Ep120: Meditation Virtuoso - Delson Armstrong

In this episode, I'm joined by Delson Armstrong, spiritual teacher and star student of meditation teacher Bhante Vimalaramsi, whose senior student David Johnson has said, Delson Armstrong has mastered every practice we've given him. He is the most amazing student we've ever seen. In this interview, Delson recalls his early life training in the Himalayas, where he mastered the system of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, attaining to all of its highest states of Samadhi, attained all six levels of Kriya Yoga under three separate lineages, studied Sanskrit and was exposed to practices of Shaiva Tantra through students of Osho. Delson shares his subsequent explorations of Buddhism, including Mahamudra, Dzogchen and the TWIM practice of Bhante Vimalaramsi. Delson recounts and contrasts his experiences accomplishing the eight jhanas, attaining the four levels of Buddhist awakening and realizing Rigpa.

Delson also reveals yogic feats such as recalling past lives and entering into a type of suspended animation called Niroda Samapati for up to six days, and reveals his passion for neuroscience and recent participation in a study at the University of Amsterdam that has examined his brain and body in this state of yogic suspension. So without further ado, Delson Armstrong. Delson Armstrong, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Steve. It's good to be here. Well, I'm very pleased to be talking with you, Delson, and especially pleased after the introduction that David Johnston, author of A Path to Nirvana and a student of Bhante Vimalaramsi, I'm even more interested after his introduction to you, which I might read to you now if you don't mind.

Delson Armstrong has mastered every practice we've given him. He's the most amazing student we've ever seen, and he's completely open to talking about everything and his experiences. He remembers many past lives as a yogi in the Himalayas and in other realms. He's mastered the jhanas in the way Bhante, that's Bhante Vimalaramsi, in the way Bhante teaches, right from the suttas, as Bhante V explains them. He would be happy to explain to your audience how one goes through the jhanas and makes the final leap to nirvana and all of the four levels of attainment. He can talk about the special state of the anagami and the air hand, whereby you make a determination to sit in the state of niroda or cessation.

There's no breath and perhaps two heartbeats a minute. He just allowed himself to be measured at a Netherlands research center. So that was David's introduction to you when he suggested you for the podcast. And so amazing. And on the basis of that, I'm very, very, very pleased to meet you. It's a wonderful introduction. I really appreciate that. Could you talk a little bit about your life story, how it was you grew up, etc. And you went through a number of spiritual systems to quite a high degree of attainment before it was that you came to the method that you're currently working in now, this TWIM and so on with Bhante Vimalaramsi's teachings. So could you just take us through the arc of your story and how it was we're speaking now? Sure.

I was born in India and I lived there for the first five years of my life. We moved then to the U.S. I grew up in New Jersey, New York, so most of my life up until the age of 13 was basically a fairly American childhood. I was born in that part of this time where we were just being introduced to computers, and so I had the best of both worlds, if you would, because I remember playing basketball and going biking in the summers, but at the same time being able to play video games on the computer and PlayStation and so on and so forth. You were born in 1990? That's correct, yeah.

I wasn't really introduced to spirituality as such. My parents were very open-minded. I grew up in a Catholic household actually, and my mom's been pretty much a very devout Catholic, but she was very open-minded about things, and she let me explore all kinds of different philosophies for myself. They were not very imposing on what I should believe or what I shouldn't believe. I remember we went to India when I was about 11 or 12, and it was quite a culture shock because I had very little memory of India at that time. I don't know if you've been to India, but as soon as you go to India and you land, it just bombards the senses. There's just noise everywhere.

There's all kinds of interesting smells and tastes and the warmth and the humidity. And it's just an onslaught on the senses. And then that was really my first introduction into, let's say, the different kinds of belief systems from Asia, particularly India. And I was quite fascinated by it, quite curious about it. And when we came back, there was a family friend who introduced me to Hatha yoga. He took me to a yoga studio and we did all kinds of asanas. And I found that it was quite, it came quite naturally to me. And there was a lot of very advanced postures we did, like the headstand, like the shoulder stand, and things like that.

Of course, I needed a little bit of help, but once I was there, it was just amazing. And then we came out of that session about an hour later. And I remember just feeling very, like, elated and floating, and I was just so surprised that doing this kind of process, and mind you, I was only 13 or 14 at the time, so I wasn't really aware that this was possible. So I asked him, is this possible to do every single time, and where does this come from? And he gave me this book. It was like a compendium of different kinds of postures and breathing techniques and meditation techniques, and so I devoured that book, and I looked for more books and searched for more books and started reading. Then I had a chance to actually go back to India at the age of 13 or 14.

And I studied at an international school in a place called Gurgaon, north of New Delhi, and was introduced to all kinds of interesting people from all around the world, and had a very interesting education. But I was also very much interested in meditation, and so over there I actually met a yogi. He was a teacher there, but he was also a yogi, and I shared a lot of my thoughts about life and school life and this and that. I had a fairly normal school life, but then I kind of got disenchanted with it quite early. By the time I was 16, I decided to take a little break from school and went to the Himalayas, and that's where things took an interesting turn, because I got introduced to a lot of interesting teachers and gurus and

It was just majestic. We went up to the Ganges, we went up to a place called Haridwar, Rishikesh, up to Uttarkashi, and we spent most of our time in Uttarkashi, which is still about the foothills of the Himalayas. And I got introduced to yoga philosophy. I got introduced to Vedanta, Advaita Vedanta. I got introduced to Sankhya and all kinds of interesting texts, like you said, Yoga Sutras, Yoga Vasistha, which is a very interesting one, and also some kind of Kashmiri Shaivism and Tantra and things like that.

So my education in spirituality really started there at the age of 16. And I got interested in learning more about these different kinds of states, so I started learning Sanskrit as best as I could, so I could go back to the original texts and really understand what they're saying. Because sometimes the translations of these texts aren't always the greatest. They're wonderful to have for the English speaker, but it's great to go back to the Sanskrit or the Pali, and you get a different connotation from reading it directly in Sanskrit. I had a chance to study the Yoga Sutras for quite some time.

Then I got introduced to Kriya Yoga. I got introduced to Kriya Yoga under three different lineages, under the lineage of Yogananda with his Self Realization Fellowship in Encinitas. They have an Indian foundation, which is called the YSS, that's the Yogoda Satsang Society. That's really where I got introduced to it. The second lineage was under Lahiri Mahasaya, who's actually the guru of Yogananda's guru. So Yogananda's guru was Yukteswar, and Yukteswar's guru was Lahiri Mahasaya. He's really the guy who formulated all of the different practices under Kriya Yoga. And I had a teacher who was a direct student of one of Lahiri Mahasaya's grandsons. So it was sort of a direct lineage from there. So I was introduced to that particular lineage.

And then the third lineage was under Paramhansa Hariharananda, who actually was a student of Yukteswar. And in that particular lineage, there were six degrees of Kriya Yoga, which I went through. And they get more and more refined in terms of the breathing techniques, in terms of the different postures. And there are different kinds of things that you go through when you do those kinds of techniques, because what you're really doing is you're manipulating the kundalini in a certain way through the spine and different parts of the body to awaken different kinds of centers.

So that was very interesting. I had a lot of great experiences from that. And then I really went back to understanding the teachings of Ramana Maharishi. I was introduced to some people who knew Nisargadatta Maharaj and J. Krishnamurti, as well as U.G. Krishnamurti. So I've had a very diverse, let's say, spiritual education. In terms of the Yoga Sutras, there are some levels of samadhi that I talked about that seem to be very esoteric, but if you really break it down, it's quite simple and quite easy to follow. But it gets a little more, well, not necessarily esoteric, but more refined in terms of the different kinds of states of mind, because they're the more advanced states of mind you get into, where language stops being able to explain some of the things that are happening. The language can only point to certain parts of these states. Then I went back to the states and I actually studied at the New York Film Academy.

I did screenwriting and ghostwriting, and I wrote some novels and things like that, and that was ten years ago. I went to San Diego, where I helped develop an app. I was working at a public company, and then I got introduced to Bhante Vimalaramsi. Like most people, I was just looking for different kinds of meditation techniques in Buddhism, and I was interested in Tibetan Buddhism, so I got introduced to Dzogchen and Mahamudra for some time. But then I was also interested in metta meditation and the brahmaviharas, which is really the forte of the TWIM practice, so I did a search on YouTube for metta meditation, and lo and behold, we have Bhante Vimalaramsi on there. I didn't really understand much of what he was saying in the beginning, because he was talking directly from the suttas, and a lot of the understanding in the suttas you really get after you do the practice.

Actually, I had a chance to do an online retreat with David Johnson, as you mentioned, and I had a chance to meet Bhante a year or two after that. He was doing a retreat in California, the usual Easter retreat that he does annually, and I only went and saw him for about a day. We had a good conversation about the more refined states within TWIM, what we call the jhanas, and the different states that are within the jhanas, like different experiences that are going on. At the end of the conversation he said, "Are you interested in teaching?" and I said, "Well, with your permission, yeah, I think I could start teaching." He said, "Well, please go ahead and start teaching." And so I started off teaching online through the Damasuka meditation center website.

Meditation center website, but I took a little bit of a break, and then went back to Asia. I had another experience with TWIM, and it was a very profound experience, and I went back into the suttas and started to really understand what was going on when we were talking about the suttas, because if you read the suttas just as it is, it's very interesting language, because it's almost like a secret code, and once you experience certain things, it starts unlocking and unpacking a lot of the things that the Buddha or the other arahants in the suttas are talking about.

It was about three years in between when I met Bhante and before I actually started teaching as such. That started off with people sending me emails, and then getting on phone calls, and then on Skype and Zoom. And then the pandemic hit. And during the pandemic, somebody suggested, "Why don't you do weekly Dhamma talks?"

And I said, "Okay, fine, I'll do that." And that's really how it started. And then that grew, so I've been working with the Suttavada Foundation, which is a sister organization with Damasuka, and they've been arranging different kinds of online retreats with me teaching them, and now we're just starting to get into physical retreats. So really, that's been the journey so far. Fascinating. Yeah, that's a lot of systems to go through, and you've said publicly that you attained the highest levels of samadhi laid out in the Yoga Sutras, which is sort of predicated on concentration power. It seems, at least, that seems to be a big part of it. You've also said these six levels of a particular Kriya Yoga lineage, and so on. I'm curious if you could describe a little bit your experience with each of those, say, starting with the Yoga Sutras. When you first began to practice, what was it like?

