JANET COOPER NELSON:
Good evening,
and welcome to this annual
Mary Interlandi lecture.
It is astonishing to look
out at this audience.
And I think I must
begin by apologizing
for those of you who are
still trying to figure out
how to position yourselves.
There still is a bit of space
to sit on the floor here
at the front.
If you are sitting
next to a seat that's
empty, and can raise your
hand, that would be great.
I can't say that
I see one, but--
there.
Over there.
I'm sorry.
We've brought in the chairs
we could find in the building.
If anybody knows
the building better,
and can find more chairs,
that would be welcome, too.
As I said, good evening, and
welcome to this annual event
that we are able
annually to convene
because of the generosity
of Mary Interlandi's family.
Mary came here to study,
and in her second year
here, while away on leave, died.
And in 2003, which
seems to me, as someone
who's been here for more than
two decades, just yesterday.
I was thinking as I was reading
about our wonderful speaker
tonight, Jon Kabat-Zinn, that
there was a convergence I
wanted to point out to you.
In 1979, there was
a little-known guy
named Jon Kabat-Zinn
who said to the world
that there might be another
way to relieve the suffering
of chronically ill patients.
And he started to
use an acronym, which
is now so much a
part of our life
that it's hard to believe
we ever didn't know it.
But that was mindfulness-based
stress reduction.
He proposed only an eight
week approach to this,
and very quickly was
beginning to have
data, the stuff we all love
in medicine and science,
to show that it mattered.
But my reason, as the
chaplain of the university,
to draw your attention
to it, is this
was about five years
before Mary was born.
And Jon's work and Mary's life
were overlapping in many ways.
That, in fact, Hal has
outlined might even
have been the case that
Mary was hearing about Jon's
work in her class here.
Jon visited Brown last in 2002.
And Mary died in
February of 2003.
And some of the ways that
this convergence occurred
are not mine to outline
for you precisely.
But it does feel
to me, particularly
as we have watched Mary's
parents, Beth and John
Interlandi, her
grandparents, her siblings,
be drawn into this initiative.
Be drawn in their generosity to
other institutions than Brown.
To see that learning,
and that learning
that produces healing,
and mindfulness,
and truly a more abundant life
is what their lives are about.
And thereby honor Mary's life,
all too short, but very much
focused, in her lifetime,
on the good of others.
Little kids in Nepal,
her classmates,
her love of learning,
her love of art.
It's extraordinary at times
when we walk a campus like this.
There's building after
building bearing a name.
This is the Friedman Auditorium.
And I'm embarrassed to tell
you, standing here tonight,
I cannot tell you that story.
This is the Metcalf Building.
This is Brown University.
You can take this mindfulness to
heart as you walk these paths.
But I hope tonight as
we begin, and as we
have the extraordinary
privilege to welcome
Jon Kabat-Zinn to this lectern,
that you will, in Mary's memory
and honor, be mindful of a
gift that her family gave
in the worst of moments.
That has over the
years since her death,
contributed to the very best of
what this university is about.
Its learning, its quality of
attention, its determination,
through the learning we are
able and privileged to share,
to create the good.
So Jon, it is an
extraordinary pleasure for us
to welcome you in that spirit.
But it is here we are speaking
to Beth and John Interlandi
by video, and we know that they
will be joining us in heart.
They are not so
far away in Maine,
awaiting the birth
of a grandchild.
They are very
often here with us.
But we send them
tonight our love.
And I do that with no apology.
You may never have known them.
But I promise you, they
are people you would love.
And I hope in time
to come, if you
come to this lecture in other
times, you will meet them.
They love being here.
But that love is not some sappy
Hallmark card cheesy emotion.
It is the very grit and
the blood in our veins.
It's the quality of attention
we may bring to our years
and our days that actually
make the things we
learn be about the healing
and good of other lives.
Mary's life was about that.
Beth and John's
life is about that.
This lecture is about that.
And it is in that
spirit tonight,
as your chaplain, that it's
an honor to welcome Jon,
and to welcome my colleague
Hal Roth, with whom I always
get to participate, as we
shape this annual event.
So welcome.
I apologize for your
sore tush already.
But I guarantee that it will
be extremely worth your while.
We're going to play a little
do-si-do up here with seats.
You may want to do the same with
another person in the audience.
HAL ROTH: Good
evening, everybody.
My name's Hal Roth.
I direct the Contemplative
Studies program here at Brown.
I want to welcome you on
behalf of our program,
on behalf of our donors,
on behalf of the Interlandi
family, on behalf of the Office
of Chaplains and Religious
Life.
I want to begin by thanking two
of the people who really helped
very much in getting
this space, and getting
everything organized,
and sending out
invitations and notices.
Lee Kalarian Kendall works
in the Chaplain's Office,
and is a remarkably
skilled administrator.
And also for the
Contemplative Studies program,
Anne Heyrman-Hart,
we would not be
able to do a 10th of what
we do without Anne's work.
So please, let's take
a moment to thank them.
So Jon was last on
the Brown campus--
I was looking up to see
what I could find online--
back in November of 2002.
As it happened, that night, just
by a interesting coincidence,
his father-in-law, the
great American historian,
Howard Zinn, was also
talking on campus.
And they ended up talking
roughly opposite each other.
Howard Zinn, many of you know,
wrote The People's History
of the United States, and many
other progressive historical
books.
And he was here
trying to warn us
against supporting
an invasion of Iraq.
Ultimately, he was not
successful in convincing
the administration
not to do this.
But it was one of these really
interesting coincidences
on Jon's last visit.
Jon and I were last
weekend at a memorial
service for our late
colleague Catherine Kerr.
And it's interesting to see
that, surrounding Cathy at--
she went to Amherst as
an undergrad-- there
was this kind of interesting
collection of intellectuals,
many of whom have ended up being
influential in their various
fields.
Particularly in
contemplative sciences
and contemplative studies.
One of which is John
Dunne, who is a professor.
He has the first chair in
the Contemplative Humanities
at University of Wisconsin.
And also Evan Thompson,
whom many of my students
have been reading.
Co-author of The Embodied
Mind, and a person
who's a philosopher and
cognitive scientist,
and has really shifted the
field of cognitive science,
and helped develop contemplative
studies in a fundamental way.
So that group was at
Amherst, but also there
was another group at Haverford,
about 20 years earlier.
And in that group, as it
turns out, was Jon Kabat-Zinn.
But also one of my close
colleagues, John Major,
with whom I worked on
a major translation
project to translate
what was then
the last great untranslated
work of classical Chinese
philosophy, called
The Huainanzi.
And also in that
group, and I'm not sure
if you knew each
other, was Al Dahlberg,
one of our senior
colleagues here in biomed.
A wonderful molecular
biologist who
has retired a few years ago.
And I'm hoping that--
in fact, not only hoping.
I'm predicting that the group
of young people who are here now
working in the Contemplative
Studies program that
we've developed-- and we
have the country's first
undergraduate major in
contemplative studies that has
been created here at Brown--
that in another
decade or two, people
will be looking back on this
group of students, and saying,
wow.
What an interesting
collection of really
important and
influential young minds
have passed through Brown
during this particular era.
So Jon graduated from
Haverford in 1964,
and went to work at MIT in
Salvador Luria, Nobel Prize
winner Salvador Luria's lab.
And did a number of
things and eventually
in 1979, as Janet said,
set up at the University
of Massachusetts Medical
School in Worcester
this program in
mindfulness-based stress
reduction.
But during the 70s, he also--
we were talking about this as
we were coming here today--
spent a lot of
time in Providence.
Some of you have known or
heard of the Providence Zen
Center, which happens
to be in Cumberland.
And, of course, that's
not really a zen koan.
That's actually based
on where it started.
It started actually on the
corner of Hope and Wickenden,
above what I think
is now the Tokyo
Restaurant, in an apartment.
And the very charismatic
zen teacher Seung Sahn,
who founded the Providence
Zen Center, now the Quantum
School of Zen, which
is all over the world,
was teaching in that apartment.
And Jon would come down and do
daily practice, and then go up.
He'd get up at 4:00
in the morning,
and drive down, and then go
back, and work in the lab.
So that was one of
the major influences,
I think, in what
Jon has eventually
developed as mindfulness-based
stress reduction.
Also Insight Meditation
Center in Barre
was starting up in the '70s.
And John also practiced
and co-practiced there,
with Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph
Goldstein, Jack Kornfield.
In 1990 he published
his first book,
very, very influential
and important book,
called Full Catastrophe Living.
Based on a decade of
his work with patients
at UMass Worcester.
And then in 1993, I think it
was, he was on the Bill Moyers
program.
That's actually where I first
heard about your work, Jon, was
Healing and the Mind.
I think there was a whole
hour devoted to the work
that you were doing there.
And that really catalyzed
a more general appreciation
for Jon's work.
And the method that
he developed started
to be used in a lot of different
scientific research programs.
So now it's really
the most widely used,
the gold standard for
evidential research
in the effects of contemplative
practice throughout the world.
So when I said it, when I
introduced John 15 years ago,
in November 2002,
Mary Interlandi
was a student of mine in a
course called Great Mystical
Traditions of Asia.
And I think we began talking
about creating a Contemplative
Studies program with
that group of people
who were on the fringes
each of our departments
at that particular
point in time.
About creating this program, and
Mary was very excited about it.
And it's quite possible
that she actually
came to Jon's first talk here,
back in November of 2002.
So I said then, and
it's even more true now,
that as Buddhism has moved
from its country of origin
in India, throughout
Asia, Southeast Asia,
and then into Tibet, into
China, throughout East Asia,
that what Buddhism did was it
absorbed, it interacted with,
it blended with the
religions that each
of those cultural traditions
had there and produced
new versions of Buddhism.
Now coming to the West,
the role of religion
to a great extent,
which really provided,
up until maybe a century ago,
provided the description of how
the world worked, and how human
beings fit into that world,
has been in many ways
displaced by the sciences
and scientific method.
