Summary:
- Interview Overview: The discussion explores various topics related to spirituality, consciousness, and science.
- Neil Theise’s Background: Neil Theise is a professor of pathology at NYU and a pioneer in adult stem cell research. His work extends into complexity theory, integrative medicine, and consciousness studies.
- Complexity Theory: Theise discusses Complexity Theory, which he describes as one of the three great scientific theories of the 20th century, alongside quantum physics and relativity. He explains how it relates to life and consciousness.
- Spiritual Practices: Theise shares his experiences with Zen Buddhism, Jewish practices, and shamanic initiation, highlighting how his scientific and spiritual practices have become seamlessly integrated over time.
Full transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 700 of them now. 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, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll find them all organized in various ways. Also, while you’re on the site, check out our new BatGap AI bot, into which I’ve uploaded nearly 70,000 files of transcripts of talks that people who have been on BatGap have given, PDFs of their books and so on, and it’s a very interesting AI chatbot with which you can have extended dialogues about any spiritual-type topic, even in other languages other than English. it in Vietnamese or Swahili if you speak those. It works. This enterprise is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and a page explaining alternatives to PayPal. Also, if you’d like to help support it in a volunteer kind of way, we have teams of people proofreading transcripts and doing some other things. So get in touch if you’d like to help in that way. My guest today is Neil Theise. I’ve seen Neil speak a number of times at the Science and Nonduality Conference and very much enjoyed his talks. He’s a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Dr. Theise’s studies and so that first part you’ll be thinking what does that to do with BatGap. Okay, this next part does. Dr. Theise’s studies in complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields such as integrative medicine, consciousness studies, and the science-religion dialogue. He is a senior Zen student at the Village Zen Do in New York City. His lifelong Jewish practice has involved both traditional observances and formal academic study. And in recent years, to his surprise, he has also undergone shamanic initiation. So welcome, Neil.
Neil: Thank you very much, Rick.
Rick: I went to the Zen Center in New York City in the fall of ’68 because I had learned to meditate, but it seemed, what I was doing seemed so easy and enjoyable that I thought, “This couldn’t be serious. It’s too easy.” And so I went to the Zen Center to check into what that was all about, and it was an adventure. We had our car towed away, and then we were trying to cash a check in Times Square area and asking prostitutes–I don’t think we knew they were prostitutes– if they could cash a check, and getting responses like, “My man don’t take checks.” And we finally got the car back somehow or other and got back to Connecticut. Anyway, it was one of those adventures and that was my total experience with Zen.
Neil: Well, it’s in the moment. I’m sure you were in the moment.
Rick: It was. Okay, so this will be a free-flowing conversation. I’ve read Neil’s book twice. He has a book called “Notes on Complexity.” He sent me the audio version of it. It’s about four and a half hours long, and I really enjoyed it. So I listened to it a second time, and I could easily have listened to it a third time and continued to learn things, but we’re going to use an outline of the book’s chapters as a guide to our conversation, although we might deviate from it at times if other thoughts come up, or if some of you send in questions. So, first of all, Neil, what is complexity and why are you interested in it, and how does it pertain to spirituality and consciousness?
Neil: So, Complexity Theory, I think it’s fair to call it one of the three great theories, scientific theories of the 20th century. the other two obviously being quantum physics and relativity. The thing is that quantum physics describes everything at the incredibly small and relativity covers everything at the very large scale, but where life happens, where our lives happen, neither really works very well. And, you know, we’re still debating whether there are quantum effects that bubble up to the everyday scale. And we know gravity affects us, but other than that, day to day, not so much. complexity–it’s related closely to something called Chaos Theory which more people are familiar with. It’s sort of what came after Chaos Theory was developed and basically it’s an understanding how life happens, how living things arise from the substance of the universe, how they interact with each other to create larger scale living things so that’s whether you’re talking about biomolecules self organizing into cells, cells becoming bodies. Or various bodies becoming social structures and depends on what you include as a body if it’s ants then it’s an ant colony, if it’s people it might be a neighborhood a city, an economy. If it’s all the living things within an area then you’ve got an ecosystem. Everything alive on earth? Then you’re talking Gaia. So complexity describes all of those things and it’s called Complexity because there’s nothing more complex than life. That’s sort of the hallmark of life. You can’t reduce it to very simple equations that you can just pop a few numbers and get a result. life is never machine-like despite what are cultural metaphors tend to say in terms of bioengineering and cells as building blocks. This makes them seem like things you can build like a machine. But that’s not what life is. It’s more complex and more dynamic than that. So that’s what Complexity Theory covers. I stumbled into it sort of by accident. Everything in my book actually sort of step by step assembled itself, which is what complex systems do. They assemble themselves into larger scale things. and by bumping into somebody often by chance. My clinical practice, I’m a pathologist, this is my microscope and my office, and I spend my day looking at microscope slides, and we’ll probably talk about that if we’re going chapter by chapter a bit. So I’m looking at human tissues at the cellular level all day long. And sometimes, and they’re human tissues, I’m not looking at mice, my research involves looking at human material because that’s what comes to me as part of my clinical practice. At some point, looking at liver slides, liver is my subspecialty, I work with a liver transplant team, I started to figure out how we could prove that the liver had stem cells. And nowadays that sounds not very exciting because everything we know has stem cells, but 25 years or so ago the liver was not generally thought to have stem cells.
Rick: Just explain briefly what stem cells are.
Neil: A stem cell is a cell that can become all the cells of an entire organ on its own, or all the cells of an entire body on its own. And so, for example, we knew the bone marrow had stem cells for the rest of the bone marrow and the blood and we know this because you can take a cell and transplanted into someone who has no bone marrow, like someone who’s had leukemia, and you’ve needed to erase all their white cells in order to get rid of the leukemia, and you take some cells and put them in the patient’s bone marrow, and lo and behold, the bone marrow repopulates and they get all the cells of the blood. The surface of the skin is known to have stem cells at the base. That’s one of the reasons skin heals so well. You destroy a little bit of the surface, The stem cells at the base of the skin of the epidermis very rapidly replicate. They reproduce each other and fill in and you have full thickness healing. The GI tract was known to have stem cells, so everything from mouth all the way out the other end, and they turn over every 24 to 48 hours. The GI tract’s really dynamic.
Rick: So the reason a burn victim doesn’t heal fully is that the stem cells are destroyed because the burn goes so deep? Is that true?
Neil: To some extent, but probably it’s more about the scar tissue that then forms, which is not normal tissue, and therefore the cells don’t know how to organize themselves in order to fill in when the scar tissue takes over. Though that’s turning out to be far more interesting. I mentioned to you before we came online that we now know that the scarring of end-stage liver disease we call cirrhosis, whether it’s from alcohol or chronic hepatitis C or an autoimmune disease, if we can stop the disease, the scarring can actually melt away. In burn victims, under the right circumstances, we’re learning how scar tissue can melt away and then stem cells could possibly fill in.
Rick: Wow, that’d be cool if they could actually.
Neil: Yeah, it would be cool. But, and this is an example of a complex system. We can’t go in and say, let’s plaster over this wound with some cells, bam, the way we might, you know, fix a wall. But if you put cells and let them interact in an environment that’s conducive to their interactions, in fact, the interactions are between each other and between them in the environment, very much like people walking down the street, or ants doing their jobs in a colony, they tend to do what they need to accomplish for the well-being, the health of the system. And no one is planning it. No one’s telling each cell what they need to do. The new tissue is arising out of the dynamic interactions at the local level. So that’s exactly what complexity is talking about. So when I was looking at the liver, I realized, oh, the liver has stem cells, and I figured out how that could be proven. And that had been controversial at that point because usually a liver is just sitting there, though we know that if you whack out half of the liver within 40 days it grows back to normal. The question was which cells accomplished that and are there stem cells as part of that process? So my group showed that there were and then as part of that work and outgrowth of that around 2000 there was a lot of news about adult stem cells as opposed to embryonic stem cells and my group was one of the pioneering teams that showed that cells, at least from the bone marrow, not only could bone marrow stem cells produce all the elements of the bone marrow in the blood, but they also could contribute to the lung, the liver, the kidney, the brain, the muscle. It was our paper in 2021 that showed that that could happen with one single adult stem cell, that it could contribute to all these tissues and that meant an adult cell could behave like an embryonic stem cell. That led to George Bush’s address to the nation in October of that year because the anti-abortion argument against embryonic stem cells had been “It’s not ethical.” But now because of our work and the other teams that were working on this, they could say “Oh you don’t need to do embryonic stem cells, you can do adult stem cells and they can do everything.” That’s not really true. You need to do both sides of the research and to some extent the reason we don’t have a lot of more progress in terms of stem cell therapeutics is because the politics of all that just kept communities of stem cell workers from talking to each other, cut out the funding because this made embryonic stem cells soar sort of at war with adult stem cells. I no longer am in that field as much as I can avoid it. For those reasons. But so, while I was doing that, a friend of mine in England, who is an academic, interested in interdisciplinary communication, people talking to each other across different specialties and walks of life, he put me together with another friend of his, named Jane Prophet, who is an artist, and she had been interested in how, this is and we were just starting to have Internet things going on where people were creating avatars for themselves or relating to avatars. She thought this was really interesting and wanted to examine using her art practice, how people emotionally connected to virtual creatures. She created a virtual world called TechnoSphere, where you could create a little animal, decide whether it was an herbivore or carnivore, put together a bunch of body parts so you know what it looked like, though it was never actually visualizable on a screen, and send it out into the world. She was in… the animals would send you a little postcards by email to tell you what they were up to, “Today I was grazing.” “Today I outran a carnivore.” “Today I got pregnant. “Today I didn’t outrun the carnivore, and this is your last email because I’m dead.” I tended to always, being Buddhist, I always sent a little herbivores and they never survived. But the key thing was when they had reached thousands of creatures in TechnoSphere, the creatures started organizing into social structures that they had not programmed. And it turned out this was an example of artificial life, which is also a realm of Complexity Theory. When I was telling her about how cells move around the body, interacting with each other and with their local environments to create tissues, She said, “Oh, that’s like how Complexity people talk about how ants form colonies.” And I was like, “What’s Complexity?” So it was Jane that taught me about this. Unpacking that for the next 20 years, you heard some versions of that at S.A.N.D., has sort of become