foreign go for it just continue hey fellow G and tears don't like our spirituality with a Twist no such thing as mistakes we just roll yes yes everything is destined even my even my purple flub-ups yeah on the [...] tagline of this thing I made it but I'm bad set of gazillion [...] times um all right so good times it's all about the professionalism that's it so um okay so we're doing this thing on what's sometimes called the mind only School sometimes called the yogic experience school and we're having a chat about it hey I was thinking about Daniel it's not the kind of thing you can do full Justice to in the amount of time we'll be able to do it but it's a different way of thinking about the world and it's a different kind of spiritual teaching and it's cool to talk about it was initially driven by the idea of talking about ego in this sense of like individual identity that you have to protect or something like that because that was a Hot Topic and Daniel had uh this whole idea of an existential Guardian operating system yeah you know so we did that but um it led naturally into this discussion of this other thing and we got to this point of really talking about what the connection is between the mind and the external world so we'll solve that in the next 45 minutes no problem you know it's funny is my daughter I had a long this is like it's been very synchronistic lately uh it's been kind of nice lots of little synchronistic stuff actually I have whoops reaches back I found this book actually on sale in the local bookstore and I was doing synchronicity it's like that's synchronicity it's so synchronistic that the actual book is there we found it like a couple of weekends ago I had a copy back in the day and I lent it to a student grad student gone so I've never lent a book to a grad student it hasn't disappeared naughty yep gone I must have done the same thing to people too so that's okay um anyways uh uh my daughter uh uh speaking of synchronicities uh has to do this uh class at uh you know for her undergrad and it's supposed to be about she can either choose to do an Ingress class exam and she was asking me about should she do the in-class exam which sounds really hard so I was like now write the paper but the paper's on the problem of Consciousness and what's the nature of like Consciousness in the brain I was like holy [...] we're doing an episode on this exactly like uh tomorrow so this is uh this is our nicely synchronistic thank you Uncle Carl thanks Uncle Carl lifetime uh uh and connection to episodes all right so here's what they say in this yoga experience School brief version they talk about these three natures and I don't think I got your Vibe on this Daniel and I am curious to see what you think especially since you're coming out of retreat and in a very profound State of Mind so they talk about the idea of the dependent nature and this is the idea there's this sort of uh causal flow that's happening there's like a kind of a karmic energetic Cosmic flow that's happening and um and all these experiences are constantly happening to all of us right then they're all footing by and in our way of looking at this from our own point of view some of these things are experienced as external things sensory experiences from the world around us that we take in through the gates of our senses I like to use the word Gates nice word so Gates of the senses come in some of them are experienced as more internal as in the flow of our thoughts and feelings um our deeper drives and motivations those kinds of internal things that we've been talking about a lot lately yeah um so there's this kind of karmic energetic flow happening is the idea and this is what they call the dependent nature right it depends on causes and conditions I think it's the idea so they say dependent we just like to talk that way so you know that makes sense that they would say that but anyways I don't think you have to be Buddhist to get this idea obviously no there's a flow of experience some of it's sensory some of it's internal some of it's how our internal relaxed reacts to our sensory and vice versa as we've been talking about these things influence one another you know yeah so uh so this is the whole thing you know you're in love and that you're in love with everything you feel like you're in love and like you love the whole world or you were talking about in The Retreat Daniel you're so full of the feeling of this Retreat you kind of like feel like you could just embrace the whole world right you feel this expansive quality of like I love everything I love this whole planet right yeah so yeah these things are affecting one another okay so that's the dependent nature and then they have this thing they call the imputed nature this is where this gets to get gets pretty deep in this yogic experience thing because I think by calling it Yogi experience they mean that this is what you can experience through the process of your spiritual training and practice and meditation and all this kind of stuff but self-reflect on these things but keeping in mind that the word yoga in this sense is not in reference to uh bendy stretchy right yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not we're not talking about downward dog or you know Warriors right yeah warrior pose yeah yeah yeah in this case yoga meaning like uh practice or the coming together of the sort of unification of two different things at once right and as you were talking about your retreat obviously the physical aspects of yoga can be a part of this yeah you know it could be part of that training yeah but now you're talking about something else on top of that too yep yeah yeah yeah like physical physical yoga is nice it does help to clear the channels and rid the body of some anxiousness or whatever you know whatever some physiological physical combination of discomfort and feelings for sure which is why it's really nice and it does some strengthening and whatever health-wise but I think the the deeper part is like that that's external working internal and what we're moving you know more in this conversation is internal then moving external probably that's true but even it's going to be weird it's such an interesting take on things so I will yeah yeah but like we were talking about I think in some some of these previous episodes obviously what you do with your body is going to affect your mind and vice versa right for sure so if you do the yogic stuff physically rock out good right but then there's the internal part too yeah uh um okay so there's this thing they call the imputed nature and this is the idea of this sense of distinction between subjects and objects between internal and external and they use this word imputed meaning that in our minds we impute this idea that there's a completely independent external world that's separated from our internal world and is separated from our mind and our Shen and our like our experience of things we break this apart and we see these two things as like um two separate things two entirely separate things and they're going to say that that's not true that that split between the internal experiences and the external experiences is like not really there it's kind of artificial and imputed now what totally that means is the thing I guess that you're going to wrestle with when you try to just talk about this and what you know we're going to do our best stab at trying to talk about this but the normal way I think they're saying is that the way you experience the world that you think okay there's this external world and I have my sensory experiences of it and there's my internal world and I have my own emotions and thoughts and feelings and those are two separate things in reality and they're going to say no they're not and it's even a little bit different even than saying they're interconnected but we'll I guess we'll try to explore it and see what we think this means to both of us right as we try to like wrap our heads around this and share what we can of our own uh two senses yeah around this so but they're saying No this is an artificial split so it's something you call it like it's like a non-dual kind of way of thinking but in this very strong way to say you know no there really aren't external objects the way you think there are and those aren't split off from the internal world the way you think it is that's not correct I think ultimately it's going to go the idea that there's just kind of like one flow