Delson Armstrong - Part I - Marvels of Mind & “High Altitude” States of Meditative Absorption(Jhana)

Welcome everybody to this Edge of Mind podcast, where I really, I say this a lot, but there are times when I really mean it, and this is one of those times. I'm so excited to introduce you to Delson Armstrong, who, as you'll see, is really a remarkable individual. And as usual, what I will do is read a slightly abridged version of his bio. We'll have the whole thing posted on the link to this particular podcast, but I'll start with that and then send us a salvo of questions Delson's way, covering just a vast array of different topics here. Let me just clue this back in.

There we go. So, Delson Armstrong began his spiritual journey with yogic meditation at the age of 13. He traveled to India, where he studied at International School for three years and completed his A-levels through the University of Cambridge International Examinations Center for the British Council. When he returned to the United States he graduated from the New York Film Academy. I mean, how cool is that? With a concentration in screenwriting, and began his writing career by publishing three books, and now ghostwrites for publishers, studios, and private clients.

He has attained all six great degrees of Kriya Yoga under the lineages, and there's a host of these lineages, and with your permission, Delson, I'll just skip over those, because they can read them. Plus my facility with Sanskrit and Pali is, I'll probably trip over all these amazing names. He studied the Upanishadic contemplative traditions also under successive lineages, and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, where he's attained all 10 levels of samadhi, or the meditative states of absorption that we are definitely going to be talking about.

He's also practiced Gnana Yoga and self-inquiry through the lineages of Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, two of my major heroes, and attained the level of Sahaja Samadhi, effortless absorption, and studied the teachings of J. Krishnamurti and U.G. Krishnamurti. He then shifted to TWIM, maybe we can talk a little bit about what that acronym means, by completing an online retreat by David Johnson in 2016. He is now leading both off-site physical retreats and online retreats as time permits. Delson took to the TWIM method easily. And reason, let me just toss this, and the reason I'm reading the extended biography for you all is Delson's history, as we'll see, is quite extraordinary, and I think the more we can contextualize the framework, you know, where he's coming from, what got him to this particular space, I think the more

traction we'll have on the conversation. So that's why the somewhat more lengthy introduction. He took to the TWIM practices easily, understood the concepts of the 6R's, perhaps another rich topic that we can talk about, Delson, without much guidance. He has taken the deep dive into the practice and is able to easily guide students to the most sublime states of progress. He was asked by the Venerable Bhante Vimalaramsi specifically to start teaching, and what a beautiful human being he is. While guiding online retreats he supports individuals on their journey, interacts with research institutions on neuroscience, cognitive behavioral therapy and the phenomenology of meditation. When situations allow for it he is open to guiding physical retreats around the world upon invitation. His teachings are freely available to all. And I really want to say a couple personal things about that last note, Delson, and also plug your beautiful book, which I hope we get a chance to talk about. I'm really grooving on this thing. It's really a rich ride. But what's one of the things, don't, that's really touching to me

is your honest, true, selfless service to the truth, to the Dharma, that you offer so freely. You spend your life in the retreat, you spend your life really in the service of reality, in the service of truth, as really a representative of reality, and to me that's really inspiring. That's why I'm so excited to introduce you to my community, so they can reap the benefits of your extraordinary mind and your capacities and your path. But I do want to say the vast majority of our conversation for sure will be in your court, and allowing you to really run with your stories, and I mean this in the highest complimentary sense. You are a fantastic storyteller. Some of our mutual friends have sent me links, and I'm going, I would love to do a campfire event with this guy and just sit around having marshmallows and hot dogs all night long. You are an amazing storyteller, and so it is with that kind of preparatory set of comments on my long-winded part that I open and embrace

what you have to offer and what you will share with us today. And so with that, before we get into some of the really, really meaty stuff, dependent origination, the stuff that I really love to talk about, the granularity, the particulars of the nature of the mind as it's revealed in contemplative meditator practice, you absolutely positively have to tell us a little bit about yourself and your stories, some of your capacities and capabilities. So let's start with that, and then maybe I will direct you a little bit to share with our audience how you got to this particular station in your life, what brought you here and where you aspire to go. So thank you for giving me permission to give an unusually long introduction on my part, because I think the nature of our conversation, understanding respective frameworks and context, will be important, because you'll be using Pali language, perhaps I'll be using Sanskrit, and so there will be some commonalities and there will also be some areas of difference. So tell us about yourself a little bit.

Yeah, I think the bio does a pretty good job, but you know, for me I've always been somebody who's been a contemplative, somebody who's always exploring the nature of reality ever since I could remember. And that's for quite some time. I was always fascinated by the idea that there's something more to this world than just what we see in terms of the physical reality that we understand through the sixth sense basis, for example. And one thing I think people don't really know too much about, the one thing that really got me into the contemplative tradition, is as a child I was so, so big a fan of Star Wars, right? And so Star Wars is really what got me into, wow, okay, so is there such a thing as the Force? Can I become a Jedi? Can I wield a lightsaber? Those kinds of things when I was a little kid. And so that really jumped, you know, kind of made me jump into

what is mysticism, and what are the different kinds of traditions. Now, I grew up in a family that was very open-minded. My father would always tell me, when you're ready you can just decide what you want to do in terms of how you want to lead your life and everything else. He always said, do what makes you happy as long as it doesn't inhibit others' ability to be happy. That I really took to heart. And so my parents were always very open about a lot of things. We grew up, I grew up in a Catholic household, although we weren't really practicing Catholics, and I did that whole thing. I did my first holy communion, my confirmation, I was an altar boy, all of that stuff. But towards the age of 12 or 13 I was introduced to yoga, to Hatha Yoga, by a family friend, and

I went with him, and he said, do you want to try out a yoga session? So I did that with him, and I was just so, so kind of stoned by it. I was like, wow, this is amazing, I feel like I'm in a different dimension. Is it possible to replicate this again with yoga, doing what we just did? And he gave me a compendium of yoga literature, like, hey, try this out, check this out. So he introduced me to B.K.S. Iyengar and then other yogis. So I started looking on my own as a 13-year-old, and I was just so fascinated by it. I remember sharing it with my mother, and my mother, even though she was, and she still continues to be, somewhat of a practicing Catholic, had a lot of deep knowledge about different kinds of traditions within the Indian culture.

I was kind of void of that kind of culture because I grew up in the U.S. Although I was born in Bombay, we moved to the U.S. when I was five, so I wasn't really introduced too much to that kind of culture. But she, I remember, she told me, she went to Nepal, she went to different temples, she did a lot of different things. And when she saw me having this interest in yoga, she really pushed me along towards it with a lot of interesting conversations, and she herself does yoga. She herself is a yogi in some ways.

and then when we went back to the back to india when i was 13 that's really when i had the culture shock and i was not really prepared to um understand anything that was going on i mean the first time you ever go to india it's an assault on the senses right i mean there's just yeah so many things to see so many things to smell so many things to hear you know you just stand in the middle of the road and there's just amazing influx of sensor sensory experience that's going on so that was one thing and then really starting to see oh this is a different kind of culture than what i grew up in which was the american culture let's say uh but that just pulled me deeper into it uh and then like like you've said i i went to an international school it was called pathways uh it's still there it's in a place called gurgao which is uh close to delhi

I wasn't really interested in school a lot, but I had a teacher there who was, he was teaching drama, but he was also a yogi, and so I decided to leave school, and he invited me to come and spend some time with him in the Himalayas. So we went to Haridwar, we went to Rishikesh, we went to Uttarkashi, we went to some caves, went rafting in the Ganges, met some interesting people, went to different kinds of yoga institutes, and that was really my, let's say, formal education, or the beginning of my formal education into yoga and into sorts of, let's say, Shaivite Tantra,

and Buddhism came about much later. I did get into Tibetan Buddhism much, much later, very little bit. I was introduced to it by Lama Lina, Dzogchen, Mahamudra, those kinds of things. And I will say, I mean, to your point, I think there's also some interesting overlap between, let's say, the Dzogchen traditions and what we do in TWIM, which is especially about that spacious quality of mind and so on. But we'll get to it as we get deeper into the discussion. Anyway, and then my other part of my life was, like you just said, my film career. And that was really a lot of ghostwriting stuff that I did.

And now that's translated into me doing these books for Buddhism, so I'm right now working on a book on dependent origination, and I always joke that I'm almost done with it, but I'm still stuck in craving, the chapter on craving. So well, there's a few things to say about that, right? Yeah, yeah. So I'm taking it a little bit of time, and I'm also doing a lot of retreats now. I'm here at Dhamasuka, which is in Missouri, and I'm doing some retreats until the end of August, and then I'll be going to India, we'll be doing some retreats there. So the way I kind of got into the teaching mode, if you will, is

I was always continuing to be fascinated by the meditative arts, right? So I got introduced to Bhante Vimalaramsi through YouTube. I saw some of his videos and he was talking about dependent origination. He was talking about metta practice, and I was actually interested in understanding what the metta practice was about. So you could say I was sort of an experimenter, right? I wanted to try yogic meditation. I wanted to try self-inquiry, bhakti yoga, advaita vedanta, and now I wanted to get into metta practice. So I did an online retreat with David Johnson, one of the senior students and teachers here.

And I had some great experiences from it. I was like, wow, this is... I've not experienced anything like this before. I've had similar experiences, but not in this context. So we exchanged emails back and forth about the practice, and they had me do things like determinations, going to this jhana and that jhana, doing this, doing that. That was a lot of fun. Then I had a chance to meet, I want to say 2017, I believe that was. He was in California, and I was in San Diego at the time, and he was doing a retreat in San Juan Bautista. So David Johnson said, why don't you come and meet us? So I went and saw him for the day, and we had a great conversation, about an hour-long conversation, about the Dhamma. Towards the end of it he said, you know what, what are your plans for the future? Do you have an interest in teaching?

I hadn't really considered it before, but since he was asking me this, I said I would consider it. With your permission, he said, yeah, you have it, you should start teaching. So I started doing online teaching. I did a lot of online guided retreats and things like that. But it wasn't until actually 2020 that I got into teaching, let's say, over Zoom. It started off where I went to India during the pandemic, or just before the pandemic, and I wanted to go on retreat, and I was on retreat, and there was a whole story about that, because I can go into cessation for a

determined amount of time. So there was a situation where there's a cave up in Uttarkashi which I usually go to, and there's a friend of mine who stays nearby and he has a place. So the idea was I would go into the cave for six days and come back and then replenish myself, and then go back again for another six days. So I went into cessation, but about halfway through it, about three days later, the pandemic hit and there was a lockdown. So my friend and a few of his buddies came to get me, because the lockdown was going on and nobody could be out, and they found they couldn't shake me. They were just like, they thought something had happened, maybe I was in a coma or something had happened. So they took me back to their place, and they sent a message to David and said, this is what's going on with Delson. Is he dead? Is he in a coma? What's going on?

And David said, oh, don't worry, he'll be fine, just wait for another three days and see what happens. And I remember waking up, or opening my eyes, and I was on the bed, and there were just these lights around, and I thought to myself, okay, I've done it now, I've gone beyond seven days, and somehow I've ended up in a brahmaloka. There's all these lights over here. Oh my god, it's awesome. But then my friend told me, no, no, this is what happened, and you can't go back into the cave. So I had to finish the rest of my retreat for about the next four or five months at his place. I had my own room there. As that was happening, there was an individual, Kuhn Bigalar, who's one of the founders of the Suttavada Foundation.

