Soul Boom - Jeff Kober: Is Anxiety a Symptom or a Teacher?

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Jeff Kober joins Rainn Wilson on Soul Boom to delve into the profound questions of human existence. The two discuss how a deeper awareness of consciousness can transform your life, explore the dual nature of anxiety as both a teacher and a challenge, and learn the importance of finding beauty in everyday moments. Jeff shares personal stories and spiritual tools to help navigate the complexities of modern life, emphasizing the power of love and presence. Don't miss this enlightening conversation that promises to inspire and uplift. More Jeff Kober: Check out Jeff's new series on the Soul Boom YouTube channel, Day Shift w/ Jeff Kober! http://instagram.com/jeffkobermeditation Thank you to our sponsors! Pique Tea (15% OFF!): https://piquelife.com/SOUL Waking Up app (1st month FREE!): https://wakingup.com/soulboom Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Spring Green Films Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Soul Boom Generation, I've got a really exciting announcement for you. We've got a substack. If you love the Soul Boom podcast and book and ideas, then you're going to want to get our weekly newsletter Substack sent to your inbox. It's magnificent. There's going to be fantastic guest authors. Some are written by me. A lot of them delve into the ideas around the podcasts that we're doing that week. So sign up. Please subscribe. Go to Soulboom.substack.com. Thank you. You're listening to So boo. Every day, as much as I can, I practice being here rather than in my thoughts about here. Oh, that's juicy. Being with you rather than my thoughts about you, especially being with you rather than with my thoughts about me.

Right. It means I'm a human. It's the nature of being a human that I'm going to fall out of the truth, constantly. It's the point of being here. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast.

Jeff, let me cut to the chase. I'm listening to this podcast. I'm 25 years old. I'm feeling a little bit directionless. I live in Dubuque, Iowa. I have anxiety, sometimes depression. I feel a lot of concern about climate change, the current political situation. I get into overwhelm. I spend way too much time on my phone. What would you say to this person?

What are some spiritual tools that you would give to someone kind of at the cutting edge of the mental health crisis? like right on that verge where, you know, life is presenting this very particular 2024 set of challenges. First of all, I would say, accept that you're listening to this because this has something for you, trust in the grace of consciousness, the universe, God, whatever you want to call it,

and listen as if you're going to hear one thing that can allow you to move through this day with a bit of not hope, but surety that we're all here for a reason. We're not here in order to suffer. We're here in order to grow. And I don't know what to do about all of these things. The beautiful thing about doing spiritual work is that it's a common. common upgrade to virtually everything I do. And David Hawkins, a quite brilliant teacher, said, we changed the world not by what we do, but by what we have become. So if you're

listening to this podcast and with your Rain Wilson's insistence on spiritual growth and personal growth, you're in the right place. And keep doing that and follow whatever is occurring to you, in terms of the next right action toward the growth of the whole, rather than getting bogged down in the weeds of it's all going to hell in a handbasket. That's a great place to start. I want to continue this conversation and this line of thinking. There's some really important kernels in there. We're not here to suffer.

We're here to grow. Everyone has a purpose and a reason for being in this kind of plane of existence. and that there is a miracle of consciousness. You know, I mentioned your book. You talk a lot about consciousness. How can a deeper awareness of one's consciousness positively impact someone's life of this random person in Dubuque that we're talking about?

First of all, become aware that awareness does not reside in the intellect, understanding, problem solving can exist within the intellect. But the intellect is like the tiniest fraction of what my consciousness actually is. And we're stuck in this. It's like a sickness of our society that as I think, so I am, as I feel, so life is. And if I'm going to have a different experience of life, I need to do something out here in order to change the way thinking.

is happening in here. Nothing to be further from the truth. We're meant to know ourselves in a tactile way. We're meant to feel ourselves as a process of living, rather than as a series of problems to be solved. When I look at myself through the lens of the intellect, all I see are problems. It's a problem-solving tool.

And how many times have you had this experience? if I just get that job, I'll be okay. And I get the job. It's like, oh, yeah, but I need more money than that. But I, we need this. It's always the goalposts keep moving because it's not about that. So become aware that awareness is not a problem to be solved itself, nor is it a question to be answered.

It's a question to be lived with. You know, we were just talking about Aldous Huxley and his book, The Divine Within. And he talks in there about having an experience of, he was listening to some friend on the beach who was talking about something that was boring, Aldous. And he looked at the film of sand that had gathered on his hand, and suddenly he realized that each of the little grains of sand were these perfect geometrical shapes. And each of them had an iridescence to them. And these rays of light were bouncing back and forth and across these different grains of sand.

And he was having the experience that beauty exists in everything if I'm looking for beauty. It doesn't have to be something necessarily beautiful. But I must be engaged in the world in order to discover beauty in the world. And I must do what I personally can do to recognize that my experience, of myself and my experience of the world resides solely within my consciousness, rather than within the occurrences of the world. What about anxiety? Well, for an extended period of time, I was in anxiety all the time.

