Jon Kabat-Zinn

30:19And then they got a second tape four weeks into the program where we introduced them to sitting meditation. And by that time we had been introducing people week by week into sitting meditation, not on the floor on Zafu's, by the way, but on chairs, really nice, got the hospital bias, really nice chairs, very important. And so we gave them another 45 -minute CD, a guided sitting meditation that takes you through a number of objects of attention. So you start with your body sitting there breathing and then it turns out, well, there are other things in the environment that we can be aware of, like hearing sounds.

30:57And hearing isn't just hearing sounds, it's hearing silence. It's hearing the spaces between sounds. You can't have music without space between the notes, right? So you're basically hearing rather than listening. You're not reaching out to grab sounds. You're letting them come to you. And then we expand from sounds to thoughts. Just as you could have a sound mirror and things could come in front of the mirror and and you'd hear this sound, that sound, the space, that space. What about a thought mirror where thoughts arise, they disappear, they come, they go. And the mirror doesn't go chasing the thought.

31:39If red comes its red, red goes its goes, then blue comes. So this is another way of being in relationship to thinking is that rather than getting caught in the stream of thoughts, you're just seeing them as events in the field of awareness. And then of course they were all afraid of the motions of one kind or another and stories about our favorite subject, which is always me. So they tend to carry you away and then you forget you have a body, you forget your breathing, right? So then you notice, holy cow. I was supposed to be aware of the present moment but I've been lost in thought having dinner with somebody in LA and I'm here in Massachusetts Jesus, and then you realize, oh my goodness, the mind has a life of its own.

32:26And it's running me more than I'm running yet. And I'm a prisoner, and sometimes especially if you're suffering from anxiety or depression, which so many people are. So people had come with medical diagnosis, but they all had anxiety to one degree, another depression or various kinds of psychological challenges. So in a way, mindfulness is like such a big pot that you can put everything into it. And that's why we could combine people with different kinds of diagnosis because the final common pathway is you're awareness. You're embodied awareness, which you can always come back to. And so we teach people, okay, this is really hard stuff.

33:09Like, we're going to ask you to just be aware of the present moment. That's almost impossible for us to do for any stretch of time. So we're going to give you a kind of ally in the process. We're going to invite you to fuel your breath in the belly or at the nostrils. So wherever it's most vivid, okay, I'm going to feel the breath. As it comes in and as it goes out.

33:38And then another one comes in. And you can already feel yourself dropping into stillness, into silence.

33:53And you know it's possible that maybe the best way we can make use of the rest of this time that we have is to just not say another word and just be in this silence. But fully present, fully embodied, with no agenda other than to fall awake, stay awake, and rest in awareness. Be it completely at home. Beautiful. I never heard of the thought mirror idea before. I think it's very beautiful. I love that. Yeah. Thank you. It's like the sound mirror too. I like to relate thoughts to sounds because people get that sounds come and go. And we often, like if we're unretreat sometimes for seven days or five days, we start six o 'clock in the morning.

34:43These are for professional training retreats and so forth. And very often, you know, the doors and the windows are open when it's summertime, and you hear sounds. So you could say, well, I'd be having a great meditation, but there's all these sounds going on. No! If they're sounds, then that's part of the present moment. So then afterwards we might ask, well, what did you hear when you were attending to hearing? And people will say birds or something like that. And they'll say, none of you heard birds. What you heard was some version of tweet, tweet. And then the mind turned it into a bird. I recognized that sound.

35:24That's what, and then people were really good at birding. They will know which kind of bird and stuff like that. But it's once removed, it's kind of colored by thought that you say bird, what you're really hearing is the purity of the sound. And then when you can come back to that, sometimes that's referred to as original mind or original hearing before thinking sets in and colors. And there's a huge amount of creativity there because then you can see connections that before you never actually saw because we're so lost in thought all the time that it's not just pre -tweeted being turned into birds but everything is turned into thought so quickly that the other forms of our native of intelligences and there were multiple ones, never get a chance because we're so lost and caught in our heads.

36:17And then if you fold the motion into it, then it's even more complex than that. Do you think that there was a time in our ancient past when we were aware and awake purely? I do. And the reason I think this, people write about this, and so forth, and I don't know what the accepted anthropological thinking about it is, but the fact is that if we didn't have that, we would get eaten, right? You're out there in the jungle. All you need to do is go the Amazon and try to spend the night in the Amazon, even in the tree, whatever you want to do, and And you'll begin to realize that you're going to be food for lots of insects and other things that prowl and that are terrifying potentially.

37:12So I do think that we evolved with enormous sensitivity around the various kinds of signaling in the present moment, simply to stay alive. And to be in community, you know, in wherever you go there you are, one of the chapters is called sitting around the fire. And the reason for that is that when we were living as hunters and gatherers for millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years, that's all we did at night. You couldn't do anything else, but sit around the fire. I mean, there's like danger in the dark. You sit around the fire and you sit together. And yeah, you tell stories and you're seeing and everything else, but at the end of the evening and you watch the calls, which is like really amazing because like you get universes of different stuff going on in the calls.

38:11And at a certain point, things quiet down, right? I mean, people get quiet and just stare into the embers. So, I think we were meditating naturally as homo sapiens, all through that hunter and gathers period of tens, hundreds, thousands of years, and that we were really embodied in the natural world in a way that our precocious intellectual, historical, cultural intelligences have made a little bit less accessible to us and that what the sort of meditative renaissance, if you want to call it that in a certain way, is doing, is inviting us to not lose that genius just because we have other geniuses that have also made their appearance in a much more complex culturally determined world.

39:08Yeah, so we were connected and then we had progress. In quotation marks. How did your old academic MIT life inform the rest of your life? I went to MIT because I was in love with science. And I was in love with science in part because I was born into a family where my father was a scientist. His field was immunochemistry and he was a professor at Columbia Medical School. and he was a scientist scientist. I mean, he really lived it. And my mother was a painter. And while my father was really well -known in his field and recognized, my mother never showed her work and only sold one painting. She had her first show when she turned 100 and was living in an assisted living.

40:05and she had a show with five other artists and she showed a number and she got so much wonderful feedback for it. She loved it, but she sold one painting in her life and then she regretted it for the rest of her life. She wanted that painting back. So I grew up in this household where there was art on the one hand that was not recognized, but she didn't need recognition. She didn't crave any recognition. She was so happy doing her painting. And she was prolific. I mean, just in lots of different forms, so not just painting, but also all sorts of other things, inkblots and just every conceivable kind of artistic medium.

40:46And she was just as happy as a clam just being in that world. So I grew up like seeing this as a young boy and seeing like they appreciated who each other were, But my mother could not crack molecular immunology and immunochemistry for sure Although she helped my father with all these proofreading of his books and stuff like that most days and my father we would go to the museum of honor at every Sunday and they put me into a School at five years old at the museum of honor to you know do stuff and I still have the elephant that I made when I was four or five years old But I could see that my parents were subtending different dimensions of reality and creativity.

