apology and here's those of us like our spirituality with a twist so we are back with the final part of what became a series of episodes uh there was uh there's a member of our gnt community family who had loss of death in the family and we decided to do this series of episodes kind of in recognition of that the previous ones we had done had been a little bit more on the personal side we were talking some of our reactions to that experience and things related um but this one is going to be a little bit more conversation kind of on uh specifically the tibetan book of the dead and the bardo and we had talked about these things before but if you talk about them once a year or something there's not a bad thing in that you know do we want to kind of go through it again and really talk about this whole death thing what is it anyways um not a small question has some import in all of our lives um and i was like when i was thinking about like uh the details of this for the week uh i thought about our conversation last week daniel and he brought up this whole issue of the denial of the reality of this within our culture or something people don't want to look at it so sort of a major thing you brought up last week and it kind of shifted in a weird way i i also was thinking a lot when you brought the subject matter up we were sort of like freestyling it and i thought i love about pain you know and how people are afraid of pain too very reasonably so you know this whole set of issues of like those two things but the denial part is a big deal and uh and we sort of talked about that a little bit but we didn't get a chance to talk about these kind of meditations that they do in the tibetan buddhist and tantra tradition specifically about making people get over that denial which is you said there's an important thing right you can't sit around denying it right um so the what the funny thing about it is when you when you talk about you know these kinds of contemplations that they ask you to do again we're drawing a lot in the dalai lama school because you know that's the one that i happen to you you happen to draw on the most with these conversations but i think they all ask you to do this there's much difference between any of these schools they all do it the funny thing about that struck me is that it's really not they're not optimistic contemplations but the other hand i don't think you're supposed to think of them as pessimistic either i think you're supposed to think of them as realistic and then i think there's supposed to be an undercurrent of optimism hidden in it for the reason that like life continues on beyond this life for everyone so that i think that's the weird part usually beginning before that you're supposed to think about the preciousness of the life you have and then ultimately you're really supposed to think this my lives will continue in some way and i'll be doing other stuff besides this life so it's a reframing of the whole question but i don't think you're supposed to feel pessimistic about it exactly you know what i'm trying to say yeah no i think well yeah no i mean that's definitely what they're trying to do like they they don't want you feeling pessimistic so it's kind of like the the i guess you could say the affliction is the medicine yeah i mean that's the kind of attitude that you have in these things for sure yeah you know and and to accept it is is the only way real i mean really that is the only you know we'd like to have things not be so black and white like you know but at some point that it does boil down and acceptance is your only option you can resist but you won't resistant through and through well resistance is futile as they say in the films that's right yeah so um i i think it's important you know that we have these conversations and you know we do a little series on things some other podcasts we'll do you know one-offs of different episodes every week but we kind of run little series because i think we'd like to have a little bit more longer form kind of discussion you know just for ourselves to kind of have some time to think about things as we kind of go through give people time to think about things between the episodes too yeah yeah and and you know so as we kind of like worked towards the crescendo here i think the big piece about all this is that like you know resistance is futile acceptance is necessary that's the that's for me this is the kind of like the key and then once you get to that stage okay then what and you could say in your mind oh yeah okay resistance is futile acceptance is necessary got it okay cool now what well assuming that you feel that actually you didn't just repeat it there are things that you can do to kind of help yourself along the process and so i think how you know you had mentioned with your grandfather or myself a little bit with my grandmother being kind of a death doula if you will i know that's a it's a job but like you know helping steward people along their process is one way but then simultaneously on like a in a smaller reflection you also have just everyday kind of loss that occurs right or everyday transition we won't even call it loss we'll call it transition that occurs what what comes the one that comes to my mind is one of my patients daughters going off to college they have a very close relationship and she's been kind of hiding it from her daughter and it's been eating at her and so she's like really really physically active and doing all kinds of stuff just to busy her mind but she's got injured and she came in for treatment and at some point she said i'm just busying myself not to deal with this but i don't want my daughter to worry about me and i just said look this is kind of like someone passing if you have this conversation with her and you open it up and air it out then the time that you have left whether it be a month or a few weeks or whatever you can spend together knowing that like you have lived this chapter of your time together to the fullest and i think that's the point right so you have to accept that this is the way that it's going to be but it's not a nihilistic viewpoint of saying although that's the end therefore that's it it's actually the opposite it's saying that's the end point let's live it up the best way that we can between now and then and that's the that's the kind of hope you know at least that i have yeah yeah i think it's all true and then you know there's like a there's a metaphysical component to this as well which is just like there's an aspect of each living thing that's going to transcend this existence there's a buddha nature there's a thing beyond you know this and so i think um well you know like a couple of different things happening when you talk about within like your life and losses and things like that of course those are painful you know when you think about the the big ending of all of our lives that's going to happen there's like this magic in that that you're supposed to discover too which is that you know you will continue on you know in some form or another beyond this you know there's so anyways it's like kind of like two sets of ideas running right parallel right there's the acceptance of change and the acceptance of loss and the acceptance of these things that you're talking about i think right and taking the attitude with it which is what like okay except that these things are going to happen and i also like take the attitude that like i'm gonna like make this [...] good what i have right yeah and then the other part is like when you get to like the actual end of like anyone's life there's this there's this heart of magic in it which is that you know there's this magical thing called the buddha nature which will continue on which is yeah i guess we'll get we'll talk to it when we do the tibetan book of the dead stuff but you know i think that you're supposed to like look at it from that point of view too otherwise it is like uh otherwise you're talking about something that's much more of a bummer right you're supposed to see this other thing which is [...] hard in this culture we've done tons of episodes on this it's really hard to get to that place because the culture doesn't really support it you know unless you're unless you're like you know it's christianity or some materialism and you're kind of like okay so if you're not a christian you're a materialist and like so in part we're talking to both of these audiences anyone who might be interested yeah i mean you know it's that's the thing there's something else beyond so in this culture we don't we value youth we value beauty i mean all cultures do really youth and beauty vitality you know but then simultaneously we hide the aged we hide the the aging process you know like i mean everybody wants to feel as good and as young as you possibly can of course that's been that way forever i mean snake oil salesmen were there because they were selling something that somebody was buying you know what i'm saying like in the non sake snake oilsman sense you know traditional chinese medicine our day jobs they've been working on trying to keep people uh you know as vital and healthy and young as possible for millennia that's like a major goal of what they're trying to do in all these different ways so yeah so you know by acknowledging these things i think it's just accepting one of the facts of life okay so here's the here's the i mean i just kind of did like a short hand of the kind of things they ask you to contemplate there's a real like kind of systematic way of doing this that lama son kappa the founder of the school the dalai lama is laid out and it's drawing on other people to uh gunpopa uh from you know like the cargo school does something like this so there's this there's this thing of doing this you know um yeah i'm positive that they all have this me all these old tibetan names people will have things like this some way or another so i didn't do the official uh you know whatever nine rounds or something i just wanted to bring up the kind of issues that they talk about that you're supposed to think about but i guess part of the important point is it's supposed to be kind of a systematic contemplation so anyway so they do things like this with the context of you're really not supposed to be pessimistic so um all right anyway so you've realized the preciousness of your life and the beauty of life and