Powerful Lessons From the Intersection of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, with Dr Daniel Chapelle

I just didn't give up. I kept on reading, and so eventually I developed simultaneous or you know, equal interest in psychology and philosophy, with the initial emphasis on depth psychology, you know, psychology of the unconscious Freud and Young, and

then archetypal psychology that means anything. And I was I'm a student of James Hillman, who was a primary student of care Jung and so wow, yeah, so I got into archetypal psychology and what we called and what is still called phenomenological psychology, that is to say, trying to understand human experience from the basis of human experience itself, not from models from physics or from physiology or biology, but sort of straight from direct experience and to sort

of make a great leap already into the connections with philosophy. I think the original phenomenologist and phenomenological psychologist was the Buddha of all people. And this was, you know, the West didn't have something called psychology until about the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The Buddha spelled out two thousand and five hundred years ago a very comprehensive, sophisticated psychology of everyday life. And so the other person who is much closer to home for us, who is I think also

a phenomenological philosopher and psychologist, is Nietzsche. So to make sort of a kind of a long journey long story short, I went from Freud and company, you know, Young and Helen, to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche I went to, of all people, the Buddha, and from the Buddha I eventually ended up with a Taoist, you know us, first Confucius, and then a Laudza who is very well known in the West, and then someone who's not at all known in the West,

which is a philosopher who came a couple of generations after Laudze. And his name is Zwangzhu, and he's a very, at least when you first encounter him, very bizarre sounding guy. Like all these these ancient Chinese philosophers, they operate in a very different way from the way we do. You know, we are essentially Greeks by origin in philosophy, and we became you know, first you were Greek philosophers, then we became European philosophers, and then on top of that we

became Christian philosophers. And it's all very discursive. You know, one thing follows from another, one thing argues for another from another, and the Chinese are very different in style, and that takes some serious getting used to. They'll start with a little anecdote to figure off. Let's say two men fishing in the river and they have a conversation that is no more than one page long, and you go,

what so, it takes quite some introduction. But once you get past that, and you need help getting past that, you know, help from from western skul of uh Chinese philosophy, then you begin to see, like some very bizarre and shocking things, Like one of the things you discovered is this Chinese philosopher Zumangzhu. He is, in more than just one way, a kind of a Nietzschean philosopher before Nietzsche,

two five hundred years before Nietzsche. And you go, what so, once you begin to see these connections, that opens up a world so wide and the windows so wide that it is just unbelievable. And so that's that's the that's that's the the ground that I plow, so to speak, you know, the area that I work in. And so my last book, which is called a Minimalist ethic, a minimalist ethic for everyday life. It is, it's it goes.

It starts with Socrates and it ends up all the way with the Chinese, and it includes things like the celebration of the Sabbath and and and Buddhism and Taoism and what have you. And you begin to see I I am. Originally I was sort of an academic type, but I got away from academia and being a practicing psychologist, I had to learn to talk the language of people with whom I said, need to need so to speak. That's very different from it. It's very different from an

academic audience. And so I write for that audience. And this last little book is my shortest, but I think my best and actually most important and most original book, which is that that minimalist ethic from for everyday life. I don't know if you're familiar with somebody named it's a Scottish person, Ian McGilchrist.

The more important part is that the left brain and the right brain they're sort of phenomenologically different. They do different functions. The left brain is more the analytic, rational, focused, scientific, argumentative, logical kind of approach to things. It's the thing that with which we focus our attention on something that's right under our nose, you know, like under the microscope. The right brain knowledge has to do with a more comprehensive

knowledge of the entire world around. It's not so focused on one specific thing or and it's sort of more comprehensive in the sense that it involves like intuitive ways of knowing, in the effective importance of the elements of knowing and so on. And these two brain hemispheres they work together. You can't be if your one side of your brain is seriously damaged, and then one side of your personality so to speak, is damaged as well, doesn't

function as well. So his critique being a neurophysiologist, which I am not at all. I'm like the Buddha, you know, the Buddha never heard of the brain, so to speak, but he did very well for himself. Nonetheless, you know, he wasn't a scientific researcher, but he came up with this fantastic, fantastically sophisticated psychology. This guy, Ian McGilchrist would