And one of the biggest causes of anxiety that I know for myself is my resistance to feeling the way it feels to be here. It's really uncomfortable to be in a body. It really, I, It's not painful, but it's extremely uncomfortable. And it's really uncomfortable to see myself as someone who carries rage or anger or shame or fear, all these so-called dark emotions or negative emotions. And someone who wants approval and wants to be loved and wants status and these other kind of more ineffable,

darker needs of the ego? Yes. Just it. Please correct me if I'm saying, you're absolutely right. I would quibble with both of ours use of darker. Okay. And that paradigm tells me this part of me is okay and this part isn't. And I have to get rid of this part and grow this part.

As long as I never accept the dark part, I will never be able to live through the light part or the good part. because I'll be fighting this and acting as if I don't have it. But if I recognize where these feelings come from, that they are a natural outgrowth of living in a world where separation and lack of love is my experience, but togetherness and love is my deepest desire. I had lots of psychological answers for a lot of years

and was never able to get past my anxiety or get past my deep, not core, but deep belief that I was unworthy of life, let alone happiness. There must be a spiritual solution. There must be an awakening to the idea that there's so much more than what I'm seeing. You know, at the cusp of 2024

and all of its challenges, and specifically anxiety. You said you used to suffer from anxiety. Psychological solutions didn't necessarily benefit you. I think we all have broken hearts. I think we all have deep and profound experiences of despair and existential angst. I think we're all carrying a huge reservoir of grief.

Our society tells us that if we were doing it right, we wouldn't feel those things. And it gives us no way to change those things, except if you just look like this or, you know, get this much of that, then you'll feel differently. Which is the algorithmic Instagramification of contemporary life where look how good this person is in the swimsuit. Look at all the followers they have. look at their perfectly curated life. If I could get there, then I would be. For myself, I had to make sense of my life in a way that had discomfort.

And I don't like to use the word pain, emotional pain. It's just uncomfortable. Yeah. When I accept that discomfort is part of the equation and when I give myself a reason that experiencing the discomfort is for my growth and my higher purpose, then it becomes palatable. It becomes something I can handle it, becomes something I can easily live through. If doing this thing, if living through this amount of discomfort moves me X number of steps

toward enlightenment or X number of steps toward living a life of purpose, and value, is it worth it? Of course, because that's what we all want. We want to matter, period. And the bastardization of that is, I want your approval. The truth of that is it's an observer-dependent universe, and I want to be a part of it that's making it grow, making it better, making it evolve, helping it evolve.

I want to be a part of the evolution. Life is suffering or life has suffering, is the central teaching of Buddhism. And the word in Sanskrit was dukkah, which means kind of anxious discontent. So life is, when we think suffering, it's kind of like being flagellated and your hand is crushed and you're vomiting.

Like that's suffering. But anxious discontent. It's like you're waiting in the Starbucks line is really long and there's three emails that are really annoying and you know you're going to have to respond to and you didn't get that one job. And why didn't your friend text you back?

Are they mad at you? You're just in this like anxious discontent. I love that meaning. Yeah. Yeah. You're talking about anxiety being a possible teacher. And I love that perspective because anxiety is there as a warning flag that something's out of balance, right? And anxiety kept our species alive for 100,000 years.

Like, oh, no, the bushes are. are shaking and there could be a wild boar in there. Uh-oh. Now, I would say anxiety is the bushes are shaking and I'm going to pretend they're not there because I have something I need to accomplish here. That's what fear, just fear, you don't have to think about fear. Fear just, I was walking and my wife and I were hiking in Montana a few summers ago. She was ahead of me. It was stupid to be out hiking.

It was 95 degrees and we were in the foothills and, there were a lot of snakes. And all of a sudden, I watched as my wife's body flew up into the air and landed behind me. There's a snake on the path. She didn't have to think, oh, snake, I should jump. Her body went. Yeah. She's got some cat-like reflexes.

She does. Well, she's an almost professional tennis player. So the fear is absolutely essential. The survival mechanism. It keeps our species alive, keeps me alive personally. Anxiety, though, is there's something that is knocking at the door and I'm ignoring it. So there's some denial there? Denial and rationalization.

Like, if someone were knocking at the door, literally, right now, and you and I were trying to have this conversation. and we had the idea that the conversation must go on no matter what. We would be able to offer progressively less and less of our attention to each other and to the conversation because it would become more and more challenging to ignore the fact that that noise was at the door. And the stories about what it means that I'm not answering the door, what it would mean if I answered the door who's out there, that SOB, all the stories would take up more. and more and more of our attention, offering us less and less attention and energy to share with each other. So what's the solution? Get here, be with what is. I practice virtually every day as much as I

can. I practice being here rather than in my thoughts about here. Oh, that's true. That's juicy. Being with you rather than my thoughts about you, especially being with you rather than with my thoughts about your thoughts about me. Right, right. It means I'm a human. It's the nature of being a human that I'm going to fall out of the truth constantly. It's the point of being here. I have discovered for myself a worldview that says I am consciousness, having a human experience, becoming fully lost in my humanness solely for the experience of digging my way out of it and of having every experience good and bad positive negative along the way that that implies. And that as above so below, the whole of consciousness has embodied itself in order to remember its oneness with itself.

