Hardcore Meditation
A black-belt conversation between Dave Nadig and Daniel Ingram
[This conversation has a 3/10 Woo Rating]
I don’t know much about meditation and I don’t have a consistent meditation practice. Which is a little embarrassing as someone who writes and talks a lot about spiritual-ish topics.
New Year’s seems like a good time to explore meditation practices in a way that’s accessible to novices and experts alike.
Thankfully The Leading Edge has
as a member. Dave is a good friend, his professional background is in ETFs and market structure. He’s also precisely the kind of person that would hate being described as an expert on meditation (which just makes me trust him more). Dave’s been meditating for decades but also has an incredibly deep understanding of the underlying science (and has written beautifully on the topic before). He interviewed fellow black belt Daniel Ingram, who he introduces below.
Dave Nadig: Daniel Ingram is a Doctor, a meditator, a writer and a teacher. His book “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: an Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book” is, depending on your perspective, either a deeply heretical or profoundly inspired translation of thousands of pages and years of wisdom from hardcore meditators in the mostly-Buddhist tradition. It, like Daniel, is known for a direct and low BS way of approaching the extremes of human consciousness that emerge from high-dose concentration. He’s one of the few luminaries in the broad and heterogeneous world of “meditation” to consistently and vigorously point out the risks, dangers, peculiarities and challenges that meditators experience, with an eye towards a broader medical and scientific understanding of how meditation “works” – both positively and negatively, primarily through his work at The Emerging Phenomenology Research Consortium. [Tom: both Dave and I would like also like to highlight the valuable work of Willoughby Britton at Cheetah House, who personally helped me during an adverse meditation event1].
Daniel’s writing (and his community at Dharma Overground, where I’m a lurker) have been significant aids in my own practice in the past years. While I tried to keep the Jargon to a minimum, a few quick glossary entries:
Jhana (also dhyana): Deep states of absorbing concentration meditation. Different traditions assign various “levels” or “stages” to describe the phenomenological contents of experience common to meditators over the years.
Piti/Rapture: Pleasurable, overwhelming sensations that can range from pleasant tingling to euphoria that makes sex seem almost boring. (almost).
Kasina: A form of meditation using visual objects (usually a candle or colored disk) and then (predominately) the afterimages (both retinal and imaginal).
Podcast here (Apple and Spotify), video and transcript below.
Dave Nadig: Dan Ingram, thank you so much for joining us. My name is Dave Nadig. Could give us just a brief background on who you are and why we might be talking to you.
Daniel Ingram: Sure. Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here and great to meet you. So I started having weird experiences as a kid. I could get into some blissful and peaceful states, and then started having lucid, flying dreams at about age five. I remember the first one I had, and then took a weird course in meditation in this hippie Quaker school I went to in fourth grade, and, you know, learn space visualization stuff. And then, while trying to have better lucid flying dreams, at age 14 or 15, I got pretty good at concentration, my consciousness exploded in my first major energetic opening, or whatever you want to call it, had my first out of body experience, the classic lift out, see yourself there in the bed, float through the wall, freak out, snap back, Buzz and paralysis and what the hell. And I was never really the same. And I started having strange, intermittent, you know, things that I would later learn were standard meditative experiences happen to me over the next 10 years, until I started going on intensive, awesome meditation retreats. The map.
And, you know, wrote a book and founded an online community with my friend Vince horn called the Dharma overground. And then another book on fire kasina with my friend Shannon Stein. And also hung out a shingle somewhere in the late 90s and said, if you're having weird, meditative, energetic, psychedelic, whatever experiences, I'll talk to you for those, you know, talk to you about those for free and won't even take a donation. And so I got to talk to 1000s of people and read 1000s of forum posts and get 1000s of emails and learned and, you know, we all talk each other and grew together and went along the way and before I knew it, I was something of an accidental expert in the deep end of human experience. And then on the other side of me, I was like, you know, you know, pre med and electrical engineering and public health school doing infectious disease epidemiology stuff, and then medical school, and then emergency medicine, and then also some healthcare administration business and process and metrics and stuff like that.
And then five and a half years ago, my friend Dr Julieta Galante invited me to Cambridge University. She was an MD PhD with a public health degree, and thought it would be good if, like the clinical and scientific mainstream, understood the deep end of human experience better. And so through that process, a bunch of people gathered around her vision and the vision that came out of that group with Andrea grabovac and people like that. And before we knew it, we were the emergent phenomenology Research Consortium. And before we knew it, there is now 300 of us, five years later, and we're, we do neuroscience and phenomenology and ethical papers and all kinds of stuff, trying to figure out how clinicians can and mental health people and the scientific and public health and public in general, can understand the highs, lows, weirds, plateaus, the strange Adventure this thing could be like, you know, a lot of people, I'm sure in your community, had something happen to them. They were surprised by they went and did some ayah, Oscar, whatever, and thought it might make them more productive. You know, bankers or investor people, or something much more complicated than they thought it would be.
Dave Nadig: You lined us right up in the direction I want to head, because I definitely want to get to some of that. I want to start with some some really foundational stuff, though you talk about sort of those experiences some of us had. I definitely had similar experience as a kid, early meditation experiences, oddly, also at a Quaker school. But I don't think that's related. Well, it Do you find that that's really common? Like you said, you've talked to 1000s of people now, is, is? Is a childhood experience a really common entry point?
Daniel Ingram: It's nothing particularly special for me or you or anybody. Like a lot of kids have this stuff, I think, and then it very often leads to later stuff, where they end up in psychedelics, meditation, you know, psychology, something, some adventure.
