A Conversation with Delson Armstrong

Welcome to Deconstructing Yourself, the podcast for metamodern mutants interested in meditation, awakening, Vajrayana, Tantra, Zen, what color is your lightsaber, psychedelics, non-duality, love, and more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and in this episode I'm speaking with Delson Armstrong. Delson Armstrong is a meditation teacher whose work brings together Buddhist, yogic, and tantric traditions. A teacher of Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation, he is known especially for his expertise in the jhanas and other deep meditative states. He is also authorized to teach all seven stages of Lahiri Mahasaya's Kriya Yoga and practices in the Sri Vidya and Trika lineages.

Delson teaches internationally, offering retreats, workshops, and individual guidance focused on awakening, freedom from suffering, and translating ancient contemplative methods for modern practitioners. Now, without further ado, here's a conversation with Delson Armstrong. Delson, welcome to the Deconstructing Yourself podcast. Thank you, Michael. It's good to be here. Yeah, I'm happy you're here at all. You mentioned that you had quite a harrowing experience recently. Yeah, that's right. This might have not happened. It was quite an ordeal and totally unexpected, but here I am, you know. This was about, I think, maybe 10 days ago. Actually, a little over 10 days ago. It's almost been a couple of weeks, I guess. Yeah, it was in the middle of the night, around 3 a.m.

It was a one in 1,000-year rainfall for this part of Missouri where we're in, and where I was was a pretty low land. So my cabin was pretty much submerged, and I was caught off guard, almost drowned, but got to safety and waited till the morning until things receded and, you know, kind of rescued myself. And I had a fellow friend, a monk, who was hanging by a tree the whole night in the dark, and he got a pretty bad puncture wound and things like that. So all I can say is we're lucky to be alive. I mean, it was quite something. And did you end up being unharmed?

I actually got a pretty deep gash on my foot, to my ankle. I didn't know it because I was just struggling to stay afloat. And I guess what happened is everything was jumbled, all the furniture, and maybe a glass piece was there that sliced through the foot. So when I got up to the attic, I noticed the injury. I couldn't really feel it, but I could see all this gore.

And I had to walk about a mile to get to the ambulance, once we found the first responders, because there was so much flood water everywhere. So we wrapped something around the wound and walked to the ambulance. And yeah, so we got stitched up, but stitches are removed and everything is fine now. And was your family not there, or is everybody safe? Everybody's safe here. Actually, this was about the second to last day of the retreat. So this was actually at the retreat center at Dhammasuka Meditation Center. So we have sort of an upper level, uphill, which is the main center, and then the monastic residence and my residence, which is down below. My family, my mom and my sister, are in India at the time.

That's where they live, and so for them, it was quite a shock to hear that this had happened. Wow. Well, I'm so glad that you're safe and that everyone is relatively uninjured. That I imagine was pretty intense and shocking. Yeah. You know, it was interesting. The monk and I, we were at the hospital and we had nothing but the clothes on our backs, and I didn't even have any shoes on. And so they gave us these psychiatric ward scrubs to wear, and we checked into the hotel looking like a couple of escaped mental patients. Really a dark comedy at the end, yeah.

That's wonderful. So everyone ended up being okay. Yeah, it's all good now. Okay. Well, we share a friend in Ruben Laconin, and I was posting about this interview on Twitter just a few moments ago. Ruben asked the question, if you survived the flood, using your cities? That's a good question. I wish I could. I wish I would have, you know.

So, what's interesting about that is I was basically trying to stay afloat. Like, my head was pretty much covered in water. So I'm trying to stay afloat. I have my phone, which was still working at the time, with the managers uphill, who couldn't really get to us, and they were speaking with emergency services. But what struck me in hindsight, when I look back at this, is that there were no gods that I was praying to. There was no sort of like, oh God, help me or anything like that. It was just pure primal awareness that I need to survive. And that was all that was there. And I look back on that, and it shifted the way I perceive, let's say, spirituality now.

