The One You Feed - Adyashanti on the Process and Experience of Awakening (part 1)

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

Please Support The Show with a DonationAdyashanti is a renowned and gifted spiritual teacher. He's written many books, hosts meditation retreats and speaks around the world to large audiences at a time. With such a wide audience, it's amazing that when you experience Adya's teaching, it's as if he's speaking directly to you - to your very heart. Whatever your experience with or preconceived notions of spiritual awakening, allow yourself to re-engage with the idea through this interview. As you turn the inquiry towards yourself this time, you may be surprised, moved and/or transformed by what you find - if you are brutally honest in the process.our inner life. Visit oneyoufeed.net/transform to learn more about our personal transformation program. In This Interview, Adyashanti and I Discuss...Eric's awakening experienceThe awakened state in perpetuityThe shift in perception that happens with awakeningThe paradox of wanting something like awakening yet wanting it stands in the way of having itWill gets you to the cushion and once there, it's important to let go of itDoes one need a spiritual teacher when seeking awakening?The teacher evoking something from vs the teacher giving something to the studentHow people work with unconscious patternsHow you can't not be awakened - even if you don't feel it, it's thereEmotional conflictPaying attention to what's recurring in youAnything that's happened to us that was too big for us to remain conscious while we experienced it, gets trapped in our system - turned into some other emotion or it just gets stuffed and is now just there waiting for you. The universe is now asking, "can you experience this now?"Being fine with being sadLet everything be exactly the way it isHow dealing with life's experiences as they come transforms youA clinched fist vs an open hand metaphor"Let" vs "Let go"If you can't let it go, can you let it beFailure as part of triumphFailing your way through something consciously can cause a sort of transformationWhat it looks like to build a spiritual practiceDaily quiet meditation, Engage in some precise self-inquiry (a wonderment of "being")How spirituality is the direct investigation of YOUR experienceThe only way to get self-inquiry wrong is not to be ruthlessly honest about what's happening in your experienceThe fear of getting something wrongThink of your spiritual teacher kind of like a college professorPlease Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If I could get somebody in a room with me and just do a moment of magic and have them awaken and stay that way, that's what I would do, right? We would just start a McDonald's of awakening. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go

all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really no really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limit edition sign jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. True Meditation, and The End of Your World. Adyashanti is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence. Adyashanti also runs the Omega Retreat, which Eric, our own The One You Feed podcast, Eric, has taken part in. And before we get started,

we really want to get to know you guys better. So The One You Feed podcast is competing with other shows to get the most responses to a quick survey. It only takes a few minutes, literally, of your time, and you can do it straight from a smartphone. So please help us out and support the show by going to wondery.com slash survey and filling it out. That's wondery, W-O-N-D-E-R-Y dot com slash survey. As usual, thanks for all of your support. really excited to have you on a second time and to be able to actually do it both times in person has been wonderful. I don't get that opportunity a ton with people. So, but our first interview went so well, so many people loved it that I was really excited to get to do this again. And we talked about, we'll make this a two-parter. So great. Thank you. I'm happy to kind of put it onto the end of the last one we did, which is so wonderful. Yeah.

So it's kind of nice we get a chance to kind of tie up all the loose ends. Yep. So I don't think I'm going to do the wolf parable like we normally do. You talked through that once, but I want to start off by telling you a little bit about an experience I had with you and then kind of go into questions from there. So I attended your Omega retreat this last year, and it was wonderful in a lot of different ways. And I had a period of time there where I had what I think we would typically refer to as an awakening. I sort of became one with everything for three or four hours. Yeah. So really remarkable experience. I want to talk with you a little bit about where do people go from there? And I want to talk a little bit about that was an experience. And I don't think an experience is what we're chasing. And I know even chasing anything is problematic. But I want to I want to talk a little bit about what the realized

or awakened state in perpetuity is like versus that moment of awakening, which had a high degree of ecstasy, which I don't think is what we're talking about here long-term. Not in the long-term, no, because so much of the, not all of it, but so much of the ecstasy is the ecstasy of sort of first discovery. Yeah. And that's beautiful. You know, you only get one first discovery of anything. And so a lot of it is just that, the sort of, I call it kind of byproduct. Right.

