← B. Alan Wallace

B. Alan Wallace 2014 Public Talk Cultivating Cognitive Intelligence

B. Alan Wallace · 2014 · 1 h 35 min · Vajrayana Institute via Internet Archive

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  • 2:43

    But cognitive balance, and each of these entails a type of intelligence. So cognitive balance, cognitive is the faculty of desire and intention. So cognitive balance is overcoming excessive desire and intention, a deficit and dysfunctional. So that theme, too much, too little and dysfunctional, runs through all four of these. So the first one is desire and intention or conative, as in conation. Attentional, this is easy, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, there it is right there, deficit hyperactivity and then dysfunctional ways of attending.

  • 7:41

    So that's our basic framework. Just by the way, this framework of too much, too little and dysfunctional, that's right core to the traditional Tibetan medical tradition. when they deal with the basic constituents of the body too much too little dysfunctional that's their therapeutic matrix and the same is true for indian ayurvedic medicine so i was inspired by that then apply that to the mind so that was my little innovation okay and then the four aspects i introduced that too so the framework is fresh this is something i've conceived

  • 10:38

    It's that the deepest type of ignorance is ignorance of who we are, that we fail to recognize our ground, our deepest nature. It's called the... innate mind of clear light. It's called Buddha nature. It's called pristine awareness. It's called primordial consciousness. It's transcendent. And it's our deepest ground, our deepest identity.

  • 28:04

    I'm not silly. I know that there are cells and whole networks of cells. I know they're immensely complex, but let's not get carried away. It is chemicals and electricity. They have not a single trait in common with subjective experience. Thoughts, desires, emotions, dreams, none. When you introspectively monitor your own subjective experience, you don't see that they have a single physical characteristic, not one. They occur more or less at the same time, but we don't even know whether they occur simultaneously.

0:26 Good evening and welcome to Bajrayana Institute. It's delightful to welcome back Dr. Alan Wallace so soon after his August visit. Now for those of you who may not have heard Dr. Wallace before, he's a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, has taught Buddhist theory and meditation worldwide since 1976. Report an error

0:50 Having devoted 14 years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford. He is the president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. With his unique background, Dr. Wallace brings deep experience and applied skills to the challenge of integrating traditional Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world. Report an error

1:24 And tonight... Cultivating Cognitive Intelligence. Please welcome Dr. Alan Wallace. Report an error

1:37 Good evening. I find the topic for this evening to be of enormous interest and relevance, I think in any phase of history and in any part of the globe, but if anything even more so nowadays in our modern world. Report an error

1:54 For those of you who have attended the last couple of lectures I've given here over the last year or so, then you'll know that this theme of... Cognitive intelligence fits within a broader framework, so if we can go to the next slide you'll see what that is. Report an error

2:11 Some years ago I developed a model of four aspects of mental balance, which I found to have great explanatory value but also therapeutic value in understanding really the crucial elements of mental well-being and health and well-being. And so just very briefly for the framework for tonight, we'll focus right in on the third of these. So you see two have gone by and I guess next fall we'll probably go to the emotional or next winter. Report an error

2:43 But cognitive balance, and each of these entails a type of intelligence. So cognitive balance, cognitive is the faculty of desire and intention. So cognitive balance is overcoming excessive desire and intention, a deficit and dysfunctional. So that theme, too much, too little and dysfunctional, runs through all four of these. So the first one is desire and intention or conative, as in conation. Report an error

3:10 Attentional, this is easy, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, there it is right there, deficit hyperactivity and then dysfunctional ways of attending. So that's the second one. Cognitive, the same thing, and I'll explain that in much more detail, of course. And then finally, emotional balance, how one achieves such... Report an error

3:31 Types of balance is through development of the corresponding types of intelligence, so cognitive intelligence, attentional, cognitive, and then the very well-known emotional intelligence. Now, my working hypothesis here, having had many discussions on this theme, is that the entire bandwidth or spectrum of mental diseases, mental problems, from debilitating psychosis to very mild neurosis, all of them can be... Report an error

3:59 identified within this framework of course it's not just one or the other it's combinations of these as well The major point of this model is that there's also an utterly smooth spectrum from being mentally ill, mentally troubled, to moving on the positive side of the ledger, into developing exceptional mental health, exceptional mental well-being, all the way up to, in the Buddhist framework, all the way up to Buddhahood. Report an error

4:23 It is a smooth spectrum, an entirely smooth spectrum. And so the same matrix then, if you look at the classic Buddhist practices, they all fit into that matrix and then you start simply adopting these different methods of mindfulness, of compassion, the four immeasurables and so forth to carry you right on through from mental dysfunction all the way to enlightenment. Report an error

4:43 So we shall see, but this is being investigated by various people and I found it very useful. So indeed we move on to the central topic for tonight. Here it is. It's the same framework, so I'll spend very little time on this slide. Cognitive deficit. Cognitive deficit. Now, I think, I hope that you'll resonate with each of these, that you're not learning about something with which you have no experience whatsoever. Report an error

5:06 So see if any of these resonate with you. When are we experiencing a cognitive deficit? It's when we fail to perceive what is present within the six fields of experience. Well, this is simple. Within the six fields, there's something that's presenting it to us in plain sight and we don't notice it. Something is said to us. Report an error

5:25 And we don't hear it. And likewise for the other physical senses, but also events, thoughts, emotions, desires arise in the mind. They're there and we don't even notice it. So a cognitive deficit that some aspect of reality is presenting it to, it's just like my ten fingers facing right to you and you just, you don't get it. Report an error

5:45 How is that possible? It's something that reality could present itself and you just don't get it. How is that possible? Well, because you have a cognitive deficit. So that's pretty simple, isn't it? How could you not have heard what I said? I said it right in front of you. How can you say you didn't hear it? And well, then you can have an answer for that. Report an error

6:02 I was experiencing cognitive deficit. That just ends the conversation right there. Now see if this rings a bell. Cognitive hyperactivity, where we're engaging with some aspect of reality, but it's completely veiled by our own preconceptions, our projections, our assumptions, by transference, our conceptual... Report an error

6:26 Overlays on reality. So we don't see what's there because all we're seeing is the reflections of our own mind, of our preconceptions and so on. Does that ever happen? Report an error

6:36 Oh, a lot of them. Well, I certainly know what that's like. And then we don't distinguish. What's reality dishing up? And what are we projecting out? We conflate the two. Sometimes we only see what we're projecting. And then often it's an alloy. A little bit of reality is filtering through, but then it gets totally mixed up with our own preconceptions, projections and so forth, in which case we're just getting the mix and then we can't tell afterwards, wait a minute, what was I perceiving and what was I projecting? Report an error

7:13 Because in our experience they're completely mixed together. That's a problem. And the third one is cognitive dysfunction and it's basically simply... A furtherance or a kind of a combination of the preceding two. And that is, this is where we have simply a distorted perception of reality. That something is skewed. Report an error

7:33 We're just missing it. So it's delusional. So people who are literally delusional, who are psychotic, well, they'll have that to a disabling degree. So that's our basic framework. Just by the way, this framework of too much, too little and dysfunctional, that's right core to the traditional Tibetan medical tradition. Report an error

7:50 when they deal with the basic constituents of the body too much too little dysfunctional that's their therapeutic matrix and the same is true for indian ayurvedic medicine so i was inspired by that then apply that to the mind so that was my little innovation okay and then the four aspects i introduced that too so the framework is fresh this is something i've conceived So we move on. Report an error

8:18 As we address this, then many of you with a background in Buddhism, you'll know that in the Buddhist worldview, the root of suffering is ignorance and delusion. And everything else is derivative, craving, hostility, arrogance, jealousy, all types of unethical behavior, harmful, violent behavior, all stems from ignorance and delusion. Report an error

8:37 Fundamental, right? Then we can ask, though, what type of ignorance? Are there multiple dimensions of ignorance as well? And I'd like to provide a little framework because there are so many different approaches I could take to this topic tonight. I could think I could click off 12 just immediately, on the top of my head. Report an error

8:54 Utterly different ways of approaching this very, very deep topic that's relevant to every aspect of life, to education, to business, to government, to science, to everything. But I'm taking this particular approach for the following reason. If we look in traditional Buddhist accounts or explanations of ignorance, One that just came up recently, because I just finished leading an eight-week retreat in Phuket, Thailand, and it came up there, is there are said to be three dimensions of ignorance. Report an error

9:24 And when there's ignorance, there's bound to be delusion. We very rarely just stay with ignorance. We very, very rarely stay with the sense, I simply don't know. We don't like to linger there. We linger for a little while, and then I know. But often we don't. And that's where delusion comes in. In the first moment of a dream, most of us, we don't know what's going on. We don't know it's a dream. Report an error

9:55 Very quickly we get it figured out. This is real. And that's called a non-lucid dream. That's where delusion comes in. You're dreaming. You didn't know you were dreaming. But very quickly you went beyond ignorance to delusion. And you're thinking these are real people. That's a real situation. This is all objectively real. Report an error

10:13 And I'm really here. And you have no idea your lifespan is maybe five minutes. That's delusion. So within delusion, that's a good analogy right there for the bigger picture. The deepest type of delusion, and I'm speaking now just so you know to bracket this for those of you with a background in Buddhism, in Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, a school of Tibetan Buddhism that I have great faith in. Report an error