He got a hold of me via email because he saw some of the preliminary studies that were happening, very unscientific because it was just through the Muse headband, right, that showed how the mind is when it's in jhana and cessation and things like that. So he sent me an email and he said, is it okay if I send some emails and get some clarification on certain things? And I said yeah, that's fine. And then he said, is it okay if we talk over WhatsApp? And I said that's fine. So it started to become where, on a weekly basis, I would speak with him, and then a few of his other friends who were in the meditation community. And really that's where my teaching started. My teaching, quote-unquote career, took off, and then that became where I did weekly Zoom talks about the Dhamma, and then eventually started doing online retreats. And now here I am, just teaching full-time.

deep end of the pool rather quickly but i have to chuckle isn't it interesting uh delson what it takes sometimes different folks for different strokes what gets you into the dharma for you it was star wars for me it was kung fu do you remember that you probably you're too young but But the TV series with David Carradine, where he was the Kung Fu master and he was evicted and he come to this United States and he basically be spiritual, spiritual. And at the end of each session, he'd have to kick some ass, right? It was like, I wanna be like David Carradine. And so for you, you wanted to be a Jedi, I wanted to be David Carradine.

And I think somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also somewhat importantly, because to me, this is the definition of upaya, skillful means. Is not people not meeting people where you're at but meeting people where they're at? That requires tremendous sensitivity, openness, the ability to listen, and really to understand what's going to speak to this particular person. I think it's very important, because it's not a one-size-fits-all thing. On one level, the Dharma, reducibly, all Dharmas agree on one point, but the way in is different for all of us. And so I love these kinds of stories, because hey, again, it's like, I don't care where it comes from. If I can get to the center of this mandala using kung fu or the Jedi, I think I'm there, I'm with it. But a couple of things here, you point out a couple terms for our listeners that I think we need to explore, because these are so compelling.

One, well, three things. One, talk to us briefly about the jhanas and what those are. The role of determination, because this is in the Buddhist world that I roll in, these are terms that are not frequently tossed about. And so this is one of the wonderful things I learned from you already. It was like, whoa, this is really interesting stuff. So talk to us a little bit about this. This is a colossal topic, so I understand it, but you bring not only a sophisticated doctrinal

understanding but most importantly experiential traction, footing. Here you sit the walk, right? You walk the talk, so to speak. So the relationship of the jhanas is to the determinations, and then of course we have to spend a little bit more time talking about nirodha samapatti. I've heard this pronounced different ways. It's samapatti, some people say samapati, some people say, I don't know which one is correct. You can help me there. But these are wildly, not wildly, wonderfully fruitional states in the Theravada tradition that you have tremendous facility with. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about this. Like why is this important? And then I'm going to come back. I want to throw this up, right, so I don't forget it.

I love the way you also have this interest with science, and we'll talk more about that, the lab studies that you're doing with scientists. I know some of these people as you do. And so I want to toss this out in this capacity, because not only from a dharmic world, Delson, but from a purely evolutionary role, it's not particularly advantageous from an evolutionary point of view to enter nirodha samapatti, right? I mean, from a Darwinian point of view, that makes no sense. Why would you do that? You're setting yourself up to be eaten by a tiger, right? So before we jump to that, I just want to say it before I forget. Give us a little preview of this wonderfully sophisticated topic of the eight states that jhanas are, and then the postdoc school and the road of samapatti, and then the role of determination, and all that, because this is so fascinating to me, and the reason I think it's so important for our listeners

is because it points out the wonders of the mind. That we have these extraordinary capacities, and if we have exemplars like yourself and others, these can be real sources of inspiration for us. It's like, oh my gosh, I had no idea this potentiality was even available for a mind. Wow, there's a role model. Maybe I could work to cultivate something like that. So speak to us about these somewhat beautiful topics. Sure. So, you did touch a little bit about dependent origination, you mentioned it, so I will say from the context of the four noble truths, right? So we talk about suffering, the cause of suffering, or the conditions to suffering, and then the cessation of that, and the path leading to it. So we can look at dependent origination as the second noble truth, as an elaboration of that. When we talk about the jhanas, it's an elaboration of the third noble truth, which is the cessation of suffering. So the way I explain what jhanas are: yes, there are different states of mind and states of experience

but there are also different levels of cessation of suffering. And so what that means is we also have to understand that there are so many different opinions about what jhana is and what jhana isn't, because there are some schools that say that jhana is a very highly concentrated, super focused state. And the tradition and the community that I'm with, we say that the jhanas are much looser than that. I mean, there is still collectedness of mind, which is to say that you have an object of meditation, and your attention, like a satellite, is around that particular object as a way of keeping the mind collected.

But there's an open awareness there, there's an open presence of mind there that allows you to be able to notice and acknowledge when hindrances arise, because what we look at, and the way we see it, is hindrances, whether it's sensual craving, aversion, restlessness, sloth and torpor, doubt, whatever it might be. They are actually teachers. They allow you to see where the mind's attachments and aversions lie. So dealing with them head on, by understanding and acknowledging them, and then letting them go in the right way, which is what we talk about in the 6R's, allows the mind to become more collected. So my very basic definition of jhana is basically that it's the non-presence of any kind of afflictive states of mind, that is to say, the hindrances

and the presence of certain positive states or wholesome states of mind, which include the seven enlightenment factors. And then, based on that being collected, there is what happens: there's joy that arises, there's some comfort in the body that arises, and so on. So, the first jhana, there's four main factors to it. There's vitakka and vicara, which is really the thinking and examining thought, and what that really is, is setting the intention to start to get into a meditative state of mind, and then placing your attention on an arammana, simply put. That's really the way to look at it in this tradition. And then, as a result of that, because there's relief in the mind from any afflictive states, there's a natural joy that arises. So the idea isn't to cultivate and create and construct a state of joy. It's rather to relax and rest into the natural presence of joy in that particular jhana. And then there's the sukha, which is the comfort and pleasure in the body. Now once you start to really get collected

you don't need to continue to be with your object. The mind is naturally with the object. So now you get into the second jhana, where there is the cessation of the vitakka and vicara, and so the mind is now just really collected, very happy, very unified, but not one-pointed, not focused, not to a point where it becomes like this laser. Rather, it's still very open, and it's very much present with what's going on. And then the third jhana, it's a reduction of the joy, and that happens quite naturally. And so now the joy changes into a more balanced equanimity, more peaceful, tranquil balance of mind. And then the fourth is where the mind becomes like a very highly polished

marble stone. There's nothing going on, and it's just the presence of mind that's there. What it's called is the mindfulness due to equanimity, or mindfulness purified by equanimity, if you will. And why that is, is because as you're going through these jhanas, you're cycling through the enlightenment factors. So every time you cycle through, the enlightenment factors can be seen as a linear process, but they can also be seen as a cyclical process. So just for listeners out there, it's basically mindfulness, which leads to investigation of states, which leads to energy, which leads to joy, which leads to tranquility, which leads to collectiveness, which leads to equanimity. But what I say here is the equanimity then conditions the next arising of mindfulness. Your mindfulness only gets that much clearer as you progress through the jhanas. Now, technically there's only four jhanas, but what happens is at the fourth jhana there are four states of mind or experience that arise, and these are known as ayatanas, spheres or dimensions

so we have the experience of infinite space, the infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception or non-perception. So what happens is, in our tradition, mainly what we do is we take metta, loving kindness, as the beginning part of the meditation, because it just naturally makes you feel happy, and you're naturally more open to the joy that arises. And eventually, as you progress to the four jhanas, and you get to the fifth state of infinite space, your mind becomes very expansive. It's boundless space, and there's this spaciousness that's all around, and that metta, that loving kindness, changes into what's known as karuna, or compassion, and now you have compassion for all beings, in all places, in all dimensions, time and space. And so this experience becomes so expansive that the consciousness that arises, dependent upon this experience, starts to actually break down. So infinite consciousness is usually talked about as being an understanding of now that consciousness fills that in expansive space

but we go a step further, and what we say is that expansive consciousness is actually made up of, let's say, iotas or data packets of consciousnesses. And what that means is, one of the analogies I use is, you think about a ray of light, a ray of sunshine, that sunlight that comes through, and it looks like one ray of light, but actually that's made up of quintillions and quintillions of individual photons. So same in here, what we see is the arising and passing away of individual, let's say, consciousnesses. Once we start to see that, we might see it like eye contact, ear contact, nose contact, tongue contact, body contact, or even mind contact, and each time there's contact we see the arising and passing away of consciousness, depending upon that particular sense space

now when that happens, we're seeing in that process that everything is dependent, everything is dependently arisen, or, and because it's conditioned, it's impermanent. So we're not reflecting on it, we're seeing for ourselves, as things pass, arise, and pass away, that there is impermanence here. And as things start to get tiresome, we see the inherent dukkha in there, we see the inherent suffering in these conditioned experiences, and because of that we see the impersonal nature of conditioned experience. And once we see the impersonal nature, we develop a level of equanimity. So with infinite space, the karuna then goes into mudita, or empathetic joy, at infinite consciousness. That mudita then transforms into equanimity, or upekkha, at the level of nothingness, and this nothingness arises naturally as well. What happens is, in each arising and passing away of consciousness, the gap widens, and as the gap widens the mind starts to become more aware of those gaps. And now you're just in this plane of nothingness, this dimension of nothingness, tied to equanimity. Now even that becomes quite coarse, and what happens is the mind gets

so all this time we're radiating karuna if we're in infinite space, we're radiating mudita if we're in infinite consciousness, and we're radiating upekkha if we're in nothingness. But eventually that too becomes quite coarse, and mind sort of just goes in on itself. It wants to rest in itself, and this is really the experience of pabhassara citta, the luminous, radiant mind, as it's understood in Pali. Excuse me. So we stay here for a bit, and eventually we get into what's known as neither perception or non-perception

And this is a very interesting state to be in because it's like, when we talk about perception, what perception is the mind's ability to recognize and label things as they arise. But in either perception or non-perception, it's like the sankharas, the formations that arise, are kind of looked at or cognized, but they're not fully recognized as something. So it's like you're starting to see the percolations of thoughts arising before they actually arise in neither perception or non-perception.

