Remembering William(Bill) Hamilton Featuring Daniel Ingram, MD

Transcript

this name comes up in almost like a uh infamous sense in some ways um bill hamilton you i you know in the beginning beginning of your book and the book is dedicated to to bill hamilton and i'm like who you know who is this guy who's bill hamilton i'm trying to find like good resources on him and it's so sparse throughout everywhere everybody has heard of this guy you find out that everybody's heard of him but not many people knew him um but he had kind of um i don't know i i don't want to frame it in like a a way but he was almost he sounded like almost like a badass uh in the dharma world so he was he's one of the most badass meditators i've ever met in my life well so and i was fascinated by that and and of course his his book is available um saints and psychopaths uh which is a fascinating read but at the same time i'm thinking like this guys anything like what this guy was right exactly and and i couldn't find anything else and i'm like where's you know where's videos his of his like dharma talks where's this and i so i i decided that i'm going to start a project i'm going to write an article for medium and hopefully do some interviews and and compile everything together and again uh you know i think fascinating from what i've heard there was a short interview with deep mindfulness where they asked shinzen young about bill hamilton and he gave his small account and um i forget the terminology he used um the unsung hero of the the western dharma world oh yeah no question so who who's bill hamilton and why did you dedicate your book to him so bill hamilton there's no way to overstate how important he was to my practice to kenneth folk's practice and to a number of people's practices he was an obscure kind of paranoid weird geeky quirky odd hyper-dedicated gentleman that by the time um he died had done i think seven years on retreat or something and i only met him once in person and this is before i even had anything like the capacity to appreciate what he was and then talked with him on the phone a lot in the period of 96 to 97 and then he died of pancreatic cancer unfortunately when he was relatively young his early 60s i think and he was supposed to have written a whole bunch of books that were going to be his dharma and teaching and he didn't uh and so my book is very much an attempt to in a in a way that i think is nothing like what he would have been able to do had he written it to get some of this stuff down in writing that was not that he didn't write down unfortunately and that i ended up being the person who wrote it down i think is unfortunate because he would have done a better job i'm quite sure now he was a very interesting person because he's kind of cusp between full pragmatic dharma and the old way of taboos and not talking about it and weird kind of ideals about spirituality and kind of boomer mishmash anyway plenty of good boomer practitioners out there but you know what i mean and so um and he would talk about practice and awakening you kind of had to drag it out of him you kind of had to break through the barriers of like his reluctant and then he would open up and then he would just start pouring out amazing stuff about fractals and technical meditation and genic at phase attention shapes and deep insights and cool takes on things and yeah and so i talked to him a lot on the phone but again only met him once in person and kenneth focus the person you really need to talk to if he's kind of in a non-podcasty mood at the moment which is yeah too bad from the learn about bill hamilton point of view i understand why he is it's fine i respect that but he hung out with him a lot more he was there at the end when he was dying he um they were much closer he did retreats with him he hung out his places at whidbey island and he's the guy to talk to so i don't mean to like say i'm not your guy but i'm not as good as some people but he didn't teach many people in terms of like what i would think of as the full transmission download of what he was i think they're really only two of us that we know of there may be others we don't know about but as far as i know it's kind of kenneth and i which is really too bad um yeah well that's why i want to do a um kind of like a small project on them like i think it's fascinating and i think it's you know galvanizing and um yeah again it's just a fascinating thing and and um what would you say about his his capability as a meditator he died what i think of as an arahat who had spectacular genic skills and could attain to fruitions that lasted hours and could attain to narota samapati and was always just a total badass when it came to be able to do these very advanced states and stages and to be able to do them for long periods of time so he could really get duration of these things and had a lot of control and [Music] you know he was the first person i i heard seriously talk about formless realms he was the first person i heard seriously talk about in a road of summer party and you could tell he was talking from his own experience and he would just get technical and precise and think stuff about how to do these things and what they were like and and all of that in a way that i i never heard anybody else really do at that full-on level and this is when he would open