Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 735: David Nichtern

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

David Nichtern, Clancy's meditation teacher from the Midnight Gospel (and Duncan's meditation teacher here in Meatspace), re-joins the DTFH!Join David on February 10 at 6pm ET for a FREE online talk, DEVELOPING YOUR PRACTICE TO TEACH - The Journey from Meditation Practitioner to Meditation Guide, only on DharmaMoon.com!This episode is brought to you by: Secure your online data TODAY by visiting ExpressVPN.com/Duncan and get an extra FOUR MONTHS of VPN coverage when you sign up! Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos now, by going to Ethos.com/DUNCAN - In as little as 10 minutes you can get your free quote and up to 3 million dollars in coverage! Amentara has a new offer for DTFH listeners! Visit Amentara.com/go/Duncan and use code DUNCAN22 for 22% off your first order!

Welcome friends to another episode of the DTFH. If you're a fan of the Midnight Gospel, you probably remember Clancy's meditation teacher, David. Well, David happens to be Duncan's meditation teacher too in Meetspace, and he has joined us here today for a fascinating conversation about Buddhism, attachment, and letting go. If you like David and you're interested in going deeper, I want to invite you to join David on February 10th for a free live online event exploring the profound practices of mindfulness and the journey of becoming a meditation teacher. All the links are going to be down below or you can go to Dharmamoon.com to find that. So I hope you will check him out if you enjoy him. We've been friends now for years and years and he is certainly one of the coolest people I know.

I hope you'll enjoy him too. So please welcome back to the DTFH, David Nichtern. David, welcome back to the DTFH. It's good to see you. I love your background. Good to see you, too. Good to see you, Papa Bear. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm breeding. I'm a breeding, but living things crawl on me. Every moment that I come home, it's either kids or dogs. Not the wife so much. But. how many dogs do you have two two and four kids right four kids two dogs two dogs i mean that's a full house right it is it is it is a full house yeah it's a full house lots of um lots of energy in there you know but you know what's interesting about it is like the

me before I became a householder couldn't stand being around anybody. You know, now it really doesn't bother me. You know, I mean, it's annoying, of course, to always have something climbing on top of you. But it's not like it would have been catastrophic to that other version of me. It's just fascinating the way people can just, you just shift according to your circumstances, you know? You know how they keep those helium balloons down on Earth, right? Right. What do you mean?

Well, you know, it tends to rise. Oh, yes. And go up into the stratistry, but they put sandbags on it with little faces of kids and dogs and jobs and jobs and bank accounts and mortgages. And every sandbag has a little face on it, you know? Yeah, it keeps you grow. It definitely keeps you in the earth plane and all the, but you, the, the, the, it does seem like that's sort of, um, an illusion too, right? Like when you start distinguishing, well, this is Earth, this is sky.

Sure. Aren't you, isn't that a bit of a confusion there? Isn't that a bit of a distorted perception of things? It's dualistic. Yeah, dualistic. But, you know, we talk about this. We end up on this topic so often about the absolute and relative dimensions of things. Hold on.

Wait, say the last, I lost audio for one second. Say that again. No, I'm not sure what that was. It was just a little blip. You good now? Yeah, we're good. It puts you into a kind of relational truth of modality. So, and for us, for the kind of journeyers that we are, the kind of practitioners we are, that's sort of adventitious.

Adventitious. That too. Adventitious means opportunistic. Ah, okay, I see what you're saying. So you're saying that sort of within that distinction, there's some sort of energy or something you can get out of that. Well, I'll give you an example. There was one of the great Rimpichase was visiting in New York,

and they were asking about, you know, is their life on other planets and things like that? Yeah. And he said, there are billions of planets and life all over the place. But this is an incarnation on Earth is considered particularly auspicious and good. Hold on. Hold on, David. Do you have a compressor on your mic or something?

Because you're like, you're fading in and out on me. Or maybe just turn your mic audio up a little bit. I'm losing, like, words. So it sort of sound. And then like that. Is that any better? Yeah. We'll see what happens.

Is it louder? It's louder. That should do it. Okay. You let me know. Start with a Rimpichet anecdote again. Yeah. So I won't say who, but one of the Tibetan Rimpichets was asked about, you know, kind of different life on other planets and things like that.

And he said, you know, almost matter factly, of course, there's tons of it. But that this, an incarnation in Earth is considered particularly auspicious because it's a great place. because it's a great place to work through your karma. Right. Yeah, it's like that that's an issue. So, okay, so this is really interesting. I'd love to know your thoughts on that because there are all these strange places

where Buddhist mysticism and some fairly, like, weirdly popular, like, I don't know what you'd even call it, like neo-nostic ideas emerge into the culture. everywhere right now. One of them being that Earth is like a prison situation, that prison in the sense that, well, you're shaking your head, but it doesn't that kind of align with the Buddhist conceptualization of samsara and no longer taking on birth at all? And the earth is sort of a um it doesn't just have physical gravity it has a sort of spiritual gravity field that

keeps you stuck in these sort of looping cycles and so um it sounds like what you're what you're the rimposha is talking about is like you know it's not so much a prison as a university or training academy or something like that but you could just as easily say it's It's, yeah, you can get out of prison if you, on good behavior. You can, you know, if you sort of harmonize with the Dharma or whatever the particular right modality of living is, then there is some hope of no longer hanging out here in this realm. Where would you like to be? What's that? Where would you like to be?