41:33And even as a young boy, and I remember this very vividly, I sort of was wondering, well, there must be a way to unify those worlds. They can't be separate. And then when I heard this talk at MIT when I was 21 years old by Philip Kaplow who wrote this book called The Three Pillars of Zen, I think the year was 1965 and I went to this talk and out of all of MIT, like thousands and thousands of people, there was Houston Smith who had invited him who was a professor of philosophy and religion, Caplow, and then three people in the audience. And I was one of those people. And it took the top off my head and I started meditating that night and I never stopped.

42:20And I started and awful lot of things in my life and didn't go anywhere. but not that. And then did you seek out other teachers from that point on? Yeah, yeah. A lot of different teachers, and I studied and savoury treats with teachers in various traditions and so forth. And the older I get, the more I consider it, and speak about it that way as a love affair. Like, meditation's not one more thing that is good for you, and you have to stick into your already too scheduled and busy day. meditation is a love affair with the present moment, which is the only moment we're ever alive in. And if you miss it, it's a certain way which you miss that moment of your life and they're not forever.

43:07And so it's a kind of love affair with embodied wakefulness and then a deep inquiry into who am I? Actually who am I on this planet between birth and death, with the story of you me, you know, my father, my mother, or everybody else, the whole story of it. But then the story is not who we really are. That's just kind of a fiction, and as we know, depending on who you want to impress or what you want, you could tell the story in 50 billion different ways. And a lot of it's just ego wanting to make a certain kind of impression, but who are you really? That's the fundamental meditative question.

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45:31Tell me about the difference between meditating yourself, your daily practice versus meditating in a room with hundreds of people all meditating together. Well, in a way I feel like I'm in that room even when I'm by myself because I've got the whole planet with me. When you begin to realize that the mind is limitless and when I mean the mind I mean awareness. So this is something that's not particular to me or you or people who like really are devoted to meditation. Everybody, the nature of the human mind is that it's limitless. So it's not your mind or your awareness, it's awareness. If you use the word my or your, you've made a fundamental error and collapsed the universe in a certain way around those pronouns.

46:22And while, yes, you have to use those pronouns to get through life and you know, you can't go to the bank and say, you know, give me somebody else's money. You have to say, give me my money. But when you don't know who's talking and you haven't investigated that, then you tend to fall into and believe the story of me. You will wear another. And a lot of times the story of me is very unhappy. It's like, what's wrong with me? Why am I so depressed? It's closer to the old main frame computing system where there's this great computer somewhere, and we all have terminals, but we don't have a laptop that does everything itself.

47:05We're just connected to the main source, and we're all connected to this main source. So, awareness is when we tap into it, it's again, not ours, it's the awareness. Yes, so beautifully said. And you ask me about how my scientific training has informed that view. I could go on at great length about that because let's go back to awareness for a moment, okay? Can you find the center of your awareness? Just experiment. Can I find the center of my awareness? And then you might expand that inquiry. can I find the periphery or the circumference of my awareness?" And at some point, maybe if we have enough time and you care to, we could just like sit in silence for an extended period of time, which has enores value of its own.

48:01And I remember when you talked to Anderson Cooper, you proposed that actually to sit together for a period of time. And anybody would be watching on a screen or on TV with, like, well, they're not doing anything. And they'd be right, you know, in the sense that you're not doing anything, but you are being. And there's an infinite universe of that. And when that happens on the screen, as happened when Bill Moyer's filmed MBSR in his PBS special healing in the mind, 40 million people saw it, and they were entrained into the stretches of silence where they broke the television rules about dead airspace.

48:42And they had under a minute, but it says like, anathema to television to have a minute of silence. And they had a very long stretch of us at the end of a meditation in the classroom with 40 medical patients just being no sound. Of course, the microphones were on, so it wasn't dead air sound, but just room tone with all of us breathing. And 40 million people saw that program at one point or another, and some majors, proportion those people were entrained into, I don't know what I just saw or felt, but I want that. And we heard about it, I mean, because we'd set up a phone bank so that our patients actually took the calls from people saying, whatever that was, I want that and turned out to be MBSR, you know.

49:35So we could give it to people, but this is kind of the real beauty of awareness is that you can't find the center for it. You can't find the circumference of the periphery. And you already, I don't want to say have it because it's like you don't have awareness. It'd be more appropriate to say you are awareness. That's in some sense your nature, a significant part of your nature. And so what is awareness most like that we know in the domain of science? What has no center and no periphery? The universe. You know, the greatest cosmologists will tell you that the universe is boundless and it's also accelerating.

50:32So it's like really unbelievably mind -blowing that it's not like things are accelerating in space. Space is accelerating out of nothing. In other words, awareness is growing. It's comparable to that, okay? No one understands this, but it's phenomenal to think about. They may be one in the same. Look, here we are on planet Earth, right? We're dispoiling the planet to the point where, you know, it's really questionable about whether future generations, I mean, in even generations that are alive now, are going to be able to live live as comfortably as, you know, because of, you know, the ways in which we're killing each other all over the planet, but also because we've given the planet a fever that could get out of control, run away fever, turn earth into Venus or something like that.

51:25So, it's time for us human beings to actually wake up. So, in that sense, you could say, human beings on earth, we don't know about life anywhere else, but human beings on earth are aware through the, you know, James Webb Space Telescope and the LIGO observatories that that measured the kind of Einstein predicted gravitational waves and so forth. The science is actually showing us that we're the universe's way of knowing itself, at least in our neighborhood, called this solar system. And one of the things we discovered is that like, we're made of, you know, I mean, if you remember chemistry in high school, you probably had a periodic table of the elements in your classroom.

52:15That is such a mind -blowing meditative thing to actually contemplate. You've got hydrogen and helium, which are the only things that came out of the big bang. It's just hydrogen and helium, and helium is inert, so it doesn't do anything. But at a hydrogen and huge, unimaginable periods of time, billions and billions of years, out of this explosion, out of nothing. So we don't know what was before the Big Bang, but you get all this energy. Finally, it collapses into hydrogen and helium. And then out of that, you get stars. First generation of stars. Then when the stars explode, they make oxygen and phosphorus and nitrogen.

52:58So you can't get them from regular stars. You have to get them out of the energy of stars that explode. So you're making these atomic nuclei and you get the periodic table. Well, you know, you couldn't have iPhones without some of the rare earth elements that no one's ever heard of, but you need them for electronic batteries and all sorts of things and our technology nowadays. So when is humanity actually going to recognize that on this tiny little, extremely fragile planet that maybe we need to wake up through the full dimensionality of our possibilities, so that we don't kill each other or dispoil the entirety of the planet for future generations, just when we could actually recognize that we're in intimate balance with all sorts of other alive elements of this planet, that we are also threatening with extinction.

