Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 581: David Nichtern

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

David Nichtern, David from The Midnight Gospel, Duncan's meditation teacher, and friend, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about David, including where to find his fantastic music and books, on his website: DavidNichtern.com. The book discussed in this episode is Awakening from the Daydream, available everywhere you like to get your books! Duncan and David are holding a FREE online discussion on September 26, from 6pm - 7pm ET. You can register for Eternity & Nowness over at the Dharma Moon website. You can also always sign up for the popular Dharma Moon Meditation Teacher Training! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by:  AG1 - Visit DrinkAG1.com/Duncan for a FREE 1-year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase! Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order!

Greetings friends, it is I, Professor D. Truselma, Professor at Harvard, one of the great universities in Ivy League University. I am tenured. I study chemistry, which I consider to be the ultimate field of research. In my many years in chemistry, led me to a magnificent metal known as mercury. And it was mercury that inspired me to start a podcast, even though many of my colleagues said that that was a mistake because I wouldn't be taken seriously by the medical journals. If I started a podcast and interview whoever I wanted, but I am tenured. And I wanted to do a podcast. And I wanted to sing songs and I wanted to write

an album and I wanted to work on a quantum entanglement style time travel device that is a wearable wrist watch. But most importantly, I wanted to sing. I wanted to sing about one of the great medals. Here's one of my songs from an upcoming album. Tuck your ears the answer Tuck your ears the answer Trink it in, mercury again Take a look They call it a poison

Because they don't want you to know That if you are lost The direction it will show You'll see beautiful colors That's actually a track from an album I'm releasing. It's called Mysterious Mercury and it is obviously dedicated to a misunderstood metal known as Mercury. Here's another song from the album. And here's just one last song. There's actually 700 songs on the album, so it is a digital download.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to fit it all on a CD though. I do have an idea for a CD made of mercury. I think it could be used to store not just data but feelings. Here's another song from now. Silver like an angel, let it dance inside you Please don't be a stranger Don't believe the stories that they tell you That it's poison, it's life In metal, life, in metal, life In my soul, lie. We call it Mercury. We're green.

Mercury. Mercury. We have an excellent episode for you today. With us here today is someone you probably know from the Midnight Gospel show I created with the Genius Pendleton Award. A few years ago, David on the Midnight Gospel, David in the Human Realm, it's David Nick Turnne. He is my meditation teacher, my friend,

and a wonderful person who has written lots of really great books. We talk about one of them on this episode. Today, it's called Awakening from the Daydream, and it is good. If you're interested, I will have a link to it at DuncanTrustle.com. We're going to jump right into this podcast, some quick announcements. First, I would love for you to join my Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com.4-dTFH.

Every week we get together, we meditate, we have a long rambling discussion. Your family wants you to come to them, your true family, not your blood family. Don't be tricked by them. They're robots. Come to your true family, the DTFH family. You can subscribe at patreon.com,

Ford slash DTFH. Also, my loves, I'm going on the road. I will be into coma next week, if you're listening to this on the week of the 16th and then not long after that I'm going to be at Cobb's comedy club in San Francisco, one of my favorite clubs ever. I hope you'll come out and see me. All the tickets you can find them either on my website. I still got to get the ticket links up there. I'm lazy, I need help. Or you can just go to the Tacoma Comedy Club or Cobb's Comedy Club and grab tickets. They are going super fast.

So I hope you'll get the tickets in advance. All right, let's jump into this podcast. I hope that you will come and hang out with David and I on Tuesday, September at the 26th. We're going to be doing a free live online discussion called, Eternity and Nounis. Very simple topics, but you know, why not start with the basics? If you want to sign up for a spot, you can find the link at dunkatrustle.com. We're also going to be talking about the Dharma Moon meditation teacher training that starts in October 2023.

I've taken this because it's a great way to learn about Buddhism. What do they say? If you want to learn about something, the best way to learn about it is to drink mercury, pour it all over your body to cover yourself in it, and get it in your bathtub and your pores every or this field, or to teach, and if you don't have access to mercury or you don't want to, the people who think it's a very deadly neurotoxin. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Again, that's the Dharma Moon meditation teacher training. It starts in October 2020, 30. If you're interested in that, again, the link is going to be at dunquatruscle.com. Or if you want to, you could just go straight to the tap by heading over to dharmamoon.com.

That's D-H-A-R-M-A-M-O-O-N dot com. I'm a dad now, don't drink mercury. I can't believe I broke the bit. I don't know who's listening to this. It's poison. I just watched a bunch of YouTube videos on it. It inspired whatever you just heard at the beginning. God, I've become soft. I don't want you to drink, Merg. of YouTube videos on it. It inspired whatever you just heard at the beginning. God, I've become soft.

I don't want you to drink, Merg. Please don't drink it. It's not good for you. At least that's what they tell you. All right, everybody. Here we go. Let's dive into this wonderful conversation with someone that I've been working with for years now

who has truly helped my meditation practice and taught me so much about Buddhism. Everybody, welcome back to the Dunker Drossil Family Hour Podcast, David Nickturn. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, Welcome back to the DTFH. You are not in New York right now, you're in LA. What are you doing out there again? That's a good question. I'm on my way to Joshua Treef tomorrow to play guitar with Krishna Dott said, Bati Fest, which is the closest thing to a grateful dead concert I've been able to conjure up

for about 40 years. Wow. Lots of tattoos, lots of yoga, lots of maybe some frisps, and lots of chanting and meditating and good food. So that's tomorrow through the weekend. No, I've heard so many good things about that. Yeah, I put a couple of days on either side

of it for visiting friends in LA. Cool. Are you enjoying being in LA? What's interesting question, driving in I thought, it may be declining possible. Oh really? Is it, I had noticed. It used to be such a kind of spring time energy place and everything's blooming and blossoming and happening.

And I think it's like I see signs of old age sickness and death everywhere. Maybe it's just my personal karma to be seeing that right now. But it feels like things are in the slightly decaying mode. Do you think so? Oh, yeah. For sure. I mean, that's all we left. It's sad.

It's such a great city. It's such a beautiful, wonderful city. It used to be. And it's just, you know, it's tough, man. Like, you can't, I think the great, like, quandary is you wanna be compassionate and you wanna sort of have like, America was, is a story of failed utopias.

You know, attempts at utopia. Oh, good topic for us today actually. He failed utopias. Yes, so you know, so many people, the great American experiment. You know, look at the pilgrims, right? They were coming here. They were gonna have some incredible, like religious utopia.

And then you look at all these other attempts at utopia including the current attempt at utopia that was definitely not working out. And I think with the, including the current attempt at utopia that is definitely not working out. And I think with the on the west coast, they're utopians. It's so beautiful out there. It's so beautiful. I wouldn't you want to just create a utopia out there. And it's been how do you deal with the, you know, the, how do you have to figure out what compassion is, you know, and what it really looks like. And I feel like for them, right now, they feel like there's some compassion involved

in like letting people with traumatic brain injuries and fentanyl addictions and like big problems that should probably be dealt with medically, stay out on the streets or maybe they can't find the funding or they don't know what to do or I don't know But then what that creates this Death spiral which is you you know you're dealing with like The hippie dream right like is no police. That's the hippie dream. No police. No heat. No pigs Right, it's the hippie dream no police no heat no pigs, right? It's the hippie dream. What a beautiful dream

but but you know and then but then what ends up happening is if you stop What side do you want to err on do you want to err on the side of like authoritarianism and like no? We've got to have strong strict brutal regulation and laws or or do you want to err on the side of, no, not much regulation, compassionate DA. You know, it's a mess. And so they're on the side of like, okay, they're trying to see what happens if they were loose in restrictions. And you get this, you know, mobs of people robbing stores,

then the stores can't be there anymore. So they leave, the stores leave, people leave. Now you're not collecting as many taxes as you were to pay for whatever services you would need for the people out on the streets. And this is a death spiral, you know, you need taxes to fix the problem, I guess. So that's one than a death spiral.