Well, I like it here. I mean, I like, I'm happy here. But I might just, you know, sometimes I wonder, well, maybe that's just because you're a fool. I mean, what I'm saying is when I look back at before I had kids, I was happy, you know, a different kind of happy, but I guess happy. When I look back before then, as far as I could remember, there's always some threat of happiness intermingled with a threat of suffering. So I don't know. I'd probably be happy theoretically. I don't know.

I often wonder, like, if I was in hell, would I be like, well, it's not the worst place? Maybe I'm just a fool. Well, whether one is or not, the notion, clearly, since we're referencing the Buddhist framework, is that the most important element in the sense of liberation is one's own mind. Right. rather than the physical locus of the body. Right. And that can be ranging from having a good attitude when you go to the dentist. Yes. And not torture yourself for the whole week before you go.

Right. You know, and then, you know, the amount of mental, you know, confabulation of fabrication of construction that's happening in our minds could make a prison into a university and a university. a prison. A prison into a university, university into a prison. You're still fading in and out a little bit. You know what? Can you turn it just to your max recorder instead of your headphones? State of mind is the determining factor in one's encounter with reality. Well, for example, whether you consider the situation samsaric, nirvanic, or neutral, wouldn't you say day by day that really is a heavy reflection or mirror-like reflection of your state of mind absolutely yeah 100% so that's what we work on yeah 100% and the the um the that's where i to go back to

what we're talking about in the beginning that's where i i guess i would get into a question regarding that distinction between earth and sky because somewhere there that distinction seems to stop existing in such a clear way. The when, because you know, from my own fascination with Skymind, which is a term David uses, I think another way to put it might be like the astral realm, things not of this earth, expanding one's consciousness, taking shit tons of acid to try to merge in with all reality. You know what I mean? There's all these different outlets that aren't meditative that one could use to at least get fleeting temporary glimpses of a kind of non-selfcentered, fixed reality.

And one of the most available to people is psychedelics. And so what starts happening when you begin to realize a shifting of one's own perception or even, deeper than that when you start realizing you're sort of looking at your mind around you you know that you're you can't get out of your mind you're inside your mind at any given moment it to me the earth realm stuff

it's it becomes a little less solid I guess is the best way to put it yeah so the sky dimension is spaciousness you know unobstructed spaciousness which um is a more of a kind of

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Duncan, that's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-N-D-C-N-C-V-N-C-L-LAS-V-N-V-N-L-LAS-D-N-A-R-T-N-A-R-T-A-R-A-R-T. Attitude, you could say, or kind of a, you know, view, right? The Earth is sort of like there's stuff to deal with, but it's workable. Yeah. And then we talk about joining heaven and earth all the time, which is to mix the spaciousness with with the four kids and the two dogs and the wife in whatever the mode she's manifesting for for for your benefit and to see if you can mix some spaciousness in with that form realm and if you can also not get attached to the vagueness and voidness of the spaciousness

so that it has a kind of fungible and you know a realistic kind of dimension for you and then then that would be non-dual. If you joined heaven and earth, there's a sense of, like, not really needing to hyper-emphasize that distinction at that point. You're integrated. Right.

Yeah, that's an interesting place, that integration. Because the, you know, the spacious POV, as you were calling it. Yeah, POV, good, yeah. The spacious POV, it's nice. you know

if only that was it but inevitably if you're if you're wandering around earth there's shit that has to be done you've got to feed yourself

it's almost like a cosmic joke we have to shit we have to eat and we can either get too cold or too hot forcing an infinite loop of action if you want to stay alive And we want to stay a lot.

That's the main thing. Wait, wait, wait, because I think this is a highly conceptualized framework of it. For example, personally myself, I ate a nice bowl of yogurt this morning. And right before I talked to you, I did have a shit. Yeah, good. And no problem. Oh, yeah, no problem. I'm not saying that's a problem.

I'm just saying that this, these are things that I'm assuming black holes don't have to worry about. you know what I mean a black hole isn't like ah I gotta eat another star holy shit it's hard I see I see you know so there's a there's you're talking about an attraction

to that kind of vastness and on absolutely on yeah so one thing to consider about that I can understand that is that an attraction to that an attachment to that actually lands you in the God realm

in terms of the six realms not not in the sense of space because there's a very dualistic relationship with it, which you're describing. Because you're running away from something. You're trying, yeah, exactly, or you're trying to get closer to something else. You know, it's like, yeah. So, so that would be the subtle twist of this spaciousness is that it can, and, and you could say the same thing for the drugs and so forth, that there's an attraction, a draw towards being drawn towards this kind of, you know, unobstructed and kind of,

spacious, universal kind of thing, and you become addicted, basically. I have noticed an attraction to drugs in my life. But this, I think what's really beautiful of the Buddhist, what's beautiful about the Buddhist framework is that you do sort of get a little bit of a surprise party. I guess I wouldn't want to call it that because I would never want a surprise party, but you do get this sort of experience. If you are someone who has been attracted to the God realm stuff, when you start realizing, oh, wow, I don't necessarily have to, you know, go through all of these sometimes expensive, sometimes dangerous, sometimes embarrassing trips to get to

this place. This place is sort of omnipresent and within the whole picture. It's not like it's in some corner of reality that you have to trek towards. It's not like you have to get on a helicopter to get to Everest and then hire a bunch of Sherpa to get in line to get to the top of a peak that was covered in human excrement to have some sense of Bagesness Magesness Yeah Yeah I think you understand it right

Yeah I do I do yeah Yeah that's why Buddhists touching the earth As sort of a directional vortex for You know serious spiritual practitioners Maybe make contact with common sense With the grounded reality that you experience As being a seat of wisdom

