Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 547: David Nichtern

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

David Nichtern, Duncan's meditation teacher and David on The Midnight Gospel, re-joins the DTFH! On Thursday, January 19th, 2023, Duncan will join David for a FREE online discussion about mindfulness, meditation, and the Dharma Moon Meditation Teacher Training program. You'll meet Duncan, David, and the Dharma Moon teachers, get to ask questions about the program, and find out if the Dharma Moon Meditation Teacher Training is right for you. Click here to register directly for the Dharma Moon 100 Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training. And on Tuesday, January 24th, 2023 you can join Dharma Moon teacher Ethan Nichtern for a special deep dive twelve-month online course on the Buddhist path. Designed to be highly practical (and occasionally geeky), this program will provide a comprehensive overview of the Buddhist path, with an emphasis on the psychological, metaphysical, and socially engaged elements, and will help establish or reestablish a commitment to regular meditation practice through a variety of Buddhist techniques. Click here for more info! 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! Rocket Money - Visit RocketMoney.com/Duncan to cancel your unwanted subscriptions and start saving! Athletic Greens - Visit AthleticGreens.com/Duncan for a FREE 1-year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase!

The NTT IndyCar Series. It's human versus machine, against all odds, every single lap. The ones who risk it all, battling not just each other, but the menaces hidden within the most challenging tracks and motor sports. Pushing 240 miles per hour and taking 5Gs to the neck just for fun. Fractions of a second, lost, are gained in every corner, adding up to defeat or victory. Experience the Children's of Alabama Indy Grand Prix this Sunday on NBC and Peacock at 3 o'clock Eastern. I can count everybody. I'm talking about buying meat, storing it in special meat banks, and waiting for the value of the meat to go up. And let me tell you folks, it's gonna go up. You can keep meat frozen for much longer than people think. You know what they

don't want you to know? They don't want you to know. The meat one stored appropriately in last 5,000 years. 5,000 years. 5,000 years. You gotta put it in the right place. Can never take is your ability to spray white goo. Come away, come away, come today, come today. Come away, come away, come to the world of French kissing. They're doing Spanish kissing. They're doing Costa Rican kissing. Where's the American kissing? When I was coming up, hey, Caroline, I'm glad you spread your wings. Just walk around saying you're French kissing. All your dreams, but when you fail, run out of money. Get addicted to blow. When it lasts, you come back to me. I won't say I told you so. I won't say I used your insecurity against you.

Made you scared to do more than be with me. I won't say that it surprised me when my conditioning didn't work and you set yourself free. They say, go where we're fighting. Hey, don't turn the channel again. It's me, D-True Cell, and this is the Dunker Trussell family in our podcast. Unfortunately, we're on AM radio now, and I don't know what to do about that. Y'all know I got stuck on a big, yellow, sticky fucking thing that I found in my basement, and when that happens, they come and they put a microphone in front of you and you go to AM, but I hope that you will stay tuned. Don't turn that dial because today we have a wonderful podcast for you today with my meditation teacher, David Nickturn. You know him as David from the

Midnight Gospel. He is a wonderful person and PS this Thursday. We're doing a little online event together. You can find out about that by going to DharmaMoon.com. Also, this weekend, I'm headed to Madison, Wisconsin, Comedy on State. My sweet Madison friends, come see me, won't you? And also, I'm going to be in Nashville in just about a month or sooner than that, a few weeks away from that. So come see me and the brilliant William Montgomery Summon Demons together. I hope you'll come. If you want commercial free episodes of the DTFH, you can go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH, subscribe, and you will get episodes uninterrupted with the commercials that feed my family. You should listen to them. Use the offer codes, but if you're sick of it, patreon.com forward slash

DTFH. All right, pals, returning to the DTFH is the beloved meditation teacher, composer, musician. He plays guitar in Krishna Das's band. And most importantly, my wonderful friend, David Nickturn. David, welcome back to the DTFH. It's nice to see you. I'm a little jealous. I wish I was in Costa Rica with you. Yeah. I, you know, ordinarily, I would say, oh, it's probably, you know, be there now and all that kind of stuff. But I think being here now is pretty cool. I mean, it's unspeakably beautiful here. Yeah. And it's, I saw your view. The people are kind. They have this thing Puravita, which is just a way of being, the people are gentle and kind of kind. There's a community here around the Blue Spirit Retreat Center, which is where I'm playing a week with Krishna Das, his guitar

player. I'm getting to be my musical, you know, person that I get to be. I'm in a beautiful house. And I wrote to a dear friend of mine, I said, if you're depressed, in this place, it's your own damn fault. Oh, isn't that the worst? To me, that was always the sort of the, what was so sinister about LA is that, you know, inevitably, especially if you're coming to LA to like, do stand up or like actor and you're going through the pain your dues as it's called, you are going to have bad days and to like be faced with a reality that you are in the most beautiful place you've ever seen, blue skies, beautiful. It's like the weather is perfect, but it's not doing anything to assuage the whatever your particular problem is. I mean,

that's where LA becomes like very dystopian is that it's sort of dystopian. Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, it all comes back to us, you and I have talked about many times and I'm wearing my t-shirt today, the six realms, my book Awakening from the Daydream. So, you know, there's, we've talked about it before, and probably it's not a good thing to focus on now, but just in passing, there are six realms in the Buddhist way of looking at it. There are descriptions really of psychological ecosystems that you project onto the situation, but they also are coming from the seemingly outside. Yeah. So, it's an inside-outside kind of deal. And in the god realms, you know, what you call Debaloka, everything's kind of nice and easy and set up, but they didn't notice

impermanence yet. So, it's like watching somebody on a canoe trip, you know, and it's a beautiful day and the birds are chirping and they don't see that they're approaching a rapids. Right. So, there's no awareness of the rapids, which let's call that old age sickness and death, which is what I've been thinking about almost nonstop. You have. You know, it's, and I was going to write a tune called the old age sickness and death blues. What do you think? I love it. Yeah. Yeah. But here you don't think about that. You go, oh, it's so nice. I'll go for a swim. I'll go for a walk. What are you so uptight about? Just chant some mantras, chill out. You know, but it's a temporary and illusory experience, not because

