Speaker 1: Hey everyone. You may have already heard about the one
Speaker 1: you feed mass meet up that's going to happen on Saturday,
Speaker 1: June twenty nine, but if you have not registered yet,
Speaker 1: this would be a great time to do it. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be completely free. It's going to happen on Saturday,
Speaker 1: June twenty nine all around the world. In order to
Speaker 1: be part of it, you don't have to make up
Speaker 1: commitment at this point, but if you register, we know
Speaker 1: where you are, and if enough people in any given
Speaker 1: place register, then we have enough people and we will
Speaker 1: schedule a meet up for you all. So the more
Speaker 1: people who register, the greater probability of a meet up
Speaker 1: taking place in your area. So you can go to
Speaker 1: one you feed dot net slash meet up to sign
Speaker 1: up for this gathering. You'll need to do it by
Speaker 1: June twenty two and today June and again go to
Speaker 1: one you feed dot net slash meet up to register
Speaker 1: your interest. I sincerely hope we have lots of people
Speaker 1: participating in this giving you a chance to meet each other.
Speaker 1: It's a when you feed dot net slash meet up.
Speaker 1: Thanks human beings, we don't seem to do well if
Speaker 1: we're living life exclusively for ourselves. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true. And yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Audi A Shanty. This is actually his third
Speaker 1: time on the podcast, so he's a member of an
Speaker 1: elite club there. He's an American born spiritual teacher devoted
Speaker 1: to serving the awakening of all beings, and his teachings
Speaker 1: are an open invitation to stop, inquire and recognize what
Speaker 1: is true in liberating at the core of all existence.
Speaker 1: Audio Shanty also runs the Omega Retreat, which Eric has
Speaker 1: taken part in frequently. Hi, Idea, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks Eric. This is our third time to sit down,
Speaker 1: so I don't know. I think there's been one other
Speaker 1: guest who's been on three times. So you are in
Speaker 1: elite company, is that right? Yes? Yes, So it's always
Speaker 1: fun to do and we are in person, which always
Speaker 1: makes it even more fun for me. So many of
Speaker 1: them we I do remote, so I of when I
Speaker 1: could do him in person. So thank you. Some of
Speaker 1: what we're gonna talk about is your most recent book,
Speaker 1: the most Important Thing, Discovering Truth at the heart of Life.
Speaker 1: But before that, you're going to get a chance to
Speaker 1: respond for the third time to the wolf. Parable Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says,
Speaker 1: in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are
Speaker 1: always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents
Speaker 1: things like kindness and bravery and love, and the others
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second and looks up at his grandfather and
Speaker 1: he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says,
Speaker 1: the one you feed so I'd like to kind of
Speaker 1: ask you, like I said, for the third time, and
Speaker 1: I don't know what you said the first two times,
Speaker 1: so have had it. I don't know either, which is
Speaker 1: probably a good thing. It's an interesting question, you know,
Speaker 1: because it's it's like one of those parables that, on
Speaker 1: the face of it seems pretty simple and straightforward. And
Speaker 1: I think anybody that's halfway conscious, um, knows exactly what
Speaker 1: you're referring to in that parable, right, um. And yet
Speaker 1: it also seems to have this portal into something that's
Speaker 1: really quite quite deep and universal for us all um.
Speaker 1: And the thing that comes to mind when you were
Speaker 1: telling me that parable again, is that, you know, is
Speaker 1: that actually like it's the same wolf, right, the good
Speaker 1: wolf and the bad wolf is the same wolf. Right.
Speaker 1: It's it's all part of our part of our psyche.
Speaker 1: And I do think that, Um. Mostly, I think we
Speaker 1: feed with our sort of attention and intention I think
Speaker 1: are undervalued things in human life, you know, just our
Speaker 1: mere attention, like where are we giving our attention to?
Speaker 1: But also our intention And I've focused a lot a
Speaker 1: lot more on that in the last few years of uh.