the parallel work to my clinical work. Where that interfaced with the spiritual side, a story I don’t tell in the book, but relates directly to this experience of working with Jane. Somewhere in there, I just became focused on the idea that I kept imagining that the cells I was talking about and what I was picturing happening in tissues was happening on my microscope slides. Or when I was doing animal research, I don’t do it anymore, I don’t particularly like doing it, but when I did it during that period, it’s happening in the mice over there. But eventually I made the obvious connection that anything I’m describing there is happening in here. It’s me that I’m talking about. When I talk about stem cells, what stem cells are doing, I’m describing what my body is doing, what the cells of my body [are] doing. At the same time, I was starting to become aware of this difficult tension between is my body this thing which is how I typically relate to it bounded by my skin or is it a community of cells like a flock of birds or a colony of ants and You can argue it both ways and this really started to wear at me I was already a Zen student at this point and I’d started on koan practice. Although I think at this moment I wasn’t doing koan practice particularly. By Koan practice in Zen, what I mean is meditating, sometimes it’s on a question like, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” This is not the answer. You can’t present an answer that answers this through a logical process of thinking. You sort of have to experience the Koan itself. Or more often it’s a teacher having an interaction with a student in which the student becomes awakened in some fashion. So you’re trying to have the experience of what’s going on in that koan. Classic example is usually one of the first koans you learn. A student asked Master Zhaozhou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Everything has Buddha nature, doesn’t it? So why would you be asking about a dog? But on the other hand can a dog who can’t meditate have Buddha nature? So it’s a student probably who thinks they’re very clever and is gonna catch the teacher at something. Master Zhaozhou responds “Mu” which is Japanese for no or nothing– which isn’t really an answer. It feels like a sidestep but in hearing the word, the monk has an awakening experience. So when you’re working on koans, they get very obsessive when you’re deep in the weeds with it. You sort of can’t stop thinking about it. It becomes the world you’re working, walking around in. And very much this question “Is my body a thing or a cell or a colony of cells, a community of cells?” There’s got to be a way to decide it, what it really is. I just kept gnawing at this. I was–a few weeks later after meeting Jane, I think it was that first summer, I was walking across town in New York City. And I was thinking about this– body or cells, body or cells. And I came to a cross-section, and there was a do-not-walk sign. So I stopped. Body or cells, body or cells, body or cells. At the moment the light changed, I was experiencing the cells and everyone else stepped off the curb. I couldn’t move because my leg had become a flock of cells that I didn’t know how to control and direct. Then it switched and I was able to walk across the street but there was this moment and then sometime later also the same summer I was in my Zendo–back in those days I was the Thursday morning opener so if anyone wanted to come and do early morning meditation, the place was open. It was a smaller community back then. And it was pre COVID. So sometimes there was no one but me. I lit the incense on the altar and I sat on my cushion opposite. And I had a practice I was supposed to be doing that my Zen teacher had given me but there I was sitting on my cushion going “body or cells body or cells body or cells” while doing zazen. And I just, it was a very focused moment. And then there was this point where for some reason I looked up and saw the incense stick across the room on the altar turning into smoke. And my physical experience of “body or cells, stick or smoke,” it was the same experience. I was experiencing both versions of my body and the incense stick themselves together. In that instant, I was like, “This is what we mean by emptiness of inherent existence.” It wasn’t an intellectual concept. It was just a very visceral sort of thing. Of course, within moments, I was out of that moment and it was becoming an intellectual thing. But in that moment…my whole life I’ve been interested in science. You know, when I was in seventh grade, my ambition was to finish up Einstein’s work on a Unified Field Theory and win the Nobel Prize for it. But I was also getting bar mitzvah’d and thinking about becoming a rabbi, and dreaming about what’s Jewish mysticism. And maybe I could find a way to do that, too. Those were very separate practices to me. I didn’t, I never felt they were in conflict, but nor did I feel that I had to look for a way for them to interact or overlap. I was just maybe because I’m a Gemini, but it was just, it was fine. When people would challenge me on that, lots of people in medical school were like, wow how can you be an observant Jew and be a modern thinker? I had four communities that weren’t comfortable with each other that I was trying to embody. I was a gay man living in New York City. I was a doctor. I was now becoming a Buddhist and I’m a observant Jew. In any room, someone’s going to object to one of those. In that moment everything became seamless and my science practice, my spiritual practice weren’t separate. I understood that. I experienced that. The work since, in the last twenty three years since that time, has been exploring why that’s not the case, why they aren’t separate, why they are the same thing. That’s what the book has come to be. Diving down, using Complexity Theory. So are cells are thing? No, they’re just biomolecules floating in water. Are molecules of thing? No, they’re just atoms. So are they a thing? No, they’re just quantum phenomena. [On a] quantum level, are those things? No, those just pop in and out of space-time, the energetic field of space-time. Is there no thing anywhere? No. Oh right we wound up using Complexity Theory and Quantum Physics to get to Buddhist metaphysics and Jewish mysticism and stuff like this. So that’s the book, that’s part that’s the first half of the book.
Rick: Yeah, interesting. Alright, I have a number of thoughts and questions. I’ll tell you why this topic fascinates me, and we’ll see if it fascinates you for the same reasons. Maybe it doesn’t. Did you see Robert Lanza speak at S.A.N.D.? He talked about Biocentrism.
Neil: Yes, yes I did.
Rick: Yeah, which is the idea that the universe has this remarkable way of arranging itself to be conducive to life, supportive of life, against all odds. I mean, there are so many variables that have to be just so in order for the universe itself to arise and then for life to arise, and if any one of them were off by just a tiny bit, it wouldn’t happen. And so, that to me points to the notion that there is some kind of fundamental, all-pervading intelligence orchestrating everything, which I find very interesting. Brian Swimme, you may have seen him at S.A.N.D. I’ve interviewed him. A famous quote of his is, “You leave hydrogen alone for 13.7 billion years and you end up with rose bushes and giraffes and opera.” Somehow hydrogen organizes itself into these complex things.
Neil: Complexity.
Rick: Complexity, exactly.
Neil: This is what Complexity Theory is about. How does that happen?
Rick: Yeah, amazing. There’s a podcast I like a lot called “Closer to Truth” with Robert Lawrence Kuhn.
Neil: I’ve got a few interviews on there with him.
Rick: Oh cool, I’ll probably…
Neil: He met me at S.A.N.D. right?
Rick: Oh, I didn’t realize he was at S.A.N.D. Okay, wow. Anyway, so a lot of, he often devotes episodes to the discussion of whether mathematics is discovered or invented. In other words, is it intrinsic to the universe? Because the universe seems to have been operating by mathematical principles long before anyone could be around to understand them. Or are we just sort of overlaying an interpretation on something and just inventing in a human language something that doesn’t indicate any kind of deep organizational intelligence to the universe? So all those are interesting questions. I mean, to put it in simple terms, is there a God? I mean, is God the all-pervading or all-orchestrating intelligence that makes complexity possible, makes life possible, that makes the universe possible? OK, so maybe you should respond to all that before I say anything else.
Neil: Jump in on that?
Rick: Jump.
Neil: So I mentioned how every step of the way I keep bumping into people who seem to be there to take me to the next thing I’m supposed to do. And I went in 2010 to Stockholm to the Science of Consciousness meetings. Only kind of by accident, because a friend of mine, Bill Bushell, who I do complementary medicine stuff with, and at that point was the science guy for Tibet House, the Dalai Lama’s center of action here in New York. He had to give a talk at this conference, and he had not had a lot of experience doing public speaking. He was very nervous and begged me to go with him so he could have a friendly face in the audience. In order to do that, I had to come up with an abstract on something to do with consciousness. I was already doing the Complexity stuff. I had ideas about how Complexity might relate to consciousness. So I went and presented that stuff. In the morning, the guy who would eventually become my collaborator, Menas Kafatos, was giving a plenary session. And he has come for decades now and is one of the first serious physicists who really stated this–
Rick: I’ve interviewed Max twice, by the way, for those who’d like to check him out.
Neil: Pardon?
Rick: I say I’ve interviewed him twice for those who’d like to check him out.
Neil: So he agrees with many of the founders of quantum physics that the correlates between Quantum Physics and things like Vedic understandings of consciousness are not accidental or happenstance. 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. He was giving this plenary session, and I wandered into the plenary session just to see what was going on, because I wasn’t particularly interested in consciousness studies. And he’s talking about how in order to take the Quantum Physics stuff further, we needed a different way of thinking about biology. He starts describing what that would look like. And I’m like, “It’s Complexity Theory. It’s the stuff I’ve been writing about for the last eight years! Why is no one noticing what I’m talking about?” I got very angry and I walked out of his lecture. That afternoon…(a little scientific ego there.) my abstract had been accepted for presentation in a tiny little side session. There were four abstracts being presented. I was the fourth one to present. The only people in the room were the people presenting and their friends. But Menas was the moderator of the session. I presented my ideas in Complexity Theory and consciousness, which was not yet an idealist position. I was sort of a panpsychist, that the way things interact in the world as a complex system gives rise to consciousness. 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.” We started working on this together. We’ve published, I think, six or seven papers together. 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. Materiality is an illusion. And in our academic writing, we refer to this underlying, this ground of being, this godlike thing, as fundamental awareness, or pure awareness. That’s nothing but the awareness of awareness. It’s non-dual, there’s no subject-object split. There’s no way to describe it linguistically, mathematically, through images. Somehow, as it yearns, one might say, to become, to understand what it itself is, it necessarily starts to shimmy into a subject-object separation. And when it does that, the only way you can have separation is if you have dimensionality. dimensionality like space, like time, maybe other dimensions. And so the moment duality arises from non-duality, the moment non-dual pure awareness recognizes itself as subject and object, all of material existence springs into being. With space-time, you have, because of quantum physics, an energy-rich field. That gives rise to all the subatomic particles emanating out of the space-time continuum. Those self-organize into atoms, into molecules, according to the principles of Complexity Theory, which are very simple. They’re summarized in Chapter Three of the book. Out of that comes life. I don’t refer to it as intelligence because part of the problem here is that in English we have so few words for mind, consciousness, awareness, intelligence, sentience. Those are five biggies. None of them are precise in any way. I don’t use intelligence because I feel like people tend to project what their own experience of their own intelligence is, in particular how laden with intention our intelligence is. I don’t know that the pure fundamental non-dual awareness is intentional in that way. I don’t think there’s design happening, but I think there are implications that are unavoidable, and to that pure awareness becoming aware of itself, and those implications are a living conscious universe. Not merely a universe that contains living conscious beings, but a universe that is seamlessly in its entirety living and conscious.
