(Why Mindfulness Isn't Enough)

Hi, everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald. All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hi, friends. Right at the start here, I just want to say that I'm sending lots of love to all those communities who've been affected by the devastating floods caused by Hurricane Helene, and in particular, my many friends in Asheville, North Carolina. Friends in Asheville, please let us know what we can do from afar to help, and we'll do what we can. Our hearts are with you. Our hearts are with Black Mountain. Oh, Black Mountain. Our hearts are with Black Mountain. And one way to help is through the North Carolina Community Foundation. That's NCCommunityFoundation.org, and you can easily follow the links to the Hurricane Helene Relief Fund. And let's extend our loving hands and hold each other close in precarious times. So, remember way back when, when episodes of The Emerald were only an hour long? Maybe some of you even remember way back before that when they were like half an hour long, but that was a long time ago. Well, I did a little parenthetical episode here on a subject that I touched on in the previous episode and wanted to flesh out a little bit more, and I hope you enjoy it. And a couple things just quickly here at the beginning. First, letting people know that my year-long course, The Mythic Body, is starting up again on November 1st. And a good number of people have applied, and as many of you know, there's a waiting list. But I just want to encourage people to not let the waiting list deter them from applying, because things move and things change, and it's good to apply. And you may find that if you apply, you are in fact able to take the course. 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So, if you've been a listener of the podcast for a while, you've heard me talk a couple of times about modern mindfulness practices, and how the practice of simply sitting with our thoughts in the modern world may not be sufficiently addressing the state of the modern mind. In the previous episode on guardianship, I said this, in a modern world of fracture and fragmentation, and a disorienting deluge of voices that push and pull and hold our attention for hours at a time, it's not enough to simply freeform sit with our minds and see what shows up. The practice is to architect a mandala, to breathe the dust off of energetic relationships that exist but need constant replenishment, to establish living relationships that can adorn the consciousness even as they guard it. And that was drawing on an older episode, called When Bread is No Longer Bread, the context episode, in which I said this, the Buddhist mindfulness practices of simply sitting and observing arose themselves in context, the context of a deeply regimented society with clearly delineated roles, and a ritual life that involved intricate daily practices of feeding, honoring, bathing, chanting, singing. They arose within an overarching worldview that was populated by animate beings of forest and spring. The earliest of Buddhist texts, as Sam van Schaik explores in his book Buddhist Magic, speak of such beings and the incantations to appease them. In a world of such deeply constructed context, to practice simply sitting as the clouds of thought pass by makes sense. There's a balance, one could say, between the contextual and the fluid, and within that balance the mindfulness practice is ultimately inseparable from the context in which it sits. Fast forward 2,500 years to a postmodern world in which the mind is basically a jumble of disconnected and decontextualized floating rubbish. In such a world, simply sitting with what-is may not be enough, because what-is has been wrenched from its original context. In an age of social media addiction, frenetic discourse, talking devices, instructing people to simply sit with what-is might be akin to asking them to sit in the middle of a category 5 hurricane of crap. It's understandable what the Buddha was doing. Focus too much on ritual, and that ritual might get empty, might become over-reliant upon external structuralism. The Buddha was responding to a society that had become extremely preoccupied with elaborate ritual. But in a modern world, in which we have no such ritual, in which minds are already untethered, jumping right to deconstruction as opposed to construction may also have its issues. Specifically, there is deep value to a mind that understands where it is in time and space, that understands the importance of the local beings of the watershed and its dependence upon those beings for survival, that is constructed like a medicine wheel, along clear directional lines, that has an architecture to it that can withstand a world of media freneticism and agitated discourse. So that long bit is what I said in the context episode, and I want to fill these thoughts on mindfulness out a bit, to give them some life, some body, some breath. And the first thing I need to do, of course, is make sure we get out of a kind of for-or-against discourse. Like, it's possible to love something, and to have critiques of it, and offer those critiques in the interest of vibrant discourse, so that something may renew and replenish itself, and so that hidden cultural tendencies might be recognized and repatterned. So to be really clear, I'm not against mindfulness. I'm not bashing it. I'm not encouraging anyone to stop their mindfulness practice. I'm asking questions that are designed to deepen our understanding of how consciousness actually works, and what practice actually means, and what we in the modern world miss when we adopt practices that live in an entire living, breathing context, which we don't adopt along with the practices. I know and love many mindfulness teachers. I probably first practiced Zazen meditation when I was, I don't know, five. And by seven, I started staying up after my parents turned out the light and meditating, because I'd gotten it in my head that I was gonna be a boy monk. That didn't last very long. I didn't meditate with anything resembling the diligence that my parents did. But I did grow up meditating. At 14, I did my first major meditation retreat. I did another at 19. But by my teenage years, I was practicing in the Tibetan Tantric lineage, whose meditative practices are very different than just sitting with what is. The silent meditation we did in Tantric practice happened in the midst of a deity puja, after offering to the ancestral lineage and the directional guardians, after establishing a luminous architecture, after mantra recitation, which vibrationally smoothed the field. And I noticed, even at a young age, something very simple. It was a whole lot easier to slip into rapturous states of consciousness after these ritual elements had been performed, after chanting and offering, and practices of shaping the mind. And this was understood in these traditional systems. It was understood that meditation wasn't just a free-floating practice to be done just on its own. This is why traditional yoga has eight limbs, and only the final ones are meditative, and the rest are life practices designed to construct context. Because the mind needs anger, just as it needs movement. It needs sound and breath. It needs offering and flame. For what is the mind, really? What is the mind? Is it simply ours? A brain localized inside our heads that has its own agency as it interfaces with a world that is little more than a backdrop? Or is it relational and contextual itself? In traditional cultures, there is a meticulously constructed foundation of context for the mind. There is context in what clan or lineage one is born into or initiated into. There is context in the rituals of varying life stages. There is a surrounding mandala of animate beings, a living ecology of which one is inextricably a part, and a ritual process to reconnect to and be in relation with