[Music] hey P G and tear those of us like our spirituality with the twist then was [...] with me before this thing started we get it it is the gear the gear I'm the only one with this gear by the way nobody you know people like oh where' you get that from I was like I made people I got a badass cup yeah I Happ with me today uh I think it's sitting in the other room on my it's sitting actually at my altar in the other room nice my other Buddhist paralia soaking up Good Vibes um all right so we decided like end of 2024 into 2025 this is the time for us to start talking about this thing called karma mudra which is the use of relationships sexuality especially uh in the spiritual path right which uh we're going through all kinds of different dimensions of this and uh that is the subject matter of 2025 maybe right yeah like once we open up the subject matter it's open yeah the Pandora box the Pandora's Box is open it is open so this will be a subject matter to be ongoing per our Infinity number of episodes that we're gonna do with this thing yeah I mean this is like alchemizing desire number three of 3,000 or something like this yeah that's right that's not totally true we we're gonna have on other people and and and whatnot so we'll talk about it but it'll be through different lenses and and that's kind of how the the yeah yeah we got other people gonna talk to but you know I think yeah in terms of our presentations of spiritual subjects this is our time to do it so um we were going to talk maybe the next few weeks about like the idea of attachment and what that means in terms of like spirituality and then a little bit in terms of psychology I think I was thinking about Daniel that's one of the things I think we're trying to do that's a little unique which is to bring some of the psychological stuff in here in a different way yeah that maybe other people would do so I mean I think that's an innovation yeah and people like it yeah I think like there are like in somewhat in I mean it's hard to say you're innovating Buddhism it's been around forever and dosm and these things but in our own little way I guess we're trying to do things that are Innovative you know yeah yeah um so the subject matter of the day is this thing of what's called sutana and tantana and this is a way of talking about I guess you could say Buddhism but maybe the spiritual path in like two different directions in terms of attachment the idea is that the Sutra approach and this comes from the Buddhist sutras the sort of the Buddhist spiritual texts right they're called sutras and they call this Sutra Yana Yana means a vehicle but anyways you know the Sutra vehicle but really for what we're talking about here the idea of like kind of rejecting attachment and you know uh seeking kind of non-attachment which of course is really big in the Buddhist world and we want to talk a little bit about that right yeah I mean and and just and we just we should just give the those two those two terms because at no no one knows those terms for sure so suriana doing dude yeah yeah yeah no I know yeah right but then the but then the other side the Tantra side also so go ahead go ahead you do it I just want to make sure we do it well the tantry on the side is where from what we're talking about is the use of like sexuality desire passion in the spiritual path so you don't turn away from it and try to like pull away from it as a spiritual goal but you sort of more embrace it so to speak and try to use that as like sort of your spiritual sort of just part of your spiritual tools right there's more to say about that but you know you got other stuff you want to add to that because there there are things you can those are big terms obviously from what you're pointing out there's a lot you can say about them yeah for sure I think one is the one is the St like the the the study vehicle or the the study path suriana is the path of the path of learn I mean it's all learning but we're talking about specific learning learning from writing or learning from teachings right in that in in that sense and the tantana is the the practitioner side the experiential side the one that you get from learning the one that you get from practicing and those two are often done in tandem because you can't just in it everything you can't just practice I mean you want to learn from everything but you have to learn from somewhere because inevitably you're going to run into problems that you have no answers to so you need to refer back to something in order to get some frame of reference to then weave back into your life so these two this these two sides uh are you know two sides of the same coin and what the same coin it's the development the the vehicle for your own you know Enlightenment essentially right the enlightenment vehicle I me I guess you know you'd have to say that there's lots of studying and learning in like Tantra of course kind of shocking how much there is there's all kinds of stuff to learn there right and then you know Sut on people a lot of times those are monks and people are doing practice so it's you know part of the picture but I get what you mean it's like there's different ways you can kind of break this stuff up actually Dr Nita tries to do like you know we're using in part Dr Nita's book on karma karma mudra sort of like one of the starting points so we can kind of maybe do like his little checklist on a couple of sides of this but you know what struck me about it you know we were did an episode last week and I think you were really you know when we were doing that we sort of had these little bits of show notes kind of prep but you were really taken by this idea of like what constitutes a spiritual life yeah and this is kind of at the core of those questions too right what do you do with these parts of yourself right if we think about it in