Don't Talk About Nibbana – Tales From Nibbana Episode 2 With Delson Armstrong

What's the name of the show again? You remember. Tales from Nibbana? Tales from Nibbana. Tales from Nirvana. Nirvana? Nirvana. Nirvana. I like Nibbana more sometimes, because in some sense, that space doesn't have the more masculine-sounding thing that Nirvana has, right? Nibbana is something softer, more feminine, like something you relax into, right? Nirvana sounds like something I have to do, right? It's more of a, hey, bro, are you coming to Nirvana today? It's like, no, I'm at home, I'm chilling at Nirvana. More that vibe. What do you think Nibbana means?

Means? It is the quintessential non-meaning. But it sounds like you have an idea that you're pointing to. Well, I'm just saying, the etymology of Nibbana. Oh. Yeah. Like in cooling or extinguishing? Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's translated as extinguishing, sometimes as extinction. Yeah. But ni, right? Ni is the one that's like no or on or non. And bana can mean forest. It can mean fire. It can mean to weave. It could mean a bunch of things. Fuel.

Interesting. That's a good choice of word then. Especially the weave part. I don't know. That's very appropriate, right? Weaving of pieces of mind together into layers and layers of meaning, yeah. Contents, awareness, yeah. Right, yeah, no, weaving. Right. What about Nibbana? What about it? Do you want to go there? Shall we go to Nibbana? Okay. Do you know the path to Nibbana? How many people do you think we're triggering with the name Tales from Nibbana?

I wonder how many people actually care, you know? Well, I like it. Tales from Nibbana. It's like, you know, Tales from the Crypt. Yeah. There you go. I like it. We need to get a nice title, you know, Tales from Nirvana with a Rick and Morty style kind of title. Yeah. One thing to say that also connects to what we spoke about in the last session is the way that certainly in Theravada, in Theravadan circles, Nirvana is not a thing that you talk about. It's not a thing that you ever touch on, interface with, come into contact with, except for that very precious singular moment in cessation or after cessation, depending on, right?

It sort of has this like, don't talk, don't talk about it. Right. It's like the boogeyman. If you talk about it, maybe it's going to come, but in this, if you talk about it, it will not come. Right. Rule number one of Nibbana: you don't talk about Nibbana. And that, of course, is in stark contradiction to the other traditions, particularly the whole Mahamudra and Dzogchen lineages and approaches, where you immerse yourself more and more in their equivalent of Nibbana. They say absolute ground or such. I really love the Tibetan term, kunzhi. Kunzhi? Kunzhi. That's all everyone talks about. Interesting difference. And then yesterday we were speaking about the difference between Rigpa, Nibbana and anidassanam vinnanam.

I'm not going to repeat that. You can check out that video. Then one thing that we left out was phala samapatti. Or sometimes I've heard you say arahata phala samapatti. Right. And so it's like abiding in the fruit. And the fruit, of course, assumes the Nibbana, right? The fruit of the practice. I guess if you had arahant, it's like abiding in the fruit of the arahant, like the place where an arahant would abide. But then maybe not even necessarily if you're an arahant, right? What's the deal with this whole thing? Let me unpack everything you were just talking about. Because there was something we were talking about, which is, you know, it's hush-hush within, let's say, certain Theravadan circles.

And I think one reason is because nobody knows what it is. And everybody has ideas about what it is. Which is to say that Nibbana is consciousness. Nibbana is not consciousness. Nibbana is with consciousness. Nibbana is without consciousness. It's the unconditioned outside of space-time existence. And it's in a whole other dimension and all of these other things. And I think they're all extrapolated from what the Buddha talks about in the suttas. The Buddha talks about touching his body with Nibbana. One touches the body with Nibbana. He talks about if there were not this place, place is what it's mentioned in the suttas, but it's like if this dimension, this space, this whatever, that was uncreated, unformed, unmanifest, then I would not talk about it if there was no such thing as that.

So I think we should talk about Nibbana more and more and more. Less emphasis on jhanas, more emphasis on Nibbana. Now, coming back to what you were asking about, arahata phala samapatti, sometimes also known as arahata phala samadhi, which means the collectedness around the fruit of arahatship. Samapatti is the attainment of the fruit of arahatship, just a longer way of saying, collected around Nibbana, let's say. And the reason is because I would say that the mind of the arahant is one whose mind is, yeah, I say arahant, because, just because, we'll get into that. But like the mind of the arahant is someone, or it's basically Nibbana, the mind of the arahant. Even while the arahant is talking, while speaking, while driving, while on the computer, while eating, while taking a dump, whatever it is, is still in Nibbana.

