Transcription
I've been meditating now for 22 years, so I do do meditate. But, but I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family. My dad was a minister for a while, and there they were explicit that meditation was actually bad. It would open your mind to the devil, and and you shouldn't do it. So I was there. It was really interesting that I was actually, it took me longer to start to meditate because of that. I mean, for something of the devil, you don't want to get into it right away. And so it took me a long time. What's your raised him from your very, from your youth, it's it's hard to to wake up and let go of the limitations.
But so, but there are, of course, Christian spiritual traditions that that are open to meditation, like the Benedictine monks and Father Father Thomas Keating and so forth, really, really deep spiritual people. So I just got, you know, a little brand of critics. Christianity itself is not stuck with this, but there are wonderful brands of Christianity as well as, you know, mystical Islam and Buddhism, Hinduism, a lot, a lot of wonderful traditions.
So my my practice is, um, I started meditating 22 years ago because I needed trouble. I had trouble sleeping and I didn't want to take pills. So it was very pragmatic. But that was the door, and I began to realize that it had something more to give me than just helping me to sleep. And it's, it slowly transforms you. Meditation process in my case, very, very slowly. I mean, you know, I, it's, I think an academic, you're stuck in your mind a lot, right? So academics, I mean, we're, it's all about the mind, it's all about competition of ideas. Yeah. And so letting go, learning to balance that with letting go of all thoughts altogether. At first, it seemed like complete nonsense, right? I mean, it's all about thought and better thoughts. What does it mean to let go of thoughts altogether? So it takes a while for me as an academic, it took a while to really begin to grasp the importance of letting go of thoughts.
Now, for for my academic colleagues, what I would say is, in terms of Bayesian theory, so this is now a little geeky kind of thing. We have all these Bayesian priors, and what we perceive then is based on our priors, and we have our posteriors based on what we, you know, the data that we get in our priors. Meditation is a process of letting go of the priors, you literally, and then you can actually be open to new directions that you wouldn't otherwise be open to. So ultimately, meditation is a way of, if you want to be creative, it's a way of breaking down the barriers to creativity. But on a spiritual level, what I found is it, it's forced me to face and slowly let go of my fears and my anxieties and my selfishness and my, my self-image of myself. And and I'm not saying that I'm anywhere near done by any means, but but at least I'm on the path. Yeah, of of waking up. Um, and I, I see that you, for me, then an interesting challenge is this balance between completely letting go of thought on the one hand, in in times of meditation and also just in everyday life, driving and so forth, to to not be lost in in pointless thought. Yeah, self-destructive thought, to to literally be there as a presence without any thought on the one hand, and yet on the other hand, to then use thought wisely and productively, for example, in in science, building scientific theories and so forth, while at the same time not being too attached to my own theories because I know that they're just the next baby step, but not by any means the final word.
So it's, it's learning again to have that playful attitude of the, you know, I mentioned in the VR game, I am my avatar, and I'm glued to the wheel and I'm all up tight, or I'm, I just know it's an avatar, it's a game, and I can enjoy the game. It's, it's learning. Most of my life I've been glued, I am my avatar, and I'm everything is important and matters, and learning to back off from that and enjoy the ride. Um, even as I build precise theories. So be precise, be careful. [Music] But in some sense, also relax and enjoy while you're doing it.
It seems that from at least the limited study that I have of some brilliant minds like Einstein, Newton, Tesla, have had practices that allow them to, um, essentially get into different brainwave states that allow them to, like we were speaking to earlier, rest into that place of the one. And it's almost like the intelligence of the one kind of comes down into you. The more that you start to imbibe in that place, like its nature starts to become your nature, and some of the breakthrough ideas come as a byproduct of that. Have you found that to be something interesting?
Absolutely. All of the ideas that I've had have come in moments of silence. But but it's an interesting interplay. Of course, you have to do your homework, right? Of course, you, you can't have insights about physics if you haven't studied your physics. Yeah, right. So so so it's, it's there's no excuse. If you, if you want to do something, you have to do your study. And and but on the other hand, then you have to let go of everything, you know, too. So that's the, that's the interesting back and forth. Yeah.
Study. I'm a professor. I'm going to tell my students to study, do your homework, I'll give you a test. Right? So you have to study. On the other hand, for moments of creativity, once you've done all that homework, then sleep on it, let go of it, and then go into silence. And that's where the creative ideas come. And that's why I think that science will continue to progress because we're not just little three-pound brains, we are the infinite intelligence. That every new step in science is just a new baby step, and there's an infinite number of steps to take. But we're up to the task. We are not little three-pound brains, we are the infinite intelligence. So we will have the always have these fun creative leaps. And so this is going to be, this really is a fun creative ride.
But what the one is learning, I guess, is to take each perspective, really dive in, really take that perspective. So this is taking, um, the Don Hoffman four-dimensional space-time perspective, and it's taking that, taking it quite seriously, and then learning to relax, learn from what I need from that perspective, don't get all wrapped up and identified with it. Um, have some creative fun, and then at some point, you know, by the time you're 70, 80, 90, you're gone from this perspective, you've let go of that perspective. Um, and so you need to learn to let go of that as well. Enjoy the ride. And then [Music] thank you.