absolutely worth checking out. He sort of argues that our culture, largely since the Enlightenment, has focused has has sort of given the rain of governing our lives and our decisions and whatever to the more left brain part of our person. And again, you can't be too literal or too simplistic about these things, because these these two brain hemispheres, they overlap, they work together, they compensate for each other, and what

have you. But anyway, his argument is, and there's no argument, no arguing with that argument, that ever since the Enlightenment, we've become like super weighted on the side of rationalism scientism. Religion is out the window. Religious experiences, bull religious dogmas, certainty out of the window, you know, introspection, you can't rely on it. Really, So it's behavioral science is what we want. And that's how a psychology is how we got where we are too, because all of science is

sort of in that sense. And his argument, and it is mine, well, although I commented very differently, and I ad I skipped the brain altogether, so to speak. But his argument is that the whole person we need to develop the right side of existence more. That's why I think so many people are into yoga and meditation and spirituality and and uh earth, you know, earth awareness and so on. That's that's more right, brain kind of stuff. It's funny here I am talking about McGilchrist's book instead

of my own. But the point is that we end up in the same place. And I actually recently wrote to him and I hope that I'll hear back from him, is that, you know, we both end up with what he calls and what I also call religious experience, direct religious experience, you which is different from religion. Hume has a fantastic line which says, religion is a defense against

religious experience. You know, religion is the stuff handled with left brain materials, you know, Catholic theologian arguments and you will believe this and dogma in whatever. That's a defense against the directness of phenomenological experience because you know, very few of us are really interested in religious dogma, but all of us are interested in what we might call

religious experience. And that doesn't have to be something fantastic, great, you know, something biblical, although you know, biblical literature, of course, is full of the material of religious experience. You know, like people allow Dawkins and whatever who poo pooh religion. I think they're missing the boat entirely. They they think that religions is about gods. You know, like these supernatural things which are easy to to do away with, you know,

with some clever, you know arguments. But the point of real religion, a real religious study, is not it's not about God, it's about who we are. It's about humans. Religion is about what it is like to be human. And so these people they forget that day sort of, you know, Dawkins, you know, they they think they do away with religious religious dogma, and they have thereby done away with all of religious tradition and religious experience, which

is of course not true. And so my book ends up the little one, you know, the medal, the minimalists, I think in everyday life ends up in the with with with the Sabbath. I'm not Jewish. You don't have to be you don't have to be Jewish, you don't even have to be religious to really get the idea of what the Sabbath is, you know, in the mythology of Judeo Christian tradition, in Genesis, the Book of Creation,

you know. And again you don't have to believe these things, but they nonetheless they say something about something, and what you hear them say depends largely on how you tend to listen. And so in any case, we all know, we all grew up learning that it took God six days to create the universe and the world, and then he saw that it was all good, very good. And then on the seventh day, what does he do? Nothing? Now he leaves at the west then and we do a pretty good job. So he rests and he says,

you know, it's all good, it's very good. And I think the Sabbath is that capacity to rest, to come to a place rest in your own life after all the week, the week of the kind of work that you do, and you come to a Sunday or a rest day, or a day on the golf course or whatever it may be, mountain climbing, where you reach a point where you say, ah, this is what it's all about. You know, some an experience that that that adds to the usual. You know, you can have good food on

a daily basis, but that does not really satisfy. There are a few things in our life that satisfy us, and the Sabbath is one of those. And that's God's invention. And again I'm not a religious person. I'll talk about Einstein about that, but I've lost my train of thought here that also comes.

pretty good, you know, amazing. And that's what celebrating or keeping the Sabbath, as they put it, is about that. It's about finding ways through ritual behavior or through any other behavior. Buddhists do it through meditation. They reach that point of shedding all their usual thoughts, you know, and

coming to a place of profound peace. Not peace after war, not peace when you make up with your spouse, but a piece that is that income is the whole world, and that is what the Sabbath is, and that is what meditation aims at, you know, similar to God, the creator. There's the legend of the Buddha. Has it that when he reached the enlightenment, you know, he had been meditating for six years and then one day he wasn't getting where he wanted to get. One day he decided, I'm