I think more than a death spiral, it's an alternating waveform where you go towards one emphasis and then you go towards the opposite side. It's the Yin Yang kind of spiral. So I mean, New York is like that. It's gone through phases of, you know, where the city gets refurbished and uplifted and then goes through periods of deterioration. I think that's just where we are and it really has to do from my point of view as you know, having written the book on the six realms, you know, in the Buddhist paradigm. It's really about that and really suits that. So for me, L.A. used to be sort of a God realm. You know, things were kind of, you know, I remember going, I grew up in New York and going to somebody's house and they've avocados and lemons growing in their back, you know, you can actually,

it's almost, you know, prozeic and, and art typical. So, but in terms of what we're doing with our personal journey, are we trying to get to the God realm, are we trying to get to a more awakened kind of pervasive state? Is a real, that's a probably Buddhist question. Maybe people don't even know what we mean by that. But is there anything you could hold on to in any kind of idealized realm?

Is there something that you could fixate on about it and make it sustainable? And that's the idea of the God realm. And none of the realms are permanent. So they say in the God realm, if you have that kind of great karma, at some point, a little sweat develops in your armpit. And you start to be a bio-stucked trash. Stinky gods.

Well, it's unsustainable because there's too much fixation and attachment in it. And then the engine runs low on gas and it turns into its opposite. You know what I mean? Well, you know, also, I would imagine, like, if we're going to talk about literal gods, like, you would be, I imagine that, like, literal gods are sort of, they're weirdly lacking situational awareness, right? Like they're, the more, the more you start experiencing a rarefied life, whether like God-round or hell-round, the less connected you are to sort of normal life.

And the less normal life makes sense to you, and the less what normal people do make sense to you, even if you want to imagine it does. I mean, how many, there's at least a few videos of politicians going to the grocery store, because they want to seem like they're of the people. And so they go to the grocery store and they have no fucking idea how to buy groceries,

because they haven't bought groceries in years. They're always confused. They don't know what's going on. Like the normal day-to-day stuff that they're supposed to be a wiper aware of so they can legislate or whatever, they don't experience that. I can't remember.

There was just a politician who was like bitching about some kind of like, I don't know, rich fish. I don't remember what it was, Crudo or something, you know, like trying to connect with people, like kind of like saying, like, yeah, the caviar, has been the price of caviar these days is fucked because of inflation.

And, you know, so that's God realm, right? Like you're, you're, you're, I saw, I saw a guy who looked just like Kim Jong Un in the Korean market here yesterday, but I don't think it was. Oh, no, maybe you never know. I think he's in Russia right now. But yeah, so God realm, you, on top of sort of, like, you sort of lose the thread. And you, I guess, from the mythological perspective, living hundreds of thousands of years,

infinite, infinite access to sense gratification, you would forget, however you even started as a God or whatever it was before you are a God. And then you would. And the flavor of that realm is ignorance. That's the that is the texture of that realm. So when they say ignorance is bliss, they're not kidding. You know, there's a sense of ignoring certain aspects of reality to sustain that kind of high. And that could be just a temporal level. That could be a temporal level or it could be a God's have their form, god realms, and then there's formless god realms. Those are incredible. You just

completely, you don't really have a body, you just have a sense of space and bliss, but it's not sustainable. If there's any attachment to it, it's not sustainable. Otherwise, I'm there. It's on me up. And it's not compassionate. It's not based on, it's based on ignorance. Ignoring. Do you remember when Gal Gadot and a bunch of celebrities, like the pandemic had barely been going on?

And they put that awful video out of them singing Imagine. Do you remember that? It was one of the most cringy, oh my god. Oh my god. It's all these like millionaires. And imagine all the people. Oh my god, oh my god, it's all these like millionaires. And imagine all the people, like they're, you could see the houses they're in.

They're like, they've got pools behind them. They've got grown gardens, groves. And they're like in some like just impotent attempt to soothe the nerves of people who are like now in a two-bedroom apartment with three kids and they can't leave. They're seeing John Lennon and it's just so satanic and messed up and so to me that's the other thing about the gut when I think about the God realm. It's that even the attempts at connecting with the human realm are warped and diluted and twisted

in this specific way, so that whatever they try to do, that even seems that it was meant to be compassionate, comes off as a completely elitist and completely out of it. Yeah. The gods. Yeah, so you. And then the hell around it. Yeah, well, wait, wait, don't go to the hell rooms and go down to the jealous background, which is the adjacent one, which is there's some access to what you're talking about, but it's not a given, and the space becomes very competitive and aggressive to achieving those things. It's not like falling off a log.

You have to work for it, fight for it. In that realm, there's no compassion. You can't have compassion for people and strive at that level. It involves putting some people down to get there, you know. So this is Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, like, like, fighting online with each other and like, saying that one that their dicks were bigger, like, literally, like, my dick is bigger than yours. Like, they actually said that. You know, these are, yes, they were gonna get in a boxing match. Like, so here you have two billionaires.

And if you're a billionaire, you could do anything, go anywhere you want, do anything. But, and there's a lot of billionaires out there that don't tweet. That's the realm of the God's billionaires. They're out there, who knows what they're doing? We don't know what they're doing, who knows what they're doing. But then you get the tweeting billionaires.

And Trump is another example. And that's how you know if you're a billionaire, if you're tweeting at another billionaire that your dick is bigger than them, you are no longer in the realm of the God's. You are now in the realm of the jealous gods. Because truly, there's something else to do than fight with other billionaires on this planet.

Like, you could, the pranks you could play as a billionaire, the trolling, the chaos you could sow, just for fun, that none of them make, like if I were a billionaire, all I would do is make commercials for fake products. I would try to buy all the commercials in Fox News for weeks of just fake products. And just for fun, just for fun. They don't do that, they don't do that.

They just, they fight each other. It's so sad, it's such a waste of money. They don't do that. They just, they fight each other. It's so sad. It's such a waste of money. Do you think any of those tweeting billionaires listen to you? Are they listening right now, maybe?

I don't think, I don't think so. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I doubt it. Like if they do, please just let me, I will help you make the fake commercials. Like we will have so much fun making fake commercials and fake UFO landings, just all kinds

of joyful things we could do together. But yeah, I don't know if they do. I don't know. I mean, wouldn't, wouldn't you love, though? I mean, like, it is something like you can, we can only sort of fantasize about what that incarnation is like. Wouldn't you love a day, or a couple of days in that situation just to get a taste for real?

I think we've had incarnations like that, most likely. But I mean, I know, say, God realm and jealous God realm are, there's something familiar about it and You know you can sort of see the bridge that leads to it And maybe you've made decisions not to crossover. I mean Like you could have tremendous success don't you think and that would put you in that kind of zone? I mean, I don't know like the map the map for comedian in general, there are, like, you know, even the top of tier ones, I don't know if they hit billionaire level.

I think to hit billionaire level, you got to get into, like, tech, or you got to get into real estate or something like that, you know? And I don't know if, like, what the difference is, experientially between $800,000. And I don't even know what the, is the definition of billionaire property owned or is it like liquid like cash in the bank? Like I don't know, or is that, I have no idea. But I mean, you see the billionaires, you know, like Putin, that's a billionaire. Real mother jealous gods, you know, he's in hell.