And so while there has been some
really interesting interactions
between Buddhism, and
Christianity, and Judaism,
really the major place where
Buddhism is taking hold
in North America is within
scientific research,
through the understanding
of contemplative practices.
And when the history
of this period--
and as I said this back in 2002.
It's even more true today.
When the history of this
transformation of Buddhism
moving in to the
West is written,
one of the major, major
catalysts and players in this
is going to be Jon Kabat-Zinn.
So once again, I'm very, very
pleased to introduce Jon.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Did
you go to Haverford?
Yeah, wow.
Class of '63?
'60.
OK, so I just missed you.
But I knew your name.
I hardly know what to say
after those two speakers.
I mean, first of all, the
degree of eloquence and emotion
and it's obvious why you are
the Chaplain of the University.
And really also obvious
why that position
is critical, essential
to the well-being
of a community like this.
So that we do actually
remember each other,
and who we are,
because no one's here
all that long on the planet.
And yet the conceit is
that we're all immortal.
And we behave a
little bit arrogantly
in the face of the law, or the
inevitable law of impermanence.
And maybe the Buddha wouldn't
have put it quite like this,
but there's shit
to pay for that.
And in general,
I was also struck
because I don't spent a lot
of time on university campuses
anymore.
And in this era since the
election and the inauguration,
universities have always
been islands in a sea of--
SIRI: Sorry, I--
JON KABAT-ZINN: I'm sorry, too.
Islands in a sea of, in
some sense, not necessarily
a alignment with the beauty
of the learning that you
were inviting from us.
And what learning and
inquiry, and what develops out
of that kind of learning
can offer to the world,
and offer to us as
embodied beings.
So that we don't just become
like unbelievable intellects
that are just driven
here and there
by more and more
acquisitive motivations that
lack wisdom in a certain way.
So I'm just really touched
to come into this hall,
and see so many people
coming out on a Thursday
night when you all have
better things to do.
Some of you look actually
quite young and--
I mean, much younger
than college age.
And this is really not about
what your head will take away
from this evening.
It's much more about
your whole being.
And I'm guessing
that you know that,
or you would have
found something better
to do on a Thursday night.
I mean, after all,
look around you.
Who comes out for a
talk about meditation?
Or about mindfulness?
Especially once you grok,
and probably most of you
do, that it's really
about non-doing.
It's about dropping into being.
Well, who's got time for that?
I mean, it's like, we're busy.
I check my calendar.
So the very fact that
we're all here in this room
is in some way or other
a social statement.
And a statement about
something that I usually
think of as having to do
with longing, or hungering,
or a kind of
intuiting that there
is more than merely
the cognitive
constructs and all the emotional
overtones of those cognitive
constructs that we play
around in so facilely.
And then get so deeply
attached to, in terms of views.
You following me?
Do you hear what I'm saying?
And then we're seeing this
played out in the larger world,
in ways that, really,
are quite terrifying.
Because, once again, it's become
a dualistic, antagonistic,
oppositional framing of those
who think one way and those
who think the other way.
And we have virtually forgotten
that we're 99.99% the same.
And that's true
genetically, by the way.
For every single human on the
planet, in terms of the DNA,
99.9% identical.
Black, white, tall,
short, male, female.
And yet we forget
these kinds of things.
So the reason I
wanted to come tonight
is because as far
as I'm concerned,
the work that I will be
talking about is a love affair.
And I'm not talking about MBSR.
I'm talking about the
invitation that MBSR
is one of an infinite
number of portals or doors
into his own heart.
And the full potential of being
human in the very brief time
that we have that
we call a life span.
And that we are capable
of missing, like that,
when we get too
caught or caught up
in everything that is carrying
us from one thing to the next.
And I'm particularly
happy to be talking
in particular to the
Brown University students.
The reason being,
because the world really
is going to depend more
on you than on the older
people in the audience.
Seriously.
And I remember when I--
one of the formative
things in my life,
before I was commuting down
to the Providence Zen Center
at 4:00 in the morning
to sort of practice
with [INAUDIBLE]
during his retreats,
was walking down the corridors
at MIT, when I was a freshman
graduate student there, and
seeing a sign on the wall,
saying, The Three
Pillars of Zen.
Talk by Philip Kapleau.
Introduced by, at
the invitation of,
somebody named Huston Smith.
So I didn't know who
Philip Kapleau was.
I didn't know who
Huston Smith was.
I didn't have the slightest
idea what Zen was.
I was like 21 years old.
The Gulf of Tongkin
had just happened.
We were beginning to sort of
get into a war with Vietnam.
And I was depressed
out of my mind.
And for some reason or
other, I went to that talk.
And out of all of MIT,
this was seminar hour.
There was Kapleau, there was
Huston Smith, there was me,
and then maybe two other people.
That's who showed up for The
Three Pillars of Zen in 1965.
And his talk took
the top off my head.
And I remember saying
to myself, I've
been looking for
this my whole life.
Which at that point
amounted to 21 years.
My whole life, I've
been looking for this.
And what it was not
so much Japanese Zen.
But the deep message
of the dharma,
in some sense, as a unifying
way of understanding things that
are apparently opposites, like
science and art, for instance.
And for me, that was
really up at that point,
because my father
was a scientist,
and my mother was an artist.
And I could see
that there had to be
something bigger that would
hold their different ways
of knowing.
And when I heard
his talk, I got it.
It's like, and he
didn't put it this way,
but after the many
years of practice--
that happened more
than 52 years ago--
what we're really talking
about is the human capacity
for awareness.
It's nothing special.
Only it's insanely special.
And you don't get
much training for it
in even places like
the university,
before Hal Roth started
the-- and others started
this Contemplative
Studies thing.
Because what do we
do in the university?
We train in thinking.
Discursive thinking, analytical
thinking, deductive thinking,
every kind of thinking
you can imagine.
And then often we get into
bed at the end of a long day,
and we secrete one or
two thoughts in the mind
when we really need to get
to sleep, and what happens?
You're up for hours.
So we, in some sense,
are lacking in intimacy
with the activity and
reactivity of our own minds,
and that has consequences.
Major consequences, in terms
of how we conduct our lives,
in terms of how we relate to our
bodies, in terms of our health,
in terms of the health
of our relationships,
or even the health of our
impulses around relationships.
And this is like if thinking is
one incredibly powerful faculty
that has developed in
such beautiful ways
within the university,
awareness is
an equally powerful,
if not more powerful,
faculty that virtually
never gets any airtime.
And no clue of how you
would train the muscles that
would potentiate
access to that domain
that we're already born with.
So it's not something
you have to acquire.
One more thing you
have to train in.
No, what we need to
do, in some sense,
is get out of our
own way, and learn
to actually recognize this
hidden dimension of experience.
Cosmologists and
physicists love to talk
about hidden dimensions.
It turns out we don't live in
a four-dimensional universe.
Maybe it's more like 11, if
you believe string theory.
And then you've got
branes and then--
that's B-R-A-N-E-S-- and that
is why gravity is so weak.
Well, if they can talk about
hidden dimensions, then
maybe we can too.
And one very important
one is the present moment.
Very often that's the
first thing to go.
You start to interrogate or
investigate your own mind
and just see, where is your
attention most of the time?
Check it out.
Most of the time it's
probably in the future.
One powerful thing people
do in other cities--
I don't know about
Providence-- is they worry.
About the future that
hasn't happened yet.
And you remember Mark Twain's
famous little injunction
that he's had a huge amount
of tragedy in his life,
and some of it
actually happened.
Because we perseverate
and drive ourselves
insane about all these
things that are not
going to happen in the future.
And then there's the past.
Who did what to whom?
Who's to blame?
And we generate incredible
narratives about the past.
Why I am the way I am, or
why it's downhill from here
at age 21.
And if you added up, just do a
spreadsheet on past and future,
it turns out the present
moment is almost completely
eradicated in our experience.
We don't have time for
the present moment.
We're too caught in our heads,
thinking, thinking, thinking.
And see, what
awareness gives us is
a whole other dimension
where we can actually be
aware of what we're thinking.
And then recognize that, as
Einstein said, 99% of it's
just total bullshit.
He didn't say it
exactly that way.
He said it in German.
But basically, he said that
if you had one or two good
thoughts in a lifetime-- and
he had a few more than one
or two--
you were way ahead of the curve.
And I think the trouble is we
take our thoughts so seriously.
We believe them.
And we reify them
into a narrative.
And then we will die
for that narrative.
And it's wrong.
So that's called delusion.
And we all do it.
It's part of the
human condition.
But when you recognize
that you're doing it,
you have a whole other fulcrum,
space, from which to operate.
And therefore you're
instantly already
free from the potential way in
which you could get seized up
around that thought sequence.
Especially if it's freighted
with lots of emotion,
and heavily also
freighted with the,
what are called in English,
the personal pronouns.
Especially the singular
personal pronouns.
Our favorites.
Me.
Mine.
And I. I, me, and mine.
So to be on the lookout
for them actually
gives you new degrees of
freedom in navigating your life.
So I thought that,
before we go any further,
that it might be nice to
actually take a few moments
and drop into being.
Now, that seems, from my
even framing it that way,
that I'm assuming that
you're not already here.
And I'm not assuming that
you're not already here.
I am assuming that you are
already here, especially you.
You seem to be the youngest
person in the room.
And so you are really in a
very privileged position,
because you haven't actually
gotten so entrained into habit.
Everything's new
when you're young.
And it's very cool.
So what I'm going to suggest
is that, how many of you
would say that you have--
this would be interesting to
see-- how many of you would say
that, realistically speaking
and without exaggerating, you
have something of a
regular meditation
practice in your own life?
Raise your hands up high,
and then look around.
You see, this is some kind
of communist conspiracy.
I mean, I can tell you that
when I came here in 2002,
had I asked that question, I
don't think we would have had.
Something's happening.
And one of the things--
I don't remember exactly
how I titled this talk,
but I will find out in a second.
