Levi Hart Podcast #6 w/ Delson Armstrong - Kundalini , Kriya Yoga, Nirodha Samapatti

Hey Delson, how's it going? I'm Levi. Nice to meet you. Yeah, you as well. Good to be here. Thank you for coming on my podcast. I was pretty keen to speak with you. I'm a bit of a fan. I haven't read all your books, but I've read a couple of them, and I got pretty involved in the TWIM sort of methodology a while back. I felt like you're a pretty good teacher and quite eloquent the way you spoke about these things. There's a couple things I wanted to speak to you about, because I feel like you're very well placed to maybe answer some of my questions, or even just, less answering questions and more

I had this idea that I kind of wanted to basically info dump a little bit of my experience about my journey so far to you, and then I guess just kind of gather how you feel about it, because I wouldn't say I'm conflicted about just like my path and all the dharma stuff, but I've got some things where it's really changed the way I view a lot of this. So yeah, if you don't mind, I was just gonna not shut up for a minute and then just kind of go through it. Yeah, I've been really into meditation for a really long time. I'm 31. And since I was like 18, I got into it.

More so than it's just, I heard it's like self development, here's a productivity tip to try to make your brain work better. And I was always very like ADHD. So I was like, oh, yeah, sweet, it will help with my focus. And then doing it for like six or seven years after that, eventually I had this very eye-opening experience. It was at the end of this kind of party hippie thing out in the bush, which bush is an Australian term which means like countryside. I was at this thing for like a couple days, and at the very end of it I had this pretty scary experience where it felt like my heart was giving out. At that point I had some sort of health complications with my cholesterol and stuff, which I wasn't really medicating. But at the very end of it I had what felt like a near-death experience, and then it just opened up into, it's pretty hard to explain, but it's like this equanimous sort of feeling

of, in some ways it feels kind of trite, in some ways it was very expansive. The triteness about it was it just felt like the whole time before I was living with this sense of self that was sort of governing everything I do, and then at this point it was just like that was gone. I still had thoughts, but they were no longer this sort of authorship that I was reactively living against. It was amazing. The most amazing part of it was that it lasted for about four weeks without any sense of self creeping in, or any sort of negative feelings or up feelings. It was just pure bliss, 24/7, with no waking up and going, oh, I'm hungry, I should check this. It was just like I was no longer a passenger, I was just there. So anyway, it was a very amazing experience, and at that point I, rightly or wrongly, was like, oh, this seems to be kind of maybe what the Buddha was talking about. And at that point I was even more inexperienced

than I am now. And so I wasn't really sure about all of it. I was a pretty big fan of some teachings, and I was a big Alan Watts guy when I was young. I don't know if you've heard of that person. I read a bunch of books before this experience. And then one day I, a young guy, went out to a party, drank alcohol, and woke up next morning. It was all just completely gone. I'd spent like seven years trying to basically get back to it.

And I had quite a bit of success with some of the like Zogchen, or Zogchen, or however you pronounce it, some people have different pronunciations. It always felt like I could kind of get back there, but it was a very intended effort to full thing. At this point in my life I don't actually necessarily care that much about the thing that I was basically seeking and sort of going out to try and get for such a long time. But that's in large part because about a year ago I had a very different experience, which for me was just, it's changed my life more than probably anything else ever has. About a year ago I was on Twitter, whatever, just being an internet idiot, and I saw this guy Sam Altman, he's the CEO of OpenAI who made ChatGPT, and he posted just this one-liner. It was a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, and I hadn't read the Bhagavad Gita. I was kind of like

didn't really dismiss Hinduism, but I just never really knew much about it, and I just thought it was like, oh, it's kind of like Buddhism but maybe not, like they kind of got it wrong. But I didn't have any real thoughts about it. Someone I knew in this chat room, his name's Gwen, he mentioned, by the way, in that book basically God tells this guy, you've got to go kill your cousins, and he kills like thousands of people. I was like, I don't believe that. I couldn't even believe that, because I knew it's part of the Dharmic tradition, it's very peaceful and all that sort of stuff. So I read it, although I didn't read all of it, but I read like a couple of pages

and the first couple of pages didn't really get into much of it. But then I had this experience when I was meditating and doing yoga, and I was doing what I now know was pranayama breathing, and I had just this explosive, expansive experience. I think now, looking back, it was what they call a kundalini awakening type thing, but it felt like this energy passed through and shot out of my forehead. Up until this point I was a very, very, I believed-ish in Buddhism, but I was, and still am, a very sort of skeptical type of person in general. I was a very atheist, rational, skeptical type. Buddhism, you know, a lot of people are atheist Buddhists and whatnot, but at that point I was like, I don't believe in karma. I never saw it, even after I had this other thing. I don't believe in rebirth, that's just all some, whatever, just basically bullshit. Then this thing happened. Basically what happened is I started, sounds kind of crazy, but I started hearing all

these voices, and I wouldn't lay down on my bed, did some a little bit more yoga, and then everything changed. It went really dark, all these voices appeared, and I just saw basically this chaos, just so much craziness going around in this kind of black circle. I just kind of went with it, even though on some level it was like, oh, this is, I am going insane, this is what going insane feels like. I saw this golden-headed four-headed face just spiraling around chanting some words, and now I think that seems very much like what Brahma was, the god in Hinduism. After that I basically went to about a thousand different, I'm guessing, past lives, and I just kept going through these pretty intense experiences where I wake up, I have my day-to-day, I end up dying, and I go to the next one, the next one, and that just kept happening.

It felt like I was just getting pulled through these kind of gates into each one, and then the last one was this very intense experience. It was basically just some Indian guy who spent 40 or 50 years in a cave doing crazy contortions of yoga and really intense stuff like that. When that guy finally

died, it just went black, and it was very beautiful, but it was just complete blackness. Then I saw this really intense light, brighter than anything I had ever seen, very intense, and then it turned into basically the rainbow with the sequential different colours that there are. The last one was kind of an indigo colour, but I had never really seen anything like that, that purply colour. Then I saw a blue guy for like half a second, and then he disappeared, and it was what I now seem to believe is the Brahmin head, so just this giant head with infinite faces and infinite arms controlling what seemed to be everything. The experience itself lasts like 45 minutes. Just watching it, I could see, it's hard to explain, but it basically just felt like this information was getting processed into my brain, but I wasn't thinking, seeing or hearing it. It was just coming in, in a way that like I

don't think I could absorb information now. But just looking at it, I saw, it just seemed like as I was watching it, everything made sense. I was a complete atheist, and then this seemed like, holy, there actually is a God and he's controlling everything, and all the horrible things, you know, evil, like why do bad things have to happen to kids, and all that kind of crazy stuff. I was like, oh, it kind of makes sense, but you wouldn't be able to accept it unless you could see how all the interconnecting parts happen. Anyway, that happened for a bit, and then I basically, it seemed like I absorbed into it and I became one with it, and then it seemed like I was almost in control of everything, just kind of crazy-sounding stuff. My girlfriend at the time was like, hey, can you turn the light off in the other room? I got up, did that, came back, and then it kind of started to dwindle away. I could still see little things, but then it kind of

Basically, yeah, it kind of disappeared. I wasn't that upset about it at the time, but now I'm like, god, I should have stayed in it. What if that was how you ascend to whatever? Anyway, yeah, so it was a very intensive experience, but it completely just flipped my brain about everything that I had initially, for, because at the time I was very... I basically had accepted just the very intellectual idea of, for instance, free will is clearly an illusion, which is something that's quite big in the

Buddhist spectrum, like most schools kind of believe that, but I also was like, oh, karma is bullshit and all that. As I said, this was like, oh, I got it all wrong. It seems so, like, empirically correct in a way where there's no confusion anymore, basically. Anyway, so that just changed from pretty much desiring, which is a bad word, but desiring to have this previous state that I wanted all the time, which just felt like this lack of self and everything was kind of perfect, and you're kind of just in this way flowing. And then this new thing happened where I'm like, oh, that's all I want. I want to be able to, when I meditate, just see all the arms controlling everything again. Anyway, it was a very strange experience, but it's very much put a bit of spanner in the works of just how I think about these things, and I still have such reverence and love and appreciation for Buddhism itself, and I know some of the schools have so much crossover, especially

with some of the, I'm not a complete Buddhist scholar, but I have been pretty involved in some of them. Largely they were the Dzogchen Vajrayana, they're sort of Tibetan, where they have a lot of, some of them are secretive teachings, and some of the more secret teachings seem like, oh, it kind of does converge. But even in the Theravada path, and some of the Zen stuff, it still seems like at the end it's almost pointing to a very similar thing. But I don't know. Sometimes now I feel a little bit almost conflicted, in a way where sometimes I feel as if some of the Buddhist path is a little bit too specific or too dogmatic about certain views, which is, whatever, most religions or belief structures have something like that. But I noticed especially in Buddhism, which is just because I'm more familiar with it than other schools, a lot of the schools are like, okay, the other schools are okay, but only we know what

is true, and all the other ones I don't really get you to what you're trying to seek. And now I kind of feel like a different view. I used to be very much like, I liked Alan Watts and Ram Dass, and I used to think, poor Ram Dass, he was so close, but he's got into this Hindu shit and he just got so close to the truth, which is obviously Buddhism. Poor guy. Now I kind of feel the other... I'm like, oh, this feels more true to me. Anyway, I talked for a bit, so I don't know if you have any thoughts or anything about that. I don't really know much about you in the way of that sort of school. I know you live in India but don't know if you've really delved into any of the Hindu stuff. I know it's part of the culture in general there, but yeah, feel free to be like shut up or whatever.