And in order to have every experience, dark and light, good and bad, that is available to the embodied. What's that quote as a, I live between love and something else? Sri Nisaradha Maharaj said, love says I am everything, wisdom says, I am nothing. Between the two, my life flows. Between the wisdom of nothingness and the love that says I am everything. I live between that. And it's the wisdom that I am nothing. It's not the assessment.

that I am nothing. That's really important. Because the ego will tell me I am nothing. I'm a piece of shit. I'm nothing. You're worthless. It's not worthlessness. It's nothingness.

It's nothingness. Empty mind in Buddhism, right? I guess. And there aren't there two, I know there are more than two streams of Buddhism, but I know that one stream states that the final experience is of everything or

allness and the other stream of Buddhism says that the final experience is of nothingness. I know that I prefer the everythingness than the nothingness. It sounds more fun. Right. And more real to me.

This is not... And helpful. Nothing. And helpful. What does the world need? I'll give you the absurdly simple answer first, which is the world needs love. There's no situation that will not be upgraded by the addition of love.

If consciousness is one thing, that means I can't depend on someone else to bring the love to that situation. I'm the one who must bring it because there is no something else. There is in this relative world in our experience. You're over there. I'm over here. As one teacher said, you have to have an ego just to know that when Frank says something, you know, it didn't come out of you. But I need to bring love into all of my situations, all of my relationships,

and to recognize that if I can't bring love into a situation, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me, but nor does it mean that there's something wrong with that person. It means that I haven't yet discovered how to love in this situation. Let me stay open to do it. How could I love in this situation? I don't know. What a great question.

to live in. So I try to live my life in questions rather than in answers. I try to not demonize others for their perspectives and their opinions. And I leave myself open to being guided by something other than my best thinking as to the next right action. All that being said, there's something to be said for social insistence on change, I see that all of our problems are based in the fact that all value has been reduced to money. There's no more valuation of quality of life, no valuation of love, of community. There's valuation of money and I need to get mine in order to be okay. and we all have to find the values that live within us rather than accepting the values that are offered us by society.

Morality is not about following a rule system over there. It's about getting in here and going like, what matters to me? What's right? Not what my fear tells me to get, but what's right? How do I get there? Stop listening to the fear, listen for the love in here. Find the way to go in here.

and we change the world by what we have become, not by what we do. And if all of us are looking for peace, peace is going to begin to be found. But we're not all looking for peace. No, we're not. But I don't have any control over what you're looking for. And for me to demonize you for not looking for peace is for me to not find peace in that area. How do I find peace in that area? You think about Gandhi.

He brought the British Empire to its knees by insisting on nonviolence. Who can do that? I can't do that. I don't know how to do that, but he did that. He insisted on not hating. That's a good start. How do you define God? I define God.

and this is not me being a jerk. It's, I define God as that thing that can't be defined, but that has all these different aspects that indicate a life of value, that indicate a world of meaning. Anything that I call God has to be infinite. If I can describe it, that makes it finite. So I'm describing an aspect of God.

Yeah. and cultural norms and psychology and our upbringing will determine perhaps what avenue we're going to follow to get in touch with God, but maybe not. God is that thing that the way it really feels to me is we come in here, we don't know how to do this, we stumble around trying to find it, and if we're sincere, we'll stumble in the right direction. and God is the flow of life moving from the darkness to the light. And as I start to listen to the feeling of that flow, I will start to become more aligned with that flow.

And when I become aligned with that flow, it stops being a struggle. Because now I'm just course correcting, but going with this flow, not that I am given, but that I am. That's what spiritual works. I am that flow. Let me do the thing.

You know, if you want to travel east, don't start out walking west. If you want to find flow, go in the direction of flow. If you want to get free of the ego, move in the direction of that which is not the ego, which is movement, flow, grace. I want to backtrack to see how you got to this point where you have these kind of insights about your own life and the human experience. Where were you from? Montana. And you grew up like climbing trees and eating bears.

What happened out there? It was Montana small farm, small town. No internet, two channels on TV, national magazines at the time, but no national newspapers. So no idea that life was possible outside what was being seen right there in front of you. That's a positive in some ways. It sounds kind of idyllic. It sounds idyllic to me to be like in climbing trees and picking apples, playing eight-man football with my buddies. And the only news I get is from like a Reader's Digest or like a Time magazine from three weeks ago.

That does sound idyllic. Because you own yourself, everything you've gone through has given you a sense of self and a sense of ownership and agency. You can choose to be in the place of idle. Or you can choose to reengage with the world and do another job, be here doing this. One of the truths of being alive as it occurs to me is that we come into these bodies with a self-assignment. There are some lessons I need to learn this lifetime, and I've given myself an equation of birth and life possibility that will give me the opportunity to learn these things and to grow in these ways. And part of that equation is I come into the body and within a few short weeks, I forget where I came from. And then suddenly I'm in this thing and like, and you're over there and what the hell am I supposed to do?

