Deepak Chopra in conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn

what we'd like to do with you is get maximum bed fit from our guest faculty speaker teacher what I'd like to ask you John is how did you get started because we all have a story right before I get into the story and I just want to say that the picture that you paint is of course as you said another story but it's really quite compelling so it's very it's very enjoyable for me to simply bathe in the enormity of you know this description of what might be or what is and and to think about it and then I think the biggest challenge which brings me back to the question addressed is like well okay how do we operationalize this and the way we live our lives so that we're not just living up here in thoughts of entanglement that we are seriously entangled with without understanding any of it whatsoever because this is complex stuff so I was speaking actually on the podcast that I was doing with your team a bit ago and and it really the way I got into this was in some sense in part because I grew up in a family where my father was a very well known highly accomplished and extremely rigorous and very honest and ethical scientist and my mother and who had you know lots of kudos and recognition in his field is what would be called nowadays of molecular immunologist at Columbia Medical School and my mother was a painter and completely unknown she never showed her paintings she never had a you know a show an exhibition of her art work and she would never sell one even if guests came all the time to the house and admired to work but you would never sell one because she loved them herself and she didn't do it for fame or for she did it because she loved the process in some sense so I grew up in a family where my father saw with certain kind of eyes and my mother saw and painted with very different kinds of eyes and my eyes when I was like even three or four or five years old I could see that they were seeing with very different eyes and that they were seeing different realities as because of that and that they lived in different realities that sometimes they couldn't communicate how much they loved the reality they were living in and I got that I don't know how but when I was very little and so I think that what it is but it was some sense expand my interest in what reality really was because I could see it through the one vein and I could see it through another view another window and it's like but Nick can only be one reality so how do you unify these discordant elements as Wordsworth said and make them move in one society which is a lot of few lines from the preludes so this has been something that I and then I went into science because my father was a scientist so you know there's a certain kind of ambition and the sense that this is like really really really important stuff and when you grow up in that kind of world that's pretty much what you know but but the tempering of my mother in the way she saw the world which is more like Monet you know in terms of shadow light color reflection you know form that isn't exactly what a photograph would be by any stretch of imagination but you know what is being portrayed that was an element of it so I kind of majored in multiple subjects chemistry and also comparative literature and stuff like that although I didn't do that as a formal major but that was what I was playing with trying to understand poetry and music and so forth so and then when I was at MIT in molecular biology as a graduate student I I heard a talk by a man named Philip Kaplow who maybe you cross paths with but Philip Kaplow was actually during a journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism in the 40s and then was a reporter at the Nuremberg war tribunal and that had such a profound effect on him with the testimony that he was hearing that he went off to a Japanese monastery for six months in a freezing cold like Hokkaido in northern Japan and told this story in his talk at MIT that he had all these medical problems ulcers and anxiety and all sorts of things and if there's six months of sitting in a freezing cold monastery in Japan all those symptoms went away and I'm sitting there this seminar was invited by he was invited to speak at MIT by Houston Smith who was a professor of philosophy buzz to a really wonderful fellow who had a phenomenal book called the religions of man so anyway I searched by the way I read at the age of 14 and it's a phenomenal book and he revised it but I would urge all of you to you can learn a lot about humanity by reading the Houston Smith book so I saw a sign on the walls at MIT saying the three pillars of Zen talked by Philip capital at the invitation of Houston Smith I didn't know who Philip Kepler was I didn't know who's in Smith was 1965 we were just starting with the Gulf of Tonkin incident if yet no more and I went to that talk at seminar hour at MIT you know how many people were at that talk aside from Kaplow and Houston Smith and myself maybe two or three other people and the talk just blew my mind and I was 21 years old at the time and the thought that went through my mind is this is what I've been looking for my entire life which was a long only 21 years but it had something to do with the the sort of different ways of knowing different epistemologies for understanding the one reality so I started meditating that day and very improbably I just never stopped and I started studying with various teachers and various traditions and and yoga and the Pung shots were a part of it and I studied with various Swami's and so forth and you learn a lot from people and over time began to train more in the Buddhist tradition and go on fairly extensive and quite rigorous meditation retreats I know you were just telling me about one that you were in when you actually were in Thailand for a period of time and and took vows as a monk is that right and so these are very very rigorous very very intense and I describe meditation retreats as their laboratory is just the way in neuroscience lab or you know the chemistry lab is there there