Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Saraswati and Raghu Markus

Episode Date: February 6, 2015

Raghu Markus ( and ramdass.org) and Saraswati Markus (nourishing life) join the DTFH to talk about authenticity, the mind body connection, and being in the now.   This episode brought to you by harrys.com

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. Hello my dear sweet friends. It is I, Duncan Trussell, the Thwilich of Cloudcashin, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast.

A few weeks ago I received this audio file from a man in Kentucky. Here Duncan, my name is Harry Deppon, and I am sending you this audio file in the hopes that you have the courage to upload it into your mudgames. Two months ago while singing in my backyard, I was witness to a meteor impact in the forest outside my house. A bright light filled the sky and there was a sound like a thousand angels screaming in the night. I will never forget the way the meteor sounded when it hit the earth. It sounded like a fist punching a cold steak. I rose from my hammock and ventured into the forest to see if I could discover where the meteor had made its impact.

It was not that hard to find where the meteor had made its impact. I only had to go in the opposite direction of the animals that were running from the forest. Squealing, howling, barking, and chirping when a great cloud of mammalian terror they plunged away from me, but I ventured ahead for a moment, forging upstream through a river of terrified fur. Until at last I arrived at a smoldering spot in the forest where a crater the size of three Volkswagen buses lay. The smell of that smoke was unlike anything that I had ever experienced in my entire life. It was the smell of a demon's breath hot on your back as he impaled you again and again in the lower circles of hell. His eyes rolling backwards in his head as his slavering fangs dripped acidic saliva onto your buttocks, feet, and back.

In the middle of the crater there was something that was clearly an egg shaped the color of the night sky dusk. I ventured closer into the impact zone. Having discussed this with my wife, I recognized the terrible mistake that I made. One should never very enter into a meteor crater. A scientist should be called immediately, but it was as though that egg had a hypnotic hold over my psyche and I was drawn into it. The very top of the egg could only be compared to the protuberance of a baboon's genitalia. Fleshy and alive, what happened next changed me forever and could potentially change the world. I'm prepared to give you exclusive rights to my story on the condition that you proved to me that you were to be trusted by playing this first part on your podcast.

Once I hear that you have played this part, I will supply the next part of this story as well as photographic and video evidence if you request. I hope that you will make the right decision. Not only your life, but the life of all beings on this earth depend on it. I know what you guys are thinking. Duncan is putting himself in a great deal of danger by leaking this kind of information out into the world. Some of you are probably thinking I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. You think I'm doing this level of journalism not because I care about getting the truth out there, but because I want to win another Pulitzer Prize. I imagine some of you even think that that was my voice in the beginning of the podcast and that I couldn't come up with an opening monologue or intro.

So I just recorded that to fill in some space. You, sir, would be wrong or madam. That email was sent to me two weeks ago with an audio file attached. And if you're out there friend, I will continue to share your story with the world. All right, we got a great podcast today. We're going to dive right into the interview, but first some quick business. This episode of the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast is brought to you by the pubic wizards over at harrys.com. They say that before you are born, you are a being composed entirely of light fueled by love.

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Go to Harry's.com. Use coupon code Family Hour and try it out. Support them. They support this podcast. Hare Krishna. I want to say thank you to everybody who's been using the Amazon portal. I don't know what has happened. Either more of you are using the portal or one of you is buying a lot of shit from Amazon.

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Okay, that's it. Let's dive right into this podcast. Today's guests, one of the guests is a returning guest. The other guest is her first time. It's Raghu Marcus and Sarah Swati Marcus. As most of you know, Raghu Marcus works with the love server member foundation. He organizes the retreats that happen in Maui. These are the retreats that I've been going to and that I will actually be doing live podcasts from in April in Maui.

And Sarah Swati Marcus teaches yoga at these retreats. And my favorite part of there's two of, I have three favorite things at these retreats. One of them is getting to be around Ram Dass and listening to him talk, which is like standing in front of some kind of nuclear love bomb. And the other thing that I really love is the yoga that happens in the morning. And Sarah Swati teaches these incredible yoga classes and she has figured out the perfect way to mix in all the various poses with interesting philosophical and spiritual perspectives related to having a human body in this incarnation. Raghu Marcus is a co-host of the mind rolling podcast, which is located on the mind pod network.

And Sarah Swati, you can check out her website by going to nourishinglife.com. So now everyone, please open your hearts and send some laser beam level love blasts in the direction of my two great friends and teachers. Sarah Swati and Raghu Marcus. Welcome back to the Dunga Trussell family, our Raghu Marcus. And for the first time, Sarah Swati Marcus is here with us at the Dunga Trussell family hour. Thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you, Duncan. It's great to see you. Good to be with you. Great to see you too. We were just having a conversation in the living room about these retreats where you teach yoga at these retreats

and how a lot of what I learned from those retreats comes from your yoga class. It's exactly at the same level as when Ram Dass is speaking or Cornfield speaking or any of them. I get my mind blown by your classes, so it is odd that you haven't been on the show yet. Why do I keep having you on, Raghu? I'm going to give you $200 for that. Yeah, we'll talk later. Thank you so much. Ram Dass, I mean, I'm sitting in your space here and I couldn't feel more at home.

Thank you. And taking care of. And, you know, they've been definitely submerged in these teachings for a long time. And when I teach yoga where we met at the retreat, I really try to think about what could I bring that would companion these teachings from people like Jack Cornfield and Ram Dass and Krishna Dass, Mirabai Bush, Trudy Goodman, you know. So I really try to make the yoga integrate into that. So I appreciate that happens for you. Yeah, I mean, I've had some of the most transcendent experiences of my life in your yoga, just in your yoga class.

Maybe that's probably just because I'm incredibly out of shape and just need to exercise. So like anytime I'm doing any mild physical exercise, it's like, wow, this feels great. But you have this perfect pairing of the actual yoga itself mixed in with philosophy that it's really interesting. Because it's and also you just sort of offhandedly say things like in the last yoga class or the last in the retreat, you said the spine is the antenna. The spine is an antenna. Do you remember that? I do. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Well, what's funny is, you know, I ran into you and you're like, I've been thinking about that thing you said in class, your spine is an antenna. And I was like, did I say that? Is that something I've ever said or could think about? It took me a minute, you know, because you drop into some kind of flow or stream where you open to a wisdom body channel and things come out, you know, that makes sense in that moment. And then so I didn't even recognize it at first, but then I thought about it a little bit. And what that means is that your your spine is an extension, obviously, of the brain and it's all your central nervous system and moment by moment. We're making decisions about the degree of our suffering or pain and whether we're going to aim and towards that and compound it, make it worse or whether we're going to course correct towards something more wholesome and healing and nurturing. Right.

And they have that opportunity and those are called, you know, you know, that those opportunities are called awareness or practices or consciousness. And so when you surround yourself with these kinds of images that are here in your space and teachings and, you know, sounds like mantras, I think that helps us to, you know, to aim in a different direction. So that's how the spine is in the antenna is reading the environment, feeding back to the brain and you make a decision. Do I feel safe or do I feel, you know, contracted? Right. Yeah, that's that that is I love what you're saying specifically. I love everything you're saying, but one thing I really like about it is that you're pointing in the direction of the idea that we have free will. You're sort of obliterating the possibility of being a victim. If your spine is giving you these moments and every second to push in the direction of wholesomeness or to go back into the path, the destructive patterns, if you're always you're saying that we get to decide. I think we can decide if we know we're doing it.

So our level of awareness and consciousness, I'm not sure how much free will we have with that. Maybe that's there's some predetermined. You know, they say, you know, you, you know, you've when you're born into a family of yogis that you that's a really high birth. And the rest of us who weren't, who knows how we stumbled onto this kind of material. And often I'll speak to that in a class where there's so many, so many people who never will hear these teachings ever. Right. And to just really take in how rare it is and soak that in free will. That's deep. Yeah, it's deep.

