68: The Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human

have doctor Dan Siegel on the show. Dan is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, the founding co director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, and executive director of the Mind Sight Institute.

He's the author of multiple best selling books on mindfulness, development and neurobiology, and his most recent book, Mind, A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, offers a deep exploration of our mental lives as they emerge from the body, and our relations to each other and the world around us. Thanks for chatting with me today, Dan, Oh, what pleasure. Scott. I'm happy to be here with you. I'm just your book is. All of your books are absolutely fascinating and

really quite refreshing to read. You know, from a scientist, this very feeling, this very spiritual feeling of there's something, there's always I feel like you're always seeking for something more than just what's immediately observable by our numbers. Yeah. Well, there's so much about the mind, and this last book, Mind is a deep dive into that for sure. Yeah. So why did you write this book? You've written about the mind already in a lot of publications. Why what

was the impetus for this one? You know, with this one, I was really wanting to focus very specifically on the questions about who we are, what the mind is, even questions like where is mind? Or when does life occur? All these questions that you know, a journalist might ask as the what are called interrogatives, you know, who, what, why? Where?

Or when? How? And even to address the fundamental reality that we have an inner, subjective life that is both something we feel in everyday moments but also something that we share with each other when we tune into each other. So I wanted to really look at those questions. And

there's a really strange reality which was so weird. I just thought I should write a whole book on this reality, which is the word mind doesn't have a shared definition in any of the fields that explore the mind, and so this book really says, okay, can we actually have a shared view of what the mind is and then see how views from let's say, anthropology studying culture, or sociology study groups, or psychology studying our mind's experience of

memory and attention. Can we look at all those and combine them with things like neuroscience or even physics and study the nature of energy. So all that is in the book, and it's really a journey together with the reader looking at what the mind is. Yeah. I love how you set it up as a journey as well as an invitation. I really like that. You know, you're so right about the mind being lacking a consensus in any field of what that is. And sometimes I see

the mind use synonymously with self. And that's interesting too, that we sometimes use as synonymously. And you go and talk a lot about in your book about the relationship between mind and identity, right exactly, you know, and people sometimes make mind and self the same, and sometimes people make mind and brain the same. And when you see the self has something bigger than just the body, and certainly a lot of people would agree this self comes

from the mind. Then you start realizing, well, if the self includes our connections with each other, like right now between me and you Scott, or between our conversation and people who might listen to it. We connect to each other in these various forms of communication we have, so that if you say, well, myself is created in connection.

Im Forster said that as well, and we have this issue of looking at these connections as a source of our identity, then maybe the mind is not just restricted to the brain, as has been talked about for so many years, since times of Hippocrates twenty five hundred years ago. It's been said mind is only an output of what goes on in your head. So in the book, you know, I say, look, I know it's the accepted view that mind is basically what brain does. But maybe that's only

part of a much bigger story. And the reason I made the book a kind of journey between the reader and myself. As we go through these sets of questions of who we are, where are we? What is the mind? All that kind of a set of interrogative questions, what we do as a sort of a companion journey is look at what the reader's own experience is of mental life, both internally and interpersonally, and we look at the science

of what mental life may be about. And I share also my own journey of subjective explorations, just as a way of being present with the reader as shere he goes through their own journey of exploration. Good, I would like to talk a little bit about your own journey, if that's cool, Well, usually keep it private. I've written a book about it. I guess it's public. Yeah, I figure now that it's public. Now I want to know how long, Like, when did you first discover mindfulness meditation?

Let me start there, Well, mindfulness meditation is really pretty new in my life. I mean my wife Caroline Welch, who runs our mind Sight Institute here, she's been meditating for decades. But for me, I wasn't a meditator and you know, didn't really focus on mindfulness meditation until I wrote a book called Parenting from the Inside Out with Mary Hartzell, and we use the word or the phrase be mindful as a parent, meaning be conscientious and intentional

and aware of what you're doing as a parent. And parents who took our workshops and who read the book, said you know, when we're going to teach them to meditate. And you know, neither of us, Mary nor I was a meditator, and we were already saying things pretty wild, like relationship shape the brain. So you know, we didn't really want to be doing something that to us seemed kind of I hate to say this, but kind of out there. This is now, back in two thousand and three.

