hey fellow g interiors those of us are like our spirituality with a twist in this third episode of our four-part series we continue our discussion with the jovial enlightening tantric teacher glenn h mullen or simply lama glenn to his students the long version of his bio is in the intro to the first episode but even the short version is still pretty long so here goes llama glenn traveled to the indian himalayas in the early 70s where he first met the dalai lama he stayed on as a student for 12 years studying with 35 of the greatest living masters of the tibetan tradition drawing in those experiences he has authored over 30 books and become an international teacher of tantric buddhism lama gun has also been an avid advocate for buddhist art curing important art exhibitions and advocating for contemporary artists of the east in the west he is currently at work on a book on nicholas roarick the great russian painter spiritual thinker and social activist long gun is also the special adviser to the warwick house museum institute in holland batur mongolia which i personally helped create by making a very modest donation of support but every little bit helps right which is just a way of bringing up the philanthropic aspect of lama glenn's work supporting meaningful spiritual creative and humanitarian causes so if you have the resources never want to support some noble causes lama glenn is a good and reliable conduit for that kind of generosity finally is also an expert in travel to the sacred sites of the himalayas he leads tours and acts as a consultant to those wanting to travel safely and meaningfully through those sacred sites [Music] okay in this episode llama glenn serves up a full-on overflowing and spiritually intoxicating cocktail glass of gin and tundra he was really on a roll actually someone who has known him for a decently long time this is really one of my favorites of his unique presentations of tantric thought and practice he talks about how to seek a personally tantrically meaningful and joyful life in a world too often run by thugs and buffoons and outlines the buddhist practices that help one do that including creatively seeing the world as joyful divine and interconnected and overcoming what einstein called optical delusion enjoy the episode welcome to jyn and tantra spirituality with a twist the podcast that takes tantrism buddhism taoism sutheasm cabalism shamanism chinese medicineism and all of the other isms we've been influenced by and blends them into a tall crisp cool cocktail your spirit has been longing for you to get together now isn't that refreshing i want you to get together you know and i mean it is kind of a random speculation on my part but i think in the west our economic systems are completely obsolete they're all based on sort of colonial capitalists rape and village the earth policies need the restructure of the economy our way of spending our daily time what is meaningful activity and meaningful pursuits has to be revised our approach to medicine health well-being has to revive our approach to family child child rearing has to be revised and uh if we can get those four or five things done [Laughter] also i would like to see one environmental tradition brought in from genghis khan with genghis he made the rule that if anyone pollutes earth water fire or air there's no redemption it's a death sentence so i think that would be a very very good solution to our present environmental crisis we could probably just in the united states use some steep fines just to like get the ball rolling then the rich the rich will still abuse it we have those fines now the epa in the states i mean that's one reason why some people hate the epa is because all you have to do is give the epa 25 a year in a fine and it's kind of a license to dump toxic chemicals wherever you want and save yourself a half a billion dollars you know i think genghis khan had the right policy it should be the death sentence i am really fascinated by what you're saying the llama glen because i've been thinking about that a lot too those five or six things you mentioned i mean when you really look at it honestly that's where the whole culture kind of just went right and yeah it sort of comes out of i think a combination of colonialism linked to the industrial revolution being linked to this three semetics religions you know the jews the christians and the muslims that god created the world for us to enjoy now if you look at those three teachings in a deeper way you could say made us caretakers of the world but people don't take it that way they took it they take it like that oil under the earth is mine i can frack it or that's how that sacred mountain has gold i can blow it up and use harmful chemicals that poison the rivers for the next thousand miles you know it's amazing that outside chicago fish caught in the lake superior the first of the lakes is often too toxic for the fish to be eaten and if you go downstream by the time you get to toronto just if you fall in the lake which i did one time because a boat came in when a ferry boat came in from toronto on toronto island and a little kid fell in right in front of the boat when it was there went just when the boat was 10 feet away and luckily i was standing right there so i dived in and grabbed the kid and hung on because those propellers spin like that right a kid would have been chopped up to hamburger but we both need to get shots because that's the one thing now you have to deal with the other thing right yeah the lake is so polluted that even like falling in it requires a shot so the thing you know daniel and i are doing this uh this little podcast venture we're a part of now you know those things that you're mentioning we sort of look at i don't know how you feel about this daniel but for me it is kind of like we recognize that those are