Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 536: Monk Yun Rou

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Monk Yun Rou, fascinating Daoist monk, martial artist, and author, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Monk Yun Rou on his website, MonkYunRou.com. Subscribe to his newsletter here. Be sure to check out his new memoir The Monk of Park Avenue: A Modern Daoist Odyssey (A Taoist’s Memoir of Spiritual Transformation), available wherever you buy your books! Check out Monk Yun Rou's Wisdom Wednesday Zoom class too! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Apollo Neuroscience - Try Apollo's new wearable to improve your sleep, focus, calm, and to reduce stress! Visit ApolloNeuro.com/Duncan for $40 Off your first order!

Progressive presents an ad from mom. What does it say here? Bundle your home and auto insurance with progressive and get protection around the clock. You know what? I'm sorry. I think it should be around. What are you signaling?

Me to stop talking? Oh, all right. I'll stop talking. No, just kind of tell me. That's all you get around the clock protection when you bundle and save with progressive. It's easier than getting your mom to make this radio ad. Progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other

insurers is not available in all states or situations. Hi pals, it's me, DeTrucel. And this is the Ducal Trustle family hour podcast. If you're listening to this on the week of November 7th, then you, like me, are probably crawling with all kinds of weird government propaganda from the left or the right or the center. God knows where it fills us up, crawls inside of us this morning when I woke up and did my nipple yoga, which I highly recommend

that you consider doing. It's a fantastic way to wake up. It's a fantastic way to realign yourself with your body, and it will show you why nipples are on everything. You see, nipples are kind of like the wake up button on the human body. They're more than just something that babies suckle on to get their sweet mother's milk. No, no, no.

Nipples are kind of the way to tell your body that you're awake. They're a way to invite your body into the day. And there's a special method. It's similar to yoga breathing, also known as pranayama. But in this case, it's nipple yama. It's a rotating circular motion from the right nipple to the left with a yank on the right, yank on the left, yank on the right, yank on the left, squeeze, right, squeeze, left, push up, up, down, down,

squeeze, squeeze, left, left, right, right, squeeze, squeeze, right, left, left, right, left, squeeze both nipples simultaneously. And you're going to get a gush. What's going to come out generally is all the stuff that you dreamed. If you had nightmares, then the color of the fluid is going to be a kind of grayish, slimy, dark color. If you had great dreams, then you're going to get more of a pink flow, not bloody, more like the color of a rose.

And, you know, there's colors in between. There's actually people who in other countries will examine the nipple flow, the fluid, the nectar, and let you know what's going on with you karmically. But unfortunately, we live in the West and though we have this incredible technology around us, it's really difficult to find someone to read your nipple fluid. But I digress.

What's happening to every single person living in the United States and maybe other countries is that we are getting inundated with high level hardcore propaganda just blasted in the face with some of the most intense, insane, psyops level bullshit that maybe has ever existed on the planet in the old days. If you wanted to condition people, if you wanted to send out propaganda, it had to be on the printed page. It wasn't all colorful with alerts and zings and bangs and zips.

And though I do love zips and bangs and tweets and alarm sirens and bright colors and charismatic, angry people. At some point, it's important to check in with yourself and ask yourself, is it normal for me to be tight as a wild gorilla's asshole that just spotted a leopard hanging in a tree above it? Probably not. So I hope that you're finding a way to not disconnect because God knows the last thing you want to do is disconnect from politics.

I mean, my God, it's truly the most important thing in the world. I mean, especially this election. We've never heard this before in any other election in any other midterm. Never have we heard that this is the most important one. No, truly this, this one of all of them of every single one. Oh, yeah. And I know what you're thinking, but it seems like in every single one of these elections, they act like it's the most important election of all time.

And every single time I fall for it and then I get really like wound up and I vote and things seem to basically stay kind of the same. Not this one. This one matters, friends. This one matters because democracy is on the ballot, my friends. Democracy is on the ballot. This is a chance once in a lifetime, maybe to vote no to democracy. Do you really want to be part of a democracy?

You really want to go down and put some dumb shit into a machine in a high school gym. God forbid you have to poop and you go and sit in that high school gym bathroom. You're going to you're going to get high school crabs. You're going to go home with some false sense of, I don't know, accomplishment, a mild dopamine drip and crabs just crawling all over your pubes, laying their eggs in there. And you're going to have to explain that to your lover. Like, no, you don't understand.

I voted. I'm not messing around. I didn't hook up with somebody who had pubic lice. I pooped in a high school gym. I'm saying poop because we can't say shit on the podcast anymore. Romdahl used to talk about the different levels of reality. One level, it's the level of the midterms. It's all the human stuff, your social security number, where you put your vibrator

before the guests come over, that stuff. That's just one level of reality. There's another level of reality that's pretty amazing, low population density, too, just outside of all that noise and madness and insanity. There's another level of reality, a beautiful level of reality. There's a lot of different names for it. Some people call it the present moment. Some people call it bored as shit, but it doesn't have to be boring.

In fact, it's an incredible place, a place where everything most of the time is fine, beautiful even, incredible, where you don't really have a personality or identity in the way you understand it. You don't really have a you and stuff you like and stuff you don't like and people you're angry at and people you're happy with and a list of people that you've buried in various landfills across the United States. No, in that present moment space, you're just this, everything and nothing simultaneously. This is a beautiful place to be.

Now, you can't hang out in that place all the time, can you? You have to do stuff. You got to go to work. You got to go to that puppy mill and you've got to get the dogs to make love. You got to go to the penitentiary you're a guard at and you've got to stop the prisoners from making love. This is your life. This is reality and I'm not suggesting that you should dismiss this or go

floating off in some meditative, ambivalent haze. What I'm saying is if you get too stuck in the midterm stuff, you get too stuck in the politics, if you get too stuck in the fleeting, temporary, bugling of megalomaniacal narcissists who are making so much money from their positions of power, then you can end up with a slight tremble in your undergun. It'll tremble and it'll wake you up in the middle of the night as it vibrates and it exudes that thick, creamy stress oil that so many of our underguns released during the midterms.

This is why I'm suggesting maybe it's time for us to vote no to democracy. And yes, to monarchy, think about it. Democracy is not really working. And since it's on the ballot right now, this is a chance to actually get rid of that system. No more weird, geriatric people gaslighting us about bullshit. No more going down to vote. No more feeling bad because the person you voted for turned out to be the next

incarnation of Joseph Stalin or Charles Manson. No, you don't have to feel bad anymore. If the king sucks, you didn't vote for him. And your friends didn't vote for him either. It's a king, but maybe the king won't suck. Maybe our new king will be beautiful with an incredible beard and a sword that glows when evil is nearby. You won't live in a country anymore.

You live in a kingdom. And yeah, are you going to have the false sense that you have some control over the direction of the country you're in? No, but there's some possibility that while you're out in the fields, uh, working with your ox or when you're walking down one of the many byroads of your new kingdom that you might pass the king and he might like you and make you a Duke or a Duchess and give you a kingdom inside his kingdom. You might become the Duke of Minnesota.

You might become the Duchess of New Jersey. Now that's pretty incredible. You're not going to have to get a lot of money from various corporations and billionaires so that you can get enough TV ads to get elected. No, you just need to make that king's eyes twinkle in that special kingly way. And he might grant you a boon. I think there's something to be said for thinking about voting no to democracy. And yes, to monarchy.

Friends, if you are listening to this on the week of November 7th and you live in Fort Worth or Dallas, I would love for you to come and see me perform. I'm going to be at Hyena's Comedy Club November 11th and Fort Worth. And then November 12th, you can catch me in Dallas at Hyena's Comedy Club. We're doing two shows a night and by we, I mean myself and the brilliant William Montgomery. I hope you'll come out. I've got a Patreon.

It's patreon.com. Fortslash DTFH. We gather twice a week for a meditation and a wonderful gathering. We write books together. We love each other. We're a family and we want you to join us. Just go to patreon.com. Fortslash DTFH and sign up and finally my loves.

I'm getting my YouTube channel fired up. All the weird stuff that doesn't necessarily fit into the podcast. You can find that by looking at Duncan Trussell on YouTube. Filling it up with new content every day. I'm evolving my studio soon. I'll have over 300 cameras that I can look from one camera to the next to the next as I talk to you about ways to upgrade your iPhone. That's on YouTube.

I hope you'll subscribe. Now I'm fascinated by today's guest. He's the only Taoist monk that I know. Of course, I was introduced to him by one of my favorite DTFH guests, Danieli Bolleli. He's been on the podcast once. I hope you'll listen to that episode. But before you listen to that, listen to this one.

