Is It Possible to Uproot All Anxiety and Anger? Steve Armstrong Says Yes.

26:54And when you see that, you realize, everything is made up of other things and there's nothing that has an inherent existence within itself. Heavy-heady. But what this means is our mind is out of control. We can train it, but we can't prevent certain thoughts or feelings from arising in the mind. They just come, don't they? Due to causes and conditions. We don't control all the conditions of our life externally or internally. And so that, coming to see this and to recognize this in our experience, can be rather unsettling. First, knowledge is knowledge of mind and body. Yes. Second, knowledge is?

27:36Knowledge of conditionality. And third, knowledge is? A knowledge of the three characteristics, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and I'm going to call it conditionality, but... Sometimes referred to as selflessness. Yeah, selflessness. But that's a scary word. It's like selflessness, who am I if I'm selfless? Right, but selfless in this context doesn't mean generous. It means that the you that you think exists doesn't exist. The little inner you, the little ears, Dan, doesn't actually exist. Yeah. Yeah. Every moment is just a conjunction of conditions giving rise to an experience which we identify with as me.

28:09Yes. But if you break down life from the solid movie of experience to the 24 frames per second, that the little Dan is just a story you're making up every frame as opposed to actually what is happening in every frame is something is happening and somebody is knowing. And it is being known. Yeah. But there is nobody doing the knowing. No, that's right. This is heady stuff. So maybe not. We'll get into it a little bit deeper as we progress through the progress of insight. So what is the fourth knowledge? The fourth is a significant stage in practice. It's called arising and passing away. Okay. So I think I've had the first three.

28:45Yeah. And I've heard of the arising and passing away, sometimes referred to as the A and P. And this is the fireworks. Yeah. These are the fireworks. This is where the fireworks come. But what happens is at arising and passing away is the speed with which you can notice the moment's experience start going by very rapidly. You just see. Stuff is just going by. And you're not stopping the flow of experience to have an emotional reaction to it or have a relationship or have a cognitive story about it. It's just like the mind is just seeing things as they go by, moment to moment, very rapidly. And this is when the mind can do its work.

29:23The mind's work is to know what is. And when all of our stories about ourself and reactions to I like it, I don't like it are put aside, and that's what happens in the first three knowledges. we slowly begin to put aside all our reactions, all our beliefs and assumptions, and we just see, this is the way it is. Then the mind is able to do what it does, and it gets just really lit up. And then there are these phenomena called pseudo-nirvana. Pseudo-nirvana, or nirvana would be the Pali pronunciation. Spiritual goodies. We can call them spiritual goodies. Pseudo-nirvana, meaning that people mistake the experiences they're getting in the A &P for nirvana.

30:04Yeah. Or Nibbana. Nirvana being Sanskrit and Nibbana being Pali. Yeah. Like what? Ecstasy. Yeah. For example, there are times when the mind just gets lit up and it is just, it's not like the ecstasy of, oh boy, this is so much fun. It's just like the whole mind and body is just in orgasmic bliss. Just like full body orgasm for hours. What's the bad part of this?

30:33it's exhausting it's exhausting no but while you're experiencing that and when it first arises you say wow finally i'm out of knee pain and i'm out of restless wandering mind it's just blissful it's just joyfulness wow this is ecstasy this is great you know we say this has got to be it this is so good you're enlightened yeah that's right so you read the chapter in my book about being on retreat yeah you were one of the teachers yes hey you didn't name me i didn't name i didn't name because we didn't actually meet until today. No, that's all right. But the retreat was in 2010, and there's a moment in that chapter where I describe having a very heightened experience for about 36 hours.

31:09Yeah. Is that A &P territory, or is that just like a terrible beginning meditator has his first bout of clarity and feels pretty good? You had a lot of samadhi, which is continuity of mindfulness and purity of mind. Purity of mind opens the door to all these spiritual goodies. So you'd get some taste of tranquility and joy and ease and clarity and a lot of confidence. You had a lot of confidence during that bout. And these are all manifestations of some of the pseudo nibbanas or the spiritual goodies. But you don't think technically I was in the fourth knowledge there? You can't say you go through a door and then you're there.

