[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
My name is Rick Archer.
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening
people.
I've done over 700 of them now.
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and look under the past interviews menu, where you'll find them all organized in various
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kind of way, we have teams of people proofreading transcripts and doing some other things, so
get in touch if you'd like to help in that way. The guest today is Neil Theis. I've seen Neil
He'll speak a number of times at the Science and Nonduality Conference and I very much
enjoyed his talks.
He's a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and
the anatomy of the human interstitium.
So you'll be thinking, "What does that have to do with BatGap?"
Okay, this next part does.
Dr. Thies' studies in complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in
fields such as integrative medicine, consciousness studies, and the science-religion dialogue.
He is a senior Zen student at the Village Zen Do in New York City.
His lifelong Jewish practice has involved both traditional observances and formal academic
study.
And in recent years, to his surprise, he has also undergone shamanic initiation.
So welcome, Neil.
Thank you very much, Rick.
I went to the Zen Center in New York City in the fall of '68.
I had learned to meditate, but what I was doing seemed so easy and enjoyable that I thought,
"This couldn't be serious.
It's too easy."
And so I went to the Zen Center to check into what that was all about.
And it was an adventure.
We had our car towed away, and then we were trying to cash a check in the Times Square
area and asking prostitutes.
I don't think we knew they were prostitutes if they could cash a check, and getting responses
like, "My man, don't take checks."
We finally got the car back somehow or other and got back to Connecticut. Anyway, it was one of those adventures
That was my total experience with Zen
Well, it's in the moment I'm sure in the moment I'm sure it was
Okay
This will be a free-flowing conversation. I've read Neal's book twice. He has a book called notes on complexity
He sent me the audio version of it's about four and a half hours long and I really enjoyed it
So I listened to it a second time and I could easily have listened to it a third time and
continued to learn things.
But we're going to use an outline of the book's chapters as a guide to our conversation, although
we might deviate from it at times if other thoughts come up or if some of you send in
questions.
So first of all, Neil, what is complexity and why are you interested in it and how does
it pertain to spirituality and consciousness?
theory, I think it's fair to call it one of the three great scientific theories of the 20th
century. The other two obviously being quantum physics and relativity. The thing is that quantum
physics describes everything at the incredibly small and relativity covers everything at the
very large scale. But where life happens, where our lives happen, neither really works very well.
You know, we're still debating whether there are quantum effects that bubble up to the everyday
scale and we know gravity affects us but other than that day to day not so much.
Complexity, it's related closely to something called chaos theory which more
people are familiar with. It's sort of what came after chaos theory was
developed and basically it's an understanding how life happens, how
living things arise from the substance of the universe, how they interact with
each other to create larger scale living things. So that's whether you're talking
about biomolecules self-organizing into cells, cells becoming bodies, or various bodies becoming
social structures. And it depends on what you include as a body. If it's ants, then it's
an ant colony. If it's people, it might be a neighborhood, a city, an economy. If it's
all the living things within an area, then you've got an ecosystem. Everything alive
on earth, then you're talking Gaia. So, complexity describes all of those things. It's called
complexity because there's nothing more complex than life. That's sort of the hallmark of life.
You can't reduce it to very simple equations that you can just pop a few numbers in and get a result.
Life is never machine-like, despite what our cultural metaphors tend to say in terms of
bioengineering and cells as building blocks. This makes them seem like things you can build like a
machine. But that's not what life is. It's more complex and more dynamic than that. So that's what
complexity theory covers. I stumbled into it sort of by
accident. Everything in my book actually sort of step by step
assembled itself, which is what complex systems do. They
assemble themselves into larger scale things. And by bumping into
somebody often by chance, my clinical practice, I'm a
pathologist, this is my microscope in my office. And I
spend my day looking at microscope slides. And we'll
probably talk about that if we're going chapter by chapter a bit.
So I'm looking at human tissues at the cellular level all day long.
And they're human tissues.
I'm not looking at mice.
My research involves looking at human material because that's what comes to me as part of
my clinical practice.
And at some point, looking at liver slides, liver is my subspecialty.
I work with the liver transplant team.
I started to figure out how we could prove that the liver had stem cells.
And nowadays that sounds not very exciting because everything we know has stem cells,
but 25 years or so ago, the liver was not generally thought to have stem cells.
In fact, the only part...
And just to explain briefly what stem cells are.
A stem cell is a cell that can become all the cells of an entire organ on its own or
all the cells of an entire body on its own.
So for example, we knew the bone marrow had stem cells for the rest of the bone marrow
and the blood and we know this because you can take a cell and transplant it into someone who has no
bone marrow like someone who's had leukemia and you've needed to erase all their white cells in
order to get rid of the leukemia and you take some cells and put them in the patient's bone marrow
and lo and behold the bone marrow repopulates and they get all the cells of the blood.
The surface of the skin is known to have stem cells at the base that's one of the reasons skin
heal so well. You destroy a little bit of the surface, the stem cells at the base of the skin
of the epidermis very rapidly replicate. They reproduce each other and fill in and you have
full thickness healing. The GI tract was known to have stem cells, so everything from mouth all the
way out the other end, and they turn over every 24 to 48 hours. The GI tract's really dynamic.
So the reason a burn victim doesn't heal fully is that the stem cells are destroyed because
the burn goes so deep. Is that true? To some extent, but probably it's more about the scar tissue that
then forms, which is not normal tissue, and therefore the cells don't know how to organize
themselves in order to fill in when the scar tissue takes over. That's turning out to be far
more interesting. I mentioned to you before we came online that we now know that the scarring of
and stage liver disease we call cirrhosis, whether it's from alcohol or chronic hepatitis C or an
autoimmune disease, if we can stop the disease the scarring can actually melt away. In burn victims
under the right circumstances we're learning how scar tissue can melt away and then stem cells could
possibly fill in. Wow that'd be cool if they could actually. Yeah it would be cool but and this is an
example of a complex system. We can't go in and say, "Let's plaster over this wound with
some cells, bam," the way we might fix a wall. But if you put cells and let them interact
in an environment that's conducive to their interactions, in fact, the interactions are
between each other and between them and the environment, very much like people walking
down the street or ants doing their jobs in a colony, they tend to do what they need to
accomplish for the well-being, the health of the system. And no one is planning it.
No one's telling each cell what they need to do. The new tissue is arising out
of the dynamic interactions at the local level. So that's exactly what complexity
is talking about. So when I was looking at the liver, I realized, oh, the liver has
stem cells and I figured out how that could be proven. And that had been
controversial at that point because usually a liver is just sitting there.
though we know that if you whack out half of the liver within 40 days, it grows
back to normal. The question was which cells accomplished that and are there
stem cells as part of that process? So my group showed that there were and then as
part of that work and outgrowth of that around 2000, there was a lot of news
about adult stem cells as opposed to embryonic stem cells and my group was
one of the pioneering teams that showed that cells at least from the bone marrow,
Not only could bone marrow stem cells produce all the elements of the bone marrow in the blood,
but they also could contribute to the lung, the liver, the kidney, the brain, the muscle.
And it was our paper in 2021 that showed that that could happen with one single adult stem cell,
that it could contribute to all these tissues. And that meant an adult cell could behave like
an embryonic stem cell. And that led to George Bush's address to the nation in October of
that year because the anti-abortion argument against embryonic stem cells had been, it's
not ethical. But now because of our work and the other teams that were working on this,
they could say, "Oh, you don't need to do embryonic stem cells. You can do adult stem
cells and they can do everything." That's not really true. You need to do both sides
of the research and to some extent the reason we don't have a lot of more progress in terms
of stem cell therapeutics is because the politics of all that kept communities of stem cell
workers from talking to each other, cut out the funding, because this made embryonic stem
cells sort of at war with adult stem cells. I no longer am in that field as much as I
can avoid it. So while I was doing that, a friend of mine in England who is an academic
interested in interdisciplinary communication, people talking to each other across different
specialties and walks of life. He put me together with another friend of his named Jane Prophet,
who is an artist, and she had been interested in how, this is 25 years ago before video games were
quite as dynamic as they are now, and we were just starting to have internet things going on where
people were creating avatars for themselves or relating to avatars.
And she thought this was really interesting and wanted to examine using her art
practice, how people emotionally connected to virtual creatures.
And she created a virtual world called Technosphere,
where you could create a little animal, decide whether it was an herbivore,
a carnivore, put together a bunch of body parts.
So you knew what it looked like,
though it was never actually visualizable on a screen and send it out into the
world and then the animals would send you little postcards by email to tell you
what they were up to. Oh, today I was grazing. Oh, today I outran a carnivore.
Oh, today I got pregnant. Oh, today I didn't outrun the carnivore and this is
your last email because I'm dead. I tended to always, being Buddhist, I always
sent little herbivores in and they never survived very long. But the key thing was
when they had reached thousands of creatures in technosphere, the creatures
started organizing into social structures that they had not programmed. And it
turned out this was an example of artificial life, which is also a realm of
complexity theory. And so when I was telling her about how cells move around
the body, interacting with each other and with their local environments to create
tissues, she said, "Oh, that's like how complexity people talk about how ants
foreign colonies. And I was like, "What's complexity?" So it was Jane that taught me
about this. And unpacking that for the next 20 years, you heard some versions of that
at SAND, has sort of become the parallel work to my clinical work. Where that interfaced
with the spiritual side, a story I don't tell in the book, but relates directly to this
experience of working with Jane. Somewhere in there, I just became focused on the idea
that I kept imagining that the cells I was talking about and what I was picturing happening
in tissues was happening on my microscope slides. Or when I was doing animal research,
I don't do it anymore. I don't particularly like doing it. But when I did it during that
period, it's happening in the mice over there. But eventually, I made the obvious connection
that anything I'm describing there is happening in here. It's me that I'm talking about. When
I talk about stem cells, what stem cells are doing, I'm describing what my body is doing,
what the cells of my body is doing. And at the same time, I was starting to become aware
of this difficult tension between, is my body this thing, which is how I typically relate
to it, bounded by my skin, or is it a community of cells like a flock of birds or a colony
of ants and you can argue it both ways. And this really started to wear at me. And I was
already a Zen student at this point and I started on Koan practice, although I think at this
moment I wasn't doing Koan practice particularly. And by Koan practice in Zen, what I mean is
meditating. Sometimes it's on a question like, "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" This
is not the answer. You can't present an answer that answers this through a logical process
of thinking. You sort of have to experience the koan itself. Or, more often, it's a teacher
having an interaction with a student in which the student becomes awakened in some fashion.
