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aimee christiansen:welcome, everyone. my name is aimee christiansenand i'm working on climate change for google.org. and my good friend meng askedme to do the introduction to jon kabat-zinn, and i'mhonored to have the opportunity to do so. but i first wantedto thank meng for organizing this event. it's such a special occasion,and i thought that meng’s title

was especially appropriate giventhat he's known as jolly good fellow here at google. it best captures john'steachings. so just a little bit ofbackground on his bio. jon kabat-zinn is a scientist,writer, and meditation teacher engaged in bringing mindfulnessinto the mainstream of medicineand society. he's professor of medicineemeritus at university of massachusetts medical schoolwhere he was founding

executive director of the centerfor mindfulness in medicine, health care, andsociety, as well as founder and former director of itsworld renowned stress reduction clinic, which, i don'tknow about you guys, but i could use a littlebit of that now. i'm looking forward to this. he's authored many books,including full catastrophe living: using the wisdom ofyour body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness, aswell as wherever you go, there

you are, the book thatintroduced me to him. dr. kabat-zinn's work hascontributed to a growing movement of mindfulness intomainstream institutions in our society, including medicine,health care, schools, corporations, and perhapseven here at google. dr. kabat-zinn received hisph.d. in molecular biology from mit in 1971, and hisresearch focused on mind-body interactions with healing andvarious clinical applications of mindless meditation, trainingfor people with

chronic pain and stressrelated disorders. we're hoping that his teachingswill help all of us to not only optimize our mentaloutput for google but also optimize our qualityof life wherever we are. so welcome, john. thank you. jon kabat-zinn: well, thankyou for that very sweet introduction. and it's wonderful forme to be here.

i've never been here beforeand it does feel like an interesting planet to be on. i'm just feeling my way. but i, too, want to expressmy gratitude to meng for inviting me. and i understand that i'mpart of a much larger scheme in his mind. how many of you heard alanwallace talk when he was here some time ago?

not that many. so we're covering a very broadspectrum because i'm sure a lot of people showedup for his talk. and then paul ekman is goingto come in may, i'm told. and paul ekman is also involvedin this kind of work in another way, some of whichi'll explain to you when i get to the slides. audience: [inaudible] jon kabat-zinn: what's that?

and matthieu ricard, whose faceyou'll see in some of the photographs i'll be showing,is coming next week, and i highly recommendyou to see him. we have sort of a parallelbackground in that i was a student of salvador luria's atmit, who won the nobel prize early on in the historyof molecular biology. and he was a graduate studentat the same time at the pasteur institute in paris,france with francois jacob, who was a close friendof luria's.

and then he happened to go offto nepal and was so struck by what he felt from the tibetanmeditation teachers that he met there that he gave upmolecular biology and has been a monk for 40 years. but now, as you'll see, he'sbeen engaged in a larger enterprise to do science onmeditative experience and look at the neuroscience of whathappens in the brain when people have been meditating forvery long periods of time and with tremendous motivationand intensity.

so it sounds like there'ssomething of a sequence of speakers coming to google thatare in some way all pointing to some hidden dimension ofreality that's in some way hidden to us, in other wayscompletely self-evident. but when it isn't self-evident, it is really opaque. and i like to think of it asan orthogonal dimension-- that is, rotated 90 degreesin relationship to conventional reality--

but one that allows in quantummechanics, for instance, as i understand it, an orthogonalrelationship allows, actually, two different entitiesto occupy the same space at the same time. and in the mind, that is a very,very useful feature to actually bring onlineas opposed to leave just as potential. so i'm going to be talkingfrom a number of different angles.

i entitled the talk, aftertalking with meng about it, mindfulness, stress reduction,and healing, because that's what a huge amount of our workin the past 28 at the umass medical center has been about. but there's another parallelelement to it, and it partly depends on how you feel aboutstress and stress reduction. but when we use the word stressreduction, we're not talking about some kind of dimestore relaxation attempts to calm people down and justmake them feel a little bit

better so that they can worka little bit harder. we're talking about, actually, atransformation in the way in which we relate to our lives, toour bodies, to our calling, to our loves, to our ambition,and so forth, so that we can live lives of balance andfundamental, profound satisfaction. and i believe that's truefor human beings, that that is possible. and i think that a lot of time,the society entrains us,

if we don't do it ourselves,into severe imbalances that can sometimes be unbelievablyaddictive, intoxicating, and wonderful on one level, and onthe other hand, maybe actually draining your life's blood onanother level or killing you. and so, in a certain way,metaphorically speaking, i would say that in this society,we seem to more and more be dying for some authenticdoor into ourselves in a way that's bigger than justwhat usually defines us. and that's not to deny thebeauty of what we often do,

how creative we can be, howimportant it is to-- i mean, at a place like thiswhere you're basically redefining the world and theuniverse in ways that potentially are tremendouslyhealing for the planet. but to have this be, in somesense or other, held in a kind of awareness that ordinarily,we're just not taught in school and that requires acertain kind of intimacy in cultivation in orderto be able to have it more at our disposal.

so if we're going to startwith stress and stress reduction-- periodically, time magazine andnewsweek and so forth put stress right up thereon front because-- i mean, i started the stressreduction clinic in 1979. and when i think back to 1979,i say to myself, 1979-- what stress? because of you folks and peoplelike you, i can get more work done in a day than iused to be able to get done in

a month, and it'sfar better work. but it still has a cost. doyou know what i'm saying? because then the expectationis-- not just from other people but from myself-- that i will just be-- so the digital revolutionalready has catapulted us into a condition where increasingly,there's no end to the work day. there's no end tothe work week.

and so there's a way in whichwork can encroach all of life. and if you love work more thananything else in the world, hey, no problem with that. and there have alwaysbeen people like that on the planet-- scientists, musicians-- where it's all that. but there's also potentialcosts to pay in terms of burnout, in terms of addiction,in terms of

overdosing, so that you're notactually tapping into the creativity that maybeyou once were. and it requires more and moreeffort to get the certain kind of return, as opposed to lesseffort, more dance. but for 20 or 25 years, therehas been a lot of research being done epidemiologically,what the effects of various kinds of risk factors on humanhealth, mentally and physically? everybody knows smoking is a bigthing in this society, to

actually demonstrate thatcigarette smoking is not good for your health. and in 1964, the surgeongeneral's report actually came out and said that. so there's that and there'shigh blood pressure and there's high cholesterol and allsorts of risk factors for coronary disease, forcancer and so forth. but stress was always considerednot measuring up to a bona fide risk factor.

but a couple years ago at ucsf,in the laboratory of liz blackburn, elissa epel, whoactually happens to be a mindfulness teacher but is ayoung assistant professor at ucsf, did a study looking at therate at which the repeat subunits at the ends of all ofour chromosomes, which are called telomeres and which arerequired for every cell division in every cell in ourbody that divides, that it turns out that long-term chronicstress can accelerate the rate of telomere degradationenormously.