And an opportunity to To you know Manifest wisdom and compassionate all the good qualities Well for me where I guess that part of me that loves drugs and is, you know, drawn towards, I hate the term, paranormal, strange, high weakness. Sure. It becomes really interested in experimenting with the malability of Earth realm stuff, not from the normal sort of way you can move Earth realm stuff around, but from, you know, how, how, how. if this is my mind, which I'm fairly certain it could be, and I can control my dreams, and clearly

if I stop hissing at the earth realm, it stops hissing at me. You know, there's a direct relationship in my state of mind and how the world seems to function and operate. That's where it it's interesting to me because you just start wondering, wait a minute, like how much of this can I control? How much of this do I, can anyone control for that matter? How impressionable is reality not from the normal perspective of, you know, lift up a rock, stack a rock on top of the rock. You're going to stack a rocks. We all know that works. And that is your mind doing that. You're controlling your body with your mind. But how, I guess what I'm saying is, There's some sense when you start stumbling upon this knowledge that magic could be quite real that a lot of the stories you hear about miracles and cities are probably not bullshit.

Yeah, so as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about a practice that my teacher, Trunker Wemichet, wrote, called the Sadna of Mahamudra, which is a literal. that's you practice and you recited. And there's one phrase that bubbled up into my mind as we're talking, but you won't find ordinary earth and rocks here, even if you look for them. And then it goes on to say all the rivers, all the mountains are actually the sacred world. Yeah.

So it's not, we're not saying that earth is kind of, from that perspective, it's not disappointing. At all. It's wonderful. And also challenging, which, do you want to live challenge free? That's okay. You go to the God realm for a couple of eons.

No challenge. It just feels like what you're talking about, that facet of reality, it's hiding from you as much as you're hiding from you. Like the degree. Exactly as much. Yeah, exactly as much. And the less you're hiding from yourself, the more it shows you. And this sort of as above so below relationship, it applies to everything that, and this is the dream.

You know, this is the archetype in so many different stories. Gandalf shows up at the Hobbit's house. The adventure begins. A treasure map is found leading to, you know, an incredible journey. You go through a wardrobe. you're in some other realm. The looking glass. You know, you go through the looking glass.

All of these are different ways that, you know, creatives have articulated. I think what we're talking about, which is, number one, the absurdity. And I guess I'm just talking about this because I've been watching this incredible documentary that you should watch. You will love it.

It's called Miru. It's on Netflix. It's about the, super professional mountain climbers alpinus as they call themselves and so you know they they look down on people who climb Everest this is bullshit you can hire people is that literally they look down they don't really oh i didn't mean it like a dad joke but that's hilarious no i may that's so bad um but no they're just sort of like they're just saying like look with everest you hire You can hire people to set up your tent.

You can hire people to carry your shit. You can hire people to do. This is about them trying to be the first people to climb Mount Miru, which apparently no one has made the ascent. And it's, I just love watching these adventure docs, but it's incredible because they are really describing this zone of risk. that professional mountain climbers are disciplined to not go beyond, which is why they stay alive. If, in other words, it doesn't matter.

If you're one inch out of this zone of safety, you don't do it. So, spoiler, Skip Ed, three seconds. It starts off with them making this ascent. They're within 600 feet of the peak of Mount Murui. They could see it. It's right there, right above them. but yeah they couldn't do it because it was getting dark and they're like we're not climbing that at night and we're tired we'll die and so they all they just look at each other and like and just

yeah start heading back down but the reason that sounds that sounds like the record business it's like a lot of things it's a lot of things it's a lot of things are like that and and but i'm only bringing it up because here you have these they're all in incredible people. Like, you could just see their, their vibrance and their connection with the natural world and their complete fearlessness. Like, they are so tuned into the reality. They might not come back.

They might die. Their friends have died. And so there's a mystical quality to them. But when you're... Well, isn't it also a little like those guys who surf the 100 foot waves? Isn't it a similar? Yeah, I had one on my podcast. but really yeah but you're sitting around in your comfortable house with all your kids and your dogs

and from the what we're talking about there's some sense where i'm thinking i don't feel like i need to buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of climbing gear and ascend a peak to get to the place i think that they're going for it. Now, that just might be wishful thinking. I don't know, because I'm never going to... Four kids is by far a toll or peak to climb. I feel like that. I feel like that because I feel like it does, but I don't think that you need four kids or a mountain. I think you just, if you have, you know, two arms, two legs and a head, a brain, a nervous system. That's, that's enough. You're contending with enough just from that perspective. And that's what I'm, you know, that's what I love about, you know, what you've taught me and, you know, what I've gathered from the

Buddhist path is that it sort of opens up that for everybody without necessarily having to spend shit tons of money and flying a bunch of planes to get there. Yeah. And also, there's some flip of beginning to respect your karma that the situation that you're in, the time you're born in, not struggling to live another, a different life, you know, if only this, only that. But working with the energies of the situations that have sort of arisen for you is a kind of, you know, real wisdom in that. Yeah. You know, not trying to postulate some extreme circumstance in which you could become enlightened or whatever you want to talk about. But that the very circumstances that you're in has everything that you need.

If you are able to have the right set of tools to work with it in a way that illuminates the process of your own mind. Okay, let's talk about that, what you just said, because I love it. Because this is definitely a hilarious thing that creeps into my mind. I'm sure it creeps into many people's minds, which is, you know, I'll be, I don't know, at the sink, washing, washing dishes or something. Infinite dishes. It's 108,000 dishes, right? Washing dishes. Right.

