Andrew Holecek: Death is the end of a body. It’s not the end of a relationship. And so if we maintain this deep understanding of the fabric and the commonality of the human condition,
We can meet them at this reduction base, we can meet them at this level, and we can really help them.
Tami Simon: Hi friends. I’m Tami Simon, and since I was young, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I didn’t prepare properly for my death the last time around, and I don’t wanna make that same mistake again. Now, of course, maybe this was just a child’s imagination, but questions like, am I actually ready to die? Is there continuity after death?
And if so, what continues? These are questions across cultures and across time that have pushed inner explorers to inquire more deeply and learn more. Welcome to this special Insights at the Edge Series. Once more, exploring reincarnation and the gap between lives. Stay with us.
I wanna, uh, get personal for a moment and see what you make of this, which is, I feel like if I were a good Buddhist at the time of my death, there would be this voluntary, as you said, desire to serve all beings and come back into incarnation as a loving servant. Yeah. But what I’ve noticed, and I used to believe that, but I’ve noticed of late.
I really hope I don’t have to come back, and that’s the truth. And I feel a little embarrassed or confessional or, uh, weak to say that, or I must not have a good tolerance or ability to work with pain and form or something. But I’m curious what you make of that, Andrew. Yeah.
Andrew Holecek: Oh man. This is so cool. Okay, so, whew, let, let’s give a, an example here about, first of all, coming back who comes back and like.
The, you mentioned this word, volition, or I think I mentioned that you echoed it, you know, deciding, um, intentionally to come back. Well, here’s again, this is why we have to change the way we think, and I’ll give you an analogy here again to bring this home, because there, and this is what makes this so fantastic and so ironic, paradoxical, which is, which is by the way, the way reality is interpreted through the lens of a dualistic mind, irony paradox.
It’s just like, doesn’t jive. There is no you that makes these decisions, just like in the lives of the great beings like Trump, JE or Ramina Maharshi or the great beings. They’re not running around making decisions the way we do. They’re letting reality decide. And by this what I mean is look at, look at an, an instance in your life.
Perhaps a car accident, an instance of trauma, disaster or war. You, you read about these accounts everywhere in the literature. I’ve had this experience because I’ve been in car accidents. The people will often state Tammy, in a moment of trauma or war, they will. They will do outrageous things that make no sense whatsoever.
In a Darwinian self preservation worldview, the person will risk their lives. They will decide to save someone at the risk of their own life, a complete stranger. Now, why on Darwin’s good earth would this ever happen? Well, it won’t happen in Darwin’s world. What’s happening here, and this is just an analogy.
These moments of really intense sensory impact, whether it’s trauma, war, accident, or whatever, the ego is literally temporarily stunned out of existence, and you almost, almost literally come to your senses. And so therefore, these spontaneous moments of Bodhi Safa activity take place precisely because there’s no time to think about it.
There’s no time to contract away from it and say, Hey, wait a second. Let me deliberate on this. No, you risk your life to save another because you realize at that level there is no other, you’re reaching out to save yourself. And so what I’m saying here is what is it that’s dictating the action? It’s not you.
It’s like Suzuki Roshi said, strictly speaking, there are no enlightened beings. There’s only enlightened activity. And so enlightened activity is just this, a person who is so open, so quiet in this case that every moment has the sensory impact to bring you to your senses, and therefore every moment decides for you.
This is why the wisdom traditions say at this level, it’s effortless. It’s it’s effortless. You don’t have to think about it. Everything is like entering a flow state. This is another example. If you’ve ever had an experience of the zone or the flow state, this is also analogous to that athletes performing at the top of their game.
They do so because they’re now thinking about it. They’re not contracting, they’re not referencing, they’re flowing with the moment. And so therefore, at those levels, whether it’s a sports physical activity of some sort, an accident or whatever. You enter the stream, so to speak. That’s a wonderful rendering of what I mentioned earlier.
You enter the stream because your whirlpool completely dissolves, and then the stream decides, reality decides, and you spend your life as a Bodhi Safa as a representative of reality. There’s no you, Tammy, that’s making these decisions. It’s just reality itself, pouring itself through you.
Tami Simon: Alright, now, now I’m gonna ask you a personal question.
Okay. Do you have a memory that you feel, you know, that’s pretty reliable, I think, of a past life? And if so, how do you understand that as a movement of the habit patterns from that life into this incarnation?
Andrew Holecek: Yeah, these are great. Do you stay up all night thinking of these questions? These are all
Tami Simon: No, no, no.
Andrew Holecek: Well, I’ve had, I’ve had intimations, I can’t say, you know, I wouldn’t sign my, um, name on a legal document saying that I’ve had an overt memory. Oh yeah, that was me in Tibet 400 years ago. I have absolutely, positively in, in deep meditation states, especially you mentioned in my intro dark practice where, where I spend up, you know, month or so in the dark.
I really open, I really relax and by the wake. You wanna prepare for rebirth and the end of life, you go into dark retreat. And it is in those instances when I’m completely relaxed, completely open, and I’ve fundamentally just died, then yes, I’ve had some things that I would, um, append. This is probably, um, the recollection of, of a life.
And so what actually creates the substrate or the matrix of continuity. This is a tricky thing to do, uh, to answer because once again, you can’t think of it, um, in normal think thinking ways. You have to think of it using terms of like process, philosophy. The philosophy of occulus in the west, or basically nagar geno or anybody who teaches on emptiness in the East that you can think of it, you can think of the mindstream.
And again, just think evangelistically here. Think right hemisphere, not Lamis, left hemisphere. Don’t get too literal here ’cause none of this non-dualistic stuff makes sense. But you can think is, uh, of this ongoing infinite wave of continuity. What literally called the indestructible continuum for those Tibetans might be listening.
It’s called “ma” or the indestructible continuum. It’s an indestructible stream of mind, which in this case the analogy would be just like “space.” Well, what is space? Well, it’s not a thing, but it’s also not nothing. Right? And, and, and this is what, if you wanna know what continues at an absolute level, that’s it.
Nothing. Now this is evangelistically where it gets challenging. So think mytho poetically. Maybe go back to the stream image. That underneath, underneath the, the surface of the stream, there may be these underlying kind of sub currents. Literally it’s called again for the geeks, ana, underlying mindstream of a karmic thread.
This is the dimension that that beings have access to there. It’s not them, but it’s also not, not them. See, it doesn’t fit traditional ways of thinking. And so that underlying indestructible thread or continuity is in fact the substrate that lodges these, these, um, pret temporal pres spatial memories from previous lives.
So, I wanna pause and, and not go too geeky here because now we’re starting to get into really deep philosophy of mind. Questions. I’m happy to go there. But I’m also concerned about roadkill.
