Ep127: Siddha Tales - Delson Armstrong 2

In this interview, I'm once again joined by Delson Armstrong, spiritual teacher and star student of Bhante Vimalaramsi. In this interview, Delson recalls tales of unusual spiritual mentors, including an Indian cobbler who taught Delson to read people's karma, unlocking the ability to see not only others' past lives, but also their future fate. Delson engages in a detailed discussion of how to acquire, refine, and master siddhi, also known as special powers, discusses his own encounters with entities whilst on dark retreat, reveals his experience with the yogas of dream and sleep, and offers advice on dealing with periods of karmic reckoning. Delson also describes the 31 planes of existence, from the Brahmalokas to the hell realms, and shares his opinion on figures such as Mara, Patanjali, and Jesus Christ.

Without further ado, Delson Armstrong. Delson Armstrong, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. It's good to be here. Well, I'm so delighted to be talking with you again. We have quite the menu today of topics to discuss. There's some interesting stories biographically that we're going to cover. And also, we're going to talk about a very interesting topic, the 31 planes of existence. Wonderful.

Let's begin now. In our correspondence before this call, you mentioned that there were actually some other mentors of yours who were really rather interesting, including a cobbler in India who provided you some insight and instruction into reading people's karma, as well as a man who had 13 near-death experiences, and that both of those men sound very interesting. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about those. Yeah, so the first person that you mentioned, the cobbler, I met while I was in Bombay. So I was about, I'd say, just about 16 at the time. This was right before I made my trip to the Himalayas, and it was a chance meeting. It seemed like a very chance meeting. I was walking on my way and I

damaged one of my slippers, so there was a cobbler on the way, and I went and saw him. He looked at me, and I spoke to him in basically broken Hindi, because my Hindi isn't so good. He kind of recognized that my Hindi wasn't that great, so then he switched over to English, which for me at the time surprised me, because I didn't really expect him to speak such great English. We exchanged pleasantries, we talked about this and that. He asked me where I was from and what I was doing. I said I'm just visiting Bombay and I'll be heading on a trip very soon.

And he fixed the slipper for me. And then that was it really. That was a first chance meeting. But there was something about him, you know, his smile, his gaze, which really intrigued me. And especially the fact that he spoke so eloquently while we were talking and the subject matter that we were talking about was just you know we were we were just talking we were just talking about the U.S. and India and you know relations in the U.S.

So I really thought about this person, and I was staying with my relatives at the time, and I told them about this person. I said, have you met him? Because he's in the neighborhood. Are you aware of him? And they said no, we don't know him, and it's nice that you met him. So he was on the way back. He was on the way while I was walking to and fro, so I decided to go and say hi to him again, and we just had a nice conversation. He had a little shack. It wasn't a full-fledged store, a walk-in store. It was like a little wooden shack, and he sat on the ground, and he had his tools inside the shack and all of his stuff that he was doing outside, and he was sitting very relaxed. He said, would you like to sit

with me and have a cup of tea? I said yeah, sure. So he ordered two glasses of tea, one for him and one for me, and we started talking. Somehow the conversation steered towards yoga, towards spirituality, towards meditation. He had some really interesting knowledge, because he was talking about what he called brahma jnan, which is really the knowledge of the Brahma, the knowledge of the atma. I was kind of struck by this, and he talked about the Upanishads and the whole Vedanta aspect of it. At that time I was not really aware of what he was referring to, because this was before I made my trip and really learned a little bit more about yoga and Vedanta.

But it really intrigued me and I wanted to know more. So the days went on, and I really didn't have a lot going on at the time, so I was preparing for my trip to the Himalayas. I had the chance to see him almost every other day, and then eventually every day, and we would just have tea and talk and everything. One time I was with my cousin, my younger cousin, and he too had damaged a shoe. So I said, I know a person who can help, so we went together, and

then the cobbler looked at my cousin, just looked at him in the eyes, and started smiling, and he did his thing repairing the shoe. My cousin went on his way, and I sat with him and said, well, what was so funny? Why were you smiling at my cousin? He said, well, I see great things for his future. I see some interesting things for his future. So I said, oh, what were you doing? Some kind of face reading or palm reading or something? He said no, I get a sense of people's karma. I get a sense of where they are and the choices that they've made and where they're headed.

He said some interesting things about my cousin, about things that would happen five years down the road, ten years down the road. And it actually did happen. A lot of things that he talked about, in terms of where he would be, what kind of relationships he would get into, what kind of trouble he'd get into, things like that. Of course, I didn't know it at the time. I didn't have the forethought, the foresight, to see it. So I asked him, how did you get this siddhi, right? How were you able to read people's karma? He got into the mechanics of it, and he addressed it in the Yoga Sutras. In the Yoga Sutras, what's talked about is how to read your own past lives through samskaras.

So samskaras are these impressions in the mind, so to speak. Let's say, the equivalent of that would be the synapses in the brain that carry memory and carry certain kinds of messages around. The idea is that these formations, in Buddhist terminology, are known as sankhara, or formations, as they're usually translated. They are the carriers of karma. They're the carriers of the effects of your previous choices. He went into some great detail about this, and he explained to me, you could do it for yourself, but then you can also look at people and get an impression by placing the mind on their mind. So, effectively, reading into the thought processes within their mind through a certain technique, and then being able to see what choices they made in the past, and then get a sense of where they're headed in terms of their karma. Now, the interesting thing about karma that he told me is

it's not written in stone. There are three types of karma. He went into the whole theory of it, but basically he said karma is such that it can deviate, it can change, dependent upon a person's decision making, dependent upon their choices. But there is sort of a trajectory of where that might be headed based on the choices that they made, and that was quite interesting for me. He did walk me through how it's done, and it required very deep meditation, which

at the time I was wondering if it was even possible for me to do it. But what was interesting, and this is something I reflect on now, was whether it was a result of the meditation techniques that he was making me go through, or whether it was a result of what was happening in the Himalayas. While I was in the mountains, we were in the foothills, around a place called Rishikesh and Uttarkashi, and I was with my teacher. One of the things that I experienced, amongst some other mystical experiences while I was there, was precognition, and it was like

I could almost say it was sort of like déjà vu, because I would have visions of the next day and what was going on, and people that I had never met before, and I knew what they were going to say and what their names were. It happened all while I was there in the Himalayas. It was just every single day. There was a point where I met a certain individual and I knew exactly what they were going to say, and I started finishing their sentences for them, and they kind of got freaked out by that. So I wonder, if I reflect on it, I think it might have been a result of the meditative practices I did just before going to the Himalayas, but I never really developed it further. There is a sense of understanding of karma now, where you can get a sense when you see a person or talk to them and place their mind and get a sense of what choices they made in the past and how it leads to a certain thing, but it's not something that I I readily

provide to people as a way of teaching because it's quite advanced, and sometimes people don't want to know, and it's their right not wanting to know what their future holds. Yes, that's fascinating. Do you think this cobbler attained that siddhi from past meditative experience, or presumably he wasn't entering into these very profound meditative states just instantly whilst looking at your cousin and fixing the sandal or the slipper? So could you say a little about how that works, and also in terms of your own experiences of siddhi? You mentioned precognition. And I think a lot of meditators do report that a sense of precognition coming is one of the first weird things that one notices, especially doing concentration practices.

