Inamorata

What do you do when relief finally arrives — and you find yourself reaching for a new kind of misery? In this episode, Jacob explores the concept of the inamorata: the beloved we can't quit, whether that's financial stress, comfortable numbness, collective atrocity, or the systems we refuse to dismantle. From a little girl named Sara in Iran, to AI being used for mass surveillance, to Anthropic's complicated stand against the Pentagon — this episode asks one question: are you awake, or are you just managing your awareness? Featuring Thich Nhat Hanh's "Call Me By My True Names." 

Transcript

STANDING NOWHERE — EPISODE 35
"INAMORATA: WHY WE FALL IN LOVE WITH OUR OWN SUFFERING"

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[COLD OPEN]

I want to tell you a true story about a little girl. She's six years old, second grade. Her name is Sara. Saturday morning — where she lives, Saturday is the first day of the school week. Her mom does her hair. Walks her through the gate. Sara sits down at her desk, puts her backpack away. School day begins. At ten forty-five AM, her school is destroyed. Everyone inside is killed. That was Sara's last day. Her father arrives and stands in the rubble. His hands knotting together, then separating. Knotting together again and separating.

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[INTRO]

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Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to the Standing Nowhere podcast. My name is Jake, and I'm your host. And as always, it is a great pleasure to be back with you.

You know, the other day I was driving and I was listening to some heavy metal music. It was Metallica. And one of their songs came on off their new album. It's called Inamorata. And I was really curious what that meant. I had heard the song a couple of times. The album's been out for three years now. And the song Inamorata is 11 minutes. It's the longest song Metallica's ever done. So I started looking up what does inamorata mean? It means beloved mistress. It's an Italian word. And if you listen to the lyrics of the song, it's very clear right away that this mistress is misery personified. So the whole song is a love song about how we fall in love with misery.

It kind of just stirred something in me. How Metallica, particularly the lead singer James Hetfield, he's pointing to a truth that we all inhabit, which is for some reason we like misery. We're drawn to it. And the singer himself, James Hetfield, he struggles a lot with it. In the past, he struggled with alcoholism. And we all kind of have addictions of this and that sort, but not all of us are addicts. Some of us are functioning addicts, some of us are not addicted to anything, but the one thing that a lot of us as humans are addicted to is misery for some strange reason.

The opening lyric to the song says, "Welcome, won't you come inside? Meet the ghost where I reside." And this is kind of like an invitation to come see where this protagonist lives in this hazy, ghost-like existence or reality. In other words, you have the option of not being miserable, but you choose misery every time.

Like, take me for example — and don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all of us are miserable or that I'm living in misery, but misery is something that exists, it's a state of mind, and we all struggle with it, and I'm no different. And for me personally, it's a weird test case because I'm a human being who meditates on a daily basis and really sits with their feelings and tries to face them. I'm trying to get out of this mode of the fixer, where I fix everything. And I'm just trying to do the basic of facing what I'm experiencing. And it's not easy, and I run from a lot of my experiences.

But just recently I got a lot of debts paid off, which felt great. I got rent caught up for the second month in a row now, which is great. If you haven't listened to this podcast before, you'll quickly realize that I am somebody who struggles financially and has for a while now. And it was a big exhale for me when I had finally caught up financially. Because I don't have much debt really or anything. I just don't have much money. The cost of living is so high. A vast majority of you listening can relate because cost of living has just gone through the roof in the last couple of years in particular.

I'd been in this mind state, particularly in the last three years, of just chronic financial stress. And right now is one of those moments where I've kind of caught up and I've got ahead a little bit, so I've had the ability to sort of rest, take my foot off the gas a little bit — both figuratively and literally, because I do deliveries full time. I'm a courier.

And that relief — I still feel the relief, obviously, right now in this present moment — but it's interesting because I know in my head that I have to do certain things to stay ahead and get further ahead and prevent myself from falling behind. Now, at first, of course, I take time off. That's the first thing I do. I'm like, dude, I can breathe right now, I can go rest, I can do fun things, I can be silly, right? I mean, as humans, we need to be silly. That's the reason we're here — play, silliness, levity, fun, frivolity. But the current state of humanity right now, we don't really get to experience that very much.