And if you have, if you're if you're in a tribe that teaches you how to hunt and fish and the things that tribal people must do to keep the tribe together, that's great. because then, oh, this is how you do. Oh, this is how you do that. This is why you can stand there and look like you belong. But you're here. You feel like an alien. And no one is saying, you're really good at that. Keep doing that.

Or here, let me show you how to do this because you're going to need this skill later on in life. If no one ever takes you aside and gives you any of those, then you end up feeling as if you have no value. and you, I believe what we do is we find a way to pretend we know what we're doing, to look like we know what we're doing, and try to pick it up in the meantime. So we're always presenting an image out here and then try and go, what's he doing over there? Oh, I can do. This is the way you sits.

And people get lost in that. I had the great good fortune of getting so far down the track that I had. had to find a spiritual solution. Take me there from Montana to getting so far off the track that you had to find a spiritual solution. What happened in between? I know there was a, there was an accident, a car accident at 15 that was pretty seminal in your development. It was, it was a watershed moment. Up to that point, I was, you know, I was on the varsity football team. I was dating the cheerleader. I was, could see myself, you know, I was fairly intelligent, but still I was looking at, you know,

being a farmer and raising kids and doing all of that and trying to find my way to fit in here because I didn't know anything else. And then I was in this car accident where a friend of mine died and I didn't. I wasn't drunk. I wasn't breaking the law. It was a legitimate accident. but coming from that era. Was he driving or you were driving? I was driving and he ran out in front of my car in the rain and died. And he was, and yet, this is a seven-year-old boy. I was 15.

We had ridden the school bus together. He was the only seven-year-old boy I'd ever talked to and we became fast friends over the course of a few months. I would sit and do flashcards with him. I protected him from some bullies who were picking on him, and then we became buddies. And he told me how his father taught him how to capture prairie dogs with a noose. And, you know, I told him what I knew about being 15.

And then I guess the world would say randomly, we came together in that fashion. Because of this small town and the, ignorance of Protestantism, and I use that term ignorance, not in terms of being pejorative, but it's saying the only way to deal with certain things is to ignore them. And there's no way to make sense of this other than to say it's the devil, so let's ignore it, which means let's ignore him. No one ever talked to me about this.

I mean, imagine one of your children being involved in something like that. that. And then you never talk to them about it. That's, I can't, that's astonishing. I can't imagine what that would be like. Yeah, me too. If my 15-year-old son accidentally hit and killed a child, any child, but especially one that he knew and loved, that would be like all hands on deck. Yeah. Years of conversation about that and that process.

Let's put this on the table and, and find a way to therapy and hugs and crying and prayers and all that. Yeah, constant conversation. I had one of my father's cousins wrote me a letter about it. And my friend Stan Frank, who was three years older than me, ended up becoming a cop in Billings, Montana. He talked to me about it. That was it. Literally.

That was it. How did it affect you? What did you go through? I went to hell. and stayed there for a long, long time. And just as our experience of the world is based in our consciousness, hell is an experience in our consciousness with our consciousness. It says we're not worthy of being here, but I don't know how to leave.

And I tried to leave, and I couldn't. I tried to, I tried a couple of times to take my own life. and I life wouldn't let me. I finished high school and I tried to go to college and couldn't get a handle on that because I was just, I was lost. When did the drinking start? My first drunk was at the Lutheran Church. I was an altar boy and I got drunk on communion wine.

It was, you know, alcohol, drugs were just a way to just be somewhat comfortable in the world. And I think to have a sense of agency. I would get drunk and high if I felt bad. I would get drunken high if I felt good. I would get drunk and high if I were bored. I would get drunk and high just to have a different experience than the one I was having. And it was the only control I had over this

because I had no awareness of this machine, of experience that we are. Were you in L.A. being an actor at this point? I followed a woman here. I stumbled around. You know, the woman and I broke up because of my shenanigans because I didn't know how to have a relationship. I didn't know how to have.

I had no value. Yeah. And so anything that I had had no value too. I was in a rock band for a hot minute because my pot dealer said, we need a bass player. Do you know how to play? Yeah, sure. You know, I figured it out.

And at a certain point, I was working at my first and only office job. I worked for a paralegal company, a Getty Oil Company for one year. And I just had the idea that I remembered being in college that something that classes had made sense. I could make sense of life by being in a class. And someone, I said this to the group of people I was working with. And someone said, I'd go to this acting class. I think you'd dig it. And I went.

And for the first time ever, I saw people having emotional breakdowns on. stage looking the way out here, the way I felt in here. And I went, oh, wait, this, oh, oh, this belongs someplace. And I was, I was hooked. That was just the barest beginnings of change, you know, and just like crawling out of the mud of, you know, those Darwin-esque pictures of the fish with legs crawling out of the mud. That was, that was, That was me. I went to my first acting class when I was 26. Oh, damn.

Okay. Pretty late. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I stopped drinking when I just turned 32. Okay. After I had gotten the job that was supposed to fix me. You get the series regular job, the steady paycheck, the fame, the attention.