Of having a perceptual shift, which when you just very briefly described it to me, you said I was at one with everything. So that tells me something as a teacher really important. That tells me that you had a shift of perspective which gave rise to experience, rather than an experience, simply an experience. That's one of the main differences between something that we might call awakening would be has to always involve some real shift of perception got it not any old shift of perception but yeah very least yeah i think a lot of the ecstasy for me was the phrase that kept going through my head was thank god God that's over. Like just the burden of carrying myself. And, you know, that has ebbed and flowed since then. And I, you know, it's been difficult to

stay in anything. And again, not even the ecstasy, but just to stay in that, in that place. But it was interesting. I came back and all of a sudden, a lot of things that I had been doing, just didn't interest me. An example would be I had been someone who talked about writing a book for the show. And I had been working on that when I came back, I went, that's not a priority for me right now. Because I realized that at least to some degree, that was driven by my desire to be an author. Now, I've come back around to that, and I think I'm approaching it from a different place, but it was just, it was a fascinating experience. So...

In fact, I think a lot of the most fascinating parts of that kind of experience are actually more of what falls away. Yeah. Then what appears, like the unity and stuff, can be wonderful, but it is really interesting that you see almost in retrospect what you were doing that was more self-oriented or motivated. And so when that gets to be seen through, whatever was self-motivated takes a hit.

Yep. Like you said, you can like you said you can you can decide discover a new motivation that may not be so self-motivating very oriented but yeah i walked out wondering do i want to do this show i mean and and that didn't last very long because i think i've been able to keep my motivation, enough of my motivation about the benefit it brings to myself, psychologically and spiritually, and other people. But it caused me to think about it differently. So one of the things I'm interested in is, you've talked about this, everybody talks about this paradox of, I really want to awaken. about this paradox of, I really want to awaken, but really wanting something seems to stand right in the way of awakening. I mean, my experience of awakening there happened when I, I don't know how

I did it, but I truly said, whatever, I'm going to let everything be exactly as it is. I had been fighting sleeping. I had been fighting sleeping. I had been fighting back pain during meditation. And I finally just went, yes. So there's a desire to awaken. You pursued it with great fervor, as you've talked about. So how does one do that? How does one honor that desire to awaken,

which does feel like a natural thing to some extent, but not find themselves in the trap of always going, I wish I was awake? Yeah, it's a great question because it's just so relevant to so many people. And, you know, at the end of the day, I can talk about, you know, almost like the ideal orientation. But none of us gets to make that decision, right? We do not get to make that decision. My orientation was striving, seeking with about as much gusto as you could, you know, conjure up without going totally insane. Is that the best way to do it? No, clearly. Is that the way that I had to go through it? Seems like it. So, I always have an eye like, where is somebody? What's authentically real for them?

For some people, what's authentically real is diving into the seeking energy so that it can run itself off as fast as possible. With somebody else, you can just point out why it's unnecessary to approach it the way they've been approaching it, and they can shift to a different approach. So, what I found as doing this for 22 years is that there is no blanket statement, no blanket teaching I can give to everybody. You know, I can say, well, yeah, the more you're striving towards it, you're actually blocking the realization that you're looking for. But sometimes that's what we have to go through until we hit the moment like you had at the retreat, where a number of things start being difficult all at the same moment, and maybe something says, okay, I just got to let go of

this. I can't keep resisting in all these ways. You said something at that retreat that I thought spoke really well to this dilemma and has helped me a little bit was, I think it was your teacher who told you that the use of will was to get you to the meditation cushion. But once you were there, that's the place to let go. That's a great, if I said that, I'm really happy I said it. Whoever said it, well done. I don't have any memory, so I can't take credit for it, but that's a really, actually, that's a good way of, that is a pretty good way of putting it. Yeah. That's the thing that you can't really put in language, right? We're riding a balancing edge of too much will, where it all becomes striving and seeking, and of course then you're always focused on what's not happening or what hasn't happened yet.

Or the other opposite, where you become so lackadaisical, you just kind of think, well, it'll happen when it happens. And you'll utilize non-dual terminology to help you be lazy about it. You know what I mean? So those are the two extremes. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us actually experience our life. Yeah. Somewhere in the middle that doesn't fall into the nice conceptual boxes.

