Episode #614: Richard Evans, an architect who began practice in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, describes his life as a search for truth grounded in direct experience rather than belief. In this discussion, he presents that search as the thread connecting his early skepticism, his confrontation with anxiety, and his later commitment to meditation as a way of testing what was real.

That search began in childhood, when he attended Anglican church services and felt that something did not add up. He did not accept what he was being told about God and expected some kind of consequence for that disbelief… yet nothing happened. That moment shook his trust in inherited belief and left him looking for something that could stand on its own. As he grew older, that question stayed with him. At one point, while walking down the street, he asked himself what he actually wanted from life; the answer that came was not career or stability, but the need to knowtruth itself.

His own experience of anxiety gave the search greater urgency. He describes this as a serious issue within his family, yet his own experience of it still felt isolating. Over time, however, he recognized that what he was experiencing was not unique; it was a recognition changed his search from trying to understand the world, to finding a way to relate to suffering without avoiding it.

That need led him to Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka, which became the first clearly defined method in his search. The first course was difficult, but it gave him a way to test what he was being told against what he could observe. Later, as his experience deepened, the structure of the practice and the organizational constraints no longer felt sufficient on its own. Conversations with other practitioners helped him refine his understanding, and doubt became less an obstacle than a sign of the edge of what he understood.

He describes his practice now as more self-directed, guided by observation, conversation, and continued inquiry, and no longer compelled to discover a “final answer.”

Episode #613: Mike is a lifelong martial artist who came to Myanmar through martial arts training rather than faith, and yet found himself pulled into a Burmese esoteric world he had not been looking for. The line he returns to as both method and warning is simple: “See things as they are, not as they appear.”

He began formal training in the late 1950s, moving through Japanese systems before encountering Burmese martial arts in the United States decades later. What held him was not spectacle but a demanding structure, built around principles, weapons work, conditioning, and long timelines for advancement. That discipline set the conditions for everything that followed. When he first traveled to Mogok in the mid-1990s, it was not as a spiritual seeker. He describes himself as not religious, and skeptical of claims that could not be tested.

In Mogok, he watched demonstrations that crossed into trance and invulnerability, where practitioners endured blades, flame, and boiling water while in altered states. The moment that stayed with him was not the performance but the logic offered afterward: when trance breaks, the protection leaves. Soon he was questioned about his conduct and invited into initiation rites that tied martial discipline to mental training and vows. The five precepts were treated as a foundational requirement, with specific restrictions on alcohol, drugs, and even meat on the grounds that “wild minds,” when ingested, carried effects into samathā practice.

Back in the United States, the initiation continued working on him, pushing him toward teachers across traditions and into a daily meditation routine he continues to this day, while also deepening a conviction—first raised by teachers in Mogok and later affirmed in other encounters—that he had been Ta’ang in a past life.

That same insistence on unsentimental perception shapes his political reading of Myanmar’s war. Mike rejects neat models that ignore fragmentation and uneven power, and he argues that durable outcomes depend on leverage and enforcement, not slogans. In both arenas, he is arguing for the same discipline: train the mind to stop seeing what it wants to see, or it will keep repeating the same decisions.

Episode #612: “You do create a dependency. You create a long-term relationship that also you can leverage into political influence as well.” Ian Storey, a principal fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, sees that dependency as the thread connecting Russia’s military, energy, diplomatic and nuclear ties with Myanmar. The relationship is economically small, but it gives Moscow influence in precisely the sectors the military government has needed most since the 2021 coup.

Myanmar began turning toward Russian weapons in the early 2000s after years of heavy dependence on China. Russian fighter aircraft, helicopters and training later became embedded in the military’s capabilities, creating continuing requirements for spare parts, maintenance, munitions and technical expertise. Since the coup, Russia has also supplied oil and refined products, including aviation fuel, while the two governments developed ruble-kyat payment arrangements and other ways to conduct trade under sanctions.

The political exchange is equally transactional. Myanmar’s military government endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Moscow has provided diplomatic recognition and continued military support. Yet Russia will not sacrifice its wider ASEAN interests for Myanmar, and Storey stresses that the country remains a relatively minor Russian market.

Nuclear cooperation could make the relationship much harder to unwind. After more than two decades of discussions and training, Russia has agreed to provide Myanmar with a small modular reactor, although construction has not begun. If built, the plant would tie Myanmar to Russian financing, operation, fuel and technical services for decades.

Storey doubts Moscow would commit major resources to rescue the military if it faced collapse. Russia remains a secondary power in Southeast Asia, pursuing narrow advantages in arms, energy and nuclear technology. For now, however, those narrow advantages align closely with the military regime’s needs, leaving Myanmar exposed to a partnership that can be deeply consequential without ever becoming deeply committed.