Ep292: Dharma Reunited - Daniel Ingram and Delson Armstrong 2

In this episode, I once again hold the dialogue between Daniel Ingram and Delson Armstrong. Daniel Ingram is an independent Buddhist writer, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and co-founder of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium. Delson Armstrong is a spiritual teacher, author of A Mind Without Craving, and founder of the Freedom of Mind Foundation. In episode 136, Meeting of the Dharmas, I hosted a dialogue between Daniel and Delson in which they compared their enlightenment claims. At that time, Delson claimed a version of enlightenment that included a permanent freedom from negative emotions such as fear, anger and desire. Two years later, in episode 280, Delson renounced this and all other claims to spiritual attainment.

And now Daniel and Delson meet again for a new dialogue. Daniel offers his response to Delson's recent renunciations, warns about the power of self-hypnosis, and explains why it is so common for people to revise their enlightenment claims. Delson considers how it was that he mistook the nature of his spiritual achievements, considers the impact of his renunciation on his practice community and students, and looks ahead to his own future as a teacher and guide. Daniel and Delson address criticisms they have both received for their revisions of important Buddhist doctrines, such as the four-path model of awakening, comment on gatekeeping and fundamentalism in Buddhism, and consider whether advances in contemplative neuroscience may pose a serious threat to traditional religions and their institutions.

So without further ado, Daniel Ingram and Delson Armstrong. Daniel Ingram and Delson Armstrong, welcome back to the podcast. Delightful to be here. Thank you. Good to be here. Thank you. Wow. Well, this is a sequel I've been looking forward to for quite some time. So thank you both for coming back onto the podcast. Several months ago, gosh, maybe even over a year ago, the two of you had a dialogue. And one of the themes that was central to that dialogue was an examining of and comparing of both of your journeys through the Buddhist four-path model, beginning with stream-entry and going through various other stages after that. And one of the crucial differences in your experiences and in your interpretations of those models was to do with something called the 10 fetters model, whereby at each step through each stage of this four-path model, various fetters, chains, you are freed from them.

And what does that mean exactly? And does that mean that one never feels, for example, negative emotion again? Does it mean that one never feels sensual or erotic desire again, etc., etc.? And so this was one of the crucial, the moral perfection model, sometimes that's this is one of the crucial differences. At that time, Delson, you held that your experience bore out that, yes, indeed, at each of these stages, at each of these thresholds, there is a shedding of certain capacities for negative emotion, so-called negative emotion, including things like desire, anger, fear, etc., like that.

But Daniel, you had a different idea about that, where these stages represent primarily a perceptual shift in one's experience of oneself in relationship to reality, etc., but in any case not necessarily one could be a full arhat and not necessarily and be able in fact to experience negative emotion or sensual desire, etc. That's a possibility, although presumably the experience of that would be quite different to a muggle such as myself.

But now, plot twist, Delson: in a recent interview with me and in an independent video you put on your own channel, you have renounced that stance that I just described and revised your view on that four-path model and on the spiritual path in general, in a quite, I would say, significant change of position. So here we are, the two of us, the three of us rather, back here to revisit, at least at the beginning, this very same theme. So I'm curious, Daniel, we were saying we were discussing before, so I know that you've seen Delson's retraction, renouncing video, and I know the two of you have had a brief conversation as well following that. But Daniel, I wonder if I might ask you for a response. What was your response, your reaction, upon seeing that video? Well, so I should mention a little bit about the history of some of the community I've been a part of. The Dharma Overground, which is a community that's been around for about 16 years now in various forms, we've seen

a bunch of this. So it was, and we've been debating these things, and we've had people who claimed whatever levels of this, only later to go, no, and renounce it and say they were sorry, or say they had revised or moved on or expanded their view, or appreciated more things like Vajrayana or Mahayana perspectives on some of these things, or whatever, or renounced all the models entirely. And I myself, actually, in my own practice, this is in the late 90s and early 2000s, I would go through various cycles and things and think, oh, I've done it, this is the way it is, okay, finally, and then days, weeks, months, sometimes minutes later go, okay, no. So that just doesn't happen to be all over the internet, right? Because this is in the days before people were posting and podcasting about all their experiences. So this is familiar to me in the community, but I recognize that plenty of communities have

not gone through things like that, and they haven't sort of had the experience of this happening, and so it can be more traumatic or challenging or surprising or something, right? And I realize that most communities may not have had someone go through these particular debates and discussions. It's embarrassing, it's confusing, it's surprising, it's disappointing, it's also freeing. It's a lot of things. And so it wasn't actually much of a surprise.

And in fact, when we did that video, I was like, okay, time will likely do the same thing that it did to every single other person I know who's ever claimed this publicly, including myself. Or actually, again, I had the joys back then of not claiming those things publicly, so, but you get the

idea it's just the time i lifted so um yeah so welcome to a long and glorious you know discussion that also split buddhism right so it's it's this split buddhism early on right what does this lead to what are the soteriological consequences of practice what are the possible endpoints right so the divisions between the theravada and the mahayana and the various maps of where this was all going and what one should aspire to and what it looked like is nothing new and in fact you know zen got so frustrated by all of this that they tossed out all of the maps almost entirely uh not i mean not quite entirely right they still sort of got some but you know they uh because they were just like yeah um no so yeah it was it was um expected welcome appreciated uh okay yeah cool good fine nice sure my thoughts

Well, I wonder, Daniel, if you felt any degree of vindication? Sure, of course. Right. So that's a normal human thing to feel, right? I get a lot of emails, and there have been videos and stuff saying, hey, Daniel, the only possible way you could think that is if you haven't attained anything.

you don't really know the dharma, you haven't studied, you haven't read, you haven't practiced. So yeah, but on the other hand, the feeling of mudita and appreciation is vastly bigger than that, right? The feeling of still being happy the conversation is ongoing, still really appreciative that the exploration is ongoing, that we get to discover these things together as a community, vastly outweighs any petty little feelings of vindication, right? Which are of course there, right? They're there. But the fact that we get to have these dialogues in an era where there is this cross-pollination, I think that's a thousand times more important. And so just really grateful to be part of the journey and to get to share it with people who are earnestly caring about these questions and exploring them and seeing for themselves what these things may or may not lead to. And Delson, when you look back at that dialogue and now here we are having a sequel, what are your reflections? Is anything coming to you about that, about the change that's happened since then?

Yeah, it's so interesting, because we had talked about meeting together on this podcast again, and I was reflecting on some of the things that we were saying the first time around. And it's actually, let me see, a broader perspective on what is possible, and the fact is that when we talk about awakening, it is certain kinds of shifts in the way we look at the world, the way we relate to the world, but it has also allowed me

to look at my experiences again and look at the suttas and have a different understanding. So Daniel and I actually were on a call together, I think a couple of weeks after our, after my recent video with you with regards to renouncing attainments. And he was very gracious on the call, and he gave me a lot of great insights. Before the call he sent me an email, which was very, very helpful. It was an excerpt from his book which talked about all of the different maps and models, and I was actually quite taken aback by not only him reaching out but also the fact that all of the maps and models that he mentioned are so extensive.

My initial reaction was to throw away all the models, and I remember talking to Daniel about this. He said, you might want to do that. You might want to just throw away the models. You might want to just throw away the maps. You might want to reflect back on it. You might want to go back and forth and all of this. And he told me some things. He said one is, just take time with it. Just don't throw away everything and just wait and see how things progress, and not everything needs to be documented publicly, and it could just be your own reflections, and you come to it when you're ready. So right now I'm still kind of reflecting on that process and seeing what is the best way of expressing what I think now. That doesn't mean that I don't stand by what I said last time when we had our interview. The way I feel, actually, is like I've been telling this to my friends. It's like, when a snake comes

Out of its new skin, and it's quite vulnerable. That's the way I feel. Not necessarily emotionally, but just totally exposed to the outside world. I'm becoming more and more comfortable with that process. And I think, for me, moving forward as a practitioner, as a guide, as a teacher, I'm allowing things to unfold. I'm allowing time to take its course. And I think whatever I need to do will kind of show its way if I just have the patience and just wait. Maybe a few weeks, a few months, maybe even up to a year, and then see where I want to take my life.