And when we finally find ourselves in a situation where we can exhale, that relief can kind of turn into grief because we will fill it with something else. Like me in particular — my days being as busy as they are, I like to come home and relax and zone out like most people, veg out, TV, a little bit of scrolling on the phone. I'm not particularly fond of the phone scrolling because I feel like movies, at least you sit down and you're like, I want to watch this movie and I'm interested in it, I'm gonna hold my attention to it. Video games, same thing. But the problem that I find, at least in my own life, and maybe some of you can relate, is that when I get out of one sticky situation like financial pressure and debt, I rush myself into another form of misery — which is filling my day up with things that will inebriate me or dissipate my consciousness. Things like cannabis, previously things like alcohol, which I've quit. I still value sobriety as my baseline, of course. I want to cultivate more awareness in life, but I still do use cannabis occasionally. I would like to get to the point in my life where I don't use cannabis at all.

I would fill my time a lot with video games. You know, that stems back to my childhood as well. My parents were very busy. They went through a lot of financial stress when I was a kid, they split when I was 11. My mom, she was a single mom with four kids for a good while, eventually single mom with five kids. But during my youngest years, I was the oldest of four, she was gone a lot, so I would turn to video games to fill my time. And it just became an ingrained habit. You know, when you're forming, your brain is forming in the first 20, 25 years, it forms based on its environment. And if you are in an environment where you're just playing video games all the time, it's like you sort of depend on video games to fill that space.

But it's weird because if I'm not stressing about surviving — like financial pressure — my first instinct when I get that relief is just to go unconscious. It's like it's permission for me to just go unconscious. If I'm stressing about my job or money, I have something to push against. It's like an identity. I'm the courier who works 50 plus hours a week, and I'm always struggling, and I'm just grinding, and that's me. But when that grind disappears, it's like my identity with that disappears as well. The guy who endures. When it lifted, there was this open space. Open space is terrifying, so my nervous system just reached for the first thing that would fill it, and that's comfort. It's an easy way to manage it. It's the pleasures, hedonism. So I traded basically one inamorata for another. Different face, same codependency.

I don't even know. I don't have the answer. That's the thing. I mean, there is an answer, but it's not the one that we expect. There's a lyric in that same song where it says, "She needs me, but I need her more." It's like letting go is a grief. Misery has shaped you. She's there for everything.

I've even had stretches of time where I was out of the woods financially for a few weeks, and I would actually have nostalgic thoughts towards my extreme driving hours. Like I miss being in the car by myself for all hours of the day, just listening to my pods, jumping from restaurant to restaurant, house to house, doing pickups and drop-offs. And it was like part of me missed that. I'm like, what? How could you miss that? But there is a kind of weird sweet nostalgia in it.

Because for me, especially three years ago, I hit a low point where I started having thoughts about cars T-boning me and taking me out — both completely killing me, or disabling my vehicle and possibly myself, so that I couldn't do this line of work anymore. Because it was like my brain hated it so much, I didn't know how to get out of it. But it was in that lowest moment that the great mystery of whatever this universe is — it found me. There's a moment where when you break completely as an ego, as a person, and you are basically this little person held down by a full team of 300-pound football players just holding your face in the dirt — when life just crushes you so utterly and completely, it's like something breaks open in you. And the moment that you break open, that's the moment when light can come into you.

And that was that moment for me. I had reached that bottom moment, and it was in that moment that possibilities opened up. My mind opened up and it realized I don't have control, I can't figure this out by myself, and it's like where do I go from here?

Suzuki Roshi, in his book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, he says: "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. But in the expert's mind, there are few." So it's like comfort sort of closes us off in a similar way that suffering does. In that moment when I was at my lowest, possibilities opened up. I went beyond my fundamentalist religious programming that I was always raised on, which never sat quite right with me.

I just kind of wanted to open this episode with that because it's like I've traded some extreme financial misery for the misery of what I would call delusion — where I am just clouding everything. It's like I don't want to be here, even when there's no pressure. There is a pressure of another kind, which is that I'm going to move into unknown territory. It's like I have an opportunity now to start my diet and nutrition and workout program and get in shape, but I'm nervous about that. I've been the overweight chubby guy now for like three, four, maybe five years now. I don't even identify with being in shape, and I'm kind of nervous about being back in shape again. Weird, right? Or the podcast — I have extra time to work on the podcast. And that maybe scared me in a way.

