foreign spiritually with a Twist so we are talking about ego Daniel had this thing um his creation of a way of thinking about this the existential Guardian operating system and uh so it's kind of like in the flow of that but actually pretty different so you know we want to talk about the ego in terms of like Eastern thought and so to my mind Daniel this is going to be an episode talking about some fairly intense [...] because it's deep and it kind of follows from what we were talking about with this existential Guardian operating system but you know I wanted to bring kind of an Eastern flavor to it right put a little kimchi on it or something like that oh okay yeah when you yeah yeah oyster sauce when you first brought it up a little Wasabi maybe even make it a little spicy it's not that spicy we might have spicy episodes coming but okay uh Spicer episodes in the in the in the future because we're going to talk about relationships and sexuality we've been kind of talking about that stuff and those are in the pipeline yeah but um you know when you first brought the whole idea up of talking about the ego this was the thing that popped in my mind first and so you know uh it was something that we had in the the idea of talking about ego in this sense so we're going to talk about this thing called the mind-only school or the yoga experience school chitamatra which means mind only or yogacharo which means yoga experience schools of sort of Buddhist approach uh Zen is one of these and whenever you start talking about Zen it's going to be some kind of crazy intense [...] associated with that and we're going to build for sure either way to this radical claim that there is no external World apart from the mind or the Consciousness and this is what they mean by yogic realization um so we'll get to that uh we'll do a slow build okay I need that but um you know what hit me with this is I was kind of doing something on my side of the prep on this was that um it occurred to me this is kind of like a podcast you know like a podcast of ideas every once in a while I think about what we're doing that's like yeah this is a podcast of ideas we were talking about this a little bit before we might up officially to record and to me not just ideas just for the sake of ideas like some kind of armchair philosophy or something like that and not just ideas just for the sake of like arguments like in politics or something just some kind of ideas like that make some rhetoric that you can throw up at social media just to argue with somebody else or something like that like uh I don't like those things I know what you feel about that what do you think I'm not into it I think I like ideas for the sake of ideas it's called mental masturbation I think I agree with that I was having some texts with somebody I was like what the I can't even talk about this [...] that this person's talking about right what to say about it it was just some [...] there's so much political rhetorical [...] and I was like okay whatever there's so much of it in general that like adding to that noise is already unnecessary and undesirable from from our you know our standpoint really yeah and like there's like literally millions and millions and millions of podcasts you know what I'm saying we'll just get meta for a second right and talk about what we're doing right break the fourth wall although who's writing me as a character so that's a good question you know they'll be mind only in a little bit right yeah so it's like we want to be able you know you want to do your thing you want to be authentic you want to create something that is entertaining obviously but then educational and where is the the line between the two and if you drift too far I think on one way or the other it tends to be more lecture which is you can go to school and get that whatever and if you're more educational I'm sorry if you're more entertainment then you're dealing in comedy or drama or you know whatever those those things are and like this that's not you know that's not what we're not aiming to pull those strings it's kind of interesting because yeah we talked about it again off mic a little bit we don't do like the issue of the week right whatever it is we just don't do that and a lot of stuff is oriented around like uh you know what did Kamala Harris say and what did this happen and then the NBA trade deadline oh God yeah we live in Chicago so will the Bears trade their quarterback Justin Fields will they will they not you know um uh anyways you know like uh I'm not interested in those things right you know and it has something to do with authenticity I think that's the right word yeah so like kidney was like I think we're hopefully dealing in actually useful ideas right things that might actually help you and we were talking at the end of the last episode about the idea of like intoxicating thoughts some thoughts can have like an intoxicating power to them like a verbal Ayahuasca or something like that you know they can really affect your mind and uh I think that's what we're trying to do right a kind of uh uh you know that kind of a thing so I didn't to me in context I think this is the like what made me think about that with this episode because this is kind of like a powerful idea make it over what you will this whole thing we'll be talking about about the zenamatra yogachara mind-only yogic experience it's like a powerful kind of idea and if you can play with it it's kind of like it's kind of like a little bit of a verbal drug or something like that it tries to do something to you it's like an idea that's like intoxicating again intoxicating thoughts right so um okay I in my own notes I kind of wrote down like you know kind of my little summary in my own head about your idea of the existential Guardian operating system and it's a useful idea and I guess that's what I was trying to get to that's a useful idea you're trying to share that with people to be a kind of a Spur or a trigger to get people to think about their experience in some new way right it's like a a tool right a mental tool an ideal an idea tool you know and you kind of frame it out there and so okay yeah I think that's maybe kind of put all this together um is that how you're thinking about that too yeah yeah but we've sort of teased the idea of the yogachara so I want you to give it oh yeah we're gonna do it for sure yeah all right so so the only thing about it is we talked about this ego thing and that was like in the last episodes and there was a certain way of thinking about that right especially this idea that um it functions as a kind of defensive thing it can also function usefully yeah it could function pathologically you have to be aware of it it's an adaptation a system of adaptation but you want to be aware of it or something right so you know how this is working so it doesn't end up being like an unconscious thing yeah it's kind of more like running your running the ship or something like that yeah okay so I want to like put