Tami Simon: Uh, you know, I appreciate your checking in at each point, Andrew. And one part I wanna fill in for people. Yeah.
’cause you mentioned dark retreat. Yeah. And I know this is something that you’re intensely interested in at this point in your life, writing about it and teaching about it. And for people who are like, wait a second, can I experience this myself? How might I get a taste of the power of darkness? Can you share a little bit about that?
Andrew Holecek: Yeah. Oh, you can, you just, now you’re hitting my sweet spot. We’ll be here for three hours. So, yeah, we, I’m doing a research with, uh, two teams of scientists who are doing some formal studies. I’m writing two books, as you know. This is, I’ve been doing this practice for 29 years. I’m coming out of the closet because I think it’s time to talk, so to speak.
Right. The dark closet. Totally. That was by design. So the most, you know, here’s the great thing about Dark Retreat. You wanna do your first dark retreat with me? Oh yeah. Here we go. Close your eyes
for the next 30 seconds. Do absolutely nothing.
You’ve just done your first dark retreat. Now imagine doing this, and this is the way I teach it now, Tammy, I, I, I play on the 49 day model because as you know, in the Tibetan tradition, this is the penultimate preparatory practice for death. You, you go into the dark to die, but at the same time, it’s the penultimate birth practice because you can’t have birth without death.
This practice is just as much about birthing as it is about dying. So when I teach it, basically what I do is I play on the 49 day bottle, right? Don’t go in for 49 days. Please close your eyes for 4.9 seconds. I can do that. Close your eyes for 49 seconds. I can do that. Close your eyes for four minutes and nine seconds.
I can do that. You get the idea. Close your eyes for four hours. In nine minutes I get the idea. Slowly titrate drip. Become familiar with the very definition of meditation in the Tibetan language, GOM gom to become familiar with, become familiar with this radiant, archetypal, primordial dimension of your mind, darkness.
And then as you do that, perhaps at some point you can get, we talked about this earlier. You can get these, um, masks, either the mindful mask or the Monte eye mask. I had one right around the corner. You start to, um, practice a little bit more directly. And if you do this very carefully, very cautiously, and very safely.
This could be, in fact for me, without question, the most transformative practice you’ll ever do because the one fantastic thing about the dark practice, it’s, it’s literally what makes it so difficult, Tammy, is it is actually the art of enforced not doing it. This is why it’s the, it’s, it’s basically shala, it’s like meditation on steroids in the Buddhist tradition, it’s called non distracted, non-meditation.
Hinduism is called Anup pa, the path of no Path. You simply enter this arena of complete sensory deprivation for short or extended periods of time, and uh, and, and then you simply bear exquisite witness to the massive restorative process that takes place when you finally stop doing, you’re no longer a human doing.
For the first time in your life, you’re a human being, and basically what you’re doing is you’re recapitulating the death process. I’m I, one of the books I started that I put aside is, is called Lessons from a Corpse. And by this what I mean is, well, according to these traditions at the moment of complete cessation or death with no respiration, no movement, no nothing.
When you come to complete stasis and silence, the nature of the mind is laid bare. The bar Dita is laid bare. Well, when you go into dark retreat, you’re imitating that Shavasana. You’re going in taking this corpse, so to speak, you’re doing absolutely nothing. And the the mind bending thing, and this is what we’re studying, creativity surges, healing surges, restoration surges, everything starts to remember, heal.
Simply through the act of the cessation of dismemberment, simply through the act of cessation, of dis-traction, which literally means to pull apart if you stop pulling everything apart, which I’m arguing and, and my scientist friends agree with me. This is the reduction base of the meta crisis, Tammy. I think you can make a very powerful argument.
What constitutes this meta poly crisis today is one distraction upon the next one fracture, one dismemberment upon the next. Each one disconnects us further and further and further from reality. You go into the dark. You can no longer dismember, you’re forced to remember. The essence of spiritual practice is remembrance, and this is the genius of this meditation.
Just stop doing die. And everything starts to be laid bare. It’s miraculous in its simplicity. But simple doesn’t mean easy. So I’ll pause because you get me, you get me going on this.
Tami Simon: I wanna, I wanna con connect a couple of dots for people. Yeah. So we, we mentioned the eye masks. I personally find working with an eye mask to be really powerful because you can open your eyes instead of having them shut the way you did the 30 seconds.
And that creates a, a certain different experience. And then when we talked about you coming out of the closet, you have a dark closet I do in your, in your home that you practice in. So this is interesting to me that, that these are bridges, if you will, that you don’t have to go to some retreat cabin someplace that’s all set up and sealed that we can do this kind of work.
Now I wanna, uh, ask a question about that because you’re making it sound extraordinarily accessible. When I put the mask on, the person wants to know. For four minutes and 59 seconds working up to four hours and 59 minutes. Am I just breathing? What am I doing? Yeah. What if I just start thinking all the time?
Andrew Holecek: Right, right. This is, this is where it becomes, um, really interesting. So just little sidebar, you can go into dark retreat for a dozen different reasons. This is what I’m writing about. You can go in to actively nurture creativity, actively nurture, restoration, healing, repair. You can do that through overt intentionality and their practices.
But by far, the greatest, the most important practice is exactly what I said. It’s literally the art and the practice of doing nothing. Um, and that’s what meditation is. It’s, it’s the practice of doing nothing. Well, and for many people it’s exactly like you said. Well, how do I do that? Right? How do I, it’s an, it’s an oxymoron.
It’s like when you get on the plane and you know, they go try to relax. That’s a contradiction in terms. So what you do, this ties into what I mentioned an hour ago. Fundamentally, the irreducible instruction, if you want some more words for it, is you open, open. So you go into the dark. And, and that’s why you mentioned earlier, having an eye mask, opening your eyes underneath it is really helpful.
It’s better than having your eyes closed and then basically through simply relaxing and opening the fundamental irreducible instruction for a good death, that’s all you have to do is open and relax at the highest stages. You know this. Um, Tammy, the teachings of Hamra and xin, the highest, the higher teaching get the practice gets, the simpler it is, open and relax.
It really is that simple. But again, simple doesn’t mean easy. You see, even in the 30 seconds that we did the mind’s moving, am I doing this right? What should I be doing? Well, you recognize that those are fleeting moments of contraction, by the way, and you open to them and you open, and every time you open, what are you doing?
It’s a micro death every time you’re opening. It’s a micro death. And so by becoming familiar with, again, the very term for meditation, this quality of openness, you feel it, it’s a highly, um, somatic embodied experience. Everything starts to open and expand and relax. And then, like I mentioned earlier, all amazing, almost miraculous generative restorative processes take place through that gesture.