Because one understanding of Nibbana is that it's the absence of any of the fettered sankharas, or the tainted sankharas, which means it's absent of any greed, hatred, or delusion. That's the classical, traditional understanding: the mind of the arahant, awake or asleep or whatever, is Nibbana. So that's the Nibbana with remainder, and the Nibbana without remainder is traditionally seen as parinibbana. But there is, I would look at it in this way: the general mind of the arahant is Nibbana, because it has no tainted sankharas. It's just always fresh. It's experiencing unconditioned, or unconditioned-ness, in the sense that it's spontaneously present to whatever situation is there. That's one, let's say, mundane nirvana, which is just happening in everyday life.

But then such a person could sit down in meditation, or just sit down and kind of power down. Basically withdrawing, let's say, from sense spaces, in the sense that it doesn't look at anything, it doesn't really pay attention to anything, and it's just centered in itself. And that I would say is Nibbana without remainder, which is like accessing a certain meditative state where the mind is just collected on the object, Nibbana. And how is that similar or different than nirodha samapatti? So nirodha samapatti is the total cessation, or it can be seen as a total cessation of consciousness, awareness, just a complete disintegration of any kind of awareness. So here we're making a distinction between sanna vedayita nirodha, versus nirodha samapatti, which is the complete...

But here's the other thing, though, that's very interesting to mention, because nirodha samapatti, and this is the thing about the word nirodha, has so many different contexts. - Of course it does. - Right. It's got dukkha nirodha, cessation of suffering. Sanna vedayita nirodha, cessation of cognition and feeling, as you'd like to say, cognition. And then nirodha samapatti means the attainment of the ability to go into nirodha whenever you want. So the ability to go into nirodha whenever you want could mean total cessation of awareness, or to that state of sanna vedayita nirodha. And so when you say Nibbana without remainder, you only speak of the complete cessation of nirodha samapatti, the blinking out of everything, including consciousness.

Not necessary. Not necessary. Not necessary. So you're pointing to both sanna vedayita nirodha and nirodha samapatti as Nibbana without remainder. Yeah. Awareness or feeling and cognition as the remainder. Yes. And so we either have the mind of an arahant continuously submerged in Nibbana or springing from Nibbana very freshly, either with remainder, which is the maps of existence, models of self and other and reality, the relative existence and so on with all of its cognitions and ideas and ways of relating. Right. It has cessated. It has seized. Yes. So that's clear enough, I think. And then where does arahata phala samapatti come in? So that's interesting, because arahata phala samapatti you don't find in the suttas. It's more commentarial, I believe.

And the idea is that it is only accessible by arahants, to be able to access the Nibbana in a dormant phase, in a cessated phase, which is to say Nibbana without remainder, accessible only to arahants. That's the traditional understanding. - I see. So this whole term just means when you're an arahant, you can incline the mind towards Nibbana without remainder. - That's it. - Yeah, it's very simple. So that's something that you do not consider to be accessible at the classically stated lower attainments, at least according to the Theravada maps. Right. But which is interesting, to complicate things further, there is, according to, I believe, the Visuddhimagga, or at least the writer of the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa, who talks about the ability to access fruition of a sotapanna, or stream enterer, access fruition of a sakadagami, and access fruition of an anagami.

So you would have a sotapanna phala samapatti. Yeah. - What does that look like? - Yeah, that's the thing. Like what would that mean then, right? Because the sotapanna touches Nibbana for a moment. - Yeah. - That would be the understanding. Likewise with the sakadagami and anagami. - Same Nibbana. - Yeah, same Nibbana. - Yeah. - Perhaps what it means is maybe for a few moments, or maybe it's shaky, maybe it's not stabilized. And the only reason I would say that is just going back into the sutta: when the Buddha says stabilized in that, then he falls to a lesser attainment, let's say, so for example to a lesser deconstructed state than the complete. Yeah, so for an anagami, for example. Yeah. So the idea is, you know, and I think the sutta on the four foundations of mindfulness, he says, if one does not attain full liberation after seven days of doing this, then if there is still some kind of inclination to the Dhamma, if there's still some kind of wavering, if he's not stable in it, then he is an anagami.

