Open Source Awakening

Summary

Insight Myanmar Podcast – "Open Source Awakening"

Host: Max Ante
Guest: Daniel Ingram
Date: August 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This engaging, nearly two-hour interview journeys through Daniel Ingram’s life and work — from his early, unconventional meditative experiences, through his deep immersion in both spiritual practice and scientific study, to his present-day advocacy for transparency and normalization of advanced meditative phenomena in the West. The conversation explores the intricate interplay of Burmese meditation traditions, the open-source ethos of knowledge-sharing in spiritual contexts, and the cultural tensions between orthodoxy and innovation in global Buddhism. Listeners are offered a rare, candid view into the biography and philosophy of one of the most polarizing but influential contemporary figures in modern Dharma.

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Main Discussion Points & Key Insights

1. Who Is Daniel Ingram? (00:57 – 09:17)

• Background: Practicing meditation since the early 1990s; teacher, retreat leader, author of "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha"; co-founder of Dharma Overground.
• Key Milestones:
  • Began as an open resource for “weird meditative experiences.”
  • Authored influential, openly-shared “hardcore Dharma book.”
  • Co-founded Dharma Overground, a pioneering online forum in the early 2000s fostering public discussion of advanced or taboo meditation topics, especially those overlooked or discouraged by other Buddhist forums.
• Modern Work: Focused on connecting mainstream clinical and scientific research with meditative phenomenology, organizing the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium.

“I hung out a shingle somewhere in the late 90s and basically said if you're having weird meditative experiences, I'll be happy to talk to you about those for free. I won't even take a donation.” — Daniel Ingram (04:34)

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2. Burmese Lineage, Fire Kasina, and Unorthodox Retreats (09:17 – 12:54)

• Fire Kasina Practice: Intense practices based on ancient and pre-Buddhist concentration techniques using visual supports like candle flame to access altered states — often paralleling (but distinct from) psychedelic experiences.
• Burmese Influence: Heavily shaped by Mahasi Sayadaw-style techniques, which brought profound insight traditions from Myanmar to the West.

“If psychedelics are kind of like scuba diving or bungee jumping or something, this is like learning to be a bird or a fish, because you actually did it on your own wiring...this is not safe.” — Daniel Ingram (09:27)

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3. Early Life, Unusual Experiences, and “The Multiple Daniels” (16:03 – 27:06)

• Family & Childhood: Roots in both scientific rationalism (father, a pediatrician) and spontaneous mystical experience (mother’s labor, intense Goenka retreats).
• First Encounters: As a child, spontaneous meditative states and lucid dream phenomena, well before formal training. Struggled to contextualize or share these experiences.
• Secrecy & Stigmatization: The danger of pathologizing spiritual experience — both a personal lesson and driver of his later advocacy.

“My pediatrician father now is very happy that I had the good sense not to say anything to him about what was going on with me because he now admits he would have done something really stupid and harmful...” — Daniel Ingram (22:39)

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4. Bridging Science, Materialism, and Mysticism (27:55 – 36:57)

• Intellectual Tensions: Describes his “multiple Daniels” — one scientific, one mystical, long in conflict, now integrated.
• Educational Path: Jumped from physics and chemistry to literature and mysticism, influenced by both scientific and spiritual texts.
• Peer Influence: Connections with contemporaries like Kenneth Folk, who pointed to living evidence that deep meditation “does something powerful and profound.”

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5. India, Service, and First Retreats (37:18 – 52:10)

• First Retreat (1994): Nine days with Christopher Titmous; immediate conviction of the power and potential of intensive meditation.
• Year in India:
  • Service with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
  • Deep immersion in Bodh Gaya; both the sufferings and spiritual potency of one of Buddhism’s holiest sites.
  • Profound dharma connections and exposure to mapping and normalization of extraordinary states.

“There is this sense that you can really do this. This is a possible thing. And you could feel some of the wisdom that would come off of these people...” — Daniel Ingram (44:53)

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6. The Impact of Burmese “Insight Maps” and Normalization (53:26 – 59:42)

• Map Technology: First introduction to traditional Burmese maps charting experiential stages of meditation — providing validation for strange phenomena (e.g., body distortions, energetic experiences).
• Contrast with Goenka Tradition: Where Goenka retreats downplay discussion of such experiences, Mahasi-based contexts may normalize and map them.

“This scratchy old tape, this guy described pretty much what I had gone through in order over the past ten days...I was just astounded that there was actually this kind of sophisticated map technology.” — Daniel Ingram (53:30)

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7. Cost and Consequence — “Destroying My Life” in Pursuit of Awakening (60:18 – 66:47)

• Public Health Service in Bihar: Confronted by both personal and systemic suffering; impact of poverty, corruption, and existential precarity.
• Obsession with Awakening: After tasting intense insight, all other life goals (including medical school) were temporarily abandoned for pursuit of full enlightenment.
• Disenchantment with Western Dharma Circles: After “stream entry,” experienced alienation and suppression at IMS when trying to openly discuss progress and insight.

“We very quickly realized that the energetic mode I was in and we were in...did not jive very well with the practice community and style of communication and social conventions of the Insight Meditation Society staff at the time.” — Daniel Ingram (66:11)

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8. The Taboo of Meditative Attainments & The Ethics of Disclosure (66:47 – 71:38)

• Taboo and Orthodox Arguments:
  • Caution and controversy around discussing stages of awakening.
  • Joseph Goldstein’s warning: Talking openly may create karmic harm for all involved.
• Daniel’s View: While acknowledging potential risks, sees greater danger in pathologizing, silencing, or invalidating these phenomena.

“Nearly everybody finds it an incredible relief to have found someone they can have an honest conversation about their experiences.” — Daniel Ingram (71:21)

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9. Scientific Mainstreaming & Gatekeeping (73:11 – 76:11)

• Focus on Professional Acceptance: Working to bring meditative phenomenology and altered states into medical, psychological, and scientific understanding.
• Normalization as Harm Reduction: Importance of frameworks for both benefit and safety as more people access deep or destabilizing states, via meditation, psychedelics, or trauma.

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10. Becoming “Dr. Daniel” — Life in Medicine and the Liminal Spaces (76:37 – 90:02)

• Career Arc: National AIDS Hotline, public health grad school, then medical school alongside continued deep practice.
• Isolation & Seeking Community: Despite living in Buddhist communities, often felt unable to honestly discuss or explore experiences. Sought out a small circle of like-minded mavericks.
• Birth of “Mapping”: Emergence of work systematizing meditative stages — inspired by the Burmese tradition, but increasingly controversial in the West.

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11. The Maps — Blessing or Curse? (81:12 – 86:20)

• Pros & Cons:
  • Cautions: Scripting, competitiveness, over- or under-claiming, chasing experiences.
  • Benefits: Normalizing, validating, empowering, providing practical guidance for practice.
• Complexity: From basic, linear models to multidimensional, fractal maps; practitioner experiences vary widely.

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12. Source Texts, Authority, and the Open Source Dharma Ethos (86:20 – 102:39)

• Burmese & Commentarial Lineages: Maps stem from a complex web (Visuddhimagga, Abhidhamma, Vimuttimagga, Patisambhidamagga), but even within Myanmar, attitudes differ.
• Open Source vs. Orthodox Gatekeeping: Daniel frames his work as living tradition, historically continuous with Buddhist diversity — seeing the Buddha’s injunction “to teach with an open hand” as a model.
• Colonial Critique & Sectarianism: Acknowledges colonial influences in systematizing, but sees intra-Buddhist debate, innovation, and schism as predating the West.

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13. What Is Awakening? Competing Models and the Ten Fetters Debate (114:56 – 129:19)

• Controversial Claim: Daniel openly identifies as having attained “arhatship” (fourth path) through orthodox Theravadan methods, but notes his realization doesn’t match the literal ten fetter model.
• Theravadan vs. Mahayana/Vajrayana Models: Ten fetters stress extirpation of negative emotion (fear, irritation, etc.), while other schools see final insight as a radical transparency in experiencing all phenomena, including emotion, without identification.
• Scriptural Ambiguity: Both sides find support (and contradiction) in the Pali Canon.

“For me, what happened was at the end of the [2003] retreat, everything just basically became in tune with itself...everything saw itself simultaneously as immediate, utterly ephemeral, absolutely natural, knowing itself where it is all the way through.” — Daniel Ingram (114:56)

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14. Daniel’s Invitation: Test the Highest Claims (135:25 – 139:00)

• Science as Arbitrator: Rather than fruitless debate, Daniel invites the world’s meditation “champions” — those believed to truly have eradicated fear, craving, agitation — to submit to scientific, behavioral, and neuroscientific study.
• Open Invitation: Let’s bring open-source methods and honest inquiry to the “final question” of meditative attainment.

“Let us do the experiment. So if you out there in listener land think that, you know people who really truly have dissolved, you know, maybe the first five fetters...let’s actually do the science. Let’s see what is real in the highest paragons that the people out there can find and put forward who were willing to be studied.” — Daniel Ingram (135:25)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the Dark Side of Dharma Secrecy:

  “The fact that a really kind, well-trained, caring person such as my own dad might have done something really harmful...is now part of the strong motivation for the work I do now...” (22:39)

• On the Power of Maps:

  “These maps are so helpful for me. They make so much sense. They appear so descriptive and compellingly so, and they appear so empowering. And yet the people I was hanging out with also didn’t seem to like them that much.” (79:08)

• On Sectarian Debates:

  “I became something of a controversial figure for talking openly about these things. This is a quick way to get ostracized from a lot of mainstream mindfulness, meditative insights.” (93:05)

• On Open Source Awakening:

  “There’s the whole invocation to teach with an open hand. Right. The Buddha said, I’m not holding stuff back, I’m teaching with an open hand.” (96:24)

• On Personal Realization:

  “Everything just is happening as it is where it is. So it proved for me that Vipassana could actually do something like what it would do. The problem is it just didn’t perform according to the ten fetter map.” (114:56)

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Notable Timestamps

• Daniel’s Introduction & Background: 00:57 – 09:17
• Fire Kasina Retreats & Burmese Influence: 09:17 – 12:54
• Early Life Experiences & Stigmatization: 16:03 – 27:06
• Collegiate Years, Science & Mysticism: 27:55 – 36:57
• First Retreats & India/Bodh Gaya Stories: 37:18 – 52:10
• Introduction to Insight Maps: 53:26 – 59:42
• Difficulties with Western Retreat Culture: 60:18 – 66:47
• The Debate on Disclosure: 66:47 – 71:38
• Medical Career & Continued Practice: 76:37 – 90:02
• Map Controversies and Complexity: 81:12 – 86:20
• Burmese, Commentarial, and Sectarian Context: 86:20 – 102:39
• The Ten Fetter Debate and Claims of Awakening: 114:56 – 129:19
• Daniel’s “Bring Us Your Champions” Scientific Challenge: 135:25 – 139:00

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Tone & Language

• Daniel Ingram: Candid, sometimes provocative, energetic, and unapologetically nerdy — alternating between technical precision, heartfelt advocacy, and occasional irreverence.
• Max Ante: Warm, curious, self-revealing, and consistently probing for both nuance and practical meaning. Value placed on open dialogue and respectful disagreement.

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Conclusion

This episode not only chronicles the exceptional arc of Daniel Ingram’s personal and professional journey but opens a vital window into the evolving landscape of Buddhist practice, transparency, and scientific investigation in the 21st century. Listeners are left with an open invitation: question tradition, experiment responsibly, and dare to bring both extraordinary human experience and open-source wisdom into the light.

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For further resources, referenced websites and texts, see the episode notes and Daniel’s platforms (Dharma Overground, firekasina.org, etc.)

Transcript

[Podcast Producer]

Before we get into today's show, I just want to add a quick reminder that any donation given to our nonprofit mission Better Burma will be shared directly with those in Myanmar who need it most. Any and all donations make such a difference right now. Go to better Burma.org donation if you would like to contribute or stay tuned to the end of the episode to hear more options. With that, let's get on to the show.

[Max Ante]

Sam. Well, hello everybody. Welcome to today's Insight Myanmar podcast interview. And this is Max Ante, your host for today's session. And thank you very much everybody who's tuning in and listening. Thank you for joining us. And most of all, thank you to Daniel Ingram, who we are excited to have on the platform. This is his first time interview with the Insight Myanmar platform. There's been some keen interest for a good number of years actually on the inside me and more platform side, notably from from Joa, who heads up and runs the platform. He he's been aware of Daniel for a good number of years. And meanwhile, of course, Daniel Ingram has already done not only dozens and dozens of podcasts, but quite possibly likely over a hundred. So should you want to go in and listen to any other podcasts, Daniel goes in depth into so many topics and I myself have actually already previously done one interview with Daniel which you can actually go listen to if you wanted to on the Max Ante podcast or the, the, the channel, the YouTube channel where me and Daniel discuss quite a number of topics, but which we won't be covering today as such. So today I'm excited to introduce Daniel Ingram so that we can actually unpack and get to know who is Daniel and what is he all about. Daniel, it's great to have you here.

[Daniel Ingram]

It's great to be here, Max.