Well, I'm still trying to piece it all together for myself. And I think I'm in an interesting space, where a lot of the spiritual exploration I've done in my life has been a lot of fun things, a lot of entertainment, let's say, in hindsight, because I've always been interested in Tantra and the cult and other things like that, in addition to meditative practices like going through jhanas and getting into Rigpa, these kinds of things.

And I see for myself this sort of disillusionment with the everyday kind of spiritual fare of, you know, let's do this and let's do that, and enlightenment and the journey to enlightenment. And there are these levels of awakening and all of these interesting things that we see not only in Buddhism, but in Vedanta and other traditions.

And I think that, and I can speak for myself, but maybe this is a value judgment on spirituality in general, which is that I feel like spirituality has become yet another form of accomplishment for the ego, the spiritual ego. I'm in a place where I'm looking at all of that and I see through it. I see the entertainment value of it. And right now I'm still trying to make sense of it in terms of what really matters and what really makes sense in the long run. And I think the beauty of it is that it's never a conclusion. It's an ongoing process of, you know, self-discovery, so to speak, discovery of values and what makes sense.

What matters, discovery of, well, is this the path, or is it my own path? And what does the end of that path look like? And so it's a real reckoning for the spiritual ego. The spiritual ego, it's a great term. And of course, it's a concept that, for example, Trungpa Rinpoche really wrote very powerfully about in his book on spiritual materialism. And it's a very deep, important topic, right? In what way are attainments, or I'm at this level or that level, or even just the thought that you've achieved anything at all, simply feeding your own narcissistic inflation, right? Kind of making you feel grander or more special or somehow worthy, or that you've achieved this or that.

And so I'm curious, you have worked in a lot of different traditions. So have I. It's an interesting territory to explore, how various traditions interact and so on. But you're bringing it down to something fundamental, and I'm just curious, what have you found that most effectively cuts through that spiritual ego, at least temporarily, or maybe more enduringly? The flood, and that's kind of stayed with me in a positive way, let's say, in the sense that over the last couple of weeks what I've been seeing is that there's this, what I'm always referring to as, this sort of primal awareness that cuts through all of the BS. And it's very fresh in the sense that I look through the structures of my conceptual framework that comes up, and maybe there's a sense of like, this isn't something that feels worthy for me or of me, or I feel like, you know, this is impinging on my boundaries.

And that awareness cuts through right there and says, no, here's a time to establish boundaries, or here's a time to just say no, or here's a time to just be silent. And so as I'm starting to become more in tune, let's say, with this primal awareness, that's really helping to cut through a lot of the baggage. And I'm also quite reflective of this understanding that I don't want to make the primal awareness a thing in itself either. So it's there in the background at all times, it feels, but at the same time I can't call it mine or something that's always there. Yeah, what you're calling primal awareness, this won't let the ego take any particularly permanent stand, right?

Even if we can't kind of find a view from nowhere and inhabit that day by day, we can allow this knowing to continuously keep our grip really light and maybe even playful on the views that we're holding, right? Even about what we may have achieved, or what our wants are, or any of that. Maybe a little bit of a, you call it the exhausted seeker. I love that. But we could also say be a little bit just sort of amused by it all and not taking ourselves quite so seriously.

So I did bring up your new book, which I haven't heard you talk about much anywhere. And this is very interesting in the flow of your spiritual biography, coming from having seemingly done all the tricks, right? Attained all the stuff and then renounced the attainments, and then taking on the mantle of guru-hood, or at least teacher-hood, in a tantric lineage, and now even beyond what's at least traditionally seen as being a guru, which is being the composer of a Sanskrit text, right? And so I'm curious if you can comment about that, because I just find it super fascinating. And also, what is your book about? Yeah, yeah.

