That I take seriously and also take no responsibility for. And that’s kind of a baseline. Love is everywhere.

Love is everywhere. Doesn’t feel like it though, at times. But love is everywhere.

The thing that makes it not feel like that is our mind. And our mind is using all the references that it’s stored over time in every moment to try and tell you something about the present. It’s using old information.

And it says, you gotta listen to this, about this that you’re seeing. And it can be very convincing if there’s not another voice. Or there’s not another authority in our minds.

And this authority for me is openness. Openness is my ultimate authority. It’s really what I’ve found at the highest level of teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, is that it’s like, oh yeah, say bye to Buddhism too.

The boat that rode you across Samsara, you now no longer need. Kind of thing. That’s the idea.

So anything that’s good is set up for you to transcend it. Anything that’s good, I feel like, has elements of the universe that want you to go beyond all your ideas and just get into your existence. Being alive.

It’s everything. It’s everything and we miss it. It’s everything.

It’s my whole world now. Just happy to exist, simply happy to exist, and the magic really happens there. It’s hard to convince.

It’s hard to convince a conditioned self that only has the repetition of conditioning for most of the day we are called to go back to sleep by participating in what we call civilization. And which has notes of that at times, but really is a competition machine. But I kind of want to look at the thing that’s looking to call things competition, that part of my mind.

So when I say Love Is Everywhere, it’s also a song by Pharaoh Sanders, and it’s an amazing song that I’ve listened to a bunch in the last year.

And it’s just kind of like an explosion of love. And I feel like that’s what this world, that’s the way I’m experiencing it now, even no matter what the circumstances. Death, people die, people get sick.

There is plenty of hurt in the world, and I’m exposed directly to it. In weekly sessions, I sit with people, and I help them parse through all of their difficulties, the difficulties throughout their entire life. We look at all of it.

We look at what’s coming up in the present, and we find sustainable ways of being able to maintain naturality. See, we’ve separated ourselves from nature.

We’ve completely divorced ourselves from it. We wear shoes inside. Do you understand?

We wear shoes. Wearing shoes is like, there’s subconscious sendings to a natural body that says this earth isn’t safe for us. We need this distance between us and the earth because it’s not safe.

And that’s how far we’ve gone from our naturality. And we talk about getting into nature, forgetting that we are it. Forget it.

We are it.

So I’m, these days, I mean, reducing myself at any given point, and this is the openness authority in my mind that I talked about earlier. The openness is, what am I beyond what I think? What am I beyond what’s been shown?

What am I beyond this unfolding story? Even, what am I beyond the road to enlightenment? What am I beyond a Buddhist?

I am an alive happening. I am a happening that is here now, brought together by many elements of the universe, fire, water, earth and air to begin with, and space. But then there’s the history of all those elements and where they’ve been in time or beyond time.

The history of all those elements as they’ve related to other things in the universe. And then those things have all come together in this composite body. And it has a limited time as that on earth.

And it has a specific lens to see the world. And there’s an expression. How could there not be an expression of all these elements coming together as a human being?

How could all that not be expressing other things? All the things that make up us came from somewhere else.

And so, I’m trying to get back to the essence of the sources of nature that I am. And that’s where Buddhism and recovery and all these things have taken me is to really want to go beyond even my most spiritual idea. Lacey and I, lately, we’re just going like, we don’t even want to use the word spirituality anymore because just like so over here, it’s just like spirituality, like that’s a thing.

Like spirituality to me is how to honor your existence through being in a harmonious rhythm and interplay with the elements of the universe, taking in all pathways and all viewpoints where they intersect in truth. That’s it. And that’s something, those are a lot of words still, but it points and frames a picture of what I’m talking about that is just an ongoing practice and communion with.

That’s how I spend my time. These days, I’m just as likely to be driving with the sound off in the car, to hear the wind, to listen for the spaciousness in my mind, to pay attention to how the drive is affecting my body as I drive through different traffic platitudes.

It’s really nice to listen. It’s really amazing to listen to your body and to listen to what would be called intuition, which is like when you’re in openness, when something beckons you, curiosity can go, hey, what’s over here? And what I find is when I’m not looking for things these days, and I’m in that openness, that a very specific thing near and dear to my heart occurs.

An invitation comes or what appears to be an invitation, but really it’s I’ve given the invitation to this situation to have me, and I follow it, and it ends up being something miraculous, and this is a daily occurrence. It’s all from openness and curiosity. So that’s the ultimate authority to me, and however I get there, and I can get there through Christ consciousness, I can get there through indigenous wisdom, I can get there through bhakti.

These are all amazing ways of getting there that ask none of us to belong to solely. And yet, why not all one?

Today I need to get my car washed. I went to the local car wash here, and I thought I’d get an oil change also. And the lady said it was going to take an hour and a half.

And I don’t bring AirPods to this. I think ahead and I go, should I bring AirPods to this? Should I bring a book to this?

And these days, I’m finding that being with my own mind when I go places and just being open to any situation and not filling it with something else, yields more of what I’m looking for. And I’m reading less, you know, if you have been following this show at all, you know that I read every morning and have for 20 years, just read a little bit to throw off the mind every day, when you wake up and you’re in whatever last night’s dream was and what are the day’s expectations of you are and that seems to be pulling you toward it and you’re just almost unconsciously moving toward goals that you don’t even agree with and you know that thing. I need to throw that off in the morning and have and I was on to it very early on once I got exposed to some spaciousness in my mind, I thought, wow, there’s a real jerk in there.

“That’s kind of like calling the shots all the time and using shame and using like, oh, this really intense visceral anxiety, crippling anxiety, what I used to call free floating anxiety, which I now know is just being in disharmony with some element of your own truth, with some element of your own environment. That’s where anxiety comes from. And it’s the universe’s love, isn’t that fucked up?

The universe loves you enough to say you’re off course, and this is the way that I’ll get your attention. There’s no reason anybody should ever feel strangled by their own body, not in this limitless universe. There’s no reason.

We’re pushing against the rhythm. If you push against the rhythm, the groove falls apart.

So I’m always seeking to harmonize. And sometimes, here’s the thing, here’s the tricky thing about harmonizing with your environment, is that sometimes, you know, you got to hit some off notes, actually. It calls for you to hit off notes to be able to equalize what’s going on in a room.

Sometimes, if the room’s too quiet, there needs to be something loud to wake everything. And sometimes, if the room’s too loud, there needs to be somebody dwelling in the silence and drawing attention to that. That’s hitting the harmony.

It’s not blending in. It’s hitting the harmony. It’s balancing.

So that’s really important to me, and it’s really important as an ongoing practice. And so I trust my mind now, believe it or not, there isn’t much being said about being able to trust your mind again on planet Earth that you can do that.

Why do I trust my mind and how? How are you able to trust your mind? Maybe you might be asking, you know.

For 21 years, I’ve been paying attention to my mind in a somewhat sterile environment supplicated by various spiritual traditions and early recovery in 12-step groups. All of that was the environment, that was the new environment to be able to explore my mind, and I didn’t really take up the opportunity in the first decade. I thought, well, there’s a new character here forming, and God, it feels so good to be listened to.

Fuck, I’ve been a victim my whole life of so much, and now I’m in a room full of other people who were victims, and they’re all listening to me, and they’re giving me good feedback and camaraderie, and oh, my God, it feels so nice to be celebrated. And so it’s a new intoxication. The rooms, the 12-step rooms, are a new intoxication.

It’s an intoxication of being heard, being recognized, being celebrated for being one among the shipwreck. You didn’t know there were others. And so that was my experience, is like I built a new character, and this person was now industrially serious, and he was basically the opposite of the guy that I was.

He was not on the take, he was on the give, but it was really for the same reason. At the end of the day, it was like, so I could have some peace of my mind. That used to be from drugs.

And now it was from like, well, I’m outrunning that old Jaymee. God, he was a real asshole. Oh, thank God, he’s gone.

And that he that is talked about there is my mind and my heart that is being talked about there by me for the first 10 years of what would be called 12-step recovery. That’s a fight. In this case, it’s shitting on yourself.

It’s shitting on a kid who was brought into this world, all of us, and then programmed by our surroundings. And if that malfunctions at some point down the line, we call that us. After we hurt people, and then we end up in something that can help like recovery or something, then we shit on the us that we were, and we try and outrun that us.

And it’s like a subtle or not so subtle form of aggression toward ourselves, as Pema Chodron would say. So that’s what I did my first 10 years. I was trying to outrun myself and prove something to myself, that I’m worthwhile and that I’m good.

But you know what? I still had a lot of the old thinking, and I still ashamed myself into things, and I still experience anxiety and things like depression, and I had to go outside of the rooms. I was on antidepressants at one point, which helped instantly.

And so I don’t shit on them. It helped instantly, and I’ve been off of them for a decade. All things are that, to intermingle ourselves with life and all of its variations, and then move beyond it.

But always be a continuing thread to that thing, to that place that you’ve been, to that road. There’s a continuation, and yet it’s gone. It’s like a candle flame.

You know, the candle flame, it looks like this still object, but it’s really just like a bunch, it’s just constantly going. You couldn’t catch the candle flame, it’s just, it’s in constant movement, and yet it looks still, and that’s our naturality, I think.

So I’m really interested in that, and I’m really interested also in, you know, this work that I’ve been doing for a while, when I started in addiction and mental health treatment, they would pair me up with people. I was not a therapist, they had hired me as a spiritual director, and I was this guy who had a diminished ego and was a friend to everybody, and could teach people how to meditate, which has been the most helpful thing I’ve ever found. And so, I used to spend an hour in sessions with people, and this is totally just like, I just got thrown into this situation.

I have no formal training as a therapist, but I had 10 years of recovery leading up to that, and I had kind of moved beyond the ideas of that recovery and all the limitations of it, and moved into this new domain, and I was surrendering every day to all my ideas of myself, and had been doing so for a year and a half before I hired at this job, and so I was in this like new state of, I don’t know anything, I don’t know “anything. And so, they paired me with people in these sessions, and so I’m doing kind of like what therapists are doing. This is 2014.

I would go in a room with somebody who I just met, and I’m building a relationship with, and then help them go over their story in the way that I’ve gone over mine. All I’m doing is using my story, all of how I’ve untangled myself from my story. And this has kind of grown into now I’ve been doing it for 10 years where I’m not a podcaster.

This is my love letter to you. It’s a record of one person’s awakening and how that person interacts with other people, some of his favorite people of all time. I’m somebody that helps people with their stories and teaches sustainability.

How to sustain not a spiritual practice but a life. And it’s heavy work. It’s the heaviest work.

This is not, I don’t teach people to meditate in these sessions. This is going over the story and using my particular lens, which if you’re here and you’re not new to this show, then you know what that lens is and how it’s drawn in some of my favorite people more recently to just have the conversation. You know, I had nothing to offer Jim James, but the conversation.

Really nothing to offer him but who I am when he showed up here. I drew that in by being who I am, what I have to offer as a person in a moment in time. And that’s what I teach my children, how to be good people that people want to be around.

And that starts in our own mind. The news starts in your own mind.

Everything starts there. So we have to develop a friendship with ourself and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve developed this friendship with myself.

I am my greatest resource and I’m not a singular resource. I pull from all areas of the universe and I have two gurus, no, three gurus. Two who are alive and one who’s invisible.

Take what I can get.

But I become my friend. I trust me. I trust my mind.

That’s an accomplishable thing. To show my kids how to do that is to show them basically how to fish rather than buying them a fish dinner. If you develop a friendship with yourself, people are going to naturally want to be around you.

It’ll be a no-brainer. I want to be somebody that can benefit directly without what you can do for me. I don’t sign up for what you can do for me.

Anything that I sign up to ever, I never hold anyone to giving me anything that hasn’t been pre-arranged. There’s no quiet little takings, no like a well, hey, I did that for you that one time. Anything I show up to and I commit to, it’s because I want to be there and I know what I’m giving and I sign up for that no matter how it goes.

It’s not contingent upon how it goes. I just signed up for showing up to something and I used to bring a book just in case something went wrong. I could read at least, but now I don’t even do that.

I can just sit with my mind. So today, I was at the car wash and rather than sit there for the hour and a half, I thought that I would walk down the road to a restaurant called Mandala, it’s a Tibetan restaurant, and I was close by the car wash, so I decided to go sit there instead. And on this day, I didn’t bring the airpods, like I said, or a book, I just kind of wanted to sit and just like, because you might hear something.

Sitting in quiet, you might hear something like, hey, why don’t you take yourself down the street? Go to Mandala. You got an hour and a half, are you going to sit at a car wash or go sit among all this Tibetan iconography?

So I went down there and I walked down the street. It feels good to walk down the street. It feels good.

