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Frank Yang: Ego Death, Consciousness, Vipassana
March 2, 2023
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that can create its own solidity because a lot of people go to like Vipassana retreats like 20 years 40 years and they still don't have stream entry which is like the first level of awakening because they're just becoming better meditators better observers the whole point is to deconstruct the meditator and erase that duality between the object of meditation and the meditator so that there's absolutely no distinction between the observation the observed and the observer it's all just one seamless process
Frank, Frank Yang, thank you. Thank you so much for coming. This is highly, highly anticipated, almost a year in the making. You're a mindfulness coach, you're also known for your art installations and your workout videos, which puts myself to shame and counteracts the mindfulness. You travel around the world, you influence people or at least attempt to influence them for the better and to show people how to be more present with themselves and with the world.
Can you fill in what have I missed? What should the audience know more about you? Yeah, I mean, I don't really identify myself as anything like on the human level. If you ask me what I do, I say I'm an artist, filmmaker. I do photography. I do a lot of weightlifting. I do bodybuilding and fitness coaching and I also do spirituality coaching, what I call consciousness coaching.
And it's pretty much what Kenneth Ho called contemplative fitness. Yeah, because I really like the relationship between fitness and mental fitness, physical fitness and mental fitness. So I've been meditating also for 10 years and I also played the violin for about 30 years and I've been weightlifting for about 20 years. So those are the kind of the main things that I do.
As you know, Tou, this Theories of Everything channel is about interviewing people with regard to what is fundamental. So, how can anything be fundamental? What is it? Well, if you look at it from a direct experience point of view, which is what kind of player fitness is about, you know, all kind of player traditions is about the subjective experience.
And they'll tell you that's the only thing that you know is your subjective experience. You don't know anything outside of that. Even the perception of external reality is arising through consciousness. So when I say consciousness, a lot of different spiritual traditions like to call it different things, true nature, nature of the mind, or awareness, or emptiness, or the Hindu is called the Brahman,
So that is the number one thing or probably the only thing you can be certain of. And as a coach, what I do is to guide people or at least offer some insight from my own path as a matter of direct experience, how to recognize the true nature of experience or consciousness or what you really are at the deepest level.
And if you want to talk about the nature of reality, well, you are reality. You are part of reality. And whether or not the nature of mind is the nature of reality, people have been debating that for like, I don't know, billions of years. And the way I look at it, you know, the materialisms and idealisms and the solipsisms and all this stuff. And my point of view is it's all, it's all true. It's the simultaneity of all those different perspectives and they're all codependent arising.
I myself am a fan, a huge fan of definitions even though there are limitations to them so I see both sides. I'm sure you get asked, Plenty, what is consciousness and emptiness? Okay well according to the Buddhists
Emptiness is a word that is used to describe what you really are at the deepest level. So what you are is not a thing, it's a process. So one way to look at emptiness is that it's a process of co-arising or co-dependent origination. For example, me and you are speaking right now and we're both arising and co-creating each other just like how particles, when they observe each other, they kind of give rise to each other.
And before this process of interaction, you are in this state of indeterminacy, like a pure potentiality kind of thing. It's like a generalist cat, like, you know, when you put the cat in a box, if you don't open it, it's neither dead nor alive in both kind of thing. So emptiness could be defined as a process of co-creation. And before this process is realized, what you really are is in a state of indeterminacy or pure potentiality. So the me, quote unquote me,
is only arising the way it is at this moment because of the way you are arising. So neither of us has inherent existence apart from this relation or interconnectedness. So in and of ourselves, we are empty. That's one way to perceive emptiness.
Another way to perceive emptiness is more of a more of a direct experience kind of thing. For example, because of the meditation I've been doing, we can talk about the techniques later, but I've been meditating for 10 years and on May 25, 2020, I went through a shift, what I describe as reaching the wisdom axis or the emptiness axis of this spiritual or contemplative development to the end point. And I
Everything from that moment on, there was a permanent shift in my consciousness, in my baseline consciousness from that point on where everything that I perceived is quote-unquote empty. What that means is that my direct perception right now is ballast. It doesn't have any separations. It is vast and the awareness is pederamic.
And everything becomes holographic. Everything I perceive is like a hologram. Kind of like how you put on a virtual reality goggle, you know that the image that you perceive is not ultimately real. It doesn't have any hair in existence. You're just perceiving a holographic image, dancing pixels and lights.
When you take off the VR goggle, you think that you are already in the real world now and everything is solid, but in actuality of direct experience, at least when you realize your true nature, when you take off the VR goggle, you're actually still perceiving a virtual reality, the virtuality of the mind, you can call it that. And when I look at the computer screen right now, there's no distance between me and the screen. So the air between objects or the gaps between objects is as full as the object themselves.
So you can say that all the objects, all the quote unquote material objects that are perceived in the quote unquote external world are holograms. Or you can say that the distance or the space between all those objects are full. So that's another way to perceive emptiness in a more perceptual way as a direct experience is that everything is full and empty simultaneously because if something is completely empty, those are completely full. So that's why a lot of spiritual traditions focuses on love and compassion because
Emptiness and love are two sides of the same coin. If you are a conical complete empty, you're also a complete fool and you're able to express love. So that's another way to look at emptiness. And I think the most important thing to know about emptiness is that emptiness and form are identical. Emptiness is form and form is emptiness. Or in other words, look at it as samsara is no other than nirvana. That's another way to perceive emptiness. Another way to perceive emptiness, and this is probably the last one that I go into,
is what Adyashante calls the dark light of the absolute. So that's how he describes the true nature. It's like emptiness is kind of like the merging of a singularity which has no size, no dimensions and no locations with boundless and infinite consciousness. So you know how a lot of spiritual mumbo jumbo say you're everything and nothing and that's what they're talking about. So in my direct experience,
It's really hard to describe, but if I can describe it using that, under that context of the dark light of the absolute, it feels like something that's extremely dark, but also extremely bright. Something that is everything, but it's all nothing. So it feels like you're a singularity, that's small, quote-unquote smaller than the size of an atom, which that's just a metaphor because it doesn't have a location, it's not even a point.
So is this continuous awareness required for one to be awakened? Oh, it depends on who you talk to actually. If you talk to the Buddhist school, they'll actually tell you that
The continuation of consciousness is actually just another ground that you could get attached to. Like I've seen a lot of people that are on the spiritual path and before... Okay, here's how I describe the entire spiritual path in one sentence. It's to dissolve every single speck of solidity in your body-mind.
So basically the only reason why you're not abiding or recognizing your true nature, which is again, it's this infinite boundless space that's aware, is because of the separation between you and the environment. So the whole spiritual path is about dissolving that solidity and that solidity some people call it conditioning, some people call it the ego mind.
Some people call it your shadow. So basically, it's just like everything that you are accumulating throughout your whole life, like lenses of perception, as some people call it, that are sort of laced or filtered on top of true nature, which is again, it's boundless. So the process is a little bit like Michelangelo tripping away a marble and revealing a form underneath. But in this case, the form is formlessness.
So if you talk to a Buddhist, they'll tell you that everything, including awareness itself, is empty. It doesn't have any here in existence. It's not a thing. It's not something that you can attach your identity to.
And if you look at the Buddhist meditation, especially the Theravada tradition, Vipassana meditation, the highest meditative attainment, which is what I call the gold medal of Olympic contemplation, the gold medal level of contemplative fitness is sort of this attainment called ascensation or fruition or nirvana. So in that case, the highest attainment in meditation is actually
unconsciousness because what the Buddha means when he says nibbana is actually translated to a blowout or lights out so when you reach that state of the stateless state your entire universe disappears and then reappears again so you sort of blink out of existence for a bit and you come back so in that moment not even consciousness exists not even awareness exists and you sort of use that
as an insight to see how your entire reality or the entire universe is constructed.
the clinical highest attainment even though I don't even look at it as something special anymore but then before I was like wow this is like you know the highest attainment in meditation and I attained it and there was still a little bit of ego there that was attached to that non-experienced experience. So the insight is that
When you go into a cessation and you come back from it, when you blink out of existence and then reappear again, it's sort of like a reset button on your computer. It does two things. Number one, you see particle by particle how your entire reality, your perception, your cognition, your body, this whole field of experience,
is constructed moment to moment to moment. So that gives you the insight of how everything is a mental fabrication. And that's another way to receive emptiness is that everything is a mental construct, which means that nothing has inherent existence. Right. So another thing I does is for some reason that I don't know about, because I guess I think people are still doing like science behind this, but like, you know, people have had cessations for like hundreds and thousands of years, but, um,
More recently, some of my favorite teachers that talk about how to attain this realization actually are scanning their brains to see what's going on in the brain when they have a cessation.
So what happens during a cessation as a matter of direct experience is that, for some reason, a cessation just shifts your consciousness to another level, like your baseline consciousness. You see people take psychedelics or even have a lot of crazy mystery experiences, but then after the experience, they just contract back to their original state before they had the experience. That happens all the time.
But for some reason after a cessation, now there are macro and micro cessation, there are like huge cessation in this moment, a big cessation for some reason just perpetuate your mind or your consciousness into another reality or I shouldn't say another reality but you know another level in terms of your baseline consciousness.
This reminds me of the transmutation of a drunkard into a sage.
Is there an objective or an end goal to the evolution of consciousness? End goal of the evolution of consciousness? Well, first of all, you realize really consciousness has no levels because you can't get more infinite than infinite. But the reason why it seems like consciousness has a level and it seems like that consciousness evolves is because your mind
interpreted that way. So consciousness only has level from the perspective of the dreamscape, from the perspective of the mind. So when you're still going through the process of dissolving your solidity and deconstructing the separate self or the dream self, it does feel like you are evolving in terms of levels. And I did that for a while and for a while I was like, holy shit, I'm making consciousness games. Like I'm getting more aware. I'm becoming more conscious.
But then ultimately I realized that consciousness has no levels. Only the dream has levels. Or you can say that consciousness includes and transcends all levels in the dream state. Again, when I talk about these things, it's always neither and both. It's always because the ultimate, the absolute, and the relative are one.
So it depends on which perspective you're taking. If you're taking on the conventional level, yeah, consciousness has levels, you know, in accordance to the mind, relative to the mind. But from the absolute perspective of consciousness itself, consciousness doesn't have any levels. But since the absolute relative of the Buddha mind and the everyday mind are one, which is that, that is really the ultimate realization, then it's always both and neither.
So a question that many people are likely thinking is why would a God consciousness, assuming that our true nature is more than we are now, fragment itself into individualized personalities that we seem to be? Why would that happen? Well, first of all, I don't know if there is a single entity of consciousness. I mean, I have experiences like that where I was for sure convinced that there is one single entity of consciousness, but I'm agnostic about that right now. So again, going back to the both and neither, my stance is that you are neither the many nor the one.
There could be. Okay, let's just take that stand that there is a unified consciousness. This is one being.
Like, let's just call that the universe, just to be a little more less confusing. Okay, there is this universe. Why would this universe, which is even as a matter of direct experience, you can experience how everything is just made up of one substance, you know, the sort of the unified field of zero, the way I call it. The emptiness is just one substance, just how physicists say, you know, when you divide atoms, you go down to the subatomic particles, it's just empty space and everything is just a vibration of that space.
So matter is an energy kind of thing. The hardness of solidity of matter is only the different intensity and vibration of the empty space and empty space itself without the sort of the congealed version of it would be like matter. If you don't congeal it would be like empty space. But anyway, well, because the absolute, the unity,
also codependent arise with form. So emptiness and form, again going back to the inside, the emptiness and form are identical. So all the forms and appearances and the multiplicities and the manys and the divisions that you see cannot actually exist without the unity. And the unity cannot actually exist without the separations because they're codependent arising. So they kind of need each other
You can look at it in terms of evolution, about how each organism sort of needs to feel separate in order to survive. But then even though the ultimate nature of reality is oneness. So within this oneness there is a multiplicity of rights. So you can't have one without the other, is what I'm saying. So on one level it doesn't evolve, and on another level it does.
And I do think that if you want to talk about the evolution of consciousness, I do think that there is sort of this intention like this, let's just call it the universal intention or the cosmic intention for consciousness to wake up to itself. So there seemed to be some kind of a progression there on that level where consciousness just wants to recognize itself because it is itself. It's kind of like, you know how people like to get drunk and
So I think everything that we do is to feel whole, is to return to the source. But then we can't return to the source unless we feel separate first, even though they're actually ultimately the same thing. So it's almost like God is playing hide and seek with itself.
In order for God to realize itself, it sort of have to, you know, separate itself out of this cosmic joke to go through this process of returning to itself. Even though on the ultimate level, again, there is no duality. Everything is already one. This must be, well, depending on how you look at it, comforting or discomforting to the materialist that in an infinite amount of time, their decisions, they'll come to exist again, make those same decisions, essentially be given a second chance, a third or fourth.
Yeah, I think that's the whole process. It's like you wake up and then you wake down. So this whole process of awakening, it's all about waking up and then integrating emptiness and integrating the godmai or infinity back into the finite so that you see no distinction between the infinite and the finite, the divine and the mundane. That's true non-duality. So recognizing emptiness, which is what 99% of the spiritual teachings talk about, which is the waking up part, is only half of the game.
The other half of the game is called integration. How do you, after recognizing that everything is empty, put it back into the form? After recognizing that everything is a mental fabrication, how do you refabricate that into a form? It's almost like going back to the ground zero that gives rise to all the programs and then
Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and
So then what is it that science gives to us, affords us, what is value?
I think we're starting to understand what goes on in the brain through this process of awakening and meditation. So we're getting closer to it. But at the end of the day though, like as a matter of a direct experience, like people have discovered this truth from the matter of a direct experience that the true nature of experience, the true nature of the mind for thousands of years and that insight hasn't changed. Anyone who goes through the spiritual path would receive the same insight. So that
speaks to a fundamental law of mind or even the law of reality because, you know, the mind is part of reality. And if you look at modern physics, a lot of things that the modern physicists are saying, such as the observance effect, you know, Schrodinger's cat or string theories, it actually fits very well with what the contemplative traditions have discovered. Like they're like just two sides of the same coin. So like sometimes I call this path, this meditative path,
What are the grounds and paths and what's the difference between concentration and contemplation?
Okay, I'll give you an overview of this spiritual path. Well basically like I said earlier, the whole spiritual path is about dissolving every speck of solidity you experience in your body-mind. From solid form to liquid to smoke and then to air. So that's pretty much the whole spiritual path. But how do you do that? How do you turn everything into a hologram?
Well, you can do it in a few different techniques, but I like to make it simple. I like to just condense them into two categories of practice. One is expansion and then one is contraction. So that's sort of answer your questions about the difference between concentration and awareness. So if you use the Vipassana technique, which is your basic mindfulness, you are sort of contracting awareness.
which is boundless, without any borders or boundaries, and is still and is just always there. You contract that awareness, which is your true nature, into a point of concentration. So when you watch the breath from a meditator inside the head, you are doing concentration work. So what you're doing is you are using attention to deconstruct the object of meditation.
And the object of meditation could be the breath, that's what most people start out with, or it could be the body, you know, you do body scanning, you'd be going to a 10-day Goenka retreat, or it could be a mantra even, or it could be, I don't know, the statue of a Buddha. So basically you pick an object of meditation, and then you contract awareness to a single point of concentration, and you just investigate into the nature of that object.
So that's your basic mindfulness or vipassana. So the reason to do that is because, oh well, first of all, the ultimate goal is to discover the nature of experience, right? So you're using the object of meditation as this anchor or this tool to see what the fuck it is. So you investigate into the nature of the object of meditation.
And if you go deeper and deeper and deeper, as your concentration power becomes stronger and more powerful, you go deeper into the true nature of that object of meditation. So, for example, the breath. At first, if you talk to a person who has never meditated, what the breath is, they'll tell you, oh, the breath is the breath. For them, it's completely conceptual. They might have an image in the head of them breathing, or they're like, okay, the breath. And you go a little deeper. Okay, the breath is actually made up of what?
Inhale and exhale. Okay, now you go a little deeper into the experience. And then you go deeper and deeper and deeper into the breath, you realize that there's no such thing as the breath at all. They're just made up of infinite numbers of particles that are constantly arising and passing away. And that there is no solid entity in that experience.
You can apply that insight to the body as well. You know, if you use the body as an object of meditation, if you look really deeply into the nature of what the body is, you realize that as a matter of direct experience, you don't actually have a body. The body is just made up of clouds of sensations that again constantly arise and then pass away, morphing, undulating, fluctuating. There is no hand, there's no head, there is no feet, there is no chest as a matter of direct experience, except for dancing, vibration,
So that is how you get to the true nature of experience through this what I call the dual mindfulness. The reason why it's called dual mindfulness is because there is still a duality there, at least if you still go through the process.
There is still a duality, a separation between the meditator and the meditator, between the subject and the object. And that is the thing that you're trying to deconstruct and dissolve, to reach non-duality, to reach oneness. There cannot be any separation between the subject and the object, between you and the world, between the object of meditation and the meditator. But if you do Vipassana, you are going to start out with the meditator, meditating on the object of meditation.
But if you take this all the way, the more you dissolve the object of meditation, the more you dissolve the meditator as well. It's kind of like, you know, when a cat is like taking apart a yarn ball. When a cat is ripping apart and taking apart the yarn ball, the cat, which is also made of the yarn ball, is taken apart as well. That's pretty much the whole process if you go down the Vipassana path. So another way to describe it is like you kind of zoom your experience or zoom your identity, you know, into
the smallest component of experience. And then you go inside the atom and discover that, well, it's just a matter of empty space. The two most important insights are impermanence and no-self. So among these dancing sensations, amongst the flow of sensations that are constantly arising and passing away, you can't find a self in there. So that's the contraction method. And the other method is the expansion method, which is what Zen Buddhist calls riding the ox backward.
So basically, when you first start meditating, obviously you still have a very solidified center. You still have a very solidified body-mind.
In Zen Buddhist or in like the Dzogchen tradition, they ask you to just sit. You just sit and don't apply any techniques. Don't even contract your awareness to attention. You just sit there. So what happens when you sit there is that if you just sit there for long enough, all the body's conditioning will start to dissolve. So you kind of like fake it until you make it kind of thing, right? So you kind of, even though the boundless awareness hasn't completely opened up, you try to like expand the mind as vast as you can, right? So you try to abide in this infinite space.
as much as you can. And then whatever conditionings in the body mind that arise will be sucked into that space.
So that's the expansion part of the equation. So one is relaxation. The expansion part is the relaxation, the serenity, the letting go. And the other contraction is, you know, you use an effort to concentrate on the specific object of meditation. So you're just kind of drilling the mountain from both ends. But if you only do Vipassana, you are going to end up in the vast entry space. And if you only do the do-nothing meditation,
You are going to start doing Vipassana as well, because if you just sit there and do nothing, like I said, all the tensions in your body, all the solidities and traumas and conditionings, they will be released. So one is you're letting God dissolve you, and the other is using the meditator as an anchor to dissolve you, but you actually end up in the same spot. So the only technique of the do-nothing meditation is letting go of any constrictions, grasping or contractions,
and resistance to the body mind. The exact same way that you release a fist after holding on to it really tight. So it's not really a doing, it's a practice of non-doing, letting go. So anytime you feel a sensation, and when I say sensations,
What I mean is everything from sight, sound, the body, emotion, thoughts, any kind of sensations that are congealing, you simply let it go the same way that a dog is biting onto a ball really tight, and then you're just letting it go. Letting go of the ball. What Michael Taft calls dropping the ball. So to do nothing meditation, you can actually also do Vipassana from the perspective of the open awareness. You can investigate into the emptiness of phenomena from the perspective of the Godhead. Godhead Vipassana in itself.
It's called Vipassana or non-dual Vipassana. So the difference between the do-nothing meditation and Vipassana is only the degree of effort and the contraction versus the expansion. So the more you can contract, the more you can expand and vice versa because the mind is like a rubber band. So reaching the cessation is taking Vipassana to the max effort degree until you reach the singularity. And then you flip yourself inside out to total expansion.
And the pitfall of do-nothing meditation is that there can be very subtle and microscopic sensations that are congealed that you're not aware of because you lack the concentration power to detect them. That's why even in Dzogchen, which is pretty much the highest teaching in Dzogchen, is the do-nothing meditation. They ask you to do years of preliminary practices where you're just kind of doing mindfulness and vipassana.
And also people who do a lot of developing meditation, they can create an identity out of awareness itself. Where in Vipassana, you can clearly see that even consciousness is part of this arising and passing away. And consciousness is also part of this process of codependent arising. It's not a separate substrate apart from that which is conscious of. And the pitfall of Vipassana is that you can easily get attached
to the stages of insights and create more resistance through that or the meditator. And again, when I say insight, it's not a conceptual or theoretical thing. It's a direct scene of what's really going on in your experience. I know a lot of what I'm saying here sounds paradoxical and probably nonsensical to the mind because you can't grasp any of this with the intellect. So the less you conceptualize and theorize about reality, actually the paradoxes
The more in one with reality you are, because reality itself is not going to question or theorize about itself, because it is itself. So the theory of everything of the mind is the perfect merging of expansion and contraction, both in practice and in direct experience. So you're merging the Vipassana empty school of Buddhism with the non-duality school, the open awareness school, or the Zen tradition. So it's the perfect merging of effort versus effortlessness.
You're trying to find that balance. That's what meditation is. You're trying to find that middle way. Buddha's first teaching is the middle way. The middle way between expansion and contraction, which also means the simultaneously of both and the transcendence of both.
When that happens, in a sense, there's no more expansion and contraction. That's where true equanimity lies. So this also transcends the debate about whether consciousness is permanent or not. Because unconsciousness gives rise to and is codependent arising through superconsciousness. So it's both. So that also transcends the duality between life and death. The existence and non-existence. So you're kind of totally dead, but that's why there's only life.
Do you have a daily ritual? Do you have some methods?
Once you recognize emptiness, then that's it. Once you lose the center of experience, it never comes back again, ever. So once that's done, there's no more to be done in terms of the passionate for me. So what I do now is, even after the center is dissolved, there can still be some really deep conditionings that are left in the very deep part of your body. And then that usually takes seven to ten years to dissolve.
to completely dissolve. Some teachers say it doesn't completely dissolve. For the rest of your life, you're going to be integrating this insight because life just goes on. Because life is conditionings, right? So what I do now is I just sit there and do nothing and then just let awareness sort of clean up whatever remainder of the solidities, the remainder of the condition that are still there. So that's the integration part. They like to say you first wake up and then clean up and grow up.
So the cleanup part is pretty much the integration part. So another really common technique that people use is kind of like a contemplation path. It's called self-inquiry. So self-inquiry is also called the 90-90 method. So 90-90-90 means not this, not this, not that, not that. So anything that arises in your direct experience, you just label it in a visceral way. You kind of have to feel it out, not just intellectually, that this is not me, this is not self.
90, 90, 90. Not this, not that. So it's very easy in the beginning when you just perceive a cup and you're like, oh, this is not me. It's easy, right? But then you start to know sensations too. The sound, sound is rising, not this. The visual field is rising, not that. When you get to the mind, it gets a little tricky. Can you perceive thought? Can you look at the thought of yourself? If you can look at it, if you can perceive it or experience it, it's not this, not that.
