From the Duncan Trussell Family Hour
(Patreon) 1/28/22:
Duncan: “You’re not always trying to
be the thing you were the last time you were
something…It makes a lot of sense to constantly be trying to replicate some
version of yourself you thought was happy.”
David: “Good. That’s somehow saying in a plain English way
what all the (Buddhist) teachings are trying to say, that you’re trying to
replicate something. That’s a notion of karma
isn’t it? It’s a replicator. And you’re trying to create a familiar sense
of something either good or bad, it doesn’t even matter if you’re familiar
thing is a shithole.”
Duncan: “Are you making fun of my
basement?”
At an undisclosed, mysterious
location, hide the kids, hide the wife, Duncan’s got the vaccine and now can’t smell the
difference between oatmeal and poop. Thank God he can still see!
Duncan: “There’s something funny
about Buddhism…according to Kornfield, to the Buddhist, ‘God is lists,’” like
reading the ingredients on a box to experiencing the cookie whole.
Sweet/funny/edgy, the fact that the self does not exist, is there anything
edgier?
…
David: “A person could have
completely manifested (their (negative) reality) and that’s the space that
they’re in, settled into it, stability.”
Duncan: “Stabilized into (self).”
David: “We all have glimpses,
wouldn’t you say (of realization)?”
Duncan: “That’s the problem, it kind
of matches waking out of a dream that you can go right back into. So something
like that is possible. That sense of
never-ending* relief makes sense if you’ve been toiling away trying to
replicate what you were a few seconds ago over and over again; what a horrible
job! You didn’t even apply for the
job! (Or maybe you did if you subscribe to esoteric metaphysics). For the sake of this conversation, you find
yourself and you’re in a body, and you’re looking around and there’s all this
stuff around you and you’re wearing clothes that you picked out a long time ago
and maybe you got some tattoos that
made sense when you got them!
David: “…Maybe you got some tattoos
that made sense when you got them, good one.”
Duncan: “And now you’re like, ‘what
the fuck did I do? Who am I? What am I? What is this?’ so maybe when this
happens you’re confused or something and since that moment of confusion is so
scary, you go back into trying to replicate yourself. You think, ‘oh my god, I
disassociated! I remember why I got that
tattoo! I got that tattoo because Carlo is beautiful!’
David: “And the cosmic joke about how
(the universe) resets itself over and is that none of it’s necessary…but that
can dribble into a nihilistic perspective, as we’ve talked about, how if the
self is null and void, ‘why should I have kids? Why should I treat people
well?’ The simplicity, if it’s not ripened properly, it’ll just turn into
nihilism.”
Duncan: “An angry atheist believes a
non-consensual ghost story. Where someone tells you a story they think is going
to scare you and they’re like, ‘no, you don’t get it, when you die you’re gone forever. Death is the anesthesia that keeps you away from the
pain of life, (Richard Dawkins), but they’re mad. They’re not going to tell
you in a gentle way, there’s a weird anger behind it. ‘I didn’t write the Bible, why are you mad at
me?! I didn’t invent God! It’s not my fault that the way you embodied the Infinite
didn’t work out for you!’
My encounter
with the thing you’re talking about, it’s always been very sweet, and my sense
when I’ve encountered it, is not to be confrontational, like, ‘you know you don’t exist! You’re not a you! There’s
nothing there!’ There’s just a sense
of from being rolled by the most obnoxious wave where you can’t get air right
now because you’re under this immense force that won’t immediately remit its
grasp. Some existential version of that,
but in this case, this wave is a series of reactions, and from your reactions
you get lost in your thinking, and from getting lost in your thinking, you
react in another dumb way, and every once in a while you might come up to the
surface and look around and think 'Oh, fuck! I got another tattoo!’ and you’re
back down again! Rolling! This is very painful sort of experience. So anytime you get that sense of ‘wait, I’m
coming up for air,’ it usually is quite joyful, it doesn’t include that anger part,
it doesn’t feel like you want to get nihilistic with it at all. Or disregard
other people. Or shame them for being themselves. It seems to engender a more
loving way of thinking about other people.”
David:
“Emptiness and compassion are linked. Two components of Mahayana. Emptiness
opens the way to compassion.”
I’ve been in the habit of seeking to
undermine my own integrity to make myself less attractive to potential
predation. There’s a lion in the roads
of Zion, already full
on house-pets. Aslan basking in
infinitude ponders the inimitability of Jesus Christ of Nazareth who performed
miracles seemingly at will, rather, being in the right place at the right time
as it was written! “Walking on water
begins with the conception of water-walking,” he prowls near a fountain, “What
does that have to do with buoyancy? Floating an idea – what does water-walking
have to do with humidity?”
In other news, another circus-less
lion escaped from the porous zoo, the open safari, or the stocked Central Park? Whatever the case, our borders are not the
problem, it’s definitely the zoo-keepers/veterinarians we need to provide with
more tranquilizer darts, the hunters with semi-automatics, and general populace
with stay-at-home orders. The imperiled
citizenry seek a hero, Mysterio?
As I stare/start off into space at a
fixed point in the distance between here and there, my awareness expands as
consequence of consciousness practice.
How long can one endure not seeming interesting? Seeking approval, “Is
this good enough?” breaking concentration for input (some food, some sex). Scratching some itch, the irritated. Affixing a visual representation of that
irritation, the tattoo artist, etching a preferential, talking taco that says,
“I’ll put anything inside me,” in the Queen’s language and the cartoonist’s
font. The tattoo artist, ennobled by
virtue of attributions impressed upon others like navel service, “Are you sure
you want that there?” A conscript flips through the shop’s
brochure, a droll picture-book, and picks out another Tweety, the circling bird
of post-traumatic head-injury (star-birds).
The non-essential plastic surgery impresses a wraith-like form between
two horrific visages.
Duncan: “Any
time I find myself being aggressive or weird, it’s (100%) the opposite
experience. It comes from defending
something I feel needs defending. Once
you let go, what’s there to defend?”
David: “One
thing one of my teachers said is, ‘don’t defend yourself,’ but then he went on
to say, ‘don’t defend the dharma
either.’”
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