Like I’m at the car wash and I’m walking down the street and it’s, you know, all these cars. And it just reminds me of all the times like I walked in my life without anywhere to go, like without anywhere to land. I remember one of the last days before getting off Skid Row in 2003, like I was walking in Pasadena and I had to be out all day.

I was walking around because I didn’t have anywhere to sleep and nowhere would have me anymore and I had burned all my bridges and there was a shelter that accepted people at night and you had to be there at a certain time, so I’m killing time during the day just on foot and strung out in South Pasadena, where my kids now live and go to school, where I just watched my daughter graduate from middle school yesterday. Those same streets, I was walking around homeless, maybe two miles from the house I grew up in, no one wanting to come and rescue me for good reason. And me just wandering and walking, hoping that something would happen and being so hurt and not seeing it as my problem, seeing it as everybody else’s.

It just reminded me of that, just walking down to the restaurant to Mandala today. It just reminded me of walking and then there’s all those cars passing by. And I don’t know, it just reminds me of something analog.

It just reminds me of the 90s, of nobody fucking walks down the street anymore.

I’m not talking to you, New York. So anyway, I go down to this restaurant and it’s not open yet. I’m an hour early.

So I just sit there. And as I’m sitting there, I’m thinking about, because it’s a Tibetan restaurant and basically my world has opened up from this restaurant. Oh my God, I’m unpacking this right now, in real time.

But showing up there today, I showed up there as I’ve shared on this podcast one time when I was really in something and then the owners who I’d become friends with introduced me to who would become one of my root teachers. Just from showing up at that restaurant, that teacher introduced me to my guru, Lama Lanang. So a lot of good things have happened from just going to this restaurant and being in a sort of open state.

And so, I went there and I’m early, and I was just thinking about my teachers, and I was looking around and much nicer on the eyes than the car wash. And at that moment, my guru calls me.

And I, you know, I will say that Lama Lanang and I are in regular communication, but the timing of this is extraordinary. And we connect and we have a wonderful conversation. And he says things to me that are jokes that it’s kind of like inside jokes that I’m so incredibly proud to understand that I get and that he gets joy from knowing that I get and we’re having this conversation at this unopened restaurant where all the magic has happened for me in the last four years or so.

And you know, this is unplanned. I didn’t wake up with this in my head. I’m getting my fucking oil changed, you know, and I’m open.

I’m not filling my head with a podcast. No problem if you’re doing that. I’m just saying I’ve done that.

I’ve done that. And now it’s really hard actually to listen to people trying to tell me all the time who to be, how to be, how to see it. Sometimes I need somebody, I guess, like sometimes it feels really good, I suppose, to hand it over to somebody else to show you something that you haven’t, to show you it bundled in a new way.

But it’s getting harder and harder to be entertained.

It’s getting harder and harder.

And I really want to take one for the team. I really want to. But I’m 47.

I’m now older than Chogam Trump was when he died. I’m older than John Lennon by seven years when he died.

And it’s hard for me to sit around and not try to be of benefit. And my life looks colorful maybe, hopefully, because it is. You know, and I’m showing windows of possibility through going through your own story.

The benefits of going through your own story, not waiting for other people to come and apologize to you, not waiting to be shown how to do it, but just tackling the parts that hurt and going towards that with verifiable traditions and the wisdom contained within. And that’s what I’ve been doing, filling my head with that rather than my own thoughts, creating space and applying that to my own story. Because you need space if you’re going to view your story, because most of us think we are our story.

So space is that other authority that comes in and it’s just, it’s the zoom out. It’s when the astronauts first went into space and they looked down at the tiny ball and they’re like, what are we all fighting for? This is crazy.

Why are we fighting? This is like one tiny, we’re all just so small.

As you all know, you may know if you followed the show, my perfect recipe is like the grain of sand. The grain of sand on the beach is, there’s more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on all the beaches combined. But there’s more atoms in a grain of sand than there are stars in the sky.

I’m the grain of sand. That’s my practice. I’m so small, and everything is in me, and I’m a part of everything.

Every day I’m looking to be introduced to a new aspect of existence. Something that’s just passed me by and I really needed to get out of town. And I hadn’t seen my brother’s home in Aptos, California, beautiful forest and they have a ton of land and a beautiful home and it’s quiet.

You get introduced to a quiet, you know, that’s like where there’s no manmade sounds. I could hear a single cricket like in the afternoon, just chirping, nothing else. So quiet.

And it’s really weird because I find myself in this situation where like I am somebody who has valuable things to say, and yet I don’t want to say anything.

Like I don’t want to say anything, I just, I don’t want to be in the way. And yet, I’m in on the joke. It’s one of the universe’s bits of humor which are so important.

And if you listen to this podcast regularly, you hear a lot of laughter. God isn’t the universe absurd at times in its delivery.

Just how it chooses to speak to us can be so absurd. Getting quiet up in Aptos, so beautiful. And I could feel how much of this city, and I live in a great town.

It’s hard to call Ojai a city, because it still feels just like a town. But I could feel even the pace and the rhythm of what I’m normally in, in the city of time. I could feel time go, surrendered time, for a day or two.

I had the opportunity to shut off and surrender time and just to allow whatever happened, happened in those days in the openness. One of those days was, I was missing my spiritual community. They were all getting together.

Sam Burkle’s group were all getting together at Devender Band Hearts House, and that’s where we meet for Sangha. And I was up in Aptos, and so I was too far away, and I was missing them, thinking they were getting together that day. And I was really wanting to dig in a bit deeper this past Sunday and connect.

I hadn’t talked to Lama in maybe a week, and we hadn’t met in class because classes hadn’t been, had been postponed because he was doing a retreat. And so I was just feeling like, you know, it’s like, I guess what used to be called Sunday scaries, like which is that like, oh, I’m going to work tomorrow, like that sort of thing. I was kind of feeling that tinge of just like, I want to dig in a little deeper.

I miss Lama, and so I want to spend some good time studying this morning. And as I pull out the book and pull out his picture and all that and think about Sam Berkel’s down south in LA and the crew all getting together for a Buddhist ceremony, I’m sitting there with all my materials and Sam Berkel’s text, and he says, Hey, you’re up there. You should go see Pema Oso Ling, which is a retreat center.

It’s like 150 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And it’s where Sam and many people, if you’re a Tibetan Buddhist, then this place was, Tinle Norbu Rinpoche inherited this place and then gave it to his principal student Lama Sunam Rinpoche, who is a friend of mine who’s an elderly man, but I am developing a relationship with him. And he has a daughter named Yeshe and she has a boyfriend named Adam.

And I’m close with them, getting closer with them. And we meet at these sanghas normally at Devendra’s with Sam. Anyway, that’s the lineage is like Tinle Norbu Rinpoche’s.

This is his center and there’s a gigantic, huge Guru Padmasambhava statue, just enormous in a shrine room. And there’s a stupa there that’s really breathtaking. And I hadn’t seen any of this.

And so Sam sang like, hey, while you’re up there, you got a last day. He takes me out of the blue, unplanned. I told you what my day was like.

It was just wanting to connect deeper to my Tibetan Buddhist practice and to kind of honor my teachers somehow. Well, Tinle Norbu Rinpoche is my teacher’s teacher, and this place was his. And it’s nearby, I’m like 20 minutes away.

So I decide that I’m going to do that. I’m like, that sounds great. And now I’m like, what kind of magic is this?

I was just missing them down south. And now it’s found me in this bed on my last day in Aptos. So I do my practice, and then I get in the car to go to drive, and a student of mine texts and says that he’s in some trouble, so I pull over on the side of the road where there’s a reception, and we have a nice conversation, a 20-minute conversation or so, and it feels very nice to be that person.

It feels very nice to, you know, this is somebody that I worked with years ago who can still call me and say, hey, I’m in something. You know, I can’t afford a session. Can we meet?

And me being on this vacation, on this very special journey even, going to a place that I’ve just been invited to over text, that’s a continuation of like my life’s goals, and yes, of course I can pull over. Yes, and yet to be me? Yeah, that sounds great.

I’ll be me over here and be of benefit on the way to be of benefit land. That’s taught me everything about this. So it’s easy.

I pull over and I talk to this person. And then I get back to driving, and the reception is starting to wane. And I’m in the redwoods, and I’m going up.

The grade is getting steeper, the road is getting bumpier, and there’s no reception. And I want to talk about this for a minute because I’m kind of obsessed with this. The feeling, and this is so fucking sad, but the feeling of being unreachable and not knowing what’s going to happen next and still feeling like you could survive it, that is a very interesting feeling.

And that’s what I experienced. I have no cell reception, the road is bumpy. I don’t know where I’m going, I’ve never been there.

I know it’s up this road somewhere. Anything could happen right now. I wouldn’t be able to get help.

There are no cars going back and forth. Pretty insane. And I love it.

And I don’t know what that is. I mean, trust me, I’m not like trying to bungee jump or skydive or anything. You know, those are extremes.

You know, this is just everyday bungee jumping. You know? And it’s sad that that, and why I said it’s so fucking sad is like that that’s the risk.

It’s like, oh, whoa, you drove without reception for a minute. Like, wow, fucking David Blaine over here. But it really felt like something.

And for a minute, I didn’t exist. And I’m driving through the Redwoods. I’m unreachable, nobody, nothing, nowhere.

And that’s kind of one of the most natural places I’ve ever found. Because there’s nothing that can be done for you in that moment. And here we are, riding the fickle horse of life directly into the unknown.

It was a good feeling, and I felt like I was going through the car wash. Like, you’re unreachable now, and you don’t know what’s next. And so you’re going through this force, like you’re going through this force field of leaving it all behind on the way up to leaving it all behind-ville.

And I finally get up the hill, and I pull into the first available parking spot. And I don’t know what to expect. Gigantic place.

“Where to begin? But I was just told that by Sam, he said, like, hey, if you just say where, you know, tell him that you’re a friend of Lama Sanam. Lama Sanam is the sweetest, sweetest man, the most humble man.

Oh, my God, you would freak out if you knew Lama Sanam Rinpoche. Oh, the sweetest man. The man will not take any credit for anything.

I’ve tried to get him to bless Malas, and he always looks for the bigger guru in the room. He’s like, no, no, no, this person should do it. So I was told that if I connect, if I just say, I know Lama Sanam, can you show me where his quarters are?

That I would be shown, but I’m kind of like hoping that I don’t have to use that. So I pull up, I get out of the car, and it’s like a scene in the 60s where like, you know, where you arrive at the commune or the ashram or something, and then like some girl in the distance is like, like in a 60s movie, like, hey, what’s going on? Like, nice to meet you, what are you doing here?

Kind of thing, and it’s like, they’re in the distance, it’s like this girl and this guy, and they’re kind of running toward me, and I realize it’s Lama Sonam’s daughter, Yeshe, and her boyfriend, Adam. I had no idea they were there, and they don’t live there. And there, I would have expected to see them at Devendra’s.

But they’re here, and they’re running toward me, and I’ve just pulled up, and I’ve gone through the wash of the Redwood Forest, and I’ve answered the call from my bed that morning of like, ah, digging deeper, and then Sam comes with this invite, and all of that is now run toward me through Yeshe and Adam. And you’re just pulling up, and it’s this kind of magic. It’s fucking magic.

This is every day of my life now. Friendship with self, openness, benefit, no harm, dedication, devotion, non-self-practice, those are the ingredients. All of that has materialized into this kind of magic.

It’s really been following me around a lot longer than I’ve paid attention. I mean, it was with me when I didn’t even know. I posted a picture today of being at the Tibetan Freedom concert in 1997, a concert that my favorite group of all time was throwing, having all of my other favorite artists, Radiohead was there, U2 was there, Tribe Called Quest, Sean Lennon.

It was an insane lineup. And I worked the concert. I knew one of the guys who ran the Milarepa Fund for Adam Yaut.

I got to go to the after party and hang out. That shit changed my life. I ended up sitting in a booth with Adam Yaut, Winona Ryder, my friend Josh, who ran the Milarepa Fund, and David Blaine is doing a card trick for us.

This is 1997, so he hasn’t put out his thing yet. He’s practicing, he’s snuck in, David Blaine. Everybody’s in the room.

It’s like a collection of everybody that I’ve looked up to forever. Courtney Love, Steve Malcolm is from Pavement, Lenny Kravitz, all the Beastie Boys are there, Twiggy Ramirez, Helena Christensen. It’s an insane room.

Everywhere you look, radio heads in the room. And I had just gotten into OK Computer. That record had just come out.

This is then. And a friend of mine who I didn’t even know was there also, another friend from Santa Fe, who’s a photographer for Spin, happened to be there, been flown in. I didn’t know this.

And he was like, Oh, my God, you’re here. He’s like, This is perfect. You’ll be the excuse for me to like we can go around and I’ll take pictures of you talking to people.

So he used me as like the thing to be able to generate people talking to each other. Like that happened to me at 20 years old. And I got into fucking so many concerts that I wanted to get into, like the backstage thing.

