Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 524: David Nichtern

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

David Nichtern, "David" from The Midnight Gospel and one of Duncan's favorite guests, re-joins the DTFH! David and Duncan are going to host an info session about David's 100 Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training course on August 31. Click here for more info! And if you're interested in the 100 Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training course then click here! The next class starts October 1st. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Herb Stomp - Use code DUNC15 at checkout to receive 15% OFF your first order! Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order!

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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. Hey pals, it's me, Duncan. And this is the Dunker Trussell Family Hour Podcast.

Thank you for listening. Today, we have not only my meditation teacher, but one of my favorite guests on the show. You've seen him on the Midnight Gospel. He plays himself, David. Get ready for a deep conversation about the time-space continuum, the Buddha, and many more incredible things.

Friends, David is a meditation teacher, meaning if you're interested, you can actually take courses with him. He's doing 100-hour mindfulness meditation teacher training starting October 1st. All the links are going to be at dunkintrussell.com. And if you want to hang out with us together, we are going to be doing, I don't know what to call it,

like a live podcast on Wednesday, August 31st online. All those links are going to be at dunkintrussell.com. Also, if you want to see me live, I'm going to be at San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Dallas, and Houston. All those dates are at dunkintrussell.com. And as always, subscribe to the Patreon. It's patreon.com, d-t-f-h.

You're going to get commercial-free episodes of this podcast. And we hang out almost every week with a meditation and a family gathering. Maybe I'll see you there. All right, folks, strap in, and welcome back to the DTFH David Nickturn. Welcome back to the DTFH.

It's great to see you. Here's my secret. I never left. Well, then where were you? I didn't see you. I was between lines and between spaces. Oh, yeah, I was very Buddhist of you. Here's a zinger of a first question.

How about this one? If you could change anything in Buddhism, what would it be? That's so interesting because I don't think necessarily Buddhism is just an external thing. It's sort of like if you said if you could change something in air, which would it be? And are you talking about the air outside here or the air in my lungs?

Well, I mean, I get your response. Because I was thinking to myself, if Buddhism is true, then that means that really you would kind of have to, by changing it, you would actually be changing everything else simultaneously. If it's a little too heady to start off the podcast or too like super Buddhist nerd or something like that. But I was thinking, oh, yeah, I guess

you would have to alter time space or something so that then the Dharma itself would have to reflect that alteration in some way or another. If it's true, if it's a true reflection of reality. Well, so you know, Duncan, in our teacher training programs and stuff, in terms of how to respond to questions, sometimes we say, what's the question behind the question? Is there a question behind the question?

No, it was just like, gosh, I wonder what David will say if I ask him what you would change about Buddhism. I wish I could say there was some plan behind it other than just like, I'm curious what someone who's been studying this for their entire lives in considering it, is there some aspect of it where you think to yourself, oh, yeah, that could use some revision. Yes.

Well, it's being revised. The ism part is being revised for 2,500 years. It has been revised and updated even just by changing languages, Duncan. You can't possibly mean the same thing in English as you meant in Sanskrit. It's not possible. Do you read Sanskrit?

Do you not read Sanskrit? No, no, no. Have you ever thought about it? Just like diving in and trying to learn Sanskrit so that you could start reading the original? I'm reading that thing. I sent you the treasury of, I love the names of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures so much,

basket of bountiful rainbows. I sent you that. I can't remember you know what I mean. They have the most beautiful names. But the one I sent you. It's both positive, isn't it? The vibe is kind of glowing and positive. It's the coolest.

It's called the treasury of precious qualities. That's what I'm sort of absorbed in right now. And yeah, as I was reading that and thinking to myself, my god, I have no idea what some of this is saying. And I was wondering to myself, what if I could read Sanskrit? I wonder, when you're reading like that kind of thing, it has a quality of, it's like a poetic equation.

And you think to yourself, my god, if there's like one number that's kind of out of line here linguistically, how much is that impacting my understanding of it? Yeah, it's like pi if one number in pi was different. It wouldn't be pi anymore, would it? Yeah, right, exactly. And it feels like the Dalai Lama wrote a forward to it.

It feels like clearly like a great deal of effort was put into this particular translation. But still, it's like, my god, how do you take something from the Tibetan plateau and then turn it into English and replace symbol sets that are based on your experience living in Tibet so that a Westerner can understand it? Really a powerful question.

I think it's sort of been an issue for all the great translators throughout history. And I would say that sometime if we want to go deep into this, I would have my partner, Larry Mermelstein, with whom I teach our Tuesday night vintage Dharma class, because he is a Sanskrit and Tibetan scholar and put a scholar in general. So he and I co-teach certain classes.

And then he's really highly qualified. He's been the head of the Nalanda Translation Committee. So when Trungpa Rinpoche came to the West in 1969, pretty soon after that, he started a group of about 10 or 15 translators who've been working to this day. A lot of them are quite far along, but still involved. And Larry is the head of that.

So it adds that kind of dimension to it, which I can't add, because I'm not a scholar. I'm not trained in the linguistics. But as you see the translations come, what you are really dealing with is, first of all, a verbal tradition, oral tradition for 200 years. There was nothing written down for the first 200 years after Buddha lived, going to probably the earliest

translation school, which would be Pali, based on sort of language at the time. That is not, by the way, an extant language, as far as I understand it. And then Pali got pulled into the higher Sanskrit, more formal Sanskrit. And that carried the Dharma for many, many centuries. And then in the 8th century AD, the Tibetan,

several Tibetan teachers, one of whom was watching a little later than that, Marpa, the translator. Even his name was like it was like Duncan, the podcaster. This was like Marpa, the translator. His gig was learning the teachings in India and then bringing them back to Tibet and translating them into Tibet. Now, in 1950, we have a group of people

translating those Tibetan teachings, which derive from the Sanskrit, which derive from the Pali, which derive from the oral tradition, back into English, and trying to make some sense out of it. For example, Duncan, there's no word for ego. That's a Western word, ego, like egolessness, ego, which is such a big word in the Western Buddhist world. They don't even have a word for it.

So what would it mean? Atman would be probably the closest thing to it. An impermanent, a non-evolving, non-changing self that's somehow part of your personal ecosystem. There's part that doesn't change a soul, if you will. And really, what Buddha was teaching was that that atman formulation was not based on anything that he could directly perceive or experience.

Oh, wow. So he was like going after a central idea in the world and saying, no, no, no, no, this thing is completely not correct. Well, or that it exists but in a different way, which is that it's fabricated. But there's no unfabricated self that exists primordially. Oh, OK, so where is like they were saying this thing,

the atman, is like a kind of eternal primordial. Aspect of sentience or he was saying, well, it's made up. It's a made up thing. Or look directly at it and you tell me. I mean, it's more like there's a process of contemplation of like, well, are you going to take that on faith? Or are you going to be able to verify? So I would say the real innovation of the Buddhist

teachings is verification by the individual practitioner. He was doing for the atman what people who think Bigfoot is bullshit were doing for Bigfoot. He's like, well, come on, you don't have to insult people. There's no need. It's just like, OK, we're going to look at this from the perspective of prajna or discernment. And you tell me, where is it?

What is it made of? How does it operate? Well, let's think about this. There are right now more pictures of something that might be Bigfoot than there are of this thing that he was deconstructing. There's more pictures of UFOs than this thing that he's. There's more pictures of the Loch Ness Monster.

