Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 754: RamDev

Episode Date: May 31, 2026

RamDev (AKA Dale Borglum), contemporary of Ram Dass and founder of the Living/Dying Project, re-joins the DTFH!Check out the Living/Dying Project for more information on RamDev's organization, which provides compassionate support to those facing life-threatening illnesses, and for ways you can help!North Carolina family! Duncan is coming to The Comedy Zone in Charlotte, June 4-6. Click here to get your tickets right now. Thank you, and we love you!!This episode is brought to you by: In as little as 10 minutes you can get your free quote and up to 3 million dollars in coverage at Ethos.com/DUNCAN Visit Amentara.com/go/Duncan and use code DUNCAN22 for 22% off your first order! For a limited time Hollow Socks is having a Buy 2, Get 2 Free Sale. Head to Hollowsocks.com today to check it out. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. You can support the show and tell them we sent you!

Greetings to you, my sweet friends. It's me, Duncan. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to record an intro for this amazing episode while I was at the studio, which is why you're seeing whatever image Josh has decided to put up on the screen. Hopefully it's a beautiful phoenix rising up from the ashes with beautiful breasts in long, flowing blonde air, and a glowing beak of light. Before we get into this incredible episode with Romdave, I have some deep. dates to announce I'm going to be in Charlotte this weekend coming up. You can find me at the comedy zone, June 4th, June 5th, and June 6th. After that, I'm coming home to Asheville, June 7th.

I'll be at the Orange Peel. And then you can find me in Nashville, Tennessee, at Zanies. I love that club. And I've got a big one coming up. June 27th. I'm going to be in the Wilbur in Boston. I need you to get tickets in. advance that is a big big theater guys buy them up okay let's get going with this incredible podcast rom-dev has been on the dTFH before you can find out everything you need to find out about them by going to the living dying project all the links are down below rom-dev welcome back to the dTF you've written this beautiful book that i have so many questions about and uh And so I'm sure a lot of people listening are absolutely terrified of dying.

You've written this incredible book, How to Live So You Can Die Without Fear. And from what I've read so far, it's just wonderful. You mean you haven't read the whole book yet? Well, Chad, I got Chad GPD to do it for me, man. I don't need to be. But look, I just think they're jumping right in to something I don't even think a lot of people want to hear about or talk about, which is death. And I don't think people want to acknowledge how secretly afraid they are of their demise.

You know, I think most people have a kind of falsely cavalier attitude about it. They fooled themselves into thinking they're not really worried about it when it's just right there all the time, like some terrible river in a forest that's just babbling away right behind the tree line of your life. And so tell me about the problem that you are posing in this book, this sterilization of death in Western culture and what that leads to. it. So I don't go around thinking about death all the time. In fact, I don't think about it a lot. And I remember I was out teaching workshops and somebody gave me an article about death. And I thought, why are they giving that to me? And then I remember it. Oh, they think I'm the death guy.

Yeah. And I'm interested in waking up. Yeah. Trimper Rumpurimperche said that until you have an intimate connection with death, your spiritual practice will have the quality of you really being a dilettante. So until we really know moment to moment that we're going to die, then as long as we're pushing that fear away, pushing it down in there, we can do that semi-successfully, but it really takes a big cost to really feel that that river in the background is in my experience

one of the deepest practices, one of the quickest ways to get to the core of what it is that's going on. So all fear is based on fear of death. And fear of death is exactly where you're not enlightened. Enlightenment is realizing that we are whole, we are one, that we go beyond suffering because we realize that in some fundamental way,

yes, there is pain being a human being, but we don't need to suffer because we aren't who we thought we were. We are pure consciousness in a certain sense, which in no way diminishes the fact that people are being blown up and people are being raped and people are starving to death. All that is happening. But this background anxiety, this background fear of death that we try to keep at a distance,

is really what keeps us from being fully alive. Pushing the fear away in order to not feel it takes so much energy. This letting go, this opening to it, means ego death. And ego death is scary. So the title of the book, How to Live So You Can Die Without Fear,

It's basically How to Live So You Can Live Without Fear. I mean, dying is going to be the product of how we're living. can we live right now? Right. Without fear. And very often, almost always, when fear arises, people, including myself for the longest time, fixate automatically on the trigger of the fear. I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid of him. I'm afraid of what might happen. Rather than what does it actually feel like in my body to be afraid. So like right now, maybe there's some slight anxiety that the technology of the podcast won't work out or you've got to do something later today that might be challenging.

You're kidding? How about the spread of Ebola in India? How about measles in India? How about hauntavirus? How about World War III? You think I'm worrying about the podcast right now? I've got four kids. I don't want them to die of hemorrhagic.

fever. Okay, so calming down a second and asking your body, what does it feel like to live in a world? We've got four young children and there are pandemics and there are wars and there are crazy politicians and there are all these things going on. And that you cannot completely protect your children. You can do your best, but I know people who were very close to Maharajani. whose young children died of brain cancer. Yeah. Right. It's not like you love God and you're completely protected. It's not like that at all.

Oh, my God. For the non-breeders out there, you just, it's the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, thing, um, came walking up to me. And he's like, ah, I have road rash. I'm like, what? We've been riding bikes. He was at a playground. I was looking at the other kids.

Opens his shirt. He's got this terrible. just skid on astroturf or something. He's being so tough about it. But just that alone, you're looking at this. And immediately, as Sharon Salzberg calls it, the add-ons come in. Like, oh, what if that gets infected? My God, what if, what do we do?

Is he going to be all right? How is he being so stoic right now? Is he in shock? What's going to happen? And then every day, you know, I'm looking at it. And it's like, God, is it infected? What, you know, the, I just, it's, almost inexpressible the feeling you get when you're worried about your children's health.

And you realize, well, there it is. There's the river right there that you're talking about. There's what can you do? Like, obviously, you keep them safe. You get them healthy food. You get them to the doctor. You could do all of those things. But you can't stop the road rash, man.

It's going to happen. They're going to fall out of trees and fall. off bikes and get sick and get into accidents and you think like I don't know how in the how I would even stay sane if something like what you just described happened to one of my children I don't know how I would do that I don't know how I'd be able to wake up again and that is fear that's pure fear and it sucks well in my experience kids are pretty psychic They know what you're feeling. Yeah.

