Truth Seeking, Science and Pandemic: Francis Lucille

[Music] welcome to the wisdom in times of crisis online event here we explore the wisdom of these particular challenging times my name is jean rick miller and i have the great pleasure to be in conversation with francis lucille today francis is a spiritual teacher in the tradition of advaithanta and francis you were a disciple of jean-claude a french advaita vedanta teacher from 1975 all the way to his passing in 1998 and francis you have a very strong background in science as well as a young person you were immersed in it for a few years and i'm curious what drew you there francis what drew you to science well i was a good student in high school so i i studied both liberal arts and science and then when i had a choice to make i decided for science because at the time i had reached the conclusion that philosophy was leading nowhere i was wrong but and then so i chose science and at some point i i had fulfilled all the obligation all the i i had to check all the all the the cases for happiness according to the happiness recipe book that i had inherited from my parents so i had a good diploma good job i was married i had children nice bourbon homes and two cars in the driveway and i was miserable my job was not interesting my we got divorced i was sick and at some point and i was at the time a scientist and an atheist and at some point in my misery i said god if you exist it's time to show up and god showed up a few months later in the form of a book by krishnamurti that i purchased in a bookstore in paris in the latin quarter and that triggered my seeking for the truth for liberation did that um was that the first the first time that you were um that you felt that drive or i mean something something took you to buy that book yeah yeah no no but that which i bought that book because at the time i felt uncomfortable in social situation i was a little shy a little self-conscious so i wanted to i was trying to get rid of this problem so i went to the to the area where they were selling books about psychology self-help this kind of books so that's that's what my primary intention but of course upon reading krishnamurti he led me to understand that the root cause of my problem was somewhere else that it was ultimately in the belief i had to be a limited and separate entity that already you got that from christian from reading the first book in krishnamurti you you were ahead of the game there yes yes and then this ultimately uh got you to to meet john klein yes at some point i wanted to so it led me to change to drastically change my life to change the direction of my career somehow my my interest for the truth was so strong that uh i didn't i it didn't cost me anything i had no regrets to let go of my ambition for a career i think that's something you can understand yourself because we have followed a little bit parallel roads and yes and but at some point i wanted to meet someone who would embodied this freedom and i was seeking for a teacher and as they say in india when the disciple is ready the teacher appears and he appeared to me in the form of this very stabilized very cultivated gentleman called jean-claude what is it that most unites the scientific mind and and the drive of the spiritual seeker what do they have in common truth the love for truth the love for and seeking reality and this kind of no mindset of the scientists are there any any parts of science any scientific phenomena any uh any particular scientific facts that make you come closer to the truth of a non-dual reality not at the time no but what what i understood at the time is that in fact the question i had and that and which was the reason why i became interested in science in mathematics and physics in fact in health sciences uh were in fact metaphysical in other words they were philosophical in a sense rather than scientific you know i think it's uh schrodinger one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics of modern physics who said i'm paraphrasing but he once said in one of his books there are two types of people there are those who marvel at accomplishment the fact that we discovered americas of fans that we went to the moon the fact that we we created machines that are able to fly or to communicate at distance et cetera and there are others who marvel at this simply because there is something rather than nothing and he adds those are the mystics the philosophers the poets and the physicists so it is it is so i realize i was not really to be an engineer but rather a physicist mathematician poet mystic yeah i imagine the career of an engineer especially i think you were for a while in the weapon system administration that must have been really difficult were i was developing and testing all kinds of air-to-surface and air-to-air missiles wow you've come a long way i would say and so have we all and so have all the are there other examples of great scientists that come to mind that were also mystics definitely definitely schrodinger knew advice he had read the books but others such as fermi dirac oppenheim einstein also had had mystic fiber and when you and when you look back uh at physics at mathematics in general what can you see there that has the flavor of of reality of something bigger than our little minds you know for instance as i think what at least physicists they have this they i guess they see their their science as the discovery of the laws of nature and the fact that they have this notion of nature as a whole and as a whole the wholeness of which is and enforced by laws the laws of physics right so they have they have this deep intuition of the oneness of reality right yes they do and there's something special in mathematics too i think there is something the same notion of of you know this this deep intuition we have that let's take for example the number pi right and that if there was somewhere in the confine of the universe a different intelligent species that