of itself, but because of our bringing to a desire to sustain it in an unrealistic way. Right. Yeah, that's always, it's a bummer, right? That's the, that's sort of the driving away from Disneyland feeling. Do you remember that when you were a kid? Did you ever have that? I did. I know. That's a really good one. Driving away from Disneyland. You're clutching your little souvenir, your garbage snow globe, staring desperately back. You fantasized about getting off their rides and living in the haunted mansion, and suddenly you're out, man. It's over. You're not going back there for a long time, and you experience the heart like real heartbreak kids experience like legitimate heartbreak because

of their inability to sort of accept the impermanence of those like heightened moments when you go on a vacation or a cool trip. And as you, and I have met our hearts and minds about this so many times, it's an essential conversation. And for all of our friends out there who are like contemplating a kind of spiritual dimension to life, if it does not include old age sickness and death and the notion of suffering being woven into the fabric of our relative existence, it's not Buddhism. Right. It might be something else. Right. But that's like, and it's not that you're depressed and like negative. Oh, life sucks. You know, it's not that at all. It's just what is it actually, what's the arc of our life is. It is clearly something to bring into present awareness

that the situation that you find so delicious right now, whether it's a bowl of gelato or a beautiful lake or is impermanent, just the nature of it is impermanent. I think one thing to consider is that as far as we're aware, compared to any other time in recorded history, there is this strange possibility that what we currently call the human realm could shift and turn into a god realm that, you know, that it could go from being human realm to god realm. And this is the dream of the transhumanist. And this is the, not just a dream. This is sort of, if you look at all the threads of evolution in the various fields that could transform humanity into something completely different, you see that along with the possibility we're all very well,

well, we know, the scary one, nuclear war, climate disaster, apocalypse, that, you know, Terrence McKinney used to say, it's like there's a race right now, a neck and neck race between these two possibilities. But no matter what, human realm, if you look at, whether you're looking at the metaphysics of most world religions that involve the apocalypse, so the eschatological perspective points towards a dramatic massive radical shift, including in Buddhism, maybe on different timescales, but similar versions of abrupt change at some point. Or if you look at it from the perspective of life extension therapy, that we all just became essentially lab rats for what will inevitably be a technology that

doesn't just help us with viruses, but probably grows our hair back, cures cancer, they're already working on it, thus extending the human lifespan statistically. It's called Taoism, by the way. This idea has, you know, elixir of life, you know, immortality. The Fountain of Youth, with the mixed in with this, there is, so you could, if you wanted to, as a human, knowing you're going to die, you're going to get old, everyone around you is changing in front of you, your grandparents, you know how they're doing, or if they're even alive, you know it's there, but you can, if you want to, entertain something that's a little bit more than the elixir of life, that is like, you can look at research papers, human life extension therapy,

I'm just throwing out there, we have to admit, within the buddhist concept of reality, there was no mRNA vaccine, there was no AI, there was no internet, there was, there was none of the things we have now to show a path forward that could potentially fly in the face of old age, disease, and death, blues, and I think that's interesting, it just, this stuff wasn't around. Well, just keep in mind that God realms, for example, can last for eons, you could have that formula could, you stabilize the causes and conditions of it, it's even beyond the level of this temporal physical world, and you're in a bliss state for eons, and then you know, you know what they say then, after that karma wears out, because it is

a karma, it is propelled by causes and conditions at some point, Gampopa says your armpit begins to sweat, and a little bit of a BO thing happens, and you go, uh-oh, and then you, that karma crashes, that level of kind of absorption, meditative absorption tends to crash, because it's not sustained by any kind of regular disciplined, you know, exercise that's going on, it's just been given, and you crash, you go right to the hell realms, isn't that funny? I always think of like 1929, you know, those people jumping out of those windows, you could have just moved into your grandma's house in the Bronx, you didn't have to jump out of a window. Yeah, or you could have like gotten a life insurance policy, and figured out a better way to like, support your family,

that was, you know, there's ways to, if you're gonna, if you're gonna end your life, there's probably better ways to do it than jumping out a window, also jumping out a window, come on, there's like, I think back then you could just go to the drug store, and get a jar of morphine, what are they thinking man, God, and I know what you mean though, it's like you're watching the, you're watching like, it's, you know, it's not raining men, it's raining gods, it's raining jealous gods, it's, you're watching them fall out, they kill themselves, because they would much rather be like, not have a body anymore, than experience, probably the just normal reality of most people who don't know what it's like. Or compassion. Yeah. The awesome, devastating power of compassion.

Yeah. The destructive power of compassion. Yeah. Yeah. Atremendous thank you to the glorious herbalists over at herbstomp.com. You get one shot at this, friends, you got your limited human body, you're not a god, you can't go out and just randomly eat weird shit, not expect some aspect of your physiological reality to collapse in on itself, which is why it is important for you to only use the purest ethnobotanicals out there, you don't want to take some dockyard cratum, you don't want to take some sewer tunnel cava, you don't want to put in your body blue lotus that somebody found in a dumpster. No, you want to go

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when you use the coupon code DUNK25. That's no spaces, DUNK25, when you check out at herbstomp.com, free shipping for orders over a hundred bucks, herbstomp, America's most trusted cratum. Thanks, herbstomp. I feel it's all mapped out, and I hear you, and of course, as you well know, I'm a techie, and I was reading the Singularity, you know, Kurt Wilde's book. Kurt Wilde's book, The Singularity is Near, one of my faves. Yeah, while I was in Bhutan looking at the temples, same convergence, you know, thinking well with these two things, do anything with each other, and I would have to say that from

my perspective, limited perspective, these things have come and gone for eons, including probably whole civilization, high-tech civilizations, if I had to guess, say, because the principle underlying it is what is sustaining what, and is there a perpetual motion machine of some kind that you can plug into your very limited and greedy little self-oriented sense of what bliss could be. So I just want to go on the record of saying, since I'm very interested in talking more with students these days about what I would call a tantric perspective, a Vajrayana perspective in Buddhism, which is that the real problem with most of how we frame out bliss in a spiritual context is there's still somebody holding it, so it's limited in scope, and I would

say if there was an understanding of the insubstantiality of the experiencer, the bliss would be at a level you couldn't even, ego can't hold it, can't contain it, so it'd be radically blissful, but it's also empty. So we talk about in tantra, the union of bliss and emptiness. I love that combo, right, union of bliss and emptiness, because the empty people say, oh, don't get too happy here, you know what I mean? And then the spiritual bliss people, they go like, oh, don't worry about all that other stuff. This, we can transcend it, we can go above it. But the idea of bringing those two principles together and no real substantial permanent entity has to take on the athletic super event of holding that shit together, which you just fire that person.