And a lot of parenting is I do this, I protect, I provide. But I think a bigger part of it is you're modeling the way to be a human being. You mean I shouldn't have started crying when he had road rash? I shouldn't have started crying and curled up in a ball and wailed in the playground. I can't lose you, boy. I can't lose you. Yeah, I know what you mean, though. They are psychic.

This is why we give them fluoride, calcify their pineal gland. There you go. That'll do the trick. So a story about my kid. He was maybe the age of your kid. And he and his mother and her parents and I were vacationing in Maui. The women were off shopping. And grandpa, me and Declan, my son are waiting in the corner of the shopping mall for them to get done.

And he's running around. And he falls down and he skins his knee. It was not like bleeding. It was not like a gaping wound, but he had a big abrasion. And he started crying and it came running over to me. And I took a look at his knee and somehow intuitively, I don't know how I did this, I said to him, Declan, it's not so bad, it's going to be okay. And he expected me to do probably what his mother would have done,

which said, oh, oh, poor Declan, let me hold you, let me hold you. And he's being trained then, the more he yells, the more comfort it gets. Ah, yes. And then people are conditioned that pain is a way to get comfort. Pain is a way to, oh my God, pain is a catastrophe. Please, please be nice to me. Absolutely. You know, I did not do that.

Like, I have taught him that men don't cry and that we don't express emotion. He knows that it's not healthy for a boy to show pain in this world of darkness. I say that to him every time I put him to bed. Are you kidding me? Yes, I'm kidding. But what it would, I will tell you, though, that you bring up in this book. And this is something I really would love to dive into with you is how subtle selfishness appears and shows up not as like overt selfishness, but you're like, oh, are you okay?

But really, you don't want to feel the worry and anxiety. that you're feeling related to a person who's sick or dying or a kid with road rash, you're less concerned with that person's well-being. If you want them to be okay, you want them to be okay because you don't want to feel bad for them. And, you know, it's this insidious, subtle bullshit that creeps in and parades around as compassion. When it's not compassion at all, it's self-interest disguised as compassion. And it can be so subtle. It can be so subtle, but when you realize, like, do I want this, do I want the baby to stop crying because I don't want the baby to be upset? Or do I want the baby to stop crying because it's upsetting me? Do I want my father to not be suffering as he's dying because I want his suffering to go away? Or is it because it's upsetting me so much? I mean, they two aren't separate, by the way. They're mixed in together. But. Right. It must be hard to be you, huh?

You should read the reports. So compassion is not an emotion. Compassion is a state of being. And I think a misperception is that compassion is something I can shoot to the other person. The baby's crying. I'm feeling compassion for the baby. Compassion is compassion is, could you define compassion?

You're asking me to define compassion? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I'm from my sense of compassion has changed over the years. So I could, I could start with what you're describing, which I would call the basic bitch definition of compassion, which is a sense of enveloping another being in your radiant love, a kind of like pushing out of some,

some invisible matrix within which you're wrapping this person up and helping them in some way. It's like, reminds me of Trump or Rimpichet talking about spilling a barrel of honey on top of somebody. You know, it's this syrupy bullshit. That's what I used to think it was. You know, now not so much. To me, compassion isn't, it's just what you're saying. It's not so much a feeling as this state of consciousness where I have expanded to some degree and can handle what's going on in a sort of authentic, spontaneous way.

That is it where I'm not all wrapped up in my own bullshit or prognosticating horrors beyond horrors or, you know, that look that I think dying people have to learn to live with, which is like people like, I don't know, it's like some version of the fake smile. You know what I mean? Some kind of like your eyes are scared as hell, but you've got this plasticy like hello thing going on. You're not really there. It's being there. God, I don't know. Why'd you ask me that? Let me see if I could summarize that.

So compassion is exactly the same thing as love, loving kindness, except in the context of suffering. It's keeping your heart open when there is suffering. Yeah, that's it. So that when you're feeling compassion for your child who's crying, that includes you and includes mom and includes the whole thing. It's not like I'm beaming compassion to you. Now, it may start out like that. As a practice, it may start out like I'm doing compassion. But in truth, compassion is our true nature.

It's who we are. In fact, when the mind is completely awake, in Buddhism, there are three qualities to the totally awake mind. One of them is great clarity, the knowing quality. The other is spaciousness, no clinging. But the third quality of the wake mind is naturally arising compassionate activity. I've been around all these different supposedly enlightened teachers, and one of the things they all had in common was that they were all compassionate. They were driven by relating to the suffering of the people that had come to them. Right? Some of them were Christians, some were Buddhists, some were Hindu, some

were shaman, whatever. But they had that quality of compassion. Tell me about naturally arising, not to cut you off, but before I forget to ask, tell me about what does naturally arising look like? What it looks like is that you're not doing it. It's just who you are, that when you come in contact with suffering. Compassion is the spontaneous. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by ethos. Look, I just got life insurance and you just feel so much better. I know it's embarrassing that something like that will actually make you feel better, but it does. If I kick the bucket, I know that my family is going to be taking care of. And also, Ever since I got life insurance, my wife has been much more open about me doing a variety of adventure sports,

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Rates may vary. Thank you, ethos. Unwavering response to suffering. Yeah. So that when your son has this big road rash on his chest, if you feel compassion, it's compassion for how he might be suffering. it may be his compassion for him thinking that he has to be stoic.

It might be compassion for the place in you that thinks maybe you're being selfish, that it's something that changes moment to moment to moment. Yeah. It's fearlessness. Where is it landing? So the open heart is certain defining qualities. And one of them is it's a connected heart. Right?

You're connected to yourself. You're connected to your son. You're connected to the earth. You're connected to God. Another is a spacious heart. There's no clinging. Right. And the other is a warm heart.

So, I mean, like right now is we're talking. Can we be connected? Can we be connected to the people who are listening? Or are we up in our heads? What are we going to say next? How is this coming out? All that kind of bullshit. Right?