Dave Nadig: What would your recommendation be? I mean, as a parent and somebody who's also been through that, you know, if you have 12, all sort of and adolescent strikes me as probably a really poignant piece of this too, because so much else is exploding. What would your advice to parents be who aren't necessarily on the spiritual path or aren't meditators? If you have a child going through something and you suspect that that might be what it is? What do you do?
Daniel Ingram: Well, I'm gonna back up and actually first just suspect that there's a non trivial possibility they're having some of these experiences. So I can't actually tell you the number of people where I've been like, talking to them, and they're interested in the eprc and meditation, and they've done all this stuff and adventures and consciousness, and they've got a kid that they've never actually really talked about that stuff with, and I start asking the kid questions about, like, what do you see on your closed eyelids, and what's your dream life like? And have you ever been able to sense energy or whatever? And all of a sudden the kid is is telling me all this stuff, right? And the parents like, what? The what, what? When it happened to them, they were getting started, and yet somehow it had just never risen. Like, I didn't tell my mom or dad what was going on with me, even though my mom was super into spiritual stuff. So like, I didn't, I didn't tell them any of this stuff. They learned about it way later. And so it was very much a solo adventure. And so the first thing is, just gently, you know, offer your kids the space and the context to talk about their inner world and what it's like. Because you might just be amazed. It's the first thing I would recommend.
Dave Nadig: Is this first hurdle of, no, you're not crazy, kind of just the universal problem. Because I know certainly I went through it myself, having those early experiences where you're just like, Oh no, what I am is committable.
Daniel Ingram: Well, that was very concerning in the second year of medical school, where there was at least 10 of us who were like, when they were telling us, like, what the definitions of mental illness were, and we were like, Yeah, that's our life. And practice like, that was our childhood. We're somehow medical students, and we're somehow very functional.
We're able to have weird experiences and yet also navigate life in the face of those, sometimes with some derailments and adventures, but sometimes also tremendous value in healing and discovery and things that really seemed to make us better in some way, at least we thought. And so, yeah, so yeah, giving space to a conversation about that, which is permissive and inquisitive, and also maybe talking about some of your own adventures in this stuff, so that it grows up normalized, that that's just another thing you talk about, like the weather or politics or what we're gonna have for lunch. Yeah, I'm surprised. How many? How were your dreams last night?
Dave Nadig: People don't really talk about dreams anymore.
Daniel Ingram: Well, I do a lot actually! but that's how I started.
Dave Nadig: Okay, so let's put ourselves in the position of somebody who is an adult and has flipped, has been cracked open, has had their insight and now they're trying to sort of make some sense of it all, which is certainly where I've been. And a lot of folks I've talked to have been too like you mentioned. Maybe you did some psychedelics. Maybe you went on some sort of secular meditation retreat out of the blue with no prior practice. You're coming back to some version of the real world trying to figure out what the heck to do next. Is there, like a simple set of modalities that you recommend for people who are just starting out? Is there a simple set of meditation practices, movement practices? What's the what's the easiest baseline for somebody who's just trying to restabilize?
Daniel Ingram: So unfortunately, the first thing to do is to find someone you can tell your story to, who resonates with it, and to find community who has skilled in this stuff and is farther along than you are, and some people who are kind of where you are. So that's very validating and valuable. I literally think that is 50% of it, because just making human connections tell your story, and having someone who has, you know, maybe some gray hair or has done a bunch of time listening to other people who have talked about this stuff that in and of itself, can be incredibly valuable, particularly if they're open minded enough to not just try to cram it into one box that is their tradition, their product, their retreat style, their whatever it is, their cult, their you Know, their marketing thing, their their life coach, whatever. So you get the idea.
I think actually that is, like literally 50 % teacher and community, or wise friends and community. It doesn't necessarily have to be someone who's, like, formally your teacher. Like, I'm not formally anybody's meditation teacher. I don't take formal students. I like chatting about this stuff. It's fun. But if someone says, I want to be your student. Your student, I just say, No. Like, straight up, like, I'm sorry. Like, I don't do that, but we can have a conversation, and I'll tell you some cool people to talk, to talk again another half year or year, who knows? Or something, but so. But I do think that that is literally half of it, and the magic that comes out of that, of discovery, of finding frameworks, of finding normalization of the books and the techniques and stuff that they recommend and what resonates with you, and going on that journey, that's a lot of it. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is, if someone actually asks me for formal meditation advice that to me, yeah, there's some kind of basic stuff I can say. So what do I say if I don't have time and I do what I consider like the not very good thing? Even though it's a very good thing, I recommend books like A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield, which is a great book. So when I said not very good thing, it's not that these aren't great things. They are, but to just say, Oh, here's a cool book, like, right? That's, that's in comparison to what I really like is like a 90 minute conversation with someone of like, what's your goals? What are your risk tolerances? What kind of strengths are you bringing to the table? What are your challenges? What have you tried before? What worked or didn't work? What are you going on? Right? You know, do you like hats or not? Do you like formal structures or not? What's your relationship to hierarchy, money, power, misogyny? You know, the usual crap you're going to run into as you start wandering into the spiritual marketplace. What kind of linguistic and conceptual and ontological and epistemic and resources do you have? You know, how much time do you have? Do you have the money and time to go on retreats? Or, you know, like some retreats could be very cheap, so they don't have to be expensive. You could go on a go anchor retreat, for example, it's just donation, you know, that could be very affordable. Or you could ordain which might be free once you you know, pay for the ticket to wherever you know what, and so like to have a much bigger conversation. And what's your relationship to the powers? What's your relationship to internal family system? What's your relationship to run into a lot of that, you know, how narcissistic Are you? How how traumatized Are you?