So from what I've understood over the years, free will is something we need to think we have. And then we can go forward because we make choices, as you say, they can be for life or dark. But ultimately, we could never understand the reality of what they call karma and grace. That's one of the biggest things we have. I mean, you've been to a couple of these retreats. Yeah, see how much the conversation kind of turns into that direction, almost at every retreat. And I'm not sure if we're maybe it's just me. I'm super interested.

I'm super interested because of what was said, you know, by both Nincor Olibaba, who many of you listeners out there. If you've heard me on Duncan before, you know, I'm talking about and that he said to Ram Dass one day when he was asked, is karma and grace the same thing? Meaning, do you have free will or is it all just it's all planned? It's all part of a plan that's everything is absolutely indicated past, present and future. And it's all part of that divine intelligence. And really, you don't have any, you know, which is a rational way of understanding something that we can't understand. And that's what he said.

That's not something I'll talk about publicly when asked that question. And then Ram Dass is thinking, gee, why did he say that? And he thought and he told this to the interpreter, who then said, I must have told Maharaj Ram Dass is wondering, is it possible that they're not the same? Anyhow, he came back and he said, Ram Dass and I understand each other very well. So then later on, I actually got a chance to ask my Indian mother about this in particular, who had been with Maharaj for 50, 60 years. And she said, yeah, it's true, you cannot understand that.

There's no way any, if you're living in duality that you shouldn't say it quite like that. You cannot understand that reality. And what we need to do is act as if we have free will. In not so many words. Well, there's the freedom to be conscious of what you're doing. That seems to be a real... You can actively make that decision to just start following your breath into your nose and out through your nose and then notice when you get lost.

That feels like free will to me. Could be having the grace to even think about your breath. Right, I see. Okay, I see what you're saying. You know, the... Again, we can't understand... It's a circular conversation. It's a circular conversation.

I remember one thing you said in the yoga class at the spring retreat, which was, I think it was a spring retreat, it was one of these retreats. You said, the place, the bridge between suffering and grace is surrender. Do you remember saying that? Really cool. And that... I love lately especially thinking about the notion of surrender. And I wonder if you guys could talk a little bit about what it means to you, the idea of surrender.

Because many people when they hear it, that's not a good word. To say the very least. Jesus. You want to go first? Ladies first. Well, ladies first, that's a whole thing. Because that's never free. Ladies first, there's a price tag there.

It's like, you have to be careful. I'm always... On your podcast, you and your listeners are witnessing our dynamics. Oh yeah, there is a price tag to ladies first. Ladies first, we're opening the door, paying for dinner, it's not free. So just point your conscious there, miss there ladies. Hear it, be strong. I've said it.

I've said it out loud. I've said it out loud, like I pay for everything. I've said it out loud, those foul words have come out of my mouth and I've watched them like some awful verbal flatulence. You're interrupting Adam, you're just exposing all of my deep vulnerability and manipulative qualities in one terrible, simple sentence. You go, why did I do that? Always. I mean, I'm either... I'm unfortunately spend a lot of time going, why did I do that?

I spend a great deal of time doing that. But surrender. You know, when you think, if you heard, we surrendered in Afghanistan. Not that we were leaving Afghanistan, but we surrendered, it's like... You know, Sharon Salisbury, she said it, one of these retreats. She's like, you know... Well actually, she said something different, but it reminded me of surrender, which is forgiveness. It's sort of along the same tapestry, I guess, as letting go of something.

You're forgiving someone, you're surrendering something that's like causing obstruction. You're giving residue. You know, you want to be spacious. That's part of why we work with the body and the breath and movement and coordinate all of that is to make space so that something new can emerge. You know, a new thought, a new feeling, a revelation. You have insight, not outside. But she said about forgiveness. She said, forgiveness doesn't mean amnesia.

You know, I loved that. The name is a little bit about surrender. I mean, surrender just means you don't give up, you give up the fight. You know, like you kind of, a little bit can be with things as they are, just little by little by little. And that is, you know, one way to think about the bridge between suffering and grace is to... You know, sometimes I've described it as bringing in like whatever you want to have happen. You know, you know, if you... I remember the last time I gave this example is when my mother was just diagnosed or she had just had a stroke and I was really hoping that she would overcome the stroke and heal.

And I was causing me a lot of pain and suffering that she had had the stroke and that then there was me, my attachment to how she healed and all of it. So having, wanting truly what I want, which was for her to get better, make a full recovery, but also bringing in the opposite. Like leaving room for the fact that she's not going to get better. And like where do we find the place in our body-mind to hold both energies? And I think that becomes part of that movement to surrender. That's a great question though, that you... Where do you find the place in your body-mind to hold both those energies? And are you supposed to?

Holding both those energies, do they just rip you apart? I mean, isn't there a greater truth happening that it's regardless of whether your mother is sick or well right now or your friend or your dog or whatever. The big, big reality is no amount of hope is going to keep anyone in this room or listening alive permanently. So does surrender mean maybe just going into that mental space completely or consciously being aware of the fact that you are a relatively to the span of time a rapidly decaying cloud of particulates? That's often I think of myself like that. Well, more and more lately. The times are tough. Getting old sucks.

It does, yeah. You're doing it well. I mean, you are one of the most strikingly handsome men I've ever met. See, this is what you get on the show now. This is nice. I'm telling you though. How long have you guys been married? I call it we were struck from bell one and that's been eight years in April. Wow.

That's cool. You were struck struck from bell one. Yeah. I like that. He actually when when he asked me for my phone number, you know, you put it right in your phone. He before I, my name was Saraswati. My name was Robin. So he put my name in his phone as Robin Marcus.

Right away. I was like, oh, you're really into it. You're really into this. All right. Now we're getting too squishy here. Not too squishy. Surrender. Surrender.

So the biggest thing about the Indians, like they have a concept of surrender, the Hindus, especially in Bhakti yoga, yoga of devotion, yoga of the heart. They, and we had one friend who steeped in it, who KK who, you know, and he said to us, you have no idea what that because the word is so completely destroyed in the West. That word has nothing to do with what we know is surrender. And he went into a hole. I won't get into his, you know, extraordinary definitions. But basically it comes with, it's the last thing before you get fully enlightened with

the way they understand it to be the last point at which use their stops being an eye. And so you have acid, right? Best example. If you take a lot of acid, you get to the point where there's no eye. Yes. Right. And that's when people freak out generally. Yeah.

Right. Or right before that point. Or right before. Yeah. And so it's the same. That's the same point the way I understand it. Once that's gone, then you are fully in what's called in India, Sharanagat. You can go to Ramdas.org and find S-H-A-R-A-N-G-A-T, Sharanagat.

And it's the word for surrender. And there's a complete explanation of exactly how to arrive at that on Ramdas.org. Well, that's an interesting term. Sharanagat is the word for surrender. Surrender. Well, it sounds a lot prettier that term. We need new words. The words are all gone.

Yeah, exactly. Like we have no more words that make any sense anymore. Forgiveness, all these words, all the words that seem to be the recurring symbols that point in the direction of waking up are, have been so overused that they're just meaningless. And if you spend even the slightest amount of time thinking about, when I think about forgiveness, I will usually get like a negative feeling tone. It's not like I think about forgiveness and I'm like, oh great. It's usually like, ugh, somebody must have done something fucking horrible to me.

And then, you know, like you'll think that. And get into it and how they're going to react. Yeah. And just forgive them. It's so heavy and covered in all these like ideas that you learn from when you're a kid and you get into trouble. Or you know, the vision of like some patronizing pompous enemy being like, I forgive you. But they don't really, they're using the term as a medium to inflict guilt.