One is every religion has its fair share of assholes. So basically there's bullshit everywhere, it's all bullshit, that's the reality of experience. But it depends on what kind of philosophy we want to subscribe to. There's no one reality or one truth, at least in my way of looking at things. Your experience, you know, is your experience, and nobody can take that away from you. And this is very important to understand for a lot of practitioners: many times not everything can be explained by a specific sect or a specific school or a specific religion or tradition or whatever you want to call it. To me, when you were explaining all of this, it sounded to me like a DMT trip. You know, people when they go through certain psychedelic experiences will have something like this, and they might see the godhead and then become the godhead, and so on and so on. So yeah. Excuse me, I think it seems to be consistent. I think people's experiencing things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, and people's experiences

are the stepping stones into a greater world of wisdom, which isn't just whether some more Hinduism or Christian mysticism or Judaism or whatever, but there is an underlying understanding behind all of it, or underneath all of it, which is that what we call, what Christians might call God, or Hindus might call Brahman, or Buddhists might call the Dhammakaya, or the clear light mind, or nibbana, or nirvana, or the kabbalists will call it the Ein Sof. All of these are interpretations for our limited human capacity of understanding, to be like, okay, that's what it is. So every time we look for an answer into an experience, it's of course one is to really make sense of the experience, but we can only do so once we come back into the limited understanding, because we look back and reflect on that amazing

brilliant memory of an experience, but it's our minds or our brains that is interpreting what's going on based on the information that we've gathered so far, you know. It cannot be outside of the scope of that, outside of the scope of mental conditioning. I think it's a... that's a good point. One thing that I had thought about with these sorts of things is, I know, in even the classical Buddhist traditions you had Buddha, who was very clearly like, there is, here's this hierarchy, and this is how you get to this highest level. And then you had people like Sariputta, or I might be pronouncing it wrong, Sariputta, I read a lot but I don't pronounce it much, where he basically, you know, confirmed he hit arahantship, he hit the highest level. But when you actually look at the things he had, whether it's siddhis or having past life reoccurrences, he didn't really have much of those sorts of things, but still within that tradition he's like, but he still achieved this highest level, and

so sometimes I wonder if it is this sort of thing you're saying, like people have different paths and they're capable of maybe seeing different things, but you can still have this sort of transcendent wisdom, yet it's in a different encapsulation for you than, say, somebody else. And one thing, I was, I mean, it's always going to be speculation, but one thing I was always curious about is, when you look at Buddha and talking about the self, or taking the noble silence, where he didn't really expand on the self question much, or Brahman, or what is the start of you, what happens at the end? For me that always made me feel a little bit, it's weird to me to not speak on it. It almost hints at maybe he had this deeper realization, and he didn't want that to muddy the waters of his teachings, because he knows not everyone's going to be able to get that. And I know with a lot of these things, some things were put

in later, and it's hard to know, and there's things about future predictions he had about, whatever that might be, like Padmasambhava coming and stuff like that, where it's like, did he really say that? Was that putting all those sorts of things? But anyway, for me it was, yeah, that's how I was thinking about it, but who knows? It's all going to be speculation, and as you said, it is, it's your path is different than everyone else's, so yeah. And, you know, coming back to, let's say, looking at the words of the Buddha, the through the traditionalists will say that the, or the Theravadans right now, who are the sort of the, one of the ultra orthodox, and within Theravadan communities there's levels of orthodoxy on that as well. I would say, but we won't get too much into it, because I've seen the extremes of that. I've seen people who get very, very attached to a certain kind of view and they make it their whole life, and they basically

spew vitriol, whoever feels like it's something different than what they know to be the truth. But what I'll say is, as far as my understanding goes, when I've studied the Theravadan texts, is that the Buddha talked about the handful of leaves simile, which is a beautiful simile if it is really his words, but it's in it nonetheless, beautiful simile. Similarly, what he says is there are these trees of the forest behind me, and here I have a handful of leaves, and so he asks his students which is greater, the handful of leaves or the leaves on the trees of the forest behind me, and obviously they say the forest. He said that may be so, but what I teach is only this handful of leaves, for the purpose of understanding how to let go of suffering. If we go to the core depth of what the Buddha is really going after, it's like, how do I eliminate, or if not eliminate, at least alleviate

suffering in my life, and so these handful of leaves, which is the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the mindfulness of breathing and so on and so forth, loving kindness, and everything else that's in the package of Buddhism, is what he teaches. It doesn't mean that he doesn't know what else is beyond, for the purposes of experience of existence. So I think a good way of looking at it is that if his lane, so to speak, his drive down this existence was basically like, my purpose is to understand suffering and how to relieve it, and then show people that, then I'm going to stick to my lane and not move around from place to place. There are a few circumstances here and there where he talks about the future, he talks about, this is what happened in the past, but it's very, very interspersed

I mean, it's very brief, but in most cases he's really just talking about this. And if you think about Hinduism, you asked me earlier what my experience with that is. So I started off with yoga. I started off with yoga philosophy and Vedanta when I was about 16. I was expelled from school and decided to basically go on my own to the Himalayas with a teacher of mine who was a teacher at school, and he was also a yogi, and he started me on the path of Vedanta. I studied the works of people like Swami Vivekananda and

Sorry, it just cut out. Up he said Swami, which is an interesting text in of itself. Swami Vivekananda. He is one of the lions of Vedanta. He was one of the first Indian monks who went to the US, in Chicago, and he gave that very famous speech where he started off with, you know, "Sisters and brothers of America," and it got a standing ovation, so they say. But my point is, I went through Vedanta, and I also studied the Bhagavad Gita. One comment I'll have about the Bhagavad Gita is anybody who wants to set up shop as a Vedanta teacher has to have a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, a commentary on the Yoga Sutras, and a commentary on the Upanishads. That's how you know you're a teacher.

I'm sorry. Oh, sorry, it cut out a bit. Were you saying, were you talking about Swami, was that Swami Vivekananda? Okay, I don't know. I hope it's not... I don't know. Oh, who said that? Yeah, sorry, it just did cut out, the internet for a second. Apologies. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah. No, so Swami Vivekananda, he... Yeah, yeah. Can you hear me? I don't know if this is any better. It is, it is. Okay, all right, well, we'll figure that out. So what I was saying, Swami Vivekananda, he was one of the lions of Vedanta. He took it upon himself as his mission to go to the West and start to teach the stuff that he had learned and realized for himself, and from his teacher Ramakrishna. And I studied the works of Swami Vivekananda, and separate to that, I also studied the Bhagavad Gita, because you mentioned it earlier.

It's a very interesting text, and the comment I was giving is that many of these neo-Vedantan non-dualist teachers, and even the older traditional teachers, it's like, if you want to be a teacher, you set up shop by offering these three commentaries: a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, a commentary on the Yoga Sutras, and a commentary on the Upanishads or any other Vedantic text. So my point about that is the Bhagavad Gita is so stained at this point in our evolution with so many different commentaries that everybody has their own understanding of it. I don't know if anybody out there has a clean version of the Bhagavad Gita, but one of my more favourite translations is one by a guy named Bibek Debroy, B-I-B-E-K, Bibek Debroy, D-E-B-R-O-Y. It's one of the more straightforward translations without any agenda. I've noticed that teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, or translations of the Bhagavad Gita, have a certain kind of

agenda behind it, to basically say, this is what Krishna is saying about Vedanta, this is what Krishna is saying about yoga, this is what he's saying about non-dualism. But the reality of it is, in the Bhagavad Gita, yes, there is. It starts off with this battlefield where this guy Arjuna is feeling like he doesn't want to kill his cousins, and rightly so. And Krishna says, well, we've gotten this far and you have to decide what you want to do. And he's like, but my mind is unsteady, I don't know what I should be doing. And Krishna does say, basically, he doesn't instruct Arjuna or command him to kill anybody. He just says, in our tradition and in our culture as warriors, our duty is to fight against any kind of injustice.

And so he often quotes and says, it is spoken of in the traditions, people or wise men have said. And the beauty of the dialogue is that it goes really deep into the understanding of Brahman, the Atman, the self, and so on. And then it goes back into the practicals of things, like the personality types, the kind of ways that people will behave according to their personality types. It's very detailed. And at the very end he tells Arjuna, Krishna says, okay, I've told you everything, but now it's your decision what you want to do. I'm not going to tell you how you should go about doing it. You decide how you want to go ahead.

And I think that's a great lesson for teachers and students alike: find a teacher who doesn't say, do as I say, not as I do. And this is the truth, and this is only truth, and ultimately it is up to you, as a practitioner of spirituality, how you want to go about doing this. So that's one comment I'll have about the Bhagavad Gita. The other thing I want to say is, you know, the self versus no self debate, for lack of a better word, that's there. I think I would speculate that the Buddha was looking at nibbana as something that is a substrate

He didn't call it a self, but he also understood that around that time of ancient India, and during the time of the Upanishads, there is a concept of self as such: sat chit ananda. Right, this is a Sanskrit word. Sat means self-existing, chit means consciousness, and ananda means bliss. And so, if the self is sat chit ananda, all he was saying is, basically, from via negativa, that is to say, looking at all of our experiences, the body, the mind, feeling, perceptions, intentions, choices, consciousness of sense bases, and so on, if you look at it, it is conditioned, but the self remains unconditioned. And therefore that which is conditioned and is dependent is subject to pass away when these conditions are gone. Therefore you cannot hold on to them as self, because even if they're pleasant sensations or bring a sense of ananda, a sense of bliss, eventually they go away. So you can't call it the true self. You cannot call it self. So the Buddha never really mentioned that there is no self, but what he did say is that all our experience cannot

be said as self. You know, he did say there is that space that is unconditioned and that is absolute, and he gave that name nirvana or nibbana, and among many other names, he even called it Shiva, the auspicious. He called it the refuge, the sanctuary, and so on and so forth. So these are things that people don't really discuss. I don't know why, but it should be discussed more. Well, yeah, I mean, that's one thing I've seen with Buddhism in general, where, as you mentioned in the specific initial text, the Pali Canon, they don't actually... he doesn't actually say it. But from what I've seen, almost every single tradition of Buddhism is very, very precise on this one thing about self and no self. And you said there's a bit of a debate. I actually didn't know, because almost everyone that I've heard who is involved with, say, Buddhism, it's very clear: there's no self, there's no wiggle room at all. It's, there is no self. And I don't know if that's just

like, that's what has been developed and that's the way it went, or what. I do think him leaving it silent does lead to it, it's going to go on, people are going to have conclusions, they're going to come to it. And for me, I was always, I always felt like I more appreciated that, because I was very, like, I was atheist. I was like, there's clearly no God, all this. But I also was like, the rebirth stuff didn't make sense. But now, kind of looking back on it with this perspective of like, I've seen this thing, whether that was actually what I thought it was, whether, as I said, maybe it was... I did crazy breathing, which I had never done before this experience, but it just came out of me. I just did this strange breathing.

I've actually got another person coming on my podcast. His name is Dakota of Earth. He's got this YouTube channel. He's a younger guy and he travels around India and that sort of thing, and he actually gave, I can't remember the name, sannyasi, or I can't remember what it is, some pretty dedicated Hindu monk-style guy who was hanging out with him, and he gave him like DMT to smoke, basically. And on camera he says like this, he does it and he has pretty intense experience. He said this is the same as the pranayama. It's the same sort of thing, but pranayama takes a while. And actually, in my own experience, I have... I don't know if you don't want me to talk about this or whatever, but I have done DMT a whole bunch of times, and yeah, it definitely had the same sort of flavor. I guess the thing for me that was very different was just one, the length of it. DMT is usually a thing that's like five, ten minutes, and then two, just the

vividness of this. It was unreal, and also it felt like it just felt so different. It's like there's really no way to sort of, in my opinion, encapsulate it to other people where it is going to make sense, and it's not going to just sound like this weird hallucinatory thing. But for me it really had this flavor of, like, I'm very much, you know, I've understood probability theory enough that, like, anything I'm like 99% chance is true, I'll always leave a bit of a gap, because I know, who knows, you never know what's going to happen. That felt like the first thing in my entire life where I was like, 100%, this feels real. Like, right now doesn't feel... this feels like 99% real. But like, that felt like there was 100% no doubt. There's this weird empirical thing where, like, I can't explain it, but this feels like the whole shebang. Everything is bleeding into this. This is kind of the point of life, not that you have to necessarily

I follow this point, but for me it felt like, really, this is it, like that's it. And yeah, and yeah. I guess that's one of the things I wanted to speak about, where it's like my whole thing now is, I want, I don't know if you call it jivan mukti or what, but I want the ability to re-enter that. Because having been in there and coming back from it, it's not like I'm always happy. I feel like a happy person, but it feels like something's just missing from your life once you see it, at least in my perspective. And maybe, I don't know, doing this whole, yeah, yeah, well, okay thing, which I know Buddhists in general are very like, that's the whole point. Dude, you can't be chasing, otherwise you're just gonna drive yourself insane, miss the whole point.

