Cali Alpert:

Welcome to Dropping In from Omega Institute. I'm Cali Alpert. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our Rhinebeck, New York campus is temporarily closed, but we're still here for you. Now, instead of dropping in on campus in real time, we're dropping in to our treasure trove of audio archives to offer you talks, teachings, and practices from some of Omega's most memorable workshops and conferences. In this 22-minute episode recorded at Omega's 2017 Being Fearless conference, Jon Kabat-Zinn discusses how presence and wisdom must be cultivated, then offers a dropping into being practice. So put some time aside for yourself, get comfortable, make sure you're not behind the wheel, and drop in.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

This is the meditation. Our hearing, listening is mindfulness. And a lot of times we don't listen. We only hear what we want to hear. And through all of our senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, interoception, proprioception, we are not attuned to the actuality. And yet we call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens, the species that knows and knows that it knows. In other words, the species that has awareness and is aware of our own awareness and therefore can navigate the complexities of the world.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

I don't think so. Not quite. It's a nice idea. And it may turn out to be the only thing that will help us thread back in. And we may not have another thousand years. I like to say this is the work of a thousand years, but what if we don't have a thousand years? What if we don't even have a thousand minutes? And we don't. We're urgent, we're all sorts of urgency and anxiety because every time a tweet goes out saying you'll see or anything like that, well maybe it's like today. Don't know that the nuclear weapons will go off.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

So that is, as we pointed out last night, a remarkable opportunity as well as a terrifying situation to be in. But it's one where we need to meet it with all of our intelligences on board. And I don't have to tell you, any of you, that that's actually the hardest work in the world for us human beings. Even though we are the species that knows and knows that it knows, awareness and meta awareness. We need to live our way into it. And so if we are truly the cells of the one body of the planet, then we need to recognize that mindfulness would include how we teach history.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

What I learned about American history is a triumphalist perspective from white property land owners who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and actually changed the wording from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. Where in the Declaration of Independence it says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but it got switched in the Constitution. Do you know that? Life, liberty, and property. Why? Because it's like property. And let me just urge you, because I want to get to the cushion, to read a book called Democracy in Chains, which is an analysis of how forces for the past 60 or 70 years have been trying to cultivate an economic perspective that justifies the property keeping everything. And of course now the income asymmetry, the wealth distribution is so profound that the society cannot survive like that. It's like the blood supply only goes to certain cells, but not the other cells. That's not a prescription for a healthy life. Needs to go to everywhere in the body.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And these cells all came out of one fertilized egg, by the way. So let's just bow to all the mothers in the room who have given birth to other human beings. One cell going to thousands of trillions, inconceivably out of the one fertilized egg. The men have something to do with it, but it's fairly brief. And then the nurturance, of course, that possibilities forever. But right inside, let's say our own little old heads is the most complex arrangement of matter in the known universe. Hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, 86 billion neurons, and then another similar number of glial cells. Nobody knows what they're doing in there. And so let's not give up on ourselves just yet. We are remarkable miraculous beings and capable of profound attending, profound presencing, profound wisdom, but it does have to be cultivated. Because we're so much as Thich Nhat Hanh likes to say, practicing the opposite. We're practicing anger, we're practicing reactivity, we're practicing othering.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And this talk is sort of labeled non-dual awareness. Just think of it because we can't go into in great detail, but that's the heart of the mindfulness practice is non-dual awareness. And that means there's no us and no them. It's a fiction, it's a narrative. It has some relative truth. And we do need to recognize our own unique belongings and our own unique communities. But there's a larger community that we are part of that if we don't recognize that, no amount of othering and going to war with those who are not like us or trying to preempt them in favor of us. Well, that's what we've been doing since the last ice age.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And so again, I'd recommend one other book, which just came out by Robert Sapolsky called Behave. He's one of the great neuroscientists on the planet and also primatologists. He studies monkeys and apes. And this is a book that's basically saying, it's really complicated being human, really complicated. So let's not find any kind of simplistic answers and try to impose them on everything because it's all context dependent.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And we know a lot about the brain and how it's working, but no matter how much we know, it's nothing compared to what we don't know. And so we need to really cultivate that not knowing. And that's what awareness really is. Socrates was famous for going around saying know thyself. And one of his wise ass students once said to him, Socrates, you go around saying know thyself but do you know yourself? And of course, as a good teacher, you always want to twist things a little bit. So he said, no. The teacher goes around saying know thyself. And then the teachers when asked, do you know yourself? He said, no. Wonderful, but he wasn't finished. And he said, I know something about this not knowing. So that's awareness of what we don't know, awareness of how ignorant we are, awareness of how greedy we can be when we want more and more and more. For me, me, me.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And what I don't want, push away a version of one kind or another, or hatred when the other end gets really bad, it's us against them. So you don't need to look far for this. And in terms of action, the first action I would propose for really transforming the planet or healing or whatever, however we want to visualize what is possible in this planet, the first action is in some sense to drop in on ourselves and be still. And we train athletes in this. And the athletes they're not competing to see who can be the stillest.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

They want to go the fastest, but sometimes they recognize that the speed actually comes out of stillness. And so we cultivate a certain kind of stillness and also to just do it on the cushion, just because they put one up here for me. But it doesn't matter if you're on a chair, standing, standing on your head, lying on the floor, or whatever, but let's just take a few moments and drop into being, because if you're looking to the sage on the stage to give you all the answers for what to do, whether it's Cornell West, or anybody else who is up here, big mistake. It's a distributive investigation and we all have a role to play.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And nobody's insignificant because we're all cells of the one body. So can you be aware of sitting here or if you're standing, standing here? And I don't mean fall into thinking about how it feels to be sitting or standing. I mean to actually bring awareness into the body and feel the body sitting, feel your bottom on the chair, feel your feet on the floor, feel the spine self elevating out of the pelvis. But if you sit away from the back of the chair and just let your spine self elevate, well, that's one of an infinite number of miracles just that the spine can do that. And that the head can balance beautifully on this whole apparatus and the shoulders can drop and you can drop right in.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

