The Path to Unconditional Freedom with Meditation Master Delson Armstrong

Before we get into this conversation, I want to ask you to join this amazing community of consciousness explorers. This whole idea of pursuing expanded consciousness and the boundaries of human potential while living a modern life is relatively new, which is why we interview revered masters, teachers, experts, and practitioners to help you on your own journey. To stay up to date on the latest conversations, simply click subscribe below and you'll be notified each time a new episode comes out. I am so grateful for all of your support and comments. I love reading them. Now let's dive into this conversation. Hey, Delson, how are you? Good. How are you doing? Excellent. I'm excited to have this conversation.

So much that we are going to dive into, but I really think as a frame for all of this, you've lived a very interesting life, man. A very untraditional life relative to many people that I'm surrounded by and just startups, entrepreneurship, even just people in the U.S. And so I think maybe to kind of frame up our conversation, it would be amazing just to hear about your spiritual journey and how all this has unfolded. Yeah, sure, sure. I just want to say thanks for having me on the show. And yeah, basically, my life has been a very, when I look back on it, and I'm only 33, so I have a long ways to go.

But when I look back on it, it seems like I've lived many lives in this one life. And I've taken on many different kinds of roles and my search began really at the age of 13 when I was first introduced to Hatha yoga. And when I started doing Hatha yoga, I wanted to know, is there a way to replicate this process over and over again, which is that it leads you to these states of mind where you feel total equanimity. You feel a lot of peace and bliss and so on. And that was really my first taste into that kind of realm of altered states. But it wasn't really until the age of 16 that my journey began properly, let's say, when I left school and decided to go to the Himalayas upon the invitation of one of my teachers.

While I was in the Himalayas, I studied different kinds of philosophy. There are philosophies in India which are covering all kinds of things from the nature of being and the self to consciousness to the different elements, how is creation coming to be, and really very deep subjects that I got myself engrossed into. And I started getting initiated into different practices, so mantra practice, some tantra practice. I got into Kriya Yoga. I've been initiated into three different lineages of Kriya Yoga, all stemming from the main master, which is Lahiri Mahashaya. And later on, I did some self-inquiry, studied Krishnamurti's work, J. Krishnamurti, U.G. Krishnamurti. I've basically done pretty much all kinds of mystical meditative practices as best as I could and for as long as I could.

And it's not been limited to just the Eastern Indian milieu of meditative practices. I've done Christian mysticism, looked into Sufism, Jewish mysticism, and so on. And I think it's just been my personality growing up that I was always interested in the occult, interested in mysticism, interested in understanding how the mind works. Are there energies beyond what we see in terms of the physical? And that's really what led me into this journey. And right now, what I do is I live a life as what you would say is a Dhamma teacher, which is where I teach meditation related to Buddhism. What I mean by a Dhamma teacher is somebody who practices and teaches the Dhamma or Dharma, which is the teaching of the Buddha.

And that process is essentially rooted in what's known as the Suttas. So the Suttas are essentially the different sayings of the Buddha. So we have different kinds of lineages and traditions, but this is primarily in the Theravada tradition. And in 2016, I first did an online retreat with a group called the Dhammasuka Meditation Center online with David Johnson, who's the author of The Path of Nibbana.

And that retreat was amazing. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what was available to us, the technology that's available to us in terms of the mind and the altered states. And later that year, I actually met David in person. And then a few months after that, I met with the main teacher, Bhante Vimalaramsi, who passed away recently. But he was the one who founded this process, which is known as the 6R's and TWIM.

And I was requested by Bhante Vimalaramsi to start teaching. And I took it up as best as I could, but I had been living in San Diego at the time and I was already engrossed in writing work and other things like app development. So I didn't really have time to teach. It wasn't until during the pandemic, about a few months into the pandemic when I was in the Himalayas and meditating there that a lot of people started reaching out to me about the practice. And one thing led to another. And it unfolded in a very natural way where I've taken up this role as a teacher and guiding people into different practice and any other meditative practice for that matter, depending upon their inclination.

And I think, call it karma, call it destiny, call it whatever you want. I think my fascination with so many different traditions has helped me as a teacher to be able to know where a student is, where they're coming from, and what might be the best approach for them. And now all I do is, it's funny because oftentimes my mother, I come visit her. She lives here in Mumbai and I come visit her. Her friends will ask her, what does your son do? And all she says is, he has fun. That's all he does is he has fun. And that's exactly what I'm doing.

That's amazing, man. It's a good North Star for life, I would say. Yes. I do have a few questions about your experience. So you very humbly kind of glossed over the fact that you had reached the highest levels of attainment across various traditions. And maybe just as background, I think there were at least four ones that they were. Could you just list those out? It's augmented in the Buddhist tradition, the levels of attainment.

Yeah. Well, I know, for example, you went to the highest levels of Kriya Yoga. Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Just kind of, you basically went as deep as there is to go in many traditions. And I just would love if you could just list those out and then I'll get to the question. Yeah, yeah. For example, I studied the Yoga Sutras and started practicing breathing practices and mantra practices, which are related or within Kriya Yoga, that take you to these states called Samadhi. So Samadhi is the umbrella word. And depending upon the context, Samadhi can mean an altered state or a state of collectedness.