And what was the journey there? It seems an unusually rapid rate of progress, or perhaps you had unusually clear teaching. To what would you attribute your remarkable success in these different systems? Well, I should probably first owe it to my teachers, because they were very clear in giving me a very good grounding and a very good foundation in the Yoga Sutras. Before we started to get into the later parts of the Yoga Sutras, in terms of the Ashtanga Yoga marg as it's called, which is really, we talk about yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi.

When I started getting into the practice, it was very much important to establish yama and niyama, which is really related to the ethics of it: not lying, not stealing, and so on, which is very similar to the Buddhist principles. In fact, you'll find this quite universal in any tradition, the ethics part of it. And then things related to the body and how to clean the body, and how to maintain different kinds of levels of, let's say, spiritual, emotional and mental cleanliness, which is part of that yama niyama process.

And then only after that we started getting into asanas. And what I realized about asanas is, yes, Hatha Yoga has a lot of benefits in terms of health, in terms of helping keep the body supple and energetic and so on. But if you go back to the Yoga Sutras, what it talks about is that any kind of asana that is simple and keeps you steady and comfortable is considered an asana. So I decided to master only one or two asanas at the most. I did the whole practice of different kinds of vinyasas and different things in Hatha Yoga, but my favorite posture was the shoulder stand. The headstand, not so much. My teacher said the headstand is not really that important for you, but if you can do the shoulder stand, that would be great. So I did the shoulder stand and the plow, which is when you take your body all the way, your feet all the way to the back.

And that kind of unlocks certain things in the body, in terms of the way, I guess, pressure points or different parts of the spine were kind of twisted in a certain way, so that really prepared me, let's say, for the different parts of pranayama. Now Kriya Yoga includes some parts of asana and some parts of pranayama, and I was introduced to the basics of pranayama, which include alternate nostril breathing and what's known as kapalabhati. Kapalabhati is basically known as the skull shining breathing technique.

My teacher had me do 100 at a time, 200 at a time, and there was a point where I started doing 2,000 at a time, so it was a progressive sort of steps in that process. It was only after then that I got introduced into things like Kriya Yoga and things like pratyahara. Pratyahara is all about withdrawing the senses, being able to center your mind around an object of meditation. There are different kinds of objects of meditation in the Yoga Sutras. For example, Patanjali talks about using the pranava, which is actually the word om or the syllable om, and then centering the mind's attention around that, and then that gets you into a concentrated state of mind. When you start to do that, you start to lose awareness of the six senses, including the mind, because the mind starts to become much quieter.

And then you start losing contact with the outside world. Once you have that, there's what's known as dharana. Dharana is really where the mind starts to become further concentrated by focusing in on that object. When that happens, there might be different kinds of thoughts and different kinds of ideas and concepts that come up in the head, and the point here is not to ignore them, but to just keep your mind centered around that object. The more you do that, the more you then get into what's known as dhyana, and dhyana is really concentration. Now this is concentration proper, if you will. This is really the mind that becomes super focused, and then the fruit of that practice is samadhi. Now samadhi is understood to be sama, which means equanimous or balanced or tranquil, and dhi, which is the intelligence or the mind. Now within the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali talks about different levels of samadhi, or different types of samadhi. Let's say they're not necessarily levels upon levels, although when you get to the more refined states, you'll see what I mean.

The beginning part of it is called bhava samadhi and ananda samadhi. This is really related to the joy that somebody feels. There's a certain level of joy that comes about because of that concentrated mind. And from that joy, you experience sasmita samadhi and asmita samadhi. Sasmita samadhi is where the sense of I am is present, the sense of I am meditating, so it's a division between, let's say, the subject and the object. Asmita samadhi is where the subject falls away and all there is is the object, so to speak.

Then you have savicara samadhi, savitarka samadhi, nirvichara samadhi and nirvitarka samadhi. What these are: vichara and vitarka are basically the words for thinking and examining thought. So there's still some kind of mental activity in savicara and savitarka. But in nirvichara and nirvitarka, that thought process starts to become more silent and eventually goes away completely.

And then finally, we have savikalpa and nirvikalpa. In savikalpa, what it is, is that the sense of object is still there. So there's still a subtle sense of self, a subtle sense of a subject looking at that object. Even though now we've gone through that process of sasmita and asmita, we still have that process of seeing an object. But then what we talk about when we say savikalpa or nirvikalpa is basically that word vikalpa in those two words.

Vikalpa means the alternate, or it can also mean choice, or it can also mean intention. So this is a samadhi which is basically choiceless awareness, coming back to Krishnamurti. What we're talking about really is there's a choice, there's an intention to keep focusing on the object in savikalpa, but in nirvikalpa there's no alternate here, there's no choice given. It's just a flow, a process, and eventually there is just the object completely, and it's like a merging of the atman with the Brahman, as we talk about in Vedanta. Now there's another level called sahaja samadhi. There's another level called dharma megha samadhi, and it's very fascinating. If you go back into the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali talks about really interesting things that you can do with these states, because if you focus on certain parts of the body, or if you focus on certain parts of your thoughts, or things like that, you start to develop siddhis. You start to develop certain kinds of psychic faculties. So he talks about, for example, how do you get to past lives? You get into them by looking at your samskaras. Samskaras are basically

The roots of your thoughts that are dependent upon previous choices you've made in the past. You start looking at that, it kind of unfolds, and it kind of goes on rewind, and you start to look at different past lives. Then he talks about using this process of samyama, which is taking dharana, dhyana and samadhi together. It's a flow, and being able to look at each moment in time. It's almost like sci-fi stuff, because if you actually look at the Sanskrit, what he's talking about is freezing space and time and being able to look at different moments in time, and you start to be able to do this with that process of samyama. You talk about kriya yoga. Kriya yoga is a process of manipulating different parts of the body, or different chakras as they're called, in the spine, but when you get into the

When you get to the fourth and fifth level, you're actually taking that energy of the kundalini and not going outside of the spine. You make certain kinds of movements that affect the way that that kundalini starts to move up, and it's not about bringing it up through the spine but through a certain kind of circuit that moves basically like a snake up towards the crown chakra.

It's very intense stuff. It can be, it can get quite intense, and some people kind of get freaked out by it, because you start to lose complete awareness of the body and you realize there's just consciousness everywhere. Some people get so freaked out that they go, "No, no, I don't want any more of this, I need to get back to my body." So for those kinds of things there are certain kinds of techniques that you have to do in kriya yoga to keep the mind-body complex, as it were, grounded. So you keep your mind in a way that even if you go to these higher elevated states, you don't freak out, because you have your root chakra open, which keeps you grounded. And then the last parts of the degrees of kriya yoga have to do with the centers in the brain.

What that means is you start to develop access into the thalamus and hypothalamus, into the pituitary gland and into the pineal gland. And they start opening up a secondary chakra, which is really the eighth chakra, which is about here. So here we're going through the seven chakras, but once those are open, now you get into this part, which is where they say is a storehouse of your karma. And you do certain kinds of techniques to open that up and bring that energy down into the pineal gland. So this is some, I mean, really, I can tell you all about these things, but the way it's done is really the secret of it.

But a lot of people don't like to talk about these different things with Kriya Yoga because it's a very, very secretive thing. But I never saw the need and importance for it, because the way I'm explaining these things to you, they give some kind of idea, but not necessarily the actual technique of how to do them. Very fascinating.

And I'm curious, much debated, the fourth yama, brahmacharya. I'm curious how that was interpreted in your training. And actually, when you were going through these systems, how old were you and what was the time period? Say, it took you a year to do the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, for example, or two years to do Kriya Yoga, and you started at 16. Can you be precise like that? Is it possible? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I was in the Himalayas at the age of 16, that was my first introduction into the asana and pranayama. So the yama part I was starting to do, and they had me first just do that for about three or four months, and then from there just focusing on asana and pranayama for about six months to a year, and then getting into the samadhi parts of it.

So by the time I was about 20 or 21, I was starting to do actual meditation. But it was all happening at the same time, if you will. And what I mean by that is, I was getting my introduction into the Yoga Sutras, getting my introduction into the Yoga Vishistha and other different kinds of techniques. But they were done in a way that fit together like a puzzle, you know, they would join together in a very harmonious manner. By the time I was 23, I was basically done with the kriya yoga practice. So it's basically through a seven-year span, from the age of 16 to about 23, that I went through that process of going through the samadhi levels of the Yoga Sutras and then going through the six degrees of kriya yoga, which is, as you said, quite rapid. I mean, it takes for some people about a good

two, three years before they're introduced to the next degree of kriya yoga. But I guess I was a bit of a stubborn and adamant student with my teachers, and I practiced for quite some time. What I mean by that is you're looking at about six to eight hours of practice every single day. That's not the kind of time people necessarily always have to practice, so it kind of got accelerated because of that, because I had the good fortune of spending the majority of my day, if not all my day, in this particular practice. And brahmacharya. Brahmacharya, yeah, that's an interesting one. So my teachers were very open with this, and they were the kind of teachers who said brahmacharya, we understand, to be celibacy

but they also understood brahmacharya to be a life where you have controlled sexuality. Well, in other words, they were very much of the nature of saying, and it wasn't a taboo. Sex and sexuality, these kinds of topics, were not a taboo at all. I had the good fortune of having teachers who really talked about these things. And even talked about the Kama Sutra. The Kama Sutra is very interesting, because the Western idea, or what had been the Western idea of the Kama Sutra, was that it's just these different sexual positions and things like that. That's just a very small portion of the Kama Sutra, because there are other parts of the Kama Sutra that talk about sex and sexuality in terms of, well, the art of seduction, let's say, and things related to relationships and how long to be in a relationship for and things like that.