Wow, nice. Well, it's very kind of you to say so. And again, I should mention that the stuff I've written about, almost none of it is new, right? So, the MOPS and the models, I get to benefit from this staggering collection of really thoughtful, interesting, deep, profound, well-studied practitioners, who have left traces and discussions, and then the other discussions with the community.

My friends, people who have been my teachers, people who looked to me as a teacher but then taught me interesting things as they wandered the paths themselves. All of that. It's really a dialogue, and it's an ongoing dialogue. And people think this is simple, right? It's not simple. It maybe it's profound, it's complicated, it's interesting, but it's not simple. And people want it to be very simple. And the longer I do this, I've been talking to, watching my own adventures for decades, and those of my friends and colleagues and wanderers on the path, and talking to a lot of people about their own journeys and what they report. Honestly, people who are telling me stuff they may have never told anybody. So it's not for public fame or whatever. It's just like, hey, can we have a conversation? This is what I think is going on with me, this is my experience. And you realize that there is an incredible amount

of variance. In the same kind of way that we're discovering neurodiversity, that people are all kind of different and perceive reality differently, may have different brain structures and all that, I think all of that applies equally to the path. And I think the intersection of this notion of vast ranges of intricate neurodiversity, and their intersection with the models of awakening and how those might form in a progressive way, is going to be a very rich field of exploration.

Because even the most progressive and open of traditions still have a tendency to want to condense it to something simple. And in some ways, it is reality just showing itself naturally, transiently, immediately. Sure, there are some straightforward aspects to this, but most of the specifics, as far as I can tell, from being a naturalist studying what's actually out there in the jungle, the wild world of awakening, it's all over the place. The envelopes, the progressions, the risings and fallings, and the variants of this as people go forward in their own journeys and share them honestly, just with friends on the path who have something like an open mind about this stuff. Mostly through bitter experience, and our own ideals colliding with realities as we went, slowly softening our priors and our filters, then you get to realize that, yeah, this is a very, very complicated thing.

And I think that will hopefully be one of the great things that the 21st century gets to lend to this, is that sense of intricate neurodiversity with intricate and complicated paths. I mean, think of all the forces and factors of biology, of practice, of how everybody practices differently, of cultures and inclinations, the incredibly, ridiculously complicated thing our brains and hearts and minds and bodies are. Like again, there's no way some of the ways this unfolds are going to be simple. That's kind of the next thought I have on this. And just one more: Bill Hamilton warned again and again and again. So I kind of got lucky with having Bill Hamilton as one of my teachers, because he said it is so easy to hypnotize yourself into believing a model.

And this is one of the things he warned about again and again and again, like that you've eliminated an emotion or whatever. And he said, you know, one of the sort of bugs and features of meditation is that you can sort of auto-hypnotize yourself, and that allows one to potentially tune into incredibly powerful and profound experiences. Sort of like Dan Brown, like one of his things is hypnotizing people into non-duality or whatever.

Well, that might be real non-duality, like, perhaps, it's hard to tell. But there's a real possibility that what he's doing, and in the same way with feelings, in the same way with powers, in the same way with all of that, the mind is programmable and tunable. But part of that programming and tuning can also be the creation of shadow sides, where somehow we learn, because as we train our attention to be very specific in what we include and what we exclude, the exclusion capacity to not notice aspects of our experience, which in some ways functionally makes them not there. Right? So it's a funny thing. Like if your partner says something and you honestly didn't hear them because you were thinking through your response to the previous thing they said. Did you hear them or didn't you hear them? Well, it's complicated. Maybe you didn't actually hear them, even though they said something your ears could hear. Your brain didn't hear it.

Or like you're reading a book in a coffee shop and the coffee shop goes away and there's just the story, and then all of a sudden the coffee shop's back. Was it gone? I don't know, but functionally, for you, it was. In the same way, I think there's ample evidence that we can do this with our emotions, and particularly as we are very inspired by very beautiful, profound, and compelling models of what might be possible in human experience, but also in some ways can create these effects. That's one of many possible explanations for what's going on. I simply offer these as theories, really, possible extrapolations or interpretations of an often noted phenomenon. Those are my long-winded thoughts. Thoughts. Well, you've touched on something that I'd hope we might discuss, which is the mechanism, what actually happened there.

Delson, with your experience, Daniel's mentioned that he's seen this sort of pattern before, where somebody feels that they've attained a sort of level of enlightenment with certain conditions, and then that view starts to shift. Maybe I haven't dispelled all notions. For example, there may still be something that's there, but in terms of attainment, it's not what one thought it was. So I wonder what that mechanism is. Is it an inevitable part of the journey? Is it an inevitable part of the sort of afterglow of profound spiritual experiences?

Is it in some cases perhaps even a sort of manic phase? Not perhaps in your case, Delson, but a sort of manic phase, where one, I mean, it is the case, I think, that sometimes people having a manic episode can feel, oh yeah, that's a thing. Yeah. So I'm not suggesting that that was happening to you, Delson, because you didn't have any other symptoms of that, but you know, that's another possibility. Perhaps what's going on there? Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting that Daniel was talking about, was it Dan Brown, hypnotizing people into non-dual states? Yeah. Yeah. It could be. In my experience, I was so enamored by the mythos of the suttas, of the terrible, beautiful, right? Yeah, elegant, yes, compelling. It is absolutely compelling, and it's, as you say, beautiful, but it's also like this idealization, where it's like, yeah, what would it feel like to be totally free of all of these afflictive states? And you get yourself into it.

Because through deep meditation, through deep practice, through some form of validation with your community, through continual talking about it, through continual retreats and so on, you kind of get yourself into this mode of thinking and even feeling this experience of being free from the fetters, being free from any kind of anger or frustration, free from any kind of sensual desire, or whatever it might be. And for a while, that was my situation. It was my case. I'm saying for a long while, but what changed, I think, was also coming back into the fold of society, because for the most part I was very much, let's say, secluded or semi-secluded. What I mean by semi-secluded is I was in the bubble of being within my community and teaching to my community, and continually being in the process of reading the suttas, studying the suttas, and being like, okay, this is the way it is, this is the only way it is. And I think what really helped

was coming back into being with family, with friends, with difficult people, and being there for a more prolonged period of time. What's that joke or that comic strip, like if you think you're enlightened, spend a week with your family? Something like that. So for me, that was what it was. Not necessarily with my family, but with just being in society, and realizing, oh wait, I may have had all of these profound experiences, I may have also seen through how reality unfolds, and so on, but the emotional quality of being free of any afflicted states, actually, yeah, there is still this challenge of dealing with assholes. There is this challenge of dealing with people who are belligerent, and so on. And that, for me, was an eye-opener. That was sort of like shattered, let's say, the quote-unquote illusion of being free from any afflictive

