Ep381: I Nearly Died - Delson Armstrong

In this episode, filmed in London, England, I am once again joined by Delson Armstrong, spiritual teacher, meditation virtuoso, and author of A Mind Without Craving. Delson recounts his recent close encounter with death in severe floods in Missouri. He recalls fighting for his life as 10 feet of water filled his retreat cabin, and how he escaped with a deep laceration of his foot. Delson describes the surprising consequences of this experience, including what he calls a crotchety old man attitude towards spiritual practice as entertainment or escapism, symptoms of trauma, and a new perspective on meditation and enjoying life. Delson also talks about spiritual luminosity, why he hasn't meditated since the floods, his openness to a change in life direction, and the relationship between the will to live and the ego.

So without further ado, Delson Armstrong. Delson Armstrong, here we are. Here we are, in the flesh. Here in London. And so wonderful to finally meet. And we've had a nice little while here walking around Hyde Park. And in our walk, you informed me that you've had an interesting experience in Missouri. I wonder if you might tell us about that. Yeah, first of all, it's good to meet you in person. And yeah, I'm really excited about this.

This happened, if I remember the date correctly, somewhere around the 6th or 7th of June, 2026. So just a couple of months ago, no, more than a couple of months, three and a half months. We had this torrential rainfall at Dhammasuka. Dhammasuka is the meditation centre where they teach TWIM, and it's what Bhante Vimalaramsi founded as the epicentre for TWIM.

Dhammasuka has two levels. There's a top level, which is on top of the hill where the main centre is, and that has the retreat cabins, the dining hall, the meditation hall, and so on. As you go downhill, there is a monastic area and teachers' area. They have a few cabins there, including mine, which was named Nirodha, funnily enough. So if you ask anyone at Dhammasuka, where is Delson? He's in Nirodha, usually, watching TV. So this was the night of somewhere around June 7th, I think. And the next day we were going to have a memorial for Bhante Vimalaramsi, because it had been now, I think, two or three years since he passed.

In any case, we were just having rain that whole night. It was a usual night, and I was, you know, getting ready to go to bed, and went to sleep. I got up around 2.40 or 2.50 in the night and looked at my phone, and there were all of these messages from Bhante Kusala. Bhante Kusala is another monastic who was visiting at that time. Actually, it was maybe two days since he had arrived.

He does retreats there and he's a good friend of mine, and he was living in the cabin adjacent to mine. The messages I got from him were: Delson, my cabin is flooded, I've left my cabin, and I'm hanging from a tree at this moment, and the cabin is totally gone. I'm thinking, what is he talking about? And I see all of these videos. First of all it's pitch black, and then there's a lightning flash, and you can see the water rising up and getting right into the cabin. So I get up from my bed and turn on the lights, and I look outside my cabin window, the window of my door. I can't see anything.

And as I'm doing this, there's water coming up, seeping in through the door at the bottom. I'm thinking, oh, I've never experienced this before. This is weird. I walk to the middle of my cabin and call up David Johnson, who's living up there. There's also a section where they live, and Kirsten, who is one of the retreat managers.

No one is picking up, and finally Kirsten calls me back and I say, my cabin is flooding. She says, what do you mean? I say, first of all, I got a message from Bhante Kusala that he's hanging from a tree, and she's like, what? Before I could say anything more, the door of the cabin just bursts open.

There's this huge flood of water that fills the entire cabin. It's like something out of the Titanic, and there's 10 or 12 feet of water that submerges most of the cabin. So I'm trying to hang on to something for dear life, because I'm almost drowning. I have the phone in one hand and I'm holding on to something with the other, just trying to keep afloat. The water sucks out again, because at that point the cabin has moved from its foundation and it's spinning around like Noah's Ark or something. By this time it's pitch dark. Luckily the phone was still on, and I was speaking to David and Kirsten on speakerphone. They said they called emergency services, 911, two or three times, and they said, we're on our way. I'm just trying to figure out how to stay afloat. In that moment there was just pure survival instinct. My body is full of adrenaline.

I don't have anything else in mind. Nothing else comes to mind. There's no mantras, there's no Buddha, there's no triple gem, there's no gods or anything. I'm just thinking, pure survival. The only thing I'm in is this primal awareness that keeps me glued to every moment, to make sure I'm not making any kind of mistake. At some point the water comes back up again, and it's going to suck me in, suck me out, actually. I'm just holding on to whatever I can hold on to. I remember at one point I was holding on to a wooden frame and it broke, and I almost left the cabin.