There's actually more evidence now in the world for these theoretical, exciting mystery creatures than there are for this thing that many people, the ego, or whatever, consider to be a fundamental element of their identity. And yet, you can't take a picture of it. The moment you try to describe it, you feel dumb when you start saying,

I hate when they're like, who are you? So tell me who you are. You're like, wow, I love chocolate chip cookies. Milk is with milk, especially. They're great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, to be really clarifying here, the Buddha would say there is such a thing as self,

but it's relational. It's not absolute. OK, so yeah, it happens as a property of connecting other people or being in space, I guess. It's a quality of space. And time. And time. And so it's kind of a symptom of being in time space

is this thing. But since we don't. And it can become a very heavy-handed, like anything that exists in space-time, it can become a nuclear reactor on overload. Or it can become a river with boats. I'm looking at my window. There's a river with boats flowing on it.

No reason to say there's no river. There is a river, but it's a relational river. It'll probably dry up in a couple of thousand years, and maybe there'll be something else there. The ball. How great PCP. He went to three waves. Shoot off all ladies' face.

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Don't forget, you can now get 50% off your next order of cratum when you use the coupon code DUNK15. That's no spaces! DUNK15 when you check out at Herbstomp.com Free shipping for orders over $100. Herbstomp, America's most trusted cratum. Music I was, as I was reading this book, and I'm glad you brought up

that we're talking about time, as I'm reading this book and so this beautiful poem, I'm realizing there seems to be a, I don't know how to put it, a kind of structure to a lot of these scriptures. It starts off with a kind of like an enunciation of the preciousness of human birth and the transient nature of human birth and sort of tries to impart a sense of expedience.

Like, look, you're not here that long. You have this little moment that you can sort of like work with yourself. You have this moment where you can try to reach some kind of understanding about what's really going on and yet this is, at least though, the vintage ones is what I'm talking about. The other one I love to listen to on Audible

is the Way of the Bodhisattva. It starts off with the exact same thing, almost like, I don't want to say Old Testament style, I have like real intensity of like, what the fuck are you doing? Expediency is great. That's a great word for it. And those are called the Four Reminders of Renunciation, which is something we've been talking about recently,

is what does that mean? In order to benefit from where you choose to place your energy and attention in your life, there has to be some sense of giving something up and taking something on. Sacrifice. That word renunciation is used there and those are Four Reminders

to not get caught up in trivial stuff that's really not going to move the needle for you. Or anybody else? This is a very beautiful song or poem, I don't know what you would call it, but the way these reminders are showing up, they're really quite disturbing kind of if you are trying not to think about that stuff.

It's very flowery too, but one of them being like, you know, you're spending your time enjoying and you look up and 100 days, they look up and 100 days has passed and they don't even think about it. You know, it's like referring to this quality of, and this brings me to like a point

I wanted to chat with you about is it's a quality of time blindness or something. Like it's like the nature of the way humans perceive time makes things seem far less fluid than they actually are because, you know, we see time in this certain rate and because of that we don't see trees growing out of the ground, we see solid trees,

we don't see the grass growing, flowers growing, and you know, I don't know if you've ever gotten fat, I don't know, like, you know what I mean, like if you, you know, you step on the scale and you're like, wait, what? But you somehow managed to not, you knew like, I think I might have gained a couple of pounds, like 15 pounds,

but if you saw yourself swelling out like a balloon, you would probably take action. But so it's, so I started thinking, is Buddhism, as we understand it, a kind of like antidote for time blindness? You know, is it? Whoa, that's so, well, those four reminders definitely are that. They're saying, yeah, this is,

this would be something to contemplate, that you, before you practice, you contemplate them and think, how do I want to spend my limited time? And you know what's a very Buddhist story in its own weird way? No. The ghost of Christmas future and Christmas past. Okay, oh yeah, sure. You look at the past, you look at the,

which is all your karmas that have accumulated, you look at the future, and if you get a glimpse of the future, like I had dinner last night with a 91 year old friend, and very sharp gentleman, and he's saying, look at his body, he said, this is just vehicles falling apart, and this is what happens.

He's coaching, he's a psychiatrist, and he's coaching, mentoring older people now. He used to do children and adolescents, and you have to look at, you go, that's time, not blindness. I look at him, you know, he's 20 years older than me, and I go, whoa, okay, this is a ghost of Christmas future here, this is gonna happen to me, and that's what those four reminders do.

So it's not to make you freak out or feel bad, it's really not, it's a reminder to practice, that's what it is. Well, that's the, I mean, I didn't get like, it was intentionally trying to upset me or anything. If it's upsetting you, it's upsetting you because you have put some energy into not thinking about that reality, you know, not because it's trying,

I mean, it would be like upsetting a fish by saying, you know, you're in the ocean, it's, you know, so the, but I started thinking to myself, oh, okay, so this is actually, like, you know, if human beings are evolving, and if part of that evolutionary process involved a more expansive view of time, if somehow we changed the rate in which we understood time

so that we began to see in a different way how quickly things move, how quickly things change and could watch these things, then as a natural byproduct, I think that it would produce some of the effects that are attributed to meditation or attributed to a spiritual path. And this is why the old cliche, it's in country songs,

something about you should live like you're dying or I heard some country song like that, but... Yes, everywhere. It's everywhere. But why? Well, nothing has really changed for this person other than instead of a monk coming to them and saying, listen, you don't understand how quickly things are flowing here.

Before you blink, your body's going to be really old and then another blink and you're going to die, it's because a doctor said it. You know what I mean? And then because the doctor said it, you're like, holy fuck, I got to start telling people I love them. I've got to start like, you know, I'm not going to spend any more time doing this or that stupid thing.

I don't want to waste my time with this shit. You know, to me, that's one of the really stunning things when you get someone around someone really close to death. Is there at least the ones I've encountered, they don't really bullshit. You know what I mean? There's not a lot of bullshitting going on. Like your mom was amazing in that transition, right?

Your mom was like radiating wisdom on that eighth episode of Midnight Gospel that you put up there. That's an example of the proper use of the notion of renunciation right there. Right. And it's almost... Not to make you feel bad or guilty. I don't think...

Not the point. Not you, anybody. Oh, right. Right. So renunci... So this idea of renunciation is... Let's talk about the common... When people hear renunciation,

the common view of renunciation is... I'm going to give up something... Chocolate-kip cookies for Lent. There you go. And so there's a bitterness associated with the term itself. It's not seen as a joyful term. Like if there was a day each year called Renunciation Day, I don't know how many people...

It's called Lent. Right, Lent. And I don't think people are really... And it's called Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition. Everybody has a version of that where you go, hey, let's just tone down the consumption here for a minute. Yeah, it's called the end of the month for a lot of people. And you're realizing, you know, it's like...

It's part of a cycle. But the associated with renunciation from that definition is like... It sucks. It's not viewed as a kind of great thing. Deprived. You're being deprived. That's it. Depriving.

Deprivation. Is that the kind of renunciation you're talking about? No, it's closer to what you were talking about before. It's recognizing something about the fabric of the way things unfold that once you're in the veil of time and the unfolding thing, that it's worthwhile contemplating how you use the time. That's all. Right.

Right. In the use of that time, this is where you land, and we always end up talking about the Noble Truth of Buddhism. This is where you land in the fourth Noble Truth, right? Or this is... Yeah, this is the path. Here's how... Once you have understood, even through faith,

that this thing you're in is moving quick. There's not much time, and you want to find a way to spend your time, here's the path. In that path, at least from when I was reading in the appendix of this book, it seems like they were saying this path in a lot of forms of Buddhism is meditation. Is that correct? The path is meditation? Well, there's an eight-fold path, right?