[Max Ante]

Awesome. So it's quite possible that, yeah, there's a lot of people listening who may well know you, but then you know a good, a good number who don't. And so the quick little overview on on you and why you'd actually be on a Buddhist or meditation focused podcast channel is that you've actually been a practitioner for a good number of decades in meditation going back into the 90s. And not only have you attended so many retreats during the 90s, but now you've actually become a meditation teacher, you run your own retreats and you've also written a book that you're relatively famous for and also you run an online platform. I'd love for you to just share briefly fill in the gaps as a quick overview on basically why should people have a listen to us now for the next couple of hours and what it is that you are known for?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, thank you for the introduction. Yes. So I hung out a shingle somewhere in the late 90s and basically said if you're having weird meditative experiences, I'll be happy to talk to you about those for free. I won't even take a donation. And somewhere around that same time I started publishing what would eventually become a book called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. An unusually hardcore dharma book book which back then in the 90s and early 2000s, people would print out on their office printers and then eventually it got printed in various forms thanks to Eon Books and Oliver Rathbone. Very grateful for them. And then me and my friend Vince Horn and some other people co founded something called the Dharma Overground, which is an online site where people could talk about meditation experiences and depths of practice that you really couldn't talk about without just getting flamed off of them from the other sites that were available at the time. There was some Western Australian Buddhist thing, I can't remember what else is available, but none of the other sites would really allow you to talk about the interesting stuff, the dark night stuff, the energetics, the awakenings, the deep breakthroughs, the very strange things that could happen that would all rapidly get you banned or moderated or flamed off. Co created the Dharma Overground and that now has, I don't know, 11,000 members or something. I'm not sure how many are active and probably over 160,000 posts or something. It's been around for almost 18 years I guess. And so somewhere along the way me and my friends became kind of accidental experts in the wide range of what people were doing out there, the wide range of what this stuff could lead to. And yeah, I started going on meditation retreats with Christopher Titmous and Sharda Rogel and some other people related to them, first at IMS and then in Bodh Gaya at the time monastery, and then I did a retreat at Malaysian Buddhist Meditation center. That was my first real serious exposure to the intensive practice coming out of Burma. So since we're talking about Myanmar, Burma insight, that's where that really began for me. But I was influenced to start going on retreats by some people who had trained in Myanmar, who had trained with Mahasi teachers, who had trained with other Burmese influenced teachers, such as with Goenka and his ATS on their retreats, et cetera, and were very influenced by the styles that had developed in Myanmar in the early mid-1900s and really become popularized in the west, starting at places like IMs around, I think it was 79 or 80 when Mahasi saidow and his crew came for the first time there and led the three month. And they noticed a dramatic jump in how many people were getting what they thought of a stream entry and deep insights when they moved to some of the Burmese techniques. And so that's kind of the lineage that I came out of and some of the things I've done these days I mostly work on a big project to help the clinical mainstream and scientific mainstream better understand the deep end of human experience. So I help informally organize and support something called the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium and the charity Emergence Benefactors to support it. And we have grants that look at things like what should doctors know about the wild and wonderful things that can happen on the path? And so they care for them skillfully? Or what kind of research is needed? Or is there an arc of insight, what we would call like the arising and passing away to Duke and Yanas, to Peka Jnana. These are fancy terms that some of you probably know, but you know, sort of first big major opening and deep insight leading to some knowledges of suffering, leading to expansive, open, spacious, integrated places where awakening can then happen. And so I now do some formal research into that with some fine people on the teams I work with. And that's what I spend a lot of my time on now. But I still do intensive retreats that are influenced by things that came out of the old commentarial traditions, which are very much appreciated in places like Myanmar by reasonable number of practitioners there and do what we call casino retreats and enjoy doing those and going very deep and doing some neuroscience on those. So that's some of what I'm up to these days.

[Max Ante]

Just to clarify, for a couple, for people, the Cassima retreats, maybe people aren't exactly familiar. That's a candle flame retreat, correct?

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, well, we use candle flames and sometimes just regular lights when we're in Airbnb rentals that won't allow us to have live fire inside. So the idea these are practices that are actually pre Buddhist and then they got expanded, they got included into the standard canon of Buddhist practices and then they really got expanded in the commentarial tradition. So you see a lot of detail in depth about how to do the various Kasinas and Kasina. K A S I N a is a Pali word that basically means an external support to be used for Concentration, for the initial development of concentration. And the idea is very simple. You look at a light source for a little while until you can close your eyes and see some of an afterimage of it. And then you just follow that until you get bored, which might be a minute or might be an hour. And then you open your eyes and you look at the light source and you do it again. It turns out when you do that in very, very high dose, in a well supported environment, you can get into some remarkable states of consciousness that eventually end up looking very much like psychedelics, but usually much cleaner, although sometimes even stranger than some psychedelic experiences, which is a remarkable thing to say. And if psychedelics are kind of like scuba diving or bungee jumping or something, this is like learning to be a bird or a fish, because you actually did it on your own wiring. And if you do it for a few weeks, you actually wire your brain to be something different that perceives reality in a very different way. And we've got a whole website. You can go to firekasina F I R E K A S I N A DOT or and read about all our remarkable adventures and reports and advice and safety warnings, because this is not safe. This is the first talk I give on this retreat that we do usually once a year or so these days, sometimes twice a year for about three weeks. And so that's what the casino practices are. And they come out of the 10 casinos, which come out of again, traditional Buddhism, although pre Buddhist. And so there are like color casinos and so four colors, and then there's four elements, one of which is fire or light. And then there's limited space and limited consciousness casinos as well. And if you do one of these, you end up kind of getting all of them. Eventually you end up seeing all the elements and all the other aspects and all the colors, which is really fun. So they're amazing practices that really help open one up to. To an appreciation of the weirder stuff they talk about in the old text when they talk about realms and entities and energies and all these powers and people having group experiences of the powers and stuff, which all seem totally fantastical until either you do a psychedelic, but then you can say, oh, it's just the psychedelic. When you do a practice like this. You can also, if you've got the tolerance for what it takes to get there, which we could talk about if we want to, but if you have the tolerance for getting the dose high enough and dealing with the strange things that can happen, then you can also get into very, very Magical and powersy territory into what we call the siddhis or iddis. It's Pali in Sanskrit. But also deep stages of awakening, deep jhanic factors and other transformative things that are hard to quantify and not necessarily mentioned in the text, but certainly run into today.

[Max Ante]

Wow, there's. There's certainly a lot there. And it's great that you did give people that very deep overview and a couple of your core websites, even that they can follow up on and. Yeah, and research them. Those links will be included with the text related to this podcast, in case you didn't quite get those down. So you'll be able to click on those, everybody. Wow. So. So Daniel, that, that's, that's what's taken you to where you are today. You've even been talking about the neuroscience, the research that you're doing. And it's like we could even almost just. You can kind of either leave it there even or like just discuss any of those topics in depth. But I actually want to take it all the way back, if that's okay, and go back to. Well, what kind of person would actually be driven in such a. Unusual direction? Because people actually, yes. Kind of like you and me, who take a very deep turn in, in this sort of direction in life that, that's not a very common thing to do. And it would take, yeah, it would take a certain kind of person because I mean, while there are, I hazard a guess, between 500 million through even probably not a billion Buddhists, but it's certainly in the many hundreds of millions worldwide just being a. And it's not just being a Buddhist, but you know, declaring oneself as such, having respect for the Buddha. That's great. But it's kind of quite different in a way to taking this approach, as you said, in an unusually hardcore direction, which is also the subtitle to your book. And so to unpack that it is a certain kind of person with a story. And what's great, actually in your book, which is extremely detailed and it's in its. I guess you could. It's a multi edition. There is like a latest edition which is not for the faint of heart. It's a hardcore book and there's a whole section, actually the last section of the book is autobiographical and. Yeah, yeah. And there's actually a. In that section alone, there's a good almost 140 odd pages about you and your life. And so, yeah, I'd love to take that journey so that people could. Because it's so fascinating about like well, everything that you're currently doing and what you set up, even a website of almost 20 years with many thousands of participants. This is not a small thing for you to have done in the world. And so let's go all the way back to how you began. There you were arriving in the world and if such a thing is even true, because we can't, I presume, anyway, we can't remember beforehand. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, maybe some people can. But there was a beginning. And what was that beginning like for you, Daniel? Let's go all the way back.

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, so beginning at the. Depending on where you want to begin, maybe I should talk about my parents just a little bit. And so my father is a physician. He's a pediatrician and a very stable provider type, I would say he was like one of the engineering students with pocket protector and slide rule in the 50s at a good school and a hard working guy. And he's superficially very, very muggly, you might say, using Harry Potter language to describe someone who really is not particularly philosophical. The exact antithesis of Wu, except that he occasionally sees ghosts. So that's that. And so that's kind of the one pole which I would describe as 95% very, very muggle. And then my mom actually, while giving birth to me, started to get into what kind of looks like insight territory with a lot of spontaneous movements and shaking and stuff that is beyond what you would just expect from ordinary labor and then got into this extremely expansive, light filled, blissful experience while giving birth to me, that sure looks an awful lot like the arising and passing away phenomena that you can get to in the fourth insight stage. As, you know, think day six to eight of a Goanka retreat. For those who know what that's like, A lot of people usually laugh and smile if they've been on enough of these things because that's usually the day when people sort of pop. And my mom would actually go on to spend years doing Goanka retreats and hanging out in Shelburne Falls and going to various places and sitting with all kinds of people back in the day. But that was much later and I honestly actually didn't really know anything about that phase of her life when she was going through it because I was kind of doing my thing and she was sort of doing her thing and okay. But later found out she had done all this very intense vipassana in this Burmese style and gotten a lot out of it. Really appreciated that. But curiously enough, despite that being my mom, I Actually came to this through totally different circumstances in a lot of ways. So my origin story actually begins with someone having some very, very deep insights during the intense experience of childbirth of me, which is sort of interesting and it turns out not that uncommon. I've spoken with a reasonable number of women who, who while giving birth to children actually got into serious insight territory. Something about the intensity of the experience and whatever hormones or chemicals or something are coursing through the body catapulted them into very, very profound territory of really seeing sensate experience with extreme degrees of resolution and sustained clarity, high concentration and equanimity. And then eventually a lot of bliss and light and all kinds of experiences like that. So that's kind of how I began. And then my memories go way, way back. So people are like, oh, you couldn't possibly remember when you were one. Well, I actually can. I can remember like houses I lived in and stuff. So I'm going to start talking about young childhood experiences that for me are already a few years into where my memories are quite strong and verifiable. So. And turns out some people just occasionally have really good memory. I'm not sure why I do. I don't think it makes me particularly special, but it's just a thing. So I started having very blissful and peaceful experiences when I was about three and a half or four. Somewhere in there I would lie down on my parents down comforter, I've told the story, I think before, and just breathe. And I would get into progressively tranquil, blissful, peaceful experiences that 20 something years later I would learn to call Jhanak factors. So Jhna or Dhyana is meditative development factors that are standard factors you might encounter in mappy technical meditative traditions or even just in daily life, as some people do. And they were moderately strong then and it would be 20 something years before I would get into those. And then the real gateway in some ways was flying dreams. So I remember my first lucid flying dream where I swam up into the air. I was about five and a half years old and we moved a lot when I was a kid. About every year or two we'd be in a different house. So I can actually pretty accurately date most of these early memories because of the house they took place in. And so then that combined with a Close encounters course, which was a course I took in fourth grade at a Quaker hippie school in Durham, North Carolina run by these cool people. And one of the courses I took in fourth grade was all about analog synthesizers and about Meditation. So it's like the kind of thing where like squeeze your toes and relax them and feel the golden light coming in and stuff like that. Really, really basic sort of visualizations and guided meditation stuff, which I thought was super cool. And then when I was about 14 or 15, I wanted to have more lucid flying dreams because I really liked them. And so I started visualizing flying before I went to sleep for about a half hour every night. It turns out that was enough meditation tech to get me to my first massive explosion of consciousness and bright lights and my body becoming sparks flying all over the room. And then shortly thereafter, having my first out of body experience. The class classic, lift out, float through the wall, freak out, snap back, buzz and paralysis. And what the hell was that kind of thing? Very, very vivid, very transformative, and very, very different from an ordinary dream. And then I was kind of off and running and I started having all these very, very weird experiences of strange energetic stuff and odd mood shifts and perceptual shifts. And I had no idea what these things were. And it's again hard to, as I say in the book and have said another number of times, it's hard at this distance to sort out what was ordinary teenage weirdness because, you know, teenager versus what was purely meditative stuff. And I don't think there's a clear line or perfectly clean line, but certainly something very odd was going on with me. And my pediatrician father now is very happy that I had the good sense not to say anything to him about what was going on with me because he now admits he would have done something really stupid and harmful to me had I mentioned all the strange experiences I was having.

[Max Ante]

Because he might have even tried to get you committed or something. Is that what he said?

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, you get the idea. Yep, he said stuff like that. So glad I kept my mouth shut. But the fact that a really kind, well trained, caring person such as my own dad might have done something really harmful to me is now part of the strong motivation for the work I do now, which is to help good doctors like him to better understand the very remarkable effects that intensive practice, and sometimes just life or now psychedelics, which are becoming more prevalent again, can create in people. And how the clinical mainstream really has a pretty poor understanding of these things and often violates the basic principle, do no harm when encountering these sorts of things.

[Max Ante]

It sounds like there's a line you're reminding me of one of my favorite authors. His name is Paul Levy, he's written the Wetiko books. Not sure if you're familiar with them.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, I've read the first one.

[Max Ante]

Yep. Yeah, excellent. Fantastic. They are, yeah, he's written, I think three now or something. The others are really also remarkable. I highly recommend them to everybody and Daniel's confirming that. I don't know if you remember, but he's kind of tragically in his story because he does also tell his own story in that book where unlike how you were fortunate with your dad, his dad did commit him, his parents did commit him and it was being committed in a psych ward, as he tells in his story, Paul Levy, that he basically, upon getting out, realized his own definition of sanity, being knowing who to tell.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, that's certainly practical wisdom these days. Certainly. And yeah, over the course of the years, again, I hung out the shingles somewhere in the late 90s and said, if you're having weird experiences, I'll talk to you about the strange stuff. And in the course of that I've talked to, I don't know, at least probably by this point, 200 or so people who ended up committed for what I would consider garden variety beneficial standard insights and the kind of experiences that can happen as a result of getting into this sort of territory, however you get there. So again, reasons that I pour my time, social and financial and temporal capital into figuring out how the clinical mainstream and scientific mainstream and the public in general can do way better when it comes to the remarkable journeys that all of this stuff can lead people on. Sometimes very challenging, very bizarre, as you know, for sure.

[Max Ante]

And I guess one of the things that fascinates me with your early childhood, but, or even maybe more so, teenage experiences is that there's possibly many a good number of people who might be listening firstly, who might find it actually just straight off hard to believe you there could be people thinking that about such extraordinary, you know, like claims of like actually having an out of body experience. Most people, I guess don't actually believe that that's real, firstly.

[Daniel Ingram]

But actually if you start doing survey work, you'd actually find a weirdly large number of people have actually had these sorts of experiences. They just, again, most people don't talk about them and they know why not to, or they write them off or they dismiss them or they compartmentalize.

[Max Ante]

That's where I wanted to go with it is like that's what as a teenager, like, what do you think made you different in that you didn't write them off? What I mean is, so you were actually. Oh, I did.

