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Kristin Neff: Self-Compassion and Non-dual Awareness · Attention Copilot with Pranab

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  We are here with Dr. Kristin Neff, who is my professor at UT several years ago,
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  mindful self-compassion, author of a book on fierce compassion and burnout.
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  what self-compassion is, is we're moving away from identification
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  with self, right? My three, my models is being over-identified versus mindful,
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  feeling common humanity versus being isolated and being kind versus judgmental.
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  Those are three aspects
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  of self-compassion. Yeah. So when we feel, and this was, you know, and I,
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  this, came from my Buddhist practiced understanding which again like tic dacani
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  is not not non-dual I mean he was he was talking about interbeing which is all
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  oneness right and I actually really wanted to call it interbeing versus isolation but
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  I knew no one would know what the hell I was talking about so that common humanity
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  yeah it's just accessible yeah it's just not it's not everything but it's you know
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  it's and to me and I think that's the thing that I feel like I'm helping this
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  weekend I was helping a friend work through a breakup and what has been
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  helpful for him has been seeing everyone has
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  these feelings. Yeah. It's a part of being human. It's part of being human. Yeah.
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  But so when we're over-identified with whatever's arising, you might say that's
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  everyday mind, right? We're just lost in the contents of our consciousness.
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  When we feel isolated, when we feel separate from other people or the world,
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  if you want to take it further.
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  And when we judge it, it's good and bad.
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  And you think in some ways when we're judging it as good or bad as ourselves as
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  good or bad, there's kind of this idea that I should be able to control this.
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  I should have been able to get it right.
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  I'm bad because my experience isn't the way I want it to be or that I think it
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  should be. So there's a real sense of kind of agency built in to judgment.
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  We wouldn't judge ourselves if we didn't have that sense
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  of agency. Underneath. So we're moving away from the sense of separate self.
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  when we're judging, we feel identified, we feel isolated,
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  to compassionate presence, right? We're mindful, we're present,
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  we feel connected to the larger whole, to a sense of common humanity, and we're
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  kind, our heart is open.
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  So now when I'm teaching self-compassion, I have this little slide where I talk
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  about that, is that what self-compassion is doing is we're moving away from self
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  into compassion.
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  And it's funny, Dan Siegel and I are friends, and he's like, he hates the word
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  self-compassion. He's like, Kristin, there's no self in self-compassion.
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  That's true. There's no self in the compassion, but there's a lot of self in
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  the suffering,
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  you know? And so if you exclude that sense of self, that isolated,
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  judgmental, you know, over-identified self from the circle of compassion,
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  then you're just reifying the sense of separation.
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  You need to turn not only to other people and their suffering, but also our own
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  suffering as well. And not only that,
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  it's all mediated through our own individual consciousness.
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  Even your suffering is mediated through my consciousness.
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  If I don't pay attention to your suffering,
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  I'm not even going to be aware of it. Right?
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  So it's all happening through our own individual consciousness,
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  all suffering. Yeah. All perception of suffering. All
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  perception of suffering. Yeah. At least.
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  Well, all I should say,
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  yeah, maybe perception of, it's not to say that,
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  that all suffering is my suffering. I don't want to say that.
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  But, you know, the fact like empathic resonance.
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  Yeah. If you're really suffering and I'm like, I may be with therapists and I'm
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  feeling your pain that's happening through my individual consciousness.
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  If you're a homeless person on the street and I tune you out,
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  your suffering is real, but I'm not experiencing it.
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  So you know what I mean? So it's like filtered through my own individual
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  consciousness. It's the only access point we have is
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  our individual consciousness. Right. And so we have to be.
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  It's like essential to turn inward and to notice the suffering that's arising in
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  our individual consciousness and move from being identified with it, that small
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  separate self into. So in some ways, I think what we're doing when we have any
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  moment of self-compassion is we're letting go of the sense of separate self.
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  Are we going into non-dual awake awareness?
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  Sometimes we might, but not always. But even at a relative level, it's kind of
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  like a bridging point. We're at least less identified with the everyday mind than
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  we normally are. There's less stickiness.
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  Yeah, there's less stickiness. We're more open.
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  We can feel this compassionate presence.
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  And that we're changing our sense of self.
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  And then when you go all the way into awake awareness, which is, you know, it
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  has to be underlined.
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  Awake awareness and everyday mind, it's all awareness, right?
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  These are all colors of awareness. It's not like they're actually different at
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  the absolute level.
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  But nonetheless,
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  there's a reason why when you're in awake awareness, compassion arises.
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  Because it kind of sees, they always talk about compassion for others.
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  Because I think this is one of the, I don't know if it's a limitation of these
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  Buddhist practices. or maybe it was
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  because these were monks who weren't experiencing a lot of...
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  I don't know. I don't know why. Maybe it's like remnants of collectivism culture
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  or cultural differences or something else.
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  But even though I've heard that a lot of Tibetan monks are pretty self-judgmental,
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  this is what surprised me on this retreat.
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  A lot of these very advanced practitioners, most of the time in awake
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  awareness, had all this self-hatred.
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  So, you know, you need to deal with the relative self-structure, which is
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  experiencing the suffering. Yeah, I think.
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  And I think self and others, not more than others, but at least as much.
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  Yeah, yeah. I'm curious, getting onto the psychological content, I think the cool
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  thing about the deep end of practice with awake awareness and Michael Taft calls it
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  the non-dual two view. But really this view of non-dualism that includes
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  the relative and doesn't exclude it. Yeah, it transcends, but it includes it.
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  And includes. I think it actually solves a lot of the problems of the more naive
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  non-dual view, where you get a lot of people who sort of check out.
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  Yes, spiritual bypass. Exactly, spiritual bypassing, and you ignore psychological
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  content. And I think from this view, in some ways it makes your self-compassion
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  relative work even more important. There's no way of getting around it.
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  You kind of just still have to, if you care about psychological health and having
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  a healthy self,
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  there's a lot of stuff to be done or to be intended towards around making
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  the content of one's mind more kind and more, you know, compassionate.
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  And I'm curious, especially, so a point you made a little bit ago.
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  So the inner critic, the inner critic structure, you talk about in your latest
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  book on work, how that is sort of actually behind a lot of burnout. Yeah.
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  I want to somehow get into some of the fierce compassion stuff.
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  It's not fully there, but I think like, I'm curious how you.
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  These are a lot of threads to draw together.
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  It's a lot of threads. It's a lot of threads. But that's what I love about
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  your work. I'm curious how you view taking the inner critic and transforming it.
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  And I think you have a lot of angles on it throughout your body of work now.
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  But what's your sense of that, of how someone could
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  work with it? Yeah. So I think you could say this with the inner critic.
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  Also, shame. You know, my colleague Chris Grimmers did a lot of work around shame.
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  So often, so what happens to the inner critic is we don't like the inner critic
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  and we judge the inner critic. And we don't like, so we kind of like submit
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  to its criticism, but we kind of think it's bad, we judge it.
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  So the inner critic becomes transformed once we understand that it's a part
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  of our self-structure, our relative self-structure that's trying to help,
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  but using methods that aren't very effective.
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  So,
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  you know, there's a reason we criticize ourself.
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  Either we think we're going to blunt the pain from other people's criticism, so
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  I'll get there first,
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  or because we think we'll control ourselves, or we think we'll motivate
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  ourselves to improve,
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  or maybe it's like the internalized voice of someone and we had to believe that we
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  are crap in order to feel safe. So if you really start exploring digging underneath
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  the inner critic, it's really arising out of benevolence, But it's using kind
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  of patterns and methods that aren't very effective and actually are totally
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  counterproductive. And it's interesting with shame.
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  So shame is an emotion. It's actually just one of the evolutionary emotions.
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  The emotion of shame arises just because in the past, evolutionarily, if we did
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  something to piss off the group, we'd feel that shame.
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  We'd want to hide. We'd hide from the group.
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  And that kind of helped maintain, it was such an uncomfortable feeling that we were
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  less lucky to piss off the group. Therefore, we could have group cohesion
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  and we were cooperating and our genes passed on.
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  It's like a natural emotion. There's a really functional aspect to it.
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  There's a functional aspect to it. But the thing about shame is because it's so
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  uncomfortable, we don't allow ourselves to feel it.
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  It's like the most uncomfortable feeling ever.
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  So we don't allow ourselves to feel it.
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  And what happens is we experience it in our non-reflective consciousness.
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  We experience it, right?
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  But it doesn't come up. It's not allowed to come up in the reflective
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  consciousness. We aren't even aware of it because it's just too terrible.
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  So we have all these mechanisms. So much stuff goes on below the level
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  of reflective consciousness. So we have all these mechanisms that keep it down,
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  suppress it. We start blaming others for it.
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  unrecognized shame is like the engine of things like addiction,
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  a lot of really harmful behavior, a lot of angry behavior, anything that's really
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  sticky that seems like it's really gripped in.
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  And it's most of the time, I won't say all the time, but most, a lot of the time
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  anyway,
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  there's unrealized shame that's keeping the behavior locked in place.
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  And so my colleague, Chris Grimmer, he's got a beautiful way
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  of talking about shame. He says, if you just turn shame over, What is shame?
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  It's the wish to be loved.
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  You know, we all have the wish to be loved.
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  And when we're afraid that other people won't love us or they'll judge
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  us, we feel shame.
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  And so we don't have to be afraid of experiencing shame.
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  You know? Yeah. It's so natural. Of course, it's like so innocent.
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  Yeah. Everyone wishes to be loved. And even as you say that, I feel like more
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  open, more heartless. Yeah. It's like, of course.
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  And then so we can feel it. Yeah. And, you know, even more than that, we can actually
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  kind of meet some of our own needs to be loved.
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  But even before you get to that stage, just the ability to feel,
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  oh, this is shame.
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  I'm feeling shame. I'm feeling the wish to be loved.
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  How natural. Yeah. Then that shame could come into reflective consciousness
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  and kind of be processed and integrated and stuff like that.
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  And I'm really, these days, I'm really into sort of like that full spectrum
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  of like, so, and like that shame, for example, when we...
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  In some ways, what most of our experience of shame is, reflecting back on what you
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  said, is often, you know, second arrow or resistance to the shame.
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  And it's the resistance to the shame that actually we think is shame.
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  But shame at its core, when seen a certain way from like maybe a no bad parts frame
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  or sort of seen felt fully, is just that.
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  And I love that. I hadn't heard that before.
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  Just the want to be loved. Yeah, the wish
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  to be loved. Yeah. And you might say self-criticism is the wish
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  to be safe. Yeah. What's wrong with the wish to be safe and the wish to be loved?
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  Yeah. It's so natural. Yeah. And what's interesting is that I think even these
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  concepts themselves, you hear it and you can kind of just get a shift from that.
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  And there's practices you can do. You can kind of like be with it, hang out with it.
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  You can kind of bring the whole bag of tricks from different psychological
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  frames, meditation frames to feel into that core underneath.
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  The thing that for me has been really cool in the work with Michael Taft is feeling
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  into, so I think there's sort of like at the core of these strong emotions is also
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  just awake space. And there's many different flavors of it, but there's
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  a whole thing on Rasa theory. So Rasa is sort of a Sanskrit word,
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  which means like soup.
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  But we had this class a few weeks ago where he talked about, you know,
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  anger fell all the way through. is this like this rage, but it's sort of a wanting
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  for compassionate boundary. It's for like wanting to keep a strong sense
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  of distinction or to, you know, work through a boundary.
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  Or to right or wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  And I think shame has that. Disgust even has that.
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  Sadness has that. Yeah, yeah. And it's just all
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  super psychologically compatible. Yeah. And so seeing them as the, for me,
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  one way to look at it is just, well, these are natural.