But I think the level of precognition you're talking about is a little different to what's commonly reported in meditators. You're talking about knowing exact sentences and seeing a whole day ahead of time. That's, I think, much more than the common precognition, or the sense of precognition that meditators do often report at even fairly early stages, it seems. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I would say that's a fair statement, because I do know of other people who do start out on the meditative journey and they do kind of awaken, let's say, certain siddhis, including some elements of precognition.

like they get an impression of something that might happen, and they get a feeling, an intuitive feeling, that maybe I shouldn't be doing this, or maybe I should head in that direction. You know, it's the intuitive mind, really, the way I look at it, that is being awakened there. And there are other siddhis that might arise, in the form of being able to kind of know what the person is thinking, and being able to kind of be mind readers, if you will. But yes, I would say that, to the extent of where one was in the Himalayas and experiencing this, I would like to think that it was probably twofold. One was the meditative states

that I learned from this particular cobbler, along with, I believe, the energy of the Himalayas. You know, there is something to be said about going to certain places on this planet, including the Himalayas, where there's a certain sense of coming home, a sense of like, I've been here before, and also a sense of like a new awakening in some way or another. You know, it's like you're living a different life when you go to the Himalayas than you would while you're in the city, or whatever it might be. Obviously, the most obvious reason is because you're going into the forest and the mountains. But there's the subtle energy, I would say, which is impacting the way people experience certain meditative states.

And I think now that you mention it, this cobbler, he probably had a lot of attainment with meditative states, and looking at a person go into a meditative state and then be able to access their particular sankharas. The way he explained it was very interesting. He used an interesting analogy. It was very rudimentary, but I thought it was a very fascinating analogy. He said, you think about the way the internet works

and the way you connect uh to a website you know there's a certain ip address and you ping that certain ip address and therefore you connect to that in that particular web page so in the same way if you know or if you're able to ping a specific uh ip address of the mind of a certain mind then you're able to access what they might be thinking as well as their deeper sankharas which are really the web pages of that particular mind so that really made sense to me at that point in time that what he was talking about uh the meditative states that he was doing or let's say the meditative practices that he was doing were primarily uh rooted in vedanta as i said and uh in the nath tradition uh what is known as the not tradition or the nov not tradition the nine knots and the knots are like basically the not yogis that lived in the himalayas many many centuries ago, and you have different individuals like Gaurakshanath, Matsyendranath, it's quite a mouthful to say, but basically nath means lord or master.

These were a specific type of school of yoga that did different practices to attain certain states and to attain certain siddhis. Of course, I don't have experience of siddhi, so I have to make an analogy to other skills, you know, like for instance playing a musical instrument, for example, which is something I have some skill in, or even fighting, for example, or physical sports, say. At the beginning level, one doesn't have skill, but one might have other attributes, like raw power and muscle, for example. You can sort of muscle your way through things. As you become more refined and you gain more skill, you need less muscular power to achieve the same result. You become more efficient, so the power you've got goes further, and you can achieve the same as you could before, with less power, because the efficiency of the skill is improved.

and they say the difference between a master guitarist and a mediocre guitarist, and I'm afraid in the latter category, is efficiency. The virtuoso makes it look easy and effortless. It's not effortless exactly, it's just very refined effort, you know. But yeah, so I'm curious if it's the same for these sorts of siddhis, when you get the knack for it and you refine the skill, do you need less meditative

raw meditative power, does it? Do you have to build up a lot of power to acquire the siddhi and then to break through in some degree, and then afterwards it's a refining of that, or am I thinking of it incorrectly? What's the mechanics of that kind of a process of learning, acquiring a new siddhi, for example, and then refining its use afterwards? Yeah, well, if you think about siddhis, yeah, they are certain skills, I think you put it rightly in that sense. And you think about the way the yoga tradition has been, the Vedic yoga tradition, where you have stories of ancient rishis, ancient seers, who went into the mountains, went into the Himalayas, and they did what they called tapasya.

Tapasya, meaning producing heat. And so they spent many, many, many, many, many, many years just to develop this raw meditative power, as you put it. And then that enabled them to awaken certain, let's say, energy centers in their body, like the chakras, if you were to follow the chakra system, or anything else, but basically awakening a certain kind of shakti, a certain kind of energy field that allowed them to access, let's say, higher powers, for lack of a better word, to access these siddhis. So I think initially there is this winding up of energy that's done through a process of meditation, a process of, well, in this tradition, or in that particular tradition, concentration. Concentrating the mind to such an extent that it is super focused and aligned to one object and one objective.

Because the siddhi is really the accomplishment. The siddhi is the fruit of the practice. It's the fruition of the practice. Once you attain the siddhi, then it does feel like it's effortless, because it's not like the second time around it requires the same amount of effort. There is, let's say, a learning curve, if you will, which is to say, how do I do this? And then there's a level of practice that's involved once you have the siddhi. So what I'm saying is, in the different phases, the first phase would be the preparatory phase, which is the tapasya, which is like raw meditative power that you do for many, many, many years, and then you build up that power, and then it awakens something. And I do say that it is karmic

in its effect, which is to say, you talk about some certain inborn talents that people have. I see that as being karmic in nature. I see that as being a remnant of a past life. So it's quite possible that the accomplishment of that siddhi, or the attaining of that siddhi, is a resultant of previous karmic factors from previous lifetimes, coupled with the effort that one is doing through the process of these meditations. But once it's awakened, then it's a matter of the second phase, which is then accessing that siddhi over and over again, and then being comfortable with it, and then there is a level of mastery, which I see as the final phase, which is you bring it up and you're able to then just use the siddhi. The way I would see it, it is also in the process of jhanas that we talked about briefly last time. In the beginning it seems quite

let's say not really challenging or difficult, but just trying to get your bearings of what is this jhana that you're in, or what is this level that you're in. But eventually you get the hang of it, and you start practicing further and deeper, and then you get to a level of mastery where you're able to see every factor to a minute degree of each jhana and each level of meditation. Very interesting, and that has some intriguing possible consequences when we consider the 31 planes of existence, which we'll come to. All right, can you tell us a bit about the man you met who had 13 near-death experiences? Yeah, this was an interesting one. So I spent about five or six years with this person.

So this was back when I was still in New York, New York City, and I was a ghostwriter at the time. So I had just basically gotten back to New York, started getting into the film world and screenwriting and ghostwriting and so on. And I heard about this project about this man who wanted to write a biography about himself, an autobiography, so he was looking for a ghostwriter. And he basically said that he'd had 13 near-death experiences, and he was looking for somebody who can write his story but, more importantly, has some spiritual understanding, some kind of degree of experience in the meditative arts, in the spiritual arts, so to speak. So I signed up for the assignment. And, you know, I gave him... well, he got my message. He gave me a call, left me a voicemail, and he was in San Diego at the time. That's how I went to San Diego. So I returned the call, and we had a good discussion about what my experience was in terms of my writing experience and then spiritual experience.

and then the last thing he said before you we ended the call was okay great so when can you come down to san diego and i said how about this weekend i think it was around a tuesday or Wednesday at the time. So he said, how about this weekend? And I said, okay, that's fine. He sent me a ticket. And I visited his place in San Diego. At the time, he was living somewhere in Del Mar, for those of those who might be in knowing where, you know, that that might be in San Diego. But anyway, I went and visited him and he told me his story. And over that weekend, basically, i recorded the whole story his whole entire life story and why is it that he had these 13 near-death experiences and what were those near-death experiences and what happened as a result of those near-death experiences now at the time i was in a different frame of mind so this was when i was just starting up my career and i was more interested in let's say

making a name for myself in writing career and being able to make a little bit of money and so on and so forth now this person that i met he um he had a very interesting life he he has led a couple of public companies uh and he has a fairly wealthy lifestyle and so on and so forth and so at that time with that frame of mind i asked him how is it that you did this like what was it that made you be able to manifest these things and he said well if you want to learn it why didn't why don't you become my protege and so i asked him can you be my mentor and so that was the beginning of our let's say six year journey into this and the 13 year death experiences that he had so he had them at various stages of his life the first one he had was when he was very young as a child and it opened up uh what he calls channels and pathways in his mind