Somewhere in the house, there's a howl of, who knows what's happened, to scream from one of the kids, and the dogs are barking, and the doorbell rings, and the dogs bark more. And I'll think to myself, you know, this wasn't supposed to happen to me. I was supposed to be in a monastery. I was supposed to be sitting by a waterfall. somewhere or you know the the the just what you said i postulate the preconditions of enlightenment and they always happen to be somewhere far away from where i'm at this fantasy of assembling

this sort of peaceful englomerate of things around me at which point i guess i get enlightened And now I see this as just utter horseshit, but I wonder if you could talk about that a little more because I think so many people look at their lives where they're at right now, they look around and they think, this ain't no boaty tree. There's no, I'm not out in the woods, I'm not, I haven't done the fasting. You can't circle my spine with your, I haven't emaciated myself. I haven't had visions of the great angels. or Devas or gods.

I'm never getting there in this place. And then they try to run. No, but you have done stand-up comedy. True, true. And they haven't. Yeah, that's true. But you know what I mean? This is, I think, one of the poisons that creeps in

as a direct result of encountering any of these paths that have at their nucleus. a being who went through severe austerities of one sort or another to achieve realization or an orbit around them of other enlightened beings who also lived non-standard lives. It haunts people who come to this stuff in the midst of what from the outside might be looked at as a fairly normal, standard human life. Yeah. Beautiful, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, because you're hitting a nail on a head and you're realizing it appears to be two nails, but it might be one nail. And that's the thing is that from the, and to strictly doctrinally speaking, as a Buddhist student and practitioner, the teaching would say you do not need those circumstances

to achieve that kind of realization. And there have been many iterations of household, pathways towards what you're talking about. They require a kind of discipline in post-meditation practice, that you hold the view in your post-meditation practice. What's meditation? So meditation has a lot of, it's a great question, and a lot of people would say a lot of different things about it. Yeah, I'm sorry. You know, remember that movie Rashimon, which had the different perspectives in the forest, a murderous committed? Anyhow, the long story short is everybody's going to have something different to say about this.

But I can say something about it that one of the generative terms about meditation in Tibetan is GOM, G-O-M, which simply means to become familiar with something. Yeah. So you have a sense of having an individual consciousness, right? And you're placing that on a particular object of perception and trying to get to understand it better. For example, you could be placing it on the breath, right? And so now you're just feeling the breath. You're feeling through that, you're feeling the quality of present awareness, which is easier to access because you only have one thing to work on, one equation to work on.

And you're also noticing, you know, the activity in the mind, which is something we don't always notice, that the mind is kind of like doing this and fluttering and telling stories. And you're noticing that without judging it, which is nobody's ever done. Right. That's complete science fiction from the point of view, the average person. Right, right. But you just notice what your mind is generating and not try to manipulate or judge it. So as you know, in our trainings, this is the hardest job we have is to turn the course of study from everything else to just having a clear view of what one's mind is generating without judgment or manipulation. Right.

So that's interesting in itself. So meditation is the art of becoming familiar with reality and with your own. mind in a very direct way. And so it includes a lot of different techniques, for example, different methods. Some of them have more focus and kind of intentionality. And some of them are a little bit more open, you know, just like, you know, just feel the space or something like that. Right. Depends on on the mind of the student or the person who's practicing it. What are they going to be able to connect with? Right. It's fly fishing, Duncan. From a teacher's point of You get fly fish and you catch them and you throw them back.

That's cool. That's cool. But you have to have a lure that looks like something that they would want to bite into. Right? So somewhere along the way you find a practice and you dig in. Yeah. And then it happens. You know, something will happen that is, you know,

initially extraordinary and whether you and you know from my perspective i know that there's the way this is talked about is carefully it can be confusing but you know i cracked open a an old grimor i have my favorite book of magic crowley's liber four and i almost brought it to read uh the opening of the book is prior to the getting into the magical systems is really an incredible course in meditation. That's the opening of the book, is this is the first you have to deal with your mind before any of this other bullshit. Start with your mind. And I was curious your thoughts on one point he made, which is that Buddha is in India.

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goes into a deep meditation has an extraordinary experience which we are in the way which people call enlightenment. This experience non-different from the experience that Jesus had or from the experience that any other person had, except that that experience gets populated with the God's deities, ways of articulating it according to the times. So Jesus, he starts talking about some, you know, Jewish desert God. It's the best way he can articulate this experience. Buddha's, The story is Mara and, you know, all of these things. The best way he could articulate, he's not, it's like he's going to talk about it in the cultural language of some other part of the world.

And, but the experience itself, identical, Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita, the, when Krishna reveals the universal form, this is the, another depiction of the identical phenomena, which happens the moment you can you are no longer encumbered by the mind and I was just was wondering your thoughts on that do you think he's on point well I I don't feel qualified to do a cross reference of different you know teachers and great masters and things like that as to whether their experiences were basically the same or different so so I can't say part but um when you talked about buddha and said he had an extraordinary experience i would actually dispute that okay yeah i so just can i just zero in on that one thing and that i would say

he had a super ordinary experience okay which is different than extraordinary well okay i mean no wait i want to say why right because there's some actual possibility in any of the circumstances that you're describing, for any of us, any sentient being, to recognize on the spot that the ordinary experience they're having is complete, contains all the possibilities of good living, magical circumstances, good companionship, good society, it's all embedded and anybody could recognize it at any moment if they would just tune in okay okay i got you i think that's fair enough because when you say extraordinary it makes people oh yeah once in a lifetime fantasize about some fireworks showers i don't know what elves or i don't know some good dm t style the encounter

but you know this is in the bag of agita when christina decides to like take off his clothes so to speak and shows Arjuna who he really is. The commentary afterwards from Arjuna is I'm sorry for any way I offended you. They were friends. They'd been hanging out.