So compassion is really misunderstood. And it is often felt compassion is about being nice. And right now in fundamentalist Christianity, there is a bit of a war on empathy. There are books out there by famous people called The Sin of Empathy, Toxic Empathy, with notions that if I'm, that it's a zero-sum game, and if I'm empathy for you, I might not get enough for me. Oh, yeah. That sounds like horseshit.

well and it doesn't sound very Christian on top of it all but at the same time i mean it's a lot of work transforming christianity into a pro-war system i mean do you know how many that's the kind of math you have to do to shift of your neighbors yourself into like you got to blow up kids sometimes that is like going to take many chalkboards full of shit math to get there And I think that's a lot of, you know, the separation of church and state is it, it's there for a reason. And it seems like a lot of fundamentalists of all religions have hitched their wagon to the state, which means that you've got to be pro-war, which means you're going to have to go back in there and revise some stuff if you don't want to wake up screaming at night. So let's look at the relationship between empathy and compassion. Yeah, okay.

Empathy is I'm able to feel what you're feeling. I'm empathetic toward you or you're empathetic toward your son. Yeah. And you can't have compassion without being empathetic, but you can be empathetic and not be compassionate. Okay, sure. So, like, you can be empathetic and feel, here's what's going out, my son, that's too scary,

so I'm going to tell him to be strong. I'm not going to feel what he's feeling. too much for me. I mean, what you're describing is like a tool for any con artist. Like a good con artist is empathetic. Like a good con artist can empathize with a person's plight so that they can manipulate that person. I mean, it's the, you know, I could see how empathy devoid of any other thing can be used

in all kinds of rotten ways. But I guess the point here is that you can feel compassion only to the, you can feel compassion only to the depth that you're willing to be touched empathetically by the suffering of yourself or of another person or group of people. Yes. So that it's maybe easier to feel what your son is feeling, but then you're attached to him. And it's easy to get stuck in your mind. I'm supposed to protect him.

I'm not a good dad because look what happened. And to keep the heart open and to be touched by it. Maybe he wasn't even. suffering that much. Just because he had a wound, just because he had physical pain does not mean he was suffering. So maybe that's not the greatest example. Like that thing with Declan, when he came running over to me, and I said, Declan, it doesn't look so bad. And he realized that it was just a scrape, and he stopped crying, and he went back to playing immediately. But he kind of expected he was going to get the full treatment of, I've had a problem, I'm going to get a lot of comfort

right now. Right. So, modeling as a parent or just as a human being that I can feel your suffering, I can feel how upset you are and it's okay.

I'm right here. The spacious of my heart is big enough to allow this to happen. And that doesn't mean if he is actually really bleeding, I'm going to really hold him or, but

but that it's a natural arising compassionate response. It's not always being nice. It's being able to say no with an open heart. So as a parent, you realize that if you never can say no to your child, you're going to raise a monster. Oh, for sure. And it's easy to say yes with an open heart. It's easy to say no with a closed heart,

but can you say no with an open heart? Yeah. Because at times, that's the compassionate thing to do. You have to set boundaries. That's the loving thing to do. Yeah. Right. So Buddhists have this underlying notion that isn't really talked about a lot, more so in Tibetan Buddhism than Theravada Buddhism, that we have a basic goodness.

Yeah. A basic wholeness. And that's why mindfulness practice works. because mindfulness practice says you don't have to fix things. All I've got to do is pay attention. And by paying attention, you see how suffering is being created, and you'll nationally start letting go of that, and what will be revealed is this radiant true nature

that here's who you are and who everybody is, even though they don't know it most of the time. Right. Right. So that beginning to trust that quality in you that, okay, I can have this embodied mindfulness. I can be the martial art of being Duncan or being Romdave. And open my heart to what is this going on here.

And out of that will come the wisest, most effective, compassionate response. Who are the people that really change societies during times of great social injustice or inequity, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, who when you think about it, all were people that had a deeply nonviolent, profoundly open-hearted response to societal change. Maharajie said, when Abraham Lincoln was president, he knew that Christ was president. Yeah. and and and and and and and and and and and and when he came to england and they gave him a tour of the spinning mills the the mills that were creating cloth and stuff and they thought this is so great look we have here in england and they said what do you think of western civilization he said i think it would be a good idea and then he went and slept with 14 year old girls you know what i mean doesn't that suck it's like your talk it's like you're talking it's

smack about Western civilization, cuddling up with 12-year-olds to test your sight of your guru ability. I mean, look, we can't throw out the Gandhi with the bathwater, I guess, but it does slowly you didn't do that. As far as I know Gandhi was not having

any inappropriate sex or touching or anything, he was just Hey, hello? It is pretty creepy. Hi, Gandhi. Oh, what? You wanted to sleep with my 12-year-old daughter? to test your celibacy, okay, I'll send her right over.

I'm not here to defend them. I think we're going down a wrong alleyway. By the way, the alleyway that I want to go to here is. But let's just complete the Gandhi thing. Putting aside that, I'm not saying his whole life is impeccable. I'm not saying that. But he was able to change this profoundly inequitable, colonialization of India by the British.

Incredible. With a nonviolent movement. And maybe he was all screwed up in other ways. I hear no way to defend that other part of what was going on. You can listen to my other, I have a whole podcast series attacking Gandhi available on iTunes. But the, I want to like, though I agree with you. And I hear what you're saying, like for sure the things that create.

these huge positive ripples in the culture and in society do seem to radiate out from people who have achieved this open-hearted attitude towards reality. And that's beautiful and great. But I want to talk about to get granular here and talk about what I assume people listening have experienced anytime they've gotten out of their heads and had the guts. to go spulunking down into the heart, which is the, this is not always a pleasant expedition at first. And I don't mean in the sense that you, if you have become a mind person, and I think the world that we're living in right now and all the examples of technology that we're seeing right now are all related to an imbalance between the heart and the mind, everything is mind oriented it's artificial intelligence it's not artificial compassion it's not

artificial empathy the focus is on production expediting production and it's all of that is is up up here in the head so a tourniquet a kind of cultural tourniquet is separated many of us from our hearts and then you meet you hear people like you or ram uh ramdas talking about this hard stuff, and you know, maybe I'll see what I could do there. And then you start your practice, and then you begin to encounter this undiscovered country. And this isn't rainbows and light vehicles and all this stuff. This is like a wild garden filled with deep, powerful, overwhelming feelings that could repel someone, could repel someone. It could drive someone back up into their head or into a

bottle or into benzos or into some kind of numbing thing. And that's what I want to talk about, is that that that this, this heart approach, this getting into your heart, it, it, it, I think it requires a level of wild courage to do that. I mean, the shit people, people, have been through these days. God, I have friends who were in New York when September 11th happened. Steak of the bodies. You know what I mean?

