Dr. John Hagelin - Hacking Consciousness at Stanford University

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 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 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 etc is really part of their resume another course advisor is John bright who's with us here today thank you John for your supports and he is one of the leaders of the international Transcendental Meditation movement TM for short and of course Andrew Todd hunter who because of travel schedules is also not with us today but he essentially is our core sponsor isn't it his lectures in the Department of Biology and creative writing and he's a really prolific writer filmmaker 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 meditations 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 - do you have any questions about logistics how the course will run any questions at all good everybody know some question back there ideally you do also the the reading the required reading so on every speaker will have that biography and usually some type of piece that they've 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 yes you may audit this course and 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 yeah so there would be a lot of fun so thanks for coming yes yes there's a syllabus were you on the initial email okay are you registered for the course or okay so have you signed up for the Google form that I sent out all right just leave your email with me I will send you a syllabus all right let me pass this to just pass it through yeah and if your student please sign in on this paper and if you want you can also leave me your email 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 worldview 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 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 meditation techniques I've tried Qi Gong 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's actually that observer behind that thought and that's where so this whole interest came about in terms of hacking consciousness and after undergraduates I worked for a while and sort of forget it 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 don't I 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 grounded 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 so I'll just mention some highlights he is one of the most cited quantum physics physicists of our time he has written over a hundred research publications about soar he has done groundbreaking research at both CERN and slack our very own slack 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 I'm not Mike can you hear me okay back there 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 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 experiencial access to it consciousness I'd have to say is really self hacking but how do you can hack it so in the process I am also an astrophysicist or a half astrophysicist I like to always spend a moment locating ourselves in the structure of the universe and here of course are the almost at 9/8 planets I grew up with nine it's a sad story and here they are a 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 a solar system we tend to be quite fond of it it is our own and we do live here that's what Sattar like like Jupiter gas Colossus hydrogen and helium star about a half a billion miles from the Sun about that distance from us as well and doesn't take much of a telescope your backyard to see that incredible jewel out there like that this is the ice world of Neptune now the last the feat of eight planets that's what the noonday Sun looks like from Neptune to the like Iowa in the winter you don't get much of a suntan 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 then a clear night you can see it incredible things happen like stellar explosions called supernovae which are responsible the final last gasp in the life of a star that can result in this kind of cataclysmic explosion during which the heaviest elements get cooked like gold and platinum anything ever than iron thrown out into space contaminate space with heavier elements because if Billy 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 etc all come as remnants of supernova explosions our bodies comprised of things like you know oxygen nitrogen carbon we're 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 backyard 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 in 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 is this 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 expend 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 space time scales and one of 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 in that inward explore started at a very surface level 300 years of classical mechanics dedicated the study of macroscopic matter but turned about 90 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've learned in college and that is that the atom is not a billiard ball and not a solar system in miniature in high school that may be say the 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 is there's no purpose and it doesn't work at all the 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 the hot topic in physics today as it has been since the superstring 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 common more common parlance this is typically in the form of super string theory and M theory these theories are very exciting for reasons I really wish we could get into in great depth I'll mention a few things these theories fulfill line Stein's lifelong 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 as 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 nonlinear process involving itself 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 back the quantum principle or uncertainty principle as is known is the principle of increasing dynamism at fundamental scales the same using 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 could say silent at its core but it's roiling and boiling on the surface of life erupting in this effervescence of what looked like effervescent bubbles emerging from ginger-ale that sometimes called zero point motion these days it's called or vacuum entering these gates stays 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 ray'll actually but they are these little rubber bands these little loops they are infinitesimal ups called super strings little rubber bands little literally relativistic rubber bands infinitesimal and I know it's kind of depressing for those who are seeking the ultimate nature of reality to conclude that after all 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 and 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 is 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 its own natural tone that type of mathematical physicists that undertakes this calculation of the enumeration of the vibrational frequencies