So I was holding on to the door at this point with my feet. I was like this, and then the water receded again. David said, well, there is the attic section, that would probably be the safest place to get to. Luckily there was a ladder. I found the ladder and I climbed it and got to the attic. Then the water rose again, the ladder floated away, and at this point it's pitch dark. I can't see anything. The only light I have is the flashlight from my phone, so I'm looking at what's going on, and I look at my foot and there's this big gash

over here on my foot. It's just muscle and tissue, and I'm thinking, oh god, I hope I don't bleed out. That's my one worry. I'm applying pressure, I can't do anything else. I just have my phone. So I tell David, look, my foot's gone, it's been cut open. He says, well, we called emergency services and they're looking for you guys, but they're all still on the way. At this point they can't even come down the hill to find us. The whole thing has become a huge torrential lake, so there's nothing they can do and nothing we can do except wait. I remember through the night I was calling out to Bhante, and he was calling out to me, to make sure that both of us were alive, or at least conscious.

All we could do is wait, and so around six o'clock, maybe 5.40 or something, you could start to see the sun come up, so you could start to see a little bit of light. I look out, and I remember the window has an attic. So I'm looking out like that.

I look and there's another cabin behind me, and I'm thinking that's not right, because my cabin is the only one that's towards the gate, so something has happened here. In that whole process I'm smelling gas, and I can hear a gas leak going on. I hear Bhante's voice, Bhante Kusala. He just has his yellow shirt on, everything else was gone. He had his phone tied in a little pouch, which he hung on the tree, so he had climbed down. By this time the water had receded, and he called out to me and said, we need to get out. I don't have my ladder, and I've got my foot busted open, so I had to basically jump off from the attic and go through all this wreckage. Then I tried to find our bearings, where are we? He said, yeah, we've moved around, and everything is just a wreck, there's wreckage everywhere. So we're walking through the forest and finally get up to the road.

At that point we had a little sheet with us, so we wrapped something around my foot. Bhante Kusala had a log that pierced through his rib cage, so he had a puncture wound. We're on the road walking down, and then we see the ER guys, and we're waving to them, the emergency responders. They see us, and I don't have my shoes on, I don't have anything, just the clothes on my back. They said, well, we have an ambulance, but we're going to have to walk a mile through the floodwater because there's no way the ambulance can get here. So we're walking through floodwater, and we finally get to the ambulance and they take us to the hospital. They clean up the wounds and stitch us up, and our clothes are gone, so they give us these psychiatric ward, kind of like scrubs. They said, okay, you're good to go.

and we had to find a hotel for the night or two so we luckily i had my phone with me you know and in my phone uh were my credit cards so i was able to actually go to the hotel we waited for a taxi in missouri it's difficult it's difficult to get a taxi so finally we had to call the hotel manager he picked us up and then he said there's no hot water today so we had to go to a different hotel i mean that and then uh we get to the hotel and we are in our scrubs mind you so my hair is all disheveled here is this monk who's not a he doesn't look like a monk just you know completely disheveled and we look like an escaped a bunch of escaped mental patients and get to the hotel

And we sleep through the night and it rains, so we have PTSD about that. It's like, oh god, what's going on? So that was a horrendous situation that we went through. Yeah, yeah. And so a couple of days go by and we get back to the center. We have cabins for us on the upper level and we live there, we stay there. And for me, my personal journey was that, wow, in that moment, where I thought I was really going to die, like I was going to drown, and I did almost drown. The only thing that came to mind was just the survival instinct, this primal awareness and the desire to keep living for the sake of my mom and my sister.

That was really all that was there. It was like, if I go, who's going to take care of my mom and sister? That was sort of the thought that I had. And over the course of a few weeks, first of all, it had to be business as usual, because we had to do a retreat in California and we had upcoming retreats at Dhammasuka. So it was business as usual. So I had about five days to kind of recover. And then I headed to California and did a retreat over there. No, I'm sorry, it wasn't five days. It was maybe more like 10 days, because I remember we took the stitches out after a week.

And then a couple of days later, I went to California. And the thing that happened to me was, I realized that I had become, as I say jokingly, like a crotchety old man regarding spirituality. Like in my mind, it became, my personal experience was, spirituality has become a form of entertainment. It's become another thing to pass the time.