not leaving this seat here until until I'm enlightened. And guess what he got enlightened haliloja. And so what happened after that is he took I think it's seventy four days forty seven days of complete rest. He didn't do anything, and he said, everything has done nothing else needs to be done. That's the same thing that God said on the seventh day. Everything has good, everything has done nothing else. We don't need to worry about anything else that has

to be done. And that's the kind of experience that all of us are capable of in the smallest ways perhaps, but the essential dimension is the same. You know, Like one time I wrote that in one of my books, I think, or in two. Well, one day I fell in love with a paper clip. Excuse me, Yes, I did some moment where all of a sudden the paper clip struck me. I wasn't just using it, although I needed a paper clip or whatever. But when I reached for the paper clip, it struck me as a wonderfully

miraculous little thing. What an invention it, what a humble job it does, but how well he does it? And I didn't think all those words with it. When you start adding words to your experience, you're done. You know your experience done. That's sort of like trying to explain a poem. If you have to explain a poem, you've

lost a poem. And the same thing with my paper clip, And distinctly remember that day when I fell in love with that darn little paper clip, And so small things like that, A moment of quiet, of like real silence can do the same thing, and.

The best career in the world, the best fortune in the world, the best test line in the world, the best wife. You know, none of it is going to make you happy. That's a realization you have to make, and a lot of us don't make that until we're like in the middle of our life. You know, when you're young, you think, oh, you're going to do it. It's sort of like it applies to other people, but

not to me. You know. One popular teacher of Buddhist teachings, he was at a conference and he talked about that, and he said, you know, we have to start here with the idea that life is sort of unsatisfactory as they also call it, instead of suffering, you know. And he said, well, there will be some people here who say will say, well, yeah, that applies to most people maybe, but not for me. I just got a new girlfriend. I'm as happy as one can get. And he said,

I'll see you next year, you know. But it is true. So I did write a book about that, the Necessity of Unhappiness, and it talks about you unhappiness of four figures, first the Buddha, secondly Nietzschee, who also realized that he as a philosopher, he noticed that everybody was after truth, you know, all traditional Western philosopher daring the truth. He says, one not other tru one not rather untruth or even

illusion or something else. And he said, the basis, you know, we have to start with the fact that existence is very tough, very hard. It's difficult. It is you know, it's suffering, you know, and we're not made for this sort of you know, one day we'll have land, the perfect job will be happily. Ever after no, he said, you know, happiness is Unhappiness is necessary. And I have a third figure, which is the Book of Job, from

the biblical figure of the Book of Job. Also he I don't know if you listeners are familiar, but Job is sort of a saintly figured like a real good.

He burns down his holdings, he kills all his workers, and he kills all his children, and you know, when there's nothing left to take away from him, he inflicts him with boils that are untreatable, incurable. But at the same time he won't let him die or commit suicide. So he's stuck there, you know. And so he goes from being the most devoted person you know, to being the most blasphemous person more than nietzs you and Nietzsche.

Everybody knows God is dead. We have murdered him. That is niets you he's famous or from his line, Job does some he says something far more blasphemous. He says, once he really can't handle his suffering anymore, he gets enraged and he yells out. He says, goddamn, the day I was born, let it never have been If you look carefully at that is goddamned today I was born. Let it not have been. Let it never have been.

That is sort of a counter creation myth, you know, wishing not to have been created, which of course none of us can do. If you're wishing not to have been created, you too late, because you're already fully involved in life. If you you say you wish you know, I wish you had died at birth, too late again, because you're, you know, by the time you realize that you're you're you're too old, you know, to be dying in her as a baby, and and so on. And so Job goes through all these faces, and each of

those makes him feel even worse. And so he says, God, damn the day I was born. And then he goes on blaspheming so called blasts feaming. I don't think it's blest feeming at all. And actually, at the end of the book of Job, God himself comes out and he says to Job, you have spoken the truth about me and your friends who said you must have done something wrong, otherwise God wouldn't have punished you. They were absolutely wrong. So God sides with Job. And so what Job does.