So you know, we said, what are you talking about? And they would say your book, and they show us the phrase be mindful, and we said, well, that's be conscientious. They said, no, let's be a meditator. And I said, well, what kind of meditation is that? And they looked at me like I was nuts, and they said, that's mindfulness meditation.

So around two thousand and four, I got invited to be at a conference with a fellow I had never met before, I didn't really know about, named John cabots In, and he had brought mindfulness into an application in the clinical setting. So I read his couple of books and you know, read a few papers that were at at that time. This is two thousand and four. We then met in two thousand and five at a meeting and you know you can hear the audio recording of that

thing that John and I did together. But Diane Ackermant, it is hilarious because I know nothing about meditation, but I did have some experience as an attachment researcher. And what I said to John on this panel, as I said, you know, I don't know anything about meditating, but your research was adults are basically identical to the research on

secure attachment. And you know, I'm not sure why a relationship that's secure between a baby and a parent would result in the same regulatory capacities developing as you get from doing this thing called mindfulness meditation, whatever that is. So John encouraged me to go get training in meditation, which I did with actually with him at a silent retreat for a week, and I wrote a book about

that experience called The Mindful Brain. And then John and I started teaching a bit together, and you know, it was really fascinating because I'm not a meditator by background, but I work in a field that looks at relationships, and it seemed to me mindfulness meditation was a kind of way you were making your relationship with yourself more secure, almost like transforming what for many people is kind of either neutrality or hostility to one that's more of a

compassionate way you might relate to your own best friend. It's almost like befriending yourself. So that's exactly what secure attachment is is where you realize you can rely on your caregiver and kind of relax into becoming the best you you can become, which I think is what mindfulness meditation done with compassion can really achieve. You know, I never thought of that link before, and it makes so

much sense when you bring that up. Yeah, yeah, so you're it's in a way like the interesting So you're you're secure. You know, you kind of trust your own experiences in your own thoughts, and you don't you're not as attached to them in an insecure, anxious, dependent way exactly. That's so cool. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I in a personal disclosure, I just finished my own

eight week MBSR course here at Penn wonderful. Yeah, with Michael Beam the pen mindfulness and noticed can resonate now with a lot of things you talk about in your book that I would not have before the course. Few I think it's interesting that I will say that becoming going through it and meditating does make me more of a caring, compassionate person, both towards myself and others. But it is kind of amazing that, like, why is that

the case? You know, like really like getting beneath the surface, because I mean, all I'm doing seemingly is sitting there for forty minutes a day and listening to my thoughts and becoming aware of my breath. Why is something like that, you know, why does that lead to compassion? It's fascinating to me. Yeah, Well, there's a couple ways of approaching that question. The first way would be on the surface and the way a lot of people describe it, which

I'm happy to try to articulate that view. And the second would be a kind of a deep dive, which I do in the Mind Book to address this question. You're asking, Scott and looking, you know, as best I can at what the science of that might be. So let's do the one that's often said, and there is a bit of a debate, just to start with the controversy that, you know, the word mindfulness itself doesn't have an absolutely accepted definition in the world of research, so

we generally mean, you know, from the word meditation. Meditation simply means a training of the mind. So when it's mindfulness meditation, then you're learning to train the mind to be mindful. Then you have to say, well, okay, that's fine, but what does that mean. So some people would say it's a way of strengthening attention so you can then open the mind up to be sensing whatever is arising as it arises. So it has two parts to it.