the problems where the culture's kind of gone awry and then apart we're trying to reach out to other people who are just trying to find their way within this this space you know uh you know and having you know people like you on to share your wisdom about how to do that but yeah i think that's the recognition i think that's even the whole motivation in doing this just that the idea like yeah something has gone awry you know it's affecting on a macro level but on the micro level you know you start to try to find your personal way within this it's like not an easy situation i guess that's the motivation for us even doing this yeah i mean all of us are live today when the the amount of public attention on the desperateness of a planetary situation is not a secret or an esoteric scientific fact known only by a few elite educated intellectuals the environmental situation is well known to everyone the danger of the military situation with you know probably 20 countries having nuclear bombs and some of us some of those countries having dozens of nuclear bombs and uh you know the state of the uh the economical situation with i mean america what is it one or two percent of the people being very very very wealthy and 20 or 30 million people living well below the poverty line in china of course it's the same and europe's gotten around a little bit that way by sort of having a little bit of a welfare society but that's really a patchwork on the situation it's not a solution to the situation just giving handouts to those for whom the social structure has placed them in a desperate situation a handout is a temporary solution not a long-term solution and the other biggest problem we have as humans i think is finding a meaningful life or meaning in life and uh there's a lot of interesting psychological research done on this medical research done quite a bit of literature out there on it but the key to happiness often is not how much you have or what your living situation is or even if your you know wife and kids are that well behaved it's really your own sense of the meaningfulness of your days and nights of the meaningfulness of your life a sense of purpose a sense of value something like that and i think in the western world that's become very very serious because we used to have not really so much of a link to what we are doing as being fulfilling because the industrial revolution brought in this kind of educational system where people are basically school is basically a polytech to produce workers or executives inside the industrial complex and the big international financial complex is basically a career training device and the problem there is we really see what we do as a way to pay our bills yeah that isn't very meaningful for people if you don't have meaning that i mean of course it is important to pay your bills i'm not to say that not having meaning isn't important but there's no sense of the fulfillment of the rigors of life the demands of life the blood sweat and tears that life entails with you know all the kinds of ups and downs that come with every year from you know house fires and tornadoes and earthquakes and friends dying wife and kids getting cancer and dying and all these kind of things if paying the bills were enough then that would be wonderful but as we notice as studies show it's really not enough but a sense of a deeper meaning in life and a way of processing the vicitudes is really something that has to be explored one reason i love nicholas rurik and as you know i'm presently in retreat doing a book on nicholas rory maybe you could tell a little bit about uh that project and who rorick is yeah one reason i love him very much is uh i love him as an artist of course he's one of the great artists of the early part of the last century but as a social thinker he came up with this idea after world war one that until now the planet has largely been run by thugs and buffoons and he managed to convince a few billionaires in new york that this was the case and had one of them build something called the masters institute in new york city which would try to get the like the genius social scientists political scientists engineers uh financial wizards and so on get them all in one building designing a kind of a new world order which would actually work because until now it's sort of been you know buffoon versus buffoon if you look at world war one it's a perfect example of that you look at the napoleonic wars and they are a perfect example look at the way colonialism raped and pillaged country after country you know burning down libraries in south america like the mayan indians all of their culture being destroyed they're all of their vast scientific and social literature all being destroyed before anyone had even read it outside of the most of those minds thereafter sort of not really allowed to pursue their traditional training for education so having buffoons and thieves and brigands thugs run things is not really the best way to go and with that's really what we've had in the west uh really for the last four or 500 years i think and uh you know we've brought us to this near extinction of our planet as uh people like al gore and the such like to stay comment from repeatedly and they're you know it's quite true that we are their extinction on many many fronts because of being led and guided by you know this is a political season in the state so one doesn't like to accuse anyone of being more of a buffoon than anyone else that's enough there's not for that label to go around it's a big enough label that most anyone involved in that whole situation so anyway i like nicholas eric's idea of getting the geniuses of the world together to kind of think things through of course that it didn't work out because you know stalin came up in russia and hitler came up in germany and america