This is an authentic Taoist monk, a martial artist and somebody who is valiantly combating a fungal infection in his brain. Someone who is on the precipice of letting go of his body and is completely fearless and completely open about his situation. You can find him by going to monkyunru.com. I'm going to have the links at dunkintrossell.com. He is an author. He's written many, many great books.

He talks about some of them during this episode along with an incredible vision he had after he stopped breathing. This is some wild stuff. So strap in and welcome back to the DTFH monkyunru. Welcome, monk, welcome to you. That you are with us. Shake hands, go meet new people. Welcome to you.

It's the dunkintrossell.com. Dunkyunru, welcome back to the DTFH. How you doing? Doing okay. Now, you got interrupted. I don't know if I'm glowing like the last time. Do you always have a glow? It could be the lighting.

We had to sort of shift the podcast around. What happened? I had a hospital powder, too. We did, and I'm sure it was a health-related thing because nothing else would do that. Things aren't going on, but I'm still here. Are you feeling better since your visit to the hospital? Well, you know, I got two things going on.

You may recall one is... I do. Yeah, I'm feeling better since the visit to the hospital. That was not a high point in any way. But you know, how about this? I am not in the hospital. Thank you. Oh, yes.

God. Feeling better. I'm glad. I see that you had my brother, Daniela, on again, which I haven't had a chance to listen to. Oh, it's good. I love him so much. Can you tell me what's going on behind you there?

What is that? Is that an altar? What are the symbols above? I'm looking at your awesome studio. Quite impressed. You've got... It's very organized. You've got a bookshelf.

And right behind me, I see... I'm going to unimpress you. How am I unimpressed? The only thing that doesn't impress me is you put your router next to your samurai swords. Are those samurai swords? Yeah. See, I don't think you should do that.

They're not samurai swords, but they are Chinese swords. So the reason that that's there is that it keeps me on my toes because the router imbues crazy energy, imbues those swords with crazy energy. And sometimes they come right out of the stand and they start warring around. And I got to end up under the desk, and I don't know if they can see that low and all.

All right. You guys used to have a magical sword problem in my studio too. You know what I did? Got rid of the fucking swords. I didn't... I love that. I love that having to stay on my toes. Yeah.

I knew your desk ain't on your toes, friend. Well, it doesn't always get all four swords. So usually I have a chance to grab at least one and defend myself. And since I'm not doing a lot of sword dancing these days. Sword dancing. You know, it's not all bad. So I have this bookshelf.

Well, I have a lot of things here. The red thing, framed. Red thing is my ordination with the Chinese government. It's a very, you know, embarrassingly stamp. Then there's some other artwork. I don't know how much you can see. I can see the horses. The very top center piece.

That's... I bought that at the art gallery at the Forbidden City many years ago. Almost, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago. It was a display from the University of Inner Mongolia. And that was painted by the chairman of that art department. It's just the most beautiful painting. And I hate snow and I hate horses. Don't ask.

It's a fantastic painting. And then here is my... When I was very, very sick, I started to pare down my library. I didn't want my wife to have to deal with all that. I didn't want her to do away a lot of things. But there's still, you know, the good texts and the critical things that I need for my classes and stuff. Tell me about the altar behind you.

What... It's not really an altar. It's a table. I moved some things off of it. I don't know really how I can very easily show you this. This bookshelf is got a lot of altar stuff on it. I'll just show you one or two of them because they're beautiful. Nobody can see them except us.

We can describe them. Yeah. Well, we are recording videos, so maybe who knows one day it could end up on the internet. Oh my God, you disappoint me so much. I told you. You're gonna warn me too. I can...

Don't worry. It doesn't have to. Look at your beautiful... Look at your beautiful... Okay, well, I'll pull out a couple things. This is really amazing. I have a lot of Buddhist things and a lot of Buddhist things of interest. One has an extraordinary story with it.

Well, my father in the 70s is a famous physician, and he briefly took care of the Shah of Iran. And... Wow. The Shah of Iran gifted him. He had no idea what this was. Nobody in my family had any idea what it was. I never dared to ask him for it,

because he had no idea what it was. So after he passed away, I asked my mom if I could have this. Wow. It's beautiful. This is an extraordinary carving in... I guess maybe Afghan or Persian, Turk wise, which is different from our own here.

Folks, it's just beautiful, vivid blue. It's really pretty. What is that a carving of? Well, so that's the thing. It's the legend of the Monkey King. Oh, Hanuman? The Buddhist monk traveling from east to west and journey to the west. And here you can see his staff.

I see it. Remember, we talked a little bit last time about how Taoism was a very porous religion philosophy. Yeah. And one of the ways that it has survived thousands of years. And if you count its shamanistic precursors, longer than that, is to absorb, to be porous or permeable,

one of the good Taoist scholars here in the US called it that. I can't remember whether it was permeable or porous, but I've thought about that for a long time since I read that thing. It's very true in the monastery where I was ordained in Guangzhou, in southern China. If I'm ever fortunate enough to be able to go back there, sign of American relations don't make it likely.

But if I am, it's called Qinyangguan, which means pure Yang, which means you open the top of your head and you connect to heaven through your meditation practices, which you asked me about. You were fascinated by the six hour standing guys. Yeah. Remember that.

Anyway. So this is a very good entry to what I kind of feel like I want to talk about with you today because we really didn't get there last time. And it's very, very important. We'll see if it's of interest. I wrote a novel which just released the Jade Boy, brand new. To do that novel, it took me years to write it. I had to travel all over China.

And I was in pursuit of this riverine neolithic tribe that lived. And was the sort of foundational shamanistic thinking as one of those early shamanistic practices that we think salted into Taoism. Okay. And I wanted to put this story together with Taoism and make a kick ass story about a Jade robot was constructed with a golden head. It's constructed to be about the size of a six or eight year old boy. And he was gifted to the Baron Queen of Kubla Khan.

You know, the Kubla Khan was not troubled by a Baron Queen. He just got another one, you know, so he had many. But this was the first Queen and she still had to be honored, even though she couldn't have a baby. And the court inventor, the guy who invented strutting swans and musical elephants for the amusement of the Khan was in love with this first Queen and he created for her a child substitute. Okay.

And he gifted it to her so that she could technically have a child. And there was, and it turned out that the boy was sentient. That somehow this robot was alive. Okay. And that's, and there was a whole religious convocation about all the different religious heads were in Kambalik at that time where the, where the emperor was, and they decided that, you know, yes, he was alive, which meant that he could theoretically,

he was the son of the first Queen. He could be the next emperor. Be the next emperor. The first emperor. An AI emperor. But the AI was thousands and well, now it was 800 years ago. And there's a whole lot to the story. It's the most fun thing.

Anyway, this little statue. It represents that culture. So it has very interesting eyes. Big ears. Yeah, it kind of looks like a little bit like the, the creature from the black lagoon, but not like way cooler, kind of like aquatic. It looks, it looks Polynesian.

The creature from the black lagoon. I have a green one. There's a parent. I got a, it's a blurry internet connection. You know, I don't understand what I'm seeing there. Yeah, that's right. No, you're right. It's the creature from the black lagoon, which has kept me going with that book all these years. It's got aquatic ears.

I didn't mean to insult your statue. It's got like kind of like flappy aquatic ears. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you that. Anyway, here's something that happened around this. So I went and found an excavation in central China. And I found a museum that had just opened about this culture. And it was a beautiful museum. I learned everything I needed to know from the book in this museum.

When I came back, I stopped in Hawaii to work some more on the book. I got a little room in a big island, Airbnb, and I just stayed there with my laptop working on this, everything fresh working on this book. And I was like super disciplined. I didn't go out and I had a refrigerator. And I just, I didn't go out.

And like after 10 days, I thought, you know, I'm out of my mind. I'm on the big island. I'm staying in a room. I can do this. That's Western New York, which, which I'm not above doing. This was good because I was on my way back. Anyway, I get out, I get my car and I drive. They completely other side of the island. I had a nice lunch.

I'm just so relishing not looking at the screen. I take a little procrastinatory walk and I see kind of a junk store, like just some old furniture and stuff. But for whatever reason, I walk in mostly so as not to head back to work. I'm just wandering around this dingy shop and I go at the very back of the shop. There's a case and in the case is that little guy along with a friend. And I look at it because I've just come from the museum where these things are. Yeah, see them.

Wow. WTF. Yeah. That's my little guy. Yeah. And he's in a jade. Yeah. And I have one of those free zones of crazy stuff.

