WEBVTT 00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:02.000 00:00:10.617 --> 00:00:13.271 Πριν από 3 χρόνια υπήρξε ένα σημείο καμπής στη ζωή μου 00:00:13.271 --> 00:00:17.435 διότι τελικά είχα όλα όσα νόμιζα ότι χρειαζόμουν για να νιώθω ικανοποιημένος, 00:00:17.435 --> 00:00:21.946 και όμως έπαρχε ακόμη αυτή η φωνή στο κεφάλι μου που μου έλεγε ότι έπρεπε να κάνω περισσότερα για να είμαι χαρούμενος. 00:00:21.946 --> 00:00:25.145 Όσο περισσότερο κοίταζα τη δίκη μου ταλαιπωρία βαθιά, 00:00:25.145 --> 00:00:28.001 τόσο περισσότερο την έβλεπα σε κάθε άτομο γύρω μου. 00:00:28.001 --> 00:00:31.890 Έχουμε πρόβλημα να περιμένουμε στην ουρά, είμαστε ανυπόμονοι με τα ίδια μας τα παιδιά. 00:00:31.890 --> 00:00:37.192 Είναι σαν να πιστεύουμε όλοι μας ότι το μέλλον κρύβει την υπόσχεση για την εκπλήρωση μας. 00:00:37.192 --> 00:00:38.946 Και προέρχομαι από οικογένεια επιστημόνων, 00:00:38.946 --> 00:00:43.235 όποτε ήθελα να χρησιμοποιήσω αυτό το υπόβαθρο για να καταλάβω την αληθινή ρίζα και αιτία 00:00:43.235 --> 00:00:45.477 του τόσο πολύ πόνου. 00:00:45.477 --> 00:00:48.308 Και εκει που με οδήγησε μου άλλαξε εντελώς την οπτική μου 00:00:48.308 --> 00:00:50.295 του παρόντος επιστημονικής ιδεολογικής δομής, 00:00:50.295 --> 00:00:52.610 but more importantly than that, it's changed my views 00:00:52.610 --> 00:00:57.169 on what it means to be a human being and to be alive. 00:00:57.169 --> 00:01:00.398 I want to share this theory with you, and it's way out there. 00:01:00.398 --> 00:01:05.309 So, I ask you to have a critical, but open mind for the next 14 minutes, 00:01:05.309 --> 00:01:08.277 because you might not actually be what you think you are. 00:01:08.277 --> 00:01:12.270 So, who am I, alright? I'm a human being, and I'm 33 years old. 00:01:12.270 --> 00:01:15.883 But if you take a microscope and look at any part of me, you see cells. 00:01:15.883 --> 00:01:20.536 And I'm a community of 50 trillion cells, doing a magic dance. 00:01:20.536 --> 00:01:23.499 And you at any one of those cells with an even closer microscope, 00:01:23.499 --> 00:01:26.061 and you see 20 trillion atoms. 00:01:26.061 --> 00:01:30.662 And so, I'm also a community of 1,000 trillion trillion atoms. 00:01:30.662 --> 00:01:33.459 But when you look at those atoms really up-close, 00:01:33.459 --> 00:01:35.902 they fade away, and all you see is energy. 00:01:35.902 --> 00:01:39.262 And 13.7 billion years ago, at the Big Bang, 00:01:39.262 --> 00:01:42.269 everything that we've ever found in the entire universe 00:01:42.269 --> 00:01:46.902 was one infinitesimal, undifferentiated, pure energy. 00:01:46.902 --> 00:01:49.052 All of us are energy. 00:01:49.052 --> 00:01:52.969 A human being is a very complex pattern of energy. 00:01:52.969 --> 00:01:56.891 So, I stand here as a 33-year-old, basically motionless, 00:01:56.891 --> 00:01:59.884 but when you look up-close at any single part of me, 00:01:59.884 --> 00:02:03.659 I'm moving the speed of light, and I'm the age of the universe. 00:02:03.659 --> 00:02:05.606 So, the question for me is: 00:02:05.606 --> 00:02:07.639 I know this conceptually. 00:02:07.639 --> 00:02:09.606 Why don't we feel it? 00:02:09.606 --> 00:02:12.723 Why do we walk around being so sure that we're a human being all the time, 00:02:12.723 --> 00:02:16.243 and we never feel like we're energy, because it sounds awesome? 00:02:16.243 --> 00:02:18.637 And I think the reason that we don't notice it 00:02:18.637 --> 00:02:23.458 is because we are so distracted by the human levels of our experience 00:02:23.458 --> 00:02:26.207 that we fail to notice what is always sitting beneath. 00:02:26.207 --> 00:02:28.674 And so, I want to look at those distractions. 00:02:28.674 --> 00:02:29.963 Take five seconds, 00:02:29.963 --> 00:02:33.343 and think about something that you're going to do tomorrow. 