Yeah. It has eight aspects to it, and one of them is definitely meditation. Other ones are right livelihood, right view, right speech, you know, treating... By saying right, it doesn't mean by external judgment standards. It means like holistic, integrated way of going about those things. And bringing mindfulness to all of them would be an important cohesion factor there. That was the surprising part, at least in the appendix that I was reading. It seemed to be sort of saying that the basket that holds all of those,

the eight-fold path is somehow... Like some schools of Buddhism say it's meditation, like that is the... And maybe it was... I don't know, maybe I read it wrong. I was on a plane. It was late at night. So I don't know, maybe I was reading it. Well, technically one of the eight would be right meditation.

Okay. So if you wanted to make a cohesive wrap around it would be meditation and post-meditation, in the sense that you're not doing a formal practice, but you're addressing the elements of living with a kind of mindful awareness and the kind of sensitivity to the whole impact equation that you're unleashing on yourself and on the world as you move through the world. And that's where we get into what you were saying earlier. This is the interdependency idea, which is you...

If you're not aware that not only are you a melting candle in the fire of time, so is everyone else around you. And in that relational quality, you have this potential to either really help people or completely fuck them up. And then the gradients of that become increasingly refined, but still within it is like you can really cause a lot of damage when you're wandering around here if you're sleepwalking. That's right.

And it happens every day. And what the Buddhists would say, you started this conversation by saying, what would I change? And there could be a number of different ways of answering that, but about the actual iteration of the Buddha Dharma, so to speak, some views would say that it's perfectly iterated. It's perfectly stated. And that's kind of daunting,

but nobody says therefore you just take it on faith. Nobody says that because part of the iteration is you should digest it yourself and see whether it's accurate or not for your situation or not. So personally, I'm at this stage of whatever practice or study I do, I'm trying more to fully penetrate into it than I'm involved with something, but I need to change it because something's fucked up. I'm more like, let me get a little deeper into it and see if I can find something that maybe could be... Now, no doubt things can be expressed differently in language and in culture.

I think that's something that is separate from the question that you're asking, because language and culture do change. They're part of a flux situation, and we do have to find creative ways to express these things, but is the underlying statement of things as they are, dharma-ta, which means suchness or things as they are, is that going to change? It doesn't appear to me at this point that we're talking about something

that's in the arena of change, actually. It's primordial. It's just what it is. It's as it is. It's just, look, if you're going to like hang out in time, this is probably what's going to happen while you're here. Here's like how you're going to get confused. If you're going to go on this vacation into time, here's the sights you're going to see, and this is probably going to happen to you.

If you're feeling like weird, here's why. Then I think it's a magnificent explanation for that, and also an antidote to it. As I'm reading this poem on the airplane, I had this experience that paralleled an experience I had when I was in college where I was on acid reading the book of John. I thought it was the acid because all of a sudden, I don't know how to put it, but it clicked in me,

not what he was saying so much as the impact that whatever he had been contemplating or whoever he had been around had had on his consciousness. It just clicked like, my God, even if this thing has been translated a million times, I can still feel or grok within the words. Whoever this person was or whatever they were, they had come into contact with something extraordinary.

Reading the poem, I had the same experience, minus the acid, just sparkling water. It was like, my God, whatever mind wrote these words down in this order was not... That's some clarity to it. Yes, some astounding clarity to it, and then I was really moved by that, just that. You know what I mean where it goes from?

I think this is probably true in any study of any wisdom, tradition, scripture, where it goes from this kind of analytical, oh, this means that, and that means that. I don't know, when someone turns the air conditioner on in the room, if it's hot, all of a sudden there's this whoosh of like you push into another experiential place that runs counter to the words, if that makes...

Not against the words, but it seems... And Duncan, speaking of which, could we pause for one second so I can go open and turn on the air conditioner? Please do, I do not want you to bake while you're here. Okay, I'll be right back. Music When I'm enjoying edible THC,

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This is something that is always very exciting to me when something goes from being, I don't know, just like, I don't know, scholarly or whatever. You know what I mean? Where you're just reading a thing. It's fun to read. It's interesting. It goes from that to where I don't know how to put it.

It's like you go from 2D to 3D or something. Do you remember those books that they used to have where you would squint a certain way and it would pop into 3D? I hated them. Magic Eye, the headache producer. I hated Magic Eye. But still, it's that thing where all of a sudden

it's vivid and it's present and it's meaningful. And that is the fun part of being a Dharma student, I think, is you are not just studying some dead sea scroll, which is interesting in and of itself, but it pops into 3D in terms of how it helps you work with the energies and situations in your life in a kind of fungible way. So, yeah, I do think, for me,

that's what the Dharma is, though. I don't have that fascination with dead sea scrolls. I'm not a scholar in that way. Do you know what? I think that more people would be interested in them if the sea wasn't dead. It's like something about the dead sea scrolls that makes them seem that much more musty,

because it's like a dead, even though like, you know what I mean? The name itself makes them seem so old. Bad branding. Yeah. Bad branding. And really, for the sea, for the scrolls, come up with a better name.

So, to me, what's really spectacular about that quality of Buddhism, which you, I think it can only be experiential. I mean, you either, which one I'm reading this, it was sort of pointing out like, first, you do, there is a little faith here in the sense that you're going to believe your teacher. If someone is telling you, you trust,

this is something, you can have faith in that at first, but not like that's not enough. No. Then from that faith, you start exploring it more, and then somewhere along the line, the magic eye effect happens where you go underneath the writing or something, and then into this other, I don't know what you call it, another zone.

Well, you know, when you are going into another country, you can't show them your teacher's passport. That's hilarious. That won't get you in. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. This is one of the very frustrating aspects of Buddhism,

is that that's the problem, is, you know, yes, you have to do it. It's a thing for you to do. It's really, no one's going to, like, whatever this particular situation is, you know, there's a documentary on Netflix about those kids who got stuck in that cave. You know, that thing that just happened?

Yeah, yeah. I think, where was it? Thailand? Where that happened? Yeah. It's poor kids who's stuck in a cave. I read that they actually gave them ketamine to get them out of there.

Like, they drugged them so that they could, like, without, it was so dangerous to get them out. I don't know if that's true. So sorry, folks, listening, but, you know, they, all they had to do was fall asleep and, you know, they were rescued from the cave. This particular thing that Buddhism is talking about, whatever this particular situation is,

you don't really, even Buddha, right? Like, even like meeting Buddha, hanging out with Buddha, if you could go back in time, sit down with Buddha, that's still not going to get you out of the situation. It has to be you. It has to be you. Well, and it's like also impossible to do. We don't have a Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine.

Right. Sherman, you know, remember that? And they go back and see Buddha. I've wanted to, I've asked questions like, how did, when Buddha was having teachings, how did people hear it? They didn't have microphones and PA systems. How did they hear it?

That's a great question. I, so the answer that I got was, it was set up like that thing on Wall Street, you know, they'd have people who would repeat it for the outer reaching people. Whoa! So it would add. But I don't know, but that's what somebody told me.

It would add go back. There's no electricity. Yeah. Whoa! That is so crazy. The, the, so that, those little details are so interesting. I've never even thought of that,

but those little details of the story give it so much more life. Yeah. Like what that must have been like sitting in a room with whoever this was and hearing the, probably softly, whatever this person is saying and then hearing it sort of get repeated

all the way back to the back of the room. It's hard to imagine Buddha yelling going like, you know, the for noble truth. You know, I mean, it's like, it doesn't really fit with the vibe, you know? I mean, is there, is there any record of like, how big were his crowds? Like how many tickets was he selling?