Yeah, everybody says they want enlightenment, whatever that means to them. Everybody says they want freedom, whatever that means to them. But in my own experience, in my own mind, it was like, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? What is it that we're actually doing? And when I look back on that experience, I have a friend, Ryan Burton, who's one of these sort of psychonauts who goes through these different parts of the cosmos and his mind, and he does a lot of cool things.

And I told him about my experience. And one of the things that came to mind afterwards was I did experience something that was, we could say, otherworldly. It was more of an impression of this thing of seeing the cosmos and the interconnectedness of everything. And then beyond that, these multidimensional beings, some kind of beings that were feeding off of the energy of every being. And it's like all our emotions, our meditational energy, everything is being, sort of, siphoned off.

And I try to make sense of that. And Ryan was like, yeah, well, Robert Monroe from the Monroe Institute talked about that. He talked about loosh, something called loosh. I said, it feels very nefarious. It feels like we're in some kind of prison planet. It feels like we're just cattle or something. He said, yeah, that could be the sense of it. But another way of looking at it, that Robert Monroe talked about, was that they're siphoning off energy, but it's like your parallel person in the future or a different timeline that's utilizing that energy for whatever they need in this moment. So it's like you needed that energy when you were surviving the near-death experience.

And another person somewhere else that's you in a different timeline is taking energy from you for their particular energy. And I thought that was really interesting. I couldn't really make sense of it. But the thing I felt was, I felt like I saw or experienced what the Gnostics would call the demiurge. And that there's something beyond that. What it is, I can't tell you. But yeah, this is the impression I got. So since then, I've been more impatient with people who are just coming in for what I would call spiritual entertainment.

And I don't find it a problem to be a spiritual entertainer, because this is what I feel like we teachers have become nowadays, is spiritual entertainers. So I embrace that and I'm totally fine with having that kind of archetype. But also, I just don't have time for BS. I just see that people are really wasting their time. This is my impression. This is my experience with it. And people should realize that when you die, it doesn't matter how many hours you've meditated, what techniques you've collected, which masters you've seen or experienced things with, the years and decades of practice. What matters in that moment is how clear you are as those moments go by.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What's going on now in your state? Are you thinking? Are you meditating? Are you just being? What's happening right now? Appreciating the silence, in the sense of being here? It's interesting, because initially I was expecting you to ask something. It was interesting to have that level of clear silence in that moment, in those moments. Right now, as we speak, you could say the thinking mind is saying nothing. There's nothing there.

You can call it emptiness, you can call it whatever, and this is what I've been seeing in terms of my, you know, if people come and want to learn from me, let's say, or want to know more about what's going on, I could say that the way I'm envisioning things is there's this thinking mind, and then there's this luminosity which has no words, which has no concepts. And it's like being able to move to and fro between these two.

The thinking mind is just the world of concepts. It's the world of what we're doing when we are teaching or learning or meditating or eating or whatever it is. We have ideas about it, or we develop ideas about it. And then there's the luminosity, which is present all the time. And the only way I'm saying this, that the luminosity is present all the time, is through the medium of the thinking mind.

And the luminous mind needs no proof. It needs nothing. It's like The Big Lebowski. The Dude abides. Let's say Nicky do. It's the best. Let's say abides. Yes. Yes. Well, perhaps I will ask you a few things. We'll come back to the story, I think, in a moment, but while we're on this thread, this is the sort of thing that can't happen on Zoom. You can't just sit like that on Zoom. I mean, you could. Yeah, I'd worry if maybe my connection's not working. You know, seven days later you pop out of neuroticomapathy. Anyway, what you're expressing now is this, I suppose,

an emerging dimension of your practice and experience. Is it something that's been there a while? Is it a rediscovery? How would you contextualize this with what we've talked about in the past? Or where are you at now? It's interesting, because if I try to contextualize it from my own practice and my journey, I think a good way of looking at it is, it's really the Tibetan and the Mahamudra and Dzogchen approach. This is why I keep saying the luminosity. It was very interesting, because I talked about it in Austria, and most of the people there are from Austria, so it doesn't fully translate in German as we would want it to, where the luminosity is seen as something that's bright, and it's a light, and things like that. So I might even just call it clarity. It's that which illuminates things. And if you remember last time we spoke, we talked a little bit about paraconsciousness.