He's existing in a, he's like somehow simultaneously a god but he's living this. He's not in know, he's in hell. He's existing and he's like somehow simultaneously a god But he's living this not in hell because he's slitting. Matt He's not in the hell room if you jump down to the hell room You're a loser and you're not winning even one one hand, you know when one round You know, there's no up and down to it. It's just down down down. So okay, I think most of us go through those realms and by the way, not to, you know, we're too fine a point on it, but the book I wrote called Awakening from the Day Dream that we've talked about before it talks about. I love that book so much. Well, and it's a good way to get oriented

towards both the realms as a state of mind and also as a, so manifested condition that you can enter. So like in your situation, you have a new little baby girl, right? Yes. And you're all tenderized, right? You're all like gooey, right? Yes. And you see children in the park playing,

you go like, oh, I wanna help them. I wanna be, look at how sweet that is. And you see their parents acting bad, then you say, I understand how that feels, right? They're just have a bad day in their head of the patient. That's called the human realm. Right. And that is, from our point of view,

the only auspicious realm. So in terms of the state of mind involves success and failure and gain and loss and navigating towards, you know, more possibility for compassion and for insight to dawn, because you're not winning or losing all the time. Right. Well, you know, this is, I was just reading this thing last night, you know, because I hang out on the weird message boards, and you know, I'm following the UFO stuff, probably in an unhealthy fixation.

But one of the threads in the UFO conversation with all this stuff coming out and the disclosure and who knows, is it not real, is that aliens or whatever these things are, they don't even call them aliens anymore. They're calling them non-human intelligence. View human beings as vessels that contain souls within them, and that these souls are being like, I don't know how to put it, it's like wine. So they're sort of, they keep humans coming back over and over again

to sort of like sweeten or to like, I don't know, ferment or whatever you wanna call it to create a really great vintage soul, which they eat. I didn't even insult it. That's like that twilight zone, remember? To serve serve man it was a cookbook. Yeah, I do remember it. I remember, yeah, they find some book. They think there's, but yeah, so which plays in which obviously connects to the this Buddhist, it's a bed and Buddhist cosmology in which the idea is you don't, it's a trap. Like, no matter what, it's a trap. If you are coming back here over and over and over again,

right, it's a trap. Don't do it anymore. There is a way to step out of all the realms, right? And that's why the human birth is the great birth because that is the your odds increase exponentially if your mission is to no longer keep landing in the samsaric loop of. Except there's fine print in the contract which is even if you do escape you have to come back as a bodhisattva and as a compassionate person. So you don't really get. Is that always the case, or you do have to come back, or can you just skip it? No, you could go, you could skip it. According to the teachings, the doctrine, you could skip it and, you know,

either go to a pure realm, you know, a higher kind of quality of lifestyle in terms of what all the virtues we're talking about, or just, you or just kind of merge with the spaciousness of the situation and not really need to identify yourself or create a unique personal identity. But you would, according to the like the myonic teachings and further on, you would say,

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So I could read the fine print in the contracts I got you, there is no way out, literally. So, you know, I think maybe you should talk a little bit about the initial reaction people have to any of this, at least the reaction I had when you start hearing this stuff is like, my God, that's sensitive. I like my life. I want to be a human. What do you mean you don't want to keep coming back? Or, you know, people will misconstruery incarnation as a kind of lazy way of dealing with annihilation when you die. People will think, oh yeah, they believe in reincarnation because they're

afraid of death, but they don't realize that the Buddhists are saying, no, you don't want to re- no, you don't want to re- No, you don't want to re- Like, that's not a good thing necessarily that you keep coming back. That's not good. We got to get out of this thing. It's a loop. Talk about death spiral. It's a fucking death spiral, man.

And you got to get out of that. So can you, can you talk about that a little bit? Like that, that, you know, when people hear this stuff for the first time, it, it sounds almost like it's dismal that it is is you know reducing the human experience to yeah it's neilistot negative yeah yeah yeah many but I think even I heard the Pope say that about Buddhism you know it's it's a common let's say critique or understanding of putism. They're intellectual. They're neolistic. You know, they don't believe in this. They don't believe in that. So the whole thing ends up being kind of like somebody taking the plug out of a hot bath that you're trying to take at the same time. They're

Exactly. You're not going to have a long on it. Exactly. So, you know, it's, I think, helpful to look directly at what your experience is, which is mainly what the Buddhists say. Look directly at your experience. Is there any discomfort or not? Up to you to say, you say, is it, are you in some kind of hot bath with bubbles or is there more to it than that and there's some kind of suffering and some kind of complexity and some kind of illiterate use quality. So let me give you the, I love this stuff and I probably over reiterated countless times the kinds of suffering there are, the kinds of pain. Yeah. Check the box first, not getting what you want. Check or check check Okay getting what you don't want check or no check check I use this to car

Alternating between getting what you want and losing what you want. That's the third one check and fourth all pervasive kind of a sense of slight and And fourth, all pervasive kind of a sense of slight out of sync quality or lack of ease and flow that just sort of permeates pervasive even the great moments that you have. There's a kind of slight undercurrent, underbelly of some kind of irritation or you know, ill at ease quality. Yes, no. Sure, check. Well, baboon, I mean, that's called the first noble truth.

And if you're willing to look into that, you just, you just shifted away from a nihilistic interpretation to a realistic interpretation. You're actually looking at experience directly without wishful thinking and without negative thinking, without an elistic approach or without a theistic approach. You're just looking directly at the nature of experience. That's all I'm saying.

Okay, but when I look at those things, my feeling is, it's worth it. Oh, the cost of suffering, if that's the admission fee to have the experience like watching my third child be born to watching a marriage go from like chaos to love to watching like Yeah, the other way around but you know there is like a kind of culmination that can happen in a life where There is like a kind of culmination that can happen in a life where you look at all of that that you just said and

Identify you know it you're familiar you're more than familiar with it and But you're still like but it this is still quite lovely even with all that all that. Oh, yeah Yeah, I don't think any but I think in a way that's almost like not what's being talked about. That's a different point, which is, you know, you could call that some kind of basic goodness or wholesomeness or but a nature or bodhicitta, you know, that the goodness is still there, you know. But our clinging to it is a case further suffering. Yes, would you agree with that? Yes. Look, you know, it's a kind of a thing that's. It's a case further suffering. Yes. Would you agree with that? Yes.

Look, you know, it's a kind of a cleaning that's being challenged. And are you equally economist, you know, when the good marriage goes to bad, or when, you know, when you lose a child, or when you lose your job, or when there's like a flood that wipes out thousands of people in Libya, are you still, you know, I can you hold about steady during those experiences? Then you're looking at something that to me is worth kind of really cultivating. Right. Right. Equanimally.

Here's my counter to it. This is a dream I was going to tell you about. Okay. The next time we talked, the, the craziest dream. And in the dream, I was in my body, but it was like a cave in situation. And there were beings like outside of the cave. And I, I don't know how to put it other than like I experienced the totality of suffering, of like being stuck as a person as like just this. It was the most, I've never, you know,

you hear people talk, you know, everyone hears that story about like the master takes the student a lake, shoves his head underwater, and like the student finally comes up for air and the master's like, when you want realization, the way you wanted air, that's when you started your practice. And in this dream, it was like that.