that ecology. There is story reflected and passed down that lives in the hearts of the people and in the very land. All of this forms what can be called relational mind. And the recognition of the importance of this contextual relational mind is why even those traditions that are the most focused on silent meditation still have altars, still have chanting, still have story, still have a framework and worldview in which they sit. And how we got to the place where mindfulness has been extracted from this ecology, extracted from worldview, is an interesting story, deeply tied in with the fracture of the postmodern mind. While the roots of mindfulness practice stretch back thousands of years, the rise of what we now commonly refer to as mindfulness practice began in the 19th century in Southeast Asia during colonial times. And very directly, the reason that the more meditative and recognizably psychological aspects of practice were centered, and the more ritualistic aspects of practice were sidelined, this was a direct result of colonial attitudes towards ritual. As author Kate Crosby says, quote, the treatment of meditation as purely a mind science arose during the European colonial period. It corresponded to the Cartesian divide between psyche and physis and the related rift between religion and science, then prevalent in the West. This adaptation of meditation in the modern period allowed for its revival and eventual widespread adoption. The resulting types of meditation practice, labeled vipassana because of their focus on cognitive insight, gained widespread popularity, ousting other forms. End quote. This focus on transcendent essence over ritual form is part of a larger pattern. Says Zen Jew Earthlin Manuel in her wonderful book The Shamanic Bones of Zen, quote, the tendency to denigrate ritual activity as something that is grounded in irrational or superstitious beliefs are products of the Age of Enlightenment in the West and the efforts of European intellectuals to come to grips with foreign cultures they encountered in the course of world exploration and colonial expansion. So vipassana was the eventual product of an ecology that was originally much deeper and richer than its surviving practices indicate. Theravadan mindfulness practices arose in the wet, humming jungles of Sri Lanka and Thailand and Cambodia and Laos, in cultures who were deeply immersed in vibrant nature. The Buddhist ecosystem historically did not just look like people just sitting. It looked like animate tradition everywhere looks. Quote, Francois Bizot describes the eclectic nature of Buddhism in pre-modern Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia as a congruence of Vedic Brahmanism, Tantrism, and a pre-Aryan, Austro-Asiatic cult of guardian spirits and protective divinities interacting with Mantravada beliefs and practices. It resulted in what Bizot has characterized as Tantric Theravada and in this rich ecology practitioners were healers, ritualists, magicians, intermediaries navigating a world of ancestors and nature spirits, of insects and tigers and snakes and monsoon rains. From Bizot, quote, at the monastery the monks are also mediums and the fishermen consult them. The spirits of the dead speak through their mouths. Others are called Lok Ang Khoi because their bodies remain seated while they take leave of them to inspect the surroundings of the village and discover the cause of the misfortunes of those who consult them. So the meditative practices themselves were not limited to practices of what today would be called mindfulness. There were schools of practice in which mind was deliberately shaped through meditations on points of light and blazing discs and sounds and meticulous realizations of the imaginal body complete with somatic energy centers. The Buddha was not an abstraction but something that could be realized in the somatic structure through sound and luminosity, through focused awareness in the navel center. Quote, even this simplified instruction in the esoteric Theravadan traditions begins to give us some idea of what is unusual or distinctive. The importance of pinpoints of light, crystal spheres or gems, the use of mantra, sacred phrases, the attention to a pathway of physical locations from the nostril to a place two fingers breadth from the navel. While mindfulness practices today focus a whole lot on either focuslessness or focus on interior sensation, historic Theravadan traditions were rich with practices of constructed focus called kasina practices. Quote, the ten kasinas mentioned in the suttas, says Maha Thera Nayanatiloka, are earth, water, fire, wind, blue, yellow, red, white, space and consciousness. Hours meditating upon the fire, linking to the fire, seeing the simultaneous form and formlessness in the fire. Hours establishing focus within the blue spaciousness of sky. There was a whole lot of emphasis on establishing focus before practices of focuslessness. This is something to take note of in a modern distracted and fragmented world in which focus is a rare commodity and it's congruent with the journey from Dharana to Dhyana in the yogic traditions. You got to find focus first. You got to build the mandala before you simply sit with what is. And these focal practices had real world application. They were designed to assist in the navigation of a forest life that was rife with dangers. The mindfulness, the loving-kindness, the focus of the forest monks, they were living and dynamic forces grown from the thick forest itself. They directly helped people navigate everything from ancestral spirits to rampaging elephants, like literally rampaging elephants. In her book, In the Cool Shade of Compassion, Kamala Tianovich describes one forest bhikkhu named Pracharan who taught initiates how to use kasina focal practices to neutralize charging elephants in the forest. Most elephants have divine ears, Pracharan says. Using kasina meditation, you will find out if the elephant has devata, deities who guard him. Then you will know that the elephant has divine ears. To subdue an elephant that is on a rampage, you must first be able to see the deities who are guarding the wild elephant. Then you radiate metta, that is dynamic love, to the deities. Once the deities receive the metta radiated by you, the deities will convey this to the elephant and then guide the animal away from you so that it will not harm you. But it's very important, Pracharan clarifies, that the practitioner connect to the intermediaries, the guardian spirits, rather than the elephant itself. For many tudong monks, he says, have been killed by being stepped on by elephants while trying to spread thoughts of loving kindness directly to them. You heard it here first. Feel into that for a minute though. Loving kindness and focal meditation, not as abstractions, but as a means of forest survival. That's context. That's ecology. What is labeled mindfulness these days has lost much of this ecology. All of this rich animate texture, the body of the practices, the forest itself, gets discarded in favor of a meditation that is more focused on direct individual contemplation of mind with very little contextual architecting. This is what arrived in the west as mindfulness. And it was palatable to western minds because many of the recognizably religious and ritual elements had been stripped away. And because stripped of context, it emphasized individual experience over relationality and so resonated with this modern world of individuals. To be clear, again, I have a deep love for the Vipassana traditions. I know they're powerful and helpful. I also think it's important to fill out our contextual understandings, fill out minds that need a broader spectrum of practices in order to truly come into fullness, mind fullness, right? So there's an initial wave of decontextualization that happens in the 19th century. Another wave of decontextualization with the