Dave Nadig: These are fantastic comments, and honestly, ones I wish I'd heard like five years ago, but like during the pandemic, it was really difficult to find those communities to reach out to those people. And I think a lot of people that I'm talking to are still kind of in that mode. I mean, I'm a bit of a hermit myself. I'm not a particularly get out in front of a lot of people. I do a lot of this, but I don't go to a sangha every week for a meditation set. I don't have a weekly group. So how do we navigate that in without that context of going to retreat centers, right? I mean, the community that we're talking about here, that Tom built is, is by definition, extremely virtual, right? We get together in occasional calls like this. We have a big group, you know, there that sort of feels like a first start, but there's definitely a difference between that and going and sitting someplace for three days and then having your interview with the abbot or whatever.
Daniel Ingram: That said, the world of online retreat stuff has been amazing. So just last night, I, you know, videoed into a retreat in New Zealand, where they're doing fire kasina, and they wanted to chat, and we chatted for a while, and it was really fun. You know, it was really cool to hear their experiences, and they valued my input on it, and I got to learn from them. And so what COVID did do? Yeah, it damaged some of the meat space stuff, although, in all honesty, most of the centers have just decided to totally ignore COVID now, and it's everything's back to normal, despite COVID still causing staggering amounts of damage, death, long term disability, long COVID and other problems, and bird flu on the way, probably unfortunately. But aside from all of that, of the fact that nobody learned from this, and nobody decided to clean up the air quality, or like other than that.
So aside from all of that, like, what it did do is it made virtual retreats and virtual Sanghas 100 times more of a thing. No, I don't know what the number is, but a ton more, and suddenly this is normal, whereas it wasn't before COVID. What were podcasts? They’re getting together online, virtual conversations, virtual meetings and virtual retreats. A lot of people still do them. And I'm, you know, there are actually two fire kasina retreats. There's another one in Germany that I show up for every few days for and I've done, you know, retreats where we had people who were, you know, calling in. And there was one in Thailand that I participated in from here, and they were there. And so, is it the same? No, but is it probably a much lower carbon footprint and a lot cheaper and a lot more flexible, and yeah, like, you know, can actually be a good thing. So there was a lot of good that came out of that, despite all the chaos and problems in isolation.
Dave Nadig: Okay, so starting with that, and I think that's great advice, that those communities are out there, those opportunities are out there in your studio, for I'd love to talk a little bit about modalities. One of the things that I've talked to a lot of people about is everybody seems to have their own thing, right? And it can be as simple as, like, the you know, I am very focused on somatic Objects of Meditation, you might be very focused on visual Objects of Meditation. Does any of that matter? Are there pathways that you think are either easier, less fraught with peril, more accessible to somebody coming in, or is it really just a matter of trying a bunch of different stuff and seeing what feels right?
Daniel Ingram: Both are true. So it is true that sometimes you do have to experiment some before you find something that's really good fit. It is also true that certain paths are riskier. Higher dose is riskier, more visualization of stuff that is not there. More mantras is riskier. It's also more magical and sometimes more powerful and more interesting. So both are true, like tantric stuff, where you're involving a bunch of DD can be very powerful. Can also be more risky, like the breath can be a much safer object. Can also be really boring, sometimes for people and they can't concentrate on it worth a darn. Like, you know, open open awareness practice can get much less sort of internally chaotically, neurotically whatever, and yet it may miss some of the precision, you know, rapid internal noticing or noting practices or whatever, or body scanning can be much more energetically activating, you know, and somewhat riskier, but also give people like vastly superior analytic meditation skills and technical chops.
You know, Jhana practices can really help people calm down, except they can also be triggering for some with body trauma, where they, you know, think books like The Body Keeps the Score, but then they can also, like, get people kind of in those tracks, and then that is meditation for them. And maybe they don't get as much insight, but maybe they got gained a lot of mental health benefits, and that was really a wonderful thing for them to do. And it got them off, you know, valium or whatever they were on, I don't know. So, like, you know, so, so all of these have their pros and cons, and it really is, it should be a conversation. And I think, weirdly enough, like Claude and GPT four, like, whatever, you know, the models are now, like, they're, they're sophisticated enough that you can actually have this...
Dave Nadig: Oh god, I'm so glad you brought this up, because I have to talk to you about my Daniel Bot!
Daniel Ingram: Well, actually, that would be yet another one! So, like, there have been a number of these already made, and not just me, of plenty of people. And Rick Archer actually is building compassion bot with the people at service space and so and meta Nipun look up Rick Archer of Bucha at the gas pump, and the incredibly massive tool he's pouring resources into with tons of teachers. Ai yogi is another one. So there are a bunch of people building really interesting toys that have, you know, access to tons of material, and they're really going places. They're a really interesting option, like cynicism about them, and now, like, honestly, I'm like, a lot of the time, that's probably going to do you better, because it is more balanced. It's not selling something. It's yeah, they can be wrong and lie and hallucinate and say crazy stuff too, like teachers.
Dave Nadig: Almost everything you've done is sort of out there in the public domain. I loaded all that into an AI bot, along with, apparently, it has already scraped everything that dharma overgrounds ever published, which includes, like, hundreds of meditation diaries and people's individual experiences, right?
Daniel Ingram: And these debates, right? We've been debating these things for 16 years!
Dave Nadig: To be able to type in "oh, I came off the cushion yesterday, and I had this wild visual experience of mythic horizons full of fire." And you type that in, and it's like, oh, yeah, here's three other people, and here's what this person did, and here's what that person did. That strikes me is, is, I mean, I'm reluctant to say something like teacher in a box, but that's some of what you get out of a retreat environment where you're having discussions and talking to teachers.
Daniel Ingram: Except they won't have anything like the knowledge base or the diversity that AI does. Just to be honest, the teacher can't yeah, the teachers won't. None of them can.
