WEBVTT

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[Music]

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

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My name is Rick Archer.

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Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening

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people.

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I've done over 700 of them now.

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If this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P,

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and look under the past interviews menu, where you'll find them all organized in various

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ways.

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Also, while you're on the site, check out our new BatGap AI bot, into which I've uploaded

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nearly 70,000 files, transcripts of talks that people who have been on BatGap have given,

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PDFs of their books and so on, and it's a very interesting AI chatbot with which you can have

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extended dialogues about any spiritual topic, even in other languages other than English.

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Try it in Vietnamese or Swahili if you speak those. It works. This whole enterprise is made

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possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate

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it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and

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a page explaining alternatives to PayPal. Also, if you'd like to help support it in a volunteer

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kind of way, we have teams of people proofreading transcripts and doing some other things, so

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get in touch if you'd like to help in that way. The guest today is Neil Theis. I've seen Neil

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He'll speak a number of times at the Science and Nonduality Conference and I very much

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enjoyed his talks.

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He's a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

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Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and

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the anatomy of the human interstitium.

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So you'll be thinking, "What does that have to do with BatGap?"

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Okay, this next part does.

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Dr. Thies' studies in complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in

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fields such as integrative medicine, consciousness studies, and the science-religion dialogue.

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He is a senior Zen student at the Village Zen Do in New York City.

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His lifelong Jewish practice has involved both traditional observances and formal academic

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study.

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And in recent years, to his surprise, he has also undergone shamanic initiation.

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So welcome, Neil.

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Thank you very much, Rick.

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I went to the Zen Center in New York City in the fall of '68.

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I had learned to meditate, but what I was doing seemed so easy and enjoyable that I thought,

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"This couldn't be serious.

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It's too easy."

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And so I went to the Zen Center to check into what that was all about.

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And it was an adventure.

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We had our car towed away, and then we were trying to cash a check in the Times Square

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area and asking prostitutes.

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I don't think we knew they were prostitutes if they could cash a check, and getting responses

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like, "My man, don't take checks."

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We finally got the car back somehow or other and got back to Connecticut. Anyway, it was one of those adventures

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That was my total experience with Zen

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Well, it's in the moment I'm sure in the moment I'm sure it was

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Okay

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This will be a free-flowing conversation. I've read Neal's book twice. He has a book called notes on complexity

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He sent me the audio version of it's about four and a half hours long and I really enjoyed it

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So I listened to it a second time and I could easily have listened to it a third time and

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continued to learn things.

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But we're going to use an outline of the book's chapters as a guide to our conversation, although

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we might deviate from it at times if other thoughts come up or if some of you send in

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questions.

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So first of all, Neil, what is complexity and why are you interested in it and how does

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it pertain to spirituality and consciousness?

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theory, I think it's fair to call it one of the three great scientific theories of the 20th

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century. The other two obviously being quantum physics and relativity. The thing is that quantum

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physics describes everything at the incredibly small and relativity covers everything at the

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very large scale. But where life happens, where our lives happen, neither really works very well.

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You know, we're still debating whether there are quantum effects that bubble up to the everyday

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scale and we know gravity affects us but other than that day to day not so much.

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Complexity, it's related closely to something called chaos theory which more

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people are familiar with. It's sort of what came after chaos theory was

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developed and basically it's an understanding how life happens, how

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living things arise from the substance of the universe, how they interact with

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each other to create larger scale living things. So that's whether you're talking

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about biomolecules self-organizing into cells, cells becoming bodies, or various bodies becoming

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social structures. And it depends on what you include as a body. If it's ants, then it's

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an ant colony. If it's people, it might be a neighborhood, a city, an economy. If it's

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all the living things within an area, then you've got an ecosystem. Everything alive

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on earth, then you're talking Gaia. So, complexity describes all of those things. It's called

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complexity because there's nothing more complex than life. That's sort of the hallmark of life.

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You can't reduce it to very simple equations that you can just pop a few numbers in and get a result.

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Life is never machine-like, despite what our cultural metaphors tend to say in terms of

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bioengineering and cells as building blocks. This makes them seem like things you can build like a

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machine. But that's not what life is. It's more complex and more dynamic than that. So that's what

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complexity theory covers. I stumbled into it sort of by

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accident. Everything in my book actually sort of step by step

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assembled itself, which is what complex systems do. They

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assemble themselves into larger scale things. And by bumping into

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somebody often by chance, my clinical practice, I'm a

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pathologist, this is my microscope in my office. And I

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spend my day looking at microscope slides. And we'll

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probably talk about that if we're going chapter by chapter a bit.

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So I'm looking at human tissues at the cellular level all day long.

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And they're human tissues.

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I'm not looking at mice.

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My research involves looking at human material because that's what comes to me as part of

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my clinical practice.

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And at some point, looking at liver slides, liver is my subspecialty.

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I work with the liver transplant team.

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I started to figure out how we could prove that the liver had stem cells.

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And nowadays that sounds not very exciting because everything we know has stem cells,

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but 25 years or so ago, the liver was not generally thought to have stem cells.

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In fact, the only part...

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And just to explain briefly what stem cells are.

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A stem cell is a cell that can become all the cells of an entire organ on its own or

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all the cells of an entire body on its own.

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So for example, we knew the bone marrow had stem cells for the rest of the bone marrow

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and the blood and we know this because you can take a cell and transplant it into someone who has no

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bone marrow like someone who's had leukemia and you've needed to erase all their white cells in

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order to get rid of the leukemia and you take some cells and put them in the patient's bone marrow

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and lo and behold the bone marrow repopulates and they get all the cells of the blood.

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The surface of the skin is known to have stem cells at the base that's one of the reasons skin

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heal so well. You destroy a little bit of the surface, the stem cells at the base of the skin

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of the epidermis very rapidly replicate. They reproduce each other and fill in and you have

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full thickness healing. The GI tract was known to have stem cells, so everything from mouth all the

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way out the other end, and they turn over every 24 to 48 hours. The GI tract's really dynamic.

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So the reason a burn victim doesn't heal fully is that the stem cells are destroyed because

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the burn goes so deep. Is that true? To some extent, but probably it's more about the scar tissue that

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then forms, which is not normal tissue, and therefore the cells don't know how to organize

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themselves in order to fill in when the scar tissue takes over. That's turning out to be far

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more interesting. I mentioned to you before we came online that we now know that the scarring of

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and stage liver disease we call cirrhosis, whether it's from alcohol or chronic hepatitis C or an

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autoimmune disease, if we can stop the disease the scarring can actually melt away. In burn victims

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under the right circumstances we're learning how scar tissue can melt away and then stem cells could

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possibly fill in. Wow that'd be cool if they could actually. Yeah it would be cool but and this is an

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example of a complex system. We can't go in and say, "Let's plaster over this wound with

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some cells, bam," the way we might fix a wall. But if you put cells and let them interact

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in an environment that's conducive to their interactions, in fact, the interactions are

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between each other and between them and the environment, very much like people walking

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down the street or ants doing their jobs in a colony, they tend to do what they need to

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accomplish for the well-being, the health of the system. And no one is planning it.

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No one's telling each cell what they need to do. The new tissue is arising out

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of the dynamic interactions at the local level. So that's exactly what complexity

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is talking about. So when I was looking at the liver, I realized, oh, the liver has

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stem cells and I figured out how that could be proven. And that had been

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controversial at that point because usually a liver is just sitting there.

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though we know that if you whack out half of the liver within 40 days, it grows

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back to normal. The question was which cells accomplished that and are there

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stem cells as part of that process? So my group showed that there were and then as

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part of that work and outgrowth of that around 2000, there was a lot of news

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about adult stem cells as opposed to embryonic stem cells and my group was

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one of the pioneering teams that showed that cells at least from the bone marrow,

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Not only could bone marrow stem cells produce all the elements of the bone marrow in the blood,

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but they also could contribute to the lung, the liver, the kidney, the brain, the muscle.

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And it was our paper in 2021 that showed that that could happen with one single adult stem cell,

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that it could contribute to all these tissues. And that meant an adult cell could behave like

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an embryonic stem cell. And that led to George Bush's address to the nation in October of

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that year because the anti-abortion argument against embryonic stem cells had been, it's

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not ethical. But now because of our work and the other teams that were working on this,

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they could say, "Oh, you don't need to do embryonic stem cells. You can do adult stem

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cells and they can do everything." That's not really true. You need to do both sides

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of the research and to some extent the reason we don't have a lot of more progress in terms

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of stem cell therapeutics is because the politics of all that kept communities of stem cell

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workers from talking to each other, cut out the funding, because this made embryonic stem

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cells sort of at war with adult stem cells. I no longer am in that field as much as I

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can avoid it. So while I was doing that, a friend of mine in England who is an academic

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interested in interdisciplinary communication, people talking to each other across different

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specialties and walks of life. He put me together with another friend of his named Jane Prophet,

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who is an artist, and she had been interested in how, this is 25 years ago before video games were

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quite as dynamic as they are now, and we were just starting to have internet things going on where

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people were creating avatars for themselves or relating to avatars.

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And she thought this was really interesting and wanted to examine using her art

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practice, how people emotionally connected to virtual creatures.

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And she created a virtual world called Technosphere,

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where you could create a little animal, decide whether it was an herbivore,

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a carnivore, put together a bunch of body parts.

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So you knew what it looked like,

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though it was never actually visualizable on a screen and send it out into the

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world and then the animals would send you little postcards by email to tell you

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what they were up to. Oh, today I was grazing. Oh, today I outran a carnivore.

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Oh, today I got pregnant. Oh, today I didn't outrun the carnivore and this is

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your last email because I'm dead. I tended to always, being Buddhist, I always

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sent little herbivores in and they never survived very long. But the key thing was

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when they had reached thousands of creatures in technosphere, the creatures

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started organizing into social structures that they had not programmed. And it

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turned out this was an example of artificial life, which is also a realm of

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complexity theory. And so when I was telling her about how cells move around

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the body, interacting with each other and with their local environments to create

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tissues, she said, "Oh, that's like how complexity people talk about how ants

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foreign colonies. And I was like, "What's complexity?" So it was Jane that taught me

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about this. And unpacking that for the next 20 years, you heard some versions of that

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at SAND, has sort of become the parallel work to my clinical work. Where that interfaced

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with the spiritual side, a story I don't tell in the book, but relates directly to this

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experience of working with Jane. Somewhere in there, I just became focused on the idea

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that I kept imagining that the cells I was talking about and what I was picturing happening

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in tissues was happening on my microscope slides. Or when I was doing animal research,

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I don't do it anymore. I don't particularly like doing it. But when I did it during that

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period, it's happening in the mice over there. But eventually, I made the obvious connection

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that anything I'm describing there is happening in here. It's me that I'm talking about. When

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I talk about stem cells, what stem cells are doing, I'm describing what my body is doing,

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what the cells of my body is doing. And at the same time, I was starting to become aware

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of this difficult tension between, is my body this thing, which is how I typically relate

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to it, bounded by my skin, or is it a community of cells like a flock of birds or a colony

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of ants and you can argue it both ways. And this really started to wear at me. And I was

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already a Zen student at this point and I started on Koan practice, although I think at this

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moment I wasn't doing Koan practice particularly. And by Koan practice in Zen, what I mean is

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meditating. Sometimes it's on a question like, "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" This

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is not the answer. You can't present an answer that answers this through a logical process

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of thinking. You sort of have to experience the koan itself. Or, more often, it's a teacher

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having an interaction with a student in which the student becomes awakened in some fashion.

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So you're trying to have the experience of what's going on in that koan. A classic example

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is usually one of the first koans you learn.

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A student asks Master Chow Choo,

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"Does a dog have Buddha nature?"

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And everything has Buddha nature, doesn't it?

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So why would you be asking about a dog?

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But on the other hand,

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can a dog who can't meditate have Buddha nature?

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So student probably thinks they're very clever

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and is gonna catch the teacher on something.

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And Master Chow Choo responds, "Mu,"

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which is Japanese for no or nothing,

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which isn't really an answer.

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It feels like a sidestep.

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but in hearing the word, the monk has an awakening experience.

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So when you're working on koans,

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they get very obsessive when you're deep in the weeds with it.

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You sort of can't stop thinking about it.

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It becomes the world you're walking around in.

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And very much this question,

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is my body a thing or a colony of cells,

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a community of cells?

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There's gotta be a way to decide it, what it really is.

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And I just kept gnawing at this.

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And a few weeks later, after meeting Jane,

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I think it was that first summer,

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I was walking across town in New York City,

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and I was thinking about this, body or cells,

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body or cells, and I came to a cross section,

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and there was a do not walk sign, so I stopped.

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Body or cells, body or cells, body or cells.

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And at the moment the light changed,

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I was experiencing the cells.

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And everyone else stepped off the curb,

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and I couldn't move because my leg had become a flock of cells

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that I didn't know how to control and direct.

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And then it switched and I was able to walk

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across the street, but there was this moment.

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And then sometime later, also the same summer,

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I was in my Zendo and I was back in those days,

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I was the Thursday morning opener.

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So if anyone wanted to come and do early morning meditation,

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the place was open.

00:17:47.460 --> 00:17:50.220
And it was a smaller community back then

00:17:50.220 --> 00:17:51.700
and it was pre COVID.

00:17:51.700 --> 00:17:53.820
So sometimes there was no one but me.

00:17:53.820 --> 00:18:00.740
And I lit the incense on the altar and I sat on my cushion opposite and I had a practice

00:18:00.740 --> 00:18:05.140
I was supposed to be doing that my Zen teacher had given me but there I was sitting on my

00:18:05.140 --> 00:18:10.880
cushion going "body yourselves, body yourselves, body yourselves" while doing Zazen.

00:18:10.880 --> 00:18:17.800
And it was a very focused moment and then there was this point where for some reason

00:18:17.800 --> 00:18:24.320
I looked up and saw the incense stick across the room on the altar turning into smoke.

00:18:24.320 --> 00:18:32.440
And my physical experience of body or cells, stick or smoke, it was the same experience.

00:18:32.440 --> 00:18:39.080
I was experiencing both versions of my body and the incense stick themselves together.

00:18:39.080 --> 00:18:44.320
And in that instant, I was like, this is what we mean by emptiness of inherent existence.

00:18:44.320 --> 00:18:46.160
And it wasn't an intellectual concept.

00:18:46.160 --> 00:18:49.240
It was just a very visceral sort of thing.

00:18:49.240 --> 00:18:52.560
And of course, within moments, I was out of that moment

00:18:52.560 --> 00:18:54.920
and it was becoming an intellectual thing.

00:18:54.920 --> 00:18:57.480
But in that moment, my whole life,

00:18:57.480 --> 00:18:59.360
I've been interested in science.

00:18:59.360 --> 00:19:01.960
When I was in seventh grade, my ambition

00:19:01.960 --> 00:19:05.440
was to finish up Einstein's work on a unified field theory

00:19:05.440 --> 00:19:06.960
and win the Nobel Prize for it.

00:19:06.960 --> 00:19:08.560
But I was also getting bar mitzvahed

00:19:08.560 --> 00:19:10.680
and thinking about becoming a rabbi

00:19:10.680 --> 00:19:13.080
and dreaming about what's Jewish mysticism,

00:19:13.080 --> 00:19:16.000
and maybe I could find a way to do that too.

00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:19.840
And those were very separate practices to me.

00:19:19.840 --> 00:19:21.800
I never felt they were in conflict,

00:19:21.800 --> 00:19:24.720
but nor did I feel that I had to look for a way

00:19:24.720 --> 00:19:26.480
for them to interact or overlap.

00:19:26.480 --> 00:19:28.660
I was just, maybe because I'm a Gemini,

00:19:28.660 --> 00:19:30.720
but it was just, it was fine.

00:19:30.720 --> 00:19:32.400
And when people would challenge me on that,

00:19:32.400 --> 00:19:34.520
lots of people in medical school were like,

00:19:34.520 --> 00:19:36.320
well, how can you be an observant Jew

00:19:36.320 --> 00:19:38.300
and be a modern thinker?

00:19:38.300 --> 00:19:40.280
Or I had four communities

00:19:40.280 --> 00:19:41.720
that weren't comfortable with each other

00:19:41.720 --> 00:19:42.960
that I was trying to embody.