10:38 It's that the deepest type of ignorance is ignorance of who we are, that we fail to recognize our ground, our deepest nature. It's called the... innate mind of clear light. It's called Buddha nature. It's called pristine awareness. It's called primordial consciousness. It's transcendent. And it's our deepest ground, our deepest identity. Report an error

11:02 We fail to recognize that. So there's an ignorance, an unawareness of that. And then in that unawareness, we take ourselves very seriously within this life. I really am Alan Wallace with everything she said. Report an error

11:18 PhD from Stanford and all of that. That's why I really have a PhD from Stanford in all the story. You didn't mention I publish 40 books. Report an error

11:32 That's where the delusion comes in. Even though relatively speaking, yeah, that's true, whatever. But no, not just taking that as a relative. That's where I really am. Stanford PhD, 40 publications. That's where the delusion comes in. That's the root. That's the core. We could easily spend an evening or a month or a year on that. Report an error

11:51 That's the deepest one. But how do you probe to that level to even recognize that there is an ignorance there and there is a delusion there? Because it's not obvious. How do you get there? Well, we come up a level. We come up a level to what is called conate ignorance, conate unawareness. Conate simply means, as any medical doctor would know, conate as in birth. Report an error

12:14 We're born with it. There's a type of ignorance and then therefore delusion that we're born with. So you can't blame it on your parents. Report an error

12:21 Can't believe it on modernity, can't believe it on anybody else, you can't believe on it and you're just born with it. But the remarkable thing is although you're born with it, it can be dispelled. That's good news. And this cornage ignorance comes in different guises but the most important one is we grasp onto, to use the technical term, we reify. Report an error

12:41 We grasp onto ourselves, other people, the environment and pretty much everything we attend to as if it exists in and of itself. Its own globule, its own inherent existence, its own independent existence. We decontextualize everything. When we lock onto something and reify, we grab onto it as if it's substantially really there. Report an error

13:01 We don't see it in its rich nexus of causality. Grasp onto it, especially when we get upset. Especially when the mind becomes overcome by grasping, by craving, by addiction, by infatuation. We reify the object of our desire. And when we get really angry, Hateful, malevolent, we reify. This has happened all throughout history, check. Every time it happens, individual level, national level, global level, ethnic level, religious level, governmental, philosophical, whenever there's that, we always reify. Report an error

13:35 We reify ourselves as something self-existent, inherently existent, separate. We're born with that. It's an ignorance of knowing how we actually exist and then it's delusional. institutional and apprehending ourselves in a way we don't actually exist. We're born with that. How do we get to that level? That we recognize the ignorance, we recognize the delusion and therefore may be poised to apply the remedy by probing deeply into the nature of reality. Report an error

14:03 How do we get to that level? Well, you have to look at the surface level of ignorance because there's a surface level that is acquired. Now, if you want to blame your parents, you can blame their parents. You can blame the educational system. You can blame the United States. That's a big influence. And it's always such an easy punching bag. I know. If in doubt, it's probably America. Report an error

14:28 But it's stuff coming from our time and place in history. Racism, for example. Babies aren't born racist. You have to learn racism. You have to learn that women are inferior. That doesn't come naturally. You have to learn that delusion. It's very, very widespread. But you have to learn it. Little kids don't know that. Report an error

14:45 Somewhere along the line, they get it. Oh, women can't learn math. Oh, women can't be blah, blah, blah. This is delusional. It's ignorance and then it's delusion, but you'll learn it. But where I'm going tonight, I'm going for the big fish. We're living in modernity. Materialism is very, very strong. Report an error

15:04 So are other things. Religion in some ways is very strong. Many things are very strong. But who are we and what's the nature of the mind? That's what I want to tackle tonight. And I'm not going to go to the deepest level, down to primordial consciousness and Buddha nature. That would be a lot of fun. I like fun, but I'm not going to go for fun. To look into the inherent nature of the self, that's fascinating. Report an error

15:26 That would be scintillating. I'm not going to go there. I'm going to go up on top of the swamp to where we live right now. What you read when you read the media, when you read the New York Times, when you read any of the type of media here in Australia, all your major newspapers, the major news media. Report an error

15:44 We're all checking out the internet. I get virtually all my news from the internet. So what do you see when you go onto the internet? What do you see if you go to Scientific American or Nature or Science or Journal of American Medical Association, et cetera, et cetera, the top ones in science? What's the message? Well, of course, it's not uniform. There are many different scientists with different views. But there are some dominant messages. And that's what I'd like to look on tonight. Report an error

16:09 Because if one is stuck there, you'll not get to the deeper level. And if you don't get to the deeper level of Konade, you'll not get to the deepest one. So we have to take it from where we are and we're living on the surface. That's where we're living. So we have to address that, I think. And then see, is this ignorance? Is it delusion? Or am I ignorant and deluded? So we'll see. So the relationship, this is about our identity. Report an error

16:33 This is not something philosophical about somebody else. I have no interest in spectator philosophy, as if we're standing outside of reality and saying, hmm, I wonder what it's like. Human nature as if it's somebody else's problem. Whether we like it or not, to use a term from existential philosophy, we've been thrown here. And that's also a term from Buddhism. Report an error

16:54 of us can say, oh yeah, I chose to be born in Australia or Romania or America? Who can say, oh yeah, this is my decision. I was born in this family. I really thought it was a good family. I came in because I wanted The term throne, we've been propelled here. Somehow we got here. Don't know quite how, don't know how when, or when yes, but how and why, not so clear. But we are participants. That's one of the non-optionals. Report an error

17:22 We are participants. So for me, philosophy is always a matter of the heart. It's not an intellectual game. The stakes are too high. Our existence, our flourishing, our existence as a species may actually depend on it, and I think it does. And so here's William James. He is one of my heroes. He, writing more than a century ago, He addressed the unresolved mind-brain problem. It's a problem, it's a question. How do the two relate? The activities in the brain and our immediately experienced subjective experience. Report an error

17:53 That they are correlated was known back at his time and now we know, neuroscientists above all, know a lot more about those correlations. Brilliant technology, methods, theories. So they shed a bright light and it grows every single year. Specific functions of the hippocampus, the amygdala, the frontal cortex, the brain stem, and so on and so on. They're just learning more and more. It's brilliant science. And I simply celebrate that and applaud them for it. Report an error

18:20 The great growth there, it's called the soft problem or the easy problem by David Chalmers, a philosopher, and that is that there are correlations and finding more and more correlations. Electrically with a micro electrical stimulus, stimulate just a small ganglia of neurons and then see what happens. Report an error

18:37 Well, maybe a specific memory comes up. It happens, right? That's very interesting. So that particular little network of neurons, when they're activated, then a particular memory comes up. That's very interesting. Damage a very particular part of the brain and then suddenly you can't see horizontal lines, you know, or what have you. This is good science. Report an error

18:56 But now what's the nature of the relationship? That there are correlations is undisputed and nobody does this as well as the neuroscientists. It's brilliant. What's the nature of the relationship? Well, William James addressed this more than a century ago, as I said. And he said, well, maybe one possibility is the brain simply produces thoughts like an electrical circuit produces light. Report an error

19:16 That is, this is the thought generator. Just like that. So thoughts, emotions, dreams, hopes, fears, aspirations. The brain is the power plant and it just produces things. Just like the gallbladder produces bile. That's a possibility. That's one. But it's not the only one. This is one of the least dogmatic thinkers in the modern history. Report an error

19:36 He's really remarkable. And he was a physician. He started neuroscience in the United States. He was a psychologist. He was a philosopher and wrote one of the greatest classics on religious experience ever written. That's a pretty good bandwidth. Medical doctor to religious experience. Quite extraordinary. And he does everything without dogmatism. And I actually mean that. Report an error

19:57 He has no axe to grind, neither religious nor anti-religious. He's just a very inquisitive soul with a lot of creativity. So it considers, well, there's one possibility, but it's not the only one. Here's the second one. The brain enables or permits mental events as the trigger of a crossbow releases an arrow by removing the obstacle that holds the string. Report an error

20:16 So maybe the mind doesn't produce thoughts, it simply enables them to emerge. And if you damage parts of the brain, even the optic nerve, then you can't see anymore. Because that optic nerve, the connection between the eyeball back to the visual cortex, if you damage that, then visual perception is no longer enabled and you go blind. Just that one thing, then you go blind. Report an error

20:39 Images, colors, lights and so forth, they're not generated by the optic nerve or by particular neurons in the visual cortex, but if you damage them, then they're disabled. That's a possibility. You see, it's not the same as the first one. How about the third one? The brain transmits thoughts as a prism transmits light, refracting into a spectrum of colors. So maybe the source of thoughts, emotions, desires, hopes, fears, dreams, spiritual experiences, maybe they don't actually emerge from the brain at all. Report an error

21:10 Maybe, in fact, they are more transmitted through, configured by the brain rather than originating from the brain. Maybe it's not simply that they're enabled by the brain. Maybe their source is deeper than that. So looking at these three, these were his own three hypotheses. He said, you know, for everything we know about the mind and the brain, all three of these are viable hypotheses. Report an error

21:32 So the science doesn't determine which one of these. Maybe there's another one that's better. These are all completely compatible with everything that was known then about the mind and the brain. And that's still true. That's still true. All three of these could be true. So we have to leave options open, right? Report an error

21:52 We don't jump for a conclusion just because it's convenient. We go for a conclusion because there's compelling empirical evidence and a rational argument, right? That's what things should be. Now, let's see if we followed that open-mindedness of William James, who was neither religious nor was he a materialist. Neither one. Report an error