the fact that you're going to continue on and then you kind of go well okay as far as this life goes inevitably this life is going to end there's just no way around that and you have to like think of the inevitability of this i was trying to prep for it for this week for us so i made myself do this a little bit more and i did it in the context of thinking about you know kind of what we were just talking about that i have a transcendent part of myself to a buddha nature or a spirit or a soul or whatever you want to call it consciousness that's transcendent of like just my physical body and it's a powerful thing to do right um and i think just thinking about the power of the mind is kind of powerful and that the power of the power of the shen and the spirit is powerful so there's that part they talk about the fragility of the body so they want you to think okay the body is kind of a fragile thing has all these different parts some parts may eventually clog up and break daniel was just talking in the pre-show about this clunker car 11 of a car hopefully nobody has a lemon of a body um we got stuck with a lemon car unfortunately it happens you know hopefully none of our bodies are lemons uh but you know the whole thing that like things can get kind of like uh fragile and it's easy for things to break inside it's easy for things to happen outside the body so there's a sort of a meditation on that just be aware of you know the vulnerability of the body which not in a way that's supposed to make you paranoid but the way that's supposed to make you just think oh yeah yeah there's a i shouldn't i should be aware of uh you know this aspect in in terms of the idea like i'm not gonna be around forever you know and there's real reasons why that's the case right let me do a whole thing about life is going to end but it's only and it's only getting shorter it's not getting longer there's never any day the day before like that ain't a thing every day it's gonna get shorter um so i you know uh i think the point where to light a fire under people's asses like what you were talking good to put value in it again that's not meant to be like uh a dreary thing that you're supposed to walk around all pessimistic about it's really supposed to get you like yeah this doesn't go for on forever let me get my ass in gear and do good [...] up in whatever ways are meaningful you know and then when they talk about ways that are meaningful they make this last series of points which is something like wealth is not going to last so whatever you had in terms of like material wealth is not going to go with you there's like the old black and white movie you can't take it with you true you can't take it with you and then even the relationships with loved ones though you build them up and they have karmic meaning and karmic intensity and you can crash cross paths with those people in the future and those relationships can be bonds that you have where you discover people that you know in some way like you and i you know we discovered like a connection between us right now we do this thing and like from uh buddhist point of view tibetan point's point of view tantric point of view whatever point of view you want to talk about like uh this is not just happening because of the now this is happening because we had built the the ties of some relationship sometime before and it's reappearing again right and for those who are interested we have some episodes one of i think they're called uh karma explained well we do a bit of this um kind of break down on karma they're good good conversations if you haven't heard them before and if you have heard them go ahead and pop them up again you might learn something or not i haven't talked to people who listen to these things more than once when there's something that's interesting for them yeah i have to um yes i think like that adds a different tone to it too because like the relationships you're building now make them good don't make them shitty make them good because those people are probably going to cross your path again at some time or another and you don't want them all like edgy with you but i would be remiss to say eric if uh we didn't have some episodes where we kind of crapped on like soul mates and some twin flame things you know and oh you crapped on that much more than i did my friend approach that with the humility of respect oh yeah yeah you're getting the nuts by that repeatedly i am very respectful of that yeah okay those are different episodes too people listen to but like i've had like some intense experiences with people and i'm like okay i'm gonna respect this [...] right yeah i'm not i don't play games with uh the soul mate thing i'm like okay this is intense things can happen between people all right uh and so you treat those people with respect yeah uh anyways but the thing i think that i think that's optimistic about this and i've talked about it with my son and my daughter and and you know the idea that the bonds that you're building are gonna like probably reappear in some way um ones and they're going to show value to you in the future you know um which is a different attitude too you know i don't think we do that and i think in our culture it's like people are disposable to be honest yeah i don't know i mean disposable that one i'm not so sure i know people have people have their you know friends and their cohorts and their do you know what i'm saying even your children you know you know what i'm saying like there's just some yeah i mean i think in some corporate level of course that's that's you know in some on some level everybody looked at that but i don't think that i don't know that the culture i don't know that i could say that the culture teaches that okay separate episode something for you and i to chat about for sure and we'll like you know i mean i can do something meaning to do something called neoliberalism in you so maybe yeah for sure the culture promotes self-aggrandization it promotes self-promoting promotes self-marketing you know what i'm saying definitely self-minded things but i don't know that it and that's active about that you know you can be anything you want you should be a millionaire you you know all these kind of things right but i don't know that i could remember anybody's people like repetitive viewpoints saying get rid of people they're use them you know uh okay huge episode okay i'm just saying the other thing i would say about it would be uh my discovery of you daniel is you're a very loyal person right yeah uh i think you're an outlier but we could talk about that you know possibly but i you know i have a you know and some of whom this is kind of real right now we get real so i have a number of friends uh several of whom are frequent this podcast on a regular basis they're they're they're loyal their loyalty is probably equivalent to mine because we've been friends for so long through so many various things so i would agree but i will also say to the point that you brought up previously it's like if we have bonds with certain people in this lifetime then those are probably going to be the ones that have value you know what i'm saying and i don't know how we would have time to have such a huge network of people that we could always call upon there's just not that much time available in life so i understand what you're saying um but i don't know that it's a culture i don't know that the culture does that i think that just might be people's nature you know and the fact that like we live in such kind of a windy society where things are turning yes we live in the windy city chicago for our international listeners uh but you know windy meaning like there's high amounts of turnover people are moving jobs are changing families are changing you know it's kind of in and out well okay where do they have some episodes on relationships in general yes yes yeah that's before there's there's good foreshadowing right there and i think you and i are gonna have some conversation about that yeah that's good i'm ready but i also understand you don't want to like be on the podcast and say oh yeah yeah everyone's disposable when you have your friends listening to this but i'm not paying for friends who are disposable i'm not pandering i don't panic i'm not pandering no i'm just i'm just joking no no you're not you're a very loyal person yeah okay well okay i that if we start talking about that we'll be here for the whole update we'll be here then we'll never try to talk about death back to barto never talk about death um anyway so they say you know uh wealth loved ones and then finally even this body that you're you've been so attached to this whole life literally and psychologically is gonna go so that's kind of the thing so then they say well what's going to hang around well the way different things are going to hang around like the skills that you build are going to hang around in a sense you know if you like spend a lot of time doing music you'll probably carry some musical skill with you you spend a lot of time my son for some reason has this whole thing about jess there's his little blankie again in the background and so he just has some chest karma he's had since he was young something happened he built something around that and so on medicine the arts of the different types whatever it might be for you you know business acumen you know different things you'll probably carry those things with you so there's a certain like look at what you develop in the course of your life too because you're going to carry in some ways those tendencies with you those relationships those things but in the immediate they're not going to be there and you're going to continue on your journey you can say that like education experience skills hobbies are ways that we can update our software that will that will have to get a little bit of a reboot but aspects will carry on i think that's fair to say but then they get to the big one which is going to be spiritual practice so when they say well what's really going to do you the most good of all these things is going to be your meditative philosophical and spiritual contemplations what would you what so spiritual practice can sit what would that consist of i think we're talking about like everything we've been talking about the whole time like how you meditate how you study spiritual ideas how you contemplate these