Rick: Yeah, so there’s, I don’t know if this is from Kashmir Shaivism or not, but there’s an idea which is Menas’s field, but there’s, aside from physics, there’s a principle known as self-interacting dynamics of consciousness.
Neil: Right.
Rick: Yeah, go ahead.
Neil: And that’s what he taught me.
Rick: Right.
Neil: So, what we found is between my understandings of Jewish mysticism, particularly Kabbalah taught in the 16th century by Isaac Luria, Lurianic Kabbalah. The principles that come from contemplative practice there about the nature of existence and how existence comes into being, Buddhist metaphysics that derives from contemplative practice. He brought in elements of Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism, and we realized that, number one, they differ because each community of contemplatives is asking a different question. And so you can interrogate the non-dual from a variety of perspectives. You’re going to get a variety of answers because it starts with what’s your question. The question in Buddhism is: how do you end suffering? The question in Jewish mystical practice is: how was the world created, Bereshit, in the beginning, and how does that continue to happen in each single moment, because every moment is a new creation. In Kashmiri Shaivism, the real fundamental question is, how can you possibly go from non-dual awareness to duality? When you line these all up, and this is what I try to do in the next to last chapter of the book, is they fit together into a very nice story, which is what I kind of expressed. The idea of non-dual reality sort of going through, they’re called the tattvas, the first five tattvas in Shaivist practice. First there has to be the urge within non-dual awareness to understand what it is. Then there has to come this moment where there’s a recognition of, well to examine, to answer that question, there has to be an “I” and a “that.” But they’re still the same thing. And then you can flip it. Well, there also has to be a “that” and an “I,” and there’s this tension, which is the questing awareness in each of those moments? And they sort of, there’s a sense in Shaivist thinking about how these are sort of shimmying, shimmering back and forth. Then there’s a further separation, but they’re still unified. “I am that.” There’s an identity. And the flip, “that am I.” And then suddenly, “I and that”, and that’s duality. And that’s where, and this is, I think, something novel that Manas and I are contributing. That moment of separation into I and that, into subject and object, as I said, requires dimensionality. Otherwise, how do you measure separation? The only way one can have separation is to have a dimension in which separation can be measured, whether it’s distance or time or any other number of dimensions. Then you have space-time. And the moment you have space-time, then you have an energy-rich field out of which all existence springs into being. So the act of non-dual fundamental awareness, as expressed in Kashmiri Shaivism gives you a very close map to how existence arises from it as expressed in Luriana Kabbalah, in particular Four Worlds Kabbalah. The moment you have that, if you describe that stuff mathematically, which I’m using Complexity Theory, the book isn’t about math, but the the power of the derives from the mathematics that underlies it then out of understanding the universe as a complex system that arises from pure non-dual awareness in this fashion you wind up getting impermanence, interdependence emptiness of inherent existence, karmic law, all the principles of fundamental Buddhism and uh… it’s a remarkably tidy package and one of the things I’ve been enjoying since the book came out is I don’t have a lot of experience in so many other cultures of spirituality and contemplative practice or other kinds of practices. And to find out what questions they ask and to see their frames of reference mirrored in the same Complexity Theory construct just kind of emphasizes over and over again, I think that science and spirituality are no longer two separate things. we are honest about what contemporary science and philosophy actually are saying, which most people in our culture are not willing to do.
Rick: Right. Yeah. I gave a talk at S.A.N.D. myself on that very topic about how science and spirituality are just two sides of the same coin, really. They each have something to offer the other, and neither can be complete without the other. Hopefully we’re going to be evolving in our knowledge and our approach to knowledge a way that maybe 50, 100 years from now, it’ll seem kind of archaic to think of them, that people thought of them as so separate, and that they’re actually just both necessary, they both provide essential tools, and each has some unique tools that the other doesn’t have. We can talk more about that today. I mean, earlier on, you kind of traced us back from complex structures like the body and cells and molecules and atoms and subatomic particles down to just like, you know, fields of possibility where there’s no materiality. And this whole thing you went through, are we cells, are we a body? You could do the same thing with, are we anything at all, or is there nothing, and go back and forth on that conundrum.
Neil: This was the first paper I wrote with Menas, and we both were feeling our way towards it, But without each other, neither of us had a complete way of explaining what we were intuiting. That goes back to something in quantum physics that comes from Niels Bohr. Anyone who knows anything about quantum physics, even without knowing how it works, knows that there’s something about light that’s both waves and particles. What that means is, depending on the experiment you do to figure out, is light waves or is particles, you get one version or the other and you never see both at the same time. And Bohr called this a complementarity. In my talks and in the book, the simplest way of imagining this, and there’s a picture of it. Oh, there’s the book on my shelf, but I won’t bother opening it. Everyone is familiar with the image of two faces in profile, as silhouettes looking at each other. and the space between the faces looks like a vase. Is it two faces or is it a vase? Well you can really only see one or the other. Some people say that they can see both. I’m trying to dig up, someone told me there was fMRI imaging that showed that in fact all you can do is move that back and forth very quickly. But even if you can do it, I mean the principle is there, that for the most part you focus on one or you focus on the other. And if you say, if you focus on the faces and say it’s two faces, you’re missing the vase. If you focus on the vase, you’re missing the two faces. A complete description is both two faces and a vase. The way a complete description of light is both waves and particles. And you can only approach it from one perspective or another. And your conscious choice of perspective determines what you experience of the world. Bohr believed that complementarity was not just a quantum level phenomenon of wave-particle duality of light. He thought it was a universal principle. He felt so strongly about it that he used the yin-yang symbol as part of his coat of arms to represent complementarity and even put it on his tombstone. My first paper with Menas was that part of what Bohr was intuiting was what Complexity Theory is giving us. There is no right answer to is the body a thing versus a phenomenon arising from smaller things, the cells. It is equally both. They’re a complementarity. Are cells a fundamental unit of existence? Yes, from one perspective, but from the lower down, nanoscopic, molecular perspective, there’s no cell. It’s just molecules and water, etc, etc. So the universe is made of these complementarities, and we can experience the world in very different ways depending on which questions we ask, which choices of observation we make. This is where my work to some extent moves into integrative medicine type stuff, because we might say that, well I can definitely say that when we use the phrase “Western medicine” or “Western biology,” What we mean is the moment people invented microscopes and we could look under the microscope and see the body was made of cells and cells could not be subdivided and they couldn’t be subdivided. We knew because the 1st things we could see were cell membranes and cell walls. They look like empty boxes. And if you chop up an empty box, you don’t get smaller boxes. You just get bits. So, it looked like an empty box. They called it a cell because it looked like the cell of a monk or a prisoner. Four walls, ceiling and floor and no furniture. Years go by and they start to develop special stains to look at details of the cells. These are the same stains I use, I’m pointing at my slides over there on my shelf, that I use to look at tissues today. It’s the same stuff. we filled in the nuclei and the endoplasmic reticulum, all the bits and pieces that fill in the cell. But cell doctrine was born, and that’s Western medicine and Western biology. All living things are made of cells, and all cells derive from prior cells. Well, that means we’re really good if we think of cells as building blocks, and we think of tissues as structures made from them, and it gets us to a nice machine-like view of the human body, and we’re really good at orthopedics. We’re really good at antibiotics, thinking about bacteria out there and ourselves in here, and infections are when the outside gets inside and things like this. But other cultures of health and healing talk about fields of the body. the body. They talk about the body as a coarse body and a subtle body and an energy body. They make diagrams where it looks like Russian dolls inside each other. Western trained people like me go, I’ve dissected the body into its parts. When I open it up, there’s no smaller body inside. It doesn’t exist.
Rick: It’s subtle.
Neil: It’s subtle. Our view that cells are the fundamental unit closes us off from seeing, well the body is a quantum field and when I come into a room with someone else our quantum fields are merging. 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.
Rick: Or a saint.
Neil: Hm?
Rick: Or a saint.
Neil: Or a saint. That’s something different and Western medicine and Western biology can’t describe that. We’re working towards languages where we can and that’s part of my work as well. But that’s the challenge. We have this Western medicine and Western biology has such a rigid view. It’s right up there with the materialist view of existence. That it’s the air we breathe, it’s hard to see past it. But these different perspectives give you also, I mean, the world is a much more interesting place, and health and healing are much more dynamic, interesting processes than we routinely allow it in our culture.
Rick: There’s a difference between subtlety and smallness. One of the ways I understand spiritual awakening is the development of the capacity to incorporate multiple dimensions within one’s awareness or experience, from unmanifest to subtle, relative to gross relative. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be walking around seeing cells and atoms and things like that. That’s smallness. Those are little. It means that there’s a subtle reality to every gross object we perceive, and we ordinarily are blind to that. It’s kind of like we’re looking at the waves on the surface of the ocean without seeing what’s deeper down, but people have gained throughout history the ability to open consciously to those subtler realms and to the absolute field that underlies them all and to recognize that absolute field as one’s own self. That to me is a good way of defining what awakening or enlightenment is. Some people poo-poo the idea of subtle phenomenon such as angels or fairies or, you know, different things like that. Other people actually experience them. And you know, they could be…
Neil: Well, that’s where my shamanic stuff, like…
Rick: Yeah, that’s where that comes in. and you know they can be dismissed as hallucinations or or whatever but uh… throughout history and every concept
Rick: Except when i mean this is my next book it’s actually the book i wanted to write but people were like you can write that book to you right the complexity my mother’s last uh… eight years of her life she lost her short-term memory, probably some small strokes we don’t really know, but and she needed twenty four-hour home care you know she was a risk of leaving the stove on when she made a cup of tea for herself, things like that. During that time, dead people started showing up. Quite often, and then they started bringing other dead people to meet her and then spirit guides from the universe start showing up. My favorite bit was, at some point, like six years into this, when it got to the point whenever I visited her, I would say, “Any visitors?” And since she very rarely had a physical visitor other than her home care attendants, we knew what I was asking. And she would tell me who had stopped by, or she wouldn’t want to tell me. Then one day I said, “You know, you haven’t mentioned any visitors lately.” She said, “Oh, they were boring me. I told them to stop coming. There will be plenty of time for them later.”
