Daniel Ingram Interview

Summary

The discussion examines how to understand awakening through maps, stages, techniques, and different mystical traditions. It also explores why spiritual insight does not automatically produce ideal behavior, emotions, or psychological development.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is awakening, and how can spiritual progress be understood without relying on vague definitions?
• Does profound insight automatically lead to ethical behavior and emotional maturity?
• Can different spiritual traditions describe the same realization in different ways?
• How do meditation techniques shape the experience and expression of awakening?
• How can practitioners test spiritual claims through direct experience rather than belief?

Key takeaways

• Insight, morality, emotional maturity, and practical life skills develop along partly independent paths.
• Spiritual maps are useful when they clarify experience but harmful when treated as rigid packages.
• Different traditions may share an underlying realization while producing different relative expressions.
• Meditation techniques shape how awakening is experienced, described, and integrated.
• Practitioners should investigate experience directly instead of imitating idealized models of enlightenment.
• Pragmatic practice and honest comparison across traditions can expose what reliably holds up.

Transcript

Introducing Daniel Ingram

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Daniel Ingram. Daniel is an emergency room physician outside Huntsville, Alabama, but that is not his primary claim to fame. Daniel is a very accomplished Buddhist practitioner and, to some extent, teacher. He’s written a very interesting book, which we’ll be talking about during this interview.

I’d like to start by just reading a fairly long bio that he wrote of himself toward the back of the book. It’s sort of humorous, but has a lot of useful information in it. And it’ll give you a sense of his personality, which you’ll get a better sense of as we do the interview.

Daniel is an extroverted Gen X intellectual. He is known for his pronounced enthusiasm, lip-flapping, grandiosity, eccentricity, and calling people on their stuff and shadow sides, regardless of whether or not this is helpful or even accurate.

He is an Arhat and has a solid mastery of the basic concentration states, from the first jhana to Nirodha-Samapatti. We’ll be defining terms like this, including pure land jhanas. He also has a solid knowledge of Buddhist theory and the texts, and because of these three areas of expertise, considers himself a qualified teacher.

He was also authorized and encouraged to teach by a lineage abbot of the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition. When it comes to insight practices, he has standards so high, exacting, and uncompromising that only those who are dedicated practitioners are likely to find them helpful.

On the other hand, he is a firm believer that if people simply practice the basic techniques recommended by the Buddha, they can be very successful and awakened meditators. He is one of the rare teachers who will talk about insight directly and answer nearly any question about dharma practice without using code, covering things up, or watering things down.

Daniel is a die-hard Mahasi Sayadaw fan, though he is very happy whenever he sees people trying to master any of the world’s great mystical traditions and thus considers himself a pan-mystical evangelist. He is also a chronic map monger and technique freak because he has had them work very well for him.

He does not claim to have any special knowledge of how to live skillfully in the conventional world, but has found that a positive attitude, non-pretentious kindness, and a sense of humor will take you a long way.

If you imagine that you want to bust out of some hardcore practice, but are in fact just looking for a daddy, shrink, social worker, or someone to help you prop up your self-esteem, Daniel is unlikely, at this stage in his development, to be the best person to help you meet your needs.

He considers himself to be one badass dharma cowboy and prefers similar company, or at least those who aspire to be so.

So that’s great, Daniel. Thanks for that introduction. I’m sure it will cue things up nicely for people.

And inasmuch as I never have enough time to read all the things I would like to read—as Jeremy said in Yellow Submarine, “So little time, so much to know”—I didn’t manage to read your whole book. But you had certain chapters starred with little lightning bolts, signifying that they are likely to be controversial and push some people’s buttons. So, sure, I read those chapters, almost all of them, but there’s a lot you can fill us in on.

And of course, we don’t have to just talk about your book. Your book just provides a template or a map for things we might want to discuss. But I feel like you have a lot of valuable things to say, and I hope we can take a nice, solid two hours at least and really thoroughly cover everything you would like to say.

A lot of people watch these interviews—thousands—and many teachers whom I’ve interviewed have told me that it has actually been the most impactful thing in terms of people getting in touch with them or finding out about their work and all. So, let’s do it.

Daniel: All right, sounds good. What do you want to talk about? What would be fun?

✨ Why maps of awakening matter

Rick: Well, for one thing, you said you’re really into maps, and I am in a way too, just because I think there’s a lot of vagueness and ambiguity in the spiritual world—Buddhist or non-Buddhist, Christian, anything—with regard to what this is all about.

We talk about enlightenment and awakening; you hear these terms, and I feel like everybody has their own definition. If medicine were practiced this way, there would be a lot more people dying than there actually are.

There are a lot of imprecisions, and we’re talking about something, I guess, that’s very abstract and subtle. It’s hard to put into words; you have to experience it yourself. Maps, of course, never really do justice to the territory. A map of Montana is nothing like visiting Montana.

But I think maps are valuable because it’s very easy for people to have all kinds of misconceptions about what enlightenment is, how close they are to it, whether or not they’ve attained it, and so on. So I think the clearer we can get on that as a culture, at least as a spiritual subculture, the more helpful it will be for people.

Daniel: Yeah, definitely. I think so too.

Rick: In your book, you have all sorts of models that you outline for stages of enlightenment or aspects of enlightenment: the non-duality model, the sudden school versus the gradual school, emotional models, and all sorts of different things.

So, since we’ve gotten onto this part, let’s start talking about what awakening is, what enlightenment is, and whether these models are like blind men feeling part of the elephant—and if we put them all together, we might have the whole elephant—or what. What would you like to say?

Daniel: Well, at least in the book and the way I think about this, I try to break this down into lots of different axes of development. So there are so many different things you can develop, both in terms of how you live your life and how you perceive your life.

And so I think that most of the models that I have come across fall into some of the basic fallacies of, like, if you perceive this, you will automatically know that; or if you have understood this, then you will automatically only be able to do certain things; or if you have directly perceived some aspect of reality, then you could only have certain emotions, or you could only think certain thoughts, or you could only say certain things, or you could only do certain things.

So there are lots of models that fall into what I call the package fallacy, meaning that if you have this, you automatically get this other thing as part of a package.

Rick: Let’s get a specific example.

Daniel: The common ones are that, say, if you understand that the world is an interdependent, naturally occurring, intrinsically luminous place, you could only say the sort of things that the person imagining the model would like to hear said, for instance. That being a common one.

Or you could only do the sort of things that the person imagining the model would like to see done, or only feel the sorts of things that the person imagining the model would like to imagine people would feel in their idealized world.

Rick: Yeah. So, for instance, if you have that sort of fundamental clarity that you just alluded to, you wouldn’t get angry, or you wouldn’t cheat on your wife, or you wouldn’t X, Y, Z. You’re saying that we could use behavioral quality or morality as a correlate of certain attainments, or could we not?

Daniel: Yeah, so that’s one of the great questions. And I think that the way I think about this is that it’s very important to separate each of the various categories of life, the way we perceive life, our internal mental skills, and our external skills, and realize that developing one doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will automatically develop the others.

I know people who have really relatively profound degrees of insight whose morality, I would say—in my idealized world, obviously, in my vision of morality—could use some revision.

Or Chögyam Trungpa, being one of these interesting examples of someone who, when I read his commentary on the nature of mind and wisdom, I have no problems with it at all. And when I look at his life, it didn’t meet my particular ideals—not that they’re necessarily anything other than my own arbitrary ideals from a certain point of view. Do you see what I mean?

Rick: Yeah. In other words, he probably wrote that stuff while he was sober, you’re saying.

Daniel: Well, not necessarily. He might have been wasted when he wrote it. I don’t know.

Rick: I don’t know.

Daniel: So, who knows? I think the common thing is that people assume that seeing something about the essential nature of reality will alter the specifics in very specific ways that usually meet their specific ideals for how reality should be.

And I think that it’s important for practice to have models that are more embracing of reality than that. Because I think what can happen is that people have models of awakening, and then they attempt to imitate those models.

Not that lots of those imitations of the models don’t lead to lots of good things—to better behavior, better speech, and better ways of living in the world. And they often do, actually, so that can be skillful to some degree.

But the problem is that if people have models of awakening that say they don’t involve neurotic thought, or don’t involve sadness, or don’t involve crying, or don’t involve irritation, then when those things arise, it can be tricky for the practitioner who’s working with that model not to try to repress them, ignore them, pretend they’re not happening, or create shadow sides out of those aspects of reality.

And I think that prevents a lot of people from really investigating those things, from coming to embrace those things, from seeing their true nature, and noticing important aspects of those things and bringing them into their awareness, rather than repressing them, ignoring them, pretending they’re not happening, or doing those kinds of things.

So that’s why I think some of the models are important that break things into separate boxes: perceiving things as they are on the one hand, and models about the relative on the other hand, which have all sorts of ideals for how our mind should be, how our emotions should be, and how our behavior should be, all of which are good.

And I think working in both is obviously important, but recognizing that, from what I call an insight-practice point of view—and I’m coming from a Theravadan map and model point of view—from an insight point of view, being able to be with what’s going on in all its complexity, in all its human richness, in all its glory and tragedy, in its ordinariness, is important for accepting this life and seeing it as it is.

Different lines of development

Rick: I’m sure you’re aware of Ken Wilber’s lines-of-development idea, right?