and so if you have ever heardthe words coming out of your mouth after a particularlyhorrific experience, "god, that one just took yearsoff my life," it turns out it's true. because the telomeres, once theydegrade, the cells can't divide any more. so if stress increases the rateof telomere degradation, i mean, you can't get moresomatic and molecular than that in terms of evidence thatstress has, potentially, if

it's not mitigated, theconsequence of basically increasing aging. and i'm not going to go into thestudy in any great detail. it was published in the pnas-- proceedings of the nationalacademy of science-- in 2004. but just to say that they didthis study on parents of children with chronic medicalproblems that are basically not going to get better. so it just doesn't get anymore stressful than

that kind of thing. it's not like, well, at acertain point, i'll get to go on vacation or this willevolve in some way. no, that's just going to bethe way it is for life. but they actually took parentswho didn't have chronically ill children, which are theblue points, and what they found was that they were alsoshowing telomere degradation. and what really mattered was howmuch stress they thought they were under.

they were under a lot lessstress than the other parents, objectively speaking. but if you think you're underabsolutely intolerable levels of stress, you createthat reality. but that's a very positivefinding because it says, if you change your relationshipto your perception of the stress, then you could actually,potentially, reduce the rate of telomeredegradation. and now, every study onmeditation has thrown in the

telomerase assay and so forthnow, and we don't know any results yet. but looking to see whethertraining in a course of meditation over a period of timemight actually slow or restore to normal, say, the rateof telomere degradation. so i just want to throw that outto you because there's so many exciting things going onin the field nowadays about but i want to make some prettyfundamental points here. if you stare at that word fortoo long, it doesn't mean

anything, as you know. but i want to make a distinctionbetween how much doing we know we doand-- what's that? audience: doing. jon kabat-zinn: doing. yes, if you're swedish,it's doing. how much doing we wind up doingover the course of the day, as opposed to what youcould call, and the chinese might call, non-doing, or whati like to call "being." we're

called human beings. but it might be moreappropriate, the cliche goes, for us to rename ourselves"human doings" because we seem to be very much doingall the time. and often, the doing is comingout of the head, but not necessarily coming outof the heart or coming out of the body. and so it's, in some sense,disembodied doing. and over time, even the greatestdoing, disembodied,

can get you into real troubleat the level of the body and its health but also at thelevel of our human relationships. have i lost the audiencealready? or am i making somesense here? ok, because a lot of this isgoing to be impressionistic. in the amount of time i have,i'm not going to be able to go into this in tremendousdetail. but what i'm going to be doingis trying to point you at some

places where you'll be ableto verify this or not for yourself on the basis of yourown experience just by paying attention in a certain kind ofway that ordinarily we don't. and if you want a briefdefinition of meditation, it's about paying attention. it's got nothing to do withbuddhism, mysticism, the east, the west. it's aboutpaying attention. so by virtue of the fact thatit's about paying attention, it universalizes it.

it's about something that'stotally universal. and it's not attentionfor its own sake. it's attention for the sake ofa profound capacity that we all have innately that weordinarily never pay any attention to. and that is awareness. and i'm going to argue thatawareness has a way of balancing out thought in waysthat are profoundly intuitive and also profoundly creative.

and we were would nevertaught that in school. were were only taught to thinkin school, and we get better and better at being criticalthinkers, but we are not so good at holding our thoughtsand emotions and sensations and relationships in ways thathave coherence, groundedness, the potential for greatersatisfaction, balance, and, if you will, happiness. and matthieu ricard is goingto talk on happiness. and he'll come in his verycolorful tibetan robes.

and matthieu is the real thing,so you're going to really enjoy him, and i urgeyou not to miss him. so we call what we do "mind-bodymedicine." we've been calling it that fora very long time. finally, the media haspicked up on that. because from the very beginning,we've been trying to actually transformmedicine. medicine itself is sufferingfrom some serious chronic diseases.

you may have realized that inyour own encounters with the medical profession. and so we're, in some sense,trying to breathe new life into medicine, and throughscience and through some other ways, get it back to itshippocratic roots and not lose the art of medicine while we'redeveloping the science of medicine. i'll just point out in passing,the word meditation and the word medicine sound alittle bit alike in english,

don't they? and there's a very, very deeproot meaning that they share, and that makes it not quiteso weird that we would be bringing meditation into themainstream of medicine. whereas, it could have beenthought 30 years ago that it's tantamount to the visigothsbeing at the citadel and about to tear down the gates ofthe city and so forth. far from it, meditation has nowbecome completely accepted within mainstream medicinethe past 30 years.

and i'll show you someevidence of that. this is basically a photographof a 150 doctors and other health professionals beingtrained in mindfulness in one of our professionaltraining retreats. i just got back from anotherone last week. and what we callmindfulness-based stress reduction is spread-- this map is 10 years old. and by the way, i'd just like topitch-- this is the perfect

environment to do it. if any of you folks can put mein touch with software that i can put points on a mapat will, i would that. without the coordinates. just name the city andit shows up on my map of the world. i'm looking for it. and i'm serious. i'd love that.

so this is a poster of a daylongseminar that was held at the national institutesof health at their giant auditorium in the natcherconference center, right on the grounds of the nih in 2004called mindfulness meditation and health. and what i want to say is, fromthe perspective of 1979 when i started the stressreduction clinic, the idea that the national institutes ofhealth would hold a daylong symposium entitled mindfulnessmeditation and health, it's

more infinitesimally improbablethan that the big bang would stop expandingand the universe would begin to collapse. i mean, this is like a hugesea change at the nih. and they are now funding studiesof meditation in the range of between $10million and $100 million at the moment. and are really interested inthis, in part because the more you can teach people how to takecare of themselves as a

complement to what the healthcare system can do, the cheaper it is and themore effective. because then what you're doingis you're creating a participatory medicine asopposed to an auto mechanic's model of medicine. and we mostly practice automechanic's in medicine. so this is another streamof it that i just want to point out. i'm part of a groupof people--

matthieu is as well-- called the mind and lifeinstitute, which has been around since 1987 and whichholds periodic conversations between western scientists andthe dalai lama and other eastern contemplatives onsubjects of mutual interest having to do with, basically,two things. the nature of mind and thenature of reality and how these different streams andepistemologies and way of knowing might actually informeach other if they have

conversations together. and these have all beenprivate meetings. i'll show you some photographsof them in a bit over the years, except that his holinessthen, at a certain point, said, "i want to havemore people be able to attend these meetings." so we held apublic one at mit in 2003. you probably read about it inthe new york times magazine about that time. and that was on neuroscienceand meditation.