It's a little bit more probably like a flow state. You know, the idea of effortlessness is really trying to get almost to something more like a flow state, rather than just make no effort and, you know, have another donut and crack a beer and watch TV and hope something good happens. That would not be probably the right path for most people. I guess the reason it's so hard to describe or talk, or not the reason, but if you look back, you know, you're in the Zen tradition. I mean, they've been discussing this question forever. You know, if you're already perfect, why are you meditating? You know, that sort of concept. And so it's just a dilemma is the wrong word.

Well, I guess it is a dilemma in some ways. And so that leads me to my next question. You primarily had as a teacher someone who was completely unknown, a wonderful woman who lived in a house, very, you know, just, just her. And it was a very small group and you were very intimate with her. Your world is you teach a lot of people. I don't know how many people were there in Omega. I want to say several hundred, you know, I don't know what, it doesn't matter. Somewhere between three and three fifty, probably. How important is one-on-one time with a teacher versus interaction with a teacher that's kind of like what most people have with you? It's a good question.

Again, I don't really have a sort of final answer to that question. It always comes down to each of us individually, right? The question isn't, does, in the broad sense, does humanity need a close working spiritual teacher? Or, you know, it's like, well, do I? That's what's really, what does it feel like to me? Do I feel like I'm at a point where I could really use some more personalized guidance? Or maybe I have something I want to discuss, but I don't want to do it in front of 300 people. Or, you know, so, I mean, of course, when I started teaching, neither me or my teacher ever dreamed that it would take the form that it did. I think both of us thought, without even really talking about it, that it would look something pretty much like being in my living room. Mm-hmm. with my spiritual practice. We weren't kind of sitting around chumming it up and talking about it all day long.

It was a place where we went to meditate and do some chanting and she'd give a talk and then every once in a while she'd give like a day long and then she'd see us privately. So yeah, it always goes back to the individual, doesn't it? Yeah. That's the thing about the longer I do this,

the harder it is to articulate any part of it because I see that the opposite of what I could say could almost be equally true. Right. Of almost anything I say. You know what I mean? So, you know, do people need teachers? Well, I don't know. That's not really a relevant question, is it? For anybody, it's do I?

Where do I feel like i am do i need interesting do i need that yeah that's a great way to think about it because there's certainly certain traditions that have that idea of that awakening almost comes from the teacher that's right which i don't get that sense in your teaching that that's at all what you're saying? No, it's not what I'm saying. I mean, it's kind of a paradox, because in Zen, the whole definition of it is a direct transmission from teacher to student outside of words and scriptures. Right. That definition has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it can easily lead to a false impression. Because look, if I could get somebody in a room

with me and just do a moment of magic and have them awaken and stay that way, I mean, that's what I would do, right? We would just start a McDonald's of awakening, you know, come hang out with the teacher for three minutes and there you go. Doesn't actually happen that way. Yeah. You know, it just doesn't happen. I think what I see is what's often called transmission, and if it's useful. We can transmit energy, we can transmit experiences from one to another, if we know how to do that. Not that I'm giving you something, I know how to evoke it. Yeah.

Right? A comedian knows how to evoke laughter from you. Are they giving you the laughter? No. Right. But they're involved in some relationship. So I think of it as the teacher acts almost like as an unconscious mirror. They're mirroring back something for the student. In that sense, it's a transmission where I'm not giving you something that you don't already have. Of course, how could I give you your true nature? Right.

I could give you all sorts of experiences if I was skilled at doing that, but I couldn't actually give you what you are. By the definition of that would be pretty impossible. Nor is it a good idea to try, by the way. Yeah. Early on, I don't know if we discussed this last time we were together, but very early on, I realized almost by stumbling upon it that I could cause most of the people that came to me to have a kind of awakening experience. And it wasn't that I was giving them something. I would just sort of wick up a sort of presence, turn the dial up on it. So it'd be so bright, they would kind of overwhelm whatever mind state or, you know, whatever place they were in. Fortunately, I realized very early that even though to me that seemed to be a good thing, like what's, what couldn't be good about that?