We have an intimation of it every night when we fall into deep dreamless sleep. You can see this when you’re looking at your sleep partner and they’re in deep non-REM delta, that’s the deepest form of sleep. It’s, it’s almost like you’re looking into the face of a deity or the face of God, right? They’re so open.
They’re the whole, their whole countenance is just radiant and open. Darkness invites that through. Um, and it maintains a kind of a cultivates a lucid awareness of this. So I’ll pause to make sure that’s hitting what you’re asking. It’s difficult to say, um, to put into words because, well, there’s gotta be more to it.
Isn’t there more than that? No, no. It’s unbelievably simple as
Tami Simon: you know. Now, in terms of preparing to die, I know you’ve worked with a lot of different approaches and meditations to help people, including. Supporting people in the exploration of psychedelics as they prepare to die, which is an area where a lot of people are like, okay, this is the time I need to do this.
This will help me. And I wonder for a moment, because now you’re talking about darkness being the most powerful medicine to help you die, but other people will say, no, this is where psychedelics come in to help you die. And I’m, I’m just curious how you see these different possible tools and their distinctions.
Andrew Holecek: Beautiful. God, you’re so gifted at this. This is one reason. Um, I mean, I’m working with several scientists exactly on this topic, studying the release of endogenous DMT and all kinds of amazing things. And, and so dark retreat is sober psychedelics. Um, you don’t have to have a psychedelic experience by taking one of these entheogens or, I, I, I, I like terms, I kind of came up with this notion called fanatic.
After the God Thanatos ENSs are ways to intimate the death experience. My dear friend Tony Bois teaches on this. Roland Griffith did it. There’s a lot of research on this. Um, so there’s tremendous parallels between the psychedelic track of opening, especially, especially with agents like five M-E-O-D-M-T and, and, um, certain types of, um, well, you could say I am ketamine and, and maybe ayahuasca five m EEO is the king here because it takes you in, in my experience to this reduction base, this open, complete, utter reduction base.
So the difference between them and, and they’re Yes, for sure. I mean, my experience doing extended dark retreat and then coming out, um, I did this and actually had the amazing opportunity to do a five ameo journey right after I came out of like nine days. Nothing happened. I, I was in that space for a week.
So then I went back in and I said, geez, I don’t need to take this frog medicine. I can just open to this extent when I go into the dark. So to target it, very specifically, starting with Stanoff, Ron Griffith, Anthony Bois, there’s so many others. Psychedelics absolutely positively have a place. The data is there to help people relax, open.
That’s what happens with psychedelics. Open and gain an intimation of the death trajectory. So psychedelics in and of themself, irrespective of dark practice, absolutely, positively have a place. But the only problem there is legality, accessibility, preparation, integration, all the things that you have somewhat challenging to deal with.
Dark retreat, you don’t have any of these issues. It’s legal. You just have to close your eyes. You just have to go into the dark. It’s sustainable. You can microdose in the blink of an eye when, and here, just parenthetically, just as a sidebar. One of the biggest challenges with the dark retreat to tie it in there, is dosage.
Like if you do go in, how long do you stay in? Because just like in the bardos and just like with psychedelics, you can overdose on yourself. And so the issue with healthy titration, with dark retreat, this big, beautiful medicine is how do you get the dosage right? This is where it’s helpful to have a little support, little background, some guidance and the like, but back to the world of the psychedelic itself.
Absolutely. It’s a way to, as you know, this term is pointing out transmission or in this case of pointing in transmission. That basically allows you what what makes this is, this is really cool. Lemme throw this in. This is really important and you’ll see how this ties in. Look below any experience, Tammy, to which you would append the label.
Spiritual mystical, like a psychedelic experience, like a great deep meditation experience, like being stunned by a view in nature. Look below any one of these experiences, and then as a good first person scientist, what is the common underlying ingredient behind any level of experience to which you would append the label spiritual?
I promise you’re gonna find some degree of openness, I promise. And so what creates the dra, the dramatic aspect of, of a huge, super spiritual experience? Like within 10 seconds, if you do five MEO, your mind is blown wide open. It’s dramatic beyond words, but it’s only dramatic because you’re so contracted.
This is why Suzuki Roshi said so beautifully. Enlightenment was my biggest disappointment because he was so open. He was already so relaxed and when he finally opened completely, it was like no big deal for the rest of us. When you have this cataclysmic, orgasmic spiritual experience, the ecstasy is directly proportional to the preceding level of agony.
So if you’re really contracted, and this is, this is, this is important to say because a lot of new age masters and gurus that pop up these days, they have these incredible 100% legitimate spiritual experiences, but they’re only so orgasmic and, and, and cataclysmic because they’re so contracted. And so I mentioned this because this ties in everything we’re talking about.
Psychedelics opens you the dream experience, opens you meditation, I call it the grand opening. Meditation opens you doc retreat opens you. My favorite definition of meditation is habituation to openness. So the idea here is you don’t need any of these other agents. You just need to open precisely what takes place at the moment of death precisely what takes place the moment we fall asleep.
Otherwise, you won’t fall asleep. That’s insomnia. Precisely what happens with high dose psychedelics. So they’re all pointing their metrics, their markers pointing to the same underlying quality of mind. And I point these out can be because, hey, wait a second, why don’t I just work with openness all the time?
Why don’t I transform my daily life, my entire life into a massive, ongoing spiritual experience by simply opening to it? And this is something that we can do. Simply dying to it, relaxing. Everything becomes spiritual then. And therefore all these vectors point to the same kind of underlying phenomenology.
Tami Simon: All right? I wanna make openness more tangible, if you will, for people. I’ll share with you a couple ways I relate to it, and then fill in other aspects, if you will. So some of the ways I relate to it is physically letting go of tension and contraction, because that I can feel it in my body. I can feel, you know, the pain here or there, and doing things like even just very physical, myofascial release, breathing, letting gravity take me, sloughing off, tension, that kind of thing.
So that’s one dimension. Another thing is being open to other people’s perspectives and viewpoints, and having an open mind where I’m willing to entertain a totally different way of looking at something and kind of questioning. Ways that I’m like, well, this is my position and this is how I see it, and how else, oh, and then I also think of openness as spatial, as kind of like, I can feel this kind of radiant kind of, uh, if you will sense of my own field, the radiant field getting bigger and boundless in every direction.
How else though, Andrew, do you touch into openness?
Andrew Holecek: Yeah. This is so great because again, the, the microdosing, you know, short sessions repeated often I think in those Western ages. Huge. And so what I do, and I, I’m like, well, let’s do it together. Let’s do it together. I do this all the time. You know this, I did it last summer.