[Daniel Ingram]

I did write them off at the time, the Mogul part of my brain, hyper compartmentalized them. So the other side of me, while playing things like Dungeons and Dragons and talking about powers and spells and stuff, there was another serious materialist side of me that was super not into all these things and really just filed all these things in a drawer that wouldn't really make sense until 10 years later when I started going on insight meditation retreats and started having these experiences reproducibly every time I went on retreat and that compressed years of occasional weirdness into the daily weirdness and much stronger. And suddenly I was like, oh, wait a second, this is meditation territory because meditation is bringing it on now again, but much more reproducibly and in particular sequences. And oh, wait a second, here's maps that actually describe and validate those sequences. And oh, wait a second, here are other practitioners describing the same things that I've been going through and had no idea what they were. And oh, wait a second, this is not that weird.

[Max Ante]

So that's great to hear that like, what is just fascinating that they were, as the teenager, flying around and being able to reproduce it for yourself, kind of like sounding like occasionally because it was more sporadic across that decade that you're saying as you are maturing into adulthood, you're kind of, by the sounds of it, ultimately dismissing it as actually understandably in the materialist world that we've been trained in, that this is, you know, not real, that this is a materialist world. And so you then, you know, become a man, 18 and embark in your. In your 20s, I presume, given what you're saying in a materialistic, like hardcore, like, everything is, you know, solid. And what are those years like? Like, how. How do you start sort of entering the world of adulthood and what is your view and what are you up to?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, so, you know, there's kind of, I've described like the multiple Daniels and one Daniel is the Daniel that like, loved electronics and got my ham radio operator's license when I was like 11 or something and loved physics and chemistry and math and went to the school of Science and math and was a physics major and then a chemistry major and pre med and all that stuff. So this is one of the Daniels and this is the Daniel that really didn't like any of the other Daniels and sort of wonderful for a long time in terms of being the dominant Daniel, I would say. But then there's the other Daniel who had this extremely weird and complicated and sometimes quite terrifying dream life that I've often said I wouldn't want to subject anybody to. But it was certainly fascinating, if nothing else. And this very strange capacity for lucid dreaming sometimes. And sometimes out of body travels, although again, pretty occasional, until I started doing more meditation and ran into books like Traveling by Alan Guidon. That actually tells you how to cultivate this stuff for people who are interested in that kind of sort of thing. And then so there were the different Daniels really didn't get along and really didn't talk to each other. And in some ways it's only now in this phase of my life where I get to put together my engineering training and my electronics training and my science training and my biostatistics and all epidemiology and medicine and all the stuff I went through with all the weird stuff. Now there's actually a reason to put them all together because of the project that I work on. So this is sort of a new integrative phase for me that's happening in my 50s, really started about seven years ago in some ways, maybe 10 or 11. Eleven years ago in some other ways. And so as I was going into the world, I was going to college and I was running sound for bands and I was a long haired rocker kid. And then I was also in one of the bands I was in or ran sound for. I met a guy named Kenneth Folk. And Kenneth Folk and I discussed philosophy a lot. And I was very much influenced by a book called the Dancing Wooly Masters, which is one of these early books by Gary Zukoff. And it sort of puts together the sense of like Taoist, Zen kind of things and the new physics, the curious paradoxes of quantum mechanics and consciousness and nonlocality and concepts like that with the obvious spiritual stuff that plenty of the people who came up with quantum mechanics were into. A lot of them were actually quite mystical. If you look at the founders of quantum mechanics, they all have their own fascinating stories in relationship to the deep end of the weird, most of them. And even Einstein had a lot of very profound spiritual experiences that he wrote a bunch of letters about to a friend. And so in that time I was in some ways struggling to put these things together a little bit. And reading books like the Spectrum of Consciousness by Ken Wilber, which was very influential on me. And really seeing that there were people who did put the stuff together but really didn't know what to do with it. And it seemed all kind of impossible. And like, who would actually ever seriously practice? Or how would you get into deep mystical territory in a sustained way? Or is awakening really real? These kinds of very understandable questions, just given my experience and worldviews and conditioning. And then Kenneth ran into a guy named Bill Hamilton. Bill Hamilton had trained with, not only was at IMS back in the early days and set up the Dharma Seed tape library, this is the Insight Meditation Society, but also spent a lot of time training in Burma and in Malaysia and with Upan Dita and I think Mahasi Saida and other deep practitioners and teachers in that lineage, Ujanaka Bhavamsa and other people like that. And Kenneth also went and did a year retreat with these people and you could tell it had done something powerful and profound. And I was like, okay, okay, I can see that this has really done something. And then after college I went and ran sound in California for some bands and was on the road and running around in doing other things. And then I came home and started doing some electrical engineering and I started thinking about medical school again. And then I started thinking about going on retreats. And before I knew it, I was signing up for my first nine day and I guess I was 24.

[Max Ante]

What year was that?

[Daniel Ingram]

This would have been 1994, I think. 1994. So August 1994, I think I did a nine day with Christopher Titmich and Charda Rogel and Jose Rezig at the Insight Meditation Center. And that's when stuff got wild. And that was the first time I realized that, okay, these are meditative experiences because meditation makes them happen again and again and again, just much stronger and makes them much more intense. And it was weird that nobody was really talking about them.

[Max Ante]

Okay.

[Daniel Ingram]

And there were other people who were reporting this stuff, but the teachers wouldn't really talk about it. They wouldn't really normalize or validate. They just sort of speak in platitudes, oh, let it go. Oh, don't get caught in stories about it or whatever. I wanted more than that, which is kind of understandable given how strange and powerful these things were.

[Max Ante]

And so had you already, just to clarify, like your education? I mean, you've already, by the sounds of it, done at least one degree by the time you're 24 and doing this first retreat. Is that.

[Daniel Ingram]

That's true? Yeah. I had a bachelor's in English literature and I'd finished my pre med stuff and taken my MCATs. But I was again, long haired rocker kid. Really didn't. Well, I guess I'd cut my hair by that point.

[Max Ante]

But didn't you say something about physics training as well? Or. I'm just trying to.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, I was A physics major for my first year in college, and then I switched to being a chemistry major, and then I switched to being an English major and actually took a lot of religion courses, a lot of courses on the Bible and origins of Christianity and sort of like whatever courses in mysticism they sort of had at unc, which was not much, but they would talk about the Christian mystics and some people like that. So that was interesting in the early Christian Gnostics in some of my courses in terms of.

[Max Ante]

I mean, that's some amazing sort of jumping around at university to kind of get eventually more into the mystical stuff. There you are in your early twenties by the sounds of it, doing all of that without yet having access to Kenneth and these other men just yet. So. And, and you've come out of the. Your teen years in the, in the 80s doing dungeons and Dragons and all that. The interest in magic as a kind of. Just as a playful concept while still having these sort of remarkable dreams that in hindsight, by the sounds of it, were actually magical. But. So you kind of got this. This leaning towards essentially magical experiences. But, but. So I'm just curious, like, there you were at uni, sort of diving into it because you were sort of making it sound like it was more the materialist in you. That's why I thought you might have been doing more science, so.

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, I was. I mean, I took all my pre med courses in the first two years, and then after I finished all that and took my MCATs and did fine, I was like, I don't have to take any more science or math. And I realized that my English courses, particularly, like my English course, my degree was mostly what I would call the poetry of dead British white men. But my favorite dead British white men were the Romantics. And my favorite. And the Romantics, as you know, can get pretty mystical. And I also liked T.S. eliot and poems like the Four Quartets and Little Gidding. And I got the sense that these people had been on a real journey, particularly Blake and some Coleridge. And you could feel it, smell it. It was like, okay, there's something here. I can tell these people have had something powerful happen to them.

[Max Ante]

So you were, you were beginning to get lit up at that time doing those English literature. It sounds like you were beginning to get lit up, that the magic might have been real. There was something. Is it starting to occur like that?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, you could start to feel that these people had really touched something deep and profound and there was some kind of like, homing instinct. And when I would get around that. I was like, oh, yeah. And then like Ken Wilber, the spectrum of consciousness, you can feel there's something under that. And he's obviously a complicated figure, as are we all. But there was like, okay, someone has touched something and it's got a depth to it. In the same way the book the Dancing Woolly Masters by Gary Zukoff, it's like, okay, there is something here that feels deep and true and compelling and interesting that I can also tell I don't really understand very well. And so. But it seemed like it was possible in some way to get to go that way. And then the question is, how do you do that? And then finally with the idea, oh, you can go on these intensive meditation retreats in real centers with real people and real teachers that have hopefully really done these things. And that's how it all began.

[Max Ante]

Really. Yeah. And that's 94 in the States. Yeah. In the US doing the first one. And when you're 24 and so where does that, like, what's the impact? Because you've done your first degree, you're 24, you're the long haired rocker, and now you've done this retreat. What's the impact? And what are you feeling like doing upon leaving that?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, as soon as I did the retreat, I was like, okay, this is for me, this is what I need to be doing. I was suddenly totally hooked. And then that I had already started thinking, maybe I really do want to do something that's not so just sitting in front of a computer. Because electrical engineering has a lot of sitting in front of a computery thing to it, which will be a recurring theme as we go. And then I thought, maybe I want to really actually think about medical school again. So I talked to a gentleman who was on admissions committee who was a friend of my dad's, and he said, why don't you do some big project that really ties your strange and wandering resume all together and maybe do like a year of volunteer service or somewhere. So I wrote all these letters to all these organizations, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders and blah, blah. And the only response I received, and again, this is the days before the Internet. So you write letters then was this little handwritten note from Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. And they said, we can't give you any money or food or lodging or anything, but if you want to come and help, there is a need. Here's the address. That's it. So, and then on this retreat, Christopher Titmous said, by the way, if you want to come to do a retreat with us in India, we're doing a 27 day in January and February in India in Bodh Gaya, and you're welcome to come join us there. So off to India based on this crazy old Brit and saying, come to India. And based ON that was 94. So we went, I guess we got there in very early 95 and wandered to Bodh Gaya and did 17 days of the 27 day retreat. And then we wandered off to Calcutta and spent some time there. And on that retreat also, again, a lot of very profound things happened and I ran into some more teachings and depths and Norman Feldman and Fred von Allman and Yvonne Weir and again Charda Rogel, very profound practitioners. And Christopher, of course, and Sabana Barzaghi. And there was this. Sabana was talking about insight and talking about in this very frank and straightforward way. And I could just feel, okay, this is real. Like she's describing something straightforwardly deep and personal and real. But she's also talking about it in this very, very normal, ordinary way. And I thought, yeah, I want more of. I want to hang out in a world where that conversation is much more the norm. Very, very compelling. And Norman would have these late night sessions where he would read from the Pali canon and he had this old pts editions of the Pali canon, these little red books. And he would read things like the Shorter Discourse on voidness majiminikya 121 or one by one as they occurred, 111, these very, very profound suttas. And I could just feel, okay, this, this is it. This makes sense. This is fantastic.

[Max Ante]

So, so now the magic was essentially becoming real here. You were, you were tapped in. You basically just supercharged yourself by plugging directly into the Dharma in 94. And they were. You went actually pretty much straight away to the very epicenter source, which is Bodh Gaya, which, you know, inside of the Buddhist traditions. Again, how could I possibly know if this was true? But I've been told that as remarkable as it sounds, every single Buddha throughout all the eons is not only enlightened in, in India, but in Bodh Gaya, that there is. There is a view, a view that again, I don't think certainly not all Buddhists share it, but it's just an interesting claim to think that like in a complete eon, which is what you know, that you could kind of call that from the Big Bang to the Big crunch, if such things are real. This is part of actually Buddhist cosmology. That there's a maximum of five Buddhas, five fully enlightened beings and Siddhartha Gotama being the fourth, Maitreya being the fifth one. So. And many eons don't even have one, but this one's got five. And so. And apparently they all pop up, become enlightened under the tree. Under the tree in Bodh Gaia. And I got there a bit later than you. I got there 15 odd years after you did in 95. I got there with. I took my, my then 15 year old daughter. Because while you were in 95, we're a very similar age. While you were there experiencing Bod Gaia. That was actually you were fulfilling my alternate dream. I'm not kidding. I started, I started meditating when I was 20, in January 92. And I took a very, very peculiar different path given I was with the very, very, very lay tradition of Goenka. I became a parent. And so by 95, 95 I became a dad. And all I wanted to do was get to Bodh Gaya, which is where you were. And, but I got there 15 years later with my 15 year old daughter at the time and sitting. The point of this is to ask you to sort of slow down in this part because it's so, so interesting. There I was fulfilling a complete dream of sitting under the Bodhi tree, admittedly a, you know, so called sapling from a sapling because it was destroyed and taken to Sri Lanka.

[Daniel Ingram]

Sri Lanka and then transplanted back.

[Max Ante]

Yep, yeah. Across literally millennia. And, and so the, the bodga that I got to in 2010, 2011, that was, you know, non stop chanting and so many hundreds of people pouring into the Mahabodhi temple. But, but the tree itself, it was like sitting under lightning. Yeah. And I was. Because what we're speaking to is this ineffable experiences of that, that defy materialistic thinking. And, and I felt the same thing. I don't, I'm not sure if on that trip or, or since then you got to go to Lumbini, which is where so called that the Buddha was born up in.

[Daniel Ingram]

I've never been to Lumbini actually.

[Max Ante]

Okay. Yeah. Well, each of these major points, like there's, there's, there's the four main point points in India, you know, obviously where the Buddha was born, got enlightened, the first, the first teaching and passed away. Those are the four. But then there are four other ones, but Lumbini and Bodhgaya are two of the absolutely critical ones. And Lumbini has a Almost a. Like an opposite effect to. For me. And I saw. I witnessed this with others then, Bodgaia in the meaning it's like floating in heaven and it's this completely ethereal, like you've just gone into the heavenly realms inside. Inside the gardens that were in the archaeological site of where they say the Buddha was. Was born, Siddhartha Gotham was born. And so that was in contrast to the Bodhi tree, which was just like being plugged into an electricity socket. That's what it was like for me. And that was my long little treatise on that. What was it like for you? And were any of those sacred sites actually also impacting you with an energetic experience?