I met the Beastie Boys so many times backstage. I would just get in. Somebody would just hand me the ticket.

They’d just stick the sticker on me. They’d say, go in, kid. And so this kind of magic that’s been following us and limiting mind is what has been restricting us, limiting mind based in how we’ve been emotionally raised, what our level of maturity is, what we’ve shown are the laws of this universe.

Is God money? Is God prestige? Is God physicality that you can accumulate in a bunker and be safe?

Is that God?

Or is God love?

And is love something that maybe we can look at? A lot of what we get involved in, it looks like what you can do for me. It looks like capitalism, you know?

And we all need it, and we know what it is. We really know what it is. We know when somebody listens to us and doesn’t have an agenda.

We know when they’ll show up for us because they have, because they’ve shown that. We know what love is. It’s unconditional, goes beyond, goes beyond condition and is still there.

We know what that is, and we’re all looking for it, and we don’t know that we’re it, and that is not out there. If you think that love is outside of yourself, you’re going to be in an addiction. It’s not.

That’s a dependency on something to bring you into love. Yes, people do bring people into love. Absolutely, they can be that window, but ultimately, the only love that you can ever count on is the love that you have for yourself because people will fail.

They’re designed to. They’re not designed to fit your specific qualifications. That’s not what other people are designed for.

That it even happens is a miracle. That people can cohabitate, that we even fucking drive down the street and aren’t crashing into each other left and right, and are all maintaining that distance in between the cars. You know what I mean?

Like as insane as people can be, most people are keeping that distance between the cars. Like there’s this respect. There’s this ongoing respect on the road that we don’t talk about.

We’re only talking about the accidents, and that’s limiting mind. Limiting mind is the news, focusing on only tiny parts of the story of what’s going on in the whole.

Limiting mind does that, and it says this is what this is. You know what this looks like in the Southland. We’ve seen this before.

Here comes El Nino. We call something El Nino. We’ve nicknamed something something, and then it’s a whole personality that either comes to fuck us up or make our land green, whatever we decide in that moment, whatever limiting mind does.

So this notion of God being love, it’s just it goes beyond your ideas. It’s the staying power of presence, the unmovable staying power of presence that really is not asking anything of you. That is love.

Everything else is a form of dependency. But it’s another way here. I’ll make it gentler.

It’s a vehicle. Love outside of ourselves is a vehicle, just like spirituality, just like health and wellness. It’s a vehicle, just like psilocybin, just like antidepressants.

A vehicle, not a destination. A vehicle, a thing to use to go from here to there, and then you leave the vehicle.

And that’s freedom. You know what non-freedom looks like. Go anywhere, you see people trapped in their bodies.

You see people adding comfort layers to themselves. To distance their heart from the world, you see it either through muscle or through fat.

Muscle is somebody hurt me, I’m going to protect myself, and they’re never going to get me again, and I’m going to show them, yet I’m still scared on the inside, or else I wouldn’t have to do this. I wouldn’t have to blow myself up. And the other one is I’m sad, and so there’s these layers between me and the world to protect me because I’m sad.

Ultimately, I don’t feel like I matter, so there’s these layers in between me and the world. It’s trapped energy, that’s all. It’s trapped energy.

Energy needs to move. And you know what? Wherever you find yourself, it’s all just a story, and you see people carrying their story around, and you see it in the way that we interact.

And I want to tell you, the content that you’re taking in, a lot of it, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but they’re cutting out all the fucking gaps. They’re cutting out all the gaps to fit in as much information as possible to hold your attention away from your life. Posing as something to enlighten you, but they’re showing it to you through no gaps in speech.

So we’re all starting to talk to each other with no gaps in speech. The way that these shows are edited are just a subconscious feeding of what it’s like at a higher caliber of living than you are, which is implied, because you’re the one on the other side of the phone looking at them. So you’re watching them feed you content at this rate, and it subconsciously programs your mind to think that it’s okay over time.

And this is how social behavior changes. And it’s happening. We’re not really listening to each other, knowing everything that we know now about what’s destructive.

So just watch out for it. There’s a valley of intuition that occurs in between gaps and sentences. It’s something to be explored.

Don’t take my word for it. Pay attention. See if paying attention to somebody else and putting your shit aside for a minute, really listening from a deep place.

See if you can more skillfully navigate their situation, really listening to them, not listening to what you already think they’re going to say. To finish the story of visiting Pema Osa Ling, Lama Sonam’s daughter, Yeshe, and Adam, take me directly. They’re like, oh yeah, Lama is having lunch right now.

They’re on break at this retreat, and there was a three-day retreat there. And I’ve shown up, and this is incredibly auspicious, as I’ve outlined. So I go inside the cafeteria area, what would be considered that.

And there’s four teachers, obvious Tibetans, all over the age of 50, if not over the age of 60, sitting at a table by themselves. Then there’s all these empty tables around them, and then the people who are there for the retreat are sort of in all the other tables. So there’s this distance between the teachers and the people.

And out of respect, I imagine. I’ve just blown in the wind, like I’m like some tumbleweed blowing in. But Yeshe brings me in, and Lama Sanam looks at me and he goes, It’s you.

I can’t believe you’re here. He goes, Do you want lunch? And I was like, I’m not going to say no.

My teacher Lama Lanang, who lived at Pema Oso Ling, which is so extraordinary to get to go to this place that my teacher, my guru, lived early on in his residency in the United States. So I felt already, I knew that bit of the history going there. And Lama Sanam knows Lama Lanang.

And Lama Lanang has told me, Don’t obstruct anyone’s kindness. Just if someone offers you something, you can take it. Just stop limiting people’s generosity.

And so I’m like, Sure, I’ll eat. Yes. And they put me at the table.

Now, my idea going there today, just to bring you into this, this is kind of fun, is like my only idea was like, when I got the invitation, I was like, Oh, this is gonna be great. I got this Jesus T-shirt that says, Power in the blood of Jesus. And it’s Tibetan red, like that maroon with yellow writing.

And I just thought it’s so funny. I haven’t worn it yet. It’s a vintage shirt.

And it’s just so great. And I wanted to bring that shirt. I wore that shirt there.

And I wanted to bring a booklet of Maharaj and bring a picture of Lama Lanang. All in my mind, this is my creative idea. And take a picture holding up Maharaj’s picture, wearing this Jesus shirt in front of the enormous Guru Padmasambhava statue.

At some point, I want to have somebody take a picture of me so I can just do a post that says, same thing. And it’s a fun creative idea. This is how I think of these things.

We’re like, oh, I’m going there. How can I use this opportunity to playfully and skillfully show what I really believe, that I’m not just a Tibetan Buddhist.

That I’m not just a Christian, that I’m not just a bhakti, a yogi, a Taoist? It was fun. It was like this, oh, maybe I can pull that off.

And I sit down at this table, and I take off my jacket, and I’m wearing the Jesus shirt with all the teachers. And they’re all looking at me like, I think, and it’s fascinating. And then the people who are there for their treat, I imagine, are like, what the fuck just blew in here?

This guy with the big white beard, and the Jesus shirt is now sitting. And my T-shirt, the color matched all of their maroon at the teacher table. So I’m like this guy in the beanie with the white beard and the red shirt with the teachers at the teacher table, awkwardly eating this meal that’s been brought to me, but with joy.

And so like, this is, what do I do? Say no or move away or go, no, no, no. I breezed in, I had no plan.

I had no plan. And I’m ending up at the teacher table at the retreat, where my teacher once lived, where the great Tinlin Norbu Rinpoche handed it to this teacher, Lama Sunam, who’s at this table, who’s brought me there, and all unplanned. And so of course I’m going to eat.

And of course I’m going to sit there. And also, this is the trippy thing, when you’re sitting at a table with four Rinpoches, two Lamas, two Tolkus, that’s what I was sitting with. And one of them was leading the retreat, and he’s like a heavy.

When you’re sitting there, some of the social graces of like wanting to connect, like and go like, like, so yes, I’ve come from whatever, like and there’s this language also kind of thing that you have to navigate. And so I just, I do one awkward thing and kind of catch myself where I’m like, I pull out my guru’s picture and I go, Lama Lanong, like showing everybody. They’re like, oh yes, yeah, we know him.

And I said, he used to live here, right? Yes, yes, yes. And then I realized I’m trying to make conversation with people who don’t, they’re like the people who don’t need you to fill the fucking space.

Like that’s the whole design is like eat your lunch. And so I just sat there and I ate my lunch in a very dignified way, in a way that I was very proud of. And I can also accept the fact that I’m at the teacher table because the same thing happened to my original mentor when he entered in India.

When he entered in India, within a few days, he was sitting with the Dalai Lama out of nowhere, just wanting to be open to the experience. And he was immediately put in front of the Dalai Lama and studied with him for two weeks and then was sent to study with Zansar Jamyan Kensey Rinpoche. So this has happened.

I know this. As this is happening to me, I go, okay, well, I’ve seen this before. My teacher told me about this, my original mentor in Tibetan Buddhism.

So I know now that I can sit at the teacher table, and it doesn’t matter what it implies. Don’t get excited, Lama says. No matter what it is.

Don’t get excited. And so I can sit there and I eat, and they’re all looking at me, and it’s really sweet. They try to include me in a conversation.

And these are elderly men, and they’re all having this conversation in Tibetan. So Lama Lasanam is wanting to let me in on what they’re discussing, and he says, Oh, a friend of ours just passed away. And I say, How recent?

And he said, Two days. And I’m like, Wow, two days. Knowing what I know about the PoA process, I realize that there must be people praying for him, for this person, and there are probably maybe multiple people praying for him, navigating this experience of leaving his body and as he heads to the next.

And so I ask, I was like, Lama son of them, there’s a lot of people doing PoA probably right now, right? And he goes with his hands. He was like, Yeah, it’s us.

Like, it’s the people at this table. And I was like, Oh, I was like, Wow, this is the team? I’m sitting with the team of people who are quietly at this table.

As I was trying to fill the space, what they’re doing in their downtime that looks like downtime is praying to their friend who’s passed away and making sure that he knows that he’s dead and making sure that he can skillfully navigate this experience and bring all the teachings into him moving through this. And that I’ve sat at this table. That’s an active participation of that.

And that was mind-blowing. At the end, we take this picture. It’s really sweet.

I got Tukultajrul to bless a mala, but my brother just brought me back this mala from Kathmandu that he got on the street from a mala maker. Anyway, so I have this mala, and I’m like, it’s brand new. I haven’t worn it yet, and I really want to have it blessed.

And I think I’m in an extraordinary situation to have it blessed. So I ask, there’s four teachers at this table, and I try to give it to Lama Sanam, and I say, like, hey, I brought this mala. My brother just bought it in Kathmandu.

He says, back from there, could I have a blessing? And he, oh, no, no, no. He’s like, both two teachers, both kind of like, oh, no, him, him, him, him.

And they all go, like, give it to Tokutadro. Like, oh, not us. And this is Lama Sonam.

This is so Lama Sonam, which is extraordinary. In the times that I’ve met him, this is this humbleness. It’s like he always looks to somebody that’s bigger, that could be perceived even as bigger, and gives it to them.

It’s like, no, no, not me. God, he wouldn’t want this. And this Lama Sonam, he took care of Tinle Norbu Rinpoche in his passing.

He helped a saint pass. And oddly enough, what’s really funny is this very humble person, this very humble, if we can call him a person, this very humble monk, he was given. Tinle Norbu was like, I don’t want this center.

He’s like, here, give it to Lama Sonam. And Lama Sonam, of course, doesn’t want to be in a position of power. So I think this is hilarious to me to learn this, that Lama Sonam has inherited Pema Oso Ling as a responsibility, because he’s just always looking to see who’s higher than him.

His humility has just gone so far beyond, just baseline of like, oh no, I’m okay. It’s just like, no, there’s got to be something better. I’m nothing.

Thank you. And you know, that can be a turn off to people, I imagine. Maybe they can go like, oh, I don’t want to aspire for that.

That sounds, you know, but he’s gone through all the stages of ego to get there. So this is like a byproduct of actually indulging in the ego on some level and working through its stuff. So Yeshe then takes me from this lunch, once again, nothing planned.

Takes me from there to see this stupa. This stupa was just recently redone, and it’s beautiful and it’s one of the only red stupas in North America and or in the world, I guess. And it’s a very special one.

And look up what a stupa is, so I don’t have to stop here. And you can even look up a stupa at Pema Osel Ling. And it’s so beautiful when we do these rounds, I do these circles, and I can’t even believe it.

I’m at this place, and this has all come from me just in the morning wanting to dig into my practice, and now I’m in the place where my teachers have taught, and so many blessings and empowerments and studies and intentions have been put into this place, and it’s so close to my heart, and it’s like the universe couldn’t stand it. It’s like, no, no, no, no, Jaymee, the last day in Aptos, no, we got to get him there. And here I am, and it’s like the most personal thing to me.