States, and I think it was a gradual process. I don't think it happened immediately. I think it was a process of introspection and inspection and exploring what's going on here, and also realizing that hey, I don't think I want to lead a life that is semi-monastic or monastic in nature. In other words, leading a normal life, quote unquote normal, I mean, what is normal really? But leading a life where you have the average experience of being in a partnership, having children, and so on and so forth. I thought that, you know, it felt

lopsided to lead a life of a monastic. I don't have any criticisms there. If people want to do that, that's great for them. But I realized that was the other thing. I felt like there was some level of gatekeeping when I started looking into it, which is like, if you are an arahant, you need to join the monastic order or you're going to explode. Yes, the questions of King Milinda, and it's funny, I actually talked to Biko and Alio about that one, and he said, no, no, that's apocryphal. Even he, like, yeah, he's like, no, it's late, because I think it's from The Questions of King Milinda, which is very, very late, right? And so, at least even some of the hardcore people who are known to be sort of perennial critics of people like myself, and I'm sure they will probably now be coming after you if they haven't already, with their pitchforks and whatever. But, you know, with their pitchforks, and he thought

that one's apocryphal, that one's too late, it's not real. So anyway, that's very interesting. So there are still people under that idea, right? There are still people within certain hardcore fundamentalist Buddhist communities which feel like, no, that is the way. I mean, I've seen and encountered people who feel that. Oh yeah, me too, lots. Yeah, and I can only imagine what the responses are going to be in the comments section of this video. It's going to be a hoot of human experience and expression and feeling, and yes. So what would the implications be of that, in that case, that the possibility of having a lay arahant for a fundamentalist Buddhist is unheard of, or it's unthought of? That's the case, and

so you know so so anyway going back to that the the this idea this notion which was very much part of the fundamentalist buddhist idea of like if you become an arhat you have to join the monastic order or you will uh go up in flames uh after seven days uh that really did make me question a lot of the things that are there in terms of like it seems very to me at least it seems very much in the favor or of a monastic order rather than the lay life and if i'm somebody who wants to lead a lay life

how how compatible is that with what i want you know and so it that's that's the series of questions that came up in my mind and jack cornfield mentions this i can't remember it's in a path with heart or after the ecstasy of the laundry it's one of these excellent books that everybody should read but um he said something like hey maybe we actually wanted kids you know you might have from years and years of practice and chasing these models and ideals maybe you want a family maybe you want kids and you might discover this late in life and and have regrets about that You know, and, you know, he's obviously a very deep practitioner who's now married to Trudy and, you know, and I also got to see this with Christopher Titmuss.

So apologies, Christopher, if you end up watching this or hearing this, I'm going to slightly put words in your mouth that you didn't actually say. But I got to see this with someone who would declare things like, this Christopher is not suffering, and then also talk about how hard it was to see his daughter go to the pubs and come back smashed on her 18th birthday, and how challenging that was, and what it was like having a divorce and a kid and living on donations.

donations because of a really strict adherence to this sort of sense of buddhist ethics around money which i super appreciated but like having to support a family and and you know getting to see on the one hand someone who could point very clearly to realization to wisdom who's incredibly well studied and was a monk for years and grew up in the tradition and would if pressed claim something that in all but the word seems to be our hot ship or a realization that the type of suffering that insight could destroy had been destroyed and yet then to see him obviously in pain from stuff about family and life and work and money and relationships and and also to see the beautiful expression like again thank you christopher titmus profound gratitude writing books like fire dance and other poems which you probably can't find anymore but their fire dance is this this there's this poem about him watching this beautiful woman dancing on a beach like just gorgeous and like the the beauty of that and the humanity of that and so i got to see in in one of

my most important early teachers this strain and conflict and if people would ask him about the four path models he said you know the buddhist path is enough paths for me so or something like that you know that that like he he just didn't want to go there so he he so on the same time where he would declare profound depths of realization demonstrate it could point to it could see it would also demonstrate this profound humanity and this tension with the models watching it all in this previously theravadic monastic teacher so again i i'm blessed that i got to see people struggle with this before i did and already have blazed a lot of you know trails and ground and normalized some of these sorts of conflicts and i'm just super thankful for

that i think both of you have made comments that speak to the social dimension of of these uh of this this sort of a situation um delson you talked about the social support if you like of the group of practitioners that you were working with being able to exist in an environment of practice and scripture reading and people there with a shared belief in a certain way that things are and how supportive that was in your practice but also not perhaps intentionally, but also shielded you from other points of view, belligerent people, difficult people, people who didn't really recognize any significance in what that group held to be the most significant and the most fundamental.

And you're also talking, Daniel, about the influence of Christopher Titmuss and so on, but I'd also like to point to the sort of internet communities that you that really in some ways the internet's moved on i think that these sorts of communities don't quite exist i don't i don't think anymore sort of underground scenes in a sense perhaps not quite in the same way but well yeah you can correct me by by all means but certainly you and your group the sort of if i might if i might be a bit flippant with it the sort of fans and enthusiasts of pragmatic dharma people reading books like yours mastering the core teachings of the Buddha, participating in the message boards and so on, taking on a certain worldview, striving for certain attainments, watching the phenomenology

closely, and sort of buying into it, in a sense, and then declaring themselves to be at a certain level. And then later on, perhaps moving out of the orbit of that social scene, albeit mostly online, I think, moving out of the orbit of that, finding that what seemed to be so concrete, so fundamental, so central, sort of evaporates in contact with other aspects of life. So there's this sort of social aspect, on the one hand, very supportive, on the other hand, influential in this other kind of way. So I'm curious about, if you might, either of you, if anything I've said there prompts any reflections um about about uh about this these sorts of social forces that are probably an inevitable part more or less if you're going to participate in relationships um social relationships to do with practice perhaps these sorts of forces are inevitable maybe not i wonder if anything i've said there prompts a prompts a thought so i was actually having an interesting conversation about uh relationships uh specifically like with a good friend of mine a couple of days ago.

And we were talking about how relationships are kind of a reflection of karma and vice versa. If you think about, I mean, this is one way of looking at it, which is when we talk about karma, it's almost like it cannot exist unless there is some kind of relationship. We might go as far as to say that karma doesn't exist a so-called non-dualistic state um but again that could just be a bunch of mumbo jumbo

um what i'm trying to get at is like the whole idea of relationships and the whole idea of relating to the world or even relating with ourselves we can get into this space where we're conditioning ourselves based on the community that we're surrounding ourselves with our family our friends and so on to adopt a certain kind of world view and then when you go out into a larger world that kind of also changes as you start growing up into the world and so on and for me the way i look at it is now um reflecting on this is we could use the relations that we have with our family and our friends and our co-workers and our you know partners or whatever as a means of alchemical transformation towards some kind of greater freedom i don't know if any of that made sense but yeah any thoughts i think it's almost inevitably oscillatory where

we are inspired by the ideals the dreams the promises the sort of world without sin as gordon white uh calls it the sanitized apple world of perfection and clean models and cleanliness there's a beauty in that of you know and then communities form around that and then they get spun up into their own transference and counter transference which are concepts that are probably really important to unpack um at some point but i'm just going to sort of raise them as a as a general topic right and then they reinforce each other and put people on pedestals and create shadow sides and do all the things that visionary inspired you know mythically inspired uh communities do and then there's inevitably a crash a break a flaw a fall um a

something that, and then there's the reactions to all of that, and then there's the introspection and the solitude and the loneliness and the isolation and the confusion and the reflections and the re-evaluations and all that come from the inevitable problems. And this happens in all communities, right? So this is part of the history of all spiritual communities, all movements, you know, all

empires, uh, you know, it's just the nature of the world, right? And then yeah, there's a learning in that, though it tends to be a pretty hard one, and then there's a forgetting and a redoing of the whole cycle. Like, fascism is bad, let's have a war. Oh, maybe fascism is okay, let's vote it in. Like, you know, whatever. Like these kinds of cycles are just an inevitable part of the human experiment. Generation after generation we have to viscerally make the mistakes that we read about someone making but didn't really understand, and then we get to understand them for ourselves. And I think that's really important. It's really important because reading about these things in books and reading about the conflicts is nothing like having actually lived them for yourself. So I think in some ways it's absolutely beautiful and profound and so important to get to live the great ancient conflicts and debates between the traditions for ourselves, to rise, to fall, to reflect, to learn, to grow, as communities, as individuals. I just think that's an essential part of the human cycle and

drama. And I think it makes better teachers. Like, I think Christopher Titmuss and Bill Hamilton, having Lint learned from bitter experience, were better teachers, you know, despite all the crap they sometimes took. Christopher Titmuss is obviously still teaching. I didn't mean to use the definitive past with him, but anyway. Well, let me put it another way. If we can grant, perhaps, that a person who claims a certain level of realisation, now I'm talking generally. Of course, Delson, you've done that recently. But as you pointed out, Daniel, you've seen that sort of thing happen a lot. Of course, every case is different, not to make an equivalency of all of them. And presumably, when the tide of the initial period of claim recedes, and one realizes that whatever one has, it's not all one thought one had, what role does the social proof, the social feedback play in both the initial sense of one's enlightenment, whatever the case may be, and then it's re-clarification.