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah. So I, you know, obviously, I hung out in. I've been spent about, what, six months or something total in Bodh Gaia, and I had a lot of different impressions of it. Everything from this is one of the darker pits in hell to this is obviously a site of incredible wisdom and profound teachings. And, like, when all the Tibetan monks would descend in the winter and populate the temple in the evening with countless thousands of butter lamps and chanting. It's just absolutely magical, beyond reason. But the most important, important thing, I think, was the sense that this could be done. And person after person I ran into there had the sense that you could really do this. This is a possible thing. And you could feel some of the wisdom that would come off of these people, everyone from Sister Jessie to the guy who ran the Burmese Vihara to some of the Tibetan teachers that came through that I got to sit with and hear teachings from Choganima and people like that, as well as Christopher Titmus and his crew, and just other people who would wander through, like this woman, Katie, who had spent years in Burma and years doing intensive practice. And you could just feel the depths of it. It was very, very obvious. And their ability to help and hold and support and normalize practice and strange things and all of that was very powerful. But Bodh Gaya, also, for me, like, I got very sick there a lot. I was working out in these villages. There was, you know, like, one light bulb in the village that they ran a line off the. Off the, you know, local power poles illegally, and, you know, there's no toilets and got, you know, hepatitis and hookworms and giardia and amoebiasis and all kinds of terrible things. So, yeah, so Bodh Gaia, on the one hand, was absolutely amazing, and on the other, something of a nightmare. And I could describe all the poverty and corruption and terrible things in Bodh Gaya also, equally. But maybe I won't. So just know that it was this extreme, like, 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows kind of place, where beautiful things like the Nipponji Temple and the abbot there, who you could tell had a real love of the Dhamma and depth of experience, and sitting with them in the evening and hearing the big bell at their temple ringing out through the rice fields, it's just. Yeah. And we're hanging out at the Root Institute and getting to read to go through their library because, again, this before the Internet, where libraries were so important and these books were hard to find and people who had real dharma books, it was like, oh, treasure. So much treasure. And these people who had dedicated their lives to service and to serving in some of the poorest parts of the world and some of the poorest, most downtrodden people in the world. This is under the time of Lalu Prasad and the extreme corruption of the Bihari government, which I could also tell all kinds of terrible stories about.

[Max Ante]

But I mean, just quickly on that, like, some people might not realize that the state of Bihar, which is where Bodh Gaya is, it's one of the absolute most impoverished states, if not the most impoverished in an already somewhat impoverished country, one could say. And so it's like the. It's very peculiar that one, if it was so true that the absolute enlightened one always arrives there, that it's a place of such, you know, absolute poverty and the depravity of people being sort of having the roughest time, which is. Which is a very strange sort of paradox. Right.

[Daniel Ingram]

And when I actually, you know, I got to spend a lot of time out in the villages and actually lived out in these villages that were a five miles walk out through the rice paddies. Oh, on that walk out, by the way, there's a little temple to the place where the woman gave the Buddha the rice milk meal.

[Max Ante]

The first meal.

[Daniel Ingram]

The first meal that he ate after his years of asceticism that gave him the strength to attain awakening in the story. And there's a little temple that's actually. You were asking me about sites that made an impression. That site. It's actually a very small little thing that made an impression in a way the rest didn't, because the rest felt like too gaudy or touristed or decorated or popular or something. And this is just this little temple on this little pathway outside of the city that people don't really go to much at all, as far as I know. And it's just to this very simple and profound gesture of the simple offering of a meal, to an aesthetic. To an aesthetic that helped them on their journey. And that actually had a resonance for me that was much more profound than most of the rest of the sites I saw with the huge temples and pyramid like things or whatever. Yeah. So that actually touched me in a way. It's like, okay, there's something simple and humble, and it's interesting. People are still. It's still rice and milk. Like, they have cows and water buffalo, really? And rice. And 2,500 years later, they're still living in mud huts, just like they would have then. It felt like I had stepped back millennia in time. And actually in the villages, these women would sort of rock back and forth and do this chanting. And if you've ever heard Pali chanting, particularly in the Burmese style or some of the other stories, places of Pali chanting, their chanting sounded exactly like it. Exactly. And I thought they've probably been chanting this way for 2,500 years. Like, wow. Yeah. So longer.

[Max Ante]

Wow. I mean, it's extraordinary that you were basically, you said six months just in Bodh Gaya on this. Here we are, you know, you're about a year in or thereabouts into your dharma journey. From 94. It's 95. You spend six months in the place where the enlightenment one awakens. But that sounds like you then also continue the journey in India further than just Bodh Gaya. And what are some of the other adventures that continue on through 95 and I guess maybe into 96 or continue on with the story.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah. So I kind of went out of sequence a little bit to focus on Bodh Gaya. But the actual sequence, just so we get this straight, is we came, we did just a little bit of tourist stuff. We saw that Taj Mahal and Fatipur Sikri and whatever stuff. Okay, fine. Because, you know, we've just shown up in India and then we went on this retreat for 17 days. And then we. Actually, this was my first wife and I. We went to Calcutta, and I initially spent some time volunteering with Mother Teresa's missionary, Missionaries of Charity in her original.

[Max Ante]

Did you just say, sorry, that you were there with a. With a partner as well? Yep. So it wasn't only us. You there with your. With a first wife. You were there together. And so you've actually got a companion that you do. Wow. At the time you're traveling with somebody. Okay. And so then you get to Mother Teresa. Continue on. This is fascinating.

[Daniel Ingram]

So then we went to Calcutta and we. I started volunteering at the original house for the dying in destitute Kali Ghat. And then it wasn't quite medical enough for me. It was a little more hospice y and I wanted something a little more medical. So I actually transferred to volunteering in a street clinic called Calcutta Rescue in the northern slums of Calcutta and living in this cheap little hotel, the modern lodge down in the tourist district where it would like flood in the monsoon about a foot deep in Calcutta sewage we would have to walk through and riding the bus about 45 minutes north to the clinic. And it was quite the adventure anyway. And I got to learn a tremendous amount about suffering and life and misery and leprosy and tuberculosis and all kinds of other things. And then we actually got tired of that and went and wandered Sikkim for a while and got to see some temples and some things that didn't really have much of a dharma component in the way we thought it might. So then we went off to Cambodia briefly to see if we could do some volunteering there. And that didn't work out the way we thought it would. And then we went back to Bodh Gaya. And so then that's where the whole thing of doing how many months was

[Max Ante]

that sort of whole journey with Mother Teresa and into Cambodia?

[Daniel Ingram]

About half of the time. So I was there for a little over a year and about the first half was after the retreat with Christopher was 5 months in Calcutta and then about a month of wandering in Cambodia. And then in the middle of that summer of 95, we did, I guess it was a 12 day or something like that in Malaysian Buddhist Meditation center, which is the first time I got taught by the Burmese people Sado Urajinda and got taught Mahasi noting. And that really was super powerful. Thank you, Burmese insight people. And that is the first time I heard the tape. And so I had. I had all the tape. So the tape is I had all these wild things that happened to me. I had. My body felt like it got really big and it got really small and it felt like all of a sudden my breath was shaking. And then it felt like there was all this energy and I was like pouring sweat and sniffing really fast and then really slowly and it felt like my breath was stopping and I was going down to these very, very deep, deep, deep, strange, like thick, syrupy, kind of felt kind of drugged. Very deep spaces. And then up and shaking and sweating for days and lights and all kinds of adventures. And then I kind of crashed and felt Like I couldn't even sit for five minutes where a day before, I could sit for four hours, no problem in a row. And then the guy played this tape and it was this old scratchy Burmese monk. And they play this when someone is having insight and they want somebody to normalize it and this is their way of doing that. And this scratchy old tape, this guy described pretty much what I had gone through in order over the past ten days or so. And it was absolutely mind blowing that they had mapped the stuff out, that somebody knew that I wasn't the only one, that this is a sequence, this is a path. Like, clearly they'd played this tape hundreds of times for lots of retreatants and they knew. And I was just astounded that there was actually this kind of sophisticated map technology that could predict and describe all of the stuff which I just thought was weird or random or who knew what it was. And then that helped me get to a stage called Upeka, Upeka Jnana, or Equanimity, where everything got very open and spacious and formless and amazing and very even. And then the retreat ended and I crashed back into the knowledges of suffering and proceeded to sort of destroy my life. As I embarked on my service project and we went back to Bodh Gaya and hooked up with the Root Institute and I became darker and stranger and. And messed up all, you know, canceled all my medical school interviews and started caring only about meditation and awakening.

[Max Ante]

Wow. My goodness. A lot there even. Oh, let's. Let's get back to that in just a minute. I just thought there you are talking about on that. I think it was a 12 day retreat and you're hearing the tape and. But you're already sort of deconstructing and getting bigger and smaller. That was one of the things you. And by the sounds of it, there was actually like a Burmese map of actually those sequence of experiences, including the bigger and smaller. Is that. Is that correct?

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, all like, all that kind of stuff. Because normalization for all these weird things.

[Max Ante]

It's really taking me back to my first retreats, which were all. I was just as, you know, like I was just completely a Goinka boy. That was just me from. From the age of 20 to 40 nonstop. Mr. Goenka was. Was it. But straight away, I think it was even on my first 10 day in. In January 92. Yeah. I was getting bigger and smaller and sweating like nothing else. And that would go on for retreat after retreat. And obviously in the Goenka tradition, there is no discussion it's the opposite of what you're talking about. There's, there's not really any, any discussion around such, I guess you could call them fantastical. And for anybody who. People who've had these experiences which actually, you know, as you and I know, are relatively common if you do these kinds of practices.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, yeah.

[Max Ante]

But for people who haven't maybe done a retreat, it just might sound a bit, you know, totally kind of either bizarre or unintelligible. Like, you know, what do you mean by getting bigger and smaller? Because you take. Because I hardly ever obviously talk about this sort of thing. Most you don't generally. So it's just, it was really quite a bizarre experience to be sitting in a hall and then suddenly feel myself to actually be way bigger than the hall and there's like a hundred people in the room and I'm actually, I'm now experiencing, not just believing, but as an experience of myself being a giant and, and, and feeling everybody else as being very small. So the room is suddenly small. All the people are small around me. And I, and I'm trying to make sense of this as a, as a 20, 21 year old, I'm going, hang on. And it doesn't just go away. It's not like just for 30 seconds, it just keeps on going. I'm getting bigger and bigger and it's out of control. There's no control over this at the time anyway. And then myself completely shrinking again and getting very, very small. And then just noticing that it would just sort of happen like a, like an uncontrollable light switch where these sort of phenomena would just descend upon me for no particular reason though. And it wouldn't happen like it wasn't like every second day or it was completely like seemingly random. I wasn't sure I'd start sitting. I didn't know what I was in store for. And then there was obviously across the years, so many others. I just wanted to comment on that because it really took me back to some of those and I had not heard that there was a sequence like a map. Like it sounds like. Are you saying that bigger and smaller is step 5A or something like that?

[Daniel Ingram]

Is it really like that's somewhere around step one to three, depending on how you want to count it. But yeah, it's in the early nanas, in the early insight stages.

[Max Ante]

Yep.

[Daniel Ingram]

These distortions of body and then other weird ones like dropping through the floor or dissolving happen later on in stage five, dissolution. And it's again, lots of predictions that turn out to actually work pretty well. Like relatively sophisticated terminology that have been written down, you know, a long time ago, distortions of body for people to

[Max Ante]

have written down, like hundreds and hundreds of years ago, this sequence. Thousands. Well, there are thousands people have written this stuff down. And then you and me and thousands and tens of thousands of other people to able to reproduce them. And so for people who are, I guess, you know, understandably thinking that this doesn't sound very realistic, it's clearly very realistic because it's. It's been. It's been quantified. And so now back into the story, that little sojourn on the side we're picking up on, you literally said, and then you go back to Bod Gaia for six months to, what was it? Destroy your life or something like that?

[Daniel Ingram]

Basically destroy my life, yeah.

[Max Ante]

When we were talking before about Bod Gaia, you didn't previously refer to that six months as that. Please do tell. Like, what else happens in the state of Bihar?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, what else happened? A lot of. I could go on and on. I could do a whole podcast on my adventures in Bihar about the government beating up the people I was working with. And I was almost there and just luckily hadn't come back that day related to some money that the government stole. And then I could talk about all the villagers and getting me. You know, they literally had us sign contracts that we wouldn't. That our families wouldn't sue them if the government agents shot us during their human bloodsport jaunts on the weekends. Like, I know it just gets. The whole thing gets weirder and weirder, but bringing it back to the Dhamma, obviously talking about suffering is related to the Dhamma and the human condition. But. My time there was a mix of sort of a service project that was nothing resembling successful, but certainly very educational, though I learned all kinds of things I didn't think I was going to learn about how to do and not do a service project, what you need, what kind of resources, public health, like, what kind of support structures you realistically need to actually attempt to make a positive difference, how hard public health is, things like that. But also learning a lot about misery and deprivation and people starving and the terrible choices that people make are forced to make sometimes in the face of extreme poverty, as well as what government corruption can look like when it's literally 100% corrupt, which is a remarkable thing to say. Like, literally none of the money went to anything that it was supposed to go to zero. Like literally zero. It was absolutely wild. To see. And that was fascinating, but also the sense that I had been on the very brink and precipice of the thing I was looking for, and now that was all I cared about. So I canceled all my medical school interviews. We actually got a free ticket owing to some strange things, whatever. And then we got a little something. So I ended up going home and then going to California to talk to Kenneth about Insight and then going back to India and then just decided, I just want to be on retreat pretty much from then on until I get awakened. I don't care how long it takes. That's really all I care about in this world. And when we were back home, I sold most of the meager positions I had and some musical stuff. I really didn't have much at all and took that money. And the idea was do this retreat and then go off and make some money and then we'll just go to Burma and basically practice until I wake up and hopefully my partner wakes up too. And then what happened was day six of this 27 day retreat, I got stream entry, which we could talk about, or what I called stream entry. Christopher Titmouse, not much of a path labeling kind of guy, but it was this line in my life that was suddenly extremely different. And after that, I suddenly was like, well, hey, I have a foothold on this territory. I kind of know how this works now. I kind of get it. Maybe I could go back and start caring about other things like restart medical school and graduate school applications and get more training so I can do more good in the world and. And be of more benefit. Because I had seen what doctors were able to do in comparison to what I was able to do with the level of training and skill I had then. And that seemed much more valuable. So, yeah, we could unpack that whole story in detail.

[Max Ante]

Is it fair to say that you basically put the pedal to the metal and just went for it? By the sounds of it, this is like 96 now, because you go, you leave India.

[Daniel Ingram]

This is early 96. That's it.

