Nothing Special, Everything Miraculous – Angelo Dilullo – Transcript

Angelo Dilullo Interview

Summary:

Introduction: From Intense Suffering to Awakening

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. My guest today is Angelo DiLullo, an anesthesiologist living in the Denver area and author of the book Awake: It’s Your Turn. Angelo, maybe we should start with your internal suffering as a young person, and how you eventually came to a way out of it.

Angelo: I grew up in Colorado. My degree of suffering, my internal angst and stress — the feeling of being out of sorts with life — was very much out of proportion with the family dynamics I grew up in. It started when I was a kid. I remember being in presence as a child most of the time and noticing thoughts. Then the thoughts started crowding in and defining me. I could push on the thoughts or try to push them away, and it would push back and feel more enclosed. By my early teens I felt something was pervasively wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but my conclusion was that it was wrong with me. And I was looking for the answer in thoughts — I was taking myself to be thoughts, taking myself to be some conceptual idea of me and my past and my future.

Angelo: By 18 or 19 I learned to meditate from a gentleman who had learned TM from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I really took to it — it was like water in the desert. I meditated twice a day. It helped, but really only in the moments I was meditating, a respite from the suffering going on all day. Then at 24, after a romantic breakup, I picked up The Three Pillars of Zen by Roshi Philip Kapleau. There’s a chapter with accounts of people going through Kensho. I read each one and said, ‘I don’t know how this is going to happen for me, but this is going to happen for me, if it kills me.’ I figured out how to start doing self-inquiry in a certain way, and it caused a massive shift in the way I perceive everything.

The Night Everything Changed: Two Phases of Awakening

Angelo: There was one major shift one night while I was meditating. Literally everything was pure conscious being. It wasn’t experiential — identity dissolved into it. There was no personal identity, there was a universal consciousness, an identity of pure being. I had the thought very distinctly, ‘Oh, this is what spiritual people are looking for.’ And I thought it was what everyone’s looking for. It was so much more real than real. It was self-obvious and self-validating, and thoroughly enjoyable. But it also wasn’t a big deal like an explosion of ecstasy — it was more like a neutrality that encompassed everything.

Angelo: Then the next day, something even more unexpected happened that I couldn’t begin to describe. All I can say is the whole paradigm of identity and everything that has to do with identity just completely disappeared, and it never came back. In comparison to what had happened the night before, I thought: I don’t think people actually want this. It’s sort of not wantable. There’s just nothing there. But it’s also not empty. There’s no identity at all. And so nothing you could ever want out of that could ever come of it. It was like: this is home. But it’s even beyond form.

It was so much more real than real. It was self-obvious and self-validating. But it also wasn’t a big deal — it was more like a neutrality that just encompassed everything. A peace beyond the story of me, beyond this lifetime.

The Method: Self-Inquiry and the Nature of Thought

Rick: How did the self-inquiry you developed relate to TM? Was it different? Did you continue TM afterward?

Angelo: It was a very simple thing I figured out. As I was sitting and meditating, I became fascinated by what a thought even was. I really oriented my attention to thought, watching it arise. I was literally waiting for the next thought, orienting and watching it arise. And then I would say to myself, well, what’s next? The mind just got quieter and quieter. But it wasn’t dissociation — it was much more intimate. As I recognized each thought as a thought, it was as if the substance of the thought got closer to me, until there was only the substance of the thought, what it’s actually made of, the thinking stuff.

Angelo: Then it was like the gap between what I perceived as myself as the thinker, and the thought, closed completely. And then there was only pure thinkingness — pure consciousness, pure light of thinking without any object whatsoever. The sense of being a thinker and the sense of being a thought is overlooked all the time. It’s almost like a standing wave in consciousness. Ramana Maharishi says clearly, ‘Just notice the thought and ask yourself, for whom does this thought arise?’ He’s saying look back — keep going back. In Zen: take the backward step. All of these are trying to get back to that sense of subjectivity and realizing you’re overlooking yourself as a distinct entity apart from everything.

The sense of being a thinker and the sense of being a thought is overlooked all the time — it’s almost like a standing wave in consciousness. When that gap closes, it just gets completely quiet. It’s self-validating that this is it.

Rick: I honestly don’t understand the sense of no personal identity. It seems to me you couldn’t function without any sense of personal identity — if someone whacked your knee versus a rock, you’d definitely choose the rock.