31:48It's more like as a cutting edge, we could say you step through the door. You fall back into the third knowledge and you don't stay in there all the time. so you're gradually learning how to access that fourth knowledge yeah right passing away don't take that as a confirmation of anything but just as we're talking it's why it's so touchy to confirm because we're really the whole the whole process and the whole progress of insight is self-knowledge it's about self-knowledge and if i can say to you poof dan you're enlightened if you believe me because of your faith in me or your wish to be enlightened or whatever, you can walk around full of BS for a long time before you realize that's a delusion.

32:31So is this why, we're taking a bit of a detour here from the progress of insight, but that's fine. Is this why Western meditation teachers have been so reluctant to talk about this stuff explicitly? Partly, but I think it's more that most of us who started practice in the early years, very driven in some ways, either spiritually called or karmically called and just really on the fast track to get to our spiritual life. And when we were told, here's the map, check it out, some people just get really overbearing, obsessive and strive too hard or with too much effort, which actually impedes their evolution, and I should say, of the knowledges.

33:17Right. So the weird thing about this map is trying too hard, you can't make any progress. No, that's right. So you have to put yourself in this weird kind of neutral position of trying without trying. Well, it's like, you know, if you said, hey, I've heard of this town called Paris. I'm going to go find it. You could wander a long time before you'd ever hit Paris. So it's good to have a map. Here's the map of where Paris is. Boom. Okay. So you can wander around till you find what looks like Paris. And then you say, I need a map of the streets of Paris. So you get a map from someone who's into famous authors that lived in Paris, and you follow that map to all these locations that famous authors lived.

33:58You might be obsessed with getting your checklist done, but in the meantime, you're seeing the rest of Paris. And missing it. A lot of it. Because you've got to focus on that, and you're missing what goes by elsewhere. So same thing with having a map of a spiritual journey. If you've got a map and you're obsessively just trying to get it, well, that's just the wrong attitude to begin with in the first place. Did you go through some of that? Yeah, of course. When I first started meditation practice, I thought it was to have drug-like experiences. I thought, you get high. That's good. That seemed like the goal.

34:36When I first shared that mistaken belief with Saira Upandita the first time I was practicing with him. Sayadaw Ubandita was Mahasi Sayadaw's successor in Burma and with whom you practiced. He recently died. Yeah. And when I, you know, he said something about what do you think happens? And I said, well, you know, you have these kinds of experiences. You just be mindful and you have some drug-like experiences and then poof, you can enlighten. He just burst out laughing. He just burst out laughing. I mean, I wasn't offended. It was just, I was naive. And so he spends a lot of time instructing, offering the teachings of what the path is, at least the beginning path, how to get onto the path so that you're not wasting your time looking for pseudo-nibbana.

35:17It'll come. Anybody that practices is going to definitely experience pseudo-nibbana. It's pseudo. But just to get back to why you and your ilk, you and the other meditation teachers have been hush about this, there's a lot of weirdness around this progress of insight. You're one of the first teachers who I've been able to sit here and just talk about this, talk about the names. And then, but even you got a little, you were like, don't take me as confirming anything. So there's a guy named Daniel Ingram, who you and I were discussing before, who wrote a book. He's a Western guy, he's an amazing ER doctor down in Alabama.

35:53And he wrote a book about how he sort of went all the way on the progress of insight. That book was very much a cookbook, a term that he's okay with. And that caused an enormous amount of controversy within the tiny world of American Buddhism. And the reason why that's controversial, there are about 7 ,000 reasons is why it's controversial, but one of them is that if people know too much, American teachers, yourself included, have had a lot of hard experience personally and with their students of seeing people get obsessed with making progress, which of course impedes progress. Sure. And that was the danger.