up and he would talk about fine stages and substages and janas and subnatas and sub-genres and seeing this part of this aspect of the experience within that and that also kind of technical craft of ultra precise meditative phenomenology he's the first person i ever heard do that in that way uh just unbelievable and yeah nobody else was doing that nobody else was talking from that kind of a place and nobody else was he was lucky you could just call him up and talk to him because he was hiding out in his trailer and in whitby island and didn't really have a lot of people who appreciated what he was and so he was also available in a way that rare high-end practitioners rarely are yeah like the hidden master yeah he was and he was one of these dudes and he also helped create the dharmaseed tape library library he was there at ims in very early days so he got to see all that stuff and just yeah a person who really deeply appreciated the depths of the dharma and was willing to be his quirky weird self and talk about this and break the taboos and thus transmit something very important and powerful is he well i was going to say is he part of the inspiration of why you kind of um would go out out and talk about attainments oh yeah but he was not one of these people who was out like all over the place talking about entertainment very select people but i was like man this just these knot needs to die with these old dudes who nobody knows about like that's just a mess like that no like that's a waste that's a true waste of of talent and resource and the ability to help people and what what do you think that bill um you said he was planning on right kind of writing a series of books uh seven books or so that would be kind of his dharma teaching um what do you think he would that was my understanding of his plan okay okay what do you what do you think he would have possibly done differently um sake than than mastering the core teachings of the buddha i don't know i couldn't replicate bill yeah like i'm not yeah i i'm not i'm not quite sure um clearly mctv is through my own voice in my own style it's my own take on his tech and the tech that came out of upandita and mahasi and some of the you know rare backroom advanced practitioners that bill had access to and the conversations he was a part of so it's clearly spun through my own lens and i'm not sure i could replicate exactly what he would have done so yeah like i remember people like i remember hearing this jazz musician talking about django reinhardt this great guitar player and someone was like well show me something like what jango would do you know he's like i can't really quite do that yeah just i can't really replicate him in the same way i can't replicate bill hamilton and he had he had an uncanny ability for one-liners so like just these the that was one of his signature things like you know like enlightenment highly recommended i can't tell you why yes uh yeah you know or suffering less noticing it more yeah an ominous one and he there are a bunch of these again we should try to convince kenneth to i i highly encourage you i've emailed him you know tweeted him he i i was fortunate enough to get tim i said he he quoted someone and i said i said kenneth drop some bill hamilton quotes and he just went on this short tirade of like maybe 10 different really awesome um bill hamilton they're not doing insight they're doing psychology that kind of thing yeah yeah i was and i loved it man and you know i wish i there were more resources to bill hamilton that's that's really why i want to create a resource even if it's a modest one you know even uh in honor of you know him and and the dedication and the and everything he brought to the practice and so i guess we could say the movement especially kind of like he sounded like kind of like a western attitude in a sense but brought the wisdom of the east and um you know i also want to ask you know kind of is there's so there's there's nobody there's nowhere you can really find teachings like that today is there like from or is there well it's complicated so when you say find teachings like that um no there are people well what we've tried to do in pragmatic dharma is bring a lot of that stuff forth so actually it's vastly more available today than it was in bill's time yeah so people have vastly more access to that kind of attitude birth perspective the fractal tech that came out of him sub-genres and sabjanas and where's that advanced resolution stuff i mean you know you'll find some of that at mctv you'll find something on the dharma overground you'll find that in kenneth folk stuff you know and uh other people who have been influenced by these things so you can find some of it but currently as far as i know there is no place you could like go on retreat there's no retreat center or anything that's full on that kind of tech and attitude yet yeah there will be yeah because i've actually been looking for a place like that and it's been really frustrating and it's like i kind of just have to go somewhere or or not go somewhere and just do it on my own right you know personally in my circumstances better if i go somewhere i have the three kids so it's nice that i can just go and do the work you know um but how how do you think bill did it you know like it was just kind of thing of a bill being bill