So I got introduced to that as well. I had the good fortune to be introduced to that. And what they said was sexuality should be open, but it should be in a way that doesn't harm yourself and that doesn't harm other people, and obviously within a certain bound. They did have the understanding of what's known as ogis, and the idea of ogis is the retention of your sexuality, of your semen converted into ogis and things like that. But those are very advanced practices, those are things that take quite some time. So my teachers were basically of the notion that you're young and you will have sexual desires and there's nothing wrong with it, and there's no need to suppress it, because as soon as you suppress sexuality it can go haywire. We hear about different kinds of students, and even certain gurus, who go through that process, and it just doesn't become, it's just that repression becomes something that becomes animalistic. So they were of the idea that sexuality

itself is not a taboo, but what you do with it and how you use it is what matters. But they were of the nature, and my teachers were celibate. They were basically people who went through that process of the traditional brahmacharya, but they were open-minded enough to know that as a youngster you have certain drives, and it's important to pay attention to that. But eventually, as you start to get more and more advanced, you start to lose interest in sexuality, you start to lose interest in sex, and it's a natural process. It's a process that happens because when you get to these more refined states, you get less and less interested in the sensual states, on the levels of the senses and on the level of sex as such. So I think brahmacharya should be discussed in a way that is sex positive, and it should be discussed in a way that allows people to say and make the choice of whether they want to be celibate or not, and give them the warnings for both open sexuality

as well as celibacy, and let them make their own decision as to how that helps. But I think, as you get older, quite naturally you realize you kind of lose any kind of significance when it comes to sexuality, and then coupled with the practice, it just isn't an important thing in your life anymore. And that's the case presumably for you? Bhante Vimalaramsi has said in the interview in this podcast that anagamis, for example, have no sexual desire. In fact the suttas do say an arahant, for example, is incapable. It's impossible for an arahant to have sexual intercourse. And that's been your experience?

Yeah, yeah, I have lost complete interest in any of that. It's a natural process, that's what I'm saying. You don't need to suppress it. The mind will start to let go on its own as you do these practices, and specifically certain kinds of practices, like the jhana experiences, like samadhi practice, because there's an understanding in the suttas that for, let's say, lay individuals, or people who are not really introduced to the meditation, the Buddha says your domain really is sensuality. He doesn't condemn it. He just says that's for lay people, and that's for people who want to have business and people who want to enjoy the finer things in life, but within means. What that means is within an ethical boundary, in a way that doesn't harm yourself or others. But then what he says is there are many kinds of feelings, so you have sexual and sensual feelings, but eventually, once you start to experience the mental pleasant feelings of samadhi

It's like you have gotten a more profound, deeper and richer experience of pleasure, that the lower pleasures just don't... they pale in comparison. So that's why I say it's a natural process. When you actually experience these pleasant feelings in the form of samadhi, the sensual and the sexual pleasures pale in comparison, and then when you experience nibbana, even the states of jhanas become just a playground where you might just go and enjoy them. But then when you have nibbana, that is the ultimate. The bliss of nibbana or nirvana brings everything else to a lower level, including samadhi. And samadhi here, are you referring to samadhi in the Buddhist conception or in the Yoga Sutra conception, or you don't see a distinction there? I ask because, as you pointed out, it is the case that some advanced practitioners, masters of samadhi, still do engage in sexuality, and sometimes deleteriously, as you pointed out. So perhaps you've changed the kind of samadhi you're referring to in that sentence. Is that the case?

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good thing you brought up, because there is a distinction. I will say, to a certain extent, if you're doing the samadhi of the Yoga Sutras, there is something to be said about the fact that these sexual energies can be, let's say, sublimated into deeper and more refined states. But when I refer now to samadhi, we're talking about the Buddhist context of samadhi, where we're talking about now the four jhanas and the four ayatanas, or the arupa jhanas. And so what we're looking at is what I notice in my practice when I did the Yoga Sutras, or the Yoga Sutra kind of framework of samadhi practice. When I look at the samadhi practice the way it's taught according to the suttas with regards to the jhanas, there is an overlap in terms of the experiences.

But the difference here, at least when we talk about the twin practice that Bhante Vimalaramsi has introduced, is that it's less concentrated and more collected. I think there has to be a distinction made between what we say when we say concentration and what we say when we say collected. What we're really talking about when we talk about concentration is that the mind becomes super focused. In the suttas it's talked about as mind-crushing mind, and that sounds very, very painful, and indeed it can become painful. For example, Bhante Vimalaramsi, when he did his samadhi practice as it's understood in the Mahasi tradition and so on, it was super concentrated, and he experienced headaches and things like that. And so if you become super concentrated, what is happening is you are suppressing or repressing all of those desires

Instead of understanding and acknowledging them and letting them go in the proper way. What I mean by that is when you have collectedness, what you're doing is you have an object of meditation like loving kindness or compassion, or even the breath, for example, but the mind kind of anchors itself around that object. It doesn't become the object. It doesn't focus its focus itself on the object. It's just sort of circulating

around the object, and in doing so there's an open awareness. This open awareness is very similar to rigpa in Dzogchen and Mahamudra. So it's a type of awareness where the mind is very open, very collected, and just seeing things as they really are when they arise and pass away. So in Pali this is known as yata butta jnana dasanam, which is the knowledge and vision of reality as it is, or of things as they really are. And that's a deep level of equanimity that happens when you collect your mind around this object. Since the mind is open and since the attention is open, there is space not only for hindrances to arise but also insights into how this mind works.

When the hindrances arise, what happens is you use the process of right effort within Buddhism, and in the twin practice it's known as the 6R's. Really the 6R's are nothing but a wonderful way of doing right effort, which is: you acknowledge that a hindrance has arisen, some kind of a distraction has arisen; you release your awareness from that; you've relaxed the mind and the body. The relax step is really key, because what it's doing is, I talked about samskaras earlier. And the Pali version of samskaras is sankharas, which are translated in English to formations.

And formations are like these proto-thoughts, and they're like these seeds of karma that arise dependent upon choices you made previously. So when we talk about hindrances, what's happening is hindrances arise as a form of old karma because of something you did in a past life or something you did in a previous moment in this life. And instead of fighting and suppressing the hindrance, which when you do, by the way, if you do that, you're repressing it, so that when you come out of the concentration practice, you feel wonderful and quite elated, but there's no personality shift. There's no shift in the mind's ability to look at what is happening in the wholesome and the unwholesome.

So because of that inability to shift and let go, the hindrances pop up again. And the analogy I use is basically you take a beach ball and you submerge it underwater and you immediately let go of it. It just pops right back up. So there's no real actual change going on as such. So the transformative aspect of this practice is, you acknowledge that there's a distraction, you acknowledge that there's a hindrance. And when I mention hindrance, we're talking about really the five general hindrances. We're talking about sensual craving, we're talking about ill will or aversion, we're talking about restlessness and anxiety, we're talking about sloth and torpor, or dullness of the mind. And we're talking about doubt in the practice, or doubt in your capacity to be able to practice.

So these might happen in different ways. When you recognize them and you release them, and then you relax the mind and body, you're relaxing the karmic formations that give rise to that particular hindrance. When you do that, you come back to the smile. And smiling is an important part of this practice because it's when the mind becomes uplifted quite naturally. And it's an anchor point to return to your object, and then continue that process of collectedness, and then repeat whenever you get distracted again. Yeah, that's very interesting. And that's a summary there, the 6R's, the TWIM method. I'd like to ask you some questions about that a bit later, actually. You mentioned Yoga Vashistha as being quite an interesting one.

I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about that. And also around that same time, you said some Shaiva Tantra you were introduced to. I'm curious what those practices were. Yeah. For example, in Yoga Vashistha, it's a big book. It's a massive volume, and what we found out is the Yoga Vashistha is a smaller fragment of an even larger volume of text, so there's a lot more unexplored stuff in the Yoga Vashistha. And what I find about the Yoga Vashistha, it's like a syncretic text. What I mean by that is it uses Kashmir Shaivism, it uses Vedanta, and it uses Buddhism as its platform

as well as yoga itself. So it takes all of these different road maps and tries to create its own kind of syncretic tradition from there. The Yoga Vashistha has a lot of very fascinating stories and a lot of fascinating ideas about consciousness, and it talks about how consciousness is really this awareness that is all-pervading. Some people call it the Brahman, some people call it rigpa, some people call it different names. But the Yoga Vashistha is really a dialogue between this king or prince, Rama, and his teacher, Vashista. Vashista was known as one of the Vishis, one of the seven Vishis in Hindu mythology and in the Vedic tradition. So when we talk about the Yoga Vashistha, he goes through seven different levels of understanding.

And it starts off very much similar to how you understand this particular world that you see around you, with its five physical senses and the mind, and so on. And it starts to get more and more refined to where it talks about the stages of practice of somebody who starts to do the meditation practice. So he incorporates different parts of Vedanta, specifically talking about reading scripture, reflecting on it, then doing the meditation dependent upon that reflection. That's known as manana, which is reflection. And as you do that, you start to get into a state of

what you could say is disassociation, maybe that might not be the right word, but it's very close, which is you start to disassociate with the world around you, because you start to see that the world that you see is a projection of your ideas and concepts. The reality that you experience is nothing more than the projection of all of the different ideas and concepts that you've already held before, and you start to let go of those, and you start to come to an experience of what's known as turiya and turiya tita. And this is really coming from one of the Upanishads, it's the Manduka Upanishad, or the Mandukya. I always get confused by the two, Manduka and Mandukya, but it's one of those two. And in that particular Upanishad it talks about the secret of Om, and what they're talking about is Om is made up of four components, actually four separate sounds. There's ah, there's ooh, there's ma, and then there's silence.

So the ah is related to the waking state of mind, the u is related to the dreaming state of mind, the ma is the dreamless, and the silence is beyond that. So beyond that is turiya. That turiya comes from the word chaturya, the fourth state, and that state is very similar to sahaja samadhi, where your mind is so mindful that it's actually still alert not only in the waking state but also in the dreamless dreaming state as well as the dreamless state. And the understanding is that this particular mindfulness or awareness is really your true nature.