And these different levels overlap with what we call the jhanas in the Buddhist tradition. And in these different states, you experience levels of superconsciousness, let's say, in the sense that you experience greater degrees of bliss and joy that are independent or not dependent upon external factors. They are mind made or generated from within. And it's a long-sustaining state of bliss and joy, which eventually get into states of very, very strong mindfulness, very, very strong awareness, where you can start to see a lot of the building blocks of how mind produces its levels of perception.

And later on, you see that you have experiences of infinite space. It's an expanded awareness that goes beyond just this mind and body complex and towards all beings, where you experience infinite compassion. And you start to get in touch and in alignment and in attunement with these different beings, that is to say people around us. So you become more empathetic and so on. And then you experience what's known as infinite consciousness, which is a very trippy state to be in because you start to notice that consciousness is mind-made and is dependent upon external factors. And it's like, I'll give you one example that I had when I was in San Diego and practicing.

And it can be a little disconcerting for beginners if they start to see that, but then the insights that come up, primarily that this isn't in your control and so this isn't you. Whatever you can observe, this is very important to note. Whatever you can observe, whatever you can experience, whenever there is any kind of an experience, that experience in itself is not you. So when people say that I am this, or this is me, this is mine, that's what causes the suffering. But these states start to separate that identity from these different experiences. And ultimately, it takes you to these states where you start to notice the gaps between each moment, and you go deeper into those gaps, experience a level of nothingness, and then from there, you experience the subconscious material that's there.

And this subconscious material is like the building blocks of your reality and how you take things in this world. And in some traditions, they say that this is dependent upon past lives. So there's possibility of looking into past lives, looking into how the subconscious works, what are your triggers, what are the things that make you tick, and so on. And then you get into a very, very quiet and deep state where everything shuts off. So it's like unconsciousness because there's a blank. You don't even know that there's a blank. You're just gone somewhere. Your mind is totally off, subjectively speaking. And when you come back out of it, you start to look at really the deepest levels of how reality is produced.

And you come to these realizations that are really life-altering. You don't see the world the same way anymore. You don't interact with the world the same way anymore. And you start taking things less personally, which I think everybody can do in this world at this point. So many questions. One distinction I would love you to talk about is I've heard you say, and excuse me if I butcher this, and some traditions believe that reality is essentially a projection of our inner material, of all the concepts, ideas, information that we hold in the unconscious.

And there's, I think there's kind of multiple interpretations of that. One being the way we react to what we're experiencing with our emotions and all of that based on our samskaras, that is creating our reality to an extent because it's creating the reaction. But then there's a more literal interpretation, which is no, what you see is actually a direct projection of everything. You are effectively creating the screen that you are watching, and I would love for you to talk about what your experience has been of those two distinctions. Yeah, I think the way to look at it is the distinctions are also mind-made.

That is to say that they're just different perspectives looking at the same thing. You're just looking at it from different angles. So when you mentioned samskaras, and that's really what we talk about when we talk about the subconscious material. In some traditions they talk about vasanas and samskaras, and in Buddhism it's the sankhara, which is just the Pali version of that. And so samskaras are essentially these impressions of the mind based on previous experiences, could be even past lives.

And that's really what starts to build up the subjective experience of this world. Now, in terms of an objective reality out there, now that's stretching it out because now you have to think about what does that mean. But even the experience of a so-called objective reality is dependent upon the samskaras. In other words, the samskaras they can be changed, they can be transformed, but can they be escaped?

Because the reason I bring up that question is because the samskaras are the building blocks of our so-called karma as well. So when we talk about karma, each of us has different kinds of actions that we produce through our thoughts, through our speech, and through our actions. So our projected reality is dependent upon our karma. What we've done in the past, we will reap in the present or at a later stage. And so in that sense, in the relative world, that's inescapable.

Now beyond that, I do go into this understanding of the absolute. For lack of a better word, we can call it the absolute. We have this distinction between the absolute and the relative. And the way I look at karma, which is really what brings all of these different beings that we have in this world, in this existence, interacting with each other and behaving in different ways, are nothing but vibrations throughout this field.

And so the interactions of these different vibrations start to create different waveforms which then concentrate or concretize into different kinds of beings or different kinds of life situations or events. But in the absolute sense, it is the background from which all of these vibrations come out. Now, does that mean that that background is the objective reality? I don't think we could say that either because it too changes all the time. It too changes dependent upon the different karmas that are there. And so the idea that we project our reality is one reality based on the relative, and that if it's projected onto us and that we are just mere projections of that reality is also the same as saying that we project that reality.

But I do want to make a distinction here. I would not say that we should say that we are the same as that projection or that we are the same as that which projects those projections. In Buddhism especially, the tradition that I'm teaching from, the way we look at it is all of it is dependent or interdependent upon different kinds of reactions, reactivities, chains, causes, conditions, and so on.