I go to the lady at the front and I say, could I look in those next year? Yeah. And I take these two out and ask how much they are. And they were a little pricey, but I ask her where she got them. You know, my husband was all into Chinese stuff and he was over there. And he visited a museum in central China called Sanchin Way. And I can't tell you if they're real. They're probably just reproductions.

And I'm listening to this in my eyes. And I tell you, you know what I'm doing here? And she goes, no, that's, this is, you're making this up. It's impossible. It's impossible. And I'm not making it up. So I buy one. From two weeks later, the other one comes as a gift in the mail.

What? She sent it? She sent it to me. Cool. Cool. So I have these pair reminding me of the power of story. Incredible power of story and coincidence, which isn't probably. And it was a real like mind bending thing.

That does not seem like a coincidence to me. That seems like an episode of the Twilight Zone or something, except usually like the Jade statue is cursed. Or in this case, it's just, well, let's really think about it. There just was pause for a second. I think it's important when magic happens. And especially in like ceremonial magic, if you successfully execute some spells, some,

some whatever, you're supposed to like, and you say, you downplay it or you don't admit what it is. And apparently that's like bad practice. Like you have to admit it worked. It happened. The thing worked. So let's think about it. You've gone to the big island.

You're in an Airbnb, 10 days going nuts, writing. You go to take a simple walk, meaning this is right by you the whole time you've been writing. It's just been sitting there calling me or something. And there it is. It's not, I've never seen whatever that thing is in my life. Like I've never seen, it's not like we're looking at a, a bobbly head of Kevin Costner or something.

Honestly, I've never seen a bobbly head of Kevin Costner, but you know what I mean? This is impossible. That's the partner. Wow. That's what she sent me. They're both Jade. And they are amazing.

And that was some kind of magic other than I, I didn't have that intention, right? Cause I didn't know those things were there, but however it happened, it was an extraordinary thing. Well, yeah. That's, that's extraordinary. That's a affirmation of your book. I would be very excited because it would be like the universe saying,

yes, you're on the right path. And usually I just think of those things as bread crumb trails, little clues dropped into the time space continuum by whatever to indicate, like, okay, yeah, you're doing the right thing. Kind of like when I give, you know, you, I'm trying to get the dogs to like sit on their cushions when we watch TV. And I, you know, I'm trying to manipulate them with food. Right.

It's like that, except you're not a dog and whatever this thing is, it's probably a whole infinitely more intelligent than humans. When she said my husband visited San Qinglui, I probably like got dry mouth and froze. Yeah. For a moment or two. Yeah. Because I had no way really of immediately integrating that into my reality.

It took me a little while. That's the other quality of it is you, you have to either forget it, which I think a lot of people do. I think those things happen more often than maybe people think. It's just that it's too much to deal with that reality. So, so you just sort of, you naturally forget about it like a dream or something, or you adapt and realize, yeah, whatever's going on here. Well, you know, we've got some serious blinders on as for sure.

We've got serious blinders that are only allowing us, or we were deciding to wear the blinders and we're only seeing a tiny sliver of whatever's happening. In an earlier book, Mad Monk Manifesto, I talk about this in terms of filters. And I say, you know, we're just as we have evolved through millions of years, we have gained these filters on our consciousness that interrupt how much and what we can see. Right. And I think the, I posit, I wasn't there, so I don't know,

but I was a student in evolutionary biology for a long time. I posit that these filters are the brain's number one job. As we evolve, the filters kept us from dying and going nuts, being overwhelmed with a thousand frequencies of light that we cannot see coming in from the cosmos, and we would be blinded by them or so confused by what we could see that we couldn't function, find a mate, find shelter, find something to eat. And that we need the filters, but not all of them. We now have an opportunity through meditation and Dallas practice to remove selectively and purposefully the filters.

So, you know, when we drop acid or two shrooms or something, you know, I think there's also a lot of filter removal going on and which is can be, you know, terrifying or fabulous, but it can't select. Right. I can't select. No, it's pretty, it's a roll of the dice. It's like, if you get lucky, you take the right amount of acid, you take too little. You don't take enough acid and what happens is the filters get magnified.

It's like you get triple filter, quadruple filter. You get stuck in the filter. You take enough acid, no more filter. You know, that's where things get interesting. It sucks when you get stuck in the filter on a psychedelic though. That's, that's where I think that's interesting. I never really thought of it that way. I will say that people often ask me why I don't do more of that stuff.

And I say, you know, I don't feel like I'm in any way a control freak, but I do like to control some things. And in this case, my Dallas meditation explains the filters in some ways, not in this language, but, you know, basically, and tells me which to take off or which not to take off. And that has proven to be fantastic. Admittedly, it's a lot more work and a lot more pain in your legs than. Well, yeah, teach a man to teach a teacher, teach a man to make acid versus teach a man to buy acid. The man can make acid forever. It's difficult to obtain the precursor ingredients, unfortunately.

But in this case, you know, and this is why, you know, you hear if you're, if you're so many psychedelic people, fans of psychedelics get drawn into meditation out of some intuition at the very least that just maybe there's something here. But you hear from people like you and you hear from people like Ram Dass and you hear that you hear over and over again. I'm telling you, there's a way to get to a place so much more fabulous than the place you're getting to from psychedelics. It's just like you're saying it's there's a difference between having a discipline to sit, have a daily practice to, you know, have a teacher to do all the things and, you know, meeting somebody in a park to get a piece of paper. Big difference, you know, one is quick, one is slow and people in our culture, they like quick. So I understand the, I understand why.

I'm not a dedicated psychonaut. So, but the experiences I've had very much underscore that for me at least, because I do like daily practice, and I do like the frame that it gives life. And I also, you know, we were talking about story and something I've been thinking a lot about since our last conversation. And I wrote a newsletter about this subject. And you know, maybe it's because I got a lot of books coming at this year, I got three came out already. Wow. I feel like that we don't give story enough credit in terms of creating our culture, our society, how we see the world. It's all story. Yeah, whether it's a Judeo-Christian story from Syrian stone god, Babylonian, but whatever. Or it's a Hindu story about, you know, created 60 million gods, whether it's a Taoist, so-called scientific way of looking at the universe constantly rebalancing itself and harmonizing.

These are all stories. And if they're strong stories and the luck of the civilization dice gives them sway for a long period of time, then they become so inextricably entwined in the fabric of our everyday life that we don't even know they exist. We don't know where those stories came from. We just are born into them. Yeah. So to me, the fascination, and it took me a long time, decades, I think, to really understand this. To me, the fascination is to see what it feels like to create mythology. And I don't have a large enough audience because I'm in a fringe area in the wrong country, let's say, for that. What? What? You mean Taoist monk isn't like trending on Tik Tok right now? It has been trending on Tik Tok like I can't tell you. Oh, I get all kinds of hits. So I've discovered that there's two different ways to convey these ideas. One is, I write something like Madman Benefesto, which is I hand you a glass and I say, Duncan, drink this. You take a sip and you guys disgusting. It's so bitter. I say, yeah, but it's the real thing. So take it and, you know, you read this, you'll really understand what's going on.

And you go, all right, you hold your nose in your swallow and you say, yeah, that was awful. And then you take a minute and you go, oh, I see what you're saying now. Yeah. But it tasted terrible. I couldn't get through it. Yeah. Or you can take that medicine, put it in a strawberry milkshake. It's the same medicine. Same medicine. Well, I'm telling you, there's a company, Annie's, our kid has allergies, so we have to be careful, but they're brilliant. They came up with a crunchy snack that looks like our kid, I'm sorry, their kid loves cheddar bunnies. All right. But Annie's is just released, not sponsored by Annie's, by the way, hidden vegetable bunnies.

So it's brilliant. It's brilliant that no idea he has no idea he's eating vegetables, thinks it's cheddar bunnies, which it is, they don't taste terrible, they taste good. So yes, I know exactly what you mean. If we are, and I think that it's like, they're real parallels between parenting and what you're talking about, which is that if I try to get my kid to eat like all the things that you think a child should eat, good luck, good luck. What are you going to do? Tie him down, foie gras, broccoli into them like they do with the geese? No. You got to like hope that they like it and then like find ways to get good food into them. So I feel like what you're saying is when through a practice, you discover that this is not false, but in fact, there is a way to reduce one's suffering in the material universe that's so incredible. It might be the most beautiful thing floating in the world. And then what generates from that is compassion. And then what comes from that is you want to help. But like what you're saying, you go right with the broccoli, people aren't really interested in broccoli. People aren't interested in that, especially when it challenges, when it challenges you, you know, when it challenges your identity, when it challenges all the work you put into your own personal story. So yeah, I hear what you're saying and I agree. A deep and hearty thank you to the alchemists at Loomi Labs for supporting the DTFH and for creating my favorite microdose gummy out there. Friends, are you afraid of edibles? You should be. I am. In the old days, I'd try to figure out just the right microdose of whatever edible I had and inevitably I would get that shishito pepper effect, slurp one of those babies back and the next thing I knew, I was fantasizing about what it would be like to be disemboweled by an undead pirate lich with a with a magical hook for a hand.

