There’s an artistic spirit, something beyond words that speaks to me every day, and it’s the thing that I’ve been listening to more and more. It’s become the bigger part of my reality. It’s interesting because this isn’t performative.

This artist doesn’t want to perform anymore. It doesn’t want to fake things. It doesn’t want to smile for the camera just because we’re in a beautiful place.

It doesn’t want to make conversation just to make conversation. It doesn’t want to keep up with the pace of life. So I’m answering to this artistic spirit, and I say art because I mean it’s the art of living.

What do we have here? We have all these paints and this canvas, that is what we’ve been given in our story, our origins, our ancestry, that and our individualized stories of our households since we were very young. And now I feel like I have this great blank canvas and a limited amount of paints, but all these colors can be mixed together to make other colors.

And I’m not really interested in doing anything other than entertaining myself. And I can only really entertain myself if I’m being honest, honesty in all my relations. Hence, why I don’t want to perform anymore.

I don’t want to perform to keep up with things. I want to be an honest self. Because I’ve taken a look at my honest self, and I really do give a shit about everything.

I’m inspired really by everything.

So I’m not worried about that person as an artist living the art of life. I’m not worried about that person because he cares. But I do want to give him the opportunity to work with the canvas that he’s been given in these paints and really do something.

And so I was downstairs a short time ago in an empty house. Very rare situation for me with nothing on my calendar. And I’m watching a Harmony Corinne interview.

And I’m inspired by this Harmony Corinne interview to take myself upstairs rather than rest, put myself in front of this microphone with no plan or script, and see what comes out. Who am I talking to? You know, right now, I’m talking to no one.

There’s no one else in the room, no one else in the house. It’s just me and me. And I’ve become a friend to myself.

I mean, really, who else has seen the journey? Who else has seen all those moments that we try and get other people to see? Like, look, I’m doing this thing for myself.

Look, I’m sacrificing something. Look, you know, who’s seen that? I’ve seen it.

And over time, I’ve earned my respect. And I’ve done it by getting my hands dirty in life and not avoiding and not putting things off.

And I don’t know what drives this artistic spirit. I don’t know what fuels it, but I do know that space is what it calls for. It calls for space to be able to express.

And it’s so nice to be in this kind of relationship with yourself without needing any validation from the outside. And I don’t even know what to tell you because I needed to try and get validation from the outside, from everything and everyone, including some of the most influential artists and creators in my life. I even sought to get their approval.

And once I did, sure, that was nice, but God, could I have done this all on my own without putting myself in all this much trouble? And I guess that’s what compels me to be here today, to share with you ever, is the idea that I might say something that not only inspires me further, but has the opportunity to inspire you. So honesty is everything.

You go out and you can see forms of dishonesty everywhere that are acceptable. Just a waitress having to put on a smile.

You know, we got to ask ourselves, why would we want a waitress to fake happiness in order to serve us? Everywhere to me is a love project. How can I, at least if this is going well, this space that I’m entering into, how can I help sustain it or even leave it better than it was?

And I do that in repetition everywhere I go. That’s my interest. That’s a form of sincerity.

Why wouldn’t I want that for other people? I want that for myself.

You know, I was thinking about, I was washing the dishes today, and some of the dishes weren’t mine. And I’m a champion fucking dishwasher. I mean, I do it every night.

I kind of run a tight ship with my life. Like, things are clean. I like order.

I don’t put things off. I understand a good mess though. I really do.

I understand it, and I can also just live in a, you know, I’ve been homeless twice.

And I can live in chaos and see the beauty of it. But I like things to reflect my mind. And these days, my mind, it’s a disciplined place.

In that discipline, it can hold a wild imagination that finds its way into all kinds of creative acts and conversation. But it’s an art. Conversation is an art.

Listening is an art. Everybody just has so much to say. And now I go places and people just…

I mean, it’s always kind of been this way, but it’s like ridiculous now. You know, I don’t interrupt them also. And I’ve become skillful at the art of disengaging from conversation that’s gone on too long without making people feel bad, because it really…

The dismount of things really matters to me, like how I leave something. I want to leave people with the feeling without having to over explain, like, hey, oh, I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you. Like, I want to do it with less words.

You know, I don’t want people to go, oh, oh, yeah, sure, okay, I’m sorry. You know, just they get interrupted and they don’t, they realize maybe they’ve been talking for a while. And then, and then I don’t want them to feel bad because I really do care.