So this book, it's called Moksha Vidya, which means the heart of awakening, of liberation. And I was in Copenhagen after retreat last year, in a hotel room. It's so interesting. It was just an inspired sort of writing, and it came to me that it would make a lot of sense to just write it in this way. And so the Sanskrit verses, or the Sanskrit aphorisms, seemed like a really fun way of doing it, because you really have to be good in Sanskrit, you have to really know your Sanskrit to be able to do it. And there's so many words for different flavors of the thing that you want to describe.

And Sanskrit is one of those languages that allows you to do that. So there's a few hundred Sanskrit aphorisms in there. And it was inspired really in the old traditions of things like the Yoga Sutras or the Vedanta Sutras. And the idea is like, let's just pack statement in Sanskrit and then translate that, and then I figured I would give my auto-commentary on that. And it came inspired by this realization, I maybe you could see realization, but just this thought that, yeah, right now it's a love letter to me. That's really what it is. It's a love letter to the exhausted seeker. It's a love letter to everyone who has tried every trick in the book, and seeing through the spiritual materialism, and wanting to get to that space, let's say, or just wanting to get to a place where they don't need to go anywhere.

And so it's divided up into a few sections. And it's seemingly a synthesis of Buddhism, Vedanta, Tantra, Yoga, and Sankhya. Form. And, you know, fortunately enough, I have the copy still. I was planning to have it done sometime later this year, but with the flood, the edits were gone on my old computer, which were nowhere to be found. They've drifted away. So luckily I have an edit from my copy editor from the email. So it'll take me a couple of months to kind of just go through it, given my schedule, and then to release it. And what I thought I would do is also include some illustrations. So I hired an amazing artist from Calcutta who comes from the Kali Tantra tradition.

So he uses a lot of different yantras and things like that to illustrate some of the verses and some of the words, some of the passages that are there in the book. Magnum opus thus far. I'm only 36 years old, so who knows what else might come up over my time here on this planet. But yeah, it's a personal love letter to everybody who has tried everything and still realizes and sees through the emptiness of all of it. Well, this is incredibly interesting. I'm just curious, how did these Sanskrit aphorisms arrive for you? Are they just appearing in your head, already formed in Sanskrit?

Or are you carefully assembling a hyper-condensed Sanskrit aphorism in the sutra style? Or how did the text actually come to you? So I think there's about 400 Sanskrit aphorisms in the text. And it actually came in as just inspired streams of consciousness over a period of about two days while I was in Copenhagen. So it was just typing in the transliterated version of Sanskrit, because obviously I don't have a keyboard that I can have the Devanagari script on. But just doing the transliteration of, this is what comes into mind in terms of the content.

For example, the very first aphorism in the book is Atamoksha Dhyananam, which means now comes the actual study of liberation. Very similar to what you would see in the Yoga Sutras. Yes. Vedanta Sutras. And so it's like, okay, that's great. That's the first verse. And then the second verse is freedom is liberation of the heart in the English. So what's the Sanskrit? The Sanskrit would be Vrdeya Vimocca. So moksha, which is liberation, is the freedom of the heart. Vimocca being freedom or liberation.

So there are little tidbits of statements, and it just came up, and it was like, I want to say this, and this is what's coming up. And then that's like writing from the heart. It's writing from the inspiration. And then the actual translation, and then the actual, let's say, commentary took a few more days, right, to really look at it and say, what do I actually want to say when I'm saying something like this? So there's the intuitive mind, for lack of a better phrase, which comes up with these Sanskrit phrases, and then there's the one that has some level of analysis and logic, and saying, okay, what do I actually want to say?

And then allowing the intuitive mind to take that and then write up the auto-commentary. And that's how the process continued. So after I left Copenhagen, I was in India, in Mumbai, and spent a better part of maybe two months, let's say, working out all of the auto-commentaries. That appeared to you in Sanskrit. That's really, really interesting. Yeah. Now, you said that, I probably won't get all of them, but that it's kind of a synthesis of Buddhism and Tantra and Advaita Vedanta and Sankhya and a few others. And so obviously, let's say on a philosophical level, these systems don't agree about a lot of stuff. That would be very hard to make work. And so I assume you're coming from a different place, not trying to somehow make a coherent statement about the nature of the universe or whatever, but rather talk about something else.

