[MUSIC]
Stanford University.
>> So I'm Michael Heinrich.
I'll be your host, essentially, for these
nine
weeks as we delve into the topic of
consciousness.
And particularly delighted to see such an
interesting and
varied audience, we've got ambitious
Stanford students, Stanford professors.
We even got some really interesting
community members.
We've got some Google engineers amongst
us.
We've got senior VPs and CEOs of Fortune
500 companies as well as startups.
We've got meditators and non meditators.
So a really interesting group of people,
but before we get started I'd
also like to sort of thank a few people
that have made this possible.
First our course advisors.
One of which is Dr. Cesar Molina.
He couldn't be with us today because he
unfortunately had
a travel booked before this course even was
announced to him.
But he did his residency at Stanford, he
practices at the
El Camino Hospital, and he's also the
co-founder of The South Asian
Heart Center, which really is all about
prevention through lifestyle change, and
sort of rest, diet, et cetera, is really
part of their regimen.
Another course advisor is John Bright, who
is with us here today.
Thank you John for all your support, and
he is one
of the leaders of the International
Transcendental Meditation movement, TM for
short.
And of course Andrew Todhunter, who
because of travel schedules is
also not with us today, but he essentially
is our core sponsor.
He lectures in the Department of Biology
and creative writing, and he is
a really prolific writer, film maker,
very,
very creative, and really made this
possible.
And of course, the Department of Biology
and the Head of
Biology, Bob, for sort of making this
possible and sponsoring it.
So let me cover also actually, let me also
thank the Stanford TM group
for, sort of their support helping market
this, and you guys are awesome.
Thanks for always showing up for group
meditation
so thank you for, for your support as
well.
So before we get started, let me also
cover a few logistical things.
If you've signed up for the one
unit course, you're allowed to miss one
session.
Since we only have nine sessions together,
you know,
ideally I'd like to see you as much as
possible.
I understand if sometimes you have some
conflict, but if you wouldn't
mind and essentially put down your name
and also your student ID
to make sure that I have a record of you
being here,
then I can sort of make sure that you've
actually attended the class.
And before we start too, do you have any
questions
about logistics, how the course will run,
any questions at all?
Good.
Everybody.
Oh, some question back there.
>> Is there anything else required besides
attending the classroom sessions?
>> Ideally you do also the the reading,
the required reading.
So on every speaker we'll have their
biography and usually some type
of piece that they have either written or
some piece written about them.
And at the end, we also ask you to do a
reflection piece, just a one page
paper essentially about what you've
learned in the class,
or some piece of the reading, something
like that.
So, we really want to make it fun, so you
can choose the medium.
It could be a website if you wanted to, it
could be just a paper.
It's up to you really.
Other questions?
>> If we've already, already maxed
credits, can we audit this course?
>> Yes, you may audit this course.
As I said, it's also open to the community
because
we invite sort of a really high quality
audience, so that
we can really push our speakers on this
topic of consciousness
and to really see, you know, how
scientifically validated it is.
You know, so it would be a lot of fun.
So thanks for coming.
Yes?
>> [UNKNOWN]
>> Yes, there's a syllabus, were you on
the initial email?
>> No.
>> Okay, are you registered for the
course, or.
>> Not yet.
>> Okay, so have you signed up for the
Google form that I sent out?
All right just leave your e-mail with me.
[LAUGH] I will send you a syllabus.
[LAUGH] All right, let me pass this
through.
Just pass that through,yeah.
And if you're a student please sign in on
this paper.
And if you want you can also leave me your
e-mail
address in case you have not signed up for
the Google form.
Any other questions?
Good, so let's dive into consciousness.
So hacking consciousness, how did this
come about?
So I've always been fascinated by the
topic of consciousness.
As an undergraduate I studied cognitive
science, and the
predominant world view there is that this
physical thing, the
brain, this part of this, that's matter,
gives rise to
mental processes, and these mental
processes are then considered
consciousness.
But I always found that answer somewhat
unsatisfactory, because
I asked myself, well, doesn't a flower
have consciousness?
Doesn't a tree have consciousness?
I mean, there's some organizing power,
right, to to a flower or to a tree.
What is that intelligence that makes a
flower bloom?
And then I also I've always been really
fascinated by mediation techniques.
I've tried Qigon.
I've tried mindfulness, Buddhist walking
meditation, contemplation meditation, Zen
meditation,
and I always wanted to dive into this idea
of consciousness.
And what I noticed is that when I think a
thought I can actually be conscious of me
thinking a thought.
So who is actually that observer behind
that thought?
And that's where sort of this whole
interest came about in terms of hacking
consciousness.
And after undergraduate, I worked for a
while and sort of forgot
about this topic, until I found myself
working for a man named Ray Dalio.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with
him, but he runs a company called
Bridgewater Associates.
It's one of the most successful macro
hedge funds of all time.
And he said that he's been practicing this
meditation technique called transcendental
meditation for 40 years.
And he said that that is one of his keys
to success.
And I said, that's a big endorsement, so
why not try it out myself.
And through there again got exposed to
this topic of consciousness and really
found myself again experiencing as well as
getting intellectual knowledge about it.
So I thought, now that I'm at Stanford
doing graduate studies, why don't I
have other people participate in this
journey
and really see what consciousness is all about.
Can you access it?
Can you hack it?
How do you hack it?
And those are some of the questions that
our speakers will address over these nine
weeks.
Which brings me to Dr. John Hagelin, who's
our esteemed guest today.
I could probably spend five minutes
introducing
his background, but I won't do that.
[LAUGH] So I'll just mention some
highlights.
He is one of the most cited quantum
physics, physicists of our time.
He has written over 100 research
publications about CERN He
has done groundbreaking research at both
CERN and SLAC, our very own SLAC.
He's been part of many movies, including
movies like What the Bleep do We Know.
Has had many TV appearances.
And this list goes on and on, so I'd
rather just have you hear from John Hagelin
himself.
So please give a warm applause to John Hagelin.
[APPLAUSE].
>> Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE] I'm not mic'd, can
you hear me okay back there?
>> Yes.
>> It's great to be back here, sunny,
campus looks wonderful.
And what a great audience.
I haven't even talked to you yet but just
the description
of who you are, should make this a lot of
fun.
Certainly for me, anyway.
We're going to be introducing the subject
of meditation basically from a very
classic perspective from the Yogic
tradition
and from there ultimately the Buddhist
tradition.
And in the context of that talking
partly from the standpoint of a
fundamental physicist.
What consciousness is or at least what we
think it might be.
And ultimately experiential access to it.
Consciousness I'd have to say is really
self hacking.
But how do you hack it?
So in the process I, I'm also an
astrophysicist or a half astrophysicist.
[LAUGH] I always like to spend a moment
locating ourselves in the structure of the
universe, and here of course are the, I
almost said nine, eight planets.