terms of one side that tends to be pulling away yeah From Desire attachment passion sexuality right and another side that is more like no we're going to work with that you know that makes a big difference in what your spiritual life is going to be for sure right yeah yeah we had mentioned this last week about you know is is a spiritual life inherently aesthetic or inherently monk-like or inherently renunciate and um you know the the the tantre the tantric path would say absolutely not yeah but they they would that would that would no that would would not be the case at all in fact they would be the opposite they would say how do you weave that in now I mean there is the the deep understanding there's tantric yogis who you know coales their sexual energy and they they're they're free of attachments from you know life and things like this and they're kind of an aesthetic but they're doing it in a way to you know Enlighten them enl make themselves enlightened and we see this today with people who are you know a little bit more I guess we can call them flighty you know they don't want to be attached to a certain area but they're they're kind of free and easy more vagabonds I mean maybe they're not maybe they maybe they actually maybe not there really aren't that many people like that these are people who live in Vans doesn't support that you know like these are like van life people yeah you know what I'm saying who sell everything and then just like want to just travel and and whatnot they're not part of the norm I mean yeah there's a niche of people who do that but it's certainly not the norm actually culture doesn't really support that free and easy wandering LIF but they true they never really did no culture ever really did they were just in in like Tibet and India they were so prevalent at one point that it was seen as part of your own good like religious Fortune to help these people and so maybe you can say that like that was part of the religious culture and therefore part of the actual culture but I think now with the way that we have been divided and and you could certainly you know reflect on this as well we don't have have a whole lot of religious influence on the culture because we are a a a Panacea of cultures and there is not one kind of dominant uh religion you know to the Chagrin of many of course I'm I'm sure you know but when you don't have that you have uh you know you're free from hegemony but if you do have that then there are some um practices that that are pass along the uh the population that then can be used you know to Foster their own things positive and negative I know that might be a little bit vague for our audience so I apologize if I'm speaking on like super large anthropological uh facets at this moment but that's how I see it I sort of felt like I'd have to my own little spiritual way right yeah regardless of what the culture was doing yes but like to me what popped out and I I guess we'll see what you think what me what popped out with this is like well how do you think about attachment and I I don't know all right so as the fates would have it I was trying to think of like how to talk about this and I'm listening to a little audio book from one of the Buddhist Scholars who I like this guy guy's name is Roger Jackson I always get like I can't remember who's the Jackson who made all the Lord of the Rings movie is that Peter Jackson Peter Jackson this is Roger Jackson sometimes I get those first names messed up with these two dudes but anyways he's a Buddhist scholar and he wrote a book called just called like reincarnation so I'm making my way through it and he says like you know part of the oldest theories that you get with spirit uality or what he calls the samsara Karma Moka model which goes something like we're stuck in samsara we talked about this in different episodes but samsara is kind of like the everyday world around you that you get stuck in and also kind of like the cycles of reincarnation so you can think of this maybe on multiple levels the sometimes it's just like the Matrix the [...] that we're stuck in for sure know other times other times it can be thought like you know you just keep reincarnating into that same [...] over and over again right I think someone asked the Buddha something like what's my next life going to be like and he said what's your life like now probably be that [...] again you know you want to do that again you know if you're lucky sometimes you can get worse but in any case you know that and then the karma part is we're kind of all stuck there because of our own karmic inclinations that we built up right and then the Moka part just is you know kind of a great word like meaning freedom I think sometimes that's like the name of like you know the the yoga The Yoga Studio in your neighborhood or something you might not even know what the word means but it means kind of a spiritual Freedom right so that have multiple levels too but I guess part of the idea like in this way of thinking you know initial thoughts were like what keeps you bound could be your attachments keep you bound yeah so it's it's a question think go like what do we think this means and then what does Tantra tried to do handling that stuff in a different way I'm sorry yeah so from the the the yoga you mentioned yoga right and so in yoga I know not everybody's watching this on video but an open Palm right finger spread this is the yoga mudra so this is the sign for yoga right or sign for mudra the sign for Moka and I was reading this book that somebody bought me recently and they were talking about that this mudra and why this and the different uh definitions of Moka and most often the definition is freedom but actually when you look at it from the side of this mudra which is again for our visual audience you can see my palm is open for our audio audience