Don't know. But, you know, there is an interesting thing also that how does something stay alive for that? Can you imagine all the other teachers who are around 2,500 years ago, who we have no idea what they were talking about? You know, and I think about that, making records and stuff like that.

You go like, okay, you know, go 100 years in the future. Is anybody going to know who the Beatles were or is going to be some obscure, you know, loot player who, you know, 5,000 years from now is, so we don't know what the echo chamber is like for what we're saying. And, you know, my take, Duncan,

I don't know how you do your creative work is I just don't come from that place of who's going to think what about it. Oh, God. You know, I mean, every once in a while, I have like a vision of someone stumbling upon my podcast on like, I don't know, some recorded media and like the smoldering apocalypse

and for a second listening, I mean, like, what the fuck? But that's pretty much it. I don't have that. It could be 100 years from now and somebody could be building a government based on your, you know, your podcasts. If you're listening to this,

please don't build your government based on my podcast. There's lots of other podcasts that will make better governments. I want to, like, what's really striking to me about that echo thing you just told me is that, and also that it's Marpa the translator and that is it in a weird way. So, yeah, you know, we don't have a way back machine.

Like, nobody is yet is going to be able to go back and hang out with the Buddha. But in a weird way, that process is still happening. Like the Buddha spoke, people repeated it. They repeated it to the back of the room. The people in the back of the room repeated it when they got home to wherever they were going. Those people repeated it and those people repeated it

and that repetition weirdly kept echoing through time. It's like, as opposed to like entropic echoes, I mean, that's all echoes are entropic, or we would be in a hellscape echo chamber of like listening to the shit people said to yesterday echoing around. The echo evolved or something, didn't it? I mean, I guess it goes back to that question,

like what would you change? The echo transformed into not just different languages, it transformed into different forms, different styles, different modalities. Rituals, different rituals? Different rituals. So what a wild echo. So in the echo itself, and I'm sorry,

is that the Buddha? In the same way, if you heard my voice from a long distance echoing around, I would still somehow be wrapped up in that voice. Yeah. I mean, I know you've had Professor Thurman on your podcast. Yes.

I can imagine him saying, I have heard him say, that the Buddha is molecular. It's literally saturating every molecule. So some of these drawings, like literally, there's tiny little Buddhas in different parts of what you would think of as a Buddha, and in different parts of space, and in different parts of situations.

So thinking of it as something that's a kind of saturation and only way down the line is it moving into the world of form. We pick up things in the world of form. It's like a bowling ball comes down the shoot, and you pick it up and you throw it at the 10 pins. But way before that, there's just the lay of the land. There's the 20 alleys in front of you. There's space.

Right. So the question is, picking it up in the realm of form, you're really tracking it back to the realm of formlessness. That's what we're really doing with practice. We're using the crumbs of form to go back to the realm of formlessness. Right. Right, right, right. That's so interesting.

You know, they talk about the tip of the iceberg or whatever, but in this case, it's like there's just the tip, and then there's no iceberg. Yeah, and you're on the Titanic, and you say, I don't get it. This is that little thing, that little white triangle on top of the water. What's happening to the boat here? It's going down, you know.

Yeah, yeah. We don't see, you're right. We don't see the full thing. And a lot of things are like that. Aren't teeth like that? They have roots that go really deep into your gums. Trees have roots that go deep into the ground. We tend to see the surface form.

But you know, it's like just that echo, like people repeating what he's saying and it going to the back of the room is so intense. In the sense that, like, what that would mean to me is that if you are hearing the Four Noble Truths, you are sitting in that room. It's a very big room. That's right. And a very old room, but you're still sitting in the room.

That's, you know, that's exactly the way communication really happens. It ripples out probably endlessly through time and space, but becomes fainter from an obvious point of view. And some of the things that the Buddha iterated probably are very faint to the point where they're almost like a watermark on a piece of paper, like the average eye, the average perusal will not pick them up. They're more subtle. And, you know, that's the notion of things like terma, treasure teachings in the Tibetan tradition.

There are subtle imprints of this kind of intelligence that, you know, they have to really listen pretty carefully to pick those up. Right. Right. Okay. So then I'm glad you said that because then I'm glad I've never really talked about those treasure teachings. Can you maybe explain to people terma or what the concept of treasure, treasure teachings is in Buddhism, another awesome term, so many cool terms,

treasure teachings, compendiums, flowery barrel of life or whatever, but treasure teachings. So can you explain what that is? Yeah. Well, treasure refers to like a very potent value that's attributable to something. Right. And we often have the notion of hidden treasure, right? And that's like any pirate lore has hidden treasure. Yeah.

So the notion of something being there that has this kind of richness, this kind of potency, and yet it's not immediately apparent might involve a search, you know, actually of some kind of deeper dive, so to speak, like in pirate lore. And then what's in that? Well, it could be material things, but it could also be wisdom. The treasure, the idea of terma is some kind of wisdom is packed, bundled, into a form that can be revealed at a later time by somebody who can uncover it, rediscover it, and through various methods.

And that's called terma or treasure teaching. And the person who does that is called a tertun, which is somebody who's a treasure revealer, that means somebody who can reveal that. And that's a very rare, but, you know, noted phenomenon and noted teachers that have that attributed to them. That's part of what they do. Is it kind of like in physics or something? You, from like one equation, you can extrapolate all of these other ideas in physics. And sometimes people just using like these fundamental equations realize there's an implication that hadn't been understood yet

or make a connection, or is it literally like somehow? Because this is my dumb idea of what it was until what you just said, is I thought it's like they literally find like a dead sea scroll, or they find like... Ah, well, see, so there's a couple of different kinds. I'm just telling you from the tradition itself, I'm not, you know, making this up, but classically there are different kinds of terma, and some are in the form of scrolls written down. Literally, there's instances of people diving into lakes and pulling them out of the bottom of lakes,

putting their hand into solid rock and pulling them out of solid rock. That's one kind of terma, and then there's another kind that's called mind terma, which comes into the consciousness of that teacher very directly. It would be probably closest to what we would call channeling or something like that. Okay. And, you know, for example, Trungpa Rinpoche was a teritun, acknowledged as such, and he would just start reciting these things and didn't claim any authorship of it. You know, she's not saying, this is some sort of feeling, this touchy-feely kind of thing,

and I want to give it words to it. The words just come streaming out. Yeah. And so they're considered intact in a way. So, okay, so this, okay, so this, again, it goes back, and I'm glad we're talking about this, because I love thinking about Buddhism in terms of time, because if our human understanding of time is past, present, future, but is limited, which it clearly is, I mean, it's not like hippie-woo-woo-shit to say that there's other dimensions

where time probably functions differently than the way it functions in this dimension. We, where the potential for seeing time completely differently would be there if there was some sensory apparatus in that whatever that was. I can tell you one of those right off the bat is called old age. What do you mean? You see time differently. Oh, right. Yeah, right.

The older you get, the more... You're in a different domain. You do not have the same sense of time and kind of expanse and kind of, you know, no particular issue. So the whole realm that we are in is a funnel towards appreciating the value of time or becoming oppressed by the lack of awareness of it, as you said earlier. So in this case, these treasure teachings, there is this... If you look at the thing outside of time and imagine that whoever the Buddha was had this outside of time capacity, then if that's the case, then it would be an easy thing to give these talks not just for the current place,

but to like give the talks infinitely out. Sure. And that's what you would be picking. If you had the kind of microphone or, I don't know, sonic telescope or outside of time kind of ability, then you would in real time be listening to one of these teachings as though you were in the very same room. That's right. Only other people can't hear it. Well, and that, you know, there's something definitely to what you're saying.

