This is one of those podcasts I would recommend to ANYONE. In this show I am joined by my brother Daniele Bolelli: writer, professor, martial artist, and host of History On Fire and The Drunken Taoist podcasts. I brought him in to talk about a profound piece of literature that reveals deeper insights every time I pick it up–the Tao Te Ching. We go through numerous passages and explore their implications together. Along the way we make a slight detour, discussing one of my great heroes, Ikkyu Sojun. The rebellious, lascivious zen monk famous for the words “Throw me into hell, and I’ll find a way to enjoy it.” This podcast is one of the best operating manuals for any situation life presents us with. 

AUBREY: Daniele, my brother.

DANIELE: Man, I'm so happy to be here. 

AUBREY: Yeah. It's so great to see you again man. And first of all, I missed you and I missed our conversations and I miss going into everything that we can go into. But there's a particular draw to have you come out and talk to me because I wanna learn more about something that I'm having a difficult time doing. And this is the taoist principle of the principle of doing the most while intending to do the least, because I have a real hard time with it. I have every opportunity now to just relax a little bit, to not clench my jaw and try to achieve everything through force and young energy and just kind of allow the world to come to me. And really a lot of the magic in my life has been this nice balance of that. But nonetheless, my proclivity is to just go hard and I'm having a hard time stopping and I can feel the wear on myself. And I know that I need to make this transition and I need to understand it deeper. So I was driven back to the Tao Te Ching, back to some of these older principles, that I know have been lighting the way and informing us all on how to do this a little better, myself included. But I haven't quite been able to grasp it. So I figured maybe we can unpack this a little bit together and we can do a little therapy for me and a little elucidation of these principles that are truly timeless. So thanks for coming. 

DANIELE: I would love to explore the things I don't practice, so that's perfect.

AUBREY: That's me too. And if we continue to explore these things that are hard to do

DANIELE: I mean, the way I see it is we are all wired a certain way and realistically you can change yourself to a point. So the way we are wired, the way you are wired specifically that you're discussing, but I'm very similar in that regard, is also special in some ways. So you don't want to get rid of it, but you wanna, 5%, just tweak it a little. Just smooth that edge. And I do the same thing in that regard. Because when you read, some of those concepts are fantastic and you intellectually, when you start understanding them, you're like, that's genius. That's how life works. Of course, applying it when your whole history, your whole being as being shaped in a different way. Easier said than done. But I also think that's where the wisdom comes in, in a way that I dig, because it's not dogmatic. It's not about you have to do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And that's the way this is a principle.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: Do your best with it. In fact, what I like about, for example, the way concept, the idea of effortless action, of getting stuff done with the least amount of effort. Well, the key word is least is not no effort. It's least amount of effort and least is relative. It depends on the situation. It depends on your ability. It depends on a lot of things. So if you are used to, in order to get the job done, I have to put 10 amount of energy. If you bring it down to nine, you're already winning. That's success. 

AUBREY: Yeah, totally. 

DANIELE: In an ideal world, if you can pull it off with a tree, that's ideal. But hey, that's a long path. And who knows? Maybe one can get there, maybe not. But if I can just take that first step. That's idea a win. 

AUBREY: I'm trying to get a win here. It's a very good point though, because no action is an action. A zero is an action. And that action will not produce a result. No. Like, you can't just manifest something when, not act in the way of what you're manifesting. Like, think and Grow Rich, that's a famous title of a book. Thinking is an important part, but you have to do some shit too.

DANIELE: A hundred percent. It's like that's a good start. But it's kind of like, okay, you bought the lottery tickets. That's good. That's an important element. We need a little more to get there.

AUBREY: Right. Totally. And I also want to talk about one of my favorite rascal masters, Ikkyu Sojun and the Zen tradition. So, we'll cover both of those, but we might as well dive into Taoism first. What is this? And how did this become a religion? Because it very much seems like it's borderline more of a philosophy than it is a religion, but it's been religiousized in a way. And there's devotees to this philosophy. And there are some interesting ways in which the Taoist can be viewed as a type of deity. Potentially. So I could see kind of where it is, but it's interesting that this is one of the established “religions” of the world when it's so different than most of the other religions.

DANIELE: It is. The way it works in China is that all Chinese religions are based on some kind or another of animism. That sort of the general beliefs across China has been some type of shamanic animistic beliefs and then people would start their own variation on it. So people like Confucian philosophy, so they mix traditional animism in China, wheat Confucian philosophy, boom, you got Confucianism as a religion. People like Taoist stuff. So they mix the animistic stuff with Taoist principle and you get Taoism as a religion. In their regard, it's interesting 'cause people practice it as a religion. People purely read it as a philosophy. People do some weird mix of the two or none of them. Some people don't read the philosophy, don't practice the religion, but maybe they practice some arts that have been heavily influenced by Taoism. So their practice is very Taoist, but I would never even call it Taoist. They don't even know that that's what it is. It's like Chinese medicine is largely based on Taoist concept. So there are I guess many different entry points. To me, the philosophy is the core. It's like that's the origin of it all. That's what you can do without. The other one is a little bit of a shopping cart. You decide, yeah, I like this, or no, I can do without, it's fine. And  that's kind of how I approach Taoism.

AUBREY: What's the history? When did it come to be? Who was Lao Tzu? Who wrote the Tao Te Ching? 

DANIELE: The history is messy, to say the least. It's more mythology than history. The short thing is nobody knows the time period, somewhere between 2,600 years ago and 2,400 years ago, depending who you listen to when Taoism and the idea of the Tao Te Ching were written down and it emerged. The idea probably predated in the sense that many of those are shamanic concepts, but the actual writing of the Tao Te Ching would've happened somewhere in the couple of centuries time span. Lao Tzu is a historical figure. I mean it's one of those that's good luck separating. 'cause basically all we have about him is mythology. Even his name is not like Lao Tzu. Literally he was kind of meant like an old boy or this teacher figure was also really youthful, at the same time. There's a tale that I'm sure it's historically accurate to a T that say that Lao Tzu's mom was pregnant for 80 years and by the time, by the time Lao Tzu popped out, he was an old man with a beard who was born laughing. So yeah, I'm gonna go on a limb and say that. Probably not. 

AUBREY: I bet the downside.

DANIELE: So everything we know about him is a myth. Like one of the few things that we kind of ‘know’ is that he supposedly works in the Imperial Library and he was some kind of master of ceremony there, and he gained a reputation for being this brilliant, wise person and distilled that. Again, 99.9% made up, but is a beautiful myth. Tells that one day when he was becoming an old man, he decided, I'm done. See you guys. I'm retiring. I'm off to whatever the equivalent of Florida was for ancient Chinese people, to warm up my achi bones and do my thing. And he gets to the edge of town and one of the guards at the gate, he's like, but I hear so much about you. Your reputation precedes you. My friends who listen to you talk lives, you're such a brilliant guy. You didn't write anything. This is such a shame. Your wisdom is going to disappear. Can you please write something? And Lao Tzu says is like, eh, no thanks, bye. And he's like, no, no, no. Time out. 'cause I'm kind of the guardian and you only go through if I let you go through. So tell you what, there's a jail right here. It is some pen and stuff to write with. So go get to work, when you're done, you can go. Until then, hang out in jail. So it's funny 'cause he's technically, according to the myth he's created in jail, not by somebody who's oppressing him, but by over-eager fan who wants the goods. So lots of rights for a few days composes this 81 poems, hand them over, go take a look, say this is good stuff you earn mix go off to. And so why have even a kind of meat like this, it's really directly tied to the first line of the Tao Te Ching, which depending on how you want to translate, it can be the Tao that can be explained is not the eternal Tao or one variation or another. In other words saying that, what can be put into words? It’s never the real thing. There's something there that's reality and words are an approximation of it. 

AUBREY: Which is true of anything. 

DANIELE: A hundred percent. 

AUBREY: Especially to Tao.

DANIELE: The deeper the topic is, the more words you are just groping in the dark hoping to catch something. And I think that story, the myth is exactly about this, is like to understand that writing a book, whatever insight, whatever wisdom is there is going to be trapped in a way that is gonna be expressed always the same way, regardless of who's in front of you. So you can't adapt the conversation, you can modify it, you can tweak the language depending on the person you're speaking with, which ultimately is what make real conversation happen. You are putting it in stone, it's done. And then because that's the way it's set up, is bound to be misunderstood, bound to become applied, dogmatically is bound to lose whatever it is you're trying to drive it. So he almost has to be forced into writing it down. Because he feels the real insight is fluid. It can never be trapped like that. 

AUBREY: So he is almost bastardizing the truth of it. By putting it into words 'cause words are always a lie. They're always a little bit of a lie because they're only a partial truth. There's a little bit of approximation, symbolism, emblem of a concept that goes in any word, no matter what. And I think poetry is trying to get you the feeling of something. Using these clumsy tools we call words, to try and get the way everybody's like, oh, poet. Amazing words. Like, well, no, the feeling that you have and the understanding you have is what's amazing. If the words got you there, they do it hopefully as effortlessly as possible. But that's definitely a deep part of it. And it seems like also another part of the ethos was to remain nameless, faceless, empty. And that's a deep part of the tao. So writing something, putting your name on it kind of goes against part of the true spirit of it. If you really walking the walk, you remain nameless. You don't become Lao Tzu who wrote this book. That everybody in the world knows about. So he had to be compelled to do it. Which at that point of compulsion, it's like, okay, this is the way the Tao is working now. Without resistance. I'm not gonna make a stand here. Sure. I'll write it. Like whatever. And then I'll move on. 

DANIELE: And that's where the first line is genius. Because technically, if you stick by the first line, that should also be the last line of the book. It is like, well you can't really talk about it 'cause it's beyond the words. So we're done.

AUBREY: The guard wouldn't have liked that much. 

DANIELE: But the point is, once you get it, that what we are playing with is not quite the real deal. Well, if we have that understanding, let's talk about it. There's another guy, Chuang Tzu, who comes a bit after Lao Tzu in terms of Taoist write. He is the second main Taoist writer. He has a line that's similar, but in a funny way. He says, where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him? It is this joking kind of thing. But he's saying, look, as long as we understand the words are limited, let's play. They're fun, let's go with it. We can pass energy to each other through words. But let's not mistake that for reality. Because it's an approximation of reality. And that's what's cool about it. Say, once we understood that, okay, now let me write a whole book on it. 

AUBREY: Right. That kind of reminds me of the two great Sufi poets that I've read, Rumi. Who is like, kind of like Lao Tzu in this way. And then there's Hafiz who's always a little bit more joking. And a little bit more rascally in his nature. And it seems like there's that same kind of dichotomy there. 

DANIELE: Hundred percent. Even Lao Tzu. A lot of the Tao Te Ching is written as advice to people of high quality who can then use that to help lead other people. So there–

AUBREY: Yeah. It’s not about governing. 

DANIELE: Yeah. It's an idea about how some fantastic individuals can help everybody else. Chuang Tzu has a much darker view of society. He's like, society's entirely behind redemption. I'm just gonna work with these single individuals to make their life better. That's great. But I'm not bothering trying to change society. That's entirely out of my, so there's a different take between the two. But Lao Tzu, is there anything historical about him? Maybe, I mean, some people say he wasn't even a single guy. It's maybe a mix of several writers who put together things and somebody essentially created an anthology out of it. Nobody knows.

AUBREY: Ultimately we get far too lost in the person. 

DANIELE: And so doesn't matter.

AUBREY: Sometimes it's helpful, I think when you look at Christianity. I think it's a shame that we don't know Jesus, the person better, because a lot of things are made up about it and interpreted about this. But if you really saw him, like he still has to take a shit. He still likes to make love to his woman. He still likes to do all. The whole world would've changed based upon the man, because the man himself has been mythologized. Rather than Christ consciousness, which is this deep, powerful, mystical truth that Christianity created, they created the most extreme being of polarity. They possibly could. And this is what Christ evoked or Jesus evoked if you follow that. And what he talks about is the most extreme polarity of all of the light and love and goodness possible. And then kind of condense that into a being. And that's what's really interesting. But because Jesus has been mythologized, it would've been nice to see the man that accessed that. And that would've been really helpful. But in this case, it doesn't matter at all because the philosophy stands with or without the figure. Entirely.

DANIELE: Absolutely. And that applies in general to most Asian religions/philosophy. I mean, think about Buddhism. Buddha's life. There's not a ton of solid evidence that, I mean, probably there's some seed of truth there, but was he really the guy that the myth tells? There's no way to know. The first things that are written about him are like 150 years after his life. I mean, by that point you can be talking about Superman. Because he's mostly gonna be made up. Jesus is not 150 years, but there's still a big gap. So most of these folks, you don't know the reality. 

AUBREY: Isn’t it in Buddhism, there's a saying, if you find the Buddha kill him. 

DANIELE: That's a zen thing. 

AUBREY: Which is very much this idea. Like, no, don't get lost in the person. Follow the idea and I think that's the beautiful part of both Taoism and Buddhism. It's like, no, we're not talking about people here. We're talking about ideas. 

DANIELE: Exactly. In Western traditions, history is a big deal. Like whether Jesus really lived and died on the cross and was resurrected. It's almost seen as that makes the religion true or not. In Asian stuff, it doesn't really matter whether there was Buddha or there wasn’t, whether it was, it's the principles. Do the principles work or not? That's where it begins and ends. It's purely, as you said about the ideas, not about the history behind it.

AUBREY: Which is a much more powerful way, like everybody should be able to follow the path. Any religion in my mind should be a bridge to the divine. And anybody should be able follow that bridge and find the divine themself. And if you don't meet those qualifications, to me, there's something wrong with the religion. Like, this isn't one person did it, and this is what he said. And this is infallible. It should be like, this is a bridge. And anybody, if you follow this bridge, you'll get closer to it. 

DANIELE: You can get to it. Yeah. 

AUBREY: And there's parts of the bridge that you can't even explain, but we'll get you as far as you can and you'll figure out the rest.

DANIELE: No, a hundred percent. And that's where, to me, Taoism as there's something special about it because whereas most philosophies, most religions, in order to practice them, while you should know them and then stick to a certain set of beliefs, and that's what makes that philosophy in Taoism, you could have never read the Tao Te Ching. You could have never heard any stories about it. And maybe in your life, you're applying Taoist principles like a master. Why? Because that's the language of life. Because all the things they are talking about, they don't require a set of beliefs. They don't require you to subscribe to some historical theories. They don't require you anything other than to be able to read life to see those principles that are in nature. So you can be paradox–

AUBREY: And constantly test them with reality. Not test them with a word or take on faith, the article of faith, but let me test this against life. And see if it applies to life.

DANIELE: That’s exactly what it is. So to me, Taoism, even the ‘ism’ is off. There's the Tao, there is no ‘ism’ there. It is like you either understand those ideas and apply them or you don't–

AUBREY: And there’s no consequence other than the consequence you'll actually feel.

