Rev Left Radio - Waking Up Through Meditation: Embarking on the Pathless Path

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

Lauritz Marquardt (aka Conscious Development on YT) returns to the show to discuss meditation, Buddhist practice, offer tips and advice, and much more. Find Lauritz's YT channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/ConsciousDevelopment Find his website here: http://www.lauritzm.com Our previous episode w/ Lauritz: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/awakening Mahasi's Progress of Insight: - https://www.bps.lk/olib/bp/bp504s_Mahasi_Progress-of-Insight.pdf - https://www.bps.lk/olib/bp/bp503s_Mahasi_Practical-Insight-Meditation.pdf       Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have back on my friend Lauritz to talk about spirituality, Buddhism, meditation practice, answer some basic questions, give some tips and advice, and even kind of go a little deep into some of these concepts as well. That would be interesting, I would hope, for not only beginners, but for intermediate and even advanced practitioners. I had Lowrits on, I think almost exactly a year ago, I guess almost a year ago. And I will link to that episode in the show notes as well if you want to listen to that after listening to this. There's no order necessarily that you need to listen to it in, but it is present.

And I always like to link to a guest's prior appearances when they come on the show for people that just hear them for the first time in this episode. They can go back and listen to the catalog episodes. But this is a really fascinating, wonderful conversation with a really down-to-earth and insightful person. And we talk about the role of momentum and meditation practice, you know, the cycles that one goes through when engaged in it, some tips and advice for people setting out on a spiritual or contemplative path of any sort. We talk about meditation, different aspects of it, and more or less just have a really wide-ranging and very interesting conversation. And I know this is something that is kind of unique about our platform is that we have these conversations. We're obviously a left-wing political show primarily, but I've always got really good feedback

when I've done these forays into religion and spirituality and Buddhism and meditation practice, and this is another installment of precisely that. So for those that are interested in those episodes, you're really going to get a lot out of this one. So without further ado, here is my episode with my friend Lawrence, who also has a YouTube channel called Conscious Development, which I'll also link to in the show.

notes. And we just have a wide-ranging discussion about spirituality, Buddhism, meditation, and more. Enjoy. Thank you, Brad, for inviting me again to the show. My name is Lovitz-Marquharth, and I started meditating 10 years ago and the details of my path and how I got into it. As you just explained, can be found in our first conversation, which we had, I think, when was that? It was August of 2021 last year. Yeah, I also just said, wanted to say, like, yeah, almost a year ago, yeah. So, yeah, details about, as I said, how I got into it. People can find there, but quickly to say I got into this mostly through psychedelic experiences,

as I think many people in the West come at first in contact with like this idea that, yeah, there may be something more to reality than is visible from the surface that we operate on. And yeah, quickly when you do research and what the heck did I experience, you find something like Buddhism or spiritual traditions. And yeah, I quickly found out that there are like practices to facilitate some deeper perspectives on life, and that's how I ended up really exploring meditation and sharing my insights along the way on YouTube, and how you found me and how we have now our conversation. Yeah, absolutely.

And so, yeah, that episode that we did previously a year ago is called Awakening from the Dream of Separateness, and I will link to it in the show notes, and again, that will go over. A lot of Lawrence's, you know, awakening experiences. We talk more about Buddhist philosophy in general, et cetera. That's a, you know, you don't have to listen to that episode first, but to get an idea of this guest and some of his background, you could do that or you could listen to it after. But today's episode is going to just be more focused on covering some basic stuff within spiritual practices. Specifically, we're kind of operating within the Buddhist tradition, but, you know, we can kind of even leave that tradition and expand outward, you know, when it fits us to do so. But I thought this would be very helpful because, you know, this is mostly, you know, left-wing philosophy and history podcast.

and a lot of my listeners are interested in this stuff and I've gotten a lot of feedback saying we really like when you do these religious or spiritual episodes it's very hard to find this anywhere else in like the left wing media space in particular so people are very interested in this but you know a lot of people also have little to know experience in this whole realm

so I was hoping that this conversation could be helpful for people in that sort of position where you're new and interested and curious and are thinking about getting in But I also think a lot of this stuff will cover will be just as relevant and hopefully interesting for intermediate and even advanced practitioners of various sorts. So this is by no means going to be simply an intro, but I think it should be accessible to people all across the spectrum of experience. Yeah, so I guess the first way to kind of get into this conversation broadly, Lawrence, is to talk about my email that I emailed you recently about a feeling of plateauing in practice. and I kind of just reached out to you

and you gave me some very helpful advice but that's something that I was that I've been struggling with you know over the last year or so which is feeling very much as if you know I've had these periods of intensity in the past and I feel after time you know maybe you kind of feel stuck like I've been doing my practice every day

for a while I don't feel like I'm making any progress so can you just kind of it's a you know these questions are big and you can take them in any direction you want but the problem of plateauing in practice, if you've struggled with that and how to kind of get out of it. Yeah, a good place to start. It brings me to some of the fundamentals that one has to become clear upon whenever, wherever you are on the spiritual path and when you want to start is to really first get clear about what is it actually that we want to achieve with meditation. what is the purpose why am i doing this is it maybe just for why did i get into this the first place in the first place is it for stress reduction did i hear about it from some cool person and i just

tried it but when we really look into the deeper aspects it quickly becomes clear that there's a real goal here with meditation that we have and um I like the term to say meditation facilitates seeing clearly. And by seeing clearly, it really is not just with the visual aspect, but in the sense that we have six senses, basically, they put also the sense of thinking as the sixth sense in the Buddhist tradition. And seeing clearly means seeing all those aspects of reality very clearly. And so when you feel you have started with meditation and you ask, okay, what could be this next step for me?

What direction should I go into to remember that the goal is to see reality clearly? That's one very important first insight, actually, because then it becomes possible to say, I can actually let go of the idea that I am stuck, that I am at a certain point in my practice, and that I'm a certain type of meditator or I have this certain history of meditation. Because when you see clearly, you will recognize that any thought about the past is just that. It appears as something in the mind. it is maybe a picture that flashes in front of your inner eye or maybe it's a verbal thought that runs through your head but actually really seeing clearly just acknowledges in the moment

when it appears that oh this is a thought and one aspect of all experience is that it's impermanent and so recognizing that okay everything i ever have is impermanent sensation arising in the present, that's one very, very important insight one has along the way of meditation. And it's possible through recognizing that actually everything that I ever believed was no more than a thought. And then actually the work can begin and you can label all of these different types of sensory inputs in your mind while you meditate. So just as for the beginner, it's the same practice as when you are beginner as when you are advanced. You sit there and usually it's at first advised to do this in a quiet place. So there are not a lot of distractions coming from the outside.

And then you label all of your experience so that you first of all learn what is experience made of. Yeah, the one last point I want to say about this feeling of being stuck is to recognize that there is no one being stuck, that this experience whenever in meditation or outside of it is flowing on. It is constantly several times a second you have some sensory impression and the reality of being stuck somewhere or not being enlightened or being somewhere on the path. all conceptual. It's inside the content of a thought. And with meditation, we try to go beyond the content. Yeah, very well said. And so to kind of summarize that idea is like I'm conceptualizing

myself as stuck. And that is by that very nature of me talking about myself as being on a plateau or stuck or not making progress is indicative of the fact that I'm stuck in my conceptual mind. and there is this this experiential shift that can happen once you build up some experience with meditation where you know especially i think it helps when we'll talk about momentum in a second but where you're in a state of conceptualizing whether that's good neutral or bad you're thinking about something and so just for example i'm thinking in my house walking around thinking about how my meditation practice has stalled out how i don't feel like i'm making progress basically talking to myself in my head about my practice.