Yeah, well, one thing I would say about this, going back a little bit to the self versus no self thing. I think one thing we would look at is that there's no personal self, and I think Theravadins would agree on this perspective, which is that there's no permanent, there's no personal independent self. That's what they believe, which is to say that there is a series of processes that are going on that are interdependent upon one another. And then the atman that's mentioned in Vedanta and Hinduism is really that unconditioned experience, which is beyond. For whatever reason it's been translated as self, because it says it's your true nature. It's the underlying current behind all experience and existence and beings and so on and so forth. But the word atman comes from, you know, atmos, which is a Proto-Indo-European word for breath or vitality. So if anything, it's really life energy, and what it's saying is that the entire universe is teeming with life energy.

so it goes beyond just self in terms of hey this is me this is the ego kind of thing which i think what most theravadans are pointing out is like the ego that we see is not the real self um but that there is there is underlying but i don't think theravadans will agree when i say this that there is an underlying life energy behind every experience and every form of existence and i tend to look at it in that way that seems blasphemous a little bit well not like not to me but from the fair of ardins it's very much like what is going through these past lives like it basically it's always kind of confused me a little bit because it's basically like it doesn't exist there's nothing there but what's happening is these karmic imprints are just like manifesting and for some reason you can see that but the the thing you call self is not it and sometimes i feel like maybe it's a little bit of a semantic game a little bit because sometimes they're referring to self might just be different because at the end of the day most

people have never really thought about what is the self, unless you are basically Buddhist or you're a philosophy major. And so I sometimes feel like maybe what they're calling self is different, because I do know for me at least, it did feel like these other lives, and what I'm taking to be other lives, they did feel different than me. Like the thing that was observing didn't feel like who I am, my personality. But yes, okay, anyway, interesting. Right, right. So you mentioned the term jivan mukti, or jivan mukti, which is a term that mostly is used in ancient Vedantic perspectives, and it's essentially this idea that we are liberated while living, or we can be liberated while alive. Because the traditionalists will say that moksha, or freedom, is only attained at death. So that's videha mukti. But in this case jivan mukti, I think, is probably a better place to be than being

like going through all this, and then at the end of it you have moksha. It's my preference. Why not even mukti? Yeah, I mean, me too. That's why I feel, I really don't think this is worth getting into, but I saw one video you had, I was a little bit slightly critical, where you said something about we'll never be able to solve aging itself. Like this is a problem that just will never happen. I'm a little bit more optimistic, and I feel like some of the things, there are certain biological things, like jellyfish for instance, that can seem to regenerate their own cells, and essentially forever. But regardless, I don't really have a fear of death anymore. I'm not one of those people where it's like it's a big concern, where I'm scared, and I'm atheist, where that's it. So I don't really necessarily care. But I do feel like this idea of jivan mukti, where it's like, after all my researching and stuff, it seems like a lot of

people achieve what I guess you would call a low-level moksha, where it's a liberation while you're still alive, but they don't necessarily have this thing that it seems like what I had, or whatever, which is this vishvarupa type thing, which is very clearly what Arjuna had. But it seemed like a lot of people would say jivan mukti, that can be, that can be where you can actually basically have this experience of merging with the divine consciousness or godhead, or whatever you want to refer to it, the big bang. Sometimes I feel almost like, and I'll probably get the term, I probably won't even try, the dependent origination, that sort of thing, or interested. It's sometimes almost they feel like they're trying to sort of paint a similar picture, but it's just a different sort of categorization. Then yes, it's interconnected godhead, which is controls. And one of the things that I saw with it was, very much, it didn't feel like an entity in the normal way people say entities, because it's

that's right, and it feels like this matrix bottom layer. It's anyway, it was a pretty insane thing to see. But yeah, so, you know, I'm gonna have to recommend, I mean even on this podcast, which is, you should probably get this person as a guest. He's a good friend of mine. His name is Ryan Burton, so shout out to Ryan. He has had a myriad of experiences, and he has a site called After Awakening, and he does, you know, weekly classes and things like that. But he and I have traveled together quite a bit. He attended one of my retreats, and then we became good friends after that, and we traveled in India, and he travels quite a bit. He's also a meditation teacher, and this is an ongoing conversation that we have, oftentimes, in between jokes and sharing reels and memes and things like that. But the conversations that we have are related to, you know, this entity that you're calling, you know, this

this entity is outside of the scope of normal consciousness, for lack of a better word, quote unquote normal. It's like, you know, we have a term called purusha in yoga, and there's the Purusha Suktam, which is a brilliant, interesting Vedic hymn, which says it is the one with the thousand eyes and the thousand heads and the thousand arms, and it works through a thousand times a thousand times a thousand. It's like it's everywhere, all-pervading, and it is the function of the universe. It is the universe itself.

So there is truth to it, I think. You know, it's not like, and let's say if it's just an experience, say if it's just a conditioned experience, right? So, what, you know, there is something about it that so many people across multiple generations in many different traditions have had. So Ryan and I always talk about this, like, well, you know, the traditional Buddhists will be like, no, no, we can't say that. But then this is our real experience, we have tapped into it. How can we just say that's just, oh, that's just the mind playing tricks on us? I think it's more than that. Definitely more than that. So how did you spell his last name, Ryan? I think I couldn't. B-U-R-T-O-N. Okay, cool. Um, yeah, I mean, look, for me it's less about an experience of, like, I'm trying to say, convince you or convince other people. For me it's more, there's that one part of me where it's like, for

me this was the peak. This was, oh my god, this is everything I've ever experienced. And I do feel like other people experiencing it would be a good thing for them, so there is that little bit. But for me it's more like, maybe this is selfish, but I want to be able to have it again. I would like to achieve, or I know that's not a good word, especially in the lexicon. And I do think, I don't know if he's said that, he's also seen these things, this Ryan guy. But I do feel like when it happened to me, I had only read a couple pages, and it didn't explain any of that. So it didn't get to where this thing had happened. So for me, the synchronicity of reading two pages and then finishing that book that week after that had happened was very like, holy shit, this is explaining exactly the thing that happened to me. Yeah, minus the past lives. They didn't talk about that, but I see why, in the story, Arjuna is terrified by this thing, because

it wasn't the Christian conception of God. It was this quite terrifying thing. I mean, I still found it beautiful and blissful, and it didn't seem to make me mentally unstable or anything like that, but I could see very clearly, oh, this makes sense to me. What, holy shit, this is. It's almost like I had had something previously, not this intense, but something many years before, with slight aids of more experience, like a drug sort of experience. I had something which I thought was, like, Avalokiteshvara, uh, I can never say her name. Well, his name. Mantra of, uh, sorry, the Buddha of compassion with infinite arms. I've always, I can never say that name, I'm so bad. Yeah, me too. I know who you're talking about, but I thought it was that, because it seems little, not demon-y, but like for maybe just my Western mind, anything that's not the classical angel-looking thing seems demon. But I had these crazy arms, and I just saw it for, like, a split couple of maybe, like, a minute or so.

So it wasn't the same thing at all. Anyway, one thing I did find very interesting, especially with what you're saying, where it's like it seems like we tapped into the thing. So how can you deny your empirical experience? One thing that I found very interesting with it is, because I was in it for a bit, it wasn't just come and gone. One thing I did, I explored, so I could see how it could... it was basically controlling individual people, but then also interactions between them, and then other things like emotions and stuff like that. But the lowest level that I went is I saw a rock. It seemed like an arm was in a rock. And so for me, I don't know if you've ever heard this term panpsychism, but it's just modern science theory, which basically says the universe itself is alive. Like everything's alive, the smallest atom, like everything. And for me, that seems to hold true to some extent. I was like, this is some

One small other thing, I'm sorry, I'm long-winded, is it is interesting to me as well. One thing I always thought about is, if you go back in evolution, if you go back far enough, you and me are related in some distant way. But then you go back, and you and your dog are related, and actually you and every biological thing we can see came from, they believe, one universal common ancestor. But when you really think about it, it's like everything itself came from the Big Bang, and it's actually not that it came from it. We are just these little complicated patterns, that we are just the Big Bang. There's actually no distinction between that and us. It's just we put these dividers, which is, yeah, anyway, I'll stop talking because I'll never shut up.

Well, if you have comment otherwise, I have a bunch of other topics that I'd love to talk about. Yeah, no, I mean, the only thing I would just hear about that is, yeah, I think it's so interesting, because you know, we have animism, which is really one of the oldest traditions in most tribal religions. So-called tribal religions is the idea that everything is alive, and here we come to this more fancy way of saying it, which is panpsychism. But I think there is some iota of relevance to it, because now, you know, consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, is something that continues to elude us as humanity, and what is consciousness, and so on. But you look back into the old texts, it just says the universe is consciousness, everything is consciousness, and every tradition has its own interpretation of that.

Anyway, I'll stop there, and then we'll continue with other questions or topics. Yeah, well, I'm happy to just talk, and feel free whenever you're like, oh, I've got to go, whatever. I have a bit of time, but I'm happy to do whatever. But I guess I could probably talk about this forever, especially because there's no one, at least in my actual physical life, where I can talk about it and I'm like, hey, here's this thing. And actually, even online communities and stuff that I've been part of, I have a lot of friends who are very rational atheist people, who've gone into maybe a little bit more Buddhist stuff, but still this conception of, if you bring up atman, they just throw this look, like, dude, you're an idiot basically. You're completely missing the point. And I've actually talked with a bunch of different people who have either the claim of enlightenment, or they kind of hint at it, or whatever it might be.