54:00And so mindfulness isn't just kind of a medicine for individual people suffering with various kinds of physical or psychological ailments. We could say that nowadays, mindfulness may be medicine for the planet. And when I say mindfulness, I also mean heartfulness, the words are the same in all Asian languages. So it includes compassion. It includes kindness. It includes love, basically. But a loft that's informed by what we were talking about about the emptiness of those personal pronouns, so that you can't take them seriously. Putting on your scientist hat for a moment is all matter. Everything that we perceive, physical matter, made up from the elements on the periodic table, that's all, that's the entire menu of everything.

54:54We used to think that. And again, here like now, I'm just going on the basis of being an informed citizen because I'm not a cosmologist or a theoretical physicist. But it turns out that it has been recently discovered, I mentioned that the universe is expanding. And it's not just expanding, it's accelerating in that rate of expansion. And that's called dark energy. Nobody knows what's driving that. Nobody knows. Not the smartest people on the planet know what is going on. And that's something like 75 or 74 % of all the energy in the universe is dark energy, because they can figure this out. Then it turns out there's also dark matter.

55:42Then it turns out that there's all this gravitational force in the universe that is not made out of atoms and molecules of the kind that's in the periodic table. So it turns out that stars and the periodic table of the elements and the earth and the planets and everything, we constitute what they estimate to be 4 % of the entirety of reality, 4 % and the rest we don't know. So I had his Korean Zen Master, a study of a three -number years name, Song -san, and he used to talk about not knowing mind. And he had a wonderful way of talking about it because of his Korean accent and the energy behind him, so he would say, don't know.

56:28He would just go like, don't know. Where is your mind? Don't know. And then he'd say, keep this, don't know mind. So keep this, don't know mind. Well, all great scientists, that's what they most need us to not know because otherwise you're imprisoned by what you do know and you can't go beyond that to the next discovery of just what's right beyond the horizon of the known. Christian Murdi wrote a wonderful book called Freedom from the Known because it can be so imprisoning. And so keeping don't know mind, that's what mindfulness is about. It's not falling into the cognitive stream or waterfall or however you want to frame it.

57:12It doesn't mean that you're not thinking or that you're going to get stupid. It means that you're recruiting other dimensions of intelligence, and I like to speak about them as superpowers. So thinking is fantastic. I mean, we wouldn't have it without thinking our condition would be unthinkable, but there's another power that we have that never gets any airtime or until recently, and that is awareness. So will you ever talk anything about awareness, embodied awareness in school? You were taught a lot about thinking and structure of sentences and how to, you know, sort of talk and read and stuff like that.

57:51But so that's all great and that's all about thinking. But then this is other superpower that we're born with. It's like, oh, we have to get it. We have it called awareness. And we don't even know the territory. We just lost in it. And then so we don't want to go there. We just want to stay in our thoughts and emotions. A lot of it's reactive. But what mindfulness is, what all meditative practices are, they're doorways into awareness, into who you already are, beyond thinking, beyond name and form, as they say in the heart sutra. And when you enter one of those doors, and they're an infinite number of doors into awareness, So it's not like parochial or one -size -fits -all or anything like that.

58:40Then there's the potential for us to each live our moments as if they really, really, really, really mattered. Really mattered. That's why wherever you go there you are, okay? Because it's like you only get this moment. Yes. If you're not paying attention, it's gone. Well, here's another one. And so you got another chance, but if you're zoning along on autopilot, not liking the way things are now, but desperately grasping at something in the future that's going to make it all come together for you, that's a kind of signature of a certain kind of delusion. I'm not saying one shouldn't have ambition and creative drive and faith and confidence in one's own powers, But it's very, very easy to miss one's moments all the way into the grave.

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1:00:54So the first book, Full Catastrophe Living, is really after years of this eight -week course. Yes. And teaching a two -wire audience who were not just there to do. Exactly. I wrote it after I started the stress reduction clinic in 79 and that book came, so it was like 11, 12 years before that book came out. And then the book wherever you go there you are, which we're now talking about the 30th anniversary of it. I wrote that three or four years later. It came out in 1994. It's a very different book. Yeah. Tell me the story of that book. Why then? I love that you're even interested in this. I mean, I feel like there's a certain impulse I have to turn the table and start interviewing you because we're having this kind of conversation and it can't be by accident or just kind of random.

1:01:48And so I'm really interested in the fact that since we've crossed paths, there's a certain way in which I feel like even I know almost nothing about you that we're on the same wavelength in some fundamental way. And I'm really interested in that more than I'm interested in the story of me even if, you know, we're doing it for some kind of express purpose, you know, which is not to sell books, but to ignite passion for something that's a deep human inheritance that nobody is missing anything lacking in this regard, but we often think we are, and so we feel like inadequate in a certain way. And what we say to our patients before I come around to try and answer your question, if you still want me to, you know, when we first encounter our patients in the stress reduction clinic, and we listen to their stories, which we do, which is really important to listen and not interrupt them, which constantly happen in medicine.

1:02:52And we say, well, listen, from our point of view, no matter what diagnosis you're here with and they're here with every conceivable diagnosis, from our point of view, as long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you. And what MBSR is going to do is pour energy into what's right with you, let the rest of the medical center take care of what's wrong with you, and after eight weeks, see what happens. And what happens is that they recruit those interior resources we were talking about before or they tap into them like the oil drillers, and they come up to the surface, and they put them to work as a formal and informal meditation practice, so that ultimately, maybe in eight weeks, but certainly in eight years or 80 years, you discover that life itself is the meditation practice.

1:03:42That every moment is incredible invitation to show up in your fullness, in your beauty. No matter what, even if you're depressed, even if things are not going well at the moment, even if you've run out of creative ideas and all of that, awareness doesn't care. The thought I've run out of creative ideas, if you hold it in awareness, awareness is just going to laugh at that one. Yeah, there's an infinite source of wisdom that we can tap into at any moment if we get out of the way. And I know that you're famous for that and also infamous in a certain way for that because it's pretty unusual actually.

1:04:25And it's even more unusual that you share it with the world in an embodied way. And I just want to bow to you for that. I feel like I never would have believed it, but you know that I've actually encountered somebody where I can connect in a way with there's no separation and it's way beyond whatever the stories where they brought us here and that we know that instinctively and if we never even saw each other again it wouldn't matter. It's beyond time and space. Well the truth is is that in some ways I am a product of your teaching so that it makes sense. It's like you recognize in me. It's the mirror thing.

