Awakening Now

What Is Awakening and What Happens After With Ryan Burton

• Ilona Ciunaite / Ryan Burton • Episode 67

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What is awakening? If this question is alive in you, listen to my conversation with Ryan Burton. This is a deep dive. Ryan Burton, an awakening guide and meditation teacher, explains that awakening involves dissolving the self and dualistic perceptions, and is a cessation of the old way of seeing life. 

I loved talking to Ryan as he was expressing from a place of wisdom with light humour, it made the conversation fresh. 

We explored the nature of awakening, describing it as a shift from living in craving and dissatisfaction to experiencing profound peace and contentment. 


Ryan shared his experiences with meditation retreats, describing moments of stillness and profound peace as foundational to his spiritual path. This path often involves personal suffering, which, in Burton’s case, included losing his father, leading him to deeper spiritual exploration. 

Awakening, while offering bliss and clarity, also brings challenges as one's previous life attachments and mental patterns resurface, requiring release and acceptance. This intense transformation can feel like a "dark night" or detox of the mind, body, and spirit. A lot is happening after the shift!

We discuss the illusion of separateness and how deeply entrenched beliefs shape one’s experience of self and the world, with awakening providing an escape from such dualistic tendencies. Awakening is described as a realization that all aspects of life—the pleasant and the challenging—are simply manifestations of consciousness.

Additionally, the conversation touches on meditation's role in seeing things as they are, unclouded by preconceived beliefs, and the importance of allowing experiences to unfold without needing outcomes. 

More about Ryan on his website 
Http://afterawakening.com


If you want to work with me, send me an email through my website which is 
http://www.IlonaCiunaite.com 

If you need assistance with your inquiry, come to Liberation Unleashed, where you can register for a free account and receive a volunteer guide free of charge. 
Liberation Unleashed
Http://www.liberationunleashed.com

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Liberation Unleashed book on Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/Liberation-Unleashed-Breaking-Illusion-Separate/

#awakeningnow #ilonaciunaite #howtodoselfinquiry #selfinquiryquestions #liberationunleashed #seeingthroughselfillusion

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Podcast 
https://awakeningnow.buzzsprout.com

Music by Valdi Sabev, Visit his channel for more calm and relaxed music 
https://www.youtube.com/c/ValdiSabev/featured

Websites
http://ilonaciunaite.com
http://liberationunleashed.com

hello Ryan hello Ilona how you doing um very well and you good good this a cool morning in uh Los Angeles so yeah I'm in a warm evening of

Mauritius like on the opposite side

okay well today I'm speaking with Ryan Burton and he's Awakening and meditation teacher I think I think that uh that captures it yeah meditation teacher is that's pretty much all I do so yeah well you have a website it's called after Awakening so do you work more with people who kind of had the shift already and they are settling in and integrating or either both both but it seems to be the case that um a good portion of my my students have already undergone um a shift to some degree so unfortunately a lot of of what I teach um apparently it's incomprehensible to uh beginners so I do try

to I always teach the basics of course of meditation but definitely the majority of my of my writings and my content and my my talks are um post nonduality or or talking about that whole territory oh wonderful great well the show is called Awakening now so it's really before during and after everything is included right it can only be now right so perhaps our conversation will be useful for people who are before during and especially after the shift so before we start and get into it can you tell me your definition of Awakening what is

that yeah I would say Awakening is the gradual or instantaneous cessation of identity and cessation of Duality I think Awakening in general is just cessation uh the falling away the cessation of of greed of of hatred of of duality of clinging of

attachment of concern of holding on and really the in a way birth of all the wholesome qualities of path and um you know what Buddhism calls the enlightenment factors and those are all qualities that's true equanimity mindfulness happiness these are all things that uh that arise and pass but they also generally come to really characterize the life of of a person who's either undergoing this shift or who this has already happened to and it's been quite some time after the fact