I’m crying because I’m looking at this stupa, and I’m like, this thing couldn’t be more, it looks like an antenna, an alien antenna, sort of energy vortex, like monument, so colorful and dynamic, and it looks like it’s a charger or something like, if the Grateful Dead did Star Wars or something. And I’m looking at this thing, and it’s so foreign to everything else in my life, like so foreign, nothing looks like this. Nothing is kind of designed like this, and yet it means the most to me, this thing, this foreign object that is not of my nationality or my spiritual upbringing, is now like the most important thing to me, to be sitting in front of.

And I spontaneously cry. These days, it’s so much that it’s very hard to say anything about it or do anything about it in those moments. You just go, what can I do with this?

You try and capture it on video, and you try and bring other people into it. You try and capture it. It doesn’t do it.

It doesn’t even get close. And I really care about sharing the journey with you. I think it’s fun.

I feel like some sort of spiritual journalist or something who’s kind of on a Hunter S. Thompson trip, and just kind of like sloppily and skillfully, perfectly sort of navigating these situations that call for reverence and respect, and somehow I’m invited into those things as me as this guy in the Jesus t-shirt at the stupa. And that’s an extraordinary place to be, and so I try and share with you on Instagram and occasionally on this podcast, but an episode like this, you get to hear me without interviewing somebody.

And I think I’m always pushing myself to ask better questions on this show and always noticing that I am, I think, asking more skillful questions. And so I’m proud of myself in that way, and I do this as a thing to, I bring you into it, but really it’s like, it’s a record keeping of the love that I found for not only this universe but myself in it, this limited time self. And so all that occurs to me on a daily basis as I walk down the street, I’m not being Jaymee.

I’m not. I’m walking down the street and I’m going, I’m a collection of all these things that are having a unique lens in this moment that isn’t a person and really doesn’t want anything from anyone, only wants what the universe wants from me. I’m a decade into that philosophy, fully surrendered into it, with many stages of other surrenders that have come in this decade.

But here I am in that moment in front of that stupa, realizing that this foreign object, this strange thing is like, it’s really my whole life’s work. So we go from there then to the shrine room. Two weeks ago, I was meditating before, sitting with Lama Lanang in a class on Zoom that I attend every Saturday for two hours.

And I’m meditating after doing my practices of guru yoga. I’m sitting in still space of meditation, and I see a shrine room in my mind. I get a flash of a huge monument and sort of like a room that just looks like a highly decorated and decorated also room.

And I get a flash of it, and I’m like, whoa, oh wait, I’m sitting in class with Lama in a couple minutes. Maybe I can ask him what that is. And so I do in class.

I said, Lama, when it came time for questions, Lama, I just had a flash of a shrine room in my mind. I’ve never heard of that before. Is there a shrine room in our minds?

I try to make it general because it’s an awkward thing to ask. And I don’t want to come off as like, you know, oh, you’re having a special experience. And he says, yes, but don’t get excited.

Just like does not want me. He’s like, yeah, that’s the thing, but hey, what are you going to do about it? You know, basically.

Like, yeah. And I don’t know if I want to talk about the shrine room in your mind right now. He doesn’t say any of this, but this is kind of what I hear.

Just like, yes, but look, not everybody’s having the shrine room in their mind flash. And I don’t know if I want to address that right now. It’s kind of like the feeling that I got.

And I was like, okay. And I just left it as this unopened thing, like this unanswered thing. And now I’m at Penma Oso Ling, and I walk in that shrine room, and I realize that’s what I saw.

Now, how does that even happen? I don’t know. I don’t care to explain it.

You guys will figure it out. You guys will figure it out in your own life, or you won’t. It’s okay.

But that happened. And I’m in there, and I can’t believe it. And I have my little Maharaji writing booklet, journal, that has Maharaji’s picture on it.

I walk in with that, and a picture of Lama Lanang, and I’m wearing my Jesus T-shirt, just as a reminder. And this shrine room, this gigantic hall, with a huge statue of Padmasambhava, they bring me Lama Sanam says, will you stay for the ceremony? And I was like, yeah, for a little bit.

And I meant it. I’ll stay for a little bit. I’d want to stay for the whole thing.

But I was going to spend some time with Lacey in the afternoon on our last day up there, which I wanted to do. I wanted to do that and stay for what I could. So I said, yes.

And he brings me this table. This is the second table that I’ve now sat at. This one’s on the floor, but it says reserved seating.

Now I go, am I that? At the table, the dinner table with everybody, with all the teachers, me and my red shirt. And it said reserved seat.

Brought me right to it. Empty seat, the only empty seat at the table with the teachers. You know, reserved seating, it just messes with your mind is all, is what I’m saying.

I don’t know what the fuck. I really don’t. So I sit down with my Maharaji booklet, which is not this tradition, just in case you’re green around the deities.

Whole other tradition, Ram Dass’s guru. My gurus are Lama Lanong Rinpoche, Tilku Oregan Phuntsok Rinpoche, and Maharaji, Nirmal Kurali Baba. So I have them all out on my little table that says reserved seating in front of the gigantic, like front row seat in front of the gigantic thing, Padmasambhava.

And I have this booklet out, and this man comes from behind me and puts his arm on my shoulder. And this is their attendance for the retreat that are there. And this guy with dreadlocks puts his hand on my shoulder.

I look up because I’m sitting on the floor. I just look up over my shoulder. I see this guy, and he’s got tears in his eyes.

And he looks like Maharaji, like a skinny Maharaji with dreads. And the tears in his eyes, he’s staring at the picture of Maharaji. You know when an older man cries?

You know how sweet it is? How amazing it is? How miraculous when a man over 50 cries and it’s not sloppy, but it’s like you can tell that they’re working to cry, that they’re honoring their feelings.

He took one look at Maharaji, and I could see in his eyes how much that person has meant to him. And I think in that moment, Maharaji, the last person that he expected to see in the Tibetan Buddhist retreat that day. And I brought it and made him cry.

And he said, he’s a good one. And I said, oh, I see him on your face. As he walked away.

And there I am sitting with that booklet. I’m looking at Lama Lanang’s face, right next to Maharaji. I’m looking up at Padmasambhava, and I’m in the Jesus shirt.

And this is perfection. All one. Maybe even all zero.

But all one, and it’s being honored. And this one individual here is bringing all these things together, taking it all on a ride, ending up in the reserved seats. How many of those fucking seats did I miss in my life?

How many seats because I wasn’t quiet enough? How many seats because I didn’t have the integrity to actually say, no, actually, this is what I want to do to honor me today. Did I miss?

Scary thought. One, I don’t really entertain anymore. I take the opportunity to live.

And so that’s my beautiful time at Pema Oso Ling. I stayed for a bit of the ceremony, which was incredible. I snuck out about 40 minutes later from the front row and didn’t really sneak much.

I left Pema Oso Ling and I went back through the wash of no Wi-Fi. And it’s almost like, on the way in, leave it all behind, have a fresh experience. On the way out, leave it all behind, have a fresh experience where you’re going next.

So beautiful what the trees in the wilderness did for us. Us. I’m a traveling us.

Us.

You know, also, while it was up there, I took a couple sessions, and I have a student who’s my morning jacket super fan. I mean, like, not a basic bitch super fan. I’m talking about like legit, like, come to Jesus, Jim James type shit, you know?

And I love this person. I’ve been working with her a couple months, something like that, and grown really close. She’s listened to every episode of the podcast or something like that.

She deep dove after Jim James and even came to OI to do a session in person and went on the tour on her own. Went to Mandala Restaurant and went to John Dennis’ shop, Valley of the Moon. All these people had been guests on the show, you know?

Went to the places and then came here and did a session with me early on. Well, there’s this, My Morning Jacket just did four nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco, the legendary Fillmore, where everybody fucking played. It’s like the monastery where the counterculture musically was erected.

And so then these are very small venues for My Morning Jacket. They’re usually playing Hollywood Bowl, stuff like that. They’re not playing theaters these days.

And so this is four days in a week with one gap in the middle of My Morning Jacket only, no opening group at the Fillmore, and they’re not playing any repeat songs. I’m in this session on Thursday morning in Aptos, and her name is Jaymee. It’s funny too.

Yeah, it’s great. It’s the Jamie’s. Jaymee has gone to every night of this concert.

It has tickets for every night. She also intuited the ticket password, the code. She didn’t have the code when it came time for pre-sale tickets for this thing, and she intuited it in a moment.

She typed in the right thing, and she got access. She used some, I’ll leave that to her. But she couldn’t believe it, and she got nights to all four, and she had gone to two of them so far and was there to report that there was such joy and that it was palpable.

And so I text Jim, and I told him. I was like, hey, this is the report from the audience. And he invites us to the next night on Friday, which is the last night of the run.

And it’s Friday night at the Fillmore. We’re in Aptos about an hour and 40 minutes away, and so we go. And this is unplanned, all of this is unplanned, and it’s so specifically us.

And so our plan becomes to meet with Jaymee Merritt, and I decide, well, let’s do it at Haight-Ashbury, because I want to touch into Haight-Ashbury whenever I can. I mean, it’s like a power station, almost. We go to Haight-Ashbury and hang out there for a bit, meet up there, and then we head to the concert.

We don’t know what it’s gonna be like. We don’t know what kind of tickets we have. We don’t know anything about this experience.

We just know that Jim’s invited us, and we’re at Will Call or whatever. So we get our thing, and we get passes, and we get this access to an after show party sticker. We put it in our pocket, and we go inside, and we’re some of the earliest to get there, and we’re right up front.

And we’re with this group of super fans that Jaymee is friends with. She has been going to a lot of the shows since she’s been a fan and has dove deep into this community, and it’s a really incredible loving community. If you’re a My Morning Jacket fan, I have to say that it has some of the unique, most unique qualities of community and friendship and love and acceptance.

Something that you might expect at a Grateful Dead concert or something like that is really happening at these My Morning Jacket shows. And we take in this concert, and it’s three hours, and it is like a drug. I mean, of course we know all these songs, and of course we’ve been invited by this singer who’s like five feet away from us, and we’re attempting to have this relationship.

It’s so intense. And we’re jumping with people and feeling this joy, and it’s like people are touching our shoulders and looking at us in the eyes and smiling, and we’re like a part of this big throbbing machine of what the band is generating at their most arguably harmonious between themselves. You can really see it.

I notice the drummer looking fondly at moments at gym when he doesn’t know it, or the guitar player or bow or the keyboard player, any of the guys, I catch them over this three-hour concert looking fondly at gym or at other members of the band and going like, wow, what I perceive to be like, God, I love that guy. Look at what we’ve made it through. It’s the Fillmore, and it’s one of our favorite bands of all time, Lacey’s and Mine.

And so we just, that’s our experience. We meet this 10-year-old girl who’s there with her parents, and they’ve taken her to like 10 shows this last year, and she’s gotten sticks from the drummer, and these parents are just the most incredible people. They just, they have means, and they take care of their children.

They take them to the concerts that they want to go to no matter where they are. She ends up getting another pair of sticks from Pat the drummer at the end of the show. This incredible fucking unbelievable show that while you’re there and in all of that, and while I’m me, and seeing how this all materialized from nothing, and seeing that all of this is going down, you go, what do you do?

What do you do with this other than be there for it? So we’re really there for it, and afterwards we go to the after party, which is so cool because it’s so mature men. These men in this band have their after parties like snacks, and people that you can have light conversation with, and it’s not a party, it’s not sluts and drugs and all kinds of shit.

It’s like a very sincere place to just take in a few moments with people that have been invited to the after party. And we see Jim come in the space and he comes up to us immediately, and we hug and we talk for a bit, and we have some quick exchanges, and I get to meet Pat and tell them about what it’s like being in the audience. And it was one of the greatest concert experiences of my life, for sure.

For sure. And we don’t stay long at the thing. We pay our respects, we say hi to Jim, we exchange for 10 minutes or something like that, and then Lacey and I go.

That’s how I’m decoding my ego, is like going to all the holy places, and going to all the holy people, and seeing that they’re all just people who are still asking questions, who haven’t found the thing yet. And I’m decoding the ego thinking that there’s anywhere to be in all these situations. Meeting the people, you meet them, and then you find that they don’t want to sit around and talk about how great they are, believe it or not.

They don’t want to talk about the history, necessarily, of what they’ve done. They’re wanting to relate to now and sort of maybe have something outside of that because they don’t get it very often. And so, and all I’ve wanted to be was them.

And now it’s pretty good just being open.

It’s really good just being open. Dreams come true, and they become more specific the less you chase. And I hate to say it.