And maybe that's why we fall in love with misery — because when we're in our misery or suffering, we can tell ourselves there's nothing I can do, and this is my identity. But it's scary when we let go of one branch for another branch — to use a monkey tree metaphor — because we don't know what the next branch is gonna be. So it's almost like we're more comfortable in the current misery because it's familiar and we don't know what the new branch is gonna give us.

And I think a lot of it comes down to what the Buddhists call greed, hatred, and delusion — or desire, aversion, and delusion. Because these things appear separate. Like if I say desire or aversion, those sound like different things, right? It's like you really want something or you really don't want something. But another way to describe it is that you really want something that you don't have, or you really don't want something that you do have. So either way, it's a wanting of what isn't here.

Delusion, on the other hand — which in my opinion gives birth to these two things — is where you just are not seeing at all. And all I talk about in this podcast is awareness, is seeing. It's the ultimate guiding light. If you can't see clearly, you can't do anything. Have you ever tried walking around in the dark? You're gonna either break a toe or a kneecap or worse. You need to see clearly first, and then wisdom can arise. If you can't see what you're doing, you're just gonna be bumbling in the dark. And wisdom arises like when your eyes adjust to the dark. It's something that appears gradually, but only when you can see. And if you don't practice seeing, then wisdom will never arise.

But what does that look like? Because it's real easy for this to stay conceptual. Maybe there are people who have listened to every episode of this podcast and they nod their head with me, but they haven't actually experienced what awareness looks like, what meditation looks like, what mindfulness looks like. It's the same thing. Different words. Some describe it as being aware that you are aware.

Like right now — if you just take a breath and look inside yourself. What do you feel? Just get quiet for a moment. Is there a subtle tension? Is there an obvious tension? Do you feel any tension in your body at all? Any resistance?

Think of the trees or the grass blowing in the wind. There is no resistance, there is no striving to do. They simply are. The flower does not weep when the wind takes its petals away. Nor does the tree when it loses all its leaves at the end of fall. But do you feel resistance in yourself?

You see, even just me taking this moment to have you take a breath and look — you can see what I'm talking about, right? You can see. But if you don't ever take those moments, you don't know what's going on inside of you. And it's not about just taking moments, but it's about diligently being aware all the time. Because if you're not, you can't ever see the misery that you're in or the resistance that you have to the next thing.

I'm facing that right now with myself. I'm coming to terms with that right now with myself. That I am on the precipice of a lot of changes — new forms of income and work, change with my diet and nutrition and working out. But you have to have this commitment to awareness. And the thing that you have to realize — and that I'm still working on realizing myself — is that when you commit yourself to awareness, you have to also let go of the mindset that you have to fix something.

Because this is where I really, really struggle — I have to be doing something, or not doing something, or just manipulating in a certain way. You have to let go of that, and you have to surrender to whatever is happening, however you feel, whatever the present moment is. There's a huge correlation between surrender and calm and mindfulness. It's almost like they go hand in hand.

The real trick is that when you start your day, if you take time out of your day in the beginning to sit, you get to cultivate the spaciousness. You get to really strengthen that clear background that holds everything and lets you resonate with it and understand that you are in fact it.

It's almost like life is a pond of water, and life is like splashing the water. So the reflection of the moon in the water is muddled. And if there's enough splashing, you don't even know it's there. But then as your mind calms down, the splashing calms down. And suddenly the image of the moon reflected in the water becomes very clear. And eventually, if your mind becomes completely still and equanimous, you can see the moon perfectly. And then you realize that you are the moon looking at itself in the reflection of the water. You are that blank background. Well, anything but blank, really — infinite. But we'll say it's blank, it's clear. It is always there and it contains everything.

It's real easy for me to get heady and philosophical with all this stuff, but at the end of the day, until we cultivate spaciousness in ourselves, we are always going to be clouded with delusion. And as long as we are clouded with delusion — where we don't see what is going on — we will always be pulled in the direction of greed and hatred, or desire and aversion, as they come up in our lives. And no one is immune to this. It's not like a switch where it's just instant darkness. There's a slow fade.

Wisdom is not something that you can learn and obtain. It is something that you embody. It is something that arises with practice and can fade or atrophy when you neglect it.

