Angelo Dilullo: Awakening After Breakup, Zen, No Thoughts, and True Reality Beyond Lifetime

0:00Quick question, when was the last time a display ad changed your mind? Now think about the last time a friend told you about something they loved. Different feeling, right? That's how podcast advertising works. A host who's built real trust with their audience talks about your brand and their own words and their own voice. It doesn't interrupt the experience. It's part of it. With A-Cast, you can access the world's largest podcast marketplace. Choose the right shows, the right audiences, the right format. Then watch the data tell you it worked. You're not buying impressions. You're buying influence. Learn more by visiting acast.com slash advertise. The event that occurred or like you said, it was really over a pretty short period of time. And it was strangely precipitated by a breakup. So I had a romantic connection. And at that time in my life and with the person I was connected to, it was kind of like perfect. It was perfect storm. It was set up in such a way that I thought,

1:01oh, this is the person that I always thought would finally make me happy. I don't know if I thought that overtly, but there was some sense that finding that perfect romantic partner or that girlfriend or whatever it was. And I had the girlfriend and I had a girlfriend. Yeah, it was kind of like all your chips were in the one basket with that person. Because you know how sometimes you have those partners in your life where you feel like, yeah, this is the one. It's hard to remember that actually. I'm not sure if I felt like this is the one or like, there was this massive amount of buy-in to our future together. It was just more like, I had kind of held out for something for so long and I never had a really strong, deep emotional connection with someone. And that was like kind of the first time for me. And when I realized that even a deep connection with someone, what I really realized she was suffering too, like I could feel it. I could feel, oh my god, there's no escape from this. It gets everywhere around me. And I kind of had known that. I have a very empathic nature. So I could feel it. People around me are suffering and I had been my whole life and I kind of knew that. So I felt kind of hopeless in a way. But I thought, well, that one thing, maybe that maybe

2:02romance will do it. And it didn't. That was it. But then it didn't. There was a breakup. And it wasn't even necessarily like a bad breakup or a really harsh breakup. I wasn't disillusioned in the usual ways we talk about disillusionment and breakup. There was just a feeling in me like, wow, I have to let that go too. And there was a kind of sense of deep hopelessness. Like there's nothing to save me. Then it kind of became a question of like, do I need to be saved? Like, why do I think I need to be saved? What am I being saved from? Myself? What does that mean? You know, if some am I the problem in that kind of a thing? So it was like the series of really deep questioning. And at the same time that I was kind of questioning in that way, there was some feeling of shifting. It's all I can say. It was very fundamental. Almost as if the ground you walk on and have walked on your whole life is starting to just shift just a little bit in a way that's impossible to overlook. And very fundamental. So something was changing. And I wasn't sure what it was. And it didn't feel scary to me at that point. It felt kind of like

3:09exciting and almost like a relief. Like something big is going to give here. Some big cracks got opened up. I don't know what it is, but something's got to change. And that was followed pretty shortly by reading a book, opening a book called Three Pillars of Zen. Now I'm not sure if I talked about this before, but I'll give you some background on the book. And that is Zen, in Zen practice, in traditional Zen practice, and contemporary American and Japanese Zen practice, you will almost do something, almost always do something called docusan. It's almost always included in the Zen sort of process with some very rare exceptions. But docusan is really a private, what they might call interview with a teacher. But it's not an interview in the way we think about interviews. It's face to face sitting in a small room with a Zen teacher, usually with no one else in there. And it's a private encounter. It can be a very short encounter. It can be a longer encounter. But the idea with this encounter is typically it's very instinctual. It's not like,

4:13oh, how are you doing? I'm doing fine. How are you doing? It's not like that. You're talking about what's the most important thing to you, talking about to put in Zen terms, the problem of birth and death, awakening, Ken show, your own suffering. And you are often talking about in terms of a colon. So that's one of the reasons that docusan is private is because you may be working on a colon. And if you crack that colon, you break through that, then it's kind of a private matter in the sense that you want anyone else who might work on that colon to be free of any expectations based on watching that happen or something. So that's why they keep that private. But docusan is a very important part of Zen. And it would be very uncommon. In fact, I think it maybe never happened before this book that anyone would record what happened in doxan. But the genius of Philip Kaplow, Kaplow Rochi, who was the author of the book, was that he talked his Zen teacher into actually letting him essentially record the conversation in doxan by leaving out

5:19certain things that were critical to like the colon. Like he wouldn't give away the colon, but he transcribed essentially the conversation between the Zen teacher and the student who was working on waking up. And again, very instinctual language, very direct language. And he would actually sit, the teacher and the student would be there and Kaplow Rochi would sit at the side and just listen. And then after the student left, he would take notes really quick and try to remember what he had heard because his teacher, Yasutani Rochi, would not allow him to write during the conversation because he didn't want to be distracting. So that was it. So that was one of the chapters in the book. And it was this doxan encounters where people are working with his end teacher. And I read these dialogues and I was like, oh, that right there, that's what I want to do. That's what I need to do. That's what I've always wanted to do. And more so, I felt like I understand it. I know I know what this is. This is beyond understanding. And I know exactly what it is. It was very familiar to me as if I had lived multiple lifetimes doing it. So that was one chapter. And then another chapter that stuck out, these two chapters were the sort of inciting factors of my experience.