And so the Yoga Vashistha goes through that process of explaining it through very interesting stories. There's one interesting story about this sage who was, in one lifetime, a crow, where he was able to transform into a crow, and then he lived through different eons. And there's a story of where he meets what's known as a space yogi, and it's translated as a space yogi, and he has this contraption where he lives in this sort of like a UFO kind of thing, and he's orbiting the earth and looking at the earth, and he watches it all throughout the different eons. And then when it's time to come back down, he comes back down and time has passed. So there's a lot of very trippy, if you will, concepts in the Yoga Vashistha that talk about space and time, that talk about time dilation, not only in terms of the physics of it, but also the idea that when you travel vast distances from one planet to the other, there is a difference in the way you experience

time and how people on earth would experience time. So that's all talked about. They talk about things like, just as we have the experience of this world, as we are living on this planet, there's an experience of bacteria and protozoa that are living off of us. And then he talks about it on a super macro level, where he talks about how there are beings living on different galaxies. So it's a very cosmic trip, and I would recommend it, but it's a long read. It's a huge,

huge read. It took me a good two years to go through it. So that's the Yoga Vashistha. And then, within, let's say, Tantra, when we talk about Tantra, we have to understand there's this idea that Tantra has to do with sexuality, and there are some aspects of that when it comes to sexuality, but Tantra is really all that really means is technique. We have three different words: we have mantra, we have tantra, and we have yantra. Mantra is the concentration of the mind using a specific syllable, let's say a specific sound. Tantra is the technique through which you do that process, and yantra is these different mechanisms that you can use. For example, you can use rudraksha beads, you could use mercury, and I've gone through this process of seeing how mercury is solidified using certain kinds of herbs, so that it's used as a carrier for energies

and so there's different kinds of amulets and different kinds of crystals and different kinds of metals that you can use, which is that process of yantra. So I've seen what are known as the Siddha yogis actually take solidified mercury in their hand and take certain kinds of herbs that are found only in South India and parts of the Himalayas, and they mix that up, and what it does is it kind of purifies the mercury, and it creates this little kind of gelatinous ball, if you will. And then they do other kinds of processes. They chant mantras into it, and then it becomes this very dense metal ball. And the understanding is that within Siddha tradition you can actually elevate that mercury to create consciousness in it, conscious energies, and you can make it into your guru, if you will. So I've seen different kinds of mercury balls, or solidified mercury, do different kinds of things. So you can use them to awaken psychic faculties, you can use them to elevate your mental level and elevate the kundalini, and things like that. Now, in Tantra specifically,

I was introduced to a text, which is known as the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra. And that goes through something like 112 different kinds of meditation techniques. So when we talk about Tantra, what it really is, is using technique to get to these different levels. And the different levels include things like just the body level, the mental level, the consciousness level. And because we're talking about Shaivism here, their understanding is the ultimate is to unify Shakti and Shiva. And when we talk about Shakti, what we're talking about is the creative force of mind, which is also understood as kundalini, and that Shiva is here. And so what you're doing is you're reaching into the kundalini and bringing it up so that Shakti and Shiva are unified, and you get to a state of Shiva consciousness, if you will. You get to a state.

But what I will say is, whether you call it Krishna consciousness, whether you call it Shiva consciousness, whether you call it Brahman, or whatever it might be, these are all the same kinds of conscious experiences that you have. And so the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, I should say, is a dialogue between Shiva and Shakti. Shakti, or Parvati, as she's also known, is talking with Shiva, and she's asking him, what is the ultimate secret of reality? And he says, if you really want to understand the true nature of reality, you have to go through a process of Tantra. And so Vigyan Bhairava Tantra really means the science and technique of Bhairava. Bhairava is another word for Shiva, which means the terrible one, or the one who is awesome, or however you want to put it

and so these techniques are very interesting, because they talk about using the breath. In some ways they talk about, if you're in a vehicle, start to notice the motion of the vehicle in relation to your own body, and you start to get into this kind of rhythm, and that rhythm allows your mind to become very hypnotic and concentrated

and then gets into that state of consciousness. There's another technique where you lie down on the grass and you're watching the blue sky, and you start to lose complete awareness, and your consciousness becomes like the sky. So they're very, very cool and very interesting techniques. I would definitely recommend if people want to try it out, they should do it, but obviously they should do it under the guidance of somebody who has a certain level of mastery with these texts. And what was the lineage of that you were introduced to that text? Yeah, so I was actually introduced to it by, believe it or not, by Osho, by the lineage of Osho. I have a lot of good friends who used to be students of Osho, or Rajanish, as he's known, and so he introduced a lot of his own practices, like the Mystic Rose practice and different kinds of meditation techniques, but he did a great discourse, or series of discourses, on this particular text. And so the lineage that I learned it from was

really through that lineage of Rajanish, and his discourses, I think, were collected, if I'm not mistaken, into the Book of Secrets. That's two volumes of his particular take on that text. Oh, very interesting. Okay. You mentioned you also explored Dzogchen and Mahamudra. Of course, Dzogchen and Mahamudra often emphasized the importance of a guru, a realized guru, and transmission, and so on.

So I'm curious what exploration you did with Dzogchen and Mahamudra, and if you worked with any gurus of those traditions. Yeah, in particular I worked with Lama Lina. I don't know if you're familiar with her, but she's mostly doing Mahamudra now. She's a very interesting character, because she's very spirited, very fiery. And I had a chance to really go through the preliminary pointing-out instructions, but before that there's a whole process that you go through, which are different kinds of purification processes, if you will. So I learned a lot of that before really getting into the pointing-out instructions. And the pointing-out instructions should be done with, as you said, a guru, because they will be able to really understand your mindset and the way to contextualize how to point out certain things about Dzogchen and how to recognize Rigpa, the true nature of, let's say, your consciousness. So I studied with her for about three years before really going through that process, and what I found is

this experience of Rigpa is also very similar to Sahaja Samadhi or Dharma Megha Samadhi, where you come to a point where you realize that awareness is just always there. It's always there. It's pristine awareness that you can just rest in, if you will, and you don't need to make heads or tails of it. You just allow the mind to rest within mind, if you will. Now, in terms of the context of the TWIM practice, we have that experience as well, but we have it at a certain level, where we go into the different jhanas, and at the very last part we have this thing called the signless state, the signless samadhi, and that is really similar to Rigpa.

So that's my lineage with regards to Rigpa, or Dzogchen and Mahamudra. That's fascinating. And you touched actually on that comparison between Rigpa and some of the states of TWIM, and at first glance, they do seem rather similar. So I'm curious now, in your story, we're coming to your encounter with David Johnson, and then also Bhante Vimalaramsi. Of course, having attained Rigpa, or realized Rigpa, you're nodding there. Why then were you still looking? You could say, what was it about the TWIM practice? Now we're going right back to the suitors again. You've been entertaining Rigpa in the Great Perfection and so on, and now you're going to go right back to the suitors again. So can you explain why that happened, what was your process? So the thing is, like I said, Rigpa is very, very similar in terms of that open awareness. By that time, I would say this was probably the time I was 20, 25, or 26, and

At that time, I became sort of like a scientist. So I was very much interested in exploring different kinds of territories of spirituality. The interesting thing was, with my mind, it was never attached to a particular school of thought, and it was never attached to a particular philosophy. At that point in time, my intention was to explore all facets of spiritual practice.

And what I did was basically studied on my own, going back into the Yoga Sutras at the age of 25, comparing it with Rigpa, comparing it with other kinds of traditions. And my whole goal there was to be able to accumulate as much in terms of the way of different techniques so that I could understand if somebody came to me and said, well, this is the tradition I come from or this is where I've been so far, I can immediately recognize and use, let's say, the language or the different contexts to be able to kind of nudge them along the path and tell them, well, okay, have you considered it this way? Have you considered it that way? So it wasn't that I was necessarily looking for anything, but at the same time I wanted to see what else was out there, what else is out there in the field of spirituality.

And interestingly enough, metta practice was not something I did necessarily. So I did get introduced to metta practice from Sharon Salzburg, but I was looking for other techniques and things like that. And then I saw Bhante Vimalaramsi's video and I tried it for myself, and what I immediately recognized is when I started getting to the first and second and third jhana, wow, this is exactly like, well, not exactly, but in terms of the qualitative experience, it's almost like the samadhi experiences in the Yoga Sutras. And then he talks about opening the mind and keeping it aware, keeping it open in terms of its awareness. Okay, that's a lot like Rigpa, that's a lot like Dzogchen. You're not... it's interesting, because in Dzogchen you start off with practices that keep your mind quite collected, keep your mind quite concentrated, but then it opens you up to Rigpa, which is a completely different experience altogether. So I think that part of the mind started to compare: how is this very similar to different practices?

And how is it different? And the main difference I see about this practice is there's not a lot of emphasis on concentration. There's more emphasis on understanding mindfulness. And if you don't, if you remember, I think Bhante might've talked about this, which is his understanding or his definition of mindfulness is remembering to observe how mind's attention moves. That's an interesting definition because all you're saying is you're getting into that metacognitive awareness if you will which is mind watching how it just moves so that's a lot a very similar to Rigpa in that sense you're just allowing thoughts to self-arise and pass away without any interference without any interaction you're just allowing things to submerge back into that true nature of Rigpa now you know when I got introduced to the meta practice I did a little bit of it on my own, but I decided to get some guidance under David Johnson with the online retreat.

So I did it. I read the book on the practice and I started doing it. And it was interesting, because I gave a report to David, and he asked, there's a questionnaire and it says, how long was it before you lost your awareness of the object of meditation, and how long was it before you got distracted, and things like that? How long were you on your object of meditation? And I said, well, I was on my object of meditation for about 20 minutes before the mind got distracted in this process. And he didn't believe me. He said, okay, well, I think you might be misunderstanding

what the questionnaire is asking. I said, no, but that's my experience. He said, well, let's see what happens in a couple more days. So I did the same thing and I said, well, this is what I experienced. And I went to the fourth jhana and I experienced this, and he kind of checkmarked in his own mind all of the different things that they're looking for when he talks about the fourth jhana. He said, yeah, okay, fine. You're in the fourth jhana. Now you do this practice.