that out there because this is going to be different and then at the end we can talk about whether it's similar or not similar all right yoga Chara here we go right uh now onto something completely different so there are these kind of uh there's this school of Buddhist thought like and Zen kind of fits into it too so this is a little bit of a Zen vibe to this um and they really just have like a different way of discussing ego kind of like all together like I said in the backstory of the episode that's the first thing that came to mind when you brought that word up and in it again there's this super Claim about like what's the nature of how the mind connects with external reality that's like the big thing so the argument in the end is going to go like there is no external World apart from mind and Consciousness and so what the hell does that mean and then what does the ego have to do with this is what we're going to try to talk about right but they say this is the yogic realization this is what you're supposed to realize like this okay there's a way to start understanding this idea it's kind of like useful to look at like Consciousness itself now that's another [...] hard word ego Consciousness all these things are really like tough words yeah um but I'm a present kind of the take on it that you get in sort of this Asian thought and uh we'll kind of see where where it leads us as we go so on the one hand we certainly have like five sensory consciousnesses and this is you know what will be talked about here all kinds of schools to put this thought this mind-only school of thought two you know we have we know the world through our sight our sound our smelling our taste our touch right we got these five sensory consciousnesses and Buddhism pays a lot of attention to this I think Asian thought overall pays a lot of attention because there's a real concern about like what's the nature of mind and the rest of the world like how does that work what that what is that about probably in a way we'll talk about more later that we don't always think about in our culture and the way Western culture and whether we even say our culture anymore I don't know sometimes I don't even know if I want to call it my culture because I feel like it's my culture anymore I think it's just I think it's worse the culture whether it's you know yeah yeah you know um so there's that right and then they talk about the idea of a sixth consciousness which I think when I first learned this was like hmm that was new to me I think I first stumbled across this idea in undergrad and I was at UFC and I read some book on Buddhism I don't even know where I got it or why I got it but we got to this point where they talked about mental Consciousness and I was like hmm I never thought about that before but the idea is that we do experience kind of our own inner worlds we experience our own feelings our own thoughts we feel the deeper things that drive us on some level and we can look at those two right and in a certain sense they're things that we're experiencing because it's not stuff that you you know uh are consciously thinking a lot of times it's just purposely thinking it's just stuff pops up anybody who's tried to meditate for like five seconds has realized that this is the case your mind will produce all kinds of stuff it just does it's going on all the time so in the kind of like the Asian cultural World Buddhist world but the extent that all this stuff influenced Asian culture overall uh you know the spiritual culture that we're trying to talk about well this is just another thing you recognize in a certain sense it's you're experiencing the activity of your own mind which gets you six of those so what do you think about that idea when did you first hear about that Daniel and how did you react to that did you have a similar thing with that yeah I don't know that I heard it like that like they I don't think I got the label you know they're like this is the six the sixth Consciousness is right yeah but but in in definitely in context of of uh Buddhist Meditation so vipassana or you know even in shama any any Buddhist Meditation they'll talk about the inner workings of the mind you know and and in in a different way than simply like not simply but like in sort of modern discussion on mindfulness right they'll just say thoughts come and go be with the breath or be here be present you know what which you're doing anyways but but in the I guess in like the sort of at least from my interpretation the Buddhist view is is one of self-discovery right yeah I think that's right looking at how you know stuff I know stuff through my sense Consciousness but I also know stuff from experiencing whatever my own internal mind is doing right now you're you're able to not just like let it come up and then go but then have a level of recognition you know and then see what see if those streams are what they're attached to and so not to just you can certainly depending on the type of meditation you could certainly cut those streams of of thought which they'll say you can use like a little man with a sword or a woman with a sword and just kind of chop it up and you know get back to whatever it is you're doing but that's one type the other other types are to look at that thing actually you know from a from another perspective not necessarily one of your own as you're sort of riding the waves but more of like a third person Observer and say okay what Tendencies are coming up in my mind am I thinking about my calendar am I thinking about my partner and I think you know and these are the attachments or you know that we've discussed before and when you can see Tendencies and trends ends then you're inherently learning about these kind of like unconscious drives that are always like that's your identify investigate and so on right that you were talking about with this exact thing exactly so I think that's like part of like Buddhist thought and you can even see how they correlate in an interesting way like I heard something from someone that I really loved and she was talking about something she was thinking about in her life and then she realized she had all this pain in her rib side right um so what happened in that moment you know for that person right in that moment you're thinking about like whatever that part of your life was you know that you're thinking about right and then you know you had your own thoughts and feelings going on and then this sensory thing happened all of a sudden physical sensation happened bang you know something happening in the body and then it like it's all how you get aware of how these things kind of interconnect and then it gives you a way to kind of figure out even what they mean to you because that little King in the side is a certain kind of like alarm ringing it's like a bell going ding ding ding ding ding ding ding like think about this you know what I mean because you can start to see that these things are going to affect one another what's going on in this