E201 - Dandapani: A Monk's Warning "Distraction Is Costing You Your Life"

Dandapani is a Hindu priest who spent over ten years as a celibate monk before devoting his life to teaching the world how to master focus. His central claim is simple but unsettling: most of us are not distracted by accident, we have spent years actively practicing distraction, often more hours a day than most people practice anything else they care about. In this conversation, we unpack what it actually costs to live a physically present, mentally absent life, and why that cost compounds with every passing year. What We Dive Into: 1. Whatever you do for hours a day, every day, you get good at. Most people have unintentionally practiced distraction more than they have practiced anything else, which is why concentration feels so foreign and difficult by comparison. 2. You cannot practice being present directly. Presence is simply the outcome of keeping your awareness fixed on one thing without it wandering. Trying to "be present" without training focus is chasing an effect while ignoring its cause. 3. When your attention bounces between unfinished tasks, each unresolved jump adds a small charge of anxiety that accumulates over the day. Learning to hold awareness in one place, even briefly, interrupts that buildup before it becomes stress. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: https://oneskin.co/KNOWTHYSELF Code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off ___________ 00:00 Intro 01:29 What Distraction Costs Us 07:29 The Law of Practice 13:19 Life Is Finite, Not Short 24:08 Money, Purpose, and the Path of the Householder 28:08 Tasting the Super Conscious 32:21 Awareness, Anxiety, and the Roots of Stress 39:42 How to Train Focus: The Ball of Light 50:11 Eliminating Fear by Controlling Awareness 55:43 The Greatest Gift: Undivided Attention 1:01:36 Becoming a Monk: The Search for a Real Teacher 1:11:20 Choosing a Philosophy Before the Practice 1:23:26 Signs of a Maturing Soul 1:30:21 A Day in the Monastery: Practicing All Day Long 1:36:38 Intuition, Psychic Sensitivity, and Its Dangers 1:43:28 Going Narrow and Deep on One Path 1:50:14 Filtering the Mind Like a Kitchen Strainer 1:58:44 Building Willpower: Finish What You Begin 2:03:04 Reincarnation, Compassion, and Unresolved Baggage 2:13:29 How to Spot a Fake Guru 2:17:42 Ambition, Peace, and the Final Message ___________ ✨MORE FROM DANDAPANI ↳https://dandapani.org/know-thyself-podcast ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dandapanillc ↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dandapanillc 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Life is not short, it's finite. We just don't know when that ends. With every passing month, every passing year, you feel less and less fulfilled. Of course you do. You're either with your phone or you're thinking about something else, physically present, mentally absent. How hard is it to be distracted? I can almost for certain you're saying, "It's not difficult." That's because you've practiced it so much. It's not hard for me to be concentrated, not because I lived as a monk. It's just what I practice. There's a clock counting down with my name on it. Those minutes I'm giving you, I will never get back. Can you keep your awareness of this person while you're sitting with them? If you can just do that one thing, you can have everything. But you won't. One of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention. My guru gave me that gift.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Whenever he was with me, he was completely present. Don't waste it. Just do not waste it. That's the most precious gift we have.

• 0:55André Duqum?

  How to focus?

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Really simple. We practice doing one thing at a time throughout the day. And what I recommend people to do is...

• 1:09André Duqum?

  Dandapany, you are a Hindu priest who spent over 10 years as a celibate monk and has now gone on to sharing the world the power of unwavering focus. I just want to start by setting the stage and asking, what does living life with a distracted mind cost us?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Everything. Ultimately, our life force, the finite amount of time that we have, each of us have on this planet, which cannot be replaced. We can't get it back. And the relationships we have with the people that we love and the things that we love, our experience, ultimately. Physically present, mentally absent.

• 1:58André Duqum?

  Physically present, mentally absent.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  We spend so much time, people, working to earn money to buy experiences with family, with things, travel, whatever it may be, going to music concert and then to be mentally absent when they're physically there.

• 2:18André Duqum?

  It's almost like life happens in a way where we miss the experience of it.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then, you know, while you're physically there, mentally you're somewhere else. You know, you're either with your phone or you're thinking about something else. So you're not experiencing the experience that you worked so hard to create. And then with every passing month, every passing year, you feel less and less fulfilled. Of course you do, because you've had all these experiences, which you've never actually truly experienced, because you couldn't be present. And you can't be present if you can't be focused.

• 2:59André Duqum?

  I feel like the concentrated mind, that state of having a concentrated mind, is inherently pleasant. Do you say that the terms are synonymous with presence and focus and concentration? How do you delineate if you do?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Focus and concentration mean the same thing, literally in the dictionary. So I can use those words synonymously. Present is a byproduct of being focused. If I can be focused, I can be present. If I can keep my awareness, as I teach in the book, or my attention on you, without it wavering to something else, I'm being present. But if I'm physically here and while you're speaking, my awareness is drifting and thinking, what should I have for lunch? What should I do this afternoon? That's where my attention is going, my awareness is going. I'm physically present, mentally absent, and I'm no longer present anymore. Mentally, I'm not here.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  So when people talk about being present and practicing being present, you don't, it's erroneous. You don't practice being present. You practice being focused. Being present is an outcome of being focused. So the typical Instagram quote, be present, be here, be in the now.

• 4:22André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  You're looking at the outcome, but what we need to be doing is what is the act that gives us that outcome?

• 4:30André Duqum?

  We live in a time where our attentional system is hijacked in so many different ways because there's so much more stimulus around us. That plays a huge part into the generation that we find ourselves in, yeah.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Absolutely, because people have no clarity of what it is they want in their life and because it's easier for me to hijack your attention if you don't know what you want. If you knew what you want, it would be very difficult for me to hijack your attention. Because then I have clarity of where I'm going, where I'm focusing my energy, my time. I remember, I used to live in New York for a long time and my wife and I lived in Astoria. And I remember one weekend, she said, oh, let's go. She said, I want Thai food. And that was our favorite Thai restaurant was about a 20-minute walk away. And we were walking there and a few minutes into the walk, I said to her, oh, look, that Greek restaurant finally opened. You know, they've been working on it for a year. And so, let's go try that. She goes, I want Thai.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  So, okay. We kept walking a few more minutes. And I said, oh, what about that place? We've been wanting to go there. She goes, I want Thai. So, I'm trying to hijack her to go to all these different places because she had clarity of what she wanted, which was Thai food. I couldn't hijack her. I think similarly in the world, people don't have clarity of what they want in life and they are unable to articulate that very specifically. So, it's easier now for the digital world to hijack your attention. And most of us were never taught early on in life that we should have a purpose in life, that we should have priorities or clarity of what we want in life.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Rather, we were trained to think that you're still young, you'll figure it out in time.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Right, that's the common advice. You're still young. You don't have to have it figured out all this time. Go out there and explore the world. But a confused mind compounding on itself becomes more and more confused. A distracted mind compounding on itself becomes more and more distracted. Like when I give, when I do events and I ask my audience, how many of you here are distracted? Almost everyone puts their hand up. How many of you have to try really hard every day at being distracted? Like, no, I'm a master at it. I don't need any practice. Because you've been practicing for so long. Similarly, if, if we don't seek to find out what we want and we're perpetually distracted

• 7:03Speaker 00

  and don't work towards finding clarity of purpose and priorities in life, we'll never find it.

• 7:10André Duqum?

  It seems like knowing what you want and knowing what is worth wanting is born out of having some clarity and a focused mind. And a focused mind is also born out of having, knowing what you want.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:23André Duqum?

  And so you brought up a very important point, which is we're practicing being distracted every single day for hours on end.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:30André Duqum?

  Talk to me about the law of practice and why that's an important thing to, to have context around.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  And let me ask you a question, Will, Los Angeles.

• 7:36André Duqum?

  Yep.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  If I wanted to play for the Lakers, human me, how many hours a day would you recommend I practice?

• 7:44André Duqum?

  Probably as much as you could.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Well, give me a number just to.

• 7:47André Duqum?

  Yeah, I don't know, six.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Six hours, how many days a week?

• 7:52André Duqum?

  Six.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  So six hours a day, six hours a week. After six months, would I play for the Lakers?

• 7:58André Duqum?

  No.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Thanks for your faith in me. But I'd be better at basketball, right? And after a year, much better at basketball. I look at your face again, like, there's no way he's playing for the Lakers.

• 8:07André Duqum?

  I believe in you, man. Maybe the G League, you never know. Dream big.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Oh, dream big, right? Yeah. I could be the next king.

• 8:14André Duqum?

  I think a monk could, a priest could cross them ankles.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  But after practicing basketball for six hours a day, six days a week, after a year, I'd be really good at basketball, may or may not play for the Lakers. What if I practiced distraction six hours a day, six days a week? What would I be good at after six months?

• 8:37André Duqum?

  Being distracted.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  And after a year?

• 8:39André Duqum?

  Master.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Master. But the truth is, we have 24 hours a day. Most people sleep, what, seven, eight hours if we're lucky? So awake 16, 17 hours a day. And out of that 16, 17 hours a day that we're awake, are we really practicing distraction six hours? Or is it more like seven or eight or nine hours? And is it six days a week? And Sunday, what was Zen and Focus and centered? Perhaps it's seven days a week. So imagine if we were practicing distraction eight hours a day, seven days a week. After six months? Would be so good at it. If I practiced the piano eight hours a day, seven days a week,

• 9:23Speaker 00

  you would tell me that I would be better at playing the piano after six months, wouldn't I?

• 9:27André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Practicing eight hours a day, seven days a week. So why would it be any different for distraction? If I practiced distraction eight hours a day, seven days a week, after six months, I'd be great at it. After a year? A master. After two years? Could write the bestselling book on distraction. There'd be nothing about distraction that I wouldn't know. Most people are masters of distraction because that's what they practice. They've never been taught how to concentrate and they never practice concentration. You can't be good at something you don't practice.

• 10:02André Duqum?

  Not only do we not practice it, we're not also taught from a young age how did our mental faculties work? What our mind actually is? I'm hoping this conversation can serve as like a rock in people's life to come back to, to really gain context and understanding how their mind works so that they can design their life, know what they want, go after what they want, get what they want, and not let their life pass them by and become a creature of circumstance. We are practicing distraction.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:34André Duqum?

  Maybe 10 to 16 hours a day. For most of us, our phones are being checked on average over 200 times a day.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Insane.

• 10:41André Duqum?

  It's, you know, what feels insane to me is that like we have this gift of being alive and

• 10:49André Duqum?

  In many ways unbeknownst to us, these systems, because often, again, we don't know what we want, are hijacking our life in a way we're not fully aware to. So it's like, we don't even know what we don't know.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:02André Duqum?

  And to continue setting the stage a bit, how did and how has examining your own mortality and the finiteness of your life motivated you to really actually understand how to focus?

• 11:15Speaker 00

  You know, the Dalai Lama has a beautiful quote. I'll try to remember it exactly if I can. He says, "We don't talk about death to fear death. We talk about death to appreciate the preciousness of life." And I really love that because talking about death can be unpleasant and uncomfortable for a lot of people. But if you come from the perspective of realizing how precious life is, then you realize that life is not short. It's finite. And the typical common phrase is, "Life is short." When you're stuck in L.A. traffic for three hours, do you ever go like, "It's only three hours. Not bad. That's short." But you go, "That's long."

• 11:57Speaker 00

  So if three hours is long, wouldn't three days be even longer? If I told you you were going to jail for a year, you'd go like, "Oh, my God. That's a long time." A day, you could probably ring that. So life is not short. It's finite. There's a clear definitive end to it. We just don't know when that end is. And I believe in reincarnation, but I know I have one life as Danda Puni. My next life, I could, I don't know, be a six-foot-tall blonde girl named Olga for all I know. But I have one life as me, and I want it to be an amazing life. And the fact that, you know, I don't know when I will die and my knowing and realizing that life is finite

• 12:40Speaker 00

  causes me then to really dial down onto figuring out, what is my purpose? What is my priorities? Being able to articulate that clearly, then developing this ability to focus so I can stay focused on that. And when I can live a purpose-focused life, the outcome of that is I live a more fulfilling life, a happier life. I wouldn't say a happy life, but a happier life, a more fulfilling, more rewarding life. And there's less things to get distracted, right? If I'm driving down a highway and I know where I'm going to. There'll be a less reason to take the exit.

• 13:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  But if I don't know where I'm going, if I'm just gonna say I'm gonna drive for the next five hours, I can just take any exit I want. And I think that's what's happening 200 times a day. People are picking up their phone and taking an exit, you know, somewhere. And think how costly that is time-wise, knowing that your life is finite, or energetically, knowing that you only have a finite amount of energy today.

• 13:45André Duqum?

  Hmm.

• 13:46Speaker 02

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• 14:31André Duqum?

  It reminds me of this quote I just pulled up from Alan Watts.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:34André Duqum?

  Said, "To plan for a future, which is not going to become present, is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future, which, when it comes to me, will find me absent, looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face." They failed to live because they were always preparing to live. And I think so much of our life is living in this future-based proposition, you know, oftentimes, of desiring things in our life, almost preparing to live, like there's going to be some ideal state in the future and which will fully arrive and be present. But we're also training ourselves to not enjoy the moment once we get there. So we're not gonna even be there when it comes time to reap the rewards.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  We're thinking of the next thing.

• 15:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  I use a four-step framework of purpose, focus, simplify, and sacrifice.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Gain clear of your purpose and priorities. Learn to focus, practice focus, so you can stay focused on that purpose and priorities. And then simplify your life to those priorities. And part of simplification is sacrifice. I can't simplify my life by not giving up things and people that aren't aligned with that. And simplify doesn't mean you can't have ambitious goals. It just means you're hyper clear what it is you want in life. And you're just narrowing it down on that. You're focusing your time, your energy, all your efforts into those things. And for everything else, you're affectionately detached from.