and at that mit meeting, atleast 90% percent of the questions were about theclinical applications of meditation. so we decided we had to have asecond public meeting, science and clinical applicationsof meditation. and that was held in washingtonwith twice as many people as the mit meeting,so about 3,000 people in november of 2005. and i also want you to note,from the point of view of the

sea change in medicine, thatit's co-sponsored by johns hopkins school of medicine,which is the oldest, most venerated school of medicinein the country, and georgetown. so they no longer are infoxholes, not wanting to be associated with either thesubject of meditation or with somebody wearingbuddhist robes. however, originally we weregoing to do it on the nih campus, and they just couldn'thandle that because it would

look like the nationalinstitutes of health was promoting buddhism if the dalailama stepped on there. and so we took itout of the nih. so now i'm going to give you abrief parentheses and speak about the mind and lifeinstitute just so you have a sense of this and a kind ofparallel universe of what's going on here, especially sincematthieu is coming in. this is matthieu ricard. and this is the 17th karmapa,who is, i think in that

picture, 17 or 18 years old. and in tibetan buddhism,everybody is the incarnation of everybody else. they've been familyfor a long time. and this is one of the mind andlife meetings where lots of monks come. and here's his holiness, andhis holiness's translator, thubten jinpa. and then alan wallace, whowas speaking here a

month or two ago. and then, the karmapa. and his holiness, one of thereasons the karmapa is part of it is that, being 17 or 18 yearsold, his holiness is hoping that he would getinterested in science because the dalai lama is veryinterested in science. he's just really into scienceand engineering. and you can read about hishistory in that regard. but it's just a naturalscientific curiosity.

and if you spend days in a roomwith him talking about science, he's alwaysinterrupting the presentations and saying, "but have youthought about doing this?" and they say, "well, your holiness,that's the next study that we decided to do."so he's right up there. even though he's only had, like,a high school education, formally, in terms of science,he's really well read and also extremely well tutored by somenobel laureates and so forth. so he's got this lovefor science.

and this is, let's see,a bunch of scientists. this is steven chu, who is anobel laureate in physics, who is now doing molecularbiology. eric lander, from mit, from thebroad center, who may very well win the nobel prizefor some element of-- audience: steven was herejust last week. jon kabat-zinn: who was? audience: steve. jon kabat-zinn: oh, stevechu was here last week?

well, what do you know? so it's a very tightly-woven,interembedded family that, no doubt, google-- i mean, where is google not? but this is a sort of frameworkabout it, in these private conversations. and we dialogue. it's a real dialogue, aninquiry, and very beautiful. and every one of thesehas a book come out.

so you can find themon google and read them if you have time. and this is a picture of themeeting in washington where i'm presenting to hisholiness about mindfulness-based stress reduction. and here's matthieu, ajahnamaro from the theravadin buddhist tradition, and richarddavidson, who's the head of the keck laboratoryfor neural imaging at the university of wisconsin anda collaborator of mine.

and to just say, for those youngscientists here who are interested in this interface,for whatever reasons that i couldn't even imagine but themaybe you could, because mostly we're talking aboutneuroscience and behavioral medicine and things like that,but it may be google people who could add a whole otherelement to this thing. we hold periodic, every summer,summer research institutes at the garrisoninstitute in new york city. and this is an example just ofus being in conversation with

a bunch of young faculty andgraduate students and even undergraduates in neuroscienceand medicine and clinical psychology on these deeplyinteresting questions of what we can learn from each other. so that's the end ofthe parentheses. if you track just the numberof scientific papers in the literature on meditation, it'sbeginning to look like it's going exponential. and this is the university ofmassachusetts medical center,

where the work that i'm goingto describe comes from. so we call what we do what is mindfulness? i had a friend of mine makesome calligraphies for me. and then, when i went to chinafor the first time to talk, i thought, well, i'm going to haveall these calligraphies. i'd better bring them. so this is the calligraphyfor mindfulness. and the reason i show it to youis that, as you know-- and

i'm sure many of you here speakchinese, but i don't know any chinese, so i'm onlysaying what i've been told-- and some people say it's goodcalligraphy, other people say it's not so good calligraphy. there are a lot of differentopinions about this. but as i've been told this, isthe word in chinese, "nian," for mindfulness, and it's madeup of two ideograms, one for presence over the ideogramfor heart, ok? and the reason i'm showing itto you is not because of the

chinese but because if you hearthe word mindfulness, it's very easy to thinkof it cerebrally. and it's like, mind, ok, andso it's about some kind of cognitive, discursivethought process. but it's not that at all. in asian languages, again, i'mtold, the word for mind and the word for heart is the samein all these languages. so we need to, when we hearthe word mindfulness, also hear heartfulness sowe're not going to

understand what it is. and my working definition of it,operationally speaking, is it's moment-to-moment,non-judgmental awareness that's cultivated bypaying attention. so moment-to-moment,non-judgmental awareness. why moment to moment? well, because the present momentis the only moment we're ever alive in. it's the only momentwe can think.

it's the only moment in whichwe can be creative. it's the only moment inwhich we can relate, perceive, do anything. and there are two interestingthings about meditation that are very often really not wellunpacked in our society. one is that, just likeanything else, it's a learning curve. and so there's a certain wayin which meditation is instrumental, just like drivinga car or learning to

play a musical instrument. you just do it over andover and over again. you do it. you follow the algorithm of theinstructions and so forth, and you think that you're goingto get better at it and you're going to have benefitsthat come from it. and so it's goal seeking andthere's a certain kind acquisition. and it's always incompletebecause it's on the way to

someplace else, somebetter place. so there's an elementof striving and an element of thinking. and it's like with anyskill that you learn. that's the instrumentalelement. but unlike anything else thati know, and the reason that meditation is so powerfulis just like in quantum mechanics, when you take anelementary, let's say an electron, so i don't have to usethe word "particle." it's

both a particle and a wave. orit's neither until you do the experiment. and depending on what kindof apparatus you use, it manifests as particle. it manifests as wave. but wecan't really say what it is when we don't dothe experiment. so it's kind of just differentmode of reality, and they speak of it as beingcomplementary, that the particle and the waveare complementary

elements of the non-thing. and the non-instrumentaldimension of meditation is that there's no place to goand there's nothing to do, that there's nothing to attain,that this is it. and if you drop into this momentthat it's not about ever it getting any better thanthis because it can't get any better than this. this is it. you'll just lose more telomeresin the next minute,

if you'll pardon my puttingit that way. but it's like we tend to persistthat in the future, it's all going to come togetherbetter when google is much bigger or when you work outall the kinks or whatever. but that's a very limited wayof thinking about this thing because the future that you'reliving in now, this present moment, was the future ofwhen google started. so look how successfulyou are. do you know what i'm saying?