so with Awakening there's uh there's so many different ways to Define it right right there are so many different Awakenings too yeah and there's many different Awakenings that's right Enlightenment Enlightenment is not a one-dimensional thing it's very much like a gem or like a diamond it has so many faces and aspects but to characterize specifically the kind of Awakening you and I are talking about as opposed to the term Spiritual Awakening in general Spiritual Awakening in general is I used to be a material person I used to be concerned with material things and then uh experience or an Insight or something happens and the orientation on life shifts from being this outward uh this outward Journey really to an inward journey into into oneself and into a deeper understanding of uh of what we

are but with Awakening there's this in this context there's this specific aspect there's the specific aspects of the loss of identification the loss of um dualistic per ception uh the loss of a sense of a doer for example and those are not necessarily related to the term Spiritual Awakening in general right just means you become a spiritual person right but this but this is about the end of personhood you know so this is quite different yes this is completely different it's coming back to sanity out of insanity that's not spiritual it's kind of coming back to reality see things as thy are yeah how how else would you define it actually this a very good question um my short version would be a fundamental shift in how we perceive ourselves life and everything yeah fundamental shift which reveals that what I thought I was doesn't exist the way I thought it existed

and the word Awakening is a bad word actually if

keep going if to keep going because what we are is not

asleep well that shift happens is very very um perceivable and the life changes completely not the events change in that in that way but the way life is being seen

yeah absolutely I would say I would say one of the main characteristics is that it's

a when that when that moment of of Awakening dawns right uh it's funny because people many some people from the Western materialist worldview they're like or even skeptical people who are skeptical of all this stuff they're like how do you know it was just like not in your mind or something that you fabricated and I was like if this could be fabricated I think it would be the ultimate fabrication of my life for sure if this could be constructed or engineered or Faked I that that I mean uh it would it would receive the ultimate reward for uh for that being the case but this is really Awakening is such a visceral and undeniable shift I mean people's entire lives can change For Better or For Worse as a result of it I mean we all we hear very often with relationships um if two people they start a relationship in a particular mode like the non-awakened mode and then one of them undergoes this process and the other doesn't it causes huge huge problems because now one person is a is in a completely different in a completely different phase in a completely different way of looking at life and the other person in the relationship feels after some time like you're not even the person I married anymore you've changed so rapidly as a result of this uh for for most I'd say for a lot of people it's not that they're um their preferences change right it seems that if you like Indian food or if you like um feel like Mexican food that's probably going to be the same after the fact but how the person interacts with and how they relate to the world is is completely different you know before Awakening you really have the sense that things are outside of you you really have the sense that there's such thing there's such a thing as other people and ex and the external world and after the

Awakening that that sense vanishes I mean you can still have you can still have your distractions and have periods where you slip up or you have a reaction or or what or whatever but the fundamental view of how you relate to this and what this is is completely changed yeah I mean when you feel that for example like all beings are within your heart I mean that's just that's just not normal way to go through life you

know so so how did that shift happen in your experience what happened it's interesting

for me I had a

pretty I guess I would say standard or or normal um upbringing I grew up in the early 90s in Southern California and yeah my mom is Tai and Buddhist and uh dad's a white guy ancestry goes back to Britain and and Switzerland and he grew up in Iowa and they met in a hospital uh in the early in the late 80s in Los Angeles uh they both had they were both working there and so I had I had that that uh mixed race experience growing up so that was that was unique and um being at Thai being at Thai summer camp school there's a temple in North Hollywood and that's a city here in uh in in LA uh I would be sent there for the Summers to learn Thai and uh every morning we'd uh you know say the Thai national anthem and then they'd send us into the temple to meditate for a few minutes um they didn't teach us anything about Buddhism or anything about meditation but there was a Buddhist statue and there were monks and nuns so I had some exposure to it um but my sister and I we were the only uh uh not full Asian kids in that school so the bullying was uh extremely severe so I think it it that was uh suffering is generally what what leads people to to the path I mean if if you don't have some form of discontent there's really no reason to seek any of this so so I think I had that um pretty young and and then as I got older I I realized that my dad had uh drug problems and those those drug problems eventually took his life um when I was 19 oh man I'm sorry yeah yeah thank you

