Lecture by Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

Channel: Brown University

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Length: 121min 33sec (7293 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2017