Ep. 14 - Music, Life and Buddhism w/ David Nichtern

This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. Welcome back to synchronicity. This is episode 14. My guest today is David Nicktern. Super duper excited for you guys to hear this one. Easily one of my favorite conversations. Podcast or otherwise. I had a feeling going into speaking with David that it was going to be pretty cool. We have a lot of crossover stuff. I think David said kindred spirits at one point, which made me feel pretty good because he's such a cool guy. But he's a musician. He's an author. He's a Dharma teacher. And more importantly, he just seems to be a very grounded individual who is walking the line of being rooted in Dharma teachings, Buddhist teachings, but also being in the world, right? Going into the world, not trying to escape it to find something else.

He studied with Cho Giam Trungpa. I got ahead of myself. I just got back from vacation. I wanted to talk about all that, but I'm so excited about David. I'm just going to stick with this and then we'll do that afterwards. It'll be a little herky jerky, but okay, that's all right. Yeah, well, as I say, David, he's listened to this. For instance, did you know, hey, besides being lifelong childhood, literally friends with Christopher Guest from Waiting for Guffman fame, amazing movies. We all know Christopher Guest. If you don't, go check out some of his movies. Come on. What are you doing? But in addition to that, he and his son Ethan, Nick Turn, is a great Dharma teacher in his own right.

Second generation Western Dharma teacher, go check out stuff by him too. And he and his son got to hear songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder before it was even out, because David had written a song Midnight at the Oasis, which was like a global chart topper, and Stevie Wonder, he put some together, some songs after that, and Stevie Wonder liked one of them, and it was his song. So we got to basically record Stevie Wonder on one of his tracks, and he said Stevie Wonder, FYI. Top three favorite artists for me ever. I mean, we spoke about David Bowie, he's up there on that list, but for me, Stevie Wonder, man, that is some transcendental music.

Songs in the Key of Life before falling in his first finale, in her visions. I mean, so many Stevie Wonder albums just are so vital to periods of my life, and just really, if you don't know Stevie Wonder, if you haven't really gotten into it and you just know kind of the famous ones, or if you're like, you know, I just called to say I love you, which I love. It's a great song, but man, there's some depth to that stuff. Man, love Stevie Wonder, but anyway, David and Ethan, Ethan was too, so I don't think he remembers it, but there's a photo of it. They got to listen to Stevie Wonder's songs in the Key of Life before it was even out. It's a double disc album, it's incredible.

Yeah, David has an incredibly, like I said, grounded approach to many facets of life that we experience here in the West, especially, because it's one thing to talk about, you know, spiritual, Buddhist, whatever approach you're taking it from. It's one thing to talk about it kind of in a bubble, or isolated from the real world, lofty spiritual goals. Oh, we should be doing this. You know, we're going to get enlightened. It's another to actually take those thoughts and ideas and concepts into the world with you. And David has just done such a tremendous job of this. And for me personally, a lot of interest in my life, I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do that. So it was just a great conversation for me, and he goes into so many cool things.

So I'm going to talk about a variety of books and media, and they're all, as always, if you go to mindpodnetwork.com/noah, the first episode will be this one. If you click on that inside of there, there's all of this stuff you'll hear us talk about in the episode so you don't have to go hunt it down for yourselves. But yeah, so that's David. Now I'm going to do a weird shift. I usually say, "Hey, here's my little shpiel," and then I talk about the guests, but I was too excited. So let's shift gears and go back to kind of what's been going on. Not that you're on the focal point of the show or anything, but I just got back from Jamaica, which is an amazing, amazing place. Just incredible. I mean, it's a beautiful country. The people there are just some of the nicest people I've ever come across.

I've been there a few times before, but this time it was a bit of a different experience. I was on a family trip with my mom, my stepdad, my sister, and my wife, and we were staying about two and a half hours south of Montego Bay. Montego Bay, if you don't know, is at the north of the island, kind of in the middle-ish towards the west, I suppose, a little bit. We were about two and a half hours south of that, really at the bottom of Jamaica, which I had never been to. Previously, I'd stayed at either a resort or a pretty fancy villa, but we were staying at a house down south of Jamaica. What struck me, outside of there's amazing fruit there, there's amazing weed there, there's amazing people there, but I was truly shocked at the kind of impoverishment and just poverty of the country and the people who are living there.

To their credit, most of the people I met didn't really seem bothered by it, but it was surprising that a country that so many people go to vacation, stay at one of these fancy resorts, that just outside of that little bubble, there's just tremendous amounts of poverty. It's a really great place to live, just from the climate and what's going on. It's nice, but if you come into hard times, we met a guy down there who had cancer, and he just got it as he woke up one day and saw a tumor on his neck. It had been growing, but I guess he wasn't really checking or didn't mind or didn't see what was going on, and then he found out he had lymphoma.

And he was in great spirits and looked really healthy and was going through chemo and is having an approach to it that I thought was incredibly healthy, that I wish I would aspire to if that ever happened to me. But I think it gets really hard in those types of situations. Being poor, for so to speak financially isn't like the worst thing in the world, that's not the worst thing. Being poor in spirit and happiness, that's much worse. But when things go rough down there or go sideways and you can't account for it, this happens in our country too. I don't want to make this an externalized thing, but when that happens there, it's a big fucking deal.

So I was trying to think of some ways to potentially set up some system to allow people to break out of it. I don't know all of the factors, admittedly what's going on. I get the sense, I don't want to speak out of turn here, but that the government probably wasn't looking out for its citizens as much as you would hope a government was. You know, we think it's not so great in this country and sometimes it isn't for a lot of people, it's really not great, but man, I was not expecting to see that down there. And like I said, it was a great trip. I got recharged, refocused, amazing time. I have some incredible guests coming up, starting with David.