What I mean to say is you might feel you're very enlightened when you're in your group. You go out and then you feel you're less enlightened. how how do you relate to such groups after such an experience can you ever really go back into that that sort of garden of eden can you ever really relate to the groups that have put such faith and belief into the that as you put i think was it the perfect the perfect model the perfect world the world without sin are you welcome are you welcome there maybe even having been a leader in such a group but then having a different nuanced view doesn't it spoil the party rather to come yeah of course it does of course it does uh i've i've had to deal with that in some extent

um i i did receive a lot of uh let's say support by emails and communications about you know whatever i spoke about in our last interview uh with renouncing attainments and of course my whole idea was to kind of just go beyond just attainments and the models and and so on but you know within within twin community and here i'm here i'm saying the twin community and therefore i probably will receive a lot of flack yet again from some members of the community for speaking but let's let's go here we are

um i know that they there are people who want to hold on to those models i know there are people who want to kind of just be like no no no you're wrong or you know you know they haven't gone as far as to say cast him out and they still look up uh for guidance and and and uh teaching from myself which is well appreciated uh but there have been a couple of people who've been left confused because obviously in the past myself being so enamored by all of the notions and ideas of a perfected liberation and espousing it through my own teachings and guidance now here i am taking somewhat of an 180 if not basically a 180 on that whole thing uh they're left confused and wondering how do they proceed because for them in their experience they are having those processes they are having those experiences there are people who say that they've had second path and therefore that means they have seen an attenuation of their uh greed and hatred and so they are standing by that and i respect them for that and that's completely fine by by

that standard yeah i also know it's a rare interjection i also like i have no problems with the the path models through second path like i we have no beef like they're fine at least or largely fine this these are doable things that it all works well enough like is it is it a perfect model no but like yeah up through second path it's where at third path with the elimination of of lust and anger and things like that or you know we're like yeah suddenly like

okay what i call the third path glass ceiling where it's like yeah yeah and and so you know in my interview with uh with you steve when we're talking about uh trying to recontextualize the ten fetters i kind of did that but i i don't think i i need to do that or i i should be doing that because there's there's different ways of looking at that process uh and i've had to come to terms with that with the community with the twin uh practitioners where you know i've had to basically say okay do you or do you not believe in the ten fetter model and and do you or do you not believe in the four path model do you or do you not believe in some of these words that are mentioned in the polycanon about what it means to be awakened and so on and it's been a very interesting journey in that regard because i've been i've been kind of like trying to figure out what is the best approach here

because you know people have their experiences and if those are if that's their experience and that's their experience there's nothing else i can say to discount their experience and only time will tell what those experiences mean in the long term and if they change or they find something else or they find something worse or something better or whatever it is but the challenge has been coming back to the community where now i have to be able to say look this is my experience this is how i see it and can we not have another dialogue which is not so rooted in trying to get to a level of perfection whether it's moral perfection emotional perfection or mental perfection and can we just talk about the practice i realize that people might not want to do that because they really want to get somewhere they want to achieve something they want to get to that you know golden finish line where yes there is some level of perfection so we'll see how things evolve that's why i was saying earlier i feel like i i've you know

shed off new skin and so i'm in a very vulnerable position and i'm not sure what the future holds uh in terms of whether i continue to teach in that community or i decide to change things in the community or decide to teach something else entirely or just be a more syncretic teacher i'm of the nature of being syncretic i like to teach kriya yoga i like to teach tantra i like to explore tantra i like to explore other things and i have a lot of other things that i can you know show people but i also see that that might be a challenge for the people in the twin community because what does that mean i think they they want to go where i'm going because they feel and i might be maybe i think too high highly of myself here but i feel like they want to go where i'm going because that's the route to take that's the way to take but i would say that everybody's journey is individual so whatever it makes you uh what it makes whatever feels right for you

in your journey that's what you should be doing um and let me be let me be let me do what i want to do nice yeah so many thoughts about all of that this is really good i think that vulnerability you mentioned so i think plenty of people and this is developmental right there are developmental stages where we want to follow a parental figure where we want to follow a beautiful thing right these sort of ideals of mythic perfection and a perfect person or something who like that's that's the developmental thing on the path that plenty of us have had moments of and may spend years in sometimes or decades or our whole lives and that's okay and you know they can find someone else to attach in that way to if someone else arises like that's that's often what happens so when you if you study the history of these things there will be a whole bunch of people who would just go find someone else it's like they were following the dead and then they started following fish or whatever i don't know like it's not quite the same equivalent

but you get the idea right they need to follow somebody you know they're going to be in a scene following and that's what they do but the the brave admission of vulnerability right i think that's really some important dharma right if you're going to follow that that's a beautiful thing to follow so so which is like instead of looking that way to the golden path and the golden fruit to to look this way at the vulnerability and humanity that's really hard right that's a hard thing to do to that our tender-hearted frailties our failings our faults our shadows our suffering truth number one as as the buddha put it so i think leading and leaning into that vulnerability and the sense of not a golden thing out there but a human thing in here is a very really i think a beautiful direction to lead into and not a beautiful person to follow out there but a human heart to and gut and mind and brain and body to explore in here, right?

Because everybody's looking out there because they don't want to do this part. They don't want to turn it in because turning it in is hard, right? And so there's always this, oh, it's like you'd rather watch TV than meditate. You'd rather follow the beautiful dream than actually look at your pain and your sorrow and your trauma and the realities of suffering and the frailty of the human condition and that vulnerability that you so importantly mentioned. I also find that it's very, very common then for one to find oneself surrounded by a very different type of practitioner who themselves is also graduating as a sort of a slightly condescending or perhaps slightly pejorative way of saying what it is, but graduating to something much more full spectrum, much more human, much less idealized, much more real.

and that tends to be a smaller bunch, right? That tends to be a smaller, more scattered, more down-to-earth, deeper bunch. So that's what I found. Who are the people who like to hang out with me? It filters for less projective, except in the 'oh, Daniel's a... delusional, whatever' but it filters for people who are more full spectrum.

more and again sorry if any of it sounded condescending or pejorative to anybody who isn't full spectrum, whatever that ideal means, right? So you've got to be careful with this stuff. But a friend of mine said I got Vajrayana realizations through Theravada methods. The Vajrayana is when you mentioned tantra as well. So tantra is the Vajrayana, and I think that's a really cool direction to think about. Tantra is the full spectrum. Tantra is the raw power of the Kali and the beautiful open heart of some of the more benevolent, or I guess they're all kind of benevolent, but you know what I mean, the nicer ones. Yeah. And, you know, there's this range in tantra. There's this humanity and mythic form that's powerful, right, and that speak to a possibility of realization in the face of these very, very human energies rather than a way excluded from them. And not to give the Mahayana too much cred because I

I sometimes get really friggin' annoyed about how much they trash the Theravada. So, you know, both are true, but when the Mahayana says maybe bodhisattvas come and wake arahants up from their slumber, maybe there is some slightly better way of reading that, that some of the shadows and the delusions that can come from chasing beautiful profound models, maybe there's a little bit of waking up to the rest of it as well, to the compassionate beating heart in there at someone as well, to the Vajrayana perspectives as well, which I think are very valid and important developments and extrapolations and expansions and, you know, revisions of Buddhism. Not that I don't dearly love the technical, stark beauty of the Theravada, which I do. So I think, you know, opening up to the range of other traditions, some of the beautiful heart stuff from Christianity or the, you know, mysteries of there. Anyway, plenty of cool traditions out there like that, that you mentioned, teaching from a range of other traditions. So I just wanted to highlight

some of the things that you had said and re-emphasize and encourage some of that, my own perspectives and opinions. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. Another dimension of this whole situation, public dimension you could say. Well, there's sort of two things I want to say at the same time. The first is, you've already sort of hinted at it: this is all happening in public. We're seeing this process unfold with you, Delson, let's say.

and personally I think there's something valuable about that. It's a contribution, in a sense, to others, especially given the fact that you're willing to come on into these sorts of conversations and discuss. You're not just making a renunciation and then disappearing, something like that. You're willing to reflect on it, and with Daniel, and in previous episodes I think there's something admirable about that, at least from my point of view. However, it has attracted some criticism, and it's now... now you have something else in common, the two of you, iconoclasts. Well, one of the... yeah, if I might, on the first thing, that this idea of sharing one's practice in public.