And if you can catch yourself doing that, if you can catch yourself in the moment, okay, oh, there I am. I'm lost in thought, thinking about what I'm doing, thinking about the past or the future me in relation to my practice. And just to be able to drop that even just for two to three seconds at a time and just fall back into an experiential present, meaning you're not talking to yourself or conceptualizing or having mental images about what you're doing or what you will be doing or what you have done, but you fall into the experiencing of the present moment in itself, which is

sensations in the body, maybe the breeze through my window is touching my face, making the right side of my face a little cooler than the left side of my face, you know, maybe my palms are a little sweaty or I have an interesting sensation in my knee. And the moment you fall into that experiential mode, the problem that you thought you had two seconds ago isn't present, at least for that time. Now, you can fall right back into thinking and conceptualizing, but at least in that moment, you've seen through the illusion that you were stuck at all. Is that right? I couldn't have said it better. Yes, that's completely right. And that reminded me that there was the second part to your initial question, which is that of momentum. And what you just described is,

nothing difficult. Everyone can do that. And you can actually, for a moment, just recognize the actual quality of your experience. But then usually we have the opposite momentum, which is to quickly, after a few acknowledged moments, to go back into the content of our stories, of our concept. And that's what makes it so hard to wake up, which is you can compare it to like a journey with a bicycle up a hill like a very high and very long hill and one moment of recognizing reality as it is is like one pedal stroke and when you just do that for like one hour a day or however long you decide to practice dedicated meditation in a day that's just like one little it's just like cycling up the hill for one hour but the hill is much much larger and so

when you stop your practice and you go back to the conceptual mind for the other however many hours they are in the day to be awake you roll back down that hill to the very beginning and next day it's kind of like almost starting new again and that's really what I have found in my personal experience gave me the most successes I didn't start out with this idea in my mind that meditation or something that you practice on the cushion. Somehow I got into it with very strong focus of mindfulness in all activities in everyday life. And even though for the beginner,

that's a really difficult practice because concepts are so ubiquitous. We use them all the time and we get lost in them very easily and quickly. When you keep at it and you apply some real effort to it, and you really know that you want to practice this, it's very, very powerful, and you can make a lot of progress in a very comparatively, very short time

if you dedicate all experience under the right attitude to this practice. And so that's what I recommended to you in the email, to say, okay, you recognize that you have been practicing in a certain way for a long time, and there is not too much is changing. You don't have the feeling that this practice is really taking you to another way of seeing reality. Then, yeah, it could be possible at a time of very dedicated practice,

which is usually in these traditions called retreats, very helpful where you say, okay, I see I have this very mental work maybe and I'm lost in concept all day and I really recognize that it's difficult for me to keep this mindful mindset during the day. Then I go to a retreat for maybe 10 days or a week or two weeks and really dedicate basically all waking hours to this practice from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed.

The personal style retreats are meant to be continuous stream of mindfulness of recognizing what reality is. And so, yeah, that's how you can use and basically needs momentum to really get certain insights from meditation. I think that's incredibly important. And, you know, these are just analogies, but I've heard another analogy that kind of sticks in my mind of like, you know, if you take like two, imagine trying to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, right?

you have to go hard hard hard and then all of a sudden you start seeing a little smoke and you keep going and keep going and maybe a spark flies out and you get the fire going but the moment you you stop turning the sticks right the all the momentum that you've built up dissipates almost immediately and so you know you have to start all over more or less and in some sense that might be kind of overly rigid in the in the sense that i think like even if you would dedicate a chunk of time every day like on the cushion to meditating i think there's a um a certain underlying momentum that is kept up day by day as opposed to moment by moment where if you're going on retreat or trying to be there all the time but it's not like you know i meditated

for an hour in the morning on tuesday and then on wednesday when i wake up to meditate for an hour i'm completely starting over in some sense and there's the idea of the beginner's mind or whatever but in the sense like no i can actually kind of if i keep up a practice even if it's just a period of of a day, it's easier. It becomes easier over time for me to fall into the meditative sort of mindset. And actually, I find myself falling into it naturally when I'm going about my daily life. So if I, you know, spend a, you know, let's say 30 minutes on the cushion that morning, I'm much more likely at 5 p.m. when I'm at a red light to naturally fall into that inner quiet place, that kind of that meditative spaciousness within. It happens almost automatically and much

more easier than if I'm not keeping up a practice at all. And I noticed, like, just in general, when I'm not keeping up a daily practice of any sort, my mind in general becomes much sloppier, you know, much more susceptible to distraction, much more likely to look for distraction instead of peace and silence inwardly. So in that sense, momentum can operate at that level as well. Does that, does that ring true to you? Yes, absolutely. And definitely daily practice, if one is able to only, let's say meditate really one hour a day and then not has the time or not the possibility to really engage in mindfulness the other days of the other hours of the day then really what you just said is very true the practice can certainly keep you at the level that you're at it's it may be

slow progress but it's also very beneficial in a sense that whatever level of insight you have gained, you can maintain that because on the other hand, as you just said, if you have periods when you don't meditate, these moments of mindfulness become very rare. And even your ability to access a certain level of presence and mindfulness in stressful situations when it's really counting drops dramatically if you don't have a meditative practice. And so there are a lot of benefits to a dedicated practice in the day. But really, it is not only something that you decide to do, what you just said to remember to be mindful during the day. It is also already a fruit of the path. It is something that is, that you will recognize. It's not something

you decide to do. Every moment of mindfulness appears on its own, just as a as any other sensation. So it's difficult to say, I did this. I am mindful now. Of course, when you first start out, and this is the paradox, you have to engage the self. You have to know why you are excited about this. Why do you want this?

It's very important to be clear of one's goals with meditation as well. Do I want this more than, I would say, mostly anything else? And if that's not a firm thing in your mind yet, then sooner or later, this can also cause some slipping back or some stalling on the path and with the practice. Because, yeah, it will become difficult. It's not always easy. And when these difficulties come, they test how committed you are. So that's something not to forget.

Absolutely. You said earlier about labeling experiences, and maybe just touch on that kind of quickly, are you specifically talking about the actual practice of noting in meditation, or are you meaning something a little less explicit than that? What do you mean by labeling the experiences? When you're in meditation and you're watching sensations or whatever thoughts, feelings come up and fall away, what exactly do you mean by labeling experiences? yes i think it's um it's talked about in with different words so some people say noting some labeling um noticing is a little bit different but yeah labeling or noting is the practice of really becoming so clear with your experience that you can say okay this very short impermanent sensation that just arose is a certain thing i say for example in meditation use um sit down and you watch your breath. Maybe you observe the sensations of your stomach rising and falling. And so you feel this sensation of your stomach rising. And with the mental thought, you just say the word rising. So you really concretely become aware that this, what you just experienced,

was a momentary sensation of the stomach rising. And why we do that is to keep the mind in and focused on the practice. There is also the benefit of creating clarity because with more subtlety you will recognize that actually experiences made up of very, very short, very rapid experiences that make up the illusion of being a separate self, of the world, the 10,000 things out there and the self,

which is nothing more than just very rapid sensations arising are rising and passing away. And as long as we cannot see these different aspects of experience clearly, it's difficult to untangle that and really let the mind grasp on a very direct experiential level what it means to see clearly. Because that's not something and that's one other important factor. I want to mention about meditation and the attitude in general is to recognize recognize the difference between the conceptual knowledge in spirituality, which is basically

what we are talking about now, and to go beyond that, the willingness to go beyond that. Usually for people, it starts out with a lot of research and a lot of reading and trying to conceptualize this and trying to get it, and that's an important first stage that most people are on. But then really it comes down to practice and that's where labeling comes in. You say, okay, I have recognized that I cannot understand this with the mind. I cannot transcend the mind through more understanding. And you then see that every situation you experience, whether that's on the cushion or you're walking in the park or you're listening to someone or you're listening to the bird or you feel the air on your skin every moment is a moment

you can recognize as such and sooner or later the mind will realize some very important aspects about reality about what experience is made up of and these important aspects are impermanence suffering and no self so again we are on the conceptual level so It's easy for the mind to say, okay, I'm trying to look for impermanence or suffering or no self, which is not the way to go about this. In practice, you just do the practice and the inside will be the result. You will realize the experience has these three qualities. So that's what it means to go beyond the minds and beyond the concept,

to leave them aside and continuously just observe thought as thought. feeling is feeling, seeing is seeing, hearing is hearing, and smelling a smell. So just all the senses for what they are. Yeah. Yeah, that's really wonderful. And just to kind of, you know, double down on the idea of labeling experiences or noting you used a wonderful example of the arising of the abdomen when you're breathing. But, you know, you can, you're just sitting there, you're sitting quietly. these are mental these are soft mental notes so there's just nothing that you're saying out loud or

whatever but yeah you're you're you're basically just telling yourself what you're feeling moment by moment like thinking sense and these can be as you know i mean maybe when you're starting you just have like a handful of categories like thinking feeling you know this or that and then maybe as the practice develops you can get more nuanced with it like oh this is memory or this is thinking about the future whatever um but ultimately noting itself can be be dropped as well. And then you kind of come into an open awareness, if you will. Do you have anything to say about that transition from a more, you know, focusing awareness on the ephemera of sensation and thoughts, et cetera, versus the dropping back into just sort of open awareness and the experiential

difference there? I know it's a subtle question, but yes, we can talk about this. And that's where the conceptual difference between noting and noticing comes in, which is when, and this happens especially on longer retreats or with more continuous mindfulness, also in the daily experience, the mind drops into a state where it's so mindful that the sensations come at you so rapidly that there is no more space for really labeling the experience. It's like sound, side, taste, touch. Everything is meshed so quickly together that, like, it happens several times a second that you actually clearly perceive the experience,

but the mind cannot quickly come in and say, oh, this is such and such a feeling. and that's when you can. You don't have to. You can still at a rather moderate pace of once a second. You can apply a label. You can continue to do that. And some people even advise that.