It was like that. It was like a full recognition of all the first noble truth stuff, like a full experience of like the price of being incarnate, the reality of it, after all the fairy tale stories you've been telling yourself are stripped away. Just this compressed

scabin situation, and I woke up and I was like, oh God, that was fucking horrible. The experience was like a harsh movie or something. And I don't know what that was, maybe we didn't turn they see on that night and I live in fucking Texas. It's just got too hot in my room or something, but it was horrifying. Like it was, when I woke up and thought about it in terms of suffering, and in terms of the first double truth, that's where I was like, okay, right, this is what they're talking about. This is the, this is what is the root of

any action that I take that doesn't have compassion in it or love and it or kindness and it, of course, how are you going to act in any kind of noble, kind, sweet way if underneath all of your stories, you feel like you're stuck in a mine shaft? That's your unconscious preaching the Dharma to your conscious mind. It's interesting when I talked to somebody yesterday who does remember their dreams and I thought, wow, what a loss, you know, because there's so much unfiltered information in your dreams in subconscious mind. And it's talking to you, maybe symbolic language, you have to be able to translate it. But when you said that, I thought, okay, first and double truth, the four kinds of suffering, the noticing, the discomfort, the

anxiety that underlies, not as a proclaiming it to be a thing, but noticing that it's part of our ecosystem. That's the first. Second is looking at the cause of it, which I think is what your dream is really about. It's the second and the whole truth. What is causing that? And that is, you know, meant to be a serious contemplation for us. If you acknowledge the first, you're supposed to seriously contemplate the second one. The third one is the cessation of it. Hello everybody who's idealistic and who's wants to, you know, have a good dream and go to heaven. the cessation of suffering. How is that? That's pretty good. Yeah.

Because you've released the causes of it. And the cause of it is clinging to a mistaken sense of personal identity. That's the cause of it. That is taking you permanent. That's taking to be rigid. That's fixed. That's defending itself.

All the things that are like basically your imagination in overdrive, creating a nightmare for yourself. Then let's get to the fourth one because this one, the eight-full path. So, this Aaron, with this new baby, we looked at all the mistakes we made in the last, with the last two kids, and we decided, okay, we're gonna try this thing that we've heard about,

and apparently some Asian cultures they do it, which is the mother gets to stay in bed for a month, like not literally like bed ridden, but they stay in their room. You bring them food. It's just, you try to like, lessen, just give them time with a baby, not stressing about any other thing. You try to remove all the stressors from it so that they can heal, so that the baby, the milk the baby's drinking doesn't have some kind of like cortisol in it or stress chemicals. And so this time I went into like full servant mode, like, you know, just

bringing food up, making sure she had water, just, you know, just trying it as much as I could make that my number one focus. And I, that my mood changed over that month. Like it was just, it went from, you know, my own selfish bullshit. Like I wanna play video games. I don't, till like loving it. Till like loving carrying the tray up,

loving getting the water, loving all of it. And then everything started shifting. And I realized my God, I just have not really focused at all on the eight full path at all. And I was thinking this must be what they're talking about when they talk about right livelihood. This is what they're talking about. Because it's like it's easy.

You hear the first three, you know, it's so simple, and it needs to be simple. Stop being attached, the suffering will end. But the fourth, it complexifies a little bit. It's like, here's how you let go. And this is a way of life. This is the way of life. And you know, and then that now it's like any time I feel like in that compressed state,

100% of the time it's because I am fixating on myself because like even if I'm helping someone or trying to help someone might the intent is not to help. You know what I mean the intent behind it is still so even maybe more precisely you're fixing on a false sense of self. Yeah, right, right, right, right, right. Because if you look at your sense of identity when you're being a just a compassionate husband, there's still a sense of self, but it's it may be more genuine in some sense that that is what actually makes you feel like you're thriving and that your life is good and that you're helping other people and being kind, you know, you have to explore the sense because the A-fold path is the relational part of the path. Up to then it's been pretty much like you're just seeing it clearly, you're seeing what

it is, you're seeing what it isn't. Now in a relational truth, which we're not trying to demolish with our practice, right? You're trying to inhabit the relational world with an enlightened perspective. Would you say? Yeah. That's really totally different. That's different than disappearing into a puff of smoke. You're inhabiting a relational world with acuity, with accuracy, with a clear sense of what is and what isn't, and with, you know, feeling of blending in with it and compassion and being observis. And then there's some kind of shine that happens, you know. Now, maybe that's, maybe that is or isn't full but a hood who knows, I couldn't say. But it certainly seems

like a part of a journey towards something that you feel more integrated, more wholesome, better, more balanced, and also less fixated on stupid shit. Thank you Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH and for keeping my beautiful website and prime shape for years. If you are a creator who wants to start a podcast, if you're interested in creating a home for whatever it is that you're putting out into the universe on the world wide web and then Squarespace is for you. They have got everything you could possibly need. I can't tell you how many websites I have made with Squarespace. It's so easy. If you mix and match templates you can just smash together late at night when you've come up with some brilliant idea for a website or if you wanna make something complex,

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and they have so much for creators who want to really go in deep on your podcast. They even have members only areas, meaning that if you want to create extra content for your hardcore fans, you can do that with Squarespace. It is a beautiful, ever-evolving toolbox filled with cutting edge technologies that will allow you to create the website that your dream deserves. You can try it out right now by heading over to squarespace.com-fourthslash-duncan. Try it out for free. When you're ready to launch, use Africa Duncan.

You're going to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Again, at squarespace.com-fourthslash-duncan, try it out. When you're ready to launch, use Africa Duncan. You're going to 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. God bless you. Squarespace. Now maybe that's maybe that is or isn't full but a hood who knows I couldn't say, but it certainly seems like a part of a journey towards something that you feel more integrated

more wholesome, better, more balanced and also less fixated on stupid shit. Yeah, well, yeah, but in there is in it, there is a, I don't know where I'll put it, like when you're doing it, there is a dissipation of the self. Like you do go away kind of, like there is just carrying the tray up to the room, heating up the food. You know, something in it, but in all, but in the midst of that, I was just trying to apply the things we've worked on together to it, applying the mindful state

to the thing, like just look at the tray, look at the food, focus on carrying the tray up, focus on just that, just do that without any of the other shit. And somewhere in there, yeah, it's a glow, is the best way to shine. Something happens where, I don't know, it was revelatory. And it's so simple and obvious, I'm sorry, y'all, I'm a selfish asshole,

that this is even revelatory to me. But it really was. And I don't know that, and you see how the meditation practice and the ability to do that sort of thing go hand in hand, like the two work together really well. Yeah, that is the Ed Hall path. That's the thing is without doing something that kind of introduces a new set of parameters,

a kind of method, a way of moving gradually towards something that's more reasonable. It's very hard to make a leap across the chasm. You have to build a bridge of some kind, which is relatively bodhicitta to do something that's actually quite reasonable in a way. Even if it seems radical compared to like the selfish asshole you're talking about that we all can be at times you know. Right. Yeah. You know that right? I've heard I've heard there might be a few of us out there. I think the people who are roaming around in that dream of yours. Yes. Yes. And you know, and the other cool thing about it is you know here suddenly is like a something that goes beyond

just this sitting practice, something that goes beyond the mindfulness practice. Now there's an actionable, in a very simple actionable series of things you can do around you, because it does appear that pretty much at any time in your life, there's someone who needs you to help them or there's some, needs you to help them. Or there's some... And then I started noticing,

I'd love to know what you think about this. I realized, oh, but there is a way to serve myself. Like there is a way to serve myself in a non-selfish way. You know, like there is a way to identify that suffering body or whatever you wanna call it. Not as me, but as a part of the universe or something. And then, you know, we've heard count les iterations of this very same thing, but kind of, you know, hold it like a baby.

You know what I mean? So that instead of like, like when the baby's crying, you're not like, I want to obliterate you. I want to annihilate you. I want to annihilate you I want to like and be extinguished and very very very demonstrably and very realistically you are that baby Yeah, sure. Yeah, you know what I mean? We are I mean, we all are that baby because look at our days how they go by I mean we're kind of like we're still being toilet trained on some basic level Oh, I'm still I don't know if we're turning into fine wine

or whatever that other premise was, but we are being trained to become more processed, more cultured, more evolved. I think that's part of living. That's a viable thing. And people go about it different ways. But without that part of living, it feels pretty aimless to me.