22:10 Now let's see where we go. So here's one possibility. And you'll find this now. Look at your own press. Look at the press here in New Zealand. Radio, television, internet. internet, newspapers, everything, how often now. don't think Australia is different from the UK, United States, and so forth. Look to see whether it's not true that the words mind and brain are now being used interchangeably, ubiquitously, if evidence is in. Report an error

22:40 mind actually is the brain. Even William James didn't come up with that one. He never even suggested maybe there's simply one and the same. But that too is a logical possibility. Maybe they're just the same thing viewed from different perspectives. Subjectively, it looks like thoughts, feelings, emotions. Look at the brain and you're seeing the same thing, but what you're seeing is neurons, glial cells, synapses, dendrites and so forth. Report an error

23:03 So this first came up, well not from B.F. Skinner, but he articulated, the great American behaviorist. He articulated as follows, to agree that what one feels or introspectively observes are conditions of one's own body as a step in the right direction. So he doesn't give any evidence or reasoning. He simply says this is a step in the right direction to think that the mind simply is a function of the body. That's what Aristotle believed. Report an error

23:26 So he's adopting Aristotle's view. But again, he doesn't give any evidence for that. It is a step toward an analysis both of seeing and of seeing that one sees in a purely physical terms. A purely physical terms means not subjective terms. It means in terms of behavior, brain activity and so forth. He doesn't say why once you go there. Report an error

23:46 He just simply said it's a good thing to do. This is important. Let's continue. After substituting brain for mind, well, again, he gives no evidence or reasoning. He just says, well, let's just do it and see what happens. After substituting brain for mind, we can then move on to substituting person for brain. Oh, now we solve the issue of human identity. You are a brain. Report an error

24:06 Or as the American neurologist Antonio Damasio says, you are a brain. A human being is a brain carrying a body on its back. So now we're just substituting brain. person for brain, okay, now you're a brain, and recast the analysis with the observed facts, but of course there were no observed facts here at all. were simply saying, wouldn't this be a good idea, let's do it. Report an error

24:27 He didn't cite any evidence or reasoning why we should equate that justifies equating mind with the brain and then a human being with the brain. No evidence and no reasoning. He just said this would be a good thing to do. If you're a behaviorist, it really empowers you. It disempowers everybody else, but that's their tough luck. Report an error

24:48 But now he adds this, enormously important, but what is felt or introspectively observed, which blows us out of the water, is not an important part of physiology. Of course it's not, because it's not part of physiology at all, which fills the temporal gap in the historical analysis. In other words, what he's doing here is he's marginalizing, if not completely banishing, introspection as a means to understanding the nature of mind and human identity. Report an error

25:17 Let's just throw that out. It's not scientific after all. It's subjective. And just leave it to the behaviorists and the neuroscientists and they'll tell you who you really are because your introspective observations are bound to be misleading. Now, there's no evidence for that and no reasoning. It's simply a strategy. It's like choosing chocolate ice cream over vanilla. They'll say, let's just do it. Report an error

25:40 Now, Christoph Koch, and I know him, he used to teach at Caltech and he invited me to their speak. I spent, this is the longest marathon conversation I've ever had. Literally. He and I and some other fellow faculty at Caltech and graduate students, we went from 11 o 'clock in the morning until 10 at night, non-stop. Report an error

26:04 And that included a two-hour lecture by me. It was enjoyable in a manner of speaking, rather like seeing how many hot dogs you can eat in an hour. Report an error

26:15 You might want to stop after a while, but you do like hot dogs. So Christoph Koch, who himself is, we had, as I said, a long conversation, a very amicable one. It was never combative. It was really always amicable, mutual respect. He invited me there, not to debate with me or to ridicule me as a Buddhist, but to have an interesting conversation, and we did, for 11 hours. Report an error

26:37 But he's looked at this, the flat-out equation, saying these two are actually the same thing, this whole array of subjective experience. You know what it is. You know what it's like. And then brain activity. He said, are they neuronal activity, subjective experience? Are they really? One and the same thing viewed from different perspectives, which is a very, very common view, with no evidence or reasoning behind it. It's just a choice, a preference. Report an error

27:04 The characters of brain states and a phenomenal states, that's your subjective experience, appear too different to be completely reducible to each other. This by a materialist and a world-class neuroscientist. He's now the scientific director of the Allen Institute for Brain Research. He got out of academia to, I'm sure, a much more lucrative job. Report an error

27:24 by Paul Allen, who is one of the two founders of Microsoft. Lots of spare cash. So he's up in Seattle now. But he's speaking common sense here. If you say that two things are identical, then you would expect they'd have at least some characteristic in common. Now, neuroscientists know a lot about the brain, the chemical constitution right down to molecular level, cellular level, global level. Report an error

27:51 They know that the brain consists only of chemicals and electricity. I mean, inside the skull, there's nothing besides chemical electricity. There's no mystical things in there. Report an error

28:01 none of the qualities of the chemicals and electricity. I'm not silly. I know that there are cells and whole networks of cells. I know they're immensely complex, but let's not get carried away. It is chemicals and electricity. They have not a single trait in common with subjective experience. Thoughts, desires, emotions, dreams, none. Report an error

28:21 When you introspectively monitor your own subjective experience, you don't see that they have a single physical characteristic, not one. They occur more or less at the same time, but we don't even know whether they occur simultaneously. It's hard to tell when you have some neuronal activity and that's subjective experience. Are they occurring exactly simultaneously, which would be necessary if they're identical? Report an error

28:42 Or is it a little bit of lag time, maybe 100 milliseconds or a tenth of a second? If it's a lag time, then you know it's a causal relationship, which means they're not identical at all. If they're simultaneous, then they could be, but wouldn't have to be, identical. But we don't know scientifically, so the evidence is not there. So he simply expresses a skepticism. Report an error

29:02 That's an interesting hypothesis, but number one, there's no evidence for it. And number two, there's a lot of counter-evidence. When you look at the brain, you see no subjective experience. When you look at subjective experience, you know nothing about the brain. So wouldn't that suggest maybe they're not the same thing? So no compelling evidence, but what you see in the press now. Report an error

29:21 That conclusion is now often presented as a scientific fact. The mind and brain, the two words are being used interchangeably. And moreover, look in the press, I read it every single day, when you want to know who's thinking your thoughts, what is experiencing your desires, what's planning, who's the agent? Report an error

29:40 Look, it's the brain. You just got displayed, you got fired. The press fired you. It used to be you, it used to be the mind. Look now, it's everywhere. The brain does this, the brain does that, the brain does this, the brain does that, and you're along for the ride. You as an individual, a human being, you're along for the ride, either as a non-entity or as an epiphenomenon or an illusion. Report an error

30:02 But the brain is the agent. Now how did that happen? Where's the evidence? The answer is that there isn't any. It just kind of slipped in, like somebody slipping LSD into your Kool-Aid. Report an error

30:15 Let's move on. Okay, now this one seems to make more sense. This is what William James was suggesting, right? The brain produces thoughts or thoughts, emotions and so forth. These are a function of the brain. Now that's more sensible, isn't it? That's more sensible. As Marvin Minsky, the very famous psychologist said, the mind is what the brain does. Report an error

30:35 Now that's very familiar. Many, many scientists say, well that's true, duh. So John Searle, for example, one of the two top philosophers of mind in the United States at University of California, Berkeley, he said there is a simple solution to the mind-body problem and this solution has been available to any educated person since serious work began on the brain nearly a century ago. Report an error

30:57 And in a sense, we all know it to be true. So he's saying, hey, William James, wake up. You have three options, only one of them is right. This is the first one. The mind is that every educated person knows. In other words, this is definitive. The evidence is in. This has been established. There's no more conversation here. If you're educated, then accepted. If you're not, get an education. And what is that? Report an error

31:17 Here it is. Mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain. Okay, that's what Aristotle said. That's what John Watson, who started behaviorism, that's what he said. That's what B.F. Skinner said. William James presented that as one of three options. Report an error

31:37 Now we should hold in mind that the patriarch of this, the original great propounder of this view is Aristotle. Radically unlike his teacher Plato and his teacher Socrates and going back to Pythagoras. It's good to know just for context that Aristotle, the brilliant Aristotle, the immensely creative Aristotle, when he addressed his tension, his brilliant intelligence to the brain, what is the function of the brain? Report an error

32:03 His answer was... Aristotle. Report an error

32:05 That the brain is actually a coolant system. It's an organ in the body to cool your body. And that's why human beings are more intelligent animals because we're not so hot-headed. Report an error

32:18 And so we're not overcome by our emotions so easily. And so that's what the brain is for. It basically is a refrigerator. So the same person that said the brain is a refrigerator is the same person that came up with this idea. You might want to look for context. There may be a problem. Now this is being presented as simply, duh. Report an error

32:41 You know, like, if you don't know that, what rock have been living under? I mean, look at the media, look, it's everywhere. The mind either is the brain or, okay, if you want to get, you know, nitsy-bitsy around it, okay, it's the function of the brain. But now let's just pause for a moment. Again, just pausing and noting that what's inside the skull is chemicals and electricity in extremely complex configurations. Report an error

33:00 No question about that. Well, the notion of one process being a function of a physical entity happens all over the universe. You know it in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, cosmology, astronomy. It's in every field of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, all the way through. You have a physical entity and it has a certain function. I mean, the cases of that are countless, right? I'll tell you something else that's equally true. Report an error

