#684: Jack Kornfield — How to Reduce Anxiety and Polish the Lens of Consciousness

0:00 Just a quick note before we get started, to experience and practice one of the most important themes from this episode, stick around after the interview for a guided loving kindness meditation from Jack. He is very famous for these and for a very good reason. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L M N T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious sugar free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suit to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink

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5:13 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So nothing else will do personal question. No se Cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. This is a rare in-person episode.

5:45 And my job always is to investigate, interrogate people I consider to be world class performers. I have one in front of me. He's a friend. He is a repeat guest, a very popular guest, Jack Cornfield. You can find him on Twitter at Jack Cornfield. Jack trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. That's an understatement, but maybe we'll come back to that. He has taught meditation internationally since nineteen seventy four and is one of the key teachers to have introduced Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. Jack co founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts, with Sharon Salzburg and Joseph Goldstein and Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Current projects include cloudsangha.co, which we will talk about, which offers practice groups for all, the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, which is trained seven thousand. Seven thousand, that's a lot. Mindfulness teachers in seventy five countries and wisdom ventures, a fund investing in companies that promote compassion. His books. Many books have been translated into twenty two languages and have sold roughly two million copies. They include The Wise Heart.

6:46 A guide to the universal teachings of Buddhist Psychology, a path with heart. After The Ecstasy in the Laundry, one of the best book titles of all time, Buddha's Little Instruction Book. The Art of Forgiveness, Loving Kindness, and Peace. And his most recent book, No Time Like the Present, Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy Right Where You Are You Can Find. All things Jack at JackCornfield.com. That's K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L D dot com. And we'll link to of course all of his social

7:14 And Everything else in the show notes to note blog slash podcast. Jack, so nice to see you. I'm very glad to see you, Tim, and I'm glad that our lives have now intertwined over a number of years. So it's been a pleasure in all these different venues. It has been a pleasure. You have been a safety net. A mentor or guide Field.

7:35 EMT perhaps with some of my situations over the years, and I really appreciate your pleasure too. We do it for each other. The triage, the wisdom, the teaching. And There are a million different directions we could go. But Before we started recording.

7:51 We were chatting a bit. I was making my tea. Asking about good departure points, perhaps The initial Lift off where we should go.

8:01 And we landed on a name. And that's Stan Groff. So perhaps You can take that and lead us wherever you may. Providing context on who this is. Why it matters, why it relates to your life, and so on.

8:14 Yeah, thank you, Tim. And I wanted to do this in some way because Stan Groff in the scene that I want to set for you who are listening. Open is the doorway to uh Huge number of really interesting questions. about who we are, about humanity, about healing, about interconnection, about all kinds of things.

8:32 So here's the scene. Stan Groff or Stanislav Grof, as he is sometimes called. Is a Jackbourne. physician and psychiatrist.

8:43 Who was the last legitimate L S D researcher In the nineteen seventies. He Done L S D research in Europe, got Samples from Sando's and

8:52 Took some himself. And it completely changed his life. From be a kind of academic physician to say, Whoa There's something a lot bigger going on here. And he ended up at Johns Hopkins when he escaped from the communist regime.

9:07 Running the last L S D Research. For People who had cancer and and were in hospice were dying.

9:16 For vets returning. for clergy. So that they might actually have a little experience of the divine that was off the pages of their text and And so forth. And then he moved.

9:28 After that to Over the course of our time to get to the story, And he's a polymath.

9:40 You know. Twelve or fifteen languages and Read Sanskrit and is completely well versed in the European education of the great music of the world and all kinds of things like that. So when it became

9:52 Less possible to work with psychedelics except a bit underground. With his wife Christina, holotropic breath work. Which allows people to go to some of those very profound open states. Using breath.

10:07 Um and it mirrored things that I'd learned in monastery in Burma. where we'd done incredibly intense deep breathing for some hours. And open to all kinds of states. We work together at retreats all around the world and we'd be in a room with Two hundred or three hundred people.

10:25 Huge speakers, think The Grateful Dead or something like that. Um Half of the people lying on their backs on a nice match. And then a sitter next to them. And then the music would start with the instructions. Very simple instructions.

10:41 Breath is deep. And fast and hard as you can. And keep it going for the next Our Two.

10:48 Until for lift off, till you go wherever you go. So people would be breathing away and there would be this incredible music. It might be drumming from the African musicians in the Congo Drum

11:01 Jungle or all kinds of world music. And as you looked out over the room once the breathing had kicked in after half an hour or an hour It was like walking into Dante's divine comedy. It has heavens and purgatory and hell and so forth.

11:19 So there would be people In bliss, laughing, smiling, their arms spread. Like they were Angels having the most ecstatic experiences. There would be people in the middle who were working stuff out with their bodies, things that were tight that would s want to open and every kind of possible sound would come. There were a lot of people in a birth experience because like

11:42 Psychedelics of different kinds. One of the doorways you go through isn't in your regression. Is to relive your birth. And so there would be b people Pushing and

11:53 Being squeezed and going through a process That was both physical. But more than that it mirrored what their birth was like. And then there would be people reliving incredible traumas of different kinds. Birth traumas, childhood traumas, and so forth.

12:09 And they were encouraged. to go through it and let it all out. There would be laughter, there would be the sounds of ecstasy, and there'd be people. Crying and screaming and you all at the same time with this Pounding music.

12:23 And you go like, what is this? The result of it kind of cut to the chase is Once the music quieted down and People are invited to make some art and then talk about it. Is that

12:36 And Stan's work is this. If you trust the body And psyche and heart and mind to open. And you give it the opportunity and the medicine and someone's with you, so you're not alone. It wants to open.

12:49 And whatever's unfinished wants to come out. Or whatever needs to be expressed. And if there isn't something that's waiting there Then it becomes the doorway. to the realms of profound

13:02 Oh with awakening, freedom, understanding Beautiful things. sayings that Stan offered as we all began this collective journey was from our friend Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist. Who said

13:17 If you're to do this inner work You either need a very big story Like the vastness of the universe that it has. What we could see in front of us. Heavens and hells and you know, the hungry ghosts and the jealous gods and everybody all enacting it. Either you need

13:35 A very big story. Or even better. No story at all. And this

13:42 was really the scene of the gateway to the human heart and the human psyche. This is who we are, what we carry. And then we shrink down a bit. As we need to. in our roles to be a parent or a An artist or a business person and so forth.

13:57 But They're really Kind of a Contraction. Of

14:03 This enormous spirit that we were born with and that we carry. So how's that for an opening scene? Yeah. Divine comedy of expansive states I I think it's a great place to start. And I'll add just a few things to that and then I will have numerous questions that come to mind. So the first is For people who

14:23 May wonder about the scope of Stan's experience. He's probably in some way directly or indirectly supervised. At least fifteen hundred. Sessions. I remember when I spoke with him quite a number of years ago. Thousands of thousands. Yeah. So the breadth of experience that he has in witnessing In a clinical setting. how these things affect consciousness and also outcomes is vast.

14:50 It's really vast. The second is whole tropic breath work. For people who need just a bit more in the visual In terms of conjuring an image of what you just described. The pounding music really can be pounding music. It's really can be very, very loud.

15:09 And I've had some really bizarre experiences. going through holotropic breath work, which I don't do that often, and I may be doing something incorrectly, but I tend to have, speaking of pounding, a pounding headache the day after from the breath work. However I've had some really

15:28 unusual experiences that I didn't go in Trying to confirm. So I didn't go in with the expectancy of these. Experiences, but Later I was told that it was sometimes referred to as a yogic sleep. Maybe you have some thougated to this, but the experience of breathing as hard as I can, I take these directions very literally. So I'm really going for the gold medal of

15:51 Sweating profusely and Having the experience of Subjectively. A gap in time where

16:02 I haven't fallen asleep in the physiological sense that most people would. Conjure. But I've gone Blank and then I come to and I'm still breathing.

16:14 As intensely as I was. But I had these gaps. It would pop up repeatedly. Do you make anything of that? There's a beautiful old

16:25 Yogic text. The details Eight kinds of yogic swoons. Swoons. Not a word we use very often, but basically it's description of what it's like to leave our ordinary consciousness and either go to a place where it's in the void, where there's nothing Or the sense of

16:43 profound emptiness, but there's still some awareness. There's a variety of them. And some of them have a huge impact on us when we experience it. It's as if Oh, the whole world that we've constructed is a little bit like a dream.

16:57 And we'd step out of that dream of our identity. And here we are. Coming back into this dream. And it puts it in an incredible perspective. raises a lot of questions also, whether it's my experience

17:09 That I described. Certainly you can have some interesting Responses with say Tetney and the the the lobster claws were From the breathing when the hands get pulled in that you start puckering at the mouth just physiologically due to various changes. In the blood, but

17:25 And I should note for folks. I have quite a few friends who have trained or done weekend courses in holotropic breath work. It is not standard that people have headaches afterwards. I haven't experienced that. For whatever reason, I just drew the Joker card on that, but I have found it very helpful. I've also experienced with breath workers in uh Baltimore specifically, the approach of

17:51 Holotropic minus forty percent intensity. You can still seemingly reach some very Let's call them alternative experiences of consciousness. But if we put that type of practice aside, even my experiences in some cases with, say, surgeries and anesthesia. Where

18:08 I'm given a push of Versed before I go under And the last thing I remember is them asking me to switch from, say, a gurney to a table. But they afterwards tell me that I was conversing freely Following directions, cracking jokes for twenty minutes afterwards, which I have no recollection of Who was that? Who was that? Exactly. Who was that?

18:28 If the primary observer that I have sort of constructed as this identity of the self. Was not that.

18:37 Who was that? So If you look back at your life, you've had some Very unusual experiences. From the vantage point of let's just say most Westerners who are raised in the secular society without mindfulness practice.

18:51 You've spent a lot of time in silence. You've had the experience of metabolizing your anger wrapped In all sorts of clothing. And we've explored these in previous conversations, so we probably won't get into all the weeds, but

19:07 How do you think of This is a big question, but consciousness As it stands right now, or is that a bad question? It's a central, a really important question. And Kind of connecting it with

19:19 Starting with that scene of Seeing Dante's realms all laid out and the people You know in ecstasy and those in agony and everybody in between. One more thing to say about it. 'Cause some people say, Well, that's too fast, if you've got a trauma and it's not right. Of course nothing's right for everyone.