And eventually, you come to a point what's known as the signless state of mind. It's the animitta samadhi. And here, it's an objectless awareness. Before, you were taking mind itself as an object. And then you let go of even that, and it's just this pure awareness that's looking out into space, like a flashlight that looks out into space and doesn't land anywhere, and eventually the batteries run out. That's the fuel for attention, and then you basically drop into the cessation of perception, feeling and consciousness,

which is nirodha. This is... there's so much to unpack here, and I'm glad you took a little pause. A couple things here, Delson. This is really so, so rich. It's really just to put it, again, in the context you're talking about: the four brahmaviharas. You didn't mention that overtly, but that's really another framework for what you're discovering, the four divine abodes. And it's fantastically beautiful, because it starts from the outside, especially in your approach with metta. This loving kindness, Sanskrit "my tree", that becomes your object, and I love that. Because I think, Sanskrit, Pali, right? Citta, same word, mind, heart. We tend to think, oh, meditation is all just a cerebral, cognitive, mental thing. No, no, no. It's just mindfulness is just as much heartfulness. And so I love the fact that this particular approach starts with more of the heart, because maybe, the Tibetans, again, there are near enemies and near friends to every one of these trajectories, and perhaps some of the excessive, so to speak, emphasis on the cerebral, mental aspect sometimes can

be a little bit dissociative towards this more affective, emotional, loving component. I think that's incredibly important. A couple other things here. There's so much you said here that's just so interesting to me. One is, you intimated at the outset, and I want to come back to this because this is important, on one level you mentioned the word attainments, and there does seem to be this. The way I look at it, Delson, let me test my understanding with you: two authentic vectors of understanding the meditative journey. One is, in fact, the path quality of attainment, acquisition. I want to attain these particular states, these samadhis, these whatever. I think that's utterly valid. The path of effort. But however, and you mentioned this, and that's why I want to circle back to it, I think it's perhaps more valid, just as valid but perhaps more so, the path of effortlessness. That fundamentally, it's as much, if not more, a process of discovery. You're in these, on the whole level, these states can seem remarkable and extraordinary, but on another level they're absolutely, utterly ordinary. Samsara is what's extraordinary.

These are ordinary states. And the reason I think this is important is because we in the West tend to be somewhat acquisition-goal oriented. Oh, I need to attain this, I need to retain that. I'd love to hear what you think about this, because I think at the highest levels, once one exhausts that, then you realize what the Hindus talk about is anupaya, the path of no path, that even the notion of path itself can become counterproductive. So please talk to us a little bit more about that, and then I want to say more about the atomistic nature, the discovery of the dharmas, small d, because I think that's incredibly important. There are other things I want to say here, but let's talk about this a little bit, because on one level, to me, I get two vibes when I hear this. One is, wow, this is tremendously inspiring. On another level, well, this is really intimidating. I can never attain that, I can never get there. And so, therefore, I think the second aspect of the path of discovery

can allow us you said open open relax and in the mahamudra zogjang teachings really one word summarizes the whole shebang relax yeah open relax that's it interview is over podcast done path is done we're both out of work right but on another level it's too simple it's too obvious what do they say it's hiding in plain sight it's too obvious we don't see it but you get the point so talk to us a little bit about the reconciliation between the path of attainment and effort which is completely legitimate versus the more perhaps if we could dare say absolute path of effortless relaxation and openness yeah so you know the way the way to to unpack that uh in my understanding is you know i think it's sort of like having a compass or a setting setting a uh a a rudder to where you want to head towards and insofar as that that's concerned

that is known as in poly is you know which is a wholesome desire if you will a wholesome placing of mind towards a goal but that's where it's it stops it's just you're you're guiding your mind towards some kind of direction anything beyond that i would see as starting to create in the mind a lot of agitation and restlessness uh and as you said you know talking about these attainments can be a little intimidating for people in the beginning so the the the key central point for the practice when we're doing it into twin practice is actually as you just mentioned relax

So that's why I say, and I emphasize, that jhanas, or these experiences, are levels of cessation, and they're levels of relaxation. Yeah, so let me interrupt. In a certain way, there is, like Meister Eckhart said, on the path we don't proceed by addition, we proceed by subtraction. Right? Via negativa. Hence all the nirodha, nibbana, nippapanca, all the negations, negations, negation. So that's another way. Classically it's hard for the interruption to work with this, the cessation. Really understanding that it really is a process of negation, not addition. How can you attain something you already have and already are? So, right, nibbana. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no. I just want to put an exclamation point on this, because I think this is critically important for one's understanding of the notion of path itself, because on one level, absolutely,

completely viable thing, this thing called path. But on another level, perhaps more fruition level, the path itself becomes an obstacle. So anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you, I just want to put an exclamation point on that. No, and I'm glad you did, because that's a good point to bring up, which is nirvana or nibbana in Pali. It's understood as that which is unconstructed, or unformed, or uncreated. The misconception with people when they start out on the path, or let's say people, and it's no issue, I mean, it's just because of the way people have been brought up and the way they think you need to accomplish things, is by adding to it, by creating something, by constructing something, by formulating something. But then as they start to get deeper into this practice, they realize, oh, all of that is rooted in an understanding, or misunderstanding, of an idea of identification

or misidentification, of what needs to be done. And really what needs to be done is what we call right effort in the Eightfold Path. Right effort is really not about constructing an experience. It's actually about deconstructing reality. So nibbana is actually the deconstruction process that allows you to get to the Dhamma, that allows you to get to reality as it actually is. So when we talk about right effort, we talk about it from a mnemonic device, which is known as the six R's. That's really the core, the heart of that, is the relaxed step. So very simply put, what it is, is you recognize that you are distracted. You release your attention from it. You relax the mind, relax the body, and in that process of relaxation, what happens is mind opens up, and in that moment you already experience nibbana. You experience this process of spaciousness where there's nothing uncreated, there's nothing created, there's no formulation. It's just mind as it is. And then you come, and then you generate something that's wholesome through the smile, and then you come back to your object, and then you repeat whenever necessary.

So this is how we describe right effort through this mnemonic device. And the more people do this, the more they realize, oh, I don't have to do anything here. All I have to do, you know, I could save people two hours of dominox by just saying two things: observe and relax. That's really it. It's fantastic. And really, because this is so important, Delson, I want to stick with it. Stick with it. Tricky words, sticking with it, right?

But it's really interesting, because to me, again, you mentioned Mahamudra and Dzogchen, arguably in the Tibetan tradition, and I think that's why you're attracted to them, the fruitional most trajectories of the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions. And so to me I love these fruitional approaches, because what they argue, I wouldn't say argue, assert, in let's bring it to your language: there is only nirvana. There is only nirvana, that's it. Or in Buddhist language, there's only the clear light mind, there's only the dharmakaya, that's it. The issue was one of recognition. And I love this again, because it bespeaks the immediacy of the awakened state, that basically what samsara is, is either partial or complete non-recognition of what is always already right in front of you. And so it's like T.S. Eliot famously said in the Four Quartets, right, you return to where you began, but you see it as if for the first time. And so this ties in beautifully

to what you were saying before about the path. And this is where our neuroscientist friend Ruben Lakonin comes into play, that the path, really using the alliteration, that what I call the three D's: you have the six R's, I have the three D's. Number one, D is deceleration. That's the shamatha, the slowing down, but putting the brakes, b-r-a-k-e, b-r-e-a-k, double entendre intended. Deceleration leads to deautomatization. That's what you were talking about, the negation of reactivity, the increase of responsibility. Basically, deautomatizing leading fundamentally to deconstruction. And so this is incredibly important also in a very practical way, because this stuff may sound really good on paper, but when we engage in the path and we start to deconstruct our self-sense and the world that arises concurrently with it, well, from an egoic perspective that's akin to death. And so this is where all the resistance to the path comes in, does it not? The fear, the anxiety.

And so that's why right view, first of the eight, arguably the most important, is what we're talking about here. With right view, not only will you better tolerate the mini death that's involved on this path, whether you know it or not, you've signed this death contract, and then also the view and the fruition will end. So I know I throw a bunch of noodles on the wall here, but to me this is so critically important, both in terms of setting the context and also, like you said, setting your mind in the right direction, so that you know where you're going and what it is you're actually trying to accomplish. So say a little bit more about that. And also, the atomistic nature is what my friend Evan Thompson uses. He coined this word, it's a wonderful word, quantum phenomenology. I love it. It's a big word. I love big words, but you get the idea. The mind that becomes so nuanced, so precise, so subtle that all the things that the literature talks about that can seem

almost philosophical rhetoric. This comes from Yogacara, comes from direct experience, from a mind that is so refined and precise that it actually discerns these atomistic qualities of reality. So talk to us a little bit about, anyway, whatever might react or respond to what I just threw out. I'm glad you brought that up, because that's something that I also teach, which is there is something that is the reactivity mindset, which is really the craving mindset. That is a mind which is, we talk about dependent origination, and it's interesting you talk about quantum phenomenology. That's a great way of looking at it, isn't that great? Yeah, the one I call the planetary generation quantum cognitics, that is to say, it's a cascading of different things that lead to constructing your experience, right? So the idea here is there is reactivity and there's response.

Reactivity, or reacting to situations, is rooted in that craving, in identification, in ignorance, in seeing things as me, mine, or myself in the wrong way, let's say, or in the ineffective way, in a way that leads to further suffering. Whereas the response, or responsiveness, is rooted in wisdom, rooted in compassion, rooted in real, true understanding of the nature of reality. And this happens as a result of seeing and deconstructing that quantum phenomenological state or different states, which is to say, now that you have the cessation of ignorance of these states, now you can be more mindful or be more aware as and when they arise, so that you can relax them, so that you can let them go, and then come to that Nibbanic mindset, which is from where actually the mind in Nibbana is spontaneous.

Everything else that people react with is from all of this projection of different ideas that cascade down, whereas the Nibbanic mind is spontaneous. It acts as it is required according to the situation and person that's there. But it will always, I tend to say, always respond in wisdom and with compassion. And it does so because, this is my languaging, this is where, high five, my friend, we 100% agree, it's really the path from self-referential reactivity, which creates karma, to other-referential or non-referential response-ability, which doesn't create karma.

And I think this is also incredibly important to understand, because when you engage in the world with this kind of enlightened activism, again, this is cash-value, street-level, important stuff, when you act, I should say respond and dance with your world in this capacity, it is effortless. There's no intentionality, because there's no self-reference, hence there's no karma created. Therefore you live like Suzuki Roshi said in the Zen tradition: don't be a smoky bonfire, be a good bonfire, cremate your experience as you live it. And the way you do that is reducing the craving or the contraction. That's a whole different topic I want to talk about. The craving, to me, is contraction. You reduce, you replace the contraction with openness, and therefore every action you take happens effortlessly, with a smile on your face, spontaneously, because you're in tune with the dictates. Every reality, you're simply responding and acting as a representative of that reality, because you're so open to it, you're such a good listener, that reality tells you what to do.