are opportunities to actually investigate something of importance so that's how I got into it and and then the love affair that I was speaking about yesterday was like well how could I find work or make work for myself because I knew I wasn't gonna find it in 1979 how could I make a job for myself where I could be meditating all the time and they paid me to do it and I could share the this pure potentiality so to speak with other people who were hurting and really falling through the cracks and not having their needs met by medicine as it was being practiced and was there something missing and the last thing I'll say in terms of this is that I think I pointed to it yesterday the words medicine and meditation are linked at the etymological hip and you know where I learned that a Linda from David Bowen who was a quantum physicist who worked with Einstein and has this wonderful book that came out in 1980 called sort of what was called the implicit order the implicit oh yeah and you probably saw it and read it at the same time it's just a remarkable different way of describing quantum physics and reality so he points out in that book about physics that the words medicine and meditation are linked and the way it works is that in Latin the root you Latin root is means to cure so you know that's the link but the deep indo-european root which comes from of course the Indian subcontinent and Sanskrit is our Sanskrit or some deep into European root is to measure any was saying like well what could medicine and meditation possibly have to do with measure and the answer is zero nothing if you think of measure is a standard of length or volume or whatever in your and your very sort of judiciously mapping out how long the length of this carpet is or something like that but what it's referring to is the more platonic notion that everything has its own right inward measure okay every form that arises out of the formless has its own right weight inward measure so medicine is the restoring of a dynamical right inward measure what we call homeostasis or allo stasis when it's disrupted or disturbed and what's meditation meditation is the direct perception of right in would measure in other words that you're already whole you're already okay this no matter what's wrong with you there's much more right with you and can you sort of embrace the entirety of that and that would be and we could study this and investigate it help people onto the glide path of greater healing and well-being where healing in my working definition is not fixing or curing but coming to terms with things as they are so if you take away from that remembering is wholeness of that which was dismembered I to remember the fragmented aspect of being and sati the word mindfulness in sanskrit sati has an element of it that means remembering so when we drop in whether it's formal sitting meditation or every when you're cultivating mindfulness an element of it is to keep in mind to remember what is arising so that there's a sense of like growth and continuity from experience rather than everything is like completely fragmented and there's no way to string things together but that's not the entire meaning but it has that root element of it and and then well I'll just leave it at that for now few more insights from what he just said it's just some remembering things so you know in the non-dual traditions they say when you see yourself in an object the experience is beauty when you see yourself in another person the experience is love so love and beauty go together so in every culture you know in every culture on David balm here's a very interesting personal story in 1980 wholeness in the implicit order was the name of the wholeness in the implicit order so 1980 I saw a little ad in the New York Times that Krishnamurti was going to be speaking at the felt forum in Madison Square Garden didn't know who he was except Indian yeah I said if an Indian is speaking a very beautiful face who is a beautiful so I said if an Indian is speaking at Madison Square Garden it must be a big event so I I still remember the day it was around the 10th 11th of January freezing cold it was snowing light snow in New York so it was very kind of harsh day and people were waiting outside and when the doors opened 7,000 people walked into the door the felt for him and at precisely 9:15 when the lecture was going to start we saw this person in a three-piece suit ears to where he was brought up in England so the English accent used to wear a watch etc and he ran up the stairs and sat in a chair which was even more you know bare than this yeah straight back straight back right in the frame and people started to clap and he kind of looked he was a stern kind of person and people started to clap and he looked at the audience ISM why are you clapping if you want entertainment Broadway's across the street and then for three hours non-stop he spoke as if God was speaking the truth and then suddenly he realized three hours were over he put his watch back in his pocket and he rushed out so then I started to research him and I rouse all the stuff that Aldous Huxley has written but then I basically came across his conversations with David Baum the physicist now Boehm has a very interesting history was kind of anglo-american he was a physicist but he didn't participate in the atomic bomb process so he was labeled by the United States as as a traitor and he couldn't get a job and Einstein actually found a job for him in Brazil till after the war was over etc but Bowman Krishnamurti became very good friends and boom is known for that book you know the implicit order and the holographic wholeness and the implicit order and he's known for one of the interpretations of quantum physics which is now called the pilot wave which is having a resurgence right now because nobody can agree on and he talks about hidden variables go ahead you were going to say something well it strikes me that there's another connection that Houston Smith actually made a move with Krishnamurthy he did Houston Smith this fellow who invited who just passed away by the way in