The flip on the TV, it's just war, death, and your algorithm is like, look at this. And if you, any of you, just, any of you listening or watching, think of like the last horrible thing the algorithm showed you. Now imagine looking at that, but from the lens of your heart or with empathy when you're seeing, you know, someone getting beat.

in the street or whatever you know it really fucks up the game man it fucks up the game because in the world that we're in right now we need good guy bad guy we need he good he bad bad guy got what he deserved good guy win when but when you start looking at it from what you're with the heart from the heart space it isn't so much good guy bad guy anymore and it isn't so much enemy friend it's just people And if you let yourself feel that all the way, you're not going to enjoy TikTok anymore. I'll tell you that. You're going to make people, you're ruining TikTok for people. It's hard bullshit.

You know what I mean? Really? I mean it. Like, people are numb. People, it's easier to be numb. It feels that way. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what feels like a force field around my heart. Got it.

So one of the things that I, I, really emphasize in the book is that I've been teaching meditation for 50 years and I have a very strong feeling that are a couple things that are out of balance that are underrepresented in the way that these eastern practices are presented in the West and the first one is about embodied mindfulness that a lot of it's up in the head or even the head trying to be in the heart the heart is the fourth chakra what about the first three chakras okay so So the first three chakras are basically about getting grounded and getting centered. They're the antheotes to fear in the first chakra.

First chakra is about, okay, it's safe to be physical, it's safe to be where I am. And this is learned during the second half of gestation to about one year old. And to the extent that you or anybody had trauma, neglect, illness, accident, abuse, on and on, feeding difficulty, whatever, toilet training stuff. To the extent you had that, you're probably not completely grounded. And particularly when something is challenging so that we get lost in fear. And that getting grounded and inhabiting the root chakra is the antidote to that. And then this little person is growing up.

And from the ages, these are approximately six months to about two years old, learning to inhabit the second chakra about moving into the world now. And the problem there is guilt about what you're doing. Your parents say you're making too much noise. You're peeing where you shouldn't be peeing. You're drawing on the wall instead of on the piece of paper. Right, right. And the third chakra is then about shame about who you actually are,

taking you up to about four years old. So that learning, centering, grounding practices allows you then to be the martial artist of being you. We haven't gotten to the heart yet. The heart is about being vulnerable. And you and me and probably everybody listening here is somebody who at times your heart has been so open, you've been weeping at the beauty of life, of the beauty of your child or the of nature, music, or whatever it is. And at other times, the heart closes up like a safe door. It's so shut that you don't even remember it's ever been open before.

Right. And it's very frustrating to be somebody or to be around somebody whose heart is opening and closing, opening and closing. That's why relationships are so hard. Right. So that in some traditions that even come right out and say that the belly supports the heart, that this martial artist quality of being a warrior of compassion, of being able to inhabit the belly with some stability and strength,

then allows you to bear the vulnerability of the open heart. Got it. So that if you try to go right to the heart and say, I'm going to be compassionate, I'm going to be loving, it's not going to work very well. That's cool. Mirabai Star, who wrote the forward to my book, told me the story that when she was a teenager, she was living at Lama, and Ramlas came to teach a workshop there, and he said,

we're going to start at the heart chocker because the lower three chakras are too dangerous, which was an opinion he radically changed later on. But that's a common misperception that down there in the dark, deep, there's all this complicated stuff, it's not as radiant and lovely and beautiful as the open heart or up above their tantra and wholeness and all those things.

But because we haven't processed the fear, the guilt, and the shame, we don't have a stable foundation for being in the heart. And then compassion for others and even compassion

for ourselves becomes very, very difficult. Right, of course. I remember once I was at a Tibetan empowerment and the Lama said, okay, we're all going to open our hearts now to do this practice. So as a way of opening your heart, think about your mother. And they said, oh, wait a minute, this is America. I forgot that in America thinking about your mother doesn't necessarily open your heart. Right.

Where he comes from, you just think about your mother and boom, your heart springs open. So in a way it's kind of. That's wild. Yeah, he's got to deal with these weirdo Americans. I want to ask you a more technical question related to what you're talking about in the chakra system. The idea is the energy is always flowing through these all the time, or is what they say that, you know, your chakras get blocked. And you, in other words, like, is your heart inaccessible if you, I don't think that's what you're saying. Thank you, Amantara. for supporting this episode of the DTFH.

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child is growing up. Is it like the chakras are coming online, so to speak, like these things are the energy is beginning to evolve through the system? It starts in the first three and then gets to the heart, or are they all sort of fluctuating, like flickering on and off all the time? And I don't know if that's too literal or looking at it from a system theory approach. I hardly ever say this, but I'm not sure that I know the answer to that. Right. And I'm not sure. I mean, to me, that's kind of theoretical. I mean, to me, I'm sure that a lot of people listening to this podcast that don't even think about chakras at all. I mean, it's basically we're saying that there's a way of being in yourself, in your energy body, that helps you to be more loving and that over many, many

centuries of people doing introspective contemplative practice, they found that focusing your energy, focusing your attention, focusing a mantra in the chest area leads to feelings of devotion, compassion, loving kindness. If you focus on the left side of the chest, like a hands width to the left, I don't know if you can see this, focus up there, that's kind of relational love. That's I'm loving you, grief, humanity, tenderness. tears, whereas the center of the heart chakra itself is more spaciousness. So over here, it's like opening love on the left, and then the center, it's stabilizing loving presence.

And people can play with that. I bring this up. Well, the right, that's where Ramana Maharshi says, is the seat of the I, the I am, non-duality. And believe it or not, the third. physical heart is not on the left side of your chest. It's more on the left than the right, but there's parts of it on the right side of the chest. And it's mostly in the center, and there's even a part of the heart on the right side

that's the one that tells the heart to beat. I forget what the name of that is anatomically. I read it just last night actually. I still don't remember it. So bringing your attention, or suppose you're somebody that says a mantra, saying the mantra in the center of the chest. versus the left side of the chest, it ends up being a really different experience.