If only that's the reality we live in. See, that's the world I want to be in. I want to be in the reality where the Olympics has got like a bliss holding challenge, like who can maintain simultaneously holding on to their identity and experiencing transcendent bliss. Oh, I'm in the right place for that. There's plenty of people here who are doing that. I mean, I'm not going to point, there's so many tribes doing the spiritual exploration in the West now that everybody's represented, every tradition's represented. And some of them will talk about bliss and union and oneness as something that is experienceable without totally surrendering your concept of who would experience it.

Yeah, the cake can eat it too thing. I mean, it's the, and I get that, I think that's very exciting. I mean, I, this is the, I love the stories of Krishna and I especially love the breakdown of the mythology into a way of talking about the encounter with bliss while maintaining identity and the, this sort of dualistic path towards complete dissolution in a different way, falling in love to the point of non-beingness is pretty awesome. I mean, I love it. And, but then also mixed into there, it's fun to throw the aggregate Buddhist stuff in like, well, what are we talking about when we're talking about a Hanaman? What are we talking about when we're talking about a Krishna? Is it, does it got parts? Like if you disassemble, does it have

atoms? Is it, and, and, but also interestingly enough, within the breakdown of the relationship seems to be an admission of interdependence in the sense that like when you're chanting, sorry, Krishna, you're chanting Dorada, Radha, Krishna's lover. And that, and that that with no one to fall in love with you, it doesn't matter anymore. You need the bifurcation of your creation and the imposed amnesia to successfully execute that love affair. You can't Krishna. I think that's, that's where the tantric perspective as I, you know, have learned about it comes into play because you're not just trying to annihilate duality because duality is what allows for union. There's no such thing as union if there's no diversity. So you're holding

both truths. It's called the two truths. We've talked about this a million times, absolutely, and the relative truth. And the third truth is the inseparability of those two. Now, if somebody says, um, what, you know, um, you can repeat that there's some unconditional fabric, you know, that is not based on an individual journey. And then there's some individual journey going on. You don't need to negate either one. So we say not one or not two, we negate both of them, each of them. To avoid getting conceptual about it, to avoid making too much of a big deal about it. I think that unless you are like between the ages of zero and two, you maybe three, maybe five, I don't know, but unless you're like a very like enlightened four or five year old, or just a

normal baby, that we've, you've become like so entranced and so convinced of the material stuff that the sort of the, you know, earth plane shit, you know, and that that a lot of I think it might be easy to confuse bliss. You start experiencing when you realize that that's not all that's going on here with, is there a difference between that bliss and the bliss of emptiness, the, the, the place where blissfulness and emptiness meet. I'm talking about the relief, the waking up from a bad dream, the, oh wow, this is incredible. The little glimpses you start getting of it where you're like, oh, what? Wow. Wow. Holy shit. And then within that, then when you start realizing that it's, maybe there's actually ways to tune into that. And it doesn't take as long because it doesn't

take once a year that potentially there's a way to start tuning into that all the time that I see how you would get imbalanced in the other way. Who the fuck wants to, you know what I mean? That's right. Sure. That's right. Like, do you remember when you found out you could come? I remember exactly. And, and, and the point is, you're going to be jerking off a lot. That was a layup drill. You know what I mean? Like, when you find out, I have to admit that is what, that is exactly what happened. That's what happened. Professor Drussell, yeah, that's good. Thank you.

To continue my lecture on the coming. So yeah, but what I'm saying, you know, like, oh my god, it's like built in to the early part of a human life. It's amazing. Like, you can do this thing that produces some of the most extreme feelings of pleasure you've ever had in your life. Add to it, depending on what your family's like. It's taboo. Maybe you're not supposed to do this. Is this off limits? Oh my god. Then like now you have access to this sort of incredible heightened super experience that you didn't have before. Well, I mean, the whole family should celebrate. Right? Because it's also like, by the way, grandma, that's how you're going to get great grandchildren. That's, it's good news, you know? It shouldn't be bad news. It shouldn't be bad news.

But it just depends on the culture where you're at or whatever, you know, and now you have the conversation, whatever it should be shameful. But what I mean is like, I think that there is another version of that that is possible in adulthood too. But except sadly, we don't get there from rubbing our genitals. It's more of some kind of, maybe from rubbing our genitals, I don't know, but it's more of a, I'm saying this other thing that the various tribes or aspects of the spiritual community have all stumbled upon is like, what? There's this? What is this? And then once that happens, suddenly you get Buddhism, you get Islam, you get all the world religions, there are various ways of talking about,

hey, there's another thing going on here. And it's incredible. And you don't even need it. You don't need it, genitals. You don't even need a body. But, but aside from that, yeah, I think, you know, when you said relief, just, and I feel like partly my job is just to hang out and talk about anything. But partly my job is to sort of, every once in a while, bring it back to the Buddhist framework, since that's kind of my card, you know, and stuff like that. Yeah. You know, and it is, it is a powerful framework not to inflict on people as a kind of clinical schematic diagnosis of something that's ineffable. But this is a way of progressing. So the idea that the relief you mentioned earlier stuck out in my mind of like, you're

in a knot, you're twisted into a knot, and you recognize that at some point in life, you go, you know, what the hell, man, I'm sitting here in Costa Rica looking out at the ocean, and I'm feeling anxious about whatever, you know, and you go, what, what is that knot? And you become curious about the knot, and I'm seeing K and OT. Yeah. And the Hinayana, the very basic discipline of developing recognition of the knot, and also a sense of gentleness about experiencing it, and maybe even curiosity about it. And then seeing that the knot is not really made of anything solid, which it's not, the knot is not solid. Yeah. And you have a relief that is called, you know, satori or, you know, or a kind of, it's the stage of the arhat, you are liberated

