Stopping the Search, Suffering, and Surrender
Transcript, including graphical montage, summary, questions explored, and key takeaways
Summary
This conversation explores what happens when the drive to find spiritual answers relaxes and life is allowed to be exactly as it is. It also touches on suffering, surrender, OCD, control, and the limits of popular spirituality.
Questions This Interview Explores
- What changes when the search for spiritual certainty starts to feel like part of the problem?
- How can suffering be seen more directly without turning it into a personal failure or spiritual project?
- What is the relationship between surrender, control, and the feeling of being a doer?
- How do meditation, OCD, and ritual patterns become entangled in the urge to fix experience?
- What does a more ordinary, less idealized view of awakening look like in daily life?
Joey Lott is not a spiritual teacher. He’s not offering enlightenment, awakening, liberation, or any such carrot to keep you searching for something else.
Instead, he’s just a fellow person who had the fortune to discover that the willingness to stop seeking for answers, for solutions to all kinds of imagined spiritual problems, reveals the peace of just being whatever is happening – which is all that is ever happening anyway. It’s not a glorious attainment. It’s not morally or spiritually elevated. It’s very mundane, and often uncomfortable – exactly like your life now.
Joey doesn’t do formal teaching. In an ever-changing manner, he does experiment with inviting others to join in a conversation and explore the assumptions that underlie suffering.
Website: joeylott.com
YouTube Channels:
Books:
Interview recorded 2/13/2016
Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.
YouTube Video Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Introduction to Buddha at the Gas Pump
- 00:04:47 – Shifting Perspectives on Identity
- 00:09:22 – The Perception of Suffering and Reality
- 00:13:34 – The intensity of my meditation practice
- 00:17:42 – The Addictive Cycle of Meditation
- 00:20:49 – The Experience of Suffering and Inner Dissatisfaction
- 00:24:53 – The Relief of Stopping the Obsession
- 00:28:35 – Fear of Triggers and Rituals
- 00:32:57 – The Shift Towards Surrender
- 00:37:24 – Relaxation of Control and Shift in Perspective
- 00:41:47 – Embracing Fear and Facing Problems
- 00:48:43 – Finding Balance in Spiritual Teachings
- 00:50:41 – The Middle Ground of Purification
- 00:55:31 – Spiritual Teachings for the Benefit of Humanity
- 00:59:40 – Methamphetamine and the Brain
- 01:03:35 – The Marginalization of People
- 01:08:25 – The Reality of Experience
- 01:12:40 – Critique of Popular Spirituality
- 01:16:53 – Recognizing the Full Truth
- 01:21:19 – The Directness of Experience and Comparison to Ramana
- 01:25:22 – The Illusion of Awareness and Consciousness
- 01:30:06 – The Promise of Removing Uncertainty
- 01:33:55 – The Illusion of Ownership and Doership
- 01:38:35 – Appreciating Concepts, But Valuing Experience
- 01:42:58 – The Paradoxical Nature of Taking Action
- 01:46:49 – Dealing with OCD
- 01:50:39 – Perception of a diverse natural world and dangers of moral authority
- 01:54:01 – The Decline of Bee Populations and Environmental Responsibility
- 01:58:47 – The Interconnectedness of Life and the Power of Consciousness
- 02:02:37 – Ambivalent about taking money for conversations
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