Rev Left Radio - Awakening from the Dream of Separateness

Episode Date: August 15, 2021

Lauritz Marquardt (aka Conscious Development on YT) joins Breht to discuss the spiritual path toward awakening and his experiences on the path.  Topics include: Buddhist philosophy, Lauritz's awakening experiences, the illusion of a separate self, what enlightenment really is, how spiritual practice informs political struggle, and much more.  Find Lauritz's YT channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/ConsciousDevelopment Find his website here: http://www.lauritzm.com Find the video discussed in the episode here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXHtG93d06I&ab_channel=ConsciousDevelopment ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have my friend Loritz from Germany. He actually is based out of Dusseldorf, Germany. He's also the creator of a YouTube channel called Conscious Development, in which I stumbled across his YouTube channel randomly, and it's basically a channel in which he, just in a very down-to-earth and open and on-eastern, this way discusses his experiences and his insights on his own spiritual path, rooted, I think mostly

in Buddhism. And I just, I love the channel. I reached out to him. I got him to come on the show and we have this fascinating, wide-ranging discussion on spirituality, his own experiences with insight and awakening on the path, some of the obstacles of spirituality. And then at the end, we talk, as always, with this show about politics and climate change and tie in the spiritual element to those topics as well. So this is just a fascinating, really fun conversation that I think a lot of you will get a lot out of. And as always, if you like this conversation, you can check out Lawrence's YouTube channel Conscious Development, which I'll link to in the show notes.

And as always as well, if you like what we do here at Revlift Radio, you can join us and support us on patreon. com forward slash rev left radio and in exchange for a monthly donation you get access to bonus content so without further ado here is my conversation on a wide range of topics with a loritz from conscious development enjoy my name is laurice markup and i run the youtube channel conscious development and basically my background is that I started meditating about nine years ago and had some pretty significant shifts in my perspective onto the world and my work started basically from there putting all of these insights into videos and so yeah that's how you found my content and how we ended up here on the podcast.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to have you on. As I was saying before we recorded, I just sort of stumbled across your YouTube channel randomly one day and really liked it. I thought it was an interesting, very down-to-earth approach to the whole thing. No airs about you. And that was something that drew me in. And so I reached out and it worked out.

You mentioned that you started meditating about nine or ten years ago. Can you talk about sort of why you got into? into spirituality, what initiated that interest, and then sort of what tradition or traditions you operate in or influenced by? Yeah, that's a good start because it's resembled, I think, how many people come to the spiritual path when they are from, like, Western countries. Before I discovered meditation, it was that I started, I studied mechanical engineering, and so I was very much into physics and math and into this whole worldview where you think

that there is the fundamental reality out there and you perceive a physical universe. And during my studies, I don't remember exactly why, but I ended up consuming magic mushrooms. and that basically completely showed me that this whole model of reality could not possibly be true and yeah that's how my path started on to discovering spiritual teachings and especially practices like meditation and mindfulness in your videos you know you don't really you don't overemphasize a certain tradition and for a while I was like I'm not exactly, I know he's into meditation and Buddhism probably.

Do you have specific traditions or are you just sort of like take what you find useful from the broader spiritual milieu? Yeah, more the second. So I take from many different traditions, but most of my experiences are well represented in Buddhism. And to some degree also in, Vedantic teachings. And so, yeah, that's what I found in not from the beginning when I stumbled upon the

teachings first and there were insights resulted from that. But it was more so looking for an explanation for what was happening in my experience. And so I went into this whole endeavor very much without any idea because also my family, My parents, they are not spiritual in any sense. They are not religious even. And so I had no idea of this whole spiritual concept. And that's also probably why in my videos it's not like a very clear undertone of one specific tradition. Yeah, it's really interesting.

There's some interesting similarities between you and I and how we got into. And I think it's broadly true that a lot of people stumble into spirituality, through a psychedelic experience. I've talked about it on this show many times, but I had a very intense experience on mushrooms when I was 16, sort of very naive. Me and my friend each got, you know, 3.5 grams, and he backed out at the last minute,

so I took his and mine for a total of seven grams. And I was 16, and I hadn't even, you know, drinking alcohol, really, at that point. And I had this incredible experience of subject, object, collapse. which at that point, I didn't even have the words to describe, but I laid down and looked into the night sky and felt as if the stars were raining into me, and there was literally no distance between me and the stars. And I just had this insane experience, and at 16, I really didn't know what to make of it. And it was only a couple years later when I was working at this catering business,

just hauling kegs around town for parties and stuff. One of my coworkers handed me a bunch of Alan Watts CDs. and as, you know, I was 18, 19 years old and sort of listening to that and then I was just, I was like, oh, this actually resonates with that experience I had a few years earlier and that sort of snowballed into a much more in-depth exploration of specifically Buddhism, but, you know, Taoism, Hinduism, mysticism more broadly are certainly all influences. Do you, did you have any, or do you have any, like, teachers or specific influences that were really important for you? you started getting into it, anybody stand out to you? Yeah, that's so interesting that your story so closely resembles my own. Because for me, it was also Ellen Watts, that was the first person that introduced me to these Eastern ideas because, yeah, he basically translated many of those Buddhist ideas into our Western understanding.

And so, yeah, I find that many people when they first get in touch with this quote unquote spiritual material that Alan Watts is a great first step for them because it's really easy for us to understand. And so, yeah, he also had a great influence on how I perceive the Buddhist ideas or the Eastern ideas to be very much matching what I experienced. And so, yeah, I had a similar entry to this as you had. That's wonderful. Yeah, I was also, you know, and you mentioned being into like engineering and mathematics and science. And I come out of a philosophy background. I just have a bachelor's degree in philosophy. But I was very interested in science.