of rubber bands are called nerds but they're very very but the miracle of superstring 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 is Einstein equates well frequency of course in 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 Vitae grating 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 gravida another one acts like a particle of light the spin one massless photon another one looks like a spin one-half quark or an electron and so forth and you get just the categories of matter and energy that we know and love that are the 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 to be 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 strings looks like ours or at least at least roughly like ours 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 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 gravity no a spin one force field to spin one-half bear Mian or the newly discovered Higgs boson there is an interesting relationship which can't begin to touch on the day that these five actually correlate in a very precise way to one of these ancient you know these quaint ancient prosaic theories of the universe as 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 environment is this sort of ocean of immortality ocean of pure being are not just these super strings 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 enormous Li 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 survived and if you you know do the math even relatively simply you would conclude that there is depending upon a few 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 its intrinsic creativity and dynamism and incredible properties and the physics and I would like to shift gears but this will be I think a useful background any questions just on the physics given a little bit of 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 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 when we can talk most clearly about is structured in layers in parallel to the structure of the physical body in parallel of the structure of the physical universe Wow what does that mean well just subjectively it means we have surface thoughts concrete thinking got to do this got to do that almost an audible level of course thinking pre verbal some cases even verbal but quieter than that in a more subtle quiet and expansive frame of mind is the world 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 I've 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 in different layers of concreteness versus layers of greater subtlety greater power greater comprehension greater completeness and if we just to make this idea familiar and it probably is to some you we can start with the natural numbers the counting numbers 1 2 3 these are the numbers we learn first these are the numbers that have most concrete meaning and most concrete relevance in practical living you go to the sport you to store you buy 3 apples not pi not the square root of negative 1 but you know 1 2 3 apples and that's you know its own numerical framework 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 the so called additive identity 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 those power is at the expense of some concreteness the number zero is just a bit more abstract than the number 3 a bit more abstract you don't go to the store to buy 0 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 add the negative numbers minus 1 2 3 etc 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 it's 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 framework at the expense of being a bit more abstract to these you add the fractions 0.732 or 2/3 or 7/8 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 Irrational's in order to get the real numbers in the Irrational's fill in all the holes in between all the rationals and they have the form of something like point seven three two eight five three it's 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 this system of real numbers you can at least do physics you can do calculus you can do Newtonian physics but you're at a deeper conceptual level less concrete much more powerful at the expense of being more abstract next step add numbers proportional to the square root of negative one so called imaginary numbers and there's a good word for them because I'm not going to try to explain to you what they mean they're really a giant step removed from practical day-to-day reality but enormous ly more powerful without these numbers the reals plus the imaginary z-- equaling 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 the different more holistic but or 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 to historic yogic tradition the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali the bhagavad-gita 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 turned the attention powerfully within to begin to experience and explore quieter levels of mind deeper and 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 the state of ABB's saluté 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 glimpsed 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 Samadhi not enlightenment its Samadhi in the Yoga Sutras 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 then the seer the experiencer is established in the self and the self or Ocwen in this tradition is not our time-space bound selfs not our physical body it's not our fluctuating thoughts it's not our fluctuating moods it's our it's the field of our own inner subjectivity inner wakefulness inner consciousness which is at the basis of every experience but which itself is rarely experienced so that's the meditative state Sumati and it is called been known historically at least described throughout the ages as a fourth state of human consciousness distinct from waking dreaming or deep sleep those are the three cycling relative states of consciousness the Samadhi has nothing to do with time timeless state non changing state and from a modern scientific perspective I think we can say since about 1970 and increasingly all the time this meditative state and their different states one can experience in meditation I'm really talking more civically about samadhi classic meditation state slipping beyond thought all together to experience pure being it is a fourth state of consciousness it is metabolically distinct and neuro physiologically distinct and certainly subjectively experientially distinct from waking dreaming or sleeping when the mind becomes absolutely still the body Sims imal taenia Slee 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 you know 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 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 can perhaps at least in principle really subtle 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-related diseases are relieved and/or prevented so for example one very common technique to