hamilton or did you have he was just a concentration natural the first time he ever tried to meditate to some record he just dropped into some super deep state so he just had something he had a gift no question second he clearly had a tenaciousness like he did seven years of retreat he would do long hard retreats and primitive conditions and burma and back in the day and all kinds of stuff he he was just he had a tenacity about him that was just impressive and he was driven you know he cared about this stuff it it bit deep into his something and just grabbed him and you know so he became a spiritual question he was willing to follow whatever strange unusual gurus and weird teachers and just crash around in the scene trying to figure out what the heck and you can read about some of his adventures in saints and psychopaths yeah um he also clearly cared more about transmitting the dharma than he cared about the taboos right even though he cared about the taboos you had to get him to open up he wasn't just full on open like my you know like i am he wasn't that something but so he's kind of this transitional figure between the one way and the other way but a foundational transitional figure without which this probably wouldn't exist in its current form yeah yeah and again um please if you can't speak to kenneth for me i if i can even get both of you on uh to have a you know bill hamilton uh you know in memory of bill hamilton episode and resource and then i can also use that for my article i mean that that would be fascinating i think even just again in memory of him and again uh maybe even kind of like a minute transmission of his tech you know i think even doing it in the spirit of that is empowering you know whether if you want to say an energetic or quantum level or whatever it is there's something there oh that's a plain fact he could transmit something you could feel it it was obvious he could transmit something even sometimes when he didn't seem to want to it was the weirdest thing like he couldn't help himself yeah it just broke through the taboos it broke through his reluctance it broke through his skepticism and doubts it broke through everything and then he just kind of had to say stuff yeah and uh just off the cuff is there anything that he said that stood out to you like another quote or cool thing wow um [Music] the most striking thing is that it could be done the most striking thing is him speaking from the place of someone who could do it it just made it real in a way that hearing people talk about sort of theoretically or hinting they might have done it or whatever was not the same as him just talking about what he could do yeah i just found that unbelievably inspiring it's like okay this dude can do it this whole weird old guy can do this maybe i can actually do this yeah so that simple spirit of can be done was the most important thing yeah yeah and that's awesome and uh yeah i really hope this stuff works that it's not just myth and fantasy and also a willingness to really be micro phenomenologically um empirically expensive so like he was willing to overlay additional frameworks of fractals and sub stages and all the stuff that you didn't find in the old text because he was able to see it and then i was able to see it and it's like oh in the same way that mahasi in writing practical insight meditation or you know the progress of insight some of these books was willing to talk from his own experience and go outside and beyond what was just mentioned in the canon and the commentaries about some of the stage criteria and what can happen on the path hit that same willingness to do that transmitted through bill and then just got amplified by a whole lot of western conceptual capability and freedom and innovation and bill was a fascinating mixture of a very strong traditionalist and powerful rebel that was going to let his own experience shine through orthodoxies and shine through in a way that was just not going to be held down even kind of despite himself and so that spirit coming through i think was one of the most powerful things and certainly a profound inspiration for mctv and my own practice yeah what do you think it would have been like if if bill you know hadn't suffered an early release or whatever you want to call it right moving on um what do you think he would have done and and how it would have changed things yeah i think his writings would have been quite profound and powerful and that we never got them um the level of technical detail he was capable of and the um he had just been doing it so long you know he also had a maturity that comes from just years and years and years of doing it and he had come up around so many different teachings and so many different traditions hindu vedanta stuff and ram das and shinzen and zen and you know very influenced by trungpa and we would have seen a remarkable fusion of all of those from that level of technical craft and personal unbelievable competence and insight that i think would have been unprecedented in its time and still stand on its own today not just historically as something that was a moment in time putting together the forces that he was had access to in the 70s and into the 80s and 90s but also something that was beyond them because he was a person who pushed things based on incredible depth of practice yeah and