And he accessed a different dimension. According to his description, he accessed this portal and this place where it was very similar to what you would see or hear about in different near-death experiences, the commonality being going through a tunnel and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. He heard voices, and he heard different kinds of voices about going back to the earth plane and continuing his life. But what he found was, when he came back, it opened up, as he said, the channel pathways to certain kinds of skills or, let's say, certain kinds of assets of personality. For example, as a kid he developed a great sense of humor, and he started to understand how humor opens up the heart. As he said, it opens up the heart center, because you're able to better connect with the person if you're able to make them laugh and make them feel at ease, and so on. Then he also had some, let's say, drug experiences as well. At the time it was

I think the 70s or 80s. So he did some acid trips and he overdosed on cocaine and things like that. So he had different near-death experiences, too. He had a shroom trip, a couple of car accidents, and different kinds of things. And then the 12th near-death experience was very close to where we are in the present in terms of the timeline. And what he said was, this time around, when he came back from his near-death experience, what happened here in his 12th near-death experience was he was in Chicago at the time with his family, and it was August, so it was quite hot, quite humid. He was trying to change something with the pool, the swimming pool, and it was the chlorine filter or something. When he opened it up, he inhaled the chlorine gas, and it made him go into, you know, arrest, like cardiac arrest or whatever. And then he just had an experience, and when he came back from it,

he said it felt like a bunch of information just downloaded into his mind. It was like he had connected to the ether. He had finally connected to what he called the ether, and experienced what he called these principles, like 3,000 principles of life. And it was, as he puts it, from some other kind of, let's say, interdimensional or extraterrestrial intelligence. And so it was a collection of thoughts of wisdom in different facets of life. So I had a chance over that six year period

to be able to be mentored in those principles and get a sense of what these principles were all about. They were related to opening up your different chakras and different centers in the spine. They were related to how to live a life where you're always happy, how to live a life in which you are experiencing abundance, not only in terms of wealth or money but also in terms of experiences and relationships, emotional connections and things like that. So it was a multi-faceted approach to living the best life that you could. So that was a very, very important stage in my life. I would say those six years, to be able to learn from him, and he's still there in San Diego. He's doing his own thing, and he has developed his own, let's say, program or his own methodology of teaching these things, and

he and I stay in touch quite often, so I'm very grateful for those experiences that I've had with him. Is he a public teacher? I would say he's semi-public. I mean, he's open to being able to talk to people openly. He has appeared on a lot of different talk shows. He's appeared on Oprah many, many years ago for something else that he's done, so he is okay and comfortable in the public eye. Right now I think he's re-packaging, if you will, those elements of teachings that he has and delivering them in a way that's accessible through the internet and so on. With your experience of different contemplative traditions, do you recognize his methodology, or the principles, or the means of exploring them? Do they remind you of any, or have any similarities to any other contemplative traditions or philosophies that you're aware of?

They do, but with an interesting twist, because the information that he received, as he says, is according to him, and according to the way he's received that transmission, delivered in a way that is unique in terms of its messaging, in terms of the way that it's messaged. But I do find certain connections to Tantra. I find certain connections to the Siddha tradition. The reason I say that is because this is a very life-affirming kind of practice. It uses energy centers to definitely get into deep states of meditation, and to get into deep states of insight and wisdom, and so on. But it doesn't just stop there. It also talks about what is the best way to live life to the fullest. So I find a lot of similarities in that sense from certain elements of Tantra and certain elements of the Siddha tradition, which is the South Indian yogic tradition, which is all about how do you live in the world while still maintaining some level of higher consciousness.

And so being both in the mundane and in the super mundane territories. I noticed you haven't mentioned his name yet. Is that deliberate? Oh, well, his name is Greg Halpern. Greg Halpern. You look him up, Greg Halpern. Wow, okay, very interesting. In that story you mentioned various different psychedelic compounds, and also drugs like cocaine and so on, that Greg had used. Have you yourself experimented with any psychoactive substances, either recreationally or in contemplative contexts? No, actually I haven't, which is interesting. But I would say I've had similar experiences with reference to how it's described.

I don't know if we were talking about this before, but I did certain dark retreats, where you go into a cave and you're in darkness for about 40 days or something. So in this case, the practice I was doing was called kaya kalpa. Kaya kalpa is from the Siddha tradition, which is about, it's sort of like, an anti-aging thing. It's actually used primarily for anti-aging, reversing the aging process at the cellular level, at the level of the DNA. And the way it works is you take certain kinds of Ayurvedic herbs and substances. These aren't psychoactive at all. They're rather related to purging the system of certain toxins and things like that, and then certain kinds of herbs that build up certain tissues in the body or help build certain tissues in the body. So while you're doing that, you're in a period of fasting. You're fasting for about, depends upon the length of time that you're doing the whole program for, but anywhere from 7 to 21 days. And so you do this process of fasting, and then you go and you start to

drink certain kinds of juices and herbal concoctions and things like that. And while you're in the darkness, the meditative practice is to focus in on the pineal gland. It's really focusing in on awakening what they call is the amrita in the brain, in the mind. So there's actually a process called khechari mudra, which is in Kriya Yoga. You take the tongue and you access a certain thing over the nasal palate, and then you taste certain kinds of bitter and salty substances, and eventually it's sweet to the taste. So along with that, you then focus in as best as you can to that location of the pineal gland, and it awakens the light within, so to speak, and you get certain kinds of very interesting experiences. I would say they're probably just hallucinations, and they're probably hallucinations as powerful and as strong as, let's say, DMT or an acid trip. I couldn't tell you from experience, but I could probably say they're probably very similar.

Very interesting experiences, and who's the nations of lights and entities and landscape entities? Yeah, yeah, lights and entities. I saw certain kinds of interesting entities, like serpent-like entities, which I would say are the nagas. And then other entities, and it's very funny, but they look like wizards. If you were... they kind of look like you, but with longer beards. And they're basically, I would say, the rishis or the ancient yogis. So I look at these as probably archetypes of the mind that you're accessing, and then downloading certain kinds of wisdom and information through that process. Did you interact with those entities at all during that dark retreat? Yeah, I did. It was more of a, let's say, a telepathic connection. So I would see these entities in front of me, and some of them were also like grey aliens, so they looked like greys, and then other kinds of entities. I would interact with them and

it was more on a mind-to-mind level. There would be certain kinds of insights that you would get about the emotional body, insights about the physical body, insights about what you should be doing or should not be doing in terms of your own life path, if you will. And then there was this experience of interconnectedness, a sense of a holographic nature of the universe, that the cell or the atom contained within it all of the elements and building blocks for an entirely new universe. So it was quite the trip, you know, no pun intended, but it was really interesting. Okay, before we get on to the 31 planes of existence, I'd like to ask you a bit about sleep. Sleep, yeah. Now, David Johnson who

viewers of the last episode, or listeners of the last episode, will recall, introduced us, mentioned that you don't sleep much actually, and I'm curious then, what is your experience of sleep, and how has it changed? And in particular, has the awakening of various insight stages, stream entry and beyond, affected your experience of sleep? Yeah, that's an interesting experience now, because the way I envision sleep, or the way I look at sleep now, is just a physical process. So when we talk about the various stages of sleep, I'm able to just be conscious of them. So I know that, for example, the mind is now getting into a REM phase, or it's getting into a deep sleep phase, and

so there is a level of mindfulness now in this mind which is able to be, let's say, alert or awake even while asleep. So the purpose of sleep, in this case, the way I look at it, is just rest for the body and certain regenerative processes that the body has to go through at the level of the cells. But on the mental level, or let's say on the subjective experiential level, I'm still aware of being awake while, let's say, in deep sleep as well. And the way I look at it is it is a fulfillment of the understanding in one of the Upanishads. It's either the Manduka, Mandukya. I always get confused by it because they're so similar sounding, but it's an interesting one because it talks about the secret of the syllable Om.