36:23You'll know too much and we're very heady. We're great thinkers. We Westerners are great thinkers and we don't have a lot of faith for practice. Well, if you can think yourself into a blissful state or akin to believing that you're enlightened, great, good. Don't have to do the work. Excuse me, that's a cynical view. But I was... Cynicism is fine here, just so you know. Yeah, right. I know. We're in the same club. But, you know, I think that, you know, the introduction of a lot of what came in with the teaching of mindfulness and insight in the West, primarily the Western psychological understandings that help a lot of us get through the first years of practice and kind of become normal and then suitable for really intensive practice of insight, I think has been a great blessing.

37:10And to have gotten the fast track to enlightenment early on could have derailed me and others. I heard about it a little bit, but didn't pay much attention to it because it didn't seem real to me, frankly. It wasn't until I got to Burma that, oh, it became apparent that this is what's happening. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. So we're at the fourth knowledge here, the arising and passing away, which is where you see very clearly that everything is arising and passing away. And that can feel really good. And you can have these pseudo Nibbana or pseudo Nirvana experiences. Now, let me just say about pseudo Nibbana, because we think this is it, we get attached to it.

37:50We take delight in it. We take delight in bliss. We take delight in joy. We take delight in clarity. We take delight in strong faith. We take delight in effortless energy. We take delight in non-reactive equanimity. And we just feed a sense of self until we can see those experiences as just ecstasy being known, bliss being known, great faith being known, clarity, piercing clarity, just being known. So what? Until we can have that level of equanimity towards those spiritual goodies, we don't progress beyond rising and passing away. so it's a big it's a big step i could see worse things than being stuck in a state of ecstasy that feels like a pretty good cul-de-sac to me well it's a turnout on it's a scenic turnout on the route dan you know as upendita would say there's better things ahead but before you get to those better things you got to go through some tough things so let's go let's progress through the other knowledge the next the next mature arising and passing away where the spiritual goodies are arising, but you're not indulging in them.

38:51That's great. You know that the path is just noticed. It's like the best practice you've ever could imagine. It's just, it's so effortless, and it's so clear, and it's so continuous, and so at times blissful, and you're not indulging in it, and you don't care if it comes or goes, and it's just very easy, a lot of equanimity. It's really great. And so the next phase of practice is where, I guess we'd have to say we purify our understanding of dukkha. What's the name of this? It's called Banga Niana. It's the opening to the dukkha nyanas, what are called the knowledge of dukkha. Suffering. Yeah, suffering.

39:27And this is one of those, I didn't mention it before, but this is the second, what we call a rolling up the mat stage of practice. This is where practice is so hard. People freak out and roll up their mat and leave. Yeah, we just want to roll up our mat and go home. So this comes immediately after the awesome stuff of A &P. And again, the name of this knowledge is? It's Banganana, the knowledge of dissolution. Dissolution. Sometimes this knowledge is called the dark night. Yes. People don't like this. Some people don't like this. People don't like this. Some of it say it's the dark night, similar to the dark night of the soul.

39:59I don't know what the dark night of the soul is, but there's some of the similar characteristics. But I'll also make a distinction if you want me to. When you begin to open to the fact that everything is rising and passing away, and everything is unsatisfactory, changing, and it's out of control, suddenly or gradually you begin to recognize, up until this point, I have to use three-dimensional, objects are arising and they're being known. Another object arises and it's being known. Object arises and it's being known and it's very fast. but all along up to this point the knowing has seemed to be steady stable like it doesn't arise and pass away but at mature rising passing away you start to notice that the knowing itself is not steady so the dan that's knowing is actually not there yeah it's like the object and the knowing arise at the same time and they both pass away at the same time and they arise again an object and another knowing and it passed away so that's dissolution Another.

