All right. So, what am I talking about today? A lot of you guys have kind of gone deep within
yourselves, are part of a spiritual path. A lot of you are, you know, people that are
in deep inquiry. And a thing that unites almost every spiritual
path that humanity has ever pursued is this idea that everything is connected. It's this powerful idea. Like, it's central to so many of these systems
of belief, but in the modern age, it feels almost the opposite of that. It feels like everything is disconnected. And in a way, we kind of look to this idea
because this idea, you know, gives us hope, like, if only this was true, or maybe if this
was true, then I could keep going, I could keep believing. And as Vishen mentioned, you know, my background,
I have a lot of technical background. I've been a scientist. I've been an engineer. I've been these sorts of things. And I'm here today to talk to you about how
it actually is true, without any mysticism, without any of the sort of cloaked language
around it, or the need for faith to go believe it. I'm just gonna describe in very practical
direct terms, literally how everything is connected. And we're gonna go do it in three simple stories;
story of the heart, story of the breath, and story of the mind. So, let's start with the heart. So, right now, all of us in this room, our
hearts are beating, pumping blood, moving oxygen. And why do our hearts do this? Well, it's actually to move hemoglobin around. And it's actually the action is not even on
the hemoglobin, per se, the hemoglobin carries four molecules called heme B. And in the heart
of the heme B molecule is a single iron atom. And this is the critical piece of hemoglobin
because basically, this iron atom is the thing that allows oxygen to bind and move all around
the body and nourish us, and allow us to live, for our breath to mean something. So, some of you might have known that, but
a thing that you may not have known is that iron only comes from one place. Iron can only be formed during supernovas
and in super massive stars. And it means every single iron atom that is
at the heart of your heme Bs, that is moving your blood right now, came through a series
of a dozen stars that were formed, lived their lives, exploded, formed into new stars, lived
their lives and exploded. We all come from the same dozen stars. Now, the story doesn't really end there because
here's the thing about supernovas. The star, it explodes, and all its stuff is
all over the place now. And now that all its stuff is all over the
place, it actually doesn't naturally want to come on back together and be a star again,
right? So, once the star explodes, why would that
stuff become another star? And there's a couple mechanisms but the most
important one in the universe is this process called galactic collisions. Because when two galaxies collide, all this
material that had been spread far apart runs into material that had been spread far apart
in another galaxy, and in that process, it creates a thing called a stellar nursery. And these stellar nurseries are the birthplace,
the major kind of...the workhorse where all these new stars are born. Now, we look at the large universe and we
kind of think, "Oh, man, galaxies are colliding. It's so random. It's so crazy." This is not too rare a thing actually. Galaxies on average collide with other galaxies
every billion or so years, and then two large galaxies will collide with each other roughly
every eight to nine billion years. And because of it, these processes actually
is kind of that central process, wherein all the scattered material that had been spread
into the cosmos, pulls back together into stars, creates the next generation, explodes
again. But even this process, oh, and this is what
it looks like. So, basically, galaxies far apart, a little
closer, start to swirl around each other, right on top of each other, and then form
into something new. And these images are not the same galaxy because
this happens over, you know, half a billion to a billion and a half years. But we took images of different galaxies in
order to go show all the different steps in the process. Now, this leaves at least one more question,
and this is why galaxies would collide in the first place. And it's not a random process. It's not we're sitting around in a random
accidental universe. It actually looks something like this. So, you see all these little dots. Every one of those little dots is a galaxy. And that red dot, and really, we're much smaller
than the red dot there, that's where you are right now. That's our galaxy sitting amongst the 100,000
other galaxies. And you see these lines that are swirling
together, those lines aren't galaxies, but this is basically the path of how these galaxies
will swirl together. Now, this feature is called Laniakea. It is the supercluster of galaxies that we're
within, and it contains over 100,000 galaxies. And it's defined by what's called a gravitational
watershed. So, do you guys know that thing like when
there's a mountain range, like the Rocky Mountains? And then you pour a bucket of water on the
east side of Rocky Mountains, it's gonna go flow down to the gulf or the Atlantic. You pour it on the other side of the Rocky
