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Project Description
Meditation Gives You Superpowers with Jon Massmann
Several years ago, Jon Massmann attempted suicide. At the advice of his therapist, he decided to try meditation. Against the advice of his therapist, he decided to dive in head first with a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. These 10 days changed everything for Jon.
Meditation literally saved Jon's life. It also transformed him into an entirely new person. With a new outlook, Jon is currently traveling around the world learning about different styles of Buddhism, while simultaneously writing his book "The Skeptics Guide to Liberation". Some interesting topics we cover include:
0:48 – Why meditation isn't just for hippies
12:58 – Are your genes at all responsible for your emotional state?
21:20 – Rewiring the mind's chaotic and anxiety-driving thoughts
30:02 – You are a buddha when you're a child.
40:28 – How to disassociate thought from identity
54:17 – Technology Unhinged: AIs vs. You, Cyberwars, and VR Paradise
1:07:20 – The Different Types of Buddhism explained
1:19:56 – Shattering common myths about Buddhism
1:28:01 – The science of meditation
1:34:51 – How you can use meditation gives you superpowers
1:45:10 – Buddhist Reincarnation and Life After Death
1:59:05 – Burnt out on the Western Medication? Try Meditation Prescriptions
Audio version of this podcast:
The most interesting excerpts from this podcast:
How Meditation Will Give You Superpowers
How to Cure Depression Using Meditation
The Different Types of Buddhism Explained
We have a profound episode. Today
we're joined by john Maxwell and he's writing a book on Buddhism. And it's no exaggeration to say that Buddhism, meditation and mindfulness literally saved his life.
You're going to learn the history and the more esoteric ideas behind meditation and Buddhism you're going to learn a more practical how to guide
by the two
you're going to learn the superpowers you can gain from meditation and if you're watching this and thinking I don't want to meditate I just want to and get money well
you're gonna learn how meditation can help that to
the mental architect with Sam Sebring no blueprint for peak performance
be the best you can be.
We're here with john mass man. He is a Buddhist expert. A mindfulness chaser. I don't know if I'd say expert, a learner. A guy that runs from the cops apparently
from what I was told he shut up all all up on his arm to knees. What happened? Dude? Why are you bleeding?
I just had a little, a little runt of military experience. I was uh, I was reading in my motorbike for the first time in ages is not my motorbike. Its my girlfriends. But uh, I tried to avoid a police check and
took it took the uterine kind of sloppy and they cornered me and got me on the winner. Not my not usually running from the law, not your finest moment, my finest moment. So I guess for people that don't know in Thailand, they have police checkpoints everywhere. It's kinda like the following Tex because we're supposed to have like an international license and none of us do. Yeah, so they pin you for 500. I just didn't want to pay the 500 bucks. usual thing everybody I know here.
They tried to get me for 1000 bought the other day, actually. Yeah, yeah, they could. Now they got your 2000. But either way, they're usually pretty easy to avoid this time. Apparently they've been training for this guy was on point, dude tackled you your motorcycle. Yeah, yanked me right off. It pulled me to the ground and was yelling at me he's one month jail one month jail yeah but he didn't actually mean it Did you think you're going to jail for a month and there's a brief a brief moment I thought maybe. But then they pulled me over to the police chief and he was totally chill. He's like, oh, Thailand. No worries.
And we all left. Laughing even the guy the tackle me Give me a fist bump after we were like bleeding and. Yeah, I wouldn't be totally laughing after that one. That it was it was funny to me because we left like, just like with I paid him 500 button and just walk out the door. I feel like after all that, they should let you go. Yeah, well the tackling? Yeah, I was like I paid I paid the price with the Thai tattoo. So
they thought he had drugs apparently. Yeah. So you got the backpack it's not a good sign. Yeah. And a white guy with a backpack are running for
I'm a checkpoint that's that's what they were thinking they were freaking out and thinking that I had drugs but as soon as they found nothing on me they were totally cool God dang because in Thailand I don't know if this is true but I've heard like weed this was like a death penalty I'm not fulfilling so you get jail time for I'm sure you get jail time for weed it but uh. ties and let's see I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm not heard that rumor right yeah I think that there are a little bit more locks on it now It depends on what area of Thailand and I'm sure and I don't know how not heavy into the heavy ended the especially after this scuffled not heavy into breaking the law you're not going to be carrying around your pounds of anymore back and forth from the vinyasa retreat Maggie trafficking in between mindfulness sessions that's fast so you are writing a book on Buddhism right now? yeah very sadly I'm kind of in the research phase at the moment span So you decided on a title yet? Yeah, it's kinda I can have like the whole brand worked out just because I'm like I'm a I wouldn't have an image heavy prism. I'm like a designer. I'm like a visual designer. I like I like
I'm often with marketing, but I love having like, a cohesive vision for something put together. And like I'm, I'm, I am a visual designer on some levels and vision. So right now it's called the skeptics guide to liberation and or ego death.
So yeah, it's been, it's in the works and I've written like maybe two or three chapters roughly unedited. But it's going to be a work in progress over the next few years is that kind of delve more into this stuff and study it kind of firsthand I was kind of one of my big goals for coming out to Southeast Asia in the first place was to get a first hand experience with this stuff and like really kind of learn it from from its source. So how did you get into Buddhism
is about two years ago,
I've dealt with clinical depression. Most of my life culminated in a attempt about pushing two and a half years
and at the time my therapist I was lucky enough to have a great therapist at the time and she
said after after I got kind of and after, after I told her everything that was going on she recommended that I get into mindfulness
mindfulness meditation. And at the time I was like it's a lot of horror for hippies. It's it's silly like I just had this image of like Transcendental Meditation all the kind of like ridiculous I just pretty useful, very common Western stereotype of just useless hippie and so I was total skeptic and she said no I really want you to look into it. She recommended me some authors and it kind of got me doing a little bit of reading I think the first book I read was waking up by Sam Harris which was great for like a skeptic like me
he just lays it out all no BS just plain and simple accessible from like a Western skeptical mindset. And
so I read that I was like okay this this has some stuff to it like he was he's listening kind of this
psychological science behind it and everything and and so on a whim just kind of at a point of desperation had been through the wringer with all like depression medications and stuff like that. I was just fed up with a system. I was like, I just want to give this I want to give something when good shot. I just need a semblance of hope to get through this. So
against my therapist advice I enrolled in a 10 day meditation course in southern Washington just two hours from my home
and yeah with knowing basically nothing about meditation, being basically a skeptic of meditation and enrolled in this 10 day course and
went through the wringer with that it's a
doing your first 10 day retreat is definitely one of the most brutal things you can do. You went from zero to 100 with that whole nation hit the ground running and yeah, I hit the ground from knowing nothing about meditation, maybe meditating like 1520 minutes at a time to like meditating 10 hours a day an hour 10 Yeah, you you wake up
Not in a row I hope about you take little breaks in between but you're basically meditating is not know you do you do it an hour at a time but uh. Not you're expected to sit and maybe not full lotus but some type of upright position
so every physically demanding I I always hear about that and because I mean my back can get a little sore when I meditate for 20 minutes and so when I hear that a lot of people here that say oh I couldn't stay focused for 10 hours dude I don't think my back good take 10 hours so that's that's one of those mentioned my mind yeah well that's one of the most like there's these initial stumbling blocks that everybody has to get over and posture and building those muscles in ways that you haven't used them before is one of them. So everybody experiences like that. That level of discomfort sometimes it gets excruciating. I have like I have a really bad injury with my leg a few years ago and I have a metal rod running up my leg it's kind of older than the other time you tried running from the police
said it worse
either guide to running please. It's a common thing. Be mindful and you hop the fence.
Yeah and on the first retreat I had this metal rod digging to my kneecap basically and for surgery it was excruciating Lee painful like like I would just have like surgeries and pay and after like 2030 minutes and be expected to sit for an hour and but eventually learning to cope with pain is one of the things that look one of the first stumbling blocks you get over especially in the 10 day retreat like it usually a few days and you learn how to cope with pain especially my accident is the pain dissipate or do you just kind of learn how to accept it. And so both the demons like it depends how you view pain in the mind because dissipating is also like learning to accept it also causes it to dissipate. It's just you know pain is so much it is there is the physical sensation of pain that so much of our conception of the experience of pain is is how we're processing that pain. So that's why people can experience the same like sort of trauma but like handle it completely differently. Like you can pinch somebody one person will react extremely strongly another personal I won't really care.
So they're experiencing similar sensations of painters, their brain is processing differently. So in meditation, you're learning to uproot how your brain processes virtually everything, including pain. Pain is one of the forefront things that you have to tackle that first. But like it is one of the things that you tackle. And so I mean, that's that's a bona meditation is you're delving into all of these mental processes and seeing them and then learning to change them at your will. So in your opinion is a kind of a situation and that the more you resist the pain the more president is. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the big tenets with meditation and mindfulness in general is resistance is a form of exaggeration resistant actually adds tension. So people who and this applies to anything as opposed to as opposed to paying this applies to supplies to like psychological problems. This applies to addiction and really any form of resistance in Buddhism they call a version of version is a form of it's one of the roots of suffering.
If there's anything bad in your body, you have to learn not to push away from it, because that exasperated and not only and then that version becomes like a, like a form of like, hyper focus. And it becomes a form of
obsession almost where people they try to avert. And we we do this every every day and to different degrees, but
we try to push away from everything that's bad from us. And it does create obsession. And most people, it's just, it's socially accepted obsessions and like our version to death, internalize the most folks most socially accepted obsession. But that's our driving force like Freud that talked about the death drive like it's a driving force for a good chunk of our behaviors.
yeah, it's so so version version is one of the key tenants in Yeah, absolutely resistance to it. It's a big player in it. So on one sense, you don't want to, you know, avert yourself away from from things that are bad, but on the other sense, like an actual real life you don't want to know.
necessarily put yourself into situations that are you know something bad is happening to you. You want to remove yourself from that situation you're making grades in school you want to study if you're fat eating bad food you want to you want to change that. How do you balance those two things, those exterior goals that you legitimately should be doing and that interior mindset and that
of having a lack of a version Do you see them trying to say yeah, so this is this is a big common misconception with Buddhism that like it's like if you were to reach enlightenment when you then just become a totally useless human being from the western standpoints like upon eliminating suffering Do you then like not get out of the way if I buses had to do direction you're not like move if a tiger is trying to strike I you it's a no it's the you have to remember that the entire premise of Buddhism and his entire goals he said is the elimination suffering and it's all practical like if if something isn't practical for you in Buddhism you can basically do away with that he basically says that I can't draw quote off the top my head but it's he said my my primary aim.
is suffering and the elimination of suffering. And so essentially you become enlightened, or you work towards enlightenment. And then you go back to doing whatever you want to do. You just don't suffer over it. So you get out of the way the bus, you shouldn't suffer. But you move out of the way that you just don't suffer. You try to get out the way the bus bit of a hits you. It's like,
Yeah, and it's essentially that it's just taking suffering out of the picture, you can then go and do whatever you want. And the thing is, is, once you have suffering out of the picture, you're doing everything that you want out of cure motive, you're not doing it because of fear. You're not doing it because of addiction. You're doing it because you know, it's good. And because you want to be doing it, it's you have a total pure motive in this total cure drive, you actually become more functional. And you can see this in studies of people that are like long term meditators. They're actually more functional human beings. That's why there's CEOs at Google that are that are preaching this stuff that's why I like they're incorporating that's why they're incorporating missing the tech industry because it makes you more functional. You think it would make you more useful sitting among the useless hip you'd go just like smoke weed.
didn't hang out at Woodstock and do nothing but like actually you have a total renew desire for everything in your life because you're doing it without like these negative influences. The tech industry is a weird one they've got they've got a lot going on. Uh. They do meditate a lot, which is awesome. also heard. I don't know if this is an incorrect statistic. I'm really sorry if it is. But one of my friends told me that something like 50% of Facebook engineers have an Adderall prescription which I just thought was wild. It doesn't surprise me. I've also I've also heard of I've heard of UFC fighters doing this as well. But a lot of people in Silicon Valley are like micro dosing acid an awful lot so these seem like the type of people that are just experimenting with everything they can get their hands on and I'm glad that meditation is one yeah i think i think there's this big awakening for like modifying the brain going on right now in terms of like people are seeing and and like honestly they are finding healthier mean this amount of right you know, we had this
Whole pharmaceutical obsession for so long or just pushing pills, and everybody still going on, asked me, I think. Yeah, but there's now now there's this sort of resistance to that. We're seeing that like, Okay, this is actually kind of dangerous. We're kind of just taking shots at the dark at the human psyche here. Like, there's just just throwing darts at a dartboard and hoping something sticks and we're up a lot of people in the meantime, I think Adderall is admirals. A nice artifact of that it's a good example. An example invocation of it's just huge widespread I was I was hooked that's like the one drug that I was maybe hooked on they got general yeah I was on it for a while I I went off of it because it started giving heart palpitations and I was description or recreational prescription it's so easy to get prescription for in the states yeah walk in so you don't want to do your homework it's a rock and rap Yeah exactly. And that's the problem it's like it's like all of a sudden everybody has a DD and really it's like we're addressing behavioral problems as if their psychological as if they're I should say as if their chemical problems I've always thought that new prevalence of add to be a little bit ridiculous and
alongside with the push we have for drugs right now. We also have this massive, massive push for
acceptance and discussion of like mental health issues, which is awesome. Which is awesome. I think that we should accept and discuss mental health issues. But sometimes people take a little bit too far. And that means you can't actually examine what's going on. We have this huge push that oh, we should be accepting and discuss depression and discuss add and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But that also means that when you kind of bring up and say, hey, maybe there's an alternative approach to add, hey, maybe there's a different source of your depression that we're not currently addressing with your cycle drugs. I've gotten pretty visceral reactions from people. Yeah, well, there's this a totally I think it really right and it's a weird it's a weird thing to drown because now we've had and this is why Western psychology such a train wreck and we've had this era of people that were grown to believe that depression and anxiety are purely chemical and that's one of the most dangerous lies I think we've been
I think it's something that's pushed on us by pharma. And I don't want to be one of those, like anti pharmaceutical drinkers. And I think that there is definitely a place for medication. I think that things like lithium for bipolar, that's like absolutely essential. Like that's changing. It's literally curing the problem for most people that have like bipolar and it's huge, but
depression, anxiety, these are kind of the main might have been my main focus in terms of behavioral science. And in terms of like, what I'm studying and focusing my energy into as somebody who suffers with depression.