00:19:42.960 --> 00:19:45.400
I was a gay man living in New York City.

00:19:45.400 --> 00:19:51.360
I was a doctor, I was now becoming a Buddhist, and I'm an observant Jew, and in any room

00:19:51.360 --> 00:19:54.040
someone's going to object to one of those.

00:19:54.040 --> 00:19:59.240
In that moment, everything became seamless, and my science practice and my spiritual practice

00:19:59.240 --> 00:20:01.520
weren't separate.

00:20:01.520 --> 00:20:03.360
And I understood that.

00:20:03.360 --> 00:20:05.000
I experienced that.

00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:11.360
And the work since, in the last 23 years since that time, has been exploring why that's not

00:20:11.360 --> 00:20:17.200
the case, why they aren't separate, why they are the same thing. And that's what the book

00:20:17.200 --> 00:20:23.880
has come to be. Diving down using complexity theory, so are cells a thing? No, they're

00:20:23.880 --> 00:20:29.480
just biomolecules floating in water. So are molecules a thing? No, they're just atoms.

00:20:29.480 --> 00:20:36.960
So are they a thing? No, they're just quantum phenomena. So quantum level, are those things?

00:20:36.960 --> 00:20:42.960
those just pop in and out of space-time, the energetic field of space-time.

00:20:42.960 --> 00:20:49.960
Is there no thing anywhere? No! Oh, right! We've wound up using complexity theory and quantum physics

00:20:49.960 --> 00:20:54.960
to get to Buddhist metaphysics and Jewish mysticism and stuff like this.

00:20:54.960 --> 00:20:58.960
So, that's the book. That's the first half of the book.

00:20:58.960 --> 00:21:01.960
Interesting. Alright, I have a number of thoughts and questions.

00:21:01.960 --> 00:21:05.960
I'll tell you why this topic fascinates me and we'll see if it fascinates you for the same reasons,

00:21:05.960 --> 00:21:08.060
for the same reasons, maybe it doesn't.

00:21:08.060 --> 00:21:10.160
Did you see Robert Lanza speak at SEND?

00:21:10.160 --> 00:21:12.400
He talked about biocentrism.

00:21:12.400 --> 00:21:14.160
- Yes, yes I did.

00:21:14.160 --> 00:21:16.040
- Which is the idea that the universe

00:21:16.040 --> 00:21:18.920
has this remarkable way of arranging itself

00:21:18.920 --> 00:21:21.920
to be conducive to life, supportive of life,

00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:22.800
against all odds.

00:21:22.800 --> 00:21:24.160
I mean, there are so many variables

00:21:24.160 --> 00:21:26.720
that have to be just so in order for the universe itself

00:21:26.720 --> 00:21:28.440
to arise and then for life to arise.

00:21:28.440 --> 00:21:30.800
And if any one of them were off by just a tiny bit,

00:21:30.800 --> 00:21:32.080
it wouldn't happen.

00:21:32.080 --> 00:21:34.840
And so that to me points to the notion

00:21:34.840 --> 00:21:37.920
that there is some kind of fundamental,

00:21:37.920 --> 00:21:40.920
all-pervading intelligence orchestrating everything,

00:21:40.920 --> 00:21:42.960
which I find very interesting.

00:21:42.960 --> 00:21:45.800
Brian Swimme, you may have seen him at SAND.

00:21:45.800 --> 00:21:46.640
I've interviewed him.

00:21:46.640 --> 00:21:48.520
A famous quote of his is,

00:21:48.520 --> 00:21:52.040
"You leave hydrogen alone for 13.7 billion years

00:21:52.040 --> 00:21:56.120
"and you end up with rose bushes and giraffes and opera."

00:21:56.120 --> 00:21:59.600
Somehow hydrogen organizes itself into these complex things.

00:21:59.600 --> 00:22:00.720
- Complexity.

00:22:00.720 --> 00:22:01.560
- Complexity, exactly.

00:22:01.560 --> 00:22:03.560
- This is what complexity theory is about.

00:22:03.560 --> 00:22:04.720
How does that happen?

00:22:04.720 --> 00:22:10.960
Yeah, amazing. There's a podcast I like a lot called Closer to Truth with Robert Lawrence Kuhn.

00:22:10.960 --> 00:22:13.120
Yeah, I've got a few interviews on there with him.

00:22:13.120 --> 00:22:14.080
Oh cool, I'll probably meet him here.

00:22:14.080 --> 00:22:15.920
He met me at S.A.N.D., right?

00:22:15.920 --> 00:22:20.400
Oh, I didn't realize he was at S.A.N.D., okay. He often devotes episodes to the discussion of

00:22:20.400 --> 00:22:26.800
whether mathematics is discovered or invented. In other words, is it intrinsic to the universe?

00:22:26.800 --> 00:22:32.000
Because the universe seems to have been operating by mathematical principles long before anyone could

00:22:32.000 --> 00:22:37.840
could be around to understand them, or are we just sort of overlaying an interpretation

00:22:37.840 --> 00:22:44.360
on something and just inventing in a human language something that doesn't indicate any

00:22:44.360 --> 00:22:48.440
kind of deep organizational intelligence to the universe?

00:22:48.440 --> 00:22:49.640
So all those are interesting questions.

00:22:49.640 --> 00:22:53.000
I mean, to put it in simple terms, is there a God?

00:22:53.000 --> 00:22:59.280
Is God the all-pervading or all-orchestrating intelligence that makes complexity possible,

00:22:59.280 --> 00:23:02.560
makes life possible, that makes the universe possible.

00:23:02.560 --> 00:23:07.400
You know I mentioned how every step of the way I keep bumping into people who seem to

00:23:07.400 --> 00:23:11.520
be there to take me to the next thing I'm supposed to do.

00:23:11.520 --> 00:23:18.360
And I went in 2010 to Stockholm to the Science of Consciousness meetings, kind of by accident

00:23:18.360 --> 00:23:23.400
because a friend of mine, Bill Bichelle, who I do complementary medicine stuff with, and

00:23:23.400 --> 00:23:28.640
at that point was the science guy for Tibet House, the Dalai Lama's center of action here

00:23:28.640 --> 00:23:34.420
in New York. He had to give a talk at this conference and he had not had a lot of experience doing

00:23:34.420 --> 00:23:38.140
public speaking and he was very nervous and begged me to go with him so he could have a

00:23:38.140 --> 00:23:42.900
friendly face in the audience. And in order to do that, I had to come up with an abstract

00:23:42.900 --> 00:23:46.740
on something to do with consciousness. And I was already doing the complexity stuff and

00:23:46.740 --> 00:23:53.860
I had ideas about how complexity might relate to consciousness. So I went and presented that

00:23:53.860 --> 00:23:58.820
stuff. And in the morning, the guy who would eventually become my collaborator, Menasca

00:23:58.820 --> 00:24:04.660
Fatos, was giving a plenary session. And he has come for decades now, and is one of the

00:24:04.660 --> 00:24:07.660
first serious physicists who really stated this.

00:24:07.660 --> 00:24:11.340
I've interviewed him twice, for those who'd like to check him out.

00:24:11.340 --> 00:24:16.140
So he agrees with many of the founders of quantum physics, that the correlates between

00:24:16.140 --> 00:24:23.740
quantum physics and things like Vedic understandings of consciousness are not accidental or happenstance.

00:24:23.740 --> 00:24:36.940
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.

00:24:36.940 --> 00:24:45.340
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.

00:24:45.340 --> 00:24:49.580
And he's talking about how in order to take the quantum physics stuff further,

00:24:49.580 --> 00:24:52.460
we needed a different way of thinking about biology.

00:24:52.460 --> 00:24:55.260
And he starts describing what that would look like.

00:24:55.260 --> 00:25:00.700
And I'm like, "It's complexity theory. It's the stuff I've been writing about for the last eight years.

00:25:00.700 --> 00:25:02.940
Why is no one noticing what I'm talking about?"

00:25:02.940 --> 00:25:06.060
And I got very angry and I walked out of his lecture.

00:25:06.060 --> 00:25:09.900
That afternoon, a little scientific ego there,

00:25:09.900 --> 00:25:14.140
my abstract had been accepted for presentation in a tiny little side session.

00:25:14.700 --> 00:25:23.700
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.

00:25:23.700 --> 00:25:33.700
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.

00:25:33.700 --> 00:25:41.700
I was sort of a panpsychist, that the way things interact in the world as a complex system gives rise to consciousness.

00:25:41.700 --> 00:25:48.700
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.

00:25:48.700 --> 00:25:55.700
And we started working on this together. And we've published, I think, six or seven papers together.

00:25:55.700 --> 00:26:06.700
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.

00:26:06.700 --> 00:26:14.660
first. Materiality is an illusion and in our academic writing we refer to this underlying,

00:26:14.660 --> 00:26:20.980
this grant of being, this god-like thing as fundamental awareness or pure awareness. That's

00:26:20.980 --> 00:26:26.660
nothing but the awareness of awareness. It's non-dual. There's no subject-object split.

00:26:26.660 --> 00:26:32.980
There's no way to describe it linguistically, mathematically, through images. And somehow,

00:26:32.980 --> 00:26:41.260
As it yearns, one might say, to understand what it itself is, it necessarily starts to

00:26:41.260 --> 00:26:44.760
shimmy into a subject-object separation.

00:26:44.760 --> 00:26:49.720
And when it does that, the only way you can have separation is if you have dimensionality.

00:26:49.720 --> 00:26:52.820
Dimensionality like space, like time, maybe other dimensions.

00:26:52.820 --> 00:27:00.220
And so the moment duality arises from non-duality, the moment non-dual pure awareness recognizes

00:27:00.220 --> 00:27:06.620
itself as subject and object. All of material existence springs into being. With space-time,

00:27:06.620 --> 00:27:12.540
you have, because of quantum physics, an energy-rich field. That gives rise to all the subatomic

00:27:12.540 --> 00:27:18.580
particles emanating out of the space-time continuum. Those self-organize into atoms,

00:27:18.580 --> 00:27:23.380
into molecules, according to the principles of complexity theory, which are very simple.

00:27:23.380 --> 00:27:28.300
They're summarized in chapter three of the book. And out of that comes life. I don't

00:27:28.300 --> 00:27:38.300
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.

00:27:38.300 --> 00:27:42.300
Those are the five biggies. None of them are precise in any way.

00:27:42.300 --> 00:27:52.300
I don't use intelligence because I feel like people tend to project what their own experience of their own intelligence is,

00:27:52.300 --> 00:27:57.100
in particular how laden with intention our intelligence is.

00:27:57.100 --> 00:28:02.380
And I don't know that the pure fundamental non-dual awareness

00:28:02.380 --> 00:28:05.100
is intentional in that way.

00:28:05.100 --> 00:28:07.180
I don't think there's design happening,

00:28:07.180 --> 00:28:10.540
but I think there are implications that are unavoidable.

00:28:10.540 --> 00:28:15.180
And to that pure awareness becoming aware of itself,

00:28:15.180 --> 00:28:18.140
and those implications are a living conscious universe,

00:28:18.140 --> 00:28:21.820
not merely a universe that contains living conscious beings,

00:28:21.820 --> 00:28:26.940
but a universe that is seamlessly in its entirety living in consciousness.

00:28:26.940 --> 00:28:31.460
Yeah. I don't know if this is from Kashmir Shaivism or not, but there's an idea,

00:28:31.460 --> 00:28:34.860
which is Manasseh's field, aside from physics.

00:28:34.860 --> 00:28:38.980
There's a principle known as self-interacting dynamics of consciousness.

00:28:38.980 --> 00:28:40.660
And that's what he taught me.

00:28:40.660 --> 00:28:45.620
So, what we found is between my understandings of Jewish mysticism,

00:28:45.620 --> 00:28:52.980
particularly Kabbalah as taught in the 15th century by Isaac Luria, Lurianic Kabbalah.

00:28:52.980 --> 00:28:58.500
The principles that come from contemplative practice there about the nature of existence

00:28:58.500 --> 00:29:03.780
and how existence comes into being, Buddhist metaphysics that derives from contemplative

00:29:03.780 --> 00:29:10.260
practice. He brought in elements of Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism, and we realized that,

00:29:10.900 --> 00:29:17.940
Number one, they differ because each community of contemplatives is asking a different question.

00:29:17.940 --> 00:29:23.860
So you can interrogate the non-dual from a variety of perspectives. You're going to get a variety of

00:29:23.860 --> 00:29:28.900
answers because it starts with what's your question. The question in Buddhism is how do

00:29:28.900 --> 00:29:34.900
you end suffering? The question in Jewish mystical practice is how was the world created, Bireishit,

00:29:34.900 --> 00:29:40.420
in the beginning, and how does that continue to happen in each single moment? Because every moment

00:29:40.420 --> 00:29:46.660
is a new creation. In Kashmiri Shaivism, the real fundamental question is, how can you possibly go

00:29:46.660 --> 00:29:53.780
from non-dual awareness to duality? And when you line these all up, and this is what I try to do

00:29:53.780 --> 00:29:59.460
in the next to last chapter of the book, is they fit together into a very nice story, which is what

00:29:59.460 --> 00:30:07.460
I kind of expressed. The idea of non-dual realities, they're called the tattvas, the first five tattvas

00:30:07.460 --> 00:30:15.380
in Shaivist practice, first there has to be the urge within non-dual awareness to understand what it

00:30:15.380 --> 00:30:22.020
is. Then there has to come this moment where there's a recognition of, well, to examine,

00:30:22.020 --> 00:30:26.420
to answer that question, there has to be an "I" and a "that," but they're still the same thing.

00:30:26.420 --> 00:30:31.220
And then you can flip it. Well, there also has to be a "that" and an "I," and there's this tension,

00:30:31.220 --> 00:30:38.180
like, which is the questing awareness in each of those moments? And there's a sense in Chéveuse

00:30:38.180 --> 00:30:43.620
thinking about how these are sort of shimmering back and forth. And then there's a further

00:30:43.620 --> 00:30:50.660
separation, but they're still unified. I am that, there's an identity, and the flip, that am I.

00:30:50.660 --> 00:30:57.780
And then suddenly I am that, and that's duality. And this is, I think, something novel that Manasseh

00:30:57.780 --> 00:31:03.580
and I are contributing, that moment of separation into I and that, into subject and object,

00:31:03.580 --> 00:31:08.940
as I said, requires dimensionality. Otherwise, how do you measure separation? The only way

00:31:08.940 --> 00:31:14.580
one can have separation is to have a dimension in which separation can be measured, whether

00:31:14.580 --> 00:31:21.820
it's distance or time or any other number of dimensions. And then you have space-time.

00:31:21.820 --> 00:31:26.420
And the moment you have space-time, then you have an energy-rich field out of which all

00:31:26.420 --> 00:31:35.060
existence springs into being. So the act of non-dual fundamental awareness, as expressed

00:31:35.060 --> 00:31:43.940
in Kashmiri Shaivism, gives you a very close map to how existence arises from it, as expressed in

00:31:43.940 --> 00:31:49.300
Luriana Kabbalah, in particular Four Worlds Kabbalah. And the moment you have that, if you

00:31:49.300 --> 00:31:54.980
describe that stuff mathematically, I'm using complexity theory. The book isn't about math,

00:31:55.620 --> 00:31:59.380
but the power of it derives from the mathematics that underlies it,

00:31:59.380 --> 00:32:05.140
then out of understanding the universe as a complex system that arises from pure non-dual

00:32:05.140 --> 00:32:10.340
awareness in this fashion, you wind up getting impermanence, interdependence,

00:32:10.340 --> 00:32:16.020
emptiness of inherent existence, karmic law, all the principles of fundamental Buddhism.

00:32:16.020 --> 00:32:22.580
It's a remarkably tidy package, and one of the things I've been enjoying since the book came out

00:32:22.580 --> 00:32:30.180
is I don't have a lot of experience in so many other cultures of spirituality and contemplative

00:32:30.180 --> 00:32:36.100
practice or other kinds of practices, and to find what questions they ask and to see

00:32:36.100 --> 00:32:41.780
their frames of reference mirrored in the same complexity theory construct just emphasizes

00:32:41.780 --> 00:32:47.540
over and over again. I think that science and spirituality are no longer two separate things.