33:30 And there it is. All known functions of physical entities throughout the entire universe of every possible kind. Physics, chemistry, biology, for starters. All known functions of physical entities are themselves physical. Physical entities have physical functions. You can observe the physical entity and in doing so you can observe the function of that entity because the function itself is physical and when you observe the function of the physical entity you can observe the entity itself. Report an error

33:55 It's kind of like one of those duh moments, right? That the functions of physical entities are physical and you can see them simultaneously. The functions of a physical entity are physical which means they're measurable. You can observe them and when you observe them you're observing the entity of which they're the functions. Report an error

34:11 Now just think of, are there anything that we know where that's not true in the whole of the universe? Report an error

34:20 What's that? Dark matter they can't observe? But then the fact that they call it matter is basically a placeholder. Because all they know is that the universe is more coherent than they can explain in terms of known forces. And therefore the only thing they can imagine that could provide that extra gravitational pull would be matter. But that's a placeholder. Because they know nothing about it. Report an error

34:43 If they know nothing about it, they have no right to say it's matter. And they can't observe it. So maybe it's angels. Report an error

34:52 Because we also have dark energy. And dark energy, the universe is not only expanding, but the rate of acceleration is increasing. Right? Well, they don't know why that happens either. They have not a clue. And so what do they call that? Dark energy. So that's a possibility, but they don't know anything about it. Report an error

35:11 So the fact they called it energy is because they didn't know what else to call it. And so you can either go for dark energy or dark matter or you can go for seraphim and cherubim. We know equally little about both. And why couldn't it be non-physical? Who's to say? But if you're a physicist, you don't want a non-physical hypothesis. You have nothing to do with it. So they're going to say dark and hopefully one day they'll learn something about it. Report an error

35:35 But it's a mystery. That's why it's called dark. Dark means question mark. It's a very good point though. So there it is. So all known functions of physical entities are physical and therefore exhibit physical qualities that can be objectively measured. Now that's just a true statement for every known physical entity in the universe and its functions. Report an error

35:54 But that's not true when it comes to subjective experience. Observe your own subjective experience, the whole range of it. Dreams, emotions, desires, thoughts, memories, anything. They have no physical attributes whatsoever. Tell me the mass, the location. location, the magnetic force, the gravitational pull, momentum, the velocity. I mean, tell me a single physical trait of any of your subjective experiences, you directly observe it. Report an error

36:20 You find it has no physical properties at all. And now study the brain So therefore, Report an error

36:29 that's a wild hypothesis with absolutely no empirical support behind it at all. Surprise. Mental phenomena display no physical quality and cannot be objectively measured. So if you're going to say... observe a single subjective experience. Report an error

36:59 to go back to the drawing board and look at what William James said, there's no reasoning behind this, there's no evidence, nothing. It's just an opinion. But now John Searle and many, many others are presenting this as an unquestionable fact. That's fraudulent. It's really too bad when scientists do that. They shouldn't. This is sloppy. Among those three hypotheses, you should show evidence showing that one is preferable to another, but they haven't done that. Report an error

37:23 They've just gone for the easy one. Let's move on. So now the hard problem. The hard problem was very famously articulated by David Chalmers, who's right here in Australia, a world-class philosopher of mind. And what is this hard problem that he's quite renowned for? And he's not a materialist. He thinks that consciousness is actually fundamental to the nature of reality and not simply an emergent property of complex configurations of material phenomena. Report an error

37:53 So this is the sheer fact of our first-person immediate experience, often called as qualia, and its relationship, its relation to the brain. That's the real deal. There's these two realities, our subjective experience and brain. So what's the relationship? That's the hard problem. Okay? That's not bad, huh? Hard problem. The easy problem is that there are correlations. Enormous progress there. But over the last 135 years of the cognitive sciences, there's been no progress on this one at all. Report an error

38:23 They're no closer to a solution. And the reason for it is to think you already have one. It's called an illusion of knowledge. When you stop asking the question, you think you already have the answer. But you don't. You just have an opinion. That's too bad. That's not even bad science. That's pseudoscience. So... Report an error

38:40 Daniel Dennett addresses this question. He's one of the, with John Searle, he is the other leading philosopher of mind in the United States. There are a lot of them, but really these two are the most famous. And between the two of them, Daniel Dennett, probably more renowned and more widely embraced by the scientific community. He's their poster child. Report an error

38:58 They really love him. So Daniel Dennett, in quotation marks, solves the mind-body problem in an astonishing way. When I first read him, I couldn't believe that a person who is not psychotic was saying this. He's not psychotic and he is saying that and that really threw me for a loop because he actually means what he says here. Report an error

39:23 I checked. I couldn't believe it. I said, no, no, no, you can't, you can't, no, you really, he does. There simply are no quali at all. Report an error

39:34 You're not having any subjective experiences. That's how you solve the problem, by saying there is no problem because right now you're having no subjective experience at all. I find that, I've studied a lot of Western history, I find that the most denigrating Report an error

39:55 statement one can possibly make to a human being, the most denigrating, to say that, look a person in the eyes and say, you're not even conscious. Report an error

40:11 If you think of the history of racism, and tragically we have a very wide and long, diverse history of racism on the planet, think what races say, whether it's to people of different skin color, different religion, and so forth and so on. There's a common denominator. They always identify the target as someone who's less than human. You're an animal. You'll always find something lower. Right? Just think of all the words that come out by races. Report an error

40:37 It's always, you're not like me. I'm fully human and you're not. Now what's more denigrating than to say, you have no subjective experience at all. You are basically the same as a silicon ship. Now is anybody that crazy? The answer is yes. There's a book that's selling like hotcakes right now. Future of the Mind by a very distinguished, very accomplished, highly intelligent physicist. And he's very charismatic too. I've heard him speak. He's great. Report an error

41:07 He's charismatic. He's articulate. He seems warm-hearted. And he's written this book, Future of the Mind. And he said, if you want to know in terms of the evolution of consciousness, what's the most primitive entity that is conscious? And you might be thinking an aphid, an earthworm. He said, no, no, no, no. A thermostat. Report an error

41:30 A thermostat, yeah. A thermostat has a very primitive degree of awareness of hot and cold and adjusts the temperature accordingly. A thermostat has consciousness. And then the brain is basically an elegant thermostat. He says, there is no such thing as a hard problem. A thermostat has the lowest possible level of consciousness while humans represent the highest level currently known. In other words, your brain, you are a brain and your brain is an elegant, sophisticated thermostat. Report an error

42:02 This is not... A report from an insane asylum. This is a very distinguished philosopher, a scientist, a physicist. Well, I just read this one. This is maybe still on the New York Times if you check online. It's available. It's in an article called Are We Really Conscious? We've had it from two philosophers. There's Daniel Dennett and there's his predecessor, Patricia Churchland. Report an error

42:25 It's called Illimitative Materialism where they say subjective experience doesn't exist at all. And she won the MacArthur Fellowship. The MacArthur Fellowship is called the Genius Award. She got the Genius Award for saying that people have no subjective experience. Report an error

42:42 Daniel Dennett says the same thing. Michio Kaku says the same thing. Same thing. There is no heart problem because you have no subjective experience. And now we have Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano, a full professor of psychology and neuroscience at an eminent university, one of the best in the United States, in this article that was very... Report an error

43:05 Very high profile on the New York Times just recently. He says, and I quote, how does the brain go about processing information to become subjectively aware of information? Report an error

43:17 The answer is it doesn't. There is no subjective impression. There is no such thing as subjective awareness. It's not even an illusion. It's a mistake. There is only information in a data processing device. He said we can program silicon chips to be aware. Report an error

43:37 But of course they're not aware. They're simply processing data. Awareness. I don't know any argument against it because it's so utterly psychotic that it leaves me speechless. All I want to do is say, boo! And if the person shows a startle reflex, I said, there, Q-E-D, boo! I'm finished. That was my proof. Report an error

44:12 So I know this business. This business, Adam Frank, is very fine. He and I have corresponded, actually. It's also published in New York Times and so forth. So he's a man of real reputation. He's a cosmologist, astrophysicist. He wrote a review of Michio Kaku's book about physicists. And Adam Frank brings in a lovely note of sanity. He says, thus, if we follow Michio Kaku and Graziano, thus the essential mystery of our lives, the strange sense of presence to which we're bound till death and that which lies at the heart of so much poetry and art and music. Report an error

44:47 is dismissed as a non-problem when it's exactly the problem we can't ignore. If we're to have anything like a final theory of consciousness, we had better be attentive to the complexity of how we experience our being. Report an error

45:02 That's enough for me. Thank you for words of sanity in the face of psychosis. What really tears my heart is to know that people like Dennett, Kaku and Graziano are able to teach this in classrooms as if it's true. As if it has scientific validity, as if, this is what Graziano says, we're running experiments in the lab, as if this is a scientific theory that they're actually running. But there's no way of testing that ridiculous hypothesis. Report an error

45:30 There's no way of testing it whatsoever. In fact, there's no way of testing the hypothesis that the mind is the brain. No test. No one has ever devised it. And nobody's ever tested, scientifically, whether the mind is a function of the brain. So it's not even a scientific theory, let alone a scientific fact. It's an opinion. Report an error

45:48 With no corroborating evidence or reasoning, they just decide. So it's one of the most extraordinary cases of pseudoscience in the history of science. Report an error