It's very hard to put your finger on it, but there's something different about when I was really almost intentionally trying to wake someone up, and then when it happened sort of on its own, with no intention. There's something that was more pure about it when it didn't involve my intention. There is something much more lasting if it didn't involve my intention um there is something much more lasting if it didn't involve my intention i was gonna say maybe it's a cause a brief experience and then not last or right because i'm not standing next to anybody overwhelming their presence it's like magic mushrooms right like here you are right you know and then yeah right so i i just i'd stop doing it even though from my point it seemed like i had had all the right motivations. But what I saw was even the motivation for the teacher that's trying too hard to make something happen in their student isn't a good idea. And it's not a good idea for a student because awakening just simply doesn't end up to be good for everybody. If you're not ready for it, it can be so disorienting that it can actually make life more difficult. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You talk about how people have a realization or awakening experience moment, whether it be 10 seconds or 10 hours or 10 days or 10 weeks, right? But that unconscious patterns will pull them back out of that space. So I'm curious about what some of those unconscious patterns are and how do people work with unconscious patterns? Yeah. And I'm sure I did explain it to you just as you depicted it for me, but I want to make it, I want to make a little bit of a change. It's not so much that you get pulled out of the awakened perspective as it sort of gets clouded over. Clouded over, yeah.

It's a very small thing. But in the end, it actually makes a big difference in one's approach. Because you're still there. You're still there. You can't not be there. I think that's one of the things that awakening shows you. Even if I feel like I'm not there, at the same time, strangely, I know that I am. But that's not really good enough, right?

Because we don't want to just know it. It can almost be frustrating. It can almost be frustrating. Right. So what pulls us back? Mostly any unresolved emotional conflict. Any unresolved emotional conflict that could be between ourselves and us, between ourselves and the world, whoever, whatever it is, anything that's sort of unresolved doesn't mean it will, but it can have the power to, that contracting energy can kind of, you know, it can happen within seconds, right? You're driving down the road, you're feeling open and spacious and lovely, and then somebody, you know, cuts you off or almost hits you, and who knows how you're going to react? You know, it doesn't give it, it's not always some really big, complicated,

dark pattern as much as it's just sort of that emotional triggering. So, what I like to tell people is, you know, awakening will blow a certain amount of one's conditioning, unnecessary conditioning, sort of out of their consciousness. For everybody, it's different. For some person, say, it blows out 5%. For somebody else, it blows out 95%. You never know. But the stuff to pay attention to is what's reoccurring. Have I seen this pattern, you know, like 10 times in the last month? Okay, then I need to pay attention to that. I actually need to kind of maybe intentionally go meditate on that energy, like intentionally allow myself to feel that.

And if I have to think things to feel it or go back to memories to feel it, fine, go back there, do it. It's almost like a willing suspension of higher truth. So you can get down into where it hasn't penetrated, right? Because it's easy to stay on the outside and just kind of say to yourself, well, it's a passing thought form and, you know, you'd be in a very transcendent mindset but that doesn't necessarily help it so you get it evoked and then you see if you can really just um be with the be with the energy of it because that's our resistance right this isn't pleasant i want to i don't want to be with this yep so it goes somewhere else but most of all this stuff is, if you get one simple principle, and it is somewhat oversimplified, but I think it works in overwhelming majority of cases. Anything that's happened to us, could be yesterday, could be 40 years ago, that was too big for us to remain conscious why we experienced it, it gets trapped in our system.

That's what happens. Right? So it gets turned into some other emotion or it just gets stuffed or something. And those things are just sort of there waiting for you. As if like the universe inside you is saying, okay, can you experience this now? Can you just experience this? And if you can, then it can go through you and you can start to find some release. And if you can't, then can go through you and you can start to find some release. And if you can't, then you tend to go just in circles again. Yep. That's such a big learning to be able to do that.

It is. Like it's one of those really easy things to say, but when it comes to the moment, it doesn't always seem that simple. But it does work. Yes. You tell a story about when your first moment of a huge heart awakening was when you had to put your dog to sleep. Yeah. And I just had to do that the other day. Sorry to hear that. Yeah.