00:32:47.540 --> 00:32:52.340
if we are honest about what contemporary science and philosophy actually are saying,

00:32:52.340 --> 00:32:55.300
which most people in our culture are not willing to do.

00:32:55.300 --> 00:33:02.260
Yeah, I gave a talk at S.A.N. myself on that very topic about how science and spirituality are just

00:33:02.260 --> 00:33:07.540
two sides of the same coin, really. They each have something to offer the other, and neither can be

00:33:07.540 --> 00:33:12.980
complete without the other. And hopefully we're going to be evolving in our knowledge, our approach

00:33:12.980 --> 00:33:19.180
to knowledge in a way that maybe 50, 100 years from now, it'll seem archaic that people thought

00:33:19.180 --> 00:33:25.380
of them as so separate and that they both provide essential tools and each has some unique tools

00:33:25.380 --> 00:33:27.140
that the other doesn't have.

00:33:27.140 --> 00:33:29.100
We can talk more about that.

00:33:29.100 --> 00:33:35.500
Earlier on, you traced us back from complex structures like the body and cells and molecules

00:33:35.500 --> 00:33:42.300
and atoms and subatomic particles down to just fields of possibility where there's no materiality.

00:33:42.300 --> 00:33:46.880
this whole thing you went through, are we cells, are we a body, or you could do the same thing

00:33:46.880 --> 00:33:52.960
with are we anything at all, or is there nothing, and go back and forth on that conundrum.

00:33:52.960 --> 00:33:58.640
This was the first paper I wrote with Manasseh, and we both were feeling our way towards it,

00:33:58.640 --> 00:34:04.540
but without each other, neither of us had a complete way of explaining what we were intuiting.

00:34:04.540 --> 00:34:09.900
And that goes back to something in quantum physics that comes from Niels Bohr. Anyone

00:34:09.900 --> 00:34:13.260
who knows anything about quantum physics, even without knowing how it works, knows

00:34:13.260 --> 00:34:18.420
that there's something about light that it's both waves and particles. And what

00:34:18.420 --> 00:34:23.100
that means is, depending on the experiment you do to figure out, is light

00:34:23.100 --> 00:34:28.440
waves or is it particles, you get one version or the other, and you never see

00:34:28.440 --> 00:34:33.580
both at the same time. And Bohr called this a complementarity. And in my talks

00:34:33.580 --> 00:34:37.700
and in the book, the simplest way of imagining this, and there's a picture of

00:34:37.700 --> 00:34:42.500
of it. There's the book on my shelf, but I won't bother opening it. Everyone is familiar

00:34:42.500 --> 00:34:49.600
with the image of two faces in profile as silhouettes looking at each other, and the space between

00:34:49.600 --> 00:34:55.060
the faces looks like a vase. Is it two faces or is it a vase? Well, you can really only

00:34:55.060 --> 00:34:59.620
see one or the other. Some people say that they can see both. Someone told me there was

00:34:59.620 --> 00:35:04.520
fMRI imaging that showed that in fact all you can do is move back and forth very quickly.

00:35:04.520 --> 00:35:09.580
But even if you can do it, I mean the principle is there that for the most part you focus

00:35:09.580 --> 00:35:11.820
on one or you focus on the other.

00:35:11.820 --> 00:35:15.660
And if you focus on the faces and say it's two faces, you're missing the vase.

00:35:15.660 --> 00:35:18.340
If you focus on the vase, you're missing the two faces.

00:35:18.340 --> 00:35:22.660
A complete description is both two faces and a vase.

00:35:22.660 --> 00:35:27.520
The way a complete description of light is both waves and particles.

00:35:27.520 --> 00:35:31.300
And you can only approach it from one perspective or another.

00:35:31.300 --> 00:35:36.440
And your conscious choice of perspective determines what you experience of the world.

00:35:36.440 --> 00:35:42.960
Bohr believed that complementarity was not just a quantum level phenomenon of wave-particle

00:35:42.960 --> 00:35:44.340
duality of light.

00:35:44.340 --> 00:35:46.260
He thought it was a universal principle.

00:35:46.260 --> 00:35:51.740
He felt so strongly about it that he used the yin-yang symbol as part of his coat of

00:35:51.740 --> 00:35:56.900
arms to represent complementarity and even put it on his tombstone.

00:35:56.900 --> 00:36:04.340
my first paper with Manas was that part of what Bohr was intuiting was what complexity theory is

00:36:04.340 --> 00:36:10.820
giving us. There is no right answer to is the body a thing versus a phenomenon arising from smaller

00:36:10.820 --> 00:36:17.780
things, the cells. It is equally both. They're a complementarity. Are cells a fundamental unit

00:36:17.780 --> 00:36:26.100
of existence? Yes, from one perspective, but from the lower down nanoscopic molecular perspective,

00:36:26.100 --> 00:36:42.100
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.

00:36:42.100 --> 00:37:07.400
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.

00:37:07.400 --> 00:37:13.080
we knew because the first things we could see were cell membranes and cell walls. They looked like

00:37:13.080 --> 00:37:18.840
empty boxes. And if you chop up an empty box, you don't get smaller boxes, you just get bits.

00:37:18.840 --> 00:37:25.480
So it looked like an empty box. They called it a cell because it looked like the cell of a monk

00:37:25.480 --> 00:37:31.560
or a prisoner. Four walls, ceiling and floor and no furniture. Years go by and they start to develop

00:37:31.560 --> 00:37:36.600
special stains to look at details of the cells. And these are the same stains I use. I'm pointing

00:37:36.600 --> 00:37:41.880
at my slides over there on my shelf, that I use to look at tissues today. It's the same stuff.

00:37:41.880 --> 00:37:47.240
And then we filled in the nuclei and the endoplasmic reticulum, all the bits and pieces

00:37:47.240 --> 00:37:52.680
that fill in the cell. But cell doctrine was born. And that's Western medicine and Western biology.

00:37:52.680 --> 00:37:57.720
All living things are made of cells and all cells derived from prior cells.

00:37:57.720 --> 00:38:02.520
Well, that means we're really good if we think of cells as building blocks,

00:38:02.520 --> 00:38:05.920
and we think of tissues as structures made from them,

00:38:05.920 --> 00:38:10.040
and it gets us to a nice machine-like view of the human body,

00:38:10.040 --> 00:38:12.520
and we're really good at orthopedics.

00:38:12.520 --> 00:38:15.600
We're really good at antibiotics,

00:38:15.600 --> 00:38:19.440
thinking about bacteria out there and ourselves in here,

00:38:19.440 --> 00:38:22.560
and infections are when the outside gets inside

00:38:22.560 --> 00:38:23.600
and things like this.

00:38:23.600 --> 00:38:27.160
But other cultures of health and healing

00:38:27.160 --> 00:38:30.360
talk about fields of the body.

00:38:30.360 --> 00:38:36.760
They talk about the body as a coarse body and a subtle body and an energy body.

00:38:36.760 --> 00:38:41.000
And they make diagrams where it looks like Russian dolls inside each other.

00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:47.560
And Western trained people like me go, "I've dissected the body into its parts.

00:38:47.560 --> 00:38:52.520
When I open it up, there's no smaller body inside. It doesn't exist."

00:38:52.520 --> 00:38:53.480
It's subtle.

00:38:53.480 --> 00:38:54.680
Yeah, it's subtle.

00:38:55.560 --> 00:39:03.560
Our view that cells are the fundamental unit closes us off from seeing, well, the body is a quantum field.

00:39:03.560 --> 00:39:08.560
And when I come into a room with someone else, our quantum fields are emerging.

00:39:08.560 --> 00:39:20.360
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.

00:39:20.760 --> 00:39:27.640
or a saint. That's something different and Western medicine and Western biology can't describe that.

00:39:27.640 --> 00:39:33.000
We're working towards languages where we can and that's part of my work as well,

00:39:33.000 --> 00:39:39.080
but that's the challenge. Western medicine and Western biology has such a rigid view,

00:39:39.080 --> 00:39:43.880
it's right up there with the materialist view of existence, that it's the air we breathe,

00:39:43.880 --> 00:39:48.920
so it's hard to see past it. But these different perspectives give you also, I mean, the world is

00:39:48.920 --> 00:39:53.880
is a much more interesting place and health and healing are much more dynamic, interesting

00:39:53.880 --> 00:39:57.440
processes than we routinely allow it in our culture.

00:39:57.440 --> 00:40:03.360
Yeah. There's a difference between subtlety and smallness. And one of the ways I understand

00:40:03.360 --> 00:40:10.400
spiritual awakening is the development of the capacity to incorporate multiple dimensions

00:40:10.400 --> 00:40:17.400
within one's awareness or experience from unmanifest to subtle relative to gross relative.

00:40:17.400 --> 00:40:21.280
And that doesn't mean you're going to be walking around seeing cells and atoms and things like

00:40:21.280 --> 00:40:22.280
that.

00:40:22.280 --> 00:40:23.280
That's smallness.

00:40:23.280 --> 00:40:24.280
Those are little.

00:40:24.280 --> 00:40:29.840
It means that there's a subtle reality to every gross object we perceive, and we ordinarily

00:40:29.840 --> 00:40:31.820
are blind to that.

00:40:31.820 --> 00:40:35.980
It's kind of like we're looking at the waves on the surface of the ocean without seeing

00:40:35.980 --> 00:40:43.640
what's deeper down, but people have gained throughout history the ability to open consciously

00:40:43.640 --> 00:40:50.300
to those subtler realms and to the absolute field that underlies them all and to recognize

00:40:50.300 --> 00:40:53.220
that absolute field as one's own self.

00:40:53.220 --> 00:40:57.780
And that to me is a good way of defining what awakening or enlightenment is.

00:40:57.780 --> 00:41:03.180
And, you know, some people poo-poo the idea of subtle phenomenon such as angels or fairies

00:41:03.180 --> 00:41:05.100
or, you know, different things like that.

00:41:05.100 --> 00:41:06.420
Other people actually experience them.

00:41:06.420 --> 00:41:08.540
That's where my shamanic stuff like…

00:41:08.540 --> 00:41:09.940
Yeah, that's where that comes in.

00:41:09.940 --> 00:41:14.940
And you know, they could be dismissed as hallucinations or whatever, but throughout history and every culture...

00:41:14.940 --> 00:41:21.940
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."

00:41:21.940 --> 00:41:28.940
My mother's last eight years of her life, she lost her short-term memory, probably some small strokes. We don't really know.

00:41:28.940 --> 00:41:35.940
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.

00:41:35.940 --> 00:41:39.940
and during that time dead people started showing up

00:41:39.940 --> 00:41:42.940
quite often and then they started bringing other dead people to meet her

00:41:42.940 --> 00:41:45.940
and then spirit guides from the universe start showing up.

00:41:45.940 --> 00:41:49.940
My favorite bit was at some point

00:41:49.940 --> 00:41:52.940
six years into this, it got to the point whenever I visited her

00:41:52.940 --> 00:41:54.940
I would say, "Any visitors?"

00:41:54.940 --> 00:41:57.940
and since she very rarely had a physical visitor

00:41:57.940 --> 00:41:59.940
other than her home care attendants

00:41:59.940 --> 00:42:02.940
we knew what I was asking and she would tell me who had stopped by

00:42:02.940 --> 00:42:04.940
or she wouldn't want to tell me

00:42:04.940 --> 00:42:07.940
And then one day I said, "You know, you haven't mentioned any visitors lately."

00:42:07.940 --> 00:42:12.940
She said, "Oh, they were boring me. I told them to stop coming. There will be plenty of time for them later."

00:42:12.940 --> 00:42:13.940
That's funny.

00:42:13.940 --> 00:42:16.940
And then she never saw another ghost as far as I know.

00:42:16.940 --> 00:42:22.940
But she also had direct experiences of quantum level reality.

00:42:22.940 --> 00:42:24.940
And Dogen talks about this.

00:42:24.940 --> 00:42:31.940
And in Tibetan practice, Bill Bichelle, who I mentioned earlier, that I went to the first consciousness meeting with,

00:42:31.940 --> 00:42:37.340
meeting with one of his interests is how Tibetan meditators can train themselves, and this has

00:42:37.340 --> 00:42:43.940
now been verified through scientific lab examination, the human retina can see down to a single

00:42:43.940 --> 00:42:50.260
photon. And Tibetan monks train themselves to see a single photon. So it's possible for

00:42:50.260 --> 00:42:56.780
the human eye, the human ear, the human sense of touch, to discriminate the actual fine,

00:42:56.780 --> 00:43:00.940
tiny, the small side of things that's available to us as well.

00:43:00.940 --> 00:43:03.660
But Kondzlaj talks about that in the Yoga Sutras.

00:43:03.660 --> 00:43:04.660
Yeah, exactly.

00:43:04.660 --> 00:43:05.660
Exactly.

00:43:05.660 --> 00:43:06.660
So that happens too.

00:43:06.660 --> 00:43:08.860
I walked in on my mom.

00:43:08.860 --> 00:43:13.940
She was always smiling in these years and she was very anxious when I was growing up.

00:43:13.940 --> 00:43:15.340
Probably when she was too.

00:43:15.340 --> 00:43:18.860
And at some point I said to her, "You're always smiling now, even when you're sleeping.

00:43:18.860 --> 00:43:20.580
How do you stay so happy?"

00:43:20.580 --> 00:43:25.980
And she said, "Well, I no longer really worry about the future and I can't remember the

00:43:25.980 --> 00:43:27.780
past so all I have is the now.

00:43:27.780 --> 00:43:30.380
And when you live in the now, you're happy."

00:43:30.380 --> 00:43:37.380
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.

00:43:37.380 --> 00:43:46.380
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.

00:43:46.380 --> 00:43:53.380
She said, well, it's in tiny little pieces. And then she made this gesture like she's chopping carrots.

00:43:53.380 --> 00:44:00.460
chopping carrots. I said, "What's that like?" She says, "It's so beautiful. I wish you and

00:44:00.460 --> 00:44:05.340
Mark and the kids, my husband and my niece and nephew, I wish you could see it like I do. It's

00:44:05.340 --> 00:44:12.460
just so beautiful." And then she paused and she said, "And time is like that too. It's not smooth.

00:44:12.460 --> 00:44:16.980
It's in tiny little pieces." I've heard other people say that.

00:44:16.980 --> 00:44:22.620
What did you do with my mother? So I think everything you said is absolutely true. But

00:44:22.620 --> 00:44:28.180
But I think potentially, and it's a degree of focus and concentration and training, if

00:44:28.180 --> 00:44:33.960
the question you ask is, "What is the true structure of the nature of reality?" then

00:44:33.960 --> 00:44:36.960
you might perceive those quantum structures.

00:44:36.960 --> 00:44:42.880
If your question is, "What is the true nature of conscious reality?" then probably the

00:44:42.880 --> 00:44:47.240
first thing you're going to bump into is the underlying sea of consciousness.

00:44:47.240 --> 00:44:48.680
There are no separations.

00:44:48.680 --> 00:44:54.240
If you perceive one theoretically, ultimately you'll be perceiving the whole thing.

00:44:54.240 --> 00:45:00.040
When I think of the word enlightenment or if someone had a Kensho in Japanese Zen terms

00:45:00.040 --> 00:45:05.360
or an enlightenment experience or awakening experience, what I've come to think about

00:45:05.360 --> 00:45:12.640
that not so much about what you discover, but it's that you have that moment when you

00:45:12.640 --> 00:45:16.880
see the two faces and then suddenly you see the boss.

00:45:16.880 --> 00:45:21.200
Someone asked me in a yoga group I was giving this talk to, they said, "What's enlightenment

00:45:21.200 --> 00:45:22.200
like?"

00:45:22.200 --> 00:45:24.320
I'm like, "I know."

00:45:24.320 --> 00:45:30.400
And I said, I used a video, as I used to do in some versions of the talk, of a murmuration

00:45:30.400 --> 00:45:32.480
of starlings.