So it's just kind of peeling away the layers of the onion. And then when you go down to the very deep end of it, you start to perceive even the witness. Can you witness the witness? If you can witness the witness, the witness is also not self. Can you perceive perception itself? Perception is also not self. Can you be aware of awareness? Can you be conscious of consciousness? Can you perceive even God consciousness? If so,
If you have an experience of God-consciousness, then it's still something that's arising in the experience. Then you simply objectify that as well. Say, oh, that's not me, that's self. So you kind of objectify everything in your direct experience until the subject vanishes. You turn everything into an object, right? So once you turn everything in your direct experience, including this whole field of consciousness into an object, then where's the subject? It disappeared into it.
So one way to look at it is that there's only the object, there's only the world and there's no self. And another way to look at it is that there's only the subject, always self, there's no object. So that's another way to merge the true self and the no self school, right? You know, they lead to duality between subject and object. Okay, so I'm sure Westerners get wrong plenty about imagination and how this may lead to quote unquote manifestation. Most people, at least in the West, believing that it's a fantasy of a kind. The way I look at manifestation is
Just let the universe or just let your experience unfold without a doer. So if you just let nature unfold without a doer, pretty much every single moment is manifestation. That's how I look at manifestation. Meditation to me is not communicating with higher power. It's not visualizing some things that you want and then getting it because when you realize emptiness, you don't want anything anymore because everything is full. So there's nothing that I want in terms of like manifestation, but then every moment is manifestation.
So like the way I experience reality is like it's kind of like just the universe giving birth to itself moment to moment to moment. That's the ultimate manifestation. Yeah, that's how I look at manifestation. Because I don't know how to answer that question because I don't really manifest things because I don't need I don't feel like I need to like there's nothing that I want to manifest. It seems like everything that is happening, whether imperfection or perfection is just the way it is.
In my direct experience, there's no such thing as imperfection. Even the quote-unquote imperfection is perceived to be perfect. That's going back to how form and entities are identical. Even solidity is perceived to be air. Going back to the process of dissolving yourself from solid object to liquid, to smoke, to air, what is a hologram? The hologram is
Pretty much emptiness and form combined, right? You see an object, but then it's actually holographic. And so are emotions. The way I experience emotions and perceptions and objects and entities are all holographic. Even when I perceive a rock, it feels like I can just penetrate through it. It feels like I'm just perceiving something that doesn't have any inherent existence, that is just an image. So for me, there's no difference between imagination and reality.
Okay, so the rebuttal is that the real world has more solidity. Yeah. Oh yes, that's just a level and a degree of solidity. But it's made out of the same stuff.
Like dreams are a less solidified version of clinical reality. So when you are walking around the waking world, things are more solid. When you go to sleep, things are more liquidy.
So the reason why when you take psychedelics, things start to breathe and start to morph and color start to change is because at that moment when you take the psychedelic, your brain or your mind is becoming more malleable. You're dissolving the mind. That's why people get glimpses of their true nature on psychedelics because when you take a psychedelic drugs, it dissolves your senses of perception and it dissolves the solidity in your experience very quickly. But then if you dissolve them very quickly, they also come back and contract back into form very quickly.
But through meditation, you go through years and years of this rewind the brain into like locking that inside of realization into a permanent state. Tell us about any states of bliss or negative entities that you've encountered. OK, so I've experienced a lot of crazy shit like on my journey. I would say when I was going through the unfoldings, I was experiencing mystical experiences that are just as powerful, if not more powerful than like my DMT trip.
Like I remember the shift into non-duality, like my first thought was this is like as powerful as my 5Mio DMT trip. But now it's my direct perception, now it's my direct experience, but now it's completely ordinary to me now. So the only reason why you think your 5Mio experience, which is, you know, non-duality or boundless space, or just having a glimpse of your true nature is because it's only insane or it's only a profound experience, again, relative to the ego mind.
So any kind of spiritual experiences or mystical state that you have is the byproduct and the side effect of the dissolution of your conditioning. And that's what a lot of people in the spiritual circle get around is that they think that mystery experiences are the thing that they're supposed to be looking for. Mystery experiences are really nice, you know, I've had experiences of like going to other dimensions, entities, past lives, again, just
The experiences that are just as powerful as psychedelic trips. But then now they're all transcended, in a sense, because there is not much conditional left in this body-mind. So, psychedelic experiences, most of it, and mystical experiences, you know, even entities visiting me and things like that, they're just a byproduct of my subconscious mind getting burned off. Once that dream is unfolded, there's not going to be much of those experiences anymore. What you get is just the is-ness.
Because the entities and other dimensions and physical experiences still presupposes form. It's just the content that are arising in this vast context of even a consciousness. Okay, Frank, what are UFOs?
I mean, if I see a UFO right now, I'll be like, oh, that's really cool. Like, we have aliens. But then I wouldn't perceive it to be fundamentally any different than perceiving anything else. Like, it wouldn't shock, it wouldn't like, my fuck me. Yeah, because once you see through the nature of my experience and how everything is pretty much made of the same kind of metal fabric, everything is pretty much the same. But then that's where the beauty is also, because then you stop
even the distinction between things seem to be empty, and that's where I think compassion comes from. But of course you can still enjoy the multiplicity of forms, you can still enjoy the difference between a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, you can still have a preference over form, but you know ultimately there's no distinction. And I think this realization actually makes that
The more you realize how everything is homogeneous, the more you can appreciate the multiplicities. You can say to me in my direct experience, everything is God.
You're never apart from God. You can never get closer or further away from the source. And when a Buddha talks about emptiness, he's talking about God as well. So it depends on what tradition you're coming from, your culture, your context, how you like to use your words. Like I said earlier, the way I describe the natural state is I can use God to describe it.
What is the dark night of the soul and depersonalization? The dark night of the soul is pretty much the process of contraction on the spiritual path.
So going back to the cycling of contraction and expansion, see, everything in the universe is contracting and expanding, right? You know, when you go to sleep, when you wake up in the morning, day and night, the seasons, or even when you do weight lifting, you're bulking, cutting, and you're breathing, you're inhaling and exhales, life and death, you know, getting on with a girl, breaking up with her,
Since your channel is called Theory of Everything, I'll say the theory of everything, if I can describe it in one sentence, is this process of contraction and expansion.
So when you go through a spiritual path, when you start to meditate and when you start to pierce through the veil of illusion and get into the emptiness of things, each time you have an opening, each time you pierce through the veil of illusion and get an opening into the true nature, the boundless space of true nature, some of your subconscious and your traumas and conditionings, whatever is separating you from this vast space,
Another way to look at dark night of the soul is the process of the dissolution of the ego.
So if you look at ego as sort of like a program or a matrix, when it gets attacked, when you start doing some meditation practice and you start seeing through it out, the ego is not what you really are, when that program is undergoing attack, it's going to cling on to itself harder. Because, you know, like any other program, if you get attacked by a virus, it's going to do everything it's power to survive. So that process can be extremely uncomfortable. So a lot of people, they meditate and meditate, oh, everything's great, but then suddenly they go into this state of depersonalization.
where they have a glimpse of their true nature, the emptiness of things, but then the other half of them, they have one foot in the emptiness, another foot still in the world. They have one foot in the vast spaciousness, in the groundless ground, and then they still have another foot in the ground. So they're still trying to hold on to the ground, they're still trying to hold on to their ego-identity, while at the same time having some kind of glimpses into the infinite nature of reality.
So that's where the dark night of the soul comes from. It's when you expand and then you contract back again, you feel very uncomfortable. It's kind of like a withdrawal from a really good psychedelic trip or a bad trip or something like that.
It's like once you experience God in divinity, now you get to experience hell until you transcend them both. Because they cannot exist without the other. People talk about experiences of love, experiences of God, all those great mystical explosions. Oh, my consciousness exploded through the universe. That's fucking great. Now I feel like a god. But then the other side of that coin is the contraction. You can't have expansion without contraction. That's a loss of nature.
This has been brought up plenty and he's been interviewed before, Leo Gura. Where do you feel like you comport and where do you feel like you disagree?
I haven't watched his videos in a while actually. I used to watch his videos when he talks about like how to do self-inquiry and things like that. I found him to be very useful until, I don't know, about three or four years ago. I just haven't really watched a lot of his videos. Yeah. But from what I know, Leo Garad talks a lot about the God consciousness thing, right? Yeah, so
In my stages of awakening, I like to categorize, even though ultimately there's no levels to this thing, but then through the process, I have five stages of awakening. The first stage is the ego phase. That's when your identification is with the ego mind. That's pretty much everybody if they haven't discovered that they're not the ego. So once you discover that you're not the ego,
The ego started to dissolve. The solidity of the body might start to dissolve. And you open up the space of awareness more. And now you can abide in the witness. That's the second phase, what I call the witness phase, the witness consciousness. So that's when you identify with being this witness. Now that's meditation like one on one. When you first start to read the power of now, I could totally ask you to like, you know, be aware of your thoughts. You're not your thoughts. Now you are the witness of your thoughts. Just shifting your identity from the ego to the witness. But the witness is actually just a solid version of the ego.
Because by the witness phase, you still have a lot of solidity. You have a little bit of space, but still a lot of solidity. And then you keep dissolving that center point. You keep dissolving the solidity of the body mind. And the space opens up more. And then now you enter the third phase, the third stage, what I call God consciousness, or infinity, or being. That's the everythingness phase. Now you experience everything to be you. But at this point, even though the solidity in the center is still not completely dissolved, it's very thin now. It's very subtle. It's very tiny.
So when the solidity in the body-mind becomes very tiny, the space opens up even more. So what happens during that phase is a lot of people, they will cling on to that vast spaciousness and attribute their identity to everythingness. So that's why a lot of people started to say they're God or that I am everything, I am infinite consciousness, which I went to the same phase myself. And then I think it's at this phase that a lot of people attribute their experiences to the nature of reality.
Yeah, okay. Now, because the rest of the solidity or the rest of the ego is still somewhere in your field of experience, even though now it's very tiny, it's still going to take credit or cling on to this vast spaciousness or any kind of spiritual insights or experience that you have and make it into a thing, ratify it and objectify it.
Theoretize some kind of theory into a nature of reality. Because this vast space is so prominent. It's like the only thing to be real for you at this point. But even at that stage, there's more to go. You continue the dissolution, now you enter the nothingness phase. This is what I call the emptiness phase. So now your identity is shrinked down to almost like an atom now. But then there's still a little bit of you that's trying to cling on to emptiness.
So each stage you have a ground. So the point is to use one ground to dissolve the previous ground until all ground dissolved and you become the groundless ground and it's just fully falling. And then the fifth stage is what I call the natural state. So the natural state is the complete merging and the transcendence of all the previous four stages. So I'm not suppressing any stages or I'm not saying any stages are wrong. I'm just saying that you can get stuck in one of those stages.
And then the final realization is actually the merging and the transcendence of all the stages. So some traditions focus on one stage more than the others. For example, if you talk to the Hinduism school, like the non-duality school, they focus on the infinite space more than the Buddhists.
Even though if you take just one stage and max it out, you are going to have the same insight. If you take everything in this phase and max it out, you are going to reach the same spot as the emptiness phase in stage four. And the buddhas tend to focus more on the emptiness phase. So that's why you get a lot of debate over the course of history about the neo-avaita school versus the buddhism school. The buddhism school would be like
Oh, the Neo-Avada people didn't go deep enough. They haven't realized that also Brahman is also empty. Brahman is also just another fabrication. That Brahman is also just another ground, right? And the Brahman school or the Hindu school will be like, oh, the Buddhas, they haven't realized the infinite space of consciousness, right? But then I actually think that the natural state is sort of like the merging of those two stages or even the stages before that.
So in a sense that I described the natural state is kind of like the permanent merging of a permanent cessation and infinite consciousness. So you're taking two schools, both Buddhism, the Nathana school and the Hindu school, the God consciousness school, the awareness school, and then you merge them together.
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So should people practice Tantra without protections, such as the empowerments of Heruka and Shakyamuni?
I'm not sure what they are, but I know a little bit about the Tantric school versus the Sutta school. The Tantra school focuses more on the form side of things.
And even the, I think the Vajrayana or the Dzogchen school, they focus more on the ground, like they focus more on the awareness part of it. And Buddhists focus more on just seeing through the emptiness of everything. Buddhists are trying to attack things from just, from the pure emptiness perspective and the Dzogchen Vajrayana school are going from the form. They're going from form to emptiness in a sense. And the Buddhists are going from emptiness to form. But again, they're actually talking about the same thing, just like the
The Hindus and the Neelvaita and the Dzogchen people talk about the true self. And Buddhism talks about no self. But no self is true self. Because when you shrink down to nothing, you're also everything kind of thing. So that's why all the stages are valid. It's just like some schools tend to focus their techniques on what specific
more on one specific stage than the others, because you kind of have to. If you're a tradition, you kind of have to build your practice around at least some aspects, one aspect of awakening over another. But at the end, it's all the same thing to me.
To me, Tandra is just the taking the emptiness and then putting it back into form. So the reason why people associate Tandra with sex, I guess a lot of people do it, I did. When you talk about Tandra, you're like, oh, it's just like a sexual unit, right? So the reason why sex is such a big thing in Tandra is because
When you actually recognize the emptiness, well, you're supposed to practice Tantra only after awakening, only after recognizing emptiness. So after recognizing emptiness, you kind of go back into the world and engage in activities that would otherwise trigger you before. So sex, for example, sex and love are like relationship stuff. It's like the biggest trigger for most people because the deepest conditioning for most humans.
is sex and love because we're here to reproduce as biological organisms. So if you can abide in the vast illness, if you can hold the view, if you can still abide in the panoramic awareness during sex instead of contracting to just your fucking dick, then maybe your realization is legit. So is it safe to, I guess you can practice, you can do any kind of practicing at any stages. It's just a degree of intensity.
Then, what is your relationship to sex? Do you fight it intrusive? To your path? To your path of enlightenment?
I used to. I used to be a sex addict. I used to be like fabbing like five times a day. And actually, one of the reasons why I got into meditation 10 years ago is because my sex drive was so high and it was interfering with my life. I wanted to use meditation to kind of make my sex drive a little bit lower. Well, to me, sex is a catharsis, right? Again, going back to expansion and contraction, like the only reason why we want to have an orgasm
Other than to feel unity, I guess that's the same thing, is to feel expended, to feel unified with another person. So in a sense, without that contraction, sex plays a very different role after realization.
Because I guess you could say awakening or truth realization is the ultimate catharsis. Because you're so relaxed and your being is so vast and spacious and balanced that you don't need to contract and then expand again in a sense.
I like to call this day that I'm in right now, just the universe fucking itself 24x7. So when the universe is fucking itself 24x7, because it just feels like without solidities in the body-mind, without the center that's filtering experience, experience is experiencing itself without the experiencer. When that happens, it just feels like every moment is penetrating itself.
So when every moment is penetrating itself, the role of sex becomes something that isn't a necessity anymore. Like before, at least for me, because I was such a huge sex addict, before I couldn't live without sex, I was like, you know, if I could choose between living the rest of life, not having sex or dying right now, I'd probably choose dying right now.
So sex was like survival for me, right? But then nowadays it's like, well, it's cool to have sex, but then if I don't have it, I don't think about it. Yeah, it's kind of like the preference over water or Diet Coke. You can still have preference sometimes for Diet Coke, but then you can quench your thirst with water. It's not a necessity anymore.
Alright man, getting back to this daily routine, what's your workout routine? My workout routine right now is I just do whatever at the gym. I used to work out a lot. That's actually why I got into spirituality as well, because I wanted to upgrade myself. It's not like self-improvement or stuff like that. The little did I realize, the ultimate self-improvement is self-destruction.
So in a way fitness is kind of like self-destruction too. Let's take the example of fitness since we're talking about fitness. So the reason why I wanted to work out is because I wanted to feel connected to other humans. So I wanted to grow bigger muscles and get stronger because I wanted to connect with other humans because I wanted to upgrade myself. I wanted to upgrade myself so I can connect with other humans.
So that's why I got into spirituality. Another reason. So there's two reasons why I got into meditation. One is to reduce my sex drive. Another is to upgrade my brain. So I went through this whole fitness phase where I was super identified with the body.
All I wanted to do was jump high around faster and build bigger muscles so I could just be superhuman. And I was like, okay, if you want to be superhuman, you can exclude the mind. You have to upgrade your consciousness too. You have to upgrade your brain. So I started to read a lot of philosophy and all kinds of stuff and get into
You know, especially the philosophy of the mind. And then after getting to philosophy of the mind, I started to get into psychedelics. After psychedelics, I was like, maybe there is a way to permanently kind of access those kind of higher mystical states of consciousness without psychedelics. So I got into meditation. So as a part of this process of self development, I started to meditate.
And kind of like how you wanted to get bigger muscles when you work out in meditation, you're expending yourself, right? You keep expanding yourself until you become everything. But then again, going back to the process of expansion and contraction, if you want to become everything, you have to also become nothing. So self-improvement taken to the extreme level is self-destruction. So you can only truly find the self when you lost the self.
What would be a more superior definition of enlightenment? The definition of enlightenment to me is just recognize what you really are at the deepest level, like what you really are. That's it, just recognize the nature of experience. And the nature of experience doesn't have a solidified entity behind anything. There's no thinker, hearer, observer, doer, seer inside the head. There's no avatar inside the head that's directing your experience. There's no one the driver sees, so to speak.
So in a sense enlightenment is about deconstructing that solidity in the center again going back to the dissolving solidity is to deconstruct that Observer in the head that's looking out to the world and they realize that the universe has always just been perceiving itself without a center All right, Frank. I'm gonna be Frank. You have a rich metaphysics, but on your Instagram and you're like a Greek sculpture How do you reconcile the two is their disconnect?
There used to be a disconnect, but then that was only because I have a fully integrated form with emptiness. Because nothing is excluded, even with realization. Nothing is excluded from infinity.
Everything is okay. Everything is part of it, right? So just because you have a nice physique, it doesn't speak. It doesn't determine your level of realization in a sense. I mean, there was a phase when I was like still like in the no man's land where I haven't integrated the insight, haven't integrated the emptiness insight into form completely yet. And now every time I work out, I feel very contracted up and I hold it. I'm doing this for the ego or like, you know,
This is detrimental to my spiritual process and spiritual progress. But then that's only because the rest of the ego was saying that. The rest of the ego was making a story out of that. Reality itself doesn't make that distinction.
So then how is it that you handle negative emotion?
The way I experience negative emotions is that I don't quantify, I don't experience them as negative nor positive. They're just kind of neutral. When I experience quote unquote negative emotions, they barely arise nowadays, but sometimes if they do arise, experience just like smoke that's like puffing within this vast spaciousness. So any kind of emotion, both positive and negative, because they can't, one cannot exist without the other, all emotions are experienced as like wind blowing through the sky.
Once you become the sky, the wind, it doesn't really affect the sky even though it can be there. The weather can still go through its process of transformation because nature, again, undergoes through the process of expansion and contraction all the time. So you can still have good weathers and bad weathers, but if you're a body in the sky, if you become the sky, which is the nature of mind, you're not affected by the weather, but the weather can still be there. So every sensation is self-liberated.
It's only when you cling on to sensations that you create suffering. So Shijun Yang said suffering is pain times resistance. You can still have quote-unquote negative emotions arise, but then if you don't cling on to them, if you don't identify with them, if you don't resist them, they're not manifested as suffering. Do you believe yourself to be enlightened? I don't know if I want to answer that question.
It depends on your definition of Arhashhip. The most direct definition of Arhashhip, which is the highest level of awakening according to a Theravada map. So I'm only going to talk about this from the Theravada map because we talk about these words like enlightenment,
Especially in enlightenment, different people define it differently. So I'm just going to go with arhatship because it's more contextualized. So the simplest definition of an arhat according to the Buddha is in seeing only the seeing without a seer, in the heard only the hearing without the hear, in the heard only the heard, in the seeing only the seeing.
In the thinking only thinking without the thinker. So basically what he's trying to say is you're a direct experience after you've dissolved the nozzle perception in the center of your head or somewhere in your body. So if you look at it from that perspective then yes because I haven't had a sense of a hearer center or observer or perceiver or a sense of doer in two years. So in my experience every single sensation is just perceiving itself.
I can like drink a bunch of alcohol, I still have no center.
But then again, sometimes conditions can still arise, but then again, they're perceived to be without a location. They're just kind of like, again, wind blowing in the sky. Like, where is the wind in the sky? Is it in a certain location? You can't find it. Like, there's a sense of unlocatability and a sense of ungraspability. You can't grasp it. It's there, but you can't grasp it. It's kind of like the rainbow, you know? The rainbow is there, but not there, right? That's how I perceive things.
What occurs after death? What happens? I don't know. I don't really think about death. Well, in a sense, I don't know, the whole notion of life versus death doesn't make sense that much to me anymore because you kind of transcend the duality between existence and non-existence. You realize they're just concepts.
How do you see the universe? Do you think about how it's all structured and where are places within it?
Like I said earlier, when you're undergoing through this process, when you direct the experience, you're walking around waking life experiences dramatically altered, you start to formulate all kinds of theories about the universe. But then most of that is still just a projection of your ego. Are psychedelics then a useful tool for reaching certain states? Sure, yeah. Yeah, psychedelics are great tools.
Psychedelics to me again is just a tool for you to dissolve the slitter in the body mind and again all the special experiences I experienced on psychedelics are no different than the special states and mystical experiences you experience when you're meditating or when you like lucid dreams or when you like have a Kundalini explosion like I went through the space where like my whole chakra opened like every chakra in my body opened up
And then I was obsessed with Kundalini for a while. I was like, holy shit, I had a Kundalini awakening. And I started looking up, you know, just literature about Kundalini, like open up the third eyes. And then I realized that opening up the third eye is only a means to an end. You're opening up the third eye so you can perceive the wisdom eye. And when I say the wisdom eye, what I mean is just emptiness. So what the Kundalini is, is pretty much just the dissolution of all the conditions and the traumas that are stored in your body.
And for some reason all the traumas are restored in very specific places like in your spine, like the chakras. So I experienced all those chakras opening up and at that moment I was like, holy shit, this is like, that's when I realized that you can experience mystical states and states of consciousness that are as powerful as psychedelics just by meditation, just by dissolving the solidity in the body through Vipassana or whatever techniques they use.
So after I went through all that, I realized that there's no distinction at all between psychedelic experiences and like jaunas or like samadhis and any kind of like meditative absorptions. They're just the byproducts and the symptoms and the side effects of that dissolution. So the way I look at commonly explosion is like tripping on your own conditioning. So if you take a lot of psychedelics, if you cling on to those experiences or your ego recontextualizes those experiences, not even in psychedelics, but even in meditation, if your ego clings on to those experiences and make a thing out of them,
The way I look at psychedelic experiences or any kind of mystical experiences or energy stuff kind of leaning like dreams or like going to other adventures, aliens, entities is
Looking at it from the perspective of the two axes of development in terms of the path to awakening. So with awakening, you're going from the surface level of consciousness to the source of consciousness. That's the x-axis of development.