And I went through a very intense atheist phase. Did you tie in your atheism to your interest in science? You mentioned your parents are both non-religious. Were you sort of atheist? before this, or did you just not really have any religious orientation? Yeah, that's also something I had a deep insight on much later, because at that time I wasn't really aware about what my worldview regarding God or religion really was. It was more of like, at that time, I wasn't really aware really of what this means for people

if they hold such beliefs, what it really does to your way you see the world, and what it did to mine if I didn't have that perspective. And so I didn't call myself atheistic, but in a sense, there wasn't this lens for me. It was purely scientific, like there was this big bang, and then the universe started, and this is out there, and that's real. Here I am this human in this vast universe, and, you know, that's basically, I think, how most people perceive the world, even though they may be Christian or Muslim or other religions. But I think they still, for the majority, they still have this view. Yeah, absolutely.

So I want to shift the conversation and talk about an experience that you had earlier that you documented on your YouTube page. I think he was earlier this year, actually, and I was sort of very interested when that video came out. I was like, you know, watching it in rapt attention. Like, I want, you know, this is very interesting how he's putting into words this experience. And it was very clear that this experience was intense, by the way, you know, you were trying to put it into words, which in and of itself is quite a challenge. So can you talk about this awakening experience that you had earlier this year and just sort of walk us through what happened exactly? Yeah. in a sense it's as you already touched upon it's mostly impossible actually to put it into words

because that's the fundamental nature of yeah what you call an awakening experience it is really the transcendence of all conceptual thinking and so whenever you hear now something that I say about this experience, it's important to recognize that it's happening on a different level because I have to use concepts, I have to use words, language, and use these concepts that are already present within our understanding to basically point to something that is not contained within a conceptual understanding. but all of that as a just as a introduction or as a background for what i'm going to say about this experience that means they are only half truths so yeah they can pick up something from that but it's not the experience in and of itself yeah and so this experience never really stopped since then it's still informing like every moment of experience that I'm having but the intensity has vanished a little bit and so in that experience and I try to capture it in video format as you

mentioned it's a feeling of melting into that which is happening from moment to moment and yeah it's difficult to describe but it's the very real sense that everything that's perceived is part of your body you could say or that every perspective every thing that you see is just an expression of who you are and that it's not separate from from what you usually think you are but that is an illusion and that's why it has dissolved so it's it's a dissolving of illusory understandings of the world and that's also that all ties up into what awakening actually means but awakening is also something that can happen in different steps so there's not this one awakening and that's also very where it gets confused

because people talk differently about it and you never know if the other person has had the same experience as what you call awakening because it's always you can wake up to a greater truth. There's also like this final awakening, but basically every awakening is a shedding of illusory beliefs and really the final. awakening comes when we stop believing in anything, and we see only what's true. And that's also why spirituality is such a long process, usually, because we have many layers of these beliefs, and that's also why I, for example, still meditate after this awakening, because I still see in myself many beliefs that I still have to work through and let go and maybe even discover more beliefs

that I'm not actually aware of right now. Yeah, that's basically how I would put this experience into words. Oh, yeah, one maybe very significant part of this experience was also that there was no inner monologue anymore. That's what's different from that experience to my experience right now for example because this kind of then restarted my thoughts came back and tried to make sense of the experience but in the moment there was like no conceptualization of what was experienced yeah very interesting so you you frame it as as layers of belief another

way to put it and correct me if I'm wrong is sort of layers of identification with certain views, opinions, et cetera. And you mentioned this idea of melting into the whole, the loss of a sense of separateness. And we talk about it as a sort of the separate sense of self that, you know, people walk around the world feeling as if they are ultimately located somewhere up in their head, behind their eyes, between their ears, looking out at a world that is fundamentally separate from them. And that is the ultimate illusion that is, seen through in moments of awakening or insight. And in fact, when you start analyzing your thoughts in meditation practice, you realize that there's not a thinker that is thinking the thoughts,

but rather the thinker is created through the veil of constant inner thinking. It's a product of thought, not the author of them. And so the fact that when you had this awakening experience, your entire inner dialogue dropped away at least momentarily is interesting. And, you know, I've listened and talked to many people that, you know, are credibly very far down on this path and have had, you know, credible awakening experiences or, you know, in some cases, claim to have been fully enlightened in some sense, and in so far as that's even possible. And they all say that it's a continuing process. And I think that's one of the big misunderstandings about enlightenment or awakening or spirituality is that you do these practices and then all

a sudden boom, you know, some huge revelation goes off and you are forever changed into some sort of, you know, guru type person or whatever. And that's just not the case in almost all instances. It is this, you know, moment of insight and then this attempt by the ego to reappropriate that experience, but with less of its tools that it had before. and slowly you continue to practice and more and more layers of identification fall away. Do you think what I've said there is more or less fair and in line with what you experienced? Yeah, totally. I agree with all of that.

And I would add to it that what you said, that it is not going to happen in an instant early on at least, maybe after many years of discovering these beliefs and basically destroying them through discovering them as false belief then maybe after many many years like the final real enlightenment that can happen in an instant

but why it doesn't happen early on this as you said it has many layers this ego that we identify with it's not just one single simple belief that we can discover and see as false and then it all breaks down it's a very, very strong structure. It's a very strong mental structure that we usually have spent our whole lives building up, usually very unconsciously.

Like from the early childhood on, we picked up all the ideas from our environment, and this whole structure has been built for decades, probably. When you discover spirituality, you're in your 20s or 30s. and then it's a very strong structure. And yeah, as we both discovered this through something like magic mushrooms, that's one of the most powerful ways to momentarily transcend all of the ego structure and all of the beliefs involved. Because in these very strong trips, you have no more access to those concepts.

you, I'm sure you experience that at some point, you're no longer able to use these concepts to interact with the world. And then something that lies beneath all of that is revealed. But then, yeah, you come back from the trip and usually eustructure reemerges, sometimes even stronger than it has been before. And, yeah, you're back in your normal everyday awareness. the clear understanding that all of that you have the memory of what just happened and yeah that's how it usually starts yeah for for me with with any psychedelic um you know DMT acid mushrooms etc as you say there is like this the actual experience and then the re fortification of the self afterwards um but you know i have found in my most intense and worthwhile trips that even though the

ego completely and utterly reforms after the trip has passed, it's loosened the bolts on the ego a little bit. You've sort of at least momentarily seen the absurdity of the ego multiple times when I've been on a psychedelic trip. I have laughed. I started by myself just laughing out loud at the absurdity of how insecure and trembling and desperate that the ego is. And so even when you come out of it and it re-fortifies itself, there's still this sense of like you just take it a little less seriously. That's probably not always true. I'm sure there are people that could have experiences and because of their background psychology come out with a deformed ego or something else. But for me, it's been like a loosening of the bolts of the ego.