Speaker 1: The way I like to try to approach. It is
Speaker 1: when we all look at our or whatever our deeper,
Speaker 1: more meaningful experiences in life have been. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: they could be revelatory moments or whatever. It could be
Speaker 1: the birth of a child, or falling in love, or
Speaker 1: a spiritual awakening or all sorts of different experiences. But
Speaker 1: I think that this kind of gets back into that,
Speaker 1: this sort of wolf parable analogy is when we touch
Speaker 1: upon our depth, I think we can, we can sort
Speaker 1: of we have a certain experience. Sometimes certain insights come
Speaker 1: come from that. But what the thing that we don't
Speaker 1: often do, which gets back to intention, is looking and
Speaker 1: reassess and go from that perspective, from the perspective of
Speaker 1: whatever has been my more some of my more meaningful
Speaker 1: or insightful experiences in my life, what becomes truly important
Speaker 1: you know, and then important in the sense from the
Speaker 1: inside out rather than from the outside in. And I
Speaker 1: think that's a way of connecting with our truer nature,
Speaker 1: right with the more benevolent way of being um inside
Speaker 1: of us. And but to see it not just as
Speaker 1: an experience or something that feels good or feels meaningful,
Speaker 1: but really it's it's sort of more, there's a more
Speaker 1: challenging way I think to look at it, which which
Speaker 1: when we look from our depth, goes how does that
Speaker 1: experience prioritize our life? In other words, what becomes meaningful,
Speaker 1: what becomes worthwhile orienting my life around That's kind of
Speaker 1: how I look at it now, and I think that's
Speaker 1: a way of orienting it around that benevolent and wise
Speaker 1: sort of light within ourselves. But like I said, I
Speaker 1: think it's also the same wolf, even though it has
Speaker 1: these two aspects, right, It's the same self, same psyche
Speaker 1: that experiences both our light and our darkness. Um And
Speaker 1: yet I think, especially as I get older. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm fifty six now, and I think one of the
Speaker 1: things as you get older, as you age more certainly
Speaker 1: in my case, you just become more and more willing
Speaker 1: to experience the entirety of of your being. And I
Speaker 1: think part of it is you get encountered with things
Speaker 1: that we try not to encounter early, like limitation, like
Speaker 1: human flaw, human fallibility, you know, all those parts. And
Speaker 1: even from aging level, you know, we're not in the
Speaker 1: upward curve of our strength and endurance and even our
Speaker 1: cognitive capacity, but we're in a different dimension of of
Speaker 1: our life. And even though I don't associate that with
Speaker 1: like darkness or anything like that, um, I think there
Speaker 1: is an encounter with limitation that we don't usually see
Speaker 1: as sort of the light, bright, shiny, you know, wisdom
Speaker 1: part of us that, But there is a profound kind
Speaker 1: of wisdom that comes with a kind of confrontation with
Speaker 1: limitation or even with sometimes some of the dark spaces inside. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We did an interview with a guy named Jonathan Rouch.
Speaker 1: He works for the Brookings Institutes. Books is called the
Speaker 1: I think it's called the Happiness curve if I recall,
Speaker 1: and he basically says that if you look at again,
Speaker 1: this is demographically every your individual experience might be different
Speaker 1: that you see happiness start off as you're younger up here,
Speaker 1: and then it sort of plummets down and sort of
Speaker 1: bottoms out in what we might consider middle aged late forties,
Speaker 1: and then it starts to actually go back up. You know,
Speaker 1: you actually start to get better, and I think it
Speaker 1: flips that narrative on its head of oh, your later
Speaker 1: lives are going to be unhappy. You do to your point,
Speaker 1: you do have this recognition of limitation, and you realize
Speaker 1: all the things that you might not accomplish in life
Speaker 1: that you thought what you were you were going to
Speaker 1: do and yet looked at in the in a certain way.
Speaker 1: We can become happier, more contented, deeper people as we
Speaker 1: age if we allow that. Yeah, I think, and I
Speaker 1: think that the definitions of sort of what we even
Speaker 1: think of as happiness is changes. So like, for instance,
Speaker 1: now kind of going back to what you're speaking about,
Speaker 1: is to me, the when we're young happiness is well,
Speaker 1: it's the sort of the conventional idea of happiness. You know,
Speaker 1: it's associated with of innocence and potentiality and like that
Speaker 1: upward curve of life and all of that. And I
Speaker 1: think there's as we mature, whether it's physically or spiritually,
Speaker 1: that happiness becomes more a outcome of wholeness, that we're
Speaker 1: actually becoming whole beings. And again to kind of tie
Speaker 1: into that the parable of the two wolves, like that
Speaker 1: there's a different kind of happiness when we start to
Speaker 1: open to the through this sort of greater sense of
Speaker 1: whole wholeness of being um. And I think that that's
Speaker 1: in one sense, that's why that arc of well being
Speaker 1: maybe that's even the better word well being or something
Speaker 1: like that than conventional happiness comes online, because I think
Speaker 1: we start to have a bigger capacity for our own wholeness.