things how you contemplate your life in these deeper ways um yeah all of that stuff as they saying that's the that's the most valuable aspect of all these things that you'll take with you i think but you could also include the way in which you carry yourself how you how you interact with the world you're oh yeah i got by all of that but then they did this little pocket of things like you know like if you meditate on buddha nature and you actually kind of become like oh i think there is something like that and you have like moments of feeling that that's going to be a kind of a powerful experience for you for something like this okay and something powerful to carry on do i agree i think i was kind of like even more so than the way we talk about i think we're both emphasizing the idea of like yeah what you do in this life yeah the relationships you build the habits that you build right the knowledges that you acquire all that stuff is really important and then you have this last little kind of kernel of things which is you know like how you build the spiritual aspect of who you are let's put it like that maybe which could be built up of things like meditation and uh you know contemplation and questioning and exploring you know different ways of thinking about spiritual aspects of life those things going to carry on in a powerful way so it's a cell job on that if you want to be honest about it but you know it's like a it's a decent cell job you know it's a good sell job on something that's good it's trying to say hey you should spend some time doing this in the context of your life because that's going to carry a lot of value even when other things are going to be you know they're going to follow but this will really create the core of something for you does that make sense to you or yeah yeah i know when you talk about like like what spiritual practice involves i think you're right you want to include like how you act not just if you're sitting in meditating that's how you act in your life outside of that too yeah i i was working with a client of mine this morning and we were talking about something and he goes well one thing i don't have is anger issues because like i i hope that as i as i age and you know if my mind declines i'll maintain my sense of humor you know and i just thought that was just such an insightful thing to say in the middle of like doing push-ups you know but like it really is like he i've never seen him man i've known him now for well over a year never seen him angry ever you know a little frustrated over some you know life things but like not to the point of anger never like never turns everything into humor some way to kind of laugh about it and i just in that moment i was like man that says a lot to his internal state now he doesn't meditate or anything he's not like that but um i just i don't know i find sometimes you get windows into people's cognitive processes or their hearts or whatever you know whatever you want to think of heart mind connection and it gives you a lot about them and that that kind that moment sort of hit me and i was like oh okay they're there you are on the inside you know existing in a pleasant place it's nice i think like i think of the chinese medicine about this because it's this ability to take the other emotional states and turn them into humor laughter joy whatever so in chinese best they talk about the heart being associated with this fire phase we're gonna do a bunch of stuff on elements in a little bit just to talk about the tibetan book of the dead and uh i always think about this and i think i probably got from my teacher from china too lester wong uh who it was like you should you have to find like this joyful place inside yourself over and over and over again like all the time um i got some episodes on his meditation style that i did a while ago back in 2020 and i never put them up i probably will under there are little shots of spirits that are like overdue to be replenished i've got a couple of episodes that i did that have to be like uh put up at this point but in any case yeah that was his sort of meditation style to find that what you realize from a chinese medical point of view is you're finding yourself back to the natural emotion of the heart which is joy so if you can take anger and transmute it in the joy if you can take sadness and grief and somehow transmute it into joy you know like an irish wake irish wake yeah you know you're at the wake you tell some jokes you know you drink a little bit you know there's a whole song called finnegan's wake if you haven't heard it you can listen to the irish song about the wake everyone gets rowdy drunk and a brawl starts an irish wake then you turn sadness and grief and anger i don't know that's not the way but you're supposed to be a joy you know in all these things so anyways that whole idea that you can like transmute these emotions into this more joyful place then you're in your alchemist right yeah um yeah cool uh okay but they're still gonna do the cell job on the spiritual thing there's no way around that all the good stuff we do in our life one side and then the other part is like you contemplate your spiritual stuff all right which gets us to the book of the bardo that we wanted to walk through uh the death what is it anyways part from a book of the bardo point of view so there's no doubt this has been the theme running through the whole episode that there's the separation of the spirit or the soul or the consciousness or the mind or whatever word you want to use uh from matter that's just kind of like across this whole set of conversations like even in our chinese medical medical world we talk about yin and yang separating and the yin is the body and the yang is the shen the spirit of the person and they separate and that's called death but there's a thing that's separating away so we've done our episodes on materialism that's got a text from somebody in the past week where he was listening to those episodes and he was like wow this is a real thing y'all are hitting on it's a genuine problem i want to have him on as a guest i won't give away who he is uh but anyways he reached out and he was like because i'm not sure who's gonna come on that and when but it's something that we know and we were like yeah that's a good thing and he was talking about it like how he feels like it affects all of music and art and interesting ways so anyways he has opinions about this so i thought okay good come on so a preview of a big preview of something that we may do in the future but anyways this whole like probably too often but a lot of them we eventually get to they're in our hearts to do and eventually so uh and we gotta work so what can you do yeah so uh okay so there's definitely this idea of a consciousness or a spirit or whatever outside of the physicality outside of the brain which is a whole other set of episodes we've done and we'll probably do more in the future but hair explorer thing more just a thing you know for um you know just our small 100 000 audience you know roughly it's about what it is if you guys are interested and not we say this regularly but like if you're interested in some particular topic that you'd like us to to go over or you're interested in or whatever you know please send us a message you know like we're i'll definitely i'm not guaranteeing that we're going to do it but like we'll bring it up i'll look into it and if it's worth talking about if it's worth spending you know an hour two hours on it then you know or even a half hour you know we'll bring it up we'll we'll kick it around and so you know because sometimes it's nice to have you know we all have we eric has stuff he wants to do i have stuff i want to do but you know it's nice to have some different perspectives different opinions and we are open to those things so before we pop in i wanted to just make sure that i say that yeah i think we've done stuff like that before people have brought up an issue and we're like oh yeah we should do that yeah yeah um so anyways it's a big subject but just to point it out there that's part of the reason why this is a more optimistic framework because there's a part of each of us that's going to continue on you know a core of uh you know pure consciousness or something like that clear light mind it's like kind of you if you listen to the dalai lama he'll talk that way people can say buddha nature and you can say the person shen whatever word you like you know that's all good um but anyways there's this whole idea and then there's all the kind of i guess you'd say information carried along with that particular person because we've all had lives where we've done all these things so that's where you build up like oh i can play chess oh i love this person oh i do this i know how to have a relationship i know how to do these things there's stuff that that that that stream of that consciousness has developed too but that's going to flow forward so here's the idea that they talk about like they give reference to this you know for those who don't unfamiliar they talk about the mind as like a clear light exp state experience i'm not exactly sure what you know it's composed of clear light or it is clear light like my sort of question or thought is that like from you know your take your experience is the light it's is the mind itself clear light or is the radiance of the mind or that part of the the being that continues clear clear light so is it the is it or is it both from your experience because i i've always this is it's like it's a subtle question right like is it the light from the bulb or the bulb itself or the bulb emitting the light together creates that light you know and i don't i don't know that i'm not sure that i could say i've had an experience that would definitely give me one side or the other but maybe that's just separation and i can't experience them separately yeah it's kind of a funny question okay so let me see if i can kind of get to the unpacking of something like that um so there's a real question of i guess like what is this subjective experience of the person so i guess to me in like like say if you listen to dalai lama talking about this and he's representing this llama some kappa kind of line of thought you know founder of the school of the dalai lamas and all that so the subjective experience is one of clear light they don't always