Is that your experience? It seems like what you're saying... Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I'm glad you brought up karma, because this is something that we look at in the form of, again going back to dependent origination, what we understand is that even in the suttas, the sutras, or the Pali suttas in the Nikayas, it mentions there is something to be said about old karma and new karma. So everything that we're experiencing up until this present moment is an experience of old karma, or let's say the repercussions of karmic choices in the past that were rooted in ignorance, rooted in craving, rooted in this reactivity state of mind. But now there is a choice. Can I ask you real quick, because I don't want to forget some of these: is this what's referred to as vastu in the 12 links, nidanas one through seven? This is what's given to you, right? Is that correct? I just want to make sure. Where, yeah. So the ones that are given to you are basically ignorance, sankhara, or formations

consciousness, nama-rupa, or mentality-materiality, the sixth sense space contact and feeling, so vedana, right? Vedana is basically this experience that we're having right now. Yeah. In the present moment, now there's a choice here, in the present moment. Do you want to add to that fuel by reacting with ignorance, reacting with craving, reacting with this is me, this is mine, this is myself? Or do you see it as being a process that arose because of past causes and conditions that were impersonal, and therefore you respond in a way that lets go of that reactivity? Once you do that, then the new karma, which is the craving, the clinging, the becoming, the birth, and the jara-marana, they don't come to be. So instead of adding to the repository, what's happening is the repository gets emptier and emptier with every succeeding experience of vedana.

with the proper wisdom that's attached to it or experiencing it. That's fantastic. And so really, I'm reminded of what James Joyce once said: history is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake. We're trying to awake from this conditioning, basically the twelve nidanas, one through six, right? That's part of the history, the nightmare that conditions us. And this is where, of course, predictive processing and what all the neuroscientists have to say come into play, the wonderful marriage of deep contemplative insights like you're talking about and the contributions from the neuroscientific community. So yeah, and I would just add, rebirth for example. When we talk about jati, or rebirth, what I say is rebirth is basically the same definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Result, right? So if you're going to continue being in a craving mindset, then you're just going to add to it. But if you have wisdom

then you're producing no new karma exactly and that's the enlightened mind exactly and then and then see if again i want to test my understanding is is would it then be fair to say one of the contradistinctions delson between the buddhist tradition and others which i don't mean to criticize in any way is really not really getting out of rebirth but getting out of involuntary rebirth that's the way i see it the rebirth itself is just the play of the mind it's lila ropa that's just what the mind does that's never a problem so the point is not to end rebirth the point is to end involuntary karmically driven propulsive rebirth taking now instead forming and this is the 12 links are the genius heuristic for this right replace the first nadana ignorance with wisdom the potter the second nadana then what does that do that's still working but instead of throwing ignorance into form that'd be me confused sentient being now you throw wisdom into form and that's a toolkit or reincarnate someone who comes back out of love and compassion

not out of ignorance to be of service to reality is that a fair a fair way to look at it from your understanding yeah it could be uh and i would say that uh yeah that's a great way of looking at it actually because you you talk about how ignorance is replaced by wisdom right and you you touched upon right view uh just a few minutes ago and i could also say that right view becomes the rudder so you know you know so right view is what then sort of you could say dictates if you will that enlightened mind in the in the sense that it becomes automatic right everything so far that beings do is automatic automatically create creating craving automatically ignorant but then when you let go of that and then you replace it with the with the with the wisdom with the right view

then the mind becomes automatically wise, automatically compassionate. There's no effort to be made. There, beautiful. It's like my languaging: instead of living our lives on automatic ignorance, as we're automatons, right, driven by automatic ignorance, now we're living on automatic wisdom. It's in it. And we know this is happening when we say that colloquially, like when we do something we shouldn't have done, we say, oh god, I just couldn't help myself. That's because of the power of your sankharas and your habits and your karma. Yes, perhaps you want to get to the point where you act with love and kindness and compassion, and of course you wouldn't say the following because you're humble, but you would also say, I couldn't help myself, I couldn't help but be loving, I couldn't help but be kind, because that is now my default, that is now where that good karma, or no karma, now leads me from self-centricity to other-centricity. Absolutely. Yeah. So there's, oh my gosh, this is so rich, but we have to return to one thing.

We left a little dangler here. Talk to us a little bit about the determinations, because this is something that is somewhat idiosyncratic to your tradition. There's not a lot of traffic with it in my tradition, and when I read it I said, oh my gosh, I never really thought about it this way. I've had these colloquial experiences, like waking up in the middle of the night to catch a plane. That's an expression of determination, yes, but more specifically, that's a very over-the-counter iteration. But more specifically, when you're engaging in the road to some apathy, and I want to return to that, what ends it? Why do you do it? Like, what again, evil? What is the evolutionary purpose?

Darwinian or spiritual, for doing something like this? And then what is the role of the determinations here? Because this is so fascinating, and if this is something that my audience does not traffic in, I really want to hear you riff on this. Yeah. So, determinations. This is something that later happened, after my experiences with David Johnson at the online retreat, when I started doing more practice. He said, why don't you start getting to determinations? It's a much more technical meditative experience than anything else. So it's like you're refining and sharpening your ability to get into these jhanas. When you first begin to work with these jhanas, you kind of stumble into them, and you're getting into them and understanding them a little bit, and then you get into the next one, and the next one, and so on. It's all very naturally progressive, but determinations allows you to explore each territory of the jhana, as if they were rooms, and say, oh, here's

this, here's that. Oh, here's where the contact happens, here's the feeling, here's the perception, here's the intention, and so on. And as you're doing that, you get more well versed in the quality of each state of mind, the quality of each jhana. Now, specifically with determinations, they have to do with duration. The way I was trained by Bhante Vimalaramsi was, all right, so you get into this jhana and you explore it. You do the first jhana and you stay there for, let's say, five minutes. Stay there for five minutes. You tell your mind it'll go no higher than the first jhana. Stay there, and then once you're able to do that, stay there for, you know, up to a minute and a half or something, and then you come in and out of jhana at micro levels. So you're like, I'll be in jhana for three seconds and then come out of it. I'll be in jhana for five seconds and then come out of it. So the idea is you're training your mind or its ability

to be in a specific state of mind for a predetermined amount of time, and you do that through each of the jhanas. The jhanas one through eight, let's say the first four jhanas and the four ayatanas, the four dimensions of experience, and then he tells you, what you do is, okay, I want you to go from jhana one all the way to jhana seven, and then come back from jhana seven and go down to jhana three, and then go from jhana three and go to jhana five, and so on and so forth. And when you do this, what it's doing is it's training your mind to be dexterous.

This is really a technical experience. It's just refining your mind's ability to enter these, some of the states, basically, and being able to just intentionalize, okay, I want to be here at this amount of time. Now, you mentioned you could do this, and this is what we do on retreats. We tell people, all right, if you have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, let's say, make a determination like, I'm going to get up at 5:25 and see how close to it you get, or 5:31 or 5:32 or something like that. This is just the precursor to training the mind to be able to do that. Now, not a lot of people do this within the tradition. I know of a few people who do it, but ultimately the idea is you get from this and then be able to determine how long you want to be in nirodha samapati. Nirodha samapati is the attainment of the cessation of perception, feeling and consciousness.

And you can get there, and then you can be there for up to a minute, or you can be there for up to seven days. That's the Pali Nikaya understanding: that you can be in this state where there's utterly no feeling, no perception, no consciousness going on, for up to seven days. And what I joke, I say, the reason, you know, what is the benefit of doing that? Right? Bragging rights. Oh, there you go. I was going to say that's, I love it. High five, my friend. And it's like, what would Darwin say to this? What would I guess, fantastic. I love this stuff. So yeah, keep running with it. But the reason why you do it is really: you think about all experience that you have. Even though the mind is in a state of nibbana, it's in a state of not conceptualizing, not creating, not formulating. The six sense bases are continuously experiencing things through sensory data packets. So the idea is that in cessation of perception, feeling and consciousness

the six sense bases are inactive, so the impediments, let's say, of those sensory data packets don't continue. So there's a sense of relief from that, and one of the things that people see is, when they come out of cessation, it's like their eyes can take in more information, their ears can take in more information. The colors become brighter, the lights are just more luminous, and so on and so forth. So in the Pali Nikaya, as it says, the faculties are serene and clear, which means that they're clear because there's no, let's say, dirt of sensory packet information happening in cessation of perception, feeling and consciousness. So what comes to mind is Huxley's famous beautiful term from The Perennial Philosophy: the brain is a reducing valve. And it's also somewhat indicative to me, Delson, of this narrative of progressive opening, that really, on one level, if we were, we meaning ego, the reference stance, the developmental stance, that's what ego is to me: it's just an arrested form of development. We need the ego on one level, or otherwise we wouldn't be here talking about egolessness.

It's a part, a necessary part of evolution, so don't get rid of it. Transcend but include it. But what ego does is it acts as a reducing valve, because if ego saw reality the way it really is, it would incinerate. In other words, the sensory input, the amount of reduction that inert in the sciences tell us, this one part per million, right? What we reduce allows us to negotiate, again, Darwinian, the world in order to survive. But this is survival at a biological, evolutionary, Darwinian level. We're talking about post-Darwin evolution, where evolution continues, right? As Chardin said, but now it's just moved indoors. It's moved to the level of mind and heart. That's what evolves. So the same parameters and metrics that we used vis-a-vis Lamarck and Darwin and others no longer apply for spiritual evolution. And in fact, I would argue that this is one reason spiritual evolution is so difficult, because we have a biological, even genetic, legacy burned into our DNA that actually is working against us on the spiritual path. Hence fear, that is so critical, and biological evolution becomes a massive retardant in spiritual evolution.

In spiritual evolution, and so I'm curious if that lands with you as well, because again, this has cash value for me, Delson, because it helps us understand my languaging: the forces of the dark side. Right there you go, the forces of the dark side. Our histories, our conditioning, our ignorance, individual, societal, collective, even scientific legacies, all the massive forces of the dark side that co-conspire to keep us so in the dark, so afraid. Yeah, yeah, that's a wonderful way of looking at it, because spiritual evolution, as it were, as I understand it, is really a process of, it's a process of more to reality, rather than, as you said, in the biological perspective, it's like you need a sense of salience so you can only target what you require for your particular needs. You pick out this because it satisfies the craving mindset.

So the way I look at it is, the idea of the craving mindset is, all right, there's an agitation that happens in the body, in the nervous system. Once it requires, either that it's hungry, which is the mindset of attachment, that I need something in order to satisfy me, or I'm in danger, so I need to run away from this, or I need to push this away. So that's the aversive quality of the mind, or I am this, I'm standing my ground, and I'm saying that this is me, this is mine, this is myself.

That's that sort of state of mind, let's say the fight or flight kind of state of mind, right? That is really the tension that happens in the nervous system. And it's that contraction that you were referring to, or at least that's the way I would understand it, that contraction that is physically felt in some ways, if you're really attuned to it. Now, this is where the old model, let's say the samsaric model, will say that, okay, I experience this craving, or I experience this aversion, I experience this identification.

But if I feed into my craving, or if I feed into my aversion, or if I feed into my identification, I experience some level of relief. Now there's a bit of an expansion of the nervous system, because I was really hungry, and I went for that piece of chocolate cake, I ate that piece of chocolate cake, and I felt really satisfied, and now I feel relief. But there's another model here, which is the Nibbanic model, which is saying, what if you could experience relief without having to act upon the craving, without having to act upon the aversion and identification? So the idea here is the relief is experienced even before the craving arises, so that the craving never even has to arise.

Beautiful. This is, talk about cash value. But we can't let this word get out, Delson, because it would crash the world's economy. I mean, really think about it. This is my languaging around this. And I mean, I'm so in resonance with you here. Is that again, if we take a very close look, and that's the invitation, the empirical scientific invitation of these traditions. The Buddha said it: don't take my teachings on face value. Look at your own experience. Test my teachings against your experience. Work out your own salvation with diligence. So he's saying, be a good first-person scientist. Look at yourself. And so for me, like you, I like to look at things very, very closely. And when I look at things like craving

I actually see, and this is a way perhaps to summarize what you just said, when I look at it in an unexamined way, I think I'm happy when I get what I want. And that right there is the basis of the obesity epidemic at every level: physical obesity, intellectual obesity, spiritual obesity, all the ways that we just consume because we think we're happy when we get what we want. Not quite. If you take a closer look, we're actually happy when we stop wanting. So in other words, we confuse the satisfaction of want with its temporary transcendence.