audio audience I have my hand up and I'm just basically going to give somebody a high five with an open hand that's the yo that's the mocha mudra well why is that it's release because when you are holding something in your hand let's say I'm holding this tin I have all four fingers in my thumb wrapped around it so it looks like a fist but what's the opposite of a fist is an open Palm with the fingers spread and what are you doing with this time you're releasing so the action of opening is the release so Freedom thereby is when you're when you're not holding anything but the action to get to that freedom is release and I don't know when else I'm going to get to share that but I wanted to because it fits right here so perfect and these are the kind of things that R roll around in my head you know you know when you think about something like that okay so this is like the whole debate about like what does attachment mean right yes and it could mean like different things in different contexts or something right because there isn't a thing that would go you know you want to release stuff and releasing stuff what are you laying go of your issues your things that are holding you back your idti dos and who you are you know false versions of who you are false identities like you're releasing I mean you could think of it in that way and that's a kind of like yeah you could say like letting go of attachment in that sense is you know um part of any spiritual path right yeah suriana you want to do that on some level right yeah yeah but that's almost I think that has a tantra Vibe well a lot of times what ends up happening the sutri means like you like and we're going to talk about like Desire with this right but you start to get away from you know what the desires are you're purposely trying to pull yourself back and like non- attach right a sort of like a tool and a goal or something like that yeah not maybe in the way that even like what that image in the hand means to me which is like going to let go of potentially all potentially all kinds of stuff yeah but you know specifically a lot of times the way this gets like uh thought of like the more sutraa thing we were talking about earlier has more to do with like letting go of attachments and emotions and those kinds of things this is the Dr Nita stuff where he's contrasting this too so we'll talk our way through it and then the Tantra one is more like no I'm going to embrace and transform my emotions I'm going to work with my attachments I'm going to work with my desires like we were talking about so that's sort of this point of contrast right and then it ends up a lot lot times meaning like meaning like in the more maybe conventional non- tantric kind of path it would be like I'm going to purposly try to like get rid of the causes of my emotional difficulties sometimes we use this word Dua emotional sufferings right and um you know in some ways this will be like even monasticism where people like step away from the world overall right yeah and you know whoops I think my son crawling along behind me and now he's gone I thought I I thought I saw a little mouse back there yeah little mouse in the house so um but Eric you know what man yeah so I mean it raises questions because I think a lot of people lot times when people we'll go through the rest of Dr Dr I think a lot of people times when people think about spirituality they think about it more in that sutri way I'm gonna let my attachments go I'm gonna like and that's my progress or something and my my almost like your goals are sort of be like non affected yes you know and I I guess I'm trying to like in a certain sense give a contrast to that not saying it's bad but you know there's a contrary position which I think I'm trying to advocate for in our little podcast project yeah which is like no you don't have to do things that way you can use these experiences emotions passions desires as tools of the spiritual path yeah yeah I mean so like I said early on you're you're alchemizing your desires right you're you're not necessarily you're not trying to avoid you're not trying to evade you're not trying to not do we're saying there you know the tonas are saying the path the path is through not around um but more importantly and not more importantly but simultaneously these attachments are super deep super deep Beyond even to the level of your deep penetrative awareness actually it it's I mean I don't even know how to like fully get I mean the reason why I'm saying this we don't we're not going to go into it now because I haven't really done it and I don't and this is not I've been thinking about it for the last like 90 seconds and if I should really go into it now but what I'm going to just share from my own self is that like I have had some moments uh on some psychedelics never in this country because just in case I run for Congress they'll never be able to use this video against me so [...] you but I mean I've had some very deep moments where it seemed like deep states of transcendent were Transcendence was possible was imminent actually that was the mode that was the the place where I was going to and yet there was things that were holding me back that I fears and like be emotions and just I don't know I could say like chains that were gripping you know what I'm saying that were even though I was like being vacuumed up into somewhere these things were holding me back and I couldn't identify anything it wasn't guilt it wasn't shame it wasn't fear it was all of them and then more and as we're talking about this like these attachments in com you know in in contrast to you know the release of them I'm just now being I guess shown those experiences that I had in a sense to say like there is far more that holds Us in place than we are probably aware of yeah yeah yeah I mean I think there's a there's