Episode Details

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(0-10 minutes)

Stewart asks Francis: What does meditation mean for you?

He says that being in the present is a bad response because it doesn't accurately reflect what the present is. The future merges with the present. He says you can continue to meditate when doing something mundane like thinking, planning, or abstract reasoning. He says that state of meditation is being connected to source or flow. When you are connected to everything else. This is the state of meditation. He says that meditation is about fully expressing yourself in the cosmos. Meditation is not anti-thought Subscribe

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Stewart responds by saying that sounds like a non-linear reality. Francis says that there was a time when he meditated for 8 hours a day. He did the Santiago de Camino in Spain and started to use headspace, he took an art class in Florence and then continuously increased the time that he meditated until it was eight hours a day. He ended up in monasteries in the east, particularly in Thailand.

At some point, he realized that this meditation practice had permanently shifted him and he could either bring it into his daily life or he would stop living his life and end up in a cave. He said that spending time in Buddhist monasteries leads him to realize the falseness of secluding yourself in a monastery. Practice is meant to be lived.

Francis talks about the Buddhist ideal or messiah, the bodhisattva. He explains that the first movement of Buddhism is realizing that the world is suffering. The second movement of Buddhism is that through meditation we can experience the unity behind all duality. He says that meditation is an act of living death. Its the act of getting used to death before it happens. He says that this consistent with Stoic forms of meditation. He says that if it ends there, then you have a pathetic religion. Francis says that its great that Buddhism doesn't end here and that the third movement of Buddhism is coming down from the mountain and sharing what you have found and fully expressing yourself.

Francis gets into the idea that people who are fully expressing their truth are what the Buddhists refer to as Bhoddisatva's. He says that Donald Trump is a Bhodisatva, that Genghis Khan is a Bodhisattva. That horrible historical figures are more enlightened than your average person who is not fully expressing their own truth or dharma. He says that people like Martin Luther King or other "good" historical figures are also enlightened or bodhisattvas. All of these people, both "Good" and "Bad" fully expressed themselves. They took a position and risked being wrong.

From here Francis gets into the historical evolution of Zen and how it is a combination of Buddhism and Taoism that merged in China. He talks about the great historical loss of great temples in China under Communism. He discusses the Yin Yang symbol of Taoism and how it represents duality and how duality becomes one. Male and female are one. Good and evil are one. Past and future are one. They are both present. We are all playing our part.

(10-20 minutes)

Stewart talks about how Enlightenment itself is misunderstood and that the actual state of enlightenment is not a concept but a way of being or an experience. He says that this whole comparison of enlightened beings kind of misses the points because each experience of enlightenment is a unique and subjective awareness of unity. He expresses that talking about enlightenment and comparing different historical figure's state of enlightenment gets into murky territory. He questions the validity of comparing different states of enlightenment.

Francis responds that validity itself is a dogmatic word. It implies that there is one right way to do things, a scripture or a code that w