Transcription
[Music] Hello everybody. So it's nice to see you about this mystery of being human. Here we are. We're human, I guess. And in thinking about it, I woke up this morning with a little bit of jet lag around 4:00 in the morning, and I was thinking, it's been so hard to get to be human. The Buddha had a Darwinian theory. Scientists, I'm sorry, scientists, modern materialist scientists are really great. I really love you. I love all the things that you do. I don't love you as much as the Dalai Lama loves you, but but I do love you and all the wonderful things that you have found and so on. But you're just trapped in materialism. You know, materialism is just not a discovery, it's a decision. Which scientists discovered nothing? And which one is getting the Nobel Prize for that discovery? Was it in the 17th century when they decided they were gonna get away from the church and the Inquisition and now and all of the terrible things? And they says, they notice one of them reported back, one of them died and reported back, "Hey guys, it's cool. I'm nothing. If I didn't have a soul, I'm not having a future life. Just so everything happens in the one life. It's all material and there's no no subtle energy or material that we have to have a conservation of." Which person discovered that? Actually, you know, by common sense, immediately that no one discovered that. No one ever will discover that because nothing is not discoverable. That's what it means. You can't find it. It isn't there. You can't go there. You can't be there. There's no there there. It's nothing, right? So how can you become nothing? Continuity of energy, your consciousness, and your life process is something. But it's too scary. How are we gonna know what it's gonna be? So, so in the Buddhist thing, Buddha's, which is I shouldn't say, but it's a booty. And I decided we don't say Darwinist, we say Darwinian. So I'm gonna say Beaudion, booty, and science instead of Buddhist because people here Buddhists in America and they think, "Oh no, those guys, they're all meditating, they never have any fun, and they're leaving the planet because it sucks." And and they discovered emptiness, and that's like our modern nothingness. So hell, hell, what the hell, you know? And we say, "What the hell? I can light thing, you know, like it isn't anything. It's nothing." So the mystery of being human is really is a mystery for us actually, because we think that nothing is the ground reality. When you kill yourself, you return to nothing. That's why people do it. They think they're going to nothing, and that nothing is anesthetic, and they're in a state where life seems so painful. There, you're gonna return to that safe place. And we have a role model when we fall asleep at night, and we give up. Actually, you know, you die every night. You know, you realize that. Don't be. How can anybody be scared of death? Every night you let go of your consciousness 100%. If it doesn't leave and you stay awake, you can give me an Ambien, you know? So we have a big thing about knocking ourselves out, right? People say, "Knock yourself out" to somebody. They say that, and we think, "Yeah, right. I'm gonna have a great time." So, so what is this? We're scared of that. That we shouldn't be. We don't have to be. Scared of the king is life is what is scary. So from a Buddhist point of view, as previous kinds of animals and all of us also in an infinite past, for previous kinds of gods, actually, we were already. We didn't have to go to California or Trump Tower. We already were in thousand-year jacuzzis, all of us. And we wasted a lot of time there because it gets boring, you know? Your skin gets all wrinkled and so on. And even a god thing, you know? And we were all kinds of animals that it was really difficult to make the choices of sensitivity to others, of awareness of the pain of when we were lions, the bite on the neck of the antelope, the awareness of that as pain in the antelope. That took thousands of lion lifetimes because we didn't have somebody reading us, you know, some sort of psychological studying about what it feels like to be bitten as an antelope, you know? So we couldn't read that. So it took hard. It was very hard to become human. But now that we are human, we're desperately trying not to be human. I was reading some popular books like this a Harare guy and someone named Peterson, and they do like act like it's just well-known that really what we are as biological robots, and we're all just having sensation in our bodies and taking drugs or going to this and that and going to some string and, you know, no problem beyond this life. And really, then Harare says, we're gonna conquer that. Google is gonna conquer. Guess they have Reykjarvik over there. He's gonna like create robots. We'll go download us all into robots. We'll apparently be just stacked, you know, we won't need parking space. This will all be robots. And that's escaping from the human. And then spiritual traditions, we want to go off and have a vast space, going to be their space, and we'll be one with God. And that's also getting away