um so I think you know the pain of seeing him Decay and uh the pain of losing him as well it it really made me just extremely interested in uh a different approach to to life when I was 18 I did my first uh Vipassana Retreat um it was it was suggested uh at the time because I was I was becoming interested in meditation and I had these roots with Buddhism and it was like this return to that even though I you know forgotten it for so long and yeah I did my first Vipassana retreat in the goenka tradition immediately as soon as I turned 18 I signed up for it and uh I turned 18 I turned my birthday's at the end of October and this retreat was in December at the beginning so literally within a month and uh yeah it was a very difficult Retreat it's a very very difficult retreat but I

remember about around the fifth day or something it it started to get easy and I was able to to manage the pain and the The Retreat wasn't wasn't as uh as much as much uh unendurable suffering as it had been after that point

and it's not that I actually didn't experience anything profound in the meditation like in the actual um in the actual practice sessions like yeah there are these Body Sensations and strange energetics and stuff like that but nothing particularly um nothing particularly unique but after the retreat was over uh it was on the 10th day you break they allow you to talk and now you haven't talked in 10 days and now everyone's talking I'm telling you if you ever want to see true happiness see a group of people that haven't talked for 10 days and now they're talking like oh wow yeah they just it's very it's a very Divine experience everyone's so happy everyone's so happy to be able to talk and I remember um I just left the dining hall where everyone was chatting and and it was snowing outside and I just walked uh walk into the snow through the trees and and for the first time in my life my my mind stopped my mind stopped and everything was still moving the trees were were were were responding to the gentle breeze and the the snowflakes were still falling everything was still moving but at the same time nothing was moving it was this total this cutting Stillness and this feeling of of peace I I never knew peace in my life right I I had no idea I had no idea that peace even existed and my heart just cracked open

and yeah I just felt this overwhelming overwhelming peace and and contentedness and I thought

wow you know if I if I died after this it would have all been worth it 18 18 years was worth just this this is this is exquisite this is Sublime so that's all it took I mean it just took those just took that five minutes of Timeless peace may have been a little longer I'm not sure but that was really my um that was really my

initial I guess you could say opening it wasn't it wasn't the non-dual opening or or Awakening but it gave me it gave me a an experience and this really the sense of peace and beauty that made me want to pursue it further so I did no now we call it a glimpse right yeah yeah we call it a glimpse that's right yeah so I think a year after that or within a within a year yeah within a year um my temple uh Dhammakaya Temple they have many Branch
Centers all over the world they're they're a temple in Thailand uh and I had been going there to to practice meditation uh they opened this meditation coach training program uh back then in in 2012 and yeah and everyone at the temple was like hey you should really go do it it's it's three months and at the time I was just in community college so I I decided to um to take a semester off and and go and that was a 90day retreat and it was um the most brutal difficult experience of my life I think I think uh Retreats of durations that are that long um really it takes a mature practitioner to make the best of it so yeah anyone who's really young of course I'd say if you can if you can handle it go ahead but if you're really still if your mind's still doing a lot of clinging and a lot of holding on and and attempting to control um a concentrated environment like that can be very very difficult for a person so for me it was tough yeah but oh you went through it yeah yeah yeah it's like this is the thing this the good thing about uh conditions like that you make so many mistakes so fast that instead of taking three years to make all those mistakes you make them in three months oh good so you learn you learn three years worth of experience yeah possibly my skull is very thick you know so I would I didn't understand so I think for me it would have taken three years to get through that nonsense probably would have taken three years to realize you know uh using Force using force in meditation is not is not helpful and it can be damaging so yeah so I had to I had to learn that the hard way but that's that's that's the majority of my background um instead of going to college like most of my friends you know with my father having passed away I I had to be present for my family and uh my mother and everything so yeah but fortunately it it

um grief like that and losing someone that uh that you love like that it it's so it's so profound that really a lot a lot can fall away so we often think that Awakening is practicing meditation and studying and listening to Dharma talks and interviews and things like that but Awakening is uh if you allow it it's just life and things that happen in the conditions that you face and challenges that you're dealing with they're all a part of that process it's very normal that when a person under goes a big shift their whole life blows up why is that you know so yeah why is that the the re the reason that things get difficult after a big shift is because your non Duality has to be tempered right your state has to be refined and tested and the way to do that is for challenges to arise