Mountains, it's gonna flow down to the Pacific. This is exactly that same thing. There's basically lines in the universe where
if a galaxy happens to be on one side of the line, it will swirl and dance with 100,000
galaxies over here. And if you drop it on the other side of the
line, it'll swirl and dance with 100,000 galaxies over there. And this is our dance, right? And I think that the structure is an incredibly
beautiful-looking structure. To me, it looks like, you know, the petals
of an orchid that are unfolding. And over the course of the next, you know,
5 to 10 billion years, we're gonna slide along those lines and flow into each other. This structure is called Laniakea, which in
Hawaiian means the immeasurable heaven. Which is slightly ironic because when Brent,
Tally, and team did it, they measured it. Cool. So, one last thought about this. So, quick review on the heart. Really, if it was not for this, then the galaxies
would not regularly collide. If the galaxies do not regularly collide,
we could not get so many generations of stars. Without those generations of stars, we could
not accumulate the amount of iron that would be required to go create something like the
earth. And without that iron, we couldn't move the
blood that moves in every single one of our heart beats right now. And in that way, from the very beginning,
every one of our heart beats is directly connected. Second story. Okay. This is the story of the breath. Now, breathing is just one of these like amazing
pleasures in life. Like, we do it unconsciously but it can also
be one of the most grounding connecting thing, just directly as a human being. But this thing that we take for granted is
actually not a thing that was possible on this earth 3 billion years ago. Because 3 billion years ago, the composition
of the atmosphere was something like this. Actually, we had about the same amount of
nitrogen in the air, but we had almost no oxygen. We had .05% oxygen in the atmosphere, definitely
not enough to support any of the breaths that we take today. And instead, we have a krypton of carbon dioxide. And what it actually meant was the earth was
basically entirely inhospitable except for the tiniest, you know, handful of single-cell
organisms that kind of figured out, like, in rock crevasses a way to exist. Now, lucky for us, one of those organisms
was an organism called cyanobacteria, also called blue-green algae. And you guys will probably come to like these
guys by the end of the talk because they figured out this cool trick, which as far as we know,
has only been figured out one time in the entire history of the earth. They figured out this trick called photosynthesis. And with that trick, they are able to take
sunlight and convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. A thing never have been done before and never
have been done since. And given that, on the earth 3 billion years
ago, they start doing their trick. And little by little producing oxygen, producing
oxygen, taking all this carbon dioxide that was stuffing up the atmosphere and converting
it little by little into oxygen. And this is how patient, you know, they were. Basically, it took a billion years for that
oxygen to go build up in the oceans before any of it started poking up into the atmosphere. But even then, we weren't done because as
it poked up into the atmosphere, the earth just immediately absorbed it. So, if you've ever seen like iron oxide, like,
the rusty colored hills, that's actually oxygen being bound into the earth. So, they had to work for another billion years
putting oxygen out without it accumulating into the atmosphere as the land started to
suck up all this oxygen. And once 2 billion years had passed of that,
finally, oxygen was able to begin accumulating in the atmosphere. So, about 700 million years ago, something
magical happened from the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere. And this chart shows the rough range of the
percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere over the last 3 billion years. Enough oxygen got into the atmosphere that
the ozone layer formed. And the ozone layer, you guys might, you know,
you kind of know it but you maybe don't know it. But the ozone layer was a major breakthrough. Before that, you know, so much ultraviolet
light was coming from the sun, it would blow apart any life, right? The only sorts of things that could exist
before the ozone layer were these single cellular and very simple multicellular life. There was no complex multicellular life before
the ozone layer. Ozone layer forms and shortly after, you know,
complex multicellular life starts to proliferate in the seas. You know, 100 million years after that, the
first plants get onto land. You know, the sun was pretty harsh. There was literally nothing living on land
until this happened, right? And then everything else that you know about
biology, everything that you know nature to be, happened after that. So, basically, here's the ozone layer, and
here's all the stuff that you've ever heard of, right? So, it is all due to the work of these tiny
bacteria in the ocean chugging and chugging away for billions of years. And those bacteria actually never left us