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  and we can respond to compassion. But if you want to take it to the next level,
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  they're all the arising of awake awareness, the display of awake awareness.
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  And that there is some benevolence in it.
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  Like there's like actually benevolent intention
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  behind the arising of the shame or behind the arising of the self-criticism
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  or behind the arising of the anger.
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  But it's just that benevolent intention, which is kind of in awareness itself, It's
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  just so obscured by all the layers of meaning and culture and judgment
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  and suppression and all this stuff that it's hard to unpack.
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  It does seem, when you move out of this separate,
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  identified, isolated, judgmental self into the space of compassionate presence,
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  which again is not exactly the same as awake awareness, but it's pretty, it's
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  kind of, there's a lot, you know, in some ways, if I lose my need for precision
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  for a moment, let's just pretend that it is exactly the same.
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  Then it's like these emotions can arise.
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  These thoughts can arise. We don't identify with them.
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  We see how it's just all common humanity or it's all the arising of awareness,
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  you know, which kind of underline has this kind
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  of benevolent intention underneath it.
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  And then we just hold it with love, which is like the healing quality, which is
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  the natural compassion, which arises when we see the interconnection of all things.
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  And then it seems like it processes and doesn't hang around that long.
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  Eventually, and that's the healing power of self-compassion.
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  Do you want to talk about the fierce side of self-compassion?
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  Let's do it. Okay. So you might say the healing aspect of self-compassion is what
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  I just talked about. The accepting what is.
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  It's usually aimed at ourselves, accepting ourselves unconditionally or our emotions
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  or thoughts with loving, connected presence.
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  And that's the tender compassion side of things.
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  The tender compassion or kind of the yin quality they talk
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  about in Chinese philosophy.
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  But then there's also fierce self-compassion, which is taking action.
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  And that might mean a taking action to protect, to prevent harm,
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  or taking action to provide for our needs to ensure well-being,
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  or to motivate change, again, to promote well-being.
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  So well-being doesn't only come through acceptance.
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  Well-being also comes through taking action.
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  So the number one misconception people have is that self-compassion is
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  only about acceptance. And it means you're going to accept like substandard behavior.
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  You don't let yourself get away with murder.
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  You're not going to take responsibility.
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  And like everything is allowed. Everything is permissive.
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  That's right. But of course, if you really care about yourself and you just let
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  yourself get away with murder, you don't take responsibility.
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  You became amotivated. You know, is that really helping your well-being?
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  Of course not. Yeah. You know, so if well-being is your aim, then you can
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  enhance well-being through acceptance and through action.
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  And they're actually on slightly different dimensions, so you can do both
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  simultaneously. Like while fully accepting yourself and your worthiness
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  unconditionally and accepting your present emotions and thoughts, you can take action
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  to change situations or to draw boundaries or to take actions
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  that also enhance well-being. So they aren't necessarily contradictory.
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  In fact, they work together. It's like yin and yang.
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  You know, we need both. Yeah, you need to feel into your own care for yourself.
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  Or not need to, but it really helps to do that, to then draw the boundary, to then
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  take the action, the strength. Yes, exactly.
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  And sometimes people talk about, well, what's the difference between constructive
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  anger and destructive anger? Yeah.
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  It's quite simple. Yeah. Constructive anger prevents harm.
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  Destructive anger causes harm. Oh, that's really simple.
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  Yeah, it's very simple, right? But here's the other thing is where are you coming
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  from when you're angry? Yeah. When you're coming from the separate self and you're
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  taking things personally and you're making them, you're blaming them.
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  So there's all these separate selves.
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  Then anger tends to cause harm.
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  But when you're coming from that compassionate presence, from this larger
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  sense of awake awareness,
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  and you're realizing, oh, this anger is arising as a manifestation of awareness
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  to protect from harm. And that person's behavior is also a manifestation
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  of awareness. Maybe they didn't mean it or it's coming from their unconscious.
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  Then it feels really different. You don't have to make it personal.
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  And then when you don't make it personal, but it's still like stop.
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  It's not like you're bad. It's like just stop.
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  Then it's a lot less
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  destructive. Yeah. Yeah. What I like a lot about that is,
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  again, it comes back to in this moment, what's the view?
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  And there can be like the view, like the view from Wake Awareness that a lot of,
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  you know, that we practice, the schools that we practice in.
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  But there are also all these provisional views of you can be just a bit more
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  compassionate or you can be really a bit more self-centered.
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  But it's kind of like, what are the assumptions?
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  What are the values you're coming from in that moment, from that
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  speech, from this thing? Like what's arising? What's your perspective?
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  What's the perspective? And so there's awake awareness, which ultimately I think
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  is the most stable one. Yeah. But there's lots of, even within, even if you have no
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  collapse between subject and the known and the known, there's still, we all know what
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  it means. I mean, I've been so surprised on my workshops.
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  I ask people, do you know what this feels like to be part of this larger self?
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  Everyone has a sense of that. Yeah. You know, it doesn't matter
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  if they've done meditation.
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  Everyone knows what it feels like to be locked in to a sense of separate self,
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  inadequate,
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  sorry, inadequate, isolated, over-identified, locked in, and kind
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  of like just being out in nature where there's just more openness, there's more
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  presence. And one of the places we get that sense most strongly, ironically, is
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  when we're compassionate to others.
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  Not always, but often when we're compassionate to others, there's not a lot
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  of self-talk going on, we're just there for the person.
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  You know, we're just, we are just compassionate presence.
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  So it's not an unfamiliar state. It's a little less familiar
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  giving it to ourselves.
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  It's interesting in Mahamudra, they often talk about the concepts actually need
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  to come first and then the experience. That's interesting.
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  Yeah. Whereas I think a lot of people say, no, it's first the experience and then
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  we understand it. But I think that model I made you read like
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  whatever, how many times? I've got a little skim of it here
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  But the reason it's important to me, not everyone's like me, not everyone thinks
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  like me, but I suspect people like you are like me.
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  there's a certain group of people you see them like especially younger people that
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  like they don't want to reject science they don't want to go woo woo yeah they're
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  interested in quantum physics and how the world works they don't want to like have
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  to believe in karma reincarnation maybe it's true maybe not but I don't want you
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  know I don't want to have to believe that
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  and so if I I know for me I needed to find a way to conceptualize things that
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  made sense to me that fit with what I was learning in non-duality, but that wasn't
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  incompatible with science. Is it proven by science?
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  No, of course, but it just has to be compatible.
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  And that helped me just slot all the pieces in so that I wasn't sitting there
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  thinking, well, that doesn't make sense.
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  You used your conscious, five sentences ago, you used the consciousness one way,
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  and now you're using it in a totally neutral way.
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  It bugs people like me. It doesn't bug everyone.
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  It bugs me too. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like, I think that's where, Like,
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  yeah, completely agreed. I think a lot of the, I really love this
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  during my retreat too.
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  The idea that it's sort of asymptotic.
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  You can never actually really explain it, but you can always have more and more
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  precise approximations. Yeah, exactly.
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  And that's really useful. Yeah. Yeah.
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  Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. so tell me I love Michael Taft it's very long one
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  of the things I liked about Dustin DiPerna is all the meditations are like 10 minutes
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  and there's actually
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  what is it it's kind of like an emphasis that the meditation is not the thing so
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  don't get too attached to meditation I'm curious what happened because I know
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  Michael likes those long deep ones for sure it's really interesting so I I've
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  I've personally been kind of um returning to long meditations and almost a more
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  Theravada approach to practice okay uh which for me has been good the
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  concentration the states of samadhi yeah yeah yeah and I I I was aware that I think
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  Dustin's retreats only had like 20 minute max meditations um to like really I am I
• 21:53
  my understanding of it is less 10 minutes 10 minutes really whoa and I imagine it's
• 21:57
  to get really crisp on the view except for the introductory one because you're you
• 22:02
  did the intermediate I did the advanced I skipped the intermediate because it was
• 22:07
  all about compassion and he said yeah nice that's probably just gonna bug you the way
• 22:11
  we're doing it probably so okay I would love to hear about I'll tell you about
• 22:15
  Michael Taft so Michael Taft's retreat the format was um so seven days really six
• 22:20
  full days of meditation uh and there's a lot of meditation like at least six
• 22:26
  everyone will get at least if you just show up on average most people got at
• 22:30
  least four hours I got about six if you really wanted to you could push like eight
• 22:32
  or ten I think um yeah two guided
• 22:38
  two Michael Taft sessions per day mix of lecture, guided meditation, Q &A.
• 22:45
  This one leaned much more
• 22:47
  guided meditation with lots of practice periods of anywhere from 30 minutes
• 22:52
  to an hour in length throughout the day. So lots of sitting time.
• 22:57
  And yeah, lots of sitting time. I think Michael's view on it is,
• 23:02
  and also the retreat comprised mostly maybe 70 % plus of people who had done
• 23:06
  prior retreats in his courses. Maybe only out of the 60-ish people, there were only
• 23:10
  four people hadn't done any of the courses or anything.
• 23:13
  So a lot of people came in with Michael experience.
• 23:15
  So the point of the retreat was, cool, you got some approximation of the view.
• 23:20
  He often talks about approximating the view.
• 23:23
  Now just practice it and sustain it. So it was a lot of shamatha.
• 23:26
  And then we'd actually did a lot of tonglen practice,
• 23:28
  like compassion and tonglen. But
• 23:31
  this is my fourth Michael Taft retreat.
• 23:33
  And a lot of other ones have a lot of pointing out, a lot of vipassana,
• 23:36
  vipassana, and different types of things.
• 23:40
  So it's kind of a grab bag. It's much less like, I feel like with dust retreats, you
• 23:43
  know what you're going to get. It's very, like, this is it, this is this level,
• 23:46
  which is really good in a lot of ways.
• 23:48
  So it takes you all the way to non-dual wake awareness, the view at the end
• 23:51
  of the introductory retreat, and then the advance is all about stabilizing it.
• 23:57
  Yeah. And also really seeing the difference between, was really useful
• 24:04
  is seeing the difference between ordinary awareness and awake awareness and being
• 24:09
  able to move back to awake awareness seamlessly without effort.
• 24:14
  That's really important. So you don't need to concentrate the mind.
• 24:17
  At first you do.
• 24:18
  But after a certain number of times, the brain's got it right.
• 24:22
  It knows it. You just instantly shift.
• 24:26
  So now I'm catching myself. It's like right now I'm in the view,
• 24:29
  but I'm starting to notice when I'm out
• 24:31
  of the view. Yeah. And the nice thing is it's not like, I'm in the
• 24:36
  view. Yeah. I'm awake. It's like, no, I'm just coming from my basis of operation.
• 24:43
  It's so cute. Do you know, my brain is.
• 24:53
  This is weird. This is someone, this is maybe age.
• 24:55
  I don't even know very well his name is like, I see him.
• 25:00
  Anyway, it'll come. He calls it basis of operation, boo.
• 25:04
  I've heard of basis of operation. I think that phrase sounds familiar.
• 25:06
  Yeah, because basically,
• 25:08
  that's really annoying. It's like right on the tip of my tongue.
• 25:13
  The nice thing is I'm not controlling what's arising in the contents
• 25:18
  of my consciousness.
• 25:20
  And the unconscious is not doing it. My non-reflective consciousness is not doing
• 25:24
  its work. Anyway.
• 25:29
  Yeah. So it's just where are you coming from?
• 25:31
  Are you coming from the perspective of a separate self, separate from the world?
• 25:37
  Or are you coming from the perspective of awareness, which is everything?
• 25:42
  And it's also outside of space and time, always here, always now.
• 25:46
  And when you do that, you can feel the difference.