19:36 But there are two ways to go with this. One, which was Stan's way, is just as you said, go for the goal. Just keep going. And the people he trained If something was opening up and it took a long time. They

19:49 Take all night and sit there with you as you breathe or screamed or wept or just lay there quietly. Until you felt you had Been able to Experience it all. And come back to a place of

20:02 Presence. Now some other people say, Oh, you have to resource the trauma away. You have to get More quiet and Strengthen yourself before you even approach your trauma and that's better for you. Neither of these are the right way.

20:16 But I'm glad there is this spectrum. For me. Entering that room or doing that work. through me into the place of being the Conscious witness of it all.

20:28 And my deepest experiences, whether it's through Long Meditation. I spent More than a year in silence doing in this little hut doing intensive meditation eighteen, twenty hours a day. Or whether it's psychedelic experiences which were equally profound.

20:46 Or other things. Who we are His consciousness. And there's a couple of levels, a lot of levels to it. One, I can say You're not your body.

20:58 Clearly your physical body changes all the time. So it's not who you are. You rent it. You get to use it. You're not your emotions. They're always changing, like the tide. You're definitely not your thoughts, at least I hope not in most cases. Certainly for me and people I know. Who you are You could say is the consciousness that was born into your body And that we'll leave it and we could talk about death and how consciousness leaves.

21:21 But there's a deeper level than that to know that not only are you that As consciousness. But more profoundly It's all consciousness. That it

21:33 Deepest level what I've experienced is that there is whether you call it primordial consciousness or a field of consciousness that The creative principle That creates all things.

21:47 And we're a piece of that or a part of that. And they're all kinds of beautiful myths that talk about how consciousness Wants to explore all the possibilities it can be Or it is the creative

21:59 of the universe, there's the void and then Out of the void comes creativity in all these myriad forms. When you experience this, and it's not a philosophy. You understand? That this is a play.

22:13 The Hindus call it the Lila, the play of the divine or something like that. And it doesn't mean you don't have to take care of your part. The players in theater. The players in theater. The play of the divine and it doesn't mean that you don't have to play your part, as Ramdas would say

22:30 You know, remember your true nature. And your social security number. Right. You have to remember both. And that's part of the very interesting paradox. Of waking up. Knowing that what you are Is consciousness itself.

22:46 You are awareness. You're not all those other things. You are the awareness that's experiencing these things. When you know that. It gives you A kind of freedom.

22:58 A sense of well being and freedom. Within which you can go through all the things you do as a human being But some part of it behind that. is smiling and going, Wow. I hope I say this when I die, like

23:11 Wow, what a ride. You know, that it's been quite and some of it is painful and tragic. But with that perspective. There's a place of wisdom. Let me read you something. It's just a not very long few lines in the Tao to Jing. All the time in the world. If you don't realize the source.

23:31 Consciousness. You stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from You naturally become tolerant. Disinterested.

23:43 Amused. Kind hearted as a grandmother. Dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao. You can deal with whatever life brings you.

23:55 And even when death comes, it's okay. You are ready. And so it's a kind of Three thousand year old or two thousand year old description of the consciousness. Where you're both disinterested and amused. And at the same kind hearted.

24:11 And and attentive. And it's the wedding of that universal dimension. With this mystery of actually being a human being. Which is what you've done. Then you can enter or you go to Japan or you say, All right. Let's

24:23 Let's play this game. Let's do martial arts. Let's do business. But you do it with less than a fear and attachment and much more with the delight of the game. Right, it makes me think that you're Yeah.

24:37 Come back to the play. Term. You're aware of the movies that you are watching or the games that you are choosing to play. But you have that outside.

24:50 witness perspective so that you don't necessarily identify or grip to strongly onto those things. Exactly. And that includes your own personality. And again I just'cause I I'm thinking of him in this regard referred to Ramdas. He talked about His personality's being like his pet, you know, and he would see his neurosis.

25:10 And he said, You think that getting wiser and more enlightened that all would go away? He said, It doesn't. He's just I've I've adopted it. It's my pet. I feed it. I say thank you, you know, but I know it's not who I am. And from that place Even the kind of Great suffering that many of us uh have in our lives, the people that we love who've died and it was We can hold it with great tenderness.

25:36 But it's not a surprise. It's like oh This too, this is part of what it is to be human. And you know, someone dies in and from that perspective. It was their time. So quick question for you.

25:50 Related to the Joseph Campbell. Quote. That you mentioned earlier. I'd love for you just to elaborate on that a little bit. Maybe what it means to you that you either need A really big story. Mm-hmm.

26:03 Right, one of maybe a cosmovision or a mythology. Or better still, no story at all. What does that mean to you? So I have a friend, Roger Walsh, M D PhD, who's on the faculty of Stanford Medical School, written a lot of books as both a mystic and uh Psychiatrists and other things. And being somewhat scholarly, he decided to read through

26:25 The entire encyclopedia of world religions. From Ahura Mazda all the way to Zoroaster and everything in between. Underachiever. Exactly. So I said to him afterwards, I said, Roger, you read the whole damn thing. What did you get out of it? And he said What I saw is that every religion Has a story.

26:47 Of the origin of the world. It is a story of some kind about how to navigate Gain loss, praise and blame. You know, good and bad, he said. Usually has a story about death and afterlife.

27:00 They're all very different stories. They're quite compelling. They're all different stories. And when I was finished I realized Human beings need to tell a story. And place it on top of the mystery. Because without the stories

27:15 Then we would be in the Present with the mystery of being alive with the universe. But for most of us. We want a story and so these are the big stories that humanity has written. Mm-hmm.

27:26 What is the alternative of no story? Because when I think of no story That actually strikes terror into my heart because I imagine this free floating nihilism or meaninglessness, and I understand Experientially in some of these alternate modes of experience through psychedelics and so on. That you can have the experience of no story.

27:50 No time, no name, no self. I understand that. Or I shouldn't say I understand that. I've experienced it. I definitely Can't claim to understand it. But what does the alternative mean to you. Well this is really important because

28:04 It's as if you're Talking to S Zen Monk somewhere and they talk about emptiness and you go, Oh shit. It's like how do I deal with that? How do I, you know, buy a new car, or how do I, you know

28:18 Take care of my family or things like that. So it's a really important question. And there are a couple of we talk about number of levels. One level is the more opinions you have about the way things are. the more trouble you have. And one of my favorite passages the the Buddhist texts aren't really full of a lot of jokes and humor, but there's one place where the Buddha says, And those who cling to their opinions go around the world annoying one another.

28:44 You know, and that's that's an observation that holds true thousands of years later. Like Twitter. So we know that. The more we're attached to our view because Whatever you're thinking or whatever you view There is an alternative. It's not the only view. So on this level

29:01 What? My Korean Zen master Day Sung Sanim said. is to keep a don't know mind or Suzuki Roshi calls it beginners mind Where you meet somebody fresh where you go into circumstance first. So that's part of not having the story. But it's a much more positive cast on it.

29:19 Then the second is that without having that story Then it's replaced in somehow Bye. Of

29:29 I don't know quite words. Wonder value. Meaning. A sense both of the vastness of things And also the delight in being

29:39 Incarnated as a human being. And so with that, like the Tao De Qing says you remember the source, which is you are consciousness. That's who you are. And you get to witness this. You are the Awareness, the loving awareness then your story might be all right.

29:55 I am the loving awareness as you know, as you are as everyone who's listening. You are loving awareness. And you get to then Embody and enact in this world. And then you get to choose how.

30:09 And it turns out In Our direct experience. That there are ways we can act. That bring

30:18 Understanding, connection, joy, happiness, well being. Create suffering. In the Buddhist teachings the Buddha said I do not

30:30 Answer philosophical questions. People would have all these what's the first beginning What is all the meaning of karma, how all of this, what's the story? You would say I just teach

30:42 Can release themselves. From suffering. And fear and confusion. And live with the innate freedom that is their Birthright. That's what I teach.

30:51 That is a story. It's my favorite story, I think, in this life. Because there is Suffering and difficulty and incarnation. There are causes that human beings

31:03 Can understand. And there's freedom. When Nelson Mandela walked out of Robin Island prison after twenty seven years. That's a long time, you know, that's Was half his life in that prison.

31:16 With such magnanimity. And graciousness and compassion. He not only changed to South Africa But he Somehow change the imagination of the world.

31:27 They can put your body in prison, but no one can imprison your spirit or your consciousness. And when you know this deeply Then There comes a different innate kind of story.

31:40 Which is one more deeply of Connectedness and care. Stangroft or Return to our dear friend Stanislav. Yeah. Has written a lot of books. You mentioned he's a polymath, he truly is, and he's prolific also in his writing.

31:55 There is One book, it may be two volumes. I'm I can't recall offhand. Called the Cosmic Game.

32:05 One volume, the cause of the one volume. Why does this Book. Of all of his books. Grab your attention. Or why is it meaningful?

32:15 It does, I'm glad you named it. Because he explores the very questions you're asking. Not only who are you? But he also shows Suppose we were to have a world

32:28 That didn't have loss, didn't have conflict, didn't have Disease didn't have the kind of troubles that we live. What would that world be like? And he explores and you kind of follow along.

32:40 With his exploration. How it is. That the world that we live in Somehow has been manufactured in in some way. What there is to learn from it.

32:51 And what's beautiful about it is that He says I think in the beginning That he took the records from five thousand LSD sessions. And from the deepest understandings and the height and Lot of the people who did those sessions were also people

33:06 who are already meditators or yogis or martial arts masters or In some way. And shaman people who had a already a very deep Spiritual. Perspective.

33:17 And he collated them and he said, Here's what we as human beings, when the gates between the worlds open This is how it looks. Which which is really compelling. He's so clear that he doesn't want to say This is how it is, or how I think it is.

33:33 He said this is what five thousand people report. From the height or the deepest of their experiences and you go, Oh yeah. I've seen that. I know that that's true. Mm. All right, I need to dig back in and get into the cosmic game, so I'll get that on my Kindle for my upcoming travels.

33:50 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me. On the road. So what is AG1? AG One is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out.

34:39 go to drinkage one dot com slash Tim. That's drinkage one, the number one. Drink AG One dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG One dot com slash Tim. Check it out. I Let's talk about Something perhaps.

34:59 that many people listening will identify with, or at least recognizing their daily experience. And that is Anxiety. And maybe we could just define terms.

35:13 And look at anxiety as Fear of the future. You could also define it differently. Could be pre experiencing the worst case scenario. I really don't know how you would like to define it, but If you wouldn't mind digging into that and share any approaches that you think are helpful.