So you're going straight down to the source. If you're a non-dual practitioner, or if you follow the teachings of Ramana Maharshi or Nisargada, that's why it's called the right method. You're going straight to the source. Disregard all the experiences that ever came across on the spiritual path. You realize they're all part of the dream. You go straight to the source. The horizontal axis is your cities and now mystical experiences, energetics,
Most people, when they go down to the source, or at least they try to get down to the source if your goal is awakening, you are going to encounter a lot of energetic stuff, like kind of lenies and, you know, jhanas, mixed-way experiences. So, for most of it, it's zig-zag lying down to the source. So, that's why even I experience a lot of, like, crazy, mixed-way experiences. So, some people, though, they, instead of going down to the source, their experiences are so powerful that they just get sidetracked. So, they're actually just going further away from the source, or at least they just go, they go that way, horizontally.
by indulging in those experiences instead of going downward. But that's okay too because it's cool to be a conscious explorer. You can be a conscious explorer without recognizing the true nature of consciousness. But then, like, if your goal is to go down to the source and realize your true nature, for most people they aren't going to experience those things. But you can just as easily get trapped in those experiences and just go that way, just go horizontally without ever reaching the source. So that's how I contextualize. That's how I contextualize the difference between enlightenment and mystical experiences.
There are several people in the world in the comment section looking for a Kundalini explosion. What advice do you have? Just use the mystical experiences as a tool for investigation, right? So like to get down to the source of consciousness, to penetrate through the emptiness of phenomenons, you can use anything in your experience to do that. Like if you encounter a lot of mystical experiences or, you know, seeing entities, just use them to deconstruct
Phenomenons into emptiness. They see that they are fundamentally the same thing as perceiving a rock or imagining a rock or having a drink or eating ice creams. They are all the same stuff. I think mystical experiences are great. Psychological experiences are wonderful. I think they are kind of like
It's kind of like Buddha would just throw candies at you on the path. Because when you go down to the source of consciousness, for most people, the more mystical experiences you're going to have because the more you're dissolving, the deeper into the nature of reality or the nature of mind you're going. So it's actually for a lot of people, at least for me personally, it's a sign of progress actually. So even though it could be a distraction for a lot of people, it's at the same time a sign of progress for a lot of people.
There are places like shrines and at least ostensibly sacred temples and people meditate in proximity to it. So what role does this proximity play? Are these places indeed sacred?
Not, they don't really play that much of a role. I mean, you can attain the same insight sitting in your bedroom as like the holiest places in the world. Yeah. I mean, you're looking inward to the nature of mind until you flip yourself inside out, right? So you can do that anywhere. And when you do flip yourself inside out, everywhere is the same. Like I used to go on, I used to
I used to go to temples and then just feel like super euphoric and be like, holy shit, this place has super good vibes. Like, oh, I feel like my spiritual muscle just got bigger just by being in this temple. When I see a statue of a Buddha, I would get like goosebumps. But now when I see a statue of a Buddha, I just see a rock, like I just see like empty rock. That is not different than perceiving this water bottle. Yeah, like sitting stillness in my home, just meditating or not meditating, that's not different than like
filming in the city of New York for like 12 hours a day. It's just the same thing. It's the same stillness, same vast spaciousness. So ultimately it doesn't make a difference. But if you're still on the path, you can use that as an anchor. You can use like temples and even basically every single spiritual tools is an anchor. You use one anchor to dissolve another anchor until all anchors dissolve themselves. But then ultimately the entire spiritual paradigm has to be transcended. Like you realize the entire spiritual paradigm
It's just a lot of fabrication. It's just a tool for you to use. Because as I said, use the ladder to climb this mountain and then after you climb to the top of the mountain, you throw away the ladder. You don't need it anymore. Even the Buddha said something similar. The Buddha said even empty, this is empty. What he means is that even the whole Dharma, his whole teaching is empty.
This whole teaching is just a tool fabricated for you to use so that you can realize your true nature. But once you realize your true nature, you realize that the entire paradigm of spirituality is actually no different than any other paradigms, any other programs. It's a program that you use to destroy all other programs, but in and of itself, it's just another program that you have to transcend.
But a lot of people who get into spirituality, they never got through that program of spirituality. Like they would deconstruct and dissolve all the other programs. Now that I'm the spiritual being, you know, and I used to be a sex addict, I used to be in the pick-up program, I used to be in the gym program, I used to be in the artist program, and then I dissolve all that, but now I'm still in the spirituality program. That you're not completely free yet because you're still trapped in spirituality. But then so you have to let that go as well. But most people like can't let go of the last step because the last speck of their ego or identification still need to cling onto something.
Avaguru, what's the importance of it?
The only true guru is yourself. The only true guru is whatever is your direct experience right now. But of course the gurus can be very useful. I mean, I wouldn't get to where I am without looking up about gurus on the internet. Like I don't have a teacher, like direct teacher. I don't have a teacher in real life, but I watch a lot of videos and I read a lot of books. So those were my gurus. Like the internet was my guru. So I think it's definitely important to have, it can be very useful to have a guru.
Okay, so then do you believe in spiritual guides? That I've met in real life or just people that
I don't know. Everybody. Yeah, I see. The thing is, I look at everybody's teacher. Every single person you encounter on the spiritual path, every little thing you encounter on the spiritual path is your teacher. And how does one get swole? How do you get swole? How does somebody get swole? Well, you eat more calories than you burn and you
you progressive overload on your weights. It's actually pretty simple. To get swell is actually pretty simple. You just try to lift more weights, try to lift more reps with the same weight or put more weight on the bar and eat more calories than you burn off. So those calories are going to the muscles. Dude, I don't even know how to get swell anymore because like I don't really like when you asked me the question I was like how do you get swell because it's like
Where do you find the motivation to work out?
Oh, motivation. I think you just got to build the habit. You know, at first go to the gym like once or twice a week. And then once you start to build up the habit, you just rewire your brain. It would be like breathing. That's pretty much what fitness is to me now. It's just like breathing. It's just like going to the bathroom.
It's
20 years
It's the same thing as, you know, trying to get muscle, the same thing as getting better at the violin. It's the same thing as trying to learn a language, try to acquire any skills, right? At first you kind of have to like consciously learn it with your cortex and you have to think about it. And then you let the knowledge sit down into your heart and into your gut until they are sit down to the cellular level. That's why people go into this spiritual path. They have glimpses, but then they contract back. They have it and they lose it. They're like, Oh my God, I'm awakened. And they contract back.
That's kind of like an athlete going through a flow state and then they're losing it or like you play the violin, you know, oh, for this passage, I can play without thinking I'm in a flow state, but then I fuck up again because the knowledge hasn't seeped down into your cellular level. You haven't completely wired the brain yet. So once you rewire the brain, it just becomes like breathing to you. Just like the meditative state. Once you rewire the brain, what used to be like a huge big bang, like, holy fuck, I glimpsed up for five seconds becomes your moment to moment reality.
Let's take a brief digression. What's your favorite piece on the violin? Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. That's my favorite concerto, I think. And also the Brahms. Brahms is awesome, too. Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Dude, his stuff is like, oh my god, I can't even describe it. Talking about especially contracting, he's just like max effort especially contracting happening simultaneously.
You can just clearly see how the two chords better rise. The reason why you feel like an explosion, orgasmic explosion on some of his passages is because he gives you that contraction before that. That's how all good music is. All good music is the process of the expression and contraction. That's how you can apply that to everything. I like Bach too. With all these good four seasons, the classical stuff. But Tchaikovsky's probably my favorite.
Do you gain any insight or motivation spiritually from music? Yeah, we can talk about that as well. I think music and meditation... I mean, I started out as a musician. I started playing the violin when I was five. So that's sort of the core of my being, right? So when I started to get into meditation, I was like, wow, this is just like music. Like, I see another way I describe the natural state is like, it feels like the universe or God is DJing to itself.
It just feels like music everywhere, right? Like whatever high that I used to get from music or play music or hear music, like I get it now just through my direct experience, like moment to moment. This is like everything is just music. Like every single sensation that arises is just like, ah, right? So it's like, like music, I think is one of the best ways to like glimpse the infinity, I think, because it's one of the most abstract art forms. You can't really see it, right?
It's just so abstract. It's just like energy. It's like pure energy. And you can really sense the nodes of music just arising through emptiness and then going back into emptiness. And the silence between the nodes is actually made out of the same thing as the nodes themselves. It's all empty. But then within that emptiness, it vibrates and bursts into form. That's how music works. And you can extend that insight to sight, to taste, to the body.
to anything, to all sense stores. So pretty much meditation is discovering that insight exactly the same way that music works, the insight of expanding and contracting and the vibration of emptiness into form. If you look at string theory, it's like a lot of string theorists will make the metaphor of how the vibration of the string
inside a particle, subatomic particle, it's like music. This vibration, you have an A, this other vibration, you have C, and that's how music is constructed. But ultimately, all music, all notes are the same. It's just different degrees, intensity of expansion, contraction, and vibration. So meditation is tapping into that, like not just hearing music, but like in all your direct experience. So music is great.
Also like music, it's a really good way to perceive the pederabic view of awareness. Because when I tell people that your awareness or your experience is pederamic, I use a lot of 360 videos in my YouTube videos to illustrate that awareness is actually pederamic. And music is actually one of the easiest sense stores to tap into the pederabic nature of awareness.
Because music is just all around, right? So hearing what's behind you and hearing what's in front of you and hearing what's to the left and to the right, it makes no difference. Like from the perspective of sound, there is no distance, there's no directions, there's no locality. So then you can actually expand that into all other sense stores and perceive the nature of experience to be non-local and panoramic.
So like meditating on sound or even meditating on music is one of the easiest way to access the true nature of mind. Just connecting the dots between like all kind of art forms or even like you know physics and just anything that you do. It's funny because once you once you get into non duality you can see any everywhere.
Because it's the true nature of experience and everything is a resonating experience. You can actually just watch a movie and be like, okay, actually every movie talks about undualities somewhere in there, if you really watch it. But not even just that, it's just like everything that you see around you, you can kind of use that as a metaphor for truth realization, which I found really fascinating. But music is definitely one of the most obvious ones.
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Have you heard of remote viewing?
Oh, I mean, I've heard of it. I don't know what it is. Like, what is it? It's essentially people training non-local awareness. I mean, we do more, I think experiences like that. Um, when I was going through the path, uh, experiences when I was experiencing, uh, the world through other people's eyes, I have experiences again, like past lives or like other dimensions where out of body experiences. Yeah. But then, uh, again, they're just content.
That there's just content arising through consciousness, fundamentally no different than anything that isn't really doing. To me, just looking at you through the screen is no different from like astral projection. But then again, they're fun. There are actually a lot of traditions, they focus on that as a means to get to emptiness, like dream yoga, for example, or like practicing lucid dreaming, trying to stay aware during dreams or trying to do vipassana, dream yoga.
Because in those states here, it's a little bit more, uh, less solidified. So in a sense, the insights come easier during dream states or doing like, you know, out of body experiences, which again, I think it's also why when I was going through the pathway, a lot of those experiences is because like my mind was more valuable, more malleable. And then I was doing a lot of insight practices, you know, and my mind was more concentrated. So I was able to like actually those states easier.
But then I mean, I don't really like try to access those states anymore and they don't really come to me as often as they used to just because I don't know why. I guess going back to my theory or according to my experience about how most of those experiences are just a byproduct of the dissolution of solidity in the body mind. Once you're dissolved, those experiences, unless you train them, which you can, like I know Dana Ingram, which he calls himself an Aarha.
and he is an Arhat. He does a lot of fire casino practices where it's pretty much, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's basically working with like what I call magic. So that's his way of putting the emptiness back into the form. So I would say after realization those abilities will come way more easier for you and if you don't train in they probably just won't occur as much.
How would you instruct someone who's a beginner to reach enlightenment and I put those in quotes on purpose and what's the plan? What's the path? Yeah, I think if you, it depends on where your goal is. I mean, I don't
Not everyone wants to attain realization. Some people just want to explore consciousness. That's totally fine. Some people like to play basketball. Some people like to play video games. Some people like to take psychedelics or meditate to attain different states of consciousness. And that's fascinating. I think that's wonderful. But again, like I said, if your goal is truth realization or awakening, that could be a very good tool
But that could also be a distraction. It all depends on how you use them and on context and stuff like that. It's always good and bad. Everything is good and bad. To me, the most magical thing is your direct experience right now, like the is-ness. Just the fact that you're conscious, it is like the magic show. You can't get any more magical than that. Just the fact that every moment is giving birth to itself. Every single moment, like I said earlier, is manifested in itself.
That is already the greatest magic show of all time. How does that even happen? Nobody fucking knows. Right? So like, whatever is arising within this magic show, like the magic show within the magic show, just isn't as mind blowing to me anymore. It's just the fact that I'm experiencing something right now. And I'm having a conversation with you and all this stuff. It's like, it's arising. And then you're all of it and none of it. And it's like, what the fuck? That to me is magic.
Oh yeah, you had a question about enlightenment, right? So I think the best way to answer that question is only enlightenment gets enlightened. It's kind of like the same thing as the magic show, right? It's like there's no one here to get enlightened. Only wakefulness wakes up to itself. That's the most direct answer I can give you about why enlightenment is. Because the ego can never get enlightened. And again, the point is not to
kill the ego. Because you can't kill something that wasn't alive in the first place. It's just to see through its validity. That's another trap that I want the Buddha to know is that you are seeing through the self as empty processes happening. You're not trying to kill the self. Because at the end, you know, this whole spiritual path is just about being your most authentic self. And your most authentic self is empty. And the paradox is to realize no self is to find the self. So a higher self
Self and no-self are actually just the same thing.
I remember when I first started meditating, again, like I said, I was doing it because I had such a strong sex drive. So my friend who already went to a Vipassana retreat, he was like, Frank, why don't you just witness your thoughts? I was like, what does that even mean, witness my thoughts? Because I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of people, they go through a whole life without ever watching their thoughts even once. They're just thinking their entire life. They don't even know that there's an awareness around the thought, right? So watching your breath or just watching your thought.
It's like the first step towards the, you know, the boundless nature of truth. So imagine like piercing through a veil, right? So imagine like all the defilements and all the condition is like a veil. So when you watch your thought or watch a sensation, you're piercing through that thought and you create a very tiny little hole. And then every time you witness a thought,
Hopefully if you're making progress, the hole in the veil becomes bigger and bigger and bigger until the entire veil is gone and there's just emptiness. So even just watching your breath for the very first time on your first day of meditation, you are already creating a very tiny hole, a very tiny glimpse into emptiness. Tell me about some spiritual or metaphysical experiences. Oh, those mystical experiences? Oh, I've had like
Well, the best way I can describe those experiences is how similar they are to psychedelic trips. So like, if you take it like NNDMT, or again, DMT is a little different from 500 ml DMT. So most of the experiences are closer to my NNDMT experience, which I only took once. It's you just seeing like fractals of things like, you know, going in and out of each other and
Just like, you know, going to a warm hall and just your usual psychedelic stuff, you know, if you pull out one of those psychedelic videos, like the infinite spiral, things like that. That's very common when you're still going through a process, very, very common. But the 5-in-1 DMT is the one that gives you a glimpse of non-duality right away. That isn't really an experience per se.
So what happens during a 5ml DMT trip is that you get a glimpse of your true nature of infinite space. But then it's always laced with a lot of your bullshit too. It's always laced with a lot of your conditionings. So that's why you get the trip stuff.
Like a filter on top of the vast, infinite space, right? So when I took the 5-MIL DNT, I actually did two hits. The first hit I was like spiraling my own mind. I was perceiving like infinity. I realized that wasn't it. So I took another hit and then that was dissolved and I glimpsed into the emptiness of true nature. So again, my direct experience right now is the emptiness of true nature without the visuals.
So like during the unfoldments, when my stuff is coming out, when the lens of perception is getting dissolved, I experienced very similar stuff as well. Yeah, just like, you know, having orgies with the whole universe, like having sex with like different entities. I had an experience where like I was like, pretty much wide awake, but I was in a really like,
I was awake, I wasn't sleeping, but then because I was going through like a kind of linear involvement, so like my state of consciousness was like altered, I literally saw midgets appearing like in my room, like trying to suck my d**k. Like it was like right there, it was like mid-deformed midgets, it's like just like a bunch of deformed midgets, and it came back like three or four times, like it was just like little midgets like right in front of me trying to suck my d**k.
And then I was like, okay, that's something I need to look at. Why is that being projected onto my consciousness right now? Yeah, but I can say, you know, sex was like one of the biggest conditionings that I needed to dissolve. So that's probably why. So like a lot of those visions are like sexual, very sexual, and a lot of visions of like gods and like, like, like, previous like, I remember my, in one of my retreats, I experienced something like going back
in time, like just becoming younger and younger until like before I was born and then there were like dinosaurs and like just the whole shebang, like the birth of the universe, all that stuff. Yeah. So I experienced like pretty much everything you can read about in spirituality, like experiences that I've experienced in them all. And then now they're just like, oh, that was cool. But where are they now?
To me, this right here, what I'm experiencing right now, which is what everyone is experiencing if they remove the center, it's in a sense way more profound, but at the same time, way simpler than anything you can experience on meditation or psychedelics. So it's almost like it's the merging of something that's so divided as ordinary.
And the two are one. If you can't perceive God in a piece of shit, then you haven't realized God. You can't make any distinction between this is God or this is not God, this is truth or this is not truth. You can't make a distinction between this kind of mystical experience is closer to the source than other kind of mystical experiences because everything is source. When everything is source, there is no source in a sense.
That's why I like to use this phrase, when you truly realize God, God disappears. When you truly realize the self, the self disappears. When you truly have an insight, you consume it. It's like eating food, you know. When you eat a food, the reason why it disappears is because it is embodied into your physical form so completely that it disappears. So if you're still perceiving God, then there's still a standard.
In a sense, because most people who talk about God realization, they still have a center that's perceiving God consciousness that's over there. And they don't theorize about it or just attach their egos to it. But then when you truly realize God, when you are perceiving the Godhead as the Godhead, instead of perceiving the Godhead from, still from the center of the separate self, then God ceases to become even a thing.
Yeah, so that's when somebody asked the Buddha what he was after he's awakened. He's like, hey man, what are you? And he was like, I'm neither man nor God. I'm awake. So he's like trying to tell you that, you know, what God and man are just
But there's just concepts in a way, right? But then again, it depends on who I talk to. If I talk to somebody who's really into God, I use the word God. I have a friend who's a Christian and I have no problem with using the word God to describe the natural state. If I talk to a neuroscientist, I'll just go to the brain. If I talk to a non-dualist, I'll be like, yeah, there is no brain. This is just what it is. So it's all of it. Yeah, it's all of it and none of it.
For people struggling with addiction such as sexual addiction, would you recommend meditation? See meditation is really, it depends on how deep you go with meditation really. Like if you, like in the middle of the path sometimes like when the condition has come up, you can actually make it more for you. Yeah, I mean the meditation is very tricky because when you get to the deep end of meditation, it's like
Sometimes you can seem even more egoistical because now, because number one, you're more aware of the ego so you can feel like more contractions because now you're aware of it before you're not aware of it. So you can become even more aware of your sexual drives. You can, you know, experience those things even more like intensively. And then we have any kind of insights into like no self, just even just a little bit. Sometimes you use that as like an anchor for spiritual bypassing. It's like, Oh, there's no self anyway. Let me just go fuck around and cheat on my girlfriend. And like, you know, that can happen. So like,
Yeah, like I said, it depends, man. It really depends. Meditation really can go both ways if you go down to the deep end of it, unless you finish the job. So that's why going through the spiritual process is very similar to going through a mental breakdown. Because you're losing the mind, you're losing at least the ego mind or the solidity of the mind.
When you look at a mental disorder through a spiritual lens, does that then give you the impression that they're misunderstood?
Sometimes I think, yeah, yeah, like, sometimes, you know, like, okay, so what is schizophrenia? Schizophrenia is pretty much, schizophrenia is pretty much an ego gonna muck. So like you hear voices in your head you think is real. You see images in your head you think is real. You can't distinguish between like reality and the mind, right? So, but in the natural state, in the awakened state, you cease to make that distinction too.
but you're totally functioning like you function even more normally than before but then you realize that that what's in your mind and what's outside of my there's no distinction between inside and outside self and others and you know in a way it's kind of like I don't want to say it's kind of like schizophrenic be schizophrenic but it's it you know we just even just seeing a person on the street talking to themselves
Okay, not even just everybody talks to themselves, right? Somehow we believe the voice in our head to be real, right? So even that's a very mild form of schizophrenic, right? So then a schizophrenic person who is, you know, officially diagnosed or clinically diagnosed is just a more intense version of that. So with realization, you kind of see through how there is no distinction between the voice in your head and the voice outside.
Why are we at least seemingly detached from the natural state of mind or consciousness? Because of conditioning.
Okay, we talk about like traumas, right? Like, you know, all those traumas are manifested in, you know, the solidities in the body mind. That's what's separating us from like the unity of all things. So people talk about traumas like, oh, something that happened to you when you're a kid, like you lost your job, broke, your girlfriend broke up with you, you got abused, lots of trauma, sure, lots of traumas. But just the fact that you were giving birth is already traumatic, the trauma of the existence. So
I talk about the development of the standard, like the seer, the thinker, the doer, the hearer, right? Even the solidity in the head is the result of trauma. The trauma of separation is the trauma of identity, right? So even just something as subtle as having a perceiver inside your head that's congealed, just congealed sensations, that's trying to take credit for true nature, even that's trauma because we're born and then our mothers give us a name and that moment is already conditioning. It's already a sense of separation there.
Over time, we have hundreds and thousands of things that are just piled up in our natural state due to conditions like that. That's just one example. You go to school and then you have a certain role you play. When you go out into society, you have a job. All those conditionings are manifesting themselves as physical solidities somewhere in the head or in the body. For most people, it's in the head because that's where most of our identification with the self is. It is with the perceiver.
Yeah, so to answer your question, the reason why we have sets of separations is because of culture, because of conditioning and culture. Civilization cannot function without each person being separate actually, because most of the stuff
that arises out of monosolidation are the result of separation. Trudh Dalsai who is like one of my favorite teachers, he said he has experiences which I can relate to as well where he would tap into the minds of other people. That's how he defined reincarnation actually. He said reincarnation isn't about my previous life as much as I'm experiencing other people's minds right now.
So because our minds are interconnected, you know, like quantum entanglement, whatever you want to call it, because everything is interconnected, everything is codipattern rising and that individual minds have no locations. If you access non-duality, you are going to have experiences where you're tapping into other people's minds. That's why I get a lot of synchronicities all the time. Like people saying things and I know exactly what they're going to say or I want to say something and then they will say the same thing or
Sometimes when I'm editing a video, I'm answering a question like in my video and then the exact question will be asked by like a few other people like on Instagram. Just crazy shit like that happens all the time and I don't look at them as anything that's like supernatural. I look at them as very natural thing that's occurring, right? Because like the fact that you think you are the separate entity enclosing your own mind is actually the unnatural state of being.