even say bliss and emptiness here though sometimes they will i get the feeling from like gaelic rinpoche's point of view who's one of the other people that we studied with that like downs are kind of cultivated things where this mind of clear light can realize bliss and emptiness okay so in a way i think you're talking about like how that feels subjectively to the person in those moments when that mind appears when that state appears right and then there's a whole thing of like where they'll say something like recognize that that is the however you want to phrase it core of your being or something like that core of your mind that that's the core so you have to recognize that experience as the core so i don't that unites the two things you're talking about into one thing but i think it kind of does and there seems to be this idea of recognition it definitely comes up in the tibetan book of the dead in the bardo book because there's this moment where this is going to appear and there's a big point made of like recognize this as this is the core of your being and that experience will probably flip past yeah and you'll miss it you know but like you're supposed to recognize like there's all these it's like they kind of use the metaphor of the water and the glass that settles you know and then you see the pure water or something as opposed to all there's other stuff that's floating inside something like that comes up a lot you know so this moment of recognition and there's supposed to be this aha oh wait a minute that's a thing that's the core of my nature then there's another trippy part that will happen um especially happens in like this thing called the guyasamaja this is brought up one of the buddhist tantras where you can also kind of find that clear light in all of your experiences because because it's the core of the mind when that experience shows up but there's also a way i think zogchen the great perfection schools are like this too where like hidden inside of every single experience you have this thing is still there because it's the core of who you are so i think there's moments of subjective experience of like bang where this will appear and they kind of talk about moments when this happens it's supposed to happen in certain moments during sleep it's supposed to happen in terms of like sexuality you know it's supposed to happen in terms of like and you brought this up too even like weird mundane things like people sneeze this pops up for a second but in any case there's these moments where it will appear and then there's supposed to be a moment of recognition um where those two things i think that you're bringing up get you not united but then there's also this line of thought that goes wait a minute if you really take a step back and think about it it's there all the time you know in every experience because it's the root of who you are right so in every sensory experience that you have which is like all the experiences you have or in some ways either outside senses or experiencing your own emotions and your own thoughts or whatever that thing is always kind there so i've wrestled with that set of questions too i totally get that for me there's also been the thing of like when they say when this really gets hit there's going to be this moment of seeing that like i suppose it's kind of like all everything becomes this clear light thing this has fascinated the hell out of me forever this is another one of these things where you never know what we're going to talk about once this mic goes on because we weren't prepped to talk about this at all but you know we're talking from the heart of what our experiences are so um i was reading this kabbalistic book called the bahir and one of the passages that hit me in that thing not only kabbalistically but even like from all my zen and taoist thoughts and all that buddhist thoughts of different types tantric thoughts up to that point kind of coalesced around this thing which was that um it says something like from the point of view of the divine i will just use divine i think they say the endless they don't even say god is the word in this one i had to double check and look at the by here again but i think i got to sit down in the shop i have to peek it anyways let's maybe remember it uh from the point of view of the divine or the endless or something like that everything is just itself everything is just the the light of the endless and they use light there too they use that same metaphor the word light appears a lot right so everything is just that light but from the point of view of relative beings everything appears how it appears now if you get shunyata if you get emptiness that's a way of talking about emptying this too because from everyone's individual's perspective they're seeing their own stuff you know as ram das a friend of mine was talking about ram das recently we're both going through our struggles and she said now i was listening to ram dash she loves him a lot and she said well we're all on our own trip it was ron dawson's comment and i was like okay that's not that many words but that's true we're all on our own trip yeah everybody's having their own trip so yeah we're all having our own trip but from the point of view of like the biggest point of view everything is just this clear light phenomenon and i don't know this hit me like a [...] thunderbolt for whatever reason in that moment it was a thought i had before but i just coming from that source or something at that time it really hit me and i started thinking you know what i remember talking with students about it back in the day i remember thinking like having the thoughts and talking with some students about it i had like uh this group of students i was specifically training in chinese pulse diagnosis and so we were talking i was like you know this is so weird for me because i think that's true and yet i can't see things that way all the time so i had that weird moment of like that sounds really true to me but at the same time i had to admit to myself like i'm not seeing that subjectively i have moments where i see and experience things that way and they said well the bad is on that's my fault that's not the fault of the light of the endless it's not it's not it's fault that's me that's on me to do that and that actually the funny way led me to like go back through the buddhist tantra rob because i felt like yeah i need to like get to this thing of like seeing things that way and we all have our own spiritual stories of why we do what we do at different times okay but like uh you know uh there are other reasons why i was like thinking about the different emphasis i placed in different parts of my spiritual life at different times but in any case that also got me thinking a lot about this buddha nature thing and where you like experience the clear light buddha nature inside of yourself and then you also realize everything is that actually and then sometimes they describe that as like this experience of like water pouring into water so you have the subjective experience and then you realize everything is that and then water pours into water which i'd like to get more clear in this life before i'm done but i've gotten better at it over the years like i get like you know that thing like you're like yeah there's that probably is how it is i really like this term the endless i'll be honest i think that that does a way better job of describing the thing than you know the divine or something like that you know divine almost has an air of like at least at this point for me like impure angel-esque you know say omnipotent type power you know i'm saying like divine has power but you know when you say something is endless that just you can't even it does a much better job of not allowing at least not allowing my mind to coalesce around any kind of concept you know they call that they call that raiification like i can't reify anything because it's like well there's no ending which means when did it start i don't know never like how does that you know how does that exist it's almost like it exists outside of conceptuality which to me is more divine than divinity well you know what's interesting about that is like that's like your inner whatever it is kabbalist or whatever for sure you know because that the whole point of that is to like go through and not give you anything to hang on i can remember reading like the zohar and doing the meditations around the zohar and things like that such as i did them and like you know that's a big thing and there's a big conversation the zohar is one of another kabbalist books that's really famous book of splendor from like okay so anyways this in this thing uh there's just a whole question of like the nature of like the connection of the endless to things that are more finite it's like a major point of discussion and we haven't done like a kabbalistic series but it seems like we're hyped to do it because there's inner resonance for both of us so we'll be hyped to do it at some point and that we will do you know we make these promises and it will happen at some point or another because we have a long checklist of [...] to do i'd like to get i would love it if our friend uh mr miller would join us for that one we'll see well i'm sure you will yeah yeah yeah we could do a conversation with him just about his experiences with that and talk about him in his life i like wouldn't mind doing a little yeah jin and tantra work up on that and then we can do our own series too yeah i like the idea yeah we have a friend who's uh definitely has experience with this and his chinese medical person and just a profound person just in general so yeah so um uh but anyway so yeah so this is this is the thing so that's the way i kind of think about the question that you're talking about um and i think you also want to like do with that one daniel or should we talk about anything else you want to do with that or should we talk about the bar no dissolving thing okay yeah all right so okay so on this whole bardo um well actually before before you go eric i just i think why i why i mentioned the endless is that like there is going to be much that is not conceptually understood there is also much that is going to be conceptually understood and so there's this kind of has to be this balance but i i think between the two and that like you can in in the spiritual practice