got into a tuffle with japan and that led to america and everyone getting into a tuffle with europe and european tefl and sort of the whole thing just fell apart and uh hopes of it going so it was it was we could we could say it was it was like a pre-mature a pre-term birth what do you call that if a child comes out became a miscarriage yeah it died before it was born it only existed for 10 or 12 years but einstein signed on to it and many of the great thinkers of the world signed on to it i didn't know there's an einstein connection it's interesting yeah yeah so this is actually kind of a deep thing obviously like you know not in our show notes but like you went like going to this place is very good because i think it's something that people really feel and i and if i talk about very personally you know my own personal experience with this was like i don't know i can do anything about this macro level maybe some roaring person could do something but i don't know if i can do anything about this and i may be growing up in america you get a little bit despondent did you feel like with the macro levels out of control what we can do so all of a sudden you sort of focus on the micro level of the indep individual people around you you know and yourself and maybe that's the way you can make a contribution to the world um how do you think about that with your students llama glenn i mean there's this huge overwhelming problems and there's also the problem of each person trying to develop themselves well i think with a teacher of mahayana tantra buddhism i am a strong adherent to the idea that the individual motivation is extremely important and if every person does their best for their own enlightenment uh on the one hand and secondly to be kind and gracious to all other living all other beings when we say all other living beings it doesn't mean all other humans it means trees and grass and rivers and clouds look like we say tin tin tempeh kilcor in tibetan the supporting and supported mandalas or supported and supported sources of joy something like that and i think that's the best place to start is by trying to become a universal hero heroine or a bodhisattva that to from one's own side to try to cultivate one's own inner calmness in her as they say ethics meditation and wisdom of examining the the inner one's inner life nature of self one's inner life those three as the foundation and the six parameters on the basis of that as we're called to be a generous with all living beings and to be ethical with all living beings to be patient and forgiving with all living beings be only joyful with others regardless of what kind of rectum apertures they are to always bring joy to once every activity and to cultivate daily quiet and contemplation because without that everything one just becomes all tied up in knots inside it becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution and finally to develop the three kinds of wisdoms and sort of a sense of the infinity or vastness of being and at the same time a kind of specific precision of the finite aspect of the moment and thirdly how always to express oneself with others in a way that is being beneficial and meaningful so i think beginning with oneself in that way and it doesn't matter if you're a buddhist or some other tradition well of course being a buddhist i think buddhism has some advantages that others don't like right now gaspe where i am you know i grew up church of england which i guess in england in america that's the episcopalian church we weren't allowed to call it the church of england anywhere down there but you know i think there is in the christian or the jewish tradition the idea of god made the earth in six days and then took a rest i think we have to think if he did take a rest it was rather a bad idea because the project wasn't very well finished yet or he took the rest on the sixth day leaving a little bit for us to take care of ourselves so i think as a buddhist i think uh sort of ethics meditation and cultivation of wisdom of one's own inner functioning very very important and the six parameters love those six i think inner joy is the most important in terms of benefiting others at least feeling good about yourself in other words noticing that joy is a switch you control it's not a response to a pleasant stimulation that's stimuli is that it's an inner switch that you can keep turned on and i think if people do that everyone is going a little bit in the right direction and not everyone has to be uh any or a religious person as dela lama often likes to say my religion is compassion and compassion is okay but like chug young trump says you have to be careful it doesn't become idiot compassion which is why the bigger buddhist context of the three trainings and the six parameters are important kind of uh backgrounds to that statement by the dylan well that's what i've sort of noticed about your teachings llama glenn things that jump out at me always are on the one hand the joyfulness of it you know which i think comes through in a conversation like this you know you're you're you're presenting a joyful spirituality and i think sometimes people don't see that daniel and i have talked about a lot they don't see the spiritual life as being necessarily a joyful thing but to know learn about yourself to change yourself to transform yourself to grow and develop is one of the biggest joys you're going to experience and the fact that that can also affect other people is a joy and then i think you also you know people use the word emptiness shunyata and what always strikes me when you talk about that is the interconnectivity aspect of it too that things are entwined and so yeah one thing and other things change too change yourself other things change yeah i mean a problem with translation of you know any tradition from one language