And again, coming to the classical definition of Terima, often they're considered to be revealed at a time when they will be most useful, most valuable specific teachings. And in the Tibetan tradition, there's one teacher in particular named Padmasambhava, who you have a connection with, you know about Padmasambhava. Yes. He was probably, he was thought of as a Buddha, you know, in Tibetan culture, and he was an Indian teacher who is, you know, credited with having brought the first iteration of the Buddhist teachings to Tibet, and very powerful kind of, you know, multi-dimensional kind of being.

And he had 25 close disciples, supposedly, and he buried a lot of treasures, treasure teachings, specifically with a sense of when the future, you know, what would need in the future. And one of those quite frankly, which I've been thinking about today for some reason, is that the Dharma moving west, coming to the western, it's such a big event. I think we've sort of taken it for granted so far. We have headspace and calm and all of these meditation apps, but the Dharma has moved into a completely new civilization within the last 70 years, period over and out. And it's just the beginning of that, that, you know, who knows where we'll come from that.

Look, it's, it's, it's, I'm going to try, unless you haven't memorized, isn't there like a famous quote where it's like a prophecy almost or something? Well, the iron bird flies, the Dharma moves west. Is that the one you're thinking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, when the iron bird... It's also a Hopi prophecy too, you know? That's an interesting aspect to that. I didn't know the...

They said that the, the red man will come from the east, something like that. Whoa! So when Karmapa met the Hopi elder, that was like quite a, it was quite a powerful, you probably can read about it online. But you know, here's the thing, Duncan, this is, this world is a magical place. Right. You know, it is, it doesn't take a lot of letting go, just simply observing, tasting summer corn, you know, talking to a friend, watching your kid learn how to swim.

If your heart and mind are open, you just see this level of complete auspiciousness that's, that's saturating everything. Right. Well, I mean, this level of auspiciousness that you're talking about, this is the other thing that I love reading about in these scriptures is, within the structure of the thing, it generally, I've noticed it's pointed out in more, not just in the one I'm reading, but in the way of the Bodhisattva and some other ones I've looked at that in some periods of time,

in some Kalpas as they call it, there are no Buddhas. It doesn't even happen. There's not even, there's not there. So if you, if you, if you incarnate in one of those times, you don't even have the hope of like coming into contact with this stuff, probably in the sense that there wasn't anything there. No one came up with it. There wasn't.

So if you're even born in. That's right. To the time, then, and it's weirdly, you are kind of born into the temple or the room that Buddha was giving these talks in. Like you're just way in the back. Your karma wasn't, you're in the cheap seats, baby. We're in the cheap seats. That's the Kali Yuga.

We're in the cheap seats. We're like, The average thing would be you're in the bleachers in the Kali Yuga. You're not even in the parking lot. There's not even a ball that's going to get a big homerun that's going to come out and hit you in the parking lot. You're sort of on the other side of the river and there's no game going on. You're on the other side of the river and like trying from like the distant den.

No, no, nothing, nothing radio silence. So you just know, but you know, there's some, there's a game going on right now. I'm pretty sure. I mean, your people are talking about the game. People are saying, look, there's a great, it's happening. It's, it is. I mean, this has been my, on psychedelics, whenever I've like brushed shoulders with this, it's always like, oh shit, it's happening now.

And then I think, oh, I don't under. That's always seemed confusing to me a little bit with Buddhism where it's like, Oh, right. It's now like the things happening now, not just like being the present moment now, but literally like, Oh, it's now, like whatever the thing is, is now when they're drawing the sand mandala, they're not memorizing. It's not coming from some, put the dot here and then the dot there. It's more like they're looking at something and drawing it.

When you're telling me this, it's not like he's memorized these things and then is repeating them from memory. It's like he's listening or something or it's just or transmitting from something that's now. Well, that's why I think, and you've probably felt or heard me communicate this before, that a great place to apply energy and, you know, effort is just getting people to be more curious about their experience that they're actually having. And I call that meditation, you know, if that's a fair way to think about meditation, just be curious about what's happening in your field of experience, in your sense fields, in your thought realm. You know, it's the four foundations of mindfulness. It's the body, what's happening in your body, what's happening in your emotional body,

what's happening in your mental activity and what's happening in the phenomena around you. If you could just be curious about that and not have so much momentum that you think you know already, return to a more, a more direct observation post. I think the Buddhism would reiterate itself automatically. That's where it comes from, it comes from that. You would have Buddhas, you would have the same cycle go around again of somebody saying, oh, let's see what is true about the experience that we're having. A, there does not seem to be a trace of a solid fixed identity in it.

B, mistaken identity creates suffering and for oneself and others. C, there is some kind of unfabricated quality to the ground of our experience that's got the texture of awareness and kind of luminosity and vividness and it's just there. It's not something you have to make up, you don't have to take anything to see it, you don't have to block anything to see it, you don't have to make it something happen to see it. Just be curious. So that's why you know me, I'm trying to get people just to sit down. Not that I'm like on some religious zealot thing about Buddhism or something,

but when you do sit down and when I do it, you know, and sit down and I clarify the situation that I'm not trying to accomplish anything right now, I'm just trying to be here and I'm just trying to be curious and not resist what's happening and see the nature of it, that this is, has the possibility to actually transform the situation because we're always trying to manipulate it, usually. Wow, right. So that's why we do all this. That's why we're doing Dharma Moon.

That's why we're doing these teacher training programs. That's why we're having spaces, you're offering spaces where people can get together and sit and you're not feeding them any kind of doctrine at that point. That's too late for that. Once you start meditating, you should put the book down. Right. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's what I love about the silent meditation as they call it is that there isn't a way. You can't, there's nothing to put in.

Like, what are you going to, what are you going to add to the silence? What is the, what's the subtext? There's some great stories there since we talked and invoked Marpa, the translator, since he seems to be in the room. Marpa studied so hard, Duncan. People were so serious in those days, you know, and he studied so hard and his whole thing, I'm going to bring this back to Tibet and I'm going to translate it into Tibetan and I'll make a good living for my family and I'll be, you know, doing some valuable thing, you know,

and he's in the boat crossing a river, you probably have heard this story, right? Yeah. And he's got all those books that you're reading and all those texts that were hard earned and there's a guy in the boat who's jealous of him, you know, a kind of competitive student who accidentally quote unquote knocks the books into the river. Oh my God, Marpa, I'm so sorry. Oh, did I knock all your books in the river? But that moment is regarded as part of the teaching as much as him collecting them.

It's not, you didn't need to collect those books. You needed to collect them. You need to read them. You need to study them. And then you need to drop them in the river and see what, how much of it is really manifestable within the realm of your own understanding and experience. So that's part of, you know, that's sort of the touching and going, you know, you connect and then you also let go.

But I think the sitting thing, I still will probably take less breaths, encouraging people to incorporate some kind of sitting practice into their lives, even if they could have to squeeze it in or, you know, maybe do a little less of something else, even sitting 20 minutes a day opens a gate to just that kind of sweet naive curiosity about what's happening in your own state of mind. There's no aggression in it at all. It's not trying to conquer anything or trying to, you know, get higher or lower or, you know, push somebody out of the way.

It's just, it's that beautiful, children have it. Well, it's like that, it's like a little thought experiment. Imagine you really don't know what's going on with you. Yeah. That's easy for me to imagine. Yeah. Yeah. What if you don't, but a lot of people think they do.

You know, I certainly do. A lot of people are like, well, I'm feeling this because of this. And I feel like that because of that. And it's obvious that's what's going on. I mean, even the notion that may just maybe the reason you think you're the way you are, that you know what's going on with you could not, it might be off a little bit. It might be, in fact, completely wrong is already semi-liberating. I mean, that's kind of.