45:58 Taking a mystery and then pretending it's not a mystery and as if it's already a fait accompli, already done. It breaks my heart because I love science and it really troubles me when I see just empty claims being presented as scientific truths. Let's move on. Now here's where the rubber really hits the road. If this wasn't troubling enough, are Report an error

46:19 all mental... Types of distress, mental problems, neuroses, psychoses, mental dysfunctions, disease and so forth. Are they all really simply nothing more than brain dysfunctions? It's a possibility, but let's look. Eric Kandel is a Nobel laureate. He's famous, he's eminent, he's a very distinguished neurologist, one of the greats in the United States. Report an error

46:44 He writes, and this was also published in the New York Times. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability. It constructs a sensory experience. So he's simply saying, among the three hypotheses of William James, the first one's right, but he gives no evidence. It's just as if they voted, like a school of cardinals. Report an error

47:07 Really, it's no different. They simply say, do the eyes have it? Oh, the eyes have it. Okay, the mind is what the brain does. But no evidence, no reasoning, just this is the way it is. Like a pope. Report an error

47:21 It constructs our sensory experience, regulates it, regulates our thoughts and emotions. So now you know who the agent is. Not you. Not your mind. It's the brain. And it controls our actions. So in case you thought you had any moral responsibility, in case you thought you had any moral responsibility, well, this lets you off the hook. Whether you kill your spouse, drown your children, commit rape, genocide, don't blame you. Report an error

47:46 The brain did it. Really. And the brain, as any neuroscientist will tell you, the brain operates according to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, and they are amoral. Let's have no mistake about it. The laws of physics, chemistry and biology are amoral. Ethics has nothing to do with the laws of nature. And if your brain is functioning entirely according to natural laws, then your brain is functioning in an amoral fashion, in which case the word ethics refers to nothing. Report an error

48:13 And none of us have any responsibility for anything we ever do, therefore there should be no penal code. There should be no notion of punishing anybody. Are these people willing to connect the dots? Follow the implications of what they're saying? Are they recognizing that what they're saying leads to the demise of human civilization? Because that's what it is. Let's be real here. Report an error

48:50 If you're not responsible for anything you do, then you're not responsible. You say, my brain did it. Report an error

48:58 It, the brain, is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider essentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Your brain did it, not you. So actually the brain should get the Nobel Prize. He should give away his Nobel Prize. So thank you, but I don't deserve it. Report an error

49:20 Take a photo of my brain and put the prize there. I didn't do anything. My brain did it, right? So the brain is responsible for everything. Speaking, creative works of art, looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain. The same principle of unity, that is the identity of brain and mind, applies to mental disorders. Okay, now that's very serious now. That all mental disorders, from mild depression all the way to psychosis, there are nothing more than, this is a position. Report an error

49:50 All mental disorders from mild, mild dysneurosis all the way down to debilitating psychosis, they are all nothing more than dysfunction of this machine in there, the brain. That's what they are. But this would imply, of course, that if all types of mental disease, the whole bandwidth, are simply brain dysfunctions, then the way to cure mental disease would be with physical interventions. Report an error

50:16 I mean, what else? In other words, drugs, surgery. Any other kind of physical interventions, that should do it. But drugs above all, because what we're dealing with is a very complex chemical mix here, with all these different dopamines, serotonin and so forth and so on, it should be just basically like fixing the engine in your car. Report an error

50:33 Oh, a little bit too oil, a little bit too oil. Oh, add this, add this, you know, basically like a chemistry cat. But now, what's the reality of the situation? Because that should be true, that we really shouldn't need therapists anymore. Because they're just talking. They just talk. Well, what's doing everything is the brain. Not talking or thinking. Thinking is just what the brain does. So fix the brain. You should just be able to get in there and fix the doggone brain. Report an error

50:59 That should take care of everything. In other words, drugs, drugs, drugs. That should do it. That should be the big solution. So after decades of research, diseases like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's still resist treatment. Oh, that's strange. Despite countless investigations into serotonin and other neurotransmitters, there is still no method to cure clinical depression. Report an error

51:19 But if it were simply a brain dysfunction, you'd think, well, gosh, we've had decades now. So the revolution in pharmacology has given doctors more drugs to use, allowing millions of people to reduce their symptoms. Now that's good. To reduce symptoms, that's a good thing. Yet the overall impact of this drug revolution on public health has been mixed, and decades of research on the drug's mechanism, on serotonin, for example, the target antidepressant drugs like Prozac. Report an error

51:46 The target of antidepressant drugs like Prozac has taught scientists nothing about the causes of mental illness. Now, this is from the scientific establishment. This is not a Buddhist giving my own evaluation. What I say doesn't matter, really. I'm not a professional here at all. But they're saying this, that for all of the vast expansion of knowledge of the brain over the last, let's say, 20 years, it's yielded very, very little practical knowledge that helps diagnose or treat any mental disease at all. Report an error

52:13 But then that would suggest that Eric Kandel is wrong. Because if the brain is doing everything and you've learned a lot more about the brain, then you should learn a lot more about the sources and ways of treating mental disease. But you haven't. Therefore, you must be wrong. Report an error

52:30 What was most concerning here to me is that the, I mean, not most concerning, one of the many things concerning, is the current director of the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States. The top man. He's totally persuaded that Eric Kandel is right. The man who is in charge of mental health for the country. Report an error

52:49 It's persuaded that every psychological problem you have is a brain disorder and therefore drugs must be the primary intervention despite all the contrary evidence. As if I know something they don't know, which is absurd. I'm poking in as an outsider, taking a little glimpse here and there, but this is representative. So the benefits, and now in terms of antidepressants, in 1989 I was interpreter for a meeting between His Holiness and some absolutely world class. Report an error

53:18 Neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, including the man Louis Judd who was then the, then he was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health. And he was proudly proclaiming to the Dalai Lama that at that time the scientific community, the medical community could manage the symptoms of 85 % of cases of depression, manage the symptoms with a wide array of drugs. Report an error

53:40 In other words, got this pretty much under control. 85 % of cases of depression, we've got a handle on it. So very optimistic, very positive. We're really making big progress here. Drugs are the way of the future. Well, just a few years ago, you can see in 2010, there was a very, very large study done, the largest study thus far, on antidepressants, the whole spectrum. Report an error

54:02 And the results of that, you can see that I gave the full source. You can check this out to see if I'm in any way misrepresenting anything. It's my job not to. The benefits of antidepressants are now known to be non-existent to negligible in patients with mild, moderate and even severe depression. Report an error

54:18 And high doses of antidepressants are hardly more effective than low ones. That's published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Now, do you think that put a dent in the sale of antidepressants? Report an error

54:33 They're as good as placebos, literally. The billions of dollars that have been spent on Prozac and so forth, their actual efficacy, except in cases of extreme acute depression, apart from those, everything lower, they're no better than placebo. Statistically, they just melt away. And yet they're still selling high-like hot cake. They're selling sugar tablets as medicine. Eric Kandel is wrong, but this is one heck of a lucrative business. Report an error

55:04 And it also, and I say this with total sympathy, it puts psychiatrists in a terrible situation. Imagine a psychiatrist. In America, I can only speak the country I know best. Report an error

55:15 People who are fortunate enough have health insurance. Many people don't. If you have health insurance and you come down with, let's say, a really significant case of depression, you'll be able to, you'll get a referral. From your general practitioner. He or she will refer you to a psychiatrist. You'll have a couple of sessions that are paid for by insurance. They may be half an hour. Report an error

55:35 They may be 15 minutes. And you'll come in and say, I have depression. The doctor might, and I know many of them are altruistic. They're compassionate. They're benevolent. They want to help. They may ask you why. And you say, well, I've been married for 50 years. My wife died and I'm utterly bereft. I've lost all meaning of my life. I don't know what to do. Report an error

55:53 I'm terribly depressed. Or you may have other things. I feel... Just anger all the time. I tend to focus on negative thoughts a lot. I feel like I was abused when I was a child. I'm living in a war-torn country where I'm fearing for my life all the time. My family got killed in a civil war. I mean, there are so many reasons. When Louis Judd, in 1989, said that we can manage the symptoms of 85 % of cases of depression, the Dalai Lama asked, but wait a minute, depression comes from many, many sources. Report an error

56:30 For many, many reasons. So how do you account for that when you're administering the drugs, prescribing the drugs? Because it's so diverse. So many reasons people become depressed. And this medical doctor, the head of National Institute of Mental Health said, it doesn't matter. The drug works no matter what. It doesn't matter what caused the depression. Report an error

56:49 Except for, yes, it does matter because they don't work. And did you really need to be a brilliant scientist to figure this out? For crying out loud, this is easy. But did the drug companies want you to know that they're selling sugar tablets? But now, coming back on a note of sympathy, your medical doctor, you've been prescribing a certain drug. They have a lot of them, right? To a certain client, a patient of yours. Report an error

57:13 And the person finds her a lot better. And they're coming to you, saying, thank you so much. That drug has changed my life. It's lifted me up. I can function again. I have my head above water. Thank you, really. It's such a blessing you gave me. And keep that prescription coming. And they come back six months later, whatever, for a renewal. And in the meantime, the psychiatrist has just learned that the drug he, let's say he, has been prescribing is basically a sugar tablet. Report an error

57:38 This person is not rich, cannot afford maybe say 50 hours of therapy, maybe that's what that person needs, or a lot of meditation. That's usually not an option. And so you've been giving something that's a sugar tablet to a person and spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars for it. And now you are faced with a dilemma. Report an error