happening which we'll get to we'll get to the punch line of the thing it's kind of building towards that but that's the idea and so the big word here is like imputed that the the point of like uh confusion in this way of talking ignorance or delusion or whatever if you want to use more fancy spiritual words but the whole idea of what's not being seen is this idea that's an imputed thing that there isn't this internal external split the way it seems to be that's kind of a fabrication of our way of experiencing the world so on some subjective level it's happening but like when you go deep it's not really now I can say that there's a lot of different attitudes about this so I study pretty deep Daniel in his own way too we all study our own things but I studied like sort of the presentation of this from llamas and Kappa who's the founder of the school of Dalai Lama's and he is a little critical of this point of view so not everybody totally agrees with this so if you hear this and you're like that doesn't seem right to me then you'll have good company of other people that lost questions about this but for me this has been a very interesting kind of like little time of like doing our podcast together because I'd like to say okay let me take this really seriously you know and invest some of myself in it and see what would this feel like to see the world this way sure so that's what's been really interesting for me let me like let me take the leap and go okay true not true I'm not even going to debate that point what would this feel like the think of the world this way that what I think is internal and external and that division that seems so real to me is imputed what would that mean so I guess that's why I'm throwing out maybe for the two of us talking about it and then people listening to go like okay let's take the plunge in this together a little bit yeah I'm gonna put our toes in the water jump in the pool see what this feels like to do this I've been doing it myself a little bit and it has this really we were talking about like intoxicating ideas right intoxicating ideas it's a new phrase I like the ideas that are intoxicating and it's a kind of intoxicating idea to like play with in your mind you know it's like a little bit like uh playing with this idea of like the verbal ayahuascas of the world right you take good idea and it like has a like a it has a power to it that affects your mind kind of deeply so like that's what I've been trying to do with this I've been trying to play with this idea in my life since we've been talking about this and investing a little bit more of myself in it which is interesting because the school I started off in studying all this stuff was Zen and Zen's a little like this so it's kind of a little bit of a flashback for me too but anyway so that's the imputed thing you got anything you want to like throw in about that now or should I do the next no we'll wait until we finish the next one okay so then what they say next is this idea of what they call the perfect nature and this is this recognition that this subject object split that we so strongly feel does not really exist so here's uh how things are seen to really exist then on some level what's happening is there is always this sense of our minds creating our worlds with this split of sensory outside internal emotional conceptional inside um but the idea more like okay now we're going to say something different we're going to say no what's going to happen in this way of thought is that there's just one flow kind of we'll kind of describe it that way and in our way of experiencing our mind's way of experiencing this flow we experience some things as internal something is external some things as physical objects some things as mental objects within our own mind spaces but both these internal and external things are just part of this one underlying flow which is very hard to see because we're so used to seeing things as internal and external experiences and making these divisions with how we kind of like look at our worlds so I think that's the best way I can think of to try to describe it these are just two different aspects of this underlying hidden flow that's going on and there's a kind of a a parallelism but maybe not even parallelism is the right way to talk about it but there's this one flow and depending how it hits us Well appear some of it will appear to be our own internal worlds and some of it will appear to be this external world but when we kind of recognize that no it's like really part of like one one flow the Supreme that's the perfect nature the Supreme Source yeah we did the whole thing on that at some point yeah uh all right so I to me and if you have the initial reactions I had some thoughts for myself which is like kind of [...] like well how crazy is this idea you know for us now but you have anything you want to talk about first with that because we didn't do a lot of prep on it no we didn't so this is just like hey surprise here's the school of thought this is the imputed nature and the perfect nature I mean I'm having a hard time differentiating them you know first first off they seem identical they're more they're more closely related I mean there's a fluent so they're emphasizing the idea that there's a flow of cause and effect in the first part yeah that part I can kind of see so I think the reason they talk about that way so you can recognize cause in the fact and then I think you're right then there's this idea like okay there's this imputed thing and then there's this idea of uh recognizing that no it's all part of this one kind of flow of mind for flow of shen or Spirit or something like that I mean I guess from what you're saying the first part emphasizes the idea that there is this causal flow right and then some of those things will appear as internal or external objects in that causal flow right correct yeah something like that so I think it's an emphasis on the cause of causal flow and how things appear and then the second part is more the idea that then we split more distinctly and then the third part is probably to say like well we have to unsplit so maybe that's the reason they talk about it that way but I hear what you're saying okay I think I think that makes a little bit more sense you know I mean I'm asking for I'm you know this is a little bit of clarification you know being on the because I was gone for you know whatever nine ten days before you before you go maybe it would be something like if you just said there's a causal if you just said there's a flow you might not recognize the cause and effect and you might not recognize the way things seem to appear and then you know I mean by the time you get to the third point you start going oh wait a minute no this is all part of like one underlying yeah Universal flow or something like that yeah I mean one of the things that we were definitely doing is is cultivating the sense of focus on the subject you know for sure yeah yeah yeah you know during the the mahamudra parts and things like this but during meditation this is often it's worth doing for people yeah so mahamutra is like we yeah we got the termin is like a certain kind of deep meditation where you try to like without a lot of props and meditative tools you try to like connect as much as you can to what the underlying nature of reality is or something and oftentimes you're you're you're open to the external world but your attention is drawn inward they'll they'll refer to it as like a passive State it's like a feminine passive practice but not passive in that like you're staring into space not doing anything you're actually not staring at anything in particular all of your energy is is withdrawn on the inside towards the subject the subject being you um but then also you know when you can when you can actually do that your realization of who you think you are is not the same as the you that you think that you are right now and even when saying it it sounds kind of wild which is why it's difficult to describe which is but you know but which is why we're having this conversation as best we can you were having so means great mutra means usually like seal sometimes you talk about mudras like things you would do with your hands and stuff like that but that's not the mudra that's being talked about here um this is this idea of like mudra meaning a seal yeah yeah a sealer yeah or something or like the ones you see off the pier in San Francisco