So you're trying to have the experience of what's going on in that koan. A classic example
is usually one of the first koans you learn.
A student asks Master Chow Choo,
"Does a dog have Buddha nature?"
And everything has Buddha nature, doesn't it?
So why would you be asking about a dog?
But on the other hand,
can a dog who can't meditate have Buddha nature?
So student probably thinks they're very clever
and is gonna catch the teacher on something.
And Master Chow Choo responds, "Mu,"
which is Japanese for no or nothing,
which isn't really an answer.
It feels like a sidestep.
but in hearing the word, the monk has an awakening experience.
So when you're working on koans,
they get very obsessive when you're deep in the weeds with it.
You sort of can't stop thinking about it.
It becomes the world you're walking around in.
And very much this question,
is my body a thing or a colony of cells,
a community of cells?
There's gotta be a way to decide it, what it really is.
And I just kept gnawing at this.
And a few weeks later, after meeting Jane,
I think it was that first summer,
I was walking across town in New York City,
and I was thinking about this, body or cells,
body or cells, and I came to a cross section,
and there was a do not walk sign, so I stopped.
Body or cells, body or cells, body or cells.
And at the moment the light changed,
I was experiencing the cells.
And everyone else stepped off the curb,
and I couldn't move because my leg had become a flock of cells
that I didn't know how to control and direct.
And then it switched and I was able to walk
across the street, but there was this moment.
And then sometime later, also the same summer,
I was in my Zendo and I was back in those days,
I was the Thursday morning opener.
So if anyone wanted to come and do early morning meditation,
the place was open.
And it was a smaller community back then
and it was pre COVID.
So sometimes there was no one but me.
And I lit the incense on the altar and I sat on my cushion opposite and I had a practice
I was supposed to be doing that my Zen teacher had given me but there I was sitting on my
cushion going "body yourselves, body yourselves, body yourselves" while doing Zazen.
And it was a very focused moment and then there was this point where for some reason
I looked up and saw the incense stick across the room on the altar turning into smoke.
And my physical experience of body or cells, stick or smoke, it was the same experience.
I was experiencing both versions of my body and the incense stick themselves together.
And in that instant, I was like, this is what we mean by emptiness of inherent existence.
And it wasn't an intellectual concept.
It was just a very visceral sort of thing.
And of course, within moments, I was out of that moment
and it was becoming an intellectual thing.
But in that moment, my whole life,
I've been interested in science.
When I was in seventh grade, my ambition
was to finish up Einstein's work on a unified field theory
and win the Nobel Prize for it.
But I was also getting bar mitzvahed
and thinking about becoming a rabbi
and dreaming about what's Jewish mysticism,
and maybe I could find a way to do that too.
And those were very separate practices to me.
I never felt they were in conflict,
but nor did I feel that I had to look for a way
for them to interact or overlap.
I was just, maybe because I'm a Gemini,
but it was just, it was fine.
And when people would challenge me on that,
lots of people in medical school were like,
well, how can you be an observant Jew
and be a modern thinker?
Or I had four communities
that weren't comfortable with each other
that I was trying to embody.
I was a gay man living in New York City.
I was a doctor, I was now becoming a Buddhist, and I'm an observant Jew, and in any room
someone's going to object to one of those.
In that moment, everything became seamless, and my science practice and my spiritual practice
weren't separate.
And I understood that.
I experienced that.
And the work since, in the last 23 years since that time, has been exploring why that's not
the case, why they aren't separate, why they are the same thing. And that's what the book
has come to be. Diving down using complexity theory, so are cells a thing? No, they're
just biomolecules floating in water. So are molecules a thing? No, they're just atoms.
So are they a thing? No, they're just quantum phenomena. So quantum level, are those things?
those just pop in and out of space-time, the energetic field of space-time.
Is there no thing anywhere? No! Oh, right! We've wound up using complexity theory and quantum physics
to get to Buddhist metaphysics and Jewish mysticism and stuff like this.
So, that's the book. That's the first half of the book.
Interesting. Alright, I have a number of thoughts and questions.
I'll tell you why this topic fascinates me and we'll see if it fascinates you for the same reasons,
for the same reasons, maybe it doesn't.
Did you see Robert Lanza speak at SEND?
He talked about biocentrism.
- Yes, yes I did.
- Which is the idea that the universe
has this remarkable way of arranging itself
to be conducive to life, supportive of life,
against all odds.
I mean, there are so many variables
that have to be just so in order for the universe itself
to arise and then for life to arise.
And if any one of them were off by just a tiny bit,
it wouldn't happen.
And so that to me points to the notion
that there is some kind of fundamental,
all-pervading intelligence orchestrating everything,
which I find very interesting.
Brian Swimme, you may have seen him at SAND.
I've interviewed him.
A famous quote of his is,
"You leave hydrogen alone for 13.7 billion years
"and you end up with rose bushes and giraffes and opera."
Somehow hydrogen organizes itself into these complex things.
- Complexity.
- Complexity, exactly.
- This is what complexity theory is about.
How does that happen?
Yeah, amazing. There's a podcast I like a lot called Closer to Truth with Robert Lawrence Kuhn.
Yeah, I've got a few interviews on there with him.
Oh cool, I'll probably meet him here.
He met me at S.A.N.D., right?
Oh, I didn't realize he was at S.A.N.D., okay. He often devotes episodes to the discussion of
whether mathematics is discovered or invented. In other words, is it intrinsic to the universe?
Because the universe seems to have been operating by mathematical principles long before anyone could
could be around to understand them, or are we just sort of overlaying an interpretation
on something and just inventing in a human language something that doesn't indicate any
kind of deep organizational intelligence to the universe?
So all those are interesting questions.
I mean, to put it in simple terms, is there a God?
Is God the all-pervading or all-orchestrating intelligence that makes complexity possible,
makes life possible, that makes the universe possible.
You know I mentioned how every step of the way I keep bumping into people who seem to
be there to take me to the next thing I'm supposed to do.
And I went in 2010 to Stockholm to the Science of Consciousness meetings, kind of by accident
because a friend of mine, Bill Bichelle, who I do complementary medicine stuff with, and
at that point was the science guy for Tibet House, the Dalai Lama's center of action here
in New York. He had to give a talk at this conference and he had not had a lot of experience doing
public speaking and he was very nervous and begged me to go with him so he could have a
friendly face in the audience. And in order to do that, I had to come up with an abstract
on something to do with consciousness. And I was already doing the complexity stuff and
I had ideas about how complexity might relate to consciousness. So I went and presented that
stuff. And in the morning, the guy who would eventually become my collaborator, Menasca
Fatos, was giving a plenary session. And he has come for decades now, and is one of the
first serious physicists who really stated this.
I've interviewed him twice, for those who'd like to check him out.
So he agrees with many of the founders of quantum physics, that the correlates between
quantum physics and things like Vedic understandings of consciousness are not accidental or happenstance.
And his first book was called The Conscious Universe, in which he's stating the idealist position, which is that consciousness, awareness comes first, and out of that arises what appears to be a material universe.
And he was giving this plenary session, and I wandered into the plenary session just to see what was going on, because I wasn't particularly interested in consciousness studies.
And he's talking about how in order to take the quantum physics stuff further,
we needed a different way of thinking about biology.
And he starts describing what that would look like.
And I'm like, "It's complexity theory. It's the stuff I've been writing about for the last eight years.
Why is no one noticing what I'm talking about?"
And I got very angry and I walked out of his lecture.
That afternoon, a little scientific ego there,
my abstract had been accepted for presentation in a tiny little side session.
There were four abstracts being presented. I was the fourth one to present, and the only people in the room were the people presenting and their friends.
But Manas was the moderator of the session, and I presented my ideas in complexity theory and consciousness, which was not yet an idealist position.
I was sort of a panpsychist, that the way things interact in the world as a complex system gives rise to consciousness.
And he heard what I was saying and rushed over to me after my talk. It was like, here's my card. We have to talk to each other.
And we started working on this together. And we've published, I think, six or seven papers together.
And eventually, he dragged me to some extent. I was extremely conservative and very cautious, but dragged me over the edge to seeing that no, consciousness comes first.
first. Materiality is an illusion and in our academic writing we refer to this underlying,
this grant of being, this god-like thing as fundamental awareness or pure awareness. That's
nothing but the awareness of awareness. It's non-dual. There's no subject-object split.
There's no way to describe it linguistically, mathematically, through images. And somehow,
As it yearns, one might say, to understand what it itself is, it necessarily starts to
shimmy into a subject-object separation.
And when it does that, the only way you can have separation is if you have dimensionality.
Dimensionality like space, like time, maybe other dimensions.