I fucking hate to say it, to tell you that, because I really went at it the other way, and you couldn’t tell me any different. But it really is in surrender and trusting that whatever it is that you love that’s truly meant to be will not only find you, but it’ll wrap itself around you and never let you go, and you’ll kind of disappear into it. Lacey and I do mentorship sessions.

These are anywhere from an hour long to I do longer intensive work with people, but these hourly sessions can be scheduled through lacey at loveistheauthor.com. She can book consultations to sit with us and have our particular lens look through your life and help you find sustainable ways of living and truly being in your existence. And we do that through various traditions, all of which the thread of which are sanity, not magic.

I hope this has been informative and that it helps in some way. I want you to know that if I don’t know you, I’d like to know who you are. Make yourself known on some level.

I know that I’m thinking about you. One of the greatest honors of this incarnation has been that I’m sort of the guy who, as soon as I get somewhere, I sneak everybody in with me. So just consider yourself a part of that family.

The post Love is Everywhere appeared first on Love Is The Author.

Rather than looking for a guest, sometimes I wonder what I’ll say about what it is that I’m working on outside of my head and can that be useful? There’s been some indicators along the path that have let me know that I’m healing something in my bloodline, that I’m healing a child wound in my life. And it’s come through dreams.

My mother has had a few dreams in the last few years as I’ve really been digging into kind of inviting the inner child, so to speak, the innocence, pure luminosity, the way they were born, the unconditioned soul, spirit, the unconditioned mind, to invite that in to my life more and more. I had been over the last five years or so asking that innocence in me to tell me what it sees. What do you see in this situation?

Starting to give that innocence or that inner child like a voice more in my life as maybe first thought. First thought, best thought is a Buddhist idea. And it’s something that my teacher even says all the time.

He says the first thought is the one that goes with the heart and then the head gets involved. So there’s been a lot of indicators that this innocence or this inner child thing hasn’t had a voice in a long time. Because when we were kids, we were not seen as valuable because we had innocence and we hadn’t learned about the world yet.

And learning about the world was seen as knowledge. And it seemed like that’s what keeps you safe, is learning about civilization, learning about social faux pas and cultural ideas and things that will get you through life. So that’s not the unconditioned soul.

That is the soul being conditioned. And so I invited that kid, that innocence, back into my life, really just giving it a voice first, just like empowering your child to have a voice in their life. So that’s what I did.

And the results were very interesting because it was some of the toughest work. It’s just like shadow work that comes, like all the stuff that the old haunts that you don’t want to look at, that you think, you know, well, shit, I’m progressing spiritually. This is great.

This is great. Why does it still hurt? Why am I still afraid?

And why do I still want to impress my parents? Why can’t I have a healthy this or that? Why do I keep hurting myself?

All that’s the shadow, the undone, the graveyard. It’s a graveyard of old haunts, of misconnections that we’ve had in our life. That’s what I consider to be the subconscious.

It’s just like where all those things in life, where something missed the mark, where there wasn’t an apology, where there’s something undone, and it’s like a graveyard, and all the spirits are flying around, and we keep that stuff buttoned up, and we try and keep it down. But then when people drink, or people get upset, or they’re triggered, all of that, all of the subconscious graveyard of all those misconnections rises to the surface like Ghostbusters or something, inhabits the upper realm. And that’s why people, the nicest people who seem so nice, and then you get drunk, and then it’s like, whoa, that was a whole other side.

Well, that’s, but there’s a bunch of misconnections in there. So anyway, that subconscious world, you know, those things just like in Sixth Sense, you know, the ghosts are trying to tell you something. And I, most of my life, I thought I’m going to stay on upper consciousness.

I’m not going to worry about the subconscious world. And then it just has a way of finding you. It has a way of showing up in behaviors.

And it’s really your friend, you know, it’s trying to make a connection with you if you’d only look at it, you know. And so it was very painful to look at the subconscious and where like in that world, that world of like where all the hurt originated in our lives. And so anyway, through this process of inviting the innocence to speak forward, my mother started having these dreams.

She’s had two dreams in the last five years that were really compelling that she told me about while I was visiting with her. She said, Hey, I had a dream about you last night. The first dream was she dreamed that there was a child me and there was adult me.

And we were having a meeting with her and we were telling her, we’ll take it from here.

Very powerful image. My mother having to surrender me to me and in a dream, that was very meaningful to me. And she designed, she did something with Photoshop.

She took a picture of me as an adult and kind of put it together with a picture of me as a child, like me holding a child, a child me, like as a buddy. And more recently, she had a dream that she was with me in like a castle. There was an open window, and we were in kind of a tower, and we were way high up.

And I just ran over to the window and just jumped out the window. And my mother was freaked out and horrified, and she thought there’s no way she’s going to survive this. And she went to the window and looked over, and it was a huge drop and I landed on my feet and kept going.

Also, very, very powerful dream. I haven’t been dreaming myself in a while, so when I do, they stand out. Last night, I feel like I had a dream that’s connected to all these other dreams that my mother’s been having, because yesterday I was doing a session, and I do it in front of my window to use the natural light.

And on this particular day, there’s a painting crew across the street painting a house. And they’re on their lunch break, and they’re facing me in lawn chairs, and I’m doing this session, and I’m not paying attention to them much, but they are, I’ll glance over every once in a while, and they’ll be looking over, and I kind of wonder, like, I don’t know, very lightly for seconds, I touch into that place of like, are they making fun of me? I wonder if they’re making fun of me over there.

And it was so light, the touch of, I wonder if they’re making fun of me. And I continued on the session, and these guys, you know, they’ve been here for a week painting across the street, and so they look in the window often, and I wonder what they think. And so it all led up to the last night in the dream, it was, I was me now, and across the field for me in this dream, there were some people making fun of me.

Cool kids or something. And instead of feeling unempowered, and instead of cowering, and instead of wondering if they don’t like me, I walked all the way across this long field, and they saw me approaching slowly to face it, and to say, what is it about me that you don’t like? Which is what I did in the dream, and they scattered.

And that’s, I woke from that, and I told Lacey, she said, that was a really big deal dream, tied to your subconscious. I mean, that’s one of my original kind of wounds, is just always trying to fit in, never wanting anybody to be mad at me, always trying to be a good boy, going way out of my way to just clear anything up or just, I couldn’t have anybody not like me, because then they wouldn’t get it, you know? They wouldn’t get it, like, you’re missing out.

I’m a good person, I swear. And there’s a series of these people in my life, these kind of like cooler kids, these people who I thought were cooler. And of course, later on in life, you grow up and you see them around and you go like, holy shit, I handed my youth over to you.

So it was a big deal for me to sort of, you know, between the series of my mother’s dreams, which feel like I’m no longer needing mother’s protection, you know, and I’ve become independent, and I was feeling that today. Today, after having that dream, I took my dog to the park to walk, and I’m really working on big surrenders right now. Like it’s very, very challenging to try and fit what’s happening to me spiritually into the material world to make sense of it.

And so I’m having those challenges and where the true sustaining good, my true source, is stronger than it’s ever been, and ego wants securities and it’s dying further. So it makes trouble, and it makes worry, and it looks for guarantees, and it looks for safety. Always.

And it’s dying when it’s doing that. If you don’t feed it, it’s dying. Your ego is dying, and you are becoming a part of everything.

But it’s very challenging, and it’s taken years to be able to learn how to navigate not falling prey to it. And the process really has just been calling the bluff on the fear, going toward the fear and pulling the mask off of it and seeing that love is there. And so I took my dog for a walk, and after having this dream, and this dream where I faced the bullies, and they scattered, just like in a psychedelic trip where they tell you to go toward the difficulty and ask you what its purpose is.

You know, I kind of did that in this dream. I was not scared. And my dog and I are walking at the park this morning, and we’re approaching a summer camp, it looks like, for soccer.

And these kids, they’re probably 10 years old. And I’m walking with Billy, and I, you know, you guys know what I look like. So I’m looking like that.

And I’m walking about, I don’t know, 30 feet from the kids with my dog, and then I hear this kid out of the noise of kids kind of call out to me and go, what’s up, brother? And I don’t look. And then the kid says it again.

And I don’t look. I don’t even look. You know why?

Because I’m free.

I freed myself up from needing to look and wonder, does that person like me? And so rather than adding to the chaos of the world of getting involved in something like that, I just kept walking. And I realized then that what I had become free of was some of the earliest conditioning that I received from people who perceivably had more information than me, like the kids on the playground or the people in church, my family.

Now I’ve gotten free from needing to look over there to see if I’m over there, to see if I’m in the complaint about me or the making fun of. I don’t relate to it anymore. And that was a huge feeling for me.

I really felt free. And this has been a lot of effort.

I can’t tell you how important it is to be consistent in your practice. Every single difficulty that I see in the people that I work with in mentorship sessions is inconsistency. From what they know to work, we still flirt with the neurosis.

Because we’re like, can we still make this work? Is there any bit left here that we can make work? God, this is so comfortable.

I like eating this. I like sleeping with this person. I like all the things.

This is what can be done. About a month ago, I was walking through the park on a Saturday. There was an art fair going on in our local bookstore, Barts Books, legendary used bookstore.

I had a stand there, and I was walking by, not wanting to buy anything, just enjoying being around people. That’s it. I just really enjoy swimming in people sometimes.

And I’m walking by the Barts Books stand, and out of the corner of my eye, I see this book, and I walk past it. I see it really quick, and I walk past the stand, and then I come back. The book was The Notebooks Of Sonny Rollins, edited by Sam VH. Reese.

And it’s got a black and white photo of Sonny Rollins, the jazz legend. And I admit to myself that I don’t know much about Sonny Rollins, but moments like these, these auspicious moments where something reaches out to you, I’ve just really paid attention to those moments my whole life.

When a suggestion comes, and there’s some sort of compelling enthusiasm that I have to investigate, that’s really valuable. That’s like alive stuff. So I grab this book, and then the person who’s behind the stand says like, oh, I’m reading it right now.

It’s so good. And this is not on a big label or anything like that. What the book is, and I buy the book for whatever reason, I buy it.

And I have to say that over the last month, I’ve never really had this experience before, but in reading just the introduction to this book, to familiarize myself with its contents and a little bit of background on Sonny Rollins, it doesn’t take me very long to get into here to realize that I feel like I am Sonny Rollins. I don’t know. I’m not taking myself seriously, but at the same time, that’s been my experience is reading this.

I’m just like, I feel so connected to this person. I learned so much about Sonny Rollins and that I want to share some of the things that… Because this book has become the never-ending story for me.

Every time I open it, I’m reading about what I’m going through in that day, the precise coordinates of how to handle it and coming from a mind that I trust because it’s studied the same sources from the East and it’s pulled itself out of civilization for a while after being somebody to actually be nobody for a minute and work on self. And I don’t mean self-improvement. Working on self meaning the one.

Seeing ourselves in everything, practices. And Sonny Rollins did that and I didn’t know much. I didn’t know that he was this person.

But Sonny Rollins had been somebody and he’d been really like somebody who in the first 10 years of his being a jazz musician, in the first 10 years of playing the instrument, he was already a legend. He had been an exciting new person in jazz music. And in 1959, what I didn’t know is that he pulled away for two years to do this independent study on himself and almost just completely disappeared from the scene, almost at the height of his popularity.

You know, and he was a young man, but he was really interested in doing the kind of work that we talk about here on this podcast.

I’m going to read some bits of what I learned today and what I read today…

“Rollins continually reevaluates his emotions, reminding himself that the motive for doing a thing is inevitably and ultimately above that thing. His list of motives and aims includes the wish to uplift and inspire people, and his notebooks repeatedly reflect a belief that jazz could accomplish social good in the world. For Rollins, jazz was vigorously hybrid. It was the music’s ability to break down artificial racial barriers that saw him align jazz with the realization of the next American dream.

Rollins’ interest in both yoga and Zen had a certain connection with the general tendency towards spirituality and jazz. The notebooks reveal someone interested in these both as daily practices and as ways of understanding his relationship to the world. Over this period, entries track his progress with different positions.

He notes at one point that he can now do the lotus pose very well. The header, The Sonny Rollins’ Yoga For Americans Club, signaled his ambition to promote the practice. “

This is 1959 we’re talking about.

Privately. Sonny Rollins. Reading books, studying, pulling himself out of the world, reevaluating, finding what’s important.

This I found really fascinating in some of the notes here. Sonny was concerned with the electric organ coming into jazz. The Moog synthesizer coming into jazz.

This is such an amazing thing to think about is that this electronic instrument, this instrument that now is just so common to see on stage, all kinds of electronic instruments are common to see on a stage, even with organic instruments. And at the time, this influence of something that you plug in, that’s not a real thing, that is pulling sounds from sound waves and almost pulling from invisible sources, these electronic keyboards, there was a concern about, is this jazz? Such a beautiful thing for a musician to have those kinds of considerations.