journey west. And then a few years later, all this gets further decontextualized as mindfulness becomes extracted from Buddhism altogether and becomes personal psychotherapeutic wellness tool, an anti-anxiety treatment, a performance technique, a practice whose primary benefit is internally psychological rather than relational. I don't have to tell you about the ubiquitous prevalence of mindfulness, 10-minute mindfulness, corporate mindfulness, mindfulness with very little understanding of the ritual, magical, animate forest ecology from which this practice grew. So we're left with a culture in which meditation is assumed to be an individualist exercise. If there are benefits to practice, they have to do with processing or with individual performance enhancement. And this is simply to ask, isn't the larger animate context important? This is to ask in an era of fragment and isolation, of rising depression rates, anxiousness, compromised attention, of torrents of panic, what is it that the modern mind needs? In an era in which we are decidedly over-focused on ourselves and our own process, what is it that the modern mind needs? The modern mind doesn't just need to sit with itself. Mindfulness alone doesn't require relationship. Mind needs relationship because mind is relationship. The mind needs to establish itself within a relational architecture. Then within that established architecture, within that cauldron, it can percolate and bubble. Within that boundary to ritual space, it can dance. Mind needs to know its body, its contextual body. It needs to anchor itself within a great wheel of ecology. A mind needs roots and a mind needs to know that it has a belly button. Yes, a mind, like a body, needs an umbilicus and a placenta. It needs source. It needs a mother. So sometimes the floor of the ritual space is called a navel. Sometimes entry into the sacred space is called entry into the womb. Ancient Buddhist practices spoke a lot more about wombs than modern ones do. Esoteric Theravada practices focused deeply on the navel center. One historic Theravada Buddhist teacher speaks to his pilgrim disciples from the womb of a sacred cave. Quote, here we are in the center of the womb where the embryo sucks water from its mother, grasping the umbilical cord. Having just completed our visit inside this cave, we have acquired great merit, for this is the womb of our sacred mother. The opening here is the golden gate. In going through it to practice asceticism, we have regressed into the mother's belly. In this way, we are born anew. And descending into the cave, the mind remembers where it comes from and where it's going. It's not alone, this mind, free-floating in post-modern detritus. It is part of what came before and what will come after. Part of a great spiraling line of ancestry. The mind needs ancestry. The context that comes with connecting to ancestry. You can't free up meditation practice from ancestral practice. All spiritual and religious paths are ancestral, says Erthlin Manuel. Buddhism is an ancestral practice. Remembering and practicing the ancestral aspects of any tradition provides living context for the mind. Quote, central to the ceremonial life of most, if not all, Buddhist traditions are ritual offerings to ancestors. Food, flowers, water, incense, rice, sweets, tea, sculpted offerings, and other significant items are given to invoke and honor the ancestors. The chant used in the ceremony, the gate of sweet dew, says it all. Giving rise to the awakened mind, we unconditionally offer up a bowl of pure food to all the hungry ghosts in every land, to the farthest reaches of vast emptiness in the ten directions, including every atom throughout the entire dharma realm. We invite all our departed ancestors going back to ancient times. What is a person sitting alone, isolated, meditating, without a connection behind them and before them? We need some type of enacted reconnection to who came before us and who comes after, so that That the mind doesn't get trapped in its own solitary churnings. Thinking that it lives in the only age that matters. Thinking that it is the pinnacle of everything. Permitted to do everything. Responsible for either nothing or for everything. Rather than a continuum across generations. Do we see, do we honor the 300,000 year spiraling line of which we are a part? Do we know that the story neither began with us nor will end with us? The body, heart, mind needs to be pointed towards the great web of ancestors who never stopped watching us. And take one glance in their direction. Pause and look back at them at last. And ancient eyes moisten. And what we call mind softens. And suddenly we find there's an entire support system for our own minds that we had forgotten. And all we had to do was point the mind in their direction. For mind needs to be pointed somewhere. To what shall we point the mind? In a world in which we've been cut off. Isolated from an interconnected ecology around us. Let us take our minds to the smallest leaf and tiniest ant and the greatest galaxy. Mind may not need to just go inward by itself. In a world in which body, heart, minds are already told that they're alone. Mind needs to project itself towards all its relations. When the Lakota tradition say all my relations. This is architecting the mind. This is mind fullness. Fullness of mind. All my relations. Mind needs population. It needs a populated wheel of animate beings within which it sits. It needs dotted clouds along the horizon. It needs 6,000 species of songbird. It needs a living, breathing pantheon of gods and goddesses. The Buddha may have taken no ultimate position on the existence or non-existence of God. Mostly since he was trying to move people away from hyper-externalized ritualism. But everything in the Buddhist texts makes very clear that the entire context in which it sits is deeply populated with animate beings. Animate beings. Yakshas, Nagas, Kinnaras, Gandharvas, Devas, Apsaras, Ashuras, Rakshasas. The mind sits in a wheel teeming with spirit. Populated with life. This doesn't mean that everyone who meditates is required to believe in Yakshas. But it does require a basic orientation to what you could call an ecology of inter-relationality. With whom is this being, this heart-mind, in relation? To whom does it owe its gratitude for the food that it eats? To what mountain or stream or aquifer? Who does it rely on every day for its sustenance? Feel how the mind starts to shift simply when I say, connect now to the deep underground aquifer beneath you. Feel those underground waters. Connect to the cycle of evaporating rain. This establishment of the wheel of relationality is essential. It constructs the mind. The mind is constructed to the east, to the south, to the west, to the north, to below, middle, and above. To the celestial bodies, to the great web of being, and to the umbilical thread of ancestors. The mind is connected to which way is down and which way is up. Minds in this day and age, minds tumbling through space, minds need a basic orientation on which way is up. Do you remember which way is up? A study on the rise in teen and child vertigo by the National Institute of Health recently concluded that, quote, prolonged screen time may cause balance impairment in children. Children are imbalanced because we've lost the basic map and compass. Sometimes we don't even know it exists. If we do acknowledge it exists, it exists for us conceptually. But the map and compass isn't a concept. It's established ritually. Breath by breath. Song by song. Visualized architecture by visualized architecture. Point by blazing point. The mind needs to cast anchor lines to the moon and stars, to the seasonal cycles, to establish where it is, what it is made of, and where it's going. So before I just sit with my mind, I remember where this mind sits. It sits in a relational wheel. It sits with guardians at the gates. And