Rick: That’s funny.
Neil: Then she never saw another ghost as far as I know. But she also had direct experiences of quantum level reality and Dogen talks about this, and in Tibetan practice, Bill Bushell, whom I mentioned earlier that I went to the first consciousness meeting with, one of his interests is how Tibetan meditators can train themselves. This has now been verified through scientific lab examination, the human retina can see down to a single photon. And Tibetan monks train themselves to see a single photon. So it’s possible for the human eye, the human ear, the human sense of touch to discriminate the actual fine, tiny, the small side of things. That’s available to us as well.
Rick: Patanjali talks about that in the Yoga Sutras.
Neil: Yeah, yeah, no, exactly, exactly. So that happens too. I walked in on my mom. She was always smiling in these years. She was very anxious growing up, when I was growing up. Probably when she was too. At some point I said to her, you’re always smiling now, even when you’re sleeping. How do you stay so happy? She said, “Well, I no longer really worry about the future. And I can’t remember the past. So all I have is the now. When you live in the now, you’re happy.”
Rick: That’s great. Yeah, so I walked in on her one day.
Neil: And she’s lying in bed, wide awake, but just looking at the empty ceiling, empty to me. I said, “What you looking at?” She said, “Space.” I said, “What do you see?” She said, “Well, it’s not anything like I thought it was.” “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, it’s in tiny little pieces.” And then she made this gesture like she’s chopping carrots. I said, “What’s that like?” She says, “It’s so beautiful. “I wish you and Mark and the kids,” (my husband and my niece and nephew), “I wish you could see it like I do. It’s just so beautiful.” And then she paused and she said, “And time is like that too. It’s not smooth. It’s in tiny little pieces.”
Rick: That’s interesting. I’ve heard other people say that.
Neil: Who are you? And what did you do with my mother? So I think everything you said is absolutely true, but I think potentially, and it’s a degree of focus and concentration and training, if the question you ask is, what is the true structure of the nature of reality, then you might perceive those quantum structures. If your question is, what is the true nature of conscious reality, then probably the first thing you’re going to bump into is the underlying sea of consciousness. It’s all, there are no separations. If you perceive one theoretically, ultimately, you’ll be perceiving the whole thing. When I think of the word enlightenment, or you know, if someone had a Kensho in Japanese Zen terms, or an enlightenment experience, or awakening experience, to me what I’ve come to think about that, not so much about what you discover, but it’s that you have that moment when you see the two faces and then suddenly you see the vase. Someone asked me in a yoga group I was giving this talk to, they said, “What’s enlightenment like?” I know. I said, you know, I had used a video, as I used to do in some versions of the talk, of a murmuration of starlings. If you’ve ever actually been present for starlings, you may first just hear this sound coming from up there and you look up and there’s this thing in the sky and then there’s this moment you realize, “Oh, no, it’s starlings.” It’s an extraordinary moment. There’s a joy to it and an excitement to it. That to me is an enlightenment experience. You saw reality this way, you saw it this way. The most extraordinary enlightenment experiences are you see the world of everyday reality, samsara, and then suddenly you see its non-dual pure awareness aspect, and they aren’t two. It’s just, do you see it this way or do you see it this way? I think in Zen practice, the question, the aim, I think Buddhist practice, the question, the aim, how do you alleviate suffering is you learn to flexibly move between those views. We’re separate. I hurt. I’m alone. We are seamlessly one whole thing within which everything is just as it should be. I’m separate. I’m alone. I hurt.
Rick: Yeah. My sense is that it’s not necessarily, it’s not strictly either/or.
Neil: It can’t be. It’s both and.
Rick: So as you go along, it’s more and more blended, both/and. And that it may be that, you know, like a camera, like my camera right now, so I’m in focus and the background is a little bit fuzzy, but then the camera could be adjusted so that I’m a little fuzzy and the background is clear. I think that’s the way it works. As one goes along, there’s eventually always this continuum of pure awareness or self-realization or whatever you want to call it, in the midst of whatever else is going on.
Neil: Right. And you’re just able to do it that much more flexibly and freely. You know, the freedom, when people talk about in Zen terms, that’s one of my primary practices, so it’s often what comes to my mind. People talk about the freedom of a Zen master, of a Zen adept. The freedom is the freedom to move back and forth.
Rick: And again, to have both there all the time. Sometimes the fact that it’s always there might not be obvious. If you could sort of say that pure awareness is like a tone, the tone is always going, after a while you wouldn’t be paying so much attention to it, you’d be doing this or that, but any time you want to check, oh yeah, the tone is still there. In my experience, like sometimes if I injure myself, like I fall off my bicycle or something like that. The contrast of that experience makes it, you know, vividly evident that there’s something that’s not affected by that and that something is always there and it just, you know, you don’t have to pay attention to it as a thing because it isn’t one, but it’s just this, like the screen of a movie, you know, like they always use that analogy. The screen is always there no matter what you play on it. Awakening is more like a state where you actually see the screen and watch the movie at the same time. The movie no longer overshadows the screen.
Neil: And not get caught by either.
Rick: Right.
Neil: Oh, this isn’t real. I’m not going to react emotionally what’s going on because I know it’s just light on a screen.
Rick: Right.
Neil: Yeah, that’s true. But on the other hand, oh my God, what a story.
Rick: You want to enjoy the movie, you paid for it.
Neil: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the task, right?
Rick: How would you explain, I have a friendly debate going with a friend and I have had it with other friends about whether consciousness is just a product of the brain or whether it’s fundamental as Menas and others have said, and you, and everything arises from it. I’m hard pressed to present him with a convincing argument or anything that could be accepted widely as proof. It’s more like you just have to choose your philosophical stance, but how do these two camps actually achieve some kind of common understanding?
Neil: Yeah. Well, first off, you have to be willing to listen to each other.
Rick: Yeah, we do that.
Neil: Well, no, we don’t.
Rick: My friend and I.
Neil: Oh, you and your friend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that’s step one, and we’re not very good at that. Personally, I think that every approach to panpsychist and materialist notions of the brain have their value and validity and truth and they are in complementarity with the idealist view that everything comes out of mind. I think you need perspectives from all three to really understand what’s going on. In the book I talk about how, but I would turn that on its head, some people in our culture, the big evidence that people have for the brain makes our minds, and that’s the materialist view, our brains make our minds, and so when you’re dead and your brain dies, then your mind dies and you cease to exist. Is that however you measure what’s going on in the mind, as we get better, in the brain, we get better and better at looking at in living brains what’s happening at the fine anatomic and signaling levels electronically, metabolically, anatomically. We see correlates of all our conscious experiences. And so for most people in our culture, that’s very compelling to say well these brain activities correlate with these experiences in our minds, therefore one is the cause for the other. But that’s a logical fallacy. I know that every summer I will see lots of people wearing sunglasses and I will see lots of people eating ice cream and often they overlap. And in fact, mostly they overlap. If they’re outside eating ice cream, they have sunglasses on. So I might say that wearing sunglasses leads to eating ice cream. No, the bright light and the heat of summer leads to both. So that would be and this is why there is no cognitive neuroscientist, there is no neurologist, there is no psychiatrist on the planet who can avoid saying this brain activity is a neural correlate of this conscious experience because there’s no proof of causation and no matter how hard they try they can’t ever find proof of causation. Now it may mean that our science is inadequate. But another possibility is that these are all reflections of the mechanism whereby our human brains sample the infinity of non-dual awareness and turn it into something we can have and be aware of as our own human minds. And the model I use for this in the book is a radio. A radio is not taking music out of the air and letting us listen to it. It’s sampling the infinite radio waves, some of which are playing Beatles music, are created by the Beatles having made some music, sampling it and putting it through a speaker so we hear it as Beatles. We don’t expect to open the radio and see the Beatles playing there. We also know that we could build a different transducer, that a radio transduces radio waves into sound, but we also know everyone got very excited when we first got laptops. Well, when we first got computers. You could put music on your screen and then you can have a light show on your screen going with the music. That was like, you know, you and I are old enough to remember when that was exciting. That’s because it would transduce it into light. You could transduce it into anything. So what I would say is a bee’s brain transduces universal consciousness into the mind of the bee, which is very different than what a human brain does. And what we’re examining when we do fMRIs and EEGs and make all these correlations, that’s saying something about the mechanisms whereby transduction happens. So I’m not saying that all that brain science isn’t valid, it’s just being interpreted with this bias that’s leaving everyone sort of empty-handed. What’s the term for that empty-handedness? This is chapter 10 in the book, I think, is what David Chalmers philosopher called the hard problem of consciousness. That no matter how well we understand the mechanisms whereby the brain signals, we have not found anything to explain the experience of consciousness itself. So I got this one from Deepak Chopra, which some people will yell at me for saying I got something from Deepak, but I really like Deepak. We get along in a whole bunch of ways and there’s some areas where we disagree. But he’s got a real gift for expressing things clearly. Here’s a green pen. Now I’m looking at the green pen and I know that there are photons bouncing off the pen. They reach my retina which detects them, creates a chemical signal that goes back along my optic nerve into my visual cortex and I see green. You saw green when I held it up. Now if you close your eyes and I say, “Imagine a green pen,” you don’t have all of that happening. You have your visual cortex lighting up and now we’ve gotten so good at that we can actually measure what’s going on the visual cortex and say, “Oh, I think you’re seeing…” It’s as good as, “Oh look, they’re looking at a fuzzy green vertical line.” Soon they’ll be able to say, “Oh, you’re looking at a pen.” But where is that green pen? Where is the experience of that green pen? It doesn’t have a location. In fact, when you close your eyes, where, you know, is it in your brain? Is it in your skull? Is it in the room? There’s no way anybody has been able to get at the nature of that actual experience. We can describe everything else, but we can’t experience, we can’t understand so far the nature of the experience itself. If you say that you can, we just haven’t gotten there yet, then it leaves you kind of stuck for what to do when the human mind is contemplating itself, then you can’t answer it as a purely scientific question because the mind contemplating itself, there’s no subject-object split. It’s the self contemplating the self. When we do that, what do we find? We find things like a continuum of non-dual consciousness that underlies everything, the way the ocean underlies those waves.
