Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 522: Jack Kornfield

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

Jack Kornfield, prolific author and Buddhist teacher, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Jack, including his Mindfulness Meditation courses, on his website, JackKornfield.com. You can also find all of his books there, including A Path with Heart, Meditation for Beginners, and his newest book: No Time Like The Present (which are also available wherever you buy your books). Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package.

A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney. 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. JCPenney. Greetings, pals. It's me, Trussell, and you are listening to the Dunker Trussell Family Hour Podcast.

It's being recorded from a wonderful, themed luxury hotel room in San Diego, California. I'm staying at the Frenaz Hotel. I was lucky enough to get upgraded into one of the aquarium rooms, and guess what I've got swimming around right in front of me? A dolphin in an aquarium.

Such a cute little guy. His name is Cameroon, and he is really fun. He keeps doing these flips and spins. It's almost like he's trying to communicate something to me. I think he wants to touch me, or I don't know what, but he keeps sort of pushing against the aquarium, and then he'll flip and spin and push against the aquarium. And sometimes he gets real still,

and we just watch the ocean together. And I can tell he is enjoying the view as much as I am. All hail the seven gods of luck. All of our shows sold out at the La Jolla Comedy Store this weekend. But if you weren't able to get tickets, you can drive down to Miami. I'm gonna be there next weekend,

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Thank you, Squarespace. If you want commercial free episodes of the DTFH, you don't need to go on Reddit and suggest that instead of doing commercials, I should just shovel hornet's nest in my asshole. Instead, you can go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and subscribe. Not only will you get commercial free episodes of the DTFH,

you will also get to hang out with your true family, the DTFH family. We hang out every week. We've got meditations every Tuesday. We have our family gatherings every Friday and we would love to invite you to join us. It's patreon.com forward slash DTFH. You probably already know today's guest.

He's written, I don't know, 17 books or something. One of them was my first real introduction to Buddhism and I'd love to recommend it to you along with all of his other books. It's called A Path With Heart. If you're interested in meditation, you could check out his book Meditation for Beginners or check out his newest book, No Time Like The Present,

Finding Freedom and Joy Right Where You Are. For some people, Buddhism can seem dry depending on whatever the lineage is. Buddhism can seem complex, overly intellectual, too many lists, but Jack has this incredible talent for synthesizing Buddhism with Western thinking and talking about it in this way that is really gonna change your life.

He has most certainly made my life much better just from his books and the fact that somehow by some great karmic act I must have done a previous incarnation, I get to have these conversations with him from time to time. If you really want to take a deep dive into this stuff, you might wanna consider Jack's Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program.

It starts 2023. You can find all the information about it at jackcornfield.com. And now everyone, welcome back to the Ducatressal Family Hour Podcast, Jack Cornfield. ["Welcome Back to Ducatressal Family Hour Podcast"] ["Welcome, Welcome to Ducatressal Family Hour Podcast"] It's the Ducatressal Family Hour Podcast.

Jack, welcome back. Whenever I know that I have a podcast coming up with you, it puts me in a really great mood. Thank you so much for being here. Maybe I could mark it as sort of a mood stabilizer or something like that. You are, you are a mood stabilizer. Thank God for you.

Yeah, here's where you sign up and send your prescription. That's right. I would freebase you, I would inject you into my veins. If there was something I would get addicted to you, I would probably have to go to cornfield rehab. Yeah, you would have to, you'd have to get off of that addiction.

You can talk to my beloved Trudy, she'll tell you. You know, too much of a good thing and you get sick, so. Oh, she loves you. I don't think she's even close to that yet, Jack. She just did a podcast. She loves you. You know, COVID put us all in, do you remember Estelle Pereira's book,

Mating and Captivity? Yes. Well, there we are. We're all COVID, COVID captivity. How are you, Duncan? I'm glad to talk with you. Hi, I'm Jack, I'm good. I, you know, I'm working on a book right now and just.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry to hear it. Thank you. As an author. Yes. Terrible. And now I've got a real deadline and it's just, I feel sorry for everyone around me

and I'm, it's just brutal, but amazing. And cause I've never written a book before. How many books have you written, Jack? Well, written and edited in 16, but who's counting, right? I mean, yeah, the first book is it's sort of like, Duncan, you're like, you're a virgin, right? And there's a bunch of things that you have to learn about how to do this dance.