How would you describe that? Yeah, that's actually a really good point, because obviously, as you rightly said, these different traditions don't agree on many things, including, let's say, their understanding of the nature of reality. But at the same time, what I noticed in my own experience of writing this, Patanjali. Because to give you a little bit of background with Patanjali, as far as I know with the Yoga Sutras, there were so many different styles and lineages of yoga at that time, or at least this is the traditional understanding.

And so the idea for Patanjali was to synthesize all of that and come to the core of what was most practical. And so that was the intention, let's say, when I look back on it, for example. So the ethical framework is part of that. The experience of what Vedanta, Advaita Vedanta especially, is discussing in terms of the inseparability of the Atman and Brahman, even though that completely is in conflict with the traditional understanding of anatta, and especially in Theravadan Buddhism, yet it's there. It's there as sat-chit-ananda. And a little bit of Kashmir Shaivism, which is the primary purpose of recognizing that experience.

So it's like taking different elements that I felt were important from each of these different traditions, and then bringing them together in a possible practical way. For example, with Tantra, there are so many different practices relating to the use of energy, like prana and the system of the chakras. There are techniques there that are not my own, but inspired from my understanding of things like Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, and also inspired from my own experimentations with breath work and using prana as a way of calming down the analytical mind and stabilizing the different values in the body. So it's like taking the best of everything and bringing it together without necessarily coming to some kind of a,

immediate conclusion about the nature of reality. Although I do touch upon a little bit of that in the last section, where I call it para purusha. So purusha in Sankhya and yoga is the unchanging, immutable element that sometimes is referred to as consciousness. It is whatever you may call it, and then you have prakriti. And so my sort of twist on that is going beyond what I call parapurusha in Sanskrit, which is usually translated as paraconsciousness.

It's the so-called substrate before any kind of conceptualizing can happen through the process of consciousness. Yeah, this is a topic that you've begun to really explore, the paraconsciousness or parapurusha. And I'd love to dig in a little bit there, because in different places you seem to be saying something slightly different about it, or it just seemingly, how can these two things both be the properties of paraconsciousness? So I have some questions there, but let's just start with you just kind of talking about that a little bit. There's a Substack of mine called The Mirror Beyond Mind. And that is referring to this article that I had written for the Berggruen Institute essay competition last year on the nature of consciousness.

And my whole sort of idea was to explore the different concepts of what consciousness is from the different lenses of traditions. So starting off with the Vedas, which talk about Purusha, and the Upanishads, which talk about Prajna, and so on, and then going down towards Buddhism, and then finally into Kashmir Shaivism and so on. But the idea was that for me, as I see paraconsciousness, I look at it as a way of understanding the uncontrived or non-contrived, non-conceptual mind. The mind before any complexification happens, and before any sort of thing that is able to reflect and say, ah, this is what consciousness is.

And so, to try to tie everything together, my way of looking at it is that, yeah, paraconsciousness means it's beyond the conceptual frameworks, transcending the idea of ordinary conceptual frameworks of what mind is, and that it is also the substrate from where mind arises. Good. And so in different places you've called this substrate neither sentient nor insentient, and that you can only know it after the fact? Yeah, this is something that I've said as well. I do look at it from the lens of Buddhism as well, about something like Nibbana Dhatu and something known as Vinyanamanidasanam. And I think that's a very interesting term in Pali, Vinyanamanidasanam, which is the non-manifestative consciousness or the non-reflective awareness, as I like to translate it.

So it's like the mirror without a reflection, putting a value on it. It's the purest place to be in, before the sense of an I, before the sense of a me arises. When there is a sense of I or me, there is duality. There's a sense of subjectivity and objectivity. And so I don't call it sentient in the sense, because my definition of sentience is that it is playing in the realms of karma and consciousness, whereas it's not insentient either, because it is alive and it is outside. This is how I'm looking at it. It is outside of the parameters of ordinary, you know, space-time consciousness and conceptuality.