6:24The other chapter was called Enlightenment Encounters, which is... While every other channel is fighting for your customers' attention, podcasts are where they've already given it. No one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes. They choose to be here. They trust the voice in their ears. And when that voice talks about your brand, it doesn't sound like advertising. It sounds like a recommendation from a friend. Acast gives you that trust at scale. Digital precision, host-read authenticity, and performance data that proves it worked. Don't fight for attention. Buy it with Acast. Learn more by visiting acast.com slash advertise. 9 or so people's description of going through the experience of Ken Cho, which is essentially what we call like instant enlightenment, satore, a true shift in identity that is very, very profound. And each one of these people in the book wrote about their own experience, in their own words,

7:24in their own time frame, I think half of them were like monks or monastics and the other half or householders who just went to Zen centers periodically to do these retreats. And this was like in the 60s. So by reading those accounts, same thing. I felt like, oh, that's exactly what I'm going. It wasn't even what I want. That's the only possibility for me anymore. Because this stuff did work. My life didn't work. I could see people's lives working around me. My did work. So I reading these chapters was very catalytic. It was instantly catalytic. Something lit up, something was on fire. It uses in term, term, I had read Swallow or Red Hot Iron Ball that I could neither spit out nor swallow. I had to go through. There's only way it was through this. And otherwise death, it didn't matter. It didn't matter what happened. Otherwise, I had to go through this. And I knew it and I felt it. And it wasn't scary. Like I said, it was like, it was truly exciting. Like, finally something that feels real. Finally, that's something that feels more real than this illusory world that had felt so false to me and so uncomfortable and caused so much suffering.

8:30So I just, you have reading these chapters and then just sitting and meditating and kind of without, it's had a little hard to give you a technical description of what I did, but I'll try. I put into action these kinds of contemplations that were in the book that were aligning very much with my contemplations that were already there. The instinct just lined up very well. And so I sat down and didn't let, I didn't let myself grab onto one more thought. I just looked at thoughts and I was like every single thought I've ever had that I remember has just caused me to suffer. And so I, it's kind of like, well, what's here if there's no thoughts? What is here if I don't let thoughts define what I am at all? So I noticed that I actually don't have to grab onto one more thought. The thoughts will come, but they're not me. They're not defining me. They're not, whatever they say, they can say whatever they want, but I'm not going to assume they're about me. I'm just going to notice their thoughts. I'm going to sat down and did this and then the thoughts became less and

9:31less and less frequent. And it got very, very quiet, like very quiet in my mind. And I was very awake. And the thoughts would get a little bizarre after a while because they were so infrequent that they'd start saying things like, Oh, I must be asleep. And to hear that thought in your mind and not feel like it's about you, but believing, knowing you would have believed it was about you before is very strange. Like I would have believed that before. I would have thought that was my thought. And it's just seeing it float by. And it's like, I must be asleep because there's no content here. But I was wide awake. Wide awake, obviously. It's more awake than I'd ever been. So these bizarre thoughts started coming through, but they were more and more scarce. And it just got quiet or in quieter. And it was profoundly peaceful. Even the thought that says, Oh, this is profoundly peaceful would come, but it wasn't my thought. It would just come and go. And that was released. And there was even more peace. So every thought that was released was more than just one thought in that moment that was released. It was layers of identity, years of ideas, years of

10:31self-doubt, years of self-contraction of self-consciousness, just just every single thought was just blown it away. It's like ice thrown into the fire again and again and again. And again, to get to the point where you can do that, take some work. And I've worked with many people around this. And that's what this is now. But anyone can. And once you get to that place where you really are willing to go off of the map, and you will feel like you're going off the map when you really let go of thoughts to this degree, you're going into uncharted territory in a certain way. At the same time, you often feel an instinctual knowing that yes, this is very real. And if you're willing to do that, then the next part will happen for you. And the next part that happened is kind of the coolest thing that I could ever even begin to talk about. It's definitely the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me. Amazing is just such a weak word for this. It was life changing for sure.

11:32That sounds very small for this. This went beyond this lifetime. There's no doubt that what changed, what shifted, what was realized, what disappeared, was the scale and scope of that was so beyond the way I had thought about my life, even this physical life, even the physical body, the energetics of it, the implications of it were fully beyond this lifetime, fully beyond the scale of what we would consider a local experience or a local environment very obviously. The energetics of it were felt as a kind of infinite body. Everything that happened beyond this was beyond description, beyond verbal capture. I can't say it. There's no way to say it. But by speaking about it, because I can feel it right now, sometimes the the the the transmissions there, sometimes people can hear this and instinctually get it like, oh, that okay. And if that happens enough times, you may learn to orient yourself to it. I hope you're thoroughly enjoying this moment from a full

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