One breath meditation session, right? But we’re gonna do this in a slightly different way. I’m, I’m not making this up. This comes from the hamud tradition. What I want you to do, because what you’re saying, Pam, is spot on. You feel into the visceral somatic, yes, there’s cognitive aspects of openness, like you said, in terms of expanding one’s worldview, being willing to be challenged, being willing to be open in that regard.
But by far the most important is the visceral, somatic, and body expression. So let’s do this together. I want you to take with me, we’re gonna take one nice big inhalation, and as we exhale, we’re gonna all sigh together and then rest at the end of that space. Just rest in that end of sigh. Okay, ready? Here we go.
And breath.
That’s it. It’s the most beautiful thing and here’s the way I work with it. Just, just as you know, as an antidote to impulsivity, to relentless distraction. I do this every time, and I teach this with my bardo stuff. ’cause bardo yoga seems like, oh, this is so esoteric and these practices are so lofty. Well, we take rebirth every time we capitulate to our impulses.
So this practice is one breath. Meditation is a type of birth control. You feel the impulse to reach for your phone. Like how many times a day do we do that? Every time you feel that impulse, the in the invitation, I use the word phenomenology in geek speak as a micro phenomenologist. That’s what meditators are.
Notice what you feel when you reach for your phone. Notice what you feel when you reach to check your tablet, your computer, the fridge, the remote control. I promise you’ll feel a moment of contraction. You’re about to give birth. Talk about reincarnation, Tammy. This is how we give birth moment to moment.
You feel the contraction and then you insert a one breath sighing meditation. So you, you transform obstacle into opportunity. Do I really need to take rebirth by checking my phone right now? Do I really need to take rebirth in a contracted way by doing capitulating to any level of impulse? You feel it?
Take a big end breath. Let’s do it again.
Here’s another way I do this all the time. If you pay very close attention to the way your visual field works, it’s highly revelatory the relationship. Between the mind’s eye and the physical eye is very intimate in this age of relentless scrolling on our Instagram, our feed, our Twitter, I mean the, the whole age is just scrolling, skimming, flitting our eyes.
I mean, our eyes, our eyes are, which by the way are most dualistic sense, right? By far we can see the farthest. They’re most superficial. They’re the ones where we assess based on mere appearance, all the, which by the way, is taken away in the dark. Appearances don’t matter in the dark. You can’t have a bad hair day in the dark, right?
So here you are. Look at your, look at your eyes. Look at the way your eyes are working, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Skidding. We, we confuse, um, this, you know, mirror appearance for honest perception. So what I do here, then I notice this all the time. I’m at the gym, I’m doing my workouts right. By the way, tongue in cheek always remember, health is just the slowest way to die.
So here I am doing my immortality strategy at the gym. I finish a set. I feel the impulse to check my phone. Stop. Bardo yoga. What do I do? I’ll one of two things. I’ll either do a one breath meditation or what I’ll do, Tammy, I’ll, I’ll raise my gaze. Let’s do it right now. Look straight ahead, open.
Decentralize your gaze. Open your visual field. Hold in this receptive, open way, and notice what you feel. Notice the almost instantaneous sense of centeredness, collectiveness, and it’s a magnificent antidote to this. Discursive scrolling, visual thing where our eyes then seduce us into form, into exteriority, into appearance.
This is another classic indicator of the dark age, driven by artificial light, the superficiality of a meta crisis. These simple practices do not let the simplicity belie the profundity. In addition to the one breath, you raise your ga, you look straight up. I do it at a stoplight. I’m at a stoplight.
Should I check my effing phone? No. I’m gonna look straight up, open.
That’s it. Short session. Let it go. It’s like hitting the gong. You don’t have to cl Go. Go cl cl. Hit it again and again. You know, hit it once. Gong open. This is what Trump said, one of our joint teachers, when, when he talked about flashing TGS. Remember? Flat. What does that mean? What does flashing TGS mean?
Ordinary mind. This is what it means. Open. That’s it. And then as you start to sensitize to that, become more familiar with that, you’re preparing for death. This gives birth for the geeks listening to what’s called the child luminosity. At the moment of death, they talk about the great reunion of the mother and child luminosity.
So to give birth, how do we give birth to the child? Luminosity. Luminosity just means this openness. And so basically, as we become more and more familiar, even at this moment, these momentary levels do not let the simplicity I below the depth, we become more acclimatized. Familiar. There. It’s open. Open.
That’s it. It’s stabilized. It’s enhanced. That’s the birth of the child. Then at the moment of death when the mother and child like water poured into water reunite, as they say in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, recognition and liberation are simultaneous. That tiny drop will recognize its nature as the ocean that’s awakening.
So this little goofy practice, it’s like, are you kidding me? This is Bardo yoga man. This is Bardo yoga on the spot, the one breath meditation sign opening base. There’s more. But
you know, now it’s, it’s good, Andrew. It’s so accessible and useful and I really appreciate it. Now, in preparing to die, one of the issues you address, and I wanna bring it up because in terms of reincarnation, I think it’s something that is very alive for many people, which is.
Tami Simon: A couple different aspects. One is I am sitting at the bedside of someone who’s dying and I wanna help be a support to their good death. And I wanna be a support potentially to their good rebirth. Perhaps someone that I know how to sudden death. Yeah. And I really wanna help that person while they’re in the bardo and help them with their rebirth.
What can the, the helper do in all of these different wow situations?
Andrew Holecek: Wow, man, these are so great. Well, let’s, let’s talk about both ends of it. So, and this is something, boy, I mean, I work with this, I wouldn’t say on a daily basis, but a lot, one of the best things you can do, and this ties in some of the stuff we’ve talked about before, is when you’re at the side of someone who’s dying within certain limits are let the professionals take care of their body.
Our job, so to speak, is to take care of their mind, their heart, and the way we do this. What happens, and those who work in hospice know this. When a person is dying, you know this. And if, if you understand the process phenomenology as I’ve described it now, it’s like, oh, now I get what this guy’s talking about.
As they are on the deathbed, their whirlpool is dissolving. They are no longer limited to this suit. They’re starting to unwind, unwind, come apart, and therefore their mind is literally starting to spill into space. You feel this in the environment. They are no longer contained. They they’ll, they’ll open, then they’ll contract, they’ll open, they’ll contract.
When you’re in that space, you feel it. So the single best thing that we can do as practitioners is meet them in that space by. Being silent still and open ourselves. This is amazing because what will happen, Tammy, and I’ve experienced this endless times, is they will be magnetized to the openness and the stability that you represent with your mere presence.
You don’t have to say a thing, you simply open your heart and mind. And then Christine Long Ager writes about this beautifully. It’s almost as if you, you’re meditating for them because as their mind is dissolving and their whirlpool is relaxing and your mind is dissolving and your whirlpool is opening, well guess what’s happening.