Wow, that's it. I've never heard that before. That's cool. So I feel like what you're saying is, if you're having a problem going into your heart, feeling, experiencing what that is, it could be related to not being grounded or based or not having a strong foundation in the,

like in the earth realm stuff, which is going to make it more of a precarious journey in there. And you know, what's interesting, though my martial arts career ended, I think, my fourth jiu-jitsu class that I took many years ago, I've met a lot of, like, high-level, you know, UFC fighters, and what one quality they all have is always, it's fascinated me, because you know you're with these exceedingly dangerous humans. I mean, you've seen them pummeling people in a ring.

Like, you know that if they wanted to, they could put you to sleep. I'll bet you're going to say, I'll bet you're going to say that they're, they're kind and gentle. Yeah, 100%. They're the most gentle, sweet, open people. And they're radiated. They have this weird radiance. And it always like perplex me because the closest I'd ever come to that was it like, the Ram Dass retreats and meeting people who have a real solid practice or like devotees and

stuff have that same kind of glow but then you're meeting these like athletes who are identical seemingly identical it's always fascinated me and I think you just answered you just helped me solve that mystery there because they're inhabiting the belly there there's this they're beyond guilt and shame so I mean I was talking to a client an hour and I was talking to a client an hour before I was talking to you today and we were doing a practice and she said I don't think I'm doing it right. I don't think I can do it right. Something like that. And we were talking and it was a heart practice and I'm saying okay you're trying to do the heart practice but what arises is shame and can you then work right with a shame so that whether you're a meditator or whether you're

martial artist, it means working with those places where you feel inadequate, where you feel ashamed of who you are, that you have some contempt. So if you turn contempt inward and shame, if you turn contempt outward, it's grandiosity, not to mention any particular president of the United States in that particular sentence. Okay, so contempt. So, so, so let me read. So let me read. I read a quote by Payment Children about compassion. Compassion is more emotionally challenging than loving kindness because it involves the willingness to feel pain.

It definitely requires the training of a warrior. When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and hold. hold and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance. So here she's talking about meditative compassion in terms of relax, gently, soften,

without aversion, without tightening. It's just what you were talking about before. learning to lean into what's painful in the world. Rather than automatically, unconsciously, be pulling back from things we don't like and grasping of things we do like. Beginning to be mindful of the difference between preference and attachment. So in Buddhism, there are, for these wholesome qualities like love and compassion, Far enemies and near enemies.

Far enemy is a thing that's the opposite. Like the far enemy of love is hatred, obvious as could be, right? Far enemy of compassion is being indifferent. You're suffering, not my problem. I don't care about that at all. But the near enemies are so interesting because it's where we often get stuck and don't really even know we're stuck there. The near enemy of love, we could do a quiz here, but let's just cut to the chase.

The near enemy of love is attachment. Think about falling in love with somebody. How much of it is pure love and how much of it is, I'll love you five if you love me five, but if you only love me four, I'm only going to love you three. And I'm loving you because I don't want to be alone and I want to have sex and I want my friends to think I'm somebody capable of being in a relationship and on and on and on.

Whereas true love, like when you have a tiny baby, you love them to third. If they're crying or not crying, and then they turn into teenagers, and if they're crying, you don't love them quite as much. Right. So beginning to disentangle the love and the attachment in our relationships is tricky business. And it involves being centered and grounded. To be able to, as long as you're being overwhelmed by fear, guilt, and shame,

it's going to that those qualities of attachment are going to be right kind of caught up in the mess of it all yeah yeah yeah yeah this is the nearer enemies i love that description we've talked about it before and i and how very subtle these things can be like it it's it gets so subtle and um and confusing The, you know, Carl Jung talked about how the, you know, the leader can be a projection of the nation's shadow. So when you're seeing the leader, you're looking at this shadowy thing that's inside the culture. So, and so the, if you have some kind of rotten psycho leader is one, one way to like alchemize. that into something good is to think about, okay, where is that in me? Like what are the, what are those things that exist in me? Where how have I, how am I like that? And, uh, which is why what you're

talking about, I will never stop believing these technologies are the most revolutionary, truly revolutionary technologies in the world. I mean, assuming what Young said is right, I don't know. I think it sounds good but if that were true if like the big players we see on the global stage are just being projected from the masses then that would imply that if we all started this journey inward the process of balancing and unentangling getting into that heart space then one might expect something to emerge into the world that was that that was a reflection of that. And which is why I love talking to people like you. I don't even know if you realize your revolutionaries. I can remember the last thing Ram Dass said to me, he knew he was a revolutionary. You know, I was pushing his wheelchair up this hill.

And he looked at me and he goes, thank you for joining me in this revolution of love. And it was so beautiful because he knew what he was up to. He knew what he was putting out there was more than just. you know how to feel good around your parents on the weekend he knew what he was putting out there which had its roots in the 60s counterculture movement and psychedelics but i think he understood that this stuff has the potential to do way more than make you like connect with people around you or help dying people theoretically this very thing could be a road out of the current zeitgeist into something we've never seen before right

I've always thought that, you know, I could just, but it's really hard. And I think it's important to note that you might be one of those people who thinks that you're going to have some kind of peaceful death or that you've heard meditation as the preparation for death. Good luck. If you're not doing, I was just talking to someone last night about this very thing. They were saying, very brilliant artists, they were saying that they want, you know, they want to die when they die. when they die, they want to die free of all burdens and free they want to be unattached and let go.

And I was saying like, well, you've got to do it now because it's a lot to put on yourself right when you're dying that suddenly you're going to let go of all your attachments. Like if you can't do it now, how are you going to do it when you barely breathe? You know, and so this is why this, what you're teaching is so important. not just because it's going to it's part of what could lead to us not living in a hell verse but because it really inspires me to look at where I'm at right now and just know this is where I'm going to be when I'm dying this mental state that I have right now this is exactly what it's going to be like when I'm on my deathbed this is exactly what it's going to be like when I'm letting go why would why would it get better I'm going to be

covered in shit and blood from hemorrhagic fever. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, well, I mean, when you, when you die, you might be in a car with some of your kids and your car spinning out of control when your kids are screaming. Thank you. When you die, you might be lying on the floor of Walgreens

and some strangers breathing in your mouth. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's there's, there's, no way of preparing other than this preparing to be alive right now right and how can you be alive if you're numb how can you be alive if your if your heart is closed off that's not life you're a robot you're a drone at that point you know you're just some you know the term right now that people are using to to to talk about AI have you heard the term clanker no it's the new anti-AI movement is all these emergent almost like blade runner terms are coming out now referring to any like a i l lm

system as a clanker this is like an algorithm that is pretending to be human but one must ask am i a clanker too if you you know what i mean if the if you're not feeling how can you accuse a computer of being a clanker when you also are essentially minus your your heart minus compassion, minus everything you're talking about, you're just an algorithm spitting out the next dumb thing. The opposite of, by the way, what you're talking about, this effortless arising of compassion. It's this effortless arising of bullshit. You know what I mean?