I don't believe that it's primarily chemical anymore. I think that is primarily behavioral and that isn't to say that it manifests in chemical but I don't believe that
the attacking it should be from a chemical means I think that there are more effective ways to tackle to tackle it from a behavior from behavioral means because yeah you like you're you you can't it's you can't tell people that like your issue is behavioral anymore like they've been told to believe that I my genes have made me depressed my genes that may
me anxious, there's nothing I can do about other than take medications, which is a giant lie. Like it's I've experienced that firsthand. It's, it's, if you really delve into like behavioral psych and you look into what are the building blocks of this thing we call it the mind of this experience of the mind. And it's, it's, it's really behavioral habits it's things that we've been reinforcing since childhood and and it becomes so reinforced that it becomes so subtle and subconscious that we take them as regular. So when you go up with a negative mentality towards yourself, it just becomes manifest and everything in your life when you go up with Yeah, whatever it is. And really depression can be said to be an accumulation of mental habits. It's manifesting chemical ways it affects your physiology, which just shows how interlinked the body in the mind are, but
I think there are cases where medication can be definitely you suppose in specially in terms of bringing somebody to a state of balance where they can pursue other means like CVT like DDT
Like mindfulness therapies, what oh CVT and DVD, CBD is cognitive behavior therapy. That's essentially it's very similar to it, the ideas, it's almost identical. The ideas behind meditation, mindfulness, so CBD, you sit down with a therapist, and they basically walk you through all of your mental habits and help you restructure them from the ground up. I'll see your basic unit through who habits and then learning to rebuild those DB T is very similar, except in more of a conversational format. It's a little bit more
I'd say it's a little bit less like hard vested and less technical and more humane, maybe. And then you have like NBC t, which is mindfulness based cognitive therapies, which is essentially the thing I love about meditation or the passion and specific which is the kind of study it's basically CVT minus the therapists Do you basically given the tools to delve into your own mind and observe those things as they observe those thought patterns and stuff that has they're working and so
So yeah, so
I do think that it totally read that. It's It's so hard to talk about these things, and especially so hard to say it's a behavior thing, because then it puts the onus on the person with the disease. They can, they're, they're become less of a victim, and everybody wants to be a victim. I think everybody wants to everybody wants to be able to blame their problems, and their parents are playing their problems on something else. And it's not to say that when it's behavior, it's your fault, because it's things that you were doing,
it's things that you were doing when you were unconscious things that when you're a kid, you didn't have your unconscious of these behaviors that we're doing it for a second, but it puts the onus on you, which is scary for some people. But ultimately, it's the most empowering, empowering thing out there. Because then you can told you're totally in charge of tackling your own illness. It's just a lot of work. Yeah, it kind of almost seems like a situation where you have to temporarily get worse before you get better in the sense that you know, you've been told your entire life that you're a victim and that's very very comforting. You know, you build an identity
around that, and then, oh, I came out of my mom's just depressed. You know? Like, there's just nothing I could do about it. And to be told, no, your behaviors are what are causing a depression. Maybe what you're eating is causing a depression. Maybe just your thought processes, or the way you're going about your day is causing a depression is a massive, massive, massive hit to the ego. Yeah, no, I mean, I don't have to tell you. The ego loves to defend itself. So, you know, you're looking down these two roads. One is, oh, I could be a victim or one. Oh, I could take a massive hit to my ego and admit that I've been doing this myself. He goes gonna say, oh, guess what? You're still victim. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think it is. It is not only because it's never an exclusive thing. It is partly like partially, it is genetics personally do something that you've inherited from your parents. And those behaviors are things that you've been hearing from your parents. Most of our behaviors we inherit from our parents subconsciously, at least or our circle of friends and then everything else environmental cut stacked on to that so to a degree it's Oh yeah, everybody's a victim. But like it's that's not a solution oriented way to look at it. It's not
It's like saying I'm a victim. And then like what in people are increasingly finding what pose Can I take to undo. This just isn't working for a lot of people it's working for some like I think that there are certain cases that essentially they get lucky because a lot of psychiatry's there's a lot of medical lot of the Medical Psychiatry is literally just throwing shots in the dark and say go this worked for some people with similar symptoms. We're just going to hope this works on you. Well, I think especially unique position because I, you know, I've known all of this intuitively, and I've had friends suffer from depression or things like that, and I tell them this, I say, look, you know, I try to caveat I'm sure there's an element of genetics and you know, there's things outside of control that are causing this, but a lot of it is inside your control. And if you change the things you're in control of the way you eat, what you do in your day, your meditation practices, you can help this a lot you can obviously but that's coming from a naturally happy upper middle class white dude, no, no one wants to hear that. So when you say it, someone
He's actually been through this, someone who has come out the other side, you can say, look, if someone else can do this, you can, too. Yeah, I think that is I think that is absolutely. And I think is also useful to acknowledge that
to a depressed person,
there seems like there's no way out. Like,
you talk to a depressed person. You tell them like, Oh, you just do this, this and this. And this, the to eat, right? You exercise, you reshape them at habits and they'll be happy to them. That seems ridiculous. And they're trapped in this just Thai food of Jewish negative. And they can't, they can't see a way out. They literally can't see a way out. And that's the problem. It's like they,
when you prescribe something, it's so blurry and confuse them because it's not within their normal functioning of how they understand the universe right now. It's so hard for them to understand. That's why I think that something like mindfulness meditation, something like a shock to your system like a 10 day retreat is so it can be so useful to people if you have though if you have the willpower to do it because you have to shake
up your worldview, you have to, you have to,
you have to get out of the slump in some way or another. And for some people, it's a progressive thing for me, it helps to have that thing are just completely shut up my understanding of my own psyche and like how I can handle it, which happens totally. I was in a 10 day retreat, you don't leave, you know, leave the same person regardless. Yeah. What happened in your 10 day retreat? You went in someone who's suffering from massive depression, things like that. You went and meditated 10 hours a day, what was your experience? Um, so yeah, I went in there. And it was weird as this weird kind of like. So I went through a organization called Dharma, which is one of the biggest organizations and every meditation retreats significantly different and they all have similar veins, especially if you're going within like Buddhism, as opposed to like yoga schools.
Most beauty schools are somewhat similar. If you're familiar with them, then you'll notice the similarities. But Dharma retreats are very structured and they're almost close enough to be identical in the different 400, 500
locations that they have around the world. And so the idea behind
The dumber treats as they give you this one technique, and they walk you through step by step every day, you start with the most basic form of it. And you build on it every single day. And your users doing again and again and again and again. So first they sit, you're sitting, and you're learning to observe the breath. And the point of that is you're learning to narrow your focus on to one single thing. So that instead of your brain is being pulled around by whatever all the time you're able to just let your mind arrest and the object of your attention and by doing that you're sharpening your focus. And the analogy I like to use is as it's as if you were like trying to find something way out on the horizon. You can't do that if your heads moving around. And if there's a bunch of flying around. In order to focus on something on the horizon. You need to stand still stabilize yourself, stabilize your vision, and like basically rest in that point until it becomes sharpened out. Same thing with the mind you need to be able to stabilize it in order to see the finer nuanced things of the mind the the subtle, the more subtle things so you learn to observe and
Through for the passion of that, the gateway to doing that the the
catalyst for doing that is focusing on the sensation of breath you focusing on just the sensation of breath, no visualization,
no words. Nothing just pure sensation. And by doing that, everything else fades away after time it takes hopefully. Yeah, it takes 2030 hours or me. I'm thinking about I gotta do later.
Yeah, well, that's the thing. And a lot of people say that, like they say that they're not cut out for meditation. Because as soon as they start meditating, they just notice Oh, absolutely chaotic their mind is and that is the first step that everybody gets. It's called the monkey conquering the monkey mind is the first thing that happened to me I thought, wow, I really need to meditate now when i when i was that I mean I heard about meditation A while back on it. Oh, I could focus on the breath. How hard How hard is that to focus on the breath sat down. I got a good two seconds in in my 20 minutes of focusing on the breath is solid to say it was a good two seconds I enjoyed those and then the other 19 minutes and blah blah blah blah blah. It
Greenham and after I got done I'm like wow, I need to meditate. And that's that's absolutely like the first step. So usually the boy huge us tonight with frustration, but like that is absolutely the first steps that almost every single person goes through. Some people are more catered towards to it than others, I had severe add, but within about two three days, I was able to hit like maybe five, five minutes, 10 minutes or two to three days of meditating 10 hours a day, this isn't to say, as a 2030 hours of practice, then it really starts to click, then you really are able to sink into like five or 10 minutes of pure just pure focus. They call in Buddhism they call AK gotta which is the complete absorption and the object of meditation and that's when you really start to go five or 10 minutes without an external thought coming in and um yeah especially in the format of retreat you usually maybe 234 or five days in different for different people in different for like the state that you were going into it.
Yeah, you can you can hit that Like it's different for everybody. Everybody is a completely different path. And it's hard to compare paths because, you know, it's like a good analogy that I want to
My favorite Buddhist teacher said is if you want to climb Mount Fuji, we got some people start in Japan, some people start in Florida. So it's you got to start where you are, and then work your way there. And it's impossible to compare path because everybody's taking radically different paths. And so with those 510 minutes that at the end of the retreat, or is that where you are now? Um, so yeah, and the retreat, another first retreat, I started hitting like maybe five, five to 10 minutes in certain sessions. Yeah, you make you make a significant amount of progress. If you really apply yourself
for me, it was like this last ditch thing of like, I'm really gonna give this a shot for some people they get in. A lot of people leave halfway through because they're just frustrated and they don't care to see it through. I read about a lot of those. Yeah, and those are the people that are like coming out and ranting about how meditation is. Yes, I know. But if you really apply yourself, you really sit through it. It's almost guaranteed to experience something in lieu, I really do think that 99.9%
of people can meditate in Canada reach deep states of meditation.
Because it is a natural state of the mind. This is one thing that Buddhism talks about, is actually one of the most natural states of the mind. It's the state of mind that we were in, when you were kids. We were constantly lost, and the object of our of our focus all the time when we were kids, and we get glimpses of that we have this feeling of being a kid. And usually this feeling of being a kid is associated with being lost in something.
And it's that they call that the Enlightenment you you get these tastes of awakening good This tastes and enlightenment throughout your life, the more adult you become, which means the more work your mind becomes, the more you get lost in virtualization. And the more you get lost in the Cartesian theater of the world. You're not actually experiencing the world you're watching your movie display of it, I think is Deckard talks about the Cartesian theater of the mind and the more you get lost in that the less you're actually experiencing reality. And that's, that's getting further away from the weekend meditation is learning to return to that state of pure and just being lost in whatever you are. I never thought of it like that. I remember being a kid and I used to include these rock forts.
I would just sit there for eight hours stalking rocks of another making a wall. And it's all I wanted to do. It's hard to think about
it. It was amazing. It was the greatest day of my life to sit in this stack and rocks not bored out be right now. And it's like, like boredom.
Boredom is an artifact of the ego mind. So like, that's one of the things you learned attack on meditation, you're going to get rid of boredom, because boredom is just a weird thing that we staple on to things like for the vast majority of like, the existence of the human species. Boredom was an electric we could afford. We had to do the same things over and over again, chased by tigers and shade you couldn't afford. Yeah, or like, just like the everyday things like boredom. And for a lot of people, especially outside of the Western world. Like you go to like places like here in Thailand. And people do the same same every day. Like maybe boredom is something that you feel in my degrees, but not to the degree that like a depressed person is bored with everything you can't get up like a bike say you're like just like playing video games all day every day because you can't call up a job I'm sure you're gonna get bored with that it's like boredom is actually just an attitude of the mind and like it's something that you go with my attacks on, but when you're a kid, we didn't.
experiences because everything was new and fresh. And we didn't have this thing that was controlling us and that was dictating our behaviors and how we process the world. So why do we move away from being a tiny little Buddha when were four years old to how we are now what causes that? It's so that's a tricky thing that gets into like the realm of like phenom phenomenology and that's something that even like either Buddhist science or Western science I don't think can really tackle so it's why does the human mind develop? It's a really tricky question. I have my own some theories on it. I do think that like
it starts with the formation of language starts with
language is how we start to make sense of the world, especially in a communal society. As a communal species. We use language to communicate and we use language to for meaning. And because we are a meaning seeking species, we try to see meaning and everything and eventually it starts with small meetings. Like you find the word for Apple, you find the word for coffee cup, and then you get feelings attached to those things.