it's all an element ofperspective on it. and if we're always blastingthrough the present moment to get some better moment, in asense, we're not reading the present moment. we're not inhabitingthe present moment. and as you'll see, some veryfamous people have made some very interesting comments aboutthe downside of that. so as it says in the heartsutra, the great mahayana text and all the buddhist traditionsin asia, "nowhere

to go, nothing to do, nothingto attain." you're already complete, already whole,completely endowed. and the thinking is notattached to anything. the thought is incrediblypowerful, but when it glomps onto, like, we insist that ithas to be a certain way, then our thoughts can blind us. and we're talking more aboutthe quality of awareness. so the way i like to put itin that kind of present participle form, isawarenessing.

so mindfulness is, in a sense,it's awarenessing, we do it all the time, but we're notaware of it, so we need to actually cultivatemetaawareness, metacognition, or metacognitive awareness. and i just want to say-- i don't want to go into thisin any great detail-- that this is based on a kind of non-dual view of the universe. that we do create subject andobject, we separate things as

me the viewer and what isviewed and all of that. and from a conventional pointof view, that is fine, but there is some other element thatunifies what wordsworth called "discordant elements"and makes them work in one society, there's some deeperelement of integration that, very often, we are opaque to. and so that's beyond relativeopposites, like what i like and what i don't like. that can rule my life.

i only react to things that arepleasant and unpleasant things, i try to escapefrom all the time. so i'm always trying to get whati want and push away what i don't want is a veryimbalanced way to live. getting stuck in positiveemotions and negative emotions. i believe that thereare no positive all emotions have information,and if you know how to handle that information, then it canall be really useful.

whereas if you say, "well, angeris a negative emotion," sometimes anger is a veryappropriate emotion. but if it leads to mindlessviolence, for instance, then it's not a very gooduse of your anger. and even you and me, there's aseparation there that is not necessarily fundamental. awareness itself. if you start to becomeaware of your awareness, it's boundless.

there is no center. there's no periphery. it's non-dual, but it isdiscerning without being completely thought grounded. and that's something you candiscern for yourself. so anyway, mindfulness isuniversal, as i said, but the most articulate expression ofmindfulness on the planet comes out of the buddhisttradition. and apocryphally speaking,people used to go up to the

buddha and say, "areyou a god?" and he was said to haveresponded, "no, i'm awake." and if you know anything aboutbuddhist iconography, all of these kinds of forms, whetherit's the buddha or various bodhisattvas and so forth,they're not about the deities. they're representationsof states of mind. and that's the representationof the state of mind. awake. so the implication is that weare somehow in a hypnotic

dreams state that perpetuatesitself. and we're kind of awake, butkind of not awake and, in some sense, a slave to thatunawareness. so we can zone along onautopilot for years at a time, more or less unconscious,even while we're thinking we're conscious. and the implication of that--and you can check this out for yourself-- is that you may neverbe where you actually are because you're alwayssomewhere else.

if you start to see how muchof the time your mind is in the future, for instance, howmuch of the time your mind is in the past, the presentmoment tends to get a little squeezed. this can have profoundimplications for creativity, for well being, for happiness,and for physical and psychological health. this calligraphy is thecalligraphy for tao, or path. so it's suggesting, in thosetraditions, that there is a

kind of lawfulness of theuniverse, often mysterious, but a way to be inline with that. that's the chi kung andtai chi and all those martial arts are about. when you align yourself with acertain lawfulness of things, then a certain kind of harmonyresults from that. and when you don't, thensomething else. so the notion of a way witha capital w. so part of meditation practice is findingyour way with a capital w.

it's not like there'sone right way. you have to find your own way. you can't just have somearbitrary authority tell you what you need to be doingto be more awake. it's like your job, with acapital j, or your way with a capital w. and if you don't knowwhat your way is, great. we always want our ownway, don't we? i love it, though, you can see it happening in supermarkets a lot when the kid has a meltdown and wantsthree different things at the

checkout line. and the parents says, "you can'talways have your own way." and the child says, "whynot, mommy, why not? and you wind up saying, "you'llunderstand when you grow up." but isn't it true? we've grown up, and don'twe all want our own way? but if somebody with a shavedhead and robes comes in with a far-out looking, gnarled andcarved stick and asks you,

"what is your true way?" youmight not be able to even open your mouth. and this is the calligraphyfor, literally, turning. but it means breakthrough. so what is a breakthrough? it's that orthogonal turningtoward something, especially when you feel aversion for it. instead of recoiling fromit, you turn towards it. the whole martialart of aikido--

blending, moving in,turning towards. and if you know rumi'spoetry-- "the guest house,"for instance. it's all about putting out thewelcome mat for all the stuff that arrives at our door,whether we like it or not. "this being human isa guest house. every moment a new arrival. a joy, a depression, a meanness,some fundamental awareness comes as anunexpected visitor.

welcome and entertainthem all! even if they are a host ofsorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of itsfurniture, still, treat each guest honorably. he may be cleaning you outfor some new delight. the dark thought, theshame, the malice. greet them at thedoor laughing"-- that's advanced practice--"and invite them in. be grateful for whoever comes.

because each has been sentas a guide from beyond." that poem is 900 years old. but what it's suggesting is,turn towards rather than recoil away from. and see, open your eyes,take a look. that's what this isreally all about. and it's suggesting that whenyou do that kind of turning, there is the potentialfor breakthrough-- breakthrough insights,breakthrough behaviors,

breakthrough rearranging ofyour cellular organism. because the body is listeningto what the mind is doing. and when the mind learns how toself-regulate in particular ways through self-observation,interesting things happen. so thoreau said famously-- if you go back and read walden,you'll see it's all a rhapsody about thepresent moment. "i went to the woods because iwished to live deliberately, to front only the essentialfacts of life, and see if i

could not learn what it had toteach, and not, when they came to die, discover thati had not lived." martha graham-- "all that'simportant is this one moment in movement. make the moment vitaland worth living. do not let it slip awayunnoticed and unused." and william james, i'm not evengoing to go into that, in the interest of time. but he's basically saying thata method to voluntarily bring

the mind back when it wandersoff would be the foundation of the best possible education. but he says it's easier toconceive of that than to find one that would really work. but it's evidence that he didn'tknow anything about buddhism because that's exactlywhat it is, is the mind goes off, youbring it back. the mind goes off, youbring it back. the mind goes off, you don'twant to bring it back, you

bring it back anyway againstthe resistance. and something starts to growagainst the very resistance that's a lot more interestingthan a bisect. and it's mindfulness. mbsr is a compliment to medicaltreatment, not a substitute for it. in the hospitals, it's fullyintegrated into medical clinics and subspecialties. it does involve a certain degreeof discipline and work,

although i like to think ofit more as play than work. and with our medical patientswho suffer from severe chronic medical conditionsof all kinds-- including anxiety andpanic and so forth-- it's a fairly intensivetime commitment. it's 45 minutes a day, six daysa week for eight weeks. and there are four formalmethods that we teach: a body scan, which is a lying downmeditation, a sitting meditation, mindful hatha yoga,and mindful walking.