The dissolution of separation is actually the more natural way of being. Animals probably communicate like that all the time, right? Spirit guides is one of those examples. You can have the false spiritual guide who leads you to places that are
Is it preferred to be a more technologically advanced society or a more spiritually advanced one and what the heck would that even
I think the ideal state is the merging of both, going back to the merging of integrating emptiness back into reform. The ideal civilization would probably be a civilization where everybody enters non-duality, everybody accesses their natural state. But then we still go on and develop technological advancements in science, in art and everything. But then I think the world would look very different. I think in some sense it would be even more advanced technologically and scientifically.
and artistically if everybody has just a natural state because just as an example of my own life like I'm doing everything that I used to do pre-awakening like I'm still you know working out play the violin I'm still going on dates I'm still just doing like the things I frankly used to do I'm still editing videos but then I have to do that way more efficiently now
Because your brain is undergoing this massive transformation, like you're getting a new operating system of the mind. Because without all that bullshit out of the way, everything becomes more efficient. So I always say recognizing your true nature is going back to how your brain and your body, your nervous system is wired before it was powered out by all these conditions and lenses of perception. So going back to doing things the way
So you do them more efficiently because they're not filtered. You're not as attached to like outcomes and you don't get tired as easily. Like I can work out 12 hours a day now without getting tired. It would just feel like I'm just still sitting still in my room when I'm out there just filming 10 hours a day. I don't feel tired and like even my conditioning at the gym just improved. I can like you know work out longer hours without getting tired because we spend so much of our time and energy and our calories building up this illusion and avatar in our head.
that we don't have managing like to do other things. So about civilization, if everyone enters non-duality, I think the technology would like advance as well and in a better, in a more compassionate and loving way. Yeah. So again, you said that the ideal civilization to me is the merging of the spiritual world and the material world. Because again, even on the personal level, there's no distinction at all between the spiritual and the material, right? Because if there is this duality,
Yeah, so the true non-dual civilization would be one that's like super advanced technologically, and then everyone's enlightened. And I think we're getting there. Because I think technology is kind of speeding up this process too, because of the internet, because of the psychedelics revolution, because we have the entire history is teaching at our fingertips. But just like any other tools on the spiritual path, you can also be the distraction.
Will we create an artificial consciousness? Probably, but artificial consciousness to me is not different from consciousness. People always ask me about AIs, right? They'll send me stuff, the questions they're asking. You know how I think there's some kind of new website or something, you can type questions that they already answered. I'm just looking and I'm like, that's really cool, but how is that different from when somebody else, who he would be answering?
It's just part of the happening of the universe. Like you are already that consciousness that you're trying to create, right? So even though that's really cool, I'm excited to see where like artificial intelligence take us. I think we will get there, but ultimately I don't see the difference between artificial intelligence and just general intelligence or animal intelligence or anything else.
And so are you optimistic about the future? I don't know if I'm optimistic or not optimistic. I think every way, I think everything, not just your personal life, but the entire universe is just the way it is. It's already perfection. Like I look at the, I look at the entire universe as like a Mandela, as like a fractal of Mandela, right? And then this fractal is always perfect, regardless of what happens.
So if you take a piece out of this mandala, another piece would just immediately give birth to itself because of this missing piece. That can actually be experienced in your present moment reality right now.
This Mandela, this Infinite Mandela, which is your reality right now in the entire universe, always perfect. The only reason why I don't think anything is perfect or we have a bad day or, oh, this shit is like bad for civilization is because we're not seeing the big picture. We're not zooming in on seeing the whole Mandela. Yeah. Do you get asked these kinds of questions often? Not the way that you ask because most of my clients, they just ask very specific questions about techniques or like,
like the meditations or or it's more it's more specific but you're touching things that i that i that sometimes i talk about with people but usually i don't talk about this that much i mean there's stuff that i've been talking about with you that i talk about with my clients yeah but like the stuff that you just asked me like about like ai sort of civilization i don't really talk about them that much i don't really have thoughts about them when you ask me i just kind of oh this they just come out so like they're
Alright Frank, I'm going to butcher these pronunciations but bear with me. How would the different states of mind along the path from the stream entrance to Arahant be differentiated?
You know how I talk about the two sides of the coin, like the expansion and contraction? Most people who got a spiritual path only focuses on one side. You get like the Vipassana school, the Maitreya school, so where they just kind of deconstruct sensations down to the quantum elements, but they're not expanding awareness.
If that sounds confusing, I always give the example of building an athlete. If you want to build a really powerful and very fast athlete, you need to have both strength and speed.
Because strength times speed is power. So if you're too slow, you should probably do some plyometrics. If you're just someone who's naturally really fast and don't have a lot of strength, if you want to jump higher, you can probably do more squats. So it's the perfect combination of both strength and speed that gives rise to a powerful athlete.
So enlightenment is kind of like power. You need the strength of the mind through concentration and you need the vast spaciousness. And the vast spaciousness is instantaneous, right? It's almost like the speed of light, right? The only constant in the universe supposedly is the speed of light. The only constant in your experience is that vast spacious awareness. So you need both.
You need to tap into both the end of the spectrum, both the contraction and the expansion, both the vipassana, the mindfulness, and the do-nothing meditation, the surrendering, the non-dual stuff, to build the perfect spiritual athlete, so to speak. So that's what the thing that most people are missing, because they would get into one school, they'd just be like, okay, the non-dual school, be like, oh, you don't need to meditate, just be, but then your experience of just be
If you're still contracted, if you still haven't dissolved the solitary in the body mind through Vipassana and concentration, it's not the natural state. And the Buddhist school would be like, oh, you have to, there's a path to this thing. Like you have to have a lot of concentration. You have to become very good at meditation. You know, you can't just be, you have to practice like five hours a day. There are attainments. You have to access this Jhana and that Jhana. You have to have a cessation, things like that. But then I'm all about merging the two schools together and just find out what works for you.
How important are the jhanas? Jhanas are, again, just like mystical experiences, are the byproduct of the solution. The natural state is kind of like the sixth jhana of infinite consciousness, but without the subject-object split. So if you get to the sixth consciousness a lot, then you can rewire your brain to kind of access that state. But then if you're in a jhana, that means there's still a meditator. Because jhana, just like psychedelic experiences, is this temporary state you can come in and out of.
So the natural state is like the balanced consciousness again merging with cessation that's permanent. So it's like a wake cessation. So that's why Adyashanda calls it a dark light. So jhanas are like just another tool. But even if you don't practice Vipassana or like Buddhist meditation, some people experience jhana anyway without knowing anything about jhana. It's just because they go through the process of dissolution.
What are the defilements?
The defilements are just conditioning to solidities and traumas that are stored in the body. Let me give you a visual metaphor for that. Imagine your true nature is buried in a pile of mud. Throughout your path of spiritual practice, you're trying to deconstruct and dissolve that pile of mud so your true nature, the light of consciousness, can shine through.
So the defilements and the conditionings and the solidities or the traumas, which is the same thing with the stuff of the ego, the stuff of your identification, the stuff that makes you think you're separate from everything else, those are the defilements. So all the spiritual practices are just tools to dissolve that defilement, that mud that's covering up your true nature.
And all the spiritual experiences are just a byproduct of the process of that dissolution. So when the defilements and when the mud that's burying true nature is starting to dissolve, your experience will become more psychedelic. Because you're becoming less solidified. That's why things are morphing, moving, vibrating, undulating, lights are dancing and things like that. That's why you experience kind of linear stuff, like your energy going through your body and you see
So then every time you poke a hole through that veil, what happens? Your stuff comes out. All the stuff that's buried, that's manifested as the munt that's buried on top of the infinite light of true nature comes up. So then you have to let it wait to dissolve it. And that's where the darkness of the soul comes in. When that stuff comes out, you're going to feel very uncomfortable.
Alright, so another way to describe it is that the only reason why you're not awake is because of all the stuff you're afraid to look at. Because once you look at the stuff, you're piercing through the veil and you let it come out, you let it be released, and when you surrender it, you let awareness dissolve it. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim, check out a pop-up art show,
Can a method of meditation itself be an obstruction?
Yes, yes, yes. That's why the no method method of the do nothing meditation is the expansion part of it. You're just trying to surrender and let go and do nothing. And then if you just sit there and do nothing and stare at the wall for like 10 years, you'll probably become enlightened. Because even like getting bored, wanting to move, that's conditioning. Right? So if you just sit there and do nothing and then become uninvolved with whatever is surfacing, they will be released.
But then you can also, that's going from the outside in. You can also go from the inside out by doing Vipassana, by contracting awareness to tiny laser beam of attention and then deconstruct the solidity through the meditator. But then the do nothing meditation and the just sit, you don't even take that into consideration because that can create its own solidity.
Because a lot of people go to Vipassana retreats like 20 years, 40 years, and they still don't have stream entry which is like the first level of awakening. Why? Because they're just becoming better meditators. They're becoming better observers.
But the whole point is to deconstruct the meditator and erase that duality between the object of meditation and the meditator so that there's absolutely no distinction between the observation, the observed, and the observer. It's all just one seamless process. But then if you just sit there and meditate through the perspective of the observer for 20 years without recognizing the fact that you are still doing it from the meditator, from the observer, without realizing that the witness is just more solidly that you're congealing.
It's a more subtle form of the ego, but still the ego. The meditator is just another form of the ego. But if you take that all the way, if you take the proportional path all the way like I said earlier, if you truly deconstruct the object of meditation to emptiness, the meditator will be dissolved as well. Because if you dissolve the object of meditation, the meditator will simultaneously be dissolved as well. Because you see that insight not just through the object of meditation, but
You apply that to the meditator as well. So the do nothing meditation where you just sit and don't apply any techniques, one of the advantages is that you don't have to go through that process of using the meditator as an anchor or even using the direction of attention as an anchor. You just kind of bypass all that and then just realize that even the meditator, it's just more sensations that are controlled. How does the sense of self change along the fourfold path?
It's just more and more solidity gets dissolved, more defilement gets evaporated, so the vast spaciousness opens up more. So the only difference between a stream enter and a second path person and the third path person and an Arahant is just the amount of solidities that are dissolved and how much spaciousness is opened up. So it's around my path, like every time I go through a path,
The sense of self becomes less and less localized, and the awareness becomes more and more panoramic and balanced. So during the first three paths, there's still a bubble. So when I reached the entry, I was like, holy shit. For the first time, I kind of know what Douglas Harding was talking about when he said, you have no head. I can kind of glimpse it. I really don't have a head. But then there's still a distortion in the field. There's still this bubble that's wrapped over my head.
But it was very spacious compared to just being completely stuck in the nose perception in the head. But it's still not the full thing. It's only like 5% of what I'm experiencing right now. And then as I go on to the next path, the spacious opens up more. The panoramic view just opens up more and more. Until the fourth path, the bubble bursts.
So one of the major insights of fourth path or arhatship is that there is no distinction between awareness and sensations. It's like perception, awareness, sensations, thoughts, body, everything is just one thing. You can say there's only sensations and that there's no awareness or you can say there's only awareness and there's no sensations. They're talking about the same thing.
During the second and third path, there is still a very subtle duality between sensation and awareness. You're still experiencing sensation arising and passing through this fabric of awareness. So going back to the anchor, you can say that in Vipassana, you are using the object of meditation and the meditator as the anchor. In the do-nothing meditation, you're using the vast spaciousness itself as an anchor. So in the do-nothing meditation, you are
Using the awareness to meditate on itself, in a sense. Where in the Vipassana, you're using the meditator to meditate on the object of meditation. But then every anchor has to be dissolved. So for most people, the last anchor is awareness itself. At least the awareness as a separate substrate apart from sensations and perceptions. Okay, now how would you ever know if you made it to the top, so to speak? The fourth path moment
It's so obvious and so like just so clear there's no doubt about it at all. It's just there's no room for doubt because there's no gaps and distance between anything. It's like everything is completely full and empty simultaneously that leaves no room for any kind of doubt. When the mind recognizes itself so completely, when the universe penetrates itself so completely, the metaphor that I use is the snake by its own tail.
Like if you see the logo of a snake biting its own tail or this like infinity sign that goes like this. Like every single sensation in my experience feels like this. Like the relationship between my body and the world also feels like this. Everything is just like this, like the infinity sign. Then when you reach the infinity sign, where is there to go? It is itself!
There's obviously nowhere to go. It becomes so obvious that this is the most obvious thing that you can experience. It's the true nature of your experience. So the fourth high moment is just like, that's it. You just have no doubt that the search is over. I think that's one of the number one signs of whether or not you've done it. It's like the search is completely over. You're not looking for anything anymore outside of this direct experience right now. You can't get any more infinite than infinite.
If you're still searching, then you probably still have more ways to go. But then after that, you still need to integrate things. But the path after awakening, the integration path, the cleaning up after waking up, you can still practice and you can still read about spirituality, but then the search is just not there anymore. You're not looking to gain any higher insights. You're not looking to become more empty. You're not trying to make awareness more aware.
But then you can still practice to integrate the emptiness back and forth, refine the realization more and more. Because as Adyashanti said, the mystery just keeps getting deeper. It's like you flip a switch. There is a switch that you flip. And I think for most people that have gone through the process, they do recall a switch. Like after the switch is flipped,
Who is the greatest teacher in the Vipassana history? And do you consider yourself to be a teacher by the way?
See myself as a teacher, actually. I mean, I say I coach people. I don't know, the whole guru and student-teacher-student relationship, I'm not too comfortable with it. I always say I don't have a teaching. But anyway, that's another discussion. In terms of who I think is the best Vipassana teacher, I actually
I don't know that many Vipassana teachers throughout history. I only know the modern ones. For me, the most influential ones are Daniel Ingram. His book, Mastering the Core Teaching of the Buddha, I think it's like the book that... I think that's the book that kind of... That was my book. That was like my Bible. It's funny because I discovered that book after stream entry. If I discovered that
When I just started Path, maybe I wouldn't get as much out of it, it wouldn't make sense, or not at the right time, but I think I discovered the perfect time. But that book, and I think Michael Taft is also another great teacher, and he's the one that
really focuses more on the expansion part of it. So, through David Ingram and Michael Taft, I was able to understand the similarity and the difference between contraction, the Vipassana, and do-nothing meditation, like the expansion. So, those two teachers are considered like the most influential and also Kenneth Folk and Shijun Yang.
So the teachers that I recommend to people, the books that they write and the stuff that I talk about, they're more like manuals. They're more like workout manuals, you know, how to get big instead of like theories. I mean, there's a little bit of theories, sure, but then they don't really talk about the nature of the universe that much. They just talk about how do you recognize your true nature? Like here's are the steps and you can do it. And that's why they're called the Pragmatic Dharma Circle.
It's like this kind of this wave of American teachers that you know gather insights from like other teachers with lineages and they just kind of like made it their own thing and try to pass on the Dharma, pass on this like knowledge or this wisdom and the techniques that are like thousands of years old or hundreds of years old and make it applicable to the modern man who is living in modern civilization.
Alright Frank, where can people find you?
I'm most active on Instagram. Just www.instagram.com slash Bean underscore Frank underscore Yang or just my YouTube. You can just type in Frank Yang. My channel is just called Frank Yang or you can go to my website. It's www.frankyang.wtf. What the fuck?
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc.
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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"text": " that can create its own solidity because a lot of people go to like Vipassana retreats like 20 years 40 years and they still don't have stream entry which is like the first level of awakening because they're just becoming better meditators better observers the whole point is to deconstruct the meditator and erase that duality between the object of meditation and the meditator so that there's absolutely no distinction between the observation the observed and the observer it's all just one seamless process"
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"text": " Frank, Frank Yang, thank you. Thank you so much for coming. This is highly, highly anticipated, almost a year in the making. You're a mindfulness coach, you're also known for your art installations and your workout videos, which puts myself to shame and counteracts the mindfulness. You travel around the world, you influence people or at least attempt to influence them for the better and to show people how to be more present with themselves and with the world."
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"text": " Can you fill in what have I missed? What should the audience know more about you? Yeah, I mean, I don't really identify myself as anything like on the human level. If you ask me what I do, I say I'm an artist, filmmaker. I do photography. I do a lot of weightlifting. I do bodybuilding and fitness coaching and I also do spirituality coaching, what I call consciousness coaching."
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"text": " And it's pretty much what Kenneth Ho called contemplative fitness. Yeah, because I really like the relationship between fitness and mental fitness, physical fitness and mental fitness. So I've been meditating also for 10 years and I also played the violin for about 30 years and I've been weightlifting for about 20 years. So those are the kind of the main things that I do."
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"text": " As you know, Tou, this Theories of Everything channel is about interviewing people with regard to what is fundamental. So, how can anything be fundamental? What is it? Well, if you look at it from a direct experience point of view, which is what kind of player fitness is about, you know, all kind of player traditions is about the subjective experience."
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"text": " And they'll tell you that's the only thing that you know is your subjective experience. You don't know anything outside of that. Even the perception of external reality is arising through consciousness. So when I say consciousness, a lot of different spiritual traditions like to call it different things, true nature, nature of the mind, or awareness, or emptiness, or the Hindu is called the Brahman,"
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"text": " So that is the number one thing or probably the only thing you can be certain of. And as a coach, what I do is to guide people or at least offer some insight from my own path as a matter of direct experience, how to recognize the true nature of experience or consciousness or what you really are at the deepest level."
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"text": " And if you want to talk about the nature of reality, well, you are reality. You are part of reality. And whether or not the nature of mind is the nature of reality, people have been debating that for like, I don't know, billions of years. And the way I look at it, you know, the materialisms and idealisms and the solipsisms and all this stuff. And my point of view is it's all, it's all true. It's the simultaneity of all those different perspectives and they're all codependent arising."
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"text": " I myself am a fan, a huge fan of definitions even though there are limitations to them so I see both sides. I'm sure you get asked, Plenty, what is consciousness and emptiness? Okay well according to the Buddhists"
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"text": " Emptiness is a word that is used to describe what you really are at the deepest level. So what you are is not a thing, it's a process. So one way to look at emptiness is that it's a process of co-arising or co-dependent origination. For example, me and you are speaking right now and we're both arising and co-creating each other just like how particles, when they observe each other, they kind of give rise to each other."
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"text": " And before this process of interaction, you are in this state of indeterminacy, like a pure potentiality kind of thing. It's like a generalist cat, like, you know, when you put the cat in a box, if you don't open it, it's neither dead nor alive in both kind of thing. So emptiness could be defined as a process of co-creation. And before this process is realized, what you really are is in a state of indeterminacy or pure potentiality. So the me, quote unquote me,"
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"text": " is only arising the way it is at this moment because of the way you are arising. So neither of us has inherent existence apart from this relation or interconnectedness. So in and of ourselves, we are empty. That's one way to perceive emptiness."
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"text": " Another way to perceive emptiness is more of a more of a direct experience kind of thing. For example, because of the meditation I've been doing, we can talk about the techniques later, but I've been meditating for 10 years and on May 25, 2020, I went through a shift, what I describe as reaching the wisdom axis or the emptiness axis of this spiritual or contemplative development to the end point. And I"
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"text": " Everything from that moment on, there was a permanent shift in my consciousness, in my baseline consciousness from that point on where everything that I perceived is quote-unquote empty. What that means is that my direct perception right now is ballast. It doesn't have any separations. It is vast and the awareness is pederamic."
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"text": " And everything becomes holographic. Everything I perceive is like a hologram. Kind of like how you put on a virtual reality goggle, you know that the image that you perceive is not ultimately real. It doesn't have any hair in existence. You're just perceiving a holographic image, dancing pixels and lights."
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"text": " When you take off the VR goggle, you think that you are already in the real world now and everything is solid, but in actuality of direct experience, at least when you realize your true nature, when you take off the VR goggle, you're actually still perceiving a virtual reality, the virtuality of the mind, you can call it that. And when I look at the computer screen right now, there's no distance between me and the screen. So the air between objects or the gaps between objects is as full as the object themselves."
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"text": " So you can say that all the objects, all the quote unquote material objects that are perceived in the quote unquote external world are holograms. Or you can say that the distance or the space between all those objects are full. So that's another way to perceive emptiness in a more perceptual way as a direct experience is that everything is full and empty simultaneously because if something is completely empty, those are completely full. So that's why a lot of spiritual traditions focuses on love and compassion because"
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"text": " Emptiness and love are two sides of the same coin. If you are a conical complete empty, you're also a complete fool and you're able to express love. So that's another way to look at emptiness. And I think the most important thing to know about emptiness is that emptiness and form are identical. Emptiness is form and form is emptiness. Or in other words, look at it as samsara is no other than nirvana. That's another way to perceive emptiness. Another way to perceive emptiness, and this is probably the last one that I go into,"
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"text": " is what Adyashante calls the dark light of the absolute. So that's how he describes the true nature. It's like emptiness is kind of like the merging of a singularity which has no size, no dimensions and no locations with boundless and infinite consciousness. So you know how a lot of spiritual mumbo jumbo say you're everything and nothing and that's what they're talking about. So in my direct experience,"
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"text": " It's really hard to describe, but if I can describe it using that, under that context of the dark light of the absolute, it feels like something that's extremely dark, but also extremely bright. Something that is everything, but it's all nothing. So it feels like you're a singularity, that's small, quote-unquote smaller than the size of an atom, which that's just a metaphor because it doesn't have a location, it's not even a point."
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"text": " So is this continuous awareness required for one to be awakened? Oh, it depends on who you talk to actually. If you talk to the Buddhist school, they'll actually tell you that"
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"text": " The continuation of consciousness is actually just another ground that you could get attached to. Like I've seen a lot of people that are on the spiritual path and before... Okay, here's how I describe the entire spiritual path in one sentence. It's to dissolve every single speck of solidity in your body-mind."
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"text": " So basically the only reason why you're not abiding or recognizing your true nature, which is again, it's this infinite boundless space that's aware, is because of the separation between you and the environment. So the whole spiritual path is about dissolving that solidity and that solidity some people call it conditioning, some people call it the ego mind."
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"text": " Some people call it your shadow. So basically, it's just like everything that you are accumulating throughout your whole life, like lenses of perception, as some people call it, that are sort of laced or filtered on top of true nature, which is again, it's boundless. So the process is a little bit like Michelangelo tripping away a marble and revealing a form underneath. But in this case, the form is formlessness."
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"text": " So if you talk to a Buddhist, they'll tell you that everything, including awareness itself, is empty. It doesn't have any here in existence. It's not a thing. It's not something that you can attach your identity to."
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"text": " And if you look at the Buddhist meditation, especially the Theravada tradition, Vipassana meditation, the highest meditative attainment, which is what I call the gold medal of Olympic contemplation, the gold medal level of contemplative fitness is sort of this attainment called ascensation or fruition or nirvana. So in that case, the highest attainment in meditation is actually"
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"text": " unconsciousness because what the Buddha means when he says nibbana is actually translated to a blowout or lights out so when you reach that state of the stateless state your entire universe disappears and then reappears again so you sort of blink out of existence for a bit and you come back so in that moment not even consciousness exists not even awareness exists and you sort of use that"
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"text": " as an insight to see how your entire reality or the entire universe is constructed."
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"text": " the clinical highest attainment even though I don't even look at it as something special anymore but then before I was like wow this is like you know the highest attainment in meditation and I attained it and there was still a little bit of ego there that was attached to that non-experienced experience. So the insight is that"
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"text": " When you go into a cessation and you come back from it, when you blink out of existence and then reappear again, it's sort of like a reset button on your computer. It does two things. Number one, you see particle by particle how your entire reality, your perception, your cognition, your body, this whole field of experience,"
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"text": " is constructed moment to moment to moment. So that gives you the insight of how everything is a mental fabrication. And that's another way to receive emptiness is that everything is a mental construct, which means that nothing has inherent existence. Right. So another thing I does is for some reason that I don't know about, because I guess I think people are still doing like science behind this, but like, you know, people have had cessations for like hundreds and thousands of years, but, um,"
},
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"text": " More recently, some of my favorite teachers that talk about how to attain this realization actually are scanning their brains to see what's going on in the brain when they have a cessation."
},
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"text": " So what happens during a cessation as a matter of direct experience is that, for some reason, a cessation just shifts your consciousness to another level, like your baseline consciousness. You see people take psychedelics or even have a lot of crazy mystery experiences, but then after the experience, they just contract back to their original state before they had the experience. That happens all the time."