DANIELE: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Like this hypothetical judgment that's going to create some eternal consequence for you one way or another in another world. Okay. Whatever. Let's talk about this one. Is this help in this world? Is it help in your life? That's where it's a lot more interesting 

DANIELE: And to me it's beautiful, because it's practical. Exactly what you said. There's a very pragmatic element to it. It's like if you understand the law of gravity, you probably are not gonna lift a hammer over your head and let go. Is it a scene if you do? No, you just get bumped and it sucks. It's like that's very begin and then. So if you learn those things, it can make your life easier. Can you swim against the current? Yes. It's a lot easier to swim with the current. And it's just stuff that if you get it helps make your life easier.

AUBREY: Let's go to this first passage. You started it and told the first part, but there's some really interesting parts because it's weaving in a subtle explanation of the Tao. And then also some starting to get right into some advice as well. So I'll read this. This is the Stephen Mitchell translation. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The unnameable is the eternally real naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire. You realize the mystery caught in desire. You see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within Darkness, the gateway to all understanding. This is some deep poetry. So let's take this piece by piece. We talked about the first part of it, the unnameable is the eternally real naming is the origin of all particular things. And we kind of talked about that as well as like, what is this? This is a pen that I'm holding up right now because I call it a pen and I understand what a pen does and it meets the criteria for the pen. But if you were wordless, you would just see the thing and see what it does. And it wouldn't have been emblemized, but because it's a pen and that's a simple thing, it meets the criteria quite well. So it becomes a particular thing rather than an expression of the ability of what it potentially can do. 

DANIELE: I think you nail it because it is very related to something that we are talking about before. We were on the podcast earlier at lunch, like how people use labels for ideas. And the reality is that those labels lead to more misunderstandings than anything. Because sometimes it sounds like we're having the same conversation, we're talking about the same thing. Because we use the same label. But what we mean by it is completely different. Somebody will talk Christianity and they think about the inquisition and squashing different religious viewpoints. Somebody else is talking about Christianity and they're talking about being nice to your neighbor. You are both using the same word and they have nothing to do with each other. And so sometimes the problem with words is that they usually, there's a range of meaning and we get completely loose track of the practical application of it. It's like, what does your Christianity mean? How does it make you behave? Does it make you be nicer to your neighbor? I'm down. I like it. Does it make you be an intolerant freak? I'm not down. I don't like it. I wanna see what the action is, the flow from whatever you're saying. And I think very often we get caught into this semantic discussion where people, they may be having an argument and they're not even talking about the same thing. And people go on for, whether you're talking about politics, whether you're talking about religion, whether you're talking about so much stuff. Half of the time I'm just like, I don't care. Show me what it means. I hear the words, I hear this and that. Show me how it translates into behavior. Show me how it translates into pragmatic things, how they affect life. Because otherwise we're just getting lost in some philosophical castle here, that doesn't really have a parallel in real life. And I think that's what he's driving at there.

AUBREY: As you approach. There's a great concept, I forget whose concept it is, but he talks about hyper objects. And these things that are impossibly complex to understand. And the more people who are part of something and the more ephemeral an idea becomes, and the more variations on it, the more difficult it is. Because let's go back to this pen. Well, if I stab someone in the neck with this pen, this pen is a weapon. And that's what this pen is. And then, is it really a pen? Well, I suppose it's a pen, but really it's a pointy thing that you can poke somebody with. Or if I'm using it to hold my place in a book, is it a pen or is it a bookmark that just happened to be a pen? Or if I'm holding it using it to hold something down, well then it's a paperweight. But it's still largely understandable. But this is such a simple thing and it can still be many things. And then you get to something like Christianity, and I think you mentioned there are approximately 30,000 different variations of Christianity that are practiced. Different sex and different belief systems. And then within those 30 thousands, there's each individual that's approaching those same core tenets with their own purview on what it means in their own internal translation. So when you say the word Christianity, what the fuck are you talking about? 

DANIELE: Exactly. There is no such a thing. It is like, give me a specific example. Otherwise it's abstract. It doesn't mean anything. And I get it. It's like living in the word means seven to generalize sometime. Because it takes forever otherwise, to get to the point of saying no, what I really mean in this one instance, in this one time and this one, but the problem with generalizations is that while they are useful to some degree. They are also horrendously lacking precision and not only lacking precision, but can downright distort reality sometime. And take it to a place where it really has no parallel in reality, but we treat it like it's real. And because it's a word, it feels solid. It feels like it means something. And to me that's the origin of many, many, many, many problems. Think about the kind of political rivalries that exist between people and how people can get really nasty with each other over politics. Most of the time, you all want your kids to live a good life. You want them to be healthy. You want to drink water that's not poison. You have a ton of stuff in common when it comes to how you go out and live your day. Start with that. Let's focus on that part. A lot of the other things are abstract, sometimes it's not, sometimes there are real differences in behavior. Okay. Let's address those. But many, many other times, they are verbal traps that we fall into.

AUBREY: Yeah, that's very true. And it makes me hesitant to use certain words. Like the word God is a word I'm very uncomfortable with. Even though I feel like I know God, I feel like I've felt what God is. From my own journeys. And I feel God as the all sound, the all light, the all color, the everything. Love, Mystery, Source. Like it's the only thing. It's the thing, and in many ways it's like the Tao, although, we'll go into that probably as well, because they say that the Tao is older than God. Which is very interesting. It's almost like, and there's different ways to explain that, but the word God itself, I use it and I know that everybody is hearing a different thing.

DANIELE: Completely. But immediately is gonna go like, ah, he is weird religious freak.

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. 

DANIELE: My dad was a Baptist preacher, was an asshole, so I hate Aubrey. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There are a few passages there in between Aubrey saying something about God, the way you mean it, and I think that's the problem with language. That's why I think I understand what they mean, thereby having to adapt language. Like when you are face-to-face with somebody, you feel their energy, you see their reaction, you see our word, you say it makes them squirm one way or another, and you can tweak it immediately. He's like, oh, okay. I got that feedback. This is where you're coming from, so let me try to go about it a slightly different way. And then you can adapt it and you can make communication successful in written words online, you don't have any of that stuff. And so you're stuck with these verbal traps. 

AUBREY: It almost seems like the only way to really use language well is in a one-on-one conversation. It's like what you're talking about. Because there is that feedback. You have to see if the person understands what you're talking about. And I think it's also a problem that we get into when we judge what someone said a long time ago without the context of the environment, the person, the whatever, and it might illuminate some ignorance for the time, but the ignorance of that time was so pervasive that the idea that someone was supposed to be elevated beyond that ignorance is absurd. And it's like, but we'll still punish them according to the standards of what we know now. Like in 1985, wearing blackface for Halloween was normal. It was normal. And someone didn't mean offense by it, they just didn't know better. Wearing a Native American headdress was not offensive. It wasn't taking away from a culture. And it was just like, I'm celebrating this in some way or playing. But now we know better. And so now there's a different standard. But to hold somebody to something from a past time and apply it to now, it's like you have to know the context, the time, the environment, and the people, the place. And yeah, sure, it may illuminate that they didn't know something. But one thing that pissed me off, I came to Texas and I got tricked into going on a ski trip that was really like a Christian conversion trip. And they're like, come on, let's go skiing. And it was like bible study every night. And I was like, come on, you gotta be kidding me. I was fresh out of moving from California. My parents were fully agnostic and like, well, we don't know. We don't believe in anything. And then they were explaining to me, they were like, if you don't believe in Jesus as your savior and take him into your whatever, that you go to hell. And I was like, okay, well, from what I know, humans have been around for, I don't know, 80,000 years and Christ has been here for 2000 years. What happened to everybody before that? Are they all in hell? And the preacher or whatever, he said, well, they should have been worshiping Christ before he came. And I was like, what? What are you talking about? Like, how are they gonna know? If they don't know how are they gonna worship Jesus before he is even arrived and before someone even expressed anything. But they have this belief that, oh, well you still go to hell anyways. And I was like, get the fuck outta here. Get me outta here. I don't like skiing this much. It's not worth it. I'm done with this nonsense. It's very interesting. But it's the same principle of judgment that we apply when, like there is ignorance, just plain ignorance. And if you're gonna be punished, literally not being aware when you had no ability, no agency to make a choice based upon your awareness. What game are we playing here? What demonic fucking principle is this? 

DANIELE: And that's where, to me, in Tao Te Ching fashion is like somebody was going that far in that direction and coming up with their whole theology about how that works that way, and the people who were. It's like, bring it back down 16 levels. How do you treat your neighbors? How do you raise your kids? Tell me about that. It's like, bring it back to a place where his ear, where's tangible? Where otherwise, when they go far, people come up with really weird shit where it's like, how do you even, what kind of perverted abstract game are we playing here?

AUBREY: Yeah. And that's where these dogmatic principles, then you try to apply it to everything and you realize that there's irreconcilable facts like 80,000 years of humans all went to hell because they didn't know any better, but it was their fault somehow. You're either saying that this God is a demon. Who's punishing people who didn't deserve it, or you're like, it's just crazy. Or you're wrong. But like, they're not adapting that at, at least that preacher at that time. I think probably there's ways and subtle nuances that so many different people have dealt with this same question, but at that point, in that time, it was not dealt with. So I was like, I'm fucking outta here. This is insane. All right. The next line of this, free from Desire, you realize the mystery caught in desire. You see only the manifestation, yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. So what do you take from this passage here?

DANIELE: This is clearly, I mean, some stuff, one of the thing that I find fascinating about this book is that every time it's a short book, you can read it in a couple of hours, but every time you read it, you may uncover layers that have been way over your head before.

AUBREY: I agree. 

DANIELE: So I feel like this one is like one that I'm idea, I think I get some of it. I think there are some part of it that I'm not getting, like the initial part, the three from desire versus kind of being caught in desire. That one makes sense, right? It's like when you are needy, when you come from a place of need because you desire things to be a certain way, all you're gonna see is your projection of your own need. All of reality is gonna be based on this, I want this. And so everything is gonna be filtered through that. When you don't come from such a place, reality comes, you are a much cleaner mirror. You can reflect things, how they are as opposed to how you want them to be. So that I do see as an important point. But it does sound like it's going a couple of layers deeper than that. 

AUBREY: Especially as he moves into the darkness. I think that was really well said. Especially the idea of like, when you're in desire, you're looking at the world as the ways to fill that desire. That's your confirmation bias. That's your satiation bias. Let's just call it like your desire to satiate a need is now you're seeing, does this fit this thing? And so you're trying to condense reality and looking for a manifestation that will fill this thing rather than the totality of everything, which is the mystery, which fills all cups and fills all things. So that I think is, it's deep, but it's potent. And then mystery and manifestations arise from the same source, and I think this is now getting into classic mystic territory. This source is called Darkness. Darkness Within Darkness. What it seems to me he's talking about is he's talking about the void. Very similar to what Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about, or people who talk about manifesting from the quantum reality of the void where all things are possible and it's just a state of super position of all possibilities. And then something crystallizes that is then a manifestation of all of those possibilities. But it's still from the same source. It still came from the void. This pregnant overwrite pair of every possibility waiting for you to pick something, drag it from a golden thread from all possibility into reality. But it's still from the same source. And he says darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding, there's a model, and I'm gonna have this guy on the podcast, but he has a nine dimensional model of reality and cosmology. And the first and the ninth dimension are two different articulations of the divine. Whereas the first is the energy, like imagine the big bang in an explosion. It's like the energy of the yang of God. The ninth is the yin of God, which is just the all possibility, the emptiness. It's where everything and nothing are pretty much the same, but they have a slightly different hue to them. It's why one is depicted as the white and one is depicted as the black. It's like this is the energy factor of God. This is the possibility factor of God, the empty part or the everything part. The nothing or the everything. And it seems like the Tao is what he's talking about is the ninth dimensional articulation in this mystical system of understanding of this is the all possibility, this is the substrate, which is still God. But it's the substrate that's there before that one. And I believe it's like this one choice that God makes. And as soon as that happens, it's like big bang, planets fucking polarity. Second dimension, third dimension, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. And it's this giant ohm like, yes. And then there it is. But before that, and that's why it says the Tao is older before that. 

DANIELE: There's some stratum there. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Just possibility. Waiting for that one ohm of creation to come through.

DANIELE: Basically, you summed up Taoist cosmology in a nutshell. That's kind of some of the later chapters. That's basically what it breaks down to. It's saying there's this thing that's there before all things that I speak of the Tao as the mother of the gods, as before the gods, as before there are even, because in Chinese animism, of course, they have multiple data, not just one. And they have Tao as this impersonal thing. It's not a being, it does not have a personality, does not have likes and dislikes is this energy that's there. From which everything else will spring. And the way they break it down in Taoism is that there's this energy that's, what you refer to as the void. It's all potential, but nothing manifested. And then you have this separation between the opposites, the Yin and the Yang. These two opposites. And then the interaction between Yin and Yang creates what is called the 10,000 things, which is basically all of reality. All the different manifestations of reality. And basically all of life is this dance between Yin and Yang. And if you want to go back to it, both of them were born from this void initially. That's how they conceive of reality. 

AUBREY: Yeah. And that's part of the cosmology as well, that this first split is pure polarity. It's light and dark. And I think as I was saying, referring back to what Christianity did, they made a being, maybe actualized, a being that was from a second, like Christ is a second dimensional being. A being where there's only two things. There's the light and then there's the darkness. But they completely miss what the darkness is. Because they make it all evil and stuff. And this is in the cosmology from Mattias DeStefano I'm referring to, that's more of a sixth dimensional being of delusion and trying to cloud you from seeing the truth. But the active and the passive, it becomes polarity, becomes a very different thing than we understand it as. And I think they missed that whole thing with the devil and all of this. But they did this idea of the Christ is really, I think the only religion that's created it, really named the second dimensional Yang principle of this love and life and light. 

DANIELE: Which is tricky because all religions understand that there is duality in life. It's inevitable. You look everywhere, you see duality. But the way, by giving it a value judgment by making it God versus the devil, good versus evil. They're really missing the point, which is what theism is trying to drive it. That duality is a dance. It's not a fight. It's not a line in the sand where the forces of one side and the other clash. It's this harmonious dance that's constantly changing where these two dancing partners have to find the rhythm and the right balance, and that's what it all of that is, is about balance at the end of the day, is about constantly tweaking this really a dance, if you wanna look at the metaphor, but not even the metaphorically, it's how you live. You are constantly adapting between these two opposite forces that are not good or bad. It's like, is masculine and feminine? Is one good and one bad? No, they are energies. They're good energies. They both have they're beauty in it. Cold and hot. Too much cold, too much hot, bad, but there's a sweet spot there where you like to experience cold, but not crazy. You like to experience heat, but now where it cooks you–

AUBREY: And situation 

DANIELE: And you like somewhere in the range between where you can live between cold and hot, you wanna play all of them. They're all great. And so that to me is a healthy dualism. It's a healthy approach to take opposite energies and find out how you can make them work in a functional, harmonious, and happy way. Conceiving of everything as this titanic struggle between light and darkness, it's kind of a green way to live. 