1:05:09And I also know that what's in your book you didn't create you Recognized it. It's this so you pointed it out to me But you're pointing I'm pointing we're pointing at the same thing Exactly we're all pointing yes, and I get the sense again. I don't want to go beyond my capacity to even and say anything remotely authentic in this regard, but a work of art, a particular piece of music or even a song. Everybody hears it differently. I'm imagining that the artist, even if it's a single artist or if it's a group, their relationship to it changes over time. Because they were to rerecord it, they would record it differently over time, that it's a kind of manifestation of the present moment.

1:06:02It's a kind of flowering of a certain kind of actuality in multiple dimensions. And everybody resonates with it however they will, given their unique filters and history and everything else. And when we can agree that in general we'll say something like, we love this, this is awesome. Then it also lets us recognize how interconnected we are, how we aren't isolated monads, how we often love the same things and we need each other to point out the beauty and also the places where we need to grow. It feels like magic to me. It is. It is magic. And the reason you are pointing to it, and now I'm pointing to it, is because we love it.

1:06:55That's the only reason. It's all devotional. Yeah. And that's why, you know, after close to 60 years of having a formal meditation practice. And of course, what I'm talking about is not that easy to do, because who has the time, and it seems so much like nothing. But what I've come to is, like, if you take your seat in the morning and I'm using sitting as a metaphor for any door into mindfulness, a lying down standing on your head, you know, jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, whatever you're doing, that the present moment is an invaluable gift and you're willingness to enter into it in a fully embodied, wakeful way.

1:07:43It's a love affair with life itself. And it's also in a certain way, a carmic assignment. It's like, hey, if the world produced you, why not give the world back everything that you are? And if you doubt that the world needs it, just recognizing, that's just a thought. And it's about as true or as useful or interesting as what you had for breakfast three weeks ago. No one cares, you don't care. So when you start to investigate your thoughts with mindfulness meditation, you begin to realize that if you have one really good thought in your entire life, you're ahead of the curve. Most thoughts are just rehashed, same old, same old.

1:08:30And they're usually not true, and especially the ones that have to do with I, me, and mine. Because we don't know who's talking when we use those. We're kind of in the story of me, and the way I like to put it is there were so much bigger than the story, awareness, if it's boundless. We've already proved that like your co -extensive with the entire universe when you would drop underneath thinking into awareness. and what could be more amazing than that, not to be missed, okay? Not to be missed. So life is not to be missed. So wherever you go, can you be fully present in this moment? Without pushing anything away, without pursuing anything, and without generating a story of like, yeah, now I'm meditating or now I'm like a big shot or, you know, or I'm worthless or whatever the thought is, Those thoughts will happen.

1:09:30But when you are in awareness, you recognize that's just an event in the field of awareness. It's called the thought, frayed it with very often with negative emotion. You see it as like a cloud in the sky. It just comes. You don't have to do anything. It just sort of evaporates by itself sooner or later. Comes goes. You don't take it personally. Then you're fully alive in this moment, fully embodied. And that's a radical act. In this day and age, it's a radical act of sanity to engage your moments in that way. And not what I'm saying is, I've discovered for myself that it's a radical act of love.

1:10:10So when I sit in the morning, which I do on an absolutely regular basis, and I sit on the floor on the soft floor, but I'm not recommending other people to that. And maybe in 10 years or 20 years, my legs won't be able to handle that, because they're an infinite number of doors into what I'm calling sitting or awareness. But when I do take my seat, I see it as a radical act of love. Not one more thing I have to do in the morning before I get going on my day, but like a radical act of love, and in a certain sense, a tuning of one's instrument before you take it out on the road for the day to do whatever you're going to do.

1:10:50And then your entire day becomes mindfulness practice. And that's what wherever you go there you are as well. It's like life is the meditation practice, not sitting meditation or yoga or standing on your head. Life is the meditation practice. And there's no separation from music, sound, silence, creativity, possibility, and then So with their suffering, rather than running away from it, say, well, I can't go towards the suffering. You instinctively bodhisattva -like actually turn towards the suffering because you can't be whole when other people are at home. You can't be entirely at home with genocide or with injustice of a certain kind.

1:11:48And it's just not possible because otherwise you're compromising your own moral integrity. So in a world that's suffering, you know, meditative awareness really seems to me now to be a kind of karmic assignment for humanity as a whole. So that we don't destroy this beautiful gem of a planet because we don't, as they like to say, or puns intended, we don't have a planet B. One of the things that I so love about wherever you go there you are is I read it 30 years ago when it came out I was already a meditator for probably 15 years and I remember as I was reading it feeling like this is the best book on meditation I've ever read and I'd read quite a few at that point and I would give this to someone who's interested in meditation and who's never done it and And I would give it to someone who's been meditating for 50 years, and there's no better guidebook, regardless of where you are on the path, to connect to the practice in a new, deeper and more profound way.

1:13:02Well, speechless, and incredibly gratified because, of course, you know, why do we do the work that we're doing? Why do we put anything out there in the world? We want other people to be touched by it, to be moved by it in a way that is an official to them. That's something or other that is feeling some kind of space in a way that's profound. Tell me how your practice has changed over the course of your life from the early days to now. In a way it hasn't changed at all. You know, it's really interesting. I still love it in the same way. In fact, I value it more than ever as I get older because there is that law of impermanence And this is why there is, you know, suffering in the world is that things don't stay the same.

1:14:01And so there's inevitable loss. And if you have a body, it goes through changes. And then ultimately it dissolves back into the elements. And it's really important for me to live the life that's mine to live while I have the chance. So my practice really hasn't changed so much. If anything, I'm getting more and more deeply into the yoga, the older my body gets. Really spending a lot of time on the floor in my meditation room on my yoga mat, experimenting and exploring with stuff lying on my belly, and pretending I'm swimming in the water. I love to swim, but being in New England, I only swim in this summer time.

1:14:52But there's something about swimming in the air that you have to deal with gravity and limitations and stuff like that. And I have an almost 80 -year -old body now, but I'm recognizing that it's really a powerful meditation practice to listen deeply and experiment with subtle motions of what the body wants to do, loves to do, and is nurtured by doing, not just to prevent accidents or to be strong, but because it's a kind of investigation of the body aging, the body not being a 20 -year -old body or even a 40 -year -old body anymore, it's like, but it's this body and it's the only one I have. So the yoga has become more and more profound for me.

1:15:46And the sitting has become just more and more of a love affair, so to speak, that's, you know, for the first like 40 years that I was meditating, I would wake up at very early in the morning, like four or five, and sit for an hour, and then do yoga for an hour and stuff like that. But as I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot more relaxed about the kind of heavy -duty discipline after 40 years. You'd think I had enough momentum to ease off a bit. So sometimes I'm meditating bad. And I actually recommend it more and more to people because you know, you probably have this experience yourself. But all meditators, it's like, do I want to get up out of bed and mccold and go meditate?