I'd be happy to talk to you more, some offline or something like that. What's your deadline? I've got five months. I've got five months and I, my editor is wonderful. Penguin is awesome and they know it's my first book. So it's not like they're raking me over the coals or anything like that, but I still have to write,

I still have to get it written. You have to write a damn book, but let me say this. They know that authors, we authors are weird and quirky and they're used to us extending our deadline. So you should just be aware. I don't want to tell you that too soon because then you'll just freeze and not do it at all till the deadline comes back.

I just extended the deadline, Jack. Now it's a real deadline. I recognize the previous deadline was kind of a, you know, I don't know, it wasn't really a deadline, but this is a deadline and I need that. I mean, that's what's really getting me just to start hitting the keys. But I gotta tell you,

and I know you probably, well, maybe you don't, it's not so brutal now, but I don't know if you remember your first book or what the, you know, I go through days of where I'll sit down to write and it's like, my brain is muck and nothing is coming. And I think, oh, maybe I have some undiagnosed neurological condition or something.

Why is this not happening? Those days will follow days where it's just, oh, there's a chapter. I did a chapter, there's something. And then I'm like, ah, this is easy. Why do people complain about writing books? And then bam, into this horrific windshield where I just splatter across it, doubt everything.

But Jack, just before this podcast, I finally got the next, you know, unedited, rotten chapter out. It was about cancer, when I got cancer. And I won't go into details of the thing, but all of a sudden I realized I can't, I'm having a real hard time writing about this, not because I don't have the words, but because it hurts.

And I can't tell you how wild this feeling I'm having right now is only because I assumed that I had gotten past all that, you know, that I'd gotten past the year that I got cancer and my mom died of cancer. And I just was wondering, your thoughts on this quality of grief or trauma, what is this?

How is this still stuck in me? Does it go, does it ever go away? And I just would love to know your thinking on this. Well, I'm sensing what you say. I need to, before I leap in with all the, you know, wise presentiments and whatever that might've even be wrong, when you say it hurts, how does it hurt? What's the hurt?

It's not the worst hurt, but it's, you know, I mean, it's so, I'm really trying to avoid tearing up on podcasts right now, because I think it's as cheesy as you can be, but I'm sitting here writing. All of a sudden I'm crying as I'm writing. Then I'm like, why am I, why am I, what is this? And so it's a kind of sweet, it's sweet, but it hurts, it's a, and maybe part of the reason

it hurts, it's sweet right now is just because it's like an old friend or something that I forgot about, that suddenly it's like, oh, hi, here I am, just hanging out right in your heart, right under the surface of everything, just sort of hanging out here. And I've been hanging out here for a while for, since that year.

So I guess it's a kind of sweet pain, and if that makes sense. Yeah, so your pains, so there's a few things to say. First of all, going back to your writing, you know, they're the days it comes out and you go, oh, I wrote something. And then days a little bit later that you look at it and say, this is shit.

Yes. Why did I think this was, and it's like you were drunk or stoned and you wrote this brilliant long, long poem and the next morning you went and looked at it and say, this is dribble, I thought it was brilliant. So do you know what that makes you? What? A writer.

All right, that's good news. You've arrived, you've arrived. So there's that, just to keep that in mind. And then to port that over to this next question about the grief that you carry, do you know what that makes you? Why? It makes you a human.

Right. This is sorry to say. You took human incarnation, Duncan. Yeah. In the weird form that you did, the lie that we all done this. And you get praise and blame and gain and loss and pleasure and pain and birth and death.

Yeah, and all of those things. And so, you know, that brilliant book about trauma by our friend Bessel Vander Coke, New York Times bestseller for years now is called The Body Keeps the Score. Yeah. And what you're experiencing as you write about it is you're opening that gateway in your psyche

and your mind and heart. And then that which is held in your body, the grief for your mom and her death, the grief and pain and terror that came initially, probably for cancer and how you manage it. All that's still there. And I remember somebody describing therapy as helping people shift from the same damn thing

over and over to one damn thing after another, right? That's brilliant. So that there's a necessary repetition in our life, but when you grieve honorably, which means you let yourself feel it and let yourself go through all the parts of grief, which include your tears, you know, and we all carry a portion of the ocean of tears

that's there for humanity and there in the universe. When you let yourself grieve in the ways that grief does, then it's still there. It doesn't take you over so much or much, but it can be triggered because it's still held in your body, right? As Bessel would say, it is still held in the heart for this incarnation at least.

And so any kind of Dharma expectations that, okay, now I've handled it. Anybody who said they've handled it, anything, is gotta roll up the window shades and look out cause it's coming again at some point. It just doesn't work that way. What we do handle is our capacity for love and our capacity to be present and say, yeah, this too.