I have Kelly Carlin coming on soon. I have Sharon Salzburg coming on. I have a lot of really cool people. Speaking of Sharon, if you didn't know, now you know, we're in the middle, it just started at the beginning of the month, Sharon's Real Happiness Meditation Challenge, 28 Day Meditation Challenge. It's incredible this year. Lily has, her assistant has gone through and created such a wonderful experience, and you can still sign up for it. I'm writing and blogging for it, but you know, this is actually the only, typically the only 28 days of the year I meditate in a row is during Sharon's Challenge.

So I'm incredibly grateful for that. I think there's a lot to be said for accountability and having that be a part of lots of people doing this. So I'm excited for that. But yes, some cool guests coming on. I'm going to stop talking now. As always, rate, review this on iTunes. They are still coming in. They still make me really happy. But yeah, I'm going to stop it here. So without further ado, here is David Nickturner. So thank you again for coming on. I really appreciate it. And we were talking just before here, off the record, about a podcast you had done with Pete Holmes. And I wanted to start there because you had a Tibetan word for synchronicity, which is the name of this show.

And I didn't care. It was like tendro, tendro. What was that? It's tendrell, T-N-D-R-E-L. Okay. That's how you spell it in English. Okay. Synchronicity, it has synchronicity element in it, but it also means auspicious coincidence. So that's a very powerful notion of Tibetan Buddhism auspicious is sort of more than just a coincidence. That's a coincidence that's sort of laced with impact and meaning and potentiality. I love it. So I was just recently reading something. I'm a big Jungian. I'm a big Jung fan. I love, love, love. And one of his students and translators, Marie-Louis von Franz, wrote an excellent book called Psyche and Matter, which is fundamentally exploring the relationship between the Psyche and Matter and in our manifestations, all of these cool stuff.

And she told a very interesting story. She was dealing with number, because she viewed it as like a primordial structure that we could get at. And she told this amazing little parable story of related to the Yi Qing and Chinese numerology. She said there was an emperor and they were deciding whether to go to war with another, you know, place, a dynasty. And there was a vote and there was 11 of them. And the vote was eight to three to go to war. And so they retreated. And the reason was is because three qualitatively had more significance and more harmony than eight. So that was more significant than actually having more people voting. So I love that auspiciousness.

Because I, it's something in my life that has, I'd say before I really, my first real experience with recognizing there was something more to life or reality as we know it was, was truthfully with psychedelics, right? That shattered my preconceived notions of what the world was. I always like to say before I did them, I had my head squarely at my ass. Like I didn't know what was going on. But after that, I kind of realized there was something else and kind of could tap into that. I didn't have a name, you know, took reading. I took experiences. But I always have felt that there is some level of grace or auspiciousness connected to certain particular events and occurrences in life and keying into that.

It's kind of like, I think Maslow calls it peak experiences, things like that. And again, going back to your podcast with Pete, I heard you speak about your life and how that kind of the inter, interweaving of what was going on. But I specifically one story caught my attention a lot. And it was, maybe you could talk a little bit about, there was a point where you had written a career, you had written a hit song, it was blowing up around the world, you were getting opportunities all over the place. And then suddenly you made a decision to actually forego that and study with Cho Geong Trungpa. So can you talk about a little bit about that and, I don't know, reflecting back on it and what was going on at the time.

Yeah, so the year would have been about 1975 and I had already been studying with Cho Geongpa for five years. Okay, 70. So when I first started studying with him, there were parallel tracks in my life. There was one, you know, going on retreats and with him and studying with him. And, and also being helpful with it, with the, what are now called Shambhala centers, then they were called something else but, and in a directly parallel track, I was moving in and out of the entertainment and the film and music and TV world's mostly centered around music activity. So at a certain point, sometimes I had to choose sometimes just because you can't really be in two places at once, unless you're like very special.

So I would go back and forth and then try to integrate what I learned from one arena into the other, and, you know, in 1975, Trungpa Rinmatte, well, actually it was actually in '76, he asked me to go and be the director of Karma Chilling Meditation Center in Vermont. Not only was I having a very nice bump in my career then because I had composed Midnight at the Oasis and that was a big hit record at that time and then I was getting off his new film scores, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and, you know, so his request was kind of intense for me, because I had to, it wasn't just going on a retreat or something, moving myself, my new wife, my new young baby, who wasn't even born yet actually.

My son is Ethan Nick turn who is now a very, very well known Buddhist teacher. I mean, he's, he's, you know, extremely focused and prominent in the sort of second generation American Buddhist teachers working on his fourth book, you know, but Ethan at the time was an embryo. A fetus of sorts, you know, and that's when the request came through to live in LA and I had a new wife and a new situation cooking, so it was quite a wallop in a way to go do that. And I had to make a hard decision about it. And we moved from a beautiful house on Mulholland Drive and into two tiny little rooms that come exploring. I went from making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to $15 a week as director of commercial and also I had the option to periodically occasionally go back and forth and do music work. But sure, as you know, with these Dharma centers, they take a whole lot of managing. So, you know, that idea kind of worth thin, pretty quick. And so I spent two years at Karma Chilling, which is just recently renamed that.