00:45:32.480 --> 00:45:38.240
And if you've ever actually been present for starlings, you may first just hear this sound

00:45:38.240 --> 00:45:42.200
coming from up there and you look up and there's this thing in the sky.

00:45:42.200 --> 00:45:45.320
And then there's this moment you realize, "Oh no, it's starlings."

00:45:45.320 --> 00:45:51.080
an extraordinary moment. There's a joy to it and an excitement to it. That to me is an

00:45:51.080 --> 00:45:57.800
enlightenment experience. You saw reality this way, you saw it this way. The most extraordinary

00:45:57.800 --> 00:46:03.680
enlightenment experiences are you see the world of everyday reality, samsara, and then suddenly

00:46:03.680 --> 00:46:10.600
you see its non-dual pure awareness aspect and they aren't two. It's just, do you see

00:46:10.600 --> 00:46:16.920
it this way? Or do you see it this way? I think in Zen practice, the question, the aim, I

00:46:16.920 --> 00:46:22.120
think Buddhist practice, the question, the aim, how do you alleviate suffering is you

00:46:22.120 --> 00:46:27.960
learn to flexibly move between those views. We're separate, I hurt, I'm alone. We are

00:46:27.960 --> 00:46:34.080
seamlessly one whole thing within which everything is just as it should be. I'm separate, I'm

00:46:34.080 --> 00:46:36.120
alone, I hurt.

00:46:36.120 --> 00:46:40.540
In my sense, it's not strictly either/or.

00:46:40.540 --> 00:46:43.940
As you go along, it's more and more blended, both/and.

00:46:43.940 --> 00:46:47.860
And that it may be like a camera, like my camera right now.

00:46:47.860 --> 00:46:53.080
So I'm in focus and the background is a little bit fuzzy, but then the camera could be adjusted

00:46:53.080 --> 00:46:56.240
so that I'm a little fuzzy and the background is clear.

00:46:56.240 --> 00:46:58.020
And I think that's the way it works.

00:46:58.020 --> 00:47:03.660
As one goes along, there's eventually always this continuum of pure awareness or self-realization

00:47:03.660 --> 00:47:07.780
or whatever you want to call it, in the midst of whatever else is going on.

00:47:07.780 --> 00:47:12.100
And you're just able to do it that much more flexibly and freely.

00:47:12.100 --> 00:47:16.700
When people talk about, in Zen terms, you know, that's one of my primary practices,

00:47:16.700 --> 00:47:21.140
so it's often what comes to my mind, people talk about the freedom of a Zen master, of

00:47:21.140 --> 00:47:22.340
a Zen adept.

00:47:22.340 --> 00:47:26.900
The freedom is the freedom to move back and forth.

00:47:26.900 --> 00:47:29.820
And again, to have both there.

00:47:29.820 --> 00:47:33.860
And sometimes the fact that it's always there might not be obvious.

00:47:33.860 --> 00:47:39.260
If you could sort of say that pure awareness is like a tone, the tone is always going.

00:47:39.260 --> 00:47:42.020
After a while you wouldn't be paying so much attention to it, you'd be doing this or that,

00:47:42.020 --> 00:47:44.980
but any time you want to check, oh yeah, the tone is still there.

00:47:44.980 --> 00:47:50.220
In my experience, sometimes if I injure myself, like I fall off my bicycle or something like

00:47:50.220 --> 00:47:55.780
that, the contrast of that experience makes it vividly evident that there's something

00:47:55.780 --> 00:48:01.580
that's not affected by that and that something is always there and it just, you know, you

00:48:01.580 --> 00:48:06.500
don't have to pay attention to it as a thing because it isn't one, but it's just like the

00:48:06.500 --> 00:48:09.260
screen of a movie, you know, like they always use that analogy.

00:48:09.260 --> 00:48:11.940
The screen is always there no matter what's playing on it.

00:48:11.940 --> 00:48:17.340
But awakening is more like a state where you actually see the screen and watch the movie

00:48:17.340 --> 00:48:18.340
at the same time.

00:48:18.340 --> 00:48:19.940
The movie no longer overshadows the screen.

00:48:19.940 --> 00:48:21.660
And not get caught by either.

00:48:21.660 --> 00:48:22.660
Right.

00:48:22.660 --> 00:48:27.220
this isn't real, I'm not going to react emotionally what's going on because I know it's just light

00:48:27.220 --> 00:48:32.660
on a screen. Yeah, that's true. But on the other hand, oh my God, what a story.

00:48:32.660 --> 00:48:34.740
You want to enjoy the movie, you paid for it.

00:48:34.740 --> 00:48:35.220
Exactly.

00:48:35.220 --> 00:48:40.260
I have a friendly debate going with a friend, and I have had it with other friends,

00:48:40.260 --> 00:48:44.340
about whether consciousness is just a product of the brain or whether it's fundamental,

00:48:44.340 --> 00:48:51.140
as Manas and others have said, and you, and everything arises from it. And I'm hard-pressed

00:48:51.140 --> 00:48:57.540
to present him with a convincing argument or anything that could be accepted widely as

00:48:57.540 --> 00:49:03.000
proof. It's more like you just have to choose your philosophical stance, but how do these

00:49:03.000 --> 00:49:07.300
two camps actually achieve some kind of common understanding?

00:49:07.300 --> 00:49:10.740
David: Well, first off, you have to be willing to listen to each other.

00:49:10.740 --> 00:49:11.740
Pete: Yeah, we do that.

00:49:11.740 --> 00:49:12.740
David: Well, no, we don't.

00:49:12.740 --> 00:49:13.740
Pete: Oh, my friend and I do.

00:49:13.740 --> 00:49:18.820
David: Oh, you and your friend. So, that's step one, and we're not very good at that.

00:49:18.820 --> 00:49:36.820
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.

00:49:36.820 --> 00:49:40.820
You need perspectives from all three to really understand what's going on.

00:49:40.820 --> 00:49:45.820
In the book I talk about how, but I would turn that on its head.

00:49:45.820 --> 00:49:51.960
In our culture, the big evidence that people have for the brain makes our minds, and that's

00:49:51.960 --> 00:49:56.780
the materialist view, our brains make our minds, and so when you're dead and your brain

00:49:56.780 --> 00:50:02.540
dies, then your mind dies and you cease to exist, is that however you measure what's

00:50:02.540 --> 00:50:06.780
going on in the mind, as we get better at it in the brain, as we get better and better

00:50:06.780 --> 00:50:14.020
at looking in living brains, what's happening at the fine anatomic and signaling levels,

00:50:14.020 --> 00:50:21.460
electronically, metabolically, anatomically, we see correlates of all our conscious experiences.

00:50:21.460 --> 00:50:27.060
And so for most people in our culture, that's very compelling to say, well, these brain activities

00:50:27.060 --> 00:50:30.860
correlate with these experiences in our minds.

00:50:30.860 --> 00:50:33.580
Therefore, one is the cause for the other.

00:50:33.580 --> 00:50:35.340
But that's a logical fallacy.

00:50:35.340 --> 00:50:36.340
It is.

00:50:36.340 --> 00:50:40.780
I know that every summer I will see lots of people wearing sunglasses and I will see lots

00:50:40.780 --> 00:50:44.340
of people eating ice cream and often they overlap.

00:50:44.340 --> 00:50:46.620
In fact, mostly they overlap.

00:50:46.620 --> 00:50:49.500
If they're outside eating ice cream, they have sunglasses on.

00:50:49.500 --> 00:50:53.580
So I might say that wearing sunglasses leads to eating ice cream.

00:50:53.580 --> 00:50:58.780
No, the bright light and the heat of summer leads to both.

00:50:58.780 --> 00:51:05.820
And this is why there is no cognitive neuroscientist, there is no neurologist, there is no psychiatrist

00:51:05.820 --> 00:51:12.500
on the planet who can avoid saying this brain activity is a neural correlate of this conscious

00:51:12.500 --> 00:51:16.060
experience because there's no proof of causation.

00:51:16.060 --> 00:51:20.740
And no matter how hard they try, they can't ever find proof of causation.

00:51:20.740 --> 00:51:26.380
Now it may mean that our science is inadequate, but another possibility is that these are all

00:51:26.380 --> 00:51:34.820
reflections of the mechanism whereby our human brains sample the infinity of non-dual awareness

00:51:34.820 --> 00:51:40.540
and turn it into something we can have and be aware of as our own human minds.

00:51:40.540 --> 00:51:43.180
The model I use for this in the book is a radio.

00:51:43.180 --> 00:51:47.860
A radio is not taking music out of the air and letting us listen to it.

00:51:47.860 --> 00:51:53.940
It's sampling the infinite radio waves, some of which are playing Beatles music, are created

00:51:53.940 --> 00:52:00.120
by the Beatles having made some music, sampling it and putting it through a speaker so we

00:52:00.120 --> 00:52:02.300
hear it as Beatles.

00:52:02.300 --> 00:52:06.440
don't expect to open the radio and see the Beatles playing. We also know that we

00:52:06.440 --> 00:52:11.480
could build a different transducer that a radio transduces radio waves into sound

00:52:11.480 --> 00:52:15.680
but we also know everyone got very excited when we first got laptops. Well

00:52:15.680 --> 00:52:19.240
when we first got computers you could put music on your screen and then you can

00:52:19.240 --> 00:52:22.800
have a light show on your screen going with the music and that was like you

00:52:22.800 --> 00:52:26.780
know you and I are old enough to remember when that was exciting. That's

00:52:26.780 --> 00:52:30.920
because it would transduce it into light. You could transduce it into anything. So

00:52:30.920 --> 00:52:37.040
So what I would say is a bee's brain transduces universal consciousness into the mind of the

00:52:37.040 --> 00:52:40.200
bee, which is very different than what a human brain does.

00:52:40.200 --> 00:52:45.800
And what we're examining when we do fMRIs and EEGs and make all these correlations, that's

00:52:45.800 --> 00:52:49.820
saying something about the mechanisms whereby transduction happens.

00:52:49.820 --> 00:52:54.360
So I'm not saying that all that brain science isn't valid.

00:52:54.360 --> 00:53:00.720
It's just being interpreted with this bias that's leaving everyone sort of empty-handed.

00:53:00.720 --> 00:53:06.160
And the term for that empty handedness, this is chapter 10 in the book I think, is what

00:53:06.160 --> 00:53:11.020
David Chalmers philosopher called the hard problem of consciousness.

00:53:11.020 --> 00:53:17.240
That no matter how well we understand the mechanisms whereby the brain signals, we have

00:53:17.240 --> 00:53:22.100
not found anything to explain the experience of consciousness itself.

00:53:22.100 --> 00:53:27.540
So I got this one from Deepak Chopra, which some people will yell at me for saying I got

00:53:27.540 --> 00:53:29.980
something from Deepak, but I really like Deepak.

00:53:29.980 --> 00:53:34.520
get along in a whole bunch of ways. And there's some areas where we disagree, but he's got

00:53:34.520 --> 00:53:39.820
a real gift for expressing things clearly. Here's a green pen. Now I'm looking at the

00:53:39.820 --> 00:53:45.980
green pen and I know that there are photons bouncing off the pen, they reach my retina,

00:53:45.980 --> 00:53:51.300
which detects them, creates a chemical signal that goes back along my optic nerve into my

00:53:51.300 --> 00:53:57.100
visual cortex, and I see green. And you saw green when I held it up. Now if you close

00:53:57.100 --> 00:54:03.600
your eyes and I say, "Imagine a green pen." You don't have all of that happening. You have

00:54:03.600 --> 00:54:08.300
your visual cortex lighting up, and now we've gotten so good at that we can actually measure

00:54:08.300 --> 00:54:12.420
what's going on in the visual cortex and say, "Oh, I think you're seeing." It's as good

00:54:12.420 --> 00:54:17.300
as, "Oh, look, they're looking at a fuzzy green vertical line." Soon they'll be able

00:54:17.300 --> 00:54:22.980
to say, "Oh, you're looking at a pen." But where is that green pen? Where is the experience

00:54:22.980 --> 00:54:28.260
of that green pen. It doesn't have a location. In fact, when you close your eyes, is it in

00:54:28.260 --> 00:54:35.020
your brain? Is it in your skull? Is it in the room? There's no way anybody has been able

00:54:35.020 --> 00:54:41.420
to get at the nature of that actual experience. We can describe everything else, but we can't

00:54:41.420 --> 00:54:48.260
understand so far the nature of the experience itself. If you say that you can, we just haven't

00:54:48.260 --> 00:54:54.460
gotten there yet, then it leaves you kind of stuck for what to do when the human mind is

00:54:54.460 --> 00:54:56.740
contemplating itself.

00:54:56.740 --> 00:55:03.100
Then you can't answer it as a purely scientific question because the mind contemplating itself,

00:55:03.100 --> 00:55:05.340
there's no subject-object split.

00:55:05.340 --> 00:55:07.740
It's the self contemplating the self.

00:55:07.740 --> 00:55:09.940
And when we do that, what do we find?

00:55:09.940 --> 00:55:15.660
We find things like a continuum of non-dual consciousness that underlies everything, the

00:55:15.660 --> 00:55:20.620
the ocean underlies those waves. I'm not sure we find that. I mean, I'm totally with you. We're

00:55:20.620 --> 00:55:25.580
in the same boat. Philosophically, we're trying to convince your friend. Yes. You know, but it

00:55:25.580 --> 00:55:31.980
comes down to is he's got to explain. It's on him to explain the hard nature of consciousness.

00:55:31.980 --> 00:55:38.860
I have the hard problem of consciousness, because if he's unable to do that, then how do you explain

00:55:38.860 --> 00:55:44.140
anything about the experiences of people in contemplative practice? There's a whole portion

00:55:44.140 --> 00:55:50.540
of human experience that he has no approach for and says, "I won't have an approach for it because

00:55:50.540 --> 00:55:55.900
those things can't be." Yeah, that's part of it. You've heard the term "promissory materialism,"

00:55:55.900 --> 00:56:00.380
that, "Okay, we haven't figured it out yet, but we're going to figure it out, so just stay tuned."

00:56:00.380 --> 00:56:06.700
And I use arguments such as, well, near-death experiences. They're under anesthesia, they see

00:56:06.700 --> 00:56:10.860
a red sneaker on the roof of the hospital, the janitor goes up and, yes, it's there, or they

00:56:10.860 --> 00:56:15.860
see their uncle buying a Snickers bar in the waiting room down the hall, and sure enough

00:56:15.860 --> 00:56:17.260
he bought a Snickers bar.

00:56:17.260 --> 00:56:21.620
So that would at least, if you believe that those things really happened, and I'm afraid

00:56:21.620 --> 00:56:27.620
my friend is skeptical because they're anecdotal, then that would at least suggest that…

00:56:27.620 --> 00:56:32.580
Every bit of data starts as an anecdote until you aggregate them into a mass of data.

00:56:32.580 --> 00:56:34.900
Any single data point is an anecdote.

00:56:34.900 --> 00:56:38.620
And there's tons of data, if you look at all the near-death experiences and all the

00:56:38.620 --> 00:56:40.100
other stuff that people have been experiencing.

00:56:40.100 --> 00:56:42.340
This was what happened with my mom.

00:56:42.340 --> 00:56:44.940
You know, I was wondering, is she having delusions or whatever?

00:56:44.940 --> 00:56:47.100
And they were happy delusions, so let her have them.

00:56:47.100 --> 00:56:51.020
You know, I wasn't going to argue that she wasn't being visited by people she cared about.

00:56:51.020 --> 00:56:53.860
Although then people started visiting who annoyed her.

00:56:53.860 --> 00:56:55.700
That's when she said, you know, stop.

00:56:55.700 --> 00:56:59.680
But I went to visit her one day and one of her ghostly friends had been there.

00:56:59.680 --> 00:57:03.220
The rabbi I grew up with actually, who had been kind of boring her.

00:57:03.220 --> 00:57:05.300
And I said, Oh, I'm sorry.

00:57:05.300 --> 00:57:06.300
Was he annoying?