Maybe there's something to talk about there. But what I really want to ask you both about is the criticism that one attracts, sometimes from anonymous commenters and emailers, other times from institutional figures with significant social cachet. So one of the criticisms, so that's something to talk about in general, but then maybe I'll bring it to a point with one criticism, which is this: the two of you have revised or offered a different view now on the four path model, ten fetters, this sort of thing. So it said you're offering a different view. This might, and I think has, annoyed some people within Buddhist institutions who have said... I'm thinking, for example, of Bicquanalia's criticisms of you, Daniel, which we covered in a very long and very interesting episode indeed, where we went through that.

But basically, to put a fine point on it, it says something along the lines of, what if neither of you actually were attained at all? What about that perspective? Rather than the models are wrong, the two of you are now turning around to revise these sacred doctrines, because they don't match your experience. What if, rather, the models are right and you just didn't get there? You made a mistake. Well, that's the original criticism and certainly the ongoing one, of course. Yeah.

Right, right. And I put that to you in sort of energetic terms, because, well, that's how it's often leveled, I think, in those sorts of quite energetic terms. And even further, the terminology, the vocabulary used, goes even further than that. Oh yeah, your capacity for euphemy, is that a word, euphemism, with regard to how polite they have been or not been, is impressive. Yeah. So the hubris of turning around and revising these religious, these, these, you know, millennia-old religions, religious mosques, because they don't. Your experience doesn't accord with them. This is the sort of direction that one slice of criticism will go. So I'm curious about that. You've both done that, you've both offered a different view on these things, and in both of your cases, I think certainly in Delson's case, a different view, even to your own view not so long ago. So now you're in that same boat. You're in that same boat. That criticism is leveled at both of you by some. What do you think of

that. I think we kind of talked a little bit about this in one of our interviews, which might be published at some point, either before or after this particular podcast. It's the latest one, after the renouncing the attainments. I guess it's still in production. But in any case, I did mention a couple of things about that. Daniel and I have, I think, a common critic from a specific channel who has been very, very adamant in... I'm not really sure exactly where they're coming from, what they're all about, except for the fact that they definitely have something against the very, at least I teach, and how I represent myself and my community in terms of the TWIM community. I'll say one thing. One of the valid criticisms, or I should say the valid reactions, that have been is certain people who put me on a pedestal, and I kind of perpetuated that by just being within that scope of being like the perfect arahant or perfect

being or this and that and all the other, and I think it's valid for them to have the reaction that they have had. I'm talking about a close personal friend of mine who recently came up on a video, and again I'm repeating my message to that particular person in public, which is one was this the one that was like five hours long? Yeah, yeah, that's right. I haven't watched it but I just saw it. I was like, wow, that's five hours. Oh my golly, that's a lot. There's a lot there. There is a lot there. And I have had the time to watch all five hours of it, or five and a half hours, whatever it is. And the thing I would say about that is he had been a close personal friend of mine, and I think he looked up to me as a teacher and as a guide, and I failed him. I failed him as a teacher. I was actually quite frustrated with him because of the boundaries that

he crossed, and things that happened with other things, which I'm not going to get into, but it really blew up into a big sort of admonishment from my side towards him. And I think he was just looking for someone that could really give support, and I didn't. So to him, I really... I'm sorry. And once again, I'm repeating what I would have said in the most recent interview, which is: I'm extending out my hand in hopes that we can reconcile. Let's see if that is possible. If not, that's fine. We can go our separate ways. But aside from that, there have been other five-hour videos, Daniel, that you might have seen, or from that particular channel. I think you even commented or went through a whole comment chain with a particular channel there, talking about a series of videos and things like that. I don't know if you have anything to say about that, but

Yeah. Wow. Well, first, what happens when the spiral of transference and counter-transference is shattered is so hard for people, right? So transference, that sense that their teacher, their therapist, is, you know, this is a rise from the therapy world, right? The therapist is the wise being that, or whatever. And then the countertransference is where the therapist starts to believe it. And the same thing happens with leaders. It happens to people who rise to the top and get yes-people all around them. There's endless speculation that that's what happens to our current politicians, who do seem to do crazy things because people are telling them it'll all be fine or telling them what they want to hear.

And it happens in spiritual communities. And it's very compelling, like we're all subject to this. Literally, one of the reasons I don't take any permanent students is my profound fear of counter-transference and transference, and how sort of intoxicating and corrupting and human and vulnerable, but also really sort of addictive and bizarre and distorting all those relationships and those kinds of things can be. And that may be my own fault for not being willing to dive into that in quite the same kind of way. I realize it still happens. There's no way it doesn't happen, even with the online interactions or the community stuff. It does. And there are people who can use that really well. So in tantra, right, you project onto the guru as being the perfect person, and then they can use that as skillful means, use the counter-transference in theory to then break you of your delusions. But we all know how painful that can be, right, and how rapidly that can devolve into the ass end of crazy wisdom, abuse and problems. But one way or another, the whole thing's painful, right?

So my heart goes out to anybody who's been on the breaking side, where there was a lot of transference and counter-transference and you were the person who was expecting perfection. And it's awful when that breaks, right? It's awful. So yeah, sorry. It hurts just acknowledging that. And then going back to the Biko and Alios, and there's now a Damadina, and Cliff Saron, and there's a bunch of these people who have now sort of started to pile on, and the letters of complaint in the editorial. You may not have seen this in the academic literature.

So we're shifting. We have a new epistemic, and the epistemic is neuroscience, right? Delson, you also have been with me, getting our heads put into scanners and wires on our heads and stuff. We're playing a new game, and this new game of fMRIs and EEGs and sophisticated analysis is one that the orthodoxy is starting to become increasingly uncomfortable with, right? Because they don't know what to make of it, and the standards for how, how did the epistemics of an ancient text, right, the ancient text says this and the scanner says this, what do we make of that? Well, this is all new territory for us, and predictably the orthodoxy doesn't like this conversation. So, the stuff we're doing at Harvard or whatever, and all the papers that are coming up about jhanas and insight stages and those things. And Neurophenomenology is going to be the new one, and these are intrinsically things that make them very uncomfortable. So what if they get

So what they haven't done yet, and I'm kind of waiting for this moment where maybe they send their champion, right? So the orthodoxy sends their champion into the scanner, the person who they believe, yes, can do these things, right, and somehow gets past all of the sensors. If you're not allowed to disclose this attainment, and you can't say this as a monk, and you can't do this, or whatever, but neurophenomenology is going to ask, did you do this, did you attain that? And so they're kind of in this funny position where there's no easy way for them to play this, right? Because let's say they send their champion, and their cessations and their genres or whatever look kind of like ours, right, or a lot like ours, or identical to ours, and you get the big alpha power drop around cessations, and you get the decoupling of the frontal and front and back parts of the brain in a very profound way, in the formless realms or whatever.

You get the same kind of stuff. And they said their champion thinking they were going to look so different, and maybe they look the same. I don't know. We haven't done it yet, but that's going to be an awkward moment, because part of the contemporary epistemics is that maybe neuroscience is able to measure some of this stuff, and then what will that mean for them? I don't know. Again, we need to do the experiment and do the science and really see and compare and have the organic conversation. But it's funny, they're still trying to argue from the text says this. Well, we all know the text says that. That's not news, right? But the new news is the new way of what might be the standards for truth, and in our current age, scanners and wires and analysis of brain waves and stuff have some relevance, at least to play in the conversation. I'm not saying I know exactly what they all mean, but I'm just saying the new epistemics, what is truth and how do we know?