Just feeling that hook going up through my belly and into my throat, pulling my head off and then somehow I stay alive so that the undead pirates dangling my head in front of its head and saying to me, you're me, you've always been me. I'm too old for that shit. I got things to do, man. I can't worry about maybe finding myself on some roller coaster created by Satan plunging into the depths of hell. And this is why I love Loomi Labs. They did it. They created the perfect microdose gummy. Thank you, Jesus. And it's available nationwide. You can fly with these. I don't know why I'm not going to ask why. All I know is I can take them on the road and they help me sleep. They give you that nice, perfect glow that comes from just the right dose of an edible. Again, microdose is available nationwide. To learn more about microdosing THC, go to microdose.com, use code Duncan to get free shipping and 30% off your first order. Links can be found in the show description. But again, it's microdose.com, code Duncan. Thank you, microdose gummies. Last time we talked with, we spent a little time on the vision that I had was our comatose and that vision of what is the future of humanity and all that. I got, I got some feedback from out there. I'm not surprised that you are not surprised. I'm sorry, but before you talk about the feedback, would you mind summarizing that vision again for folks who are just joining us for the first time because there might be people who didn't know this story initially. I had multiple organ failure from sepsis and I was pretty, I guess, I was, I hesitate to use the word because I cannot say if my heart had stopped, but it probably had and if it hadn't, it was about to, and I wasn't really aware of that.

I wasn't aware of being resuscitated, but anyway, and you know, I was resuscitated in an ambulance, so I became conscious in the ambulance. And I was aware of, you know, the conversation between the EMTs and the hospital as they're driving you 800 miles an hour because if you ever had to get the guy to the hospital fast, this was the time. And so I heard the back and forth and, you know, they said you'll need to repeat those blood numbers that would take blood. Those are not consistent with human life. I do remember hearing that thinking well that that's that's not good. Yeah. So anyway, I was, I was out for a few days. And during that time I had this vision, and I had a, I had a companion in the vision. And I don't want to get religious about that because I have no real sense. I would love to tell you that was, you know, lousy or Buddha came and hung out with me, but I can't tell you that. What I can say is that I was aware of what I call the curator and the curator was interested in showing me stuff he wanted to show me. I did have a sense it was a he, but I couldn't say what he looked like or anything. He kind of yanked me around the cosmos. I was going very quickly through space. I remember passing comments and seeing them in great detail. I was going by zooming in close to planets. There's a lot of space in this as opposed to trees. Right. It was a very cosmic thing. And it gave me some tiny sense of how much there is out there and how insignificant and tiny we are.

Yes. Which is, you know, a Taoist idea in some respects that, you know, you're part of a matrix or fabric. You're not, you're not by any means utterly important, but nor unimportant. But nor is it all about you. Right. Another thing which you pointed out in our last conversation, nobody really wants to hear that, especially not in our culture. That's the broccoli. Right. And everybody wants to hear it is all about you. And that's where self help industry arises. Anyway, when I began to come out of this, whatever this state was. Last thing I remember being shown is the future was the future of humanity, which maybe is the future of humanity. I felt certain about it then and I guess I still do now. Which was that, you know, we become very enmeshed.

Yes. In our AI. And we end up floating around in space in these giant synthetic things that look like Alaska King crab legs. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, but, and I reacted poorly to that model. I was like, no, no, no. And the curator gave me a bit of tough love and said, you know, I'm sorry, you don't like it. Because it's not really about you having crab legs tonight. That's how it's going to be, you know, that's what's going to happen. So anyway, I did get, I got some feedback from people were not angry at me but but they were disturbed by this vision which I completely understand.

The best I could do was say, you know, I don't have the sense that despite my poor reaction to it, it was a bad thing. I had the impression, for example, that there was no suffering at all. And how could be, how could I resist a state in which pure consciousness was retained. And yet, and everybody was there and you were there as Duncan but you were Duncan part of a big thing. But there was no physical suffering and I can't tell you that I got so into it that I could talk with the curator about emotional suffering and disconnection or any of that because it didn't last that long. And mostly because I got upset. If I had not gotten upset.

I have a feeling that I would have gotten more detail on this. No, no crab legs floating in the No, thank you. But it's not like, it's like you're, you're talking about like a kind of technological extrusion or something like some kind of like a Yeah, yeah, just some some form of like, I don't know, space ship was like sort of kind of carbon fiber but it was, you know, nothing hit that hit it couldn't hurt it. Yeah, strikes bumped into it and bumped off. It was very, you know, it was was way beyond our tech. But somehow we got, we got there. And, you know, there are many people in that field to think that human beings, just like a seal of cancer, better examples are things that have gone extinct the dodo. They were just there to serve the course of evolution and we as human beings are just there to serve the course to serve the purpose of generating what they call strong AI, which looks at us like we look at an ant.

Yeah, right. That's not going to step on you unless you're directly under my foot, but you know, it's like, let's imagine you and I are sentient droplets of water. We just we came to I don't know what happened and we are beginning to realize that we're in a river. And we're beginning to realize that this river is getting faster and that this river is about to turn into a waterfall, meaning that our entire experience of what it means to be this wonderful little peaceful bit of the river is about to radically dramatically drastically change and we've gotten attached to different like whatever the hell's in that part of the river we've gotten attached to it. This is what it's always been this little part of the river. And there's droplets who are like, we're going to stop the flow of water, we're going to find a way to freeze it, we're going to find a way to stay exactly here non flowing. We are not going over that fucking waterfall that waterfall into the end of everything. And that's what that's what's happening right now, except in this case it's like what you're talking about the waterfall is many different names for it. But it's the technological singularity is one of the more common ones the apocalypse is another.

The color you got. Yes. But of course, you know, really what's happening that a most water, you know, most droplets of water is that shit's drying up. So that's another another, but we're going to become a cloud. I like the river I don't want to be a cloud I don't want to be evaporated no. You know, stories, all the way back to ancient stories on tablets and Egyptian things and so on. You know, what they're always about, because the only thing that's really true, despite what we could make up to. I don't know, clarify or reinforce these ideas. The only thing that's really true is change. Absolutely. You know, two years ago before I got sick, I was still jumping around with a 30 pound sword and doing splits.

And now I'm reaching out for something to stabilize me as I go down the stairs. Right. And it can't be too many of them, by the way. How could I have possibly foreseen that. I mean, worse happens people get it by a bus. I mean, you get ALS, which is a disease I could think of that's even worse. But I don't I don't think that I like I don't think any of us are like thinking, well, you know, at some point I'm probably going to have a very rare fungal infection. Right. But I mean, the fact that it was this particular one is interest, maybe because it's rare. But the point is that if you if you live in a way that cultivates the awareness. And we talked about this too, but that you are part of something very much larger, and that the things that happen are not poor me things. I never I never had a why me feeling. Which is strange, I know. Not one you didn't have a single flicker of like, are you fucking kidding me? Like, seriously, like this is this is it?

Yes. But that I find is a bit different than why me. I wasn't feeling right. Like, I'm not like why me like victim. You didn't get victim. Yeah, right. Yeah. Great. You know, this happened to me, as opposed to someone else. I didn't have that. I did have the. This is not a fun way to go out feeling because we would not have that feeling. But you know, we don't get to choose. I remember my primary master. Once, a dozen years ago, I got sick, and he and not this sick, but I got sick. And he said, oh, very good for you. And I remember thinking, excuse me and what, you know, I felt a flare of irritation at this.

How could you say that really? Why would you say something like that? And he saw my expression. He says, look, you have a place to go. And this is a shortcut. You didn't choose it. But if it didn't happen, you'd have another 25 years of meditation to get here. It's pretty much the same thing here. And I said, I'm sick of shortcuts. I'm fine. Just give me the 25 years of more practice and I'll scramble up the mountain on all fours, you know, but. And again, he said the same thing. Yeah. Okay.