1:16:34And it's like, well, you don't have to get out of the bed to meditate. Just wake up. We say every time we come to the end of the night, I walk up. But it's probably not true. It's probably like I partially woke up and I jumped out of bed on an autopilot and I was already late and I miss brushing my teeth and I was like lost in thought and driven. Well, why not, before you drop into autopilot, why not finish the job and wake up completely for this moment. Why not feel your whole body? You don't have to do a 45 -minute body scan, but put your mind in your body and feel the body. Breathe with the body and really feel your hands because they're miraculous.

1:17:19You wouldn't want to be without one. But we take them for granted so much of the time to touch. The longest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is touch. touch. Touch has so many meanings. I mean it goes on for I don't remember how many pages, because now it's all digital, but metaphorically, literally, physically, when you put your attention in your hands, you're touching the universe in a certain way, the universe of your body, and your body is like the result of 13 .8 billion years of evolution from the big bang has resulted in this constellation of atoms and molecules in the form of you waking up this morning, holy moly, maybe I shouldn't miss this, maybe I shouldn't have jumped out of bed on autopilot, but really appreciate the amazingness of being in the body, then you can take your mind, your attention out of your hands and put them in your feet and play around in whatever playful ways you want.

1:18:30And then get out of bed and maybe even form the intention that maybe life itself is the real meditation practice. I'll just be mindful all day. And whether you sit or you don't sit, yeah, I feel like people delude themselves into thinking, well, I'll just be mindful all the time. It's mindfulness in everyday life. That's a subtitle to the book. But I'll just do that. But it turns out, unless you're exercising a muscle on a regular basis in the gym, so to speak, on your question, lots of luck with that one, because self -delusion is infinite and getting back into the gym and working with, not against, the resistance of the mind when it goes off, you bring it back, it goes off, you bring it back, it goes off, you see where it's gone, you recognize something, and then even if it's seductive, you know, you bring it back anyway and stay in the open -hearted, spaciousness of not knowing.

1:19:28Something grows over days, weeks, months, years, decades, and it's exactly what I think all the great meditation teachers are pointing to, and all the great poets, for that matter, that life is not to be missed, and it's so easy to miss it. Then it's almost cominsensical to fall into the love of hair. Coming about the difference between a meditation practice where you're focusing on what is versus a concentration practice where you're focusing on a mantra or flame or a guided meditation for that matter, which is a third category, I suppose. You may wear your listen to somebody else's voice that's guiding you.

1:20:15Yes. Mindfulness is not the same as concentration. So there are concentration practices and then there are mindfulness practices. So concentration has more to do with stability of attention. Okay. And kind of one -pointedness or vividness on the one object. So you can get very, very deeply into selecting one object and attending to you mentioned a candle flame or you know some kind of mantra. Or a mantra. But even those can be used mindfully. So it's like it's not hard fast boundaries. But a mantra is basically a sound that you internalize. Om Namashivaya or whatever, and until a point where there's no you doing it anymore, it's just here doing itself, so to speak, and you're resting in the embrace of the sound, even though the sound is silent.

1:21:26So it's very one -pointed when we talk about concentration practices there, and meant to developed what's called samadhi or shamata. It's like deep calmness and stability of mind. But then there's insight, there's vipassana, there's this other element of it, which we're also born with. So we're born with that capacity for one point of this, but you have to exercise the muscle in order to really stabilize the mind. And then there's mindfulness or vipassana or insight meditation or I mean there's so many different words for it in the different traditions and I won't go into that but where you're just sitting as the Japanese like to say just sitting nothing more the Japanese for the shikantasa just sitting nothing more they don't use the word meditation and I often encourage people to throw out the word meditation because if you have the thought I'm meditating, you're bringing a lot of baggage into that.

1:22:24So then you have to, am I doing it right? Am I sitting up straight enough? Do I look like I'm meditating to other people? And it's like, wait a minute, all that's just garbage. It's just all more thinking. So if you let go of trying to get anywhere else and just be where you already are, then you're dropping into awareness, you're resting in awareness. And that is its own stability, so that you just add home in that boundless spaciousness. Christian Mertichol, the choice of this awareness, it's called Zokchen in the Tibetan tradition. It's like there are a lot of different doors, but it's basically the same room.

1:23:06All the doors are into the same room, and the room is human awareness. And we already have it. I'm not sure I mentioned or emphasized this before, but you don't acquire awareness, you're born with it. So you already have it, we all do, but what's challenging is accessing it. We don't have ready access to it because thinking is like some gigantic black hole that's sucking all of our energy all the time, thinking in emotions and self -centeredness. So, when we dissolve some of the attachment, the thought, and emotion, and self -ing, then the pure awareness, or we could even call it awareness -sing, is just available 24 -7.

1:23:54And there's no curriculum anymore. You're boundless like space and time. And as the heart sutra says, there's no place to go. there's nothing to do and there's no special something or specialised mindful state that you're supposed to attain. So if you're trying really hard to meditate and wondering, is this it? Am I feeling it right? And their chapter is about that in the book. Then you really weigh off base because what you're feeling is the curriculum. The question is, can you be aware of what you're feeling? And then not try to edit it or get somewhere from it, but to just let it be and let it teach you what it is to teach you.

1:24:36How does guided meditation work differently than those? Well, all of those can be arrived at just without any guidance, but sooner or later almost everybody needs to be taught how to meditate, at least the beginning of it. So it's like a glide bath. You know, it's like a plane taking off. There's thinking of evil, connevil taking off with, you know, on this motorcycle and jumping over cars or whatever. So you need a kind of glide path of practice, but then ultimately you're just resting in awareness and there's no place to go, there's nothing to do, and there's no special something you're supposed to retain because it's all special.

1:25:18There's nothing that's not special when you drop underneath thinking. So, in a certain way it takes us into the realm of the poetic, where serves pros basically peters out that you just more words won't do anything more. But the great poets, of course, their challenge just seems to me as always been to take what's impossible to put into words and put it into words. And I'm thinking of people like Emily Dickinson, who is one of my favorite poets. And she recognized that a lot of the time we're in a war with ourselves, we're of two minds, we're fighting with each other. So one of my favorite poems, if it's okay for me to recite it, deals with these personal pronouns that are so problematic.

1:26:15And the Buddha is famous for having said nothing is to be clung to as I, me, and mine. He said his entire 40 years of teaching could be encapsulated in that one sentence. Nothing is to be clung to, the verb to cling as self, as I, me, or mine. Easy to say, not so easy to do. That's why we need the discipline. A lot of people, I mean, all of us really, we're conflicted a lot of the time. And sometimes maybe we even hear ourselves saying something like, I'm with two minds about that. I want it, I don't want it, I like it, I hate it. Here's Emily Dickinson, because, and of course she apparently suffered a great deal in her own life.