is that not only are you you know you're honing your contemplations and you're working with these difficult you know kind of ideas you're wrestling with them you're feeling them or whatever but then you're also not going to maybe have a specific answer and say well that is that right it's not going to be just boiled down to a nice tiny little explanation and you're going to be put on a little bow and it's going to hang up in your closet with all the rest of your concepts that you learn and you know reading writing and arithmetic i don't i don't believe i think it's a constant thing that like we're working to refine working to understand working to embody working to feel and part of the process of looking at this is to take on the things that are you know essentially larger than life you know larger than just our like our finite experience and that's very difficult because most of things that we learn are kind of finite actually i mean they may be like there's levels of mastery music education you know all the different careers that are out there but they're still within a whole you know they're still they're kind of like infinite amounts of wells that sort of all lead back to the source of the earth you know what with the for water you know you use the water analogy so i just think i wanted to give people some like i don't know out in that like if you don't get it no problem like that's that's okay you know but like the fact that you're wrestling with it means that you're at least moving forward some momentum on your spiritual practice on your own development to be able to look at these difficult concepts and you know from various traditions and say okay i'm gonna give it a try or at least i'm gonna think about it as opposed to just like denying it or never even hearing about it yeah so for me like it was kind of funny because we you know we went and it's we plopped in this very technical conversation in the middle of this episode plop it just came up um but you know i think we talked about in the way that's like honest to our experience and obvious to our you know uh our hearts and whatnot uh i think maybe it's a separate episode too we're discovering tons of separate episodes within this episode i think you have like uh a very interesting set of questions personally about like what is like conceptual knowledge versus what is experiential knowledge like that's a big deal for you right and what conceptual means versus things that are transcendent of the conceptual like this really matters to you a lot in my conversations with you over the years and in this podcast like this is the thing that really matters and there are like you know like then you enter this into this world but there are definitely like schools of thought that will say the emphasis of things to be non-conceptual right and then there's also like a thing that says do you have to like is value is it valuable to conceptualize things and in what ways even in your experiences do you have to like learn how to conceptualize them otherwise those experiences will just flit along that's experiences so anyways maybe that's a whole set about like a whole thing to have the conversation you know what the heck that means i can kind of like see how it might work but anyways yeah i know this is a huge thing that i think is uh kind of uh if you're doing zen you'd say this is a zen riddle for you this is a co-op a personal koan you know hosokawa roshi like the person i studied zen with in the beginning parts of my life great zen master like really great zen master honestly um he said that you know the koans that happen naturally are the ones that will probably be the ones that will carry you forward someone can ask you a riddle what's the hand of one hand what's the sound of one hand clapping you're like well okay you can try to answer it but you know and it does have it like kind of things you can think about as an answer uh we talked about with guy newland actually these koans seem more clear once you sort of get them uh at least in part but you know the whole thing of like the ones that come from inside you know those are the ones that will really carry you forward because those are the ones that really you know mean something to you personally that's that's always stuck with me for like all of these years i thought yeah that's really true the personal koan is the one that will drive you forward oh okay cool well one never knows mike goes on who knows uh but okay anyway so uh we wanted to do the bardo thing so all right good points all the way around tip of the tip of the cap to both of us we're both doing what we uh uh the best we can with this all right so there's gonna be the separation of uh the the shen from or the spirit from the body kind of from the whole world surrounding the body to them that's kind of interesting i never thought about exactly those words but that's true separation from the whole world surrounding the body in a way uh so in the tibetan book of the dead which as robert thurman yeah uh who i want to have him on the show again yeah we should i mean i think i think we could bring him on like we could talk about this actually yeah yeah you know i was almost thinking i'd love to have him on just to talk about relationships and sex and stuff too he'll do it through he'll do it and i thought well that's a different part of uh you know maybe give him a chance to talk about something different i'm gonna try to reach out to him again and see okay in any case i'd rather have him talk about this but you know our co-ons all right in any case why'd that be interesting because he's a person who lived a lay person's life you know sure so um uh okay so but any case so the idea is that he's really because it means between say hold on eric you cut out say that again for people the whole idea of talking about it not as the tibetan book of the dead lama glad made this point in his episodes or maybe not with us but he's made it certainly for sure yeah but that was sort of like a that was a publisher's device to take advantage of the idea that the egyptian book of the dead was popular they weighed people's hearts on the scale and right well that you know uh anubis and rod i don't know who all the characters in that but any case you know that was kind of a popular thing so they called it tibetan book of the dev and it got published but it doesn't that isn't the title it's the book of the bardo the book of the between and this of course is a big thing for robert thurman our beloved bobby t like who talks about you know this issue it's a between thing you know it's what happens between lives and it's also what happens between all the little betweens of your day like the idea that sleep is kind of a little bit of an analogous thing to death right yeah shakespeare talks about that you know each day you know there's a little bit of sleep is like you know like that little bit of death for the day so it's kind of about all these different transitions that happened uh that happened in these very natural ways live and you know being a human being right all right so the thing is in the bardo there's supposed to be this dissolution process that's supposed to happen in the book they describe this in stages and uh people in their death will go through this whole process but sometimes if you have people who are ill leading up to their death they'll go through like stages of this process too so they might have some of these experiences you know they still have more time left in their life but they'll have little snippets and snapshots of these things too that we can kind of talk about as we go through so so anyways doing i'm doing it now as you're as you're talking oh you're doing this yeah yeah yeah i want to i'm like i'm over there man so um yeah i was kind of looking at you like okay daniel's doing something kind of deep inside yeah um i totally was through the zoom yeah yeah sometimes we're doing that so okay so there's a special so what we're talking about is there's a special set of visualizations around this where you sort of imagine this process happening and it's a it's a kind of a tricky set of meditations i think i don't think it's an easy set of meditations i think it's something you have to spend time with yeah but we'll definitely do something about this either as a short little instructional video or um or we'll do it together you know uh maybe one of the other one or the other of us will do it or maybe we'll do one together but it's kind of a tricky thing with lots of visualizations with it we try to imagine what it's like to subjectively experience this process of things kind of dissolving and eventually hitting upon like the this core kind of clear light mind thing and uh i know the dalai lama at one point i was listening to him and i think he does it there's an idea that you do this six times a day so he just said like yeah i do this six times a day this disillusion thing you know it's part of like his daily meditation thing so it's a real like important one in the dalai lama school for sure right but a lot i think a lot of like the himalayan schools do something kind of analogous to this and for you know people who maybe don't have a regular kind of practice of some type which is fine you know and just i'm i'm at the level of like if you meditate and that you're just counting you're not just but you're counting your breath well then good that you're doing zen that's fantastic people have a reach enlightenment by just kind of not just but counting their breath like that you know whatever it is but when you have some of these like i'm not going to call them deeper i'll call them like visualization visualizing type processes that are that are native to you they it comes up in your life all the time actually you know they'll just sort of or pieces of them will just pop up you'll see you know there's one point in this meditation where it's red well anytime you see the sun setting boom you're reminded of that or anytime you see a movie where there's like a bright orange fire glow you're like oh that reminds me of that and so then like life begins to kind of like fold back on onto you reminding you of these particular states and actually like life begins to look more like theater like how llama glenn will say and that like it's sort of reminding you you know the hand that's writing things would kind of poke its finger on the page