Doesn't matter what you feel. And it's the same thing as the guy telling me too bad if you don't like this future of humanity, but that's what's happening. It's a Job experience. It's a Job book of Job style thing. Job is just getting dragged about by God. He is over it. And at some point God basically says the same thing. Like, who are you? Like, who are you to question that which made the Leviathan? Like, what? What do you want? You giving me notes? You giving me notes, Joe? It is a very good story. Very good story.

And I've just, you know, I decided a long time ago that I wanted to live. I wanted to write my own story for my own life. And I also wanted to write stories of ideas and I wanted to create people and relationships that I could imbue with some of the things I'd learned. They're not didactic books, not the novels anyway, but they have the whole, you know, the stream is in them. Yes. You know, and it's my favorite thing. And now that I'm physically quite limited, I did this workshop last weekend, people came to Tucson for some study. You know, it was a couple of days of movement and philosophy put together. And honestly, I wasn't able to do a lot of the movement.

I had assistance and everything got done, you know, but I wasn't like I was before. And I could, I could tell that some of the folks there who hadn't seen me in a while were like, oh my God. But not, not everybody. And they got over it. And, you know, I just, I just told them, I said, look. Taoism is all about change. Yes. I mean, that's what this is. I became a monk in this because I take that. I take that philosophy and worldview so seriously that it really makes more sense to me than any other story about who we are and why we're here.

So, since I like it so much and I've been telling it and hearing it for so long and different voices and different times and people and books. I'm just going to accept that this is exactly what is supposed to be happening right now. We, I mean, it's got to be, it's got to be, what do you, is there a malfunction somewhere? Is there like a circuit somewhere, the deep space that somebody's like, oh, shit, we got to plug this in. I'm so sorry. It was a malfunction. So it's on me. Or, you know, that they're all playing us as a video game. That this whole thing is from our, from our descendants who have created a reality kind of matrix like, and they're, and they're seeing a monk. Let's see what happens if we do this to him.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It could be. Handles with Mr. Monk. It just could be the dinner's ready. You know, it's dinner's ready. The way we translate getting called to dinner, you know, when you're a kid and you, you experienced, I experienced that these kids, these days, I don't get it like we do, but we, they just don't let us roam. People would have dinner bells. You have to ring the bell. You hear the bell. You go, you don't want to get to the point where you hear your mother angrily yelling for you because that means that you fucked up. You know what I mean? So you go and you go eat dinner. I, maybe that's, we're talking about something similar, but in an hyper dimensional level where what we consider like death, letting go, it's just ding, ding, ding, ding.

Come on, it's time to eat. And then, you know, then it's, there you are, you're back at the dinner table eating and your mom's like, you got to stop playing that game. Why do you always give yourself that fungus thing? You should try a different way to tie. Yeah. And, you know, that I've always had a weak constitution and had a lot of things wrong. My childhood was not robust. So it's not entirely surprising that I got this as opposed to some, you know, Olympic swimmer or something, but still the story, even that is a story. You know, that's me creating a narrative of well, you know, I was a little fella. I was a little fella and I kept falling down and I couldn't keep up with my friends on the bike trail. Okay, now I'm old man and look what they do to me.

We're a bitch. I mean, this is like you're habituated to it. It's like what you're talking like the, this reality, this, this truth of change, this fact that look at you, every single one of us is a melting candle. No way around it. We're melting at different rates. Sometimes you start melting faster than you thought you were going to melt. This, what it seems like what crept in or big, big stories, powerful stories, addictive stories that are the opposite of that, the opposite of the melting candle. There's hope. You might live forever. We're going to find a cure for death. We're going to cure a death. We're going to cure disease. And so these stories became solidified. And if that's not the story, the story is a distracting story. Let's look at the midterm elections. Let's focus on geopolitics. Let's look at that story instead of looking at the much bigger story, which is like, we're melting, baby. We're melting down every single one of us. That's a really intense story, even though it's true, you know? So I think we're habituated to like sort of echo that in varying ways of attempting to bring some solidity to this, this very non solid, very fluid, very, very, very impossible to control situation that we find ourselves in.

I get it. You know, it's a, and I understand why people think it works. I understand in the past versions of me why I would adhere to that. I still do. I don't want to spend all day thinking about the fact that I'm like a old candy bar, somebody left on a sidewalk, gradually melting. You know, one of the things that came out of that vision was something that I had before the vision. But it was heightened and sharpened, which was my constant awareness that human beings are far from the only and maybe not the smartest creatures on this planet. And then we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to just be a pure force of destruction. And do we do other nice things? Do we have the ninth symphony Beethoven? You know, do we have Ulysses? Yes. Do we do amazing things? Yeah. But what happens somehow is those amazing things that we can do somehow dropped out of service, meaning that we can't, we don't use those facilities now.

Right. To, for the greater good, it became an all about me culture. Oh, yeah. And, and, you know, it's very the problem for me, at least with that is that I'm painfully aware of the consequences of those decisions and actions all the time. I just, I'm in a constant state of seeing them. I don't mean negative because sometimes they're very good. Things we do. It's not just bad things we do. Yeah, whatever they we do, and whether we judge them one way or the other, there is no extracting us from the whole of reality. That was him has this phrase. That that was shame that that was big.

Which means, you know, when you're fighting with your wife, you know, step outside, take your telescope and take a look at the farthest stuff you can see and and realize that we are just this little marble as it's often called. You know, the sad thing if you had a, if you had a nice enough telescope, you'd probably see some alien fighting with their wife. So, you know, a long time ago I wrote a novel about about aliens and the subject of it was, they're here all the time, they're in our drain pipes, they're flying, you know, 767s or whatever. But we just don't see them. There's that fantastic story about Captain Cook coming, sure, in Polynesia, Hawaii, I can't remember. And the natives came to the beach, and there were his ships on the horizon. I find this a fabulous metaphor for this whole thing. And they didn't see him. Yeah, he was right there, right there. They didn't see him at all. Right there. They couldn't understand. He was landing. Yeah. And they can see that those were human beings dressed funny. You know, they had no ability to even perceive those people. Why? Because they had nothing, nothing in their experience or sensorium.

That's a European conquerors coming to destroy our island, our way of life, take our stuff, our women, all that. No idea. No idea. Didn't see him. So, you know, as far as aliens go, I am completely open to the idea that there's one standing in the corner laughing while I'm having this chat. They're in the other corner. What's happening right now is so cool because the radar technology that they have developed is brand new, insane, like hardcore, never before seen ways of like using radar. And so now, all of a sudden, there's this uptick in pilots seeing shit that they didn't see before because the radar is picking it up now, like things hovering in the air, things going faster than anything anyone's ever seen. It's causing all this turbulence in the government because it's like, what, we're going to ignore this? You're going to ignore that? You're going to ignore the ship? We don't know what this is. Didn't we learn our lesson about the European conquerors? We don't know what these things are. And so it's causing a lot of problems because people in the military can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. People in the military, they swore oaths. They're like, listen, I have to leak this. You can't tell me that I'm like, they call it a swamp gassing where you, and that's what they did. They ruined people's lives. Instead of gaslighting swamp gassing, it's like they ruined people's lives. Like people in the military would encounter these things. They would report it. And then they're gone. It's like, you didn't see an eight. There's no UFOs. What are you talking about?

And now it's all coming out. Like, oh, no, no, no, they, they, they report just came out. I can't remember how many cases in the report. Maybe I'll just make up a number of thousand cases of those thousand cases. This isn't just like someone in a field being like, whoa, I just saw a thing. This is like people who you have given the responsibility to fly million dollar jets. And of the of of these half of them, something like 50% of them cannot be explained. No idea what the fuck it is. No idea. So yeah, I agree with you. It's everywhere. They're all around us. The universe is teeming with sentience. And we're pretty blind to most of it. I think so. I think that's exactly right. I want to thank Apollo Neuroscience for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Apollo is a new wearable that helps you sleep more and stress less. This is some wild technology, friends. It's like a micro dose on your wrist that helps you feel more present connected. If you're having problems sleeping, it can calm your nerves and clear your mind, melting away stress so you can sleep. It's like a wearable hug for the nervous system using touch therapy to help you wind down into a restful state without drugs or side effects.