It's the second one in like eight months. So it's been a tough year dog wise. That's close. Yeah. But I have learned over time to just be okay with it. learned over time to just be okay with it in the sense of like, be okay with, I'm fine with being sad. Yeah. You know what? I'm not going to try and turn away from that. I'm not going to try and somebody asked me, are you at peace with it? And I said, well, that's a, I'm not sure how to answer that because philosophically or morally or, you know, yes, dogs die. They get cancer. It happens,

right? There's nothing, the moral order has not been ripped apart by this event. But I'm very sad. So I'm not done with that, you know, but my favorite thing I've heard you say, and I was in a book or heard you say, but, you know, let everything be exactly the way it is. I don't know if it was in a book or heard you say it, but, you know, let everything be exactly the way it is. And that is such a powerful teaching. And almost is easier for me in some ways to apply to big things like that than it is the trivial moment to moment, day to day. Strange, isn't it? That my little comforts. Yeah.

Well, the big stuff we often are, we confront like, I have really no option. I either push against this and suffer, or I don't. The little stuff, you can get the little illusion, well, I could kind of put this off, or, you know, it's easier to do a little dance maneuver. Yeah. But it is, it's one of those teachings that's just so deceptively simple. But it is. It's one of those teachings that's just so deceptively simple. And, you know, I've been teaching it for 22 years, and I still find out what that teaching means. I'm still discovering a deeper understanding of what the teachings that I've been teaching for 22 years is. And I often have found that to be the case.

The truest, in the sense of the most useful sort of statement, there's often a simplicity about them. Sometimes they're so simple that something in us will say, no, no, no, it couldn't be. We have to have something more complicated than that. But often the most helpful stuff are the simple things that we're just kind of missing. You know what I mean? Yep. Simple, not easy mean yep simple not easy simple not

easy you know but in the end like your dog passes right it's easier to let yourself feel as bad as you feel or feel whatever grief you feel without trying to shut it down it's easier to do that in the end than to be trying to shut it down for the rest of your life. That's right. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And I, I think I learned that I've, I referenced her from time to time, Pema Chodron,

um, her book, when things fall apart, I learned that letting it like just giving myself to that moment. Yeah. It was one of the best things I ever learned to do, I think, because I feel current with things in my life, you know,

yeah. His death didn't bring up all the pain from the last dog because I grieved the last dog. That's right. You know, and the last dog didn't bring up all the grief of my marriage or that marriage falling apart because that had been, you know, it's, and I wasn't that way for a large part of my life. I think every little thing that happened had, you know, a powder keg of emotion behind it, just waiting to blow. Yeah. Well, and that's the nice thing is about we can,

we can actually transform. Yeah. So another thing that you did at the retreat, and it's a hand gesture. I can't, listeners won't be able to see it, but it was a really, a really useful thought for me. And it was something your teacher used to say to you all the time. And she would say, less of this, which is a clenched fist for listeners, and more of this, which is an open hand for listeners. So talk to me about that in general. And I'm curious, is that still one you work with? Sure. It's, you know, it's another one of those deceptively simple teachings. with? Sure. It's, you know, it's another one of those deceptively simple teachings. And then until you start to really kind of contemplate it. And I like the physical part of the gesture. I mean, anybody listening could put their hand in front of themselves and make a

fist. And okay, that's what it means to hold on. That's how it physically feels. And then you let your fist go. And you open your palm. And it's like, okay, that's what it feels like to let go. and you open your palm and it's like, okay, that's what it feels like to let go. Because sometimes we literally kind of forget it. Not in our minds, but in our bodies. Our bodies are like, I'm trying to do something, but they don't have a reference for what that feels like. But yeah, my teacher told me that when I was, well, back to where we started, you know, 100 miles an hour gunning for enlightenment with everything I had.

And I couldn't hear that teaching at the time. I literally just wasn't in a place where I could really hear it and utilize it. But I came to it nonetheless. I came to it nonetheless because, well, nothing else works. It's pretty simple, right? Going through life with lots of resistance just doesn't work, right? It's not fun. It's not self-expressive in any positive sense. It doesn't win you better friends. It just, it's like not workable.

