http://thespiritscience.net/2014/11/11/science-and-spirituality/
Here is the Transcript of this amazing talk:
“Three years ago was a turning point in my life, because I finally
had everything I thought I needed to be fulfilled, and I still had this
voice in my head saying “I’ve got to do more to be happy”. The more that
I looked at my own suffering deeply, the more I saw it in every single
person around us. We have trouble standing in lines, we’re impatient
with our own children. It’s as if we all think the future holds the
promise for our fulfillment. I come from a scientific background, and so
I wanted to use that background to understand the real root and source
of why there is so much suffering. Where it’s led me has totally changed
my views of the current scientific paradigm. More importantly than
that, it’s changed my views on what it means to be a human being, and to
be alive. I want to share this theory with you, and it is way out
there, so I ask you to have a critical but open mind for the next 14
minutes, because you might not actually be what you think you are.
So
who am I? I’m a human being, and I am 33 years old. But if you take a
microscope and you look at any part of me, you see cells. I am a
community of fifty trillion cells doing a magic dance, but if you look
at any one of those cells with an even closer microscope, you see twenty
trillion atoms. So I am also a community of a thousand trillion
trillion atoms, but when you look at those atoms really up close they
fade away, and all you see is energy. And 13.7 billion years ago, at the
Big Bang, everything that we’ve ever found in the universe was was one
infinitesimal, undifferentiated, pure energy.
All of us are energy. A human being is a very complex pattern of
energy. I stand here as a 33 year old basically motionless, but when you
look at any single part of me, I’m moving the speed of light, and I’m
the age of the universe. So the question for me is: I know this
conceptually, why don’t we feel it? Why do we walk around and we are so
sure that we are a human being all the time, and we never feel like we
are energy? Because it sounds awesome. I think the reason that we don’t
notice it is because we are so distracted by the human levels of our
experience that we fail to notice what is always sitting beneath. So I
want to look at those distractions.
Take
five seconds, and think about something that you are going to do
tomorrow. What you just did is something that as far as we understand,
no other organism in the entire universe can do. You just built an
alternate reality inside your head. You just made a prediction about the
future that has never happened in reality. This power for prediction,
when you can compare alternate realities, allows you to plan for the
future. From agriculture to your retirement, this has changed the face
of the planet. It’s probably the most significant evolutionary step
forward since walking upright.
I want to look at this tool in your head, because your mind is a
thought generating machine, to make, proliferate predictions about the
future, to guide and goal-orient your behavior. What does this machine
look like in all of our heads in 2011?
Another experiment: take 10 seconds and stop thinking…
…Did anyone make it 10 seconds? I make it about two and then I start
strategizing about how I’m going to stop thinking and then I think about
that the whole time. What this means is you have such an evolutionarily
advantageous tool that it’s become completely compulsive, but you’ve
got to remember, no other organism does this at all. And the side effect
of having the most evolutionarily advantageous tool in the entire
universe sitting in your head is that you have no control over it, and
when you have no control and you compulsively generate all these
possible realities, you always compare them to where you are, to try and
goal orient your behavior. This creates an entirely new class of human
suffering. Things like jealousy, and regret about something that
happened in the past, and anxiety about your future, no other organism
can feel. I want to understand if it’s possible to totally eliminate
those sources of suffering from humanity.
This is just a brief list of all those possible sources of suffering.
In
order to find out if it is possible to remove those sources, we have to
take a kind of scientific experimental objective look at ourselves. We
have to look at all the layers of our own experience and try to be as
objective as possible about them. This is amazingly difficult because
we’re so emotionally involved in our own lives. As any of you know, if
you go to a movie and you are emotionally involved, two minutes into it
you totally forget that you are at a movie, and the lights turn on at
the end and you are shocked back into reality. So this is even more
difficult because we have to look at our own movie, the movie inside our
consciousness.
We are going to do two quick experiments, which will only give a
taste of something that takes much longer to kind of understand the
depth of.
The
first experiment is with sight. From what we understand in physics, all
light is a vibration of electromagnetic field. None of those light
waves intrinsically have any color, there’s just this change in
frequency. But once those waves go into your eye and into your brain,
you create the subjective experience of color. What this means is that
you all think that you’re seeing me out here with a red shirt on, but
this red only exists in your head. This entire picture you are seeing is
happening inside your head; in a movie inside your consciousness, and
if you remove a little bit of the attention from me directly, you can
start to have some attention on yourself – noticing that you are seeing
me – inside your head.
So lets do a second experiment that is even more subtle than that one. Read this sentence twice, silently to yourself…
…It’s weird, right? But you can get this very weird, subtle
perspective that you can look at your own thought process objectively.