I grew up with nine, it's a sad story.
And here they are in proper relative size
to each other.
They are certainly spaced farther apart
than they look like in this.
And our solar system is a pretty marvelous
example of
the solar system, we tend to be quite fond
of it.
It is our own and we do live here.
That's what Saturn looks like, like
Jupiter
a gas colossus, a hydrogen and helium
star.
About a half a billion miles from the sun,
about that distance from us as well.
And it doesn't take much of a telescope in
your
backyard to see that incredible jewel out
there like that.
This is the ice world of Neptune.
Now the last, the eighth of eight planets.
That's what the noonday sun looks like
from Neptune.
A little like Iowa in the winter.
You don't get much of a sun tan, there.
And that's our solar system.
Of course we're living in a galaxy, the
Milky Way Galaxy with about 400 billion
suns.
Most of those we think, with some kind of
a planetary system, not all.
And in this sort of island universe, in
this rather flat or pancake shape,
and within our Milky Way galaxy which is
that stripe you
can probably see, the sky is good enough
here that on a clear night you can see it.
Incredible things happen, like stellar
explosions called supernova, which
are responsible, the final last gasp in
the life of
star that can result in this kind of
cataclysmic explosion
during which the heaviest elements get cooked,
like gold and platinum.
Anything heavier than iron, thrown out
into space, contaminates space with
heavier
elements, because it really started as
hydrogen and helium after the Big Bang.
And from those heavier elements blown out
into space, new stars form and planets
form.
Not just gas planets like Jupiter, but the
Earth, made of
dirt, silica, iron, et cetera, all come as
remnants of supernova explosions.
Our bodies comprised of things like, you
know, oxygen,
nitrogen, carbon were not cooked during
the Big Bang.
They were cooked in stars and then blown
out into
space from where our planets and our
bodies were ultimately taken.
If you take your back yard telescope and
take it away from the plane of the Milky
Way out in the direction of deep space,
and
if you have a good telescope you see this.
You see more galaxies than stars.
And each of these galaxies remember has
several hundred billion
suns, and you kind of get in the state of
awe.
A kind of a state of wonder.
What enormous intelligence this is, what
incredible
creativity, what are the laws that govern
it?
And that's one of the quests of science
and astronomy,
all science actually to understand the
fundamental laws governing the universe.
So that's it for outer space.
We're going to spend the rest of our time
looking at inner space.
The structure of reality at deeper and
deeper levels.
That means in the language of physics
at least smaller and smaller spacetime
scales.
And one are the things we've learned, one
of the most important things we've learned
from
the last hundred years or more of physics,
is that the universe is structured in
layers.
Structured in layers of creation, from
superficial to fundamental, from
macroscopic to microscopic.
And that inward exploration started at a
very surface level, three hundred
years of classical mechanics dedicated to
the study of macroscopic matter.
But turned about ninety years ago towards
the
exploration of the deeper world of the
atom.
Atoms and molecules, the world of quantum
mechanics.
And what we discovered is a little
surprising
and probably not what you learned in high
school.
Maybe what some of you have learned in
college.
And that is that the atom is not a
billiard ball and not a solar system in
miniature.
In high school they maybe say that well
you know, the sun is
like the nucleus and the planets are like
the electrons orbiting the nucleus.
It's a quaint picture but it has
absolutely nothing to do with reality.
It serves no purpose and it doesn't work
at all.
So quantum mechanics is a whole new
language.
A whole new logic, a whole new mathematics
that is subtler, more expansive,
more profound, and appropriate to describe
physics at this more fundamental level.
Very soon physics went on to discover the
atomic nucleus, to explore the nucleus
and the fundamental particles that
comprise the nucleus, quarks and leptons.
And a whole new language was needed for
that.
Not a radical departure, but a substantive
departure called quantum field
theory which is the marriage of Einstein's
relativity with quantum mechanics.
Again though, a whole new formalism, a
whole new mathematics required.
And then ultimately the, certainly the hot
topic in physics
today as it has been since the super
string revolution
swept through here about 20 years ago is,
maybe 25
years ago starting with super gravity
theory, is unified field theory.
Which in today's, you know, more common
parlance is typically
in the form of super string theory and M
theory.
These theories are very exciting for
reasons that I really wish
we could get into in great depth, I'll
mention a few things.
These theories fulfill Einstein's life
long quest to
discover the unified source of the
diversified universe.
The unified fountainhead of all the laws
of nature
that govern the functioning of the
universe at every level.
The mathematics of this is big, is
extremely daunting,
even though the fundamental reality is one
of absolute simplicity.
The mechanics of the expression of that
fundamental
unity into the diversity of the laws of
nature is a rather complex, very
non-linear process
involving self interaction in a very
non-trivial way.
But speaking qualitatively instead of
heavily mathematically, the fundamental
nature of this field of unity at the basis
of all diversity is absolute silence.
Absolute abstraction, almost.
You could say pure existence, pure being.
But it's not a field of inertia.
It's not a field of death, I would say,
because
the quantum principle guarantees that
intrinsically this field is dynamic.
In fact, the quantum principle, or
uncertainty principle, as it's
known, is the principle of increasing
dynamism, at fundamental scale.
The same reason nuclear power is more
powerful than
chemical energy, even though in some
respects it's very similar.
But it operates at a level that is a
billion times smaller.
And therefore, operates at a level of
nature's dynamism that is a million times
more powerful.
Due to this intrinsic dynamism of this
universal field.
The field is actually, well you can say
silent
at its core but it's roiling and boiling
on
the surface of life, erupting in this
effervescence of,
of what looked like effervescent bubbles
emerging from ginger ale.
That's sometimes called zero point motion.
And these days it's called dark energy.
Because it's this type of activity that is
driving the universe
today in this ever accelerating expansion
that has been relatively recently
discovered.
Now, for the astute audience, and most of
you are certainly in
that category, you probably have surmised
that these bubbles aren't ginger ale
actually.
But they are, these little rubber bands,
these
little loops, they're infinitesimal loops called super strings.
Little rubber bands, literally
relativistic rubber hands, infinitesimal.
And I know it's kind of depressing for
those that are seeking the
ultimate nature of reality to conclude
that after all of these years of
profound philosophy and scientific
research we
discovered that the core reality of
the universe is a rubber band, but it's
not really what we're saying.
It's not the rubber band that is
fundamental.
It's this universal field of intelligence.
This intrinsically dynamic self
interacting field that percolates
super strings, and these super strings are
what we used to think of as particles,
the fundamental particles in forces of
nature, in the context of
these theories, are just the different
vibrational states, of these rubber bands.
Now there's a certain type, you can sit
down.
And you can examine the physics of a
rubber band.
You can count the different vibrational
states, the different modes
of vibration that a string, a rubber band,
can vibrate in
and you will conclude that each of those
vibrational modes of
a rubber band has its own frequency, it's
own natural tone.