his 90s so Houston Smith did this movie with Krishnamurti and when I was teaching biology at Brandeis I was also teaching a science for non-science majors and really teaching meditation and yoga in that class it was very popular there it's like the class was this size we got to have it in the castle at Brandeis University and and Christian the way Houston Smith did it is Houston Smith played the idiot he just asked Krishnamurti these questions and Krishnamurti as you say was very stern so he he he would just turn on I mean he'd say that is completely impossible for God's sake sir can't you get this straight what I'm trying to convey and it was like he by making himself invisible the way Bill Moyers also does he brought Krishnamurti out in a way that was really rather fantastic you may be able to find that movie on the internet but when I was teaching at Brandeis I actually went to MIT and asked Houston Smith who I then told the whole story of being at his talk with Kaplow if he would lend me the film so I could show it and that was in the days before the video was invented so it was like a reel-to-reel kind of thing if I could show it to my biology class at Brandeis so there were all these kind of personal interconnections that I think are true for all of us and one of the one of the beauties of theirs Krishnamurti yeah one of the beauties of this is that you never know who's in the audience you never know you know I mean this is a its own nonlocalized field of profound intelligences and we're all in some sense the cells of the one body and also collaborating in a deep inquiry as to you know how to make the most of our very evanescent and fleeting lives in ways that would align with what's deepest the best in us as human beings rather than you know the kind of contracted tendencies which get us into so much trouble Oh producer that show that how do you do it Rene is remarkable so that's Krishnamurti that's Houston Smith who I met with Gorbachov in the early you know when the site what was it called better strike that was happening last night was happening and there he is he was also an extraordinary person also to continue this story because we're gonna make a point at the end okay I became fascinated with Krishnamurti who then passed away in 1985 actually at the age of 90 so there was no way to get to him but through my readings I found that Aldous Huxley's Widow was in Los Angeles Laura Huxley and so I tracked her down by then she was in her late 70s but the story is that she was nineteen years and you know these are recollection so you may have to do your own search but the story is that she was 19 or 20 when she read brave new world and she decided she was she fell in love with this Huxley who was then in California and she was in Switzerland just by reading his book and then she came and actually literally seduced him into marrying her and they had an amazing life together and they were very close to Krishnamurti and so she regaled me with all these stories about Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley and Henry Miller and then through a series of happy accidents I ended up and the Krishnamurti school Brockton Park in England where I met mrs. bomb who's by the way still alive she's no 90s and she's living in Israel and then she told me all these stories about bomb and how he was basically pariah because he didn't cooperate with the atomic bomb etc etc but coming back to what you were saying about your father and your mother by the way the same thing with my parents my father was a cardiologist a very science-based cardiologist at one time he was a cardiologist to the Royal Family in England he was a consultant to the Royal Heart Hospital he described high-altitude pulmonary edema the first one to describe it what happens when you go - yeah well in during the Chinese and Indian War he went to leh while people were killing each other he was putting catheters and measuring pulmonary artery pressures so he was a very strict scientist but my mother was a storyteller and all these mythical stories and it wasn't until very late you know in life that my father actually embraced consciousness in a very big way much more than I did because he saw the effects it had had but the question is yeah through my influence in the beginning he said what are you doing I sent you to medical school you know yeah and but slowly I kind of introduced him and I took him to meet Maharishi etc and he was he was just taken by the presence of some of the people that he met but talking about the story in your construct and entanglement since you know we talk about thoughts and feelings and emotions and even perceptions aren't in a sense entangled within the story that we have created of what is reality so that story in a sense influences how not only do we perceive but how we feel and the thought structures we come up with and you know that and in the end what how we explore reality yeah I agree but you know the stories themselves it's really interesting you know the sort of dual slit experiment you know that the don't don't go the photons don't go through one slit they go through two slits except when the wavefunction collapses and so that's also true for stories I would say at least metaphorically that I could have told you thirty did that story about just my childhood a hundred different ways depending on the effect I wanted to have and you know there are different elements of it so forth it's actually very very complex as it's true for all of us so there's a certain way in which all of our stories it seems to me all of the narratives are pointing to a narrative that's sort of no longer a narrative it's just a container for all narrative which is a lot like say the Fineman diagrams where you know the electrons you know trajectory or whatever the elementary particle is it goes by virtually an infinite number of different paths and so our narratives are really an infinite number of different paths that don't necessarily explain anything until you take the whole into account that's very sort of heady way of saying that it's important to sort of really