or something like uh like um in this case I probably more akin to like a family seal for people who know what those are you know like like an emperor seal that they sometimes they throw it like that yeah exactly yeah like a seal you'd stamp yeah yeah so so a particular state of being that is sort of stamped on your whole body sort of like an external manifestation of an energetic state yeah stamped on the body or stamped on the mind or something right yeah stamped in the bottom of my mind like you know the thing is like different people are going to talk about what that means in different ways for sure you know I mean like what does Maha mudra mean but I mean there's a definitely like a Vibe especially I think in the kind of practices you were up to in the past few weeks that they talk this way like the karma kargus school which is one of Tibetan schools right this is how they talk you know deep down they're like a kind of a mind-only yoga experience kind of a place you know so they have this Vibe about them and so we were the fortuitous that we were doing this at this time I guess yeah there it is there it is thanks Uncle Carl thank you Carl um but and so we were definitely bringing the Mind back to the subject you know which is just a different a different state to to be in a on a normally we're focused on the external world most of our time we're I call it the the discursive mind right problem solving doing our thing and then as you bring your mind you know sort of back in and out of itself you get the issue of your uh default mode Network popping up right the Mind becomes less active and it moves more Inward and then all of a sudden your things start popping up your which is like the existential Guardian operating system exactly or the afflictive Consciousness right this eye maker yeah you know the thing that makes this feeling of I yes gives you your sense of your personality which I think and I don't know you've been doing this in the past week and tense but like to me my vibe and this has always been something like when you stop when you start looking at your own subjective experience then you can start noticing these other layers of yourself including this eye maker yep right you start noticing this this default mode Network and you start going wait a minute that's a [...] fault default mode Network and you start to become aware of that for yourself so you really you can realize a lot of things by this turning inwards you can start to realize oh these are my patterns these are my habits that's the eye maker or something right you're seeing that experience and so for people who are looking for an experience of of this wonderfully annoying State you can simply sit down with no prompt you know like turn off all your other things and try and close your eyes and just do some meditation for you know a little bit of time you'll figure you'll find it within the first probably 60 seconds and temperatures and and what is it well it's anything that you have not directly told yourself to do so if you say I'm gonna sit here and focus on my breathing and do nothing else anything else that is not you sitting there focusing on your breathing is this thing and for most people that's 99 it is they're not focusing on their breathing at all they're not there actually and so in this case I can defend the people who say oh we should be more present in that case yes I agree we should be more present but one of the things that I've really learned now in a deep way you cannot make you cannot force external change but you cannot force internal change by external means exclusively like you have to make the shift on the inside in order to become quote unquote mindful right I can't set timers and drop and draw strings on my fingers and have all these things that remind me to do these things in order for me to actually embody them I have to do them from the inside out not only from the outside in and so you know in this way for people who are looking to kind of like have this experience of your mind popping up your ego popping up your default mode Network whatever sit down close your eyes put a timer on for five minutes and see if you can keep yourself just focused on your breath good luck the thing that was so amazing when I first started doing the Zen stuff it was just a technique where you would take your breath in you do a little bit of special yoga breathing stuff that we won't talk about now you know all that stuff again and then you just count your breath on the exhalation so you just breathe out and you go one for the amount of time that you're breathing out yeah and it was freaking impossible like you'd make it to three and be like I just lost it what number realize okay and you have to start back over at one and you can't even make it to ten you know it's amazing to find out that your mind is really like that yeah it has all of this stuff going on inside right all these thoughts emotions sensory things happening but then I think what they're saying in this line of thought also this real strong sense of like an independent like you this little you or something and they kind of in this style of thinking right they're kind of saying oh yeah you gotta notice that that's a whole nother level inside of you that you can be aware of and then maybe after that you hit into this feeling of like oh I have this huge energetic nature with all this karmic stuff going on within it that would be the thing that you might think of after that sure because those are those other levels that they add to like a person right they say one is this sense of I talked about this in previous episodes yeah yeah and the other would be this sense of like oh wait I'm a huge energetic beating with all of this karmic stuff around me all this karmic energy those are two other layers of thinking about who you are right right so if you stop and do what you were doing for like whatever week 10 days or whatever it is then you know I think part of that in this style of doing things in that let me turn in words is that you start to notice these things because they're there yeah yogic experience yeah meditative experience you start and I was like oh wait a minute I got this little eye maker in me huh interesting oh wait a minute maybe there's more to me I'm like a huge more sprawling interconnected energetic thing than I really thought I was because these other people do things in the room and I feel what they're feeling inside themselves I feel other weird [...] you know I have a much more sprawling expansive Consciousness than I thought I had one of the things that I definitely picked up you know being on Retreat is when we when we did discussion about the ego because it's going to come up inherently right well that school loves to talk that way oh yeah the karma card you loves it yeah yeah so and the thing you know one of the things that my teacher brought up was that like your ego is not it's not the thing that people I think think it is which is my why we started this whole conversation whenever it was a month and change ago that it's not this always like this uh burden Warrior you know ruining your plans and telling you you're nasty and you know what I'm saying it's not always this negative voice going no it's actually not once you have some level of practice even if it's rudimentary your ego is going to be far more sneaky and far more of a smart monkey than a dumb one and it's going to tell you very nice things and gonna come up with great ideas and fantastic inspiration for you in order to get you to stop looking inward right so a friend of mine who you know may listen to this and I and I mentioned this to her so if she hears it you know uh we had this conversation so I'm not outing you right now you know what she was meditating and had this inspiration to like share her thoughts in a book and maybe even a speech somewhere well she got out of her meditation started you know writing things down and then synchronistically Uncle Carl uh one of her patients said oh you should I should get you I have connections to doing a TED Talk you should be doing this Ted Talk and so she's like oh I should start really writing writing the speech or something to say she sat down and guess what came out nothing oh really okay writer's block before he even started oh interesting and what did I say to her yeah that's because that wasn't the inspiration that you are looking for that and that is your sneaky mind right there these are not the