from that personal knot for, for however, you know, however deeply it goes. But it has not yet occurred that there are sitting right next to other knotted beings. And in standing as far as limitless space is concerned, you look at the squirrel, you know, on your property, just trying to get a nut from one place to another. You look at the woodpecker, you know, just banging his head into the wall to get it warm. You look at your kids getting frustrated. You look at, you know, your society, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you give birth to another level of practice, really, of discipline, which is including the naughtiness of others in a really creative way. That's called the Mayana teachings, right, the big teachings. Now, that's a very intentional

path. It's beautiful. It is so intentional, though, you have to remember a lot of stuff and you have to kind of carefully look at your habits and how they obstruct compassion and communication every day in so many ways. And you have to be willing to work with that. And they say, if you practice Mayana, you know, rigorously, that in three Kalpas, three eons of lifetimes, you would achieve liberation. Wow. Three eons. It's a long time of being a great bodhisattva. Yeah. Now, what's the difference? And this is a perspective that I was drawn to in my exploration of Buddhism and other spiritual traditions in the Vajrayana tradition that emanated from India and from the yogis in India, the Mahasiddhas in India, not, not, you know, monastic people that came late way later.

And these yogis achieve some kind of wakeful energy that's completely beyond negotiation, navigation, modulation, calibration. It's just like somebody who's, you know, not formulating, not conditioning their experience along those kind of plus and minus grid. And they pass that tradition through some very interesting, and we're going to start talking about this at Dharmamun, the lineage tree, teacher to teacher to teacher to teacher. That is only this tradition is only human transmission. Yeah, at this point, you need a human being to to get the gist of this. But they say, I'm just again, passing along, that you could, if you are just applied those that method and that perspective, you could achieve that same kind of yogic freedom

that those great progenitors, those Siddhas had in this very lifetime. Right. In other words, before you go, you know, on your way to the beach, my chest feels weird. And then dealing over before that, you could recognize and even stabilize a kind of clear, lucid, luminous, fluid state of being It's the new year, friends. I don't know what your goals are, but maybe you want to manage your budget better, save money. And if you want to do this one incredible tool, you can use as rocket money. I used them before they supported my podcast, Rocket Money, formerly known as True Bill is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors

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Rocketmoney.com slash Duncan. Thanks, Rocket Money. You could recognize and even stabilize a kind of clear, lucid, luminous, fluid state of being. Yeah. Which would contain the two lower Yanis. It would contain the natural compassion for all beings. It would contain the level of discipline that keeps it from becoming a Godro. It's very tight. So that's the journey. I'm just passing that along. Honestly, I'm really, I treat Buddhism like classical music, Duncan. There's a lot of people treating it like jazz and you got to come up with your own sod and this and that. To me, it's like you go back and learn what Bach did and how composition works. Okay,

then you could become Prokofiev. Then you can become Schoenberg. So I like working with people who are willing to at least learn the formal path and then figure out which tool is good for you. I mean, honestly, most people are going to benefit immensely from mindfulness meditation practice, which is pure Hanayana practice, just recognizing the thoughts, come back to the breath. I've seen so many people benefit from that. Yeah. Actually, K.D. two days ago gave a little bit of a lecture and he said, and he was really talking about shamatha, even though he's talking from his tradition, coming back, coming back. He said, so you can at some point become a little less reactive so that when your turtle dies, you don't jump out the window. And I laughed for two

days. I wrote him a text in the middle of the night. I said, he didn't even remember he said that. So when your turtle dies, you don't jump out the window. Right. Well, I mean, this, what's it to me? It's really an interesting sort of, it's an interesting thing that's existing in society, in the world, with the tsunami of information and desire and all the various corporations who have like honed methodologies to keep you fixated on your body, on the medicine that you might need, on things to heal your aches and pains, on getting that fucking car, which for sure is going to repair your relationship with your wife, definitely. And the, you know what, I mean, like all the tricks that they're

constantly blasting out at us. You see how, oh, well, as a totality, our species is sitting under the Bodhi tree. It might not seem like that, but we're, you know, here we are all in a state of meditation in some way, shape, or form, fixated, focused, concentrated on all kinds of stuff. So there we are. And Mara has, has appeared to us. The appearance looks different for everybody. Like for some of us, Mara looks like the next step in your career for some people. It looks like, I don't know, abs or, you know, threesomes or better ecstasy or fame or whatever. But here it's happening right now. Here's the encounter in real time with a sum total of all of us. There's the fear of global collapse, nuclear war, death. There's the daughters of Mara,

the potential to like it powerful and use your intellect to control and gain and, and then, um, mixed into that simultaneously, we're all experiencing this sense of like, and this is what I experience anytime I brush shoulders with the clear, luminous, beautiful, empty reality is, why the fuck do I deserve this? This, uh, you know what I mean? Like this can't be, it can't be this easy. You can't just drop into that space, right? Like that requires flogging of oneself. That requires, and some conditions it does. Yeah, they literally ask for that. Um, so I'm saying with the tantric practice in particular, you know, if you've ever thought about the three temptations of Buddha and wondered about the third one, I think that one can come up,

right? Like that sense of, of, wait a minute, holy shit, I'm as happy right now sitting in my chair, in my studio meditating in like a shed as I was when I was walking with my mom on the beach, holding her hand, but there's no mom, no beach. There's no external cause of this that I can identify. Give me a fucking break. It can't be real. I don't believe it. This is, I don't deserve it. So there's a name, there's a name for that actually that, um, I don't remember the Tibetan word for it, but it's called the thief thought. That's how it's translated. Thief thought. It's like a thief that comes in and just goes, wow, I left the door open and they took it. They took my basic goodness. Wow. Yeah. So that's, and it's really not even, you know, there's obviously karmic

things that come up, depression or anger or all the clashes, firing, jealousy, pride, all that stuff. But there's just something in it that's just like a little Pac-Man that comes in and bites and bites and do that inability to really rest the mind in, in what you're talking about. Yeah. In the aliyah, that's what they call in the Buddha, in the Mahayana, it's called rest in the mind, the aliyah in all consciousness and in the ground consciousness. Just rest your mind. Yeah. Yeah. And the thief goes na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. It's very nasal. Yeah. You don't, you don't, it's, it's, you don't deserve it. You don't deserve it. Why? You, even think about it, like really, I mean, like, if you look at the conditioning of a lifetime of