AUBREY: Yeah. I was on an ayahuasca journey and I had a vision of Christ in form. Jesus in form. And I had a vision of the devil in form. And what Ayahuasca showed me is they immediately embraced, started kissing and making love.

DANIELE: I remember that. I remember, 

AUBREY: I was like, Oh man. 

DANIELE: I remember now. I love that when you say it. I was like dying laughing, but it was also profound, so I loved it. 

AUBREY: It was really interesting. And I think there's just, again, you say the devil and it conjures up all of these different things and it's an impossible, it's a hyper object of a word. I think there's a big missing explanation for what the yin principle of the initial duality is, or what the opposite of Christ actually is. Not being the evil thing, because as I said, I think that's many steps down the way. That involves human beings and choice and like these different other energies, which are a muddied, delusional blend of things that are way, way, way down the road. But in the pure sense of that first duality, I think understanding that in the classic way of yin and yang makes a lot more sense than all of these kind of desert religion cosmologies.

DANIELE: A hundred percent. To me, in a younger, they describe life. That's how life is. And that balance, which is constantly shifting. So you can be dogmatic about it, like I use the metaphor of surfing for this stuff. Because it seems fitting in the sense that life is sort of the wave that's constantly changing. If one moment the balance is stilling 70% to the right and 30 left, and so you say, oh, that's the balance, so let's write it down 70%, 30%. Well, a moment later, the energy of the wave has changed. If you do that, you fall and you end up at the bottom of the ocean. Now you have to tweak it where I'm 60-40 this way, now I have to. And so balance is a dynamic state. It's something they are constantly adapting based on your reading of the current situation. The problem is that's hard to work. Because it means you have to be aware, you have to be awake, you have to pay attention, you have to be sensitive, you have to read it in real time. Dogma is so much easier because it's in every situation, do A and avoid B. I mean, if you are a dumb ass and you have no idea what's going on, some principles are better than others most of the time. But come on man, there are 10,000 exceptions to that. 

AUBREY: Making love is generally better than making pain. Not always right. Generally, there is a general rule. 

DANIELE: So there are good guidelines. But daily delicate guidelines. Not fixed law written in stone. And so Taoism is very big on avoiding absolutisms. But even that, it's funny, Taoism is very, there are no absolutes, except when there are. He's like, most of the time, no, but occasionally there are a few things where there's a pretty hard line. There is no killing somebody generally bad, a self-defense or this or that. You can make an argument. 

AUBREY: Well, he talks about how you go into war. You go into war with great sorrow. So like with great, like, but he doesn't say never go into war. He says, you go and you approach it, I forget his exact words, but you approach it like a funeral. Like you approach it like a thing of great sorrow through that you have to do and then you retire sad. No matter what. Not victorious. But sad. 

DANIELE: Absolutely. And so he's making an allowance, but he's also showing that that's a far from ideal scenario. And in some cases you don't have an option, but other cases, you know what I mean? There is no self-defense rape. It's like that's pretty wrong. 101% of the time. So occasionally, not often. But occasionally there are some absolutes. Those are very rare though. Most of the time–

AUBREY: And now my mind's scrambling to think, but is there some kind of self-defense rate. You're in a prison and there's a guard that won't let you out unless you get through his chastity. And then you'll be like Mike Tyson and you'll fuck him till he loves you. We were talking about how Mike Tyson talks shit back in the day and he said some dark things. 

DANIELE: He had some weird lines.

AUBREY: He said, I'm gonna fuck you till you love me. That was to say that to your opponent, you're about to fight. That's heavy. That's fucking heavy. But yes, you're absolutely right. You start to get into absolutes, if not near absolutes. And where you have to create, do so much hypothetical dancing to even make sense. But even still, you're only approximating an absolute. And I wanna go back 'cause I was trying to associate Christ consciousness with a second dimensional polarity, but I don't think it works. I think it's actually probably more in line with a hybrid first dimensional reality of this is actually God energy expressing, this is something that's actually a combination of both polarities. The allowance, turn the other cheek. Well that's clearly yin energy. And like all of these, this softness and gentleness of when I've experienced Christ's energy expressed through a medicine man, or expressed through, it's so impossibly gentle. And of course, that carries the combination of both principles. So I think actually the only accurate way to express that duality is more with the Yin Yang. Symbolism, right. Like the active passive and that, so I think, I wanna go back and just clarify like, I think I've been thinking about it a little bit wrong because I think in the Eastern way, I think that's really the only way to understand duality.

DANIELE: It's both at the same time. And I think Taoism put special emphasis on the Yin. Because they say everybody understand the Yang. Their thing is like, you don't need to be a genius to understand that strength is a powerful thing. That big, strong muscle carry you through that effort gets a result. Most people get it 'cause it's fairly self-evident. So Taoism is like, yeah, we are good with that. We got it. 

AUBREY: You got this. Clearly everybody building walls, raid castles, doing all these things, like we get it.

DANIELE: Totally, got it. The other side of it though, is the one that they argue that's not as well understood. And that's the Yin aspect and that's the power of this more subtle, delicate energy that's extremely powerful in a way, not overtly doing stuff is getting stuff done in a way where it looks like you barely move the muscle, but somehow you got the stuff done. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: Which if you look like the tales of great martial artists are clearly an older guy, cannot compete with the speed and power and hardcore energy of a younger guy. How can they do it? They can only do it through better timing. They can only do it through better getting there faster. Not because they're really faster, but because they minimize the amount of motion to get to that point.

AUBREY: And potentially they read the Tao in a way. They read the flow of energy. And then we're not talking about one of those crazy things where it's all clearly fake where someone has a pillow and they're pushing people away. Shooting chief from their hands. But I've watched this clip that Tim Ferris posted of an old Judoka. Probably 80. Going against so many, he's almost like the guy's trying to throw him, but he's just dancing. Like barely tap tiptoeing, like he'll lift but just tiptoe and like move and he'll try to hip throw and he'll just glide right around the hip that's trying to toss him.

DANIELE: I love that you mentioned Judo. Because that's a perfect example. Because Kano had read The Daring and a lot of his understanding of modifying the Juujitsu curriculum into judo was filtered through the lenses of Taoism. So a lot of his ideas were like, I don't need to teach a big guy to beat a small guy. That's gonna happen 10 out of 10. If an untrained big guy fights an untrained small guy, they're gonna win overwhelmingly most of the time. So how can I use it in a way that somebody understands that more yin energy can use it to beat a greater force? And that's what a lot of judo philosophically is. So people read it and they think, oh, is this going to be this very gentle tai chi like thing? Then you watch judo, you're like, man, this guy is, go at it hard. And there's a lot of sweat and effort involved. What happened to the way part, and again, is the least amount of effort is not no effort. If you go in somebody good, there's gonna be a lot of sweat and push and pull and stuff. But the goal is to use as much Yin Yang possible. So maybe you pull them and you manage to sweep their foot as it lands. At that point, it doesn't matter how big the guy is, if you catch the right timing, he's going down. Or there's that push and you go with it and you pull them with you put the foot and you hit the bottom again, all those things are that yin. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: But of course it's not this caricature of yin like the way the guy who shoots energy out of his pants and knocks everybody down, or I'll just go with it and everything is gonna flow. He's like, eh, no. There's still a lot of yang involved. But through mastery it's another level. It's when you can use less effort to beat the guy. 

AUBREY: Yeah. It almost seems like at a point where you have less strength, like that master 80-year-old. I don't know if he was 80, but he looked like it, 80-year-old master judoka, he had less available strength. So you almost like his judo was even more pure. 

DANIELE: Yeah. You have to, right? 

AUBREY: Yeah. Because he had to, and it's like when Ram Dass had his stroke and he had aphasia and he couldn't speak as eloquently. What he expressed was, oh, now I have to be even more in my heart. And he was by all accounts, people who've met him and he was no less powerful at that point because he just expanded his heart image. So he was almost even more of a mystic than when he was eloquent and he could crack some jokes. And I love that Ram Dass. 

DANIELE: Sure. Of course. 

AUBREY: I listen to his talks all the time. But there was something so powerful about even the elimination because it really brought out that ultimate supreme spiritual power, which comes from the letting go of all of the clever words. And I think they talk about this. Like the clever words are actually not that clever. It's the energy, you can get lost in the cleverness of a word. And how Oh, I said that really good, didn't I? You get kind of caught in that, that moment of your own poetry. Whereas if you're just being, my friend East Forest, who's named Krishna by Ram Dass, he talks about when Ram Dass said the words that he just sat across from him for like 10 minutes and then just looked at each other and this deep trance. And he just smiles and says, just this. And like that was like the most profound thing. 

DANIELE: Yes. Of course.

AUBREY: That he's ever heard. But obviously those words don't mean shit. But it was the energy and it was that transmission of like, this is everything. Just this is everything. And maybe Ram Dass at 50 would've started talking in two minutes and done all this. And he would've missed that magical moment that came from like, just sitting there. 

DANIELE: Yeah. That's why to me, language is an interesting beast. Because I love beautiful languages. But to me, the most beautiful language also has a certain simplicity, like if you cannot read that story to a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old, and it doesn't click with both of them. To me, I haven't used language well. It doesn't mean having to sacrifice complexity. You can convey really complex ideas in a way that people from many different walks of life and experiences can grasp. And that to me is, through mastery, where it feels simple, but it's not. It feels like you're just having a chat, but it's the result of a ton of work behind it and an understanding of it. And now you can distill it in a way that's relaxed and spontaneous, but it doesn't come from relaxing assurance and spontaneity. It comes from a fuck load of work early on, a lot of preparation, a lot of yang, until eventually you learn how to let go and what's left is the good stuff. 

AUBREY: Yeah. When I think telling a story is really beautiful for that because, and you see it with a lot of famous kids stories. Like, you'll hear Jordan Peterson talking about his understanding of all of these kids stories from Peter Pan or Pinocchio or something like that. And I was entertained by those stories as a kid, and I got a fraction of it and mostly got enjoyed the story. But really looking at it from the lens of a philosopher and a lens of someone who understands mythology and the mythos that it's expressing, you're like, whoa. That was fucking deep. 

DANIELE: There are layers. 

AUBREY: There are layers and layers, and that's the beautiful part about a story is it's just ready, the master appears when the student is ready, the teaching appears, it's the same with the Tao Te Ching, like–

DANIELE: Exactly what I was about to say.

AUBREY: I read this at 25 and I was like, yeah, cool. Good advice. But now I'm reading it again and it's like, whoa. 

DANIELE: Little deeper, little yeah, absolutely. I do, with Tao Te Ching. One of the first collections of Zen stories I ever read was called Zen Flash, Zen Bones, and there's 101 Zen tales. First time I read it, there were two that I thought were genius. Three or four that I was like, I kind of get it. It seems good, but I don't know. And 90 whatever many left that I had no idea what the hell they were talkingp about. I think now I'm about 30 where I'm like, some I really love, some I really get, and then 70 or so, I have no idea what the hell they are doing. And each time there's like, oh, now there's one more. This one clicked. These now make perfect sense to me. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: But it's a process.

AUBREY: I want to check that book out for sure. All right, let's move on to passage four. The Tao is like a well used but never used up. It is like the eternal void filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden, but always present. I don't know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. So we talked about this already a little bit. 

DANIELE: That's such beautiful poetry. 

AUBREY: It really is 

DANIELE: Even before you go into the meaning, just like it's so good.

AUBREY: Yep. And I think this is really expressing, this was the passage that I was referencing, but this is really it. This is what we're talking about, is this substance, the substrate before God was even God. It was just the possibility of God was the Tao. And then call God the ohm, right? But it was like Tao was there first. Man, that's good. Gives me chills thinking about that. But I don't know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. Like where did that come from? It is in that way. It's just always and then that's the thing you get wrapped in. Oh, it was infinitely there. Fuck.

DANIELE: And that's what I love about honesty. Like, I don’t give birth. It's like you're taking me so far back that it's out of my pay grade.

AUBREY: What gives birth to the infinite? It's like, I don't know, the infinite just is. But we can't conceive of that. We can't conceive of anything outside the confines of time.

DANIELE: And your ski trip preacher will like a bit bending over back or try to fight a way to explain it and like, oh, it me, it's like, I don't know. There's something that predates human experience by so much–

AUBREY: That predates divine experience. 

DANIELE: Yeah. Predates everything. What's the starting point? Of the starting point, right? It's like it's too much. It's beyond more than we can handle.

AUBREY: It’s good. Makes me excited. All right. Moving on. 22. If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked. If you want to become full, let yourself be empty. If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up. The master by residing in the Tao sets an example for all beings, because he doesn't display himself. People can see his light because he has nothing to prove. People can trust his words because he doesn't know who he is. People recognize themselves in him because he has no goal in mind. Everything he does succeeds, 

DANIELE: Ooh. A 101. That's where it's at. 

AUBREY: Yeah. That's it. There's also a piece on judgment here too, because like a lot of times we will put the value proposition whole, straight, full, reborn, everything. And having everything. These are the things we want. Everything that's the opposite of that is bad. But when you have this, when you're in locked in judgment, there's some part of you that's locked in fear. Some part of you that's held back. And to recognize the totality of yourself. You have to recognize the crookedness in your straightness. You have to recognize your partiality and your wholeness. You have to recognize all of this and then not judge it, because then it even puts it farther crystallized away from you. And you're almost damning an aspect of yourself. Which is going to just hinder you on the path to actually getting where you want to go. 

DANIELE: I mean, think like anything you wanna learn is gonna involve a lot of mistakes. If you have a judgment that you don't allow yourself to make mistakes, guess what? You're not gonna learn. That's just how it is. It's like you cannot be great at something before you ever try it. It's like you're gonna fuck up and you're gonna fuck up again and again and again. And the more you judge yourself and you are holding and going like, I shouldn't fuck up, the more it's gonna take you. It's kind of like that parable about like, I really wanna learn this. How long is it gonna take? 10 years? But what if I train twice as hard, well, than 30 years? So it is like, what do you mean I'm putting more energy? It's like, yeah, that's the problem. You are like, you're putting too much in it. It's like, let it have its own course. Take it. It has a flow. Go with that. The moment you reject that process, then you are bound to make that mistake a lot more. Because you don't immediate, you don't learn from it. You don't go through it. You are holding back. You're judging yourself and you just don't allow yourself. 