He just stays an anagami. Stable in Nibbana without remainder. Yeah. I see. At least that's how I would interpret it. So we're talking about the extreme and idealized notion of an arahant. Someone who has not just transcended those fetters, but also cleared out all defilements from the system, extinguished and exhausted all karmic traces. I see. So in the Theravadan tradition, there's no distinction between arahant, right, just having continuous effortless contact with Nibbana, with fundamental consciousness, I like saying, perhaps a less triggering term than Nibbana, versus someone who has completed the path all the way, which is, at least in the later traditions, would be called a Buddha. Right.

So the distinction that the Theravadan tradition would make between the Buddha and an Arahant is essentially that the Buddha is the first Arahant. Because he rediscovers the path to experiencing Nibbana again. And so anyone who is following that and experiences the same thing is considered an Arahant. So in the Theravada, being a Buddha is more like holding office. It's like, who's the Buddha right now? No one else can be a Buddha. It's just Arahants, and they match the Buddha in following him. And it's interesting because they talk about Paccekabuddhas. I don't know if you've heard of this term, but Paccekabuddhas are like solitary Buddhas. And there can be more than one in a so-called eon.

But when there's a Sammasambuddha, like Gautama Buddha, let's say, then a Paccekabuddha is... there's no Paccekabuddhas. So, have we extinguished and exhausted the subject of Nibbana? What else might we say about this? I guess one useful thing to mention is a distinction between the Theravadan path and the Vajrayana path. Theravadans are expected to continue diligently practicing, and mostly on the cushion, at least from the traditions that I know, until they have attained arahanship and can completely immerse in Nibbana, so to speak, without remainder, as mentioned. Whereas in the other traditions, the later turnings of the wheel, it's enough that you have access to it. There's not even any mention of the classical attainments, stream-enterer and so on.

And so even someone who's not necessarily a stream-enterer might find, identify, recognize, have some basic contact with the Nibbana element and just continue collecting the mind on that, such that more and more of awareness, more and more of what still remains, gets pulled into this recognition, and then trends more and more towards the dissolution of the existing tainted sankharas and underlying tendencies, versus continuing to construct the maps and maps and maps that we call papancha, or like saying, spinning in samsara, creating loops and loops and loops in the hierarchy of... So, anything else to say about the subject? So, since you mentioned papancha, that's a good understanding of Nibbana, which is nippapancha or nishpapancha, which means lack of any kind of proliferation, conceptual proliferation, elaboration, or non-elaboration, is also Nibbana.

Nipapancha. It's like on a spectrum, you can put Nibbana and papancha on a spectrum, right? And then during the path, you essentially just slowly move towards being able to have, as the default or the stable attractor, something closer and closer to this, and to this. And it's not about never proliferating anymore. It's more about continuously, even at the deepest level of the maps upon maps of construction, still having the chase back to Nibbana, versus ignorantly getting lost in samsara.

In some sense, losing yourself in samsara is if you have a few levels of maps, and maybe you continually deconstruct a couple and go out again to explore the world looking for the solution, but you can never eradicate or release the layers all the way into Nibbana, into the layerless, to the unwoven. So that might be a nice springboard into jhanas and their use on the path. Often you say, and many other teachers as well, that each of the jhanas is a state of the mind being more and more deconstructed. And of course this deconstruction is similar to peeling off layers of the maps, of the models, of representations of mind, of various sensory-motor pathways being activated online, used for various intentions, ideas that are always tense, always online, sometimes even fixed, and such, even represented as tensions

in our body's place, that we're constrained because the hardware of our being is already online and active and tense in this way, getting ready for action. And so each of the jhanas is not even just spinning down all of those background, continual, obsessive activities, but even taking away some of the core assumptions of what the mind can even do, so to speak. - Yeah. So I would see jhanas as exactly the way you're saying it, deconstructed states, or states of greater and greater deconstruction. If you look at the map of the jhanas, from the first four form jhanas, and if we even touch the formless jhanas, they are kind of like a classical reversal of creation.

You can see in that way as well. by that is in ancient india at the time of the buddha and even before then it was the idea of how the world is constructed and it starts off with a place where there's neither perception or non-perception neither cognition or non-cognition and then from there it there's nothingness on top of that layer and on top of that there's awareness or consciousness and then on top of that there is space and then on top of that then you have the form jhanas which are the earth water fire air.

