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Foreign [Music] [Applause] You've said that the person we think we Are Is completely different than the person We actually are oh you've done your Homework because Anything that's probably the most Important question I just find that such A can you explain and I know that you've Been to our lab at the center for Mindfulness in medicine Healthcare and Society and Judd Brewer you know this is Part of your 16 minutes show uh showed You some of the neural feedback around The practice of mindfulness And so in the midline of the brain is What's called the a network that's That's known as the default mode Network Because when you put people in an fmri Scanner and tell them to do nothing they Default to Thinking and what are they thinking About Their favorite subject of course our Favorite subject me Moi myself I And it's like my you know my shopping List my to-do list my tomorrow my Yesterday and it's a narrative So some people also call it the Narrative mode and it's a particular Region in the brain that just goes Insane when you're told to do nothing
And just lie there in the scanner and it Also involves mind wandering creativity So it's not bad but it is imprisoning The alternative is after eight weeks of Training in mbsr there seems to be Another Network a lateral Network that Comes on becomes active and there's an Uncoupling between these two networks You still need this one or you won't Find your way home at night I mean you Have to know who you are in a certain Conventional way but on the other hand If if you're not if you're stuck in The Narrative of who you think you are and You say like I'm John kevitzan and I Live here and that's all in a certain Way just relatively If I really am true to myself I have to Say you know there's a lot more not Knowing who I am than knowing who I am And what's wrong with that actually Because you know the narrative is never Big enough that's your point I think in Asking is like we have these small Narratives of what it means to be an American or what it means to be a Democrat or what it means to be a Republican or what it means to be this And none of them are true none of them If you examine it they're not true They're fictions or they might have an Element of truth that when they wouldn't Think well yeah this is true because There's a 10 true or something like that
And what I'm saying is that when we drop Into wakefulness into awareness into This spaciousness of who we already are That is almost like impossible to put Into words that's why poetry becomes so Important but that humanity and what Happens on the performance stages in the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and so forth that's the human mind And heart when it knows itself when the Human mind doesn't know itself you get Auschwitz you get the Killing Fields of Cambodia you get Rwanda you get uh Charlottesville And so That's our that's our challenge it's Like a yoga you know you work with the Tension you work with the sort of Elasticity and plasticity but also the Resistance if you will you don't work Against the resistance you work with the Resistance that's the Deep grounding of The martial art of Aikido so what we're Doing is like in some sense we're doing By dropping in on ourselves we're doing Aikido on the entire world together I think we're almost out of time is There I mean as people think about the Day and face this day what do you want What do you hope people come away at the End of the day with Well let's let this entire day be a deep Inquiry and meditation in and of itself Into Who Am I who are we not believing
The narratives that come up but staying With the questioning the answers are Cheap the questioning priceless And and trusting that there's a wisdom That's distributed throughout all of us That by virtue of our DNA by virtue of The the plasticity of our genome all Sorts of ways in which we are so much Bigger than who we think we are Individually and together that when you Know we have these kinds of Conversations and we listen deeply Inwardly and outwardly they can find a Certain kind of clarity wisdom and Bravery that will allow us to sort of Find the edge of them and us And allow it to dissolve into Love into what I think this is all about When you take your seat in the morning To practice it's a radical Act of Sanity But even more deeply I've come to see it As a radical Act of love And when you do this even you yourself And nobody else is doing it The lattice structure so to speak of the Entire world is different simply because There's one more locus of Sanity for This moment one more locus of caring Beyond the Me Myself and I That's awareness and that's cultivatable It's intimacy with our own awareness and It's loving what is You know as Byron Katie says it's loving What is that doesn't mean you have to
Accept it acceptance doesn't mean Passive resignation to look back to your Other question acceptance means uh Recognizing things as they are and then Responding appropriately instead of Reacting from someplace out of your own Mind Thank you you know we are yeah