So it's like my sort of way of coining what we might call the Dhamadhatu. And if we're to switch into Nandalshava Tantra language, is this the prakash without the vimarsha? Yes, exactly. Exactly. So the vimarsha is all of the movement, the vibration, the shakti that is flowing through creation, the prakriti. And prakasha here is the self-effulgent light, but also the mirror through which that light shines. And is that light knowable in any sense? I guess what I'm trying to get to is, in your experience, let's not talk about theory at all, let's just talk about experience.

Is this a lights-out or lights-on place? As I'm looking at it right now, it's both. It's both. That's an interesting answer. So do you feel like the entryway determines how it's going to show up, or how, for you experientially, does that show up? Experientially, it's like there's a reflection of what is being experienced, as, ah, that's what it is, but also the realization that it's just the reflection of what it is, and that the reflection is not the thing itself. So within the experience, within the capacity to experience, there's only reflection

is arising due to that light, to use that language. And again, does the sort of practice you're doing at the time determine that? Yeah, I would say that the entry point is an interesting way of saying it, because how you may contextualize that is dependent upon not only the language, but the tradition that you're coming from, or anyone is coming from. Yes. Devoid of culture and tradition and lineage, and just looking at bare, pure experience, this is what I'm saying: it is always there, and it's just the knowing that it's always there. But the knowing itself is a reflection of it. Mm-hmm. Of course, Rigpa means knowing, right? And I'm just curious, do you think those are in any sense? No, no.

Yeah. So this leads in some really cool directions. After all these years, I'm not trying to use spirituality to determine the nature of the universe. I think that's just not really that useful of a direction. But let's just say, for fun or for maybe an experiential clarity or teaching, if we think about what causes the world to arise in experience, in the suttas, it's karma or a kind of impurity, right, that suddenly causes the world to arise. But if we switch to tantra, then it's joy or play or exuberance that causes the world to arise. And of course, you can be tempted to ask the question, well, which is it? And I just don't ask questions like that, really.

It's more like, for you, how do you want to respond to that? I just put it that way. a little bit about this as well. I've done a series on dependent origination, and the last book that I wrote on it was on the topic of craving. And that came from my reflection on this very topic, which is, is it coming from karma or is it coming from joy, and so on? But the way I looked at it at that time, and the way I reflect on it now, is that it's basically just vibration. Whether you want to call it joy or whether you want to call it karma, I see all of it as vibration.

And so at some point in conditioned time, in the creation of time or in the arising of time, there's also, concurrent to that, the way I see it, a vibration. And that vibration is just whatever it is. Depending on the lens one may take, one may say, oh, it's karma. It's the unfolding of the karma of the next arising of the universe. Or the context can be that it's Shakti that has now come into play, and now here we are in this divine lila, where we are experiencing the reflection of all of that.

But at the very bare essence of it, I just call it vibration. It's just vibration. And so whether it's karma or joy is more about the lineage or the tradition or the religion or the language. Yeah. And so do you find that one of these views is better for certain types of outcomes than another? Do you tend to lean more into the karma view or the joy view? And I'm talking now, not about describing the nature of the universe, but just in work, in life, in teaching, in practice, all of that. Depends on my mood. Yes. It's the bhava, right? That is the important part. Yeah, it depends on my mood. And also the context in which I might be taking on that teacher role, and understanding where a person might be coming from.

Some people may be looking at it and saying, oh, it's all karma, and then giving them that challenge of saying, hey, can you see it from a different perspective? And also for those people who might be a bit more exuberant and say it's all coming from this divine play, then giving them that other perspective on the person, and maybe even poking and challenging a little bit. Yeah, it definitely helps to release the grip on a certain view, right? And so that's really important.