00:02:35.070 --> 00:02:37.493 So, what you just did is something that, as far as we understand, 00:02:37.493 --> 00:02:40.462 no other organism in the entire universe can do. 00:02:40.462 --> 00:02:43.361 You just built an alternate reality inside your head. 00:02:43.361 --> 00:02:45.611 You just made a prediction about the future 00:02:45.611 --> 00:02:48.226 that has never happened in reality. 00:02:48.226 --> 00:02:52.733 And this powerful prediction, when you can compare alternate realities, 00:02:52.733 --> 00:02:55.122 allows you to plan for the future. 00:02:55.122 --> 00:03:00.058 And from agriculture to your retirement, this has changed the face of the planet. 00:03:00.058 --> 00:03:03.079 It's probably the most significant, evolutionary step forward 00:03:03.079 --> 00:03:04.773 since walking upright. 00:03:04.773 --> 00:03:07.493 So, I want to look at this tool in your head, 00:03:07.493 --> 00:03:10.309 because your mind is a thought-generating machine, 00:03:10.309 --> 00:03:13.563 to make proliferate predictions about the future, 00:03:13.563 --> 00:03:16.159 to guide and goal-orient your behavior. 00:03:16.159 --> 00:03:20.212 What does this machine look like in all of our heads, in 2011? 00:03:20.212 --> 00:03:25.065 So, another experiment: Take ten seconds, and stop thinking. 00:03:32.154 --> 00:03:35.136 OK. Did anyone make it? Ten seconds? (Laughter) 00:03:35.136 --> 00:03:37.457 I make it about two, and then I start strategizing 00:03:37.457 --> 00:03:40.714 about how I'm going to stop thinking; I think about that the whole time. 00:03:40.714 --> 00:03:45.727 Alright, so what this means is you have such an evolutionarily advantageous tool 00:03:45.727 --> 00:03:47.800 that it's become completely compulsive, 00:03:47.800 --> 00:03:51.032 but you've got to remember, no other organism does this at all. 00:03:51.032 --> 00:03:55.054 And the side effect of having the most evolutionarily advantageous tool 00:03:55.054 --> 00:03:57.570 in the entire universe sitting in your head 00:03:57.570 --> 00:03:59.477 is that you have no control over it. 00:03:59.477 --> 00:04:00.867 And when you have no control 00:04:00.867 --> 00:04:03.282 and you compulsively generate all these possible realities, 00:04:03.282 --> 00:04:07.195 you always compare them to where you are, to try to goal-orient your behavior, 00:04:07.195 --> 00:04:10.986 and this creates an entirely new class of human suffering. 00:04:10.986 --> 00:04:14.569 Things like jealousy and regret about something that happened in the past, 00:04:14.569 --> 00:04:19.208 and anxiety about your future, no other organism can feel. 00:04:19.208 --> 00:04:21.504 And so, I want to understand if it's possible 00:04:21.504 --> 00:04:26.316 to totally eliminate those sources of suffering from humanity. 00:04:26.316 --> 00:04:31.635 This is just a brief list of all those possible sources of suffering. 00:04:31.635 --> 00:04:34.516 In order to find out if it's possible to remove those sources, 00:04:34.516 --> 00:04:39.512 we have to take a kind of scientific, experimental objective at ourselves, 00:04:39.512 --> 00:04:42.647 we have to take a look at all the layers of our own experience, 00:04:42.647 --> 00:04:45.091 and try to be as objective as possible about them. 00:04:45.091 --> 00:04:46.567 This is amazingly difficult, 00:04:46.567 --> 00:04:51.183 because we're so emotionally involved in our own lives, and as any of you know, 00:04:51.183 --> 00:04:53.867 if you go to a movie and you're emotionally involved, 00:04:53.867 --> 00:04:57.144 two minutes into it, you totally forget that you're at a movie, 00:04:57.144 --> 00:05:00.356 and the lights turn on at the end, and you're shocked back into reality. 00:05:00.356 --> 00:05:03.958 So, this is even more difficult, because we have to look at our own movie, 00:05:03.958 --> 00:05:05.956 the movie inside our consciousness. 