But the utility of jhanas I would see as first and foremost for beginners, to see that you can experience what I would call endogenous states of greater and greater degrees of bliss and joy and peacefulness and equanimity, and so on. In other words, you don't have to depend upon externalities in order for you to experience greater and greater degrees of joy, like through the physical sense bases. And so the mental component of that, which is the experience of the jhanas, allows you to see that you are the one, or I say you, but basically this process of mind is what is, in some sense, conditioning and determining whether there's happiness experienced, or whether there's joy experienced, or whether there's equanimity experienced.

And I would say the utility of the jhanas is to experience greater and greater degrees of focus. And then with that mind being focused, you can start to penetrate, let's say, the deeper nature of reality. So that's the utility: to make a mind that's more and more collected. Initially, to show that you can experience happiness and joy, or levels of bliss. But then eventually, as you get to the fourth jhana, a greater degree of collectedness and mindfulness, so as to show you can have access to those states, just to let the mind relax a little bit in its pursuit of those external conditions. Yes, so many people these days, especially with the increasing popularity of jhana practice, assume that this is something that not only perhaps weakens your craving for various types of sensory pleasures and addictions, but also replaces them in some way, as if one can have a fulfilling life just sitting at home, as if a monk living in a cave.

I'm curious about your take on this. You could be addicted to jhanas. Go on. Okay, I mean, if you use jhanas as a way of replacing sensual addictions, whether it's watching too much TV, or injecting heroin into your system, or whatever it is, the jhanas themselves can be craved for. And so the more you experience these jhanic states, the more you want them, and the more the mind can become obsessed by them. It's interesting in the suttas also. In the Pali Canon it says, somewhere there, Ananda says that they say we are just sitting around in jhana, addicted to it, and the Buddha says it's okay. It's the highest addiction that you can have, the best addiction that you can have. It's not really harming you as such, and it's not harming anybody else, so you can be addicted to jhana. So that much is clear. More so, I wonder if, from the perspective of having let go of cravings and attachments, you would still consider it an alternative to a fuller participation in the world, chocolate cake eating included.

- If I had to choose between jhana and chocolate cake, I would choose chocolate cake. - Fuck yeah. That's sort of what I wanted to hear you say. And I would say there's a sense that we only engage in the world to satiate our senses, like to generate pleasure. In some way, you could say that all of the signals that we're after are various forms of pleasure or satisfaction, like a state of a mind that is composed, symmetric, at ease, in some configuration that is, let's say, in accord with its programming, based on its needs, based on its urges. If you manage to just write, you have this sense of satisfaction. In a way, beyond this utilitarian perspective, there's something that is simply more satisfying about engaging in the world and in this grand story of existence, in a way where you're not just collecting those pleasurable activities, like Pac-Man navigating a maze without any ghosts, right?

As if that can be some ultimate utopian situation. Also because you want to be surprised. You want to have more than just reliable, orderly, what's the word I'm looking for? Yeah, let's say, not mundane, monotonous, maybe? Monotonous, yeah, but not even necessarily monotonous. Like to arrange your life such that it's a mass-produced, continuous, reliable input of the highest pleasures. Right. Right. Well, I'll also tell you, in that sense, jhanas can have a level of diminishing returns, right? Because I have noticed with students that the first time they experience the first jhana, they might experience great degrees of joy and everything. And they try to access it the next time, the second time, the third and fourth time, and they don't seem to experience the same degrees of joy every single time.

And I think many people, and certainly that's what my experience was, upon entering jhana for the first time, is that it is even necessarily, I would say, accompanied by some actual release, right? Then relief and extinguishing of karma and of some sankharas that have been working so hard for so long. - Yeah. - And suddenly, simply the act of collecting the mind, and suddenly, if it's on a wholesome activity, right, one of the brahmaviharas, that can be real release, right? That represents a deepening on the path that is beyond just preparing the mind for the later, more sophisticated, more impactful practices.

So I wonder if some of the excitement about jhanas that we're seeing these days is saturated in, or based in, those first initial, exciting and even fruitful experiences. So a couple of things I want to point out. One is, I think there are people in, let's say, the scientific community who have seen this concept of the jhanas and decided that, oh, this is something that people are not aware of, and we can package it into something that, you know, we can say this is accessible and it's wonderful. And the idea is that people who have, let's say, depression or are just experiencing monotonous lives can experience these jhanas without the use of any kind of substances, for example.