Then what God does is he gives them like a panoramic overview of all of creation. He says, look around, you know, bird feathers, the wind, you know, seasons. How does the cow know when it's time to have her calf? Where is the wind when it doesn't blow? Who tells you? Who calls the lightning for you? And Job is sort of it's some people describe that's one of some of

the best nature literature ever written. And so after that, God, you know, these are all things we can see it on an everyday basis, all of us, you know, even on the worst day of our lives, just as it was the case for Job. And when he sees that and he remembers, yeah, he realizes, yes, it is true. This is this is amazing stuff that we're born into.

And then he becomes silent. He stops complaining, stops swearing, stops complaining, and he says, you know, I've heard of you with my ears, but now I've seen you directly. So what he has seen is nothing but things that we can see on an everyday basis, the wind, trees, leaves, you know, on trees, and so on. So that's the third figure in that book on the necessity of unhappiness.

Is the figure of Job, because then the book ends by saying and Job then lived content for the rest of his life, which is like one hundred and fifty years or something like that, and he died content deeply content.

one of the few who ends up dying content. And then the fourth figure in my book on the necessity of unhappiness is The Catcher in the Rye, which is a very famous American novel. It's a superbly well written novel. If you ever have a chance, it's an easy read. It's written. It came out in nineteen fifty or thereabouts. You know. The Catcher in the Eye very one of

the best novels of that century. And it describes a young man, an adolescent, you know, who has been already kicked out of three prep schools, and he's about to be expelled from the fourth, you know, like adolescent going downhill, you know, pure and simple. And he also he's the most wretchedly unhappy adolescent you can imagine. But it is so beautifully written that it speaks to you, you know, like you. And he also has to go through all his misery before he can come to the end and

begins to see like something turn around. You know. He's alienated everybody, he's pissed off everybody. He has no friends, he's drifting, he's totally desperate. And then he sits in a psychiatrist's office at the end and he starts telling his story. And that's the whole book, is the telling

of his story. And then at the end he says heribed after he has described a scene where he has some kind of argument with his friends in school, high school or whatever, and he makes this amazing discovery and it's very easy to read over it. He says, it's funny. He says, don't ever tell anybody anything, because if you do, you start missing everybody. And this comes from the mouth of the most cynical, you know, sharpest tongued adolescent you've

ever read about. And he says at the end, it's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything, because if you do, you start missing everybody. So something has melted, you know. And it's just like the one line is the beginning of the turnaround for him, just like it is for Job. You know, you have to read thirty seven of the forty two books of Job before you the turnaround begins,

you know. And the same thing with the Buddha. Six years of meditation, after multiple many, many endless rebirds, you know, and six years of meditation, and then finally it's like bang, you know, and then he says, nothing else needs to be done. Everything is done. Six days of creation, artwork, you know, serious business. And then there's a seventh day. Oh, this is beautiful. That's where psychology, I think, has to go, and that's where my writing goes, and that's where McGilchrist goes.

And again I'm putting in plugs for McGilchrist. It's almost funny.

it is also Yeah, absolutely it's radical acceptance. It's calls it a more fattyue love, more fat love of fake love of everything that has been, everything that is, and everything that will be, and that is.

your your mind is. Eventually you discover that your mind is not your mind, it's not your property, but it's sort of mind playing itself out in this space of life that we call me. You know, I'm you know, you're in Melbourne, but you're also in a different way

in your own life. And I'm in Massachusetts, but I'm also in a in a space that is not geographic, but that is sort of the all the stuff, all the place where all my all my Dan Chapelle stuff happens, you know, and yours is where all your pall stuff happens, you know, and it is it requires there are different levels of different ways of understanding. First of all, if you study Nietzsche, it's important to understand that this is

an essential that is essential part of Nietzsche. It's aphorism two seventy six of his book The Gay Science, where he spells that out. And you can actually sum up Nietzsche in three aphorisms if you like. The First one is aphorism three hundred and forty one from from well The Gay Science, Aphorism three forty one, Aphorism two seventy eight, also from The Gay Science, and then section fifty six from his book called Beyond Good and Evil and Beyond Good and Evil fifty six is a boy I haven't

been in that place. I haven't visited this area of my writing and thinking in a while, but you brought it up because of your awareness that almorphati is such an important point, you know. Section fifty six and beyond good and evil is a place where Nietzschee talks about discovering that all the things you thought were actually bad in your life were They were not at all bad.