57:57 Do I tell my patient? That I won't give you anymore of the drug because it's worthless. It's only because you believed in me. Placebo effect. That's the only thing that made it work. And I will not lie to you anymore. I didn't know it was a lie. I just learned. And so I will not prescribe you anymore. You'd pay hundreds of dollars for something that has no efficacy. And it was your mind that was healing the symptoms. Report an error

58:19 Do you do that? And then the person says, but doc, I came with depression. Am I going to have depression all over again? What do I do now? Report an error

58:30 Are you going to tell them, well, come for 20 hours of therapy when they can't afford it? Or are you going to say, tough luck, we can't help you? Or are you going to go do the easy route, which may be also the most compassionate? Here's your next prescription. And keep the whole charade, the whole lie going. I say that with sympathy. But it is devastating. Report an error

58:53 It makes the whole medical tradition look like a farce. By implication, it's a farce. Go to the next slide. Report an error

59:03 Next slide, please. Report an error

59:08 What about the role of our own first-person experience? What about looking into the inner causes of depression, of anxiety, and so on and so on? What about learning to know ourselves, to become more astute observers of our own mental states, to hone and refine, make more rigorous and dependable, reliable, our own faculties for observing our own mental states, our emotions, desires, and so on? Report an error

59:28 What about that? The insider view. Well, John Watson started this. He started behaviors in the United States. Having grown disillusioned with introspection, completely abandoning William James, and he said, psychology must bury subjective matter, subjective matter, another which is, don't even attend to subjective experience anymore, and introspective method, completely eject, dismiss, abandon, without a second thought, introspection. Report an error

59:59 It will have no role here. And psychology must never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspective, verifiable, imagery and the like. Make no more reference to subjective experience at all. Report an error

1:00:17 John Searle, the same eminent philosopher in the book The Rediscovery of the Mind, he states, so the other one, okay, he said that a century ago. What did they know? John Searle, he's contemporary at one of the finest universities in the United States. He said, if by introspection we mean a special capacity just like vision, only less colorful, that we have to spect intro or to look inwards, then it seems to me there is no such capacity. Report an error

1:00:43 Whoops. So if you thought you had some ability to be aware of your thoughts, emotions and so forth, well, you don't. There could not be. In fact, it's always impossible because the model of specting inter-requires a distinction between the optics spected and the specting of it and we cannot make this distinction for conscious states. Report an error

1:01:03 So with a logical slate of hand, he now denies that you're aware of what you're feeling right now. Report an error

1:01:11 This is right next door to Daniel Dennett that says you have no subjective experience at all. It just makes me shake my head. I organized a meeting, just a one-day meeting at Oxford University a couple of years ago on mindfulness and so forth. And there was a very distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy from Oxford University. He was one of the speakers. I was speaking from a William Jamesian perspective. Report an error

1:01:39 He wasn't even bringing in Buddhism. And he came over to me and he was, literally, he was kind of almost like trembling with rage. He was so upset when I was speaking of the value of observing thoughts. And he said, it's not possible to observe thoughts. You can only think them. Report an error

1:02:00 And I have no refutation. It's kind of like if a person comes to me, if I take a friend and we go to the Sistine Chapel and I say, look at the magnificent array of colors. There are no colors. It's only shades of gray. Michelangelo, he worked with charcoal. You can see it. It's just all shades of gray. What do you say? Report an error

1:02:19 When you're looking and seeing all the colors, I spent about 40,000 hours meditating. Much of that time observing thoughts. And this just person told me, I can't do it. How do you refute the person who's colorblind? Do you just shout at them or wave a red flag? He's going to see gray, of course. I don't know what you do. So we move on. So the big lie, George Orwell is marvelous here in this book, 1984. Report an error

1:02:49 Consider this now in light of everything that's been said thus far. Okay, we have these special terms. He was a master of coining new terms. Okay, black-white. You've read it. 1985, 1984. Report an error

1:02:59 The habit of impudently claiming that black is white in contradiction of the plain facts. You have no subjective experience at all. You have no introspection. Report an error

1:03:11 How's that just for starters? Black-white. That's the kind of thing that tyrants do throughout history, whether they're Nazis, communists, any kind. They hold a gun to your head and say, I'm holding up two fingers, right? Right? Two, right? If you keep on saying that, two fingers, two fingers, after a while you'll learn. Report an error

1:03:35 You don't want to be shot, do you? You don't want to be fired, do you? You don't want to be demoted. You don't want to be excommunicated. You don't want to lose your ability to publish scientific papers. So when it's two, you learn how to say two. It's black-white. It happens all the time, all the time in tyrannies. Report an error

1:03:56 They'll say the biggest lie they like and they'll say it a lot and then imprison or kill anybody who says contrary and after a while people are nodding in their sleep. Report an error

1:04:08 Double think. This is very common. To deliberately tell lies while genuinely believing in them. To forget any fact that has become inconvenient. Report an error

1:04:21 And then when it becomes necessary again to draw back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed. Now, quite interestingly, during the same week that Michael Cassiano, his article was published in New York Times. And I just look at the online version. It's there every single day. Are we really conscious? Are we really conscious? It's been there. A lot of people are reading it. Report an error

1:04:45 In the same week that that came on, a study was published in England, a very, very large study of over 2,000 patients in hospitals in the United States and the UK. It was published, I've seen the paper itself, the scientific paper, published by a large number of physicians, a peer-reviewed journal, of course, scientific journal. Report an error

1:05:08 Very large study, as I said, more than 2,000. These are patients who suffered cardiac arrest and... When the heart shuts down, when the heart stops, the brain stops, they've studied this many, many times, within 30, 40 seconds. The heart stops, the brain just shuts down within 30, 40 seconds. The brain goes dead, then you're dead. I mean, there's no brain function. It's just a bunch of chemicals sitting up there, right? So with the wonders of modern medicine, I say this with enormous admiration, with the wonders of medicine, they have many, many cases where people are not having near-death experiences, they're dead. Report an error

1:05:44 Every part of the body is shut down. The heart, the lungs, the respiration, the brain, everything has shut down. That's called dead, right? They're flatlined. But they can be flatlined for, even without special interventions like hypothermia and so forth, they can be flatlined for three minutes, maybe even a bit longer, and they can be revitalized without brain damage. Report an error

1:06:07 And this happens a lot with people who suffer heart attacks. So the lead researcher is a man who used to teach and do his research in England. His name is Sam Parnia. Sam Parnia. He now is at a university in New York. Report an error

1:06:22 And so they did this very large study and in a very significant number of cases, something like 40%, when they resuscitated, revitalized people, 40 % said they had ongoing experiences after their brain stopped. One out of 2,000. Naturally, that's a small number. One out of 2,000 or so. But one was a 57-year-old man. And while he was dead, he had an out-of-body experience. Report an error

1:06:47 This is all documented in the scientific paper. He had an out-of-body experience where he was viewing his own dead body and the other people in the operating room. And he also heard a click, because every minute there would be a little click. It was just part of the medical procedure. There'd be a little beep once a minute. He heard the beep twice. So they knew how long he was having this out-of-body experience. Report an error

1:07:11 And then, of course, he's revitalized. And the medical doctor in charge, Samparni reported on this, said that he not only heard the beep, but he was observing the activities of the medical personnel in the operating room, and everything he said was correct. While his brain was dead, his eyes were shut, he was seeing and hearing with exceptional clarity, and everything he said was true, intersubjectively validated by the people in the room. Report an error

1:07:39 Now, how many cases of that do you need? In fact, there are many more. But this was a very recent study. If that happens even once, that a person is making valid observations when the brain is dead and they're viewing it from outside the body, they're not seeing it through closed eyelids. Report an error

1:07:56 If that happens once, then all the preceding theories are all false. Once. The heliocentric, no, the geocentric view of our system here, the sun, moon and planets, that was considered to be true for about 1400 years. The earth is in the center. Everything goes around it. There are about 4,000 stars up there. They all go around us. And that's it. That's the universe. Thank you, God, for the decorations in the sky. Report an error

1:08:29 And this is very widely accepted by all intelligent people. Galileo, before there was any evidence to the contrary, Copernicus gave a very good mathematical theory that was the alternative, of course, the sun being in the center. But he had no evidence. He had no evidence at all. And so theologians, philosophers and so forth, they debated, well, some people like Copernicus, some like Ptolemy, tomatoes, tomatoes, you know they're different, but what's the big deal? But there's no evidence one way or another. Report an error

1:08:55 Galileo was convinced that Copernicus was right, even though he didn't have the evidence. Just intuitively, whatever. He thought, it's got to be true. It's much simpler, it's nicer, the sun, everything goes around in nice ellipses. Kepler found it was ellipses, not circles. Galileo made a discovery with his telescope. Report an error

1:09:14 He couldn't have made it without a telescope. You couldn't have made it without directly observing the planets. The discovery he made was that Venus has phases, like the moon has phases. Report an error

1:09:27 If Venus has phases, and he confirmed that by careful observation, then Ptolemy's dead. One observation. That's enough. Ptolemy is wrong. He's been wrong for 1,400 years. Nobody observed Venus with a telescope. You don't need to get 10 Venuses. You don't need to get a whole bunch of Venuses. One Venus is enough to collapse that whole theory. And that collapsed it. You need one person who's having a veridical out-of-body experience when the brain is shut down. Report an error