The second thing I would say is even the Pali Canon talks about this. I mean, even the Suttas talk about this. In the Majjhima Nikaya 52, the man from Atthanagara, I think it's called, there the Buddha points out that each of these jhanas also possess the three characteristics, the so-called three characteristics, which means don't get so hung up on the jhanas. And from any jhana onward, you can experience some level of cessation. So I think within, let's say, the dharma community, we can stop emphasizing jhana that much and realize that that's not the goal. It could be a means to an end. And within the larger community, let them know that, you know, don't get so hung up on this new sensation that's the new product trying to sell, you know, amongst, let's say, Silicon Valley or whatever it is, that jhanas are, you know, the end-all be-all.

Yeah. To play devil's advocate just a little bit, I will say that, so far, the popular movement was more around stress reduction and treating anxiety and so on, maybe having some benefit to focus, collectiveness, productivity, and so on, right, was far from the complete expression of the dharma and from the possible fruits that it can have. Likewise, the jhana craze, that's a silly way of saying it, this jhana craze, you know, the kids have been talking about jhanas, right? I see it as a positive in the same way, even though it's not a complete expression, because it's paving the path, it's sort of preparing culture and increasing the window of what's acceptable to talk about in terms of meditation practices.

And even if, you know, in the beginning we're just thinking about mindfulness and stress reduction, now we're speaking about jhanas, right? And it's certainly a more profound tool in the grander system that represents all of the practices leading towards liberation from suffering and the extinguishing of karma. And so with the criticism, or not even criticism, to have resources informing people about jhana practice such that they use it for its intended purposes and more than anything make sure that when they're taught the jhanas, that when they take them in as part of their practice, it comes hand in hand with the type of views and understanding of the jhanas that make it less likely for them to become attached and become addicted to them, sort of like an understanding of them as training wheels that you have to take off your bike at some point if you really want to pick up speed on the path, then I really welcome whatever craze, even if we lean a little bit more towards the type of capitalistic born marketing tactics that entice you to get rid of all of your psychological

issues and one retreat where you're immersed in bliss 24-7. Okay, sure. If that's what gets a person to be interested in the grander path, then great. It's going to be much easier to instill the path and the rest of it to billions of people on the planet if half of them are already practicing jhana, even if a significant portion of them are using it as the golden cage that it can be. I prefer people practicing jhanas in golden cages than people being like, what's jhana? You sit and you do what exactly? You focus on pleasure? What? No, I have a job. I have a wife. So that's me playing devil's advocate.

And I will say, here is just taking off the devil's advocate hat. Say what I appreciate about the Mahamudra tradition is that the whole not exactly jana does the conception of the shamatha path or the elephant path is one map that's sort of equivalent in some ways from the beginning. Many traditions directly instruct you to, before you do anything meditative at all, to take the intention and resolve, use the practice to go towards the end of the path and to benefit all beings. So they're just starting to program you with, of course, something that's not ultimately true in any sense. Right, there's no ultimate true truth in benefiting all beings more than any other meaning, right? In the unweaved, there's no meaning. It's in some sense your choice for what to do. The emptier and the less inherently meaningful landscape of mind becomes, there's a way that instilling those intentions, and along with the other views, makes it much less likely that you're going to become a jhana addict living in some monastery or cave. And second, this whole path is

And there's these four ways that you can go about doing it. You have first the vipassana and then followed by that you have the samatha or the shamatha. You have the shamatha followed by the vipassana. You have samatha and vipassana yoked together, which is definitely possible, especially when you start to see the three characteristics of the jhanas. The fact that the jhanas are impermanent states because they're conditioned by intention and so on. They are prone to suffering in the sense that if you lose them, you're going to suffer. And that they are empty of any kind of inherent sort of essence or existence or whatever you want to put it as, basically empty of self.

path, which is very interesting, which I don't think a lot of people get through, is you get agitated about the Dhamma. And then in the agitation, suddenly you just like let go of everything and attain Nibbana. I mean, the traditional story of that is Ananda. Right? He had to go to the council and he was like, unless you become an Arahant, you're not allowed in this council. And so he's just like walking around. What do I do? Should I practice jhana? Should I do this? I do that. And then finally, he's like, I'm just going to let it all go. And the story goes as just before his head hit the pillow, he attained Nibbana.