I care to hear the whole story.

You know, but there’s a, there’s something that like there’s a lacking breaks, like the line to the breaks are broken on society with the storytelling, which says something to me. Now it either says that I attract people who just, you know, have a lot to say and, or do we all have a lot to say? And I just happen to be one of those spaces where people just either feel it or they know that I’ll listen to them deeply and it probably feels good.

I mean, that’s listening is my life. So that matters to me how I leave things, how I start things. Here’s another example of a weird one.

Like you’ll be, I’ll be walking out of a grocery store and then there’s those people who are trying to sell something. And they’re like, they’ve got their sales people out there. They will walk up to me and say like, Hey, do you have a time today for the environment?

It’s like, like immediately putting you in a, like, what are you to say? See, a weak minded person who’s worried about how they are taken by strangers would stop in that moment, maybe not have the ego strength to resist it and then go like, Oh yeah, well, sure. You know, because they don’t, wouldn’t want to be associated with not caring about the environment.

So this sales pitch that happens, that throws in Mother Nature. And then I go like, Nope, sorry, I don’t have the time. Okay, you know, it’s like this kind of creating suffering is like happening everywhere.

It’s like people create their own suffering. And like I was just minding my own business. I was just walking out of a grocery store.

Now this person tried to rope me and felt rejected. And I don’t, I don’t say all this to go. So yeah, we got to watch out for those people who are outside of fucking grocery stores, you know.

I say this because I take this as like, okay, well, how can I even improve that? How can I make it to where if I’m approached again, I can even make the science a little bit better than this feeling of rejection in this person. And where do I have the time for this?

Well, I just have this space. I have the space to consider such things because it’s sharpened by life. It’s sharpened by general disposition.

So I take these things as constant practices, just always practicing with something. Like today, I wanted to practice resting. So I took myself outside, and there was some wind, and I stared at the wind moving through a tree.

And then I directed my attention from that to a bee in the grass, just gobbling up pollen. I’m filling my head with this, rather than a bunch of TV, or even words in a book have become a little too like, oh, I don’t know. Like my morning practice now, notorious sleep and reading every morning and meditating for 20 years.

And now books and words are just like, it’s like saying too much. I kind of want to have my own experience now. I kind of like want to have more room to see post meditation.

What I’ve already accumulated in all the other books and all the other life experiences, and I want to see what that can do unprovoked. So books are kind of like sitting on a shelf, like right next to me, and I’ve just always read, but now like reading just before meditating, it just, it’s not appealing to me. I mean, my teacher, Lama Luonang, he suggested that I don’t read.

He’s like, why you read still? And he’s kind of inviting me to explore the universal potential within myself. See books, Buddhism, vehicles for awakening, all meant to be put down at some point and just experience life.

I realized that my goal with my kids is that for the rest of their life, when they look down at their phone and they see my name across it, that’d be a no-brainer to pick it up. Like, oh, I wonder what dad’s up to, that kind of thing. How many of us actually have that experience?

I have a very harmonious relationship now with both of my parents, and we’ve forgiven all of our pasts, and we live now in this new space. And it’s a real thing. I put a lot of work into it, they put a lot of work into it, and we’ve all forgiven each other.

We’re in this beautiful place. I still have the imprint of when their name comes across my phone, I still have the imprint, I go like, oh, am I going to have to… I still feel the past of all those times where I was really just trying to gain their respect and kind of have something to show for my life and make them proud.

I still feel that when I look at it, even with everything kind of behind us. So I want to fine tune that with my kids. So I’m trying to be the person and live the life in every way that affords them the inspiration to feel drawn to my support without it being authoritative and without it having those adulterations, let’s call it, like where there’s guilt, without any of that.

Like actually like, oh man, dad’s calling. Like that’s my goal. I had a great conversation with my mom about the subject of, you know, the rest of our time on earth.

And we had this really amazing heart to heart where I just said, look, I have a limited time on this earth. You have a limited time on this earth. I really want to have a genuine relationship with you.

I’m talking genuine, not like we survived our lives. And of course, we’ve been there for each other, and you know, we’re blood and all that. Not all that.

Like I want to have the genuine experience with my mother. My mother survived so much. She survived being raped by her father, you know, and forgave him in her lifetime and taught me about love.