But I quickly realized as somebody like Ram Dass talks about very openly who has, who experimented intensely with psychedelics thinking that they were going to be the road. to enlightenment, you know, hundreds and hundreds of heroic trips, and he eventually came to the realization that this gives me a peek into what could be, a peek into an element of consciousness and reality, but in and of itself, these are not going to give me anything like a permanent reorientation of my perception of reality and myself. And there's, with any high, there's always the coming back down, and then that spurred him on to this, you know, grand spiritual adventure where he went to the India and, you know, trained under teachers and gurus and spent a lot of time in meditation, et cetera. And I think I think that's what psychedelics do. They can't

offer you the full thing that spirituality, a dedicated long-term spiritual practice can, but they provide a glimpse to you. And then that can open up the entire spiritual realm. And I think the reason my psychedelics are so often that impetus for people is precisely because it kicks open the door just a little bit and then when that door closes you realize that there is a door to be opened and that spirituality is probably the more you know efficient long-term sustainable way to actually go about getting those insights yeah um i would definitely agree on that um but maybe add a twist on what you said sure um and that is psychedelics they don't show you truth directly they do it indirectly In my experience, at least, they do it by changing the experience that you are having to such a degree that all of what you thought you were no longer make sense.

But for me, they also lacked the clarity and directness of true knowing that, for example, a clear-minded awakening experience in a sober. state have. Fundamentally, I think, a different mechanism. Because they are so crazy, the experience is so different, so unimaginable to the normal everyday ego state. That's why you realize how much of what you thought and believed isn't true. But they have the tendency to make you also believe other things. and in true spirituality, beliefs are not the end goal.

The end goal is actually true, which means letting go of any belief, of every belief. And while psychedelics may help, they also have the danger of being a trap in the long run. Absolutely. Yeah, I completely agree with that as well. And, yeah, there's more to be said there, but I would like to move on with the conversation and specifically about this one experience. I'll link to the video that you did on it in the show notes for people who want to dive a little deeper

into that particular experience. But I am interested in sort of what led up to that moment of insight and awakening, sort of like how long and how intensely had you been meditating before it happened. You mentioned nine years, but five minutes a day versus four hours a day are very different over nine years.

I'm just wondering sort of what led up to that and how intense the practice was leading up into it. of course it varied over the years i had my phases where i meditated a lot more and then other phases where some other things in my life had more priority um but in general for the majority of the time except for maybe a few weeks here and there i meditate for about an hour to 90 minutes a day So that's as a, like, yeah, real dedicated practice foundation, you could say. But then really one technique that has basically been another foundational piece for me is mindfulness practice. And I discovered this really early on that, like, being present with what you experience from moment to moment is very

important practice. For me, it was in the beginning because I wanted to learn lucid dreaming. But that practice is really where I, you could say, which I do most for the longest period of time in a day, because you can do it while you do other things. It has maybe not the same intensity as like a dedicated hour of meditation, but it has many other benefits. And so I didn't really do anything particularly different for that experience of awakening because it just happened and it has happened a couple of times before that and I think actually that was the reason also why I was able to remain relatively calm and take the camera and actually try to communicate what is happening to me because some other experiences before that I really

was like panicking because the first times you experience that you are or what you think you are is dissolving in front of your eyes that can be kind of unsettling yeah and so yeah there was nothing special i did to facilitate this experience and i'm not even sure you can actually do that in my experience it just happens more or less randomly and maybe your practice is just making your mind or just makes the foundation for that to happen so yeah yeah yeah that's interesting I've heard it put this way as like you know it's it's enlightenment awakening up awakening experiences these things cannot be controlled by your will and in fact that's the fundamental illusion that these experiences reveal to be illusions. But by meditation, you know,

it sort of happens by accident, if you will. But by practicing these spiritual practices, it's been said that you make yourself more accident prone. So like, you know, if enlightenment is falling through an icy lake, meditation practice walks from the shores of the lake into the middle where the ice is the weakest and you don't have any control of when that ice breaks and no understanding of how really firm it is underneath, but you're sort of making, you're setting up a situation where it's more likely to happen, that accident is more likely to happen based on your practices.

But there's no ability to control this. There's no like, if I strive and do this practice, it will happen by this time, et cetera. I always like that icy lake metaphor. Yeah, that matches my experience with them. You said it was a little scary and that you've had those before. And what exact, and I've heard this a lot with people that have these awakening experiences is that the first one or two, the first few can be very sort of scary and disorienting.

Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Because I find it very interesting. Yeah. When this happens, it's like you try to resist it. You feel that you yourself, which you identified with, with as not the real self, but the perspective that you currently are or have the ego, we can say. That is a resistance, actually, an inherent resistance to the momentary flow of experience. It is, you could also say, interpreting, trying to control what is actually just flowing.

And when this resistance drops away, this panic is arising and then causing an inner feeling of resistance to, that is trying to reemerge. But it actually cannot do that because it has just realized that it is non-existent. So it's a little bit, yeah, it's trying to do something that's impossible. and you fully well know that in that moment and you realize it and you try to hold on and it slips through your fingers and it's just you have to let go and relax and relax into the experience and then there's nothing there's nothing bad happening actually but it doesn't feel to you when you see it at first and then after this moment of the the sort of the attempt to like kind of think of it as like you're in this you know rapacious river recurrent and you're trying to grab onto the water to stand still. But it's a futile thing and you can't actually be efficacious in your attempt anyway. But then if by letting go and you know, you sort of see this this in psychedelic trips as well. Like, you know, if it gets bumpy, just float downstream, let go. Don't try to control your experience, et cetera. And that can be interesting practice maybe

for a moment like this. But when you do let go and that panic sort of subsides, what's on the other side of that what what is the experience once the the panic has sort of washed away yeah um then was actually the first time revealed to me in this last instance where such a like deep cessation happened is that this once you can let go of this fear of letting go and just go with the experience it leads to a state of beautiful clarity it's like you are just content with the emptiness. It's like you're looking at yourself for the first time, at your real self, and you see how beautiful the design is.