living in capitalism that all of us have, you know, have you ever like, like gone to a Starbucks and you forget to, like, you're standing there and they've given you your, your coffee or whatever, or you're standing there and they're like, it's $15. And then you're like, oh, right. Oh yeah, right. You pay for things here. You got to pay for it. You know, like, if you want to go to Disneyland to get the heartbreak experience of leaving Disneyland, you got to go through a series of gates, tickets, you want to get on your airplane, you got to have tickets, you want to go anywhere, cool, there's tickets, there's a cost, a fee, you know what I mean? So the idea that in the midst of all of this, there is actually a way to drop into that place you're talking about, the aliyah,

the fundamental, the ground or whatever, minus paying for tickets, minus getting famous, minus being the, like, whatever it is that you fantasize, it sounds, at first, probably incredible. And then if you experience a little bit weirdly, it's like, wait, do I want this? I was kind of getting off on the, on the, on the. Well, and there's, here's the fair comment, Duncan. There's not as much drama there. And so there's a little bit of a kind of like, couldn't we whip, you know, something up, hopefully with a sequel? You know, you don't want to create a drama these days, like, you know, like avatars, it's beautiful, it's perfect, it's done. No, we better leave it open for a sequel. So we want to create some kind of drama that can create a sequel and keep, it's basically actually,

again, my humble opinion only, a kind of laziness of mind that goes, I want to leave a book holder there, you don't close the book and go, nice, good. I had a beautiful dinner with these people, I'm saying goodnight now, I'm walking out the door, it's a letting go piece is, is, for whatever reason, our discipline, a lot of the discipline is about how to release, how to let go of fixation, whether it's for good or bad, doesn't, it occupies us. Right? Yeah, yeah. It's the sense of occupation, busyness, having a job, having a task, having a, you know, something to do, someone to be. Yeah, the hamster wheel. It's the, it's this, it's, I'm just, it's, it's a, again, like, I don't know, maybe I'm not saying it, I just find

there to be something so groundbreaking, fundamentally revolutionary about what you're talking about, in the sense that what could be more disruptive to society as we know it, then the possibility that everyone simultaneously begins to experience the joy they thought they would experience when they got the car, went on vacation, had the threesome, got the promotion, won the lottery. If everyone suddenly realized, wait, you know, it's actually, you can just do that. Like you don't have to like, go, you don't have to jump through any hoops that somebody trying to sell you should set up. Well, there's a technical, there's a technical name for that, though. What? It's called the 60s. Come on, before he's still fucking miserable. We just got the

video. They didn't have phones back then. No, that was the rap is tune in, turn on and drop out, it's like that was exactly the rap. What you're saying right now is just you don't need all that stuff to sustain the sense of well-being. A little LSD might help you see that more clearly. We'll figure out the rest of this stuff as we go, but let's not get uptight about it. It's a cycle of kind of pushing the gas and then easing back on it. But the discipline is what I think most people would rather edit out of the whole thing. Yeah, me for sure. And the exertion that it takes to untether ourselves. So it's a deep thing, Duncan, your way, you know, your way into, you know, expostulating, exposing the fundamental logic of where people's nickers

get into a twist. You're way in there. And now you're also living your own personal life as a kind of, you know, illustrated, you know, Marvel comic book version of the same thing, where your superhero and your earthly dunkiness are trying to align. That's funny. Well, I mean, or just sort of like, you know, you, yeah, or kind of it's, I think that it is a funny, it's funny. I think there's something very funny about it. And that appeals to me a lot in the sense that what is funnier than all of a sudden at a, I don't know, a water park with your kids looking around. And for one second, instead of seeing everyone around you as different people that you don't know, having like this weird spontaneous love for them, like they were your kids, like I've, every one of these have been my

children at some point. And then all of a sudden the water park, you're just surrounded by like you're, you get that glimpse of these glimpses. Like my God, I love it. I love everyone here. I love all these fucking people pissing their margaritas into the pool my kids swimming in. You know what I mean? You like, you see, you see, you see through the, the, the, you see through the old bodies, you see through the like sad bodies, you see through it all. And then for one second, you get this, oh my God, I love all of them. I knew, I know you. You look through and you think, my God, what did I do to you in some life? Well, I bet I was a pretty shitty dad. Someone comes shoving by you or something and gives you a mean look and you're like,

I bet I was a riot. When I was your dad, it must have been horrible and whatever incarnation. Well, so let's call that experience the archetype, the hero, the primordial Duncan, you know, just for lack of giving it a better term. And the regional Duncan, who is now, you know, with children and a family and a bank account and a car. Did you, by the way, just buy Erin a new car? Hell no. Okay. You mentioned that earlier. I thought maybe. Okay. I'm just kidding. I didn't be doing that. I have to like that. No, I did not. What we did have a spectacular Christmas. I think you misunderstood. I know what you said. No, I was just playing with you there. Oh, because we did get the kids one of those cool little remote control cars they can drive around

the yard, which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. I love it so much. But the regional Duncan has the job if you, you know, mission impossible or if you choose to accept it to align that heavenly Duncan, that archival, you know, pure hearted, pure perception, uh, spontaneously arising Duncan with the regional Duncan who's, you know, who locked his keys in the car while the kids are in it, you know, and then goes, okay, where's your bliss now? It can vanish like that. You know, so that I feel is a much more, I'm more interested when people talk about that than, than the pure realms or something like that. Okay. Well, let's talk about that though, because this is what I think this is aligning the, you know, the alignment that

this is why I think getting a glimpse of that space and I think what's great about getting that glimpse via meditation or some spiritual practice versus the way I have caught glimpses of it in the past through generally LSD or some eco dissolving psychedelic is that there could be, depending on what level of psychonaut you are, some sense of doubt when you get it through medicine. There's a sense of like this, what this is, I added something here. It's dependent on this particular. There could be doubt and debt. And debt, sure. You got to buy the drugs, man. It's expensive. Well, and also who knows if you might need more of it to, to make sure that you can clear the doubt away. That's it. You're always