Speaker 1: I remember my mom when she was trying to think
Speaker 1: of the age she started to talk to me about this,
Speaker 1: but certainly in her sixties, and you know, she says, well, basically,
Speaker 1: you know, my life didn't unfall as I thought it would.
Speaker 1: None of my kids ended up to be who I
Speaker 1: thought they would be. All the things that I thought
Speaker 1: I had figured out about life, I realized I didn't
Speaker 1: have like figured out about life. And maybe that's part
Speaker 1: of that dip of middle life, when you start to
Speaker 1: come into a recognition of of you know, life as
Speaker 1: it is, rather than the image of life. But then
Speaker 1: there's the flip side of that, where she said, it's
Speaker 1: actually it's it's better like my kids ended up to
Speaker 1: be better than I hope like my there's my life
Speaker 1: didn't end up to be the way that I saw
Speaker 1: it being, but it seems to be getting better and
Speaker 1: better and better. And um, I think there's that confrontation
Speaker 1: with just the reality of life that flips the equation.
Speaker 1: I've seen as a spiritual teacher that generally a lot
Speaker 1: of times the people that are the most unhappy are
Speaker 1: the people that are seeking happiness the most. Well, in
Speaker 1: one sense, that's obvious, like if you're unhappy, of course
Speaker 1: you want to be happy, right, But I think there's
Speaker 1: also a less conventional way of looking at that that's
Speaker 1: maybe just as true, which is especially in our culture
Speaker 1: where we tend to be focused so much on happiness.
Speaker 1: Everybody's trying to be bright and shiny and happy and
Speaker 1: successful in all these things. And and I think that's
Speaker 1: sort of a misunderstanding about what real happiness is, um
Speaker 1: And I think happiness isn't even a great goal to
Speaker 1: shoot for, Like we all want to be happy sort
Speaker 1: of in eights in our d n A. But I
Speaker 1: think the most contented people seem to be the people
Speaker 1: that have tapped into their life being an experience of
Speaker 1: something that's really meaningful to them. You know, I think
Speaker 1: if we shoot for meaning rather than just happiness, we
Speaker 1: end up being a whole lot more happy in the end.
Speaker 1: And I don't necessarily mean like a meaning that you
Speaker 1: could philosophically write down in your notebook and show your friend,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you know, we all know the experience.
Speaker 1: You're a parent, right, So I imagine the experience of
Speaker 1: seeing your child for the first time, probably a happy, joyous,
Speaker 1: mind blowing moment, but I imagine that moment had a
Speaker 1: kind of depth of meaning that it's probably hard for
Speaker 1: you to even try to articulate to me, Right, is that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, And that's kind of what I mean. I
Speaker 1: think there's happiness and well being flow out of meaning,
Speaker 1: but a kind of meaning that's not always easy to
Speaker 1: articulate because I think meaning is fundamentally an experience of being.
Speaker 1: It's not something you can actually necessarily explain to somebody. Right.
Speaker 1: That leads me into your book is called The Most
Speaker 1: Important Thing, Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life, your
Speaker 1: latest book, and you say, the questions we ask are
Speaker 1: so incredibly important, And one of the questions that you
Speaker 1: ask is what am I in service to? You say,
Speaker 1: it's an awakener, it's an awareness practice and an honesty practice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it kind of comes back through the idea
Speaker 1: of meaning and and well being. And I think meaning
Speaker 1: comes out of what we're in service to. Happiness, deeper
Speaker 1: happiness comes out of what we're in service to human beings.