00:57:06.300 --> 00:57:09.220
She goes, Well, you didn't stick around long because his sister was coming and he had to

00:57:09.220 --> 00:57:14.260
go welcome and I thought well that's odd because I knew his sister very well too

00:57:14.260 --> 00:57:18.300
and she would be 102 today so I don't know what that's about and then I go

00:57:18.300 --> 00:57:22.540
home and I get a phone call from someone from my hometown that his sister died

00:57:22.540 --> 00:57:26.820
that day at 102 years old. Interesting yeah there you go. My mother wasn't

00:57:26.820 --> 00:57:32.340
reading the obituaries, she wasn't reading anything but the other problem for your

00:57:32.340 --> 00:57:38.940
friend is the insistence that he probably would say I'm assuming it's a he I think

00:57:38.940 --> 00:57:47.140
I heard. It's a his name is Curtis. That Curtis would say, I want to rely on empirical science

00:57:47.140 --> 00:57:53.540
and formal mathematics and logic. Those are the ways I understand the world. And you have

00:57:53.540 --> 00:57:58.300
to explain what you're talking about through those ways. And those will give me a complete

00:57:58.300 --> 00:58:03.220
view of the world. And I don't think those ways will confirm anything you're talking.

00:58:03.220 --> 00:58:07.160
That's the typical argument from so and I used to be that, even though I had these spiritual

00:58:07.160 --> 00:58:11.120
ideas because I didn't worry about whether they matched or not. The problems with that

00:58:11.120 --> 00:58:15.980
are number one, quantum physics. The conscious observation of a quantum event changes the

00:58:15.980 --> 00:58:21.200
nature of the event. Do you see light as waves or particles? Do they behave like waves or

00:58:21.200 --> 00:58:25.620
particles? This is what made Einstein crazy and he never found a way around it and every

00:58:25.620 --> 00:58:29.360
objection he had turned into something that could win the Nobel Prize like entanglement

00:58:29.360 --> 00:58:30.360
and non-locality.

00:58:30.360 --> 00:58:35.880
In other words, the rebuttals of his objections turned into Nobel Prize worthy discoveries.

00:58:35.880 --> 00:58:43.880
Right. And so the result of quantum physics is that at some very fundamental level to the functioning of the universe,

00:58:43.880 --> 00:58:49.880
empirical science means you separate the object of study from the subject who's studying it.

00:58:49.880 --> 00:58:55.880
I'm an objective scientist. I look at things under the microscope. The slide is there and I'm here.

00:58:55.880 --> 00:59:00.880
But at the quantum scale, and it turns out that bleeds up into everyday reality,

00:59:00.880 --> 00:59:04.380
but at the quantum scale you can't separate subject and object.

00:59:04.380 --> 00:59:06.080
They are intimately related.

00:59:06.080 --> 00:59:10.280
So empirical science cannot live up to its own terms.

00:59:10.280 --> 00:59:13.180
This is chapter 11 of the book, I think.

00:59:13.180 --> 00:59:16.380
- Gerdlin limits of formal logic is the 11.

00:59:16.380 --> 00:59:18.280
- Okay, then this is probably 10.

00:59:18.280 --> 00:59:19.480
- The other circle is 10.

00:59:19.480 --> 00:59:21.280
I want to talk to you about both those things.

00:59:21.280 --> 00:59:22.580
- Okay, sure.

00:59:22.580 --> 00:59:24.080
The problem with mathematics,

00:59:24.080 --> 00:59:26.380
and you brought this up at the very beginning,

00:59:26.380 --> 00:59:28.380
you said there's this question

00:59:28.380 --> 00:59:34.500
whether mathematics is something out there that humans discover, or did we invent it?

00:59:34.500 --> 00:59:39.660
We invented numbers because we wanted to count bushels of wheat or stars in the sky, and so

00:59:39.660 --> 00:59:43.320
we created numbers, and then it turns out we can play with them, and all these wonderful

00:59:43.320 --> 00:59:44.320
things happen.

00:59:44.320 --> 00:59:45.620
But we invented them.

00:59:45.620 --> 00:59:51.300
The view that mathematics is out there to be discovered, they aren't something we create,

00:59:51.300 --> 00:59:55.340
is referred to as mathematical Platonism.

00:59:55.340 --> 01:00:04.280
Plato described an ideal world beyond our reality, which our reality is a dim reflection. Kurt

01:00:04.280 --> 01:00:12.300
Gödel, who's widely recognized as the greatest mathematician, logician in history, was a member

01:00:12.300 --> 01:00:18.220
of the Vienna Circle, the history of which I cover, who are probably the sharpest thinkers

01:00:18.220 --> 01:00:24.300
in the 20th century, putting forth this view that empirical science and formal logic were

01:00:24.300 --> 01:00:29.900
the ultimate arbiters of understanding reality. And anything that couldn't be explained through

01:00:29.900 --> 01:00:34.580
those two things was metaphysics and dismissible. Not even worth talking. He was a member of

01:00:34.580 --> 01:00:39.540
that group. He was invited in, I think, when he was 21, because he was so brilliant. And

01:00:39.540 --> 01:00:44.300
one of his primary mentors in Vienna was a founding member of the group and invited him

01:00:44.300 --> 01:00:49.620
in. And he sat quietly in the back, never saying very much. But what he was thinking the whole

01:00:49.620 --> 01:00:55.380
time was. The Vienna Circle, as well as all the other logicians and mathematicians of the day,

01:00:55.380 --> 01:01:02.420
were looking for ways to prove mathematics, that mathematics was a complete structure that was

01:01:02.420 --> 01:01:07.860
self-consistent and could explain everything. Explaining everything meant it was complete,

01:01:07.860 --> 01:01:13.380
and that it was inherently consistent would mean that it's completely solid and dependable,

01:01:13.380 --> 01:01:17.860
as a reflection of the true nature of reality. And the power of that would be, since you can

01:01:17.860 --> 01:01:21.220
express scientific stuff through mathematics even more so.

01:01:21.220 --> 01:01:25.940
Math and science become the ultimate arbiters of what existence is.

01:01:25.940 --> 01:01:30.820
But his instinct that Plato was right, that mathematics was out there to be discovered,

01:01:30.820 --> 01:01:36.580
not something we invented. And the way to prove that that was the case was to prove that

01:01:36.580 --> 01:01:42.500
mathematics could not be both complete and consistent. The mathematicians of the day said

01:01:42.500 --> 01:01:47.300
it has to be both complete and consistent and our mission is to prove that they are the case

01:01:47.300 --> 01:01:51.300
and everyone believed they would one day prove that both things were true,

01:01:51.300 --> 01:01:56.300
and if they did, then mathematics would be able to explain everything consistently.

01:01:56.300 --> 01:02:00.300
What he came up with is called Godel's Incompleteness Theorems,

01:02:00.300 --> 01:02:04.300
and it's a lot to go into. I can't unpack the whole thing here,

01:02:04.300 --> 01:02:08.300
but basically what he demonstrated in a mathematically rigorous proof

01:02:08.300 --> 01:02:11.300
that's just kind of remarkably creative,

01:02:11.300 --> 01:02:15.300
is that if there is a system of mathematics that is complete,

01:02:15.300 --> 01:02:20.300
meaning it describes everything, it will necessarily contradict itself.

01:02:20.300 --> 01:02:24.300
And if it contradicts itself, you can build a proof out of it to say anything,

01:02:24.300 --> 01:02:26.300
in which case you're proving nothing at all.

01:02:26.300 --> 01:02:28.300
So if you have a complete system of mathematics,

01:02:28.300 --> 01:02:31.300
it will be inconsistent and therefore not explain anything.

01:02:31.300 --> 01:02:34.300
If you make it consistent, and this was the genius thing,

01:02:34.300 --> 01:02:37.300
how we figured out how to demonstrate this.

01:02:37.300 --> 01:02:39.300
If you make a system completely consistent,

01:02:39.300 --> 01:02:44.300
and he's talking about arithmetic, systems that contain arithmetic,

01:02:44.300 --> 01:02:50.060
If you make it completely consistent, there will always be a statement that is known to be true,

01:02:50.060 --> 01:02:53.980
but can't be proven to be true from within the system.

01:02:53.980 --> 01:02:59.180
So you can have statements that are provable, and you can prove them to be true,

01:02:59.180 --> 01:03:03.420
or you can have statements that you know are true, but you can't prove them.

01:03:03.420 --> 01:03:05.900
How do you know they're true? Intuition.

01:03:05.900 --> 01:03:07.820
Well, what's intuition reaching at?

01:03:07.820 --> 01:03:13.340
Intuition is reaching at the world of mathematics that's beyond our tool making.

01:03:13.340 --> 01:03:20.540
the mathematics that's out there for us to discover, that has its own truths independent of our human abilities to prove them.

01:03:20.540 --> 01:03:26.840
And so, mathematics doesn't do it and empirical science doesn't do it.

01:03:26.840 --> 01:03:34.140
The one eliminates at its finest approach, quantum physics, the most successful theory ever made,

01:03:34.140 --> 01:03:42.140
as people tout it and no one argues with that, says that its most fundamental base, that the subject and object cannot remain separate.

01:03:42.140 --> 01:03:47.340
And in mathematics, you cannot have a description that is both complete and consistent.

01:03:47.340 --> 01:03:48.940
So that fails too.

01:03:48.940 --> 01:03:55.240
The result is intuition comes back in, metaphysics comes back in, and it's kind of unavoidable.

01:03:55.240 --> 01:03:59.340
If you talk to mathematicians today, there is no argument about this.

01:03:59.340 --> 01:04:01.240
Godel shut the door.

01:04:01.240 --> 01:04:06.240
The one other thing that was important was something called decidability.

01:04:06.240 --> 01:04:12.040
Could you decide that a system, whether you can prove it's complete or consistent,

01:04:12.040 --> 01:04:18.280
Can you prove that even if you can't answer those questions, you can prove that you could answer them theoretically?

01:04:18.280 --> 01:04:22.320
The Turing machine that everyone touts, Alan Turing, his

01:04:22.320 --> 01:04:24.920
universal Turing machine, which was a hypothetical

01:04:24.920 --> 01:04:31.520
model he came up with that eventually gave birth to what we know as the modern computer, did for

01:04:31.520 --> 01:04:36.600
decidability what Godel had done for completeness and consistency.

01:04:37.560 --> 01:04:43.320
Gödel even said that his was, you know, kind of the first step and Turing finished it.

01:04:43.320 --> 01:04:49.080
So, not only do we have empirical science and formal logic and mathematics that we rely on to

01:04:49.080 --> 01:04:55.160
tell us in the modern age and in Western life, the nature of everything, and it turns out those are

01:04:55.160 --> 01:05:01.560
sand, they're not cement that we're standing on, but you throw into that computer science,

01:05:01.560 --> 01:05:06.520
which our whole world depends on, and it turns out that's deriving from the third piece that wipes

01:05:06.520 --> 01:05:11.240
out that possibility of knowing. That's a lot to dig into to convince yourself that,

01:05:11.240 --> 01:05:17.920
"Oh, I can't be sure that the brand makes mind." But Western science is a big thing.

01:05:17.920 --> 01:05:24.640
If you can't take in the whole of it, and that's kind of the stupid task I set for myself with the

01:05:24.640 --> 01:05:29.920
book is, "Can I do that in 172 pages with some pictures?" If you're missing a piece of that,

01:05:29.920 --> 01:05:35.120
then you're actually just blowing bubbles. If your friend doesn't have an answer,

01:05:35.120 --> 01:05:39.120
If you look on Goodreads, there are a lot of people who hate me on Goodreads.

01:05:39.120 --> 01:05:41.120
So they get very personal about it.

01:05:41.120 --> 01:05:47.120
My favorite is someone wrote a very long review and then republished it four months later.

01:05:47.120 --> 01:05:50.120
I guess they were worried that it was getting missed, so they reposted it.

01:05:50.120 --> 01:05:53.120
The first line was, "This book is pap."

01:05:53.120 --> 01:06:00.120
And the last line was, "This book makes Jonathan Livingston Segal look like a significant spiritual text."

01:06:00.120 --> 01:06:02.120
And for those of us who are old enough to remember Jonathan Livingston Segal...

01:06:02.120 --> 01:06:03.120
Oh yeah, I love that book.

01:06:03.120 --> 01:06:09.040
book. But when people actually try to critique me in these sorts of comments, what they critique

01:06:09.040 --> 01:06:13.840
is my view of quantum physics. Okay, that view of quantum physics, what's referred to as the

01:06:13.840 --> 01:06:19.680
Copenhagen interpretation, is debatable in some fashion, but you can't dismiss it, can't be

01:06:19.680 --> 01:06:27.040
dismissed. And I would rather align myself with the founders and folks like Manasse, who are looking at

01:06:27.040 --> 01:06:33.840
it in an open, not biased, not rigid way, dogmatic way. No one ever critiques me on the Gödel

01:06:33.840 --> 01:06:40.960
situation. And the Gödel situation is actually the most fundamental argument, because that's the one

01:06:40.960 --> 01:06:46.720
that says the best arguments we have for science and mathematics to describe the world completely,

01:06:46.720 --> 01:06:51.360
he demolished that. And they had no answer for it, and they have no answer for it.

01:06:51.360 --> 01:06:56.480
And the mathematics world, they get that. They don't argue with it. It's not like,

01:06:56.480 --> 01:06:59.360
"Well, what's your interpretation of quantum mechanics? You have a different

01:06:59.360 --> 01:07:03.760
interpretation of quantum mechanics than I do." There is no other interpretation

01:07:03.760 --> 01:07:06.480
of Gödel and of Turing's work.

01:07:06.480 --> 01:07:11.920
- So, if people really understood Gödel and Turing, and I'd never really learned much about

01:07:11.920 --> 01:07:18.640
them until I read your book, but if they really understood them, would they have to agree that

01:07:18.640 --> 01:07:27.440
subjective or mystical exploration is a necessary complement to empirical science and without

01:07:27.440 --> 01:07:33.640
those inner technologies of consciousness, we'll never have a complete picture of reality.

01:07:33.640 --> 01:07:36.920
Would that have to be their conclusion if they really understood what those guys were

01:07:36.920 --> 01:07:37.920
saying?

01:07:37.920 --> 01:07:42.180
That is the implication and Gödel himself said it in a letter to his mother which I

01:07:42.180 --> 01:07:45.920
quote in the book. I can't remember the exact quote, I haven't memorized it, but it's

01:07:45.920 --> 01:07:50.360
something along the lines of, "I have no doubt that this will be useful for people who want

01:07:50.360 --> 01:07:51.360
to talk about religion."

01:07:51.360 --> 01:07:55.920
>> Wayne: Interesting. And then, by the same token, quantum mechanics, over a hundred years

01:07:55.920 --> 01:08:02.600
ago, has established that consciousness and the material world are very much intertwined

01:08:02.600 --> 01:08:09.960
in some significant way, but people have conveniently ignored that finding for over a hundred years,

01:08:09.960 --> 01:08:14.080
which of course is much more famous than Gödel and Turing, at least in the common knowledge.

01:08:14.080 --> 01:08:15.080
So they're ignoring both.

01:08:15.080 --> 01:08:21.080
And if they weren't, if they really dug into it and had the education to understand these things,

01:08:21.080 --> 01:08:26.080
would they necessarily have to come around to concurring with the mystics?

01:08:26.080 --> 01:08:34.080
And has that actually happened, or are there quantum physicists and people who understand Gödel who are still materialists?

01:08:34.080 --> 01:08:41.080
Oh, sure. But there are people who are willfully delusional or in denial all over the place.

01:08:41.080 --> 01:08:43.780
It's not like this is foreign to human capacity.

01:08:43.780 --> 01:08:48.280
I know lots of quantum physicists that should I name names?

01:08:48.280 --> 01:08:48.680
Sure.

01:08:48.680 --> 01:08:49.280
Why not?

01:08:49.280 --> 01:08:50.680
This was real.

01:08:50.680 --> 01:08:55.680
I was invited into a room at Disney of all places and I got to

01:08:55.680 --> 01:08:57.880
hang out for a day with Brian Green.

01:08:57.880 --> 01:08:58.780
Oh nice.

01:08:58.780 --> 01:09:01.180
Now, he's a string theorist.

01:09:01.180 --> 01:09:02.280
Really?