clearing. Let me just see if this was real. Yeah, there's the loop. So, you know, in those moments where you get glimpses of it, and you know, I've had them at the Ram Dass retreat, where you aren't on any drugs and you're feeling like you're high as a kite, being around Ram Dass, you get this weird, glowy, like contact high just from his energy or, or through like a more sustained practice over time, you start seeing it again and again. And the reason I think that this is very useful is because once you've gotten a glimpse of that place and what it is, and maybe what it could be, then when you lock your kids in the car, which I didn't do, if you, anyone out there thinks David is alluding to something I said, I have not locked my kids in

my car yet, and I'm proud of it. Definitely locked my keys in the car. But the point is, if you can get like a glimpse of the thing, what that might be, then suddenly even in those moments, you can, when you're feeling the knot, the anxiety, the pain, you can find it in there somehow. That's the other piece of it. It's like, holy shit, it's wrapped up in this moment too. There it is, a familiar, a familiarity with something that for me, and I think it shows up for a lot of people, we associate with our childhoods. That was what, that's, that's what it was like to be a kid. And then when your turtle dies, you don't have to jump out the window. You don't have to jump out the window. That's called equanimity. It's not that you're not sad.

Yeah. It's okay to be sad, but you don't have to jump out the window when your turtle dies. Yeah, you don't have to jump out the window when your turtle dies, and your turtle probably was, like, wanted to jump out the window, because who wants to be a domesticated turtle? What a nightmare. Finally, you got your slow ass. Come on, we all are domesticated turtles. It's a perfect analogy already. The shell, the whole thing. Yeah, I, you know, that was the other side. I mean, you know, as I'm like doing like an analysis

of this water park on one level, I'm like seeing like, Jesus, is this what we've all, we're all at a water park, man. It used to be America, and now it's some synthetic version of what we thought was freedom and democracy. Look at this. It's all, we're all on waterslides. Some cliche bullshit thought like that. That's one level of it for sure. On another level of it, holy shit, my kids are having so much fun. On another level of it, oh my God, all these parents are miserable. They brought their kids to a water park. The kids are enjoying themselves, but if you're going to be a good parent at a water park, you are not having a good time. You got to keep your eye on your kids, man, depending on their age. They'll fucking, you know, they'll

drown. They'll get, they get stepped on. You got to, but then you realize, oh my God, that's love. All these parents love their kids so much, they took them here. And then the next level for me is, and then you realize, oh my God, like we're all having this universal experience of love that is so overpowering. We're standing up to our knees in chemical piss, watching our children have a great time. I mean, it's, you know what I mean? Well, you know, it's right in the Dharma Moon chant, experience joy in the happiness of others. It doesn't say be miserable as a guardian so others can be happy. Experience joy actually as in the vehicles, the happiness of others, and that's empathy. And it's part of our makeup. There's no doubt in my mind about it. That's,

that's why being a parent is so cool in a way. If you're, if you're not a total, you know, it hasn't become a traumatic experience too much. You go, you see your kid happy and you're never going to be as happy as that. Yeah. Nothing could ever make you as happy as that. I want to thank Athletic Greens for supporting this episode of the DTFH and tell you that I did it. I tried. I got a bunch of vitamins and whole foods and I tried doing the thing where you, where you distribute them out and you look at the fucking label in the morning when your eyes are kind of blurry because you're old and you can't read the exact dosage, but you kind of remember how much of the fish oil you're supposed to take, how much of the whatever the fuck. And then you

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Then for me, this is where I can start working with the meta-practice. I never got the meta thing. Weird relationship with parents. When you start doing that, think of your mother. It's like, how about not? How about we don't think about my mom right now? In the sense, I had a relationship that got better over time, but with my kids, okay, I got that. I feel that. I know what you're talking about. Then shifting that compassion for them over to everything else, you can do it. That is a capacity. Then that's, to me, that is where, isn't that the mechanism for joining these two things that you're talking about? Isn't that the glue? Compassion? Isn't that the sort of- But then, as you said, then it's about extending. You've tasted it. You smell it,

now expanding it so that you've, as you said, you see everybody in the park as if they were some form of family in that way. Even if it's your troublesome uncle or your junkie cousin or whoever you see them as, you still feel that connection. But that takes a tremendous leap of something. I don't think you can fake that. You can aim at it and go like, there's, I see the logic of this and I want to cultivate the strength to be able to do that, but I don't think just being like, you know, a little smiley face and- Oh no. You can intellectually, you can definitely look around and be like, oh, we all breathe the same fucking air, I guess. But I'm saying, I guess we all deserve the same

basic atoms in us, but, or you could even be like, I know these people must feel pain, but you're, you're feeling numb or, you know, you can, but you can't, I think they're, you, you can know what this is. It's how you feel on ecstasy. You take MDMA and you can experience complete love for every single person around you that you've never met in your life, but that goes away and then you fucking want to kill yourself. You want to jump out the window with your turtle two days later. I'm, I'm saying there, this, there is within this experience of human life, the possibility to suddenly find yourself in what I think I would call on one level a very lonely place to like have that glimpse of you look around and you're like,

shit, we've all got amnesia. We've forgotten that we're the same family. We forgot all the, like these are, I know every single one of you. I know you. I love you. I, I, I'm connected to you that you can have glimpses of that that aren't intellectual and little glimpses of it. What, what do you call that place? That's a strange place to look around the world and see all of us clustered around people we know separated from those we don't stranger, not stranger, part of my tribe, not part of my tribe and watching that, you know, that's what we're used to. But when you shift into this other reality, man, what is that place, David, where it's all your kids, your, your, your hairy, old, happy, sad, confused kids. It's making, it's making me sad

right now to think about it all the times. And this is where I mean, I guess framing natural tendency to frame the developing the discipline. So you have some kind of equanimity. So you don't get thrown way up high and way down low by every passing emotion, but without negating or without repressing any of it at the same time. So with awareness and equanimity, and then developing openness and compassion and a sense of, you know, change between oneself and others, that is a zone in which you experience your habitual patterns 10 times more strongly than sitting alone in a room. Now you're in the playground, you're at Disneyland and reality and people and beings are just right in your face all day long every day. And then to develop, you know, some