41:02Yeah, because the sense of a permanent enduring knower of changing objects dissolves. And this is scary as hell for a lot of people. This is very scary. Yeah, it's unsettling because you can't keep track of one moment to the next. The you that was mindful a moment ago isn't here to be mindful this time. So let me tell you. And you really feel it. It's visceral. It's like you feel that. It's like, you know, where am I? Let me tell you about an experience I had when I was young, a younger guy, much younger guy. Were you ever not younger? I'm 45 this summer, so I'm not so super young. So when I was very young, I had a recurring panic attack when I would smoke weed.

41:40And the contents of this panic attack were, it was like my brain was turning over in my head. Everything that was happening was happening right now. Oh, no, this is happening right now. No, no, now it's now. Now it's now. And it was terrifying. It felt like dying and waking up in every moment. And I know a little bit about the progress of insight in this stage, which is sometimes called the dark night or the knowledge of fear or whatever. I sometimes think that maybe I was having an experience like this as an immature weed smoker. It does sound like you access that understanding, that knowledge.

42:13But the difference between doing drugs or having a mental illness where one would access that kind of stuff is that you can't integrate it. You can't integrate that knowledge into an understanding that you can live with. No, I didn't integrate it at all. It was like a vampire being confronted with garlic. I was just repulsed by it and freaked out instead of just sort of leaning into it and seeing it with some equanimity. Yeah. And that's what happens. We get afraid and we have to work through the fear of objects and dissolution. And then there's another phase of this dark night. There's both the fear and then there's what we would call disillusionment, where you start to see that all that has appeared and that we've been fascinated by in our life is just really not very, doesn't really offer the goods.

43:01We get disillusioned with more experience. Nothing does it for you. Nothing does it for you. So this is another knowledge and another state? Yeah, it's scary because to think nothing does it for you and there's no you that it's going to be done for anyway. It's kind of, what's it all about? You can really fall into a deep confusion and nihilism and just like you disappear and you don't. It's scary. So this progress of insight is a real adventure. It is. That's another thing I like about it. There are great things that happen and all these obstacles you have to navigate. It's back to my sort of Dungeons and Dragons comparison.

43:35Coming up, Steve talks about the last few steps on the path and then stubbornly refuses to answer a few of my annoying questions.

43:49I don't know which knowledge we're in anymore, but we've gone from fear into disillusionment. And then what happens after that? Let me just say, when people get into that stage, we recognize that this is the dissolution. This is the Bangananas. This is the knowledge of dukkha, the dukkhananas. And people want to go home. And so we have to just say, okay, just settle back. Just notice what you can. Don't look for the kind of experience you had last week. That's going backwards. Just keep noticing what you can. Just settle back. Be comfortable. Don't push. Don't know expectations. And eventually people will get through it.

44:20Their pace of noticing gets even faster. But there's a knowledge, there's something that has to transpire in the mind, and that is, as bad as this is, I got here through the knowing that I just had to recognize something is being known in each moment. Something is being known in each moment. This now is being known in each moment. Disillusionment is being known in each moment. Fear is just being known in each moment. Terror is just being known in this moment. Okay. And when you really remember that and you kind of recommit, this is the next level of insight, where it's called re-observation. You determine the way forward is to just keep noticing things are being known one after another.

45:05This is called re-observation. Re-observation. That's the name of this stage. That's the name of this stage, yeah. Okay. Because you reaffirm, again, you're just observing. You're not judging this as, if we were judging our experience as good or bad and saying this is skillful or not, you would go home. You would not practice. You wouldn't know how to practice. You'd need a teacher. You need a teacher, a skillful teacher at the Dukha Nyanas to help you navigate it skillfully. If you don't have a skillful teacher, if you don't have a teacher that you can have faith in to trust, to guide you, you'll end up really disturbed.

45:36And again, the dukkha and jhanas are the knowledges of suffering that happen after the fireworks of the arising and passing away. That's like the valley one has to. Yeah, the valley of death. Literally, because you're seeing everything dies. Okay, so we're in re-observation. We're starting to emerge out of the valley of death. And what's the next? What happens? What's the next? There may be a, I haven't got it quite in my mind right now, but you're on your way towards more equanimity. And that is the stage, equanimity. This is the stage that we're headed towards. And gradually, we haven't seen it because we've been so fascinated with the variety of objects that we've been noticing.