35:33 Practices. thought exercises for people who are suffering from anxiety. That would be very helpful. I was gonna say that word before you said it. So we're somehow riding some current. We'll see where it takes us and if we're still on the in the same boat as we go through the raft. Learning how to paddle we'll see. Uh anxiety's a big but also a really important question. And the first thing to note is that we're living in a time of tremendous cultural anxiety.

36:00 Even in places where there was warfare or starvation or things when there were Very small groups of people. There was still a kind of basic I know who my family is, I know where the land is, you know, we'll have the food or we won't. But everything is up for up in certain ways. There's a kind of upheaval now. Um

36:19 identity, where we live, who we are. And so forth. That's accelerating and it's been accelerated of course And now we'll get to it. Certainly been accelerated by technology.

36:31 And we're on the cusp on the roller coaster ride. You know the click click click click click as you go as you're going up to the top direction. Right, and And the little sign that you got your ticket for said AI go on this ride. So we'll get to that. I I wanna but anyway. So there there's the anxiety, there's the economy anxiety, there's the collective anxiety about climate.

36:52 There's racial and economic injustice that's really in our forefront. And then there's the human anxiety of our own family and people going through things of loneliness and Economic insecurity.

37:06 So first thing to say, there's a whole bunch of things that might be helpful. The image that I'd like to start with. is an archetypal one of the Buddha seated under the Tree of enlightenment. The night of his enlightenment before

37:20 He Was enlightened. The Indian God named Mara. Who is the god of

37:28 Greed, fear, hatred, aggression. All of the Forces of suffering. Appeared. And said, What are you trying to do to the Buddha? And this is the way it appeared.

37:39 He said, You have no idea what you're dealing with and He said, Let me show you. This enlightenment stuff. And so he paraded before him all the most beautiful dancing dachinis and

37:50 Gilded chariots, the Lamborghinis of the time. And the Buddha said, You know, been there, done that, thank you. Okay. And then he Said well you you know You have no right to be there and he started throwing flaming arrows and swords and the Buddha lifted his hand and

38:06 Touch them all with compassion and they turn to flower petals. Well. Then Mara said. You don't even know who you are. You don't know what you're doing. And there's no reason for you to be sitting here

38:18 Then Mar came basically in the form of doubt. And that that point the Buddha put his hand down and touched the earth. And said. Will you bear witness? To my right as a human being here halfway between heaven and earth.

38:31 to awaken to the way things are. You say that one more time. Heaven and earth or heaven and hell? Between heaven and earth. Okay. If you want to go there, we can go there later. Between halfway between heaven and earth in this human form. Be my witness. That we human beings have the right to see clearly. Not with delusion, not with doubt. And then Mara appeared again, and the Buddha just looked at Mara and said

38:56 I see you, Mara. I see who you are. And the minute he said that. Clearly. Mara dissolved.

39:03 Now what people don't know in the Buddhist text is that after his enlightenment Mara came back to visit the Buddha quite a few times. You think there's enlightened retirement. But but Mars part of the game. And Tik Nathan's a really beautiful image about this. Where he sets the scene of the Buddhist in a cave, and again, the Buddha really is a stand in for your awakened self. Sitting in a cave.

39:27 Mouth of a cave meditating and his attendant is there and Mara appears. And his attendant tries to chase Mara away. And the Buddha says. Ananda. Is that my old friend Mara?

39:38 Set out some tea. Let us sit down. And he says, Is that you, Mara? And usually All that it takes is for the Buddha say Is that you, Mara, or I see you, Mara? Mara looks and kind of sadly.

39:53 Slinks away, if you will. So the first thing about anxiety Is to acknowledge that it's entirely human. that there are cultural reasons for it and that there are physiological reasons that we have fear and we have fear of loss and all of those things. And to be able to name it and say, Oh

40:10 This is anxiety. It feels this way in my body. Your hands sweat, your breath stops, your heart. And it's hard to feel, it's unpleasant in the body. And then it has its thoughts. We'll get to those in a minute. And what you can do In naming bar you can say, Oh

40:27 Anxiety I see you, I feel you. So that's the first thing. And already. You start to step halfway back from it as the witness.

40:37 So that already begins to liberate you a little bit. And then the next thing Is you can also say Thank you for trying to protect me. Because if you fight against the anxiety, what that is is more anxiety. Oh my God, I got a riddle, I hate him.

40:53 But instead it's almost like you take a little bow, Okay, Mara, I see you. Thank you for trying to protect me because that's what it's trying to do. And you remember that statement from Mark Twain. Where he said, My life has been filled. With terrible misfortunes.

41:07 Most of which never happened, right? So these are the stories you meant sort of the advanced stories. Say thank you, Mara. I see you. Thanks for Trying to protect me. Then the next thing.

41:18 is to know that there's something called the wisdom of insecurity. That it's actually okay to be insecure. My monastic teachers would say it's uncertain, isn't it? We could ask him all kinds of things. Tell me about enlightenment, my teacher would laugh. He said, It's uncertain, isn't it? He wanted us just to get comfortable with uncertainty. That's and then What happens?

41:41 Is when you realize that you can't know. That you come back into the present moment. And then the next thing to do with anxiety is ground your senses. Feel your feet on the floor. Or maybe go out in nature, stand there with a tree. Feel the roots of the tree and imagine your own feet as roots into the earth.

41:58 And notice the wind comes and the storms and all those things happen. But the tree is rooted And it can stay there and you can be the same. You can let the storms of thoughts and fears and so forth arise. So that's another practice you can do. Then You can

42:14 Question your thoughts, and this is more The Beautifully spelled out by Byron Cady, for example, who has these Practices of Questioning your thought.

42:25 Says, What if that thought isn't true? Yeah. How can you know that thought is true? And if you look deeply, you can't know it. And you get to a place of Realizing that Your thoughts are tentative. They're a creation. You say thank you, thank you for trying to protect me.

42:41 And again you become the witness of those thoughts. Then a few more. Very simple things that you can do. You can find Where you feel the anxiety most strongly in your body.

42:54 And once you feel it, you can feel into its elements. Is it hot or cold? Is it hard or soft? Is it vibrating? Earth, air fire. So you're really good. Close into it. You can ask it what stories it tells,'cause it'll have a story.

43:08 And then you say again, not only thank you, thank you for trying to protect me. But you wrap it with kindness with loving awareness and say thank you I know you're worried. I can respect you and hold you with kindness and compassion.

43:24 And You know that that's not who you are. This is a part, it's something it's common for human beings. You say. I respect this and who I am. is honoring you and so much bigger than who you are.

43:36 And you feel yourself literally Being both the witness, the grounded one. The I know you Ma I see you, Mara. And you become more The Buddha.

43:47 Rather than one who's caught by all these things. Hm. Could you say a bit more about Asking. For instance in this case. The anxiety, what stories it tells. Maybe give an example, whether from your personal experience, someone else's, or just a hypothetical

44:04 What that might look like.'Cause it's the first time I've heard that and That piques my curiosity. So It's a beautiful question. Because one of the things that I've learned all over these years Is that you can have the Sufies call it a so bad.

44:19 A conversation with the heart. And if you let yourself get quiet, it might be after a little walk in the woods or just Sitting quietly. Taking a A cup of tea or something that you like to drink and letting yourself quiet down or meditating if you want to.

44:35 And when you get quiet. You can have an inner conversation. And there's information. That's waiting there for you to ask. So for example

44:47 Since we're talking about anxiety And you want to have a conversation with it. You can say to the anxiety. Where do I feel you most strongly in my body? Okay, that's a pretty simple one.

45:00 Then you can say Ask the anxiety. What is the thing you're most afraid of? Usually it will be something like Loss, a death, something huge. Okay, okay, thank you.

45:12 Get quiet and say. Tell me the story you have about it. And then your anxiety will answer and it will say, Well If You lose your job, which we're afraid you will, you'll be out on the street, you'll be homeless, people will beat up on you, then you'll be in the hospital or you'll become whatever, and there's a whole disaster scenario.

45:32 And you can say yes, thank you. I hear your story. Then there's another interesting question. So all these are things you can ask and if you're willing to ask and get quiet and listen. Usually your body and your heart will answer. Then there's

45:45 Another really important question. Or two that you can ask. What is the most important thing? I need to learn from you. And it will give you an answer.

45:57 I want you to pay attention or I want you to take care of your financial affairs so I don't have to worry so much. You know, or want you to make sure you have friends who know where you are, whatever it happens to be. Or some bigger story. And then you can step out of the anxiety.

46:12 And this is a really beautiful one and get quiet and ask. What is my best intention? of how I want to live this next month or this next year. I only had a year to live. What style? How do I want to live this?

46:27 Because anxiety also has time in it. And so you're sort of stepping out of time and say, All right, so my time's limited. How do I want to live? What is my deepest intention? And if you pause and ask. Your heart will answer.

46:41 So this may tie into my next question. It might not. But you mentioned this M D PHD earlier and you said as you told the story of his Digesting this. Yeah.

46:56 You said And a mystic. And then you moved on to say what you said. And uh since you mentioned Sufism.

47:04 That also brought the word. Mystic or mysticism to mind for me. What does that mean to you? Someone being a mystic.

47:13 I'm afraid that it's sort of gotten relegated to the realm of religion. Okay, the Sufis have their mystics and there were the Christian desert father mystics or the Zen mystics or something. And that's true. These are people who are really interested in some way in vast spiritual experiences and understanding. But it puts it outside of ourselves. We all in that sense. Are open to mystery when we quiet.

47:38 How in the hell did you get into this body? You know, you take a look. Oh look in the look in the damn mirror. There are these weird round things that we call eyes and protuberances from your head that stick out. Mine stick out pretty far, my ears. Got made fun of as a kid. You know, you open your mouth and the tongue comes out and There's this hole in your body into which you keep stuffing dead plants and animals and grinding them up with these bones that hang down.

48:04 Right, and glugging them down through the tube and you move it. Weird watching how people you fall one direction, bipedes, and then you catch yourself and you fall the next direction. How did you get in there? And if you don't think that's weird, pay attention when you're making love. It's a fabulous thing to do. I'm completely, you know, love it. It's bizarre. It is. Okay, you know, whatever way you do it, licking, putting this in that part of that body or that and so forth, or a little whatever.

48:31 I mean It's weird. So how did you get in here? So we don't have to go to the Sufi mystics or the or the whatever. It's really more mystery.

48:42 Is the mystical In this sense. And this is my placeholder way of thinking about it, the direct experience of the mystery or seeking the direct unmediated Experience of Yeah.