You know, and what it says is you have the three syllables that make up Om: you have ah, u, and ma. And what these represent really are the waking state, the dream state, and the dreamless deep sleep state. But it talks about a fourth stage, which is called chaturiya, which is shortened to the turiya stage, and that is the silence beyond the Om, which is aware of these different states within the experience of Om. So the way I would equate that is an experience of turiya being, let's say, always on, you know, never really sleeping. And this was also found, as we talked about a little bit about their research last time, which was when I was in that sleep cycle, they didn't see indications within the brainwave reading showing that the mind had actually gone to sleep, or the brain had gone to sleep, where it was unconscious. There was still a level of mindfulness. And so that's why one of the researchers, when they came in, actually asked, were you actually asleep? Because we couldn't see what was going on. It seemed like you were still awake, there was still

some alertness through that 90-minute cycle. And why is it that this transformation of sleep, which sounds, you know, we compare it to myself for example, you know, I have very conventional sleep. Often I don't remember my dreams. In fact, despite attempting to occasionally, so I think I'm pretty baseline. Why would that change of consciousness, compared to, say, a baseline person, mean you could sleep less?

In fact, how much do you sleep on average, or how much do you think you'd need if you had to, you know, guess, and how much do you sleep, and why? Why has this change meant that you can sleep less than, say, a baseline person? Right. Well, I'll say one thing. There have been occasions, or more than, let's say, occasionally, where I've been able to go without sleep for two or three days and still be okay, still be functional. And one time, as I was explaining, when I first met Bhante Vimalaramsi in San Francisco or close to San Francisco, they had invited me to come and see him. And so at that time I was still working in San Diego, and I wasn't asleep for about two days. I took a short nap, and then did a little meditation, and then went on the plane to go and see them. So I hadn't had much sleep at that time, but if you were to ask them, there was just, you know, continuous joy and

you know, togetherness in terms of the mind, and collectedness, and good energy. And I think one of the reasons, if I was to contemplate and understand why this is the case, is because you come to a certain level in the mind where it's very efficient in the way it processes information. It's very efficient in the way it takes that information and doesn't further proliferate. So it just sees things as they really are, without any kind of judgment on them, without any kind of holding on to them, without any kind of craving or aversion or any of those reactions to it. It's just taking that information, and because of the lack of those reactions, there's not a lot of energy expenditure in the mind. So I see sleep, let's say on the baseline level, as being needed for those who need it, to be able to process the information that they've had throughout the day, and then be able to consolidate memory, and so on. That's one element of sleep, along with the physical regenerative processes. So on average, I'd say I do have about

six or seven hours of sleep but again the quality of sleep for me is different in the sense of uh at least my subjective experience is that i'm still awake during those six to seven hours in this in so far as being in this meditative awareness and i i rarely ever dream um the way i explain the way i experience rem and the dream state and the deep sleep state is basically how you would experience neither perception or non-perception uh where certain things are happening but it's like the sankaras the samskaras are there present and you can notice them and then the deep sleep state is where it's like a level of nothingness it's a complete blank but there is still consciousness there there's still awareness of that nothingness the dala lama is quoted as saying that one of the highest yoga attainments is to be able to do exactly as you're describing to retain awareness throughout the entire arc of sleep so that's quite a remarkable a remarkable report another aspect of um yogic sleep you mentioned you don't dream very often

is, we say, lucid dreaming sometimes. And perhaps I think this is perhaps a lesser attainment of what you're describing, but the idea being that in the dream state, very often we believe the dream is real. We act as if it's being real. You know, I recently dreamt I was Matt Damon being chased by several thugs with machine guns, right? And I really thought I was Matt Damon, and the faster I walked, the slower I went, the faster I ran, the slower I was. Like, I can have a dream anyway. And of course it's silly now to say it, but at the time, you know, I was really running as fast as I could. I was quite disturbed by the fact that I was getting slower and slower. So, but of course that's a corollary, rather, there's a correlation that's sometimes pointed out, between that, if you want ignorance of what's really going on, and the, if you want, believing the dream of when I'm awake, the dream of my own delusions and so on, misinterpretations. So I'm curious if you

went through a phase, or if you're able to dream consciously? And of course, advanced dream yogis can use different types of lucid dreaming for different things, such as we mentioned precognition. Well, certain times of the night, for example, one can access precognitive dreams, or, right, dreams of meeting teachers, for example, or past masters, etc. I'm thinking now of their accounts of masters such as Namkhai Norbu, for example. He used lucid dreaming to commune with his teachers, alive and dead. Actually, even alive ones, they can meet in the dream. This is some of the things that are claimed by these dream yogis, right? So

did you experience anything like that? Could you do that if you wanted to, even though you don't dream much now? What can you say about dreams from a yogic point of view? Well, you know, there was, I just want to make a little comment about that, just trying to connect to what you were saying. There was, he's passed on now, but there was a bhikkhu, a very, very wise venerable named Punaji. And actually he was one of Bhante Vimalaramsi's friends. He actually even visited him, Dhammasuka, while he was still alive, and so on. And he had an interesting comment. He said, you know, when you experience certain levels of attainment, it's like awakening from the dream of existence. To connect to that, I mean, what's to say that we're not dreaming now, right? I mean, there is a level of dream-like experiences that people have, where it's these projections of what they think reality is.

It's projections of the concepts of "this is how things should be" rather than seeing things as they actually are. That's just a comment I had about that. But I think when it comes to things like dream yoga, I probably did that on an unconscious level, or kind of stumbled into it in the beginning when I went to the Himalayas. So I believe the precognition that I experienced happened as a result of what I dreamed, or whatever I was seeing in the night happened in the day. So certain elements, certain people that I saw, certain places that we went to, certain experiences we had, was all there in the dream, and one was lucid of that. And then when that experience happened, recollecting what that was, so it's sort of like a déjà vu, if you will, but to a point where you're completely lucid of this experience. And obviously, as I just had indicated, some time back

that you can actually know what the person's going to say and then be able to complete their sentences and so on. So I think I stumbled into that experience, but I consciously haven't done any kind of experiences with dream yoga to that extent. I have done a little bit of lucid dreaming here and there, a long time back, but not to this extent. Something that's often reported in, should we say, tales of yogis, and I use that term broadly, is periods of karmic reckoning or karmic purification or karmic accounting of some sort. Sometimes that could be periods of hardship, or a physical illness for example, or various other things that can occur and are seen to be, or interpreted as, some sort of karmic reckoning, perhaps from past lives, or whatever the case may be. I'm curious, what is your take on that, and have you ever experienced any period of karmic reckoning or karmic purification, of that classic type that one occasionally does hear about?

So yes, I would say, you think about karma, and if you'll indulge me I'll give a little bit of understanding of the theory of karma from the yoga perspective. We have three types of karma: what is known as sanchita karma, prarabdha karma, and agami karma. The way it's understood is that sanchita karma is basically all the karma that you have, let's say, inherited from past lives, and that is now being accounted for in your choices and your actions. And agami karma is the fulfillment or the reckoning of that. And then the power of the is what is allotted for you in this particular lifetime. So it's basically your fate or your destiny, things that are basically unavoidable in one way or another. They cannot be avoided, but they can be mitigated in one way or another. So the understanding is that at a certain point, when you have a certain level of awakening, the sanchita and the agami karma are eradicated, but there is still prarabdha karma to be played out, because that is the karmic fuel for this life.