So why not reduce life to its closest irreducible terms and realize the phenomenology, the mechanics of desire? And exactly like you said, you already have what you want. Just discover it. Remove the adventitious defilements and realize you don't have to trash this panel planet. The average American, Delson, consumes over 200 times the world's average of natural resources, and it's all reducible to this marigpa, this lack of knowing, this ignorance. So less people listening go, oh, this is just philosophy or spiritual rhetoric. Oh my goodness, this has, this is a game changer.

For the way you live your life, it's like, I playfully say, is a Marie Kondo for your mind. Right? Remember Marie Kondo? You're not just cleaning up your closet, you're simplifying and cleaning up your whole life. If you understand the phenomenology of happiness, and that's really what you're talking about here. Yes, right. So anyways, like you're right, it looks like you're interviewing me. I get so excited when I talk to people like you, I have to back off. But let's come back. I want to hear some more stories. Are we okay? Can I return to some? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. So, you talked earlier about memory, and it's so interesting, this memory thing. You have a tremendous capacity to recollect, and so again, if you don't want to go here, I'm happy to set any of these questions aside. But you share a story, when I heard it I have to say I just giggled in the light. It was like, this is the most amazing story. So as one's

distraction diminishes. Distraction is another way to talk about forgetfulness. As we become more mindful, we become more aware, our memory naturally increases. My understanding: Buddhas are never distracted, Buddhas never forget, Buddhas never sleep. In that sense we'll come back to that in a second. And so memory also, in our traditional understanding, increases. We have an increased prodigious capacity to recall. In Tibetan, the word for mindfulness is drempa, literally means to recollect, to remember. So when you do enough memory muscle, whatever, we remember more. So talk to us, share with us this remarkable story that I can't remember where I heard it, whether it was from Liam or somewhere else, about your recollection of your previous life in the whole wedding thing, because when I heard that, Delson, it was just, I just jumped up and down in delight. It's such an awesome story. So are you okay sharing that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's basically, you know, I was doing another practice which is known

as the threefold knowledge. So in the Pali tradition, let's say we have the threefold knowledge, which is number one, being able to recollect your past lives. Number two, being able to see the arising and passing away of other beings in different dimensions. And then the third is really seeing the destruction of all ignorance and craving and so on and so forth. So in the first knowledge, you actually, there's a way of doing it, which is you go into what's known as the fourth jhana, where you have complete equanimity, and you place your mind towards what happened the day before. And you continue going all the way to different aspects of your life, and you start to see, all the way up to when you were an infant. And you go beyond, and there's this blank spot, and then you start off in the next life, and you start to see things. And though the experience is like, if there's anyone who remembers it's

like when you have the VCR, the videotape, and you're rewinding and you see the people going back in reverse. And then you stop at a point and you start to see that play out, because it has some kind of karmic resonance to a lot of the choices that you're making in your present life.

So with that background, or with that foundation, I did that. And in my previous life, what I saw was that I was this yogi, a wandering yogi in the Himalayas, and I was traveling all around India. And I came across where there was this huge celebration going on. People were enjoying themselves, and I was thinking, what was going on? And here's a wedding. There's this couple that was just newly married, and they invited me, come and have a meal. They said, please have a meal with us. And so I did, and I was so happy, I was so delighted. I blessed them, and I said, you'll have a son, you'll be blessed with a son. And I left, and then I went back and I went to the forest, and I departed, meaning I left the body. Now my mother and my father, they actually met somebody who was a yogi who came to the wedding, and they invited him to come and have a meal.

So when I went to them and I told them, and I asked them, so at your wedding, was there anybody who was a yogi, or like an ascetic or sadhu, that you might have met at your wedding? And they said, yeah, he was there at the reception. But who told you this? Was it your grandmother who told you this, or how did you get to know this? Because they had never told me about this. And so in essence, when I blessed them with a son, I was just blessing them with this present, let's say, mind-body that you see before me and before you. So that's the story. I mean, I knew my parents before I was born as their child. So what was their reaction, outside of their jaws hitting the floor? I mean, what? Well, you know, they don't know exactly that I know about that particular yogi, in the sense that I was that yogi. I see. I see. Right.

If I told them that, I don't think they would still be flabbergasted. You know, my mom would still be flabbergasted. But maybe I should bring it up to her and say, you know, the reason I know this is because this is the experience I had, because she's very open to these kinds of things. And I've had other experiences where I've seen, let's say, other realms or other dimensions, and other things that are going on in this universe.

You know, I don't know what's that famous line from Hamlet where Horatio says there are more wonders in heaven and earth than we know of. And so you can even imagine. Yeah, yeah. And so again, to me, Delson, this is just so beautiful, because again it flows in so elegantly to this narrative of opening. That on one level we think of these as cities, these are miraculous powers, but on another level they're a natural consequence of just being so open that as we become translucent and transparent to ourselves, we become translucent, transparent, porous to reality. And therefore it's only because we're so constipated, so contracted, so shut down, that we don't acknowledge the actual

normalcy of these types of experiences. We think of these psychic relative cities, these are these extraordinary events, but on one level they're extra ordinary. They're not extraordinary, they're extraordinary. And what I love about the way you deliver this, with such humor, self-effacement and candor, it's like it's just like talking about how you took the garbage out this morning. And to me that really is, it's really quite delightful, because otherwise, as you put it, the bragging rights around this stuff can become somewhat of an issue. Right? And so I very much appreciate that. One small follow-up. In the tradition that I follow, the Tibetan Buddhists, as you know, they have a massive corpus of literature on what are called the bardo teachings, the transitional teachings, the gap teachings. And you mentioned very briefly earlier

this notion of the gaps in your experiences, the kind of atomistic nature that's bardo principle in a microcosmic form. But I spend a lot of time really exploring these teachings and working with teachers. You mentioned going back in memory in this life all the way up into a blank spot, and so to me blank spot seemed to intimate bardo. So in your tradition, in your understanding and experience of recollection, what happens, both doctrinally and experientially, for you in that gap? Not just between thoughts and moments, but not gap in life between lifetimes, let's say. Yeah. And that's another way of looking at dependent origination. And so we look at dependent origination on multiple levels. One is the micro, quantum level of day-to-day or moment-to-moment experience.

And then on the behavioral level, where you're interacting with people, but then there's the cosmic or the macro level, which is from one lifetime to another, let's say. And so the way that I've explained this from the context of dependent origination and from my own experience of seeing this, I see the bardos as something that is definitely valid, whether it's the Tibetan tradition or whether it's a Theravada tradition. Maybe there might be a difference in how it's experienced, but I do see that there is something going on here. And so when we talk about dependent origination, or from the context of dependent origination, that blank spot is really not a blank spot. I mean, if I go back to that experience, it's more than a blank spot. There is something going on there, and what's going on there is a

what I would say is a karmic refueling spot. It's where what's happening is certain things come up in the form of images, in the form of experiences, in the form of maybe memories, in the form of people or different kinds of visions and things that come up, and how the mind takes it. So if the mind identifies with it, if the mind has craving for it, or if the mind has aversion towards it, fear for it or fear from it, then there's a fuel for karma to arise. That fuel and that fueling process is where this blank spot is. The so-called blank spot is there. So it's where you go from the arising of a new consciousness, a new vinnana that arises and then departs from the old nama-rupa, the old mentality-materiality, and then descends into a new mentality-materiality.

So that descension is that process, from the awakening from, or coming out of, the old nama-rupa and then coming into the new nama-rupa. That whole process is dependent upon that karmic fueling process, that karmic refueling process, which is how I understand the bardos. So when my father passed away recently, he passed away in February, I'm sorry, and I was with him when he passed away, and so I had a lot more insight into the dying process in that moment, because I saw that actually what we call the dying process or the death process isn't just medical, in the sense that it's just the stopping of respiration, the stopping of the heart and the stopping of brain activity.

Actually, something is still going on beyond that. So what's going on there is when what we consider to be the dying process, or the death, the official death, the minute of death, there's actually still some stuff going on. And the stuff that's going on, the way I explain it to students, is that we talk about the four great elements, which are the earth energy, the water energy, the fire energy and the air energy. The way it looks in the dying process is the air energy diminishes first, then the fire energy diminishes, then the water energy, and then finally the earth energy. But also the six sense bases are active for a little while even after the dying process, which means the first thing that goes away is your sense of smell, then your sense of taste,

then your sense of sight, then your sense of touch, and then your sense of hearing. Which means for those people who, let's say, are going through a process where people they love and are close to them are dying, stay with them after they're medically dead and say good things to them, guide them to a better rebirth, because they're still there in the sense, in the way of their senses. And then finally the mind goes away, but while the mind is active, that's where the bardo is being experienced, that's where the karmic refueling is being experienced, where they're seeing certain visions, they're seeing certain experiences. And if there's craving, their new consciousness arises, departs from there, and then that's technically the official death, and then there's the arising of a new birth when that consciousness descends into a new nama-rupa. Yeah, that's really, really fantastic. And you may know, om delsen, in the Tibetan tradition

there's a really interesting phenomena that's actually now being studied scientifically at the request of his holiness the dalai lama it's called tuktam which is literally post-death meditative absorption where these great siddhas can maintain meditative equipoise for weeks after death they're clinically dead but they they do they don't decompose excuse me there's no odor it really just looks like they're sleeping it doesn't look like they're dead because the the mind the what's called the bindu excuse me is still in the body it's still in the heart center the provisional location of the ultimate dharmakaya dharmata and so these are these are again it's a wonderful um dance between spirituality and science now that scientists i'm involved a little bit as a consultant here scientists are now studying this phenomena which if i wouldn't say if it's when this data is collected this is this is how paradigms change these are revolutions in the mind sciences when you collect hardcore data that does not fit into the preceding paradigm and so this leads into a wonderful segue

of if you don't if you're comfortable talking to me a little bit about the study you did in the netherlands with sleep because i'm not only am i deeply interested in the bardos but part of my real interest are what i call the five nocturnal meditations this is my languaging for five successive ways to work in a quantum phenomenological way with what is usually just lights off you know the west has a light switch model on off dead alive yes no black white well my experience and i think yours is these traditions replace the western light switch model with a dimmer it's not on off if you're just dimming gross to subtle to very subtle and so really awareness of absence is not absence of awareness just because you're you're blacking out it doesn't mean that you're completely offline it's just your exclusive identification with form doesn't recognize the formless so with your kind permission talk to us a little bit about the study you did in the netherlands with sleep i can't wait to see the data and then if you're getting comfortable with this i personally for one would love to hear

if you can share with us what it is like for you when you fall asleep, in your journey through the night, because according to the Tibetan approach, you intimated what philosophers refer to as the theory of recapitulation, which is the iterative nature of what takes place between rising, abiding, and falling of every thought, every life, every day. There is this kind of, it's called self-similarity, that takes place between all these different states. And so therefore, in the Tibetan tradition, Delson, as you know, you can use the nocturnal display of the mind as a concordant experience, as like a dress rehearsal for what they allegedly will say at the dream at the end of time when you die. So dream yoga came about largely to prepare for death. So a couple things there: tell us a little bit about the study in the Netherlands, and then also, if you would describe for us what it's like when you go to sleep and what actually occurs to you as you turn the dimmer down every night. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this sleep study was part of the larger study, which was relating to studying nirodha. So what they wanted to see was, is there a difference between nirodha and the states of sleep that the mind experiences? So this was a part of the study, but a different study research team, and Ruben was actually there while that was happening as well. So they had me, actually, they had a really nice room set up, and it was a nice bed where I could just take a nap, and then they were studying just the waking state of mind, what is that like, and starting to see what's happening there.