and so this is an actionshot of the body scan. just goes on like this. another view, sittingmeditation. it looks like nothing'shappening. i want to tell you, this is thehardest work in the world. to be in the present moment,non-judgmentally, for even a fraction of a secondis hard work. and i'm basically challengingyou to consider that it might have some enormous benefits.

we do it in spanish aswell as in english in our inner-city clinic. so it's shown to becross-cultural. mindful yoga. i won't say more about yoga. we're in the bay area,after all. and i know that there's yogahere and massage here and meditation here. so in a sense, i'mprobably just

wasting my breath talking. the real meditation practice,however, is not these formal practices. it's living your life isif it really mattered. so in other words, yourwhole life becomes a meditation practice. that's what this isreally about-- living in awareness, living witha certain degree of self compassion and kindness, andcultivating what the dalai

lama-- and other people--calls wisdom. and the body has itsown natural wisdom. the mind also has itsown natural wisdom. and sometimes, we get outof touch with it. so i'll just giveyou one example. the next time you're in theshower, just as homework from this talk, check and see ifyou're in the shower. you may be already at google. of course, maybe you'realways at google and

you shower at google. but you would be amazed howmuch, like, when you're in the shower, you're alreadyat work. you might have your whole firstmeeting of the day in the shower with you. you might be in the middleof an argument. but you're not feeling thewater on your skin. so you can begin tojust gently-- and remember, it'snon-judgmental.

so you don't beat yourself upfor non-performance on the meditative side. but you just let the waterbe in touch with your skin and know it. that's that sensoriumof feeling. you can know it, and thatbecomes meditation practice. so was a slide thati was showing his holiness and that talk. i was trying to get throughabout mbsr. i said, well, if

you consider life to be thebicycle, then mbsr-- or any training inmindfulness-- would be like training wheels. you just get the feel of it,but then you throw the training wheels away. it's all about the somaticexperiencing of it. and you can't, i don't thinkeven-- at google, you can develop an algorithmfor riding a bike. you read the algorithm, andyou just ride, never fall.

the body has to learnfrom doing, from the engagement of it. and then, once you do know howto ride, you don't need the training wheels. and there are a lot of differentways that people approach bike riding. how many of you ridebikes to work? i saw a lot of bikesout there. so there's biking and biking.

and there's meditating andmeditating too, ok? but it's not about-- einstein never needed to belike lance armstrong. it wasn't his thing. seven-time winner ofthe tour de france. the amount of mental energy thatit takes to accomplish something like this-- virtuallyunthinkable. it's why the issue ofdrugs will come up. but the fact of the matter isthat you don't have to be like

anybody else. you use your bicycleyour away. so in the last few minutes ofthis before we have questions, i want to just run by you someclinical studies so you have a sense of the kind ofwork that's being done in this area. and just very briefly to say,with a whole bunch of medical patients going through thestress reduction clinic who were medical patients-- they hadchronic pain conditions,

heart conditionsand so forth-- but they also qualified for,clinically, a mental health diagnosis in either anxietyor panic disorder. so they had a psychiatricdiagnosis on top of the medical diagnosis. and you can see that, if this isan anxiety scale, you have a step function down over theeight weeks of the stress reduction clinic. people come to the hospitalonce a week, 2

and 1/2 hour class. in the sixth week, there'salso a day-long silent meditation retreat. and so it is eight weeks, 2 and1/2 hours once a week, 45 minutes of practice every day. you see a step functionin anxiety. you also see a step functionin depression. and then, i won't show you thedata, but that goes out not just three monthsbut three years.

so something people do in eightweeks can have an effect on their lives three yearsdown the road. now i'm going to just verybriefly talk about two randomized clinical trials. one, the effect ofmindfulness-based stress reduction on emotionalprocessing in the brain and immune function in responseto a flu vaccine. and then, if there's time, verybriefly, the effect of the mind on the healing processthat you can actually

see and photograph. because healing is sort of adouble-edged word in medicine. you have to be very careful howyou use it or people start to roll their eyeballs andthink you're weird. but wound healing, nobodythinks that about. so we tried to find a healingprocess that would not create that kind of resistance. so this is a study that wepublished in 2003 with dr. davidson, my collaborator.

can mindfulness training in theform of mbsr be used to modify the central circuitryof emotion? and i just want to say-- andmaybe paul ekman will talk some about this-- but youprobably know that in the past eight years, the entire basisof neuroscience has been transformed by the discoverythat the dogma that we were taught for a generation, thatafter about the age of two there's no new neuronslaid down in the central nervous system.

and that it's all loss ofneurons, it's downhill from about the age of two and youcan hear the neurons going exponentially, that turnsout not to be true. it turns out that we'renot to not just synthesizing new neurons-- which is called neurogenesis-- but laying them down inparticular regions of the brain, and they're functionalup to the day we die. and it's driven more thananything else by experience,

and more than any kind ofexperience, repetitive experience. when you do the same thing overand over and over again, like ride bikes up mountains ormeditate or play the violin starting at a very early agewhere what you do with the right hand and what todo with the left hand are very different. it turns out you can morphwhat's going on in your motor cortex and somatosensorycortex by

just fingering a lot. and there's a very famous studyof the london taxi cab drivers downloading the streetmap of london into their heads, and you see the anteriorhippocampus shrink and the posterior hippocampusget bigger over a period of two years. losing a limb. very often, different aspects ofthe brain are recruited to different parts of thebody because the limb

is no longer there. so neuroplasticity, basically,means that the brain is not static but is continuallymorphing itself in response to negative traumatic experiencecan actually atrophy brain function and, actually,brain size. and therapy and moving in thepositive direction can restore it, potentially. that's an area of ongoing,very exciting research. so i'm going to talk about apart of the brain called the

dorsal lateral prefrontalcortex, which has a kind of division of laborleft and right. there's an asymmetry inthe lateralization. so left activation isassociated, shorthand, happiness, feelings of wellbeing, approach behaviors. right activation, all otherthings being equal, avoidance behavior and difficultemotions. there are also, of course,many other complex regions of the brain.