To try to find an objective reality that is causeless, I think it's a search in vain, because even if you find it, even if you so-called find it, it's not going to make your life that much easier. It's not going to bring you that much more peace. In fact, I would argue that it would bring a lot more questions.

It would bring a lot more intellectual exercises. So what we look at is we live in the relative world. Our bodies are subject to aging. Our minds are subject to different kinds of activities that are either good, bad or indifferent, and so all of these can be classified in some way or the other as dukkha, which usually is translated as suffering. And I find that to be a very dramatic translation. It's just that things are inconstant. We don't necessarily get the things that we want, quote unquote want. And so this so-called suffering is this reality that we're in. The idea there then is how do we transcend that suffering? And the transcendence of that suffering is to be in a state of existence or non-existence, however you want to put it, where none of that suffering, even if it's there, has any kind of effect on the mind anymore. And that is what I called freedom of mind.

It's the cetovimutti, as it's known in Pali. The ability to be happy, the ability to be balanced, the ability to have the ultimate peace of mind even in the most difficult of situations. That really, I think, is a more, in my mind, worthy goal than trying to figure out what's behind all of this. I think that's a great point.

And one easy frame that I've really taken a liking to is just moving from conditional living to unconditional living, where the act of trying to make the world perfect to feel good is just an impossible task to do at least a hundred percent of the time, and it's also exhausting. But just to move into greater depths of unconditional well-being, that to me is kind of honestly just a smarter, more enjoyable way to go about it. And I would even take it one step further and say, if we start to live in that unconditional living, as you said, if we start to come from that unconditional state, then by that very nature of living in that way, we do have some sort of effect

on the world around us. So we do in some way, in our own small actions, have some kind of positive influence. It might not change the world entirely, but at least in the vicinity around us, we are making some kind of change in our relationships with the people that we have, in the environment that we're living in, in the workplace that we work at, in our homes, and so on. And so the idea then would be if one person can do it, so can others. And so people can be inspired by that unconditional living. And bit by bit, it might just spread like wildfire. And we might have that transformational world that everybody seems to seek.

Well, that's part of the reason why I wanted to have this conversation with you. And my question for you would be, do you believe that that shift in being and the impact in your kind of school of teaching and things that you've studied? Do you look at that from the content level, from the vibration level, or from both?

Yeah. When I start teaching and I look at this, I definitely want to start from a very practical approach. That is to say, in terms of the teaching itself, I would start from concepts that are easier for the mind to grab hold onto, which then, once people take that, they can start to see the more absolute states, where you start to see the vibrational level. You start to see the no vibrational level. You live from a state where there is no vibration.

And what that means is essentially, while other vibrations are going on, that is to say karma continues to take its course, the way of enlightened living or the way of being awakened or the way of having this unconditioned or unconditional life is that those vibrations no longer cause any internal vibrations. So the interactions with people, the things that people say to us, the way people might behave, all of that no longer causes the mind to become agitated. And so at that level, you can step into that in your meditation practice and take a rest from all of the senses.

Because here's another thing to look at. These six sense bases, that is to say the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind itself, they're basically receivers. They're receptors. They take in raw sensory data, and then based on the samskaras, as we were discussing a little earlier, we project a certain kind of reality.

So even if you're at the deepest levels of meditation, your mind is still active one way or the other. Everything else might be closed off. So the idea is to then take this rest, this absolute rest, where none of that sensory traffic is coming in anymore, is the place to come from. And when you come from that, everything becomes that much more enjoyable.

So what that means is your senses are sharper, and your vision, you're able to take in more information without becoming overburdened by it, without being overwhelmed by it. You're able to enjoy life much more, but you don't become attached to it. You are able to enjoy the people around you, but you don't have expectations of them. So that is what I would call a mind without craving. And I'm plugging my book in here now. A mind without craving is the book. So that is the idea where your mind is free of any kind of expectation, is free of any kind of desire for anything because you're in attunement with the flow of life.

And so whatever is happening is received in total acceptance, total refuge in every given moment. If we learn to actually take refuge in every moment, then what that means is just being totally open to what life has to offer, then you will definitely see a lot of magic happen. And I can attest to that in my own lived experience, where there's been situations where things seem to be not going the way that we might want it, or the group I'm with might not want it.

I look forward to hearing from you there. Now let's get back to the show. It's something that I've tried to communicate to people in the business world: the decision-making from intuition, where the texture feels like the information comes into awareness as needed, when needed. The description I like is, you're like Tarzan in the jungle, and you're swinging from vine to vine, and you don't know where the next vine is going to be, but it just always shows up, and so you're always provided safe passage to wherever you're going. And I think

like once you experience that and start to live that way and also see the positive results that are generated around you and just kind of live in that deep state of trust. There's no going back. But the big blocker I see is it is so unconventional and seemingly unsafe to trust the present moment. And so many people just kind of never get there. And I'd be curious how you advise and coach people on their path from probably kind of more of a control paradigm to a more kind of intuitive present-moment paradigm.