from being human. And and of course, we don't really worry about that in our common sense culture because we're already all nothing. Every single one of us here is common sense indoctrinated from youth to think that we just what we are when we're alive, and when we die, that's the end of it. And we associate it with deep sleep. But that's what we think. Nobody really plans heavily for future life, you know? Even people who believe, who formerly believed in it, like some seers who are I once teased Rip Lauren that, you know, that he only had one future life, you know? The Buddhists have many different shots, you know, we can keep trying. But he's only got one. And he was looking a little upset. So I said, "Well, it's really long." And he liked that. He laughed and looked a little nervous. So the point is that what I really want to make today, I wrote a bunch of things, they vastly really quite good, but I don't want to read them. I don't want to read them. But no, because I want to say this, you know, right now, think, meditate on the fact that you are taught that everything you get out of life is gonna be gotten in this life, and that's all you have to worry about. Just keep booking, booking, you know, good rooms, book whatever it is, you know, and then book good flights, and book everything, good conferences, and then book a good plot in a cemetery. And that's the end. That's the last of your worries, you know? Of course, the children, and it's nice, but, you know, you don't have to worry beyond that. And so meditate right now that you realize that your common sense tells you from what authorities and scientists and they all tell you is that if you had a heart attack this minute and died, you, you would be, they would be kind of like, you know, like freaked out of dying, and then you'd just be nothing. Deep sleep would be cool. No problem. You really know. And your death experiences, they don't want to come back because they're on the horizon of disappearing. It's what we think. But to meditate on that and realize that therefore your sense of the consequence of how you live and what you do and what your whole that collective, our society is doing to the world and the planet and other beings, there's just there's a limit to the consequences. And if we die in this over, we're out of the, we're out of the causal nexus, just finished. So that's a kind of freezing. But, you know, what it does as a culture, it makes us irresponsible. It makes us wreck the planet. It makes us do daring things in a way, but it's also destructive things because we're not going to be there to all be on the other end of the destructiveness we feel, right? You recognize that. So that's the way we are. If we're really honest with ourselves, we feel that way. And I wrote a lot of more, but that's it. Now, Buddhist science discovered. Buddha discovered emptiness was his great discovery. And the discovery of emptiness is as a scientist, not a religion thing. God didn't tell him about empty. God didn't know about emptiness. Actually, yes, God. And God said, "I haven't figured it out. I mean, I'm I'm responsible and I'm do my best, but I'm not on dip in it and I don't know everything and I haven't figured out how it works. And you, when you, if you will, I have a, however, I'm sort of psychic and I think you're going to figure it out." He said to the young Buddha. And he said, "When you do, please tell people it's not my fault when horrible things happen to them because I'm not omnipotent and I didn't create the situation." So God didn't know either. But what is emptiness? It's a scientific discovery. And actually is the discovery of relativity, if you will, absolute relativity, which is a contradictory expression, right? But that's that's good, useful in this case. That is to say, there's no non-relative same period. There's nothing except our concept of the opposite of everything we've ever encountered, which has always been relative, or we wouldn't be able to encounter it. To follow me? There's no other thing that that that's what emptiness means. Everything is empty of any kind of essence that is non-relative. If there was an, if the essential Bob Thurman was a non-relative absolute thing, it could not relate to Bob Thurman. It would be irrelevant to me. You follow? Everything about me is rebel, is relative. And you. And so what that, that's a very powerful scientific insight because it means we are stuck here in life. Fear of life is not helping. We were stuck. And we wanted to be here. We got to be human by being more aware of others, actually, as animals, you know? And we didn't just eat. And I was like to jokingly say, we got to talk language because we didn't eat each other the minute we met. We had time to chat. So we're totally interrelated. And we have this tremendous sensitivity, and it freaks us out because we feel pain. And then we, Buddhist science tells us still that there's no state of nothingness. There is no nothing. Yes, that's a, that's an expression for something that isn't there. And there's no absolute that you can get into out of the relative. So you can't