so this is the left prefrontalcortex associated with positive affect insome studies. so here is the summary slide. left, happy. right, unhappy. i won't belabor it, in theinterest of time, except that if you take people and put theminto scanners or use a quantitative eeg electrodehelmet, which i'll show you shortly, and just get peopleand you don't do

anything with them. you just study whetherthey are more left or right activated. people who are more leftactivated described themselves with words like interested,excited, strong, enthusiastic, alert, and active. and if they are more rightactivated, they described themselves this way. and it is thought thatin adulthood,

you're pretty much fixed. it becomes a trait. and a study that i will showyou now suggests that that, what was called a set point,is actually malleable, that with training in meditation,in eight weeks in a work setting, it will change. and we did this in a biotechcompany in madison, wisconsin. so this is matthieu, who iscoming next week, who has been a subject in many of thesestudies along with a lot of

other monks. and the qualification is youhave to have at least 10,000 hours of intensive meditationpractice. which is the equivalent of,say, the concert master violinist in one of the greatsymphony orchestra. lots and lots of practiceand training. but mostly, these monksare over the 40,000 or 50,000 hour. and if dr. davidson comes, hewill show you a lot more about

this story. and this is just to give youa little background, than. this is 150 undergraduatepsychology majors and their profile in terms ofleft and right. so you see there are someoutliers on the left, there's some outliers on the right, butit's basically a poisson distribution. nice bell curve. this is matthieu when he'smeditating, cultivating what

they call non-referentialcompassion. non-referential compassion. no subject, no object. and in case this distance looksfairly close, this is eight standard deviationsfrom the mean. eight standard deviations. neuroscience had never seenanything like this. and we're seeing thistime and time again. it's reproducible, not just inone person but in many people,

that the brain is capable of thesame kind of thing lance armstrong is capable of when youpush the envelope in that kind of way-- in the non-dong kind away, inthe non-striving kind of way, in the non-instrumentalkind of way. and then this is more evidencefrom a study in pnas with richie and matthieu, who's anauthor on the paper, and antoine lutz, just showingundergraduates and buddhist monks.

i won't say any more exceptto say that it's a global recruitment of the cerebralcortex in the monk meditators and the college students, withtwo weeks of instruction, trying hard, but thatrecruitment is something that takes time to teach. so in our study, we wentto a biotech company. high stress, beautifulwork environment. biotech company. the president agreed to let usdo the study there, randomized

people between they takethe eight-week program or they don't. the anxiety is reduced in thepeople that take the program, not reduced in the weightlesscontrol. they all go intothe laboratory. and very briefly, this is justa way to show left versus right activation. time one is beforerandomization. time three is a four-monthfollow-up.

and the meditators are in thered and the control group are in the purple. and there's no significantdifference before. by time two, which is at theend the eight weeks but i don't have it on this graft, andtime three, the meditators are shifting more from rightactivation to left activation. that was not supposed to happenby the dogma, that there was supposed tobe a fixed point. but in eight weeks, during workhours learning the stuff,

they are shifting in thesame direction as the buddhist monks. meanwhile, the control groupis actually getting worse because we are interpreting thatas that by the time they are in the laboratory for thethird time, it's very, very aversive, and so they're gettingmore right activated. and we gave everybody theinfluenza vaccine. at the end of the eight weeksand then monitored their blood titers for antibody.

the meditators mount a strongerimmune response that the non-meditators. and then, when we plot thedegree of brain shift right to left over the antibody titer,we get a linear relationship with a fairly significantcorrelation in the meditators and no relationship whatsoeverin the control group. so that's just one littlethumbnail sketch of the kind of science that's being donenow, and it's coming out of the hospital into thework setting.

and people who took the mbsrprogram reported that they were much more effective inmanaging their stress. and this regulation of emotion,you could think of as enhancing the effectiveness ofour emotional intelligence. and then it has effects onhealth, at least in terms of the immune system. and we don't know enough aboutit to say any more than that. that's why all these otherstudies are ongoing. i'm just going to say verybriefly about this skin

disease that you can see andphotograph in healing. bill moyers was filming in thestress reduction clinic back in the early '90s. and we had done a pilot studythat showed that people with psoriasis who were meditatingwhile they were receiving ultraviolet light treatmentsfor their psoriasis healed much faster than the peoplewho were just getting the ultraviolet light treatments. now, ultraviolet light's nota cure for psoriasis, but

psoriasis is an uncontrolledcell proliferation in the epidermis, but it's notcancerous, but it's got kissing cousin genesto cancer. so it was like a reallyinteresting question. can the mind influence healing,right down to the level of gene expression,control of cell division and so forth, for its own sake andalso because of its potential applications for cancer. so when he was filming in theclinic, we had this very

exciting pilot result, but wecouldn't talk about it because we were in the middle of doingthe replication study. so this is what psoriaticskin looks like. and it can cover the entirebody, and it's very labile with emotional stress. so the more stressedyou are, the more-- your body can be covered. this is what an elbow lookslike, and that's what the same elbow looks like clear.

so we randomized people betweentwo conditions. they either get the meditationwhile they're undergoing ultraviolet light, orthey just get the ultraviolet light by itself. and this is how you get exposedto ultraviolet light. you go into a light box likea telephone booth. it's on wheels so the door closes. and then it's like you'restanding there naked with a pillowcase over your head andgoggles on to shield your

corneas from the uv. it's not like goingto the beach. it's more like going intoyour toaster oven. i'm serious. so you are reallygetting grilled. you can only be in for shortperiods of time and we titrate people up in time as theyaccommodate to the intensity of it. and we put speakers on thetop and we did a guided

meditation, if you were in theexperimental group, while they were doing it. and i'll just jump to the chaseand say, this is the probability of clearing graphfor the meditators listening to the guided meditation tape. that's the only meditationtraining they got. no person, just a disembodiedvoice. no classes, no group support,anything like that. the meditators are obviouslyhealing with a different

kinetics from the people whoare just getting the uv. and that's whether it's what'scalled photochemotherapy-- i'm glossing over a lot of thedetails, but these are published studies-- or justthe ultraviolet light by itself, which is a weakertreatment, so everything's translated more to the right. but still, at the midpoint ofthe probability of clearing, you've got a 35 to 40day difference. and when you do the statistics,it turns out the

meditators are healing at fourtimes the rate of the non-meditators. and i won't walk you throughthe table but, there are implications of the study. one is that the mind canpositively influence the healing process and speedit up by a factor of approximately four. that's pretty interesting,if that's true. we've seen it twice, so we tendto believe that more than

we would otherwise. and it's got to do it down tothe level of gene expression. there are all sorts of otherimplications of this study which i won't gointo right now. and just for the sake of havingsome time for dialogue, i'm going to stop and just quotewilliam james again-- of for the first time, sincei didn't the first time. "i have no doubt whatever thatmost people live, whether physically, intellectually, ormorally, in a very restricted

level of their potentialbeing. they make use of a small portionof their possible consciousness, much like a manwho, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into ahabit of using and moving only his little finger." and then,very famously, "we all have reservoirs of life to drawupon, of which we do not dream." so i just want to say inclosing, there are plenty of opportunities to do this kindof training if you're