droids you're looking for right it's trying you know it's saying it's not going to say you're bad stop doing this right now because people who practice their willpower is much stronger than just to move through those negative voices and and you know continue but for people who can you know who have some level of practice who are intelligent you know which if if you're listening to this podcast I'm assuming you have a decent level of intelligence right that your mind is not going to go you don't know what you're doing stop doing this you know no it's going to give you hey I haven't you never know people get those things I mean it does happen that way but you know I mean I'm not trying to argue the deeper point but yeah all kinds of [...] happens it's funny right all kinds of [...] happens I'm just saying like yeah even the good thoughts even the positive thoughts the altruistic thoughts the compassionate thoughts the things that you should do with your life that are going to help to make it better do them when you're done do them when you're done practicing do them when you finish your meditation wait till the timer goes off ding then go do the thing if it still is if it's real inspiration it'll come to you but my point is that like there are numerous aspects of ourselves that we are unconscious of and that they will come out once we try to start to move our awareness in inwards you know yeah again in this style of doing things Zen is like this too you know this whole idea of like hey look out for this ego thing it's really a a big thing right not every school talks this way but this one certainly does right and it's interesting because I know in the beginning like it was it's hard like I had to set a timer yeah and make myself so if that's helps anybody I mean you gotta do it otherwise you're just like well I think I'm done now and you get up here like I was only here for like three minutes maybe I could do a little bit longer so I had it takes a discipline to do that and uh there'll be a party to be like okay I set this for whatever it is you know reasonable in the beginning you know everyone's going to adjust to where they're at but you know you could set it for 15 minutes or something like that you know 10 minutes or whatever you're doing and you realize there's a part of me that wants to get up and doesn't want to do this yeah yeah in the very beginning it's quite strong and then of course it grows and grows and then my other things may happen too I was thinking about a little anecdote um about I think it was the writer William Burroughs so he's kind of a famous beat writer I wanted to do an episode about this because I know somebody who knows the the like is one of the top William Burroughs scholars in the world apparently and knows all about those beat guys and how they got interested in spirituality and things like that but anyways I think Burroughs maybe it was even going on a retreat with Gala crimpichay or something like that you know being you know the people that Daniel and I had uh tantric teachings with right and um and so his thing was okay I'll meditate I'll bring my notebook and my pencil with me and if I have an idea I'll write it down you know and so on and the advice of course given was no no no don't open that notebook don't write down your cool ideas to write you do that all the time you know this isn't like an exercise for you to like come up with more cool stuff to put in your book okay cool put it on the side you know you can go back to it later and if like what you were saying I mean you might feel like well this is a great idea I should really have this it's like they'll come back to you you won't lose it no it'll come back to you you know you're not going to lose it you have to write it down right now you really don't honestly no that's really a good idea it'll stick yeah it'll stick yeah so so Eric let me let me just take a a second here and think about the audience um and so so okay so we have I hope you've been thinking about the audience but could you heard something about it but I'm thinking about like sometimes I you know like we're supposed to think about like sorry guys we're going to bring you behind the uh behind the curtain if you will you're supposed to create an avatar of your audience in your mind when you're you know doing marketing oh I see why are you doing that you're doing that okay yeah okay but I'm doing it out loud because you know because I don't give a [...] about that but yeah I do know people who listen to our episodes and we just got a really nice email from somebody the other day and you know for people who want to hit us up you know don't wait multiple years do it just do it right now right Jin and Tantra gmail.com either Eric or I or both of us will answer if you want to do a long form email shorter you can leave a comment on the YouTube or you know in the Instagram either way it's all good hit us up we'd love to get the feedback but we'll take we'll take criticism too I took a really sharp physical criticism about my commentary and then the goddess Kali yeah from one listener yeah that's fine it you [...] yeah that's fine sometimes we deserve it you know I'll take it so so here's a question thank you thank you ma'am I have another I hear the question so and and we can both certainly talk about this but from the audience perspective all right so we brought up this side these ideas of right the the separate the sort of boundaries right and then then what we are highlighting as part of the boundary is this idea of the ego or the discursive mind or the default mode Network whatever the internal thing that pops up when you bring your awareness inward how do you you know as a beginner as a as a d you know we talked about how difficult it was it is right how do you how did you and how do you work with this how does this come for you know how does this influence your practice which part are you talking about this thing right here or like the dealings with the distractive aspects of the mind at the beginning the dealings with other the dealings with the distractive aspects of the mind because that's kind of where we were before and I wanted to make sure we we finished that thread you know for people because we talk about meditation a lot I guess there's like two big lines of thought around this and I know I play with both of them sure one can be the idea that you can be like a person with a sword and I think you've used this metaphor too yeah you know where you're cutting right and I think again I had these teachings with galic rimpichay and you know I don't know if I'll do it full Justice but you know there could be this idea that you could be twirling this sword and then sometimes you know Tibet was like a kind of a warrior culture you know Japanese culture is kind of warrior so sometimes you get kind of warrior imagery so you're swinging this you're twirling this sword and as the arrows come you of the thoughts this the sword Cuts them or something like that so you can do it like that I suppose right there's also this kind of more idea of like let the thought go and it'll be like kind of like releasing it you're out in a boat and there's a bird and the bird like takes off so the Mind goes and takes off a little bit but the bird doesn't have any place else to go because you're in the middle of the ocean so they'll come back again anyway something like that you know so there's different imagery around this that they kind of use to capture this thing and um in some funny ways they say even like the mind going and coming back is maybe a more relaxed way of doing things you constantly twirl a sword can be kind of hard yes you know if you if you drop the sword for a second you're going to get hit with the arrow right nope uh shoot that poison arrow through my heart is that some old 80s song or something you get that you're going to get the arrow right um and uh so sometimes it'd be more maybe in a more relaxed frame of mind that the Mind goes and comes back again now I know from I you know study with this doctor from China Qigong master master shangdi Wang one of my mentors thank you master Wong and uh yeah we student of him for a number of his for a number of years medically and then you know just in the way he was teaching how to work with the mind and meditation and things like that and so I think when I was doing this stuff with him he would say that you could even gently talk to your own mind and just say hey I know you're