Then you build stories around those things. So eventually you you, you say I like this copy got more than this coffee cup and then you form attachments I gotta go pick up pick up now as a story to it and everything my coffee guy yeah exactly. It's my copy you identify with that. So that's eventually want to go last processes of consciousness and really the question you're asking is how does consciousness for
a heavy question on you? Yeah it's a tricky thing that takes you know, nobody really knows. But we can formulate these ideas. Buddhism has its own really fascinating ideas. I personally think that the answer lies in a combination of evolutionary psych phenomenology and Buddhist psychology like I like that cohesive worldview of the combination of those things. And evolutionary psych gives us the reasons for why we form the reasons for why our brain is like this. The physical reasons and phenomenology gives us the reasons for the experience, it talks about the x like what is the science of experience, what is the philosophy of experience? What does experience me
And then Buddhist psychology goes a lot into the habits of like, how these things are formed. And And so through those three things, I think you can go and kind of get a cohesive, somewhat cohesive as far as like we can and understanding the human psyche at this point world view of it.
But yeah, so it's a tricky question to answer. I do think it but it does show and it is self evident to people that the more the longer you spend in building the ego mind, and the more you kind of get lost in this world of fantasy, and it might not be self evident to all people. But like, if you really learn to observe the mind and serve it working through something like mindfulness, you you start to realize that like, wow, I stopped just like I stopped just like feeling this table. I stopped just experiencing things through the senses A long time ago, and I started living in this world of words in this world of thoughts, which has its purposes, but ultimately that's where according to Buddhism, suffering
Lies suffering doesn't lie in the tactile experience of the world that lies in how we process it. And when that process is completely unleashed and not under our control when it's all subconscious that's when suffering starts when we are subject to our stories instead of crafting our stories like when our stories craft themselves and we start getting pulled around by them that's where suffering takes over that's where depression starts that's where he's at he starts things I'd like you you craft a story craft a story quote unquote early on in your childhood like you get a severe fear of nausea for some reason and and then that builds and builds and builds and builds so you start experiencing the sensation of knowledge and you start experiencing this crazy like years long story built up of fear of nausea and it's it's something that becomes the experience of natural becomes that instead of just like feeling a little bit of a tummy ache you started like nausea becomes this crazy experience of like you have three hour long attacks in terms of
Fear of it. But that's, that's the mind. That's how it that's how the mind works. And if it's unchecked, it takes control of you. And meditation is learning to watch that process and make sure that doesn't become unchecked and undo wall the damage that that unchecked process is done. So I think one stumbling block people have when it comes to entering into this world of Buddhism, and especially meditation is people just don't know how to meditate. You know, it sounds like this,
this very kind of crazy fall off idea like meditation or what I gotta go to the top of a mountain, right? You know, like,
and people hear the basics, you know, maybe like, focus on the breath is that I do just sit there focus on the breath. How does one meditate? Yeah, it's relatively simple. It's really if you view meditation as being lost in the object of your focus, and that is so abundant that there's different kinds of meditation, of course. So the main kinds of focus on our Samantha which is they say, fo in Buddhism, they call its focus on repetitively one pointed meditation. It's focusing on one
thing for an excellent attack that can manifest in different ways in the cool thing about meditation is you find what works for you. So some people that works like a mantra, you just repeat the same mantra over and over and over again, that's actually found a lot of other faiths, like Christian faith, like you, people were reciting mantras and they're entering into a similar state to meditation.
So you pick one thing, and you focus on it. And by doing that, everything else fades away. You rest your attention. And rest is is is a good word. You rest your attention and one thing and let everything else fizzle out. You don't strenuously bring it back. That's just adding tension to the whole thing. You allow your attention to rest. And when they continually bring it back, bring it back, bring it back,
it's like a puppy wandering off, you have to continually bring it back and set it down to stay still and carefully, repeatedly, over and over again, you're building up that habit of focusing on one thing, and then when you do you enter into the state of complete serenity. Essentially, it's almost like nothingness. It's you have that thing you have you It starts with you. Have you in the middle of your meditation and adventure.
You disappears and you just have the object of meditation. That's that's a cricketer. That's that's total absorption. That's all you have is that we experienced this. Like if you weren't playing instruments and right guitar, yeah, like attack like
you play guitar. And when you're playing guitar, new loss in the actor playing guitar, you disappears in that moment of her conception of you is not there. It's just the guitar or the act of playing guitar. It's maybe just playing guitar is there and your thoughts surrounding everything that you identify with has been gone in that moment. And that's what you could get to is. So everybody's experienced meditation to different degrees, everybody's experienced some mathematicians, different crews, then you have the passion which is where the real work is done the passion and taking that intense focus and then turning that mirror on the mind and taking that and very narrow folks watching your mind with it. You can watch your mind you can use everyday mindfulness you can use base level of passion.
All times you can just sit back. Like any person could practice this. Like say you're sitting in the car and somebody cuts you off. You can sit back and say, I'm going to watch my mind right now. What am I doing? You can watch the anger swell up, you can watch all these things. You watch your fist rises, he flipped in the bird. Yeah, go Yes, be mindful of its progress. And, but you can watch all these things happen. You can watch this Cartesian theater of the mind. But the passionate is learning to take that narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow, subtle focus and what the very discreet levels of it and that's when you're able to catch these thought patterns that their absolute root so you're able to see the seed of anger arises, you're able to see like the most subtle sensations of these things and really is if you delve into the phenomenology of feelings of emotions even have thoughts their site two sides of the same coin they start out as feeling so every single time you feel anger you got to pinpoint that were my fitness on my body so people for your interest and people feel I feel envy and jealousy in my stomach and I can when I when I'm feeling jealous I can say Wait, where am I feeling this and I can
detach myself, I can watch it. And the cool thing about mindfulness is by doing that, and by no longer engaging with it, it just dissipates completely disappear. You watch it for like a minute or two tops. If you watch it without engaging with interest fades out every single time. It takes practice to get to that point. But if you get good at it, like if I enter into a state of mindfulness, regardless of what I'm feeling, and I sit with it, and I let it be, and I don't interact with it just fades away on a ton. Well, because the only way that it thrives is when it's fed by the ego.
As long as you engage with it. It's it's still there. So so the meditation is just in really anybody you can install apps that do this you can you saw headspace, you can install insight timer, all these things I've walked through meditations. The only barrier for people getting into meditation is that those first 10 hours of effort and those are brutally hard and it doesn't have to be brutally hard depends on how you view view as attention thing, it's going to be hard if you view it as a relaxation things to continually reminding assertion, repetitive cycle
gentle reminder to completely just rest your attention. And that focus. I think that's a big reason why I let people struggle with it. And they think it's like this. You have to strain your brain to bring it back to these things with it into shape and size should do it. That's what people quit if you allow pack abs for your mind. Yeah, exactly. It's boot camp for your brain. And you can view it that way. That's actually kind of how they teach in the Dharma retreats in those 10 days. And you really subject yourself to that for a long enough you can do it but for a lot of people that ends in frustration. So I think a good way to view is just gently pulling yourself back to the object of your focus again, and again and again and again.
And eventually it becomes habit just like any habit, you do it again and again and again. And again. It becomes natural for you,
you know, you brush your teeth in the morning first you could be conscious of it eventually just becomes a natural thing you work out every morning essentially it's a lot harder at the beginning but eventually just becomes natural becomes a natural part of your functioning as a human being. Same thing with meditation you just keep on doing the same thing again again again again and eventually it works and eventually you're able to rest into that and they say enlighten
mentors, when it becomes completely natural for us today, any point or all the time you're in a state of mindfulness, that's what enlightenment is. It's just this accumulation, a snowball effect of staying in that mindfulness, state uptime
as much as you can. And, but really, it starts with, you know, in order to, it's more like if you if you want to use the snowball effect, you gotta roll the snow ball up the hill first, and then let it roll down before you
it does take a lot of work at the outset. And it takes the most work at the outset, arguably, but it pays off quicker than people realize. Especially if you take the right of using that word mindfulness. What does that mean mindfulness is this the state of being aware of your mind, it's,
it's noticing, it's just conscious, noticing things. So it's you can be mindful of sensations. Anybody, be mindful of the way your party you hold yourself, you can be mindful of your behavior towards other people. Mindfulness is just a state of awareness and really all meditation is the cultivation of awareness.
It's just because our normal functioning as we get so lost in our own heads that we get so lost in our own storage, we're constantly telling ourselves stories. We're not really being mindful and not really thinking about what we're doing. And we're not really experiencing what we're doing. Mindfulness is removing yourself from those stories. And just being with whatever you're doing and paying attention to like, what am I feeling right now? What am I doing right now? What am I actually doing right now? What am I reasons for doing these things? Can I watch my mind and read all these things? So yeah, mindfulness is it's a beard, big term, it's basically just awareness. So it kind of sounds like based on the way you described meditation, you start out you just focusing on your breath. That's all you're really worried about. just focusing on your breath, and maybe thoughts arise and it sounds like say, Okay, well, that's cool. I'm just gonna let that thought being come back to my breath. But later on, and you get more experienced
space on the way it sounds like you describe it. It sounds like you almost turn that attention to your thoughts. Is that accurate in the sense that thoughts arise and you take that attention you had
Is your breath you observe your thought? Is that is that am I getting it? Right? Yeah. So interesting dichotomy or interesting thing that we have in the Western world, we have a, we have the most of Western psychology is grounded in the Cartesian split, which is the idea that the mind and body are separate things. And you have the non material minute the physical brain, physical body Buddhism, that our habits, but so when you are observing the mind and body in Buddhism, you are observing one working thing. So thoughts and feelings are natural extension, so each other so you're just observing all of it working. So yeah, you You start by observing the breath and and that narrows your focus to something that is tangible and something that's always there and then you turn it in on thoughts and feelings and emotions and they say first during the dumber retreats, especially if you just focus on feelings and you say, why is this how is this helping me deal with my thoughts,
but the more you observe thoughts and feelings, the more you realize how interlinked they are, and maybe the same thing
like we
We like to think that our thoughts, our thoughts and our feelings are feelings.
Especially in especially in male society. We're like you don't you don't think that you feel it? Oh man, I don't even have feeling Yeah, right.
Exactly. And about like, you get, we get this classic stable argument between boyfriend and girlfriend. She's like, She's like,
I think this in you know, you feel that it's like, you know, you're not you're not thinking that something you feel or are they say, I feel this way here's, you know, you think that way. It's like, we like we like more in touch with your feelings. JOHN Oh, that's my honest in males as it we are extremely high touch her feelings. So we get to the heritage depression but uh, so but we're really thinking and feeling or two sides of the same coin. We hold on to our beliefs that we consider thoughts because we feel strongly about things you really and we really we really start to we like to think of thoughts as ours and feelings is something that's happening to us and, but really that they are two sides of the same coin you observe, you observe the process of that you're going to the scientific studies on what constitutes a thought what causes us to think the things we
Thinking we think we're in charge of them. But in reality we aren't. We're actually subject to our feelings just as much we are subject to our thoughts and and the idea of consciousness is something as the CEO controlling all this is really just a it's really a false idea if you break it down and the consciousness and almost like a reporting factor, it's more of like a street reported that's telling you what's going on. It's like we ascribe describes ins to it after the fact.
But really, it is two sides of the same coin. It's these things that we're experiencing to degree and they're triggered by different things and or they are triggered by the same thing and manifest and things that we ascribe to is different. But uh, yeah, you in meditation, you learn to observe these things magnificent ready and I forget the terminology at the time, I think they call it either Sankara which is a general term for conditioned things or
I forget the normal manifestation for thought feelings. But uh, yeah, you're learning to observe basically happening so the way I've always looked at it is kind of that my feelings
Or a reaction to my thoughts and my thoughts I'm in control of. So by extension, I'm in control of my feelings. So you're saying they're just kind of two separate things that that
are unrelated in a sense, or, or are related and you control both of them. Um,
so in a way you control nothing, if you really break it down. If you really, if you really take a look, take a look into, into how the brain works. And the more and more we delve into the psychology of this, the idea of controls, actually a false one. And
we like to think of this like, like I said, a CEO at the top of all of it, controlling all of it. And this is this is part of ego death for because it's part of the way the way the process of Buddhism is like, the ultimate conclusion of Buddhism is there's no self there is no person controlling, there's nothing to hold on to because it controls and illusion but ironically,
Western science is trying to point to this more and more and you can do studies of decision science, the science of decisions and how we make decisions and it's
Almost everything now is pointing to the fact that it is involuntary and we ascribe the illusion of voluntary Enos to it so your unconscious mind makes decisions for you, before your conscious mind realizes it. And you can watch brain scans of people doing this.
They're presented with decisions, they're unconscious man makes that decision for them shows up on the brain scan. And then they said, I made that decision. And it's a total falsity is just the way that the brain makes sense of the universe is to it makes the most sense to say, I did that to us as a functioning being and makes the most sense to say I did that. But it's like what do you mean when you say I did that doesn't mean like as I mean, like you sent the signals down to your arm to do that by thinking about it saying no, most of most of its impulsive most of it. It's almost all arguably orbits impulsive and it's just a we have this idea of the self of like this accumulation of our impulses. In reality, it's just individual impulses and so
a lot of meditation and interesting thing about it is
You with Buddhism, you don't have to take any of this stuff for truth. And actually, they say, doubt all of it. They say, don't believe any of this stuff. Don't believe it. Because somebody tells you, when you sit down, we say, there is no and arguably, Buddhism didn't ever say there is no self.