interested. the bay area has morembsr teachers-- a higher density of mbsrteachers than anyplace else on the planet. and if you're interested inthe work of the center for mindfulness, that'sthis website. and if you're interested in thework of the mind and life institute and the dalai lama,that's that website. i want to apologize for blastingthrough this so

quickly, but i wanted to giveyou a broad enough range of this is so that you understandthat there's an art to this, there's a science to it, andthe fun really comes in the interface between the two. and then there are very, veryreal, 28 years worth of data, on clinical applications of thiskind of thing, now more and more grounded in molecularchanges at the level of cells and also neuroscience andthe level of the brain. so it's a very exciting time inboth medicine and science

to start unpacking thesekinds of things. but even beyond the science ofit, there is the kind of excitement of maybe makingaccessible to us a dimension of living that's been-- if you don't mind my usingthis in a pun-like way-- right under our noses from thevery beginning and that we easily miss because we blast somuch through our moments. and we're so into thinking butnot so much into being aware of what we're thinking.

so i want to thank you for yourattention and now open it up to any kinds of questions,comments, or observations if you care to. male speaker: after questions,can you tell people i'll be having meditation at 3:15? jon kabat-zinn: yes, meng issuggesting that i say that at 3:15, there'll be a meditationclass for anybody who wants to dive into the actual practiceitself rather than talk about the practice.

so please, go ahead. audience: it's justa basic comment. you showed many picturesof monks and you did the studies on monks. i just want to say that monks,they may have less stress, but their lives seem tobe really boring. for people who are workingat google, we have a lot of work to do. we have a lot of thingsto create.

and we do have alot of stress. and some kind of a balancebetween a monk's life and an engineer's life, for peoplewho have a lot of stress-generating work to do,how do you handle this? jon kabat-zinn: ok, well, iwant to make sure that you understand that the reason i'mshowing the pictures of monks is basically to showoutliers, ok? but the fact is, seventeen17,000 people have been through our stress reductionclinic over the past 28 years,

and none of them know anythingabout monks or buddhism and could care less and they're allstressed up the kazoo, or the wazoo, or whatever. so my point showing about themonks was that the regular people in the work setting whenwe did that study, their brains shifted in eight weeksin the same direction as the monks who have been doingit for 40 years. so there's a tremendous amountof latitude for dealing with the stress that you'reunder as a person.

and very often what we think is,well, the first thing we want is someone to justmake it better, like maybe drugs or whatever. but there is no real solution tothe kind of stress that we are living with fromthe outside. it has to be a kind of from the inside, learning to rebalance. and balance is always losingyour balance and then recovering your balance.

so swimming in theseseas becomes something of an art form. and it's got nothingto do with monks. it only has to do with regularhuman beings trying to put one foot in front of the other andlive our lives as if it really mattered and not get so stressedout in a particular direction that we losesight of some of the beauty in our own lives. on the other hand, not to getso laid back that we stop

contributing to the world orto our work or whatever. and that is an art form, andeverybody, in a sense, has to do that interior workthemselves, i would say, because no one else isgoing to be able to do it for you, certainly. so that's the challenge. but i think there's a very,very good track record-- which maybe i didn't articulatewell enough-- that this is for real people.

it's got nothing to dowith buddhist monks. it's just as i said, matthieuis coming next week. you might come and see himjust for fun, see that he ain't that differentfrom us anyway. and believe me, the monks haveplenty of stress, and they don't think their livesare boring. i mean, boring is asboring sees it, so it could be different. audience: you definedmindfulness as non-judgmental

awareness moment to moment. why is the non-judgmental soimportant that it takes 20% of the definition? jon kabat-zinn: well, withoutthat, i mean, that's the hardest part of it, becausewe've got ideas and opinions about everything. so the invitation is to see ifyou can be with a percept without getting caughtin your liking or disliking of the percept.

it turns out to be very,very challenging. and non-judging doesn't mean-- it's not an invitationto get stupid. it's not like, "well,i'm not going to be judgmental anymore. i'll just walk outthere and if a truck's coming, no problem. i'll just walk in frontof the truck." it's not about that.

we make a very fine distinctionbetween non-judging, which is like-- judging, in my vocabulary, islike black and white, good and bad, like and dislike. it's very binary. and we tend to jump into thosebinary, plus-minus, good-bad, very rapidly. discernment is seeing morethe shades of gray between zero and one.

everything in between, betweenblack and white, so to speak. it's very much, as i'm saying,a way of being. it's an art form where it'snot that you don't see clearly, it's that you do seeclearly because your mind isn't fogging it over with allyour preconceived zero-one decisions from moment to momentabout what you like and dislike, which is a littlebit like a prison. audience: so i thought theresults about the psoriasis were very interesting.

but i didn't think the controlgroup was actually a control group because in the set whowere given the meditation, they were given something-- [tape change] audience: --versus if people aretold to take time out and problem solve, whether there'sthat difference. because it could also be thatif people were played this tape in the middle of theirtreatment which said, "now think about all your problemsand think how you're going to

solve them. be active," and so on. "takecare of yourself. take care of your health,eat properly." jon kabat-zinn: we call thoseanti-meditation tapes. audience: yeah, anti-meditation. they might also show thisincreased result because they might also take time out totake care of themselves. jon kabat-zinn: now, i'm goingon long-term memory here because i don't know of anyrecent studies of that kind.

and you're absolutely rightin your criticism of the psoriasis study. it was like a pilot studywhere we didn't give the control group somethingcomparable to either fill their mind-- even music-- but something comparable, atleast. but i think the anti-meditation, it's not simplythat you are thinking. there's a big difference betweenthe meditators and the

thinkers, so to speak. but that is a very interestingquestion, and no doubt it needs an awful lot moreinvestigating than has been done so far. audience: i was listening to atape recently from a book that the dalai lama wrote. and in it, he said somethingvery funny about neurobiology. he said he was listening to alecturer give a lecture about the amygdala--

and i think it was goldman-- andhow the amygdala has all these negative impactson our emotions. and he laughingly thoughtto himself, "well, then enlightenment is simple. we'll just cut out the amygdalaand then we'll all be enlightened beings." and, of course, it doesn't workthat way because when you cut out the amygdala, there's awhole host of responses that you excise from theopportunities that humans can

have in their interactions,such as being rightfully afraid. and any time you're startled,you need that. however, i was thinking aboutthe studies and how you were talking about the right and leftprefrontal cortex and how there's a noticed diminishedactivity in the right prefrontal cortex. and then i thought about whatthe dalai lama was saying. and how do we know what theeffects of the right

prefrontal cortex could be andhow they could possibly contribute to a wholesomelife? and do we really want to sort ofshut out those capabilities and being present with fear andbeing present with those more negative sides, isn't thatcasting the exact same binary, positive-negativething you were talking about before? jon kabat-zinn: yes, and that'swhy i'm just showing you what's been done and givingyou that frame on it.