So that entails how long this life will continue on for, or gives an indication of how long the biological life will be, and what certain kinds of situations will be experienced as a result of that karma, or an effect of that karma. So the yogic understanding, and this is what was taught to me at least, the theory of that is that you have packets of karma in one lifetime, and these packets vary in terms of every five years, every seven years, every 10 years, or every 12 years, depending upon the tradition. But basically what it's saying is, around these times, with that kind of reckoning, certain things happen. There's like an unfolding, an unpacking of karmic baggage, and that can be both good and bad. So it has mixed results. So sometimes

certain things will propel you to go places because of situations, and that's karmic in nature. I mean, everything in this life is really karmic in nature. Every choice and intention we make is producing a karmic result to be experienced in the future, and the choice that we make now is influenced by karma from a previous action made before. So the understanding is this karmic reckoning is very much experienced by everybody, but yogis are more aware of it. Yogis, again, being a very broad term: meditators, or let's say people who are in tune with this.

And so I've had my fair share of that. I've only been here 31 years in this particular life, but I've had my fair share of that, starting at the age of, let's say, 15 or 16, which actually propelled me to go to the Himalayas. It was that disillusionment, that disenchantment with the world, just looking at the world and not really satisfied by it. And then taking my journey and experiencing certain things, and then also experiencing sickness, when I was, and this could be a result of having been in the Himalayas and all the other things. But coming back, I experienced a terrible bout of jaundice, to the point that I was really

almost dying. I had lost a lot of weight and I had become almost skeletal, and so I consider that to be part of that karmic reckoning. So the unpacking of the cognitive or the precognitive experiences, the unpacking of experiencing these different masters and teachers and different traditions while in the Himalayas, coupled with the medical condition that I had coming back from the Himalayas, I take all of that to be an unpacking of a certain package of karma. So the karmic reckoning happens at later stages as well, where other things happen. You lose your job, or you lose a family member, or you get divorced, or whatever it might be. For people, it propels them to think about their lives. So there is something to be said about the importance of these events.

You can either choose to see them as, why is this happening to me? And, you know, be very in a self-pity mode. Or you could see it and say, okay, what is the lesson here? And what is the direction now that this life wants to go in? What are the choices that are available to me? If you change your perspective on that, then you can actually start to make certain choices that are rooted in wisdom, rooted in self-compassion, rooted in more wholesome qualities that lead you, and at the very least mitigate, let's say, the negative aspects of the unpacking of that karmic life. And so then you are more in alignment with your intuitive mind.

And by doing so, you have a better management of how to travel around this particular karmic unpacking. Could you give an example of a more wise or compassionate choice in relationship to such a packet of karma? Yeah, I mean, I could give a very general example. Let's see. If you think about it, like, somebody gets fired from their job, and at the same time, they get divorced, and at the same time, they lose their house, and at the same time, they lose a parent. And so it's just like, what is happening here? Is God cursing me, or is this my fate, and so on and so forth? That could be one way of looking at it.

But another way of looking at it is really starting to contemplate: why did you lose that job? Was it because you could seek to do something that you've always wanted to do? Perhaps the job that you had was not satisfying, or it was not leading in a direction that you wanted to go in your career. Now you have a level of freedom to make a choice, dependent upon the choices before you. The relationship that was broken, perhaps you could look at it in a way that this frees you up from the responsibilities or the expectations of a partner, and now you can really start to make decisions for yourself without having to think about that particular individual and taking into account their choices and their concerns and so on.

So now you're only thinking for yourself, and now you have a level of freedom in that sense. So what I'm saying is, basically, it's a change in the level of perspective of how you view these things. Losing a family member, losing a loved one, losing a friend, that's always a terrible thing, but the understanding can be that it propels you to reflect on their life. You can reflect on their life and see the wonderful qualities that they had, and be able to imbibe those qualities in yourself, so they live on, so to speak, through those qualities, through what you've developed in your own mind. And then of course, on the more general level of spirituality and insight and wisdom, you have a certain level of understanding of the impermanence of conditioned existence.

So these could be choices or perspectives that are rooted in wisdom and compassion and understanding. Thank you. Very interesting. So I'd like to ask you now about the 31 planes of existence. These have been presented by teachers in various different ways and understood in various different ways. Often, actually, one sees them popularly as sort of metaphors for psychological states, almost a Jungian or psychological interpretation. But that's actually not exactly how you describe them. You describe them as places that we can actually go and experience, eons of torture or eons of jhanic bliss, or whatever the case may be. And when you have talked about them, you do sound rather like you've been there.

I don't know if that's the case or not, but you do seem to have the sense of first-hand experience. Now, I'm not sure if that's the case, but maybe that's just my impression, the way you talked, rather confidently about it. So can you tell us what are the 31 planes of existence, and is it possible for you to contextualise this teaching, before we get into the details, in terms of your own experience? Yeah. So first, I want to say, a lot of times people will have a reaction to understanding the 31 planes of existence, and understanding it as being, okay, these are different planes of existence, and so you've been here before, and so on. But then that's just another belief system, and that's just another thing I have to kind of buy into in order for me to do the practice. And what I say is, no, you don't need to. You don't even need to think about rebirth or that there are planes of existence and so on for you to be able to benefit from the meditative practices.

So I want to just say up front about that is that people, you know, who want to try meditation, and specifically let's say jhana practice or the twin practice, they don't need to believe in anything. That's really the heart of the Dhamma in terms of the Buddha's message: come and see for yourself. We're not asking you to buy into anything. Check it out for yourself. Now, when it comes to the actual 31 planes of existence, you look at it from a couple of angles. One is, yes, I do see them as psychological states. So in one life you can experience the 31 planes of existence at the level of mentality. If a person is somebody who has a very, let's say, greedy or stingy mindset, it's very much similar to what is described as a hungry ghost: never always never satisfied, but always hungry. Or somebody who has a very aversive, hateful mind is someone who is, you know, like in a being in a hell realm, tortured by their own thoughts of hatred, tortured by their own thoughts of aversion.

Similarly, if somebody is more sense-based, let's say somebody who's more attached to the body, attached to sex and food and all these other things with bodily pleasure, it's quite possible that they're very animalistic in nature. And then you get into the human plane. Of course, but then you get into what is known as the six sensuous heavens. The way it's understood in the texts is that in order for you to get to these states you don't need to be practicing meditation. You only need to be developing a virtuous mind. That is to say, in the Buddhist context: keeping the precepts, having generosity, developing to some extent the paramis in terms of benevolence and loving kindness and generosity and gratitude and so on and so forth. The reason is because these kinds of states of mind are very much psychologically similar, if not the same, as the devas in the deva planes, as the devas in the six sensuous heavens.

Now, when you get into, for example, the idea of the being that's known as Mara in Buddhism, you know, in certain light he's seen as this sort of satanic devil figure that tempts meditators and things like that. That's not the way I see him. He is just another deva who's sort of a rebel in that particular plane, and he has his own posse, if you will. His ideology, or his idea of the world, is that everybody should be within the sensual realms.

So don't go into jhana, don't go into practicing meditation, don't do this, it's a waste of time. We're here to enjoy ourselves, we might as well enjoy ourselves. That's the mindset that he has. So his intentions are to bring people down from their lofty goals of attaining certain kinds of states of meditation, for the sole purpose of saying if they go away, they're no longer populating the sensuous heavens, and so I have nobody else to hang around with, I don't have anybody else to stick around and have fun with. That's one way of looking at it. And so Mara is

in that sense a tragic figure, because he doesn't realize that there is more beyond this, or even if he does, he's not interested in that. Now, I say he, but it's not necessary that he's male or female. He could be androgynous, but whatever that might be. I'm just saying he because that's what's traditionally understood, that Mara is a male figure. But there is a psychological component to Mara as well, where you have jealousy, and you have certain kinds of traits where you see other people succeeding and you don't want them to succeed, just because you're either jealous or you want them to still be at the same level as you do. And I equate that as an analogy of: you see crabs when they're in water, when they're in part of water, they try to grab onto the other crabs, so that they don't get out, they don't escape. So in the Brahma lokas, they are equated with the jhanic factors.