Something about, what's all
this business of mindfulness?
Because you hear it talked about
all the time, all the time,
all the time.
Mindfulness,
mindfulness, mindfulness.
The most important thing is
not to talk about mindfulness.
It's to actually be here.
Be present.
Be awake.
Be mindful.
And one of the problems with
the success of it, and the fact
that it has gone
to the point where,
well, if you plot
the papers, just
the number of papers in the
scientific literature since--
I think it's correct that
science, in some sense,
is driving a lot of this.
If you plot the number of papers
in the scientific literature
on the subject of
mindfulness per year,
starting in like
the year 1980, it
goes along at the level one,
two, zero, three, two, one,
four, five, and then
around the year 1998, 2000,
it starts to tick up.
And now it's going straight up.
660 papers on
mindfulness in 2016.
I purposefully didn't bring
the PowerPoint to show you.
You can imagine it.
And a lot of the science
behind it is really good.
I mean, these are young,
serious scientists,
on the clinical side, on
the neuroscience side.
And they are bringing
together-- even
before they went to medical
school, they were meditating.
And then, they get
to bring together
their love of the mind, and
of the science, the brain,
helping other people,
healing, together
with their own
meditation practice.
I mean, that's to die for.
That's a wonderful way
to unify life and work.
And so there is this
mushrooming effect.
But whenever anything reaches
a certain point, where you're
starting to see mindfulness
on the sides of buses,
or whatever,
advertising and stuff,
it starts to get hyped
beyond its evidence base.
And then people
feel like it's hot.
It's hot.
It's a hot thing.
So you've got to be part of it.
And so, without even knowing how
to spell the word mindfulness,
all of a sudden you're talking
about mindfulness all the time.
Or maybe selling
mindful hamburgers.
You've got the edge
on the competition.
We do our hamburgers mindfully.
Or mindful jewelry,
or whatever it is.
And this is not
necessarily a bad thing.
It's symptomatic or emblematical
of a certain kind of success.
That dharma, this
thousands of years
of a certain kind
of universal wisdom
that was articulated
in many different ways,
in many different traditions.
But it's never been
about Buddhism.
The Buddha wasn't a
Buddhist, for God's sake.
God.
I apologize to God.
It's been about being
human, and discovering,
or recovering, or uncovering
what that might be, in a way
that's highly empirical,
highly operationalized, and all
evidence-based.
So you can do this yourself.
It's not about attaining
some kind of philosophy,
or kneeling in the face
of some kind of catechism,
but really asking yourself
deep questions, like who am I?
So I'm assuming that you're
all already fully present.
But I think that there's some
value in actually at least
playing with the notion of--
and I even asked for a zabuton
and zafu to sit on the floor.
I didn't think the floor would
be that far down from you.
But because I want to make a few
points about how important it
is to actually cultivate--
I don't even know
what to say-- this.
To cultivate intimacy
with yourself.
And I want you to at
least entertain the notion
that what we're talking
about is a love affair.
A love affair with--
well, ask yourself for a second.
Why did you even come tonight?
Oh, Jon Kabat-Zinn was talking.
No.
Why did you really, really,
really, really, really, really,
really come tonight?
Why did I wind up in that room
with five other people at MIT
in 1965?
Is there some longing,
some yearning,
some maybe deeply
unconscious vibration,
that says that somehow,
it doesn't feel like it's
fully complete for me?
That all my understanding,
and all of the gifts
that I've been given by my
family, and by everything else,
that there's still
something that--
and you can't put it into words.
But reflect.
Let's reflect for a moment about
why you even showed up tonight.
You all have better
things to do.
You could be shopping.
You could be eating.
So let's recognize how
precious it is to actually stop
from time to time.
Literally, as well as
metaphorically, and drop out
of all the doing and into
a domain that's very often
a little bit removed from us.
Which is the domain of
being, as in human being.
We're not called
human doings, but we
act like we're human doings.
So there's some, what I want
to say, and I'll say it.
I'll assert it just
to be provocative.
And you can play with it,
or decide that I'm nuts.
Or this is not for you,
or thank you very much.
But to establish yourself on a
regular basis during the day.
Or at least once a day for
some non-trivial stretch
of clock time.
And just hang out being.
With no agenda, other
than to see what's
up when you don't
bring up anything.
You don't check your phone.
In fact you shut off your phone.
We're talking now, for those
of you who were born recently,
we're talking about
something that quaintly
called the analog world.
It's like trees.
Not simulated ones, real ones.
Or nature, or the sky, or air.
And you're part of that.
And so to shut off the phone,
and all the other devices,
and actually just
drop into being awake.
And you don't have
to have a script.
It's helpful sometimes
to have a script,
because the half-life
of interest in being,
for most of us, because
we're so addicted to doing,
is on the order of nanoseconds.
So yeah, you got all jazzed
up, coming to a talk.
And the next morning
you're sitting
on your floor in the bedroom,
or in a chair, or whatever.
Because you don't have to do
this cross-legged on the floor.
But I'm doing this
for the same reason
I'm not showing PowerPoint.
Probably you don't go
to that many lectures
where people sit on
the floor like this.
So if you remember nothing else,
remember, oh yeah, that guy
who came and sat on the floor.
And that might actually lead
to some kind of resonances
with what brought you
here to this crazy talk
in the first place.
So can we just be present?
Notice I haven't even told
you yet to sit up straight.
Can we just be?
Be awake.
Be at home.
And part of that would
include, certainly, the body.
Because we'll talk
about that more, I hope.
The body is really big.
Big one.
But can we be at home with
the unfolding of life?
Inwardly and outwardly.
In this only moment, because,
frankly, it's the only moment
we're ever alive.
But we're always waiting
for Saturday night,
or the next whatever it is.
And not recognizing
that, the beauty of this.
And even the young woman
that this whole series
is named after.
No one expects somebody
in their 20s to just die.
But it happens.
And so seeing if you
can allow your awareness
to basically embrace the
entirety of your body,
sitting here, breathing.
I'm making the wild
assumption, by the way,
that everybody is breathing.
And if you aren't, come
and see me after the talk.
And can you just
hold it in awareness?
And if you want to focus, you
can collimate your attention
to focus on, say, the
breath sensations,
and privilege them,
if you wanted to.
Or a sense of the
body as a whole.
And, of course, being
human, sometimes the body
has its own agenda.
It has its own grievances.
It has its own,
what it's carrying.
And a lot of the time,
that could be pain.
And can we put out the
welcome mat for all of it
just as it is in this moment?
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Not judge any of it, and
just be with the unfolding
of experience, moment by moment.
As if your life depended on it,
because, I will assert again,
it does.
And in more ways than you
think, and in more ways
than as human beings
we can possibly think.
Thinking takes us so
far, but incomplete
without this other
domain, awareness, itself.
And intimacy with
is cultivatable,
and that's, in some sense,
why it's a love affair.
And another way to frame
it is it's silence.
A love affair with
silence, stillness.
And learning how to
inhabit this domain 100%.
And part of this
invitation is really
an invitation to treat
yourself with kindness.
And with care.
And not create some kind of
idealized thought framework
in the mind of what you're
supposed to be feeling now.
OK, I'm being.
Now what?
And did I have a
good experience?
Was it a good enough experience?
Is this what I'm supposed to be
experiencing when I meditate?
My mind is wandering
all over the place.
It's unruly.
Most of the time it's in
the past and the future.
Yeah, but now you know it.
So the curriculum is,
whatever's happening.
Well, nothing
special's happening.
Who says?
Who even said that?
Who is doing this judging?
Rating?
Oh, that was a really
good meditation.
Oh, what a terrible meditation.
I was itching all over.
So antsy.
My mind wouldn't shut down.
Yeah, but who knows that?
Is the you that knows
that, which is awareness,
is your awareness actually
all over the place?
Maybe if you start to
really pay attention,
it's possible to learn how
to inhabit the awareness.
And then the mind will do what
it does, just the way the ocean
waves, but down below,
it's not waving.
So you can't really
see the ocean waves,
because it's the surface
of the ocean that's waving.
In the same way, you can't
say the mind's waving.
It's like certain
aspects of mind,
having to do with thought
and emotion, wave.
But if we don't
take it personally--
remember those personal
pronouns-- then, hey.
I'm the whole ocean.
No problem.
No need to have a better
experience, because you--
Hal, you mentioned The Embodied
Mind, and the great work
of Francisco Varela, and Evan
Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch.
This is what it's all about,
and that cognitive science
is really zeroing in
on, is the incredible
and completely ignored power
of embodied wakefulness,
of embodied awareness, without
the script and the agendas
and the narratives.
Because that's what taps
a deeper intelligence,
that is really here
for the apprehending.
It's not someone else's nature.
It's your nature.
But not if you're
not paying attention.
So I'll just ask you.
How many of you found that
you could feel your breathing?
Raise your hands.
OK.
And how many of you felt that
you could feel your body?
That you could be
aware of your body?
OK.
And now I'll ask you
another question.
Who says it's your breathing?
Who says it's your body?
And I mean this seriously.
Who is claiming it
as my breathing?
I like to say that, in
the scheme of things,
if it were up to
me to be breathing,
I would have died
a long time ago.
Got distracted.
Whoops, texts.
Some, forgot.
Dead.
The biology doesn't
allow us any--
whoever we think
we are-- anywhere
near the brain stem, the
phrenic nerve, the diaphragm.
No, you can't.
Yeah, you can hold your breath,
but you can't commit suicide
by holding your breath.
You're not reliable enough
to do the breathing.
To say nothing of the heart,
or the liver, or anything else.
You say my heart, my liver, my--
we're not doing the inquiry.
We're not doing
the due diligence
about who's claiming--
yes, there is the body.
But my body?
Who's talking?
Who's the Columbus
planting the flag?
My body.
In the name of the Queen
of Spain, Isabella.
I claim this body.
It's pretty
interesting, isn't it?
It's not merely linguistic.
