Deep Transformation Podcast: Self - Society - Spirit

16/08/2025

“One way of experiencing pure being is from within itself; then there is experiencing it from the perspective of all manifestation. This is when we understand form is formlessness and formlessness is form.”

🎙️ Episode 195
A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 12, Part 1 of 2) – Opening to Pure Being: Awakening to the Fundamental Nature of Reality

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/a-h-almaas-wisdom-series-12-1-pure-being-nature-of-reality/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

In the twelfth dialogue of the A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series, Hameed Ali guides us into the profound experience of pure being, which lies at the core of all mystical teachings. There are two nondual ways of experiencing the fullness of being, he explains. We can recognize we are infinite and boundless—as if we were the sky, but still experiencing this through our being—or, we can experience the oneness of being from the perspective of all manifestation: the mountain, the rocks, the molecules and atoms… “Wherever you go, physically or mentally, is pure being.” Hameed calls the first recognition “unity,” and the latter “oneness.”

Hameed clarifies the paradox of nothingness: “being and nothing are two ways of knowing the same thing; you can feel it as a fullness or you can feel it as an emptiness.” And he explains that being being and knowing being are the same thing, when knowing is understood in its deeper sense as gnosis. “Awakening is knowing our being or our awareness for what it is,” he says. Why is Hameed so uniquely articulate in talking about the experience of pure being? John asks him. This talk is an amazing teaching—visual and sensory, scientific and mathematical, deeply mystical and spiritual—Hameed comes at the subject of pure being from all angles. Recorded June 26, 2025.

13/08/2025

🎙️ Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From Zen Hospice with Frank Ostaseski

📺 The FULL video of this conversation is now available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uZYz-uCB5I

Some of the topics discussed in this episode:
• Imagining death as an unprecedented opportunity for transformation
• Acceptance, letting go, and the deeper dimension of surrender
• Who are we after we are stripped of our identities?
• Meeting death with don’t-know mind
• Creating our own rituals around dying
• Bringing death & dying out of the closet

“Grief is a way we continue to love someone… a natural response to the experience of love.”----🎙️ Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From ...

12/08/2025

Frank Ostaseski: "...impermanence is not later. Impermanence is here in this very moment. You know, it's woven into the very fabric of life. And so, if we attend to that, if we attend to the constant change of things, then we won't be surprised by our dying. Attending to the constant change of things... Not just that the seasons come and go and relationships come and go, but that we ourselves are both here and disappearing."

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🎙️ Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From Zen Hospice with Frank Ostaseski (Part 2 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/learning-from-death-and-dying-frank-ostaseski-2/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

One of the questions I ask people regularly is, "Do you think that dying will happen later?" And you know, if I'm in an audience and people—everybody's hands go up. Of course, everybody thinks it'll be later. Well, impermanence is not later. Impermanence is here in this very moment. You know, it's woven into the very fabric of life. And so, if we attend to that, if we attend to the constant change of things, then we won't be surprised by our dying. Attending to the constant change of things... Not just that the seasons come and go and relationships come and go, but that we ourselves are both here and disappearing. So then we don't hold so tightly to our treasured beliefs and to our fixed ideas about who we are and to our sense of separateness.

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10/08/2025

Frank Ostaseski: "...We speak about this beautifully and the texts speak about it, but then, there's this very grounded everyday compassion which seems really important. It's when we do stuff, when we feed someone soup, or we change their diapers. That's everyday compassion. And for me, that has to be rooted in this boundless compassion. Otherwise, we will get exhausted and we will not be able to continue to do it."

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🎙️ Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From Zen Hospice with Frank Ostaseski (Part 2 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/learning-from-death-and-dying-frank-ostaseski-2/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

Compassionate action which is I think what guided our work in the Zen Hospice Project, it works from this understanding, at least in my way of thinking about it, as this kind of boundless compassion that's available to us all the time. We speak about this beautifully and the texts speak about it, but then, there's this very grounded everyday compassion which seems really important. It's when we do stuff, when we feed someone soup, or we change their diapers. That's everyday compassion. And for me, that has to be rooted in this boundless compassion. Otherwise, we will get exhausted and we will not be able to continue to do it. But that boundless compassion, it needs this everyday compassion. Otherwise, it's just a big idea. It's just a big prayer, and that doesn't help anything in the world. So, it's this blending of the universal and the everyday which seems so important in our work at the bedside.