so with uh were you going to say something I say I wanted to say if somebody is listening who is looking for awakening thinking that oh my God once I awaken everything is going to be easy peasy Rosy happy all the time so this is this is something to rewind and listen again yeah yeah exactly they and of course there's there there is a a great deal of bliss and and peace and happiness that opens up and so much more meaningfulness can ultimately become the case uh for a person I mean you you really do get get liberated from a lot of your from a lot of your

nonsense but that doesn't change the fact that uh after summer fall comes and after fall winter comes and after winter spring comes you still have the seasons of life you know the people that you love and care about are still going to get sick and old and pass away and you'll still have the difficulties it's just that you don't see those difficulties and conditions as outside of you anymore and in the and in the deeper stages of of Awakening it's possible that there's that there is so much abandon there's so much release and and letting go that even very very difficult things don't touch you the same way that they used to or they don't they don't make you suffer nearly as much or for nearly as long you know that that is the case uh but generally and especially up until that point even after the initial Awakening there's usually a trial period it's like it's like it happens and it opens up and now it's in this uh incubation phase and people describe that as like a dark night or they're in some kind of an abyss what has happened is that with the Awakening it's like you can imagine this massive Descent of light coming down into your system into your body and and into your energy and that is pushing out now all of these stagnant discordant stuck energies and mental formations in the system so it all comes to the surface so it's a massive detox right yeah it's a massive detox that's right it's just it's a spiritual mental emotional physical for a lot of people this process is even physical right true actually causes physical changes so and depending on the person of of a particular dimension of experience or dimension of life will be emphasized but it's very standard you know if you're going through an Awakening and your whole life is falling apart I don't want you to think that this is unique you know that like uh as if as if hundreds of thousands of people have not gone through this before or you know we look at the the vastest of the cosmos could be millions or infinite number of beings that have undergone a similar process in the past present and future so when you undergo The Awakening you've really entered this path and this territory has its own rules like it's not it's not apart from life at all it's not separate from life at all but it it has its own rules it has it has its own language you know the is there a way back you know maybe maybe I just haven't heard of it uh maybe uh dementia you know dementia may be a way back completely it ever happened it's really one way flip yeah exactly and sometimes you may hear that it's not what you want you know yeah well that's the lesson it's not about what you [Laughter] want that's the that IS the lesson so you know so many people going through this are like I didn't choose this you know I didn't want this yeah literally it's not what you want yeah it's one way ticket to some interesting ride yeah yeah it's it's all