Yeah. But, you know, each one of us has to find that out in the grist of our own experience, which finding that out isn't always easy. Yep. You know, because you usually do it through a few pretty overwhelming moments. Yep. I think that's why I think the serenity prayer, I know it's, we only hear a short part of it, is maybe the wisest thing I have ever heard because it covers that there's work

to be done here. And there's plenty of times where you can't work. You got to. And of course, then that wisdom is the precious gold to tell the difference. But I can be on either of those extremes. I have an ability to be like, F it. Right. Yeah.

That's not spiritual development. That's not, I don't know what it is, but it's not a healthy pattern. Right. Right. So that means I've got to engage in the desire to change, you know, and then there's plenty of things where letting go is clearly the important thing. And I had a thought about this, and I think it was after you did that and then this, and I thought about the phrase letting go.

And I almost thought that in some cases it might be better just to think of let, because letting go, sometimes we can't, right? Right. So let go, and I'm trying to let go, but it's not going. Right. You know, whereas let is sort of like, okay. Yeah. Like.

I like that. You know, here it is. If it goes, great. If it doesn't, okay. Right. But I'm not in control of that. Right. You're clear on what you can and can't do.

That's right. I'll often say something very similar to your let, which is nice and short. Okay, if you can't let it go, can you let it be? Yeah. Can you let it be there? Just that. Yeah. And that's kind of like your it.

Yeah. Right? Let it. Can I do that? Because usually, if we really honestly look at that one, more often than not, the answer is, yeah, I can let it be. And then, gosh, what would that feel like to let it be? Because to me, that's the crucial step. Like, what's the sense?

What's the feel so it's not intellectual anymore? It's like when you unclench your hand. You can feel it. It feels different. Yeah. Right? You don't... The kinesthetic experience of that, I think, is what we need. Yeah. Right? You don't, it's the kinesthetic experience of that, I think, is what we need.

Yeah. Kudos to your teacher for a very beautiful way to look at it. She was banging a really tough nut there for a while. Yeah. Bless her heart. You know, I can think of plenty of times where I was trying to let go with a clenched fist, you know. Like, I knew I should let go. I knew I would be better off trying to let go with a clenched fist, you know, like I knew I should let go. I knew I would be better off if I let go. I just didn't have the ability to do it.

And sometimes that's the truth, right? I just can't do it right now. Yeah. I think it's always good to normalize that for people because I think I felt like I was failing, you know, evolved people, spiritual people, people in recovery, they let things go. And that's not working right now. So I must be failing. And, you know, and it wasn't any failing. If there was any failing, it was in the being too hard on myself. Yeah. And sometimes failure ends up to be the part of triumph. Yeah. Like sometimes you just, you gotta fail your way through some stuff. You can't do it all like neat and pretty and spiritual. Sometimes you just sort of fail your way through it.

Yeah. And, but if you fail your way through something consciously, that can actually cause a sort of transformation. If you fail through something unconsciously with nothing but resistance, we tend to not transform much. Learn much from it. Yeah, but I love that serenity prayer. I think that ability to discriminate between what you can do and what you can't do.

Know what you can do, but just as important, know what you can't do. And I think it's really important in any kind of spiritual practice that we would have some real clarity about exactly what we can do and exactly what we can't do. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You used to work with students one-on-one, and I know that everybody's different. So not asking for a blanket statement.

But some degree of practice seems to be part of the equation or useful in the process. Absolutely essential, meaning 99% of the cases. Yep. In that case, how would you think about building a practice? You know, what would it consist of? How often or how long? Or again, I'm not looking for exact answers, maybe as so much as a way to think through it. Yeah. No, I appreciate the question, Eric, because I have thought this because my impulse is, you know, to try to really help people find their own way. And so it's to not give direct answers to a question like that. And yet, you know, I've also seen that that's not always the best response either, because sometimes people

just can't find their way. Yeah. You know, they just... And I think one of the things I've learned from working with lots of people, you know, in the coaching work I do, is that ambiguity is the mother of procrastination in a lot of cases, right? If I don't know what to do, now I've got to figure out what to do and do it. If there's some clarity about that first part, then all I have to do is muster up the energy to do it. And we get stuck in that first part.