Dave Nadig: This was sort of the angle I was going for. One of my reluctances with the spiritual community, you call it the spiritual marketplace, I call it the spiritual industrial complex, is that almost everybody is in their silo, right? Like "I'm a Zen guy", or "I'm a Theravadan guy", or "I'm an Art of Living guy." These people genuinely, I believe, with very full and open hearts, think that they've found *the answer* for a way of doing things. But, but to your point, part of what a good teacher should be able to do is say, "Look, I understand you've been sitting Shikantaza for three and a half weeks. This is not for you. Maybe you should go try some yoga."Like a good teacher should be able to see you're in a place of stuckness or going in a bad direction. This version of the path is not for you. I've heard so few actual teachers in the sort of spiritual marketplace ever say that. Is that just my experience?
Daniel Ingram: I mean, there are certainly teachers ... I know people who do that ... who refer to other teachers, who refer to other techniques and styles, but it is pretty grabby.
A lot of people charge. They want students. They want revenue. There are the economic incentives to keep people in their sphere, in their in their circle, in their product, in their, you know, catchment area is, you know, is strong and so, I mean, there are people like me who, since I a want to be nobody's teacher. Every single person who comes to me, I refer to somebody else. So without exception, I'm going to tell you about other techniques, books, resources, retreats, like, so that's always what I'm doing. That also might be imbalanced, right? So that's also kind of weird from a certain point of view, right?
Dave Nadig: I think, for a certain Western mindset, I think that makes sense, right? I mean, if you're used to a world of googling for facts and trying 14 different versions of software and you're approaching the internal space the same way. I think it can be difficult to be like, great. I'm gonna spend a year and a half being a Zen guy and see how that feels. That's a lot of commitment in the modern world@ So, so let's talk a little bit about the flip side of that, which is sort of spiritual dilettantism of about that modality of the month. Is that particularly bad? I've certainly been cat caught up in that at times myself. Is it? Where does that fit into the mix, that exploration? of the
Daniel Ingram: I think that's the only way teachers are ever going to have a sense of what's out there, and at least some superficial taste of its flavor or value, or kind of vibe like, so if you're wanting people who are practicing now and eventually ending up with the capacity to say, Oh no, you should go do some, get some body work. You should, you should be doing some breath stuff. No, you need therapy, man. Like, just good or something like, the only way you know to do that and can kind of recognize the patterns and to do it well is if you've played around a bunch.
So if you're if you're ideal involves (which mine does) that kind of diversity, then somewhere in there you've got to explore. So I don't know if it happens in the front end, the middle, the back end, or a mix of all of those, but that's got to have happened for any individual person that might be hard to predict. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, obviously, if you're just like, Oh, I like, you know, paid attention to my breath for 10 minutes, and then I, you know, did a mantra for 10 minutes and whatever, and they didn't really get me very far. So then I, you know, went to like, yeah, obviously, you know, that sort of sampler plate of stuff, and very, very low dose, without a sense of what it really is, you know. I mean, there may be things you're just like, Yeah, I'm just not into circling, or something like, which I'm not, like, some people love circling. I'm not meaning to rag on circling in any way. Like, don't, you don't have to accept any of my biases. But like, you know, to know, okay, yeah, that's my thing. That's not my thing. That's useful.
And then it is often true that somewhere in there, someone will suddenly go, yeah, that, right. So if they do this for long enough, yeah, that and then they do that for a while is pretty common. It's also sometimes that people find none of those things, and then they end up sort of one of these, putting together their own system, or their own way, or their own fusion, or they're just like, they just, I just, I just can't, you know, and that also sometimes can be really interesting. I mean, the Buddha was kind of that. I mean, you know, they studied with all the teachers of the day, and then they were like, Yeah, but no, but not. And then they did their own thing, right? So, so that's where Buddhism, at least, comes from. And certainly plenty of other traditions came from that. And so you got to leave space for them too. And sometimes that's a lonely path, a weird path, a frustrating path, okay, but sometimes great things come out of that also.
Dave Nadig: I've definitely had that experience of, like, I mean, I think almost everybody I've ever talked to about their practice where, you know, you have that half hour conversation about, you talk about what's worked and what's doesn't, oh, I don't sit in this posture. I see, you know, those kind of nuts and bolty conversations. Everybody does seem to kind of do their own thing, which is great. I've sometimes found it difficult to commit to being like I want to go do this retreat for X number of days, because I have to sit for that length of time, or this length of time, or we're not standing, or we are standing, and that, you know, as you get older, you know, we get curmudgeonly, and those things can be difficult. Let's talk a little bit about the flip side of that dilettantism, which is the really getting hooked on one modality again, something I have pretty strong personal experience with. I sort of came to the Jhana maps as a way of explaining experiences I was already having.
And then the separate question about the sort of maps versus scripts, but it is the case certainly that I've now experienced, and I've talked to lots of folks, that really strong, concentrated experiences can be pretty darn addictive, like they can be really pleasurable. And when we say that, like when people talk about things like Piti and rapture, I don't think people are crass enough about how good this stuff feels. Like sex is second nature. Like this is hardcore stuff in several versions of that word, in the modern world, where we are so addictive to pleasure, I worry a little bit because I'm a warrior that, like my own experience of wrestling with the near addictive quality of that. Do we really want to foist that on the entire world? How do we wrestle with that? Wow,
Daniel Ingram: I'm actually going to back up before I forget again. I think it's an important point just to wrap up the dilettante thing. So even if you go to a monastery where everyone in theory, is doing a strict technique in the same thing. If they do it for long enough, they're all going to start diverging, and they will have interpreted the instructions differently. And it'll, you know, filter through their own neurodivergence to come up with something else. And even if you look at like the top students of like some teacher, they're all going to look really different. Like you look at the top students of, you know, U Ba Khin, you know, one was Goenka, but there was also Robert Hover and some others. They all look different. They teach different stuff, and they have different feels and vibes. Same with Mahasi Saidow, if you look at, you know, some of the people that then came out of they're all very different in some ways, in terms of teachers and so this diversity, even in this, you know, they're all sitting in straight rows doing the same thing. No, they aren't. They're not doing the same thing, and they're not becoming the same thing either. So that's, that's the first other point I wanted to say about that.