1:27:03Me, from myself to banish, had I art impregnable my fortress unto all heart. But since myself assault me, how have I peace accept by subjugating consciousness and since we're mutual monarch, how this be except by abdication, me of me. So very powerful evocation of how much we struggle with ourselves and don't like each other or even hate, detest parts of ourselves and try to hide them from people. And she just does that so amazingly as a poet. I mean, if those were notes, I mean, it would be a masterpiece, you know, of music. I mean, she takes it. It's a totally simple little English pronouns and plays with them in a way that's like mind -blowing and then drops it into the impossibility at the end of like me for me, you know, I banish myself.

1:28:30Now a lot of people, we do that a lot and live lives of tremendous pain and suffering because we haven't reconciled the warfare between me and myself. And what the meditation practice is saying is there is no war between you and yourself. The awareness can hold that me and myself, and the awareness is the unifying factor. And then you see, these are just play thoughts and emotions, and they have no actuality beyond what you've nurtured them or feed them with. They are just comings and goings that aren't the full story. They may have some partial truth, but they're not the full story. And if you don't want to live in alienation from yourself for your entire life, then you have to, as Wordsworth said, reconcile this courted elements that, and make them move in one society.

1:29:29If we're not the thoughts, and if we're not the totality of awareness, what are we? Well, we're closer to the catalytic of awareness. That's interesting. We're embodied. That's what I would say. And then beyond that, language gives out. Or we don't know who we are. We are the universe's way of looking at itself. In this particular corner of the universe at least. And harking back to what we were saying about science and understanding the big bang and more and more our place in the universe through the amazing technologies that now can look back in time by looking out in space all the way back to very close to the beginning of the Big Bang.

1:30:19And understand that, it's like humanity has an amazing role in the universe that we shouldn't disregard. We are geniuses, we're all geniuses. And if we could create a society that recognizes genius and creates laws that prevent certain levels of harm caused to other members of society, And then perhaps we could actually not self -destruct in the next hundred years or fifty years or ten years. And that's why I do what I do, because in some sense, that me from myself to banish, it's like all of humanity is struggling with that. It's not just Emily Dickinson and me, you know, 19th century struggling with her unrequited love of fear.

1:31:12So here's another poem if you're okay with it from Derek Walcott, another wonderful, incredible poet from the island of St. Lucia, who went to Nobel Prize some years ago and recently deceased. And it's kind of like the opposite of the Amaldeiconscent. So I like to use the two of them sometimes in tandem. And this poem is called Love After Love. Do you know it? Okay, it's called Love After Love. the time will come when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror and each will smile at the others welcome and say sit Sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

1:32:08Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to yourself. To the stranger who has loved you all your life, who you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror. And this is the classic last line. Sit. Feast. On your life. Beautiful. Beautiful celebration of life. Yeah, awesome. in very few words and that's what great poets do is they can take what's really impossible to put into words and they somehow manage and then it resonates. I want to give you one more just that fafon and because of music.

1:33:06So this is by Rilka, the great German poet of the early 20th century, from his book of hours which it doesn't have a title. My life is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying. My life is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me. I stand before it like a tree. I am just one of my many mouths, and at that the one that would be still the sunnest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because death's note wants to climb over, but in the dark interval reconciled, They stay here trembling and the song goes on.

1:34:11Beautiful. Wow. Magnificent. Tell me about being the mountain. There's a practice in where we go there. You are called the mountain meditation. And the mountain meditation is really an invitation to experience stability. So when you look at a mountain, gaze at a mountain or a picture of a mountain, you can actually invite the energies of the mountain into your standing or your sitting. Even if it's a picture in your mind's eye, it doesn't have to be looking at the mountain itself. And realize that you know there are many ways in which we're mountains too. We can sit with utter dignity, beauty, beauty.

1:35:02The head lofty, elevating itself right up through the neck and top of the head. And the pelvis rooted to the chair or the cushion or whatever it's rooted on and something grounding with the legs and the feet. And so you're taking responsibility in a certain way to recognize that it's possible to drop in on a certain kind of massive of magnificent beauty that is utterly stable, unmoving. And then, as we say, the mountain just sits there. It doesn't say, well, I'm bored, I'm going to get up now. It just sits. And the sun goes across the sky. And for a moment, a moment, the shadows on the mountain are different, the light on the mountain, the weather patterns around the mountain, the seasons move day and night, and through it all the mountain just sits, being its utterly intrinsic nature.

1:36:12And it's not saying, oh, I don't look so good today because there's too many clouds and fog and the tourist gets me, or in the midst of ice storms and snow and blizzards. The mountain sits through all of that. So when we take our seat in meditation, in a similar way, we can imagine the body as a mountain of our choice. And that's stable. It's rooted in the mantle and the crust of the earth. That's stable. And with a lofty peak that on a clear day, at least has a panoramic perspective. in 360. And as the sun goes across the sky, you know, as day follows night and the seasons follow each other, we can sit in our meditation practice through weather patterns of all kinds in the mind, through periods that feel winterized, inner fog, low hanging, ceiling and clouds, and then springtime comes if we're patient, and then summer, and then fall, and there's not one moment that doesn't have its own intrinsic beauty.

1:37:28And you're not how the mountain looks. The mountain has no concern for how it looks, or what other people think of it. The mountain and just is what it is. It's in its intrinsic nature, and in its intrinsic, unique beauty. And when you meditate so that in some sense your body and the mountain that you're inviting come together. Then you can actually, with every in -breath, derive energy from that stability, from the image itself and the felt sense of it in the arms and shoulders and hips and legs and the elevation through the back coming out of the pelvis and right up through the neck and the head.

1:38:24And that's meant to launch you into the timeless present moment where you can let go of that image and all thought and not be the mountain anymore, but be the beauty that is yourself. Beautiful. Great practice. Yeah. People find that really strengthening or motivating in a certain way because it's intuitively obvious that the mountain is beautiful and the mountain is stable. Why can't I be beautiful and stable and low and behold you discover? You can. There's a line in wherever you go there you are talking about being able to experience the seasons in a breath. And it was just a beautiful image.

1:39:27It caught me when I first began speaking to people. I guess as soon as I opened my mouth. But maybe long before that, I never know. We're all speaking to each other all the time by virtue of our embodied presence. So when we're at home in our own skin, other people recognize it in a certain way, and they want to be close to it. And they usually project onto the other person that there's something special about that person. And if the person is wise enough, they will recognize that as a projection and as basically wrong. and remind the person that they to share all of those energetic qualities and that it doesn't take a lifetime to realize them because they're already here.