So that was an interesting contrast in terms of following through. Now, I would say since then, I was still going back and forth. I still to this day go back and forth. Because when I go to retreats and still forth and when I'm teaching, it's obviously focuses on that. And then when I'm in the music world to focus on that. But there's a lot of cross talk between those two. For example, you know, conversation with Pete Holmes or, or, you know, working with Christidos or something. So, you know, right now there's, you know, before there was probably two of me and maybe, you know, sort of one story to cover it.

And now that's probably one of me with two strands and an integrated story. I really, I mean, this to me, I battle with this actually personally quite a bit. I sometimes get that feeling that. And I don't want to sound egotistical at all. It's when you know that you have a variety of skills and interests trying to figure out the correct balance and level of focus between those things is at least personally for me has been difficult. I look at someone like you, who you seem incredibly grounded in the Dharma teachings, which is kind of your base. I heard you said it's like about two thirds of your life now.

And then the entertainment and the other, the music stuff and other things you have going on is the other part of it. What do you notice as you go through life? Is there an oscillation between those things or is there the primary root Dharma, the guiding beacon that feeds into the others? Like, what have you noticed in your life? Well, here's, here's the key is that I have contemplated what you're talking about an extent that I even created a workshop around. You're talking about and it's called create creativity spirituality and making a buck. Oh, OK, we're going to take this course. It's available for your listeners at creativelive.com.

OK, excellent. It's a two day workshop online that you can take. Wow, I'll have a link to it. Yeah. And we go through each of those three areas in some detail. Each one has its own kind of, you could say logic, its own governing principles, which is what I talked about a lot. And then beyond that, there's the integration of the three into a full life. And as I used to kid around saying there's an obvious fourth arena for most of us, can you guess what that would be? No, I can't actually. I think you could. I bet I could, but I'm going to let you say it. Creativity. Yeah. Spiritual practice and livelihood. Right. What's the fourth major arena of a human life?

You tell me. Relationships. Right. Of course. I know. I was going to go a little more crude than that, but sure. I think the word relationship includes crude, refined, all right, everything. Right. So relationship is, I used to kid around about it and say the fourth one is obviously relationships, but I don't. I don't give workshops on that. I take them. And then I said, but I haven't really found any good. But having said that, now I do. I do feel OK about giving a workshop that would. So but the creativity, spirituality, making a buck is online at creativelive.com and you can, you can take that workshop.

And I put a lot of thought to exactly what you're talking about because I recognize that in a way I'm with other people pioneering and integrated. Yeah. Whereas traditionally the spiritual thing would take you and it has taken many people right out of the running. Right out of it. Right out of it. And that to me, I once got a Vedic astrological reading and I was a little skeptical before going in. And she was saying, Oh, well, you know, your guru is here. You're incredibly spiritual person, which I have not cultivated, but it seems to be bestowed upon me. But your place is firmly in the world. Like you're not going to a cave somewhere. You're not going to sit at a monastery.

And so I always try to figure out a way to integrate that that's manifested in my life is I've had the incredible opportunity to work with organizations like love, serve. Krishna, Sharon, Jack, Tara Brock, like all of these amazing teachers, which is fused my professional. And, you know, I guess ethical interests into one thing, but I told you I graduated from Berkeley. Making music is the thing that gives me that feeling that that je ne sais quoi, you know, goosebumps. So I've always been trying to figure out a way to kind of fuse those things into a cohesive kind of operating thing that doesn't feel too rigid, but allows me to express.

I think what needs to be expressed in a way. So I, you have at least one new workshop participant. I'm sure there'll be others who are listening, but that's awesome. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Yeah. Let's include relationships. Sure. Those four areas. What do they have in common? Hmm. Outside of me. I didn't say outside of anything. They have me in common, I suppose. And your mind. Yes. Sure. So your consciousness, whatever you want to call, whatever you mean, when you say me. Sure. Self. Yeah. Sure. So, so they have that in common. But what's interesting about it and what fascinates me because I tend to put a big frame around things.

I like the bigger view. Sure. So what's interesting about them is that they bring out different things and that's what the workshop I'm intrigued because when I do it with people, I kind of feel the energy in the room shift pretty dramatically. I like business. Business is interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I like music is the most fun. Yeah. Right. And the spiritual practice. So what I did is just, I separated them out and then put them back together. And you're the first thing you said is it is a balanced element. Yeah. If you're, if you, if you have to, there's no spiritual practice that I'm aware of that takes you beyond the need to actually be you, right, authentic self. It's not about becoming somebody else. Right.

That's like a misconception. Right. I mean, I feel like this is, this is delving into Cho Gao Trungpa's spiritual materials materialism in a way because when you try to, I feel like when people talk about enlightenment or what is meditation going to do for you, you're going to like transform from an ugly caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly and then you'll be in floating around and everyone's going to, but I, it's not been my experience in any way. Peak experience is a side that is not something that actually fundamentally changes. So, yeah. Well, that's why in, you know, in Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism in particular, there's something that's talked about, which is called ordinary mind.

And, you know, this is a very subtle thing to, to allude to because we don't mean the ordinary discursive, erratically obsessed OCD and mind. We mean the mind of this moment that is kind of able to relate completely in a pure way, but it's happening right now. And, and so that's called the body mind, right? That's a weakened mind, but it's not found somewhere else. Right. And it doesn't look like something else. Well, you, you just brought something to mind, again referencing the Pete Holmes podcast, which if anyone hasn't heard at this point, obviously, please go and listen to that. You made it weird with Pete Holmes X, just such a great episode.