If there's no journey, there's no sense of path, just accumulating wealth or power does not seem to be as satisfying as that is at the end. And I see people at the end of their life, it wasn't satisfying. Yeah, that's a real rough one. That's a real rough one. Because you do, when you do catch a glimpse of whatever you want to call it, when you do catch a glimpse of like, wait, call it, when you do catch a glimpse of like, wait, how is it that, you know, washing dishes that my wife just ate off of upstairs

is more fulfilling than like my peak moments of hedonism. Like how is it not fulfilling is even the right word for it. It's like discovering a new country or a new zone or something. Like you know what I mean? Like the encounter with that is so I could see how it, the end of your life got, I mean, almost we better that you didn't realize that. It would almost be better that you just died.

And you're like, God damn it, I wish I I had more money than like to die and realize like, fuck all that time. I was trying to like a crew wealth and stuff. I could have had this instead and this is true value. Ooh, ooh, that sucks. That's a, hmm, that's not a fun. I guess there's some version, which is part of the teachings, you know, that I studied where you can explore the possibility of integrating those two realities, which is leadership, which is communication, which is arts, which is culture, which is government. All those things could be integrated with the sensibility that you just talked about.

And then you have a very, very potentially resonant, rich situation. I think we've seen moments like that in various times and places. And as the kind of people who are, you're always looking, how could I plant seeds, even if they won't sprout right away? But in the future at some point, you want to plant those kind of seeds. So I think there's a lot of people I talked to that. If you tapped into it, they would vote for that. They would drink to that. Yeah, for sure.

It does bring a question up. Can you work backwards? Like in other words, instead of starting with the sort of becoming familiar with what you are, what's going on with you, all the things that go along with like some sitting practice or some contemplative practice. Instead of doing any of that bullshit,

could you theoretically just start at the eight full path and then work your way backwards? Well, so that, you know, that's a great question in a way. at the eightfold path and then work your way backwards. Well, so that's a great question in a way. And I think if you look at different Buddhist schools and different spiritual trainings of all kinds, they do work backwards and forwards. And sometimes, so when we talk about the view, developing the view, the practice and the outcome,

so some people start with the view. I like starting with the view, so there's some clarity about what's even being talked about. That's my, maybe my little bit of a bias or whatever, or style, personal style. But you could start with the practice, like, like a lot of Zen doesn't really start with much of a view, you know, it's just like get on the cushion and just be with yourself. So yeah, or,ioca, just go help people, go feed people. Like, you know, like Maharaji says, go feed people, you know, help people. Yeah. So I do think you could go forwards or backwards or up and down and over and across.

But at some point, if there's not clarity in the view, you know, a lot of practice could potentially take you into a space in which, and I use the analogy of like learning how to play tennis holding the racket the wrong way. You hit a thousand balls, but you're not progressing the equation really because there's some fundamental twist in your logic, you know. So I'm so more positive. Well, maybe because you're still. Yeah, I know, I like that. I don't agree with, I mean, I don't know,

because like, I've been working with you for so long now. So that, and that is the, the sort of process that we've worked with. But I, and I get it, you know, and I see how like I don't, one seems like it could get really technical. The other seems like it becomes spontaneous or something. One, you, you know, there's,

suddenly in one, all these ethics and rules and regulations or restrictions do this and that and this and then that and then that and all of that, some kind of memorization or something. Whereas the other one it seems like from the view, all that other stuff kind of naturally spontaneously occurs. Yeah, and I think you're right to point it is a two way highway. But if you're doing it practice first,

you want to make sure you have good teachers. Because if they say, hit the ball a thousand times and they never show you the right way to hold the rack and they didn't know the right way to hold the rack. It's, you know, possible that, you know, a lot of time and energy could go down the tube. So make sure, you know, but if you have a good teacher like who you trust and, you know, has some clear manifestation of the qualities that you're trying to cultivate. You know they could suggest something like I tell people to sit a lot. They either think that's a good idea or they don't.

But at a certain point it seems essential to me whether you understand that or not that you have to get your butt on the cushion and actually cut the chain of the carmic chain a little bit and just rest your mind a little bit and see what's going on under the hood. So that's pretty mechanical in a way to tell people just to do that practice, you know? Yeah. Have you noticed in Buddhism, that in some forms of Buddhism, Protestant ethic emerges that seems a little surprising. Like having worked with you, it's interesting sometimes whenever I find myself

on this message board or that message board, there's a lot of like, like stuff that doesn't seem great to me, like a lot of superstition, a lot of beating up oneself, a lot of like, is this irreverent? Is it irreverent to do this in front of the Buddha, a statue of the Buddha? Do I have my flower in the right bowl? Like things like, and people legitimately feeling like

shit because they, I don't know, didn't hit the bell the right way or the, you know, it's a total, you know, bell curve from, it always to conservative to progressive. And yes, in my sanghas over the years, there have been plenty of super conservative people who just relish the forms and really impute the forms with a lot of power. And then there's people who go totally formless.

So the weird thing that I would say is that the teacher that I studied with, which was Joe Gimper Rinpoche somehow managed to marry those two things. It was kind of a, it was kind of something that stunned me. So you couldn't sneak out the left or sneak out the right, you couldn't kind of get around it. But I am, I lean towards the formless and his ground is clearly formless. You know what, can I read you something that I sort of had isolated for today?

Yeah, please. About the from Trump Grooomertey who, you know, you and I both share a admiration for how he sort of helps illuminate, you know, the view at least. He's talking about the fourth moment, which just intrigued me because we're going to be in our upcoming info session. We're going to talk about, you know, nouness and eternity, which is sort of an interesting. We're not going to do that today, but just a little glimpse at that. The fourth moment is this thing that I find fascinating because there's past, future, and then the present

is called the third moment. So why would you need, what is a fourth moment? That's really, and what it's delineating is, the fourth moment is beyond that tribunal of the past present and future. So it's a space, kind of, you could say, that's worth pointing out. So he says, it is unprogrammed experience, simultaneously experiencing hot and cold water in its own individuality.

Whenever there is a reminder, it's part of the fourth moment. The present is the third moment. It has a sense of presence. You might say, I can feel your presence, or I can feel the presence of the light when it's turned on. Now there is no darkness. The present provides a sense of security. You know where you are, and you keep your flashlight in your pocket.

If you encounter darkness, you take out your flashlight and shine the light to show you where you're going. You feel enormous relief created by that little spot of light in front of you. You don't see the whole environment, but you feel the sense of presence and the present. The fourth moment is a state of totality. Basic awareness is taking place, which doesn't need any particular reassurance as such. It is happening, it is there. You feel the totality. You perceive not only the beam of light from the flashlight,

but you see the space around you at the same time. The fourth moment is a much larger version of the third moment. Without the experience of the fourth moment, there isn't enough intelligence taking place. You're just accepting things naively and that naivete may become the basis for spiritual materialism. Naivete is believing in something that doesn't exist, which means that it becomes a sense of ignorance or stupidity,

which is where the God-realm conversation we were having earlier comes in. You turn on the cold shower and you hope everything's going to be okay. You know, so this is, and then he goes, and you turn on the cold shower and you hope everything's going to be okay. You know, so this is, and then he goes on to say the fourth moment, your experience of your life is actually the fourth moment, including the suffering, including everything. And it is happening now without any real ability to say, be here now or don't be here now It's already happening somebody turned the switch on a long time ago and you're having your experience as a So it means paying attention to the totality of both the good and bad happy and sad, you know kind of quality of the whole thing This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Friends, when I was up in Asheville, North Carolina, I got into therapy and it changed my life.