And so the moment duality arises from non-duality, the moment non-dual pure awareness recognizes
itself as subject and object. All of material existence springs into being. With space-time,
you have, because of quantum physics, an energy-rich field. That gives rise to all the subatomic
particles emanating out of the space-time continuum. Those self-organize into atoms,
into molecules, according to the principles of complexity theory, which are very simple.
They're summarized in chapter three of the book. And out of that comes life. I don't
refer to it as intelligence because part of the problem here is that in English we have so few words for mind, consciousness, awareness, intelligence, sentience.
Those are the five biggies. None of them are precise in any way.
I don't use intelligence because I feel like people tend to project what their own experience of their own intelligence is,
in particular how laden with intention our intelligence is.
And I don't know that the pure fundamental non-dual awareness
is intentional in that way.
I don't think there's design happening,
but I think there are implications that are unavoidable.
And to that pure awareness becoming aware of itself,
and those implications are a living conscious universe,
not merely a universe that contains living conscious beings,
but a universe that is seamlessly in its entirety living in consciousness.
Yeah. I don't know if this is from Kashmir Shaivism or not, but there's an idea,
which is Manasseh's field, aside from physics.
There's a principle known as self-interacting dynamics of consciousness.
And that's what he taught me.
So, what we found is between my understandings of Jewish mysticism,
particularly Kabbalah as taught in the 15th century by Isaac Luria, Lurianic Kabbalah.
The principles that come from contemplative practice there about the nature of existence
and how existence comes into being, Buddhist metaphysics that derives from contemplative
practice. He brought in elements of Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism, and we realized that,
Number one, they differ because each community of contemplatives is asking a different question.
So you can interrogate the non-dual from a variety of perspectives. You're going to get a variety of
answers because it starts with what's your question. The question in Buddhism is how do
you end suffering? The question in Jewish mystical practice is how was the world created, Bireishit,
in the beginning, and how does that continue to happen in each single moment? Because every moment
is a new creation. In Kashmiri Shaivism, the real fundamental question is, how can you possibly go
from non-dual awareness to duality? And when you line these all up, and this is what I try to do
in the next to last chapter of the book, is they fit together into a very nice story, which is what
I kind of expressed. The idea of non-dual realities, they're called the tattvas, the first five tattvas
in Shaivist practice, first there has to be the urge within non-dual awareness to understand what it
is. Then there has to come this moment where there's a recognition of, well, to examine,
to answer that question, there has to be an "I" and a "that," but they're still the same thing.
And then you can flip it. Well, there also has to be a "that" and an "I," and there's this tension,
like, which is the questing awareness in each of those moments? And there's a sense in Chéveuse
thinking about how these are sort of shimmering back and forth. And then there's a further
separation, but they're still unified. I am that, there's an identity, and the flip, that am I.
And then suddenly I am that, and that's duality. And this is, I think, something novel that Manasseh
and I are contributing, that moment of separation into I and that, into subject and object,
as I said, requires dimensionality. Otherwise, how do you measure separation? The only way
one can have separation is to have a dimension in which separation can be measured, whether
it's distance or time or any other number of dimensions. And then you have space-time.
And the moment you have space-time, then you have an energy-rich field out of which all
existence springs into being. So the act of non-dual fundamental awareness, as expressed
in Kashmiri Shaivism, gives you a very close map to how existence arises from it, as expressed in
Luriana Kabbalah, in particular Four Worlds Kabbalah. And the moment you have that, if you
describe that stuff mathematically, I'm using complexity theory. The book isn't about math,
but the power of it derives from the mathematics that underlies it,
then out of understanding the universe as a complex system that arises from pure non-dual
awareness in this fashion, you wind up getting impermanence, interdependence,
emptiness of inherent existence, karmic law, all the principles of fundamental Buddhism.
It's a remarkably tidy package, and one of the things I've been enjoying since the book came out
is I don't have a lot of experience in so many other cultures of spirituality and contemplative
practice or other kinds of practices, and to find what questions they ask and to see
their frames of reference mirrored in the same complexity theory construct just emphasizes
over and over again. I think that science and spirituality are no longer two separate things.
if we are honest about what contemporary science and philosophy actually are saying,
which most people in our culture are not willing to do.
Yeah, I gave a talk at S.A.N. myself on that very topic about how science and spirituality are just
two sides of the same coin, really. They each have something to offer the other, and neither can be
complete without the other. And hopefully we're going to be evolving in our knowledge, our approach
to knowledge in a way that maybe 50, 100 years from now, it'll seem archaic that people thought
of them as so separate and that they both provide essential tools and each has some unique tools
that the other doesn't have.
We can talk more about that.
Earlier on, you traced us back from complex structures like the body and cells and molecules
and atoms and subatomic particles down to just fields of possibility where there's no materiality.
this whole thing you went through, are we cells, are we a body, or you could do the same thing
with are we anything at all, or is there nothing, and go back and forth on that conundrum.
This was the first paper I wrote with Manasseh, and we both were feeling our way towards it,
but without each other, neither of us had a complete way of explaining what we were intuiting.
And that goes back to something in quantum physics that comes from Niels Bohr. Anyone
who knows anything about quantum physics, even without knowing how it works, knows
that there's something about light that it's both waves and particles. And what
that means is, depending on the experiment you do to figure out, is light
waves or is it particles, you get one version or the other, and you never see
both at the same time. And Bohr called this a complementarity. And in my talks
and in the book, the simplest way of imagining this, and there's a picture of
of it. There's the book on my shelf, but I won't bother opening it. Everyone is familiar
with the image of two faces in profile as silhouettes looking at each other, and the space between
the faces looks like a vase. Is it two faces or is it a vase? Well, you can really only
see one or the other. Some people say that they can see both. Someone told me there was
fMRI imaging that showed that in fact all you can do is move back and forth very quickly.
But even if you can do it, I mean the principle is there that for the most part you focus
on one or you focus on the other.
And if you focus on the faces and say it's two faces, you're missing the vase.
If you focus on the vase, you're missing the two faces.
A complete description is both two faces and a vase.
The way a complete description of light is both waves and particles.
And you can only approach it from one perspective or another.
And your conscious choice of perspective determines what you experience of the world.
Bohr believed that complementarity was not just a quantum level phenomenon of wave-particle
duality of light.
He thought it was a universal principle.
He felt so strongly about it that he used the yin-yang symbol as part of his coat of
arms to represent complementarity and even put it on his tombstone.
my first paper with Manas was that part of what Bohr was intuiting was what complexity theory is
giving us. There is no right answer to is the body a thing versus a phenomenon arising from smaller
things, the cells. It is equally both. They're a complementarity. Are cells a fundamental unit
of existence? Yes, from one perspective, but from the lower down nanoscopic molecular perspective,
there's no cell, it's just molecules and water, etc. etc. So the universe is made of these complementarities and we can experience the world in very different ways, depending on which questions we ask, which choices of observation we make.
This is where my work to some extent moves into integrative medicine type stuff because we might say that, well, I can definitely say that when we use the phrase Western medicine or Western biology, what we mean is the moment people invented microscopes and we could look under the microscope and see the body was made of cells and cells could not be subdivided and they couldn't be subdivided.
we knew because the first things we could see were cell membranes and cell walls. They looked like
empty boxes. And if you chop up an empty box, you don't get smaller boxes, you just get bits.
So it looked like an empty box. They called it a cell because it looked like the cell of a monk
or a prisoner. Four walls, ceiling and floor and no furniture. Years go by and they start to develop
special stains to look at details of the cells. And these are the same stains I use. I'm pointing
at my slides over there on my shelf, that I use to look at tissues today. It's the same stuff.
And then we filled in the nuclei and the endoplasmic reticulum, all the bits and pieces
that fill in the cell. But cell doctrine was born. And that's Western medicine and Western biology.
All living things are made of cells and all cells derived from prior cells.
Well, that means we're really good if we think of cells as building blocks,
and we think of tissues as structures made from them,
and it gets us to a nice machine-like view of the human body,
and we're really good at orthopedics.
We're really good at antibiotics,
thinking about bacteria out there and ourselves in here,
and infections are when the outside gets inside
and things like this.
But other cultures of health and healing
talk about fields of the body.
They talk about the body as a coarse body and a subtle body and an energy body.
And they make diagrams where it looks like Russian dolls inside each other.
And Western trained people like me go, "I've dissected the body into its parts.
When I open it up, there's no smaller body inside. It doesn't exist."
It's subtle.
Yeah, it's subtle.
Our view that cells are the fundamental unit closes us off from seeing, well, the body is a quantum field.
And when I come into a room with someone else, our quantum fields are emerging.
There's one field arising from the two of us and the sorts of experiential transactions that happen when an energy healer comes into a room or a rolfer or a saint.
or a saint. That's something different and Western medicine and Western biology can't describe that.
We're working towards languages where we can and that's part of my work as well,
but that's the challenge. Western medicine and Western biology has such a rigid view,
it's right up there with the materialist view of existence, that it's the air we breathe,
so it's hard to see past it. But these different perspectives give you also, I mean, the world is
is a much more interesting place and health and healing are much more dynamic, interesting
processes than we routinely allow it in our culture.
Yeah. There's a difference between subtlety and smallness. And one of the ways I understand
spiritual awakening is the development of the capacity to incorporate multiple dimensions
within one's awareness or experience from unmanifest to subtle relative to gross relative.
And that doesn't mean you're going to be walking around seeing cells and atoms and things like
that.
That's smallness.
Those are little.
It means that there's a subtle reality to every gross object we perceive, and we ordinarily
are blind to that.
It's kind of like we're looking at the waves on the surface of the ocean without seeing
what's deeper down, but people have gained throughout history the ability to open consciously
to those subtler realms and to the absolute field that underlies them all and to recognize
that absolute field as one's own self.