But there's a point and having gone to two of the open your heart and paradise retreats, there's something that I've noticed from both that I've went to. And I've, we've gotten this feedback also through mind pod network is a lot of people, especially my age who didn't even have the opportunity to go meet someone like Maharaji or a guru or Chogyang Trungpa. And there's certainly avatars now who embody those qualities who are out there, but a lot of people feel like they're missing out. I never felt like that. I, I've had experiences in my life, synchronicities, just so many things that tie together that I don't, I have faith.

I have pure faith in the Dharma and other things that are going on. But you mentioned, I loved this analogy, you know, because there was a famous story of people who went to go see Maharaji, they were on a bus and then there he was. And you use the analogy of, well, there's a lot of different bus stops and the buses go to a lot of different places, which to me is the key tenant of one of my favorite mystics, Ramakrishna, which is basically, it's everything. There's a lot of paths up the mountain. The view is the same. Take whatever you need to get there. So, yeah, I, I just, can you talk a little bit about the different methodologies and how you relate to how, how, what attracted you to Buddhism particularly?

I know you said you met Chogyang Trungpa at a, he was visiting from a yoga retreat. It wasn't really a miraculous experience for you, but somehow you got hooked, right? You had a dream later. I want to get into dreams later. But what was it that kind of pulled you there? Was there anything that you noticed or looking back noticed? Yeah. Well, you see, I'm not addicted to miracles. I'm even suspicious of it. So the whole thing already is a miracle. The fact that you aren't having this conversation that we can even understand. I'm going to Japan next week. Yeah. The fact that you and I are speaking the same language, having similar reference points. And, you know, there's something that Deepak Chopra said on the medical side, which is where I feel like, you know, there's really some interesting coming together when you look at some of this stuff from just that premise that in your body, right now, there are two million events triggering synchronously. Talk about synchronous. Yeah. Yeah.

To enable us to have this conversation for you to sit up. So if you begin to really look at the experience that you're having, there is some miraculous unfolding. Now, there is a miracle on top of the miracle. And those miracles wake us up to the fact that the original things are miracle. Sure, sure. Like many epiphanies. Sure, sure. Yeah. So people do need a jolt. And, and the gurus that I've known. And I think, definitely Trump Ramsey fits into this category. And I just finished reading the book about Maharaji that just came out. Love everyone. Sure. Sure. And so it's almost like they're willing to do anything manifest any way at all. But that comes from a primary sense of not really having anywhere else to go or be.

Then you just go, I'm here having this conversation now with you. That is, I'm content to be doing that. I mean, I could be thinking I could be doing blah, blah, blah. Sure. In the absence of discontent, we have so much resourcefulness and access to so many channels of invasion. So I think that's an important point is what does somebody need as opposed to it's not what the teacher needs. It's what the student needs. Sure, sure. And then, and also what would, I'm sort of from the school of crystallizing or catalyzing. I feel like I was very influenced by I've been studying, you know, with a Taoist teacher for the last 14 years named sat Han.

He teaches Chikong and Tai Chi here in New York, but he also really teaches a very pure form of Dragon Gate School of Taoism and he's also a Buddhist. And he's also kind of, you know, contemporary in a kind of up to speed on the crazy world we're all living in. Cool. Programs his own website. And the idea that, you know, there's some kind of natural flow. What's happening. So some of it is relaxing more rather than trying harder. But keeping awareness, keeping, you know, a kind of, and when I'm teaching, I find a lot of people need this concept of relaxing and staying awake at the same time. Right. Right. Rather than relaxing into kind of like a mushy state, a passive, not aware state. Right.

Or pushing into some kind of hyper state. Right. It would probably be my tendency. Yes, Buddhism. Yeah. It's the middle way. Right. Buddha's Buddha, you know, I always have a lot of fun talking about Buddha because I was just teaching a Crapalo this last week. Wonderful group of students. And, you know, Buddha. But really, if he was alive now at the transition point where he kind of dropped out from his marriage and his family life and he would have gone to Crapalo and taking any one of those 50 workshops I said, but in those days, the version of the workshops was there out in the jungle. Sure.

Yoga and that way for this way for, you know, asceticism. And he just wanted around and did take a bunch of workshops. And then really what he discovered is the middle way. A lot of Buddhism is formulated as a kind of synthesizing of extremes into into a kind of taking. When you, when you look at extremes, they always indicate a kind of intelligence that's between them. Hmm. Well, it's like equanimity, how important that is with all of this stuff. I mean, I know everyone, you don't need to be told or taught that when you get really angry or really sad, you're not thinking clearly. Like, you know, after when you come out of it, if you do, that something was not really letting you see what feels like to me is when you go one in one direction too much and you don't take the middle path.

Your perspective narrows. And to me, one of the most important things or lessons I've been learning in life is the more perspective you have on a situation, the more 360 degree you can cultivate on a situation, the better chance you have making a wise decision, right action. The chances increase, not always, but I found that that sometimes is the case. Okay. No, now let me throw this. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there's, if you look at stability or perspective as a middle way, you can then take that and move that over to the right. That becomes an extreme. And what's on the other side of that extreme is commitment, or intensity. So that's another interesting thing to, you know, if we become too equanimous. Right.

There's no guru worth his or her salt who wouldn't throw you right back into it. It's true. I get it. Well, you know, we can never out think, you know, that we can never think our way out. Katie always says this, you can think your way out of a prison that's made of thought. Right. But I think it's really just the sense of surrender and the body or the devotion, the Buddhist thing is getting to a point where any form of cleverness can be trumped by the rough edge of the what that which is actually real. And so it's a tricky business because the Dharma very easily can be made into pancakes and sausage, you know, I know exactly what we're saying. I've seen it happen in myself. I've seen it happen with other people. I've seen it happen with organizations who are founded on Dharma.