escape from the relative. But the relative is infinite, and it is miraculous, actually. So being alive in the center of this miraculous relative as the Nexus of its great intelligence and sensitivity is something that we've decided we wanted to do because it would be more fun. We were looking for the true nature of it. We wants, what animals are all realistic, they want to know if the lion is gonna jump on them. The deer does. And you know, we were realistic. So we wanted a no reality. And we got to this best place. Better than the gods' place because gods have a not full sense of invulnerability. We know we're vulnerable. We constantly lose our lives and are reborn constantly. And we, we therefore are really stressed to find how do, how to get down to the deepest nature of the self so we can navigate. Like we want to learn how to lucidly dream. Isn't that what I think the lie bears is here somewhere or he will be? Lucidly dream, not just wander through anything dreaming, but lucidly dream. So we know we're dreaming when we dream. How about being lucidly awake? So we know we're awake when we're awake. And we're here. And we don't want to lucidly sleep. It's just happy to be unconscious, right? But apparently, it's possible. So, so that's a difference. In other words, the psychotic culture we live in, I'm sorry to say, I know it's rude, but it is psychotic because we, why don't we turn off all the the carbon spewing things? Why do we allow people to brainwash us that we need them and we're wrecking fennel for our children? We profess to care about. How come we don't just stop it right now, all of us? Because we think finally, it doesn't matter. Finally, you know, that's the American slogan. Well, go for it. Doesn't matter. Really, nothing matters because nihilism, that's it. That's the idea that nothing is the final reality. No consequence. Emptiness, on the other hand, means that we're in this infinite relativity. And therefore, we are, we are committed to making it better for everyone because we can't escape them. You know, you, they got me up here, and they're getting rid of me in six minutes. So I'm not gonna be annoying you after that. And you're longer. But I'm gonna be back, life after life. And you're gonna be back in audiences. And Mauricio will give me more than six minutes later. But no, I'm just kidding. It fixes enough. And and no, but you all of us. And you're gonna give lectures in other lives. Oh, no, I've already heard you. And then the worst thing is the most difficult thing is we've all been each other's mothers. In Tibetan, they say, "All the old mother sentient beings." It's just everybody's common expression. You know, "Margon semjon tongues," you all the mother sentient beings. They say that because they are based on this more realistic relativistic science. And this fake pretense that you can hide in nothingness from reality and causality that our current scientists are stuck in. And all their brilliance and creativity and magnificent inventions are just harnessed to that. And there, I was reading that Haring, he says that he thinks that we've conquered famine, war, and sickness with our high-tech, which he, we haven't actually. He didn't go to Somalia and so on. But or enable war or or, you know, he hasn't been friendly lately. But, you know, he thinks we've conquered that. He says, "Now Google is gonna cause." I like him. He's brilliant. Don't get me wrong. Google is gonna conquer. Guess we're gonna engineer an end to death, you know? But this is the most stupid thing. How many billions are we gonna spend on engineering death? You know, that huge thing like that. Oh, we're gonna all be robots. If you all want to be a robot, just like yourself, you know, you wouldn't worry about gaining weight and buffets any longer, you know? You, you would always be stuck with the same people. You'd be one Russian guy for me. Don't worry, there will be soft. It won't plank into each other, you know? But you have robot sex. Everybody will be soft. Give me a break. Meanwhile, nobody is spending a penny to engineer their ability to lucidly dream, to lucidly go down into finding the super subtle level of their soul, find out of the, the place from which you can create yourself in any way you wish, what's called the magic body, and navigate death and do lucid, I'm not just lucid dreaming, lucid I'm lucid the dream state. This could be widely taught, you know? Actually, if you go to the movies and you watch those movies where they, they even in the, my favorite movie, Avatar, when he would go into playing and lie down, the guy with the lace, and then he would jump up with it with his blue body on his tail, you know, and like eight feet tall, have a real fun time with it with a walk. And the other, the beautiful teacher, you know, the lady, the lady blue being, whatever the name was, Navi, the Navi lady. And then right on that thought, that that then she, they call that, you know, that flying thing awesome. But when he went in, it, there would be obscene like that, you know, as he shifted from body to body. So they, you could sit down in this