It's going to do it. What role was that? It was a movie called Out of Bounds with Anthony Michael Hall and Jenny Wright. And I literally. I was in the room with the director and the writer. We've been hanging out all afternoon. I said, so do I have the job or not? And I literally closed my eyes to watch the change happen inside my head.

And nothing happened. They said, yeah, you got the job. Nothing happened. And I went out that night and drank a bottle of scotch and smoked a bunch of crack and nothing happened. I couldn't get drunk anymore. It couldn't get high. The one thing that had never let me down. It stopped working.

Yeah, stopped working. So, you know, I did. I did two weeks on the movie and then stopped drinking. We had two weeks off for Christmas New Year's. I stopped drinking the day before New Year's Eve. Cold turkey or did you go into the program? I checked into a motel and a hotel and sweater and shook for three days. And then thought, this is a really bad idea.

I needed a drink. And, you know, accidentally got taken to a 12-step group. And life from a different perspective began. Did you have a higher power before when you were drinking? Did you have a, you had a vague sense of some kind of Christian God going on up there? It was the Christian God who, in retrospect, I think what I did was I said,

I know God wants to punish me. So I made like a tacit agreement with God. I'll stay over here and punish myself. you stay over there and if ever I raise my head above above zero you can smack me down but I'll do it myself yeah yeah trust me yeah I'll take care I'm fine over here again I literally beat myself up one night in front of the mohollen fountain on riverside in Los Filles I punched myself in the face repeatedly with because I was in a fight with my girlfriend and that's what she did and she said stop stop I said, you do this all the time.

He says, yeah, but I don't really hit myself. So that's where I was living. It reminds me of that scene from the office where Dwight does fight himself with karate and self-defense. I don't know if you've seen that one. That's fantastic. How do you go from vague sense of God 12th step to being a Vedic meditator and scholar? I'm not a scholar. I'm an autodidact who has had.

had to learn things just to stay alive. And so I kept looking. I just kept looking. I knew I knew that there was something. And I was able to keep looking in spite of the voices that said, I didn't deserve to find that something. I mean, I was 17 years off of drugs and alcohol and still miserable, a great percentage of the time.

meditating on a daily basis, praying, working a spiritual program, trying to be of service in the world. And I gave up. I just said, if it hasn't changed by now, it ain't going to change. Just quit. And I said, I've got about 70% of a life back. I don't know where I got that figure, but that's the way it felt. And I said, that's going to have to be good enough. And I said, okay.

And so I stopped seeing myself as broken. stopped thinking I needed to be fixed and just went, okay, this is it. And literally a month and a half later, I learned Vedic meditation. How? My wife had a friend who learned the practice, and my wife Adele came to me and said, so Renee learned this meditation. She said, we should go do it. I said, yeah, okay.

She said, I don't want to. And she said, no, no, no. She got this word and she thinks it, you know, for 20 minutes and makes her happy. I said, let me know how that works out. She said, no, no, no, no, come. So I went to an introductory talk. Up to that point, I'd always looked out here for how to figure it out. Where's the answer?

Where I'd go use bookstores. What's your answer? Answer, answer, answer. resonance that means I'm on to something that is at the very center essence spirit of what I am and what he said resonated and so I went the next day and got a mantra and the very first time I meditated I had the experience of my thoughts being here and me being here I hadn't had a breath since I was 15 I find that to be the most powerful aspect of meditation and my practice is feeble compared to yours but an hecart

totally talks about it so beautifully this idea that you are the witness to your own being like when you're in a meditative state when and it doesn't it's not some like meditative state like you're floating or you're in your nirvana or something like that you're just having the experience of meditation you're kind of like oh my consciousness is more than my thoughts and my feelings It's almost like looking down on yourself sitting on the bench or the chair or the pad or whatever. It's not exactly like that. But almost, yeah. But it's a little bit like the security camera view of like, oh, here's me and look, oh, here's a jumble of monkey mind thoughts.

But I'm not those monkey mind thoughts. And then that beautiful separation can give you perspective to get through the day, you know, even just 10 minutes. It's huge. Yeah. It's huge because, and even in meditation itself, you'll have all these thoughts and you'll feel yourself separate from them. And all of a sudden you're like, what am I going to have for lunch? Oh, no, I have to make that phone call. I need to.

Oh, wait, I'm meditating. And then all that we kept, we keep getting hooked into these thoughts, feelings, ideas, stories, and coming back. Physical discomfort is hooked. Oh, wait, coming back. And being the space within which everything happens. rather than everything that's happening. We're the space that holds everything. It's like David Hawkins describes it this way.

He said, especially with this voice in the head, he says, imagine you're a Yankee Stadium. It's midnight. For some reason, you're there all by yourself, and the lights are on so you can enjoy yourself. And you're sitting in the dugout, and there's a transistor radio. You're old enough to remember transistor radio.