01:09:02.280 --> 01:09:06.080
You're going to talk about materiality when you spend your

01:09:06.080 --> 01:09:08.980
time as a string theorist and you're going to say no the world

01:09:08.980 --> 01:09:12.900
material. But you're talking about vibrating strings that are mathematical

01:09:12.900 --> 01:09:18.500
constructs that no one can test? Really? And when I talked about my views of

01:09:18.500 --> 01:09:23.340
things, oh he just you know sort of sneered. John Carroll does the same thing

01:09:23.340 --> 01:09:27.580
I heard it. Yeah, and Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same thing. Yeah. And it's like

01:09:27.580 --> 01:09:31.500
well you want to believe what you believe. I should have started as an

01:09:31.500 --> 01:09:35.460
idealist given all the other experiences, spiritual experiences I've had or

01:09:35.460 --> 01:09:39.060
witnessed in my life, you'd think I'd have gone right there. But

01:09:39.060 --> 01:09:42.620
part of me was like, No, gotta be careful about this. And it

01:09:42.620 --> 01:09:48.540
was menace just slowly. And the record of our scholarship is how

01:09:48.540 --> 01:09:53.740
we sort of tugged at this piece by piece by piece until finally,

01:09:53.740 --> 01:09:57.700
yeah, there's no other consistent view that has a chance

01:09:57.700 --> 01:10:01.500
of explaining everything, including the hardest problem of

01:10:01.500 --> 01:10:05.300
all, which is the hard problem of consciousness. Because saying

01:10:05.300 --> 01:10:11.060
the world is mind is saying that the world is nothing but experience. You don't have

01:10:11.060 --> 01:10:17.060
to explain what an experience is and how an experience comes into existence if all existence

01:10:17.060 --> 01:10:24.500
is nothing but experience within the big C consciousness of pure awareness. It has amazing

01:10:24.500 --> 01:10:32.160
capacity for explanation just from the standpoint of scientific rigor. If there's a theory that

01:10:32.160 --> 01:10:38.200
you can't disprove but has a lot of explanatory potential, you shouldn't just reject it out

01:10:38.200 --> 01:10:39.200
of hand.

01:10:39.200 --> 01:10:41.320
But that's what our culture does.

01:10:41.320 --> 01:10:47.280
Why do you think that these people are so stubborn about shifting paradigms?

01:10:47.280 --> 01:10:50.360
I interviewed a guy named Mark Gober who also spoke at SAND.

01:10:50.360 --> 01:10:54.960
He wrote a book called "The End to Upside-Down Thinking" and basically what we've been talking

01:10:54.960 --> 01:11:00.200
about that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, everything arises from

01:11:00.200 --> 01:11:05.260
consciousness and he gave all kinds of nice arguments of how to flip that paradigm. But

01:11:05.260 --> 01:11:12.440
if you accept that consciousness is fundamental, and if you accept that there's some kind of

01:11:12.440 --> 01:11:17.260
– well, you didn't want to use the word intelligence earlier, but some kind of orderliness

01:11:17.260 --> 01:11:23.760
within the functioning of consciousness that gives rise to this incredibly complex, beautiful

01:11:23.760 --> 01:11:29.480
universe, then you're beginning to accept that there's some kind of a God notion,

01:11:29.480 --> 01:11:32.620
Which of course makes materialists very uncomfortable.

01:11:32.620 --> 01:11:36.040
And part of me responds to that with, "Oh, the God word.

01:11:36.040 --> 01:11:37.040
That's an English word."

01:11:37.040 --> 01:11:39.280
Well, yeah, so you can use a word.

01:11:39.280 --> 01:11:42.480
I have Hebrew as an option too.

01:11:42.480 --> 01:11:46.440
You can leave the A out and just say G underscore D.

01:11:46.440 --> 01:11:48.800
I think that word is...

01:11:48.800 --> 01:11:53.240
I don't want to spend time arguing that turf because that's just an English word that we

01:11:53.240 --> 01:11:54.760
label something with.

01:11:54.760 --> 01:12:00.120
I understand how important it is for some people, particularly in our culture.

01:12:00.120 --> 01:12:06.920
I will choose to think in terms of a God figure when I'm doing a devotional practice, like

01:12:06.920 --> 01:12:10.320
Jewish prayer in a synagogue, and like things.

01:12:10.320 --> 01:12:11.640
So it's a useful thing.

01:12:11.640 --> 01:12:14.560
Let me put it this way, let me interrupt you here.

01:12:14.560 --> 01:12:20.460
You spend your days looking through a microscope at cells, and what you're seeing is something

01:12:20.460 --> 01:12:22.280
incredibly complex and marvelous.

01:12:22.280 --> 01:12:26.280
I've heard it said that a typical cell is as complex as the city of Tokyo.

01:12:26.280 --> 01:12:32.520
You know, I can't imagine that you regard a cell as you're looking at it as some kind

01:12:32.520 --> 01:12:37.520
of accident that just somehow the billiard balls all hit each other in such a way as

01:12:37.520 --> 01:12:39.520
to form such a structure.

01:12:39.520 --> 01:12:41.600
There's got to be some organizing principle.

01:12:41.600 --> 01:12:44.560
Yeah, and these are the rules of complexity.

01:12:44.560 --> 01:12:46.560
But are they unconscious?

01:12:46.560 --> 01:12:47.560
Are they dumb?

01:12:47.560 --> 01:12:50.880
Yeah, I think you can program a computer.

01:12:50.880 --> 01:12:56.040
If you program virtual ants, they will give rise to a virtual ant colony if you understood

01:12:56.040 --> 01:12:58.760
the rules of ant interactions well enough.

01:12:58.760 --> 01:13:00.900
You don't need top-down design.

01:13:00.900 --> 01:13:06.860
There is an element of top-down design in things, but this is where another term that

01:13:06.860 --> 01:13:12.040
I explore in the book is useful, instead of talking about hierarchies, which we often

01:13:12.040 --> 01:13:15.360
think of, and even illustrating what I mean.

01:13:15.360 --> 01:13:20.840
We go from quantum foam to quantum particles to atoms to molecules and we're thinking in

01:13:20.840 --> 01:13:23.200
this hierarchy from bottom to top.

01:13:23.200 --> 01:13:24.680
But it's not that.

01:13:24.680 --> 01:13:29.960
All of these levels exist simultaneously in what Arthur Kessler referred to as a whole

01:13:29.960 --> 01:13:30.960
archae.

01:13:30.960 --> 01:13:34.660
It was Lynn Margulies who gave me this word the first time.

01:13:34.660 --> 01:13:41.680
So when we think of the coarse body, the subtle body and the energy body, we aren't thinking

01:13:41.680 --> 01:13:45.240
that there are three separate bodies that are nested within each other.

01:13:45.240 --> 01:13:50.360
talking about the same human body that we're choosing to interact with at the Western medical

01:13:50.360 --> 01:13:56.520
level, at the biomagnetic level, at the level of consciousness. So things that look like

01:13:56.520 --> 01:14:01.720
they're planned top-down, this is the fundamental hallmark of complex systems, is they look

01:14:01.720 --> 01:14:04.280
like someone planned them, but no one planned them.

01:14:04.280 --> 01:14:10.680
No one, in terms of some isolated, discrete individual. I mean, this is an important point,

01:14:10.680 --> 01:14:14.200
because I have always thought, you know, listening to people like Robert Lanza, there's got to

01:14:14.200 --> 01:14:21.740
be some kind of organizing intelligence, intrinsic and fundamental to the universe that is self-interacting

01:14:21.740 --> 01:14:26.620
consciousness that somehow gives rise to all these orderly laws of nature that structures

01:14:26.620 --> 01:14:27.620
all the complexity.

01:14:27.620 --> 01:14:31.600
You said earlier that it didn't have a goal or an agenda, but I would say that its agenda

01:14:31.600 --> 01:14:38.260
is to create increasingly complex forms through which it can actually experience its own creation

01:14:38.260 --> 01:14:39.260
as a living reality.

01:14:39.260 --> 01:14:45.260
I think the volition is we are sense organs whereby the universe can perceive itself.

01:14:45.260 --> 01:14:46.260
Exactly.

01:14:46.260 --> 01:14:49.260
But I don't think it has preferences beyond that.

01:14:49.260 --> 01:14:54.260
But why is it getting increasingly sophisticated as the universe evolves?

01:14:54.260 --> 01:14:59.260
The nature of this is again the nature of we'd have to dig into those four rules.

01:14:59.260 --> 01:15:04.260
Why complex systems lead to bigger things, to more complex things, to more complex things.

01:15:04.260 --> 01:15:10.260
So how is it that cells self-organize into bodies, bodies self-organize into communities,

01:15:10.260 --> 01:15:16.260
molecules self-organize into cells, and it's the same mathematics that describes all of that.

01:15:16.260 --> 01:15:18.260
It doesn't matter what size you're talking about.

01:15:18.260 --> 01:15:24.260
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.

01:15:24.260 --> 01:15:30.260
If you have 25 ants, you get a colony, and if you buy one of those ant farms and watch it for a while,

01:15:30.260 --> 01:15:35.700
it for a while. They dig tunnels, they make food lines, and they have a cemetery. But by the time

01:15:35.700 --> 01:15:41.060
they get down to a handful of ants, they're no longer working with each other. If you get 250

01:15:41.060 --> 01:15:45.540
ants, you get more complexity. And it's not only the number of ants, but the greater diversity of

01:15:45.540 --> 01:15:51.460
interaction. And if you have 25,000 ants, even more complexity. In human terms, a village is

01:15:51.460 --> 01:15:58.900
not a city is not a megalopolis. But interestingly, the same computational ways of describing this

01:15:58.900 --> 01:16:04.180
through complexity, to some extent through chaos, apply no matter what you're talking about.

01:16:04.180 --> 01:16:09.140
So that's rule number one. The more diversity and the more members of a system you have,

01:16:09.140 --> 01:16:15.140
the greater complexity that can emerge. The second is that there are feedbacks within the system that

01:16:15.140 --> 01:16:20.580
keep things within a healthy homeostatic sort of range. So like your body temperature never gets

01:16:20.580 --> 01:16:27.300
too hot, doesn't get too cold. Think of an air conditioner that as a room gets warmer, the air

01:16:27.300 --> 01:16:32.660
conditioner turns on at a set point and as the room gets colder, the air conditioner turns off.

01:16:32.660 --> 01:16:37.380
That's a negative feedback loop keeping things in an oscillating, comfortable, healthy realm.

01:16:37.380 --> 01:16:43.780
And that's the realm in which creativity and self-sustaining functioning of a complex system,

01:16:43.780 --> 01:16:50.980
whether it's a colony or a city or an organ, takes place. Now, you can have positive feedback loops,

01:16:50.980 --> 01:16:55.220
and negative and positive don't mean good and bad. Negative means, you know, there's sort of

01:16:55.220 --> 01:16:59.460
limits being placed on it. A positive feedback loop would be like you have a

01:16:59.460 --> 01:17:03.100
heater in a room and the hotter the room gets the more the heater turns on so the

01:17:03.100 --> 01:17:07.620
room gets hotter and hotter and hotter. You can have positive feedback loops in

01:17:07.620 --> 01:17:11.780
living systems. Think about when we have a fever. You need to metabolically rev up

01:17:11.780 --> 01:17:15.300
your immune system so you get a fever helps you fight off the infection but

01:17:15.300 --> 01:17:18.980
then the negative feedback loops come in to bring your temperature down to that

01:17:18.980 --> 01:17:23.820
comfortable range. If you have an overabundance of positive feedback loops

01:17:23.820 --> 01:17:27.620
you can get self-organizing larger scale structures,

01:17:27.620 --> 01:17:30.120
but instead of being creative and adaptive,

01:17:30.120 --> 01:17:32.220
the way a complex living system is,

01:17:32.220 --> 01:17:34.820
they're energy-expending and self-wasting.

01:17:34.820 --> 01:17:37.920
So in terms of cells and tissues, that's what cancer is.

01:17:37.920 --> 01:17:41.420
You've taken off all the inhibitions on how cells behave,

01:17:41.420 --> 01:17:43.520
and they expand very rapidly,

01:17:43.520 --> 01:17:45.620
but then you eat up all the energy in the system,

01:17:45.620 --> 01:17:47.420
and the cancer dies, and you die.

01:17:47.420 --> 01:17:49.120
Economic bubbles are the same thing.

01:17:49.120 --> 01:17:51.620
Too little regulation in an economy,

01:17:51.620 --> 01:17:53.220
you get positive feedback loops,

01:17:53.220 --> 01:17:58.500
loops, you get a bubble and that collapses. So there has to be a balance and overabundance

01:17:58.500 --> 01:18:02.360
of negative feedback loops keeping things comfortable.

01:18:02.360 --> 01:18:06.220
Sounds like climate change is a positive feedback loop because we're reaching tipping points

01:18:06.220 --> 01:18:09.960
and the methane is being released and so on and so forth. It'll be interesting to see

01:18:09.960 --> 01:18:15.340
whether Gaia as an entity can kick in with some negative feedback loops to counteract

01:18:15.340 --> 01:18:16.340
it.

01:18:16.340 --> 01:18:19.860
Well, one way to do that might be Gaia kicking in with enough diseases that we all die.

01:18:19.860 --> 01:18:20.860
Yeah, and that would...

01:18:20.860 --> 01:18:22.860
eliminate humans, things will adjust.

01:18:22.860 --> 01:18:24.860
That's true.

01:18:24.860 --> 01:18:26.860
Are we the cancer? You have to ask.

01:18:26.860 --> 01:18:28.860
The third thing is

01:18:28.860 --> 01:18:30.860
that things really happen at the bottom,

01:18:30.860 --> 01:18:33.860
at the interactions at the local level.

01:18:33.860 --> 01:18:36.860
There are influences that are top-down,

01:18:36.860 --> 01:18:38.860
but the majority of stuff that's happening

01:18:38.860 --> 01:18:40.860
is happening at the local level.

01:18:40.860 --> 01:18:42.860
There's no ant in the colony trying to decide

01:18:42.860 --> 01:18:44.860
where there needs to be a food line.

01:18:44.860 --> 01:18:46.860
There's no body in the cell determining,

01:18:46.860 --> 01:18:48.860
and there's no organ in the cell that's determining

01:18:48.860 --> 01:18:52.060
Are you hungry? Are you afraid? Are you horny? Are you sleepy?

01:18:52.060 --> 01:18:55.420
It arises out of everything happening at the local level.

01:18:55.420 --> 01:18:58.060
And the fourth thing, and this is the most important,

01:18:58.060 --> 01:19:01.460
there's always some low level randomness in the system.

01:19:01.460 --> 01:19:03.780
And this is where the magic really happens.

01:19:03.780 --> 01:19:07.380
So if you have too much randomness in the system,

01:19:07.380 --> 01:19:11.380
ants won't organize into a colony and humans won't organize into a functioning

01:19:11.380 --> 01:19:14.060
society and cells, you'll get cancer.

01:19:14.060 --> 01:19:16.460
If there's too little randomness in the system,

01:19:16.700 --> 01:19:21.740
then if the food supply runs out in the ant colony, the ants aren't going to be able to find another

01:19:21.740 --> 01:19:27.580
way to find the food because it's the random ants wandering around, not part of the food line,

01:19:27.580 --> 01:19:32.460
who are likely to bump into, "Oh, there's another sugar cube over here." Or in human societies,

01:19:32.460 --> 01:19:37.100
the scientist or the poet or the musician who's exploring the nature of their reality a little

01:19:37.100 --> 01:19:41.900
differently than everyone else, and turns out they discover, you know, they're Charlie Chaplin

01:19:41.900 --> 01:19:47.580
and the world changes. So too little randomness, you get no ability to change and if the environment

01:19:47.580 --> 01:19:53.100
changes, the system will collapse and die. If there's too much randomness, you get no self-organization,

01:19:53.100 --> 01:19:57.900
you get no larger scale emergent structures that look like they're planned. You don't get food lines,

01:19:57.900 --> 01:20:02.700
you know, in New York. It's not so true anymore, but 6th Street used to be where the Indian

01:20:02.700 --> 01:20:07.100
restaurants went. That's not because someone planned Indian restaurants for 6th Street. It

01:20:07.100 --> 01:20:11.740
happened that the way the Indian restaurants were competing with each other, they created this niche

01:20:11.740 --> 01:20:14.700
where their competition created more business for everybody.