But when they talk about non self, and they talk about the experience of non self, and they don't say,
take that for granted. They say, you meditate for long enough, you observe the mind and you realize that non self as a truth and if you really mean by that non self, so, and this is a big thing, big common misconception in Buddhism is that he said, there is no self and
in the primary text is never the Buddha's never actually attributed to having said that, in fact, when his followers asked him, is there a self he said that question is useless to me. So there's my goal is suffering the omission of suffering again, and that is a metaphysical shop to deal with metaphysics and deal with God's I don't deal with the questions of existence. I deal with what is practical for eliminating suffering and for that purpose, and they have the nonsense
Sutras, which is basically you sit down, and you watch every single process. Anybody watch. Okay? And you say, am I my hands? No. Am I am I know? You go through the whole body? Then you go through all of your thoughts. Am I my thoughts? Am I my addiction to this? Am I my thoughts, my beliefs about this? You observe all these things. And eventually you go through everything. You say, No, I'm not this. No, I'm not. No, I'm not this.
That is the non self suit.
And eventually, you have nothing, you have nothing left. You can, the more and more you observe everything in your mind at the more and more you watch that you That thing is a separate thing from you, the less there is of you to be there
until you have nothing left. And that's what nine suffers. And by doing that, by going through that process, they say you are reaching enlightenment because with nothing of me to be there, there's nothing for there's no suffering to be had. If I'm not clinging to anything. I'm not attaching to any of these processes in my mind, and there's no suffering to feel out there. And then from there, I can go and function as like whatever.
I want to be it's just like I'm not allowing suffering tension equation yeah and of course that gets in the whole thing it's like okay well if there's no you than what is doing the things afterwards and it's more of a that's where again this is supposed to be a practical philosophy more than metaphysical and there is no claim there is no you it's just you're learning to disassociate suffering with all of the things that you attribute to you.
I think most people are with you up until I'm not my hands. I'm not my arms. I'm not my iPhone. I'm not this I'm not that until you get to thoughts and I think that's I think that's where most people would be tempted to say, Well, come on, I might thoughts surely I like my thoughts. Like, that's who I am like, I control my thoughts. If I'm not my thoughts, like Who am I? And that goes back to that goes back to way back to the cartoons. But that goes way back to the cart and he says, at the very least I am a bundle of thoughts. He says, you can maybe prove to me that I am a brain in a vat that I am like in the matrix. I'm like being everything around us being simulated.
But at least I have my thoughts. Interestingly, with meditation, you know, where the whole I think, therefore I am. Yeah, I was an English speaker and yeah, singer. So at the very least, I am a bundle of thought, I remember who was him, it was carpets or that. But anyways, in western psychology, we, we have that those ultimate that is the total reductionist approach where human being is, at the very least we are our thoughts, Buddhism goes a step further, and says, you can learn that you can learn to watch your thoughts, you can learn to stop them from happening, you can experience a state of thoughtlessness at that point do you stop to exist? It's like, what happens if you're sitting there and your mind stops? I've experienced this several times, any experience, meditator will tell you, the experienced thoughtlessness at that point do I stop to exist? It's like, well, if those things can stop for an extended time, sometimes for some people, it happens for days or weeks, where they experienced that oneness of consciousness, they can still function and everything, you can still go about doing things, but they experienced thoughtlessness, essentially, and hybrid matter what that looks like. I've never experienced that.
experience that I've potentially write about. Maybe I'm not sure that's a Zen thing. Yeah. Yeah. The whole the kind of like the spontaneous
healing enlightenment for at least a few days. Yes. I've heard about it all these Eckhart Tolle allegedly Well, I mean, I guess he's kind of on it forever now. Yeah,
I think similar. So it's probably similar to that. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole spontaneous and like nothing, but seems a little weird. Yeah, it's a little weird, especially if you view it as an accumulation of habits. Like all of a sudden, you just have to, you have all the habits. So this makes sense to me. But whatever, and I did for you if that happened. Yeah, I guess the adulation. So I'm not anyway, I can't talk about other people's experience, I can only talk about my experience, in that, like I have experienced thoughtlessness, and at that point,
at no point did I say, I stopped existing,
I can say that, in the moment of thoughtlessness. My identity stopped, essentially stopped functioning in that moment. But as soon as I left it, all my identity is my ego came back this is just kind of at more at my own will,
but it's more
More about non stuff isn't about saying there isn't. So if it's about saying the things that we attribute selfish to are faulty, that they're not permanent, they're not unchanging there is no there's nothing that you can really cling on to. And the more you try to cling on to those things, the more suffering you're creating for yourself. So it's not really a metaphysical statement. It's a practical philosophy for undoing suffering. And the more you try to delve into it and metaphysics and more the Buddha would be like just be like you're wasting time it's not helping you so helping you with this process it's just getting bogged down and something that it's essentially it's counting any news on the head of a pin it's useless philosophizing it's not it's it's something that there is no answers to it's like asking is there a flying spaghetti monster so we can't kind of course there is why don't you believe in the pasta foreign
hear about that one guy sorry derail you he so
it I believe is in the United States the there was a Jewish man who's allowed to wear a yarmulke on his head little Jewish hat during his
driver's license photo normally they say no no hats somebody says you know i'm jewish I gotta wear this can take it off so let them keep it
this roles in the DMV with a colander on I think I did see says I'm a devout pasta far and I gotta have this
like to please take the column he said no no you're offending me I'm a pacifier in this went to the Supreme Court court he won he now has a photo of him with a calendar so to do got away with devil horns I think yeah yeah yeah
I think they're just bored
the point yeah
so we'd system I actually think the the greater message they're trying to prove is that religion should pay taxes yeah that's that's it shouldn't be exempt which they did that that's that's kind of insane to just kind of declare, you know, I'm a religion I'm not gonna pay tax especially man. Have you seen these like these titles?
division preachers they get paid like millions and millions of dollars. Hmm. Well, they get paid millions, millions and dollars because they're extracting it from their congregation. Yeah. Give me a mail. You're good. Hell yeah. Yeah. That's why I came up. I came up with I wouldn't say a super conservative upbringing. But I came up from a Christian background and they know that there's a lot of good and Christian well, but like, there is also a lot of extortion because our people taking advantage of people. Well, yeah, actually, if, if you really look at what is actually written in the Bible, and most of it, there are a few weird parts for they say, You can't eat shellfish, and you should stone your children in certain areas. But but for the most part in the Bible,
it's actually very, very, very similar to like, Buddha's teachings and, and teachings of every other faith. You know, I've always kind of felt like all these different holy texts are like different paths of the same mountain. Yeah, I would say I would take it a step further. I would say it's not necessarily what's written in the Bible, you will get the words of Christ Himself. Look at the words of the people that these things are based around instead of what the stories that are crafted
around them from other people. Yeah, any right? There's a lot of and it's this is very synergistic view. I think that there's truth to it. I mean, there are some primal differences that again, a lot of it shows and like the personality of these themselves, so like, I don't think that I think that like, for instance, I think as long as a lot more separated from Buddhism and Christianity, I think Christ is similar to Buddha, more similar to Buddha, Mohammed was, I don't wanna get into that. But uh, yeah, if you really look at the core things, what a lot of them said is a lot of a lot of very similar things which is really just I think they were just getting to the root of the like innermost desires. If humanity which was essentially unification essentially like a seeking of something higher than ourselves, this the reason that religions exists, the psychological reasons that religions exist in the first place, because we want to be a part of something bigger than us, because it provides us a sense of security by the presence of the sense of meaning we are meeting seeking creatures Well, actually, I think that's one reason that
a lot of people like in our generation or a lot of people in the
millennial generation right now are kind of going through, especially people at coming out of college who are looking to try to figure out what they want to do in their life kind of going through this quarter life crisis. And I think this is something a lot more common today than it was 123 hundred years ago, 500 years ago, because 500 years ago, first off, you probably wouldn't even really be faced with a question of what do I want to do? You're just doing whatever the you can't eat. So you have that personally, but also you're indoctrinated with religion, or at the very least nationalism for your entire life. So you always feel like that you're a part of something greater and there's absolutely I wasn't alive 500 years ago, but by the sound of it, there's very, very little questioning of it. You're born you're Christian, that's it. You're Christian as and there are some downsides to that things get a little hairy, but it does give you a sense of greater purpose and so this is kind of like one of the first generations we've ever had where
there is a distinct
distinct absence of religion and is a distinct absence of nationalist will not very many people really identify with their country because at least back in the day if you didn't have religion at least you were French and you could be French you know are you Russians I heard yeah you know, you could just like identify like you could have something greater that you could identify with well, like you said it's I mean we also have this conception of like the Western world being like the most atheists sleepless nights I know look at China China's many of these for forever Oh really? you're transmitting piece for forever they might have like I didn't I didn't know that I haven't caught so yeah, they've been there the longest standing atheist nation by far but they did have a strong degree of nationalism they're like a poster child NASA NASA you got to have one you got one of the other because when you don't have either yeah I kind of go through this existential crisis inevitably things kind of good for you yeah and yeah and I think that's the interesting thing and that's why I was that she was talking with my little cousin about this a while ago she's coming out of she's going into college she's trying to decide on a major and she can't decide and a lot of quarter life crisis going on yeah we all do and not even Corey like she's like she's like.
Not even 18 yet. And but a lot of people, especially in the Western world, when you can do everything what do you do inside your faces this ridiculous luxury of choice. Nobody in history is really had like I can I'm wearing a middle class and privilege I can do whatever I wanted to know and that's becoming it's becoming increasingly more of a quote unquote problem was ridiculous problem but it's like when you're faced with the complete ability to do whatever you want to do that's almost a crippling anxiety. It's like paralyzed by choice. Hey, parallels by choice exactly
and where we are hitting the society and hopefully we're hitting in society where that becomes an option for everybody. We're and we're even like, you know, ideally we're gonna hit up pointing the revolution of technology where we work and we can all just do art for a living or some Oh, hell yeah, we're like,
yeah, you can just create which is why human beings were made us human beings in the first place was creation.
But if we do go for the universal basic income once AI kind of gets great, sorry, I'm really, really into this topic, but I feel like we're kind of
headed down this road in the next couple hundred years. As far as AI is concerned, one of two things is going to happen. One AI is going to replace everyone's jobs. And it's gonna be awesome because we're going to hit this level of wealth in the world where everything is done for us that we can redistribute wealth and everyone's happy. or number two, we choose not to redistribute the wealth not to sound like a crazy socialist or anything I'm kind of talking in the context of robots running the world if we choose not to redistribute the wealth we're going to have maybe like 100 people the top or just trillion heirs and that one of the bottom is kind of starving like Blade Runner Terminator style yeah I do think I honestly think that that's going to be the I think what's going to happen in my vision like it'd be prophetic I think it's going to be that at first and I think eventually maybe hopefully major upset yeah revolution and and then it's gonna get distributed. But the way the world's heading right now the most powerful, getting more powerful and less powerful or getting weaker.
So we need to have some sort of revolution and my goodness, I can't say
A lot to say that I'm not allowed to condone revolution but I'm not saying you shouldn't do or a
hint hint
lower class America Come on I hate being suppressed
I mean it's good but it's a you suppress the people for long enough they will strike back and that's like I I'm not a proponent of personal violence but like there is a boiling point that people reach where they essentially have to resort to violence so terrible they just is just historically proven again and again you suppress if you put long enough they had to die out or fight back will also I think hopefully if you really get the mass on your side it'll be all right but uh. You know back in the day
I just take the American Revolution for an example we got fed up and we said that you Britain where we're going to revolt and so you know we had kind of like muskets and things like that and you know there's maybe like a bit of sword
Fighting and things like that he knows it's pretty like rudimentary warfare and so it was our numbers versus the numbers and we had a lot and so we want I feel like during the AI
revolution if we try to revolt it's going to be us vs robots and drone strikes which might be a little bit more difficult yeah anybody can really kill an entire country people you're if you just kill everyone in the country so yeah well that's interesting thing I have you ever read the book common Davis he talks about this is great book and he's a Julia practice. We have a passionate believer this whole book I'm like, what's the next step of humanity going to look like and it sounds like you to speak right up your alley. And but he said, interesting thing about war now is wars. We're past the point of fighting wars, overland and resources, land and resources and civil wars. Yeah,
well, yeah, and a lot of its internal internal was but as far as like, big wars and wars nowadays aren't going to be fought with traditional weapons and then I can be fired over land and resources there. This is the most valuable commodity on the planet is knowledge.
can be found on Instagram yeah they're gonna that's the thing is like there we're not we're not fighting over we're not fighting overland and resources anymore we're fighting the most valuable commodity on the planet is knowledge I think this is good he used was like
one day of Chinese trade on the stock market is more than like conquering most entire countries, whatever you it's like there's there's when money was the primary money or like the expansion of resources was like the primary goal of countries in the past it's no longer What are really fighting wars over and wars are going to take place and CYBER WARS it's going to be very different and maybe Toronto wasn't too far off and but uh. Yeah it's I think that it's hard to it's so hard to diagnose what war is going to like in the future and it's cool to see that like, seems like we're advancing towards PCC, all the in North Korea that came out and it seemed like it came out of nowhere, like a seems like we were going to this point of like, Oh, well what there's gonna happen and all of a sudden it's getting diffused.