It's like the most beautifully designed thing that you could ever imagine and with all of your understanding and sense of the world, you are that. and it's so clear and then you just rest fully happy and content within that realization. And that's, you know, what I felt in this last deep awakening. And then you mentioned that your inner dialogue sort of slowly comes back. Your ego tries to reformulate in the wake of such an experience. Can you talk about sort of what's happened since?

Has it deepened? Has there been challenges in its wake? um have have you sort of has the ego fully reestablished itself i'm just sort of interested in what's happened since because it's been uh several months i think since you've had that experience as i mentioned i feel it hasn't really um gone all the way back because somehow my inner state has shifted into um i feel much more connected to my experience much more engaged counterintuitively i feel more happy but i also cry more often since then i feel like the experience I'm having, even though I know it's like empty of inherent existence, it feels much more immediate, more personal.

And yeah, my practice has also, I have gained a newfound motivation to do it, to explore different techniques or different styles of meditation and see how I can like really implement more. what I experienced there into my day-to-day, yeah, mode of existing. And so while the inner dialogue has returned, still something has remained. And I think some beliefs that I hold or have been holding unconsciously have somehow dissolved from this larger ego structure that I see the world through. yeah and that that whole idea is in line with this multiple layers of like sort of working through these layers and so you know maybe the you know just to be sort of crude about it the top three layers have fallen off but you still have you know an indefinite amount to go whatever number that may

be and so you're sort of making progress in that sense some things have been fully uprooted but there's still more work to do and that's in line with everything i've heard from accomplished buddhist practitioners. I did want to say about the tier thing because that's something that really resonates with me. And I think it was, I can't remember if it was a Ajajan, a Jack Cornfield's teacher. He always says this thing where if you haven't like wept, then you haven't really, you haven't started meditation in earnest. And while I don't know if I've experienced the, you know, radical openings that, that you're describing here, certainly on a smaller scale, I've had these little shifts and these moments of insight, and I've found that when I started meditating all the way up until to today, the tears, the sort of the weeping comes out at sort of unexpected times, and it's not a sad thing. For me, it's often, and maybe you have a little different experience of this, but for me it's often rooted in compassion for others. I've been practicing for about 10 years, and this sense that a suffering of another person, even a

complete and total stranger, even just somebody I hear on the radio or see on TV halfway across the world who is crying because a bomb destroyed, like killed their child or they're in the wake of a natural disaster and they lost a family member. I can no longer cut myself off psychologically from that suffering. And it brings out this sort of ocean of tears within me and this deep sense of connection with that person and this deep sense of wanting to alleviate the suffering of all beings and so i think that that's interesting when your tears sort of come is it related to compassion or is it related to the immediacy and attention and intensity of your moment-to-moment experience how would you frame that um yeah it's similar to what you described it's um more

of a deeper sense of beauty with the experience, even though the content itself may be tragic. It's feeling the immediate pain with the person or with the world, but also seeing the underlying beauty. Because that was what has maybe this experience has facilitated it, but it has, I've noticed it since then, is this underlying clarity of my true self, you could say, is shining through all experiences more. And so I'm mostly crying when it happens because of beauty. The last example is I'm not really a huge sports fan, but I watched some of the Olympics lately.

And the people that are like, they are really involved in their sports. and they suffer for it but also they feel great joy when they win and in the past it never happened that I like so and that I watched this so engaged and I had to like really I could feel what they were feeling in those moments and I had to like cry for just for the joy of like people engaging in these sports events and yeah so that is really a very newfound connection to experience for me. Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think even if we have a little different experience of it, they're both rooted in a deep

connection and an inability to feel separate from the trials and tribulations of other beings. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's the shared. Have you ever struggled, because I'm interested in this particularly, and this actually part of what got me into spirituality is suffering, which is a very common doorway for people. and I've struggled with anxiety and depression my entire life and have always seen my spiritual practice

as a way of at least engaging with that on a deeper level, if not totally overcoming it. Have you ever struggled with those things? And if so, how has your spiritual practice impacted them? And if not, that's totally fine. I'm just curious. Yeah, my whole journey also probably before even discovering spirituality involved

as it has probably for everyone in his or her life at some point involved some suffering. And this you found perspective on that spirituality gives is deeply helpful in those moments of suffering because they are no longer the suffering that you experience them for previously or that you thought they were because really what this worked after your suffering is it reveals

the many layers that are to the experience that we call suffering and it's not all inherent in the experience itself in Buddhism they call it the second arrow or

avoiding the second arrow and that just means that with mindfulness and present awareness you avoid many of the downstream effects of a painful event which we cannot avoid like we have these experiences in our lives if that's physical or emotional pain that are probably going to happen to everyone at some point in their lives and so that cannot be avoided but much of the actual suffering is not in that experience itself but it comes from what we make of that experience and discovering that that is in our that we have the

ability to modulate that and really reduce our suffering through how we see it that's one of the greatest benefits of spiritual work very well said and it completely resonates with my experience as well and it's transformed my experience moment to moment of some of the more you know negative emotional states like anxiety, like depression, like anger, to not add, as you would say, that second arrow of trying to get out of it, trying to writhe under it, trying to escape it, looking forward into the next few moments and anticipating that pain to continue, but actually just being with it in the present moment as a sensation in the body and just reducing it to that and experiencing it.

It's not running away from it. It's quite the opposite. It's completely and fully being present with it. And that shift, that move, reorient your relationship to it. It doesn't, as you say, eradicate all suffering. And it's not like when you have these awakening experiences, you never have a negative emotion again. You know, that's sort of some of the misunderstandings that people can have about it.