But you can turn to noticing, which is then just quietly note to yourself, okay, I experienced this sensation consciously. So you don't say the full word. in your mind, but you maybe just make a, like a, like a small mental note. That's not a real word, but it's just recognizing that you have experienced this mindfully. And then even that, as you said, can drop away and you can merge with the flow of experience. But that is also, again, something that comes as a result of the practice.

it's not and that's why I also don't teach this to beginners it's difficult to say when you are at the point that this shift happens and when you have knowledge of this it's rather easy to say oh I feel kind of advanced I should drop the labeling and go maybe to noticing or even drop that but it's not like something that you decide to do it's like the practice is developing with time through these stages automatically So there is not really someone who can decide when it's time to do that or not. And actually, it's better if you are doubting whether you should still label or you should drop it. It's to say, I can stay with labeling. That's more safe because the labeling is yet just another sensation. Actually, it's arising. It's just a thought. But what this thought is doing is interrupting.

continuously the habitual tendency to get sucked into stories. So when you are outside and walking and you are kind of feeling fed up with this labeling, say, seeing, seeing, or walking, walking, feeling this and that. And you have these labels in the mind. That's easy for the mind to become lazy and say, ah, I want to switch to just recognizing everything as it is and not do this labeling. But the tendency then is to after maybe a few minutes to, you get stuck again in a story and you go back to thought.

So staying with labeling as long as possible and maybe even all throughout is definitely the safer bet. Very helpful. Very interesting. Yeah, I like that a lot. And, you know, just really this last thing on this point, because it is a little bit sort of advanced and might be over the head of beginners of this idea of like through noting you start to realize that. a sensation that you took to, you know, perhaps be a singular thing actually is made up of infinite micro-moments and microsensation. So just, for example, the breath, if you were just to sit here, a normal person, focus on, like, what is the sensation of the breath? Well, I feel like

a, on the inhale, I feel like my abdomen expanding, and then there's a pause, and then on the exhale, there's a contraction, and then, you know, you repeat. But, you know, through noting and then meditation practice in general, you start to realize what you took to be three things, arising, pausing, contracting actually is made up of functionally a virtual, I mean an infinite amount of micro sensations and moments in that thing that you called, you know, the pause or the arising or the contraction. Your mind starts to be able to see with increasing clarity how that thing is actually made up of infinite, micro moments in between. and that can sometimes give way to a sensation of, you know, disintegration and permanence

or the seeing through in a moment of clarity, the lack of a substantial self at the center of all of this. And so I think that is worth just knowing and being aware of. But I really liked what you said, too, about practicing and the way you're kind of framing it is very much resonant with my experience, where the practice, you know, you start as the beginner doing the practice. But very soon, if you're committed to it, you start realizing, actually the practice is working through you. You are actually being worked. It's not you working the practice, if you will. And I found that to be a very interesting and actually

quite fascinating experience to start to realize like, I, you know, I took this to be a thing that I was doing. But it's very clear that this thing is operating within me. And, And I'm sort of a superfluous thing. It's happening without my direction and my control. And that in and of itself can be quite the revelation. Yeah, what you just mentioned is probably one of the most important steps along, if we can map out this process at all. But some people say, don't do that and say it's difficult.

But if we can, then this, what you just mentioned is one of the very important steps along the way and phases that you go through, which is called the stream entry or in other traditions the rising and passing it is the moment when one has intuitions about this earlier before it happens but when it's really really deeply clear to you that this process is kind of driving itself and you couldn't ever do this process of awakening then you have passed this point of no return basically it is clear that awakening is going to happen and whether that's in this lifetime or in what they call in buddhist in in rebirth that is up to debate so it's not guaranteed that this idea of you this human being now can wake up after this point but it's very very likely and um this insight is so profound because um there is a lot of actually um it's not a very early insight it's quite a advanced insight and you have to

most people have to put in a lot of work to get to that stage but it makes clear one of the three characteristics that I mentioned earlier which is no self this comes with the inside of the one I thought to do the practice that was feeling was connected to these feelings of struggle of striving of doing stuff of engaging focus and effort

that this is really just part of the flow of experience that is part of the sensations arising that is very very significant and it already when it's complete and genuine it rewires how you perceive reality yeah and i kind of think of stream entry to use more conceptual analogies is like you know passing the event horizon of a black hole or something at that point and you you're you're sort of locked in now you are you are being taken for a for a trip if you will and there's no more even illusion that you're the one in control so the idea of stream entry and just it's sort of intuitive like you're dipping yourself into a stream and being carried away by the current you know and that image is is pretty powerful but again that's a

pretty high level accomplishment if you will in the in the practice and I'm certainly not claiming that I've been that far I'm just saying that I have had the inklings the the sort of you know the the little revelations, the micro revelations of no self in this stuff, but I don't necessarily, whatever, it's not worth it to talk about where I think I am, but even if I'm not there, I can still, before reaching there, kind of see how the practice itself is working through me and that there is no me in control of the process, even though you almost have to have that illusion to start the entire thing. You almost have to have the illusion that I'm going to start a meditation practice because it's what I want to do, and I'm going to sit down for this.

this amount of time and I'm going to do this. And so there's that paradox of like the feeling that you're in control and that you can apply effort and will towards a project and accomplish it is an illusion ultimately that you will see through on the path, but it's almost necessary for the path, for you to begin down the path in the first place. And then you're disabused of that notion over time. And I always thought that was a fascinating, you know, paradox, if you will, in this entire spiritual realm, but specifically within Buddhism.

exactly you could go maybe even further and say that's part of the definition of the process of waking up because why can you wake up it's because you have been asleep before so it's yeah it's clear that there was illusion before but on this past it is just a continuous work with actual reality that's why it's when when you mention something like okay these teachings They belong to Buddhism and they are like part of this larger framework that they established of how to wake up. That's true on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's just tools to investigate reality. It's a way of seeing clearly what is arising every moment. And yeah, what the Buddha discovered of how to do this and how people after him have refined the traditions, which have led to different traditions within Buddhism. It's a huge field. They have all recognized that actually there is nothing inherently to be believed in in Buddhism.