Rick: Well, I’m not sure we find that. I mean, I’m totally with you. We’re in the same boat philosophically…
Neil: I forgot we’re trying to convince your friend. Yes, you know, but it comes down to is he’s got to explain, it’s on him to explain the hard nature of consciousness I have the hard problem of consciousness because if he’s unable to do that Then how do you explain anything about the experiences of people in contemplative practice? There’s a whole portion of human experience that he has no approach for and says, “I won’t have an approach for it because those things can’t be.”
Rick: Yeah, that’s part of it. You’ve heard the term “promissory materialism” that, okay, we haven’t figured it out yet, but we’re going to figure it out, so just stay tuned. I use arguments such as, well, near-death experiences. People have these [experiences], they’re under anesthesia, they see a red sneaker on the roof of the hospital. The janitor goes up and yes, it’s there. Or they see their uncle buying a Snickers bar in the waiting room down the hall, and sure enough, he bought a Snickers bar. So that would at least, if you believe that those things really happened, and I’m afraid my friend is skeptical because they’re anecdotal, but then that would at least suggest that…
Neil: Every bit of data starts as an anecdote until you aggregate them into a mass of data.
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: Any single data point is an anecdote.
Rick: But there’s tons of data. If you look at all the near-death experiences and all the other stuff that people have been experiencing.
Neil: This is what happened with my mom. You know, I was wondering, is she having delusions or whatever? They were happy delusions, so let her have them. You know, I wasn’t going to argue that she wasn’t being visited by people she cared about. Although then people started visiting who annoyed her. That’s when she said stop. But I went to visit her one day and someone had been there. one of her ghostly friends had been there, the rabbi I grew up with actually, who had been kind of boring her. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Was he annoying?” She said, “Well, he didn’t stick around long because his sister was coming and he had to go welcome.” And I thought, “Well, that’s odd,” because I knew his sister very well too, and she would be 102 today. So I don’t know what that’s about. Then I go home and I get a phone call from someone from my hometown that his sister died that day at 102 years old.
Rick: Interesting. Yeah, there you go.
Neil: My mother wasn’t reading the obituaries. She wasn’t reading anything. But the other problem for your friend is the insistence that he probably would say, I’m assuming it’s a he, I think I heard.
Rick: It’s a he. His name is Curtis.
Neil: Yeah, okay. That Curtis would say, I want to rely on empirical science and formal mathematics and logic. Those are the ways I understand the world and you have to explain what you’re talking about through those ways and those will give me a complete view of the world and I don’t think those ways will confirm anything you’re talking [about]. That’s the typical argument from so and I used to be that, you know, even though I had these spiritual ideas because I didn’t worry about whether they matched or not. The problems with that are number one: quantum physics, the conscious observation of a quantum event changes the nature of the event. Do you see light as waves or particles? Do they behave like waves or particles? This is what made Einstein crazy, and he never found a way around it, and every objection he had turned into something that could win the Nobel Prize, like entanglement and non-locality.
Rick: In other words, the rebuttals of his objections turned into Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries.
Neil: Yeah. Right. And so the result of quantum physics is that at some very fundamental level to the functioning of the universe, there is no… Empirical science means you separate the object of study from the subject who’s studying it. I’m an objective scientist. I look at things under the microscope. The slide is there and I’m here. But at the quantum scale, and it turns out that bleeds up into everyday reality, but at the quantum scale, you can’t separate subject and object. They are intimately related. So empirical science cannot live up to its own terms. This is Chapter 11 of the book, I think. Gödel: Limits of Formal Logic is the 11th.
Neil: Okay, then this is probably 10.
Rick: So the circle is down. I want to talk to you about both those things.
Neil: Okay, sure. Well, so the problem with mathematics, and you brought this up at the very beginning, you said there’s this question whether mathematics is something out there that humans discover, or did we invent it? We invented numbers because we wanted to count bushels of wheat or stars in the sky, and so we created numbers and then it turns out we can play with them and all these wonderful things happen, but we invented them. The view that mathematics is out there to be discovered. They aren’t something we create, is referred to as mathematical Platonism. Plato described an ideal world beyond our reality, which our reality is a dim reflection. Kurt Gödel, who’s widely recognized as the greatest mathematician, logician in history, was a member of the Vienna Circle, with the history of which I cover, who are probably the sharpest thinkers in the 20th century, putting forth this view that empirical science and formal logic were the ultimate arbiters of understanding reality. And anything that couldn’t be explained through those two things was metaphysics and dismissible. Not even worth talking. He was a member of that group. He was invited in, I think, when he was 21, because he was so brilliant. And one of his primary mentors in Vienna was a founding member of the group and invited him in. He sat quietly in the back, never saying very much. But what he was thinking the whole time was, the Vienna Circle, as well as all the other logicians and mathematicians of the day, were looking for ways to prove mathematics, that mathematics was a complete structure that was self-consistent and could explain everything. Explaining everything meant it was complete and that it was inherently consistent would mean that it’s completely solid and dependable as a reflection of the true nature of reality. The power of that would be, since you can express scientific stuff through mathematics even more so, math and science become the ultimate arbiters of what existence is. But his instinct that Plato was right, that mathematics was out there to be discovered, not something we invented. The way to prove that that was the case was to prove that mathematics could not be both complete and consistent. The mathematicians of the day said it has to be both complete and consistent and our mission is to prove that they are the case and everyone believed they would one day prove that both things were true and if they did then mathematics would be able to explain everything consistently. What he came up with is called Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, and it’s a lot to go into. I can’t unpack the whole thing here, but basically what he demonstrated in a mathematically rigorous proof, that’s just kind of remarkably creative, is that if there is a system of mathematics that is complete, meaning it describes everything, it will necessarily contradict itself. And if it contradicts itself, you can build a proof out of it to say anything, in which case you’re proving nothing at all. So if you have a complete system of mathematics, it will be inconsistent and therefore not explain anything. If you make it consistent, and this was the genius thing, how we figured out how to demonstrate this. If you make a system completely consistent, and he’s talking about arithmetic, systems that contain arithmetic. If you make it completely consistent, there will always be a statement that is known to be true but can’t be proven to be true from within the system. So you can have statements that are provable and you can prove them to be true or you can have statements that you know are true but you can’t prove them. How do you know they’re true? Intuition. Well what’s intuition reaching at? Intuition is reaching at the world of mathematics that’s beyond our tool making. The mathematics that’s out there for us to discover, that has its own truths independent of our human abilities to prove them. And so, mathematics doesn’t do it and empirical science doesn’t do it. Both of them, the one eliminates at its finest approach, quantum physics, the most successful theory ever made, as people tout it and no one argues with that, says that its most fundamental base that the subject and object cannot remain separate. In mathematics, you cannot have a description that is both complete and consistent. So that fails too. The result is intuition comes back in, metaphysics comes back in, and it’s kind of unavoidable. If you talk to mathematicians today, there is no argument about this. Gödel shut the door. The one other thing that was important was something called decidability. Could a system, could you decide that a system, whether you can prove it’s complete or consistent, can you prove that even if you can’t answer those questions, you can prove that you could answer them theoretically. The Turing machine that everyone touts, Alan Turing, his universal Turing machine, which was a hypothetical model he came up with that eventually gave birth to what we know as the modern computer, actually, did for decidability what Gödel had done for completeness and consistency. And Gödel even said that his was kind of the first step and Turing finished it. So, the [idea] that, you know, not only do we have empirical science and formal logic and mathematics that we rely on to tell us in the modern age and in Western life, the nature of everything, it turns out those are sand, they’re not cement that that we’re standing on. But you throw into that computer science, which our whole world depends on, and it turns out that’s deriving from the third piece that wipes out that possibility of knowing. That’s a lot to dig into to convince yourself that, “Oh, I can’t be sure that the brain makes mind.” But Western science is a big thing. If you can’t take in the whole of it, and that’s kind of the stupid task I set for myself with the book, is can I do that in 172 pages with some pictures? If you’re missing a piece of that, then you’re actually just blowing bubbles. If your friend doesn’t have an answer…there are people, if you look on Goodreads, there are a lot of people who hate me on Goodreads, right? Though they get very personal about it. My favorite is someone wrote a very long review and then republished it four months later. I guess they were worried that it was getting missed, so they reposted it. The first line was, “This book is pap.” And the last line was, “This book makes Jonathan Livingston Seagull look like a significant spiritual text.” For those of us who are old enough to remember Jonathan Livingston Seagull…
Rick: Oh yeah, I love that book.
Neil: But when people actually try to critique me in these sorts of comments, what they critique is my view of quantum physics. Okay, that view of quantum physics, what’s referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation is debatable in some fashion, but you can’t dismiss it, can’t be dismissed. I would rather align myself with the founders and folks like Menas, who are looking at it in an open, not biased, not rigid way, dogmatic way. No one ever critiques me on the Gödel situation. And the Gödel situation is actually the most fundamental argument, because that’s the one that says the best arguments we have for science and mathematics to describe the world completely, he demolished that. They had no answer for it and they have no answer for it. And the mathematics world, they get that. They don’t argue with it. It’s not like, well, what’s your interpretation of quantum mechanics? You have a different interpretation of quantum mechanics than I do. There is no other interpretation of Gödel and of Turing’s work.
Rick: So, if people really understood Gödel and Turing, and I never really learned much about them until I read your book, but if they really understood them, would they have to agree that subjective or mystical exploration is a necessary complement to empirical science, and without those inner technologies of consciousness, we’ll never have a complete picture of reality? Would that have to be their conclusion if they really understood what those guys were saying?