He attained arahantship. So my point being about this is that it is also interesting to note that, you know, people will come to this experience of Nibbana in different ways. And it really is dependent upon their inclinations, how fast they want to go, and so on. Well, one other thing we can say to seal the subject is these days what we've been working on is a retreat based on a path that yokes together the jhana path and the Mahamudra path and representing my long-term effort to identify the first principles of the dharma across all traditions and finding the best way to formulate those practices, still of course respecting and directly in contact with those first principles or our best understanding of them, to create a practice path that minimizes the confusion one might have about the instructions, the uncertainty you have about what the purpose of each practice is, and in a way where you always know,

capacities of mind in the immediate moment versus any content or anything that you could do in the past, what practice or how you might incline the mind again in the immediate moment to progress on the path, and that's something that I'm particularly excited about. I've been putting a lot of work into it, and it's also so great to have you participate in this endeavor with me. I'm so excited about what we've been building together and to start offering it to people, to the public at large, and seeing how we can create something that I'm hoping can even be replicable and brought to people at scale. Particularly because so much of the path beyond the jhanas, beyond what's classically available in books, has been secretive and not really available to the public in English.

- Yeah. Can I just say, I love how you started off that whole thought process with, to seal it all together. - Yeah. - Because we have Mahamudra, which is the great seal. - That's right, there you go. - I feel seen. - Yeah, I'm excited about this. This is gonna be great. And we've been kind of using guinea pigs. And we'll have more guinea pigs on the way to see how this goes. I'm excited to see this.

How about we take a short Nibbana break? Okay. It's like, you know, immerse, unweave, relax everything. Let's see what we want to do next. All right. Three, two, one. Oh, yeah, thanks. I have a question before that. How did you train yourself to continually do HRV breathing? You mean just continuously with one to two breaths per minute? That kind of thing? I was more thinking five to six breaths per minute. Oh, okay. Yeah. Practice, lots and lots of practice. The Kriya Yoga practice that I was doing was basically going up and down the spine, probably at least 144 to 288 cycles of breathing up and down, and then just keeping that going.

And then that just started to become the default way. Five seconds up, six seconds down, with the breath. Yeah, but more like 15 seconds up, 15 seconds down. I see. So that's just slowly entrains the whole system, this slower pattern of breathing. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever read Autobiography of a Yogi. In there it talks about how if you do a million of these cycles, you get spiritual enlightenment, like you're now off the wheel of samsara. Yeah. And I did 11 million of those. So your enlightenment is now up to 11. Up to 11. That's right. Nice.

Oh, man. I'm really astounded by the benefits of HRV breathing. I put it very early on in my book as a preliminary practice that I'm really instructing people to do at the beginning of every sit. Of this level of systemic relax, relaxation, tranquility, peace, just like a subtle bliss that pervades the body simply by spinning down the sympathetic system. Yeah, right. All the yeah, yeah, explore a whole different meditation, definitely. I had times in my in my Dharma office hours where I would start with the stage of re-breathing, and then something like learning in the moment, finding peace and safety in the body, and having it pervade through the entire body. I was astounded by the results that people were reporting afterwards.

It's like we struggled so hard sometimes, like so much effort to get to this jhana and that jhana. Jhana, am I in tranquility already? You take a few breaths at the beginning of the meditation. You should if you are interested and if it makes sense to you. I know Forrest is in Southern California. Maybe meet up with him and do an interview with him or something. That sounds like fun. You said you're going to be there in a few months, right? At some point? He'll come join you there. In a few months? Is it a few months? I don't know. Let's see.

I'll speak with your manager. A lot of gratitude for Forrest for putting out all the content about both the practice of HRV breathing and then the rationale and the yogic tradition, philosophy, background. I learned a lot from that. Every day I think I watch maybe like five or six hours of his content at this point. Oh yeah, you'll be happy, you'll be happy to know that. Yeah, very useful stuff. Yeah. Shall we go to a question from the audience? Yeah, can you read from here or should I read it? Let's see here. "How do they work?" And it says in brackets, "placebo would be a valid answer, but then explain why practitioners consistently ascribe different properties to different mantras."

Then it says, to what extent are the traditional teachings surrounding mantras, e.g. 108 repetitions, chanting maha mantra, when you're dying so Krishna saves you, and so on, based on real phenomena versus just culturally transmitted noise? Do you have any thoughts on this? I'm still laughing because of the idea that there is something to be saved from that. Some Krishna swoops in from the sky and does what exactly? I don't know. But anyway, there's of course a real question here that is interesting: the role of mantras in the path and particularly the uniqueness of the and how it might contribute to specific aspects of the path or something you want to cultivate? - I can tell you from my experience in Kundalini and Tantric Kriya practice and things like that, where in Kriya Yoga and Tantra we talk about the different chakras along the spine, and what it is is that each chakra has its own mantra to activate that particular chakra.