this part of this process of surrendering and and letting go and the thinning of this the sense of self and you know for me as part of my uh Awakening and my journey and capacities I found that Consciousness is is multi-dimensional you don't only exist in one place in space and time or one level or layer in space and time so in the physical Dimension you have the sense that I didn't choose this I didn't want this what the hell is going on let me out here yeah exactly but what you find or at least what I found is that there is this uh guiding nature as an aspect of yourself that's outside time and uh some people call that the higher nature or the higher self and it's it's distinguished distinguishable from um just the awakeness or just the emptiness nature of of phenomena right uh it's particularly this aspect of oneself that is guiding this process would would you call it like Spirit guides or Angels or some I actually call it higher self higher self actually call it that yeah okay um it's just not this you know permanent immutable Essence uh so doesn't violate that self-term thing in Buddhism but there really is um I see that I see the mind as an onion or as an onion and this physical layer is the outer layer of the onion and if you go down a layer quote down a layer uh you get the dreaming body or the astral body and uh down another one you have the the mental body and and the causal body so you have these sheets of of Consciousness that are attributed with uh a particular experiencing apparatus the one in this layer is this physical body right but in uh in dreams it's a non-physical body so a few layers in there's this uh aspect of you that is outside of time as we experience it here and this is the voice of guidance so a lot of people at some point in their Journey they'll start to have this sense that um something is really leading them along something is facilitating this this process and that may communicate with them in dreams it may communicate with them in certain experiences you could also call it intuition right that's that's a general term for it but one of the questions that I had at some point in my Awakening was what is this thing because for me it was very specific like it wasn't just a general uh we're here to support you you know like I was having dreams and I called them the uh simulation dreams so interesting tell me yeah yeah the first one that really stuck out and this didn't this this this took a while I think this didn't happen till probably two years after my initial Awakening and so that would have been 10 years after I began meditation so 10 years after I began practicing I started having these very unique dreams and one of them was in a parking garage and and I'm seeing a little demon and uh little little demon guy like 10 feet in front of me and he runs at me and I try to send him loving kindness and he just rips my throat out and then the dream rewinds and he's standing in front of me again and he runs at me again and this time I try to uh fight him like physically fight him I lose I get defeated and uh and the dream rewinds again and now so it's the third round and the interesting thing about this phenomena was that I didn't know that the dream was being rewinded every single time this thing was running at me it was like it was the first time it was running at me oh wow so now it's running at me and then for some reason I just decide to open my mouth like very large and I just eat the guy just swallow I just swallow him and when I eat this demon the whole parking garage gets illuminated I become 100% Lucid fully aware now I remember that the dream was just rewinded three times this uh at the hospital at hospitals they have these uh diagnostic
screens that that stand on a kind of uh rolling platform or rolling base so one of those appeared a screen and the screen spoke to me and it said said something along the lines of the voice of childhood that voice that so many of us heard as kids that that told us that we could do great and incredible things and that we could change the world and and change ourselves that voice of Hope is never lost it is only obscured and drowned by the voices of the world we just forget who we are what we are and what we're supposed to do because we let other people influence us too much something along those lines you know it was a long it was a while ago so and then I woke up and what was interesting was like when I heard this voice it really did remind me of that voice that inner voice of Hope in in childhood that can really just get wiped out by uh the traumas and and the difficulties of growing up and um so the first thought I had was what was pressing the rewind button cuz certainly wasn't my conscious mind that was causing this effect so what what was causing that effect and a lot of people talk about guidance a lot of people talk about this this inner voice and they communicate with that it's often described in channeling and a lot of spiritual work is about contact with this voice but my question was where is The Voice coming from what is it right what is it I want to know what it is and that led to that was a very deep inquiry that that led into these deeper layers or deeper planes of Consciousness so and what I ultimately discovered was that there is this formless higher self a cosmic layer or a cosmic Consciousness that is uh guiding not only this particular Incarnation but hundreds of thousands of incarnations it's like it's playing hundreds of thousands of simulations simultaneously so when a person has a deep like they have that specific uh Awakening where they have all of their past lives recalled that's because at this particular layer that information is that that level of you is experiencing all of those lives simultaneously so wow sounds intense I don't remember any past lives not yet oh yeah yeah it's it's uh nonduality generally is about the nature of experience right in Buddhism they say all experience all phenomena are empty in Vedanta in Vedanta they say all phenomena are within the heart of the self and that those General absolute view maxims are are the case um in my in my Awakening but there was this added dimension of uh of experiencing the various layers of Consciousness so in this physical layer the mind is appearing as this room uh mind is appearing as this conversation you and I are having but a few hours ago the Mind presence was appearing as the dream that I was having and uh before that it was appear it was appearing as a conversation I was having you know outside with my friend before I slept so whatever appears whatever is being experienced the mind is appearing as that presence is appearing as that and that is the exact same case with all of these layers of Consciousness or these strange supernormal experiences if you step into a computer Mainframe and all of your past lives appear to you your mind is appearing as that present is appearing as that so do you put mind and equals presence mind and presence the same yeah yeah yeah yeah I I distinguish mind from like the the way that I'm using mind right now is different from uh