really concerned ah yes about this issue with this relationship with this person I know it's really bothering you because you're really in love with this person and you know maybe they love you maybe they don't and whatever you're going through in your life you know maybe think about your kid you know well they might have this issue with school and that's really bothersome I don't want them to like you know have this problem maybe some other kids are giving her a hard time whatever you're thinking of but you can kind of go like okay I know that you're very concerned about this but like we can leave this for a little bit we can come back to this later you can like in a certain sense he would say you could talk to your own mind in that way so yeah I get you this is a legit concern totally reasonable I'll get back to you later on that let's concentrate on this thing pronounce Adventure mine will actually listen to you right and go like oh yeah good point I could let that go for a little bit you know so um so yeah you know I think like there might be multiple ways to do this and I suppose for me I've tried to be a little bit like okay you know I'll probably do different things at different times whatever seems to be the right one to work until I work with my own mind there is something you're saying if you try to force sometimes it just doesn't work you're like I'm gonna swing this sword now but if you're not in a sword swingy state right may not work as well maybe it's better to let the bird go and come back again or maybe it's to have a little convo and say oh you know I know this is really concerning you now I'll get back to you on this I promise I'm not going to leave this concern legit concern I'll come back to you the other thing I think that happened for me was I developed a fairly decent sense sense of like some days you want to do this some days you don't right it's real so I think to me when I got these I got it doing Zen In the Beginning I'm not gonna lie I've had it like the entire time I knew I had to build this because I recognized this quality that it's like this some days you're in a Zone some days you're not you know some days you meditate it's the best feeling you ever had some days you go to do your thing like you're like I don't want to do this and you know whatever you know so but usually when you get going you'll feel better I have to say that's the experience too yeah but um uh I think the whole thing about I was thinking about this just last night you know the whole thing about doing like for me I have these uh Buddhist tantric empowerments and there's a sort of thing you may call a commitment which you say you're going to do it every day now certainly like why do you do that in a way it's because you know sometimes you're not in the mood yeah but you make the commitment to do it and even if it's kind of half-assed and it's like well this is a shitty meditation session I'm not doing a very good job here that's okay yeah you know and I remember one of the ladies back when I was doing Zen that you know she was very good student at Sun she had started with her and her husband at the same time and she just completely outstretched him she was okay anytime and he quit you know starts again female always dominates in practice oh it happens every time I end up talking about Dean Raiden a little bit but there's a whole thing that you know like the statistics of women who are able to like do psychic powers and sigh and sensitivity like they're trouncing the dudes man okay guys we're getting lapped and drowned sorry guys we gotta focus more yeah we gotta like Focus less or something change what we're doing but anyways he said statistically it's like that when they do Psy research we had Dean Raynham before he's a person who researched like Psy you know uh like extra sensory kind of stuff or extraordinary powers of the mind he was a guest on the show he was really great um anyways I was kind of prepping for this episode listening to his audiobook a little bit anyway so going back to this there was this lady and uh it was one of the most helpful things I heard you know uh in the very beginning parts of this because she was very experienced and I don't think she even wanted to teach but they just said you should teach because you're getting really good but your husband quit so okay you have to worry about him anymore making him look bad so you can come in you can come and teach she really didn't want to I mean I knew her from the treats and stuff but but she did it and then she said this very like wise thing which is like yeah days go up and down right for all kinds of conditions yeah it's a causal flow it's it's you know it's that uh it's that dependent nature of things that they were talking about so some days you're really in the zone everything is right the other days the weather's bad it's too humid your body doesn't feel right you ate some food yesterday that doesn't feel good something's on your mind whatever you know there's all kinds of [...] that can happen so it goes something logical astrological energetic things she was talking about that too there was um exactly my teacher Anna was brought up a he has a student of his for many many years who ended up moving to the monastery with Monastery in Nepal and he's came for like a year Retreat he's been there 20 years and he focuses his practices around the cycles of the Moon and has been yeah yeah and so there's there's many there's a multitude of things that can kind of get [...] with someone that I I love very very much and we were just talking about yeah the moon moves every day and you feel different yeah you move different each day as you know [Music] yeah so those are all true and Sushi said that and I was like oh because I thought I thought like well I'm supposed to get to this same spot every day you know it's my job to be just the same every day maybe I'm a little bit perfectionistic potentially Virgo it's a problem yeah so um you know the whole idea that I want to be that way but then to recognize like no you know some of the days it's not your best day to do this astrologically physically right psycho emotionally whatever's going on with you right it's not always going to be your best day but you still do this thing right and you do it as best you can on that day and uh uh yes I also had that idea too so that could that's one of the things I guess I would say around this okay yeah I think yeah for myself definitely the idea of the the sword cutting for sure is one and you know this is a reference for people like uh also to take you back to what it is that you're doing right so if you have some meditative technique let's just say it's counting your breath then that that sword cutting is you detaching for whatever thought that you had and just going right back to the to the order that you have set up for yourself and you just come right back and right back and right doesn't matter what comes up or whatever you let that go and that's it that requires some willpower actually you know and maybe even a little bit of energy on some level so if people are practicing in the morning or at night or whatever you know whatever meditation you're doing um even if it's guided you know you want to come back to that guide you have to do you have to to will yourself back to it so that's certainly one technique um I I do sometimes allow myself to go okay what is it what what is it now is it your checklist you want to go off your checklist again okay let's go through it what do you have to do today you got that you got that okay you got that thing okay cool and you got to call that person okay cool okay anything else man you can have it out now let's go and and you know you find that you're like oh I want to do it again you know you don't sound like you know like I allow myself to do that and then but after one or two rounds I'm like okay that's it now we did it that's all we can connect there's nothing's going to be gained from doing this again right when we're gonna sit here until the time we're not existentially guarding anything right now you're not doing anything that's it you're only guarding yourself at this point and the other thing I think that I you know I do is sometimes I'll label I will give a label to something so if I'm doing something and I'll say oh that's bringing up if I could if if the emotion is present or there's something there and I could say oh that's fear yeah these are fearful thoughts okay you