So that means you have the first four jhanas, and they are equated to those mind states. So in the Brahma planes you have the experience of, in the first level, great amounts of joy. There is great amounts of joy and comfort and bliss, and it's just very energetic and vibratory. Then you have the second level, which is associated with the eradication of mental proliferation in the way of vitakka and vicara. So that means that there is still some joy, there is still some bliss. And then in the third it's like there is just the sukha. Sukha is like this comfort, this very pleasant, tranquil happiness. And then the fourth level is just complete balance, and there is complete equanimity and tranquility there. So the mind states of individuals who live in these Brahma realms, in these Brahma lokas, are basically the same as those you would experience in a jhana, dependent upon what jhana you're experiencing.

And so they're just experiencing, let's say, the fruition of that practice, the fruition of being in that jhanic state. And how it's commonly understood is that when you have a certain level of mastery of a certain jhana, you get to a certain level, a sub-level, within these Brahma planes. So if you're able to get into the first jhana very proficiently, then you experience being the Mahabrahma or another type of Brahma within that realm. Same for the second, third and fourth. Now, the arupa, which means the formless realms, are quite interesting, because there's no form there, there's no experience of a body. So what we're saying here is, in the sensuous realms, which include the hell realms, the hungry ghost realms, the animal realms, the human realms and in the six sensuous heavens,

they all have a body that is able to experience the different sense pleasures as well as pain. Now, what I would say is, when you talk about the hell realms and you talk about the sensual heaven realms, the nervous systems are different. So you could say that the karma of whatever was there in the previous life actually produces the nama-rupa, the mind and body for that next experience or that next life, and that also includes the nervous system. So in a hell realm, the nervous system is geared to experience more pain, and they experience time in a different way. Likewise, in the sensuous realms, their nervous system is geared to experience more pleasure much more easily. Now, in terms of the Brahma realms, there's what they call the luminous form. So there is still some kind of form, but it's a form that is not exactly, let's say, physical completely. There is some kind of form that is luminous, because there's light. It's a light body, so to speak. It's an astral body in another way of understanding.

But in the formless realms there's no form at all. So what it is, is it's almost like your disembodied consciousness experiencing those four arupa jhanas, depending upon where you are at. So we have the four arupa levels, which are infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception nor non-perception. In infinite space, all that is is an experience of vast expansion. There is a sense of limitlessness to what you're experiencing, in the way of a body. So the way I would equate it is, it's like you are the entire galaxy, or you are the entire universe, experiencing all of that space at that same time. Consciousness is the awareness of being in that infinite space, but then it breaks down into individual arising and passing away of consciousnesses. The analogy I use for this is, you think about a ray of light and how it seems like one fluid ray of light, but in reality it's actually trillions and trillions and quadrillions and quintillions of photons,

that make up, in those individual photons that make up that ray of light. So the awareness in infinite consciousness is broken down into those very fragmentary elements. And indeed you actually experience that on the level of the jhana, the arupajhana of infinite consciousness. Nothingness is where it's a perception of nothingness, meaning there comes a point where you experience the gaps between the arising or the passing away and the arising of a next consciousness. So it slows down to such an extent that you see the gaps. The way you can analogize that is, you think about the old films that you used to watch in a movie theater, and you slow down the film reels, you start to see the individual frames, and you start to see the gaps between one frame and the other. That gap, the experience of that gap, is really the experience of nothingness. So here there is still some kind of contact, feeling, perception, in the way of experiencing nothingness, but that's all happening in the mind, or in the mentality. There's no rupa, there's no physical form there.

And then finally, neither perception nor non-perception. It's a very interesting state to be in. The way I equate it is, we call that in the twin understanding a quiet mind, or it's a signless state of mind, which is to say that there's nothing going on, but there is still a level of awareness. It's a level of the sense of I am. So there is that conceit of I am that's there, but there's no intention going on, there's no other contact, feeling or perception, just this very broad sense of I am. And so it's very much equivalent to the experience of what we were talking about last time, which is the asmita samadhi, the sense of the samadhi where I am, I am, I just am, that's it. I am, I am not this, I am not that. There is just a sense of I am. You go beyond that and there's the experience of rigpa, in the sense of this primordial awareness, this awareness that's pristine, this awareness that is empty. Or there is an understanding that it is not self, it's empty cognizance, which is to say

there is awareness but there is no identification with that awareness so in that case when beings are there uh they're experiencing basically i am that's it that's all they're experiencing there is a sense of existence a sense of self there that i am present and then at the very last moment there is an intention that arises based on the intention that arose prior to having taken birth so to speak in the realm of neither perception or non-perception and so that intention then guides rebirth into the next plane or the next existence that they are to experience based on the intention which is those karmic formations

So this is just a broad outline of the 31 planes of existence. Now within that there are some really interesting things, like the entities that we talked about earlier. You have the nagas, and you have magical beings and mystical beings and things like that, which happen at this level, where it's between the earth plane and one of the gods of the 33 as they're understood. So all of the archetypes that we understand in terms of, like, grey aliens or wizards and elves and leprechauns and other things that people experience when they're on different kinds of psychedelic journeys, that's really experienced here at this plane. And so these archetypes can be experienced at the mental level, but there is an understanding that they are also quote unquote physical, because they are present as their own separate existence. The way I would describe the planes of existence is like the spectrum of light. So it's all one level, so to speak, but it's just different parts of the spectrum of that light. So that's really the way I would describe it.

Well, that's very interesting. So we have 11 kamaloka, or these sensuous realms, generally 16 of the rupaloka, the four jhanas if you want, with their four subdivisions as you mentioned, and then the arupaloka, four of those, that makes the 31. Remarkable. Well, perhaps we could talk. We could talk about a lot of things there, but it's true, I think it's striking that your description of those realms is basically the jhana description also. You're making that comparison all along the way. And while I said before that you don't present them typically as psychological states, you've included that. So you're saying that they could be thought of both as psychological states or as actual locations that one can end up in, you know, like going to Amsterdam or going to New York, or so. And also that

They can be seen as a sort of jhana progression in a certain sense that one might walk in one's practice. Yes. The different interpretations, is that fair to say? You're shading in all these different interpretations at the same time. Is that fair? That's right. I would say that's fair. Well, let's talk a little bit about the entities then, as we did mention them earlier, and you're bringing them up here again. You've mentioned psychedelic use. One of the things that people can encounter, in particular with psychedelics, particularly as you mentioned DMT and things of that nature, is that it has been reported that people encounter entities, a sense of other, a sense of, that's not just a part of my mind, this is, you know, that's a wizard there. Yeah. Okay. There's some, you know, some interconnectedness of all beings and so on, but that's an actual, you know, rishi floating there. Yeah, and any resemblance to me, of course, is entirely coincidental. But

But other people, as you mentioned, you access that sort of thing in dark retreat, and some people I know have reported, in fact even on this podcast, accessing or having such experiences through meditative techniques such as kasina practice, fire kasina practice, which seems to stimulate somehow the visual perceptual faculties to some degree, given as it is a very visually oriented meditation style, and gets you into high states of concentration. That's one of its objectives. However, people who have, we would, perhaps in Western medical view, see as having mental illnesses, schizophrenics for example, or those that have psychotic breaks for example, also can experience entities, or have the experience of entities, subjectively speaking, which can be, for some of them, neutral, for some of them positive, and oftentimes negative and disturbing.

