Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the, the part of me that is real is, you know, everything's coming and going. It's all coming and going. Well, how could, how could I ever not come and go when the entire world is just Buddhism has this idea of codependent arising. Nothing exists. Nothing has self nature. Nothing exists by itself. It's an endless, infinitely connected web.
That's beautiful, man. I love that.
Can I say that? So this is what I've learned from, because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it, you know? But what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that it's not just, you're not just saying, right? This is why, you know, so I do koan practice. So this is a tradition in Zen that it was established.
It was a teaching method that was established like a thousand years ago, these book of koans. And every koan, you know, if you've ever read Goodell Escher Bach, he's got a whole chapter on koans. They're kind of non-logical problems that you have to work on. One of my favorite one was, stop the sound of the distant temple bell. You're like, what?
Every time my teacher gives it to him, I'm like, what are you talking about? This is a whole Zen thing of like, up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So your job with these koans is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you realize what the thing is trying to teach you, what aspect of experience. It's trying to teach you. So there's no answer.
There's no, and in fact, actually, you don't give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate. The first time when I sat, when I did a call on and the guy was like, don't tell me the answer, show me the answer. I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, you know, I've kind of learned the language of them.
So I could never tell you, if I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You'd be like, what? You know, it's never, it's not the words. It's the, you know, so like your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty, but With contemplative practice, as it deepens over years, it really does take years. Just like anything in math. It took me years to understand Lagrangians.
you kind of come to a deeper understanding with like, yeah, the words of like, it's not just like, oh, everything changes. You actually feel that movement. Like you feel it with like breath to breath, you know? And it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy and it's not connected to anything, right? That's what I've kind of gotten from practice.
It's just like, yeah, you know, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment, that is truly the way things are. Like, it's not okay because I have a feeling about it, okay? I want it to be okay. It just is okay. And so really, it's a pretty awesome thing.
Yeah. Which is cool actually, because that, you know, I'm also, you know, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well, going back. And I get it, right? I mean, you know, the... But that's also the cool thing. I think one of the things is like, yeah, well, that is what it is. That is what it is, right? You don't have to do anything.
You don't have to like manipulate it or move it around or like, yeah, this is the experience, you know?
Like, what the hell are you doing, bro?
Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, it's not really, I mean, you're staring, you're facing a wall and you, what you're doing is you're, you know, you're just sitting with, you know, you can, there's different meditative practices, right? There's counting breaths. So that's usually what I do. I sit down and I start counting breaths. And for the first half hour, it's just like, blah, blah, blah.
I'm thinking, like I said, I'm thinking about my taxes. I'm thinking about what I got to do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full session, a two-day session, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses. This was back when there were LPs. Yeah. With the freaking pauses. Nice.
You know, because my mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order.
Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see. You know, because you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while. I used to hate sitting. You know, I do it, but I... After a while, the mind gets exhausted. Like that part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter. It's just like there's nothing else to do. And then you get bored.
And now I realize that's when something interesting is going to happen. Because you kind of like drop down. And now it's a very physical practice. People think you're just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually, it becomes a very physical process where you're really just following the breath. You're kind of riding the breath. And it gets very quiet.
And within that quietness, there's a path. Because obviously there's been – Buddhism is always like not about thinking. But there's a huge literature. So these guys are always about don't think. I've written all this stuff. But they're guideposts. They're like the finger pointing at the moon. And, you know, there's the idea of first, you know, your mind is usually scattered, right?
Like, right now when I walk out, I'm going to go get the Uber and everything. My mind's going to be all over the place. But with sitting, first you concentrate the mind so that there's no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening, but you're just not there happening up there. You're not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind.
which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away, you know, and there's just this presence. It's kind of like a raw presence. And that's often where the joy upwells from. But you sit with whatever. Maybe you're going to sit and you're going to have, like, you know, maybe... You're going to go through like an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something.
Showing 561–580 of 594 · page 29 of 30
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