It's the same thing, minus the compassion. How many of us are doing that? Not me. Not me. Yeah, I'm not sure how much effortless it is, though. I mean, maybe eventually it's effortless, but right effort is a very interesting concept because it really changes as we go down the path. And in the beginning, there definitely is an I who's trying to do better,

who puts myself down on the cushion or kneels down or does my Tai Chi or whatever it is. But eventually the effort is the effort of letting go, the effort of surrender, the effort of receiving. Right. And looking at the path of really a refining of effort to letting it be more and more subtle and more natural rather than it's a fight. And in a way, if you look at martial arts, how can a tiny elderly martial arts master defeat a big hulking novice because he's or she's not doing it? Right. It's the chi of the universe that's flowing through.

Right. And we can do that when we're in the dojo, we can do that when we're not in the dojo, right? That I'm not doing it, that God is doing it through me. Right. And that whole God's will and that whole Christian thing that I was forced fed when I was a kid, the words are sometimes difficult to assimilate. I get that. But there is this quality of flow or surrender or ease.

that you feel in some people. And when you meet somebody who's really in that flow, it's pretty unmistakable. Yeah. And it's very, very attractive, and it's very comforting, really. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, I mean, having, you, having been around it, having tricked so many people like you and giving me free therapy during these podcast sessions, but having, having seen it, It's, it's, go ahead, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, you go ahead. I was just going to tell people the blurb you put on the back of my book.

Please do. You said, you said, doing a podcast with Romdave is better than three months worth of therapy. I'm in it. I totally, I realized last night is always thinking about our podcast today that I was having the same feeling I get when I go to therapy. Like it's like, oh boy, here we go. You're going to, you know what? Which I, this is a number. This is a number. Another thing though, by the way, which I do think it's confused is maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm projecting my confusion on everybody else, but I had a sense, you know, you get around people who have a practice, who are teachers, and it's going to be flowers and roses and Nagchampa and sweet, and it isn't. It's difficult. It's, but it's the best kind of difficult.

You know, it's, you're dealing with the truth. and the you know everyone ramdas obviously exuded this radiant powerful loving energy but anyone who knew him knew there was an edge there and that it wasn't all just sweet that it wasn't mean but it was fully open and honest and that can be really difficult for people to to assimilate I mean this stuff is hard man like this isn't, I just, I guess you just aren't going to sell a lot of books, you know, saying that. It's martial arts is hard. This is difficult stuff for a lot of people to really confront, um, to confront some of these things head on. And it's the thing you're inviting us to do is, it's quite a pullup, much like when Jesus said, you know, love your neighbor is yourself.

What the fuck? That is. Doesn't everybody want to be happy? Everybody wants to suffer less. Everybody wants to suffer less. Yeah, 100%. And there are tried and true ways to suffer less. Now, if you want to drink a lot because you're in a lot of pain, that temporarily works. If you want to binge watch Netflix for the next week, that works.

But you know that it doesn't work. permanently. It's only temporarily suppressing this stuff and probably making it a little bit harder down the road. Right. So you got to get to it. So that there's no rust. Consciousness does not care how long it takes or how much it hurts. Consciousness is everybody's moving in this direction of freedom. Donald Trump is moving in that direction. Pete Hagez, Netton Yahoo, we're all in that path of wanting to suffer less. And we're at different. stages. And maybe even somebody who looks like this horrible person is just taking on the role of moving society collectively forward in a way that needs to happen. Who knows? I mean, like,

maybe Judas and Ravenna had an important part to play in the Bible and in the Ramayana, right? Yeah, no mud, no lotus, no Judas, no Jesus. I mean, that is the truth. Like, without Judas, it's no credit. Praise the Lord. We have. We have a lot. We have. We have. We have a new sponsor for the show and I love them. Hollow Sox! Thank you for connecting with the DTFH and thank you for sending me the best socks on Earth. I'm sure you have probably heard of Hollow Sox. If you haven't, you got to check it out.

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After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. You can support our show and tell them that DTF sent you. Get those socks. Get those beautiful hollow socks. But I'm not going to, I'm not even going to, this fucking, these guys are dicks. You know what? I'm done with it. These guys are dicks.

I've tried. I've done you. Ram Dassin has put him on the altar, but I just, fuck that. Like, I, I, I've been through that. And by the way, where I'm derailing what you're saying, which is quite beautiful. I just, I don't know. I'm done. I'm like, by the way, it's like, okay, we could spend all our time like trying to like

figure out. Let me help you. Jeffrey Dahmer was a sweetheart. I'm sure Jeffrey Dahmer was nice to his dog. But like, you know what I mean? It's better, I think, to get granular. It's like this is a granular approach, right? Like, who gives a fuck what these wizards or doing?

I think I think you're misunderstanding compassion. I am, clearly, misunderstanding most things. So let's go into this a little bit. So compassion for Donald Trump and Pete Higgsath, who you ascribe the dick label to, and I would not disagree with you. But compassion is, can you think. about or be in the presence of those people or just think about them and your heart stays open, right? Or does your heart automatically close and you suffer because of your automatic relationship

with those concepts, the concept of Donald Trump, the concept of Pete Heggsat? It just feels distant to me. It feels like thinking about like Archie Connollors. It's not thinking. It's not, it's not thinking. That's where you're making a mistake. My heart doesn't close or I mean, I'm being a little like performative when I'm calling them dicks. I mean, the whole don't give me, like I'll go Unabomber on you right now. I'm not going to do it. Like I know where you're getting at here. But to me it's like forget about thinking about these oligarchs to close my heart.