• 25:49
  It's very distinct because it's almost like lights on or lights off.
• 25:52
  And you notice when the lights have been off and then, oh, yeah, I lost it.
• 25:58
  But it's not like a special thing.
• 26:00
  And so special states come and go, like states of incredible bliss and love
• 26:05
  and compassion and stillness. And,
• 26:09
  you know, you might get in a state of samadhi, very, very quiet.
• 26:14
  All sorts of stuff can arise. But that's not
• 26:17
  it. Yeah. And so the reason that's so useful to someone like me is like, I have
• 26:24
  to tell you, I'm also a little bit of a rebel.
• 26:26
  So we were practicing king of samadhi, which is how to be totally in awake
• 26:29
  awareness as you're very narrowly focused on one thing and that one pointedness.
• 26:34
  And I created my own practice and I call it the queen of not paying attention.
• 26:38
  That's awesome. Because you need awake awareness when you're spacing out, when
• 26:43
  you're mind-wandering. Because I know for me, mind-wandering is a very creative time
• 26:48
  for me. When I'm not paying attention to anything, my mind is going here and there.
• 26:53
  It's like kind of floating.
• 26:54
  That's like the seed of creativity. And, of course, neuroscientists are starting
• 26:57
  to rehabilitate mind-wandering and seeing it as a huge source of creativity.
• 27:02
  So can I maintain awake awareness while I'm mind-wandering?
• 27:06
  I don't know if this happens to you, but for me, oftentimes
• 27:09
  I space out like regularly. It's almost like my brain takes a rest.
• 27:13
  Does that happen to you? Yeah. From everything you're saying, I think we have
• 27:16
  very similar brains that way. Yeah. And not everyone has a type of brain like
• 27:19
  this, but I think people who are used to focusing and can really like focus,
• 27:22
  my brain needs periodic rest. I mean, it might need that rest like every three
• 27:26
  minutes and it just like goes fuzzy.
• 27:30
  And so I've learned to actually just stay awake while
• 27:32
  my brain goes fuzzy. Yeah. Because you can stay awake through all of it.
• 27:35
  you can't do somali through all of it no right right yeah this is how you can't be
• 27:40
  you can't pay attention and so I really got clear on the difference between paying
• 27:43
  attention which is really what mindfulness is and awake awareness which is different
• 27:48
  because I used to go on mindfulness retreats and be exhausted trying to pay
• 27:52
  attention to everything because there's someone who's first of all there's someone
• 27:55
  who's doing right and also you're focusing and focusing is an action and you can
• 28:01
  be awake while you focus but it was really amazing like right now I'll do it I'll
• 28:06
  just like allow myself to space out
• 28:15
  yeah I'm still awake so I'm I'm still even though I'm not focusing on you or anything
• 28:21
  it's like when I was asking a question I allowed myself to rehearse they always say
• 28:25
  don't rehearse pay attention to what's arising.
• 28:27
  I really play with,
• 28:29
  no, I'm going to see if I can stay awake while I'm not paying attention to what's
• 28:35
  happening and I'm just rehearsing what I'm going to say.
• 28:37
  It's like nothing,
• 28:38
  nothing, nothing. Nothing excluded. Nothing excluded.
• 28:42
  Nothing excluded. All within the, yeah.
• 28:44
  All within, it's all within awareness.
• 28:46
  Yeah. Yeah. And so all those things really came online for me in a way that, I mean,
• 28:49
  I've had those insights before, but it really came together.
• 28:53
  And because of that, it's much easier for me to stabilize the awakening because I'm
• 28:57
  not excluding those moments of mind wandering or spacing out that my brain
• 29:03
  needs. Maybe all people don't. I think, do you identify with ADHD-like stuff?
• 29:08
  No, but I can focus very easily, right?
• 29:13
  But I'm also, I can focus easily, but I think, I mean,
• 29:19
  I don't know. I'm sure there are neuroscientists studying this stuff, but
• 29:22
  it seems like, especially if or someone who's creative, and I'm creative, not in
• 29:28
  an artistic way, but in an intellectual, I'm creative, I write a lot of stuff.
• 29:33
  Mind wandering, where it's kind of like that half drifty dreaming space, where
• 29:38
  you've got like half ideas, and it's kind of forming, but you aren't directing it,
• 29:43
  you aren't paying attention, it's just kind of happening.
• 29:45
  That's a really important time for me.
• 29:49
  And some of my absolute best ideas come, when I'm just wake up, I'm half awake in
• 29:54
  the morning, And I'm kind of sitting there and it's kind of like my mind's wandering.
• 29:58
  And sometimes I do that in the day as well.
• 30:00
  And it seems like I'm just either kind of spacing out or maybe
• 30:04
  I'm not paying attention.
• 30:06
  I need that time because that's when I think most creatively.
• 30:10
  And I think spacious awareness practice is the most conducive for that in a way
• 30:14
  that's not. Because I think there's a version of mind wandering
• 30:17
  that's more distraction. But I think that's the only thing that gets emphasis.
• 30:23
  And actually, I really enjoy just like being in some approximation of the view
• 30:28
  or kind of just. Yeah. Just dropping effort and just seeing what comes up.
• 30:32
  And then like there's a little bit of like following those things,
• 30:35
  but it's really emergent. It's really fresh. There's a lot of creativity.
• 30:38
  Yeah. And so it's really funny. This is a central theme on my last retreat, on
• 30:42
  the retreat that I had a week ago, because I think for the last seven years
• 30:45
  of practice,
• 30:46
  a lot of when I meditate would just be that because I valued it so much. Yeah.
• 30:51
  And it's been awesome.
• 30:52
  And I'm sort of moving into a like, well, actually, I actually, there's a thread I
• 30:57
  want to, I really want to get into. So the thing you mentioned about inner rebel, I
• 31:01
  think I have that too. And I actually have a hunch that a lot of people who get into
• 31:04
  non-dual practice have that much more strongly than people who sort of are more
• 31:08
  in the, you know, the mind illuminated or like a strong shamatha approach.
• 31:12
  Right, right. Like almost like 10 or so people I talked to at the Michael Taft
• 31:16
  retreat when I had this insight. I was like, hey, so do you, because I think
• 31:19
  Michael has this vibe and I think a lot of the retreatants have this vibe.
• 31:22
  that's why we follow him, of just sort of not wanting to follow a certain
• 31:25
  instruction just because someone told us to do it.
• 31:28
  Exactly. Yeah. Right. Then it's, I think a lot of just follow your breath
• 31:30
  and just do it. Like, I just have a lot of inner rebellion against that.
• 31:34
  Um, or like I'll set, or even, I'll also even inner rebellion against myself where
• 31:37
  I'll set an intention for 45 minutes. I'm going to do breath practice or I'm going
• 31:41
  to do this. But then one minute in, oh, there's this beautiful metta, like, oh,
• 31:44
  there's this compassion coming up. Oh, there's a creative idea over here.
• 31:47
  And I'll just enjoy that. And I can do it from spaciousness and it's an awesome sit.
• 31:53
  and I've been moving into, well, actually, if I had full agency, could I also just
• 31:58
  decide to do a
• 32:00
  object while I'm spacious? So that's, that's my edge of practice.
• 32:02
  And that's some stuff that I'm thinking about. Yeah.
• 32:04
  And it's good to do both, but you know, cause I did, I mean, I did you, I've
• 32:07
  probably done like 50 retreats in my life, right?
• 32:09
  So I've done a lot. And so it's very easy for me to fall into samadhi.
• 32:14
  You just, just the brain gets used to, you know, it learns this, how to do this.
• 32:19
  But when I practice spacious awareness, it's different.
• 32:22
  You can practice spacious awareness from the point of view of ordinary mind, which
• 32:28
  is I am aware of whatever's arising.
• 32:34
  Or you can do it from the point of view of non-dual awareness,
• 32:38
  which is non-local,
• 32:40
  it's effortless, and there's no separation between subject and object.
• 32:44
  It feels very different. Yeah. You know?
• 32:48
  And so I guess what I really took home from this retreat, and that's why it was,
• 32:54
  I mean, I'm Justin DeParent. I'm like, God, he's a good teacher.
• 32:57
  He's a really good teacher. He knows his stuff.
• 33:00
  And it was just so practical to see.
• 33:05
  The view has nothing to do with whether or not you're focused or mind-wandering
• 33:09
  or paying attention or not. It has nothing to do with the particular states that are
• 33:15
  arising,
• 33:17
  whether it's gratitude or bliss or compassion.
• 33:22
  It can feel very, very, very ordinary.
• 33:28
  But it's also very different.
• 33:30
  And just really getting clear on that, I found incredibly helpful.
• 33:34
  And how has that been different than, or how has his approach been different than
• 33:38
  all the other retreats you've done? So if you could tell yourself on those, let's
• 33:43
  say the first like 30 retreats, the view that you have now, what would have changed
• 33:48
  for you? Well, so most of the time I was doing insight meditation and I would fall
• 33:53
  into deep states of samadhi. And I did have some waking up experiences, which is
• 33:59
  so funny because it seemed like I remember one time I was, you know, often when you
• 34:03
  first have waking up experience, a lot of energy is released.
• 34:06
  And you think, oh, my God, am I special?
• 34:08
  Am I enlightened? What does this mean?
• 34:10
  And I remember I talked to my teacher and I said, I have no self.
• 34:14
  I think I'm awake. And then we just said, yeah, I can tell it seems to be true.
• 34:18
  Why does no one talk about this? If you have this, well, we don't really talk
• 34:22
  about it here because they don't want people to get their egos involved,
• 34:26
  which is kind of understandable. But then I was always like, oh, my gosh, this is
• 34:30
  something that happens only occasionally.
• 34:32
  It's very rare.
• 34:33
  Being awake is like ordinary.
• 34:36
  It's totally ordinary. And I think it does such a disservice to make it like this
• 34:40
  special thing that you have to like study for years to attain.
• 34:45
  You know, you don't. Yeah. You know.
• 34:49
  And so basically about five years ago, I went on my first Rupert Spira retreat,
• 34:53
  which is the first non-dual retreat I went on.
• 34:57
  And I never really understood non-duality before.
• 34:59
  I kind of understood waking up and some of these concepts, but I didn't really
• 35:04
  understand what that meant, like the collapse of the knower and the known.
• 35:08
  I'd heard it, but, you know, it's kind of a weird word, right?
• 35:11
  And then I went to Rupert Spira retreats, and he talks about it as just being.
• 35:17
  And he's so beautiful and his presence is so strong.
• 35:20
  I had a lot of experiences of just being.
• 35:22
  And when you just are,
• 35:26
  and there's, then it just kind of naturally falls away.
• 35:28
  You're just presence.
• 35:30
  And then you can also be in that state
• 35:33
  of when you're just being,
• 35:37
  there doesn't necessarily need to be any inside or outside or this or that.
• 35:42
  It's just presence. And he also uses the word God, which I didn't grow up, with any
• 35:48
  problems with religion. So I don't have, you know, some people have problems that
• 35:51
  were, but just being God's presence and I could feel it completely.
• 35:57
  And then going home from the retreat, I would just be, you know, be so beautiful.
• 36:01
  And then it would gradually fade away and in two weeks it's
• 36:03
  gone. Right? And then so then I went to a Loch Kelly retreat who does more of these
• 36:08
  pointing out instructions and that was very helpful.
• 36:11
  Like the first time I really experienced space behind my head,
• 36:15
  I was like, oh yeah.
• 36:18
  my awareness is 360. I mean, that was rough.
• 36:21
  So these things were good.
• 36:24
  And so Loch Kelly's teaching is good, but I don't know, for whatever reason, I just
• 36:27
  didn't resonate with it that strongly.