They were just who what your life is. And it has to do with one thing that coming to a point where you can see that, hey, this is good, like seventh Day, you know, kind of this is good, this is very good. Where your life, even the ship in your life is good, very good. You find the same idea in Saint Augustine, who says somewhere he has a prayer in his confessions, and he says, and again, you don't have to be religious for these things to

make any sense for you. But he says to his he prays to his God, and he says, in your creation, in your in what you've done or whatever, there's some things which we human beings think think are good, and some things which we think are not so good, but totalent, but the totality of all things is even better than the best of the good things. So it's a kind of an amorphattigue, is the totality of things, the acceptance the way things are. We don't have to make them good,

they already are, you know. And this this.

And so so talk to us a little bit about that, because this is kind of central to all of this, right, is that that amorphatty, that understanding that that that stuff is neither good or bad.

And so that's meditation is a long, long approach, and there's no better approach to this then meditation, I think if you want to approach it on an experiential, really lived level, not just intellectual stuff to talk about, not academic lectures to talk about behind the podium. I don't

do podiums, you know. I sit with people, need to need, as I said, you know, and my language isn't always you know, kouth maybe I think that's the word in English, right, yes, But my language is everyday language, which is a very fine language, I'll have you know, because that's where we suffered, that's how we suffer, that's how we fight with our spouses or lovers or whatever, you know. So it's a

very good language. And the Buddha, the Buddha too spoke a very vernacular language, whatever it was that he spoke because he was always talking about images from nature from you know, he lived in an agricultural culture and he had images of that all over the place. So he was not an academic standing up behind the podium either. And so I figured, if it's good enough for the budd it's probably good enough for the rest of us.

But so meditation is something I have. My two favorite books are the little one that I mentioned already, which is a minimalist ethic for everyday life, and the one, the practical one about meditative self care, which is also the name of the website meditative self care dot com. That's where we make our get our hands dirty, why sticking them in our own experiences, you know, in our own see how our own minds work and so on.

So those two books for people who are listening who might be interested in, you know, what do I do now or is there something I can do? Those two little books, they're both very cheap.

And yes, indeed, meditation starts with attention, learning to to tame your attention. You know, like the meditators, the Buddhist they talk about monkey mind. You know, like our minds. We all have sort of adhdal. You know, our minds are like monkeys, jumping from one thing to another. And the first thing you learned to do in meditation is to to train the mind to stay put on You say, I'm going to focus on that, put my attention on this and keep it there. That's how you started meditation.

And then the second what happens is you learn I can't do that in my mind jumps to something else all the time. And they said, aha, look what you're learning. What your mind is doing. You got monkey mind. We all have monkey mind. And so meditation begins with bringing attention back again and again and again to the topic on which you placed it or want to place it. So and then also you begin to you begin to see what else your mind is always doing, is bringing

up stuff, and you're chasing after your mind. Another little story or analogy that they use in the Buddhist us, they say is attention is like if you throw a stick in front of a dog, the dog chases after the stick, and you know, keep chasing after it, says. But on the other hand, if you what they call the lion gaze as opposed to the dog's chasing, the lion gaze is if you throw a stick in front of the lion, the lion looks at the origin of

the stick, but doesn't run after the stick. And this is sort of like you develop the lion's gaze by you watch your mind and you see things coming up, but you don't chase after all of them. You watch that mind, you know, kicking up, throwing up all kinds of sticks, and you don't run after them. That's the beginning of meditations, and.

Their attention is future focused, and there's strong concern about the future. But the whether attention is absolutely key to their pathology.

the universe revolves around me exactly. So we suffer from who we think we are. And as you become more aware by paying more attention to how your mind works, you catch yourself at your irritability and at your whatever, your hostility, and you begin to see, Jesus, I'm a horrible person. Well you're not a horrible person. You're just a regular guy, you know. But this is how our minds work, and this is how it produces our unhappiness.

Because if you think you're going to you're special. You're going to be very disappointed because you know, so we suffer from who we think we are, and we're always thinking with somebody. It's not just like one thing. I am professor so and so, well you're that, Yeah, sure everybody can see that, but you see many other things.