mental conscience this is going to affect your body right and probably even the fact like not just like physically how your body feels but even how you like see the world you know you're getting a certain frame of mind and the world just looks different through your eyes or the music sounds better or you know the food tastes richer if you're in a certain mental state right yeah if your feelings your emotions are different so it's all like how you learn about yourself and how you learn about how these things interconnecting or something like that once you get aware of these kind of like six things happening and how they entwine with one another right and they're like a little in our professional world of like traditional Chinese medicine of course we think about this a lot of course we've been putting a lot emphasis on the body but you know all of that kind of does like Vibe together in this way and you're knowing this through your own experiences that's the Consciousness part right you know you're knowing it through how the body feels you know you're meditating some thought hits you and you realize your body starts to then you sort of learn something in that right and that came through the consciousness of like like uh touch and sensation you know of your own body or something like that it's trippy but that's how it is yeah I mean this you know we've been having this discussion more a little bit on like you know body Consciousness somatitization you know things like this like learning and and you know I know you're cool you know you're cool with it it you know sort of it's becoming more on the Lexicon of therapy now you know the somatic type Theory I go back to like you know like this has been the only reason I sometimes have the reaction I have is this has been a thing for me since like my 20s and [...] yeah you know I've been doing this stuff so long so to me it's not like new right and it's kind of like there's just rebranding of the the same old ideas and so sometimes I react a little bit like okay this person is hijacking this other old idea and calling it something new so they can sell a new book or something so I kind of roll my eyes a little bit right and which I can understand but it's okay you know I mean it's still the ideas are getting out there and it's important that's personal like that's what it is the ideas are getting out there and I and it it like the body keeps the score that you brought up that shit's like as old as the sun sure sure but I mean like a new thing yeah but nothing is new okay fine right if you can Rebrand it and make some money off of it I don't I don't like that [...] yeah but I think but but it's it it's representative of a culture shift not necessarily one individual full disclosure I've never read the book so I have no opinion about it I just bashed it but I don't care about it it's not that book in particular it's just like it just happened to get in the way of my bashing okay sorry yeah yeah but not anything against the personal no but I think it it does put people back in contact with some other aspect of themselves because they're they've abandoned that you know they've abandoned the physical signs right whether they're thinking I mean so if somebody has the awareness of having a thought then having a pain they've made that connection yeah right if somebody doesn't have that connection to their body then they're just think then then this is just kind of like a thing that's floating around and the thought on the inside also then floats around so there's this level of awareness that when you bring your mind back on the inside and you can sense things if we can start and somewhere in the body and have a growth sensation because I feel like Body Sensations are gross as in there they're much louder they're obvious they're obvious when you get into the mind sometimes it's obvious but a lot of the time it's more subtle you know especially when you depend on the person though Daniel though you know I mean like you're kind of a capricorny earthy dude right you have some awareness of your body so other people like it might be their emotions that are super powerful and that's the thing they feel you know I mean I'm not trying to like uh um even disagree with you I agree I know what you're talking about right the sensations of the body are pretty Salient you know yeah you get a paper cut even you're like holy [...] that hurts you know they're Salient right but you know there is this thing of like you know uh people will attune to different parts and that's what's so interesting about it and then people can kind of go often different ways of what might like attract them and attach them or something it could keep you from seeing the big picture maybe yeah does that make any we're agreeing essentially yeah we're agreeing I'm just saying it's a it's a practice of being aware of yourself whatever system you're using you know the increase of awareness of what's going on on the inside is the is the movement as opposed to I don't know what's going on in here I'm just driving this truck I can say like you know back when I started doing this Zen thing you just sit still for a [...] long time and a lot of stuff happens in your mind and in your body and I did start to learn and I had this really deep body work too which we haven't talked about too much maybe we'll do some other episodes on like whether it's like to respond to some of this Bodywork stuff psychologically again that was in my 20s and it was intense and it's very useful exactly the way you're talking about because the body's so meaningful right and some people might even say it's keeping the score [Music] I had the Zen therapy done um and it was an interesting experience but I did start to realize like oh my body is going to tell me stuff yeah it is going to like communicate it's going to tell me somewhere I feel about things which I think was new for me because I you know I had done psychology I had gotten my head trunk I got some of that stuff I had learned how to look at my own thoughts and emotions maybe but I hadn't fully correlated with that physical stuff right like in a way that would probably be pretty natural for us now given our traditional Chinese medicine orientations okay that clicks but at the time they hadn't clicked for me yet I knew my mind and I knew my emotions but I didn't always feel how it connected with the body yeah I think that for most people they don't have that experience they don't have the head shrinking experience they don't have they don't have these kind of you know Bodywork that it's just not a thing so I was pretty driven person so I was like seeking pretty interesting you're looking for for Threads to jump on and connect and follow all the way back up and so from a pop some acid I'll get some Bodywork I mean that was my 20s what do I have to do yeah so then the cushion 12 hours a day to understand myself okay I'll do that I'll get this guy to shrink my head some guy gives me a tab I'll take that whatever [...] has to happen I think you know I think most are not so adventurous and so you know they have to use sort of like the most gross tools to work their way in in the moment which is interesting yeah and the most gross tools are is this here you know I mean give me good advice it's gonna like pay attention to your body they'll probably tell you stuff right and then if you can take it and then but if you could take that and not stop there I think is your point like it's not just that you're not just a gross machine you know then you sort of work your way backwards and say okay you're feeling this but what is that feeling actually is there is there an emotion associated with okay well what's the emotion attached to what does that do for you how did you you know what I'm saying like it starts to move more deeply and then we can say what are the archetypes potentially or what are the Tendencies the Aggregates that are being cultivated or that are calling out or you know whatever the case is you know and this is kind of like the beauty actually of our own medicine right of TCM of whatever you want to call it East Asian medicine and philosophy is that Union between all of them um that like can give you the mind-altering experiences of you know being in a deep meditative State on the acupuncture table or in meditation or during Qigong or Tai Chi whatever you know so last thing oh sorry let me cut you off go ahead no and that and that to me fits right in with the six consciousnesses yeah yeah because then it's how you learn how your minds your feelings your emotions also interact with these other consciousnesses these other experiences yeah we're going to be doing something on uh relationships and um I'm going to talk a little bit about Freud a little bit about this guy named Wilhelm Reich and they're kind of especially Reich is probably the original body keeps the score person or something right yeah yeah and um you know there's that whole complex relationship because just to put it like into um I'm thinking of one person in particular but just to put into a contract a context you could have tons of bodily feelings and not want to know what that's saying and you can block that out yeah right so there is a kind of a like a way that you get in a lot of the stuff that we love of trying to pull these things together the awareness the making unconscious conscious idea right this is what you're trying to get to have happen and then then this way of talking well that's how you learn how these you have these six consciousnesses and they kind of like affect one another right okay so um so that's the basic and you know again a lot of uh Asian thought will talk this way and they kind of stop there usually you say six so if you're interested in Buddhist stuff and you start looking you get a lot of like six consciousnesses the one that was weird for me was now I had to had to add this mental consciousness and maybe for me I was someone who was so interested in like my own thoughts and ideas and stuff that I was just like well I'm not experiencing that I'm creating that you know but there is that those moments where you when you have to sit and meditate we realize well no I'm not creating this this is a bunch of [...] spewing spewing out it has its own agenda stuff is just going I think people don't I I think people don't really talk about that actually very often and so it was very insightful when I first read it I was like oh that's an Insight because you know the issue somebody wanted to come on the podcast I won't mention her name we got an email we've got some emails from some people so you know podcast Bookers if you're listening to this listen to what we're saying I'm gonna say now before you reach out and ask if you can come on the show and promote some particular thing like you got a Vibe with what we're vibing on you know what I'm saying like I'm open we have tons of people out here who are very different ideas but like you know uh you know whatever we do our thing and and anyways we're open to everybody but we're also open to saying no so people being open is also open to be not being open we are free to choose baby we're free no but the point is that like open to be closed people may say oh you know I'm gonna sit down and they have this idea meditation is like shutting off of the mind which obviously we've said that's not true many many times yeah Bob Thurman really bashes that if you want oh yeah yeah yeah but then but then to your point like people then think okay okay now I'm gonna control it I'm gonna control this thing that's talking all the time you could certainly try and you can get pretty good at it actually you know but then to also be aware that that it is a flow of stuff that's kind of like doing its thing it's always running actually you know and that like doesn't say anything about you as a character good or bad it's just but it's happening you know and so when you become aware of that thing that's the first it's kind of like the first step you're like sort of like all right now I have to make changes to this infinite flow of stuff that's happening right you gotta get my my sieve out even on the psychology thing it wasn't an accident that Freud came up with this idea of like stream of Consciousness even to get people to pay attention to this thing because it's like so part of his original thing for whatever it's worth you can like him or not like him there's reason to not like him for sure sure but you know even this Bobby T Robert Turman says there's parts of him that's genius you know and he recognized like there's this flow going on inside of people and yeah we gotta make them look at that so they can figure out how this is affecting them right yeah yeah okay lots of stuff we can say about this but I'll push it so we can do the chicken thing right we'll get your reaction to it too Daniel because I am curious what you think about this so in the to the Matra School in this mind-only school yoga experience school they say there are two other levels that make up people and per what we've been talking about first we can look at the ego and what this means in this way of thinking now the word ego you know we've talked about it maybe a little bit in the previous episodes I don't recall exactly but it really means like I that's all it means I like the letter I like I and Freud actually when he talked about this in German just used the German word for I which is e so he just is like yeah it's I you know so this to the Mantra School introduces this idea of I or ego here but they say it in a very particular way so you'll see this talked about in a couple of different little phrases the one shows the massive downside the other one kind of hides it a little bit but it's it's it's not a good thing so it'll be a little bit of a different from what you were talking about Danny uh or introducing for us so sometimes they'll call this the afflictive mental consciousness afflictive sometimes they'll talk about it the afflictive eye Consciousness