Right, right. So for me, I would just say, yeah, if somebody wanted to engage in this, or probably any spiritual teaching, but I'll keep it restricted to mine for the moment, that, yeah, I would suggest that they do some meditation every day. I would love them to do, you know, at least a half an hour, morning or evening. If someone said, what's ideal? I'd do a couple times a day would be ideal. Don't push it to the sense that you start to hate it, however, because you don't want to get a

relationship with the very notion of meditating as something that's arduous and awful and something you don't want to do. I've been shaking that off for years. Yeah, it took me a while. For an old Zen guy, it took me for a while to rediscover, like, actually sitting here can be really, really nice. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't got to be... It's nicer when it's not 18 hours a day like the Zen folks do, too.

Yes, it is. Well, they make, you know, I'll get in trouble with Zen folks, but, you know, us in Zen, we can make a kind of fetish out of meditation. It's the Zen object of worship. And part of that is really good, because at least you're doing something. You're not just sitting around talking about it. That sense, it's really, really good. But when it becomes too emphasized, then maybe it's not so good. So I think spending some time in quiet is really... That's the magic. That's the magic. That's what allows something inside of you that you don't have any conscious access to. Something starts to occur within us below what we're perceiving,

simply when we're sort of intentionally attending to a quiet space. There's something that happens underneath that that's very spiritually powerful. Who knows when it will manifest. So that's pretty easy, right? In the sense of to tell someone, well, meditate, try to meditate some every day. The other one is just as important, but not so easy to turn into a formula because that's the kind of the inquiry part. And the

inquiry can just be taken as sort of a tool, like this is just what I do because it's supposed to be the thing to do. Or I like to have inquiry be a manifestation of something more native to you. Right? So if somebody comes up and they say, I'm working on the question, who am I? You know, I often ask them, why? What does the question mean for you? Why are you interested in the question? Because I want to see if the question is actually theirs, if it's really relevant to them. If I do find it's relevant to them, then we have something to work with.

If not, then we find something that is relevant. It's harder to take that and make it into a formula, right? Because it's almost like a wonderment at being. Just the mere fact of being a kind of a wonderment. And by saying wonderment, I don't mean to put a spiritual whitewash. It doesn't mean that it's always fun to do that. You know, at a certain point when the resistance goes away, then it's pretty darn enjoyable. But I've often thought I would love everyone that came to see me have had like two or three really good years of pretty arduous meditation under their belt, and two or three really good years in college courses that taught them nothing but how to think well for themselves.

And those are kind of polarized opposites. One, right, is kind of not thinking. And the other one is how to really think very clearly. Because I think we often don't learn that either. And inquiry is a way of using your thoughts and your perception in a really clear and really, really precise way. You talk about it has to be precise. Has to be precise. That's why I always orient towards, okay, what are you doing here? What do you want exactly, precisely? What is this about for you? So that's part of it. And yeah, if we're going to get precise, that's the key. You have to be precise. You know, it's like someone can ask themselves, like, when I'll do

this at retreat, you may have seen me do it, where I'm working with somebody through, say, Who Am I? And they'll go, Who Am I? And they're not used to being as precise as I usually want them to be. And so I'll say, okay, what happens when you ask that question? Well, I don't come up with an answer. No, that's not the first thing that happened. What's the thing that happened? That's the right answer that you know you're supposed to arrive at. Right. What happened that caused your mind to say, I didn't get the right answer?

Something was being experienced. Well, when I asked myself who was I, I didn't find anything. Okay. Now that's interesting, isn't it? But all that, just that right at the top, that can all be missed if you're not precise. Who am I? I don't know. Maybe I have to ask the question another hundred thousand times.

But if you're really precise, you ask the question, but you're looking at what that question is evoking in your experience. Yeah. That's what you're really looking for. What is it evoking in my experience present time? Then there's no future to it. That's it. You know, you talked's no future to it. That's it. You know, you talked about the ability to think very well for themselves.