kind of ongoing feeling of intention to aim for the higher ground of your, what you know is the higher ground, not what somebody else tells you, aim for the higher ground. And then to be able to experience, and this is where I really kind of wanted to take, take part of this conversation, the edge, because there's an edge there, you're calling it loneliness. I'll agree with that, it's lonely, but there's also an edge of like, what are you working with right now as a practitioner, as a seasoned practitioner, as somebody who's serious about this. And, you know, you might have all the logic or all the whatever, and you might be a very senior practitioner, you might even be a Rinpoche, for example. And I'll give you an example, Mingyur Rinpoche has this great book

in which he was completely open about having been a Tulkoo in an Incarnate Lama and having panic attacks. And this is somebody who was with the Silver Spoon, he's in the monastery, he's a made man in the mafia sense of it, everybody's gonna get him, get him whatever he needs. And in the middle of the night, he sneaks out in the middle of the night, and goes on an away trip for three and a half years where nobody knows who he is or where he is. Yeah, that's edgy. Yeah. So we have our own version of that where we're not, you know, where we're keeping some sharpness, you know, to our path. That is not self-destructive, it's not harsh to ourselves, but it keeps the kind of precision of where forward is, you know, where up is. And,

you know, we need support in keeping that edge. Sangha, you know, good friends who are not just like, you know, colluding with each other. We need teachers along the way who are like, you know, accomplished. And we need some kind of method and some kind of teachings, whatever floats your boat, you know, comically. And so that's the three jewels, right, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. I think without that, or some version of that, we'll get stuck in one of those places, we'll get stuck in the harsh self-approval assessment that you mentioned earlier. We'll get stuck in a gooey kind of wishful thinking kind of spirituality. We'll get stuck in feeling like we're seeing something profound, but we're isolated in that perception. Loneliness, the wrong kind of loneliness,

you know. Right. So it's beautiful. I mean, I guess the long story short is I advocate for whoever's out there to find your community, to talk and practice together. I think I have found that to be a tremendous gift in this life. You look at the gifts people give you, people have given me money, people have given me guitars, people have given me this, that and the other thing. But that kind of Sangha, like what we have, what you and I have, this is to me is the greatest gift. Yeah. I mean, I don't see how you, you know, I think it's, I think what's really wonderful, and I can only speak for Buddhism and maybe a little bit for Christianity, but I never went as deep into Christianity as I have with Buddhism, is that you sort of realize like, you know, the

instruction manuals that they have for it are very accurate. Like it's not a, the sort of steps or the points or that infinite lists, you start seeing, oh yeah, I get why that's there. I understand why there's an emphasis on community or why you need to have somebody who's been doing it longer than you, or more effectively than you to run stuff by like, what the fuck is this? What is that? Because there's stuff with that, you know, you have to like, the difference between intellectually recognizing that we all share a common ancestor, and you know, as a secular person might, and I think there's something really beautiful about that, like Carl Sagan's ability, the pale blue dot, that's all of us. That's us. He's tuning in on

that lonely part of it, or when people go into space and see planet Earth, it's blissful, but there's some sadness there. There's a sense of like, damn, it doesn't have to be just like this, does it? Damn, it doesn't have to be like this. And so I think it's good to have people where you could like say, what is that? What is the name for that moment where you realized that it's one thing to have amnesia and not know you have amnesia? It's an entirely different thing to like, start getting your memories back, but still have amnesia. You know what I mean? Like, if you just have fucking amnesia, and you're just like, this is me and this and that, but if you start like really like realizing, wait, there's some other thing I can almost remember, but not quite. And

then you have these memories. I don't know any other thing to compare them to the memories. You start having these memories of like, oh, that's what I am. Maybe in, you know, I guess the, for my psychonauts listening, it's the DMT experience, that moment of breakthrough, post terror, or terror mixed in with deep familiarity of this incredible insane zone that you've gone into. There's familiarity there. I know this place. This, I've been here a million times. That's what I'm talking about, a sense of remembering a home that you is more home than any home you ever lived in. You know, that's, that is what I'm trying to get at there. And that's a really, you need people who have maybe couldn't have had that experience to sort of help you. I

Well, they point it. That's the pointing out the pointing. You're right. And then because it is familiar already, because it's the ground of being arguably, and you know, it should feel familiar when it's pointed out kind of, but you also have it pointed out that our ability to obfuscate it to, to get all caught up in all kinds of trivialities and clay activity is profoundly developed. Like it's like looking at, you know, those bodybuilders in, you know, and you go, you don't have to do that to get in shape. But samsara is like that. It's like, why do you build up those muscles like that much? You're in good health. You're in good shape. So samsara is like that. We build up incredible

muscles of protective defensive layers that are, you know, not really that healthy. Is it? Well, but this is where I guess where I've hit my like, I don't know if this is exactly meant by it, but this is where I've hit my edge here. This is where I've like hit my place of like, is it a fucking mistake? Like, you know, here you have this like fundamental ground of reality, a place untouched by it cannot be cut by a sword withered by the wind. It does not grow old. It was never born. It will not come into being will not cease to be primordial, timeless, all the descriptions of it, whatever archaic or non archaic way you want to describe it. If you know what I'm talking about, why the fuck as part of that is this all going down? Is the like, Jesus Christ,

I need to like, maybe I should start taking a hair growth medicine or extend my dick or tighten my butthole or get my nipples polished or whatever. By the way, I just, I did all that and I feel great. Thank you for sharing. You know, I believe that one, the why question, which is sort of flipping around where you are, that Buddha did not address just historically speaking. He was, you know, he would say like, basically, I'm an auto mechanic, you know, you know, I'm a doctor, you know, so, but the why I had an earlier thought than that, that's my condition thought. My earlier thought was when you started talking about it right at the beginning, I thought of you in the playground with your boys, you know, and, and they're playing hide and seek

and you're watching. Yeah. Because I watched my granddaughter Izzy play hide and seek. She just went to a park. She found some totally new people that she didn't know before that she's five. And by the in 10 minutes, they're all running all over this park. We can keep an eye on them, that we're the parents, so grandparents. So we just want them, as you said, we can't just like play our own game of hide and seek at that point, we're holding the court for their hide and seek. And they're having their ecstatic. And they're terrified that they're going to be found and they want to be found. And they, you know, it's a game. Right. It's a self, you know, fulfilling game. And it is, is it just part of the