Speaker 1: We don't seem to do well if we're living life
Speaker 1: exclusively for ourselves, right, doesn't just doesn't seem to make
Speaker 1: us happy, And yet we seem to be inclined to
Speaker 1: try absolutely and at a certain point in our life
Speaker 1: maybe that's just developmentally reasonable, Like you know, when we're
Speaker 1: quite young. But as we get as we get a
Speaker 1: little older, a little older would be by our late
Speaker 1: teens or early twenties, I'm not talking like you know,
Speaker 1: old age, but we start to we start to have
Speaker 1: this this turning and and start to realize that the
Speaker 1: pursuit of just the pursuit of happiness for ourself doesn't
Speaker 1: end up making us happy. Self centeredness just isn't a
Speaker 1: very happy way to go through life. I remember years
Speaker 1: ago when I did UM, a weekend intensive. It was
Speaker 1: really a learning experience for me and I as a
Speaker 1: subject matter. I called the whole weekend UM servants of Truth,
Speaker 1: and the idea was, what does it mean to actually
Speaker 1: serve what you yourself realize rather than trying to get
Speaker 1: more realization and how do I hold onto it and
Speaker 1: how do I have more experience? And this sort of
Speaker 1: acquisition orientation towards spirituality and spiritual experience instead look at
Speaker 1: whatever our more meaningful experiences of being and start to
Speaker 1: act ask ourselves like how could I be in in
Speaker 1: a deeper service to this? And it really showed me
Speaker 1: something because I got about half the people on that
Speaker 1: intensive that I normally get, which is interesting you know
Speaker 1: as a teacher, like you know, you learn a lot
Speaker 1: from your students. Um, And it really showed me. But
Speaker 1: that that weekend, which is going back probably twelve or
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago, now that what I took out of
Speaker 1: it is adia you're not getting something across is if
Speaker 1: this is how the people are responding to this idea,
Speaker 1: this is an idea you've got to articulate better than
Speaker 1: you have because of being the serve If the word
Speaker 1: servant to something just scares people off or makes them uninteresting,
Speaker 1: like that told me as a teacher, I've got to
Speaker 1: be I've got to start to articulate this in a
Speaker 1: in a better way. UM. So people really start to
Speaker 1: realize number one, what I'm talking about, and UM, I
Speaker 1: think that what the foundation of both human and spiritual
Speaker 1: maturity really is. You tell a story of your first
Speaker 1: teacher and this idea of service, about how she started
Speaker 1: teaching and would show up each week right a Dharma
Speaker 1: talk show up to meditate, and oftentimes there was nobody there.
Speaker 1: Nobody came for a for a for an entire year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell me more about not a single person. And yet
Speaker 1: she and this, you know, she did this in her house.
Speaker 1: So she reorganized the whole living room, put out all
Speaker 1: the meditation cushions. It was no small thing. And then
Speaker 1: after a year, one person showed up and they sat
Speaker 1: together for a year until a few more and then
Speaker 1: a few more started to show up. But it was
Speaker 1: a real remember when her teaching telling me about that story,
Speaker 1: worry and kind of as a dovetail to that, if
Speaker 1: I sort of fast forward many years after she asked
Speaker 1: me to teach, and not long after she asked me
Speaker 1: to teach, they found out she had a sort of
Speaker 1: sheet will number one. She just hadn't planned on it
Speaker 1: been intuitively, she just knew it was time to stop teaching,
Speaker 1: and so Jesus stopped. She didn't even know why. Well
Speaker 1: then six months of that, so this is about a
Speaker 1: year now after she had asked me to teach, um,
Speaker 1: they found she had a brain tumor um, which fortunately
Speaker 1: was was not cancer. And but they had to operate,
Speaker 1: and you know that all the complications of brain surgery unfolded.
Speaker 1: But and then when she started to recover from that,
Speaker 1: she used to come into the office. It wasn't this
Speaker 1: office that we have now, but not too far from here,
Speaker 1: when we were much smaller, and she said, I want
Speaker 1: to come help you guys out and I said, okay,
Speaker 1: come on in, we'll see what we have to do.
Speaker 1: And one day I walked in the door and there
Speaker 1: she was sitting at a desk and it was back
Speaker 1: when they were like tapes before CDs and stuff, and
Speaker 1: she was putting, you know, the decal on the tape
Speaker 1: where you could write the name of it and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. And I remember walking in the door and
Speaker 1: I saw her doing that, and and for me, in
Speaker 1: one way, that was one of the the most profound
Speaker 1: teaching moments that I had from her, of just seeing
Speaker 1: that she had always talked about serving the Dharma and
Speaker 1: I was there there she had been for over thirty years,
Speaker 1: like the teacher, and that was her way of serving
Speaker 1: the Dharma. And then when she could no longer do that.