I mean, that's why I mean, I have not found another teacher who so explicitly kind of delineates those points more than Chogam Champa. It is miraculous to me. I mean, right now I'm fixated on idiot compassion. Right. I am fixated on it because I know there was at least several periods of my life where I was just firmly idiot compassion guy. I remember distinctly, I taken too many psychedelics at a point. There was a guy at Berkeley. It was a five week program. I had a really nice pair of headphones. And I knew this guy wanted to steal the headphones. I knew it. He was just doing everything. He said, let me borrow them.

I just want to borrow them for a little bit. I'll give him back. And I said, you know what? I know this guy's going to steal them, but I'm a nice guy. I'm going to give him an opportunity to take the headphones and give them back and improve his karma. And sure, I gave him the headphones, stole the headphones, never saw them again. And I was like, oh, well, that was unfortunate. I just, I love the practicality and the crazy wisdom, right? That's what it was. I mean, I don't, I haven't found anyone else who really just cuts through that and also is constantly what he seemed to have done. And I mean, you were with him personally. He seemed to always call you on your bullshit. And that to me, the teachers in music, like, I remember my first saxophone teacher, Robbie Robinson. I was really good when I first started. I had a lot of talent.

But I was really unfocused because I thought I could coast off my talent and then come middle school, high school, people started catching up because they were practicing every day. And I wasn't. And I was just doing it. But he was the type of teacher was like, this is bullshit. Like, what did you do all week? And I'd be like, Oh, okay, I better practice. Whereas a sophomore passive type of teacher probably wouldn't have gotten that out of me. So there's something and I have a weird authority complex. I don't like authority, but I respect authority in a lot of ways. So it's, I just, I've been consistently impressed with his method of teaching. Sure. Yeah. And there are to this day. Many, I work a lot with students one to one, as well as in classes.

And I would say, a certain percentage of the students I work with are completely directly coming towards the energy of Chogem Trunk, I can imagine. They're reading his books. They're understanding his approach to Dharma. They're looking for clarification or for support in terms of in terms of that. There are three incredible volumes called the profound treasury of Dharma, which in from 1973 for about 10 years, maybe even more than that. Every year, Trunk or imitate taught a seminary, a three month training, bro. I went to the one in 1976, which was a seminal one because the Shambhala teachings came out there. But before an amp that it was a classical training in the three on approach to Indiana, Mahayana, an introduction formal introduction to Vajrayana Buddhism was very rigorous, you know, before anybody could start doing, you know, topic practices.

You had to get really, really grounded. Now, a lot of Tibetan teachers do not ask for that. Right. So those teachings have been two of his older students. Judy Leaf and Carolyn Gimme and spent 10 years or so compiling, editing those seminary transcripts from 10 or 15 years of three month seminar organizing them by topics, editing them. And so you can go look in the hinyat, you want to look about the existence, you want to look about Abu Dharma, anything you want to study, you go there, and it's just boom, it's right there. What is this called? It's called the profound treasury of Dharma, ocean of Dharma, which is which is what chug yam means. It means ocean of Dharma.

So it's it's and you can get it on Amazon kindles thing or or on the full book pages, you know, the full hard copy. Yeah. And, you know, if you really want to go into the deeper pool of his teachers, that's where you get it. Now, having said that, of course, there are like 20 books out there. Like cutting through spiritual materialism, the myth of freedom, and the Shambhala and the sacred path of the warrior, that are just really seminal books from the west. There's, you know, I don't think there's much, you know, to argue about there. No, but then another level deeper, you know, you can you can really tune into his teachings that way. So a lot of people are still coming just as they are to Maharajis world.

The absence of now, there's a lot of continuity in Buddhism. You see, there's I was just kidding. You're you've plucked it out of my mind lineage. Go. So the idea is that there's an explicit quality of transfer transferring the teachings along, which in more the city traditions, it's a little more opaque how that happens, but it's a literal and surfacey and so there's, you know, as you know, the person, Sakyang Meepam Rinpoche is the, you know, official and authorized empowered heir to the Shambhala lineage and, you know, conducts is the head of that school, the Shambhala school. But many of the older students also, or you could consider, I think, you know, kind of children, various people are passing forth pretty much exactly what we learned from.

I would not be teaching Dharma at all. I have no ambition in this area. I could, I think I could say I'm free of ambition in this area. Yeah. Yeah. It's I like doing it. Sure. I enjoy seeing what happens. I like the Dharma. As he says, good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. I found it to be so. But, but it's not something I felt like, oh, I'll be a Dharma teacher. That's cool. Well, dark players, you well know. Yes. I like, I like being a musician. I like business and so forth. But the Dharma is, I consider an obligation and an honor to take that. And it goes, that's how it goes through.

You're you're taking to shift to another region of the world. You're taking kind of the socratic approach to this rather than the softest approach, which I have always. This has been a focal point of a lot of things I do with work is, you know, how to what's right livelihood when it comes to being a Dharma teacher. And there's any number of permutations of that out there right now. And intention, obviously, is a huge part of that. But I will say this. Your lack of ambition of being a Dharma teacher has probably saved you quite a bit of strife just from my limited experience because it's, it's, it's a, it's a really.

It's like, that's where the lotuses are going to grow, right? It's murky. It's muddy. There's stuff there. And I've seen quite a bit just in my limited experience behind the scenes with some of this stuff. But yeah, I think, again, I want to bring it back to another aspect of Buddhism that I think for me personally is becoming very important, not only with podcasting and just kind of getting some of this stuff out in consciousness in the world, which is the concept of Sangha and community. Because to me, this is where right now, in this moment in time, however we can save of time and space, it seems to me that we're on past the precipice.