They were just pals. They'd been playing games together, joking with each other, doing normal stuff friends do. And then suddenly your friend turns into this thing that's more effulgent than a billion sons with saints bowing down to it, you know, praying.

And you're like, whoa, man, I'm so sorry. I called you a fucking idiot the other day. I was just didn't know. But I feel like that is pointing towards what you're talking about. That when you do begin to realize this place that you've been in, hanging out in, you know, doing all the things that you do in, is in as you once

told me a temple there is some sense of like holy shit I can't touch anything ever again oh my God I don't want to move are you kidding me you know what I'm saying

so it's not as though it's it's extraordinary in the sense that you've recognized it for what it is which is from that perspective Yeah, but the idea that there's something very sensitive in the sacred world, and that responds very much to your level of awareness and care and consideration and intentionality.

Yeah. And also that, you know, can open up gateways to a sublime sensibility. Yeah. So it's the same. This is just a metaphor. I hope everybody understands. I'm just using it as a metaphor. The sacred world is very tender, very sensitive.

We don't want to go stomping through it with combat boots on. In this case, the stomping through it with combat boots means that we just are relentlessly operating from a clasia point of view and our greed and our aggression are just rampant and unchecked. So we don't want to treat the sacred world that way. I agree. Probably even worse. But it's like a... Imagine, I don't know.

like I was showing my kids videos of monkeys. They're so funny and they're they're funny and they're just so disgusting. They're cute and everything. But, you know, I was showing them the monkey scratches its ass, smells its finger, passes out and falls off a branch famous. Hilarious. That's so funny. It smells so bad.

It knocks. It's shocked and it falls off a branch. Or the classic, the monkey at the zoo, shits in its hand. and just nails a grandmother watching, just dead on perfect, like professional baseball level zinger right at this grandma. It throws it the oldest, most vulnerable person, the screams of people, they can't believe it.

But imagine you take a classic monkey, right, which is us in this case. Exactly. Monkey in the Sistine Chapel, right. suddenly gains awareness that it's been throwing its shit all over the Sistine Chapel. You know what I mean? Yes. That there is a sense of, but I think that's a little more precious than it needs to be.

I'm just saying that this glimpse of a super mundane reality, even though it's a super mundane reality or super normal reality, it still could be one of the most incredible experiences a person has in their lifetime. And it invites an attitude of respect, consideration, and care. Yeah. It invites that. So the thing that we have to, in terms of coming back to the idea of tuning into our own mind and how it's operational,

there's embedded in most of our minds what's called the seventh consciousness which is the clashe aspect of the deeper rooted negative patterns and habits that we have and they bubble up to the surface largely unconsciously we're not really aware

like if we get into a rage on the road or something like that or we you know or we have some kind of craving that's we can't manage you know so largely these clashes are you know kind of driving the car

periodically. And it requires like some real intelligence about how to work with that reality, which is that those are unprocessed pieces of karma that we all carry in our seven companies. And so therefore the respect for the

sacred world invites us also to take a very respectful attitude towards our own neurotic patterns and towards our own how we work to, without judging, without condemning, to just refine ourselves more. Wouldn't you say like there seems to be some direct relationship between getting any, even the slightest glimpse of this and subdued, those clashes being subdued?

I'm not saying eradicated necessarily like a magic wand or something, but some, there seems to be some relationship between this view and those, you know, I could think of my own life of just like, God, Like, you know, you look back at these, you know, clashes, which I think it are vernacular, that we call them neuroses maybe, or like clinical terms for these things. But a kind of schmaltzy relationship can develop with one's clashes, a kind of embarrassing sentimentality towards one's quirks as being a kind of like, you know, a jagged edge that people just have to learn to live with something this is what I'm like you know what I mean a real sentimentality towards okay display like people who like to fart in front of other people or something yeah you know so consider this formulation okay because this is a thread that I'm working on a lot right now

it's this seventh this kind of clasia consciousness and then the nearly adjacent just sort of ordinary storytelling mind and and the fact that they leak into each other. And all of a sudden, you're just telling an ordinary story and you're in rage, you know, or you're deeply saddened or craving something. Yeah. That this is our life. To become more aware of this is very important.

So the first thing is to become aware of that without judging it. You can't, if you're ready to judge it and manipulate it, you don't even have the option of seeing it. Right. But then the second thing is be aware of the tendency that we also have adjacent to it to justify it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

Okay. And then there's a third tendency, which is probably also could be pointed out to feed on it. Oh, yeah. So there's a glacier, which is kind of weirdly innocent in a way. It's just what we are carrying. You know, it's like in your open your knapsack and you see it in there. Then there's a tendency to sort of justify, oh, yeah, you know,

I yelled at that guy because he was a schmuck, you know what I mean? And everybody thinks he's a schmuck and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then on top of that, you start to get pumped. Your endorphins are pumping and you feel like I like this feeling. Oh, yeah. So those three have to be dialed, recognized and kind of, as you said, liberated or dialed back. Let's talk about the justification part because I think that's a good one, isn't it? That's a good one.

Why? Why do you think people feel the need to justify a particular set of. behaviors that keep manifesting in their lives as opposed to others. Like, I don't have to justify going to sleep. I mean, I'm tired. I don't have to justify eating. I'm hungry. I guess a better way.