love our stories but not believe that they're absolutely true and to really keep in mind that that it's possible to drop underneath the story to wherever the generating of story comes from and there's a deep beauty there that you as I've been listening to you you you're naming in some sense pure awareness or pure consciousness or something like that whatever you call it and that is a trustworthy human experience for us and so a it's healing to actually drop underneath the stories and not take not be too attached to them because in some sense as we know the sort of route one of the root causes of of suffering is attachment and identification with those naughty personal pronouns we were talking about I me and mine and it struck me I didn't say this in my talk yesterday but the Buddha is famous for having said and he taught non-stop for 45 years he's famous for having said all of his teachings could be encapsulated in one sentence and I like to say on the off chance he wasn't just joking that maybe we should memorize that sentence even if we don't understand it you get 45 years worth of Buddhist you know transcendence transcendent wisdom one sentence of what is the sentence nothing is to be clung to the upper to verb is to cling nothing is to be clung to as I me and mine so two questions one is since you brought up the suffering and yesterday you did talk about the the silent sermon right yes and that you remember schiappa he remember the story the Buddha holding up the flower so and then only one person smiled smiled so that was the famous disciple by the name of Ananda you know he was like bright guy in the class and one of the stories versions that comes down which is frequently at least talked about in India is everyone else was confused because when the UH nanda got the transmission so they went to him this is something happened you know you and the Buddha seem to have some visual connection special connection we all we saw was a flower what did you see Ananda and he said I saw the flower but I also saw rainbows and sunshine and earth and water the wind and the air I saw the infinite void I saw the whole universe in that flower that's a sudden shift in perspective just in that silent transmission I didn't Blake write a little poem that's right you know through the first in a grain of sand yeah world in the Wildflower he had the world infinity in the palm of your hand universe in an hour or eternity you know yeah something like that yeah and even there you see your I told the story as it being maha kassapa saw it because that's the way the Zen people told it and but then this story same story but someone else had the experience so there's a there's a perfect example of help it's a story do you know nobody that we know is actually there to report it and then some people nowadays would call it fake news anyway all you well exactly in a certain way I think this whole conversation around you know fake news and what is real it's not just problematic it's actually pointing to a kind of potential for us as a society to mature to the point where we realize that whenever anything is framed it's like long before there was a Donald Trump I mean you know people used to say all the time don't believe everything you read in the newspaper you know why because a lot of it's not true it's a particular kind of angle that even with the best of intentions the most authentic and and ethical journalists they will tell the story a certain way but they don't have all the facts and so forth it's their perspective too isn't one of the Eightfold teachings is right view exact and that right view is either no view or all views exactly and there's this what you're talking about for those of you not familiar with it is that the Buddha's first teaching after his full awakening experience was a teaching that he gave to five people called the Four Noble Truths or the four ennobling Truths and they were in the form of maybe I said this yesterday did I yeah I think they were in the form of a medical diagnosis you know that the first noble truth is the diagnosis and this is often misrepresented as they say life is suffering that is not what the Buddha said the Buddha did not say life is suffering the Buddha said there is the question of suffering and it needs to be addressed so that's the diagnosis is there is this thing called suffering that's the ailment diagnosis so what's the etiology what is the source of the disease and the source of the disease is what I just quoted clinging identification grasping so that's very contemporary how much I mean to look at the opioid epidemic look at how attached we are to our devices so I mean we are you know sort of clinging desperately to our own view and of course discounting all other views that don't coincide with our own so what's the third is the the the prognosis and the prognosis is excellent from the Buddhist point of view prognosis is there is the possibility of liberation from suffering in the form of greed hatred delusion and so forth and then what you're pointing to is the fourth noble truth which is called the Eightfold noble path and right view is one of the eight right mindfulness the first and there are so these eight path factors and that is the treatment plan you instantiate the eight full path you practice you exercise the muscle as we were talking about yesterday and that oh my god you've got the Eightfold you guys good know the four you know so so so all this is really to say that that the stories and the narratives that we tell each other it could be really really valuable as long as we don't get into the sort of self identification with them as being the absolute truth and there's something about the unknowability that is you know in some sense part of the of entanglement and we just like it's not necessarily possible for us to understand everything but maybe we will and I just want to since you spoke so much about quantum physics and gravity and they you know the early you know Einstein and so forth maybe I should we should pay homage to the fact you you mentioned it in passing that one of the most amazing things