That type of mathematical physicist that
undertakes this calculation of the
enumeration of the vibrational frequencies
of rubber bands are called nerds.
[LAUGH] But they are very, very.
But the miracle of super string theory,
just honestly
simplify things quite a bit for the sake
of time.
Is that these different vibrational tones,
these different vibrational frequencies of
these fundamental super strings, each
frequency corresponding to a different
energy.
'Cause Einstein equates, well, frequency
of course, and
energy and also Einstein equates energy
with mass.
These different rubber bands, due to their
different vibrational modes,have
different amount of energy, which means
different amount of mass
and when you look at those masses and
the other
properties of these vibrating strings, lo
and behold, you discover.
That this is a universe of just certain
types of particles.
One of those vibrational tones acts like
gravity.
A particle of gravity, a graviton.
Another one acts like a particle of light.
The spin one massless photon.
Another one looks like a spin one half
cork or an electron and so forth.
And you get just.
The categories of matter and energy that
we know and love
that are the building blocks so to speak
of the universe.
So, that's kind of an amazing prediction
you start with a relatively simple
principle
I say deceptively principle deceptively
simple to
be fair, of a vibrating relativistic
string.
And from that you conclude that the
universe coming out
of such a field percolating these screens,
looks like our's.
Or at least, at least roughly like our's.
It's a very different view of the
universe.
It's almost like this universal field,
like
a guitar string is a one dimensional
field.
Surface of a pond is a two dimensional
field.
This is a, a three or more dimensional
field.
But fields have their own, vibrational
states, call them waves.
And depending upon how the field is
vibrating, depending upon the,
the frequency of the wave, that wave, will
behave like a
graviton, a particle, a so called
gravitino, a spin one force
field, a spin one half fermion, or the
newly discovered Higgs Boson.
There's an interesting relationship which
we can't even begin to touch
on today, but these five actually
correlate in a very precise way.
To one of these ancient you know,
these quaint ancient Prosaic theories of
the universe
is comprised fundamentally of five
elements, and
that's an interesting point perhaps for
another day.
Finally, I'm going to leave physics in a
moment.
I'm sure you'll be relieved.
In addition to these super strings that
percolate from this
time translationally invariant it's this
sort
of ocean of immortality, ocean of pure
being, are not just these superstrings and
not just particles but entire universes.
To the current ability of ours to
calculate in the
context of such theories there is a finite
probability that whole
baby universes will emerge from this
bubbling
cauldron of what is called space-time
foam.
And most of those are duds.
They disappear almost immediately in a
burst of energy, but given
the right initial conditions, they grow,
some of them, will grow exponentially.
Expand enormously.
And that is called inflation, the
inflationary universe, big bang theory.
If you look at this picture carefully you
will see that there are
several of these going on as we speak and
some of those survive.
And if you, you know, do the math
even relatively simply you would conclude
that there is.
Depending upon a few assumptions,
probably, an uncountable
infinity of simultaneously coexisting 
universes
continuously erupting from this enormous
universal ocean of
intelligence and that is called today the
multiverse.
A scary concept; I'm not in love with it.
But is a concept that is sort of getting
forced upon us as we look more deeply
into the nature of this fundamental
physical reality, and start to
fathom it's intrinsic creativity and
dynamism, and incredible properties.
End of physics and I would like to shift
gears.
But, this will be I think a useful
background.
Any questions just on the physics giving
the limited time
we have I'd be happy to take one or two.
This will be part of the test at the end
of the course.
(LAUGH).
In this context, in this physical
framework,
what is consciousness and what is
meditation?
Now here, I'm going to draw upon two
sources and a lot of what
I say is not familiar or that
familiar or yet familiar to, Western
psychological science.
Familiar, certainly, to some people within
it but
it's not really common parlance in Western
psychological science.
Consciousness is structured human
consciousness, the one we
can talk most clearly about, is structured
in layers
in parallel to the structure of the
physical body,
in parallel to the structure of the
physical universe.
Wow, what does that mean?
Well, just subjectively, it means we have
surface thoughts, concrete thinking, gotta
do this, gotta
do that, almost an audible level of
coarse thinking, preverbal, in some cases
even verbal.
But quieter than that, in a more subtle,
quiet, and expansive frame of mind,.
Is the world of, of abstract concepts.
The world, you could say, of the
mathematician, the scholar.
And this is a quiet and a literally more
expansive style of thinking, with it a
rather different character.
And I'll talk about that.
And even deeper, more abstract, more
refined, more silent levels of thought.
In these different levels of thought have a
correspondence that
can be rigorously unfolded to different
levels of physical nature.
And here's a simplified a truncated this
argument but mathematics is probably the
most, the most successful formalization of
the structure of human mind.
Structure of human thought structure of
human logic.
In mathematics comes in different layers
of concreteness versus layers of great
subtlety, greater power, greater
comprehension, greater
completeness, and if we just to
make this idea, familiar and it probably
is to some of you,
we can start with the natural numbers, the
counting numbers, one, two, three.
These are the number we learn first.
These are the numbers that have most
concrete
meaning and most concrete relevance in
practical living.
You go to the store.
You buy three apples, not pie.
Not the square root of negative one.
But, you know, one, two, three apples.
And that's, you know, it's own number
frame work.
Interestingly enough, if you add one more
element to it called
0 you go from the natural numbers to the
whole numbers.
Not a big deal, you wouldn't think but
it's kind of a big deal
because the whole numbers are more
complete it's a more powerful numerical
system.
There are things about the natural numbers
that are true, but unprovable.
Once you add these so called additive
identities
0, you can prove things about the natural
numbers that were always true, but
unprovable before,
because your numerical system didn't have
sufficient power.
All this power is at the expense of some
concreteness.
The number 0 is just a bit more abstract
than the number three.
A bit more abstract.
You don't go to the store to buy zero
apples.
And it's not a number people that, use
so much unless you're an accountant or
something.
They use so much in day to day living.
If you had the negative numbers minus one,
two,
three, et cetera, you have what are called
the integers.
The integers are a more holistic, more
powerful numerical framework.
You now have a system of numbers that
is closed under subtraction and in that
respect
its more powerful and you can prove a
lot of things about the whole numbers that
were
true but unprovable you now have a more
powerful frame making the expensive thing
a bit more
abstract to these you add the fractions
point
seven three two or two thirds or seven
eighths.
You have a more powerful system, a more
comprehensive
system, a system almost good enough to do
physics.
Not quite.
For that you actually have to add not just
the reals, not
just the rationals, but the irrationals,
in order to get the real numbers.
And the irrationals fill in all the holes
in between all the rationals.
And they have the form of something like
0.732853 et cetera, without end.
And they're difficult to even write down,
obviously, and they're
really, in a sense, somewhat difficult to
even describe, but.
With the system of real numbers you can at
least do physics,
you can do calculus,
you can newtonian physics.