because some time along the way, plants got smart and through a process called endosymbiosis,
they actually captured those bacteria for their own good. And all the green that you see in plants are
actually the direct ancestors of these bacteria from three billion years ago. They're called chloroplast now that they've
evolved inside of a plant in an endosymbiotic way. But really, you probably ate some of these
guys today. And, you know, from the beginning, not only
did they create our atmosphere, but up, you know, to now and into the foreseeable future,
they are the other half of our lungs. Every single time we breathe out, one of these
guys is going to take that in and breathe it back to us. And without that, you know, clearly, there
would be no way for us to take a single breath. And through this process, through this sort
of, you know, grit, if you will, of this organism, all of our breaths are connected. Now, one other thought about this, so, let's
say you were one of these organisms, and it was 2 billion years ago. And you get born into this world, and you
live for a couple weeks, and then you die. It would be really easy for you to assume. It would be really easy for you to think that
your life didn't really mean anything at all, right? You were born. You breathe, you know, swam around a bit. And then, you know, after two weeks, you died
and the earth seemed to basically be what it was before. But what you wouldn't have known is that every
single breath that you took contributed to the possibility of countless life after you. And I think this is a valuable meditation
because a lot of times in our own lives, we are kind of struggling with, do we have this
purpose. And I just wanna give you the thought that
maybe the purpose of your life is longer than your consciousness lasts, right? The purpose of your life exists on this time
frame that you will not be able to understand but is more fundamental, more deep because
of it. All right. Third story. This is the story of how our minds are connected. And I'm not gonna go into, like, a kind of
mystical woo woo territory about, like, you know, ESP and all that sort of thing. Other speakers can talk about that. It's totally fine. But instead I'm gonna talk about very concretely
how all of our thoughts and minds are connected. And I'm gonna do it through the story of this
instrument, piano. Now, anybody who's seen somebody who's really
great play the piano, you just know that this is a magical thing, right? Basically, people can create, you know, joy. They can express pain. They can express so much complexity and emotion. They can do it with force. They can do it with subtlety. This instrument is a powerful, powerful instrument. And the people that play piano, you know,
whether they're concert pianists or, you know, professional musicians, or musicians of any
stripe, if you were to kind of scan their brains and kind of see what's going on, you
would actually see a good chunk of their brains when they're doing this stuff is being dedicated
to, you know, how to play the piano. So, there are structures, you know, that are
related to the movement of the fingers across the keys. There are structures that are related to music
theory and how to relate that, what the piano is capable of doing, the motion of the pedal,
and so on and so forth. But one thing that you may not have thought
of, so of course, if you do the sort of thing, if you play the piano, you have these structures
in your brain, and all the people that play the piano have these kind of parallel structures
in the brain that allow them to play the piano, of course. But a thing that you may not have thought
about, about this process is that before the year 1700, this was a set of patterns of the
brain that was just not possible. Because in the year 1700, the piano was invented. All right. Literally, this type of beauty was not possible
until that year 1700. And it took a bunch of centuries after that
for people to develop all the different styles of piano-playing for us to achieve the level
of beauty that we have arrived at with the piano. Now, what does this mean for us? Well, number one, it means that there's a
set of people that invented it and their patterns of thoughts propagated forward and opened
up the bound for many other people to go play around with this instrument. And that propagated forward for many other
people to develop interesting styles, and be able to teach other folks that then studied
piano, and really, this piece of work allowed us to open up entirely new vistas of human
experience and possibility. And those thoughts were directly connected
in a chain of possibility. Now, in the larger scope, I called this phenomenon
the palette of being because what happens is every single one of us is born into a world
where particular things are possible, right? So, you might be born into a world where it's
possible to become a pianist or a musician. It's possible to become a computer scientist. It's possible to become a dancer. It's possible to become all these things. There's colors in the palette that you can
go dabble in and paint from in order to create the masterpiece that is your life. Now, the thing beyond that, which I think