And that's one way of approaching it as well, which is, it illuminates consciousness. It illuminates what it is that we're seeing, experiencing, feeling. It's the illuminator, and it remains. And again, when I'm speaking, I'm aware of the fact that this is a way of conceptualizing it through the context of my experience and understanding of the world at this point in time.

But I also said this, like, people enjoy having a struggle. They enjoy the spiritual struggle. They don't think it can be as simple as just letting go and being here now. It sounds like a Hallmark card, be here now. But really, there's such beautiful simplicity and truth in that. And I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because I do understand and see the rationale and the benefit of practice, of doing some kind of a practice. But I think what happens is we may take the thing that we're practicing as another form of activity, without realizing that we do need to let go of the practice as well. So, like I said, in those moments when you're really facing death, it doesn't matter how many nirodha samapattis you've done.

It doesn't matter how many days you've been in cessation, how many jhanas you've mastered. It doesn't matter what you've achieved and all of these things. My experience has been, what matters is how clear you are. And the luminosity feels like the clearest thing there is. That space where all concepts just die. And it's not something you have to achieve.

It's there already. Just a small shift in the mind. So I see the benefit of having a mind that is trained through some form of modality, for the sake of being able to shift gears from the thinking conceptual mind and to just turn it slightly on itself, so that what it sees is that empty cognizance, that empty radiance. I mean, you can just rest in it, just be in it. I'm going to tuck your mic in. No, what we should do is swap places. No, I'm just joking. Can you imagine if you'd be like, what the hell? They're already tripping because of that silence. Boom. Then suddenly, I'd be changing shirts or something. That'd be so much fun.

Oh, my God. No, we've got to keep this part in. I mean, just for the fun of it, we've got to keep this part in. Anyway. So, when you were in this experience, you talked about this sheer survival instinct, the will to live. And what was your, I suppose, you know, famously Ram Dass, he had a stroke.

And one of the things he reflected about after that stroke was that he was something like, he was afraid to die or he didn't want to die. There was still some kind of attachment to life there. And he reflects in, for example, this documentary that he made, in which I heard him say this. That he realized, he said something like, "Ram Dass, I'm Ram Dass." It was humbling for him to feel that. Somehow he felt like he was perhaps beyond that, it seems. Or he emphasized, at least he had that attachment.

Did you have any sense, or even afterwards, of the relationship between your so-called spiritual practice, or the fruits of your spiritual practice, if we conceive of it like that, and your confrontation with death? It's interesting how we might look at it as an attachment to life. And the way I look at it is, we seem to, and I'm speaking for mostly myself, but also my experience with seeing students, we seem to want to escape life, especially the Theravadan approach. And this might seem like a criticism, but from where I'm coming from, what I'm saying is we have this beautiful gift of life.

And to be able to live it the way we want to, to be able to live it in a way that doesn't cause myself harm or others harm. Obviously there are unintended consequences of all of our actions one way or the other. And we can only take responsibility for the things we know of, that we know we did something wrong.

But my point is, I don't see it as an attachment. I don't see it as an attachment. I see it as another kind of reawakening of, or re-realization, or realization that this life that we have, we're going to leave it anyway. And most people in the spiritual realms, in the world of spiritual practice, seem to use spirituality as a form of entertainment, I said, but also escape. It's like, I don't want this life. I want to live, or I want to leave this life, or I want something that escapes the mundane aspects of life. And it's like, why? You can have everything. You can do all of that.

You're limited maybe by, or we are limited by, our energies and our resources and so on. But to be able to embrace life now is really what I'm looking at. The beauty and the gift of being here and present with whatever is going on. Even if nothing's going on, here we are in the park and people are just strolling by, and we can see the water behind and the sky and everything. And it's just perfect as it is.

We don't know what's going to happen in the next moment. And there can be fear about that. There can be anxiety about that. But those are all conceptual conditioning. I have to do something. I have to achieve something. I need to make something of myself, even in the spiritual world. I think people should be able to look at themselves and be honest and say, are you really doing this for what? What are you doing this for? Because if you're trying to escape this present moment, which truly is the only thing that you really have, how are you going to choose to spend it?