What are the ontologies and how do we know? What are the maps and models and how do we know? That's something I really look forward to, the next few years of that dialogue, because I think it's going to be rich and interesting. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited about that too. And I guess I'm not sure how much more time or energy I can give to something like that, and I would love to continue to contribute to the neuroscience community by continuing to be under an MRI and the EEG and so on and so forth. It's just a matter of my energy and inclination. But I think it's amazing that that's coming out, and lots of other practitioners, like they're putting all kinds of other teachers, yeah, deep practitioners and stuff, in these devices, and attempting as best they can with current technologies to measure what might be going on in our brains. And again, the relationship between experience and realization and the blobs and waves that appear on these things is not yet well defined. But it's a new area we get to explore, so that's exciting.

I recently interviewed for the second time Ron Serrano. Oh yeah, I was just talking to him the other day. He's fun. Yeah. And he's a Dharma Mechanics guy, right? Dharma Mechanics community leader, and cool. Also a subject in many neuroscience source of studies on these things, and I think some of the same studies that you've both been involved in. A couple of things came out in that conversation. One of them was that this question of what are the implications for religious

traditions or enlightenment-oriented religious traditions such as Buddhism, if the neuroscience, if neuroscience can provide insights on awakening or enlightenment and various states of consciousness and jhanas and so on, and perhaps even validate them in the sense that, well, we can see if it's happening or not. I mean, one could imagine getting to that kind of a point. I think we're not there, we're very close, so right. And I compared it to astronomy. Astronomy, something previously in the realm of very much a religious sort of house of knowledge, with something like the Copernican revolution and further scientific revolutions, is wrested away from the religious house into this sort of scientific house, and now religions that have something to say about astronomy have to really acknowledge the scientific side, or at least relate to it in some sort of way.

So presumably, a shift of the locus of authority, expertise, verification, and perhaps even a refinement of methodology. Now, sometimes neuroscience and Western scientific studies of religious phenomena, be they psychological or neuroscientific, they're criticized for taking these practices out of context. Out of what context? The religious, moral, cultural context in which those practices are couched. Mindfulness, for example, being used for everything other than what it's used for in its cultural context. But here we see maybe a wresting of the awakening part out of the religious context entirely. Could that be a possible outcome? And what would be the consequences for something like that? I mean, how sci-fi is this, first of all? I mean, the two of you are involved closely with this, and you submit yourselves to these tests, which I think is also very admirable to do.

You put your money where your mouth is in that respect. Yeah, I also help fund them. I really put my money where my mouth is. And I help support these. I help design the studies, I help figure out how we're going to do this, and I help figure out where the money comes from to invite a lot of people in to be scanned from a bunch of different perspectives and traditions so we can have a really rich dialogue among the various groups and people. Yeah, that's what you were saying. Well, and then the last bit of that is what's left in a religious tradition, such as Buddhism, if it's sort of enlightenment bit, which is, admittedly, only a part of the religion.

I mean, you may be sort of theoretically its core, but the activity of a religion is greater than simply its ultimate objective, so to speak. If that's wrested away, what's left? So really, how sci-fi is my astronomy parallel? And what would be the implications, in your view, if such a thing was to happen? All right, I'll jump in. So first off, I want to hand it to the Theravada. I think the Theravada, in terms of technical descriptions of moments of mind and frequencies and pulses and stages and genres, is profound and still has a tremendous amount to lend to the neuroscientific conversation. The phenomenology they did thousands of years ago, between 2,500 and 1,500 years ago, and in the contemporary age, with people like Mahasi Sayadaw, and people exploring the vast range of what jhanas can do, you know, Pa Auk and Ayakama, and the whole range of this conversation, all its richness and glory and conflict and intricacy and subtlety, I think is unbelievably informative and is going to actually itself get a lot of validation.

So we can give it, we can have appropriately a lot of gratitude and respect for what they did with the tools they had and their incredible investigations and categorizations. I think there are lots of other traditions that can also lend to that as well. I don't mean to needlessly pedestalize and fetishize the Theravada, but it does hold a special place in my heart for its technical accuracy and its names and dedication to really good phenomenology. The West still hasn't caught up to that. Right. So that's the first thing. The second thing is this very weird tension between Biko and Elio saying the stages of insight only happen on Theravadan insights retreats.

And, by definition, as a tautological, proprietary bit of orthodoxy versus this notion of Buddhism is universally describing something inherent in human potential, which is the way I've always looked at it. It's like an anatomist or a physiologist that is just describing gallbladders and channels of receptors or whatever. Anyway, so there's this tension between these two things. And I think actually science is going to push this pretty hard over this way. That's my belief and view. People can criticize that, it's going to be a conversation. We'll see what the science actually does. I don't know. That's my speculation as a hypothesis that can be tested.

So that's different from wrenching these things away from religion, that in some ways is validating a project of descriptive phenomenology, a project of taxonomy that goes before Buddhism with the jhanas and the kasinas and the interactions and the powers. All of these things are way pre-Buddhist, a lot of them, right? So I think there is room for the interpretation that there will be a lot of validation and expectation, or the hypothesis testing, that there may be a lot of validation. On the other hand, the sort of rough clinical perennialism that the EPRC and the other project I work on, that's like, yeah, maybe, giving the cultural overlay, seeing a white light and bliss might be different to a Buddhist than a Christian from a certain point of view. They've got to be some of the same occipital receptors and sites, and they're neurotransmitters. There's going to be something that's common even if it doesn't go full unbridled

perennialist, right. Recognizing that cultural context and interpretation and meaning that we overlay on this is profound and important, but there's got to be some commonalities, and I think there's a lot of beautiful space for science to kind of unpack and explore a bunch of that, and also discover some of the profound things that they've been talking about for years that science has kind of ignored: the stuff of awakening, the stuff of the profound relevance of internal experience, the stuff of powers, the experiences. Like, there's, there's gonna, both all of this is gonna grow by this conversation, the traditions, the, and so I think rather than wrenching away, validation is an important part, or expanding and adding nuance, which hopefully is what the Theravada and all these traditions have always wanted, is more accuracy, more clarity, more sense of the possibilities and the range of what's out there and how we can reduce suffering. Right, because if the real goal at its core is the reduction of suffering and the increase of wisdom and compassion and making the world a happier, better place, right, a clearer, wiser place, I think

all these tools are going to help with that. So going back to the core goals, that they're more fundamental than any of the traditions, hopefully, right. I'm really excited about the possibility of what technology may be able to do, recognizing it will have its problems and its own orthodoxies and its own power battles and its own all the that academia brings to these worlds, right? It brings its own power posturing baggage and scrapping for money and prestige and all the that comes with academia. That's all going to be part of the mix too, but I'm still excited about the richness of the conversation

Long answer, but hopefully that was helpful. Thoughts? My eyes just glazed over while you were talking. It's not like I wasn't paying attention, but it's all right. You know, it reminds me a little bit of certain initiatives. I'm thinking of Jeffrey Martin, for example, this finder's course where the sales pitch is something like you don't need to deal with the religious traditions necessarily because I've looked at them. I'm not saying this is exactly what Jeffrey Martin says, but I'm describing a sort of a type of angle you could take. I've looked at them, I've done many, I've used surveys and different things and I've done the research and found what really works. I've looked around and found a scientifically validated fast track to awakening and enlightenment and I can show you the statistics of its results, right? So I can

imagine one outcome of certain sorts of neuroscientific is we know how it really works, again that sort of re-contraction to orthodoxy. So, you know, that was what each of these movements, each of these labeled things, each of these traditions, each of these sales pitches, each of these products, each of these brands of religious tradition of practice, they all say that. Right? So each of them says they're the highest, the best, the most refined, the most validated. That's always part of the mix of the advertising strategy, and each of them have some little point in there about something cool they may have figured out or reformulated in some way that works in a time or a place or for a certain audience or market demographic or test market or whatever. Like, you know, they, these things continue to iterate through with their advertising strategies and their interesting points they make that may work for some people, sometimes, for a while at least. So is it the case that each innovation, sorry, well, actually, rather, I'd rather hear what else needs to be said, then follow up with my question.