And also, I myself have met people who've claimed to be able to perceive all sorts of beings and entities just naturally. They didn't get there through psychedelic cues. They didn't get there through fire kasina or dark retreat or anything like that. They're quite functional people in all regards, but they see angels everywhere, for example. I've met people like that and talked to them about it, and they seem to see them just the same way I'm looking at you here on a Zoom screen. Perhaps the final thing I'll say is

Of course, many traditions, including where I come from in Scotland, there are many warnings against consorting with or interacting with trow, for example, or selkie. These are sort of denizens that are said to lurk around the place where I come from in Scotland, very north of Scotland, and for various reasons, little people, etc. It's said, right? The story goes something like this. You see them. It's very appealing. There's nice music and there's a lot of dancing. You start dancing, and then you can't stop dancing, and then they take you under the hill, and you'll never see your family again. Or you're walking along the beach at a certain time of night, in a certain phase of the moon, and you see a very attractive figure. Oh, you become very entranced by them, and they seem really attractive. It turns out this is a selkie. They've become a person for a period of time, but now they're going to take you under the sea, and you'll never see your parents again.

All of the stories that I heard ended up with that threat. You'll never see your parents again. Anyway, so do you have a view on that? Can you explain a little about these entities and the means of perceiving them, and how should one relate to them? Should one follow the example of the old folk around where I came from and just avoid?

Or of course, we also hear many stories of yogis interacting with certain beings, even teaching certain beings, like Nagarjuna for example, teaching them, or receiving blessings from them, or so on and so forth. So what advice would you have for the traveler of these realms, and for those who might experience them through all the various different means that it's possible to do so? Yeah, yeah. That's a good question. I think number one, one of the guidances about this is you want to develop a very good control, and what I mean by control is a good level of mastery of a specific jhana. And we're talking really here about the fourth jhana, before you start delving into these kinds of things. The reason being is that allows the mind to be very tranquil, very balanced, and very equanimous.

so whatever it is you might encounter now this is also uh a point of guidance for when you want to access previous lifetimes as well in your rebirths because you might not like what you see when you see previous rebirths so uh it gives a level of clarity and understanding and equanimity so that if you do encounter these beings uh you don't get uh you don't get afraid you don't you know you don't get startled and things like that because i have uh known of individuals who've tried to access for example patanjali you know the founder of yoga and uh you know the way patanjali is uh depicted in the statues if you've ever seen it is sort of this half man and half snake kind of body

And that's to say that's a very nice interpretation, a softer interpretation, of what you would probably experience, because according to this individual, when they saw Patanjali, it scared the hell out of them. It was like, wow, okay, I don't want to access this anymore. So I would caution people: if you don't have an experience of some level of balance and tranquility and equanimity, don't go for these things. So first develop that, and then, if you are interested in accessing these realms, do it for the right reason. And what I mean by that is going back to the understanding, let's say, of the suttas, of why certain monks did it, or certain individuals did it, including the Buddha himself. He went through these different realms because he was trying to understand kamma even better. He was basically trying to understand how is it that you ended up in this particular physical plane or this particular realm, what are the actions, the intentions and thoughts that led you there. So the reason why yogis would do this is to understand

what, how does kamma play out, so that people take birth in these experiences, or the rebirth occurs, where now the formations, the samskaras or the sankharas, now transport a new consciousness into these particular realms. Now, as far as the tales that you were talking about, from Ireland, I'm sorry, Scotland, I would say it's an interesting thing, because you hear a lot of similarities in terms of these stories. So for example, I talk about, let's say, the Tavatimsa heavens, which are the gods of the 33, and the gods of the 33 are basically, in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, Indra and Varuna and Agni and Mitra and all of these different gods. But what you see is they're archetypal, right? They're archetypal in the sense that they're talking about also the same kinds of gods in Norse mythology, or in Greek mythology, or any other kind of, let's say, Indo-European mindset.

So could it be that it's just an offshoot of a proto-culture, which is one of the theories of proto-Indo-European culture? Or could it be that there were certain shamans, certain yogis, proto-yogis, who accessed these different realms and saw the same thing, but their culture interpreted it in a certain way, and yet you still see significant similarities between these different individuals that are described in the different traditions?

So I think there is something to be said about that. These similarities can't just be considered coincidence. I think there's something greater there, in the sense of people having seen it for themselves, and then the stories get passed down, and sometimes they can be interpreted in one way or a different way, and then they become children's stories, as you said, and it's a warning for children not to go out into the dark, and make sure that you're staying with your parents, and so on. So I think the access to these planes has provided some level of richness to the different traditions that we have. Even in Native American cultures they have their own stories, which have certain similarities to the Indo-European cultures, the Southeast Asian cultures, and the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, and so on. I'm curious, of course, what was so terrifying about Patanjali that your friend reported? That links to a broader question: do do these sorts of

Entities, if you like, from these sorts of realms. Is it possible for them to have an influence on us, on our states of mind or on circumstances and so on? And what are the consequences of encountering such beings? Yeah. I would say definitely there is an effect, definitely on the mind, and there is an effect in the form of influence, in so far as you hear stories of yogis who encounter certain entities, encounter certain nagas. I mean, the nagas, for example, are a very important element in the yogic tradition. The idea in the yogic tradition is that before you had the Vedic gods, before you had the Norse gods, before you had all of these different gods, you had the typhonic gods, which were like the gods of ancient Egypt and so on. But even before that, there was worship of the nagas.

The mythology behind that is that the yogis have passed on these stories in the Himalayas, that the nagas came from a different dimension. They came to this earth plane to start to teach the people here, beings here, certain ideas, certain notions, certain techniques and so on. There is reverence given to the nagas, not only in the yogic tradition, because you see, for example, the icon of Shiva with the snake around his neck. The snake is basically representing the naga, and what it's saying is the naga is also a lord of the yogis. The naga is also a teacher of the yogis, just like Patanjali is.

so the reverence given to these snakes snake beings uh reverence given to the nagas the idea is snakes are a devolved form of the nagas so the nagas are you know reptilian in nature we talk about reptilian entities those are what really nagas are and you see snake worship all throughout different cultures you see again you know in ancient greece ancient rome ancient india ancient china wherever you go you see some form or another even in mesoamerica uh you know you have the aztec and mayan religion and so on so again that's pointing out you know there is something to be said about these experiences now as to what they look like or how they are perceived the way i understand it is there is there there is a way that they're perceived and there's a way that they actually look so what i mean by that is when you talk about like devas you know you talk about like the the angelic beings

they they they possibly look differently than the way humans interpret them so they might just be in the beginning just like balls of light or spheres of light but because of the cultural imprint in the mind it projects onto that that this is an angel from heaven or this is a deva from this deva loka or this is a god from this particular realm you know so so i think there is no universal form for these entities at least from the deva realms onward uh there's no common form but i i see them as being seen based on the projections of culture based on how the mind interprets them and patanjali

yes yeah yeah i really wonder i mean i i would i would want to ask that individual but according to him the way he saw patanjali was the snake being uh it was humanoid in form but he had very reptilian features so he had like snake-like eyes and scaly skin and so on and so forth and and it just scared him because he didn't expect that it was like having what you could say like a dragon in the room or something you know you mentioned the nagas there coming from another dimension to teach various notions and techniques what sort of notions and techniques yeah so what we're talking about is like specifically kundalini yoga kundalini kriya yoga for example uh talking about you know you'd hark back to uh shaivism because this is really rooted in the shiva shiva shivite yogic tradition which is to say that you know any kind of technique that you experience in the way of certain pranayama techniques certain kinds of breathing techniques uh certain kinds of energy manipulation techniques with kriya yoga and so on these are all attributed to the nagas

