The Art of Life

[Music] [Music] i was kind of a semi-normal or nearly normal young boy [Music] i was 14 and sick at home one day and turned out i'd read every book in the house but one which was my algebra one textbook and when i went back to school i said to my high school math teacher mrs hunsicker i said there must be something wrong here i read that whole book in four hours it doesn't say anything and she said you know it's funny most people never notice that so that's how i learned that i had this uh ability in mathematics and there was this whole other world that i kind of got sucked into that was beautiful i had six years in graduate school with all a's on the doctoral exam i got 100 points more than anybody else and then one day i graduated i was supposed to go off to mit because mit was the number three place in the united states and i got there and it was it was cold and there was no beach and so i said no i want to go to berkeley just kind of by coincidence that the unabomber had been there and he had a two-year appointment and he had just dropped out so there was an opening so [Music] so i went to berkeley [Music] i spent two years there and but i decided i needed some time off i've been in the university since i was 16 now i was 29 and i met a young lady from hawaii and so we came and we lived together for a year on the beaches riding our bicycles around and and then she fell in love with a saxophone player which it's one of those things that happens about 50 years ago a man named abraham robinson invented a logically consistent system of infinitesimals for a while he felt that my work was the most beautiful work that had been done with his method and so i had my 15 minutes of fame i was he talked about me in all of his lectures and in the jungle and wherever i was i'd written four papers which i sent off to abraham robinson so after i was here for three years i decided it was time to go back and i got a letter back from his secretary saying he died of cancer so i got stranded because it was only this one man that thought i had done incredible stuff nobody else would have understood any of it or cared about it [Music] someone said that someone out here had a piece of land in the jungle they wanted to sell he brought me out here up this trail and it was just like tarzan i mean i had no no way to relate to it all except for tarzan and so we shook hands there in the jungle and so i came out and just started hacking at the jungle and just kind of wrapped up in a piece of plastic at night and then and then i'd walk up to the road and hitch into town and i didn't have any money at the time so i would just wait until something happened and i wound up having a box of food again and i'd come back out and do it all over again [Music] i had one once this size like this and i cut it with a chainsaw like this and it came back and i threw myself back and it came like that and it hit another branch right there just before it hit my head it was just taking my head off everybody clears they use a big machine and you just push it but if you did that you'd destroy those thousand fifteen year old hawaiian lowie the the walls the only way to not do that is to do it by hand but that's insane i mean there might have maybe 10 years of work to clear that i mean no sane person would do that so no hawaiian was going to do that so i wound up with the land [Music] when i first came here like 40 years ago twice i was talking to an old hawaiian and they would start telling me about partying when they were young before until the holly thing took over and all of a sudden you could hear it in the way they were talking what true freedom was it was like a whole reality it was like wow i i don't have a clue what that was we're enslaved inside of our heads without knowing it without being able to see it we're we're crippled they call us howly's and holly means without breath or without soul and part of it is you know like hi and we're in our brain someplace all right but hawaiians like that they grab you and give you a big bear hug right i mean you know they're so real it's so wonderful [Music] so this was my escape [Music] out here you can just be whatever you are sometimes i say i spent 13 years in the university learning how to think now i have to spend the rest of my life learning how to not think you know you'd like to think that you paid your dues not by owning something or anything else but just by because you you've given your love and your energy [Music] you know people ask you know you you studied mathematics in the university for 13 years what do you use it for and i it just makes me cringe i say it's like do you ask bach if he like what can design door chimes it was beautiful it was a beautiful experience it is a beautiful experience mathematics this is this whole world of the pattern the beauty is behind all of that and it's only by intimacy with it means you know you study it you learn it you understand you're being with it it's the same thing with beauty you can't see beauty unless you're intimate with it maybe i need all this incredible beauty and stuff around me to have a feeling of wealth i don't know [Music] this was a chance to do something that was just basically pure the art of life [Music] everything about here is is bizarrely impractical there were wild pigs running through all here that at one point about two months ago about 20 of them surrounded my house all night long and you could hear this [Music] all night long from sunset to sunrise it was like one of those horror movies and i went out with this machete i went out and i saw this big boar and i looked at him and he looked at me and i went back in the house they would have just ripped me to shreds this is fairly recent growth but we're sort of heading off more into uh the edge of where i actually cleared and so things get thicker you can see when you get into this stuff it's harder to figure out how in the world actually even get through it personally i think it was kind of an insane thing to do the old house the one that fell down originally at one point i built it all out of bamboo you can tell by the texture like if it's a young one and you cut it it'll just rot if you need a really old one and then you we'd run it through a fire to try to push the sap out and then i painted it with three coats of spar varnish and i built a whole house out of it and then i got moldy it didn't work the basic thing is we have hands we've had hands for millions of years and what are hands for you if you have hands you grab things you hold them and you manipulate them and so our whole conceptual being is in terms of that we our concepts that we have our meaning that we have we hold it we grasp it and we manipulate that we do that with