I remember them well. So there's a transistor radio sitting on the bench and it's turned up really loud. And you're going, I don't know how to turn this down. How do I turn this down? I can't make it stop. I could watch Center Field. The radio is still playing,

and I can hear it if I listen for it, but it's not right in my face. Right. And you don't have to be a victim to the transistor. No, the transistor radio is going to go. But happiness does not depend on the transistor radio stopping. Just like, you know, you mentioned earlier that, and I said talking about that accident, it's like, let's put this on the table and live with it and build an experience of life that is inclusive of this. Build a sense of self and of happiness that is inclusive of a mind that

never stops and that talks a lot of negative stuff about me. I don't have to change that. It will change over time, but it's such a small part of what I am. What a specific school or branch of meditation do you practice? What I teach Vedic meditation, it's, it's Vedantah. Veda means knowledge. And the Veda is a set of teachings that were originally oral. and then became,

it started being written down about 5,000 years ago that speak of consciousness as being primary that like the idea of or theory of the unified field everything is an expression of this one whole complete thing.

Like there's an ocean of pure consciousness, a pure being, and then there are waves upon that ocean of activity. What I am is a wave, what you are is a wave, but what we really are is ocean. and it's like you just stole that from my book they might have said that 5,000 years ago in

the Vedas but I have said it in 2023 in soul boom I read it yeah I read it and meditation is about de-exciting the wave of me so I can begin to experience the ocean of me and what is ocean in this metaphor, it's the thing that never changes. It's the basis of everything. It's the place that, if I know myself as that, its very nature is okay. It's just okay. What needs to change, nothing.

Are you okay? I'm okay. Bliss is the Ananda is the Sanskrit word for it. It just means... Satchitananda. Sachitana. So I am... Mm-hmm.

shit. I witness. I know that I am. I'm aware of my I amness. And Ananda, and the very nature of what I am is bliss itself. And you have the experience of meditation by finding something to guide you in the direction of being.

And this is where I needed to find a meditation that someone offered me, because the meditations I'd done up to that point, have been a way of changing my thinking, redirecting my mind, but I need to transcend the mind to have this experience of universality. So when I got a mantra, the mantra is a guide that when repeated in an effortless fashion attracts the mind to the more and more subtle layers of thought. And so this wave function of thinking, thinking, thinking, doing, doing, de-excite, de-excite. the excites and I start to experience that underlying feel.

Anything I'm doing to try to have that experience moves me more in the direction of waves. So I need a guide. I need that mantra that by design, if you will, from nature, begins to be forgotten, begins to disappear. So what school is? Is it transcendental meditation? It comes from a common source is transcendental meditation, yeah. Do you need a mantra to meditate? You don't.

I have taught people universal mantras and show them how to use them. What's the universal mantra? Like hum-so or so-hum, depending on which school you listen to. Not ho-hum? Not-ho-hum. Hum-so is actually... Not so how you doing? No.

You see, those all have meaning. Okay. And we want to get past meaning so we can transcend this meaning part. and humso is something that you would practice with the breath like hum is the inhalation and so is the exhalation so you can bring that silently within following your breath hum and then you'll get distracted and you'll come back distracted and come back and you'll have an experience that said the truth is the truth is the truth you're not going to get a different truth by getting to the end result of Vedante anymore. You're not going to get a different truth. And if you get to the end of Christian

mysticism, it's the same truth. Do you say your mantra out loud when you meditate? No, you say it subtly within and silently within because it's designed to be forgotten and transcend all of the senses. Is it a guide in the same way that some schools of meditation would have you focus on the breath and just kind of feeling the breath like coming in through the nostrils and coming out. Like it's a point of focus or you could focus on a candle or you could focus on a sound. Sanskrit is the language of the Veda. It's the most ancient language and it's an expression of nature rather than a set of pointers toward nature. Sanskrit speaks of the way nature behaves, and I don't know of a Sanskrit word for focus, it might exist. And someone might write in

and please let me know what they tell you. There's a word for concentration, but not focus, because focus implies the exclusion of everything else I'm going to focus on this. Nature never does this. If a lion is waiting to pounce on the gazelle and we're going to sneak up behind him, he's paying attention. Yeah, he's got the gazelle in his sights, but he's, he's, yeah, he's got the gazelle in his sights, he's aware 360 degrees. He goes, oh, lunch is coming to me. So I'm not going to focus. I'm going to be aware of,

but I'm going to be aware of in a very specific and as effortless as possible fashion because I don't want to be doing it. This is a way of getting free from the ego. And the ego, the ego wants to take credit for everything, and it certainly doesn't want to be transcended. As a long time subscriber to your newsletter, let's go right to the ego now. You talk about the ego.

I call it the ever-present selfish me, which is fretting and declaring in its childish pomposity. How dare they? Well, I never. Why can't I get what I want? In 12 steps, it's known as self-will run riot. I call it the insistent self from a more Baha'i perspective. Tell us more about the ego. And how does the ego manifest itself?

to that 25-year-old in Dubuque that we're addressing today? So ego is like the word God and like the word love means a different thing to everyone. The way that I use ego is it's the way I would describe myself. Like we meet Jerry in Dubuque. That's his name now. Now, okay. He's got a name. So Jerry.