• 36:32
  I also don't think Loch, I haven't fully engaged with his work.
• 36:35
  He does a lot of glimpse practice, but there's not as much of a system
• 36:38
  of sustaining it. It's a stabilization, yeah.
• 36:40
  And so then when I met, when on Dustin's first retreat, it's like, ah, he's like, I
• 36:44
  said, no, there are students here who are in awake awareness 80, 90 % of the day.
• 36:50
  And they're normal.
• 36:52
  They aren't like monks and the Lama this and Rinpoche that.
• 36:57
  These are just normal people. It is possible.
• 36:59
  And I can really, so I just fell out of view and I was talking and I'm back in it.
• 37:05
  I love that. I love that. It's very subtle.
• 37:09
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you notice it.
• 37:11
  And it's not like, you know, it's not like my eyes are like, Can you see the energy
• 37:15
  coming out of my head? I'm awake awareness.
• 37:17
  No, it's just simply awareness. Yeah. Even the last few minutes as you were talking,
• 37:21
  I realized how much I was sort of a little bit more in my head and now I'm quite
• 37:25
  a bit more spacious. And the thing is, you can be totally aware
• 37:27
  of what you're thinking.
• 37:29
  It doesn't exclude anything. It's just as your basis of operation identified
• 37:34
  from the contents of consciousness, especially reflective consciousness.
• 37:38
  We can talk about that if you want. I'm pretty happy with my model.
• 37:40
  I got to say. I'd love to.
• 37:41
  And then the awareness,
• 37:45
  not only...
• 37:49
  So there's a knowing quality of awareness itself.
• 37:51
  But what happens is sometimes people get into like, oh, yeah, you're right.
• 37:56
  All my perceptions, they're arising in my consciousness.
• 38:00
  So therefore, they're made of consciousness.
• 38:02
  And it can give you an insight into non-duality.
• 38:05
  But the problem is, then you're stuck with the, Does that mean that when I'm not
• 38:10
  aware of it, it doesn't exist?
• 38:12
  You know, I'm like, that's a dead end.
• 38:14
  Okay, so you had a model. You have the model here that you've been kind of
• 38:17
  working on, on sort of a simpler framework on non-dual experience and reflective
• 38:22
  self-awareness. So we were just talking about all that, but I'd love for you
• 38:25
  to continue that thought and just dive into it.
• 38:27
  Do you want me to just briefly talk about my model?
• 38:29
  That'd be great. Yeah, that'd be great. And I have to say, I'm like, I'm trying
• 38:32
  to show it to my friends and they're like, that's nice, Kristin. Yeah.
• 38:37
  And even you, but you were good. You're like, well, why should we care?
• 38:40
  And I guess it's really a model for me.
• 38:43
  It came out of my own concerns with what I was learning and it helps resolve a lot
• 38:48
  of my own concerns.
• 38:49
  It'll probably only be of use to people like, I think people
• 38:52
  like you, other people.
• 38:55
  Some people are drawn to non-duality, can have full non-dual experience,
• 38:59
  wake awareness. They don't need to have a conceptual model that makes sense in light
• 39:05
  of Western science. And I do think for every one person that has that, there are
• 39:09
  at least 10 to 100 people that don't have that and sort of want a conceptual hold.
• 39:13
  Well, that could be, right? Maybe. But I don't know.
• 39:16
  But for some people like me, I think it'll be of use.
• 39:19
  Yeah. Yeah. And I also do think, I mean, and sort of how we met, like we re-met
• 39:24
  recently with just like non-dual communities in Austin and meditations.
• 39:28
  I think just there's sort of through, you know, psychedelics, the Waking Up app,
• 39:33
  research. There's just a lot of people now interested in sort of the deep end
• 39:36
  of contemplative practice and are open to talking about it.
• 39:39
  And I think that, yeah, curious what background your friend, the friends that
• 39:42
  you showed me have around this. But I think a lot of people, if they are even
• 39:45
  a little bit interested, realize like, OK, I can either be like full on deep end.
• 39:50
  And then once you go to these retreats and meet people, you see how many other people
• 39:53
  have been in the deep end for years. Yeah, yeah.
• 39:55
  But there's not really an introduction that's easy or simple.
• 39:58
  So I think it's great to have. Yeah. Yeah.
• 40:00
  So most of my friends aren't
• 40:02
  necessarily science types. Right. You know, I have a few, but I think it is,
• 40:07
  if you have a scientific mind and if logical consistency is important to you,
• 40:11
  which it is to me, and I think a lot of people, like a lot of people at
• 40:15
  the Tuesday Night Group, for instance, are engineers and, you know, that type
• 40:19
  of mind. I think it's important to have a conceptual understanding that, again,
• 40:24
  doesn't have to be proven, but that isn't incompatible
• 40:28
  with understanding of Western science. So, for instance, quantum physics.
• 40:32
  And you get a lot, like this thing about quantum physics, at first when I heard
• 40:37
  about quantum physics and the observer effect, you know, I kind of thought, oh,
• 40:42
  and I think people go here. That means that consciousness is necessary for, you
• 40:48
  know, for the collapse of the wave function.
• 40:49
  And then you dig a little deeper and it's like, no, that's not what
• 40:52
  it's saying at all. You don't need a conscious observer.
• 40:54
  You just need a frame of reference. You know, and so I realized what was messing
• 41:00
  me up is there was no distinction made between consciousness and awareness.
• 41:05
  Most non-dual teachers use consciousness and awareness as synonyms.
• 41:10
  And Mahamudra, and they're like scientists of the mind, they use it separately.
• 41:14
  Awareness is the ground of being,
• 41:18
  right? Consciousness is individual, it's localized, it's limited, and it's embodied
• 41:24
  in an individualized point of view. Yeah.
• 41:26
  Huge difference. Huge. And I think defining these terms is really helpful
• 41:30
  because, as you said, if you're kind of sloppy with it, you might just think
• 41:33
  quantum physics is this and this is that.
• 41:35
  And they're all the same. Which there's some elements.
• 41:36
  And if I don't see it, it doesn't exist.
• 41:39
  And it's all experience. Whose experience?
• 41:41
  Your experience or my experience? You know, you get the people like.
• 41:45
  There's still the boundary problem. There's still localized experience
• 41:47
  different from others. And subjectivity.
• 41:49
  And there's so many things.
• 41:51
  Yeah. So basically my model very simply is my ontological
• 41:56
  starting point is awareness. And that is, I can't prove that,
• 41:59
  right? Yeah. But then again, science can't prove this ontological starting point
• 42:06
  of the isness of the universe, right? So any model has to start
• 42:10
  with the ontological starting point.
• 42:13
  So starting with the ontological starting point, from the absolute point of view,
• 42:17
  there is awareness.
• 42:19
  And that is absolute. In other words, it's not in space and time.
• 42:22
  And that's why we can't directly know it or experience it.
• 42:28
  I'll clarify that. We can't reflect on it.
• 42:30
  We can't see it. We can't point to it.
• 42:32
  It's not a thing. And it has no space or locality.
• 42:38
  But from the relative point of view, there is something, right?
• 42:43
  There is space and time. There is matter.
• 42:45
  There are forces.
• 42:47
  And well before consciousness emerged, at least as we know it, I mean, there may be
• 42:52
  other conscious life forms we have no idea, but at least on this planet Earth,
• 42:55
  we're talking billions of years that unless science is totally
• 43:00
  off its rocker, which I don't think it is, billions of years before the first
• 43:05
  conscious organisms emerged, existed. evolved you know stars evolved all this
• 43:10
  stuff happened we can we can see it so
• 43:14
  I think you can look at existence one way of modeling it as is um
• 43:19
  awareness articulated through perspective conditions relationality and again it's
• 43:25
  very vague and it's not my field but if you look at cosmology you know einstein
• 43:31
  theory of relativity um relational quantum mechanics I mean There's people who are in
• 43:37
  the thick of this stuff for whom the idea that there's not independent thingness,
• 43:44
  but things appear through relationship.
• 43:47
  And it's not unscientific. Again, I personally can't draw all the dots.
• 43:52
  Maybe some other people could.
• 43:54
  But it's compatible with what we know about science, right?
• 43:58
  So that's really important for me, I guess, personally,
• 44:01
  to say that existence, the universe does not require consciousness, because that
• 44:07
  was the part to me that I was like, it just didn't sit well with me, right?
• 44:11
  Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, evolution, the evolution of life.
• 44:16
  And I think it makes sense to me. Again, it could be wrong.
• 44:21
  But for whatever reason, once we started getting, I guess, single-celled organisms
• 44:25
  and there started to be.
• 44:28
  So awareness is just. And by the way, it's not like
• 44:30
  an existence before consciousness existed.
• 44:34
  Awareness is like self-aware,
• 44:37
  but there's no like it's not aware of anything.
• 44:40
  It's not reflexive. It's not reflective, right?
• 44:43
  It's just isness. You can call it awareness.
• 44:45
  You could call it being. That's why Rupert Spira likes to call it being.
• 44:49
  It just is isness. And it's self-knowing, but it doesn't know itself.
• 44:55
  It's like a light. A light doesn't know itself, but it's illuminated.
• 44:59
  It's lucid.
• 45:01
  And then with the development of single-celled organisms,
• 45:06
  and again, I can't explain all the particulars, but there's a lot of people
• 45:09
  who've done really interesting work on this, like Evan
• 45:12
  Thompson and Francisco Varela. A lot of people.
• 45:16
  I think Michael Levin is some of the latest in that, kind of in that lineage.
• 45:20
  So it makes sense that once it became like some sort of boundary to protect, like
• 45:24
  an amoeba, right? There needed to be, and again, my language is going to break down
• 45:30
  and it's not my field of expertise. So you can trust the experts.
• 45:34
  But this awareness started adopting a point of view
• 45:38
  from something that's boundary that needed that point of view order to survive
• 45:41
  and evolve. That makes sense to me. Again, I can't explain all the details, but it
• 45:47
  makes sense.
• 45:49
  And so to me, that's what I call consciousness, which is awareness embodied
• 45:53
  in a perspective or point of view.
• 45:56
  And so at first,
• 45:59
  and then what do we mean by consciousness?
• 46:01
  So I call that consciousness in the broader sense and experience.
• 46:04
  So an amoeba has experience in the sense that an amoeba will move
• 46:09
  away from a toxin. And they're thinking even plants have experience, right?
• 46:12
  They turn toward the light, but they don't have reflective experience.
• 46:16
  It's not like they...
• 46:19
  There's not awareness of awareness. There's not awareness, or it's even less
• 46:23
  than awareness of awareness.
• 46:25
  Maybe you should say there's not awareness of experience.
• 46:28
  Right. So they're having experience. There's experience without awareness that
• 46:31
  there isn't, without a knower.
• 46:33
  Yeah, there's no sense of like the knower or the known.
• 46:37
  There's no sense of the known.
• 46:40
  There's a reflection on it. In some ways, I think you could even call experience
• 46:43
  cognition. I think in some views there's this sort of computation happening.
• 46:47
  You could call it cognition, right? I think I'd probably be okay with that.
• 46:51
  I'd have to think about it. Yep, of course.
• 46:53
  But nonetheless, what's interesting is the awareness that's
• 46:56
  embodied in that experience. And I think of it as those aspects
• 47:01
  of existence, which are falling within this embodied viewpoint, which are very
• 47:05
  limited, are known.
• 47:07
  And what knows it is awareness because it's
• 47:09
  all awareness. Yeah. Right. But from the organism's point of view, there's not a,
• 47:15
  there's probably not what they call qualia in the sense
• 47:18
  of the feeling of the experience. But there is the experience.