It's deeply, deeply
human, and that
has to do with what's quaintly
sometimes called wisdom.
Knowing who we are.
There's that famous quote
from Walden, from Henry David
Thoreau, who said,
"I went to the woods
because I wished to
live deliberately,
to front only the
essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn
what they had to teach,
and not, when I came to die,
discover that I hadn't lived."
It's an occupational hazard.
Seriously.
Because we're always
someplace else.
Check.
Mind is someplace else.
A lot of the time.
And it's got agendas.
And it has opinions.
Things would be better
if, and then you
script the whole world.
And when we talk about this
being a liberative practice,
that's actually what we're
liberating ourselves from
is our own self-imprisoning,
self-conditioning tendencies
that the world collaborates
to actually enhance.
Sometimes by factors
of thousands.
And that we actually
sometimes in our relationships
do it with each other,
to keep ourselves
in a certain kind of
somnambulance, or prison,
or unhealthy dynamics,
that ultimately do not
lead to greater
well-being, or eudaimonia,
or whatever you want to call it.
And so that's what
mindfulness is really about.
And far better to actually
exercise the muscles,
so to speak, and not merely--
that's not the real
meditation practice.
It's important.
And I find over my
own lifetime, I've
found an infinite
number of different ways
to practice formally.
Including when my
kids were little,
and sensing whenever there
was awake energy in the house.
And I'd sometimes have to
wake up at 3:00 or 4:00
to just get some meditation in.
But it was good when
I wake up at 5:00.
And then they'd wake up and
come and sit on my head,
or in my lap.
But they're different
times of life,
or different circumstances, in
all of our lives are different.
But you have to
figure out how that
anchor that formal practice
in a way that works for us.
But the real
meditation practice is
how we live our lives
from moment to moment.
In the face of what
Zorba the Greek
called "the full catastrophe
of the human condition."
How many of you have ever
had the thought that,
I didn't sign up for this?
I thought life was going to be.
I thought parenting
was going to be.
I thought grandparenting was.
I thought retirement
was going to be.
I thought divorce
was going to be.
I thought marriage
was going to be.
And I was like, whoa.
And here we are.
If you understand
what I'm saying,
you're going to be so
far ahead of the curve.
You just don't
take it personally.
So we reify these
kinds of narratives.
And then they serve as limiting,
in some way, straitjackets
or prisons.
And what the meditation practice
gives us is it reminds us.
It reminds us.
It re-bodies us.
It wakes us up.
If we understand what
the invitation is.
Otherwise, you can do that
robotically for 50 years.
And talk about mindfulness
till you're blue in the face.
And say, yeah, I'm
mindful in everyday life.
And I'm always being mindful.
And you'll just drive
everybody around you nuts.
And they'll all
know it's not true.
This is very humbling,
and let me say,
because we do this with people
who basically-- we offer this.
What MBSR is is it's a kind
of safety net in medicine
that's aimed at
catching people who
are falling through the cracks
of the health care system.
That was the language I used
in 1979 when there were cracks
in the health care system.
Now it's more like chasms.
[INAUDIBLE]
But to catch people falling
through the cracks and chasms
of modern health
care, and challenging
them to do something
for themselves,
as a complement to whatever
medicine can do with them,
or for them.
To start where
you are, no matter
how painful, no
matter how dysphoric,
no matter how maddening,
and see what's possible
when you start to
nurture yourself
in the kinds of non-doing ways
that I've been suggesting.
And that's how MBSR got started.
It was like a pilot
experiment to see
whether people would actually
go for something as weird
as nothing.
Or from the outside,
at least, I mean.
If you came upon a
class of MBSR patients
in the hospital, and
we had glass walls,
which we sometimes did.
I mean, the people who pay
for it in the health care
industry, the insurance,
they say, we pay for that?
They're not doing anything.
Sometimes they look-- they're
just lying on the floor.
They look like they're sleeping.
They look like they're dead.
They're not doing anything.
And that's the point.
And I would have to say this.
It looks like they're
doing anything.
What they are
actually engaged in
is the hardest
work in the world.
To string even two moments
of mindfulness together,
it's not non-trivial.
It's the hardest
work in the world.
To not be completely
caught up in the madness
of your own thinking.
And if you don't think
it's mad at the moment,
all it takes is slight
change in circumstances.
And you didn't sign up for this.
And you will think that you
could easily lose your mind.
If you think that
that's what the mind is.
But if you understand that
the mind is much bigger
than what we think
the mind is, and it's
much bigger than
thinking, then, you see,
everything becomes
the curriculum.
And there's no alternative
to turning into, and turning
towards, and facing
what is arising.
And then it turns out that
we spoke about learning,
because this is a university.
When you learn
things, what happens
as a result of learning?
Would you say that as we
learn, is there a certain way
in which you could say we grow?
Could you say that?
OK.
But when you're
learning about yourself,
and when you're
beginning to discover
different elements of
yourself, you're beginning to,
in some sense,
realize, or make real,
that you're bigger than
who you thought you were.
If you think you're a
liver cancer patient.
Well, but then you're
forgetting about your humanity.
So when people actually go
deep into the suffering,
they actually realize that
the awareness of suffering
isn't suffering.
That they are much larger
than their suffering.
And it reorients that
deep question of who am I?
If I'm not my pain, if I'm
not my cancer, if I'm not
my depression, if I'm not
my anxiety, if I'm not
my future, if I'm not all of
my dreams, if I'm not my roles,
very often I've been put
into by social circumstances
that I don't feel comfortable
with, then who am I?
And how do I fit into
the larger picture?
Well, there's an awful lot of
healing that can go on in that.
So there's learning,
growing, healing.
Healing, in my
vocabulary, really
means recognizing
things as they are,
and coming to terms
with them as they are,
because that's the way they are.
For instance, just to pick a
wild example out of the hat,
the election wound
up with a president
that some people might think
is stark raving mad or out
of his mind.
It's happened, though.
It could be that he's not.
We don't know.
But truth seems to be some
kind of very iffy proposition
all of a sudden.
And even the
institutions that we
think of as democratic checks
and balances and so forth.
Yet how are we to
understand this?
So mindfulness can be brought
into the social arena,
and the political arena,
and the economic arena.
And it means really being--
at least I'm trying to
understand it this way myself--
to really honor that the deep
part of meditative awareness
is non-dual.
It's not making me and you,
this and that, good and bad,
like and dislike.
Because those are merely
reactions and thought
constructs that are
often very limited.
And what goes first,
as I said before,
is the humanity of the other.
And so what we really need
is a non-dual politics.
A politics, an
economics, a framework,
an education that actually
recognizes the core humanity
in the face of implicit bias.
I mean of white
privilege, of all
of the kinds of things that
are in some sense disease
processes in our society.
That even regular
diseases are being--
the ax is being
taken to them now,
in terms of how we're
going to deal with health
care in this country.
But the deeper diseases--
well, you can see
where I'm going.
What I'm suggesting
is that when we
take a stand in our own
lives, and integrate
the full dimensionality
of our being, which
would mean awareness, and
thinking, and emotions,
all held in a way that
is in alignment with what
the Buddhists would
call wholeness,
or which we could call
well-being, or [INAUDIBLE].
Use the term eudaimonia.
Then, all of a sudden, the
world is already different,
just by the virtue of the fact
that you've taken a stand.
Sometimes sitting, sometimes
just being you, just being you
is the most powerful
thing you can do.
Just be 100% you.
I mean, I used to, as Hal
said, drive down to Providence
every morning to have
interviews with Soensa-nim.
Soensa-nim was this
unbelievable character.
He had a lot of Brown
students, because he came to--
nobody really understood
how it happened--
but he came to Providence
because he knew a few Koreans
who were living here.
There was not a very big
Korean community in Providence
in the early '70s.
And he came here because
he knew some Koreans who
were running a washing
machine repair business.
So here's this Zen master,
repairing washing machines
in Providence, Rhode Island.
And Brown students, being
very, very intelligent,
got a wind of it, and started
coming around, and asking him
questions that had to do with
more than washing machines.
And so he would invite them
in and developed a zen center.
And one of the most wonderful
things about Soensa-nim
is that he never bothered
to learn English.
It was like English grammar
was simply beyond him.
And I'm so glad that he didn't,
because he just made it up
as he went along.
And it was so much
more powerful.
It sounded so wise, and
transformative, and you know--
so one thing he would sometimes
imitate for his students.
He'd say, OK.
One of the most profound
meditation practices
is just asking
yourself, who am I?
Or what am I?
Ramana Maharshi did
that at the age of 16,
and had a full blown
awakening experience.
Not that that's the end of any
kind of meditative engagement.
The end of meditative
engagement is this moment.
Whatever the experience.
But he'd sometimes imitate
it for his students.
And think of all being in
their 20s at that point.
He would puff himself up.
You have to picture big round
Korean head, bald, shaved,
with robes, and a big Zen stick.
And he would puff
himself up like this.
And he'd say, what am I?
He'd sit there
for a few moments,
and he'd get this
quizzical look on his face,
and he'd say, Don't know.
Don't know.
How many scientists
are in the room?
OK, so one thing I
think we'll all agree
is that knowing
what you don't know
is absolutely critical
to doing good science.
Because everybody
knows everything up
to the point, but to
find the next discovery,
you have to get out of your
own way in a certain way,
because your very thinking
can become an obstacle.
I mean, the famous, most
famous example is Kekule.
At least the one
that I know, Kekule
the German organic chemist
who was trying to figure out
the structure of benzene.
And it just didn't work.
Couldn't put the carbons
and the hydrogens together.
And couldn't figure
out anything.
And in the middle of the night
one night, he had a dream,
and the dream was very graphic.
A snake swallowing its own tail.
And he woke up and
said, it's a ring.
No one had ever, in
organic chemistry,
conceived of any kind of
clathrate ring structure.
It's not a clathrate,
technically speaking.
Now there are buckyballs.
60.