Yeah. No, I was just going to give my kind of personal take on the whole idea of doing the neuroscience research and so on and my participation in it. And I was kind of motivated by two things. One is curiosity in terms of what does my brain actually look like and if there actually is a brain in my skull and all those good things. And ultimately, what are the findings?

things like, what does that mean for the practice? What does it mean? Can we actually translate it into something that's objectively, kind of, objectively repeatable? Can we see this in other people? Can we see this in other traditions even? And the second motivation for me was inspiring others, like actually that there is some level of scientific validation regarding these states, regarding these practices, and the people who are of that mindset, the people who are of that bend, may be inspired then to look into these practices having been inspired by the findings of the research. But this sort of a discovery stage, it's a very open, open feeling, but as I was sort of hinting at later, earlier, that can then eventually, I think, what did you say, contraction back to the orthodox, Daniel? That yeah, so the contraction around a new orthodoxity and then a new expansion for a new culture, time, place, epistemic, whatever, people, developmental stages. Right, that's normal cycle of these things, right? There's thesis, antithesis, synthesis, you know, to

get expansion and contraction. Oh yeah, this is it. Oh yeah, but, you know, of course that keeps going, right? I was going to ask if it's an inevitable thing, and it seems you're saying probably yeah. It's like the spander of knowledge, sort of, yeah, digestive. I mean, that's what's been going on for all the thousands of years we know of so far. That suddenly, I would be surprised if it suddenly just stopped. Well, this is just it, nothing else to say. What are the chances? Yeah, well, this has been very interesting indeed. I'm curious what happens next. Now, in some cases, Delson, when we talk about your recent review of your position, you know, we're talking about your case specifically. We're also talking about it suggests then all similar

cases and also I think can teach us something about future cases. Presumably you're not the first and not the last. We've gone through this sort of a change, at least if we can take Daniel's experience to be the case also. Plenty of report on the Dharma, dharma overground, and it's gotta have been countless before. Like, there's no way we're new, right? So, well, what happens next? Daniel, in your experience, Delson's fresh off his renunciation of his previous ways, fresh off his renew, the skin is off the snake as you put it, Delson. So in your observation, Daniel, and all the experience you've had seeing people go through similar sort of processes, what happens next

Yeah, so I think, I think the exploration, the continued unfolding of the humanity of it, of the human realities, of the emotional realities, of the stuff that comes through relationship, of the stuff that comes through conflict, of the, you know, all of that is just beautiful and rich and human and real and valuable. And while certainly I can, my pattern recognition stuff always wants to put patterns, you know, from an internal family systems point of view, I have this part of me that loves patterns and maps, right? That's how I got into this whole thing. But, and so that side's like wanting to say stuff, and then the sides of me that are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but who knows what the hell it's going to be, uh, is coming more strongly to the fore of, yeah, the ordinary things, the human things, the, you know, I think, I think Delson, if you end up, you know, like getting married or having kids or whatever, like as all, as you know, all of my

Teachers and friends have said that it will be its own little Zen masters walking into your life. So I think that's a profound teaching in and of itself. Like, that will have its own beautiful logic and absurdity to it. Yeah. I mean, to that point, you know, I was talking to my friends about this, and one of the things that came up was the fact that I came into this whole process relatively young, right? I mean, I am only 34. And when we last spoke, Daniel, I think I was what

Man, it was quite a long, long time ago. It feels like it was a long time ago when we last spoke, and I was just maybe 30, 31, something like that. And so I remember you telling me something similar. You were like, well, you still have some ways to go, even age-wise, and we'll see how things go. We all do. I do too. I'm only about to be 56 in a little bit, and I think about how much more my teachers were, 70 or 80 or 90. How much... oh my god. Now I'm starting to have some appreciation of what that might mean in terms of the acquisition of wisdom. Holy

You know, yeah, I mean, for me I'm still just a baby, relatively speaking, right? In the Dharma world and in the world of teaching. And so if I decide to make this a career, which I probably will, because I have nothing better to do with my time and energy, and really, I mean, I find great comfort in teaching. I find great comfort in being able to be not a teacher from a pedestal, but being a fellow spiritual explorer. Yeah. This is what one of my close friends was talking about. He's like, you know, after the video came out with the interview, after all of this, you can just kind of relax and let go of all of those things that were there on your shoulder and just be one of the people. And I love that. I love how he expressed that. He said, you can just be a fellow spiritual explorer. So if I decide I want to make this my career, maybe it'll be different. Maybe you'll find me being, I don't know, a welder or a carpenter

in 10 years from now. I don't know. We'll see. But in any case, right now my intention and trajectory is being a teacher. And I'm very young, not only in terms of being 34, 35, but also just entering the life of teaching and entering the life of elucidating these states, like the jhanas and neuro, the samapati, and then helping neuroscience in whatever way I can by offering up my time and brain and so on. So I would love to see what the future holds. You know, I mean, I feel like my life as a teacher will evolve continuously, and this is just one chapter, this is just one iteration. So for me it's both exciting and also a bit daunting, but in a good way.

Nice. Yeah, that, you know, I vastly prefer, and this is all our attachment styles. We get to see our attachment styles playing out and maybe change and grow a little bit as we get older, the attachment styles that we also appreciate in resonance, that we have resonance with. But I very much appreciate the going together as humans relationship. Like when we go on retreats, we all practice together, and we go together and we learn together and we grow together. That's the attachment style, or the sort of kalyana mitta or mitri relationship, that I personally am most appreciating at the moment, in that humanity. Also the thing of work with one's hands. So my father's soteriology is work as the salvation of us all, and I really appreciate Amish communities where a critical part of the practice is the work of one's hands, building things with one's hands. Emergency medicine was like that. It's very hands-on. You're always doing things with your hands. Procedural. It's immediate. It's human.

I thought that was an incredibly valuable part of my own path, for installing alarm systems or, you know, digging ditches and doing gardening, sheetrock construction, roofing, all the various things I did along the way. Those were satisfying. There is something satisfying about gardening and building stuff and making things. I think that's really valid and valuable, particularly in the sort of digital world where things can become very ungrounded, or the spiritual world where things can become very idealistic and floaty and sort of odd and erotic and all that stuff. Like just hammering a nail. There's something, you know, something about that, making things. I still, when I get to work on my tractor, you know, when it's broken yet again, there's something important about that. So I appreciate the spiritual traditions that honor and value that. Yeah. One pattern, I'm speaking now to that other side of you, on the right-hand side, upper right-hand quadrant of your internal family systems. Does it have a name? May I address it directly? The mapper. Let's call it the mapper. Yes, hello.