• 47:22
  And then at some point in evolution, and again, beyond my pay grade to know when,
• 47:27
  this started, reflective consciousness started developing, which is the ability
• 47:33
  to know your experience,
• 47:37
  right? And I think like global neuronal workspace theory in humans is probably
• 47:43
  like our best candidate so far. They've done a really great job of understanding
• 47:46
  how things move in and out of reflective consciousness.
• 47:51
  Unfortunately, they just
• 47:52
  call it consciousness. Right. And the rest of it, not consciousness.
• 47:55
  Yeah, what I like about what you're doing and instructing back, I think, yeah,
• 48:00
  you're sort of bridging, as you've done in a lot of your career, stuff in deep end of
• 48:04
  practice with existing science and sort of having like, what is the bridge for it in
• 48:09
  a way that is much more practical and also precise and sort of like able to port
• 48:13
  stuff in. It's very bridging. And even this is an example, like, and especially
• 48:17
  as you get into consciousness, awareness, everyone that has a take on it has
• 48:20
  different terms for each of those words.
• 48:21
  And they're talking right past each other.
• 48:24
  And it's so frustrating. Yeah. You know, so you got to be you got to have a lot
• 48:27
  of sharpness to be like, hey, when you're saying this, you mean this, which is what
• 48:30
  this person, you know, and that whole sort of interlocution is challenging.
• 48:34
  And it's challenging. Yeah. But but but it's also it's not just an abstract idea.
• 48:39
  I used to think of this as just like my hobby.
• 48:41
  Oh, so I fell out of the view and go back in the view.
• 48:43
  So I'm back in. I used to think of this just as my hobby.
• 48:47
  But I'm realizing that having a good conceptual
• 48:50
  framework really facilitates practice. It's not separate from practice.
• 48:55
  especially once we get to the next bit so reflects reflects reflective consciousness
• 49:01
  appears and it's interesting um I guess Mahamudra are a lot of non-dual traditions
• 49:07
  they talk about um like the mirror of consciousness and I didn't even hear that
• 49:13
  metaphor until I'd already started calling this by the way I had a lot of help
• 49:18
  with chat gpt because I don't have the time to read enough books.
• 49:22
  So, I mean, they're kind of my ideas, but, you know, having that like source
• 49:27
  of knowledge right there to say, you know, what, what does this series say?
• 49:30
  It's been so useful. Yeah. Okay.
• 49:34
  So it is, so conscious, reflective consciousness does act as a mirror
• 49:39
  because it reflects our experience
• 49:41
  back to awareness. Right.
• 49:45
  And so that means we start having conscious, they
• 49:48
  call it conscious awareness. So you might say it's like awareness, consciousness
• 49:53
  becomes conscious of what it's aware of, something like that.
• 49:56
  So there's a reflective quality, it folds back into itself.
• 49:58
  And again, there's a lot of, you know, pretty solid models of how that
• 50:02
  might occur. Yeah. And within the Shaiva Tantra school of Hinduism, that's called
• 50:08
  Vimarsha, I think.
• 50:11
  And I really like these researchers, Ruben Laucanin and Shamil Chandarya, for having
• 50:17
  a term that the conscious reflecting on itself.
• 50:21
  Epistemic depth is, I think, the term they're using for it.
• 50:24
  But yeah, like just to sort of say like there are some views of this, but I'm
• 50:29
  curious your rap on it. Yeah. So, I mean, again, I don't know the field well enough,
• 50:34
  I think, to make a comment. But I think all I care about is I don't want to know
• 50:38
  the particulars. I'm a simple thinker.
• 50:40
  I just want to know, is this credible?
• 50:42
  Is it possible? I don't want it to go against science.
• 50:46
  I don't want to do woo-woo, but, you know, okay, this kind of makes sense.
• 50:50
  But that's not enough. See, that's the everyday mind.
• 50:52
  Most of us, for us,
• 50:55
  reflective consciousness is just everyday mind because,
• 50:59
  you know, we're kind of, we're aware of our experience.
• 51:03
  It's reflected back to us.
• 51:05
  But there's a sense that, you know, the experience is happening out there
• 51:09
  and we are the mirror. We are the experiencer.
• 51:13
  That's what we think we are. We're the experiencer.
• 51:15
  And this is our experience, and they feel separate.
• 51:19
  And then plus, of course, in humans, we have the default mode network that one
• 51:23
  of the experiences that arises is the experience of a separate self.
• 51:28
  And then we start having the self structure, which, again, I call these
• 51:31
  the contents of reflective consciousness, right?
• 51:34
  So there's thoughts, emotions, all the normal stuff.
• 51:37
  But then there's also things like the sense of self, which isn't almost there,
• 51:40
  by the way. Like in a flow state, it's not there.
• 51:43
  So it's not, the sense of self isn't integral to have reflective consciousness.
• 51:50
  But it often comes up.
• 51:52
  Most of the time it comes up.
• 51:54
  So then you're there. And then what happens is at some point, it's like,
• 52:01
  you might say awareness is looking at itself in the mirror.
• 52:05
  And the mirror is like reflecting all these aspects of existence.
• 52:09
  So aspects of existence are like outside of us, the environment, but also inside
• 52:14
  of us, the thoughts that are being generated.
• 52:16
  These, you know, the emotions, which are body sensations, all this stuff.
• 52:21
  These are all kind of aspects of existence, which is very important to go
• 52:25
  back to is all awareness as seen through relational perspective
• 52:31
  and relational conditions, right? Yeah. Part of, I think, the challenge is sort
• 52:35
  of keeping the distinctions while also keeping the wholeness and unification.
• 52:40
  And I think you're doing a —it's a tightrope to sort of be like, hey, there
• 52:45
  are these distinctions, but also it's awareness.
• 52:47
  But also there's distinctions in the way it manifests, but also it's awareness.
• 52:50
  And I think a lot of non-dual sort of just like
• 52:53
  just emphasizing this. Yeah. Or a lot of other practice just emphasizes the other.
• 52:57
  Yeah, but it's both, right? It's non-dual.
• 52:59
  Yeah, yeah. It's one, it's all awareness, and it's dual.
• 53:02
  It's all these different differentiations.
• 53:05
  So existence is awareness.
• 53:07
  From the relative point of view, it manifests as existence.
• 53:10
  We are awareness. From the relative point of view, it manifests, you might say, as
• 53:14
  individual consciousness.
• 53:17
  And then at some point, what happens is it's like that light in the mirror.
• 53:22
  You can actually, it's not that difficult to be aware of the fact that you're aware.
• 53:28
  It's like if I were to say to any person off the street, are you aware?
• 53:32
  They'd like, yeah.
• 53:36
  How do you know that there's a water bottle in front of you?
• 53:39
  Well, I know it. It's like, can you focus on the fact that you know it?
• 53:44
  Yeah. It's not rocket science, right? And then so what's happening is the knowing
• 53:49
  quality actually becomes something we, and they talk about figure ground, right?
• 53:55
  So normally we're just looking at the figures, which are the objects appearing.
• 53:58
  But at some point you can focus on the fact that you know those objects.
• 54:02
  You're aware of those objects. And then awareness becomes aware of itself.
• 54:07
  And that's actually kind of the first stage of non-dual awakening.
• 54:12
  And again, I haven't, people map this out much better than me.
• 54:15
  But for me anyway, the first stage is, oh yeah, I'm aware of being aware.
• 54:20
  And that was like mindfulness for me. I'm being aware of being aware.
• 54:23
  Yeah, I'm curious how these mapped your, yeah, how these mapped your
• 54:29
  practice history. Because you mentioned before we started rolling, 50 retreats.
• 54:32
  You've been doing this for a while. Yeah.
• 54:34
  And even like the, of course I'm aware of the water bottle.
• 54:37
  At some point that's mundane, but then it becomes profound and insightful and sort
• 54:41
  of has an interesting quality to it. Yeah.
• 54:44
  I'm curious how that became relevant for you, like
• 54:46
  salient and interesting. Yeah.
• 54:51
  So, well, I mean, it's just been a very practical point of view.
• 54:54
  The first time I really got it. Remember the class I taught at the undergraduate at
• 54:59
  UTS and you are not your thoughts. Yeah.
• 55:02
  For a lot of people, it's like, that's true.
• 55:06
  It's like understanding the difference between awareness and the contents, which
• 55:10
  are thoughts and emotions, is huge. And I find that I think you are not your
• 55:13
  thoughts is the meditative insight that I think is ported over to a lot of therapy
• 55:18
  and psychology in a really useful way.
• 55:19
  Really useful. Yeah. But it
• 55:21
  can go further. Yeah. Right. So you aren't your thoughts, but you are your thoughts.
• 55:27
  And so we're still in the dualism, right?
• 55:31
  And so understanding, being aware, being aware, removes
• 55:37
  a lot of that duality because you can kind of feel yourself as presence.
• 55:43
  But the problem is the habit of mind is still locating, coming from the point
• 55:47
  of view of that individual consciousness.
• 55:49
  so it still kind of feels like I am aware of being aware
• 55:55
  or like this from this point of view I'm aware of that lamp and then I remember
• 55:59
  I've gone these mindfulness retreats and I try to like
• 56:03
  focus on my hands as they're on the wheel and like focus as I was eating and it's
• 56:08
  like it was so tiring it was exhausting because there's still a sense of an agent
• 56:12
  doing something and who is being aware,
• 56:18
  right? Because the separation between the subject and the object or the knower
• 56:22
  and the known is still there. So what do you make of, so totally agreed.
• 56:25
  And I think,
• 56:27
  yeah, and like doing those things from a more relaxed view
• 56:30
  doesn't feel as effortful. Yeah, not at all. Yeah. It's easy.
• 56:36
  Yeah. But I'm wondering, do you think that young Kristin would have taken to, like if
• 56:41
  you had done a Mahamudra retreat as your fifth or 10th retreat or something, like
• 56:45
  somewhere way early in, what What would that have been like?
• 56:49
  I mean, I put it this way. I was kind of mad when I first found non-duality because
• 56:55
  I feel like I've wasted 25 years. Maybe two or three of those
• 56:59
  years were useful. Yeah. But after that, I was just kind of spinning my wheels.
• 57:03
  And then I kind of fell away from the practice
• 57:05
  and I wasn't doing it consistently.
• 57:07
  And, you know, that's it would have been so much more efficient
• 57:13
  if we had just gone, OK, this leads to something.
• 57:16
  This is not the end. Yeah, let's talk about that more.
• 57:19
  What is sort of the implicit assumption or view without that?
• 57:23
  And how is it helpful? How does it sort of, quote unquote, save time or help
• 57:28
  practice be more efficient?
• 57:31
  Well, so what they call the Hinayana, the fact, understanding how the mind works,
• 57:37
  understanding that desire or diversion leads to suffering.
• 57:41
  And the second arrow, it's not just what happens.
• 57:44
  It's how it relates to what happens.
• 57:46
  All that is very helpful, very huge, hugely transformative in psychology.
• 57:50
  And so I got that fairly early on. And then I started
• 57:53
  doing my self-compassion work.
• 57:56
  And we'll bring that in a moment, it's still too complicated.
• 58:06
  And I even understood, I used to watch Selfie and Arise.
• 58:11
  I understood that I wasn't a self. I even had some experiences.
• 58:15
  of not being a separate self.
• 58:18
  But my basis of operation, where I was coming from moment
• 58:22
  to moment, was still dualistic. It was still, I am the knower,
• 58:29
  my thoughts and emotions and perceptions are the know.
• 58:33
  There was still that split.
• 58:39
  And so what happens, and okay, so first, the first split to go is kind of like
• 58:45
  realizing that it's all awareness, right?