So now getting to the jhana addiction thing. Yeah. So first off, like, just backing up to a real world point of view, if people could be addicted to jhanas versus nearly anything else, obviously, that is the right improvement over boot. Yeah, this is, I want to say this like 1000 fold stronger, like, give us the biggest exclamation point I can possibly give it, you know. And then yes questions of but they miss insight practice, and yes, they might neglect their family or parent but compared to meth and booze, or you know, ketamine or whatever the f*ck people are getting too addicted these days. I'm like, Jesus Christ, yes, please.
It can become an impediment to other practices. And again, you know, I warn about Jhana junkies in my book. You know, that's my own thing, right? So I'm, everybody has their style, right? I'm an aversive type. An aversive type means, like, I could tear reality into, like, meaningless particles that I didn't give a f*ck about, you know. So I was good at insight practices, but cultivating blissful, peaceful states, they just didn't grab my mind. Like, I just didn't, right? I just, it was very hard. It took me a while to figure out, like, how to to tune into that kind of vibe and mindset, because I'm not a desirous type. I'm not there's not a hierarchy here, by the way. These are just different personality qualities.
There's not one better than the other, like, and so the other thing is, some people who are not that good at jhana can kind of feel weird or like, kind of jealous and like, Oh my God, I wish I had some jhana, but I can't really do it. Doesn't people, it was not really built that way. So that's important to just recognize. And then some people, it is just their karma to be really good at jhana. They're just, it's a thing that's that's the gifts they were given, that is a cool gift, like, that's a cool and important gift. Can it get out of balance and over focused and mis insight and neglect family and just become like this whole thing. And, you know, get all evangelical and zealous and whatever. Yeah, sure, like anything.
But so can insight practice, Insight practices, you know, can become that. Anything can become that. So we can become obsessive about, you know, we can become co dependent with being nice to people and compassionate. So you can take anything and take it too far, so it doesn't, you know, anything on the spiritual path patience, you can become too patient, and you just sit there waiting for stuff to happen. Like, it's a great, you know, you can become too grateful. Like, maybe you shouldn't be that grateful for that. Maybe that kind of sucks, like, you know. So any quality that can become a golden chain. So just to recognize that there's nothing in the spiritual path that is free from that potential danger and trap. Yeah, so do I think it is.
I also think it is really important that jhanas are getting attention now, because they kind of didn't for the first few decades, at least in the mainstream, right? Is the Insight Meditation Society and mindfulness and all that. And this doesn't do anything weird or nothing ultra powerful, right? It's not addictive. It's not, you know, that was kind of the messaging. I'm really glad that the counter message like the jhanas are important, and they can be super powerful, and, yeah, maybe they can be on par with psychedelics, and maybe they can be on par with drugs. Like, that's important because, weirdly enough, like, drugs have more cred in the world of, like, powerful experiences and bliss. No, it's true. Like, and meditation is having to, like, say, No, us to us too. We could actually do this. Like, I'm glad that's counterpart. I'm glad that's, you know, there's some this side is getting its its due, and maybe it goes too far for some people like anything.
Dave Nadig: One thing that you say often in your podcast appearance is "check out your ethical trip." And my favorite quote of yours of all time comes from a podcast you did a while ago, which I'll paraphrase it to the effect that
"A brighter minded, more aware Tiger is probably a better hunter."
And I feel like that is the phrase of our moment in the zeitgeist.
Daniel Ingram: Especially if you're associated with Wall Street, right? These are apex predators.
Dave Nadig: But these are also the people who are discovering psychedelics and alter states of consciousness and meditation. And there are now multiple tech Valley versions of Jhana meditation that have been trademarked, and, you know, copyrighted and probably patented at some point, which on the one hand I have very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I've had these wonderful experiences and I am not so profoundly a misanthrope that I don't have some evangelism in me for other people to have good things that I've had. But on the other hand, that quote of yours just plays at my head over and over again.
Do we actually need more billionaires with higher mind focus and access to the powers just like that? Do you believe that there is any connection between the sort of very mechanical, let's just call it mind-training aspect that comes from sitting on the cushion and the ethical components that a whole lot of Buddhism is actually written about.
Daniel Ingram: So I'm kind of famous for being on the disconnected side of that conversation, and I, in some ways, I do it as sort of a counterbalance, because it's not like I can't see the arguments about how learning to connect with your inner darkness might make you appreciate other people's inner darkness, and you can be more compassionate for their suffering when you recognize your own suffering. This you can get a better theory of mind of other people as you understand your own mind, and yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But, and I actually did a whole kind of solo podcast on this, you can find it on my SoundCloud called "The Institute," so if you're looking, and I go a whole thing about this, and the basic argument is about psychopathy, and psychopaths, and narcissism and all the sort of dark triad Machiavellian stuff, and that question about "an awake Tiger."
I'm actually pretty skeptical and pretty cynical about this. And I think that if we're going to put all our our eggs in the consciousness 2.0 basket, or a lot of resources, without addressing the question of what it does with psychopaths and psychopathy, because the evidence from the spiritual world is that it often empowers psychopaths to take the leadership roles in communities and exploit people. Again, awake tigers. Exactly as you said, I'm far towards the side of being cautious, kind of cynical, and I have so many real world examples of where this did not work out: made people more dangerous, more cunning, more subtle in their craft of psychopathy, harder to detect, more cloaked in the terms and terminologies of this stuff, more exploitation capacity.