1:40:27What it really takes is getting out of our own way and that's why I'd have guided meditations and write books and stuff like that is so that they're all glide paths, as we said, into your own experience of your own life and taking responsibility for it in such a way that it's an adventure of discovery. There's a lot of stress, pain, and challenges in life, and it doesn't always work out or it happened the way we wanted to, and sometimes it's merely annoying, and sometimes it's actually tragic. But with this kind of equipping of ourselves, so to speak, for the challenges of the arc of a life lived fully, not only can we do it, the word doing is the wrong word.

1:41:16We can be it. Okay, it's not about doing. It's about being. There's a lot in wherever you go there, you're about the distinction between being and doing. But we're doing it together.

1:41:29Can you guide me through a short body scan? Sure. Lefto. Let's do it. We'll experience the body as a whole line here. We're sitting if you're sitting. And noticing that awareness can hold the entirety of the body. Right in this moment, the entire universe of sensations associated with the envelope of the skin.

1:42:13And the entirety of the body lying here or sitting here.

1:42:25and coming to rest and awareness so that you're basically at home in awareness. With things exactly as they are, and we're going to invite into awareness the body, as As it is sitting here, lying here, and experiencing it as a totality in its wholeness.

1:43:06And the first thing you'll notice is, of course, that there's breathing going on.

1:43:21And we're just aware of the breath coming into the body. And then peaking at the apex of the in -breath and then leaving the body, flowing out. and then a little trough at the end of the out breath. And then what do you know? The next in breath. We gifted with it. Then so rather than the conceit that we're breathing, recognizing that the body is breathing for sure.

1:44:03But we can just go along for the ride and not have to interfere or push or pull the breath in any way. But just rest in awareness of the body as a whole lying here or sitting here.

1:44:28Then when you're ready, then just bringing awareness to the feet and we'll do both feet together. And noticing that as I invite you to do it, you know how to do that. You can feel the feet. I'm not asking you to think about the feet, but to simply feel the sensations, or if you can't feel the sensations, then feeling the lack of sensation or numbness. So whether it's warmth or tingling, or any other sensations, or lack of sensation, just holding whatever is here for you now in this moment as we attend to the sensations and the feet.

1:45:25And then when you're ready, taking a slow, deep more intentional breath in and breathing all the way up into the lungs so that you're filling the lungs to their capacity. And then on now breath, just letting go of the breath. And as you do that, letting go of the feet as well. And moving your attention into the lower legs. And the knees. And just feeling again, whatever sensations are here from this region of the body. or lack of sensation and just holding it in awareness, feeling them, attending to them. Without thinking, just directly experiencing them. Of course, they may be thinking going on as well, but we're focusing on the direct tending to sensation.

1:46:37And then here too, taking a deep breath in whenever you care to write down into the region of the lower legs and knees. And then on the out breath letting them dissolve in your mind's eye as well as the breath lets go and leaves the body. And as we move into the region of the upper legs,

1:47:05And just feeling again, whatever is here to be felt. The upper legs end all the way up to the hips on the outside and the groin on the inside, on the surface and deep. Any and all sensations or lack of sensation?

1:47:36And when you are ready, you are too. On an outrather, just letting them dissolve as you move into the pelvis and the region of the pelvis and hips and buttocks and genitals. And again, the only assignment is to bring awareness to this region of the body in particular and breathe with it as you're holding it in awareness.

1:48:13All sorts of memories, thoughts and emotions may arise in this region or any other region of the body. Everybody's body is different. Just like whatever thoughts or emotions come and go when they go. But we are zeroing in on the sensations as best we can.

1:48:38And then when you're ready here, two on an out breath, let it go. As the breath lets go. And coming into the whole region of the lower back and abdomen.

1:48:57And here you'll feel the belly expanding on the in breaths and receding on the out breaths.

1:49:09And just welcoming any and all sensations or lack of sensation. Again, the important thing is to simply bring vivid awareness to this region.

1:49:27You're not actually doing anything, you're just being with it.

1:49:34And when you're ready here too on an outbreath letting it dissolve in your mind's eye as the breath let's go. It has the mind let's go. It has you let go. And as we move into the region of thoracic spine, the upper region of the chest, the ribcage, housing the, of course, the lungs and the heart and the great vessels, and just experiencing the universe of the upper torso. Of course, the ribcage will be expanding with each and breath and receding a bit with each outrat, seeing if you can detect the shoulder blades floating on the back of the ribcage, Seeing if you can detect the collarbones in the front that go back to the shoulder blades and form the whole mechanism for movement of the arms.

1:50:51If you'd like, you can even see if you can detect your heart beating in your chest. And whether you can or can't, you're simply at home right here with this region of the body in all its wonder, beauty, including the chest wall and the breasts. the spaces between the ribs.

1:51:32And when you're ready, here too, taking the slow, deep, intentional breath in and filling up the lungs, filling up the lungs right up to the apesies of the lungs behind the collarbones and all the way back to the shoulder blades and cradling the breath at the very apex of it for a moment, and then just letting it wash out,

1:52:02maintaining a seamless continuity in the awareness moment by moment, by moment.

1:52:11And now we can move into the hands, just as we did with the feet, we'll do them both together, and you might marvel at the fact that we can actually hold both feet or both hands in awareness at the same time. When you think about it, it's pretty amazing. And feeling the sensations in the tips of the fingers and thumbs. And in the backs of the fingers and thumbs and all around, and then feeling the sensations in the backs of the hands, and the palms of the hands. Then maybe if you're very, very quiet, even picking up on the pulsations and the radial arteries and the wrists, then just breathing with the entirety of your hands.

1:53:21And if you like, get some point taking a final breath right into the hands and then breathing out from the hands and letting them go as the breath lets go. And as we move into the forearms and rests again, inhale both, and the upper arms, the deltoid muscles, the biceps, just feeling the entirety of the rest of your arms and armpits.

1:54:04Any sensations, all sensations, no sensations, the key invitation is to simply be present in awareness without doing anything, just apprehending what's here to be felt, sensed, Known Resting and awareness in this particular region of the body

1:54:34And again whenever you're ready taking a slower deeper more intentional breath in directing it right to that region of the Horms and shoulders Upper arms armpits And when you're ready Here too, let it go.

1:54:59As we now move into the region of the neck and overlapping with the shoulders again, and not just the neck but the throat, and not just the throat but the larynx, and holding holding the hold of this region and awareness and maybe marveling at what the larynx can do in concert with the lungs and the tongue and the mouth, and just holding the entirety of the neck and shoulders and awareness, feeling whatever is here to be felt. When you're ready, just like with every other region of the body, letting it go as the breath Let's go.

1:56:03And as we move now into the head and face, and just feeling the entirety of your head an anphase, holding it in awareness, letting go of any thoughts you might have about it, and how it appears, just allowing it to be as it is from the inside, in its own intrinsic and profound beauty.