Daniel: Somewhat. I know a lot more about the early Wilber stuff, having been influenced by his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. I’ve read some of his later stuff a little bit, but I’m not as familiar with it. So, what was on your mind?

Rick: Well, as I understand it, he speaks of the various facets and aspects of the personality, behavioral things and emotional things and so on, as being like various lines of development, and consciousness itself could be considered a line of development. And he posits, as I understand him, that these things are not as tightly correlated as we might sometimes assume, that you can get quite advanced along a particular line and be still quite stunted in other lines.

And this kind of runs contrary to something I was taught in my training as a meditation teacher and stuff, which was that there is a pretty tight correlation between the development of consciousness and all the other aspects of the personality. The analogy was used that if you water the root of a tree, all the other leaves and branches and fruits and flowers will all flourish. But that doesn’t seem to pan out that well in actual life.

So, I kind of tend to go with Wilber’s idea more these days. Well, I think it’s not a black-and-white situation. There is a correlation, but it’s just more rubber-band-y; it’s just looser. But you can’t get too out of whack without something, some kind of break, or without the stunted aspects eventually kind of getting shaken up and pulled along, don’t you think?

Daniel: Yeah, so there are definitely correlations, but most of the maps are very narrow and idealized and black-and-white about how they lay out those correlations, or they’re just so vague as to be sort of useless.

Like Zen is a remarkable tradition, but its maps are kind of useless. They’re so vague and amorphous and nonspecific as to leave people just sort of filling in the gaps with their own projections, as opposed to, say, the Tibetans or Theravada, whose maps get so exacting that they’re actually kind of naive, in that they assume it will happen in some very specific ways sometimes, which are also sort of naive.

So, you can run into problems both with maps that are too vague, in that they really don’t tell you anything useful about how these things may or may not correlate, or maps that are so specific that they always assume that if you have this, you automatically have that, and if you do this, you automatically have that and develop that. So anyway, both sides of the map world run into trouble.

Rick: So have any mapmakers that you’re aware of come up with a more balanced, middle-road kind of perspective, or is that something you’re actually trying to achieve?

Daniel: That’s one of the things I’m trying to achieve as one of the map revisionists who tries to look at as many of these maps as I can and try to figure out, based on personal experience, as well as the experience of my Dharma friends and colleagues, what makes sense and what’s helpful and what’s sort of part right, and then the things that you can really hang your hat on, what are the few things that you can really go, “Okay, that seems to hold up pretty well to reality testing, and actual people who are willing to talk about these things in a straightforward way.”

Rick: Yeah, one line I picked up from your book on page 119, you said, “It is what is common to the great mystical paths that makes them special. The differences are 100% guaranteed to be fundamentally irrelevant.”

And I suppose that’s a good thing to keep in mind when we’re talking about maps. It should be possible, theoretically, I think, to come up with a map, with a universal map against which you could chart, or into which you could place any mystical tradition. Just pick anything, and you say, “Okay, this is what they were saying here, and this is what they were saying there,” and so on.

But of course, you have all kinds of complications in terms of language and culture, and something that happened 2,000 years ago and got handed on for 200 years before anything was written down. It all gets pretty murky.

Daniel: Yeah, that’s true. And then you’ve got people who can experience the exact same thing and then describe it from totally different points of view. The no-self versus true-self debates, being one of the great examples of that, where the field integrates and suddenly there’s an unbounded field, and some people say, “Well, now the whole thing is me,” or true-self or whatever, and some people would say, “Well, now none of it’s me.”

But really, what happened was the artificial boundaries dissolved, and they tried to use language from the previous way of being, and take that and try to apply it to something that now it really doesn’t quite apply to either way. And so that can cause a lot of confusion.

Rick: Yeah, I agree with you on that. I call it the Certs paradox. Certs is a candy mint, Certs is a breath mint, and they’re both right. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember those ads, but it used to be, when I was a kid, these twins were arguing about whether Certs was a candy mint or a breath mint, and then the announcer came in and said, “Stop, you’re both right. Certs is two mints in one.”

But anyway, that’s a good case in point, this emptiness/fullness thing, or there’s no self and this is myself. I think they’re both describing the same thing, as far as I can tell, and it’s just a matter of where you want to put your emphasis, or how you want to flavor it.

Techniques shape experience

Daniel: Yeah, I think so. And then I think the other thing that gets complicated is there are definitely relativistic effects to different techniques for getting there, and there are so many techniques for getting there, and each of them does wire the brain a little bit differently. You are doing something that’s different.

If you’re, say, noticing every little sensation arise and vanish as fast as you can in your full field of sensate reality, like a technical high-end vipassana practitioner, that’s going to feel very different from just opening up to the wondrous nature of the loving quality of the divine. Do you see what I mean?

And so, there are relativistic effects that are side effects of the techniques that people use to dissolve artificial boundaries and come to see the true nature of phenomena. And so those can also skew the way people think about it, talk about it, and even feel it, and they can also cause a lot of relative effects that are very different.

There is a different feel to people who have grown up in different traditions. And it’s because they trained their minds differently from a relative point of view. So, there are some relative differences in these things.

Rick: That’s an interesting thing. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Because as I understand it, enlightenment, from whatever tradition you come from, is supposed to be a state in which reality, as it ultimately is, has been cognized or realized. You have gotten right down to the real nitty-gritty. You’re apprehending or residing as the fundamental reality of the universe.

But as you say, there are so many different ways of getting at it. And so, all these different techniques and practices are going to wire the brain differently, are going to have different effects on you.

So, if we take, let’s say, hypothetically, get a room full of people who have “attained enlightenment” through a variety of practices, are they actually experiencing the same thing and just expressing it differently? Such as members of an orchestra who are all playing the same symphony, but one is playing the piccolo, and one is playing the tuba, and one is playing the kettledrums.

Or have their different approaches actually wired their brains in such a way that each has a totally different flavor, not only in terms of their expression, but in terms of their actual cognition, a different sense of the ultimate reality, which would imply that their cognition isn’t really ultimate, because it’s been flavored by some individual conditioning?

Daniel: Well, I tend actually to think that both of those aspects are true, to some degree. So, my working hypothesis is that if you’ve got a bunch of very advanced, realized practitioners from a bunch of very different traditions together, they’re going to have certain common, shared aspects that, if they can break out of their little sort of terminological, dogmatic fortresses and really just honestly talk about what they’re experiencing, at a very simple phenomenological level, they’re going to find common ground.

And they will also find some specific differences. There clearly are some different ways that you can be wired from what I’ll think of as a relative point of view. But I do have this odd notion that there is something intrinsic, and that intrinsic thing will be common.

And so, when I read across what I think of as the better mystics and meditators and people, and I get to the good stuff, the part where they’re really talking about the true nature of the thing, it all seems to be talking about the same thing from my point of view.

And maybe that’s a filter that I have, a cognitive filter, and I’m just reading it that way, or extrapolating to my experience and assuming that I know what they’re talking about. So, I tend to fall both in the intrinsic camp and the constructionist camp, meaning that both are true, if that makes sense.

Rick: Yeah, it sort of does. And I can think of some examples in the Hindu tradition, in the Vedic tradition. It’s considered that although—well, maybe this gets into relative things, though—although you take a variety of rishis, they’re all established in Brahman, and they’re all established in ultimate reality experientially, but according to how they’re wired, they’ll have different cognitive abilities.

A friend of mine named Igor Kufayev wrote an interesting article in which he talked about how awakening could take on totally different qualities according to whether you had a predominantly sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic makeup, and then there could be other considerations of what makes up the nervous system in terms of Ayurveda or astrology or any number of other things.

Daniel: Yeah, definitely, or just personality traits and the tradition you came up in and how you practiced. Some of my more helpful teachers—actually, one of my teachers, Sharda, came up in Vedanta with Poonjaji of Lucknow. And when I would try to talk technical stuff, she didn’t have any idea what I was talking about, but she gave great meditation advice because she was looking at something really important.

So, I’m sort of a technical guy. I think about frequencies and beat patterns and phases of attention, and all these sorts of things—lots of stages and states and substates. And she was just this big-hearted person, just looking at it, going, “Okay, yeah, but…” But I found that very helpful.

And so actually, I found it one of the interesting things—I found it very useful to train with people who looked at reality very differently from the way I did and whose strengths were actually totally different from my own. Because it helped me expand out and see other points of view and round out some things that I think, if I’d just stuck with my way of seeing things, wouldn’t have worked out as well.

Rick: Yeah, that’s nice. I get that benefit from this interview show, although I don’t actually train with people, but just having these different conversations is a nice way of cross-pollinating.

Daniel: That must be amazing.

Rick: It’s a lot of fun, yeah.

Daniel: I’m sure it is.

Rick: You should try it.

Daniel: Well, sort of. So, there’s the Dharma Overground.

Rick: Yeah, you do have that.

Daniel: And some of its sister sites. So, while the amount of diversity there sort of varies, most of the people there have grown up in a number of traditions. There are very few people who are just strictly one tradition or only have one background. And it’s been fascinating to have this online experiment of people comparing their experiences, trying to sort this out, helping each other practice well and debate things and discuss things, sharing their journey, and trying to figure out what it all means. So, I do get some of that.