And that to me is a good way of defining what awakening or enlightenment is.
And, you know, some people poo-poo the idea of subtle phenomenon such as angels or fairies
or, you know, different things like that.
Other people actually experience them.
That's where my shamanic stuff like…
Yeah, that's where that comes in.
And you know, they could be dismissed as hallucinations or whatever, but throughout history and every culture...
Except, this is my next book. It's actually the book I wanted to write, but people were like, "You can't write that book until you write the complexity book."
My mother's last eight years of her life, she lost her short-term memory, probably some small strokes. We don't really know.
And she needed 24-hour home care. You know, she was at risk of leaving the stove on when she made a cup of tea for herself, things like that.
and during that time dead people started showing up
quite often and then they started bringing other dead people to meet her
and then spirit guides from the universe start showing up.
My favorite bit was at some point
six years into this, it got to the point whenever I visited her
I would say, "Any visitors?"
and since she very rarely had a physical visitor
other than her home care attendants
we knew what I was asking and she would tell me who had stopped by
or she wouldn't want to tell me
And then one day I said, "You know, you haven't mentioned any visitors lately."
She said, "Oh, they were boring me. I told them to stop coming. There will be plenty of time for them later."
That's funny.
And then she never saw another ghost as far as I know.
But she also had direct experiences of quantum level reality.
And Dogen talks about this.
And in Tibetan practice, Bill Bichelle, who I mentioned earlier, that I went to the first consciousness meeting with,
meeting with one of his interests is how Tibetan meditators can train themselves, and this has
now been verified through scientific lab examination, the human retina can see down to a single
photon. And Tibetan monks train themselves to see a single photon. So it's possible for
the human eye, the human ear, the human sense of touch, to discriminate the actual fine,
tiny, the small side of things that's available to us as well.
But Kondzlaj talks about that in the Yoga Sutras.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So that happens too.
I walked in on my mom.
She was always smiling in these years and she was very anxious when I was growing up.
Probably when she was too.
And at some point I said to her, "You're always smiling now, even when you're sleeping.
How do you stay so happy?"
And she said, "Well, I no longer really worry about the future and I can't remember the
past so all I have is the now.
And when you live in the now, you're happy."
Yeah, so I walked in on her one day and she's lying in bed wide awake, but just looking at the empty ceiling empty to me.
And I said, what you're looking at? And she said space. I said, what do you see? She said, well, it's not anything like I thought it was.
She said, well, it's in tiny little pieces. And then she made this gesture like she's chopping carrots.
chopping carrots. I said, "What's that like?" She says, "It's so beautiful. I wish you and
Mark and the kids, my husband and my niece and nephew, I wish you could see it like I do. It's
just so beautiful." And then she paused and she said, "And time is like that too. It's not smooth.
It's in tiny little pieces." I've heard other people say that.
What did you do with my mother? So I think everything you said is absolutely true. But
But I think potentially, and it's a degree of focus and concentration and training, if
the question you ask is, "What is the true structure of the nature of reality?" then
you might perceive those quantum structures.
If your question is, "What is the true nature of conscious reality?" then probably the
first thing you're going to bump into is the underlying sea of consciousness.
There are no separations.
If you perceive one theoretically, ultimately you'll be perceiving the whole thing.
When I think of the word enlightenment or if someone had a Kensho in Japanese Zen terms
or an enlightenment experience or awakening experience, what I've come to think about
that not so much about what you discover, but it's that you have that moment when you
see the two faces and then suddenly you see the boss.
Someone asked me in a yoga group I was giving this talk to, they said, "What's enlightenment
like?"
I'm like, "I know."
And I said, I used a video, as I used to do in some versions of the talk, of a murmuration
of starlings.
And if you've ever actually been present for starlings, you may first just hear this sound
coming from up there and you look up and there's this thing in the sky.
And then there's this moment you realize, "Oh no, it's starlings."
an extraordinary moment. There's a joy to it and an excitement to it. That to me is an
enlightenment experience. You saw reality this way, you saw it this way. The most extraordinary
enlightenment experiences are you see the world of everyday reality, samsara, and then suddenly
you see its non-dual pure awareness aspect and they aren't two. It's just, do you see
it this way? Or do you see it this way? I think in Zen practice, the question, the aim, I
think Buddhist practice, the question, the aim, how do you alleviate suffering is you
learn to flexibly move between those views. We're separate, I hurt, I'm alone. We are
seamlessly one whole thing within which everything is just as it should be. I'm separate, I'm
alone, I hurt.
In my sense, it's not strictly either/or.
As you go along, it's more and more blended, both/and.
And that it may be like a camera, like my camera right now.
So I'm in focus and the background is a little bit fuzzy, but then the camera could be adjusted
so that I'm a little fuzzy and the background is clear.
And I think that's the way it works.
As one goes along, there's eventually always this continuum of pure awareness or self-realization
or whatever you want to call it, in the midst of whatever else is going on.
And you're just able to do it that much more flexibly and freely.
When people talk about, in Zen terms, you know, that's one of my primary practices,
so it's often what comes to my mind, people talk about the freedom of a Zen master, of
a Zen adept.
The freedom is the freedom to move back and forth.
And again, to have both there.
And sometimes the fact that it's always there might not be obvious.
If you could sort of say that pure awareness is like a tone, the tone is always going.
After a while you wouldn't be paying so much attention to it, you'd be doing this or that,
but any time you want to check, oh yeah, the tone is still there.
In my experience, sometimes if I injure myself, like I fall off my bicycle or something like
that, the contrast of that experience makes it vividly evident that there's something
that's not affected by that and that something is always there and it just, you know, you
don't have to pay attention to it as a thing because it isn't one, but it's just like the
screen of a movie, you know, like they always use that analogy.
The screen is always there no matter what's playing on it.
But awakening is more like a state where you actually see the screen and watch the movie
at the same time.
The movie no longer overshadows the screen.
And not get caught by either.
Right.
this isn't real, I'm not going to react emotionally what's going on because I know it's just light
on a screen. Yeah, that's true. But on the other hand, oh my God, what a story.
You want to enjoy the movie, you paid for it.
Exactly.
I have a friendly debate going with a friend, and I have had it with other friends,
about whether consciousness is just a product of the brain or whether it's fundamental,
as Manas and others have said, and you, and everything arises from it. And I'm hard-pressed
to present him with a convincing argument or anything that could be accepted widely as
proof. It's more like you just have to choose your philosophical stance, but how do these
two camps actually achieve some kind of common understanding?
David: Well, first off, you have to be willing to listen to each other.
Pete: Yeah, we do that.
David: Well, no, we don't.
Pete: Oh, my friend and I do.
David: Oh, you and your friend. So, that's step one, and we're not very good at that.
Personally, I think that every approach to panpsychist and materialist notions of the brain have their value and validity and truth and they are in complementarity with the idealist view that everything comes out of mind.
You need perspectives from all three to really understand what's going on.
In the book I talk about how, but I would turn that on its head.
In our culture, the big evidence that people have for the brain makes our minds, and that's
the materialist view, our brains make our minds, and so when you're dead and your brain
dies, then your mind dies and you cease to exist, is that however you measure what's
going on in the mind, as we get better at it in the brain, as we get better and better
at looking in living brains, what's happening at the fine anatomic and signaling levels,
electronically, metabolically, anatomically, we see correlates of all our conscious experiences.
And so for most people in our culture, that's very compelling to say, well, these brain activities
correlate with these experiences in our minds.
Therefore, one is the cause for the other.
But that's a logical fallacy.
It is.
I know that every summer I will see lots of people wearing sunglasses and I will see lots
of people eating ice cream and often they overlap.
In fact, mostly they overlap.
If they're outside eating ice cream, they have sunglasses on.
So I might say that wearing sunglasses leads to eating ice cream.
No, the bright light and the heat of summer leads to both.
And this is why there is no cognitive neuroscientist, there is no neurologist, there is no psychiatrist
on the planet who can avoid saying this brain activity is a neural correlate of this conscious
experience because there's no proof of causation.
And no matter how hard they try, they can't ever find proof of causation.
Now it may mean that our science is inadequate, but another possibility is that these are all
reflections of the mechanism whereby our human brains sample the infinity of non-dual awareness
and turn it into something we can have and be aware of as our own human minds.
The model I use for this in the book is a radio.
A radio is not taking music out of the air and letting us listen to it.
It's sampling the infinite radio waves, some of which are playing Beatles music, are created
by the Beatles having made some music, sampling it and putting it through a speaker so we
hear it as Beatles.
don't expect to open the radio and see the Beatles playing. We also know that we
could build a different transducer that a radio transduces radio waves into sound
but we also know everyone got very excited when we first got laptops. Well
when we first got computers you could put music on your screen and then you can
have a light show on your screen going with the music and that was like you
know you and I are old enough to remember when that was exciting. That's
because it would transduce it into light. You could transduce it into anything. So
So what I would say is a bee's brain transduces universal consciousness into the mind of the
bee, which is very different than what a human brain does.
And what we're examining when we do fMRIs and EEGs and make all these correlations, that's
saying something about the mechanisms whereby transduction happens.
So I'm not saying that all that brain science isn't valid.
It's just being interpreted with this bias that's leaving everyone sort of empty-handed.
And the term for that empty handedness, this is chapter 10 in the book I think, is what
David Chalmers philosopher called the hard problem of consciousness.
That no matter how well we understand the mechanisms whereby the brain signals, we have
not found anything to explain the experience of consciousness itself.