and break the fourth wall like deadpool you know and marvel yeah turn to the camera and just say hey look at it it's a movie i look good right yeah um can you believe that [...] that just happened in that last scene [Music] um yeah so yeah there's like a there's that experience there's like i can't think i want to say it's rothko or something but he makes these huge canvases the painter and some of them are like these red things and i've been a museum seeing it you know it's like really tall and you just stare into the red and you feel it you know yeah okay so um so it's the thing you can do you can do if this speaks to you right um a robert thurman has a whole thing on this meditation we'll do our things too so it's a thing that gets talked about a lot people give instruction on this but anyway so the way it's supposed to work in the in the process of a person passing away or if you want to do meditative aspects of this that they're going to go through these elements and you know elements are always funny when you use these words um because you know we don't talk that way anymore but obviously in traditional culture you were always talking about in terms of elements and phases and things like that it was very normal to talk this way and they're kind of like political metaphors when you say earth you don't mean like the actual dirt and the whatever i think there's sometimes there's i think i would have had that confusion before i was around these cultural ideas they're poetical yeah i think i think i also like when i'm studying with likes to use the term archetypes and i like i like this also because it has a you know a cognitive approach to the term you know like the earth archetype makes you think it's more than just again just dirt you know like there's some maybe aspect of earth element living within you whatever that means you know so this whole way of talking i know however you want to call it poetically or archetypally in this way yeah so in the process of a person passing away though what's supposed to be happening is this earth starts to dissolve and with this like there's the whole idea that there's a loss of an awareness of physical forms in the world which means these are usually tied into a sense capacity too and then this one it's the sense capacity of sight starts to go so the person will sort of stop seeing things around them and so one of these uh elements will sort of like phase away and then this one it's a loss of earth and what that really means is a loss kind of a form now one of our favorite subjects and the one that i think you love a lot daniel is the aggregates to the elements and the aggregates so in booze and they use this idea of this thing called the aggregates and now you're talking about the form aggregate of the person their awareness and interaction with forms starts to go their body's still sitting there right but the connection of their minds spirits whatever to that is going away yeah and so their connection to form is disappearing and with this there's this uh change of sight and there's also just a change of awareness of like form in the world around them okay so that's the first one that goes then the second one they talk about going is the water so the water will dissolve the poetry of it kind of seems intuitive they talk about the water is sort of related to sort of the emotions or the feeling aggregate so now the feelings of the person probably more connected to this particular life in which they're in will start to go away but the big thing is the idea that people will tend to feel things as being good bad or neutral so one of the things you're talking about feelings certainly in tibetan buddhist thought tantric buddhist thought you get this idea of this these these specific sort of three groups of feelings you know we come from a chinese medical perspective and a lot of times you get the idea that each element has a set of emotions associated with it which is true here too but now we're talking about sort of feeling overall and the fact that people will tend to feel things as being like i don't like that thing i'm drawn to that thing i'm indifferent to that thing this thing doesn't seem to impact me that much it's like yeah it's like uh some sort of like innate magnetism or repulsion or neutrality right or neutrality yeah yeah yeah yeah which is kind of funny when you think of that because it's like electron protron neutron yeah yeah yeah right out of my head yeah so that whole idea that that's how nature kind of works that's how our kind of feelings work it's a weird way it's an interesting way to group feelings you know it's a it's like you could still do like anger and anger like emotions or fear and fear like they still do that but it's also grouped in these three which is just kind of interesting way to do it it kind of reminds me of like young children who are very clear like you're like you want to try this artichoke no it's written no nothing you're not going to say no just know but then you know something else you'd be like hey do you want to eat this you know brick of totally bitter cacao yes i want to eat that thing and you're like you're not going to like it i want it and something else you'll give them they're like i don't know i don't even see it is it there like is it yeah they're completely different to it no so you put the carrot on the plate and they're like where is it like they don't they like it guess i'll eat that but all right yeah but like there is not there is not a process of like they're not running it around their minds going hmm well let me see like it's not it's not like that it's just sort of sort of like root level response to a stimulus i guess i could say so yeah i think it's a kind of a like a fascinating way of organizing the emotional life to really think of it that way you know like like so that goes beyond this discussion of the bardo and even like you know that it gets more into the meditative aspect of it where you start to realize okay i have this water poetical aspect of me which has to do with my feelings and my feelings can go good bad or neutral and kind of become aware of this within my life and then also like at this point they're supposed to be kind of dissolving away whatever those were for this life start to go and then in terms of the sense organs there's specifically this idea of uh the sounds being connected to this so the ears are kind of tied into this this uh element or phase or whatever you want to call it for the water element yeah if you're if you're uh we have a lot of like traditional chinese medical people listening this doesn't totally match up we can probably do the tcm of it some other time yeah but in any case it's a little different but you just have to kind of roll with it you know some of it overlaps and it's interesting but this one doesn't yeah this one does so you know this is this whole idea of this and then the next thing that kind of goes for the person is the fire element which in this way of thinking has a lot to do with like uh concepts or sometimes they'll use discernments um this is sort of like conceptually how people organize their world they organize it this way which is pretty interesting we've talked about before sometimes they'll use the the idea of like the discrimination yeah aggregate but oh you've kind of talked like that doesn't always sound good in english no you know and i know you don't like that one that way for foreign opinion i like conceptual you know the the conceptualizing yeah you know or you know robert thurman likes to use the word raiification you know i i like interesting i like i like i like that because i think we're doing that all the time you know even in like you know right or wrong stereotypes just understanding just larger things in order to move on right just put it okay that's a that's a car okay whatever kind of car it is doesn't matter it's a car i put it in the section with cars i can move on you know yeah yeah it's kind of it is like it's a concept thing like that so i've heard people use the word discernment that doesn't that seems okay to me too yeah discernment is is for me discernment is a is a little bit more of a fine filter you know allowing things to kind of pass through whereas conceptualizing is just taking blocks of information and attaching it to other blocks of information it could be it could be refined you know for sure tighter but you know i know we're sort of arguing semantics but you know the semantics make a difference when someone's hearing a word that really resonates with them like we talked earlier about like the endless versus divine you know like that changes it changes the texture because part of the part of the problem is english actually is the language that we're speaking doesn't have the depth actually that many of these other languages have where you have three or four or five meanings for one word you know and so when someone says a single word it gives them this sort of like multi-layered understanding instantaneously as soon as they have it when we have to kind of like go through and give context or concepts if you will well i mean i guess it comes up with some things where you might have a special word that means something in other language that we don't got it right right is like the big example of this where you're like what the hell does that word mean you know emptiness well that doesn't sound right anyway so yeah i get it i think like like what i like about what you're talking about though is like when you throw out different words sort of like helps you connect to like what the idea is and all the different words have a kind of a a way of capturing it right and so then i think yeah for all of us when we hear these things you can go oh that one speaks to me okay so let me explore what that one means you know yeah we're we're rappers man they're spiritual rappers the word we're just not rhyming but like you know people some people feel the flow from the east coast some people like it down south you know some people love the midwest something like a sound from georgia some people like it from uh from uh the golden state right that's right man we gotta represent so to me like i had this um psych background coming in and it had a lot to do with and i think it does in this in this way of talking to about how you experience the world like you experience sensation in forms and then you have