Using maps without becoming dogmatic

Rick: Yeah, in fact, I think it would be worth taking a minute to read some of the main points from the Dharma Overground, which is your website. Here are some of the main principles and attitudes that you favor: pragmatism over dogmatism; what works is key, with “works” generally meaning the stages of insight, the stages of enlightenment, freedom from suffering, and what ways are possible, etc.; diligent practice over blind faith; this place is about doing it and understanding for yourself, rather than believing someone else and not testing those beliefs out.

Openness regarding what the techniques may lead to, and how these contrast or align with the traditional models. Personal responsibility: you take responsibility for the choices you make and what you say and claim. A lack of taboos surrounding talking about attainments. The assumption that the various aspects of meditative development can be mastered in this life. The spirit of mutual supportive adventurers on the path, rather than rigid student-teacher relationships. And finally, the notion that the collective wisdom of a group of strong practitioners at various stages and from various traditions and backgrounds is often better than following one guru-type. So, I like all that. It’s a nice, mature kind of package.

Daniel: We try. I’m not sure the end product is always totally mature, and my posts are not always totally mature, but we do our best.

Rick: Yeah, well, online forums are always kind of wild.

Daniel: Yeah, that’s true. It’s amazing, the things people say in them that they would never say to a person if they were sitting there with them.

Rick: I know. It’s anonymous. But you mentioned this woman who was a Papaji disciple, and that brings up an interesting point regarding our whole discussion, which is that people from that lineage, as far as I know—Ramana Maharshi’s lineage—would tend to find a lot of the things we’ve been talking about so far, and will talk about today, unnecessarily complex and detailed: all these levels and stages and attainments and yada yada. There’s this kind of feeling like, “Hey, it’s just one simple reality. Don’t overcomplicate it, dude.” And so, I can see that, and I appreciate that.

On the other hand, people do have a plethora of experiences, such a rich variety, and they go through all kinds of stages of development. And if you think that it’s just one thing or the other, on or off, black or white, it’s not going to pan out in people’s experience. So, people need to understand what they’re going through as they go through all these various stages. I’ve had people tell me that they had some kind of insight, and they feel that there’s no distinction whatsoever, experientially, between them and Ramana Maharshi. And I would suggest that there are probably lifetimes of distinctions between them.

Daniel: Both are true. So again, the maps can totally confuse people. It’s very, very easy—as I myself have done thousands of times—to misdiagnose my own practice and later go, “Nope, I was totally full of it. I was just totally confused.” I’ve done that more times than I can count, so I recognize that problem with the maps full well. And nearly all of my colleagues have had the same things happen to them. So, the potential for misdiagnosis is definitely huge and common.

And actually, I think that’s an important thing to recognize. So, if you’re going to be using a map, recognize that you’re going to totally misdiagnose yourself on a semi-regular basis, if you care about these things, and realize that that’s okay. And so, I think that the important thing is, if anybody is using a map or a tradition or a specific set of goals or stages or levels, that you recognize that you’re going to get it wrong a lot of the time, and that’s part of the learning process.

When I started learning mathematics and I started multiplying numbers, I didn’t always get the multiplication right. A lot of the time I did, but sometimes I didn’t, and that’s normal. And it’s the same thing with maps or whatever. So, I think people need to recognize that and realize that you just take your own diagnosis, and everybody else’s diagnosis, with a grain of salt and give it some time. Very important.

If you’re going to be using a map, recognize that you’re going to totally misdiagnose yourself on a semi-regular basis, and realize that that’s okay.

But also, if you have no maps, it is true that people without a context or the ability to normalize strange or unusual experiences can really be freaked out by them, totally go off in strange tangents, have really derailed their practice, and become absolutely fascinated with things that are actually just standard, not-that-interesting phenomena—what we call the arising and passing away in Theravadan Buddhism.

That can involve bright lights and traveling out of body and explosions of consciousness, vortices and Kundalini phenomena, profound shakings and bolts of energy blasting up and down your spine, chakra phenomena, and all this stuff. That stage tends to blow people’s doors off and then is generally followed by something very dark, the sort of dark-night stages, which can be extraordinarily disorienting. You can go from this wild spiritual high to, all of a sudden, your life’s falling apart—your marriage and your career and your whatever—and you’re irritable and you don’t know why.

So, if people don’t have something to help them go, “Okay, no, that’s normal. That’s fine. We all went through those multiple times. Everybody goes through that. That’s just standard human development,” if you don’t have that, people can really run into a lot of trouble. And it’s amazing how simply saying, “Actually, no, that’s normal. Here, read. This is just standard stuff,” helps people.

An analogy I was using with my friend Willoughby Britton—and I can’t remember; I think we sort of came up with it together—was to imagine if you had a young teenage female who all of a sudden started bleeding and had no idea that there was such a thing called a menstrual period. It’s stressful enough as it is without thinking that you’re suddenly dying or going to bleed to death or something terrible.

And so, contextualizing what I would consider stock stages of development, which are just normal human processes that people go through as their consciousness begins to wake up, is really important to help people navigate that territory. Just like it’s important to figure out how to navigate adolescence, when all of a sudden you start having experiences that are not stock and standard, that you grew up with in your earlier childhood. Same kind of thing. Very helpful to have it normalized.

Rick: And you’re a doctor, and you’ve just used the word “misdiagnosed.” Obviously, if you yourself, Daniel, had some kind of severe pain somewhere, you probably wouldn’t diagnose yourself. You’d probably go in and have a colleague check it out for you, because you can’t be sure if you’re just diagnosing yourself. Maybe you don’t have the right instrumentation or whatever. And so, I think that’s an apt metaphor for the spiritual path, where a lot of times you need a teacher, wouldn’t you say? Someone who is more advanced than you are to help give you a sense of what you’re actually going through, because they’ve gone through it.

Daniel: Right, or a good set of friends who have gone through it.

Rick: Yeah.

Daniel: Yeah, it helps tremendously to know the territory ahead and have people who have been there, made the standard mistakes like we all made, and are continuing to make them. And that helps a lot. And the collective wisdom—not just the teacher, but also a tradition that has the sort of summary collective wisdom of thousands or hundreds of thousands of practitioners over whatever period of time, distilling down the essence of what they came across.

So, modern medicine gets better by taking care of zillions and zillions and zillions of patients and seeing the range of diseases and processes, the rare side effects, and the common things. That breadth and depth of experience helps make it better.

And I would add, for diagnosis, the point of not diagnosing yourself, which can be tricky, but also not diagnosing friends and family members or close friends. It’s very common to want to diagnose friends and family members. It’s a notoriously dangerous business, particularly with your closest Dharma colleagues, rivals, and friendly competitors. All these things happen, particularly in the map-based traditions. Just be careful of trying to diagnose them, just like you wouldn’t want to do psychotherapy on a family member if you were a psychotherapist. Same kind of thing for Dharma diagnosis. It’s just notoriously dangerous—a tricky thing to do.

Yeah, I prefer that my wife go to doctors other than me, because she should get somebody with a more objective point of view on whatever is going on.

Rick: No, that’s good. There’s a certain faction who’s listening to this right now who are kind of cringing, if they haven’t tuned out already, because of all this talk of practice. And I was just reading this morning in your book, the “You’re Already There” chapter. There’s a certain faction who feel like practices are bunk, that they’re only going to reinforce the notion of a practitioner. Just realize that you’re already that, you’re already essentially enlightened, really realize that, and you’re basically done. And you and I both agree that that’s kind of crazy.

Daniel: I think it’s totally crazy. Go ahead.

Rick: Well, I was just going to say, I think that I have two theories as to why people say that. One is that we can all intuitively grasp that there is this deeper reality. And I think a lot of people mistake that intuitive aroma of that deeper reality for the full realization of it. They think that that’s all these guys have been talking about, what they’re now experiencing through their…

And I used to do this when I was 18, on drugs. I could stand up and pontificate for hours about the nature of reality, because I had this intuitive insight into it. And I think another thing is that people don’t want to sit on their butts in practice for 20 or 30 years. It’s so much easier to just realize that you’re there and not have to go through all this arduous practice. So those are my two theories.

Daniel: Yeah, well, so I think definitely that while it is true that the notion of practice does in some ways reinforce the notion of a practitioner, there’s no question about that. So, I’ll give them that point, that there is validity in that.

But still, like the candle flame that consumes itself, that consumes the candle or whatever, if the practice is a skillful practice, or a helpful practice, it does help dissolve the boundaries anyway. So, it does help dissolve the misperceptions. It does help to clarify.

If the practice is a skillful practice, it does help dissolve the boundaries anyway.

And when you have better resolving power, better clarity, better openness to experience, and a better acceptance of the realm of sensory phenomena, then that really does have the capacity to change things in a way that the less clear, less accepting, less precise, less open ways simply don’t.

Rick: It takes a thorn to remove a thorn.

Daniel: Yeah, so we’re on the same page there. But it is definitely true that the shadow side of goal-oriented practice or technique-oriented practice is definitely the sense of division. So that’s true: that reality must be somewhere else, that there is somewhere in the future that I’m trying to get to, somewhere other than where I am now. And so, that’s a perennial problem for goal-based practitioners.

And so, they make a valid point. So, I’ll give them that. But it’s true, isn’t it?

Rick: Yeah, there is somewhere you’re going to get to in the future. And you’re not going to, in the snap of a finger, realize full-blown enlightenment as clearly and fully as is possible. There’s no way that’s going to happen. It would necessitate a radical change of the physiology, for one thing, a transformation of the way the brain functions.