You went from the absolutely driest and emptiest point of practice, like total nirodha for six days, to the absolutely polar opposite end of the spectrum, with the goddess and play and lila and all that, which of course I love. I have a lot of tantric background also and really, really appreciate that. But I'm curious, and this is a funny way of asking, what was missing that these goddess traditions give to you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting. The reason why I actually went into the goddess traditions was because of all things I was consulting with an astrologer, in such a way that I am completely obsessed, or I have been, maybe still so, completely obsessed with the project of liberation.

And so the idea of whatever it is that will take you there. I've been sort of trying to see the blind spots, where there have been times where I've been attached to a certain view. And so trying to go beyond that, or trying to see what the opposite of that is, is one aspect. But the very practical approach has been: I was speaking with a South Indian astrologer and asking him to look at my chart and see what's missing. What should I be looking at? And having this implicit faith in him and in the tradition of Jyotish, he said, well, based on the planets and all of these things and the different charts you have in this life, you should look at worship specifically of Lalita.

And so Sri Vidya was the immediate answer. me to it. And I'm very happy for that, because it's given me a very different perspective on things. Something that I experienced a long time ago, like 30 years ago, after seeing a lecture by a Jyotishi, is that I started having very intense dreams night after night after night, where the Vedic planets would come to me and teach me Jyotish. It was super bizarre. I was just like, what is going on? But I just kept getting download after download after download. And so I ended up doing a lot with Jyotish, just because it's like, hey, this is being presented to me. I didn't ask for this, but here it is.

And it's really fascinating. Again, it's not about believing or not believing, but it's certainly something that is traditionally part of all these cultures and religions, even. And so there's a lot there. So just talk to me about your own experience with Lalita. Yeah. So I was, in that sense, shopping around for someone who could teach me. And it's very interesting when you go into this discovery of Sri Vidya, that a lot of teachers are reluctant initially to give you any kind of practice, for whatever reason. And so it took a while before I was able to find somebody who was not only willing, but was able to actually have the capacity and practice of imbibing and imparting that to me.

My guru in Sri Vidya, his name is Gita Nath, and he lives in Bhuvaneshwar in East, in Orissa. Sometimes he's in Delhi, and sometimes he's in Bhuvaneshwar. But in any case, he's somebody that I found through a YouTube video, and he was explaining the process of the Sri Chakra, and that there are three ways of approaching the Sri Chakra. He is also a Kriya yogi. So, in the lineage of Sri Yukteswar and Paramahansa Hariharananda, we had that bond, that understanding. What fascinated me about his way of approaching things was what we call the Samayachara school. So you have Dakshinachara, you have Vamachara, so that's the right-hand path and left-hand path.

And you have something called Samayachara, which is also known as Mishrachara, which means it's a combination of the two. What happens is, let's say it's orthodox and heterodox. The idea is that with the Dakshinachara school it's very much ritual based, and the Vamachara kind of tries to transgress all of that, but Samayachara is very meditative in nature. So you're taking those components of worshipping the Sri Chakra, or the different aspects of the Sri Chakra, which is the physical manifestation of Lalita, in the sense that you're internalizing that. You yourself are taking the elements of the different goddesses and gods that reside, or the energies that reside, in the Sri Chakra, and you are implanting and imprinting them in your own energy body through the process of meditation and mantra practice.

So I've never, for one, been very, I find it very interesting and fascinating, and I can do it to a point. But this is really what fascinated me more than anything else. So that was the practice, and going through what we call the krama, the sequence of, you always start with Ganesha, in this case Mahaganapati, because he is the one who breaks the obstacles. He's the one who either brings or breaks the obstacles, to approach the empress, which in this case is Lalita. And the final real form of Lalita is Nirvana Sundari, who is the playful one, who is the embodiment of nirvana.