You know, one of the things that I've heard you stress over and over, and it's one of those things that I think can hear it deepening and deepening levels. Like, I think you've said something to the effect of spirituality is the direct investigation of your experience. Yeah. Like we have to be willing to look closely for ourselves and be willing to trust what we find there, even if what we find there isn't where we think it should be. Like, you know, sometimes if I look for myself, I think I find something. I know the answer is it's not supposed to be there. Right. So trust in that for me has been important in going, that's what I see and feel. Now I can keep working with it and eventually go past it.

But if I skip that, and I'm certainly not trying to say like, I've got this figured out in any way. I'm just trying to stress the importance of trusting ourselves to some extent and looking at our experience, not yours, not some enlightened beings. What's happening with me right now when I ask these questions? Because I don't want you chasing my experience. Right. When there's a lot of that going on, you know what I mean? So I think you're right in the sense of

our experience is where it's at. And it's one of those really simple things, right? But when you go to do it, you realize it's not so simple at all. I'm so used to comparing my experience to everything around me that I never have my experience for more than like a quarter second before I'm comparing it. So, like you said, if you were doing this inquiry and you came back and said, Adya, I really feel like I'm coming up with a self, I would say, okay, well, let's explore that. Tell me about that. And we dive into that. It may sound like, because I've done it for myself, but I don't necessarily go when I'm with somebody

with a preconceived idea of what I think they're supposed to see. Whatever they see is, that's what they see. As long as it's their own experience, then we can just keep looking through the layers of that. Yeah. Right? As I tell people, the only way to get this wrong is to not be ruthlessly honest about what's happening in your experience. The only way you can get it wrong is to not do ruthlessly honest about what's happening in your experience. The only way you can get it wrong is to not do that. But outside of that, you're not getting it wrong. But boy, is that hard to do for people. Yeah, it brings to mind for me how we are afraid to be wrong, how much we want to have the right answer. And also, you know, you talk a lot about not turning your authority over to someone else.

You know, the word spiritual teacher has a sense of like my teacher. And most of our experiences with teachers is you've got to give them the right answer. When they ask a question, there's a right answer. Right. And so the very idea of saying my experience of that is very different. I know what the right answer is because I read the book. Yeah, right. But I'm not having that experience.

And I just think that's so hard for us is to say, I don't know. It is. Or that's not what's happening. Yeah. Well, we've mythologized the role of the spiritual teacher, which doesn't help us out. Yeah. What do religions do with their authority figures? They dress them up to look like kings and queens. That's what they do, right? Whether

it's Christianity or Buddhism or whoever it is, you dress the authority up as if they're a king and queen. And then we wonder why we have so much projection going on around. Whereas having been with my teacher as long as I have been, there is something that goes beyond the bounds of like, say, relating to a spiritual teacher as like a college professor or something, which I think is actually a pretty healthy place to start. Relate to your teacher kind of more like that, kind of more like if you were in a college. You know, over time, you know, my relationship part with my teacher became more just something, there was a different element that was

added. It was more like a profound combination of respect and gratitude got mixed in over time. Yeah. But that was over time, right? It wasn't immediately manufactured out of nothing, which would have just made it a projection. So I think when people initially go to teachers, they're probably best to, they're going to assume any kind of stance. Something more like listening to a college professor,

at least initially, is probably a good idea. And to always remember that, or be aware of that balance between you go to a teacher for hopefully some wise counsel and advice. Right? So in that sense, you're open and you're available

and maybe you'll even try some of it. But the balance part is at the same time, you're not pretending like you're a spiritual child or infant, right? You're looking at the advice, you're seeing if it seems good and rational and worth doing for yourself. And so there's all these mini decisions that are actually getting made all along the point. I would just say make them consciously. Yep.

the point, I would just say, make them consciously. Because there's just the thing where we make spiritual teachers like kings and queens, it does not serve awakening. It just doesn't help. It just doesn't help. And it makes people, of course, very vulnerable to replaying whatever unhealthy relational patterns they've had in their life. Yeah. They'll tend to do it with their teacher. It's been a long time since Martin Luther did what he did, right? But it was that you, the regular people, have access to the Word of God yourself. Right.

You can read the book. Right. You don't have to go through these people. Yeah. Right. Excellent. Well, let's wrap this up for part one. And when we come back, more questions about practice and self-inquiry. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.

Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.