},
{
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"text": " But for some reason after a cessation, now there are macro and micro cessation, there are like huge cessation in this moment, a big cessation for some reason just perpetuate your mind or your consciousness into another reality or I shouldn't say another reality but you know another level in terms of your baseline consciousness."
},
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"text": " This reminds me of the transmutation of a drunkard into a sage."
},
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"text": " Is there an objective or an end goal to the evolution of consciousness? End goal of the evolution of consciousness? Well, first of all, you realize really consciousness has no levels because you can't get more infinite than infinite. But the reason why it seems like consciousness has a level and it seems like that consciousness evolves is because your mind"
},
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"text": " interpreted that way. So consciousness only has level from the perspective of the dreamscape, from the perspective of the mind. So when you're still going through the process of dissolving your solidity and deconstructing the separate self or the dream self, it does feel like you are evolving in terms of levels. And I did that for a while and for a while I was like, holy shit, I'm making consciousness games. Like I'm getting more aware. I'm becoming more conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 966.015,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 946.135,
"text": " But then ultimately I realized that consciousness has no levels. Only the dream has levels. Or you can say that consciousness includes and transcends all levels in the dream state. Again, when I talk about these things, it's always neither and both. It's always because the ultimate, the absolute, and the relative are one."
},
{
"end_time": 990.572,
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"start_time": 967.125,
"text": " So it depends on which perspective you're taking. If you're taking on the conventional level, yeah, consciousness has levels, you know, in accordance to the mind, relative to the mind. But from the absolute perspective of consciousness itself, consciousness doesn't have any levels. But since the absolute relative of the Buddha mind and the everyday mind are one, which is that, that is really the ultimate realization, then it's always both and neither."
},
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"text": " So a question that many people are likely thinking is why would a God consciousness, assuming that our true nature is more than we are now, fragment itself into individualized personalities that we seem to be? Why would that happen? Well, first of all, I don't know if there is a single entity of consciousness. I mean, I have experiences like that where I was for sure convinced that there is one single entity of consciousness, but I'm agnostic about that right now. So again, going back to the both and neither, my stance is that you are neither the many nor the one."
},
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"text": " There could be. Okay, let's just take that stand that there is a unified consciousness. This is one being."
},
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"index": 44,
"start_time": 1028.524,
"text": " Like, let's just call that the universe, just to be a little more less confusing. Okay, there is this universe. Why would this universe, which is even as a matter of direct experience, you can experience how everything is just made up of one substance, you know, the sort of the unified field of zero, the way I call it. The emptiness is just one substance, just how physicists say, you know, when you divide atoms, you go down to the subatomic particles, it's just empty space and everything is just a vibration of that space."
},
{
"end_time": 1080.589,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1058.029,
"text": " So matter is an energy kind of thing. The hardness of solidity of matter is only the different intensity and vibration of the empty space and empty space itself without the sort of the congealed version of it would be like matter. If you don't congeal it would be like empty space. But anyway, well, because the absolute, the unity,"
},
{
"end_time": 1104.633,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1081.015,
"text": " also codependent arise with form. So emptiness and form, again going back to the inside, the emptiness and form are identical. So all the forms and appearances and the multiplicities and the manys and the divisions that you see cannot actually exist without the unity. And the unity cannot actually exist without the separations because they're codependent arising. So they kind of need each other"
},
{
"end_time": 1131.869,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1105.247,
"text": " You can look at it in terms of evolution, about how each organism sort of needs to feel separate in order to survive. But then even though the ultimate nature of reality is oneness. So within this oneness there is a multiplicity of rights. So you can't have one without the other, is what I'm saying. So on one level it doesn't evolve, and on another level it does."
},
{
"end_time": 1160.998,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1132.381,
"text": " And I do think that if you want to talk about the evolution of consciousness, I do think that there is sort of this intention like this, let's just call it the universal intention or the cosmic intention for consciousness to wake up to itself. So there seemed to be some kind of a progression there on that level where consciousness just wants to recognize itself because it is itself. It's kind of like, you know how people like to get drunk and"
},
{
"end_time": 1189.616,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1161.305,
"text": " So I think everything that we do is to feel whole, is to return to the source. But then we can't return to the source unless we feel separate first, even though they're actually ultimately the same thing. So it's almost like God is playing hide and seek with itself."
},
{
"end_time": 1217.688,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1189.923,
"text": " In order for God to realize itself, it sort of have to, you know, separate itself out of this cosmic joke to go through this process of returning to itself. Even though on the ultimate level, again, there is no duality. Everything is already one. This must be, well, depending on how you look at it, comforting or discomforting to the materialist that in an infinite amount of time, their decisions, they'll come to exist again, make those same decisions, essentially be given a second chance, a third or fourth."
},
{
"end_time": 1247.807,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1218.814,
"text": " Yeah, I think that's the whole process. It's like you wake up and then you wake down. So this whole process of awakening, it's all about waking up and then integrating emptiness and integrating the godmai or infinity back into the finite so that you see no distinction between the infinite and the finite, the divine and the mundane. That's true non-duality. So recognizing emptiness, which is what 99% of the spiritual teachings talk about, which is the waking up part, is only half of the game."
},
{
"end_time": 1273.626,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1248.234,
"text": " The other half of the game is called integration. How do you, after recognizing that everything is empty, put it back into the form? After recognizing that everything is a mental fabrication, how do you refabricate that into a form? It's almost like going back to the ground zero that gives rise to all the programs and then"
},
{
"end_time": 1300.555,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1274.411,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and"
},
{
"end_time": 1331.357,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1304.121,
"text": " So then what is it that science gives to us, affords us, what is value?"
},
{
"end_time": 1359.104,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1331.903,
"text": " I think we're starting to understand what goes on in the brain through this process of awakening and meditation. So we're getting closer to it. But at the end of the day though, like as a matter of a direct experience, like people have discovered this truth from the matter of a direct experience that the true nature of experience, the true nature of the mind for thousands of years and that insight hasn't changed. Anyone who goes through the spiritual path would receive the same insight. So that"
},
{
"end_time": 1388.865,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1359.326,
"text": " speaks to a fundamental law of mind or even the law of reality because, you know, the mind is part of reality. And if you look at modern physics, a lot of things that the modern physicists are saying, such as the observance effect, you know, Schrodinger's cat or string theories, it actually fits very well with what the contemplative traditions have discovered. Like they're like just two sides of the same coin. So like sometimes I call this path, this meditative path,"
},
{
"end_time": 1417.585,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1389.343,
"text": " What are the grounds and paths and what's the difference between concentration and contemplation?"
},
{
"end_time": 1445.742,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1420.06,
"text": " Okay, I'll give you an overview of this spiritual path. Well basically like I said earlier, the whole spiritual path is about dissolving every speck of solidity you experience in your body-mind. From solid form to liquid to smoke and then to air. So that's pretty much the whole spiritual path. But how do you do that? How do you turn everything into a hologram?"
},
{
"end_time": 1475.265,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1445.981,
"text": " Well, you can do it in a few different techniques, but I like to make it simple. I like to just condense them into two categories of practice. One is expansion and then one is contraction. So that's sort of answer your questions about the difference between concentration and awareness. So if you use the Vipassana technique, which is your basic mindfulness, you are sort of contracting awareness."
},
{
"end_time": 1503.507,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1475.589,
"text": " which is boundless, without any borders or boundaries, and is still and is just always there. You contract that awareness, which is your true nature, into a point of concentration. So when you watch the breath from a meditator inside the head, you are doing concentration work. So what you're doing is you are using attention to deconstruct the object of meditation."
},
{
"end_time": 1530.094,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1504.189,
"text": " And the object of meditation could be the breath, that's what most people start out with, or it could be the body, you know, you do body scanning, you'd be going to a 10-day Goenka retreat, or it could be a mantra even, or it could be, I don't know, the statue of a Buddha. So basically you pick an object of meditation, and then you contract awareness to a single point of concentration, and you just investigate into the nature of that object."
},
{
"end_time": 1550.879,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1531.425,
"text": " So that's your basic mindfulness or vipassana. So the reason to do that is because, oh well, first of all, the ultimate goal is to discover the nature of experience, right? So you're using the object of meditation as this anchor or this tool to see what the fuck it is. So you investigate into the nature of the object of meditation."
},
{
"end_time": 1576.425,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1551.22,
"text": " And if you go deeper and deeper and deeper, as your concentration power becomes stronger and more powerful, you go deeper into the true nature of that object of meditation. So, for example, the breath. At first, if you talk to a person who has never meditated, what the breath is, they'll tell you, oh, the breath is the breath. For them, it's completely conceptual. They might have an image in the head of them breathing, or they're like, okay, the breath. And you go a little deeper. Okay, the breath is actually made up of what?"
},
{
"end_time": 1597.517,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1576.903,
"text": " Inhale and exhale. Okay, now you go a little deeper into the experience. And then you go deeper and deeper and deeper into the breath, you realize that there's no such thing as the breath at all. They're just made up of infinite numbers of particles that are constantly arising and passing away. And that there is no solid entity in that experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1626.51,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1598.148,
"text": " You can apply that insight to the body as well. You know, if you use the body as an object of meditation, if you look really deeply into the nature of what the body is, you realize that as a matter of direct experience, you don't actually have a body. The body is just made up of clouds of sensations that again constantly arise and then pass away, morphing, undulating, fluctuating. There is no hand, there's no head, there is no feet, there is no chest as a matter of direct experience, except for dancing, vibration,"
},
{
"end_time": 1641.374,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1626.988,
"text": " So that is how you get to the true nature of experience through this what I call the dual mindfulness. The reason why it's called dual mindfulness is because there is still a duality there, at least if you still go through the process."
},
{
"end_time": 1664.684,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1641.834,
"text": " There is still a duality, a separation between the meditator and the meditator, between the subject and the object. And that is the thing that you're trying to deconstruct and dissolve, to reach non-duality, to reach oneness. There cannot be any separation between the subject and the object, between you and the world, between the object of meditation and the meditator. But if you do Vipassana, you are going to start out with the meditator, meditating on the object of meditation."
},
{
"end_time": 1693.353,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1665.145,
"text": " But if you take this all the way, the more you dissolve the object of meditation, the more you dissolve the meditator as well. It's kind of like, you know, when a cat is like taking apart a yarn ball. When a cat is ripping apart and taking apart the yarn ball, the cat, which is also made of the yarn ball, is taken apart as well. That's pretty much the whole process if you go down the Vipassana path. So another way to describe it is like you kind of zoom your experience or zoom your identity, you know, into"
},
{
"end_time": 1723.268,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1693.797,
"text": " the smallest component of experience. And then you go inside the atom and discover that, well, it's just a matter of empty space. The two most important insights are impermanence and no-self. So among these dancing sensations, amongst the flow of sensations that are constantly arising and passing away, you can't find a self in there. So that's the contraction method. And the other method is the expansion method, which is what Zen Buddhist calls riding the ox backward."
},
{
"end_time": 1733.712,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1724.224,
"text": " So basically, when you first start meditating, obviously you still have a very solidified center. You still have a very solidified body-mind."
},
{
"end_time": 1764.65,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1734.974,
"text": " In Zen Buddhist or in like the Dzogchen tradition, they ask you to just sit. You just sit and don't apply any techniques. Don't even contract your awareness to attention. You just sit there. So what happens when you sit there is that if you just sit there for long enough, all the body's conditioning will start to dissolve. So you kind of like fake it until you make it kind of thing, right? So you kind of, even though the boundless awareness hasn't completely opened up, you try to like expand the mind as vast as you can, right? So you try to abide in this infinite space."
},
{
"end_time": 1773.422,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1764.974,
"text": " as much as you can. And then whatever conditionings in the body mind that arise will be sucked into that space."
},
{
"end_time": 1796.715,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1774.377,
"text": " So that's the expansion part of the equation. So one is relaxation. The expansion part is the relaxation, the serenity, the letting go. And the other contraction is, you know, you use an effort to concentrate on the specific object of meditation. So you're just kind of drilling the mountain from both ends. But if you only do Vipassana, you are going to end up in the vast entry space. And if you only do the do-nothing meditation,"
},
{
"end_time": 1825.555,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1796.715,
"text": " You are going to start doing Vipassana as well, because if you just sit there and do nothing, like I said, all the tensions in your body, all the solidities and traumas and conditionings, they will be released. So one is you're letting God dissolve you, and the other is using the meditator as an anchor to dissolve you, but you actually end up in the same spot. So the only technique of the do-nothing meditation is letting go of any constrictions, grasping or contractions,"
},
{
"end_time": 1840.299,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1826.049,
"text": " and resistance to the body mind. The exact same way that you release a fist after holding on to it really tight. So it's not really a doing, it's a practice of non-doing, letting go. So anytime you feel a sensation, and when I say sensations,"
},
{
"end_time": 1868.473,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1840.52,
"text": " What I mean is everything from sight, sound, the body, emotion, thoughts, any kind of sensations that are congealing, you simply let it go the same way that a dog is biting onto a ball really tight, and then you're just letting it go. Letting go of the ball. What Michael Taft calls dropping the ball. So to do nothing meditation, you can actually also do Vipassana from the perspective of the open awareness. You can investigate into the emptiness of phenomena from the perspective of the Godhead. Godhead Vipassana in itself."
},
{
"end_time": 1895.828,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1868.814,
"text": " It's called Vipassana or non-dual Vipassana. So the difference between the do-nothing meditation and Vipassana is only the degree of effort and the contraction versus the expansion. So the more you can contract, the more you can expand and vice versa because the mind is like a rubber band. So reaching the cessation is taking Vipassana to the max effort degree until you reach the singularity. And then you flip yourself inside out to total expansion."
},
{
"end_time": 1918.131,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1896.271,
"text": " And the pitfall of do-nothing meditation is that there can be very subtle and microscopic sensations that are congealed that you're not aware of because you lack the concentration power to detect them. That's why even in Dzogchen, which is pretty much the highest teaching in Dzogchen, is the do-nothing meditation. They ask you to do years of preliminary practices where you're just kind of doing mindfulness and vipassana."
},
{
"end_time": 1946.101,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1919.804,
"text": " And also people who do a lot of developing meditation, they can create an identity out of awareness itself. Where in Vipassana, you can clearly see that even consciousness is part of this arising and passing away. And consciousness is also part of this process of codependent arising. It's not a separate substrate apart from that which is conscious of. And the pitfall of Vipassana is that you can easily get attached"
},
{
"end_time": 1972.722,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1946.459,
"text": " to the stages of insights and create more resistance through that or the meditator. And again, when I say insight, it's not a conceptual or theoretical thing. It's a direct scene of what's really going on in your experience. I know a lot of what I'm saying here sounds paradoxical and probably nonsensical to the mind because you can't grasp any of this with the intellect. So the less you conceptualize and theorize about reality, actually the paradoxes"
},
{
"end_time": 2003.285,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1973.797,
"text": " The more in one with reality you are, because reality itself is not going to question or theorize about itself, because it is itself. So the theory of everything of the mind is the perfect merging of expansion and contraction, both in practice and in direct experience. So you're merging the Vipassana empty school of Buddhism with the non-duality school, the open awareness school, or the Zen tradition. So it's the perfect merging of effort versus effortlessness."
},
{
"end_time": 2023.933,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2003.609,
"text": " You're trying to find that balance. That's what meditation is. You're trying to find that middle way. Buddha's first teaching is the middle way. The middle way between expansion and contraction, which also means the simultaneously of both and the transcendence of both."
},
{
"end_time": 2054.787,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2026.237,
"text": " When that happens, in a sense, there's no more expansion and contraction. That's where true equanimity lies. So this also transcends the debate about whether consciousness is permanent or not. Because unconsciousness gives rise to and is codependent arising through superconsciousness. So it's both. So that also transcends the duality between life and death. The existence and non-existence. So you're kind of totally dead, but that's why there's only life."
},
{
"end_time": 2069.275,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2055.06,
"text": " Do you have a daily ritual? Do you have some methods?"
},
{
"end_time": 2094.309,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2070.213,
"text": " Once you recognize emptiness, then that's it. Once you lose the center of experience, it never comes back again, ever. So once that's done, there's no more to be done in terms of the passionate for me. So what I do now is, even after the center is dissolved, there can still be some really deep conditionings that are left in the very deep part of your body. And then that usually takes seven to ten years to dissolve."
},
{
"end_time": 2122.995,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2094.309,
"text": " to completely dissolve. Some teachers say it doesn't completely dissolve. For the rest of your life, you're going to be integrating this insight because life just goes on. Because life is conditionings, right? So what I do now is I just sit there and do nothing and then just let awareness sort of clean up whatever remainder of the solidities, the remainder of the condition that are still there. So that's the integration part. They like to say you first wake up and then clean up and grow up."
},
{
"end_time": 2151.681,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2124.701,
"text": " So the cleanup part is pretty much the integration part. So another really common technique that people use is kind of like a contemplation path. It's called self-inquiry. So self-inquiry is also called the 90-90 method. So 90-90-90 means not this, not this, not that, not that. So anything that arises in your direct experience, you just label it in a visceral way. You kind of have to feel it out, not just intellectually, that this is not me, this is not self."
},
{
"end_time": 2179.275,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2152.176,
"text": " 90, 90, 90. Not this, not that. So it's very easy in the beginning when you just perceive a cup and you're like, oh, this is not me. It's easy, right? But then you start to know sensations too. The sound, sound is rising, not this. The visual field is rising, not that. When you get to the mind, it gets a little tricky. Can you perceive thought? Can you look at the thought of yourself? If you can look at it, if you can perceive it or experience it, it's not this, not that."
},
{
"end_time": 2207.995,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2180.077,
"text": " So it's just kind of peeling away the layers of the onion. And then when you go down to the very deep end of it, you start to perceive even the witness. Can you witness the witness? If you can witness the witness, the witness is also not self. Can you perceive perception itself? Perception is also not self. Can you be aware of awareness? Can you be conscious of consciousness? Can you perceive even God consciousness? If so,"
},
{
"end_time": 2237.807,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2208.78,
"text": " If you have an experience of God-consciousness, then it's still something that's arising in the experience. Then you simply objectify that as well. Say, oh, that's not me, that's self. So you kind of objectify everything in your direct experience until the subject vanishes. You turn everything into an object, right? So once you turn everything in your direct experience, including this whole field of consciousness into an object, then where's the subject? It disappeared into it."
},
{
"end_time": 2268.08,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2238.797,
"text": " So one way to look at it is that there's only the object, there's only the world and there's no self. And another way to look at it is that there's only the subject, always self, there's no object. So that's another way to merge the true self and the no self school, right? You know, they lead to duality between subject and object. Okay, so I'm sure Westerners get wrong plenty about imagination and how this may lead to quote unquote manifestation. Most people, at least in the West, believing that it's a fantasy of a kind. The way I look at manifestation is"
},
{
"end_time": 2297.619,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2269.292,
"text": " Just let the universe or just let your experience unfold without a doer. So if you just let nature unfold without a doer, pretty much every single moment is manifestation. That's how I look at manifestation. Meditation to me is not communicating with higher power. It's not visualizing some things that you want and then getting it because when you realize emptiness, you don't want anything anymore because everything is full. So there's nothing that I want in terms of like manifestation, but then every moment is manifestation."
},
{
"end_time": 2325.299,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2299.292,
"text": " So like the way I experience reality is like it's kind of like just the universe giving birth to itself moment to moment to moment. That's the ultimate manifestation. Yeah, that's how I look at manifestation. Because I don't know how to answer that question because I don't really manifest things because I don't need I don't feel like I need to like there's nothing that I want to manifest. It seems like everything that is happening, whether imperfection or perfection is just the way it is."
},
{
"end_time": 2353.831,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2325.811,
"text": " In my direct experience, there's no such thing as imperfection. Even the quote-unquote imperfection is perceived to be perfect. That's going back to how form and entities are identical. Even solidity is perceived to be air. Going back to the process of dissolving yourself from solid object to liquid, to smoke, to air, what is a hologram? The hologram is"
},
{
"end_time": 2381.527,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2354.189,
"text": " Pretty much emptiness and form combined, right? You see an object, but then it's actually holographic. And so are emotions. The way I experience emotions and perceptions and objects and entities are all holographic. Even when I perceive a rock, it feels like I can just penetrate through it. It feels like I'm just perceiving something that doesn't have any inherent existence, that is just an image. So for me, there's no difference between imagination and reality."
},
{
"end_time": 2411.63,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2382.654,
"text": " Okay, so the rebuttal is that the real world has more solidity. Yeah. Oh yes, that's just a level and a degree of solidity. But it's made out of the same stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 2422.858,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2412.039,
"text": " Like dreams are a less solidified version of clinical reality. So when you are walking around the waking world, things are more solid. When you go to sleep, things are more liquidy."
},
{
"end_time": 2451.442,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2423.49,
"text": " So the reason why when you take psychedelics, things start to breathe and start to morph and color start to change is because at that moment when you take the psychedelic, your brain or your mind is becoming more malleable. You're dissolving the mind. That's why people get glimpses of their true nature on psychedelics because when you take a psychedelic drugs, it dissolves your senses of perception and it dissolves the solidity in your experience very quickly. But then if you dissolve them very quickly, they also come back and contract back into form very quickly."
},
{
"end_time": 2480.913,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2452.602,
"text": " But through meditation, you go through years and years of this rewind the brain into like locking that inside of realization into a permanent state. Tell us about any states of bliss or negative entities that you've encountered. OK, so I've experienced a lot of crazy shit like on my journey. I would say when I was going through the unfoldings, I was experiencing mystical experiences that are just as powerful, if not more powerful than like my DMT trip."
},
{
"end_time": 2509.753,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2481.425,
"text": " Like I remember the shift into non-duality, like my first thought was this is like as powerful as my 5Mio DMT trip. But now it's my direct perception, now it's my direct experience, but now it's completely ordinary to me now. So the only reason why you think your 5Mio experience, which is, you know, non-duality or boundless space, or just having a glimpse of your true nature is because it's only insane or it's only a profound experience, again, relative to the ego mind."
},
{
"end_time": 2535.913,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2510.657,
"text": " So any kind of spiritual experiences or mystical state that you have is the byproduct and the side effect of the dissolution of your conditioning. And that's what a lot of people in the spiritual circle get around is that they think that mystery experiences are the thing that they're supposed to be looking for. Mystery experiences are really nice, you know, I've had experiences of like going to other dimensions, entities, past lives, again, just"
},
{
"end_time": 2566.084,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2536.561,
"text": " The experiences that are just as powerful as psychedelic trips. But then now they're all transcended, in a sense, because there is not much conditional left in this body-mind. So, psychedelic experiences, most of it, and mystical experiences, you know, even entities visiting me and things like that, they're just a byproduct of my subconscious mind getting burned off. Once that dream is unfolded, there's not going to be much of those experiences anymore. What you get is just the is-ness."
},
{
"end_time": 2583.319,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2567.21,
"text": " Because the entities and other dimensions and physical experiences still presupposes form. It's just the content that are arising in this vast context of even a consciousness. Okay, Frank, what are UFOs?"