the gates are guarded because the mind needs defense. Not in the fearful, contracted sense, as we explored in the guardianship episode, the mind needs to be defended. Buddhist ritual texts, going back to the very beginning, speak of how to guard the mind. From San Van Sheik, quote, The main theme in early Buddhist ritual texts is protection. This genre of ritual is known in the Theravada traditions as paritta, and in Sanskrit sources as raksha. Both words meaning protection. So the mind that seeks rapturous meditative states must have guardians in place so that the mystic union, the mind basking in conjunction with its own resonances and the resonances of the greater cosmos, is held in a container that guards it safely. Our bed is in flower. Says San Juan de la Cruz. And the bed he's referring to is the place where he will unite with the beloved, the divine consciousness. So the bed, the wedding bed, is the meditative state. Our bed is in flower, he says, bound round with linking dens of lions, hung with purple, built up in peace, and crowned with a thousand shields of gold. What does the mind need? The mind needs to offer. Offering literally opens up space in busy minds. The mind goes from being a closed self-obsessed system to a mind that is instantaneously, magically almost, in relation. Because it has opened itself up to the larger world and allowed something to start to move, to flow from it and to it. The mind moves. This is the nature of mind. It moves. Is it the wind moving? The flag moving? Or the mind moving? Mind ebbs and flows, it pulses. If it isn't allowed to move between things, it will circulate obsessively within things. I'm going to say that again. If it isn't allowed to move between things, it will circulate obsessively within things. You feel me? Offering allows the mind to move between things. So, mind needs the tangible act of offering. Imaginal offerings are wonderful. The tantric traditions are full of imaginal offerings. But it's also a really good anchor for the mind to actually offer flowers, and fruit, and food, and flame. To offer tangible things. Because we recognize that we're navigating a tangible world of actual forces. And those forces eat as we eat, and they offer too. As everything offers its body in the end. And the whole place is a kaleidoscope of offering fires. Our gods need to eat, says one Haitian voodoo practitioner in David Abrams' Spell of the Sensuous. Preparing, cooking, and offering help us establish the relational mind that moves between things, as opposed to just within itself. The spectrum of offering foods helps weave a richly contextual mind. So the mind is an offering mandala populated with a spectrum of offerings. Coconut pudding and white rice for the sea queen. Honey for the golden-veiled lady of waterfalls. White manioc and red palm oil for Eshu. Eshu, the messenger, is fed at the opening of the ritual in order to establish that same flow of moving between. In any ritual, as in any mind, you need a flow between the subject and the rest of the world. Mind is not isolated, it is intermediary. It goes between. And the foods offered to Eshu, the messenger, are literally messengers themselves. They cross the oceans. Manioc from South America to Africa. African palm oil from Nigeria to Brazil. The offering helps open up movement, helps the mind travel and go between. All this is mindfulness. Preparing, cooking, and feeding food to cultivate the offering mind. Try it. Cook food. Offer it. Then sit with the mind. Notice the difference. Offer a few words of gratitude and notice the difference. For all the rituals and ceremonies, says Erthlin Manuel, there must be gratitude. Oh, beloved, there must be gratitude. Gratitude and offering hold the matrix of mind in coherence. At the center of the architected mind, just as at the center of any ritual space, is a great offering fire. A hearth around which all activity congregates, upon which the stuff of life boils. Boiling mind. Boiling mind. Have you heard the ones who speak of the boiling mind? The mind needs a hearth. It needs that home fire, those feasting tables around which to sit. It needs to be fed, and if not fed, it will feed on itself. How much of the meditation of isolated mind feeding on itself will we do, before we open up to feed the world around us, and therefore be truly fed ourselves? It's simple. Mind needs an altar. An altar, says the shamanic bones of Zen, is always at the center of any shamanic practice. Mindfulness without an altar is like saying to the universe, only I exist. Only my mind is worth recognizing. I'm going to optimize myself in my own little universe, and why would I do anything that's about something other than me? Because I'm a libertine, post-French revolution, humanist individualist whose own mind is the pinnacle of creation. There's only one problem, though. A mind like that wallows in its own self-important spirals for a very long time. So, yes, the mind needs an altar. We've got to have a place to offer and to lay things down. The mind needs to lay things down that aren't ours to carry. Lay down your burdens on the great altar of mind. I want to lay my bones down in the water. I want to lay my body down on the earth. And on that altar, place butter lamps and candles. For the mind needs candles. Not as a symbol for something else. You feel me? The candles aren't a symbol for something else. The things that adorn our shrine aren't abstractions. The human body, heart, mind literally needs fire. The entire human somatic neurological process was utterly shaped by fire. It needs to be bathed in fire regularly. It needs the specific spectrum of luminosity. This is where the modern mind needs to really understand, really feel. The ritual elements aren't pretty flourishes, aren't nice things to have. To view them as such is to play into hundreds of years of mind-body fracture, in which the actual stuff of the world is treated as a backdrop, rather than the real living forces we navigate, each with their own quality and medicine. Why does nearly every ritual in the world involve fire in one way or another? We'll go deeply into that in the fire episode. But now, just let it sit. Our minds need flame. What would the mind be without flame? What would the spiritual path be without flame? Do you feel the single flame at the center of the smoldering coal bed of mind? Can you bathe in its light, this holy fire? Somewhere along the path, my old friend Pirzi Akhan writes, the seeker encounters fire. Fire smooths out vibrational incongruencies in the field of consciousness. It illuminates as it transforms. Why would we sit with a mind devoid of butter lamps, of shining fire, of the scent of wax and the smoking wick, even imagining a fire for a few seconds changes everything? Try it. Imagine a fiery drop. The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra entreats us. Or a blaze that burns everything away. Imagine a fire. Imagine a luminous flame. Now, what has happened to your mind? Is it the same mind as it was just a moment ago? Just as the mind needs fire, it needs water. Wade into the ocean, feel the change in your mind. Dunk your head under all the way. Ancient baptism rituals weren't symbolic. They were to actually wash all those anxieties and panics away. Wash them away. Wash them away. All those places we are rushing and seeking after and striving forward, wash them away. For the only sin, says Roberto Colasso, the only sin is impatience. Mind pours as the universe pours. Do you feel the pouring forth of mind? So many rituals involve the pouring of water. Pour water on a smooth stone for five minutes and feel what happens to your mind. Feel the replenishment of mind. Feel how that stone is mind and that clear replenishing water is mind. And mind is pouring upon mind. And mind is washing mind, washing itself with itself. As it offers water outside of itself, it itself is poured upon. Mind