• 16:07André Duqum?

  So I wanna, I would love to keep diving into that. But to really set the stage and how you, what your conception and understanding of how the mind works and how focus works, just to get right to it. What are the different levels of the mind? And how, let's start unraveling how the mind works. That way, we can know what to do with our mind, focus and awareness.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  I, I always tell people, we just need a basic understanding of the mind in order to understand it, be able to control it and direct it. People go down the rabbit hole too much because it's so fascinating. And then stay down the rabbit hole and never come up, you know, and, and live life.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  If you look in my book, The Power of Unwavering Focus, chapters three to five talk about the mind. And there's two things you need to know. One is the mind has a vast space with many different areas within it. And awareness, I define awareness as a glowing ball of light. And you are pure awareness moving through the mind. The mind doesn't move, awareness moves within the mind. And wherever awareness goes, because it's a glowing ball of light, it lights up that area and you become conscious of it. So if awareness goes to the angry area of the mind, it lights up the angry area of the mind. You become conscious of being angry. Are you angry? No, you're in an area of the mind called anger, experiencing anger. You are pure awareness in that area of the mind.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  As easily as you went there, you can move your awareness to the happy area of the mind. It lights up the happy area of the mind. You become conscious of being happy. Are you happy? No, you are pure awareness in an area of the mind called happiness, experiencing happiness.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  So what is the takeaway? The takeaway is that the mind and awareness are two distinctly separate things. The mind doesn't move, awareness moves within the mind. And your goal is to control where awareness goes in your mind. And that's the end of the class. And if you can get that, it'll completely change your life. Do you know how to drive a stick shift car?

• 18:17André Duqum?

  I have, yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. What do you need to know? Three paddles, you've got your clutch, your brake, accelerator, your gears. Steering wheel, left, right. Oh, straight, go forward, right? The critical thing is knowing when to release the clutch, step on the accelerator and change the gears. If you can get that right, you can drive. If you can't, the car just hops and then stalls. You don't need to learn about the fuel injection, the carburetor, none of that, how the brake fluid works, none of that stuff. Once you get those things down, maybe the indicator to turn left or right, you get to drive anywhere you want to go. And once you understand that you're not the mind, that you're pure awareness moving within the mind,

• 19:01Speaker 00

  that's all you need to know about the mind. You can go deeper and study about the prefrontal cortex and what the serotonin does and the dopamine does and the this and the that. And when I went to sleep, I spent two hours in the gamma waves and then three hours in the delta waves and then five minutes in the this and this state and that state. You can do that till the cows come home and it's not going to make a difference. But at the end of the day, can you control where your awareness goes? Because at any given point in time, either I'm in charge of where my ball of light is going in the mind, my mind, or my environment is the people and things around me. So if you came up to me and said, Dhanapani, your shawl is ugly.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  I can allow you to take my awareness to an upset area of the mind and I reach over and pinch you, or I could hold my awareness in an uplifting area of the mind and say, oh, thank you so much for letting me know I should go shopping today, you know? And my ability to control my awareness allows me to choose how I respond and react to life's experiences. That's the fundamental level. Ultimately, the goal is to take awareness in a controlled and focused way into your superconscious area of the mind and experience the self inside of you. That is the goal, but you need to be able to navigate awareness

• 20:26Speaker 00

  within the mind. But understanding that awareness and the mind are two separate things is the first step.

• 20:33André Duqum?

  You spent so many years deep in the contemplative practices and studying every day and would you say that there is a correlation to how matured your consciousness is, like how much you've grown as a person and how distractible you are? Like, is there a link between how easily distracted somebody is and where they're at on their journey of development?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Yes, I would say the more you, if you were now, remember I said the mind is a vast space, right, with many different areas. If we were to put a framework around that vast space, we could look at the mind as a three-story building. The ground floor would be your conscious mind, your instinctive area of the mind. The second floor would be your subconscious, which is your intellectual area of the mind, and the third floor is your intuition or the superconscious area of the mind. At any given point in time, that ball, your awareness, is in one of those floors. Now, you can't be on the second floor of the house and the first floor of the house at the same time. So when you're in the conscious area of the mind, which is the external mind where you're dealing with your five senses,

• 21:43Speaker 00

  your physical body, everything around you, that world is very chaotic and distracted. But if through your meditation and the work you've done with yourself, if you've been able to take your ball of light to the third floor and experience even part of the superconscious area of the mind and experience it enough time where you start to realize that it exists, not just a one-off experience.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Then you get less distracted in life because you go, I want that. I really, really want that. And all these other things don't matter to me. It's the same way if you look at a professional athlete, like a tennis player or a soccer player, that's playing at the highest level. They've tasted something, you know, on one end of the spectrum of winning, of the highest form of excellence. And they want that so badly, they're not willing to get distracted by everything else that's going on in life. And they're just focused on getting that. So the mystic is no different. He or she, through the ability to concentrate really well,

• 22:51Speaker 00

  has been able to navigate their awareness to the superconscious here of the mind, multiple times to experience it enough where it's gone from knowing to deep experience or realization that such a thing exists inside of us, that you go, this is why I'm here on this planet. I am here to know thyself, to know who I am. Now, all these things around me are fascinating, but not as fascinating as compared to what's inside of me. So there's less to be distracted with. It's only when you don't have the experience of something greater, that something lesser, so to speak, becomes more inviting and charming.

• 23:40André Duqum?

  Having the taste, the ontological, the first person experience of, you use the word superconscious, that higher state of mind. To me, that is one of the most immediately transformative experiences because it becomes deniable, it becomes self-evident in your experience, right? You can be taught, listen to a million podcasts till the cow come home, of what you should do, of what's worth going after, of who you are. And it's all outside in, right? And so, why I love having this conversation, especially with somebody who's been deep in the practice yourself for many years, is that... You become a walking invitation when you have tasted that place within yourself

• 24:22André Duqum?

  and you're no longer under the constant delusion that your life is going to be fulfilled from an arrangement of circumstances outside of yourself, fully. When you've tasted how fulfilled you can be, just in your own being, by tasting that level of yourself. I'm curious, how does that rewire how you walk back into the world? You still build businesses, you're still in the world, you're still creating a lot of things. But how does that change what you think that those things are gonna actually give you?

• 24:54Speaker 00

  So I was a celibate Hindu monk, living in a cloistered monastery. And now I'm a Hindu priest. In Hinduism, priests, monks, lead celibate lives by themselves or in cloisters with each other. And Hindu priests fall under the categories of householder. So there's two paths in Hinduism, it's a monastic or a householder. So now that I'm a householder, and as a priest, and have a family and a business, I need to support myself. So part of having business is to earn an income, so that I could have a life that I could live and provide for my family.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  The critical part here is that

• 25:38Speaker 00

  it's very difficult to live in the world and pursue a deeply spiritual path if you do not have enough financial resources. In Hinduism, there are four goals for a householder's path.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Wealth, love, righteous action, and enlightenment. But it starts with wealth, which a lot of people think that money is the root of all evil. And when I grew up, you know, deeply interested in spirituality, people would tell me, money is bad. But here you have Hinduism, the oldest religion in the world, tells you that if you do live in the world, that should be your first pursuit. Because when you can buy shelter, you can buy food and safety for your family and security for your family, you'll have the peace of mind to go sit down and go with them without having to think, how am I going to pay for my children's school fees? Can I put food on the table tomorrow? Can I meet rent?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  And all of these things that are necessities for just existing. So the pursuit of money for me is solely for the purpose of buying me a lifestyle that allows me to pursue my ultimate purpose, which is self-realization. And when, when I can no longer assign purpose to the pursuit of money, then money is not worth pursuing anymore. Some people just love making money, and that's totally fine. We all have our own lives and we can do whatever the heck we want with it. For me, money serves a very clear purpose.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  It's buying me the life that can allow me to pursue my spiritual life. If that makes sense.

• 27:28André Duqum?

  Yeah, that's, I think, important to give the context around because, I mean, it's foundationally Maslow's hierarchy in some sense. You know, you living in the world, if you're not going to be in a cloistered monastery where you can just fully dedicate, you don't have to worry about the worldly situations, you know, as much.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  But don't forget, also in the monastery, the monastery needed to get income to pay bills still.

• 27:50André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  You know, to feed the monks, for health insurance, for doctors' fees, pay water bills. It's not like the monastery could exist without money. People just don't see that part of it. They see the monks walking in robes and meditating. They go like, look at that life. No money concerns, no this. They were monks in the monastery. Their sole focus was to acquire money to feed all the other monks. Right? Money is needed.

• 28:21André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Whether you're a monastic or a household.

• 28:25André Duqum?

  But I do want to go back to, so you talked about having that taste of essentially the superconscious, you know, having that that interior experience where you go beyond the limitations of identification with your own thought and emotion. Part of obviously why we're so distracted is because we think we're our thoughts. And so when you taste yourself beyond that, how has it rewritten what you think the external world is going to give you?

• 28:54Speaker 00

  I think it's more clarity of what do I need to do in the external world that will support this journey? And you're more wisely discerning as to how you're moving in the external world and engaging with the external world. And what you're engaging with and what you're doing serves a bigger purpose of supporting this inner journey. And going into the superconscious is not a binary experience. It's, it's, this is a terrible analogy, but imagine, and an inaccurate one. Imagine if I was flying to the sun. As I got, as I left earth and get closer and closer to the sun, I would feel hotter and

• 29:39Speaker 00

  hotter. It doesn't work that way, but you know, but imagine this, if I was getting closer to the sun, I would feel more of the sun's heat. The superconscious is that way. As you touch into the fringes of the superconscious, you experience the furthest part of it, right? It's, you feel warm, but you can go further and get hotter and hotter and hotter as you'd get to finally to the core of the sun, which is the self. So a lot of times, people mistakenly think that if I touch into the superconscious, I become enlightened, I become enlightened, and then that's it. It's like a light switch. It's an on and off, and then I don't have to do anything else. I just sit there and just be. The whole

• 30:23Speaker 00

  spiritual path is work, hard work. And it doesn't sell. No one wants that.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  The way you become a rich guru is you don't sell hard work. You sell an easy spiritual path, you know? But it's nothing but hard work and it doesn't end. And you just have to keep working and working and working on yourself over and over again. And you have to keep taking your awareness into the superconscious, experiencing it, coming back out again. And there's a difference between knowing something and realizing something. And realizing something causes a permanent shift in behavior, in perspective, and how you act and react and how you see the world. There are a million people that can talk about this better than I can,

• 31:19Speaker 00

  from intellectual, understanding place. But I think not everybody can do the work consistently. The same work, not different work. Boring, repetitive, over and over, year after year, decade after decade. Same thing to go into the superconscious over and over again. That's difficult for most.

• 31:43André Duqum?

  So we have these three levels, the conscious, the subconscious, the superconscious. Most of our waking life were in our conscious mind, right? You gave the delineation between the mind, which is like a room with empty vast space and the awareness can like a light bulb or go anywhere within that room.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, or within the mansion, imagine. And each room would be a different area of the mind in the mansion. Yeah.

• 32:12André Duqum?

  So I think most people would agree that when distracted, it's like living in a mansion where the awareness is very sporadic, chaotic and without control. It's bouncing from, essentially dictated by the environment, right? Any stimulus, whatever dopaminergic impulse, you just kind of go from one thing to another and...

• 32:38André Duqum?

  We're experiencing levels of anxiety and loneliness more now than ever. And I'm curious your thoughts on the connection between the two. Because when you're so distracted,

• 32:48André Duqum?

  there's this like low level anxiety and suffering that kind of is coupled with it in ways that we don't always admit to ourself. But anybody who doom scrolls feels empty on the other side of it, right? So what is the link there between being distracted and feeling empty? And then we can go into the very real practices that support us being concentrated.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  In my book, I talk towards the end about anxiety and stress and how that relates to awareness in the mind. The critical thing is understanding, what is the movement of awareness that causes anxiety? If awareness doesn't move, that means it's focused. If I can keep my ball of light on you, it's focused. What is the outcome of that? I'm present. I'm completely here, not anywhere else. Anxiety would be something like this. I have projects A, B, C, and D. I'm working on project A. After three minutes, my awareness leaves project A and goes to B and goes, shoot, I was supposed to send a Zoom meeting link out. Like the call's in half an hour.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  I bet you everybody's waiting for the link. And then I come back to A, keep working on A for another minute. Awareness leaves A, goes to C and go, I never sent the invoice out to the client. He was waiting for it yesterday. Shoot, I really got to get that done. Then I come back to A again, keep working on A. Then I go to project D, engage with that for another 10 seconds, come back to A, keep working on A, then I go to B, I come back to A, I go back to C, I come back to A, I go back to A, I come back to go to B. And I keep doing this. And what am I building? Anxiety. Uncontrolled awareness, which is distraction, leads to anxiety. And those of you who are listening, try this experience at home. Make a list of 10 things you need to do,

• 34:38Speaker 00

  work related or home related, that are fairly important. And start moving your awareness between each of them for like about 15 seconds. Keep awareness on one thing for 15 seconds and then move to the next thing. Go through your to do list of all the things you need to do about that. And then move to the next thing. Engage in that for another 15, 20 seconds, then move to the next thing. Tell me how you feel after 15 minutes. If you're not anxious, I'll be surprised. I do this in a workshop and everybody says, like, stop. Because that's what we do. Awareness is CNO on the phone and then it goes here and then it goes there and it comes back here and it goes there and it goes through a to-do list in their head, comes back here. You do this over and over again, all day long. You build anxiety.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  So the critical thing is understanding what is awareness doing that results in anxiety? What is awareness doing that results in being present? You have to understand the mind and the mechanics of the mind so that you can prevent anxiety. You can be present. You can prevent being stressed. You can prevent fear.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  But you need to know the mechanics of the mind. And you do not need to know an in-depth mechanics of the mind. It's like driving a stick-shift car. I don't need to know how the carburetor works. I need to know how to clutch and the accelerator and the gear stick work. Does that make sense?