Hi, Jerry. Who are you, Jerry? Well, you know, I'm 25. I'm from Dubuque. I played football in college. And, you know, I'm doing some night classes at the community. He's talking about doing this. I'm working at a Quiznos, subs, and my girlfriend's name's Rebecca.

And I like fly fishing. And this is my, these are my pronouns. This is my sexual preference. These are all facts, but they're not truths. And the ego is my experience of and the stories I tell myself about the workings of my survival nature. As I understand it, my animal nature, survival nature, requires me to survive first, my species, village herd, to survive second, and to seek comfort. third. Those things are going to be operating in me always because I'm in a body. I would add to that number four, status.

And I status being well regarded, a popular having some power that comes from esteem coming from other people, that this is a natural kind of egoistic, social. I would put that under the category of, survival. Because if I'm not reflected adequately, I'll die. That's a, that's a truth at the base of animal nature. And if I don't have power, I will die. And the idea of having more followers seems to be more comfortable. I want to have more, so I can put it within mind, but I'll go with yours. I'll have number four as a status. Either way. So the ego is, is

All of those things operating in me all the time and the stories I tell myself about my experience of those things operating in and through me. For example, I came to Hollywood. I had never had good experiences with my father and most of the men around him. And I was berated and told I wouldn't amount to anything. And then I come to Hollywood.

would and stumble literally into acting. And suddenly I'm walking into rooms filled with white male authority figures who are there to judge me. And fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Those are the four ways there might be more that we respond. And flight. Fuck. Fuck. Okay. Okay. I'll throw it in there. Okay. It's a kind of fawning, I suppose. But you have to believe you belong there to actually engage that within the room. But if I go in there and suddenly I'm hit with this anxiety, no matter how I respond, I'm going to tell myself a story about there's something deeply wrong with me because I'm having this anxiety because and I'm, and the only thing I want to kill these people for judging me or I want to get out of their way as fast as possible because I know they couldn't possibly want to

hire me. And I don't belong here. And I tell myself a story about why I don't belong here and how don't belong here. And if you have ammunition for the ego, like, remember that thing that happened when you were 15, remember that thing that was done to you when you were 12, then you build a whole case and a vision of your life based on those things. That's the ego. And I'm identified as all these things, and then I'm looking at you to tell me if you're seeing me the way I see myself, or if I'm doing a good enough job that you're seeing me a little better than I'm seeing myself. And it's all based on... A reflective sense of self is what they would call it in therapeutic kind of psychology.

Yeah. And the truth is it doesn't matter how you see me. If I've got a story that I don't deserve happiness, I'll never have happiness. That's beautiful. I need a story that tells me that everything I'm going through matters. everything I've gone through, everything that's happening and that has happened right up to this point has been perfect to get me to this point

and in this moment I can make a choice to move in the direction of growth and love or to continue to listen to the voice of fear and smallness. And the ego says stay small because small is defensible. Stay small because if they don't see you, they're not going to hurt you. And I can defend this.

Consciousness or spirit says, expand, get bigger. How big can it get? It's an interesting. That and kind of narcissism. You have that kind of like Donald Trumpish, kind of like, I'm the best, I'm the most awesome at this, I can do all, you know, because that's expansive.

But that, no, that's ego. Mm-hmm. expansion. And that's, instead of saying stay small in order to stay safe, be the biggest thing in the world to stay safe. Yeah. It's still, it's defending that ego. Yeah.

And, you know, I had a therapist once tell me that narcissism was kind of the inability to be another bozo on the bus that you're either less than everyone else or you're greater than everyone. else. You're on that, you're constantly on that teeter-totter. Like, I'm less than, I feel terrible. I'm better than everyone. But just being the same and being okay with that, that is really impossible for a narcissist. You know, it might be impossible for all of us, but we can pretend it. Well, we all have narcissism to a certain extent. Isn't it part of just being alive in a human being? Isn't there kind of like a little speck of narcissism in just having an ego at all?

There's a sense of self-interest, absolutely, which when taken to an extreme would equal narcissism. Narcissism is an actual diagnosis, but narcissistic behavior absolutely is a part of having an ego. I wouldn't know anything about that. I wouldn't know about it either, but without. a spiritual aspect to things or idea of things. There will be, and if we're like relatively sane, neurotic but relatively sane, there will be a constant push-pull between what's best for me, what's best for all of us. And, you know, 12-step programs operate through

an experience of enlightened altruism. I must be of service in order to, I must give it away in order to keep it. And left to my own devices, I'd rather take it than give it away, but I'm going to give it away because they said, and actually it keeps me sober, okay? You add spirit into the equation and begin to know yourself as consciousness,

begin to know that you're, even just to know that you're something more than this, to know myself as that other thing, actually I start to get fed as that other thing. I start to be filled up by the experience of consciousness within, because it's connected to everything. I don't need anything from you if I'm in touch with what's going on inside me. And when I can awaken to have a spiritual awakening,

awaken to what I am that is other than my thoughts and feelings, then the ego doesn't go away, but I stop behaving as if I'm the ego. And so behaving as if I'm the ego means I'm constantly looking from out here to see how I'm doing, looking at you to see how this looks, and then deciding how much to put out and how much I need to take. But if I awaken to the spirit of what I am, the only way to look is outward. Is that essence? Because you talk a lot about essence.