But in actual practical experience, it’s very rare, if not entirely unknown, for people to go from A to Z in the blink of an eye.

Daniel: Incredibly rare. So, there do seem to be a few possible cases. There may have been a few, maybe. If you look at the history and the things people report, okay, maybe one in 100 million? I don’t know. But it’s an incredibly small number. So, your chances are much better being struck by lightning a few times than having this happen to you.

So, if I were going to bet—were I a betting man—I would bet on the people who practice well and really try to develop their capacity for clear thought, heartful awareness, and those things, clear comprehension of what’s going on. So, given a choice.

🕊️ Spirituality and social change

Rick: I know that in your book, in various places, you talk about integration. And I’m one who believes that the material, relative problems that confront the world, such as overpopulation or global warming or all these things, are actually very related to spirituality. Spirituality, in fact, can provide a very fundamental level of solution to things that have seemed insoluble or intractable through other means.

Daniel: Explain that. Help me understand that, because I’m more of a cynic, unfortunately, on that point of view. So, help bring me over to your point of view.

Rick: Sure. Well, the reason I feel that is that I feel that everything we see on the surface of life—economies and cultures and political systems and dysfunctional political systems, such as we have both in Burma and the US in our own different ways—are all reflections of deeper trends or tendencies in the collective consciousness.

Just as perhaps the overall view of a forest is going to be influenced by the healthiness of each individual tree. And if most of the trees are gray and dying, you fly over in a helicopter and you see a gray forest, susceptible to forest fire. But if each tree is nourished from its roots by whatever miracle grow, plenty of water, then the trees individually will become green and the whole forest will appear green.

So, what I’m suggesting is that all the crazy stuff people do—like take global warming, for instance—you can look at a lot of the cause of it being short-sightedness and greed. And now the ice is melting in the Arctic and the oil companies are thinking, “Oh boy, new places to explore for oil.” So, it’s stupidity, short-sightedness, and greed.

And if short-sightedness and greed, which I’m sure are both dealt with in Buddhist psychology, are dominating the collective psychology, the collective consciousness, how do you get rid of them? You can’t just paint the forest green, fly over with a plane, and spray-paint it green. You have to make each individual tree healthy.

You can’t just paint the forest green. You have to make each individual tree healthy.

And so, I would suggest that a spiritual renaissance will be the most fundamental possible solution to these macroscopic problems.

Daniel: Maybe. And so, I guess it depends on what you mean by a spiritual renaissance and how broadly and deeply you imagine that being able to go in the collective population, as well as specifically among the people with the greatest power to alter those things.

But I think that there would have to be a spiritual renaissance among CEOs and politicians and the wealthy elite of the banking system, as well as the ordinary consumer. And while I dream of similar things, and I would love for that to be true, unfortunately I must admit I’m a bit of a cynic in that I see so many people that that would have to happen to, to such a profound degree, and even then, I’m not sure it would accomplish the things you want it to accomplish.

Rick: Let me chip away at your cynicism a little bit more, if I can.

Daniel: Please.

Rick: I don’t know about your life, but in my life, a reorientation to spiritual development made a huge difference in terms of not only my subjective fulfillment, but in terms of the outer manifestations of my life, my relative success and happiness and interaction with people, being a more responsible person, and all kinds of good stuff.

My educational enthusiasm, everything.

Daniel: Yes, it helped me, too.

Rick: It made a big difference. And so, if we multiply ourselves by some millions of times, and if millions of people were to become as engaged in spiritual development as we have, perhaps that would have an impact on the entire society. And I believe that’s actually happening, maybe to varying degrees, but it seems to be waking up more and more and more and more.

I would say that the corporate CEOs and politicians who seem to really have the reins in hand of the way society is going are actually pawns, ultimately, of the collective consciousness. And we’ve seen radical shifts in the world take place quite unexpectedly, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a variety of other things. I can’t prove that those were symptomatic of a deep change in collective consciousness, but I suspect they may have been.

And I think that this is getting into New Age prognostication, because there are a lot of people like Barbara Marx Hubbard and others who talk this way, whom I respect and whom I will actually be interviewing in September. I think that there is a groundswell, a deep fundamental awakening taking place in the collective consciousness, whether it’s because more and more people are engaged in spiritual practice, or whether more people are engaged in spiritual practice because there’s some kind of awakening in global consciousness. I don’t know which is the cart and which is the horse, but that seems to be happening.

And I don’t think it can possibly happen without there being profound ramifications on the more obvious levels of life.

Daniel: Maybe. Except, okay, so here’s a generational thing. You’ve got to remember, I’m Gen X, so my cynicism is different, and I’ve got to try to tease out what is a generation. I’m 45.

Rick: Okay, so I’m about 20 years older.

Daniel: Right. And I feel that. And so, when I look at your generation and its optimism, I am at once jealous from a certain point of view, and also I think it’s naive.

I actually believe that empires can collapse, that systems can fail, that calamity is possible, and that we have not eliminated the threats that could cause massive regressions of society or technology or morality or anything. I actually wish I could share your optimism, but I don’t see it as anything resembling guaranteed or cut and dried or even straightforward. I see a lot of trends that I find incredibly concerning: population increase; the sort of increase in low-level, nearly continuous wars involving the United States; and the rise of robber-baron capitalism basically nearly taking over the political process.

I could go on and on, but there’s also the continued unchecked nature of population growth, the potential for diseases and pandemics, the continued instability of the global economy, and the potential for things that we’ve sort of imagined we’ve gotten past, like nuclear war. It was only a few months ago that the Russian foreign minister was mentioning turning us into nuclear ash or radioactive ash or something.

And so, we forget that there are still massive potentials for terrible things to happen. So, call me a Gen X cynic or call me a realist, or I’m not sure what. It’s not that I don’t see a lot of potential. I see a lot of growth and a lot of great things happening too. But it’s a chaotic system. It’s a strange system, and there’s a lot of potential for instability in both directions.

Suddenly, amazing things could be happening all over the world that are just fantastic. Or suddenly, the whole thing can come crashing down, and I would not be surprised by either.

But I have a general sense—and I may be misrepresenting you—that your generation has the sense that, yes, there are downturns and there are whatever, but it will generally go up toward positive, continuous progress, growth, the expanding of human consciousness, and the global peace and harmony that will descend upon the wonderful nature of all things. We will become all ecological and all these things. But I’m not sure it’s true.

So even as I look at myself, yes, it empowered me. My education, my ability to help people, and my ability to help my family—all of that was enhanced. Realization helps with a whole lot of things. It did, no question about it. It made me vastly happier and solved a lot of problems.

But it certainly didn’t solve everything, nor did it make me less resource-consumptive. The fact that I was more successful in education and more successful in my career meant that I could spend more money, afford more plane flights, and have a bigger house that uses more power. Those things happened, and they’re all bad for the environment.

So it made me a bigger consumer. Even though I buy more products, even though I drive Priuses and try to rationalize these things, still, actually, on average, I’m probably using more resources than I would have been had I been less successful. And what’s that doing to the planet? Probably messing it up. You see what I mean? Sorry, that was a long rant.

Rick: Yeah, that’s all right. And if you were a peasant in Burma, you’d be using fewer resources still, even a Burmese monk.

And I agree with everything you just said. All this scary stuff may pan out. We all may go to hell in a handbasket. For all we know, an asteroid might crash into the planet next week and kill us all. There’s bad stuff happening, and it’s hard to see how it’s going to be reversed.

But all I’m saying is that the subtle is more powerful, and the spiritual realms that we’re talking about experiencing are more subtle. If larger numbers of people are experiencing these realms and enlivening them, it’s somehow going to percolate up in terms of different expressions in society and technology and so on, rather than the sort of lower consciousness that has predominated and given rise to them.

Daniel: I surely hope so.

Rick: I think we have to counterbalance technology by raising human intelligence and morality to a level at which technology is responsibly managed. Why not teach meditation in schools? We have mandatory mathematics and mandatory learning to read.

Daniel: I imagine it both ways. So, I guess the two options are either to totally secularize attention training and to simply say this is attentional fitness, as my friend Kenneth Folt calls it, or attention training, just like we train to learn to count, or we train to learn to spell, or to speak, or to use a map.

Just so you’re training attention to be stable, to be clear, to be precise, to be workable, to be handleable, and training your emotional world to be psychologically healthy and balanced and kind and skillful and generous, et cetera.

So, you either have to totally secularize it, which the problem is that most of the traditions like owning their technology and their concepts. Or you have to integrate these things into the religious traditions, because it’s not like people’s religious views are suddenly going to go away. America is a profoundly religious country. There’s a church on nearly every corner here where I live in Alabama. Not that they all get along with each other, so the question is, could you integrate meditation technology back into each of the religious traditions?

But I actually think that part of the problem is that there’s a developmental thing with people. People are on a developmental bell curve with regard to seeing the value of mind training, seeing the value of meditation, and even being able to do it.

I see people who are adults who can barely handle their minds. They can barely handle their emotions. They can barely handle circumstances. And I see kids who have unbelievable levels of maturity and self-insight, and the ability to handle themselves in the face of stress and their internal experience, and to articulate it.

I see nine-year-olds who have a level of descriptive ability of their internal states and an ability to be mature and poised that I see plenty of forty-year-olds not having, even some of my fellow colleagues and physicians who may be incredibly smart, capable people, but never really learned to be emotionally balanced or polite, or to handle their own internal emotions and experiences in a mature way.