And so I’m falling in love with Sonny as I read this, you know, his discipline. The style and content of The Notebooks from the 70s vividly convey Rollins’ moments of uncertainty. At one practice sheet, Rollins writes to himself, This is no laughing matter.

He ends another passage with the rather equanimous observation, Things are never constant. Before sharply veering into pessimism, Disaster is coming, disaster is coming. Rollins addressed himself directly, giving himself advice, or reminding himself of rules that he had decided on before.

His tone could be firm, his language always direct, but he was rarely overtly critical of himself. Other comments reveal an earlier history, sometimes violent frustration with his own failings. Like in one particularly moving note, he contemplates showing his wife Lucille how I fucked up my own nose making it more bulbous, a way of hurting myself because of my guilt feeling regarding my musical inefficiencies.

Rollins was searching for a way to measure the greatness, qualified musical talent in non-worldly terms. This is from the book. Rollins’ notebooks stand out for their function, written for personal use, and best understood as a record of his thoughts and motion, and for their style.

Unlike retrospective books or interviews, they are not subject to the distortions of memory or later preoccupations. Neither does Rollins’ right to fit a pre-existing arc. There is no heroic trajectory here.

He is painfully honest about difficulties and shortcomings even at the height of his professional success. Rollins’ tendency to synthesize and distill, a habit that began as a means of sustaining a period of renewed dedication to doing things well, where reflection would allow him to evaluate his own success and calibrate routines, gradually becoming a lifelong commitment. As Rollins says in one of his notes, no matter how you feel, get up, dress up, show up.”

So this is what I read this morning, and this is some of Sonny Rollins’ notes. This is on motives and aims from The Notebooks Of Sonny Rollins. The idea of teaching music in the prescribed manner is our attempt to present people with a view of that finer side of their nature, which is akin to such things as trees, grass, sky, among other natural phenomena.

It is this appreciation of and uniting with such things which determine our ability to establish a contented existence in the world of finance, business, economic, security, etc. This is why the ventures of the project must always uplift and inspire people. In order to bring such inspiration to people, I must not be concerned with applause by the audience.

I must stand erect, tall and straight. I must be of clear head and pure heart. No stimulants.

I should not be either pleased or despondent over a performance and or solo. Always redirecting my attention to the sound of the music. Sound is all in caps.

And in this way, what is produced will assume its subsidiary nature to what my intent and ideal is. In this way, I will be doing my part to inspire and uplift the congress of people who have come to see. Rollins writes a note to himself. Your beautiful collaboration with Thelonious is indeed worthy of the highest commandment from this individual it receives that.

After hearing the record today, it was necessary, proper, and the right thing to so inform you. Continued success in and throughout life. Sincerely, Sonny Rollins, to himself.

This method is so important. What he’s doing here and what he’s studied and when he pulled out of his somebody-ness and he’s going to the root of nobody-ness and he’s taking in teachings that point to him being a part of everything and everything transmitting from mind and motive. That’s such a beautiful teaching that he gave there of understanding that it is not the art that we are creating.

It is the motivation to get in touch with.

Art is a very difficult thing to sit down and actually do. Okay, I’m going to do art now. No, but we get inspired.

We get inspired and that inspiration, a lot of times if we’re really in touch with ourselves, there’s a motivating quality to why we’re making the art that could point to actually what to paint, what to write about, what to speak about, what to sing.

It’s our motivation that matters. Why are we doing this? It’s a big question.

Why are we doing the things that we’re doing? Why do I say that thing all the time that I don’t agree with? Why am I participating in this relationship that isn’t working?

Why? Why am I doing this? Why am I chewing gum?

Something as simple as that. Why do I chew gum? Where did this start?

“These kinds of questions. This is why the subtle needs to be pronounced. And the only way really, really, really to do it is to give a period of time to subtlety, to dedicate a period of time to subtle study.

Subtle study involves a very, very low simmer ego, full broil ego, just wants confirmations, and it knows everything. And it’s not happy about not knowing anything. That feels unsafe.

It points to the truth, nothing is stable. Nothing has ever been stable. You came from nowhere.

You came from the unknown. Everybody goes there. Everybody came from there.

We all survive not surviving. It just happens. For me, I pulled out of all of my strong identifiers, willing to be directed in any way.

That was 11 years ago, that leap. Pulling out of all my ego identifiers and taking a year out of my life to not do anything that I had been doing that was based in ego and try and find a regular job. All the ego death situations, that’s what I did.

I didn’t listen to music, and I worked a job that got my hands dirty. Those two things were big for my ego dying. I didn’t want to work in a machine shop.

I didn’t want to make money for an honest day’s pay, necessarily, like the old-fashioned way. I relied on my talent and me being a musician and all of my credits and all that stuff up until this point. And so now I was just shelving that shit, shelving it hard, and I wasn’t even going to listen to music until I could respect it again and not have it be something that was just there to do something for me, for my ego.

So I took a year off of that, and I did what Sonny Rollins did, pull out of it all, study, learn about the subtle. What I learned in that year is that I am sustained and I am loved by this universe. I just have to recalibrate what my idea of love is.

And my idea of love now is that I get a shot. I’m alive. It doesn’t get any better than that.

That’s love. Yeah, it hurts, and you got to put up with shit, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. They don’t define me anymore.

As a matter of fact, every single pathway that got me here, including everything that hurt, is all of the gold. It’s the gold. I would not exist without it.

It is the golden path. And this thing that Sonny Rollins did, he came back to music in a couple years, and it sent him on a whole new trajectory. In his 40s is when he did this.

And then he lived another 40 years and continued to explore and continued to not worry about the audience and continued to be true to his motives, what was really motivating him and why to create this art and why to share at this time. And, you know, he wasn’t performative in the way of like keeping up with an image or anything like that at any point in his career. It changed his life.

And then I would find this book and just be reading about this person who’s done what I’ve done, and I’m doing it again. I’ve been returned to that time, I feel. I feel like I’m going through that thing again.

Like, what the hell am I? I’m here to help. That’s what I’m committed to.

That’s it. You know, and I’ve found a way, and I’m not lucky. This isn’t luck.

I didn’t find a way, luckily. I’ve curated the things that I love and brought them in, stitched them into this service work. So I made my life look like the eras that I loved, that I missed out on.

And I did it genuinely, not by buying the right things and all that stuff, like really getting into the soul of the counterculture. This thing that got birthed here that ended the dark ages of emotionality and those people, it’s on their backs. I got to say, it’s on their backs for taking acid, for going to Woodstock, even if they didn’t stay a hippie, it’s on their backs that we’re here.

You know, they made it mainstream and they changed something in America that it wasn’t able to sustain. But here we are. Here we are.

The generations that are being born, have you looked into their fucking eyes? Have you looked into a child’s eyes from the last 20 years? These kids are being born to help.

You can see it. You can see it in their eyes. They’re awake.

Just when the planet feels like it’s in peril, there’s this generation of kids that are coming up that we have, a lot of people are writing off. You know, in the same way that we were written off when we were coming up, I was written off for being a skater. Now it’s a billion-dollar industry.

You know, it’s obvious. Skateboarding is obvious now. Back then, it was skateboarding is a crime when I was growing up.

It was literally you’d get a ticket or go to jail. When everything’s changing, it’s evolving, and so it’s on the backs of all these people that we write off that we have all this change, that we’re in this goodness. And that’s what I’ve seen, you know?

And we got to… I’m not saying… Look, I was mad.

I was mad that I had to do the work. I was mad and frustrated, and there was this why me and why can’t… Why can’t my family show up and why can’t the people who were here before me lead?

And why am I leading this thing, this healing charge? And like, this isn’t fair. I was in that forever.

And I just kept having to go beyond it. The bulk of my work in mental health and addiction has been that. It’s been to return to the place beyond the conditioning, to have them re-evaluate and re-envision their lives, because the old ideas that we were programmed with, they haven’t been revised in forever.

It was literally you’d get a ticket or go to jail. When everything’s changing, it’s evolving, and so it’s on the backs of all these people that we write off that we have all this change, that we’re in this goodness. And that’s what I’ve seen, you know?

And we got to… I’m not saying… Look, I was mad.

I was mad that I had to do the work. I was mad and frustrated, and there was this why me and why can’t… Why can’t my family show up and why can’t the people who were here before me lead?

And why am I leading this thing, this healing charge? And like, this isn’t fair. I was in that forever.

And I just kept having to go beyond it. The bulk of my work in mental health and addiction has been that. It’s been to return to the place beyond the conditioning, to have them re-evaluate and re-envision their lives, because the old ideas that we were programmed with, they haven’t been revised in forever.

So we need to revise them, and we need to write the things for the people who are coming next. And that’s what your individual practice is. It doesn’t feel that way at times, but your journaling could save someone’s life.

That meditation that you’re doing every morning when you do it a few days in a row and you’re feeling good about yourself, that shit could save someone’s life. Think about your childhood for a minute.

You know, a kid who wanted it all to go well, a kid who may have been loud or quiet to draw attention to the fact that they really wanted to connect, that kid has been giving a shit their whole life. They’ve been caring.

And we’ve been trying to get people’s attention in one way or another. That’s what I did. Is this good enough?

Is this good enough? Always. Am I there yet?

Mom, dad, I got married. I’m having a kid now. Is this good?

I’m working this thing. Oh, I got a song on the TV show. Is this good?

Always. Is this good? Is this good?

Always about the parents.

So it’s very important. It’s very important the work that you’re doing. It’s very important if you’re able to pull out of ideas long enough to be able to explore them and revise.

Don’t wait for the time to show up. Time doesn’t create itself. It’s an illusion.

But a body is finite. I truly believe that you’re infinite. But it’s without the you.

I’m sorry. It’s just without the you. But you’re a part of things that always have been and always will be.

And this conscious life expands. Consciousness expands and it goes further and further, and you end up wanting to take care of yourself more and more. You end up wanting to listen a little bit more because you know how much it means to be listened to.

And you end up like fulfilling your checklist on your own without people doing it from the outside. And so you have more room to give to people. This is consciousness expanding.

How do you make consciousness expand? The very, very simple way of doing it is challenging your ego in the morning upon awakening, challenging it with a reading of something that brings you outside of stale overnight mind, that stale biscuit overnight mind that’s coated in dream sauce.

It just immediately makes new bread. You throw out that biscuit and you cook something new in the morning that says these are fresh ingredients with the day. Read something that challenges your limitations in the morning, points to a bigger world, just for five minutes and then sit with it for five minutes.

Ten minutes a day could change your life. And here’s the thing. This prescription, ultimately, time is limiting.

So you’re going to have to even let go of time at some point. But for now, to get regularity, use time and just read something for five minutes that challenges the nature of your thoughts. Challenge that thing and then take that new you into all those things that are already designed for you to do that day.

And that’s how consciousness expands daily. You fortify yourself with spaciousness. My ultimate authority now is openness.

It’s the ultimate authority. When in doubt, openness. When certain, openness.

Across the board.

My teacher Lama Lanong came to the Love Server member Kirtan at Raghu Marcus’ house here in Ojai and did a blessing at the end of a beautiful Kirtan. And it was a very, very special gathering, a crescendo of the last couple years here in Ojai, meeting every month on the full moon. And this one was, I feel like the instrument was tuned so well between us all, everyone in attendance.

Just incredible. And afterwards, you know, there’s this feeling, this ecstatic feeling that can come over people. And in this particular case, there was that feeling shared by many.

I was speaking to a highly devoted spiritual practitioner, who I respect, after the Kirtan, who had been in attendance. And he said, you know, the problem that I’ve had with Kirtan is that, is non-integrated Kirtan afterwards. He said, you know, there’s that high that comes, but, you know, during the week, like people aren’t with that same vibration, and so they go for the high, but then it doesn’t filter in to the rest of their life and what they’re like at home and all that, and all their quiet moments.

But it was an interesting taking. It’s across the board. It’s across the board on all spiritual traditions, really.

It’s, you know, you can find this anywhere. We got to watch out for these highs, you know. And Maharajah was really big on that.

Also, speaking of Loveserve Remember, he said it’d be better to become Christ rather than to visit with them. I want to talk about something also that I talked about recently on a Mystical Cynical episode, which is the idea of enlightenment, that it’s some sort of party or bliss state. Enlightenment is no self, and it means you’re a part of everything.

And as a human, enlightenment means you’re here to serve the world and you have no privacy.

I really want you to ask yourself if you want that. Because I have to say, I moved toward it thinking it was something else. It was my ego for many years in forms of spiritual materialism that grew lesser and lesser over time due to my devotion and my practice.

But still, there was always this ego that wanted to get something out of it. The more you practice, the deeper you go, the harder it is to take ownership over something that’s invisible and something that you couldn’t begin to say that you have any power over.

So enlightenment is not a private, royal event that’s bliss. It is dedicating yourself beyond self to all existence. And it’s relentless.