This too is part of the game. So you went through a really tough year and now you re-experience it some. And people know about grief. You know, when someone you love dies or there's the end of a relationship or marriage or something where you've been so deeply connected and then there's this huge loss.

Grief initially comes in waves. You know, you have these huge waves of outpourings of all its parts of anger and, you know, blame or why did this happen or confusion and tears and so forth. And then the waves subside. Grief doesn't actually go away. What it does is there become space between it.

So you're grieving horribly and then you have to go to the market and you have to figure out, well, am I gonna get, you know, tied or eco-soaked for my on that, in front of that counter. And you're trying to figure out cause they're all trying to get you to buy these 40 things with their colors.

And all of a sudden you go, oh, I forgot to grieve because it went away for a little bit. And I'm back being a regular person, trying to figure out which, you know, a laundry soap to buy. And then a new wave of greed will hit, grief will hit. So you start to learn actually when you pay attention to grief

that it's both honorable to let it be experienced and also to let it ebb and flow. That it's what it does. And then for you, I'm not sorry about this. You talk about the, you know, the tears, which is damn, I wish the world leaders when they get on the, you know, television and talk about, well, we're gonna invade this or we're gonna do that.

I wish they were weeping when they said it. Well, maybe this is why Biden has started wearing sunglasses. Maybe he's making me laugh. I would hope so. That, you know, because that level of leadership also involves, if you're honorable about it, knowing that the decisions you make,

even if the best you can do, involve a lot of suffering. I wanna thank Gloomy Labs, the creators of Microdose Gummies, for supporting this episode of the DTFH. The chemists at Gloomy Labs have done the impossible by creating the perfect dose of edible THC. Now you can eat a nice Microdose gummy and go for a run without also running from the demons in your head because you took one of those edibles

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Because that level of leadership also involves if you're honorable about it, knowing that the decisions you make, even if the best you can do, involve a lot of suffering for a lot of people. I'm glad you said that, because this brings me to something I wanted to bring up with you.

I just did this podcast with this genius Lex Friedman who just got back from the Ukraine where he was interviewing people for a month in the Ukraine. I saw him, he came to the door and was like, well, I've never seen dead bodies before, this. And we talked about it. And he brought up something that seemed paradoxical

in that situation, which is that these are people who have had their homes destroyed, these are people who have seen so much death, who have lost loved ones. And he said, the spirit there is so sweet that everyone's helping, that people are really unified and very sweet. But then he talked about the soldiers.

He talked about the state of consciousness one has to go into, to launch a missile into a group of people. And how many of these people are... I mean, if I'm still upset, if I'm still grieving because I lost my mom to cancer in 2013, these are people who have lost their children three days ago.

And I realized in that moment, I was scrambling for some kind of pithy, Buddhist thing to say. And all I thought about was my kids. And I thought about if something happened to my kids, if my kids had been murdered, that I would not be able to... I guess it's just like,

just even speculating it, I started questioning my own exploration in the Dharma and my own meditation practice and all this stuff, Ram Dass and you and Trudy and everyone teaches like in that moment, somehow just being around someone had just gotten back. I thought all I would feel was hate and all I would wanna do was kill people who'd hurt my kids.

And I feel like I just ruined everything that in that moment where if I was cornfielding, I would have had something real to say, but I had nothing other than my God, I get it. I'm taking a breath because it asks for some space around it. And the fact that you were weeping, just cause you couldn't write your book, nevertheless, the fact that your tears were coming

in part because of what you did suffer through cancer and your mom's death and so forth, we grieve because we care. If you didn't care, you wouldn't grieve. So underneath grief is the fact that we actually are connected and love. And that's part of what you were experiencing when Lex came back because it was the shared grief.