And so, then the problem is, how do you deal with that bell curve of what seems to be a mix of intrinsic talent and ability, as well as conditioning, and do that on a broad scale and get everybody up to a level that’s reasonable, so people won’t be intimidated by it or all these things?

So, I think it’s a wonderful dream. I love the vision. I have a similar vision, obviously. Wow, wouldn’t it be amazing if everybody just learned to meditate and we’d all be great and kind and wonderful? Except that I see so many practical barriers to it from an on-the-ground point of view.

Rick: Yeah, but bell curves move. If you took the upper fringes of the bell curve of the Middle Ages, you’d probably find that that was about where the middle of the bell curve is now.

And it seems to me that the pace of change is accelerating, so it might not take us another five hundred years to see really dramatic, profound change.

Daniel: Got to hope not.

Rick: Yeah, really, we don’t have five hundred years. And I know there have been tens of thousands of kids instructed in meditation in U.S. schools and hundreds of thousands in other schools around the world, which perhaps have a little bit less opposition.

But still, that’s the tip of the iceberg, and I think it could really proliferate. Obviously, there would perhaps have to be different sorts of training for different people, and all kinds of different things could be experimented with and tried.

Daniel: The other problem with the stages of meditation is they can sometimes be destabilizing, which is not talked about a lot.

And so, then the question is, can we put in place a broad enough and sophisticated enough system of psychology or social support or MD training, or even just get this into standard developmental curricula of junior high schools and health class, that there are these stages of meditation, that they can look like this, and that they sometimes can cause real instability?

I’ve had some—it is not that infrequent that I get phone calls or Skype calls or emails from people who I think of as pretty strong practitioners who all of a sudden are now totally suicidal.

These are hyperfunctional people. I remember getting a call from a person with a doctoral degree, someone in what I would think of as the middle stages of awakening, who’s always like, “Dan, I’m totally suicidal. I just had this big, crazy opening experience, and now all of a sudden I’m just thinking about killing myself.” And I’m like, “Yeah, don’t do that.”

Luckily, two or three days later he called back and said, “No, I’m good. It’s just a temporary meditation side effect. I’m okay.” But it doesn’t always go that well.

So, I don’t know if you’re interested, but you should interview Willoughby Britton about these things if you’re interested in interviewing interesting people.

Rick: I would.

Daniel: And she also is actually getting NIH grants to study meditation and its various side effects and some of the dark sides of meditation, which is kind of amazing. So, we’re getting NIH money now to study these things, which is important.

But I think we have to be careful. If we’re going to implement sort of mass meditation programs, we need to recognize that they’re going to do a lot of good, I think. People learning to calm down, to be clear, to be stable, to understand what’s going on in their hearts and minds and bodies is really valuable.

We also need to recognize that sometimes this stuff can cause some wild, temporary instability and sometimes even psychosis and real trouble. I’ve had a number of meditator friends who have really flipped out, who are good, sane people, but for a little while their operating system, as it was rebooting to some other configuration, didn’t function so well, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Daniel: You see what I mean? And most of them later on got through it and were better for it and for the experiences they had. But that short-term stabilization part—we have to recognize we are going to cause some trouble.

Rick: Yeah. No, I totally understand and agree with that, and have experienced it myself, both in friends and in myself. I never got suicidal, but I’ve certainly gone through some nutty phases, really goofy at times. Still a little goofy. So that would have to be part of the package, you know? It would have to be understood that, okay, you’ve got a lot of crap bottled up, and now we’re going to start releasing it in stages.

And as it releases, some of it may have to be dealt with. You may have to have massage. You may have to have more physical activity. You may have to do some yoga. You may even have to take some kind of drug.

Daniel: Yeah.

Rick: And so, a really mature, complete package would take that into account and have that as part of the plan.

Daniel: I like your thinking. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, it’s a great vision. I hope to be some teeny part of helping to make something like that happen.

Rick: I think you are, you know? And I don’t think it’s going to be one-size-fits-all. I think everybody should have a chance at it.

I think the kinds of things you practice—transcendental meditation, which is done a lot with schools; mindfulness; all sorts of things—it should all be tried, and it is being tried.

There’s that Doing Time, the doing-Vipassana movie, where they’re teaching meditation in a prison, and a lot of that has been done with Buddhists and other types of practices.

So, I think all this stuff has the… It’s like we’ve got a genie, or maybe Pandora’s box would be a better analogy. We’ve got a lot of stuff bottled up in our individual and collective psyche, and it comes out explosively in mass shootings and that kind of thing occasionally, and every day on the news or something.

It also trickles out continuously, like pus oozing from a wound, and creates all kinds of undesirable influences in society on an ongoing basis. We’ve got to purge all this stuff, and we’ll have a much better world when we have purged it, but the purging process has to be treated carefully.

Daniel: You also have to remember that the purging process is continuous. People are being born all the time, and each new generation has to figure out something that resonates with them and works for them, and the conditions they’re coming up in and where they find themselves.

It has to be done with each new person coming along. So, part of the thing we can subtly imagine is, “We’ll sort it out, and it’ll be sorted out,” except that it’s an ongoing thing with each new phase and each new generation, each new challenge, and each new set of political circumstances.

🏘️ Faith, experience, and community

Rick: There is a shift toward the more experiential, as opposed to the merely faith-based. At least in my own attitude, I’m perfectly comfortable if people want to just go and sing hymns on Sunday, or chant Hare Krishna, or whatever they want to do. That’s fine, great, do it. And I don’t mean that condescendingly. I think people are naturally gravitated toward what is meaningful for them, and if it ceases to be meaningful at a certain point, they’ll gravitate toward something else.

I think, unfortunately, the faith-based crowd has historically been in the majority, and they’re the types that gravitate toward administrative positions. So, they end up taking over the thing and persecuting the mystics, driving them out into the desert or whatever. But perhaps the tables are turning. Perhaps the experientially oriented folks will become more of a majority, because that’s really what it’s ultimately all about.

I mean, Jesus and Buddha and whatnot weren’t real big on faith; they were into experience. But if you don’t have a means to gain that experience, then what are you left with but faith? The costumes and this and that—you need to have an effective means of getting down to the real nitty-gritty.

Daniel: Right, yeah. Yeah, these are perpetual opportunities and problems.

Actually, my first introduction to meditation was in a Quaker school. So, these Quaker hippies in the mid-1970s had us sit in meditation every day. I took a course taught by these Quaker hippies, Christian hippies, that was called Close Encounters. It was my first introduction to meditation, in the fourth grade, as an elective, in this interesting hippie school I went to, Carolina Friends School in Durham, North Carolina, long ago.

It was really important, actually, I think. So, you can put meditation in schools, and you can put meditation even in Christian contexts, recognizing that one day some of these groups will remember that this began as a meditative tradition, with Jesus meditating in the desert, and get back to some of that stuff. Who knows? So, there is hope.

Rick: Ultimately, what we’re talking about is very much experiential. Just having faith in something that is really supposed to be experiential is no more gratifying in the end than standing out on the sidewalk, believing how good the meals are in this particular restaurant while slowly starving to death.

You really need to have the experience. I kind of think people are drifting in that direction. There’s this whole theme these days of people being spiritual but not religious. By that, I think they mean that they are really interested in spirituality as an experiential thing. It’s not like they’re opposed to religion; it’s just that they’re not satisfied by it. They’re not satisfied by mere belief.

Daniel: Yep. And then the other question is, some people who are totally into the experience of the thing and practice and clarity and mental development and all these things can also really miss the churches and the social gatherings, the potlucks and the songs and the music and the beauty of the pipe organs. And so, we’ve got to remember that that is also feeding some obvious human need, or there wouldn’t be so many churches and pipe organs and people singing and congregating together and having potlucks.

And so, the question is remembering that, because that also nourishes a lot of people and supports a lot of people. There’s endless data to show that people who are involved in church organizations have better health outcomes; they live longer. Is that because of the nourishing casseroles of the old church ladies bringing them to their homes when they’re sick or whatever? I don’t know, but maybe.

Rick: This is an interesting point, actually, which we haven’t quite touched upon. I can think of a number of examples of very experientially grounded, enlightened people, such as Ramakrishna or Papaji, whom we mentioned earlier, or Nisargadatta, who also really loved the ceremony and the pujas and the devotional practices.

I have a friend who was raised Jewish named Eric Eisen, and I interviewed him about a year ago. I remember when we were teaching back in Detroit in the ’80s, he used to love to go into Catholic churches and just sit and witness the ceremony, the stained-glass windows, and everything. He said it would just send him into these heavenly, ecstatic states.

Daniel: The majesty of it is remarkable.

Rick: Yeah, it can really be an enriching thing. I totally agree. We’ve got an amazing Catholic church not too far from me that looks like something you would find in the best of Spain, the Spanish cathedrals there. It’s just down near Cullman, Alabama. You’d never know it was there unless you knew it was there. The marble and the gold and the huge, vaulted arches—it’s just an amazing place. How could you not like that from a certain point of view?

So maybe the overarching point here is: resist the temptation to pigeonhole anything. Firstly, there’s the “different strokes for different folks” point, but also, there’s nothing wrong with a more complete package. It doesn’t have to be plain-vanilla nonduality, with anything else being superfluous frills.