know oh these are exciting thoughts these are desirous thoughts and if and I feel like if I could put a label to this wind if you will that kind of comes up it almost decreases the whole the magnetism that it has because there's some sort of like unconscious attraction to that Force that's sort of pulling you out of your practice following the thing oh what was that well sometimes it's a it's emotions or something like sometimes you just realize oh wait a minute I'm having an emotion yeah you know especially if you're not it depends on what your relationship is to your thoughts or your emotions or whatever it is yeah sometimes it'll be like oh I didn't realize I had that whole set of emotions oh that's what I'm actually becoming aware of now and then just knowing that can be very helpful and and I do find that like you you put the flashlight on it and it's like oh look there it is you know that's that thing there okay and it kind of it doesn't doesn't like disappear instantaneously like oh I'm free of it now but it takes the intensity down it pulls the magnetism down so that you can actually settle back in and practice or sometimes that idea of just recognizing and like you're saying like you have a word for it or whatever I think that does help yeah sometimes it's like then you learn some really weird stuff like Oh I thought that was a physical sensation in my body and I guess it is but that's actually an emotion who knew who knew you know yeah so those are moments of insight you know I just thought it was gas yeah I thought it was just gas pain and I shouldn't have eaten that extra burrito yesterday that's right but no yeah but uh you know Bobby T Robert Thurman was interesting on that when he was on the podcast because I had always heard him of saying oh God how should I even try to talk about this you know don't get distracted by the small stuff or something I kind of heard him having that attitude but when he was on I kind of I felt like I was setting him up to make that point and he said the exact opposite he said don't don't don't belittle your epiphanies you know he took it in the opposite direction and that's an epiphany um wait a minute I thought that was a pain in my head but wait a minute I think it's actually an emotion yeah you know and there's about there's a balance because you can certainly get caught up on every little thing that pops that's right you know that's true but I I think the probably the larger so so I gave a couple you gave a couple there's more though right and to say what's going to work for one person maybe it'll work for one person maybe it won't work for another one maybe it only works for this person one day at that one time and then they have to do something else the the bigger point is that like what a person has to become their own kind of engineer on themselves and find some way to be able to make it through and if it's using or ways or ways right yeah right like every day is a little bit different even if Eric has techniques that work for him sometimes it doesn't work that day it's you know Friday the 23rd and guess what ain't none of that working today well how are you gonna figure it out you have to figure it out like in some way or feel your way through or into it your way however you want to put that that term see the thing I think that happens with that is no matter what you're making some kind of progress in yourself because even if you're like this day sucks and I'm just gonna have to gut it through that you're developing will and determination and that will help you in some other aspect of your life yes there was a guy who came in back in the zendays too who had gone through surgeries for like multiple brain tumors and they brought him in the talk as kind of a long-term Zen student and he wasn't the guy who was around all the time either and again I was in my 20 I was a young guy and he came in he was older guy probably late 50s early 60s or something like that and he said yeah a lot of these qualities that I developed doing this stuff were the things that got me through these experiences and I thought about the determination aspect of that it's like yeah I developed determination doing this and then that determination helped me deal with this health thing it's it's a it's an it's a and and not a small amount of Ingenuity actually well I mean using your kinds of things it's like learning how to program your own internal device yeah exactly you're becoming your own programmer you don't have to wait for the inheritors of Steve Jobs to like download some [...] and you you can program yourself that's exactly somebody asked for yourself somebody asked me where I was and I was like oh I'm gonna go offered you know 10 days on a Meditation Retreat that go oh I don't know why people do that and I said well you're changing yourself permanently yeah it's fun okay this is like uh something we could talk about for a long time but I was listening to something about the spirituality of John Lennon yeah uh our guest and friend of the show uh uh Miguel Connor who was on from Aon bite nostic radio had an old episode with someone who had written a book on sort of the philosophy and spirituality of John Lennon So they did an interview it was it's really good so if you want to like check that out you can just do a search under a on bite nastic radio John Lennon that's a-e-o-n right yeah yeah a-e-o-n um so um so anyways it was like you know like part of the interview was you know John Lennon The Beatles famously went to India to learn how to meditate at some point and John Lennon got a little bit cynical about some that he thought parts of the spiritual stuff that could be a rip-off like some of the guruism he was like okay this is you know over the top guruism you know uh which is a fair critique right so he had some of those experiences he was like but the thing I didn't realize was he meditated for the rest of his life and at times he would sometimes meditate six or seven hours in a day or three or four hours in a day I was like I didn't know that and uh he he's like took it a little bit out of the spiritual context so he had spiritual ideas for sure different podcasts I thought maybe we would do in just about you know Tim because he's an interesting character you know but um maybe a little on him and George Harrison or something uh these people from the Beatles who were really spiritually interested uh but in any case he said something like it's how you clean your mental palette and he said it made a big difference for his creativity because he was like yeah you get so bunched up you can't feel your own creativity yeah for him as a songwriter he was like there's too much crap in there I got clear this out and when I cleared out the good ideas will come through so I mean you want to say well why do you do this those are all kinds of reasons why why you do this right yeah but John Lennon thought about his songwriting yeah one other tiny little point on like concentration in the in the tantric World they do talk about this idea of like you can have mental sinking which your mind will get very lacks yes or mental excitement right and um sometimes if you have a lot of mental thinking you can focus your mind a little bit more up yeah so it might be like focusing a little bit more higher in your body or something if if you're doing like a tantric meditation sometimes you're visualizing something so you put your mind more on the upper parts of the visualization and when your mind is very agitated sometimes it's better to put your mind more on the lower parts of the visualization and it has this balancing effect in Chinese medicine we would know that Zen and yang by the way right yeah Chinese culture you need a little bit more Young You focus up a little bit more Yin you focus down and you can start to learn how to adjust your mind maybe that way so that can be helpful too you know and they recommend that technique as well all right so there's some stuff yeah no there's that's it's good stuff I'm glad I'm glad we did that I mean you know the thing is like you are operating your own being for the entirety of your existence so it is and this is the most subtle and Powerful part that's why you know someone like like uh Bob Thurman barbecue talks about this like learning how to do the inner technology right yeah yeah and he was okay so I thought I'd go back just a second or two to wrap up our stuff because we do it okay so part of this is like you know