It's not your grief. It's the grief that we carry as humanity and it's happening right now, not just in Ukraine, but in Myanmar or in, you know, South Sudan or in places all around the world, including in our own towns and cities and so forth. And then you say, well, what if I were to face the worst thing I can imagine,

which is the death of one of my children? That's kind of for people that's like the, you know, even I, you know, would be willing to die or be, you know, hurt or tortured, but spare my children. Yes. Right. So now you're going to the right heart of human incarnation. How can we love when the possibility

this enormous pain is there? Yes. And war is not new, by the way. We've been doing this for a very long time. And so this is part of our collective heart. And then you put on top of it some kind of idea. I forgive me for saying it, some kind of spiritual idea. Okay. If it were me and Ukraine, Czechoslovakia around us or, you know,

some saint or something like that. Then they'd all say, oh, yeah, you know, it comes and it goes and who I am is so much bigger than all that. And my children were killed in a missile and it's, you know, it's just how it goes. That's nonsense. It's an ideal, you know, and we need ideals in some way

to kind of look to see, can we be more wise or gracious or compassionate with all the suffering in the world and all the love that's in the world. But any kind of measurement, you can't measure grief. You can't compare it. You also can't even really prepare for it. Okay. I'll meditate and then when my, you know, something disastrous happens to my children,

I'll be chill. Not me, not me. I don't expect that. I do everything I can. If my daughter was in the farthest part of the world and said, daddy, and she's like 37, right? I really need you. I would go.

I would not hesitate at all. She was going through a hard time when she was working. She was doing internship in Cambodia for the war crimes tribunal. And then some stuff happened. This was a decade ago or so when she was, you know, starting to study law and I got this message and I said, I'm on a plane tomorrow.

Yeah. You know? Yes. So you're just talking about the human heart and the fact that we do care and we're interwoven and that loss is painful. Yes. And there's no, and that means that we also have to grieve

in some honorable way. My friend, Maladoma Somme, who was a West African shaman and medicine man with a couple of PhDs from the Sorbonne and I think Brandeis or Michigan or something, he said, the Dagger people, his people, they really understood how to grieve and it was part of their cultural ritual

as it is in other cultures around the world to come together to grieve, to take their time to make rituals. He said, when I came to the US first, after this very deep shamanic journey that he'd done where this psychic and, you know, all the eyes that we don't usually have to see we're all open,

and then his eyes almost cheered up. He said, I walked in your streets and they were full of the ungrieved dead. And I said, what do you mean, Maladoma? And he said, all the people who died in this Western culture, homeless on the street or along the borders or in the ICU tended by caring, you know,

nurses and medical people, but not with their family, not with their community. He said, you can feel the spirits of those who haven't been honored and how important it is for us to know how to grieve as well as celebrate. And for them, grief and celebration come together, the celebration of life as well as the honor.

So you're talking about something really huge. How do we as human beings navigate birth and death? Yes, that's it. But I have to say, you know, if in the face of this, what springs up is war. Yes. And not grieving if what springs up is war. Hatred and aggression and killing and war, yes.

And, you know, I think it would be hard to argue based on what we just said that if someone is attacking your country and killing your children, it would be hard to argue that fighting back against them was not justified that- So who are you arguing with? Is this an argument Duncan's having

with two parts of his brain? Very common for me. Or are you trying to read some sacred scripture that says you should never hurt anyone for any reason at any time? Or what's going on in that? Maybe I'm trying to bury the part of myself that years ago, high on acid, looking out at the world

was thinking, you know what, world peace is possible. We could do it. There's a way to stop blowing each other up. Surely there's a better way for us to have this argument than exploding each other's bodies. And now, I don't know. It feels like maybe that was foolish or naive. You're confused, Duncan.

You're taking, you are taking, well, I know that. We know that. You're confused, but that's not, so that's just, okay, that's how you are. How you roll, but you know, that's how we all roll, I assume. But anyway, no, it's not that. You're trying to put some half-assed Duncan philosophy

about whether you should ever fight or fight back or whatever, you know? And then you're mixing it up with, well, what about my children and what about war and stuff? So let's separate them to make it a tiny bit. I won't even say saner, because the whole thing is nutty. The fact that human beings solve their differences by picking up weapons and trying to kill each other.

In fucking kindergarten, you know, and one kid's hitting the other with blocks and you say, use your words, use your words. I mean, can't we get the people who are, yes, isn't there a better way to resolve our differences instead of just being lost and hatred and greed and ignorance? And that's what the spiritual teachings are about.

They say the more hatred and greed and ignorance, the more suffering. And the less hatred, which is to say more love, the less greed, which is to say more generosity and caring and sharing. The less ignorance, which is to say understanding or wisdom. The happier, the better. That's the principle.

Now, no spiritual teacher ever said, so now we're gonna get rid of war. I think we could. I love your dream and it's not just acid. It's a possibility in this universe that we could find a better game than war where we could still compete and collaborate, do things, but solve our differences in other ways.