1:10:02 That collapses everything you said thus far. You don't need many. If it happens once, well it's not happened once, it's happened more than once. But that didn't get published in the New York Times. This wild-ass, crazy, psychotic idea that we have no subjective experience at all, that got published. With no evidence, because you can't even imagine there could be evidence. Report an error

1:10:22 How would you have evidence that you have no experience? And if there were evidence, how would you know of it since you have no awareness? That got published there on the front page of the New York Times. And this one, not a peep. I've not seen any coverage of that in the United States. Only in the UK where the study was done. There's something amiss here. Report an error

1:10:43 That's double think. Crime stop. This is a big one. Think about Eric Kandel and his statement that the brain does everything. And all psychological problems are simply brain dysfunctions. Crime stops means the faculty of stopping short as though by instinct at the threshold of any dangerous thought. Dangerous thought is one that might overturn your belief system. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Report an error

1:11:14 Crime stop, in short, means protective stupidity. Report an error

1:11:20 I think that pretty well characterizes everything I've said thus far. In terms of reporting, if I've said it, then that's my problem. But see if the shoe fits. Protective stupidity. Why would anybody do that? I can tell you. Science at the time of Darwin did not have much reputation. If you're a natural philosopher, scientist, it's like whatever. Theologian, now that's really something. Businessman, you make money, that's something. You're a scientist? Darwin did all this research on his own nickel, on his own money. Report an error

1:11:57 He was relatively affluent. Einstein needed a paper and pen. That's all the resources. When he got a job, big endowed chair at the University of Berlin, I know his life so rather well by now. They asked, they're bringing this man who by then was eminent. Professor Einstein, what can we provide you with laboratory support and so forth? He said, well, I need some paper, I need a pencil and I need a big waste paper basket for all my mistakes. Report an error

1:12:27 He was a cheap date. James Clerk Maxwell, The Four Equations, revolutionized electromagnetism in modern physics, greatest scientist since Newton, paper and pencil. Report an error

1:12:41 Until the 20th century, science was a cheap date. There were no big grants, nothing. Alfred North White, no, no, no, Albert Russell Wallace, Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer and inventor of the theory of evolution, lived on nickels and dimes, hardly anything. He made a living by collecting specimens and selling them. And he simultaneously with Darwin came up with this brilliant theory. And it's a brilliant theory. Report an error

1:13:13 20th century. Science is big business. We have to face it. It's big business. There's enormous amount of money at stake. Enormous competitiveness to get grants. And the bigger the better. The bigger the grant you get, the more prestige you get. Prestige is enormous. Money is enormous. Prestige is enormous. How many papers have you published? Report an error

1:13:33 How many... Awards if you won. How often is your work cited in other publications? Prestige is enormous. And then influence. Power. Who's advising the president, the prime minister and so forth? Who's advising corporations? Power, money and status. Report an error

1:13:54 They're up to their neck in it now. And so if you're wondering why there's such massive inertia and protective stupidity, it's not stupidity. It's a very crafty way to protect your money. Prestige and power. And science is the first casualty. Medicine is the first casualty. Next slide. Report an error

1:14:19 Oh, let's start breathing again. Back to William James, as I said, one of the least dogmatic people in modern history. Let's come back to psychology that means something to us. Psychology is the science of mental life, both of its phenomena, that is our first-person experience, and their conditions, such as brain states, behavior, environment, and so forth. The phenomena in question are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like. Report an error

1:14:44 That's what the science of psychology should be about, what we experience to be our minds. Introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. The word introspection need hardly be defined. It means, of course, the looking into our minds and reporting what we there discover. Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness. Report an error

1:15:08 I think now I'm listening to somebody who's saying he's following the momentum of science for the 300 years that preceded him in all branches. Report an error

1:15:22 From particle physics to cosmology, from botany to zoology to geology to you name it, in every branch of natural science, your primary mode, your defining mode of investigation is to carefully, with great sophistication and rigor and precision, observe the phenomena you're trying to understand. Report an error

1:15:42 Galileo and his telescope is symbolic for everything else. Look at modern brain science. Fantastic technology for studying the brain. The EEG, the MRI and so forth and so on and so on. It's incredibly good. And likewise for cosmology, for botany, for everything else. Observe the phenomena you're seeking to understand. Report an error

1:16:00 But now if the phenomena you're seeking to understand is your own subjective experience, that's invisible to every instrument of science. There's no instrument of science that can actually observe a thought, an emotion, a desire. Brain correlate? Sure, why not? Behavioral expression? Sure. But not the phenomena themselves. There's only one way you can observe the phenomena themselves and it's called introspection. Report an error

1:16:20 And that has been banned for 100 years now. Banned. Don't go there. I spoke with one of the leading neuroscientists studying meditation. World class. I won't say his name because I don't like targeting people. I will hammer, some of you have listened to podcasts, I will hammer hard on views that I think are terribly detrimental. Report an error

1:16:40 I have no qualms about that at all. With no harm meant to any individual. So I'm not quoting an individual. But world class scientist. Studied meditation a lot. And I asked him on one occasion, I said, but, you know, the whole course of the mind sciences for the last hundred years has completely dismissed introspection. Report an error

1:17:02 Don't you think that we'd have a more balanced understanding of the mind and the brain if there had been some comparable development, refinement, utilization of introspection together with behavioral studies, neuroscientific studies? Wouldn't that be more balanced? And he looked at me and said, and actually I think it's turned out quite well as it is, because this has given us much more. Report an error

1:17:22 He didn't quite want to say money. That's what he meant. It gives us neuroscientists a lot more power and influence and money if we can ignore introspection and start saying all the things that have been said thus far. All mental problems are just brain dysfunctions. All mental events the brain is doing, not you. That empowers the neuroscientists and disempowers everybody else. Report an error

1:17:55 We're running out of time. I'm going to just run through this quickly. This could be an evening or a week. Some of these are silly and some of these are very legitimate. Why hasn't introspection played an important role in the scientific study of the mind for the last century? Because it has not. This is not complex. Report an error

1:18:13 This is not a great mystery. If you want to understand something, observe it. And if it has to be introspection, well then go for it. Make it better. So what are some of the objections? And that is introspection observations are unstable and impossible to verify. Report an error

1:18:26 Well, they're unstable if your mind is unstable, if you haven't developed your attention or introspective skills. Modern science doesn't know how to do that. Report an error

1:18:36 Buddhist contemplatives, Hindu, Taoist and so forth do. But that means they'd have to step outside of their own area of expertise and listen with respect and humility to other people who have been working on those for thousands of years. But that's hard to do. Because then you lose prestige. You lose money. You lose... Because you've given something away. Report an error

1:18:59 Who wants to do that? These issues have been dealt with in detail. That's what I'll say. This is not an argument. I'm just saying there's a lot here and I could spend hours on this one. That one has been addressed in Buddhist practice for centuries. The next one is silly, but I heard it said, so I'm saying it. Interceptive observations are useful only for understanding meditative states, but not ordinary and pathological mental states. Report an error

1:19:23 Well, that's by a person who's thought about meditation and never practiced. Because anybody's meditated. When you meditate, you experience only meditative states, like bliss, luminosity. Buddha, nature, God, visions of Virgin Mother. Or do you experience wandering thoughts, anger, agitation, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and insomnia? Report an error

1:19:44 So that one we can laugh at. Here's an important one. Introspective observations are subject to contamination by theory. Now that's true. But of course, so is every other observation, scientific and otherwise. That's called cognitive hyperactivity disorder. And we all experience it. We all know what it's like. Interfection is not special. Report an error

1:20:07 Subject to phenomenological illusion. That's true. When observing mental states, there could be an illusory aspect to it. But of course that's true for all observations. And that is as we look around. Look around in the room here. See any colors? Don't they seem to be out there? They're not. There are no colors out there. The colors arise independent upon your visual cortex. Report an error

1:20:27 They seem to be out there, but they're not. Now do you think your visual cortex actually is a spray gun? Do you think colors are being sprayed from your eyes? On to people's shirts and so forth. You think that's what the mind does? It sprays colors like a spray can? That would be novel. But no. Report an error

1:20:47 But then this is all illusion, right? Because this seems to be out there. And the sounds we hear. Can't you hear when the sound is close by and when it's far away? But there's no sound out there. Sound, as we hear it, the qualia of sound, the sound that we hear, that arises in dependence upon the auditory cortex. Sounds don't come to us. Ripples in a medium like air, water, solid, that comes to us. Report an error

1:21:08 That comes through the space, but not sounds. Smells are not out there waiting to be caught like within a butterfly net. Smells arise independent from the olfactory lobes, gustatory the same. So we seem to be experiencing a world that is all around us, filled with colors, sounds, smells, tastes and so forth, and that's all an illusion. And that's true whether you're a scientist or an artist. Report an error

1:21:29 All scientific observations are fraught with illusion. So that's not unique to introspection. Report an error

1:21:38 Intersective observations are subject to concealment and misrepresentation by unconscious mental processes and motivations. That's from Freud and he's right. But that has been also addressed by ancient meditative traditions. How do you address that? Well, it's complex, it's subtle, but don't think they've overlooked that one. But now how about scientific observations? Are they not too subject? Report an error

1:21:59 Not seeing certain data. Seeing things that are not there. Scientists or human beings? And finally, subject to distortion due to observer participancy, and that is when you observe a thought, a sheer act of observing a thought makes it go away. So how about that? How can you make observations of the mind when you observe something and then it vanishes, poof, when you observe it? Well, in quantum physics, and I've been trained in that field fairly extensively, every time you make an observation in quantum mechanics, every single time, you influence that which you're observing. Report an error

