702. Neil Theise

Personally, I think that every approach to panpsychist and materialist notions of the brain have their value and validity and truth and they are in complementarity with the idealist view that everything comes out of mind. You need perspectives from all three to really understand what's going on. In the book I talk about how, but I would turn that on its head.

In our culture, the big evidence that people have for the brain makes our minds, and that's the materialist view, our brains make our minds, and so when you're dead and your brain dies, then your mind dies and you cease to exist, is that however you measure what's going on in the mind, as we get better at it in the brain, as we get better and better at looking in living brains, what's happening at the fine anatomic and signaling levels,

electronically, metabolically, anatomically, we see correlates of all our conscious experiences. And so for most people in our culture, that's very compelling to say, well, these brain activities correlate with these experiences in our minds. Therefore, one is the cause for the other. But that's a logical fallacy. It is. I know that every summer I will see lots of people wearing sunglasses and I will see lots of people eating ice cream and often they overlap. In fact, mostly they overlap.

If they're outside eating ice cream, they have sunglasses on. So I might say that wearing sunglasses leads to eating ice cream. No, the bright light and the heat of summer leads to both. And this is why there is no cognitive neuroscientist, there is no neurologist, there is no psychiatrist on the planet who can avoid saying this brain activity is a neural correlate of this conscious experience because there's no proof of causation.

And no matter how hard they try, they can't ever find proof of causation. Now it may mean that our science is inadequate, but another possibility is that these are all reflections of the mechanism whereby our human brains sample the infinity of non-dual awareness and turn it into something we can have and be aware of as our own human minds. The model I use for this in the book is a radio. A radio is not taking music out of the air and letting us listen to it.

It's sampling the infinite radio waves, some of which are playing Beatles music, are created by the Beatles having made some music, sampling it and putting it through a speaker so we hear it as Beatles. don't expect to open the radio and see the Beatles playing. We also know that we could build a different transducer that a radio transduces radio waves into sound

but we also know everyone got very excited when we first got laptops. Well when we first got computers you could put music on your screen and then you can have a light show on your screen going with the music and that was like you know you and I are old enough to remember when that was exciting. That's

because it would transduce it into light. You could transduce it into anything. So So what I would say is a bee's brain transduces universal consciousness into the mind of the bee, which is very different than what a human brain does. And what we're examining when we do fMRIs and EEGs and make all these correlations, that's saying something about the mechanisms whereby transduction happens. So I'm not saying that all that brain science isn't valid.

It's just being interpreted with this bias that's leaving everyone sort of empty-handed. And the term for that empty handedness, this is chapter 10 in the book I think, is what David Chalmers philosopher called the hard problem of consciousness. That no matter how well we understand the mechanisms whereby the brain signals, we have not found anything to explain the experience of consciousness itself. So I got this one from Deepak Chopra, which some people will yell at me for saying I got

something from Deepak, but I really like Deepak. get along in a whole bunch of ways. And there's some areas where we disagree, but he's got a real gift for expressing things clearly. Here's a green pen. Now I'm looking at the green pen and I know that there are photons bouncing off the pen, they reach my retina, which detects them, creates a chemical signal that goes back along my optic nerve into my visual cortex, and I see green. And you saw green when I held it up. Now if you close

your eyes and I say, "Imagine a green pen." You don't have all of that happening. You have your visual cortex lighting up, and now we've gotten so good at that we can actually measure what's going on in the visual cortex and say, "Oh, I think you're seeing." It's as good as, "Oh, look, they're looking at a fuzzy green vertical line." Soon they'll be able to say, "Oh, you're looking at a pen." But where is that green pen? Where is the experience

of that green pen. It doesn't have a location. In fact, when you close your eyes, is it in your brain? Is it in your skull? Is it in the room? There's no way anybody has been able to get at the nature of that actual experience. We can describe everything else, but we can't understand so far the nature of the experience itself. If you say that you can, we just haven't gotten there yet, then it leaves you kind of stuck for what to do when the human mind is contemplating itself.

Then you can't answer it as a purely scientific question because the mind contemplating itself, there's no subject-object split. It's the self contemplating the self. And when we do that, what do we find? We find things like a continuum of non-dual consciousness that underlies everything, the the ocean underlies those waves. I'm not sure we find that. I mean, I'm totally with you. We're in the same boat. Philosophically, we're trying to convince your friend. Yes. You know, but it

comes down to is he's got to explain. It's on him to explain the hard nature of consciousness. I have the hard problem of consciousness, because if he's unable to do that, then how do you explain anything about the experiences of people in contemplative practice? There's a whole portion of human experience that he has no approach for and says, "I won't have an approach for it because

those things can't be." Yeah, that's part of it. You've heard the term "promissory materialism," that, "Okay, we haven't figured it out yet, but we're going to figure it out, so just stay tuned." And I use arguments such as, well, near-death experiences. They're under anesthesia, they see a red sneaker on the roof of the hospital, the janitor goes up and, yes, it's there, or they see their uncle buying a Snickers bar in the waiting room down the hall, and sure enough he bought a Snickers bar.