They don't tell you anything, actually. All what they tell you is based on the notion that, yes, we also have here these tools, that when you use them, you can discover these things on your own. So it always comes, as I said in the beginning, with the warning of all conceptual knowledge can be interesting. And we need it in order to communicate with another about this. But for the practice, none of that actually applies. You cannot sit there in meditation and actually reflect upon experiencing. I mean, that is going to happen nonetheless.

to happen that you want to explain your experience to yourself, but that has to happen under the umbrella of being mindful of that. So again, as recognizing thought as thought, concept as concept. Because as long as you are in thoughts and in the content, no matter whether those thoughts are genuinely good in their content or bad, that difference actually is minor in meditation practice and has no real implication. So thinking good thoughts can actually be the larger trap because it's easy to recognize bad thoughts that one actually doesn't want to think in meditation

and recognize those. But then the real good one, it's harder to let go of those. Totally. Yeah. And I really love your overall point about, you know, Buddhism, let's just take that, is a toolbox. You don't want to fetishize it. There's the idea of, like, Buddhism is a raft you use to cross the river. When you're on the other side, you let go of the raft. You don't keep carrying it. And to keep caring it is, you know, the metaphor for fetishizing the tradition or treating it as a purely intellectual, philosophical system, you know, amongst others to reduce Buddhism to its merely conceptual, argumentative claim-making side. Metaphysics, you know, arguing metaphysics from a Buddhist perspective. It can be fun, then it can be useful. Like philosophy in general is fun to debate and talk about and think about and research. But ultimately, the rubber hits the road when you let go of that and actually do the practice itself. And when you're in the midst of the practice, there is no room for thinking about the philosophy of Buddhism or arguing Buddhism against a competing system or whatever it might be. So I think that toolbox or that raft metaphor is very helpful.

along the journey, so as you can always kind of temper your love and appreciation of this tradition, with that realization that you don't want to turn it into an identity, you don't want to basically do spiritual materialism and turn your spiritual path into a garment that the ego dresses itself in. Yeah, you said that perfectly. And one of the tools you could say in Buddhism, that's definitely important for the advanced, stages which comes back to your initial question about feeling stuck is that it is easy at a certain level of development to reach very pleasant state in meditation to the point where

like you are really genuinely looking forward to your hour of meditation and you like to go into that but that is actually a very sneaky trap that I think many people can fall into and sadly gets stuck there for decades because these pleasant traps, they feel so good. But what is actually happening there is a lack of clarity. There is a lack of seeing clearly the sensations arising in the moment. And you could sit in meditation with pleasant sensations arising for years. But when you never clearly perceive them and label them actually, going back to the initial practice of saying,

okay, I am feeling this pleasantness. I'm clearly seeing it. I'm not letting it slip under the radar. I'm going to ruthlessly observe every sensation that comes flying at me. Only through that can you actually go beyond this attachment to pleasantness. Yeah, I think that is so helpful. You know, like as you said earlier, yeah, when you're in Buddhist, you're doing these meditation practices, yeah, you notice.

the intense negative emotions and it's quite easy to you want to fall into a state where those feelings no longer have a grip over you and so the practice can really get some traction in that regard. But the first moment you have a pleasant or even an ecstatic experience in or adjacent to your meditation practice, that same skepticism and that same willingness to look at it clearly disappears in favor of reveling in it and thinking, oh, you know, oh, this is actually it. This experience is the thing I'm looking for in the practice, this experience of peace or of quietness or of calmness where, you know, in the actual Buddhist practice, you would just look at that as another fleeting temporary experience that comes and goes and not to cling

to the good, just like you're willing to not cling to the bad. And that's very important. And it actually is a great transition to this next question. Because you just talked about how you can have these really amazing experiences and especially often in the beginning you can have some very you know very enjoyable experiences and that was my experience as a late teen early 20 something when I first started the practice um I remember just having ecstatic moments and and kind of deluding myself that these experiences were the path cashing out for me already and so I had like um you know I would be like driving around and just like weeping and joy at a sunset or I remember at one point 19 years old telling my like stepdad in a grocery store. I discovered this meditation stuff.

I've been doing it for like a few months and I just I'm I've figured out life. Like I don't think I'll ever be sad again. Like now looking in retrospect, it was absolutely laughable of how naive I was. but but it was a very real uh you know jolt of an ecstatic positive feeling that i had um in those early those early experiences and i almost kind of thought this is it and little did i know i was just taking the first baby steps on a path that is by no means a simple upward slope to more happiness and peace but is actually can be very challenging and so this is the question i want to kind of bounce off you with that in mind which is this idea of cycling um and that's

probably not a word that a lot of people use just a word I'm using right now. But I've felt in my relationship to my practice going in these big cycles where, you know, I'll start the practice. I'll have these deepening spiritual experiences or whatever, just the benefits that accrue to you when you really do a meditation practice, feeling very, very good. And then eventually it'll hit a wall, not in the sense of a plateau, but in the sense of, oh, some negative things are coming up now. And so I've been through these cycles, you know, a handful of times throughout my 10, 12 years of doing meditation practice where there'll be a period of growth and deepening and real benefits accruing to me through the practice. And then at some point, some negative stuff will start coming up, some stuff that I wasn't dealing with. And there's, you know, you can call it a dark night or whatever, but these prolonged periods of what I would call spiritual suffering or spiritual trials and tribulations.

where I feel like I've taken a step back or like now like something new is coming up or why am I having a new wave of neuroticism, right? Like when I first started meditating, for example, one of the main benefits that accrued to me was a real sense of confidence, like almost like I was coming out of my insecure teenage years and I was very, very confident. And I was like, I don't think I'll ever be neurotic again. But then periods of neuroticism certainly have come since then, you know, intensely. and it's almost been disorienting because I was like,

I thought I had already gotten beyond this. And so what do you think is this, am I just making this up, am I imposing a pattern where none exists, or is there something here to this idea of cycles as you engage in these practices over long periods of time? Yes, what you just described, your experience is very common. I don't know if you could say that every meditator experiences this. Probably not. Some go straight to straight all the way and do it in like you could say one cycle.

But most people climb the ladder, so to speak, and then they fall back down a bit and have to get what they have thought to understand again on a deeper level, maybe, and have to go through certain insights again and again, because it's not that you have to see certain things once and then your whole mode of operating switches over. and is replaced by the one that's fitting reality more clearly. So it takes repetition, which we do in meditation all the time. You observe the breath, which is in itself a cycle, and you go back to the cushion over and over again every day.

So it's a practice. And no matter where you conceptualize to be at the moment, which may be valid and could help you to find important pointers in your practice but the ground is again to let go of those ideas of those memories

and observe the rapid arising sensations in the moment very, very arduously over and over and over again because the mind comes back in and shows you very clearly that oh i'm still clinging to this experience i'm still dependent upon content of experience whenever you have the memory of oh my last meditation session they went so great now i expect

this meditation session to go the same way and then it's horrible and you are struggling then what can come from that if you continue to practice well and for the practice it does doesn't matter what content arises, whether pleasant or unpleasant, then you can actually get the insight through these repeated cycles that you are not in control, because there is no one to be in control. And really, this insight has to think in deeper and deeper and deeper. And that's why this path shows you that nothing is worth clinging to. Even the good fruits and the good experiences that come from the practice or that you say are associated with the effort that you put in. So it's very natural. But the solution at every step is again

to apply equanimity with the sensations that are arising. So whenever something is painful or pleasant to recognize that as such and if necessary, maybe something on a deeper more subtler level arose for you then put a new label on it if you observe that's something that's repeatedly arising and it will go away after a certain time if that's a unpleasant emotion

or even in daily life a not conducive activity or what they say is an unwholesome activities, they will drop away with clear seam. So it's natural and nothing to worry about actually. So that would be my advice for you right there. That's very helpful and I really love this idea of repetition of having to see something over and over and over and over again to really get it. And just to speak my audience as language for a second, when they're getting

into, let's say, Marxist philosophy. You know, you come across a term like, historical materialism. The first, you read the definition, the first three times you do it, you still have no clue. If I asked you after you just, even after you just read the definition, can you in your own words explain this concept, you would have a very hard time doing it. Engaging with it over and over again, hearing this thinker talk about it, this thinker talk about it, this third thinker talk about it, and disagree with the first two. It's through that process that you really start to deeply understand the thing. And that is exactly true in this practice as well. But the things that you're saying are things about

how your own mind acts and your own behavioral and emotional momentum and patterns you're locked into operate and just by virtue of seeing them clearly the bonds that they have on you loosen and over time dissolve it's not like you see a thing and then now you have to exert will and do something to get rid of it it's like the spotlight of attention and awareness clearly clearly seeing a thing is all it takes to make that whatever it is you know, to loosen its grip on you and ultimately fall away from you. Yeah, certainly. And one thing that came to my mind while you were speaking about this

is when you have in conceptual terms, maybe you want to understand the concept, what you're actually doing is like you get pieces of information from different areas and then you connect them, you listen to them, you integrate them. And it really deeply connect to the whole body of knowledge that's already within your mind. Then it becomes a part of you when it's really kind of becoming this part, this part of this larger mesh, and you can really know how it relates to all other aspects.