Speaker 1: Now it's putting labels on tapes in the office and
Speaker 1: seeing that as serving the dharma for her previous student,
Speaker 1: for her previous student and the humility and the and
Speaker 1: the sense of service, and that just touched me some much,
Speaker 1: you know, I just thought, Wow, like that service beyond
Speaker 1: who you are or or how you can be seen
Speaker 1: or your position or whatever, that's just serving what's valuable
Speaker 1: to you in life. Yea. And that taught me a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that story you you go on after it to
Speaker 1: sort of say something. And I've noticed this a lot
Speaker 1: also in working with people, is that we tend to
Speaker 1: have this idea that if we're going to be of
Speaker 1: service or we're going to do something good for the world,
Speaker 1: it's become so inflated with being seen, with being noticed,
Speaker 1: or even if it's not that, even if the motivation
Speaker 1: still is, you know, if we've managed to sort of
Speaker 1: keep ego out of it, it still seems like if
Speaker 1: it's not on big scale, we feel like it's not important.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that's a place that a lot
Speaker 1: of people get lost and feel that life isn't it's
Speaker 1: not as important as it could because I'm doing this
Speaker 1: little thing, you know. And I think we sell ourselves
Speaker 1: short of the good work that we do do in
Speaker 1: life by not appreciating it because thinking it has to
Speaker 1: be grand for it to matter. Yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: a really good point, Eric, I really do, because well,
Speaker 1: because the former of what you just mentioned can kind
Speaker 1: of be a sort of a sort of concealed ego orientation.
Speaker 1: Right unless it has huge impact or I'm seeing or
Speaker 1: I'm noticed or something, I don't have much motivation for it.
Speaker 1: Um where Really, I think the service to whatever we
Speaker 1: hold valuable is like each moment of life. It's a
Speaker 1: life orientation that really doesn't have anything to do with
Speaker 1: how big the scale is or how how much it
Speaker 1: is known, or that's what I got from It's from
Speaker 1: seeing my teacher, you know, with those tapes. It was
Speaker 1: like that service. She's serving what's valuable to her. She's
Speaker 1: giving her life, her energy or commitment is actually to
Speaker 1: serving the dharma. And it doesn't make any difference how
Speaker 1: that scene, if it's on a big scale and a
Speaker 1: small scale, whether it's noticed or not noticed, it's just
Speaker 1: getting down. Like let's say I could go out and
Speaker 1: have interviews like this or get big talks or do
Speaker 1: retreats or whatever, and then I'm like sitting in a
Speaker 1: line in a bank and somebody behind me is having
Speaker 1: a tough time. But I don't want to be bothered,
Speaker 1: you know, like all of a sudden. You know, for me,
Speaker 1: if I didn't step up to that moment and acknowledge
Speaker 1: that person or to see what their need was at
Speaker 1: that moment, the whole rest of my life would just
Speaker 1: seem like a total charade, you know what I mean? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it See, it's kind of easy to be noble when
Speaker 1: you're up, when you're noticed, when people notice, But think
Speaker 1: most of our lives is not. That's not where it
Speaker 1: takes place, right right, So even when I'm like, I like,
Speaker 1: I'll be going to a retreat right and I'll be teaching,
Speaker 1: but I'm actually teaching for maybe four hours during those days,
Speaker 1: which means there's twenty other hours. I think the twenty
Speaker 1: other hours are just as important and maybe even more
Speaker 1: important than the four. Those are all a little small moments,
Speaker 1: you know, where it makes a difference. Um, Because really,
Speaker 1: I mean, how much have you and I and all
Speaker 1: of us in our in our lives had those moments
Speaker 1: where somebody just gave us what I call our two
Speaker 1: most prized commodities a little time and attention when we
Speaker 1: needed it, and it wasn't known, and it wasn't on
Speaker 1: a stage, and it wasn't It wasn't for any other
Speaker 1: reason than somebody saw that we need a little time
Speaker 1: and attention and when somebody gave it to us. I
Speaker 1: think most of us have all had those moments, and
Speaker 1: those can be very transformative moments. They're small, at least
Speaker 1: from the exterior, but um so I think that's a
Speaker 1: really really important part because we can't get hung up
Speaker 1: like I don't want to do this unless I can
Speaker 1: change the world. Well, she's how big an ego is that.