But you add a deeper conceptual level,
less concrete,
much more powerful at the expense of being
more abstract.
Now, next step.
Add numbers proportional to the square root of
negative one.
So called imaginary numbers it's a good
word for them because I'm
not going to even try to explain to you
what they mean.
They're really a giant step removed from
practical day
to day reality but enormously more
powerful without these numbers
the reals plus the imaginary equaling the
complex numbers
you cannot do quantum mechanics, you
cannot understand the atom.
Let alone the atomic nucleus.
Let alone the unified field so different
levels of mind different levels of
conceptual
wholeness relate to different more
holistic but more
abstract levels of nature these levels of
nature are more abstract
more powerful like that we have levels of
mind.
From this perspective meditation
classically understood from the
fundamental from historic yogic tradition,
the [FOREIGN] and so on.
And from there Buddhism at least early
Buddhism.
Meditation was understood as a technique
to take our active
thinking mind and our outwardly directed
attention and turn the
attention powerfully within to begin to
experience and explore
quieter levels of mind deeper deeper
levels of the thinking process.
And as the mind gets increasingly quiet
and expansive, and
quiet and expansive, very quickly or not
so quickly, that's a
question of technique, the awareness gets
drawn completely beyond
any localized concept or boundary of
thought to experience a state of absolute.
Abstraction.
Pure subjectivity.
Pure wakefulness, pure being, which is
either a bunch of empty
words or it has some meaning to you
depending on perhaps whether
you may have lived that experience at some
time or other, in
which case what I'm saying will make maybe
a little more sense.
This is the so called meditative state.
This is sumati, not enlightenment, it's
sumati.
In the yoga sutra, the first couple of
verses read.
Yoga, experience of unity, inner union,
union with what?
Union with universal intelligence.
Union of individual mind with universal
intelligence.
Yoga is the complete settling of the
activity of the mind.
Then, and automatically then, if you don't
fall asleep,
automatically the seer the experiencer is
established in the self.
And the self, or opman, in this position
is
not our time space bound selves, not our
physical
body, not our fluctuating thoughts, it's
not our fluctuating moods,
it's the field of our own inner subjectivity, inner
weightfulness, inner consciousness.
Which is at the basis of every experience
but which itself is rarely experienced.
So that's the meditative state, Samadhi,
and it called, been known historically
at least, described throughout the ages as
a fourth state of human consciousceness.
Distinct from waking, dreaming, or deep
sleep.
Those are the three cycling, relative
states of consciousness. Samadhi
has nothing to do with time, timeless
state, non changing state.
From a modern scientific perspective I
think we can say
since about 1970 and increasingly all the
time this meditative
state, and there are different states one
can experience in
meditation, I'm really talking more
specifically amount Samadhi, classic
mediation state.
Slipping beyond thought all together to
experience pure being.
It is a fourth state of consciousness.
It is metabolically distinct, and
neurophysiologically distinct, and
certainly subjectively, experientially
distinct from waking, dreaming or sleeping.
When the mind becomes absolutely still,
the body simultaneously
gains a state of deep relaxation or deep
rest, significantly
different from what is normally called
"rest" or "relaxation" or even "sleep".
Rest, I'm getting kind of practical here
but trust me I won't stay practical
for very long, rest of course is a very
powerful antidote to stress.
Relaxation is, you know, a powerful
antidote to stress, and
the different levels of rest you can
achieve at night.
Or through prayer, or through some
meditation practice which perhaps can at
least in principle really settle the
individual, bring a sense of great comfort.
To the degree that we're settling deeply,
to that degree stress is dissolved and
with it stress relateds disease are
relieved and or prevented.
So, for example, one very common technique
to transcend, and
that's really what tm technique is for,
it's really for transcending,
among other techniques, but, the
transcending is the key, to, much
of my discussion, not the technique for
how to get there.
But, the point is that state of
transcending is
a state of deep rest, and, for example,
high blood
pressure, which is most important risk
factor for heart
disease is ameliorated, more effectively
than through hypertensive drugs,
typically.
And more effectively than what is normally
called relaxation which is relaxing and
generally good for you but maybe not as
deep a state of physiological rest.
The american heart association did the
largest study ever done that was just this
spring, excuse me late last spring, it's
already 2014, and they looked
at all kinds of alternative approaches to
reducing high blood pressure and heart
disease,
and they, it was the best, the early
research was done at Stanford.
A really excellent meta analysis of
many, many hundreds
of published studies was, was done here,
but the AHA
just did another gigantic study, and they
concluded, in a
formal policy statement, that doctors
should prescribe transcending.
It mentions specifically TM for patients
with
blood pressure over 120 millimeters of
mercury.
Which I suspect is you know, a great,
great many of you.
Bottom line when it comes to, to, heart
attack, I'm going to
get off this, subject, he, of health soon
because its kind of common sense.
Most disease is caused by stress, or
complicated by stress.
If there is a really effective way to get
rest deeper than sleep, deep rest at will.
It seems plausible that you can unwind
stress more effectively than mere sleep
which helps
enormously but doesn't always completely
do the trick,
and so this is a very interesting study.
Nine year longitudinal study random
control assignment study funded by the
NIH which was just published in the last
couple of years.
Showing a two thirds drop in heart attack,
stroke and death.
In two random assigned groups, both at
risk
of heart disease, both groups took their
medicines.
Both groups supposedly stuck to their
dietary and to their exercise regiments.
The actual compliance for those was pretty
poor, and
one group though added transcending 20
minutes twice a
day to their regimen and that group, that
was
the only difference, experienced a marked
drop in heart disease.
That was big news.
There's more to health than heart disease
and according
to blue cross blue shield and their own
statistics.
Transcending is a very effective antidote
to every category of disease
on which they keep statistics, which is
every category of disease.
The only disease that wasn't reduced was
childbirth, which is arguably not a
disease.
[LAUGH] The meditators were having just as
many babies.
And you put that all together, this is my
last health related slide, stress
and fatigue cause wear and tear on the
system over the course of a lifetime
and would you really stay up and cram for
an exam maybe several nights in a row you
start
to feel the effects of aging and most of
that
will go away when you finally get some
rest. But it does leave a mark.
Deeper rest of transcending starts to
really diffuse
deeply seated stress, and the result of
that
is people who do this regularly take, you
know, say, 20 minutes, twice a day, which
is typically what an adult, recommended for
an adult
and your biological age, your,
your, cardiovascular
age and other ways that doctors can tell
you how old you are, even if you lose
your birth certificate.
Five people are about 12 to 15 years
younger than their chronological
counterparts, just from meditating.
There are a lot of other things you can do
to
improve health and longevity, but this is
the easiest for sure.
All right, I am an educator, and more
interested in the brain, and brain
development, and
here I just have a couple of, just a
couple of important things I think to say.