I think it's all about taking those baby steps. And so, as I was mentioning, the process that I primarily teach is known as Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation, or TWIM, which was coined by Bhante Vimalaramsi. And one of the two important facets of the technique is to be able to have fun and to be able to relax.

And so oftentimes I will see, when people come to the retreats that I conduct, they have this wonderful intention, wonderful enthusiasm to want to do really great. And I say, "That's all well and good, but now I want you to let that go, because that's going to get in the way of you wanting to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve."

And oftentimes, what will happen is somebody tries too hard. This is what we talk about. The two blocks I see are essentially interconnected. One is trying way too hard, pushing yourself way too hard to achieve something, becoming attached to the outcome, essentially. And the second is not accepting yourself as you are, or not accepting the situation as it presents itself.

These are the two real main blocks. And so through the retreat, we give them different techniques like forgiveness practice, and then we do the loving-kindness practice, and so on. And the relaxation aspect, which is really the central aspect of the 6R's, there's recognize, release, relax, re-smile, return, and repeat. And briefly put, what that means is you recognize whenever your mind gets distracted in the meditation, you release that thought or that distraction. You come back to the present moment by anchoring your attention to the mind and body and consciously relaxing any psychic

or physical tightness and tension. You come back to a smiling kind of state. So you come back to a smile and you return back to your object. As people start to do this in retreat, later on, what I tell them is you can actually utilize this process anywhere you are. It doesn't need to be in the context of just meditation.

And so, as Bhante Vimalaramsi would say, meditation is life, life is meditation, which means life becomes a meditative process. And you utilize these tools to be able to let go at much deeper and subtler levels. That automatically translates to a mind that is accepting of the present moment without having to try to be accepting of the present moment, and it automatically translates into a mind where it shifts from trying to think, what do I need to do, to trusting in its own intuition. And as you said, the more positive results you see, the more the mind gets motivated to go into that intuitive state of living. That's beautiful, that's beautiful. Yeah. Just reflecting a bit on my own practice.

I've been practicing out of a tradition called Ren Shui. And the whole idea is they call samskaras patterns, but basically using every single moment we're triggered or taken out of peace or disturbed as we move through experience to basically identify a pattern that you're automatically compulsively engaging in. And as we start to become the watcher of those in our everyday experience, we start to see that, wow, I have just been a subject. I thought I was the master of my life, but I was actually the subject and the reactor to these automatic inner compulsions. And as you start to notice them, you become separated from them, and that's when life really starts to become a meditation, which is really interesting because I know a lot of people probably live, like a lot of people, myself included, when I started on this journey four or five years ago, hear this and they're like, but I like my life, but I like my job, but I like my friends.

I don't want to just go in the Himalayas, cool that you did that, Delson, but that's not me. And the interesting thing that I've experienced is the actual integration of these concepts and ways of being just make everything you're already doing more enriching. It creates meaning out of everything. And because there's a constant opportunity to see more of yourself.

And that process, that is what is enriching more so than getting everything you want. Yeah, man, it's just so cool. And I love hearing just about the convergence of ideas between this school of tradition that you've been teaching out of and the ones I've been primarily focusing on in my studies.

Yeah, yeah. And I think you have something there when you talk about this integrated approach. Because most of my students are not monks, and it's like you said, it's great and all to go into the mountains and the Himalayas and do these kinds of things. And some people are inclined to do that, and some people have a different approach, totally fine. And primarily my students, the people that I teach, come from that life where they're entrepreneurs, they have their own businesses, they have jobs, they have families to take care of, and so on. So the idea that we need to let go of all of this isn't always that well received when people come into it initially.

But I would say true renunciation, the idea of letting go, is not letting go of the physicalities of it, which means you need to go run into the mountains and meditate for long years, but letting go of our processes of identifying with these different things that we say is me, mine, or myself. So we say that this is my person, this is my husband, this is my mother, this is my job, this is my house, this is my body, this is my mind, and so on. And if we go through any kind of meditative process that allows us to relax and see for ourselves the reality of the situation,

then we can see that these ideas and concepts of identity are just rooted in past causes and conditions. And really, this identification process is the crux of what we need to let go of. Once you let go of that, then everything else falls into place. Then the intuition automatically comes to be. Because intuition doesn't come from a personal sense of self. Intuition is beyond the logical thinking. It's beyond the process of analytical decision-making. Intuition is immediate. So one of the exercises, for example, I give to people is, you want to try to practice your intuition, let's say you're dealing with a situation, you're dealing with maybe a problem in your meditation, you're having some certain blocks, and it's difficult to deal with that.

What you can do is just very simply ask the mind the question, "What is this block?" Or sometimes people have these life decisions to make, and they're kind of confused by these two or three or four choices. So just come up with a simple question of what seems to be the most appropriate and effective decision to make. And then leave it at that. Just feed it into the mind and then go about your day. Maybe it might take the rest of the day. Maybe it might take a week. Maybe it might take a month. But then like a flash, a eureka moment, the answer comes to us.