So that would at least, if you believe that those things really happened, and I'm afraid my friend is skeptical because they're anecdotal, then that would at least suggest that… Every bit of data starts as an anecdote until you aggregate them into a mass of data. Any single data point is an anecdote. And there's tons of data, if you look at all the near-death experiences and all the other stuff that people have been experiencing. This was what happened with my mom.

You know, I was wondering, is she having delusions or whatever? And they were happy delusions, so let her have them. You know, I wasn't going to argue that she wasn't being visited by people she cared about. Although then people started visiting who annoyed her. That's when she said, you know, stop. But I went to visit her one day and one of her ghostly friends had been there.

The rabbi I grew up with actually, who had been kind of boring her. And I said, Oh, I'm sorry. Was he annoying? She goes, Well, you didn't stick around long because his sister was coming and he had to go welcome and I thought well that's odd because I knew his sister very well too and she would be 102 today so I don't know what that's about and then I go home and I get a phone call from someone from my hometown that his sister died

that day at 102 years old. Interesting yeah there you go. My mother wasn't reading the obituaries, she wasn't reading anything but the other problem for your friend is the insistence that he probably would say I'm assuming it's a he I think I heard. It's a his name is Curtis. That Curtis would say, I want to rely on empirical science and formal mathematics and logic. Those are the ways I understand the world. And you have

to explain what you're talking about through those ways. And those will give me a complete view of the world. And I don't think those ways will confirm anything you're talking. That's the typical argument from so and I used to be that, even though I had these spiritual ideas because I didn't worry about whether they matched or not. The problems with that are number one, quantum physics. The conscious observation of a quantum event changes the

nature of the event. Do you see light as waves or particles? Do they behave like waves or particles? This is what made Einstein crazy and he never found a way around it and every objection he had turned into something that could win the Nobel Prize like entanglement and non-locality. In other words, the rebuttals of his objections turned into Nobel Prize worthy discoveries.

Right. And so the result of quantum physics is that at some very fundamental level to the functioning of the universe, empirical science means you separate the object of study from the subject who's studying it. I'm an objective scientist. I look at things under the microscope. The slide is there and I'm here. But at the quantum scale, and it turns out that bleeds up into everyday reality, but at the quantum scale you can't separate subject and object. They are intimately related.

So empirical science cannot live up to its own terms. This is chapter 11 of the book, I think. - Gerdlin limits of formal logic is the 11. - Okay, then this is probably 10. - The other circle is 10. I want to talk to you about both those things. - Okay, sure. The problem with mathematics, and you brought this up at the very beginning, you said there's this question whether mathematics is something out there that humans discover, or did we invent it?

We invented numbers because we wanted to count bushels of wheat or stars in the sky, and so we created numbers, and then it turns out we can play with them, and all these wonderful things happen. But we invented them. The view that mathematics is out there to be discovered, they aren't something we create, is referred to as mathematical Platonism.

Plato described an ideal world beyond our reality, which our reality is a dim reflection. Kurt Gödel, who's widely recognized as the greatest mathematician, logician in history, was a member of the Vienna Circle, the history of which I cover, who are probably the sharpest thinkers in the 20th century, putting forth this view that empirical science and formal logic were the ultimate arbiters of understanding reality. And anything that couldn't be explained through

those two things was metaphysics and dismissible. Not even worth talking. He was a member of that group. He was invited in, I think, when he was 21, because he was so brilliant. And one of his primary mentors in Vienna was a founding member of the group and invited him in. And he sat quietly in the back, never saying very much. But what he was thinking the whole

time was. The Vienna Circle, as well as all the other logicians and mathematicians of the day, were looking for ways to prove mathematics, that mathematics was a complete structure that was self-consistent and could explain everything. Explaining everything meant it was complete, and that it was inherently consistent would mean that it's completely solid and dependable,

as a reflection of the true nature of reality. And the power of that would be, since you can express scientific stuff through mathematics even more so. Math and science become the ultimate arbiters of what existence is.

But his instinct that Plato was right, that mathematics was out there to be discovered, not something we invented. And the way to prove that that was the case was to prove that

mathematics could not be both complete and consistent. The mathematicians of the day said it has to be both complete and consistent and our mission is to prove that they are the case and everyone believed they would one day prove that both things were true, and if they did, then mathematics would be able to explain everything consistently. What he came up with is called Godel's Incompleteness Theorems,

and it's a lot to go into. I can't unpack the whole thing here, but basically what he demonstrated in a mathematically rigorous proof that's just kind of remarkably creative, is that if there is a system of mathematics that is complete, meaning it describes everything, it will necessarily contradict itself. And if it contradicts itself, you can build a proof out of it to say anything, in which case you're proving nothing at all.

So if you have a complete system of mathematics, it will be inconsistent and therefore not explain anything. If you make it consistent, and this was the genius thing, how we figured out how to demonstrate this. If you make a system completely consistent, and he's talking about arithmetic, systems that contain arithmetic, If you make it completely consistent, there will always be a statement that is known to be true, but can't be proven to be true from within the system.