is way more profound is that the colors don't stay stable. The way that you live your life, you can add
colors, right? The people that got together and took their
mechanical engineering prowess and invented the piano, they added a color. It meant that every bit of civilization afterwards,
now has a new color to work with. Outside of people that have invented things,
just sometimes your way of being adds a new color, right? Kind of an aside, it's like I remember when
Lady Gaga was coming up, I was like, "That's so Madonna, what she's doing," right? And it's because, like, Madonna came in here
and she, like, just was a particular way. And then a generation later, like, somebody
could look at that and it's like, "I like that." And she's not, you know, an exact copy of,
nobody will ever be. But she decided to use some of those colors
that did not exist before in order to go paint with and do something phenomenal. And this is actually the opportunity of all
of our lives to be able to not only deeply embrace and play with all the colors from
the palette of being, but through what we create in this life, through our relationships,
and through what, you know, just our basic way of being, to add colors to this so that
future generations are able to invent, live, be in a different way with each other. So, closing on the arc of this first bit,
I've covered three different arcs of how the heart, the breath, and the mind are connected. And a thing that I often get when I talk about
the universe at large is actually people feel really small. They feel like, "Man, all this stuff is happening
and the universe is so huge and I'm nothing." But not only is that kind of depressing. It's also factually not true, right? Because what happens in your life? In your life, the way that you live is going
to affect your friends and family. The many friends and families that interact
with each other are going to affect the way that society moves forward. The way that society moves forward is directly
going to affect our relationship to the environment. And the way that the environment evolves can
directly affect the physical biosphere, the physical substrate on which biology lives
upon. And if a little organism like a cyanobacteria,
through a couple billion years of patience could completely change this world from smoking
lifeless, to green and beautiful, and incredible, you know, do not underestimate what you as
human beings can do with that same sort of patience and that same sort of dedication. That was part one. You can probably clap. All right. So, I kind of covered the whole history of
the universe and life. So, we're going to...we're gonna kind of zoom
in. We're gonna zoom in to just people because
Mia asked me to try to make this practical for people. This is by request. So, like, let's talk about us for a second. So, number one, what are we, right? If we're gonna talk about us, like, our lives,
what exactly are we? Well, we're made of about 7 billion, billion,
billion of these. So, that is an image of an atom, specifically
a hydrogen atom, and it's probably appropriate because about two-thirds of the atoms in our
body are hydrogen atoms. Now, a thing, so, you know, in a way, there's
nothing to be surprised at. Like, this is literally us all the time. So, this is maybe the least remarkable thing. But a thing that you can, that might be remarkable
about this is if we were to look into the atom and try to understand it, the things
that make it up, the protons, electrons, you know, I wrote underneath how long they exist
for. A proton exists for 10 to the 32 years. Electron exists for 6.6 times 10 to the 28
years. I know that doesn't mean that much for people
that aren't that scientific, but just for reference, the universe has existed for this
much time. So, that means an electron, you know, the
amount of time that an electron lasts is gonna be a billion, billion times longer than the
universe has existed, right? This means all the stuff that you are made
of right now is effectively immortal. It's immortal at like a level of comprehension
that you cannot even begin to start, you know, wrapping your head around because it's gonna...it
has a level of stability which is actually much, much longer than the length of the universe
so far. So, that was part one. We are basically a vessel for just this immortal
stuff. Part two is what exactly do we do with this
immortal stuff? Well, effectively, we are a continuous flame
of interbecoming. And I did this calculations. They were pretty fun to do. But basically, I guess I have a different
sense of fun than everybody. It's cool. But in a given day, you basically bring in
a little more than a kilogram of solid material, 2.5 kilograms of water between what you drink
and the water in your food. And you actually also interchange almost a
kilogram of air. And what it actually means is that 7% of your
body exchanges out in a single day. That means yesterday, 7% of you that was you
yesterday is not here anymore. And, like, the stuff that you are right now,
tomorrow, 7% of that is gonna be gone. And you may not know, you may not have a sense
of what 7% of the body is, but basically, that's roughly the mass of your arm, right? So, every single day, one of those is leaving