And that choice is up to each and every one of us. If we enjoy meditating in this moment, let's do that. If we enjoy debating about spiritual practices and texts, let's do that. If we enjoy just sitting here in the park and taking in the sunshine, let's do that. But not every moment is going to be a wonderful moment. Every moment can be a moment of panic and fear, and a moment in which we're experiencing abuse, a moment in which we're experiencing trauma, and a moment in which we're experiencing PTSD.

So every moment here is the only thing we have. What can we do about it? How we're going to die and what's going to happen is not in our control. So the only thing we have with this moment is to be able to live as fully as possible in whatever circumstances we are, with whatever is available to us. Does that mean we give up everything? Does that mean we become monastics?

If you want to, great. But you could live life how you're living it right now. You could still have goals. You could still have ambitions. But be prepared to not achieve them. Be prepared to fail. Be prepared to be okay with that. So the attachment to life, I think, is one way of looking at it. And the spiritual practices are one way of helping to contextualize what reality is in terms of the lived moments you have.

We can only say we have so many years based on how old we are. But that's not a promise. That's not guaranteed. So if you are someone living a life of anxiety, living a life of poverty, living a life where you're experiencing abuse, I can understand that. I can empathize with that because I've had my own challenges with that.

But what I would say is, if you can really be in that space where you're fully engrossed in what's happening here, even if it's painful, the only thing that you have to hold on to, so to speak, is your awareness of that pain or your awareness of that pleasure. The pain and the pleasure, just like life, are very fleeting.

They seem eternal. They seem slower than they actually are because of the way we react to them, the way our mind reacts to these situations. But if we are in that space which is aware, the illuminator, as it were, that which illuminates everything, then I believe that that's true freedom. That's like being the lotus in the mud. No matter how terrible things get, you can take refuge in your own luminosity, in your own awareness, and I think that's what counts. And I think that's what I see: people can contextualize that as the luminosity being Krishna or Rama, or being my own mind, or being the Tao, or being Brahman, or being whatever.

Again, that's just for the satisfaction of the conceptual mind. So if I speak for myself, I would say I would just like to live to the fullest in whatever capacity I can. And I'm still working with that, because to be in full surrender, it's a beautiful thing. It's a wonderful flow. But the thinking of mine is always there. What if this happens? What if that happens?

What if people don't, what if people, what if that happens? What if all of these what-ifs? It's okay to have them, as long as you can see them for what they are, which are just passing thoughts. Everything in this world is just passing thoughts, passing concepts. So taking refuge in that space, for me, feels very secure.

You mentioned Mahamudra. In Mahamudra they have that wonderful metaphor of the waves in the ocean. It's interesting you brought that up, because this is the metaphor that I like to use in my teaching now. This is what I was using in Austria, which is the thinking mind, as I put it, is the waves. They come and they go, and the ocean is the stillness, is that space. But they're not separate from one another.

The wave comes and goes, but it's the ocean as well. So, it's a nice thing to say. Sure. It's an easy thing to say. Sure. And that's one of the advantages of metaphors, isn't it? It's easy to say that. But is it enough to merely say it, or to appreciate it intellectually, or maybe even aesthetically, or poetically?

There's a sense, isn't there, that, well, in order to arrive to that kind of a place, one has to do a lot of practice. I mean, that's some other place that I'm not at. Even though, in a sense, the idea is that this is it. Well, okay, I need to do some things to get to this set so what about that is it enough to maybe assert that and to accept it is there something else that needs to be done yeah i mean this is why i'm not devaluing the spiritual journey but i want people to understand that you know the spiritual journey is there for the purpose of

developing a certain level of clarity that you can redirect and this is where you know something like pointing out instructions are helpful where when the mind has a certain level of samadhi a certain level of collectedness it can take what's being pointed to words and then rest in it so again i'm not devaluing the practice and i understand we need it we need some kind of practice but i would like to let people know let's not let's not mistake the practice as the end-all be-all because the real practice then starts in in my mind in the recognition of this so all the stuff that we've been doing to get there and then the recognition of it

And then the real practice begins in how to remain in that recognition, and that might be meditating, that might be another kind of modality, that could be bhakti, that could be anything, really, to get you there and to stabilize in it. But even the practice of stabilizing, for what end, or to what end?

Because once you realize there's really nothing to do at that point but to genuinely relax into it, it's quite possible just to relax, just to make that one move. To relax into it requires possibly decades of preparation. It requires possibly months and months of dedicated meditation practice. Maybe days, depending on who you are and what you've done, and your mental makeup, and so on.