It's paying attention with more stability, and then it's creating a receptive state that you know, John kevins In would say is not judgmental. Jack Cornfield and Trudy Goodman Cornfield would call it basically a kind of loving awareness. Seana Shapiro might call it kind attention. I love the term kindfulness. I think that's an awesome phrase. I'd before that's cool. Yeah, is that nice? And you know, so in each of

these views you've got receptivity and acceptance. You've got in some views not all, you've got a kind regard, a compassionate stance towards the self and others other people. And this is the controversial part. Don't see mindfulness in this way. They actually see it as an attention training practice, which

is cool, it's good. Like we did a study at UCLA where we got people with attention deficit disorder, you know, to hugely increase their capacity to pay attention, sustain attention, and not get distracted better than you would get from any medication anyone has ever discovered. So that was kind of an awesome discovery of this, you know. So people would say yes, of course, because mindfulness is an attention

training practice. But if you return to what I said at first, it's got the two components attention training and a kind of state of awareness which is different from attention that has this kindness to it, this love to its compassion to it. And so those are two different views.

And I share this with you because some compassion researchers of various backgrounds would tell you that mindfulness is not enough that you need to add compassion training, whereas other people would say no, no, no, mindfulness is by the very nature of how we teach it compassion training. So I just want you and your pod listeners to realize that in the literature now there's a bit of a tension between is mindfulness enough and I think the term

kindfulness kind of gets around that. It's like it's mindful and kind at the same time. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, you know, so this is just something to put out there. Now you can ask me, well, what do I think is the deeper mechanism of it? And the short version of the surface one is you know, what you train gets you stronger because you know, neurons and fire together, wire together. There's another phrase basically where

attention goes, neural firing flows and neural connection grows. And you know what that means is that when you do forty minutes a day of this stuff, you're changing your brain. So that's pretty amazing and pretty fantastic, and that's why you see a shift. Now I see mindless the way

I just describe it. Yes, but when you get to a deep, deep dive into what the mind is, you look at the mind as this is all in the book mind, you know, as this self organizing, emergent property of energy flow that's happening both within you and between you. So this is a way of saying that you're mental life is shaped by things that happen not just in your brain, but in your whole body, and not just in your body, but in your connections to other people

and nature and all sorts of interconnections we have. So in this view, optimal self organization is something you can look at which arises when things are differentiated and linked. So differentiated means allowed to be different linked means connecting them. So for me, my understanding from my own personal experience and as a science person, my understanding of how to see what you're saying, has got Why these kinds of

trainings alter the way we live is the following. We are creating an integrated state in our practice, so that what that means is you're differentiating the receptive awareness or the sense of knowing from that which is known. Like your thought is not your awareness of the thought, or your sense of the breath. The feeling of the air coming in and out at your nostrils is not the

awareness of the breath. So when you distinguish knowing from known, and we do this here at the Institute with something called the wheel of awareness, where we place the knowing in the hub, the known on the rim, and we systematically, you know, move this spoke of attention around. This is the practice I was doing before I ever heard of something called mindfulness meditation, but it was done to create integration of consciousness, to take the experience of consciousness and

differentiate and then link it. And people started getting better in all sorts of ways. They reduced anxiety or dysphory, or you know, they started getting a handle on post traumatic symptoms they are having and just having a sense of thriving. And you know, for me it may be a distorted view, but when I learned about mindless meditation,

to me, it was a profoundly integrative practice. And what I wondered about was could the differentiation of knowing from known also spread out to the brain, So would you see a more integrated brain. And the key thing about integration of the brain is you have different areas that become linked, and then the brain is able to participate in more optimal regulation of attention or emotion and mood,

thought behavior, interpersonal relationships, things like that. And then the reason I think, in terms of your questions, Scott, why we become more compassionate is number one, integration means compassion because what you're doing is you're differentiating me from you. But if you're suffering, then I want to link with you to help reduce your suffering. So ultimately integration made visible as kindness and compassion. So that's on the relational side.