a truth to that obviously right when it comes up in like the meditative literature too you people get to like you know there's these stories you know the person is really close but they have something that's kind of holding them back or something like that yeah now I guess it depends on what you decide to do with that we've told this tale before but there's the one about like uh the teacher and the student and uh this person just can't make progress and can't make progress as a student so the teacher eventually says hey we're going on a pilgrimage and they travel and they travel and they travel and eventually the student's like where are we going and they climb up a mountain side and eventually they're in kind of like a nice Valley in the mount the lake and there's a little house and then the teacher goes okay listen there's your house you've been longing for this house inside of yourself for all this time now here's your house and all of a sudden the student pops right and uh just just uh gets over that and so that's a one way of thinking about attachment then too right you know the person was craving this craving this and all of a sudden okay here's this thing you've been longing for bang and all of a sudden you can kind of like Get over it but I think if you asked at that time would that person know they were longing for a house probably no right but it was like holding them back in some way but I guess you know for me and I don't know what you think about this but it's sort of like I'm partially curious what you think about how people think about spiritual it in terms of this I was thinking about it's Robert Wright yeah he's the guy who wrote these kind of books about meditation and all that yeah yeah why why Buddhism is true is the one his famous one yeah good read for those who haven't read it why Buddhism is true Robert right it's a good read you know yeah yeah but I think like he's sort of more representing in my mind at least sort of that idea of like how it's attachment that causes your problems and then you have to let go of them or something I think that's sort of that's the path that he's talking about and I think that's what a lot of people sort of think you know that this entails and it's almost like this understanding like well if I can get rid of my feelings of attachment then I won't be affected by the ups and downs of the world around me you know I won't be affected as much by the Pains of the world around me I'll have this distance from them and I almost feel like that's a little bit how I think about how he thinks about things at least it seems that way to me and I also think that's what people think in the culture like that's what yeah the spiritual path is or that's what the Buddhist path is so yeah yeah and we touched that we touched on this a little bit last week too so that yeah no I I believe that's to I believe that to be the case that inherently in a spiritual path is renunciation is asceticism is is abstinence you know oh yeah because you had that family member who was kind of going like yeah like you're still interested in sexuality I thought you were a spiritual dude yeah what do you mean what's hav you transcended that what do you mean you haven't cut your B you haven't cut your balls off yet dude bro what are you waiting on you know spirituality now yeah get it get yeah and then there and therefore then um mindfulness is a way to kind of remove yourself you know that's the kind of like the the path towards you know becoming now which is none of the you know none in my opinion none of none of the above not attached not anything else you know you sort of you know but like you said the downside to that and this is really the downside to this is that you become kind of an automaton you know you're you're sort of removed you're removed from society but you're still in it and I think the way that I would describe it is that you're not removed from society you're in it you're just not attached to it it doesn't it doesn't affect you in a way like uh if we're going to use a term from biology you have a uh hydrophobic barrier you know meaning you keep water on the out on the outside of you um in in some kind of like energetic sense you know well I mean like I don't know what I think about that I I kind of you know as I was prepping these little notes from Dr NE I kept thinking yeah that that seems like that's an attitude that we have yeah you know and then it also I see is connected to sort of like the 10% happier movement right where you know it's if you're not familiar with that it's one of the journalist I can't remember his name but Dan Dan something yeah yeah he had like a panic attack I think on hammer or something yeah he had been War correspondent for years probably a little PTSD doubt right he started having these panic attacks and then you know he discovered meditation as a way of starting to help to deal with the anxiety of these panic attacks he talks about this kind of thing of like the 10% happier kind of vibe which I think that's another thing that's real common in the culture as I was thinking about this if I can take a step back and have more non-attachment then I can be 10% happier but as I was thinking about that I realized at least for myself and then like you know to the extent that we're trying to communicate things of our ideas here to other people I would say that like I'm not satisfied with the 10% happier thing like I want more than 10 percent 10% isn't good enough for me and I it got to me a little bit your question last week of what constitutes a spiritual life and I was like 10% happier for me that's not a satisfactory spiritual life personally you know there's two two points one so my mom is is you know we've had her on the uh the show before so I think I think it's called Nadia's Journey which is a great great episode um Eric did