frame, we could watch for six hours that kind of that kind of special effect. And then we would handle the Bardot. We would have freaked out. You wouldn't go and hide in a hole. You wouldn't go and try to be reborn in St. Louis or something. You would be born in California. You would be born in the middle of the conference here, you know, two minutes. So, so this is the thing. So that's what we should engineer. Just, you know, what this thing is, science and non-duality. It's not science needs non-duality. They already have a kind of dualistic non-duality of that everything is nothing. So we're just doing making machinery. No, but non-duality tells you, true non-duality tells you that this here is the ultimate, and this is the absolute. So this has to be made right. And you have to find your own soul. So we have to do soul engineering in here. I like to see the engineers who do some soul engineering, like the Indians and the Tibetans and the Chinese and Japanese have done. And they really, and you can do that. And then instead of walking around thinking, "I'm gonna fall into nothingness when I die," you could walk around thinking, "I am already in Nirvana. This is all bliss here. If I'm pissed off, it's my fault, my lack of proper vision." And then we would, then we men would do what will make us happy, actually, which is the beginning of our finding a proper life, which is we would learn to listen to our women. Okay, I like it here. Enjoy. Seriously, enlightenment is stupidly defined as some male guy having a big brain thing off in their brain. I saw a light. Agreed. Yes, dear. You saw a light. Now watch the frickin dishes. If you define enlightenment as infinite presence in relative reality, then the more enlightened of the two genders is the female. The more connected, the more we're embracing and open to life, the more willing to have like a tenant for nine months in their stomach who didn't pay, doesn't pay rent, and it didn't have a proper lawyer signing a contract, and they don't know where they came from, you know? And so that is a more enlightened part of the human life form is the female one. And if them, and the males and failure to listen to that is what makes them so destructive and so confused and so frustrated and whatever. That's the real secret of it, you know? That's enlightenment. And be more connected and and feel, feel more and realize that your sensitivity is your intelligence. And don't run away from your sensitivity. Don't accept versions of spirituality to tell you you can achieve someplace and get out of here. Oh, and and the spirituality of materialist science tells you you'll be naturally getting out of here just by dying. So don't worry about any other thing, special thing. It's all meaningless anyway, and it's random, and it's an accident, and we don't know what it is because we're scientists, and we're never gonna know what it is. Cause that's the nature of science. I'm free, you know? We can do what it is. There are scientists who knew what it is. Someone told me once, one of my students, actually, he got all involved with some colleagues in the university. He got over into the Natural Science area from the humanities, you know, where you're sort of unappreciated. And he said, he said to me, "About I'm sorry, you know, but Buddhism is in science, but no, there's no science in Buddhism." I said, "What?" This is why I asked him, "Why?" He says, "There's no serial revision." It's a big answer. Well, let me said, you know, you, you'll never know what reality. So all your theories will be appended later. So therefore, you will continue your march of ignorance. And the idea that someone could understand reality completely and work from there is is ruin, that ruin science. But actually, Buddha outsmarted them because Buddha said, "I understand everything. I know everything. I'm saying I'm so happy, by the way, and you all should be too, cause everything is just fine. You can just relax." Said, "But unfortunately, I can't really describe it to you." So no theory will capture in conceivability of non-dual samsara is nirvana already has always been the only absolute that is really meaningful since this infinite relativity that's always been the way it is. And it's fine. It's filled with energy. When you fall asleep at night, you don't lie into nothingness. You wake up feeling energized because there's endless energy to draw from you. The universe wants to give it to you. It's not a person. It's a field of infinite energy called clear light of the weak lord, clear light of the void. And you can only know that clear light through bliss. So it, so have some bliss, have some fun. And notice, feel that you're dealing with reality when you have fun. And when when your wife tells you, or your girlfriend, or your daughter, or your grandmother tells you, "If you like, honey, don't go to the lab today. You have some fun." That's the voice of Buddha talking to you. So you better listen. I didn't listen long enough in my years of academic life, so I didn't have as much fun as I'm going to have in the remaining ones. Thank you very much. [Music]