It might not be the answer that we're looking for or that we want to hear, but it definitely will be the right answer for the journey that we're taking in this life i love that i i have a similar practice um and also another one i'd throw out there is is i love writing those questions down before i go to bed um as kind of like planting a seed in the garden and without a doubt the information comes often in the middle of the night which i think is fascinating um there's just a kind of clarity clarity at that point one one question that i would be curious for you to talk about is um in the vein of inspiring others there's this notion of

this path and these practices can result in this level of unconditional living and wellbeing. I'm just feeling good all the time, which is great, but it also opens us up to new potentials for things that we can experience. Intuition being one of them. I've heard you talk about understanding our past lives, understanding kind of the building blocks of our reality, time dilation. I mean, just all of these different things. And I know that those are not necessarily things that in many traditions, the siddhis, if you will, are not things that we intentionally seek out, but they're more kind of emergent. I'd be curious to understand, just to have you talk about some of those experiences, mostly just to have people be aware that there are potentials and capacities for humans that are available if you would like to experience them, but are probably things that you might don't hear often talked about.

Yeah. So I think it's there definitely in the Yoga Sutras. It's there in the Buddhist texts. It's definitely there in some of the other Indic or Indian philosophies, this concept of siddhis, as you brought up. And we have to first understand what the word siddhi actually means. Siddhi comes from the root word siddh in Sanskrit, which essentially means to be accomplished at something, to be perfected into something.

So I look at these different — the ability to see past lives, for example, or like you said, these experiences of seeing the building blocks of reality, time dilation, and so on. But then there are other siddhis, like they talk about it in the different ancient texts about being able to read another person's mind or being able to levitate and some other very outlandish kind of experiences.

I think the utility of these siddhis comes about once you do come from that unconditional living. In other words, they're not something necessarily that you have to train for. You can, some people do that. They train for these, but they come about as the icing on the cake or the cherry on top as a result of being in that intuitive state. So for example, the ability to read others' minds, you could see that in different ways. You could see that as literally being able to pick up the thoughts of others, or you could just see that as being empathetic and understanding what the other person is feeling and being more attuned emotionally with the other person.

Oftentimes, there comes situations, and I'm sure a lot of people will identify with this, where you're in a group setting and you come up with something and the other person says, "I was just thinking of that," or they might say, "It's like you read my mind," and that's because you're becoming in alignment with the rest of the group or with that person in that sense. As for the utility of these siddhis, as for what is possible, I think if we were to look into the ancient texts,

there is no limit to what is possible. It's just a matter of how open you are to receive, let's say, for lack of a better word, the grace of these siddhis. The ability to look at the past lives, what's the utility of that? Other than, of course, subjectively for yourself, proving that there are past lives in your subjective experience, it's to really understand how karma works.

When you understand that life is nothing but a series of different kinds of choices and how we choose to take those choices in terms of our intentional actions causes further choices to arise, then we can stop that process so that we are not beholden to those past causes and conditions, but that we learn from them and now are beyond the scope of karma. And that's also part of unconditional living, being beyond the scope of just the causes and conditions that come to be. And then that again means that being able to live in a way where you act appropriately for the situation.

Because not every action is universal to every situation. Some acts will be dependent upon the cause and condition of that situation, and some act will be there because of other situations or causes and conditions for those situations. We talk about siddhis like levitation or walking on water and being able to do some kind of astral traveling. Now if you can do that, I think the benefit of levitation is you definitely save a ton on airfare, right? You also, your legs would be more rested from walking up the stairs. Who doesn't? There you go. There you go. Yeah, I wouldn't discount the possibilities of these things.

I myself haven't seen it. I myself haven't experienced anything like that in terms of the more outlandish things. But that's not to say that it's not possible. That's not to say that somebody hasn't done it in the past or might still be doing it somewhere in the mountains. And it seems there seems to be some type of intelligent design with some of these things, where they come about when you're kind of more, the heart is open and you're more oriented towards service and contribution. And then it's kind of just like fuel to the fire. And so when there's this kind of egocentricity about, oh, I'm going to do get this power.

to use it, it's like you kind of don't get it. And when that falls away, then it creates the space for these just helpful things to arise in your experience and become available to you. Which is almost like the universe kind of like winking at you a little bit. Yes. I think you bring up a very important point in that regard because if people are motivated, and this has happened in different traditions, people have been motivated by just attaining these powers.

And there are stories in the Buddhist text where people have done that and they've used them for their egocentric needs or desires, and it has produced terrible results for them in terms of what that means for their karma and what that means in terms of how they inflict some kind of pain or suffering. But as you said, if you open yourself up to the universe, if you let go of the sense of personal self, if you let go of the ego, if you learn to be one with life, if you allow things to unfold, then you might just actually use these siddhis when appropriate, in the service of beings all around. Or if you're in danger or other beings are in danger, you, without thinking, do something which is out of your control.