Daniel: Well, that alienates nearly everybody. The number of people who can get into that is very small. They might go very far with it. The few who can get into that are probably going to go very far, but that’s the narrow end of the funnel in terms of people getting into this stuff.

Experiences, powers, and unusual perception

Rick: I had a panel discussion of people who were having what we would call refined or celestial perception. I was interested in this because the religious iconography and the scriptures of every tradition talk about people having these kinds of experiences—seeing halos or auras and angels and all this stuff. I know there’s a lot of this in the Buddhist tradition too.

I knew it would be a little bit controversial, so I had this panel discussion of people who actually have that sort of experience on a daily basis. I knew it would be controversial in that there would be some camp who would say, “These people are off in la-la land, and even if they’re having valid perceptions, it’s a distraction, it’s a hang-up, it’s not relevant or valid on a serious spiritual path.” And others were saying, “Thank God, I’m so glad to hear this, because I’m so tired of the dumbing down of spirituality, where any kind of relative phenomena are dismissed as irrelevant.” So, what’s your take on all that?

Daniel: Well, I didn’t see the interview, so tell me a little bit more about what they were perceiving and what it was doing for them, how it changed or positively impacted their lives.

Rick: One woman has all kinds of experiences involving seeing light coming out of people, and she can tell if a person is lying because sparks come flying out of their heads. She can see people’s past lives, whether or not she wants to, a lot of the time.

Another guy had a spiritual awakening quite profoundly after 30 years of being a Trappist and Benedictine monk, and was grounded in pure consciousness 24/7, we might say. After a little while, he began to see subtle beings and angels attending to people and doing things on a regular basis. He doesn’t know quite what to make of it, but it’s very kind of—and he’s not distracted. In fact, he didn’t really want to talk about it.

Another guy has been having this for decades, and has really deep, profound, extraordinary cognitions on a daily basis. One time I was taking a walk with him, and I said, “Well, what is your experience?” He said, “Well, I see millions of souls coming in and out of my body. I see the Devas, or the laws of nature that are governing the various levels of creation. I see them functioning and so on.” I said, “You mean in meditation?” He said, “No, right now.” And this guy is a practical guy. He’s a businessman, a family man, and has a couple of kids.

Daniel: Well, actually, starting off just with the theory and tradition, that’s all standard textual stuff. If you read the old Pali Canon, there’s endless discussion of people seeing beings and ghosts and Devas and all kinds of realms, and that’s actually so totally part of the thing. I have the book on my desk, The 31 Planes of Existence. It talks about seeing all these different realms and beings and these things.

So, I’ve had some experiences of different realms and seeing different things like that. The question, for what I call the powers—if we broadly lump them all in the category of powers—is, first, there’s no question that these things happen to people, and that this is the way they perceive reality.

For most people, these things are transient. Most people will have temporary glimpses of very altered ways of perceiving reality. I remember I was on this retreat, the retreat right before I got stream entry, which would be the first stage of awakening from a Buddhist map-point of view.

But right before I got that, I was walking around the Thai monastery in India in this interesting state where I was seeing everybody simultaneously as Buddhas, fully awakened beings, and mush demons. They were sad, limited, scared creatures, and yet fully awakened beings at the same time.

That was my experience. It was true of the chickens and the puppies and all these little creatures, and the birds up on the wires. I was seeing them all in this same context: simultaneously as the luminous dance of God and as small, scared individual creatures, all at the same time.

So, I’ve definitely had some of these experiences, though I don’t walk around perceiving reality that way all the time. But this is standard stuff. It’s ordinary for these things to happen. I’ve talked to plenty of monks and other meditators who’ve had lots of experiences like this, who’ve seen angels or celestial beings or devils or demons or other divine presences or other stuff.

But you raise the point of saying that these people are family people who have jobs and relationships and lives, and they’re functioning just fine.

Rick: Functioning better.

Daniel: Yeah, functioning better. Right. So, you have people who listen to the garden gnomes, and the garden gnomes tell them how to grow vegetables, and the vegetables they grow are totally amazing.

Rick: Yeah.

Daniel: What’s the problem? So, in terms of that, it sounds great. I wish there were better vegetables with the instructions that the garden gnomes give, rather than the smaller ones that weren’t as good. If it’s enhancing function—me being a pragmatist at heart, I care about function.

And so, if this is enhancing people’s lives in some way or other, providing benefit, great. Cool. And so, I like Freud’s definition. Freud talked about mental illness as that which interferes with love and work, basically.

If it’s not interfering with love—our ability to connect with people and have relationships—or work, our ability to function and maintain our lives and eat and feed our families or do whatever we need to do as our work, or if it’s enhancing that, then cool.

Rick: And I think it’s worth discussing it, because, like some of the other things we’ve been talking about, it is something that people experience, sometimes quite by surprise. Just as we were talking about the high school curriculum, maybe you’re going to have to say, “Well, you might start seeing angels.” But if there’s some preparation or some understanding that this is part of the trip, then it won’t scare people, and they’ll take it in stride.

And perhaps just as importantly, they won’t blow it out of proportion and think that it’s of supreme importance, or try to develop it specifically, whereas it really perhaps should be a side effect or a symptom of a certain stage of development.

Daniel: Well, actually developing those things specifically sometimes is really cool. So, take the Tibetan Tantra people, who spend hours and hours and thousands of hours visualizing deities. They have a whole specific canon of things they learn to visualize, and not only to then see the deities, but then to actually become the deities and walk around embodying themselves as the deity, and actually seeing themselves as the deity, and then merging with the deity.

So that’s actually explicit tantric practice. So sometimes that’s the path. And I know a lot of those people who have gotten a lot out of doing that, and have actually spent some time visualizing deities and doing some of those things, and found it totally fascinating.

And if you get your visualization skills good enough, these things actually become these remarkable, transparent, luminous, intelligent entities that often seem to be totally intelligent and totally interactive. And then you can recognize that your nature is the same as their nature, and actually have these remarkable experiences, where you collapse into the awareness and cognition of them, and they merge, and all these profoundly transforming things.

And so, some of those practices can be absolutely skillful and fascinating, and actually cultivating the powers. So, the powers are one of these topics a lot of people don’t like to talk about. But you can get a lot of remarkable things to happen to your consciousness by cultivating the powers.

It’s also a possible quick trip to destabilizing psychosis, as you learn in the TM world. Because anytime you’re doing a visualization or a mantra, or even more, the two together, that’s pretty much how you get into that territory, seeing stuff and hearing stuff. And that can, as you know from your TM work, be very transformative and also sometimes cause people to flip out, which is why the Tantric path has been called fast and dangerous. I see why now.

Rick: I can imagine a scenario in which people open up to this sort of realm of subtle phenomena, and it’s a bit overwhelming at first, just as other types of awakenings might be overwhelming at first. And initially it doesn’t enhance your life, because you become somewhat dysfunctional by virtue of it, but over time it gets integrated and stabilized, and you get it under your belt, and then actually things have been vastly enhanced, and you’re kind of on a new level of functioning.

Daniel: Right, definitely. And recognize that any time you enter into new territory, and new experiences and new wiring, there’s likely going to be some instability. There’s usually an awkward period, as you might call it.

✨ Stages of awakening

Rick: There’s a whole section, a number of sections in your book, where you talk about your personal attainments or realizations, and a lot of the terminology is unfamiliar to me. Even through stream entry, I don’t particularly understand. And then you talk about arising and passing away, and then there’s stream entry, and da-da-da-da-da-da, all kinds of things here.

And then you talk about the third path and nirodha-samapatti, and all these developments. Wouldn’t it be useful for you to sketch out some of these stages of development in general and with respect to your own experience?

Daniel: Sure. Wow, how much time do you have? It’s a huge topic. Maybe if you had some of them, we could try to narrow it down, but there are a hundred models of development and awakenings.

Rick: So, let’s give us the Reader’s Digest version. So, what’s stream entry, for instance?

Daniel: Okay, so stream entry would be the first stage of awakening, from a Theravadan Buddhist point of view. I would associate it with the first bhumi of the Tibetan path, the multiple-bhumi model.

Rick: What’s a bhumi?

Daniel: A bhumi would be a level or ground, so a standard Tibetan map. It means something like ground or level.

And then, stream entry would be the first taste of some sort of really clear understanding of reality, as well as the first taste of what we would call fruition, which is where reality vanishes and reappears.

So, right in stream entry, the first few moments before stream entry are brief, sort of three- or four-burst tastes of incredibly clear cognition. The field cognizes itself totally, shudders in some way, vanishes, and then reappears.

And then, when that happens, the mind is sort of reset in some way, and channels of perception that one had been developing are suddenly sort of locked in. So, that sort of then causes a number of specific technical transformations.

So, it’s the first taste of awakening. It allows a person to relate to the stages of meditation differently, to be able to call them more easily, to navigate them more easily, and for many people to be able to reattain to that very clear way of being that causes reality to synchronize, vanish, and reappear, called fruition.

Rick: Is it a permanent shift?

Daniel: Yeah, so it’s a permanent shift. It’s what we would call the first of the really permanent shifts, from a Theravadan mapping point of view.

And so, the stages that lead up to it are the arising and passing away, which is the Kundalini awakenings, the explosions of consciousness, the rapturous visions, the energetic stuff, the spontaneous movements, the bright lights, the visions, sometimes powers opening.