Because people realize that war isn't useful it's not a useful thing anymore it's not like a while to realize that it took us a lot of tribalism to get over but like we're we are reaching point I think we're seeing that no you can cooperation is better than Ward we can survive better as nations if we cooperate more than more than you have the extreme extremists out there that still they have their reasons for war they're very separate than mutual well being
I think that those things are slowly getting radical I'm a I'm a optimist in terms of like where humanity is headed I don't think we're I think we're we might die a nuclear war but
barring that I think we're going to keep heading upwards at maybe you have some maybe have some slumps like the Richard gonna take over for a while. I think taking over the rich are gonna think oh, well, this guy
yeah, it's interesting. We kind of had to hit a point of globalization to where it was just in our best interest and not go to war for to eventually stop its
very tempting for, for me to say, Oh yeah, we've reached a new paradigm of human consciousness. We've just decided that war isn't good anymore. Unfortunately, I don't think that's what it is. I think it's just kind of economic interests have ever realized do go towards really expensive and you lose more than again anyway you lose a lot in terms of diplomacy and trade. And yeah, it just kind of kind of yourself up. So I'm curious where humanity is headed. Have you heard of the year the Fermi Paradox
vaguely can recap so basically what it states is that if you look at all the different planets and all different solar systems, and all different stars, and every single galaxy are the chances of life being the chances of life not only will not only the chances of life existing, but the likelihood of life existing and advancing to the point where we should see evidence of it on earth is almost a statistical certainty. And so people are asking you know, why hasn't it happened and one of the leading theories right now is this idea that greatness
area which is basically saying
society advances technologically to a certain point, it's almost always destined to destroy itself in one way or another. So one of the easy fingers that we had point, once this theory came out was a nuclear warfare, say, oh, we're just going to blow ourselves up. But we actually have a really cool theories. Now, one of my favorite theories is that we reach a point of technological advancement that we all just switch over to a VR virtual reality society fade out as a species. Exactly. Well, I mean, we still kind of exists but we exist more in like the matrix sense in that we're all just kind of being fed through the tubes and we're having just a perfect heaven like reality simulated for us. And so once if a species were to advance to the point where they could,
you know, be a multi planetary or species that could explore other galaxies, it's arguable that they would also be advanced enough to the point that they could simulate any reality they want in
Virtual Reality of you know, drive to really get out. Why would he go out there when you can just eat cake and jack awful day? virtual reality and unicorn world? Sounds like a great world. Sounds awesome. Yeah. Sign me up. That's why I like I'm a big fan of shows like black mirror that. Oh yeah. Like really satirical tech? Where's technology heading in? Why could this be terrifying? I do think that buggers all heavy handed. But
in that like, most of the time, it's like negative, but it is good to have that stuff in culture to like, be checking to like, keep us keep us a little bit paranoid, because we do need to be a little bit paranoid of technology, because technology unhinged is that's where you end up like, like having tons of atom bombs. Or like, yeah, that's where a robot uprising gets in is when it's unhinged. So it's good to have a little bit apparently that's why I am a big proponent of at least having a little bit of conservatism and every society because you went liberalism swing you unhinged advancements swing too far to the left and all of a sudden you just it's
It's unpredictable chaos and it's it's uncertain. Watch us on checkers or you need to have that pendulum swing of society that is like sort of has been saying. Okay, let's hold back a bit. Let's wait. Let's relax. It stopped with these robots. Yeah, the digital that band name by the way, technology on hinge. That'd be sweet. I go check them out. Good. Uh, maybe maybe good with horror sci fi series. Um,
but, uh, but yeah, sorry, I forgot the topic that we were. Yeah, we got a bit off topic. I actually wanted to ask you. So, um, what are the different types of Buddhism because I've kind of
researched a little bit and I've always kind of, like, identified myself as a practitioner like Zen meditation. And you've made a really, really interesting argument for Vipassana, which which kind of fits under the I'm gonna mispronounce it, their their data center about their about a sect of Buddhism. So what what what are the different Buddhist philosophies and there's a lot I mean, it's been around forever. It's been around longer than most religions. It's been around
500 years longer than Christianity, and it's pretty old. So there's a lot of subsets within the main. The main sport that happened at the beginning was the two driven schools of Tibetan money, Anna.
And it's basically just slight doctrinal differences. They basically I mean, they manifest in different practices. That's in my hand is my focus on like Montreux chants and stuff like that. Whereas Teradata is more focused on I see so studying the nuances of that isn't really my specialty. I don't I don't want to speak too much of that because I probably will smith speak
my is I like to have outage because I have more exposure to it here. And it is many practices the main form of Buddhism practiced in Thailand to my knowledge.
Yeah, it totally is. I was looking for them. Okay, good. I'm not bullshitting
one's gonna fact check. All right. Never gonna and so then so the there's my hand it about it and everything was kind of branches that from them. There's tons
Different, Buddhism and Zen was a follow followed up Chan Buddhism is branch of Chan Buddhism in China, and a lot of these are relative to where it started, all started in India and actually started in what's now Nepal and a place called loony. I went, as I went to a Buddhist birthplace last year in southern Nepal, that used to be India and
and from there, it just branched out branch out a lot of it died off for like a few thousand years or something. So like basically went completely undercover and then had a few awakenings and one of the big awakenings was in Tibet. So you have Tibetan Buddhism, which is one of the kind of now it's like very world famous like Dalai Lama is Tibetan Buddhist and in Tibetan Buddhism is very closely intertwined with Hinduism in terms of like they believe in a pantheon of gods they they have like a whole they have a horse, Hughes superstitions and stuff surrounding that and it's very pantheon of gods and Buddhism. Someone I think of when I think of Buddhism Yeah, well in second liberties and we read
detach from that stuff. But in Tibetan Buddhism, it's a very it's very it's a superstitious is the word that's a that's a heavy term. But did you have a lot of like folk tales, a lot of religious beliefs, things we described to his religious beliefs here, it's,
it's a really gorgeous Pantheon and you can a lot of my favorite authors are Tibetan Buddhist, I don't, I'm not, I'm not like a I'm more of like a rational skeptic. So that is really the whole spiritual side of it doesn't really apply to me just
have an affinity for it. But yeah, so you have, you have a whole range of different things. And the thing I like about the passion, which is the one that I was talking about with you, and the passion is essentially like the Orthodox orthodoxy of Buddhism, it's like as true to the roots as possible. It's like, Okay, what is what, how can we distill this into the most like, applicable practical thing that we can so have a passion is just the practical side of Buddhism, and it's also psychology, they say, they say that they say,
Zen is for poets they say as it is then as for poets and
This is Dennis for poets. Tibetan Buddhism is for artists. And
the passion is for psychologists. It's kind of a good way to people are actually trying to get some done. Oh, yeah. And it's just like an ultimate. That's the cool thing is you can choose, if you have, if you love the poetry and you love you love the, like beauty is an exam, then by all means, I think that can can be a palpable path to enlightenment of you love. And if you have the cultural side of Tibetan Buddhism, that can be a very beautiful way. And arguably Tibet, Tibetan culture was probably the most enlightened culture on the planet before was totally wiped out by China. But China
and like there's It's estimated that a good chunk of the population was actually enlightened
and then the passionate I think we're passionate for me, I like it because it's the most like understandable from the western standpoint. It's It's very, it's very cohesive with Western brain science. It's very cohesive with how
Now how psychologies under Howard more importantly how
neuro psychology is understanding the brain and neuroscience is understanding the brain and emotions just as very straightforward very just that it just makes sense to me. But ultimately, it's about what, whatever works for you. And so it's it's fun to research on there are very nuanced differences between some of them and most of it is just how it's manifesting culture. So like Zen is huge in Japan. So if you like Japanese culture, go check out zone if you like Indian culture, that's where it comes from.
And now the passion is probably the big kind of game changer in western mindfulness. That's like kind of the big roots of like NBC NBC at its roots in fashion
and in Thailand it's mostly Basha. So um, yeah, it's ultimately about what speaks to you what works for you, and they all have their positives and negatives. So kind of like what originally appealed to me about Zen Buddhism. Was it simplicity.
In a way,
but as I kind of got more into it the level of simplicities, it's almost frustrating. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I kind of see I kind of the opposite view than Buddhism. It feels I would, I'd say yeah, I guess I'd say that it is simple, but it feels too esoteric for me. It feels sense. And it's, it's,
it's almost like cloudy. It's almost like it's almost feels like nonsense at times. And to me, it just doesn't make sense. It's just so for an understanding of
the mind and just of the universe to me, that it was so hard for me to grasp what they're saying. Like, I just don't understand what they're saying. What's that it's hard for me. And now that I understand mindfulness meditation more through the lens of the passionate a lot more Zen makes sense to me. But I think it's a very hard thing to breach from the western mindset. And because it is so distant, it's so like, it can be very like out there. And from our perspective, just because it's such a different way of understanding of it's more than
Marvel language thing, I think it's just their way of how they freeze things is and that is very poetic and kind of feels like you're skipping to, like the advanced. Yeah. And that's,
that's kind of the philosophy of Zen is like, they try to, like Zen cones are there to, like, confuse you into enlightenment. It's just how you think, literally meaningless. And it's like, you just like, like,
what I do with this, and then eventually you're like, Okay, that doesn't make sense. So this part of me doesn't make sense or something like that.
So yeah, and that's so that's why it doesn't it's very esoteric. It's a very it's, it's for it seems like it's almost like academic in its approach to the mind that you have to like, study for a long time. And it's not really as practical as I would say, but
for some people, I'm sure it totally works. And like maybe just jives with certain people more than others. Like I am a poet and I like poetry, but and there's a lot of beauty ins and poetry but
for me, it's not the most practical it's not like the most direct way to it. In fact, it kind of seems like a zigzag a lot to get there. And maybe that's just a that's maybe that's just my Western.
framework was interesting in one sense, because I agree with you, I kind of get the feeling
that you need to study it in order to get somewhere. But it's funny because they actually, from what I've read in Zen Buddhism, almost teach the opposite. And that you should kind of avoid studying it as much as you can, and just kind of figuring it all yourself.
What's your opinion on that? Because you're obviously incredibly well read when it comes to Buddhism, do you think there's any danger and over studying Buddhism? Um, I would say if Buddhism stops being practical, then it becomes useless. It's it is practical, first and foremost, if it starts becoming an object of analysis and not an object of practice for you, then
you're going to lose track of it. So if you start focusing on purely like non self as a concept on purely like you said, oh, there is no self and you become lost in that then it's it's just it's the same with Western philosophy. Honestly, you look at
Majority of Western philosophy was counting on the head of the, just useless philosophizing. It was just it was so lost an objection I look at. Like Kierkegaard now, and kicker was a miserable. He didn't. He spent so much time just getting lost in these, what I think are unanswerable questions about he he did contribute a lot to like to a lot of a lot of philosophical fields, but also like you read a lot of QPR stuff and it's just so far removed from practical and it's not like like that's what I love about like structure and like search was about He's like, how can we make How can we bring this back to earth and like let it stop being so esoteric and let it stop being so confined to the app deep like trenches of academia and let it just be a practical thing and how can we make philosophy practical but like there's so many I grew even Heidegger as much as I like a lot of headache is reading all of it was just like he talks about like the thing Enos of things and you're like, what does that mean what you like, and he goes into like, this whole crazy thing on thickness in like, unless you like, read the precursors to Heidegger, you're going to be so last unless you
Read all of Heidegger's work. It's just gonna be like a confusing mess. Have you gotten on that road? Yeah, I'm not. So I'm not. I'm not super deep. And I like reading philosophy, but ultimately, a lot of thickness of things. Yeah. And actually, a lot of his thickness also has to do with, it's very similar to Buddhism and Buddhist ideas. And,
but it's just, it's so hard to unpack. Whereas
I think that Buddhism was meant to be practical, isn't meant to be simple, and that there's a, there's a quote that I can think of with the moments basically, like he said, The Buddha said, specifically, I did not speak I did not speak the Dharma, which is the teachings that are just speak my teaching subtle and sublime. I wanted to be clear, he said, I did not speak the most subtle and sublime which means he did not make them to be confusing. He made them to be accessible. He's like, I made these to be as clear as possible. I gave you a step by step guide to enlightenment and if you get lost along the way, that's because you're not just following what I told you to follow. And it's it's like,
like the passionate it's very straightforward, it is pretty much a surefire way if
Practice as they tell you to practice that is like a pretty much surefire way to enlightenment just in terms of like you can. You can dissect that in terms of in terms of psychology, in terms of like the psychological states that you're entering as you go through the stages of the passionate and you are learning to undo the negative mental patterns of the mind doesn't by nature, reaching enlightenment, and so you can dissect it, it's tangible, it's it's there. So if you allow Buddhism to become an esoteric philosophy, then yeah, I'd say you're you're really wasting your time. So let's say you got two people in the room you got a Zen Buddhist center of a pasta boots and they're both sitting in their own corners of the room there each meditating what would
be the difference going on in their minds and wellness approach. Let's get too into like I this is I'm at the stage of my studies. I don't know that much about 10. I don't wanna speak too much on done I've already spoken probably more than I should. And
actually that's like next month around July I'm actually going to study Chandler has emerged as a precursor citizen. I'm going to stay that for a month.