or sometimes they'll just say like the eye maker or the thing that makes ego there's an ego-making level of the consciousness of a person this is special to this particular way of thinking this mind-only way of thinking but it's kind of a powerful idea I guess in the Sanskrit it's ahamkara or something that my my Sanskrit isn't always that hot yeah I'm meaning I and Kara meaning maker right but this eye maker idea so what they're trying to point out is we all have this sense of self that's kind of related to our own inner and our experiences and at times we could be thinking about like oh my knee hurts or oh I got that paper cut or whatever sometimes it'll be in our emotions sometimes we'll be in our thoughts these things are kind of changing and flitting around all the time right so when you start paying attention you start to go like um I had this emotion now it changed I had this thought now it changed you know that's the whole idea of like just recognizing the flow of things like what you were talking about oh shit's flowing and I'm not in the same space all the time you know can't step in the same river twice or whatever things are flowing along so say that's just going to flow but there's this deeper sense of like this eye maker this ego maker which imposes this idea upon the person that there is this unitary permanent independent thing yeah I or you could even say that it's kind of like limited so it has this negative effect of like creating this thing not only of like unitary permanent uh independent just separate what would be kind of like an illusion but separate separate independent separate and like cut off in the world around me cut off from all the energies of the world around me and then also in the sense like limited so it's kind of like a like you could say like a truncating thing a thing that puts out these artificial barriers and boundaries that aren't really there right and so it's already kind of like um a problem and that it's kind of like delusional or illusory or something and the point that they're trying to make is then as people as living things not just people but I guess everybody you know squirrels and raccoons and grasshoppers or whoever you are who might be listening donkeys um that we actually identify with this thing right you know that this is what creates our identification with this and I was reading one of the I don't have his name in front of me here this is bad but I'll I'll make sure I'll shoot the credit over for him maybe if you when we write the episode or something because he does a good job explaining this but it ends up being like a cause of a lot of troubles right and they would argue that from this point of view the cause of like all the troubles are coming from this right right um and it creates a lot of like weird internal dialogue in people that's negative it creates a lot of like weird internal white noise that's confusing and it kind of filters and colors our experiences and does this thing to them it makes them much more limited right it cuts us off from the full range I think I thought about this as I was prepping this you know the shower curtain of wisdom in the Next Room and uh you know the whole idea of the Ayahuasca quote that I have from the one artist is it Pablo I'm a Ringo is that his name Daniel I don't know okay anyways great like shamanic artist and he just says like you know it's uh the thing that happens with Ayahuasca is it like overcomes this and it helps you realize that this is illusory right he has something like like not verbatim but like you know give or take you know like paraphrasing that's what it's about it tells us that our experiences are illusory and so it's this kind of like in like this weird filter the meditative thing and I like the way it said in the book I was using sort of prep these materials but they talk about like ego radio when you sit and meditate you realize I have all of this sh going on and they say that's this thing this afflictive mental Consciousness this seventh thing that's like in play kind of uh blah blah blah away all the time obstructing all the time doing all this stuff now in this case it's not being presented as it's like it's a good thing that's adapting or whatever this is presented obviously negative this is probably more akin to the that defensive part of the you know the existential Guardian operating system that I was you know referencing the last couple weeks this particular part this sort of like this exact this guarding thing the the personal personality traits that we use to keep ourselves sort of I guess protected in a way you know um so the thing that they're saying is that it's going to be a major block like all the way through you know I mean it's the thing that creates this delusional sense they're going kind of deep does that fit into what you're thinking because that's exactly I mean that's exactly okay that's like I didn't I don't know this level I I know this but I don't know this you know I know it's like what I what I I I am yogic experience yogic experience so I experienced this and been writing the first and writing the episode a couple weeks ago yeah that's what I realized as I was reading and going through I was like oh here's this thing that's inside that is like you know it's a garden that's that's it's in the name right that's what it does you know but then as I went forward I'm like well I don't want to look at it only as like this negative thing because it's here so if it's here and it's not going anywhere and it's only negative well then to me that's like dualistic and I'm only giving it one aspect and if I want to have integration with it it can't only be you know a poison pill there's gotta be I gotta get high from it at least once or twice you know yeah it can't just be there must be some pleasure I'm getting from this gotta be I need something you know give me give me a little bit a buzz you know yeah little buzz little tingle a little something something yeah relaxing okay give me a little bit neck rub shoulder rub yeah yeah but that was yeah that that's exactly my that was mine but like in this take of this this is like the main like kind of like the main obstructive thing and it's stopping like a ton of real and potential realizations that's the idea right um then on the meditation side then the idea is that this kind of like the more you meditate the more you sort of like take away from this it gets weaker and weaker you know if you want to use like the fire metaphor or something you kind of cook this thing and it starts to melt down and it becomes less and less of an obstructive thing in the person's life or something we'll do some episodes on because we'll do some psychology and relationship stuff we'll talk about Carl Rogers and he thinks this way too like your existential Guardian operating system is kind of close to his like false self-concept thing you know when it goes wrong where the self-concept goes wrong but when you kind of like melt this Carl Rogers Eric Carl