You know, you're an old letcher who's drooling over all your young female students or something, you know, and you're you're and at home you're like a you know, a door mat, you know, and and you're afraid of your children so you avoid them. You know, you're all those things as well. You know. So we suffer from who we think we are. That's the core issue of the Meditative Self Care book. So if you put those two together, then I think you cover all the bases. You know. So, but attention that.

we experience. And you know, it has to do with becoming more aware on a moment to moment basis of all your intentions. You know, like if you find yourself drooling again over this young female student in your classroom, catch yourself at that and see where that leads you. It's going to disappoint you because you're an old geezer. You have no business chasing after young women, you know, and so your karma is going to be that they're going to laugh at you. That's not something that is

regulated by the stars or the heavens. It's just your own psychology. If you act like a in a pretentious manner. People are going to take a distance from you, you know, because you're a cold person, cold fish or something like that. And so that's all it is. That sounds very simple. The point of it is it has to do with becoming aware of intention. You know, you say attention is the most important thing. Attention and intention. Attention is where

you put your your consciousness. Intention is where do you want to go from here? You know you want to cut off, you want to cut off the guy in front of you, or you want to get even with the guy who cut you off in traffic, or you know, that's intention. And you know if you're the guy, if you want to get even with the guy in the car next to you, you're an angry guy yourself, and guess what you're going to experience. You're going to experience a lot of anger. Don't be surprised if you do.

That's karma and which is completely perfectly understandable as is the result of your intention. Karma means the word karmen sounds great. Karma means action. Doing Karma is simply what you do, what you know, your intention in what you do, and and what you the price you pay for that intention. If you isolate yourself from people, you're going to be a lonely person. You know, if you're if you're above people, you know, they're not going to come and comfort you

when you need it. Um, that's that's very simple. Karma. Well, it gets I mean it gets complicated also, of course, but it is it's a very down to earth you know. The Buddhists say, we think that karma is maybe a part of your life. The Buddhas said, no, Karma isn't part of your life. Karma is your whole life, everything you do, from moment to moments. You know, it's a very typical Buddhist expression, from moment to moment because nothing ever stays the same. You don't ever stay the same

for two moments in rome and everything. What happens is what shifts is your intention. Your attention shifts and your intentionship and your intention is going to point to where you're going to end up. You know.

tried it? It is way harder than we mortals can actually do, because there's so many more negative emotions that we have and impulses and whatever. So there's a Chinese philosopher Confusions. Instead of saying love your neighbor as yourself, he says, don't do to other people what you don't want done to yourself. That sounds like the same thing, except formulated differently. One in a positive fashion, but you must do the other in negative. What you shouldn't do

what you don't do. And actually, in reality, it is easier to avoid doing something than it is to positively do something. It's easier to you know, none of us can generate loving feelings all the time. I certainly can't, you know, we spend our whole life trying those of us who try a little bit, you know, but you can't. But what you we can always do is say no to ourselves. Don't do this, don't do what you just intended to do. And again that's where you know you

have to pay attention to your intention. Socrates said famously, I know I don't know anything except for one thing. The one thing I know is that I know nothing. And he wasn't being just humble, you know, or pretending to be humble. What he meant was he followed the dictates of what he calls his namon. His inner namon is you know the voice that talked to him, and the voice always told them, no, don't do this, don't

say that, don't believe that. And so I start with in my book with Socrates as a person who says, you first have to cultivate the doing no and saying no in leaving though, which means you have to get to a place where you tell yourself, well, I really don't know about this situation, instead of saying, oh I got my opinions about it. Every situation you mean that I don't know, Or you reach a point in your so called knowledge to where you can say, where you

can realize that you really don't understand it. You know. That's what he did with his audience with his students. You know, he always made him feel not so much dumb as he brought them to a point where they said, you're right, I really don't know what I'm talking about. And they were intelligent, well meaning persons, you know, and he wasn't just making fools of them. You have to come to a point of not knowing. That's where you start from. And the essential element in not knowing is

don't believe what you think. The psychologists also have discovered that in cor to behavior therapy. They say, don't believe everything you think. You know, you know, I think, I think like nobody's gonna love me. I'm not worth loving all this. Don't believe everything you think. The Buddhists go like a thousand miles further. They say, don't believe anything