AUBREY: And we start to make all, because our judge, so when we judge ourselves, we withhold love from ourself. And we withhold love from the world that might be trying to reach us because we feel that we don't deserve it. And that act of withholding that love from ourself then causes us to, it's so painful. That's the most painful thing, is the withholding of love. Love is the most beautiful force to feel in the universe. And then the withholding of it is hell. So, of course we're afraid of hell. It's like a child who's afraid of getting grounded. Of course. What do you do? You lie. You lie if you're afraid of getting grounded. If you have a really authoritarian parent figure and they're punishing for this, I don't know if I'll tell who, but someone very close to me. Their parent grounded them for a year because she was listening to a hip hop album. When she was in high school. A year. So what did she do? Did she stop listening to hip hop? 

DANIELE: No, of course not. 

AUBREY: No. She just fucking lied better. Lied better and that's all. That's all it is. But we do that with ourselves. So when we punish ourselves by withholding love for this thing. That we have, oh, I sense this part of me that was turned on by this thing, or was selfish in this way. And we punish ourselves, then we just don't look at it, we'll lie to ourselves and say, no, I didn't do that. There's the justifications why, and this is why it made sense. And so we start to trick ourselves and then we prevent ourselves from actually being virtuous. By embracing our lack of virtue. 

DANIELE: It's the problem with repression, why never works. Because if your way to solve something is by repressing a part of yourself, you're just empowering it and letting it grow in the darkness, and the more you try to squash it, the more it's gonna come out in a really unhealthy way. That's why when you see a lot of philosophy. Not everybody who's hardcore celibate has issues, but many people are because it doesn't come natural to them. It's an effort of the wheel, where they are like, I need to squash my sexuality because it doesn't fit with my idea of what a good person is. And guess what? That's where suddenly you get like the Ted Agart of the word, busted doing meth with a gay hooker kind of thing. It's like, couldn't it have be just a little easier about masturbation and stuff? It's like, maybe you didn't have to go that far. It's like you are just a little more accepted of yourself, but you didn't have to turn into this weird, hidden monster that you are hiding from everyone, but you can't really stop because it's part of you. And there's more honesty toward yourself, toward others. There's more chances to learn and grow from stuff rather than pretending. Pretending is not, there rarely solves problems. Denial is not the greatest strategy ever, usually. 

AUBREY: So this is drawing me to an interlude where we can talk about Ikkyu Sojun. Because this is, and we'll go back to reading these different passages, because here's something that, when I went to Thailand, there were the monks in their saffron, I think was the color of their robes. And I was with my partner Caitlyn, at the time, and I could interact with them and like hand them money and touch them, but she couldn't. And I was like, what? Okay, I guess. And this was because of their chastity, but it seemed to me how brittle is your chastity that my partner can't pay you $5. How brittle is it? It's like an alcoholic that can't see a beer across the room without freaking out and running over to it and drinking it. Well, alright. Maybe if you're that hungry, for that drink. Like okay. I get it. But it just seems like it's reinforcing this brittleness of this concept. And if the concept is inherently, universally that brittle, maybe it's the wrong fucking concept. 

DANIELE: Speaking of Zen flesh Zen Bones, there's a perfect story for this one, right? It's tailor made. It's the story of these two monks who are in an order that discourage monks from interacting with women, so they have that standpoint. So they are approaching as been raining heavy. So the road is completely muddy and they see a young woman who's trying to cross, but there's mud everywhere. She's like in her pretty clothing. So she's trying to figure out how to cross and one of the monks goes, and asks her, “Hey, do you want me to do you wanna hop on my back and I'll carry you across and the way you don't have to?” And she's like, “oh, thank you so much.” So he does it right. They go and monk number two is just pissed and he's just stewing for hours or days. And like hours later he goes back to monk number one and he is like, how could you? You know better than that. We are not to interact with women particularly young and pretty like that one, what the hell did you do? And monk number one is like. I left that lady by the roadside. Are you still carrying her with you? Which is fantastic. She's like, why? I could do that and leave her. And that's where it began and ended. It's senior in their mind, they are so clingy to this idea and you're obsessing about it. And again, the more you're whipping yourself about it, the more you'll cling to it. And I'm with you completely on that, if you cannot handle the fire soft reality around you, it's an admission of defeat. It's like if you say that, I cannot look at any woman otherwise I'm just gonna be immediately thinking about her naked and wanting to have sex with her. And that's terrible, and say, okay, I've already lost that game. And we do that a lot. I mean, as a society, as humanity. Look at how people approach the topic of sex, not only with adults or with themselves, but like if a kid is anywhere in the neighborhood, everybody shuts up or they have to use euphemism more. It's a kid, he's not an idiot. You can talk. He's like–

AUBREY: Oh, and he has a phone. Guess what he's on PornHub.  He's seen shit you've never even seen. 

DANIELE: Can we just do that? Have a conversation for why you, sex is cool and fun, but also comes with some issues. So you probably wanna be a little more emotionally mature before you think to dive about it and have that conversation in an honest way. What the hell is so hard about it?

AUBREY: It’s very interesting. And that’s a very complex topic that maybe we could dive into. But I want to go back to this idea and I think the crazy madman, Carlos Castaneda, who followed some Toltech philosophy. He said this really well. He said basically, renunciation is a trap. Because you think you were doing great things, but really you're just focused on yourself. It's like, oh, I've fasted for so long. Congratulations. What'd you do for the world? How is that good for people? All right, maybe if there was not enough food and you fasted to like, give somebody more food. Great. Good for you. That's very kind. The people in Auschwitz who had very few rations of stale bread and Viktor Frankel saw him tear off a loaf and half of their serving and give it to somebody else. Okay. Alright. Now we're fucking talking. 

DANIELEs That's powerful.

AUBREY: Now we're talking but when you're just renouncing. It's in this almost masturbatory  self-aggrandizement, kind of concept of like, so there's a lot of traps in this path. And it's not that every path is valid if you're really genuinely called to it. Go for it. Like, live your life exactly how you want and if this is the way that brings the best out of your life. Like, I'm not judging the path, I'm just saying it's rife with challenges and traps that I think are sometimes overlooked. And I think probably fewer people than most are not aware of these traps that they're falling into.

DANIELE: And that’s where I think the absolutism comes in. Where, no, we're not making an absolute argument like, oh, celibate is always bad or Everybody depends on the reaction. Depends on the result it creates. If it allows you to free up some energy and being a more loving human being and you're happier with yourself, then it clearly was the right answer. If it makes you think that you cannot take five bucks from the lady, 'cause then I think the results are speaking loud and saying that that's not working out great.

AUBREY: Yeah, totally.

DANIELE: Depends. 

AUBREY: So let's talk about Zen Buddhist monk. I'm wearing him on my shirt. And if people can see he's drinking wine off a woman's beautiful breasts. Yes. And this was a shirt that you made, so this was a deep understanding of this guy. And he was a very interesting character for history. So tell us, tell us some stories about this man. 

DANIELE: He's my old time hero. When people ask me one historical figure that stands above and beyond for you, I'm like, Ikkyu Sojun, no hesitation. He's my guy. I was introduced to Ikkyu by the writer Tom Robbins, a guy still life with Woodpecker, another outside attraction, that guy. I love Tom Robbins. I find him a phenomenal writer. And I love Zen. So when he told me about this guy, I'm like, how do I not know about him? I need to dive in. So I started reading. And Ikkyu is like Bugs Bunny in a zen kind of way. Hilarious. He's a trickster. He's funny. And he's also really profound at the same time. His story is a tricky one, I'll try to make it quick, like a quick bio of him. He lived in the, I think he was born at the very end of the 13 hundreds going into the 14 hundreds. He was the legitimate son of the emperor of Japan. Right when he was born, there were palace conspiracies. His mom was afraid that somebody may try to kill him to get rid of a possible claimant to the throne. So she put him when he was five years old in a zen monastery kind of to say, look, he's gonna be a zen monk. You guys don't have to worry about it. Because jealousy among concubines is kind of stuff.

AUBREY: It was crazy. I watched this show on Netflix. Called Age of the Samurai. They were some fucking killing. Manipulating Machiavellian. It was wild.

DANIELE: Yep. And that's exactly what she's afraid of. So he is like, please let him leave. He's gonna be a happy little zen monk. He is gonna have nothing to do with anything. So the guy grows up without his father, really, without his mother. 'cause he got to only see her once in a while. He grows up in the very stern, strict, severe thing of a zen monastery. Not the recipe for the perfect, joyful life right there. And Ikkyu is, as he grows up, he has this incredible grasp of zen, and precisely because of that, he puts him at thought with so much of the Zen establishment, because the way Ikkyu describe it, so much of the Zen establishment become largely corrupt, largely more worried about money and donations for patrons than for the essence of it all. So to a point where he's regularly clashing, even with some of his own teachers, like there's a point where in sand there's this really weird thing where “enlightened master”, however you want to define that as to sign a certificate of enlightenment to prove that you are enlightened, that you made it, that you achieved it. That's like your spiritual PhD. And if you get it clap, clap, clap, now you can go teach. And Ikkyu got his certificate and he was like, he burned it. And he's like, how can you? That's the thing that opened. I'm like a certificate of enlightenment. Seriously, that's what we're doing here. It is. Like, fuck you guys. It is like, let's be real. So at one point they're trying to rope him in and they give him they make him the head of this one smaller monastery saying, oh, maybe the responsibilities, because he was a bit of a wild guy, but he was also brilliant. At one point, nobody can find him a few days later, and he's like, where the hell did he go? And they go to his quarters and they find this poem that he left behind where basically he's saying, look, nine days in this monastery, I'm losing my mind by now. If anybody come looking for me amid they're at the brothel, at the saki shops. See you guys. He's like, well, what? You are supposed to be the spiritual master. And so much of his thing is aiming a one issue, which is the artificial separation between sacred and profane. He's saying there is no such thing. If you cannot find the sacred in the most mundane circumstances in life, you are not gonna find it meditating on a mountain away from everything and everybody. The sacred is a state of consciousness. The sacred is how you approach things. It's not what you do is how you do it. And so in that sense, he digs sex, he did drinking, he digs zen, he digs to him. There's no separation between those things. It's like if you do it in a certain way. Anything can be sacred. And vice versa. If you do it in another way, the most stereotypically sacred activity is bullshit, is an ego trip and has nothing to do with, so you can be meditating there in your robes and stuff. And it's all an act. There's nothing spiritual about it.

AUBREY: Yeah. It's like the husk without the corn. It's just missing the essence of what this is really all about. And that's, I think, something we do in so many different religions that is such an important concept. Like find the sacred in everything. And whether that's a mystical teacher I follow, Paul Selig is like, unless you can find God in the mud and in the shit you don't know God.

DANIELE: That's exactly the same concept.

AUBREY: You don't know unless you can find zen in sex and zen in sake and zen and whatever. You don't know zen either. You don't know how to savor every moment and treat every moment. That is the essence of zen. That's what they're talking about. It is the ultimate, just this, it's like, oh, you're pouring tea. Just this. It's like doing one thing at a time and relishing it. Presence. Knowing that presence is the magical beauty that we're all craving. It's the ecstasy of it. People think, oh yeah, there's that new relationship energy when you meet someone. Well, what is that? You're just present. You're just present because your desire is driving you to presence. And the newness and the novelty's driving you to presence, which is creating awe. And creating all of these feelings. That's the big difference. That's why something new is powerful because for a moment we stop all of the fucking other stuff we're thinking about and we're like, wow. And every moment has wow possibility. If you're right there with it. 

DANIELE: Yeah. Because you are looking at it with new eyes, with unfiltered eyes. You're not projecting your expectation or your past history or whatever. You're seeing this person, there's that magic. Whereas after a while you take it for granted. You see what you wanna see. And that's, to me, the essence of the game, right. I mean, it's funny that we are hilarious, like there's a classic zen saying about sleeping when you're tired and eating when you're hungry kind of thing. The full quote, he got a lot more scatological. It got in like peace shit and be human right. It gets very, and even the fact that people only quote the first half and skip the second tells you that they completely missed the point. Because it's like embrace the human experience and that's a layer of consciousness in everything that you do. And that's where it's at. That's where you find the sacred. You don't find it in mystical clouds of instance. They are a part of life. They're great. Along with everything else. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: And so Ikkyu becomes, of course, this kind of gesture because he's always poking at the stuffiness and the rigid rules that are missing the point.

AUBREY: Like the virtue of the hyouka. 

DANIELE: Exactly. That's exactly what it is. 

AUBREY: That's that coyote, the trickster medicine that keeps things from being too rigid and too dogmatic by just doing the opposite thing. Oh, you're supposed to circle the lodge fire this way. Okay, I'm gonna go the other way. Oh, you're fasting. Let me eat this fucking delicious fruit in front of your face and see how you handle it. Like this is an essential quality to any spirituality to prevent it from getting stale. And lifeless and dead. 

DANIELE: And that's what he is. You said it perfectly. He's the zen hyouka. He has that energy in a zen context, and that's how he's throughout his life. And what I love about it is that many people who play fast and lose with the rules, very often they end up doing it in a self-serving way. Where suddenly it's like the cult leader who's having sex with everybody's wives. Because he's like power, power, power. And all the well somehow flows to me and all that stuff, right? Ikkyu play fast and loose with the rules. But you never hear a story of people saying, well, he was kind of a dick about it. He was like, he's just a very free human being, but not an abusive human being, not a predatorial use. The lack of rules just for me and screw you, kind of thing. That never shows up, which is very rare. Because many cases where sometimes you see people who have brilliant ideas, you're like, oh, that's great. I like the flexibility. I like the non-dogmatic approach. Oh, and then you have to become a cult leader. Fuck. Miss that opportunity. 

AUBREY: You see that time and time again. 

DANIELE: Whereas with Ikkyu, he comes across as a genuinely kind guy, as somebody who is just a good human being to others, but he's also having a blast. He's also not bound by the same restrictions that many people are. And I love that combination. I like that. I mean, in some ways, like the prototype of the good, bad boy. Is like he's enough of a bad boy 'cause he's clashing against the rules. But he does it also in a way that's never like the downside of the stereotype of the bad boy, with kind of a dick and selfish and all of that.

AUBREY: Right.

DANIELE: So to me it's like that's the perfect Tao right there. He’s just at that edge between these two opposite energy and he keeps them at the right balance. And he's like that throughout his life. Shortly before he died, which by the way, he had a really long life, he had this thing that was hilarious where he tells his disciples, after I'm gone, I know some of you guys are gonna mostly spend your time around ladies and some of you are gonna do this. And those paths are fine by me. Those are good zen. But if you become a professional player, start blabbing about zen as the way, then you're my enemy. It's perfect. 