Rogers and it's me well you're buying it's like a photo finish at the end that's it I better dive forward good thing I had a long Roman nose you know yeah yeah yeah so um anyways you know and the point is like as this happens then the person can get kind of closer to closer to Enlightenment or closer and closer at least to truth seeing things more and more clearly right because you lose these obstructions from this thing whether you want to call the next Central Garden operating system or whatever or whatever you want to call it you know to the extent that this is an obstructive problem right so it's clearly not being framed in a good way though you sort of Wonder like maybe you need a little of this again otherwise you just stumble around and fall down the flight of stairs you need something to protect you you know you can't just go like should I eat this poisonous berry who cares go for it you know whatever it's all my ego [...] it yeah and then you sit there you go vomits for uh three days yeah I don't know you know so I I do get the idea of what you're saying in this way of thinking though they really say it gets a problem right they're definitely framing it as a problem yeah um and this is the thing that like meditation is trying to overcome or from the shower curtain of wisdom the Ayahuasca is trying to like get a little breakthrough to start overcoming to get over this thing right that's a slant to this school for sure you know yeah okay so then you get to the point of like what is it covering up and then this gets really intensely interesting too okay so I think you have to say and this is what we've been talking about from like sort of a very Universal spiritual point of view this thing is limiting okay cool uh and what's it limiting what's it cutting you off from and you really could say like probably the deeper mysteries of life and the deeper truths of the universe and the deeper blisses and the deeper amazements that are there in the universe it's cutting you off sucks right and I think you can kind of recognize it psychologically and you could recognize it in meditation a lot of stuff like psychologically you know as we've been kind of going back and forth between these two things you do sort of recognize this eventually I got a personality or what I'm calling a personality and it sucks it has to go this thing I'm calling my personality it's just a bag of shitstorm it has to go out in the trash with it so I mean you do sort of realize that I think even in Psychology um but in this school they're starting to say something kind of special about what it's covering up and they're saying it's covering up this realization of Mind only so what does that mean we'll get to it maybe in a couple of uh different routes to it because it's such a deep idea and then you know we'll kind of maybe share our reactions to it or something like that so the first thing maybe to say about it though to get to it is this idea they like we had six levels of like experience and Consciousness right five senses you could experience your own mind now they're saying there's this other thing you can experience this ego thing inside you your existential Guardian operating system you can experience that thing right that's part of something inside of you too then they add this eighth thing so this is kind of unusual they'll talk about eight levels of a person who's just making they're just making [...] up now um isn't everybody yeah that's the point you just you're right in their wheelhouse after the eighth there's a 12th thing and well self-concept existential Guardian operating system Ian ego superego what is this stuff form on form on formless but I think it's like a way of trying to like talk about the world to point out things that are useful yeah of course yeah yeah so um so this eighth level of thing is this idea of what they call the Mind basis of all or if you get deep into the Buddhist world you might hear this phrase called a Leia a-l-a-y-a and maybe you get in other parts of the Asian culture too certainly a lot of this stuff will find its way all over the place because it's a way of talking about all the different karmic energies that are associated with a person right so in the kind of Asian framework you have all of this sort of energetic stuff around you all of this karmic energy right we've gone through all these lives we've accumulated these things we're accumulating them in this life now so we're accumulating all of these Associated kind of energetic imprints right and you always have to figure out like how to talk about this exactly there's a stream of the of that person right there the flow of their being their Spirit a lot of times like they say just Consciousness with this right there's this flow but you're accumulating these sort of energetic little imprints right and it's kind of like energy right Karma um Galaxy would talk about this in some ways you know like great galicious where he would say like you know sometimes when you're doing quantum mechanics maybe you'll find this eventually all these little karmic imprints are probably all over the place right so this is the idea of how they talk about they say you have this whole level of who you are that's this a vast sea of these karmic imprints and so you're supposed to kind of imagine this incredible Warehouse of energy and karmic scenes that we all kind of present sort of there in some kind of quantum way that's associated with us and we're carrying all of this energetic history of this lives and maybe previous lives and all this stuff is Flowing along with us right this is this idea of this mind basis of all and so we can't see that right we don't see it and they're saying part of the reason why we don't see it clearly is because of this afflictive mental Consciousness we can't fully see this you know and even when events are happening that should ring our bells to recognize it a lot of times people don't right you can get like a slap in the face that can tell you hey there's something deeper going on like this but you won't see it and they're saying in part why because you're like so wrapped up in this smaller sense like who you are what you're doing what you think is important all this kind of [...] like that does that make sense what I'm trying to say very yeah so you had this thing going down and you can't see this whole other part so that's part of what the ego is hiding it's hiding this deeper reservoir of who you are right this incredible Storehouse of like energetic potential with all these different little seeds in it and you know they're going to affect your experiences in the world right and they're going to say also going to change what the world's going to do right these things are going to affect what the world is going to do to you you just can't see it and you're going to say something sorry yeah your reaction to these things too because it's deep right so so you know we just came back from a week-long retreated Mexico to our friend's place uh kumankaya