Then going into sleep, what's happening over there, and then studying what are the stages of sleep that I experienced in that mind, and then coming back out. And then they had me again be in the waking state, then go into nirodha, and then come out. So in the first part of the study, when I was, they saw the waking state, then they saw me going to sleep. When I came back out from the nap, they asked me, were you actually asleep, because your initial brain readings, or the brainwave readings, suggest that you were still awake? And I said no, I was in deep sleep, but I was conscious. I was aware of being in deep sleep. That's really what was going on, because what they said was there are certain spindles in the waves which suggest that there's deep sleep going on, but this is not present where the mind fell asleep. The mind was asleep, but it didn't fall asleep as such.

Later on, some of the initial data that came out showed that in the waking state there was a lot of delta activity going on, anyway, right. And then the sleep phase actually showed that the mind was alert and awake. So it was almost like a converse of what you would expect. You would expect some kind of alertness and then some kind of low activity going on in sleep, but here the waking state, in my experience, in my subjective experience,

is that the mind is always just calm and collected, and nothing going on as such. And then in deep sleep nothing's going on, but there's still alertness there. So when I go to sleep, and I close my eyes and I fall asleep, I'm not falling asleep. It's just the mind goes into rest, and there's an awareness there. So I could also contextualize it from that model that you talk about in Advaita Vedanta, which is you have the waking state, you have the sushupti, which is the deep sleep state, the dreaming state, and the deep sleep state. Now, in my experience, I don't really have dreams going on. I'm aware of how the transition happens, and there's just an experience of neither perception nor non-perception.

That experience of the eighth jhana is going on, and then the mind is just aware, but there's no awareness of anything. It's not even awareness of nothing, it's just an objectless awareness, if you will. And so this is so fascinating to me. So, again, this is my languaging, and let me see if this resonates with you. So there's this kind of tacit awareness that you said, that is, I suppose you could call it non-dualistic awareness. There's still awareness, but it's objectless. In other words, you're actually not aware of it's aware as so awareness, basically.

In Tibetan, wrong bob, the mind falls into itself, and therefore it rests in this ultimate formless awareness, which is really what, fundamentally, I think you might agree with me, this is fundamentally what we really want, irreducibly, is to rest in this absolute dimension of awareness. It's what we lose during the day. So you rest in this tacit formless non-dualistic awareness, and so therefore, in a certain way, you don't really lose. Well, actually, I suppose you could say technically you lose consciousness, but you don't lose awareness. In other words, if you use consciousness, in the Sanskrit vijnana, is a kind of pejorative dualistic term, because consciousness denotes the net duality that implodes, disappears, or whatever. But again, don't let me put words in your mouth, but what I'm hearing is then that there's this underlying tacit awareness that you fall into, you descend into, that remains kind of like the 24-7-Eleven awareness, right?

It's the awareness that's on all the time. Yeah, is that correct? That's absolutely right, and the only difference is how the experience of that awareness is. That is to say, in the waking state, let's say, there's just an experience of this world, this reality that we experience through the six sense bases, but then in the sleep state there's nothing going on. There's just mind, just mind resting in mind, that's it. Beautiful. And so talk to us a little bit, because again, in the Yogachara tradition, which is one of the most sophisticated Indian philosophies ever to come out of India, and I'm a huge fan of the Yogachara, I love their descriptions of mind and reality, and they talk, as you know, about the substrate consciousness, the alaya vijnana, the storehouse, and then fundamentally that when that storehouse consciousness is depleted, that's the repository for the bakchak, the samskaras, all the latent karmic predispositions. On one level, when that is emptied, dreams nirodha, there's no dreams. Dream stop. There's a cessation of dreams. And so I, my language again, I'm curious how this lands with you. Two questions.

Want to say a little bit more about that experience, or lack thereof, of the dream? There's no dreams. Another way to say this for me, Delson, again, question to me, another way to say this is to also say everything becomes a dream. So in a certain way you stop dreaming, but everything becomes a dream, because for me dream is code language for manifestation of awareness, for manifestation of mind, and that is what in fact the Buddha woke up from, right? He woke up from the nightmare of reified samsara. He woke up to the empty dream-like nature of nirvana. So he woke up to the fact that everything is a dream. Does that languaging work with you? I'm curious. That completely resonates, actually. There's another monastic named Punnaji, I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he was a friend of Bhante Vimalaramsi, and he said enlightenment is basically awakening from the dream of existence. Yeah, beautiful, right? So I completely resonate with that, which is, you awaken from this sloth and torpor, if you will, of individualized

identification with something that is basically conditioned, to something that is unconditioned and always fresh, in that sense always spontaneous. And it's just something that is, you know, it's not the arising of anything. Actually it's the complete cessation of experience. Beautiful, beautiful. And again, this is where we have to talk about quantum phenomenology, because this is where we have to be very specific and articulate, even with the languaging that we're using, because when you're talking about the cessation of experience, that can easily slip into some nihilistic, like, oh, this is you're just turning into a zombie. This is where the difference in Buddhist languaging is: experience, like consciousness, always has a slight pejorative tinge. It's replaced, transformed, with realization.

Where there's still some thing, it's just not a thing, and therefore existence and the reified senses, we know it, which defines samsara, that's been erased, that's been negated, and then what's left is of course this ineffable formless, that is so hard to put into words, non-experience. What we know is the realization of the awakened state. So for someone like you, and again, don't let me put words in your mouth, lucid dreaming no longer has applicability in your nocturnal arena, because there's no dreams, display of mind to transform, to work with. However, what does speak to me, or I'd be curious to see what your response is, what the Tibetans talk about is osal yoga, luminosity yoga, sleep yoga, where in a certain way that is the penultimate nocturnal practice. Lucid dreaming is a subset of sleep yoga, luminosity yoga, and therefore to me, when I hear you say this, this sounds like the fruition of actually luminosity. Okay, this kind of black light

of non-dualistic awareness. So can you actually put descriptive terms to what that so-called experience, quote unquote, is like? The reason I mentioned this, Delson, is I believe people actually have this experience, quote unquote, but may not recognize it. What the philosophers talk about is the difference between access and phenomenal consciousness, that you can actually experience something but not be able to track it and access it into conscious awareness. So that's why this is not just a philosophical issue. It could be helpful for people to say, oh my gosh, whoa, now that Delson's saying this, I'm having something like that. I never really thought of it this way before.

so yeah i mean i can contextualize it from my experience of what what i see it as or how i experience it from also let's say our pali tradition which is it is that mind or that ex experience if you will that is what's known as uh signless undirected and empty okay and the reason is because it's not an object in of itself you cannot you can't put the mind to it right it is it is it just is you can't make it into an object and the reason is because all objects ultimately are conditioned all objects ultimately therefore are impermanent and therefore the mind doesn't want to hold on to anything it doesn't hold on anymore to anything whatsoever

It's undirected because it understands that directing the mind anywhere, even to this experience, which you can't, you can only relax into it. You can only allow the mind to open up to it. But directing the mind asserts the idea that there is something that is quantifiably or qualitatively a source of happiness. But if everything is conditioned, then it is impermanent, and therefore it is liable to cause suffering in one way or another, liable to cause dukkha in one way or another. So for that reason, the mind doesn't direct it anywhere, it just relaxes.

Let go of any expectations of what it could be or what it couldn't be. And then finally, it's empty because it's empty of self, empty of anything that can be seen as me, mine, or myself. So it just is. It just is an experience, if you want to talk about it in language. And this is where language gets difficult, right? I mean, you can only point to the moon, but if you pay attention only to the finger, then you're missing the whole point. So the language is only pointing to what that experience is. It's only pointing to that particular

frame of reality, framework of reality, if you will. So it is, as I would call it, something that is unconditioned. I mean, it has no conditions at all. It's unconstructed. So your objective, if you will, the mission here for anybody here, if you will, is not to construct it, not to go to it, not to become it, not to be it. It is just. It is there. Just relax into it. And hence the irreducible instruction of recognition and relaxation, as they say over and over in the Bardo, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which, if you've read it, is a code language for a book of life, right? Yeah. Recognition and liberation are simultaneous. Recognition is really the key point. You already are a Buddha, you just don't remember. These teachings jog your memory. You're already in a pure land, you just need to recognize this is nirvana, you just need to recognize. So this returns again to the empowerment of the utter immediacy of the awakened state, that yes, on one level, because of the profound

mechanisms of relative reality, karma, samskara, all the things that the 12 links describe with such elegance and force, that's still relative truth on one level. It's basically just the evaporation of that recognizing, opening, realizing it's right here and right now. And so there's some talk to us, if you would. I find this so inspiring, by the way, because I work a lot in this world. When did this, how did this skill set in the nocturnal mind, in the nocturnal meditations, what you're just describing, take place? Was this running correlative and concurrent to your experience of the jhana states, or how, like, when did it start coming about? What were you doing in your daily life that either facilitated that, or was it more kind of serendipitous, just karmic unfolding based on your predispositions and skill sets?

I would say that it started to happen towards the year 2020. It started to really become more and more apparent, and the reason I'm saying that is because I've had different cessation experiences that have led to, you know, quote unquote, nibbanic experiences that allow the mind to let go of certain defilements and so on. But as those defilements were being let go of, and once the mind was rid of certain defilements, the mindfulness, by the way, you mentioned mindfulness as being a form of remembering, a form of recollection. That's the way we see it here as well, which is sati. Sati is coming from the word smriti in Sanskrit, which means to remember. So as your mindfulness becomes much clearer, it is actually becoming even more mindful.

of the different shades of experience that are happening in sleep, the variances that are happening, and eventually as it becomes more stabilized in that, then you see that even dreams are seen as just illusions. They're just seen as maya, they're seen as certain things that are arising because of sankharas. And then when you have an experience where the mind becomes fully void of certain sankharas, so the way to look at it is that they're in the relative experience, such a mind will still go through the links of dependent origination, however

Like we said, there's no more ignorance, so there's only right view or wisdom arising. And so any formations that arise, arise as a result of the cascading of old karma that is yet to be experienced. That is why this mind and body are still here, because they're still fuel from previous karma that still needs to be experienced, based on previous choices prior to that experience of, let's say, full awakening. And so anything that arises, then that consciousness that arises is void of any defilements. It's just clear consciousness, consciousness that is rooted in wisdom. And then anything that arises in the form of contact and feeling is seen for what it actually is, which is not me, not mine, not myself. This is the reality of the situation. And so because of that, there's no fuel for new karma. So the only active links that are there, present in such a mind, are wisdom replacing ignorance, formations or sankharas.