So that word is kind of a corrupted, polluted word. Surrender you think of, that means I lost. And love, that word is like, who the fuck knows what that means? And see, we have a red heart symbolizes that. And you put chocolates in it on Valentine's Day. All these words are really, really difficult entryways into the stuff that it seems like they're pointing to. I wish we had a completely new vocabulary.

Do you see interstellar? I haven't seen it. Oh, you've got to see that. At one point, one of the protagonists, a female scientist, they get into really tough, so you've got to help me out here. They get into a really bad situation in space. And they don't know how to get out of this really bad situation. They're having a dialectic.

And it's basically about, you know, it's almost science and spirituality. Well, they're at this moment where they only have enough fuel that you can do one thing or the other. You know, they can go to this one place that she kind of wants to go, or the other place that actually looks more promising. And they're starting, and somehow they stumble upon the idea. She has a soliloquy where she says, you know, I just talked about love being this force that we can't really measure, like an unmeasurable force in the universe.

Yeah, the magic that, I think he even said, magic that interconnects everything. And we just haven't really, yeah, we have not done enough science to prove that is what, right? That was what the thing was. So it was actually one of the greatest lines I've heard in a movie in a long time. Love is. It was Anne Hathaway is the female star. And I felt it was actually like a really great piece that they just needed to insert somewhere. Like, let's just have her say it now.

It just seemed totally out of left field and had nothing to do with the movie. Yeah, but we need new words, that's for sure. Well, how about this though? I mean, because I don't have that feeling about the word forgiveness. A mentor of mine would often say, forgive everyone everything right now. Like, what if we could? Like, just that's really powerful. Like, we didn't have to like have all these things clinging to us.

Like, can you imagine if, if you could do that, what would actually drop away? Like all the millions of things weighing us down. I don't know. That's what I'm getting a visual of. I love it. But I have no problem in general. Yeah, forgiving people. Yeah, really easily forgive people.

But forgiving myself. It is impossible. I can't like, I can, if I do something completely ridiculous, something me, sometimes I get really angry. I'll say awful things, awful things. And then I look back at that place, especially from the perspective of what I learned from these retreats, and think, why are you even going to these retreats if that's inside of you? I'm just kidding.

I, but, but it, because what I mean is, if you don't, if you're lucky enough, and I chug him trumpet says, if you cannot go down the spiritual path, just don't do it, because it's, it really isn't like as pleasant as a lot of people like to say that it is. Or like you like to imagine it is when you see like the image of the Buddha and that beautiful smile on his face and that complete attunement to love, you wouldn't think, oh man, that guy must have gone through some serious shit to get to that place. You just think that's where I'll be. But I don't, I, if you're unconscious and you're just a jerk,

and you're sort of rampaging through this dimension as a jerk, and there are some real jerks out there completely unconscious on a rampage. All they think in their life is, man, people are, people are assholes. I'm the punisher. I got to inflict justice on these sons of bitches as much as I can before I die. And they do that and do that and do that. And they have some weird miserable death. And that's it.

But if you start watching yourself and really contemplating the idea that you do have free will and that you have the ability to open yourself up to this love force and yet still knowing that noxious stuff comes out of you from time to time, it's incredibly frustrating. The key there, you just, everybody's got that noxious shit coming out of them. Why are you any different? Because I want to be better than everyone. Oh.

But I, I don't mean that. That was a cheap attempt at a dumb joke, but please go on, Saraswati. Sorry. No problem. You know, I remember I, I was going through a kind of, well, a very difficult time, a tremendous disappointment. And I happened to be, had that experience, like just imagine a tremendous disappointment. And it really made me question like everything I had done,

spiritual practices, like, you know, guru, shmuru, you know, that kind of thing. And I was just so like, oh, but I also happened to be on my way to Maui and I got a chance to sit with Ramdas and share that. And he had such an interesting kind of, you know, thing to say about it. He's like, oh, he's, you know, he's so beautiful. He's like, oh, look what, look what Maharaj is squeezing out of you. Wow. Look at that.

That's cool. Like a purification. It made me, I had a whole different relationship with like all of my loss of faith and just scowling and, you know, if I, if I don't get grace when I want it, then what good is grace? Right. Yeah, sure. It's like, or for me, the question that comes into my mind after I've thrown my iPad into the wall in a rage is I think to myself, am I a fraud?

Should I stop talking about this stuff until I get to a point where I'm not throwing expensive electronic equipment into the wall of my house? That's what it, that's what, that's where it gets to me is I think, oh, you know, you don't know anything. You really haven't done the work at all. If you're at a point where you'll get to so angry that you'll destroy an iPad over nothing, over what is this? Ultimately nothing.

Right. This should be, this is a line to help actually. Yeah. Just get in that line, right? Yes. That's where you're at. That's what it feels like. You're in that line.

It feels like they're. You're the worst person I've ever met. You know what? What? This, I'm going to tell everybody what you did. We're at the retreat. We're walking. This retreat, by the way, was at a beautiful cove in Maui.

Whales jumping and dolphins and. Turtles. Turtles. Just a fantastic place. We're chanting every night with Prishnadas and it's like, you know, wonderful. Yeah. Melodies and the rhythms and you get into a trance and every day and it builds up and all these meditate.

You know, it's just a, the food is great. We're hanging out with people and he says to me, actually he did, he and I did a podcast, which we haven't done anything with, by the way. Oh, I was wondering what's going on with that. And at the retreat and in it, he talked about, you talked about Choghi and Trumpa. Yeah. Who says, you know, at a certain point, it's easy to grab your new spiritual ego and make that the thing.

Yeah. And it's like no, you know, no better than where you were at before coming completely egocentrically just from a different platform. Basically. Right. Yes. And then we walked outside and he says, yeah, like being in this place is sick. I mean, you know, this restaurant, people are eating Dakaris.

Dakaris. Dakaris. Wow. I didn't know they had Dakaris. Yeah. It's a Montreal. It's a neighborhood. People from Montreal.

Anybody who's listened to this, you'll know what I mean. Dakaris. Okay. Dakaris. Yeah. Dakaris. Dakaris. So and we're walking along and the food and everything is fantastic.

We are full of shit. Aren't we? Yeah. Right. I don't know if those are my exact words. Something like that. But yeah, I don't know. I wouldn't say full of shit.

It's just this. We're having a good time and we should be in, you know, wearing cloth of horse hair and being whipped a couple of times. I don't think we should wear horse hair cloth. Being whipped can be awesome sometimes, but the essence of the thing is, well, I'm still in the place way before where you're freaking out on the acid and not where you're suddenly, you've had that beautiful surrender, that beautiful moment. I remember the quintessential LSD experience, the ultimate LSD experience I ever had was

when I was just out of high school, I was sitting on the sofa with a friend listening to classical music, Beethoven or Mozart or just listening to the music and listening to the notes. And then I started thinking, oh, oh, these notes, so they came out of someone's mind. You know, someone, this music was in someone's mind and then I'm listening and then I started thinking, what part of me is, wait, what part of me is thinking these thoughts? Like where, if these notes came in someone's mind and I'm thinking about these notes coming in someone's mind, these thoughts have come into my mind.

So where are the thoughts coming from? Where are they originating from? And in that moment, man, I had that big acid, like, you're just gone, man, and it's glorious. The feeling is exhilarating, expansive, peaceful, wonderful, awesome. But the lead up to that is, it's like flying into a black hole or something. It's just turbulence and insanity and for me, that translates into some, I like, I love the Buddhist term fundamental dissatisfaction, an acute sense of a kind of underlying, un-dealt with quarry of shit inside of me.