who you know Remy was been on podcasts and you know people got a chance to to get away from their life and and yes it's the ego that is or you know in this description of the ego uh that is keeping people separate and sort of not able to see these things but in addition to that it's also the world it's also people's habits it's their responsibilities it's there all the things that they have to do their dogs their wives their husbands their children their you know bills you know everything and yeah that's all part of life right just in general but at simultaneously it also requires our most limited resource which is time and if you don't have the the prioritization of your time in order to do the internal dive that is going to take to even get to like level one to say oh oh what's going on inside of me not even necessarily be aware of any of these other things this other stuff is going to be so far abstract that the conversation won't even occur so I think I wanted to just make the point that it's the ego also but then it's the place in which that we are living that that doesn't allow for this kind of like internal that even the opportunity for this internal reflection nor is there a place in society where this type of internal reflection really has legs where is the conversation around these types of things you know what I'm saying like these sort of like quote unquote spiritual ideologies uh spiritual in what sense you know what I'm saying like even the word spirituality what is that I don't even know what that it means I know we can look up the definition and and write it down but I guess it's associated with something that we don't want to call or something like that you know like to me this is like internal Discovery self-discovery what else do you need to figure out in life you know I'm like okay we can be an expert at you know physics or you know radio waves or you know whatever microphones I don't know right which are important to give back into the world but like in addition to diving into a topic why not dive into who it is that you are all the damn time like you aren't anybody else ever and so like the idea that like that would be totally skipped out I think we're not uh we're not giving enough weight to the place that we are currently residing in where these things are just like moved off into some like random realm that doesn't get discussed but only with people who have like you know dream catchers here's mine uh oh I'm aware uh and and you know incense and and you know robes but that's not that's not true you know what I'm saying like I think I think this is to me this should be taught in school personally yeah yeah you're right you know what I'm saying okay so yeah so you know for me like this is so funny because I got my exact same ranting bitching rant at the end which is like we talk a lot about Society rules Norms structures in the society and so on and I put the notes at least I do but you do too um and uh so yeah again if it's verbatim so if one is spending one's time energy mind emerged and all the things that this culture has set up as like you got to do all of this right it's amazing thing about adult life when you start to notice that I remember when I realized like there's not one [...] second if you let adult life run amok to do anything else no like this whole at least you know I'm talking about America we got people from other places you can let us know but like if you kind of let it every single moment of every single bit of time will be taken up with some responsibility that you're like some box to check some form to send in some other thing to do like every single [...] second will be taken up with something and so if that's the case and all these responsibilities and all the different things that people tell you you're supposed to Value More Than This which may have value those things but you know they're supposed to consume everything how is this how are you supposed to see this I am curious so we probably have maybe like a quarter to a third of our audience that's International and so I I'm you know I'm very curious if you're not from the US I would love to hear your take on this because I think for both Eric and I we feel like I I don't feel like this is uniquely American I think this is uniquely Western and I think the Western culture is ubiquitous in in most of the world most of the developed world but invasive it's invas invasive culture but I will don't be naive about it it's invasive I agree we'll talk about this more in future episodes too because I got some stuff on this coming up but it's a base but I would love to hear from people from around different parts of the globe you know in an email and you can email us at gin and Tantra gmail.com um and just let me or or leave a comment in the YouTube video you know what that's certainly cool too I I'd just like to hear your experience and do you believe this to also be in your part of the world because you know I I don't have I mean I have some people who live in other parts of the world that maybe I'll have this discussion with them I think is probably very similar but you know we're open to all different folks I mean it kind of depends like I think once you get this and I'll I'll say it once you get this capitalistic kind of materialistic and we're gonna talk more about this in a little bit culture stepping in with all of its ideas of how things are supposed to be and it's tied in with a lot of stuff it's yeah I'm going to talk about in future episodes it's tied into religion it's tied into how the culture is organized it's like there's a whole thing around this right how you're supposed to conduct your life how you're supposed to conduct your relationships are you supposed to do everything you know just a lot of this this whole thing and there's a reason to be suspicious yeah like why is it set up this way and yeah I think at some point or another you have to kind of look and say okay there's some element of probably trying to control people in this one the main ways that you control people in a in a it's a soft mechanism control but it has a threat because if you don't take care of this thing I'll ding your bank account for that if you don't take care of this thing over here HR if you work sends you an email now you gotta do this other thing you know like you're constantly like yeah like in the midst of all of these Petty tasks like incessantly right I mean isn't that true yeah no it's true I think though so there there's there's a delineation here because you know as I'm working a little bit more in the medicine community and whatnot I'm also noticing that like in that sort of spiritual kind of communal quote-unquote spiritual Community is also Laden in conspiracy theory right and and and and two and as we're talking about society's power structures in general I can hear someone being like Oh see they're talking about it they're talking about the you know the invisible hand that governs and I'll just if someone's thinking that I will