Named after Buckminster Fuller.
So not knowing is an
incredibly powerful faculty.
To get freedom from the known,
freedom from that you're
aware of what you know.
But also be aware
of how what you know
creates ruts in the mind that
actually makes it hard to--
and then, of course,
somebody makes a discovery,
Nobel-Prize-winning
discovery, and you say,
well, I could have--
why didn't I see that?
Why didn't I see that?
So the not knowing is
a cultivatable skill.
And when we can invite that
into the meditation practice,
then there's just, what the Zen
people would say, just sitting.
Nothing more.
Shikantaza in Japanese.
Just sitting, nothing more.
No big agenda, no
enlightenment, no
getting to be a better person.
How can you be a better person?
You're already a Buddha.
How can you improve on yourself?
There's no improving on you.
There's only a realizing it.
And what's realizing mean?
It means making it real.
How do you make it real?
By remembering.
By putting one foot
in front of the other,
and then watching when
you get in your own way.
Any of you ever get
into an emotional sort
of tiffs in your family
that you're to blame for?
Just raise your hands if
you been through that.
And that you don't
want to take the blame,
and it's always the
other person's fault.
But if we can't
deal with that, how
are we going to deal with
terrorism, and war, and?
So the human mind is
actually in its infancy.
If you look back to,
say, the last Ice Age.
What is it, like 14,000
years, or something?
Let's say it's 400, 500
generations since the last Ice
Age.
All of civilization,
all of history,
all of the beauty
that's in the Louvre,
and the concert
halls and every--
and in the universities,
and all of the mayhem,
and horror that human beings.
It all comes out
of the human mind,
on the one hand, when it knows
itself, and is investigating,
and loves learning, and
growing, and transformation,
recognition.
And when it's either you or me,
then we fall into a darkness
and we go through
these cataclysms.
Where millions of people die,
and then we all become friends.
Again.
So there's a certain way in
which we called ourselves,
as a species, Homo
sapiens sapiens.
In Latin from the
verb sapere, which
means to taste or to know.
So we're the species,
arrogantly, I would assert,
that knows and
knows that it knows.
I don't think so.
I mean, it's a nice name, but
we need to live our way into it.
And the way to do it is
not through the president,
or the Congress, or Angela
Merkel, or anybody else.
The way to do it is
through you and me.
We need to take responsibility
for being cells of the one body
politic that's
called the planet.
And when we do that,
I mean, the book
has not been written about
what the potential for this
would be.
And since you mentioned
Buddhism, and Buddhism moving
into all these different
countries in Asia,
and my saying that it's
not really about Buddhism.
It's about what's called
dharma, or the lawfulness
that the Buddha,
who you could say
was like an exquisite
scientist in his age,
but didn't have
any FMRI machines,
or CAT scans, or
anything like that.
And is often called the
physician of the world.
And the four noble truths, if
you know anything about this,
is in the frame of the classical
medical diagnosis, ideology,
prognosis, and treatment plan.
So nothing magical or
mystical about this.
This is an empirical
self-evident
unfolding that you can engage
in, and see for yourself.
And if it doesn't make
sense, forget about.
But if it does make
sense, then there's
a certain way in which
it's possible to tap
into your own uniqueness.
That, I would say, I
would assert again,
that the world is actually both
starving for and dying for.
Every single one of us, young
or old, that the world actually
needs us to show up in our
full seeming, if you will,
or our full humanity.
And, of course, we benefit.
We're the first
people to benefit
from it, because otherwise,
what Thoreau would say is true.
You can drop into your
grave and then wake up
at the last moment,
and say, holy cow.
I got it all wrong.
I thought it was
important to be an SOB.
Or just be hard on everybody.
Compassion is for sissies.
Or whatever your particular
slogan is, or thought frame.
And instead realize, no.
There's something, and
it's not about the Buddha.
And it's not about Buddhism.
And it's not necessarily
even about the dharma
in one framework.
What those are are invitations
for us to, in some sense,
measure ourselves
against any framework
that makes sense to you, and
see whether it illuminates you.
And not knowing.
Who am I?
Don't know.
Of course, you also do know.
Because if you didn't, who would
get you dressed in the morning?
What would happen to
your bank account?
Oh, I'm beyond money
and stuff like that.
You remember the
famous Nasreddin story?
Nasreddin is like a Sufi sage.
Wander around in
the Middle East.
Before they were occupied by us,
and coalitions, and so forth.
Centuries ago.
And so he goes into a bank.
Wants to cash a very big check.
And the teller says to him--
this was before digital IDs--
the teller says, can
you identify yourself?
And in those days,
you wear robes.
And so out of his robe
he pulls a hand-mirror.
He looks in the mirror.
He says, yup,
that's me all right.
So mindfulness of the
personal pronouns.
What do we mean
when we say my life?
My love?
My work?
My calling?
My pain?
What do we mean?
And is it big enough?
Is the narrative, is the story
we're telling us ourselves,
big enough to hold the
actuality of your insight?
Of your intuition?
Of what brought
you here tonight?
Of that inexpressible kind of
sensing that there may be more,
or different dimensions of
understanding, or reality,
than mere thinking?
And merely what has been
known up to this point?
And that's how the
world progresses.
That's how the world heals.
That's how the world grows.
And when we fall into fear.
The first thing that
goes in some sense
is the other, when the
other is different from me.
And I feel threatened.
And there's a lot of that
going on right in this country.
And it's tearing the
fabric of the body politic
apart, both in this country
and around the world now.
That is, we might
have thought, well,
if the election had
gone the other way, that
wouldn't have happened.
I don't think so.
It uncovered a diagnosis that
was sitting here all along.
That a lot of happy
people were thinking,
kumbaya, it's all
going to be great.
But the level of
pain in the country
was not being attended to.
Not being attended to.
So now, in some sense, it's
more important than ever
that we throw ourselves.
I was thinking,
because you heard
that my father-in-law was on
campus when I last spoke here
in 2002.
And I was thinking, wow.
Wouldn't be great if
Howard were talking now?
I could just shut up.
Because his voice is needed
now, far more than it was then.
I mean, if you haven't read The
People's History of the United
States, or just even
the past 30 years of it,
it's really worth going
back and reminding yourself
that this has been
going on all along.
It's not, oh, it just
happened since November.
There are forces at play that
are way beyond the personal,
and the personages that
get developed here,
and it really has to do with
what the Buddhists would
call the big three.
Greed, hatred, and delusion.
They're framed differently.
Sometimes it's greed--
it's always greed.
So here's a good
mindfulness practice.
See how many times
during the day
you can identify greed
arising in yourself.
Even mini-greed.
Just almost socially
acceptable, but greedy.
Not major greed disorder.
But we're seeing major
greed disorder played out
in the newspaper every day.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
I mean, the middle class,
and the working class,
not enough money
going to the 0.01%.
Squeeze all the rest of it out.
Greed.
But it's in us too.
It's not just in them.
That's my point.
As soon as we go
dualistic on ourselves,
we're already as good as dead.
We need a new way of being
that recognizes what Wordsworth
called "discordant elements" and
makes them move in one society.
And I think ultimately what
it's going to be is love.
That's why I keep--
this practice is a
practice of embodied love.
And delight in-- when you get
beyond the personal pronouns,
love, of course,
isn't just my wants,
or my desire, or my love.
It's if you love me back.
It's a love of life,
a love of learning,
a love of universities, a
love of places like this,
a love of community, a
love of interconnectedness.
And there's an insane
amount of beauty,
at the same time as there's
insane amount of suffering.
And Thich Nhat Hanh was
very clear about this.
During the bombing of Hue,
and during the Vietnam War,
he would remind
his monks, as they
were taking their fellow
monastics' corpses to the
to the cemeteries,
to burn the corpses.
He would remind them, make sure
you see the flowers growing
by the side of the road.
It's a non-dual
perspective on horror.
And how are we to be in
[INAUDIBLE] relationship to it.
To fine tune it,
to minimize harm.
I think there should be a
Hippocratic oath for virtually
every profession.
Not just doctors.
Politicians.
First, first oath.
First, do no harm.
Educators, first do no harm.
Of course, how
would you even know
if you're doing any harm,
unless you're paying attention?
Unless you're
cultivating mindfulness?
And there's no one
right way to do it.
Let me just make sure you
understand that I am not
advocating a method.
Now we're going to just paint
the world over with MBSR,
or MBCT, or MB je ne sais quoi.
Because I said, they
are skillful means.
One of a potentially
infinite number
of ways that might
be developed to heal,
to promote that kind of
learning, growing, healing,
and transformation
of understanding
who we are as human beings.
An infinite number of
different ways to do that.
And I would say that
our karmic assignments,
if you choose to accept it.
Mission Impossible,
of course, is
to find out what yours
is, and live that
as if your life depended on it.
Because not only your
life depends on it,
but the entire
world depends on it.
Was that a grace note
from a cell phone?
So before we go to questions,
I want to just quickly review
one or two things.
Because I very much
want to ask about--
hear questions and so forth.
I haven't really covered
scientific studies
and research.
I'm happy to do that if
it comes up in the Q&A.
But I do want to
say that, in terms
of the hype around
mindfulness, that just like
all the other toxicities that
are developing in the world
today, the only real
antidote to that
is the depth of our practice.
Each one of us, embodying
our understanding,
whatever that means to you.
Not conceptual
understanding, or merely
conceptual understanding,
as best we can.
And living that, and trusting
that it's good enough.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
You don't have to be
whatever you could
imagine an enlightened being.
Of course, being in
an unenlightened state
any imagination of
an enlightened being
would be completely
unenlightened.
So give it up.
And in many traditions,
actually, as soon
as you give it up, that's it.
Because enlightened,
unenlightened,
it's just one more dualism.
It may never be better
than it is right now.
You may just be older.
But what you have now, what
each one of us has now,
is unbelievably precious,
no matter how old we are.
And the opportunity to
realize that every in breath
is a new beginning.