After the experience? You have this go on after you have this sartori? I have this, the more that I practice mindfulness, the more that I meditate, the more that I go to these retreats, the more I become more acutely aware of this, like, I don't know what you call it. Is it like a sort of angst? Yeah, it's just a feeling of like fraudulent anger and... Oh yeah, how could this be happening when you are who you are?

You shouldn't even been listening to this, right? Any of the teachings, reading, they shouldn't be doing it because even, because you're so bad that touching this stuff could dirty it up. Well, right, yeah, I know you're joking, but I, the, and I know that's what they're... That's how crazy, paying attention to your thoughts, it's just, I mean, you're having fun. Right. And it's good, you know.

Well, that's interesting. I mean, I think what you've said to me pretty often is that you're really enjoying this. You're like digging in, you're feeding your pathology, you know, the part, and we do, we perpetuate our own pathology. You know, one of another, same mentor said, you know, you want to get healthy or maybe we could say, get rid of suffering, change everything you like, you know, just do the opposite of everything you have been doing, and that helps you to get, you know, so it's actually not very, very mysterious.

Right. So you're saying that it's just sort of like getting off on the, the, I'm so used to feeling like crappy or, in my case, I can turn anything into sadness or grief, I can tell you, we were at a beautiful thing yesterday and it became suddenly all about me and my loss, you know, and had nothing to do with that, but that just got triggered. Okay, yeah. You know, and then, you know, I think Krishnodar said something just so beautiful. He can be so staggeringly beautiful sometimes, but he said, you know, we do practices because

Maharaji is always there, it's just, we're not, you know, and so like we do these practices to try to be in that field that we can resonate with who we really are, not so much this part that feels like the fraud or feels angry or, you know, not that part. It's daunting though. I mean, and I don't want to hang out with that part and I do know, I mean, I am someone who can really get off on like being down in the dumps or, and there were times in my life where I was really into that. Now I'm at a place I just don't like it.

I wish it wasn't, I don't want to be like that and I don't like it at all. Here's, here's a, here's something you really don't like as well. What? I wanted to, I wanted to illustrate, you know, this whole self reflection of being this horrible person, horrible thoughts, blah, blah, blah, and it's a story of when I was with Maharaji back then. See Duncan, also in that podcast, didn't we talk about it then? Or we talked about it with Krishna Das.

It was that you can't relate to this story. I wanted to get to the Maharaji story. Yeah. It's the stories of our experiences with Neem Karoli Baba. You can't? No. Well, no, I, the, not, here's the thing. It's not that I can't.

I have his picture all over my house. It's on every, it's, I have him in a lot of places and I think about him all the time and I love him because of you guys and the retreat. That's why I, that's where I feel really connected to whatever that guy was because I can feel the imprint on you and you and the people that I've run into there and it's undeniable. It's real. And so I know that there was something there. I don't know what, but there's something there.

You know, on my message board, when people start talking about Neem Karoli Baba, quite often many of them are like, yeah, I don't believe any of these stories of his anything really. People are quite skeptical. It's hard for people to connect to the notion of a guru. So, and I, I, I wish there was another word for Maharaji. I wish there was a way to express that wherever you're at this fill in the blank, this, tendency in the universe for healing to happen or this, this, I mean, when we say Maharaji Neem

Karoli, but we could say there are, especially that we knew in the last century, a number of these kinds of beings that were no longer living in duality. They were no I involved with them and we met a few of them, Maharaja, I can say I legitimately met two of them, Maharajina, a woman, a saint named Sidha named Ananda Mahima, who's very famous. Anyhow, it is, they, it's localized in a body while they got a body, but when they don't have one, it's, they, it's just, they're just an extension. They are resting in that place that all these books talk about, which is completely at one

with what the essence, and we can call it divine intelligence, God, whatever you want. The Buddhists have names, everybody has a different name for it. And that's what this is. And for us now, although I tell you these stories because I, I, I think at times they illustrate something that relates to the presence of what we're talking about in the present. And in this case, it was your reference to how you think of yourself, right? Yes. So I, I was sitting in front, I was about 20, 30 feet in front.

I've told this story before, but it's good in this context on mind row. He was asked for these stamps that we all had. We all had a, somebody had created a posted size stamps of Maharaja and sheets, sheets and sheets of them. He'd ask for them and you'd give them too many. Instead of giving two to each of the 20 people sitting around, you give them all to the worst jerk you ever saw in your life, you didn't know what. And he asked for them one day and I was sitting far away, not that far, like 20 feet.

I wasn't right up there. And I thought, I've got some, but I don't have that many. So I'm going to rip mine in half. I'll give him half and I'll keep half. And that's all right. No problem, right? Yeah. So I did that.

And it wasn't like he's, you know, omniscient powers. I was right in front of him and I ripped it. I didn't deny him anything. I went up and gave it to him. He threw him back at me and screamed at me, night! And that's how it is. No. Go away.

And for one week, I don't know if we didn't see him for a week, I was close to suicide. I mean, I really was like, I had to kill myself for being the worst jerk that ever lived and how in the world I could be in such a, I did what you just talked. The story, I told myself that story. I went back there after a week. I still had the stamps. He said, anybody got any stamps? I said, I threw, I got all them out and I put them on the bed, on the tucket, on the

bench. Did he keep them? He didn't say a word to me, right? It didn't look at me. He took them and he turned the other way and he gave them all to somebody else. And there was nothing he's talking about. Literally two minutes later, he pointed his finger at me and didn't say a word. And that it's a famous mudra of his either meaning everything is one or watch out, motherfucker.

I got the watch out. It was all transparent and then I could, you know, once you're stopped being judged by somebody who has nothing going on that doesn't care about your input, it's a one way street. And once you're not judged, you know, and it's a whole other picture. So this is the, in this kind of yoga where you have a guru, he's sort of embodying like these built in aspects to all of life, which is that life in general, if you try to rip your stamps in half and save some for yourself and trick, trick life, life inevitably will scream no, that's for sure.

And so they kind of like embody that in their teachings that you get to experience the very same thing you're going to experience if you're a selfish person. You've been ripping my ignorance. I made that move. But it's just completely obviously I did it. And I was right in front wasn't like, geez, maybe I'll go in the back. Yeah, these up in half. He won't know which at that point, I couldn't believe he didn't know anything because he

knew everything that was going on. All right. So I, it was just ignorance. I acted. Okay. You want to talk free will. Yeah. It's where it gets interesting.

And I got this teaching back that I'm sitting here and we're talking about it today, right? How many, you know, decades, got it. Right. So this is a huge, so it's like, you read a book. If you read a book, you could read, I don't know, any kind of child's fable will say share or give or don't be, don't be, give, give more than you should give even whatever. It's like, it's not a, it's not, that's the problem. We've heard it so many goddamn times in so many different ways.

Don't hang on to all the stamps. Don't cut the stamps in half. Give everything you can away. We've heard it so many times that it stopped meaning anything. And which is why this teacher function is so important because they can embody what happens to you and your life if you keep cutting your stamps in half. And even more though is stop having so much self interest going on relative to judging yourself. Right, right.

It's a tremendous self interest or what do the Buddhists call it, self cherishing. Selfishness. It's self, it's just, right, it's selfish. If you're thinking about, yeah, I'm so angry, you know, it's a fraud. It's really what you're doing is thinking about yourself. Exactly, exactly that. I mean, I think it's possibly more insidious than that. It's a habit.

And the definition of a habit is something we do unconsciously. So by bringing ourselves into mindfulness more of the time and mindfulness is, I mean, that's why they say you don't just do mindfulness on the cushion. You do mindfulness while you're doing the dishes and do mindfulness, you know, so that you can notice what your experience is and something arising. Oh, something arising. And maybe there's a way you can just zoom out and I love that practice of noticing if something's, oh, is this pleasant or is this unpleasant and like leaving it.