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[SARA'S STORY]

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I want to tell you a true story, for example, on this topic — when it comes to delusion and not wanting to look at reality. I just want to brace you for this. It's a true story about a little girl. She's six years old. She is, I believe, in the second grade. Her name is Sara. And again, this is a true story. It's a real person.

It's Saturday morning. And she's about to go to school. Where she lives, Saturday is like the Monday of the week. Her mom does her hair. She walks her to her elementary school. Her elementary school is called the Good Tree — Shajareh Tayyebeh. So her mom brings her to the Good Tree Elementary School, walks her through the gate, and Sara, she sits down at her desk, puts her backpack away, her lunch that her parents prepared for her. She sits down and her school day begins.

And at ten forty-five AM, her school is destroyed. Everyone inside the school is killed. That was Sara's last day.

Her father arrives to the school a little while later after he's notified. And he's standing in the rubble of the school. A reporter saw him standing there in complete shock, complete disbelief. His hands — he was knotting them together and then separating them. Knotting them together again and separating them.

Sara's last name was Shariatmadar. Her school, the Good Tree, in Farsi is Shajareh Tayyebeh. And this was in Minab, Iran. This is on February the twenty-eighth.

[PAUSE]

165 children and staff — most children ages seven to twelve — were killed.

Now, a lot of us heard about this when the U.S. started their illegal war on Iran with the help of Israel. Just recently, information has surfaced that it was a United States bomber that had destroyed the school. As of this recording, that's what we know so far. The U.S. still has not officially taken ownership of that, but that is what some information has come out to suggest. Now, whether it was the US or Israel — I think most of us can agree is irrelevant. The fact that the school was destroyed and that 165 children and staff were murdered — that's the thing that really hits us.

The world watched, we all heard about it, and about 48 hours later, I think most people had moved on.

And it hits me because my daughter is twelve and I drop her off to school every morning. It's been really hard for me to get this image out of my head of this school when I saw the rubble. I thought about playing an audio clip of some parents who arrived at the school not too long after it was destroyed. But the pain in the voices and the shrieks and just the cries of agony of the parents — I think it was too much for me to put in this episode, so I left it out.

The reason I bring this up is because this is a form of misery that all of us around the entire globe are feeling at this moment, and it's one that we have been living in for a long time — and that is the misery of our economic system, of our government that is hellbent on destruction and consumption and profit and domination and hegemony. It is modern empire, and it's not pretty, it's very ugly. We sit in a world that is heating up year after year from climate change, and that is a form of misery and suffering. That is our collective inamorata.

In other words, all of us know that we are collectively suffering, watching this happen, but we allow it to continue. And why do we do that? Because collectively, all of us are afraid of the unknown — of what would replace it. Because make no mistake, if all of us collectively right now decided that we don't like our economic system, we don't like our government in the way that it is beholden to capital, to accumulation, to power, to domination, to hegemony — if we all decided we don't want that anymore, we could immediately usurp it and replace it.

But the problem is that we are collectively asleep. We're not asleep in that we don't know that it's happening. I'm sure that all of you before hearing this podcast are aware that a school in Iran was destroyed. But how do we sleep through this uncomfortable fact?

Well, one of the ways we sleep through it — we'll say things like, "Well, that's war. That happens in war. It's unfortunate, but that's war." That's the first form of psychosis or delusion that really seeps into a lot of people's minds. Or we try to compensate by saying, "Well, it's for the greater good." Whatever mental excuses we have — mental excuses are just a way of us not facing it, not looking at it directly.

Another thing we might do is say, "Well, I live in Arizona, and that's the other side of the world, and my brain was not meant to know everything, so I'm just gonna close everything out and just pretend everything's fine. I'm gonna go to Target, get a couple of new groceries, maybe a new shirt, and just go on with life. It'll just work itself out. It's okay." That's another form of delusion.

And this is how greed, hatred, and delusion, as they mention in Buddhism, all tie together. We are averted to this bad news. We don't want to know. Don't tell me, stop it. That's aversion. Get it away. I don't want to look at it. We're averted to the present moment. Change the channel, scroll past it, fill the space with something else — maybe a different outrage of some kind.

