The One You Feed - How to Navigate Your Spiritual Path Through Self-Inquiry with Adyashanti

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

In this special 2 part episode with Adyashanti, we delve into the world of spiritual exploration and and discuss how to navigate your spiritual path through self-inquiry. By embracing self-inquiry, individuals can uncover the illusions and patterns that hinder their spiritual growth and cultivate a deeper sense of self-awareness and personal understanding. In this episode, you will be able to: Gain profound insights about awakening and enlightenment that will deepen your spiritual exploration Understand the crucial role of a teacher in your spiritual journey, and how their guidance can ignite your awakening Learn valuable techniques for letting go of attachments and creating a consistent spiritual practice to enhance your personal growth Discover how to strike a balance between seeking guidance from others and trusting your own intuition and discernment on your path Explore the power of self-inquiry as a transformative tool for deepening your spiritual exploration and gaining personal understanding. To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize we have years and years of incredible episodes in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this part one episode with Adi Ashanti. Does meditating feel like a chore, another to-do list item to check off, or perhaps it's even fallen off the list entirely? If you sense that meditating regularly would benefit you, but you struggle to find a sustainable place for it in your schedule, I can help. There

are reasons people struggle with creating and maintaining a meditation practice, and it isn't because meditation isn't right for them. In my free guide, The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Seem to Stick with a Meditation Practice and How to Build One That Lasts, I teach you why it can be a struggle to build a meditation practice that lasts and the small fixes that can have a big impact when it comes to getting you where you want to be with meditating regularly. Go to OneYouFeed.net and sign up for this free guide right on our homepage. Go to OneYouFeed.net and sign up for this free guide right on our homepage. 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. 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 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode for the second time in history, I believe Adi Ashanti, the guest was the 166th episode that we did. He's the author of The Way of Liberation, Falling into Grace, 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. Hi, Adya. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. Nice to be back with you again. I'm 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, 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. 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 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 the kind of the, 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 at the very least.

Yeah. I think a lot of the ecstasy for me was, the phrase that kept going through my head was, thank 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. 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. In fact, I think a lot of the most fascinating parts of that kind of experience are actually more of what falls away than what appears. 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 discover a new motivation that may not be so self-motivated or oriented. Yeah, I walked out wondering, do I want to do this show?

I mean, 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, 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 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? 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 is 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. Yep. 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 gotta let go of this yep i can't keep resisting in these all these ways so 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. It's somewhere in the middle that doesn't fall into the nice conceptual boxes. It's a little bit more probably like a flow state.

The idea of effortlessness is really trying to get almost to something more like a flow state rather than just make no effort and have another donut and crack a beer and watch TV and hope something good happens. That's, that would not be the, 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,

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, lived in a house, very, you know, just her. And it was a very small group. And you were very intimate with her. 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 50 probably. Yeah. So a lot of people. So people aren't working with you one-to-one. You've mentioned this is simply not tenable anymore. My question for you is for somebody who is seeking awakening, 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. So, yeah, people do often get a false sense, though, of my relationship with my teacher, even though I went there every weekend. relationship with my teacher, even though I went there every weekend, I probably asked her 10 to 15 really direct questions in the 14 years I knew her that had to do with my spiritual practice.

We weren't kind of sitting around chumming it up and talking about it all day long, you know? 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 you know i'm 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 do the that's not really a relevant question is it is 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. It's not what I'm saying. I mean, it's kind of a paradox because in Zen, the whole definition, if it is a direct transmission from teacher to student outside of words and scriptures. 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, 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? 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. That's by the definition of that would be pretty impossible.

Nor is it a good idea to try, by the way. 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, what couldn't be good about that? But I saw really differently that there was something, 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. I was going to say,

maybe it's a cause of brief experience and then not last. Right, because I'm not going to be 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 just, I stopped doing it. Even though from my point, it seemed like I 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.

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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 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. It can almost be frustrating, right. So, what pulls us back? Mostly any unresolved emotional conflict. That could be between ourselves and us, between ourselves and the world, whoever, whatever it is. Anything that's sort unresolved has 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 be with the energy of it. Because that's our resistance, right? This isn't pleasant. 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. 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? And 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 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 yeah 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 your dog to sleep yeah and um i just had to do that the other day sorry to hear that yeah it's the second 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 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.

Yeah. But I'm very sad. That's right. So I'm apart by this event. Yeah. But I'm very sad. That's right. So I'm not done with that. Yeah. 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. And that is such 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 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. And 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. Simple, not easy. 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 think I learned that, I reference her from time to time, Pema Chodron, her book, When Things Fall Apart. I learned that letting it, like, just giving myself to that moment is one of the best things I ever learned to do, I think. Because I feel current with things in my life. You know, 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. And that's the nice thing is about 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. 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.

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? 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. 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. You know, because you usually do it through a few pretty overwhelming moments. Yeah. 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 gotta, 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? That's not spiritual development. That's not, I don't know what it is, but it's not a healthy pattern, 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 mm-hmm right right so let go and I'm not trying 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. Yeah.

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... 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. You know, because I've been... She was banging a really tough nut there for a while. Yeah. Bless your 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 if I let go. I just didn't have the ability to do it. Right. And sometimes that's the truth, right? Yeah. 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. Yeah. You know, evolved people, spiritual people, people in recovery, they let things go.

And that's not working right now. Right. So I must be failing. And, you know, there 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.

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 brian kranson is with us how are you 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 mendel 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. Yeah. 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. It's 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 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. 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 theiscover, like, actually sitting here can be really, really nice. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't gotta 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. Yeah. You know, 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 inquire 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 i've had like two or three really good years of pretty

arduous meditation under their belt and 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. 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 gonna 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 i 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. 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. 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 talked about the ability to think very well for themselves. 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. 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 trusting 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? Yeah, because I don't want you chasing my experience 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. 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 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. Yes. 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 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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. You know, because there's just the thing where we make spiritual teachers like kings and queens, it does not serve awakening.

It just doesn't, just doesn't help. Yep. You know? 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. Yep. 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. 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 Thank you. 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 reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

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