I don't even use the word precipice. We're in the thick of these revolutionary ways of being able to communicate technologically at least. I think the interconnectedness of the world has always existed, but now we're seeing these, yeah, my job, I do a lot of web analytics stuff. So I get real time data feedback. If we send an email out about a meditation course, I can see specifically how many people are engaging at that time. And this is a crystallization of consciousness in there's, I don't know another way to put it. So it seems like there's an amazing amount of potential and even just podcasting like this, getting this, having this get out to people and of course radio has existed, but all these little different shades and colors of Dharma are popping up.

And I'd just like to hear from your perspective, like, what do you see as either potential opportunities pitfalls anything what's your take on on kind of where we are with all of this stuff right now. It's funny, you know, Saturday night, I was walking down an icy hill. And it was the wrong choice. Could have been driving down the icy hill, but my friend and I chose to walk down the icy hill. And in one micro second, that's as far as time experience of time goes, I went from being vertical on my back. And unlike the one car accident I was in my life which everything went into slow motion. Yes, this was like propofil. There was no continuity of any sort I was one place and then I was another I couldn't transport the other side of the galaxy.

And then I reconstructed what happened, you know, I started feeling my left wrist had a little pain in it my left elbow maybe the back of my head a little bit. So, but in real time as we like to say, the essence of a lot of what we're about to talk about is time. Time has a lot to do with it. In real time I experience moment one vertical moment to no transition. So, the link and I know you're the kind of person who thinks this way between the experience of time and consciousness. If you have no consciousness, there is no time. Simple as that. So, you know, looking at that as you said pitfall, you know, I do not go against the flow of time and evolution and technology and stuff.

I'm not nostalgic. I'm not nostalgic in any way, really. Right. I accept the poignancy of some of the more beautiful things that have happened in the past. Sure. I accept their impact on the present moment in terms of like relishing that. You know, there are certain things that happened that will never happen again in the same way you mentioned Stevie Wonder earlier. Sure. You know, the kind of quality of certain moments, certain experiences. But, you know, a wise person moves along with it. Because otherwise you end up, you know, kind of fighting. So, now what is it that's actually happening is really worth looking at with all this technological stuff.

And I would say the speed of the mental aspect of communication is rapidly going to an exponential level. I mean, the bell, the curve is just absurd. I mean, absurd. And you probably are. I'm a futurist. I study a lot of what's, you know, the, I could recommend three or four really great books about where certain people think this is all going what you're talking about. But, you know, in the notion of the singularity that take on reality. It's an exponential curve happening, whereas our biological curve has been a linear curve. So exponential just means it hits a certain point and the thing just starts to take off.

And anybody understands waveforms goes like that's, you know, you can't be hanging up with predictability and kind of a conventional mind you got a, that's going to whoop your ax of those things. So, but I can say this for sure. The human component of it. Certain aspects of our most divine and most profound aspects of human being have to happen in real time. And so sometimes slowing down experience is more valuable than speeding it up. Off, I found that to be the case more, not more often than not. I don't want to say, but I found that to be the case. Absolutely. And I have different experiences with all of those. I eat essentially faster than anyone I know. I can't get the food in my face.

Luckily, if I'm in public with other people, I tone it down and I'm like a normal human being. But if it's me and my wife and I don't want to break, I have a kid on the way. My son's going to be born in May. Yeah, I'm really excited. But I don't want to shift that habit to him. Sex, I don't do quite as fast. And meditation, I'm in the middle actually of Sharon's 28 day meditation challenge. I'm blogging for it and I pointed out in my first blog post, the 28 day meditation challenge is actually the only point in the year where I meditate 28 days in a row. And I'm immersed in this stuff every day based on my work. So I have quite different experience, but I know when I do those things more slowly and more presently, my experience is drastically improved.

The key for me is trying to figure out how to remember to do that in each instance. That's what I'm trying to cultivate. Well, and that there's a certain brilliance. You know, you talked about Trunkamete's great phrases like spiritual materialism and so forth. And it's a genius at coming up with those kind of phrases that live for a long time. But, you know, another one that he came up with was talking about boredom. And he talked about, and I use this a lot. You talked about hot boredom and cool boredom. Have you heard that one? I have heard it. I don't remember it, but I kind of know where it goes. But I'd love for you to explain it. Well, so when somebody starts to meditate, there's a lot of momentum in their state of mind.

It could transfer over as it does in spiritual materialism towards, well, maybe I can find a better cosmic mouse trap. And ultimately, if somebody does not add lots of layers of technique, but rather is reductive in terms of what your technique is simplifying. Just following the breath, for example, or just being, you know, following some simple practice that is reductive. At that point, you know, they'll start to experience friction with the momentum and speed that they walked in with. The conventional notion of what that is is called boredom. But it's really what Trump, in particular, is hot boredom. It's not really actually technically speaking boredom yet. It's really frustration, irritation, messlessness, red ants and the pants, whatever you want.

Yeah, so the fact that we advocate that, and I'll tell people the workshop, look, I didn't put this in the air because I'm not sure you would have come. But this is very good if you're getting bored doing this practice. Yeah, this is really, you're starting the rubber starting at the road. But then he said, okay, so the hot boredom, which is ordinarily the boundary of most of our experience, we go, I'm bored, I got to do something different. Change the landscape, change the channel, change the occupation, change my job, change my relationship, whatever change, change change. Then, if you can abide or stay, not run away and cut through some of that speed, what it opens into is another portal, which is called cool boredom.