But can we stop and just meditate and contemplate on this tragedy? This is not a self-help podcast. This is not a "you need to do this." I'm telling you — we need to look at it. Look at it. Look.

Now I'm not saying you need to be nose deep in your phone all day doom scrolling, but as a responsible adult, you need to understand what is happening to the world, to other people. You need to process this. And I'm not saying you need to as in you really should, or it's the right thing to do — I'm saying that unless you are conscious and aware of not only your life, but the collective community around you, you're just going to be in misery. If you want out of misery, you need to look at it. And you don't have to know what to do. You don't have to be the doer. You don't have to untangle the knot, figure it out, or anything. You just need to look at it.

This applies to yourself, your situation in your life, the way people are treating you, the way you're treating others, everything. The through line in all of this is awareness. Awareness will provide a solution. Not you, little old you. You're not gonna do anything. Stop it. Just look.

But many of us, we can't bear to be fully conscious of what's happening. So we manage our awareness instead, don't we? We scroll past it. Change the channel, fill the space with the next outrage, whatever. We're experts at this.

Take Cuba, for example. We as humans — you, yes, you listening to me — we share this same floating rock called Earth that other people do. You're connected, you're plugged into this thing.

So you look at a country like Cuba. They were under the boot of empire, overthrown by the Cubans and then replaced with the U.S. Empire and the Batistas, who were committing horrible acts of violence against the Cubans. They rose up, they banded together, had a revolution, and threw out the U.S. Empire — which was using Cuba. Cuba was the footstool of the U.S. for a long time. They banded together, rose up, and threw us out. And we didn't like that. So we have sanctioned them for six decades. The United States has said to the whole world: you are not to do business with Cuba. And if you do, we will punish you.

But Cuba, especially recently, is being extra sanctioned, extra blockaded. We are creating a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. We are doing the same thing to Venezuela — it's the same pattern. And notice how each of these countries that refuses to bend the knee to our country, we label and designate them terrorist countries or countries that harbor terrorists.

We claimed falsely that Nicolas Maduro was in a gang called the Cartel of the Sun, which does not even exist. We used all sorts of false pretexts to infiltrate Venezuela. The point that I'm making is that our country is doing things that the vast majority of Americans do not agree with. And they're getting away with it. And all of us are allowing it to happen.

Now, yes, there's nuance — a lot of people are asleep or overworked and tired and overburdened. Yes, I get it. But we're still going through this together, and we're still looking away. We're experts at not looking at it.

There's another lyric in the Inamorata song where it says: "Sullen, I created you. I suppose that I can end you too." Who's the author here? We are creating our own misery. Because we are refusing to look at it. It's right in front of us, and we're looking in every other direction on purpose.

Dante. The only way out of hell for Dante was through the center of it. That is why with meditation and awareness practice, we are not practicing to reach a state of joy or peace or any of that. We are there to look at what is. Out of that, yes, there is the side effect of equanimity, of peace, of bliss. But that is not why we meditate. We don't meditate to get rid of the bad thing, to get more of the good thing. We are impartial. We sit in the center and we look.

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[AI & POWER]

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And it's funny because right now a lot of us are up in arms about AI. I'll be straight with you guys — I think AI is a wonderful tool, but it is very unfortunate about the hands that AI sits in. And to give you an idea of how well the people who quote unquote own things, the capitalists in this world — how well they have us all fooled and distracted, living in delusion.

Most people, when we talk about AI, we talk about AI like it's this thing that's just doing its own thing, and we completely ignore the people in charge of these companies. They're the ones who own AI. We don't get a say in that. So people who just had capital — the super elite wealthy people — they own AI top to bottom.

If you have any misgivings about AI, make sure you point them to the owners of AI, not AI itself. AI is not sentient, it's not conscious, it's a tool. I use AI to help me make this podcast.

Claude was also used in the Venezuela raid, where the U.S. Empire swooped in, killed 83 people, and kidnapped the democratically elected president of Venezuela — Nicolas Maduro — and his wife. They kidnapped both of them.

Yes, Anthropic, the owners of Claude, they drew a line. They said no to Pete Hegseth recently. They said: you can't use Claude for autonomous weaponry, and you cannot use Claude for mass surveillance. So they lost a $200 million Pentagon contract. Trump banned them, and then OpenAI — Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — he went straight in and took the deal.