So it's wonderful to say that the waves are just the thoughts. The waves are the anxiety. The waves are the torment. And the ocean just is there, and they're not different from one another. But I think that will only make sense once we really recognize the ocean for what it is. And that will only make sense in a lifelong practice.

Because I don't think there's an end to this. I think life then begins with how to keep seeing this. At this point in my life, I see it that way: how to keep seeing this, and seeing, oh, here comes up another thought. Here comes up another reaction. Here comes up another opinion. Here comes up another defense mechanism.

And not to bypass it with the ocean and waves analogy, but to see it for what it really is. But see it from that luminosity, and then realizing, ah, yeah, I'm taking this very seriously in this moment. What is the reason for it? What's going on here? And it's just that the mind's conceptual proliferation is making it more than what it really is.

And then when you realize that, you can kind of back away, step back and see it. And then the wave reintegrates back into the ocean. What you went through there in Missouri is quite, I suppose we'd say these days, traumatic. And when the body-mind is required to switch into that mode, that survival mode, which is a very pure state, in a sense, a very singular kind of state, it leaves a mark. It's a period of high arousal, and high arousal is one of the factors in memory of all kinds and traumas.

Have you noticed any consequences of that, psycho-emotionally? Of course, when the state leaves, the adrenaline goes, then there's typically a reaction, shaking, emotions, perhaps crying and so on. But when that's in a state, in a sense, the physiological state passing through. And as you pointed out, in the hotel, it's raining. Suddenly, you're on high alert again. Have you noticed any consequence, I suppose, trauma, tension, vigilance and so on as a consequence of this experience in Missouri? I would say probably for a couple of weeks, at least, since that experience, I was definitely on high alert whenever there was rain. But also, when everything wore off in terms of the adrenaline, the realization that, holy hell, I could have died.

And I cried, like, wow. I cried like crazy, and it was like the realization that at that point in time, if I was gone, that would be it. That would be it. And there were times when I was reliving that moment or reliving those moments. Even now when I think about it, there's a different context to it now, but the weeks from it were very raw. At least the first 10 days to two weeks was very raw where, when you think about it, it's like, oh God, yeah, I could have really died.

And now when I think about it, there's, yeah, it leaves a mark, as you said, there's a little sort of residue there. It's like, but I think with the practice and with the coming to Jesus moment of what I see regarding spirituality, it's helped redefine that in the sense of like, okay, I can see what that is, and I can see it as a movement of the mind, and that if I really look at my surroundings and be aware, I'm safe in this moment, you know? And so that's the beauty of being able to hook into this moment and say, am I experiencing this right now, right here, through my senses, somatically?

No. And then I can just, ah, I'm fine. That's all good. What's the mark? What's the quality and texture of it? How do you experience it? Even as it came up there, for example? It's like this clenching in the heart, you know, clenching in the spiritual heart. Like bracing for impact. It's a small little quiver at this point. Do you intend to work with that by going into it in your practice, or is your plan, I suppose, to let it do what it does within this larger context? When you said the latter, the latter, that resonated more for me, you know, where

Doing the work with it, I don't think it has left that much of a mark in the sense of, like, I fear for my life now whenever I hear the rain or when I'm near water. Although I can say this, when we were in Austria, we were in a place called Carinthia, and there's a beautiful lake near the retreat venue, and he said, let's go swimming on the last day.

And I was ready to go, and we went to the lake, and I said, oh, it's three and a half meters deep. And I told my friend, okay, I'll try. And I started walking down the steps into the lake, and as my feet touched the water, I was like, I don't think I can do this. So I just sat on the bench and watched them frolic in the lake. So there might be things like that that can happen, yeah.

I would say probably I don't enjoy the water as much anymore. You know, you've no doubt heard of this thing called MDMA-assisted therapy. So the idea is you take the MDMA. This is not advice, by the way. It's going somewhere. And it sort of forces you to feel good. And then, from what I understand, I've never done this myself, but you, a therapist or so, go back over some traumatic experience.

and from this sort of place of openness, from this place of love, from this, and it can help, they say, to re-textualize some of that. It reminds me a little bit of the kind of forgiveness practice that you have in TWIM, where one's also working with knots of various kinds of holding, of bracing, usually in terms of relationship.