But it does reorient your relationship to that suffering in such a way that you don't compound it. You don't add to it unnecessarily, which, you know, most people do most of the time. Yeah, and that's also especially true for just everyday experience with, like, the minor struggles we have, if that's a fight with the co-worker or with the boss or with other people that we are interacting with. Because what happens when you have these difficult situations? Usually, that's the one thing you think about for the rest of your day.

if it's a major bad experience that you're having, that's not actually anything bad or painful in itself, but you make it that because you are thinking about it for the rest of your week or so. And that's the whole story created around these really just conceptualizations we do of our experience. And so, yeah, many, many of the uncomfortable experiences we have in our daily life can be avoided through this consciousness work.

Totally. Can you talk about some of the challenges you've faced on the path? Because I've had spiritual practitioners, many Buddhists on the show, and we've discussed things like the Dark Night of the Soul, and I've been open about some of my spiritual sort of dark periods on the path, and I had some really interesting sort of perspectives on what the Dark Night is, is and how it often is this sort of unavoidable aspect of the path. And as you're ripping these layers of identification and repression away, things often will

bubble up that might take you by surprise that you didn't even know were there because part of the awakening experience is to fully face what is there and not to repress or escape or look away from the reality moment to moment. So have you experienced anything like this? any challenges, anything akin to the dark night of the soul, for instance? Yeah, I have, but I have only discovered the concepts around such experiences much later and learned about what this is, that this is actually something that's known about and talked about in spiritual circles.

But, yeah, where do I start? This is, because I find this is a really important topic, because many people who have experiences of awakening or of deeper understanding of actually true characteristics of this world they are they shy away from it or to pursue it further because it is it's emotionally difficult because it involves these emotionally difficult experiences from time to time and maybe in the most general sense for me what it has done it has really kind of robbed me of my vision for my life because yeah when I when you get out of school and you

start to study and then I studied mechanical engineering and was completely into this whole materialistic worldview where like your house and your car and wife and kids and this will make you happy like this is this was my understanding my whole life was like kind of directed towards like I had this vision of one day I will be driving this nice BMW electric car and you know you have all this idea about your life

and then you have this insight into truth and it's like okay all of that's kind of going out of the window it's like not worth pursuing anymore and that can be very unsettling and for me it was I'm no longer struggling with it but I definitely struggle with it for a couple

of years because you feel kind of lost. Maybe you have also experienced this, that what seemed meaningful before is no longer worth pursuing, no longer worth putting your energy and effort into, because you see how illusory it is. But all of that said, usually when you are seriously on this path and you don't shy away from maybe even some more of these difficult experiences. In the long run, it will all be replaced by something more genuine, by something more true or more closer to truth.

And in my experience, it will make you happier. And so, yeah, it's definitely something that's happening to people and that can be very unsettling. But to go into the details about what to do in such cases, I think that to really make that, to give it the attention, the topic needs, I think would be too much for now. Totally. Yeah, and there's lots of resources out there. There's Willoughby Britain does interesting work on this.

You can just search Dark Night of the Soul, spirituality, and come up with some interesting stuff if you want to dive deeper into that aspect of it, which, you know, has sometimes been neglected in spiritual communities, especially with a lot of naivete around, you know, if I do these spiritual practices, I'll just get happier and happier and better and better until one day I'm perfect. And that's sort of naive. And it's worth deconstructing that for people that are genuinely interested in the path to get rid of some of those illusions from the outset.

I'm wondering, though, do you seem, and maybe I'm wrong, and I can only get so much from your YouTube channel, that more or less you're sort of on the path alone, but I don't know, like, do you have teachers? Do you study under somebody? Do you have a spiritual community? I live out here in Omaha, Nebraska, in the middle of Red State America. And while there are some resources, it's very limited. So I found myself being very much on my own. No family or friends have, you know, been interested in this stuff and I haven't had any community. And I feel like at first I was like, well, you know, that's fine. I can do it by myself. But as the practice,

unfolds, it seems more and more necessary for me to have maybe the support of a community, if not a teacher. I was wondering if you have any relationship to that. Yeah. In Buddhism, they also emphasize this fact that we as human beings need this social aspect, that we need our community that we can relate to and that is at least on a similar past and has similar goals to us to be successful at this long-term. So from that perspective, yeah, it makes sense to strive to have other people with you on the path. But also, I would say for people listening to this who are like really want to pursue this, this don't think that you need that or you cannot start at all.

It's more like with today's technology, we have access to so much information. and to so many other people. And even though it's not direct contact maybe with someone who's your neighbor, for example, but the information is there. And you can also engage with people through online forums. And I have done that as well. And I have been lucky to find, yeah, which are now three good friends of mine in my close proximity, who are on the same path, I would say, or very similarly interested in this.

whole endeavor of discovering what's true and I have done so through like online forums but to the question of if I follow a particular teacher not in real life so I have no one living here that I ask questions regularly or that I interact with on a regular base yeah absolutely I think you make a great point about technology opening up access and that otherwise wouldn't exist. So in the past and in the pre-internet age, perhaps there was more importance on getting in a community and having a teacher because those were really the only ways to learn and to engage with these teachings in a really deep way. But nowadays, with so many options, you can really do a lot of this by yourself, and particularly getting started. I think

you make a great point there that you do not have to wait around to get started. And at some point in your development, if you feel like that's necessary, you can go out and find that community or find that teacher, and they certainly exist. And it couldn't hurt, but I largely, you know, I really do agree with what you're saying there. I want to touch on this question. I was thinking about skipping it because you kind of addressed it before, but maybe you could say another thing or two about it, which is, and this is a question I ask, just for people out there that might be like, what's the point, you know, oh, I lose my sense of a self. That doesn't seem particularly interesting or worthwhile what are the benefits of a spiritual path they might

be asking like you haven't convinced me let's say so what would you say to somebody about that and maybe a one way to frame it is you know what are some of the biggest lessons or benefits that you've you've had in your life based on your practice that's a really good question because we all want something out of the energy we put out into the practice right we We don't just invest time and energy into something that has no benefit for us. And with spirituality, it's twofold. It's in your immediate practice, while you meditate, while you inquire into the truth, and while you do all of that, it's best not to focus on any outcome.