It's Yam, Ram, Lam, Vam, Ksham, Om, whatever the order is. And then in each chakra, there's like these different petals, and each petal has its own mantra as well. And these are called Bij mantras, which are seed mantras. And the way I look at it is like, it's almost like affirmations. You could say you're using these affirmations to kind of implant an idea or some kind of thought about certain kinds of deities in your subconscious. So that's one way of looking at it. - And then what? - And then what happens is... - What's the use of having deities implanted in your mind? - So each deity has a certain kind of representation.

Like for example, in a Maha Ganapati. The Maha Ganapati mantra, I don't know if anybody wants to hear it, but it's basically like... So by engendering your mind with the Mahaganapati mantra, you get this, perhaps a placebo effect, as it's mentioned in the brackets, where you feel like, yeah, there's no obstacles in my way. I can really get through this. Or with the Lakshmi mantra, which is all to do with money and abundance and all of these things, you start to feel like, oh, I am abundant. I have money or I can attract money. And so you start to make decisions in that way. In the Vedas, there's a lot of ancient mantras. You have Gayathri mantra, which has now become very much popular amongst everywhere, to the point that you hear it at spas and all these other places.

But originally the Gayathri mantra was an initiation mantra. It was a cultural thing in ancient India. to now they do the same thing. When you're about seven or eight years old as a boy, if you're a Brahmin, they'll give you the sacred thread that you're supposed to wear, and then they repeat that mantra in your right ear. And it's like, now you're using this to illuminate the mind. You're using this as a way to open up the mind to the world.

So I think a lot of it is culturally induced. But I think there's another thing to look at, brainwave entrainment or brain entrainment in general, where I think his name is Todd Murphy. I might have gotten it wrong, but he talks about this. He says, it doesn't matter what mantra you use. You could use, like, butter toast. You keep saying that in your mind, butter toast, butter toast, butter toast, butter toast. And then your mind starts to become more and more collected. So it's just another way of collecting the mind, essentially. That's the maybe utility I see of mantras. So if I hear you right, you're saying unless you have the cultural background, right, that infuses meaning into the practice, this is essentially a form of mind-collectedness practice, a form of shamatha practice.

Yeah. I see. They're ancient affirmations, basically. Yeah. And of course, one thing that I want to say is I would not actually relate to this as placebo. If this is placebo, then all of meditation is placebo. All of meditation is taking on some view that is meaningful to you, otherwise we're not adopting it. That meaning is then used as a filter of perception, filtering, conditioning, all arising phenomena, all sensation coming in, and changing your interpretation of it, changing the way that the mind organizes itself, seeing. Yeah. And so I think placebo is not the best word. I would use psychoactive words, psychoactive instructions, because this is what we're dealing with here. I like that set of psychoactive views, instructions, words that change the way that your mind is doing itself. Yes. And what we would call liberating views, skillful views, are skillful, psychoactive words.

Ones that have the mind trend towards the solution of tainted sankharas, the solution of all the maths upon maths upon maths. Keep us spinning in samsara. - I do also want to address that part about the 108 repetitions. I recently had a Sri Vidya initiation. Sri Vidya is the Shakti Tantric path based on mantras and things like that. The person that I had been talking to, who had initiated me into these different mantras, he said, you don't need to have a Rudrakshamala or something to count how many times you've done it, because all it does is get in the way of you actually getting your mind collected, because you're always thinking, okay, did I count 107 or 108?

Was it? Just do it for as long as you can and then keep it going. It doesn't matter how many times you actually do it. So 108 is one of those numbers, right? What's the other one? 84,000, something that just means a lot. A lot, exactly. Do it a lot. Yeah, do it a lot. A lot, you know. Like the 500 arahants, right? Or the 500 of the monks became arahants. It means a lot of them became arahants. - I see. Except of course for the one million times that you had to do that Kriya Yoga. - That's right, which became— - That's the true number. - I am now 11 times more enlightened than any being on this planet.

- Anyone who's, yeah, exactly. Oh, well, a luxury to have you here with us today. One thing you did share with me that blew my mind a couple of weeks ago about the OM. I've heard before that because it has the whole range of the voice box, I don't know how to call it, the om that follows everything, then it's a representation of the everything, of the beyond, the Shiva, the whatever the fuck. But my mind was blown when you actually made me do the thing and then see in my body what is vibrating. So do you want to talk about it? Yeah, yeah, sure. Do you remember what I said? So let's see.