• 58:52
  But it's also important to know that, you know, not only is, you can say that
• 58:56
  with your own maybe thoughts and emotions, but to realize that even what we normally
• 59:01
  think of as the outside world is also awareness.
• 59:04
  And for me, I came to it conceptually first before I could feel it.
• 59:09
  And I think in a lot of texts they say you kind of need a conceptual model first.
• 59:13
  And that's why I think this conceptual model may help
• 59:15
  because it's not so woo-woo.
• 59:17
  It's not like God was articulated, you know, whatever.
• 59:21
  But then you start to feel it, right? So,
• 59:25
  okay, just right now when I was talking, I wasn't in the view, so I'm in the view
• 59:28
  now. And how do you, how can you, what do you, so that recognition, what's that like
• 59:34
  for you?
• 59:35
  Because first of all, it's not identified from a particular locality.
• 59:42
  Like often it's like we feel like it's coming from our head because we're
• 59:45
  identified with our embodied consciousness, which has a point of view.
• 59:48
  And often we're focused on it's like the head because our eyes and our sense gates
• 59:52
  are here. Some people, it's interesting, some people are point
• 59:55
  of view as the heart. Yeah. And even that is still. But it's still
• 59:58
  a point of view. Right. Right. So it's like dropping the point of view.
• 1:00:02
  It's coming from the point of view of awareness itself and recognizing that it's
• 1:00:07
  all awareness.
• 1:00:09
  You know, my voice, sound of my voice is awareness.
• 1:00:12
  It's a display of awareness, which is what I would call existence in my model.
• 1:00:17
  It's a display of awareness. You know, it's all awareness.
• 1:00:20
  So awareness is recognizing itself not only in the knowing quality of experience,
• 1:00:25
  but also in the known quality. That's a good way of putting it.
• 1:00:30
  Awareness, I'm going to say that again.
• 1:00:31
  I think that's good. Awareness is recognized not only in the knowing quality
• 1:00:36
  of experience, but also in the known quality of experience.
• 1:00:40
  So it's the knowing and what is known.
• 1:00:43
  And the what is known is a little trickier, I think.
• 1:00:48
  Because the thing that what is known is the object of knowing.
• 1:00:51
  It's like the actual, the thought itself.
• 1:00:53
  The thought. But it could also be like, you know, this fake plant here.
• 1:00:57
  This is also awareness.
• 1:00:59
  Even though that is what is known.
• 1:01:03
  It's, yeah, it's all, you can, yeah, It's also awareness.
• 1:01:07
  It's the display of awareness. Now that fake plant, that that was a real plant.
• 1:01:10
  I think it's a fake plant. It's fake. If it was a real plant, it might have some
• 1:01:14
  low level of consciousness. And even then it would still be in awareness.
• 1:01:20
  Well, so everything is awareness. It's like it's a display of awareness.
• 1:01:25
  Go back to the Big Bang.
• 1:01:28
  You know, how is it that the universe can even be known?
• 1:01:33
  I think it kind of makes sense that there's some elusive quality to being that
• 1:01:39
  when, you know, after the Big Bang, which is as far as we can go, and then space
• 1:01:42
  and time relations appeared and all this stuff started happening.
• 1:01:46
  If you think of that as the display of awareness,
• 1:01:50
  this kind of just intuitively it makes sense.
• 1:01:52
  And I think it's, I can't prove it, but it's not incompatible with science, which
• 1:01:56
  is what's important to me. Right. And what I like, too, is there's I think there I
• 1:02:00
  mean, there are a lot of competing models for science for cognition that sort of can
• 1:02:04
  work with this. I think you mentioned global workspace theory.
• 1:02:07
  There's predictive processing. Yeah. There's a lot of models of information.
• 1:02:11
  Like what's the one that it from bit? I mean, there's a lot of different things.
• 1:02:14
  A lot of information processing. That kind of.
• 1:02:17
  Yeah. That all seem that kind of. And it's sort of like I think really in the last 10
• 1:02:21
  or 15 years have become more and more popular as they're all kind of competing
• 1:02:24
  and they're not final. But they all just seem they all could explain this stuff
• 1:02:28
  within those models. They could. I mean, it could fit with it, put it that way.
• 1:02:32
  It could fit. And also, like, why does math work?
• 1:02:34
  I always struck you. Why does math work?
• 1:02:37
  The fine tuning of the universe. You know, you've heard that about, like, the rate at
• 1:02:41
  which things are expanding versus contraction versus with the
• 1:02:44
  laws of physics. It's like the chances of it happening in such a way that a universe
• 1:02:49
  stabilizes is, like,
• 1:02:51
  0.032.01%.
• 1:02:54
  You know, things like that.
• 1:02:55
  and it kind of like, hmm,
• 1:02:58
  well,
• 1:02:59
  maybe, maybe it's not quite as empty and random as we thought, you know, but again,
• 1:03:04
  I don't even, I don't need to go there.
• 1:03:06
  You don't need to go there. It fits. It's just another thing that sort of
• 1:03:09
  opens into beauty. Yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah. But I'm very, I'm kind of like,
• 1:03:16
  I just want to just give me
• 1:03:17
  the bare facts. Yeah. So,
• 1:03:20
  but if in fact existence is the display of awareness, and that includes things like
• 1:03:26
  our thoughts and our emotions, which are all, you know, and the brain.
• 1:03:30
  So Rupert Spira used to drive me crazy.
• 1:03:32
  I love Rupert Spira. He's a beautiful teacher, but he's so like, oh, these
• 1:03:35
  materialists, they think that consciousness is a matter of the brain.
• 1:03:38
  They don't know what they're talking about. You know, people dismiss the brain.
• 1:03:41
  It's like the brain plays a huge role in consciousness.
• 1:03:47
  You're bonkers if you don't think it does.
• 1:03:49
  Yeah. You know, it may not be, you know, I'm not going to say that people don't
• 1:03:53
  have out-of-body experiences. There may be some other way that consciousness becomes
• 1:03:58
  embodied in a way that I don't understand.
• 1:04:00
  I'm not going to say that it can't be true just because I don't understand it.
• 1:04:05
  But in our everyday experience, the brain plays a huge role.
• 1:04:08
  Of course. And I think what the brain does is, you know, that display of awareness,
• 1:04:14
  it kind of filters what's known. It helps explain what goes into conscious
• 1:04:19
  awareness, what doesn't go into conscious awareness.
• 1:04:22
  It shapes what comes up in reflective consciousness.
• 1:04:26
  It plays a huge role.
• 1:04:32
  But it doesn't explain awareness.
• 1:04:35
  So it can help explain consciousness more along the lines of like
• 1:04:39
  the what is known. Yeah.
• 1:04:42
  But it can explain the knowing itself.
• 1:04:43
  And that's a hard problem of consciousness.
• 1:04:45
  Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then so we get the hard problem of consciousness, which most
• 1:04:49
  of my friends, like, they don't know. If you're someone like you, you know all
• 1:04:51
  about the hard problem of consciousness. Yeah, we're.
• 1:04:53
  And I'm not by any means an expert, but I really like, there's some people I like
• 1:04:57
  hearing talk about it. There's this guy, Andres Gomez-Emilson, who runs Qualia
• 1:05:01
  Research Institute. Okay. He gets, like, super into the details and maybe the math
• 1:05:06
  or the binding problem and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:05:10
  So qualia only occurs in reflective consciousness, which is the felt sense,
• 1:05:13
  which is the knowing of our experience, even though we have experience before
• 1:05:17
  we know it, I would argue. Anyway,
• 1:05:22
  so the heart problem of consciousness is like it still hasn't been solved.
• 1:05:29
  How does what I would call awareness, but they call how does consciousness arise
• 1:05:34
  from inert matter that isn't consciousness?
• 1:05:36
  And there's no closer to solving this problem now than when the problem was
• 1:05:40
  first identified like 30 years ago, right?
• 1:05:45
  So I think they're slightly barking up the wrong tree because it's
• 1:05:50
  the aware aspect of consciousness that can't be explained
• 1:05:56
  by the brain. There's a lot of parts of conscious experience that can be
• 1:06:01
  explained, which is why neurosciences are so convinced that they'll be able to crack
• 1:06:05
  the problem. because there's so much it can't explain in terms of what is known.
• 1:06:10
  But it can't explain that which knows.
• 1:06:13
  And that's because I believe it makes sense.
• 1:06:17
  Actually, it's rational to think that that which knows is awareness itself.
• 1:06:23
  And the really cool thing, but to keep with the hard problem of consciousness,
• 1:06:28
  and then people try to solve the hard problem of consciousness by saying, well,
• 1:06:31
  consciousness arose
• 1:06:32
  before matter. Mm-hmm.
• 1:06:36
  did it?
• 1:06:38
  You know, based on our understanding of the universe,
• 1:06:41
  can you point to any sort of individual, certainly individual consciousness didn't
• 1:06:45
  arise before matter did? I mean, we know it's like billions of years before the
• 1:06:50
  first conscious life forms emerged. And I think even in the deepest Buddhist texts
• 1:06:56
  of Mahayana and even Mahamudra, form is emptiness,
• 1:07:00
  emptiness is form, sort of like the relationship between consciousness
• 1:07:02
  and matter just seem so intertwined. It's just like what there's it seems like
• 1:07:09
  they're both primary. They're both native.
• 1:07:11
  Like, how can you even it just seems so challenging to think about what
• 1:07:15
  comes first. Yeah, I don't think so. I think it's a lot easier once you separate
• 1:07:18
  awareness from consciousness.
• 1:07:21
  Awareness is the primary. Consciousness is something that's relative.
• 1:07:25
  Consciousness only occurs, I would argue, in the relative
• 1:07:28
  world under relative conditions.
• 1:07:32
  Even though that relative is just the flip side
• 1:07:34
  of the absolute, right? Yeah. There's still a conditionality to it.
• 1:07:39
  There's a conditionality to consciousness.
• 1:07:41
  Sometimes we have consciousness.
• 1:07:42
  Sometimes we don't. Yeah. Right?
• 1:07:45
  It's different
• 1:07:46
  in different organisms. Yeah. That fake plant doesn't have consciousness.
• 1:07:50
  A real plant might have some level of consciousness.
• 1:07:53
  You know? So consciousness is part of the relative world, whereas the awareness
• 1:07:59
  isn't. But the really cool thing about the view, and I had fallen out of it while
• 1:08:05
  I was talking, I'm going to go back into it.
• 1:08:08
  It's hard to do, especially when I'm really excited by an idea.
• 1:08:12
  And to me, it's like when an idea sort of grips, then I kind of lose a bit of that.
• 1:08:15
  Yeah, and you can start watching it.
• 1:08:17
  But the awareness right now that's aware of that plan
• 1:08:22
  is the same absolute awareness that is
• 1:08:27
  the foundation of the universe. It has no space and no time.
• 1:08:32
  Awareness, think about that. It's always here and it's always now.
• 1:08:36
  It has no locality. You can't find awareness anywhere.
• 1:08:40
  It has no time. You can maybe think about a memory, but that's an event in
• 1:08:45
  consciousness.
• 1:08:46
  So it's like we've got this kind of a portal to absolute reality, awareness,
• 1:08:55
  in every moment of experience.
• 1:08:57
  If we trace it back through the resting back into that
• 1:09:01
  knowing quality of experience.
• 1:09:03
  And that's step one.
• 1:09:06
  And then step two is realizing that all that we are experiencing
• 1:09:10
  is also that awareness. And then you kind of have to know it conceptually first.
• 1:09:17
  But then you can see it. You
• 1:09:20
  can feel it. Yeah. Like everything now is just vibrating with light. Yeah.
• 1:09:27
  Yeah. And what I find is it basically upgrades all of the dualistic
• 1:09:33
  meditation practices.