So I did an intermediary practice, which is known as breaking down the barriers, which is basically, it's actually, interestingly enough, rooted in the Visuddhimagga, this particular practice. It's just an intermediary practice, where you go through different categories of people and you send them loving-kindness, and then from there on you start radiating loving-kindness and compassion and the other brahmaviharas, and it's a natural progression. Then I had another experience of the arupajhanas, and then I had the different attainment experiences. I think in the online retreat he was quite surprised to see that that was the case, and I'm, I wouldn't be surprised if he and Bhante had some level of disbelief in the reports that I was giving them.

But some of the reports that I gave them are actually in his book, so you might be able to read them in the Path to Nibbana. But he then had me say, okay, fine, you went through this practice and wonderful. And then a couple of months later, I said, is there anything left? Is there anything more I should be doing with this practice?

He said, well, if you want, you can start doing determinations, which is you can start to go into any jhana for a determined amount of time. And then you can go through successive jhanas, or you can skip jhanas and do all kinds of things like that, and then ultimately go into nirodha and then determine how long you want to get into nirodha. And I have the email exchanges, and it's quite funny, because he says, well, we can't stump you there either.

It seems like you were able to do exactly that, and he said, hey, would you like to try doing past life work? Would you like trying to do past lives and looking at different realms and the threefold knowledge? I said yeah, I could try doing that. So we did that, and a little tidbit there: I think Bhante had spoken about it in one of his retreats, but he said, so we had this person, and he was referring to oneself, and he said, we couldn't stump him. We would try giving him all kinds of different kinds of determinations. And finally we said, okay, what's the longest you can sit for?

Let's see. And at that point in time, I sat in cessation for 52 hours. And he said, oh, only 52 hours. Can you sit for longer? So I started sitting for even longer periods of time in cessation. And then afterwards, he had me going to past lives, and the past life stuff was very interesting. You look at how karma works and you get a deeper understanding of what's known as dependent origination. Now, it could just be because of the way I was practicing, it could just be because of my own interpretation or the way I was understanding Tibetan Buddhism and things like that, but I think the key difference of going back to the suttas, the missing element here, was the understanding of dependent origination, because dependent origination really gives you clarity on how mind builds the world around you. It gives sort of like the zeros and ones of the matrix, and you start to get an understanding of it. So when you get an attainment, what happens is, in the process of nibbana, you go through cessation

and you come out of it, and then you start to see certain things, and these certain things are the building blocks of your perception of reality, and these building blocks are the different links of dependent origination. That was, I would say, a key thing that I was missing from my previous practices, and it really helped to understand: okay, this is how craving would arise, this is how feeling arises, this is how stimulation of the senses arises, and so on. And it had a different understanding of consciousness.

So the Rigpa experience itself, I realize, using this whole process of the jhanas in between practice, is very much the signless state. When we talk about the signless state, it's a state where there is no sense of conceit. There's no more sense of 'I am' there. And it is an objectless meditation, if you will. It's almost like there's just pure awareness, but it's still a conditional state. To use the words of the Buddha and the suttas, it's volitionally produced, and whatever is volitionally produced is of the nature of being impermanent, and therefore not being self, and therefore should be let go of. So when you let go of that very subtle formation of 'I am', you get to what is basically the cessation of perception, feeling and consciousness. That is the nirodha state. When you come out of it, you then see the links of dependent origination, and you experience nirvana. You experience nirvana, as you say.

So when I went through this process of the twin practice, that was a missing element. I saw the key element was the understanding of dependent origination, and everything kind of just locked into place. And now when you see the world, you no longer take it personally, you no longer take it as being self. It's just a series of impersonal causes and conditions.

And you even see that, even seeing into past lives, that experience as well is just a process of impersonal causes and conditions through the links of dependent origination. And how you react to that causes you further rebirth, not only on the macro level from one lifetime to another, but from one moment to another. So for the arahant, for example, dependent origination still continues.

But there's no more ignorance. The arahant no longer has any conceit, no longer has any ignorance, no longer has any craving. So when we talk about dependent origination, it's cut off at the level of feeling. So any old karma, if you will, the effects of previous choices that were made before full awakening, are still to be experienced. And this is the understanding, whether it's in the Vedantic tradition, whether it's in the yogic tradition, or whether it's in the Buddhist tradition, it's all the same thing in that sense: the karma is still to be experienced.

But the difference here is because there's no more ignorance and craving, there's no latching onto it no further fuel because further new karma for further rebirth yeah fascinating well you've said a lot of remarkable things there one aspect of uh the interview as you uh as you referring to there with bantavimla ramsi a few episodes ago and he talked about the four path model this idea of four levels of attainment starting at stream entry and going as you said the way up to our hat and you also referred there in that answer to path attainments and it seems like you had them in fairly rapid succession i'm curious can you remember each of those path attainments and would it be possible to to recount those moments yes yes so the very first time i had no idea what i was doing like i kind of stumbled into uh the first attainment if you will and and what that means is i was going through the level of nothingness which is the seventh uh jana it's it's a level of nothingness

and there's deep equanimity and the mind was just observing mind at that point in time and then suddenly it all just switched off i was not even aware that it switched off until it came back on so it's like the mind went for like a nap or just blacked out or whatever had happened and i and the first thing i remember the mind going was like what just happened and in that process of looking at it what i saw was these little tiny flickers these tiny little lights or figures or circular things and what what those were were the first samskaras the first formations that were arising and creating the process of the rest of the links of dependent origination to arise and i noticed immediately that i felt this amazing joy and this amazing relief that that was there and the way david explained it to me was well okay you experienced all of that and he said okay and he said i think you went for a little swim which is his way of saying that you know you had stream entry you entered the stream if you will

And I didn't make anything of it, but what I did remember was when I came out of it, the world was hyper real. The colours were sharper, sounds were louder, food tasted better, smells were sharper. The senses were just, you know, hyper aware. It was like I was living in some kind of four or five dimensional reality, just floating around. For the first couple of days I was just like that. And he said, okay, congratulations, go back and sit and continue on. I had a similar experience, but this time the links were much sharper, much, much sharper, and I started getting fascinated by what it is that I'm seeing. So I asked him what is going on exactly, and he explained to me, you're starting to see the links of dependent origination, and because of that the mind lets go, and experiences through that release, nibbana. So then I had the fruition experience.

And then I said, okay, that's great. And the thing about this is I had no kind of prior knowledge about these things, and I think that was kind of beneficial for me, because I didn't have expectations of what to see, what to look for, or the idea of the four path model and things like that. I just didn't have any clarity on that. I was more interested in doing the practice, and I was definitely surprised by that blackout state of the mind, if you will, where the mind completely goes blank.

So I did it again, and I said, okay, well, I had another experience. I had two of those experiences in one day, and I think that was when Dave and Bhante were probably starting to get into disbelief, because they said, how is it possible that somebody could do this? And my only explanation is because I had that beginner's mind, that mind of no expectation. And I would venture to say, from my own experience in teaching people now, and from people who talk about it, that

i would venture to say that it's much easier to stumble into stream entry than it is to get into the higher states because at that point when you're stumbling into it you're not you don't know what to look out for but now that you know the the road map now you know where the signposts are you're anticipating you know what's going to happen and the problem is that anticipation is counter-intuitive for you entering into cessation and then experiencing libana so it's it's easier doing it the first time than it is the second third fourth or you know uh

But then, anyway, I went through this process a few more times, and every time I went through it, what I realized was my understanding of dependent origination became even more clear, much clearer, to the point that there came a point where it's very similar to that Yoga Sutra experience I was talking about, where space time freezes and you're able to see different moments in time. There came a point at that particular attainment where

you could see dependent origination, but then it froze, and you could literally go back a step and see how, ceasing this, everything else ceases. So you were seeing the arising and passing away of dependent origination, and then the reverse order of that, and then the forward and reverse order of that as well. So it was quite a trippy thing, if you will, to see that. But when you come back out of it, what you notice is there is so much immense relief, and that relief is from having broken the fetters. You break the fetters, and you no longer experience the same reality as other people experience it, the way they do. You see through reality. The way I explain it is, it's like you have been unplugged from the matrix, but you come back into the matrix and you can live in the matrix, but you know that this is the matrix. You don't have any attachment. In other words, you are living in the world but are not of the world, so to speak.

So what happens is you start to see dependent origination in people, and you can start to see karmic streams. Now, I'm just talking from experience, in the way I've seen it. Maybe people might see it in different ways, because students have talked about how they've seen it in a way where it's like this quantum computer, where they see all of these different streams of reality coming together, and they see frames of reality, and things like that. So when you get into these attainments, what's really happening is you're getting a refined understanding of how mind really works, and how this reality is fully, completely, undoubtedly impersonal.

And therefore you no longer take it seriously anymore. You have the bliss of that attainment. You have the bliss of fruition, a bliss of nibbana, and that, you know, is the ultimate. That's the ultimate reality. So you start to see how karma works, and, you know, good, bad or indifferent, it doesn't affect the mind in a way, whether it's positive, negative or neutral. It just sees it as a continual unfolding of reality, until, you know, the dissolution of the five aggregates. When you said there that you had the experience twice, twice in the same day, I might take that to mean that you retained to the second and third paths within the same day?

Well, the second path, the path and the fruition of the second. Oh, I see. Yes. Yeah. And then later on, subsequently, the rest of the paths and fruitions. So that's basically what we're talking about at that point. I mean, I kind of summarised it, but what I'm talking about there is your level of understanding of the dependent origination, and the clarity becomes even greater. And what happens is you start to realise, especially at the final attainment, which is really what we're talking about, which happened much later on, is you realise that even the relief, even the joy, even this process of nibbana that is experienced, is impersonal as well. So you get a deep experience of anatta, a deep experience of not-self, in that what was happening prior to that is, when you feel that joy after experiencing it, people then have a tendency to cling to that joy.

They have a tendency to add a sense of I am to it, a tendency of saying that this is my joy. But what happens is, there is, in the suttas, known as the contact with nibbana, or the contact with the nibbana element. And this contact is known as the emptiness contact, the signless contact, and the undirected contact.

The reason is because it's making contact with nibbana, which is empty of self, which has no signs, it's not an object, and it's undirected because there's no intention to get to it. It just happens when it happens. When causes and conditions are right for that experience to happen, it will happen, and the unconditioned occurs, so to speak.