[Max Ante]

Yeah. You go back to the States, you've. You've got your partner and you're. And you don't want to do medical school, you don't do anything. And you start, you do more retreats, by the sounds of it, with Christopher Titmous, and then you, you have what you feel is the. Is the stream entry experience. And then that. Because that, in a way, you know, sort of scratches that itch, so to speak, it fulfills that criteria that you were looking for. Of the efficacy of nirvana, of what the Buddha was talking to, meaning that you. It happened in a way because you were maybe imagining that you had to go to Burma and spend the next decade and suddenly, boom, it's within the next few months. And so instead of you hightailing it off to Burma to spend time in the forest far away from everybody or whatever, you actually decide to do the opposite. Now you've actually touched what you were looking for. You decide to go and make a difference as a doctor. Is that what happens next?

[Daniel Ingram]

Kind of. And I'm simplifying a little bit. It's actually more complicated and convoluted than that. We actually, after the 27 day retreat, we actually went to IMS because the person we met on the retreat at the end of it said, hey, you should go be on staff at IMS. So we were actually on staff at IMS for about two weeks in early 1996, until basically everybody realized that the energy of rebellious excitement about maps and talking about practice stages and the possibility of awakening is a real technical thing, weirdly enough, did not jive very well with the practice community and style of communication and social conventions of the Insight Meditation Society staff at the time. And so two weeks later, are you

[Max Ante]

saying you were having a clash with them? Is that what you mean?

[Daniel Ingram]

To put it gently, we very quickly realized that the energetic mode I was in and we were in, and the culture of IMs, which was very much. Don't talk about it.

[Podcast Producer]

Shh.

[Daniel Ingram]

We don't mention that here. We don't talk about that here.

[Max Ante]

Is it just that you were kind of like overly excited like a little kid? Is that what you mean?

[Daniel Ingram]

That was part of it. But even if I was not overly excited like a little kid and just sort of normally excited like a mature adult, which I wasn't at the time, really, but had I even been that, that probably would not have worked either is my guess.

[Max Ante]

So you're making it sound a little bit like kind of like what I was alluding to with the Goanka culture, where very much, oh, okay. So it was even over there. Like, you know, we don't get too weird. We don't talk about too much mystical stuff.

[Daniel Ingram]

That's right.

[Max Ante]

So you're saying that there was. That must have made you feel a bit kind of suppressed in a way. Was it like that?

[Daniel Ingram]

Absolutely. And totally alienated and absolutely flabbergasted. And I just. I couldn't believe it. I was utterly shocked. And anyway, so we left.

[Max Ante]

You were shocked because this was the Very thing that everybody was actually saying was the thing to do.

[Daniel Ingram]

Right.

[Max Ante]

And so here we were. It was like the highest aspiration, and

[Daniel Ingram]

yet you couldn't actually talk about it.

[Max Ante]

Yeah. So then that becomes like this conundrum. This, you know, just doesn't. The whole. How was your faith with the entire establishment of everybody based upon that?

[Daniel Ingram]

It was actually quite shaken. So that began what. That was sort of the seeds that led to a conflict that is literally still ongoing with these people. So I. Now I'm something known for, as a poster child of the counterpoint is the polite way to put it, or the antithesis of their thesis. So, Joseph Goldstein. I've had a number of conversations with Joseph Goldstein about this kind of stuff over the years. And our most recent one was just a few years ago in person, in his house. And he still is like, you should not talk about this. You cannot talk about this. You're advocating that you should talk about this is not okay. He gives all sorts of convoluted reasons, one of the most interesting of which is, hey, if you actually have serious insights, he said, let's say you have real insights and you talk about this, but people can't understand it. They're going to insult you, they're going to get mad at you, they're going to be confused by you. And to insult someone with serious insight is a profound karmic offense. And then you will be ruining their karma for them because they insulted you. And so if it's because of you talking about this that they will end up with this bad karma of insulting an awakened being or whatever. And he said, and if you're wrong, then obviously you're leading people astray in the Dhamma, and that's equally bad karma for you. So however you play it, if you're talking about this and you're right or you're wrong, there's terrible karma involved for somebody. And. And so there is no valid reason to talk about this.

[Max Ante]

And what's your opinion on that?

[Daniel Ingram]

It is true that if you talk about this stuff, there are people who will react badly to it, who will insult you, who will be confused by it, who will freak out, who will react, who will potentially generate negative karma for who knows, him, you, them, everybody involved. So it's not that he's entirely wrong, and it is also true that you can be wrong about this stuff. You can be confused. This has happened to me. This has happened to lots of other people I know at various stages along the way, to various degrees. It is easy to get this wrong and then easy to spread things that are not as helpful or as true or as skillful to other people. So both of the points he makes, I think are at least within the bounds of the argument, correct to some degree. That said, there is also tremendous benefit that can also come from talking about these things, including people finding it normalizing or very helpful. So of the 3,000 or so, I don't know how many people I've spoken with or so out of 30 years I've been doing this now, but nearly everybody finds it an incredible relief to have found someone they can have an honest conversation about their experiences, their adventures. And that is literally 50% of the help that I'm lending them is just an ear and the space to describe their own experiences, to explore the terms they're using for them to think about how this relates to the Dhamma and what you can do that's skillful and how you can relate to this in a skillful way and where you might be able to go next, how to avoid the challenges, how to use MAP technologies in a reasonable way that helps you avoid the pitfalls and perils and helps you get some of the benefits and figures out what to look for next. And so there's this entire other side of it that speaking about it can be incredibly normalizing, a source of social connection, empowering and help people achieve levels of wellness and non damage to themselves and other people that are very, very hard to imagine happening without the ability to have an honest conversation about what your experience is like and what you think it means. So both are true, but I think somehow they're missing the other side of it and I'm not quite sure why.

[Max Ante]

So what I hear you saying is that with people worldwide, so I guess so many millions of people meditating in so many different traditions and actually many, many groups are deliberately doing it for magical purposes, obviously. And they're all able to talk about it, but not usually in Western Theravadan style traditions.

[Daniel Ingram]

Right?

[Max Ante]

So maybe it is in among the people of the east unto themselves, but usually once it gets, you know, taken to the west, people are, and in these traditions there it's like sort of just, there's like potentially an admission that it could be real, but it's sort of silenced. And, and so you're saying that the, what you're feeling and what the feedback you're getting is that people are bottling this stuff up and also potentially invalidating it for themselves and in the, in the worst cases sharing about it and getting you Know, sort of trapped in various ways through people being concerned about them. Yeah. So you're saying that there is actually a, while there is a danger or a so called potential danger in so called karma. You're also saying, oh, there's another danger which is in, in the west, where this is all actually, we'd have to say, kind of new in the west, there's not really a place for this inside of our highly materialistic, reductionist style of thinking and behavior. We don't have really a, a place or a language for this. Whereas in the east, maybe they are able to hold it more easily, is that fair to say?

[Daniel Ingram]

I think they are. I think they are much more easily, yeah. And then. Which is one of the reasons I've decided to focus on some of the highest gatekeepers of what is considered okay and reasonable discourse around this, really, the people who control the Overton window, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, neurologists, the sort of semi priestly class of the university and academy system, right. That have some sort of gatekeeping effect on what is considered normal, sane, reasonable, rational. And I have known plenty of doctors and PhDs and people with master's degrees and therapists that also had profoundly deep insights, had navigated psychedelic and meditative experiences with high degrees of skill, or been really had their lives wrecked and destroyed by these things equally when they weren't able to find good supports or normalization or frameworks, or occasionally, unfortunately, even when they were. And those were not enough. And so I know it is possible for people with high level doctoral degrees and training who are in theory the gatekeepers of these sorts of things in society, to be able to have these conversations because I've had countless hundreds of them. I'm now sort of the unofficial main supporter of an over 300 person research consortium, most of whom have doctoral degrees, who are people who have also all had some of these experiences, basically. So there is a universe in which professional classes and society can have these things normalized with better technical lexicons, better language, better conceptual frameworks, better training, better diversity of perspectives on how to relate to them in ways that do less harm and provoke and promote more good and more benefit, and even get soteriological, which is questions of salvation. Can you actually be saved from some of the challenges of being born a human? And the answer is, at least to some degree, yeah. And these practices can be profoundly transformative and helpful, sometimes augmented by other things from other traditions or ways of looking at it. As, you know, right, you've had your own adventures and things that helped.

[Max Ante]

Indeed.

[Daniel Ingram]

So the ability to blend these things together in a skillful way, to be able to blend these perspectives of what helps and what harms and what truly helps and what truly harms and what is possible, I think is something that eventually the scientific and medical and mental health world can do. And that's the vision that drives me getting up every morning to try to promote this stuff and figure out what are all the things we need to do to make the world better able to have this be less taboo and more normalized and more skillfully supported.

[Max Ante]

Very. Absolutely. I want to. Just because you were talking about medicine and the doctorates and we haven't yet got back to the story of there. You are choosing. We just got to that point where you're choosing to essentially choose medicine and to do your degree and lead you on the path which you were just talking about in present time. But let's go back to what happens next. What happens as you become the doctor. Dr. Daniel well, okay.

[Daniel Ingram]

There's a long way to go before becoming Dr. Daniel we got another eight years or something before that happens. Seven and a half years or so of story. But the next thing. So I come back from India, or we come back from India. I end up getting a job at the National AIDS Hotline and doing some nursing research. That was also a fascinating education. And this was the Centers for Disease Control helping people with the HIV epidemic. And this is in the 90s when it was often a death sentence and the medicines existed, but they weren't that good. And the testing was there, but it had the tissues, still has tissues, and there was a lot of misinformation and got to speak to a lot of people about their remarkable adventures in that side of life. And that was also a fascinating education. I could tell all kinds of National AIDS Hotline stories. And I was also doing some research and in the VA Hospital about people's nursing care, just helping people collect surveys and starting to do that. And then eventually, rather than getting into medical school, I got into public health school. So a year later, I find myself in public health school. But along the way I continued to have all kinds of adventures and insights. So I continued to do that. Year before I ended up in medical school, I was practicing probably three and a half to five hours a day. I did a number of retreats at Bhavana Society, which is a Sri Lankan center by Bonte Guna Ratana in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which I really liked. I actually helped build the temple and frame the windows in their main meditation hall then, and really got a lot out of that. And I continued to make progress in insights. So I continued to have all these adventures and insights unfolding and the deepening of what had started and really gotten sort of tapped into on those retreats I had done in Malaysia and India. And now getting into a lot more of this stuff in daily life while still navigating the job world, which was a fascinating set of adventures and how to navigate the highs and lows and strange things while holding down normal jobs. So that was interesting to learn about and very isolated, though I really only knew a few people I could speak with about this stuff. And again, books were hard to get.

[Max Ante]

But surely there was your partner at home you could talk to her about, but you just didn't have that many other friends at the time, even though you're going to temples and things and you're. Hang on. So is that partly because you feel a bit ousted as well from the IMs in that community? So is that partly why it's feeling like an isolated period?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, actually, in that period, I actually did go back and do another retreat there with Christopher Titmus and. And I'm trying to remember Sharda was there and someone else who was it. Anyway, I'm forgetting now, it's been too long. And again, I had the same thing where I tried to talk to them about insight stuff and all the stuff that was going on. And now I've got maps, now I've got terminology, and they were kind of coming from the sides of the insight meditation world. Really didn't like the maps at all. And so there was a bunch of collision there where they. And I sort of butted heads. And I tried talking to Joseph Goldstein more about this, and that also didn't really go well. And so it was this very strange thing where I'm like, these maps are so helpful for me. They make so much sense. They appear so descriptive and compellingly so, and they appear so empowering. And yet the people I was hanging out with also didn't seem to like them that much. Bhante Gunarottana was sort of a mixed thing because he's Sri Lankan, so he's very traditional monk guy who would talk about the maps but wouldn't talk about the maps. Sort of odd. So again, I wasn't really feeling like I was met in the sense of just having a normal conversation. And during that time, I really started talking a lot with Bill Hamilton. So Bill Hamilton is this guy who by that point had done. I Think six years of intensive meditation retreats and a lot of training with Upan Dita and thought about these things for years. He would sort of talk about the maps, but he also was very strange. And then he, he got pancreatic cancer and then was dying of that. And this is a guy I'd only met once, and I was just talking to him long distance on the phone. And he is a very strange, quirky dude that was, you know, so it was a weird time in terms of finding just people I could have a normal conversation with. And again, it would be, you know, 10 years before the Dharma overground, and I would really find a group where I could really just speak about these things very, very normally, as if they were like, you know, oh, what do we have for lunch? And by the way, what insight stage are you in? That kind of thing.

[Max Ante]

So what is there about these, you calling them maps? What is there, what is there to like about them? And what is there to not like about them? Because you're talking about people having these very sort of opposing views. And then there are those who kind of like them, kind of don't. So why would you like it? Why wouldn't you like it? And why would you kind of like it and not like it?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, so first, to validate the people who don't like the maps. I totally appreciate why they do not like them. So the maps are prone to scripting, to competition, to weird comparisons, to overcalling, to under calling, to chasing experiences that you're not having right now, to overestimating and over reifying experiences you are having right now. So there's a lot of different ways one can go wrong with the maps, all of which are quite predictable and all very true. And on the other hand, the maps can be incredibly normalizing, incredibly empowering, incredibly validating, and they contain this technology of, okay, now you can see this. Now maybe try looking for that in this and then that will allow you to see this. And, and then if you look at

[Max Ante]

that, just to clarify the maps, is it another way of saying it? Is this like a listed sequence instead

[Daniel Ingram]

of it being like a listed sequence, just like, just like levels of a wizard in Dungeons and Dragons.

[Max Ante]

Oh, okay. Because I.

[Daniel Ingram]

Which gets compared to a lot.

[Max Ante]

Right, right. Because I was a D and D freak as well in the 80s. That's all I was doing a little bit of Thai school, mostly D and D. So I get the, the experience levels and the levels. And so instead of it being like a, like a visual multi directional map with all these different coordinates. It's well, are we talking a linear sequence or are we talking like a Stargate map of like you're going to zoom around here and there?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, so in its most basic forms, it kind of looks like a sinusoidal sequence where you sort of go up and then you kind of come down and then you go up and you go way down and then you kind of come up and then you go around and around that again and again. So it sort of looks like a sinusoid, but in the most sophisticated versions of the maps, it looks like a multi dimensional hyperfractal where there's all these different little sub parts of the maps and big cycles and little cycles and you can mix and match all these different directions and factors into something that becomes very, very elaborate and that really only. You're really only able to describe that kind of a map in a way that makes any sense to someone else who's experiencing things with that level of depth and complexity, which again is a doable thing.