So you can have statements that are provable, and you can prove them to be true, or you can have statements that you know are true, but you can't prove them. How do you know they're true? Intuition. Well, what's intuition reaching at? Intuition is reaching at the world of mathematics that's beyond our tool making. the mathematics that's out there for us to discover, that has its own truths independent of our human abilities to prove them.

And so, mathematics doesn't do it and empirical science doesn't do it. The one eliminates at its finest approach, quantum physics, the most successful theory ever made, as people tout it and no one argues with that, says that its most fundamental base, that the subject and object cannot remain separate. And in mathematics, you cannot have a description that is both complete and consistent. So that fails too.

The result is intuition comes back in, metaphysics comes back in, and it's kind of unavoidable. If you talk to mathematicians today, there is no argument about this. Godel shut the door. The one other thing that was important was something called decidability. Could you decide that a system, whether you can prove it's complete or consistent, Can you prove that even if you can't answer those questions, you can prove that you could answer them theoretically?

The Turing machine that everyone touts, Alan Turing, his universal Turing machine, which was a hypothetical model he came up with that eventually gave birth to what we know as the modern computer, did for decidability what Godel had done for completeness and consistency. Gödel even said that his was, you know, kind of the first step and Turing finished it.

So, not only do we have empirical science and formal logic and mathematics that we rely on to tell us in the modern age and in Western life, the nature of everything, and it turns out those are

sand, they're not cement that we're standing on, but you throw into that computer science, which our whole world depends on, and it turns out that's deriving from the third piece that wipes out that possibility of knowing. That's a lot to dig into to convince yourself that, "Oh, I can't be sure that the brand makes mind." But Western science is a big thing.

If you can't take in the whole of it, and that's kind of the stupid task I set for myself with the book is, "Can I do that in 172 pages with some pictures?" If you're missing a piece of that, then you're actually just blowing bubbles. If your friend doesn't have an answer, If you look on Goodreads, there are a lot of people who hate me on Goodreads. So they get very personal about it. My favorite is someone wrote a very long review and then republished it four months later.

I guess they were worried that it was getting missed, so they reposted it. The first line was, "This book is pap." And the last line was, "This book makes Jonathan Livingston Segal look like a significant spiritual text." And for those of us who are old enough to remember Jonathan Livingston Segal... Oh yeah, I love that book. book. But when people actually try to critique me in these sorts of comments, what they critique

is my view of quantum physics. Okay, that view of quantum physics, what's referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation, is debatable in some fashion, but you can't dismiss it, can't be dismissed. And I would rather align myself with the founders and folks like Manasse, who are looking at it in an open, not biased, not rigid way, dogmatic way. No one ever critiques me on the Gödel

situation. And the Gödel situation is actually the most fundamental argument, because that's the one that says the best arguments we have for science and mathematics to describe the world completely, he demolished that. And they had no answer for it, and they have no answer for it. And the mathematics world, they get that. They don't argue with it. It's not like, "Well, what's your interpretation of quantum mechanics? You have a different

interpretation of quantum mechanics than I do." There is no other interpretation of Gödel and of Turing's work. - So, if people really understood Gödel and Turing, and I'd never really learned much about them until I read your book, but if they really understood them, would they have to agree that subjective or mystical exploration is a necessary complement to empirical science and without those inner technologies of consciousness, we'll never have a complete picture of reality.

Would that have to be their conclusion if they really understood what those guys were saying? That is the implication and Gödel himself said it in a letter to his mother which I quote in the book. I can't remember the exact quote, I haven't memorized it, but it's something along the lines of, "I have no doubt that this will be useful for people who want to talk about religion."

>> Wayne: Interesting. And then, by the same token, quantum mechanics, over a hundred years ago, has established that consciousness and the material world are very much intertwined in some significant way, but people have conveniently ignored that finding for over a hundred years, which of course is much more famous than Gödel and Turing, at least in the common knowledge. So they're ignoring both.

And if they weren't, if they really dug into it and had the education to understand these things, would they necessarily have to come around to concurring with the mystics? And has that actually happened, or are there quantum physicists and people who understand Gödel who are still materialists? Oh, sure. But there are people who are willfully delusional or in denial all over the place. It's not like this is foreign to human capacity. I know lots of quantum physicists that should I name names?

Sure. Why not? This was real. I was invited into a room at Disney of all places and I got to

hang out for a day with Brian Green. Oh nice. Now, he's a string theorist. Really? You're going to talk about materiality when you spend your time as a string theorist and you're going to say no the world material. But you're talking about vibrating strings that are mathematical constructs that no one can test? Really? And when I talked about my views of things, oh he just you know sort of sneered. John Carroll does the same thing

I heard it. Yeah, and Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same thing. Yeah. And it's like well you want to believe what you believe. I should have started as an idealist given all the other experiences, spiritual experiences I've had or witnessed in my life, you'd think I'd have gone right there. But part of me was like, No, gotta be careful about this. And it

was menace just slowly. And the record of our scholarship is how we sort of tugged at this piece by piece by piece until finally, yeah, there's no other consistent view that has a chance of explaining everything, including the hardest problem of all, which is the hard problem of consciousness. Because saying the world is mind is saying that the world is nothing but experience. You don't have to explain what an experience is and how an experience comes into existence if all existence

is nothing but experience within the big C consciousness of pure awareness. It has amazing capacity for explanation just from the standpoint of scientific rigor. If there's a theory that you can't disprove but has a lot of explanatory potential, you shouldn't just reject it out of hand. But that's what our culture does. Why do you think that these people are so stubborn about shifting paradigms? I interviewed a guy named Mark Gober who also spoke at SAND.