Remember, from the perspective of today's,
talk on meditation, and there
will be others, because there are
different things you can do.
When you sit and close your eyes and
practice
the meditation program for different types
of results and even
for different reasons, and there are many
ways to
use the mind and many ways to develop the
mind.
Mathematics is one thing, well, anything
you study is going to develop your
mind and your mental abilities at least in
specific respects, specific ways.
So there are many things you can do to
develop the mind.
What I'm talking about today is the
classic sense of meditation is defined for
example of the yoga sutras is taking the
awareness as efficiently as you can, beyond thought.
This is not an automatic process.
If you think about it, well how am I gonna
quiet the mind completely, you know,
forget it.
It's just a matter of, of technique.
If you, nobody ever told you how to go to
sleep you may,
you know, never fall asleep if you stare
watching television all night long.
But if they, look you know, turn off the
TV, lie down
like this and do this and do that and
you'll probably fall asleep.
It's like that with meditation.
There's certain conditions you set up,
certain simple techniques with
the mind you can do and find the mind,
being
just lured, being just kind of sweetly
lured to these
these deeper, and deeper levels of mind
which are so fulfilling.
It's so intrinsically charming, so kind of
fascinating that your mind just goes
there.
Just get a taste of the direction, you
know when you walk through the airport and
there's a Cinnabon somewhere and you kind
of smell this thing, you just go for it.
It's like that with the mind.
Give it a taste of what it's like going to
deeper
levels of mind, and that's all the mind
wants to do.
So this is easy, it's just a question of
like a diver.
It's a question of how you leave the
board, kind of the rest is automatic.
Different levels of mind, surface, active,
concentrating mind.
Quiet states of self-reflection and beyond
thought state of being.
Each of these has a completely different
style of brain functioning.
The electrical activity of the brain, the
activity that can be studied in many ways.
EEG is a good approach to meditation
because things change by the moment.
Use something like PET or SPECT or MRI
or FMRI, things, you know, you can capture
things
that are happening slowly but the EEG
provides
a window of things that are changing very
fast.
The whole signature of active thinking
mind and concentration focus.
is a lot of cognitive processing a lot of
high
frequency high amplitude gamma. In a
meditation technique that focuses
more on a state of quiet self sort of
reflection
self observation so called in
the scientific literature typically open
monitoring.
Mindfulness is a very common popular form
of this type of quiet.
Self reflection and they're versions of
that too.
Notice a completely different state of
mind in
this active, concentrating, cognitive processing state,
and then slipping
beyond mental activity all together,
beyond mind, to
experience consciousness, has its own very
interesting physiological state.
So different levels of mind have their own
levels of neuro-physiological activity,
and the signature for this meditative
state, for transcending, for samadhi.
Is this a state of, of very high amplitude
alpha coherence?
Here's a picture of the whole brain front
to back, and you
see something that's quite unique to the
meditative state, or to samadhi.
You see the entire brain during
experiences of the transcendent.
The whole brain is functioning in concert.
In a highly integrated, highly coherent
almost synchronous fashion.
If you process this mathematically and you
look at what's going on
in terms of the coherent functioning
of the brain during relaxation versus
samadhi.
They're quite different.
This is somebody in eyes closed
relaxation,
and these different dots are where the
electrodes are placed on the scalp to look
at the electrical firing of the
neurons within the brain, and occasionally
you
see a bar connecting neighboring points
measured
on the scalp, and that means those two
points are talking to each other.
Those two parts of the brain are
functioning in a correlated fashion.
There's some kind of coordination, some
kind of coherence in there, but not a
whole lot, and in a meditative state, this
is the same person three months later.
They've learned to meditate.
This is during the meditation experience.
The whole brain is basically.
Functioning in a completely integrated
way, and that's remarkable.
Remarkable for a brain guy because you
don't see this in waking, dreaming,
sleeping, hypnosis, anesthesia, or any
drug induced state that I'm aware of.
This, orderly brain functioning is not only
philosophically or interesting from the
Neuroscientist perspective, but
it's actually very useful, because orderly
brain
functioning, let's call it is global EEG
coherence.
We all have some coherence.
You would not be in this room today, if
there
were not some orderly cohered activity
taking place in your brain.
But that orderly brain functioning in the
extent
of orderly brain function it translates
to, orderly thinking.
Orderly thinking translates to orderly
speech, coherent
speech that translates to coherent,
purposeful, effective action.
Typically that means fulfilling action.
But this orderly brain function the
accorded research correlates with
increasing IQ.
Really?
Increasing intelligence wait a minute,
increasing academic performance.
Learning ability short term and long term
memory.
Creativity according to test, alertness
moral reasoning.
Psychological stability emotional
maturity.
Everything good about the brain it turns
out depends
on its orderly functioning, and as an
educator I've taught
in many places the idea and the reality of
having something you can do any student
can do.
Any adult in a nursing home can do, that
was a very interesting Harvard study on
the institutionalized elderly
with TM
and what happened to their memory,
longevity, health.
But the fact that, you know, there was
something
you could do that increases intelligence
and creativity, and all
measures of intelligence that are used
within the field
of education today are highly
statistically significant improved by
transcending.
That's fairly remarkable.
It would have maybe been considered
impractical because everybody knows
the brain you know, forges new connections
and learn things
very quickly, but sometime in the 30s,
certainly by my
age you have this precipitous and
disastrous loss of raw intelligence.
The pruning of the brain but now we know,
and
we've known now for probably 15 years that
the brain
is so plastic and so malleable and so
capable of forging new connections
and learning fundamentally new things
really throughout life.
But the problem with the brain, they also
say is it's use it or
lose it, and it's the use of the brain, in
a very creative educational
environment, that will develop certain
competencies that
you did not have before, and it's
this specifically, it's the utilization of
the
entire brain in a highly integrated way.
That correlates with intelligence,
creativity more than anything else.
So, that makes this idea, of experiencing
Samadhi and then increasing the orderliness
of brain
function not just during cause who cares
but
after meditation is a very very
significant finding.
This is a stressed brain.
A few walking around campus, everywhere,
for that matter.
And what stress does is really the
opposite of
what we really want in terms of brain
functioning.
Challenge is a good thing.
Overwhelming challenge that causes stress
and induces fight
or flight response is not a good thing.
That kind of stress shuts down the
prefrontal cortex, the higher brain.
Which is responsible for our higher
human functions: judgement, planning,
moral reasoning.
And under chronic stress, unfortunately in
certainly parts of the world are
under chronic stress, mean in general life
can be under chronic stress.
Chronic stress shuts down the higher brain
chronically.
And to the extent the higher brain is shut
down chronically, it's not developing.
It fails to develop properly.
And if it doesn't develop by the age of
25.
It's not going to develop at all.
And because of this pervasiveness of
stress, this
is something the Surgeon General has also
been, been
promoting recently, the, we're using, we
have an
under-utilization of the full resource of
the human brain.