transcend and that's really what the M technique is for it's it's really for transcending among other techniques but the transcending is the key that too 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 took me late last spring sorry 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 done here but the aah a just did another gigantic study and they concluded and a former policy statement that doctors should prescribe transcending it mentioned specifically TM for patients with blood pressure over 120 millimeters of mercury which I suspect is great great many of you bottom line when it comes to heart attack I'm going to get off this subject of health soon because kind of common sense most disease is caused by stress or complicated by stress if there is a really effective way to get rested deeper than sleep deep rest it will it seems plausible that you can unwind stress more effectively than mere sleep which helps enormous Lee 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 regimens the actual compliance with those was pretty poor and one group though added transcending twenty 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 is more to health and 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 was introduced as childbirth which is arguably not the meditators were having just as many babies and you put that all together this is my last health related slide stress and fatigue caused wear and tear on the system over the course of a lifetime and when you really stay up and cram for an exam maybe several nights in a row you'll 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 notes like 20 minutes twice a day which is typically what adult would 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 find people are about 12 to 15 years younger than their chronological counterparts just from meditating a lot of other things you can do to improve health and longevity but this is the easiest for sure alright 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 a meditation program for different types of results and even for different reasons and there are many ways to use the mind that many ways to develop the mind mathematics is one thing Oh anything you study is going to develop your mind and your mental abilities at least in specific respect specific ways so there are many things you can do to develop in mind what I'm talking about today is in a classic sense of meditation as defined for example of the Yoga Sutras is taking the awareness as efficiently as you can beyond thought and this is an automatic process the idea I mean you think about it will come I'm going to quiet the mind completely you know forget it it's just a matter of tech 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 should look you know turn off the TV you know 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 Lord being just kind of sweetly lured to these deeper and deeper levels of mind which are so fulfilling they're so intrinsically charming so kind of fascinating that your mind just goes there just give a taste of the direction you know you smell that you walk through an airport as a Cinnabon somewhere 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 divers question of how you leave the board and 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 brain can be studied in many ways EEG is a good approach to meditation because things change by the moment view something like patter SPECT or you know MRI 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 their versions of that too it is a completely different state of mind and this active concentrated cognitive processing state and then slipping beyond mental activity altogether 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 a 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 within eyes closed to relaxation in these different dots so 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 sub there's some 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 or 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 what's called global EEG coherence we all have some coherent you would not be in this room today if there were not some orderly coherent activity taking place in your brain but that orderly brain functioning in the extent of orderly brain functioning translates to orderly thinking orderly thinking translates to orderly speech coherent speech and translates to coherent purposeful effective action typically that means fulfilling action but this orderly brain functioning accorded research correlates with increasing IQ really creasing intelligence wait a minute or increasing academic performance learning ability short-term and long-term memory creativity according to test alertness moral reasoning psychological stability motional maturity everything good about the brain it turns out depends on its orderly functioning and as an educator taught in many places the idea or 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 is something you can do that increases intelligence and creativity in 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 so capable of forging new connections and learning fundamentally new things really throughout life but the problem with the brain they also say is its 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 because who cares but after meditation is a very very significant finding this is a stress to brain if you 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 a 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 judgment planning moral reasoning in under chronic stress unfortunately in certainly parts of the world are under chronic stress thinking general life can be under chronic stress chronic stress shuts down the higher brain chronically nd the extent the higher brain is shut down chronically it's not developing fails to develop properly and if it doesn't be developed 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 promoting recently the we're using we have an under utilization of the full resource of the human brain he was said actually we seem to be living in a society of Arrested Development meaning that no 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 in a stress impedes the development of that a few comments about acute stress that would get back to higher states of consciousness and hopefully to some questions acute stress and it's manifestation is 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 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 in your cars revving it's not an ideal situation to find yourself in now normally rest relaxation allows these sorts of things to normalize but unfortunately for somebody often who's had that kind of trauma the normal rest of 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 state or fight-or-flight what's really exciting is some of the recent research that's been done shows that the deeper rest of Samadhi this meditative state calls 