From the deep energy side, you know, I just finished this study of these ten thousand folks who participated, and it's a long story but and it's in the book. But at the bottom line is you know, I think that when you look at what energy is, what mindfulness

meditation does, and what that receptive hub awareness represents. Is this what physicists call sea of potential, this kind of spacious openness that we can talk more about if you want, But basically from that spaciousness that you access with your forty minute day practice, I think it's the origin of love. Wow, you said so much interesting things I would understand really dive into what you mean by integration. You don't just

mean integration within our own system. You're really referring to a really getting outside of ourselves and integrating in a larger world and then ultimately the whole universe. I guess, so I really, yeah, yeah, I mean, if you that's a beautiful way of sitting back and saying, Wow, there are layers at which energy flow is arising, and if integrating it is well being, then I am a part of the larger universe. Yes, and yeah, exactly, you know it's fascinating. And then love, I mean, do you view

loves the same thing as compassion? Because I had doctor Keltner on my podcast and he differentiates between those two and I was wondering if you kind of view them synonymously. Well, I love Daker. I mean he's a buddy, and I think his work is absolute genius. It's fantastic. And you know we've talked about this. So yes, compassion and love, I completely agree with Daker. They're different kinds of entities.

I mean he also does these beautiful studies of awe and all compassion, love, these are all what Barb Frederson and I just wrote a chapter in a textbook for Paul Gilbert, which is a textbook all about compassion. And Paul asked us to write a chapter. So we individually, so we decided to do it together. And you know, Barb Fredrickson wrote a book called Love two point zero, right,

and she talks about this thing called positivity resonance. And so what you'll see in the chapter or in this workshop we did together basically the idea that if you apply the notion of integration. You're raising Scott here that integration is differentiating, allowing things to be different, and then linking them. So what I said to doctor Frederickson is this,

and I said this to Dakar too. In fact, the end of the Mind book is talking about both their work and both about love and about compassion as well as all. And then I show some photographs of this place that Dacker did this amazing study of all, which I can tell you about in a moment. Maybe he talked about it on the podcast, But the bottom line is,

here's what doctor Frederickson I talked about. If you view positive emotions like all, compassion, love as increases in integration, so they fits into what Bart Fredrickson has written about called the broaden and build view of positive emotions. You can look at what are called negative emotions as decreases in integration, like sadness and anger and fear and shame. And when you see these views of emotion as shifts in integration, then you can look at love and compassion together.

This is why I put them together and say these are states of higher integration. You can even put all in there. So on the broad view, I think compassion and love share this common ground of increasing integration. How when you love someone, you're honoring the differences and promoting deep close connections. When you're compassion with someone, you are honoring that that person's suffering. You yourself are not the

sufferer in the same way, so you're differentiating. But then you're reaching out to see as Paul Gilbert beautifully teaches us, how to figure out how to reduce their suffering. And in that let's say B is the person suffering as you trying to help. When an act of compassion is engaged, the A being separate from B shifts to A and

B becoming part of one interconnected system. And so the level of integration, what in math terms it's called the level of complexity, is raised with an active compassion, And in that sense we also get the level of integration raised with love. But we also get that level of integration raised with awe. So they're both sharing this similarity in my view of relational experiences that raise integration. But yes, they are distinct aspects of ways you can raise integration.

You want to have experiences of all like this morning, I took my dog for a walk in nature. Both well I can't speak for him, but for I speaking for myself, I was filled with awe. I was filled with you know, compassion for some problems that were happening in the world. And I was filled with you know, love of life and all this stuff. And I even felt connected to the community I'm part of. So I tweeted all this with some photographs that you can see. And then there was a quote on a bench from

a Cherokee view of the beauty of silence. So I took a picture of that was carved into a bench and anyway, you know, so there's all these ways we can have love, compassion off together, but they are distinct agree fascinating. Let's talk about personality differences. I mean, what do you make of people we label psychopaths? And there's been research trying to integrate mindfulness into prison and the evidence is still mixed on just how effective that is or even just you know, like I think of like