Neil: That is the implication. Gödel himself said it in a letter to his mother, which I quote in the book. I can’t remember the exact quote, I haven’t memorized it, but it’s something along the lines of, “I have no doubt that this will be useful for people who want to talk about religion.”
Rick: Interesting. Then, by the same token, quantum mechanics over 100 years ago has established that consciousness and the material world are very much intertwined in some significant way, but people have conveniently ignored that finding for over common knowledge, but so they’re ignoring both. If they weren’t, if they really dug into it and had the education to understand these things, would they necessarily have to come around to concurring with the mystics? Has that actually happened, or are there quantum physicists and people who understand Gödel who are still materialists?
Neil: Oh, sure! But you know, there are people who are willfully delusional or in denial all over the place. It’s not like this is foreign to human capacity. I know lots of quantum physicists that, well, should I name names?
Rick: Sure, why not?
Rick: You won’t get sued.
Neil: No, this was real. So I was invited into a room at Disney of all places, and I got to hang out for a day with Brian Greene.
Rick: Oh, nice.
Neil: Now, he’s a string theorist. I mean, really, you’re going to talk about materiality when you spend your time as a string theorist and you’re going to say, “No, the world is material.” But you’re talking about vibrating strings that are mathematical constructs that no one can test? Really? When I talked about my views of things, oh, he just sort of sneered.
Rick: Yeah, John Carroll does the same thing.
Neil: Pardon?
Rick: John Carroll does the same thing. I heard him in the comments.
Neil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same thing.
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: Yeah. It’s like, well, you want to believe what you believe. I didn’t start with, I should have started as an idealist given all the other experiences, spiritual experiences I’ve had or witnessed in my life. You’d think I’d have gone right there. But part of me was no, got to be careful about this. And it was Menas…just slowly. The results of our scholarship, the record of our scholarship is how we sort of tugged at this piece by piece by piece until finally, yeah, there’s no other consistent view that has a chance of explaining everything, including the hardest problem of all, which is the hard problem of consciousness. Because saying the world is mind is saying that the world is nothing but experience. You don’t have to explain what an experience is and how an experience comes into existence if all existence is nothing but experience within the big C consciousness of pure awareness.
Rick: What do you think?
Neil: It has amazing capacity for explanation just from the standpoint of scientific rigor. If there’s a theory that you can’t disprove but has a lot of explanatory potential, you shouldn’t just reject it out of hand. But that’s what our culture does.
Rick: Why do you think that these people are so stubborn about shifting paradigms? I’ll give you my quick take on it, and then hear yours. It necessitates their… I interviewed a guy named Mark Gober, who also spoke at S.A.N.D. He wrote a book called “The End to Upside Down Thinking,” and basically what we’ve been talking about, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, everything arises from consciousness. He gave all kinds of nice arguments of how to flip that paradigm. But I don’t know, it’s like if you accept that consciousness is fundamental, and if you accept that there’s some kind of, well you didn’t want to use the word intelligence earlier, but some kind of orderliness within the functioning of consciousness that gives rise to this incredibly complex, beautiful universe, then you’re kind of, you’re beginning to accept that there’s some kind of a God notion. You know, there’s some kind of, which of course makes materialists very uncomfortable.
Neil: Yeah. A part of me responds to that with, “Oh, the God word. That’s an English word.”
Rick: Well, yeah, so you got to use a word. I mean…
Neil: I have Hebrew as an option, too.
Rick: Yeah, you can leave [a letter] out and just say G underscore D.
Neil: You know, I think that word is…I don’t want to spend time arguing that turf because that’s just an English word that we label something with. I understand the import of, how important it is for some people, particularly in our culture. I will choose to think in terms of a God figure when I’m doing a devotional practice, like a Jewish prayer in a synagogue, and like things. So it’s a useful thing, but…
Rick: Let me put it this way, let me interrupt you here. You spend your days looking through a microscope at cells, and what you’re seeing is something incredibly complex and marvelous. I’ve heard it said that a typical cell is as complex as the city of Tokyo. I can’t imagine that you regard a cell as you’re looking at it as some kind of accident that just somehow the billiard balls all hit each other in such a way as to form such a structure. There’s got to be some organizing principle.
Neil: Yeah, and these are the rules of Complexity.
Rick: But are they unconscious? Are they dumb?
Neil: Yeah, I think you can program a computer, if you program virtual ants, they will give rise to a virtual ant colony, if you understood the rules of ant interactions well enough.
Rick: Yeah, you told me about that guy…
Neil: You don’t need top-down design.
Rick: Right. There is an element of top-down design in things, but this is where another term that I explore in the book is useful, instead of talking about hierarchies, which we often think of, and even, you know, illustrating what I mean, we go from quantum foam to quantum particles, atoms to molecules, and we’re thinking in this hierarchy from bottom to top, but it’s not that. All of these levels exist simultaneously in what Arthur Koestler referred to as a “holarchy.” It was Lynn Margulis who gave me this word the first time. So when we think of the coarse body, the subtle body, and the energy body, we aren’t thinking that there are three separate bodies that are nested within each other. We’re talking about the same human body that we’re choosing to interact with at the western medical level, at the biomagnetic level, at the level of consciousness. But it’s all the same body. So where was I going?
Rick: Okay, we’re talking about, you were talking about how computers can self-organize. Like you were talking about the guy in Boston.
Neil: So things that look like they’re planned top-down. This is the fundamental hallmark of complex systems, is they look like someone planned them but no one planned them. Sorry, I forgot to say that.
Rick: No one in terms of some isolated, discrete individual, but how about there being… Well, yeah, I mean, this is an important point, because I have always thought that, you know, listening to people like Robert Lanza, there’s got to be some kind of organizing intelligence, intrinsic and fundamental to the universe that is self-interacting consciousness that somehow gives rise to all these orderly laws of nature that structures all the complexity. You said earlier that it didn’t have a goal or an agenda, but I would say that its agenda is to create increasingly complex forms through which it can actually experience its own creation as a living reality.
Neil: I think the volition is…we are sense organs whereby the universe can perceive itself. But I don’t think it has preferences beyond that.
Rick: But why is it getting increasingly sophisticated as the universe evolves? This is again the nature of, we’d have to dig into those four rules, why complex systems lead to bigger things, to more complex things, to more complex things. So how is it that cells self-organize into bodies, bodies self-organize into communities, molecules self-organize into cells, and it’s the same mathematics that describes all of that. Doesn’t matter what size you’re talking about. The four ways that happens: number one is it doesn’t happen if you’ve got three ants, you don’t get a colony. If you have 25 ants, you get a colony, and if you buy one of those ant farms and watch it for a while, they dig tunnels, they make food lines, and they have a cemetery. But by the time they get down to a handful of ants, they’re no longer working with each other. If you get 250 ants, you get more complexity, and it’s not only the number of ants, of ants but the greater diversity of interaction. And if you have 25,000 ants, even more complexity. In human terms, a village is not a city, is not a megalopolis. But interestingly, the same computational ways of describing this through complexity, to some extent through chaos, apply no matter what you’re talking [about]. So that’s rule number one. The more diversity and the more members of a system you have, the greater complexity that can occur. The second is that there are feedbacks within the system that keep things within a healthy homeostatic sort of range. So like your body temperature never gets too hot, doesn’t get too cold. So think of an air conditioner that as a room gets warmer the air conditioner turns on at a set point, and as the room gets colder the air conditioner turns off. That’s a negative feedback loop keeping things in an oscillating, comfortable, healthy realm. That’s the realm in which creativity and self-sustaining functioning of a complex system, whether it’s a colony or a city or an organ, takes place. Now, you can have positive feedback loops, and negative and positive don’t mean good and bad. Negative means, you know, there’s sort of limits being placed on it. A positive feedback loop would be like you have a heater in a room and the hotter the room gets, the higher the temperature, the more the heater turns on, so the room gets hotter and hotter and hotter. You can have positive feedback loops in living systems, think about when we have a fever. You need to metabolically rev up your immune system, so you get a fever, helps you fight off the infection, but then the negative feedback loops come in to bring your temperature down to that comfortable range. If you have an overabundance of positive feedback loops. You can get self-organizing larger scale structures, but instead of being creative and adaptive the way a complex living system is, they’re energy expending and self-wasting. So in terms of cells and tissues, that’s what cancer is. You’ve taken off all the inhibitions on how cells behave and they expand very rapidly, but then you eat up all the energy in the system and the cancer dies and you die. Economic bubbles are the same thing. Too little regulation in an economy, you get positive feedback loops, you get a bubble and that collapses. So there has to be a balance and the overabundance of negative feedback loops keeping things sort of comfortable.
Rick: Sounds like climate change is a positive feedback loop because we’re reaching tipping points and the methane is being released and so on and so forth. It’ll be interesting to see whether Gaia as an entity can kick in with some negative feedback loops to counteract it.
Neil: Well, one way to do that might be Gaia kicking in with enough diseases that we all die. Yeah, and that eliminates humans. Things will adjust.
Rick: That’s true.