Every moment is a new beginning.
It really, in some
sense, frees us
from a lot of the prisons
of our own creation
that have stories about
how inadequate we are,
or how we've done
our work, or we're
too small to have an
effect, or whatever it is.
And we need to really see how
big we are as human beings,
and then not make some
giant story around that.
About hey, I don't know if you
realize it, but I'm a Buddha.
Do you realize that?
I'm the Buddha.
Yeah.
I don't know about you,
but I'm the Buddha.
And that, nonsense.
That kind of nonsense.
We're either all Buddhas
or nobody's a Buddha.
So I'll leave you
with two poems.
Maybe some of you have heard
me recite these, because I--
oh, and also, one other thing.
I don't know if you read the
New York Times on March 3rd
last week, but there's
a wonderful editorial
about the Pope, called "The
Pope and the Panhandler."
The pope is really a
very, very mindful guy,
in certain domains.
And he's talking about how,
the next time somebody asks you
for money, give it to him.
Give it to him.
And notice.
Be mindful of your impulse not
to, or to give them a lecture,
or to do it, but withholding, or
scorn, or I'm better than you.
He says, no.
Give it to them, and
make eye contact.
You have to make
eye contact, and you
have to touch their hands.
This is the pope.
Not the Dalai Lama.
The pope.
The last line of the
editorial, New York Times,
is, "Maybe compassion
is the right call."
See, what's happening
in the world,
and you can read it in the
newspaper every single day,
is that we are growing
into something.
By infinitesimal
little arisings.
And every one of us is
hearing them differently,
or missing some, and catching
others on YouTube, or whatever.
But there's definitely
some kind of development
that's way beyond, and
far deeper, than all
of the crap that passes for
the hype of mindfulness,
or all of that
commercialization of it,
or the ethical questions around
whether we should be training
the military, or the police, in
mindfulness, or corporations,
which, of course, they'll
just do more greed.
They'll do greed better if
we teach them mindfulness.
But not if it's real.
Not if it's really mindfulness.
At least, it's arguable.
And you know what?
They're still, they're
actually human beings.
And you could say,
well, actually,
corporations are more
privileged now than human beings
after Citizens United.
So the question is how to be
skillful without betraying
your ethical core.
So that's a koan.
It's not a reason to
give up, or to say, no,
we can't actually relate to
the humanity of those people.
If we train them in
mindfulness, they'll
just become better
snipers, better killers.
It turns out that there's
a lot of evidence.
I know Amishi Jha was
scheduled to talk here.
Couldn't.
Then schedule began.
Again couldn't.
But she is coming.
And she has been doing this
kind of work with the military.
Both in the Army and
the Marines, and there
are a lot of
testimonials that when
the Marines are in close
combat situations, in what they
call counter-terrorism
situations,
where no one's wearing uniforms.
It's like we're the red coats.
We're the blue coats.
We're just.
You don't know who it
is, and most people
are women and children.
They don't pull the trigger.
So there are arguable--
these are at least
arguable domains
of investigation in
terms of understanding
what the potential limits of
this kind of thing would be.
The other thing is
that meditation may not
be for everybody.
There are some people
who, or at least
meditating like
dropping into silence.
Maybe some people have so
much trauma, or so many
demons, that they need to be
held in a certain kind of way.
I don't mean maybe.
This is actually
absolutely true.
Need to be held in a
certain kind of way.
Willoughby Britton does
research on that right
here in this university.
But it doesn't mean that
mindfulness might not
be good for 99% of
people, or maybe 95%.
Or maybe 90.
But the point is, what do
we even mean by mindfulness?
Because when we investigate that
in the deepest of ways, then
it may be that, under the
appropriate conditions,
even unthinkable trauma
can be met in a way.
It might not look like
sitting on a zafu.
But it might look
like compassion.
Let's not forget
that the word mind
and heart in Asian
languages is the same word.
So if you're not hearing
the word heartfulness
when I'm using the
word mindfulness,
you're not actually
understanding it completely.
There's no separation between
compassion and mindfulness,
although some people want to
create that kind of thing.
And instrumentally, yeah.
Of course, some of the guided
meditations look different,
but the essence doesn't.
It's not like the
heart and the lungs now
have to compete about
who's more important.
So the two poems.
And then we'll open
it up to questions.
Dialogue.
And I want to thank
you for your attention.
I really feel touched.
In some sense, blessed
by just the privilege
of having an evening
like this together.
One of the poems is
by Emily Dickinson.
So Emily Dickinson,
as you probably know,
there was nobody
like her before her.
Nobody like her after.
No one ever did
what she did with
and to the English language.
And both of these poems
are on the subject
of your personal favorites,
the personal pronouns.
The words you probably use
more than any other words
in the language,
every single day.
So the first one, "Me, from
myself to banish, had I art.
Impregnable my fortress
unto all heart.
Me, from myself to
banish, had I art.
Impregnable my fortress
unto all heart.
But since myself
assault me, how have
I peace, except by
subjugating consciousness?
But since we're mutual
monarch, how this be except
by abdication, me of me?"
You feel that?
So I'd like you to reflect, just
for a moment, and ask yourself,
how much of the time do
you abdicate me from me?
You close off some parts of me.
Shine a light on
other parts of me.
Pretend that's all there is.
There's shit to pay for that.
As I'm sure you all know.
But easily said.
But a lot of hard
work, in some sense,
is involved in healing that
kind of impulse to separate.
And it often is trauma-driven.
Because we might have gotten
the message when we're young,
not wanted.
Not good enough.
Only show certain sides.
We don't want to see
the other sides of you.
That happens to
virtually all of us.
Little t trauma, big T Trauma.
How we heal from that
is essential to not be
imprisoned in a certain
kind of pain, and anger,
and disillusion,
and disappointment.
So how many of us have not,
especially as teenagers,
wanted to have--
have you ever had a love
experience that, you
felt like destroyed you,
and you had the thought,
I will never be that
vulnerable again?
I mean, it's just not worth it.
Anybody in the room ever have
that happen when you were 15,
or whatever?
So that's what she's talking.
"Me from myself to
banish, had I art."
If I could do that, then my
heart would be impregnable.
"Impregnable my fortress
unto all heart."
But the consequences, the
causes, the cost of that.
"But since myself assault me,"
which we do all the time, "how
have I peace except by
subjugating consciousness,"
in other words, going mindless.
Numb.
No longer recognizing
aspects of my own being,
because other people
don't like them.
Or are afraid of them.
And it could be
the way you look,
it could be the color of your
skin, it could be whatever.
Equal-opportunity destroyer.
"But since myself
assault me, how
have I peace except by
subjugating consciousness?
But since we're mutual monarch."
I think it's "and," not "but."
"And since we're
mutual monarch, how
this be, except by
abdication, me of me."
Shoot another little
arrow into my heart.
Myself.
So the other one is the
counterpart of this.
It's by Derek Walcott,
who won the Nobel Prize.
He's from the island of St.
Lucia, an Afro-Caribbean poet.
And it's called
"Love after Love."
Probably many people know this.
These poems are in a
number of my books.
"The time will come
when with elation you
will greet yourself
arriving at your own door.
In your own mirror.
And each will smile at
the others, welcome.
And say, 'Sit here.
Eat.' You will love again the
stranger who was yourself.
Give wine, give bread,
give back your heart,"
to yourself, "to
the stranger who
has loved you all your life."
"To the stranger who has
loved you all your life,
who you have ignored for
another who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from
the bookshelf, the photographs,
the desperate notes.
Peel your own image
from the mirror.
Sit.
Feast on your life."
Thank you folks.
HAL ROTH: If you would like
to ask questions of Jon,
we still have some time
for question and answer.
There are microphones in
the middle of the staircase,
on either side of the rooms.
This will enable everybody
to hear the questions.
Also we're recording
this to put up
on our website,
which you can find
if you search, if you Google
for contemplative studies.
Many of our lectures
have been recorded
and are up on the website.
I also want to remind
everybody that if you're
interested in learning more
about the contemplatives
studies concentration,
we are having
an open house on Tuesday,
this coming Tuesday,
the 21st of March starting
at 6:30 in Hillel.
Please, everybody is welcome.
Particularly also if you're
interested, sophomores,
in signing up for
the concentration,
this is the time when
you have to do it.
So without further ado, please.
We'll start on this side
of the room with questions,
and then we'll
move back and forth
from one side to the other.
SPEAKER 1: Yes, I enjoyed
your presentation.
And I know I've been
wondering for myself,
if there was more
mindfulness, if that
was something that
was to spread,
I question to myself what
kind of economic system
would work in that
type of situation?
And I've thought about that.
And I think that
the example that we
get from our human bodies,
right, where you have,
I believe it's about 37 trillion
cells that work together.
JON KABAT-ZINN: And many of
them aren't human cells too.
It's the microbiome
which outnumber us.
SPEAKER 1: Yes, and so
I've been wondering, is
that a good analogy for--
as humans learn to
be more mindful,
is it possible
that a form of life
sort of like the body
where cells, perhaps,
have their own individual
consciousness of some sort,
combine to form a
greater consciousness?
Or if that's something that--
how do you visualize how
an economy would function?
JON KABAT-ZINN:
People are actually
writing papers about it.
There's a woman named Tanya
Singer, a neuroscientist
in Leipzig at the
Max Planck Institute
there, who's doing all
sorts of interesting studies
on both mindfulness
practices, and compassion
practices, and dyadic
exchanges, and so forth.
And is really talking about
the potential economic
consequences.
There's a whole
field of economics
called neuroeconomics.
Behavioral economics where they
model these kinds of things,
sometimes on supercomputers.
And it turns out that
compassion, and the panhandler
example from the pope, and
so forth, that there are--
I mean, after all,
how much money
do you have to have
accumulated to be happy?
It turns out it's not very much.
And the rest of it is just
this unadulterated greed factor
that we don't investigate
from the point of view
of a democracy of law.
