Joe Rogan - Imagine Being Born the Dalai Lama w/Duncan Trussell

Imagine being born the Dalai Lama. So from the jump, you're something special. You're the chosen one. You're the one. You're the reincarnation of who? Who are they supposed to be? Oh, they're a tulku is what it's called. So it's the tulku system. And the way it would work would be, you know, because you have like, if you look at the history of Tibet, it was called the Hermit Kingdom, and it was closed off from the rest of the world. It's very hard to get in there. Seven years in Tibet is about somebody who made it through and became friends with the Dalai Lama as a kid. Anyway, so within this system, there is this idea that beings reincarnate. And that if you're awakened enough, if you're like really like at the sort of last phase of the sort of, what would you call it, the cycle you were talking about earlier, then you stop losing at least some of the amnesia that happens when you get processed through the liminal in between period called the bardo between this incarnation and the next. So anyway, they go to children, they put in front of them the particular items that belong to the previous incarnation that they think they are. Oracles, visionaries bring the monks to a particular village, and then the kid picks it. And then that kid becomes the next, this or that. It's called a tulku. How many kids do they look at? I don't know, man. I don't know the depths of it. What if the kid turns on to be an asshole? Did that take his powers away? Well, I think it has happened where tulkus are like, it's similar to like, what the fuck is the, what is the thing where those kids get one summer to go like the summer of fucking, what is that religion? Oh yeah, that's Amish. That's a rumple. Rumspringer. Rumspringer? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Rumspringer. What is that? There's a great documentary on that. Yeah. It's called The Devil's Something. It's like a great name, The Devil's Summer. But it's just like, The Devil's Playground. The Devil's Playground. Woo, I want to go there. Where's that? And they fuck and they smoke, and then a lot of them come back. They feel empty. I believe that was one of the ways they studied the impact of MDMA, wasn't it? Because like, if you find someone who's taken MDMA but no other drug, it's pretty rare. So you need to find a person who's only taken MDMA, otherwise you can't assess if there's some cognitive damage because it could have been the acid, it could have been the mushrooms, it could have been the time you fell on your ass when you were hammered. Who the fuck knows? But these kids, some of them have only taken MDMA. And so I believe that they used them as a sample to determine if there was any kind of neurological damage caused by the drug itself. So I think a symbol of phenomena happens within that system where some kids are like, I'm not a reincarnated being, I'm a musician, I want to go play music and they leave. Do you know who's a musician who's also a reincarnated being? Jimi Hendrix? Steven Seagal. What? Yep. When did that happen? I didn't know that. They told him. I think the Dalai Lama might have hooked him up. Told him what? One of those guys over there told him that he was the reincarnation of someone super special. Jesus God. It's a big deal over there. They had a ceremony and everything. Here it is. Oh. From 1997, this is the long written thing about it. Oh, that's a lot of words. I know. I can't read that shit. I can't read that shit. The recognition of Steven Seagal as a reincarnation of the treasure revealer Chung Drag Dorje. Wow. Of Pyle. That's exciting. Pyle Yule Monastery. So he's a reincarnation. Well, that's comforting to know. He's always been with us, you know, because it's like one of the things that does bother me is to imagine a world without Seagal, you know? So it's cool to know he's always been here coming back again and again. How come nobody was ever a loser in a past life? Oh, they- Everybody was always a fucking- No. Awesome. Oh, you mean, oh, right. Yeah. When I- People that are full of shit. Full of shit, people. Yeah, of course. Like, what are you going to be? Like, you know what? If you're making money as a fucking psychic and you're like, whoa, you're basically like a gutter rat. You've only been a rat. You've lived in filth. You weren't even- you're a mucus thing. Like I'm not sure what you would call it a kind of- Box jellyfish that killed babies. You're a tapeworm. You're one of those lung worms that went into someone's brain. Your trichinosis, motherfucker. Your uncooked pork. You were a moth. You were a- Ooh. Yeah. The whole, like, to me, like the whole reincarnation- He's a toku. Yeah. A toku. That's a statement from the guy. I recognized my student, Steven Seagal, as a reincarnation, toku, of the treasure revealer Chung Drag Dorje. Wow. Since there's been some confusion and uncertainty as to what this means, I'm