And we've learned to do that in a number of spheres, but in other ways, we haven't yet. So that's about war, war. Plato said, only the dead know the end of war. And so he was saying this is kind of built into human society. Maybe it's not always, and I don't think it has to be, but let's just call it a long-term project.

And I think we can work toward that. We can see the causes, we can build institutions and make connections and hopefully in doing so, those of us like you and me who hold this as a possibility can actually support the work that step by step has people with differences listen respectfully or the true reconciliation work that honors the previous generation's horrors

and tries to move past it. We know individually that it's possible. So there's that. And then there's your question, well, what if something happens to me, to my child, my community, my family, is it okay to stand up, should I fight back, should I not? There's no question, Duncan,

that you should do everything in your power to protect your child, your family, your community. So that's, I've never heard a spiritual teaching that just says, let it all happen, it's all just an illusion. I mean, maybe it's out there, somebody on a different acid trip, but generally speaking, that's not what you hear.

Okay, so then you're asking this much more difficult question and we have to bring Gandhi into the room because he's our guide in this. And he said, you know, he said, I'm 100% committed to non-violence, but let me see if I can figure, remember how he said it. He said, but if I had to choose between violence and cowardice, I would choose violence.

Wow. Isn't that a statement? So he said, when I choose non-violence, I choose it knowing that I'm willing to bear the suffering rather than inflict it on someone else. Thank you ExpressVPN for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Fortunately for me, my children are still young and I don't have to worry about that terrifying moment

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Use my link and you can get three extra months free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Duncan. Expressvpn.com slash Duncan to learn more. Thank you ExpressVPN. When I choose non-violence I choose it knowing that I'm willing to bear the suffering rather than inflict it on someone else. Okay, so this is kind of

the highest possible spiritual ideal. Wow. But then, you know, I told you this story about a woman I met, I met a guy on the train from Baltimore of Philadelphia and a woman he was working with. And he'd been, you know, he was helping to work in a program for incarcerated youth

and particularly young men who'd been sentenced for long terms for homicide and things like that. Yeah. And he told me this story of a young boy 14 years old who was in gang in Baltimore, wanted to get in a gang. And the initiation was to go kill somebody. Kind of like the, because we don't have real initiation in our culture, you know, as there would be

in most traditional societies. And if you were in the Maasai, they'd give you your spear at a certain age at 14 and you'd go out and you'd bring back the lion that you killed and they'd say, okay, now you're a man and you can be held in that way. We don't have that. So our kids are initiating themselves on the streets

because they don't have any adults. They don't have any mentors who can say, all right, let me see how good you are, give them a task, make them do something. Because if you're a young man, the question is, is there anything dangerous to do around here? Can I do it? You know, let's get real.

But young women too, I don't want to make it sexist. But in any case, we don't have that much. So for him, it was to go shoot somebody. And he shot this other boy who we didn't know, got arrested, court was convicted, given a sentence. And when he was about to be marched out of the courtroom, the mother of the boy who was killed,

the judge said, do you have anything to say? And she stood up and she said, she looked at this young man, he said, I'm gonna kill you. And then to effect down. And then they took him off to prison. Well, she started to visit him a year later. And he was so surprised

because he didn't really have a family. One of the reasons you joined the gang is, you know, his family had been broken by the poverty and racism of his community and, you know, addiction and all those kinds of things that happen in target communities. So she started to bring him a few things. She said, you know, I know you did that,

but I'm, you know, I think in you in here and I just want to drop off a few things that might be useful. She started to make a relationship with this kid. You know, if I was him, I don't think I'd eat any food she dropped off, at least at first. Yeah, that's probably a good thought. Well, what you do is you get a taster in the next cell,

say, hey, try to see how there's, somebody dropped off this great stuff, see how it goes. That is incredible to imagine. But anyway, there's a moment she decided, well, let me finish the story. Sorry. Well, it's okay. You can interrupt me and I'll not all interrupt you.

So she's, so she visited him and he was in for, because he was a juvenile, he might've been 13 when he actually shot this young man. When it was time for him to get out, they were gonna let him out when he turned 18. And she was talking to him. She started visiting more regularly. And he said, I don't know what I'm gonna do.

I don't have a family to go to, you know, a place to stay. And she said, well, you know, I live by myself and I have extra room. So maybe you could stay here for a bit. You know, let's see how that goes. Well, you've got nowhere else and now I've got to know you a bit. So she took him in and he said, I don't have any work.