would be utterly different from the human race but which would have reached a level of sophistication of development in their civilization that would be even greater than others and if they would have developed mathematics and they would have come across the number pi you know the pi would be exactly the same it would be defined it would be exactly the same value right three point one four five nine et cetera it will be defined in the same ways either as the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of the circle or as the the sum of a series you know one of uh n and square or something like that you know so they will have the the same the same definition so now these two civilizations have never communicated how is it possible that pi would be the same for them unless pi had some form of existence now pi is not a material thing the question then where where does pie exist in which realm you know so plato would say yes that's my realm the ream of platonic ideas right yes absolutely that's that was always what as as when i was younger if that those ideas fascinated me you know what what would we find when we meet when we meet a different civilization and what would we have in common and i and i had the same reflection as you do it it seems inc inconceivable that they wouldn't have discovered pi but but yourself you know as a mathematician when you discover on when in in the course of your studies you know when you discover a new property you don't think that it is something that we human beings have created let's say you discover the law of refraction of the prime numbers right and and and it is not something that we human being have created some things that we just discovered sorry so where did that ex where does that exist you know it's yes and it's something that's difficult for non-scientists to realize to understand that these these concepts these are more than cons are more than human concept they exist independently exactly creation of the human mind that there is a level of reality to it which is independent from the human mind yes there is a level and i think musicians also artists they have similar understanding you know that in the realm of beauty just in mathematics is in the realm of of truth about mathematical ideas but in the realm of duty in the realm of they have this understanding that what they what they the composer what he puts it on his piece of paper it's something he receives from a different place you see i'm talking about a true composer i'm not talking talking here about disco music of course yes every every create creator feels like he receives he or she receives from a different realm and that brings the question because in in some part of the spiritual teachings we say that reality is uh absolutely unreachable for the mind right but here we see pieces that are that do belong to the realm of the mind and seem to connect to something that is real well you see the mind is not the mind doesn't have access to this realm but this realm has access to the mind and by accessing the mind this ram transforms the mind in other words through the process of understanding the mind gets transformed but the mind doesn't understand the mind as a as a biocomputer you know in artificial intelligence they have this chinese room thought experiment in which let's say let's say let's take an example you have a you have a chinese guy who doesn't speak neither english nor french he's in a room in this room he has all french english dictionaries at his disposal a lot of bilingual books and he is given a set of instructions to apply which are similar to the set of commands in a program translate in a translation computer program so now he's in this room he's given a text to translate in french he doesn't speak french nor english he's give he's chinese he he starts translating following one by one the the lines the commands of the program and the text is relatively simple and he comes up so from the french into an english text just as a computer program we've done and if an english reader would say a bilingual reader would say yes this translation is good and this translation conveyed perfectly the meaning from french to english however the chinese guy who did the translation had no access to the meaning right since he didn't understand so that brings the question of meaning you think because a computer has no access to the meaning right artificial intelligence somehow doesn't have access to the meaning true and where does the meaning live you know the meaning is not in the text itself either yes so so in this example if you will what what this ge duncan experiment uh really illustrates is that a computer and a human brain that is envisioned as in a materialistic version perspective as a biocomputer doesn't have access to meaning you see a mechanical thing such as a physical computer if we say the human because you see the the common religion in academia right now is that there is no difference between mind and brain that there is a one on one correspondence between mind and brain now brain is a biocomputer brain is matter right made of quarks and gluons right right for me right quarks and gluons that's brain so brain therefore be with the example of the of the chinese rooms that i just mentioned brain has no access to meaning therefore his mind is brain mind has no access to being and i i agree with that so i agree mind his brain but in this case we as consciousness have access to meaning therefore we are we as consciousness are more than mind or brain interesting yeah yeah so all the the mind can really do is get inspired from that realm which is which is bigger than than itself see its own limitation because if you really look hard you can you can the mind can show itself its own limitation and and open to receive reality yeah but what is beautiful is that this experience of understanding is one that we all share right we with some it's not something foreign to us but all we need is to be open to the