46:12We've been so fascinated with the spiritual goodies. And then we've been so obsessed with the, or preoccupied with the Dukanianas. We haven't noticed that the stability of the mind to be with these changing objects has gotten stronger and stronger to now where it's just so equanimous. Anything can arise, and we don't react. Anything can arise, and we don't react. The best possible spiritual goodies can arise. No indulgence in them. The worst terrifying, fearful dukkha that you can imagine arises. No fear of that. Equanimity. Unshakable, steady observation. This is the way it is, moment to moment.

46:53Okay, so here we are. We're about to get to the sort of culminating experience in this adventure. You start out with some basic understanding of the way the mind works, and during the progress of insight, the mind is steadied and concentrated and seeing things clearly, and you hit the fireworks of the arising and passing away, sometimes called pseudo-nirvana, or sometimes, I love this term, corruptions of insight. Let me just explain what that means. Okay. The spiritual goodies arise because you have good practice. But as soon as they arise, they become an object of indulgence or feeling gratified.

47:30It's that gratification with those experiences that is the corruption. Joy is not a corruption. Tranquility is not a corruption. Faith is not a corruption. Clinging to them is the corruption. Indulging and clinging to them. So we started with the basic understanding of the mind and the body and conditionality, And then we enter into this A &P where we have the pseudo nirvana. Then things get scary. We're in the Dukhananas, the dark night, the valley of death, whatever. There's a bunch of stages of this. And then you start to emerge with re-observation where you fall back into the real anchor, which is that mindfulness, which is just seeing things clearly.

48:04And then you get to this really cool area called that. And again, I've had no experience with any of this. This is just my understanding from talking to you and reading. You have equanimity, which is everything's cool. You're just cool with everything. Yeah. And out of equanimity, this is where we get to the big N word here. Okay. Now let me just prep you a little bit. Okay. Okay. When the mind is in this equanimous, it's not a state. It's like moment to moment, it's just not reacting. It's just there. Things are going by extremely rapidly. And even the sensations of the body are going by so fast, you don't stop the flow of experience at all.

48:40For myself, when there was strong equanimity, it just, the tangibility of the body feels like mist. Mist. That's as heavy and as thick as the body is. It's like mist. Okay? And so the mind is very light, too. It just not, it just doesn't get entangled in anything. It doesn't miss anything, either. It just doesn't get entangled. It doesn't pick up. It often doesn't even pick up the ideas of what's being presented to it. it sees, but it's not picking it up to massage it into, I like it, I don't, I should do this, I shouldn't do that. The mind doesn't do that. And so the equanimity tends towards long periods of time of just sitting quietly observing the flow of phenomena.

49:23Time gets distorted. You sit down, you seem to take two or three breaths, and a couple of hours has gone by. you have some real time distortions that are phenomenal okay now what's happening is the objects are being seen quickly and recognized quickly and when i have no reaction to them but what's being seen about them is one of the three characteristics we're seeing that they're impermanent we're seeing that they have the characteristic of dukkha which means they're either painful themselves not at this point they're unstable or they're not controllable Unreliable. Unreliable. Yeah. And then the third characteristic, they're conditioned and they're not self.

50:03They're not stable. You can't control them. Okay. So we're seeing objects. We're seeing these characteristics of all objects. And so think of it this way, Dan. Imagine that you were seeing, you understood everything that you're experiencing is painful. You wouldn't pick it up. You wouldn't deal with it. You wouldn't, you just, no, I don't want to, I don't want to deal with that. Or if you realize this that I'm looking for to make my life 10 % happier is unstable. It doesn't last. It might be 10 % happier today, but it's going to be 10 % less happy tomorrow. Why do that? So you don't pick it up.