Like just like watching a commercial for the humane society, my heart will close. You know, like I, like I'm talking about just. the day-to-day habit of closing down. And when I said three months of free therapy, it was because in the last podcast we did, you've just got to the core of a lot of what I contend with.

You know, which I think many people do contend with, which is like your parents fucking die. And you're like, you know what I mean? You're pissed. And if not, that's some other thing. So I'm sorry, I'm rambling here, but the... But what I'm saying, what I'm saying, Duncan, is it, I'm getting excited myself here.

It's possible to have emotions, have strong emotions, and not be lost in them, not become the emotion. Like in English, we say, I am afraid. In Spanish, you have fear. In Tibetan, fear is here. So you think about Pete Hegsev. Anger arises. nothing wrong with anger. And in fact, I told you before that there were two things I thought were really out of balance

and Western spirituality. The other one, as well as it's not embodied enough, is we don't understand Tantra. And Tantra says that the stronger the emotion, the greater the opportunity for awakening, that all emotions are awakened energy. They're all of healing messages. That's cool. Being angry at Pete Higseth is not wrong. It's not bad being lost in the emotion, becoming the emotion, closing down because of the emotion.

You never dated him. You know what that was like dating him in college? He hurt me. Well, you can try to deflect here because I understand why you might want to deflect here. And what we're saying is, is it possible then to feel a really difficult emotion? Yeah. It's not a bad emotion. Anger is hot, it's sudden, it's hard to feel and not get lost in it.

And there are these sayings in Buddhism, like being angry at somebody, hating somebody, is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die. Or there's this metaphor, there's a guy in a boat, and he's going across a wide river, and it's really foggy. He's in a small little rowboat, and he's halfway across the river, and another rowboat bumps into them in the fog and almost knocks him out of the boat and he gets all mad he's yelling at the guy in the other boat

he's yelling at the guy and the fog lifts and there's nobody in the other boat and that's the metaphor there's nobody in the other boat there's nobody there this is your concepts about Pete Hegsev right so that can you be angry and we're right to be angry

people people are starving to that. People are being blown up because of policies of this current administration. I get that. And anger can fuel activism. But when we're lost in the anger, it makes us a little crazy. We act in a way that isn't very skillful very often. How many times you've gotten angry and you've said or done something like you're in traffic

and somebody does something, you know. Right. And a friend of mine says that when you're driving, it's the only time in life where you've got your legs open a little bit and your arms open and you're going towards other people at a high rate of speed, right? You're in this really vulnerable physical posture in relationship to the world. So what I'm saying is, I'm not saying anger's bad. I'm not saying get rid of the anger. But can you shake hands with the anger? Can you embrace the anger?

Can you use the anger? Yeah. And that takes a lot of practice. Right. It takes being grounded and centered. It takes opening your heart to the place where you get angry. Yeah. And it's not undickifying Pete Higseth.

He's still a dick, right? But your relationship with your anger about it has changed. Right. Yeah. I know, yeah, I got you. I really love this idea of, like, how, like, when you, a lot, like, a lot. like a lot of the places where there are these big powerful rough emotions are just it's just pockets of energy that are just right there for you and i know what you mean like it's there is this

you know when when when i have pulled off a regular meditation practice and you start becoming a little less gun shy about going into those places you just start realizing how it's not like this monolithic emotion how like anger actually if you start hanging out inside there you realize there's all these other emotions that it's like a cluster of emotions and some of them are blissful strangely like mixed in there is a lot of joy and good stuff it's not all bad but the main thing is how can't you know you were talking about people wanting to be happy which is true but how the fuck do you expect to feel happiness if you've been practicing not feeling other stuff.

Like you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're numbing down, you're numbing down. It doesn't matter. Maybe you are having moments of transient happiness, but guaranteed they're not going to be as powerful or real as it would be if you weren't cutting yourself off, right? So the Tibetans have this really profoundly beautiful notion of compassion, which is that it's a mixture of sadness and joy.

so that you're sad because there's suffering in the world. You're not happy that children are hungry. You're not happy. That makes you sad. But your heart is so open that there is a joyfulness that transcends happiness and sadness, that contextualizes the sadness. So that at one and the same time, you can feel this joy. And you're sad because the world's fucked up.

It is. I mean, it's like, I mean, or you could even say, say it's perfect, but it's fucked up and perfect at the same time. I mean, people are being raped. People are starving to death. There are mothers watching their children starve, and there's nothing they can do about it. Yeah. Yeah. I read some statistic that I've forgotten already, but something like 40% of Americans have had to skip meals lately to save money. Right. I mean, that's stunning. And we're spending all these. these billions of dollars on being having soldiers and sailors and people over there in the

Middle East and people are hungry here. Oh, what's going on? I mean, listen, if you want to get pissed off, this is like, if you're a rageaholic, man, this is the golden age for you. You have so many excuses to be angry. I mean, especially that shit is really going to piss you off because you feel like you can't do anything about it. But, you know, I mean, we disagree politically.

I think Pete Hagseth is one of the great minds. He's like our Churchill. He's a strategic genius in his charisma. When have we seen charisma like that before? My God, he's like just a leader of leaders. And an esteemed journalist, his work on Fox's groundbreaking. But I don't want to get political. I think that the the every time I talk to you I remember so Jesus says I do remember my heart like every time

and am always like inspired to to be honest with myself about places I'm numbing down and place like whatever that thing is that I'm unwilling to confront there. You know, and that, that's, I need that all the time. So I feel like I'm going to have to start calling you every day and talking to you. You know, I've got to figure out a way to die before you do. I need you on the phone. So, so all the stuff that's going on in the world. think everybody, almost everybody, is starting to numb out a bit. I mean, there's such a flow of,

I've got a homeopath, I've got a healer who's like this brilliant guy. And he said that all of his patients, everybody he knows is exhausted. Yeah. Everybody's exhausted with what's going on in the world. It's overwhelming. Yeah. And to me, dealing with this stuff without the Dharma, without compassion, without getting grounded and centered, without some tantric understanding, I don't know how people are doing without getting profoundly exhausted. You're from Texas. There's a dance called the country two-step. Okay. I have what I call the tantric three-step.

What is it? Okay. which is the dance you can do anywhere, anytime. And the first step is no matter what's going on, anger at Pete Hegseth, whatever it is, embodied mindfulness. Let go of the narrative. What does it feel like in my body to be me right now? Can I inhabit the root?