He wrote a book called "The End to Upside-Down Thinking" and basically what we've been talking about that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, everything arises from

consciousness and he gave all kinds of nice arguments of how to flip that paradigm. But if you accept that consciousness is fundamental, and if you accept that there's some kind of – well, you didn't want to use the word intelligence earlier, but some kind of orderliness within the functioning of consciousness that gives rise to this incredibly complex, beautiful universe, then you're beginning to accept that there's some kind of a God notion,

Which of course makes materialists very uncomfortable. And part of me responds to that with, "Oh, the God word. That's an English word." Well, yeah, so you can use a word. I have Hebrew as an option too. You can leave the A out and just say G underscore D. I think that word is... I don't want to spend time arguing that turf because that's just an English word that we label something with. I understand how important it is for some people, particularly in our culture.

I will choose to think in terms of a God figure when I'm doing a devotional practice, like Jewish prayer in a synagogue, and like things. So it's a useful thing. Let me put it this way, let me interrupt you here. You spend your days looking through a microscope at cells, and what you're seeing is something incredibly complex and marvelous. I've heard it said that a typical cell is as complex as the city of Tokyo.

You know, I can't imagine that you regard a cell as you're looking at it as some kind of accident that just somehow the billiard balls all hit each other in such a way as to form such a structure. There's got to be some organizing principle. Yeah, and these are the rules of complexity. But are they unconscious? Are they dumb? Yeah, I think you can program a computer.

If you program virtual ants, they will give rise to a virtual ant colony if you understood the rules of ant interactions well enough. You don't need top-down design. There is an element of top-down design in things, but this is where another term that I explore in the book is useful, instead of talking about hierarchies, which we often think of, and even illustrating what I mean.

We go from quantum foam to quantum particles to atoms to molecules and we're thinking in this hierarchy from bottom to top. But it's not that. All of these levels exist simultaneously in what Arthur Kessler referred to as a whole archae.

It was Lynn Margulies who gave me this word the first time. So when we think of the coarse body, the subtle body and the energy body, we aren't thinking that there are three separate bodies that are nested within each other. talking about the same human body that we're choosing to interact with at the Western medical

level, at the biomagnetic level, at the level of consciousness. So things that look like they're planned top-down, this is the fundamental hallmark of complex systems, is they look like someone planned them, but no one planned them.

No one, in terms of some isolated, discrete individual. I mean, this is an important point, because I have always thought, you know, listening to people like Robert Lanza, there's got to be some kind of organizing intelligence, intrinsic and fundamental to the universe that is self-interacting consciousness that somehow gives rise to all these orderly laws of nature that structures all the complexity.

You said earlier that it didn't have a goal or an agenda, but I would say that its agenda is to create increasingly complex forms through which it can actually experience its own creation as a living reality. I think the volition is we are sense organs whereby the universe can perceive itself. Exactly. But I don't think it has preferences beyond that. But why is it getting increasingly sophisticated as the universe evolves?

The nature of this is again the nature of we'd have to dig into those four rules. Why complex systems lead to bigger things, to more complex things, to more complex things. So how is it that cells self-organize into bodies, bodies self-organize into communities, molecules self-organize into cells, and it's the same mathematics that describes all of that. It doesn't matter what size you're talking about.

And the four ways that happens, number one is it doesn't happen if you've got three ants, you don't get a colony. If you have 25 ants, you get a colony, and if you buy one of those ant farms and watch it for a while, it for a while. They dig tunnels, they make food lines, and they have a cemetery. But by the time they get down to a handful of ants, they're no longer working with each other. If you get 250

ants, you get more complexity. And it's not only the number of ants, but the greater diversity of interaction. And if you have 25,000 ants, even more complexity. In human terms, a village is not a city is not a megalopolis. But interestingly, the same computational ways of describing this through complexity, to some extent through chaos, apply no matter what you're talking about. So that's rule number one. The more diversity and the more members of a system you have,

the greater complexity that can emerge. The second is that there are feedbacks within the system that keep things within a healthy homeostatic sort of range. So like your body temperature never gets too hot, doesn't get too cold. Think of an air conditioner that as a room gets warmer, the air conditioner turns on at a set point and as the room gets colder, the air conditioner turns off. That's a negative feedback loop keeping things in an oscillating, comfortable, healthy realm.