um did he say or like did he have a way of saying like this is how i practice or you know he just how how would he talk about his method of practice like was he using noting was he using jhanas was he using all of it together or yeah he was using this very complicated mix of things that was his own you know he had so many influences that he put together a lot of stuff and he was also willing to push and play and explore like he thought of like his whole project where he went on this retreat with upandita to work on attaining narota samapati like that kind of pioneering reconstruction of old tech through diligent practice and trying to follow instructions and and experimenting mode that was just what he was and so the willingness to explore and to even attempt to replicate the experiments and the old books just through diligence and hard work and effort and playing around and seeing what actually happened and comparing that to what it said was supposed to happen and then just keeping going with that layer upon layer hour upon hour you know on and on that was what he was and so that spirit of just basically not taking no for an answer saying no i'm going to crack this thing that in and of itself was his most powerful gift i think yeah and i i think you mentioned before in some interview of he had some kind of possible tantric genius what what was that were you referring to um what was the genius of bill yeah he it's a funny way to put it i don't know why i may have put it then but maybe i did um yeah his ability to simply transmit what he was has that that quality to it that direct vajrayana quality to it yeah um yeah because it came through it's funny when i think about the words he said like they weren't as impressive as the fact that he was saying them or the way he said them or something that came through in them his one-liners were great but then he would sometimes go into these sort of long kind of rambly sometimes subtly paranoid or clearly trying to hold back diatribes on various topics like what was vajra samadi or what did trunkpa mean by this or did trump actually write his books or other topics or like what was up with you know other spiritual teachers that won't name a whole lot of names or something but there was something that was coming through that was much more powerful sometimes than even the specifics so that i think was this real genius is that and that is very tantric because it was very transmissional yeah okay and um do you think i know i kenneth faulk had like a pdf that's available i found out on dharma overground and he he has some stories in there about bill and some of the conversations which were really cool but um other than saints and psychopaths and then i think um ken falks that pdf is called um [Music] uh something uh fitness it was like um contemplation contemplation yeah attentional fitness intentional fitness um and uh is were there any other kind of resources out there that had anything a bill in them not that i know of not that i've ever found or heard of okay and i guess he doesn't have any writings or anything left behind not that i know of um yeah not that i know of all right yeah you never know right but yeah again uh yeah i really appreciate you talking about bill um because there's very few people who can or even will um and i i've gone around like everybody i can think of in like the dharma world and emailed them message them whatever you know what you have on bill hamilton and a lot of them if you wanna if you wanna find more you could try reaching out to some of the old ims people like you could try i don't know if steve armstrong or steve smith would know some stuff about him joseph goldstein might have a few stories i'm not sure i think when he was there um i don't think they really appreciated what he was and i think he felt himself as kind of an outcast in some ways even though he was an insider who was there back in the day and from the beginning of that whole western dharmaseen movement his whole attitude was so alien to most people doing this and his capabilities put him in a class not entirely by himself but a very small circle of people who could do the stuff that he could do and for whom that level of depth of technical practice was a reasonable set of frameworks that would match their experience um yeah and so you know even though he was around then i don't they don't you never hear of them really giving him his full do and i think it wasn't until the last few years that he kind of fully came into his own by which point he was hiding out in a trailer from the law because you know his ex running up all those charges on his american express account or whatever you can read about it and saints psychopaths yeah and it was during those years that he did his last retreats and i think it was during his last retreats that he really came into the full power and measure of what he was by which point he was only talking to a few people and far from the major centers of insight and then he died yeah and and bill like yeah he wasn't just kind of doing mindfulness-based stress reduction like he was going for awakening right oh yeah he died you know i think of him as dying in our heart yeah and so and for most of the time i was talking with him he was third path i think he got it on his last retreat burma yeah and then he got sick did he talk