I had been procrastinating. I knew probably I had some stuff I needed to work through. Didn't want to do it. Had a lot of feelings about therapy. Primarily, I didn't want to feel vulnerable. I didn't want my metaphysical chest cavity torn open and my heart obliterated by some therapist. It was scary. It made me have to deal with the reality that I like every other person on the planet. Have a biological neuro computer instead of some beautiful, perfect flawless silicon machine that gets regular updates from the divine. No, it's some mushy thing that apparently stinks and looks like cauliflower. And I didn't want to deal

with that, but thank god I did. Got into therapy. Spent many, many weeks working through some stuff. And am I perfect now? Not at all. But am I better? Did it work? Yes, 100 per cent. And if I could recommend anything to y'all, if you're feeling like maybe you could benefit from therapy, don't put it off. Off. Go do it. As soon as you can, you will be so glad you did. And better help is the best way to get into this. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist. You could switch therapists anytime. No additional charge. By the way, like whether you do therapy online or not, this is something that you might end up having to do. I certainly did. And what's beautiful about BetterHelp is they make it easy.

Out there in meat space, it can feel a little weird switching therapists. BetterHelp makes that a simple thing so you can find somebody you really connect with because that's a super important part of therapy. Get a break from your thoughts with better help. Visit betterhelp.com slash Duncan today to get 10% off your first month. Thank you, better help. So it means paying attention to the totality of both the good and bad, happy and sad, you know, kind of quality of the whole thing. I really love- Does that make any sense? Oh, yeah.

I love that he kind of points out almost like a blindfold quality, the present moment, that you, it's cool. It's, it's, it's, I know what he talking about, because, and I think that what, at least for me, what does happen is you do, that you go from this like neurotic fixation on the future or the past or what you have coming. I used to have horrific, God, there's a name for it. It's anxiety related to something. So if I, like, you know, I have a show tonight

and it used to be that if I had a show at night, that's all I would think about. I would feel so anxious through the whole day and all I would be thinking about is like, shit, I gotta do this show. Oh my God, am I gonna get enough rest? I gotta write jokes. And then that would sort of create like a

In film a line through every frame of everything and so and I thought that was normal I thought it was normal and that's a shitty way to live if you're a comedian because hopefully you have shows every night or as many nights as you can and so then The pret you start practicing and you discover that what he's talking about, the present moment. Now, all of a sudden, at least for me, I started having these little moments of not being worried because I figured out how to get into the moment. And then I would come out of it and feel guilty, like Jesus, that seems like you're not

supposed to be able to do that. That's like taking a vacation, an unauthorized vacation or something. And then some familiarity with how to do that and then more and more in the moment, the anxiety diminishes. Until now I have a little bit fleeting moments like that, but it's nothing like what it used to be. But then you start realizing, shit. But then you start realizing shit. Like I don't think this is it. I don't think this is it. And then there, this like weird, the present moment starts feeling like a screen or something.

You know what? A screen or a... A gozi filter. Yes, a gozi filter. And you realize, fuck, I was thinking that this is... a screen or a little something. Yes, a gauzy filter. And you realize, fuck, I was thinking that this is emptiness or this is when they're talking about emptiness. This must be what they mean.

But you realize, no, it's still not that. And then that's when you start catching, I think, glimpse is what he's talking about. Which is this sort of primordial awareness that is saturated into the present moment, but is not being impacted by. And it's indestructible, and it's indestructible and unfabricated. It doesn't depend on you recognizing it at all. You're already part of it.

Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. That's that. And here's the idea, Duncan, as when we were talking about that a minute ago, I'm sitting here thinking, I mean, you know, you can't control when somebody else is talking, you go like, I'm following your line of thought, but another line of thought to belt. And in this case, it was the irony of everything you're talking about, the whole thing is to try to make people laugh. And that's not really funny.

You're going through all that just to make people laugh. Look, I know, I'm different. And that's not really funny. You're going to all that just to make people laugh. Look, I know I'm different. Most comedians incredibly balanced in a very healthy relationship with their job and life. And their childhood. Right? Their childhood, oh, but I have an exception.

I don't know what it is. But yeah, but you know, it's sort of like, and when I first started encountering that and then trying to differentiate it or something from the present moment, I realized like for me in the present moment what really grabs me is the visual field like I get really locked into colors and stuff you know like the visual that are like the way my body feels, not so much hearing, not so much, but something about the spatiality of the present moment

is hard to see beyond. And almost like you don't want to try to see beyond. You don't want to like try to like think, is there something on the other side of this wall or whatever this is that people call the present moment? Is there a need? Is there something else? There's a near field, but not exactly spot on version of it,

which is called Johnna States. We've talked about that before, JHA and A, you become absorbed in the present. It's like a little bit like trippy, you know? And I've been going out since the pandemic. I've been on the road for a month now. And I feel like I am on some kind of trip because everything's super vivid compared to the 2D world.

I've been living in for three years. Yeah, right. But it's heightened. It's very heightened. So that's OK as long as that, you know, as long as that doesn't become yet another in a long string of attempts to amuse oneself. Well, and it is.

Any not at first amuse yourself with it, David. I mean, how do you not? When all of a sudden, the encounter with the present moment that you used to have to take 100 micrograms of LSD to encounter suddenly starts happening minus the acid. How are you not going to, like, you know, I could get it. Cause you, you know, that's another thing that happens. It suddenly you aren't like, you are in your body. I'm not saying I'm astrally projecting

any bullshit like that. But it's like you're horizon widens and you're now the me, the rest of stuff thing starts going away. And now you're just sort of like in this tapestry or something. And that is a blast. Like that is a blast. And honestly, I get it.

I don't, I get it. I can see why you would get it completely addicted to that. And for me, also something unnerving about the encounter with that other thing. Yeah, well, do you agree though that any attachment? Do you say that any attachment to any type of experience will create a further ripple

going forward? In other words, you're gonna wanna get back there somehow or if there's something about it that, so you know, I've said this before, remember to use to say just disown it. Disown it. There's nothing in it to own. Well, that's a little bit aggressive. It's almost, it's not like letting go.

He said disown it so that you clearly recognize our ability to get sort of caught up and fixated at the drop of a hat. And so you cut it proactively. But I'm going to tell you, I'm addicted to vaping. You think I'm going to be able to let go of being able to suddenly like shift into some unit of state with the present moment? Like that's where it does get brutal.

That's where Chuck and Trump does get brutal because it's like, I don't want no. Like this is a wonderful little outpost here. This is wonderful. I don't have to freak out about my shows. I don't have to worry about all the shit on my plate anymore. I can just go into the moment. And it's not like it's, it seems to be amplifying my ability to do stuff.

Like, I'm better at doing things when I'm in that state. It's flow state is what people call this. that state. Flow state is what people call this. It's the flow state is what people call me. Well, you can help me here, Duncan. You can help me out here, okay? Give me a chance to be compassionate to me, okay? You're my guide to the zeitgeist at the moment, along with other folks. Oh, no.

But, you know, my wheel has turned, you know what I mean? I'm like grandfather and I'm going like, hmm, a lot like, I'm going to Bacchew Fest, which feels like a grateful dead concert to me, but that's just because I know what that is, energetically. So if you are vaping, I was in London, teaching a workshop at a beautiful yoga studio there, just this weekend, and I saw people in cafes vaping.

And I'm going to admit, I don't know what it is. What is vaping? What are you vaping? What's in the cocktail? OK, so if you want to look at, let's compare addiction or mechanisms of addiction to electricity. So cigarettes as far as addiction go, I think we could say this is the light bulb. When you know when someone figured out you could roll tobacco up and burn it and inhale it and get weirdly high and focused and you know and then just

keep doing that over and over again until you've coughed your lungs out or whatever. That's great. Secret tastes like shit and they make you stink. So in some infernal laboratory in my fantasy somewhere in the hollow earth, an imp demon, arch demon maybe. It was like, okay, how can we add sugar to nicotine? How can we make nicotine sweet? Now it's add to the experience of one of the most, if not the most addictive substance on the planet,

another addictive substance. And then now you have the vape, now you have vaping, which is these things. So you're inhaling nicotine? Is that what's going on? You're inhaling some kind of nicotine that is being converted into a vapor that also has within it some sweetener.