Because I have to be honest, when you discover truth, there is nothing inherently in it. improves any objectives of your life like you won't gain any more recognition from anybody about this or gain earn any money for it or whatever it doesn't like whatever you are focused on right now probably none of that improves in and of itself but then also there is this what I feel this overall journey this overarching development that you go through in order to to be able to experience and hold this truth, that is very worthwhile. So, for example, I feel much less stress in my day-to-day experience.

It's not that I have this as a goal or had this as a goal, but just through the mere fact that my thinking is so much more silent and so much more. it has less meaning for me. So I don't believe everything I think, therefore I feel less stress. So it has this benefit for me that I have really felt over the years. And I don't ponder these negative things anymore

for so long that are happening in my life. Because I catch them so quickly. Like when something bad happens and I think about it, I almost immediately see that and I can stop it. So that's a very relevant benefit of this work. I mean, it doesn't, it's not enough to be seen from the outside, but for you, for your real direct immediate experience, that's very meaningful.

And so, yeah, that's my, you could say, current experience or what I have so far gained from this work. But in and of itself, in the end point, the truth, there's nothing really in it. So whether you're enlightened or will ever get enlightened or not, I think the work has certain benefits for why it's worth doing. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe somebody would start their journey, like wanting to be special

or wanting to get recognized or like, you know, if I do this practice and I reach this thing, I could be like a holy person and people would like come to me for my wisdom and stuff. and the very desire for that falls away, you know, through these practices, the need for outside praise and recognition. The need to feel special is precisely what is uprooted through these practices, which is an interesting aspect of it. And for me, I could say a lot of things to add to what you said, but I would say, like, if you're interested deeply in the truth of the matter. If you're interested in like, I have this one life, I do not know what, if

anything comes after it, I find myself in this miraculous cosmic soup of atoms and quasars and stars and gravity. And I am genuinely interested in finding out, you know, what is consciousness, what is being alive in the cosmos mean? Who am I really? You know, this is a path of that sort of deep, profound search for truth. And then one of the other benefits on top of what you said is this increasing feeling of connection. And particularly in, you know, these late stage capitalist societies, I mean, I'm sure Germany has plenty of this, but in the U.S., it's even ratcheted up of this hyper-individualism,

hyper-atomization, hyper-alienation, what people yearn for, even if they can't conceptualize it clearly in their head is this desire to connect with yourself, with those around you, and with the natural world, with the cosmos in which you find yourself. There is this often subconscious desire to be unified with, you know, the nature, if you will. Call it God, call it nature, call it the cosmos, whatever you want. And even if you can't articulate that to yourself and you don't even know that's what you want. There is that sense of needing to be connected. And certainly throughout the practice, it's deep into that connection for me, deep in my

connection to myself and to the people around me and, of course, to the natural world and nature more broadly. And I think that would be added to what you said as well. Yeah, that's so true. I would even say that what you just mentioned is like a. prerequisite for really starting to work it's like you you can have some of the stress reduction benefit or feeling more calm in your day-to-day life with just some 10-minute meditation every day without like going really deep but if you are as you said interested in the truth

for its own sake and for no other reason then because you want to know the truth of this existence, then that's real, that's the real reason to engage in it. And that's probably what is even necessary for you to make it long or far on this journey. Yeah, and something you just said there that made me think of something else is, you know, I was into philosophy, still am obviously, and into science and really in for long periods of time into, you know, if I can come up with the right understanding of the world, if my ideas and worldview can be right, then maybe I can be happy. And there's a difference on this path where you don't need to subscribe to conceptual linguistic belief systems so much as you can

experience directly and viscerally these truths. So they don't just join the rest of your ideas in your head of abstract concepts that you call truth, but actually it's a deeper truth that you can experience directly without the mediation of linguistic inner dialogue structures. And that is a huge thing that's drawn me to the path as well. As I exhausted philosophical ideas and scientific worldviews as if they were going to bring me happy if I could just figure it out, I realized that that was a never-ending game that you can play, but it never actually results in anything like contentment or inner peace. and this uniquely, these spiritual practices uniquely offer that.

Yeah, definitely, totally. I would say there is belief and in belief there is no end. You can create a million different stories about this world and whatever you want to believe in and debate about, but that never changes what is true. And so there's everything else and there's truth. And, yeah, you can leave everything else aside and go directly for the truth. Absolutely.

All right. So I have a couple more questions. And in here I want to, this is a political podcast after all. So I like to touch on politics, even when we are discussing mostly non-political issues. And there's often a divide I've talked about on the show many times in spiritual communities between like individual realization and social political collective activism. The latter is sometimes seen with suspicion by spiritual communities. On the political side, spiritual pursuits are often seen as self-indulgent and individualist retreats from public and political responsibility.

Part of the reason why I touch on these topics is because I want to bring these things together and show that they're actually simultaneous processes, the inner work of transforming your relationship to your own reality moment by moment, and the external work of transforming our political, social and economic systems and institutions actually go hand in hand and they're both sort of weakened a little bit if the other is completely neglected. So I guess I would ask just like what are your politics generally if you don't mind me asking and how has your spiritual practice if at all informed or shaped your political views or commitments? Yeah, that's such a great topic. I mean, if we are talking about separating

beliefs, so what we don't know from what we actually know, then this is very relevant for politics. And as our understanding of the world is based on something we can never know, basically going back all the way to the model of there is this physical universe out there, which we cannot know, that falls under the category, we can never know that. But that's the whole worldview our society runs on. And so the politics that's arising from that is shaped by that understanding of the world. For example, if we would truly feel and experience in every moment,

then part of our body is actually out there in the world. Like we know that the air we breathe are coming from the trees, but we don't feel that we have told ourselves the story that we are only this body but actually we are this whole system where you could say

part of our lungs is out there in the trees and so if we would actually shift our perspective to feel so connected to the world I think that would also hugely change our political landscape

that just as like a basic viewpoint from which I come and look at the political discussions. And from that, yeah, we here in Germany, as you also are aware of, we have all in all Western countries the problem of at the moment having to decide whether we want to fight climate change or not. in that sense i i'm aware that for us intellectually climate change is the concept but i still believe it points to something real so we have climate change as a problem and so i find the responsibility for that in all of us and as we have decided that we vote a party for us to make the decisions for our whole community I believe we have to vote for