You can fall awake. And maybe feel the body sitting here breathing and riding on the waves of the breath sensations in the body, wherever they're most predominant. And just seeing if you can rest here in the awareness, take up residency in your own awareness, with no agenda other than to be awake hearing what's here to be heard and just hearing it, naming what you think the sound is coming from extra. It's just this feeling what's here to be felt. Knowing what's here to be known, including not knowing. So underneath thinking, you can experience the thoughts moving through your mind as just events in the field of awareness like clouds moving through the sky. They come, they go. Some of them are highly charged emotionally. Some not at all. Some may be about this conference and taking action and time of disruption and all that. Just let them come and go as thoughts. And you stay in the awarenessing, bless you all.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

Rest in the awarenessing, in this timeless moment that we have a name for. We call it now. So in this very moment, can you let go of this and that and just be awake without preference. It doesn't mean you're abandoning your principles or that you're not ethical, quite the contrary. It means that you're embodying everything human, including that the very act of dropping in in this way is, as I was saying, a radical act of sanity and a radical act of love. Not narcissistic self-preoccupation, but a true honoring of how you are a human being. Why not be available to this moment, because if you're driving through this moment to get to some better moment when it will all be great, call it vacation or whatever, more dead than alive, because you're just missing this moment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

So we're reclaiming our life. And sometimes it just looks like silence, feels like silence, empty, vast spaciousness awareness with no boundary, no periphery, no center. And no matter what's happening in the doing world, we can approach it from this perspective. And the awareness is always bigger than whatever we're attending to. So we just be the attending and trust that that actually brings a vast number of different human intelligences on board that we're already born with. So we don't need to cultivate or develop them so much as just be available to them.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

After all, there are more cells in your body than there are stars in the galaxy. And if you think about atoms in your body, then you have to go to multi versuses, and it's all right here. So if you don't recognize that you're a genius and a miraculous being, I mean, and so resting here in wakefulness, feeling whole, allowing the awareness to suffuse the entire body and recognizing that you are a whole human being and perfect the way you are, including all your imperfections. So that from this point of view, there's no improving on yourself, whatever you think yourself is. You're already whole, and it's not going to get better over time, it's just going to get older. So this is it. And can we be fully awake, fully alive now?

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

In your unique form, your unique contribution to this planet, your unique cellular identity is a human. In the vast network of not just humanity, but life on this planet and the boundlessness of the universe that we seem to inhabit. And resting here in no time as if your life depended on it, eyes open's fine, eyes closed fine, and with no place to go, nothing to do, at least in this moment. Nothing to do, and nothing to attain. Simply inhabiting your own humanity, your own wakefulness, your own heart, your own recognition of the profound interconnectedness of all of us. We're all breathing in the same atoms and molecules with each breath. We're all 99.9% the same genetically anyway. And so resting here moment by moment by moment in awareness as if your very life depended on it.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

Because it's how you get your life back. It's how you be who you actually are in the very brief moment that we have called a lifetime, a human lifetime. And so gratitude for this practice, this capacity to cultivate mindfulness and for the framework or the context in which it's elaborated. However you've come to the practice is incredibly important. This is what I call the universal dharma, universal wisdom that comes out of specific traditions, but they are not belief traditions. They are empirical traditions where you investigate for yourself and you see what the actuality of it is. And you put things to the test, and if it doesn't pass your test, then try something else. But if it does stand the test of time, then giving yourself over to it as if truly your life depended on it. Because in my perspective, from my perspective, literally and metaphorically, it does in more ways than we think.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And because thinking isn't all that it's cracked up to be in more ways than we can think. Because it's one of a number of multiple intelligences, but when it takes over, we can't even get a good night's sleep. We drive ourselves crazy. And then if somebody managed to hack their way into your brain, whether the initials are DT or something else, once in there, you need to find ways to recognize the actuality of it and the completely illusory nature of it. And that's also where the non dual element of this comes in. You fall on one side, fall on the other side, as my Korean Zen teacher once put it or put it thousands of times, said it over and over again, open your mouth and you're wrong.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

Because you're falling on one side of a dualism or another side, subject object. We have to watch out for the personal pronouns. I am a Democrat. I am a Republican. Dangerous. I like this. I don't like this. How about attending with awareness and with love and kindness and compassion to who's speaking. Who is that? Who's underneath the I, who's underneath the me, who is it that wants to this and doesn't like that? And when we cultivate that muscle of mindfulness or heartfulness, then we actually can discern that we're not who we think we are.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

And the narratives we tell ourselves are way too small and reactive. And as Robert Sapolsky shows and with tremendous accumulated evidence in this book Behave, that a lot of it's context dependent. Judges will give much harsher sentences before lunch than after lunch because they're hungry and it completely changes their biology, their attitude, their perspective, everything, and their compassion. So it's complicated. It depends, as he says. And Republicans have different brain patterns and different responses to disgust, to revulsion, from Democrats. But if you change the circumstances slightly, then it's not so true and you can even flip it. So when we get into us-ing and them-ing, we're actually drifting away from wisdom. And at this particular point on the planet, we need all the wisdom we can get.

Cali Alpert:

Thanks for dropping in with us. If you enjoy today's episode, please check out our many online learning opportunities featuring more of your favorite teachers and thought leaders. Visit the Learn Online section on eomega.org for more information. Dropping In is made possible in part by the supportive Omega members. Help Omega remain a source of hope and healing and receive special content, invitations and discounts designed to support Omega's engaged community of members. Visit eomega.org/membership today.