You’re meeting in this collective, non-dual stream, and therefore they will be magnetized to you because you represent that which they’re losing. Which is stability, which is a sense of ground. And so therefore, you can have incredible impact for someone who is dying by simply sitting next to them and meditating in this open awareness kind of way.
It is phenomenally impactful. They will almost, not almost, they will take refuge in your mind space because you’re representing that stability, that dimension that they’re losing. It’s huge. And so then when they finally do completely dissolve and open into that space, well, this is where it gets really interesting because space time causality or constructs in this infinite open space that they’re in for a while, these statute of limitations, space, time, causality, don’t abide at this dimension.
Those limitations aren’t there, and therefore we can pray for them. We can call them into our mind space. I do this all the time when a loved one dies, literally as literally like, mom, I did this with my mom. Mom, you’re dead. Come join me. Enter my practice. Let’s practice together. And so therefore, because space time causality doesn’t exist at that deeper level, you meet them in this infinite field.
And therefore you can, you can literally talk to them. You can guide them even after they’re gone. Death is the end of a body. It’s not the end of a relationship. And so if we maintain this deep understanding of the fabric and the commonality of the human condition, that we all share the same universal bed of mind.
We can meet them at this reduction base, we can meet them at this level, and we can really help them. Because we can literally guide them. There’s technical. Tell me, tell me more about that. When you say guide them just in everyday language guide, guide them to what? Guide them exactly. Towards, what do you say?
Exactly What I say is, okay, let’s just say, mom. Mom, you’re dead. It’s cool. We’re gonna really miss you. We really are. But now’s the time to think for yourself. Something like that. Now’s the time to relax and open and just surrender to God. My mom believes in God, which is great. High five. Surrender to your God.
Follow the light and to God. And so what you wanna do, this applies. This is so great, Tammy. This one image to me has been a godsend. Budd ascend. What you want to do when someone is dying and beyond, you want to create an atmosphere. That allows that individual to open and relax. There’s that underlying theme again.
And so the image I have is the following. Imagine you’re having a bitch of a day, right? There’s a lot of these right now. It’s like, oh, you know, you’re really having a hard day and you’re with someone, let’s say, let’s just say it’s a big burly guy. It doesn’t matter. And the big burly guy catches the vibe of where you are.
Doesn’t say anything, walks over and gives you a big, warm, loving hug. What does that do to you? Oh my God. You melt, you relax, you open because you’re in this amazing manola, this amazing holding environment of love and kindness, and you can’t help but just go, ah. That’s the space you want to create when you’re with someone to come back to your early question.
You want to do whatever you can, and you do this by really being open. There’s that narrative again, really listening, not just with your ears, but with your whole body, psychically, somatically. And therefore, it’s amazing the dying person will tell you what to do. The environment will tell you what to do, and I tell you every single time it’s gonna be something like whatever you can do to create an atmosphere just like that hug where you open and relax.
So what this means is, oh my God, don’t come in with your highfalutin bardo teachings. Don’t come in reading the Tibet Book of the Dead unless they ask for it. Come in as a very sensitive listener, like I mentioned earlier. Let them lead this dance. And then do whatever you can. If they believe in God, support that belief.
If they believe in, in in a Muhammad, support that belief. Don’t convert them to anything but reality. Do whatever you can to let them open and relax as they’re dying at the moment of death and even beyond. Now, what if you sense in to this person that’s died is having a really tough time? They’re encountering, you could say, dark forces, their own clinging, their own holding.
Tami Simon: And I’m bringing this up because I’m also reflecting on practicing and preparing to die. And I mentioned I went through a hard time and that there can be times when we get, yeah. Swallowed up. We don’t have access. You know, I made it describe like the openness, relax the body, you know, and that’s all great when it works.
But what about during these times when you’re losing the wrestling match? Yes. Either personally or you sense that someone else is, they’re down for the count. How do you help them or yourself? Yeah. Oh boy, this is a good one. So, two ways, I’ll briefly mention the absolute way because it frames it. Um, it’s also the reason for listeners who are familiar with the practice of Tong Lin, this is why the first, the four stages of tong, Lin starts with what I’m about to say.
Andrew Holecek: Emptiness cannot harm emptiness. So I’m just gonna say this very briefly because for most people it’s too steep, it’s too absolute. But it’s also important if you understand deep in your bones. That everything is of the nature of mind. That’s what dream is. Manifestation of mind, everything is of the display of the mind, and that mind is inherently good, base of goodness, beautiful, divine, sacred.
If you understand that, then you can basically relax into that infinite open space, that view, it’ll handle everything. But for some people that’s say, yeah, that’s a nice view. That sounds great. Well, well then what about these relative things? Well, this is where it becomes really, um. Difficult in, in the sense that it, there are some underlying, in my understanding, uh, Tammy Universal principles behind this whole journey.
Um, at, at the outer levels, there are what are called surface structures. I’m not gonna die the same way a a, a Muslim or a Hindu or even a Christian will die until I drop into this formless reduction base where I think all these deep sur um, I’m sorry, surface structures collapse into the fundamental deep structuralist structures.
Then there is a universality. So what I mentioned earlier is that fundamental deep bed, the whole play of the surface structures is, is where it gets really interesting and it becomes pretty idiosyncratic. Um, so it would depend hammy about. The person. So for instance, this is why it’s very helpful to understand the person and their disease and their background, because then you can help remind them.
The essence of spiritual practice is remembrance. Remind them to take refuge in, in their, their God, their deity. Remind them of their mantra, remind them of their prayer. And so I’m a little bit hesitant to give a cookie book a, a cookie cutter prescription here because these surface structures are idiosyncratic.
And if we come in with a kind of shotgun approach there, that may not be so skillful. But one thing that will help you tune into this even psychically, is when you open to such an extent, it’s like the images is like your mind becomes like a completely tranquil pond. And then when that mind, again, is so open and so still, and you feel it in your body.
You’ll notice little pebbles is of insight that are dropped into that pond, that who knows where they’re coming from, that will then, uh, basically show you, teach you what to do. So I, I’m a little cautious to say more than that because, um, really it’s situations are so individual, even with people who are so-called Buddhists from one Buddhist to the next, I have found over and over that it’s, it’s most important to go in with this incredible sensitivity, this openness, this receptivity, and then from there you can respond.
Um, there’s a vast That’s good. That’s, I think that’s helpful in terms of working with other people. You mentioned when we first started our conversation. Uh, a lifetime ago and Right, right. Exactly. Uh, many lifetimes ago in our past life conversation about, uh, your own journey through a difficult passage and you gave the example of a divorce, and yeah, you also talked about a job, but it seemed like there was something else you could have talked about that had to do more personally with the body.