At that. Just that. So the note, this is like Cornfield's noting idea, which is that when a thing arises, you call it anxiety, anger, fear, and bow to it. It's really good. So this is cool because what you're saying, because, you know, quite often I have things emerging in me that I have no idea what the name for the thing is, you know, like he, he talks about it's like you're sitting in the forest in a rare and like you're going

to watch the woodland animals that usually you don't see because you're scaring them all away. Oh, look, a bird, a coyote. But like when I'm doing this meditation, there's things where it's like, that's something that I don't, that's like something out of a crack underneath the forest that's like got a lot of eyes and I'm not sure what you'd call it. But this, I love that because then you're not stuck naming, trying to verbalize. It's so much, so much more simple.

Pleasant, unpleasant. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. And you can do that in any given moment. You can do that in any given moment. Yeah. In fact, I mean, that's a, that's a typical step in the mindfulness training is, you know,

how to work with thoughts or how to work with emotions and, you know, notice when you get down a groove because these grooves, you know, they're inner psyche, inner body and then, you know, and then they're not their beliefs, their thoughts, they're, you know, emotions, all of that stuff. And so I think, I think this work with consciousness really does lighten up or kind of that groove. Yeah. And we're less inclined to fall into that. So I, I really, I don't know if you noticed, but I just like, you know, when you were talking

about that fraud stuff, you know, 10 minutes ago or something, it really, it really moved me because I just don't see that person very much at all. I mean, of course, you know, you don't see how I feel on the inside either, but, you know, I see so many other things I would say first before that, before that. But it's, you know, I like addressing the innate sense of fraudulence that seems to exist. I know it's in me and I know that it must be in other people too. And the, the deeper I get into doing sitting meditation and doing mindfulness meditation

throughout the day. And the more I do watch things arise and you get down into the personality, you know, into the sub, you start getting into these weird sub basements of yourself that you didn't even know were there. And all, it's like you're, you know, like when you clear a clog sink and it's incredible what's down there, especially if it's been a long time since you've cleared the sink. And like it's, it's disgusting as you're like pulling hair and, and, and you get through that one layer, but then you get underneath the hair and maybe stuff has been down there

so long. It's just stopped even looking like hair. It's turned into this weird, and it's spit and toothpaste and like gelatinous just gelatinous stuff. And it's cool though, because it's the same thing. Like there's a, you know, is it popping videos on YouTube? There's probably millions of views, millions of views of people who enjoy watching the zits explode out of people.

But so there's, so it's weird because like you, as you're pulling this, as you're getting into mindfulness and watching, you start getting into these sub basements and it starts with like, I mean, the other day I was just sitting, was laying in bed, I've been meditating and all of a sudden I clearly remembered a pottery frog from my grandmother's house when I was six that I was fascinated with. Just a pottery frog. Somehow in the, the work, that little memory got dislodged from down there and just came floating up into my head.

No reason for it to be there. I completely forgot about the frog. It was cool. I mean, I knew it. It's a vivid thing that you see, you know, you start dislodging all this stuff. And then, then when you get underneath that place, there's, you begin to get into the inner workings of your personality, the gears, the habitual gears of even what I'm doing now, the way I'm moving my hands and talking and the thing that I'm trying to get at and

I want to get at something and I guess I really want to get at something that feels not real. There's an unreal quality to it. It feels, I don't know. I don't know what I would be underneath that, but that part of the thing just seems a little real. That's where Jack talks about, it's okay to be human, you're okay. Look at us. You know how he goes into that rap?

I love it. Yeah, I love that too. Yeah. So that's it. You just got to turn, I mean, we do, do this all the time. It's just turning it around and saying, it's okay, you're just human. And you know, the biggest thing and the compassionate thing, which is we're talking about what Jack teaches and Sharon solves, people we talk about all the time, and in those courses there

for 10 days, you get very deep and yet it dislodged stuff, starts to float to the surface. Some of it's not very pleasant at all. And that is the nature of the path allowing for the fact that a lot of unpleasantness will have to be gone through. That's certainly the truth. Like in this particular retreat, you know one retreat, somebody had started to have a toothache, right? And they actually went up to the Goenka, who is a teacher, a famous Vipassana teacher.

He said, just keep, part of the things you sweep through your body with once you have one pointedness, so you're completely at one with every sensation. So this guy would get to his tooth, he'd get kind of stuck there. Okay, by the end of the course, they had to take him to the hospital, his jaw was so swollen out that they didn't want to take responsibility for it anymore. So talk about stuff coming up and what happens and how powerful meditation really can be. If you go to one of these 10 day retreats, she's got great stories, you got a nice story. These 10, a lot of people don't know that there is a thing called Vipassana meditation,

which I guess is called insight meditation as well. So poly word for insight and I think part of that ceramic frog, and also it's associated with word mindfulness, they're all related and part of the same tradition. And so mindfulness is either being with your experience, direct experience exactly as it is, so that's certainly noticing what's arising, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Or creating like a field or maybe another part of it, another branch, another way to practice, is to create a field to submerge into this place where actually you do have insight, does bubble up, where you do put two and two together, you have a breakthrough.

Oh, that's why I'm angry, oh, that's why I feel fraudulent or blah, you know, whatever, and then it's sort of cleared and so I kind of, you know, my perspective, I'm a medical person and so I'm often thinking about health and how this conversation, what those touch points are with health and you know, health, the word, the origin, the etymology means something like whole, comes from whole. So if you can, if we can think about, you know, these experiences, these habits or feeling states that bring us so down or experiences, which is what we're talking about, regrets and forgiving ourselves and just all of it, just they get pocketed away, our conscious mind doesn't want to, you know, so all of it's pocketed away and fragmenting us

and we wonder why we feel disconnected and like we have to reach to the, you know, the outer world and fill it up with stuff until we realize stuff doesn't do it and we start looking inside, inside, to find a doorway to this wisdom body that we were talking about on the sofa. And I love this idea, this, what you're talking about is the other thing that's been coming to my mind, it's a lot of this coming from this Goldstein book you recommended, Ragu, it's so good, but the, the one thing he says is that quite often a human moves to alleviate suffering, where movement itself is to like when, you know, you crack your neck or you move your, it's your, you're doing massage something, you touch it and it feels better. Yes. And

the idea is that this action, whatever it is, and a very popular movement these days is to take your phone out of your pocket and stare into it for as long as you possibly can. That's one of the big, big movements of the day. Everyone's making it all day long. Look at the phone and I think that you can tell the extent of a person's suffering by the number of times they look at a phone in any given minute or two minutes or three minutes. That's probably true. Because they want to get away, they want to get away so much from this suffering, from this pain, from whatever it is. For me, it might be a feeling of like not accurately representing myself or it might be a feeling of anger underneath everything or underneath that, of course, must just be terror. But

when you realize that you are playing video games all the time, not because the video games are fun, but because you don't want to deal with the clogged sink of your heart, or if when you realize that you're looking at your phone all the time, it's not because you're busy or have any interest in communicating with anyone that much that you need to stare at your phone like you're Batman waiting for like word to come in when to save a building from being blown up. When you realize that's all because you're desperately trying to run away from this thing inside of you. It's wonderful, but it definitely will throw your pattern off in a pretty serious way. Well, I think also, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, Ragu, but

it's, I think it's important to also, I mean, I find myself saying this all the time because I'm always giving people advice as a medical person. They come in and they ask me, what should I do for this? And I give them advice. But I think the most important thing that we can all do is live with our eyes wide open. It's like, I might choose to marathon whatever series I have left yet to marathon, but I know I'm doing it. It's not like I stopped. What do you mean marathon? What do you mean? Oh, you know, like if you watch, you know, five episodes or something. Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, right. Or, you know, listen to five of your podcasts back to back, which I've been known to do also in mind rolling, you know, just like that. It's, but do it with my eyes wide open. Like,