So I got this one from Deepak Chopra, which some people will yell at me for saying I got
something from Deepak, but I really like Deepak.
get along in a whole bunch of ways. And there's some areas where we disagree, but he's got
a real gift for expressing things clearly. Here's a green pen. Now I'm looking at the
green pen and I know that there are photons bouncing off the pen, they reach my retina,
which detects them, creates a chemical signal that goes back along my optic nerve into my
visual cortex, and I see green. And you saw green when I held it up. Now if you close
your eyes and I say, "Imagine a green pen." You don't have all of that happening. You have
your visual cortex lighting up, and now we've gotten so good at that we can actually measure
what's going on in the visual cortex and say, "Oh, I think you're seeing." It's as good
as, "Oh, look, they're looking at a fuzzy green vertical line." Soon they'll be able
to say, "Oh, you're looking at a pen." But where is that green pen? Where is the experience
of that green pen. It doesn't have a location. In fact, when you close your eyes, is it in
your brain? Is it in your skull? Is it in the room? There's no way anybody has been able
to get at the nature of that actual experience. We can describe everything else, but we can't
understand so far the nature of the experience itself. If you say that you can, we just haven't
gotten there yet, then it leaves you kind of stuck for what to do when the human mind is
contemplating itself.
Then you can't answer it as a purely scientific question because the mind contemplating itself,
there's no subject-object split.
It's the self contemplating the self.
And when we do that, what do we find?
We find things like a continuum of non-dual consciousness that underlies everything, the
the ocean underlies those waves. I'm not sure we find that. I mean, I'm totally with you. We're
in the same boat. Philosophically, we're trying to convince your friend. Yes. You know, but it
comes down to is he's got to explain. It's on him to explain the hard nature of consciousness.
I have the hard problem of consciousness, because if he's unable to do that, then how do you explain
anything about the experiences of people in contemplative practice? There's a whole portion
of human experience that he has no approach for and says, "I won't have an approach for it because
those things can't be." Yeah, that's part of it. You've heard the term "promissory materialism,"
that, "Okay, we haven't figured it out yet, but we're going to figure it out, so just stay tuned."
And I use arguments such as, well, near-death experiences. They're under anesthesia, they see
a red sneaker on the roof of the hospital, the janitor goes up and, yes, it's there, or they
see their uncle buying a Snickers bar in the waiting room down the hall, and sure enough
he bought a Snickers bar.
So that would at least, if you believe that those things really happened, and I'm afraid
my friend is skeptical because they're anecdotal, then that would at least suggest that…
Every bit of data starts as an anecdote until you aggregate them into a mass of data.
Any single data point is an anecdote.
And there's tons of data, if you look at all the near-death experiences and all the
other stuff that people have been experiencing.
This was what happened with my mom.
You know, I was wondering, is she having delusions or whatever?
And they were happy delusions, so let her have them.
You know, I wasn't going to argue that she wasn't being visited by people she cared about.
Although then people started visiting who annoyed her.
That's when she said, you know, stop.
But I went to visit her one day and one of her ghostly friends had been there.
The rabbi I grew up with actually, who had been kind of boring her.
And I said, Oh, I'm sorry.
Was he annoying?
She goes, Well, you didn't stick around long because his sister was coming and he had to
go welcome and I thought well that's odd because I knew his sister very well too
and she would be 102 today so I don't know what that's about and then I go
home and I get a phone call from someone from my hometown that his sister died
that day at 102 years old. Interesting yeah there you go. My mother wasn't
reading the obituaries, she wasn't reading anything but the other problem for your
friend is the insistence that he probably would say I'm assuming it's a he I think
I heard. It's a his name is Curtis. That Curtis would say, I want to rely on empirical science
and formal mathematics and logic. Those are the ways I understand the world. And you have
to explain what you're talking about through those ways. And those will give me a complete
view of the world. And I don't think those ways will confirm anything you're talking.
That's the typical argument from so and I used to be that, even though I had these spiritual
ideas because I didn't worry about whether they matched or not. The problems with that
are number one, quantum physics. The conscious observation of a quantum event changes the
nature of the event. Do you see light as waves or particles? Do they behave like waves or
particles? This is what made Einstein crazy and he never found a way around it and every
objection he had turned into something that could win the Nobel Prize like entanglement
and non-locality.
In other words, the rebuttals of his objections turned into Nobel Prize worthy discoveries.
Right. And so the result of quantum physics is that at some very fundamental level to the functioning of the universe,
empirical science means you separate the object of study from the subject who's studying it.
I'm an objective scientist. I look at things under the microscope. The slide is there and I'm here.
But at the quantum scale, and it turns out that bleeds up into everyday reality,
but at the quantum scale you can't separate subject and object.
They are intimately related.
So empirical science cannot live up to its own terms.
This is chapter 11 of the book, I think.
- Gerdlin limits of formal logic is the 11.
- Okay, then this is probably 10.
- The other circle is 10.
I want to talk to you about both those things.
- Okay, sure.
The problem with mathematics,
and you brought this up at the very beginning,
you said there's this question
whether mathematics is something out there that humans discover, or did we invent it?
We invented numbers because we wanted to count bushels of wheat or stars in the sky, and so
we created numbers, and then it turns out we can play with them, and all these wonderful
things happen.
But we invented them.
The view that mathematics is out there to be discovered, they aren't something we create,
is referred to as mathematical Platonism.
Plato described an ideal world beyond our reality, which our reality is a dim reflection. Kurt
Gödel, who's widely recognized as the greatest mathematician, logician in history, was a member
of the Vienna Circle, the history of which I cover, who are probably the sharpest thinkers
in the 20th century, putting forth this view that empirical science and formal logic were
the ultimate arbiters of understanding reality. And anything that couldn't be explained through
those two things was metaphysics and dismissible. Not even worth talking. He was a member of
that group. He was invited in, I think, when he was 21, because he was so brilliant. And
one of his primary mentors in Vienna was a founding member of the group and invited him
in. And he sat quietly in the back, never saying very much. But what he was thinking the whole
time was. The Vienna Circle, as well as all the other logicians and mathematicians of the day,
were looking for ways to prove mathematics, that mathematics was a complete structure that was
self-consistent and could explain everything. Explaining everything meant it was complete,
and that it was inherently consistent would mean that it's completely solid and dependable,
as a reflection of the true nature of reality. And the power of that would be, since you can
express scientific stuff through mathematics even more so.
Math and science become the ultimate arbiters of what existence is.
But his instinct that Plato was right, that mathematics was out there to be discovered,
not something we invented. And the way to prove that that was the case was to prove that
mathematics could not be both complete and consistent. The mathematicians of the day said
it has to be both complete and consistent and our mission is to prove that they are the case
and everyone believed they would one day prove that both things were true,
and if they did, then mathematics would be able to explain everything consistently.
What he came up with is called Godel's Incompleteness Theorems,
and it's a lot to go into. I can't unpack the whole thing here,
but basically what he demonstrated in a mathematically rigorous proof
that's just kind of remarkably creative,
is that if there is a system of mathematics that is complete,
meaning it describes everything, it will necessarily contradict itself.
And if it contradicts itself, you can build a proof out of it to say anything,
in which case you're proving nothing at all.
So if you have a complete system of mathematics,
it will be inconsistent and therefore not explain anything.
If you make it consistent, and this was the genius thing,
how we figured out how to demonstrate this.
If you make a system completely consistent,
and he's talking about arithmetic, systems that contain arithmetic,
If you make it completely consistent, there will always be a statement that is known to be true,
but can't be proven to be true from within the system.
So you can have statements that are provable, and you can prove them to be true,
or you can have statements that you know are true, but you can't prove them.
How do you know they're true? Intuition.
Well, what's intuition reaching at?
Intuition is reaching at the world of mathematics that's beyond our tool making.
the mathematics that's out there for us to discover, that has its own truths independent of our human abilities to prove them.
And so, mathematics doesn't do it and empirical science doesn't do it.
The one eliminates at its finest approach, quantum physics, the most successful theory ever made,
as people tout it and no one argues with that, says that its most fundamental base, that the subject and object cannot remain separate.
And in mathematics, you cannot have a description that is both complete and consistent.
So that fails too.
The result is intuition comes back in, metaphysics comes back in, and it's kind of unavoidable.
If you talk to mathematicians today, there is no argument about this.
Godel shut the door.
The one other thing that was important was something called decidability.
Could you decide that a system, whether you can prove it's complete or consistent,
Can you prove that even if you can't answer those questions, you can prove that you could answer them theoretically?
The Turing machine that everyone touts, Alan Turing, his
universal Turing machine, which was a hypothetical
model he came up with that eventually gave birth to what we know as the modern computer, did for
decidability what Godel had done for completeness and consistency.
Gödel even said that his was, you know, kind of the first step and Turing finished it.
So, not only do we have empirical science and formal logic and mathematics that we rely on to
tell us in the modern age and in Western life, the nature of everything, and it turns out those are
sand, they're not cement that we're standing on, but you throw into that computer science,
which our whole world depends on, and it turns out that's deriving from the third piece that wipes
out that possibility of knowing. That's a lot to dig into to convince yourself that,
"Oh, I can't be sure that the brand makes mind." But Western science is a big thing.
If you can't take in the whole of it, and that's kind of the stupid task I set for myself with the
book is, "Can I do that in 172 pages with some pictures?" If you're missing a piece of that,
then you're actually just blowing bubbles. If your friend doesn't have an answer,
If you look on Goodreads, there are a lot of people who hate me on Goodreads.
So they get very personal about it.
My favorite is someone wrote a very long review and then republished it four months later.
I guess they were worried that it was getting missed, so they reposted it.
The first line was, "This book is pap."
And the last line was, "This book makes Jonathan Livingston Segal look like a significant spiritual text."
And for those of us who are old enough to remember Jonathan Livingston Segal...