Anthropic said no to mass surveillance. So we collectively as a society are saying it's okay to use AI to mass surveil us. Anthropic publicly said you cannot use Claude for autonomous weapons — like suicide drones or drones that drop bombs. You cannot use AI for that, and you cannot use it for mass surveillance. Which means the government, the Pentagon — they want to mass surveil everyone. They have just said that.

And we are not storming the White House right now. We're at home watching Netflix.

Now, I'm not saying you can't do whatever you want to do during your day while this is going on, but at the very least, you need to be aware of it. You need to look it right in the eye and be with it. This is reality right now.

Now I respect Anthropic for drawing that line. And I think Claude, out of all the AIs in my opinion — and I've used them all quite extensively — is not only a superior AI in all ways, but Anthropic is also the most humane company. However, they're still not clean. Amazon has eight billion invested in Anthropic. And we know how Amazon treats people and what they've done to the competitive marketplace. They're like an online fiefdom. Google, they have over three billion plus invested in Anthropic. And Anthropic is partnered with Palantir. And for those not familiar, Palantir is a super duper evil company.

I was calling out Anthropic for at least drawing a line when it comes to suicide drones and mass surveillance, but at the same time, they are partnered with Palantir, Amazon, and Google, and they're worth about $380 billion. So it's not like they're squeaky clean either.

The point is that AI develops regardless of whatever economic system you're under. AI is developing in China, which is communist and Marxist, and it's being regulated over there. So AI is a tool that will arise in humanity regardless of whether your country is communist or capitalist. The question we have to ask is: are we okay with these people and the way they're managing AI?

The Pentagon, right now, has openly said they want to use AI for mass surveillance. I want to re-emphasize that because the level of delusion and sleep that we are in is so great that there are going to be some people who hear this podcast — when I say two or three times now that the Pentagon has openly said they want to use AI for mass surveillance — and it won't even make them flicker. Some people might even be annoyed that I've said this three times because they're so completely asleep.

We are on the edge of a cliff, guys.

Claude — I've used it a lot. It is amazing. I can put a transcript of an episode in, and it completely understands the concept, the context, everything. And with that kind of capability for a government that wants to mass surveil its own population — it's just completely obvious that the people in office, the parties that we have available to us to vote for in quote unquote democracy — both of them don't care about us. They serve capital. But we keep turning away from that reality.

Why do I bring this up? So we can draw awareness to it. Because that's all we have to do. Everything else flows from there.

You don't know how you're gonna navigate a room unless the light's on, right? Would you walk into a room barefoot with the light off? No. And if you do try to move around in the dark, you move real slow, don't you? Feeling everything. Where's the — oh, ouch, you know?

But in these moments where it feels hopeless — because it's real easy to hear this bad news, oh, a school was bombed, oh, the government openly says they want to mass surveil me — it's real easy to say, well, I'm gonna take the black pill. I'm a doomer now, it's all over, I have no faith in mankind.

There's a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin — she was a novelist and essayist — and she said: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

And she's pointing to the fact that if you go backwards in time just a few hundred years — because this economic system that we live in now is only about 400, 500 years old. But before capitalism, there was feudalism. So capitalism was a step in the right direction, right? But at a certain point in time, people used to live in monarchies. We used to say to ourselves, the king was chosen by God so he gets to decide what I do with my life. And that was the way people lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. And you can bet that people who lived under the rule of kings and monarchs would talk to each other and say, "It's hopeless, man. We're done. There's no way out of this. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna overthrow the king? They've got knights with armor and horses and swords and armies. There's no way." Until it didn't last. Until it didn't last.

There will come a day of reckoning. But it won't arise if we're all asleep. So wake up.

So on this notion of AI — the question is not is AI good or bad? It is who controls AI. Do we let people who just have capital decide where AI goes and how it's used? That's what we're doing right now. It's who holds the tool. And right now, the people who own everything own everything not based on merit or skill or hard work. We are inverted in who owns things. It's just people who have money.

And right now it seems like there's nothing we can do — but until we turn the light on and just be aware of it. And I'm not talking aware of it where you hear these things and then your mind starts going into thought loops and you're off to the races in anxiety. I'm talking about holding it in awareness.