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 Veterans Administration are relieved of most of their symptoms after one meditation it's like you have a computer that's gathered all kinds of crud and you've somebody finally tohum somebody says what's the last time you rebooted your computer so I haven't rebooted it for months I just put it 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 reboot you're resyncing the whole system refreshing the whole system that's what Samad it's 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 night's sleep but more so so incredibly fresh you know you still owe $3,000 to the bank but you know you feel completely fresh 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 whether I've lived long enough to see this but militaries of the world lots of them in our own Department of Defense and Veterans Administration in 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 the phenomenon called ADHD it's also a stress-related learning disorder and the research calming a restoring balanced brain functioning and integrated brain functioning research is really impressive that the very very deep rest it's probably more than just the deep breaths that help 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 at that part of the brain has been shut down person has very little control over their attention these kids are bouncing off the wall the first question you might ask you is I think I'd be able to meditate even close their eyes it stinked of Lee the teachers would say no but you know an efficient technique for transcending which starts mine 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 somebody who's that age ten minutes of meditations enough they don't have the crust of stress that the rest of us do so those results are amazing and as a result of the research on that schools around here and all over the country and all over the world are incorporating transcending simple technique for transcending called TM into the curriculum and we're talking about a million students now at 350 schools I did not think this would happen three years ago I would have said you know no way kind of an optimist but when it comes to schools and parents and religion you have to really make a solid case for this that it's not a religious practice it may have religious or spiritual implications but that's not what the kids are taught 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 into class alert focused and revitalize that's an amazing thing started really not surprisingly as a Midwestern er I will say not surprisingly in San Francisco and but it has now swept the world in a different talk this is our friend Jack Welsh we could talk about strengthening the executive functioning of the brain and 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 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 a tribute less and being so completely nonspecific there is nothing to give it any sense of time or change or relativity the structure of this for state of consciousness which I should say maybe has been considered in recent history not an early history but in recent history difficult to achieve is absolutely not but Angela's point of view in the Yoga Sutras of Matata Patanjali - for for basically four chapters they're all dedicated to transcending in the third and fourth chapters are dedicated exclusively to Samadhi it's not difficult but I suppose you can always get in a way of doing so like you could get away in the way of going to sleep if you really you know squirmin struggle enough you won't fall asleep it is 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 outwardly directed attention systematically within to experience and explore different levels of mind in 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 a sort of a localization of the awareness on to something very relative and very concrete with the meditation the aware it 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 speak there's less to localize becoming more diffuse more unlock alized more unbounded and then when the object of thought 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 experience 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 experience as a 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 right your mother said I'm really getting interested in it and really just you know experiencing Samadhi and that's what I'm going to do I'm going to meditate all day long and they will say well you know who's going to support you who's going to support me this is a non-functional state it is intrinsically satisfying it's extrinsically blissful in the most sort of sublime and subtle and expansive way but it's a non-functional 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 Upanishads about this fourth state of consciousness the fourth condition for state of consciousness has upman the self in his own pure state the awakened life of supreme consciousness also from the Upanishads it is neither this nor that either in urn or outer nor semi consciousness nor sleeping conscious 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 for philosophers of science and philosophers of consciousness it is peace and love so there has been debate and probably is debate across this campus and across the centuries as to whether consciousness even exists you never see it indirectly you do because 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 by practice escape the confines of our constantly changing experience too instead for a moment be left free for consciousness to experience itself at Samadhi then you can say oh oh I was not experiencing anything 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 about important point and that is you know why meditate well today you know 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 meditation 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 at least in this lesson today well in one sense it's this maximum orderliness and expansive state of brain functioning maximum EEG coherence stabilized which means not just during the meditative state but when you're out an activity dynamically engaged 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 Nietzsche Samadhi which means eternal Samadhi the state of yoga Samadhi experience of unity becomes a well-founded state an established state when it has 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 quick very quickly look at the brain during meditation of a relatively new meditator and somebody who's been doing it twice a day for a number of years eight years in the case of this particular subject one of hundreds of subjects in this study and if you have the brain you try to compare what's going on in this relatively new meditator and somebody who's been experiencing Samadhi regularly for some time be hard-pressed to find a difference really mathematically if you crunch the numbers is not a whole lot