play, the lila of this system that we're in that we that there's a hide and seek quality to it. Because when you work with people, you go, Oh, you they know, they must know that they're being terribly defensive and paranoid right now, they must know that, or they must know that their anger is being disguised as sort of rational argument with and with all the logic intact. They must know that they're overeating, and that they weigh 100 pounds too much. They must know that there's other guitar players in the world who could bury them alive, you know, with one stroke of the flat pick, you know, so hide and seek. So I feel lately that there is some kind of lila or game that's being enacted. And which isn't to say that you can be frivolous about

how you but you could have a sense of humor. You could sure that would be a good a good step on a spiritual journey to have a deep sense of empathy and a deep sense of play and humor. And I would say my gurus definitely had that. Right. No doubt about it. Like they were like, you know, enjoying the lila, not not cursing the darkness, you know. Ah, yeah. Right. Yeah, I've seen, you know, I think I've mentioned this before at a podcast the time I got to see the Dalai Lama and his translator and like that was my first glimpse of that ever in watching the playfulness and their interaction. And like, you can't like you can't fake it. Like the way they were acting, you're not they're not faking being happy. It's

like definitely I didn't have kids back then, but it's very similar to watching like, not in a sense they're immature, but in watching kids play or brothers or there's this like, they're like so playful within. And of course, they're also getting asked some of the most serious questions by like people who are dying that month, you know, so it's like not within it is also recognition of the suffering and a seriousness to a sudden like snapping to this like very intense seriousness stillness. It's amazing to see it. I mean, this is again, it goes back to your community thing. You need like it's nice to be to see it in the flesh and not just on paper, you know, to see, see what it looks like in

an action more than just. And it's challenging. Any, any time you put a group of people together to run something, to organize something, government, you know, Congress, you know, you, you will have, I tell the people at Dharma Moon, you know, we have a lot of courses that are going on. People come in and they study and they practice. But I say, if you work at Dharma Moon, like which there's about 20 people who are like, you know, doing different jobs, I said, that's the advanced course right there. Yeah. You know, think about you with your team, you know, how, how gritty that gets because there's no equivocation that will cover a failed execution. You know, somebody says, oh, it's just empty, you know, like you go, okay, it's

might be empty, but so is me firing you. It's my fucking bank account you're talking about. You're empty my bank account. Duncan, how's your, how's your world going like that? Are you up to any new creative projects that are cooking? Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah, I'm actually, yeah, I'm working on some stuff right now that I'm pretty excited about. I don't want to, you know, I'm superstitious about yapping about like that. Yeah, good. I didn't mean what, you don't have to say it. Yeah, but I got some stuff cooking. How about yours? Well, you know, it's right now, I laid an egg, which you know how that is as a creative person, you lay an egg, and then you want to go off and lay another egg, but

you have to sit on that egg to make sure it hatches. And then if it hatches, then you have to take care of the little baby that comes out of it. And then that's kind of my current situation at the tender age of, I'll be 75 in February. So that's like kind of a, you know, moving into what some people would think of as, you know, why don't you give it a break already, you know, and so forth. I'm moving into a more manifesting kind of stage, but manifesting not so much for my own portfolio, but like what could I create that would benefit forward and also share, you know, what I think is valuable and what I learned with the next generation is very important to me right now. So that took the form of Dharma Moon, which you know all about, and you've been a very

wonderful supporter and helper with creating that, DharmaMoon.com. And it takes the shape of training people and also gathering a team. Like, you know, it's like building teams is a really, playing a team sport is really sophisticated. You know, you can become a great tennis player, like John McEnor or something like that. You don't have to necessarily develop the skills of interpersonal skills so much, you know, but teams are like, whoa, one person says one little thing and then you know, so my my egg is like electric right now. And it's also full of potential and growth. And it's also takes a lot of my kind of using my best resources to hold it together. And what we have is, you know, two big programs coming up. One is Ethan, Nick Tern, you know,

you know, Ethan, my son is very, very, you know, evolved Buddhist teacher has, we had a year-long Buddhist studies course that just finished and was like a couple hundred people taking a year-long Buddhist training course. That's brilliant. Well, if anybody's interested in that, he has, we finished that one, and we're starting another one this this coming January 23rd. And there's an info session on January 10th for that. And then there's, you can just go to darnmoon.com and just register for it. If you want, you can register for parts of it. All the information is there. We'll put a link up on your podcast. And then right behind that, we have our traditional mindfulness meditation 100-hour teacher training program,

which starts on March 3rd. And we have an info session with you. You've been a, you know, yeah, what can we, how can we tell people how, how generous and kind you've been in terms of helping to get the word out about that. I got David on speed, Darly. You're kidding, it's the best. Anytime I want to like run one of my half-cocked ideas about something, you're my first to call. It's incredible. I love it. It's nice to be part of it. And it's an incredible, I love what you're, I can't imagine how complex running that kind of thing must be or helping that thing like that run, but I've definitely. Part of my training with Trump, remember too, is how to run something like this. It was a different kind of teacher that way. It

wasn't just like how you go off in a cave. And it's like how you work in, in, in society. And so he gave a lot of teachings that I'm using every day to, to work through these things. But we have this sort of core program, which is the 100-hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program. Many Dunkeits have taken it. I mean, there's, there's quite, yeah, there's quite a cross talk there. And if you're interested in that, Duncan and myself are going to do an info session on January 19th, which is Thursday, January 19th. And that's 6 p.m. Eastern time. And that will be in the chat, in the trail too. And if you forgot everything, I just said go to darmamoon.com and you'll see those two programs coming out. I cannot wait to see you on the 19th, everybody. And David,

thank you as always for doing the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Good to see you, Duncan. Yeah. Good to see you. Hare Krishna. That was David Nick, turn everybody. Don't forget to sign up for our online event. You can find all that at darmamoon. If you can't remember any of these links, you can always go to dunkatrustle.com to find them. Thank you to our esteemed sponsors. And most importantly, thank you for listening. I'll see you later on this week with an interview with Rom Dev. Until then, God bless you. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses,

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