And that, again, translates to where it's this effect of spreading like wildfire bit by bit. Our consciousness or our awareness seeps into the awareness of others around us. I talk about loving kindness and compassion meditation and the brahmaviharas, which is essentially these attitudes to take. Loving kindness is a state of being friendly with all beings. Compassion is recognizing the suffering of all beings. Empathetic joy is being able to relish in the happiness of all beings, and equanimity is being able to be unshaken by any situation.

In this process of meditation that I teach, you can actually influence other people in that regard. If somebody's having a bad day, if somebody seems to be down in the dumps, and you just exude loving kindness to them or compassion to them, you will see in a matter of minutes that person start to change their posture, that person start to look at you and look at what's going on, and all of a sudden their mindset changes.

So I have seen for myself how it really does work. And I told you earlier, I just have fun in life. And that really means, when I see people and I go to the airports, for example, traveling all the time. If people go to the check-in counter and some of them don't have great experiences, and the person at the check-in counter might be down at the house, but as soon as you smile, just a mere smile, but then when you exude that loving kindness, they reciprocate that, and they're more in tune with what you need or what you require.

And I'll tell you what I mean. This has happened more than once, where I've been offered free upgrades wherever I go, just because of exuding that loving kindness. Just to see something, they're like, "Hey, we have a free upgrade available for you. We would like to give that to you." Wow. So if you weren't motivated by just being happier, maybe you'll get a free upgrade, and maybe that'll be enough to help you spread the love. One question I did have for you is you've kind of described your current experience; maybe that would actually be helpful. You've clearly spent a lot of time investing in this part of your life and learning wisdom and practices, and there's kind of the practice, and then there's like, all right, does Delson eat meals? What does he do when he wakes up? What does life feel like, actually? And

You've used this word unfoldment, and I would love for you to just kind of expand on what life looks like for you in your current experience? Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. When I'm outside of the scope of traveling and teaching, and I stay at my mother's place, for example, I lead a very sort of boring, ordinary life. And it's just, I get up. First thing I do is I do my meditation, and then start off with the day and then just see what is available, what's going on. When I'm in teaching mode, when I'm traveling, it's the same thing. I always have a routine practice.

First thing in the morning is to do some kind of meditation. So that could be sending out compassion to all beings. That could be going to that special state where the mind completely shuts off. It just depends on how much time I have and what's going on throughout the day. Or I might get an inspiration, like a certain person maybe needs some extra loving kindness.

So I'll direct that feeling of loving kindness to that and so on. But in terms of the lived subjective experience, like what do I see behind these eyes, what do I hear behind these ears, and so on, it's the same as anyone else, I would think. But the difference is that process of unfoldment, that is universal to all beings. That is happening all the time. The thing is, people get caught up so much in thinking about the past, or thinking about the next step, or thinking about what needs to be done, or the future, or having anxieties about the future, that they forget to really look at the unfoldment, which happens in the subjective present moment, in every given present moment.

That's a phrase I always use, every given present moment, which means the unfoldment is there. And that ability to see it requires a mind that is quiet. It doesn't mean that you come to a thoughtless state. It doesn't mean necessarily that you suppress the mind and then concentrate and focus fully on the present moment. Although people do that, it just means that the mind is looking at things, making the dots, connecting the dots, and starting to be more open to the synchronicities. Oftentimes, in my lived experience, I might think about someone or I might think, maybe I need to go here or do this.

And I'll get a phone call and say, you're invited to come here and here's a ticket, here we go. Or I might think about, what do I want to eat today? And lo and behold, somebody offers to make that for me. So it's like these different synchronicities, being open to that. That's really the awakened life, is a life that is connecting the dots all the time. And that's the process of unfolding. Yeah. And what I've observed in my own experience is that I think a lot of people have this idea of like expanded consciousness being like just some meditative state where you're just seeing something crazy and all this kind of stuff, and yes, those experiences do exist, but it also, it's the interconnectedness of everything revealing itself through these moments that you talk about, where you're like, wait a second, like I had a thought and this thing just happened, I did this thing that was out of alignment and this thing just other happened. Wait, maybe linear reality just isn't some random linear thing. Maybe it's actually a non-linear responsive experience, that's where all is connected, and

But there's more to life than just our jobs. There's more to life than just our businesses. That's just one aspect of our lives. In ancient Indian understanding, and this is something I personally subscribe to, is the idea of what's known as dharma. There are four aspects: dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. And dharma essentially means what is your life purpose? It's an oversimplification, but if you would think about it, it's very similar to the concept of ikigai, where you look at what it is that you're good at, something that you enjoy doing, that could be a benefit to your community or a benefit to society at large, and also supports you within the society.

So that's your term, whatever that might mean. As a result of that, you start to make money or you start to enjoy or accumulate resources to be able to experience karma, which is the ability to have pleasant experiences in life, enjoy life much more. And then you're ready for moksha, which is coming to that awakened state of living. What's actually fascinating about this is my experience of this is that it's actually the process of the awakening that reveals the dharma. It kind of is automatic. Where instead of seeking and going, doing all these journaling and genius exercises, all this stuff to find out what is that dharma, it's actually just kind of emerges naturally and is recognized as you get out of the way.