Tami Simon: And you briefly said, we can come back to that, that has to do with a, a kind of dying understanding while in life related to our own physical form. And I wonder if you would be willing to share more about that. Yeah. So how this connects to the body is super interesting to me. Um, I think on one level you can really look at the, the process or we’ve learned this term, phenomenology of rebirth, reincarnation through the question, what are you most attached to?
Andrew Holecek: Like literally, right? So we might think. It’s our thoughts and our emotions, but really, what are we literally, literally attached to? Well, it’s this body, right? Our mind is super glued to this body. And so this really gets interesting in terms of bardo principles because what is a bardo, a bardo is when the rug of reality is pulled out from underneath your feet.
Parenthetically, we had a, a collective bar to experience during COVID when Woo boy, the whole world was sent flying. And so, um, here’s what clicked this for me. This was a pretty cool experience. So a couple years ago, I was walking down a slope on the winter, a little bit icy, and there was some guardrails, and I hit a patch of ice.
And oh boy, thank goodness the guardrails were there because my feet went right out from underneath me. And had I not been able to just reflexively, defensively just throw my arms out and grab these guardrail. Bang. Um, pretty tough collision. So now imagine, here’s a thought experiment. I like doing these.
So imagine we’re sitting here listening to this riff. Now imagine the chair underneath your feet, just suddenly yanked out. Imagine the floor that you’re sitting on suddenly yanked out and you’re sent completely flying. Imagine what that would feel like, right? This kind of instantaneous, reflexive, habitual life-saving, grasping that takes place, you know, kind of panic.
So now check this out. The ultimate rug. Now imagine the ultimate rug, right? Which is what your body being pulled out from underneath your feet. Imagine your feet being pulled out from underneath your feet and your sun flying. Well, I think that’s one way to get, uh, an emotional kind of affective taste of death.
So the ensuing panic, what, what, what might that feel like? The ensuing panic. A grasping for something to hold onto right there. That’s what freezes the infinite open space and, and barter language. That’s the dharma tile, the bar of reality. That’s what freezes the dharma ta into form into another body through, of course, the third of death.
Bardos, the, the karmic bardo becoming. So your body is that guardrail protecting us slash ego, this arrested form of development from the truth. And so remember what a synonym for or Dita is, Dharma. So lots of sense. Good words, right? Body, literally body of truth. So your body is, is the guardrail that protects you from the truth of this ensuing emptiness, nothingness, egolessness.
So what, therefore is the death in this regard? What is death in this regard? Death is the dharma caa. So this puts us in a super interesting, painful double bind, right? Because more than anything, we want this ’cause the Dharma CAA really synonymous with emptiness. I’m sorry, with, well, yeah. Emptiness and enlightenment.
So the upper bandwidth of identity, this is what we’re after. But the lower bandwidths over identity, you know, we’re afraid of death, wants nothing to do with it. So we have this kind of unconscious conflict of interest that’s playing out at these deeper levels. But here’s the point around all this, that this underlying panic, if you feel into moments of really intense fear.
Or panic recollect that feeling. Isn’t it among, in fact, is it not like the most solidifying reifying of all emotions? Think about it if you feel, how solid you feel when you feel intense fear and panic. And so this panic therefore is lodged at the center of our relative self sense. Not who you really are, but who you think you are.
And it drives virtually almost everything we do in our so-called conscious lives. Basically do whatever you can do life then becomes a sophisticated avoidance strategy. Almost literally distract yourself onto death. And so here basically is what, what we spend our lives running away from the center of our centerless selves, running away from the truth in very blunt terms that we don’t exist.
So parenthetically, this is the emptiness, the the truth of emptiness. Parenthetically, brief sidebar, but this is really kind of important. What this means is that our fear of death at the end of life is actually a secondary inauthentic fear. What we’re really afraid of is we’re already dead. In other words, if you look very deeply into who you think you are, you’re not gonna find anything.
You’re gonna find selflessness, egolessness slash emptiness. And so what we do, that’s where we can thank Freud a little bit, is we deny this harsh, noble truth of our inherent non-existence, our inherent egolessness. We deny it, we repress it, and then we project it as far away from ourselves as we possibly can.
What’s farther away than the end of life? There’s nothing farther away. So what we do is we deny repress project, the fact, the truth of emptiness, the harsh, noble truth, and we throw it all the way to the end of life, and that’s why we fear death. It’s totally. Totally unfair to death, which is just neutral.
So part of understanding this is owning up to this projection, doing the inner work. Sometimes despite these traditions are called warrior traditions, do the inner work now die before you die. And so therefore, by doing that, you won’t up your projections. And guess what happens? All your fear of death disappears.
So let’s summarize this. This is, this is kind of cool. Our strongest habit, therefore, really I like to play with words. Our strongest habit is for habitation itself, for housing. So this whole rebirth thing, it’s an affordable housing issue that, uh, in, in here it is in Sanskrit language. Catch, I’m not sure I mentioned this earlier, but in Sanskrit, um, when you die, you will meet your maker, your maker in Sanskrit, these, uh, these some scars, literally karmic formations.
They are what make us, they make us now. They make us after death. And so the heaviest of all these habit patterns, these samskara is literally called baba. Samskara is the habit for head for form, which is what ego is exclusive identification with form. Here’s the punchline. When we die, we take on a body because we believe we’re somebody we take on existence because we believe in existence.
And hence, once again, the centrality. The importance of these teachings on emptiness, practical, practical application of this emptiness really translated more colloquially is openness. Meditation is habituation to openness. So open now, die, now die before you die, because death is the fundamental grand opening.
So this is the fundamental way to prepare. So by understanding this, I think this is why I’m riffing on this for a little bit by understanding this. We’re really getting a, a deep insight into the whole process of why we reincarnate, what reincarnates are bad habits, what’s the worst of these habits, habitation for form, that which we’re most attached to the ground beneath our feet.
So we can practice this with practices like open awareness. Tammy was talking very politely about my book, recent, recent book on the reverse meditations. I talk a ton about the centrality of open awareness in that book. This is a way to practice dying before you die. And then if you do that, what’s the fruition, right?
This is the end of death. You get to the point where you can say, with real confidence and the gentle, confident smile on your face as you’re dying. Been there, done that because you’ve gone through these process, these processes. You understand it through the map of me riffing on the stuff. You engage in the practices like open awareness and therefore all fear of death is over and done with.
So this is, this is where the whole notion of body really comes into play. So opening when things really get tough. So again, there’s several different ways that I do this that have been extraordinarily helpful and impactful. One of which is what you alluded to a while back, which is this wonderful retreat, this retraction pulling away to develop this witnessing awareness that creates a sense of distance and space and perspective.