She said, oh, I'm working at this company. Maybe I can get you a job at the bottom, at least when she helped get him a job. And he lived there for six months. And she brought him one morning. She said, come in the living room, I wanna talk to you. He said, yeah. She said, remember that day in court

when you were sentenced to prison for killing my son? He said, yeah. And I stood up and she said, I'm gonna kill you. And he said, yes, ma'am. She said, well, I have. You see, she said, I didn't want a boy who could murder another kid, not even knowing them, to still walk this earth.

And so I said about visiting you and giving you stuff that you needed in prison and kind of helping you a bit. And I gave you a place to live, you know, and so forth. And you're not that boy anymore. But I don't have anybody. I have this empty room and no son. And I wanna know if you'd let me adopt you. And she did.

And she did. Oh my God. So you're asking this incredibly difficult question about what do we do when we've suffered? And you're talking about the courage of the people in Ukraine and maybe in the places where we suffered deeply where there's emergencies, not just war. You know, remember Mr. Roger's mother said,

don't just look at the horrors of the tornado and the hurricane and the tsunami and the houses lost and, you know, all of the earthquake. Look at all the helpers who flood in. Feel that whole field of human beings who get in their airboats from, you know, Mississippian and neighboring states and get there and say, yeah,

we're gonna get the people and the dogs off their roof. So we human beings have both possibilities. We have the possibility of creating tremendous suffering out of our ignorance and hatred and greed. And we have the magnificent possibilities of the great heart of compassion and knowing who we are and becoming that, which Gandhi talked about.

And so you Duncan, are there caught in the middle as a human being. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, I, you know, when I'm around you, around Trudy or when I was around Rondas, it's so clear, like it's clear. It's clear as a bell and, wow. But yeah, I am caught in the middle of it

because I can feel the other side of it. Well, we all have, or almost all of us, I can feel how I would, you know, how I would be enraged and want to fight back and hurt someone who hurt my daughter and so forth. I feel all of that. And now maybe there are people who get to the point

where that doesn't arise for them, but I don't know many, I have to say. And in my business, I know this, well, I'm using llamas and mamas and, you know, all the rest of the spiritual hullabaloo, whatever they call themselves. But that's something entirely different. I'm talking about us as human beings

and not as some ideal, but that woman in Baltimore, she reminded us as Gandhi did, because when Gandhi was fighting for independence from the colonizers of England, and when he was fighting for the benefit of the Indian people, he deliberately broke some laws

and he'd become quite famous. And there was a British judge, he went into a court and Gandhi had broken his laws. And the judge looked at him and he said, Mr. Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Mr. Gandhi, he said, "'The law requires me to put you in prison

"'for what you've done. "'I am entirely sympathetic, "'not only to what you've done, "'but to what you stand for. "'But in my role as a judge, "'I've required to put you in prison.'" And so we also get dealt certain roles. And in your role as a soldier,

we're going back to Ukraine. If you're drafted, which is a horrible thing, or if you volunteer in our country, a lot of people volunteer because of poverty. They don't actually wanna go, it's a way to get in college, or get educated, or get out of a bad situation. I mean, it's not every once I'm doing it

because of a different sense of calling. But then you're in that role. And in that role, this is what's demanded of you. And I think about the poet, William Stafford, one of our great poets, who was also partly Native American. And he was a, he was a pacifist. And he was a pacifist in World War II

and chose to go to prison rather than join the army to fight in Germany and Japan. That's an amazing thing. That's an amazing thing. So you're saying, how do we do this as human beings, Duncan? How do I do it as a parent and a husband, and a family member, a community member, and a member of society?

And I think we need, we don't need. It's like, the universe is calling on us to grow up as a species, whether it's climate or whether it's racism, which is completely insane. This child, let's see, their color is sort of blue-green. I was actually, my mom said, I was yellow. I was jaundiced, so I was quite yellow,

and my twin brother was really blue. So she had two kids who were colored blue and yellow, but... Jack, I have to tell you, one quick interruption. So when my oldest was born, he had jaundice, and he was yellow. And I remember Ragu saw him because he had, he kind of looked Asian. I can show the pictures.

Ragu looks at him, Ragu looks at me, and I'm like, yeah, I'm thinking it too. This kid looks Asian. As it turns out, he just had jaundice. So I had a jaundice child. I see. Anyway, it's insane. There's nothing sane about racism at all.