into another language is those words in one language will not have the full meaning of words in a in the other language but you know often when we look at these what is said in one tradition many layers of meaning so with guiasamaja tantra said every word in guyasa mindset has six levels of interpretation and uh i think you know a problem is people can become a spiritual tradition in the western world you know traditional spirituality european spirituality tended to be rather joyless i would say yeah you know eve and the sexual issues with this you know fig leaves and a snake and an apple or something like that is how it gets a little bit confusing and somehow sex comes out as kind of something a little bit got us kicked out of paradise was it worth it wow i mean sex is nice but paradise so you know there's kind of a and you know there's a whole tradition in the early period of christianity in europe laughter is the voice of the devil and stuff like that so now i think you know as you know eric i mostly teach country buddhism as kind of the pinnacle of buddhist buddhist tradition and the idea that every experience we should regard ourselves as a playful tantric deity and whatever occurs to us we should from other outside beings we should embrace it with a kind of a playful joyous quality a theatrical quality and not rely upon the ordinary appearance of things because always everything has many levels and you know if you're married for instance you see this very clearly right your wife is in a bad situation in her in her life you know her sister's sick or something's happening she's in a bad mood and so the food doesn't taste that good now you'd never know it from eating the food that the situation was linked to the her worry about her wife and so she got the you know the meal wrong or you know here you go you're the cook and you've got your wife eating it wouldn't have noticed that oh it's because you know your brother just hit by a car or blah blah you know something like that so there's always many aspects to every experience culture versus nurture and all this kind of stuff but both of those are at play in every situation i think the tantric idea of never accepting anything at face value and always trying to embrace everything in a joyful playful way i was just watching a comedian on this the other day making mel brooks mel mel brooks sort of take on comedy as the best way to embrace tragedy and many of the best comedy pieces comedians come out of sort of tragic circumstances and their trage their comedy often deals to some extent with tragedy then i think that's really what this tantric teaching on see yourself as a playful tantric deity whatever occurs to you is part of some sort of enlightenment celebratory regardless of what it is no you know yea though we walk through the valley of death we fear no evil we are walking through a valley of death as jim morrison of the doors puts it but nobody gets out alive so you know we're surrounded by death we're surrounded by disease we're surrounded by tragedy but amidst all of that there's also great joy and there's you know babies born and flowers blooming and beautiful sunshine and many many wonderful things so it's easy to look at the harshness and take that as something very very significant and then overlook the joy or look at the joyful and take that as the quality but then you're overlooking that tragic side how to embrace both the beautiful and the horrid in a meaningful joyful way so i think that's a challenge of every human being in their life and i think every spiritual tradition discusses this to some extent you know in my christian tradition i was brought up in it's like well the ways of god are mysterious and eventually you'll find out i mean that's kind of okay but i do prefer the tantric on the three training six parameter and the playful deity yoga so on the dd yoga um about that sort of ideas because i think a couple things you said that really struck me for people who would be listening to this would be on the one hand there's this idea of bringing the locus of joy more internal so even if the external circumstances can go and they're going to be at some point or another like that there's this learning that you can still bring that joyful thing up inside of you um you know through your own training and experience and then there's that idea that you see yourself as sort of a divine being you know in buddhism you'd see yourself as you know one of the images of uh enlightenment um some of the people we be who would be listening to this don't have that specific initiations and training in that but is there a way you can advise people to do that who are just listening who maybe don't have specifically tantric buddhist teachers teaching them that but well you know i do think that einstein got a lot of these kind of relativity ideas from the buddhist tradition because of course he grew up speaking the german language and you know buddhism the first continental european buddhist tradition was really school of study was really the german russian a little bit earlier but in in western europe and the german and he brings a lot of very interesting terms into his discussion of things that are inspired by buddhist terms as you can tell kind of from the german so he speaks about uh and that's a very wonderful world word i when we talk about how we experience it is an optical delusion we experience things completely as though everything we're experiencing is separate from us but at the same time we're just experiencing it as an inner phenomena we're not experiencing the outer phenomena we're just all we have is the inner phenomenon yeah we only can access the outer phenomena through the inner phenomena in other words the inner phenomena when i look at a mountain i'm not seeing the mountain i'm seeing the way the mountain is processed