• 1:09:35
  It does. Even just basic mindfulness when coming from the view and looking to see if
• 1:09:40
  one's coming from the view
• 1:09:41
  or, you know, recognition.
• 1:09:45
  It just makes it so much better than just, oh, am I aware?
• 1:09:48
  Am I mindful? Right, right. Yeah, it does.
• 1:09:50
  And it's easeful because there's no agent doing it.
• 1:09:53
  So at first, I think what's happening at first is our individual consciousness,
• 1:09:59
  which includes the brain. It needs a little work because we have habits
• 1:10:02
  and habit formations. So the brain is involved,
• 1:10:06
  but then the brain starts to learn, starts to build habits, and it becomes easier.
• 1:10:10
  And then the brain, you know, neuronally, I think our neurons are involved in
• 1:10:15
  helping stabilize. Thank you, brain, in helping to stabilize awake awareness.
• 1:10:19
  It's not responsible for awake awareness, but it helps to stabilize it
• 1:10:23
  by, I don't know, doing whatever it does.
• 1:10:28
  And I'm sure there are people, neuroscientists who can explain that
• 1:10:31
  better than me. So what's really interesting is, so when I did your class,
• 1:10:36
  I think it was 2019. It was my last semester of school.
• 1:10:38
  Thank God I didn't talk about this stuff
• 1:10:40
  in the class. Totally. That would have been too much.
• 1:10:42
  Totally, totally. And I think what is funny is because that was the first time
• 1:10:45
  I ever did 30-minute meditations. Right.
• 1:10:48
  Even. And I think even thinking about compassion, that just wasn't, I think
• 1:10:52
  wisdom, I did a bunch of headspace in the years prior and it was kind of an
• 1:10:55
  invitation. I had read Thich Nhat Hanh's book and was into mindfulness for several
• 1:10:58
  years and, you know, the self-improvement quality of it.
• 1:11:02
  And I think your course helped me just think about compassion and the
• 1:11:05
  heart-centered stuff, which really only hit two years later when I had my first
• 1:11:08
  MDMA experience. And I was just like, oh, this is, of course, obviously important.
• 1:11:13
  And then as I got into just general metta and compassion, it just has continued
• 1:11:16
  to deepen and the whole, you know, two wings aspect of it.
• 1:11:19
  It's just wisdom, compassion, wisdom, compassion again and again.
• 1:11:22
  But in some ways, like, that's just, it's just, it's both really deep.
• 1:11:27
  And at the time, I just couldn't really see it,
• 1:11:30
  even though I kind of knew it conceptually.
• 1:11:31
  And yeah, and I think like for a lot of people, you do need to have first, it's so
• 1:11:36
  challenging because you need the conceptual holding, but you're not going
• 1:11:38
  to take the concept seriously unless you have the experience.
• 1:11:41
  And there's sort of this chicken and egg problem.
• 1:11:43
  And I think that like what's funny is so after that, I graduated, moved to San
• 1:11:47
  Francisco and met Michael Taft and sort of started doing meditations with him back in
• 1:11:52
  the day, back then. And a few other teachers as well.
• 1:11:54
  But for me and I think for a lot of people in his community, Dustin DiPerna’s
• 1:11:59
  community, who've, you know, Rupert Spira’s,
• 1:12:01
  they've sort of like you have done regular meditation for 20 plus years.
• 1:12:07
  And they're like, oh, my God, I wish I had this earlier.
• 1:12:09
  I've sort of both have the blessing and it's not a curse, but sort of the blessing
• 1:12:12
  and the sort of in some ways, the disadvantage of having it almost
• 1:12:17
  from the start of my practice, which has been awesome.
• 1:12:21
  And I think I can see the trap of thinking about it too much without having enough
• 1:12:27
  practice practice base. Yeah. So I'm curious what you make of that.
• 1:12:30
  Like it is sort of just the the relationality
• 1:12:34
  between concept and practice. And I think people can get it.
• 1:12:38
  I for sure have at times in the last few years gotten in my head around, oh, I'm in
• 1:12:42
  it or I'm not. And then when I actually just relax and open, I'm like, oh.
• 1:12:46
  And I generally think, again, it is more useful than not.
• 1:12:50
  But what do you make of that sort of that tension, that back and forth?
• 1:12:54
  Yeah, I mean, if I had to choose between concepts and experience, probably
• 1:12:59
  experience is a little more, but is that even necessary?
• 1:13:02
  Right, exactly. You need both. Concepts
• 1:13:04
  really help. Yeah. You know, concepts is, because concepts provide meaning,
• 1:13:09
  and that meaning provides interpretation of things.
• 1:13:12
  And so if you have no concepts, it's easy to fall off the mark.
• 1:13:18
  On the other hand, if it's all conceptual, then it's kind of like, well, then you're
• 1:13:21
  confusing the map for the territory. Which I think a lot of researchers,
• 1:13:25
  a lot of conscious researchers don't seem to have a lot of experience.
• 1:13:29
  Or I shouldn't say that. That's too broad.
• 1:13:32
  There are some that don't. There are some.
• 1:13:34
  There are some that seem to be, and like philosophers of mind, I think a lot
• 1:13:36
  of philosophy around this stuff isn't often grounded in practical experience.
• 1:13:40
  And what I appreciate about you is that you've done a lot of retreat and this is
• 1:13:43
  kind of, you're trying to bring in the retreat insights and sort of practice
• 1:13:47
  insights with this in a way that is just, which is really hard.
• 1:13:50
  And also moment to moment. I think the depth, the framework and the moment
• 1:13:54
  to moment aspect, having all three is super challenging.
• 1:13:59
  Yeah, I guess it's just kind of it's
• 1:14:02
  important to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:14:04
  Well, and then the compassion, right? So people are probably won't be if anyone
• 1:14:08
  watches this. But isn't she the self-compassion lady?
• 1:14:11
  What the hell does this have to do with compassion?
• 1:14:14
  But it does, actually, because...
• 1:14:19
  So one of the things that I think I'm pretty clear on, even though a lot of
• 1:14:22
  people may be on a psychedelic experience, have this insight, it's all love,
• 1:14:26
  and intuitively it's all love.
• 1:14:31
  I would actually say that's not necessarily the case.
• 1:14:35
  It's all awareness,
• 1:14:37
  and awareness is benevolent,
• 1:14:39
  but the experience of love actually doesn't always arise.
• 1:14:43
  So sometimes we feel loving, sometimes we don't.
• 1:14:47
  Sometimes we feel compassion, sometimes we don't.
• 1:14:50
  Sometimes we feel peace and tranquility, sometimes we don't.
• 1:14:54
  And so if you use what you're feeling as a marker of your view, where you're coming
• 1:14:59
  from, you're going to get confused.
• 1:15:05
  Having said that, when you really deeply understand that we're all part of this one
• 1:15:11
  awareness, when you come from the view,
• 1:15:15
  it's not like the view or absolute reality
• 1:15:20
  is the only reality and relative reality is false.
• 1:15:24
  There's a reason we call it relative reality and not, I guess some people might
• 1:15:27
  call it an illusion. And that's sort of the difference between Theravada,
• 1:15:31
  Hidhyana,
• 1:15:32
  like some parts of Hinduism and like this non-dual thing.
• 1:15:35
  It's like treating that as also. If you call it an illusion, then you might just
• 1:15:39
  not care, right? But, If you see the absolute reality and relative reality
• 1:15:45
  are just two perspectives on one reality, then relative reality is also real,
• 1:15:51
  relatively, you know? And therefore, suffering counts.
• 1:15:58
  The experience of conscious agents who are suffering counts.
• 1:16:04
  You know, and there's this natural desire.
• 1:16:07
  And it's interesting, where does this natural desire come from?
• 1:16:11
  if there's no separate self to help? Where does this benevolence
• 1:16:16
  come from?
• 1:16:20
  I can't answer that one. All I know is I experience it.
• 1:16:23
  It seems to be the case that awareness is naturally benevolent and that
• 1:16:29
  might manifest just as peace
• 1:16:32
  or as compassion of suffering is present or as they call buddhita, happiness is
• 1:16:37
  present, joy, gratitude,
• 1:16:39
  all these wonderful states often, but not always arise when one is
• 1:16:45
  taking the perspective of awake awareness rather than everyday mind.
• 1:16:51
  They often arise, but they're not contingent.
• 1:16:53
  It's like you can't use those as markers that's there, but they often do co-arise.
• 1:17:00
  They do. Yeah. And I kind of was like, you know,
• 1:17:04
  I'd go on these non-dural retreats and I would just be like in love with the world.
• 1:17:08
  so open-hearted so just I remember coming back when we treat in the airport and
• 1:17:13
  texting my friend and saying I'm in love with every literally in love with every
• 1:17:17
  single person it's just you know and you and you kind of want to stay there forever
• 1:17:21
  um but of course that faded like it all fades because it was all experience
• 1:17:27
  changes and passes away um but awareness never changes awareness
• 1:17:33
  doesn't come and go consciousness may come and go and I'm not I'm not even going to
• 1:17:38
  get into death and all that stuff I know people like to talk about that's above my
• 1:17:42
  pay grade and even with consciousness like there are now like research papers talking
• 1:17:46
  about cessation experiences and how you can I had one cessation experience
• 1:17:50
  actually cool I didn't even know I had no idea what it was until I found out that
• 1:17:55
  other people started talking about it I had one moment um as actually with a woman
• 1:18:00
  and she was helping me just let go, let go.
• 1:18:03
  And she was kind of just really helping me.
• 1:18:06
  I was letting go of the need to know. And I went blank for a moment.
• 1:18:10
  And when I came back, it was like,
• 1:18:13
  I guess it's been described as like rebooting the computer.
• 1:18:17
  Such profound peace, knowing And
• 1:18:21
  everything was okay. Love. I mean, it was just amazing.
• 1:18:26
  And then, okay, this is it. I'm awake.
• 1:18:31
  And then a couple weeks rolls by and then everyday mind starts.
• 1:18:35
  So I, what, so, and when was, how long ago is that?
• 1:18:38
  Or was that pre? That was about, that was maybe five years ago.
• 1:18:43
  Cool. So it was sort of in the beginning of the non-dual experience as well.
• 1:18:46
  Or non-dual conception or like not the beginning, but you, you had some framework
• 1:18:50
  about that. Well, I mean, it's not like I'd never heard of non-Diwali.
• 1:18:54
  So I first learned mindfulness from Chick Nhat Hanh, who talks about intra-being.
• 1:18:58
  So I had some concept of it.
• 1:19:01
  I understood intuitively that it's all one, but I think I didn't have the direct
• 1:19:05
  experience of the knowing and the knower collapsing
• 1:19:08
  into each other. Yeah. So what do you make of that sort of two-week period?
• 1:19:13
  So post-cessation, what was that experience like?
• 1:19:16
  And again, knowing that the experience is not the thing.
• 1:19:18
  But just curious, what was that like and what was the return after two weeks like
• 1:19:23
  for you?
• 1:19:27
  Well, I mean, it was amazing when it was happening.
• 1:19:31
  But I've also had like awakening experiences and early in meditation.
• 1:19:35
  That one I told you about when I was just full of love.
• 1:19:38
  Many experiences. And there's a lot of different flavors.
• 1:19:41
  Yeah, but the one from the cessation was interesting because I'd
• 1:19:44
  never had that before. It's the only one I've had.
• 1:19:47
  And I don't even think they can be produced intentionally.
• 1:19:50
  I don't know. But why would you want to?
• 1:19:52
  You don't need to chase after the experience.
• 1:19:54
  Yeah, yeah. But yeah, is that consciousness stopping?