Oh yeah, I love that book.
book. But when people actually try to critique me in these sorts of comments, what they critique
is my view of quantum physics. Okay, that view of quantum physics, what's referred to as the
Copenhagen interpretation, is debatable in some fashion, but you can't dismiss it, can't be
dismissed. And I would rather align myself with the founders and folks like Manasse, who are looking at
it in an open, not biased, not rigid way, dogmatic way. No one ever critiques me on the Gödel
situation. And the Gödel situation is actually the most fundamental argument, because that's the one
that says the best arguments we have for science and mathematics to describe the world completely,
he demolished that. And they had no answer for it, and they have no answer for it.
And the mathematics world, they get that. They don't argue with it. It's not like,
"Well, what's your interpretation of quantum mechanics? You have a different
interpretation of quantum mechanics than I do." There is no other interpretation
of Gödel and of Turing's work.
- So, if people really understood Gödel and Turing, and I'd never really learned much about
them until I read your book, but if they really understood them, would they have to agree that
subjective or mystical exploration is a necessary complement to empirical science and without
those inner technologies of consciousness, we'll never have a complete picture of reality.
Would that have to be their conclusion if they really understood what those guys were
saying?
That is the implication and Gödel himself said it in a letter to his mother which I
quote in the book. I can't remember the exact quote, I haven't memorized it, but it's
something along the lines of, "I have no doubt that this will be useful for people who want
to talk about religion."
>> Wayne: Interesting. And then, by the same token, quantum mechanics, over a hundred years
ago, has established that consciousness and the material world are very much intertwined
in some significant way, but people have conveniently ignored that finding for over a hundred years,
which of course is much more famous than Gödel and Turing, at least in the common knowledge.
So they're ignoring both.
And if they weren't, if they really dug into it and had the education to understand these things,
would they necessarily have to come around to concurring with the mystics?
And has that actually happened, or are there quantum physicists and people who understand Gödel who are still materialists?
Oh, sure. But there are people who are willfully delusional or in denial all over the place.
It's not like this is foreign to human capacity.
I know lots of quantum physicists that should I name names?
Sure.
Why not?
This was real.
I was invited into a room at Disney of all places and I got to
hang out for a day with Brian Green.
Oh nice.
Now, he's a string theorist.
Really?
You're going to talk about materiality when you spend your
time as a string theorist and you're going to say no the world
material. But you're talking about vibrating strings that are mathematical
constructs that no one can test? Really? And when I talked about my views of
things, oh he just you know sort of sneered. John Carroll does the same thing
I heard it. Yeah, and Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same thing. Yeah. And it's like
well you want to believe what you believe. I should have started as an
idealist given all the other experiences, spiritual experiences I've had or
witnessed in my life, you'd think I'd have gone right there. But
part of me was like, No, gotta be careful about this. And it
was menace just slowly. And the record of our scholarship is how
we sort of tugged at this piece by piece by piece until finally,
yeah, there's no other consistent view that has a chance
of explaining everything, including the hardest problem of
all, which is the hard problem of consciousness. Because saying
the world is mind is saying that the world is nothing but experience. You don't have
to explain what an experience is and how an experience comes into existence if all existence
is nothing but experience within the big C consciousness of pure awareness. It has amazing
capacity for explanation just from the standpoint of scientific rigor. If there's a theory that
you can't disprove but has a lot of explanatory potential, you shouldn't just reject it out
of hand.
But that's what our culture does.
Why do you think that these people are so stubborn about shifting paradigms?
I interviewed a guy named Mark Gober who also spoke at SAND.
He wrote a book called "The End to Upside-Down Thinking" and basically what we've been talking
about that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, everything arises from
consciousness and he gave all kinds of nice arguments of how to flip that paradigm. But
if you accept that consciousness is fundamental, and if you accept that there's some kind of
– well, you didn't want to use the word intelligence earlier, but some kind of orderliness
within the functioning of consciousness that gives rise to this incredibly complex, beautiful
universe, then you're beginning to accept that there's some kind of a God notion,
Which of course makes materialists very uncomfortable.
And part of me responds to that with, "Oh, the God word.
That's an English word."
Well, yeah, so you can use a word.
I have Hebrew as an option too.
You can leave the A out and just say G underscore D.
I think that word is...
I don't want to spend time arguing that turf because that's just an English word that we
label something with.
I understand how important it is for some people, particularly in our culture.
I will choose to think in terms of a God figure when I'm doing a devotional practice, like
Jewish prayer in a synagogue, and like things.
So it's a useful thing.
Let me put it this way, let me interrupt you here.
You spend your days looking through a microscope at cells, and what you're seeing is something
incredibly complex and marvelous.
I've heard it said that a typical cell is as complex as the city of Tokyo.
You know, I can't imagine that you regard a cell as you're looking at it as some kind
of accident that just somehow the billiard balls all hit each other in such a way as
to form such a structure.
There's got to be some organizing principle.
Yeah, and these are the rules of complexity.
But are they unconscious?
Are they dumb?
Yeah, I think you can program a computer.
If you program virtual ants, they will give rise to a virtual ant colony if you understood
the rules of ant interactions well enough.
You don't need top-down design.
There is an element of top-down design in things, but this is where another term that
I explore in the book is useful, instead of talking about hierarchies, which we often
think of, and even illustrating what I mean.
We go from quantum foam to quantum particles to atoms to molecules and we're thinking in
this hierarchy from bottom to top.
But it's not that.
All of these levels exist simultaneously in what Arthur Kessler referred to as a whole
archae.
It was Lynn Margulies who gave me this word the first time.
So when we think of the coarse body, the subtle body and the energy body, we aren't thinking
that there are three separate bodies that are nested within each other.
talking about the same human body that we're choosing to interact with at the Western medical
level, at the biomagnetic level, at the level of consciousness. So things that look like
they're planned top-down, this is the fundamental hallmark of complex systems, is they look
like someone planned them, but no one planned them.
No one, in terms of some isolated, discrete individual. I mean, this is an important point,
because I have always thought, you know, listening to people like Robert Lanza, there's got to
be some kind of organizing intelligence, intrinsic and fundamental to the universe that is self-interacting
consciousness that somehow gives rise to all these orderly laws of nature that structures
all the complexity.
You said earlier that it didn't have a goal or an agenda, but I would say that its agenda
is to create increasingly complex forms through which it can actually experience its own creation
as a living reality.
I think the volition is we are sense organs whereby the universe can perceive itself.
Exactly.
But I don't think it has preferences beyond that.
But why is it getting increasingly sophisticated as the universe evolves?
The nature of this is again the nature of we'd have to dig into those four rules.
Why complex systems lead to bigger things, to more complex things, to more complex things.
So how is it that cells self-organize into bodies, bodies self-organize into communities,
molecules self-organize into cells, and it's the same mathematics that describes all of that.
It doesn't matter what size you're talking about.
And the four ways that happens, number one is it doesn't happen if you've got three ants, you don't get a colony.
If you have 25 ants, you get a colony, and if you buy one of those ant farms and watch it for a while,
it for a while. They dig tunnels, they make food lines, and they have a cemetery. But by the time
they get down to a handful of ants, they're no longer working with each other. If you get 250
ants, you get more complexity. And it's not only the number of ants, but the greater diversity of
interaction. And if you have 25,000 ants, even more complexity. In human terms, a village is
not a city is not a megalopolis. But interestingly, the same computational ways of describing this
through complexity, to some extent through chaos, apply no matter what you're talking about.
So that's rule number one. The more diversity and the more members of a system you have,
the greater complexity that can emerge. The second is that there are feedbacks within the system that
keep things within a healthy homeostatic sort of range. So like your body temperature never gets
too hot, doesn't get too cold. Think of an air conditioner that as a room gets warmer, the air
conditioner turns on at a set point and as the room gets colder, the air conditioner turns off.
That's a negative feedback loop keeping things in an oscillating, comfortable, healthy realm.
And that's the realm in which creativity and self-sustaining functioning of a complex system,
whether it's a colony or a city or an organ, takes place. Now, you can have positive feedback loops,
and negative and positive don't mean good and bad. Negative means, you know, there's sort of
limits being placed on it. A positive feedback loop would be like you have a
heater in a room and the hotter the room gets the more the heater turns on so the
room gets hotter and hotter and hotter. You can have positive feedback loops in
living systems. Think about when we have a fever. You need to metabolically rev up
your immune system so you get a fever helps you fight off the infection but
then the negative feedback loops come in to bring your temperature down to that
comfortable range. If you have an overabundance of positive feedback loops
you can get self-organizing larger scale structures,
but instead of being creative and adaptive,
the way a complex living system is,
they're energy-expending and self-wasting.
So in terms of cells and tissues, that's what cancer is.
You've taken off all the inhibitions on how cells behave,
and they expand very rapidly,
but then you eat up all the energy in the system,
and the cancer dies, and you die.
Economic bubbles are the same thing.
Too little regulation in an economy,
you get positive feedback loops,
loops, you get a bubble and that collapses. So there has to be a balance and overabundance
of negative feedback loops keeping things comfortable.
Sounds like climate change is a positive feedback loop because we're reaching tipping points
and the methane is being released and so on and so forth. It'll be interesting to see
whether Gaia as an entity can kick in with some negative feedback loops to counteract
it.
Well, one way to do that might be Gaia kicking in with enough diseases that we all die.
Yeah, and that would...
eliminate humans, things will adjust.
That's true.
Are we the cancer? You have to ask.
The third thing is
that things really happen at the bottom,
at the interactions at the local level.
There are influences that are top-down,
but the majority of stuff that's happening
is happening at the local level.
There's no ant in the colony trying to decide
where there needs to be a food line.