needs to be poured upon. It needs those streams of Abhishek. Pour ghee and yogurt and rose water upon a stone and feel how it is pouring also upon your mind. Feel the pouring, cascading, sweet rose water mind. Feel it. This is mindfulness pouring rose water. This is the full streaming relationality of mind. And as the mind needs water, so too the mind needs space. Sometimes that old cliche meditation instruction to feel the mind as the sky and the thoughts as clouds moving through the sky can be helpful. But remember, it's not a metaphor. There is an actual aspect of mind that you could call sky mind. It's tangible. The ancient Yoginis were called skyfarers and the sky is continually inviting mind to expand, to blue outwards, to dome, connect to this sky dome of mind. As spirit birds soar the sky, they are expanding the somatic spaces of the skull. As we expand, the world expands. Why do the meditative practices born on the Tibetan plateau equate mind with sky again and again? Geography and mind are utterly intertwined. The mind is as spacious as the infinite universe itself. The mind will be as constricted or as vast as we allow it to be until it finds the vastness beyond all vastness, the forever vastness, the infinite vastness of mind. Sometimes vastness needs to be deliberately connected to. Like if you feel into the mind now, how close in is it? We live these days in self-involved worlds in which everything is assumed to revolve around us, really close in. We've amplified this close in-ness by convincing ourselves that the mind is an organ that sits in the head rather than a relational continuum, which, spoiler alert, everything in nature is. Everything in nature is relational. Where is the stream located? Is it located right there where you placed your hand in the water? Guess what? That water is already gone. The stream is the clouds. The stream is the ocean into which it pours. Mind isn't the brain. Mind is everything that flows through the brain. Mind is every shimmering interrelation of which you have ever been a part, the river of your interrelationships flowing through the vessel of the brain. Every canyon in which your shouts have lingered and every cactus you've ever pissed on and every mixtape you rocked out to as a kid and every highway you ever rode to that expansive soundtrack. This is mind. Coming down the mountain. This is mind. So if you feel into the mind, how far do its horizons extend? What are the boundaries you have unconsciously created for it? Does it extend beyond your skull? Your car? Your to-do list? Your house? But you can find, with the mind, the eastern horizon. All the way there on the horizon the mind can go there. And the southern horizon, far, far to the south, where the continent narrows and the deserts give way to the Cordillera de Tamalanca and its mind forests of howler monkeys and painted frogs. What are the territorial boundaries to which mind is constricted? How far can it roam? Have you heard that they recently found jaguars in southern New Mexico? They hadn't been seen in dozens of years. They had to rethink the territorial boundaries of the jaguar habitat. What are the territorial boundaries of your mind? Are there spotted gods roaming unexpectedly in long-forgotten places? Don't just sit with the hyper-localized mess of a mind and think that this is all it can be. Send mind on a journey. Take a mission and let it be a messenger. Give it new skin, new fur. Let it fly. Let it burrow. Let it expand to the very stars. You remember the stars? The mind needs to know at least a few stars. It needs to know the location of the North Star or the Southern Cross. What hubris to walk every day beneath a single star around which the entire celestial realm turns and remain oblivious to where it is. The heavens are turning around it. Your ancestors navigated their way by it. Link to it. Let it become part of the architecture of your mind. For, oh, the mind needs starlight. The mind needs starlight. How the mind needs sprinkles of starlight. Do you remember starlight? Starlight in deep pools when the world was young. The world which Tolkien called Blessed Arda amidst innumerable stars. Tolkien described the first light that reaches earth as starlight. Starlight in running waters before the dawning of the sun and the moon. When the eyes of the firstborn shone in the nascent breathing dark. Quote, by the starlit mirror of Quiviyanun, water of awakening, they rose from the sleep of Iluvatar. And while they dwelt yet silent, their eyes beheld first of all things the stars of heaven. Therefore they have ever loved the starlight. The mind needs starlight because that's what it's made of. Everyone runs around quoting Carl Sagan about how we're all star stuff. But then how often do we actively, ritually connect to the source of the stuff of which we are made? So there are Taoist practices to orient the somatic system to constellations. To sip in the pattern and nectar of specific stars in specific seasons at specific hours of the day. What is mindfulness without starlight? Ancient minds were populated with star beings and their stories. The hairy heads of our ancestors walked within a dome sky of beings. And each point of light is a pulsing anchor in the architecture of mind. And mind is a celestial star map. A celestial star map of living relationships. The mind really benefits from soaking in the light of the Milky Way. It's really difficult for city dwellers to do this. Do you realize that there are some who might go their entire lives without seeing the luminous band of the Milky Way? And seriously, this might be the most frightening thing I've ever said on this podcast. Imagine going your entire life without seeing the path of the Milky Way. Do you know how much of your mind, your relational temple of mind, your somatic orientation is given to you by the axis path of the Milky Way? The myths and stories and songs rode into human skulls along the Milky Path. The arctic shamans rode geese along the Milky Path. Were they riding the stars or the sagittal suture of their own skull minds? Or both at the same time? When the Yoga Vasistha describes a dilapidated shrine beneath a blue dome in a corner of the mind of the creator, is it earth it's describing or is it mind? Do you see the image of the great sphere of earth sky? The image of mind? The mind is image. The mind is image and the mind needs image. It needs a work of art. It needs a nexus, focal point, stone, egg, seed, statue, sublime center around which the dance of attention can take place. The mind needs art. The mind needs form. Form is good. We're all probably pretty familiar with the emptiness aspect of the meditative path. There's a deep necessary beauty to it. At its best it confers a spacious luminosity, a translucent flow within all this. It reminds us that when we're fixated on the permanence of things, we miss a whole lot. But, realizing the inherent emptiness of everything can also be a convenient bypass for minds already unanchored from deep relationality with the form of things. Form. We have a clumsy relationship with material in the modern world. In response to the Western religious wound, we claim materiality as an alternative to religiosity. Yet, even our relationship with material is an abstraction. Divorced from the animating spirit of matter and knowledge of its actual patterns and flows, matter becomes enslaved, existing only to feed individual impulses. We grab at forms that are addictive, transitive, instead of staring deeper into the actual form pattern of waves. And when those wave patterns become uncomfortable, when they manifest in difficult love relationships or child fevers or strained communications with red-pilled uncles, oh it's okay because ultimately all this is empty, it doesn't matter anyway, rather than sit within the actual dissonance of waves and find a course together in relation. And so, it's vital, as I