The consciousness of vinnana, nama-rupa, mentality, the sense bases, contact and feeling, and that's it. That's it. Yeah, that's beautiful. So what you said earlier, Delson, is this one way to make the distinction between nibbana and parinibbana, that at least in my tradition there's still, there's, you've crossed the finish line, so to speak, but you've been running so fast, right? It takes a while until you hit ground zero, so to speak. Yeah. So is that your understanding of the difference between nibbana and parinibbana, that at the moment of death, when this karma that's embodied in this bhava sankhara, right, this form, when that's exhausted, then that's parinibbana, that's the complete cessation? Complete. Yes, yes, I would agree with that completely, because it's the momentum of karma that keeps his body running, that's my mind body running. So, you know, we have stories in the Pali tradition of, let's say, the arahants who had to face a lot of, let's say, unwholesome karma

only because of choices that they made in the past wasn't because of new karma that they created they're just having to deal with the storehouse or the repository of old karma exactly and then party nirvana happens when the fuel is completely spent in that point then like we talked about earlier then when one comes back is voluntarily driven by love and compassion and instead of involuntary impulses and so with this in mind again just so you know one of the things that my community is doing we're going to be starting um hopefully the end of this year quite a rigorous systematic preparation for end of life and death using the tibetan template of the bardo teachings and so let's talk just a little bit about what you anticipate will happen because again right view here is everything right we the reason we're so afraid of death is because we're always afraid of what we don't know ignorance and fear are virtually synonymous so even at the level of the map beautiful teachings and teachers that represent it like yourself this can can transform obstacle into opportunity

And instead of approaching the end of life looking through the rear-view mirror, which causes so much suffering, we actually have something to look forward to, like parinibbana, at best enlightenment. So talk to us a little bit about the power of right view as you've come to understand it and experience it in relationship to the end of life, how you might be working with that if you are with your student population, and then again in a personal way, if it lands with you, what do you expect or know?

When you look towards the end of your life, when this Delson, this particular costume, this Delson costume is taken off, what do you expect? What do you think will happen when you transition? Yeah, so let's unpack that. So first of all, I think Bhante Vimalaramsi, for example, and that's really what inspires a lot of the students, is that before he was a monk, I believe he would go into hospices and spend time with the dying, and he would actually go with them and kind of guide them into a more uplifted state of mind. And that could have been through reading religious stories based on their particular tradition, so it was reading stories from the Bible, reading stories from the Quran, or whatever it might have been for that particular individual.

So it's important to understand that you can guide a person towards a better existence in the future if you keep their mind uplifted. When the fear arises, when the anxiety arises, when anger arises, regret arises, remorse arises, you can take those and flip them by trying to remind them of the good things that they've done in their life, remind them of all of the times they've been generous, remind them of all of the things that you're grateful for, for the things that they did for you, so they start to avert their mind towards that. And by adverting their mind towards that, the sankharas that arise allow for the fuel of new consciousness to be rooted in something that is uplifted and wholesome.

So there's a key sutta in the Pali tradition known as the Anathapindika Sutta, and it's in the Majjhima Nikaya, it's 143. And in there it's Sariputta who's going through the dying process, or going through a process of creating situations for this particular person, Anathapindika, who's dying, in his mind to start to experience nibbana. So what he says is, I'll paraphrase, but it's a big sutta. But the summary of that is, he allows the mind not to land on anything. So my consciousness will not be dependent upon the sixth sense spaces. My consciousness will not be dependent upon my memories, will not be dependent upon my remorse and regret, will not be dependent upon this and that and so on. And so when there is this unestablished consciousness, that is nibbana, that is the experience of nibbana. So that allows him to see that. And yes, he does take new rebirth, but he takes rebirth in the Tusita heaven, where then he comes back as a deva, and so on. So that's the rest of the story.

So what I'm getting at is, for this particular group of people who might be interested in helping people in the dying process, is to allow them to keep their minds uplifted. So keep reminding them of the wholesome things, and if you think that they're okay with it, guide them through a process of letting go of relaxing and identifying with anything that's going on. Now, as for, let's say, the end of this life, if I were to explain it from the context of the Theravada tradition, the idea is that there is no new rebirth consciousness that arises, and so the fuel is spent.

Now the idea in the Pali tradition is there was such a person who, when they departed, there was this black smoke around them, and the Buddha points out to it and he says to his students, do you see that, monks? Do you see that black smoke? And they said yes, and he says that is Mara looking for the new consciousness of that being but unable to find it happening. So there will be no new arising of rebirth consciousness that will happen, and so again, you don't need to go here. So then what becomes of you, where?

Sometimes these are, yeah, I apologize in advance, these pedestrian, colloquial, and sometimes really just kind of stupid questions, but these are the kind of questions that the people listening to this are going to say that this is what they're thinking. Right, right, right. What's going to happen to Delson? Is he just going to merrily into infinity as this little, you know, spirit nymph or whatever? So what are you, quote unquote, going to do? Well, I'll tell you this. We talked about a little earlier, we talked about how this experience is awakening from the dream of existence, right? Awakening from that, so that awakening also makes you realize that there never was a you to begin with. There you go. There you go. So if there was never a you to begin with, how can there be a you to end with? Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, high five. That's just fantastic. So with your permission, Delson, if we have time, there's two small areas I want to go into a little bit more before we close. This is incredibly rich and rewarding.

a little bit about, if you would, you're unusual on a number of levels, but one is your willingness, capacity, to work with science, the scientific community, and to allow yourself to be subjected to enter these labs and to really serve as kind of a mental olympian, someone who has these unique capacities through all these predispositions. So that's fantastic. Tell us a little bit about why do you do this, what inspires you to work with the scientific community, what are your aspirations going forward? And again, I love science. If I had to do it all over again, this is, I would probably be a neuroscientist. I hang a lot with these sorts of people. I'm super interested in this. And as you know, there's a really quite a cadre of quite sophisticated scientists and thinkers now who are really opening their hearts and minds to a certain extent to explore really outliers like yourself, where you have these unique capacities that really start to stretch and eventually bust paradigms. So talk to us a little bit about your interest in science.

Why you work with them, your aspirations going forward with interfacing with the scientific community? Because this is a massive contribution. This is the vocabulary of the West, right? These are the arbiters of truth in the Western world. These are the high priests, right, for many people. So talk to us a little bit about the relationship of science in your path. You know, if I remember correctly, I think there was some time at one point, the Dalai Lama said something like this. He said that if science were to somehow disprove something that was there in Buddhism, then we would have to rethink what we're talking about in Buddhism. And I have that same sort of attitude, let's say, is to say, I have these subjective experiences of jhanas and nirodha samapatti and all these other things.

But if science can somehow, because we have certain understandings within the Pali tradition that nirodha samapatti means that there's something going on, but none of these things are going on. But if science says something else, then we have to take a look again and revise possibly those suggestions or those experiences that are talked about in the traditions. And I'm also doing it as I, I'm also looking at it from the perspective of inspiring future generations, because now future generations are very much, let's say, going to be rooted in the material realm of existence. They're very much rooted in, okay, can you prove it to me, show me how the science works.

And that category of people, not that everybody's going to be like that. But that category of people can be inspired by seeing that provable data, if you will. So that's another, let's say, motivation for why I'm doing this. But, and ultimately, it's to meet cool scientists like Ruben, and being able to hang out with them.

Yeah, they're really inspiring, especially the younger generation. There are some great, wonderful scholars like Richie Davidson and his whole team and Tom Metzinger and the philosophy. There's some really interesting people, but the younger ones, to me, like you, I'm so inspired by their capacities, their passion for really being open to explore these types of things. Because, as you know, it's not a classic characteristic of the scientific mind to be open, right? Almost by definition they're closed, reified entities, and they're not interested in this sort of thing. So are you, and I say this with some

I mean, I could help in this regard. We could talk behind the scenes on this, because I'm pretty dialed into this community. Aspirations for future research: how willing are you to be a guinea pig, so to speak? Are you willing to go into other labs to really explore these dimensions with other scientists? Is this part of your... Oh yeah, and you know, I've had invitations to go to be under MRI and things like that, while in jhana and while in the road, and things like that. These are all discussions that are happening as to when and where that will happen. We'll have to see. But I'm always open to it, and I say that with the understanding that there is a schedule now in terms of when I can and when I can't do these things, because there are retreats going on and I have my own self retreat, and things like that. But I'm always open. I'm always open to

Exploring this. And so again, in a kind of devil's advocate point of view, tremendous promise here, but peril. There's a little peril. There are shadow sides. Wherever you find light, you will find shadows. So any concerns about this sort of thing, the metrics, you know, being like, oh, now we have a measuring bar for science? So the near enemy of articulation is reification. You're articulating these incredibly refined, elegant states. Briefly go back to the jhanas. For many people, go like, well, why should I be interested in this stuff? Because it helps you understand and articulate what is otherwise just a very fuzzy, woolly relationship to your own being. Now you have a very elegant map, extremely precise, articulate

that they can describe the wonders of the mind, but again, the near enemy of that is in fact verification. That's a big problem. So talk to us a little bit about what are some of the caveats and warning signs about capitulating to science, because are they in fact the arbiters of veracity and truth? How much do we take refuge in our first person experience, and how much do we capitulate to what the scientists are telling us? Because I see some issues there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a discussion I had with Liam actually sometime back and with some other students.

Which is, you know, I mean, there can come a point where science can sort of look at and map out each of these different wonderful states of mind, jhanas and nirodha and so on and so forth, and it could be used in such a way that, okay, now we know exactly what brain states, what parts of the brain are active during these states. And now we can try to recapture that by certain kinds of machinery, or maybe a jhana pill, somebody actually mentioned. Maybe we'll have a pill that you take, and that activates certain parts of the brain and deactivates other parts of the brain, and regulates neurohormones and things like that and whatnot.

But my response to that would be, okay, great. I mean, that might, let's say, that is a possibility, and that might happen, and that people can actually access these states. But where is the wisdom behind it? Yeah, that's really the main thing here. I mean, even if you could, using these particular tools of science, capture and then be able to put the mind in these kinds of experiences, where is the wisdom of how that experience arises? Where is the wisdom of how the mind takes this experience, and so on? So that's where we talk about Samatha and Vipassana, which is they have to be yoked together if you want full awakening.

And so I think it can still be used as a tool, which is to say, and again, this is a discussion that Liam and I were having just for fun, is if science is able to recognize these different states and we're able to actually pull them apart, could we use neurofeedback as a way for people then to say, where am I in my experience? Sort of like a grading system of, well, you're getting here, but now you need to let go of this to be able to do this. So it's like a double-edged sword. You could do it in a way that helps people to be able to recognize where they are, or you can make it a drug and people just become addicted to it without any of the wisdom.