but the larger, non-dualperception is saying we hardly understand anythingabout the brain. and one of the things thati glossed over was, that left-right shift had to do withvery specific loci on the left and on the right. right next door are other locithat are doing totally different things. the prefrontal cortex is doinga million things at once, so to speak, most of whichwe don't understand.

but it has to do with executivedecision making, all sorts of things. so it's not a matter of, well,excise the amygdala or find the exact thing that will getyou a little bit more on the left side, because that'salso dualistic. so we're beginning to unpacksome of what are called the neural correlates of meditation,but we're light years away from understandingthe brain or what is really involved when you drop likingand disliking, this and that,

and into an awareness thatcan hold it all. but we're doing those kinds ofstudies with matthieu and other people, where they canrest for extended periods of time, paying attention to onething or to no thing. and extend that out and seewhat the brain does. and it's all incrementallearning curve. but nobody that i know went intomeditation because they wanted to make pretty pictureson fmri scanners. and they're going into it fortotally different reasons, but

now, because of this interfacingbetween science and meditation, it's becominginteresting. and the risk is, it'llbecome materialistic. people will glomp onto theresults and they'll lose the heart of the whole thing. and even his holiness andmatthieu are aware of that. ok, last question. where'd the microphonemigrate to? audience: i think this is sortof a related question, which

is, you said a few times thatmindfulness and meditation don't inherently have anythingto do with buddhism. as someone who is a buddhist,there is something sort of uncomfortable about thinkingabout people coming to meditation to curetheir psoriasis. and i just wonder, do you worrythat something might be lost if meditation does come tobe seen as essentially just a medical treatment and nota spiritual practice? jon kabat-zinn: yeah, but idon't see it that way at all.

first of all, the people who arewith the psoriasis, they are just agreeing to be partof a study on meditation. they're not coming to meditationthe way somebody would come to meditation. and even in the stress reductionclinic, why do people come to the stressreduction clinic? really, one reason andone reason only. suffering. and so this question got posedto the dalai lama, around

whether this kind of thing isthe death knell of buddhism because we're taking what youmight call the heart of buddhist meditation-- people do call it the heart-- but if it's adecontextualization of it, it would be a desecration or adenaturing of it, and then offering it to peoplewho are suffering, that would be a disaster. and i hope we'renot doing that.

what we're doing, in my view, isit's a recontextualization. and i asked him, during theirpresentation when it came time to ask some questions, i said,to him, "do you see any difference between buddha dharmaand universal dharma? and he said no. and so as long as thismindfulness is grounded in ethics and morality and allof the kinds of things-- and it is-- all of the kinds ofthings that would go into a full-spectrum meditationpractice, it doesn't need to

be buddhist in order toreduce suffering. and when his holiness is posedthis question about whether this is a good thing forbuddhism or not that this happened, he saidthe following. he said there are four billionpeople on the planet, one billion buddhists, threebillion non-buddhists. all four billion are suffering,so what are we going to do? just keep it for us buddhists?

and he, actually, is promotingwhat he calls secularized meditation, that's like beyondbuddhisms or any other isms. and mbsr is really justan example of that 25 years earlier. and you use the word"spiritual." so i just want to say that i have a lot oftrouble with the word "spiritual" because it's usedin so many different ways. my working definition of theword "spiritual" is what it means to be really human.

we don't know what it meansto be really human. but i like that because itdoesn't get into, "oh, she's so spiritual and he'snot very spiritual." because what isn't spiritual? is chopping vegetablesspiritual? making love spiritual? well, it all depends. how present are you? so i love that i'm even hereand that we're having these

kinds of dialogues andquestions, because i think we're in a place of somuch not knowing. and the awareness itself has anelement of not just knowing but not knowing andthe [inaudible] between not knowing and knowing,that's where the juice lies. and so there's just tremendouscreative opportunities. and i think in terms ofmedicine, and i think in terms of our society, in a certainway, you could say that the

human mind has reached a part--if you don't mind my branching out a little bitto a more global view. thinking from the last iceage, for instance, all of human history has happened inthe past, say, 13,000 years. everything. and everything beautiful thathas come out of human culture that is in the louvre oranyplace else-- or google headquarters-- has come out of the human mindand the human body in 13,000

years, which is nothingin terms of the history of the planet. and we've managed tocall ourselves homo sapiens sapiens. what does that mean? in latin, [? saperi, ?] thepresent participle of the verb [? saperi ?] is to taste or to know. so we're the species that knowsand knows that it knows.

i don't think so. i think we haven't livedup to that one yet. we are still in our infancy,not even knee socks. i mean, we're just beginning tomature enough to understand the global nature of what we'vebeen able to produce with, say, the internet andgoogle and what the implications of this are goingto be for a society that's still so tribal. for a species, it's still sotribal, that you can be

muslims and kill each other overwhether you're shia or sunni, never mind christianand muslim or whoever-- azerbaijanis and armeniansor chechens and russians. there's a certain wayin which that can't hold that much longer. or all of the horrors thathave come out of the past 13,000 years, they also come outof the human mind when it doesn't know itself. so the challenge is, couldhumanity reach a point where

we actually own that homosapiens sapiens thing, take it seriously, and then do the workof cultivating intimacy with the full range of our humancapacities and of the human mind. and then work out ways todeal with the dark side. the side where we're not goingto deny that we can get incredibly violent if we getangry, if we're thwarted, if we don't get our way, ifwe feel threatened. it's not just in other people.

and so that we have a thousanddifferent ways to maintain some kind of mental equilibriumin the face of our own insanity. that might actually havepolitical ramifications. like maybe we need a moremindful politics where it's not all about self-interestin getting reelected. you already got elected. do something. but if the doing isn't comingout of being, it's going to be

the wrong doing. so when the doing comes outof being, i think-- i'll just close this off bysaying, i sometimes say that the human species like, insome way, the autoimmune disease of the planet. without this kind of awareness,we are the first victim of our own precocity. so we're both the agentof the disease and also the first victim.

i don't think we need to staystuck in that kind of thing. and i think there are all sortsof very, very positive and, i think optimistic forcesfor us to actually not only heal ourselves as individualsbut heal ourselves in a much more global way. and i'm sure that google thinksabout this day and night, because of the power thatgoogle has, and in some way, maybe is at leastcollaborating in the shaping of the present in ways thatwill profoundly affect the

future on the side ofsanity rather than on the side of insanity. male speaker: thank you, jon. so just a reminder, we're goingto have meditation in the university theater, and it'sscheduled to start three minutes ago.