I know I'm checking out from something and, you know, or maybe or I'm bored or, you know, boredom, boredom. Now see, boredom, this is what I've been thinking about. Basically, and it all relates to what we're talking about here. The state of boredom is actually not the state boredom is another word for Duka, isn't it? It's another word for the fundamental dissatisfaction that exists in human experience and that when you're feeling bored, it's not that you're at a lost for things to do. You're numb. Are you numb or is it that you just been, you don't have anything distracting you from the fact that there's a blistering karmic series of sores inside of you that if you don't put the bomb of mindfulness on, just cankers and that this attention and mindfulness seems to be

the only thing that has any impact on it. But boredom, is it boredom? Or is it just like, oh, shit, I'm not able to ignore the what it this is. Boredom is people not wanting to just be present and be here in the moment and we're all suffering. But I agree with you. I think it is an aspect of Duka. I mean, I think that's what you're saying. I want to go back to fraudulent. Yes. I like fraudulent. You know what I think? What? I think the thing isn't feeling fraudulent, but not wanting to conceive, perceive, be involved, hear anything that's bullshit. And including whatever comes out of your mind. That's a great way to put it. And but, you know, we're, I understand that well. And sometimes what can happen, of course, you can get a little too cynical, because you're overly judgmental

on everything. Right. But I like him, particularly your people, people in general. No, he does a really good job at it. Of being overly, overly judgment, one of my talents. Yes. But yeah, no, it's common, common to everybody. You know what happens, though? I think at a certain point, discrimination starts to happen. So you kind of, okay, you know what's bullshit and you know what's not bullshit. Like go back to this retreat, which is taking place in luxurious circumstances. Yes. With incredible teachers. And yet there's always a sense of like feeling guilty. Yes. That how could we be here getting is this real or is this bullshit? You know, fun. And, and there, but there's a discriminating part of you that knows I'm hearing something and I'm feeling something.

And I'm connecting in a way that I know is completely real. Yes, whatever's happening on the physical plane is obviously a manifestation of God knows what, it sure is nice on that plane. Yeah. But ultimately, I am coming here and getting what it is that I need. You know that. That's discrimination. That's right discrimination. It's called in the Indian thing, the Becca. And that's a highly important thing to develop. And it takes, you know, it's working the more you're into your intuitive part and less in your mind, then the more that you can connect with that. And then the less that you're worried that you're going to, this is bullshit. I don't know. This is bullshit. This is, you know, the less that that starts, it starts, stops you. It does not

stop you. Right. Yeah, I, yeah, I don't, man, I really don't, I probably just misrepresent, I didn't say in the right, I don't, I think the retreats are fantastic. And I don't know nothing to do with that. I think it's great to have them in Hawaii too, because it shows you how powerful the mind is. Because that's what I love, like practicing mindfulness in Hawaii. And then realizing that you, that you're the only pull, you know, people are worried about Fukushima, the waters polluting Hawaii. But then you realize you're, you have a Fukushima inside of you that's, and that's the only thing that's tainting the experience is this inability to accept love. That's what you get from those things. Got it. That's it. So it's like you're, but you

even the recognition of like, Oh, I'm in an active war here. I'm actively fighting off accepting how incredible life can be. And that is really, it doesn't stop it. Just realizing it doesn't stop it. You're still going to give hugs that aren't as good as they could be. You're still, you know what I mean? You're not here. Yeah. Duality, fear, separation. And that kind of brings us back to the beginning of letting go or softening and into something into something else. The Dallas, and I bring this a lot into yoga. Dallas have a great concept of it's something like you can't be sensitive enough. And like that we thin our skin so much that we can just we are connected to each other that we are part of like there's nothing more that separates

that. In fact, I mean, all of these wisdom traditions say that, you know, everything's one, but you know, I'm sitting over here, you're sitting over there. So how, how does that equal one? Yes. So that actually the space that is between us gets thinner and thinner and thinner. I mean, it's just gorgeous and that we can actually reverse engineer ourselves to that place. We start with the body, lots of practices with the body, hafi yoga, pranayama, so forth, vibration technologies to kind of change, sounding, chanting, all these, but you change your kind of state of consciousness and then change the mind and change the spirit so that you, you know, you, you feel that connection, you have that connection. And then so that sort of loops around into

feeling love, like that being, you know, part of the outcome, or part of what we toneify or grow at the retreat is we, we learn to take it. Yeah. Can I do a commercial? Yeah, sure, of course. A commercial. Yes, for you. Well, yeah, because you just said this beautiful thing and really it represents who you are and your work out there. And I thought it was really well said. And so anybody who wants to take part in being able to be part of a retreat or an ongoing teacher training that will teach you just what Saraswati has been talking about, and you absolutely need to go to nourishinglife.com. Oh, that's cool. Don't know. Saraswati is making motions not to do that. Well, there you go.

Look who's not accepting love. See, it's everyone, everybody, active work, fighting it off, fighting it off. You don't want it. And it's a, it's a curious, it's a curious thing. And I, and, and but the older you get, the less it can be kind of charming or something to be like a John Wayne style, like a guy or girl. But the older you get, the more you, you, you realize this is like putting a tourniquet around my existence. And why am I doing it? Why can't I, because you see at the retreat, an entire spectrum of people, you see people who have, who are just accepting the love, they're not thinking, what am I doing and why this is, I feel terrible. They're just like, this is awesome. I love this. I get to be here and it's so great. And I feel great. You get those

people, then you get people who have gone from being an I and seem to be more of just, they're not, they are the, the, you know, the love radiators like Ramdas, you know, the people who are just really, really just put you and your yoga class and you, the way you put these whole things together and don't really get any credit for it like you should. And you're assembling the entire thing. Thank you so much for saying that. It's so true. It's huge. It's, it's, it's amazing. But you just do it. You don't, you just do it. So you get these, you get people like you are putting out this thing and then many of the people just attending the retreat are just so authentically beautiful and not in a schlocky, crystal gazing nonsense way. But like, you don't want to be

out of their presence very long because they're so cool and, and, and like Mirabai, like, I'll never forget getting to have dinner with her and just talk. It's not the feeling of like, oh, I am around a truly sacred being. It's like, oh, this is like hanging out with my aunt who I never had. Or this is, I feel like I'm with someone who's in my family. It's the weirdest thing. And so you get this great spectrum, but then in somehow in the midst of all that, you realize like, well, I seem to be completely incapable of digesting this or fully embracing it without either, well, I don't know. It's, there's no reason. It's just like, it's a real fresh, it's a frustration for me. I want to be able to accept it no matter what it is. It's not just the retreat.

It's like anything in general. I think so many people when a thing comes to them that's good, it seems like a trick. It seems like a, I don't know. I've, I don't know. Maybe I hang out with too many comedians. But you guys, this, there is a, an active war raging in the world right now is the most destructive war that has ever happened. And it's been going on forever. And it's the war where people are trying desperately to not accept love from the rest of the world. And when you find yourself on the wrong side of that war, it's like, fuck, God damn it. I don't want to be like, I want to be, I want to be like you guys. I want to be sweet and open and not secretly somewhere inside of me being like, this is all bullshit, right? This is total bullshit. I can't get past

that part. I don't think it is. I don't think it is. I think it's the greatest thing I've ever come in contact with, but I still can't like fully dissolve into it. So sorry for that long rant. Heal me. Well, I mean, does it have to be a race? Does there have to be a timeline? You know, and like, are we measuring like, well, how legitimate is my spiritual practice today? Is it more than yesterday or less than yesterday? I mean, is it like, you know, why can't it just be what it is? You know, and just have fun and ignore yourself. Just have fun and ignore yourself. That is the greatest. That is going to be my new mantra.