Speaker 1: You know, we were talking about kids earlier, like I
Speaker 1: often about like parents. I mean, there's so much service
Speaker 1: embedded in that, and yet often as parents we don't
Speaker 1: even reflect on that that is a noble and a
Speaker 1: beautiful thing to do. Like I often think as a parent,
Speaker 1: you're like, all I'm doing is taking care of my
Speaker 1: kids all day long. And look this guy's over there
Speaker 1: giving uh, you know, starting this clean water project. And
Speaker 1: we we sell ourselves short about what we could feel
Speaker 1: positive about if we looked and went, wait, my life
Speaker 1: is about service. I am serving And can I reorient
Speaker 1: my expectation of myself? Yeah? Through teaching, I have come
Speaker 1: to see how unimaginably really unimaginable. And I don't say
Speaker 1: that as an overstatement. Maybe it's an understatement how unimaginally
Speaker 1: important parenting is because I see the fallout of bad
Speaker 1: parenting or just parentings that just you know, there's no
Speaker 1: there's general Most people don't go to a parenting class
Speaker 1: like they're doing the best they can, but it may
Speaker 1: not actually be that great. Um. And I I think personally,
Speaker 1: even though I don't have kids, but I think the
Speaker 1: role of parenting is probably the most noble calling that
Speaker 1: anybody could have, right because that man, you want to
Speaker 1: have impact. Um, parenting is your place where you you
Speaker 1: may have more impact than anything else you do, because
Speaker 1: it's going to affect that person's life and their children.
Speaker 1: There's children's children, and it's gonna go on for generations. Yeah. Really,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's I just think it's huge, and
Speaker 1: most of it's done behind the scenes where there's no fanfare,
Speaker 1: and you know, sometimes it's beautiful and lovely, and sometimes
Speaker 1: it's extraordinarily challenging. It seems to me. Um. As my
Speaker 1: mother said to me many years ago, you know that
Speaker 1: the first five years I almost killed her because I
Speaker 1: was such a difficult kid, you know, not and ill
Speaker 1: tempered kid, but just I just she just couldn't turn
Speaker 1: her back on me, because you never know the next
Speaker 1: dangerous thing I would be getting into um and anyway,
Speaker 1: So I just think things like that parenting. It's not
Speaker 1: just parenting, but I think that's a really good example
Speaker 1: of of profound service. And it's easy to imagine. I
Speaker 1: can only imagine as a parent at any moment during
Speaker 1: the day, when there's you know, all sorts of challenges
Speaker 1: at any given day, that it's not easy to keep
Speaker 1: a living sense of of how desperately important that is
Speaker 1: and how much you are in service to the whole world. Yep,
Speaker 1: I think it's so easy to lose sight of. And
Speaker 1: I think it's very easy. What I'll hear, you know,
Speaker 1: people I work with in in my one on one
Speaker 1: work will be you know, I'm not doing anything important
Speaker 1: in the world. I'm like, hang on, slow, your role,
Speaker 1: hold on. Actually, you're doing something tremendously important, right, you know.
Speaker 1: And And and to feel that if we're not doing
Speaker 1: something that's big, we're not doing something important, is a
Speaker 1: we make ourselves feel bad about ourselves in a way
Speaker 1: that is truly unnecessary. I think so too, And I
Speaker 1: think it's the consequence of something that was necessary, um
Speaker 1: culturally and developmentally. I think it was necessary that, you know,
Speaker 1: because you can get sort of a lot lost in
Speaker 1: parenting and sort of lose your inner life in a
Speaker 1: certain sense, you know, through just trying to do the
Speaker 1: right things and be the right person to do all
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. And of course, generations thousands of
Speaker 1: years of women that couldn't felt like they couldn't fulfill
Speaker 1: their potential in other ways in life beyond parenting, and
Speaker 1: so all those you know, for all those reasons and
Speaker 1: many more, are you know this, This pressure came societally
Speaker 1: to start to change that, you know, to to to
Speaker 1: let people realize they can develop lives beyond and outside
Speaker 1: of their parenting roles. And so okay, that really needed
Speaker 1: to happen, right, especially for women, that really needed to happen,
Speaker 1: and that transformation needed to come. And I think what
Speaker 1: often happens is we can kind of throw out the
Speaker 1: baby with the bath water in a certain sense in that, yeah,
Speaker 1: we we want to be able to exercise our talents
Speaker 1: beyond the particular let's say parenting roles or family roles.