},
{
"end_time": 2612.108,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2583.899,
"text": " I mean, if I see a UFO right now, I'll be like, oh, that's really cool. Like, we have aliens. But then I wouldn't perceive it to be fundamentally any different than perceiving anything else. Like, it wouldn't shock, it wouldn't like, my fuck me. Yeah, because once you see through the nature of my experience and how everything is pretty much made of the same kind of metal fabric, everything is pretty much the same. But then that's where the beauty is also, because then you stop"
},
{
"end_time": 2638.387,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2612.892,
"text": " even the distinction between things seem to be empty, and that's where I think compassion comes from. But of course you can still enjoy the multiplicity of forms, you can still enjoy the difference between a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, you can still have a preference over form, but you know ultimately there's no distinction. And I think this realization actually makes that"
},
{
"end_time": 2664.684,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2638.848,
"text": " The more you realize how everything is homogeneous, the more you can appreciate the multiplicities. You can say to me in my direct experience, everything is God."
},
{
"end_time": 2685.572,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2665.111,
"text": " You're never apart from God. You can never get closer or further away from the source. And when a Buddha talks about emptiness, he's talking about God as well. So it depends on what tradition you're coming from, your culture, your context, how you like to use your words. Like I said earlier, the way I describe the natural state is I can use God to describe it."
},
{
"end_time": 2714.718,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2685.572,
"text": " What is the dark night of the soul and depersonalization? The dark night of the soul is pretty much the process of contraction on the spiritual path."
},
{
"end_time": 2744.343,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2715.026,
"text": " So going back to the cycling of contraction and expansion, see, everything in the universe is contracting and expanding, right? You know, when you go to sleep, when you wake up in the morning, day and night, the seasons, or even when you do weight lifting, you're bulking, cutting, and you're breathing, you're inhaling and exhales, life and death, you know, getting on with a girl, breaking up with her,"
},
{
"end_time": 2758.695,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2744.906,
"text": " Since your channel is called Theory of Everything, I'll say the theory of everything, if I can describe it in one sentence, is this process of contraction and expansion."
},
{
"end_time": 2782.295,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2759.445,
"text": " So when you go through a spiritual path, when you start to meditate and when you start to pierce through the veil of illusion and get into the emptiness of things, each time you have an opening, each time you pierce through the veil of illusion and get an opening into the true nature, the boundless space of true nature, some of your subconscious and your traumas and conditionings, whatever is separating you from this vast space,"
},
{
"end_time": 2803.046,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2782.91,
"text": " Another way to look at dark night of the soul is the process of the dissolution of the ego."
},
{
"end_time": 2830.299,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2803.575,
"text": " So if you look at ego as sort of like a program or a matrix, when it gets attacked, when you start doing some meditation practice and you start seeing through it out, the ego is not what you really are, when that program is undergoing attack, it's going to cling on to itself harder. Because, you know, like any other program, if you get attacked by a virus, it's going to do everything it's power to survive. So that process can be extremely uncomfortable. So a lot of people, they meditate and meditate, oh, everything's great, but then suddenly they go into this state of depersonalization."
},
{
"end_time": 2853.49,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2830.538,
"text": " where they have a glimpse of their true nature, the emptiness of things, but then the other half of them, they have one foot in the emptiness, another foot still in the world. They have one foot in the vast spaciousness, in the groundless ground, and then they still have another foot in the ground. So they're still trying to hold on to the ground, they're still trying to hold on to their ego-identity, while at the same time having some kind of glimpses into the infinite nature of reality."
},
{
"end_time": 2869.923,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2854.804,
"text": " So that's where the dark night of the soul comes from. It's when you expand and then you contract back again, you feel very uncomfortable. It's kind of like a withdrawal from a really good psychedelic trip or a bad trip or something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 2894.701,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2870.435,
"text": " It's like once you experience God in divinity, now you get to experience hell until you transcend them both. Because they cannot exist without the other. People talk about experiences of love, experiences of God, all those great mystical explosions. Oh, my consciousness exploded through the universe. That's fucking great. Now I feel like a god. But then the other side of that coin is the contraction. You can't have expansion without contraction. That's a loss of nature."
},
{
"end_time": 2912.602,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2894.701,
"text": " This has been brought up plenty and he's been interviewed before, Leo Gura. Where do you feel like you comport and where do you feel like you disagree?"
},
{
"end_time": 2938.916,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2914.07,
"text": " I haven't watched his videos in a while actually. I used to watch his videos when he talks about like how to do self-inquiry and things like that. I found him to be very useful until, I don't know, about three or four years ago. I just haven't really watched a lot of his videos. Yeah. But from what I know, Leo Garad talks a lot about the God consciousness thing, right? Yeah, so"
},
{
"end_time": 2961.715,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2940.282,
"text": " In my stages of awakening, I like to categorize, even though ultimately there's no levels to this thing, but then through the process, I have five stages of awakening. The first stage is the ego phase. That's when your identification is with the ego mind. That's pretty much everybody if they haven't discovered that they're not the ego. So once you discover that you're not the ego,"
},
{
"end_time": 2992.056,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2962.363,
"text": " The ego started to dissolve. The solidity of the body might start to dissolve. And you open up the space of awareness more. And now you can abide in the witness. That's the second phase, what I call the witness phase, the witness consciousness. So that's when you identify with being this witness. Now that's meditation like one on one. When you first start to read the power of now, I could totally ask you to like, you know, be aware of your thoughts. You're not your thoughts. Now you are the witness of your thoughts. Just shifting your identity from the ego to the witness. But the witness is actually just a solid version of the ego."
},
{
"end_time": 3021.51,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2992.671,
"text": " Because by the witness phase, you still have a lot of solidity. You have a little bit of space, but still a lot of solidity. And then you keep dissolving that center point. You keep dissolving the solidity of the body mind. And the space opens up more. And then now you enter the third phase, the third stage, what I call God consciousness, or infinity, or being. That's the everythingness phase. Now you experience everything to be you. But at this point, even though the solidity in the center is still not completely dissolved, it's very thin now. It's very subtle. It's very tiny."
},
{
"end_time": 3048.763,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3022.193,
"text": " So when the solidity in the body-mind becomes very tiny, the space opens up even more. So what happens during that phase is a lot of people, they will cling on to that vast spaciousness and attribute their identity to everythingness. So that's why a lot of people started to say they're God or that I am everything, I am infinite consciousness, which I went to the same phase myself. And then I think it's at this phase that a lot of people attribute their experiences to the nature of reality."
},
{
"end_time": 3069.377,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3049.821,
"text": " Yeah, okay. Now, because the rest of the solidity or the rest of the ego is still somewhere in your field of experience, even though now it's very tiny, it's still going to take credit or cling on to this vast spaciousness or any kind of spiritual insights or experience that you have and make it into a thing, ratify it and objectify it."
},
{
"end_time": 3095.179,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3069.77,
"text": " Theoretize some kind of theory into a nature of reality. Because this vast space is so prominent. It's like the only thing to be real for you at this point. But even at that stage, there's more to go. You continue the dissolution, now you enter the nothingness phase. This is what I call the emptiness phase. So now your identity is shrinked down to almost like an atom now. But then there's still a little bit of you that's trying to cling on to emptiness."
},
{
"end_time": 3122.483,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3095.896,
"text": " So each stage you have a ground. So the point is to use one ground to dissolve the previous ground until all ground dissolved and you become the groundless ground and it's just fully falling. And then the fifth stage is what I call the natural state. So the natural state is the complete merging and the transcendence of all the previous four stages. So I'm not suppressing any stages or I'm not saying any stages are wrong. I'm just saying that you can get stuck in one of those stages."
},
{
"end_time": 3139.633,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3122.875,
"text": " And then the final realization is actually the merging and the transcendence of all the stages. So some traditions focus on one stage more than the others. For example, if you talk to the Hinduism school, like the non-duality school, they focus on the infinite space more than the Buddhists."
},
{
"end_time": 3165.435,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3140.145,
"text": " Even though if you take just one stage and max it out, you are going to have the same insight. If you take everything in this phase and max it out, you are going to reach the same spot as the emptiness phase in stage four. And the buddhas tend to focus more on the emptiness phase. So that's why you get a lot of debate over the course of history about the neo-avaita school versus the buddhism school. The buddhism school would be like"
},
{
"end_time": 3192.688,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3166.049,
"text": " Oh, the Neo-Avada people didn't go deep enough. They haven't realized that also Brahman is also empty. Brahman is also just another fabrication. That Brahman is also just another ground, right? And the Brahman school or the Hindu school will be like, oh, the Buddhas, they haven't realized the infinite space of consciousness, right? But then I actually think that the natural state is sort of like the merging of those two stages or even the stages before that."
},
{
"end_time": 3218.78,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3192.91,
"text": " So in a sense that I described the natural state is kind of like the permanent merging of a permanent cessation and infinite consciousness. So you're taking two schools, both Buddhism, the Nathana school and the Hindu school, the God consciousness school, the awareness school, and then you merge them together."
},
{
"end_time": 3223.473,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3219.155,
"text": " A football fan, a basketball fan, it always feel good to be"
},
{
"end_time": 3251.254,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3223.848,
"text": " Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you write, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states, including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 3280.213,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3251.493,
"text": " So should people practice Tantra without protections, such as the empowerments of Heruka and Shakyamuni?"
},
{
"end_time": 3291.493,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3281.374,
"text": " I'm not sure what they are, but I know a little bit about the Tantric school versus the Sutta school. The Tantra school focuses more on the form side of things."
},
{
"end_time": 3320.572,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3292.398,
"text": " And even the, I think the Vajrayana or the Dzogchen school, they focus more on the ground, like they focus more on the awareness part of it. And Buddhists focus more on just seeing through the emptiness of everything. Buddhists are trying to attack things from just, from the pure emptiness perspective and the Dzogchen Vajrayana school are going from the form. They're going from form to emptiness in a sense. And the Buddhists are going from emptiness to form. But again, they're actually talking about the same thing, just like the"
},
{
"end_time": 3339.189,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3320.998,
"text": " The Hindus and the Neelvaita and the Dzogchen people talk about the true self. And Buddhism talks about no self. But no self is true self. Because when you shrink down to nothing, you're also everything kind of thing. So that's why all the stages are valid. It's just like some schools tend to focus their techniques on what specific"
},
{
"end_time": 3357.483,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3339.804,
"text": " more on one specific stage than the others, because you kind of have to. If you're a tradition, you kind of have to build your practice around at least some aspects, one aspect of awakening over another. But at the end, it's all the same thing to me."
},
{
"end_time": 3375.691,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3357.892,
"text": " To me, Tandra is just the taking the emptiness and then putting it back into form. So the reason why people associate Tandra with sex, I guess a lot of people do it, I did. When you talk about Tandra, you're like, oh, it's just like a sexual unit, right? So the reason why sex is such a big thing in Tandra is because"
},
{
"end_time": 3398.387,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3375.691,
"text": " When you actually recognize the emptiness, well, you're supposed to practice Tantra only after awakening, only after recognizing emptiness. So after recognizing emptiness, you kind of go back into the world and engage in activities that would otherwise trigger you before. So sex, for example, sex and love are like relationship stuff. It's like the biggest trigger for most people because the deepest conditioning for most humans."
},
{
"end_time": 3425.708,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3398.951,
"text": " is sex and love because we're here to reproduce as biological organisms. So if you can abide in the vast illness, if you can hold the view, if you can still abide in the panoramic awareness during sex instead of contracting to just your fucking dick, then maybe your realization is legit. So is it safe to, I guess you can practice, you can do any kind of practicing at any stages. It's just a degree of intensity."
},
{
"end_time": 3445.23,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3426.101,
"text": " Then, what is your relationship to sex? Do you fight it intrusive? To your path? To your path of enlightenment?"
},
{
"end_time": 3474.036,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3445.23,
"text": " I used to. I used to be a sex addict. I used to be like fabbing like five times a day. And actually, one of the reasons why I got into meditation 10 years ago is because my sex drive was so high and it was interfering with my life. I wanted to use meditation to kind of make my sex drive a little bit lower. Well, to me, sex is a catharsis, right? Again, going back to expansion and contraction, like the only reason why we want to have an orgasm"
},
{
"end_time": 3489.821,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3474.394,
"text": " Other than to feel unity, I guess that's the same thing, is to feel expended, to feel unified with another person. So in a sense, without that contraction, sex plays a very different role after realization."
},
{
"end_time": 3510.282,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3490.572,
"text": " Because I guess you could say awakening or truth realization is the ultimate catharsis. Because you're so relaxed and your being is so vast and spacious and balanced that you don't need to contract and then expand again in a sense."
},
{
"end_time": 3534.94,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3511.459,
"text": " I like to call this day that I'm in right now, just the universe fucking itself 24x7. So when the universe is fucking itself 24x7, because it just feels like without solidities in the body-mind, without the center that's filtering experience, experience is experiencing itself without the experiencer. When that happens, it just feels like every moment is penetrating itself."
},
{
"end_time": 3551.032,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3535.64,
"text": " So when every moment is penetrating itself, the role of sex becomes something that isn't a necessity anymore. Like before, at least for me, because I was such a huge sex addict, before I couldn't live without sex, I was like, you know, if I could choose between living the rest of life, not having sex or dying right now, I'd probably choose dying right now."
},
{
"end_time": 3573.677,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3551.954,
"text": " So sex was like survival for me, right? But then nowadays it's like, well, it's cool to have sex, but then if I don't have it, I don't think about it. Yeah, it's kind of like the preference over water or Diet Coke. You can still have preference sometimes for Diet Coke, but then you can quench your thirst with water. It's not a necessity anymore."
},
{
"end_time": 3600.947,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3574.428,
"text": " Alright man, getting back to this daily routine, what's your workout routine? My workout routine right now is I just do whatever at the gym. I used to work out a lot. That's actually why I got into spirituality as well, because I wanted to upgrade myself. It's not like self-improvement or stuff like that. The little did I realize, the ultimate self-improvement is self-destruction."
},
{
"end_time": 3624.428,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3601.374,
"text": " So in a way fitness is kind of like self-destruction too. Let's take the example of fitness since we're talking about fitness. So the reason why I wanted to work out is because I wanted to feel connected to other humans. So I wanted to grow bigger muscles and get stronger because I wanted to connect with other humans because I wanted to upgrade myself. I wanted to upgrade myself so I can connect with other humans."
},
{
"end_time": 3636.374,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3625.077,
"text": " So that's why I got into spirituality. Another reason. So there's two reasons why I got into meditation. One is to reduce my sex drive. Another is to upgrade my brain. So I went through this whole fitness phase where I was super identified with the body."
},
{
"end_time": 3657.5,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3636.8,
"text": " All I wanted to do was jump high around faster and build bigger muscles so I could just be superhuman. And I was like, okay, if you want to be superhuman, you can exclude the mind. You have to upgrade your consciousness too. You have to upgrade your brain. So I started to read a lot of philosophy and all kinds of stuff and get into"
},
{
"end_time": 3674.991,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3657.5,
"text": " You know, especially the philosophy of the mind. And then after getting to philosophy of the mind, I started to get into psychedelics. After psychedelics, I was like, maybe there is a way to permanently kind of access those kind of higher mystical states of consciousness without psychedelics. So I got into meditation. So as a part of this process of self development, I started to meditate."
},
{
"end_time": 3700.913,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3675.811,
"text": " And kind of like how you wanted to get bigger muscles when you work out in meditation, you're expending yourself, right? You keep expanding yourself until you become everything. But then again, going back to the process of expansion and contraction, if you want to become everything, you have to also become nothing. So self-improvement taken to the extreme level is self-destruction. So you can only truly find the self when you lost the self."
},
{
"end_time": 3729.053,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3701.766,
"text": " What would be a more superior definition of enlightenment? The definition of enlightenment to me is just recognize what you really are at the deepest level, like what you really are. That's it, just recognize the nature of experience. And the nature of experience doesn't have a solidified entity behind anything. There's no thinker, hearer, observer, doer, seer inside the head. There's no avatar inside the head that's directing your experience. There's no one the driver sees, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 3757.671,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3729.053,
"text": " So in a sense enlightenment is about deconstructing that solidity in the center again going back to the dissolving solidity is to deconstruct that Observer in the head that's looking out to the world and they realize that the universe has always just been perceiving itself without a center All right, Frank. I'm gonna be Frank. You have a rich metaphysics, but on your Instagram and you're like a Greek sculpture How do you reconcile the two is their disconnect?"
},
{
"end_time": 3771.937,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3758.951,
"text": " There used to be a disconnect, but then that was only because I have a fully integrated form with emptiness. Because nothing is excluded, even with realization. Nothing is excluded from infinity."
},
{
"end_time": 3800.043,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3772.227,
"text": " Everything is okay. Everything is part of it, right? So just because you have a nice physique, it doesn't speak. It doesn't determine your level of realization in a sense. I mean, there was a phase when I was like still like in the no man's land where I haven't integrated the insight, haven't integrated the emptiness insight into form completely yet. And now every time I work out, I feel very contracted up and I hold it. I'm doing this for the ego or like, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3815.384,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3800.043,
"text": " This is detrimental to my spiritual process and spiritual progress. But then that's only because the rest of the ego was saying that. The rest of the ego was making a story out of that. Reality itself doesn't make that distinction."
},
{
"end_time": 3841.63,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3816.186,
"text": " So then how is it that you handle negative emotion?"
},
{
"end_time": 3869.224,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3842.329,
"text": " The way I experience negative emotions is that I don't quantify, I don't experience them as negative nor positive. They're just kind of neutral. When I experience quote unquote negative emotions, they barely arise nowadays, but sometimes if they do arise, experience just like smoke that's like puffing within this vast spaciousness. So any kind of emotion, both positive and negative, because they can't, one cannot exist without the other, all emotions are experienced as like wind blowing through the sky."
},
{
"end_time": 3898.592,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3869.633,
"text": " Once you become the sky, the wind, it doesn't really affect the sky even though it can be there. The weather can still go through its process of transformation because nature, again, undergoes through the process of expansion and contraction all the time. So you can still have good weathers and bad weathers, but if you're a body in the sky, if you become the sky, which is the nature of mind, you're not affected by the weather, but the weather can still be there. So every sensation is self-liberated."
},
{
"end_time": 3927.705,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3899.991,
"text": " It's only when you cling on to sensations that you create suffering. So Shijun Yang said suffering is pain times resistance. You can still have quote-unquote negative emotions arise, but then if you don't cling on to them, if you don't identify with them, if you don't resist them, they're not manifested as suffering. Do you believe yourself to be enlightened? I don't know if I want to answer that question."
},
{
"end_time": 3954.07,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3929.343,
"text": " It depends on your definition of Arhashhip. The most direct definition of Arhashhip, which is the highest level of awakening according to a Theravada map. So I'm only going to talk about this from the Theravada map because we talk about these words like enlightenment,"
},
{
"end_time": 3975.862,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3954.735,
"text": " Especially in enlightenment, different people define it differently. So I'm just going to go with arhatship because it's more contextualized. So the simplest definition of an arhat according to the Buddha is in seeing only the seeing without a seer, in the heard only the hearing without the hear, in the heard only the heard, in the seeing only the seeing."
},
{
"end_time": 4004.48,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3976.34,
"text": " In the thinking only thinking without the thinker. So basically what he's trying to say is you're a direct experience after you've dissolved the nozzle perception in the center of your head or somewhere in your body. So if you look at it from that perspective then yes because I haven't had a sense of a hearer center or observer or perceiver or a sense of doer in two years. So in my experience every single sensation is just perceiving itself."
},
{
"end_time": 4033.029,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4005.077,
"text": " I can like drink a bunch of alcohol, I still have no center."
},
{
"end_time": 4060.862,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4033.319,
"text": " But then again, sometimes conditions can still arise, but then again, they're perceived to be without a location. They're just kind of like, again, wind blowing in the sky. Like, where is the wind in the sky? Is it in a certain location? You can't find it. Like, there's a sense of unlocatability and a sense of ungraspability. You can't grasp it. It's there, but you can't grasp it. It's kind of like the rainbow, you know? The rainbow is there, but not there, right? That's how I perceive things."
},
{
"end_time": 4082.875,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4062.466,
"text": " What occurs after death? What happens? I don't know. I don't really think about death. Well, in a sense, I don't know, the whole notion of life versus death doesn't make sense that much to me anymore because you kind of transcend the duality between existence and non-existence. You realize they're just concepts."
},
{
"end_time": 4108.729,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4084.224,
"text": " How do you see the universe? Do you think about how it's all structured and where are places within it?"
},
{
"end_time": 4132.159,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4110.23,
"text": " Like I said earlier, when you're undergoing through this process, when you direct the experience, you're walking around waking life experiences dramatically altered, you start to formulate all kinds of theories about the universe. But then most of that is still just a projection of your ego. Are psychedelics then a useful tool for reaching certain states? Sure, yeah. Yeah, psychedelics are great tools."
},
{
"end_time": 4154.65,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4132.466,
"text": " Psychedelics to me again is just a tool for you to dissolve the slitter in the body mind and again all the special experiences I experienced on psychedelics are no different than the special states and mystical experiences you experience when you're meditating or when you like lucid dreams or when you like have a Kundalini explosion like I went through the space where like my whole chakra opened like every chakra in my body opened up"
},
{
"end_time": 4180.913,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4154.838,
"text": " And then I was obsessed with Kundalini for a while. I was like, holy shit, I had a Kundalini awakening. And I started looking up, you know, just literature about Kundalini, like open up the third eyes. And then I realized that opening up the third eye is only a means to an end. You're opening up the third eye so you can perceive the wisdom eye. And when I say the wisdom eye, what I mean is just emptiness. So what the Kundalini is, is pretty much just the dissolution of all the conditions and the traumas that are stored in your body."
},
{
"end_time": 4210.93,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4181.459,
"text": " And for some reason all the traumas are restored in very specific places like in your spine, like the chakras. So I experienced all those chakras opening up and at that moment I was like, holy shit, this is like, that's when I realized that you can experience mystical states and states of consciousness that are as powerful as psychedelics just by meditation, just by dissolving the solidity in the body through Vipassana or whatever techniques they use."
},
{
"end_time": 4240.367,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4211.613,
"text": " So after I went through all that, I realized that there's no distinction at all between psychedelic experiences and like jaunas or like samadhis and any kind of like meditative absorptions. They're just the byproducts and the symptoms and the side effects of that dissolution. So the way I look at commonly explosion is like tripping on your own conditioning. So if you take a lot of psychedelics, if you cling on to those experiences or your ego recontextualizes those experiences, not even in psychedelics, but even in meditation, if your ego clings on to those experiences and make a thing out of them,"
},
{
"end_time": 4267.244,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4240.811,
"text": " The way I look at psychedelic experiences or any kind of mystical experiences or energy stuff kind of leaning like dreams or like going to other adventures, aliens, entities is"
},
{
"end_time": 4282.227,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4267.875,
"text": " Looking at it from the perspective of the two axes of development in terms of the path to awakening. So with awakening, you're going from the surface level of consciousness to the source of consciousness. That's the x-axis of development."
},
{
"end_time": 4309.326,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4283.456,
"text": " So you're going straight down to the source. If you're a non-dual practitioner, or if you follow the teachings of Ramana Maharshi or Nisargada, that's why it's called the right method. You're going straight to the source. Disregard all the experiences that ever came across on the spiritual path. You realize they're all part of the dream. You go straight to the source. The horizontal axis is your cities and now mystical experiences, energetics,"
},
{
"end_time": 4339.599,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4309.906,
"text": " Most people, when they go down to the source, or at least they try to get down to the source if your goal is awakening, you are going to encounter a lot of energetic stuff, like kind of lenies and, you know, jhanas, mixed-way experiences. So, for most of it, it's zig-zag lying down to the source. So, that's why even I experience a lot of, like, crazy, mixed-way experiences. So, some people, though, they, instead of going down to the source, their experiences are so powerful that they just get sidetracked. So, they're actually just going further away from the source, or at least they just go, they go that way, horizontally."