The, he was, said actually we seem to
be living in a society of arrested
development.
Meaning that you know, we're stuck in
various stages
of adolescence it's really at the age of
12
to the age of 25 that we really gain
the full utilization really any
utilization of the prefrontal cortex.
The executive center of the brain.
The CEO of the brain.
And unfortunately, stress impedes the
development of that.
A few comments about acute stress that we
get back
to higher states of consciousness and
hopefully to some questions.
Acute stress and its manifestation as PTSD
is the result of overwhelming trauma.
Chronic or more typically overwhelming
trauma.
And what happens in that state is
something called the amygdala, or fear
center of the brain, gets overloaded and
sometimes stuck on hyperdrive.
It's like jamming the foot down on the
accelerator of your car so hard that you
break the linkage and you take your foot
off the accelerator and it lies flat down.
And your car is revving, it's not an ideal
situation to find yourself in.
Now normally rest, and relaxation allows
these sorts of things to normalize.
But unfortunately, for somebody often
who's had that kind of trauma normal
restive sleep does not get rid of that
constant hyper vigilance and insomnia.
And the tendency because the fear center,
there's interest, we'll talk about it
more.
Fear center is on constant state of
vigilance
so that everybody, everything, every
circumstance is perceived
instinctively as a threat, and you're
constantly because
of that in a state of fight or flight.
What's really exciting, it's some of the
recent research that's been done, shows
that the deeper rest of somhati, this
meditative state, calms.
It effectively deactivates the amygdala.
And, in, a bit, about, 40% of the subjects
in
these studies that are funded by the N, by
the, DoD.
And by the Veteran's Administration are
relieved
of most of their symptoms after one
medication.
It's like, you have a computer that's
gathered all kinds of crud, and
you've, somebody finally tore, somebody
says when's
the last time you rebooted your computer?
So I haven't rebooted it for months.
I just put it to sleep at night.
So that person will unplug your computer
for you, whatever, and reboot it.
And what happens is, you get a complete,
you know, reboot.
You're resyncing the whole system,
refreshing the whole system.
That's what somatics, like, that's what it
does.
It resets, resyncs, almost reboots.
It's like you've come out of this
completely new.
It's like everything like a good nights
sleep but more so,
so incredibly fresh you know, you still
owe $3000 to the
bank but you feel completely fresh and you
have a whole
new perspective and a whole new capability
of dealing with it.
So that's amazing because of that I find
this amazing
I didn't know if I'd live long enough to
see this.
But militaries of the world, lots of them,
and our own.
Department of Defense, Veteran's
Administration, and military
academies like Norwich University are
incorporating TM
into military training as a, an antidote,
a vaccine against the ravages of war
stress.
Many educators are very familiar with a
phenomenon called ADHD.
It's also a stress-related learning
disorder.
In the research, calming or restoring
balance to brain
functioning and integrated brain
functioning,
the research is really impressive.
That the, the very, very deep rest, it's
probably more than just the deep
rest, that helped dissolve the angst and
the stress that tends to fuel this
condition.
But it's the resynchronization of the
brain and the reintegration.
It's the higher brain, the prefrontal
cortex that controls our attention.
It's the controller of the attention, it's
the executive
of the brain, and if that part of the
brain
has been shut down, a person has very
little control
over their attention, these kids are
bouncing off the wall.
First question you might ask is, are they
going to be able to meditate?
Even close their eyes?
Instinctively, the teachers would say no.
But you know, an efficient technique for
transcending which starts the mind
just traversing in the direction of
more expansion, more happiness, more
satisfaction.
These kids are just gone.
You know, after like a minute, you know,
they're just in
there and after ten minutes, you know,
somebody has to say.
Ten minutes is up.
For someone of that age, ten minutes of
meditation is enough.
They don't have the crust of stress that
the rest of us do.
So those results are amazing, and as we
saw on the research on
that, schools around here, and all over
the country, and all over the world
are incorporating transcending, a simple
technique
for transcending called TM into the
curriculum
and we're talking about a million students
now at three hundred and fifty schools.
I did not think this would happen three
years ago.
I would have said, you know, no way I'm
kind
of an optimist, but when it comes to
schools, parents, religion.
You have to really make a solid case for
this, that it's not a religious practice,
that it may have religious or spiritual
implications,
but that is not what the kids are taught.
They are taught a technique, pure and
simple, to
take the mind effortlessly, to a place
where they're
going to be really able to relieve stress
and
come back in to class alert, focused, and
revitalized.
That's an amazing thing.
Started really, not surprisingly, as a
Midwesterner, I will say not
surprisingly in San Francisco but it has
now swept the world.
In a different talk, this is our friend
Jack Welch,
e could talk about strengthening the
executive functioning of the brain.
I'll skip by that, I do want to end before
we take discussion.
Back where I started, and that is Samadhi
and higher states of consciousness.
We talked about this meditative state.
A state of absolute silence.
You could say almost absolute abstraction,
absolute expansion.
Nothing of a specific content to color or
delimit the awareness.
It is almost, it is, it's attributeless,
in being so completely non-specific,
there's nothing to give it any sense of
time, or change, or relativity.
The structure of this fourth state of
consciousness.
Which I should say maybe has been
considered in recent history,
not in early history, but in recent
history, difficult to achieve.
It is absolutely not patanjali's point of
view in the yoga sutra's of patanjali.
It's a four, four, basically four
chapters.
They're all dedicated to transcending and
the third
and fourth chapters are dedicated
exclusively to Samadhi.
It's not difficult, but I suppose you can
always get in the way of
doing so like you could get a way, in the
way of going to sleep.
If you really you know, squirm and
struggle enough.
You won't fall asleep.
It's really like that in a sense with
transcending.
The structure of Samadhi is very simple.
In the process of taking the awareness
within, which
means taking the outward directed
attention systematically within to
experience.
And explore different levels of mind.
And the deeper levels of mind actually,
the awareness is more expanded.
It's like when we focus on something which
is
really the opposite of meditation, the way
I'm defining it.
Focusing on something like this is is a
sort of a
localization of the awareness on to
something very relative and very concrete.
In meditation the awareness is basically
retiring
from that sharp focus, in the process
of retiring from that sharp focus there's
nothing so concretely stark to localize
the attention.
So the attention, there's less to
localize,
becoming more diffuse, more unlocalized,
more unbounded.
And then we the object of thought, a
mantra is typically used for this
purpose, specific type of mantra called a
transcending mantra is used for this
purpose.
Then the awareness is completely not bound
by anything.
So, in that state you have experienced.
You are immersed in the experience.
Of our purely abstract maximally expanded
silent self,
at the expense of everything else,
everything else, for that moment.
And this is usually experiences of
relatively fleeting few
seconds and it does become more stable,
more accessible with.