I want that person to have the most genuine experience in her life and have genuine support from all of us and not performative support. So we had this hard-to-hard and I just basically said, look, I want us to have the kind of relationship where we’re naturally inspired to see each other, naturally inspired to call each other, not the performative thing. Where you’re just doing it to check up and blah, blah, blah or whatever, whatever we’ve done, whatever people do.

Like the real deal where you respect each other and you’re actually calling because you care, because you really care and you want to see how they’re doing or you want to go see them and you’re excited to go see them. This is attainable. It’s a practice.

I had all the same barriers in Western civilization emotionally that any family had. And I’ve been able to do this in my life just paying attention, furthering practices of compassion and having an imagination. I imagine a better world, and I enact it in my household and in my family and in my profession and in my art.

And that’s my plan for world peace. I’ve done that in my life, and that’s what interests me is like just having really genuine relationships with people. Anything outside of that just doesn’t genuinely interest me.

People talk a good deal about authenticity and genuineness, but now there’s a performative thing in the culture that like, look, I’m doing authenticity. I talk this way and I say these terms and I move this way, but it still looks like performance to me. You know when you’re really kind of dropped in and you’re like hanging with somebody and it kind of feels like this?

It’s like more of a whisper. And people talk to each other. They go from this to, so how are you doing today?

Oh, good. Oh, yeah, well, I was doing this. Yeah, but like you jump up to do you see the like the difference?

And that’s how most people are talking to each other everywhere. And I’m not shitting on people. Something else just hasn’t been modeled yet.

It hasn’t been modeled enough in the culture to be able to be embodied. And so I’m starting with me. My life is my message.

You can do this too. I was chewed up and spit out by life. I’ve been homeless twice.

I’ve been sexually abused. I’ve been a drug addict. I’ve been a sober person who helped a lot of people.

I’ve been a professional in mental health. I’ve been a music producer. And I walked away from all that stuff because that shit hurt.

Who am I beyond all of those identifiable categorical traits? Who am I beyond what happened? This is my pursuit of going at the thing that I never knew in life that was there, which was the bigger me, which is nothing.

It’s you too. It’s everything. It’s everything.

At this moment, it feels separate, but you and I are only separated by our minds. Everything is interdependent and interconnected.

And that is more of what I am than anything. I’m not concerned with people respecting my opinion. It’s my actions.

My body of work is my service. It’s not my MP3 files.

My body of work is where I’ve exemplified unconditional love. That’s really interesting. What is driving a person like me to ask these questions?

To know a bigger reality than my credentials. What is that that seeks to know itself? I mean, right now, I’m staring at a curtain.

I’m just, it’s me in the curtain. I’m talking to this curtain as if it’s you. It is you.

I want to read you something that’s in A Course in Miracles. The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When you have an authority problem, it is always because you believe you are the author of yourself and project your delusion onto others.

That’s the deal, is that most of us are believing that the story that we had is who we are and we got to make something of it. And it’s always on the market. It’s always subject to good stocks or bad stocks.

And we consider that our story and how it’s translating into the world as being our chief importance. And what I’m compelled by is artists who go beyond that. You know, Bob Dylan is somebody that endlessly inspires me, especially in interviews early on.

He’s evasive. He’s playing with the audience. He really is acting like I could care less.

And you’re asking me questions that don’t even make sense. He’s adopted a minimalism and sarcasm and also a depth that kind of sounds like it could be the Tao Te Ching at times coming out of him. But all of this in this Tasmanian devil dust cloud is how Bob Dylan expresses himself in some of these interviews.

Just handing people back what they’re asking. Saying like, is this really what you’re asking? And confronting people about that.

Or doing it in a way that’s almost non-confrontational that you can’t really say anything towards. And I’m really interested in that. I want to find that in the world.

That’s the unknown. Anybody that we’ve ever loved has left us. But they’re in that place.

The place we don’t know about. Or are they? So Bob Dylan embodies that.

Harmony Corrine embodies that. So people who are not concerned with what you think. And at the same time have so much to say to us all.

Like this form of expression, the unknown being expressed without an end goal, is I feel the true artistic spirit.

See, even the great artists who have come and gone, we hold them still. We’ve been influenced by it. It’s something that goes on and on.