And that's the same with, not the same, but in a comparable way, it's similar with practice. The more you do it, the more you see that it is actually connected to every, every experience you have. It is what reality is made up of, finally. So there is no part of reality that you could say is not subject to these qualities that we are trying to unravel and become clear about. Yeah, absolutely. One more question before I move on to the next topic.

Is the idea of, you know, it's talked about differently, but like the burning off of karma or whatever. it may be or these dark nights of the soul or that what however you want to put it you know my experience is that challenging things come up that I in you know before my practice or throughout the rest of my life I have not properly dealt with and so one example in my early meditation sort of experiences was I had a lot of anxiety around death I was you know scared of it and at times it would break through and I would have panic attacks I would just be like in the kitchen talking with my brother and he would mention some casual remark about the fact that we're all going to die or something

and i would just go into a full-blown internal panic attack and um that was that was like my experience especially in my early 20s and at some point especially through my practicing i fell into what i you know now call a dark night these words are kind of clunky but it was just a prolonged period of four to six months where every single day of my life um i woke up and went to bed tortured and thinking and obsessing about death and the reality of it. And I remember like, you know, trying to do like exposure therapy to myself. So I'd look in the mirror and just like, you just have to face it. So I'd be like, you know, you're going to die. Everyone you love is going to die, accept it. And that didn't help. And I would just really lost. I was very scared. I thought my brain was

broken. I was like, I can't even go to get a pill for this because there's no pill that makes you not scared of your own mortality. And so it was a, it was a prolonged period of deep, deep suffering. But when I came out of it, my relationship to death has radically changed and the fear of it diminished 98%. And even sitting now about eight years after I had this experience, the grip that the fear of death had on me before I had that experience is completely gone. Even if I sit down and really focus on my own death, I cannot for the life of me conjure up fear and anxiety that used to come so naturally. And, you know, so this, I kind of conceptualized this as like, this is something that was, that I was dealing with. I could have repressed it my entire life and had it nip at my heels and come up in these inopportune moments. But through my spiritual practices, I dislodged this thing.

I had to face it. I had to look at it. I had to, as I say, have my face shoved in the shit of my own fear. And it was that process that was hard and difficult and scary and uncertain. but that was that that ultimately freed me of that fear. And I connect that deeply to my spiritual practice before, during, and after that experience. Does any of that ring true to you, or is this more conceptualizing and making a story where none really exists? What you just described is a beautiful example of what happens many times on the spiritual path is when you work through a very very,

deep aspect of your self-construct which are in really deep rooted frameworks and concepts mental structures you could even say about ourselves it's easy to say yeah what we do in meditation is letting go of those and letting go of those ideas about self but actually the process as you just described can can feel quite dramatic because in the brain and there are interesting theories about how this happens and without going too deep into it, you can imagine that like a mental concept is actually an energy system. It is something that constantly needs to be fed some mental energy.

And when it kind of, you could say, realizes that you are no longer giving it this energy, then the natural reaction the quickest way to get new attention and energy is to provoke feelings of fear because fear is so intense it's such an it's not a not a energy that we like to look at it's an emotion that it goes through the body it's like kind of very yeah it's kind of like you don't want to put your attention really on it you're trying to hide from it and then when such a concept feels kind of threatened such a self-concept and thinking that you are going to die that death is a real thing that's part of your self-construct so letting go of that is it's going to rebel and it's doing that by sending out these waves of fear because then you are no longer

looking there you're no longer looking at the fear directly that's kind of its protective mechanism and yeah term the terminology dark night of the soul really hits at home because it really feels like you are all wrapped up in that that's your whole world it's this pain it's this whatever kind of reaction you are going through at the moment and it doesn't really help to to flee from it and you did the right thing even though maybe you didn't have the best tools and the time but the thing is or the way forward is to just face it head on and in meditation you would just apply more mindfulness to those you would try not to ignore feelings of pain and suffering or anxiety or panic those would just be more objects of meditation and hopefully

when they arise you have already built up enough equanimity and clarity that you are going to power through that and those are the times when your commitment to the practice is surely tested. Yeah. Yeah, that's very helpful

and I don't think I've quite had anybody put it to me in terms like that, but it certainly makes a lot of sense and I'm grateful for that. I didn't have any tools. I didn't even know what the phrase Dark Night of the Soul was. I was very naive.

I wasn't in a community. I didn't have any teachers. I mean, I live in Nebraska in the middle of the United States. I never met, you know, naturally in my personal life, somebody else interested in this stuff. So I really, you know, went through it in a way that was incredibly scary. But if I had just one person reach out to me and say, hey, what you're going through is very tough.

You will come out the other side and you'll come out better. You know, just hearing that once from somebody who'd gone through it would have alleviated a huge chunk of the suffering that I was going through, but it is what it is, and I had to go through that and learn that lesson in my own way. But certainly if anybody out there is on this path or is going to get on this path or any path like it and goes through experiences like that, knowing about that possibility ahead of time can do a lot to blunt the fear because, you know, there's a lot of panic around my feeling that my brain was broken. And now I look back at it in retrospect and see that

was a deeply needed, deeply healing process that I went through, and I'm so, so grateful that I went through it. But at the time, I was scared, shitless, and nobody knew how to help me. And so, yeah, and there's more talk of this than spiritual communities in the last few years. And I think that's a very positive thing. Yeah, that's certainly one of the blessings of our times, is that this availability of good information has definitely increased. Yet there's also, it's coming with the curse of how do you find the right information because there's so much out there and to honestly to sort out the wheat from the shaft that took me also a long time. And probably everyone, you stumble into this and then you buy books and you listen to talks

and seminars and you have no way to distinguish what is genuine and real and from what is like, maybe commercialized and maybe has actually different goals than true spiritual awakening. But, yeah, there's no way really of going around this. Yeah, as you said, that we don't have more of this embedded in our culture, that you could kind of go to like a spiritual therapist. Because these experiences, they happen naturally to many people, just that they are that the terminology we use today to recognize those are usually different

and then the therapy may not be completely the best but yeah actually when awakening can happen also without ever hearing about spirituality it's maybe you get the hint of that this can happen to you if you are a very a person that pays a lot of attention to experience. Sometimes musicians, for example, they pay such close attention to the sense of hearing that they have kind of realizations and breakthroughs. But without the proper concept, what's happening to them, sometimes, yeah, it can be difficult. It's termed like something like, well, how do we call it, burnout or whatever, some other

sloppy definition that doesn't really help. But I think I'm hopeful that in the coming decades, this will certainly move closer and to the center, maybe not to the center of society, but at least it's easier to access good quality information. Yeah. And, you know, when something new comes into a culture, there's always going to be that process of various detours and dead ends and the co-option by commercial forces, like the Amazon Zen booth. is a thing in America now where Amazon warehouses have a little three-minute meditation booth. You can go in to calm down to increase your productivity, something that is nauseating to me. And there's also a whole world of narcissists presenting themselves as gurus and knowledgeable, spiritual, such and such is, and cults and everything like that. So it can definitely be hard to navigate, especially if you don't have anybody to help you or if it's new in a cultural environment.

And I think we're going through introducing this stuff to the West and then all of the pathologies of the West, taking it in a million directions. But I think it's a necessary part of that coming into our culture and ultimately, hopefully, having a deep and stable spot within it. But it's a process. And I really also appreciate what you said about attention and you talked about musicians,

sometimes just the hyper, you know, awareness of the sound and losing yourself in the moment-by-moment construction of melody and music, and that can be an impetus to some sorts of spiritual awakening. I think it's very interesting, and it goes beyond the Buddhist tradition. So in Sufism, for example, there's the whirling dervishes. And again, it's this spinning of the body and then what you do with the tension in that process or in the Christian tradition, in deep prayer. you become very concentrated on more or less a mantra in some cases if you're repeating a prayer

over and over again and some people could have you know mystical or spiritual awakening moments just doing that even if they weren't trying to cultivate it or weren't even aware that it was a it was a possibility so once somebody that comes to mind is like an Eckhart toli I don't know what your thoughts are on him but he's somebody I came across early in my spiritual investigations. And my understanding of his story is precisely this, that he wasn't engaging in any spiritual practices, but was at such an abysmal pit of deep, profound, suicidal suffering that something broke within him. At least that's how he tells it. And so in that case, at least if you take him at his word, there is little to know conscious path taking, and it was just more or less

by accident that he had a, you know, ruptural awakening event. Now, you certainly shouldn't just sit back and say, hopefully it comes for me. Like, you know, I think there is, people are interested in this. You have to put some effort, especially initially, into doing it. But those things do happen, and it's just worth mentioning that those possibilities are out there, I guess.