feelings around them and those are related to concepts you know that's kind of what they're talking about but these are part of a living thing uh the whole storehouse of that living thing and then it starts to kind of go at the passing of the person these things start to go away so there's this loss of like the sense of what the concepts ideas and categories were of this particular life they're dissolving and so it's yeah it is like kind of interesting at this point you can kind of get like the buddha psychology behind this so what so we've had sort of like eyes and vision and then we had like ears and sounds is there yeah this is smell um there might be different ways of organizing this i'm going based on the the way it's usually talked about in the tibetan buddhist texts that i'm familiar with is again dalai lama school yeah i mean and it's gui i think it's pretty consistent you know the book of the bardo is like more of a ningmah-related text anyways a different school than the dalai lama school so there's a lot of overlap but you know just to like be up front i've kind of taken this from how it's presented there yeah and i've read it in two different places and it's the same so you know yeah yeah yeah getting it from you know typically the same yeah um that's so but anyways you know there can be little differences just so if you know you don't want to like you want to acknowledge but anyway so yeah lots of smell if someone's practic if someone finds this fascinating and they're practicing it like one place is going to teach something one way another place might teach something a different way it doesn't mean that one is better or worse than the other now depending on who you're talking to from within those schools they may not totally agree yeah from the outside i feel like if you give yourself to something and you have the experience of it that comes to you as you do it then that's real now now it's gold it is you know it's in there whatever we're definitely taking the position of neutrality not to say that any particular way of doing this is going to be like the definitive one better than the others i don't think that there is one that's better than at least from my understanding it's what call i mean and i don't even know who would argue really i mean maybe somebody obviously would but what calls to you that's the best one for you you know yeah or if they happen to present it in a certain way and someone else does it differently there's no reason to like get all up in arms about it this happens you know unbunch the panties yeah so there's kind of a loss of smell associated with this so smell becomes associated with the fire phase at this point which is kind of an interesting choice but okay it is um and then the next thing that happens is the wind or the wind is a funny term so this is prana so it's wind or energy [Music] this gets used in a couple of ways because energy is everything so these are all energies that are going kind of like in the biggest e equals m c squared einstein sense everything is energy and now they're isolating this little individual part of uh of a composite being's makeup so this is sort of more like what you want to call the energy aspect of your individual body or something like that and it starts to go now when they talk about like how this relates to the overall construction of a person which is this aggregates conversation um there's a this whole idea of what they call compositional factors which is this big hodgepodge collection of all the different parts that make up a person's like all the different little like micro factors that come together and that's kind of hard to talk about that um so i think like the way that i've heard this talked about that makes it a little bit more accessible and they talk they do talk about this in the you know when they do the tibetan book of the dead and the dalai lamas go for sure it's like it's more like the person sense of their big picture goals and ambitions not the details of your feelings moment by moment or your conceptual categories or something like that or your connection to the form that makes up your body or something like that but more the idea of like what are your overarching sort of tendencies of goal ambition and personality with all of these there's usually some kind of element of wisdom that goes along with this so with the earth it's sort of the wisdom of uh they call it sometimes the mirror-like wisdom you know and then they'll call these other things you know um different wisdoms associated with each of these different elements which we probably have to do something on the aggregates the elements at some point too just put another thing on our list well maybe we do that maybe that maybe that's the follow-up to this then you know yeah i guess we'll see how we want to do it but in any case go too long before we yeah but the idea is that you have this um uh there's a wisdom of accomplishing activities when this energy within the person gets refined and perfected you can like more effortlessly accomplish activities accomplish goals so there's it's alright that's how they talk about these big picture goals and agendas and i think that's a simpler way to talk about this thing so i think for the person's passing away even the overriding things and themes of their life right those things that they want to accomplish with it those things are fading for that person too you know what's funny i've definitely had some you know intense psychedelic moments for sure and you can get caught up in the moment you know without a doubt especially if you you know you're feeling some feelings you know and you know i would love i would love to say that like those things don't affect me but like they definitely affect the [...] out of me you know um yeah and sometimes it's really intense and like you're just like okay this is it i'm i'm getting ready now my heart's gonna stop and okay just stopped cool oh wait no there goes again oh wait no now it's stopping now for for real you know so you go through this for a long time but i will tell you that a couple of you're talking about these like psychedelic induced very intense experiences of uh mortality and these kinds of things and i tend to go there like pretty much all the time obviously i'm supposed to work with it but like come on you're working that this is something you're working on yeah and so the idea of having um were you talking about like ambitions or or your you know plan kind of activities life projects kind of like really deep tendencies of things that you really want to do it's like a kind of it's interesting idea if you scratch a person deep they have deep tendencies maybe they want to be a parent maybe they want to be successful maybe they want to master something maybe they want it like whatever it is they want to experience love they want to experience whatever like there's some deep part even deeper you know like compassion you know like that this is a you this is like a bodhisattva kind of ideal you know but then you might have an ambition to like become a bodhisattva yeah yeah yeah right but i mean the that particular thing has pulled me through more moments than anything else more than like breathing more than you know that yeah i hear what you're saying that particular point you know it's like okay whatever i need whatever i have to muster up to kind of deal with this maybe that's letting go maybe that's pushing whatever it is that's the anchor that's the like the the other part of the magnet that sort of pulls me to it you know yeah yeah yeah i know i know i think i know exactly what you're talking about which gets to the idea of like that's why meditation is more than just like more than just like being mindful or something there's other parts to this too you know so anyways and again that's no trash on mindfulness or counting your breath or anything but there's just more to it than that and in those moments when you can tap into this part of yourself you're kind of tapping into this wind energy within you and i've had that thing too you know like uh i've had some like uh heartache in my life you know uh more recently and like when i retap into like the fundamental things i'm here to do that will always reinvigorate me and i think in a way you feel energized does that make sense what i'm saying yeah like you feel energy yeah it feels like energy you know that's how you re-tap into yourself you like tap into your own uh energy aggregate and you feel re-energized or something not in the secondary experience i don't know how that feels for you that's a different kind of vibe but maybe it feels that way even in those moments too you feel real and re-energize for your life or something yeah oh without a doubt and i feel like that happens for many many people actually they come out with a new set with a reinvigorated sense of purpose or a newfound sense of purpose it almost it's almost like that experience of death um rejuvenates their desire to move forward on that path but then the moment when you're kind of going through those intense experiences and you re-tap into that does that feel re-energizing in that immediate moment in that immediate moment i think it's i don't know i wouldn't say it's re-energizing i would say it seems like the only path forward like like any other path doesn't feel like there's enough energy to walk down you know like like you know someone say well why don't you do this for your family nah do this for your kid nope do this no but then when you get but then when you find that one the right line the one that really feels like it's we've shed away all the [...] you know we've we've put down all the ideals and all the hopes and all desires this is like soul drive in this particular incarnation then that that begins the process of like okay i can see that that tomorrow's going to exist and i could see that the next week is going to exist and i'm going to will myself forward in order to go there because that has value that exceeds my own self or exceeds my own understanding of my own like conceptual sense of myself my own more immediate like feelings and whatever it's something a little bit bigger than that yeah now i mean the experience of the form my immediate experience of the feeling my immediate experience whatever i think my concepts are how i think about things this is a little bit deeper or something i think that's