48:58 Mystery is that One way to think about it? Yeah. That's I mean that's a nice way to Say it. I might want to change the word seeking to

49:08 opening to it. And just to be really direct with you who are listening. You know what I'm talking about. You have had experiences whether it's walking in the high mountains. Or Taking psychedelics and meditating if that's your want or your avenue. You've had it listening to an amazing piece of music or going into

49:29 An incredible Cathedral or a forest of the sequoias in Redwoods of Wonder or You know it from making love. You know it even more from being there at the birth of a child. Yeah, Wow.

49:44 Oh, here's a whole new human being and my beloved wife, Trudy. Goodman, who's is also a meditation teacher in LA inside LA Is her center. She was twenty one years old. She was giving birth to her Daughter.

49:57 And By circumstance she was in a hospital room alone. It was like in the sixties and it was the old style birth basically and they left her alone and She had no idea her body just started contracting and going through these things incredibly painful. And she didn't understand it in a deep way at all. No one had sort of explained how it would happen.

50:16 She said and then all of a sudden It was late afternoon. It was in What the French colour blue, the blue hour of kind of transition between day and night. She said, and all of a sudden it wasn't my body.

50:32 My body was doing its thing delivering this child. But I became All mothers. I could feel that I was in a chain of being that went back Two A million lives before one mother after another birthing people out of their body and would continue

50:50 And there was this incredible sense. of being part of this huge mystery of life recreating itself. She said afterward I was walking down the street, I look at all these people, I say, They all came out of a woman's vagina. You know, how could that be? I mean so you want to look at mystery. It's it's staring us in the face. Got it. We are that. Don't have to be a whirling dervish. You don't have to you don't have to be whirling dervishes or there are all kinds of ways So we all know this from some way or other and even more so sitting with someone when they die.

51:22 Because there you are, especially if it's a Reasonably conscious or peaceful death. That person is there. And you might be able to talk to them, or there's some sense of them being conscious. And then as quietly as a falling star.

51:37 Consciousness leaves the body. And it's meat. It's just dead. You know. It's like at the butcher. I mean, I'm being really graphic, but that's all it is, is this cold, you know, flesh. It's so clear that it's not that person. And you go, Whoa, the gates between the worlds have opened like

51:54 Who are we? So you want that, baby. It's around you. It's here. Okay. Okay. I think that we're at an intersection where I'm gonna bring up something just opportunistically because it's it's on my mind.

52:11 And this has Somehow popped up on my radar. I wanna say at least twice. I don't know what it is. I literally have a Wikipedia page open, but why go on Wikipedia when I have you right here? And you could use

52:28 Chatbot it would answer. But anyway, I could use a chat bot. I could use a chat bot. The human chat bot will speak. Go ahead. Yeah, that's right. So you know, why use AI when you can use organic intelligence right now for the exact AI. Jana practice? Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes. What is Jana practice? Okay, so John I practice. Now you're getting down into technics of certain kinds of Buddhist practices. I know. Okay. Yeah. So One of the things that's true about the dimensions Of deep meditation practice.

53:01 is that we human beings have a capacity To concentrate our attention. In meditation practices. There are two major dimensions. One is the dimension of a awareness. It can be mindfulness or devotion or something, where you open to the mystery of things.

53:19 Unfolding thoughts appearing, emotions Or you create certain emotions of love, compassion, joy, all of those things. The other is the dimension of concentration. Where you focus. Deeply on one thing generally. It can be a candle flame or a mantra.

53:35 Or particular emotion like love. Or your breath. And uh there's a beautiful biblical phrase. Where it says if thine eye be single Then the gates of heavens open or something like that.

53:48 When you start to get very concentrated and Several things happen. Your thoughts start to disappear. To be concentrated means you're focused on an experience like the breath or a light. And the thoughts quiet down and gradually they go away. Not easy to do for most people, but it's possible.

54:09 And then as you get more concentrated On The breath or a mantra or whatever you've chosen and you do it over and over again. It becomes a doorway. The next thing that happens.

54:21 Is that inner forms of light will appear. So there you're sensing your breath. We use that as an example, but it could be other things. And as you do the thoughts start to get quiet. And then the sense. As you feel your breath is not only is there breath.

54:36 But around your nostrils or your throat or your wherever you're paying attention, your body And the The field. starts to fill with light because consciousness is made of light. So light will appear.

54:49 And then with it. comes quite spontaneously. Qualities of deep joy and happiness. An incredible steadiness and inner peacefulness. And when these qualities start to arise

55:03 They are the gateway. To a whole series of The deepest ones you no longer see or hear what's happening around you. You're so absorbed in the light or the bliss.

55:18 Or the Sense of peacefulness and well being. Disappears. And you're in a realm.

55:25 That's just filled with light and stillness and peace. And you can move around from one realm to another, several different flavors of them. The closest thing I can describe to it is If you're a diver and you're out on the water and there's waves and the sun's shining and things And then you go under the surface of the water. And everything becomes silent. You know, there's waves on the surface.

55:47 They have nothing to do with you. And instead you're in this That's timeless. Silent Realm. The purpose of training.

55:55 To go into these kind of states. Is twofold. One is It gives you some skill in navigating in your consciousness and mind. So you don't have to live if there's A lot of whatever it is, anxiety or

56:08 Conflict or things around you, you can actually stabilize yourself, become quite stable. It gives a kind of faith. Oh, the mind actually can be trained. But the other is that from that stillness. Then you can See or listen more deeply. To concentrate is a little bit like polishing the lens.

56:26 of consciousness So that whether it's a microscope or a telescope. When you're very concentrated. It the beginning you notice their thoughts. Then you notice the thoughts at the end.

56:37 Then you're more concentrated, you notice at the beginning of the thought, Oh, it's about to arise. Then you notice the impulse for thoughts to come. It's like a little burp that's coming out of the brain, you know. And then you see the space around thoughts where they're born before they're even there. And then you look into the body and at first you see hot or cold, and then it pixelates. With deeper concentration and you see. All the elements that make it up. So this is like the microscope.

57:02 Or you point it outward. And consciousness becomes vast like the sky. And there's no bounds to it. It's timeless. So these kind of states of consciousness give you access to the telescope and the microscope.

57:17 And the information that comes through that doorway. How's that? That's great. You had me at Pixel8, so Another question about this, and I suspect we've talked about this. Nobody ever asked me this on the air before, so this is fun. Okay. Yeah, so let's let's go.

57:32 I hear your description. And it grabs my attention and interest and I would love to experience these states, I consider myself Good at

57:44 Being a diligent. Practicer. So I've trained in sports, I've done many things consistently over extended periods of time. my felt experience of meditation is that it's Done regularly on a daily basis in small doses.

58:00 I experience an improved quality of life decreased. Reactivity. But I doubt my own ability.

58:09 to reliably achieve the type of states that you're describing, which is part of the reason. And now I'm not married to that. Belief. But that I think part of the appeal For a lot of people with, say, psychedelics.

58:22 Is In most cases with sufficient dosing, you're probably going to feel something. Yes. And That is not to say that should be

58:32 the sole tool or that people should be a hammer looking for nails with psychedelics because there are Risks and trade offs and so on. That is just a very long winded way of asking to get to a point where you would feel reasonably confident that someone could achieve these types of states. Are we talking about

58:49 Five years, ten years, fifteen years in some instances is like Ten people pursue this, they do it for ten years, and then only three of them experience these states. I fear The possibility that I would dedicate to a long term practice and then For whatever reason just not have the capability.

59:07 So now This is a really important question. It's more than about Johnna. Sure. Even though I'm happy to talk about it'cause it's fun to talk about. I'm also a little bit reluctant.

59:18 Because it can Mislead people or feed into a kind of spiritual Not spiritual materialism, but idealism of some kind. Okay, I've heard about these states and then or you go and you read this end stories and okay, then they worked on their co on and finally whack the master hits them and then they have this great revelation or other things like that. John is completely unnecessary for wisdom.

59:43 It's the kind of thing that yogis and people who devote themselves to meditation. Some of them can do, some can't. It depends. There's sort of light levels and then very deep levels of this. If you want to do a light level jhana There are several ingredients. One is you probably have to have a certain Temperament or inclination to be able to do it.

1:00:04 And that's probably, you know, a third of people. Not everybody can do it. And then you need to go on retreat. If you want deep jhana, you need to go on long retreats. If you wanna have some kind of initial experience a good friend of mine, a colleague named Lee Brazington leads

1:00:27 Ten day retreats and you can have an experience. And it's fun to play with. It's completely unnecessary. Now I want to talk about enlightenment'cause The point of all this is

1:00:37 If you divide it, there are experiences And then there's understanding or being. And the experiences that we have, you mentioned psychedelic experiences which which I Deeply respect. Whether it's John experience or deep insight and meditations of different kinds that we do.

1:00:55 Or other spiritual experiences. You can be the dervish, as you mentioned. Whirling and it's such a beautiful thing to see and to do. And the world starts to dissolve. Most of these practices dissolve the separate sense of self. And you're there as Alice Walker wrote of one character.

1:01:13 One day I was sitting there like a motherless child, which I was And it come to me that feeling of being a part of everything. And I knew if I cut a tree My arm would bleed. And I laugh and I cry, I run all around the house. In fact, when it happens you can't miss it.

1:01:29 So There are all these doorways. That open us beyond the Separate sense of self. which that sense of small self, it's sometimes called the body of fear, that limited sense

1:01:41 Self dissolves. Hallelujah. They're great. I played with Jana, I've taken psychedelics, I've done shamanic things, all these I've had a bunch of experiences. And part of it gives me a kind of confidence, okay, I know this territory. Part of it is deeper than that. In the most profound places as we talked about.

1:02:00 I know. that who I am is not this body. I know that who I am is consciousness. Then the game is Not about the experiences. It's about

1:02:13 Who you are, who I am as we manifest in the world. And the way that I most Express enlightenment at this point. Is not somebody who's had a lot of these experiences. In all these years, my understanding really is that it comes down to love.

1:02:33 I've met Swamis and Lamas and Gurus and Mamas and everybody else in between in my industry. And some of them are fabulous. But there's a Really interesting thing.

1:02:43 That you can have these powerful experiences And still be a little bit of a jerk. Just getting real about it, you know. And because we are one around our consciousness is like a mandala. And we can awaken some dimensions of it. So you have an Olympic level athlete Who's an emotional idiot.

1:03:02 You have a professor of nuclear physics m most brilliant and she can't find her shoes or her body. We can develop ourselves in some areas But it turns out unfortunately that doesn't always go over to another area. And so there's a kind of halo effect where people think, Oh, this person is a spiritual teacher and they've had these spiritual experiences. I'll go ask them for marriage advice. Or advice for sexuality. They don't know.