AUBREY: Yeah. That's beautiful. The truth is that if you can practice zen while making love and having sex, that's the hardest to practice. And I'll give this example, when I was around day four or five of my darkness retreat, I was dealing with so much stress and emotional stuff coming up and visions of all kinds of really heavy things that were happening. But then somewhere around day five of just being in the black completely denied everything and my thoughts naturally not gravitating towards anything sexual at all. I started thinking about sex and I started feeling, 'cause you're so sensitive at that point. It's just feelings. All you have are your feelings. And so everything that comes up is so strong. And I started feeling the feelings that come from that lust and pleasure and that, and it was like, oh God, this is strong. Like, whoa, this is fucking intense. And it's almost so intense. It's like being tickled. Like you can't not move around to try to escape even though the feeling's good. Like to really be there while you're being tickled uhhuh and not numb the tickling with your mind. Not being tickled, but just be infinitely tickled. 

DANIELE: That's rough. 

AUBREY: Fuck, that's hard. Even though the feeling, the sensation is pleasurable nonetheless, like to really be there and not move away from it or at least numb it or dull it out a little bit. Like to practice zen in making love. It's a fucking beautiful and powerful thing. But it's challenging to do that. It's, I think, almost probably easier to pour tea in the zen way. It's hard 'cause you gotta have concentration and being present. But you can do it. 

DANIELE: But the middle of sweating, grind, sex. It's a bit, yeah. There are, I guess, two things that come to mind about that. One thing about tea ceremony that's interesting by the way, is that it was actually one of Ikkyu’s disciples who created the tea ceremony as we know it, as like this zen ritual. The ceremony kind of existed as a social thing. He made it as a zen thing. So Ikkyu actually indirectly had a huge impact on Japanese cultural life, because one of his guys was the guy who started tea ceremony. Another one was influential in no theater. They played a big role in poetry and calligraphy. So a ton of Japanese cultural arts go back to kind of the guys following him around. Because they dug him. And then the other thing that was coming to mind regarding what you say on the sexual stuff is like the beautiful part about that is that if you mess up, the practice is still good. There are worse things to practice getting good at. It's like, oh, I was not quite into the set of it. 

AUBREY: Let's try again. 

DANIELE: Fucking good anyway. 

AUBREY: I need about three hours. Let's try again. For sure. 

DANIELE: Exactly. 

AUBREY: And there's a great quote that he has as well, and this quote is, throw me into hell and I'll find a way to enjoy it.

DANIELE: If you put a gun to my head and you say, pick one quote out of all of literature that you love more than anything, that's the one. That's just doesn't get any better than that. Throw him into hell and I'll find a way to enjoy it. He's not denying that some stuff sucks. He's not denying. Because so many people, especially in spiritual circles, they try to spin. It's like, no, look, it's a gift. It's something. No, sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it's done. Peace on my head and tell me it's raining kind of thing. Sometimes it's just bad. There's no spinning it. So he's saying, yeah, it's hell. We agree, but you know what? I'm gonna find a way around. I'm gonna find something even in the shittiest situation to make it okay for me. Now, of course. Some of it is a boast because the reality is that if you apply enough pressure to human being there is a breaking point for everybody. So magic only goes so far. However, the reality is that some people, they can be freaked out and flipped out and mad for three days 'cause somebody cut them off in traffic and somebody can survive Auschwitz and be okay. So clearly, there's a huge range in there, in which you can find ways to deal with progressively more uncomfortable situations and handle them well. Again, with some limits, but those limits can be stretched dramatically.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: And that's the goal, ultimately.

AUBREY: It's such a message of personal sovereignty, of saying like, all right, we're not denying that what you're in sucks. And I'm not claiming that I know the way. Like, there's not one rule. One application fits all. Oh, while you're in hell, you just accept it. And then the surrender, there's always the redemption of this moment. That's not what he's saying. He's like, I'll find a way to enjoy it. Like, I trust myself so much that in any situation that's awful. I just believe I have faith in myself that I'll figure out a way to enjoy it. And that's like, that's fucking awesome. 

DANIELE: That's powerful. 

AUBREY: Because then you apply that to anything that you're afraid of. Oh, I'm afraid of getting sick in this way, or getting cancer, or getting dementia or getting this. But if you believe that, like, all right, whatever hell this is, I'm afraid of this injury or this losing my money, whatever hell this is, I'm gonna find a way to enjoy it. And you can really believe that you're free. You're free. You're free of fear. 

DANIELE: That’s why it’s such a beautiful concept. And it's in so few words, that's like the simplicity. I'm sure we all have read a similar concept expressed in different ways, but it's a little clunkier. It gets very few words and captures it perfectly. And I love that about him. And he had a rough life. He grew up without parents. He grew up in this kind of stern environment. He lived through the beginning of a period that was like a massive civil war in Japan that destroyed the capitol where he was living, had to flee, had to see people dying of starvation in the street. He had to deal with some heavy shit in his life. It wasn't all easy, and he still had that attitude. So, it's easy when you're like, some people are like, okay, you have been lucky from day one. I like it. He's still a good concept, but he's a little easier. The guy lived through some real shit, so he is like, he has dealt with hell, and yet he still got to say it. I'm like, okay, well that you win. That's when you ask. 

AUBREY: He's walked the walk to some degree. 

DANIELE: And I mean, some of it I have to kind of almost take back what I'm saying because some of it, it's impossible for somebody else to judge from the outside because you can look at somebody's life and think like, what do you ever have to complain about? You added great from day one, but you never really know the kind of internal mountains that well. 

AUBREY: It’s like Elon Musk on Joe Rogan. He said, he looks very serious and he says, you wouldn't want to be me. Saying that to the audience, like, you wouldn't want to be me. Like, I know, oh, I'm Elon Musk. I've done all of these things. I'm so rich. I can get divorced twice and give a billion each time. And it's like, no. Like that's how rich I am. It doesn't fucking matter. And people project that on me. They project that on. I'm sure you and everybody, when it's like, oh, well, yeah, it must be nice.

DANIELE: It's like you don't know what anybody is going–

AUBREY: You don't know. And then someone, famous commits suicide, like Robin Williams or Heath Ledger, and they're just like, anomaly.

DANIELE: It’s not.

AUBREY: It's not, it's like it's always a subjective experience, like nobody knows the burden that somebody else is carrying and the demons that they're having to face.

DANIELE: Big time. I think it's easier for people when they recognize something objective that they recognize as hell. Then they're like, oh, you earned it. But the reality is that they may have earned it and you just don't know it. Because you can't tell. That's all. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Because the external is typically easier to face than the internal. Of course there's no absolutes. The internal is always easier–

DANIELE: Sometimes.

AUBREY: Sometimes the external's fucking brutal. 

DANIELE: Being tortured by eyes. This is pretty bad. 

AUBREY: Exactly. But the internal is very challenging. And the external, 'cause we can apply practice that we have, oh, there's this external problem. Let me overcome it. Let me figure this thing out. And in the doing of it. And the clarity of the doing so much of the pain of the internal is the confusion. And the frustration and the self-doubt. Even if you're moving a giant pile of sand with one teaspoon and that's all you get to do. Well, you're making progress and you know what to do and you can endure it in a way because there's clarity and there's just the labor and the pain. But when you don't know what your spoon is and you don't know what the mountain is, but all you know is you're suffocating. And drowning in the sand and you just need to get out. Well that's tough. That's difficult. 

DANIELE: And that's why anxiety sucks. It's like from the outside looking in, he is like, the hell are you so anxious about? There's nothing there that you should be anxious about. And it is like, I know it and I can breathe. That's even worse that you whip yourself. Because it's like I don't even have a reason to feel this way. And it becomes the repression and all the stuff we're talking about. The mind is a strange place.

AUBREY: Yes, it's a beast. And then talking about the mind is such a strange place because there's no, it's boundaryless when you really think about it. Because as we were talking about, we're connected to the field of others, we're reading each other. And our mind is influenced both from a physiological standpoint, potentially by the mirror neuron effect, but also by the heart field that's being projected by the energy, by the neurotransmitters that are happening. Like, so many things are happening in the mind. And then in my own belief system, there's a mind that continues to exist beyond death, but it's slightly different than our current mind. And then is it all not just the one mind of God? As Schrodinger says, the sum total of conscious minds in the universe is one. So it's like, it's so hard to grapple with. There's that saying like, you can walk in fire and tame an elephant and live in ice, but the mastery of the mind is better and more difficult. Yeah. Because it's like all of these alchemical magical things that you can do. Yeah. Impressive. But how about this thing? 

DANIELE: Clap, clap, clap. 

AUBREY: How about this thing right here that you're dealing with.

DANIELE: That's kind of like the Buddhist thing where they say, master, I'm able to teletransport outside of my body. And I'm seeing all these data. He's like, don't worry. Meditate a little more. They're gonna go away. Like, what? I thought it was special. Like– 

AUBREY: Yeah, totally.

DANIELE: That's not the point. 

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. All right, let's go back to the book. Let's see. We're slightly random 'cause I just made little notations. All right. The master who has no mind of her own, the master has no mind of her own. She works with the mind of the people. She is good to people who are good. She is also good to people who aren't good. This is true goodness. She trusts people who are trustworthy. She also trusts people who aren't trustworthy. This is true trust. So this is something that we were talking about as well. And this is kind of getting, again, very mystical understandings, but also really practical in a way.

DANIELE: Let's see, where do I wanna approach it? I think there's a line in niche that say that if you are, if you want to be a sun, you have to shine for everybody. You don't get to choose who you shine for. It's like if you're a sun, you're a sun, you shine. You just give the heat and warmth to everybody you see. And there's something there that is very relatable where it's like, if you wanna be a certain kind of person, you are gonna try to be that person regardless of what feedback somebody else is giving you back. You want to put that out there because it makes you happy, because it's your nature, because it's who you want to be and somebody response well to it. That's great. Somebody's been an asshole to you. I am not doing it for you that way. I am and I'm not. You know what I mean? It's like, it's the nature that I want to express out in the world. Maybe I'm gonna find a different way to try to convey what they refer to as goodness. Maybe I'm gonna find a way that may click better with you, but I'm not gonna give up on that goal. Of course we're what you want, so we got frustrated, right? And he's like, you want to be nice? You wanna be sweet, you want to be helpful? And you get slammed in the face and he's like, oh, that didn't feel good. Let me try another way. You get slammed in the face again sometime, you find a way at the second, third attempt. Sometimes I attempt number seven, you're like, think I'm done with a slap in the face. I think the Punisher is about to come out now. And I get that. And I'm not gonna pretend that I'm in a place where I am above that I'm not. To me, in fact, 

AUBREY: I don't think any human can, I think what this is talking about, this is an ideal. It's an idea that we have to distill in the ways that we can distill it. If we take it as literal then we're missing the point. 

DANIELE: Yeah. Weep yourself, because you'll never live up to it ultimately. It's like you can live up to it a lot, but with limits. And I think there's something powerful in there about the fact that the moment you express a certain quality to even people who may not ‘deserve it’, you may actually tweak something in them. When you start trusting people who are not trustworthy and you show them love and you show them trust, there are cases, not always, but there are cases where that person will suddenly feel motivated to be worthy of that trust. To feel like, oh shit, this person is actually, they believe in me more than nobody else believed in me the way this person is. This person is actually willing to gimme a try, and when I feel, gimme a try again. Oh shit, maybe I should try to live up to that. It feels good. It feels really good to be trusted. That's worth a shot. That's alchemical magic, right? 

AUBREY: It really is. 

DANIELE: And if you are just a judgmental little asshole said, ah, you messed up the one time I gave you a chance, so forget it. You're done forever. It's like, you're right, I get it. But if you have strength, if you can take the people failing in you, in whatever way they failed you and still be able to bring them back to, okay, let's try again, then you have a shot to help somebody live in a dramatic fashion. Again, ultimately you gotta help yourself before you're able to help others. So you can only do it to a point. You can only open your door to people so much if they abuse it. But it's a good goal. It's a good thing to keep. Like, can I open it one more time? Can we do this? 'cause if I can, it's worth it. It’s worth a shot.

AUBREY: Yeah. You have to read the particular situation. I think about an employee that we had on Onnit and he was an incredibly talented programmer. And he was an alcoholic and addict of other sorts. And everybody was like, look, he's drinking at work. He's like, we gotta get him outta here. He is a lost cause. And I was like, alright, maybe, but I'm gonna talk to him and I hear you. Like, all of these are legit, we can't have this. And it was mentioned before and he was still, and I was like, I'm gonna go out to lunch and I'm gonna talk to him. Just heart to heart, man to man. And at the end of that, we'll see. And I was like, I really believed in him. I was like, listen, I know what's going on and I know all of that, but I like, I see what you're capable of and I believe in you. Like I know that there's something more that's waiting to emerge. And it was interesting. It was like there was resistance at first, and then there was like, oh wow, Aubrey's really serious. Like he really believes this, he really sees my good and he trusts me in a way that I haven't felt before. And in that experience, then he came back and he wasn't perfect, but slowly by slowly he started getting better. And like that vision that I held for him became the vision that he adopted. It's like I cleared the way in some way for that thing, which was always a part of him. It was always true. What you see in somebody is always true. But it's just, are they gonna actualize that? But if you focus on the part of them that's negative, well that's gonna reinforce that thing. But if you focus on the good in them that gives them the possibility to move forward and achieve that and become that. And then over the next, he was with us another six years was huge in building our entire infrastructure and brought us not all the way to the end, but pretty damn close along on the path. And it was this beautiful story of that one moment. And there's so many instances like that where you still have to have boundaries. Right?

DANIELE: Of course. 

AUBREY: But even behind the boundary, can you see the good and trust, even though you say I just can't, even in a situation like that, maybe it comes to the point where you just can't work here anymore. But I see you. And I see the good and I know what you're capable of. And I believe that, and I would always in those instances, try to leave someone with that. Even when I had to express the boundary. It wasn't like you're employed here forever, no matter what. Because I'm just gonna see your good and trust you. But it is super, super powerful. And with parenting too, we talked about that as well. Like seeing that in your kids is so important. 

DANIELE: And the parenting one, when the failure of that is really inexcusable because whereas with adults, you have to deal with a ton of baggage from life that they bring. And so you can do some amazing things and maybe you can pull it off and there the place where they are at and your message is exactly what they need at the moment. And it clicks, big transformation. You save their life. Fantastic. But there are times when somebody's carrying so much baggage that you can help, you can help, you can lap. And it's limited how much you can. And sometimes you have to say, okay, that's just how much I have in me in terms of ability to give to you. But with kids. They're your kids. They don't come with a baggage. The baggage they will get is the one you pass on to them. So it's like, if you cannot create a trusting environment where kids, where they trust you, and you don't have to lay down the law and go hard about you don't do this, don't do that. You were telling me before, like in the classic, before I said so. You were saying that's such a terrible sentence. You do it because they trust you. Because they know that you have their back. They know that you are looking out for them. They know that you are not trying to squash their fan, but you're having a discussion with them about, Hey, this is why I think this may be an issue for you. This is why I think this is dangerous. This is why, but let's have a conversation about it. If you convince me that you can do these things in a safe way that you're gonna be happy with and game, let's talk about it. And you build an environment of trust. You never have to worry about all that bullshit. The classic teenager rebellion of like, they have to lie to you to defy your authority. There's nothing to defy. I'm not putting hard lines. I want you to be healthy and happy. Do you disagree with that? I don't think so. So, okay. Let's work with that. 