that feels right to me now this could be of course used in a negative light in terms of like you know group mentalities group psychosis i guess i'll even call it right where everybody feels like they're gonna martyr themselves for a greater ideal and that involves you know the the bat you know the erasing of the other or you know whatever right um so this is the kind of like this is the negative side of that but i think take it on a personal level brought down really really really fine and subtle at variously moments of intensity various moments of intensity in people's life for me this is the core driver you know and sometimes it is your children you know yeah when you use the word like when you take away all the [...] because you use that word i think what you're really saying there is like whatever that means for that person when everything else falls away all the things that are more ephemeral fall away then you're like okay so what's so that's the [...] for that person right then you get to the core of where they're really coming from you find out who kind of who you are in this way i think so that's that's this part of a person then right um uh and you know i think what we what we're talking about here and i think i hadn't really thought about exactly these words discovering is that this is a deep thing that you can tap into in a moment by moment kind of a way when you need it because it's there but at the end of the life those issues you know are wherever they are and those things dissolve too so the person no longer has that sense of it as it relates to the now of this particular existence and i could say as much as i and you know i as much as i could say this as somebody who cannot remember my last life for the life of me how about that you know or the next one right that there was there are have been several moments three in particular that if i didn't find that and i will tell you i didn't i didn't search for it it came to me it came from me it came and was brought to my mind my mind didn't bring it it just popped up like an inspiration and a very important part of daniel the spontaneity of the occurrence yeah you know it just came very natural that that is the only thing that i found that was worth moving forward for you know that was the only thing and i don't i'm not a depressed you know type of individual i didn't go into these you know into these moments thinking like oh life sucks like what's the point no but then in those moments i was like yeah what is the point actually what's the purpose of it you know like i've asked questions about being a practitioner i've asked questions about various forms of practice and i get certain answers but like when it when it comes down to like crunch time for me anyways that was the thing that kind of like bubbled up and was like here you go this will float your boat the wind or should i say ronaldo oh that's a good one right there oh my god yeah floating the boat um so this is uh this is uh uh yeah whatever floats your bow so this is that this is the some core part of who we are yeah right uh and it has something to do with how we'll probably function in our lives it'll like be behind the scenes right um [Music] that's very interesting to think about actually mm-hmm whether or not you express this or not right it's kind of a big question in relation to this this is dissolving this is dissolving this is dissolving that sense of that in this life is going to be this way it's gone away so we've had this this nice long discussion now about the the importance of this purpose you know or you know me i've shared mine you know this is now dissolving yeah because it's associated with the the here and now of this time yeah and so you're it's dissolving i.e you're letting it you're letting it dissolve you know it's or it's dissolving whether you're it's going to dissolve whether you want it or not whether you want to or not so therefore the the the tendency that the tomorrow tendency we'll call it you know goes away so there is no more tomorrow nothing matters that doesn't matter anymore you know it's a it's a it's a super deep um conceptual i don't know puzzle yeah and i guess like for someone going through this for reals in the ending of their life that's gonna go away gonna go away whatever that like feels like for them in those moments right which i guess we've all been through through it in the past apparently apparently we've done we're all gonna go through it in the future again yeah um where are we at time-wise do you wanna talk about the consciousness aggregate or you gotta like do you guys i think i think we should pause it here because once we start getting into the consciousness aggregates then it gets long it gets long and i don't want to cut it but right now we've done the first four so we're gonna so i guess what we'll do is we're kind of got to a natural spot the next thing that comes up is consciousness and then we'll tell the rest of the tale okay that sounds like a plan yeah i think it's good because you know the other stuff is is uh a little technical and and cool yeah yeah there's no reason to give it like short shrift and like the yeah we don't want to do it like a quickie we want to like spend a little time with it that's right we got to turn the music on yeah you know uh burn some incent a little slow hand right yeah we want to go like the only thing eric what uh in your notes what do you have for the piranha in terms of like um oh yeah yeah yeah um so this gets like again you could have discussions about this but like certainly according to the secret assembly which is the main way this is being talked about this is loss of taste and touch so two of them get kind of tied in here could be little differences yeah but taste and touch so that means that you know you've kind of gone through your senses now sight sound smell uh taste and touch are dissolving and the person will lose those those connections yeah what's interesting is that like in in chinese medicine in particular and even in the the buddhist theory they don't really give that much credence to like taste and smell because they could they say you can label them by how many different words you know you could say well it's sweet it's sour it's bitter it's salty it's you know what pungent you know um but there's not like no it's not like vision or hearing that you cannot you can't really describe a picture i suppose like as a a human being there is this idea that we really function very strongly on sight and sound you know i don't know what they i mean i thought about that too when you talk about smell you go like well you know concepts and smell you know but then you're kind of like well you know there's a whole thing of like how powerful that can be lately beneath the surface the smell of like the cooking in the kitchen when you were a kid the smell of like your lover's hair you know you can write a whole book on that or something like that what that brings back you know it has a powerful thing to it i guess i know it's interesting well it's also a part of the brain right you're dealing with the you know kind of like the lizard brain right the amygdala the part that's dealing with like non-concepts it's emotions which is kind of deep but they don't connect it to the emotions no they no they don't it has something to do maybe with like concepts and memory maybe maybe maybe memory but you know i i will say like like think of this like i don't know we'll go to like the someone that you're in love with when you think of the smell of their hair or the smell of like their skin or something it's really strong right you can remember that especially in the armpit it's strong potentially there it could be strong in other places too that's right depending on what's going on no but like you know that that subjective experience of the smell of someone like you can kind of remember the smell yeah i don't know maybe um i can't remember there's the french writer why is his name escaping but i think like he talks about like the taste of a cookie or something and like you know it just brings back a whole world so maybe this is a whole idea you know again i haven't thought i've thought about it but i haven't but like when you start thinking of smell you're like we got obviously we all know that there can be these really strong you know deep things in some ways that are affecting in a way that's different than the way sights and sounds are even memories of sight and sounds are different if we take the perspective of a non-humanoid okay so remove your senses how do we experience the world it's through it it's through our senses right but the world has smells the world has taste the world has sights the world has sounds you know i think it's we or we create them basically that's the part yeah that's the emptiness for a dog like smell is like a major [...] thing major thing yeah so but just the idea that like you would experience the loss of sound even on a conceptual level you know or that you would you would lose the sense of smell not from not from momentarily no smells no longer exist yeah yeah we're not you know you're not creating them you know i'm saying that all of these things would kind of go away go away piece by piece by piece what would be left oh well that's for next week oh my god why would he do that no yeah cliffhanger right in the middle uh next week on jin and tantra consciousness remaining we've done we've done the long division and there's one there's four four remainders yeah yeah the whole idea of like yeah like okay so it's smell and then it's taste and touch and those are kind of deep somehow mm-hmm yeah all right cool all right well uh eric as always as usual you know par for the course excellent so much thank you so much to our listeners to our audience to our friends to our frenemies thank you so much for tuning in for listening for watching you know however you consume uh thank you for sharing if you're watching on apple or listening on apple i guess because they don't have video uh leave us a review it helps the show grow you know if you want to pop us up on your instagram or facebook or whatever i don't know you know social media helps but ultimately people listening helps even more so uh as always eric thank you so much for for working with me uh and thank you for everybody for tuning in for eric this is daniel we'll catch y'all the next one peace