More on the wrist ankle or as a clip attached to your clothing, Apollo delivers silent soothing vibrations that help you fall asleep and stay asleep. It was developed by a neuroscientist and board certified psychiatrist who's been studying the impacts of chronic stress in humans for nearly 15 years. Apollo Neuro is running an IRB approved clinical trial in conjunction with MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, to understand long term effectiveness of Apollo wearable with PTSD patients who have undergone MDMA psychotherapy. You don't have to wait for the results of that study to come out though. Head over to ApolloNeuro.com. They've already done lots of studies on this incredible technology and the results are astounding. It's the only technology with an issued patent to reduce unpleasant and undesired experiences associated with medicine assisted therapy, including psychedelics and traditional medicine. Across their research, Apollo users experienced on average 19% more time in deep sleep, 14% increase in REM sleep, and 40% less stress and feelings of anxiety. According to a recent sleep study, consistent Apollo wearable users gained an extra 30 minutes of high quality sleep per night. And right now, you can get $40 off your Apollo today at ApolloNeuro.com forward slash Duncan. Again, it's ApolloNeuro.com forward slash Duncan.

And remember, you can find everything you need to find out about the Apollo by going to ApolloNeuro.com. Thank you so much, Apollo Neuro. There was a yesterday or today, so like yesterday or today, I just saw, I think it was in your time saying that they have determined that some percentage of them are high performing Chinese drones, which ought to give us some pause, frankly. Yeah. If we haven't even been able to figure out that what that's what they are for the last 20 years, that's, at least to me, that is not an encouraging thing. On the other hand, how do we know that the Chinese are not seeing our crazy speedy high tech drones? And because of their culture, nobody talks about it at all. It would never get out. Well, no, you know what, they call them anonymous. I read it what the Chinese government is calling them. They do have a name for it. It's something like anomalous weather.

They have a funny name that they're calling that they're calling them. They have admitted the seeing some of the same shit that lots of other people are seeing, but in a different way than we currently are. But hey, wait a second, you are telling me so you told this incredible vision that you had on the last podcast and you were saying people responded to it. It felt like you wanted to add to your vision. Like you were going to tell me something regarding that vision. You've been getting a response to it from people who were fascinated as I was. I don't think that there are any sort of images or things to add to it. But I feel like people seized on what they thought was scary. Like what I didn't hear from emails and texts and even in one case a phone call. I didn't, I got that people were disturbed by it and took it as negative. One lady, you know, couldn't sleep because of it kept coming into her mind and I felt like I had to respond to that one because she couldn't. She couldn't sleep. And you know, my worldview does not put that play that at my doorstep that's on her if she can't sleep because things happen all the time we all have stuff. But I did feel compassion in that I wanted to not have her feel that way. So, you know, I had a kind of what I thought was a reassuring conversation and it was.

But I think the main thing about that vision is that focusing on just the part at the end where I didn't like where I saw and so I kind of blew the connection if you want. Yeah, sort of doesn't capture that experience and a lot of other ones, because if you meditate for a very long time for many years, that's not the only experience I've had by any means was just a particularly timely one for when we talk because just happened before that. I never get the idea that any of those visions are negative. To me, to me, take away from them, much more significant and powerful to me as the experiencer was not, oh, you know, humanities can end up in crab legs floating around the cosmos, imprisoned or something. Because I had a little grasping of no, I like us the way we are. But besides that, the whole thing, the vision itself, the non dual quality of seeing the world as differently as I did in that vision and as I still retain. I do remember we talked about the mosquito. I just can't bring myself to kill. There have been, I was already on this path so maybe you could say fewer changes than you might expect from someone who had never had these ideas before. But remember, you know, Taoism is non dual. It's all about things being interconnected. And the very first stanza, which I know you're aware of this, in the Laozi or sometimes called the Tao Dajing, that very first line, the first line is, you know, if you can name it, in this case Tao. That's not it. Yeah, correct. And, and the deliciousness of this irony of someone who has such a clear vision of the world, the universe, everything, some group of people or single person maybe had this transcendent non dual view, which you could turn like a tank turret.

And if it meant anything and it would reveal the same expensive interconnection. Right. Yeah. He went ahead and wrote the book anyway. He didn't just say, sorry, I can't really write about this because every word I say is not really the thing. You know, that was not down. Yeah. Because language is too paltry a tool for this. But you have to admit, if you are writing the seminal book on Taoism, is there a funnier first sentence in a book about Taoism than that? That to me is what it shows how sparkling he was. Like, is that is the funniest way to start your book? Which is like a degree. And it's one of the things that, you know, I have, I am never going to dunk a basketball. I'll just say upfront, not going to happen.

I could take camps and practice. You know, I have short legs. I don't jump well. I'm not a great athlete by any means. Okay. I have a, I have a facility with language. And so even though the words I'm writing are not the real thing anymore than louses are, I still accept that it's the best thing I can be doing is teaching and writing, mostly intertwined actually. And that if I'm a tiny pipsqueak of a nothing compared to louses in the way I do it, but we both accept that even though it isn't the actual thing and we use the word moon, but that's not that great celestial orb itself. That's a word. I still find story. Anything we discuss, we end up coming up with stories, not just books.

We put the universe in terms of story. And maybe it's just because of what happened to me in the vision or what was made clearer. Or maybe it's a new level of understanding of things since that event. I think I see story everywhere now. I see how people connect with story. You know, you mentioned trying to train your dogs to stay off the couch with food. You know, I train my dog, one of them, to do everything I ask. If I've got like really juicy, disgusting, foul smelling dog treats in my pocket. Yeah. And some of the stuff I have is you have to wear a mask if I open the thing, it's a little gag you. And yet put that stuff away.

The dog is two raised middle fingers. She knows exactly what she's doing. And so yes, my worldview is now that I do believe that dogs understand human emotions better than we understand them because it's adaptive to them to do so. And she knows that I'm not carrying the treats. She has no particular interest in doing what I ask. And that is a story that is a different story than, yeah, you know, a dog just lives for me. She just looks at me and she gives me the googly eyes and she'll do whatever. You know how many people think that about their dogs? And you know, the story is really, the story is really all about the treats.

Oh yeah. It's one of my favorite ways of infuriating my wife, who really has a very difficult relationship with my poodle is because the poodle has the most like you've never heard anything so rotten. Like it's like a banshee shriek. And we got kids. We got kids you could put two and two together like she spent, you know, 30 minutes finally getting the young the baby to sleep. Gatsby, who knows what he sees a squirrel, whatever, just remember something bad shriek barks baby wakes up. Wife is like, well, you know, it's time. We just have to give we have to put him down. You can't you can't use the night as a dog for waking up a baby. But and I love but my favorite thing to do is I sit on the couch with him when we're hanging out at night. And I'll pet him like, Oh, did you have a bad day today?

You are thinking she's like, it's so fun. But I know that it's a hilarious story. People tell about the motivation of their wolf descended dog. Whenever, especially when it gets romantic and like, like what you're saying, it's incredible. I love those stories. This is but you know, the stories are great. I actually begun a little book called the monk and Mimi about me and this one particular dog to explore the stuff. But still, the amazing thing is that we keep on telling ourselves stories like I gotta put him down.

This is a bridge too far. It's a gag, folks. We're never going to I would take I don't care if that poodle only sees me as a walking treat bag. I take a bullet for that. Well, maybe not a bullet, but I definitely do a lot for that dog. So everybody ridicules me about how I am with the dog. Last time we talked, we're talking about the dog. Sorry, let's get back to that was enough with the dog stuff. You know what?

Speaking of stories at Brian, we're at an hour. Do you have maybe a few more minutes that you can chat? I happen to have with me a book that is not a vision that came to someone in an ambulance. Have you read this one? The singularity is near Ray Kurzweil. Oh, when did it come out? This book came out actually quite some time ago, which makes it that much more incredible because the book is filled with predictions. Kurzweil is made regarding where we're headed technologically and very accurate predictions and what's really awesome about it is like many of them are completely coming true.

And in fact, some of them are coming true sooner than he predicted that they would happen because Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 we will have that's when we're going to have nanobots that disassemble our bodies, reassemble our bodies. This is when like what you're talking about, this is when we go in those crab legs basically and I just wanted to dig up in here the part where he kind of describes exactly what your vision is was and let me just dig this up. I'm sorry, I didn't have this prepared. Let me just find this because it is shockingly similar to what you saw. And also another person who had a similar, a similar vision was Tim Leary. Let me just find this if you have just one second for me to look this up. Here we go. I'm going to get to the part where there's a lot of emotional pushback to Kurzweil and a lot of people who really think he's got it spot on.