Neil: You know, are we the cancer? You have to ask. The third thing is that things really happen at the bottom, at the interactions at the local level. There are influences that are top-down, but the majority of stuff that’s happening is happening at the local level. There’s no ant in the colony trying to decide where there needs to be a food line. There’s no body in the cell determining, and there’s no organ in the cell that’s determining, are you hungry? Are you afraid? Are you horny? Are you sleepy? It arises out of everything happening at the local level. And the fourth thing, and this is the most important, there’s always some low-level randomness in the system. This is where the magic really happens. So if you have too much randomness in the system, ants won’t organize into a colony, and humans won’t organize into a functioning society. And cells, you’ll get cancer. If there’s too little randomness in the system, then if the food supply runs out in the ant colony, the ants aren’t going to be able to find another way to find the food because it’s the random ants wandering around, not part of the food line, who are likely to bump into, “Oh, there’s another sugar cube over here.” Or in human societies, the scientist or the poet or the musician who’s exploring the nature of their reality a little differently than everyone else and turns out they discover, you know, they’re Charlie Chaplin and the world changes. So too little randomness, you get no ability to change and if the environment changes the system will collapse and die. If there’s too much randomness you get no self-organization, you get no larger scale emergent structures that look like they’re planned, you don’t get food lines, you don’t get, you know, in New York, it’s not so true anymore but 6th Street used to be where the Indian restaurants went. That’s not because someone planned Indian restaurants for Sixth Street. It happened that the way the Indian restaurants were competing with each other, they created this niche where their competition created more business for everybody. There’s this low-level randomness in the system. Stuart Kauffman, who’s one of the founders of Complexity Theory and a friend and a mentor of mine, talks about this low-level randomness as creating in the next moment the adjacent possibles of what could happen for the complex system, the living being. The next moment isn’t an infinite array of anything can happen. It’s a constrained amount of possibilities and you can’t tell which of these is going to move forward to become the reality of the next moment. Those adjacent possibles are what allow living things to explore the possibility of changing and responding and adapting to a changing environment. That’s where the creativity of living things happens. That’s where evolution happens. That’s where you go from simple molecules to becoming cells, to becoming multicellular organisms, to becoming ecosystems like Gaia. That’s where the universe starts as hydrogen and then you get a universe. So, complexity through these four principles, and these are the four principles that you can use to create computational models, using computers to design a system and then set it running to see what happens. This sort of gives you everything. It’s what gives you what you need to go from quantum physics to the scale of relativity. So there’s the appearance of determinism and intelligent design everywhere you look. But had there been, you know, had this adjacent possible become relevant instead of this one, there’d be a whole other reality here that would also look intelligently designed. And yet it’s completely different. I don’t think the universe, I don’t think the fundamental awareness that underlies everything is particularly wedded to any particular outcome, which is really hard for us as humans who feel that we are living, self-sustaining beings to deal with. But maybe Gaia’s answer is to get rid of the humans.
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: We’re no longer the pinnacle of anything when you look at this view, which is an area I disagree with Deepak about.
Rick: Incidentally, I co-taught the course which Deepak learned to meditate originally back in like 1979 or something.
Neil: Oh wow, that’s so cool.
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: So you’re to blame.
Rick: I’m to blame, yep. Anyway, maybe, like can I use the word God just for simplicity’s sake? Maybe the…
Neil: Sure, sure. I’ll let you have it. Instead of saying the sort of all-pervading universal intelligence, the A-U-I, maybe it’s a jazz musician. Maybe it’s a maverick. Maybe it is Charlie Chaplin, it is Albert Einstein. It thinks outside the box, and maybe there are parallel universes which, like you say, there are other adjacent possibles in play and those behave quite differently. People there have three eyes or whatever. But couldn’t it be that these four principles you outlined and any other fundamental principles that determine how the universe functions are just attributes? I think Kashmir Shaivism might say this, of this fundamental intelligence. That they would show up even in a computer game because they are just intrinsic to the way everything functions. They’re that fundamental.
Neil: Right, but I think these rules are what’s fundamental. And I don’t think…
Rick: But why are there rules? Why is there anything?
Neil: 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. Yeah the universe. These are not rules. This is the way it happens Yes, when you have these you can have elements of these in any group of interacting individuals But when you do they do not necessarily turn into living things.
Rick: Mm-hmm.
Neil: They do not necessarily creatively adapt so…
Rick: But under the right conditions, they will.
Neil: Right, right. So why is it on this planet we do, but Mars, no?
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: Mars maybe had been living, we don’t know. But for the moment, it seems pretty inert.
Rick: Sure.
Neil: Jupiter seems pretty inert. That’s because the stuff that makes it up didn’t fulfill all those criteria.
Rick: Yes, but the ancient cultures and perhaps the shamanic traditions that you’ve been studying would say that in a sense, Jupiter and Mars and the Sun itself are living beings.
Neil: I would certainly go there, but I wasn’t on that path.
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: In that sentence, I wasn’t on that path. But yes, I would say that that’s probably true too.
Rick: Right. And they’re living beings in the sense that they, like all things, have a subtle dimension in addition to the gross dimension. And even though the Sun is a thermonuclear furnace, awareness on a subtle level, it could be a conscious entity of some sort.
Neil: Well, on a subtle level, there’s nothing but consciousness, so of course…
Rick: Well, if you go that far, yeah.
Neil: …conscious and alive.
Rick: But there are intermediate levels. There’s…
Neil: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: …adi bhuta, adi daiva, and adi atma in Hinduism.
Neil: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Adi-daiva is the level of the Devas, the impulses of intelligence.
Neil: You know, again, this is sort of the perspective, this is the complementarity issue. So here I am, this is me, I’m thirsty, I pick up a cup that’s over here, I drink the water, swallow it, it becomes part of my system, etc. And that’s true, but from a complexity theory, modern scientific, quantum, mathematical, western philosophy point of view, just as true, the universe is one seamless whole, and this is the universe drinking itself.
Rick: Right. And on another level, nothing’s happening at all, it just appears to be.
Neil: Exactly. So, is Jupiter inert or conscious? Etc. etc. And yes, there are levels, but to some extent when we talk about levels, are we really talking about our human capacity to perceive them?
Rick: Sure. Because from the fundamental awareness level, I don’t think there’s any delusions within the fundamental awareness as to what the Sun is and what Jupiter is. I think when we see levels, we’re seeing it from a human perspective that’s limited.
Rick: Yeah, blind men and the elephant. I mean, the elephant is what it is. The blind men each have a different interpretation. So, and nature or the universe is not dependent upon our capabilities in order to be what it is.
Neil: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think, to some extent, our conversation is a good example of how hard it is to talk about these things, because we can only speak about it using language, you and me. Neither of us, I don’t think you’re a really sophisticated mathematician.
Rick: I’m not. Not in the least.
Neil: So, that language isn’t available to us. You might be a really remarkable poet, in which case, maybe you can use language to get closer.
Rick: Not that either.
Neil: So, we’re left with the words at hand, and English is really bad for talking about this stuff. Particularly modern English, because it really exploded, you know, post-Newton industrially, you know, etc. So, I think the only points where we’re sort of doing this [gesture of back and forth] is because our language is so limited. And to some extent, that issue of, you know, you come at all of this from your life experience, that’s your perspective, and I’m coming at it from mine, so it’s like the the two faces in the vase. It’s the body cells or is it molecules or is it atoms? We each have our… [experience] coming in. To me, the interesting thing is having these conversations across people’s experiences and there’s always, it’s always humbling. No matter, you know, growing up as… having gone to medical school, the impulse to be sure of myself is sort of beaten into me. You know, I thought I had to learn to have that kind of intellectual pride. Oh, nothing pulls it out from under you. Like being able to talk to people who have these experiences and compare them and compare notes.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I hope I’m not giving you the impression that I’m disagreeing with you.
Neil: No, no, no, no, no, no. But there are moments where we’re like, we’re sort of…
Rick: Yeah, I’m trying to make it as… I mean, these are kind of questions that like you with “Am I a cells or am I a body?” I chew on these thoughts. I’ve been chewing on them for decades.
Neil: Yeah.
Rick: And so I like to bounce them off people and see if we can…
Neil: Sure, sure, sure, sure.
Rick: Yeah. A couple of questions came in. Let me get them before we run out of time. This is from someone named Franz Bars in Dead Man’s Flats, Alberta, Canada.
Neil: Hi Franz, you were there first.
Rick: Yeah. She, she or he, had a near fatal accident at the age of 13. “Fractured skull and doctor said I’d be a vegetable at best. Since then I’ve had two awakening experiences.” One studying English 40 years ago. Not sure how that studying English brought it about, but great. And then, 20 years ago…
Neil: Reading Whitman maybe.
Rick: Pardon?
Neil: Reading Whitman maybe.
Rick: Yeah, maybe so. Then 20 years ago, an awakening experience elicited or induced by intense pain. This person didn’t recognize them as such as awakening experiences until much later. He or she, I’m not sure if it’s a man or woman, helps people understand and experience non-duality, but she or he doesn’t understand the brain. “Large parts of my brain from the injuries must be affected.” Any feedback?
Neil: Not a lot except to turn to what I said before. I think of our brains as transducers for the big C consciousness into our small C consciousness personal minds. Every brain is behaving differently from every other brain. Your brain has gone through this process obviously functioning sufficiently that you’re passing for a functioning adult in our society, which not everyone’s brain allowed them to do, but allowing for these experiences in some way. But do we know that it was the the injury and the, you know, is it who were you were in your past life that you were prepared to have some enlightening, you know, enlightenment experiences? I haven’t seen yet the connection to the injury and having those experiences. Are Are they in fact related?
Rick: Well, sometimes, as you must know, traumatic experiences of various kinds do evoke or elicit some kind of awakening thing. I’ve interviewed people who…one guy was almost hit by a car, and he didn’t get hit, but the shock of it woke him up.
Neil: Right. Right. But the way Franz described the story was teenage injury, and then many years later, this horrible stuff happened.
Rick: Hard to establish… I just established, but ultimately, you know, the, the, the stuff that’s come my way in terms of experiences that just sort of lands on me. I can think of it in terms of. Is that my brain, my brain is structured in a way that allows me to receive these or perceive these, you know, it’s a nature or nurture question, which again, complementarities or is it my lived experience that. prepared me for when this showed up I was prepared to see it and witness it. Those are sort of unanswerable questions and probably complementarities every view you can have on it, every single piece of you, every single experience, every single process you have participated in throughout life up till the time of having those experiences contributed to the fact that that experience happened.
Rick: Yeah. Franz might want to read Eben Alexander’s book or else see my interview with him or many other interviews with him. He was someone who was predicted to be a vegetable. He had encephalitis, I believe. His brain was just pus, you know?
Neil: Yeah. My mom, part of her story is she was in-home hospice care for seven months, not walking, talking or eating. I was there every day because I was sure if I missed today that would be her last day and I wanted to be there for her last day and then after seven months I got a call from one of her home attendants, “Mr. Neil, come quick, your mother’s in the kitchen asking for a cup of tea” and she had gotten out of bed, wanted a cup of tea. How was she walking after seven months? And then she lived for six more years. Amazing. Yeah, and we took her off all her medications during that time because she couldn’t swallow, congestive uh… heart disease hypertension chronic urinary tract infections kept her on her Parkinson’s meds because I knew she’d be uncomfortable with with the rigidity so we could melt that in some dulce de leche ice cream and get it into her mouth. I never put her back on the meds because I was like you know she’s gotta go from something, so let one of these things… She never had any hypertension she never had any congestive heart disease after that and even her Parkinson’s went into remission
Rick: Yeah, amazing.