And so as you're breathing it in, you're not tasting the shit cigarette taste. And it's sad, because in California, you can't, they won't let you have flavored vapes. And then, you know, honestly, I get it, because like kids, kids are smoking these fucking vakes. So in California, you can buy nicotine flavored, or tobacco flavored vapes,

which I would rather have a trucker fart in my mouth than breathe and wipe it. Oh, that's nice. that's a good image so is that what you're right in my only face is that yeah but you have to you have to you have to charge these monsters things and so yeah so okay you know what I want to make a date with can I make a date with you for real time interaction? You're gonna date. What was it you bet? And you'll just describe to me. What's happening moment by moment? Okay, I was actually happening and you know, do you do your real bring your real mindfulness to apply to the process because there's a lot of substances that will jump you up a notch and I personally feel like

the tradition I come from has some real couple of traditions have some really good like I need to say methods or techniques to jump start the engine a little. And one is called win-tours, which I'm starting to talk about win-tours a lot more, which is something that that that Trump Rubimite taught about. In other words, there's some way of channeling your natural energy by mixing intentionality, a kind of sense of acute awareness, and understanding how the mind and body configuration works, where I think you can get effects that would be less addictive and more compelling. So I don't mean to go on to the internet here and say, I got something better than vaping for the kids out there.

But I'm not sure that's not true. And the other is, she is that. She is that. She, she energy build up the product. Oh man. No, I'm, you know, we're getting some body work from me soon. I'm thinking about going to a hypnotist. Like I made a vow to Aaron that I would stop this

when the baby came and I'm still fucking doing it like a complete rat in the cage. So it's like, you know, again, to go back to the realms, this is for me, like how I really understand the realms is through addiction. Like addiction teaches you about the god realm, realm of the jealous gods, because the cycle of getting, you know, high on whatever it is you're getting high on.

Sure. It follows the same thing. You know, you have one drink, realm of the gods. Two drinks, three drinks. Literally, you're going to be in the realm of the jealous gods. You know, like, wait, who's texting you? For animal realm. Or he's right.

And then as you start coming down, now we're in the hell realms. You're just losing. No, are you skipped? You skipped the main realm of the hungry ghost. That's the main addiction realm. Yeah, the hungry ghost. And then like, so you get the cycle of addiction, you like so bright human realm.

And then you're like, fuck this. I don't want to be in the human realm. I don't care if there's something else that's vicious about this bullshit. Where's my faith? And then you repeat this rotten cycle. I mean, I get it. Like, I think, you know, that is like... And then the trucker really is farting in your mouth at that point.

At this point, yeah, I think it's safe to say. I wouldn't know. This could be farts. This could be Chinese farts. All the vapes come from China. I don't know what there's in here. It could be Chinese kids farting in these fucking things, like eating cotton candy and farting in these things. I don't know what there's in here. It could be Chinese kids farting in these fucking things, like eating cotton candy and farting in these things. I don't know. But if I knew, I'd probably still do it.

Like even if they're like, you do understand what you were inhaling, they, they, they, they shove a bunch of nicotine and cotton candy in factory workers' assholes and they just fart into these things. And I would be like ah, yeah Okay, well I'll take want to I guess I'll quit soon Well, it is of what you said you know how much I care about you and your family and as a friend

What I hear you saying is this is not really truly satisfying You know it begins to begin you you present it as if it was, but you know, Aaron doesn't want you to do it. You don't really feel good about it. So then that's a different thing that's called renunciation at that point. You know, long and delusional, you're just, you're just habituated.

That's two different things. Oh, that's cool. All right, well, I'm habituated. Yeah, I can't wait to, you know, I'm telling you, if this thing works, David, you could do a whole weekend for those of us who have gotten trapped by these fart machines. Like, you could do a whole weekend of like helping people quit vaping. And that it would be massively popular if it works. And I will let people know if this works or not. Well, yeah, I mean, and I certainly don't wouldn't be happy to be put in the position of like, oh, here's that Buddhist teacher who figured out how to overcome addiction.

You know, in some sense, all six realms are based on some form of addiction. It's just what you said earlier. There's a sense of duality. I'm here. It's there. I need that to feel better. So, I fixated it on one way or another. Even people in hell are addicted to the hellishness of it. But let's talk about the fourth moment for one second. Yeah. You can still re-acquaint yourself with that place and simultaneously be addicted to something, right? Like, you could be in the fourth moment and vape simultaneously. It's not like one precludes the other. We're talking about some indestructible primordial awareness reality.

It doesn't seem to care what's going on within it in the way that we care. You know, it doesn't, it's not impacted one way or the other by whatever the particular ripples in time space are. Or am I misunderstanding it? Well, you know, again, first thought, when you're talking about that, the universe, you know, if there was such a kind of sense of totality about it, that wasn't dominated by our individual perspective to try to create a smaller universe, a Duncan verse or a Nungi verse or whatever.

The universe does not care. I think I would go on record saying the universe literally doesn't care in the level of that you're talking about. However, just like you going through all those connections to make other people laugh, which made me laugh, just thinking about how hard you're working to make other people laugh and how basically funny you are, we're not trying, it's really, really fun. It's the universe also, there's a cosmic joke going on, which is in it's not caring. It's also working really hard. It seems to pretend that it does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I get I get it. I mean, I see how one leads the other. I get it. I mean, I see how one leads the other I get it. I mean, I do get it like glimpses

I've caught of it all of yeah, I understand why the emphasis the rotten emphasis on meditation. I understand why That because Otherwise, you're going to be sort of faking it which I think is better than not Any attempt at being kind to people around you, even if people with a thing behind it is just absurdely confused and neurotic is better than not. I think, maybe that's wrong, I don't know.

But then if you start getting the little glimpses that you get of it, and can avoid being addicted to those glimpses and then all the stuff that goes along with that, which you and I have both experienced or what you've definitely heard me talk about because then you just want to go back and then you're not getting back there so you feel like you're failing and what the fuck is this or why it wouldn't have been better to not see it at all. Right. But somewhere in there suddenly, like you do start recognizing that that is real, the fourth moment is real. It's pervasive. Yeah, pervasive. And then you start recognizing how that is a relief, unlike anything you've ever experienced. And then other people who haven't encountered that, that's all they're looking for. And so then I could see how that just leads

to a kind of spontaneous kindness, or gives you the ability to have a little more patience with people around you, than you would otherwise, because if you're in a nightmare, you're gonna act like you're in a nightmare. Well, and the fourth moment is a very refined way of saying, don't get caught up in the first moment, the past.

And that makes total sense to everybody. If you're assessing with the past and what you did wrong and stuff, don't get caught up in the second moment, which is the future, which is just anxiety about what hasn't even happened yet. And don't even get caught up in the third moment, which is the notion of presence. So there is a kind of quality of recognizing and letting go that is that is the practice associated with that.

There's a lot of letting go of which could look if it's misinterpreted, it could look like carelessness or laziness. You sure? That could be the sort of not exactly right version of letting go properly, but it could and that's why it was a carefree rather than careless. Yeah. No, I mean, this is something you told me a long time ago, just shifting of identification. You know, it's just a simple shift. Whenever you've told me that in the past, it's always just been like, yeah, okay, simple, right? But I get it, because the more you are encountering that space or identifying with that space, then the less you are gonna have the normal worries you have before. I mean, how much of a person's life

is plagued by the fear of death, David. You know, how much of my life was just plagued by the fear of death, plagued by the, what will happen when I drop this body, plagued by that, you know, in a not healthy way, not a Buddhist sense of like, yeah, you're gonna die. So let's start dying now. Let's start getting into that. Let's start getting into that.