and one of those is coming in, right? And it means that over the course of two weeks,
you actually exchange out the entire, an equivalent of the entire body mass of your body. So, these are the atoms that are coming and
going. And the astute scientists in the room will
say, "Well, that's not all the atoms, of course. It's gonna be highly leaning toward water,
and it's gonna lean toward carbon..." Yes, it is true. But even the stuff that is seemingly more
permanent, like the calcium in your bones, and all that sort of thing, 98% of all of
that cycles out within a year, right? So, you think that you are you, but really,
from two weeks ago, you kind of aren't. And definitely from a year ago, you're definitely
not. And we're constantly in the state of interbecoming,
and what are we interbecoming with? We're interbecoming with this. So, this is the whole earth. And these are just the winds, right, at two
different altitudes above sea level. And you can see, like, the brighter areas
are moving at 150 kilometers per hour. What this actually means is that the breaths
that you're taking right now, part of that was literally on the other side of the planet
four or five days ago. It also means that the stuff that you're exhaling
right now, you know, four or five days from now could be becoming a flower in Germany
or the Sudan. And this is not, like, theoretical. This is literally, exactly what's happening. Part of you today was these plants a couple
of days ago. Part of you tomorrow is going to be them,
you know, both locally, just around you in the next couple of minutes. And within the next couple days, literally
everywhere on the planet, right? And this is how much we are interconnected
with our planet. This is how much we are constantly becoming
our planet. And our sense of separation from the planet,
like, we need to protect nature, or humanity needs to have its priorities. We are that, right? So, to the extent that humanity is a priority,
then that also must become a priority. Now, this is all stuff that is true, and I
know that once I did those slides, it's like, "Ah, I really like these slides." But then, I was like, "Oh, I did not answer
Mia's question at all." What the hell is it with the quest, right? I did enjoy the calculations, but what was
the quest? But this is all the stuff that we are. Well, now, what are we supposed to do? And I bet actually after that description,
some of it kind of feels a little ungrounded because in some ways, we're immortal, right? We're literally made of immortal stuff from
moment to moment. And other ways, we're so ephemeral we can't
even conceive of it. We are the earth and the earth is us, like,
in a very short amount of time constantly, every single second. But it actually turns out that there is something
that remains. It isn't all just like a bundle of flux. And just to give you a sense of it, here's
a simple chart. So, basically, as life propagates forward
and does its thing, it gets to operate with things like cells at the level of an organism,
at the level of ecosystem. And the wisdom of all the things that life
does accumulates in a couple places. It accumulates in DNA. It accumulates in epigenetics in order to,
you know, lead to different types of epigenetic expression. It accumulates in behavior that's passed down
from one, you know, a parent organism to a child organism. So, basically, all the stuff that we're doing,
even though it's constantly influx, actually something is accumulating. Basically, life will work with these things
and accumulate as these things. And just as I talked about the palette being,
the same is true with the mind, right? The way that we think our world views, the
way that we organize our societies actually accumulate into something, right? And actually, all these are in quotes right
now because we don't really have very good language for this yet. You know, as a discipline, this is pretty
new territory for the human race. So, sometimes we call it collective consciousness. Sometimes we call it society source code. I've heard it referred to, you know, as like
psychological or psychic DNA in order to be parallel to physical DNA. But the people, the reason I wanted to give
this talk really is that the people in this room are literally a part of creating this
new territory, right? You guys are both the students of all these
technologies of the mind, and all these technologies of being. And you are also the creators and teachers,
many of you, of the same. And I kind of sat back and I tried to look
at all these teachings and as with all things, I tried to make some sense of it, and this
is the best sense of it that I could make so far. Because this is a new territory, and, you
know, effectively what we're doing as a tribe, as a group of people is we're consciously
building a new toolkit for the psyche. Now, as I looked at all these teachings, there's
both just beautiful teachings all over the place, but sometimes you'll hear these teachings
and they sound contradictory, or sometimes you'll hear a teaching and literally the teacher
will say a thing that invalidates or obviates another teaching. And I was like, "Well, is this really true?" So, I stepped back and I made a map of the