you think. Talk about being radical, you know, and that's how you become aware of what you actually think, and then you can refrain from that thinking instead of chasing after it like the dog chacing after his stick. You know, you go like whoa I wasn't aware of that. I didn't know that I even thought that, even though I never really thought it in so many words or in English or in complete sentences. But in some level, some level, I really that's what I believed, you know. And then

you can do away with it. You can then go of it, which is the great the Buddha's great form of saying. No. You know, Socrates his dam and said, don't don't believe this, don't say that, don't do that. The Buddha said, let go of everything. Don't believe anything you think that, no attachment, right, No, exactly exactly. So I don't know how we got here to this point, but.

I started reading other religions and philosophy. That's or I in first encountered Buddhism and Stoic philosophy, and and then I got really interested in Daoism and at the same time had this interest in physics and quantum physics. And I remember reading a book called The doll with Physics or The tawas it's spelled The taw with Physics by.

He makes the distinction like the way that Jung does, between religious experience and religion. Einstein said, I am a deep religious, deeply religious non believer. I don't like that.

to just keep practicing these things. And I'm very happy with that. I have my moments and periods of doubt, no question about it. But I think if I didn't have any doubt, I would I would be suspicious of myself, you know, it's like, don't ever trust a priest who doesn't doubt you know, his priesthood. You know, they become louder and meaner, but not more kindly or compassionate or

more religious. But for me, it's it's it's a thing that continues and I am what I can say a good thing, a positive thing that I can say now is when I look back at my whole life. I was not born a happy camper. You know, you were born Irish in an Irish Catholic upbringing, being from Belgium. I'm much more aware of that than most Americans might be, and I appreciate all that I had my other my own sort of form of not being a happy camper. And so I've been searching for my whole life. Essentially.

I started off I mentioned in my teens, you know, when I discovered psychoanalysis and stuff like that. But like job, I can now say, I am large. I'm seventy three, I'm coming to the end of my life. I'm not too worried about that, and I feel like pretty content with the way, you know, like again that word content, which is not just sort of an everyday kind of experience, you know, like you can be content after a full meal, and you say I got a full belly, I'm content.

Well that's nice, but that's not the content I mean. And I know you know that. But it is all these things, you know, like the company that I have kept of all those people, some of whom I've mentioned here, has been a great company. You know. I'm not a social butterfly. I you know, don't have massive networks of friends and big family and stuff like that. But those are my people, so to speak, you know, all these

all these dead people, you know. And so I can say that I'm content if I keep practicing the stuff that I have learned, that I've learned to understand, that I've learned to talk about to some degree, and that I've written about so especially in the last in the two little books that I mentioned, those are the other books are They do their own job. But it's more like my first book was on Nietzsche and psychoanalysis. It's a you know, a pretty decent academic book, you know,

as those things go. But it's I consider it some sort of engineering work, like the engineer building the basement

of a building. You know, it's an engineering job, you know, scholarly engineering is what I thought of it, you know, whereas the last stuff is really conversational, and I've had some very positive reviews about the tone in which it has written, Like people can't believe that I was able to spell out these very difficult, sometimes complex, subtle issues in everyday language, and people go, yeah, of course, I know that. You know that has given me a great deal of pleasure.

But I remember, I think I was in my early twenties reading a book called Zen in the Art of Motorcycles inter you know that, you know, the one by Robert Persik, And there's a bit in there where he's talking about us trying to get to the top of the mountain and always looking for the top, And there.

a procademic of life. So tell us where people can go to access your books, and I know you've got some courses as well.

together in some fashion. But I think they're the most accessible. They're short, they're easy to read, and people who are not used to reading maybe challenging ideas or philosophy or whatever, they find themselves perfectly at home in those little books, even people who normally don't like that kind of stuff. You know, I have a brother, and older brother who

is totally different from me. He's very smart guy, he's got more in the mind of an engineer, and he's not at all interested in the things that interest me. But the two little books that I mentioned to you, he thought they were. He was very impressed with them, And I consider that the best compliment that could possibly get from someone who is naturally a critic of everything that I you know. So, yeah, so those two books and the website, you know, I will.