A little bit of culturing and practice but
for that
moment you've given up everything so don't
tell your mother write
your mother saying I'm really getting
interested and and really just
you know experiencing Samadi and that's
what I'm going to do.
I'm going to meditate all day long and
they will
say will who's going to support you who's
going to support me?
This is a nonfunctional state.
It is intrinsically satisfying, it's
intrinsically blissful in the
most sort of sublime and subtle and
expansive way.
But it's a nonfunctional state.
It's called, considered to be a stepping
stone to something more significant.
Before I leave it though, let me just take
a few quotes.
In this case, from the Upanishad about
this fourth state of consciousness.
The fourth condition, fourth state of
consciousness is
Atman, the self in his own pure state.
The awakened life of supreme
consciousness.
Also, from the Upanishads, It is neither
this nor that, neither inner nor outer.
Nor semi-consciousness, nor sleeping
consciousness.
It cannot be seen or touched.
It is above all distinction, beyond
thought and ineffable.
In the union, with that, is the supreme
proof of his reality, very
important point the philosophers of
science, and
philosophers of consciousness, is peace
and love.
So, there has been debate.
And probably is debated across this campus
and
across centuries as to whether
consciousness really exists.
You never see it, indirectly you do,
'cause
it's the light of consciousness within
that allows us
to see everything else, but the
consciousness itself
is hidden, completely overshadowed by the
content of experience.
And because of the fact that you can't
smell it, can't
taste it, can't see it, and typically
don't even experience it.
Unless you happen to kind of, by accident
or by practice, escape the confines
of our constantly changing experience to
instead, for a moment, be left free.
For consciousness to experience itself.
That's Samadhi.
Then you can say, oh, oh,
I was not experiencing any thing, not
absorbed in any
thought, any feeling, any idea, and yet, I
was beyond time.
I go on forever.
That's the real proof of it.
Otherwise you can argue it, but honestly
the experience
of it is, it's not really, it's beyond
intellect.
The very nature of intellect, we can talk
around it, we can point to it.
But the nature of intellect is to
discriminate.
To distinguish this from this.
It is,
it is dual by its nature, by drawing
distinctions.
Whereas consciousness is just pure, unity.
Now, moving on to the last but important
point.
And that is, you know, why meditate?
Well, today the medical science will give
us many reasons why we should meditate.
Educators who have done research will give
you many reasons why.
It's good for your academic achievement,
good for your executive functioning.
But traditionally that was not how
meditation was sold.
Mediation was for the experience of
samadhi, know
thyself, by direct experience of the self
and more
important than just glimpsing it live it
and
living it is called a classically,
traditionally called enlightenment.
So, how do we define enlightenment in this
lesson today well
in one sense it's this maximum orderliness
and expansive
state of brain function maximum EEG
coherence stabilized.
Which means not just during the meditative
state-
But when you're out in activity,
dynamically engaged in
activity, whether it's a sports
competition, or a computer
game, or an exam, that orderliness of
brain functioning,
the inner calm, inner silence, inner
stability is stabilized.
Come back to that, it's kind of important.
Here's a quote.
This is about enlightenment, it's
sometimes called nirvikalpa samadhi, which
means
unbroken samadhi, continuous samadhi, or
nitya samadhi which means eternal samadhi.
This state of yoga samadhi, experience of
unity,
becomes a well founded state, an
established state.
Whether it's been respectfully and
uninterruptedly cultured for a long time.
Well, is that true?
Yes, scientifically it appears to be true.
I'm going to give you a, a quick, very
quickly, a look at the
brain during meditation of a relatively
new meditator and somebody was been doing
it twice a day for a number of years,
eight years in the
case of this particular subject one of the
hundreds of subjects in this study.
And if you go to a brain and you try to
compare it with what's going on in
this relatively new meditator and somebody
whose been experiencing
Samadhi regularly for sometime, be
hardpressed to find it difference.
Really, mathematically if you crunch the
numbers it's not a
whole lot of difference, it seems like
transcending is transcending.
Samadhi is Samadhi, whether you're
experiencing it for the first time or the
5th time or the 500th time, the
difference is outside of meditation, after
meditation.
And now what you find, is that this
orderliness of
brain function, in a state of absolute
clarity and coherence, inner
silence, it dissipates very quickly when
your eyes open up, and
you, and you realize you're late for
class, and all that.
But in the longer term meditator, this
alpha coherence
in across the entire brain, remains with
you, inactivity.
So now the whole brain is functioning
coherently, but instead of doing nothing,
it's engaged
in a task but the brain resources are all
utilized in virtually everything you do.
Not just it turns out during dynamic
activity but even during sleep.
It's just interesting enough to point out.
First some quotes from the Yoga Vasishta
about enlightenment.
He is awake but enjoys the calmness of
deep sleep.
Or he is awake in deep sleep.
So when this inner light, you could say,
Samadhi
turns on, at that point, at some point
it's inextinguishable.
And you could be in the midst of a dynamic
dream, but
now witnessing and enjoying that dream
from kind of a cosmic vantage point.
Of unbounded inner immovability.
Or under the knife during surgery.
Under anesthesia, absolutely out cold,
like a rock.
But the inner awareness, inner light
of consciousness, is not extinguished by
that.
Time passes instantly, because there's no
gears turning.
No cognitive processing in the brain that
are ticking.
Off time.
So it's a very quick process of going in
and going out.
But during that whole time the continuum
of
the unboundedness or univ, universality of
the self persists.
And that's what the research shows in
longer term meditators that during the
high amplitude.
Delta waves of deep sleep superimposed, is
the high amplitude alpha coherence of
Samadhi in one state that you could call
enlightened sleep or witnessing sleep.
Couple more points about enlightenment,
because it's a very important subject and
I may not get to see you again during this
short course.
Why is it called liberation, self
realization?
Self realization because by direct
experience you realize
the core nature of the self as basically
beyond time.
If that's the nature of the self, huge,
expanded, universal, cosmic.
To really know that, with any confidence,
experience, experiencing until you get it.
But, liberation need something a little
bit more.
So, Budist, kind of a budist term, but I
think it's
a bit accurate term to be used in this
type of description.
Let's look at the structure of
enlightenment.
In the state of enlightenment, you have
the
inner experience of absolute silence, the
self as
established within itself, as a silent
witness to
the dynamic change blowing on the surface
of life.
But in this case you haven't sacrificed
everything, you're back in your waking
life.
Whether you've got an exam to take,
whether you have
a race to run, whether you have a book to
read,
all of that surface activity of thought,
speech, action, is
taking place not at the expense any more
of the self.
Established in the self, you are engaged
in action.
And the reason this is called liberation
is because,
if you erase this, you turn out the light.
Which means you somehow forget the nature
of the inner self.
That all you're left with is pretty much
life as we know it.
The changing relative.
And the changing relative is filled with.
Change is filled with ups and downs,
successes and failures.
The Buddhists take a rather extreme point
of view on this sometimes.