by my perceptual and conceptual apparatus and so i think it's a very wonderful word he used optical delusion and then he says uh this gives us the sense that wherever we are whatever we are most close to is more important so the mountain next to me is more important than the mountain 10 miles away me is more person important than the person three blocks down the street and so on but as he points out again this is completely an optical delusion the the finest particle of matter is connected with all other things or everything is interconnected so we have to step beyond that what einstein calls optical delusion and notice the interconnectedness of all things and when we notice that of all things then of course that takes us to the other side of that discussion in nagarjuna or the indian word shunya or emptiness the infinity of things the interconnected involved things the other side of interconnectedness of all things is the infinity of all things and so i think whether or not as dilemma often puts it whether or not you're uh follow up an adherent of a particular tradition or whether you just learn some techniques for self-observation and philosophical spiritual cultivation isn't so important the important thing is that we point the mind toward actual reality like the word dharma which often is translated as religion in english literally means that which is ranking ozimba that which demonstrates a particular nature something which can be apprehended as having a particular nature in other words a kind of a reality factor you could say so we're all dealing with the same reality and we may use different words for it and some traditions might have a more sophisticated language for it and um others might have a more sophisticated sort of spiritual approach to it and so on and these are one aspect of things but the other aspect is we all have the same reality as dalai lama puts it every human has one nose two ears two eyes one mouth and i would add an [...] yeah as they say in the the medical literature nine apertures the chinese nine openings in the body only seven are up here if you're a woman ten just to acknowledge it right yeah so i think in the uh in the uh and the what was amazing to me going into the tibetan tantric buddhist world was they have all of these kind of interesting like i guess you'd say techniques you know to help you accomplish this and so one of them that you brought up was this idea of kind of re-visualizing your environment and i think when i first heard that i was like what are they asking me to do exactly but you realize that there's something really powerful about that if you're like you know if you have your significant other and all of a sudden they're being a pain in the ass and you see them as tara that just feels different you know a problem we have with everything with humans is that humans are habit are creatures of habit like for instance you know people smoke and they might think smoking is bad for them but then they've been smoking and so the natural momentum is to smoke and to change that momentum is a problem now for instance we know that certain industries are terrible for the environment and terrible for peoples working in them and so on but our whole say economic system has its own kind of momentum right and if we close down that industry you put five million people out of jobs and then that's a whole that's a whole process of momentum that momentum of those five million people has to be redirected and re-retuned it's a not a small thing and everything in our everything is momentum i look at a friend as a friend and the momentum is there to see them with friendly eyes and i'll look at someone who's been difficult to me with um you know suspicious eyes or cautious eyes and that momentum is there and it's the same thing with all phenomena we experience them on a kind of a predispositioned display you could say when we smell coffee we good but you know the first time coffee was introduced people smell it and what's that stink like the other day my niece gave me some moose meat because my great great nephew killed a moose them from most hunting season i just opened and i cooked it and the whole house smelled like moose for like 24 hours jamie oh you know this whole kind of momentum thing is there once the aroma is in the house getting it out or if someone smokes in their house getting this aroma of the smokehouse is not easy so i think when we see our body as the body of a deity in other words this body is pure wisdom pure light it's not just meat flesh blood bone [...] piss and so on it's uh really just a kind of field of energy it's just equals mc squared every molecule every atom is equals mc and the world around us appears like yeah that's like an ugly house so that's an ugly person or that's an ugly dog or that's a ugly street and so on really again it's just equals mc squared it's just pure energy bound and manifest in a particular way but when we look at it with a sort of a way of looking influence very much and so it's a little bit like that with everything we see it is what we make it more as expression in english goes beauty is in the eye of the perceiver and uh the point of seeing the world is this sort of emanation of wisdom emanation of mandala you could say it's a little bit like an early movement that came into the european christianity coming over from india where the whole sort of becomes uh not really pantheistic but kind of where the whole world is a manifest of godliness god energy or something like that every tree every rock everything if we look so in the buddhist world when we look at this thing isn't just what it appears to be but it is a kind of a pure energy unsullied from the beginning appearing in a particular way because of my relationship with it so if i change my sense of self i change my sense of relationship with it