So if we do an ah, it just literally vibrates my lower spine, like the lower chakras. And if I have an oh, you feel it here. You feel it all here. The om mantra, certainly chanting it, but also just internally bringing it up, and of course everything you internally conceive of in some way is slowly lighting up the relevant actual nervous system parts and whatever is connected to it, whatever muscle, and so it literally activates, vibrates, everything along the central channel, right, all at once if you're doing this right. Right, or circularly if you're doing like a naom type movement. Yes.

And this is in the realm of the sort of thing that I also learned both from you and from Forrest about the way that vibrating those places, and particularly those nexai of connection, of those acts of coordination associated with each of those centers, disrupts, makes the act of weaving more difficult to do in the normal way that the mind does, continually using attention, the resources of the system, to spin and hold those weaves, those sankharas in place. And so in some sense, just like the types of emptiness practices in the path of Mahamudra allow you to expand, have some space, right, in the pores of the otherwise thick, reified constructs. This is like a physical way of rattling and making it harder for those sankharas to continue holding themselves together.

- Right. It's so interesting that you mention that because Forrest would always talk about this. His teacher, Ashokji, he would talk about, the real Kriya is really the Om japa. If anyone checks out Forrest videos, you can search Om japa, he'll talk about it. - Yeah, we'll place a link somewhere. - Yeah, and so you go to each of these nexus points, which are the chakras, which are, as he explains it, the projections of the limbic system. And so his teacher said that you just have to clean it out. You have to clean out each chakra with the Om. Your way of looking at it, like unweaving again, like the nibbana, right? You're unweaving the so-called tainted samskaras, or you're unweaving the karma, because I see these nexus points as storehouses of different kinds of karma as well.

So doing that, or doing a practice like forgiveness or anything else that really kind of just unravels everything, you will see a noticeable energetic physical difference. So in some sense, step one is doing the Om japa in one of those centers, which relaxes the weave. Then step two would be to do forgiveness practice or brahmavihara practice and saturate the innards of those sankharas with the type of wholesome energy or wholesome attitude that is lacking. Of course, it's much easier to go from wholesome to nibbana than it is from unwholesome to nibbana. And that's a very useful practice. Otherwise, if you have access to the more sophisticated basis of operation, more expanded awareness, simply holding those views while doing the Om japa allows the emptiness to permeate through, or even nibbana, if you have access to being able to abide in that.

Yeah. So in that, I've traditionally not found the rationale, the why, to do this, and in those kriya practices, in chanting and all the Om stuff, it just was not clear to me. It felt very conceptual. It's almost like a prayer. Yeah. And now, just having practiced it over the past few weeks, I see sometimes how simple it would be if there's some tension, if there's something that's kind of stuck in the system, just sending these own bombs. Yeah. Right. And then my system just naturally helps it along. Yeah. Right. Sometimes even just doing it two or three breath cycles would be enough to make a huge difference or release the whole thing. Definitely, definitely. He talks about the roll-up of consciousness. I don't know if you come across that term. He calls it roll-up of consciousness: as you start to Om into each of these chakras, it doesn't even have to be in order. It's just whatever there's tension there, and you just Om into it.

There's a certain rising up of an awareness or energy that kind of then just comes here. And you do feel release or bliss, feelings of spaciousness and expansion. - So what's the roll up part? - The roll up part is he's talking about how it rolls up into the brain. That's the physical roll up, in that sense. - I see. And then also escaping from here. - Yeah. Yeah, so I realize, probably we're nearing the end of our session today. I realized that as we were speaking about the weaving, and particularly also in the context of sensory motor loops and the way that those limbic projections, karmic in nature, then cause these knots or tensions, contractions in the body, has to do with my thesis around coordinators and the way that they correspond to samskaras.

So I'm mentioning this just as a bookmark for next time. I think that might be something interesting to talk about and explore, because that's really one way, in the core of my thesis, that allows one to make this bridging of the gap between the old language and towards a modern formulation of the Dharma. That, while still completely dovetailed with the ancient traditions and language, can now be expressed in completely modern Western terms. So maybe we'll do that next time, see what we feel like. Yeah, that'd be great. Today we decided never to prepare again in advance, outside of questions from the audience. Yeah. So tune in next time from Tales from Nibbana. That was good, man. Yeah. Good stuff.