It's like a crazy thing. But it's a disease, but it's also part of the ignorance and greed. And underneath a lot of it all is fear, fear of the other. Who's different? Will the tribe or the group that are in the next cave, or the next, you know, part of the woods or wherever we lived in earlier days,

are they dangerous? Will they come and, you know, kill us or, you know, take our things or take our children? So there's all of that built in, and it's wired for tens of thousands of years. But fortunately, we also have other dimensions of our life. And so we've created, you know, agreements where we won't send nuclear weapons

to each other's country. You know, we won't do that. Or we have economic agreements or we have other kinds where we actually agree to care for each other within a country or even globally. And those come from our hearts, actually. If you were, you know, yes, there are people terribly traumatized and bitter

and hurt who might like war. You know, there's a certain love of the battle of it. But in general, it comes out of fear and trauma and not out of, you know, oh yeah, suffering is such a great thing. And so what we're doing together in some way is reminding one another of our humanity like that woman in Baltimore.

That's what you do. That's what you do. And you sometimes stop being Jack Cornfield and you seem to be, if there's an ocean of tears, you seem to be this ocean of something else. And I'm sorry if I'm taking things a little too ethereal, but I wanna ask you about this because when you were talking about this mother,

I thought that's every mother. In that moment, she stopped being the mother to her child and became the mother to the murderer of her child. She was able to expand her motherness beyond the boundaries of her own life and she became something, the ocean of mothers. She became the ocean of mothers. When I was getting my, Todd, I put it off

and I shouldn't have, but years later after my mom had passed, I went and finally got the scan that you have to get when you have cancer to make sure it's still gone, it's gone. But I was so scared and this woman who took me into the room, Jack, she stopped being a nurse and as she's walking me into that horrible machine, she says, I'm your mother, I'm your mama, you're fine,

you're fine, I'm your mother. It was the damnedest thing. I thought I was, I thought I was hearing things or something, I couldn't believe it. It's like for a second, Jack, I'm sorry, she just became my mom or all the moms or something like that. And I wanna ask you, I don't know what happened here,

friends, I'm sorry, my internet got weird and so we had to shift this to my speakerphone, recording it into a microphone. So I'm so sorry for the degraded sound quality, but I didn't wanna end the podcast early because of a technical error. So I beg for your forgiveness for the low-fi audio quality that you're about to hear.

What is that, that thing that I've seen you turn into and Ram Dass turn into and the mother and the story you just told turn into, is there some kind of, I don't know, disembodied, transcendent, I don't know, spirit or archetype or ghost, what is that? You sure have a lot of ideas and I love them, ghosts and archetypes,

they're a switch between ancient cultures and, anyway, you're asking a really deep question for all of us, which is who are we? Yes. And then nobody can answer that for you, but that becomes one of the deepest of all human inquiries. If you think you're your personality or your community, where you were born

or your family and so forth, or your body, then that limits you a lot. But in fact, you're not your body, spirit came in to your body and it will leave when you die. There's this amazing thing that happens when you have the honor of sitting with someone when they're dying, because for the last moments

you're there present with them and if it's one of those special deaths where someone is still fairly conscious as they leave, you know, you hold their hand, you love them and then their bodies just meet and the spirit's gone. All that's left is, you know, this slab of flesh. You can actually feel the spirit leave if you're really quiet in tune.

It's like a falling star, it's so silent. And then I've sat with people over many, many times years and done it in my own meditations and past life regressions and things. You feel yourself floating out of your body. There's often a review like, wow, that was an amazing incarnation, wasn't it? Because who we are is not this body

or personality or history. Who we are is consciousness itself. This is the play of consciousness. Consciousness divides itself and becomes all the things that create the world and the universe from the original source that's both fullness and emptiness, the creative principle of the universe. And so at different times in our life,

we are able to function at different levels. You know, round us used to say, remember your true nature and your social security. So remember that who you are is actually timeless. You are love. You are the connection to all things. As my teacher, Nisargada, said, wisdom tells me I am nothing and love tells me I'm everything.

And between these two, my life flows. And you feel that, that we know of this. There's this connection to everything Alice Walker wrote at one point of a character. She said, one day I was sitting there like a motherless child, which I was. And there you were that motherless person in the room getting your scan, which I was.

And it goes on and she says, and then it come to me that feeling of being a part of everything. And I knew if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house in fact, when it happened, you just can't miss it. And we do know this. We know it walking in the high mountains

or making love or taking some sacred substance or listening to amazing music or being there. Those mysterious moments of birth where new being says, here I am or death. You know, when the spirit leaves the body, we know this. And that woman there knew it. So she was, yes, she was a, you know, technician or a nurse or something in her medical role.