Speaker 1: We play, we let in life, and we want to
Speaker 1: be able to do that. But I think what we've
Speaker 1: lost in there is exactly what you were just mentioning that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we all we do want to be able to flourish
Speaker 1: in in other ways. But man, don't forget that that
Speaker 1: that that parenting role, the immensity of the importance of
Speaker 1: that is, and what an incredible service that is, and
Speaker 1: it's and and a sacrifice, even though it seems to
Speaker 1: me that parents get so so much from being a parent,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's no walk in the park every day, right,
Speaker 1: But so I think we've kind of lost a little
Speaker 1: bit of touch with valuing how important that actually is.
Speaker 1: That's a good point though, about how where we how
Speaker 1: we got where we are. I think it's really true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's almost always goes that way. We kind
Speaker 1: of to find balance. We go from one out of
Speaker 1: balanced state to a little bit out of balance state
Speaker 1: before we find something that's that's a little more wise.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk now about this idea that
Speaker 1: you talk about in the book, and you say there's
Speaker 1: no direct causal relationship between our spiritual pursuits and the
Speaker 1: arising of self recognition or of spiritual awakening, So sort
Speaker 1: of saying you can't make yourself awaken and yet so
Speaker 1: there's no wreck causal relationship. But you also say it's
Speaker 1: a mistake to assume that what we do doesn't have
Speaker 1: an impact. So talk to me about that, that dichotomy
Speaker 1: or that paradox. Yeah, well it kind of goes goes
Speaker 1: into this sort of human way that we tend to think,
Speaker 1: which is in either or categories. Right, And this is
Speaker 1: like a really great example of thinking in either or
Speaker 1: either either my spiritual say practice, what do I what
Speaker 1: I do to try to awaken or connect with the
Speaker 1: divine or something? Um, either that has a direct causal
Speaker 1: relationship to revelation or it doesn't. But if we kind
Speaker 1: of like back up from that and say life doesn't
Speaker 1: usually go in according to these these black and white
Speaker 1: ways of unfolding, um that yeah, we can't. We can't
Speaker 1: you know, have this recipe where I do this, this
Speaker 1: and this and this and I can guarantee that it
Speaker 1: equals spiritual awakening. Right, It just doesn't seem to work
Speaker 1: that way. Hell, if it did, we would have figured
Speaker 1: out a long time ago what the three steps or
Speaker 1: the ten steps are the two steps that you know,
Speaker 1: and and yet it just doesn't sort of. But so
Speaker 1: then people will conclude, well, then it has no no,
Speaker 1: there is no causal relationship. I think the causal relationship
Speaker 1: is there. It's just not direct. It's indirect. It's in
Speaker 1: the sense of, well, to go back to parenting, right,
Speaker 1: you can't cause your kids to be exactly what you
Speaker 1: think you want them to be or should be, or
Speaker 1: or guide them or you know what I mean. You
Speaker 1: can do the same thing that another parent does and
Speaker 1: have a very very different result. But there are ten
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of indirect causal relationships that are having
Speaker 1: a are setting to states there there are are having
Speaker 1: an effect. It's just not it's just not like mathematics.
Speaker 1: It's not like two and two equals four sometimes two
Speaker 1: and two equals six or five or seven or but
Speaker 1: it's also not chaotic. It's not simply chance. You know.
Speaker 1: That's there's no mistake that most people that have say
Speaker 1: spiritual awakening, not all, but I would say, in my experience,
Speaker 1: in excess of we're doing something specific in their pursuit
Speaker 1: of that. And I think we'll explore this more in
Speaker 1: Part two about how our spiritual practice, if we're not careful,
Speaker 1: becomes about the result. Right, we do it because we
Speaker 1: expect or we want this thing to happen, and and
Speaker 1: that very mentality often stands directly in the way. So
Speaker 1: the thing, where's the paradox of spiritual practice itself? Right?