00:05:05.956 --> 00:05:09.135 We'll do two quick experiments, and this only will give you a taste of something 00:05:09.135 --> 00:05:11.693 that takes much longer to understand the depth of. 00:05:11.693 --> 00:05:14.458 So, the first one is your sight. 00:05:14.458 --> 00:05:16.891 From what we understand in physics, 00:05:16.891 --> 00:05:20.471 all light is a vibration of electromagnetic field. 00:05:20.471 --> 00:05:23.932 And none of those light waves intrinsically have any color. 00:05:23.932 --> 00:05:25.928 There's just this change in frequency. 00:05:25.928 --> 00:05:27.856 But once those waves go into your eye 00:06:06.460 --> 00:06:10.209 and into your brain, you create the subjective experience of color. 00:06:10.697 --> 00:06:15.466 Now, what this means is that you all think that you are seeing me out here, 00:06:15.490 --> 00:06:19.182 with a red shirt on, but this red only exists in your head, 00:06:19.206 --> 00:06:23.266 and so, this entire picture you're seeing is happening inside your head, 00:06:23.290 --> 00:06:26.700 in a movie inside your consciousness. 00:06:26.724 --> 00:06:31.076 And if you remove a little bit of the attention from me directly, 00:06:31.100 --> 00:06:33.441 you can start to have some attention on yourself, 00:06:33.465 --> 00:06:36.203 noticing that you are seeing me 00:06:37.035 --> 00:06:38.713 inside your head. 00:06:38.737 --> 00:06:42.703 So, let's do a second experiment. It's even more subtle than that one. 00:06:42.727 --> 00:06:45.343 Read this sentence twice, silently to yourself. 00:06:45.367 --> 00:06:47.370 [The voice in your head] 00:06:47.394 --> 00:06:51.300 ["I can hear the voice in my head reading this sentence"] 00:06:51.324 --> 00:06:53.354 OK, so it's weird, right? 00:06:53.378 --> 00:06:55.764 But you can get this very weird, subtle perspective 00:06:55.788 --> 00:06:58.566 that you can look at your own thought process objectively. 00:06:58.590 --> 00:07:01.762 You're actually listening to the soundtrack of thoughts 00:07:01.786 --> 00:07:05.418 inside your head, in your movie of consciousness. 00:07:06.042 --> 00:07:07.468 [I am] 00:07:07.492 --> 00:07:10.183 Imagine that I do this process for thousands of hours, 00:07:10.207 --> 00:07:12.920 and I just try to look, as objective as possible, 00:07:12.944 --> 00:07:16.183 at my thoughts, and my emotions, and my perceptions, 00:07:16.207 --> 00:07:20.432 and even the way that my brain has modeled space and time. 00:07:20.456 --> 00:07:23.971 The more that I pull attention away from the thoughts and the perceptions, 00:07:23.995 --> 00:07:26.589 the more I seem to notice myself 00:07:26.613 --> 00:07:29.405 noticing these things inside my consciousness. 00:07:29.429 --> 00:07:33.357 And eventually, maybe I can pull all of the attention away 00:07:33.381 --> 00:07:38.030 from all those layers of thoughts, perceptions, my body, my sensations, 00:07:38.054 --> 00:07:41.439 and there's nothing left to perceive, 00:07:41.463 --> 00:07:43.781 there's nothing left that I can consider myself, 00:07:43.805 --> 00:07:46.231 because I've seen it all in front as not me. 00:07:46.255 --> 00:07:50.463 And yet, the one thing that remains is this feeling of existence. 00:07:51.120 --> 00:07:53.080 "I am" remains. 00:07:53.888 --> 00:07:56.074 This feeling of "I am". 00:07:56.630 --> 00:07:58.800 And what I find when I sit in that state 00:07:58.824 --> 00:08:04.417 is that what my identity is, whatever it is, is beyond perception, 00:08:04.441 --> 00:08:09.364 it cannot be perceived, but it is still experienced. 00:08:10.061 --> 00:08:14.000 And this "I am" is the root of our entire existence. 00:08:14.024 --> 00:08:16.877 "I am" is latent in every single aspect of our existence, 00:08:16.901 --> 00:08:21.142 but just like a fish might never notice the water that it swims in, 00:08:21.166 --> 00:08:25.847 we might never notice the "I am" because it's covered. 