Let's start working with that. But just like, I don't wanna fucking die. I don't want to breathe, exhale for the last time. And then you start encountering that thing. And there seems to be a, I'm not saying I'm not afraid of death. I don't wanna fucking die. But the neurotic terror of death starts diminishing. The temperature goes down on it, you know,

because there's that play, whatever, you wanna call it, the fourth moment. And then whatever that is, definitely feels to me compassionate, it doesn't feel, I know what you're saying, like there isn't, I don't encounter neutrality there. And maybe that's just because I'm still stuck in myself or something. And I'm not neutral.

But I don't know. It doesn't strike me as like some ambivalent vulcan or something. You know, they say it has luminosity and a warmth to it. Yeah, warmth. Even it's most expensive, you know, kind of unconditional quality. Still has some texture of luminosity, clarity, vividness, warmth, compassion, all those things are kind of part of the fabric of the unconditioned mind.

So therefore, if you can find a way to relax a little bit, once you have your basic discipline in place, mixing in a sense of relaxation with that discipline can be really effective, you know. And a lot of people used to try, you used to just trying too hard, right? You know, just pushing hard and then being disappointed or a quick self-couple. Yeah, and if you're trying too hard in one place, you're trying too hard in every place, probably. But you know what, here's a good thing to wrap up on before you, we talk about your, what's coming up, and it sounds amazing actually, this particular one sounds like a wonderful, wonderful,

I think I might wanna sign up for this one that you're doing. But this is great. You ready to check the level one? Okay. What's that? You ready to check the first level of it and part of the second one. Oh, I did.

No, well, go ahead and anyhow proceed. Okay, Spock's of Rain, my favorite grateful Dead Song. It reminds me of what we're talking about. And you know, this was written, I can't remember who wrote this, which is I'm not this. So still, Lesh Robert Hunter, and I think he wrote it for one of his parents that was passing away. Hmm. Do you know the lyrics to this?

No, not a band. Okay, goes. I'm not going to read the whole song, but it goes. What do you want, what do you want me to do to do for you to see you through? A box of rain will ease the pain and love will see you through. Just a box of rain, wind and water, believe it if you need it, if you don't just pass it on. Sun and shower, wind and rain, in and out the window like a moth before a flame. And it's just a box of rain. I don't know who put it there. Believe it if you need it or leave it if you dare. Yeah, you know, that's like a doha at some point, you know, just you have to use

poetry to point to some of these kind of things because otherwise it just becomes too literal and you know, grassby. That's all these great sitters and yogis, that's what they do. They sing or they write poetry. So that's a good practice. And you are, so how are your shows going? Are you being funny? Are people laughing? Yes. Thank God. Yes. I did the... Yes. They've been great. Yeah, they've been great. Just went out on the road for the first time.

In a couple of months, because the baby, and it was wonderful. It was so fun. It was such a fun weekend. I, you know, the audiences were fantastic, but very high. Very high. I'm not gonna scold anybody, but I mean, come on, guys.

Like, I don't want the manager. I don't want to walk out and see the manager mopping your puke up. You know what I mean? Like, I appreciate that you want to be in an expanded state when you come to see my shows, but come on, man, they got to clean up your puke. Don't do that, don't do that.

But it was great. I mean, these were my favorite crowds, maybe ever. Like, they were so fun and riotous and chaotic, and it was just a joy and that was so fun. Cool. David, tell everybody how they can sign up. Well, thank you for that opportunity and always your so supportive and helpful.

We're, you know, our platform is called darmamoon.com for the folks who haven't experienced it yet. D-H-A-R-M-A, moonusually.com. And our sort of centerpiece has been this mindfulness meditation teacher training program, hundred hour program. And it's usually over four months. We have one starting October 13th. Before that, we have an info session with you and me on September 26th, which is going to be just a brief look. We're going to talk about eternity and nounness so we can sort of wrap around the conversation about the fourth

moment in there. But also then we're going to share with people what the program looks like more precisely. And we'll also have a link to it on your page with the podcast when it comes out. So in a nutshell, you know, that was going to be the title of my autobiography Duncan, my life in a nutshell. What do you think is okay? nutshell, you know, that was going to be the title of my autobiography Duncan my life in a nutshell. What do you think is okay? Yeah, so, you know, so in a nutshell, which is where I like to get things to fit into a nutshell, it's a way to stabilize, learn about practice of mindfulness meditation, which everybody's sort of, you know, doing one way or another, try to get real clarity about the practice itself, stabilize it for yourself, for your own benefit, and then learn how to present it cohesively to others, either professionally, semi-professionally,

or just like at Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah. The practice stands out as a kind of foundation for all the things we're talking about. No, no, they say no mud, no lotus, I would say no mindfulness, no lotus. There's has to be some foundation of us willing to be present and there's a good way to go about it. So I would just invite people, if they're interested to come to the info session

on September 26th, sign up for that. And you don't have to be there for that. If you sign up, we'll send you the recording of it. So if you can't make it in real time. And then if you wanna take the leap and join us, there've been so many, what I call, Dunkites, you know, the kind of, well, I mean it, and the loving is in most

playful way possible, Dunkin. There are people who just really resonate with your perspective. It's called the family, David, if they're not Dunkites, they're family members. Oh, okay, okay. The members of the family of the Dunkin' Trustle family hour group, there's been so many filtering through that I feel like we've had a baby together a little bit.

I know you have three babies with Erin, but you have one with me, which is Sister Penny's program. OK, great. All right. Well, we have to check with Erin first and make sure it's OK. But yeah, just that that it's worked out well for the people who are, you know, in tune with the kind of conversations we've been having to check this out and come, come visit with us and contemplate taking this program if they're interested. Beautiful. All of the links.

What's coming up. The links you need to sign up are going to be at dougatrustle.com. Again, it's Dharma Moon. Check them out. It's an incredible and great. You guys have so many great offerings. And I'm so, I love being associated with you at all. Am I the mama or the papa? Well, you're the papa in this case. I think also because I have to stay there and take care of the baby.

You come in and kind of like a nice little visit. But I've been changing the diapers and. Yes, and you like a nice little visit. But I've been changing diapers and... Yes, and you're doing a great job. I'm gonna bring you a tray of delicious food and bone broth, don't worry. Okay, thank you so much, David. Always a joy to chat with you. Thanks, Duncan. See you soon.

Stop bothering me. I'm trying to work. Bob, it's me, your inner voice. We need to talk about all those collection calls you're getting. But I don't know how to make them go away! Ah, sure you do. You can contact Farber debt solutions. Who? Farber debt solutions. They'll immediately put a stop to those collection calls, late fees, and interest payments.

They can do that? Bob. They've helped over a hundred thousand Canadians just like you get out of debt. Just visit FarberDeadSolutions.com and book a free consultation. Where's my phone? I'm going to miss you, Bob. That was David Nickter and everybody. All the links you need to sign up for our conversation to sign up for the teacher training program are going to be at ducatrustle.com. A big thank you to our sponsors. And thank you for listening. I'm gonna be at the Koma Comedy Club. Next week, if you're listening to this on the week

of the 18th, come and see me Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Go to KomaComedyClub.com for tickets. After that, I'm gonna be at Cobbs and San Francisco. I really hope I see y'all out there. I love you, and I'll see you next week. Hare Krishna. I love you and I'll see you next week.