about um like stream entry and for second path and third path and all that he would talk about that kind of stuff yeah would he did he did he have like a formula for stream entry like he said if you want stream entry daniel or kenneth or whoever else this is what you got to do well one of the things you talked about is sort of vipassana genres and attention shapes and phases of attention and what you get to see with each of those and the layers of mind he talked a lot about four foundations he talked a lot about like um actually the anapana sade suta which talks about breathing in i tranquilize my body breathing and i have mindfulness he emphasized that a lot actually like cultivating all seven factors of awakening through the breath as a mindful thing so simultaneously grounding attention in the breathing while cultivating positive qualities that also lead to insights so he and using the phrases so he he advocated actually a mix of like putting together a bunch of things in a very traditional way again he was very much a traditionalist sort of um yeah he was a traditionalist who took that traditionalism and just did something amazing with it but he would he would talk about stuff like that very simple things and um he also had grounded immediacy but he also had a super high standards like you know what is vajra samadhi and he would talk about vajra samadhi and what is the samadhi that cuts through all the illusions of stability and how do you cut through the illusion of everything you know appearing stable how do you cut through the illusion of space and consciousness appearing stable i mean those are the kinds of advanced pointing things that my other insight teachers weren't doing yeah and what do you think that he he'd maybe have learned some of that like you said in burma or or and those retreats in the east and like you said like back observe yeah yeah and also he could read because he had a pretty solid basis of experience in practice he could read a lot of other people's teachings or listen to their talks or whatever and extract out nuggets of gold from them and kind of highlight those yeah yeah i know exactly what you mean um yeah i mean again thank you so much for for talking about bill hamilton i appreciate it and uh i mean if if i have any kind of uh assistance or support in that kind of project i mean you're kind of my go-to guy you know even in communicating if you can put out an email for me saying hey you know so and so this nobody guy is doing a small article project on bill hamilton resources can you help them out do you have any stores or anything that would be super ultra helpful okay we'll see what i can do yeah and um um i kind of want to end it that i'm sorry i've taken so much of your time you know i always appreciate when you come here and kick it it kind of feels like um 21st century dharma sangha you know like i love it man bill was super important like there's no way to express my full depth of gratitude for him yeah and um is there something that he he would kind of i know he didn't talk with a lot of people but something he would try to impress on a lot of people like if he had signed up like an overall kind of message to his way or teaching or style wow um do it yeah this is doable do it this is doable it's worth the time this is doable it's not going to be what you think it is but um still you should do this yeah that was the other thing about him he was willing to break with some of the traditional advertising styles that highly recommended can't tell you why most people would say highly recommended because you will eliminate these you know defilements and you will have this thing and you will this this and yeah he was starting to break with that so he he was like yeah highly recommended but yeah there's this human component to it and actually getting to hear him like you know at the end when he was suffering and still i think in somewhat denial about how long he had to live and and all that so i got to see the humanity of someone who at the same time had unbelievable wisdom and concentration ability just amazing like wow yeah so yeah i don't know his whole his whole strange quirky life was in some ways the teaching as well yeah yeah i really appreciate that and um both suffering and the end of suffering his life demonstrated both in abundance yeah yeah so um again this is kind of like an in memory to to bill hamilton and um i'm really looking forward to putting together that project because it's almost like a small journey for myself you know to hopefully grasp even the tiniest um bit of insight or transmission you know and i and you know i can't i've never spoken to him i i can't say this but i i just the way i feel i feel that what you're doing brings forward the spirit of what he he was teaching and stuff based on what i heard from him you know about him and his style and i think there's something there so i think that you know what you did with um mastering the core teachings of the buddha is incredibly important thanks um i try it's uh yeah yeah i wish he had been able to do it that's the biggest thing yeah so yeah and um again i've taken a lot of your time and i'm sorry i appreciate you coming on though um it's again it's an honor always yeah it's been delightful thank you so much for uh helping to bring these things forward in any way so yeah