• 36:02André Duqum?

  No, absolutely. I think even when it comes to things, you know, I heard stress is resistance to existence. Like, there is this, there's things in our life that we do or don't want to do. And let's take like a negative emotional experience as an example.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:20André Duqum?

  I'm curious, because there's almost like the stress and anxiety comes from our inability to actually be with something fully. When I've experienced negative emotional states or grief or heartbreak or whatever, when I'm actually fully in it and fully with it and can put my full focus on it and the resistance to it dissolves, then the suffering surrounded with it dissolves also. And so I'm curious your thoughts on the link between stress being a a byproduct of simply our lack of willingness to be with something fully.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  I think there's so many reasons why stress comes along. When awareness moves all over the mind like that, the first state is anxiety and then prolonged states of anxiety lead to stress. So for me, the ability to control awareness and the mind is the first step to eliminating anxiety and then eliminating stress completely. And then, you know what you're talking about, about the unresolved emotional experiences in the subconscious, which is that second flaw can be extremely stressful as well. But that's a whole nother can of worms, you know, to,

• 37:32Speaker 00

  to, to explore and unravel. Yep.

• 37:37André Duqum?

  Hey fam, a quick share about our skin. Healthy skin, I think, is largely driven by lifestyle, things like diet, stress, exercise, sleep. But I also use a couple of products I know I can trust while keeping my routine minimal. One brand I love is OneSkin. Born from over a decade of longevity research, OneSkin's OS01 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. What makes it different is that OS01 is the first ingredient proven to target senescent cells, which are the key drivers of wrinkles, fine lines, and loss of elasticity. It's been validated in four peer-reviewed clinical studies.

• 38:19André Duqum?

  The company was founded by an all-woman team of PhDs in stem cell biology and skin regeneration. So basically, it's good stuff. I use it because I care about what's happening underneath my skin, not just on the surface. So for a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using code KNOWTHEYSELF at oneskin.co/nothyself. That's oneskin.co/nothyself. That's 15% off. They're gonna ask you where you heard about them. Let them know we sent you. I hope you enjoy. Back to the episode.

• 38:54André Duqum?

  I want to read this little quote from your book.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:56André Duqum?

  Because I think it gets at this quite well.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 38:58André Duqum?

  So in your words.

• 39:02André Duqum?

  Most people are unable to create what they want in life because they have very little control over where their awareness goes each day. As a result, their energy is flowing to places their environment dictates, and what is manifesting in their life is not what they had intended. Their awareness runs rampant throughout the day, driven so much in today's world by social media algorithms and technology. Their finite energy is dispersed across vast areas as opposed to being harnessed and focused on a few specific things. As a result, none of their goals manifest in life. Frustration brews, eventually boiling over into discouragement. Persistent discouragement dampens the will, leading to the eventual evaporation of hope. The conscious mastery of awareness in the mind

• 39:45André Duqum?

  is an educated and a skill that must be taught to every individual. It is the fundamental building block needed to govern oneself effectively in order to be living a truly rewarding life. Well said.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Um, thank you.

• 40:01André Duqum?

  And so I think the problem is quite clear, deep into the podcast now, of the importance of focus. And I love how you bring it into our everyday experience. So talk to me about the very practical aspect of how we can hone our focus. What can people do to really have a focused mind and use the plentiful opportunities in the day to refine it and practice it?

• 40:29Speaker 00

  So first step, understanding awareness in the mind. Awareness, the mind doesn't move. Awareness moves within the mind. If you cannot get that, I can't help you with the second part. You're gonna find somebody else, you know? So, once you get that, now let's look at focus. Let's define what focus is, or concentration. I define focus as my ability to keep my awareness, my ball on you, light of you, my ball of light on you, until I choose to consciously move it to something else. My ability to keep my ball of light on you is my ability to focus. And that's how I define what focus is. My ball of light's on you and it starts bouncing around everywhere? I'm being distracted. So I think defining things is so critical

• 41:13Speaker 00

  because then we have a shared understanding of what, when we say focus, what does that mean? That means I can keep my awareness on you without it moving anywhere. And my guru had this beautiful saying, where awareness goes... Energy flows. So my awareness is on you. That's where my energy is flowing. You feel my energy coming towards you. You go like, oh, he's here. He's present with me. How do we focus? Really simple. We practice doing one thing at a time throughout the day. And what I recommend people to do is pick the non-negotiable reoccurring events in an average day. So that's a long average day would be a Monday to Friday. What's a simple, non-negotiable reoccurring event? If you live at home with your family, with a spouse and children,

• 41:58Speaker 00

  every day you speak with your spouse or with your child. It's, it's non-negotiable. It's reoccurring. So every time you speak with your child, give him or her your undivided attention. Keep your ball of light on him. It drifts away, bring it back. It drifts away, bring it back. If you speak with your child, a cumulative total of two hours a day, forty five minutes in the morning, twenty minutes here, ten minutes here, five minutes here. Add it all up, it's two hours. And every time you speak with your child, you use that as an opportunity to practice concentration. That's two hours of practice a day. We talked about the law of practice. You told me six hours a day, six days a week.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  I would still not play for the Lakers, right? But I would be better at basketball. So imagine if I was practicing concentration, practicing keeping my ball of light on one thing for two hours a day. After six months, what would I be good at? Imagine you played the piano two hours a day. Would you be better at it after? After six months, you would. So rather than create a practice in your life, find something that's already occurring, that is non-negotiable, and insert the practice into it. Would it be fair for me to say that most people don't need one more thing to do in their life? Right? Most people are pretty full, right?

• 43:22Speaker 00

  So rather than me saying, hey, wake up in the morning, do yoga, journal, meditate, blah, blah, blah, no one's gonna do that. But if I say, hey, you talk to your child every day, you talk to your spouse every day. Every time you speak with them, keep your ball of light on them. Wanders away, bring it back. Wanders away, bring it back. Now, this is simple. You don't have to change your life. You're just changing how you're interacting with your loved one. And it doesn't have to be with a person. It could be an action like brushing your teeth. If you spend two minutes brushing your teeth instead of scrolling while you brush, why don't you just keep your ball of light on your toothbrush? It drifts away, bring it back. It drifts away, bring it back. Now, that's two minutes of practicing concentration.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Having breakfast.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  You know? Why don't you just eat breakfast for five minutes? That's five minutes of practice and concentration. Now, I add up the two hours with my child, the two minutes brushing teeth, the five minutes having breakfast. By the end of the day, I'm up to two and a half hours, maybe three hours of practice and concentration after six months. I'm getting better at it. After a year, I'm really good at it. Now, I go through my life. I meet a friend. I'm completely present. My ball of light has been trained to just be here and not wander off. It's like a dog. And I lived in New York for a long time and I go for a walk and I see people walking the dog. It felt almost always like the dog was walking them. The dog was pulling them here and pulling them over there.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  And, you know, they're always raining the dog back. That's like most people's awareness. It's always running off like an untrained dog. But a really well-trained dog would just walk by your side. And you want your awareness to be like a well-trained dog that's with you until it's allowed to get engaged with something else.

• 45:20André Duqum?

  So let's zoom in.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Does that make sense?

• 45:21André Duqum?

  Absolutely.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:23André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, and I love how accessible it is and doesn't add a to do list on top of everyone's already full busy life.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:30André Duqum?

  But that you can use a plentiful, non-negotiable, reoccurring opportunities in our day to practice this.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  We all have this.

• 45:37André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  All of us, every one of us has a non-negotiable, insert the practice into that and make it a part of your life.

• 45:44André Duqum?

  So let's go into that experience, right? Because in many ways, it's been said like, the things that are actually good for you taste like poison in the beginning and then are actually have a sweet aftertaste. The things that are bad for you have a sweet taste going in and bitter aftertaste.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:59André Duqum?

  Doom scrolling feels great in the moment and then horrible afterwards.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:03André Duqum?

  Folding your laundry with absolute presence feels boring or annoying at first, but then you actually feel better after.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:10André Duqum?

  So making the bed, folding laundry, having, being present with your child, eating your breakfast. When you are in that moment and the mind is distracted, is it simply just a practice of bringing back when you noticed your mind gets drifted away?

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Did your mind drift away?

• 46:31André Duqum?

  In that moment?

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or did awareness drift away?

• 46:35André Duqum?

  Uh.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Which one?

• 46:37André Duqum?

  Your awareness drifted away.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Yes. The mind didn't drift away.

• 46:40André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  So part of this is getting the terminology right. People always say to me, the mind drifted, the mind doesn't move.

• 46:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Awareness moves within the mind.

• 46:48André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  We have to train the mind to understand itself.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  So one of the critical things you can do is stop saying, not you, but just the general you.

• 46:59André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  That the my mind drifted away. No, your mind didn't drift away. Awareness drifted away and bring awareness back.

• 47:08André Duqum?

  That's, I'm glad you caught that. I think it's important to like, keep using the, the terms that are accurate because it does helpful. It's helpful for us to, to really anchor in the mechanism of what's happening.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  And the mind needs to understand it.

• 47:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Cause I can tell my mind anything. I can tell my mind the earth is flat. And we're like, yes, it is. I can tell my mind all kinds of things to believe it. So it's so important to use words, define those words, and then use them in the correct way to train the mind to understand itself, if that makes sense. Yeah. And keep it really, really simple. And now here comes the difficult part. It's too boring for people. Is that's all I need to do? Just keep bringing awareness back? Isn't there something more like a cross nostril breathing or an herb I can take? Don't you have like some secret monastery practice that I can do in the morning? A chant?

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Maybe an initiation I could do for $5,000? That, you know, you could bring me into a practice? You know, what about a, you know, a circle that we can gather or initiation?

• 48:18Speaker 00

  No, just bring awareness back. No one will do it. And that's why we are, everyone's distracted.

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• 49:12Speaker 00

  You give someone the simplest exercise in the world. Nothing I've said to you right now used any scientific terms. I didn't use any Sanskrit words. I used a ball of light. A three-year-old can understand this. A vast space, happy, sad, angry. And this ball of light travels in those spaces. I talk to kids this way and they go, get it.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  And all you have to do is keep bringing that ball of light back. Too simple. Give me something complicated.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  And no one will do it. So you go ahead and live your distracted life. That's the end of the class. It's the most unpopular book and teaching in the world.

• 50:00André Duqum?

  Now, this is-

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Why is that about humanity?

• 50:06André Duqum?

  It gives us a way to stay distracted, you know, when we overcomplicate.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Love to overcomplicate. It doesn't sell.

• 50:18André Duqum?

  There's part of us that doesn't, that doesn't want the solution also. There's part of us that deeply wants to stay in a state of unconscious or ignorance. There's also a state of us that wants and craves for the realized state, you know?

• 50:32Speaker 00

  But here's the thing also about focus, right? As soon as you can focus, your ball of light is one place, looking at something. The longer you stare at something, the more you see. Right?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  The more I look within, the more I see in a focused state of mind. If I take a thousand-page book and I just flip through the pages, what would I have read? Nothing. If I open a thousand-page book and I focus just on one page and read every sentence, I would have some insight into the book. If my ball of light's bouncing through my mind, you know, at a crazy pace, I wouldn't see anything. But if it stopped in one area for 20 minutes without moving, it would see what's in my mind. It potentially would see a past trauma or habit pattern that I really don't like about myself or certain characteristic about me that I don't like. Oof, that's very uncomfortable. So let's just keep moving.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  You know, let's not hang around too long. We might see things we don't want to see. So being distracted is a great exercise to avoid yourself.

• 51:43André Duqum?

  So let's say somebody for one day, one week, one month, one year, start to implement this simple practice of bringing back your awareness when it gets pulled by the environment into different things. How does the quality of mind transform on that journey?

• 52:01Speaker 00

  I would say less anxiety, less stress, less fear.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  I'll define fear as awareness leaving the present, going into the future, creating a situation that hasn't happened, and coming back and worrying about it. I'll tell a story my guru told me. So my guru was born in Lake Tahoe in 1927. And when he was seven years old, he was coming back in the family car. It was snowing really heavily. He was sitting in the back of the car. He's thinking to himself, I'm gonna miss my favorite radio program. We're gonna get stuck in the snow. And back then in 1934, there was no like reruns. And it was just a guy on a mic on a radio, you know? Like, he's done, he's done, that's it, you missed the episode. And then he saw what was happening in his mind. He saw his awareness leaving the present, going into the future,

• 52:53Speaker 00

  creating a situation in his mind where the car got stuck in the snow. His dad had to go dig the car out. And then they got home really late and missed the show and everything. And then his awareness coming back to the present and now worrying about the situation he created in his mind. Then he asked himself, are we stuck in the snow? He said, no. Are we still moving? Yes. At this pace, will we get home? He said, yes. Then he repeated to himself, I am all right right now. I am all right right now. In the eternity of the moment, I'm fine. Fear, he said at seven years old, is awareness leaving the present, going into the future, and creating a situation that hasn't happened, coming back to the present and worrying about it.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  So when you can start to control awareness and bring awareness back, you start to eliminate fear. Every time your awareness starts to leave the present, to go into the future and go, well, what if this happens? Or that happens? You go like, well, it hasn't. Bring it back and stay in the present and do what you need to to compensate for anything potential that might come up.

• 54:00André Duqum?

  So would you describe that phenomena as willpower?

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Yes, you need willpower to control that ball of light. So I would define, I like to define things sort of a shared vocabulary.

• 54:12André Duqum?

  Love it.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  If I could draw biceps around my mind, right? And I would call that willpower. Very poor definition of willpower, but let's call it willpower.