And so there are certain mantras that you will use to do that. I've had interesting visions in dreams, in sleep, where I'm actually copulating with the goddess, or different visions in which the goddess becomes one with me, and things like that. It was a lot of fun to have those experiences, but also the insights that arise in terms of letting go of the rigidity of what you were referring to as the dryness of other practices, and really steeping the mind and the heart in the playful nature of Lalita. In fact, Lalita is what it means: the playful one. And so having that ability was really important for me. Yeah, again, I kind of gestured at this earlier.

It's really interesting that at one point you're kind of renouncing any attainments and don't look to me for perfection and so on, which I thought was a very brave and very honest move. Just for the record, I really appreciated you doing that. And now in another tradition, you're taking on the seat not only of a teacher, but of a guru. It's Shastras, Sanskrit scriptures. So how are you holding that? How is that showing up? Is this just what's happening and you're going with it? Let me put it another way. What did you learn the first time around that is helping you to do this the second time around? Yeah, yeah. I'm very aware of that process in the sense of, wow, this is actually happening.

But also at the same time, I find myself just flowing through life. And, not to try to amplify my ego, but the real energies, we can say, or archetypes that I really resonate with are beings like Ashtavakra or Krishna or someone like Dathatreya, which is to say, I don't take the idea of being a guru very seriously. And I definitely don't want to, but I find myself in places and situations where I'm able to uphold that in the most sacred way. But just as seeing me do that, find me at home in Mumbai, watching a Netflix show, eating potato chips in my shorts. Fabulous. Something about the way you talk about paraconsciousness reminds me of the very unusual way that Nisargadatta Maharaj talks about consciousness and awareness.

Have you explored that connection? Yeah, it's so funny. A few months ago with a friend. Actually, he might be a mutual friend. You might know him. But in any case, he came to India for about a month and came to see me while I was in Mumbai. And we had this idea of why don't we go and see Nisargadatta Maharaj's Samadhi, which was a wonderful experience because it's in a crematorium and it has his Samadhi and his Guru Samadhi. And I haven't read the book I Am That, but I have seen some of the

original Marathi interviews of Nisargadatta. And I definitely resonate with what he says, especially where he cuts through the BS and he says, okay, fine, you talk about awareness, you talk about being that and so on. But can you go beyond that? Can you cut through that? And he uses such stark language in Marathi, I love that, which really shakes up a person when they're ready to see that. Omurati, which I do, it's a completely different experience. Yeah, I Am That is like a timeless spiritual classic. Everyone should read it without a doubt. It's wonderful. But actually, it's a much later text called Meditations with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, where he's basically, just before he dies, he gives these very unfiltered, very intense talks that he goes deeply into what's before consciousness.

and uses consciousness not in the way that we're used to hearing it as, even though groundless, it is the ground of awareness or whatever. He's using it in a very similar way to how you're describing paraconsciousness, that for him, consciousness has this Vimarsha quality that contains some I-ness. It's super interesting. Something that if you haven't dug into it, might be at least fun to do. What's the book called? I definitely want to check. called Meditations with Sri Nisargadatta. And I'm sure there's a Marathi version. You can tell, unlike I Am That, which was translated by Maurice Frydman, another highly awake being, by the way. But he did a lot of massaging of the text to make it really work in English.

Whereas this Meditations book is much later. It's 10 years later. And you can tell it's a lot more bare metal right into the original talk. One thing I like about Nisargadatta is his starkness. And I'm reminded of a story. You might know this one and maybe your listeners do, but it's such a great story in any case where I think towards the end of his life, his devotees, his disciples are there and they say, we want to make a Samadhi for you. We want to make a place that we can commemorate for you. And in his usual flair, he says, for what? So that the dogs can piss on it.

He's great. Yeah, I love him for that. So, Delson, when is your book coming out, The Heart of Liberation? Well, it depends on how I can defeat my procrastination. And flood damage. And flood damage, that's right. I'm hoping maybe towards the end of this year, it will be out. Fabulous. Well, thanks for coming on the show today. I know it's been short. I hope we get a chance to talk again soon. It's been a real pleasure, and I really look forward to seeing you soon in Berkeley. Thank you, Michael. Thank you.