possibility that that part of us which is open to meaning in other words a part of it of us that understands that part of us that perceives is not physical mechanical uh dependent upon the and subjected to the limitations of the body mind so that opens a possibility that this part of us awareness that perceives instead of being confined contingent is in fact universal it does although some you know some people would argue that it's a meta property of the of matter when it gets complex enough yeah but they don't answer the question of the of the chinese rule they would probably argue that uh as um if you replace the chinese with a with a native speaker we he just have access to a lot more rules yeah but the huge difference is that the chinese will acknowledge that he didn't understand the message yes therefore he that he didn't have access to meaning [Music] that is true yeah i think it's a it's a it's a very good persuasive argument that you have there i would like now i would like to switch the subject a little bit and bring our conversation to the current state of affairs in the world because i think that's what uh of the one of the things that our listeners are eager to hear about and we we are living extraordinary times with the world virtually brought to a halt by a microscopic piece of dna that has um stopped us in our tracks and for a lot of people this is the this is the time where they're going to encounter either death around them or just simply their fear of death the death is going to come to the forefront and both from the scientific and from a spiritual viewpoint what would you say to them well since the moment we were born we began to die right so we are all dying is is as as as you as physical bodies so it's not big news too at least to me it's not big deals right it's it's that already we just conveniently ignored it and that's most of mankind they don't want to talk and to deal with these questions and [Music] i i think the the spiritual interest uh uh arises when we begin to be interested in those questions because i have news there is a solution to it you know that's i discover that in other words we don't need to be miserable because there is an end to this body that's not a good reason to be miserable but we have to discover why we have to be interested and then life can become a celebration and life can be lived to its fullest not be wasted so that's now regarding about this particular case of the of this pandemics i hope it will teach us to get closer to each other our oneness our our uh as human beings because we are so divided by religions by race by by political ideas by you know people try to divide us the society in which we live is becoming more and more divided uh and more and more kind we see the other as the adversary as the enemy and and so facing a common danger mortal danger i hope this will uh revitalize you know instincts of our oneness as as human beings that that which unites us is far more important than the petty political religious uh belief system that seemed to divide us you know our ideologies are are so divisive in the sage is independent from any ideologies very true and i see a lot of ideology creeping up even during this time there's so much divisiveness still if you look at the at the social media you see all these you see on the one side people who want to stay home on the other side people who want to reopen and they fight with each other and they call each other's name names yeah and then you go the conspiracy theories on top of this and i'm curious like what what is it that that give rise to that to all these far-fetched nonsensical theories and and and that and that made people so attached to them and ready to to fight to defend them yeah well in fact there is a there is a just balance to be found between these two these two conflicting uh uh uh necessities you know on the one hand uh to you don't want too many people to die on the on the other hand you don't want the economy to go completely down the train because more people will die because of that so there is a kind of balance to be found and intelligent people and well-meaning people could unite instead of tear each other apart and and try to to use their reason their intelligence the means at their disposal to find where the this point that is optimum uh could could be found and to readjust it over time as as the context evolves to permanently adjust it so uh for for scientific-minded people like you and i is it's just this is just a practical problem right yes and that's what the good government is here for and normally yeah because yes what the the meaning of politics is this and it comes from from this greek word police which means the city it's a city management that's what it means city management so this this road is uh is uh in in a push shape and this original is in even poor shape so which one do we fix first with our limited budget well let's start with the bridge because it's more of a problem if the bridge collapses you know this type of decision it has nothing politics you know it's just practical matters yeah and it becomes it and it becomes so heated and so passionate and what about all these nonsensical conspiracy theories francis what about the 5g people and the micros and the bill gates people and and antifauci people and you know this is what the what basic psychological need do these represent in the human psyche what do you think well you know you know i'm going to lose a loot a lot of followers but you know if you believe that snake oil crystals is going to cure you from cancer you know i have a i have a queen in africa who needs 100 000 dollars and will give me 2 million dollars in exchange if i lend her 000 that's your version of the broken brooklyn bridge francis well okay well another another um you know class of people who are in need of help right now is people who are stuck at home with nothing to do with no work and um in some way no hope uh as to their economic situation or getting