• 54:21André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  So my ball of light is drifting away. I use my biceps, I grab all of that ball of light and I just bring it back here.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  And now it stays here for five seconds and then it drifts away again. Because, but we have to be compassionate with ourselves. We're learning this at forty years old. That's forty years of unlearning we have to do. So the ball of light is used to drifting away. Now drifting away, drifting away again, we grab that ball of light, we bring it back. And we train it to do this every day, every week, every month. And after a few months, it learns to stay. You're just creating a new way of doing things. And now when my awareness is here, right on you, that's where my energy is flowing. Where awareness goes, energy flows. You feel my energy coming towards you. You go, I feel his presence. Have you ever had the experience of talking to somebody?

• 55:13Speaker 00

  And in that conversation, potentially usually with a partner or something like that, they look at you and they go, where are you?

• 55:23Speaker 00

  The correct answer is, I'm right here. Where are you? Well, I'm right here. In the context of what we've been talking about, what is the correct question to ask?

• 55:35André Duqum?

  Where's your awareness?

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Oh, honey, it left the moment you started talking.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  Right? Because I'm physically present. You start talking, my awareness starts drifting away.

• 55:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  So where's your awareness? Long gone. Now, how does that person know you're no longer present anymore?

• 55:55André Duqum?

  Your energy.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  Yes, because where awareness goes?

• 55:57André Duqum?

  Energy goes.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Energy flows. So if my awareness is on you, you feel my energy flowing towards you. Now you reply to me, I asked you a question, you reply, you're talking, my awareness drifts away. And I think like, oh, what should I have for lunch? I'm still looking at you going, hmm, interesting, yeah, hmm, right. Hmm. But my awareness is somewhere else. That's where my energy is flowing. That person no longer feels the energy coming towards them. They look at you and they go, where are you? I'm right here. Where's the awareness? Oh, honey, it left.

• 56:29André Duqum?

  Everyone knows that sensation, you know, maybe at a party or at a gathering where

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:34André Duqum?

  they're talking to someone who seems uninterested. They're looking over the shoulder, trying to see who is the more interesting person to talk to, or their mind's somewhere else, or they're talking to their spouse.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Their awareness is somewhere else.

• 56:44André Duqum?

  Their awareness is somewhere else.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  By the end of this podcast, you'll be a master.

• 56:50André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:53André Duqum?

  But there is a, there is a, there's a direct link to our ability to have a concentrated willpower and directed awareness and observing where that's absent in the folks and the people around us.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm sensitive to energy.

• 57:10André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  So when I'm talking to someone and I don't feel the energy coming to me, even though they're looking at me and going, hmm. Then I go like, they're, they're off somewhere.

• 57:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  So why am I here? Going back to your initial, where you started about, life is finite.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  If I said to you, Andre, if someone came in here and said, you know, you had two hours to live, would you be doing this podcast?

• 57:38André Duqum?

  Probably not, but we could, we could hang out and figure out what we're gonna do together. Two hours is pretty finite.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Right. And imagine that you say, okay, two hours, I'm out of here. And you're about to leave and they say, hey, can I have five minutes of your time? And you're like, oh, I only have two hours. And then out of the compassion you have, you say, okay, I'll give you five minutes. So you sit here and we're talking for five minutes. As we're talking, I pull out my phone and I start scrolling. Would you be pissed?

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Knowing that you had two hours to live, you chose to give me five minutes.

• 58:12André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  And in that five minutes, I'm scrolling.

• 58:15André Duqum?

  Right.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  So I look at my life this way. Somewhere out there, there's a clock counting down with my name on it. I just don't know how many minutes I have left. I'm giving you a portion of what I have,

• 58:31Speaker 00

  and you're not even present.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  I don't want to be here. I want to be somewhere else. Because those minutes I'm giving you, I will never get back. So one of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention. The ability to keep awareness here. Energy flows towards you, I'm completely present. Not only am I honoring the finite life that I have, I'm also honoring your finite life. Because you only have X amount of minutes in life left. You chose to give me some of it. The very least I could do is be present by being completely focused. And that's me honoring this finite window that you have in this world that you chose to share with me.

• 59:20André Duqum?

  It rewrites, I think, our hierarchy or priority of what we think is valuable. Because I could give you a thousand dollars right now. You might appreciate it, you know. But I can make more thousands of dollars, right? I can't make back this time that I gave you my undivided attention. And so because that's a non-renewable resource, it's way more valuable.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  It's priceless. And that's why when I'm very thoughtful about who I spend time with and if I'm with them, I'm completely here. What a gift. My guru gave me that gift. Whenever he was with me, he was completely present. And I thought, like, what a gift to give me that. And he's choosing out of the finite time that he has on this planet. He's taking this slice and saying, I'm choosing to give this to you. There could be a million things he could have done, but he chose to give it to me. I can honor that by being focused and hence being present. But we don't. How many times do you go? I mean, I travel a lot and, you know, I'm out in planes and airports and restaurants.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  And how many people are sitting, eating their food? I was in the lounge at the airport yesterday, and there was a husband and wife sitting next to each other, both of them on the phone. And they're scrolling and telling each other what they're seeing. No one's paying attention. I'm going like, honey, can you believe this? This, this, this. Uh huh. Oh, look at this, this, this. Uh huh.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  It was just...

• 1:00:52André Duqum?

  I think airports are a great time to put this into practice too, because it's such a distracted, chaotic environment from TSA to, you know, and just giving like a TSA agent or somebody that's behind the desk who's, because everybody's so anxious, they're so distracted, they don't often get presence. And so like sincere kindness and presence feels like an immense gift, I feel like, in those moments.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  It's such a great gift to give anybody. And it's, nothing I had is difficult to do. The question comes down is whether you want to do it, you know? And I think also the other thing is that people love to go down rabbit holes, especially today, you know, diving into long studies and research. Do you know that Stanford University came out with this research on the mind? And they took the sample and they came out with this, this, this. And then Harvard came out with this study and all fascinating, right? At the end of the day, the simple question is, can you keep your awareness on somebody without it moving away? And if you can't do this, all those other things really don't matter.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  They're great distractions, they're wonderful to talk about, can sound intellectual and smart.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  But can you actually just do it? What is the outcome you want just to do this? You can read a thousand damn books, meditate till the cows come home. Can you keep your ball of light on one thing?

• 1:02:24André Duqum?

  I say often that attention is our spiritual currency. That's why we pay it, just like with any currency, you know? When I'm paying attention, that's what I'm like.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Oh, paying attention, I like that.

• 1:02:34André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Never looked at it that way.

• 1:02:37André Duqum?

  Yeah. This is like, this is my life. If whatever your conception of spirituality, whatever I'm doing at any given moment with my attention is what I'm doing with that life, that spirituality in a sense. And I think from that, it's like, okay, what am I, what am I paying with in every moment? Super, super helpful. So you?

• 1:03:00André Duqum?

  Could I just ask a couple of things about your personal path? Because at four, was it, do I have it right? That you decided you wanted to be a monk? Or you thought you wanted to be a monk?

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, around four or five, I was living in Malaysia. A monk had come to my house. He was wearing orange robe and stripes, the whole setup.

• 1:03:19André Duqum?

  A little bit more orange.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, more orange, yeah. And I saw him and I said, that's me. And I didn't know what a monk was, so I didn't even know he was a monk. You know? But it wasn't till, I think around eight or nine years old, that I realized it wasn't about being monastic. It was about self-realization, which was what I was seeking. The monastic path is the most efficient way to get that. Obviously, at that age, I couldn't articulate all this that well. But the drive really was for me. I think I came to the realization that everything in life goes through three phases. Everything is created, exists for a while, and then it goes away.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  I remember going to my cousin's birthday party and my brother and I were excited. You know, we were all day, we're getting ready to go. And that was the creation part of it. And then my parents driving me there. And then the middle part of it was that we were at the party, eating cake, playing balloons, playing with all my cousins, and then getting in the car and driving home. And I remember sitting in the back, looking out the window, thinking to myself, that's it. It ended. That sucks, you know? And we didn't grow up wealthy. And you know, occasionally we'd go to like a restaurant once a year or have ice cream or something. That was very exciting to go out, have that, eat the ice cream,

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  and then it ended. Well, that sucks again. People were born and they live and then they die. So what is the one permanent thing in this life? And somehow, we humans go through the same cycle. We are born, you know, we live in diapers, we go to school, we learn, we grow up, we get a job, find a partner, we have babies, we raise those babies, earn money, children grow up, watch the children get married, children have kids, we have grandkids, we get older, we die, and then we do it all over again. For hundreds of years, for thousands of years.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Isn't that a little weird? I don't even wanna stop banging, going, like, hang on a second. Is that why we're here? People say, oh, you know, life's about experiences. I could reincarnate a million times and still not have every experience this planet has to offer me. So if you say life is about experiences, it's like, it's endless, literally endless. So why are we here? What are we here to do? And that was the pursuit. It seemed pointless, so pointless.

• 1:06:08André Duqum?

  And that was the impetus for you to take up a monastic life?

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. To have a teacher that could, find a teacher that could articulate to me the, again, I'm giving the spectre from here, right? So I didn't have this clarity at that time. I just knew what I wanted, I just didn't put it in words. I have a teacher that could define for me the philosophy, because the philosophy defines the goal. And even though I grew up a Hindu, he helped me define the Hindu philosophy and define the goal within Hindu philosophy, which is self-realization. Through deep meditation, can I go within and experience divinity inside of me? I am divinity, I am the self. Can I experience that self inside of me? What is the path to that?

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  And what is the lifestyle I need to live to stay on the path to get to that goal? And he was someone that could articulate all that to me very clearly.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  Give me tools and practices that were really practical and simple, like awareness of the mind and focus and developing willpower and managing energy.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  And then also be able to put signposts of progress. You know, how do I know I'm making progress? I remember he said to me once, you know, if you meditate every day for six months and after six months, you're still a jerk. Maybe you're doing the wrong practice. There needs to be signposts of progress. How do you know you're making progress? What are the benchmarks? And if I'm on a weight loss program and I'm not measuring if I'm losing weight, then I don't know if it's working or not.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  So that was the question. Fortunately, I found a teacher that could, was very real to me because I met so many gurus along the way as I was growing up. And they were all very philosophical. They spoke in very soft guru-like voices, you know, that had long pauses, that they were reflecting before they spoke. And I'm like, can you just tell me? And, and just keep it really simple so I can understand? You know, they quoted philosophy and scripture. And I'm like, none of this stuff is useful to me. Because at the end of the day, it's like, when the, where does the rubber hit the road? You know, life has so much

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  complications, just as it is. Most people are just trying to get through the day. You know, get the kids dressed, get them fed, get the school lunch ready, get them to school, get to work, get through work, come home, figure out dinner again, you know? Get the kids homework, showered, cleaned, to bed.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  We need to keep things super simple if we want to make progress. And most people can't, so they don't end up making progress. And I wanted a teacher that could just keep it really real and doable.

• 1:09:06André Duqum?

  So you found him?

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  I found him.

• 1:09:08André Duqum?

  And then you went and you decided, what was that decision like?

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  Uh, joining the monastery?

• 1:09:13André Duqum?

  Yeah. Did you know you were gonna be there for a decade?

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  No, I wanted to join for life. There was no period that I wanted to stay. You don't join the monastery for periods of time, you join for commitment.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  Wasn't a difficult decision, I wanted it for so long.

• 1:09:30André Duqum?

  And you were 21?

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  Twenty-three, twenty-four. Yeah, so quite old already. Part of my mind felt like, you know, a good number of years, a couple of decades were wasted just, you know, wandering around aimlessly on the planet.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  Doing what the hell, I don't know.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the decision to join wasn't difficult, that was clear. I just didn't want to give my life away to be with someone who wasn't, you know, like, full of BS. It had to be.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, unfortunately, he died three years after I joined. And, you know, I stayed for seven more years, my vows came up for renewal, and then I decided not to renew them.

• 1:10:12André Duqum?

  What was his name?

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Subramunia Swami, or Gurdeva, as we call him. And the monastery is in Kauai, in Hawaii.

• 1:10:20André Duqum?

  Which I'm flying out to tomorrow.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, amazing, I hope you get to go see it.

• 1:10:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, I will.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  It's a beautiful place.

• 1:10:26André Duqum?

  I'm excited to go.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28André Duqum?

  Going for, uh, to see a friend and, uh, to spend a week there, but, um, I like to, I mean, Kauai is just like absolute heaven on earth for me, it's so special. And a place I like to go, cause, um, we're just like launching our online community, and I have some things I want to go and spend some time to get really clear on the vision around. Uh, but I was mentioning before this, and you, uh, I didn't realize it was in Kauai, of all the islands, so I'm definitely gonna go check it out. And so, he passed three years until you staying there. You stayed for 10 years, and then there was a decision to go back into the world and be a householder. As a Hindu priest.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yep, and that's when I left.

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• 1:11:54André Duqum?

  So, I would love to just zoom in a bit on what was happening to you in your time there, because you mentioned you're a very sensitive individual, right? You can become aware and more keenly aware where somebody's energy is when you're here, fully, right?

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10André Duqum?

  And that is a muscle, like your bicep, which maybe was scrawny at the start, and your faculty of willpower got strengthened over that time. And this is where I'd love to ask you a little bit deeper into some of those contemplative practices and experiences, which you can share to whatever degree feels right for you. But I think I really appreciate the simplicity of everything that you've shared in this podcast.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36André Duqum?

  And sometimes talking about what's possible in terms of higher states of consciousness and deeper states of complete absorption are very exciting, because people can feel you. You're a very sincere guy who doesn't like to overcomplicate things.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51André Duqum?

  When people hear that there is this experience on offer, available to us as human beings, where you can taste yourself in such a vast, beautiful way, it's exciting and it's motivating for us to go and experience that firsthand. So what I'm sure started out as growing your mind, training your awareness.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  Good job.