And very much recommended for a meditator, you start to experience things slowing down and happening in a kind of, there's actually the dawn of some kind of spaciousness, contentment, you know, which is very rarely experienced by most human beings. Mostly we're on our way to someplace. So, I had an experience when I was about 20, I actually can't remember exactly how old I was. I took... No, how old are you now? I am 32. So, this is about a decade or so ago, and I took some LSD, I was up in Boston, and I had taken LSD dozens of times before, and had various levels of experiences. I never really took it recreationally, I always took it for a purpose. I felt there was some mystical aspect to it.

But what ended up happening is that didn't come down for three months. I didn't take any more LSD, I didn't take any more drugs, but I was in some type of flow. Everything I experienced literally every second as a synchronistic event. It was overwhelming. In clinical psychology terms, I was in a manic state, and then I was in a depressive state. I think that I have a whole host of thoughts about how we interpret mental health and illness in this country, and kind of just the western conception of it. I think there was a few more things at play, but I know having... I can process the information in the past. I will never forget what it was actually to feel like in that state, and what you're describing, at least with the cool boredom, that was my general experience.

Everything was spacious. Everything was connected not only in an intellectual or mental way, but in an actual way. If I thought of something, there it was on the bus right then. If I thought of a person, if I had a dream about a person, I saw them the next day. I mean, we're three months of this. It was an overwhelming... My fuse is shorted out at a certain point is what happened, but I find that fascinating, that concept of cool boredom, and I also... I can get glimpses of it. This actually leads us a nice segue to what I want to wrap up with us talking about, which will be kind of a little bit, is the only other experiences that have gotten me to that place outside of a few meditations and just kind of maybe auspicious times where I just kind of feel it happening is music.

Music can really create and bring on that, either creating music, listening to music, just even talking about music sometimes, it can do it. So I would love for you, because you're a successful musician, and you're a successful Dharma teacher. What to you is, and I'm a big... One of my favorite mystics is Hazrat Inayat Khan, and I love the way he kind of talks about the mysticism of sound and how everyone's kind of a bell, and we all resonate with each other, but I don't actually have a very clear or really any conception of where music fits into Buddhism. So how do you... I don't know if there's a larger context for it or how you personally approach it, but I'd love to hear you kind of elucidate on that a little bit.

What an interesting question, because of course I've had to notice decades. There's not much room for music in Buddhism. Somebody asked me, "Kirpala, this weekend, is there some music I could listen to while I'm doing it?" In the chant community, with Krishna Das, when I'm playing with him, it's all music. Even though he says the music is just the music is the syrup, and the mantras are the medicine. I go, "Okay, well, I'm into the syrup." For me, the syrup is also the medicine, so I have a different view on that slightly, but because anytime you're going to separate those two out, what happens is all one at that point.

I often kid around with people I say, "Whenever anybody says it's all one to me," I say, "Okay, well, give me your credit card and your keys to your card." Exactly. The end of my joke is that I don't say that to K.D. because he would do it. It's so generous that way. When I went into the Buddhist practices, it really left the music behind. Because there's something good about having your spiritual practice be dry. If you think of music as lubrication or syrup, there's something really powerful about not experiencing it, especially if it's very lubricating for you to go right at the dry experience of mind without that.

Having said that, if you clear the mind or work with the clarity of mind or the luminosity of mind, music can arise without any obstacle of structure. Almost like there's no struggling to have it emerge. It just emerges very directly. At times, maybe if I've done retreat, music will just kind of pour out. Sure. Also, I appreciate the idea that the Buddhist practice really gives ego no place to hide. It's really, really tough in a way. The idea of coming back into the music world, which I occupy, and there's a lot of sticky flypaper in that world. Just a little bit. Just a teeny little bit. Some people can really transcend it. I don't have that feeling like, for example, Stevie Wonder, I put forward as somebody who is so purely inspired musically that I don't think he cares at a certain level about what you think about what he just did.

But there is that tendency to the real enemy of enlightenment, as far as I'm concerned, is self-consciousness. Even though you need to develop some self-consciousness to cultivate your practice further. At some point, in the more advanced teachings, they talk about the self-conscious having been obliterated. And even somebody like Trunken Rinpoche really didn't even use the word "I". Not in G.Y.E. No, I, yeah, no, I get it. You know, like I would ask him in the morning, "Well, Rinpoche, how are you?" And he'd go, "Seems fine." I'd say, "Why don't you say I seems fine?" It was deliberate choice of language that was sort of projecting, communicating about a field of experience that wasn't checking back on itself to confirm its own existence.

And to me, that I feel personally, when I am making the best music, you're gone. You're not there. And to tap into that, and some days it's there, sometimes you're too there, and you may, your chops may even be super on, you may be on it, but you're still there, and it interferes. You said another thing, to go back to the Pete Holmes podcast, you were talking about when musicians are on stage, and there's the improvisation, and there's the interplay of what's going on, and you say, you know, most of the audience can't actually see that. And I, as a musician, I can see it. I can see when that shift takes place, and I was actually watching a video of you. It was the Baelyn Brothers, is that what it was? The Baelyn Brothers. Baelyn Brothers. Yeah, I was watching you play, and I was watching this video.