that humanity has done was actually developed these two detectors for the gravitation waves they just won the Nobel Prize for it in physics a couple of weeks ago but they built two gigantic vacuum thermos bottles okay like two and a half miles long the biggest thermos bottles in the world that actually are the greatest vacuum that has ever been created on the planets like meant to sort of imitate outer space and they have mirrors and lasers and basically what it is is that they are measuring a wiggle in space if there is a wiggle in space the distance between the mirrors will change and then the laser light will get there faster and and you can coordinate this in such a way that and so if you had one detector and you got a hiccup that you identified as a wiggle in space of course nobody would believe it because you say how do you know it's not an artifact so they built two detectives 2,000 miles apart one in Washington state and one near New Orleans and they got the hiccup at the very same moment and they could actually triangulate where the source of the hiccup was and I don't know how they do this but they could basically define that there were like two gigantic black holes that collect collided a billion years 100 billion is 200 thank you 200 billion years ago isn't that wild and let's see no it couldn't be 200 billion because the universe is only 13.8 billion 200 million years ago okay we can look it up whatever a long time ago in a galaxy far far away what is that gigantic of like a hundred solar masses 30 solar masses 60 solar masses colliding setting off the biggest energy vibration you know in the neighborhood a long time ago and then we are detecting it as a little rivulet a little wavelet in not light but space itself that is smaller than like one ten thousandth the width of an electron so you know how many papers names were on that paper how many names of physicists and engineers and scientists Apple that oh there were a thousand names on the paper so my point is whether you think that's a good use of our money or not that that that human beings could actually get together and collaborate and building the technology to do that kind of thing is beyond mind-blowing and it's one of the sort of ways in which I mentioned like the potential for a Renaissance flowering on the earth at global Renaissance that the science and the technology and the art and the beauty and the music and the poetry and the deep inquiry as to the nature of our humanity that you are teaching and embodying I mean all of that has the potential to come together and really heal what so much needs healing on this planet at this moment and was no not not like a thousand years from now because we may not have a thousand years wasn't that replicators the second time that yes now they've had hiccups like it turns out the universe is hiccuping all the time you know because because these these masses the unthinkably large if you start thinking about black holes you will lose your mind and luckily you don't know enough math at least I don't know enough math to really understand it but it is mind-blowing to think about the nature of gravity when it is so so strong light itself cannot escape from it and that they talk about wormholes in two different universes and now of course there's no one universe there's like multiverses and actually different orders of multiple universes so if that's true then you know maybe it's okay for us to really say that there are hidden dimensions to our own experience not just the other physical realities but what about the hidden dimension of this moment that's like a hidden dimension for most of us what if we reclaimed that dimension of being human it's like a hidden dimension let's see if we could inhabit that and see what the you know proximal effects of that would be in terms of health well-being sanity doing the right thing non harming and not getting into all that selfing other ring and uh Singh that leads to so much violence so John a couple of things but by the way your talk you just mentioned multi versus there's a Sansa and yoga vasishta with fear speaking to Rama which I mentioned his face has infinite universes come and go in the vast expanse of consciousness like motes of dust shining through a beam of light but a great image huh absolutely and and so those insights you know long before there were like Oh detectors and gravity waves and quantum physics were people those insights were arrived at through this through non doing through dropping in and opening into the nature of your own mind thousands of years ago and then written down in the in those scriptures and and so there's something going on that we are in some sense the inheritors of and harking back to memory you know we talk about reminding ourselves why can't we be body ourselves in English too you know moment by moment so along your journey now from the age of 21 to now 73 oh and many more to come along this journey you've seen the unfolding of the science behind mindfulness a lot of people aren't totally familiar with that but your work as a professor in university of massachusetts and all these other institutions engagement with mind life Institute with His Holiness and other luminaries in this field where are we now with the science of mindfulness both biologically and the benefits that you are talking I mean we should you know two of my longest term friends and closest friends Daniel Goleman and Richie Davidson who I've known ever since they were graduate students at Harvard in psychology just wrote a book that came out last month called altered traits which is about how to parse all of the enormity of the scientific studies on mindfulness now and drill down to what the essence of it is because a lot of the science is you know the science of some of its more rigorous than others some of it stands the light of day better than others and what they did was very rigorously go through the entire literature and abstract the sort of most reliable data and I think the first thing to say is the science is still in this infancy so what we don't know is far bigger than what