when you get to this thing about like it's an underlying flow and what we're become aware of it's like one flow is that crazy idea for this culture yeah before we kind of talked about this other stuff we were doing that a little bit and it's a very materialistic culture and so even to the point where like in my daughter's assignment the whole idea is it's your brain that's con that's the only thing that's there and your mind doesn't even really exist and stuff it's very materialistic yeah and it's obvious that ideas like this are like not like that they're not these materialistic ideas these are ideas that are coming from a different place right and you're gonna have to like maybe rethink your materiality as opposed to thinking okay the only thing that exists is the real stuff in the material world you have to think no that material world that we see around us is like an energetic flow well in physics you [...] know that already actually which is why I think for some of us who came from these physicsy backgrounds or you know Dan and I were talking about this pre-podcast who come from these certain parts of the scientific world you're like well of course this is an energetic flow what else would it be right um but you know it also goes back to some of the guests we've had on like Dean Raiden or we're going to talk about our beloved Uncle Carl again Uncle Carl where they're talking about the idea of like look at what the mind seems at times to do that indicates to you that your mind isn't Limited in the way that you think it is so if you go back and listen to our Dean Raiden episode it's like the idea that my mind is affecting stuff in the reality around me all the time if I notice it and pay attention and he gave lots of examples of this like one was the example when like Donald Trump won the election back in 2016 all the random number generators that we're supposed to be picking up on people's thoughts all freaked out because the whole world went what you know and then you know what happens in the in America influences the whole world and now this dude's you know going to be the most important person you know in the whole free world or whatever um so they all were freaking out that's because people's minds are interacting with the external World in ways that we don't always recognize or we tried to have on Rupert sheldrake he was initially his secretary was very nice and then they were like what can you do but you know he has the whole idea of the morphic field you know you get like a bunch of chimpanzees and one of them learns how to use a tool I know why I did this for the tool but okay I don't know what kind of tool they're learning that's a truly probably I already knew how to use since he was a kind of chimpanzee but um the big kind of a masturbatory gesture for this monkey I don't know why this monkey would need a tool for that he was born with a tool called the monkey hand that's right but uh uh so anyways you know one animal learns a skill and he you know this is kind of like what Rupert sheldrick is interested in and then all the all the monkeys on the island know all of a sudden how they masturbate themselves with that shell I don't know that's a bad example yeah that is a bad one but it works but you know he talks about this idea like what is your dog know when you're coming home the dog seems to know before you're there why because its mind is not limited in the way that we think it is so this is kind of like what this is trying to challenge and then both of those thinkers Dean Rayden or Rupert sheldrake they're making the point that like we tend to think of like the material is the ruler the material is the king of everything right but maybe it's not like that maybe it's Consciousness or the mind that's the queen of everything and it's operating in a different way and we don't notice it that way and when you if you do listen to Dean Rayden he'll eventually say like yeah let's flip this whole script around as opposed to saying it's matter that creates mind why don't we say the reverse why don't we say it's mine that is involved in the creation of matter which is why you would call this a mind-only school or the person that I thought was really interesting in this would be like Carl Jung which is again why poop the synchronicity book which stands there is an episode that somebody I'm sure will do it but he had this idea of like the unes Mundus the one world this young was really interested in like what happens when you have amazing synchronous events how could it be that something is going on in my life and then this other magical thing happens in the outside world that matches what's going on in my life how could that possibly be right and a lot of people have these experiences and we'll do a whole synchronicity episode we don't have a lot of time for today but you know probably a lot of us if not all of us have had the experience at least at some points in your life maybe not every day but at certain points for sure and Jung says especially when there's really strong emotions involved you know you're in love and this happens all the time you know you talk with people about this like yeah they notice this wait a minute the world is flowing in this other way and this thing is happening it's not always dreaming about the person that you're in love with it could just be like you're in this emotional state and things are flowing in some other way and you start to notice these things right yeah um and it goes along with sort of the research in parapsychology and things like that but Jung was like yeah he said maybe what's really happening is it's one world there's this flow and that's why the inside and the outside can match in this way it's not even like one thing is causing the other it's just part of a flow and you become aware of this flow in your internal world and your external world you know so it's deep and so I wanted to share like a little quote because it gets to this kind of like our world too so I kind of pulled this up he's talking about this idea and he says um this could be sort of like nothing less than the restoration of the original state of the cosmos and the Divine unconscious of the world we could see the connection between those two things our minds and the world outside and we can understand this kind of in a new way this this fascinating mystery and then he says it's the Western equivalent he's talking about this kind of understanding right I'm holding up this synchronous ebook again you know of like what's said in Chinese philosophy and I thought this was so interesting because of our backgrounds Daniel you know is the Western equivalent of the fundamental principle of classic Chinese philosophy namely the union of Yin and Yang and Dao and this just hit me in those words because a lot of times when you talk about yin and yang we could talk about male and female or you know different qualities that you can have you know in our stereotypical way how we someone says that word you start going through a list but part of Yin and yag is also internal and external right you know we think of internal and external and maybe where we have this internal external split but it's really just a flow of Dao you know the underlying flow right of energy and nature in the universe and like that's what's happening and that's why we can have sometimes these you know parapsychological experiences or why sometimes these extraordinary things seem to happen because we're picking up on this parallelism that's running and then he says he ends the quote something if the mandala symbolism is the psychological equivalent of the one world is Mundus then synchronicity is like part of this right because we're going to experience this synchronicity as we experience this one mandala flow that we're living in and I guess that's the yogic experience idea right yeah so I know if you have to bounce I got a minute I got one other thing about it kind of um uh which is just to say you know in this way of thinking again no really true internal external world we all like you the Dalai Lama talks about this too and this idea like yeah we all have our own little flow going on and we're part of this big flow and I had one little Enlightenment story it was from my favorite Zen poets and he's supposed to get enlightened whether you hear the Crow's car and they start thinking what's he what's the experience in that moment and I suppose if your EQ this great poet You Hear The Crow and you