[Max Ante]

Is there value in actually drawing that as a visual diagram for people who are visual? Because some people like to read about it, some people like to look at a simple little straight line diagram and other people want to see a 3D map. Is there value in. And have you done that? Have you made like a literal. I have diagrammatical 3D sort of mapish kind of thing?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, I've actually mapped this out in a whole bunch of different axes where I say, okay, here's how this, the insight Stages 1 to 16 affect your sleep and here's how they affect your mood and here's how they affect your energy level and here's how they affect your perception and the center of attention and the periphery of attention and things related to access to the powers and mental health opportunities and challenges. And so if you map and these graphs all look different of how they go up and down, sort of on average realizing there are variants and there are people who like the arising and passing away for most people is really fast and zippy and for some people is really slow. So there's like this, there are these nuances where you actually start getting. There's like the theory and then there's what actually happens in the wild. And you can read the theory, but then it takes lots of experience talking to hundreds or thousands of people to actually get a sense of okay, but here are all the variants. And the variants are complicated. It's like medicine. I mean this is not straight or neuroscience. This is not straightforward. Our brains are very complicated. Our physiological systems are very complicated. The way perception can unfold in different people is very complicated. And so to go from the simple maps, which look kind of linear or sort of sinusoidal, to the most sophisticated maps that can be described or exist, there is a huge learning curve. In the same way as, like medicine, right, you can go by when you have a fever, take an aspirin or something to medicine, which is this huge, ridiculously complicated biochemical system.

[Max Ante]

So is it fair to say, because there's like that. Yeah, is it fair to say, given that there's firstly, a good number of completely separate Buddhist traditions, everything from the Theravanta, Mahayana and the Tibetans and everything in the Zen. So here we are. I just really want to dial it in so people are clear on. This is not only Theravadan territory that you're discussing, but it's more Visudumaga, Burmese style overview. Is that really what we're discussing here? When you refer to the word maps

[Daniel Ingram]

here, it gets complicated. Okay, so to go to the Mahasi thing and the Burmese thing first, it is true that the Burmese tend to have an appreciation of the Visuddhimagga that I think no other country really has, on average. It's not like there aren't Thais and Sri Lankans and other people in the traditional Asian Buddhist world that don't appreciate some of the commentaries which the Suri Magga or the Path of Purification by Buddhaghosa is. It's sort of this sort of summary, like encyclopedia, or where they tried to take the sutras, which are the original texts, which are pretty disorganized, and sort of systematize them into a very logical way. But then there are things that get added. You can debate how useful or pure or impure or traditional or accurate or not accurate they are. But the Visuddhimaga actually comes out of the Vimuddhimagga. So the visuddhimagga is like 5th century. And then the Vimuddhimagga, which is before that, the Path of. So the Path of Freedom by the arahat upatisa, that's 400 years earlier. And that really comes out of the Abhidhamma, which is a few hundred years before that. And that in some ways relates to something called the Patisambhi Dhammaga, which is part of the Kuraka Nikya, which is kind of late textual stuff of maybe 100 or two years before that, which is maybe a little bit after some of the original older Pali canon stuff was written down. So it is this sort of long, convoluted tradition.

[Max Ante]

And.

[Daniel Ingram]

And then the Buddhist traditions, even within, like, you know, Myanmar or Thailand or Sri Lanka, you'll have different people who resonate more or appreciate, you know, more or less the early traditional stuff like the Udana and the Vinaya, which is old, you know, Tipitica or, you know, three baskets, Sutta, you know, et cetera stuff, versus the people who like the later summaries and commentary. And I can see sort of points to both. But it is true that the Mahasi tradition really does like the maps you find in the Visuddhimagga, which again, in some ways, I mean, they actually appear in the Abhidhamma, which is quite early, and they appear in kind of a prototypical form again in the Patisambi di Magha, which I think is even earlier than that. And these in some ways mirror the stories of the Buddha's own awakening and the temptations he went through. So you can even go back to the really old stuff, right? And like, the sequence that the Buddha describes of the temptations of Mara, the ten armies of Mara that Mara threw against the Buddha, and you can actually see the map there. You don't have to squint very hard of saying the Buddha's Path of Awakening kind of looked like what people went through later. It's hardly a surprise.

[Max Ante]

Right? Wow. Well, I mean, just to also clarify that the Mahasi tradition actually also came out of the Ledi Sayadaw. So Leti himself, with his Manual of Insight, the books that Leti was writing, he was trying. I mean, I was going to say, simplify. Leddy's books are not by any measure simple, but he was trying to explain in a slight, somewhat more modern context the Abhidharma and maybe even to some extent the Visuddhimagga. Is that fair to say?

[Daniel Ingram]

So I have not actually read Leydi's original stuff, so I have read like Manual of Insight, but Mahasi Sadow, and I've read some early PTS things and Dama Leaves, some of these early little publications and pamphlets that go back to even older stuff. And the stuff by Nana Tiloko, which I think is kind of sort of in that. Well, it's later than lady, because Lady's pretty early. Right.

[Max Ante]

1920s. He dies. He dies in 1924.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah. And I certainly have read every single thing I can get my hands on by Mahasi Saira, which is quite a lot. Right. Who came out of Ledi Saydao. And so one way or another, what you do find the Things I find in general are a. A deep appreciation that the maps are real, the maps being described in the commentarial tradition are real. And even that you find in things like the Patisambi di Magha, which is Kudakinikya, which technically is suttic, even if late. And then also that there's an. A willingness that you particularly start to see in Mahasi Saydao and then Upandita, to actually innovate and to talk about these things from their direct experience and talk about the experience of them teaching thousands of people and getting to hear real life descriptions of what the sequence looks like in all this nuance. And then you can start to see that reflected in books such as Practical Insight Meditation, which is part of the manual of Insight. And you can start. And the Progressive Insight, which is the same sort of thing where you start to see, for the first time in over a thousand years, serious scholars writing down their lived experience of not only going through the stuff themselves, but also having other people going through it and starting to write it down, almost as like phenomenologists almost documenting in the same way the naturalist did of like the jungles in the 1800s, you know, when the British naturalists wandered out into the world on their ships and things to explore. You see them writing down what people experience on the path of insight and what are the variants and how does it unfold. So you start to get more nuance. And then I started to get my own experiences of this, just talking to thousands of people about what happened on their Goenka retreats or their Mahasi retreats

[Max Ante]

before we get to the thousands of people, here you are, it's the late 90s, and you have started writing or drawing out these maps which are meant to be the. According to what you're hearing and by the sounds of it, even experiencing, meant to be the direction that the map you could say to Nirvana. And yet the people that actually were the main informants, as in the teachers, didn't want to see a map that you felt was accurate pointing towards Nirvana. Is that correct what you're saying?

[Daniel Ingram]

Okay, that is 100% true. All right, most of them. Now, there were a few teachers who appreciated some of the maps and each of them had their own quirks.

[Max Ante]

So they were telling you that you were. So they were just to be really clear here, these key teachers who were somewhat pretty darn famous by then, here we are late 90s, they are telling you that you are actually erroneous and incorrect. That's what they're Directly saying to you, that is true.

[Daniel Ingram]

And that would get worse. That would get much worse. As the decades went on. This has been an ongoing feud between different orthodoxies.

[Max Ante]

Okay.

[Daniel Ingram]

And they believe I'm a sinful heretic, essentially. So I became something of a controversial figure for talking openly about these things. This is a quick way to get ostracized from a lot of mainstream mindfulness, meditative insights.

[Max Ante]

But there is a difference between saying to somebody, hey, let's be quiet about this because it might get people into trouble. That's different.

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, that's the first move.

[Max Ante]

Okay, but that's different from saying you are inaccurate and this is an error. Which one? Is it both or. I mean, are they actually able to point.

[Daniel Ingram]

It began as the first and then it evolved to the second.

[Max Ante]

But if it is the second, if it is actually an error, so. And again, I really do want to get into the nuance here because either there's, I think, at least two ways of going with that, which is either, well, Daniel, this might actually be accurate material, but we feel that you have not got the chops to demonstrate that you've been there. Meaning it's just purely intellectual, what you're saying. That's one way.

[Daniel Ingram]

Which is actually heard that one countless times.

[Max Ante]

Yeah, sure, but that's still saying that the map is actually accurate intellectually versus no. Everything you have here is gobbledygook garbage. You see what I mean?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, you get both. So every variant of these arguments and these insults and these disparagements and these critiques, depending on how you want to frame them, have been leveled at me over the decades. I get tons of emails. Oh, but you know, and I get them on both sides. So I get emails that say, oh, you're obviously psychotic, delusional, grandiose narcissist who read a bunch of books and co opted this stuff for your own self promotion or whatever, or you're totally deluded and lost on the path of insight and you're leading people astray. I get all that and then I get countless other emails and I've talked to hundreds of people that literally said stuff like, your book saved my life. I thought it was losing my mind. These maps that you've brought forward are incredibly valuable. They led me to levels of practice that I don't think I could have possibly achieved without them. Thank you, thank you, thank you. To which I say thank you to all the people who figured them out. I didn't figure them out. Right. This is people far smarter than me, deeper practitioners than Me, Did I experience this stuff? Yes. Did I talk to hundreds and thousands, you know, thousands of people actually who have gone through this stuff? Yes. Have I read thousands of forum posts of people who validate these things in modern times? Yes. But I didn't actually figure these out. These are not my maps. Right. These are old maps and maps that sure, there's evolving work on, but fundamentally is just a modern naturalistic of what's going on.

[Max Ante]

Is it almost like that there's a, I mean we're just having a chat here. I'm not saying this is accurate, but is it almost like, well, who owns the Dharma? Is it a bit like who gets

[Daniel Ingram]

to be the gatekeepers and controllers? This is very much a fight about orthodoxy.

[Max Ante]

Okay. Because it's almost like, well, open source code. I mean, you know, I come from a programming background and you've got a lot of tech in you as well. So there's like the whole concept of open source and clearly a two and a half thousand year old tradition is very open source. It's just there and so, and you could even.

[Daniel Ingram]

There's the whole invocation to speak, to teach with an open hand. Right. The Buddha said, I'm not holding stuff back, I'm teaching with an open hand.

[Max Ante]

Okay. And so even when you start to, I mean, we're not going to go. I want to get back on track with your story. I'm about to go there. But I just want to sort of wrap up this part. Obviously there's a whole, there's so many books on the, on the history of, of the Buddha, on the history of Buddhisms. There's so many Buddhisms and, and, and there's several, you know, very fascinating texts. I'm not, I'm not saying that any of them are entirely 100 accurate and I'm not, I'm not a scholar at all in this area. I'm just a, a curious person who likes this stuff. Like one of them is the Buddha and the sahibs or the search for the Buddha. And in that one, and I'm not saying his. Charles Allen, who wrote that, I can't say that he's 100 accurate because I'm not a scholar. But I did find it an interesting concept that he put forward that modern day Buddhism, and again, this might be inaccurate, but he seemed to lean into. Modern day Buddhism is a construct, a construction across the last few hundred years patched together from, from explorers. And again, yes, this is a completely colonialized, definitely. I mean I even find myself shocked at me saying this because it's like this colonialization of the Europeans coming in to claim, once again, something or anything that they. They claim everything and then stitch it together and say, oh, look what we found. Now, let's just say that for certain, this colonial expansion that went all around the world and sort of dominated and took over and gobbled up and regurgitated, and potentially there's a view that Buddhism is part of that. I don't. I mean, certainly Buddhism exists in these countries way before, clearly, for thousands of years. But what we're looking at here is this now, in this modern context of all these texts with computers and now with AI everything together. And back to what you're just saying about the gatekeepers and all these amazing meditation masters and ajahns and sayadaws and everything in between, who. Who are, you know, rightly so, having a lot of respect. And then we have this Western outlook, which is very methodical, very logical and sequential and having its own. I would say that you are a preeminent example of this sort of scientific Western approach that wants to dissect, which is also an appropriate word for a doctor, dissect the teachings and organize them in a way that makes sense to a very Western logical mind. And yet being told that you're not allowed to do that, back over to you. Is there anything there that.

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, I mean, on the one hand, I really feel like I'm sort of a traditionalist because I take these teachings and these maps and these techniques, and I think present them in a way that, while it has its deconstructive elements of reality testing and what holds up and what doesn't seem to hold up in other ways is very much this is a living, extremely effective, extremely powerful tradition. And here are the sources for that. So I'm in a very funny place in terms of where I stand. And also, like when we go on retreats now, these Fire Casino retreats, which, again, are extremely traditionally Buddhist and very inspired by very old practices, it's like stepping into an alien jungle at twilight. I mean, it doesn't feel like something extremely mappable and dissectable and being open to the wonder and the mystery and the weirdness of it. And is part of the adventure now of the retreats I mostly spend my time doing when I actually do serious practice. And the effects are highly unpredictable and very tricky to map sometimes. And we're sort of, as a group, we come up with our own technical lexicons where we sort of talk about, how do you describe this? What are the kinds of terms for the things that you sort of semi reproducibly run into, but a lot of it is just like, wow. And the colonial thing going back to that. So it is true that contemporary Hinduism is in some ways a reaction to colonialism. Right. I don't mean to in any way degrade modern Hinduism, but there was a sense of. It was a lot of sort of individual local practices, and then the sense of it all being Hindu sort of coalesced in response to colonial pressures. But on the other hand, within Buddhism, you see plenty of intrinsic sectarianism and wars and debates and conflicts between parts of the tradition that very much think of themselves as their own traditions. So if you look at all the early strains of Buddhism that had conflicts, or the Theravada versus the Mahayana, or all the Mahayana versus the strains of the Vajrayana, or even the traditions within Tibetan Buddhism that long before there were any external colonial pressures beyond the Chinese, that you found them warring with each other for dominance and control and slaves and land and stuff. So even outside of. And before colonial stuff, which certainly did all kinds of terrible things, as you can read about in Kate Crosby's book Esoteric Theravada, which talks about how much some of these traditions got the weird stripped out of them as they reacted to sort of scientific age of enlightenment, Normie Protestantism or something, and colonialism, on the other hand, this is the sectarian battles and wars for what is Buddhism and what's real and what's true and what maps are right. And who's. You know, that was going on long before the colonial powers got there. And really all the way back to the beginning, as we saw splits even in the early Sangha, and then shortly after the death of the Buddha, with all these various interpretations and competing textual traditions and what's actually enlightenment and. And then we see the extensions of that today.