writing to clarify the situation traditionally. No clarifying necessary. I'll see you later, man. I gotta go. You might be full of shit. Meanwhile, Seagal's got five hookers going to this guy's house right now as we speak. Well, also the other- so there's talk of like ending the toku system and the Dalai Lama has even said that. And recognizing that- because what's cool, the Dalai Lama, among many things, is that he said, you know, if science- he's very rational, and he said if science proves something in Buddhism is off, we'll change Buddhism to fit the rational mind. And that's the beauty of Buddhism. There's pageantry in it. There's ceremony. There's ritual in it. Just like any other religion, it's beautiful. Personally I think that there is a sort of area of experience accessible through their practices that I guess could best be compared to psychedelics or something like that. But to me what I love about it is all the pageantry aside and all of it aside, it's not faith-based. It's a very basic series of ideas that you have to digest. You have to think about. You have to look into- you don't just get to be it. It's like, you know, maybe some forms of it- there could be an example of that, but in general it's more along the lines of here's the basic fundamental principles behind this knot in the cording of a human life that we've discovered. Here's where some suffering is coming from. All the suffering in fact. And here's how to fix it. That's the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Just hearing it, who gives a fuck? You could hear life is suffering, the cause of suffering is attachment, get rid of attachment, suffering ends, here's the system to get rid of attachment, and you know, whatever. Life is suffering was not even fucking mean. What does life even mean? What does it even mean by suffering? This First Noble Truth, it gets completely mistranslated anyway. Dukkha, it means wobbly wheel. It's more akin to like, if you're riding a bike that's got not enough air in it, it's gonna be a rough ride. But it's gonna be even more of a rough ride if you have somehow tricked yourself into thinking there's enough air in the tire so that anytime you hit some bumps you're like, what the fuck is wrong with the world? You know what I mean? That's it, that's it. It's like wobbly wheel, the thing's wonky. You think you're not gonna get disconnected when you've been on the line with Verizon for an hour? You're gonna get disconnected. It tends to happen. You're gonna get cut off in traffic. You're gonna fail. You're gonna be disappointed. This is reality, but somehow you've imagined that it doesn't work like that. And every single time you're met with the truth, you're like, oh, oh, God, this sucks. And you know, so that's gonna, that creates a lot of problems. And it creates two, some ways to deal with it, which is desire and aversion. So you're somewhere and you wanna be somewhere else, basically. You're somewhere and you're like, I don't wanna be in this place. Or you're imagining that if you get this thing or that thing, the pain you're feeling of the wobbly wheel will go away. Do the experiment. See if it's true. See if it's true. That's all you can do is really look at the shit that you want. I could come home and Moog could have pulled up and given me seven Moog ones, right? And I'm gonna sit and play those fucking Moog ones for weeks and weeks until I'm sweaty and smell like fucking just someone shoved a salami under the balls of an ape. I'm not gonna take showers. I'm gonna just be oozing a stink and probably weeping into the Moog and sneezing into it. Anyway, the point is, eventually after the distraction has gone away, I'm going to return to my fundamental self. The fundamental condition of existence as it is, regardless. And so this is sort of the, some of the principles as I understand it, which are really quite intelligent. It's really, and what I love about it most of all is there's always this invitation, which is go see, go see. It's not, because I'm telling you this, believe it. It's like, go see. Maybe it's different for you. But you need to go check. Every time you're doing the thing that you've been repeating over and over again, is it making you happy for a row? Is it really working? Is it working? And if it's working, great. But if it's not, and you're trying to pretend it is because you've been doing it so long, well, who are you, who's winning this game of self-deception? There's no winning if the game is tricking yourself. You can only- And what do you do? How do you feel about life if you're always tricking yourself? Hey, Twitter world. Yeah, man. That's right. You will only feel that everyone is trying to trick you. And you'll feel like there's a grand conspiracy. And you'll feel like the world's out to get you. And there is a grand conspiracy, which is that you are running a game on yourself. Yeah. I feel like we should end with that.