00:08:29.296 --> 00:08:35.480 "I am" is a completely empty experience, it's devoid of any content, 00:08:35.970 --> 00:08:38.754 and when I experience it directly, on its own, 00:08:38.778 --> 00:08:41.841 there's the possibility for a realization: 00:08:41.865 --> 00:08:46.635 "Maybe I'm not a human being that has consciousness. 00:08:47.135 --> 00:08:52.019 Maybe I'm consciousness that is shaped into a human being." 00:08:53.063 --> 00:08:55.300 And when I see this totally empty experience, 00:08:55.324 --> 00:08:57.564 there's no content, form, structure, 00:08:57.588 --> 00:09:01.590 there's not even a model of space and time that is generated in the mind. 00:09:01.614 --> 00:09:05.468 And we've seen those conditions before, 13.7 billion years ago, 00:09:05.492 --> 00:09:10.488 when the entire universe was an undifferentiated, pure energy. 00:09:10.512 --> 00:09:14.560 And so, just maybe there is the potential to realize directly 00:09:14.584 --> 00:09:16.646 I am that energy, 00:09:16.670 --> 00:09:20.854 I always have been that energy, and I always will be that energy. 00:09:22.390 --> 00:09:28.112 Einstein said that thoughts suffer from an optical illusion of consciousness, 00:09:28.654 --> 00:09:32.894 this illusion that there's a separate person inside an environment, 00:09:32.918 --> 00:09:36.918 when in reality, there's just energy in motion, everywhere. 00:09:36.942 --> 00:09:40.230 And just like an ocean is water in motion, 00:09:40.254 --> 00:09:43.262 we can call a certain part of that ocean a wave, 00:09:43.286 --> 00:09:47.876 but it gives us the illusion that the wave is a separate entity in the ocean. 00:09:47.900 --> 00:09:51.955 But a wave is not in the ocean. A wave is the ocean. 00:09:51.979 --> 00:09:54.670 And similarly, we might not be waves. 00:09:54.694 --> 00:09:56.687 Maybe we're the ocean. 00:09:56.711 --> 00:10:01.176 Maybe all of us are energy, and we can realize that directly. 00:10:01.200 --> 00:10:04.811 Now, this experience could never be reduced to words, 00:10:04.835 --> 00:10:07.439 because it makes words, 00:10:07.463 --> 00:10:11.280 but it could be experienced, and I think it's such an important experience 00:10:11.304 --> 00:10:15.472 that people have been trying to name it for thousands of years, 00:10:15.496 --> 00:10:17.956 and they call it spiritual enlightenment. 00:10:17.980 --> 00:10:20.226 [You are not what you think] 00:10:20.250 --> 00:10:22.979 And I think the first human beings started realizing 00:10:23.003 --> 00:10:28.021 that they were fundamentally energy about 2,500 years ago. 00:10:28.045 --> 00:10:29.871 And all of them say the same thing. 00:10:29.895 --> 00:10:33.763 They say it is the complete ending of human suffering. 00:10:34.524 --> 00:10:36.733 Well of course it's the end of human suffering! 00:10:36.757 --> 00:10:39.529 All suffering is based on the illusory separation 00:10:39.553 --> 00:10:41.991 that there's an individual in the environment, 00:10:42.015 --> 00:10:44.631 that there's a person that has to survive, 00:10:44.655 --> 00:10:48.685 that this specific collection of 1,000 trillion trillion atoms 00:10:48.709 --> 00:10:50.976 has to hold itself together. 00:10:51.494 --> 00:10:54.690 But if I realize directly that I am energy, 00:10:54.714 --> 00:10:58.945 and I realize the body and the mind are a temporary manifestation of that energy, 00:10:58.969 --> 00:11:01.658 then I can fully accept the death of the body and mind 00:11:01.682 --> 00:11:04.043 as something that does not happen to me, 00:11:04.067 --> 00:11:07.926 because I was always energy and I always will be. 00:11:07.950 --> 00:11:10.356 And if I were to experience that directly, 00:11:10.380 --> 00:11:14.072 this voice in my head that tells me I have to do certain things 00:11:14.096 --> 00:11:17.930 in order to be fulfilled loses all of its power. 