everything and that's the way our science is and that's the way everything is and and the point is that's leading us to the edge of a cliff logic and this grasping has served this huge function basically creating cement in people's heads you know in this case it's becoming lethal because we're destroying the planet you know there's too much cement that's not allowing us to think in a new way what the whole culture needs right now is how to find wealth without needing to exploit everything and it's the whole thing where science can become more holistic [Music] there was a schism of math about 200 years ago before that math all had to do with how the world worked and then there became this incredibly abstract math and it split in 1850 when lobozzewski made this hyperbolic geometry [Music] you know the simple thing is that humans somehow got to the point of knowing what numbers are people have expanded their concept of a number to include negative numbers and we've expanded them to fractions but it turns out that you can expand your concept of numbers beyond that to to include direction vectors like arrows and if you do that a huge amount of the the explanation of the the universe and math just is comes from that being able to expand your consciousness of number to include direction [Music] in our everyday life what's obvious is what worked evolutionarily but what's really obvious once you get outside of that and experiment it might not correspond to that at all when you study things holistically you know these things now with massive data you can learn things that you don't understand how they actually work we may for instance create conscious beings but we won't understand how they work outside of the human mind there's this immense universe and it's got nothing to do with human emotions there's no push me pull me the world out there outside of human minds is basically in some sense pure mathematics [Music] i'm not very musical i can't sing i can't even sing a note i'm just not musical but somehow this music is incredibly beautiful [Music] there's two strains of spirituality one of them is just loving what's beautiful and positive but the other one is in transcending that and seeing everything is beautiful and positive my dad used to say to me well what if everybody lived like you i just couldn't live that life [Music] do you feel lonely yes sometimes you would feel lonely i mean i think that that having a partner in life uh is an utterly ideal beautiful thing to be somebody that's your lifelong friend that you're intimate with but maybe that's not my karma i've been in a minute and fell fallen in love several times [Music] my father's father left him when he was 11 years old so when i was young he used to say who do you think you are a star border it's his house everything is his and it was so you know i just left when i was 16 i just left one day when i was at little beach it was this absolutely gorgeous day though it's been flat over there for a week or so in kona winds and it was just crystal clear and flat and i'd swim naked almost all the way around to the next beach and i swam into a mass of uh portuguese manowar portuguese manowar are not these big things but they're these little things that float on the surface and they have all these long tendrils that go down they're like strings and they stick on you and they they shoot little harpoons into you and the harpoons have a protein that attaches to your pain receptors and fires your pain receptors off at maximum and the reason they do that is if a fish swims into those tentacles with just one swish of its tail it would just rip them all apart but it's so paralyzed by the pain that it can't can't react and it's just paralyzed there so i swam into a huge mass of these that had been blown by the winds the southern winds and and i took i was naked so i took three handfuls off my genitals and i looked into the water and there's a there's a ball about this big of mass of these things i ripped off of me and they were all over my body fortunately i was right next to the shore and i crawled into this little spot this is a really isolated spot where there's nothing around i crawl into this little spot and looking out on this crystal clear beautiful day there's no human thing i can see it's just the island like it might have been for a few million years if you got into a fear state or anger state or anything like that you'd be dead in like 20 seconds you would just rip things apart so it was like one second if you got through that second thing you get to the next one but i was in the sun and the sun was unbearable there was a little bit of shade and i'd throw myself into there and then after about three or four seconds i get claustrophobic and i have to throw myself out back in the sun so i spent an hour throwing myself in and out of this piece of shade and just screaming and after about an hour the pain went down just a little bit enough so that i could crawl out on a rock i realized that what saved my life was that the background feeling wasn't anger or fear it was this peculiar buddhist thing that i felt like all the people [Music] all the people in the world that had ever been tortured uh it feels like there's so many people and beings right now that are in such incredible suffering and it just feels like for a moment i opened the door to their presence uh you never really had your father's love you never they weren't capable of but for a very long time was incapable of loving you because they were both so armored and they could never break through that there's a that's a lot of pain in that and maybe without that pain it's difficult to feel other people's pain [Music] [Music] i spent probably 12 years hanging out with the llama so i studied tibetan i learned at least the the religious script so that i knew what i was saying colin winpoche was his teacher and he had him stay in paiilla every time he'd see me he'd pat my pocket he says you got money you got money because he knew i had that block against the money he was here those are pictures of him when he visited spent the night here and he said you just stay here he says you there's billions of beings here you just take care of all of these beings and then one day you'll find the the wish fulfilling stone that's what the money stone what chenrezig has in his hands and then all riches will come to you but what the money stone symbolizes is great equanimity everything that comes to you is incredible richness no matter what it is but it also you know you're not there yet so it's a path and so that path it also symbolizes the guru that all true teaching comes from moving towards great equanimity this is my llama when he died he had a a blockage tumor [Music] about a week before he