just getting out of this impasse of this data that they see themselves in in other words there are a lot of people who might get depressed with uh with the uh confinement why would you you know what would you say to people who are on the verge of depression well in our in our societies we have a lot of safety nets there are other parts in the world of the world where the situation can be much more dramatic so what they have to ascertain is whether their situation is really that bad practically or whether it's mostly psychologically you see and you will discover that in most cases it's only psychological you know i was born in france during the war you're older than you and the situation was very difficult we didn't have much to eat we didn't have a telephone we didn't have heated houses you know we were freezing at night uh we didn't have a car we didn't have a telephone we didn't have tv we didn't [Music] and many people at the time even didn't have a running water or electricity so the situation we didn't have uh antibiotics we didn't have etc i could so we were basically in a much more dire situation than uh these people you mentioned who are confined in their home now are in they still have internet they still have their computers they still watch netflix they still talk to their relatives on uh on skype or whatever so to this i say the problem is mostly in your logic it's psychological so how do would you address you know the psychological problem maybe from a spiritual viewpoint yeah the what we the the the understanding we need is that psychological problems are going to be endless unless we address their root cause and the root cause of all psychological misery is this belief that we are a separate and limited entity a separate and limited entity is imminently in a state of clear and present danger by nature so uh as long as this state of clear and present danger prevails we will be needy we will be full of fear and desire in other words we will experience psychological misery so the the the the only question then is not to deal with this specific problem okay there is a pandemics now how do unheard that i am addicted to tobacco how do i handle that my girlfriend or my boyfriend broke up how do i handle that that's not the problem the problem is i believe to be a separate entity is that true for if it is true the situation is hopeless fortunately it is not true that the statement i make it's up to you to verify it being helped by those who have already verified it for themselves that's all it's very simple as long every time you experience we experience psychological suffering without any exception we can always trace it back to this belief we have to be a separate entity a separate consciousness a separate human being i would add also since we were talking earlier on about you know this division this every time there is a conflict we can trace it back to the same belief to be separate yes and i imagine this is also another category of people who might be helped by this process because in confined in our homes the tempers flare up uh there's a lot of conflict coming up and in some cases domestic violence but for most people it doesn't get as dramatic as that but there's still a lot of misery that comes up and uh and this would be a good time a good place to start uh practicing actually so what do you do how do you take someone you know that comes up with without that that has a difficulty just realizing this simple fact that is there's only one consciousness how what do you say to them when they when they are seeing themselves as a separate individual in conflict with the rest of the world what do you how do you guide them i don't guide them i get the hell out of there i don't you know i'm i'm not trying i'm not i'm not trying to convert people you know i i if someone asks for help yes i enjoy helping but if nobody asks for help i'm not going to to show up and say i am the savior i'm jesus i'm going to help you no i'm not suggesting that but i'm just saying somebody is asking for help with some difficulty you know it's not uh obvious to them this is a new field this is something that they feel known i i tell them i tell them what i've just told you see first that whatever first i would tell them understand that whatever psycho specific psychological issue you have even if you resolve find a resolution for instance you are your girlfriend has left you let's assume you you get you you get over it now will you be happy chances are no because then you need a new relationship or you need money or you need this or you need zarya you need to be famous you need something else so instead of going after various goals like getting this getting that getting that just seek happiness seek happiness and even have a lower threshold than happiness see seek not being miserable that's already good if you achieve not being miserable you are you have you have walked a long way on this path so now how to be not me how not to be miserable by following what i was saying earlier that understanding experientially that every time you experience misery it's always without exception because we believe to be a separate entity a separate consciousness a separate reality and then if it is true that we are separate entity then misery is unavoidable but now we have to revisit the evidence we have that we are separate consciousness you know and that's the next step i suggest to these people how are you so certain that this reality which is hearing my words as i speak right now which is invisible that is real nevertheless how are you so certain that is reality which is hearing my words which you call awareness or consciousness or that you call simply i because you say i am hearing the words i understand them so that this i s i dash reality i dash consciousness dash awareness dash self dash reality that this i is limited dependent upon the body since it is not physical since it is not visible what is the evidence that it is even located or