00:11:18.719 --> 00:11:21.949 At this very moment, I never have to listen to that voice again, 00:11:21.973 --> 00:11:27.149 and so everything in life becomes a game, for fun, a play. 00:11:28.273 --> 00:11:32.289 And we've all experienced that, but it's very hard to remember, 00:11:32.313 --> 00:11:34.206 because we were so young, 00:11:34.230 --> 00:11:36.931 and maybe we were at the beach building a sand castle, 00:11:36.955 --> 00:11:38.466 and the entire world faded away 00:11:38.490 --> 00:11:40.728 because we were only building it to build it, 00:11:40.752 --> 00:11:43.152 and we weren't trying to get somewhere else. 00:11:43.176 --> 00:11:45.880 We hadn't even learned how to plan. 00:11:45.904 --> 00:11:50.235 And so, the only moment that mattered to us was right now. 00:11:50.763 --> 00:11:53.520 I think this experience is so important and powerful 00:11:53.544 --> 00:11:56.305 that every religious tradition at its core 00:11:56.329 --> 00:11:59.646 has been trying to convince us of its importance, 00:11:59.670 --> 00:12:04.266 and if it's true, if the true end of all human psychological suffering 00:12:04.290 --> 00:12:09.702 is actually possible, it is the most important thing science could be studying. 00:12:10.312 --> 00:12:13.074 When we look at monks and nuns who have meditated or prayed 00:12:13.098 --> 00:12:17.092 for thousands of hours, we see remarkable shifts on their brain scans. 00:12:17.116 --> 00:12:21.489 Trillions of neural connections have changed configuration. 00:12:21.513 --> 00:12:24.962 And along with this quantifiable objective change 00:12:24.986 --> 00:12:27.297 in the operating system of the brain, 00:12:27.321 --> 00:12:33.125 they describe a feeling of undifferentiated, infinite oneness. 00:12:34.093 --> 00:12:39.131 To me, that sounds like they're having the direct experience of being energy. 00:12:39.155 --> 00:12:42.040 Now, enlightenment science and enlightenment engineering 00:12:42.064 --> 00:12:46.912 would study these ancient technologies of prayer and meditation as data sets, 00:12:46.936 --> 00:12:50.675 to understand what has to change in the structure of a human brain 00:12:50.699 --> 00:12:54.687 for a human being to understand that they are energy directly. 00:12:54.711 --> 00:12:59.116 And we still have no idea how much modern technology 00:12:59.140 --> 00:13:03.731 could completely change our ability to understand that. 00:13:03.755 --> 00:13:06.318 Maybe it's possible that, within our lifetimes, 00:13:06.342 --> 00:13:09.164 we could actually eradicate human suffering. 00:13:09.188 --> 00:13:14.388 And what would the world look like then, if every single one of us felt complete, 00:13:14.412 --> 00:13:17.685 felt whole, and felt interconnected? 00:13:17.709 --> 00:13:19.845 [Letting go] 00:13:19.869 --> 00:13:24.503 When you let go of individual survival, all of your priorities change, 00:13:24.527 --> 00:13:28.748 because you actually see the entire world as your body, 00:13:29.741 --> 00:13:32.296 you see the suffering of others as your own suffering, 00:13:32.320 --> 00:13:33.915 and you want to help. 00:13:33.939 --> 00:13:36.582 And what is the actual power of a human being 00:13:36.606 --> 00:13:40.341 to really benefit the world, when they're able to the priorities 00:13:40.365 --> 00:13:42.807 of the whole system in front of themselves, 00:13:42.831 --> 00:13:46.376 even if that means they have to die in the process? 00:13:47.391 --> 00:13:50.316 How many of us can do that right now? 00:13:51.815 --> 00:13:54.597 What if 7 billion of us did that? 00:13:56.737 --> 00:13:59.007 Maybe the one thing that keeps us 00:13:59.031 --> 00:14:03.546 from actually solving all of the other problems in the world 00:14:03.570 --> 00:14:08.969 is this persistent flawed thought that we are separate from the world. 00:14:09.718 --> 00:14:12.388 And maybe it's time we change our minds. 00:14:13.310 --> 00:14:14.634 Thank you.