And it's just such a funny paradox because it's so opposite of how the traditional kind of Western business world thinks about these things. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you hit it right on the nail, which is that the process of awakening, any kind of process that leads you to a more awakened, more open, more intuitive kind of way of living does allow you to see that, hey, maybe I should not be doing this business.

Or maybe I should not be taking up this job. It doesn't seem in alignment with my dharma. It doesn't seem in alignment with what seems to be more possible. For me personally, in this mind-body complex, for my karma, for my intentions, for my purpose, let's say, is to really serve people through my actions of teaching and being available to people to kind of help guide them in their own meditative processes.

And I found that to be my dharma, just as a result of the process of awakening. Before that, I was developing skills to develop apps, developing skills to write in Hollywood and in publishing, and so on. Now, has that all gone to waste? No, I've been able to take those same skills and now apply them to writing books on the mind and spirituality and nirvana and all of these other things. So nothing we do in life goes to waste. That's one thing we have to understand. It's just that it's re-channelized into our... it's such a beautiful revelation that, because we can't see the totality of things, all those experiences might seem like, oh, we're wasting our time, we weren't doing the right thing, but it's actually like you kind of needed to go through those experiences for the purpose of helping your dharma. But you just didn't know it at that time. It was like a training ground, which is really, really cool.

I do want to ask about neroda, because that is something you've become, I would say, a bit recognized for, and I think my audience and listeners would find it pretty interesting to hear about this phenomenon. So maybe it would be helpful just to talk about what neroda is, and then I know there's also been a lot of people that have studied you through that experience. And so there's a kind of continuous science that's coming out that's helping us learn more about ourselves as humans, and it would be really cool to get an update on that.

Yeah. Nirodha is, very simply put, it has different contexts depending upon the usage, but in this context that we're referring to, it's a state, it's a way of meditation in which everything kind of shuts down. And so it's like you go through, first you need to have to be able to develop those skills through the preceding stages of what are known as the jhanas or the levels of samadhi that I had initially talked about, where you go into infinite space and infinite consciousness and so on. But Nirodha or Nirodha Samapati is generally translated in English as the cessation of perception, feeling, and consciousness.

So in this context, perception is basically memory or the ability to recognize things and the different conceptual ways of thinking. Feeling is not our emotions. Feeling is all of the bare sensations that we have through the eyes, ears, nose, body, tongue, and mind. And consciousness here is the bare knowledge of what is happening, the awareness of what is happening.

And so in this state of Nirodha, what happens is all concepts just go away, all sensations stop or are no longer being received, and awareness switches off. So I don't know that I've been in Nirodha, because you can't know it subjectively until you come out of it. And when you come out of it, you experience what's known as nirvana.

And nirvana is basically a state, for lack of a better word, where the mind experiences unconditional reality, the unconditioned, which is beyond karma, beyond the relative and the absolute. And the utility of this process of going into Nirodha is primarily to attain that state of nirvana, but also it gives total rest to the entire biology. Because the longer periods, because this is what's being found out through the initial research that I had been conducted into in the Netherlands and at Harvard or Massachusetts General Hospital, which is that as you start to do this for longer periods of time, it actually lowers the heart rate, it lowers the metabolism, it lowers the blood pressure, into where now the researchers are starting to speculate and starting to develop, I suppose they're developing a hypothesis, that this might be tapping into some evolutionary, human evolutionary hibernation practice or process where we actually might even stop or slow down

the process of decay of the cells and so on, because the heart rate starts to diminish, everything starts to diminish, the metabolism starts to diminish, so the cells have to work less for their energy and so on. So that might be one of the case studies or case use cases of this practice. But within the context of meditation, within the context of mental development, the whole purpose is to revitalize the senses so that you are much more attentive and mindful to how reality actually works. - Wow, you know, it's, I'm really happy you clarified this, because I was actually at a dinner last night talking to some friends about this conversation

and talking about this experience of, you know, I've heard things like six days of just basically cessation, and people are like, well, what's the point, like why would you do like why would you do that? And obviously nirvana sounds compelling, but so does this notion of kind of just a full biological reset, which makes a lot of sense, especially in our longevity-obsessed world. So that's really, really interesting, and, yeah, I mean, what for this field of research, like what do you have any perspective on kind of what's next and what people are trying to figure out? - Yeah, they definitely want to put me under observation for those six days, just to get a sense of what actually happens to the biological processes.

So the next step, if it happens, and it's just depending upon my schedule and when I can be available, and the ethics of it too, because the idea of keeping somebody locked up for six days without any food and water and then drawing their blood in on all of these things, it's a bit of a challenge ethically. But if it does happen, I think it would be very interesting what the findings, the initial findings, could result in. And another aspect of it is very interesting, and I make light of that initial finding, which is they talk about how when you go into the state of Nirodha, that the brainwave patterns, the brainwaves, actually synchronize visually.