So, all that stuff is the arising and passing away, which usually people think of as the first stage of awakening if they’re not model people, because it’s so totally impressive, which is usually followed by the dark night, sort of dissolution.

Those openings start to sort of restructure, sort of alter the sense—sort of, you might even say, violate the sense of identity of continuous stuff—and cause, from your own stability, the operating system to try to figure out how to navigate in a world that’s less like it thought it was.

Then you come to equanimity, which is sort of a balanced, “Okay, now I’m fine with those things I’ve seen,” and you start to integrate them into the full field of understanding.

And when the whole field gets it for the first time and sees itself as it is, poof, reality vanishes, synchronizes, reappears: stream entry.

Rick: Yeah, portion out your time to give us a taste of some of the other significant stages.

Daniel: Sure. And so that is very transformative, but in terms of how it transforms people’s walking-around experience, it varies between people but often is not very complete.

So, it’s sort of like a first taste. It’s kind of like getting into college: “Okay, yes, you’re in college, cool, but you’re now a freshman in college,” if that makes sense.

Usually lots to go, lots to see. And that understanding now—it’s called stream entry because now you’re in the stream of the thing. So, there’s going to be a lot more spontaneous dharma happening. Cycles, shifts, perceptual changes. Now you’re in the throes of the thing. Stuff’s now going to be doing you more than it obviously was before.

Rick: You’ve gotten out of the way to a great extent.

Daniel: Right. Now stuff’s going to be happening. The first real switch has been thrown, and now some machine of deconstructing the sense of permanent, continuous identity is now woken up and working to go through layers of mind, layers of delusion, layers of stuff, to begin to wake those things up from a sort of map-theory point of view.

Rick: What is the next one?

Daniel: So, the next would be second path, and here we get into model divergence. The standard models talk about the Theravadan maps, which involve what’s called the ten-fetter model. In the ten-fetter model, you’ve got the ten fetters, and it would say that each of these is eliminated or attenuated at each path.

Rick: And a fetter means, like, handcuffs? It’s something which binds you.

Daniel: Kind of, yeah. At stream entry, they would say one eliminates personality belief: the sense of the fact that there is some continuous personality as a belief. Not that one has experienced the total dissolution of that by any means, but the basic belief that there is such a thing.

They would say that it eliminates skeptical doubt. You now know that these techniques and these practices and these things can lead to real transformation. And so, it also, in theory, eliminates the belief in rites and rituals—that rites and rituals alone would necessarily be enough to be transformative. Instead, they would say that one needs more direct, clear understanding rather than just the faith-based stuff.

And then they would say, at second path, that would attenuate greed and hatred. That’s sort of the standard dogma, and it also means you’ve completed a whole other insight cycle at a deeper level of mind, through a new arising and passing away.

Rick: So, you can be a stream enterer but still be greedy and hateful.

Daniel: Actually, you can be all kinds of realized and still be those things from a functional point of view.

Rick: Right.

Daniel: So, that’s the dogma. I’m giving you the dogma and then you’ve got the reality.

The Theravadan maps and models at once have models that talk about just the bare, clear comprehension of what they would call the three characteristics of reality. It’s impermanence. It’s selfless nature, meaning it’s too impermanent, too transient, too nondual, too whatever, to constitute a true self—a separate, permanent, continuous, observing, controlling entity.

All processes arise on their own. They’re causal. And so, there is not actually the free will that we generally think there is. There’s not this separate observer somewhere in our heads watching everything and controlling everything—a little man working the controls of the brain that we think there is. Those are all just natural causal processes that are part of this luminous, natural field of manifestation, transient, aware of where it is, intrinsically conscious, or just manifest, or whatever you want to say.

So, anyway, it’s got those models of just bare perception and clarity, bare perceptual clarity, which I consider the awakening stuff I find interesting. And then it unfortunately adds on to those things about emotions and emotional perfection and other stuff, which I consider naive. So, I don’t like all of the Theravadan models and have attempted to reform and revise them.

But anyway, then second path would, in theory, according to the ten-fetter model, attenuate greed and hatred to some degree. And from an experiential point of view, it sort of does some more damage to the sense of a continuous center point somewhere. And one will have completed another whole cycle of arising and passing away, dark night, and equanimity to get to that.

So then third path, which would be called anagami or whatever, would, from a Theravadan point of view, eliminate greed and hatred in their ordinary forms, except attachment to the formless realms, to formed jhanas. Those are deep, rich, meditative, blissful experiences, or boundless experiences, or whatever.

But from my point of view, what that does is radically transform the experience of the phenomenal world, such that it radically decentralizes consciousness and perception, such that in the glass, the manifestation and the consciousness are the same thing, to a very, very, very large degree.

Rick: The glass is sort of seen in terms of consciousness, in terms of the self or whatever?

Daniel: No, it is the thing. The experiences are where they are. We usually think of reality as being, this is the thing that’s looking out at all those things, and when this looks out at them, this experience is that there. As opposed to that there bearing the experience.

So, third path, from my point of view, really does major walking-around damage to the notion that there is a central controller, doer, observer, or perceiver, and attenuates that to a profound degree, leaving stuff that is pretty subtle from that point of view.

So now the field is much more the field. The field is more awake. The field is more directly representing itself, in a much more boundaryless way. The body, the mind, and the speech all seem to be happening as a natural part of causal, unfolding reality.

Except that in third path, there is still some subtle something that’s not quite perceived in that same clear light of just direct seeing, direct knowledge, or clear comprehension from a walking-around point of view. And then our hot chip, from my point of view, would be the last and final elimination of that as a walking-around experience or option or possibility of the way reality perceives itself.

Is there an endpoint?

Rick: Cool. And you’ve pretty much gone through all these stages. And then what do you see on the horizon? How many more such stages are there to go through? Are they endless, or is there some kind of final resting point?

Daniel: That’s a great question. So, in terms of axes of development, I actually consider that to be basically the only axis that has an obvious endpoint. And then there are all the rest of the axes, which I don’t see obvious endpoints to. How kind can you be? I don’t see an obvious endpoint to that. How well can you speak? How well can you interact with people? How well can you understand human interaction? How well and skillfully can you try to help the world? How well and skillfully can you understand the depths of psychology? How well and skillfully can you do anything? How deeply can you master the stages of concentration—the jhanas, the deep samadhi states? I don’t see any obvious endpoints to all of those things.

So, I see an amazing amount of capacity for development on all of the other axes of development. But strangely enough, on that single axis of clear perception and dissolving a sense of a center point, of a doer, of a controller, I actually see an endpoint.

So, once the final thing flips over, once the knot unties, that seems to be it. And so, that happened to me about eleven years ago. And one of the remarkable things is that it stayed consistent, meaning I don’t see… I’m a skeptic, and I’ve misjudged my practice so many times that I continue to go, “Wow, really? Are you totally high?” And yet, my best skeptical inquiry into the nature of the thing doesn’t find any last little things.

And if they’re there, I’m totally deluded about them, which is another option. You’ve got to keep that one in mind. I might be just totally full of shit. But if it is, it’s a level of delusion I haven’t managed to crack. So, I’ll leave that skillful door open, if that makes sense from a reasonable skepticism point of view.

But that you could do that, and that you could have it hold up and last… What’s interesting is there’s something—stable is the wrong word—but when you stop habitually turning something into a constant thing that’s trying to figure out its vantage point, there’s something stable about that from a weird point of view.

And that something has stopped because it’s a process, constantly trying to imagine the vantage point from which something is separate. It seems to be here, and it seems to be the back of our head, and then it’s our nose, and then it’s our eyes, and then it’s here.

Because before, if I would look at the back of my head, it would seem like the eyes sort of tried to turn backward, and the back of the head would sort of be perceived from some vantage point. Whereas sometimes it seemed like the back of the head was sort of looking out that way, so it kind of moved all around.

There’s something you have to do, sort of in this weird kind of distorting way, and sort of ignoring the true nature of the phenomenal way, to maintain that. It’s actually an active process of selective delusion and moving redefinition of yourself. That has to happen all the time. You can actually stop that process.

And now the field is just the field. And there’s something really amazingly better about that. Really amazingly clearer about that, where everything just is where it is. So, the back of the head is now just where the back of the head is, and the eyes are just where the eyes are.

Now the field is just the field. There’s something really amazingly better about that.

But nothing seems to be observing, controlling, or redefining to try to figure out how it’s looking at everything and what its relationship to everything is. Now the things are just where they are. And I must say that beats the heck out of the previous way of being.

Rick: So, what you said a minute ago raises kind of an interesting question, which is that I guess you can be full of shit and think you’re enlightened, but can you be enlightened and still think that maybe you’re full of shit? And in fact, is that attitude actually a healthy sign of genuine enlightenment?

Daniel: God, I hope so.

Rick: Or would a genuinely enlightened person be kind of convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that he’s got it and he’s not full of it?

Daniel: Well, it’s a very, very slippery proposition, isn’t it? So, the interesting thing is that the experience of the question of whether or not I’m full of shit has that wonderful nondual perception to it, which is very reassuring.

Rick: Yeah. Good.

Daniel: So, even if I’m totally full of crap, I can definitely tell you that I prefer this way of being to the previous way. I would not go back.