1:22:32 So the notion of a separation between subject and object, the measurement system and what you're measuring... It's impossible. You cannot observe an electron without influencing it and goes for every other elementary particle. And quantum mechanics is the most successful branch of modern physics. So that did not disable quantum mechanics. No reason that should disable the scientific use of introspection for understanding the mind. You can spend a lot more time on that. Report an error

1:22:56 That's quick. So William James was one very astute man. He said, look, introspection is difficult. It's fallible. Make mistakes by introspectively as we can in every other way. And the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind. And that is all types of observation are difficult and valuable. Report an error

1:23:14 The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our father, that is our later knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached. And that is there's agreement, there's consensus. That's the history of science. You can get a big fat biology textbook, an intro to biology for an undergraduate course in university. There's an enormous amount of consensual knowledge there that's not being debated. Report an error

1:23:38 And then you look a bit further and you say, ah, this is where the debate is. But a lot of consensus, right? How did that happen? By making mistakes and then retrospectively recognizing them and getting consensus, making mistakes and then retrospective consensus and so forth and so on. That's how it's always worked. You might recall that not long ago there were scientists, I think it was in Japan, who felt that they had evidence that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. Report an error

1:24:00 Remember that? Not too long ago. Neutrinos faster than the speed of light. That violates fundamental axiom of special relativity theory. Nothing travels faster than light. Nothing accelerates to the speed of light. Right? It's a big core thing. I've studied it. And these people said we found evidence. Neutrinos actually travel a little bit faster than the speed of light. Well, if that's true, oh, look out. Report an error

1:24:22 Newton, step aside. Well, then the scientists reviewed that and said, no, no, no, no, you made a mistake there. Oh, okay. That's good science. So you make a mistake. That's forgivable. And later scientists correct it. Right? Unless they can't, in which case, then, if one person makes veridical out-of-body experiences and you can't refute it, Then you either ignore it because it's inconvenient or you revolutionize everything you've ever thought about the mind and brain. That's it. Report an error

1:24:55 Next slide. Let's come back to Buddhism. It's now 8.29. I have a minute for Buddhism. Report an error

1:25:06 This is foundational. This is foundational Buddhism. Core Buddhism. Intro Buddhism. It's deep. It's pragmatic. It's true or false. You can see for yourself. General cognitive hyperactivity where we're superimposing things in reality that just are not there. Viewing the impermanent as permanent. That sounds silly. Why would anybody do that? Except teenagers who fall in love and say, I'm going to love you forever. Report an error

1:25:33 Our relationship being forever, our possessions being forever, our youth being forever, our health being forever. If not forever, well, for a good long time anyway. Life being stable, the economy being stable, the environment being stable, economic situations being stable. Don't worry, things won't change that much. People still denying global warming. No, it's just a blip, just a blip. We didn't do it. And after all... Report an error

1:25:57 Let's look out for the bottom line. We don't want to have any short-term losses. It'll be okay. It'll be okay. As one person, there's a very good op-ed writer for the New York Times who's really been highlighting global warming. And he said, somebody wrote to me and said, Mr. Editorial Writer, tell me now, how much has global warming impacted your life? Report an error

1:26:23 As if that was the answer. It was Joe Klein, I believe, Joe Klein for the New York Times. And he said, that one right there, that's the problem. That's the problem right there. If it doesn't influence me, who gives a shit? N equals one. If the Ebola virus is not on my doorstep, who cares? Report an error

1:26:44 If the fact that we've lost 40 % of the wildlife on the planet over the last 50 years, if that's not impacted you, who cares? 40%, that was the latest finding. 40 % of wildlife now. No, 50 % gone in the last 40 years. By 2050, the ocean should be empty. We'll fish them out. By the end of the century, if we don't die of mass anything, there'll be 11 billion people on the planet. Report an error

1:27:14 And this is going to turn out well, right? Report an error

1:27:20 Permanent is permanent. That which is by nature fragile, ever-changing, subject to disillusion. No, no, it's okay, it's okay. Business as usual. That's hyperactivity. You're in that which is not a true source of well-being as a true source. Your wealth, financial security, your home, your possessions, your relationships. Report an error

1:27:42 That's where my happiness is, my family. It's my possessions, it's my job, it's my reputation, it's my health, it's my looks, it's, it's, it's. Thinking that's what makes me happy. Feeling that which is not by nature I or mine as being I or mine. Report an error

1:28:00 My body, my country, my intelligence, my reputation, my family, my country, my, my, my. As if there's actually something in them that is actually mine and not simply a projection. Check again. Next slide. So last slide. Pretty close to be on time. How do we remedy cognitive imbalances? This is really the thrust, the central core of the Buddhist teachings as a whole. If ignorance and delusion are the root of suffering, then the remedy is paying attention closely, developing intention, intelligence, mindfulness, attending closely to what is real. Report an error

1:28:42 So the Buddha said this is the direct path, monks, for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for overcoming pain and grief, for reaching the authentic path, The realization of nirvāṇa, namely the four applications of mindfulness, that is attending closely to your own body, the bodies of others, to your own feelings and the feelings of others, mental states, processes, and inferentially the mental states of others, and finally phenomena. Report an error

1:29:11 This profound interface, the causal nexus of our own presence and activity in the world, interrelated, entangled with that of other people, other sentient beings, the environment at large, looking at this vast causal nexus. And attending closely to it. Report an error

1:29:36 So, final note. This is a Buddhist path. A core Buddhist path. That's the Buddha's introduction to his Mahasatipatthana Sutta, his great discourse on the four close applications of mindfulness. Bedrock foundational insight practice in Buddhism. And Report an error

1:30:01 in order to be a suitable practitioner of such a path, a follower of such a path, to be a follower of the Buddha, one of the great, very early, contemplative scholars, philosophers in the Buddhist tradition by the name of Aryadeva. He lived in the second century of the common era. He wrote a classic text, some of you will know, the 400 verses, Chatur Saka, Chatur Saka. It's cited very, very often in Tibetan Buddhism. Report an error

1:30:27 And he states in this classic text, it's like Shakespeare, it's one of the greatest in the whole tradition, people citing it now, what, 1800, 1900 years later. And he says, well, if you're going to be setting out on this path, you need three qualities. Report an error

1:30:40 Many people call this religion. I don't quite see why. It is what it is, right? This is pursuit of knowledge, insight, understanding, to free ourselves from suffering and its causes. You need three qualities. Report an error

1:30:55 You need to be without bias. You need to be objective, not clinging to your own opinions, your own views, willing to reassess, to reevaluate, to critically assess your own assumptions, your own opinions, your own views, even those you've been tenaciously holding to for decades. You need to put it on the table and say what? What is not known needs to be... Report an error

1:31:19 Assessed. Maybe we keep it, maybe we challenge it. But if you can't do that, you can't follow Buddhism. You'll just bring your biases in, you'll screw everything up. You'll never get anywhere. Just be clean to your own views, as usual. You have to be unbiased, free of prejudice. That's hard. So easy to criticize other people's views, so difficult to recognize one's own. Report an error

1:31:40 You need to be perceptive. You need to be perceptive. Really attending closely with discernment. You need to use all your intelligence you've got. Don't hold back anything. You have to be perceptive. Discerning, intelligent. If you're not, you're not going to go very far. And finally, you must have a passion for investigating for yourself, putting the teachings into practice, not just thinking about them, talking about them, memorizing them. Report an error

1:32:07 You have to be willing to put them into practice to see for yourself, are these true or false? Like a good scientist, you hear a good theory, good, let's see how we can test it. That's what I hear all the time from good scientists. That's an interesting theory. How do you test it? How do you test it? That sounds like an interesting medical intervention. Does it work or not? Report an error

1:32:25 You have to have a passion for that put it to the test of experience. If you're not, you're not going to get far on that's it. There are only three. Report an error

1:32:35 have to be free of bias as you can. all your intelligence you've got. have to have a Report an error

1:32:44 how you overcome cognitive imbalances and that's how you develop cognitive intelligence. it. Thank Report an error

1:33:12 you. It's such a simple word, but... At the moment I'm blown away by tonight. The teachings, the humour, the clarity and I look forward to seeing you at Mind and Its Potential. Report an error

1:33:29 And when you come back here too, please. And it just occurred to me, there's one more slide. I think, is there not? That's it? Okay, there's one more. And that is for cognitive intelligence, the culmination of that is know thyself. Know who you are. the way down to the ground. Know who you are as a human being, as a woman, a man, an Australian American. Know that. Keep on penetrating. Where did your mind come from? Report an error

1:33:58 Where did you come from? deeper. right down to the ground. Who are you, ultimately? And that will banish all cognitive imbalances. that will make you free, and you will be awake. That's the final Again, thank you. You're welcome. Good night. Report an error

1:34:19 If I may take one tiny bit of your time, it's to do with a course that's coming up, Cultivating Emotional Balance with Corey Jackson. And it was... Thank you. Most welcome. there's um on the 8th and 9th of november there's an intro weekend and on your seat you will find this so you can find out more about it but once again you most welcome Report an error

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Talk by B. Alan Wallace. Original at Vajrayana Institute via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/B.AlanWallace2014PublicTalkCultivatingCognitiveIntelligence. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Transcript generated automatically and may contain errors; the audio is the authoritative version.

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