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08/08/2025

“Grief is a way we continue to love someone… a natural response to the experience of love.”

🎙️ Episode 194
(Part 2 of 2) Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From Zen Hospice with Frank Ostaseski

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/learning-from-death-and-dying-frank-ostaseski-2/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

Topics:
• What qualities do people need to be with the dying?
• Boundless compassion needs everyday compassion
• Don’t wait to tell people that you love them
• Grief is a way we continue to love someone, a natural response to the experience of love
• There are subtler experiences after surrender: tracking consciousness as the brain stops
• Gratefulness and a deep sense of belonging to something larger
• Cultivating don’t know mind; meeting dying with don’t know mind
• Terminal lucidity
• Practices we can do now: how do we meet endings?
• Impermanence is not later; it’s in this very moment
• Cultural changes Frank would like to see
• Proximate karma
• Better drugs than sedation: psychedelics could help us meet the profundity of the experience
• Bathing the body after death: a wonderful tradition that can fundamentally shift our relation with death

Zen hospice pioneer, Frank Ostaseski, discusses what the subtle states of dying have to teach us, including practices we can do now.

06/08/2025

Frank Ostaseski: "...and that's the role of surrender. I don't think it's the same thing as letting go. I think that letting go has this quality of being released, you know, from some previous, I don't know, idea of restraint, we could say, but it has this way of distancing our self from something. We set something down, right? Surrender is different. Surrender has this quality of coming closer to something. "

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🎙️ Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From Zen Hospice with Frank Ostaseski (Part 1 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/learning-from-death-and-dying-frank-ostaseski-1/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

When we let go of old grudges, we give our self to peace. That often happens to people in and around the time of their dying. When we let go of fixed views of who we are, you know, we give ourselves to not knowing. When we let go of all our self-sufficiency, we give ourselves into the care of others. So, letting go has an important and beautiful role in this process of dying. But I think that there's a deeper dimension to this and I think it arises out of the chaos that I was describing, the fear that you were speaking to just a moment ago, and that's the role of surrender. And I don't think it's the same thing as letting go. I think that letting go has this quality of being released, you know, from some previous, I don't know, idea of restraint, we could say, but it has this way of distancing our self from something. We set something down, right? Surrender is different. Surrender has this quality of coming closer to something. Closer to something perhaps that we already have a taste of or have some familiarity with. And surrender to me, at least, when being around people who are dying, it has a different quality. It has a quality of expansion actually.

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05/08/2025

Frank Ostaseski: "...But dying can't be managed by medicine alone. It's too large for that model. It's too profound for any single model. Yeah? It can't show us—it can't help us to see all that death has to teach us."

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🎙️ Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From Zen Hospice with Frank Ostaseski (Part 1)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/learning-from-death-and-dying-frank-ostaseski-1/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

I want to add here, Roger, that I've been with—oh, a thousand or 2,000 people going through their dying process. Many of them were people who had no inner life practice, who had no contemplative practice to speak of. And yet the experience of dying introduced them to something that had them seeing themselves as something larger than the small separate self they've taken themselves to be. So I would suggest here that dying has about it certain conditions which are conducive... helpful to our waking up, to our discovering ourselves to be more than our small separate selves. Yeah? And so, that's why I want to say that dying is not predominantly a medical event, and we ought to stop treating it as if it were. We should bring the best of medicine to the care of the dying. But dying can't be managed by medicine alone. It's too large for that model. It's too profound for any single model. Yeah? It can't show us—it can't help us to see all that death has to teach us.

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03/08/2025

“Dying is not predominantly a medical event, and we ought to stop treating it as if it were.”

🎙️ Episode 193
Learning From Death and Dying: Lessons for All of Us From Zen Hospice with Frank Ostaseski (Part 1)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/learning-from-death-and-dying-frank-ostaseski-1/

Frank Ostaseski, Zen hospice pioneer, founder of the Metta Institute, and author of The Five Invitations, speaks with us about the profound wisdom and potential for transformation that is unleashed in the process of dying. “Suppose we imagine death as an unprecedented opportunity for transformation, he says, adding, “so why wait until we are dying?” In attending over a thousand people in hospice, Frank has often seen them experience a real sense of discovery in the dying process; there is a time of acceptance, a time of letting go, and then a deeper state of surrendering to something larger. The walls that prop up the self start tumbling down, Frank explains, and a larger connection emerges that is always there.