What was the moon of something? Okay, so let me just explain to your audience what that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Baelyn Brothers, which is B-E-Y-M-A-N, is a band that I had with Christopher Guest, who needs no introduction, and C.J. Vance, and who also is the keyboard player in spinal tap, so he's from Chris's world. Chris is my oldest friend on the planet. So we've been playing music since we were, like, literally kids at pictures of us playing bluegrass when we were 12 years old, but we made a record call in the Baelyn Brothers Memories of Summer as a child. And we went to, and the cover of it has Chris and I at eight years old in our Baelyn Brothers, which is a real picture, and then we photoshopped C.J. into the picture. A great album, I really recommend that album to your listeners. It's called Memories of Summer.

I'll have a link to it. Yeah, absolutely. Baelyn Brothers, and it's on the usual places, and there's videos of it, which is what you saw. And the Moon of Tunis was a kind of, you know, we did instrumental kind of Americana kind of music. It's not, there's no joke in it. The liner notes on the album have some jokes in it. No, it's not jokey. So it's going to be like funny music, good music, and kind of Americana. We sort of had in mind doing something along the lines of, you know, something that would be a little bit world new AG that could be played in a yoga class without the Indian influence.

Very Americana. Sure. And Moon of Tunis was a restaurant in LA, and I believe this is the case that I think it might have been Chris and Harry Shearer were in that restaurant, and it had a male belly dancer. So we call the song Moon of Tunis, whose name of that restaurant. And, you know, that's the context for what you're about to say about what you saw. Yeah, yeah, that is the context. And I'll actually have the embed of the video on the podcast page for this, but what I'm specifically referencing is there is something that happens with musicians, and I think this is, I'll make the broader connection here that you can see when people enter the flow or the Dow, and this is also a place of sports, lots of things, and you can see it. And if you've seen it before and you've experienced it, it's immediately recognizable.

And that, whatever that is, that is what my kind of driving and passion is in life, and not just creating it for music, but those types of situations, because that's where transformation happens. That's where this stuff springs from, and I just, it's, it's a beacon in my life, and I know as you could tell from my conversation with Pete, I called it the 220 in there 220. And, and it's, there are names for what you're talking about, the zone, both the zone. I mentioned it shamed us, you know, a wonderful friend who passed away several years ago, called it the Bob, which is what it's called in the Indian tradition.

So there is a number of different, and you're calling it synchronicity, we're calling it. Sure, sure. It's a number of aspects. And arguably, it's a kind of consciously accessing that space is what brings a lot of spiritual people to the same table. Right. Unless they get to attach to the kind of how they got there, which is, yeah, that happens. It does because, you know, it's, you know, I mean, there's a lot of Zen jokes about that, you know, you fall in love with the boat or whatever. You walk around on the other side with the boat on your head, you know, but, but, you know, this is also, you know, you and I are kindred spirits in that way because that's, I've been completely curious how to talk how to name that how to name that and, you know, with my friend Stefan Rekshoff and who's the guy who founded Omega Institute. We were talking maybe 10, 12 years ago I said Stefan, there's, there's something that I'm cluing into and I'm going to call it for lack of a better word, the Omega effect.

And he called it the name for it but when, when a waveform gets going through a crowd. And you start to have a kind of synchronous feeling. Yes. And I can't quite grab the name of that right now. It's entrainment. Mm hmm. Of course. Of course. People, and it's what happens at a good gospel concert there's a groove. Yeah, man. And everybody's individuality is both contained in that and also bounces back so there's a visual expression, and there's also a tapping into that. So in Buddhism, we, we don't go for it's all one because I think you get, you get to, to, it's to, it's to something. So in Buddhism, we say it's not one, but it's also not two.

That's the middle way or my nyomica logic, not one, not two. That to me is the best expression of it. So you're going to still be you playing your saxophone and you came up with a cute lick and going to be, you know, chunking chords on the guitar. But there's some vibration that's sort of like contiguous between all of it. Yes. That's what a groove is. Is this, is this related to the concept of emptiness and bliss and the merging of them, or is that a separate thing? Well, this is definitely moving to the bliss area. Okay. Okay. Because the emptiness area, I mean, I've gone through this a lot of times with people in terms of Dharma teachings.

I strongly feel, and I think there's a good argument you can make for it, garmically, that emptiness is a conditional term, because you're trying to say what something isn't. Right. That's important. Buddhist are the best people to say and what it isn't. And some Buddhist will end up stuck there. You know, it's not this, it's not that, and it's called nihilism. Something I do not gravitate towards. But there's a classical paradigm here in Buddhism. We call it the two primitive beliefs about reality. And one is called nihilism, because you sort of solidify what it isn't. And the other one's called eternalism, which is where you solidify what you think it is.

So that to me is the all one school, the kind of new age stuff in general fits into internalism, eternalism, so does all the theistic traditions. And that fine line between them, where the, you know, where the where the Buddhas are sailing happily out on the big ocean, you know, is free of both extremes. Right. Man, this has been so much fun and really, really awesome. I, this flew by as all of the best ones do. I, I have 800 million more questions, but we'll have to do it again sometime. I, I, this has been so much fun for me. Thank you. I have a suggestion. Yes. Yes. Well, this episode one, like the Think of Star Wars. Yeah. Yeah.

Or maybe this is episode four and then we'll do the prequel. Okay. Cool. Cool. But, you know, maybe, you know, a couple of months or something like that after this sort of settles down and some, and it creates some kind of after impact of like what about wait a minute. What about this? What about that? Yeah. We could just do it again. Oh, I would love to. I, you, I, the, I think would make me happier truthfully. I'm just considering just considering us developing our friendship and our communication and offering the fruits of that to the other people who are tuning in. Excellent. Thank you so much.

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