Yeah. She wasn't just that. She was the part that we all know that's much bigger that says, yeah, I have a role to play and I can do it beautifully. But that's not who we really are. Right. But she saw you with the eyes of,

as you said, the universal mother. And you orphan that you were. Yeah. We're fulfilled in that moment because she reminded you of who you are that you're not an orphan, that you're actually mothered by her and all the mothers in the fact you're mothered

by the universe, which gave birth to you. Right. And that's who you are. And we forget this, which is why there is, we forget this, which is why there's such a thing as spiritual practices to quiet ourself. Why at the mind tend to heart and begin to listen in a new way.

Go, yeah, we all had that, now I remember. Right. And now I remember love, now I remember forgiveness. Now I remember what's possible. I have a poem to read to you. Wonderful. It's from Lawrence Jernauer called The Sleepless Ones. What is all the people who could not sleep at two

or three or four in the morning, left their houses and went to the parks? What if hundreds, thousands, millions went in their solitude like a stream and each told their story? What if there were old women, fearful if they slept, they would die? And young men, and young women unable to conceive,

and women having affairs, and children fearful of failing, and fathers worried about paying bills, and men in troubles, and men unlucky in love, and those that were in physical pain, and those who were guilty. What if they all left their houses like a stream, and the moon illuminated their way, and they came each one to tell their stories?

Would these be the more troubled of humanity, or would these be the more passionate of this world, or those who need to create to live, or would these be the lonely ones? And I ask you, if they all came to the parks at night and told their stories, would the sun on rising be more radiant? And again, I ask you, would they embrace?

No. Wow. So here we are together. You and I, Duncan, are telling our stories, you know, and listening to one another, and listening to all the stories that we carry, because this is our lot as human beings. And the gorgeous, amazing thing is that

while the first teaching of the Buddha, the first noble truth is that they're suffering, and that it has its causes. We said greed, hatred, ignorance, fear. There's also an end to suffering. There's a connection that transcends the sense of fear, and separateness, and isolation, in which we become that mother of the world,

or father of the world. We come that being that remembers who we really are, our own true nature, our Buddha nature, and go, wow. What a dance we're in. What a dance. What a dance. And it's so mysterious. There's no simple solution or something.

This is how it's supposed to be. But we actually kind of braille our way half-blind through each day and say, how can I live this? And how do I handle the measure of tears and suffering that's given me? And how do I remember the unbearable beauty of the world and the joy of it? And that's our human law on our task.

Jack. And that's what mindfulness and meditation is so good. Thomas Burt instead of what avail is it to travel to the moon if we can't cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves and from one another? All right. My God, you are a genius. I love you so much.

Thank you so much. So are we winding up as this guy? That's all you want. Hey. How do you follow that? I don't know. I follow it with that passage that I looked up in scientific American, so it's presumably real where Albert Einstein said,

if you can drive safely while kissing a girl, you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, and I'm ending in that way by saying that it's worthy of paying attention to what you love. Frank Ostasevsky, my dear friend, founder of Zen Center Hospice, his language is, what would love have me do today?

Jack. Wherever you are, you know, that's a, that's a worthy question. Ah, thank you so much. Always a pleasure, Duncan. I am so lucky to get to have these conversations with you and Trudy. Thank you so much, Jack. I don't know what to say.

You, thank you. This is the per, this is, you're, we're just very lucky that folks like you are floating around out there. Well, I'm lucky that I get to float around out here too. We're all floating it together. It's like Rondas in the ocean. Remember we used to go and eat. Yes.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh joy, oh joy, and flop around in the ocean with this one good arm and a huge smile on his face. Are you gonna be in Hawaii? Yeah, are you gonna be there? Yes. Oh, let's do it. Jack, I can't wait to see it. Is there any, where can people find you?

They can go to jackcornfield.com and I've got all kinds of foundations and teachings. They can also look and see that there's a fantastic two year training for people who want to teach mindfulness and compassion practices. Just great. We've got thousands of people in 70 countries around the world learning how to bring it into their schools

or their clinics or their community or their business, so that's fabulous. And also in me here now at Network, there's a bunch of my podcast endings, so all of the above. Thank you so much, Jack. I can't wait to see it. Thank you, I love you too.

Love you. Much thanks to Jack for coming on the show. Again, you can find him at jackcornfield.com. A big thank you to our esteemed sponsors. And thank you for listening. I love you so much and hopefully I'll see some of you in Miami next weekend. Until then, Hare Krishna.

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