Yes, suffering is one of the probably most common things that put you on the path and make you discover sociality. when something that unpleasant is overpowering every moment of your life and it really there's no more coping mechanism that your mind can find to escape it you very quickly realize some aspects about reality and that is that you have no control that like you didn't wish upon yourself the suffering and yet it's happening you don't even have the control to get out of it maybe not even for a few moments and it's just continuing used then yeah in a certain bizarre way it can make this work a lot easier and it can

definitely facilitate researching the stuff and finding alternative ways of escaping suffering because that's really the ultimate goal to realize it doesn't make sense for anything to avoid anything else so there when you realize deeply that there are only sensations arising and with that comes to realization that there is nobody who could be hurt by certain negative sensations, certain kinds of pain.

But yet, that's something people rarely discover when everything is going great and you have a certain sense of autonomy and you can kind of do things to keep you're kind of relatively comfortable within your comfort zone. Then that's how most people live their life. So suffering never get so out of hand that the only escape is through because you cannot escape anymore.

All coping strategies fail and then awakening out of the illusion of being someone who is suffering that becomes the only option. Yeah, and there's plenty of stories like that in the world of spiritual awakening where people have suffered just insane tragedies and just have been absolutely pinned down by it. There's no, as you say, nowhere else to go but through. And certainly suffering has been a huge, the driving force in my experience with interested in Buddhism and meditation and all these things. But I have a very good friend who is just constituted in such a way where he has a high baseline, you know, mood. And he never really deviates from that. He's never suffered with anxiety or depression. he's incredibly confident, incredibly unique, incredibly successful, you know, and he's tried meditation,

he sat down a few times because of my interest in it and me kind of like, you should kind of check this out. He's very, very smart, you know, so I was like, you should try this out. He just never, he sat down a few times, like, I don't know, I don't really see anything in it. Maybe if he kept doing it, he would. But like you said, there's, there isn't a need. He never feels as if he's suffering. And, you know, he's very confident and comfortable in his own skin and all outward appearance. He's doing quite well. And so there's really no impetus for him to dedicate a life to going inward and trying to eradicate suffering. Whereas, you know, I have the exact opposite experiences in my life, maybe genetically or whatever it is.

I don't have a high baseline. I have peaks and valleys that I go through constantly. And so that suffering has certainly pushed me in this direction. But people have different experiences for sure. Yeah. And certainly what you said there about your friends. People with high intellect often struggle with this is, you know, with the simplicity of this technique is the point is not to be really conceptualizing about it. And when someone comes to these very simple practices, oftentimes their mind has been through like school and university.

You train this ability to conceptualize to such a refined degree that it is your, it's a very powerful tool and you're used to use to use. this tool to your benefits quite often at work and outside of it. So with very intelligent people, I find also that they have harder times not to engage this conceptual mind. It's their tool. It's their tool for success. It's how they get everything out of life that they need, the success, the money, the whatever people think about them is based all on this tool of knowing how.

to conceptualize very accurately to a high degree many things but in this work it fails and so um yeah paradoxically and maybe it's not even bad i mean there's nothing bad you don't have to wake up you don't have to do this work at all um in in the ultimate sense you don't either you wake up or you don't but yeah that's why most people don't wake up it's um too comfortable yeah absolutely well i'm gonna you know we're already pretty deep in here. I want to be respectful of your time. I want to talk about kind of rapid fire, the importance of four things on a spiritual path. This is the importance of a teacher, the importance of a spiritual community, the importance of retreats, and then the

possible importance of a therapy or something, you know, that addresses some issues outside of the practice itself. So kind of let's take these one by one and just give me your, you know, off the top of your head thoughts about how important these things are for somebody just starting out or deeper in a path for it for example i myself have been doing this stuff mostly in a lone wolf style at first at a necessity but then for whatever reason i just haven't made the jump to joining a community or really seeking out a teacher even though at times i felt like those things were quite needed or at least could be helpful um and i guess you could find teachers in this modern world in different ways. You can go online and I could read books from, you know, spiritual

teachers all around the world and hear podcast talks and Dharma talks. And so I have an access to teachers that people before the internet never even had that. And so certainly it might stand in to an extent. But I'm just wondering how important you think these things are. And let's start with teachers. Do you think they're essential or do you have one? How do you think of their relevance? Yeah, in that regard I was similar to you for many years. I didn't have one. and I searched the jungle of information myself and did all kinds of practices and combined them all, which definitely also helped me and got me quite a bit of insight. But really, when I decided to go with a teacher in my personal experience,

and that's also what they say in the tradition, things moved ahead a lot quicker. got easier as well because maybe it's first necessary to do quite a bit of research on your own before you can decide on a teacher which sounds or speaks to you which you are resonating with and which you can really say to yourself okay I'm going to trust this person on everything he says regarding practice I'm going to trust that what he is recognizing in me what he is saying to be the right thing for me, I'm going to trust that. Then definitely that's the right thing for you to do. And that's also the thing I would apply if I'm looking for teachers.

Can I really genuinely provoke that feeling within me that I'm willing to trust him? Then, yeah, then it's a good time and it's a good fit with that teacher. because without that a teacher is no more than any other kind of information to you but with the commitment then you gain the benefit of not getting sidetracked so easily anymore even though there are many different styles of meditation out there which can all be useful and helpful and apply at certain times when you commit to one thing there is the benefit bit of what we also said earlier, momentum. The mind has to first learn the practice and then really apply the effort to it.

And when you switch out the practices every couple of weeks or months, probably the momentum you've built up was not that great. And, yeah, it's easy to become frustrated because you're not yet seeing the results with it. So the teacher gives you the benefit of keeping you accountable. stay with that practice. So, yeah, I definitely, to keep a short answer, if you feel you are committed to this, get a teacher. Now, is it better, even in the digital, you know, epoch, to find a teacher that you can

actually be in person with, or, you know, is it okay to just find somebody that is remote, doesn't live near you, but with all the technology today you can still have access to? Do you have any, is it just a person by person preference thing or options thing or is there a clear winner as far as what's preferable there? You can definitely choose any teacher that you can have a conversation with. So whether that's in person or digitally over the phone, in my opinion, makes no difference. So there's, yeah, there are some ideas out there that you are like going to be awakened in the presence of some special teacher just by, them by you being in the same room with them um i find it funny and cannot really um speak to their validity of that but um i would doubt it and so um yeah you can choose any teacher basically

to in our days around the world and when you have the ability to speak with them on a regular basis once a week or every two weeks um that does the job perfectly fine cool okay the next one is a senga or a spiritual community how important is that because there's actually a movement locally here not a movement but an organization here locally that doesn't have a teacher there's no like prescribed practice or no person that gives necessarily Dharma talks but it's just a community of about like 25 people at various parts of the path that just come together and they meditate together and they talk together but you know it's all as a community of equals with no teacher and you know that's interesting and there's obviously communities with a teacher at its

head but in general just the idea of a spiritual community how important is that that differs from individual to individual generally it is a great support so when you have access to that and you want to make use of that that's definitely a plus because yeah it's easy to get sidetracked and the more people you have in your social circle that you can talk to about this and your experiences and get their input and just see other people are doing this as well and there may be people are slightly ahead of me and they report these and such changes and then it makes this whole journey much more relatable and much more realistic to you and it seems not such a strange and such a out there conceptual thing and yeah having people to talk to about these things I think

it's very important so how you do that if that needs to be like a committed social gathering once a week and only talk about one style of Buddhism for example I don't think that's necessary but having a few close friends that you can talk to about what you are going through in regard to this, I would say you don't want to go without that. So looking online maybe somewhere, they don't have to live near you, just so that you have someone in a similar position can really relate. That's really, really, really helpful.