1:56:49experiencing the sensations in the lower jaw, in the chin, and the lips, and the teeth, and the gums, and the tongue, and the upper lips again, and the nostrils, and the feeling of the air moving in and out of the nostrils in the whole of the nose.

1:57:20The cheeks, the eyes, and eyelids, and eyebrows, and the wonder of the eyes behind the eyelids, If your eyes are closed, the marvel of that sense, the miracle of it, and letting the awareness thread out to include the forehead and the temples and the ears and the whole

1:58:08feeling what's here to be felt and allowing awareness to now include the entirety of the vault of the head and the cranium, the back of the head, and just reminding yourself that underneath that cranium, underneath the vault of the cranium lies the most complex This arrangement that matter in the known universe, the human brain, which is extended out into the entirety of the body through the senses and many other pathways.

1:58:51And so holding the entirety of the head and face and awareness with a certain kind of profound wonder and honoring, and recognizing not only its intrinsic beauty and wonder, but the intrinsic beauty and wonder of you and your ability to hold it in awareness, outside time in this timeless present moment we call now. And then when you're ready once again, plan an outbreath just letting the entirety of your face and head dissolve in your mind's eye, just letting it completely dissolve as you flow into an awareness that can include the body sitting or lying here right now. But that is also boundless and simply resting here.

2:00:16Completely at home.

2:00:22with really no place to go, no better place to be in this moment than right here.

2:00:35Nothing to do to fill up this moment because it's already complete and full as it is.

2:00:47And no special agenda that needs to be fulfilled or accomplishment to be had. And nothing to attain beyond this moment because this is it, your whole life, right here in this moment. The body, the breath, all of the sensoria, and awareness itself, fully be embodied.

2:01:45And so when you're ready, you might experiment with opening your eyes, if your eyes have been closed, and maybe very, very slowly and gently introduce single, circular movement, movement, maybe in the toes or the fingers, and gradually increasing the moving, maybe massaging your face or with your hands or moving your hands together. But to simply just recognize that in a way that guided meditation is over. But the awareness goes out just like the ringing of a bell. There's the initial kiss of the bells or the clacker in the bell. But then the sound goes on. Just the way Rilka said, the song goes on.

2:02:53Beautiful. So life goes on.

2:03:01And it is wonders, and it needs you to be fully present, to complete the universe. And in some sense also I would say to complete your karmic assignment, whatever it is. Beautiful. So, thank you. There you have a slight essay. It felt so good. Well, thanks for the invitation. I mean, again, it's like it can be short, it can be long, it can be elaborate, and poetic, or it can be much less that way. But the important thing is that we realize that It's available 24 -7.

2:03:56The doors are everywhere. The doors of awareness or of wakefulness. Because there's so much intimacy in this. I mean, it's really an invitation of intimacy with yourself. Intimacy with the present moment. But because we're doing this together, and there's a certain kind of intimacy that arises This is just in our being together in this way. And I just want to bow to it and acknowledge it.

2:04:58It's still working its way through me.

2:05:08Well, it's a little bit like a tuning fork in a way. You know, there's the initial knock or hit to set it vibrating, but those vibrations, in a certain way, they, because we're not tuning forks, where the extremely complex arrangements of gazillions of atoms and molecules, those reverberations never stop. And every in -breath magically somehow invites them to renew themselves.

2:05:53And I think Rilco was right, the song goes on. Nothing changed, and now everything is different. That's beautifully said. Nothing's changed, and everything's different. And it's not some special, airy, fairy, weirdo kind of thing that's for sort of leftover hippies from a different generation or anything like that. And that's what, in a certain way, the mainstreaming of mindfulness has demonstrated that if you're human, it's really helpful to wake up. And there's a kind of score to it. But it's an unwritten score. We have to write the score. We're constantly participating in writing, co -creating the score of the of our own place or places in the world, and how we're going to navigate and modulate those interfaces.

2:07:01And I would say the world is starving for that. Absolutely starving for us to show up completely and to take care of what needs taking care of inwardly and outwardly. What are your thoughts on prayer? Because of the way I was brought up, I'm not that kind of familiar with that whole domain of things, although I did run a couple of cycles of MBSR back in the old days for the Catholic Church, for the Worcester diocese of the Catholic Church in Worcester, and they were really into prayer. What they found by coming and practicing these meditations that were from a very different tradition, they were saying it's the same thing.

2:07:47Everything is a prayer. Every breath is a prayer. So in that sense, as long as it's not so me -centered, and it's imploring for a special intervention from the divine, for my own betterment, even if it is, that's just a kind of expression of sorrow and suffering. But when one's taking this stance for the betterment of the world, or for the recognizing of the intrinsic beauty of the world, for the sake of all being, so to speak. Then everything becomes a prayer, and everything becomes a meditation, and every artistic expression, I would say, is a kind of... I hope this doesn't sound really inflated, but a certain kind of sacred offering.

2:08:40I think that's true. It's not meant to be evaluated compared to other sacred offerings, but to stand on its own as a kind of instance of recognizing the enormity of the mystery. Yes. And that we're a non -insignificant, insignificant part of it. Yes. Is science sophisticated enough to understand spirituality? I think it's getting there. I don't know where this spirituality is the right word. For various reasons, I stay away from using that word myself most of the time, not entirely successfully. And the last chapter of where there you are is called, is mindfulness spiritual. And I sort of say some things there because I get asked that question a lot by journalists or didn't but My definition of spirituality is what makes us human?

2:09:49So it becomes like a Zen Khoan. What does make us human? Well It's certain point silences the only really responsible response or an offering Like what you've made your art what you've constructed, what you've come through you. And of course you don't have to be or think of yourself as an artist, have things come through you because we're all portals in a certain way and things do come through us when we don't obstruct the portal from free flowing. So this is where I think the creativity comes in and that it's intrinsic a part of our humanity as awareness. But if it's hidden in plain sight, but not accessible, then it takes teachers or mentors or friends who care to nurture that in others, as well as in oneself.

2:10:59And I'm just intuiting because I don't know virtually nothing about it, but I'm guessing that that's one major element of how you have been functioning in the world of music for many, many decades. How is the nature of reality different than what we perceive? We have no idea, because we're limited by what we can perceive and think. But one thing we can intuit is that the nature of reality is a lot more mysterious than a philosophy, so to speak, a ratio. So this is the human adventure at its best, is to navigate those waters and expand our repertoire beyond the known without being shackled by what we know.

2:11:51Sometimes I like to say, you know, instead of waiting until you die, die now. Die now to the personal pronouns. Die now to your big ego trip and story of myself and now horrible or how great or wondrous. And by And by dying now, wake up to the beauty of this moment and realizing how much bigger you are than your story.