Steve Jobs, like he became I guess enlightened. You know, he went on this spiritual journey and he meditated, but you know a lot of people would say that he really wasn't didn't treat his coworkers terribly compassionately. So I don't know what do you make of I mean, what maybe you're just like a really nice guy. You know, you just have been your whole life, and mindfulness just takes all the clutter and fear and all the things that are blocking it out of the way. I mean,

and that's you. That's very interesting. You know, if you apply this view we're talking about about this what's called a probability distribution curve, that is, you know, this energy the way of describing energy from a physics point of view, and say, you know, the spaciousness you can achieve from this planet possibility to see a potential physicists call it is a spaciousness that has room for love and compassion

and awe and all that stuff, you know. And what it does is it lets you drop beneath these what are called plateaus and peaks of separate identity. Now, it may be and I'd have to look at the research that's been done and see what research might might be done in the future, but it may be that someone with not just psychopathology. You're talking about a psychopath right, correct.

So the way I was taught this in Skyatric training was, you know, a person who lacks a conscience has this inability to respect the life of another person, that there's just this way in which you don't see the importance and honoring of another person's subjective life, of their integrity,

their dignity, all these kinds of things. So of course actions then are done that you could call purely selfish, and if they're combined with you know, violence and hurting another person, we use the word a psychopath, or sometimes

the sociopath is used. And I know there's lots of different studies of that, and I'm not an expert in this, so this isn't an area I can talk about the research, but in the general notion, I think there can be and Jack Cornfield talks about this really powerfully about a spiritual bypass. There can be ways where people use mindfulness training, can even say they're enlightened or stuff like that, but their relationships are really filled with selfish acts that don't

reveal compassion at that person's core. And I think the reason Jack uses this term spiritual bypass is that sometimes what you find is there are some profound personal histories of pretty severe trauma that the individual is using mindfulness meditation to only be in quotes. This is a lot of quotes in the present moment to avoid reflecting on how they were hurt by important other people in their past.

They then become an attachment terms, you know, dominated by a strategy of adaptation, you know, to what they went through. But they're not reflecting on what they went through. So that strategy completely organizes how they interact with other people. It shapes as you're mentioning the word personality, it shapes their personality. And they're not very nice people, you know. And yet they can say they're masters at being in the present moment. But that's not actually what mindfulness is

all about. Only it's a part of it. And when people only focus on that, they can be very unpleasant, very interpersonally, not very well developed people if they had this bypass. Oh wow, that is so interesting that we can actually use mindfulness selfishly more, we can totally, we can become really self focused through it. And it depends. And this is the thing, Scott you mentioned earlier about

the self in the mind. This is another reason I wrote the book, because if you consider that the self is actually not just this kind of private, singular noun type thing that I have myself, and I want to accumulate things for myself. It's all about this self and this body, and this body lives about one hundred years and I'm going to do whatever I can for this body.

If you start realizing, and this is why I wrote the book the way I did with the experiences and the photos in the book, if you start literally experiencing a widening of that restricted sense of self to include other people, to include nature even, and this is where the sense of all comes in. Literally, the self expands. It doesn't disappear, it expands. And then we want to be careful about how we use words like it's just about the self, because for some people, this self is

the planet. So you go, I'm going to work hard to help the climate change issues, you know, not be so devastating. I'm going to recycle, I'm going to do all things because Earth is part of myself and so it is a selfish act then to clean up the garbage in the sense of myself is Earth. So it's a fun, you know, moment in our human family because we are faced with huge challenges of non integrated policy

and non integrated approaches of racism and exclusionary views. That are ramping around the planet, and so what we want to do then is I think lean on a scientific perspective on where we need to go as a human family, and integration takes you there, Because an integrative view of the self is not just something happened in your head, that's for sure, And the mind is more than what's in the head. The self is more than what's in the head, includes your whole body and includes your relationships

to other people on the planet. No, I definitely agree with that. What is this final line between you know, there is something that is in my that just is within the confines of my body. I take your point very valid, But there is something that I want, some potentialities that I think that only I can uniquely develop in this life that can contribute positively to the world. What is that fine balance between keeping an identity but also mastering that, you know, the Buddhist conception of non self.