An awful little bit is semi-liberating. Yeah. Even an awful little bit is okay. Yeah. Just you might not really like have it all figured out regarding your own internal landscape or why you feel the way you feel. It might not be because of fill in the blank. It might not be because of whatever you think it is.

I mean, just that alone is like exciting. And yeah, kids, because they haven't solidified. Yeah. They don't even know what's going on. They don't know what to think or what they're doing or what it is. I mean, the baby laying in the crib barely knows what it is. Yeah. How are your kids?

Oh, they're great. They're great. They're about to start school. They're both very excited. What kind of school like kindergarten? Preschool. They go to preschool. The youngest goes three times a week.

The oldest five times a week. It's been a long summer. You know, kids want to be around kids. It's like at some point being around old, like old people. You know, they love us. But I mean, you know, like when they're at the playground, they're like not excited because the adults that are there, they like the other kids that are there.

So yeah, they're doing great. You know, I gotta tell you, David, I had a flash. But first, but before I say that, okay, let's go back for a second to this theoretical sermon. The Buddha is delivering in some place. Yeah. It's a big, it's a big enough crowd that you got to have like these people like echoing what he's saying back through the room.

But let's go to the Buddha. Who is he listening to? What's it coming from? When he's speaking, where like he's not, is he, what's he echoing? Like what is, what is that? Great, great question. You know, there's some, there's some clues in the Buddhist teachings like in the Lo Jiang slogans, you know, contemplate the nature of

unborn insight that just came to mind when you said that. Regard all phenomena as dreams between sessions be a child of illusion. You know, coupled with the idea of not blaming everybody else for your stuff is this idea of recognizing the unborn nature of experience, the kind of un-fabricated part. So in, in my sense of it, if somebody was able to have their mind clear, you know, and not chasing phenomena, not chasing projections, the way that they express themselves would have complete

fruitional quality to it in terms of the potency of their communication, whether it's artistic, whether it's Milo Reba singing songs in the mountain, whether it's the Buddha giving these doctrinal, you know, discourses, whether it's the Buddha sitting there in Samadhi while Avalokiteshvara gives a, the Heart Sutra doctrine. It could take a lot of shapes but the essence of it is the state of mind and that is something that's part of our tradition is transmitted directly from teacher to student and that's less, it's less discursive, you know.

How is that transmitted? Yeah, you know, it's, there's, there's no fixed way actually but it's, you know, sometimes called pointing out or the nature of mind kind of instruction is part of the, you know, tantric tradition in Tibetan Buddhism where something about the actual essence of consciousness is directly communicated and the experience of it is somewhat non-dual, you know. It's like, they call it the meeting of the minds. Right.

Yeah, so it, and it's non-conceptual. In the, in the sense that like, non-conceptual in the sense that it's, it's like, it can't be articulated non-conceptual? Usually when it's articulated it's sort of more like poetry, you know, or songs or some kind of art expression, you know, like for example calligraphy or tea ceremony or, you know, all these forms that have come up as a way of presenting a container in which that non-conceptual experience can be recognized

and not clung to but just recognized. So that's, you recognize it and you let go, that's the way those teachings happen. There's nothing to hold on to. You, okay. So that meeting of the minds thing, it's interesting. Buddha remembers his past lives according to pretty much every, every story. I don't know where there's a disagreement with that. He apparently had full memory of all his past incarnations.

How, I don't mean how did he remember it in the sense of like, how can you do that? I mean, when he was remembering his past lives, is there any record of what the experience for him of that remembrance was like? Was it the way I remember Christmas a long time ago? Or how perfect was the memory and was it such a powerful memory that he, that there wasn't much of a distinction between the life he was in as the enlightened being in the previous lives? Well, your guess is as good as mine,

but I'm going to go with first thought, best thought here, which is I thought of clairvoyance. You know, that term clairvoyance, it means clear seeing really. And we all, I think, have some experience of that where there's just a certain clarity to a memory, to a thought, and there's no real good reason why you're able to access it, you know? And it could be you have a memory of a childhood event or something like that, or something that hasn't happened yet.

Right, precognition. I think most of our friends out here will have some kind of experience like that, where they go, wow, I kind of, I had this memory, but it hadn't happened yet. And then so-and-so called me later that night. Little trickles of that. And the instruction is to not really focus on that. Not really try too hard for that. Because then you just end up like, oh no, how can I reproduce that?

Yeah, I don't mean personally, like how do you remember your past lives? I mean, I can't afford that many therapists, I'm sure it'd be a nightmare. I'm talking about how did he remember? And not how technically, but how, what were the qualities of those memories? Is there any record of- But I'm going to still stay with it. You know, where there's a quality of spaciousness in the mind where it's not cluttered. Okay, so in that spaciousness, it's the same kind of space that the pterama come in,

that the insight comes in, that the intuition comes in, that the memory comes in. We dissolve part of the meditation practice once you get your mindfulness thing groove going, is to allow enough space so that your mind, it doesn't, you don't need to reclutter it every time you recognize a certain kind of spaciousness in it. And you know, think about the last time you wrote a piece of music. Where did that come from? Nowhere. Did you write that thing that's on your podcast with the children singing it?

Probably children singing? Oh no, that's John Jones. Where did it come from? That's the People's Temple Choir. Okay, listen, David, this is the- Okay, I know what you're saying. I just, the weird flash that came into my head was, oh my God. Here, is that, is what enlightened?

Like, if there's this possibility of enlightenment, and if the Buddha was enlightened, as whatever that may be, and then after that realization, whatever comes out of your mouth is going to be, to the right ears, some kind of Dharma teaching. Right. Then, what that implies is that like, when you get enlightened, you just are sitting on this, you're now giving, not like you're meaning to preach or something like that, or meaning to give some certain or something like that,

but should you get enlightened, and if part of getting enlightened is you remember all your past lives and your theoretical future lives, and I'm sorry, I'm being way too, I'm going against everything you're saying. Let me jump in. I think I know where you're going, and I would just say intentionality, motivation,

and spontaneity become utterly cohesive. That's so cool. Does that make sense? Oh yeah, totally, totally makes sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. It's really funny to think of like, it's fun just as a thought experiment to think from the perspective of the Buddha. You know what I mean?

It's like, you know, just sitting there like talking, and then all of a sudden there's people, and then all of a sudden they're like echoing what you're saying back, and it's just funny thinking about that, but also you can remember your past lives, and also you can see everyone in the audiences, or whatever you want to call it, in the lecture halls, past lives, and their future lives,

somewhere in there you're not going to really think you're different from them. Yeah, because that would bust the flow pretty good. That identification of me as like separate and different is where, you know, that crack then evolves very rapidly into a kind of very powerfully constructed dualistic festival of, you know, which we call samsara, you know, and that's where we live. We live there, so we don't want to disrespect it,

and we don't want to like, you know, kind of just say, oh, it's just a thing, you know, you want to really give it its due, but I don't think it's the root of the tree. You know, the root of the tree is definitely more closer to a non-dual kind of experience, or interdependent experience like you're talking about. Even with people you don't like, that's true. When he, okay, so when he's giving the sermon,

if you imagine you as him, then suddenly you could think, oh my god, he's not just giving it, he's listening to it. He's not just, he's not just saying it, and people are going back and echoing it. He's going back and, like, he's somewhere in there. If you're, I mean, just imagine, theoretically, that expansive realization of just seeing like this web

of interconnectivity with everyone in the room, who they were, who they're going to be. My god, somewhere in there, you wouldn't know, he's not thinking, I'm the Buddha. He's not, you know, there's no sense of like, it's me. It's, I'm, he's the voice underneath everyone's mind. Well, you know, Rinpoche used to call it grain of sand at that point. Or like a grain of sand.