of difference it seems like transcending is transcending Samadhi is Samadhi whether you're experiencing for the first time at the fifth time or the 500th time the difference is outside of meditation after meditation and then what you find is that this orderliness of brain function the state of absolute clarity and coherence inner silence it dissipates very quickly when your eyes open up and you realize you're late for class and all that but in the longer term meditator this alpha coherence and 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 the 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 in extinguisher bowl 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 removability or under the knife during surgery under anesthesia absolutely out cold like a rock but that 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 that's a very quick process of going in and going out but during that whole time the continuum of the unboundedness or universal universality of the self persists and that's that's what the research shows and longer term meditators that during the high amplitude delta waves of deep sleep superimposed is the high amplitude alpha coherence it's Samadhi in one state that you could call enlightened sleep or witnessing sleep a couple more points about enlightenment this is a very important subject 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 the time if that's the nature of the cell huge expanded Universal cosmic to really know that with any confidence experience experience experiencing until you get it but liberation means something a little bit more it's a Buddhist kind of a Buddhist term but I think it's a very 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 is 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 anymore of the self established in the self you were 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 then all you're left with is pretty much life as we know it the changing relative and the changing relative is filled with change it's filled with ups and down 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 Buddha's 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 realize and oh only only $100 remains or that wonderful thing is starting to rust already and so forth so the Buddhists would go so far as to say the whole world of activity is ultimately a world 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 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 some things we consider to be pretty important in comparison to that the origin of universes we want to think of it from a physics perspective and 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 houses 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 unpolluted ball and in peace beyond desires 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 this is a Buddhist quote quite recognisably so established in the self one overcomes sorrows and suffering there's one last point I want to make do I have time for one last point this idea of thought or 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 the 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 it with us for a long time well of course we know to some degree intention has manifesting power it's our intention in our motivation that gets us out of bed to go and achieve what we have to achieve so of course mine you know has power but this means something different this the idea is just holding the intention has some strength of its own some manifesting or / tippet a precipitating strength of its own I was the token scientist chosen to go on 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 I said that you know the secret there 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 12 months later it gained that very same one I wanted there are a lot of stories like that there have been frankly throughout time but you probably find there are more people you 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 who were disappointed by the book and I said well that's too bad because I could have explained why it works and why it doesn't and perhaps how to make it work we've already talked about I have to explain anything more about it there are different levels of mind different levels of mind have greater and greater conceptual power an 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 and these terms aren't as familiar from Western psycho psycho logical science but in the literature of yoga and the Vedic literature and Buddhist literature and so forth there are these four levels of mind vai curry which is almost articulated thought surface thought abstract conceptual thought fine feeling level level of finest refined feeling which is very deep within but very important to the quality of our life this word artists fine artists 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 that I gave a little bit of a hint at it earlier today but again you know this meditative process is the process of getting more and more intimately familiar with deeper and deeper levels of thought where thoughts are more powerful so somebody might ask me it sort of been asked many times does prayer have power and I had to say I'll answer this is a physicist and as a meditator in my experience it depends I went to a church service in South Central LA it's a very dramatic service of worship and people were actually leaping around and shouting out the name of God and it was kind of exciting and on a surface level it was really kind of an exciting experience but their deeper I think more profound traditions of worship where you might go and experience 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 this 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 emerge first is a fine impulse and then take up more concrete shape as they work their way through the machinery of thought but it's at that level where a mustard seed this is a tiny impulse of thought could I suppose in principle 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 where 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 were 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 missed so in one literal sense at least the field of life becomes accessible momentarily during meditation during Samadhi becomes accessible permanently even during sleep even during anesthesia God forgive forbid that becomes necessary permanently established in the self comes from regular immersion alternated with activity regular submersion in the self 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 benefits really from day one so that's what I want to convey today thank you for more please visit us at stanford.edu

Channel: Raja Felix Kaegi

Views: 111,639

Rating: 4.8511982 out of 5

Keywords: John Hagelin, Maharishi, consciousness, Stanford University, Transcendental Meditation, Hacking Consciousness, Meditation

Id: R9ucmRglCTQ

Length: 75min 23sec (4523 seconds)

Published: Mon May 19 2014