1:03:29 Shit about marriage. Yeah. So this is our human nature. If we're actually To become wise. We need to direct our attention to body, to emotions, to relationships, to thought. We actually need to become Wise in those major dimensions of her life. And we can't expect that of people just'cause they have a certain title or robe or anything else.

1:03:51 But having said that. My measure now for myself Are you loving? Am I loving? Are they? And that love isn't just like, Oh, sweet Valentine love, but it's can you be in this world? And can you love it?

1:04:05 With all its imperfections. And can you bring that spirit of care and love In the middle of What's tragic and what's beautiful. That's a liberated heart. So

1:04:17 Love, let's underscore this. For people who are listening, this might sound like a really strange question. Who are thinking to themselves, well I love my dog. I love cheesecake.

1:04:32 Love my kids. If they have kids, let's say But maybe they're like I'm not sure. If I would recognize or even know the feeling of what it is to love the world.

1:04:46 Maybe they feel like they might be colorblind to the first person experience of feeling that. Is it just something they can intuit or could you expand on that? You remember Einstein said that the Task for humanity. is to widen our circle of compassion, or you could call it love.

1:05:04 To include All of humanity and all of nature. In its beauty. And so we start By loving that which is right around us. It's natural. Your dog

1:05:14 You know, your children, the partner, the people you care about, and maybe your neighbors. And now we're talking about well what is wisdom? And what is Liberation. And it's that widening of the circle.

1:05:27 So that when you're Moving through the world. It's not just that. person over there is an object, but they become more and more a part of your family. There's a beautiful

1:05:39 Monument. to a mystical experience going back to your asking about that. In Louisville, Kentucky on I think it's on Fourth Street, Fourth and Walnut. And the great Christian mystic Thomas Merton left his monastery. And was walking down the street in the middle of Louisville.

1:05:56 And he said, I come from the monastery, we were all trying to be holy and close to God and have all these spiritual experiences the way one does and pray and so forth. And I was walking down the street and all of a sudden it came to me I s looked in the eyes of everyone going by and I saw Their secret beauty that was born in them. That no one can take from them.

1:06:18 That magnificence of spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it. He said the only problem would be I wanted to fall down at their feet and worship each one that went by. He said if we could see each other that way, there'd be no more need for war and cruelty. The world would be a different place. So this monument, a public monument to a mystical experience. What it does

1:06:40 Is it says that this is possible, but more than that There are beautiful trainings to do it. One of my favorite trainings. His trainings in loving kindness meditation. There's bunches of it on my website and Sharon Salzburg and Tard Brock and lots of other colleagues and teachers.

1:06:57 And it turns out if you practice it like anything It grows. You start with the people close to you and then those in a little wider circle and gradually extend it. And for me, for example I'm out on the st street or I'm driving or something, and I'm a bit of a speed freak. You know, I can sit quiet in meditation. But my my general MO is to get stuff done and move through the way you know. And so if somebody's driving slowly and meandering and not being a good driver in front of me and I get annoyed or

1:07:26 Even on the sidewalk people are blocking it and not aware that I have something important to get in the document. Whatever. And I feel a little moment of irritation arise, which it will. I look. And I see them

1:07:40 Not as they are now. But as they were at three as I imagine them at three or four years old, completely innocent child. You know, they all were that. No matter what things happen to them. And I go, Oh yeah, I see who's in there.

1:07:55 That's like Merton team. I see that there's that Person doing the best they can. And there's that child that's in there. And instantly my heart changes and I go, Oh yeah, I wish them well. May they be safe and

1:08:08 Whatever dance they're in, may they be protected. And this quality of loving kindness and compassion It's grown because I practice it some It's where I want to live. But it's more than that.

1:08:21 I see it, or sense it. As the best Expression of enlightenment. All those other things are experiences. They lead us back to love. And if they don't

1:08:33 I'm not sure. That they matter that much. And we can learn it and become it. So would you suggest maybe people use this objective or beacon of

1:08:44 Love. Versus enlightenment as a term because the word enlightenment has always bothered me because I've never had someone define it clearly for me in any way. Let's call it Enlovenment. I just made it up, but Perfect. Okay, great. Problem solved. We're we're we're into Enlovenment. We have problem solved. I also want to just take a side note because

1:09:06 Joseph Campbell came up earlier and he has so many tremendous books. And one of them is called I believe it's the Power of the Animal Spirits, which is this Anthropological and historic overview of Animal mythology. cross cultures. It's a beautiful hardcover book. It's gigantic. It's

1:09:27 Absolutely. spectacularly illustrated with drawings and photographs and so on. Just to come back to the why you wouldn't ask your Fill in the blank, right? That you're psychedelic practitioner automatically for marriage advice, for instance. Across the board, shamans in almost every culture pretty much consider pains in the ass. Trickster troublemakers. And here you are aspiring to be a shaman, Tim. You're in trouble. Oh no. I am not. I'm not in the shaman MBA program at present.

1:10:01 Rule number one of tracking down shamans. If they call themselves a shaman, be very, very, very cautious. Might want to run the other way. It's kind of like if you meet the Buddha on the road. Kill'em kind of situation. But Let's shift to a moment to wisdom. And

1:10:16 I would love to ask you, and this is a question that you can feel free to dissect in any way. That you like. Who would you consider some of the wisest people you have met? And Why? And or what have you learned from them?

1:10:30 I could s certainly go down the list. And I'll answer you explicitly and then there's some place I want to go from here, but I studied with a a guru. in um Bombay named Nisargadot Maharaj. And there's a wonderful book of his or dialogues with him called I Am That.

1:10:47 N- I S A R G A D A T T A. He had a little like BD cigarette stand. He was of kind of modest Business person, but he had a wonderful Grow that he met and he had some Profound. Realization happened to him.

1:11:02 And so groups of us would gather around. And One day when I was with him over a course of a few years I would go and visit him Somebody says you're eighty years old. He was sort of getting toward the end of his life. What do you think about your approaching death?

1:11:17 The kind of thing you want to ask a guru. And he looked back, completely affronted. And he says, You are telling me I will die? And the person said, Well, aren't you? He said That's just this body it's made of, you know.

1:11:30 Japatis and wheat flour and vegetables and subject. You think I am Joe It's like saying I'm made of McDonald's. Is that who you think I am? You think I'm these feelings? You think I am You know, these thoughts, you have no idea that I have this has nothing to do with me. I was never born. And I will never die. Who I am is

1:11:51 Beyond birth and death. I am the consciousness. From which everything is born. And then later he said Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. Between these two my life flows.

1:12:05 So he was a pretty Wise. Okay. Yeah, solid response. And Tik Not Han said sort of the same thing as he was dying people, Oh God Tie, as they call him, you're gonna die. And he said I was never born.

1:12:19 Look at a rain cloud and it comes down as raindrops or snowflakes and goes into the rivers and Flows into the ocean and then the gets evaporated and becomes a cloud again, you think I can disappear? I am you and you are me. We are life itself unfolding.

1:12:36 And It's one thing to have him say it. But was another to be with him and have him look you in the eye. And say this is who we are. So there are of course there's all these beautiful examples.

1:12:49 What are the most reliable approaches for Eliciting the experience the direct experience of Non self.

1:13:01 And I say that because I don't Recommend everyone use psychedelics. There are a lot of footnotes to any conversation on these compounds, which are so powerful. But

1:13:12 That is how I've had my most direct experience of What you're describing. Which has removed much of my fear of

1:13:23 Physical death. I fear the descent to death. That's still there. But In terms of the Light switch.

1:13:31 being flipped and being turned off. I don't have that m much anxiety at least at present related to that. And I haven't for quite a while. Whole trip of breath work. might be another tool.

1:13:44 Are there other modalities that you think apply or could be applied to more people than Powerful psychedelics. Of course. I mean psychedelics they open a lot of doorways and they also need to be used with some

1:14:00 Discretion and some caution or discernment. As you say, it's just not a you know, and definitely not just like Okay, let me take a high dose psychoselic and see what happens. You want satin setting, it has to be appropriate for you. All of those sort of things. It's really what we've been talking about. That there's a w worldwide treasury now.

1:14:18 We live. In the treasury. Of The great spiritual Teachings and practices.

1:14:25 And you can go online and find masters and You know, sages and llamas and mamas and so forth, many of whom are really, really good. How do you separate the charlatans from the real McCoy though? It's just like I don't know. I'm sort of like Shopping for a car.

1:14:43 Yeah you know. The minute you walk in, if it's a sleazy salesperson showroom and it feels like this doesn't feel like it's a you go somewhere else. But there are so many jokers with large followings out there. Oh yes. Well really are Any any suggestions for the intrepid used car purchaser who's looking for a llama? I'd say probably start with the name brands, although there's plenty of very widely known llamas and swamis and bamas who's also misused their position What a good teacher wants is your

1:15:17 Dedication. And your common sense. And if the common sense is thrown out, that's the wrong place for you. You really have to trust yourself as well. Now you were asking about wisdom. I want to read you a few lines from A great Indian master named Atisha.

1:15:34 And they're really instructions'cause you say, Okay, how do we do this? Yes, you can find practices, meditations, thing reflections, m walking in the In the wilderness, things that will open your mind and your heart. Here's a Tisha's instruction. In something like eight lines.

1:15:50 And they really each is a kind of practice. The first one. Consider all experiences to be dreams. That there's a dream like nature and it is true. I mean here we are, you and I are talking in April

1:16:05 Two thousand twenty three. What happened to March? What happened to January? What happened to, you know, your childhood? Where did it go? What happened to do you remember Y two K? What happened to twenty oh?

1:16:18 It's back with the pyramids and the dinosaurs. Everything. Disappears back into the void from which it came, and then something new is born. It's the reason why people keep writing love songs. It's not like

1:16:30 There haven't been a lot of good love poems. But the universe wants to keep recreat itself all the time. That's why your body creates a hundred billion red cells every day, red blood cells. The universe is a It's a process of creation.

1:16:46 But it also is like a dream'cause it appears today is here and it will be gone, like your life of this kind will be gone at some point. So consider all experience. To be dreamlike. Next one. Be grateful to everyone. So that's an instruction.

1:17:03 And it sort of fits with this Other instruction. Let suffering teach you compassion. 'Cause in Tibet, in some of the Tibetan Teachings.

1:17:15 They actually pray for suffering. They say may I be granted enough suffering So that the great heart of compassion will open in me. So Consider all experience to be dreams. Be grateful to everyone.