entire space. Really, there's four different places where
the teachings land. One is in the realm of serviceful discomfort,
right? So, basically, you know, you're sitting on
the couch and there's like teachers that will come in and be like, "Come on. Get off the couch." And you're like, "Oh, okay." And then, like, as soon as you get off the
couch you're like, "And here's how you're gonna get things done. Here's your calendars." And, like, all these productivity people,
right? It's a little bit uncomfortable. "Here's how you do your marketing funnel." Okay, great, great. It's a little uncomfortable, but, like, when
you do it, it's of service. This is serviceful discomfort. Then there is disserviceful discomfort. What this is is, these are the people that
work with the ways that we are disserviceful to ourselves and society, and are super uncomfortable
about it. So, when people carry a huge amount of personal
shame, then that's an example where it's really disserviceful to you. It's really disserviceful to society, and
it's incredibly uncomfortable, right? And you have folks like Brené Brown and other
folks that are really just diving into that and saying, "Let's go work with shame. Let's really bring it onto the light. Let's try to, you know, create healing there." There's another category which is disserviceful
comfort. And these are the realm of addictions, right,
because it's not serviceful to yourself or the world at all, but it feels really comfortable. Like, wouldn't it be much better to just be
high, or wouldn't it be much better to just sit on the couch and just watch, you know,
like binge on 10 shows in a row? And wouldn't it be more comfortable to be
a workaholic instead of ever seeing what you're doing, right? Our addictions feel comfortable to us, and
there's amazing teachers and people that are building, you know, a new consciousness toolkit
around helping people who are in that zone. And then the last zone is serviceful comfort. These are the things that we can do that both,
you know, are useful for the world and make us feel good. So, things like meditation, or restorative
yoga, or dance. Like, these sorts of things just feel amazing,
and they are also serviceful to the world. So, I created this because I know all of you
have both learned from these sorts of people, and many of you are these types of people. And I think them not like this helps us to
be more disciplined about the way that we're collectively creating a toolkit with each
other. Like, we don't need to be fighting over these
lines. Like, really, every single tool that we can
make for people in any of these places is something that as the totality of how we are
going to evolve consciousness together. I'm gonna go leave you with one thought which
is beyond what we add to the toolkit, every one of us leaves a trajectory on this, right? We might start in, you know, a sense of shame,
then we work, and then we find a little bit of serviceful comfort, but it wasn't, you
know, we really hadn't released the shame. Then we're back in addiction and so on. And eventually, we escape that through a couple
of cycles of that. Or maybe, you know, we're there and we bounce
between, you know, shame and addiction for our entire lives. And when we teach these things, and, like,
when, you know, people are marketing these things, they're always like, "Oh, well, you're
gonna live your best life and all that sort of thing." And I think actually there's a lot to that. It's a beautiful intention, and for many people,
it really does do that for them. So very exciting work in that regard. But I'm gonna leave you with a thought which
is, even if, even if the person that at hand would never become conscious, if their life
really was just this trajectory between shame and addiction, shame and addiction, and they
eventually overdosed, or left this life, or committed suicide, that even that is something
that expands our consciousness in a way that serves, right? Because the friends of that person will go
recognize what these patterns do to a human being. They feel that pain. And they carry that forward in service to
all the other people that they interact with, right? And a lot of the teachings that we're trying
to do are really effectively compassionate teachings because what it's saying is, you
know, sometimes, even if you are like the Dalai Lama, and you're pretty darn chill,
and you've done a lot of work on yourself, right, like, you're still gonna have a lot
of discomfort in your life. You're still gonna have a really tough life. But really, what we get to teach is, can we
be conscious and present in that process? Not so much like, can you nail it and make
a billion dollars and, you know, be on the cover of what have you, right? Like, those things are temporary and illustrate. Like, these sorts of things that we do which
is the deep work of being inside ourselves, living our lives with full presence, you know,
are the things that are contributive to collective consciousness and the expansion of consciousness
in the universe. And even the ones that do not get a chance
to live that consciously also do so as well. They are worthy and we see them. And in the process of seeing them, our consciousness
continues to expand. Thank you.