And there isn’t a spot where you get a you, or you would even buy it if somebody sold you a you to take care of. You wouldn’t even know how to pretend to be a you. And I would highly recommend…

You know, one of the advantages of always doing your best is that if you do your best every single day and you’re consistent with it, if the world says you failed, you can verify, I did my best. I know that I did my best. And if this isn’t measuring up, then I can’t do any better.

And that’s very freeing also. When did we learn to not be kids? It had been quiet at the car wash.

I was reading the Sonny Rollins book, and these kids came in and they reminded me of my kids when they were younger, and they even looked like them. And I was like having simulation shit go on, going like, is this even happening? That kid looks just like my daughter, and she’s running like my daughter when she was her age, and my son looked just like that kid.

They just look slightly off, slightly different, but it’s just like, what? Is this a fucking program? Like, what is going on?

And I just see it all now. It’s just like, it’s all my mind. It’s just all my mind.

Right now, I’m talking to my mind. You’re all like, you all don’t exist. This is like a complete invisible world, and it’s so freeing to just know that you don’t exist.

Thank God you don’t exist so I can ramble on. So I’m watching these kids, and they’re loud, and they’re not afraid to be loud, and they’re not afraid to go like, mm-hmm, yeah, I want this. Oh, I want that.

They’re doing loud like confirmations, and I was like, Jesus, like what? When did we get so scared? Now I’ll admit, you know, there was a woman who was in her 60s who was kind of looking over at the kids, and I don’t know, I saw her looking over, and it seemed like she was bothered by the noise.

Then again, I turn that thought immediately, and I go, okay, well, you’re just projecting that that’s what she’s in. Maybe she’s looking over, and it reminds her of her grandkids. And so I just immediately, it throws it into, I don’t know, I don’t know, who knows?

But the kids were loud, and they were taking up space, and it was kind of beautiful because they didn’t have the shame of being quiet, the shame of doubting, can I tell the world that I want this gumball? They don’t know yet that a world might not want to hear them having joy. They don’t know that yet.

And they don’t have that sensitivity to it, thank God. And I was like, when do we stop being kids, man? And I raised kids so I can see where that happens, and of course, no surprise, middle school, I was just about to say is the worst, and I stopped myself because it’s just like my kids are amazing, and they both made it out of middle school, and they’re incredible, and it wasn’t because it went well.

It wasn’t because it felt good, but they’re incredible. Before going to the car wash, I was at the brand new noodle place here in Ojai. I go there weekly, and I take myself to lunch.

I sit by myself, and I’ve gotten to know the people that work there, and they’re really sweet, and we have these great conversations. Anyway, I’m sitting at the noodle place eating my lunch, and there’s these women, late 60s, early 70s, having lunch next to me, and they’re the sweetest.

I hear them talking about why they live in Ojai, and one of the women says, well, I tell my friends that I live here because of the community, this sense of community, and it’s so sweet. And then you hear them just sharing with each other stories. Now, they’re not doing what the culture is doing so much, which is really interrupting each other constantly and going off on subsidiary story journeys and never really arriving somewhere and wondering how you ended up here.

That’s most adult conversations in the world that I notice. Like, there isn’t a strong thread of continuity and one person listening to another. But at this table, this is happening.

This is happening at the fucking noodle world. And these ladies are putting on a clinic of, like, how to listen to the other and how to relate, but without hijacking the conversation in your relation. And I’m listening to it, and it’s so neat.

And they get judgmental at times. They’re like, okay, one of the ladies, I guess she was talking about how her niece is having a shotgun wedding. And they’re going, like, you know, it’s such a shame that, like, they’re so worried about people talking.

And I’m going, like, do you see why they’re worried? But here, to their credit, they’re seeing the positive. And they’re really giving each other space to work this out.

And I was listening to them, and I was going, and then the other friend exchanged a story, and the other friend was there with her. And it was this beautiful thing, and I was going, friendship is a cleaning station. Friends are a cleaning station.

When it’s done right, it’s not something that’s sticky and messy. It’s actually a cleaning station. Like, you bring your stuff to someone else, they support, they listen, they help you not solidify in it, necessarily.

That’s what I loved about this, is that they kind of explored things, and they would get judgmental, but then they would go, but, you know, like, who cares? Like, nobody should worry about you getting pregnant. And then, you know, it’s the times of change, they were kind of saying.

And it was like you could hear these women really doing this well. They were addressing, this is a thing, but then they were also going like, yeah, but who cares? And that I thought was like a really perfect example of friendship, what was going on there today.

Really beautiful. Ask yourself that, you know. When you’re talking about something next time, try and add the element that makes it perfect, which is that you don’t know.

And all of your knowing and all of what it feels like, you still don’t know and that will make it perfect. If you can just code it with, I don’t know as much as this feels. I don’t know still.

Building up enough of those is like building up a pure land. I’ll see you there.

The post The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins appeared first on Love Is The Author.

This artist doesn’t want to perform anymore. It doesn’t want to fake things. It doesn’t want to smile for the camera just because we’re in a beautiful place.

It doesn’t want to make conversation just to make conversation. It doesn’t want to keep up with the pace of life. So I’m answering to this artistic spirit, and I say art because I mean it’s the art of living.

What do we have here? We have all these paints and this canvas, that is what we’ve been given in our story, our origins, our ancestry, that and our individualized stories of our households since we were very young. And now I feel like I have this great blank canvas and a limited amount of paints, but all these colors can be mixed together to make other colors.

And I’m not really interested in doing anything other than entertaining myself. And I can only really entertain myself if I’m being honest, honesty in all my relations. Hence, why I don’t want to perform anymore.

I don’t want to perform to keep up with things. I want to be an honest self. Because I’ve taken a look at my honest self, and I really do give a shit about everything.

I’m inspired really by everything.

So I’m not worried about that person as an artist living the art of life. I’m not worried about that person because he cares. But I do want to give him the opportunity to work with the canvas that he’s been given in these paints and really do something.

And so I was downstairs a short time ago in an empty house. Very rare situation for me with nothing on my calendar. And I’m watching a Harmony Corinne interview.

And I’m inspired by this Harmony Corinne interview to take myself upstairs rather than rest, put myself in front of this microphone with no plan or script, and see what comes out. Who am I talking to? You know, right now, I’m talking to no one.

There’s no one else in the room, no one else in the house. It’s just me and me. And I’ve become a friend to myself.

I mean, really, who else has seen the journey? Who else has seen all those moments that we try and get other people to see? Like, look, I’m doing this thing for myself.

Look, I’m sacrificing something. Look, you know, who’s seen that? I’ve seen it.

And over time, I’ve earned my respect. And I’ve done it by getting my hands dirty in life and not avoiding and not putting things off.

And I don’t know what drives this artistic spirit. I don’t know what fuels it, but I do know that space is what it calls for. It calls for space to be able to express.

And it’s so nice to be in this kind of relationship with yourself without needing any validation from the outside. And I don’t even know what to tell you because I needed to try and get validation from the outside, from everything and everyone, including some of the most influential artists and creators in my life. I even sought to get their approval.

And once I did, sure, that was nice, but God, could I have done this all on my own without putting myself in all this much trouble? And I guess that’s what compels me to be here today, to share with you ever, is the idea that I might say something that not only inspires me further, but has the opportunity to inspire you. So honesty is everything.

You go out and you can see forms of dishonesty everywhere that are acceptable. Just a waitress having to put on a smile.

You know, we got to ask ourselves, why would we want a waitress to fake happiness in order to serve us? Everywhere to me is a love project. How can I, at least if this is going well, this space that I’m entering into, how can I help sustain it or even leave it better than it was?

And I do that in repetition everywhere I go. That’s my interest. That’s a form of sincerity.

Why wouldn’t I want that for other people? I want that for myself.

You know, I was thinking about, I was washing the dishes today, and some of the dishes weren’t mine. And I’m a champion fucking dishwasher. I mean, I do it every night.

I kind of run a tight ship with my life. Like, things are clean. I like order.

I don’t put things off. I understand a good mess though. I really do.

I understand it, and I can also just live in a, you know, I’ve been homeless twice.

And I can live in chaos and see the beauty of it. But I like things to reflect my mind. And these days, my mind, it’s a disciplined place.

In that discipline, it can hold a wild imagination that finds its way into all kinds of creative acts and conversation. But it’s an art. Conversation is an art.

Listening is an art. Everybody just has so much to say. And now I go places and people just…

I mean, it’s always kind of been this way, but it’s like ridiculous now. You know, I don’t interrupt them also. And I’ve become skillful at the art of disengaging from conversation that’s gone on too long without making people feel bad, because it really…

The dismount of things really matters to me, like how I leave something. I want to leave people with the feeling without having to over explain, like, hey, oh, I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you. Like, I want to do it with less words.

You know, I don’t want people to go, oh, oh, yeah, sure, okay, I’m sorry. You know, just they get interrupted and they don’t, they realize maybe they’ve been talking for a while. And then, and then I don’t want them to feel bad because I really do care.

I care to hear the whole story.

You know, but there’s a, there’s something that like there’s a lacking breaks, like the line to the breaks are broken on society with the storytelling, which says something to me. Now it either says that I attract people who just, you know, have a lot to say and, or do we all have a lot to say? And I just happen to be one of those spaces where people just either feel it or they know that I’ll listen to them deeply and it probably feels good.

I mean, that’s listening is my life. So that matters to me how I leave things, how I start things. Here’s another example of a weird one.

Like you’ll be, I’ll be walking out of a grocery store and then there’s those people who are trying to sell something. And they’re like, they’ve got their sales people out there. They will walk up to me and say like, Hey, do you have a time today for the environment?

It’s like, like immediately putting you in a, like, what are you to say? See, a weak minded person who’s worried about how they are taken by strangers would stop in that moment, maybe not have the ego strength to resist it and then go like, Oh yeah, well, sure. You know, because they don’t, wouldn’t want to be associated with not caring about the environment.

So this sales pitch that happens, that throws in Mother Nature. And then I go like, Nope, sorry, I don’t have the time. Okay, you know, it’s like this kind of creating suffering is like happening everywhere.

It’s like people create their own suffering. And like I was just minding my own business. I was just walking out of a grocery store.

Now this person tried to rope me and felt rejected. And I don’t, I don’t say all this to go. So yeah, we got to watch out for those people who are outside of fucking grocery stores, you know.

I say this because I take this as like, okay, well, how can I even improve that? How can I make it to where if I’m approached again, I can even make the science a little bit better than this feeling of rejection in this person. And where do I have the time for this?

Well, I just have this space. I have the space to consider such things because it’s sharpened by life. It’s sharpened by general disposition.

So I take these things as constant practices, just always practicing with something. Like today, I wanted to practice resting. So I took myself outside, and there was some wind, and I stared at the wind moving through a tree.

And then I directed my attention from that to a bee in the grass, just gobbling up pollen. I’m filling my head with this, rather than a bunch of TV, or even words in a book have become a little too like, oh, I don’t know. Like my morning practice now, notorious sleep and reading every morning and meditating for 20 years.

And now books and words are just like, it’s like saying too much. I kind of want to have my own experience now. I kind of like want to have more room to see post meditation.

What I’ve already accumulated in all the other books and all the other life experiences, and I want to see what that can do unprovoked. So books are kind of like sitting on a shelf, like right next to me, and I’ve just always read, but now like reading just before meditating, it just, it’s not appealing to me. I mean, my teacher, Lama Luonang, he suggested that I don’t read.

He’s like, why you read still? And he’s kind of inviting me to explore the universal potential within myself. See books, Buddhism, vehicles for awakening, all meant to be put down at some point and just experience life.

I realized that my goal with my kids is that for the rest of their life, when they look down at their phone and they see my name across it, that’d be a no-brainer to pick it up. Like, oh, I wonder what dad’s up to, that kind of thing. How many of us actually have that experience?

I have a very harmonious relationship now with both of my parents, and we’ve forgiven all of our pasts, and we live now in this new space. And it’s a real thing. I put a lot of work into it, they put a lot of work into it, and we’ve all forgiven each other.

We’re in this beautiful place. I still have the imprint of when their name comes across my phone, I still have the imprint, I go like, oh, am I going to have to… I still feel the past of all those times where I was really just trying to gain their respect and kind of have something to show for my life and make them proud.

I still feel that when I look at it, even with everything kind of behind us. So I want to fine tune that with my kids. So I’m trying to be the person and live the life in every way that affords them the inspiration to feel drawn to my support without it being authoritative and without it having those adulterations, let’s call it, like where there’s guilt, without any of that.

Like actually like, oh man, dad’s calling. Like that’s my goal. I had a great conversation with my mom about the subject of, you know, the rest of our time on earth.

And we had this really amazing heart to heart where I just said, look, I have a limited time on this earth. You have a limited time on this earth. I really want to have a genuine relationship with you.