Personality yeah it's like interface yeah I describe when I use mind I say like all this is appearing all this is your mind everything is mind everything is mind only it just means that it's not possible to distinguish where the experiencer is versus experience like there's no way to distinguish where you end and everything else begins those dualistic lines those barriers are not actually there they just appear to be there as a result of Buddhism calls them dualistic Tendencies or ignorance you just the insight has not been sufficient enough to dispel that particular notion you know we're we're we're in the dream of separateness so Awakening is really just Awakening from the dream and its very various aspects these aspects of the dream that caused us to suffer are

separateness doership you know there's really this sense that there's a me in here that's making things happen really all that all that's here are are these processes you know for example self self is most for most people it's just memory intention and choice choice is related to intention right and perception so you have to know what you're looking at that's perception I know that I'm talking to you that's perception uh memory is the fact that I'm able to orient myself in time and choice is just the exercise of intention these are just mental processes they're literally dreams of phenomena but we conceive them to be permanent entities or we conceive we conceive them to be actually solid findable things and they're not they're just not it's fascinating that we can believe into that that there is this someone here having these choices and life is happening to me it's fascinating that that illusion delusion the fog is believable yeah yeah that's why it's called ignorance because once it's dispelled you're like how did I ever buy into this the the whole the whole world I mean our whole our whole Little Dream here on Earth is is completely ruled by craving everyone craves this whole place all of existence actually sounds like hell you know like a definition of hell you want something you don't have it craving yeah it's we're all just chasing stuff and the real characteristic of Awakening is the cessation of that right you mature out of chasing and holding on and seeking and wanting this and wanting that and wanting so many things and wishing life could be different and and this constant incessant discontentment with what is here and with what is now and with what is your life that sucks the beauty of Awakening is that that you begin to wake up from that dream that nightmare as you would put it yeah

yeah and what would be your advice to people who are wanting to wake up from this nightmare you know strange working with so many people you you can see tendencies so you can see what works yeah yeah it's it's

interesting I come from a very traditional background when it comes to meditation and and Awakening you know all my all my training was in Teravada and um also in Dzogchen and these very old systems and you know the old way was to practice a lot and I can attest that the old way works you know I I meditated I meditated for seven years and it's not that it's not that Awakening is caused necessarily by meditation but it's that meditation allows you to see what is already there and practice allows you to become more intimate more intimate with what is here more intimate with the present moment and with actuality you know a lot of spirituality is about ideas a lot of spirituality is about beliefs even non Duality we we we pick up these beliefs you know yeah it's like there is no time I actually don't know if there's time or not I'm not going to say you know that just because time is not perceivable doesn't mean it doesn't exist so we have a lot of assumptions that come with non-duality as a result of listening to other teachers what is profound about Awakening and and inquiry and meditation is that you put aside all the beliefs you put aside everything that everyone else has said and done and you just investigate experience you just look at what is mind what is thought what is the body what is this and by orienting to the truth of what is you liberate yourself from the lies and the falsehoods and the convictions that you've accepted or that you've enmeshed yourself in this orientation away from your thoughts and from The Narrative mind and uh from your beliefs is so liberating initially it is terrifying but once you arrive at this place where it doesn't matter what happens doesn't matter what you think doesn't matter what you feel you're free to a great extent from especially compared to who you used to be and how you used to function but you know to I get I don't know I guess I guess like some people some teachers encourage people not to meditate they say I love UG Krishanmurti I'm a big I've always liked him and he tells he says meditation is awful like don't ever do it it's not good and I think he's just upset that his teachers let him down and I think meditation uh is the tried and true approach and that if it didn't if it didn't work if it didn't have value the Buddha wouldn't have taught it all these Zen Masters wouldn't have taught it so meditation and prayer I think are are powerful and um for people that are wanting to start Miracle of mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
 is really good and Power of Now is a great place to begin you know and anything by Ramana Maharshi of course is incredible

the true Source yeah yeah exactly exactly so because the the case is that you know with with meditation and with doing training or a practice where you're really letting go this is the thing if you're meditating and your meditation is holding on it's building this sense of a self it's building this sense of a controller then then I can see that that doesn't help right but if meditation is really just release and it's really just looking and it's seeing and it's becoming more sensitive to what is arising becoming more intimate with what is the case with reality that's very powerful we usually don't give ourselves much time to just notice what's going on right we're we're always doing we're always trying we're always attempting to become something or get something you know life life for us is so transactional and so much of spirituality is transactional I go to this Workshop I learn from this teacher I do this I do that because I'm trying to get this thing called Enlightenment right oh they watch this video somebody watches this video and wants to get Enlightenment yeah which is fine right we I understand that but with this video it's