[Max Ante]

So this is in a way, just further another example that what you've been doing and the flak, the attacks, the criticism you've been having is nothing new. In fact, that's what's been going on for the last couple of thousand years. Very normal.

[Daniel Ingram]

I totally agree.

[Max Ante]

Yes. Okay. So it's actually, this is on par. It's all fine. This is how Buddhism is. People, actually. And just on that point, like, I mean, I've been doing, because as you well know, my 20 years with Goenka, I was. I was deeply immersed in that. And we haven't had a chance to catch up. And I do want to get back to your story I just. We're riffing on this bit at the moment where I kind of. Because I left the gorinka tradition about 15, 16 odd years ago. I got. I was in it for 20 odd years and then I got out and I've only recently actually mostly thanks to this podcast and me coming on and just recently signed to interview people thanks to Joao's kind invitation. And so it's really pulled me back in, especially after my couple of interviews came out here on the platform which pushed me to start researching again. And this is directly going with what you were just saying because you could imagine with me in those 20 years with Goenka, I thought that he was entirely accurate. Obviously I did because that's why I was with him. I actually. The only way I was able to maintain a view where I would go to India even while raising my family, I'd go there pretty much every year and do a 30 or 45 day retreat and have all these fantastical experiences like seeing entities and beings and being teleported up into blue light. You name it, it was all happening. So it was very real. And so I thought that also that Goenka was the source. I really believed him. I really said. When he said that he had the original legit teachings of the Buddha.

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, they all kind of say that, right? So like that's plenty of the orthodox people who level their.

[Max Ante]

So they. I've realized now because what I want to get to is the brass tax. I want to get down to like just in this little part here, just riffing what we're saying. So I've now been able to unpack that an enormous amount of what Goenka was saying is actually not. I can't say it was erroneous because what do I actually know about the truth of reality itself? But it is not actually accurate as part what was in the Pali canon. Not only that, so one of going. Because I'm just using a couple of key examples because we're getting back to. Are you, Daniel Ingram allowed to declare so called maps and because it's about who's allowed to say what. Because when Goenka started in teaching in 1969, coming from Burma, one of his core methodologies was this word of Sankaras. I'm sure, I'm sure you know about all this where you basically there was an accumulation of Sankaras that had to be eradicated in order to eventually experience Nirvana. You would go through the sequence of all the steps from Sutapana all the way up to Arahant but that would only happen like, like a. You you'd have to accumulate palmies like a video game getting building up your paranis and eradicating your Sankaras. Well the, the trick is that this idea that Sankaras are actually something that is a stockpile is not found in, is not found anywhere in Saudi Ubakin. His teacher is not found anywhere in Utet. His teacher is not found anywhere in the works of Ledi Sayadaw, is not found anywhere in the Vasudhimagga, is not found anywhere in the Abhidhamma. He's not found anywhere in the Pali canon.

[Daniel Ingram]

Nowhere.

[Max Ante]

So there is the, the only places it is found is actually in the Jain traditions and some of the yogic traditions. True. So. And yet there we are. And so there we are. The actual reason to go and do all of these amazing Goenka retreats, the reason to do it is to eradicate your Sankaras. And so that was why I was doing them the whole of bolus. That was the reason. So I'm only using. And I don't want to pull out all the other. There's too many of these examples actually just in that there's a few of them in this one tradition. But that was, that's for me is like a keystone. And I'm only using that as an example here where now actually for all I know, like maybe Goenka was actually tapped in to the secrets of the universe. I'm not kidding when I say that like maybe, maybe Goenka actually just dialed it in and downloaded from the heavenly beings just like the other guys did when they downloaded the Abhidharma. That's, that's. The Abhidhamma was like a, was was. You know, some people say it was like a channeled transcript a few hundred years from the heavenly beings. So is it possible that, that any of these, you know, teachers, maybe they are accessing certain hidden truths of the universe, but to then say them, say that they are the actual teachings of the Buddha, that's a different thing because it, you might be accurate. But to, to point that it's actually coming from a certain source when it's not. And I guess so that, that comes over to you where you know, you are proclaiming that you have these maps and others are. And this is. Let's, let's bring it back to the story. You're kind of unpacking them in the late 90s. We kind of went on a bit of a tangent there, but it does relate to you Know, are people. Well, people are obviously allowed. People just proclaim things and they. They say things and they. But it comes down to what's actually accurate with some. You know, if you're wanting to be part of a tradition, as in, like, a Buddhist Theravada tradition, where does. You can actually pretty easily draw the line with, like. Well, we can point to the source here, and it's hard to argue when you've got sources to point to.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah, sure. Wow. There was a lot in that. The first thing I kept thinking about was the Turton tradition, the people who find these Terma treasures or get these downloads within the Mahayana and Vajrayana tradition. So you have this sense of people who received a teaching which feels to them or is certified by someone or whatever as coming from the Buddha or as being true in the same sense that what the Buddha said was true. And so there are actually traditions that kind of formally embrace that kind of channeled wisdom thing. And there have been plenty of traditions that did that and didn't formally embrace it. They just said, oh, this was original. I mean, someone's gonna hate this. But, like, most of the Mahayana. Is that right? Most of the Mahayana is something that is kind of Buddhisty, but has that much, much later thing, you know, maybe sometimes at 1200, 1500, 2000 years plus after the Buddha. And has that revealed quality where someone felt that this was worthy of inclusion in the sense of what is Buddhism. And certainly Zen has a tremendous amount of that as well. And there's this attention within this of. Is there a perennial philosophy that people just keep rediscovering and redownloading? That is the essential wisdom of the Dhamma that is evident to people because you can see the Dhamma here and now and will just express itself in different cultures and times, the of and places. And how much freedom should one have personally or, you know, to explore one's own unique sense of Dharma transmission? Because it is true that all of my dharma teachers look different. They all emphasize different things. They talked about different stuff. None of them were anything like the same. Even monks within the Mahasi tradition, for example, were certainly not all the same. Or the monks in the Sri Lanka tradition of. They each had totally different styles and emphases and things they seem to be seeing, and that seems to have always been true. If you go back to look at the original followers of the Buddha, for example, or even the Buddha saying, hey, all the Buddhas are kind of different, Maitreya's Buddha is going to Be kind of different from me. And we'll emphasize this, whereas I emphasize that. So there is this perennial tension around perennialism itself within the mystical traditions broadly. And you see this also reflected in like are the Sufis really reflective of Islam or which Christian mystics are heretics versus saints or both. So you get this is not a new conflict within this territory or neighborhood of human endeavors, right?

[Max Ante]

Absolutely. And so there you are. We're going back, maybe it's even around 2000, you've begun actually codifying. I don't know if in secret, but slightly heretically, according to some, you're codifying these so called maps that you are getting from these ancient sources and you're doing retreats and is this. And you're. And you're studying. Are you actually studying medicine at this point and almost completing shortly to become a doctor while also unpacking all these maps. Is that what we're seeing around 2,000?

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah. So I was, I was doing a lot of practice when I was doing my national AIDS hotline job and then my nursing research. And then I got into grad school school in a health behavior health education program. And then I switched to a PhD program in epidemiology. And then I bailed after, in 1999, I realized how badly the US treats its public health PhDs and public health workers in general. And literally somebody at the Centers for Disease Control, which is pretty embattled now, but this was long ago and it was still embattled then. So I wanted to be an epidemiological intelligence officer for a while.

[Max Ante]

Just pause. Can you define that most people. I'm struggling with that one. Define what that is.

[Daniel Ingram]

So epidemiological intelligence officer are the people who go and like chase down Ebola outbreaks and they put on the hazmat suits and they go to all these places and they.

[Max Ante]

Sounds just like you.

[Daniel Ingram]

The Cryptosporidium outbreak that's happening right now that we don't really have people tracking down. That's what they used to do before we kind of dismantled our public health system in the United States at the moment and fired 3,000 people from the CDC and defunded most of public health work. So anyway, so it used to be that we had these people who would like go attempt to control these things and figure out where diseases come from and how do we stop them and how do we educate people and do all that. And I thought that would be really fun for a while until I literally called up the CDC and someone there was like, do not come here. Do not do this. They will treat you like crap, pay you nothing, expect you to work miracles with no budget, and the politicians will drive you absolutely out of your mind, run screaming the other way. So I run screaming the other way and walked across the street and went to the medical school. School in 1999. So I was 30 years old at that point and now find myself in medical school. But I'm still basically taking every bit of spare time I can every spring break and Christmas break and fall breaks and stuff. A lot of the time to still do retreats. A lot at Bhavana Society, a lot at. Yeah, Some just practice on my own and trying to figure out how to go deeper and on the path.

[Max Ante]

Yep. Wow. And then, I mean, then you. I mean, we can say it in a click that, you know, there you are, you're finishing medicine school. I'm sure it was. I'm sure it was a lot.

[Daniel Ingram]

Three and a half years later I finished medical school and then I here, then I went. I graduated a semester early in medical school, which is kind of unheard of, but, you know, sometimes I do strange things. And then went off on an adventure around the world. And as part of that adventure around the world, I went to this retreat at the Malaysian Buddhist Meditation Center. And this was with Saido Upandida Jr not that he was his son, but he was the younger, you could say the younger. And they just both happened to have the same name. And so he was often called Junior to distinguish him from the older Saida Upndida Sr. Who was much more famous. So I sat with Saida Upandida Jr. Or the younger, for three weeks. And that's when I got really the insights that I have been looking for the whole time. That was when the whole thing really came together.

[Max Ante]

This is like 2000.

[Daniel Ingram]

This is 2003. This is April 2003, the first few weeks of April in 2003. And that's when, from my point of view, I found what I was looking for in Vipassana. Like everything. So this is where the orthodox people listening to this are going to be prepared to hear fingernails on a blackboard. But our Hatsheps is what I would call it. So this is the fourth path. This is a very high claim. This is very controversial. This freaks people out. But for me, what happened was at the end of the retreat, everything just basically became in tune with itself. Everything saw itself simultaneously as immediate, utterly ephemeral, absolutely natural, knowing itself where it is all the way through. And suddenly every moment in its transient, natural, inevitable Causal, impersonal, straightforward, clear unfolding was the natural expression of the logical endpoint of Vipassana. So that's been true ever since then, how many years later we are? 20 something years later. And that's still true for everything. So it was a durable shift in perception and interpretation at the sort of rope snake level. So this is an analogy from traditional Buddhism where like you're wandering in a jungle and you see a snake and your whole body reacts as if it's a snake. And ah, your heart rate goes up and oh, you back up and oh, snake could be dangerous, maybe it'll kill me, right? And then you look more carefully and you're like, wait a second, is that a. Oh, that's a rope. It's just an old piece of braided rope that I thought was a snake and. And now you see it as a rope. It's not an intellectual change, it's the rope snake. Existential pre processing. What is it? Level. Well, that did that for everything. So everything I thought was a self, a doer, a knower, a controller, a beer, a continuous entity, a separate something that seemed to be out of phase and observing everything and doing that could sort of go somewhere or do something or be reborn or any of that, that just was seen through. And now everything just is happening as it is where it is. So it proved for me that Vipassana could actually do something like what it would do. The problem is it just didn't perform according to the 10 fetter map. I can still get irritated. For example, you're not supposed to be able to be irritated if you're an arhat. But okay, maybe the Buddha got irritated all the time though, if you read the old text. But, but it's another thing and they hate that.

[Max Ante]

I want to go into just briefly, you know what you're saying about even using exactly the exact analogy that you're pointing to the rope and the snake. Because I mean that's, that's not necessarily even just something in, in Buddhism that's like, I mean maybe many of us, I'm pretty sure most humans have had an experience, you know, something in that direction. You know, whether it was like a little, a little black stone that they thought was a spider or yeah, certainly we've seen something. But. But what? But what I hear you pointing to in that example is a very essentially out of control, visceral fear response, like a fear freeze or flight. There's something like this, there's like a response where you see the scary thing and maybe it actually is the scary thing, but maybe it's even not. It's just like a rope. And for maybe a few seconds, you thought it was a scary snake.

[Daniel Ingram]

Now, except for this was my whole life, I had thought that there was a separate subject, and now it's impossible to see that there is a separate subject.

[Max Ante]

Okay, but. And I guess that's another aspect to it. Okay, so you're dialing in maybe a different aspect to that. Because what I'm just wanting to address is the fear response to either a snake or a rope that I think is a snake. So whatever it is, like, it's like, oh, because I guess what. What I'm. What. What I'm picking up here and what I've always had a sense about this definition, which, which you've taken us to of the. Of the hour hunt, is that they essentially that they wouldn't be afraid at all whether it was a snake or a rope. Is that not the case? Isn't that what that would be for the Arahant? They would not actually experience the fear.

[Daniel Ingram]

Okay, so here we get to the 10 fetter model versus what I actually experienced. And this question, just to frame it, has split all of Buddhism since very early on, very early on, what is Awakening? What does it actually lead to? And the Mahayana and the Vajrayana and all of their schools have a totally different view on this. And the question is basically, do you eliminate certain emotions or do you not? And so if you believe the Theravada, there's something called the Ten Fetter model. And in the Ten Fetter Model, at stream entry, you eliminate personality belief, the sense that you really believe you are a continuous entity, even if you may still sometimes seem to experience yourself as one. You eliminate the belief that it's purely rites or rituals rather than clear perception that will get you to awakening. And you remove skeptical doubt. So those are the first three, that skeptical doubt in the path of the Buddha that it could lead to awakening. So that's what stream entry does. And then the Second Path is supposed to attenuate attraction and aversion, or greed and hatred, basically. And then Third Path is supposed to entirely eliminate them. So you. And Third Path is the third stage of awakening. You would technically not be able to hate anything or to become aroused or to have sex or like. In theory, likes and dislikes all dissolve.

[Max Ante]

Or fears as well?