In China and so I don't really know a ton of the actual practices and I like the philosophy of Zen and that I've like I read some Suzuki and stuff like that and but uh. I as far as the practice of Zen i i think that then
I think that they do have a lot of focus on presentation as well and but I do think that this specific process of of
of turning that mirror inside and really focusing on the thought thought tones or whatever you want to call it over your body is somewhat unique to the passionate because that's the defining trait of a passionate is that turns you said hey yeah or like feeling tone or whatever feeling thoughts whatever you want to call them dish or feelings and thoughts if you saw on a separate and that's totally fine for practical purposes,
but that this specific process of I'd imagine maybe maybe it's very similar to them and they just put it in different words, but I can't do that cuz I don't know enough about sound.
That's fine. So what are what are some common myths surrounding Buddhism, particularly in the West? Because I feel like people have some interesting ideas. Yeah, I think the number one is that it is inherently a religion, that the Buddha was supposed to be deified and like, people think it's people equate it with other religions. That's a big one. That's he never, he basically said, don't worship me. And like, that's why I think a lot of modern booze or a lot of historical manifestations of Buddhism kind of lost track. And I think that's true with any any religion. I think the more you deify somebody in the more you get away from what they just said, and more, the more stories you craft about them, the further you get from the actual experience of that person.
So I don't think Buddhism was ever meant to be religion. I think it was meant to he psychology it was meant to be practical psychology and he's just prescribing a way to get rid of suffering in your life and all manifestations. And so I think that's the number one big misconception is that is religion. And the ironic thing is that this is not
manifests in certain different religions. Buddhism can be very religious, depending on how you look at it. But a lot of those religious things are really just artifacts of culture or
like laws put in place for specifically for monks for specifically for people who are trying to live the ascetic lifestyle. So cool thing about Buddhism taking, leave whatever you want, you can hit there's nowhere in Buddhism that doesn't really say to the meat that does it, say, don't do the meat and spit out the bones. He says, He says itself like question everything I say, have like you. You need a degree of faith in order to like keep practicing. If you're constantly living in a state of doubt of it, then you probably won't continue practicing but
everything I say and don't get to experience it for yourself. So that's not really a religious thing to say. It's like I feel like that's a very skeptical
view to take if he was trying to start a religion it's a great way to start it
so I think that's the big one I think the biggest cigarettes psychology Yeah, we're not a religion. Yes, you are.
Okay, whatever you say if you insist,
I'd say the second biggest one is and I probably the non selfs suture people think that claims like the non self suitor are meant to be metaphysical claims when in reality, it's just a practical philosophy. Such a practical method. It's a methodology. It's not a philosophy to methodology. It's a, it's a way of dissecting everything in yourself and getting rid of those roots of suffering.
I'd say those are probably the two biggest misconceptions, I think, three is that it makes you a useless aesthetic that doesn't want to do anything. It's like now you can take the practical parts. You can take whatever you want from Buddhism and apply it to your life. Eliminate suffering, suffering, great if it makes you use also makes you suffer more than digit. It's you can,
that's what I love about secular Buddhism is nothing is sacred. You can take whatever you want. It's just you take what works for you. Well, I think one other large misconception people have is this kind of image that they have in their head of the monk right.
Specifically with regards to non materialism in the sense that people think, oh, if I were to become a Buddhist,
you know, if you go really far on the spectrum, like, giveaway, all my material possessions and, and things like that, or if you're being more reasonable, at the very least they feel like they wouldn't be able to have nice things or enjoy a good meal or,
you know, get a new laptop if they wanted to.
Is that accurate? Like how, how, how much of a push for non materialism is taught? I feel like your answer is going to be is that it's a natural byproduct of mindfulness and that sort of thing. So don't make you happy. Yeah, I'd say sort of true degree and I saw like i'm not i'm a tech nerd I still love so like I like Nintendo Switch it's still like so like a lot of like material things and ultimately it's just a question of suffering is it does does that thing does owning is only nothing gonna make yourself are you so attached to that thing that you can't live without it and a lot of monks have iPhones like you go like my one of my
favorite teacher amongst down in southern Thailand. He was a big one of those big fabulous phones. And he takes it out like in the middle of some of the toxic I remember certain point new like rifles through his Google keep notes or whatever he's traveling through because I know a monthly Instagram yeah something like that
but uh. Ultimately yeah well and the thing about asceticism within Buddhism is it's not something they really precise the dumb people like me what I said as a means to giving up of material. Okay, so an aesthetic is somebody who gets up material rights.
So it is prescribed for it's not prescribed for laypeople. Really, it's prescribed for people who want to dedicate your life purely to this pursuit of enlightenment. And it makes sense within that context, because it's just distractions. Like most material things are just distractions. If meditation is your primary superhighway, enlightenment
The state of being on your phone is a very unmindful experience. You're being subject to whatever if you just browsing Instagram is one of those unmindful experiences on the planet. You're just like, it's just a zombie.
flicking through garbage like most the time I hate Instagram, but
apparently not everybody anyways. It's it's just most a lot of modern technology doesn't cater, especially in the realm of like smartphones and video games like that doesn't cater well to mindfulness. And that's not to say that in order to be a Buddhist, you have to give those things up. It's saying that if you were to pursue pure enlightenment, which is what monks are doing, they're giving up everything in their life to pursue pure enlightenment. And you it's,
it just makes sense to go to those things. So it's not something you don't have to give up anything to be a Buddhist, you can do whatever you want. I mean, ideally, can't be a serial killer. I wouldn't say you're really practicing Buddhist or maybe give up the murder. Yeah, give up the
Yeah, but it is a natural I do think that Yeah, people Buddhists generally do live pretty simply after like practicing for a while because they realized that a lot of these things aren't they're adding stress to your life. A lot of these things are making life more complicated and but what I still like
Well, I like playing video games. And I like doing most normal people things. It's just, I can also notice when those things are becoming an addiction, I can notice when those things are subtracting enjoyment from my life. Like, for me, like video games are a huge like, cause I might add. And just cuz I wasn't cultivating my mind in a manner that was like, towards being focused. So I can notice those things now. And that way I not allowing I can enjoy those things. And honestly,
this is probably the next big misconception in Buddhism is they think that it's like a form of suppression of emotional suppression. They think that by meditating, you're learning to not feel things and that's not true at all. You're actually learning to feel things in their total capacity for capacity I feel especially if going from being depressed to like where I am now I feel things in a much greater capacity and because you are detaching the ego mind from feelings feelings and really the ego mind x is like a floodgate.
And if you get rid of the ego mind you feel everything in its intensity and I can be very intense very people at first and as a graduate thing it's not like all of a sudden you're just feeling everything at once but you are actually experiencing life a lot more intensely because you're experiencing it without that Cartesian theater in the way you're experiencing things as they are so you're experiencing the color flower and it's full of vibrancy especially after meditating for a while you read everything becomes vivid and intense and crazy and usually extremely joyful and but it when they're ripping you off the bike and Tony on the asphalt i love i was i wasn't exactly mindfulness
knee jerk reaction to avoid 500 ticket but uh.
Yeah, I mean in reality Yeah, you do suffer less from things like that. Like I like if I was if I was the person that I was three years ago and I happen to be able to read my whole week but now I can laugh I can end it I can leave the police station laughing it off with the guy who threw me off the bike it's like it's it does change how you process everything. It's which is ultimately the this is the one
The new your brain is one thing you have to live with. Oh, like you might as well learn to be congenial with it like a call. Well that's kind of the interesting thing is that you know people been meditating for thousands and thousands of years and just recently we're starting to get a lot of modern science supporting the fact that meditation works you know can you speak to any of that any any of the actual modern you know I I've heard of these interesting studies in them putting like monks under MRI scans and things like that like what what is the quantifiable effect of meditation um, lots there's a lot and the more we study at the more the more that it reveals as being just hugely beneficial on every level and a great book for this is published by a guardian journalist named James King let's call it Siddharth his brain and it's like massive text of like he makes a very digestible but it's like like hundreds of studies done on this stuff and like all pretty much like he tries to like sell up like all the money
Science up to that point, not all but a good chunk of it.
But it's Yeah, it's crazy. So not only in terms of like changes in your neuro chemistry and your neural structuring as you meditate, he doesn't act permanent changes because if you view
the view thoughts as neural pathways, you thoughts is like just the firing of it. And the cementing of the neural pathway over and over again. Those become essentially we can like map physical things to thoughts is kind of essentially that the firing internal pathways and and when you're meditating, you're learning to observe those in action. You're not like watching the electrical signals gone and your brain you're watching the manifestations of those things in terms of thoughts, and then you are literally going in and changing those things. So just a CVT is literally rewiring your brain meditation is literally rewiring your brain. And so
it's manifest. The more we do brain scans on the more than more it's just coming up is hugely conclusively
relevant. Go read Jim.
Kinsler look if you want if you're my sister, and I can't quote any off the top my head. There's a bunch there's lots of the kids the science is like unbelievable. This point and but I think more importantly evident is you watch people who meditate long term and not people who give her one retreating and quit after its people who are actually actively doing this and they are different people they are more functional, they are happier, they are more relaxed, they are more in control of how they have their mind and body and most importantly, the most important evidence that you can get, just try it and you will experience it as you go. And you set a 10 day retreat. I guarantee if you apply yourself and you do it how they tell you to you will come up with different person and that's ultimately thing is you can throw as much scientific evidence the one that was the threshold for me, I was like what got me interested in that and there's tons of books published on it. So does brain like kings on Buddha's brain by another author and waking up by Sam Harris has some of it and I have a list maybe you can link to the blog. I have a reading list of tons of these things, but you can read books and get a reading list on the blog.
actually release it goes looking at it less and yeah. And there's there's so much there's like there's really no it's like the type of thing it's like googling gravity at this point. It's like there's just google scientific benefits or scientific studies on meditation and you'll find no lack of resources on it. It's,
it's becoming, it's already pretty big. And it's becoming bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger than the standard a hell of a lot better than gravity, gravity. so confusing us and
branch to you had to develop a whole new realm of physics just to make sense of gravity. Exactly. That's the cool thing about and that's the cool thing about meditation is if you really give it a shot, I don't mean sit down for 15 minutes a few times. I mean, like, either do a retreat or do a study practice for like a month, or like at least try to clock in like 1020 hours and then tell me if you're really applying it. Read some of these books. Understand how it works. If you're really applying it correctly. Tell me it doesn't work. I got to tell you to send us an email. We'd be interested to talk to you. Yeah, I think there are certain people that can't meditate and that's like the zero
Point 1% that are like schizo frantic like skins in front of people who are literally chemically out of control of your mind. It's funny that 90% of people think that point 1% Yeah exactly. Oh it's it's amazing how often I talk to people about meditation and their response like oh that's that's not for me that I can't do that I'm like yet is I'm to add yeah oh god it's like that that means you should meditate I mean they needed even more than anyone else because you have so much more to gain yeah exactly it's gonna be a little bit harder work at first but like that's the thing is it's it is hard work for everybody versus just like if you put in that work you will undo those habits of attention deficit well i think what originally interested being meditation and maybe I was getting into it for the wrong reasons was that
you know I'm just a very goal oriented person I like to like work hard at things and I like to attain goals and you know, maybe attain material possessions or maybe increase my health and my wealth or relationships, you know, all these external things and I kind of originally viewed meditation
As a way to help me along that journey to
allow me the focus to maybe increase my wealth or allow me to focus to increase the quality of my social and dramatic relationships. Um, can meditation offer that? I mean, we all know that it can offer, you know, enlightenment and mindfulness and all those good things, but can it also offer you
aid in your pursuit for more external goals? Um, I think so. Like, it's, you can use it for whatever you want. That's why you have like tech giants and selling coffee, California employing this in our offices,
I'd say if you're employing it for material gain, and you're probably not on the path to enlightenment but you can still gain benefits from it. You can apply meditation everyone
ideally like those people. There's like Star means using it for soldiers. Now to make them better killers. I'd say that you are going off the path to enlightenment as you are today.
You are still using the science of meditation for your own benefit. Yeah.
So it's like it's the thing is, is the science works it's like, but word are using it for. And I think that honestly, like, I wouldn't be surprised if like, you could train better Kelly's with it. And then they would continue to practice it back home after they got back from war, and it's still making them a better person. I think that meditation does.
I think that by dissociating with the stories that we tell ourselves we naturally start breaking down two evils that those stories ingrained in us and I think that everybody if everybody I do like the Dalai Lama claim that if every single person picked up meditation he thinks that world peace would be attainable within a few years and
I think that everybody picked up meditation for the right reasons within a few years if people were meditating be better killers or time meditation. Yeah, and I don't know about that but
yeah, so does that answer your question? Yeah Yeah,
no. under percent Um, I think what
To what I was talking about that you know I can kind of be a little bit goal oriented what originally
maybe turn me off to possibly to begin with and after talking to you I'm going to go back and give a Boston a shot by the way I'm gonna I'm gonna try doing that for a little oxy make it sound awesome you the poster child for pasta
but I've read mindfulness in plain English
which as you recommend on your blog is awesome book
and the
the implication of what he was writing his book is amazing book but I felt the implication was that we're we're trying to reach enlightenment by practicing the pasta and I read that and I was like
come on like that that just felt like a very very lofty goal and I was originally getting into meditation to you know help calm my mind help observe my thoughts help become more in touch with my emotions yada yada yada I was not getting into it to become enlightened you know that sounded like a bit
am I misinterpreting the purpose of the pasta?