fine for us it's okay you know Cherrs! but it's also it's also important to see that it's possible to just stare at a wall and not have that be a transaction like yeah it's possible to just be without an orientation towards an outcome and that is I mean for some people that that is terrifying to to let go of of wanting to let go of control to let go of of needing an outcome yeah especially what letting go of wanting to control yeah the fundamental truth though is that whatever happens and whatever doesn't happen whatever you get and whatever you lose your mind is appearing as that presence is appearing as that what whether you hold on or whether you let go the holding on is awake the letting go is awake you have this idea that you're gonna become something other than what you are and when you arrive there you find it's none other than what you

are it's so funny in language it says human being it doesn't say human doing or human becoming it's human being just being that's we've we've uh today life is so fast you know the the pace that things move compared to even 30 years ago is just unrecognizable and compare that to 300 years ago you know life was much slower for a lot of people and we have this sense now that we just can't catch up there's just too much to do there's too much there's too much going on there's this Perpetual sense of being behind and this sense that we're not really we're not really present for what's happening and the reason people feel that way the reason they feel that life is getting by is because it literally is it actually is getting by you're are distracted most of the time that's the problem most of the time our attention is fractured it's in these
devices it's in all the things that we have to do it's in the duties that we have some of us have kids or whatever there's there's so much that the world asks of us right like five cats for example five cats exactly yeah so

much is going on and then suddenly before we know it you know 50 years has passed I was having a conversation with my my mother about this and she it was so was so profound because I she never usually talks like this to me or to anyone and she just said you know I'm 70 years old now and it went by so fast it feels like it feels like it was just yesterday that I came to this country and now it's been over 30 years I never went back home and

you know when I she said when she when she looked at her life you know having me and and my sister it was really um the most important thing she ever did but it's still the case that you know she's like there's never enough time there's never enough time there's never enough time with the people that you love and the reason that we have that sense is because the time we spent with them with the people that we loved we may not have been completely 100% present you know our our attention attention was elsewhere you know you're you're you're eating with your mother and she's talking to you but you know sometimes you're on your phone and you're sitting there you're sitting there in the kitchen or in the living room and all your kid wants is is some attention but you have you have to you have to finish this email you you have to you have to take care of this this thing and and when you let all of that pile up and when you let that begin to control and direct your life you feel like you're out of time and that you're behind so the power of meditation is that you begin to master your mind you begin to master your attention and when you can Master where your attention goes and how long it stays there all these doors open and it's not that happiness is elsewhere you know we're we're really under we're really uh we really have this sense that if we just move to another city or if we just go to another place or if we just change this particular thing about our life that it'll all be okay and the crazy thing about samsara the reason the reason this whole dream spins on ignorance and forgetfulness is because we know we've done that before and we know it doesn't change anything like if you have problems you move to another city you're still there the problems are in you and we know that but for some reason it's like we either forget or we pretend keep trying run away it's it's funny I was uh I there's this place uh a spir uh spiritual place called uh Meher Mount so Meher Baba blessed that place and Yogananda and and Krishnamurti used to um used to sit there or they had visited there so um I was there with one of the grounds Keepers just hanging out and uh he was telling us the story of the whole place and everything and it was awesome he uh these deer deer came up and started eating the the peaches off the tree and uh mid conversation he's like up up they're they're eating the peaches they're eating the peaches I'm gonna go tell them to stop and so he goes outside and you know he shoos them off tells him to stop and you know that's that's the thing with life like no matter how nice you keep your garden the deer are going to come and eat the peaches yeah let them eat the peaches yeah now now the the the place the place where wisdom begins is when you stop pretending like every day is the first time they've eaten the peaches like like every Christmas your mother and father complain about XYZ so when you're at Christmas and this has happened 40 times for the entirety of your life you don't need to be surprised and have a new reaction as if this is new it's not new you've seen this a 100 thousand times there's nothing new about this it's literally just