Why can't we have laws against
concentrating all the wealth
in a tiny number of hands, and
creating an enormous amount
of deprivation elsewhere,
and then creating
views like, well, if
you were smart enough,
or if you pulled yourself
up by your own bootstraps,
well, you'd be able to do it?
When the president,
actually, one thing
that he's really correct in
saying is the system is rigged.
It's rigged in
1,000 different ways
for those who already have.
So yes, there could be
a mindful economics.
I think that in a certain way
that is a wonderful metaphor.
I feel like, and I said this
in Coming to Our Senses,
that what we've learned in
medicine in the past 40 years
about health and
well-being could actually
transfer to the body politic,
and the body of the planet.
That we, when too much energy is
concentrated in too few hands,
you actually create ill health.
In the same way as if all
the blood went to the heart,
and the liver had to compete,
and then the feet got nothing,
how long would
the organism last?
So there's a
certain way in which
a homeostatic model of how
a society, or a planet,
would work so that everybody was
able to contribute profoundly.
We haven't gotten there yet.
I mean, there are, of course,
lots and lots of models,
and philosophies about it,
going back hundreds of years.
But I think we have a
new opportunity here
in the coming decades.
If we make it at all, because
that's also a question.
The human mind that doesn't
know itself has nuclear weapons.
And when it gets
angry, and you've
got seven minutes to
decide, and all the systems
are being hacked anyway,
and we don't even
know who's hacking them.
It's not a circumstance for
that much feeling of confidence
that things are going to
work out for us human beings.
The planet would care less.
Sun won't have a
problem with it, if we--
but we need to take
responsibility for that.
So I really respect and
appreciate your question,
because I do think
that there's--
and I don't know if
there are any economists,
or behavioral
economists, in the room.
But this is
increasingly becoming
the subject of rigorous
scientific research,
and economic modeling,
and so forth.
And there's a literature about--
SPEAKER 1: Just last
comment to add on that.
It seems to me, like
when I think about it,
obviously, that we're the only
life form on the planet that
even uses money.
That needs money in
order to survive.
So all of the other
creatures do fine without it.
And so, there's always
that question to me
is what's the
economic system that's
going to come with mindfulness?
But thanks for
all your comments.
JON KABAT-ZINN: I
mean, I happened
to meet the person who
invented the Visa card.
And this was a long time ago.
And he actually set
it up so that he
got paid a certain amount
to invent the Visa card,
rather than a small fraction of
every transaction, which would
have had him be a billionaire.
But he was not into greed
to that degree at all.
And the model was a universal
exchange of human value.
That's what the
plastic in your wallet
is is a universal
exchange of human value.
I mean, money is a
thing of the past.
I mean, a lot of people just
never use money anymore.
And then there's bitcoin,
which I don't quite understand.
But that's a very,
very profound point.
We take things for
granted that maybe we
don't need to take for granted.
And I know that
Finland is actually
experimenting with giving
everybody a working wage so
to speak for doing nothing.
Non-doing and doing
nothing are very different.
But maybe the Finns will
be enlightened enough
to actually give people a
working wage for non-doing.
And then see what they actually
do out of being, if they
have that kind of luxury.
But those are very
creative questions
that I think are coming up
through the floorboards.
Because the present system
is actually extinguishing
life in a certain way.
HAL ROTH: So a question
from the left side.
STEPH: Hi.
When you're talking about
your concept of healing
as acceptance, I
was just wondering
how you conceptualize balancing
both healing and acceptance
with the type of direct
action and resistance
that we're seeing
that's building,
but also that has
historically been
so important for
mobilizing change.
So just discussing that balance.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Well, I
thank you for that question.
And I don't pretend to have
the last word on anything
like that.
Or deep insight.
But I do feel like we spoke a
little bit about embodiment,
and I think sometimes you have
to put your body on the line.
You just have to show up as part
of a crowd of a million people,
wherever that is.
Or a million women,
or 10 million women.
Or people who are going
to walk through Mexico,
and take the wall with
them, or whatever it is.
Gandhi was a master of that.
I mean, he basically brought
down the British Empire
by non-doing.
And so I do think that there
is at least the rudiments
of a kind of tradition
that needs to be upgraded,
so to speak, or updated, to
be adequate to the times now.
But the resistance metaphor
is a very, very powerful one.
It's a question of how do we
define it so that resistance
isn't just us against them and
we know better than they do.
And then we dehumanize them
because we know we're so right
and they're so wrong.
And I think that is
the delusion that we
have to really
avoid because that's
itself part of the disease.
And while if health care, if
they don't cut the NIH budget,
and things keep going with the
NIH, and scientific research,
and so forth, they may
actually find genetic cures
to lots of different
kinds of cancers,
and various things like this,
in the next 40, 50, 100 years.
But what about dis-ease?
Not disease, but dis-ease.
That's more our
personal responsibility
that we need to--
and that's really, I think, the
challenge of the moment for us
is to take our dis-ease,
hold it in awareness
in a way that is
itself transforming,
and then use that
energy to optimize
the good and minimize harm.
And I don't have a prescription
for how to do that,
but I think that, in some sense,
the strength is in numbers.
There are, just to remind
you, I think it's-- how many?
Are there any
neuroscientists in the room?
OK, a few.
So by latest count--
I don't know who
actually counted them
or how they did it--
but the latest estimate
is that there are something
like 86 billion neurons
in the brain, and something like
an equal number of glial cells.
Who knows what they're doing.
But I'm sure that they're
not there by accident.
And then you said
hundreds of trillions
of synaptic connections.
By the way, they're
changing all the time.
I didn't go here in
my talk, but the brain
is the most complex
organization of matter
in the known universe.
At least, known by us.
And that's a very big,
the known universe.
I mean, it's sitting right
inside your little old head.
So we wake up in the morning
with the 86 billion neurons,
and you're already depressed.
There's something wrong
with this picture.
I mean, wait a minute.
You're like the divine
incarnation of complexity.
And there's something
incredibly beautiful about it.
And then, again, lots of
different things we do.
Excuse me.
Including exercise, including
cultivating intimacy
with people, including
sitting on a cushion,
actually drive
neuroplastic changes
in what's called
functional connectivity,
and you can actually upgrade
your brain to brain 2.0.
So to speak, if you're
exercising the muscle.
And if you're not, you're
downgrading it to 0.5.
Because the brain, it's like
the stress of all kinds,
and the inevitability
of the full catastrophe
of the human condition.
That actually has its own
effects on arborization,
and synaptic health,
and stuff like that.
So it's either going in
one way or the other way,
and we get to participate in a
way that was completely unknown
30 or 40 years ago, in
actually using the brain
as an organ of
ever-changing adaptation
to the actuality and the
challenges of our lives.
I love that.
I think there's never
been a better time,
from the point of
view of science,
to be into meditation because
it influences telomeres.
That's a whole other talk,
but biological aging.
And it influences
the up-regulating
and down-regulating,
through epigenetic factors,
of hundreds if not thousands
of genes, many of which
have to do with proto-oncogenes
or inflammatory genes, which
seem to be the root
causes of most disease.
So there's like, everything
is tilted in the direction.
Without going all kumbaya
and airy-fairy about it.
And even if none
of that was known,
it'd still be worth cultivating
wisdom and recognizing
greed, hatred, and delusion.
So in that sense,
the sky's the limit.
STEPH: Thank you.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Thank you.
SPEAKER 3: Sorry,
I'm a little short.
Yeah, thank you for coming
to speak with us today.
So I teach animal
behavior in this room,
and yesterday we were going over
two scientific papers analyzing
birdsong.
And both of them involve
the trapping of birds.
One of them involved the
dissection of their brains,
and they were
trying to understand
the neural mechanisms of
how birdsong is created.
But at the end of the
day, none of the birds
that are going to
be experimented on
will ever sing again.
So my question to you is
that a lot of your research
obviously goes into
the neuroscientific
and has to do with slightly
less invasive mechanisms
of studying, but
at the same time,
do you ever worry that
maybe examining mindfulness
in this very empirical
way, but particularly
through this Western
scientific lens,
do you ever worry that perhaps
it essentializes science
to specific neurons
in the brain,
or that mindfulness now
has to be a pathway that we
can trace within ourselves?
JON KABAT-ZINN: Thank you so
much for asking that question.
I'm asking myself, do
I ever worry about it?
And the answer is no,
I don't worry about it.
But now that you
brought it up I'm
going to start
worrying about it.
I'm going to start
worrying about it.
I think it's an important,
it's really important.
And again, I hope you
got from my comments
that I'm not into reifying
mindfulness, or putting
the neural correlates of
things we don't understand up
on some pedestal, and
calling that the cat's meow.
These are all sort of
minimal lines of evidence
that are pointing to something
unbelievably beautiful,
unbelievably complex,
that is going to take us
a very, very long
time to understand
from the outer perspective.
But without
understanding it equally
from the inner perspective
of direct experience itself.
What Francisco Varela called
first person experience.
You can put as many
undergraduate Brown psychology
majors as you want
it into scanners,
and have them doing
whatever they're doing,
and reporting on the results.
But they don't have the
first, unless they've
been meditating for a
long time, they really
can't report on their
own direct experience.
So you can't link the third
person with the first person.
In terms of the birds, I'm
just very sad to hear that.
Because in many
ways birdsong is one
of the ways in which
neuroplasticity
was discovered and understood.
And some of that
pioneering research
is really, really
powerful but to the degree
that the beings
actually had to be--
they use a euphemism--
euthanized for that to happen.
Again, it's the kind
of thing that there's
endless debate about.
But I feel where the
emotion around your question
is coming from.
And I think that,
what comes to my mind
is when Eskimos, or Native
Americans for that matter,
would have to kill
an animal to survive.
They went through a
whole ritual around
that that actually asked
the animal's permission.
I'm not a Native American.
I don't remember.
I don't know this kind of stuff.
But my understanding
is that it was
held within a larger framework
of understanding the cycles
of life, and so forth.