AUBREY: As you said, it's all strategy from there. Like you agree on the basic premises. And then let's talk about the strategy. And this is something that the Tao talks about all the time. Like it's when you get infatuated with your knowledge, your belief that something, this is a big mistake and we might get to this passage, but if we do, we'll brush over it. But it's a big mistake when you really are sure that you know something when you have epistemological certainty about something. You don't know. We don't know anything. Like we have our own perspective. 'cause we're always chained to our perspective. And our perspective is always limited. So we don't see anything perfectly clear, especially when it's talking about a human dynamic. So if you're not open to listening and potentially changing your mind. You're fucking lost. And so opening that up like, all right, let's talk about it. Let's talk about all of these situations. Let's see if my interpretation is actually better. Or if you have information on the ground that actually makes more sense than me, because I'm thinking about, I have this idea about what this party is gonna be like, but I don't fucking know. So what is it? And is that actually dangerous? Is it something that's truly dangerous? What is it gonna cost? Like there's so many nuances to it, just opening that conversation. And I'm really blessed. That's what my parents did.

DANIELE: And that stuff creates a level of self-confidence in a kid that you cannot duplicate. Because it's like the moment where a kid comes up to you and suddenly you change your mind because something they said where you go like, you know what? I think you're right. I think you are absolutely right. I think I was going with a preconceive notion, or Fuck man. I'm sorry, I messed up that one. You were right and I was off. That does not diminish your authority. That makes you 10 times more trustworthy because you're not a dogmatic little shit. Who's gonna go like, I'm right. No matter what. You are a person who's treating them with respect for another person, and when they are right, they are right. And you're like. A hundred percent. We should have done it your way. Sorry, I insisted on that. I messed up. 

AUBREY: Yeah. And thank you for illuminating my own biases. And like having that on self-reflection, like, wow, I was really biased about that, I was wrong

DANIELE: And the kid at that point, pat themselves on the back of like, man, I'm good. Look at that. And also appreciate your honesty. The fact that, oh, this is not somebody who's trying to squash my fan. This is somebody who's looking out for me with the best tools they have, and they are gonna make mistakes. 

AUBREY: Yeah. I look forward to that adventure myself. Because I like talking about parenting, but I have no kids. It's like, shut the fuck up, Aubrey. What are you talking about parenting for? So I'm like, no, I have kids. See, and now I'm a fucking qualified. 

DANIELE: I think you're gonna enjoy the adventure. For I think based on everything that you are. And I think it's gonna be a good thing. 

AUBREY: Agree. The mark of a moderate man, this is it. The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas. Tolerant like the sky, all pervading like sunlight, firm like a mountain, supple like a tree in the wind. He has no destination in view and makes use of anything. Life happens. To bring his way, makes use of anything life happens to bring his way. So the first part is what we're talking about. Freedom from your own ideas. Because those things can get fixed. It's like they crystallize and even from a neurotransmitter perspective and a neuron perspective, I should say neuron perspective, they'll crystallize in your mind and they'll land. And then the more times you travel your idea, the deeper it gets and the harder it is to change your mind.But when you can be supple in your neuronal pathways, like, that's in full neuroplasticity of ah, I'm just exploring, willing to explore all of these things. And I haven't carved these grooves of my own dogma. Ooh. And you're free. 'cause otherwise you slip into the same preconceived notions the same cognitive biases.

DANIELE: Yeah. The openness to experience. I mean, it's so funny how in so many instances in life, the majority of people have an idea of how things should be and then try to fit reality into that preconceived idea as opposed to saying, I have no ideas. I'm gonna take experience and whatever experience tells me, I'm gonna draw my conclusions from it.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: It's not exactly rocket science. I mean, it seems pretty straightforward, right? It's like you base your conclusion on evidence. I don't make a conclusion and then try to tailor the evidence. It's a basic approach to anything really, but somehow it's rare. Because people get infatuated with certain ideas or maybe that idea work once or maybe twice or maybe three times. And so now it's your salvation to the dangers and the uncertainty of reality. So now I'm gonna apply it every time. Except you also apply it when it doesn't really work. And oh, nobody cannot be, 'cause that's my sacred idea. So it must work. It's the reality that's wrong. So I need to either lie about the evidence or come up with an explanation why it is. But these cannot be wrong. That is like, it's a tool. It's a great hammer. You had a nail, you had to drive something in the wall that was great. Hammered with spaghetti, not so great. It's like a different context, right? It is not saying it's bad, it is just he works in a context and not in another. And I think the openness that they are talking about is that ability to roll with whatever life is feeding you and adapt to it. And so rather than try to filter it through this preconceived idea, you are just going with what's right in front of it.

AUBREY: Yeah. Ideas can very quickly become identity. I mean really what’s all we are. I am Aubrey. That's an idea. Aubrey is an idea, and it's an idea that's been created by me and then reflected to me by everybody else around me. And everybody's trying to reinforce their idea of you, anyways, this is a big teaching from Don Miguel Ruiz. He just recently wrote a book called The Actor, and he is talking about in this book how we're all acting upon this idea, this persona that we're creating. And then we're responding to the audience and we're tailoring our idea of ourselves to our audience. So then within the idea of who we are, we have ideas about other things, which become part of our idea. This is the person that does the thing, the pen that draws the thing or the pen that pokes the hole, whatever. It's an idea with a function and then with a belief system, and it's all entangled together. And then the ego attaches the part of you that says, I am not everything. I am this idea. I am this idea. And then something challenges that idea and you're like, ha, I'm getting attacked. And it's very much like the body tries to defend from physical assault. The ego tries to defend from a changing of an idea, because that's part of its body. And we get fucking lost in this. 

DANIELE: Why do you think most human beings crave identity so badly? Because to me, as you are saying, it seems like it's a trap more than a gift, but clearly must tell. It must hold some strong appeal because people live and die in the name of their identity of creating an identity. They get horrendously attached to certain ideals because they help form an identity. What do you think is the draw? 

AUBREY: So I believe that as we come from source and come from the Tao if you want. But the yes part of the Tao, like that in undifferentiated energy of creation. Then as we birth into polarity and then we create articulation, there's a part of us that needs to resist falling right back into the all. Because that's not the point. The point was to be separate. So the ego is translated as I am from the Latin, right? But really what it's saying is, I am not, and what it's saying is, I am not God, I am not source. I am separate. And that's a part of us. That's a part of what we are. But just because we're part of that third dimension density, we're also a part of the divine as well. So they both need to be tempered. The ego and the soul, or the ego and consciousness, whatever language is very difficult as we've described. But the function of the ego is to clinging, to identity. And when we're an ego driven. Being like an ego-driven entity where it hasn't been checked and it hasn't been brought in balance with the Tao, with source, with God, and the everything or the nothing, then we're out of balance. And so that's what we're seeing is we're seeing, okay, we get the I am not everything part. And it's like we get the yang part, we get the punch and move something with force. We get that, but we don't get the yin part. Just like we get the ego part, but we don't get the soul and the consciousness part because that's not enforced. Everybody's trying to build up their persona and this is what's reinforced. Everybody's trying to use force to move things, so that's what we get used to. And I think it's a deep imbalance from a natural thing that can't be transcended because it's supposed to be there. And supposed to be there in balance.

DANIELE: So I guess the healthiest thing would be to have a flexible identity. Because maybe having no identity is unrealistic. And it's probably not the goal of the game either. But to have an identity that's flexible enough that it can take many shapes and adapt to the circumstances as opposed to having this rich identity that becomes appraiser.

AUBREY: For sure. And wear it like someone would wear a mask. I'm gonna wear this mask today. I'm gonna be this person and I know this, nobody's gonna actually see me and I'm just gonna adopt this thing. Kind of chameleon like a dancer all the way through life. Like really in this flow of flexible identity. And I think it's difficult to do certain things. You'll have natural proclivities and certain things will remain stable, but the more fluid you are, the more fun the game is going to be. And you're not doing it as a deception. You're just allowing yourself to be whatever. And I think that's another teaching from Don Miguel is he's not trying to be his identity. He's allowing himself to, he's just being what he wants to be. And all of his teachers, Don Leonardo, Don Ezekiel, they're being who they want to be. And then they're allowing everybody else to project whatever they want and just smiling at all of the projections. Like, you're this, you're this great thing. You've got the seal of Enlightenment. I can see it in you already. He's like, whatever you wanna say. It's all good. I'll be whatever you want me to be. But I'm just me. And that allows him to be fluid. And of all the people who truly express enlighten that I've ever met, he's the one that to me, comes across that way. And he's the least attached to his own identity. He's the most fluid. 

DANIELE: That's fantastic. Yeah. 

AUBREY: It's an important ideal that I think, and it's something that if we really want the world to change, like bringing that back in balance of saying like, yes, you are you and be you and be whatever you want to be. And this is awesome. But also remember that you're everyone else too. 

DANIELE: And in that regard, isn't this a trip how people seem to, like, so often there's such opposite draw where like, think about how people go through life, where you find something that you like and so you love it 'cause it makes you feel good and now you dedicate more time to it and more time and more time. And again, it's good, there's something fun about it and then it becomes basically all that you are. So that I don't know if it ever happens to you where you have maybe somebody that from a particular experience and you're like, oh, that's a cool person from that experience. And then you kind of dig a little deeper and you realize that that's the only experience. That's who they are about. It's like there's your friend from a psychedelic circle. Everything about their life is about psychedelics. Your friend from martial arts, they talk about nothing but martial arts and you're like time out. Martial arts are fun, but Jesus Christ, man, go out later. It is like there's something else in life. It's like, why do you have to take something that's valuable and beautiful and turn it into this identity that that's all the life will be filtered through. Life speaks so many more languages out there. Learn as many as you can. It's more fun that way. 

AUBREY: Because you've gotten loved for one particular thing more than another thing. So, oh, I did this martial arts of people in my dojo, or the people in my school. They loved me more. They accepted me. I was validated for this. Okay. So I'm a martial artist and this is who I am. But it comes from a deficiency in actually feeling love for yourself no matter who you are. Same with the psych. Oh, I'm loved in this psychedelic ceremony circle. I'm loved when I'm serving medicine or I'm loved when I'm doing this thing. So we mold our identities to be loved. And then we forget that we molded it ourselves. 

DANIELE: Yeah, exactly. 

AUBREY: And then we just become it. Oh, whoops. I mean, I did this because I was seeking love for this. But we don't have that awareness. So all of a sudden this persona that we became, becomes our person. We're fucking in for it. And we're in for it at that point. 

DANIELE: Okay. I guess that's how you wanna live.

AUBREY: It's a prison. And then, I think both of us, I think one of the reasons why we're such great friends is we have such disparate love of different things in life. So we can do so many different things. Like we're gonna finish this podcast and we're gonna practice Kendo in the gym after we're done.

DANIELE: I would like to point out that what started out as practice Ken, though quickly we can translate it, we're gonna hit each other with sticks. And then it became oh by the way, you know that Aubrey's ridiculously competitive and cannot rest until he crashes you and you're crying in a corner. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. That's gonna be fun.

AUBREY: But you also heard that from people who are habitually getting crushed, projecting onto me that I actually enjoy the crushing 

DANIELE: Clearly is a projection. Yes, of course.

AUBREY: I think there's some truth to it. But yeah, I mean, I think that's something that's there. But that doesn't mean that there's not people I play pickleball with. Pretty much all I wanna do is play pickleball with them. Like, that's great, I wanna do that. And there's people who I want to go out to dinner with and have conversations with, and there's people I want to do both. And it's great when there's a conflation of these different things, but that's all good. It's like not everybody has to be. 

DANIELE: Absolutely. In fact, it works. But from the point of view as somebody who is many things, there's no problem being one thing for a while.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: I'm just kind of thinking from the point of somebody that was just one thing is just like, it's not bad. What you're doing is not wrong. It's not evil. But you may find out that there's more fun in life to be at if you expand the range a little bit. That’s all.

AUBREY: Yeah, I agree. 63.

There's just one part of this that I want to bring out of this. The advice confronts the difficult, while it is still easy, this is something that appears a couple times. And I think this is, we have sayings like nip it in the bud. We have all of these different ways to say this, but this is, I think, the best way to say it. Like, it may not even be completely easy, but like, deal with the monster before it becomes a real fucking titan. And again, reminds me of something Jordan Peterson says, where he says like, basically have the damn fight. Have a little fight before it becomes a repression and a resentment and a big thing where you explode, that little thing that's bothering you, like just say it right away. Like, hey, that kind of triggered me a little bit. Or that made me kind of feel a different way and you just deal with it smoothly and calmly before you spin on it and cycle about it. And then think about all the other times and accumulate evidence. And then create this whole like exhibit A through

DANIELE: Yeah, exactly.

AUBREY: A through Z of all the times that you are slightly demeaning in your intonation at this fucking thing. And then it's become this monstrous thing and it turns into a huge fight. But if you just said it right away, like, Hey, it's easy right now. Like I felt something funny.  There's something going on. You feel a certain way. You need to deal with it.

DANIELE: I'm a freak when it comes to that. I do that to the 10th degree. To me it's like if I feel something 1% off, I tend to be like, nope, let's address that. Even if it's minor, as you said, it's like it's minor right now, but a string of minor things doesn't feel so minor anymore.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: So there's I forgot if it's zen or taoism, there's a story that embodies these, that talk about like, this Chinese emperor cool to court, the most famous doctor of the era. And the guy shows up and he's like, well, thank you for the honor. I appreciate it. But to be perfectly honest, and not only, I'm not the best doctor in China, but I'm not even the best doctor in my family. And the answer is like, wait, what? I hear so much about you. And he's like, well, let me explain. I have two siblings and everybody knows me because I show up in crisis time when somebody looks like they are gonna die. And I pull off amazing last minute remedies and so everybody claps and thinks I'm great. But my older brother, he actually catches diseases when they are still small and he fixes them when they're still small. So it's not as impressive to look at because he is like, oh, you'll fix a small thing. He's like, yeah, and it never got to be a big thing. So he's better than me 'cause he's using way less energy to accomplish the same goal. And our other brother is better than both of us because somehow his patients don't get sick. It's a miracle. It doesn't look like it's doing anything. He's just using it preventively. And that's exactly what this is about, is the way you can get the same, you can do the spectacular last minute save, which is from a romanticized standpoint is cool to look at because it's so dramatic. But if I can get the same job without all the drama. Why do we need to get there? And so that skill is to be able to fix it before it's a problem. When it's a small problem, it's talent. Before it's a problem, it's an even greater talent. 