And that's the realm in which creativity and self-sustaining functioning of a complex system, whether it's a colony or a city or an organ, takes place. Now, you can have positive feedback loops, and negative and positive don't mean good and bad. Negative means, you know, there's sort of limits being placed on it. A positive feedback loop would be like you have a heater in a room and the hotter the room gets the more the heater turns on so the

room gets hotter and hotter and hotter. You can have positive feedback loops in living systems. Think about when we have a fever. You need to metabolically rev up your immune system so you get a fever helps you fight off the infection but then the negative feedback loops come in to bring your temperature down to that

comfortable range. If you have an overabundance of positive feedback loops you can get self-organizing larger scale structures, but instead of being creative and adaptive, the way a complex living system is, they're energy-expending and self-wasting.

So in terms of cells and tissues, that's what cancer is. You've taken off all the inhibitions on how cells behave, and they expand very rapidly, but then you eat up all the energy in the system, and the cancer dies, and you die. Economic bubbles are the same thing. Too little regulation in an economy, you get positive feedback loops, loops, you get a bubble and that collapses. So there has to be a balance and overabundance of negative feedback loops keeping things comfortable.

Sounds like climate change is a positive feedback loop because we're reaching tipping points and the methane is being released and so on and so forth. It'll be interesting to see whether Gaia as an entity can kick in with some negative feedback loops to counteract it. Well, one way to do that might be Gaia kicking in with enough diseases that we all die. Yeah, and that would... eliminate humans, things will adjust. That's true. Are we the cancer? You have to ask.

The third thing is that things really happen at the bottom, at the interactions at the local level. There are influences that are top-down, but the majority of stuff that's happening is happening at the local level. There's no ant in the colony trying to decide where there needs to be a food line. There's no body in the cell determining, and there's no organ in the cell that's determining Are you hungry? Are you afraid? Are you horny? Are you sleepy?

It arises out of everything happening at the local level. And the fourth thing, and this is the most important, there's always some low level randomness in the system. And this is where the magic really happens. So if you have too much randomness in the system, ants won't organize into a colony and humans won't organize into a functioning society and cells, you'll get cancer.

If there's too little randomness in the system, then if the food supply runs out in the ant colony, the ants aren't going to be able to find another way to find the food because it's the random ants wandering around, not part of the food line,

who are likely to bump into, "Oh, there's another sugar cube over here." Or in human societies, the scientist or the poet or the musician who's exploring the nature of their reality a little differently than everyone else, and turns out they discover, you know, they're Charlie Chaplin and the world changes. So too little randomness, you get no ability to change and if the environment changes, the system will collapse and die. If there's too much randomness, you get no self-organization,

you get no larger scale emergent structures that look like they're planned. You don't get food lines, you know, in New York. It's not so true anymore, but 6th Street used to be where the Indian restaurants went. That's not because someone planned Indian restaurants for 6th Street. It happened that the way the Indian restaurants were competing with each other, they created this niche where their competition created more business for everybody. There's this low-level randomness in the system.

Stuart Kaufman, who's one of the founders of complexity theory, and a friend and a mentor of mine, talks about this low-level randomness as creating in the next moment the adjacent possibles of what could happen for the complex system, the living being. The next moment isn't an infinite array of anything can happen. It's a constrained amount of possibilities, And you can't tell which of these is going to move forward to become the reality of the next moment.

Those adjacent possibles are what allow living things to explore the possibility of changing and responding and adapting to a changing environment. That's where the creativity of living things happens. That's where evolution happens. That's where you go from simple molecules to becoming cells, to becoming multicellular organisms, to becoming ecosystems like Gaia. That's where the universe starts as hydrogen and then you get a universe.

So, complexity through these four principles, and these are the four principles that you can

use to create computational models using computers to like design a system and then set it running to see what happens. This sort of gives you everything and it's what gives you what you need to go from quantum physics to the scale of relativity. So there's the appearance of determinism and intelligent design everywhere you look, but had this adjacent possible become relevant instead of this one, there'd be a whole other reality here that would also look intelligently designed, and yet it's

completely different. I don't think the fundamental awareness that underlies everything is particularly wedded to any particular outcome, which is really hard for us as humans who feel that we are living self-sustaining beings to deal with but maybe Gaia's answer is to get rid of the humans. We're no longer the pinnacle of anything when you look at this view which is an area I disagree with Deepak about. Incidentally I co-taught the course in which Deepak learned to

meditate originally back in like 1979. Oh wow that's so cool. Yeah. So you're to I'm to blame, yep. Can I use the word God just for simplicity's sake? Sure, I'll let you have it. Instead of saying these sort of all-pervading universal intelligence, maybe it's a jazz musician, maybe it's a maverick, maybe it is Charlie Chaplin, it is Albert Einstein, it thinks outside the box, and maybe there are parallel universes which, like you say,

there are other adjacent possibles in play, and those behave quite differently. People there have three eyes or whatever. But couldn't it be that these four principles you outlined and any other fundamental principles that determine how the universe functions are just attributes, and I think Kashmir Shaivism might say this, of this fundamental intelligence, and that they would show up even in a computer game because they are just intrinsic to the way everything functions.

They're that fundamental. Right, but I think these rules are what's fundamental, and I don't think... Why are there rules? Why is there anything? Yeah, and that's because we're humans trying to figure out how the universe works and we realize, oh, these four things recur whenever we look at what we label a complex system. For the universe, these are not rules. This is the way it happens.