see it anyway, for modern minds not to get too fixated on the form is emptiness side of the equation, and to re-familiarize themselves with the other side. Emptiness is form. The mystery manifests as form. Form is everywhere. Relational forces are everywhere. Navigation of choices and profound discernments are necessary in this world of form, just like walking a forest path. Where you step matters. The forest isn't a backdrop. It doesn't help when you're navigating the Amazon forest hunting capybara and trying not to get eaten by a jaguar. It doesn't help to understand that the forest is empty underneath. The forest is the actual, tangible waves. It is form. Our minds are a reflection of how we navigate this world of form. Is our mind a sun-drenched herbal apothecary, or can it not name one plant in our backyard? Is our mind a trove of art history, or is it a frenetic TikTok feed? Form, our relationship with external form, architects the form of the mind. Developing brains, research shows, benefit from interaction with asymmetrical shapes, unruly tree branches, and pebbles that aren't exactly round. Which is why there's a new wave of children's building blocks that aren't just cubes. Because how often in nature do we interact with perfect cubes? I mean, I've known a few perfect cubes in my day. Neoliberal cubes. How about you? Known any perfect cubes? What is the form of our artistic minds, our inquiring minds, our psychosocial minds? Do we allow for asymmetries and contradictions? Do we allow for the branching tree of mind to be covered in contradictory mosses? What is the form of mind? Form, form, light is form, sound is form, mind is form. The mind manifests itself in form. The mind has tangible, navigable, shapeable, moldable, architectable, offerable waveforms which comprise it, and the particular forms it takes are important. Those forms are not always to be simply let go of as clouds in the sky. The practice isn't just let this pass. In tantric practice, before there's any deconstruction of the mandala, the practice is to architect its crystalline form, its spacious form, its populated form, its form teeming with devotional offerings, its form reverberating with sound, its jeweled form, its radiant form, its bristling form, its resonant form, its echoing form, its shimmering form. Yes, creation, your shimmering form, brimming with the open eyes of a world whose every form is a reflection of the great form of all that is. From the rose reflection on the underside of dawn clouds, to the lapping of bioluminescent tides, this is a world of radiant form, and the mind is radiant form. Form is sacred. The form of the oak leaf sets it apart. It communicates what it is. We know what the oak leaf is for because of its form, not because of the emptiness underneath. The form is part of its distinct medicine. The catalog of worldly medicines in all their forms is important. It's how we navigate this living world. Each form is a reflection of the pattern of creation, and is sacred not only in that it is reflective of the whole, but sacred in its part and its way, and worthy of its own altar of respect and reverence. What is the rupa, the form, of the mind? If your heart-mind were a being, what would its limbs look like? How far would it extend? What is it eating? What is it offering? What is the limit of its body? If your heart-mind were a garden, what would be the state of its tending? Do we grow a garden by simply sitting with what is? We are not just renunciates whittling away everything until only extinction remains. We are gardeners, tenders of fields, tending the sunflower fields of consciousness, all gold and blue. Sun in the vast sky, the sky-field of consciousness, let us tend it. It must be tended. It must be shaped. Mind is waiting to be fashioned and formed, says David Schulman, or even discovered, like unknown land, to be spoken out, articulated, embodied, thickened, crystallized. Meditate upon form. Reacquaint yourself with the postures of classical Indian dance, and how each gesture is an enactment of the rupa, the form of creation, the dance, the image, the sound, the art, the breath. This is the sacred form of mind, breath. The body-mind needs breath. It needs sweat. In the monastery I stayed at in Japan when I was 13, monks did a whole lot of physical exercise before they ever took a seat in meditation. In the afternoon, we gardened. In yogic practice, you meditate after you do physical asana practice. Try it. See the difference. For the mind needs dynamism, movement, vibration. The mind needs vibration because it is vibration. So the mind needs bells, needs gongs. The vibration of the hum, the gong, the bell, the mantra, smooths the mind, makes sonic cymatic patterns of the mind. In traditional Buddhist practice, the body-heart-mind needs chanting. The chanting isn't optional, and the chants aren't metaphors or simply abstract acknowledgments or requests. The actual tone and the vibration of the chant, the shape of the mouth, all the rupa, all the form is at play, working through bodies, resonating, equilibrating the waters of mind, then bringing them to froth and peak, calming them to states of radiant, reflective glass. In Zen, we sometimes misunderstand the chanting as something other than part of the ritual of Zazen. It becomes another thing to do. With that frame of mind, the chanting, unfelt, becomes shallow. How many have experienced that? And yet, something as simple as humming smooths the agitations of the ocean of mind. Humming literally shakes the structure of the skull, a skull that when left to its own devices entraps us in particular thought patterns. Sound shakes all that free, literally. It shakes it free as it stirs the skull nectars. The OM sound isn't a metaphor for the pulsing of the universe. It's an enactment of it. The mouth shape enacts a universe that pulses from infinitely open to finite and discreet, and then dies and evaporates back to the infinitely open. The practice is to stir the skull nectars. If you sit down on a cushion, no chanting, no offering, here I am with my mind, how will the nectars swirl? The mind needs story. The stories of the shape-shifting nature gods, the entwining serpents. These aren't moral lessons. Buddhist-derived mindfulness practices, further extracted and essentialized to be performance wellness practices, which might have a person sitting alone meditating with no presiding story other than this is all about you and your mind. These practices need the full story of Buddha sitting, present with his breath. Because the full story isn't just a story of a lone person meditating with his own mind. The full story has an ecology to it. To remember the full story is to remember the tree under which the Buddha sat. And the shape of the pipa leaf, which I've heard, is the same shape as the mouth makes as it makes its journey through the OM sound. Ever heard that? We need the story of the tree, with all its leaves a-hummin', and the vast cosmos wheeling about that tree. We need the serpent which coiled about the Buddha and sheltered him from the storm. We need his dark skin. The Buddha had dark skin, remember. We need his ribs sticking out like branches, rising and falling with breath, wet with morning dew. We need the sweet rice milk fed to him by Sujata when he'd almost given up. We need the morning star of realization and his hand gently touching the earth. There's a vibration at the place where awakened fingers touch the earth for the first time. Feel it. The story of why you're sitting is not just a story of you. It has trees in it, and serpents, and bitter tears at the suffering of existence. It has other beings in it and their welfare, and the welfare of a cosmos in an endless cycle of living and dying. That's why you take a seat, not just for you, for the living welfare of the universe. The Buddha wasn't optimizing or using mindfulness practice to gain something. He