hear the car and you hear the experience and you hear your you recognize yourself and you realize that that's all just part of like one flow right and it's a very mundane experience like we were talking about pre-show it's a crow calling right it wasn't like he had a vision of like Shiva that appeared from the sky or something it was a sound of a crow or in the Zen school I was talking about we were kind of joking about before the episode Star Episode started but the Zen master who founded the school from the dead master from Japan had his Enlightenment experience when he was like taking a leak and he heard the urine hit against the side of the bowl what happens in those moments I think in this way of thinking it's because you realize internet connectivity of all these things that randomly Crow you realize wait a minute that's my mind this is part of a flow I'm not separate from this Crow and all this stuff yeah so for me then I think it's just kind of like it's been worthwhile since we started to go through and do this just to Imagine This just to imagine like what this would feel like you know I mean and I've been trying to do that in my own practice let me imagine like did it like when I experienced this internal and external it's just part of one flow and then Tantra you do imagination so it's an imagination yeah right make your mind imagine it well anyway that's my that's my little Spiel on it interested in your reactions too of course well I think that like you know this is a um an interesting seed that someone could plant before their meditation right and this is a meditation in and of itself not only to do on like their own particular meditation cushion but then also in regular life too and try to challenge the the conventional ideas and it's not to say that like and we never say this is the way never like it's always how we said earlier take it test it see if it works for you so you know Eric gives some of his ideas I give some of my ideas in hopes of like you know spark uh inspiration in some way for someone else to try their own thing but like you know truth be told Eric is following his inner compass I am following my inner Compass it's led us to some parallel paths But Eric still does his own thing his own my own you know and and that comes sometimes juxtaposed to what our teachers might even say actually but that's totally fine like the the goal here is not to to breed more versions of ourselves actually at least it's not mine um but the goal is to kind of like you know spark the light of inspiration for someone to do their own inner engineering you know when you really think about it if someone gives a piece of advice that works for you then you've shared then you happen to share the you both respond to this thing yeah right and that's good so you can learn from other people you have to cut yourself off either it's like a beautiful dance yeah right you learn from others you see what works you can share things with others things will maybe work for them too we're all doing this with one another right and so in this way then this particular idea of the the external world and the internal world not being separate is one way to challenge a very uh long-held and steadfast idea of of separateness you know of the being being separate from of the subject being separate from the object of me being separate from my environment of Eric and I being separate beings and of everybody else having their own like little egocentric worlds and I don't mean egocentric like whoever's listening to this you're a selfish person I don't mean that I mean as in like you are the center of the universe and technically you are for your own world you know but from a grander perspective we're trying to like challenge Viewpoint you know coming up to and say what if that's not the case what if that assumption that you've had of your entire life is not true maybe it is but if you've never questioned it how would you know you're moving in an existing purely on assumption and we all know what they say about assumptions I'm not quite sure but I we were supposed to know I remember the first time I heard that joke I found it was hysterical right it showed up with an old TV show and I was like ah yeah make an ass of you and me it was in a courtroom scene that they did on the old show The Odd Couple this really old show that was really funny that is an old show it was old uh even for me when I was a kid old old but anyways yeah yeah I could say it's like a you know I was getting serious into writing this episode I got serious and like looking at the ideas of this school of thought yeah and uh I was like okay let me do it let me let me step in a little bit and see what this feels like yeah to the extent that I could do it and I was like oh yeah this is doing something this feels kind of amazing yeah and then a lot of my other things I would normally do like if I look at my other meditations on my tube for my mandalas and things like that all got better because I could imagine them being part of this flow I guess like what Uncle Carl was talking about and it feels really cool I think in Iraq lots of getting thoughts in a roundabout way a lot of practices actually are working to dissolve that barrier anyways in their own particular way you know like they may not be outwardly saying or that might not even be the intention per se but that like through the act of practicing and through the act of like turning your attention inwards and really being mindful of like where your energy is going and then bringing it back in and having insights and subtleties and and aha moments and experiences and you know working with the mind in this way I think it occurs on its own a lot of the time actually like and that's part of the release of uh ex you know personal expectation you know what I'm saying and the the release of the feeling of separateness is through this you know it's through these realizations that like things are not so clearly uh I think that way that would be talked about because it's it's just true so it's like you're recognizing something that's true yes and certainly in this attitude then that's the way it is you're recognizing something that's already there yes right you're not creating something new you're recognizing a reality like oh I'm not actually not separate my creating the idea that I was was actually that was the thing I was creating this other thing is the thing that's actually true okay yeah like that so I would say one last like tiny thing was like just to give a shout out as I you know to uh Lama Glenn Mullen you know uh beloved teacher and uh he says you know you could have arguments of different ways of looking at things but they're all kind of going to the same point so why argue yeah amongst old schools of thought that might debate each other you know a thousand years ago that's not the point now the point is to see how all these things are kind of trying to build to what you're talking about Daniel like a set of experiences of seeing the world in a new way that hopefully is more real right yeah yeah I agree all right we did it we did we did we did it we promised we're gonna do it mind only and we did it that's right that's right yeah well as always Eric thank you uh for for joining on this on this particular podcast episode and all the other podcast episodes that we've done over the years um much appreciated and thank you to our audience whether you are uh in the continental US or you're outside in the uh World on Earth and even if you're not on Earth then you know thanks for tuning in you know I don't know how you communicate but like cool you know um we appreciate the feedback like I said earlier so hit us up email Jin and Tantra gmail.com uh Instagram Jen and Tantra YouTube Jin and Tantra leave a like comment subscription all that other stuff uh if you find our work interesting feel free to give us a shout share our work with people uh if you have something in particular that you might like us to cover that is you know near and dear to your heart or you have questions on you know please feel free to to shout us out or simultaneously if we went over something and you're still kind of like feeling like we didn't do it justice hit us up let us know we'll double back and go deeper on it if that's what people want like we're totally cool doing that so you know uh feedback is always appreciated and uh yeah we'll catch you everybody on the next one for Eric this is Daniel be well peace