• 1:13:14André Duqum?

  Got there.

• 1:13:18André Duqum?

  I'm sure there were various experiences, which you don't have to divulge, you know, the what exactly happened or whatever, but what starts as training the awareness grows deeper into these various states, which the eastern traditions, ancient wisdom traditions have created different maps for. But what's the next step deeper in terms of what's possible, once you train your awareness and you go deeper into the self?

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  I want to answer that question, but I think there's something that comes before that. And what comes before that is getting clear on what philosophy you subscribe to. So, most people are like a spiritual mouse, just going around nibbling at a whole bunch of things. I like to say people like to eat off the spiritual buffet table, you know, a little Hinduism, a little Buddhism, a little ayahuasca, a little, you know, Native Americans, put it all in a big bowl and eat it. Why do I need to give it a name? Well, you give your damn cat a name, you know? So, let me just be spiritual, not religious. People hate the C-word, which is commit.

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  And my guru used to say, people are committed to not being committed. If you want to go far into the superconscious, you have to nail down on a very clear philosophy, because the philosophy defines the goal. And one common thing that people getting into spirituality say is that, you know, all religions say the same thing. They don't, they deeply contradict each other. So, they may agree on a surface level, be good, don't lie, don't steal, do charity, all that kind of stuff. You scrape past that thin layer, they all contradict each other. The eastern religions believe in... For example, the Abrahamic religions believe in one God. Islam does, Judaism does, Christianity.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Hinduism is monotheistic, it believes in one God, many angels, some great angels. Contrary to what most Hindus say, that Hinduism has many gods, it's actually monotheistic. Buddhism doesn't have a God. So now, at this level, they're already different, right? Now, eastern religions believe in karma and reincarnation. Soul living in a body, reincarnating over and over again, evolving. Abrahamic religions believe in one life. You're born, you live, you die, typically a heaven-hell situation, judgment day kind of thing. So, before we dive into this super-conscious and what you're gonna experience, the philosophy is gonna dictate all of that. If I have one life, you can be sure I'm not here in a podcast with you.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  Because when I die, I'm getting to some court that's gonna decide I'm going up or down. I don't have time to waste. I want the eastern philosophy, I'm gonna reincarnate, I got time, let's keep chatting, you know? So, all of that makes a big difference. And then, what is God? Typically, the Abrahamic religion believe God is up there, right? A being. Hinduism believes divinity is in all things, pure energy in everything. You, me, the trees, the stones. Very different, right? One's saying, if God is up there, the path is a different path. If God is inside, you can't use the path to go up there to get the path to go inside. That's a different path.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  So, the philosophy has to be really clear. You have to figure out what philosophy do you subscribe to? Because that's gonna define the goal. I subscribe to a Hindu philosophy that defines that divinity is in all things, including inside of me, which means then the path is to go within and experience the self within. But if you inherently believe that divinity is not in all things, but divinity is up there, then meditation's not for you, because it shouldn't be an internal practice. I had a Christian lady wanting to come on one of my retreats once. And she's Christian. I said, "You're welcome to come by." I said, "By the way, we believe divinity is inside, and our practice is going to take you inside to experience God inside." She goes, "Well, God's not inside." I thought, "Well, then you're on the wrong retreat."

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  I'm going to take you away from your belief and your practice. So we need to start by getting clarity around our philosophy. To just start talking about the sexy stuff, which is the superconscious and the self and what we experience inside us, erroneous. Get the philosophy right. Philosophy defines the goal. If the goal is to go within and experience the superconscious and the depths of it, the self, then that becomes really clear. You have three states of mind: the conscious mind, the subconscious, and the superconscious. The conscious is the external mind. How do you get the external mind sorted? You need the right lifestyle. Most people live a chaotic lifestyle.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  That's why in the Hindu path, the first two steps on the spiritual path is lifestyle design. Because if your life is crazy, you can't go inside. So getting that lifestyle sorted, then going through the subconscious, doing the work on yourself, because that middle layer is everything you've ever experienced in your past, which you have to face and acknowledge and own before you tap into the superconscious and the third floor. And as you go through the fringes of the superconscious and start to go within and deeper and deeper within, I would say one of the first things you experience is,

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  and for everybody it's different, you know, the sense of you are pure energy. Now, law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. You can't create or destroy energy. And physics will tell you energy is in everything, right? There's nothing that doesn't have energy. So if energy is inside of me, and energy cannot be created or destroyed, is physics saying I've always existed?

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  And if I have, what is that essence of that energy? Energy can be transformed from one form to another. So as this body decays, energy doesn't disappear. It gets transformed to something else that's also lost the more dynamics. But energy doesn't die or gets destroyed. What is that experience of touching into that energy, knowing that you've always existed? And going deeper into that and realizing that that energy is pure, unconditional love, deep compassion and empathy, no judgment,

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  and just the purest form of love that you could experience. And even beyond that, as you go further and further into the superconscious.

• 1:20:17André Duqum?

  A couple of notes. One thing that I want to push back on a little bit, which I understand the philosophical orientation and how many of these different religions obviously have different epistemic orientations. To me, though, because belief is so infused with our identity societally and it often becomes a pacifier for our insecurity of not knowing, having, being able to experience different contemplative practices and meditation techniques without needing to change your orientation belief-wise, I feel like is a more gentle way into explore, to have the taste of something beyond your own thoughts and emotions, which then opens the door, I feel like, for different beliefs and philosophical orientations.

• 1:21:00André Duqum?

  That's why, I mean, I think this conversation and, you know, people can explore these practices at deeper lengths because it almost takes the pressure off of needing to know what is the right path versus can I discover what is true? And can it become self-evident internally first? Instead of top-down and the mind, you know?

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely, because if you don't explore, then how would you know?

• 1:21:21André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Right, it's the same way that, you know, a Western person might explore Hinduism, Buddhism and find that that's the right path for them. But I think the problem is that... If you keep just eating off the buffet table

• 1:21:33André Duqum?

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  And never make a commitment to anything, you have to commit at some point. If you wanna go far, if you just wanna wander around on the surface level, then the buffet is always great.

• 1:21:44André Duqum?

  Yeah, and I mean, this podcast in some ways is a buffet. I explore so many different lineages and paths and I completely wholeheartedly agree that we don't, we go wide and we sample and that's beautiful to, like you were meeting different gurus and finding, you know, what resonates the most, right?

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:03André Duqum?

  What is the path that calls you most? And then go narrow and deep, find it at its depths.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08André Duqum?

  And.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  But the critical thing here too, Andres, is how far do you wanna go in this life? I think that needs to be answered. You know, if I wanna play soccer in the local park with my friends, I don't have to do very much. If I wanna play in the English Premier League, it's a whole different conversation, right? So I think when it, oh, or anywhere in between. It doesn't have to be one or either, either or.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  So I think on the spiritual path, one has to ask him or herself, how far do I wanna go? If you say, you know, I just wanna find a sense of peace and calmness, then explore different traditions and delve into different things. But if you wanna go all the way, you know, the people that play in the French Open or the US Open or in the Premier League or in La Liga in Spain or whatever, they're not doing fifty different things. That's, that's their life. Anybody, even the best musicians, the best, you know, whatever, they're just doing that one thing. So, and it's your life, not yours, but we all have our own lives

• 1:23:25Speaker 00

  and we can choose how far we wanna go. There's no benchmark. We don't have to feel guilty if we just say we wanna explore in this life. Totally do it. It's your life. But I think if you make that decision, life becomes much more fulfilling, even if it's just exploring.

• 1:23:43André Duqum?

  And to me, it's like, of course, we all make our own decisions. But why wouldn't you want to experience the absolute truth of your real nature?

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  That's my question. I mean, that's why I'm like committed to a path.

• 1:23:55André Duqum?

  Look at you. There you are.

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  I don't want to waste time.

• 1:23:58André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Speaker 00

  You know, going back to what we were talking about, life is so precious. And if I can have this, why wouldn't I?

• 1:24:07André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  You know, I've had the good fortune of working with some really amazing athletes and human beings, and they want the best. And they go like, if I can have like soccer plays, the Champions League, or to win the Premier League in England, why wouldn't I take it? I'll win the World Cup. I'm gonna go for it. So for me, having the realization that

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  I, in this life, have the opportunity to go within and experience the self inside of me.

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  That's the opportunities there. It's just for me, if I'm willing to commit to it. Why wouldn't I take it? I'd take it. Be insane not to. But then again, it's my choice, right?

• 1:24:54André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  And, uh, but I think also comes down to the maturity of the soul. If you believe in reincarnation, where's the soul in its evolution?

• 1:25:06André Duqum?

  To me, it goes back to having those smaller experiences where you really taste what's possible. You see, oh, there is a there there. Like, there is actually a self beyond who we've been accustomed and existing as as this small, limited, individualistic skin bag, you know? This, the separate self. Having that experience is the most important thing. And then you mentioned there is these like benchmarks, you know? Because you asked your guru, like, how, how do you actually know you're progressing? What are the qualities? And I want to ask you, like, well, how do you know you're progressing on that path?

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  One thing my guru said was that the first sign of the awakening of the super consciousness that you become more observant.

• 1:25:54Speaker 00

  And so that would be one sign.

• 1:25:58Speaker 00

  You know, the chakra system within Hinduism, not the American version of it, which is very highly adjusted, let's say.

• 1:26:07Speaker 00

  The original version really depicts a sense of fulfillment as one's consciousness go. You would go from a place of being able to be very reasonable, a less evolved soul would not, would be very hard to reason with. You know, you could say something to them and they would fight back and argue. A more mature soul would be able to have more humility, be able to reason and go like, "Well, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, I can see why I wouldn't do this now, you know? Thank you for sharing that." And then, those are all signposts. And then, as you mature more and more, a soul that...

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  I asked my guru this, you know, "How do you tell the difference between a young soul and an old soul?" He said, "By how they respond to life experiences." So someone's walking down the sidewalk, they trip and they fall down. You see one person going, "Ha ha, you idiot," you know? Probably not so mature. A more mature soul would run over and help the person up and say, "Are you okay? Can I help you sit down? Would you like a glass of water or something?" So I think, you know, if someone responds to an issue with empathy and compassion, you know, they're a much more mature soul. You see this so much today, right? Especially well-known people,

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  whether they are business people or sports athletes or actors. Someone highlights they did something. So-and-so was found drunk or had an affair or this. Everybody jumps on and criticizes that person. Mature soul or not mature soul?

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  Not so mature soul. You were happy with them when they were giving you things. And as soon as they make a mistake, like vultures, you go and prey on them. A more mature soul would take the response of, "Thank you for all of these years for providing me a service or entertaining me." Is there, "What can I do to help you? Obviously, you went through a difficult time. Is there anything I can do to support you?" That would be another signpost of a mature soul. So I think how people react and respond is very critical. And then as you go deeper into the superconscious is that, I think you, at least I know this for myself, you start to withdraw from the world and become even more and more discerning

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  of how much you want to interact with people and who you want in your life. Because the goal becomes now the self. And you go, "I only have so much energy each day because at some point tonight I'm exhausted." So how much of that energy do I want to invest outward? And if I am investing it outward, I need to be very clear where I'm going. So, but the rest of the energy, I want to use it to drive awareness into the superconscious. And to give a very simple analogy, we talked about awareness being like a ball of light. Imagine awareness as a space shuttle on the planet.

• 1:29:22Speaker 00

  What is the space shuttle strapped to? A huge rocket, which is filled with what?

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  Rocket fuel, right? And you need all that rocket fuel to burst through Earth's atmosphere and to go into space. And it's no different with the mystic. He or she needs to harness their energy. And that's why the practice of celibacy and renunciation and not having too many material pursuits and this and that, it's not about material things are bad or sex is bad. It's a conservation of energy. How much energy can I conserve, strap it on to my awareness, to drive it from the first floor, the conscious mind, through the subconscious, break the atmosphere and go into the superconscious area of the mind? You need tremendous amount of energy.

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  And one of the signposts is that we sought to withdraw, but in a very compassionate, wise way rather than a judgmental way. I'm not going like, oh, you know, a nice person. Just going like, you know, I just need more energy to go within. Does that make sense?

• 1:30:32André Duqum?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, uh, new-vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy discount.

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• 1:31:19André Duqum?

  You start to become more observing of people in your surroundings and what's happening internally. Become what Pratyehara in the Eight Lims of Yoga is more withdrawal. The senses, you realize how precious your time and energy is and what's worth investing it into.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:31:36André Duqum?

  Examination and inquiry of the self.

• 1:31:41Speaker 00

  Concentration, right? Dharana, right? It's that step before meditation. You know, you need to be able to withdraw, concentrate, then focus it through meditation, and then finally samadhi, experiencing it, the self inside. If you look at those eight steps, they're so sequential and thoughtfully structured, starting with lifestyle design. You can't get your life in order. You can't have a lifestyle that supports an inner journey.

• 1:32:13André Duqum?

  Yeah, we'll throw it up on screen right now for people that aren't familiar that can see the progression there because it's like a beautiful, multi-thousand-year-old science of examining the process of evolution that I think is so helpful to have context for.

• 1:32:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27André Duqum?

  So. The state of samadhi and absolute absorption, what begins as a more infantile or

• 1:32:36André Duqum?

  simple practice of bringing your awareness back in and concentration, which at times can feel anything but simple, you know, because the mind is so conditioned to not be doing that.

• 1:32:46Speaker 00

  And once,

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  just to interject here, for those of you listening, ask yourself, and if you're distracted, ask yourself, how hard is it to be distracted? And I can almost for certain you're saying it's not difficult. That's because you've practiced it so much. The same way, it's not hard for me to be concentrated, not because I lived as a monk or I'm anybody special. It's just what I practice. It's really hard for me to be distracted because I haven't practiced it enough. So concentration is not a difficult state once you've practiced it.