mapper well something i've i've noticed and i don't have a broad enough sample size to to posit a trend although that it has been thrown around this idea a bit And this is among people I know that I haven't interviewed, although I've certainly tried to tempt them, but who are, in their own estimation, quite advanced practitioners, some of them following a similar kind of trajectory, Daniel, or similar ideas as you, some of them associated with you actually, friends of yours or influenced by you at the very least, who have, by their estimation and the estimation of their peers attain significant progress like second third fourth path you know in the way you look at things and um you know sometimes at a reasonably young age that's their 20s 30s 40s something like that there's a lot of life to go i've noticed a few a few trends but one of the trends that i was surprised to see was a sort of walking away from the entire premise of spiritual practice a waning of interest for

practice and sometimes a setting aside of the entire frame a sort of renouncing of attainment that's more comprehensive than revision it's a sort of walking away entirely sure and going into other interests in such a way that in this you knew them five years ago you'd never really know they were meditators at least from their book collections changed the subjects of discussion changed they're just not interested anymore i've seen that and some i've seen then return back later but very differently so i wonder if you have ever have you if you have observed this uh mapper oh yeah what's going on there that that seems like a kind of a advanced practitioner kind of a thing that i've only seen from the

outside well just the mapper part of me since you appealed to it couldn't help but think of the riding the ox back into the marketplace and the 10 ox herding pictures right so like couldn't help but think of that one um and i think that there is a renouncing that little there are all these little micro renouncings that happen constantly of fuck all this like fuck the thing i'm just a human walking away from it and like equanimity some of the insight stages or some of the dark night stages are discussed or or desire for you know disgust is a big one people just go ah screw all this stuff right screw this community screw the book screw the maps the models the path like i think that's important and healthy as an oscillatory thing that that movement away from deep renouncing of all of our ideals of our our our quest of of any sense of something to do or someone to do it or something important or profound like being able to say screw all that is a critical part of the path in in both the micro

and the macro like moments and big trends um i myself you know when i decided to go into public health and and medicine right through myself hundreds of that you know sometimes over 100 hours a week where all i had time to think about really was just you know keeping my head above water and surviving the intense training of of a medical education and residency and all of that stuff and and just being in that game on its own terms i'm here to to do conventional allopathic medicine you know that was my life you know the vast majority of the waking hours of my life for two decades you know and graduate school before that and public health took up a lot of time so and then family you know being married and you know having step kids and and step grain kids and all that takes up time and having a household so you know i myself in my own way have you know functionally large portions of my life where very little time was given to this except sort of as

an a retrofitted afterthought of compassionate right livelihood or whatever but it was also just making a living and being in a in a totally different game so i understand you know uh yeah i i feel it i get it i i think it's okay and important and valuable and valid yeah sure lots of ways to to live a good life lots of possible visions to to explore great i've also noticed in some this can happen to some teachers and the difference between the teacher And the category of person I described before, who's not a public teacher, is that it's your job. And that sometimes a teacher, I've heard teachers express, nobody I've interviewed, you know.

I've heard teachers express a dissonance between what they believe in their heart or what they, you know, believe inside, so to speak, what they're forced they feel to profess publicly oh yeah i i can't even tell you the number of people who because i'm one of these radical heretics or whatever that that those and they want somebody wants to talk to someone who they think will get it how how many of them have in confidence said those kinds of things to me so yeah that's that is definitely i'm sure we get you know yeah and dulcet i'm sure you'll get to hear a lot more of that as now your current position i describe it as it's a bit like uh one of those 80s rock bands that goes out on tour and they've got a new album but no one wants to hear it maybe they don't even really want to play anymore but they've got they had a they had a messy divorce you know and someone's got to pay for the mansion etc so they go out in the road again and

They play all the old hits because that's what everyone wants to hear, but it's not really... It's sort of a zombie kind of situation. I think I've seen that sort of thing or had people confess that sort of a feeling. And that's talking about vulnerable skin. It's a vulnerable confession, certainly. That sense of a trap, a teacher trap. - I'm actually very, very fortunate enough to have a good support system as well, which is to say your friends and fellow practitioners and my business manager and other people, part of my team, who helped me to have some kind of guidance system, be like, okay, maybe you take it easy for now and we'll figure it out in a couple of months and see what we want to do.

And these are all very good friends of mine or very people close to my heart. So I, for me personally, as from that role of being a teacher, sure, being in that role of a teacher and teaching the same retreat and the same sutras and the same thing over and over and over, it can become a bit tiring. And so I've tried to bring other elements into it. I've tried to keep it novel not only for the sake of the students but for me, because otherwise I'll be bloody bored. But I have also found some resistance among some students or other people in the community if I try to bring something new or if I try to do something new, and so there is a bit of that attention that can arise.

And that's the thing that I'm learning to navigate: where to kind of appease and where to put my foot down, and where to just walk away and be like, okay fine. I'll find another place where I can play, or just not play, and then figure out what to do. So I'm kind of excited for the future. I'm excited about what can be for me as, let's say, a teacher and what I can do. I think this has given me a good time to really go inside and feel, and feel into what exactly is it that feels true to me to be able to want to teach. Now, with TWIM, I completely enjoy practicing but also teaching TWIM, but I've been trying to bring in newer and newer contextualizations for the students and for the practitioners.

And I'm kind of navigating what works and what doesn't work in that regard, and I'm also hopeful for other stuff that I can introduce, like the Kriya yoga practice or mantra or any other aspects of life that I feel like I'd like to convey. Nice. Yeah, I looked at the whole question and it was like, yeah, I just didn't want to be in that situation at all where my livelihood was dependent on being a certain type of teacher, teaching certain types of things for certain amounts of money, or just to maintain whatever lifestyle. So I just was like, the Buddha said that saving lives was also a good thing. So I wanted emergency medicine. It's like, yeah, I'll pay the rent with emergency medicine, because saving lives is skillful and reducing suffering that way is skillful, and then just different ways to play it. I'm not saying when's better or worse, obviously that's my own karma and just unfolding, but then was like totally wanted to be out of

the whole game of having to teach the same thing again and again, even if I was bored with it, because I'd seen that in some of my meditation teachers too, where they would, at this point, just rather talk politics, and they would lay out a coherent dharma talk or whatever. And you can see, okay, they've been doing this a long time. So, but yeah, so different lots of different ways to play this. Yeah, this has been great, thank you both. These are sensitive waters, and I admire you both for being willing to swim around in them, because there's some sharks down there. It's some of them are ordained. Yeah, yeah. So it's really, really useful, I think, to talk about even things that are in the process of being worked out, not only coming with the answers but also willing to entertain questions and think things through together, and you're both able to do that, and I admire that a great deal. Thank you.

Both, any closing remarks as we bring this to an end? Anything that we haven't said that you'd like to say? There needn't be, but if there is, I'd invite both of you to say something now. Yeah, I just want to thank you and Daniel for this dialogue. It's been a lot of fun, and yeah, we'll just see what the future holds. Thank you. Yeah, I would like to thank the incredibly rich dialogue and all the people who came before us who have been informing this conversation that we get to riff on and try to see for ourselves, and all of the practices and the traditions who are struggling with and engaging with these issues through whatever role.

Because I think we need the Orthodox people. We need them. We have the Orthodox stuff. We have texts 2,500 years old because the Orthodox people continue to copy them and preserve them at tremendous expense and risk and time. So even the Orthodox kids that annoy me, I'm still incredibly grateful that they are part of this, because their role to play of preserving the traditions and attempting to keep up, you know, the sense of integrity and the purity of them is a vital part that allows this whole dialogue. So thank you, Orthodox people, even as much as sometimes you annoy the heck out of me. I just wanted to express my gratitude for them, the people who are so emphatic about how pure it must be and how perfect it must be and how true and how original and how authentic.

Without them, we wouldn't have these texts. We wouldn't be having these discussions. We wouldn't have a lot of these practices. So thank you, annoying people, for your incredibly important role you play in this, and for the spirit and heart and energy you bring to that, because it is valuable, even if it's something for us to be reacting to. Yeah, that's awesome.

You have a thought, Delson, do you? No, I was just saying how awesome that is. Daniel is acknowledging the orthodoxy and even our critics, right? Even our critics, and being totally grateful for that. I think I'm not there yet to be grateful enough for them, but I'll get there. Yeah, it's like I just bought a PTS Polycanon edition, right? Which is about as orthodox as the things you could possibly do, right? And appreciating that, appreciating that point of view and wanting to support the text and the traditions and the old and beautiful things. Yeah, and just, yeah, so thank you to all that. Yes, it is still possible to disagree even about very important things and show grace and respect to one another.

And I think the both of you did that in the first dialogue when you disagreed about very important things that were dear to both of you, and you did it in a gracious way. And that theme is emerging here once again at the end. I think that's a very good place to finish. Daniel Ingram and Delson Armstrong, thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. For more interviews like these, as well as articles, videos and guided meditations,