To me, it's it's a it's a high wire act because I don't want to, you know, take it to the extreme of just integration. Then I sort of feel like, well, then what's the point of me waking up in the morning. I'm me as my I'm useless in my own in my own body, because I'm really just part of earth, or I am Earth, which you would say, obviously is not a good way to think about it. But it is a balancing act of self actualization versus self transcendence.

What is that, right? Right? So beautiful questions, Scott, thank you. So, integration is defined as elements of a system being differentiated. They're made different and honored for their uniqueness and really thriving on their uniqueness. But then they're linked. So let's look at what you're describing about the cel Someone who says I have no inner what I call it mindscape, like the inner landscape of your mental life. Let's just call that a mindscape, right, I have no mindscape. It's

all an illusion. It's all delusion. It's all ridiculous. There is no internal bodily experience of my feelings, my thoughts, my memories. They're nothing. And if I think there's something, I'm living in delusion. So that's a very common view actually among certain individuals. And it isn't allowing for a differentiation of your memory, your narrative. You are in terms of your internal life making sense of this internal mindscape if you will. If you take on that view, that's

all nothingness, it's meaningless, it's delusion. You're actually not participating in integration because you're not allowing that to be differentiated.

So already you've obliterated integration. If you, on the other hand, just say I am only what I think, I am only what i've experienced, and forget everyone else and forget the planet, then you're excessively differentiating this mindscape and you're not honoring the fact that you're a part of You know, if there's an atmosphere that's around us, there's a kind of mind sphere that we also participate in this interconnected mental set of lives we have, So you know, then

you're obliterating linkage in many ways. So you're also obliterating integration. So what would an integrated life be. Integrate Let's keep this in mind. It's more like a fruit salad than a smoothie. You know, you're not grinding everything up and obliterating any differences and just making a homogeneous, blended mixture, not at all. The thing that's absolutely crucial about integration is that you differentiate and you link, and the linkage

does not in any way reduce the differentiation. So does

that make sense? Yeah? I like that. Yeah. So here's what I say, you know, because I am a therapist and I have some patients who you know, ascribe to non dualistic views and tell me the self is an illusion and they shouldn't look at their history of what their parents did to them, and you know, their lives are actually, you know, pretty filled with suffering because they're so averse to just sitting within their own history, right because they see the present moment as some kind of

sanctuary and anything to memory or narrative is, in their view, just part of the dualistic delusion of things. So this has happened over and over again with patients. But here's what I've discovered is that that is a form of impaired integration. And when you have integration and paired, you tend to go to chaos or rigidity, and this is what can arise. So here's the thing about you waking up in the morning. You can wake up in the

morning and you can go Scott, good morning. You have a real differentiated inner mindscape that you can explore with a lot of fun and awe and appreciation. This inner mindscape, well, if you're lucky, it's going to last about one hundred years, and you get this hundred years to play with it. Not that time is real, but we do have clocks that are real, and you should really have deep gratitude and appreciation for the mindscape life you're able to have.

But if you believe, if you say to yourself that all you have is what's inside you, then you're missing the opportunity to actually differentiate the interconnected self that you have, where you're connected to people you care about. You're connected to people even you don't care about. You're connected to your enemies, You're connected to all human people all the planet, all non human people on the planet, all living beings.

You're connected to Earth. And you know this morning when I walked around this park with my dog and I saw the birds and they literally the squirrels running around and the trees and the wind was blowing and the clouds were there, and it's just this magical moment of going, WHOA, you know, this is us, you know. And there's this word that I use called wei. You know, me is the internal mindscape we have that's differentiated, and it's connected to an interconnected identity as a wei, so you don't

need to get rid of me. You can have both as a mui, you know, MWe. And that's how I felt this morning. And it's a beautiful way to live. And I think it's what the planet is waiting for us to embrace, because when you live as a we, you take care of Earth like you take care of yourself, because it is a part of your integrated self. Yeah, that's human kind. And it's the first time I ever looked at that word and realize kid is relate to capassion. Yeah,

well totally, you know. And the last section of the book, you know, human guind can we be both? You know, here's the beauty of it. All I think is that if we take kindness as our guide toward integration. Think about what life would be like if you were kind to your inner life, kind yourself, kind to other people you meet, and kind to Earth. What a world we would have that'ud be an integrated world. And yet we can do this, we really can't. Yeah, I agree, and