[Daniel Ingram]

Well, no, not yet. So it's only the fourth one. So the fourth one, Fourth Path then eliminates the remaining five. And the remaining five are restlessness and worry. So that would be fear and restlessness and then attraction and identification with attraction to and identification with the formless realms and the formed jhanas. And then something called conceit, which is the sense that I truly am. It's translated as conceit, but it's the sense I truly am a subject. I truly am a continuous separate entity. Controller Beer. And then something called the last veil of unknowing, which is tricky to find formal definitions of actually in the text, but. But anyways, just assume that once you get there, you will see it and know what it is, or you won't. So then that's the formal definitions of these things. And then obviously the orthodox people do not like that. I, through relentlessly Theravadan methods mostly ended up with a conclusion that's more validating of say the Mahayana and the Mahayana and the Vajrayana basically say emotions may still arise like fear, like grief, like sadness, like sorrow, like desire.

[Max Ante]

Agitation as well.

[Daniel Ingram]

Agitation, exactly. But they see themselves exactly as they are in that particular insights way. So they see themselves as just naturally unfolding, utterly transient, ephemeral things that know themselves as and where they are arise inevitably, impersonally, in a sort of a way that means there's no separate thing that can say, this will arise, this will not arise, this is me, this is not me. Instead, they're merely phenomena unfolding and rolling on all the way through, everywhere, all throughout experience, the heart, mind, body, system and everything around it. So that's what happened to me. And then when I said, okay, it looks like Theravadan methods actually lead to something that doesn't really line up with Theravadan descriptions that basically unleashed a firestorm of orthodoxy on the one hand, and a whole lot of people saying thank you. That so matches my experience because I know a bunch of people who think they have woken up to this level and that's what they experience. And I've actually, in monastic contexts had backroom conversations with other extremely deep practitioners and some people who are like serious meditation teachers and some very high senior monks that in private will say, actually, you're right, that's what actually happens. And the rest is if I can

[Max Ante]

just jump in, because to get very technical on this point, and I appreciate very much all these points, you're, you're clarifying what I'm hearing. Clarification. I'm gonna say it back to you that you said through Theravadan maps in a very, you know, essentially Visuddhimaga, Abhidharma, Burmese, extremely technical methodology. You experience what you are defining as this breakthrough into what you're referring to as this Arahant ship. But the definition you're calling upon is actually not the Theravadan 10 fetters. That would include the complete eradication of agitation and fear and everything else. But you're saying you're referring to the Arahant ship as. As more Mahayana style. So that would actually clarify. So, or.

[Daniel Ingram]

Or you can also look and find some places that mirror this within the canon. So the traditionalists don't like some of this point, but you can look at examples such as Udana110 behe of the bark cloth sutta. And this is where this mendicant, who's very, very ready for insight, has been seriously practicing and trying to wake up and whatever comes to the Buddha. And the Buddha's on his lunch break, and the guy's like, hey, Buddha, you got to teach me the Dhamma. And the Buddha's like, nah, I'm on my lunch break. And he's like, no, Buddha, you got to teach me the Dharma. He's like, still on lunch break. Did you not hear that? And he's like, no, you got to teach me the Dharma. So he's like, okay, I'm going to give you the super short Dharma download. And the seeing, just the seen and the hearing. Just the heard and the thinking. Just the thought and the cognize, just the cognizant and the feeling. Just the felt. Basically, that's it. Bahia of the bark cloth hears this and wakes up and then he's killed by a cow. So, but the point of the Udana sutta is this is very direct, extremely literal. And what you find within the six sense doors and thought and experience is just the sense doors themselves. You don't find a separate, independent entity. And when you realize that that is the essence of the thing, this I 100% agree with. Or you can find places that hint at this. So if you look at the lives of the arhats during the time of the Buddha, they would still grieve their friends. They would still get into levels of pain they couldn't handle. The example being Chana, who was. Whatever illness he had at the end of his life, even though he was an Arhat, was so painful that he decides to kill himself with a knife because he's like, this is just suffering. There's no point to this. I'm going to use the knife. And the Buddha was like, okay, basically. So you do find within the humanity of it. If you read the stories carefully, they are. You can very easily and very reasonably construct an argument that says even as much as the Theravada advertised, the one thing in practice, they also seem to acknowledge something more human, something more direct and immediate, something about awakening that is different from the Pure 10 fetter model as it is often presented. And so the notion that this is also straightforward even within the Theravada, very core textual stuff, this is. It's not straightforward. And anybody who thinks it is is just not reading or reading extremely selectively.

[Max Ante]

Well, I want to jump in and give you a few points and actually just a little bit of a disagreement on. On one area because I've been, you know, since we had. Yeah, and I think you're. You're cool with that. Like, because since we had our first interview, which you can listen to on The Max Anti YouTube channel, which was in 2020 during COVID and we went through this actually in detail. So we're not going to do a big rehash there. But I did. Since then I re listened to that and unpacked and you told those same stories. And for sure there are some of these stories in the Pali canon that are definitely, you know, a bit odd, a bit curious. Like, like. Like that one with China where you're saying that only. Where the Buddha says only an arahant can use the knife to. To commit suicide. This is very odd. And that's the one example. And it does sort of point to what you're saying, which is like, oh, well, why would he. He's an arahant. And arahants are meant to be able to bear any form of agitation. That's according to the 10 fetters. And yet, you know, apparently also in our hunt, he is, you know, they, they are so detached that they can also essentially commit suicide in that particular example. But the other point where I'm disagreeing,

[Daniel Ingram]

it doesn't actually say they're so detached. So you actually don't find that particular phrase. That is a much later sort of an ideal.

[Max Ante]

I agree. So that I'm putting words in where it's not there.

[Daniel Ingram]

Or even the life of the Buddha, the life of the Buddha when he was in such agony from the pain that he said even the deepest jhanas I can get into. If you read the Buddha's last days, which was one of the great suttas very early on, it says from whatever intestinal malady he had, he said even in the depths, the deepest jhanas I can get into, I Find no relief from the suffering.

[Max Ante]

No, for sure. And I agree that there's even. And we did discuss the body there.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah.

[Max Ante]

Six years ago we had that discussion. And there is at least an idea that did the Buddha being the one to claim and eat the final point off meal that was sort of poisonous, instead of declining it, he ate it. And that's an odd thing to do to kind of end one's own life at 80. Okay, so these two examples, this is why I'm giving you a pass. Like, I'm agreeing with you. Like, okay, these are definitely odd. And there's a couple more of these that you have definitely indicated. But the one I don't agree with and couldn't find was when you spoke about the sadness and the sorrow of the Arahant's morning, I actually just could not. I went searching, and especially now with AI, we can do these searches through the Pali canon. There was no example of any of the Arahants feeling grief and sorrow. Whereas. Whereas the other points you're making. So I guess. And I didn't. I mean, we've been having such a great discussion. I just wanted to have you say those bits and have me say those bits.

[Daniel Ingram]

Yeah.

[Max Ante]

Because what. What I want to ask you, because people just trade, you know, you're right, you're wrong, and, and there's the Pali canon, where any one of us I'd love people listening to go and actually not believe me, nor necessarily believe Daniel. Go and do your own research on all of these points. Please do that. You know, you've got Daniel's amazing book. He's put all of his attention and time into there and, and the forum there. And there are other forums online and there's, there's the AI now where you can, you can critique and you can even pull apart the transcript that we're talking, plus all the other transcripts that are up on Insight, Myanmar and all the other podcasts, and you can construct your own map. And all these things we're discussing. It's quite. We have more tools now than we've. Than we've ever had.

[Daniel Ingram]

That's very true.

[Max Ante]

Yeah.

[Daniel Ingram]

Vinaya, for example, like the Buddha got so irritated by the Sangha that he left for the whole, you know, the whole rains retreat. I think you see, that's another interesting.

[Max Ante]

Yeah, that's one of the other interesting points there. Like, and again,

[Daniel Ingram]

did you look in the Suttas of Vinaya?

[Max Ante]

Yeah, yeah, I've seen that. And actually one of the forums, I mean, there's, you know, there's definitely the, the Dharma overground which you can discuss. There's also, there's so many of these. But another one that I like to use is called dharma wheel.com and that's a, that's a, that's a Taravadan. And you know what's cool with these? I. You've actually got the original texts that you can. I'm talking to anybody listening. You can study those yourself. You can join a study group with people, you can go and speak to a teacher. You can go and use multiple forums and post and you're going to get all this feedback and criticism or, or agreement. You can ask questions in the forums from. That's from real people or you can take the same question. This is what I also do. Take it to the AI, run the question in the AI it can. And then you can actually use multiple AIs, use two or three of them to cross reference each other and critique each one's response. Anything that Daniel's saying here or me, you could, you get the AI to critique it. Then you, you get that and you put it in the forum and you get the forum piece people to critique it. And then you could even go. So there's so many ways now that you know, as Daniel's discussing. Well, he. None of us had access to. No. Not even five years ago. And so because this has been such an interesting discussion, I guess there's so many more points and there was even like another 20 years that we're not going to have time to go through. But I guess out of my own interest here on where I sit personally and I'm putting this to you as a, as a question and potentially for other people who, who are also, let's say in the Torahvartin, you know, lexicon and traditions of which there are many. But while I personally, and I'm gonna be asking you directly is, you know, I've known you and consider you a, a friend for all these last time. Well, I think I first messaged you actually 10 years ago. We've actually had correspondence going back 10 years now. Yeah, it's quite incredible. And you've been extremely generous with me. I really appreciate that Daniel, so much for all those times. But in my own, as you well know, with my own story where I've had a complete disillusion of identity and yes it was. People can listen to my, my second interview with Joa on the platform where I go into that and, and it did come from my, my first ever. I, I never had any kind of psychedelic experience until I was 43. I was being a very good Dharma boy and following all the precepts and never did anything until after I got out of the Goenka tradition and just basically lost faith with being dogmatic. But that led to an experience of essentially a near death experience which. Where my identity was no longer able to operate and it ceased to be. And so I knew a state that I was actually then able to access on a daily basis through meditation. So because I kept on doing my two hours every day and I'd go on retreats and, and I'd have many other experiences, but there was this persistent, not, definitely, not all the time, I did not abide in it, but the cessation of congealed identity around my. My belief in who I was, as in like any sense of being able to claim ownership of absolutely any experience or sensed or evaporated, I was not able to maintain it. And so that became a recurring enough experience, but I did not personally because of potentially, I'm putting this to you potentially because of my deep Theravadan conditioning. I did not dare label that nibbana, let alone sutapanna or any other particular sort of level in this sort of video game of terror Bard and whatever it is. And yet so, and that's part of the question I'm putting to you or just on your opinion, but then because the other one, the other part two of this question is why I don't make that claim. And my, my experience today is that I still do definitely experience agitation. I do still experience fear. And so I, and this is what I'm putting to you, I guess I. Maybe I am either romanticizing this ideal that one day I will have this transcendental experience, which I imagine to be the Arahant, where no matter whether it's rope or the rattlesnake that I saw on your property coming directly for me, and I just am able to literally not fear. So this is actually an enormous goal for me that I still reside in this very fallible human experience, aspiring for a state which would not have me tremble at anything. And yet I've still had complete identity dissolution over to you. What do you make of that?

[Daniel Ingram]

So one of the things I actually just. You can look at my X or Twitter or whatever account now. And there was someone who was calling me out for my claims yet again. And I said, you know what I would love is you all send your champions. You all who believe the 10 fetter model literally like it is, and you send your champions who you believe have truly extirpated to the root all of these defilements of mind and have no more defilements or the possibility of fear or lust or anger or anything arising. Bring us your champions to the world of neuroscience and behavioral science, and let us study them in controlled conditions and let us see what we find. Because the conversation of people talking at each other or past each other about these ideals and dreams and orthodoxies is interesting, but it doesn't go anywhere. People seeing for themselves whatever it is they're able to see in their own practice certainly goes somewhere for that individual. But I have this dream with modern neuroscience, with behavioral science, with the ability to subject people to various stimuli and see what actually happens to them in various circumstances, if they're willing to be studied for the public good and the benefit of the Dhamma. And let's see, let us come and see, Let us do the experiment. And so if you out there in listener land think that, you know people who really truly have dissolved, you know, maybe the first five fetters, maybe they're an anagami, or think they have dissolved, all 10 fetters are a hot ship. And you think that performs in the traditional way, and you know these people and you can convince them to be studied by us. Let's go and let's actually do the science. Let's see what is real in the highest paragons that the people out there are confined and put forward who were willing to be studied. And let's see how the brains react, how their amygdalas and their fear centers react, how their arousal centers and bodies and stuff react to various stimuli and conditions. And let's see if we can show that there is something structurally, physiologically different in the predicted ways, in the parasympathetic drive and the vital responses in all skin galvanic response. And if there is truly no fear in any circumstances, that we can come up with truly no desire in any circumstances, we can come up with truly no anger in any experiences we can come up with and subject them to within whatever irbs will reasonably allow for such a high claim. Fantastic. But I am to the point in the conversation where that's the only thing that interests me. Now let's get this done. We have the technology, we have decent methods, we have an honest debate among honest people who honestly disagree based on their experiences. Let's take a new epistemic approach to what is true, and let's see if we can actually really sort this out. This is my challenge to the world. If anybody's willing to take us up on it, let us know.

[Max Ante]

All right. Boom. That's it.

[Daniel Ingram]

That's it, Daniel.

[Max Ante]

That's it. We're calling it a rat. You got the final word. How was that?

[Daniel Ingram]

No, it's the final question. It's the final, like, invitation, Right? And hopefully it's not final, actually. Hopefully that will then be a continuance in a conversation that will be helpful and generative and definitive. We dream.

[Podcast Producer]

Thanks for taking the time to listen to this episode of Insight Myanmar Podcast. Before we go, I want to call attention to a regular series we've been producing on this platform called Navigating a Minefield. The series was launched in response to the most recent Landmine monitor report, which found that Myanmar has recorded the highest number of annual landmine casualties for the first time since reporting began. Navigating a Minefield centers on the people at greatest risk as well as survivors of traumatic attacks, and features Burmese and international voices offering crucial contact on landmine use and explosive remnants of war across the country. Produced in cooperation with our media and humanitarian partners, this series is intended to support risk education, raise awareness, and highlight our shared responsibility to end this ongoing threat to civilians. You can find more information about the episodes along with risk education resources on the Insight Myanmar website. Thank you again for listening and joining joining us in this effort to keep the focus on Myanmar and its people.

[Max Ante]

And

[Daniel Ingram]

what about yara nangaya?

[Max Ante]

We got a basay and besayanang and yaranaya da yarana.

[Daniel Ingram]

But yarana.