AUBREY: It applies so well to health. Because we all have these little warning signs. It's little things and a lot of times we don't either have the discipline or the will to change. So maybe it's a dietary thing. Maybe we see ourselves starting to put on weight. And we know that, all right, I need to address this. There's some emotional underlying thing that's not being met. I'm trying to enlarge myself to actually feel safe or to feel, have some reprieve from this thing that I'm feeling. Let me tackle that. Let me change my diet. Let me work in the ways that I can. But then at the point that, we celebrate the people who go from massively obese to fit. And you're like, whoa. But what about people who've just stayed fit? 

DANIELE: Yeah, exactlyZ That's fantastic. It's great job. You are almost gone and you made it back. But never get into that place is even better. 

AUBREY: Psychological conditions, physical conditions, can we address them when we get the warnings? Because there's always little warning signs. There's always feedback and communication. If we're really present and we're really listening, we're like, okay, I see this melancholy starting to set in before it's full blown depression. Let me address this. Where's the dissatisfaction? Where's the helplessness coming from? Where have I lost hope? And let me go in, learn more, figure it out, illuminate this, and then solve the situation. That's why a doctor who can see through that whether it's a psychiatrist or whether it's a general MD who can really holistically look and like, all right, I'm seeing some things that are going to lead to bigger problems. Let's address these now, but that's not our medical model. 'cause you don't make a lot of money on that. 

DANIELE: Not at all. 

AUBREY: Keep people healthy. 

DANIELE: Yes. 

AUBREY: And that's a big problem we're in right now. 

DANIELEs That's why the Emperor of China calls you to court if you are the miracle guy. Not if you are the guy who creates conditions so that you never need to go for the miracle. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: One is way less spectacular. But it's way better. And so it's like it is less fleshy. And I think that's why the Tao Te Ching emphasizes the yin. Everybody gets the yang, everybody gets that the miracle worker is fantastic. It's the stuff that you don't see though, that's just as valuable, if not more valuable, but doesn't get recognized because it's made of little tiny adjustments rather than a last minute miracle save.

AUBREY: Actually, that’s the next line that same piece. Accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. Little tiny pieces. 68. The best athlete wants his opponent at his best. The best general enters the mind of his enemy. The best businessman serves the communal good. The best leader follows the will of the people. All of them embody the virtue of non-competition. Not that they don't love to compete, but they do it in the spirit of play. In this they are like children and in harmony with the Tao. So we were just talking about competition. 

DANIELE: I’m glad we read this before the stick walking event.

AUBREY: Ultimately, while I love competition, I thrive in it. There's some release of my mind when I can just be in there. And that's why I love Kendo so much. When you're thinking about something, you're slow. And you have to really clear your mind and really just react and you're present. There's a presence that happens in competition, presence that happens when I play basketball. Presence that happens anytime there's something. But actually when I'm way better than somebody. I'd lose presence, of course. I'm just kind of thinking about this or that. And so today I played basketball. It was awful. I couldn't hit a shot. I lost most of the games because the way that the teams were picked, I was a player that should win games based on me hitting shots, but we weren't. And I was letting my team down and there was a lot of stuff back in a long time ago. I would've been kind of devastated by that. But to me there's kind of an excitement about, oh, all right, well today I got my ass kicked, but now there's gonna be more presence when I practice. Because I'm gonna think about this. And I know they're good enough that if I'm not playing well, they're gonna beat me. And they're gonna talk shit. And they're gonna be right. And I'm gonna have nothing to say back. 'cause that's gonna be less fun. But it's the play, it turns the finite game into the infinite game of, oh, well now basketball just went up in the fun. Now the play is a little bit more interesting to me. 

DANIELE: There’s the excitement to it. It's bad. Because the result is not assured. Yeah, it's a trippy competition. Because it's like, I noticed with Savannah, my girlfriend 'cause she's a professional fighter, but when we roll, it's such a strange game because realistically I've done it longer. So while I'm not a pro fighter, I'm older and all of that, I've done it a lot longer. So she's killed. But if I go a hundred percent, I can probably catch her. But she was actually the easiest person in the world to get along with. Because she's very flexible or relaxed. She does not wanna look bad in front of me, so she does not wanna lose to me. At the same time, if she crashes me, which if I don't pay 101% of attention, she will crash me because she's good, right? So if I give 95% effort, I'm dead. She catches me immediately and I'm done. If she does that too many times, she's gonna be like. You suck. And so there's a weird game where it's like I have to give it my all, but then if I crash her too much, she's gonna be in a bad mood. If I don't give it my all and she crashes me, I'm gonna feel a great 10. She's gonna be looking at me like, oh Jesus. So it's the weird play where, I don't know, I grew up as an only child, so I grew up with a lot of competition, was with myself. Where I'm splitting two different characters. I'm playing both of them. And I clearly won is the real me. And I want him to win. But if I dominate, it's not fun. So I have to make it like me, number two is doing well enough. That is scary. It is like, oh, I may lose. And then miraculously me, number one really is so funny. The stuff we do in our heads.

AUBREY: Competing with your partner is really tricky. Especially with the dynamics. I've done that when Whitney was training to box. And I've boxed a little bit my whole life and obviously I have a huge power advantage. But that's outta the equation. You can't go hard. I would be insane. And also even rolling too. And she's a blue belt and I'm a white belt. I've trained enough, but I have a lot of strength. I could just power through something and get something that taps her out. Like one way or another just squeeze everything. Until something pops. But you can't do that. That's insane. But at the same time, like, if she catches me, there's some way in which I just feel her arousal towards me dropping. Just on a decline. 

DANIELE: A hundred percent. 

AUBREY: So then what do I do? Do I fucking completely, pepper her and like, and I'll watch myself get in these like, it's this weird thing and finally it's like, it's just not fucking worth it. Like the only way to do it is if you're laughing the whole time. Because otherwise, like, God damn, it's a minefield to navigate.

DANIELE: It is. It's bad if you eat, it is bad if you lose. 

AUBREY: It's only in that one, you really have to embody the Tao of like, this is play. This is fucking play. Everybody, like let's understand.

DANIELE: And I do that a lot in rolling with other people as well. We are here to have fun. We are playing, we're having fun. So if I'm crashing somebody, I'm just gonna ways off and it's going to, I want them to catch me at some point. I want them to feel good about it. I want them to do something where I'm like, man, that was great. You did a fantastic job. If they crush me, ideally I can bring it up. So it is not such a crush where at least it's competitive or something. But it's like, to me it's a dance. It's like it's, it is different if you're doing it for a living, if you are a pro fighter. Then well that's, it's a different story. If you are a pro at anything, well then you have to give a 300% all the time. And it's only about getting better so that in competition you can give your best. But if that's not it, I mean, it's laughing giggles at the end of the day. It's like we're having fun and if I'm crashing you, we are probably not gonna want to play with me again. So it's like, maybe I should tweak it a little where it is, there's a bit more of a dance, a give and take.

AUBREY: And in some ways though, some people might get demoralized, but pickle ball's a sport that I've picked up. Because my mom was a professional tennis player. And I've had a whole background of it. And these are just good athletes, but nobody's like, very few people are like, I'm a pro pickleball player, you don't see that that often. They are around. And of course they would crush me. But ultimately, like I have a distinct advantage, but I've become the thing where sometimes on their best day and my worst day, they'll beat me, legitimately. And that to them is like, that's something that's–

DANIELE: Achievement. Yes. 

AUBREY: Fucking awesome. So I always play all out. And it's interesting to watch everybody kind of adapt and like, some people are taking lessons. Like one of my friends, like, I'm taking lessons and they're like, well, what do you want to achieve? I want to beat Aubrey. Like that is the goal of this thing. And what a beautiful thing to have is to have that thing that's like, man, if I get just good enough, I might be able to take one, take a game, take more points. 

DANIELE: That's where you fact, it's different with everybody. Like most people don't like to be crushed, but some people want you to give 101% every time and even beat them every time. It doesn't demoralize them. They are motivated, they like it, they go for it. And in that case, by all means, let's play that. But yeah, you see that with great juujitsu guys. They tend to fall into two schools. There's the guy we are never gonna tap 'cause he's always gonna go a hundred percent and kill you. And there's the guy who can tap you anytime they want and they do. But then they give up an arm and if you do it well, they let you tap them or they let you get close. And that's also another style. And they're both interesting. I can see something cool in both approaches.

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. Ultimately though, always remembering that it's play when you get lost and all of the psychology of it. And I'll watch people too and the interesting thing is we'll play doubles or whatever. You watch somebody and they'll make a bad shot and they'll start beating themself up about it. And I got honestly into that a little bit today where it was like it was bothering me that I was missing my shot. So I started to change things and I got worse and I was like, I would try to reset and get back to it. Because I understand that the moment you start to take it seriously and the moment you're not just playing loose, you're gonna play like shit.

DANIELE: Even worse. Yes.

AUBREY: Yeah. And just reminding like, this is play. This is play. And I've gotten a lot better at that since I've been older. I mean before, back in the day, losing was death. It was death. 

DANIELE: It's a fight to the death. And there's something fun about that too. I've had play games where I literally, blood everywhere. 'cause you die for every lose ball. You do all these crazy things and they're like, there's a beauty to it. Probably not great long term, but there's a beauty to that as well.

AUBREY: To go to the toltech beliefs, it's controlled folly, they call it. Like, you can get lost in this game and play it. Like it's for real. Play it like it's so serious. Because there's some fun in that. There's some joy in the stakes of being, this is so serious, but remember it's folly and you're in control. And at any point you should be able to just be like, get switched to giggles and hugs. At that point. And that's I think the key thing. I think rugby exemplifies that really well. And when you talk about people maybe not at the highest pro level. And even then, like you play rugby and then you go drink beer with both people. And it's brutal. I mean, rugby is brutal. Brutal sport. And then they embody that like, oh yeah, we're here to play, we're all the same in the same field, and we respect each other and no matter what happens in this game, however it goes. However many tries you get, we're drinking beer. At the end of this–

DANIELE: Play hard and then it fun

AUBREY: We're drinking beer. Yes. That's the way to do it. 70. My teachings are older than the world. How can you grasp their meaning? If you want to know me, look inside your heart.

DANIELE: I think that captures that idea that you don't have to be a Taoist to be in touch with the Tao. Where it's like, they're older than the world. They are not about learning what's in the book. They are not about learning a doctrine. They are the DNA of life. So if you can touch that, which you can touch through your own heart, then you can know those teaching. You don't need to know those teachings to know those teachings. They are eternal. They are everywhere. Don't learn them from the book. Learn them from becoming a great basketball player. The Tao is in everything. And you can learn it in all of those things.

AUBREY: It's always a remembering in a way. Because there's this infinite wisdom that we carry and when we get to know something and it's like, oh yeah, oh yeah, this is true. Which is always more of a reminding than a new thing that you've adapted may feel new, but the Tao is within, has been within you always containing all possibilities and all knowledge and all things. So it's really like remembering something that–

DANIELE: Yeah. I don't think anybody can teach you something that, that it, there's not a seed of it in you already. They can shine a spotlight on it. They can help you discover it, that it was always there, but if it's not there, nobody can give it to you. It's not something that you hand to somebody else.

AUBREY: Yep. All right. 72. Getting close to the end here. When they lose their sense of awe, people turn to religion, when they no longer trust themselves, they begin to depend upon authority.

DANIELE: I mean, you see why this guy is an amazing, right? It's just beautiful.

AUBREY: It’s just pearls, like flowing effortlessly out of this cup of wisdom. And I'm skipping through. It's not like this parts of skipping aren't awesome too. 

DANIELE: They are brilliant. 

AUBREY: But we're trying to make it through a lot of these little snippets that I identified.

DANIELE:  But there's a Bob Dylan quote that is perfect Taoism and very much this, that said to live outside the law, you must be honest and that is exactly this. It’s like to a level the rules are for people who are too dumb. To live without rules is like, you need that structure. You need those limitations. You need the laws and the rules. If you don't have that thing inside you that allows you to navigate without even remembering, I should do this, I should. You do it naturally because that's what the situation called for. When you lack that guiding principle, then you need rules. And right now, I said it in a condescending way or you're too damn, too. It's kind of an asshole thing to say, because ultimately if that's what you need, that's what you need and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. And it's like maybe one day you could learn to move beyond the rules, but that's fine. That's a useful tool. But the ideal, the goal of the game is to be able to have no rules and you never have to use them because you never have to have somebody telling you, you shouldn't do it is you wouldn't do it because your understanding of life leads to the fact that you don't have to somebody on your shoulder saying, you really shouldn't rape somebody. It's like, no, it would never even cross my fucking mind. That's just not even, it doesn't come up. And so that is the difference between external authority that he refers to versus an internal guiding principle. And when you develop the internal guiding principle, external authorities are redundant.

AUBREY: Yeah.

DANIELE: Of course. If you don't have it yet, then you need some guidelines to keep you from screwing up too badly. 

AUBREY: We see this out in the world now where the governments are acting like the parent who's like, because I said so. It's like basically treating every sovereign human as such an idiot. That we need more and more rules and more and more regulations and more external authority and more use of force to prevent people from doing the right thing, which actually does the opposite. It is actually counterproductive, but they're not thinking that way, oh, we're doing something good. We're preventing this thing. But they're not, they're robbing people of the choice to actually do the right thing and be moral and really trusting somebody to do that. I run a company called Black Swan Yoga. And we have a full on donation model for all our yoga, people can donate whatever they want and we suggest $10. Like that's for people who want a guideline of what we suggest, some people pay nothing or a dollar, some people pay 20. And it's one of the best yoga businesses of all of the other ones. And there's this principle, and I just had a meeting with the team, but there's this principle of trust. Where it's like, no, we trust you. We trust that we're giving you something awesome. And you're gonna feel that sense of reciprocity. And you're gonna give it back. And it's gonna work. We did that with Onnit with our return policy. We said, if you buy something and you don't like it, you don't need to send anything back. Clip out some fucking coupons, do all this other stuff. Just tell us you don't like it. We'll refund your money. We'll charge it right back on the card. That's all you need to do. And everybody's like, well, what about the person who's gonna buy something really like it, and then they're gonna get it, their money back? Our return rate was lower than anyone in the industry, and it was the most lenient policy. And sure, a couple people took advantage of it, but ultimately people were like, oh, wow, Onnit trusted us. Oh, wow, Black Swan trusts us. Like I love them more. For working in pragmatic ways, in reality with mass numbers of people. And it would work if the governments would really trust people to, and then inform them and teach them. And of course there may be laws at the end if someone's clearly doing fraud. All right, we'll stop them from doing clear fraud. Or if someone's clearly hurting somebody else. You can stop them. And it's not absolute, but the more trust that you can give. Same with our black swan teachers. One of the reasons why the product is so good is we trust our teachers. We don't say you have to go and do every different posture. This is the preset thing. Read the room. See who's there. Get feedback real time. Create your thing. Play the music you wanna play because you know your practice. You know what makes sense? If you wanna play fucking hip hop, right. The whole class. Do that. Like whatever. If you want to go straight ton the whole class, like do that. This is a sweaty yoga class, so ultimately people wanna sweat. So make sure that that's a part of it, but play within the bounds. Color with any color you want. And just make sure you abide by these basic principles. And teachers love it. The classes are massive. We'll get 75 people in a class where the next best in Austin is like 30 maximum. And then they get 30 and they're like, holy shit. Well why? It's just based on trust. It's trust every way through. We trust the teachers. The teachers trust the people that they're gonna pay. Because they get paid based upon the students. That pay, the thing, they get a percentage of that. So it's just trust all the way around and it fucking works. It works. And it would work at scale too. Like people aren't horrendous hume like idiots. Where they're all nasty, brutish and short with each other. Like, like the natural human nature. And like he said about life, he wasn't saying that about people, but it's this idea that people are bastards. And like you have to control them. Otherwise their bastard tendencies will just run rampant. 