died and he we were at the dharma center in paiilla and he he looks at me he says when i die he says i'm going far far away he says when michael dies they've got to come to his land and have a big party for him and then somebody's going to say shh michael doesn't like noise teasing me that i was attached to my left that she wasn't so that was one of his final lessons [Music] in buddhism there's two things emptiness and compassion compassion is a choice you you choose to be loving you choose that but emptiness is something different emptiness is basically seeing the world the way that it really is it's not being subject to delusion or at least knowing when you're subject to illusion dilemma said that a fool that knows he's a fool is only half a fool [Music] the fundamentals of quantum mechanics the absolute basis of it is what it's likely when things are indistinguishable you know a photon electron not having inherent existence radically changes the way it behaves if something can happen in two different ways if they're not distinguishable you get interference and all these bizarre things that happen in quantum mechanics are when things are indistinguishable you know in buddhism it's the same thing you know oh we're all enlightened we're all you know we're perfect the way they are the other hand in reality the way we act we act like we're not and in essence it's the same thing it's because we're totally entangled with our environment [Music] the reason that our everyday world is classical is that basically everything is becomes distinguishable because of the light everything is being entangled with its environment constantly you know so it appears to have inherent existence it acts as if it has a narrow existence everything that's a deep conception of realities in terms of two things that are the opposites that are mutually contradictory you know the wave and particles you know here's yours you're an enlightened person and here you're this entangled trapped in samara you know they're two opposite views they contradict each other but you need both of them to describe reality that's the copenhagen connection and the fact that you want to grab one or the other and say they contradict each other that's you know that's not being alive because that's not the way the world really is that's what the copenhagen that's what the discovery of quantum mechanics says is that the deep reality can't be described that way [Music] about 600 bc buddha said let's try to understand the world by seeing the simplest possible thing we can do which is to do nothing so that's meditation we do nothing and we look at the same time in greece they said what's the simplest thing we can think about and this if if things are logically consistent some within as long as we stay within logical consistency we can actually come with a conclusion we won't just talk at each other for a lifetime and so these traditions starting with pythagoras and through euclid have led to western science and buddhism has continued in that way so what's the the core belief system the core concept in buddhism is called sunyata or emptiness which has different definitions but two of them are that things don't exist in the way they seem to exist they exist they seem to be one thing but actually there's something else so that's this vast philosophical system they they they also call that seeing reality as it actually is so you go out in the evening and you watch the sunset you don't go out in the evening and watch the earth rotate even though we've known this for 500 years we still don't see it so that's an example of something that's existing is something different than it seems to it seems to be the sun moving but actually it's the earth rotating right so even deeper thing that science has which was totally incomprehensible to people but since the movie the matrix now people understand is that this world out here isn't the external world it's not it's a representation in our mind there's nothing out there that corresponds to what you see there are no colors outside of the human mind or outside some mind what is this model this model is that there's this three-dimensional space and there are objects in the space and at any particular moment an object that is a particular space and in another moment like three seconds later maybe it's in another space and there's two other that has two properties one is that if this was here and it moves here it has to move through a continuous path a smooth path to get there and the other one is that two objects can't be in the same place at the same time so that's the model that we're immersed in we see as external reality even though it's part of our mind but the thing is is that was built up by evolution it was built up so that our ancestors could survive and reproduce and for no other reason at all it's inherently what we're actually seeing out there is the wisdom of our ancestors much more than any kind of external world right but the thing is is all of our ancestors were basically about this size i mean you know 50 million years ago they might have been real tiny but you know none of them were ever the size of an atom or a subatomic particle so this model that we've built up by evolution because it worked for the last few hundred million years there's no reason whatsoever no operatory reason why it should work at the size of an atom and of course it wouldn't make any difference if the smallest thing you could see was about a tenth of a millimeter but now that we can actually manipulate things at the level of an atom we find out that it simply doesn't work may what lies between clear light be self-aware buddhist of the three times through your compassion may the mind of all beings like me be freed i'd worked and worked and worked and worked here in my back got really messed up and i i really needed some therapy and so i started swimming long distances swimming a few miles along the coast then i discovered the dolphins i was sleeping on the beach i'd get up a couple hours before sunrise and do yoga and then it was a two mile hike if i went along the road to where the dolphins were or was about a four mile hike if i went around the edge of the lava flow and then you'd be coming around and there'd be the bay and you could see if the dolphins were in there and it was like an amazing thing i mean basically to be able to live in this beach and go swimming with the dolphins every day in america so these guys are swimming and i'm watching them on the bottom and i see for sure there's one bigger than all the other ones and then i realized that if he moves his head everybody moves he moves his head that way everybody moves he speeds up everybody speeds up and i'm swimming with this and i'm watching that so