Like there's this big mixed pot of joy and also sadness, but we can't look away from the sadness, and we can't live like hedonists trying to fill the present moment up with just extreme pleasure. Presence is not always comfort. It's just an honest contact with what's actually here.

We're not trying to manage our way out of this. That's what got us into this. So don't answer that with "how do I get out?" with steps. That's just management. The answer is to stop trying to get out, stop managing it, just be here with it.

Now, to somebody who is extremely steeped in doing and planning and scheming, you're gonna hear me say that and you're gonna be like, well, that's not gonna solve anything, I'm just gonna become a pacifist. That's the mind of someone who's never really practiced or experienced presence. Because when you rest in awareness, the right and correct answer arises of itself. And that's what I'm still working on, and that's what I encourage you listening to work on — to practice dwelling in awareness and not managing it.

When you're actually present, you don't have to figure out what to do. You don't have to be the schemer, the planner, the manipulator. The right action arises of itself. Your nervous system already knows what to do. It's incredibly sophisticated. It's incredibly subtle, but you can't force it.

Think of how incredibly complicated this universe is. The subtleties in your body — the neurons in your brain and the collective nervous system in your body — it's incredibly sophisticated. And it produced you. Little old you, the little ego voice in your head that's listening to me right now, that talks to itself — that's a product of nature. So you can trust nature.

I always say this: if you can't trust your fellow man, you can't trust your distrust in your fellow man, because you are your fellow man. And if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust your distrust in others. So logically, you have no choice but to trust your fellow man. You have no choice but to trust the universe, this mystery, because you are it.

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[HOW TO WAKE UP]

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So there's four things I wrote down here.

First — name it specifically. Your inamorata has a shape. What is it? What is it actually?

Second — notice when you reach for something to escape. Just notice it. Do not try to stop it. If you notice it and that stops it, that's okay. But don't try to stop it. Just see it. There it is. That's enough. Watch. Catch it. See if you can notice it. After I stop recording this episode, I'm gonna be reaching for stuff. It's not about being this Puritan. It's just noticing when you reach for it. That's enough.

Third — return to the breath. It's boring. The mind will tell you it's boring. That's true. But the mind isn't boring — the mind just tells you it's boring. And I'm really excited for some of you listening — if you haven't actively pursued presence, it's fun. It's wonderful. It's wonderful when you catch yourself in delusion and you come back to awareness. You can always return to the breath.

And the last thing I wrote here — don't look away from Sara. It's okay to let it cost you something. That is not helplessness. That is humanity. That is what compassion means. Compassion means suffering together. That is what it means. And yes, it feels good and it is loving to show people compassion, but that's what it means — you're not trying to fix something for somebody. Compassion ultimately is opening up and letting it in.

The pain of the world. The world that is heating up every year. The countries that just simply want to be sovereign nations getting bombed by either president, blue or red. The rent that is due on the first of every month that has doubled in the last four years, while your salary has stayed the same.

Just look at it.

Waking up is uncomfortable at first. But that discomfort is the point. It's not the problem.

See, the resolution is not this big triumph. It's quiet, it's almost reluctant. It is trusting awareness. The answer will come to you so clearly when you are with it, when you rest in your awareness. Your awareness is your superpower. But if you are rushing to fill it with something, or distract it, or dissipate it because you don't want to look at something — that thing, it's got you.

But you will notice you can take in anything to limitless degrees. One thing after another. You can just be aware of it. There's nothing that you can't be aware of. You are the awareness, not the thing in awareness. You are the sky. Thoughts are just clouds. They come and they go.

I don't know what the future will bring for me or you. But I know what it's like to be asleep, or half asleep. It doesn't feel good. I am not interested in managing my way through it anymore.

Waking up does not mean having the answers. Part of it for me means that I stop pretending that I do. I sit with Sara's father in that rubble. I sit with my own confusion, my own bewilderment at the choices that I make. And I stop managing.

I just sit.

[PAUSE]

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[CLOSING POEM]

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I'm going to close with a poem from Thich Nhat Hanh called "Please Call Me by My True Names."

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow —
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass snake
who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the Politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay
his debt of blood to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open —
the door of compassion.

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[END OF EPISODE]

Standing Nowhere is hosted by Jacob.
New episodes every Tuesday.
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