we do know but that there are two things that I think we put a lot of confidence and one is they've taken people with up to 60,000 hours of meditative practice and that usually comes in we're not going to have 60,000 hours to spend in you know monastery or cave or you know on retreat but people have and Richie has brought them into his lab at the University of Wisconsin over a number of years with the collaboration and help of the Dalai Lama and studied their brains and their various practices and this this kind of elucidation of their brains are just different from ours and it's an example of how what I was talking yesterday about neuroplasticity when you actually practice like this you are driving functional connectivity or connecting up different regions of the brain in ways that that's what the brain is designed to do but when you exercise the muscle with certain kind of rigor over days weeks months years and decades you have a very different brain and you can just see the colors the brain scans of the monastics versus the brain scans of kids who were sophomores you know at the University of Wisconsin or someplace having had two weeks of meditation instruction what they're all blue and these are like red and yellow and you can see right away different brains and interestingly enough a lot of those brains they're that way even when they're not meditating because at a certain point as I was trying to suggest yesterday there's no separation between life and meditation so that's why it's called altered traits that it's not like you you do this and you go into some special magical state and then for that period of time you're a wise person then you get up and you yell at your kids or you you know you serve ya yell at somebody who cuts you off on that freeway or whatever and you're the same motor slurp you always were but that the suggestion is that if you practice long enough you changed your being or I would say more differently you reclaim who you really actually really really really are and then the other element of their book that they point out is that a lot of the studies of MBSR and NBCT are really trending in the direction of like robust enough so that we can really have confidence that those particular ways of training people and mindfulness are valid and they result in these kinds of changes at the level of the immune system at the level of you know epigenetics at the level of neuroplasticity telomeres and telomerase I know you've done some work with Elissa EPEL and Liz Blackburn from you from UCSF about that so there's a certain sense in which this stuff is now believable in a way that it might not have been at the beginning another book that I might recommend to you is called the craving mind remember I talked about nothing is to be clung to his I me and mine the Buddha said so my colleague Judd Brewer who used to be at Yale and is now the head of the Center for mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School he's a neuroscientist who just wrote this book called the craving mind and it he does some really remarkable what's called real-time neurofeedback where you can see how advanced meditators are let's let's not call them advanced meditators but people have been at it for a while versus people are just starting it's like you can see on screens how easily our own mind gets enthusiastic and involved with thinking and then everything kind of goes south from there that you you know contract into your own ordinary conditions of daily living but when you let go and really forget about accomplishing anything or making anything happen then you see these signals that really support through the biofeedback process the or the feedback process a sense of like it is an on doing the more you get in the way the more doing the more judging the more you're evaluating the more you say yippee I made it go blue the more it goes red so you can learn from that that you know that all of the guided meditation instructions that are invited so inviting of us just being with what is as opposed to so the the there's no such thing as like Olympic athlete meditators sometimes they use that kind of terminology but it's not like if we were really good we would practice that long and then we be like them you're never gonna be like the Dalai Lama mother Teresa Deepak Chopra or whoever else is your guru the moment the best any of us can do is to be who we already are and be that in our fullness and that's doable that's practicable and otherwise we just put people on pedestals that are far beyond our reach and then you can get discouraged because it's like well I don't have six sixty thousand hours to practice this and besides I can hardly stay on my cushion for two seconds so it I think the the bottom line is that first of all the science is driving this but even if there were no science and I say this in the revised version of full catastrophe living even if there was no science at all about my clones I'd still be doing it because of what I heard in that room with Ruth Smith and and Philip Kaplow I'm just like it blew my mind it's not like oh I'll make nice fMRIs forty years from now you know bye nice nice patterns on F MRIs no that's nobody goes into mindfulness or meditation for that they go into it for the potential liberation from greed hatred delusion and ignorance and that we're all capable of it and it really is a love affair and I I think you can see that just from hearing the way Deepak is you know parsing reality so to speak that these are really all in some sense modes of encouragement for us to ground ourselves in the actuality of being rather than be deluded by certain kinds of stories that may be true to a certain degree but they're not big enough and they're not true enough I love your phrase what is it dropping down what was the phrase he used drop dropping in we're dropping in I love it because you know it immediately creates the experience you know when the phrase Richie and I did a study together the first randomized clinical trial of MBSR where I commuted out to Madison Wisconsin for ten weeks and led this this MBSR program not