Archetypal lucidity, by the way, this is what a lucid, this represents what takes place on a lucid dream very briefly. ’cause you see how this ties in and how you can practice it. When you’re stuck in a non lucid dream being buffeted around by your karma habits and contents of mind, it’s because you’re, you’re, you’re non lucidly, ensconced and lost in the display of your mind.
That’s archetypal non lucidity. In the moment of lucidity in a dream or in meditation, which of why meditators, by the way, have more lucid dreams. There’s a new perspective. Evolution is marked by greater degrees of perspective by which you still see the display, but because you’ve retreated to the essence in, in techno speak, we lose the essence in the display.
By retreating away from the display to the essence, we can then watch the display in this witness capacity and we’re no longer affected by it. One way to practice this outside of, um, lucid dreaming, this ties into the, uh, reverse meditations that you mentioned hour and a half ago, is this is really cool and this is how I learned them in my three year retreat.
This is kind of interesting. Let’s do it together for 20 seconds. It’s so cool. For the next 20 seconds, go ahead and close your eyes.
You finally get to do what you always want to do in meditation.
Make your mind as wild, windy, and crazy as you can go.
More, more, more. Don’t meditate on me. Faster. More. More. Whip it up. Whip it up. How many thoughts? How many thoughts? Whip it up? How crazy can you make your mind? More, more, more. Ah, let it go. Ah, it’s exhausting. Do this a couple times and you’ll notice a silent center in this voluntary cyclone, right? You’ll notice that there’s a silent stillness that allows you to bear witness to this voluntary cyclone.
This separates you from getting sucked into it. This is a fantastic way to work with things like insomnia. By the way, this is literally, I learned my reverse meditations in my three year retreat in the Mahamudra context by doing exactly this practice. How crazy can I make my mind? So that’s one way. It’s so fantastic.
You finally get to flip meditation off, right? You finally get to do what all you always wanna do on the cushion is, and you find it’s not easy, it’s exhausting. That in itself is like, wait a second. There is this toria. There is this silent witness that allows me to dispassionately watch the display of my mind.
The other option is the complete reverse. This is a kind of tantric approach. And what you do with this is when a situation arises now, and this is where the reverse meditations really kick in. ’cause what I just talked about is the first of the four stages of reverse practice, the observational phase.
What you do in the deeper phases is you go in to the display, you go into your pain, you go into whatever’s happening. So the second approach is, is you could say a kind of more tantric approach, which means it’s more embodied. And I also give people very brief practice that I do exhaustively these days instead of retreating from the practice, um, from the display, which is completely viable.
But like I mentioned earlier, if you keep retreating, that’s still subtly dualistic, you’re still distancing yourself from the display contract approaches. You pull his U-turn. And you go into it again, it’s like our mutual teacher. Beautifully said, there is no way out. The magic is to discover there’s a way in.
This is the way in. And so what you do here in the, the remaining three stages of the reverse meditations, but Tammy intimated earlier are about this going directly, fully into that experience so deeply that you actually at its fruition, you disappear into the experience. It’s beyond profound. It’s like TS Elliot said, music heard so deeply, it does not hurt at all.
You become the music while the music lasts. And so let’s do this for just a second. I do this following practice every day. Far none. One minute, two minutes, five minutes. This thing is industrial strength meditation. It is beyond profound. So let’s do it together. Hand over heart.
Close your eyes
and for the next minute, feel whatever you are feeling as fully as you possibly can.
Don’t try to change it.
Don’t be meditative. Don’t even be spiritual. Be human.
The practice is to feel it but not feed it. You know you’re feeding it. When you start to riff on it, you are on commentary. You.
You start to conceptually proliferate, you notice that release return to the feeling.
The highest form of spiritual practice, Swami Kapalo said, is self-observation without judgment, radical, unconditional acceptance.
We start doing this practice in this somewhat artificial, contrived way, granted kindergarten,
but this practice takes on industrial strength when you’re in a heap of hurt. Your life just fell apart and your lover just left you and you just got fired and you just got that diagnosis and you’re dying.
You put your hand over your heart. Even with that, hold it in the cradle of loving kindness. Say yes to even the most unwanted experiences, and right here by simply relating and holding to whatever you’re experiencing in this loving way, you start to transform it.
And we’re gonna go very quickly to the deep fruition end of this practice just to show you how impactful it is. And how non-dual it is in the non-dual traditions, higher is replaced with inner. So the highest practices are the innermost practices, the ones that take you most deeply within precisely the journey, the trajectory that you’re going to take when you die, as you transition from outer growth to inner subtle, to innermost indestructible, super subtle.
When you’re in a heap of hurt, you will discover with this practice, I promise you.
By becoming one with your pain, there’s no one to hurt.
There’s just this raw, intense sensory awareness to which we append the label pain.
Through this simple practice, not only can you deconstruct your suffering,
you can actually transform your pain, and therefore, the painful bardo of dying transforms into the simple bardo of letting go.
That’s it Beyond profound. So simple. I do this every day When I got my prostate cancer and went through multiple, incredibly uncomfortable biopsies and a much more uncomfortable surgery, this practice was at my side. When my, uh, marriage dissolved hand over heart, this practice was at my side. And so this practice develops this exquisite openness.
There’s that narrative again to the vast dimensions of your being and a radical acceptance that ensues upon that open relationship. It’s beyond profound crash course and the reverse meditations. So it works both ways, either retreating or going fully into it, reversing your strategy, dissolving into it.
It’s, it’s amazing. Just amazing. I have two final questions for you, Andrew. Here’s the first one specifically about reincarnation, which is part of the inspiration for this series. Cool. Is discovering that there’s so much evidential stories of young children, thousands reporting on memories, facts from previous lives that have been correlated.
Tami Simon: What do you make of that evidence and if you will, what’s your explanation? Oh, totally, absolutely. The work of Ian Stevenson, thousands of cases. Grace, um, what’s his name? Bruce? Um, Grayson, I think. Um, oh, what’s his name? His, anyway, his heir. There’s no doubt whatsoever. I mean, you have to jump through a lot more philosophical, metaphysical, um, gymnastic loops.
Andrew Holecek: To explain this without recourse to the rebirth reincarnation principle. Um, there’s no doubt about it. And, and interestingly enough, up until age seven when formal operational thinking kick extended year and most memories of of previous incarnations are completely erased. A lot of people, especially those as you know, who have died from traumatic experiences, that intense, um, sensory impact and then, and kind of.
Um, most compelling, interesting way leaves a deeper, um, mark. Sometimes physically, right, sometimes a bullet wound from a previous life will end up as a scar in the same place from a younger, uh, from a rebirth, so to speak. I know people, um, who I trust completely, um, who have recollections. They have prodigious memories that are able to actually go back.