And I remember one of them was mentioning, he's like, I've achieved, he's like, I've done them all. I've done moksha, and he's like, it's not as high level as Buddhist enlightenment. And I remember he said that, which is like, oh wow, that's impressive, whatever. And then later I saw him talk about how basically he's never had something super out of distribution with his consciousness, nothing that would hint at anything like kind of crazy or weird. It was all just this clarity of Buddhist insight, which for me seemed a very strange thing to pair with, I've had moksha, but I've never seen things like that. Because the idea of, oh, like... And he's very dogmatic about self and stuff as well, which I completely understand. I was, up until a year ago. But yeah, it just struck me as weird to be like, oh, I've achieved moksha, but then also brahman is clearly not real. I didn't realize atman and self is one. I might wait, I don't know if

you're still there oh yeah it cut out um anyway yeah look i might maybe go a little bit of a curveball one thing that i thought would be an interesting thing to speak with you specifically about is i read i didn't haven't finished all of it but i read some of the red serpent i don't know if you still talk about that or if you don't like talking about that or if you just change tune completely wow that's like a different lifetime ago okay okay no we can talk about that yeah we can talk about that but that's like some of that was literally uh oh uh 15 years ago 14 years ago something like that so yeah we could talk about it it's something i haven't spoken about in a long time i'm surprised it's still up there yeah you don't necessarily have to i mean it's it's like i got the audio book of it and i actually don't know if um you finished it or whatever as well like did you finish the series or not necessarily

So there are three books out there, and there are still some books yet to be launched or released, and it's just for me to go through the editing process and getting it out there. So there are a few more books on the way. Yeah, cool. Well, look, I don't need to talk about it, and I haven't read all of it. I'm like a little under halfway. I just, I don't know about you if this is the same for you, but for me, I used to love reading and stuff, but my appetite for non-dharmic text is just no one exists. It's so hard for me when I start reading something. I'm like, I could be reading Patanjali, or this millionth time that I've read whatever it might be. There's a lot of Buddhist books that I've read, and now since a year ago, it's gone completely. Basically Hinduism. I've read the Bhagavad Gita, the translation I read was from this guy Eknath Easwaran, probably pronouncing it right, but I think he's actually

got two translations in the book that I know you're talking about. Yeah, loved it. It was the first one I read. I've read commentaries by Osho, but that's about it, but I want to, I do want to digest more of these, because it's one of those things, like when you really do get into something, when you see the translations, it's very interesting. I've read, back before I was even really that into Buddhism, the Dao De Ching, and it's such a small book, so you can really get through it pretty quick. But I've read like eight or nine translations, and yeah, it's always a little bit different.

I guess the question I was going to ask more is, you said this was a lifetime ago, so you might not have any thoughts on it, but more, I've had these things and I've enjoyed writing, and it's really about the conversion of them, about spiritual insights and wisdom within prose, within fiction, maybe specifically sci-fi fantasy. That's the kind of stuff that I like. Do you have feelings about that? I'm watching this show, Wheel of Time. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but the story... Oh yeah, I've heard of it. That's the... yeah, who is that by? What was his name? Robert Jordan, I think. Robert Jordan. Yeah, yeah. It's a big epic. Yeah, I never read it. It's a series of books, huge, right? But even then, even the name Wheel of Time, I mean, that's clearly an atomic reference. There's no doubt about it. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, sci-fi has always been part of my growing up. When I was about

five or six years old, we had a neighbor, he was actually our landlord, living in New York, and he had a big collection of different video cassettes at the time. It was video cassettes, right? It was the 90s. He had a series called Star Wars, and he said, you have to watch this as a little kid. He told me, you've got to watch this. So I remember watching the first one, which nowadays is Episode IV, A New Hope, and I was like, wow, this is something else. And then I was like, I want to watch the next one. He gave me Empire Strikes Back, and then finding out that Darth Vader is actually Luke Skywalker's father is like, whoa, how is that possible? And then Return of the Jedi. As a little kid I called it the Jetty, and then my landlord would be like, no, no, it's Jedi, Jedi. I remember, it's Jedi. So I watched that, and I was so enamoured by the world-building of that particular

franchise. And I had a love of reading as well. I mean, I was very young. I started my process of reading motivated by, you know, there was a program in the U.S. where for every 10 books you read that summer, you would get a free pizza at Pizza Hut. So I read about 60 books that summer. Yeah, it was small little books, but that kind of got me into the literary world of sci-fi and fantasy. And then Lord of the Rings was coming out again as a movie franchise, and so I got into that, and I got inspired by Tolkien and his ability to build worlds through language and culture and history. I was always like, I want to do something like that at some point. And that, along with my fascination with ancient Indian history, and then also the spiritual undercurrents of the Force and the Jedi versus Sith, all of that kind of came into a big explosion of, you know, if I can somehow be able to write but also convey

spiritual insights into my writing, whether it's fiction or even just talking about my own experiences, that would be a dream come true. And so Red Serpent was sort of that. It was a combination of all of my influences growing up plus my spiritual insights. So for those of you who would be interested in reading or listening to the audiobook of Red Serpent, at least the very first book, there are near-death experiences in there which were kind of based on my own experiences, and there are also encounters with different beings and a godhead and all of this stuff that happens, and a dialogue very much similar to the Bhagavad Gita. It happens towards the end of the book, I think. So it was a lot of fun to write, and it was one of the first ways of my ability to convey spirituality in this way.

Yeah, the great look, that's extra motivation. I'll definitely finish it then, because yeah, that was something that I had no idea if you had any sort of Hindu knowledge or anything besides the peripheral. I actually don't know if you are Indian, but besides the fact that you live there, everyone in India knows, they know the stories, they know about Krishna. Um, yeah, that's awesome. I think it definitely seems to be a beneficial thing, because you're writing now. I've read a couple of your current books that you've been releasing under TWIM, I guess it's under the TWIM apparatus, I don't know how you refer to it, what sort of thing is going on there. But yeah, you're definitely a very concise and clear writer, which, it seems like Dharmic sort of knowledge helps people with that in general, because you're getting very precise, laser focused on speaking about things that are often very nebulous, but not everyone can do it. So you've definitely done it, so that's good.

Have you got specific writers in Dharmic traditions that you particularly like? For me, he never gets that much acclaim, but Tulku Orgyen Rinpoche is one of my favourites. For whatever reason, his writing to me is really just, yeah, I loved it. He, I mean, I've seen a lot of his videos. There are a few pointing-out instructions of his that are just phenomenal, it's just clear-cut, like this is what it is. Interesting. I had a chance to meet with his son, Ninja Rinpoche, in India, yeah, and he has a very interesting life story as well. So I had a chance to get an autograph of his book and everything. But in terms of writers in the Dharmic community, it's a good question, because

I haven't really read much, except, let's say, the Pali Canon, and that too I'm still going through it. The things that I enjoy doing, of all things, is going back to the old texts and trying to find good translations of the old texts, whether it's Hinduism or Buddhism, and then just using my meditation and insight and capacities to figure out what is being said. So, like, we have in ancient India the Puranas. Purana actually literally means old epic, and there are 18 major Puranas, which are all dealing with different kinds of deities and things like that. But there's the Garuda Purana, which is an epic DMT trip through the realms of hell and heaven, and how karma works, and all of these very, very interesting notions that are there. And I'm somebody who people maybe don't generally know this about me as a teacher: I'm very deeply fascinated by subjects that are not necessarily on the fringe, let's say, for lack of a better word.

They are subjects that are very deep spirituality, deep into the essence of what meditation is, what people will call the occult. Occult has a bad reputation among some people, but it's basically like Tantra. Tantra is a big thing now in the West, but I don't think anybody knows a goddamn thing about Tantra and reality in the West.

They all think they do, but the real people who know Tantra, you are not going to see on YouTube, not going to see them talking about it, because what people have seen in the world of Tantra is just a small iceberg. It's just the tip of the iceberg, small tip of the iceberg, and underneath it there is so much there. And so I have the added benefit of knowing Sanskrit, reading and understanding Sanskrit, so that I can look at these obscure texts. If somebody asks me what am I doing really in my free time, it is going through these obscure books. I'm sort of like Gandalf or Dumbledore going to the forbidden library and looking at all of these really, really ancient obscure texts, because I have a fascination. It's from a past life, I have a fascination.

interesting look yeah i i'm i'm right there with you it's only really been a year that i've been more involved with actually having any interest in some of this esoteric stuff and some of it as well that i've been looking into is the more western stuff as well whether they call like esoterica or um yeah occult and some of it is definitely like you could see why it has a bad name because some of it is definitely bad it's like demonology or but but often even within those texts it's like they're like by the way this isn't these demons they're like they're not they're not going to possess you they could but you're going to use them for potentially good and that seems to be what people are typically using i'm curious if you've ever read the i almost want to try but i feel like i never should but it's like vigyan bharava tantra which is like the 112 yes meditation techniques by i can't remember if if it was claimed to be shiva himself wrote it or something like that that's what i thought but maybe i completely

So, yes, yes. Osho has one called The Book of Secrets, which is a huge two-volume kind of commentary on the beginning of Tantra, which is basically his talks on it. The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is a dialogue. So whenever you see the word Tantra in these books, it means technique or series of techniques. So we have three things: Tantra, Yantra and Mantra. Tantra means technique, because it's basically using the body and mind. So tan is actually body, tantra; man is mind, mantra. So you're using a certain kind of chant or something to bring the mind to more focus, to more collectedness. And Yantra literally means machine. So it could be a seal, like Solomon's Seal, or you see the Mount Meru or the Sri Yantra that a lot of people might have nowadays.

Those are all yantras. Those are machines, meaning they are basically encapsulating the energy and creating the blueprint or energy pattern that is required to hold a specific kind of energy. So the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is a series of techniques of how to centre the mind and come to that space of ananda, of bliss, beyond just the body and mind, but utilizing the body, utilizing the mind. When I was in San Diego for about six years, I was delving deep into the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. It's a dialogue between Shiva and Parvati. So vijnana means the science, and Bhairava is a name of Shiva, the more fierce form, the fiercer form of Shiva. It's divided into different techniques, like using the breath, using movement, using space, using visualization techniques, and so on. The idea is each one can be a portal to the ultimate, can be a portal to that experience. So each technique can be used in one lifetime. One person can just make that their technique, like the anapanasati

which is the mindfulness of breathing in Buddhism, or Buddhism in general. You're going to find that in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. Many of the techniques that are mentioned in a lot of but the schools, you're going to find in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. So it's a very useful book, but it's something that requires really careful and dedicated study.