Yes. You can have elements of these in any group of interacting individuals, but when you do, they do not necessarily turn into living things. They do not necessarily creatively adapt. But under the right conditions, they will. they will. Right, right. So why is it on this planet we do but Mars no? Yeah. Mars maybe had been living, we don't know that's it, but for the moment it seems pretty inert. Jupiter seems pretty

inert. That's because the stuff that makes it up didn't fulfill all those criteria. Yes, but the ancient cultures and perhaps the shamanic traditions that you've been studying would say that in a sense Jupiter and Mars and the Sun itself are living beings. I would certainly go there, but I wasn't on that path. Yeah. In that sense, I wasn't on that path. But yes, I would say that that's probably true too. Right.

And they're living beings in the sense that they, like all things, have a subtle dimension in addition to the gross dimension. And even though the Sun is a thermonuclear furnace, on a subtle level, it could be a conscious entity of some sort.

Well, on a subtle level, there's nothing but consciousness. So of course, conscious and alive. But there are intermediate levels. There's Adi-Buddha, Adi-Daiva and Adi-Atma in Hinduism. Adi-Daiva is the level of the Devas, the impulses of intelligence. You know, again, this is sort of the perspective, this is the complementarity issue.

So here I am, this is me, I'm thirsty, I pick up a cup that's over here, I drink the water, swallow it, it becomes part of my system, etc. And that's true, but from a complexity theory, modern scientific, quantum, mathematical, western philosophy point of view, just as true, the universe is one seamless whole, and this is the universe drinking itself. Right. And on another level, nothing's happening at all, it just appears to be. Exactly. So, is Jupiter inert or conscious?

Etc., etc. And yes, there are levels, but to some extent when we talk about levels, are we really talking about our human capacity to perceive them. Sure. Because from the fundamental awareness level, I don't think there's any delusions within the fundamental awareness as to what the sun is and what the Jupiter is. I think when we see levels, we're seeing it from a human perspective that's limited. Yeah, blind men and the elephant. I mean, the elephant is what it is.

The blind men each have a different interpretation, and nature or the universe is not dependent upon our capabilities in order to be what it is. You know, I think to some extent our conversation is a good example of how hard it is to talk about these things because we can only speak about it using language, you and me. Neither of us, I don't think you're a really sophisticated mathematician. I'm not in the least. So that language isn't available to us.

You might be a really remarkable poet, in which case maybe you can use language to get closer. So we're left with the words at hand, and English is really bad for talking about this stuff. Particularly modern English, because it really exploded post-Newton, industrially, etc. So I think the only points where we're sort of doing this is because our language is so limited. And to some extent, that issue of, you come at all of this from your life experience, that's

your perspective and I'm coming at it from mine. So it's like the two faces in the vase. It's the body cells or is it molecules or is it atoms? To me the interesting thing is having these conversations across people's experiences and it's always humbling. Growing up, having gone to medical school, the impulse to be sure of myself is sort of beaten into me. You know, I've had, I had to learn to have that kind of intellectual pride. Oh, nothing pulls it

out from under you. Like being able to talk to people who have these experiences and compare them and compare notes. Yeah, I hope I'm not giving you the impression that I'm disagreeing with you. No, no, no, no, no, no. But there are moments. I mean these are questions that like you with "Am I cells or am I a body?" I chew on these thoughts. I've been chewing on them for decades. So I like to bounce them off

people and see if we can... Sure, sure, sure, sure. A couple of questions came in. Let me get them before we ran out of time. This is from someone named Franz Bars in Dead Man's Flats, Alberta, Canada. - Hi, Franz. You were there first. - Yeah. She or he had a near fatal accident at the age of 13. Fractured skull and doctor said I'd be a vegetable at best. Since then, I've had two awakening experiences. One studying

English 40 years ago. Not sure how that studying English brought it about, but great. - Reading Whitman, maybe. Maybe so. And then 20 years ago, an awaking experience elicited or induced by intense pain. This person didn't recognize them as such, as awaking experiences, until much later. He or she, I'm not sure if it's a man or woman, helps people understand and experience non-duality, but she or he doesn't understand the brain. Large parts of my brain, from the injuries, must be affected.

Any feedback? Not a lot except to turn to what I said before, I think of our brains as transducers for the big C consciousness into our small C consciousness personal minds.

Every brain is behaving differently from every other brain. your brain has gone through this process obviously functioning sufficiently that you're passing for a functioning adult in our society which not everyone's brain allow them to do, but allowing for these experiences in some way but do we know that it was the injury and is it who were you were in your past life that you were prepared to have some enlightenment experiences,

I haven't seen yet the connection to the injury and having those experiences. Are they in fact related? Well, sometimes as you must know, traumatic experiences of various kinds do evoke or elicit some kind of awakening thing. I've interviewed people, one guy was almost hit by a car and he didn't get hit, but the shock of it woke him up. Yeah, but the way Franz described the story was teenage injury and then many years later, this stuff happened.