I don't have to justify breathing. Yes. I don't have to give an explanation to anybody about why I keep breathing in and breathing out. Although yogis justify exaggerated breathing, that's for sure. They sure do. But you know what I mean? Like, these things, as opposed to other manifestations of, behavior. People, that isn't that red flag right there when you have some aspect of how you've

been behaving that you feel the need to justify, if not to anyone else, to yourself. So I'm drawn right back to junior high school when we talk about this. Remember you used to say wrong but strong? No, but that's hilarious and dumb. Wow, that sounds like the dumbest person on earth said that. Yeah. It's just like... Role but strong, baby! Or sometimes strong but wrong, you know,

you could say it the other way around too. But the idea is it's a double, you know, you just double faulted in a championship tennis match. You know, actually, did you know that's the new motto for ICE? If you heard that. What is it?

Strong but wrong. Ice. Terrible. Yeah. Sad. Strong but wrong. That is sort of the definition of of like true fascism, isn't it?

100%. And the third one is a big factor. Remember feeding on that energy as if it was, you know, Malamars or something like that. Right. Right. Like there's some kind of pumping up, the same way you get pumped up by watching the Super Bowl or something like that. There is definitely, I wonder, God, this is where we need all information in the

universe. This is where we need access to the Akashic records because I need to know how many people have strong but wrong tattooed on their lower back right above their ass. I'm going to guess more than more than 5,000. And get the pictures too. We want we want documented proof. No AI, no Photoshop. We'll we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll know we'll know. Oh my God. Go on. I'm sorry. I've just never heard that before. And it is so funny these days especially. And it really, you know, it really calls out a certain operating mode. And on top of that, I really think the energy, people are, you know, we eat food. We eat air, you know. But we eat energy. Like if somebody's loving, like if you watch your kids, they're eating energy coming from you. It's almost like if you can see energy, clearly the same way you can see matter. You see that it's almost

fungible. And we can get very full up on excitement and, you know, play and, you know, competition and all those things. And there is probably a healthier version of it, but it can become just a kind of toxic

waste dump of like feeding on that. And all of us have it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, we shouldn't think of it as just only certain people have. These are, kind of general traits that we all share, I think, in a way, or tendencies, possible tendencies. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's just the, it's just interesting because it's such an encumbrance, you know,

it's, uh, it, the, you know, the beginning of mindfulness or what you're talking about is, at least for me, it's a clumsy relationship with, you know, going in and out of awareness regarding things that you're doing that are probably not benefiting you or other people around you and you sort of the justification it could manifest as I was angry or it could just be

you just for you shove that part of your life under a car under an imaginary rug and pretend it's not there you try you hide it from yourself or something and then um but then you you just begin to recognize that every time this thing appears

it fucks up your life. Every time this thing appears, it fucks up your life in subtle ways or incredibly powerful ways. And that's where the non-judgmental stuff becomes quite difficult, you know, like. Yeah, difficult. Very difficult because how do you do that? Like, how do you stop ignoring some bullshit you've been up to, you know, your little game? You know, I love the Lojang slogan, don't do things with a twist. Yeah. I love that. And you've been doing things with a twist your whole life. You've been doing a little, you know, your little thing. And you start becoming increasingly aware of that little thing you do. And it's not a little thing you begin to realize. It's a manipulation. It's a grift. It's, you know what I mean? It's, it's not real. And it starts becoming appalling. It starts becoming like shit on your shoe or, you know,

like you start noticing how messy your room is and you can't stand it anymore. You know, how do you not judge that? Well, technically, we would call that renunciation, which is the, in the Kaguelanian chain, renunciation is the foot of meditation as is taught. So, and the word in Tibetan, I always found this was interesting, translates somewhat to like nausea. Like at a certain point,

you just have had enough of a certain thing. And then you kind of renounce it. And then the work starts. That's almost like the orchestral prelude that has to happen. This is a certain amount of exhaustion or, you know, real regret that they have to keep going through this over and over again. Right. And then surrender, you know, that you go and then discipline. See, this is an interesting take on renunciation because I think most of,

people when they hear renunciation they think of it in terms of i'm going to stop smoking or i'm going to you know put away something that i you know i'm going to stop eating sugar you know the things people do on lint or whatever you know but from this perspective what's going along with the renunciation is an an aversion or a yeah a recognition too recognition yeah so it's not it's not like you're going cold turkey is, you know, it's... Yeah, Lent, it would have to be bigger than Lent. It seems like it's more like when you've been on a booze bender and you look at yourself in the mirror and you're all puffy and you stink and you're disgusting and it just, you're,

you don't want to do it anymore. Yeah. It's not, it's not like you're just like, I love this thing and now I will stop because it's distracting me. And then on top of that, you need discipline because that habit is very specific. strongly ingrained. Yeah. And that's where karma, understanding karma is very helpful.

That it's not, yes, it's empty fundamentally. All these patterns and habits don't have any real substance. But they are deeply ingrained at a relative level. And it's going to take some, you know, steadfastness. That's why there are vows. There are practices. Yeah. There are schedules, things like that.

There's, you know, there's teachers and, you know, so that you have some chance of kind of shifting the habit. Well, it's vile. It's not so easy to do. This is the, like, you know, I think the, maybe the cruel joke of all of this is that you, you keep taking the collar off and then realize that you're putting it back on, you know, and it's somewhere in there, just that alone feels so nuts, you know. It, it, it, there's something so, um, this episode of the DTFH has been supported by Ammon Tara. Listen, for all of you psychonauts out there, if somehow you missed Amanita, then you got to check out Amantara.