50:41The mind doesn't reach for what it sees, doesn't offer what it looks for. So the mind is not reaching for to hold on to anything because it's impermanent. It doesn't last. It has the characteristic of a dukkha. It's not controllable. It's not yours. It has no essence even. And so the mind doesn't reach. Now, when the mind doesn't reach for anything, it might fall into the unconditioned. Okay, so now the unconditioned is another way of saying nirvana or in the Pali word nibbana. Unpack that for me, man. What is the unconditioned and how would one fall into it? Well, you know, as Trungpa Rinpoche so aptly put it, he says, enlightenment is an accident.

51:28Practice makes us accident prone. Okay. So it's like, it's unconditioned. It's not conditioned by anything. It's a reality. So we live in this world as this vast soup of causes and conditions, but nirvana is the unconditioned. It is this. Yeah. It's its own reality. And when you fall into it, you spend a lot of time there or is it like a zap and, and you bolt out of your chair. What happens? The texts say it's just a momentary visit by the mind to this reality. And some people recognize it instantly and some don't. But if you continue to practice and develop what's called the fruition, not just the initial path of nabana, but the fruition of it, then it can last for a longer period of time.

52:18What's the difference between the path and the fruition? This first visit to the unconditioned is a profound experience, and it permanently transforms the mind. And some people experience it, and it's just like, wow, they're just done. They're just done. They don't want to practice anymore. They just have done all they want to do. Some people just ride the wave of bliss and dharma joy for hours, if not days. just wow relief it's a kind of relief that's just like unbelievable okay so what happens is that all along in our practice up to this first taste of the unconditioned is we've been purifying the mind purifying our understanding and we're becoming more confident that this is the path to the end of suffering clinging end of clinging at least suffering and that at some point we have looked at all of our doubts, looked at all of our, is it possible really?

53:25Is it me? Does it work for them? Does it work for me? Can I do it? All that stuff has been seen as just another moment's experience arising and passing away. And it is said that at the point of first accessing the unconditioned, that doubt about the teachings of the path, the Dharma, and the ability to practice in this way is uprooted. Meaning it's not just suppressed through concentration, it's uprooted from the mind never to appear again. But also it is said that this belief in this, the little Dan or the little Steve that's in here that this is all happening to, that belief is also uprooted from the mind at the first access to the unconditioned.

54:13But what is it? But what is it? You've had this experience clearly. So what does it feel like? What is it like?

54:22Not supposed to say. Why are you supposed to say? This is where things get weird. Why are you not supposed to say? It's not that we're not supposed to say. It's in the book. It's a non-experience, if you will. You could have to say it's a non-experience. What's so great about it if it's a non-experience? Because it has this powerful effect on the mind. But what's so great about it in the moment you're having the experience if there's nothing to experience? That's the greatness of it. Because at this point, you have seen that every moment's experience has this characteristic of dukkha. Suffering.

54:54Nothing's going to do it for you. And so now there is this experience of no dukkha. I see. I see. No dukkha. A weight has been lifted or something like that. So it's like nothing's going to do it for you until everything does it for you? No, I wouldn't say everything does it for you. You still realize that nothing is going to do it for you like you had thought before. But now your sense of your understanding of what happiness is, is forever changed. So switch seats with me mentally here. If you were in my chair and you just listened to somebody describe this adventure that culminates in a non-experience that permanently changes the mind, would you believe any of this?

55:32No.

55:36probably not i would be skeptical i would say yeah but so why would i want to do that and can you prove it and tell me about it and show it to me can't do that but the experience of it is real and you're just saying that based on your own experience once you taste the experience of the unconditioned you know what it is okay but this there's a lot of controversy around this because we're talking about the understanding of enlightenment from one school of buddhism and there are many schools of Buddhism. Yeah, that's right. And so if you sit with a Tibetan monk and talk to them about the unconditioned, they're going to look at you like you're crazy.