Not that they often didn't help people or teach people cool things, they often do. You know, all cults have good tech. That's why they're popular, right? They have something that they do.
Dave Nadig: That's another great quote. "All cults have good tech."
Daniel Ingram: I mean, right? Or they wouldn't exist. They've got some cool thing that, like is cool tech, and that can be honored in its way. But that doesn't mean you need to buy the whole thing, right? So in the same way, you know, nearly all the spiritual psychopaths have something that that might be of value or real strong value for some of them. And so I really worry that if you don't have empathic centers as mirror neurons in your brain, and you're not one of these people that, like, you know, ah, you know that you see somebody else pain and you cringe because you can feel it in your own body.
A person I used to work for, actually, I said to them one morning, you know, "what is it like to have no guilt or empathy?" And they just smiled at me and said, "Oh, you noticed." And they said, you know, "why would any idiot feel empathy that's just feeling pain when somebody else feels pain? That's just adding pain to pain? What? What moron would possibly think that's a good idea and guilt is just going to slow you down from doing what needs to be done. And so, because I have no guilt or empathy, I'm a wolf among sheep."
And they were proud of it. They thought of themselves as a superior creature because of these mods, because they didn't, you know, and so that didn't mean they couldn't be very effective in creating some positive things they were. But there was also it was like having a pet tiger, you would never want to forget that your pet tiger was the tiger, and like, leave the two year old around it at lunchtime.
I'm deeply cynical, because I think that I know tons of people who have done tons of practice, and they're not that much more ethical. In fact, it can make people more self obsessed, more destructive to family and finances, and more it can do. It can do a lot of bad stuff.
Dave Nadig: You've already mentioned once in this call "A Path With Heart," by Jack Kornfield, You know, I think it's fair to say most of our community is a little bit older, probably, you know, 40s up. A lot of us in Gen X. We are well on our way in lives, right? We are probably not the captains of industry who are just about to discover ketamine and meditation and go raise venture capital funding. So what advice do you have on the long term path versus the short term path? I took a lot of solace from, or insight from, your discussion of things like the fractal nature of insight, and how the long path of a life can often be the same as the 10 minutes on a cushion and a cycle. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how those of us who are getting a little older in the world should be thinking about what our journey looks like in the you know, 20 - 30, years we might have left?
Daniel Ingram: Well, again, that really benefits from a nuanced conversation. I think, just even having the conversation with someone who's been doing this a long time, or with a number of people with different perspectives who have been doing this a long time. So if you've got those kinds of resources, just just, you know, if you're paying for dharma or whatever you're doing, or you've got friends or whatever it is, just make the time for that conversation itself and keep making the time for it over the years, what are we doing? Why? What do we care about now? Because it does change a lot. As your kids get older, you get health problems, or suddenly you have aging parents, or suddenly you got a ton of money in time, like or whatever it is, or suddenly you're now broke because whatever crashed, or, you know, the like, it's a dynamic thing.
And so I think again, the first meta thing, I would say is make sure you actively keep having that conversation of what is important to you on those fronts and keep in touch with that as a dialog, and not just other spiritual practitioners and teachers, but with partners and family and just ordinary friends like, because they might be able to understand, you know, the basics of it, even if they don't know map theory, but they might know you and you might be able to like, there is something also kind of limiting about putting everything in a spiritual frame, or with these kinds of technologies, or thinking of it in terms of, what's the next meditation practice I do? Like, no, maybe, like, what's the next vacation you take could be as important a topic, or when's the next time you visit your family could be as valuable for something, right?
Dave Nadig: So, yeah, that makes Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, there has been this sense I've had growing older, that as you get older, you sort of have more more space, mentally, more maybe it's that time slows down that you actually have the wherewithal to to think about things that are a bit transcendent. I mean, there's even a great book called GeroTranscendance about how we change as we get older, and our ability to accept spiritual practice.
You mentioned maps. Maps are something I keep coming back to because they were really important for me in sort of ordering my practice, more than anything. Creating, literally a map or a framework in which to understand what was going on in the internal world. But ever since, and this has been multiple years, there's always that voice in my head that is questioning whether I'm scripting my experience, or whether I'm describing my experience, and you've written some about that, I'd love to talk about that where, how do you deal with that difference of agency and free will when it comes to the meditation experience?
Daniel Ingram: So starting with the tail end of that agency and free will are both qualities that arise sometimes. You know, plenty of thoughts, wow. Why is that thought arising? I didn't want to think that. But then, oh, I decided to think of positive thought, like so, you know, both the quality of I am doing that and I am not doing that, that is happening to me, that is just the what, you know, those are just qualities that arise. So the meta thing of agency and free will is that they arise naturally. So, like, deal with it. Okay, right? Very straightforwardly, this is one of the first thing anybody notices on the when they sit down on the cushion, and that a lot of them reject it for the next however, many decades of their practice, they don't happen. But sometimes it kind of seems like they sort of do, except that isn't something you're in your control. Okay, great. That is also, yeah. So first, first thought, best thought kind of thing, the first thing.