in one way or another interesting so i mentioned before that um sometimes when you talk about these realms although actually a little less so the way you presented it here um there there is very much this sort of first person language used uh personal experience um given that you've presented these realms now as and presumably its occupants as both places and beings you know so to say but also as mind states or or thought forms and so on so one can sort of look at them in both of those ways what is your experience of these realms of course from the meditative point of view from the jannic point of view we know you've what you've said about your experience there so presumably one that you've gone to all of those realms meditatively speaking uh in in terms of jhanas and so on you've done those jannas so so that goes without saying um um

do you have any other experience of them a sense of having traveled there so i'm thinking as i ask you i'm thinking of course of you know astral travel uh castaneda things like that or in fact dreams some people travel their own dreams and so on so forth or deep meditative states of absorption where one can enter into certain uh you know buddha realms and heavens and so on uh directly and it's said to be yes a mental state but also a means of uh translocation of going to a different place also yeah so i'm thinking more of that side of things have you much experience of that yeah well when i was doing the experience of uh going through past rebirths the second part of that is actually being able to see what those rebirths and where they were so they weren't just let's say on this earth plane they weren't just in the human existence they were in the hell realms they were in the hungry ghost realms they were in the animal realms they were in the deva planes and so on so

i will say that my experience of that you could say you could equate that to astral traveling the understanding is within buddhism it's talked about the mind made body which is a body that essentially as an astral body. And so you then are able to perceive other kinds of entities, other kinds of beings and so on. So there is experience both on the meditative plane in terms of the jhanas, but there's also an experience of actually being able to communicate with these beings, being able to communicate with these different entities. But I would still say that it is still on the mental level.

And what I mean by that is like, when you talk about translocation, not saying that physically traveling with your physical body to these locations but rather taking that mind-made body that astral body and then actually moving in that realm like lucid dreaming that's that's that kind of right yeah right you could say that that it's like that it's basically that's the reason why i gave that caution which is you start off with the four jhana because you need that deep level of equanimity so the way i've done this practice whether it was going through past three births or looking at these different beings uh is first going into the fourth jana and then the mind opens up uh what is known as the divine eye so to speak so it opens up another astral

realm it opens up an astral eye or however you want to look at it and it's able to change what it's seeing visually and then able to then see larger into that spectrum of what we normally see and then you are introduced to these different beings coming and going and so the way you look at it is you know you look at the different karmic streams at least this is the way my mind let's say has interpreted it when i saw it is like these different links different rivers of karma

and it's quite possible linking back to my experience with the cobbler that the reason i see it in this way is because of that because you can see different karmic streams so in these karmic streams you're starting to see the arising and passing away of different beings whether they are in the devalokas or whether they're in the hell realms or whether they're in the brahma lokas and

so you know shameless plug when the book comes out on dependent origination one of them one of the chapters is about uh the different types of birth so whatever is written there is based on one's research from certain texts but also certain elements that i include there are from experience for example you know the different types of body that they might have the different types of nervous systems that they might have the different kinds of sense bases that they might have how do they experience reality and things like that this is from my subjective experience and you know for whatever it's worth you can take it or leave it but this is what i'm saying this is what i'm putting forth i know we're coming to the end of our time i think we'll wrap it up soon but this has been so fascinating doesn't one one of the ways in which these sorts of teachings or capacities or faculties or techniques are used is to and i've mentioned it before to contact past masters you mentioned batangeli actually um for example i'm wondering if you've ever done that if you've ever gone looking

for past masters you know jesus or something like that i'm actually interested in what you think of jesus um but uh so maybe that's two questions what do you think of jesus that's an easy one haha not yeah and um have you ever gone have you ever gone uh searching for contact with uh past masters right so the the experiences that i that i've had when it comes to past masters let's let's address that first is uh how do i put this because the way i've experienced it is being able to see my past lives and then being able to see certain lives in certain realms let's say where there might be past masters and so past teachers i'm able to kind of locate through my rebirths

But I haven't really attempted to actually communicate with them now, wherever they might be. It would be an interesting exercise, an interesting thing to experiment with and check out. I would rarely be fascinated by being able to communicate with Patanjali, because he is the founder of yoga, or anybody else who has had an impact on human history in one way or another when it comes to meditation. So the short answer is no, I haven't actually communicated with them, but I have seen them based on my experience with them in past lives. And they're not well-known past masters. I'll say that right up front. They're entities who can be extraterrestrial in nature. So one of the lives, for example, was in this plane of existence, which was sort of like a school.

It was sort of like a school of different kinds of beings there, so it was almost like an interdimensional school, if you will. One of the masters that I knew, or was learning under the tutelage of, is this alien-like being. Actually, at least my interpretation of him in my subjective mind, or of that person or that being, is alien in nature, and I realised that could be because of the way I projected my idea of what that person is. So they're not necessarily known, or well known, as far as I know. One of my mentors, the person Greg Halpern, talks about his communication with beings from the Pleiades system. So he has contact with those particular entities, and he has a lot of different stories about that and different wisdom tales of what the experience is like, and technology and things like that.

Like I said, the short answer is no, but I wouldn't be. I would be open to trying it out and seeing if I could access past masters now. As for the story, or the idea, or the question about Jesus, the way I perceive Jesus is I see him not in the same way as we understand him through the Bible completely. I believe, you know, any of the texts that we have in any kind of spiritual tradition are subject at some level of corruption, some love, and not necessarily a nefarious intention of corruption. But you think about, you know, the game of telephone: you have just ten people and the words are misinterpreted or misheard. The oral traditions might not always be pristine. And then likewise, when you have people writing down stories about Jesus or other beings and things like that, they might not always be accurate, because they've been written many, many, many years or even centuries after that individual has gone. I do see Jesus as being an explorer of

the psychic realm, an explorer of spirituality. I see Jesus as being somebody who had some influence from yoga, but I don't know if I want to say that he travelled to India necessarily. The reason I say that is because at that time, let's say, if we consider the time when he was alive, that period was a period of a lot of cultural trade. So my impression, or my idea, for whatever it's worth, is that he encountered different monks and different traditions and different yogis who travelled on their way to Greece or on their way to somewhere else from India, and vice versa. So I believe he probably had the encounter with certain individuals who had certain wisdom, and he was fascinated by that. What I'm fascinated by about Jesus is his emphasis on the power of forgiveness.

Because in the TWIM community, in the TWIM practice, there is another practice which is known as a forgiveness practice, and it's a very cathartic practice for a lot of individuals who aren't able to do the general practice of sending metta or loving kindness. It opens up their heart. So I believe Jesus's greatest contribution is the understanding of forgiveness and the power of forgiveness, and primarily not forgiving, not just forgiving others, but forgiving oneself. So whether he did miracles or not, or whether he claimed certain things or not, that might be true, that might not be true. But my impression of this, based on my understanding of yoga and the Buddhist tradition and so on, is that he definitely had some encounters. He definitely had some influence. But I caution myself to say that he might have gone to India. I don't know if that would be accurate to say. Well, Delson, this has been really remarkable, and a conversation going into all sorts of weird and wonderful places. What haven't I asked you, or haven't we talked about, that does anything come to mind?

That we ought to say as we're now reaching the end of our interview? I mean, there's so much to explore, really. We can talk about a lot of things in terms of just different meditative practices and things like that, but one of the things that we could talk about, maybe I don't know if you could talk about it briefly, is something that is a very fascinating subject. I believe you did it recently with Lee Brazington, which is dependent origination, because dependent origination is such a vast and profound subject that ought to have its own sort of exploration for people to really understand how is it that we actually perceive reality?

How is it that karma comes to be? Because dependent origination is really the mechanics or the mechanism, let's say, the gears that move the wheel of rebirth, that move the wheel of samsara. So that might be something worth exploring. Well, perhaps I can tempt you back for a third installment focused on that. Would you be willing to do that? Sure. Oh, terrific. Well, 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.