01:20:14.700 --> 01:20:17.100
There's this low-level randomness in the system.

01:20:17.100 --> 01:20:20.460
Stuart Kaufman, who's one of the founders of complexity theory,

01:20:20.460 --> 01:20:22.460
and a friend and a mentor of mine,

01:20:22.460 --> 01:20:27.660
talks about this low-level randomness as creating in the next moment

01:20:27.660 --> 01:20:34.060
the adjacent possibles of what could happen for the complex system, the living being.

01:20:34.060 --> 01:20:37.820
The next moment isn't an infinite array of anything can happen.

01:20:37.820 --> 01:20:40.460
It's a constrained amount of possibilities,

01:20:40.460 --> 01:20:45.740
And you can't tell which of these is going to move forward to become the reality of the next moment.

01:20:45.740 --> 01:20:52.380
Those adjacent possibles are what allow living things to explore the possibility of changing

01:20:52.380 --> 01:20:57.660
and responding and adapting to a changing environment. That's where the creativity of

01:20:57.660 --> 01:21:03.180
living things happens. That's where evolution happens. That's where you go from simple

01:21:03.180 --> 01:21:08.140
molecules to becoming cells, to becoming multicellular organisms, to becoming ecosystems

01:21:08.140 --> 01:21:13.820
like Gaia. That's where the universe starts as hydrogen and then you get a universe.

01:21:13.820 --> 01:21:20.460
So, complexity through these four principles, and these are the four principles that you can

01:21:20.460 --> 01:21:26.860
use to create computational models using computers to like design a system and then set it running to

01:21:26.860 --> 01:21:32.860
see what happens. This sort of gives you everything and it's what gives you what you need to go from

01:21:32.860 --> 01:21:38.740
quantum physics to the scale of relativity. So there's the appearance of

01:21:38.740 --> 01:21:43.340
determinism and intelligent design everywhere you look, but had this

01:21:43.340 --> 01:21:47.180
adjacent possible become relevant instead of this one, there'd be a whole

01:21:47.180 --> 01:21:51.140
other reality here that would also look intelligently designed, and yet it's

01:21:51.140 --> 01:21:55.740
completely different. I don't think the fundamental awareness that underlies

01:21:55.740 --> 01:22:02.180
everything is particularly wedded to any particular outcome, which is really hard

01:22:02.180 --> 01:22:08.780
for us as humans who feel that we are living self-sustaining beings to deal

01:22:08.780 --> 01:22:13.820
with but maybe Gaia's answer is to get rid of the humans. We're no longer the

01:22:13.820 --> 01:22:17.780
pinnacle of anything when you look at this view which is an area I disagree

01:22:17.780 --> 01:22:22.860
with Deepak about. Incidentally I co-taught the course in which Deepak learned to

01:22:22.860 --> 01:22:27.980
meditate originally back in like 1979. Oh wow that's so cool. Yeah. So you're to

01:22:27.980 --> 01:22:32.380
I'm to blame, yep. Can I use the word God just for simplicity's sake?

01:22:32.380 --> 01:22:33.380
Sure, I'll let you have it.

01:22:33.380 --> 01:22:37.940
Instead of saying these sort of all-pervading universal intelligence, maybe it's a jazz

01:22:37.940 --> 01:22:42.940
musician, maybe it's a maverick, maybe it is Charlie Chaplin, it is Albert Einstein,

01:22:42.940 --> 01:22:47.620
it thinks outside the box, and maybe there are parallel universes which, like you say,

01:22:47.620 --> 01:22:52.420
there are other adjacent possibles in play, and those behave quite differently. People

01:22:52.420 --> 01:22:57.780
there have three eyes or whatever. But couldn't it be that these four principles you outlined

01:22:57.780 --> 01:23:04.500
and any other fundamental principles that determine how the universe functions are just attributes,

01:23:04.500 --> 01:23:10.740
and I think Kashmir Shaivism might say this, of this fundamental intelligence, and that they would

01:23:10.740 --> 01:23:17.140
show up even in a computer game because they are just intrinsic to the way everything functions.

01:23:17.140 --> 01:23:23.380
They're that fundamental. Right, but I think these rules are what's fundamental, and I don't think...

01:23:23.380 --> 01:23:25.380
Why are there rules? Why is there anything?

01:23:25.380 --> 01:23:34.380
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.

01:23:34.380 --> 01:23:38.380
For the universe, these are not rules. This is the way it happens.

01:23:38.380 --> 01:23:39.380
Yes.

01:23:39.380 --> 01:23:47.380
You can have elements of these in any group of interacting individuals, but when you do, they do not necessarily turn into living things.

01:23:47.380 --> 01:23:50.380
They do not necessarily creatively adapt.

01:23:50.380 --> 01:23:52.380
But under the right conditions, they will.

01:23:52.380 --> 01:23:58.860
they will. Right, right. So why is it on this planet we do but Mars no? Yeah. Mars maybe had

01:23:58.860 --> 01:24:04.460
been living, we don't know that's it, but for the moment it seems pretty inert. Jupiter seems pretty

01:24:04.460 --> 01:24:12.060
inert. That's because the stuff that makes it up didn't fulfill all those criteria. Yes, but the

01:24:12.060 --> 01:24:16.700
ancient cultures and perhaps the shamanic traditions that you've been studying would say that in a sense

01:24:17.420 --> 01:24:22.220
Jupiter and Mars and the Sun itself are living beings.

01:24:22.220 --> 01:24:25.020
I would certainly go there, but I wasn't on that path.

01:24:25.020 --> 01:24:26.020
Yeah.

01:24:26.020 --> 01:24:28.500
In that sense, I wasn't on that path.

01:24:28.500 --> 01:24:31.380
But yes, I would say that that's probably true too.

01:24:31.380 --> 01:24:32.380
Right.

01:24:32.380 --> 01:24:36.500
And they're living beings in the sense that they, like all things, have a subtle dimension

01:24:36.500 --> 01:24:38.260
in addition to the gross dimension.

01:24:38.260 --> 01:24:43.260
And even though the Sun is a thermonuclear furnace, on a subtle level, it could be a

01:24:43.260 --> 01:24:44.900
conscious entity of some sort.

01:24:44.900 --> 01:24:47.260
Well, on a subtle level, there's nothing but consciousness.

01:24:47.260 --> 01:24:49.900
So of course, conscious and alive.

01:24:49.900 --> 01:24:51.740
But there are intermediate levels.

01:24:51.740 --> 01:24:55.420
There's Adi-Buddha, Adi-Daiva and Adi-Atma in Hinduism.

01:24:55.420 --> 01:24:59.700
Adi-Daiva is the level of the Devas, the impulses of intelligence.

01:24:59.700 --> 01:25:03.620
You know, again, this is sort of the perspective, this is the complementarity issue.

01:25:03.620 --> 01:25:09.060
So here I am, this is me, I'm thirsty, I pick up a cup that's over here, I drink the water,

01:25:09.060 --> 01:25:12.060
swallow it, it becomes part of my system, etc.

01:25:12.060 --> 01:25:18.860
And that's true, but from a complexity theory, modern scientific, quantum, mathematical, western

01:25:18.860 --> 01:25:25.540
philosophy point of view, just as true, the universe is one seamless whole, and this is

01:25:25.540 --> 01:25:27.340
the universe drinking itself.

01:25:27.340 --> 01:25:28.340
Right.

01:25:28.340 --> 01:25:31.580
And on another level, nothing's happening at all, it just appears to be.

01:25:31.580 --> 01:25:32.580
Exactly.

01:25:32.580 --> 01:25:35.260
So, is Jupiter inert or conscious?

01:25:35.260 --> 01:25:36.780
Etc., etc.

01:25:36.780 --> 01:25:42.020
And yes, there are levels, but to some extent when we talk about levels, are we really talking

01:25:42.020 --> 01:25:45.860
about our human capacity to perceive them.

01:25:45.860 --> 01:25:46.860
Sure.

01:25:46.860 --> 01:25:51.020
Because from the fundamental awareness level, I don't think there's any delusions within

01:25:51.020 --> 01:25:55.300
the fundamental awareness as to what the sun is and what the Jupiter is.

01:25:55.300 --> 01:26:00.420
I think when we see levels, we're seeing it from a human perspective that's limited.

01:26:00.420 --> 01:26:02.220
Yeah, blind men and the elephant.

01:26:02.220 --> 01:26:04.100
I mean, the elephant is what it is.

01:26:04.100 --> 01:26:09.360
The blind men each have a different interpretation, and nature or the universe is not dependent

01:26:09.360 --> 01:26:12.420
upon our capabilities in order to be what it is.

01:26:12.420 --> 01:26:17.460
You know, I think to some extent our conversation is a good example of how hard it is to talk

01:26:17.460 --> 01:26:23.040
about these things because we can only speak about it using language, you and me.

01:26:23.040 --> 01:26:26.880
Neither of us, I don't think you're a really sophisticated mathematician.

01:26:26.880 --> 01:26:29.240
I'm not in the least.

01:26:29.240 --> 01:26:32.160
So that language isn't available to us.

01:26:32.160 --> 01:26:37.880
You might be a really remarkable poet, in which case maybe you can use language to get closer.

01:26:37.880 --> 01:26:43.560
So we're left with the words at hand, and English is really bad for talking about this stuff.

01:26:43.560 --> 01:26:51.440
Particularly modern English, because it really exploded post-Newton, industrially, etc.

01:26:51.440 --> 01:26:58.960
So I think the only points where we're sort of doing this is because our language is so

01:26:58.960 --> 01:26:59.960
limited.

01:26:59.960 --> 01:27:05.480
And to some extent, that issue of, you come at all of this from your life experience, that's

01:27:05.480 --> 01:27:10.680
your perspective and I'm coming at it from mine. So it's like the two faces in

01:27:10.680 --> 01:27:16.760
the vase. It's the body cells or is it molecules or is it atoms? To me the

01:27:16.760 --> 01:27:21.800
interesting thing is having these conversations across people's

01:27:21.800 --> 01:27:28.000
experiences and it's always humbling. Growing up, having gone to medical school,

01:27:28.000 --> 01:27:35.440
the impulse to be sure of myself is sort of beaten into me. You know, I've had, I

01:27:35.440 --> 01:27:40.120
had to learn to have that kind of intellectual pride. Oh, nothing pulls it

01:27:40.120 --> 01:27:43.280
out from under you. Like being able to talk to people who have these

01:27:43.280 --> 01:27:47.620
experiences and compare them and compare notes. Yeah, I hope I'm not giving you the

01:27:47.620 --> 01:27:52.000
impression that I'm disagreeing with you. No, no, no, no, no, no. But there are moments. I mean

01:27:52.000 --> 01:27:55.980
these are questions that like you with "Am I cells or am I a body?" I chew on these

01:27:55.980 --> 01:27:59.960
thoughts. I've been chewing on them for decades. So I like to bounce them off

01:27:59.960 --> 01:28:04.400
people and see if we can... Sure, sure, sure, sure. A couple of questions came in. Let me get

01:28:04.400 --> 01:28:12.040
them before we ran out of time. This is from someone named Franz Bars in Dead Man's Flats,

01:28:12.040 --> 01:28:13.040
Alberta, Canada.

01:28:13.040 --> 01:28:14.960
- Hi, Franz. You were there first.

01:28:14.960 --> 01:28:20.960
- Yeah. She or he had a near fatal accident at the age of 13. Fractured skull and doctor

01:28:20.960 --> 01:28:26.760
said I'd be a vegetable at best. Since then, I've had two awakening experiences. One studying

01:28:26.760 --> 01:28:32.240
English 40 years ago. Not sure how that studying English brought it about, but great.

01:28:32.240 --> 01:28:33.240
- Reading Whitman, maybe.

01:28:33.240 --> 01:28:40.240
Maybe so. And then 20 years ago, an awaking experience elicited or induced by intense pain.

01:28:40.240 --> 01:28:45.240
This person didn't recognize them as such, as awaking experiences, until much later.

01:28:45.240 --> 01:28:50.240
He or she, I'm not sure if it's a man or woman, helps people understand and experience non-duality,

01:28:50.240 --> 01:28:58.240
but she or he doesn't understand the brain. Large parts of my brain, from the injuries, must be affected.

01:28:58.240 --> 01:28:59.240
Any feedback?

01:28:59.240 --> 01:29:12.540
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.

01:29:12.540 --> 01:29:15.740
Every brain is behaving differently from every other brain.

01:29:15.740 --> 01:29:29.200
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,

01:29:29.200 --> 01:29:42.000
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,

01:29:42.000 --> 01:29:48.660
I haven't seen yet the connection to the injury and having those experiences. Are they in fact related?

01:29:48.660 --> 01:29:57.160
Well, sometimes as you must know, traumatic experiences of various kinds do evoke or elicit some kind of awakening thing.

01:29:57.160 --> 01:30:04.160
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.

01:30:04.160 --> 01:30:10.640
Yeah, but the way Franz described the story was teenage injury and then many years later,

01:30:10.640 --> 01:30:12.720
this stuff happened.

01:30:12.720 --> 01:30:21.440
But ultimately, the stuff that's come my way in terms of experiences that just sort of lands on me,

01:30:21.440 --> 01:30:24.560
I can think of it in terms of, is that my brain?

01:30:24.560 --> 01:30:28.560
My brain is structured in a way that allows me to receive these or perceive these.

01:30:28.560 --> 01:30:32.400
It's a nature or nurture question, which again complementarities,

01:30:32.400 --> 01:30:39.200
Or is it my lived experience that prepared me for when this showed up, I was prepared to see it and witness it?

01:30:39.200 --> 01:30:43.900
Those are sort of unanswerable questions and probably complementarities.

01:30:43.900 --> 01:31:00.800
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.

01:31:00.800 --> 01:31:07.160
Friends might want to read Eben Alexander's book or else see my interview with him or many other interviews with him

01:31:07.160 --> 01:31:11.520
He was someone who was predicted to be a vegetable he had encephalitis

01:31:11.520 --> 01:31:14.680
I believe his brain was just pus, you know

01:31:14.680 --> 01:31:21.560
My mom she was in home hospice care for seven months not walking talking or reading and I was there

01:31:21.560 --> 01:31:26.400
Every day because I was sure if I missed a day that would be her last day

01:31:26.400 --> 01:31:32.240
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

01:31:32.240 --> 01:31:32.600
Mr.

01:31:32.600 --> 01:31:37.880
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

01:31:37.880 --> 01:31:41.360
How was she walking after seven months and then she lived for six more years?

01:31:41.360 --> 01:31:49.040
Amazing and we took her off all her medications during that time because she couldn't swallow

01:31:49.040 --> 01:31:51.960
congestive heart disease

01:31:52.000 --> 01:31:59.080
hypertension, chronic urinary tract infections, kept her on her Parkinson's meds because I knew she'd be uncomfortable with the rigidity

01:31:59.080 --> 01:32:03.400
so we could melt that in some Dulce de Leche ice cream and get it into her mouth.

01:32:03.400 --> 01:32:08.040
I never put her back on the meds because I was like, she's got to go from something.

01:32:08.040 --> 01:32:12.720
Yeah, so let one of these things. She never had any hypertension.

01:32:12.720 --> 01:32:18.560
She never had any congestive heart disease after that and even her Parkinson's went into remission. Amazing.

01:32:19.080 --> 01:32:26.720
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

01:32:26.720 --> 01:32:28.820
diseases of stress accumulation

01:32:28.820 --> 01:32:33.200
She died in a bliss bubble. It was just stunning nice, but why her?

01:32:33.200 --> 01:32:39.920
Why did my mother get that lucky she would say it was her relationship with the Libanuma which is

01:32:39.920 --> 01:32:47.760
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

01:32:47.760 --> 01:32:50.660
Oh, we're just fine.

01:32:50.660 --> 01:32:52.660
She would blush like she was a teenager.

01:32:52.660 --> 01:32:53.660
Oh, sweet.