Angelo: Your question is very good and important. Are there preferences? Of course — but it’s true based on a reflection in thought, looking back and seeing, that’s what Angelo tends to do. What really changes is not that there aren’t preferences, there’s just nobody that feels like they’re pushing and pulling on those preferences anymore. It’s like they’re free floating. Choices are made — but if I’m really accurate, it’s almost like the whole environment just makes the choice. It’s a self-propagating, self-responsive environment. And there’s no reactivity — no internal contraction of a self that goes, ‘Oh man, that was miserable, I hope my foot is okay later, I gotta make sure I don’t do that again.’ That internal reaction that goes on and on, interwoven in the self — that’s what stops.

Preferences are there, but the seeming self woven into all of it is what’s gone. And the weird thing is, you’ll never get anyone who’s had no-self realization to tell you what that self was that went away — because it’s not anything.

Awakening, Liberation, and the Stages Between

Rick: You distinguish awakening from liberation in your book. Let’s define some terms — awakening, liberation, enlightenment, and stages of awakening.

Angelo: When I say awakening, I usually mean the first shift in identity. You could call it stream-entry if you’re Buddhist, or Kensho in Zen. After awakening there’s almost always a honeymoon period — you feel like there are no boundaries anywhere, non-doership is obvious, it’s wonderful. What happens after that is a point of confusion. You’ll actually start feeling maybe even a little worse than before awakening — but a different kind of worse. Before awakening there was massive avoidance. After awakening, you start feeling things very intensely and directly, especially emotions. The mind interprets that as worse because that’s what you thought you were trying to avoid.

Angelo: Then comes a period you could call shadow work or emotion work — being real about what’s happening, what you’re feeling. There’s a flip-flopping of Me-ing and Being, like a roller coaster. That calms down as the relational or reactive self is addressed. When the seeming barrier between self and other dissolves, you start to truly experience non-duality — not experiencing the division between you and everything else. I would call it liberation when the sense of self in all its forms stops. That’s the end of personal suffering because it’s the end of personal anything.

Liberation is when the sense of self in all its forms — all the selfing mechanisms — dissolve or drop away. That’s the end of personal suffering because it’s the end of personal anything. I would call that liberation.

Rick: Conley Wright asks: there’s a background hum or dynamism behind everything. I can see the tree as the tree, but with a shift of attention I am the tree. Could I be making this up?

Angelo: You’re not making it up. And if you keep doing those little exercises, don’t be surprised if all of a sudden there’s a pop and you are the tree all the time, and then you’re the dirt, and then you’re the sky, and then you’re the footstep. That’s someone experiencing non-duality intermittently while thoughts come in doubting it. You can clarify that very easily — use sound. Walking through the woods or doing dishes, put your attention fully into sound with 100% of your attention, not differentiating, just sound as sound. Then apply the same thing to the visual field. Just take in colors and forms, nothing else. You can actually teach yourself to experience the non-dual aspects that way.

Angelo: The thing about non-dual perception is it really does look different. The sense of distance and space can be almost non-existent; the sense of intimacy is much more pronounced. Once it happens, it doesn’t typically go back — it just is that way all the time. And it’s kind of natural. You can still see how the mind tries to put things together in a subject-object way, but there’s no identity taking itself from that. So it’s just a thought. It’s like watching a picture on a screen. It doesn’t actually change the non-dualistic nature of the environment at all.

Consciousness in Deep Sleep and the Undifferentiated Ground

Rick: In the TM movement they made a big fuss about consciousness never being lost even during sleep if you’re really enlightened. What’s your experience?

Angelo: When I’m in dream sleep versus deep sleep, it feels just like being awake. There’s something underneath all of it — not a thing, but aware, no matter what it is, whether it’s deep sleep, dream sleep, or waking sleep. You could call it your true nature, but it doesn’t have a name. And that is always there. It’s so primary that it doesn’t even self-reflect. I might call it the undifferentiated or the unconditioned — undifferentiated aliveness, not blankness or bare awareness. It’s more like the substance of substancelessness from which substance arises. And that’s underneath it all the time, whether it’s dream sleep, deep sleep, or being awake.

There’s something underneath it all — not a thing, but aware, no matter what it is, whether it’s in deep sleep, dream sleep, or waking sleep. It’s before conditions arise. It’s the substance of substancelessness from which substance arises.