The whole ocean is there, you know, it's vast. The vastness is, is not oneself is vast. The vastness is oneself is kind of reduced, and therefore the, you know, everything else is. But here's the thing, Duncan, that I really want to just say, and not to get ahead of ourselves, because as you know, I want to get people to start at the beginning, and actually learn to work with their minds,

and really be responsible teachers. Yes, yes, of course it is. But having said that, what you just said is imagining yourself as the Buddha. There are like hundreds of Vajrayana practices, in which that is exactly what you are doing. That's cool. First you imagine yourself as the Guru. You know, you, you, you develop that kind of strong sense of

connectivity with the Guru, who you respect and admire as, as, as if that person were a Buddha. And then you visualize all kinds of deities, you know, that are, that are enlightened beings, really, enlightened aspects of reality. And in some cases, at the end, in almost every case, they dissolve into you. It's called a front visualization,

and then they, and you're there, and they dissolve into you. In some, you're already a deity in the visualization, and, and in some, you arise as the deity. That's what they say. So you, you finish your practice, and now who are you? You're, you know, you're Avalokiteshvara, or you're some deity, and you, and I've asked my teachers, does that mean I'm in the shower, and that's who I am? Yes.

It's, it's, Avalokiteshvara is taking a shower. And what's the biggest obstacle is our own doubt, and aggression, and habits about our own worth, and our own, you know, we can't think of proclaiming our nature as something that's, that's splendid without clinging to the thought that I'm not worthy, you know? Right. Somehow. And, or I'm, or pushing our way towards a sort of exaggerated sense of worth. Right. So these practice gradually familiarize yourself,

familiarize yourself with the atmosphere of the deity, and the mood, and the feeling of it, and then allow that to permeate your atmosphere. And that's quite a, you know, a strong statement about one's inherent Buddha nature, being something that you're actually practicing from that ground, not to that ground, not towards that ground, from the ground that Duncan has that Buddha nature already. Right. Yeah. I'm, again, yeah.

Like, it's, you know, I'm not, I don't know about the Avalokiteshvara. I don't know if I can go there, but I could definitely just think, oh yeah, I get it. I'm in like a massive, a thousand-year-old audience hall listening to the Dharma talk given by the Buddha right now. And it's like, it's you. It's, it's like, I'm listening to it in that way. I could do that. Like, I can get there.

And then in that case, it's a very sweet thing. Because look, you know what my number one bummer has been regarding, not just the Buddha, but Neem Krali Baba, all these stories of like, they, they get to meet the person. It's like, what's wrong with me? I didn't get to do it. But then, if you just think, you did. This is why they're celebrating.

If you're born in a time where there's a Buddha, you're there. You're already in the room. It's a room that looks like time, and it's gigantic, but it's no different than the very same room, right? Like, that's the present moment. That's the room. And that's also called, since we're sort of in this part of the zone for a minute, sacred outlook.

In those, in those Vajana teachings, you transform your ordinary perception of the, oh, this is just me, just told me with my, you know, into everybody in it is some kind of enlightened manifestation. And the atmosphere, and then you take very good care of the whole situation. You treat it with respect and dignity. And again, this is gradually restoring. It's like restoring a Rembrandt by removing layers of those little dabblings

that people have put over it for centuries. You know how they restore a painting? Yeah. Right? Somebody painted right over a Rembrandt. That's what we're doing. Got it. I got it. That's cool. So again, I'm going to just keep coming back.

Where do we start from? We start with the painted over version of the Rembrandt and take a good look at it. And I think if we can encourage people to just sit down, do the basic mindfulness practice, you'll realize that everything else that the Buddhist teachings are embedded in there and emanate from there. If we don't start there, then our imagination, our fantasy life takes over and we're just creating another kakamemi situation.

So somehow starting very basic is really super important. I can't emphasize that enough. Well, I mean, that's an exciting way to think. I love the idea of curiosity. And I love thinking of meditation more in terms of like, look, you mind that you're time blind and so you don't realize you're sitting in that room with the Buddha probably. That's okay. Whatever.

What happens if you just listen? Yeah. And then, and also I think, what would you do if you, aside from pretending you're the Buddha, which is lots of fun. I mean, what would you do if you were smart enough to know, oh shit, I'm sitting in the room with that being. How would you be acting sitting in that room? What would you be doing?

How would your voice sound? Or what would you be, what would be a natural, not like a forced kind of formality, but how, what would spontaneously come out of you if you were like sitting in the front row instead of. And what comes to mind, Duncan, is what with the next thing you did after you got out of there and re-entered your life.

Use the bathroom. Try a long lecture. I gotta pee. Yeah. For some reason, when I do those kirtans with KD, I can sit there for two or three hours without having to pee. It's a magical situation. Yeah. When I go on stage, it's the same thing. When I'm doing stand-up, it just goes away.

It's very interesting. And you've been doing a lot of stand-up lately, right? Yes, I have. And what's it like? I love it. I love it so much. I don't like pain. So I don't like the beginning phases of stand-up, where you're working on jokes.

If you want to refresh your set, you have to come up with new jokes. You might have figured out a way to make that hour work mostly. And that's why I love the process of stand-up. So I really enjoy the editing where you, and it's a real wrestling match with your ego because there might be things you're saying up there that have not been getting laughs, that got laughs once.

And you're like, oh my God, this is a very funny thing. And then it's like, it's not getting laughs. Like, why do I keep saying it? And realizing the more you cut that stuff out, the more compressed the thing gets in a good way. That's tiny, right, yeah. You're saying that you can write jokes, right? You can make up jokes?

I mean, people would argue with you if you said that I can write jokes, but I like to think I can. I think that's, you know, I know comedians, I love comedians for some reason. I love to laugh. I'm not alone in that. But I don't think I could compose a joke. I could compose music at the drop of a hat. You could just say, I need this song done.

But how do you compose a joke? What's that process like? Okay, here's how you do it. It's as easy as easy as you could be at first. I mean, like on paper it's easy. Everyone, you know that story, like when you're telling your friends, and you know you've told the story before. I don't know if you do that,

but you've told this story before. They have heard you tell the story. They like it so much, they don't go. You're telling the story again, because they want to hear you say it again, because it makes them laugh and it makes you laugh. It's part of a ritual of friendship where your friend will let you do the story again,

and you like to hear it. So those, a lot, those, you could just, anyone could write down, what are those stories? Even if you can barely remember, it's like you're talking when you're out with friends, or on a date, or whatever, the funny story you tell. Now that is a joke.

It's probably an unrefined joke. It probably needs a lot of work. It might not have strong punch lines, or whatever. But if it gets, if you've told it more than once, not on stage, just to people, and it's gotten laughs when you tell the story, you probably have a joke on your hands. Then bringing that in front of a group of people,

and holding their attention to it, probably means that within the story, you need to find moments to put little mini punch lines into the story. You got to make it funnier. So then the evolution of the joke would be understanding points in the story

that you could elucidate to make them funnier, and cutting out places that don't need to be there so that it's more funny than not. Take the air out. And then for me, the process of stand-up is like those compressing those stories down into a point where there's enough funny beats in them, and hopefully the story itself

crescendos to some real punch line at the end of the thing. You nail it. Right, exactly, yeah. So learning how to do that is learning how to do it. There might be a similarity with giving a good Dharma talk, because you want to be able to get to a point

where a certain perspective is delivered and clearly like, okay, that was it. Now I understand what the renunciation is really about. So I'm thinking, I'm wondering if there would be a way to create a new art form, which would be a Dharma talk that's also a comedy act. Could they be integrated? Listen, I don't think so.