I’m talking genuine, not like we survived our lives. And of course, we’ve been there for each other, and you know, we’re blood and all that. Not all that.

Like I want to have the genuine experience with my mother. My mother survived so much. She survived being raped by her father, you know, and forgave him in her lifetime and taught me about love.

I want that person to have the most genuine experience in her life and have genuine support from all of us and not performative support. So we had this hard-to-hard and I just basically said, look, I want us to have the kind of relationship where we’re naturally inspired to see each other, naturally inspired to call each other, not the performative thing. Where you’re just doing it to check up and blah, blah, blah or whatever, whatever we’ve done, whatever people do.

Like the real deal where you respect each other and you’re actually calling because you care, because you really care and you want to see how they’re doing or you want to go see them and you’re excited to go see them. This is attainable. It’s a practice.

I had all the same barriers in Western civilization emotionally that any family had. And I’ve been able to do this in my life just paying attention, furthering practices of compassion and having an imagination. I imagine a better world, and I enact it in my household and in my family and in my profession and in my art.

And that’s my plan for world peace. I’ve done that in my life, and that’s what interests me is like just having really genuine relationships with people. Anything outside of that just doesn’t genuinely interest me.

People talk a good deal about authenticity and genuineness, but now there’s a performative thing in the culture that like, look, I’m doing authenticity. I talk this way and I say these terms and I move this way, but it still looks like performance to me. You know when you’re really kind of dropped in and you’re like hanging with somebody and it kind of feels like this?

It’s like more of a whisper. And people talk to each other. They go from this to, so how are you doing today?

Oh, good. Oh, yeah, well, I was doing this. Yeah, but like you jump up to do you see the like the difference?

And that’s how most people are talking to each other everywhere. And I’m not shitting on people. Something else just hasn’t been modeled yet.

It hasn’t been modeled enough in the culture to be able to be embodied. And so I’m starting with me. My life is my message.

You can do this too. I was chewed up and spit out by life. I’ve been homeless twice.

I’ve been sexually abused. I’ve been a drug addict. I’ve been a sober person who helped a lot of people.

I’ve been a professional in mental health. I’ve been a music producer. And I walked away from all that stuff because that shit hurt.

Who am I beyond all of those identifiable categorical traits? Who am I beyond what happened? This is my pursuit of going at the thing that I never knew in life that was there, which was the bigger me, which is nothing.

It’s you too. It’s everything. It’s everything.

At this moment, it feels separate, but you and I are only separated by our minds. Everything is interdependent and interconnected.

And that is more of what I am than anything. I’m not concerned with people respecting my opinion. It’s my actions.

My body of work is my service. It’s not my MP3 files.

My body of work is where I’ve exemplified unconditional love. That’s really interesting. What is driving a person like me to ask these questions?

To know a bigger reality than my credentials. What is that that seeks to know itself? I mean, right now, I’m staring at a curtain.

I’m just, it’s me in the curtain. I’m talking to this curtain as if it’s you. It is you.

I want to read you something that’s in A Course in Miracles. The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When you have an authority problem, it is always because you believe you are the author of yourself and project your delusion onto others.

That’s the deal, is that most of us are believing that the story that we had is who we are and we got to make something of it. And it’s always on the market. It’s always subject to good stocks or bad stocks.

And we consider that our story and how it’s translating into the world as being our chief importance. And what I’m compelled by is artists who go beyond that. You know, Bob Dylan is somebody that endlessly inspires me, especially in interviews early on.

He’s evasive. He’s playing with the audience. He really is acting like I could care less.

And you’re asking me questions that don’t even make sense. He’s adopted a minimalism and sarcasm and also a depth that kind of sounds like it could be the Tao Te Ching at times coming out of him. But all of this in this Tasmanian devil dust cloud is how Bob Dylan expresses himself in some of these interviews.

Just handing people back what they’re asking. Saying like, is this really what you’re asking? And confronting people about that.

Or doing it in a way that’s almost non-confrontational that you can’t really say anything towards. And I’m really interested in that. I want to find that in the world.

That’s the unknown. Anybody that we’ve ever loved has left us. But they’re in that place.

The place we don’t know about. Or are they? So Bob Dylan embodies that.

Harmony Corrine embodies that. So people who are not concerned with what you think. And at the same time have so much to say to us all.

Like this form of expression, the unknown being expressed without an end goal, is I feel the true artistic spirit.

See, even the great artists who have come and gone, we hold them still. We’ve been influenced by it. It’s something that goes on and on.

They don’t have to be here to still be here. That’s very interesting. Honoring that unknown, that unknowable quality of life, even as it presents as something so noble.

I mean, oh, look, I know what kind of person you are. We look at a mannerism when we think we’re the world’s greatest intuitive in that moment. Not knowing that we’re projecting our story directly onto this person unfairly.

And maybe you find that there are some similarities there. It’s still not the same story. There’s never a same story.

There’s no same story that’s ever been in the same way that the Tibetan proverb, you can’t walk into the same river twice, suggests. Where is this cool, unknown, that seems to birth everything and take everything back? It seems to generate all of this life and what we can only figure out through scientific tools and measurements and stuff to be able to say that there is something to this invisible world.

To me, that is the monastery of the artistic spirit. And I’m looking to be a monk in that place, come what may. People think they know who I am, and I go, I don’t even know.

How do you know? I don’t have any plan. How could you know what I’m going to do next?

How could you know who I am? And who do we know? Ourselves.

And I don’t say that as a bad thing. Who better to be in good graces with? Who better to love?

Your chief witness. You know, I for one, want my chief witness, observer of my story. To have nice things to say about my efforts.

You know, he was down and out there for a little while, and it looked like all might be lost. And he sunk into depravity and theft and dishonesty. But then, in a real shocker, he pulls himself up and teaches himself new tricks.

Influenced by a wide variety of sources, but he’s the one that applies them. And that’s what I’ve done. I’ve just applied what I’ve been taught.

I had to do it. My teachers didn’t do it. They showed me the way.

Especially my enemies, so called. I revere today my enemies as much as my highest gurus. Whenever there’s difficulty, and I’ve had some characters in my life the last couple years, and I watch myself turn them into a deity, I watch myself supplant one of my gurus’ faces on their face as they’re sitting in front of me, maybe performing in a way that is triggering, so to speak.

I send love to it, and I genuinely want to feel that, and I totally believe that it’s possible that my gurus are hiding in these people. See, that’s the thing, when you open yourself up to the unknown, then in places that you never thought something wonderful could be, you’re willing to look and you find it.

Love is life. That’s it. You’ll never be more loved than the life that’s running through your veins.

You’ll never be more loved than existence.

Sometimes I feel myself on my deathbed, saying, pay attention to this one. This moment right here, this is going to be one of the ones that you are thinking about. I feel myself on my deathbed calling me to dig in more and to go low.

This is one of the big ones. I get messages from myself. And for a long while, it’s been so inspirational to live that way.

It’s the color that stands out to me in nature. It’s the beauty in your lover’s face. Life is love.

There’s no other love. You can say God is love, but when we all say God, what do we mean? We mean life.

The sources of creative energy that go into the experience of all things. That’s life. We don’t have to say God anymore.

Life is love. So when I say love is the author, it’s just like saying life is the author of your experience. Don’t give the authorship away.

Don’t sign into a publishing deal where you have an editor that wants you to be somebody other than yourself. You’re the author. Love is the author.

You are the pen.

And you’re writing your experience. Every bit of it, we’re writing. Now, here’s the thing.

We have a ghostwriter, and that’s the subconscious trauma that hasn’t been worked out. Those are the ghostwriters of every experience. And they get in the way, and they disguise themselves so well as you.

That’s why they’re ghostwriters. It’s just your name. But they’re what’s interpreting the situation.

And you shouldn’t give that authorship away to past pain, to storylines that are kind of regurgitated. We don’t like it in entertainment when stories are regurgitated. We can smell it a mile away, yeah?

We don’t like that. We don’t like trying to be tricked. So this is a trick of habit of mind, to tell us to be cautious of this bad thing that happened in the universe.

It was a happening. How many happenings have you had since, where you’ve been completely taken care of? And I mean, breathing alive with opportunity.

Arguably, anybody that’s listening to this show qualifies for those basic things. So haven’t you been loved since these bad things have happened? In all the good in the world, the news focuses on those 10 stories every single day.

Why? To get our attention, to make it real, so that you’ll need more things. And we are being shuffled around by our own minds habitually in this way.

And there’s a way out. In your life, that is love, that is only found temporary ways of expressing that love through forms of attachment, have really limited our experience in life. I want a life that affords me limitless expansion.

I’m in the limitless expansion plan. That’s the artistic spirit. It pushes us beyond the known, into realms to explore.

I mean, I remember being 17 and ditching my junior year, a lot of it, and going down to this coffee shop. At this coffee shop was this guy who was older than me, who had just graduated, and he was way into the Velvet Underground. He rode a BMW motorcycle, and he wore a leather jacket, and he smoked American spirits.

And this is, we’re talking 1993, when American spirits, you’d have to go to a tobacco store and buy them. They were this fringe cigarette that was all-natural, and that burned a long time. And they were good because of that, but they were strong.

And this one rogue individual represented the unknown in so many ways to me. And I had my, like, bohemian phase, and ran away from home to go pursue that, and being more that. I headed out at 17 years old into the unknown, into the streets of Sacramento.

I can’t even imagine my 17-year-old going to try to navigate life in a big city, fending for himself. I remember walking the streets at night just to stay, because there was no where to stay, and you just have to stay up all night, and I would tag buildings. Now, of course, it’s the destruction of property and all that, and I’m not saying that’s the way to go, but there’s that kid at 17 who’s on his own at 2 in the morning, walking around, tagging buildings, looking over his shoulder like, you know, this is innocent play.

It’s like hide-and-seek when you’re a kid, you know, you’re looking over your shoulder to see if you’re going to get caught, and you’re, you know, you’re getting creative with where you hide. Like it’s innocence. We’re all innocent.

We don’t know it. We think we’re guilty. But within each of us is somebody that cares.

And within each of us is this artistic spirit. People say, no, there’s some people that are artists. It’s like, no, an artist is really just embracing the unknown and seeing what comes and maybe, maybe materializing that, but not even needing to, just being in touch with it, these sources.

My favorite people are in touch with this, and they have a lot of trouble talking about things. You get to a phase where you accumulate knowledge and all to find that, like, you don’t have anything to say, and actually it’s very hard to even be around people at a certain point. For me, I want to hang out in the I don’t know.

I don’t want to go where everybody knows shit, where it’s just all knowledge, and that’s being what was described in A Course in Miracles. We think that we are the story conglomerate, and that’s the author of the experience. And so when somebody challenges it, they’re challenging the author of the experience.

And we go like, what? No, you’ve got it wrong. This is just my experience.

And did you see what I mean? Like, it’s ego. And I’m still, I’m not here to say kill your ego.

Your ego is a necessity for you to be able to not be in an insane asylum. You have to have ego. Ego strength, not egocentrism.

Ego core, like what they talk about in physical, like the strengthening your core. It’s like core ego is just right-sizedness, being a good citizen. It’s not letting whatever’s going on in your life impose on anyone else against their will.

We’ve been lied to that it’s the education, that it’s the pursuit of a career. Everybody did their best, attempting to make a productive society, but it has now backfired on us. And we’re unhealthy, and we’re on drugs, trauma dumping on each other.

And also, we made it through a pandemic. There’s a renaissance in art. People have more access to mental health and addiction services.

There’s deep work going on beyond archaic psychotherapy. Kids these days are onto the fact that the digital age and cell phones are the poison that maybe we’ve been feeding our kids. I think our kids are going to rebel against it.

It’s going to be a movement of kids who are just like done with the digital, and there’s going to be a renaissance of simplicity. And they’re going to do it as a form of rebellion against a culture that told them that it was outside of themselves. And I think it’s going to happen like a rebel alliance to the digital age.

And then they’ll be like in the movie Wall-E, the animated film where people are just like on their rascal scooters being multi-entertained by many screens and just fed through tubes, and that’s it. It’s really hard to look at adults. I was at a mall going to an AT&T store, and I had to use the bathroom, so I went upstairs to the bathroom, and it’s by the food court, and I was walking by this guy, who’s my age, who was sitting by himself, eating a piece of Sbarro pizza, with an anxious leg going, while looking at his cell phone that was face down on the table, that was laying down on the table, so he’s just hovering above it, eating this pizza really fast.

And I felt such compassion for this person. I was going like, man, this is this guy’s form of relief, and he’s like, he needs this moment. And how far away from that moment being the peace in my life that I know, the truth in my life that I know, and I wished him a way out.

It looked like a painful situation. And who knows, could be the happiest person in the world. That’s the idea is like, each one of us wants to be known, but we also don’t like it when people think they know us.

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