in a hospital but in high tech bioengineering company where we did the first randomized Nicoll trial and and i was really worried there was like millions of dollars riding on this study and you know it was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and Richie was a member of the the the MacArthur mind-body network in those days so I thought how am I going to actually teach this in a way that we won't be studying how people are how good people are trying to meditate you know as opposed to really meditating because like why would be we'd be interested in people try trying trying to be still you know or to get you know to some different special better state so I brought along a tennis ball I sort of just grasping at straws so I grasped that tennis ball and went from time to time when I was teaching the meditation I would drop the tennis ball and just encourage people to drop into the present moment you know so you could say like in a certain way it's like a there's a kind of hypnotic suggestion here that you just stop and drop okay drop anytime anytime any time and in any moment under any conditions with the world is kind of really a better place when we're here for it than when we check out and that doesn't mean that you can't relax or you know so binge watch with this or that or you just go mindless for periods of time but when you're mindful of how mindless you are which is what happens I mean that's that's the basic meditation practice is how mindful you are the first thing you notice is how mindless you are that that then you know it really takes root in a way that is not about getting someplace else as it was said but about being where you already are but being here in your fullness which is what the universe really I wouldn't say just asks of us but so sorely needs of us in fact and in just the one last thing because when you talk so many interesting thoughts move them in my mind the sort of yeah Einstein had something to say about human beings you know say to bring all the quantum physics and the entanglement down to earth and you're right Einstein could never accept even quantum reality I mean you know he said it doesn't play dice you know he he could never accept that there was a kind of indeterminacy in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and so forth it's like how could that be but you know he I was born long enough ago so I remembered Einstein while he was alive and everybody related to him kind of like the way maybe you experienced people relating to Muhammad Ali in his heyday I mean he was like the champ you know so Einstein was definitely the smartest man in the world so people used to write to him from all over the world with their personal problems and the interesting thing is Einstein used to write back you know it's like you think no I'm busy you know but he would write back and so I read this in the New York Times one day in the early 70s that a rabbi had written to Einstein so this is a kind of religious person rabbi had written to Einstein asking for advice on what to say to his 19 year old daughter over the death of her 16 year old sister as he put it a sinless beautiful child so this is a religious person asking Einstein for advice about something that usually you'd ask a religious person for right and Einstein replied in the most remarkable way he starts out because he is the his mind he was not an experimentalist he was a theoretical physicist so he you know he probably couldn't put two electrodes together but but he could put thoughts together and get involved in these Gedanken experiments so he unified space and time and he unified matter and energy so he wrote back a human being this is what is replied up to the rabbi a human being is a part of the whole called by us universe apart limited in time and space at least relatively speaking he experiences and you can put she and if you like but this three he experiences himself his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness this delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us remember he's writing about the death of his own daughter our task must have free must be to free ourselves from this prison by get this widening our circle of compassion and embracing the whole of nature in its beauty nobody is able to do this but the embracing of such an intention is the is the source of liberation and a foundation for inner security when I read that in 1974 having my coffee at the Harvard Medical School I basically fell on the floor I mean because that could have been written by you know a rishi or sage or the Buddha and here's Einstein the the father of you know the sort of unification of you know universal forces in in the universe talking about us being a part of all that and talking about liberation compassion and inner security I mean it's like you don't find that happening all that much and it really knocked my socks off here's my version of the same story I was I was 12 years old and I want you know in my school which was a all-boys school there was one kid who was just an amazing writer and I admired him more I wanted to be like him and so I always wanted to be a writer but my father being a scientist wanted me to go into medicine so on my 14th birthday he gave me a number of books and they were all about writers novelists but there were also doctors so you know I was enamored of being a writer and a doctor but then he gave me a book by Russian cosmonaut or there weren't any cosmonauts but he gave me a book by some Russian science writer on Einstein explaining the theory of relativity and I read it 12 for 14 14 but I didn't understand it except that happened to find and it's still there on the internet you'll find it a picture of Einstein with Charlie Chaplin's and I said this guy must be something else you know if he can hang out with John it's Chaplin because used to have these black-and-white jerky movies and then what happened is as I started to go deeper talking about poetry I was exposed in my early childhood and through my teeny teeny just to the Indian poet Tagore yeah I took or won the Nobel Prize in 1928 because