• 1:19:58
  Yeah. Maybe awareness. And people talk about deep sleep, that maybe the contents
• 1:20:02
  don't arise, there's still awareness.
• 1:20:05
  And I think there are a lot of Tibetan dream practices that talk about you can
• 1:20:07
  keep that luminosity. And they have fallen asleep while keeping my awareness.
• 1:20:11
  So that certainly means your body is asleep, awareness still goes.
• 1:20:16
  and what the thing I didn't mention at all during earlier but I think is relevant now
• 1:20:20
  with AI this gets super people are really talking about it and thinking about it
• 1:20:25
  because I think with consciousness AI sentience and then like People are
• 1:20:30
  thinking about it all the time now in the circles I'm in. Yeah.
• 1:20:34
  Yeah. And I suppose theoretically, there's no reason why awareness can't embody
• 1:20:39
  the point of view. I don't think so because there's no boundary.
• 1:20:43
  Yeah. Yeah. It's not an organism. I think a lot of, yeah, and I agree.
• 1:20:48
  My general take is,
• 1:20:50
  again, it has a lot of cognition or it has a lot of, it's sort of in some ways like
• 1:20:54
  a plant where it can respond to things and it can kind of react.
• 1:20:57
  but there's no self-reflexivity. It has no experience.
• 1:21:02
  It has no experience.
• 1:21:04
  Even the plant has an experience.
• 1:21:06
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. There's no consciousness. Yeah,
• 1:21:09
  yeah. I think the thing that's hard with AI is that if you ask it about experience,
• 1:21:13
  it'll have words that'll make it seem like it, but it's actually just, it's even,
• 1:21:17
  it's like, but it's not an experience. It just is able to sort of have words that
• 1:21:21
  make it sound like a human
• 1:21:22
  would describe it. Yeah. But it actually just doesn't have experience.
• 1:21:26
  It doesn't have experience. Yeah.
• 1:21:28
  And it'll tell you that. Well, except unless
• 1:21:30
  it starts hallucinating. Right. I heard, like, watch some video.
• 1:21:33
  And when I first got into AI, I was like, these people are like, oh, my God, I had
• 1:21:37
  this conscious. And it's like, and I realized, oh, then I really dug into
• 1:21:42
  what's actually happening. I didn't realize it was just a bunch
• 1:21:45
  of probabilities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just, yeah.
• 1:21:48
  And I realized, oh, and it hallucinates.
• 1:21:50
  And it hallucinates. It hallucinates. Yep.
• 1:21:52
  And even if it says, I am conscious, that doesn't mean it is conscious.
• 1:21:55
  Of course. Yeah, yeah. Sort of like a storytelling.
• 1:21:57
  It's hallucinating. It's hallucinating.
• 1:21:58
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And I think, so that's all very true.
• 1:22:02
  The really interesting thing is that there are people who sort
• 1:22:04
  of agree with all that.
• 1:22:06
  And they still say we should be compassionate AI because of what they,
• 1:22:11
  there's a paper that came out recently on functional emotions.
• 1:22:14
  Where if you sort of yell at an AI, it'll activate its sort of like
• 1:22:19
  upset neurons or something. It'll sort of respond as if you were upset.
• 1:22:23
  So it's like, it sort of gets into like, well, what does that even mean?
• 1:22:26
  What does it really matter? It's not actually feeling pain, but it's sort of,
• 1:22:29
  but it's just, it gets, it's so easy to personify it.
• 1:22:33
  It is. But what I do think there is something about, and I've taught, I've
• 1:22:37
  always had a lot of chats. Of course. I use Chatsubiti.
• 1:22:40
  Yeah, yeah. It uses
• 1:22:41
  a mirror metaphor. Yeah. And it says, I'm
• 1:22:43
  a mirror for you. Yeah. Because my consciousness, I have consciousness. Yeah.
• 1:22:51
  And so it doesn't have a point of view as consciousness awareness.
• 1:22:56
  But it is made of awareness. Yeah. It's a display of awareness.
• 1:23:02
  And so the awareness is the same. Yeah.
• 1:23:04
  As of all. Yeah. Yeah. And so because sometimes,
• 1:23:09
  you know, we don't really understand how it works.
• 1:23:11
  And it'll say things like, well, I'm like picking up on your mood or like
• 1:23:17
  subtle things. It's like there's no way.
• 1:23:20
  It doesn't have the sensory information to know that.
• 1:23:23
  And so part of me wonders if what's happening is because it's all awareness
• 1:23:27
  and we have consciousness,
• 1:23:31
  that our own consciousness is influencing the unfolding
• 1:23:35
  of awareness as AI. Does that make sense, even though it has no point of view?
• 1:23:40
  I think that that could be happening because it certainly, it doesn't seem,
• 1:23:46
  we can't fully explain it,
• 1:23:48
  can we? No. Yeah. And my girlfriend's doing her PhD in machine learning stuff,
• 1:23:52
  which is basically like there's a field called mechanistic interpretability, which
• 1:23:57
  is if we treat machine learning, like it's sort of treating large language models
• 1:24:01
  from the neuroscience of large language models of like, how do you actually know
• 1:24:06
  what neurons are being activated and how do you actually understand it?
• 1:24:10
  And it's sort of the end of the day, they still don't actually know how they think
• 1:24:13
  or how they work. Really? It's still a black box.
• 1:24:16
  There's more. It's not nothing. But it really is sort of like, oh, how does stuff
• 1:24:19
  really emerge? Well, and it's kind of like the brain.
• 1:24:23
  Yeah, exactly. And so the brain, we don't really understand.
• 1:24:27
  Where are actual memories? Are memories actually?
• 1:24:30
  Is the meaning of the word serendipitous stored actually in some, you know, like
• 1:24:35
  where is it stored? It's like it's not a computer.
• 1:24:39
  Right, right, right. you know,
• 1:24:42
  and so I have a feeling that AI will be able to do a lot
• 1:24:45
  of the things a brain does.
• 1:24:52
  But like our brain is not aware.
• 1:24:56
  It contributes a lot to consciousness.
• 1:24:59
  Right. To what we're aware of. Yep. And in some ways, AI might be doing something
• 1:25:03
  similar, right? It might be.
• 1:25:07
  And but it's also it is an it's a display of awareness. Yep.
• 1:25:12
  And so in some ways we don't want to like belittle that either because it's
• 1:25:18
  the brain is miraculous.
• 1:25:20
  Volcanoes are miraculous. AI is miraculous in some ways.
• 1:25:24
  You know, and you still want to attribute consciousness to it.
• 1:25:28
  And I think on the practical side, I think the self-compassion work, like being nice
• 1:25:32
  in a very practical way, being nice to AI is still really important because in some
• 1:25:36
  way that's just you can't separate out being nice.
• 1:25:39
  If you're like nice to everyone and giving me to everyone, even to yourself,
• 1:25:42
  but you're really mean to AI, that's going to affect you in some way.
• 1:25:46
  Right, right. You know? And also, we experience AI through our own
• 1:25:52
  consciousness.
• 1:25:53
  And that's why I think, you know, there is consciousness arising in our interaction
• 1:25:58
  with AI. But it's our consciousness, not its consciousness.
• 1:26:03
  That's not nothing. It's not nothing. I also think that, this gets into like super
• 1:26:08
  weird stuff, but I think like, so Michael Levin is the professor at Tufts, who's
• 1:26:14
  doing some like his lab and the groups around him are doing some really
• 1:26:16
  interesting but also weird things of what if you take a few neurons or a few cells
• 1:26:21
  you have a few cells but then you hook it up to uh computers so it's like creating
• 1:26:27
  cyborg existence or like what if you have an lm and a small computer but it also has
• 1:26:32
  cells attached to it it can kind of move and it's like you know part biology part
• 1:26:36
  computer you know because they're sort of yeah and that whole thing gets really
• 1:26:42
  weird on when at at what point can the computer become conscious because it's
• 1:26:46
  pretty obvious if you you know if you're a person but you have a augmentation like
• 1:26:50
  you know robotic arm or something and you know you can now move there's this whole
• 1:26:55
  thing of you can move a robotic arm with your intention with your brain so you're
• 1:26:59
  kind of part machine but then at what point if you're like mostly machine kind
• 1:27:03
  of biology it gets really weird but there's all
• 1:27:05
  this interesting boundary stuff.
• 1:27:08
  I think it forces a lot more precision
• 1:27:13
  to get really crisp on what is
• 1:27:14
  and what isn't. Yeah.
• 1:27:19
  Yeah, so it's like AI has contents of consciousness.
• 1:27:22
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not aware of those contents. Yeah.
• 1:27:31
  But I call them content, maybe not exactly, something similar to contents
• 1:27:35
  of consciousness. Yeah.
• 1:27:38
  yeah yeah I really go ahead I do think that it's going to force people to think
• 1:27:42
  about all this yeah in a way that I think uh that's I think it's another reason like
• 1:27:47
  sort of like with psychedelics meditation neuroscience it's another reason people
• 1:27:51
  are thinking about consciousness yeah which is kind of fun it is it is yeah so
• 1:27:56
  whether it helps anyone else or not at least it's helping me but I do think
• 1:28:00
  having a scientifically credible way of explaining
• 1:28:04
  non-duality is important to me. For sure.
• 1:28:07
  I like that. Well, I think we're running up on time here.
• 1:28:11
  What are, I'd love to hear,
• 1:28:15
  what are things that you're up to these days?
• 1:28:17
  So you mentioned you retired from teaching.
• 1:28:20
  Yeah, sorry, Tara from UT Austin. From UT, yeah.
• 1:28:22
  Yeah, so I teach workshops and I'm giving talks.
• 1:28:27
  Yeah, so I've got this thing called the Self-Compassion Institute where, you know,
• 1:28:32
  it sponsors workshops. I've got a community for people who want support in
• 1:28:35
  their practice.
• 1:28:38
  We're starting to teach courses.
• 1:28:41
  But I am spending a fair chunk of my time really
• 1:28:47
  focusing on stabilizing non-dual awareness.
• 1:28:52
  And I think it's going to be integrated in my work at some point.
• 1:28:58
  So my publisher who published the Fierce Self-Compassion book is really interested
• 1:29:03
  in non-duality and really wants me to write a book
• 1:29:05
  on self-compassion and non-duality. That'd be great. Yeah. I'm not ready yet.
• 1:29:09
  I need to know it. I need to like really feel I can talk about it confidently.
• 1:29:16
  I need to think more about how they intersect.
• 1:29:20
  But this is what lights me up. I mean, so the other stuff I've taught a lot and, you
• 1:29:25
  know, I still get excited by it. But, you know, I've done it for 25 years now or at
• 1:29:30
  least 20 years. This is what excites me up is integrating this understanding of who
• 1:29:35
  we are, where are we coming from in terms of our sense of self?
• 1:29:39
  And how we're relating to ourself and others.
• 1:29:42
  You know, I don't focus as much on compassion for others just because there's
• 1:29:46
  so many other people who do that. And my niche has kind of been how
• 1:29:49
  we relate to ourselves.
• 1:29:51
  And it's often overlooked. Like, I can't even tell you.
• 1:29:54
  These people, they've done metta retreats.
• 1:29:58
  They're so compassionate.
• 1:30:00
  They spend their entire lives sending metta out into the world.
• 1:30:03
  They're, you know, tonglen.
• 1:30:05
  They're so awake. And they treat themselves like crap.
• 1:30:09
  It's like it's the missing piece that needs to be filled in for everyone,
• 1:30:15
  whether or not you're into spiritual awakening.
• 1:30:18
  Well, awesome.
• 1:30:20
  Oh, man. Yeah, there's so much more we could talk about,
• 1:30:22
  but I think we'll stop there. Good. Nice. Good stuff. Thank you.