And I am someone who's kind of in the middle on that subject. Well, the, here's the thing, the, the reason that there I can't find it man I'm sorry. I'll send it to you when I find it. Essentially he says the exact same thing we're going to disassemble our bodies and fly into the universe essentially like our way of what we even consider to be a body and in our unconsciousness is this is going to look like a chrysalis phase essentially. And the, this is the critique. The critique is coming from environmentalists. One of the great critics of what he calls singularity singularity anism. It's a religion is from one of my friends Doug Rush coffee's written some great books.

And he's he is analysis of it is it's a it's a dream of being saved. The idea is that rather than respond to what's happening in the world, you have this fantasy that technology at some point is going to reverse all the damage we've done to the planet and everything will get better. And his analysis of that is like, this is fucking bullshit because these same people who you think are going to save you are currently investing in million dollar bomb shelters in New Zealand. So your dream of some technological Messiah or shift is just that it's a sad dream. Nothing is going to save us. Nothing. We're fucked. We don't get to be the technological crab legs.

We don't get to be that we get to be ash covered like cancer-ridden remnants of humanity, scrabbling through the wasteland. He didn't say that. That's my language, but that's the critique is like, come on. It's not nothing saving us. And it's not a river. And it's not. It's not a it's just bad. It's just bad.

We need to fix the planet. That's varying degrees of that complaint or critique is what I've heard. That's why people bash it and react to it that way. The other critique, of course, is it's inhumane. You're talking about giving up our humanity. This isn't a it's not consensual for everybody. Not everybody wants this to happen. You know, you bringing this up really shines a light on

something about towers thought that be guiles me and has for so long. Because it's so interesting this is coming up now. I'm going to talk about the weekend and the last week in conversations with two different students, both middle-aged women. They really wanted me to focus on what that was and has to say about death and about what happens after you die. And I kept putting up my hands and saying, please, don't do this. Do this belief system or the science or call it what you want.

Because we don't mostly go there. Part of what makes this all so attractive to me in young theory, the focus on change, harmony, balance. What what be guiles me most about this is it does not require any belief in any story or doctrine. It doesn't ask that of you. Yeah, it doesn't also provide the emotional suck or that many religions have provided to many populations over the course of human history.

Whether it was Christians, who were Jews, offering a less orthodox take on how to still be a Jew, but have a little easier time. You don't have to make love through a sheet. You don't have to face certain direction, like Muslim people do. You don't have to eat certain things, but not other things all the time, blah, blah, blah. Those strictures which made life very challenging. Some people really want to be told. It's like how many people are going to rejoice when in a few days,

Trump announces his next run a lot. How many people are going to stand on the edge of a cliff and go, oh, my God, what? Yeah. How can I deal with this? So somehow when you have a faith or religion or a philosophy that doesn't try by proselytizing or promising, Buddhism did this too when it first came to China. You know, there were all these, some very shamanistic, that is like religions, but the life of the average person was just so effing miserable.

They were going to be constricted. Any moment the emperor's troops that come through and conscript them to war, fight against somebody they never heard of, about something they don't care about, give away their lives, they're never going to see their wife and kids again. If you're 15 to 50, off you go. If the Buddha comes in and talks about the pure land and talks about a system of karma in which you can do certain things to direct the course of your own afterlife. This is a very attractive story. Yeah.

Everybody just like, you know, Jesus walked on water and he's going to save her. These stories are the Jews, Messiah is still coming, just wait. All of these things are stories that make it easier to accept the real here and now. Yes. That doesn't, does not have those. So by and large, it doesn't have them. So that means that there was quite a lot of friction between Taoism and Buddhism all those years ago. Because Taoism has one very clear way of looking at the world and this is something else.

What Taoism really does, and this is what I had to tell these two students in a way that I, you know, I hope went in. We are talking about how to live. Yeah. Not so much how to die. Right. Right. We are, or what happens after we die and we acknowledge that we don't know what happens after we die. And since we don't know.

Even if you are a 40,000 hour meditator, you may see things and believe certain things, but you cannot say to a follower or a fellow believer or a fellow practitioner or a fellow scientist because Taoism is kind of a science. You can't say that you 100,000% know what exactly is going to happen to you when you die. Right. So the idea is that since you can't be sure, watch nature, understand the ebb and flow of how things go, change the Tai Chi too, that little Yin-Yang thing. It's a movie, not a picture. Haha. Yeah. Right.

Right. Yin-Yang is constantly becoming Yin. Yin is constantly becoming Yin. If you take a picture of it and say this is it, you missed it a whole thing. Yeah, you missed it. So if you can live and this is, you know, what I used the word beguiled before, but I guess it's a good word. What tells me about this is that everything fits. You can make to some limited extent predictions that are likely to be right. Not a thousand percent, but most often correct.

Yeah, you can anticipate things. You can figure out ways way way, you know, the effortless living prescription. You can figure out decisions to make and ways to live that will make your life better and easier by devoting your life to compassion and humility and frugality. Yeah. Right. So the prescription is really how to live, not so much how to die. And it's a very, very practical thing, which is not surprising because the Chinese are very practical people. They can build a mythology around Taoism and have the, you know, the Jade Emperor and his thing, eating the immortal peach and all that ladies floating around and all.

Sure. And we have that stuff, but, but that's not what it's about in terms of your everyday life. Well, I go ahead. Sorry. The, I have an app on my phone. This app, when you go jogging, it will let you pretend you're being chased by zombies. It is a way to entertain yourself while you're jogging so that you will jog. Obviously, it's not so you can like experience running from zombies, right?

But the point is like, let's get you jogging. You're going to feel better. To me, this is what we're talking about. It's the, the, the, in Buddhism, which I practice, what's delightful about it is that it works that when you start discovering that in fact, this isn't bullshit. And then all of a sudden, you start experiencing a life different from what you ever thought you would have. And it, and it, and it's working. It's working. And it's great.

And all the stuff you might have gotten into it for enlightenment, whatever the fucking thing is that you've gotten up in your head about, it starts fading away and importance compared to shit, man. It's what's, it's been like, it's been a few months since I've gotten in a rotten fight with my wife. It's, I'm not, I don't want to drink anymore. What the, what is going on here? Then that becomes so wonderful that to me, the compassion is the recognition of not everybody wants the broccoli. Somebody wants an internal pair, maybe, or somebody. And I think that a side effect of this stuff, or maybe the primary effect of this stuff is compassion. It's just compassion.

And in, in Lao Zhu, Buddha, if I had to guess what's enticing them to write these things down or to teach or to do the thing you're doing, it's as simple as that. It's like, shit, this works. And I can help. And then after that, whatever comes out of your mouth is pretty amazing. I think you might be, I think you, you, the teachers, sometimes I play around this idea speaking, here's my silly freaking story. Here's my silly story. Y'all come here and you come here with certain limitations that you assign to yourself, knowing that should you be more aware than you are, your ability to articulate these things would be diffused by the, by, by whatever that may be. And so you encumber yourself, so to speak, with these filters, because otherwise you can't.

So the idea is like, instead of sailing up to the island with a ship, and in this case, you're not conquering, you're not, you're not, you're conquering suffering, I guess you could say. But instead of sailing up to the island with the ships that nobody sees and everyone freaks out or whatever, it's a different, more subtle, gentle way of doing it. But somehow you don't get to know the whole story either. Maybe you do, and you're tricking all of us into thinking you don't. I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised. It wouldn't make me mad at you. But the, that's my, that's the story I've been kicking around lately is like temporarily it's a university.

I don't know if it's going to be a university forever. This human life thing we're doing here and people like you pop in as the professors. It's a rotten job because you got to be a body and go around, you know, and do it and like deal with it. Yeah, yeah, as those like me. And then, you know, and you don't get the whole, you don't get the whole story because we don't have the whole story. And because we don't have the whole story, we're confused and scared and suffering. And but you don't have the whole story. And when you find out that this thing is happening to you, your reaction isn't why me.

A lot of us, every day we wake up and go, why me? And so, you know, you figured it out. You found a way to not do why me. And we need that. That's, you know, I, so I think it's just a hyper compassionate way of expressing how the universe expresses itself. You know, it's like, yeah, I'll do it. I'll go in there. I'll go in there again.

You know, it's funny, so many things. I, by my own, by my own lights, I have thus far failed in a lot of things. So last time, you know, I concluded that, you know, I wasn't the transcendent monk that I wanted to be, because if I were offered a do over, you know, I was like, wow, God or somebody came to me and said, you know, you got like, I'm pretty sure we talked about it. You're a thousand steps up. And you have only eight left. And if you make those last eight, remember, you know, you're going to be the by the mind blown out everything. Yeah, knowing that light, whatever, which is not a word we have.