it's just being in the dream of that situation it's being in the dream of those conditions and we just forget and we don't have this larger perspective we're not zooming out we're always caught in what is happening but when you zoom out you're like oh dude I've seen I've seen this I've seen this a thousand times like this is not new there's no reason to to have a reaction about this this person always says

this and I always try to change them you know like all of that you just just drop that you know drop that drop that odds are odds are the person is not going to change you know do what you will try you know be of service help them if you can uh if it works it works if it doesn't work you know this is the thing and I said this on a recent uh a recent class actually we have this uh assumption that everyone is here to awaken right that that's the thing that many uh spiritual teachers say we all come here specifically to awaken okay nice you know right now the look look at it like this what if some people come here to sleep I know a lot of people like that yeah what if some people are literally here to just have the total um SpaceTime linear experience of craving of suffering of attachment of clinging because wherever they're from elsewhere in time and space it's not like that it's Possible it's entirely possible that you have to shut down and completely forget what you are on the other side to generate the human consciousness here and there some people intentionally beings do that intentionally yeah why not everyone is on their own path I don't know what why people came here exactly exactly we we we have no idea we're like yeah we all we need to awaken everybody are you sure it's a little bit of this of this uh savior of the world Hollywood brainwash thing the the Messianic uh the Messianic approach the Messianic stream is so deep in human consciousness we always we always want people to be on the boat that we're on that's essentially what that is yeah we we assume that our boat is the right boat first of all here we go let's drop that boat it's the right boat for me but what do I know what's right for somebody else it's the right boat it's the only boat and your boat is bad ouch and you need to get off your boat and you need to get on my boat because you're gonna die that's that's pretty much what that's all about and uh it's really just you know facets ignorance within the dream yeah so wonderful wonderful dream let's wake up let's wake up yeah yeah definitely definitely I think that would be a good that's a good definition of Awakening too is

that Awakening is Awakening from the dream of your life and what it

was because so

much so much of what you wanted and who you wanted to become and what you valued and pursued is part of the dream of being a person the dream of me there's it's like it's like all of us have this like character storyline in time for ourselves you know and what Awakening does is it just blows that whole thing apart and you wake up from this narrative you see that everything that happened was thought you know everything that happened was thought feeling reaction life is really like this you you feel some things so you think some things then you do some things and then based on those things that you do you feel more things and you think more things and you do more things and you feel more things things and then you think more things and you do more things and then you die [Laughter]

yeah you know it's it's the Story Land you know we are here in the Storyland and then you die that means it's an exit the ride is over till next one yeah exactly and like that's that's really it so Awakening is Awakening out of the story and my God that story takes up everything everything is about me and what I want and what I need and what I need to do and where I need to

go it's all about a you that's not even there that's the meaning of

ignorance yeah it's it's it's good to joke about it and laugh about it and to see it cause otherwise it's tough

 well thank you so much it's really good fun to talk to you oh yeah great I hope it was I hope it was a unique uh unique conversation you know oh of course it's Unique conversation every conversation is unique there's no hope in that one so where people can find you how you how they can work with you or learn meditation with you yeah my website is after awakening.com so people could check that out uh once a week on Wednesdays at 6: PM Pacific Daylight Time give a a talk and then we do a long meditation sit we sit for three hours oh nice sitting sitting and walking after the fact so it's actually quite a large chunk of time and and the reason I I have designed it that way is because it really you could really see it as alone time time purely for noticing for awareness um for not having to do anything in particular you know there's there's such a a demand on generating an outcome that occurs in time and for those three hours you could just drop all of that and just sit around look at stuff you know if you want to pull out your Journal write walk sit back down walk again and it's just it's just like that so that's that's mainly uh that's mainly it yeah sounds interesting yeah I teach that that style of just inward looking and um non-meditation or you know open awareness and I also teach the traditional terada meditation systems so yeah well that's that Wow thank you so much yeah yeah thank you Ilona it was wonderful speaking with you definitely I would speak to you again okay and thank you everyone for watching for listening and if you have a comment please leave it below subscribe like and share that's all I ask until next time bye for now