• 1:33:21André Duqum?

  So I've studied a bit in Vipassana, the traditions with Goenka, which in very many ways is training for hours a day to bring your awareness through different sensations within your body. And I want to bring it back into your experience. So when you, what was a typical day for you? What was your practice like? Were you having hours of sitting per day?

• 1:33:44Speaker 00

  In the monastery?

• 1:33:45André Duqum?

  Yeah, in the monastery.

• 1:33:47Speaker 00

  We only meditated as a group for an hour a day. So my guru valued preparation more than the actual practice, how you prepare. So we meditated every day from six to seven as a group. Monks did individual practices on their own. And then throughout the day, the monastery was divided into groups. So some monks worked in the publishing department, some worked in finance, some worked in the gardens and things like that. But going back to the teaching of integrating the practice into the non-negotiable reoccurring event. So if I was working on my computer in the monastery and someone came in the room, we were trained not to look up and get engaged with that,

• 1:34:31Speaker 00

  to just stay focused on what we were doing. If I was milking the cow, then... I milked a cow, you know. So all day we were practicing so that when we sat down for an hour, we were deeply prepared. And I give the example of Usain Bolt running the 100 meter race. I don't know this guy, but I'm assuming his whole day when he was competing was filled with practice. He was either getting good rest, stretching, running, doing weights, eating the right types of food, right? All for what? 9.65 seconds? So it wasn't the 9.65 seconds supporting the day, it was the day supporting the 9.65 seconds.

• 1:35:15Speaker 00

  Most people wake up in the morning, do 10 minutes of meditation, and they go like, I'm set for the day. And then the day is chaotic. For us, the training was bring the practice into the day, because that's the hard work. And then when you sit down to meditate for 20 minutes, you've done hours of practice. All day long, I'm training to keep awareness on one thing at a time. So when I sit to meditate, to hold awareness so deeply within me and move it, navigate it to the superconscious area of the mind, I've been practicing for 12 hours already in everything that I do, from brushing my teeth to talking to people, employees, clients, whatever.

• 1:35:59André Duqum?

  Why I love that understanding so much is because everybody who's listening has whatever they're going after in life. Occupations with family and career, where they can use each moment as an opportunity for self-realization, instead of spirituality being something we do, it's an identity we wear, it's a practice we have five, 10 minutes a day. And while maybe the conditions at a monastery are the most conducive for truly cultivating that in a deeper sense, we still have that availability on offer for us all. And to me, it's like, it's the core of why I do the show, it's the core of why I'm doing all my efforts in life, because I think that is the most worthwhile endeavor to cultivate

• 1:36:44André Duqum?

  in life and to study and to examine and to inquire within. Because similar to you, like that indignation of not knowing self, of being able to think about waking up when I'm eighty and having the conditions of life and environment shape me in ways unbeknownst to what I truly wanted and what was possible for me. It's both the fire that that possibility creates.

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  Devastating.

• 1:37:12André Duqum?

  Yeah, devastating. But then also the absolute love and contribution that's possible by having some level of self-realization. Like who you become possible as a conduit for, as a vessel for, because of that connection and that knowing of self is so powerful. Because like, think about what you're doing, right? Everything that you have been doing over the past couple decades has been infused with the consciousness in which you have been doing it, right? This cultivation, this awareness that you've cultivated in the quality of your mind has empowered you to show up in this conversation so present and writing your book and reading your audiobook and all the media appearances and with your family. And who would the version of you been

• 1:37:57André Duqum?

  had you not understood this about your mind and the quality of your awareness? You know, how deep would the offering that you would have given the world and then the transmission with your book and all this stuff? Who's to know? But it's certainly of a certain caliber because of the devotion that you've had to the inquiry.

• 1:38:16Speaker 00

  And my guru, you know, I give him all the credit. Without him, I wouldn't be here today. And his ability to articulate things. Well, first of all, his own self-realization allowed me to experience through him what that would be and taste into that, which now has made my life dedicated to that pursuit. You know, and then his teachings of keeping things so simple and doable.

• 1:38:49Speaker 00

  I think to me, that's the greatest gift he gave me. I cannot tell you how complicated people make everything. You know, there's so much noise in spirituality and fireworks and glitter that people get so distracted on the path when the practice needs to be what actually moves the ball forward. Which is the simple practice of bringing awareness back, staying focused and working on that. You know, that's a basic 101. And if you can just do that one thing, you make so much more progress.

• 1:39:29André Duqum?

  I'm curious to ask you, so the Jhana states in the Zen tradition, the City states in the yogic tradition, as you cultivate your awareness, our attention is like a penetrative force that can glean us insights to that which we're paying attention to.

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:39:48André Duqum?

  Whether it's internally or externally. And this is where it gets, for the materialist notion, a bit strange, right? Where you can have these almost psychic feeling intuitions and knowings about things you have should and no business knowing, right? Whether you go and you just people watch and you sit and you observe, right? And you pick up things about people's emotional states. You pick up things that just become evident to you about somebody else's field because your sensitivity has gotten to that place. I'm just curious your thoughts on, and I know they can be kind of described as a distraction on the path, you know, you can...

• 1:40:25Speaker 00

  They absolutely are.

• 1:40:27André Duqum?

  But it is interesting to reflect on what's possible within human consciousness as you train this faculty and what is available on offer for the human mind.

• 1:40:40Speaker 00

  It is beyond the comprehension of most human beings, what the mind can do that is...

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I...

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 00

  The less mature soul would like to show that and talk about it.

• 1:41:07Speaker 00

  The most mature souls I've met, the very few monks that have developed capabilities that I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe, never talk about it, never show it, never indicate to anyone that they have it. Why would they? It's not the ultimate pursuit. The ultimate pursuit is the self. They go back to talking about the self, not to talk about that they can read your aura or they can manipulate someone from a distance or can do this or that. Those are all things on the side. Why would you ever want to talk about it? The most advanced souls are so simple, like you look at them and you go, huh.

• 1:41:57Speaker 00

  Nobody important and then you go to it's the one that is charismatic and talks greatly and can demonstrate little powers. And they want to demonstrate little powers, right? Because that's how you pull people in. Yeah. Nothing like a little magic show, you know, pull the rabbit out of the hat and then you all of a sudden you have followers coming and there's so many of those today and unnecessary on the path because it's a distraction. And maybe it's necessary for, to bring a group of people that are just getting on the path so they could learn about it. But again, it goes down to the question, how far do you want to go? Yeah. If you want the self, my guru would often say these are, you know, gifts on

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  the path of unfoldment, you know, but they're also some of the biggest side tracks. And I say, if you think the world is distracting, it's so distracting, you know, wait till you get on the spiritual path. It is infinitely more distracting than the world of what opens up inside of you. And the abilities, there's no limit. You're not bound by physical constraints now. You know, now you're open to every possibility. That's when you have to be even more laser focused and say, what do I want on the path? I want the self, not here to display abilities, psychic powers,

• 1:43:25Speaker 00

  things that can be done or cannot be done.

• 1:43:30André Duqum?

  Yeah, in many ways, it's like the higher you go, the harder you can fall. Because even talking about those states are like, when people ask me, or I'm sure I've asked you about like deeper, higher states of consciousness and different experiences you had. It can be so easy to have the egoic inflation with sharing that like, look what I've done. That makes me somebody and actually has the opposite effect of what you would hope it would.

• 1:43:57Speaker 00

  That's why I say the same thing.

• 1:43:59André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  And I'm so unpopular. Just bring awareness back. If I actually come and go to you, that's all he ever talks about. Well, if you can just do this.

• 1:44:07André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Speaker 00

  You can have everything.

• 1:44:09André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 00

  But you won't. Why won't you?

• 1:44:14André Duqum?

  And, you know, it, it, to me, though, it does beg into questions about what the nature of reality fundamentally is. When you have these deeper states of experiencing mind and it goes and expands from just inside of this to, whoa, I, the boundary between me and phenomena around me and experience of life, that boundary dissolves in, in a big way. Do you, from those experiences and philosophical inquiries, what have you learned then? What are your thoughts on the nature of mind not just being something you possess, but as a quality that we live in, in a sense?

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  I don't even think about it. I don't even want to go down that road. You know, as you go into the super conscious mind and you start to experience different things. There's a Sanskrit word, neti neti.

• 1:45:03André Duqum?

  Not this, not that.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  Not this, not that. And that's the only two words you need to learn.

• 1:45:10Speaker 00

  It's actually the same word. But uh, because it's a rabbit hole, right? How much time do I have on this planet? I have no idea. If I start to even explore the mind and all its ramifications and where it can go and what it can do,

• 1:45:31Speaker 00

  that same amount of effort and time and energy, I could have been directing towards experiencing the self over, and over and over again. And I am laser focused on that one thing.

• 1:45:44André Duqum?

  But it comes into the personal level where you dive deeper into the practice, into this understanding and practices. And you have these experiences, you know, if you believe in, for example, reincarnation, or you take it up as a possibility, and then you go on these practices and you start having experiences where these memories come to you that aren't necessarily yours. For a lot of people, it can be extremely destabilizing. It can, and who knows what percentage of the audience that maybe are listening to this right now or diving deeper into those experiences or have some sort of spontaneous insight into, into the nature of self. But um, yeah, it's, it's just worth stating that uh,

• 1:46:24André Duqum?

  this opens up a whole can of realm of existence that was there, but we previously didn't have conscious awareness of because of how distracted we were.

• 1:46:33Speaker 00

  I think at the end of the day, each individual needs, for spirituality, define what do they want in life? You know, and uh, by exploring a few different philosophies, not too many, can help you get, define a few goals and ask yourself which of those uh, can you relate to?

• 1:46:55Speaker 00

  And if you really want to go far, you need to go narrow and deep. And that's it. And don't get distracted. And keep your practices really, really simple and do the boring repetition. My guru taught me a meditation nineteen ninety-six. Thirty years ago.

• 1:47:18André Duqum?

  That's when I was born.

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  Wait, oh, my goodness. I'm still doing the same meditation. People come up to me and go, do you have a different one? What I can do with my tap? Like, I don't.

• 1:47:31Speaker 00

  That's the problem. It's it's the repetition. Do you think the guy that plays or the girl that plays in the French Open or the Wimbledon final has ten thousand different types of serves? Or maybe they have like four or five and they've just spent all their time mastering that?

• 1:47:51André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think it's Bruce Lee said, fear not the man who practiced ten thousand kicks once, but one kick ten thousand times.

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  Yes, and that's the thing. And people, when you are in the conscious mind on the first floor, you cannot do that. It's the opposite. You want ten thousand different kicks. And when someone pursues so many different things and tells you that that is the way and that is okay, they're living in the conscious mind. And if you're on the third floor, what you say to them will not make sense. And what they say to you doesn't relate. So you just have to honor where they are on the journey. And that's where they're going. But the people that is practicing one kick ten thousand times, it's like the mystic that's just doing one meditation for fifty years.

• 1:48:40André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:41Speaker 00

  Because he or she is mastering that. That's the what's going to go narrow and deep to get you where you want to go.

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked three hundred fifty thousand Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:49:19André Duqum?

  The Vedas say that truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.

• 1:49:25Speaker 00

  Uncouted by longing?

• 1:49:26André Duqum?

  Yeah, truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing. And, you know, when we think about wanting to live and to know truth, and we live in a distracted state where we are continually pushed by our, by the craving and aversions, right? The longing of some sort externally.

• 1:49:51André Duqum?

  When you contrast your current experience now versus five, 10, 20 years ago, how has the quality of your longing, your craving, your aversion, how has that transformed, if it has at all? Like, how, how much of that has been prevalent in your experience?

• 1:50:08Speaker 00

  Spiritual longing?

• 1:50:10André Duqum?

  No, like worldly longing.

• 1:50:14Speaker 00

  Oh, it's deeply minimized. I mean, I never had it so much anyway, because I went to the monastery, obviously, in my twenties. So whatever longing I had, I renounced, never thought that I would leave the monastery. Having left the monastery, my longing has always been making sure step one and two on the Eightfold Path was sorted. And that was the financial longing. You know, it's like, how do I amass enough finances to ensure that I would have a life that's stable, that would allow me to pursue with it?

• 1:50:55Speaker 00

  But in terms of longing for stuff and things,

• 1:51:03Speaker 00

  it's...

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  I think when you experience the superconscious or tap into the self enough times,

• 1:51:19Speaker 00

  Everything else comes and goes. We've done this so many times, Satrie. So many times. How many times? How many times have I been born? And lived, got married and have kids? And died? And lived as a monk? And lived as a priest? Thousands of years. Why would I come back again this time? And go get distracted by all of these things again? It just makes no sense. We're here for one purpose and one purpose only is to realize the self within.

• 1:52:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:52:07André Duqum?

  You mentioned earlier, as your sensitivity increases and your clarity increases, you can more clearly see what is worth wanting, right? Because it's...

• 1:52:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:19André Duqum?

  You can't really be focused or concentrated if you don't know what you want to be focused and concentrated on, right?

• 1:52:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:52:24André Duqum?

  And so for everybody who's listening right now and they have ambitions for their career, they want to build a certain life, cultivate a certain family. How has getting clear within yourself and having the quality of the mind be such that it's less distracted, right? Where your awareness is here and it's present? That allows space for almost like what is meant for you to become more obvious and what you truly want to be able to even be chosen because you can become aware of it. Otherwise, we're so distracted from a noisy internal environment. From your experience and then working with so many people and high performers and whatnot, what is the correlation there between quieting the internal noise and discovering what is

• 1:53:09André Duqum?

  worth wanting in your life?

• 1:53:13Speaker 00

  You know, it's a very old saying, like, everything you need to know is inside of you, right? You don't really need to seek outward to find out what you want in life.