},
{
"end_time": 4370.794,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4340.947,
"text": " by indulging in those experiences instead of going downward. But that's okay too because it's cool to be a conscious explorer. You can be a conscious explorer without recognizing the true nature of consciousness. But then, like, if your goal is to go down to the source and realize your true nature, for most people they aren't going to experience those things. But you can just as easily get trapped in those experiences and just go that way, just go horizontally without ever reaching the source. So that's how I contextualize. That's how I contextualize the difference between enlightenment and mystical experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 4400.589,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4372.432,
"text": " There are several people in the world in the comment section looking for a Kundalini explosion. What advice do you have? Just use the mystical experiences as a tool for investigation, right? So like to get down to the source of consciousness, to penetrate through the emptiness of phenomenons, you can use anything in your experience to do that. Like if you encounter a lot of mystical experiences or, you know, seeing entities, just use them to deconstruct"
},
{
"end_time": 4428.148,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4401.032,
"text": " Phenomenons into emptiness. They see that they are fundamentally the same thing as perceiving a rock or imagining a rock or having a drink or eating ice creams. They are all the same stuff. I think mystical experiences are great. Psychological experiences are wonderful. I think they are kind of like"
},
{
"end_time": 4457.125,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4428.626,
"text": " It's kind of like Buddha would just throw candies at you on the path. Because when you go down to the source of consciousness, for most people, the more mystical experiences you're going to have because the more you're dissolving, the deeper into the nature of reality or the nature of mind you're going. So it's actually for a lot of people, at least for me personally, it's a sign of progress actually. So even though it could be a distraction for a lot of people, it's at the same time a sign of progress for a lot of people."
},
{
"end_time": 4480.606,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4457.858,
"text": " There are places like shrines and at least ostensibly sacred temples and people meditate in proximity to it. So what role does this proximity play? Are these places indeed sacred?"
},
{
"end_time": 4505.009,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4481.971,
"text": " Not, they don't really play that much of a role. I mean, you can attain the same insight sitting in your bedroom as like the holiest places in the world. Yeah. I mean, you're looking inward to the nature of mind until you flip yourself inside out, right? So you can do that anywhere. And when you do flip yourself inside out, everywhere is the same. Like I used to go on, I used to"
},
{
"end_time": 4533.131,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4505.845,
"text": " I used to go to temples and then just feel like super euphoric and be like, holy shit, this place has super good vibes. Like, oh, I feel like my spiritual muscle just got bigger just by being in this temple. When I see a statue of a Buddha, I would get like goosebumps. But now when I see a statue of a Buddha, I just see a rock, like I just see like empty rock. That is not different than perceiving this water bottle. Yeah, like sitting stillness in my home, just meditating or not meditating, that's not different than like"
},
{
"end_time": 4562.432,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4533.524,
"text": " filming in the city of New York for like 12 hours a day. It's just the same thing. It's the same stillness, same vast spaciousness. So ultimately it doesn't make a difference. But if you're still on the path, you can use that as an anchor. You can use like temples and even basically every single spiritual tools is an anchor. You use one anchor to dissolve another anchor until all anchors dissolve themselves. But then ultimately the entire spiritual paradigm has to be transcended. Like you realize the entire spiritual paradigm"
},
{
"end_time": 4585.606,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4563.183,
"text": " It's just a lot of fabrication. It's just a tool for you to use. Because as I said, use the ladder to climb this mountain and then after you climb to the top of the mountain, you throw away the ladder. You don't need it anymore. Even the Buddha said something similar. The Buddha said even empty, this is empty. What he means is that even the whole Dharma, his whole teaching is empty."
},
{
"end_time": 4603.814,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4586.049,
"text": " This whole teaching is just a tool fabricated for you to use so that you can realize your true nature. But once you realize your true nature, you realize that the entire paradigm of spirituality is actually no different than any other paradigms, any other programs. It's a program that you use to destroy all other programs, but in and of itself, it's just another program that you have to transcend."
},
{
"end_time": 4633.609,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4604.206,
"text": " But a lot of people who get into spirituality, they never got through that program of spirituality. Like they would deconstruct and dissolve all the other programs. Now that I'm the spiritual being, you know, and I used to be a sex addict, I used to be in the pick-up program, I used to be in the gym program, I used to be in the artist program, and then I dissolve all that, but now I'm still in the spirituality program. That you're not completely free yet because you're still trapped in spirituality. But then so you have to let that go as well. But most people like can't let go of the last step because the last speck of their ego or identification still need to cling onto something."
},
{
"end_time": 4657.927,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4634.206,
"text": " Avaguru, what's the importance of it?"
},
{
"end_time": 4689.155,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4660.094,
"text": " The only true guru is yourself. The only true guru is whatever is your direct experience right now. But of course the gurus can be very useful. I mean, I wouldn't get to where I am without looking up about gurus on the internet. Like I don't have a teacher, like direct teacher. I don't have a teacher in real life, but I watch a lot of videos and I read a lot of books. So those were my gurus. Like the internet was my guru. So I think it's definitely important to have, it can be very useful to have a guru."
},
{
"end_time": 4719.019,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4689.735,
"text": " Okay, so then do you believe in spiritual guides? That I've met in real life or just people that"
},
{
"end_time": 4748.746,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4720.538,
"text": " I don't know. Everybody. Yeah, I see. The thing is, I look at everybody's teacher. Every single person you encounter on the spiritual path, every little thing you encounter on the spiritual path is your teacher. And how does one get swole? How do you get swole? How does somebody get swole? Well, you eat more calories than you burn and you"
},
{
"end_time": 4776.544,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4749.309,
"text": " you progressive overload on your weights. It's actually pretty simple. To get swell is actually pretty simple. You just try to lift more weights, try to lift more reps with the same weight or put more weight on the bar and eat more calories than you burn off. So those calories are going to the muscles. Dude, I don't even know how to get swell anymore because like I don't really like when you asked me the question I was like how do you get swell because it's like"
},
{
"end_time": 4803.968,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4776.92,
"text": " Where do you find the motivation to work out?"
},
{
"end_time": 4821.732,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4805.367,
"text": " Oh, motivation. I think you just got to build the habit. You know, at first go to the gym like once or twice a week. And then once you start to build up the habit, you just rewire your brain. It would be like breathing. That's pretty much what fitness is to me now. It's just like breathing. It's just like going to the bathroom."
},
{
"end_time": 4842.517,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4822.261,
"text": " It's"
},
{
"end_time": 4858.456,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4843.183,
"text": " 20 years"
},
{
"end_time": 4886.92,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4859.445,
"text": " It's the same thing as, you know, trying to get muscle, the same thing as getting better at the violin. It's the same thing as trying to learn a language, try to acquire any skills, right? At first you kind of have to like consciously learn it with your cortex and you have to think about it. And then you let the knowledge sit down into your heart and into your gut until they are sit down to the cellular level. That's why people go into this spiritual path. They have glimpses, but then they contract back. They have it and they lose it. They're like, Oh my God, I'm awakened. And they contract back."
},
{
"end_time": 4916.92,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4887.5,
"text": " That's kind of like an athlete going through a flow state and then they're losing it or like you play the violin, you know, oh, for this passage, I can play without thinking I'm in a flow state, but then I fuck up again because the knowledge hasn't seeped down into your cellular level. You haven't completely wired the brain yet. So once you rewire the brain, it just becomes like breathing to you. Just like the meditative state. Once you rewire the brain, what used to be like a huge big bang, like, holy fuck, I glimpsed up for five seconds becomes your moment to moment reality."
},
{
"end_time": 4945.572,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4918.012,
"text": " Let's take a brief digression. What's your favorite piece on the violin? Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. That's my favorite concerto, I think. And also the Brahms. Brahms is awesome, too. Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Dude, his stuff is like, oh my god, I can't even describe it. Talking about especially contracting, he's just like max effort especially contracting happening simultaneously."
},
{
"end_time": 4972.602,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4946.578,
"text": " You can just clearly see how the two chords better rise. The reason why you feel like an explosion, orgasmic explosion on some of his passages is because he gives you that contraction before that. That's how all good music is. All good music is the process of the expression and contraction. That's how you can apply that to everything. I like Bach too. With all these good four seasons, the classical stuff. But Tchaikovsky's probably my favorite."
},
{
"end_time": 5000.879,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4974.019,
"text": " Do you gain any insight or motivation spiritually from music? Yeah, we can talk about that as well. I think music and meditation... I mean, I started out as a musician. I started playing the violin when I was five. So that's sort of the core of my being, right? So when I started to get into meditation, I was like, wow, this is just like music. Like, I see another way I describe the natural state is like, it feels like the universe or God is DJing to itself."
},
{
"end_time": 5030.486,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5001.544,
"text": " It just feels like music everywhere, right? Like whatever high that I used to get from music or play music or hear music, like I get it now just through my direct experience, like moment to moment. This is like everything is just music. Like every single sensation that arises is just like, ah, right? So it's like, like music, I think is one of the best ways to like glimpse the infinity, I think, because it's one of the most abstract art forms. You can't really see it, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5059.514,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5031.425,
"text": " It's just so abstract. It's just like energy. It's like pure energy. And you can really sense the nodes of music just arising through emptiness and then going back into emptiness. And the silence between the nodes is actually made out of the same thing as the nodes themselves. It's all empty. But then within that emptiness, it vibrates and bursts into form. That's how music works. And you can extend that insight to sight, to taste, to the body."
},
{
"end_time": 5078.131,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5059.821,
"text": " to anything, to all sense stores. So pretty much meditation is discovering that insight exactly the same way that music works, the insight of expanding and contracting and the vibration of emptiness into form. If you look at string theory, it's like a lot of string theorists will make the metaphor of how the vibration of the string"
},
{
"end_time": 5104.855,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5078.524,
"text": " inside a particle, subatomic particle, it's like music. This vibration, you have an A, this other vibration, you have C, and that's how music is constructed. But ultimately, all music, all notes are the same. It's just different degrees, intensity of expansion, contraction, and vibration. So meditation is tapping into that, like not just hearing music, but like in all your direct experience. So music is great."
},
{
"end_time": 5133.66,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5105.486,
"text": " Also like music, it's a really good way to perceive the pederabic view of awareness. Because when I tell people that your awareness or your experience is pederamic, I use a lot of 360 videos in my YouTube videos to illustrate that awareness is actually pederamic. And music is actually one of the easiest sense stores to tap into the pederabic nature of awareness."
},
{
"end_time": 5159.821,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5134.172,
"text": " Because music is just all around, right? So hearing what's behind you and hearing what's in front of you and hearing what's to the left and to the right, it makes no difference. Like from the perspective of sound, there is no distance, there's no directions, there's no locality. So then you can actually expand that into all other sense stores and perceive the nature of experience to be non-local and panoramic."
},
{
"end_time": 5181.186,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5160.367,
"text": " So like meditating on sound or even meditating on music is one of the easiest way to access the true nature of mind. Just connecting the dots between like all kind of art forms or even like you know physics and just anything that you do. It's funny because once you once you get into non duality you can see any everywhere."
},
{
"end_time": 5204.514,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5181.903,
"text": " Because it's the true nature of experience and everything is a resonating experience. You can actually just watch a movie and be like, okay, actually every movie talks about undualities somewhere in there, if you really watch it. But not even just that, it's just like everything that you see around you, you can kind of use that as a metaphor for truth realization, which I found really fascinating. But music is definitely one of the most obvious ones."
},
{
"end_time": 5233.916,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5205.708,
"text": " I'm William Gouge, a Vuri Collaborator and Professional Ultrarunner from the UK. I love to tackle endurance runs around the world, including a 55 day, 3064 mile run across the US. So I know a thing or two about performance wear. When it comes to relaxing, I look for something ultra versatile and comfy. The Ponto Performance Jogger from Vuri is perfect for all of those things. It's the comfiest jogger I've ever worn."
},
{
"end_time": 5261.305,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5234.326,
"text": " Have you heard of remote viewing?"
},
{
"end_time": 5287.927,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5262.466,
"text": " Oh, I mean, I've heard of it. I don't know what it is. Like, what is it? It's essentially people training non-local awareness. I mean, we do more, I think experiences like that. Um, when I was going through the path, uh, experiences when I was experiencing, uh, the world through other people's eyes, I have experiences again, like past lives or like other dimensions where out of body experiences. Yeah. But then, uh, again, they're just content."
},
{
"end_time": 5315.555,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5288.899,
"text": " That there's just content arising through consciousness, fundamentally no different than anything that isn't really doing. To me, just looking at you through the screen is no different from like astral projection. But then again, they're fun. There are actually a lot of traditions, they focus on that as a means to get to emptiness, like dream yoga, for example, or like practicing lucid dreaming, trying to stay aware during dreams or trying to do vipassana, dream yoga."
},
{
"end_time": 5339.172,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5316.169,
"text": " Because in those states here, it's a little bit more, uh, less solidified. So in a sense, the insights come easier during dream states or doing like, you know, out of body experiences, which again, I think it's also why when I was going through the pathway, a lot of those experiences is because like my mind was more valuable, more malleable. And then I was doing a lot of insight practices, you know, and my mind was more concentrated. So I was able to like actually those states easier."
},
{
"end_time": 5367.585,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5339.667,
"text": " But then I mean, I don't really like try to access those states anymore and they don't really come to me as often as they used to just because I don't know why. I guess going back to my theory or according to my experience about how most of those experiences are just a byproduct of the dissolution of solidity in the body mind. Once you're dissolved, those experiences, unless you train them, which you can, like I know Dana Ingram, which he calls himself an Aarha."
},
{
"end_time": 5393.677,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5368.148,
"text": " and he is an Arhat. He does a lot of fire casino practices where it's pretty much, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's basically working with like what I call magic. So that's his way of putting the emptiness back into the form. So I would say after realization those abilities will come way more easier for you and if you don't train in they probably just won't occur as much."
},
{
"end_time": 5421.698,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5394.753,
"text": " How would you instruct someone who's a beginner to reach enlightenment and I put those in quotes on purpose and what's the plan? What's the path? Yeah, I think if you, it depends on where your goal is. I mean, I don't"
},
{
"end_time": 5450.282,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5422.261,
"text": " Not everyone wants to attain realization. Some people just want to explore consciousness. That's totally fine. Some people like to play basketball. Some people like to play video games. Some people like to take psychedelics or meditate to attain different states of consciousness. And that's fascinating. I think that's wonderful. But again, like I said, if your goal is truth realization or awakening, that could be a very good tool"
},
{
"end_time": 5479.104,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5451.101,
"text": " But that could also be a distraction. It all depends on how you use them and on context and stuff like that. It's always good and bad. Everything is good and bad. To me, the most magical thing is your direct experience right now, like the is-ness. Just the fact that you're conscious, it is like the magic show. You can't get any more magical than that. Just the fact that every moment is giving birth to itself. Every single moment, like I said earlier, is manifested in itself."
},
{
"end_time": 5507.398,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5479.531,
"text": " That is already the greatest magic show of all time. How does that even happen? Nobody fucking knows. Right? So like, whatever is arising within this magic show, like the magic show within the magic show, just isn't as mind blowing to me anymore. It's just the fact that I'm experiencing something right now. And I'm having a conversation with you and all this stuff. It's like, it's arising. And then you're all of it and none of it. And it's like, what the fuck? That to me is magic."
},
{
"end_time": 5540.555,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5512.09,
"text": " Oh yeah, you had a question about enlightenment, right? So I think the best way to answer that question is only enlightenment gets enlightened. It's kind of like the same thing as the magic show, right? It's like there's no one here to get enlightened. Only wakefulness wakes up to itself. That's the most direct answer I can give you about why enlightenment is. Because the ego can never get enlightened. And again, the point is not to"
},
{
"end_time": 5569.104,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5540.964,
"text": " kill the ego. Because you can't kill something that wasn't alive in the first place. It's just to see through its validity. That's another trap that I want the Buddha to know is that you are seeing through the self as empty processes happening. You're not trying to kill the self. Because at the end, you know, this whole spiritual path is just about being your most authentic self. And your most authentic self is empty. And the paradox is to realize no self is to find the self. So a higher self"
},
{
"end_time": 5585.094,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5569.804,
"text": " Self and no-self are actually just the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 5614.667,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5585.572,
"text": " I remember when I first started meditating, again, like I said, I was doing it because I had such a strong sex drive. So my friend who already went to a Vipassana retreat, he was like, Frank, why don't you just witness your thoughts? I was like, what does that even mean, witness my thoughts? Because I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of people, they go through a whole life without ever watching their thoughts even once. They're just thinking their entire life. They don't even know that there's an awareness around the thought, right? So watching your breath or just watching your thought."
},
{
"end_time": 5643.131,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5615.265,
"text": " It's like the first step towards the, you know, the boundless nature of truth. So imagine like piercing through a veil, right? So imagine like all the defilements and all the condition is like a veil. So when you watch your thought or watch a sensation, you're piercing through that thought and you create a very tiny little hole. And then every time you witness a thought,"
},
{
"end_time": 5670.776,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5643.729,
"text": " Hopefully if you're making progress, the hole in the veil becomes bigger and bigger and bigger until the entire veil is gone and there's just emptiness. So even just watching your breath for the very first time on your first day of meditation, you are already creating a very tiny hole, a very tiny glimpse into emptiness. Tell me about some spiritual or metaphysical experiences. Oh, those mystical experiences? Oh, I've had like"
},
{
"end_time": 5695.435,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5672.278,
"text": " Well, the best way I can describe those experiences is how similar they are to psychedelic trips. So like, if you take it like NNDMT, or again, DMT is a little different from 500 ml DMT. So most of the experiences are closer to my NNDMT experience, which I only took once. It's you just seeing like fractals of things like, you know, going in and out of each other and"
},
{
"end_time": 5716.323,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5695.435,
"text": " Just like, you know, going to a warm hall and just your usual psychedelic stuff, you know, if you pull out one of those psychedelic videos, like the infinite spiral, things like that. That's very common when you're still going through a process, very, very common. But the 5-in-1 DMT is the one that gives you a glimpse of non-duality right away. That isn't really an experience per se."
},
{
"end_time": 5729.343,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5716.834,
"text": " So what happens during a 5ml DMT trip is that you get a glimpse of your true nature of infinite space. But then it's always laced with a lot of your bullshit too. It's always laced with a lot of your conditionings. So that's why you get the trip stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 5753.49,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5730.009,
"text": " Like a filter on top of the vast, infinite space, right? So when I took the 5-MIL DNT, I actually did two hits. The first hit I was like spiraling my own mind. I was perceiving like infinity. I realized that wasn't it. So I took another hit and then that was dissolved and I glimpsed into the emptiness of true nature. So again, my direct experience right now is the emptiness of true nature without the visuals."
},
{
"end_time": 5773.131,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5754.036,
"text": " So like during the unfoldments, when my stuff is coming out, when the lens of perception is getting dissolved, I experienced very similar stuff as well. Yeah, just like, you know, having orgies with the whole universe, like having sex with like different entities. I had an experience where like I was like, pretty much wide awake, but I was in a really like,"
},
{
"end_time": 5798.114,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5773.524,
"text": " I was awake, I wasn't sleeping, but then because I was going through like a kind of linear involvement, so like my state of consciousness was like altered, I literally saw midgets appearing like in my room, like trying to suck my d**k. Like it was like right there, it was like mid-deformed midgets, it's like just like a bunch of deformed midgets, and it came back like three or four times, like it was just like little midgets like right in front of me trying to suck my d**k."
},
{
"end_time": 5828.643,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5798.933,
"text": " And then I was like, okay, that's something I need to look at. Why is that being projected onto my consciousness right now? Yeah, but I can say, you know, sex was like one of the biggest conditionings that I needed to dissolve. So that's probably why. So like a lot of those visions are like sexual, very sexual, and a lot of visions of like gods and like, like, like, previous like, I remember my, in one of my retreats, I experienced something like going back"
},
{
"end_time": 5851.51,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5828.968,
"text": " in time, like just becoming younger and younger until like before I was born and then there were like dinosaurs and like just the whole shebang, like the birth of the universe, all that stuff. Yeah. So I experienced like pretty much everything you can read about in spirituality, like experiences that I've experienced in them all. And then now they're just like, oh, that was cool. But where are they now?"
},
{
"end_time": 5876.493,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5853.063,
"text": " To me, this right here, what I'm experiencing right now, which is what everyone is experiencing if they remove the center, it's in a sense way more profound, but at the same time, way simpler than anything you can experience on meditation or psychedelics. So it's almost like it's the merging of something that's so divided as ordinary."
},
{
"end_time": 5903.831,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5877.5,
"text": " And the two are one. If you can't perceive God in a piece of shit, then you haven't realized God. You can't make any distinction between this is God or this is not God, this is truth or this is not truth. You can't make a distinction between this kind of mystical experience is closer to the source than other kind of mystical experiences because everything is source. When everything is source, there is no source in a sense."
},
{
"end_time": 5930.009,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5904.599,
"text": " That's why I like to use this phrase, when you truly realize God, God disappears. When you truly realize the self, the self disappears. When you truly have an insight, you consume it. It's like eating food, you know. When you eat a food, the reason why it disappears is because it is embodied into your physical form so completely that it disappears. So if you're still perceiving God, then there's still a standard."
},
{
"end_time": 5954.753,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5930.776,
"text": " In a sense, because most people who talk about God realization, they still have a center that's perceiving God consciousness that's over there. And they don't theorize about it or just attach their egos to it. But then when you truly realize God, when you are perceiving the Godhead as the Godhead, instead of perceiving the Godhead from, still from the center of the separate self, then God ceases to become even a thing."
},
{
"end_time": 5969.189,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5957.21,
"text": " Yeah, so that's when somebody asked the Buddha what he was after he's awakened. He's like, hey man, what are you? And he was like, I'm neither man nor God. I'm awake. So he's like trying to tell you that, you know, what God and man are just"
},
{
"end_time": 5997.312,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5969.445,
"text": " But there's just concepts in a way, right? But then again, it depends on who I talk to. If I talk to somebody who's really into God, I use the word God. I have a friend who's a Christian and I have no problem with using the word God to describe the natural state. If I talk to a neuroscientist, I'll just go to the brain. If I talk to a non-dualist, I'll be like, yeah, there is no brain. This is just what it is. So it's all of it. Yeah, it's all of it and none of it."
},
{
"end_time": 6025.162,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5997.312,
"text": " For people struggling with addiction such as sexual addiction, would you recommend meditation? See meditation is really, it depends on how deep you go with meditation really. Like if you, like in the middle of the path sometimes like when the condition has come up, you can actually make it more for you. Yeah, I mean the meditation is very tricky because when you get to the deep end of meditation, it's like"
},
{
"end_time": 6055.111,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6025.35,
"text": " Sometimes you can seem even more egoistical because now, because number one, you're more aware of the ego so you can feel like more contractions because now you're aware of it before you're not aware of it. So you can become even more aware of your sexual drives. You can, you know, experience those things even more like intensively. And then we have any kind of insights into like no self, just even just a little bit. Sometimes you use that as like an anchor for spiritual bypassing. It's like, Oh, there's no self anyway. Let me just go fuck around and cheat on my girlfriend. And like, you know, that can happen. So like,"
},
{
"end_time": 6080.93,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6056.374,
"text": " Yeah, like I said, it depends, man. It really depends. Meditation really can go both ways if you go down to the deep end of it, unless you finish the job. So that's why going through the spiritual process is very similar to going through a mental breakdown. Because you're losing the mind, you're losing at least the ego mind or the solidity of the mind."