Absolutely. And again, I think one thing critically to maintain is that there's a difference between correlation and causation. Just because you're talking about neurophenomenology, right? Yeah. Basically, when we're working with neuroimaging and all the genius of what's happening in the science, it's very easy to conflate correlation with causation. And then when you do that, you're capitulating what? To a materialistic point of. And so this is where I get a little bit, my red warning flags go up, because, and again, we love big topics, maybe to unpack this at a future point. But the colossal difference between right view or wrong view: wrong view is the degraded physicalist materialistic view, it's killing this planet. It's going to literally, where it's going to go, so to speak, versus right view, which in philosophical language is idealism.

World is made of mind, heart, spirit. And so this is the danger that I see, Delson, is that I think the primacy, the reduction base, is mind, heart, spirit. That's the reduction base, the ontological primitive. It's not this stuff. And so the risk I see is if we, so to speak, capitulate to the high priest of science and say, okay, now they have this, they've proven our thing in a certain way that lends credibility to the materialistic view, when in fact what we want to do is create a revolution where, if some, in fact the most sensitive physicists are saying, no, no, the world is not made of matter, the world is made of mind, mentation, mental processes. So to me this is, I say this because

You're nodding your head, I think it resonates with you. This is right view: world is not made of matter, world is made of heart, mind, spirit. And so when we make this view, to create these gentle bridges, we can run into some problems if we're not really aware of that kind of thing. Don't you think? Yeah, I appreciate that, and I completely resonate with it. Yes, yes. I think right view, which is, as you rightly said, is that it's not materialistic in nature. It is understanding that our world that we experience ultimately is made up of our experience of mind, of mental processes. So perhaps what we can do is we can become like double agents. So I can, I can become a guinea pig and then start to convert the scientists from materialists into followers of right view. That is brilliant. You can be a virus of wisdom

that comes in and infects their operating system, right? That's fantastic. I love it. Stealth help. You're going to sneak them in there. They're going to... you're going to give them data that they've never seen before, and they're going to go, hey, wait a second, what's going on here? And then they start with that, puts a crowbar into their worldview, right? Yes. Oh, I like it. Now I'm getting it. Now I'm getting it. So a couple things as we start to close up. Really, again, Delson, I'm so respectful of your time. I could talk to you all day. We haven't even gotten to your book. There's so much more about paticca samuppada that we could return to, maybe at a future time. But one of the things I mentioned at the outset I want to return to now is, I try to be as honest with myself about my blind spots, my biases, all the things that I don't see. It's like what Socrates once said so beautifully

The difference between you and me is I know that I don't know. Bursting talked about it, the myth of knowledge. What did he say? Beautifully. We're paraphrasing the humorous Josh Billings. He said, "It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you do know that just ain't so." And so from your perspective, and this is a little bit of a loaded question, but I think you get where it's coming from: when you look at Vajrayana practice and tradition, what do you see from your lens as potential blind spots? Where can tantrikas be kidding themselves? What do you see? Why are you not, I guess a point-blank way to say it is, why are you not a tantrika versus a Theravadan? Why do you align yourself more to the Theravadan versus the flavor of Vajrayana? What are the blind spots? What do you see as limitations? I'm asking this very honestly because

we don't blind spots by definition are insidious intractable and they can bury us so what what are some blind spots in the tantric tradition that you see from your lens that can help help help be beneficial to the country is well you know um i will say it from the perspective of having experienced some of that right and being able to understand some of that and and so from my personal experience from it and then coming to this particular tradition uh i think it's probably also the reason i the mind aligns to this tradition is just because of the predispositions right just because of the fact that it's very systematic for me not to say that tantra isn't it definitely has has its own different kinds of systems but i think one of the key things to look for or to see or be aware of is this idea and correct me if i'm wrong about my interpretation this idea of how you can transform

afflictive states, or use afflictive states, to get from a level of intensity to experience something that is beyond those afflictive states. For me, I don't know if that's necessarily always useful or practical. I can understand the theory behind it, and I can understand why that's happening, but I think practically it might not always be as effective as just letting go and replacing them with non-afflictive states. Yeah, that's a very small thing. That's just... yeah, let me say something about that, and then maybe if there's any other comments

This returns to the issue of upaya, skillful means, because this is my languaging. I write about it in my first book, what I call the four arts of transformation, where the arts are an acronym somewhat related to the yanas: abandon it, remedy it, transform it, self-liberate it, Hinayana, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Sahajayana. And so to me, Delson, and again, this is just my understanding, depending on the head of steam, each one of these skillful means has its bandwidth of applicability, depending on karmic predispositions of the practitioner and also depending on the head of steam. Again, the momentum, the karmic push that's there. So let's start at the very top, Sahajayana, the vehicle of self-liberation. Mahamudra, Dzogchen, at this point, liberation. My imaging is like snowflakes falling on the hot rock, or a campfire spark dissolving into the nighttime sky. The play is still there, the ornament. What previously was an adventitious defilement now becomes an ornament of the mind

And so the energy, it immediately arises. It's still born, in both senses of that word: stillborn, still keeps coming up, and still born in the sense of doa. Therefore that's a good bonfire. You've got enough heat there, there's enough fire. It self-liberates like a bird flying in the sky. No karma. If you don't have that level of awareness, transformation, tantra, Vajrayana, this is where the more alchemical tantric approaches of transforming energies, like you're talking about, come into play, and there's a whole battery of practices we can talk about. I'm sure you know some of these: the yidam practices, the generation stage practices, meditations that take the electricity, the energetics of life, and allow you to transform lead into gold. Then I wouldn't say below that, because that's pejorative, but subsuming that, then you have the remedial approach, the antidotal approach of the Mahayana, and then you have, sometimes, the abandonment. When it's just like Pema Chodron once said, in relation to upheavals, she said at a certain point, just do something different. Just don't capitulate

even if it means turning, visualizing yourself as a log, you know, don't capitulate to the energy. And so for me, Delson, this is why I like the integral approach. These four classic methods have applicabilities of bandwidth and, again, predispositions, like you say, makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. And so that's kind of the way I roll with that. But anything else when you look at Vajrayana, and you're not going to offend me, you're going to illuminate a lot of people, when you say, well, I'm not so sure about that, that doesn't land with me. What other things do you see?

in the tantric tradition, because as you know, in some classic texts they look at tantra as a bastardization of the Dharma, that it's like, oh, the tantrikas just got lost in all this stuff. So I'm curious if there's anything else that you see that we are not seeing as tantrikas. You know, I would say that it's really just that main point that I brought up. I think there's a lot of different things that we could talk about in terms of doctrinal differences, but I do agree with you that it is dependent upon what people are inclined towards in terms of their karmic predispositions. So if that helps them to be able to realize the Dharma, if it helps them to understand it, then beautiful, by all means. But I think, you know,

we are definitely in agreement with that, which is we both subscribe, let's say, to the idea that you have to relax into things. You have to be able to, you know, it. The abandonment that we talk about is really the relaxing of craving, the relaxing of contraction, opening the contraction. Yeah, terrific. One last thing, my friend, as you know, and again, I am tremendously appreciative, so you need to understand the context of the question I'm about to ask. I'm tremendously appreciative of your humility, your candor, your frankness, but as you know, you talk about stuff that people generally do not talk about, and there is this over covert kind of code of secrecy in the traditions. You know about this sort of stuff. The Daoist tradition says, he who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know. Well, if that's true, we're both in really deep trouble, right?

So on one level, like, what did Rumi say? It's fantastic. This is great. Again, this is where we're going to end in a few minutes. Silence is the language of God, everything else is poor translation. So we're poor translators. We're engaging in some dialogue because we live in a dualistic medium, in a world that uses dualistic language, and so we start where we are. And I think the key is, at least we're aware, hopefully without kidding ourselves, of the limitations of what we're doing and what we're sharing. And so you speak, and again, I personally have to say I am inspired by this. I'm not like, oh geez, here's another one.

No, it's like I listen to you. I see your presence. I see the way you manifest. I see what you do in the world, and it's like, well, the real deal. But how do you work with that? Why are you so comfortable speaking about the relative cities, these powers, these miracles, these capacities? Talk to us a little bit again about that, which should not be talked about, right?

Yeah, I completely appreciate secrecy. Even when I was in the Kriya Yoga traditions, the idea was, you know, you don't really talk about these things, because if you do, people might misunderstand, or they might even worse, try to apply it for themselves and get into a lot of trouble. You know, I completely appreciate that fact. But the way I look at it now is, of course, there are certain things to be left for people to discover for themselves through the correct form of teaching and methodologies and everything else.

But when I talk about these experiences, I just see them as, as you said, extraordinary. You can take it for what it's worth, but to me, they're just no big deal. I do this all day long, and people, if it inspires them, wonderful, it inspires them to do the practice, and if it inspires them to seek out the Dhamma, if it inspires them to make an end of suffering, because that's ultimately what we're doing here, is the Buddha says, I only teach two things, suffering and the cessation of suffering.

So if it inspires them in that way, then more power to it, but that's the only motivation of why I would talk about these things, is because of two things: wisdom and compassion. That's really it. Yeah, that's really fantastic. Anything else that I should have asked? Anything else that you want to share before we close up for today? I'm really happy to have done this, and I hope we can do another one soon. Yeah, really, for my end also. I've been working ever since I hung out with our mutual friend Liam back in December, and he was telling me more about you, and I'm going, gee, I can, you check this guy out. You've really influenced me, you've touched me in a warm way, and your capacity as a practitioner, as an intellectual, as a scholar, it's a unique blend, and your ability to bring benefit into this world is no small thing. And so yes, at a certain point, on one level, paticca samuppada, one of my all-time favorite topics, and honestly Delson, when I look at the tantric tradition

When I first discovered this, like 10 years into studying the tantric stuff, I said, why didn't I hear about this 10 years ago? To me it was like, this stuff needs to be taught more. I found it to be among the most, if not the most, explanatory models of the generation of samsara and nirvana in verse, forward and reverse fashion, that I've ever seen. Intellectual, I mean, arguably, right, the intellectual content of enlightenment. This is what the Buddha saw when he woke up, the ultimate lucidity. So if it works for you, at some point I'll stay in touch with behind the scenes to really get into that, now that people know a little bit more about you. Not that we skimmed, I don't think we skimmed today, but to take more of this granularity, this nuance, to understand how it is to return to the construction site. Right, we are there. We can't blame, we are not victims of the world, we are the victims of the world that we co-create. If you want to blame someone for your suffering and your happiness, look in the mirror. And so by exploring

this most fundamental archetype of the 12 links of dependent origination, with me perhaps bringing a little bit of the tantric interpretation. There are certain ways that the tantric people look at this that maybe it would be of some benefit to others, because then if we see how we construct samsara, then we can better see how to deconstruct it, and therefore we're giving more doctrinal footing, and then in particular, then we can send people to the cushion. It's not just the map, here's the territory. That's talking about suffering and the end of suffering. And so, with your permission, maybe sometime when it works for you, let's get into the weeds a little bit more, talk about the 12 links in more depth, because they have massive application in the barter teachings. It's huge, as you know, I'm talking to the choir here, you know. But until then, really, Delson, big bow of gratitude. I'm tremendously grateful for what you're doing. Thank you so much for taking time out of your life to chat with us, and I look forward to future encounters with you. Thank you, thank you very much. Take care.