01:32:53.660 --> 01:32:54.660
She sounded great.

01:32:54.660 --> 01:32:56.800
So, I don't know.

01:32:56.800 --> 01:32:58.480
Here's another question that came in.

01:32:58.480 --> 01:33:02.920
This is from Nina Nobile in the US someplace.

01:33:02.920 --> 01:33:08.000
Can you recall what your state of mind was before the times you felt one with the environment

01:33:08.000 --> 01:33:09.000
around you?

01:33:09.000 --> 01:33:13.980
Were you very relaxed, deep in thought about a specific concept having to do with consciousness

01:33:13.980 --> 01:33:16.760
or anything else you can recall your mind focusing on?

01:33:16.760 --> 01:33:21.920
I'm hesitant to lay claim to having had significant experiences.

01:33:21.920 --> 01:33:23.520
However, blah, blah, blah.

01:33:23.520 --> 01:33:25.220
I talk about some of it.

01:33:25.220 --> 01:33:32.580
Most times where I had an experience along those lines, it was from within a state of

01:33:32.580 --> 01:33:34.260
meditation.

01:33:34.260 --> 01:33:39.680
Not always necessarily what I would have characterized the time as deep.

01:33:39.680 --> 01:33:45.880
Most often during an intensive Zen retreat, I'm meditating many hours a day for days in

01:33:45.880 --> 01:33:51.480
a row, but not always that time that I described in the Zendo with the incense stick, but I'd

01:33:51.480 --> 01:33:57.480
been in a sustained focus state for weeks because this koan had happened.

01:33:57.480 --> 01:34:04.140
But I've also had what I would call similar sorts of experiences from devotional practice

01:34:04.140 --> 01:34:11.080
type stuff, being in shul, being in synagogue, really caught up in the prayer service with

01:34:11.080 --> 01:34:15.640
a liturgy that I'm deeply familiar with and comfortable with, and it's in Hebrew, so I

01:34:15.640 --> 01:34:21.520
I don't understand it so well that if I want I can understand it and if not I can turn

01:34:21.520 --> 01:34:23.520
it off and it's just a mantra.

01:34:23.520 --> 01:34:25.840
But I don't think there have been rules for it.

01:34:25.840 --> 01:34:30.120
I haven't had any of the experiences of when I've had sudden trauma and I've had sudden

01:34:30.120 --> 01:34:32.000
trauma I've been hit by a car.

01:34:32.000 --> 01:34:33.760
Never got something good out of it like that.

01:34:33.760 --> 01:34:35.720
I get life lessons.

01:34:35.720 --> 01:34:40.640
One thought that comes to mind on Nina's question is that famous saying by some Zen guy I think

01:34:40.640 --> 01:34:45.360
that enlightenment may be an accident but spiritual practice makes you accident prone.

01:34:45.360 --> 01:34:51.600
probably like that one. So there are things we can do which make us receptive or make it conducive

01:34:51.600 --> 01:34:55.600
to having spiritual breakthroughs and that's what spiritual practice is all about. That's

01:34:55.600 --> 01:35:01.440
why people do these things. And that's kind of where I land in the book, based off other people.

01:35:01.440 --> 01:35:09.920
I don't think the construct I give in the book of how the universe is constructed is really arguable

01:35:09.920 --> 01:35:16.480
in modern, Western, scientific, mathematical, philosophical terms. I really don't. I'm happy

01:35:16.480 --> 01:35:22.200
to have that debate with somebody, but I really don't. However, you can read my book five

01:35:22.200 --> 01:35:26.440
times in a row, and some people have told me they've done that, and it's still, as

01:35:26.440 --> 01:35:32.040
we say in Zen, the finger pointing at the moon. It isn't the moon itself. And without

01:35:32.040 --> 01:35:37.480
some sort of practice, and I say this explicitly in the afterward, it doesn't have to be contemplative

01:35:37.480 --> 01:35:41.980
practice. You know, I tried to get my mother to meditate for years until I

01:35:41.980 --> 01:35:45.940
realized, "Oh, she's got a devotional practice that puts any other practice

01:35:45.940 --> 01:35:51.160
I've had to shame." My husband claims not to have any spiritual practice at all, but

01:35:51.160 --> 01:35:57.100
if you come to our house for a dinner and he serves you what he's made, it's a

01:35:57.100 --> 01:36:01.840
practice of service. Finally, after a couple of decades, I've gotten him to not

01:36:01.840 --> 01:36:06.440
argue with me when I say that. The Vedic divisions, I think it's Vedic. There's

01:36:06.440 --> 01:36:10.440
scholarly practice, Jewish version of that would be Talmud study.

01:36:10.440 --> 01:36:14.440
You know, for me, it's biology led to all this stuff.

01:36:14.440 --> 01:36:18.440
So, scholarly practice, path of devotion, path of

01:36:18.440 --> 01:36:22.440
service, path of contemplation.

01:36:22.440 --> 01:36:26.440
Kiana, bhakti, seva, and...

01:36:26.440 --> 01:36:30.440
Find the one or the two or the three that feel right to you

01:36:30.440 --> 01:36:34.440
because the ideas are fucking useless. They do not

01:36:34.440 --> 01:36:42.440
alleviate any suffering whatsoever, but the experience of the truth of them makes all the difference.

01:36:42.440 --> 01:36:48.440
Yeah, that's a really important point, which is that one size does not fit all, but seek and ye shall find.

01:36:48.440 --> 01:36:56.440
I mean, if you have the motivation to go deeper in whatever way you conceive that, take a step and then take another step.

01:36:56.440 --> 01:37:01.440
It's like in that Harrison Ford movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, where he has to cross this chasm

01:37:01.440 --> 01:37:06.440
and there's no bridge or something, but he somehow or other takes a step and the bridge materializes as it goes.

01:37:06.440 --> 01:37:08.440
He gets across the chasm.

01:37:08.440 --> 01:37:15.440
This is part of the wonder, part of the mystery is, the universe keeps meeting me where I am somehow.

01:37:15.440 --> 01:37:19.440
Often in ways, no, I wasn't looking for that way.

01:37:19.440 --> 01:37:23.440
I didn't want that bridge, I wanted that bridge. Well, you're getting this bridge.

01:37:23.440 --> 01:37:30.440
But looking back, it's one experience after another of, if I show up, the universe meets me there.

01:37:30.440 --> 01:37:32.040
If you build it, they will come.

01:37:32.040 --> 01:37:32.540
Yeah.

01:37:32.540 --> 01:37:33.600
To quote another movie.

01:37:33.600 --> 01:37:36.040
Then that kind of brings us around to my perennial point,

01:37:36.040 --> 01:37:39.640
which is there is some kind of intelligence orchestrating

01:37:39.640 --> 01:37:40.200
things.

01:37:40.200 --> 01:37:42.840
And it's interactive, and it's conscious,

01:37:42.840 --> 01:37:46.800
and it's compassionate sometimes in a tough love sort of way.

01:37:46.800 --> 01:37:47.720
Yeah.

01:37:47.720 --> 01:37:51.760
This is the project, the problem, the koan of the COVID years

01:37:51.760 --> 01:37:52.520
for me.

01:37:52.520 --> 01:37:55.200
I was through another path.

01:37:55.200 --> 01:37:57.960
I started thinking of my mother.

01:37:57.960 --> 01:38:05.060
I'm also a devotee in small measure of Mother Mira, who's considered an avatar of the Divine

01:38:05.060 --> 01:38:11.160
Mother and I had an experience of her, not in her physical presence, that sort of rescued

01:38:11.160 --> 01:38:15.720
me from a difficult situation and I was aware during that, that oh, this could be entirely

01:38:15.720 --> 01:38:20.120
my imagination and I'm just talking myself out of some disaster here.

01:38:20.120 --> 01:38:21.940
Fine, it works.

01:38:21.940 --> 01:38:26.800
But then I said, I'm sorry I haven't been to visit you in a while, I'll make a plan to

01:38:26.800 --> 01:38:33.200
come to Germany where she lives. And then I heard in my ear, you don't need to come see me. You just

01:38:33.200 --> 01:38:39.680
need to go visit your mother. Interesting. I get all for clumped as we said. And from that point

01:38:39.680 --> 01:38:47.280
on, I realized, oh, taking care of her became devotion. When she died. Within the years after

01:38:47.280 --> 01:38:53.680
that, I started thinking about the divine feminine, the divine mother in a deeper way. And during

01:38:53.680 --> 01:38:59.600
COVID I had lots of time to read in my own traditions as well as other traditions and

01:38:59.600 --> 01:39:05.360
get a little bit deeper of understanding and I started to realize that the experience I

01:39:05.360 --> 01:39:09.520
had when I went into her presence, her delight in me.

01:39:09.520 --> 01:39:10.520
Your mother's or mother Mary's?

01:39:10.520 --> 01:39:11.520
My mother's.

01:39:11.520 --> 01:39:17.080
The really profoundly crazily unconditional love that was evident on her face when I walked

01:39:17.080 --> 01:39:18.400
in the room.

01:39:18.400 --> 01:39:24.320
that's the experience of the divine feminine in the world and it's possible to experience.

01:39:24.320 --> 01:39:26.920
But I turned to one of my Zen teachers who was a

01:39:26.920 --> 01:39:32.160
was also a Christian minister and I said, you know, this is hard to mesh with

01:39:32.160 --> 01:39:40.080
my Zen practice. I'm suddenly in a devotional practice when I was in a non-devotional contemplative practice.

01:39:40.080 --> 01:39:43.160
What am I supposed to do with this and how do you deal with it?

01:39:43.640 --> 01:39:50.440
His name was Bob Kaku Gunn and he was a few months away from dying after five years of

01:39:50.440 --> 01:39:55.200
Living with pancreas cancer and it was COVID. So it was an online thing

01:39:55.200 --> 01:40:00.080
But it was a formal Zen interview online, but he was an old buddy of mine, too

01:40:00.080 --> 01:40:06.040
And I said to him how do you deal with this? And he said well the further I go

01:40:06.040 --> 01:40:12.180
It's all just love and I was like no no no no no no first off Christian term

01:40:12.180 --> 01:40:19.080
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

01:40:19.080 --> 01:40:26.620
That's the fundamental nature and then I realized versions of the talking particularly at sand that I gave

01:40:26.620 --> 01:40:32.720
Start with you know what are the twin pillars of said in Tibetan tradition the twin pillars of?

01:40:32.720 --> 01:40:39.980
Buddhist practice wisdom and compassion wisdom is seeing the world as it is without delusion

01:40:40.500 --> 01:40:47.980
Complexity theory has provided me with a really complete model for understanding the structure and nature of

01:40:47.980 --> 01:40:52.820
Existence that includes all the science and all the math and all the philosophy

01:40:52.820 --> 01:40:58.620
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

01:40:58.620 --> 01:41:02.600
This is not my boundary at the cellular level

01:41:02.600 --> 01:41:06.580
My boundary is wherever my microbiome goes if you were here and I gave you a hug

01:41:06.580 --> 01:41:11.140
we'd walk apart and you'd carry some of me away with you and I'd carry some of you away with me.

01:41:11.140 --> 01:41:15.380
At the molecular level, we're exchanging molecules with the environment all the time.

01:41:15.380 --> 01:41:18.900
Our boundaries are the entire biomass of the planet.

01:41:18.900 --> 01:41:23.300
I've heard that every breath we take contains at least one molecule that Jesus breathed

01:41:23.300 --> 01:41:25.380
and Hitler and everybody else.

01:41:25.380 --> 01:41:30.660
And at the atomic level, there isn't an atom in our bodies that we didn't

01:41:30.660 --> 01:41:36.420
breathe, eat or drink from the planet. So are we lonely creatures that live on the surface of a rock

01:41:36.420 --> 01:41:43.140
we call Earth, or are we planet Earth itself that in three and a half billion years was able to

01:41:43.140 --> 01:41:48.660
self-organize itself into creatures that think of themselves as separate, but we're wrong. So,

01:41:48.660 --> 01:41:54.340
at the atomic level, our boundary is the entire planet. That's Gaia. It's not just the biological

01:41:54.340 --> 01:42:01.620
part. It's the non-biological part. At the quantum level, non-locality entanglement won the Nobel

01:42:01.620 --> 01:42:05.980
a few years ago, Einstein was right to his dismay.

01:42:05.980 --> 01:42:09.380
At the quantum level, we're one seamless universe.

01:42:09.380 --> 01:42:11.340
There's no separation anywhere.

01:42:11.340 --> 01:42:14.740
So when you talk about compassion, it's not,

01:42:14.740 --> 01:42:17.140
oh, I feel sorry for this person in front of me.

01:42:17.140 --> 01:42:20.580
Real compassion is I've touched a hot stove

01:42:20.580 --> 01:42:23.460
and my left hand goes to pull my right hand away

01:42:23.460 --> 01:42:27.540
without hesitation because we're just one thing.

01:42:27.540 --> 01:42:29.300
That's real compassion.

01:42:29.300 --> 01:42:32.780
And that arises from seeing the nature of reality

01:42:32.780 --> 01:42:36.780
and experiencing the nature of reality in its true nature,

01:42:36.780 --> 01:42:39.260
which is all the stuff you and I are talking about.

01:42:39.260 --> 01:42:42.700
And when that happens, true compassion arises.

01:42:42.700 --> 01:42:44.600
Or if you want to say love,

01:42:44.600 --> 01:42:46.820
and that's the fundamental nature of existence.

01:42:46.820 --> 01:42:49.660
That's the fundamental quality of the world.

01:42:49.660 --> 01:42:52.320
And that was the last time I saw my friend

01:42:52.320 --> 01:42:53.460
in that interview.

01:42:53.460 --> 01:42:55.220
It's a good thing to be left with.

01:42:55.220 --> 01:42:58.060
- Love your neighbor as yourself because he is.

01:42:58.060 --> 01:42:58.900
- Yeah.

01:42:58.900 --> 01:43:01.260
Well, that's a real sweet note to end on.

01:43:01.260 --> 01:43:02.820
So this has been a lot of fun.

01:43:02.820 --> 01:43:03.820
I've really enjoyed this.

01:43:03.820 --> 01:43:05.620
You've let me go on a really long time.

01:43:05.620 --> 01:43:07.660
Well, you say good stuff.

01:43:07.660 --> 01:43:08.660
Thank you.

01:43:08.660 --> 01:43:09.660
I appreciate it.

01:43:09.660 --> 01:43:10.660
So do you.

01:43:10.660 --> 01:43:13.780
Your book is really interesting and it's a real treat for me to talk to people like you

01:43:13.780 --> 01:43:17.660
and to enrich my own experience and understanding.

01:43:17.660 --> 01:43:18.760
Very valuable.

01:43:18.760 --> 01:43:20.940
It's all about relation.

01:43:20.940 --> 01:43:21.940
Everything's in relation.

01:43:21.940 --> 01:43:22.940
Good.

01:43:22.940 --> 01:43:23.940
So thanks so much, Neil.

01:43:23.940 --> 01:43:29.940
there's some more conferences where we can exchange a little microbiome in person sometime.

01:43:29.940 --> 01:43:33.940
That would be nice. Maybe you need to organize some BatGap conference.

01:43:33.940 --> 01:43:36.940
Oh man, yeah, people say that. It's a big task.

01:43:36.940 --> 01:43:38.940
I'm sorry, that's a mean thing to wish on you.

01:43:38.940 --> 01:43:43.940
Marito and Zaya would practically kill them organizing those conferences out there.

01:43:43.940 --> 01:43:47.940
But anyway, we'd love to meet you in person sometime and really appreciate what you're doing

01:43:47.940 --> 01:43:51.940
and look forward to reading your next book. Let me know when you've finished it.

01:43:51.940 --> 01:43:56.580
I'm looking forward to seeing what it turns out to be. I just started writing it. Thank you.

01:43:56.580 --> 01:44:03.740
And thanks to all those who have been listening or watching. We really appreciate your participation in Bat Camp all these 15 years now.

01:44:03.740 --> 01:44:09.260
So we'll see you for the next one. Thanks, Niels. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye

01:44:09.260 --> 01:44:10.260
Bye.

01:44:10.260 --> 01:44:34.580
[Music]