There's no body in the cell determining,
and there's no organ in the cell that's determining
Are you hungry? Are you afraid? Are you horny? Are you sleepy?
It arises out of everything happening at the local level.
And the fourth thing, and this is the most important,
there's always some low level randomness in the system.
And this is where the magic really happens.
So if you have too much randomness in the system,
ants won't organize into a colony and humans won't organize into a functioning
society and cells, you'll get cancer.
If there's too little randomness in the system,
then if the food supply runs out in the ant colony, the ants aren't going to be able to find another
way to find the food because it's the random ants wandering around, not part of the food line,
who are likely to bump into, "Oh, there's another sugar cube over here." Or in human societies,
the scientist or the poet or the musician who's exploring the nature of their reality a little
differently than everyone else, and turns out they discover, you know, they're Charlie Chaplin
and the world changes. So too little randomness, you get no ability to change and if the environment
changes, the system will collapse and die. If there's too much randomness, you get no self-organization,
you get no larger scale emergent structures that look like they're planned. You don't get food lines,
you know, in New York. It's not so true anymore, but 6th Street used to be where the Indian
restaurants went. That's not because someone planned Indian restaurants for 6th Street. It
happened that the way the Indian restaurants were competing with each other, they created this niche
where their competition created more business for everybody.
There's this low-level randomness in the system.
Stuart Kaufman, who's one of the founders of complexity theory,
and a friend and a mentor of mine,
talks about this low-level randomness as creating in the next moment
the adjacent possibles of what could happen for the complex system, the living being.
The next moment isn't an infinite array of anything can happen.
It's a constrained amount of possibilities,
And you can't tell which of these is going to move forward to become the reality of the next moment.
Those adjacent possibles are what allow living things to explore the possibility of changing
and responding and adapting to a changing environment. That's where the creativity of
living things happens. That's where evolution happens. That's where you go from simple
molecules to becoming cells, to becoming multicellular organisms, to becoming ecosystems
like Gaia. That's where the universe starts as hydrogen and then you get a universe.
So, complexity through these four principles, and these are the four principles that you can
use to create computational models using computers to like design a system and then set it running to
see what happens. This sort of gives you everything and it's what gives you what you need to go from
quantum physics to the scale of relativity. So there's the appearance of
determinism and intelligent design everywhere you look, but had this
adjacent possible become relevant instead of this one, there'd be a whole
other reality here that would also look intelligently designed, and yet it's
completely different. I don't think the fundamental awareness that underlies
everything is particularly wedded to any particular outcome, which is really hard
for us as humans who feel that we are living self-sustaining beings to deal
with but maybe Gaia's answer is to get rid of the humans. We're no longer the
pinnacle of anything when you look at this view which is an area I disagree
with Deepak about. Incidentally I co-taught the course in which Deepak learned to
meditate originally back in like 1979. Oh wow that's so cool. Yeah. So you're to
I'm to blame, yep. Can I use the word God just for simplicity's sake?
Sure, I'll let you have it.
Instead of saying these sort of all-pervading universal intelligence, maybe it's a jazz
musician, maybe it's a maverick, maybe it is Charlie Chaplin, it is Albert Einstein,
it thinks outside the box, and maybe there are parallel universes which, like you say,
there are other adjacent possibles in play, and those behave quite differently. People
there have three eyes or whatever. But couldn't it be that these four principles you outlined
and any other fundamental principles that determine how the universe functions are just attributes,
and I think Kashmir Shaivism might say this, of this fundamental intelligence, and that they would
show up even in a computer game because they are just intrinsic to the way everything functions.
They're that fundamental. Right, but I think these rules are what's fundamental, and I don't think...
Why are there rules? Why is there anything?
Yeah, and that's because we're humans trying to figure out how the universe works and we realize, oh, these four things recur whenever we look at what we label a complex system.
For the universe, these are not rules. This is the way it happens.
Yes.
You can have elements of these in any group of interacting individuals, but when you do, they do not necessarily turn into living things.
They do not necessarily creatively adapt.
But under the right conditions, they will.
they will. Right, right. So why is it on this planet we do but Mars no? Yeah. Mars maybe had
been living, we don't know that's it, but for the moment it seems pretty inert. Jupiter seems pretty
inert. That's because the stuff that makes it up didn't fulfill all those criteria. Yes, but the
ancient cultures and perhaps the shamanic traditions that you've been studying would say that in a sense
Jupiter and Mars and the Sun itself are living beings.
I would certainly go there, but I wasn't on that path.
Yeah.
In that sense, I wasn't on that path.
But yes, I would say that that's probably true too.
Right.
And they're living beings in the sense that they, like all things, have a subtle dimension
in addition to the gross dimension.
And even though the Sun is a thermonuclear furnace, on a subtle level, it could be a
conscious entity of some sort.
Well, on a subtle level, there's nothing but consciousness.
So of course, conscious and alive.
But there are intermediate levels.
There's Adi-Buddha, Adi-Daiva and Adi-Atma in Hinduism.
Adi-Daiva is the level of the Devas, the impulses of intelligence.
You know, again, this is sort of the perspective, this is the complementarity issue.
So here I am, this is me, I'm thirsty, I pick up a cup that's over here, I drink the water,
swallow it, it becomes part of my system, etc.
And that's true, but from a complexity theory, modern scientific, quantum, mathematical, western
philosophy point of view, just as true, the universe is one seamless whole, and this is
the universe drinking itself.
Right.
And on another level, nothing's happening at all, it just appears to be.
Exactly.
So, is Jupiter inert or conscious?
Etc., etc.
And yes, there are levels, but to some extent when we talk about levels, are we really talking
about our human capacity to perceive them.
Sure.
Because from the fundamental awareness level, I don't think there's any delusions within
the fundamental awareness as to what the sun is and what the Jupiter is.
I think when we see levels, we're seeing it from a human perspective that's limited.
Yeah, blind men and the elephant.
I mean, the elephant is what it is.
The blind men each have a different interpretation, and nature or the universe is not dependent
upon our capabilities in order to be what it is.
You know, I think to some extent our conversation is a good example of how hard it is to talk
about these things because we can only speak about it using language, you and me.
Neither of us, I don't think you're a really sophisticated mathematician.
I'm not in the least.
So that language isn't available to us.
You might be a really remarkable poet, in which case maybe you can use language to get closer.
So we're left with the words at hand, and English is really bad for talking about this stuff.
Particularly modern English, because it really exploded post-Newton, industrially, etc.
So I think the only points where we're sort of doing this is because our language is so
limited.
And to some extent, that issue of, you come at all of this from your life experience, that's
your perspective and I'm coming at it from mine. So it's like the two faces in
the vase. It's the body cells or is it molecules or is it atoms? To me the
interesting thing is having these conversations across people's
experiences and it's always humbling. Growing up, having gone to medical school,
the impulse to be sure of myself is sort of beaten into me. You know, I've had, I
had to learn to have that kind of intellectual pride. Oh, nothing pulls it
out from under you. Like being able to talk to people who have these
experiences and compare them and compare notes. Yeah, I hope I'm not giving you the
impression that I'm disagreeing with you. No, no, no, no, no, no. But there are moments. I mean
these are questions that like you with "Am I cells or am I a body?" I chew on these
thoughts. I've been chewing on them for decades. So I like to bounce them off
people and see if we can... Sure, sure, sure, sure. A couple of questions came in. Let me get
them before we ran out of time. This is from someone named Franz Bars in Dead Man's Flats,
Alberta, Canada.
- Hi, Franz. You were there first.
- Yeah. She or he had a near fatal accident at the age of 13. Fractured skull and doctor
said I'd be a vegetable at best. Since then, I've had two awakening experiences. One studying
English 40 years ago. Not sure how that studying English brought it about, but great.
- Reading Whitman, maybe.
Maybe so. And then 20 years ago, an awaking experience elicited or induced by intense pain.
This person didn't recognize them as such, as awaking experiences, until much later.
He or she, I'm not sure if it's a man or woman, helps people understand and experience non-duality,
but she or he doesn't understand the brain. Large parts of my brain, from the injuries, must be affected.
Any feedback?
Not a lot except to turn to what I said before, I think of our brains as transducers for the big C consciousness into our small C consciousness personal minds.
Every brain is behaving differently from every other brain.
your brain has gone through this process obviously functioning sufficiently that you're passing for a functioning adult in our society which not everyone's brain allow them to do,
but allowing for these experiences in some way but do we know that it was the injury and is it who were you were in your past life that you were prepared to have some enlightenment experiences,
I haven't seen yet the connection to the injury and having those experiences. Are they in fact related?
Well, sometimes as you must know, traumatic experiences of various kinds do evoke or elicit some kind of awakening thing.
I've interviewed people, one guy was almost hit by a car and he didn't get hit, but the shock of it woke him up.
Yeah, but the way Franz described the story was teenage injury and then many years later,
this stuff happened.
But ultimately, the stuff that's come my way in terms of experiences that just sort of lands on me,
I can think of it in terms of, is that my brain?
My brain is structured in a way that allows me to receive these or perceive these.
It's a nature or nurture question, which again complementarities,
Or is it my lived experience that prepared me for when this showed up, I was prepared to see it and witness it?
Those are sort of unanswerable questions and probably complementarities.
Every view you can have on it, every single piece of you, every single experience, every single process you have participated in throughout life, up till the time of having those experiences contributed to the fact that that experience happened.
Friends might want to read Eben Alexander's book or else see my interview with him or many other interviews with him
He was someone who was predicted to be a vegetable he had encephalitis
I believe his brain was just pus, you know
My mom she was in home hospice care for seven months not walking talking or reading and I was there
Every day because I was sure if I missed a day that would be her last day
And I wanted to be there for her last day and then after seven months I got a call from one of her home attendants
Mr.