• 1:53:23Speaker 00

  The superconscious has to go through the subconscious to get to the conscious mind so that you can receive it, right? So I always say the superconscious works through a clarified subconscious. If the middle floor is so cluttered with unresolved stuff and information, the superconscious intuition can't come through for you to perceive it. So when you can focus and stabilize your life, meaning that you have income, you have structure, you have discipline or routines,

• 1:53:57Speaker 00

  you create space for intuition to come through and give you clarity about your life.

• 1:54:04Speaker 00

  But you need to build,

• 1:54:08Speaker 00

  like in Raja Yoga, the first two steps of stabilizing your life, the conscious mind, and clearing the second floor and organizing the second floor for intuition to come through in order to see that. But if not, you will never receive the insights that you need.

• 1:54:25Speaker 00

  But today, we do the opposite. You know, we clutter. The first floor is so busy with everything that we're doing, and the second floor is the storehouse of information, is so cluttered with information that awareness can't even go through that, or intuition can't come from the superconscious to the conscious mind for us to cognize. So one of the things that, you know, I encourage people to do, especially like higher performance people, is to really create a filter for their mind as to what they allow inside. You have a kitchen? Kitchen sink?

• 1:55:01André Duqum?

  Yep.

• 1:55:02Speaker 00

  Do you have a strainer?

• 1:55:03André Duqum?

  I do.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  So you value your kitchen drain so much that you put a strainer to prevent crap from going into it.

• 1:55:13Speaker 00

  Right? Most people do. But for their mind, we let all kinds of garbage in.

• 1:55:18André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:19Speaker 00

  We protect our kitchen sink, but we won't protect our mind. There's no filter. And what are the filters? You know, you, you decide what are your guidelines? Like, you know, I don't want to watch this. I don't want to listen to this. These categories are my filters. So that's the first step. And as soon as you can create filters to prevent garbage from going in, then you clear the second floor enough to allow intuition to pass through into the conscious mind so that you can cognize. And that's super conscious, that all knowing part of you will give you insight as to why you're here on this planet and where you are on your journey and what you should commit to and how much you should commit to

• 1:56:04Speaker 00

  and what philosophy you should align with.

• 1:56:08Speaker 00

  So we have to take a systematic approach on the spiritual path, right? And most people never do. The new age approach is always like, just be free and let go. But you require so much discipline on the spiritual path in order to make progress. It's not a state of freedom of, you know, the typical thinking like, I, I don't need constraints, rules, and that means I'm spiritual. No, it's the opposite. The more structured you are, the more intuition works through it.

• 1:56:42André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think we sometimes have this backward conception of freedom, being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want.

• 1:56:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:56:48André Duqum?

  And if you follow the whimsies of that, then you'll actually feel anything but free.

• 1:56:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:56:53André Duqum?

  So creating the boundaries, the strainer, so to speak, for the BS to not enter your awareness, minimize the opportunities for you to become distracted, which digital life is of course now more than ever one of those huge opportunities.

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:09Speaker 00

  And the other thing is also controlling how much information goes in.

• 1:57:12André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:12Speaker 00

  So imagine that one part of the subconscious is a storehouse of information and memory. Imagine in your home, you, you're creating an extension, you're building another room and you want it to be a library. Every day you put 10 books in the library. You don't index them, you don't categorize them. After a year, you get 3,650 books, right? Would you be able to find any information? Disorganized, you can't, you have those books. All information is there, but you don't know where to find the book on gardening or architecture or whatever. How many books are we putting in our mental library every day? In the car ride, we're listening to podcasts. On the treadmill, we're listening to something. On the toilet, we're scrolling.

• 1:57:56Speaker 00

  All day, we're filling our subconscious with stuff, no filter. It's like, imagine a truck pulled up, Andre, at your front door, and you had your front door open, and the guy's handing you boxes of books, nonstop, and you're just chucking it in your house. Every day, he pulls up with a truck, and you chuck boxes of books. You know, by the end of the day, you're exhausted. You wake up in the morning, the truck pulls up again, and you're chucking boxes of books in your, in your house. After a year, what does your house look like?

• 1:58:26André Duqum?

  A messy library.

• 1:58:28Speaker 00

  A messy library. You can't gather anything. We think by listening to podcasts, reading stuff, talking to ChatGPT, Claude, gathering information, processing stuff, is helping us grow. We're filling our frickin' mind so much of crap. And we can't go back to doing the simple practice of bringing awareness back. Because all of those somehow tell us we're making, you know, I read so and so said this research, and if you drank this tea or you did this practice, if I saw that shaman and this study showed this latest thing. Who the hell cares? Can you keep your awareness on this person while you're sitting with them? That's, that's all I'm asking.

• 1:59:13Speaker 00

  If you can't do that, none of that stuff matters. And that subconscious, after a year of consuming stuff all day long, you can't even go to the toilet without consuming stuff. How would superconscious even get through? Because the second floor is so cluttered. Intuition can't penetrate through. And then you stop listening to your intuition, because intuition can't come through. And then how is your own superconscious going to be able to give you an insight into your life as to what your purpose is, or what your priorities are, or who you actually are as a person?

• 1:59:53André Duqum?

  So well said, man. And in the digital world, the algorithms are very much so designed to prey on this,

• 2:00:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:00:02André Duqum?

  On the primal reward circuitry. And so, close the door, metaphorically speaking, so that so much stimulus and information isn't overwhelming your nervous system. And then, like you said, the insights and the intuitions, whether it's through your superconscious or whatever you wanna name you wanna put there.

• 2:00:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:20André Duqum?

  Can, you can't, like, I have the saying, when, when you get quiet, what needs to be heard will get loud. And we don't have the opportunity to, to hear what wants to be loud in our system. You know, the things that are our purpose and we're really drawn towards because it's so noisy.

• 2:00:41Speaker 00

  Well, allowing things to come in.

• 2:00:43André Duqum?

  Right.

• 2:00:43Speaker 00

  Will protect our drain, kitchen drain, right?

• 2:00:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:47Speaker 00

  You have the little filter in your shower drain to stop hair from going in. I mean, I don't have that issue, but you know, you probably do.

• 2:00:54André Duqum?

  I got it, I got that issue.

• 2:00:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then you gotta clean up all the hair that's plugged in there.

• 2:00:59André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:59Speaker 00

  So, you know, our shower drain, our kitchen drain is so valuable to us, but our mind is not. And so even if we just stop reading, I think you've read enough and you've heard enough podcasts.

• 2:01:13André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:14Speaker 00

  You know, and if you don't read anymore for a year, or don't listen to any podcasts for a year, I think you're okay.

• 2:01:20André Duqum?

  Except this one.

• 2:01:21Speaker 00

  Except this one, yes. Make sure you listen to this one yourself.

• 2:01:24André Duqum?

  Like and subscribe.

• 2:01:26Speaker 00

  Delete everything else.

• 2:01:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:28Speaker 00

  You're okay, just practice. Get down to just practicing.

• 2:01:31André Duqum?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's funny. It's, it's worth saying, you're somebody that's written books, I'm somebody who has a podcast, hopefully as somebody who are trying to embody what we're, what we're sharing, that what we create into the external world, whether they're in the form of media, podcasts, books, is a signal that can remind people and, and, and be potent in their life in a sea of a lot of noise. Like, to me, I don't wanna do a podcast unless I truly know in my bones that it's serving people at a deeper level, just like you wouldn't wanna write a book or do your podcasts and stuff. Um, and it's just so much more rewarding that way. And.

• 2:02:10Speaker 00

  And I'm saying this only because I, if you genuinely wanna make progress, this is what you have to do.

• 2:02:17André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:17Speaker 00

  You know?

• 2:02:19André Duqum?

  One thing that you mentioned with developing your willpower is kind of three steps. First, finishing what you start.

• 2:02:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25André Duqum?

  Do you walk through those? Because I think that's also a great opportunity to bring it to our daily life.

• 2:02:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is something my guru taught to develop willpower, that mental muscle to bring awareness back. Finish what you begin. Do a little bit more than you think you can and do it a little better than you think you can. So I give the example of making the bed in the morning, which is finish what you begin. Finish the process of sleep. Before I sleep, I floss, I brush, put pajamas on, I go to bed. And then when I wake up in the morning, I make the bed to finish the process of sleep. Then I do a little bit more than I think I can and a little bit better than I think I can. Maybe I fluff the pillows, I double fold the comforter like they do at the Four Seasons. Whatever, you know, make the bed really nice. Same like having breakfast. And these are the non-negotiable reoccurring events, right?

• 2:03:12Speaker 00

  If I have time to make tea, I have time to wash the cup and put it away. Instead of leaving it on the table somewhere. I have time to make breakfast, eat breakfast, finish what I began, wash the bowl, put it away. So if we just brought that approach in, we would develop willpower. Then we would have enough muscle, mental muscle, that every time awareness drifted away, we would use that mental muscle to bring that ball of light back.

• 2:03:43André Duqum?

  It's a great reminder. And I think, I think I've definitely done more of the first one. You know, finish what you started, make the bed in the morning.

• 2:03:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:54André Duqum?

  That extra little care and attention of doing it better than you would have expected, you know?

• 2:03:59Speaker 00

  Because it requires will.

• 2:04:00André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Speaker 00

  You need willpower to develop willpower. The same way, in order to build my bicep, I need to use my bicep to lift weights to make more biceps. So you use willpower to develop more willpower. So once you finish what you begin, doing that little bit more, a little bit better, is an extra exercising of that willpower.

• 2:04:19André Duqum?

  Yeah. And then is there one thing? Because you mentioned the boundaries, right? There's a strainer for your sink. Is there one or two things you think are most important for people to set the boundaries so they don't let as much stimulus and information into their life?

• 2:04:32Speaker 00

  I think if you're really serious about all of this, then just start turning off stuff, except this podcast, everything else.

• 2:04:45Speaker 00

  Just start, because how can you hear what's inside of you if you're perpetually listening to what's outside of you?

• 2:04:53André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:54Speaker 00

  You know, so you need to tell the truck driver to stop coming and delivering books to your house, because as long as he's turning up every day with a truck full of books, you're screwed. You know, so you can tell him you can't come back. And that's what we need to do.

• 2:05:11André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Speaker 00

  You know, the music we listen to, the TV shows, books we read, podcasts, all the scrolling, just start. I'm very, very protective of my mind. It's easier to keep the mosquito, the mosquito is better outside the house than inside the house. Once it gets in, pain in the ass. Right, so once that information gets into my mind, I have to deal with it. So it's easier for me to have a strong filter and keep everything outside.

• 2:05:41André Duqum?

  I'm sure you.

• 2:05:42Speaker 00

  Don't let the mosquito in.

• 2:05:43André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:46André Duqum?

  I don't in my house. I let, I know both in your practice, both at the monastery afterwards, in my contemplative practices, you examine how much stuff there is underneath the surface in the subconscious that wants to bubble up and find expression, but because we're so overstimulated, it doesn't give it the chance to come into our awareness. And I think it's just worth mentioning that step one is, yeah, set the boundaries, develop your willpower. And then as you start to train your mind and your awareness, things will start coming up and out to the surface.

• 2:06:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21André Duqum?

  Unresolved emotional experiences, emotional ties to past memories that we asserted meaning to. What are your thoughts on that process? Because stuff needs, what's in must come out.

• 2:06:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, so that's actually the sequence, exactly as you described.

• 2:06:41Speaker 00

  I'm very systematic about stuff. I love it. So I'm gonna keep going back to what I said before. I'm beating the same house. It has to go back to philosophy at this point. At a very high level and simple level, do you believe more in an Abrahamic philosophy or Eastern philosophy? Because if you believe in the one life that God created, that you created this life, put you on this planet to have these experiences, and then there's a heaven hell. That's a whole different perspective on how you're looking at what's coming up. But if you take the Eastern philosophy of your soul, and there's no right or wrong, by the way, let me state that, it's just distinctly different. You pick whatever you want. I'm not saying one's better than the other, they're just distinctly different.

• 2:07:23Speaker 00

  If you look at the Eastern philosophy as I am a soul living in a physical body, the physical body dies, I reincarnate. Now, as things come up, if I look at the Eastern philosophy, I go, wow, the stuff that's coming up has been building up or has been there over thousands of years. It's not something that was created just in this lifetime where I have one life. If I'm 30 years old, that's 30 years of crap that I need, you know, to deal with. Now I have thousands of years of stuff to deal with. It allows me to be so much more empathetic towards myself and compassionate to myself and be willing to take time to resolve it.

• 2:08:05Speaker 00

  So the way I look at myself is I look at myself as a building under construction. If you've ever been to a construction site, there's rebar, broken glass, nails lying around, no one goes like, why is this a mess? Well, it's still under construction. But if you go to the Four Seasons and you see a broken glass, there'd be 10 people standing around it, making sure no one steps on it, some will be swooping it up, five people will be watching, you know?

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  I look at myself as a soul going through many, many lifetimes of reincarnation. So as things boil up and come to the surface, because I've created these filters, now I have no noise coming in, I'm able to see the noise inside of myself. So not only the bad things come up, but also the good things come up. And when I look at the not so good things, I go, this is a product of hundreds of years, or thousands of years. So if it took this long to create this, it's gonna take a while to unwind them, which allows me to be more compassionate with myself. But if you didn't have that philosophical understanding, then you would be so harsh with yourself and go like, why am I this way?

• 2:09:17Speaker 00

  You look at your life as a 30-year-old, or 40-year-old, and 50-year-old, and you go like, I'm a terrible person, I'm this and that. But if you pull the lens back and you go like, wow, I've actually been on this planet for 50,000 years. You're like, okay, I can't be more compassionate.