Rick: To summarize what you’ve been saying, you’re saying that you have reached an absolute clarity with regard to the absolute dimension of life, which really can’t get any more absolute. But on the other hand, in terms of the relative dimension of your life, there is, in anyone’s life, no end to the possibilities of refinement, insight, clarification, skill, and all the rest.

Daniel: That’s my current take on it, for better or for worse.

The value of curiosity and humility

Rick: Is there anything else that comes to mind that you feel is important, that on your way to work this afternoon you’re going to think, “God, I wish we’d talked about that”?

Daniel: Well, I think just the basic point of having a lot of fun engaging with these things is really important. This stuff is fascinating.

This stuff is totally fascinating: exploring your mind and exploring what these ancient and interesting techniques do, and learning to figure out all the unbelievably cool things you can do with your mind is just so much fun. I hope people get—that’s the attitude I would hope to convey the most. This stuff is just the most remarkable adventure. It’s like the coolest video game ever. It’s like learning to unlock the Easter egg functionality.

There is just amazing functionality, amazing states and experiences that we can get into, amazing insights that we can have, amazing things that we can explore, from the energetic point of view to the magical point of view, as you discussed, to the insight point of view, to seeing the true nature of phenomena, to opening our hearts, to dealing with our emotions, to experiencing great archetypal energies or whatever it is. It is just so totally amazing to explore this stuff.

As long as you recognize that if you have good people to help support you through the more complicated, awkward phases of this stuff, you’ll do a lot better. I think keeping an open mind and really trying to be honest about what our experiences are, how they line up with the maps and how they don’t, and trying to avoid the shadow sides of practice—those are the things I care about.

Realizing that we will all fall down, we will all make mistakes, we will all delude ourselves, and we will all recognize, “Oh, no, actually, no, definitely more to understand on that point. I’m totally full of it.” Keeping that level of humility and realizing that some of these experiences are so compelling that it’s nearly impossible not to attribute to them some unbelievably ultimate, final status, because that’s just what the brain chemistry does.

Realizing that’s just normal, and being forgiving to ourselves if we later revise that, and being forgiving to our colleagues if they later revise their opinions, and recognizing that that’s just normal in this business. Having a good time and talking to people about this and making it sort of a collective, fun, social adventure is, I think, the attitude that works the best.

Having a good time and talking to people about this and making it a collective, fun, social adventure is the attitude that works the best.

Rick: Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and you get the sense that for millions of people, billions of people in the world, life is a pretty drab and miserable affair because it’s a struggle, it’s suffering, it’s boring. Otherwise, why would people commit suicide and so on?

The reality of the situation you just described beautifully is that the entire universe, and the mind, can be a wonderland. There’s such an unlimited realm of possibilities to explore and experience that life need not be drab for anyone, really.

Daniel: Right, the richness. And we forget the freshness. There’s something in the glory of just sensory contact that, when we really tune into it, has something remarkably interesting in it.

We get so lost in our minds and our goals and our ambitions and our fears and our neuroses and our stuff that just the simple fact—there is something of that spirit that has real value, because we can learn to remember that way of being by just tuning into that way of being. And it helps ground us in our bodies and our sensory worlds, and it helps get us out of our fears—not that it isn’t sometimes important to go into our fears, but to see them as rich and interesting experiences too, as part of this field of experience.

That helps to give us a broader, clearer, more immediate perspective on them: to see all the emotions as colors of space, as textures of space, as rich and intricate experiences in this body-mind, as part of this whole field of the room that we’re in, or the sky that we’re in, or the planet that we’re a part of. Seeing them as living, integrated experiences in this field now and embracing them and being clear about them really helps.

✨ Awareness, intelligence, and God

Rick: I’ve understood that Buddhism really doesn’t talk about God, that it considers God to be a moot point, not something that is open to exploration. But when I think of fingers, I think—take the tip of my finger. There are more atoms in it than there are stars in the known universe, and on every level—anatomical, cellular, molecular, atomic, subatomic—there’s such an incredible thing going on here, and such an amazing intelligence governing the functioning at every level.

Of course, we’re not just talking about the finger. We’re talking about the entire universe and every iota of it, every square centimeter, being governed on gross and subtle levels by some unfathomable intelligence. That, to me, is God. And so it would seem to me that Buddhists would eventually encounter that level of experience and believe in God, not as the old, bearded guy in the sky, but as an all-pervading intelligence that contains us, and that we contain, that we’re part and parcel of.

Daniel: Buddhism does talk about gods. So, it talks about Brahman and various gods, considering them relative creatures.

Buddhism has a very uneasy relationship to what you might think of as true self. And the dogmatists here are going to be thick and fast on both sides. This is navigating a political minefield of the people who, on one extreme, say, “Atman Buddhism, true-self Buddhism—it’s a curse, it’s a plague, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to Buddhism.”

And then you’ve got the other extremists within Buddhism, sort of the Buddha-nature, ground-of-being people who posit something incredibly stable, incredibly permanent, incredibly something—which in experience you actually cannot find. From a very technical Buddhist point of view, you have these two extremes, both of which I find pretty annoying.

Rick: Yeah, extremists are always annoying.

Daniel: And not that they aren’t making their interesting points in an attempt to counterbalance each other. Then, from an experiential point of view, the whole field seems to be happening on its own in a luminous way. The intelligence or awareness seems to be intrinsic in the phenomena. The phenomena do appear to be totally transient, totally ephemeral.

So, I would reject, from an experiential point of view, something in the harshness of the dogma of the rigid no-selfists who can’t recognize the intrinsic nature of awareness that is the field.

Rick: And not only awareness, because awareness has a sort of—

Daniel: And intelligence.

Rick: Yeah, intelligence. I want to make sure that word comes in, because awareness seems kind of flat and plain vanilla, but intelligence—

Daniel: Right. And then I also reject, from an experiential point of view, the people who would make this into something permanent, something separate from, something different from just the manifestation itself, because there tends to be both.

I don’t like the permanence aspects because, from a Buddhist technical point of view, I do not find anything that stands up as permanent in experience. I find that quality always there while there is experience, because it’s something in the nature of experience, but it’s not quite the same thing as permanent.

So, while there is experience, there’s experience. That means there is awareness from a certain point of view, manifestation and awareness being intrinsically the same thing, intrinsic to each other. While there is experience, I would claim that element is there. It has to be for there to be experience. And I will claim the system seems to function very lawfully, which has a sort of—it’s easy to feel that as a sort of intelligence.

Rick: When you think about the miracle of what’s actually going on, just taking our bodies as a case in point, but those flowers behind me or anything else, and you look closely enough—if you actually pay attention microscopically or whatever—there’s something miraculous in every iota of creation, and that’s permanent.

Our experience of it may not be permanent; we may zoom in and out of that. But what’s actually happening, to which we are generally oblivious, is a miracle—not a miracle in the sense of something supernatural, but in terms of something vastly more profound.

Daniel: The feeling of profundity. The feeling of miraculousness. The wondrous component. So, as the Tibetans would say, “Amazing! It all happens by itself!”

Rick: Or as the Nouveau Tibetans would say, “Awesome, dude!”

Daniel: There is something intrinsically amazing about this. It’s very refreshingly amazing that the thing happens, and that things cognize themselves, or are aware of where they are, or manifest. Manifestation is truly amazing, and tuning into that amazingness has something really valuable about it, from a pragmatic point of view.

Closing remarks

Rick: Great. Well, let’s end on that note. This has been really stimulating. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.

Daniel: Me too. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Rick: It really gets me firing on all cylinders to have a conversation like this. So, we’ll do it again someday.

I’ve been talking with Daniel Ingram. Daniel is an emergency room physician, but he’s also an ardent, dedicated, and experienced Buddhist practitioner and author. He has written a book entitled Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, an unusually hardcore Dharma book. I’ll be linking to that book on his page on batgap.com, and linking to his Dharma Overground website, which is a place where you can participate in lively discussions.

Daniel: We will hope the BatGap bump doesn’t overwhelm the server.

Rick: Yes, you might need to upgrade.

Daniel: I actually just did upgrade it. We’ll hope it’s enough.

Rick: BatGap overwhelmed its own server. They kicked me off at one point, and I had to go to a dedicated server.

Daniel: Oh no.

Rick: But they kicked me off without warning. The whole site was down for three days.

Daniel: Oh no.

Rick: Anyway, so a few general points before I conclude. This interview has been part of an ongoing series. There have been about 230 of them previously now, and you can find them all on batgap.com. They’re indexed in various ways, alphabetically in the right-hand column. There’s a “Past Interviews” menu where you can find them indexed chronologically and also topically, and we’re continuing to refine and develop that.

There is a “Donate” button, which I rely upon people clicking if they feel inclined. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email every time a new interview is posted. There is a forum, a discussion forum, that has a section dedicated to each interview, so you’ll see a link to that on Daniel’s page.

There is a link to an audio podcast, because you can listen to this on iTunes or some kind of podcast reader and not have to sit in front of your computer for two and a half or three hours. So, all those things and probably more—just explore the menus.

Thanks for listening or watching. Thank you very much, Daniel. It’s been great fun. We’ll see you all next week with a pretty far-out interview. It’s by this guy named Darryl Anka, who channels somebody called Bashar. There were a lot of requests that I interview him, so it’s going to be a bit of a wild ride. Stay tuned for that.

Daniel: Have fun. Bye. Thank you. [music]