No I think you're misinterpreting the loveliness of enlightenment I think it's a but that's the thing is you can you can read mentalist in plain English and that is I do consider that like the practical Bible of meditation like that is such a hugely practical book. But yeah i mean that's the type of thing like to the meat and spit out the bones use whatever you want with meditation can help you What do you mean by that? Just pick and choose what what's helpful. Exactly, exactly you do you take what you want and leave something if it doesn't help you. And honestly, like there's a lot of things like I when I started getting into Busan, non self, I thought like my conception of non self was as a doctrine and I didn't, I like didn't want it so I did away with it. And then I later got different insight on what non self actually was, and I now embrace it.
But uh, that's the thing is like Buddhism is practical. First and foremost. If it's gonna make you stop practicing, then it. Don't do it. Don't do it. The important thing is that you're practicing meditation and you know
Important thing is that you're trying to alleviate your suffering in some form or another. And I mean, that's the idea behind boozing or whatever it is. And but this is where Buddhism strays from meditation. In general, you can use meditation for any purpose. You can't use Buddhism really for any purpose.
But yeah, if meditation like regardless like yet, totally pick and choose the meditation, do whatever you want. And I think that regardless, it will enhance your life. And if you don't, if enlightenment isn't something that's really appealing to you don't do that was appealing. I would love to be kind of a ridiculous concept to that somebody can just everyday person. It just sounds unattainable. I mean, we kind of just put a lot of
mental weight on that word enlightenment. You know, I like to think that the Buddha was enlightened like to think that maybe Jesus Christ was enlightened and it just almost sounds comical to say, I can become enlightened. Yeah, and I think it's, I think that's a cultural artifact that's attached to it. Enlightenment is just a
The total accumulation of mindfulness and it's a progressive state. It's something that I, you eventually reach. And when you completely understand your own mind, it's really just us. Just you, you go through, you go through your meditation path, becoming more and more and more aware, because you're learning to observe more and more things. And as you observe things, it's like it gets once you've observed that thing, you can observe it. So it is a snowball effect. The red pill in the matrix. Yeah, it is, once you take it, you can't go back. Essentially, you can forget about certain things, you can become less mindful, you can backtrack to a degree, but like, once you're like, aware of your own habit for something and you watch that thing manifest in you, then you can't just like undo that knowledge. So like awareness and awakening is a cumulative factor that keeps growing and growing and growing. And if you practice regularly, then you are on the path to enlightenment. Regardless if you practice meditation, whether you like it or not, I guess I've lightened by the day. Yeah, exactly. And you you are reaching closer to a state of it. And I think people think it is an unattainable thing, but it's attainable by every single person that sits on it.
Haitian cushion for 15 minutes it's like a you are slowly reaching that goal you've already tasted Lightman like like I said like we said before when you're a kid the the Buddhist like Buddhist Buddhist preach that you start out life enlightened and you start out life with that they call it the like the clear pure mind and as you grow older becomes clouded with ego with with thoughts and everything and enlightenment is learning to return to that pure state of just like board or search and whatever you're doing with no ego with no suffering
if you still experience things play for capacity you experience pain we don't suffer from it and in my experience once you learn to mitigate pain like that essentially as if you have no pain. So like ooh, superpower it is is what it is a weird mindfulness is a superpower. It is the next step for humanity. I do think it's like it's a psychological superpower. It's a it's a learning to learning to exceed the things that brought pull us down as a species starting to exceed the things that hold us back and it is yeah, it is essentially a superpower you look at
And the more experienced that and the more you delve into like the Gianna states which is like the deep states of focus. It's It feels like a superpower. And it's bizarre. They even Tibetan Briana, does that just mean the focus What does that yeah, it's essentially john Jay h A and A is a state of deep focus. And there's there's different levels and it's if you like, if you like progress markers if you like, like having a sense of progress. Jonah's are a great thing to research. They're dangerous, because then you start when you start seeking about that becomes self defeating. But they are really interesting because they're almost all within Buddhist meditation. They're like, universal experience. So are there like different types of john, is what do you mean the more like signpost soon, you hit the first Jonna. There's like eight or nine genres depending on who you ask. And when you hit the first Janet's marked by feeling called PTC, you enter into the state of deep focus, he could go to that absorption in one thing, and you get a wash with this like feeling of euphoria and this feeling of total focus. It's like being a kid you feel like you're a kid again, with you just like it's just you in the objectivity focus and everything else dissipates. And you actually get this rush of euphoria. It's almost like taking a small hit.
See it's really interesting. You mean you're making meditation sound really fun? Yeah. Oh dude like okay so monks talk about like they they go back from meditating for years and they go and watch a movie they're bored out of their minds they say that they can't is imaginings. Most Interesting thing they did doesn't give me the same thrill yeah my breath yeah exactly did the most boring thing becomes the most interesting thing which maybe it's self fulfilling in a weird way and but uh.
Yeah it's once you enter into deep states of meditation It is like the some of the most profound experiences you can have. And it's it's crazy and it's wild and it feels like a superpower. And it is like it's using your mind in ways that you hadn't done before. It's just cultivating like, I know I like I wouldn't be surprised. Don't be too surprised if like 20 years down the line. If we had an entire like cultural people like hardcore, practicing meditation, you'd find people like a lift with our minds. I don't think that's how it works. But like, I wouldn't be that surprised because it feels like you're tapping into this other raw power of your brain that's just you so much different from our normal functioning a lot of monks say
When you enter interested in meditation you're allowing your mind to rest for the first time since it's essentially it's its existence you because essentially essentially your adult life so for the first time in your total ever since your balls dropped yeah so the first time is taking it taking a break Yeah exactly. And
by doing that your your awakening some sort of new energy in it and it feels like that I don't know how to explain that I don't know like I don't know I'd be I would be interested to see if they can monitor the genres and brain scans and see what Yeah, so what are the other john is that's john one yeah that's like already like kicking it sounds tough already to do
you some people I was teaching I taught a retreat in Nepal and there was a few there's a few people that were experiencing it within five days
and I experienced it I think I don't think I experienced my first surgery I got small taste of it. But I think experience I haven't experienced that my second retreat several times and but uh. Yeah. Second one. So the interesting thing about the john is is as they progress, they get harder and harder to describe it because they're further and further beyond.
The form of virtualization, which sounds ridiculous, it sounds like some weird spiritual Whoo. But a really they do get harder, harder to scale. I think I've only experienced the first two. I think I've definitely experienced the first one a few times. Second one, I think is economic carries the second one, I figured the terminology for it, and I'm probably gonna it up. But it's more about so first one is marked by that feeling of euphoria. The second one is marked by this. It's deeper absorption. And it's it's that feeling of before it gets replaced by a feeling of total serenity where everything dissipates and you have like, essentially nothingness and you feel the essentially the absence of every feel complete absence of things, you go beyond the world of the realm of conceptualization. sounds ridiculous. Sure. All the sounds kind of silly is where the jobs are. Generally, the general vaginas are generally recommended for advanced practitioners. And like Generally, people don't delve into this until like they've been practicing for a few months at least. But I don't take someone who's never meditated before me, like sit here till you feel like you're on Molly.
What it sounds like a song.
Like a tall order
I'm gonna drink the Kool Aid moment yeah and that uh yeah Johnny It sounds like you already describing some level nine with this complete dissolution of self and a serenity how how the they reset levels hey that's the thing is I need I need to go back and read more on him I kind of I like to type tend to read I tried to try to read on the genres as I progress through them so I like experience something I'm going to go back and like see kind of like what like if there's literature that describe this that's what happened with the first one I was like I experienced this crazy feeling for my second retreating I'm like there's got to be something on this and turns out there's an entire huge terminology on the Jonathan like each one is described in detail and it matches up exactly what what it just because I'm a curious what what are eight nine I don't I don't remember off the top my head and honestly they got harder and harder to describe and that's why that's where the language surrounding it gets a lot more poetic and poetic to the point where it seems nonsensical I'm sure it makes sense with once you've experienced it and but for the everyday mind you can google the giants and they talk about the different ones and it gets further and further.
Further removed from the conceptual world because you're going beyond the realm of the ego itself and it's not like you're you don't ever have like out of body experiences it's just you're seeking sinking deeper and deeper the kind of like a dreamlike state but you are conscious through the entire thing apparently I'm curious sorry to switch gears a little bit what is the Buddhist view on what happens after death that's
totally you're totally different different answer depending on what kind of Buddhist you ask so your particular Teradata turbo it's not mine I don't yes I'm really know the I don't really know the
don't know the whole terabyte of you and honestly a different person to person to adjust so culturally influenced in so many different things I can tell you my personal view is here and
I think reincarnation if I were to believe in it.
There's a Tibetan monk
who wrote Matthew Ricard he's This is a neuropsychologist turned Tibetan.
For a few, a lot of really interesting books, there's only it's called the monk in the philosopher. It's a competition between him and his father who was a French philosopher. So Tibet, neuroscientist turned Tibetan monk conversation with a French philosopher. It sounds like that sounds like I wish I could be a fly on the wall for that conversation. Oh, you can't because they wrote it down and I'll awesome. So the monk in the philosopher and so he talks about he delves into the idea of reincarnation is really just a natural continuation of the idea of karma idea of commerce. huge misconception on the west to and just like the Indian it's not necessarily a Buddhist idea. It's an Indian idea. But a lot of people think karma means like this external force that when you do bad things, bad things happen when we do good things. Good things happen to you even people in India and especially in Thailand believe this they think that you accumulate good Marin good things happen to you and Thailand day especially, they think that that mainly manifesting wealth for them good merit means good wealth. It's a it's a folk theology thing. It's a total butchering, of the idea of what karma was supposed to be karma is literally just the law of cause and I
You do things and things happen for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And so everything you do in your life has some impact not only on the world, but on your psyche. So you kill a bug, you're reinforcing the behavior of killing within yourself, you slander somebody else, you're reinforcing the behavior of slander. So, the accumulation of bad karma is things deemed too bad by Buddhism, which is just the accumulation of habits. Essentially, karma can essentially be viewed,
also called Sankara which is conditioned things it's by doing things we are conditioning the world and conditioning ourselves it's the seeds of action and essentially it karma is effect you have causes and then karma is effect and essentially also karma is caused this because effects create Carson said it's just the natural the cycle continues exactly it's just it's that's why karma is depicted as a wheel. It's just like it's a movie on the microscopic sense and the macroscopic so
If a person can be said to be an accumulation of effects and an accumulation of effects that also causes things. So you are the result of your genetics, you are the result of every behavior leading up until you you are ultimately the result of all startups being condensed into a ball at the beginning of the universe. That is the beginning of this cycle of karma, essentially, and then cause and effect nothing exploded and formed a dust and formed planets and then formed your parents somewhere down the line and then that form to you. You are an accumulation of other things you and humiliation of karma and reincarnation is said to be just the natural continuation of that. So when you die and the things that you are the things that you did, don't just stop it gets thrown back into the universe. In some way. Your actions have made ripples in the universe. And
I like there's a Douglas Hofstetter is a mathematician. He talks about the idea of when somebody dies, he says
They live on, they live on like a sense, like a like an afterglow in like the collective Corona the consciousness of people around them they live on in some form or another and the ways that they've touched people in the ways in the actions and the ways that they lived in the memories that they leave. That to me is reincarnation. You are not necessarily reincarnated the same from the are now but you are living on in some form or another and,
and also
so yeah, reincarnation essentially just like the karmic continuation of that thing, just like the things that led up to you, being who you are in that weird manifestation of you quote unquote,
doesn't just stop it continues going on in the cycle of the universe. And so I don't know if I believe so there's the traditional idea of like, there is like a consciousness a distinct consciousness, funneled consciousness or like a drop out of the ocean and that gets carried on a pass on to another
Being depending on the merit that you accumulate that it's kind of the traditional like folktale idea of karma, not all Buddhist hold on to that. It's again, it's totally hotly debated. And that,
in that in the book, Matthew Carter talks about the idea of like, maybe it's just an accumulation of actions that somehow all get consolidated and transcribed under something else. Like there's the idea that like, it's passed on, like a radio wave to the next thing that picks it up. I don't know if I believe in that it sounds kind of silly to me. But I do believe in the idea of karma and the idea of just little it's just law of cause and effect so you do things and those are manifest out in the universe in some way or another and I think that reincarnation can live on and that idea and that's an idea of reincarnation I think pretty much anybody can get behind right
but i don't know if i believe in like
a reincarnation is like a actual manifestation into another distinct being of all the things you've done because I don't know how that would like, keep its solidity Yeah, yeah, I'm actually explanation
reincarnation spoke to me an awful lot because I have always intuitively felt like reincarnation is true. But yeah, you exactly nailed it. Just kind of the actual process between, okay, how would I guess a soul if you want to call it go from transfer human to human or human to creature or something like that.
With that being said, Have you ever heard of a book called many lives many masters really, really, really cool book. So basically what happened was,
there was this psychologist in this psychologist started using hypnosis to treat his patients. And so he had this one particular patient.