Frank would like to see the process of dying brought out of the closet—shared about, learned from, and not reduced to a medical event. It’s important to meet death with don’t-know mind and trust the dying process to teach each of us what we need to know, he explains. And some of what we can do right now to open ourselves to the wisdom of death is pay attention to how we end things, and to how we love. This far reaching discussion delves gently into the divine mystery of death and dying, touching on radical acceptance, transcending self, don’t-know mind, everyday compassion and boundless compassion, grief as an expression of love, and creating rituals to mark this passage and all passages. We are left feeling unexpectedly comforted and liberated at the same time. Recorded December 5, 2024.

01/08/2025

🎙️ Assault on Democracy: The Legal, Ethical & Spiritual Implications of America’s Democratic Crisis with Mark Fischler

📺 The FULL video of this conversation is now available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BUj06Kv3Cg

Some of the topics discussed in this episode:
• The assault on democracy is an assault on our deepest values
• President Trump’s actions in the context of developmental stages
• What is Project 2025?
• Why the assault on higher education and critical thinking?
• What it will take to change the regressive trajectory we’re on
• Standing up for the values of your country

“The rule of law is a hard-earned process… and it’s under direct attack at this time in our country.”----🎙️ Assault on Democracy: The Legal, Ethical & Spiri...

30/07/2025

Mark Fischler: "...his answer to that was that if we create an educated public, an educated citizenry, then we'll have folks that are wise enough and to be critical thinkers enough to do the fact-checking, to do the research, to contribute to the greater good of our society."

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🎙️ Assault on Democracy: The Legal, Ethical & Spiritual Implications of America’s Democratic Crisis with Mark Fischler (Part 2 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/assault-on-democracy-implications-mark-fischler-2/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

Jefferson... if you ever go to Monticello, you can look down and you could see the University of Virginia. He also created West Point. You know, Jefferson read Plato and Socrates probably at like when he was 15 at William and Mary—read it in ancient Greek. But he saw their criticism of democracy. And I think his answer to them—because let's not forget a democracy killed Socrates. But his answer to that was that if we create an educated public, an educated citizenry, then we'll have folks that are wise enough and to be critical thinkers enough to do the fact-checking, to do the research, to contribute to the greater good of our society. And so, I want to re-emphasize the importance of fact-checking, being a critical thinker, and really, you know, you don't have to go to school to do it.

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29/07/2025

Mark Fischler: "...And so this to me, the laws, the Declaration of Independence, those ideas are kind of woven within an idea of equality and dignity for all beings."

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🎙️ Assault on Democracy: The Legal, Ethical & Spiritual Implications of America’s Democratic Crisis with Mark Fischler (Part 2 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/assault-on-democracy-implications-mark-fischler-2/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

The assault on democracy that we are experiencing is also kind of an assault on spiritual understanding of the deeper nature of our existence and our responsibility, our work, to repair the Earth for all beings—the [ __ ], the bodhisattva vow, you know, Jesus's sermons of responsibility to your brother, to the [ __ ], to all beings. These are foundational to living a meaningful life, a life that's well-lived. And so this to me, the laws, the Declaration of Independence, those ideas are kind of woven within an idea of equality and dignity for all beings.

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24/07/2025

“The assault on democracy we are experiencing is also an assault on a spiritual understanding of the deeper nature of our existence.”

🎙️ Episode 192
(Part 2 of 2) Assault on Democracy: The Legal, Ethical & Spiritual Implications of America’s Democratic Crisis with Mark Fischler

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/assault-on-democracy-implications-mark-fischler-2/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

Topics:
• The assault on higher education and critical thinking, continued
• The idea of inherent capabilities of race is a slippery slope
• Authoritarianism, the “authoritarian slide,” and the current administration
• Do you cave if your livelihood is threatened or do you stand up for the values of your country?
• The assault on democracy is an assault on our foundational spiritual values
• The leftist postmodern approach to transgender issues & immigration created fodder for the movement towards authoritarianism
• The importance of creating an educated citizenry
• MLK’s four basic steps for nonviolent action
• Take direct action only after you’ve entered into a purified state such as Jesus had on the cross
• Prevent violence in protests, disable provocateurs