And that's very
different, sometimes,
from euthanizing animals
in the laboratory.
Thank you.
SPEAKER 3: Thank you.
SPEAKER 4: Hi.
Thank you for
giving this lecture.
It's--
JON KABAT-ZINN: Talk a
little closer into the mic.
SPEAKER 4: Thank you
for giving this lecture.
It's a privilege to
welcome you to Brown.
I'm going to touch a
little bit on the question
that Steph posed before,
because I came across an article
where you actually had a
conversation in Oakland
with Dr. Angela Davis,
who was at Brown recently.
And Rhonda McGee
was the last speaker
for this series,
who's very involved
in social work and law.
Something that has
come into my attention
more recently in my practice
has been the lack of diversity
among mindfulness practitioners.
So clearly, the need to be
involved in social action,
and to embed mindfulness into
social movements, is important.
But how do we also make
sure that this is inclusive?
JON KABAT-ZINN: Well,
the thing I did with--
does anybody know
who Angela Dave is?
OK.
In the 1960s everyone
knew who Angela Davis was,
I'll tell you.
So I'm glad to hear
that she was here.
So we were doing that as
a benefit for the East Bay
Meditation Center, which is
the most diverse meditation
center on the planet,
as far as I know.
I mean, it is really diverse.
And the title of
our conversation
was, "What Use Is Mindfulness
in a Socially Unjust World?"
And I think we need to
really take that on.
And Rhonda, who was here
last week, she's phenomenal.
I mean, we're actually doing
quite a bit of work together.
We were in San Francisco
just a couple of weeks
ago, talking about
this very subject.
And we're going to be
doing a benefit in December
for the New York Insight
Meditation Center, which
is the second most diverse
mindfulness meditation
center on the planet,
as far as I know.
So you've put your finger
on a really important point.
And I think there are
efforts underway, and just
the natural evolution
of this, so that it
is moving more and more into
domains where people of color
are actually doing the teaching.
And they have communities of
people who study with them.
And it's really
rather impressive.
I mean George Mumford is a
long-standing colleague of ours
who--
I worked with George.
How many of you know
who George Mumford is?
He wrote a book called
The Inner Athlete.
No, mindful athlete.
The Mindful Athlete.
And he worked, in their
championship years,
with the Chicago Bulls, training
them in mindfulness, and then
the Los Angeles Lakers,
with Phil Jackson.
And George is just--
when he worked with us, we
developed an inner city clinic,
where we tried to
take what we were
doing in the more
mainstream medical setting,
and bringing it right
into the inner city.
People, a much more
diverse population,
who ordinarily would not get it.
And then study it to see whether
the outcomes were similar.
And they were.
And then we also developed
a prison project,
where we were bringing
mindfulness into prisons
and working there in
those kinds of ways.
And that paper was just recently
published about the inner city
clinic in this 2016.
So it is happening, and I
think that we're doing--
I mean, the people that
I know, including myself,
are trying to do
everything we can
to catalyze that happening
in a way that really promotes
deep dialogue.
So that we don't fall into a
convenient comfort zone, where
we think we're being all warm
and fuzzy around difference,
without drilling down to
the real levels of pain,
and suffering, and
hurt, and disregard.
And that goes, of course,
back into our history to the--
talk about Standing Rock--
and the fact that we've
never, as a nation,
really acknowledged the
genocide of the native peoples
of this continent.
And then we have never,
equally, really acknowledged
the travesty of
slavery and the harm
that it is causing to this day.
The inheritance of that history.
We have not gone through a
truth and reconciliation process
by any stretch of
the imagination.
So that's something that's
in the forefront of a lot
of people's consciousness.
And I'm very happy to see that
it's got a life of its own,
that certainly doesn't
depend on white people.
HAL ROTH: Jon, to the right.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Yup.
SPEAKER 5: So in the spirit
not being too greedy,
I really want to thank you.
But I'm putting a shout-out,
if anyone has an extra ticket
for Saturday, I'm open.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Close
to the microphone.
SPEAKER 5: Oh sorry.
I was going to say, in the
spirit of not being too greedy,
this has been great.
But if anybody has--
JON KABAT-ZINN: You're giving
up your ticket to Saturday.
SPEAKER 5: I don't
have a ticket.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Oh.
SPEAKER 5: I want a ticket.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Oh
you want a ticket.
SPEAKER 5: I will pay extra.
I'm actually a student
of Willoughby's, you
mentioned, which was a
phenomenal experience.
But this has been great.
I really appreciate it.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Oh, thank you.
SPEAKER 5: And if you could
just comment a little bit
about Dan Siegel and his
work, Wheel of Awareness.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Yeah,
it's the same thing.
I mean, Dan loves acronyms.
And he loves to develop
models and stuff like that.
They're really teaching devices.
So as long as you don't reify
them into some special thing,
it's a very skillful way
to help people understand
why they should
do something that
looks so much like nothing.
And you could say that a lot
of this talk about mindfulness,
from somebody who doesn't
understand anything about it,
it looks like, all of a sudden,
it's much ado about nothing.
And I like to say, well,
it's much ado about what
looks a lot like
nothing but turns out
to be just about everything.
In the same way as a
book of mathematics
that I read some time ago.
It said, look at zero.
The digit zero, and
you see nothing.
Look through it, and
you see the world.
Because the discovery
of zero, as a digit,
was incredibly liberating
for all sorts of thought
that before we had the
concept of not present,
could not be counted.
We couldn't do math.
And so there's a certain way in
which emptiness and non-doing
are the same.
They look like nothing.
And it turns out they're
pretty much everything.
Why?
Because we've already got the
equipment to recognize it,
and that's called awareness.
And we're born with it.
It's not something
you have to acquire.
It's something you have
to cultivate intimacy
with, and then let
it, in some sense,
you could say teach you
everything you need to know.
By how?
Keeping your eyes
open, and your ears,
and metaphorically
coming to, and literally
coming to our senses.
SPEAKER 5: Well,
thank you again.
And just to reiterate
any extra tickets around.
I see one of my meditation--
JON KABAT-ZINN: I'll tell you
a secret in my experience.
Show up at the door.
You'll get in.
SPEAKER 5: I was
going to do that.
And I'm going to ask for you.
JON KABAT-ZINN:
That's the wisdom.
That's wisdom.
Just show up at the door.
You'll get in.
SPEAKER 5: Thank you.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Oops.
OK, we'll take two more
and then we'll stop.
SPEAKER 6: Hi.
I'm actually really nervous--
JON KABAT-ZINN: Hold it
up like an ice cream cone.
SPEAKER 6: I'm actually
really nervous asking you
this, because I feel as though
it's a really big question.
And I hope it makes
sense, but going off
of what was asked
before, and by Steph
you talk a lot about healing.
And that's something
that I think a lot of us,
especially young
people are thinking
a lot about, because we
have endured a lot of pain,
and anger, and
resentment, and all that.
But thinking about
access, like who
actually has access
to resources that
provide a healthy living,
wellness, and things like that.
I mean, you spoke a
little bit about it.
But how can you--
not just representation, who's
actually doing the teaching--
but how do you widen the access
to these kinds of resources,
especially for underserved
marginalized communities?
That, and also on
campus, I think,
I mean, just speaking from
my personal experience,
I see a lot of divisions
that have been happening
in the past few years, to
the point where people feel
uncomfortable around
each other, and there
are a lot of lines drawn.
We feel very divided.
And I think that's a
real reflection of what's
happening in the States,
and everything, but how--
as a person of color, what--
I know a lot of friends and
groups who feel a lot of anger
and hurt, and who don't want to
have conversations with people.
And how do you heal, and
communicate, and resist,
and all of these things?
And I know this is just
one method to heal,
and for some other people
it's creative writing,
and all those things but--
Yeah.
I don't know if
that's a question.
JON KABAT-ZINN: First
of all, thank you.
It wasn't just a question.
In some sense, it was a poem.
And a poignant one.
And the answer is, I don't know.
Don't know.
But you might.
Because I'll tell you.
I'm not joking.
The place where your
question is coming from,
being a really serious
and authentic question.
Look carefully at where the
question is coming from,
in the same way as I suggest
that you look at what
brought you here tonight.
All of us, not just you.
Because right next to
the questions very often
reside answers,
insights, perspectives
that we look outside for, when
you couldn't have even asked
the question unless you have a
lot of framework and insight,
or potential insight
waiting to be born.
And so just sitting on
your butt for a while
and holding that, without
trying to come up with anything,
but giving yourself
permission to just not know
and to just be.
That's the most
powerful thing I know.
And it is healing
and transformative.
And when you engage in that
yourself, new things emerge.
This was the whole point
of my talk, in some sense.
New creative things emerge that
can't possibly come out of me,
or anybody else.
Have to come out of you.
And that's the love.
That's the love.
So thank you for that.
HAL ROTH: One last question.
JON KABAT-ZINN:
Yeah so is it you?
Well, if you're
by the microphone,
why don't you use it?
Or are you just
hanging out there?
SPEAKER 7: I was
just hanging out,
but I'll ask a question anyway.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Does
anybody have a question?
SPEAKER 7: Unless somebody
has a real question.
JON KABAT-ZINN: OK, go for it.
SPEAKER 7: Something I've
been thinking about recently,
and the gentleman who
asked a question about--
JON KABAT-ZINN: Hold
it a little closer.
SPEAKER 7: --the economy
and so on earlier.
My question is, why do
we look upon a person who
hoards stuff, piles up
stuff, fills up their house,
and so on.
They couldn't possibly use it.
They just have it.
Why are they a nut?
And why is the person who
hoards the same amount of money
the exact opposite?
A hero?
To me, it's the
exact same thing.
I don't know if it fits
in here or whatever.
But I thought I'd throw it out.
Because I have no idea.
Why is that?
Why is one fantastic?
The other one's bad.
JON KABAT-ZINN: How about this?
Don't know.
Thank you folks.
Thanks for coming.
Good night.