Can I inhabit the belly? Can I be the martial art of being me right now? Just what does it feel like? What are the sensations? letting go of all of the concept temporarily. You can go back to the concepts. If you've got to write a shopping list or plan some kind of trip or something, you can use your mind.

It's a great tool they have. But for this healing practice, temporarily you let go of the concepts, the narrative of the story and you have an intimate, naked, direct experience of what it feels like to be. And you feel that intimately enough, and you begin to see how you are creating the suffering. The suffering, cancer does not cause suffering. Divorce does not cause suffering. Resistance to cancer, resistance to divorce causes suffering.

As you begin to see that, then your heart begins to open. So the second step of the Tantric three step is you feel compassion for the suffering that you're feeling in you and around you. And as the heart becomes more and more spacious, this eye fixation that used to be, right, if you look at the camera, it was right in your face all the time, me, me, me, I, I, I. It's just one little point in the vast sky of heart mind. And you begin to see then this tantric viewpoint that, yes, there's anger and there's suffering and there's emotions and there's bodies and there's life and there's death.

It's all awakened energy. Right. Maharaji says, I'm always with you. Don't worry, I'm always there. I've always got you back, right? Yeah. He says, love everybody. I mean, he didn't say, love the Democrats, but be careful with the Republicans.

Everybody. So we do that with this tantric understanding, is that it's all awakened energy. And it doesn't mean that the, the, that the, the, the, Bodyed mindfulness in the beginning doesn't generate activism and compassionate activism and compassionate parenting and whatever our job is in the moment. But we're not lost in the story. We're right there. We're opening our heart to what's going on.

And we're realizing that even this is part of the divine unfolding. And I get it. If it's your child that's suffering, it's hard to see that as, as, But it is what's going on in the moment. And one of the horrible notions in Buddhism is hopelessness. To cultivate hopelessness in the sense that this moment cannot be any different from the way it is because it is. Right. It's happening.

It's what it is. Yeah. Right? You can hope that the next moment changes or down the road is going to be different. But accepting this moment, loving this moment, this is all we have. Right. Well, what's the third step? It's the tantric understanding that this first step is embodied mindfulness. Second step is compassionate relationship.

Third step is tantric understanding. So first step is we're focusing. I mix the third and the second third steps together when you were telling I didn't distinguish them. So like let's say it another way. First step is you're aware of the content. You're really focusing on the content. You're mindful of the content. Second step is your relationship with the content.

Is it a loving, compassionate relationship? Third step is, what is the nature of the content itself? The nature of the content itself is awaken, awakened energy, no matter what the content is, ugly, beautiful, scary. Or suppose you're saying a mantra. You could say it from each of those three stages. From the first stage, invoking mindfulness, invoking, you're invoking, suppose you're saying the mantra, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, from the first stage you're saying,

Ram, please show up. I felt you in the past, or Ram Dass talked about it, or I read a book. Please show up, please show up. And then the heart begins to open. And now you're in relationship with Ram. You're feeling love toward Ram. You're receiving love from Ram. Rahm is outside, he's up there, he's way better than you, he's God, but you're not, but you're in this relationship.

But then the tantric saying of the mantra, listen to this. This always just blows my mind, even when I say it, because I know what I'm going to say. When you say the word Ram, you know that the word Ram is Ram, that it's a complete manifestation of the being. the sound is no different from the complete deity, nor is it different from you who was saying it. So that me saying Ram and the sound Ram and God is the same thing. So every time I say Ram, I'm not saying Ram, please show up. I'm not even saying, oh, I love you so much and thank you for loving me.

I'm saying Ram, Ram, Ram, and it's creating the whole universe, right? Yeah, that's cool. Huh Hey Ontario Come on down to BetMGM casino And check out our newest exclusive The Price is Right Fortune Pick Don't miss out

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you Please contact Connix Ontario at 1866 531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge BenMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. What's the third? How would you apply the mantra to the third part of this?

Well, what I'm saying is, okay, so I'm saying, first step is please show up, second step as I love you. Wait, hold on, one second. Wait, so hold on. One second. Okay. One second, sorry. We lost like one minute of that. Hold on.

I'm going to vanish and return in one second. Okay, good. What do I happen? Okay, we're back. We recorded that anyway, but keep going. Then we have to wrap it up. Could I do it aside here that a lot of time your picture is going completely fuzzy for me? Oh, yeah, it'll look great.

I'm so sorry about that, but it'll look really good. Like, we just, it's the way Riverside works. It sucks. Okay. So please continue. I don't know where we left off here. So saying the mantra from the three levels. First level is invoking, please show up.

Second level is, you've shown up, I love you, you love me, isn't this fantastic? Third level is the mantra itself is the complete manifestation of the deity. Wow, that's so cool. Like I say Rom, and in the saying, the complete Godhead is generated in that moment. And it's no separate from me who was saying it. It's one step before there's nobody doing anything, non-duality. That it's all sacred. This is so beautiful and thank you for coming on the show.

I have to weirdly abruptly go because I have something in 20 minutes I have to go to, unfortunately. Okay, okay. But I am so grateful to you for being on the show. and we will I will plug the book at the beginning too but um everybody could i say just briefly in closing go to the living dying project website we got a lot of free courses groups free stuff the most complete site on the internet about conscious dying livingdying org.

Thank you. And how to live so you can die without fear. The new book coming out. Where can people get that? Well, some people are, supposedly it's not being released till June 16th, but it's printed. I've got authors copies. And a bunch of my friends are saying they got it in the mail already. So depending on which warehouse, Amazon or book shop or Barnes & Noble, some of them are

sending out the book some aren't. but it's it's either out now or coming out really shortly. Thank you so much for coming on the show. All the links you need to find, Ram Dave will be down below in the comments. You are the best. Congrats on your book. And thank you so much for your time.

Lots of love, dear Duncan. Bye-bye. If you're somebody freaked out about death, just know that this podcast is actually about life. That's what Ram Dave teaches. And he has a wonderful new book, How to Live So You Can Die Without Fear. Come See Me.

be in Charlotte. I'm going to be in Asheville. I'm going to be in Nashville and I am coming to the Wilbur in Boston. I hope to see y'all there. Have a wonderful week. Until next time, Haragrishnah.