So when that happens, everybody makes contact when they go through the path and fruition, the different kinds of path attainments. But the difference at final attainment is there's no longer that joy of taking it personal. You see it as being an impersonal contact. You see that contact for what it actually is. And because of that, the five higher fetters, conceit and restlessness, well, I'll say that restlessness, the craving for form existence, the craving for formless existence, are all dependent upon conceit, dependent upon that sense of I am. And then ignorance is destroyed, and where that conceit and that ignorance are destroyed, there is then the understanding of this being a completely impersonal process.

So what I'm saying here is, when you have contact with the nibbana element, that feeling of relief, that feeling of joy, that's not the unconditioned itself. It's the experience after the unconditioned, the joy and the relief that you feel, and that happens within the context of dependent origination. Now, what happens in prior attainments is people or beings will take that and cling to it, which means not all of the fetters are completely destroyed. But if you see that as also being impersonal and also being impermanent, then the further links of craving and clinging and being are no longer there, and because there's no longer fuel for that, they completely fade away. So that's why I say with the arahant there's only the formations.

or the sankharas up until the level of feeling in the context of dependent origination and ignorance is destroyed, because one has already seen the impersonal process and totally understood the four noble truths in such a way that you contextualize everything that you're seeing through that lens of the four noble truths. Fascinating. You mentioned past lives, and David in his email introducing you mentioned also that you had the experience of seeing your past lives, and I'm curious if you could say how that happened. You mentioned it actually also in your previous yogic training, that there were methods for that as well, so I'm wondering if it was in both places, that you did that in both systems, or just one, and what did you see? He mentioned lifetimes as Himalayan yogis and also in other realms and so on, so I'm curious what you saw. And I'm also curious if you can, as the suttas report the Buddha to be able to do, for example, see others' past lives? Right. Right.

So yes, in both traditions the reading of past lives happens, but I only was able to do it with this particular tradition, I believe. I'm only speculating here, but I would say that if anybody wants to do it from the yogic tradition, they can go right ahead and try it out, as it's talked about in the Yoga Sutras, because there is a lot of similarity in terms of what that technique or process is. And what that process is, is basically you are going back in your memory bit by bit, and what you're doing is you're accessing the sankharas, you're accessing the different memory points, and these memory points are like a game that you've played and you've saved.

So these are points in the game where you've saved that particular point in the game, and then you start to rewind. So the way it's kind of seen is everything starts to go very fast in terms of the rewind, and you can kind of pause and then explore one particular lifetime and start to see how karma was arising in that particular lifetime. So this is done usually after a certain period of time when somebody has a certain level of mastery. I mean, I kind of

As a teacher, I would recommend that people have at least one or two attainments, if not three, and that's just my personal preference, let's say, so to speak, because that's when people are really mastering the jhanas, that's when people are really mastering the ability to experience the fourth jhana. And then of course even doing the determinations as we were talking about earlier, because you need the fourth jhana, you need the equanimity of the fourth jhana to be able to go through past lives, because there's a lot of things you might see that you might not like, you know. So people have done that, and they kind of feel like that was them in that past life, and then you have to kind of walk them through it from the context of dependent origination and tell them, you know, well, was that really yourself or is this the self now, or, you know, what's really going on? And they start reflecting and realize, okay, that wasn't really me and this isn't really me here either, you know. So it was all a series of processes of karma that was coming to play.

So my experience had been where I had seen different lives, as you said, a Himalayan yogi. And there's a particular story in which, I talked today, I talked to David about it, so he probably told you about this or at least briefly gave an explanation. I recollect my immediate past life as a Himalayan yogi, and I recall, interestingly enough, seeing my parents in that lifetime, my current parents as they are in this life. I recall seeing them, and I remember being invited to their wedding reception as a Himalayan yogi, just giving alms and things like that, and I blessed them and I said, you know, you're gonna have a son and things like that. And what I made the determination was I would go on to become their child. So the story is that I, in that life, basically left the body and then took birth in this particular life as their child.

And I actually talked to my parents about this a little bit and I said, was there anybody who was interesting that visited, you know, their wedding and things like that? It's like, yeah, why? Well, was he like a sadhu, was he like a yogi or something? It was like, and they said, yeah, there was somebody like that, and there was somebody who came in and they said, you know, they blessed us and they said, you know, you're going to be blessed with a son, and he walked away and he left, and he was never seen after that. Nobody knew what happened with him after that. So that was an interesting experience, to see, you know, to see your parents in a previous life as somebody else. It's a little trippy, if you will. You know, I keep using the word trippy because it is really a big massive trip when you go through these past lives. Then you start to see the arising and passing away of different beings according to their karma.

So you can actually start to see what were the different karmic formations that led them into, let's say, the earth plane or the human existence, into a higher existence, whether it was a deva plane or a brahma loka or an arupa plane or whatever it might be, or even lower existences. So you can start to play around with that. You can look at the different realms as being like spectrums, or spectrums of light, if you will. So we only see or experience right now in this earth plane or on the human level. All of this, like whatever we're seeing right now, is just a portion of what might be out there. And a lot of stuff that I've experienced can be kind of rooted in mythology, because what you start to see is some of the devas and some of the different mystical entities that you see in Norse mythology or Vedic mythology or Greek mythology, and what you realize is other people also experience them, and they were interpreting it within their cultural context.

So these entities, for sure, are there. And at the same time, I would say, you know, nobody has to believe this stuff. By no means do you need to believe my account or anybody's account. All you have to do is see for yourself, if you're very interested, and there's a process of doing that, and you get to it and you see it for yourself. That's why I say, you know, whether it's this practice or any other practice in Buddhism, it doesn't say that you have to believe certain things. It's a very empirical system where you do it for yourself and you see it for yourself. You mentioned nirodha samapatti, and this ability to enter into a state of more or less suspended animation, no breathing, no heartbeat, etc.

And you said you were able to do that for 52 hours on your first attempt. I'm curious what your record is. And I understand also that you've been studied doing this. Is that correct? Yeah. What is your record for nirodha samapatti? And can you say a little bit about the scientific studies that are being done on you? Sure. So I have to point out, I think I started off basically just a couple of hours, and 52 hours was my old record.

But then I was able to do it for up to six days at a time. So, being in nirodha for about six days at a time. And this was when I had a chance to go back to the Himalayas and spend some time. There's actually a story about that, which is I went back to the old cave that I used to go to when I was 16. And an old friend of mine, he stayed nearby, maybe, you know, a few kilometers away at his house, and I said, you know, I'd like to come and spend some time there, and if it's okay, you know, once a week I'll come stay at your house for food and then go back and do my meditative practices. He said that's fine, that's okay, but here's the thing that happened. So I went into nirodha and was sitting there. I made determination to go into it for about six days, and he was then informed, and I was not aware of this obviously, but he was informed that the pandemic hit and so everything was going to be on lockdown.

And so if you were found outside of lockdown you would be in trouble, and so he was very much concerned, so he came to the cave with a couple of his friends, and he tried to wake me up, and he couldn't wake me up. So they had to, actually, as he describes it, he took the body, or he thought I was dead, basically. He took the corpse and laid it on the bed, and he sent a message to David Johnson, and he said, you know, this is what happened, what do we do? And David said, just keep him warm, he'll be fine, just wait, you know. And then a couple of days later I find myself, I wake up, and I'm in this bedroom, and I thought, okay, I've done it now, I've, you know, I've gone past the seven-day mark somehow, and now I'm in some other realm or something. But then I saw my friend and I realized what happened when he told me that the lockdown was going on, so you have to stay indoors now you

can't go into the cave and keep walking out. So I basically continued my practice with that while I was staying at his house, in my own room. And what I did was I'd go into nirodha for about six days, well, six days, and then the last day I would just have my meal and talk with people and do some teaching, and then go back and continue on for another six days. And this went on for quite some time. And what happened is there's a Muse device, a device called Muse, which is like a, it reads your brain waves or whatever it might be. It's a consumer-level EEG technology, and it's kind of rudimentary in the sense that, you know, it kind of is able to see what's going on with the brains and the brain waves and things like that. So we did this, and I did this for myself, and what we detected was there was some kind of a flat line.

With the brain, brain waves, and also that the heartbeat had basically reduced. Now it's interesting, because when they did the study, the way they did the study was they found out about the study through that Muse report, and somebody who went to a party in the Netherlands. They said, you know, there's this interesting case, and this guy said, well, I know a neuroscientist who might be interested in studying this. So they said, let's try it out, and they approached me and said, we'd like to do it, and I said, okay, fine. And they did two different studies over the course of two days. The first study was what they called predictive modeling, and what they wanted to see was what happens in the state of Nirodha when it comes to the level of perception and feeling.

In other words, is the brain still active in recognizing certain sounds and things like that? So they went and they made me go through a process of the waking state, focused attention, just listening to things, and then going into Nirodha, and they did about, I think, four or five cycles of that. The second day was a sleep study. So they had me just be in the waking state for some time, then they had me going through the sleep state for 90 minutes, basically a 90-minute sleep cycle, and then a 90-minute session of Nirodha samapatti. And right now there's still some initial findings coming out from that research. I mean, it's going to take some time, because they did a lot of data gathering.

They had 64 electrodes on my head. I call that thing the octopus, because it looks like a big octopus. And they had me hooked up to some kind of respiratory belt to read how the respiration rate was going on, blood oxygen levels, temperature levels, skin conductivity. I think it was close to about 80 or 90 sensors all throughout my body, and even my feet, my chest and my back and so on. Anyway, we had a chance to speak with the scientists, and there were basically two or three things so far that they discovered from that research that was very interesting to them. The first thing was

I told them that my intention would be that at the 10-minute mark the mind's going to go into Nirodha, and at the 90-minute mark it's going to come out. So what they found was that exactly at the 10-minute mark, everything stopped, started dropping in terms of the respiratory rate, the heart rate, the blood pressure, all of those things.