grant you your your argument temporarily because studying conspiracy or studying how the societal pressures act on us is one part of the thing but why would you study something is to learn right and then once you have learned once you have knowledge that knowledge provides you with some amount of like freedom of choice so the choice you can do you know multiple things one you can go back and Loop in and study more and study more and keep wanting to find out what the truth really is that is to me a mental masturbation it's pissing in the Wind for me they talk about the kind of like it's almost like I don't want to compare just a q Anon but it's kind of like that kind of a thing right yeah it's you know it's who's pulling the wheels and who's doing who's pulling the strings pulling the strings up yeah who's true who's turning the wheels who's pulling the strings who's the who's the kings and queen makers and what's the you know right and then who's controlling them who's the chart of them and then who's you know yeah okay yeah who's in charge of them and then who's in charge of them and who's behind them you know what I'm saying like this infinite like I think that's where that Gnostic thing can just go and instead of like Oz an old man behind a you know a keyboard it's like a Russian doll that has like a million people I think it's more and more and more curtains you're like yeah exactly it's the same thing over and over again a doll and a curtain yeah my point in saying this is that like so that's one way of of becoming caught in a loop right but the but for me actually the drive then is on the inside is to change the self right is to change the internal structure so that you can exist as a as a more free being within this structure within the thing that's already in place because every being who has enlightened themselves and they do and we do Enlighten ourselves we're influenced by other people but ultimately the final step is our own leap to take you know and it's probably not a leap I love how in some of the Zen uh philosophies they talk about like realization is like finding out you have a nose you know yeah they're like oh yeah there it is you know but like you everybody who's enlightened themselves in their life has done so within some amount of structure that was you know sort of antithetical to their you know their own way of thinking or believing and so that's because I thought that that's true you go to some Zen Masters they're living in fuel Japan that Society doesn't want them to get enlightened no there's no interest in that no no interest whatsoever so yeah you know we always look back with reverence and say it was so much easier and then you know in in 30 years from now when the AI takes over um you know they will all be doomed right you know but like your your own salvation is on you actually it's on you so we we talk about the external power structures as a reminder that like yes that's a real thing but that also not to get caught up on it and to take that energy that you whatever that you want to fight against it and go back in and do that work on yourself because the more free being helps everybody that obsession with the that kind of the system is part of the system that's correct it's how it's how it gets you to waste your life like spending time on like crap within it that's not out of the system that is the system yeah you know I mean it's like when you first realize when I know when I was a teenager you see some guy dressed like some posing gothway who looks like he's the lead singer from The Cure and he realized like he's just dressing that way right there's there's nothing else happening deeper inside it's the same [...] like it's just a show you know the Counter Culture is just the culture you know um and it's just another it's just I mean if you want to think this way and I sometimes I do it's just another ruse it's just another Dead End Street going nowhere right set up to have you waste your time because then you'll be on this [...] thing would they develop the infinite scroll infinite scrolling right just keep going keep going keep you know on more crap you know of that type so it doesn't go anywhere you'll just spend your time thinking about that in some kind of weird paranoia whatever right anyway enough people get lost in that stuff yeah no it's an important subject right yeah um well I know what we're going to do with this we got one last big chunk of this and you got to be out in like five minutes so we wrap it or you wonder like how do you want to handle it yeah let's wrap it right here okay okay that sounds like an episode okay then we'll guess well guess what we'll do next time we'll look at like what else the ego is hiding yeah you're supposed to be hiding one other major thing and uh it's a cool subject matter you know and and I think uh it'll give us a chance to preview we'll get to talk about our old friend Dean Raiden ah we have to talk about one of our other favorite Carls Carl Jung again right we'll pop up again we'll talk about him we'll talk about Rupert sheldrake who refused to come on the show Rupert Rupert he invited you I did try to get him to come on the show just as a thing I rode him and I got a very polite he's like a British scientist and kind of intellectual thinker he's fun and so after we had Dean written on I was we were like what the [...] so I wrote Rupert I got this very polite British letter back about you know he's very you know he's very busy but thanks and blah blah blah and I wrote One follow-up letter and they just there wasn't what they just didn't write again why is your British politeness what happened to it British people followed up with an insult [Laughter] I don't want him in my show anyways he's just he's just a copycat poser he's just stealing other people's [...] there's that there's that Eagle right there I love it I was like okay I just I put another email that just said well if he ever has the time I know he's an old guy you know I understand yeah anyways perfect well I'm sending these things all right see you Daniel as always thank you so much uh thank you everybody for watching for listening you know if you liked our work then please feel free to share it if uh you're on the YouTube give us a like and a comment or you know whatever the people tell you to do you should probably do it uh or don't do it because you're free to choose man do your thing whatever you want you know hell unsubscribe I don't everyone tells you to subscribe unsubscribe whatever you know um yeah radical Freedom that's right we're radically free uh it but if you're listening to us on Apple podcast give us a review you know it definitely helps to show out um yeah I can't think of anything else email Jin and Tantra gmail.com com Instagram Jin and Tantra and you know feel free to find me on Facebook uh you can send me a message on there all the ways to get a hold of us we certainly love feedback and uh yeah for Eric this is Daniel we'll catch you guys in the next one peace