Awesome. And the next one is retreat. And this is of particular importance because. um it's something you and i have talked about um i did a little very small one day sort of retreat on my birthday this year and that was interesting but you know i have multiple young children um constantly busy i mean one of my kids is seven months old so uh it is a constant situation of me tending to my kids and you know for me or my wife to leave the house it has to be planned you know like okay you'll watch the kids why i go do this etc and so it and a lot of people are in that position where

it's very hard, if not impossible, to go on a two-week or a month-long retreat. But, you know, there are smaller retreats. But just in general, how important are our retreats on the spiritual practice, specifically within Buddhism? Yeah, to that point I can come back to what I mentioned, I think, towards the beginning is retreats are basically just all-day mindful. They give you the container in which you can really. focus on practice all day long. So retreats usually are not set up in a way that you do sitting-style meditation for 14 hours or something like that.

So it's broken up into individual times where you walk, where you eat mindfully, where you sit, of course. So in a certain sense, there's nothing special about retreats. It is just a container that makes it very very. very easy to keep up that mindfulness continuously. So whenever you find yourself in a situation where retreats are not an option, what you could do is really ramp up that mindfulness in activity where conceptual thinking is not that important.

And it's surprising that you can discover that actually most of the time you need very little conceptualize. many things you have learned and they have become so automatic in your day that you can do them while being completely mindful that even includes talking to people cooking of course things like doing work around the house running the errands so that's a really good option and to kind of close this gap between daily life and retreat in one's mind and the idea that's a really good idea because it doesn't because it can hold you back if you think

like, oh, only when I'm able to do this one week of a retreat, that will be time worse practicing. No, you can practice everywhere and you can even gain a lot of benefit of saying, okay, I've made my daily practice but then I, maybe I can get Sundays free and I really, maybe once a month

I say, okay, this whole day dedicated to meditation. And you will be surprised that these 10 or 12 hours or maybe more that you can dedicate to practice, they are more powerful than probably a couple of months of just one hour a day, for example. So these options as well. But of course, going to a retreat to a dedicated retreat, that would be the ideal scenario. because distractions are reduced and much easier to practice. Yeah, the entire environment is set up to be conducive to long-term consistent practice. And a lot of those retreats, you'll have the benefit of a teacher and the interview with them. So as you're practicing and deepening, you can also have these moments where you go in

and can speak to the teacher, ask questions, or whatever that may be, which can also be very helpful. but I really like your point that you can't have it as this idea of like, okay, I will take this stuff seriously when I'll eventually in the future have the time to go out and do a retreat because that's just putting things off and that's living in the, you know, the future oriented mindset and conceptualization and, you know, just being at home, even with kids, you're right. If you're, if you truly dedicated it, you could do an entire day where you just said no matter what comes up, I'm going to have to change diapers and, make bottles and clean up after the kids and change the litter box, I can do all of that while, you know, being mindful and noting the sensations arising and in practicing. You know, there's nothing, this formal split between sitting on the cushion and the rest of your life. It might be helpful at the very beginning, but very quickly, and the sooner the better, to do away

with that division because ultimately it's superfluous. This is, this is meant to permeate your daily life. And in the beginning, like, I had this idea that it needed to be super quiet. I needed, you know, everybody out of the house. And only then could I go into my room and sit down and have a really good meditation practice. But as it's developed, it's like, I could be in the middle of a construction site. I could be at the landing strip of, you know, LaGuardia Airport. And if your mindfulness and the momentum behind it is in the right place,

there's nothing inherently non-conduasive about even the most intense daily cacophonist experiences and so I think that's really important too and to to let that boundary dissolve as quickly as you can between formal practice and the rest of your life I think the better yeah I loved how you put that that's beautiful I can only agree like sometimes you can even go out into a very busy place and it can be a very exhilarating experience actually to look okay can I catch every little sensation that's coming at me here because there is so much going on and so rapidly flying at you and you are just like you are playing you are driving a formal one car and you have to be on the spot every second not to miss one

sensation and so yeah actually with a certain level of mindfulness there is nothing that needs to be excluded from the practice all right last one of these of this little section is therapy or you know forms of help outside of spiritual practice sometimes people people with deep, let's say, childhood abusive trauma, for example, obviously lots of suffering pushed into spiritual communities, sometimes with the idea that by merely engaging in these spiritual practices, I will be able to work through and dissolve my trauma, but I've heard other people, especially some very well-practice and accomplished meditators, say there can easily be a place outside of practice for going and, you know, going to therapy.

and dealing with some other stuff. And I know there's Ken Wilbur out there who talks about what growing up, cleaning up, and waking up. So waking up is obviously the meditative experience of waking up from the illusion of separateness. Growing up has the ethical component to it. But cleaning up is like this, you know, outside of practice, going to therapy, trying to deal with the shit you went through as a kid, and that that can be helpful. And sometimes it's harmful to think that simply by engaging in these spiritual practices, is I will dissolve or do away with, you know, trauma that I suffered as a child or whatever

it may be. And I'm not taking a position on this. I'm just sort of laying out the different positions. What is your take on the importance or relevance of stuff like therapy in addition to a practice? Yeah, all of these three areas are of great importance. And in the vast Buddhist literature, you will find content on all of them. And these three terms, I would put them in the order of waking up, cleaning up, and growing up.

Which is if you decide like you want to become, let's use this term, the best version of yourself, then it is definitely of great help to first get to know the basic, like what is this reality really like. So put all your eggs in the basket of waking up. first so because in a sense you can then realize that many of the problems that you would put in the category of cleaning up like your traumas and bad behaviors they will clear up maybe not all of them but many of them will clear up through seeing clearly what reality is so first waking up is just you cannot really be sane without it so working doing therapy and all of that that's fine it can help but only to a

very limited degree and the further you are into waking up you will also see all of those limitations and why they are there so don't forget to be ethical along the way because yes there are situations during your path where you are dealing with so much of your own stuff that it's sometimes the ego comes back so hard and you feel like you have to protect certain things and you act weirdly because you are going through this social crisis but to have a baseline level of how to behave morally and ethically should be in place but if you think you have that, then it's definitely completely safe to go all out on waking up first and then continue afterwards with cleaning up and then, you know, growing into whichever direction

life takes you then. Nice. Yeah, that's very interesting. And I largely agree for sure. And in my experience, I definitely, you know, as a normal human being, had moral and ethical ideas and ostensible commitments before I got into this practice. But I have noticed that just, and by virtue of doing the practice and sticking with it over many years, that the ethical behavior happens automatically. It's like, you know, when I'm presented with a moral

situation, there's no, you know, ego trying to finagle some way for me to come out on top of this situation even if that means stepping over somebody or whatever that just kind of goes away and it's so clearly obvious in most cases obviously there's some very complicated moral situations but in most daily situations the right choices is increasingly obvious and is automatically chosen you know more or less that's how i feel it so you know definitely having good ethics when you come into it is is good and just being an ethical person regardless of whether or not you're engaged in spirituality is obviously a positive trait but i've known that that through practice itself, my ethics have become much more consistent, much deeper, and just

sort of automatic as opposed to something where I have to debate or think about heavily. So that's just my experience, but. Yeah, certainly. Some people even say when you're fully enlightened, you're incapable of inethical action. So there is certainly something to that because you see. so clearly and you recognize suffering so clearly for what it is that, yeah, and on top of that there is no self, like, stepping in that needs to be defended. Yeah, not important anymore to gain something out of the individual sensations. Right. Absolutely. All right. Just to wrap

this up, you know, we should definitely, I'll definitely have you back on because there's more things I wanted to talk about, like self-inquiry, dual versus non-dual approaches, the role of love, spiritual materialism and bypassing. But I think those are going to have to wait for our next conversation, which we'll definitely have. But as a way to end this conversation, assuming there are, you know, people listening out here who are curious about what we're talking about, maybe it's striking a chord. I mean, my experience when I first got into spirituality was I was introduced to these ideas and immediately something deep within me was, like, fascinated and attracted to it, even though

I had very little understanding of what it even was I was getting interested in. And so I can only imagine that there's going to be at least a few people out there that listen to episodes like this and something within them is being, like, triggered, is being pulled in this direction. And if you are experiencing that as a listener, I would definitely urge you to, you know, follow up on that feeling and try to pursue and experiment with these things. But for the last little segment here, I just kind of want to give some tips and advice specifically for beginners, you know, that are looking for a path, assuming that they, that they, you know, know, know, know very little about all the different types of paths and just kind of want to get on something and start moving in that direction. What would, what would some of your advice for them specifically be?