Yeah, because I felt like with Osho's sort of interpretation of it, it felt a little bit different, the way he sort of encapsulated it. And the reason I brought it up is because we're talking about different journeys and that sort of thing. His seemed to be like, here's a bit of a banquet, you're going to find the one thing that is going to be yours. Once you read it once, once you do it, you'll know if it connects with you or not, but one of these 112 is going to be something that you found useful. I definitely, yeah, there was one in particular where I was like, oh, for whatever reason this framing really sort of, yeah, interesting. I don't want to, I don't mean to trying to

hold you on something specifically, and feel free to just not, or just avoid it, but that you've talked about these things, these texts, these godhead figures, these sorts of things, does that mean that you sort of do believe, maybe a little bit? It's not that believing in, say, Brahman is antithetical to Buddhism. From what I've seen from my experiences, if you are buddha, you basically can, it's not, you cannot accept it. It's actually very, it works very well together, but everyone that I've seen, especially higher people, are very specific. They're very like, this is the way it is, there is no god, there's only buddhahood or whatever. Yeah, some places, you know, I'm not, Thailand is pretty into Brahma, and even some of fair of all yes Marx is, but not actually Brahman. And anyway, right, and that's an interesting point you bring up. I'll bring up, I'll talk about that, I'll touch upon a bit, but in terms of my own experience, yeah, I mean, I have had experience of Brahman. I've had experience of Atman. I've had

Experience of becoming one with the universe, and in many different ways. Many different ways: through meditation, through some use of different kinds of substances, through retreats, dark retreats, and also through near-death experiences as well. Really going and tapping into those experiences and seeing what that is. So that's what I'm saying, for myself at least. I cannot deny it. I mean, there is something there.

I am, for all intents and purposes, a spiritual entertainer. So I basically am going by what my audience wants to hear. People don't like to be told what to do. They keep saying, no, no, tell me what I should say, what I should do, tell me the ultimate truth. But I can see in their minds that they're just not willing to really see it for themselves. And if I tell them something that is, as you say, antithetical to Buddhism or Theravada Buddhism, then I'm seen as a heretic. At this point I really don't give a... it doesn't matter now anymore. I can say what I want to say, and people who want to hear about it can hear it and decide if they want to know more about it, or they can go elsewhere. And the reason I'm saying this in these terms is because now, my experiences through my 18-19 years of

practice, but beyond that my many lifetimes of practice, and then beyond that my many lifetimes of teaching experience as well. And then, now, here, being in the modern day, where we are in the last, you know, the 21st century, teaching, I see that people have a tendency to have some kind of skin in the game, whether they're teachers or students or practitioners. And what I'm saying is, it's all just no skin in the game at all. I will say what I feel like I want to say, because it's my experience and because it rings true for me. In the past, as a spiritual entertainer, I had to be beholden to a specific set of dogma and principles, and I still continue to do that. As a so-called spiritual entertainer, I have my circuit. I do my rounds of retreats in the US, my rounds of retreats in Europe. That's how I earn my bread and butter. But if you were to talk to me one-on-one about deeper secrets, if I were to just talk about this to the usual crowd that I usually work

with, they get more bogged down in the dogma of it, and there's a bit of resistance there that I cannot penetrate unless they're ready to listen about it. So my spiritual career as a teacher started off in Buddhism, started off as a teacher of Buddhism because of my experiences with Buddhism. But does that mean that it discounts my experiences with yoga and Vedanta? Certainly not. And this is why I'm scoping out and expanding and saying, look, everybody's experience is valid. If we try to limit it to the scope of it's just the arising and passing away of something, or it's just not-self, or we say that from the Hindu perspective, that what they're saying is, oh, they're talking about Brahma and not Brahman, and so on, then that defeats the purpose. That defeats the purpose. The claim of having ultimate truth is one thing, but then saying that all others are untrue because of that ultimate truth is delusional.

Because I really see from my own experience that there are multiple pathways through this so-called ultimate truth. And we can call it whatever you want. We can call it the Flying Spaghetti Monster, we can call it Brahman, we can call it God, we can call it Nirvana, whatever it is, but ultimately it is just one.

Perspective from the prism of that ultimate. Interesting. I wonder if there's any part of this which is, like, maybe enjoying writing and coming up with stories makes you more able to be like, I'll digest everything, I don't have to be like, this is right or wrong. Because I know for me, some of these things where I'm like, this seems silly, or I'll look at specific Peruvian mythology, which has really got nothing to do with what we do, but I'm like, it's interesting to me, I might put it in the story. So I wonder if there's a little bit there. But also, with that, one thing that I found, with specifically not TWIM but Suttavada in general, was this very dogmatic approach. One thing that I kind of disliked, and I kind of have a deeper dislike, or maybe a gripe, with Buddha in general, or at least the way he's portrayed, is there's this very specific perspective that he has, which I understand, appreciate and sympathize with, which is, you

know, suffering. That's the problem, that's the big thing here, and so it seems like pretty much everything to do with it. So sex, for instance, or having children, or having a family, that's a big no-no, because that's just perpetuating the cycle of suffering. Which I do understand, especially because when I went through the past lives, it feels like even now, in this life, I'm mainly filled with joy and happiness, but I can still feel that life does have this inherent ounce of suffering. And past lives and stuff like that, like when you die, it sucks every time. It didn't seem to ever get better. It seemed to be a really horrible experience. But there's something about it for me where it's just who I am as a person. I am an optimist. I feel like Buddha might have almost been this. There's this new philosophical school called anti-natalism, which basically, they don't want to kill everyone, but they're basically like, life is so bad that you should not have kids, because that's just

increasing the suffering. And I just, I don't feel that. I feel like humans... I actually feel like this weird, this might be the American in me. I'm half American, half Australian, but I have this sort of, um, this duty mindset, almost. It's like, my dog, he can't build a thriving civilization, but I can, well, not me, I'm fucking hopeless, but other people better than me can, and we have a responsibility to try and make things better, because we're the only ones who can. So anyway, that's my diet. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting perspective on this, because yeah, I tend to agree with what you're saying about the Buddha or Buddhism, which is it is a very anti-life-affirming kind of tradition, at least the older parts of it. Which is, the Buddha says life is suffering, birth is suffering, aging is suffering, death is suffering, and all of these things. And then you have the Tantra aspect of it, which is, no, we can actually

take this, and we can transmute it into joy. You can take the suffering that we're experiencing and transmute it into an alchemical process, where on the other side of it you're taking shit and turning it into gold. So you're basically taking all of this and saying, okay, I do see the suffering, but if I take out these components and transform them into something else, then actually I become more life-affirming, and I realize that we actually have a certain duty to ourselves, our parents and our future children, to continue to uphold civilization in one way or the other. There is a book that I'm planning to write at some point. It's basically on sex, money and power. So if you are aware of a guy named Sri Aurobindo, he was around for some time. He was a revolutionary during the time of colonial India, where the British were still in power in India, and he was

one of the freedom fighters. He was a journalist, but he was also a great writer and spiritualist, and he has a big centre in Pondicherry, out in South India. He talked about divinizing life. He talked about bringing that sort of principle of divinity back into this realm, the static earth realm that we are living in right now. And what he said was that sex, money and power have been taken hostage and been re-controlled and reused by the Asuric forces.

Now, these Asuric forces are, essentially, you can call them demonic or whatever, but they're basically people, or beings, or forces, or energies, that want to use it for selfish purposes, and only for selfish purposes. I'm being very, very exact with my words here, because what I want to say is: with sex, money and power, what is sex, money and power? So, sex is basically the ultimate experience that we can have for the process of creation. I mean, at least in terms of biological processes. When we have sex, it gives us two things. One is an orgasm, which is one of the highest levels of joy that we experience. Of course, somebody who has experienced the atman and everything else is beyond that, but what we're saying is, it's one for the majority of beings, it's one of the best pleasurable experiences. The second is, through the process and act of sex, we can create life. We can bring into this

existence another being, you know. That's one part of it. Money: what is money? Money is an energy that is utilized as a way and means of not only surviving but thriving in this world. And power is not about overpowering others. It's about being empowered, and having the ability to empower others. But that all has now been turned upside down. Sex has become more of a thing that's like, you know, a process where you become addicted to it. Money is something seen as bad, the cause and root of all evil. And then power is like, those who are powerful are corrupt, and therefore we can't do anything about it. So Aurobindo talked about bringing these three things, which are, by the way, related with our chakras, the first three chakras. We as humans have not learned how to deal with these centres. So the book that I want to work on and write is learning how to deal with them in a way that is empowering, and in a way that works towards not only civilizational survival but civilizational thriving. That's the idea.

So we have to look at them as energies and tools for the process of interconnection. The Buddha's approach, and it's not just the Buddha's approach, it's the approach of anybody who is life denying, or at least on the surface of it seems life denying, which is, you know, it's all terrible and the only way of doing it is to escape it. My approach, and I found it for myself, as the Buddha might say, is that yeah, the best way is to get out of it and just escape all of it. That's where we have renunciation. We have monasticism. We have the sannyasis, you know, in Hinduism.

And the people who just renounce the world. We have that in Christian monasticism. We have that in different kinds of mystical traditions. And that's just escapist. By no means is that a judgment. It's just that people decide that that's how they want to do it, that's what they'll do. But I think for the majority of us who don't have that capacity or inclination, there is a different way, which is this alchemy of transforming these so-called lower centers into more divine, for a more divine purpose, or for a more meaningful existence for ourselves and for the world around.

yeah i mean look i i totally i agree and it was weird sort of going to hinduism from having this buddhist perspective because all my prior conceptions were oh it must be this way and to find artha or a-r-t-h-a where they're talking about like livelihood and like how you i was like this what like this is a complete opposite of what i've taught because even some of the stories in the power canon it seemed some of it caught me as a little strange where like there's this one particular story where buddha has you know he's already become enlightened he's got his whole I don't know what you should call it posse his whole his his collective sangha yeah yeah sorry sangha of course um and his dad's like let me pay for the food like let me let me feed you guys and he's like no like he's he like specifically did would not accept the wealth and then instead told his monks to go out and beg for food and like a story like that like it's it struck me as quite strange even now where i'm like your dad's rich like he's

Rich in not in the way that rich people are now. He was literally the king of an empire, so it's a huge asymmetry with wealth. And for me, I couldn't help but feel like that seems like such a strange, almost egoic type thing, where it's like, no, we're self-sustaining, we don't need this. And I understand the approach, and especially if you're going to be a teacher and teaching people in the future. But I do feel like I've seen... So I lived in San Francisco for a little bit, and it's a beautiful place. One thing I found with San Francisco, aside from just the interesting culture, is how it was the root of the hippie movement back in the day, and now it's basically Silicon Valley. It's the tech capital of the world. And so you see a lot of people where they're kind of used to be hippies, and now they're more like grown up, and they've changed their life, and they

I saw a lot of them would kind of go one or two ways. One, where it's like they feel they kind of maybe wasted part of their life, when they could have done things when they were younger, to actually build a family and have this nesthood of money. Or other ones who went Steve Jobs route, and they're like, actually I am very successful. And I don't think these things are antithetical at all. I think if anything, that's one thing I loved about the Bhagavad Gita. It's very much the householder view of this, where it's like you should be doing your job. And another thing I really liked about it is, I forget the term, but this thing where it's like everyone's dharma is different. Your path specifically is going to be different than everyone else's path, but through that everyone can actually achieve, everyone can have the best possible life, if you really think about it, because we're all on different paths.