1:17:29 'Cause they all have a lesson to offer you. Might be an unpleasant or painful lesson. Let suffering teach you compassion. Next line. Don't be swayed by outer circumstances. This is a tough one. They want you to be this and that and all that conditioning. And you can see it and you can use it.

1:17:48 But don't let it guide your life. Let your life be guided when you get a little quiet. By your own values in your own heart. A few more lines. I love this one.

1:17:59 Don't brood over the faults of others. I could do some work on that one. Yeah. Can save a lot of agony. Because people don't Act. The way we want them to. And they all have their faults. Not not us, of course, but don't brood over the faults of others. You can feel how there's liberation in every one of these lines.

1:18:21 And you can practice it. Explore the timeless nature of consciousness. Which is what we've been talking about. Two more things. At all times simply rely on a joyful mind.

1:18:34 And we'll talk about joy in a minute. Joy and community too, they're things I want to talk about. And then the last line I really love. He says. Don't expect a standing ovation. How do you spell a Tisha? A T I S H A. Oh man, that's great. No, don't expect. And it's like we're looking for the universe to affirm us.

1:18:57 The universe has affirmed you, baby. You wouldn't be here otherwise. Don't expect a standing ovation. So those are all You're asking how we do it. Those are all actually practices. They're instructions in some way.

1:19:13 And you can take one or another. This year I'm gonna practice being grateful for everyone. The ones that are difficult. I remember when my daughter first got her W one of her first jobs, you know.

1:19:24 And she was complaining about she liked the work and she like But The manager, sort of the middle level boss was Not good, he was a tyrant, he didn't organize things. God is so bad, we need to get rid of him. I said, Caroline, welcome to the world of work.

1:19:40 You think there's a bad boss there. Try another job. There will be someone he's a stand in. For the archetype of you know the bad boys, you will find them. So you gotta figure out how to deal live in a place Where and not brood over it where people are just that way. Yeah. Joyful mind.

1:19:58 I could always use More joyful mind. So joy or joyful mind. How should we Find our way.

1:20:06 Into this vast subject. Which I think All listeners could certainly Use a bit more of Yeah.

1:20:13 I wanna repeat something that I believe I might have said in a previous podcast with you, but It is one of the great poems of the last Decades in my mind. By Jack Gilbert. And it's particularly so Because

1:20:29 We at this time, those of you and I and those who are listening, Not only is there the mystery And incredible beauty of life. With all its sorrow it still has this Unbearable beauty in so many directions.

1:20:45 But we also carry in our heart The suffering of the world. And we can talk about that and how one holds it. This is a poem called A Brief. For the defense. The defense of what, you might ask? By Jack Gilbert.

1:20:57 Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving some place They're starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

1:21:09 But we enjoy our lives. Because that's also what the gods want. Otherwise the mornings before lavender summer dawn would not be made so fine as And the Bengal Tiger Orange and black would not be fashioned so miraculously well.

1:21:28 The poor women at the fountain are laughing together. Between the suffering they've known And the awfulness in their future. Smiling and laughing. While somebody in the village

1:21:41 Is very sick. If we deny our happiness Resist our satisfaction. We lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk.

1:21:54 Delight. We can do without pleasure seeking, But not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness

1:22:03 To accept our gladness. In the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our tension. Is to praise the devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down.

1:22:18 We should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit that there will be music. Despite everything. And so that's a line to make injustice the only measure of our attention.

1:22:32 The devil we must have the stubbornness What is the name of that poem more time? For the defense by Jack Gilbert. And it really speaks to the

1:22:46 Tearing open of the heart in our time. that we have the suffering of the world and it's presented to us. If we don't have it in our family or in our neighborhood. It's there on our screens. And it's there given to us.

1:23:00 How do we hold it? And is it okay? Is it okay to be happy? And the Buddha.

1:23:08 Live in joy and love even among those who hate. There's an instruction. Yes, that's there. Live in love even among those who hate. Live in joy and health even among the afflicted. Live in joy and peace.

1:23:22 Even among the troubled. That was like my War time in Cambodia and less in Vietnam. It was a place of peace in the middle of all of that.

1:23:33 Live in peace even among the troubled. Look within. Be still. Free from fears and attachments. No the sweet joy of living in the way.

1:23:45 So these are really instructions. Permission? People think spiritual life is a grim duty. I'm gonna meditate. I go to the gym I work out, I have a diet, you know, I've got my trainer, I've got it and now I gotta go and meditate. And it's not meant to be a grim duty.

1:24:02 If you don't have some joy and pleasure in it. You know, that's the wrong direction. Maybe. It's really an invitation. The quiet and calm.

1:24:11 To bring in care and compassion. If you go into a refugee camp They don't want your depression and sadness. They have enough of that. The actually some want somebody to come in and say Hey

1:24:22 You know, let's see what we can do with this, even though it's incredibly difficult. So Building on that. And also off of the previous mention of holding suffering. I'd like to shift to community.

1:24:37 And The timing is perfect for that. looking at my personal experience because I've been in Los Angeles for a few weeks. And I made a commitment to myself, which is very atypical for me, because I have this productivity fetish and

1:24:54 I should put productivity and quotation marks, whatever that means. But I decided that my mantra for this time here was going to be social, not solo. Okay. And That meant rather than doing what I normally do, which is default no to any type of social invitation. I made it default, yes.

1:25:15 And my well being My Sense of inner peace is so Since I started doing that. Now granted my output has lessened substantially, but

1:25:27 At this point, who cares, I think, on some level. And It's highlighted for me how even in a city For instance, could be anywhere, any city. possible to be surrounded by people but feel entirely alone.

1:25:40 And it takes some intentionality, perhaps. to build and be supported by community. So maybe this is a place to talk about cloudsangha.co. Cloud sang up, but We could lead into it in any way that makes sense.

1:25:56 To you. Yeah, I welcome this. As part of our conversation. First of all. There is an epidemic of loneliness, as you point to it. The Brits have their minister of loneliness now and I'm I think it's even gotten more Extreme since Brexit in some way.

1:26:11 They actually got lonely from the continent. Sadly. But anyway. From the very earliest understandings There is a teaching. Or a pointing.

1:26:22 To the fact that we need each other in community. Whether it's the Jewish minion or whenever two or more gathered in his name, whether it's the Satsang in Hindu or the Sangha in Buddhism or within a community and a village around a Teacher or a shaman or and so forth.

1:26:41 We're communal beings. We're raised by one another, we're connected. And so we languish when we don't have connection. One of the great problems in The current time is that there had been a

1:26:56 A way that many, many people Had a sense of community through religious affiliation. generations before. their church, their mosque, their temple, whatever it happened to be. That's dropped away a lot.

1:27:09 For all kinds of reasons. And it's left people more isolated. And so Together with Tar Brock and a couple of friends. We founded a company called Cloud Sangha, S A N G H A Sangha, which means community, cloud community.

1:27:24 And you can join For a month or several months. To start with. And become part of a group.

1:27:33 Of people who meet together every week. Around themes that you're working with. We have groups for Anxiety? And how people are managing and learning about it and transforming it. We have groups for People who are parents.

1:27:48 You know, and in those groups you can talk about whether it's you know, your Toddler's tantrum or your teenager's acting out or whatever it happens to be. We have groups for people who are interested in promoting joy in their lives and Groups for those who are

1:28:04 Dealing with grief or loss and those kind of things. And people who join them love them. Because you can be living in Boise, Idaho, or Belfast, Ireland, or whatever. And it can be hard to practice on your own. It's hard to meditate. It's hard to feel a sense that you have a kind of

1:28:23 Community who are supporting you and what happens is as people come together And share. They learn. As much or more from themselves together as from any teacher.

1:28:34 You know, I've done the stage on the stage thing a lot in my life and Yeah, I can put on a good actor show or something. And sometimes it helps people. I love telling stories and I remind them and so forth. But when we're in groups. One of my favorite things to do is to say

1:28:51 What have you all learned about this? Somebody will raise their hand and say, What about grief or what about Climate or what about how do I think that's the same thing. And if I respond, what have you all learned? There is a collective wisdom when invited that comes out. Where people learn so much from each other.

1:29:08 And this is really what Cloud Sangha offers. It also has if you go On to Cloud Tonga dot C O For the fun of it, there's a test you can take.

1:29:19 A mindful awareness test. See. Just for your own fun. Which areas are you really attentive in your life and which ones you really You wish you had support for.

1:29:29 And it would make such a difference. When we've got great people running them. And people who were in them love them. So It's one of the offerings.

1:29:38 In my life now that I'm very Really happy to be a part of it. Wanna invite people to try. Are there practices? tools and so on that help people to

1:29:51 sharing communal experience. What are people finding most gratifying? So there are a couple of things. There are some practices and there's teachings and you can go on that and there will be guided meditations. And there's weekly teachings by several variety of good teachers.

1:30:08 But it turns out people will come together And for example, it will be a group on parenting. Some are doing a mindfulness practice. Maybe some are doing some other form of meditation. They learn T M, or maybe they They've been doing uh Jewish or Christian practice or shamanic practice or something.

1:30:26 But there they are and their toddler is having fits and screaming as Toddlers sometimes do as they're supposed to. And the common element is much less the focus. On what you're practicing as How do you engage in the world from that place of practice? And people will say, Well

1:30:43 I meditate and it helps me be calmer with my kids. And surprisingly When I'm calmer, my children get calmer, you know. Or they say when my teen is pushing back. You know, if I get into the Conflict mode with them. It just builds.

1:31:00 But if I do my practice of Loving kindness or I do my practice of whatever it happens to be. And I look at them and I see there's Secret beauty, especially it's a beautiful thing to do when your kid is sleeping. There you've had a little conflict.

1:31:14 You know, at that age. And then you go and there they fell asleep. And you go look at them, they look And you see who they are, who they were as a child, you know, there's there's something that original beauty is there when their personality drops away a little bit. But they share that.

1:31:29 And it's less critical. What the practice is. And much more. How are you applying it and what are we all learning in doing this? And this is where the rubber meets the road in some way. And again it goes back to that definition of

1:31:42 Enlovenment or enheartenment or something that's not enlightenment. But how do we learn to love? In the midst of all of this. I've come to feel I'm excited about this because I have realized for myself if I have And I realise it's not the same thing, but group dinners with

1:32:01 Let's just say three friends, two three nights a week. That does just as much for me, maybe more in some cases than short meditations on a daily basis. Just having that support. And I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive. I do both. As of right now. But that social

1:32:18 Cohesion for us monkeys on the spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos. Is Easy to individualistic.