was existence breathing itself in full knowledge of itself, and the world bowed and flowers fell in the moment of awakening. Awakening inspires devotion, and devotion inspires awakening. They aren't two separate things. In modern, Western views of Buddhism, there's a tendency to delineate between devotional practice and meditative practice. I've heard people use the term devotional Buddhism to refer to the Buddhism that's practiced by the folk, and that Buddhism is often deemed lesser than the presumptively higher practice of meditation. But devotion is not less than meditation. Devotion is essential to the architecture of mind. For minds need to have something to bow before. The folk know this. The act of bowing before greater powers is a recognition of how it is in a vast universe of tiny temporal beings. And when that real relationship is recognized, us and the vastness, us heads bowed before the vastness, mind, in all its relationality, hums. Try it. Bow before creation. Turn over this mind to the world. And then feel mind and world hum together. That hum, that's called love. The mind needs love. Love is the bone broth of the mind. Minds pouring forth with love, sat-chit-ananda, the very nature of consciousness say the Upanishads. Being consciousness bliss. When mindfulness becomes individual optimization, where's love? Where are other beings? Others concern for others? Love for others? All this gets lost. Those practices that do remember love, Buddhist metta meditations for example, are beautiful. But sometimes the instruction to generate loving-kindness for all sentient beings can quickly become a sort of abstracted, generalized feeling. It too can become conceptual. Like let's think thoughts of loving-kindness for all beings. And there's kind of an implicit separation there. I'm over here generating thoughts of goodwill for beings over there. Yet metta, the ninth parami, usually rendered as loving-kindness, goes beyond goodwill, says Kamalatyanavich. In some early esoteric texts, metta is described as a living force itself, an animating presence. Quote, Here is how the Amata Karavanana begins its summary of metta, loving-kindness. The preliminary sign is like a firefly. The acquiring sign is like the feathers of a peacock's tail. The counterpart sign has the color of a Kalaguna stone. Such are the distinguishing marks of metta. So loving-kindness appears in the heart-mind of the practitioner, blazing, luminous, scintillant, deep, ruddy, alive. Metta that can, through its potency, quell charging elephants and shut the mouths of river crocodiles, can establish relationality with intermediary beings in its outpouring of heart. Early Buddhist texts contain far more embodied feeling, emotion, animacy than is often realized. In practice, in the old texts, loving-kindness blazes and five joys, five pities, five raptures arise. The rapture, says the Yogavatara's manual, that, quote, explodes in the body like waves. The rapture that makes the body jump to the sky. The rapture that is like the flood of a mountain stream. And these embodied joys, this felt love, this actual flow of loving-kindness, not as an abstract but as a felt presence, this feeling, is where ethics comes from. The mind needs ethics. Not abstract rules. It needs living mind built on its own rapturous interconnection with the web of life. No true mindfulness practices I know of, in their original context, exist free of ethics. When you detach mindfulness from its architected body of ethics, then mindfulness can be used for whatever you want to use it for. Zen in the art of devastating your opponent in business, as my friend Jake once quipped, or zen in the art of more effective bombing raids. A 2021 Yoga Journal article on yogic practice in the military told the story of Liz Corwin, a fighter pilot in Afghanistan who was using yogic breathing and mindfulness techniques to assist her while, well, bombing people. And hey, I'm all for soldiers meditating. It's tricky territory, right? Is there a place for the warrior who has deep practices of concentration and focus? Of course, and techniques of focus and flow have been employed by warriors in many cultures for generations. But there are also, in many cultures, deep understandings that, you know, practices that harness focused states of consciousness like these are for people who are actively working to build relational ethical frameworks in their lives. And if I teach you this practice, you can't go around harnessing mindfulness to mess with the world. It's not just a technique on how to optimize and be a killer in that boardroom meeting or win Olympic medals. It's also so that we can better offer back to the world and feed the relational web within which we exist rather than dominate it. And this needs to be taken seriously because attention is magic. Consciousness alteration is magic. Meditative flow states have to be taken seriously and honored and held within ethical frameworks. Those profiting off of flow state optimization are taking what are traditionally seen as sacred states, as living dynamic states of consciousness slash forces that require utmost care whose access has been taught in mystery schools through initiatory context. They're taking these and stripping away any consideration of love, responsibility, and relationship. Traditionally, anyone teaching or transmitting that type of attention magic has a responsibility to point that magic in the right direction. And yeah, there's such a thing as the right direction. Just ask KRS-One. Let's just say that if you're teaching Sam Altman to meditate, unless you really deliberately steer him otherwise, he's going to use that focusing magic to optimize his path of global tech domination. He doesn't just need the mindfulness magic. He needs to be ethically guided like any novice. So when mindfulness becomes a tool and not a fully realized organic system, when we shy away from any and all conduct or ethics discussions because, hey, don't want to be too religious, and we shy away from all the ritual aspects of practice because that's all the superstitious stuff, we're basically leaving the Western mind to bask in and amplify its own pathologies. If we assume that the ethical part of practice goes without saying, like we assume that people are mature adults who can make up their own minds about what right and wrong use of these techniques are, then we're ignoring what the modern Western mind possibly needs the most. Because the modern Western mind assumes a free-for-all. It assumes a free-for-all in which we get to do whatever we want because that's our individualist right. That mind needs to be reshaped through the entire spectrum of practice and offering, through relationship and story, through context. So traditionally the role of the teacher is not just to say, here's the practice, now what you do with it is up to you. The role of the teacher is to come really direct with the embodied ethics stuff. Like you've got to earn this practice through initiation slowly and you've got to show that you can handle it and you've got to show that you recognize the tree and the ground and not just the solo dude sitting there dreaming dreams of global domination. When we ignore the bones, Earthland Manuel says, we don't see the practice as one of enhancing interrelationship, but one of personal improvement. And this is the deep danger of mindfulness as solo navel-gazing, of taking potent practices and turning them all towards individual self-help, betterment, aggrandizement of self instead of re-weaving of self. There are dangers beyond the simple unpleasantness of sitting with a postmodern mind and just letting it cartwheel through its various neuroses. Dangers like the reification and amplification of neurotic self-involved thought, in which a person might come to think, I am the solo liberator of the world alone with my own thoughts and it's all going to happen