He believed that the the root of this patient psychological issue was based in his early childhood. So it put them under hypnosis, which hypnosis people have a weird view of it, but it actually has been shown that it allows you to kind of like unlock memories that actually happened that are kinda like deep down there so they put them under hypnosis.
And they brought him back to early childhood. You know, five years old, four years old, three years old, kept going,
kept going back two years old, one years old. And the psychologist was almost just curious at this point and kept going back,
please. One month old, few weeks old, kept going.
And then this dude started speaking in an ancient
version of I think it was Spanish or something like that. And it wasn't like modern Spanish, like something you can come up on. It was it was almost like the Shakespearean equivalent of Spanish it was, it was a language actually so complicated and difficult that they had to bring in specialized people to kind of like decode what he said they couldn't just pick up somebody already just known it No way. He was just like a regular dude. I'm fluent in this language, by the way, like this ancient version of this language. So he came out and the psychologist like Dude, I gotta be honest with you. I don't really know what just happened. You just kind of started saying some weird, but it was actually
Was all recorded on audio ended up finding some people to figure out what language it was. And he ended up just kind of describing his life, I believe is more or less as a slave as a servant and this language
and there's really no explanation for it. And it wasn't a one off thing actually, he ended up getting a few other patients to recreate the same phenomenon where he could get them to start speaking fluently and these other languages
that they'd never spoken before. I'm not saying that that necessarily proves that reincarnation is real, but I thought is very, very, very strange. Yeah, it's fascinating and actually like a lot of even in a lot of a lot of the monasteries that I've been to in Thailand and I had one experience with the last retreat I ended up in what part time work outside of pie and where there was a woman who foreign woman who kind of like broke down crying in the middle of one of the meditations and we would go up and we talked with amongst afterwards and talk about like I had asked if we had an equal
And I remember her talking about she said, I had this overwhelming feeling. She says, I've had this overwhelming feeling of it was like, it was like sadness for something that I lost. But like, joy that I had that I had, like, I was returning to, like,
getting it back. And
and the monk said,
Does it feel like you're like returning home and away? Does it feel like you're like coming back to something that's familiar. And she had never meditated before. It's like her first time and like, and like, I think in like, a long time, at least in or maybe ever I think she was brand new to and that's what that's always worth about the exchange. So she said, he said, it doesn't feel like you're like coming home. You returning to something like that you've experienced before. And she's here, yes. But never meditated before. And he said, Oh, he just said, it's a matter of fact, Lee said, Oh, you were you were a deep meditative in your past life and you are returning to that feeling of joy and of return out of thing and she's just she just said yes. She said, Yeah, that makes sense. She's at the I feel that's totally true and
This really again, I'm a skeptic of like anything else do you think condition because it's really profound exchange of like for her? That answer felt totally right. And it wasn't something that she thought of before. It wasn't something like it was all new experience to her. But she just said, Yeah, he said, he said,
it's a matter effectively as if he knew as if he'd heard this 100 times before. And he was the this monk was a specialist with working with wrong, it's like, this is one of the biggest temples in in Thailand. And he just said it like it is 100 times before and she just said, Yeah, like it just made sense. There's there's really profound exchange and I just like, like laugh to myself, but it was really critical. So I don't Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that. And I've heard other stories like there was like a story about a girl who her psychologist was walking through in your childhood, and
she described different parents than the one she currently had. And
eventually her parents took her they found these exact people that she was describing there on the other side of the country or something.
They took her back to this house and she could describe the house and total details to name our room. And apparently these these other parents, their daughter passed away like, right as this girl was born like, within, like the days of this girl, this girl being born and she was able to describe in detail point to all of her favorite toys and all these things and this and this other life and all of these are anecdotal, of course, but yeah, it's it's fascinating. I mean, it's, it shows that
I think, at least at the very least, shows that there's a lot of the human brain that we don't understand. If we do take these anecdotal stories to be true. It shows that there's a lot about the human brain that we don't understand. And maybe there's room for something like reincarnation, I have no idea what that mean if it was true, but that's so far beyond my comprehension. And again, this goes into old practical side of Buddhism. I don't concern myself i don't know i don't like
spend too much time thinking about it, but it's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, it really is. definitely buy into it a lot more than the whole heaven or hell business. My opinion,
my opinion, you know, Heaven is all around.
We're kind of already on heaven if you ask me and I was all around us. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
That's why I like having having a long history with the Christian roots. There are certain aspects of heaven and theories of having a hell that I really like like CS Lewis, have you read anything was not specifically with the Narnia series, but he was also a big theologian and watch the movie does that count? Yeah, call it sort of has he wrote a lot of theology books, uses he was he was heavily Christian. He was Orthodox Christian later in his life. And that's kind of Christianity that I was a part of, kind of, as I left since about that my family is still a part of, I think there's a lot to be said for it. But he wrote a book called The Great divorce was really fascinating parable or analogy for heaven. Hell, for maybe it was his idea of Heaven and Hell,
if it wasn't, it was a very good one. It's basically just heaven or hell or an accumulation of states, it's you are constantly spending your life either snowballing towards a state of goodness or stalling going towards a state of total self absorption, selflessness, self absorption, it's essentially the same as Buddhist.
Buddhist philosophy you are either working towards selflessness and ego death. Or you were coming completely lost in yourself, which could be said to be like depression. Depression is a complete absorption in yourself. And it's miserable. Any person that is completely absorbed in themselves is probably miserable. Unless they're like, delusional, self absorbed. And like, I know, maybe they're happy that way, but usually breeds misery for a lot of people. And so CS lewis's idea of Heaven and Hell is you either are constantly snowballing and working your way towards goodness or badness in heaven, hell, or ditch the manifestations of that so when you die and you are working towards God or goodness and you're living in this the seeds you plant around that or you are living in total self absorption and stuck with yourself for eternity and that's ultimately it's not like you just choose to believe and then you're saved or not. It's like you are constantly making choices throughout your life that are snow going towards one at the other. It's still a little bit black and white for me but like that idea I like that is
It works with most other theologies and worldviews, and CS Lewis is one of the biggest names in theology and he was prescribing to that. So it's something that I could kind of get banned. So if someone's listening to this right now and they have depression, what advice would you give to them and meditate and I think
try to accept try to research and not not even astray except don't accept anything on blind faith x try to research the idea of something like CBD which proves that something like depression or anxiety is hugely
is hugely behavioral, and how important mental constructions are in the construction of your mind is like, learn about how your mind works. Meditation is one of the best ways to do that cuz you're learning about on experiential level, but just research like research CBD if you're not with a therapist, research it yourself. If you're with a therapist. Find one that does CBD. It's hugely it's like one of the most patently proven cures for anxiety and depression.
It's like, as far as therapies go, it's huge. But the more you can learn about the mind of the better, like, if you that's that that should be the starting point. And meditation is one of the best ways to do that. Because you learned about it in a first hand account, like you went about it in a more reliable format than reading any scientific journal. Do. You were learning about it through your own experience, which is the most viable form of truth you can get. And
But yeah, I think if you're depressed, I think the best thing knows that there's a way out like I've experienced it, and it's not necessarily it doesn't have to manifest in Buddhist meditation. But I think in some way, it has to manifest in a structural re changing of how you approach your mind. I think that as long as if you try to find other ways through you might find some leeway and hopefully, like I hope everybody finds secure. But I do think that depression is a disease of
of habit and mental structure, and you can put a bandaid on it through things like
medication and that's hugely important for some people. And ultimately, if you want to get to something like the roots of I really do think you have to delve into on the on the level of mental structure. Yeah, absolutely. So have hope and know that there are other options for those of for those of the people that are burnt out on the western drug system, and I've been through 20 different medications and are feeling hopeless. There is another way it just takes a lot of work. Yeah, no, it's almost scary how easily we give up medications these days, and I wish doctors would start prescribing
meditation and actually, I'm curious now that we're having a lot more scientific research towards meditation, whether or not and that's going to start being taught in medical school. It is already actually there's a lot of especially a lot of talk therapist that there are embracing it on a huge level especially because a lot of interest coincides with CBD and seems like the most accepted theory for a lot of psychosomatic disorders. And yeah, it is it's happening. It's a slow it's a slow trickle, but it's happening in public schools. It's happening in private therapy. It's happening.
Holy Could you imagine if we replaced like, did you ever have to take a class where you wrote cursive in elementary school imaginary replace that with meditation, I think it would be great. I think we would have a whole generation of much more aware kids and that's like the next step for humanity. I think that I really do think that if we want to become superhuman then the next steps for that are going to be the cultivation of awareness and harnessing of technology the merging of humanity with technology once we harness those things we're going to be like unstoppable and unstoppable in a good way because our awareness is keeping those things in check I guess that's the question Are you allowed to be aware when your brain is inside of robotic body and maybe you're super aware yeah how does the Cartesian split work when you literally do split and we upload our brain to the internet you'll probably seems to be you that's that's pretty terrifying yeah it's a crazy it's interesting it's fun to think about
I love that I love the thoughts experience there's a really good blog called wait but why he talks about he like delves into those is like what happens to you when you are clone what happens to you when you are uploaded to the cloud.
Well done up led me to the cloud. Yeah you cease to be you. That's what happens. Well you heard about Elon Musk's latest company narrow link Ooh. It's gonna get weird man. So uh, actually acquired this company. It was originally a company, I believe, to help people who don't have limbs or don't have fully functioning limbs to be able to control prosthetic limbs with their mind. So they've actually kind of gotten to the point where you can attach a prosthetic limb to someone and they can close like a robotic and closed just thinking about it. And so Elon Musk said okay that's awesome but let's let's Elon Musk the out of this. So he bought the company and he says if all goes well according to him and he's usually pretty accurate about these things and about 15 years we should be able to do everything we can currently on our smartphones using our
Mind and he says, you're going to have to just get a small injection into your brain stem. And this can be this electromagnetic mesh that's going to cover your brain. And then from there, you're going to be able to do whatever it is. Yeah, after watching so much Black Mirror, I'm like, I'm not injecting anything in my brains time. Well, it's funny because I have the exact same reaction. I don't want to inject into my brainstem.
And I don't think you're going to be quite as worried about this because you're going to be too busy being enlightened and doing your own thing. But for the rest of us who are trying to you know, compete and business or society whatever the it is, we're in school. It's going to get to the point where if you don't have these brain injections, you by comparison to these people who do have them are gonna be idiot. You're going to be so dumb and you're going to be so unproductive. I mean, why would a company hire you someone who has to take
Eight hours of that company's time to type out a report to someone who can literally just think it up immediately transcribed and have it done in 15 seconds. Yeah, yeah, human application is going to have to be the new norm in order to, well, nothing is in order to succeed, the traditional idea of success will have to do that. But also at that point, maybe work will be outdated
by the time we get to that point. And maybe it's just something you do for maybe it's just something you do just because you want to do it. I feel like we're and that's the thing it takes some technology is advancing literally an exponential rate. It's like, who knows where we're gonna be in 10 years. We didn't think we you take you take somebody from 40 years ago, and you plop them in today, and I think it's impossible. It's like that. It's like the things that were the things that we're doing now, what they thought were impossible years ago, lightspeed travel probably isn't that far off like it's
yet we're breaking the laws of physics and our regular basis and don't you hate when that happens? It's the worst and the best, but, uh, yeah, I do. I think it's gonna be it's gonna be fascinating. It's gonna be cool. It's
It's obviously an awesome time to be human and think
we we do have a lot to be scared of oil so over time to be excited for I'm excited for it. I'm excited for it as well. I'm gonna be one of the last people to jump on putting something into my brain stem but uh after like I'll see
pretty easily you're meditating in a pop up brain pills again it
lame man it's been about two hours thanks for coming on let's try to wrap this up where can we find your blog and cool so I don't have a lot on it right now as you know but I will be writing more hopefully over the next few months I think that this epic especially after this experience in China it's gonna be very inspiring and I do have a goal to get this book done by the end of the year and it's also going to manifest and block books throughout the process so it's called the skeptics guide it's at the skeptics guide dot wordpress. com It's called the skeptics guide deliberation or so the the the book is either going to be titled The ego death I think it might just be titled ego death or the skeptics guide deliberation just long title but uh. Yeah you can find
At the blog if people want to chat add me on facebook send me an email maybe I can link on your on your thing or something I'll put in the show notes but uh. Yeah right now I don't have like a huge I hate social media have a huge presence on anything social media and don't need it
but uh. Yeah if people want to follow the blog that'd be that'd be overjoyed and are definitely been influenced for me to start writing more definitely have a person that thrives on the attention of others but uh.
At least it did drives me to be creative i like i like putting out things if they can if I can if their debt in the cable arena worthy of their marketing make a difference to people I like putting them out but uh. Yeah
very cool sounds good john Maxwell and he'll be enlightened by the end of the week
thanks for coming on man I keep getting scuffles with the cops yeah hopefully not avoid that I peace Thank you for listening to the mental architect I am your host Sam Sebring if you enjoyed this episode go on down to iTunes and
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Sam is an ambassador for personal growth. When Sam started to take action towards a better life, it wasn't long before he was hooked faster than Captain Blackbeard's left hand. Years later, Sam strives to produce change in others similar to the identity level transformation which occurred within himself. His aim is to break fulfillment down into a series of straightforward steps, and introduce it into the life of anyone who is willing to embark on the path of action, education and ownership.