But you're not going to get there because, you know, I'm going to take it back so that those eight steps, you know, do, and you're going to want to say yes, because they are grotesque. They are suffering beyond your wildest imagination. The thousand put you at a good place. You got you see a lot of things, you don't see everything, but you see more than a lot of people do and you see like a lot of people who have, you know, climbed this thousand and eight. I am such a wimp of a monk. But, you know, I would say, hey, you know what, if you can, I could actually do that do over thing. Yeah, the suffering of the last two years, I never experienced that. And I hang it, you know, where I was at a thousand steps and it takes me to 25 years of practicing meditation to get where I am now because of that.

I'm good with that. Let's do the 25 years, not the, not the eight steps more. You know, I'm cool with this. Roll the tape back, please. Since you offered, I say thank you. Yes. Well, I think you can roll the tape back. That's what happens when you die. If you want to roll the tape back, you can roll the tape back.

I think you get to do it. I didn't think that's what keeps it. That's what's like why we keep coming back because you can roll the tape back. It's one of the things. Again, this is just my speculation. I don't know who the fuck knows, but I do. I do think that like what we're in is it's like the thing data doesn't really go anywhere, meaning that there's ways to reassemble one's life and do it. Do it over and over.

If you want to, if you want to, and you know, I think people like you actually think that maybe when you're embodied, but I've heard a lot of people when they drop their bodies, you know, the reports are, they're like, I do not. They act like, they act like when my kid doesn't want to go to school. They're like, no, I want to stay home. No, I don't want to do it. But like, I think folks like you, you're like, I'm going to go back in. Yeah, and you know, in my metaphor, I would just not be that macho monk who said to whoever that was offering me the choice. Never mind the suffering. Bring it on baby.

I want to go. You know, I'm not that guy, which was a. A sobering revelation, but I later came to feel that that whole narrative, that whole story is horseshit. There probably is nobody who. Another narrative story that I just made up and like, why did I even go there? What the hell was that? Well, another old attachment limitation thing. And then, you know, a lot of people asked me about this.

I'm like, yeah, forget it. Don't ask me about that. It's horseshit. It's horse shit. It's horseshit, but it's delicious horseshit. Really? It's fun horseshit. You can make like cool little shapes out of the horseshit if you want to.

And you could see where, you know, my character and my experiences and my habits and all that would create that story. But yes, you know, many years in the martial arts, there has to be some ego. There has to be some machismo involved. Otherwise, you know, play a guitar instead. I mean, it's just an arriving the way I look at martial arts now. And the way I look at my own practice subject for another time, but say completely different. That was what this weekend workshop was about. I, you know, I really focused on like, why are you guys practicing this?

And that's the context and the purpose of it all actually. And what can we learn from movements and, you know, conflicts that teach us about the rest of our life? Because we are not in 1600 running around with a 10 foot sword on a battlefield. That's horseshit. That's a fantasy life. There are many people who love that and do that, just like there are people who never came out of Tolkien. Right. But right.

And I'm not criticizing it because like, you should do what you want. But it's not the best mesh with reality. The best mesh with reality is to recognize that all these principles of boom, boom, boom, boom, right? Every one of them teaches you something about how to deal with conflict in your life. And that shit is fascinating. That's crazy. That's crazy. Like every single one is a little, little fractal you can unfold.

It's not literally like, how often are you going to be punching somebody? What kind of rotten life do you have? Like clearly there's something more to it than that. And if you're connected with any kind of modern reality, you know that if you are a person who is so paranoid about leaving the house, that, you know, you need to take your 11 foot spear with you everywhere you go. You have a problem. You need to get some help, right? You need to get it.

Why does everything make you so full of fear? But you also have to realize that everybody out there, every granny has a Glock in her glove box. I live in Texas. Yeah. And I'm in Arizona. So we are preaching to the choir here, right? But what I'm saying is it's one thing if you love to practice those things, which I do, right? And since I've been sick, this is a little bit of a pathetic admission, I grant. But I carry a big spear and a big sword everywhere I go with me in my car because I'm like Linus with his blanket.

Sure. You need a stinger. I can't use them right now. But I carry them because I'm still hopeful that someday maybe and that's a crutch. But it's a fun crutch and it doesn't bother anybody. There's crutch. That's a sharp crutch. But look, you know, I love chatting with you and I would love to have you come back on and let's get into the nuance of the practice itself. This is I'm completely unfamiliar with it. The philosophy I like the physical side of it.

I think lots of us would love to hear from you about that. And and I would love in a few months if you want to come back, I'd love to have you back on. Also, you have three books coming out right now. Can you tell folks where they can find them? Sure. In the spring, which I think we talked about it briefly in the last one, I believe, but maybe not was was my memoir, The Monk of Park Avenue. Yeah, all of these you can get on my website, which is just Monk Yunro, but also just go to Amazon. They're all there. You can even just look up Yunro and see all the offerings. There's a lot. The second one is the story of the woman who ended up ruling a chunk of China because of her prowess with the spear.

And you can imagine what an Amazon amazing woman this was. I kind of became when I was studying the technique that she developed, which I still practice admittedly weekly these days, but I still try to do it. I became sort of romantically fascinated with how could this woman figure this out when as far as we know, nobody in previous Chinese history, I don't know what was happening in Africa. But yeah, you know, spear is very basic, but she figured out this whole thing about spiraling it the same way we carve the. The rifling into a barrel of a pistol or it spins the bullet so it stays going straight flies further more accurately. Yeah, hundreds of years before there was a gun. What do you mean like she figured out this is a projectile. And if I can just twist it, I'll keep it on target longer and it'll be stronger. And that was such a genius thing was like an Einstein of martial arts this woman.

And so I became sort of romantically fascinated with what little of her story exists in history books. It's very tiny. I had lots of, you know, literary latitude to render her. And I made her sort of a serial killer in the modern world and a sexual omnivore and just this amazing person in ancient China. And I wove it all together. That sounds incredible, man. I'm ordering that now. Wait, what is that called? Wasp warrior. I'll be I'll admit, I like the ancient spear thing, but you got me a serial killer. That's where I locked in.

Wow, the kind of person that she was right. This involves a lot of Buddhist stuff too, because there's karma. And when you order a one ton soup at a Chinese restaurant, you're connecting to this book, because the God hon dun is one ton. One ton soup is named after this God, because it's the God of chaos. And one ton soup has the most amorphous, crazy shaped dumplings. It's not like having a bow or having a shrimp dumpling where, you know, they're all exactly the same and every restaurant is a shrimp. You can see it, blah, blah. In any restaurants, one ton soup, the dumplings are deliberately made in a chaotic fashion. No two will ever be the same. Chaos soup.

Chaos soup. And this is the God of chaos. And she was his, he was her patron, let's say, through the ages. And so that's where the serial killer stuff comes in. Anyway, it's a really fun, fun book that involves her right at the beginning of the book to the little temper. And she pulls up in front of a 7-Eleven at a stoplight. Some guy runs across. She's driving with her husband in another car. They're going to Christmas to see his family. This guy comes running out with a knapsack, losing bills. He's just robbed the 7-Eleven. He's got a shotgun. Okay.

And she honks. She honks at him. She's mad at him. And he's using slugs instead of pellets and a shotgun. He just turns around and shoots her right through the windshield. And the slug ends up in her brain. Part of the thing is about the relationship with this husband and wife and what he slowly uncovers about her past and who she really is and her Chinese family and her life. He has to pick it apart in order to help her. So it's called Wasp Warrior because there are wasps involved in her cure. Oh, damn. The last one, the Jade Boyd, these are two that I took a lot of time with and they involve a lot of Chinese history and really fun stuff.

But that character of the little Jade Boyd is probably the most jaw-dropping and you have to be kidding me. Oh my God, character that I've drawn in 20-not books. I can't wait. These are fun books. Folks, all the links you need to find these books. And Moncunro will be at DuncanTrestle.com. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I love our conversations too. You get me to laugh a lot. So I appreciate that very much. That's a high compliment, man. I am honored by it. And a few months. Can we reconvene in a few months? Two or three months?

Absolutely. Just have... I'll have Nicole and Jeff. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Thank you. Thank you too. Good to be with you. That was Moncunro, everybody. You can find him by going to DuncanTrestle.com. All the links will be there. A tremendous thank you to our sponsors, Apollo Nuro and Loomi Labs. And thank you for listening. Come see me at Hyenas Fort Worth Dallas. I'll be there.

I love you and I'll see you later on this week. Until then, Hare Krishna. 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. We are family. 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.