I love this this. I want to use the word positivity, but I feel like that doesn't fully capture what you're saying, because it is it's quite realistic, but it does require this certain layer of consciousness that you talk about. So in the last couple of minutes, I want to get really existential for a second. So this what are the implications of your thinking about the mind for death anxiety? A lot of people have existential terror, and you know

there's a whole few error management theory. Do you think your work could be useful for managing terror? Death? Terror? You know, I can tell you from my personal experience relating to this in my own life. You know, writing the book has changed my relationship toward death. That's important, that's huge, you know, yeah, really it was a big thing. And people have read the book share that with me too,

that it's changed their feelings about it. And you know, one thing that's come up a number of times because people asked me about interestingly, you know, how does this view of mind change your view of death? And I can say, you know, and I've said this before, but when my father was dying about four and a half years ago, now, he was a pretty staunch mechanical engineer,

didn't really believe in things, you know, beyond the mechanical. Really, he was getting very close to death, like it was going to happen that day, you know, when he asked what was going on? And I looked at his Bible signs and I said, yeah, Dad, you're dying, he'd asked me. And so we held hands and he said, where am I going? Yeah? And I said, you know, I don't know where you're going, and I don't know if anyone knows. But in you know, thirty years of practice as a therapist,

you know, no one's ever come to me. I said to him, worried about where they were before they were conceived. So he kind of looked to me, like, what are you talking about? And I didn't want to get him upset, you know, he as moments we had at our fathers in relationship. So I said, I mean, I said, but what if there's a chance that you're going to go to exactly the same place you were before you were conceived?

And he goes, well, where was that? So I said, well, one way to think about it is, before you were conceived, there was a sea of potential, of all possibilities, and one sperm and one egg. Of the gazillions of sperm and egg that could have gotten together, only one of each got together, and they made you the very unique

person that you are. And he smiled with that, and that was a good starting place, And I said, so, if you actually look deeply at consciousness and our mental lives, it looks like the actual experience of consciousness arises from this same sea of potential, and in terms of you, the sperm and egg arise from that they form you. You get about one hundred years to live on life.

But then after you've had the experience in this body, these actualities that have arisen from the sea of possibilities, this plain of possibilities, you know, the sea of potential, these actualities called your life. As they come to finishing up the one hundred years, you've got to play around with them. You know, you're going to melt back into that sea of potential possibly, which is exactly where you

were before you were received. Wow. And then that sea of potential that you were back to then eventually contributes to integration again. You know, you exactly won't be aware of it though, I mean this, this won't be aware of it. Whatever I have right now won't be aware of it. But exactly a new potentiality will be aware of it. Yeah. So he got a big smile on his face. He said, you know, thank you. That makes me feel very peaceful. And you know, I got to say,

you know, writing the book was after he passed. But you know, it's not just intellectual, you know, blathering, it's I deeply believe that we collectively are a part of this emergence of energy flow patterns, and that we do get this time in these bodies, and you know, and that we are a part of this deeply interconnected world, and that if we allow that to be differentiated, that we do have these inner bodily experiences, but we also

have this interconnected set of experiences. It just relaxes the fear and the worry and the concern so that you can actually become open to being a part of a much larger hole. And you know, as Daker would say, fill with awe. And this is something we can all help each other live while we're still in these bodies, but realize how deeply interconnected we all are. Man, great interview. I want to stop there because I don't think anything

else can top that. So Ok, thanks so much for chatting with me today, and thanks for the really awesome work you're doing. All some work you're doing. My pleasure and awesome work you're doing. To Scott, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott barrk Kauffman. I hope you found this episode just as

thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com