56:09Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh, in fact, one of my colleagues who does practice with Tibetan teacher described this kind of experience to his Tibetan teacher and his Tibetan teacher says, there's nothing in Tibetan Buddhism that would value that. Okay. It's just different. Probably a great Zen master from Japan and a Chan master from China and a Tibetan master from Tibet and a... Ajahn from Thailand and Sayadaw from Burma, if they all got together and talked about their most liberating experiences, wouldn't be able to understand each other. But that doesn't mean it doesn't actually work. There's some cultural stuff there and there's some how you frame the experience.

56:47But when you take the Buddhist teachings on the Four Noble Truths, that there is this experience of suffering, and once you come to know suffering, really what the suffering is that he's pointing to, then you begin to understand or begin to get an idea of what the end of suffering is going to look like. And when you taste that end of suffering, then you confirm for yourself, oh, that's it. That's it. So you have all of these different schools and they have differing maps of enlightenment, right? We just talked about one map, but there are other maps. Do you ever have a student who starts studying under you and start showing landmarks on other people's maps, other traditions' maps?

57:30Well, I don't know. I don't know the too many details of other maps, but I do know that when students from other traditions come to me and they talk about their experiences, I can locate them on my map. So I can say, oh, that sounds like, yeah, this is what we would, this is how I would understand it from my perspective, from my map. And having talked with a lot of students who practice Tibetan teachings, there's a lot of overlap. But there are places where it goes dissonant and fuzzy and you can't overlap, you can't lay them over as a direct fit. There was an effort here in the West to form something called the Contemplative Development Mapping Projects, where they would lay the maps over each other and see if they could hear what the common goalposts are.

58:16So we finished the progress of Insight, or one part of the progress of insight with the nirvana experience. But the fact is that actually this is just the beginning. It's called stream entry. You enter the stream and then you actually go through this progress. Yes. And then the second time you have a nirvana experience, it's - Let me just correct. Let me just correct. It's not the second time you experience nirvana. I see. Because remember I mentioned the path. The path is the first moment of experiencing or realizing nirvana. But then with training, you can develop the capacity to enter this state or enter, we'll call it a state, the state or this reality of nirvana or nirvana for extended periods of time.

59:00But this is a special training of the mind. So you might stay in this experience, realization of nirvana for a minute or two or five, an hour, more. Okay, so those are fruition moments. Yeah, those are fruition. That's not second path. No, that's not the second. That's not the second experience. No. All right. Okay. So we can experience or kind of realize Nibbana many times before one moves on to second path. And then the second path, and I don't want to get too deeply into this because we have a lot of, we don't have that much time left. But second path, you are at this point a once returner.

59:30And then the third path moment is a non-returner. And the fourth is an Arhant, which is a fully enlightened being. Yeah. What's that all mean? Yeah. Yeah, I want to ask you, so can you even say, are you allowed to say where you are in this progress and why can't you if you can't? This whole lineage comes from the monastic tradition. And the rules of the monks were not to, they weren't prohibited from sharing their personal realizations and attainments. But if in the process they deceptively led others to believe their attainments, it could damage others faith and so monks were very cautious and just don't talk about their attainments so you're not allowed to say nobody's preventing me from saying anything but you don't feel comfortable saying i'm a once returner i'm a non-returner or whatever no but don't you see how that's a little like there's like this silence like mafia thing like you can't tell me where you are on this map why not i'm still on the map i'm still i asked trudging along i asked you we have Joseph Goldstein, who was referenced before, who's my teacher and has been a teacher for you for many years.

1:00:44I once asked him, where are you? And he said something like, I'm somewhere between the first and the third or something along those lines. But basically people feel there is this omerta. You just really are not supposed to say where exactly you are on the map. I respect Joseph's hedging, if you will, and clarity without specificity. I think that's probably as skillful as we can get. Do you guys, are you comfortable talking about this with your teacher or among other teachers? Are there like backroom conversations where you guys sort of figure out where you are? Something like that. You know, when I first started teaching the three-month course with Joseph, Sharon, and a couple of other senior teachers, we did take one year of teacher meetings during the three-month course where we all spoke about our, what we considered our best, clearest, most liberating, whatever experiences, both practicing concentration or jhana, as well as practicing insight or liberation.