1:32:31 prism within which we live in, say, the United States, it's easy to forget the value of something that is so obviously in front of us, but so Often. lost in the wake of, in my case, this quest for productivity and So many other things. So I'm excited to take a look at this myself. Cloudsangha.co and the spelling again for folks cloud S A N G H A.

1:32:56 That's COVID. I have some notes in front of me and this has been something on my list to ask about and maybe you've already brought It certainly. Includes a name that has already come up. So Ramdas.

1:33:09 Formerly known as Richard Albert. Flunking the course, Ramdas and flunking the courses is a cue that I have in front of me. What does flunking the course refer to? So Ramtas was a very close friend. For a lot of years. And I've known him in his different incarnations when he was

1:33:26 Baba Ramdas just back from India having written that bestseller Be Here Now that opened a lot of people's eyes about how he'd been the Harvard professor and then he took L S D and said oh. Whoa, things are that's a bigger game than this. And then he met his guru in India and all of that. And he came back. In his robes, in his beard and

1:33:45 Beads as sort of the guru, Baba Ramdas, and one of my favorite early Ramdas stories is There he was teaching a whole crowd and he was articulate and funny. And very self deprecating, you know, which is part of why we loved him,'cause he would confess his Neuroses publicly and everyone go, Oh, me too, right? Because we need there's a common humanity. And one woman was sitting in the front row.

1:34:08 an older woman and waver hand and said, Hey Ramdas so he called her and he she said Hey, there you are in the white robes and doing this whole Hindu Guru thing. Aren't you Jewish? And Ramdas said, Well well, yes, I was born Jewish. I was born mitzvah. She said, So what about it? And he said, Well there's beautiful things in it. There's the

1:34:27 Kabbalah and all the mystical teachings and there's the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters. It's There's a lot that's great in it. And then he looked at her and he said, But remember. I'm only Jewish on my parents' side.

1:34:41 And he was very witty, but it was also profound. Because who we are is not limited by our parents or our history. Who we are is much bigger than that. So when Ramdoss evolved over his life. starting say the foundation and you know working to Combat blindness in Nepal and India for now. six million people who'd been blind can see and all kinds of other stuff.

1:35:06 And then you had that major stroke. And ended up living twenty years in a wheelchair with tremendous pain and you know, different kind of infections. But he came more and more and more loving. So when you'd sit with him toward the end of his life, he'd look around, he said, I love it all. I love the

1:35:22 windows and I love the floor and I love the people who come in and I love, you know, the dirt. He said, I just love it all, whatever it is. And and people would come to see him and he would love them and There's a phrase in India. When you go to see your guru.

1:35:39 If you go to see the right kind of guru. But it doesn't have to be in India, it can be here. They look at you and they s it somehow they see through you. They see all your life, your you, Tim You know, your strengths and your neurosis and your productivity, you know, the The rat and the wheel going around making it spin faster and all that all that stuff.

1:36:01 And they look at you with so much love. And they say, Wow. You're just amazing being. And you get this glance that sees everything and says, Yes, I love you. And it changes you somehow. And that's what Ramdas became in the end, Krishna Das the

1:36:16 Great chanter and You know, also uh Fellow student of Hit their guru. Said Ramdas became in the end the person we thought he was when he first returned. From India.

1:36:28 He really became that. Place of love. Now I've gone on and on and I haven't answered your question'cause I've forgotten it as I've been waxing about the flanking. Flinking the course. Oh yes. So I went to see Ramdas After I had uh

1:36:45 A couple of Events where I fell over on stage. And was unconscious for a while and Open my eyes eventually and

1:36:53 You know, are surrounded by all the doctors who were part of the audience and so forth. Work ups and I had a lot of tremors and I got misdiagnosed. As having something like ALS, I was gonna die. Relatively quickly. And

1:37:09 I would have dementia with it. I thought I'd made my peace with dying. Okay, I'm gonna die. But then when they said Oh yeah and dementia too. That flipped me over the edge. I didn't that's not how I had pictured it. And I got frightened. Really?

1:37:25 And I remember sitting in with my daughter after I got that and crying a little bit and thinking, Okay You know. Here we go into dementia land along with tremors and my body going out of control. And then, you know, a couple weeks later I got More tests and turned out that was the wrong diagnosis and I'm okay. I'm fine.

1:37:43 You know, I'm just aging like everybody. But I went to see Ramdas and I told him that story and I said, I thought I was cool with death. I'd done all these meditations in the monastery sitting with dead bodies and My own practice. And then when the dementia came in, I got frightened. And he looked at me, he laughed, and he said, Oh yeah

1:38:01 I've flunked the course a number of times. And the minute he said it, it was like this huge relief. Because it was just being human. And our body doesn't want to die, even if you know, like you said it. And I think it's true.

1:38:16 That we've prepared ourselves in some ways. But the body doesn't want to die. It has its own story. Ramdas Represents for me and I think for us. That loving witness that can wink and say, Wow.

1:38:30 We really got into a predicament this time, didn't we? And it's okay. It's just the dance that we're in. And it's fine. He did have a real facility.

1:38:41 For combining humor With the profound and really pithy short Statements remarkable. Yes he did. I've been listening to some of his audio recordings. There's a podcast, I can't recall the name, which which is effectively sharing archival

1:38:58 Audio. Yeah. The Be Here Now Network. That's it. That's exactly it. And

1:39:06 What incredible communicator. I mean incredible human, I never met him, but uh Incredible. Incredible humor and twinkle and sparkle and Yeah, all those good things. And yeah, he was human too, so he had his own foibbles. And the thing that was so beautiful about it is

1:39:21 That he would make them all public. He would say all right, here's where I messed up this week. And everybody would smile and say, Oh You know, like just like me. I remember

1:39:32 At some point, and I'm not gonna be getting this totally right, so you can correct me I don't speak Sanskrit or can't read Pali or whatever it might be, but My understanding Is that Ram Das

1:39:44 Das is the equivalent of servant of Ram. And then you have Krishna Krishna. Right. So is DA simply Is it just a common suffix and therefore that's it? Or is there

1:39:57 Deeper meaning. behind the choice, I don't know if they made it or their guru or someone else made it of Krishna and Ram. And their guru gave them their names. Looked at you and said, You serve Ram, you serve Krishna. You know there's this whole The cool thing about the Hindu is that they have so many gods you can sort of pick your favorite. And the way it works, I mean the the problem is that we have God as a noun

1:40:22 That's singular. God. Okay. And then we fight over it. My God is realer than your God, or better than your God, or bigger than your whatever, you know, my God can beat up your God. Whatever it is in the in all these different traditions. All that you need to do is add an S.

1:40:39 There is Yahweh or Jehovah or whatever, and there's Jesus and Jesus and there's You know There's also other versions of God. There's Krishna and Brahma and And if you allow as the Hindi is doing That

1:40:55 The divine has many names. In many forms, instead of fighting over and say let's celebrate. Okay. So Das means the servant of I don't know who you serve, Tim, but um you could be uh sure. I need a guru to tell me what my name is. Anyway. No, one of my teachers was named Buddhas. He was the servant of the Muddha or the Buddha's teachings or things like that. So it's very, very common.

1:41:23 And for those who end up digging into Stan Groff and some of his writing, he has some Really? fun stories around the servants or worshippers of Shiva and his interactions with them, which is a whole separate can of worms. Okay, and Stan also has a book when the

1:41:42 I think it's something like When the miraculous happens. It's his stories of all the wild things that happened in his life that were completely unexpected and that you can't put Into ordinary consciousness, just like uh we've talked about it before. I've had the experience a number of times of knowing that someone died.

1:42:02 At a distance and not necessarily that they were ready. To die or you know, they didn't have cancer. But I knew it. They had an accident. Who would know that? And then I reach out and I found out, yeah. They had an accident and then I'll ask in a room of

1:42:16 You know, a hundred or five hundred people. How many people have had the experience Of knowing when someone's died. You know, unexpectedly And a third of the hands go up.

1:42:28 And it's because we're connected. It's just the reality of it. So I wanna talk about Climate And just

1:42:37 And one of the teachers that I most admire, who's in her nineties now and still alive, is Joanna Macy. She wrote a wonderful book called World as Lover, World as Self. And she's been doing what she calls despair and empowerment work for decades now. And she did I remember her going and Meeting in

1:42:59 The survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And at first they didn't want to talk to her. They said, Why are you rubbing our noses in it? You wanna calm you American and you know, we've already had such a hard time. Why should we talk about it all again with you? And she sat and listened, she s she repeated back what she'd heard and she said The only reason I really want to talk to you beside my sympathy because I too am a mother and grandmother, she said.

1:43:24 Is because I don't want this to happen to other people's children. And you have a story that the world needs to hear. And then they wept and they said, All right, we'll tell you the whole story. So she's collaborated for years with others in doing this work that she calls despair.

1:43:42 And empowerment work. And she describes it this way. She said, We're in a time Of what she calls the great turning. Where humanity has the capacity and tools to make The world and how we live.

1:43:56 A beautiful place or not. Things have gotten bad. And it's not just a disaster, it's also an opportunity. And we can all feel that in some fashion or other. So her game is first to get people to feel the grief. And the anger.

1:44:11 And the guilt and the despair. And to share it with one another so you don't feel alone. And that you can sense that you're part of the web of life that's responding Just as if we're not going to be able to You've cut your hand or your finger.

1:44:25 You don't say, Oh, that poor hand as if it's separate from you. It's part of this m your body. that people could start to feel that they were together in the body of the earth. Holding this and responding. And she said, All right, now let's listen more deeply.

1:44:40 And one of the things that she did with a Environmental activist named John Seed. They created something called the Council of All Beings. And on those retreats after expressing grief and despair and holding it with compassion and

1:44:54 Feeling the interconnection of the earth alive, saying we need to do something. People would be sent out into the woods for half a day. To wander the woods and the streams. With the instruction.

1:45:09 Whose voice you want to carry. Who you wish to be a representative of. And it might be someone you meet out there or it might be that it inspires you. People came together and sometimes they even in a shamanic way Would make a drawing or

1:45:25 put something on their body that represented what they wanted to do, come back in circle. And then they would speak but not as themselves. They would say I speak for the Redwoods. Or I speak for the salmon.

1:45:41 And I want you to know. That most of my people have died off. because of this and that happening. And this is what I want you to hear. I speak for the You know, and you can name the species or the

1:45:54 The part of the earth. And what would come out of people was tender Grievous at times. But also tremendously inspired.