parties that will take this as a serious challenge we are facing as humanity right now and so I'm voting for whichever party is going to most the impact that problem of climate change positively

and in Germany now here that's yeah the green party. Right. Yeah, and in addition, I think, to the voting aspect, which, I mean, is crucial. I mean, here in the U.S., we had four years of Donald Trump who outright denied that climate change was even an issue, pulled out of even tepid agreements like the Paris Agreement, and opened up public land for private extraction and drilling. And that set us four years back of doing anything meaningful. So clearly getting, you know, these far right-wing populists who are conspiracy theorists and deny the problem that even exists is an important and necessary step, but also

beyond voting. I mean, like the attempt to build structures in our own communities that can, you know, help people in the face of piling up natural disasters. I mean, in Germany, you just had historic flooding here in the U.S. We've had historic heat waves and historic wildfire seasons, and that devastates people. And so to build up the capacities in your own community, to be able to help people, to organize food and clothes and medicine and water, in addition to whatever the state can provide. And I'm sure in Germany, your state can provide more than our state. We don't even have universal health care even during a pandemic, for Christ's sakes.

So we're really against it here in the U.S. with our libertarian ethos, if you will. But the thing you said about separation and no longer through these spiritual practices, seeing yourself as fundamentally separate, I think is really a key point. Because in order to engage in something like slavery or genocide, you have to feel separate from the other and you have to otherize that person. Clearly in Germany, the otherizing of Jewish people was central to the Nazi paradigm and carrying out the Holocaust. Here in the U.S., the othering of the Native Americans

and black people were crucial in genocide and slavery, which this country is built on. But then ecocide, the feeling that you are fundamentally separate from the natural world creates a situation in which you can throw your chemical waste into that river you can you can dig up carbon and blow it into the atmosphere because the atmosphere the river the ocean they're not me they are they are things that are external to me and if they suffer it doesn't mean that i'm going to personally suffer in fact i can advance myself my society my ideas by

treating these people and these natural environments as separate from me but then nature comes around and that's what nature's doing now sort of putting a hand in our chest and like you've done this for far too long. There are now going to be consequences for your actions, and hopefully you can learn the truth that you are not separate from this entire biosphere. And with the pandemic, we realize we're not separate from people on the other side of the earth. You know, and I think with the pandemic and with climate change, our species is being provoked to evolve or perish. The way that you've been doing things for the last several centuries is, is, is not sustainable and it's going to foul your own nest unless you make dramatic changes.

And I see climate change, the pandemic, and so many political issues as like this challenge to humanity, like evolve or perish. What do you think about that? Yeah. There is so much truth to what you just said. And the biggest structure I see with the most power right now is probably concentrated in certain economies. So, or more precisely in a few companies and a company is also basically just an extended ego structure it's my company it's i am working for this company so whoever runs that company has an egotistic perspective for that company and that shapes his decision and so all of the major companies. I think there is probably no company in the world that is not driven by this perspective.

I have to survive as a company. And while I think there is probably some benefits to competition, we should much rather think in how can we actually most constructively provide what we need without harming the basis for our existence which is the earth and the ecosystem

and so yeah this all interconnect it's not what we do is all shaped by our state of consciousness it's unescapable

by our understanding our actions are guided and shaped and so we cannot go beyond our perspective and so

that's really where I think in the long run, I hope at least, spiritual work will improve also the world. If more people engage in that and what I see, more people are interested in this, I mean, there's almost nobody I know and I talk to directly that has not heard of meditation or Buddhist perspectives, at least in some minor theoretical sense. And so, yeah, I think this is spreading and I have the hopes that it will also alleviate the problems we are facing right now with climate change. But I may be wrong.

Yeah, and that opens up a really interesting line of speculation that I'm interested in, which is there does seem to be this globalization of interest in these practices that is really unprecedented. Now, I think you've alluded to this, and I've talked about this on previous episodes, sometimes that can be, like, co-opted and reduced to, like, you know, you often see, like, Mick Mindfulness or this idea that, like, you know, let's give our employees five minutes of breathing meditation so that they can be less stress, so they can be more productive, and it's like you're reducing this ancient, beautiful wisdom path to a mere breath exercise and stress relief exercise in order to boost productivity for corporations who often have incentive structures that go against the sustainability of life on Earth. And so there is this co-optive way that it can be

introduced, especially when these ancient Eastern traditions get introduced to hyper-capitalist Western societies that can be distorted in that process. But even in that case, it's reflective of this deeper reality that these practices are spreading. And with the climate crisis, with what we just talked about, about nature, sort of putting the limits on our, on our reckless behavior. And the fact that these practices seem to be gaining a foothold all across the world, it's, it's sort of tempting, at least, to think about us as entering this, this transitionary period where we are literally being asked to evolve to the next level of conscious life in the cosmos. And that, that means reorienting.

our social, political, and economic systems to be more sustainable and equitable. But it also means transforming the way that we experience our own existence and transforming the way that we experience our lives embedded in a natural context, in the natural world. And there are moments through these practices and through my engagement with the climate crisis where even brief fleeting moments where the sense of self, sort of, if not drops away, fully sort of fades into the background. And I feel viscerally myself to be the earth acting in defense of itself through the spreading of awareness,

through the spiritual practices, through organizing politically to put pressure on political systems to act on the climate crisis, etc. It's almost like these things are all happening at once. And while you can look at the road ahead of us and see a very dark, dystopian world and the horizon, there's also the very real chance that what we're entering is not the end of humanity, but rather a profound, if not the most profound, transitionary phase that humanity has ever faced. And meaningfully tackling the climate crisis is going to require us setting aside some of the paradigms and ways of being in the world that we've done for the last several hundred years. It means looking to indigenous cultures who have lived in balance and harmony with

the natural world for millennia. It means also, perhaps, the engaging of practices which weaken or dismantle the ego, which is the sense of a separate self. And all of these things together are pushing us towards, hopefully maybe, the next level of consciousness in the universe, like humanity is needing to level up. That's highly speculative. And I know that there's no hard scientific proof to say that's what's happening. But sometimes I feel that way. I'm just sort of what are your thoughts on any of that? Yeah, we can, as you said, only speculate about that.