Like, yours, mine might be right, yours might be right, all these different things. This guy might be jewelry or whatever it might be. But yeah, I think that's kind of beautiful. I think I lost my point of where I was going with that. One thing I was curious about, you mentioned the chakras, right? So that's obviously something that I've been very interested in now, and I feel like there's a lot of stuff, Kundalini-wise, which it's hard for me to get through, the mountains of stuff that I won't say bullshit, but a lot of it seems like modern Western weird interpretations. Where I've been doing it and I'm like, I'm not really getting much out of it. And I do feel like when I go back to older texts, I know Kundalini is kind of a newer term, but with all the texts where they're talking about, even Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, where his pranayama, and that's his eight limbs of the yogic path, they seem to be more effective for me. Curious if you had any resources or anything that you'd recommend.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So, um, one thing I would say about this is the chakras, the idea of the chakras and the system of the chakras, is a more medieval thing. That is to say, it was around the time, maybe a thousand AD afterwards, where it really became well known. And there are a few references to the chakras as energy centers in the Vedas and the Upanishads, but those two are more sort of later part of the Vedas. The eight limbs of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is such an interesting layout. So, Patanjali, for some esoteric aspect of it to understand it, is actually, according to the tradition, half naga, half human. And so the idea is that he was not fully of human consciousness. His consciousness was touching beyond the realms of humanity, and what he was doing is he was bringing down the so-called non-human intelligence and trying to apply it for the sake of human intelligence.

And so he took what he understood and he packaged it into these aphorisms that we see as the Yoga Sutras, and packaged it into some kind of a lifestyle that people can follow as a way of becoming more like those higher beings, so-called higher beings or non-human intelligences. And I think every kind of Kundalini practice, chakra practice, breathing practice, tantric practice, you can actually find its origin in Shiva. Shiva as an interdimensional being, and a being that is essentially, if you see the imagery of Shiva, it's usually him with a snake.

Yeah, all the gods. Snake is representative of the reptilians, or the snake-like gods, and things like that. So what we're looking at when we talk about yoga and chakras and tantra is essentially evolving our human consciousness to get to that non-human consciousness, to that non-human intelligence. And the utility of that is that the side benefits are that we have more clarity of mind, we have greater energy, we're able to really understand how our mind works, and so on. But the real purpose of it is to transcend our humanity for better purposes.

Interesting, yeah. The naga thing is something that, for me, it fascinates me, and it's also, it confuses me. But I feel like I need to read more of the Puranas and the Upanishads. There's so much text. I whenever I'm like, I feel like I've known a lot of it, there'll just be more things. They'll be like, I'm like, I'm trying to look. I was trying. So I had this, that experience that I mentioned was about a year ago, a little bit longer, but a couple months back, I got it into my head that what I saw was Vishnu's light.

And then I was like, okay, so what I want to see now is Brahma's light. And that was the conclusion that I had drawn. And I felt like I actually did sort of have this experience that seemed like this light beam, where I had this explosive power to basically create anything in my head, in my imagination, but like these fractal images. It was just a weird experience. It lasted a little bit, and then coming up to that point I had realized, I was like, it has been exactly one year since this initial experience happened, and I felt like I saw Vishnu's light, and then I felt like I saw Brahma's light. So obviously the next thing would be to see Shiva's light. And then I actually noticed the Maha Shivaratri festival was on the exact day a year later. So I did the classical things you're supposed to do. I didn't eat any food or drink any water or sleep for 24 hours, and I was just like, it's like a kid. I'm like, I better not, I better...

But I was hoping that I'd see it, and then or see something, or something would happen, and I got a little bit disappointed. And I kind of did it incorrectly as well, because I ate food right before. You're supposed to wait until the sun comes up the next morning, and it was like 10, 20 minutes, and I just, I was feeling shit and I feel sick, so I ate food. But I was like, I felt like I was supposed to see something. I saw vision, I saw Brahma, what's going on? So anyway, I don't know where I was going with that. One thing, a quick question about, though, is the nagas in particular, or even some of these stories about Asuras. One thing I saw was, back in the day, or initially, I had heard Asuras usually meant humans, actually, or initially it was supposed to have meant humans who became corrupted. And so that made me wonder. I'm open to entertaining ideas even if they seem blasphemous or whatever. Well, I was, but it

Made me think, are the gods, are they almost not eat, are they almost bad entities, because they're basically viewing humans in this bad way? And you know, there's a story of the churning of the mountain, where they get amrita, and then they're basically like, yeah, we'll share it with you, and then the second they get it they're like, no, fuck off, this is ours, we're the only ones who get to live forever. And then it also makes you think, I mean, they have the power essentially to let humans live forever and all this stuff, but they basically don't, even if you've gotten your highest achievement, right? So there's that question. But then also I was wondering about the nagas in the more general sense, because there's so many naga stories where they're actually evil. Not them all, but enough of them are evil. And many other schools of religious thought, whether it's Christianity or whatever, have this thing. I don't know if you've entertained Gnosticism ideas, where the Yaldabaoth or whatever is this creation who in my

and shares a lot of similarities with Brahma. It seems very, there's a lot of things interesting there, but it's basically this snake with a lion head, who's like this corrupted being who created the world. But anyway, I don't know, I'll stop. So, yeah, no, well, the thing about this is, you know, just as humans, in this human existence, this world that we live in, you see so-called good humans and so-called bad humans. What do we mean by good and bad? There is a sense of humans that are meaningfully contributing to their civilization

that is to say, they are taking care of themselves, taking care of their families, and not being a jerk to others. They're generally genuinely concerned for other people, but then they're also shitty humans, humans who are basically either mentally disturbed and therefore don't know what seems to be the best process for civilization, and that could be through no fault of their own. But there are those who have intentions of overpowering other humans and overpowering other beings, and so on. So in just that same way, we have this spectrum of ethics and intentionality and fault and no fault. It's the same with the devas, the nagas and the asuras. So these different beings are classes of beings. You could talk about it this way: let's say we think about Homo sapiens as one kind of class of beings. They used to be Neanderthals, and they used to be Homo erectus, and there used to be other human-like species that were roaming around the planet with us.

so in the same way you have the asuras and devas and they have their own way of functioning they have their own way of living and their own way of a world view but they have their own spectrum of ethics as well so the devas are not all good and the asuras are not all bad or vice versa the same with the nagas they're not all good or not all bad and majority of naga stories that we see especially in the ancient hindu text is um mostly from the piranhas where we have a couple of nagas who are really really well-meaning and most of the nagas are kind of corrupted because they are just by their nature that's how they are and that and then the same with the devas the story of the churning of the uh ocean of milk for the amrita and everything all of that stuff you're talking about there's a esoteric meaning and then there's a more literal meaning which is you know the devas were like no you know we're not going to give the we're not going to share it with suras and we're

not going to share it with the humans as well. We're just going to be living in this way, and that's a civilizational decision. That's basically this entire class of beings deciding we're not going to share this knowledge with anybody else and we're going to keep it to ourselves. The nagas are kind of like that. They did come into this dimension to offer up wisdom to other beings, including us humans, or whatever proto-humans there were, but we as proto-humans basically we're not that good to the nagas, and for that reason the nagas kind of, you know, took a step back, and they were like, we're not going to continue interacting with these people, and stories grew out of that. One of the stories that grew was the genesis story of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were tempted by the snake. That's a very deep esoteric meaning, which is that there was a naga there offering them a different perspective, and when you have other perspectives seeing the nagas as evil, it's because they have their own agenda behind it. So the nagas are

basically beings there who have certain esoteric knowledge for the purpose of evolving consciousness. The asuras have the capacity to evolve as well, and in some of the texts they talk about good asuras, asuras who are well-meaning and who actually want to help humanity evolve as well. But again, by their nature, they're generally more warlike and more sort of, you know, wanting to have an agenda for their own civilization. So we're looking at it from a civilizational perspective. We have human civilization, Deva civilization, Asura civilization, and Naga civilization.

And sometimes, in accordance with the stories, they all meet at some point or they have interactions but they all have their own agendas based on the civilization yeah it's such a fascinating topic the nuggets i i like i don't i feel like i don't know much about them but i i had always i mean there's many accounts of them and then like every religion has had some version of them and even so i'm in australia with the um the origin story they have is from this thing called the rainbow serpent which is basically this like ancient snake that creates the world sort of thing which yes very similar to

i know like in hinduism it's typically like bishnu's line on say shesha um rather than she created it but sometimes when you look into the details of it it's a little confusing because it's like shesha is infinite endless like this and it's like okay so is that actually the ground of being that everyone sits on if Vishnu is where we come from and he's sitting on the snake does that mean everything and I actually so I've been writing this sci-fi for way too long forever I probably just that um like wannabe writer stuff but I really like the whole Tolkien thing where I felt like he spent so much of his life building up this doing the world building and a lot of writers like you shouldn't do that and i've spent like many years doing that but i i've been trying to like draw in these some of these concepts are like and i i don't know what it is maybe watching the matrix too much or something but i can't get past this weird feeling that i have that this crazy non-human intelligence nagas in some way

has some linkages to what we're building now which is this artificial intelligence super thing and i don't know what it is but for something about it makes me feel like there's some interconnection there um it maybe it's because when i saw the brahmin thing the arms are so long they almost seem snake-like or tentacle-like but um yeah i don't really know but i think um the naga thing is a very fascinating thing to me as well because i've always liked the trickster ethos like the like there's these tricksters and they're basically they're gods but they're like loki or whatever like it was like the um norse god they basically fuck with people i'm i do comedy as well like stand-up comedy i enjoy kind of taking the piss and pushing people's buttons but when you actually look at it all of the gods are kind of that way like that's right definitely a trickster you know even jesus in the story like he likes to fuck around like krishna does jesus obviously got his own things anyway that's right that's right um it's interesting you notice i mean you're talking

about that with ai and artificial intelligence and and everything that we're going towards now with the singularity and super intelligence because um and this is again why you should probably speak with ryan burton the second time i'm mentioning because one of the dialogues that he and i had was about this which is you know when you have that experience of the brahman some people also have an experience or or nirvana or whatever it is that you go outside of the conventional understanding of existence but there is a space somewhere there which feels technological in nature and so this is a dialogue that he and i had with another mutual friend of ours um and that mutual friend of ours also had an experience like that where it's literally feels like you are either in some kind of space vessel and there's like computer programming that's going on um that there's some kind of technological