But ultimately, the stuff that's come my way in terms of experiences that just sort of lands on me, I can think of it in terms of, is that my brain? My brain is structured in a way that allows me to receive these or perceive these. It's a nature or nurture question, which again complementarities, Or is it my lived experience that prepared me for when this showed up, I was prepared to see it and witness it? Those are sort of unanswerable questions and probably complementarities.

Every view you can have on it, every single piece of you, every single experience, every single process you have participated in throughout life, up till the time of having those experiences contributed to the fact that that experience happened.

Friends might want to read Eben Alexander's book or else see my interview with him or many other interviews with him He was someone who was predicted to be a vegetable he had encephalitis I believe his brain was just pus, you know My mom she was in home hospice care for seven months not walking talking or reading and I was there Every day because I was sure if I missed a day that would be her last day

And I wanted to be there for her last day and then after seven months I got a call from one of her home attendants Mr. Neil come quick your mother's in the kitchen asking for a cup of tea and she had gotten up wanted a cup of tea How was she walking after seven months and then she lived for six more years?

Amazing and we took her off all her medications during that time because she couldn't swallow congestive heart disease hypertension, chronic urinary tract infections, kept her on her Parkinson's meds because I knew she'd be uncomfortable with the rigidity so we could melt that in some Dulce de Leche ice cream and get it into her mouth. I never put her back on the meds because I was like, she's got to go from something. Yeah, so let one of these things. She never had any hypertension.

She never had any congestive heart disease after that and even her Parkinson's went into remission. Amazing.

Medically speaking, I think that's because she lived in such a low stress state that all her diseases of aging are really in our society diseases of stress accumulation She died in a bliss bubble. It was just stunning nice, but why her? Why did my mother get that lucky she would say it was her relationship with the Libanuma which is Yiddish for the beloved name she would talk about God as see there's that word. How are you in the Libanuma doing today? Oh Oh, we're just fine.

She would blush like she was a teenager. Oh, sweet. She sounded great. So, I don't know. Here's another question that came in. This is from Nina Nobile in the US someplace. Can you recall what your state of mind was before the times you felt one with the environment around you? Were you very relaxed, deep in thought about a specific concept having to do with consciousness or anything else you can recall your mind focusing on? I'm hesitant to lay claim to having had significant experiences.

However, blah, blah, blah. I talk about some of it. Most times where I had an experience along those lines, it was from within a state of meditation. Not always necessarily what I would have characterized the time as deep. Most often during an intensive Zen retreat, I'm meditating many hours a day for days in a row, but not always that time that I described in the Zendo with the incense stick, but I'd been in a sustained focus state for weeks because this koan had happened.

But I've also had what I would call similar sorts of experiences from devotional practice type stuff, being in shul, being in synagogue, really caught up in the prayer service with a liturgy that I'm deeply familiar with and comfortable with, and it's in Hebrew, so I I don't understand it so well that if I want I can understand it and if not I can turn it off and it's just a mantra. But I don't think there have been rules for it.

I haven't had any of the experiences of when I've had sudden trauma and I've had sudden trauma I've been hit by a car. Never got something good out of it like that. I get life lessons. One thought that comes to mind on Nina's question is that famous saying by some Zen guy I think that enlightenment may be an accident but spiritual practice makes you accident prone. probably like that one. So there are things we can do which make us receptive or make it conducive

to having spiritual breakthroughs and that's what spiritual practice is all about. That's why people do these things. And that's kind of where I land in the book, based off other people. I don't think the construct I give in the book of how the universe is constructed is really arguable in modern, Western, scientific, mathematical, philosophical terms. I really don't. I'm happy

to have that debate with somebody, but I really don't. However, you can read my book five times in a row, and some people have told me they've done that, and it's still, as

we say in Zen, the finger pointing at the moon. It isn't the moon itself. And without some sort of practice, and I say this explicitly in the afterward, it doesn't have to be contemplative practice. You know, I tried to get my mother to meditate for years until I realized, "Oh, she's got a devotional practice that puts any other practice

I've had to shame." My husband claims not to have any spiritual practice at all, but if you come to our house for a dinner and he serves you what he's made, it's a practice of service. Finally, after a couple of decades, I've gotten him to not argue with me when I say that. The Vedic divisions, I think it's Vedic. There's scholarly practice, Jewish version of that would be Talmud study. You know, for me, it's biology led to all this stuff.

So, scholarly practice, path of devotion, path of service, path of contemplation. Kiana, bhakti, seva, and... Find the one or the two or the three that feel right to you because the ideas are fucking useless. They do not alleviate any suffering whatsoever, but the experience of the truth of them makes all the difference. Yeah, that's a really important point, which is that one size does not fit all, but seek and ye shall find.

I mean, if you have the motivation to go deeper in whatever way you conceive that, take a step and then take another step. It's like in that Harrison Ford movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, where he has to cross this chasm and there's no bridge or something, but he somehow or other takes a step and the bridge materializes as it goes. He gets across the chasm. This is part of the wonder, part of the mystery is, the universe keeps meeting me where I am somehow.