Yeah. The essence of something is the finest experience of that thing. And I use the term essence just to take it out of the realm of like woo-woo and you've got to have some, you know, the holy ghost has to come down. And no, you just stop looking at all this so you can be this. That's what you start bringing to the world is your essence and your experience of yourself as that essence. If I know myself as that, I stop behaving as a need ball. Yeah. You know, a giant sucking maw of need is what I was before I was able to get in touch with that. That's fantastic.

I really relate to that. You know, for me, you know, a lot of weird kind of trauma in my youth. Nothing quite as brutal and horrific as what you went through, but always had a talent to. goof off, make people laugh and tell stories and be kind of a class clown, then go into an acting class and say, hey, I can take all of that and be characters. And then the girls laugh and like me and people like me and they think I'm funny. And I'm gaping maw of need, you know, throughout my acting career because I want approval and I

want people to laugh and I want people to love me because I don't feel lovable and I don't feel approvable or worthy and it goes on and on but then I need more and I need more and more and more money more and more money and more and more attention and this you know I spent 20 some years you know being a slave to the gaping maw of need. You know, I still wrestle with it, but I have so much more peace because the totality of my self-esteem was entirely based on what you thought of me.

And from a Vedic perspective, if consciousness is the whole of what is, all that we are about is about moving back in the direction of knowing ourselves as conscious, consciousness and knowing ourselves as together as one thing. I believe we choose a certain life path that is inclusive of that experience. Let's go back to Jerry and Dubuque. What else do you need to say to Jerry?

Here are the things that are necessary from my perspective. I have to have a way of getting in touch with what I am that is other than my thinking. meditation is absolutely essential. I have to insist on being present to the world because everything that we have tells us to get away from the world. I walk out, people are walking their dogs or walking with their children, and they're on their phone. They're missing their child growing up.

They're missing all this opportunity for life. And we're here in order to have those opportunities because that's where happiness, is like oh look at the light coming through the tree so i have to insist on getting here i have to insist on having a meditation practice that allows me at least to begin to look within past the thinking and i have to develop a worldview or be open to a world view that is other than there's something wrong with me or there's something wrong with the world or there's one way of doing it or i need to get x y and z

in order to be okay or I need to get rid of A, B, and C in order to be okay. As my dear friend Bird says, you can't jump from air to air. You got to be where you are in order to move. So get here. But with a worldview or an idea of life that says, it's okay to be here, you're here for a reason because this is exactly the right place for you to move into the next phase of your life.

You don't get to have a new set of problems. And your problems are actually your gifts because they point the direction toward freedom. Step into them. Get therapy, read books, take a class, ask people what they do to get in touch spiritually. Find a way to, there's a thing called two-way prayer. It's offered for free online. up two-way prayer.org, I believe, which you can get into a dialogue with something other than you. Is it God?

Some people say so. And it's a way to get outside of the smallness that we're stuck in. In the Baha'i faith, God is referred to as the unknowable essence. If God is the unknowable essence, how do we know the unknowable essence? Well, the power, might and majesty and heat of the sun is an aspect of the unknowable essence. The power, beauty, mystery, and musicality of the wind is another way to know the unknowable essence. The list goes on and on. The power, majesty, ancientness and immovableness of the mountain is a way to know the unknowable essence.

So we see these shards of the divine and these kind of metaphorical reverberations of the divine that is beyond time and space. And maybe the polytheists were right in that way. And as you break it down ever further, I see in you shards of the divine. You know, I see curiosity and I see delight, and I see joy and I see wisdom, I see humility.

So really it's finding God reflected in everything is the closest definition to God as opposed to some being with will that is someplace other than here. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love that. And the idea that you can find God in virtually every aspect of this world and the only place I will not. Except in Las Vegas. Well. Okay. The one place I'll never find God is in my thinking. Because thinking is a tearing apart and trying to understand and insistence on. Yes, but when you use our thinking for what is it is intended, you wrote sentences in a certain order in your book of kind of meditations and thoughts.

In service to a flow of something, a flow of love. So the thinking is, if the thinking is in service to something else, then there is God in that, right? Because creativity, imagination, expression. Yes. These are all aspects of the divine. Yes, absolutely. And thinking can help those come to light? Absolutely.

I'm not saying don't think. I'm saying stop using it as a defining characteristic of what I am. It's a tool. Yeah. Jeff, I say this with all of my heart. I'm so glad. I'm so deeply moved and glad that you're alive and that I've gotten to meet you. And I'm getting all emotional.

I love your work. And it's meant a lot to me over the years. Wow. You're a gift. Thank you. I'm learning more and more that reflection is what we want from others. We don't want approval. We want reflection. We want to be reflected with love and to awaken in each other the ability to love and the experience of love. And I've gotten that from you from the first time we connected. And it means the world to me. Thank you. Thank you. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.