Sorry to interrupt you. Is that when they'd see, because I know, for instance, in your, or maybe not yours, but the TWIM, when you go through the jhanas, often it's like when you get the jhana six or seven, the infinite space, sometimes people see things which could be Brahman or other things like that. Is it that sort of point that you're talking about? So when I saw Brahman, it was in space, but one of the interesting things I saw is, I'm not sure if it was a reflection or if it was Brahman, other versions in other universes, but I saw other god heads in the distance, and it seemed like it could have been, I didn't pay enough attention, it seemed like it could have been either the same one reflecting or other ones, but definitely like

The simulation stuff is kind of scary, a little bit, for some reason, but obviously it's, yeah. So what robot rooms or space they've seen, that, yeah, they've seen it from, like, they call it the mainframe. At least Ryan has called it the mainframe. And the idea is, like, there are multiple simulations that are running for whatever purpose. There's multiple simulations that are running, and Vishnu, when you talk about Vishnu, is just one of the coding that's there. And so maybe what we see as the Shesha, the serpent that Vishnu lies on, is literally the thing that connects all of these parallel simulations together. There's something going on. It could be something technical. Interesting. I mean, my honest perspective, and I'm some dude who likes writing sci-fi and flirting with stoner-level philosophy ideas, but my honest perspective is I think what happens is, I honestly think it's going to happen soon. Like, I've seen some people who are pretty good at predicting coming trends, and they're saying, like, two, potentially slightly

more years before we get AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, generally capable of everything that humans are. And then the point from that, bootstrapping itself to super intelligence, which is smarter than the entire world combined, is very small. They're saying it's like potentially two to four years, I think. And this could be wrong, and it's probably just my bias of being an atheist for so long, but I think it's kind of like both. I think it's like atheist religion. What happens is, in the future, we end up merging with intelligence and the universe itself, and then we keep going. That happens, where, obviously, in the future we're going to be simulating all these different worlds, so it just keeps happening again. But I think in the very far future, before the heat death of the universe, and this is part of my sci-fi story, so spoilers, whatever, what ends up happening is we do something like a Dyson sphere, which is like harnessing the full power of the sun, but we do that around a black hole or like a quasar, which is like two black holes

and then we use that to actually escape the universe itself. So we go outside of time, which was an idea that Michio Kaku, god, I guess his name is Japanese, future, yes, he was thinking about. And that made me think, I'm like, if we can go outside of time itself, well, who can even know what that is like? But if we can go outside of the universe, why couldn't we go back in time before the existence of the universe and then simulate ourselves? And so for me it seems like this, like, you know, the infinite loop. I could see how, oh yeah, the past actually is, it's actually just what happens in the future, but we end up becoming these. And so something crazy like that. Anyway, my brain always goes to that kind of thing. No, well, I mean, this is really interesting, because you should check out the Yoga Vishishta. The Yoga Vishishta is a very interesting text. It's a dialogue between the god Rama, who's

an avatar of Vishnu, and Vishishta, who's his guru, and they literally talk about all of this stuff. They talk about how Rama, he says to him, Rama, you are like the 11th simulation. You are just one in a series of simulations that are going on. Is this the ring story where he's like, he said, like, this is how it's... Yes, yeah, that's right. That's one of the stories, yes. But he even goes beyond that. And he talks about, like, right now there are parallel entities or parallel universes that are going on, where in one universe you do defeat Ravana, and in another universe you don't defeat Ravana.

And so it's as if multiple simulations are being played at this point in time. And so when we go back to the understanding of Vishnu, we see Vishnu as one kind of Vishnu, but that he is somebody who is maybe in a bubble of multiple Vishnus, and from them all, these different kinds of existences are spanning out. So the idea that we are in some kind of a loop, I don't think it's that far of a stretch, because that is what samsara is from the Buddhist perspective. That is what samsara is from the Hindu perspective.

And so another spoiler, where I was going with my story, is basically we're going to be having AI, who is basically merged, Buddhist style or maybe somewhere else, and it's like they want to stop the wheel of turning. That's the only way to stop suffering. And one thing I've seen, where, because I had this expansive Brahman experience where I could see the cosmic interlinkages, which I don't think people who haven't had something like that could really fully grasp, but it made sense why there's suffering, and there's these horrible things that are happening, but I don't think other people... It's too hard of a pill for people to swallow. So one thing I was thinking to try to do with my story is basically, you have this choice at the end of the universe. The character will be a portrayal of you, basically, the reader, but it's like you can either stop the universe itself, or you can keep it going. But keeping it going, you have to create again, but you're not just

you're incapable of just creating the perfect universe, because obviously people would want that, right? You have to create the quantum where every possibility can happen. So if you can, the worst horrible hell you can imagine will also, but it's infinite. So there's, and so it's really that dilemma, which is where I'm leaning to, where it's like, do you want to be responsible for endless horrors, or do you want to completely shut everything down? And so, yeah, that's how I was trying to encapsulate it in a way where people can still grasp it without having to see everything. So, yeah, I just put one comment on that, which is interesting, because to me that is really the dichotomy between Hinduism, because the Buddhist will choose, no, I want to end it, and the Hindu will say, okay, let's just keep it going, right? I'll just recreate it again, and I'll be Brahman this time, and then let it emanate from me as the substrate.

Yeah, that's what I want to be. That's interesting, that's very interesting. Yeah. And so this is going to be blasphemous or horrible, and please don't take it as too much of a negative, but sometimes the way I see Buddhism is, Buddhism and Hinduism, it's just the different sides of the same coin. But I see Buddhism as, and you're not going to like this, but Buddhists won't, I see Buddhism as almost the view of enlightened, like a full liberation, but from the view of the self, like actually from the self, not from no-self. And what this view of having the self looks like, it feels like nothing. It feels like invisible, like you've dissolved this sense of self. And so it's actually, in my view, it's more self-laden, because you're viewing it from inside, where there is no sense of self. And then Hinduism is this inner connection where you see it from each side, including that. And then, yeah, and so I know that's probably the worst way to view it, given how

much seems like toxic poison to the view of most buddhists but yeah it seems to me a little bit something like that anyway i shouldn't say that just i think i think buddhism has has to deal with what's what i would call is uh i think buddhism has to deal with what i call is a superiority complex there is something about buddhism where people feel like they have experienced the ultimate and therefore everything else doesn't pales in comparison to it and yeah i see what you're saying about that which is that you know that sense of transcending the self comes from a sense of self and so that's always like this never-ending loop for people you know and and so but with but with hinduism or what we see as modern hinduism or what used to be hinduism also before is that it's like this tapestry of various different belief systems that somehow are kind of coming together and nobody says anything bad about the other it's like okay you believe that if you pray to the deity you're gonna get this more power to you okay you believe in kali cool

I believe in Ganesha. Oh, you believe in Shiva, okay, cool. I believe in Vishnu. There's no like, um, like, okay, this is somehow bad, but there is a superiority in Buddhism that's innate, which is we know the stuff, and other traditions are doing this, but we have the path to happiness, and other people's, or other traditions, have a lower kind of habit. I have seen it for myself. I have seen it in students, I've seen it in teachers, and I've seen it in the text. It's a truth, it's a reality. I would maybe argue that other religions also have it. Obviously, if you look at Islam, it's very dogmatic about their belief, right? Yeah, and it is very dogmatic, and of course in between different Catholic and Christian sects, I would say, because I'm more familiar with Buddhism, and I'm also more familiar from the standpoint of

like, not that other religions don't have really smart people, but Buddhism has attracted this very intellectual atheist community, which is one thing that I think is so beautiful about Buddhism. Because Buddha was almost a reaction, as far as I'm aware, to this very caste system structure in Hinduism, where it's like, no, you're either the Brahma or the Brahmins, as in the people, or you're one of these lower people, honest worthy. And he came in and he's like, no, everybody's here, here's the path, blah blah blah. And I mean, for me specifically, I would have never gotten into any of this if there wasn't this atheist sort of version. I could just feel it, because I came in from Sam Harris, who he is, like an atheist who is involved with this sort of stuff, and I could just see there's no way that I wouldn't have been as glued on to it. But yeah, I couldn't actually believe, when I got into Hinduism, how it was like

I couldn't believe it. I was so shocked, because there is this conception, especially with white or Western people, where it's like all religions are kind of the same. And then you get Buddhism and you're like, oh, this is very different. But then you get Hinduism, and because it's still a religious belief around God, you're like, it's just the same as the others. But it's so, there's no struc— I mean, it's not, there's no structure, but you fucking believe. There's literally older sex, there's not as many anymore, but there's atheist Hindus who, didn't they have this whole very complicated structure about Purusha and all these things, but it comes from a view where there is no right god. And one thing I couldn't believe about Hinduism, either, which I know people do this sort of stuff with all their religions, but I couldn't believe how many things. Obviously they talk about multiverse, they talk about, they talk about gravity, but they had evolution way before Darwin ever did. And I

like I've never heard anyone even mention the fact that they were speaking about what is, like, I think even the words we translate now as evolution, like even the terminology we're using, it's basically the same thing. So yeah, it's very, very strange to me how they've gotten so much right. Anyway. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, that's the thing about this whole process. Hinduism, what we call Hinduism, right, is basically just a way of collecting an understanding. Like we have Buddhism because it comes from the Buddha, but Hinduism because it just is from this particular part of the Indian subcontinent, which is all the way from, let's say, northern Afghanistan all the way down to Sri Lanka, and even beyond to Indonesia. And so because we have such a huge population, there's so many belief systems that are present. But I think there is an underlying kind of thread, which is why some Buddhists term Hinduism as brahminical. They say brahminical for two reasons. One is because it has the agenda of so-called brahmins

from ancient India during the time of the Buddha. But secondly, more so, because it's talking about Brahman. It's the brahmanical teachings, because there is this underlying substrate which is Brahman. But that Brahman could be, for one person, Ganesha, and that Brahman for another person could be a Hanuman or whatever. It's all extensions of the same, you know, pure essential consciousness or nature.

Yeah, I, I sometimes refer to it as Vedantin, but I guess that's probably not correct, because maybe that's more, I'd buy, to Vedantin specific. But that's the one for me, that, because we have— Sorry, go, yeah, go ahead, please go ahead. I was just going to say, to me that's the school that I've, I've liked, to not get too hierarchical, but that's the school that I've been like, this seems the most clear to where my path took me and where I want to continue. Like, I want jivanmukti, as I said. Like, I would like to, at any moment, be able to re-realize the vastness of how everything's connected. Like literally. Anyway, yeah, Adi Shankara and those people. I like, um, yeah, I like it. I was so surprised, because I never thought I would be so into this, but I flipped a switch. Like, it's also, I, I used to actually, uh, online, debate people about religion and stuff, like as an atheist. I'd go into philosophy chat rooms, and it was fun, but it's very interesting to me.