WB Yeats who was Irish poet helped to go translate his poems into English yeah that's how he got the Nobel Prize and then Einstein somewhere read these poems and he invited to Gore to come and visit him in a place called Potsdam outside of outside of Berlin because he was totally with the poems and so you know as as as Tagore walked into that room and this is by the way all reported now you can it's in my book too in the first chapter of you are the universe but you can find it on the Internet and the New York Times reported it to Einstein and Tagore met and they were in awe of each other and one was a poet at that time who was relatively unknown just becoming known the other was the most famous scientists in the world and so to gorse Einstein says toot to God there are two versions of reality one is the scientific version and then he points to Gordon it says the other is the humanist version and Tagore says but the scientific version is that of the scientific human being and so he says I agree with you on your idea of beauty but I don't agree with you on your idea of fundamental reality and they talked for about 15 minutes til Einstein says my religion is science my religion is science which means he's saying I'm putting my faith in something that I cannot prove which is an observer independent reality so last year with some people you know at the center and some friends I went to Einstein's library in Israel at the Hebrew University and all these conversations are there and they're unknown to the world it's so interesting that they're there and this Hebrew University Library with all these pictures and these conversations between poet and scientists and what I think I'm hoping we are seeing right now is a Renaissance of where poetry and art and music and literature and the humanities and the sciences come to together in friendly dialogue so we can see the emergence of a new paradigm show that show that okay that's Albert Einstein Charlie Chaplin do you have a picture of Tagore and and I sent to so he says eins ancestor Charlie Chaplin but your fame is even greater the world admires you when nobody understands you he says to answer you know this whole dialogue can be summarized between and that Frank Sinatra jingles dooby dooby doo ones about being and yeah this is what doing you have a picture yeah that's so that's in the Einstein libraries toward the poet the sage the Rishi and I designed this they just say I mean it said that Einstein wasn't that much fun to live with so you know I think it's really important again we said it before but to not Ralph I somebody into a caricature of who they were just because of their accomplishments accomplishments are profound and we should be able to draw deeply deeply on them but not in some sense lose ourselves in the worshipping of some other which is never going to be actually the truth and there's always sort of hidden elements of it so the way I frame that is you know because it's inevitable even under these kinds of circumstances that you know when there are like the sages on the stages so to speak as this sometimes puts it that there's inevitably certain projections that sort of come up you know to whoever's on the stage it's like and it's very important to be aware of those to be mindful of how much you think someone else's there and you need to get there or something like that and that the most important thing is to dive as deeply as you care to into the teachings and it's much more about the teachings than it is about the teachers and the more we can remember that even as teachers then I think the more we can thread this sort of ethical kind of you know embodiment of what's deepest in best in in all of us without creating the sort of separation that very often leads to you know highly respected well-known people who you know are supposed to be enlightened and should know better and everything else to just crash and burn and I think that if this is gonna become a kind of distributive flowering leading to the kind of Renaissance we're talking about it can only happen if every single one of us takes responsibility for the whole and I don't mean just the whole the United States I mean the whole universe in a certain way or the whole of our infinite understanding and something you said this morning you know that if you just look for the center of your own awareness will you find it don't answer but just look and if you look for the circumference or the periphery or the edge of your own awareness will you find it so you know in a sense I mean we are you know infinite beings and Einstein was right we are a part of the whole called by us universe but that part he says limited in time and space but there's a certain way in which it's not limited beyond time and beyond space and the present moment everything you've been pointing to is really a kind of doorway into some other dimensionality that may be the best way for us human beings to reclaim the name that we gave ourselves as a species that I spoke about yesterday then really be you know as the marine is like to say I think it's the Marines recruiting statement be all you can be I don't know who who what ad firm they paid for that in how much they paid but that's not a bad ideas you know be all you can't be maybe that's the love affair maybe that's the swadharma maybe that's the engagement that that we're all some kind of nonlocalized part of some larger entangled moment and if you are real fiying somebody then just talk to their way for the kids whoever that is by the way to Gore is known he's live outside of Calcutta and the family very distinguished family they had little boats on the Hubli river and Tagore would stop the boatman once in a while and just drop in as you say for hours just there in being thank you John thank you [Applause] and thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Chopra Well

Views: 38,367

Keywords: healing, wholeness, meditation, mindfulness, heart, purpose, meaning, love, enlightenment, yoga, brain, stress

Id: wyqGrwujf-0

Length: 62min 34sec (3754 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2017