Rick: The paradox chapter was one of my favorites. What makes this so paradoxical?

Angelo: The weird thing about all of this is it’s so right here. It’s nothing. It’s everything in nothing. It is undifferentiated reality, but it’s also a hand and it’s taking steps and it’s all the conventional things. There’s no need to separate out conventional from absolute unless it’s practical. In the immediate experience, it’s just simplicity — there’s nothing special going on at all. And yet it’s miraculous, it’s radiant and luminous. And it’s completely normal, completely just regular stuff happening. I’m a regular guy, I go to work, I have a girlfriend, go on vacations.

Angelo: No-self realization is very, very paradoxical. Because there can still be even a thought of self — there’s just no one it refers to. And that’s explicitly obvious. It would seem like if there’s no self, you’d stop doing anything or become lazy. And yet that doesn’t happen. There are still appearances. And conventionally speaking, they can still look like a self or a person — you can still answer when someone calls your name. So the conventional functions perfectly well. There’s a wonderful Zen master who would just say over and over, ‘Everything is perfectly managed in the unborn.’ Sometimes the most simple sayings like that can penetrate the deepest.

Don’t ever compare your own experience to anything I’ve said or anyone said. Your immediate experience is the best thing there to wake you up — just as it is, without the shroud of doubt, without comparing it to anything. That’s it. It’s that simple.

Post-Awakening: Shadow Work, Emotion, and the Contracted Body

Rick: What’s your biggest piece of advice for someone who’s had a significant shift but is in the tumultuous post-awakening period?

Angelo: Be kind to yourself. Suddenly experiencing a ton of shame, regrets, and fears — this is actually totally normal. Repressed material comes to the surface. You’re going to have periods of bliss and being able to stay in presence. And then you’re going to have periods where things are really heavy and there’s a lot of emotion work to do. That’s normal. The biggest thing I work with is really a simple formula: here’s what’s happening, and here’s what we want to be happening. We still don’t realize that we actually make ourselves suffer when we look at what is and say, ‘That’s not how it should be. I really wish it was like this.’

Angelo: What I’ve found is that the energy signature in the body — that contracted area — has been classically conditioned with your interpretation, and the body stores that, that sense of saying no to life. When you go into the contracted area and just feel that restlessness, that helplessness — ‘I can’t control reality’ — and you just stay with it, it’s not where you’d think to look. But what most people notice if they do this consistently is later on, you’ll be in a situation where something would have caused you to react, and all of a sudden you have no reaction. It’s literally like something’s missing. And you realize, that’s what I’ve been doing all these years — overlaying my belief that life should be a certain way over how life actually is.

<blockquote class=’featured-quote’>The body stores the sense of saying no to life. Go into the contracted area, feel that nervous restlessness, that helplessness. When you realize you can’t control reality and you actually feel that, what most people notice later is the reaction is simply gone.</blockquote>

Death, Reincarnation, and the Endlessness of Refinement

Rick: Gloria asks about your thoughts on God, death, and reincarnation.

Angelo: With God, I would say investigate it yourself. Can you find where you end and it starts? Come in contact with that direct experience of God, as close as you can get, as unguarded and surrendered as you can get — which will be beyond thoughts and beyond concepts. With death, my experience is it’s here all the time. True death is here all the time. This moment is never coming back. It’s so precious, so fleeting — these conditions will never be here again. So it’s like a living death. A friend told me she feels like a newborn baby and a dead person at the same time, all the time. I have a reverence for death, but I can’t decouple death from birth. One way of solving the problem of birth and death is seeing clearly through experience that they’re not two separate things.

Angelo: With reincarnation, when that second big shift happened, it was very clear that there had been multiple lives. Not a memory of who I was, but energetically very, very obvious that there were lives where this had happened and it had clarified more and more over successive lifetimes. I’ve never even said that to anybody until someone told me they’d had it. I also can’t even guarantee those are past lives because from that place, time doesn’t exist — so they could almost be parallel lives. My advice: don’t focus on it, because you’re more likely to confuse yourself or chase the wrong thing. Clarify the insight, clarify realization, and then you might be really surprised how you see these things — they might become exquisitely clear suddenly.

Rick: Thank you, Angelo. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and getting to know you.

Angelo: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed it as well. Thanks so much for your time and taking so much time to unpack all of this. I hope people get a lot out of it.