i just without thinking about automatically just get into responding to what he's doing and so i accidentally put myself totally in his control and so for half an hour an hour he just had control of me and then all of a sudden they're on the bottom he comes up off the bottom and accelerates coming straight at me and he leads the whole pod and a few minutes later they're below me and he's lined them all up shoulder to shoulder in a line with me right in the center so i figured that was sort of my initiation into the pod that i was you just do what the head man says and you're okay you know that was the rules in their motions it's very very very mathematical very geometric they're always moving and they move in a way to include you and you realize how harsh it is to be around people you know some people with their body language include you but every place you are people are excluding you with their body language without not even consciously [Music] they're just incredibly polite my conceptualization was i look in our human minds and it looks like half of the emotions are adaptions to scarcity you know this is my land this is my food this is my car this is my money my woman but these guys don't have that they they're they're hunting on these schools of millions of fish she says their problem is the tiger shark and the adaption to the tiger shark for these guys because they're not big enough to defend themselves alone is being in that pod and since they can only sleep half their brain they're in that pod 24 7. if you're not a good social being you're going to get thrown out of the pod and you're going to die so they've had millions of years to their adoption for survival is politeness if you learn a few tricks then you're more fun to play with so they'd like to come and they'd swim around you in a circle and i had these hand paddles on so i'd curl on my side and i'd go like this like crazy so one could put his head right in front of me and then spin me like a top and then just to make it more interesting they get you spinning good and then all of a sudden they try to change the axis and make you spin at a different angle which was really really fun but the only problem was is that these guys can jump up in the air and do a dozen spins and come down you know that's what they're good at that's why they're called spinners but you know you spin around a few dozen times like this and you start to throw up so i had thrown up a couple of times and there was this one time where i i just got to the point where i was going through up and i'm not going to do it again nope and all of a sudden comes wham like this okay and then i'm like oh and he comes again okay and i let him get ahead of me and i i went over the tail so now what's happened is we're changing the game so now he changed the game and what he changed the game to was i was swimming overhand and hard he put his tail right in front of my head and started swishing back and forth through my through my hands and so he's got all his buddies the other juveniles and they're watching this and so they come in and they start body slamming him on the side to just throw his rhythm off right so all of a sudden i got a half dozen dolphins so that became the game i played with him i did that like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times that was the most fun thing i've ever done in my whole life that was just incredible it's just too much fun to be able to to stop that's just what happened you know it was i didn't support myself i was just there [Music] how much money would it take to be able to spend five years going every day swimming with the dolphins you know most people they can afford a week in hawaii and maybe they're lucky if they get a day certainly with the dolphins they'll be able to go for five years every day and some of the dolphins that's karma you can't no amount of money could afford that you just have to have your freedom [Music] there was one day i was in the bay and that day the dolphins were just with me were super friendly they started swimming out of the bay and it's like three and a half miles around to the next place we can get out of the water they start swimming out of the bay and so i stopped well and they're continuing and they turned around and came back to get me with it so i so i saw some of the ways i stopped again they came back to get me again and i didn't go i was already pretty tired and then they came a third time and then i stopped and then they didn't come back and it turned out that the people from all along the coast were saying that different pods kept coming together they went along the whole coast until there were you know a thousand a couple thousand dolphins and then they headed out there was some massive party something going on and they invited me and i could have gone with them and it was this exquisitely beautiful day of course you wouldn't have survived you know you you it was but still i always regretted that i didn't go it would have been so special [Music] i just i like to feel vital and alive and i like to feel [Music] an intimacy with the world and with people the buddhist principle is that we're surrounded by zillions of buddhas but they can't have any contact with you because you're not open to them but if you ever open up it's all there [Music] everything here was built for the moment for the experience for the uh not i mean i don't know what i'm doing i built this house i don't ever build a house before i don't know what i'm doing it was just seemed like a chippy thing to do at the time evolution is a process of iteration there's no plan there's no master plan it's in each moment of what happens my life is a process of iteration you know i don't i was never smart enough or felt adult enough to have a plan for my life so there's nothing to accomplish [Music] what's going to happen after me to this i presume it just goes back to the jungle because who in the world would do this kind of work [Music] i mean what an incredible thing that you could have this much beauty i mean if you want to buy a van gogh it's going to cost you 100 million dollars is it really prettier than this the mathematics that the universe is designed on is beautiful if you can see the beauty in every being [Music] then you can appreciate and love every being [Music] we humans are drowning in a sea of things complexity stress ideas complexity has been woven into the fabric of our soul just play just be jump in with love swim in bliss saying home and a prayer [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Science and Nonduality

Views: 568,170

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Id: 7gUh8j5ui0o

Length: 38min 5sec (2285 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2022