most of the interviews I was kind of a fly on the wall just learning about my mother you kind of did that on purpose because you thought hey let's let these two people talk sure it was great um but you know she mentioned something to me the other day when I was visiting with her she said you know she came here and like she was meditating in the 70s and it was not cool people thought you were weird yeah were like why would you do that that's so weird you know like that's a strange thing to do and so even though I understand what saying about the 10% happier or the the kind of mindfulness piece is that it's it's a limited you know what we're you know what we're saying is these are vehicles that you know can take you the entire distance versus getting in a car driving a block and go oh that was cool and you're like but you got a full tank of gas no I'm good you know so we're missing out on that but in the grander scheme and this is probably why we are where we are in a meta sense for this podcast audience thank you for watching Eric thank you for rocking is that this is um this is a mystical tradition and unfortunately and it really is an unfortunate thing Eric and I'm talking to you at this moment specifically from our conversation from earlier okay Mystics have never been popular the mystical movement have never been the massive they have never moved the needle and yet they find their way throughout history and they influence the culture from the outside in never from the inside out so if I can you know put ourselves our our I'll put our desires I'm not going to say ourselves or our work I will say our desires in the same vein as the roomies and the hazes and everybody else who I can't think of you know in terms of but you know you try to like make your own little you know you got the those people are oceans we'll try to pour a little bit of our own Thimbles in there too yeah that like that's the vein and they have never been popular and these ideas are not popular so even though meditation is 10% popular you know now because it can give you a life hack and make you less anxiet and less anxious so you could be more productive realistically you know like I've made I make this analogy all the time it's like using the hood of the warm hood of your Lamborghini on a racetrack not to drive but to cook baloney you know like it's just a it's not a misuse but it's a it's an it's an inopportune use of some amazing the most amazing technology that we have which is the human vehicle but it curs me with that and you know we'll do the Dr Nita stuff as we go too don't hear the possibility of something different you don't what if you don't different don't know you know like if I didn't stumble across some stuff that said hey there's a different way of doing things you know so I mean I think that's part of what the go of we're trying to do here too and maybe specifically in this episode to say yeah there's the 10% happier thing I try to trash it it's a thing right right or maybe what maybe I associate more with like Robert Wright nothing wrong with it it's cool right you know but I think it's like that based on this idea of U I'm going to develop uh my spiritualities develop non-attachment which is a little bit close to things like IND difference or something right somewhere within that range there I won't be emotionally involved in what's happening around me and therefore I'll be 10% happier or something right yeah but U you know there's another way of thinking about this which would be sort of more I mean what Dr n is talking about what we're talking about more like well let's come up with another way of using a spiritual path that like yeah works with the passions and directs them so I I'll go through the things and yeah let's do it so so part of it is the idea of um unless unless you want to kill this here you want to kill this and pick this up again you're talking about killing some of the episodes and picking up yeah let's let me let let's do that here for a second here the only thing that I want to add to it just be just at the end of this episode because it's just kind of burning in my head you know you mentioned something just now you said that we want people to hear it and again in typical uh Buddhist and actually in Hindu uh tradition so those who are interested in a little bit of like world religion uh a lot of the sutras right the teachings the written teachings begin with uh and once I heard or ever so did I hear right they always talk about when they heard something and this came from the book that you recommended to me uh Eric which was uh an interesting read right the other goddess goddess yeah which is a good book I I recommend it it's an interesting it's a wild kind of a wild ride of history and femininity and Tantra but it's very good um what the story comes from where that thing comes from where where someone would hear something is that they said that some of the um Gods would come down and speak to each other away from society but close enough so that people around them could hear them and those people would listen and so that's why they start their stories with uh and once I heard and then then then would begin the rest of the teaching so um there's a whole thing of the Contra starting out like that a lot of times like you know with that yeah thus I heard right thus I heard th I heard exactly exactly so uh we're gonna leave it there but uh we'll pick it back up next time as always uh Eric thanks for uh for doing a damn thing this is how we do it uh audience thanks for listening uh you know check out the the second half of this episode uh that should be dropping very soon if you're on uh Instagram hit us up Jin and Tantra podcast uh leave a like comment subscribe we do appreciate uh all the love that everybody gives us and and for sharing the work uh and as always bye-bye peace