But I also feel that they have to go hand in hand. If we are going to reduce our consumption of resources and reduce our production of CO, or two that we emit into the atmosphere on a very real experiential level for us as humans that will mean that we will have to rely less on external experience to make us happy and that brings us back to the fundamental confusion we have we have externalized our sense of happiness we say we can only be happy with these circumstances. And I want to fly around the world once a year for my beautiful vacation

and I want to drive this huge car. And I want to have all of these luxuries because they make me happy. And we cannot deny people happiness. So if we want to be successful at this, what we have to do and what we will have to discover is that happy, is our own inner ability and that we have only projected this ability outwards onto objects of our experience. But really the power to have these positive states, which is what we are really interested in, that lies within our selves. And so we have to make the shift or otherwise I don't really see how we can in the short amount of time that's required to.

shift this around to make the changes necessary in order to avoid probably very nasty outcomes in our environment. And also, as you mentioned, these insights into being connected with the world, we have seen an upsurge in that, I think, in the 60s, with the psychedelic revolution, even though there was not sustainable the way it was done back then. And this is probably one of the quickest ways you can at least nudge people to have the insight that they are the whole and not just the part. And so I also put some of my hope into recent research that's now been done again with psychedelics and that maybe we will have in 10, 15 years, something or some place. in society, some agency, where you can go to and you can get like a psychedelic therapy

in a safe environment where you get the substance and you are guided through the experience, I think that would really be something close to a magic pill for changing our safe consciousness. Absolutely. Yeah. Incredibly well said. And I completely agree. And one of those emerging things that I was mentioning earlier is precisely this reintroduction of psychedelics into acceptable public mainstream life. There are major universities working on getting psilocybin passed for treatment of depression or anxiety in terminal patients. And so those things are definitely coming.

How they'll manifest is still uncertain, but one thing is for sure. It will open up the psychedelic experience to more people. And if we take seriously the idea that psychedelics, as was the case in both you and mine's sort of spiritual journey, is this doorway into some of these realizations and putting many people on the spiritual path, as it seems to do, that reemergence of mainstream acceptance of psychedelics certainly is another promising strand. Absolutely. Yeah. Very, very interesting. I'm going to ask you one more question before I let you go. and that's just what advice would you give to someone who wants to start on a spiritual journey

who listens to a conversation like this and genuinely, you know, has their interest aroused, but doesn't really know how best to go about it and maybe, you know, can't jump into a one hour or two hour a day practice right off, right off the bat. What would be some like introductory advice for someone who wants to start down this path? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. because I have no answer from my own experience for that question. I can only, from what I know now, say what could be a good entrance into this whole path. And it is the question that you also mentioned earlier, am I interested in truth for its own sake?

That is one of the fundamental questions. we have to answer, I think, for us, in order to be on the spiritual path, not just for some minor benefit that we will then drop the whole path for because it gets uncomfortable at times. You need to have a strong motivation to do this. Otherwise, I think you won't find in spirituality what you may think it will, offer you. But with that said, as in both our experiences, we have had an experience that can then suddenly open you up so much that this past becomes very meaningful to you. It gives you

a psychedelic experience really can give you the deepest insight into what this reality is and it can shake you for a while. It can leave you great. roundless, but then it also opens you up to this whole possibility that you can discover truth through spiritual practices. Otherwise, you might not even be open to discover them, to discover truth. And so that would be my advice, something to consider for someone who wants to start down this past and to consider doing psychedelics in a very responsible way. I don't recommend it, of course, if it's illegal where you live, and it's not even necessary.

If you can answer the question for yourself that you are really interested in this, I think it's not necessary, but it can help to open you up to these ideas. And then, yeah, be open to whatever comes, try different methods. Even 10 minutes a day of meditation is a great story. start. And you can always extend it from there. And also, yeah, just maybe for a start look up some videos on YouTube, even my videos on different styles of meditation. I have some guided meditations that can help you if you are really no very much at the beginning with your meditation practice. And that's a great start too.

absolutely yeah i echo all of those sentiments and um you know really approaching the the entire thing with the sense of you know open curiosity and a willingness to investigate and not treating it as like another chore like i have to do the dishes and then i have to exercise and i have to get my 10 minutes in because if you start making it another sort of burden that you have to do every day to cross off your list it can sort of strip it of some of its meaning and another thing is don't sit down and expect to have some mind-blowing experience. If you're going to sit down with meditation, it is not to get any particular state of mind

or any experience out of that meditation, but it is simply to sit and to become increasingly aware of what is happening moment-to-moment, sensations in the body, thoughts in the head, feeling tones in the heart, etc. And that sense of curiosity and investigation and not this is a chore or I want to get something specifically out of this.

That whole orientation, I think, can help a lot specifically when you're getting started. Yeah, that's probably one of the single greatest advice for a beginner. To that, what you just said, I would add, in meditation when you sit there, just see how happy can you be with doing nothing, with even letting go of your thoughts. just make this practice joyful because as you said if you see it as another chore and you dislike doing it how realistic is it that you will do it for years and keep up the practice that's unlikely so from the very beginning try to make it a beautiful experience try to look for the joy and you will find your true self that's what i believe beautiful all right well thank you again for coming on the show it's been an amazing conversation can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your work online before we let you go

yeah thank you very much i really enjoyed the conversation as well um thank you for inviting me i would also yeah if we can do it again in the future really appreciate that um yeah they can find me on my website um that's called laogotsm.com there is also the link to my YouTube channel or you could just go to YouTube directly and search for conscious development. That's the name of my channel. And yeah, that are the both the two platforms people can connect with me. Perfect. And I will link to both of those in the show notes as well as that video we mentioned earlier

where you talk about your awakening experience for those that are interested in that. But yeah, you have my email. I have yours. I would love to do this again some time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great. Thank you as well.