1:46:05 Because those voices said, Here's what we need to do, this is what we salmon ask of you. And you can do this. You know, this is what we the Secor is in Redwood's want of the world now. And so she shifts the despair

1:46:22 to a sense of interconnectedness and that we become the voices of the earth. In its most benevolent and best form. And it seems important to say this. Because you know, we started talking about anxiety long ago in this conversation as we wended our way through all kinds of strange places.

1:46:41 And this kinda takes us back. To touch on that. And the important thing is to know that suffering is not the end of the story. It's the first time Buddha's first truth that there is suffering.

1:46:53 And there are causes we can see it. Greed, hatred. Fear and so forth. And there's an end to it. There's another possibility which is the Empowerment of love, of action.

1:47:05 And part of what makes things Liberating and this has to do with compassion and empathy. is not only what you feel But then what you're empowered to do when you speak for the salmon or whoever it is. So here's the difference between compassion and empathy.

1:47:22 If you're walking by a schoolyard And you see a child being bullied. The first Experience inside might be Oh, I feel for that child. That's wrong. I feel they're suffering. So you have a kind of

1:47:36 Connection. An empathetic connection with that child, aw. I'd hate to feel that. I don't want children to feel You feel with them. Com means with with passion.

1:47:47 That's not enough. Compassion, it turns out, is a verb. You have the first step is empathy. The second step in compassion is You walk over And you talk to them, or you go to the teacher, or you go into the office and you say, You know, the kids on the playground are bullying people You not only feel it.

1:48:07 And you let yourself enter into communion, if you will, with what you see. But then something in you feels empowered. To say Let me reach out my hand. You don't have to fix the whole world.

1:48:20 But you can reach and mend the places that you can touch. And it doesn't have to be a lot. And just like you come to LA. And decided to be Social rather than solo.

1:48:31 And it makes a difference. reaching your hand out and touching or doing something Empowers you and it changes the world. I think that's tremendous place to Leave people with that as a closing comment for food for thought. Is there anything else though that you would like to add?

1:48:49 Jack. Oh maybe a hundred and eight other things. But this feels like A wonderful conversation. And also a kind of expression of our friendship for a long time.

1:49:02 I'm glad to see you. And see you seeming so well. I certainly know. When you describe that you're in new phases in your life in different ways, and I can very much appreciate that. And I've had fun.

1:49:16 And you know, as I said, it's not a grim duty. It's actually a celebration. It is a celebration and I think I'm going to also Set the A brief for the defense, the poem by Jack Gilbert as a

1:49:31 reminder so that I reread and reread and reread that. It's a really potent reminder. And I think it's it's catching me at a good point in my life, so hopefully that's true for other people as well. Jack, people can find you online, Jack Cornfield. That's the K K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L D dot com. Twitter at Jack Cornfield. Instagram Jack underscore Cornfield. They can find cloudsangha at cloudsangha.co. And we will link to

1:50:01 Everything that we've talked about in this Conversation in the show notes for people. Tim.blog slash podcast and they just can search your name in the most recent episode. Probably unless we do more of these. Someone's listening to this a few years later, they'll be able to find with ease.

1:50:18 Thank you, Jack. Thank you, Tim. What a pleasure. So nice to see you. What a pleasure. And to those listening. Until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary. To others and to yourself. And remember that compassion

1:50:33 can begin with feeling, but can also incorporate and often should incorporate some form of reaching out, some form of connection, some form of action. And thanks for tuning in. I'd like to do a guided loving kindness meditation practice. There are many, many versions of it.

1:50:56 You can find them online from Sharon Salzburg and Tara Brock and Joseph Goldstein and many, many other teachers. And this will be one version and you can see what works for you.

1:51:12 There isn't a right way to do metta. Sometimes the practice of cultivating loving kindness. It's just to radiate love. Without words. Sometimes it's to begin by holding yourself with kindness again and again. And tonight we'll use one of the classic

1:51:30 Practices. Which also involves the inner recitation of Phrases of well wishing. Toward others and toward yourself. And it invites in whatever way you can.

1:51:45 The quality of kindness The images and uh Words are an avenue to opening the heart. But the most important thing is not to use it to judge yourself.

1:51:57 Sometimes it feels Beautiful. Sometimes it's So so you know how meditation goes. Sometimes it's frustrating.

1:52:06 You know, or it brings up its opposite. How can I feel love? I'm so angry at that person. And then what do you do when you feel that? You hold that too. With compassion and kindness. If it feels mechanical, you hold that with kindness.

1:52:23 You just receive what arises. And trust. That the field of kindness itself. Is what matters. So sit comfortably, it's hard to do about loving kindness practice if you're

1:52:38 Bodies. Your knees are killing in your back's aching. So you want to be a little bit at ease. And let your eyes close gently. For the next.

1:52:50 Twenty five minutes or so. First. As you settle yourself. Let the body relax. It is let the eyes and face be soft.

1:53:16 Loosen the jaw. Maybe roll your head in a circle a little to release your neck and Let it find uh Simple, upright. Mm-hmm.

1:53:36 the shoulders relax. And the arms and hands rest easily. Feel yourself seated on the earth. Halfway between heaven and earth in this human form.

1:53:55 Let go. Rest where you are, let the earth Completely hold you. And support you. Let the belly be soft and the bath breath natural.

1:54:18 And let the heart be soft as well. So that you invite a quieting of the mind and uh Tenderizing of the heart. And the blessings of loving kindness often recited before One begins the meditation.

1:54:39 Or that it is uh An antidote to fear and anxiety. When we enter into the loving and trusting heart. But when we cultivate Loving kindness.

1:54:53 Others will love us. More commonly and Animals will notice and Care and elephants will bow as we go by, it says. Children will be happier around us and

1:55:06 We'll be happier, our dreams get sweet, our thoughts get easier. We become more gracious with the difficulties of life. As we open the heart. Now take two long breaths. Breathing in and out deliberately and quite slowly.

1:55:33 Letting go whatever wants to release. To be open. Right. And now in this Present moment.

1:56:06 Letting yourself settle. And setting the intention. To awaken the field of loving kindness. Let yourself think of or picture or remember Someone that you care about where it's easy.

1:56:28 Not a conflicted w relationship, but Someone where it's easy to feel uh Natural care and love. It doesn't have to be some super thing. It's just Whoever evokes a sense of kindness in you

1:56:48 Caring. Can you be your dog? When you remember or think of this Being likely a person. That you care about

1:57:09 Feel the natural care. Do you picture them, remember them? Then begin very simply. Whispering. Phrases.

1:57:34 Of well wishing. Inwardly. May you be Filled with loving kindness. Maybe

1:58:00 Safe and protected. Feel your care as you say these things. May you be well. And strong were healed. Be aware of the

1:58:31 struggles in their life, the measure of struggles like all human beings. And feel the tender compassion that comes. With what they struggle. May you hold your Struggles.

1:58:50 And underneath it all, may you be happy. May you be filled with loving kindness. May you be safe. And protect it.

1:59:48 May you be well and healed. Strong. May you hold your struggles. With compassion and tenderness. May you be happy.

2:00:32 Peaceful and happy. Feel the natural well wishing. As you see them. Now pick a second. person or second being where there's a natural

2:01:03 Caring and love, again uncomplicated and easy. And as you remember and picture and sense them. Think of that. Offering the same well wishes. May you be filled with loving kindness.

2:01:42 May be safe and protected. May you be well. Healed. Strong. May you hold your struggles with

2:02:17 Tenderness and compassion. Courage. And may you be happy. Truly happy. Now let yourself imagine picture

2:03:01 That is Two beings that you care about. Or they're in front of you, gazing back at you. With eyes of kindness. For they want a wish.

2:03:16 Are you the same? Loving kindness you extend it to them. Together they gaze at you. And they whisper May you too be filled with loving kindness.

2:03:34 Receive it, imagine They're blessing. Their kindness toward you. They want you to have this. May you two be safe and protected.

2:03:55 Feel their care. They say may you too. Be well. Healed and strong. May you two.

2:04:19 All your struggles. With compassion and kindness. And may gaze at you, may you be happy. Like blessing you. And you'll be happy.

2:04:44 Amidst it all. Can you take in these Phrases and words of loving kindness. And recite them for yourself if you like. You can even put your hand on your heart. And just as they wish for you.

2:05:09 These people who you care about. They care about you as well. May I be filled with loving kindness. As they wish. May I be safe?

2:05:31 And protected. Maybe well. You'll strong. May I hold my struggles with Compassion and courage.

2:06:07 May I be happy. Free and happy. Heart and spirit. Filled with loving kindness. Save.

2:06:30 Protect it. May I be happy. Now without any More words from me. Let yourself go through

2:06:51 Two or three or four more people that you care about or People that you know or people who are struggling. Or beyond them, you can spread your loving kindness out to groups of people. Places in the world where they're having difficulty to refugees. The children.

2:07:12 Women Being But start a little closer to home. Do a couple or a few more people you care about. And then become a beacon or a lighthouse and spread it more broadly.

2:07:28 Using your own phrases and well wishing. Spread the meta. The loving kindness. Like light. Far.

2:07:43 And near. Near and far. As you extend the loving kindness. You become the beacon of kindness. The beacon of loving kindness.

2:11:16 Yourself. And all that it touches. Take one more minute. Whatever invites the spirit of loving kindness. For yourself.

2:16:32 And other beings. Invited now. No, keeping the spirit of loving kindness. Low your eyes. To open gently.

2:17:35 And sense that you can inhabit the consciousness of loving kindness. Eyes open wherever you go. One of my ways of practicing this is to See the child in each person around me. Especially if I'm going about on errands and I see somebody who's

2:17:59 having a hard time or Making a hard time. getting pushier. Aggressive or Whatever.

2:18:08 And I look and I see them and I try to picture them as a child, as a young child. With a certain innocence and Their struggles as children have. And no that that child of the spirit is still in there somewhere.

2:18:25 It brings the loving kindness alive for me. Whatever the principle of meta is to do It in whatever way. Most feels natural to you.

2:18:39 In whatever way allows you to see with uh Uh. Tenderness and compassion and kindness. Find your own Beautiful way.

2:18:53 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts. guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim.blog slash.

2:19:57 Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything anywhere. giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store

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2:22:29 This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled LMNT. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious sugar free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance. That's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, etc., another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough. and it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah blah blah when insulin is low, but suffice to say, this is where element, again spelled LMNT, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick ass no-sugar margarita. But

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