They don’t have to be here to still be here. That’s very interesting. Honoring that unknown, that unknowable quality of life, even as it presents as something so noble.

I mean, oh, look, I know what kind of person you are. We look at a mannerism when we think we’re the world’s greatest intuitive in that moment. Not knowing that we’re projecting our story directly onto this person unfairly.

And maybe you find that there are some similarities there. It’s still not the same story. There’s never a same story.

There’s no same story that’s ever been in the same way that the Tibetan proverb, you can’t walk into the same river twice, suggests. Where is this cool, unknown, that seems to birth everything and take everything back? It seems to generate all of this life and what we can only figure out through scientific tools and measurements and stuff to be able to say that there is something to this invisible world.

To me, that is the monastery of the artistic spirit. And I’m looking to be a monk in that place, come what may. People think they know who I am, and I go, I don’t even know.

How do you know? I don’t have any plan. How could you know what I’m going to do next?

How could you know who I am? And who do we know? Ourselves.

And I don’t say that as a bad thing. Who better to be in good graces with? Who better to love?

Your chief witness. You know, I for one, want my chief witness, observer of my story. To have nice things to say about my efforts.

You know, he was down and out there for a little while, and it looked like all might be lost. And he sunk into depravity and theft and dishonesty. But then, in a real shocker, he pulls himself up and teaches himself new tricks.

Influenced by a wide variety of sources, but he’s the one that applies them. And that’s what I’ve done. I’ve just applied what I’ve been taught.

I had to do it. My teachers didn’t do it. They showed me the way.

Especially my enemies, so called. I revere today my enemies as much as my highest gurus. Whenever there’s difficulty, and I’ve had some characters in my life the last couple years, and I watch myself turn them into a deity, I watch myself supplant one of my gurus’ faces on their face as they’re sitting in front of me, maybe performing in a way that is triggering, so to speak.

I send love to it, and I genuinely want to feel that, and I totally believe that it’s possible that my gurus are hiding in these people. See, that’s the thing, when you open yourself up to the unknown, then in places that you never thought something wonderful could be, you’re willing to look and you find it.

Love is life. That’s it. You’ll never be more loved than the life that’s running through your veins.

You’ll never be more loved than existence.

Sometimes I feel myself on my deathbed, saying, pay attention to this one. This moment right here, this is going to be one of the ones that you are thinking about. I feel myself on my deathbed calling me to dig in more and to go low.

This is one of the big ones. I get messages from myself. And for a long while, it’s been so inspirational to live that way.

It’s the color that stands out to me in nature. It’s the beauty in your lover’s face. Life is love.

There’s no other love. You can say God is love, but when we all say God, what do we mean? We mean life.

The sources of creative energy that go into the experience of all things. That’s life. We don’t have to say God anymore.

Life is love. So when I say love is the author, it’s just like saying life is the author of your experience. Don’t give the authorship away.

Don’t sign into a publishing deal where you have an editor that wants you to be somebody other than yourself. You’re the author. Love is the author.

You are the pen.

And you’re writing your experience. Every bit of it, we’re writing. Now, here’s the thing.

We have a ghostwriter, and that’s the subconscious trauma that hasn’t been worked out. Those are the ghostwriters of every experience. And they get in the way, and they disguise themselves so well as you.

That’s why they’re ghostwriters. It’s just your name. But they’re what’s interpreting the situation.

And you shouldn’t give that authorship away to past pain, to storylines that are kind of regurgitated. We don’t like it in entertainment when stories are regurgitated. We can smell it a mile away, yeah?

We don’t like that. We don’t like trying to be tricked. So this is a trick of habit of mind, to tell us to be cautious of this bad thing that happened in the universe.

It was a happening. How many happenings have you had since, where you’ve been completely taken care of? And I mean, breathing alive with opportunity.

Arguably, anybody that’s listening to this show qualifies for those basic things. So haven’t you been loved since these bad things have happened? In all the good in the world, the news focuses on those 10 stories every single day.

Why? To get our attention, to make it real, so that you’ll need more things. And we are being shuffled around by our own minds habitually in this way.

And there’s a way out. In your life, that is love, that is only found temporary ways of expressing that love through forms of attachment, have really limited our experience in life. I want a life that affords me limitless expansion.

I’m in the limitless expansion plan. That’s the artistic spirit. It pushes us beyond the known, into realms to explore.