Often in ways, no, I wasn't looking for that way. I didn't want that bridge, I wanted that bridge. Well, you're getting this bridge. But looking back, it's one experience after another of, if I show up, the universe meets me there. If you build it, they will come. Yeah. To quote another movie. Then that kind of brings us around to my perennial point, which is there is some kind of intelligence orchestrating things.

And it's interactive, and it's conscious, and it's compassionate sometimes in a tough love sort of way. Yeah. This is the project, the problem, the koan of the COVID years for me. I was through another path. I started thinking of my mother.

I'm also a devotee in small measure of Mother Mira, who's considered an avatar of the Divine Mother and I had an experience of her, not in her physical presence, that sort of rescued me from a difficult situation and I was aware during that, that oh, this could be entirely my imagination and I'm just talking myself out of some disaster here. Fine, it works. But then I said, I'm sorry I haven't been to visit you in a while, I'll make a plan to

come to Germany where she lives. And then I heard in my ear, you don't need to come see me. You just need to go visit your mother. Interesting. I get all for clumped as we said. And from that point on, I realized, oh, taking care of her became devotion. When she died. Within the years after

that, I started thinking about the divine feminine, the divine mother in a deeper way. And during COVID I had lots of time to read in my own traditions as well as other traditions and get a little bit deeper of understanding and I started to realize that the experience I

had when I went into her presence, her delight in me. Your mother's or mother Mary's? My mother's. The really profoundly crazily unconditional love that was evident on her face when I walked in the room. that's the experience of the divine feminine in the world and it's possible to experience. But I turned to one of my Zen teachers who was a was also a Christian minister and I said, you know, this is hard to mesh with

my Zen practice. I'm suddenly in a devotional practice when I was in a non-devotional contemplative practice. What am I supposed to do with this and how do you deal with it? His name was Bob Kaku Gunn and he was a few months away from dying after five years of Living with pancreas cancer and it was COVID. So it was an online thing But it was a formal Zen interview online, but he was an old buddy of mine, too

And I said to him how do you deal with this? And he said well the further I go It's all just love and I was like no no no no no no first off Christian term I don't you know it makes me nervous and he was like no I said compassion he goes whatever that's all it is That's the fundamental nature and then I realized versions of the talking particularly at sand that I gave Start with you know what are the twin pillars of said in Tibetan tradition the twin pillars of?

Buddhist practice wisdom and compassion wisdom is seeing the world as it is without delusion Complexity theory has provided me with a really complete model for understanding the structure and nature of Existence that includes all the science and all the math and all the philosophy I've been learning my entire life because I'm a nerd that allows me to see that but where that leads me to is This is not my boundary at the cellular level

My boundary is wherever my microbiome goes if you were here and I gave you a hug we'd walk apart and you'd carry some of me away with you and I'd carry some of you away with me. At the molecular level, we're exchanging molecules with the environment all the time. Our boundaries are the entire biomass of the planet. I've heard that every breath we take contains at least one molecule that Jesus breathed and Hitler and everybody else.

And at the atomic level, there isn't an atom in our bodies that we didn't breathe, eat or drink from the planet. So are we lonely creatures that live on the surface of a rock we call Earth, or are we planet Earth itself that in three and a half billion years was able to self-organize itself into creatures that think of themselves as separate, but we're wrong. So, at the atomic level, our boundary is the entire planet. That's Gaia. It's not just the biological

part. It's the non-biological part. At the quantum level, non-locality entanglement won the Nobel a few years ago, Einstein was right to his dismay. At the quantum level, we're one seamless universe. There's no separation anywhere. So when you talk about compassion, it's not, oh, I feel sorry for this person in front of me. Real compassion is I've touched a hot stove and my left hand goes to pull my right hand away without hesitation because we're just one thing. That's real compassion.

And that arises from seeing the nature of reality and experiencing the nature of reality in its true nature,

which is all the stuff you and I are talking about. And when that happens, true compassion arises. Or if you want to say love, and that's the fundamental nature of existence. That's the fundamental quality of the world. And that was the last time I saw my friend in that interview. It's a good thing to be left with. - Love your neighbor as yourself because he is. - Yeah. Well, that's a real sweet note to end on. So this has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed this.

You've let me go on a really long time. Well, you say good stuff. Thank you. I appreciate it. So do you. Your book is really interesting and it's a real treat for me to talk to people like you and to enrich my own experience and understanding. Very valuable. It's all about relation. Everything's in relation. Good. So thanks so much, Neil. there's some more conferences where we can exchange a little microbiome in person sometime.

That would be nice. Maybe you need to organize some BatGap conference. Oh man, yeah, people say that. It's a big task. I'm sorry, that's a mean thing to wish on you. Marito and Zaya would practically kill them organizing those conferences out there. But anyway, we'd love to meet you in person sometime and really appreciate what you're doing and look forward to reading your next book. Let me know when you've finished it.

I'm looking forward to seeing what it turns out to be. I just started writing it. Thank you. And thanks to all those who have been listening or watching. We really appreciate your participation in Bat Camp all these 15 years now. So we'll see you for the next one. Thanks, Niels. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye Bye.