The second thing ... maps versus script, so they are both a bug and a feature. So it is, it is true that if I want to get into some of the Deep State stuff. I read texts about it, like if I one of the things like neurospicy is this thing I can do, but it's not easy to do, right? And I will literally read the section the Visuddhimagga on it beforehand. Literally, I'm reading how to do it out of a book. It's literally a script, but it also makes the actual experience more likely. This becomes a fascinating conversation with the Dan Brown kids, where, literally, like, half of his shtick was hypnotizing people into these states because he was a master hypnotist and could hit. Can hypnotize people into insights? Are those valid insights? Well, they all seem to think so maybe they perform as so one of the things that meditation clear and psychedelics and all of these things clearly make you is more programmable, both internally and externally. Right your own thoughts and the surroundings you find yourself in towards going It's like how to tune the incredibly intricate multi dimensional radio of the mind to different things. Part of that is what we tell ourselves and the words and the expectations. That's part of it, and that can be okay. Is it true that sometimes people can delusionally script themselves and but like, if you're feeling bliss in your body, you're feeling bliss in your body like nobody can tell you otherwise. Yeah, there it is. You're seeing a bright white light. You're seeing a bright white light, whatever, if you feel better, you feel better, great, you know. Okay, cool. Who cares how you felt better?
Dave Nadig: I would position this a little more towards younger folks who are, you know, showing up at a retreat for the first time, or have I seen this a lot, folks who are maybe 25 they've read a ton, like they've read more than I have, you know, they're halfway through the Pali canon at a very young age, and then they come to a retreat, and they have their experiences with their expectations, not with their actual experience.
Daniel Ingram: Yes, I get ton of those too, particularly as a map person who puts out very elaborate, detailed maps, so I get to deal with tons of these kids. And you're right, it can be very, very derailing.
Daniel Ingram: The EPRC (is one of the projects I help support: The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium. And we were talking about this. I'm helping some people on fire Kasina right now, right and, and they're kind of breaking down into two categories or two retreats. You've got the people who are, like, very intuitive practitioners, and it's kind of like giving young children Finger Paints, and they just kind of were like, ah, you know? (waves hands) And they're seeing what their fingers and paint do, right? And then you've got the people who are like, well, I thought it was in the second screen, but really, I thought maybe it was first shot, because there was a little bit of effort, but then, see, I was trying to do Vipassana, and thinking maybe there was this goal, but I had heard this thing where you're not supposed to like and you've got these kids versus these kids. The finger-painting kids are doing way better, yeah, like along all metrics, having more fun, faster progress, better experiences than the analytical kids. Like this is a curse from any comparative point of view.
Dave Nadig: Is there something about specific practices that make it easier to follow the maps? For me, the reason I ask that is, for me, the visual cues of fire Kasina because I'm a very visual and imaginal person, made it much more clear to me to understand where I was, and therefore let me get beyond the maps faster. Do you believe that different modalities are inherently easier for certain kinds of practice, or do you believe that those are individualized meaning for somebody else. Sound bathing is going to be the thing that gets them the same place.
Daniel Ingram: Oh, we've definitely had people who tried to do fire Kasina, and they were like, super somatic, and they just don't really connect with the visual field, and it really becomes meaningless to them. But then when they started doing somatic things, yeah, with this one guy on retreat, and suddenly it was like, yeah, that's way better. So that's a thing we all have our sense
It is also true some of these neurotic mapping people eventually will acquire all kinds of interesting technical skills, and if they can learn how to be like neurotic mappers, and then fuse that with the intuitive stuff, they can actually become really great practitioners, you know, so and maybe this helps them navigate complicated obstacles and help create new maps and help figure out the nuances of cool things like this. This sometimes is a temporary down that leads to some cool ups. So just to also give these people their due sometimes it just ends up loopy neuroticism. But so then backing up to fire kasina and since modalities, yeah, so definitely, definitely true that certain modalities are different for different people, and also different maps work differently for different people.
So like, even within fire Kasina there's just one example. (For those who don't know what fire kasina is, by the way, you look at a candle flame or a light source for, you know, a few seconds or a minute, you close your eyes, you follow whatever colors you see on the backs of your closed eyelids. And after some time, you, you know, are like bored with that, and you go back to the source, and you do it again. And you do that really high dose. And it can eventually get Jhana, insight stages, get DMT like, you know, or sort of psilocybin. More DMT, really, than psilocybin anyway, it can get very, very powerful, very strange, kind of dangerous and challenging, but also remarkably transformative. And show people that there really is a really deep end there to meditation that we're still exploring.)
On maps. If you give them the map of "screens": the afterimage dot is the first screen, the stuff that shows up around it is on the second screen. Third screen is sort of like photo realistic, and fourth screen is fully immersive. For some people that map will really work, and sometimes it doesn't. Some people really want to add a Jhanic map overlay. "Well, I was feeling these kinds of Jhanic factors..." And some people that really kind of doesn't, and they do better with, like screens or colors. Some people do better with materials. So if you frame it in terms of elements or materials, or, like, pixelated versus non pixelated, or near and far and three, you know, wide versus narrow.
Some people do better with insight stages. Like, you start talking about the murk (the purple/red cloud of color that can stymie Kasina meditators for ages) and dots, and they're like (waves hands running away) but then they're "Oh, it's getting very dark nighty, but then it was more of an energetic A and P (Arising and Passing Away) phase, or whatever they like. Even within one tradition, there might be a bunch of different maps that kind of at different points in people's practices, resonate more or less with them, right?
Most traditions have some kind of map. Zen says "we don't have maps," but of course they have maps. The words Kensho and Satori exist for a reason. "This is a highly enlightened practitioner, and this person didn't get it." They can tell, like they know.
Dave Nadig: In your experience, do people do better with maps that are culturally grounded, or do they do better with maps that are exogenous?
Daniel Ingram: Wow, that is totally variable, right? So, and that might even vary by the practice of the year. Like plenty of people are like, Oh, I like, I hated this map the first time I saw it, and then, like, five years earlier, they're like, Oh my God, how did I not appreciate what that map was? And then you have other people who are, like, I was so into this mapping system for so long, and now it is so limiting. And, yeah, I can't deal with that anymore. Like I'm having to move on. It just is too constraining for me. And really, what I'm experiencing, it doesn't fit with..