That's so cool. But isn't that bad? Isn't family our sticker? Just have fun and ignore yourself. Okay, let me let's break that sentence down. Just have fun. Meaning I bother judging anything. Yeah, yourself. Any thought that happens is not worth one extra thought. What about stop ignoring yourself so that you can actually have fun? Well, you that's the next the first if the stop following the thoughts and then that part of that is just ignoring yourself following the thought. Oh, I got you. So it's not it's not it's like, okay, the neighbor's got an awful dog. The dog's barking so much that I can't enjoy my day. Call the police and then ignore your thoughts after that. Right, right. So it's

just like you just sort of deal with the dog. Let's imagine the dog can't do whatever it is. You got to deal with it. So ignore the dog's thoughts. It's not going away. The actions. Right. So and so you're saying that perhaps the mistake to make would be when these thoughts emerge? Because in that mindfulness book, one of the teachers was saying you grab it and pull it pull it to you. Like when the thought comes you like or like, which is something I've really been enjoying. I've been enjoying doing it. The thought comes with a associated feeling tone. And then while it's there as much as I can, I try to like zoom in on it, put it under a microscope, what is it made of? This is what I've been trying to do. What's it made of? What's the substance

of a thought? Does it have a substance with Joseph Goldstein wrote the book? I would love that. Actually, if you could ever get with him and anyone else out there as a teacher of mindfulness, there isn't any better person in this country. And I would highly suggest inside inside meditation I am s. Yeah, that book has been blowing my mind. But yeah, I mean, it just that's probably not a great thing. You know, there are many different ways to deal with thoughts arising. And the the jacks one seems might might be a little bit better. I don't know. I like I like I like what you're describing because the thought becomes it's like a lead or a tentacle that if you follow it back to its root, you might be able to like unhook it, you know. And so

I mean, what what you're saying is that instead of using the breath or body scan as the focal agent or the you know, you're using the thought itself. Yeah, you're gathering your mind around whatever thought is arise. And you're really holding that rather than going from thought to thought to thought or talking more, you know, having commentary, naming, naming, yeah, naming. But it's it's this naming. Oh, here's the or here's the feeling or whatever it is. And there it is peaking, you can watch it. You know, since I've been doing, you know, you guys know this, you watch it emerge. And it really does like I've been saying, it's like we were snorkeling and we saw a sea turtle sort of go off into the water. And it just goes from being this incredible thing

dot and then it's gone. And it seems like these thoughts have the same kind of process or fluctuation to them. But yeah, it's like when the thing comes in into me, particularly like anger, when it's there, I try to really like zoom in as far as I can into the because I what is it? I mean, I know it's a neurological, it's some combinates some neuro electrical activity that must be happening in some it must be a it must be in it must be inside of my brain. So I then I think, oh, this is what is this is what is that specifically what is the vibration of a thought or a feeling? What is it at its atomic level? What is that thing? Do you know what it is?

Is it I've read that I've heard the term vritti in this yoga sutras of Patanjali. This is like energetic cyclone or something. But is there anything in the scriptures related to or in the teachings related to what is the fundamental composition of a feeling or a thought? What's it made of? I mean, I think that vritti means fluctuation or a twisted or, you know, something like that. But in Chinese medicine, I mean, if we can go to that place, you know, each emotion has a different frequency. It has a just like, you know, it vibrates in a certain way in our body. And, you know, people have different constitutions, given, you know, the line of people that they came from. And so once you take a body, yes, you know, when you're not in a body, you don't have

so much of that. But once you take a body, then you're going to, you know, have all of the whole range of experience with your constitution leaning you off in a particular vibration. Okay, got it. Yeah, sure. Like that. I mean, sure. That's how that's how we think about it and then work to antidote that with opposing vibrations or opposing vibrations. How do you do that? I mean, it's a little more complicated than this, this moment. But, you know, what I'm talking about is a system of the five elements and figuring out which, you know, is part of what I do and part of what I weave into a yoga practice actually is working through the five elements towards that goal of wholism, that health being whole being integration like that.

So we work through all the different vibratory experiences of which emotion is truly, truly a vibration and just one more quick point. I think it's so interesting and I love this analogy. The ancient ones would describe emotions. They would equate them to weather patterns like, oh, there's a storm rolling through, and then it's rolling out like it's not me, and it's not of me. It's the thing that's passing through. I get that. I like that. I like that too. Is it so easy to feel like I am this anger when it's actually just, it's a storm passing through? Yeah, no, yeah, it feels like that. When you watch it, it feels exactly like that. And it feels the other shocking thing I've been getting from this is how you really

start realizing how natural you are. Like you start realizing how the sound of your breath going in and out of your nose, it sounds like when you're listening to wind coming in on the beach, or when you're in wilderness and like winds rolling through a forest, and then you realize, oh, that is what I am. I'm just a moving version of it. But that's pretty shocking. So I do get why I love that you're using the elements, because that's something that has been coming to me lately is it sounds so weird, but how natural of nature that I am. And when you're not meditating, or when you're sort of in your head a bunch, you don't even, you feel completely separated from that idea. And I know you don't have time to explain it now. We're probably already going over the

time that you guys have, but so we would say anger is a fiery feeling, maybe. It certainly belongs to an aggressive energy. We can put it there and typically anger, resentment, even sometimes depression, you know, like something, energy not moving or either being stuck, you know, like that, or it can anger, sometimes really moves outward and moves outward fast. So an aggressive, either a blocked energy or an aggressive energy. And so they're very predictable. So you figure out, is this blocked? Is this aggressive? What kind of anger is it? Exactly. And then we know we can very predictably figure out which energy lines that is, you know, manifesting in. An energy line in your body. Yeah. An energy line in your body. And then we give asana and pranayama and sounding, you

know, when you make sound like chanting, it sends a vibration. So which chakra, you know, it's all this whole mapping. I think you should take the teacher training program that she's giving. I would love to. That's really cool. What you're talking about is really cool, man. That is alchemical, heavy alchemical. That's magic. That is like that reminds me of Crowley. It reminds me that's high magic that you're talking about there. That's super cool. And so detailed. And this is where does this come from? It's Taoist pretty much Taoist, but it's really, it's blended in with yoga. Because I love, you know, I mean, Taoists, they talked a lot about, you know, Lao Tzu, the Dao De Ching, the Yi Ching, all of those, all of those works. But what I get from

yoga, bhakti yoga, you know, these feeling states, this sort of, it's, I had to combine the two, you know, I had to combine the two. And so that's really where the two traditions and there's, it's Taoism meets bhakti yoga. It is. That's the yoga. And honestly, a good amount of Buddhist ideology is in there as well. Whoa, cool. There'll be 50 women in the class. Oh, Duncan, I can't do that. Have you been investigating this in previous podcast? Have you been this, this line of, yes, this line of, well, a little bit in the one that I did before a little bit, but I, you know, I have sort of after the retreat, I decided that I was going to try to do the work and start a real practice as opposed to a reading style practice or a

contemplation, distant, vague thinking about, about the stuff you guys talk about once every couple of days, move that into a, okay, I'm going to try to sit every day. And then I'm going to, it was much as I can follow my breath throughout the day. And then I've been pulling it off, not completely. I've missed days of meditation, but it's still a, I've been made an active intention to like do it. Have you shared this with your listeners? I don't, I don't know. I don't know if I've sort of, I mean, they're going to, yeah, I don't know that I've completely, I haven't been talking about the fact that I've been, I haven't yet to talk about the fact that I've been trying to, I've been trying to accelerate my meditation practice much, but I