DANIELE: Yeah. Not really. That's when speaking about Taoism and the pragmatic impact of all this stuff, that's Taoism right there. It's like many people involved with Blackstone Yoga, they may have never heard of Taoism, but they are practicing and they are experiencing it and they are responding to it. Because it's a principle that it's exactly what we're talking about. And I love when you see it working. Like I find it moving when I see it working. Where you are kind of giving something on trust and people reciprocate. It's like one of the most beautiful things you can ever witness.

AUBREY: It gives you faith in the world in a way. And it opens the possibility of like, oh, people are awesome. 

DANIELE: Granted, I cry at everything. I can watch a Steven Segal movie and find that movie and cry. So I literally cry, like if you drop a coin, I'll cry. But that stuff, oh man. I never resist. Like when I see things that I find where somebody does something beautiful and somebody responds to it and it works out, I always find it like the most moving thing in the world. Where I'm just like, ah, there is some goodness. There is a beauty there. Ah, I feel so good. 

AUBREY: Yeah. I'm with you. And I pray that more people, and more of these structures and organizations can kind of really open themselves to the Tao, to this understanding of the laws that are older than laws. And the law of reciprocity is one of those laws. This is what Don Howard, my spiritual mentor, would teach me. The law of reciprocity is, it's within the Tao, it's contained within this natural sense of you give something, there's going to be a natural response. And someone might intentionally subvert that, or they might be off from it, but it's still gonna draw them. It's still pulling, it's still acting on them. And so their own guilt will then create their own reciprocity to the self. It'll create all of these. If you deny it, it's gonna just compound in weird, strange, repressed ways that are gonna come back the other way. And it's really just trusting, like, oh, reciprocity is a law that's older than laws. And let's trust that. 

DANIELE: I love that. That stuff is beautiful. 

AUBREY: Yeah, man. It's really important. And I think we've really seen how the zeitgeist is moving in a different direction. And then how there's this huge response and it's just like, no, fuck you guys. And this is now creating this massive conflict, but hopefully the conflict resolves itself. And just like some deeper understanding. 

DANIELE: Yeah. Even when you think about like, what's been happening lately with Covid, a bunch of people working from home realizing that they could get the work done from home for many jobs, not all of them. And to me, if you are the boss at the place, in most scenarios, it's like, look, you wanna go to the beach and then go with your kids all day? I need this done by the end of the week. When you do it, I don't give a fuck. It's like, go to the beach, hang out with your kids all day. You stay up till 3:00 AM to make up for that later, and you get it done by the end of the week. Great. You don't want to come in the office that much. You wanna work for a moment, you still get stuff done. Great. Good for you. If you don't get stuff done, great. Now we need a conversation. It's because at the end of the day, that's what counts. But what makes you happier? What would feel better about doing your job? Or do you need more time off? Do you wanna spend more time with your family? You can take all the time you want, as long as the stuff that I need you to do gets done. That's it. Then if somebody does that to you, you wanna give them your best. 

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. 

DANIELE: Like if you are at work eight hours a day and really six hours you're watching Facebook, I guess I have to put in the time, or they don't catch me. I'm like, oh man, I want to give you my best because you're helping me. You want to be cool to me. I wanna be cool back. 

AUBREY: Yeah, and it's interesting is, that was our vacation policy as well. You take as much vacation time as you want. You have a job to do. You need to do the job. And if you're not doing the job, there's an issue with how much you believe in the mission. And how much you actually believe in what we're doing. And how much you care about all of us in this organization. And then there's a fundamental misalignment that we need to expose anyways. So like if you want to take, seven months out of the year and fuck off, well, there's a fundamental misalignment that will be revealed. But instead of the hidden misalignments that are masked in compliance with some policy, it's like, no, whatever you want. Make sure your team's okay. Make sure your work's getting done, but take whatever you need. And that's also just trusting this thing. And then that caused people to love this company. It was like, oh fuck, I love it here. They're trusting me. They're practicing what they preach. And this is something special.

DANIELE: In fact, that is in some way that do, is written as a manual for leaders to some degree. 

AUBREY: Sure. 

DANIELE: It is given to people in position of leadership for how they can help out other people and run something in a better way. And yeah, whether you're talking about a business, a family, or anything else, it's right there. 

AUBREY: 74. If you realize that all things change, there is nothing that you will try to hold onto. If you aren't afraid of dying. There's nothing you can't achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place. When you handle the Master Carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand. 

DANIELE: So let's keep to 75 because I'm not too good at this. Man, that's one that I struggled with. I'm such a control freak. It's not even funny. So while I understand that it's right, it really flies against every fiber of my being in so many ways.

AUBREY: It's getting to this very strange thing. Joe Dispenza talks about, especially the last part, I think it, obviously there's some self-evident parts. If you aren't afraid of dying, there's nothing you can't achieve. Obviously that fear of death is any fear that is the limitation on your ability to move forward. When you realize that all things change, there's nothing that you will try to hold onto. This is a lesson about attachment, right? Like time is undefeated. It will rip everything from your grasp that you hold onto. It's not possible to be unattached to anything. But it's that recognition is like, okay, everything is flowing, everything is moving. Let’s cling to nothing. So let's just be here presently. And it goes, again, to more into zen. Like, let's be here in the present. Be here now as Ram Dass said. And because everything's changing anyway. So what we have now. Is it? And that's the victory is in the moment. Not in some future moment. Because the future moment is just another moment. And that can either be a victory or not. It doesn't matter what happens, like the external doesn't create the success.

DANIELE: Oh yeah. Don't get me wrong. I've written some great stuff on the topic. Practicing them though is different, it’s a hard one.

AUBREY: It's hard. Me too, man. I mean, I think one of the great fears that I realized was that some part of me was holding myself back from loving life to the most. Because I knew I had to let it go. And it's much easier to let something go if it's not that awesome. If I didn’t love life that much, I found this out in the darkness. If I don't love life that much, well when I die and have to let it go, or my mom dies or something like that. It's not that big a deal. So what? But if I really recognize how much I love my mom then I really have to like, I really acknowledge that then I have to really deal with that attachment that I have. So it's not that I grasp this either, but the concepts are clear. Where the concepts get really, I think, particularly interesting is a second part of this, trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place. When you handle the master carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand. Because this is complicated. And Joe Dispenza talks about this balance between intention and surrender. You kind of need to try to control the future. This is him. I think Lou Tzu is such a purist. Like such a purist in the Tao. Like just allowing things to be, but almost because of the way the words are. And I bet in the conversation the words might be different. But like ultimately there has to be, not has to be, but there's likely some intention. Because he's talking about lots of things that require intentions. So there's intention, but then there's surrender. It's the yin and the yang. Here's my intention, here's my surrender and they're locked in this beautiful dance. And where you are is somewhere on that boundary line in between your intention of trying to create the future and pulling the future that you want to you. And then letting go and letting the future be what it is intended to be. 

DANIELE: Yeah. Which is I think your read on it is the correct one because it would be easy to apply dogmatically and say no attachment or no planning anything. And it's like, that's not really what he's saying.

It's not that one sided as is exactly where you're going with each, which is like it’s kind of like a way. It's not known action. It's as little action as necessary to get the job done. Is attachment inevitable and even desirable to some degree to enjoy life, but clearly more than a certain amount is just gonna make you miserable.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DANIELE: Planning, good. Effort, good. But expecting that everything is gonna work according to plan and that you can control it all. Yeah. Good luck with that. 

AUBREY: That's not the way of it. All right. The last one that I wanted to highlight is number 76. Men are born soft and supple. Dead. They're stiff and hard. Plants are born, tender and compliant dead. They're brittle and dry. Thus, whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. 

DANIELE: I love that so much. That's just a beautiful one. Speaking of that ability for who will be flexible, I get it primarily metaphorically, but not only. There's something great about that, especially, in a culture where we value so much strength. Even think of it physically. Strength, physically just big, strong muscle move. Big weights that's great, is wonderful. But if he doesn't go hand in hand with some flexibility, you are like, the stereotype of the bodybuilder was like, yeah, you look yoed, but you can't scratch your back. You got a problem there. And so the idea ultimately is about our life. That ability to adapt is probably the greatest ability that we can have. Because you don't run from reality, you respond to reality. Reality is happening outside of whether you want things a certain way or not. And in order to adapt to what you need, flexibility. You can't adapt if you have only one way to respond to something. It’s gonna work some of the time and it's not gonna work a lot of the time. And so that ability to kind of flow with it, it's the same thing we're saying about conversation. You're gonna tweak your language and your conversation and your energy depending on who's in front of you. A book cannot do that. Hence wide the Tao can be explained is not the eternal one. The eternal one is the adaptable one. It's the flexible one. It's the one that you get through living–

AUBREY: It’s the living one. It's the living word. 

DANIELE: Precisely. The written one, there are some limitations there.

AUBREY: I was meditating on the nature of writing like a religious text. And understanding that words that are written down, especially like, a bible or any of these words that are written down, and as these articles of faith, they're dead, they're stiff. You can't make modifications. There's no one with the authority to modify. The Bible, they can interpret it in a billion ways. So the interpretations can change. So I guess in that way it's modifiable. But ultimately, like anything that is really a faith that I wanna be involved, it has to be alive. It has to be moving and flexible ideas have to be alive. If you're in accord with life and you're not a disciple of death, then you move. And you adapt and you adjust and you get feedback, and you don't double down on your thing that you thought was right. And say like, let me plant my heels and entrench myself here, even though I know I'm wrong. Because I'm too afraid to be wrong. You're supple. You're not holding on anything. You're just like that judoka we mentioned. Just kind of dancing through all the moves and all the force and that's, I think, a great idea of what I'm trying to learn from this. I'm trying to learn, like, how do I be supple? How do I unclench that clenching thing in my heart? How do I let my jaw, instead of holding it tight and trying to grit my way to creating something that I think is favorable or I think will get me love from the world, which is some projection of the love that I got from the attention of my parents and coaches and other people. Like, let me try to soften a little bit. And listen to what the world wants from me. And then in response to what the world is asking, what I want for myself, what I truly want. Let me just dance with it a little bit more. 

DANIELE: That's the way there's a thing that I would experience when doing standing meditation where you're kind of going to dispose, sort of hugging the tree type of feeling. When you do that, you think you're relaxed and suddenly you realize 10 minutes in everything is burning. And you're like, why? And then you go, oh. I was holding way too much tension. Like I can hold the same frame with half the energy. And I'm like, oh. So that's what I do. Probably in 10,000 situations in daily life, both physically. And in other ways. And more metaphorically. And I'm like, oh, okay. And it's fascinating because even in situations where you think you are, well, I'm being relaxed, it's cool. Sometimes digging, taking the third look you get to see, okay, okay. You can do the same thing as you say unclench a little more than true. Let it flow a little more. You don't have to hold on so tight. A very hard lesson for people who are wired the way you are wired or the way I'm wired. Because I'm used to catching shit done because I put my wheel power. It's gonna be this corn and the barbarian Titanic effort off the wheel and I'm gonna make it happen and try off and claim the prize. And then you realize way too much hand.

AUBREY: Yeah. You do it like the rock did and Hobbes and Shaw where he had a chain around a helicopter, and with one hand he grabbed the chain and he drove the helicopter into the ground, which was one of my favorite seats. What did you just show? It's not real.

DANIELE: No. Oh. Don't tell me that.

AUBREY: You can't slam a helicopter into the ground with your brute straight. 

DANIELE: No, I wanna believe it. 

AUBREY: Oh man. Well, I think that's why both of us are attracted to this Ancient wisdom. We both know it's true. And we both have our challenges in living it and living the way and we'll find our harmony  with what our natural nature is. And I think that harmony will change as we get less force available to us. We'll use less force, but if we can get ahead of it a little bit, we'll burn ourselves out a little bit slower. 

DANIELE: Yep. Which is as much as you can ask of anybody. The course is corrected a little. That's a win. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Amen. Daniele, what are some of your favorite shows on history on fire, and where can people find it? 

DANIELE: Ikkyu Sojun. I did two episodes about Ikkyu’s life, 40 something. So there's a couple. So History on Fire, you can find it a couple of different ways if you want. All of the episodes are out on Luminary. That's behind the paywall grant. It is a small play wall. I think it's like five bucks a month or something like that, but that's kind of where everything is. They have also been nice enough to leave a lot of episodes, like 50 or so outside of a paywall so you can find it on like Apple Podcasts or other things. So, I was happy that they chose that because I don't like the idea of people paying for something when they don't know what they are getting. So I'm like, if you listen to a bunch of episodes that you like, eh, probably is not gonna kill you to throw five bucks a month to listen to more. But if you just turn and test it out or listen to a few here and there Apple Podcasts, check out a few and see if it's something that hit the spot for you. But yeah, the ones about Ikkyu, I had a blast. I just released a couple of free months about Bruce Lee. I had a great time with those. I did a bunch about Lakota culture. Historically speaking, that's probably the one thing that there are many topics I enjoy, but rarely I get to enjoy something as much as Lakota history. So I did a whole series on Crazy Horse, another one about Sitting Bull, another one about the war for the Black Hills leading to the battle of the little Big iron. I just come alive when I thought about that stuff. So, but generally speaking, since they are all topics that I pick, because I think there's something that kind of turns me on when I do the research where I'm like, man, this is lighting stuff up inside me. I'm excited to learn more about it. It’s usually stuff I like in some cases, like the Ikkyu stuff. I like it even more than others.

AUBREY: Beautiful. Well, I know people will check it out. Daniele, my brother, was an honor. Thank you so much for coming, 

DANIELE: Thank you so much for having me. 

AUBREY: It's great to hang. We'll let people know how the kendo goes. Peace everybody. Much love.