I can introduce you to them if you like. Um, and they, they can actually recall their journeys, um, into previous incarnations. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my opinion that this, this, um, is the nature of reality. It makes so much sense in a world that’s made of heart, mind, spirit, and not a world that’s made of matter.
And so I’ll say something briefly about this because this is colossal. This is what we work with, shameless moment of self-promotion. And by preparing to die programs, we, we go after two fundamental questions that solve this whole issue of rebirth and whole death process Number one. Who am I? Single most important question.
In the invite of a tradition, you answer this question, which can be answered, the riddle of life and death and rebirth, assault. Second question we go after a little bit more philosophical in nature is what is reality? And so if we think reality, which we all do because we drank the Kool-Aid, basically, literally not metaphorically, Tammy, literally hypnotized up until about age seven, in a, in a, a world that’s made of matter.
No one has ever experienced matter. The world is not made of matter. But we’re, we’ve, we’re born in that, um, matrix, unfortunately. And so we subscribe to it. Our fear of death is directly proportional to the degree of our subscription to this pathological view. This is why going after it using philosophy, quantum mechanics has a tremendous amount to say here, cognitive science, the wisdom traditions, to overthrow the tyranny of appearance of the materialistic view.
If you do that, then everything you’re saying not only becomes tenable, it becomes unavoidable. You understand that the process of of rebirth is just a natural, endless play of the display of the mind itself. So I wonder, I I say that because yes, indeed. I like you. I’m super fascinated in this literature.
I’ve read the near death experience literature exhaustively. I’ve read the Rebirth self exhaustively. I mean, a lot of these books back here are devoted to that, but I’m, I’m particularly interested in like what I just mentioned in cutting right to the quick, going right to the basis of what can bring about explanatory power.
How do we have to change our thinking? There’s that. Tra, um, trajectory again. How do we have to change our worldviews so that all these principles that seem so esoteric, paranormal, paranormal, by what definition? The metaphysical world, the physical world is a paranormal worldview if you ask me. So I throw that because in order to overthrow this tyranny of appearance and understand the display of rebirth and reincarnation, not only do you have to change the way you think, which by the way changes the way you perceive thinking and perceiving or inextricably connected.
You have to change the way you view a reality. And if you change the way you view reality, this is how you die before you die. This leads to the death of death. Death only exists in a materialistic worldview. Death only exists in the world of form. If the world is not made of matter and it’s not. The world is made of heart, mind, spirit, whatever term you would append to your definition of the absolute or the ineffable, this is a game changer.
It removes all your fear of death, gives you tremendous confidence in helping others, because even though our storylines are different, the fundamental journeys the same. So I, I can go on and on and on on this, but basically, yeah, there’s no doubt whatsoever that these, these, um, proclamations are true. No doubt.
Tami Simon: And here’s my final question, Andrew. You mentioned that the red carpet is laid as we go through the Bardo passage through loving kindness through the mind of Bo Chita. Tell me how, through our own prayer life here, we can prepare that red carpet. Totally beautiful. So two ways again. Two ways again, absolute Bo Chita.
Andrew Holecek: Relative Bo Chita. So let’s ping on these very briefly. Absolute. Bo Chita is what is another way to talk about openness, ultimate openness. Synonym for emptiness. Emptiness, it’s most important tradition. Uh, word in the Buddhist tradition about, ah, what is emptiness? What does it, what is it really? What does it feel like?
It feels like openness. And so when I feel, again, look at your deep experience. Whenever you feel an experience of unconditional love, not, not lustful, grasping, romantic love, whenever you feel like, from my puppy dog, you know, or in nature, whenever I feel a unconditional love and I look deeply within, and feel deeply within, what am I feeling?
Openness. You cannot be contracted and in love at the same time. So the way to work with this from an absolute perspective is in fact, again, practice openness, practice, literally open awareness. Meditation is a situation to openness. This is how you learn as Mja JE says so beautifully in his bestselling book.
This is how you fall in love with the world because the world is made of love. Emptiness is just a funny, ridiculous way of talking about love. That’s what emptiness is. So that’s the absolute part. You just open, open and open. You fall in love with the world. Well, if you’re not careful, that’s spiritual bypass.
Oh, I love the whole world. But why is that? What is that person doing in my sacred world? Right? So, so then you have the whole relative thing. Well, you can do this in, in so many different ways through in the Tibetan tradition. As you know, the mind training slogans, you’re about this. But honestly, Tammy, keep it simple service.
Service, work in hospice, volunteer at the animal shelter. Get out of yourself and into others. What did Wes ker say? The bu I love this guy. Enlightenment is the ultimate. Getting over yourself. That’s fantastic. But what did Ram Maharshi say? I, I’m sorry. I’m a a one line, um, fortune cookie cookie company here.
When Ram Maharshi was asked, this is so beautiful. How do you help others? Do you know what he said? What others? What others? There are no others. So if we know that from a philosophical point of view, by working with absolute tita, we start there. But in a certain way, we implement that. That’s the natural expression of that openness.
But because of the expression of it, it is both the on-ramp and the off-ramp. The on-ramp is you practice love and compassion. You practice basic goodness. You practice generosity with a smile, with a gesture of kindness. And so if we do that, then what are we doing? We’re replacing bad habits, self-referential contracting habits with good, selfless open habits.
And then you’re stuffing the ballot box. Like I said, those good habits then take control of you. And you, again, you notice this in your dreams. Your dreams, you have better dreams. They’re, they get lighter and freer, more playful. And with teachers and the dharma, you know, the transformation is taking place.
So I, I work with both, you know, the path of spirit and the path of soul. I work with both these vectors, absolutely in a relative. Um, and then basically in a bi-directional way. They bootstrap each other, they support each other. And this is a fantastic way to wrap up our conversation because this is really what it, what it comes down to.
And, and, and you know, my favorite rant these days, and I see this all the time, that if what you and I are doing here, if what I’m doing in my work is not of benefit to others and to this world, it’s irrelevant. And in this day and age, in this matic crisis, the poly crisis, all hands on deck. And so we step up out of ourselves and whether it’s opening a door, smiling at someone, being kind, we lay down the red carpet in these moment to moment gestures.
Don’t underestimate these drips, these little drips of sanity and love and kindness they add up and then the carpet gets rolled out when you do this. Andrew Hoek, a teacher for our time.
Tami Simon: Thank you so much Andrew. Very, very great contribution to our series. Thank you. Such a delight, honor. Um, so much fun to spend time with you.
Andrew Holecek: Thanks for your exquisite questions, Tammy. All the best.