Neil come quick your mother's in the kitchen asking for a cup of tea and she had gotten up wanted a cup of tea
How was she walking after seven months and then she lived for six more years?
Amazing and we took her off all her medications during that time because she couldn't swallow
congestive heart disease
hypertension, chronic urinary tract infections, kept her on her Parkinson's meds because I knew she'd be uncomfortable with the rigidity
so we could melt that in some Dulce de Leche ice cream and get it into her mouth.
I never put her back on the meds because I was like, she's got to go from something.
Yeah, so let one of these things. She never had any hypertension.
She never had any congestive heart disease after that and even her Parkinson's went into remission. Amazing.
Medically speaking, I think that's because she lived in such a low stress state that all her diseases of aging are really in our society
diseases of stress accumulation
She died in a bliss bubble. It was just stunning nice, but why her?
Why did my mother get that lucky she would say it was her relationship with the Libanuma which is
Yiddish for the beloved name she would talk about God as see there's that word. How are you in the Libanuma doing today? Oh
Oh, we're just fine.
She would blush like she was a teenager.
Oh, sweet.
She sounded great.
So, I don't know.
Here's another question that came in.
This is from Nina Nobile in the US someplace.
Can you recall what your state of mind was before the times you felt one with the environment
around you?
Were you very relaxed, deep in thought about a specific concept having to do with consciousness
or anything else you can recall your mind focusing on?
I'm hesitant to lay claim to having had significant experiences.
However, blah, blah, blah.
I talk about some of it.
Most times where I had an experience along those lines, it was from within a state of
meditation.
Not always necessarily what I would have characterized the time as deep.
Most often during an intensive Zen retreat, I'm meditating many hours a day for days in
a row, but not always that time that I described in the Zendo with the incense stick, but I'd
been in a sustained focus state for weeks because this koan had happened.
But I've also had what I would call similar sorts of experiences from devotional practice
type stuff, being in shul, being in synagogue, really caught up in the prayer service with
a liturgy that I'm deeply familiar with and comfortable with, and it's in Hebrew, so I
I don't understand it so well that if I want I can understand it and if not I can turn
it off and it's just a mantra.
But I don't think there have been rules for it.
I haven't had any of the experiences of when I've had sudden trauma and I've had sudden
trauma I've been hit by a car.
Never got something good out of it like that.
I get life lessons.
One thought that comes to mind on Nina's question is that famous saying by some Zen guy I think
that enlightenment may be an accident but spiritual practice makes you accident prone.
probably like that one. So there are things we can do which make us receptive or make it conducive
to having spiritual breakthroughs and that's what spiritual practice is all about. That's
why people do these things. And that's kind of where I land in the book, based off other people.
I don't think the construct I give in the book of how the universe is constructed is really arguable
in modern, Western, scientific, mathematical, philosophical terms. I really don't. I'm happy
to have that debate with somebody, but I really don't. However, you can read my book five
times in a row, and some people have told me they've done that, and it's still, as
we say in Zen, the finger pointing at the moon. It isn't the moon itself. And without
some sort of practice, and I say this explicitly in the afterward, it doesn't have to be contemplative
practice. You know, I tried to get my mother to meditate for years until I
realized, "Oh, she's got a devotional practice that puts any other practice
I've had to shame." My husband claims not to have any spiritual practice at all, but
if you come to our house for a dinner and he serves you what he's made, it's a
practice of service. Finally, after a couple of decades, I've gotten him to not
argue with me when I say that. The Vedic divisions, I think it's Vedic. There's
scholarly practice, Jewish version of that would be Talmud study.
You know, for me, it's biology led to all this stuff.
So, scholarly practice, path of devotion, path of
service, path of contemplation.
Kiana, bhakti, seva, and...
Find the one or the two or the three that feel right to you
because the ideas are fucking useless. They do not
alleviate any suffering whatsoever, but the experience of the truth of them makes all the difference.
Yeah, that's a really important point, which is that one size does not fit all, but seek and ye shall find.
I mean, if you have the motivation to go deeper in whatever way you conceive that, take a step and then take another step.
It's like in that Harrison Ford movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, where he has to cross this chasm
and there's no bridge or something, but he somehow or other takes a step and the bridge materializes as it goes.
He gets across the chasm.
This is part of the wonder, part of the mystery is, the universe keeps meeting me where I am somehow.
Often in ways, no, I wasn't looking for that way.
I didn't want that bridge, I wanted that bridge. Well, you're getting this bridge.
But looking back, it's one experience after another of, if I show up, the universe meets me there.
If you build it, they will come.
Yeah.
To quote another movie.
Then that kind of brings us around to my perennial point,
which is there is some kind of intelligence orchestrating
things.
And it's interactive, and it's conscious,
and it's compassionate sometimes in a tough love sort of way.
Yeah.
This is the project, the problem, the koan of the COVID years
for me.
I was through another path.
I started thinking of my mother.
I'm also a devotee in small measure of Mother Mira, who's considered an avatar of the Divine
Mother and I had an experience of her, not in her physical presence, that sort of rescued
me from a difficult situation and I was aware during that, that oh, this could be entirely
my imagination and I'm just talking myself out of some disaster here.
Fine, it works.
But then I said, I'm sorry I haven't been to visit you in a while, I'll make a plan to
come to Germany where she lives. And then I heard in my ear, you don't need to come see me. You just
need to go visit your mother. Interesting. I get all for clumped as we said. And from that point
on, I realized, oh, taking care of her became devotion. When she died. Within the years after
that, I started thinking about the divine feminine, the divine mother in a deeper way. And during
COVID I had lots of time to read in my own traditions as well as other traditions and
get a little bit deeper of understanding and I started to realize that the experience I
had when I went into her presence, her delight in me.
Your mother's or mother Mary's?
My mother's.
The really profoundly crazily unconditional love that was evident on her face when I walked
in the room.
that's the experience of the divine feminine in the world and it's possible to experience.
But I turned to one of my Zen teachers who was a
was also a Christian minister and I said, you know, this is hard to mesh with
my Zen practice. I'm suddenly in a devotional practice when I was in a non-devotional contemplative practice.
What am I supposed to do with this and how do you deal with it?
His name was Bob Kaku Gunn and he was a few months away from dying after five years of
Living with pancreas cancer and it was COVID. So it was an online thing
But it was a formal Zen interview online, but he was an old buddy of mine, too
And I said to him how do you deal with this? And he said well the further I go
It's all just love and I was like no no no no no no first off Christian term
I don't you know it makes me nervous and he was like no I said compassion he goes whatever that's all it is
That's the fundamental nature and then I realized versions of the talking particularly at sand that I gave
Start with you know what are the twin pillars of said in Tibetan tradition the twin pillars of?
Buddhist practice wisdom and compassion wisdom is seeing the world as it is without delusion
Complexity theory has provided me with a really complete model for understanding the structure and nature of
Existence that includes all the science and all the math and all the philosophy
I've been learning my entire life because I'm a nerd that allows me to see that but where that leads me to is
This is not my boundary at the cellular level
My boundary is wherever my microbiome goes if you were here and I gave you a hug
we'd walk apart and you'd carry some of me away with you and I'd carry some of you away with me.
At the molecular level, we're exchanging molecules with the environment all the time.
Our boundaries are the entire biomass of the planet.
I've heard that every breath we take contains at least one molecule that Jesus breathed
and Hitler and everybody else.
And at the atomic level, there isn't an atom in our bodies that we didn't
breathe, eat or drink from the planet. So are we lonely creatures that live on the surface of a rock
we call Earth, or are we planet Earth itself that in three and a half billion years was able to
self-organize itself into creatures that think of themselves as separate, but we're wrong. So,
at the atomic level, our boundary is the entire planet. That's Gaia. It's not just the biological
part. It's the non-biological part. At the quantum level, non-locality entanglement won the Nobel
a few years ago, Einstein was right to his dismay.
At the quantum level, we're one seamless universe.
There's no separation anywhere.
So when you talk about compassion, it's not,
oh, I feel sorry for this person in front of me.
Real compassion is I've touched a hot stove
and my left hand goes to pull my right hand away
without hesitation because we're just one thing.
That's real compassion.
And that arises from seeing the nature of reality
and experiencing the nature of reality in its true nature,
which is all the stuff you and I are talking about.
And when that happens, true compassion arises.
Or if you want to say love,
and that's the fundamental nature of existence.
That's the fundamental quality of the world.
And that was the last time I saw my friend
in that interview.
It's a good thing to be left with.
- Love your neighbor as yourself because he is.
- Yeah.
Well, that's a real sweet note to end on.
So this has been a lot of fun.
I've really enjoyed this.
You've let me go on a really long time.
Well, you say good stuff.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
So do you.
Your book is really interesting and it's a real treat for me to talk to people like you
and to enrich my own experience and understanding.
Very valuable.
It's all about relation.
Everything's in relation.
Good.
So thanks so much, Neil.
there's some more conferences where we can exchange a little microbiome in person sometime.
That would be nice. Maybe you need to organize some BatGap conference.
Oh man, yeah, people say that. It's a big task.
I'm sorry, that's a mean thing to wish on you.
Marito and Zaya would practically kill them organizing those conferences out there.
But anyway, we'd love to meet you in person sometime and really appreciate what you're doing
and look forward to reading your next book. Let me know when you've finished it.
I'm looking forward to seeing what it turns out to be. I just started writing it. Thank you.
And thanks to all those who have been listening or watching. We really appreciate your participation in Bat Camp all these 15 years now.
So we'll see you for the next one. Thanks, Niels. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye
Bye.
[Music]