Dave Nadig: "You're interpreting that question at a much deeper level than I meant! I was thinking more at the level of somebody comes across the transom to me and starts talking about spiritual practice, and they say they come from a Christian tradition, right? There's sort of two paths I would take there. One is to point them towards things like Thomas Merton and the monastic traditions of Christianity. But then for a lot of folks, what they actually respond to is something that is as far from that as possible. And they're like, no, no, it's got to be Thai Forest Buddhism, right? It's got to be as far removed from the thing that I grew up with as possible. Yeah, to your point, I'm sure it's very individual, but it does seem like there is something useful in both the tension and the familiarity.
Daniel Ingram: Oh, definitely, yeah. And particularly with regard to the like, you know, an ex Christian thing, it is not uncommon for them to wander back in at some point after they've wandered out. Or, you know, you see all these different cyclical or iterative relationships that are not here.
Dave Nadig: So we were talked a little bit about living a life, and the sort of the Jack Kornfield "path with heart." Another one of my favorite expressions is one you use when you talk about sort of heady things that people often have in their in their mind, like "enlightenment," or, you know, "true self," or whatever this lofty goal they have. You often come back with the line "look, I'm still just a mammal," which I think is just such a great line. How do you think about that tension between the physical instantiation of our seeming beings here, the cells and neurons and everything that make us up, and then what seems to be a very common, fairly common experience that human beings have when they pay attention real hard for a while, like, how do those things line up?
Is it all foundationally biological? Or do you believe that it is extra normal.
Daniel Ingram: So I am something of known for being something of an ontologically agnostic, empirical, empirical pragmatist. Which could take some time to unpack.
The ontology statement is what it is, agnosticism. How can you really know? Empirical in the sense of David Hume -- immediate experience is the first basis from which I extrapolate reality. All other things come from my immediate experience. And then empirical in the sense of scientific experiment, I can see how my extrapolations do-or-do-not lead to something useful.
So, if I adopt the frame "this is all a meat body and all consciousness arises from meat," that allows me to do certain things. It's kind of useful for anesthesia. It's useful. There are practical consequences of adopting that view. It has its points.
And then I say, "No, we're just radios receiving consciousness that comes to us from The Great Divine Mind of all pervading light or something, right?" Well, they're actually interesting things that come from when you adopt a frame like that. And so it really, to me, is like, what is the problem you're actually trying to solve, and which of the possible frames you could adopt is, is, is, what do they each lend? Because they each lend something, and they each limit you somehow, as soon as you make this decision of where you're drawing the line between a this and a that, I'm sort of, for those who knew Laura Well, the French anti philosopher, philosopher, as soon as you make a decision about the this and the that of it, the where this comes from, the draw your lines, and then you live with your choices.
I actually am very flexible about drawing a lot of those lines, and very reluctant to take super fixed positions that saying this is always the model that always works for any of those questions, And sometimes, like when dealing with magical experience, there other situations where it's like, yeah, maybe that person needs to have that shut down with drugs, like, maybe that's too far, and the DR is going to play to a dopaminergic pathway that's going to stop that, whatever the hell it is, because it's not helpful. It's not helping today, right? I'm very comfortable, you know, floating around in the ambiguities of the fact that I don't have fixed ontologies, because none of us really do, if we really look carefully at ourselves, we all have moments where we think of things one way or another way. But can we be a little more formal and meta cognitive of that and what we're gaining and losing when we do that, at least for some of the big questions, and in which situations, because it will be situation dependent.
Dave Nadig: I'm smiling because I'm remembering the I think those are one of the last chapters in in a path with heart. Kornfeld sort of goes through the characteristics of spiritual maturity, and two of them I remember vividly. One is flexibility, because things change. And the other is contradiction, learning to deal with things that don't make any sense next to each other. Yeah, both of those feel like pretty strong signs of spiritual maturity.
Well, Dan, this has been an absolute pleasure, both personally and for the group. I really thank you for joining us here. Any closing thoughts you have for us seekers out there wandering in the world?
Daniel Ingram: Yeah. So if, for some reason, you think the clinical mainstream and scientific mainstream and mental health mainstream should know more about this than they currently do, which is not a whole lot, please think about, you know, looking up the emergent phenomenology Research Consortium and the charity emergence benefactors that supports it. I help support these things as a volunteer, and I give to these projects as a philanthropist, but my pockets are not deep enough to give it anything like the support it needs. So fellow philanthropists, in the season of giving, as the tax year rolls to a close, if you're needing some more deductions for your capital gains and your crypto or whatever the heck it is, please keep us in your in your thoughts. We are happy to take these things.
You can check out our many decades long plan of how we upgrade the clinical system to vastly more appreciate the opportunities, the pitfalls, the perils, the complexities, the nuances, the details such that there's somebody with an MD and a PhD at the doctoral level who really understands the stuff with a doctoral level of understanding appropriate to the that name of that sort of degree. So help us out. It's one of the projects I'm really excited about supporting these days, and where I give most of my my day to day time is mostly dedicated to that.
Dave Nadig: I think it's very relevant to the holiday, very relevant to the year, very relevant to our group, because I think a lot of us are on that edge of trying to make sure that the science and the phenomenology are well matched.
Daniel Ingram: Take a look at our white paper and our plans that the papers were publishing, we've got, we've got an amazing team with people at top universities and kinds of people at all kinds of other excellent places doing a lot of really neat work, and we're under capitalized for what it actually takes to do global healthcare systems change.
Dave Nadig: We'll try to get the message out. So thanks. Thanks. Be well, bye, Dave, you.
Willoughby has a great podcast with Tim Ferriss where she discusses the Hidden Risks of Meditation.
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