have been doing that since the retreat. Walk the talk. Yeah. Yeah. And move it from the mind into the heart where it can really, where the transformation really can take place. That's it. Yeah. And that's it. And you're all over the spiritual circuit now too. You know that with Tammy Simon, you did a... Oh yeah. Sounds true. Yeah. And she's got a whole thing. It's like couching it and you're giving specific teachings in this particular thing. Unsounds true. Yeah. You see, that's the problem. Well, you know what? I don't think it is because, you know, what you and I, what we talked about just before we started this show was about authenticity and how that there's a place that you can drop into

that sort of, that you don't even like to think about so much. I was talking about that also because I don't remember always what I say when I teach and that it's like a well. That's how I know the podcast has been good is I don't remember what we talked about. Yeah. So there's like this well and authenticity I think is you can speak to that really nicely, you know? Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, the whole tapestry of it. I mean, authenticity doesn't necessarily mean that things always feel good. You know, as you talk about this, and I agree with you, I think anyone can tune into a higher consciousness and things can come out of them that are amazing. And if you ask, you know, if you ask Jimi Hendrix what was happening when he was out there playing

guitar, he's not, I bet he wouldn't be like, I'm just really good. I'm just a great, really, really good. He's something else is coming through him, something else is coming through. And God forgive me, please, oh great Lord in heaven and all gods that exist forever, even remotely comparing myself to Jimi Hendrix. I didn't mean to do that. I just felt as I did that. But in a very, very deep, deep, low level, like all beings on earth could tune into this thing and it'll come out of you if you just get out of the way enough for sure. I believe that. That's what he used to say, by the way. What? Exactly that. I don't do anything. I'm just getting out of the way. All of anybody who it happens to is that's the only thing. I just have to say,

I saw Jimi Hendrix live. You wouldn't think that being good. That is so cool. Yeah, well, I think maybe, I'm not quite sure, early. I was young, four maybe. But apparently, well, it's because Jimi Hendrix opened for the monkeys. And I wanted to see the monkeys. Yeah. That's amazing. Well, you know. So I know about this, but you know the term physician heal thyself. You know that term? Or something Jesus said is, take the, before you try to get the stick out of your neighbor's eye, take the log out of your eye. And I do, I love talking about this stuff. And I've said before that a lot of what I do, I think, is just regurgitating stuff that I've read. And I think I'm okay at like regurgitation, but

I think it'd be really cool to actually have that transformation that it seems like a lot of you have done or, and I know there's no spiritual hierarchy. And I know we're all the same. And I know it's all one. I know, I know. But if you go to the gym enough, you get in shape. And it's undeniable that you're in shape. And it's undeniable. So there is a hierarchy in that part of the world. And there is a hierarchy that in comedy, if you go on stage enough, you'll start getting funnier and funnier and funnier. And if you're a painter, if you paint enough, you'll become a better painter. So I think I don't see if I don't understand exactly why that wouldn't apply to the concept of meditation as well. So maybe there is a kind of hierarchy, but

what I'm saying is it'd be really cool to not be a regurgitator anymore. I would love that to not just be someone who was vomiting up something that was already good before I ate it mixed in with my own. We're against regurgitators. Let's do that too. What's that? We're against regurgitators. Yeah. We're going to do a whole. Well, what is it you say, Raghur? You say that you've gotten part of something like you've gotten really good at thinking less about yourself. You're the best at it. Obviously, I see that they... Absolutely. I mean, I have gotten over the years certainly less attached to my thoughts, emotions, all of that. I'm not following them the way that I used to. And I'm not at using them like, you know, when you get angry, you're talking

about angry, which, you know, that happens to me. That's been my biggest pain. We've talked about it before. Yeah. And when you get angry, even if it's, you're just over something stupid and you're not that angry, you know, your computer did something and then suddenly you get enraged. Yes. You take everything in your whole life and you're going down that path. Yes. Of wanting to kill yourself. Yes. And anybody around you. Yes. That is just supreme indulgence. So after a while, you get that and you don't go down there. You actually just stop. You don't go down. That's so cool. Because you know it's okay. That's that bullshit. I'm not going to do that. That's just like a crack pipe. That's like taking a head off of a crack pipe. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, what you're saying is

absolutely right. Practice makes perfect. Yes. And when we do that, again, you know, our friend Krishnadas will say something nice about he did say, you know, of course, he's great and all, but he did say something and it was about grace. Another shitty word out there, right? Yes. Oh, one of the words guru grace or, you know, when surrender, when Ramdas came first came back from India, right? After going there to try and find out what the hell everything was about, because acid wasn't doing the total thing. He came back and he said, you know, there's, I have a, I'm going to have a hard time. You're going to have a hard time because I'm going to have to talk about several things that are just absolutely unheard of in this lexicon in the West. Right. Guru grace

surrender. Yeah. Can't talk, you know, of course, and then he went on and talked about it. And he talked about him in a way that you get it. Okay. It wasn't about you. It wasn't about you. Surrender wasn't about you getting grace, you know, that the you was taken out of it as he went through all this stuff. So, you know, I think it's really important to that once you get that you and you do that. So, you can do there's nothing to do but do this practice. So, what he said was grace is like when it rains. Okay. Grace is cupping your hand practice rather. I'm sorry. Sorry. Practice is cupping your hands together so you catch the rain. Wow. Okay. That's what it is. And if you don't practice, you just get wet. That's bad. That's so good. And that's how the movie ends. I don't

tell you, I can't say how a movie ends. Spoiler. Not a dramatic movie, but I'm saying this these cultivating series and I highly tout them as something else to tell you. I thought you were talking about interest interstellar. No, no, no. Okay. On ramdas.org, there are three cultivating movies cultivating movies. And the last one was cultivating grace and transforming suffering. And it really is great. And in that he really is able in a poetic way as you know, Christian does. Yeah. Yeah. Say what that is. And what you're saying is exactly what it is. We just had a screening else to do, but practice. And it's not you can't think you're going to get anywhere. But of course, just like going to the gym, you're going to get stronger. But ultimately, I got to say though,

I think you're kind of screwed. Why? Because I think like we're like we're all screwed. It's like once you turn towards the Dharma and this sort of like occurs to you to be true, like there's something in that direction for me. I don't think you can close the door on it. You can't. So I mean in that way, I think you're you know, I think you're kind of screwed. You guys, thank you so much. I'm so grateful to get to be friends with you and to have I just feel so lucky that I get to have this kind of interaction with anybody. So thank you so much because both of you are my teachers for real. And I'm very grateful to know it isn't you. Why do you always fight that? Because this is why you know, this was the same as me, you know,

the cutoff, you know, you should take it. And I think you should start talking. You should slap me around. Well, I love you guys. And thank you for being on the show. Really? I'm going to have links to your class, links to these videos that you're just talking about. And any other I'll have all ways to contact you on the comment section of this website. And Harikrishna, thank you so much. Alright, Ram Ram. Thank you, Duncan. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening, pals. That was Raghu Marcus and Sarah Swati Marcus. You can find out more about Raghu by going to theminepodnetwork.com or by heading over to ramdas.org or by listening to his podcast Mind Rolling, which is on the Mind Pod Network. And you can find out more about Sarah Swati by

going to nourishinglife.com. Also, a big thank you to harrys.com. If you go to harrys and use the coupon code family hour, you're going to get $5 off some of the sweetest razors God ever slung down from heaven. If you like this podcast, please give us a nice rating on iTunes. Bookmark our Amazon link and give your dogs more bath than you're giving them time. We got some great podcasts coming up. Dr. Drew is coming back on the podcast. Maja the White Witch is coming on the podcast. And a great many other fascinating guests are in the queue. Hare Krishna. you