No. It would be a new form though. You'd be like dunking the first on that one. Well, no, I mean, there have been, I mean, look, what would be like the problem with all, like the problem with stand-up, I think, is that it's very ego, it's very hard on a person to be in front of a group of people

and be reminded by your species that as clever as you might have thought you were in the composition of this joke or that joke, it didn't work. And then you need to have the ability, you have to be tough enough to be like, okay, that didn't work. If you were to go up there with some kind of secret desire

to give a Dharma talk, which I'm saying, I'm only saying this because God knows, I'm trying because what would be better than instead of having to write jokes and punchlines, go up and then just look, we're not going to be funny. I've done this and like people will respond to it, but I don't know if I call it stand-up comedy. I think stand-up needs to be what itself, what it is.

And that doesn't mean that it needs to take it. It doesn't mean you can't articulate, like any good comedy show, I guess you could say, any great comics that I've seen in its own way, you could argue, well, that's a Dharma talk. It's their reflection of truth. And if the truth is Dharma and they're talking about truth, it's a Dharma talk, but if the intent in the stand-up act

is correctional, educational, if it has within it that, if it smacks of like, come before me and let me show you this or that, then you, I think at that point, you can run a ground accidentally. Even if your intention was good, I like the pure stuff and I only say, I just know from my own experience, if I can get out of that awful reality

that what I thought was funny isn't, by subverting that with some kind of like, okay, here's the talk part of my thing that doesn't have jokes attached to it. I kind of feel like I've, I don't know, I've missed the mark to some degree, but I might be too dramatic. It's just speculation.

You know, me, I like to see what's not heavy-handedly, but is it possible for, you know, for the mingling of the creative expression and the Dharma, you know, like, and in Japan, they have it. You know, there's certain, like, no theater is an example of it, if you've ever seen that. I haven't. It's, the sensibility begins to permeate

so that you're not sure whether you're learning something about the way things actually are or if you're being entertained. That line begins to blur, you know? That's cool. You know, my friend put it this way, the only rule is that it needs to be funny. That's it.

That's the purest version. So theoretically, based on that, you could say anything up there, but it needs to be funny. That's the only rule. It needs to be funny. And you have to, you can't, you can't, like, trick yourself into thinking that, you know,

they're laughing on the inside or whatever. There's a kind of a goalpost. It's a game with a goalpost. That's it. It's not out on a meadow, just free-forming. So anyhow, long story short, God, I mean, we just, we just can talk. And it's so enriching, you know, these conversations.

For me personally, I know, you know, people like it or don't like it, but for me personally, it's so enriching to have this conversation. No, for me too. I mean, whenever, sometimes what I'm talking to you, I'm telling you, I don't know, in this connection space, it really is like a,

I don't know how to put it. Like, you know, that thing that you're talking about, the under-the-surface thing, the unconditioned, that thing, it just pops up. And then the moment it pops up, I ruin it because I'm like, David, it's like this. You're the Buddha, but then you're not. And then you're, it's into time.

And then you're remembering your past lives. I do, you're right. I immediately try to fill that space up with linguistic boxes like, like a hoarder who found a new room in their house and it's like, oh hell yeah, now I've got a place to put my cat litter in comic books. I just want to fill it up right away. I think that's part of the process for everybody.

So I wouldn't personally, you know, see that as necessarily anything other than exploring so that we become more, and this is, you know, again, the sitting practice is the base, it's the root of it, where we begin to just explore what happens. And I've been saying this to the Japanese students, they just simply notice.

This is not the part of the program where we're kind of trying to make it into something or make a cake or you just simply notice what's there already. But I agree, that would be an interesting challenge if you were up on a stage and you were like, you know, trying to, you had, there was a premise for being there and you just went into a simply noticing state. It could be kind of very, very free-form

and kind of like what just happened, or it's just going to be not the right context for simply noticing. Oh, I think that's the state. What you're talking about is like, you want zero latency in performance. Well, on that note Duncan, I do want to, you know, we've had such a beautiful synergy

between the people who are magnetized by your, you know, what you're talking about. And I guess you call it the family hour. Do you call it the family? Is it sort of a family situation? Is that how you describe it? Yeah, it's the family. The family.

So I love that idea as you know. And part of your family has been part of Dharma Moon's family. And I almost feel like we have kids together. We do, it's great. They're growing up fast. So I just want to let everybody know, you know, in closing here that we do have another one of the future training programs coming right up in,

starts on October 1st. It's a 100 hour program. All you have to do is go to DharmaMoon.com and you can learn all about it. And we'll put the links in the chat. When we put the podcast up, I hope we can do that. Great, of course. And the first weekend is, you know,

something people can come and just only do the first weekend and then see if they want to sign it for the whole course. And you and I are on target for next week. Wednesday, August 31st. So if people want to hear us talk a little bit more specifically about what's coming up with the teacher training program at Dharma Moon, just go to DharmaMoon.com right on the front page and sign up for our chat that we're going to have next week,

August 31st, 6 to 7 p.m. Eastern Time. And talk a little bit more directly about that. But we have really co-mingled something here that I'm really happy about. And because it seems to be very genuine, it sort of happens spontaneously. Yeah, totally spontaneously. Yeah, so, and you know.

Do people get a chance to hang out with you one-on-one when they take your classes? Yeah, I mean, the beauty of it is I'm there and I'm sort of, you know, doing a lot of the, you know, sort of major presentations. And so people have a chance to dialogue in that context. But what we have is these very well-trained and I'm quite proud of them teachers who are, you know,

probably one to every 10 or 12 students. And they get to work one-to-one with one of those teachers during the course of the program. And they also get to work with each other, which is so something about this teacher training program that's quite unique is the way that it's very interactive. It's not just a bunch of downloads that you do in your house at your own time.

And it forms, just like in your community, it forms a sense of community and sort of shared experience. And I'm very much part of that. And I'm, you know... But it's bigger than that at this point. There's a whole sort of mandala of other teachers who are really wonderful and take good care of people at this point, really proud of it.

Well, folks, hang out with David from the Midnight Gospel. You see, like, I'm so lucky that we're friends. Like, whenever I'm reading these books, I'm always thinking about you, like, God, I'm so lucky. I can read this and not just, like, you have no one to talk to about it. Like, God, it's so cool to think, shit, I got to ask David about that. What's that?

What does that even mean? Or why does it... It's such a... I get the why in all of the lineages. There's this, like, go, if you needed someone, you got to have someone you can bounce this stuff off of. It's really difficult without that. So I'm... And I've had that myself, Duncan.

So I understand, like, we want to pass that forward. So the Kalyana Mitra, the spiritual friend principle, we want to pass that forward. I'm training younger people to do this in the future, because that's when you say, were you there in the iteration ripples? That's how we ripple it, is by... It's really this kind of personal communication going on and on.

Yeah, that's it. That is so trippy, David. Thank you. Thank you so much. Not just for this, but for all the off-camera conversations we've had. Thank you so much. Thank you, Duncan. Talk to you soon. Talk to you soon.

That was David Nickturn, everybody. All the links you need to check out the courses he mentioned are going to be at dunkintrustle.com. Join us Wednesday, October 1st. I'd like to see you there. Come to the shows, but if you don't want to do any of that, I get it. I'm just so happy that you listened to this podcast,

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