localized in the body you know we have inherited from hearsay from our parents from our educators etc uh belief systems about this eye now what is important is to realize where our parents happy campers you know were they such smart and our teachers were they happy and they were teaching us the way to be happy were they actually happy and then we tried to apply they are all the recipes that don't work at some point we have to come to the understanding that if they had worked they would have been happy you know it's like these people that sells you a course have to become a millionaire right yeah they have these big informations and you ask yourself the question well if they have the recipe how to be a millionaire what do they sell the course what do they need my money right yeah it's very similar [Music] totally was a was this process for you francis did it happen in um in a continuous way or where is it or in a quantum way did you did you make peace with your own mortality for instance all of a sudden or do can you re can you remember anything that that happened around that did you find yourself in a different place one day in my case yes but i don't think that that that that's a general model like uh one size fits all type of underwear no i think it's in my case yes but it doesn't have to be that way i think a better way not a better way but a more common way is a way in which at some point on the path i mean we have met some teaching we have met people we have made books videos whatever and then we have been interested and then we have been walking on that path and in in the beginning we were miserable in other words misery was walking you know at our side on the path and then we kept walking and kept walking looking forward and at some point you realize misery is no longer next to us misery has left us but we don't know [Music] when when did misery start off-roading we don't know but on the other hand who cares you know perhaps in france's case i remember a specific moment when misery parted company but that which matters is a parting company is not the remembrance of how it happened you know you know i'd rather have one million dollars in my bank account not remembering you know all the deposits i have made than having a deposit for ten dollars remembering very well the day i made it okay i won't probe any further then but you you talk about that that um that state of uh letting go of the misery and and jean-claude also said something about coming home is being at peace uh and and a lot of other times it's always talking in this way so is there such a thing as as living life just bathing in beauty harmony and peace or is there always room for less comfortable feelings it's like when we live believing to be a separate entity it's like there is a sense of impending doom of ultimate tragedy always always present it is really oppressive and then it replaces it's replaced by things that were there before also that that are still there that are of course there are warriors let's say i hear a little noise in my car i'm worried it might be i may need to to to to to to a new timing belt or uh my computer goes out of power i may need to change the battery it's boring i have to go to the apple store leave the computer there and now i catch the coronavirus with this these geniuses at the bar and you know so little worries like that but it's not it's not the end of the world you see what i mean ultimately in the depths of our being there is this background of peace of stability and of fearlessness how about our our deeper conditioning do we ever outgrow it or or do we just become more uh intimate and comfortable with it it depends what we call by conditioning because i assume you don't mean the fact that we know how to drive a car how to solve a linear differential equation or i don't mean you don't mean that right you mean you mean more different types of issues that involve psychological yeah all our wounds all our and digest the trauma or our yeah but the problem with the trauma we don't want to eliminate the trauma it's not possible to erase the past but you know in in psychotherapy there is this view that we have to revisit all of the past all the all the elements bit by bit in order to have the path completely clean the problem is that doing this job this work uh deprives a lot deprives us a lot of happiness in the now frankly in instead of revisiting my past i i'd rather enjoy playing tennis or playing music or listening to music or listening to a stupid or watching a stupid movie on amazon you know rather than visiting my past so to visit the past is quite boring so i mean if if it is you know it's a free country if that's what you enjoy doing please me by guest but that's not what i enjoy doing so the only moment you have then to revisit the past is only if and when the past visits you which is a much lesser threshold you see so then even when the past visits you you deal with it but the beauty is that when you understand your true nature you understand it's absolute independence it's absolute freedom and at that moment you have divorced your past in bulk your past as a human being you passed as a separate person so that when your past revisit you revisits you you don't spend hours dealing with the past trauma you just let the past trauma go back to the closet where it belongs and at some point it doesn't come out of the closet and there in the closet it dies of starvation that is beautiful and i i can feel the the taste of freedom that comes with just listening to this and i would love to ask more questions but i think we're out of time that's all we have time for i want to thank you for your contribution and uh for that aftertaste that that's going to stay with me for the rest of the afternoon thank you francis very sweet generally bye

Channel: scienceandnonduality

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Id: LwnaCNr062s

Length: 51min 19sec (3079 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020