They call that word, world, the world of
suffering.
Certainly because it includes suffering,
no doubt about it, that is
the experience of many locked in
circumstances in which they are locked.
But the Buddhist would go so far as to
say even getting that, you know even, you
know, spending
buying some wonderful thing is ultimately
sorrow because even
as you're spending it you're realizing
only 100 dollars remains.
Or that wonderful thing is starting to
rust already.
And so forth.
So the Buddhist would go so far as to say
the
whole world of activity is ultimately a
world of, of suffering.
I don't think most of us experience it
that way, except from time to time.
But the principle is at least true.
As long as we are completely absorbed in
our relative changing world.
We are a bit like a football of
circumstances that our emotions tend to be
buffeted up and down by a good hair day or
a very bad hair day.
[LAUGH] Liberation means you can be in the
midst of a bad hair day or good, for that
matter, and it is really such a surface.
Phenomenon, even something we'd consider
to be pretty
important in comparison to that, the
origin of universes.
You ought to think of it from a physicist
perspective.
An intelligence that is so expansive, in
which individual
awareness unites with that same
fundamental intelligence that percolates
strings.
And universes that honestly from that
natural perspective.
It's not an intellectual mood we're making
just from
the experience of the continuum of silent
contentment within.
Nothing frankly is so important that it
overshadows, overthrows your equanimity.
Leaving you free, basically, to engage
fully.
The house is on fire.
You get in there and you do it.
But at the same time, you are completely,
you're completely stable, and silent, and
collected within.
So here's a quote about that.
In the state of, permanent Samadhi, he is
in his own being.
Pure, never changing, never move, never
moving, unpollutable.
And in peace, beyond desire.
He watches the drama of the universe even
though
fully engaged in action, not a sense of
like
reclusiveness, that's a misunderstanding
of the nature of enlightenment,
fully engaged in action he does not act at
all.
And this is a Buddhist quote, quite
recognizably so,
established in the self one overcome with
sorrow and suffering.
Here's one last point I want to make.
DO I have time for one last point?
This idea of thought for intention having
power.
It's this idea we can't seem to get rid
of.
Does thought have power?
When i was growing up it was a book
called.
The power of positive thinking.
Anybody old enough to remember that booK?
More recently it was the secret.
But if you look back throughout, even
scriptural history, this idea that
intention has
some kind of manifesting power has been
win, with us for a long time.
Of course we know to some degree,
intention has manifesting power.
It's our intention and motivation, that
gets us out
of bed, to go and achieve what have to
achieve.
So, of course mind, you know, has power,
but this means something different.
This, the idea is just, holding the
intention, has some, strength of it's own.
Some manifesting or precipitating strength
of its own.
I was the token scientist chosen to go on
an Oprah show which is about this very
popular book and I said yes I would come
but there's something about the book I
don't fully
agree with and I feel obligated to explain
it.
Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of
frustrated guests, a lot of frustrated
viewers.
And I said that, you know, The Secret,
they're, in
the book you'll see testimonials which I
believe are valid.
These are sincere testimonials of
miraculous results.
You put the sticker on your refrigerator
that says pearl necklace and
then twelve months later it came, that
very same one I wanted.
There are a lot of stories like that and
there
have been thankly throughout time, but you
probably find there are
more people that put the sticker on the
refrigerator and dutifully
remind themselves of that desire that
they're supposed to keep nourishing.
In a month, you know, a year later,
they're very frustrated
because they're no closer to the pearl
necklace than they were before.
And just, lo and behold, three days before
the show, Oprah cancelled the
show, saying they had too many guests that
were disappointed by the book.
I said, well that's too bad, because I, I
could have explained why
it works [LAUGH] and why it doesn't and
perhaps how to make it work.
We've already talked about.
I don't have to explain anything more
about it.
There are different levels of mind.
Different levels of mind have greater and
greater conceptual power.
And even greater physical power, physical
energy because each of these
levels of mind, corresponds to deeper and
deeper levels of physical reality.
Now the correspondence between these two
can be very sharp.
We've talked in this course, briefly,
classical mechanics,
quantum mechanics, quantum field theory,
unified field theory.
These terms are as familiar from Western
psychological science but in
the literature of yoga and the Vedic
literature and Buddhist literature and
so forth there are these four levels of
mind, Vaikhari, which
is almost articulated thought, surface
though,
abstract conceptual thought fine feeling
level.
Level of finest refined feeling which is
very deep
and very important to the quality of our
life.
This is where an artist, a fine artist
might spend most
of their time and then there's Samadhi,
this correspondence between levels
of mind and levels of physical reality, is
very deep and
I gave a little bit of a hint at it
earlier today.
But again, you know this meditative
process is a process of getting
more and more intimate, be familiar with
deeper and deeper levels of thought.
Where thoughts are more powerful.
So, somebody might ask me, it's certainly
been asked many times.
Does prayer have power?
And I can say oh, well I'll answer this as
a physicist and as a meditator.
In my experience it depends.
I went to a church service in South
Central LA.
It was a very dramatic service of worship,
and people
were actually leaping out and shouting out
the name of God.
And it was kind of exciting, you know, on
a surface level.
It was really kind of an exciting
experience.
But there are deeper, I think more
profound traditions of worship where you
might
go and experience you know, God's presence
at a fine level of feeling and.
Perhaps you have a more pervasive effect
on the physiology.
Maybe the environment.
And then there's the idea, won't call it
prayer, but, you
know, from a religious perspective you
might think of it as prayer.
Taking the mind beyond thought to identify
with
universal intelligence on the level of
pure being.
That's the level from where thoughts
emerged first as a fine impulse and
they take up more concrete shape as they
work their way through the
machinery of thought but it's at that leve
where a mustard seed this
is a tiny impulse of thought that i
suppose in principle could move mountains.
So, the secret behind the secret I'd have
to say is transcend.
I'm going to stop there.
A provocative statement was made by one
very impressive person, is that life
begins not at 40, thank goodness or I've
already missed it, 50, not even 60.
But life really begins at enlightenment
and what that means is that
enlightenment is when we're permanently
aware of the field of
pure life, pure awareness, pure vitality.
And until that experience, we're living,
in a sense, indirectly only.
The experience of consciousness, the
experience of life,
at is, as it is reflected in our
experience.
But the field itself, which is absolute
contentment, absolute expansion, is mist.
SO in one literal sense at least, the
field
of life becomes accessible momentarily
during meditation during semi.
It becomes accessible permanently during
sleep even
during anesthesia, god forbid, that
becomes necessary.
Permanently establishes at the south comes
regular emersion.
Alternated with activity.
Regular submersion in the south,
alternated, and that's all it takes.
And it takes a little time.
But it's not a thing to be impatient about
because the very
process of meditation and tasting it,
brings back it's, really from day one.
So that's what I wanted to say today.
Thank you.
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