I wonder, I always wondered if such a thing could be done with jhana, to get into a jhanic state for some time, and then secure in that, so to speak, or stable in that, turn one's attention to that bracing, bracing for impact. Is that something you've ever experimented with, or what do you think of that? With your capabilities of jhana, I mean. This is a good question you asked, Steve, because I realized that since the flood, I haven't actually done any formal meditation.

So it would be an interesting experiment. But what I will say is this. I did try to sit for a couple of times. In fact, I even gave an initiation when I was in Berkeley for Kriya Yoga. And I was telling a friend of mine who lives in Europe. She's a great fan of yours, by the way. So she was really happy and excited. And she said, I like her already. Yeah, there you go. She was like, you're so fortunate. She's like, I'm so jealous that you're there. And I would be like fangirling if I saw Steve. No, you're kidding. No, I'm serious. But in any case, I was talking to her the other day.

And she was like, so do you, how do you meditate now? What's going on? And I said, I don't, since the flood. And I told her about my experience where I was initiating this group in Berkeley for Kriya Yoga. And I told her it felt like my head rocketed off into space. And I was experiencing such immense bliss.

And it was like I was completely gone. And she started laughing. She said, I don't think I've heard anyone complain about having too much bliss. But I found it very uncomfortable to be in that space. Luckily, with my experience of understanding how to ground with Navi Kriya that we have in Kriya Yoga, I was able to kind of let that subside and then come back into my core and so on. But it would be an interesting experiment. I haven't tried it yet, being able to use jhana, kind of mental MDMA in that sense, and then recontextualize that by going through that experience. It would be interesting.

Why do you think you haven't meditated since the flood? It could be my crotchety old man, which is like, spirituality is a waste of time. It's like, why would I want to sit and spend two hours just being in that space when I could live life? Say more about that. I know you touched on it a bit, but can you elaborate a bit on that? It was so funny because I went to San Francisco for my retreat, Berkeley and San Francisco.

And I was talking to my crotchety old man. I was talking to a friend of mine about this, and it was like everywhere we went, I could kind of just be very judgy about people and be judgy about, like, seeing people doing carathon and all of these other things. It's like, okay, you know, my mind was like, maybe you guys are culturally appropriating. But then I saw people being so devotional in their heart, that was so freeing and true with regard to Hanuman and Krishna and all of these deities. And I was like, okay, yeah, I can see that. I appreciate that part. So I think my mind is like, it's not doing this a lot now, but in the initial periods after the flood, it just felt like, oh God, what are we doing this for?

What are we doing this for? It's almost very nihilistic, you know. And I think that's kind of softened a little bit. Yeah. But I also do like to poke and prod students, where I see there's an attachment to the spiritual world. You know, there's an attachment to a spiritual ego, a spiritual identity, which is okay to have, but it could also be an impediment, where, oh, look at how many books I'm reading. Look at how many, how long I'm meditating. Look at, you know, this jhana I've attained. Look at, look at whatever it is, maybe not even to another person, but even just to ourselves.

And it's nice to be appreciative of ourselves, but if it becomes something where we're like evangelizers of it, I find that a real turnoff now, more so now. I was not comfortable with people saying this view is the only view that liberates, or this modality is the only thing that liberates. And I can see that. And now I judge the people who feel like that's the case. And I'm like, oh, can't you see what's going on? You're making spirituality your own imprisonment. You're being fed this echo chamber of this is what it is

and not being able to go beyond that, not being able to see beyond that. So the crotchety old man sometimes comes out and likes to be judgy about spiritual things, and I don't know if it comes from a good place or a place of full judgment. But it's just from my own experience, and maybe that's me projecting onto other people, like, look at how they're wasting their time doing this and that, and maybe they're not, maybe they're really fully appreciating it, like I said when we went to the kirtan, and being able to then really see these people's pure-hearted devotion to what they were doing and with what they were doing.

So sometimes there's the Yuji Krishnamurti that comes out in me. I'm curious if you were to follow that impulse down. Where is it coming from? Does it have layers to it? Of course, the top layer is what you've described here. And are there layers to it, or is there something underneath that? I think when I look back, it's really the fact that when I talked about that moment where I thought really this was the end, that there was no God that came. There was no mystical experience that came. There were no angels in the sky or devils in the ground or anything like it.