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And just because it's legal and you can order it online, doesn't mean that it isn't authentically psycho. go active. It's freaking powerful. So definitely, definitely look at the guides that they have there for the right dosing for you. The point is, these are purveyors of the best aminita muscaria out there. And if you're somebody who in the past has maybe enjoyed benzos, but you also like mushrooms, this is a match made in heaven. It's a great alcohol alternative. I love it.

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It's disheartening. It's disheartening. Yes, thank you. It's disheartening. Because you get this experience of your life if you hadn't been a raving, rabid asshole. Suddenly you go through weeks of not exhibiting this, whatever the claysia is. You know, for me, it's always been anger.

So you go through weeks, months maybe. Where, holy shit, what's going on? I haven't gone into an explosive rage. So long and everything starts smoothing out. and you're you're you're not your mind isn't being disturbed in the way it was and then all of a sudden you feel that gnawing things start showing up again and you're like fuck fuck it's like it's like covid or something or like you know what i mean like you're fuck how long is this going to last i thought i i thought i shook it well and it isn't like

COVID. I don't know why there's certain encoded remedies, you know, like if you read the contents on the cough syrup, you know, like in the practices, there are encoded remedies. And like, for example, we say at Dharma Moon, we always say, gentleness, precision, and letting go, which that formulation came from Pema children. Yeah. So the idea of being gentler about the whole thing. Because if there's a certain. roughness or harshness in how you got there, it's probably not going to be the best way to get out of there. Right. You know, and then the precision aspect is something, you know, I find I'm very drawn to that aspect of teaching and really clarifying what exactly is somebody doing and how to do it. And, you know, so that it's not just kind of like, I call the absence of precision sometimes this Stevie Wonder and the Penaata approach to meditation.

which I realized when I said it, it has a certain valence to it. But the fact is that he's already blind and then you blindfold him on top of that. Okay. First of all, I don't think you. David, I'm sorry, I'm going to blow up your Stevie Wonder and the pinata thing. Not because clearly you hate Stevie Wonder and you hate blind people.

Well, wait, I love Steve Wonder because he played on the song of mine. I'm joking. I'm joking. You, what? Hold on a song of mine. Wow. When Stevie, I love you if you're listening

When was the last time you were around Kids in a Penaena? Oh shit I've been made Long time ago Because you put a fucking blindfold on the kids Yeah So why does Stevie wonder

It's anyone in a Penaata's all I'm saying You should you don't need to be That's the joke is that if somebody's already blind On top of that you blind Oh I'm the idiot On top of that you spin them around On top of that you say Now go hit the target, and I meant to be talking about precision.

No, it doesn't rate. No, it's too many questions. If you're like, well, first of all, like, too many questions. Talk about it. If you're going to talk about precision, make your analogy precise. Your analogy is confusing. Steve, hold on. Let me fix it for you.

I'm talking about thrashing around blindly. A fuck. I don't know. Well, let's reduce it to the real point, which is that gentleness means that we don't try to bang our way out of, you know, out of whatever trap we feel we're in. There you go. Yeah.

Soften it. Stopping into it. Precision means we have some clarity about the process. You could save yourself a lot of time. I just did. Here you go. Yeah. But there's a third one.

What's that? letting go, which is what we're about to do of this whole topic. Yeah, right. Yeah, that one's scary too. I mean, yeah, the letting go part, it's like I was reading to the middle child. and we're doing these five-minute stories before bed. It's great. These books, every chapter is five minutes.

You know parents out there, you know how that is. Your kid's going to pick, like, Moby fucking Dick, if they can, for the bedtime story because they don't want it to end. And so I'm reading, you know, and I realize he's not even listening to the story. He's looking at the pages because they change color when the chapter ends. and he's getting increasingly anxious about when the chapter ends. And then I just stopped. I'm like, you know, the whole time you haven't even heard this story.

Oh, gosh. You've been worrying about the chapter ending, and you can't even enjoy me reading the chapter right now. Well, look at you being a Dharma teacher to your own kids. I know. What a great little Dharma lesson that is. Perfect. Well, he didn't.

I don't know if he heard it or not, but it made me think, I only brought it up because I was thinking, how many times have I done that? How many times have I been in the midst of a spectacular experience? And I know it's going to end. Or a spectacular experience hasn't it. And I can't let it go. I want to go back to that. Well, this is why that's the third element, the gentleness, precision, letting go. third element because without that we will simply attach to the method of liberation as our next

set of imprisoning ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is that famous thing Alan Watts said to Ram Dass. You know this. He apparently told Ram Dass, you know what, Ram Dass, you're attached to emptiness. And, you know, so yeah, you just, that's where it gets interesting. is there's we've got this new baby and it's fascinating but you know seeing all the the things that come hardwired into a new human are really interesting the ability to breastfeed to eat and the startle

response so that thing some people do it when they're falling asleep to this day suddenly the baby throws their arms out you know like like that you know what it's called the startle response it's there's probably another name for it, but it's interesting, the things that are built in, the reflexes that are built in, but you start witnessing this response, I guess you could say, just being in the universe, which is just that you keep trying to grab some shit. Like, no matter what, you just keep clutching and clutching and clutching and clutching. And that, that to me is the hardest thing to reprogram that. Well, it comes back to letting go, right?

It keeps coming back to that. Yeah. Yeah. Letting go is, you know, maybe the least technique of the three things that we iterated there. Huh. Like, you know, gentleness, you can use certain visualizations, certain analogies, you know, like a feather, touching a bubble or something like that, you know, like when you label thinking in your meditation practice, come back to the breath, just to do that like as if you were like, you know, doing with a child.