Neil: Yeah. So I think that’s medically speaking, I think that’s because she lived in such a low stress state that all her diseases of aging are really in our society diseases of stress accumulation. And she just…her body just…she died in a bliss bubble. It was just stunning.
Rick: Nice.
Neil: But why her? Why? You know, why did my mother get that lucky? She would say it was her relationship with the Liebe Numa, which is Yiddish for the Beloved Name. She would talk about God as sort of, see there’s that word. “How are you and the Liebe Numa doing today?” “Oh, we’re just fine.” She would blush like she was a teenager talking to her boyfriend. So yeah, I don’t know.
Rick: Here’s another question that came in. This is from Nina Nobile in the US someplace. “Can you recall what your state of mind was before the times you felt one with the environment around you. Were you very relaxed, deep in thought about a specific concept having to do with consciousness, or anything else you can recall your mind focusing on?
Neil: You know, I’m hesitant to lay claim to having had significant experiences. However, blah, blah, blah. I talk about some of it. Most times where I had an experience along those lines, it was from within a state of meditation. Not always necessarily what I would have characterized the time as deep. Most often during an intensive Zen retreat, meditating many hours a day for days in a row, but not always, that time that happened that I described in the Zen Do with the incense stick. but I’ve been in a sustained focus state for weeks because this koan had happened. But I’ve also had what I would call similar sorts of experiences from devotional practice type stuff. You know, being in shul, being in synagogue, really caught up in the prayer service with a liturgy that I’m deeply familiar with and comfortable with. It’s in Hebrew so I can, I don’t understand it so well that if I want I can understand it and if not I can turn it off and it’s just a mantra. But I don’t think there have been rules for it.
Rick: Okay.
Neil: And I haven’t had any of the experiences of, when I’ve had sudden trauma and I had sudden trauma I’ve been hit by a car, never got something good out of it like that. I get life lessons.
Rick: Well, one thought that comes to mind on Nina’s question is that famous saying by some Zen guy, I think, that enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone. You’ve probably heard that one.
Neil: I like that.
Rick: Yeah. So, you know, there are things we can do which, you know, make us receptive or make it conducive to having spiritual breakthroughs, and that’s what spiritual practice is all about. That’s why people do these things.
Neil: That’s kind of where I land in the book, which pissed off other people. I don’t think the construct I give in the book of how the universe is constructed is really arguable in modern, Western, scientific, mathematical, philosophical terms. I really don’t. I’m happy to have that debate with somebody, but I just, but I really don’t. However you can read my book five times in a row and some people have told me they’ve done that and it’s still as we say in Zen it’s still the finger pointing at the moo
Neil: it isn’t the moon itself and without some sort of practice and I say this explicitly in the in the afterward it doesn’t have to be contemplative practice you know I tried to get my mother to meditate for three years until I realized oh Oh, she’s got a devotional practice that puts any other practice I’ve had to shame. My husband claims not to have any spiritual practice at all. But if you come to our house for a dinner and he serves you what he’s made, it’s a practice of service. Finally, after a couple of decades, I’ve gotten him to not argue with me when I say that. The Vedic divisions, I think it’s Vedic. There’s scholarly practice, Jewish version of that would be Talmud study. But it could also be, you know, for me it’s biology [that] led to all this stuff. So scholarly practice, path of devotion, path of service, path of contemplation.
Rick: Yeah. Kriya, Bhakti, Seva.
Neil: Find the one or the two or the three that feel right to you because the ideas are f***ing useless. They do not alleviate any suffering whatsoever, but the experience of the truth of them makes all the difference, I think.
Rick: Yeah. That’s a really important point, which is that one size does not fit all, but you know, seek and you shall find. I mean, if you have the motivation to go deeper in whatever way you conceive that, take a step, you know, and see, and then take another step. It’s like in that Harrison Ford movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie, where he has to cross this chasm and there’s no bridge or something, but he somehow or other takes a step and the bridge materializes as he goes. He gets across the chasm.
Neil: I mean, somehow this is, you know, part of the wonder, part of the mystery is the universe keeps meeting me where I am somehow.
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: Often in ways that like, you know, no, I wasn’t looking for that way. I didn’t want that bridge. I wanted that bridge. Well, you’re getting this bridge. But looking back, it’s just like it’s one experience after another of, if I show up, the universe meets me there.
Rick: Yeah. “If you build it, they will come.”
Neil: Yeah.
Rick: To quote another movie. But and that kind of brings us around to my initial point or my perennial point, which is, there’s some kind of intelligence orchestrating things, and it’s interactive, and it’s conscious, and it’s compassionate, sometimes in a tough love sort of way.
Neil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, this is, this is the project, the problem, the koan of the COVID years for me, through another path, I started thinking of my mother. So I’m, I’m also a devotee in small measure of Mother Meera who’s…
Rick: Oh yeah, I’ve met her.
Neil: Yeah, she’s considered an avatar of the Divine Mother and so… and I had an experience of her, not in her physical presence, that sort of rescued me from a difficult situation and I was aware during that that, “Oh, this could be entirely my imagination and I’m just talking myself out of some disaster here.” Fine, it works. But then I said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been to visit you in a while, I’ll make a plan to come to Germany– where she lives. And then I heard in my ear, “You don’t need to come see me, you just need to go visit your mother.”
Rick: Ah, interesting.
Neil: Yeah, I get all verklempt as we say. From that point on, I realized, oh, my mother is…taking care of her became devotion. When she died, that within the years after that, I started thinking about the Divine Feminine, the Divine Mother in a deeper way. And during COVID, I had lots of time to read in my own traditions as well as other traditions and get a little bit deeper of understanding. I started to realize that the experience I had when I went into her presence, her delight in me.
Rick: Your mother’s or Mother Meera? I’m others. No, I’m others, right? The really profoundly, crazily unconditional love that was evident on her face when I walked in the room. That that’s the experience of the divine feminine in the world and it’s possible to experience. Yeah. But I turned to one of my Zen teachers who was a was also a Christian minister and I said you know this is hard to mesh with my Zen practice, which is all very non… I’m suddenly in a devotional practice when I was in a non-devotional contemplative practice. What am I supposed to do with this and how do you deal with it? His name was Bob Kaku Gunn and he was a few months away from dying after five years of living with pancreas cancer and it was COVID, so it was an online thing, but it was a formal Zen interview online, but he was an old buddy of mine too. And I said to him, “How do you deal with this?” He said, “Well, the further I go, it’s all just love.” And I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” First off, Christian term, it makes me nervous. He was like, “No.” I said, “Compassion.” He he goes, “Whatever, that’s all it is.” That’s the fundamental nature. And then I realized versions of the talk, and particularly at S.A.N.D. that I gave, start with, you know, what are the twin pillars of, said in Tibetan tradition, the twin pillars of Buddhist practice, wisdom and compassion. Wisdom is seeing the world as it is without delusion. Complexity theory has provided me with a really complete model for understanding the structure and nature of existence that includes all the science and all the math and all the philosophy I’ve been learning my entire life because I’m a nerd. That allows me to see that. But where that leads me to is this is not my boundary. At the cellular level, my boundary is wherever my microbiome goes. If you were here and I gave you a hug, we’d walk apart and you’d carry some of me away with you, and I carry some of you away with me. At the molecular level, we’re exchanging molecules with the environment all the time. Our boundaries are the entire biomass of the planet.
Rick: I’ve heard that every breath we take contains at least one molecule that Jesus breathed, and Hitler, and everybody else.
Neil: And at the atomic level, there isn’t an atom in our bodies that we didn’t breathe, eat, or drink from the planet. So are we lonely creatures that live on the surface of a rock we call Earth? Or are we planet Earth itself that in three and a half billion years was able to self-organize itself into creatures that think of themselves as separate? But we’re wrong. So at the atomic level, our boundary is the entire planet. That’s Gaia. It’s not just the biological part. It’s the non-biological part. At the quantum level, non-locality entanglement won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Einstein was right to his dismay. At the quantum level we’re one seamless universe. There’s no separation anywhere. So when you talk about compassion it’s not “oh I feel sorry for this person in front of me.” Real compassion is “I’ve touched a hot stove and my left hand goes to pull my right hand away” without hesitation because we’re just one thing. That’s real compassion and that arises from seeing the nature of reality and experiencing the nature of reality in its true nature, which is all the stuff you and I are talking about. And when that happens, true compassion arises. Or if you want to say love, or what, and that’s the fundamental nature of existence. That’s the fundamental quality of the world. And that was the last time I saw my friend in that interview. It’s a good note to be left with.
Rick: Love your neighbor as yourself, because he is.
Neil: Yeah.
Rick: Good. Well, that’s a real sweet note to end on. So, this has been a lot of fun. I’ve had a lot of, I’ve really enjoyed this.
Neil: You’ve let me go on a really long time.
Rick: Well, you say good stuff.
Neil: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Rick: Your book is really interesting. And it’s really, you know, it’s a real treat for me to talk to people like you and to enrich my own experience and understanding. Very valuable.
Neil: It’s all about relation.
Rick: Yeah.
Neil: Everything’s in relation. Yep. Good.
Rick: So thanks so much, Neil. I hope there’s some more conferences where we can exchange a little microbiome in person sometime.
Neil: That would be nice. Maybe you need to organize some BatGap conference.
Rick: Oh, man. Yeah, people say that. a big task.
Neil: I’m sorry that’s a mean thing to wish on you.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, Maurizio and Zaya practically killed themselves organizing those conferences out there. But anyway, I’d love to meet you in person sometime, and really appreciate what you’re doing, and look forward to reading your next book. Let me know when you’ve finished it.
Neil: I’m looking forward to seeing what it turns out to be. I just started writing it.
Rick: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, and thanks to all those who have been listening or watching. Really appreciate your participation in BatGap all these 15 years now. So we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks Neil.
Neil: Thank you. Bye bye.
Rick: Bye. Thank you.