You are actually listening to the soundtrack of thoughts inside your
head; in your movie of consciousness.
Now imagine that I do this process for thousands of hours, and I just
try to look as objectively as possible at my thoughts, my emotions, my
perceptions, and even the way that my brain has modeled space and time.
The more I pull the attention away from the thoughts and perceptions,
the more I seem to notice myself noticing these things inside my
consciousness. Eventually maybe I can pull all of the attention way from
all of those layers of thoughts, perceptions, my body, my sensations –
and there’s nothing left to perceive. There’s nothing left that I can
consider myself because I have seen it all in front as not me. Yet the
one thing that remains is this feeling of existence. I am remains. This
feeling of I am. What I find when I sit in that state is that what my
identity is, is beyond perception. It cannot be perceived, but it is
still experienced. This I am is the root of our entire existence. I am
is latent in every single aspect of our existence, but just like a fish
might never notice the water that it swims in, we might never notice the
I am, because it’s covered.
I
am is a completely empty experience. It’s devoid of any content, and
when I experience it directly, on its own, there’s the possibility for a
realization.
Maybe I’m not a human being that has consciousness. Maybe I’m consciousness that is shaped into a human being.
When I see this totally empty experience, there is no content, form,
structure – there’s not even a model of space and time that is generated
in the mind. We’ve seen those conditions before. 13.7 billion years ago
when the entire universe was an undifferentiated pure energy. So just
maybe there’s the potential to realize directly, I am that energy. I
always have been that energy and I always will be that energy.
Einstein
said that thoughts suffer from an optical illusion of consciousness.
This illusion that there is a separate person inside an environment,
when in reality there’s just energy in motion, everywhere. Just like an
ocean is water in motion – we can call a certain part of that ocean a
wave but that gives us the illusion that the wave is a separate entity
in the ocean. A wave is not in the ocean, a wave is the ocean. Similarly
we might not be waves, maybe we’re the ocean. Maybe all of us are
energy and we can realize that directly.
This experience could never be reduced to words – because it makes
words, but it could be experienced. I think that is such an important
experience that people have been trying to name it for thousands of
years. They call it spiritual enlightenment. I think that the first
human beings started realizing that they were fundamentally energy about
2500 years ago. All of them say the same thing – it is the complete
ending of human suffering. Of course it’s the end of human suffering!
All suffering is based on the illusory separation that there’s an
individual in the environment, that there’s a person that has to
survive, that this specific collection of a thousand trillion trillion
atoms has to hold itself together. However, if I realize directly that I
am energy, and I realize that the body and the mind are a temporary
manifestation of that energy, then I can fully accept that the death of
the body and the mind was never something that happened to me, because I
was always energy and I always will be.
If I were to experience that directly, this voice in my head that
tells me I have to do certain things in order to be fulfilled loses all
of its power. At this very moment I never have to listen to that voice
again. Everything in life becomes a game, for fun; a play. We’ve all
experienced that, but it’s very hard to remember, because we were so
young. Maybe we were at the beach building a sand castle and the entire
world faded away because we were only building it to build it – and we
weren’t trying to get somewhere else. We hadn’t even learned how to
plan, so the only moment that mattered to us was right now. I think that
this experience is so important and powerful that every religious
tradition at its core has been trying to convince us of its importance,
and if it’s true. – if the true end of all human psychological suffering
is actually possible – it is the most important thing science could be
studying.
When
we look at monks and nuns who have meditated or prayed for thousands of
hours we see remarkable shifts on their brain scans. Trillions of
neural connections have changed configuration. Along with this
quantifiable, objective change in the operating system of the brain,
they describe a feeling of undifferentiated, infinite, oneness. To me
that sounds like they are having the direct experience of being energy.
Enlightenment science and enlightenment engineering would study these
ancient technologies of prayer and meditation as data sets to understand
what has to change in the structure of a human brain for a human being
to understand that they are energy directly. We still have no idea how
much modern technology could completely change our ability to understand
that. Maybe it’s possible that within our lifetimes we could eradicate
human suffering.
What would the world look like then, if every single one of us felt complete, felt whole, and felt interconnected?
When you let go of individual survival, all of your priorities change
because you actually see the entire world as your body. You see the
suffering of others as your own suffering and you want to help. What is
the actual power of a human being to really benefit the world, when they
are able to put the priorities of the whole system in front of
themselves, even if that means they have to die in the process? How many
of us can do that right now?
What if seven billion of us did that?
Maybe the one thing that keeps us from actually solving all of the
other problems in the world is this persistent, flawed thought that we
are separate from the world. Maybe it’s time we change our minds.”- Jeff
Lieberman