• 2:09:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, but again, I think that regardless of what the mechanism is or reality is of past lives, and perhaps what people refer to as junk DNA, where they don't have any apparent function, or where this memory is even stored, or how it all works, or the truth of the philosophical or religious frameworks, we can almost, in essence, put all that aside, because there's so much unresolved stuff from this lifetime in and of itself that we could start working with and we'll become aware, to where it's like, yeah, if there's more material in the warehouse of our unconscious from prior lifetimes, that will come to us in the moment, you know, when we move through enough of the stuff we've cultivated and accumulated in this life too, right?

• 2:10:17Speaker 00

  So the monk's goal in the monastery was to work first with the baggage in this life?

• 2:10:22André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:23Speaker 00

  And then start working with the baggage in the closet. So imagine, I go on a holiday, you're going to Kua'ai tomorrow.

• 2:10:28André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 00

  Are you taking bags? Carry on?

• 2:10:30André Duqum?

  Yep.

• 2:10:31Speaker 00

  Right? You're leaving some of your luggage here, right? And you're taking some of it with you. So it's like going to Kua'ai is like coming, being reincarnated in this life. You only brought some luggage with you. During the stay in Kwa, you may get rid of some stuff and add some stuff. But you still have more stuff there. So if this life, you can quickly work through this carry on luggage. Then you can spend the rest of the time working on your closet. That's back home. And emptying that and filling it with stuff that you want.

• 2:11:06Speaker 00

  If you want to go far. That's the goal of the mystic, right? I, I want to spend this life resolving everything that I've created in this life. And then spend the rest of the time dealing with stuff from previous lives. I want that subconscious to be fairly organized. It doesn't work. Experiencing the super conscious doesn't require the subconscious to be fully resolved. But it needs to be somewhat cleared to get to the super conscious. Think of your house with all the boxes and books. If there was no pathway through that, you couldn't get to the kitchen. But once you have some sort of a pathway, you can start to make your way to the super conscious. If that makes, all makes sense.

• 2:11:48André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:11:49André Duqum?

  Yep. Yeah, there's, there is so much in this moment that we can metabolize. And then more luggage that we can unpack and metabolize that. And then as we get further, we see further and more will become into our awareness in the right moment. To process as, as it comes. We, we recently launched our online community. It became really clear to me that through this podcast, you know, you start to put it. Stuff out there in the world and you attract people who resonate with it.

• 2:12:18André Duqum?

  And the goal really with it and this podcast is to facilitate individual awakening towards the collective transformation of a more beautiful world. And so, so a couple of people sent in questions from the community. That I just want to ask.

• 2:12:31Speaker 00

  All for today?

• 2:12:31André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:32Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 2:12:32André Duqum?

  Yeah, for you.

• 2:12:33Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 2:12:33André Duqum?

  Specifically for you. Okay, Alexandra asks, spiritual practices are many and are more accessible than ever before. How do you recommend to the audience which to choose and focus on?

• 2:12:48Speaker 00

  Reverse engineer. Start by getting clear what your philosophy is and start at a very high level. You know, do you believe? Start with the religions because you need to start somewhere. You know, eastern religions, Abrahamic, again, no right or wrong. Do you believe in one God or no God? Do you believe in one life, multiple lives? Do you believe God is a person in heaven, a being in heaven, or an all pervasive energy? That gives you a starting place. And that will help you articulate what the goal is on this planet. Is it to go to heaven and be with your Lord and Savior? Or is it to experience divinity inside of you? Whichever you pick is fine. There's no right or wrong answer.

• 2:13:32André Duqum?

  Is that true? Is there no wrong or right answer?

• 2:13:36Speaker 00

  No, because, you know.

• 2:13:41André Duqum?

  Truly, all religions can't be correct in their conception of God and divine.

• 2:13:51Speaker 00

  Yes, agreed.

• 2:13:53André Duqum?

  But I understand the point you're making, which is, in essence, there is many different paths up the mountain, so to speak, can take you to a similar place.

• 2:14:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, but not all the paths go to the same location.

• 2:14:08André Duqum?

  Absolutely.

• 2:14:08Speaker 00

  That's an important thing to realize. I don't want to judge one is better, say one is better than the other. But what I am hardcore wired about is picking one. You know, pick one, you know, that resonates for you. Because I think at the end of the day, Andre, if you look at where we are, each individual is in their fulfillment. I can't say this is the only way. Because a person over here will not be able to relate to me.

• 2:14:34André Duqum?

  Absolutely.

• 2:14:35Speaker 00

  The person over here needs to pick what resonates to them on this point of the journey. Whereas a person over there needs to pick what resonates to them over there. That's why I say, you know, there's no right or wrong answer. Because I'm talking to a spectrum of souls, you know, across.

• 2:14:55André Duqum?

  A wide gamut.

• 2:14:56Speaker 00

  A wide gamut, you know?

• 2:14:57André Duqum?

  That's why I appreciate the humility brought into it because it's who belief. There is always a gap in belief of what you know and what you think you know. And I feel like the humble path is just admitting to yourself, what I know, I know. What I don't know, I don't know.

• 2:15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16André Duqum?

  I'm inclined to maybe think this is the conception of the afterlife or how it might work. But let's go discover myself, you know, first and foremost. Anyways, I don't want to.

• 2:15:25Speaker 00

  So I would think to Alexander, reverse engineer that way. Pick a philosophy, have the philosophy define a goal.

• 2:15:31André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:32Speaker 00

  The goal will define a path, you know? What is the path to get there? If I, if I'm in L A and I want to get to San Francisco, there's a path, you know, a few paths. And then the path will define what practices you take. But if you start with the practices, it's very confusing because there's a million different spiritual practices. But if you reverse engineer, uh, it's so much easier. It's like cooking, right? If I had a thousand ingredients, I could potentially create 10,000 dishes. But if I say I want, you know, this dish pasta, then it's easier to reverse engineer and see what ingredients I need to create this type of pasta. So just reverse engineer a spiritual path, philosophy, goal, path, lifestyle, practices.

• 2:16:19André Duqum?

  What are your thoughts on that? Because I feel like our intuition will point us in the direction that is most aligned for us as we find what we resonate in. Like when I meet somebody and they exude a certain level of qualities that I feel like are sincere, that are potent, they have a degree of realization, that is almost a signal or it's a sign that what they know is brought, the path that they followed has actually bared fruit in their life.

• 2:16:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:47André Duqum?

  And, you know, you have to be able to discern the shiny objects and the charismatic leaders that, you know, maybe. Put office, you know, a shiny path. But I think that the more, at least, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, but the more you kind of.

• 2:17:04Speaker 00

  I asked my guru that question once.

• 2:17:06André Duqum?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:06Speaker 00

  When I was a monk.

• 2:17:07André Duqum?

  What did you say?

• 2:17:08Speaker 00

  I asked him, how do you tell a fake guru from a not fake guru?

• 2:17:10André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 2:17:12Speaker 00

  You know, and he said, uh, by, by looking at the people closest to us around him.

• 2:17:19André Duqum?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:17:19Speaker 00

  Oh, huh.

• 2:17:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:20Speaker 00

  You know, if the people are closest around him, you don't really want to spend time. Or if they tell you how amazing the teacher is, you know, he's so amazing. He's going to transform your life. Wait till you meet him. You'll be in his presence and you're just going to get blown away. You know, you'll hear him talk and he'll captivate every cell of your body. Just stay away, run, get in an Uber, go anywhere, you know, get in.

• 2:17:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:46Speaker 00

  A car, drive away. But if you meet their closest students and they start asking you questions like, you know, like, so why are you here? You know, what do you want to learn? You know, uh, what are you interested in? And they don't talk about the teacher at all, then you probably found some mature group of people.

• 2:18:07André Duqum?

  It also feels like, uh, those who know, knows who know. Like game recognizes game, you know?

• 2:18:15Speaker 00

  I like that game recognizes game.

• 2:18:17André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, to keep bastardizing the basketball references, you know, if I'm playing with Kyrie and, you know, you talk up this game, he will know very quickly your level of skill because it's so embedded within his understanding of it. I think the more you quiet and you are like perceptive and observant, you can more easily discern where something is coming from, you know? And the authenticity of a teacher shines through more.

• 2:18:43Speaker 00

  And let me say, uh, in this lifetime.

• 2:18:50Speaker 00

  In this present moment, there's an incredible amount of narcissistic spiritual guru men, men gurus out there. An incredible amount of them, deeply narcissistic men that are gurus, that love to talk about themselves and love their face and what they have to say and do. And just be really, really careful of these men. Yeah. Very dodgy men.

• 2:19:28André Duqum?

  Yeah. I think it's in, one thing that we talk about in this pod a bit is the discernment between waking up and growing up. There's the charactological personality stuff that if people haven't dealt with, brought love to and gained awareness on. The waking up stuff, which you can have higher state experiences, you know, of like non-dual awareness, you're super conscious. But they are separate things. They affect one another. But, you know, why do some gurus die of alcoholism, start these cults that end up with people dying in sexual... Why are there so many gurus that are reported to have sexual, like abuse going on at their ashrams?

• 2:20:11André Duqum?

  And I think it's a really important point because just because there is the title of guru or proposed promise of a path or something doesn't always mean it is what it is. So I think that discernment is important.

• 2:20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say just be, in today's world, just be so careful about getting on a spiritual path. And if there's a guru involved, be extra, extra careful about it, especially with really large congregations and followings and, you know. These are highly charismatic individuals, you know, that can walk into a room with 5,000 and 10,000 people and have them all be adoring him or her. Mostly him, let's just say, because there's very few women that do what these men do. And, you know, highly manipulating. And there's just so much, so many bad things that come out of it.

• 2:21:08André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:10Speaker 00

  And you just have to be really careful.

• 2:21:13André Duqum?

  Well said. Taylor asks, how do you navigate the balance between ambition and finding peace in the present moment?

• 2:21:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say

• 2:21:29Speaker 00

  simplification, you know, when we

• 2:21:33Speaker 00

  if you look at time and energy, there's 24 hours in a day and there's a finite amount of energy each day. And I say finite amount of energy each day because we all get tired at night. We have no energy left. We sleep and depending how well we sleep, our energy builds back up again. And then the next day, we have the opportunity to invest that energy into things and people. You know, if peace of mind and your well-being is critical, plus your ambition is critical to you, then you need to take that time, that finite time, 24 hours and that finite energy, and not balance, but proportionately, and I emphasize proportionately, invest into ambition and your peace of mind. And then for everything else, you need to renounce, which I talked about.

• 2:22:17Speaker 00

  Purpose focused, simplify, sacrifice, right? So what does that mean? That means you put sufficient energy and time into growing your ambition for work or whatever it is, and sufficient time and energy into self-care and your peace of mind, and then withdraw from all other things in your life. And it may be watching two hours of TV at night. Instead of going out five times a week, you go out once a week. Instead of doing X, Y, Z, you only do X because you're channeling into those two things. So for me, if you take the framework of purpose defines priorities, focus, simplify, sacrifice, define what the priorities are, focus on that,

• 2:23:00Speaker 00

  simplify your life to those things, and then sacrifice everything else. So I barely watch TV. It's not that I don't like watching TV. It's just because I don't have time or energy to do that. I know what my priorities are, and then I take my finite time, finite energy, and I proportionately distribute among those things to make those things grow. Everything else, I just say no to. Yep.

• 2:23:24André Duqum?

  Amazing.

• 2:23:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:23:25André Duqum?

  Is there something that you would share with your guru if he was here right now, right now?

• 2:23:38Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:23:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, just thank you.

• 2:23:59André Duqum?

  I can feel the love and devotion and emotion.

• 2:24:07André Duqum?

  If your

• 2:24:10André Duqum?

  super-conscious had a message and 60 seconds you were to share a message with humanity that is most pertinent right now, no small question, what would that be?

• 2:24:23Speaker 00

  Work on yourself. As you uplift your consciousness, you make better decisions. As you make better decisions, there are better outcomes. Those better outcomes affect you and everyone around you and uplifts all of humanity. But you cannot make a high-minded decision from a low-minded place. And the only way to make a higher-minded decision is to work on yourself. So the greatest impact you can do for humanity is to uplift your consciousness by doing the hard, personal work on yourself, the unsexy work, the boring, repetitive stuff.

• 2:25:07André Duqum?

  This has been such a lovely conversation.

• 2:25:09Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you for all the wonderful questions.

• 2:25:12André Duqum?

  Yeah. For anyone who wants to stay connected with Dandapani's work, we'll leave links down in the description. I believe there's a link your team gave as well, where people can stay connected and get a few free offerings from you guys. So we'll leave links for that. And is there anything else in your heart that you want to share before we close out?

• 2:25:33Speaker 00

  You know, we have, we have one life. And I think we can know this. And if we know this, we don't really do very much about it. If we realize this, we completely alter our life after that. And we live a different way. And I think that's the greatest impetus for living the most fulfilling, rewarding life you can, is the realization that life is finite. And don't waste it. Just do not waste it. That's the most precious gift we have. And divinity is inside of you. If you talk about one philosophy that's true, that exists, like gravity, you are divinity. Never let anyone take that away from you.

• 2:26:18Speaker 00

  Never let anyone tell you that you're not good enough. You are God. God is inside of you. Everything you ever wanted to feel and experience is right inside of you. You just have to go inside and claim it and experience it.

• 2:26:35André Duqum?

  Thank you.

• 2:26:36Speaker 00

  You're welcome.

• 2:26:37André Duqum?

  Appreciate it. Such a lovely conversation.

• 2:26:39Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:26:40André Duqum?

  It meant a lot.

• 2:26:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. Thank you for all the great questions.

• 2:26:42André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:43Speaker 00

  I haven't had a good one like this in a long time.

• 2:26:45André Duqum?

  Yeah. My honor, Matt. Honestly, it's my greatest joy and pleasure. Thank you so much. And for everyone tuning in, thank you for checking out this episode of the Know thyself Podcast. Until next time, be well.