And then exactly at the 90-minute mark, everything came back up again. And they were kind of spooked by that, because what is that process of intention and determination that allows the mind to do that? Because as we understand it, time is subjective. So how is it that it's somehow the body clock, you know, the bodily formations are so attuned that they're able to know, or be able to say, okay, at the 10-minute mark you're going back down, and then you're going back up at the 90-minute mark? The second interesting finding was that there was absolutely zero movement, because in meditation as well they might be able to detect certain levels of eye movement and things like that, but here was basically absolute zero, not even the eyes were moving or anything. The third finding was interesting in relation to the brain waves. Now, they were concerned, because what they said was, well, we saw the flat line on the Muse device, and we were concerned that if we see a flat line in the brain wave scanner

you might die or we might have killed you, and that would be a problem. So we're hoping that that's not what's going to happen. But what they actually did find, because of the brainwave scanner being so much more intricate in terms of its findings, in terms of its... well, and they were using machine learning to be able to, so it was a very fascinating piece of research, because this research is part of a larger project with relation to meditation and memory and perception, and they're using artificial intelligence and machine learning to come up with the way that they scan the brain and also what they find in relation to that. So the third finding that came about from our initial discussion was this

they found that in the waking state there was more delta brain waves, which are associated with deep sleep, but what they found was in the sleep state there was zero delta waves. There was more of an alertness. And they actually asked me after that, they said, were you asleep? Were you actually asleep? Because what we found was we were not able to find those spindle waves that indicate that the brain is now into REM sleep or into this particular sleep. But rather what we found was that there was a level of mindfulness or a level of alertness in the way of alpha and beta waves. And I said, yeah, that's the way I sleep.

My sleep pattern is that I'm able to observe the different levels of sleep. I can know when the mind is in waking state, in light sleep, in REM, and even in deep sleep. So that's really going back to what we were talking about earlier, the Turiya stage, where you can actually see the different levels of the waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep states.

And then what they found was in Nirodha, there was basically a very, very wide amplitude wave, which was even deeper than delta wave. So it was closer to almost non-existent. It was quite interesting to see that. And what they saw was it was much deeper than a level of sleep that you would find with a normal individual, let's say. So if you were to scan the brainwave of somebody who was asleep, you would find some level of delta activity during the deep sleep phase. But here, what they found was there was even more active delta. And so they thought, well, maybe he's just taking a nap while he's in Nirodha Samapatti.

But then they made connections with the respiratory rate and the heart rate and so on. And what they realized was, no, no, no, the body was still active. The body was still, you know, still doing its processes, but the brain was at such a deep level that it was even deeper than deep sleep. Did they detect the cessation of respiration and heartbeat? That was an interesting thing to note. They did not. What they noticed was actually that the heart rate was at a fairly normal level, compared to a waking state, same with the respiratory rate. And the way that we interpret that in the suttas is, in one particular sutta there is a sutta where somebody asks the question, well, what's the difference between somebody who's dead and somebody who is in Nirodha Samapatti? And what they say is there's still heat and vitality in one who is still alive and in Nirodha, and their vital formations are still active. So the way I understand that, or the way I'm interpreting it, is that the metabolism, that's the heat and vitality, is still continuing

and the vital formations, which have to do with the autonomic nervous system in relation to the heart rate and other components, are still functioning, but albeit maybe at a lower level, but they're still functioning. So when Vimalaramsi makes the claim that an anagami can sit for up to seven days without respiration and heart rate, you don't take that to be the case? Or for instance, when your friends thought you were dead in the cave, presumably because they couldn't detect a pulse and it didn't appear you were breathing, I presume.

But how do you square the claims made by Bhante Vimalaramsi with the scientific data of your own state of Nirodha? Yeah, I think, with regards to Bhante, I can't speak for him, but I think he was probably talking about it based on initial findings with the Muse, because that is what the Muse detected. It detected basically a flat line, and it detected a heart rate of about, I think, a beat per minute or something like that. It was quite low. But I think, you know, I would say that science has shown that there is something else altogether that's going on. I also want to give the caveat that that's just me, that's just me as one subject. So they want to continue to do further research by replicating that and possibly finding more people, to be able to get better data points, and then really conclude, if they can, what's really going on. So I

would say, you know, in the case of Bhante, he's saying he probably said that based on the Muse findings. But now that we have newer findings, we're seeing, let's say, better data points because of the fact that we have sharper tools at our disposal, and they're seeing possibly that the Muse is showing a flat line, but possibly that with this new data the slow amplitude waves are indicative of something that's happening much, much deeper. So I would say, you know, it's just new information that's come out in the last few weeks that might just update what Bhante is saying.

The flat line of the Muse was the brain activity, not your heartbeat and respiration. Is that correct? That was the... yeah, that was the brain activity. So the flat line of the Muse isn't real, isn't related to your respiration and heartbeat? No, no. The Muse, well, the Muse also detects heart rate. The new Muse that we have detects heart rate as well, so it detected something like one or two beats per minute. Okay. So, of course, Bhante actually also used the example of deeper ma, an anagami who he claims could also go into states of suspended animation for days at a time, and he asked her about that himself personally, and it is

widely said in many of the systems that you've discussed the the cessation of heartbeat and the stopping of respiration for multiple days that is a classic um classically understood component of those states so would you fair to say that perhaps when bante said that he wasn't just basing it on your muse data which the original one didn't actually even pick up your heart rate and respiration but probably he was thinking about the traditional accounts and claims of yogis such as dipuma it is quite possible it is quite possible because the classical understanding is based on whatever people's experiences uh just based on maybe you know the heart rate or the pulse is so faint

uh that it's basically undetectable or you know it's it's imperceptible same with the breathing and so maybe that's how people start interpreting it but i like i said going back to the sutta itself the way i see it it kind of recontextualizes for me based on these new findings that ink okay uh from a let's say classical standpoint or from just looking at the person trying to detect a heart rate and things like that maybe it's difficult to detect the heart rate or it's it's imperceptible

but with the scientific findings with the the neuroscientific findings it recontextualizes it by saying that indeed there are these vital formations still functioning in one who is in cessation the only difference being that there is no awareness there uh there is there's a lack of consciousness present in there lack of feeling and perception in there the scientific findings seem to suggest your heart rate and respiration were at normal levels right so presumably normal levels of heartbeat and respiration are easy to detect even even for people in the ancient past throughout history yeah it doesn't quite follow does it it doesn't it doesn't so it's very interesting to see what exactly it is that uh because they still have more physiological findings

uh that they need to interpret in terms of the the analysis of the data but based on the initial findings this is what we're seeing which is that there is a normal heart rate and yes it would make sense that if somebody does have a fairly normal heart rate it is quite easy to detect same with the respiratory rate so i i think we have to wait until we see further data to really understand what actually happened it's very interesting that either they're different states what you're considering to be that state is is different or the descriptions are not accurate or maybe there are different types of states or something like that and even the experience of your friends who presumably couldn't detect noticeably any heart heart rate and so on yeah that's very interesting There is one idea here, which is the reason why the scientists want to replicate the study is because their understanding is that it's quite possible that maybe over the course of two or three days, the heart rate might actually slow down.

The respiratory rate might actually slow down. The reason being is if the heart rate suddenly stopped or slowed down, the body would go into shock. So they're speculating, or their hypothesis for further study is that perhaps over the course of two or three days, the body goes into what could be known as, like, a hibernation mode. Because even with animals, with hibernation, it would take some time for the heart rate, for the blood pressure, for the respiratory rate to start to slow down. So it might be possible that way, because we have to also understand, when those people in the Himalayas were detecting the body, it had been probably a few days, at least maybe three or four days, before they found me in the cave and presumed me to be in a coma or dead.

So that might be the case as well. Yeah, that's a very interesting idea. That's a very interesting idea. Well, I do admire your willingness to be, as you've described it elsewhere, a lab rat for these things, you know, to put yourself under the microscope like that. And I also appreciate your candidness and frankness about your experiences. Of course, traditionally, maybe it's somewhat cultural, and there are other reasons for it. The sort of frankness that you're displaying now has, at some times, been in vogue and at other times not been in vogue. And I think we can agree that, for whatever reasons, there are certain time periods where masters would be coy about making such claims, even today, in fact.

I'm not particularly asking if you think that's good or bad, but the sorts of claims you're making and the experiences you're reporting are at least, it seems at first glance, really remarkable, considering various different systems, high systems of contemplation, various different yogic systems, and including the Buddhist system in a very advanced way. Would you say you are a remarkable outlier case in the way you've been able to do that?

And if so, to what do you attribute that outlier class? Or would you say that there are others like you, perhaps Many others like you, or at least some like you, who are more coy about revealing in such a frank way as you've done, and which I appreciate you doing, they're more coy about that. For instance, do you think there are people, Dzogchen masters or masters of Shaiva Tantra or whatever the case might be, who have attained similarly advanced states and are living as you are claiming to be in the sort of end states of many of these systems? And they just don't talk about it because it's just not the done thing to do.

I'm curious about that. They say it takes a Buddha to know a Buddha. So I'm curious as to your thoughts on that. Yeah, that's a very good question. I would say, you know, I think I'm not necessarily an outlier, because as far as I'm aware, there are a few select people who might talk about it. And I realize that, you know, a lot of the things that I'm talking about do seem remarkable.

But at the same time, I would say from my limited experience or my limited perspective is that it is possible for everybody to do this. I don't consider this to be a special case by any means, although a lot of the things that we are talking about are elevated to a certain level of secrecy, are elevated to a certain level of supremacy in terms of the practice and mastery and things like that. But at the same time, you know, if I was to talk about the way I look at the world of spirituality is there is some level of benefit. I do concur with the understanding that there is some level of benefit to keeping certain things, let's say, private, not necessarily secret, but certain kinds of discussions to be one-on-one, you know, for the sake of clarity and for the sake of non-diluting the information that we're talking about so that people can experience it for themselves.

At the same time, my goal, I would say, if I were to talk about a goal, is to allow people to see that these states are indeed achievable. And there shouldn't be a taboo, or there shouldn't be a kind of limitation on discussing them, provided that the person talking about them has actually understood and experienced it, right?

So in other words, we can only speak upon things that we've actually experienced, otherwise all we're doing is preaching, and all we're doing is reflecting and analysing texts. But I am of the nature to say that if you are a teacher, you should be a teacher who has these experiences, so that you can actually know the roadmap, you actually know the path and the signposts, and be able to guide people and say, hey, look out for this, or know, based on the descriptions of what they're saying, and then recognise where they are on their path. And I also see it as a way of inspiring people. When I'm talking about these things, I'm talking about it because you've asked the questions, and I've had the intention to be completely forthright about my experiences.