1:01:40And what was really instructive to me, Dan, was that we were all practicing in the same tradition, the Mahasim Siddharth tradition, and we all had very distinctively different experiences, but we all had a similar understanding. But was that like a kind of like of a measuring, public measuring of where we are on the path? Well, we were just, it was just very, we were sharing with each other what our... But don't you get into comparing mind? Oh, look, Joseph's so much farther ahead of me. That's for people who haven't got to the first stage. You can't understand this conversation. Comparing mind is one of those grabbing things, conceit.

1:02:20I see. Comparing mind. So by the time you get the first stage, you've uprooted a lot of that comparing mind. It still hangs in there till the end. Gotcha. But that actually leads to my next question. I have two final questions I want to ask you. One is, you've gone, you won't say how far, but you've gone pretty far on the progress of insight, I would imagine. Do you retain the capacity to be a jerk ever? Oh, I practice that daily. How, if you've gone through this adventure many times and you've experienced nirvana, How can you still be a jerk sometimes? Jerk is an evaluation usually from other people's eyes.

1:02:55No, I know when I'm being a jerk. Yeah? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's being human. I think of it as being human. And in some ways, we become more human. Maybe not careless in being a jerk, but there are times we just, we still have our conditioning. We still have a lot of personal, family, cultural conditioning, which just comes out in carelessly saying things, doing things that coming from a place of delusion. We're not free of delusion. So you're not fully enlightened yet. No, we still have a lot of aversion, still have desire, still have conceit and pride. And these things come out in ways that harm others or hurt others or shock others or shock ourselves even.

1:03:32None of us like to think of ourselves as a jerk all the time, but we do. We all have some relapses, I'd say, from our most mindful and ethical and wise place that we visited. So here's my final question. So I've been playing the skeptic, but the fact of the matter is, while I am actually genuinely a skeptic, I'm really curious and want to experience some of this stuff for myself. But is that really possible, given the reality of my life? I have a crazy full-time job. I've started a company. I write books. I have a baby. I will be able to do a retreat a year and a couple hours a day of sitting, which is pretty good.

1:04:13Yes. But it took you eight years. You had to become a monk before you started really getting down the path. So that makes me feel a little dispirited. No, don't. I'll tell you why. Because all that you're doing, the practice that you're doing, the retreats that you do, even if it's once a year, the daily practice, and keeping yourself informed, talking about Dharma with other people is inspiring. It keeps your mind headed in that direction a lot of the time. And it's not only silent retreats that's going to mature the mind, mature the paramis. What are the paramis? The paramis are the forces of purity in the mind.

1:04:49Generosity, loving kindness, understanding, truthfulness, energy, resolve. Yeah, but all that I understand is all to the good and it does prepare the mind for this. But don't you need to build up some concentration? No. Like really? No. I mean, mistake. Mistake. If you build up the paramis, and in your daily life, you always have, every day you have ample opportunities to practice paramis. Patience, generosity, loving kindness, non-reactivity. You've got to practice that every day. If you make it a conscious practice, you are preparing the soil of your mind for liberating insight. And there are those among us who didn't get enlightened, didn't get their first stage on retreat.

1:05:31Household. Yeah, they hit stream entry, their first path experience, whatever lingo you want to use, not on retreat. Yeah. Okay, so this could happen in my bedroom. All depending on what you're doing. I didn't mean that in a boudoir type of way, but I meditate in my bedroom. So this could happen in my bedroom. Sure. Yes. If you inform yourself, read the book, study the book, whatever, find out what's involved, practice the paramis daily, do your daily practice, do a retreat when you can. You're gradually, if you haven't gotten first stage yet, you will.

1:06:05Thanks again to Steve Armstrong. And don't forget that there's a link in the show notes for the GoFundMe for Steve and his wife Kamala at this difficult time in their lives. Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.