},
{
"end_time": 6109.753,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6081.237,
"text": " When you look at a mental disorder through a spiritual lens, does that then give you the impression that they're misunderstood?"
},
{
"end_time": 6141.493,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6112.261,
"text": " Sometimes I think, yeah, yeah, like, sometimes, you know, like, okay, so what is schizophrenia? Schizophrenia is pretty much, schizophrenia is pretty much an ego gonna muck. So like you hear voices in your head you think is real. You see images in your head you think is real. You can't distinguish between like reality and the mind, right? So, but in the natural state, in the awakened state, you cease to make that distinction too."
},
{
"end_time": 6167.671,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6142.432,
"text": " but you're totally functioning like you function even more normally than before but then you realize that that what's in your mind and what's outside of my there's no distinction between inside and outside self and others and you know in a way it's kind of like I don't want to say it's kind of like schizophrenic be schizophrenic but it's it you know we just even just seeing a person on the street talking to themselves"
},
{
"end_time": 6191.8,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6168.234,
"text": " Okay, not even just everybody talks to themselves, right? Somehow we believe the voice in our head to be real, right? So even that's a very mild form of schizophrenic, right? So then a schizophrenic person who is, you know, officially diagnosed or clinically diagnosed is just a more intense version of that. So with realization, you kind of see through how there is no distinction between the voice in your head and the voice outside."
},
{
"end_time": 6221.22,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6192.637,
"text": " Why are we at least seemingly detached from the natural state of mind or consciousness? Because of conditioning."
},
{
"end_time": 6249.531,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6221.92,
"text": " Okay, we talk about like traumas, right? Like, you know, all those traumas are manifested in, you know, the solidities in the body mind. That's what's separating us from like the unity of all things. So people talk about traumas like, oh, something that happened to you when you're a kid, like you lost your job, broke, your girlfriend broke up with you, you got abused, lots of trauma, sure, lots of traumas. But just the fact that you were giving birth is already traumatic, the trauma of the existence. So"
},
{
"end_time": 6278.985,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6250.265,
"text": " I talk about the development of the standard, like the seer, the thinker, the doer, the hearer, right? Even the solidity in the head is the result of trauma. The trauma of separation is the trauma of identity, right? So even just something as subtle as having a perceiver inside your head that's congealed, just congealed sensations, that's trying to take credit for true nature, even that's trauma because we're born and then our mothers give us a name and that moment is already conditioning. It's already a sense of separation there."
},
{
"end_time": 6308.626,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6279.309,
"text": " Over time, we have hundreds and thousands of things that are just piled up in our natural state due to conditions like that. That's just one example. You go to school and then you have a certain role you play. When you go out into society, you have a job. All those conditionings are manifesting themselves as physical solidities somewhere in the head or in the body. For most people, it's in the head because that's where most of our identification with the self is. It is with the perceiver."
},
{
"end_time": 6323.268,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6309.019,
"text": " Yeah, so to answer your question, the reason why we have sets of separations is because of culture, because of conditioning and culture. Civilization cannot function without each person being separate actually, because most of the stuff"
},
{
"end_time": 6345.691,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6323.66,
"text": " that arises out of monosolidation are the result of separation. Trudh Dalsai who is like one of my favorite teachers, he said he has experiences which I can relate to as well where he would tap into the minds of other people. That's how he defined reincarnation actually. He said reincarnation isn't about my previous life as much as I'm experiencing other people's minds right now."
},
{
"end_time": 6373.456,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6346.613,
"text": " So because our minds are interconnected, you know, like quantum entanglement, whatever you want to call it, because everything is interconnected, everything is codipattern rising and that individual minds have no locations. If you access non-duality, you are going to have experiences where you're tapping into other people's minds. That's why I get a lot of synchronicities all the time. Like people saying things and I know exactly what they're going to say or I want to say something and then they will say the same thing or"
},
{
"end_time": 6398.729,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6374.087,
"text": " Sometimes when I'm editing a video, I'm answering a question like in my video and then the exact question will be asked by like a few other people like on Instagram. Just crazy shit like that happens all the time and I don't look at them as anything that's like supernatural. I look at them as very natural thing that's occurring, right? Because like the fact that you think you are the separate entity enclosing your own mind is actually the unnatural state of being."
},
{
"end_time": 6417.602,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6399.531,
"text": " The dissolution of separation is actually the more natural way of being. Animals probably communicate like that all the time, right? Spirit guides is one of those examples. You can have the false spiritual guide who leads you to places that are"
},
{
"end_time": 6442.278,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6418.148,
"text": " Is it preferred to be a more technologically advanced society or a more spiritually advanced one and what the heck would that even"
},
{
"end_time": 6469.957,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6442.278,
"text": " I think the ideal state is the merging of both, going back to the merging of integrating emptiness back into reform. The ideal civilization would probably be a civilization where everybody enters non-duality, everybody accesses their natural state. But then we still go on and develop technological advancements in science, in art and everything. But then I think the world would look very different. I think in some sense it would be even more advanced technologically and scientifically."
},
{
"end_time": 6490.247,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6470.452,
"text": " and artistically if everybody has just a natural state because just as an example of my own life like I'm doing everything that I used to do pre-awakening like I'm still you know working out play the violin I'm still going on dates I'm still just doing like the things I frankly used to do I'm still editing videos but then I have to do that way more efficiently now"
},
{
"end_time": 6515.316,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6490.623,
"text": " Because your brain is undergoing this massive transformation, like you're getting a new operating system of the mind. Because without all that bullshit out of the way, everything becomes more efficient. So I always say recognizing your true nature is going back to how your brain and your body, your nervous system is wired before it was powered out by all these conditions and lenses of perception. So going back to doing things the way"
},
{
"end_time": 6544.172,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6516.169,
"text": " So you do them more efficiently because they're not filtered. You're not as attached to like outcomes and you don't get tired as easily. Like I can work out 12 hours a day now without getting tired. It would just feel like I'm just still sitting still in my room when I'm out there just filming 10 hours a day. I don't feel tired and like even my conditioning at the gym just improved. I can like you know work out longer hours without getting tired because we spend so much of our time and energy and our calories building up this illusion and avatar in our head."
},
{
"end_time": 6573.456,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6544.497,
"text": " that we don't have managing like to do other things. So about civilization, if everyone enters non-duality, I think the technology would like advance as well and in a better, in a more compassionate and loving way. Yeah. So again, you said that the ideal civilization to me is the merging of the spiritual world and the material world. Because again, even on the personal level, there's no distinction at all between the spiritual and the material, right? Because if there is this duality,"
},
{
"end_time": 6598.302,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6575.23,
"text": " Yeah, so the true non-dual civilization would be one that's like super advanced technologically, and then everyone's enlightened. And I think we're getting there. Because I think technology is kind of speeding up this process too, because of the internet, because of the psychedelics revolution, because we have the entire history is teaching at our fingertips. But just like any other tools on the spiritual path, you can also be the distraction."
},
{
"end_time": 6629.36,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6599.753,
"text": " Will we create an artificial consciousness? Probably, but artificial consciousness to me is not different from consciousness. People always ask me about AIs, right? They'll send me stuff, the questions they're asking. You know how I think there's some kind of new website or something, you can type questions that they already answered. I'm just looking and I'm like, that's really cool, but how is that different from when somebody else, who he would be answering?"
},
{
"end_time": 6651.237,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6631.084,
"text": " It's just part of the happening of the universe. Like you are already that consciousness that you're trying to create, right? So even though that's really cool, I'm excited to see where like artificial intelligence take us. I think we will get there, but ultimately I don't see the difference between artificial intelligence and just general intelligence or animal intelligence or anything else."
},
{
"end_time": 6674.906,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6651.903,
"text": " And so are you optimistic about the future? I don't know if I'm optimistic or not optimistic. I think every way, I think everything, not just your personal life, but the entire universe is just the way it is. It's already perfection. Like I look at the, I look at the entire universe as like a Mandela, as like a fractal of Mandela, right? And then this fractal is always perfect, regardless of what happens."
},
{
"end_time": 6689.906,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6675.435,
"text": " So if you take a piece out of this mandala, another piece would just immediately give birth to itself because of this missing piece. That can actually be experienced in your present moment reality right now."
},
{
"end_time": 6719.889,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6690.009,
"text": " This Mandela, this Infinite Mandela, which is your reality right now in the entire universe, always perfect. The only reason why I don't think anything is perfect or we have a bad day or, oh, this shit is like bad for civilization is because we're not seeing the big picture. We're not zooming in on seeing the whole Mandela. Yeah. Do you get asked these kinds of questions often? Not the way that you ask because most of my clients, they just ask very specific questions about techniques or like,"
},
{
"end_time": 6747.159,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6721.305,
"text": " like the meditations or or it's more it's more specific but you're touching things that i that i that sometimes i talk about with people but usually i don't talk about this that much i mean there's stuff that i've been talking about with you that i talk about with my clients yeah but like the stuff that you just asked me like about like ai sort of civilization i don't really talk about them that much i don't really have thoughts about them when you ask me i just kind of oh this they just come out so like they're"
},
{
"end_time": 6776.698,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6748.49,
"text": " Alright Frank, I'm going to butcher these pronunciations but bear with me. How would the different states of mind along the path from the stream entrance to Arahant be differentiated?"
},
{
"end_time": 6796.476,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6777.756,
"text": " You know how I talk about the two sides of the coin, like the expansion and contraction? Most people who got a spiritual path only focuses on one side. You get like the Vipassana school, the Maitreya school, so where they just kind of deconstruct sensations down to the quantum elements, but they're not expanding awareness."
},
{
"end_time": 6825.725,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6796.476,
"text": " If that sounds confusing, I always give the example of building an athlete. If you want to build a really powerful and very fast athlete, you need to have both strength and speed."
},
{
"end_time": 6846.442,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6826.135,
"text": " Because strength times speed is power. So if you're too slow, you should probably do some plyometrics. If you're just someone who's naturally really fast and don't have a lot of strength, if you want to jump higher, you can probably do more squats. So it's the perfect combination of both strength and speed that gives rise to a powerful athlete."
},
{
"end_time": 6866.561,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6846.852,
"text": " So enlightenment is kind of like power. You need the strength of the mind through concentration and you need the vast spaciousness. And the vast spaciousness is instantaneous, right? It's almost like the speed of light, right? The only constant in the universe supposedly is the speed of light. The only constant in your experience is that vast spacious awareness. So you need both."
},
{
"end_time": 6894.309,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6867.005,
"text": " You need to tap into both the end of the spectrum, both the contraction and the expansion, both the vipassana, the mindfulness, and the do-nothing meditation, the surrendering, the non-dual stuff, to build the perfect spiritual athlete, so to speak. So that's what the thing that most people are missing, because they would get into one school, they'd just be like, okay, the non-dual school, be like, oh, you don't need to meditate, just be, but then your experience of just be"
},
{
"end_time": 6924.445,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6895.23,
"text": " If you're still contracted, if you still haven't dissolved the solitary in the body mind through Vipassana and concentration, it's not the natural state. And the Buddhist school would be like, oh, you have to, there's a path to this thing. Like you have to have a lot of concentration. You have to become very good at meditation. You know, you can't just be, you have to practice like five hours a day. There are attainments. You have to access this Jhana and that Jhana. You have to have a cessation, things like that. But then I'm all about merging the two schools together and just find out what works for you."
},
{
"end_time": 6952.022,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6925.401,
"text": " How important are the jhanas? Jhanas are, again, just like mystical experiences, are the byproduct of the solution. The natural state is kind of like the sixth jhana of infinite consciousness, but without the subject-object split. So if you get to the sixth consciousness a lot, then you can rewire your brain to kind of access that state. But then if you're in a jhana, that means there's still a meditator. Because jhana, just like psychedelic experiences, is this temporary state you can come in and out of."
},
{
"end_time": 6974.258,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6952.739,
"text": " So the natural state is like the balanced consciousness again merging with cessation that's permanent. So it's like a wake cessation. So that's why Adyashanda calls it a dark light. So jhanas are like just another tool. But even if you don't practice Vipassana or like Buddhist meditation, some people experience jhana anyway without knowing anything about jhana. It's just because they go through the process of dissolution."
},
{
"end_time": 7004.326,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6975.043,
"text": " What are the defilements?"
},
{
"end_time": 7029.667,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7005.64,
"text": " The defilements are just conditioning to solidities and traumas that are stored in the body. Let me give you a visual metaphor for that. Imagine your true nature is buried in a pile of mud. Throughout your path of spiritual practice, you're trying to deconstruct and dissolve that pile of mud so your true nature, the light of consciousness, can shine through."
},
{
"end_time": 7051.118,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7030.657,
"text": " So the defilements and the conditionings and the solidities or the traumas, which is the same thing with the stuff of the ego, the stuff of your identification, the stuff that makes you think you're separate from everything else, those are the defilements. So all the spiritual practices are just tools to dissolve that defilement, that mud that's covering up your true nature."
},
{
"end_time": 7080.555,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7051.578,
"text": " And all the spiritual experiences are just a byproduct of the process of that dissolution. So when the defilements and when the mud that's burying true nature is starting to dissolve, your experience will become more psychedelic. Because you're becoming less solidified. That's why things are morphing, moving, vibrating, undulating, lights are dancing and things like that. That's why you experience kind of linear stuff, like your energy going through your body and you see"
},
{
"end_time": 7103.251,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7080.555,
"text": " So then every time you poke a hole through that veil, what happens? Your stuff comes out. All the stuff that's buried, that's manifested as the munt that's buried on top of the infinite light of true nature comes up. So then you have to let it wait to dissolve it. And that's where the darkness of the soul comes in. When that stuff comes out, you're going to feel very uncomfortable."
},
{
"end_time": 7130.077,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7103.831,
"text": " Alright, so another way to describe it is that the only reason why you're not awake is because of all the stuff you're afraid to look at. Because once you look at the stuff, you're piercing through the veil and you let it come out, you let it be released, and when you surrender it, you let awareness dissolve it. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim, check out a pop-up art show,"
},
{
"end_time": 7153.302,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7131.783,
"text": " Can a method of meditation itself be an obstruction?"
},
{
"end_time": 7183.183,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7154.189,
"text": " Yes, yes, yes. That's why the no method method of the do nothing meditation is the expansion part of it. You're just trying to surrender and let go and do nothing. And then if you just sit there and do nothing and stare at the wall for like 10 years, you'll probably become enlightened. Because even like getting bored, wanting to move, that's conditioning. Right? So if you just sit there and do nothing and then become uninvolved with whatever is surfacing, they will be released."
},
{
"end_time": 7206.817,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7183.643,
"text": " But then you can also, that's going from the outside in. You can also go from the inside out by doing Vipassana, by contracting awareness to tiny laser beam of attention and then deconstruct the solidity through the meditator. But then the do nothing meditation and the just sit, you don't even take that into consideration because that can create its own solidity."
},
{
"end_time": 7219.718,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7207.398,
"text": " Because a lot of people go to Vipassana retreats like 20 years, 40 years, and they still don't have stream entry which is like the first level of awakening. Why? Because they're just becoming better meditators. They're becoming better observers."
},
{
"end_time": 7247.807,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7220.606,
"text": " But the whole point is to deconstruct the meditator and erase that duality between the object of meditation and the meditator so that there's absolutely no distinction between the observation, the observed, and the observer. It's all just one seamless process. But then if you just sit there and meditate through the perspective of the observer for 20 years without recognizing the fact that you are still doing it from the meditator, from the observer, without realizing that the witness is just more solidly that you're congealing."
},
{
"end_time": 7276.51,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7248.336,
"text": " It's a more subtle form of the ego, but still the ego. The meditator is just another form of the ego. But if you take that all the way, if you take the proportional path all the way like I said earlier, if you truly deconstruct the object of meditation to emptiness, the meditator will be dissolved as well. Because if you dissolve the object of meditation, the meditator will simultaneously be dissolved as well. Because you see that insight not just through the object of meditation, but"
},
{
"end_time": 7301.988,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7276.92,
"text": " You apply that to the meditator as well. So the do nothing meditation where you just sit and don't apply any techniques, one of the advantages is that you don't have to go through that process of using the meditator as an anchor or even using the direction of attention as an anchor. You just kind of bypass all that and then just realize that even the meditator, it's just more sensations that are controlled. How does the sense of self change along the fourfold path?"
},
{
"end_time": 7324.019,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7302.773,
"text": " It's just more and more solidity gets dissolved, more defilement gets evaporated, so the vast spaciousness opens up more. So the only difference between a stream enter and a second path person and the third path person and an Arahant is just the amount of solidities that are dissolved and how much spaciousness is opened up. So it's around my path, like every time I go through a path,"
},
{
"end_time": 7354.599,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7324.735,
"text": " The sense of self becomes less and less localized, and the awareness becomes more and more panoramic and balanced. So during the first three paths, there's still a bubble. So when I reached the entry, I was like, holy shit. For the first time, I kind of know what Douglas Harding was talking about when he said, you have no head. I can kind of glimpse it. I really don't have a head. But then there's still a distortion in the field. There's still this bubble that's wrapped over my head."
},
{
"end_time": 7376.34,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7354.872,
"text": " But it was very spacious compared to just being completely stuck in the nose perception in the head. But it's still not the full thing. It's only like 5% of what I'm experiencing right now. And then as I go on to the next path, the spacious opens up more. The panoramic view just opens up more and more. Until the fourth path, the bubble bursts."
},
{
"end_time": 7400.009,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7377.568,
"text": " So one of the major insights of fourth path or arhatship is that there is no distinction between awareness and sensations. It's like perception, awareness, sensations, thoughts, body, everything is just one thing. You can say there's only sensations and that there's no awareness or you can say there's only awareness and there's no sensations. They're talking about the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 7430.128,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7400.384,
"text": " During the second and third path, there is still a very subtle duality between sensation and awareness. You're still experiencing sensation arising and passing through this fabric of awareness. So going back to the anchor, you can say that in Vipassana, you are using the object of meditation and the meditator as the anchor. In the do-nothing meditation, you're using the vast spaciousness itself as an anchor. So in the do-nothing meditation, you are"
},
{
"end_time": 7457.995,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7431.254,
"text": " Using the awareness to meditate on itself, in a sense. Where in the Vipassana, you're using the meditator to meditate on the object of meditation. But then every anchor has to be dissolved. So for most people, the last anchor is awareness itself. At least the awareness as a separate substrate apart from sensations and perceptions. Okay, now how would you ever know if you made it to the top, so to speak? The fourth path moment"
},
{
"end_time": 7486.783,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7458.456,
"text": " It's so obvious and so like just so clear there's no doubt about it at all. It's just there's no room for doubt because there's no gaps and distance between anything. It's like everything is completely full and empty simultaneously that leaves no room for any kind of doubt. When the mind recognizes itself so completely, when the universe penetrates itself so completely, the metaphor that I use is the snake by its own tail."
},
{
"end_time": 7505.196,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7486.783,
"text": " Like if you see the logo of a snake biting its own tail or this like infinity sign that goes like this. Like every single sensation in my experience feels like this. Like the relationship between my body and the world also feels like this. Everything is just like this, like the infinity sign. Then when you reach the infinity sign, where is there to go? It is itself!"
},
{
"end_time": 7533.814,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7505.896,
"text": " There's obviously nowhere to go. It becomes so obvious that this is the most obvious thing that you can experience. It's the true nature of your experience. So the fourth high moment is just like, that's it. You just have no doubt that the search is over. I think that's one of the number one signs of whether or not you've done it. It's like the search is completely over. You're not looking for anything anymore outside of this direct experience right now. You can't get any more infinite than infinite."
},
{
"end_time": 7563.933,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7535.333,
"text": " If you're still searching, then you probably still have more ways to go. But then after that, you still need to integrate things. But the path after awakening, the integration path, the cleaning up after waking up, you can still practice and you can still read about spirituality, but then the search is just not there anymore. You're not looking to gain any higher insights. You're not looking to become more empty. You're not trying to make awareness more aware."
},
{
"end_time": 7584.906,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7564.838,
"text": " But then you can still practice to integrate the emptiness back and forth, refine the realization more and more. Because as Adyashanti said, the mystery just keeps getting deeper. It's like you flip a switch. There is a switch that you flip. And I think for most people that have gone through the process, they do recall a switch. Like after the switch is flipped,"
},
{
"end_time": 7609.241,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7586.186,
"text": " Who is the greatest teacher in the Vipassana history? And do you consider yourself to be a teacher by the way?"
},
{
"end_time": 7630.145,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7609.65,
"text": " See myself as a teacher, actually. I mean, I say I coach people. I don't know, the whole guru and student-teacher-student relationship, I'm not too comfortable with it. I always say I don't have a teaching. But anyway, that's another discussion. In terms of who I think is the best Vipassana teacher, I actually"
},
{
"end_time": 7655.247,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7631.118,
"text": " I don't know that many Vipassana teachers throughout history. I only know the modern ones. For me, the most influential ones are Daniel Ingram. His book, Mastering the Core Teaching of the Buddha, I think it's like the book that... I think that's the book that kind of... That was my book. That was like my Bible. It's funny because I discovered that book after stream entry. If I discovered that"
},
{
"end_time": 7671.596,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7655.486,
"text": " When I just started Path, maybe I wouldn't get as much out of it, it wouldn't make sense, or not at the right time, but I think I discovered the perfect time. But that book, and I think Michael Taft is also another great teacher, and he's the one that"
},
{
"end_time": 7692.619,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7671.903,
"text": " really focuses more on the expansion part of it. So, through David Ingram and Michael Taft, I was able to understand the similarity and the difference between contraction, the Vipassana, and do-nothing meditation, like the expansion. So, those two teachers are considered like the most influential and also Kenneth Folk and Shijun Yang."
},
{
"end_time": 7717.432,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7693.148,
"text": " So the teachers that I recommend to people, the books that they write and the stuff that I talk about, they're more like manuals. They're more like workout manuals, you know, how to get big instead of like theories. I mean, there's a little bit of theories, sure, but then they don't really talk about the nature of the universe that much. They just talk about how do you recognize your true nature? Like here's are the steps and you can do it. And that's why they're called the Pragmatic Dharma Circle."
},
{
"end_time": 7742.5,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7717.432,
"text": " It's like this kind of this wave of American teachers that you know gather insights from like other teachers with lineages and they just kind of like made it their own thing and try to pass on the Dharma, pass on this like knowledge or this wisdom and the techniques that are like thousands of years old or hundreds of years old and make it applicable to the modern man who is living in modern civilization."
},
{
"end_time": 7767.5,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7744.343,
"text": " Alright Frank, where can people find you?"
},
{
"end_time": 7791.852,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7768.2,
"text": " I'm most active on Instagram. Just www.instagram.com slash Bean underscore Frank underscore Yang or just my YouTube. You can just type in Frank Yang. My channel is just called Frank Yang or you can go to my website. It's www.frankyang.wtf. What the fuck?"
},
{
"end_time": 7814.155,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7793.302,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 7841.101,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7814.155,
"text": " It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theories of everything dot org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.