I mean, I remember being 17 and ditching my junior year, a lot of it, and going down to this coffee shop. At this coffee shop was this guy who was older than me, who had just graduated, and he was way into the Velvet Underground. He rode a BMW motorcycle, and he wore a leather jacket, and he smoked American spirits.

And this is, we’re talking 1993, when American spirits, you’d have to go to a tobacco store and buy them. They were this fringe cigarette that was all-natural, and that burned a long time. And they were good because of that, but they were strong.

And this one rogue individual represented the unknown in so many ways to me. And I had my, like, bohemian phase, and ran away from home to go pursue that, and being more that. I headed out at 17 years old into the unknown, into the streets of Sacramento.

I can’t even imagine my 17-year-old going to try to navigate life in a big city, fending for himself. I remember walking the streets at night just to stay, because there was no where to stay, and you just have to stay up all night, and I would tag buildings. Now, of course, it’s the destruction of property and all that, and I’m not saying that’s the way to go, but there’s that kid at 17 who’s on his own at 2 in the morning, walking around, tagging buildings, looking over his shoulder like, you know, this is innocent play.

It’s like hide-and-seek when you’re a kid, you know, you’re looking over your shoulder to see if you’re going to get caught, and you’re, you know, you’re getting creative with where you hide. Like it’s innocence. We’re all innocent.

We don’t know it. We think we’re guilty. But within each of us is somebody that cares.

And within each of us is this artistic spirit. People say, no, there’s some people that are artists. It’s like, no, an artist is really just embracing the unknown and seeing what comes and maybe, maybe materializing that, but not even needing to, just being in touch with it, these sources.

My favorite people are in touch with this, and they have a lot of trouble talking about things. You get to a phase where you accumulate knowledge and all to find that, like, you don’t have anything to say, and actually it’s very hard to even be around people at a certain point. For me, I want to hang out in the I don’t know.

I don’t want to go where everybody knows shit, where it’s just all knowledge, and that’s being what was described in A Course in Miracles. We think that we are the story conglomerate, and that’s the author of the experience. And so when somebody challenges it, they’re challenging the author of the experience.

And we go like, what? No, you’ve got it wrong. This is just my experience.

And did you see what I mean? Like, it’s ego. And I’m still, I’m not here to say kill your ego.

Your ego is a necessity for you to be able to not be in an insane asylum. You have to have ego. Ego strength, not egocentrism.

Ego core, like what they talk about in physical, like the strengthening your core. It’s like core ego is just right-sizedness, being a good citizen. It’s not letting whatever’s going on in your life impose on anyone else against their will.

We’ve been lied to that it’s the education, that it’s the pursuit of a career. Everybody did their best, attempting to make a productive society, but it has now backfired on us. And we’re unhealthy, and we’re on drugs, trauma dumping on each other.

And also, we made it through a pandemic. There’s a renaissance in art. People have more access to mental health and addiction services.

There’s deep work going on beyond archaic psychotherapy. Kids these days are onto the fact that the digital age and cell phones are the poison that maybe we’ve been feeding our kids. I think our kids are going to rebel against it.

It’s going to be a movement of kids who are just like done with the digital, and there’s going to be a renaissance of simplicity. And they’re going to do it as a form of rebellion against a culture that told them that it was outside of themselves. And I think it’s going to happen like a rebel alliance to the digital age.

And then they’ll be like in the movie Wall-E, the animated film where people are just like on their rascal scooters being multi-entertained by many screens and just fed through tubes, and that’s it. It’s really hard to look at adults. I was at a mall going to an AT&T store, and I had to use the bathroom, so I went upstairs to the bathroom, and it’s by the food court, and I was walking by this guy, who’s my age, who was sitting by himself, eating a piece of Sbarro pizza, with an anxious leg going, while looking at his cell phone that was face down on the table, that was laying down on the table, so he’s just hovering above it, eating this pizza really fast.

And I felt such compassion for this person. I was going like, man, this is this guy’s form of relief, and he’s like, he needs this moment. And how far away from that moment being the peace in my life that I know, the truth in my life that I know, and I wished him a way out.

It looked like a painful situation. And who knows, could be the happiest person in the world. That’s the idea is like, each one of us wants to be known, but we also don’t like it when people think they know us.

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