maybe I give a book recommendation that's very concise and very speaks to the beginner and also gives you an overview of what this work is like and that's one of the greatest works and you can find it for free online to download it it's called the progress of insight and it's written by Mahasi Sayadav and he has written this basically as an instruction to his students and he's also in there describing the phases that you are going to get to and that you are going to go through along this way and it's very clear and so whenever you are finding yourself at this point of saying okay I want to go take this meditation beyond the three-minute stress reduction productivity enhancing thing that

it's sold for nowadays then that's a great entry point and maybe to wrap it up from what we said in the beginning meditation is about seeing clearly and so every time you are questioning what should you do how should you meditate choose an object of meditation as we said you can choose the rising and falling sensations of the stomach and just watch those repeatedly and what will happen is that when you are labeling those inside your mind silently you say rising when the stomach is rising and falling when the stomach is falling it sounds simple but you will learn learn a lot of things because the mind is active it will start to distract you will happen hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of times during your meditation practice that you are getting

lost in thought and you're going to pull yourself back and you are going to recognize and say, oh, that's thinking, thinking. And then feelings will come up, sensations in the body where you say pain or pressure or itching. And you just recognize the sensations arising in the moment. That's the practice in the beginning, and it's the practice until the end. Yeah, absolutely. Some more, some just other stuff that comes to my mind is there's this debate about when you're getting into the quote-unquote spiritual world. There's so many different options, so many different paths.

Every major religion has within it a mystical and spiritual branch and element that one can follow. And I could see why, you know, somebody raised in a Christian culture, might find Christian mysticism to be more of an entryway and speak more to them than perhaps Buddhism, you know, or somebody in an Islamic culture might choose Sufism as opposed to Buddhism or whatever it may be. Is there anything to the idea that one should find a tradition and stick with it, or are you somebody who says that actually Buddhist meditation in particular is the most effective and laid out spiritual path to take? and other paths might be a little bit more vague or, you know, harder to follow or what's your take on on that idea of finding one tradition and sticking to it, especially as opposed to the, the buffet approach of pulling and pushing away different things based on your own preferences and kind of hobbling them together into one, you know, worldview or whatever it may be?

Yeah. With the caveat that I have limited experience with some of the major religions like Christianity, I haven't really doven into their practices. But from my general understanding, and I've talked to some people, I have some religious friends, and really the problem with those is that they don't have a great emphasis on practice. you will probably not find very many castles that are going beyond conceptualizing. They are going to speak to you about the results, basically, and give you rules to live by, and then it's going to come from the mind.

But maybe there are some traditions within these religions that are more practice-based, but really from all my research and I have also tried a lot of spiritual practices the Buddhist practices are really the most direct the most thought out and so even you could say sophisticated even though the application is very simple but it's really I don't think it's surpassed by any other religion And so if you want to go the safe road, just stick with what works.

But even within Buddhism, let's say, you know, there's a Zen Buddhism or Theravada Buddhism or, you know, Vajriana Buddhism. Or, you know, you can have an attachment to the aesthetics of Tibetan culture and maybe that's your doorway in. So even within Buddhism, there's many different paths and is there an idea that maybe just, you know, there's one Dharma and you can take any door into it but it leads to the same place or like, you know, actually it is helpful to start, like, like just with one Buddhist tradition in particular and kind of stick with that instead of bouncing around to different teachers and communities and sex and traditions? Yeah. Probably, and that's my experience, this is going to happen anyways for most people when they start.

It's like natural. You want to understand. You want to see what's out there. You want to read different things. And that's where this idea of when you find something. that clicks and that appeals genuinely like, okay, I'm going to trust that this teaching is right and that what they say is genuine, then there is benefit of sticking to that. And in the end, the objects of meditation, the styles can differ, but what the practice is

doing, what you are doing, and what the results are, that's not different. So whatever it helps you to see clearly the sensations arising in the moment for you, that's helpful. And maybe you prefer certain styles like reciting mantras, which is then something you concentrate repeatedly on a verbal pattern in your thoughts, in your thoughts, or whether that's something you see, something you work within the visual field. or within your emotional feel, as you mentioned earlier, when you work with love, for example, then that's like in the end you realize those are minor details as long as the practice or the tradition keeps you focused on the reality of rising each moment. There are different things you can choose from and different things achieve that goal.

Yeah, well said. And I would just also add to that is like having this approach of curiosity as opposed to treating it as like another chore you have to do to make yourself better. Like I need to exercise and I need to get enough sleep and I should also meditate because I'm trying to, you know, do self-improvement. That's fine as far as it goes. But this idea of just being very curious and having that as your main posture when you're engaging in this stuff and studying this stuff can be very helpful. People listening to a show like this are obviously curious about the external world. They're very curious about how it works, different ways of interpreting it, how to change it. So there's a natural inclination there to be curious and to investigate.

And that exact same approach and posture can and I think should be applied to one's inner life, one's mental and emotional behavioral patterns. And there's nothing that I've come across superior to Buddhism when it comes to being very clear about, you know, how to do this and so I think that helps just in general treating it with curiosity and openness and investigation as opposed to treating it as yet another self-improvement task or chore that you have to check off your list every day because you can really kill the practice by treating it like that at least I found that to be true in my experience and then the other thing is a healthy dose of self-compassion can be very helpful you know a lot of people have no problem

expressing compassion towards others but a lot of people especially in certain cultures like the one I live in self-hatred self-loathing not feeling worthy enough is certainly predominant and you know you can engage in these practices and then start to become very harsh with yourself start to judge yourself you're not doing this right enough you're not making progress enough that person is doing better than you oh you know you're being sloppy sit down and shut up and you know that approach that little tyrant, that little Nazi in your mind that wants to whip you every time, you know, you do something wrong and self-flagellate, you know, kind of gently try to let go of that as well because it won't serve you in these practices. And I found that to be truly

compassionate and loving of the other, I have to develop that love and compassion and respect for myself, you know, alongside it, if not prior to it. And that's at least been my experience. Do you have any thoughts on that as a sort of final say or any final words in general? Yeah, whenever you think the thought, how can I or how do I, how can I, and then usually it's like, how can I achieve this, get this, make this happen, you can realize whenever that's going through your mind, oh, I'm already in the illusion. And then when you really believe that there is still this eye that can do this or that or be better than someone else or then you're operating not from the level of mindfulness but from the level of illusion

and yeah in terms of practice that's always a good thing to keep in mind that when this terminology you use in your thought and conceptualize them ah sorry yeah mindful it's a thought It's not. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I always love having you on. I definitely am going to have you back on because we still have about half of this

outline to work through. Yeah. But I really, really do appreciate you coming on. And I, you know, I reach out to you outside of the show and just asked you for some advice and you were so willing and, you know, so willing to give that advice to me. It really meant a lot. And I deeply, deeply appreciate it. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you

you and your YouTube channel online and anything else you might want to plug yeah as you said that um i want to mention that i really as i see the benefits of this work within myself i really love sharing this and love to help people um on this journey and so people can find me on my website lauritz m dot com and you can also find a link to my youtube channel there and information about me. I also offer coaching, which is just provided on a donation basis. So

everyone who listen to this and maybe has some questions about their practice or feels that this resonates with them and they want to learn more, no more. They can really feel free to contact me through my website.

I also have there a little calendar where you can automatically book a session with me and we talk about your stuff, people usually start to explain their situation to me and then I give them my input and we figure out the next steps for them and how practice can go forward. And so, yeah, that's what I do kind of full time now. It's started as a passion. Now I'm doing it to help people and I'm really happy that. Yeah, people are coming to me and find some inspiration from what I did and on the YouTube channel, as you also did.

So, yeah, that's my offer to people. Awesome. Yeah, and I'll link to all of that in the show notes so people can find you as easily as possible. And I'll also link to, as I said in the beginning, our previous episode that we did together. If you like this conversation and want to learn more or want to hear that other episode, it'll be in the show notes as well. you can easily find it. Thank you again, my friend, and let's absolutely do it again soon. Yeah, thank you as well. It was a great conversation. Really enjoyed it. And I'm also looking forward to our next conversation.