And moreover, there was nothing that could be said of a jhanic state, or some kind of altered experience which was mystifying and beautiful and exalted. So to me, it feels like mind games, which we induce on ourselves for the fun of it, for the fun of it. Because I have this theory, and I still stand by this theory, of like in the Vedas for example. We might talk about this in one of our previous episodes, but the Vedas have this idea of soma, the drink soma, which they drink copious amounts of and get into these altered states.

And my impression about meditation especially is that they ran out of the soma and now they're trying to figure out how do we internalize that. It's like running out of Molly and finding out about jhanas. Finding out about jhanas and doing that instead. So it's great. It's fun. It's wonderful. But again, I don't know how helpful it is in our last moments.

We can just do it to pass the time, to enjoy ourselves. Experience the fruits of it here and now, in and of itself. But not to do it because we're going to get something out of it. That's how I feel. I will say, I've had other near-death experiences where I did see the light at the end of the tunnel kind of experience and I felt like my body was drifting away and all the mystifying things.

So I'm not discounting that that has happened for me in previous times or that it has happened for other people. But I see them as mentations. They're just part of the mind happening. Like when you're able to really be in a comfortable position to surrender, it feels very flowy. It feels like, okay, everything, everything is running on all cylinders and there is a certain movement of life that is guiding you in a direction.

And what I mean by that is, before I was doing that whole thing about sitting for six days and cessation and so on. Prior to this, in 2019, I had just left my work in San Diego and I was in Cambodia for a few weeks, and I was uncertain about what it is that I would want to do with my life. And at one point I decided I'll become a pilot, so I went to the Maldives. And I went and did that. But it wasn't something that I wanted to do. It was something that I was open to doing because I had opened myself up to where does life want to take me?

And it's like, okay, we're going to the Maldives and we're going to learn how to fly and we're going to become a commercial pilot. And I said, okay, if this is what life wants me to do in this moment, I'm going to do that. And then in preparation for the pandemic, the school shut down. The flight school. And I headed to India.

And I started doing the meditation again. And I said, let me go and do that. There's nothing else I can do. And I went into the cave and the story from the first episode and everything. And it turned out that there were people who would email me and ask me questions. So there was one day where I had time to myself and I would answer questions.

And that grew into a framework of teaching. And then that grew into retreats and other things. It was not something I willed. It wasn't something that I intentionalized. It wasn't a goal in my mind. Of course, somewhere down the road I took it very seriously and stuff happened and whatever, but I think if we open ourselves up more and more in that flowing space, life has an interesting way of taking its own shape and form. So I don't know where life is going to take me now. We'll see what happens. Well, you mentioned Yuji Krishnamurti and hearing you speak in the way you've been speaking.

Of course, this is speculation. Do you think that this, you've said, crosses the old man energy? Yeah. Do you think the implications of this might... might it even undermine the activity of spiritual teaching or meditation teaching? I think it might. Is there a possibility that it comes all the way through, it might collapse that whole activity? I get the sense that it could. I get the sense that it could, and I find myself similar to that position in 2019, where I'm just opening myself up to life, seeing where it's going to take me.

And before this retreat, before this conversation, as we were walking around, I was telling you, every year I keep telling myself I'm going to slow things down, and things keep ramping up. More and more retreats happen. So if that's what has to happen, then that's what has to happen. And I find myself having the energy to sustain that, which is fine.

And it really does feel like that, not my will, but your will be done. That sense of surrender. So opening up to whatever the life will wants to take you, wherever it wants to take you, whatever it wants you to do. Because there's magic in it. There's a certain quality of magic in there. There's a certain quality of true living and life in the sense of complete acceptance. Not as the opposite of resisting, because you don't want to do it, but more of a full embracing of whatever it is that's going to come up.

Because somehow, when you're in that space of sharanagati, as we say in Sanskrit, that space of surrender. The thing is, sharanagati itself means refuge, taking refuge in something. So there's a sense of security in there. So the trauma aspect would be, and which is valid, completely valid, is, I don't know if I want to give up completely.

Because if I give up control, if I give up the will, what's going to happen? And then the spiritual context says this has happened before and you found yourself on the other side in a very secure way, so it just depends on which one takes over. Neither is as you said, and I agree with you. Neither is one or the other. It's just they can both coexist at the same time. It seems so. Well, this has been very wonderful. Is there anything you'd like to say by way of conclusion? Anything else you'd like to say? Then you needn't be. Perhaps we've done it. Live long and prosper. 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.