within me. But mind isn't ours. Where do we think that this mind of which we speak so often and label ours so often actually lives? The mind isn't located in our heads. We aren't isolated individual minds. We are facets of the mind of the world. Land made what we call this mind. And this mind is land, knowing itself. Knowledge systems in traditional aboriginal cultures are shared among a community. No one mind knows everything. The mind is a communal, ecological, geographical mind. Landscape features, embedded with story, are a critical part of the living mind. Tyson Yocoporta speaks about kinship mind, ancestral mind, five types of mind, and in this vision of mind, the spaces between things are often more important than the thing itself. What we call consciousness is not our brains alone. It's how what we call we mirrors the entire relational kaleidoscope around us. We think through the web of plants and animals that surround us. The less plants and animals that surround us, the less ability our minds have for cohesive thought. Go to Mars, liberated from this relationality of mind, and the human mind won't last long at all. One generation on Mars, and everyone will be nuts. You heard it here first. So we have this vision of mind as a facet of a great cosmic mind. This vision of states of consciousness as sacred, of mind as a fundamental dynamism. You feel what I'm getting at here? In some traditions, mind is the goddess herself. Mind is Shakti herself. So the Chandipata invokes the goddess as Chitrupena, she who arrives in the form of consciousness. And the Lalita Sahasranama calls her Chit-Shakti, she who is the dynamic power of consciousness. And it names her Prakasharupa, she who is the reflective, illuminating aspect of consciousness. So when you feel that reflective, reverberant hum in meditative states, that's her. That's the arrival of the goddess. That is mind. Mind is not a tool. In many traditions, it's a living animate power. And it's an honor to be able to work with mind, and offer to mind. And when a person demonstrates just a little bit of humility before the goddess of feeling and perception, before the living mind, when a person bows before her just a little bit, she hums even stronger. There's a vast difference in tone and temperament if we feel into states of consciousness as sacred entities themselves. Not just ourselves optimizing ourselves, not just ourselves processing ourselves, but as mind, sacred and alive. As the Tibetan Yabyom imagery shows us, to gently take our attention to the larger world and meet it there, is nothing less than the consummation of universal powers. Try it. Gently take your attention to the world, to fire, to water, to blue, to consciousness, and find there the consummation of living forces, the union of living forces, the universe basking in its own resonance. What we encounter as we slip into meditation isn't outward. mind. It's a triangulation, a living confluence. So the goddess is also named Dhyana Dhyatr Dhyaya Rupa. She who is in the form of the meditator, the meditation and the object of meditation. She dwells in that triangular womb space, reverberating as mind, birthing as mind, sounding as mind, echoing as mind. How we honor the living force of mind is how we treat this very life. The meditative states we access are alive. Life, you feel it vast as the cosmos, humming in the very subatomic substrate of creation. Life, mind. Sit by the waterfall, alive with late summer sun and dragonflies, the gentle trance that takes us. This is her. This is Oshun gathering lilies. This is mind. Muni Manasa Hamsika she is called. The swan in the minds of meditators. Close your eyes. Feel the swan dancing there. Feel the swan sporting in the clear lake of the reverberant self- reflection of consciousness. She plays this goddess of consciousness, this mystery. Now, as the text described, dark and smoky. Now gentle and terrible. She is nature. She is moon. She is mind. Oh nature. Oh moon. Oh mind. The mind itself is Buddha, says Dogen. The moon mind is completely round. Nothing is outside the moon mind. All praise to her, the goddess texts say. The one who arrives in the form of the contracted shadow of the individual self that is a reflection of the great self. This is her, the living pulsing goddess of mind. In the form of radiance, the Chandipata says. In the form of devotion. In the form of knowledge of one's limitations. In the form of poise. In the form of victory. In the form of peace. In the form of worlds of activity. In the form of law. In the form of sustenance. In the form of the mother of all things. In the form of the vast differentiation of species. In the form of all sense perceptions and motor actions. In the form of fulfillment. In the form of mind. In the form of the hues of dawn, she, Raktavarna, shines with ruddy light. Shines with the radiance of red rays. She, the rose-hued goddess, the playful beautiful one of the three worlds that traverses past, present, and future. The one who carries a goad and a lasso, prodding us forward, drawing us back in her gentle waves. This is her. This is mind. Surrounded by her retinue of animacies, her directional guardians, her forest of context, her orchestra of sounds, her blazing phantasmagoria of imagery, her offerings, her feasts. This is her, the great bliss, the fullness of mind. Mind fullness. For mind to be full, mind must honor all facets of mind. Mind must offer to mind. Must celebrate mind. Must sing to mind. Must light a flame to mind. Must be mind moving. Mind breathing. Mind bowing. Mind humming. Mind in the forest. Mind at the altar. Mind in rapture. Mind at play. Mind, beautiful mind. Let us remember together the fullness of mind. This episode featured two songs from Liquid Bloom, Pooja, the Soundscape Mix, and Feathered Serpent, featuring Liquid Bloom and Purangi. And the song Pooja features beautiful vocals by Vailana Marcus. This episode contains reference to many books, songs, articles, etc. These include Koan 29 from the Mumenkan, the book Buddhist Magic by Sam Van Schaik, the book The Shamanic Bones of Zen by Zenju Earthlin Manuel, the book Esoteric Theravada by Kate Crosby, the article Theravada Tantra Kamatana, Esoteric Meditation in Cambodian Buddhism. Good luck finding the author. And an article by Kate Crosby on Tantric Theravada, a bibliographic essay on the writings of François Bizot and others on the Yoga Vajra tradition for Cardiff University. In the Cool Shade of Compassion, The Enchanted World of the Buddha in the Jungle by Kamala Tianovich and Holly Gailey. The Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines by Mahateranayana Tiloka, published by the Buddhist Publication Society, 1st edition, 1952. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Effect of Screen Time on Hearing and Balance in Six-to- Sixteen-Year-Old Children, a study by Zara Eidegon and others for the National Institute of Health. The book Mingled Waters by Pirzia Khan. Shobogenzu Sokoshinze Butsu by Ehe Dogen. Christopher Wallace's translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. The book Ka by Roberto Colasso. The book More Than Real by David Shulman. The Good Fight, How Yoga is Being Used Within the Military, an article in Yoga Journal by Lindsay Tucker. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kiran Kavanagh. The Lalita Sahasranama, the Chandipataha. The Yoga Vasistha by Swami Venkatesananda. The song Into the River by Starling Arrow. The song Vimamayo Shunna Kashuera. The song Criminal-Minded by KRS-One. And I'm turning the mic back on real quick here to say, and of course, the song Mountain Song by Jane's Addiction. It's a sign of dark times when 65-year-old 90s rockers are brawling with each other on stage during reunion tours, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Mountain Song contains one of the greatest pieces of guitar mastery ever, and you can hear that right here.