Like when you're seeing the output of brainwaves, they synchronize, which usually happens according to one neuroscientist I spoke to about, or she had mentioned it, is that it's very similar to people who go into coma. And it's also very, very similar to people who have high doses of ketamine. So you could probably have that experience of ketamine without the ketamine by going into it. Your own inner technology is always a good thing. And just to clarify, so you, when you go into that experience, you do not ex- there is no experiencer? You kind of just wake up as if you just got anesthesia or something? - Exactly, exactly. So it's like, okay, I've gone in, so I know that I went in.

And then the next time I come out, it's like no time has passed, but an hour has passed or six days have passed, whatever it might be. And the way it is done is you set the intention beforehand and you say, I will be in this place or in this state of mind for no more than an hour or no more than two days and 24 hours, 23 hours and 15 minutes or something like that. And so the process of developing that practice is very regimented, very rigid, and I had to go through that process as was given to me by Bhante Vimalaramsi. And I think what it does is it develops the internal clock.

So even if the subjective experience is like nothing's going on, there's still something happening behind the scenes that allows the mind to know to come out at this point. I can't help but think of a talk with Yogananda that I saw where he talked about how he would do something similar with sleep, where he would say, basically, set the intention of like, I will wake up at this time. And he would wake up at the exact time that he said.

And it really alludes to the power of intention and mind that I don't necessarily think we have a full understanding of or reverence for generally. - Yeah, yeah, and you know, that's how I started actually, when I was, because I had of course been inspired by Autobiography of a Yogi, and ever since I started taking power naps, which was probably at the age of 13 or 14, I would say I'll sleep for 20 minutes and I'll wake up exactly at 20 minutes, and I had the ability to develop this intention over time. So I think I had a bit of an advantage, a little bit of a head start in that regard, and so that's why it's helped, and I tell all my students that this is available to you as well.

And that's one of the things I tell them in the beginning in my retreats: try to do that. When you wake up or before you go to sleep, you say, "Let me wake up at 5:55 instead of 6:00 AM and see how well you actually hit that mark." And that will be useful at a later stage when you start to be able to experience these meditative attainments.

Is there any type of other kind of regular situation where you use that power of intention or experiment with it in the same kind of way? - Well, primarily for naps, primarily for Nirodha, but also you could do it for things like where you're waiting for the bus, or you're waiting to board the plane, and you know it's going to be at this time, for example. I mean, this is very practical, mundane stuff. And you still need your rest. You can do that immediately without the alarm. I would not recommend for beginners to do that, because I don't want them to miss their flight or their bus.

But that's another practical example of it. But I think it's geared towards that, the ability to sharpen your intention this way. As for what other possibilities are available, I think there might be other possibilities. You could use your intention in a way that perhaps does lead into experimenting with the levels of perception. What I mean by that is using your intention to actually change the way you perceive reality.

Like starting to look into the microscopic nature of reality. Because once you sharpen the intention and you sharpen the mindfulness, as it's mentioned in the Buddhist texts, you can place your mind on something and know the full knowledge of whatever it is you need to know based on wherever you've placed your mind. So that is another interesting utility.

Can you give a specific example of that? - Well, you know, let's say you, yeah, let's say you, for example, okay, so I'll give you an example that's rooted in the Yoga Sutras. They talk about a process called samyama, which is essentially this process of bringing in mindfulness and intention and this collected mind all together and going into looking at what's going on in your body.

In the Yoga Sutras, it talks about samyama, which is this ability to converge your attention, converge your mindfulness, converge your intention, all of that together, and then focus on some aspect. Let's say if you were to go and look into your navel, it's said that you can actually start to notice what's happening in the biology of your system, and you can actually know if you have a certain disease, if there's something broken, if there's some imbalance in the body, maybe you're not getting enough nutrition of something. Another kind of utility is you look at the North Star, and you could actually have the entire understanding of how astronomy works.

So it's basically like Edgar Cayce level, where you would look at something with your mind and just know what that thing is, you know, like how Edison would sleep on books and then immediately know what's the content of that book. - Wow, very, very fascinating. And yeah, to become the knowledge. That sounds pretty amazing.

Well, Delson, this has been a lot of fun, man. Um, I love everything that you're putting out into the world. I know that you're teaching, you're writing books. I want to give you the opportunity to share where people can learn more about what you're up to and some of the things you're creating. Yeah, so right now, actually, I'm taking this year, 2024, off. So I'm just going into kind of self-retreat mode, and I'm doing a little bit of traveling and then going up to the Himalayas.

But 2025 onwards, I'll be having more retreats and different kinds of workshops and events. But people can stay updated through delsonarmstrong.info. That's the website. And then right now, there's a few books out, which is A Mind Without Preving, which I had mentioned earlier. And then the series on dependent origination, which is talking about the building blocks of how perception arises. So I've gotten about a few of those books available online, and now I'm taking the time to kind of finish the rest of the series. And that might be out hopefully next year, but we'll see how it goes. Amazing. Well, I wish you a very insightful and relaxing year of self-retreat. And we're all very grateful for this conversation and all that you do. So thanks again for coming on, man. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.