Well, I never knew anything about Hinduism really, but it's very interesting to me now that I'm, I'm balls deep. I fucking could not believe how much I have been drawn to it, really obsessively, like spend way too much of my time just thinking about it, reading it, and the Bhagavad Gita. I've read so many times, and the Panashad Panchali, like a whole bunch of them. And yeah, it's interesting. You guys never start talking, though. I'll tell you that there's so many texts, like endless. Every time I catch a cab or something, I'll meet an Indian guy, and then he's telling me about some, I've never heard of this. So much, like, when I think about, like, because I've heard you say something to the effect of, like, when you think of the Bible, it's like that, right? And then when you think of the Pali Canon, it's like this big text. But when you take the Hindu texts, it's just never ending. And I know as well with Buddhism, there's a lot of things, like I've seen in Tibet they have these huge, huge libraries full of texts that have just never been

translated, and who knows if they ever will. A lot of them are in, like, Chinese. So yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the thing about these texts. Like, uh, that's what I was saying, you know, like with Tantra or even general Indian spirituality, it's like the tip of the iceberg. There is so much there that we have yet to uncover.

And it helps to know Sanskrit, because a lot of these texts are Vedic Sanskrit, and if you know at least classical Sanskrit, it makes it easier for you to delve deeper into them. But was it hard to learn? It just depends. This Sanskrit, for me, I speak Hindi. Yeah, I mean, I grew up speaking Hindi, or at least understanding Hindi, when I was growing up in India. And in my teens I had a fascination with Sanskrit, so I actually tried to learn it, and for me it was immediate, I guess because of the understanding of Hindi, but also just picking up Sanskrit from my fascination with languages. So I always was looking at the connections or interconnections between languages. A lot of words in European languages are very similar to Sanskrit or Avestan, which is ancient Persian language.

And so that really made it very fascinating for me. It was very easy for me to adopt Sanskrit. And then just by sheer practice of reading the texts and trying to understand them, it became like a second language. Can I... I feel like I should probably let you go, because I've taken so much of your time today, but can I just ask one more random question? You mentioned about, I can't remember the text, but I haven't written down the one with Ramayana where they're talking about different multiverses and that sort of thing.

Do you ever think about, like you said, for instance, in one situation, and this is very similar to the quantum effect where they talk about, there is one world where you went this way, one world you went this way? Does that ever concern you? How, like, I'm sure at this point you're like, my karma's good, I'm a good person, I do good things, but does that ever concern you? Where it's like, some people talk about group karma, you know what I mean? Like 9/11, it's like not that every individual person had this, or like during the Holocaust. Do you ever worry, like, maybe this universe could go a very, let's say, AI or something else, it could just go a really, really negative way? Where it's like, this is my existential angsty fear. But yeah, I've, I had been, I think, conversations with, like, AI people. Yeah, you know, that's, yeah, yeah. And I think, I think, if we're looking at the timeline of where AI could become super intelligent, in, you know, in less than

a decade and things like that, I think our last frontier or last refuge is our own mind or our own spirit, however you want to put it. And as long as AI doesn't infect that, I think there is still some hope. And for that we need to continue keeping to those wisdom traditions. That's a civilizational threat that we need to look at, which is as a global human civilization, and we still maintain our ability to pass down human wisdom. Which, sure, AI can look at and ultimately calculate and be like, this is what the texts say, and so on and so forth. But that's just book knowledge. What we're talking about, or what I'm talking about, is wisdom, which is the wisdom you get from actual experience of the texts. And I hope that we continue doing that as a civilization, whether it's, you know, Hinduism, Buddhism, Tabala, ancient shamanism, whatever it is. If we retain those experiences, or at least those wisdom traditions, I think as a civilization we still don't have some

Sorry, can I bug you with one or two small quick questions? You've had a conversation with me, so you've gotten the feeling for how I am. One, do you have any sort of advice or pushing me in any direction or anything like that? And two, I just want to ask, can you explain what it feels like after nirodha samapatti? Or is it just you don't feel anything? It's like getting that drug that people take before they have surgery, like that sort of feeling of not exactly sleep, but you just sort of time travel.

Yeah, so okay. So first, for yourself, I think, if you're really having this fascination with the works of Vedanta, you should definitely check out Adi Shankaracharya. But looking at the Yoga Vasistha, I think would be a really interesting text for you to go in that direction, because what it is, is it's a syncretic text. And what I mean by that is, it doesn't say one is better than the other. It actually takes into account the Buddhist perspective, the Vedantic perspective, the yogic perspective, the atheist perspective, and it has this blend

and it has all of these sci-fi kind of sounding stories as well, but underneath all of that is just this understanding of Brahman. So that's my recommendation for you, is to check that out. Yeah, I've been, to be honest, it's just like, again, I have so many, like a list. I'm going for the Bhagavata Purana at the moment. I've tried, yeah, I actually go on the Rig Veda, either, which I feel like it's a really, like it's the first, I think, so I should be doing it, but I had an audio translation, I just hated the guy's voice. So yeah, yeah. Regarding nirodha samapatti, so when I'm going into nirodha samapatti, it's a process in which the mind, excuse me, starts to deconstruct all experience.

From forcer experiences of sounds, smells, healing and so on, to thoughts, ideas, concepts, and then proto-thoughts. And then there's this sort of stepping into some kind of light or black hole, a wormhole, and then boom, you're out. You have no idea what happened. It's just like there's a gap in time, and it's like you come back up as if you were out of surgery. But the experience of coming out is like you make contact with this energy or substrate of light and consciousness, at least in my experience, and there is a big surge of energy, bliss, relief and contentment.

A video was recently launched by Ruben Laukkonen, who was one of the chief scientists, one of the chief researchers in the Nirodha Samapatti study, and he talks about my experience as I describe it to a microphenomenologist. So anybody who wants to know more about that should definitely check that out. Awesome. I don't know if you've ever heard of this lady. She's an Australian, I guess you call it a nun. Her name is Samaniri Jaisari. But just because you've got such a fascination with everything, you might want to check her out. She does these YouTube videos, but she covers Christian mysticism, Islam, heaps of Vedantic stuff, heaps of Dzogchen, that sort of stuff. She does a voice recording of different texts, but yeah, if you like that kind of thing you might be fascinated by. Yeah. I'll send you a name. And just one final question, because I've been super self-serving with this whole conversation. I'm curious for you, where do you see you go in with

Your spiritual journey. Do you feel like there's other things that you're destined to explore, or do you feel like you've pretty much... Well, no, there's never an end to the exploration for me. For me, I was talking to Guru Viking the other time, where I'm now delving deep into certain traditions which are related with the divine feminine. That's called Shri Vidya. It's a Tamil or South Indian tantric tradition that goes into delving into the ancient divine female principle. And there are other things that I want to explore, other things that I want to kind of teach as well, like Kriya Yoga and Tantra, when I feel like it is suitable to do that, but it will take some time for me to figure out who has an interest in that. I've been more discerning with my time as a teacher as well. I have a lot of people who are interested in Kriya Yoga, but they don't have the discipline to actually want to do it, so

In terms of my explorations, the sky is just the beginning. There's a lot there that I would love to look at, and I think I have the good fortune of not being attached to one particular perspective, because I see what it does. I've been on the other side of it, where I've had a lot of criticism for the things that I've said and done, and it's from people who are just ultra-ultra orthodox fundamental extremists. So my take now is, hey, I have a lot of things that I still want to explore, and I'll do it, and mostly it'll be in the realm of mantra and esoteric. I think I'm so lucky that my whole fascination with all this probably started with Alan Watts when I was a kid. He definitely said things where I feel like he's gotten things wrong, where his historical knowledge of it was incorrect, but

He would sample a lot of things and develop this cohesive worldview, with the Kriya Yoga stuff as well. This last question, I'll leave you to your Saturday night. The Kriya Yoga, do you have a good starting point to that? I know I did message you, and you recommended one person who I still need to check out, but Forrest Knutson is the guy to check out. Yeah. And if anybody wants to learn from me, they're more than welcome to. So here's the self-serving thing. I do consultations. They don't come cheap, because my time is valuable. There's a lot of people, so they can check me out on my website, and we can have a discussion about that with regards to Kriya Yoga. Because there's a couple of places you can go to, like Forrest's channel, Forrest Knutson, and there's also Modern Kriya. He is associated with Forrest in one way or the other.

These are great starting points. And if you want to get initiated by me, by all means, contact me. Great. Look, I really appreciate you've been very generous with your time. If anyone does want to check you out, DelsonArmstrong.com is the main website. I know you have another sort of bio in, I don't know if it's TWIM or like Suttavada and that sort of thing. Right. Yeah, you've got quite a lot of YouTube videos. Anybody's interested, you have very good teachings, which I highly recommend. Great. Yeah, I feel like, unless you have any questions or anything you want to say to me, I should probably let you get back to your life. No, I like this. This was fun. So much, I really appreciate it. It's been a good conversation. I'm glad that, yeah, I feel like I maybe, I probably got, I think I was maybe highly critical of you and that's how I ended up meeting you.

Not highly critical, but I think Twitter as well has a tendency to pull out a little bit of antagonism from people. And yeah, I hope I didn't offend you. Not at all. Namaste. Well, it's quite late for you, right? So have a good night. What'd you say, sorry? It's late for you, I think, there in Australia, isn't it? It's 11.40, but I'm a young dude who's, I don't know. It's Saturday night. Saturday night.

All right. Well, have a good night. If there's anything else, just let me know and just message you. I really appreciate it. And for some of those people that you recommended, that really helps. One thing that I found with my journey personally is I would have this tendency to ruminate on the things that I know about. For instance, with Toku Urujiken, I got really into his pointing out instructions. And I feel like I just focused on that for such a long period where I neglected some of the other, even in that tradition's teaching. Sometimes it's really useful to have that sort of experience and just go into it. But I know with modern Buddhism, there's so much focus on Vipassana specifically.

Like you know this for 400 years, and then maybe in your next life it's like, yeah. Sometimes I feel like there's a fine line, especially with someone like me who's got ADHD, so I can go to different things. But one thing that I liked from Osho, which is probably bad advice for a lot of people, but for me it was good advice, he said, the things you're learning, those, that's your path, and you're gonna make mistakes, and maybe you're gonna go off and do this other thing, but that's part of your path. And that's the way it is. And so it's almost like a meta thing with meditation itself.

When you first start meditating, you're so distracted. And then you learn to be actually glad that you noticed you were distracted, rather than seeing that as a negative. And it's the same with your path. You're going to fuck up, but that's it. That's karma. That's the point of learning. So, anyway. Absolutely. I agree with that. If you ever finish your read your series, please post it somewhere so that I can finish it. I have a hard time starting a series if I don't know it's finished, but I'll definitely finish red at least, and if the other ones come out, please let me know. All right, I'll let you know. Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. Thanks, bye.