Speaker 1: That it can It can open doors, and it can
Speaker 1: also close doors, and often it does that both of
Speaker 1: those things at the same time. Sometimes. Um. Again, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of this goes back to the ways
Speaker 1: that we compartmentalize all this stuff. The way I see
Speaker 1: it now is um, the very impetus that gets someone
Speaker 1: to do any kind of spiritual practice, that gets into
Speaker 1: open a spiritual book or go to a talk, or
Speaker 1: look on the internet or you know, like why are
Speaker 1: you doing that? And your friends could care less where
Speaker 1: did that come from? In your in your life? And
Speaker 1: what I would say is that the impulse, let's say
Speaker 1: for enlightenment, big word, but we'll just the impulse for
Speaker 1: enlightenment is you have the impulse because the impulse is
Speaker 1: the first arising of the enlightenment, arising in your consciousness.
Speaker 1: That the interest itself is a sign that there's a
Speaker 1: spiritual maturity that's already arising into consciousness. That's a very
Speaker 1: different way of looking at all this, because usually we
Speaker 1: look good it is I want to awaken, right or
Speaker 1: I want enlightenment or something because I because it's not here,
Speaker 1: because I don't experience it. What I'm saying is that
Speaker 1: you're very desire for it is actually only there because
Speaker 1: that impulses already starting to flower in your life, maybe
Speaker 1: not to the extent that you would like. Right, doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you just get to sit back and wait for
Speaker 1: it all to happen, But um, the yearning itself is
Speaker 1: sort of coming from the thing we're yearning for. That
Speaker 1: can be a more useful way to look at it
Speaker 1: because it keeps us out of this either or way
Speaker 1: of relating to to our spirituality or approach our practice,
Speaker 1: whatever that might be. You know, And then I remember
Speaker 1: hearing about some of this stuff just years before I
Speaker 1: had any understanding of it, Like your practice is an
Speaker 1: expression of enlightenment itself, and I'd be sitting there meditating,
Speaker 1: going that sounds kind of profound, although confusing, but it
Speaker 1: certainly doesn't seem to be what I'm experiencing, Like my
Speaker 1: practice doesn't feel like enlightenment at all, right, at that
Speaker 1: time the circus is here. It's yeah, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: see like a chaotic circus, right, a bad circus is
Speaker 1: coming to town. But in retrospect, which is often where
Speaker 1: we are all the most wise, right in retrospects, you
Speaker 1: look back, and now I can clearly see that the
Speaker 1: even that that sort of chaotic impulse for awakening was
Speaker 1: there because the because in essence awakening was already in process.
Speaker 1: It hadn't bloomed to the sense that I was conscious
Speaker 1: of it. You know, I was at that time still
Speaker 1: kind of confused and blindly groping in the dark. But
Speaker 1: even the impulse to do that is coming from the
Speaker 1: thing that we're seeking. We think it's coming from the
Speaker 1: last of what we're sinking, rather than the presence of
Speaker 1: what we're seeking is already starting to arise into our consciousness.
Speaker 1: And you know, if we're if we're ready for it,
Speaker 1: that can kind of put a little bit different twist,
Speaker 1: you know, that we can we can start to maybe
Speaker 1: just a little bit start to appreciate within the impulse
Speaker 1: to awaken itself is is a bit of the awakened mind.
Speaker 1: We only feel that because awakened mind is already starting
Speaker 1: to sort of break through just a bit into consciousness.
Speaker 1: And if we even if we take that as a
Speaker 1: on a conceptual level for a little bit, that perhaps
Speaker 1: it allows one to kind of relax, relax into their
Speaker 1: practice rather than because spiritual practice so easily becomes a
Speaker 1: sort of institutionalized seeking, right, you know, my practice is
Speaker 1: is nothing but spiritual seeking. And that's when it becomes
Speaker 1: a barrier, you know. Um, that's when it starts to
Speaker 1: get in the way because it's an unconscious denial of
Speaker 1: of true nature. We don't know it at the time,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of what it is, right, and that
Speaker 1: is what we will explore in part two. All right,
Speaker 1: so thank you so much for coming on for part
Speaker 1: one here. It's nice to be with you. If what
Speaker 1: you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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