You know, there's a way to like incur to invoke gentleness. Precision is like there's many metaphors you could use for that. But letting go is harder to, harder to program in, isn't it? it's better just to scare people it feels like the most ingrained it's better to just push them off a cliff well for sure I mean sometimes

I guess that's what that's what I meant by letting go you want to get the student back so you know we don't with the big letting go to happen too soon you see what I'm saying oh my god I tried this on my kid sorry please I learn my lesson, this is a true parental regret. We're at Disney World. The middle child is not wanting to go on certain roller coasters. My dad did this to me. My wife's dad did it to her. Wow. So we, the assumption being not, I want my kid to suffer, he's going to like it. Get him to go on the roller coaster. He's

gonna like it. It's fun. It's safe. It's a rollercoast. So we go on, I don't remember what it was. Tiana, I think, for those Disney people out there, you know what I'm talking about. It's got a drop at the end, man. And he's having fun until we get to that drop. And the thing is, like, we got. Aren't we all? Then the drop happens. He's like, what though? He didn't say this, but he's looking. He'd be like, you, why? And then, you know, it was very sweet. The oldest is comforting in the ride, and he was like, fine. But after that was the problem. Because any ride, we're like, no, we're going to go on Pirates of the Caribbean, doesn't have a drop.

He's like, yeah, sure, dad. And so that's what you're talking about. You can't do that. I learned you can't do that. I had a very similar experience with Ethan and a ride at Disneyland. But yeah, so letting go, you know, you could then look at, you could introduce the idea of mixing letting go with gentleness and gradually help somebody let go. You could mix the idea of gentleness with precision, right? That gentleness is not just this sloppy, you know, kind of mushy thing that has some kind of precision element to it.

So between those three things, though, there's a lot to go on there. You know that song? We use it as a foundation of our teacher training program. You know that song Box of Rain, David? No. It's my favorite Grateful Dead song. I care. I don't sure which one wrote it.

But it was for their dying parent. It's a song about dying. And my favorite line is, they chose Box of Rain instead of Box of Rain. Box of Rain is supposed to be the Earth. But he's saying, 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.

It's so cool. And, you know, that kind of letting go, not just of, you know what I mean? Like, of the whole thing. If you want it, it's there. Go ahead. Go ahead. Hold on. But if you see what happens if you let if you let go, if you leave it.

Yeah, I get it. The general approach is better as long as you don't gaslight yourself into thinking, you're being gentle and really you're being lazy well that's where the precision comes in right right they're mingle but it's three you know it's three good parameters to kind of use as a guideline for any kind of practice that you're doing what a great teacher you are this has been such a joy and i know you have another teacher training coming up am i doing another podcast with you for that thing i love doing those things it's so fun uh this is it oh good yeah so maybe we can just say a nice word about it if you have one.

Well, I mean, you know, the truth is, David, that you, like, my life is infinitely better from being friends with you and having you articulating this stuff to me. I mean, it's, for me, it's a slow boil. And, but wow, you know, I, you know, I'm always thinking about our conversations. It's wild how ingrained our conversations are in my sort of day-to-day assessing of reality and how many imaginary conversations I have with you. Maybe they're not imaginary.

Maybe we're actually... But yeah, I do hope people listening who feel drawn to what David's talking about, take the leap because... And also, I've met many people after shows and stuff who've done these trainings, and it's really had a big impact on them. As have you. We do have an info session that I'm just going to talk about. about the program itself on February 10th.

So maybe we can put a link to that in the show notes. And people can come and find out more about it. But the general idea is that I'm strongly inclined to help train the next generation of teachers. You know, it's definitely good to train students and practitioners. That's always, you always want to do that. But who's gonna handle this?

You know, my teacher Drunk from Mimberchay looked at me one time and he said, who's gonna take care of these things? these days. Like when I was very young. Yeah. And it was an aside. And I at the time didn't really register. But the idea that we, the wheel rotates, for me, it's more obvious. You know, I'm going to be 78 next month. It's unbelievable when you experience that. And so just bringing along the next generation.

So our Dharma Moon teacher training program is very much in that spirit of like helping to pass through what's really been helpful for me. That retreat was so fun. What a great group of people you're out there too. It's really incredible. It's really exceeded all of my expectations, which are inevitable. Well, we have another one at the end of April coming up. Oh, really? I'll send you the deeds. Please do. All right. Well, everybody, there you go. Darmamoon teacher training program. Check it out. The info sessions are cool. There's a lot of what we just talked about there. It's not just like, I don't know, scheduling stuff. It's great. And you get to meet some of the people

who are involved in Dharma Moon. And what is that again? February what? 10th. 10th. Four days before Valentine's Day. All right. Well, that's one way of looking at it. And nine days before my birthday.

Wow. Okay. All right, David. Thank you so much. This is a wonderful conversation. Thank you for all we do. And congratulations again. You had a girl.

You've had four kids now. you're like a black belt dad Duncan you're getting the black belt you always feel like a beginner it's always but it's wonderful I'm very lucky yeah thank you David yeah love to err into in the whole situation there it's it's

I'm sure these are going to be what's that why we're divorced I'm just kidding is that what you mean by letting go yeah yeah now, baby! I'm off to Bida!

Well, thank you very much, David. You're the best. And all the links you need to find, David, will be down there if you're on YouTube or in the description on audio boom, wherever you get your podcast. David, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks, Doug.

And great to catch up. That was David. Nick Turn, everybody. Check out his free live online event on Tuesday, February 10th. Links down below. God bless you. Please like and subscribe. and I'll see you next week.

Until then, Harry Krishna.