Obviously, so you know, otherwise I have no intention of shouting about it on the rooftops, you know, hey, look at this. I have no intention like that. And the way I teach is, and I've always told people this is the way I teach is, I only teach if somebody has a question. I don't go out and say, hey, you know, listen to me and try this out, and all of those things. And I live in a way which is basically, it's almost like a monastic lifestyle, in the sense that I just go where I go, and people invite me over to teach, and I go and teach. I'm like a wandering yogi, if you will, and I'm on the border point between a lay life and a monastic life, if you will, in that sense.

So from that perspective, I see that talking about these things only helps inspire and motivate if the conditions are right. What I mean when I say the conditions are right is that you have an understanding that the student is ready to discuss these things. Obviously, with this interview, a lot of people are going to have a lot of interesting ideas about what we're talking about, a lot of interesting speculations and comments, for sure. But the hope is that it will help people be inspired to say, okay, this is interesting, I'd like to learn more and check it out and see what it's all about. So my short answer is:

If you have experienced these things, and if you think it will be of benefit for others, why not talk about them, why not discuss them? And at the same time, I would also say, in addition to that, I would also say that these states are indeed achievable, these different states that we talk about. I want to be able to demystify them, if you will, because there's a lot of language from the suttas and the different spiritual texts that make them out to be mystical states, that make them out to be almost mythical levels of experience.

But I really admire science and neuroscience in its ability to take this and contextualize it for us in a modern way, so that really what we're looking at is saying, this is what happens in the brain when you go through these states, this is the benefits that you experience on a neuroscientific level. Because by the way, just as an addition, we are later on going to do fMRI scans, and that's probably going to give us better clarity into what parts of the brain are active during this state and what parts are not active. And I would say I have a

I have a, let's say, vocational interest in neuroscience. I mean, I'm a big fan of people like Robert Sapolsky and other people in behavioral neuroscience and cognitive behavioral therapy and things like that. So I'm always of the nature to say if science can help prove to us these kinds of things, then more power to them, and if they can help us disprove other things and be able to clarify certain kinds of states in a modern understanding, then more power to them there as well. Very interesting, and given that you're asserting here that it's possible for anybody to

attain what you've attained, and to perhaps rephrase my original question, how commonly is it attained is what I mean. And for instance, we look at the world today, and at first glance it seems to be extraordinarily rare, and so the direction of my question was, is that because you're extraordinarily gifted or talented, for example? Which people have talents, it's a possible hypothesis. Or is it that there are many that have attained it that don't talk about it because of, say, religious or cultural restraints on their ability to talk about it, for example? Or is there some other explanation as to why it appears to be at first glance extraordinarily rare, what you're claiming, but at the same time you're making the claim that anybody can do it. So how does that picture resolve? Well, for one, I'll say for me personally, I think for me it's because of my

my natural curiosity into spirituality and my natural willingness to learn without barriers. In other words, well, I will have to say, all my foundation in the practice with the yoga sutras and the other traditions has kind of given me an advantage there. So I would say yes, it is achievable, but having gone through a lot of effort, and the right kind of effort, so to speak. So I say that it is achievable, but based on the idea that I myself have gone through all of these different practices. So it's a matter of hard work, but the right kind of hard work for somebody to be able to achieve it. At the same time, within the understanding of, let's say, spiritual communities, I do think that there are people who can achieve these states. I know of a few personally, but to what extent that is throughout different traditions or throughout the different spiritual backgrounds

I can't say for sure, but I would say that based on my experience with teachers in yoga, based on my experience with teachers in Tantra and Kashmir Shaivism and things like that, they indeed are the real deal, if you will. I mean, they really have these different abilities to do these different kinds of states of samadhi. And I know of, and when I'm talking about, I know of a few people. I'm talking about people who actually can get into nirodha samapati. I know of them, and I know of them within the community itself. So perhaps it is rare in the larger scheme of things, but having said that, I still think that it is achievable if you put in the work, if you put in dedication, if you put in the time, and you have the right effort with the right understanding, it will be able to take you into these same replicable steps towards experiencing, you wrote them now, in terms of

In terms of the commonality, or in terms of, or rather let's say, in terms of the traditional aspect of being secretive about these things, I think people become naturally secretive about these things. At least from my own experience, I don't really talk about these things, and I say that with the fact that I know that I'm on this podcast, and the only reason I'm talking about these things, like I said before, is because you're asking me the questions, and I'm just being honest with what my experience has been. But otherwise, I think naturally even people, to get to these different levels of attainment, they are less interested in talking about it to other people. They're more satisfied and content in their own experiences.

So there's a loss of conceit, there's a lessening of any kind of pride in these things, but that might be the other reason why people don't talk about it. It's just because the subject never really comes up, and when it does they don't really have a real interest in talking about it, because naturally they become less and less egocentric, if you will, about these things. Well, Delson, this has been so fascinating, and I want to reiterate my appreciation for your candidness here, talking as you have done so openly about your experiences. Really remarkable and excellent, so thank you. Now I'm curious, you're 31, is that right? I am 31. Yeah, so 31. What now? What now for you? Do you have any more contemplative goals, meditational areas of curiosity and interest? You described yourself as almost a scientist at this stuff. Is there anything else you're looking into or working on in that side of things?

And then I'll ask you after that where people can find you and so on. But let's start with that. It's interesting. I am very happy where I am right now. A lot of times people now will ask me that question, do you have any expectations? You have a five year plan? Do you have goals? And do you have these kinds of things? And basically what I tell them is I see life now as being a series of unfolding. So whatever comes down this path will be whatever comes down this path. In terms of my own personal interests, I do like the scientific aspect of it. For example, I'm a friend of somebody who is within the neuroscientific community.

And what we would like to do at some point in time, and just for the benefit of people both in the scientific community as well as in the contemplative practice community, is to be able to create maybe an app along with the Muse or something else like the Muse, where people can actually track their meditation progress and things like that. So I'm very fascinated by the neuroscience of it all, and the cognitive behavioral aspect of it in terms of practice. Right now all I'm doing is just the practice I do, which is the jhana practice, and then nirodha and things like that. But I'm always interested in talking with people about yoga, about Vedanta, about all of these things, and I don't consider myself anything. I don't consider myself a Buddhist, I don't consider myself a Vedantin, I don't consider myself a yogi. That sense of an image has completely gone. So for me to have a goal right now at this point, it's kind of counterintuitive. I will tell you one thing. Since I've started down this path

it has naturally and organically grown on its own in terms of my, let's say, quote unquote teaching career, if you will, and what I mean by that is people have heard about this practice, and they've heard about my experiences a little bit, or they've seen my talks and they're inspired by it, or they've gone to a retreat. And so all of the stuff that has continued to grow is because of word of mouth. People seem to have gotten some benefit from it, and so I don't advertise, I don't broadcast what I do or things like that. But when there's opportunities to talk about it, I do talk about it, when people are naturally curious and they want to know more about my practice and my experience.

Right now, as I said, I'm working with Damasuka and I'm also working with Suttavada Foundation, and they have different goals, so I just go with the flow. And the way I talk to people about this is, I'm like a free bird. I don't have any interest in making a name for myself or fame or fortune and all of these things that come up from being, let's say, a spiritual teacher and things like that. I'm just a wandering yogi, if you will. As I said before, I just wander around aimlessly until somebody says, hey, would you be interested in teaching? And I say, okay, that's fine. What did you have in mind? And then they plan it out.

Even the Dhamma talks that I started doing a year ago was not of my own intention. So my life has been really now like a series of different people's intentions without any of my own personal ambitions in there. I'm not really any more an ambitious person at all. I don't really have any motivations to see anything grow. I just see it grow when it grows. And there's always going to be people who have criticism about it, or things that I do, and I see it in the same way as people who have praise about it. That's just the way my mind works now. It's just things are flowing, and this mind, this life, this energy that's continuing on is going with that flow. And I understand you're working on a book on dependent origination. Can you give us an update on that? Yeah, I'm still stuck in craving. Well, I'm stuck on the chapter in craving. So I keep telling that to people. Well, so this book came about as an idea. I'd say it's been about four or five months and

The idea with this book is it's like an encyclopedia about dependent origination, and the way it's going to work out is it's going to be probably two volumes, because it's based off of what's known as the Upanisa Sutta, and the Upanisa Sutta talks about 23 links rather than the 12 links as we understand them. So what I'm doing is I'm going to walk people through from

jara-marana and the components of suffering and walk back towards birth and being and clinging and craving and feeling and so on, all the way at the end, all the way to the taints, that is to say the asavas, the defilements of ignorance, of sensual craving, of being. That's going to be the first volume. And then the second volume is going to talk about 12, or rather 11, additional links, starting with suffering. The Upanisa Sutta talks about how suffering can lead to conviction in this practice, and how that leads into gladness, and that leads into joy, that leads into tranquility and equanimity, and so on. So that part of that book will be the path leading to nirvana, path leading to this experience of the jhanas, leading to this experience of nirvana and full awakening.

So I'm looking at probably a good year and a half to two years before I'm actually done with the book, and then the editing and things like that, so maybe three years down the road it'll be done. We'll see how things go. I tend to be a fast writer, because once I start to get into it, I write a lot, and basically each chapter itself is almost like a book, because each chapter is about 90 to 100 pages. So it could just be a lot, a massive 2000-page book, which might just be divided into separate volumes. We'll see how it works. But aside from that, I also have another book that just came out, and then I have three other books that are in the works. They're basically going to be transcripts of different talks I've given, so they're like collections of different talks I've given and different modules of teaching that I've given, that can be available in book form. Well, Delson, this has been fascinating, a wonderful conversation. Thank you very much. I'd love to do a sequel.

There's so much we haven't talked on. You have very interesting views on 31 planes of existence. Are they psychological states, as is commonly said, or are they actual places that you can end up? And you have some very interesting views on that. Perhaps I'll just tease that question. Anyway, Delson Armstrong, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. For more interviews like these, as well as articles, videos, and guided meditations, visit www.guruviking.com.