Letting Go of I, Me, Mine — Gary Weber

I was walking into graduate school during a PhD and I had this epiphany this moment where I step back and watched my consciousness and lo and behold it was a mess you know it was just a bunch of garbage causing a lot of anxiety stress and suffering and so I said this this must be a better way there must be some way to not have this be there and I had no way of knowing that was possible this was in the early 70s and so I just set out as a scientist to try to understand if there was a way to stop this endless talking and so I would often tried a bunch of little experiments myself you know things like how much of my thoughts are about I me my or about not I me my and I find out they're almost all about I me my and nothing about anything else and they're mostly about the past in the future and I can't predict my thoughts I don't think up my thoughts my thoughts just bounce up into the sky they just come up so I just kept doing that I ran across your mana maharshi's teachings and 14,000 that's got into Zen to 14th century Zen master called bazooey said basically the same things you know where am I when am I Who am I and just trying to recognizing all this self referential internal narrative is I based and if I just tried to understand what the I was could I look at this and we've now gotten much smarter but I just kept asking the questions that worked for me if where am I and who hears and I did that and did that and did that and did that and eventually they stopped abruptly I was doing the yoga posture went up into it one way and the thoughts stopped I came back down it was all quiet and you she may have heard I had at the time a thousand people working for me for research labs and a quarter billion dollar budget and I had still mind completely quiet it was just nothing in there like there isn't right now there's just nothing there it's not unpleasant it's not a void it's just a very sweet stillness but I had to go to work that day and I went to work and lo and behold nobody noticed there was no glow there was no angelic a there were no angels singing there were no wings or anything I just went to work and turned out I was actually more functional than I had been before because I wasn't losing all the bandwidth to this blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and I wasn't you know losing all the energy that goes will along with that it was just quiet and still so I'd go to meetings and I'd be the only person in the room who was actually there for the whole meeting everybody else was off someplace else for ten twenty thirty or forty percent of the meeting or looking doing something else and so you look like the smartest person in the room even if you weren't just because you were there the whole time so and i found big complicated jobs of all sorts then and afterwards you just read the information before you come to the meeting prepare yourself so you're ready to do something in a meeting and just sit there and listen to the meeting fully present and lo and behold something comes up that is so much more synchronistic creative innovative than anything I could have thought of myself that you just learn to go with that and it turns out to be one of those what that's really fantastic oh how do you think of that thing and you just trust it more and more so and then I tried to find out what K why did this how did this thought stop what was making those thoughts before I knew the I me my thing I deconstructed that and so thought stopped but how does the brain do that you know what manifests to make that thing occur and things fall down and we found out that we've now got all kinds of good technology that explains exactly how it happened there were a lot of things took place I mean the one of the big things were getting involved in the year Yale long-term meditation work a judge Brewer who was a yell at the time i was looking at 10,000 hour plus or minus terrible at meditators and found out that in fact this default mode network we all know about now was being shut down you know and there was one key note in that that judge Brewer focused on in his rig at the Yale the shirt if that center was deactivated then you didn't have any self referential thoughts and you also produced this was an 11-member construction time that makes up selfing makes up I me Myung and you have two core nodes that do most of the work and they talked to all the other nine members and one side of this sub network makes a sense of medium time me with the past me with the future and if I deactivate this one core Center then boom that network shuts down so I have no sense of me existing through time I only live in now now now which is the classical mystical experience and conversely the other side of the other sub Network produces a sense of self another you know me and you me and the camera me in the room and if that shuts this course that's down that also shuts down if it shuts down then you lose this sense of view and other things and it becomes all is one thing so you get the two big mystical experiences just by shutting down this one note of this selfing network as 11-member selfing network and Shazam you're into a psychedelic experience and jeffery martin two doctoral thesis on some of us like 36 of us and you can look and say well okay there's a scale the hood miss a system scale and on that scale you can be from 35 to 160 Molly found 36 of us varanasi those tests and turns out that in fact there were nine of us who were at the highest level that would mrs. some scale 160 and we were there ninety percent of time five of us so you were persistently in the very highest level of the hood mysticism scale which also works for psychedelics we actually scored higher than the psychedelics people not much are the hiring psychedelic people and you can describe this in exactly the same terms I'm just good work now coming out of the UK on suicide by magic mushrooms magic mushrooms does the same thing they shut down the same centers basically the same way that the meditation does it you just shut down that put your single cortex that one yellow node and you get the mystical experiences same subjective reports it seems good miss system scale works on both of them so we've come to understand exactly how that how that does we don't make the big mystic experiences and they are very similar you the brain called filtering the brain creates our realities and the brain creates this sense of me existing through time and so if you shut down that network that creates this limitation this belief set that I'll exist through time and you can see you exist totally now and now becomes a much more powerful pregnant place than it was before it's not just the intersection between past and future it's actually a hugely different space so I was like a correcto but but now becomes enormously compelling as much you can answer more flies about the brain the brain likes this space the brain does not want to be confused crazy anxious the brain wants to be ordered get stuff under control here and that's what happens I mean the brain ends up dopaminergic Lee supporting staying in this now space and the now space gets so sweet and so compelling that you can't get out of it you almost can't leave it what happens is you deconstruct the eye the eye gets weaker and weaker wicker you can do some exercise and find out that in fact it there's not one I there's thousand devised you know there's a whole bunch of desires and if you do an inquiry process like you know when am I you see that in fact a different person shows up for every different set of relationships so you can see in the course of a day you have a hundred ad-hoc eyes come into being as different relationships take place this is Virginia Woolf now talking about as many relationships that you have a personality heavy relationships I mean we have a whole bunch of ad hoc eyes so you begin to recognize that this these eyes it's not it's not one thing it's a bunch of little things coming on an ad hoc basis as required so as they get weakened you find that they're unable to stop the brain from having this very compelling attraction to this now and they get smaller and smaller and smaller weaker less important and you just find yourself living in this some time you see enormous asked powerful stillness that's very sweet I did I heard the store but but I just people I work with who are mostly psychedelic users I don't choose him for that but many people have been the roundest work for a long time or are psychedelic users and ask them how do you how do you rank the sweetness of this now compared to sex drugs and non-duality how do you rank those three and to the person they said this persistent non-duality is the sweetest of those three things it's just a much better place in the brain generates the neural chemicals support that so it is you live in a psychedelic world I mean if your world is psychedelic by any measure y les ain't no thoughts and no thoughts isn't just my my invention I mean Ramana Maharshi said listen to get our Maharaja standard I'll take Chang it's in the bike Yoga Sutras it's in bhagavad-gita it's all over the place it was when my Zen masters passed me on the basis of having the situation and some other questions so no thoughts is not like my invention this has been around for a long long long time and no thoughts most people's when they think of thoughts is this ongoing narrative this self referential internal blah blah blah blah blah it doesn't preclude you having thoughts about planning or about problem solving that's a whole other network you go from this default mode network which creates this think we just talked about and you can still have thoughts if you read to yourself when you read if you you know work through something like how are we going to talk about today's interview talk to yourself about that but when it moves over from talking about today's interview into OMG this is really what's going to happen today then you can see the transition from pure planning that doesn't have any emotional investiture and the eyes just coated in because of our language has an eye in it automatically it moves over into a soft referential emotional narrative and the brain almost surgically can split between those two it can Rickon recognize when you move from how do I get the I 99 or how do I ever get down to 101 in the afternoons / 2 okay I just have stillness and the brain can cut that very cleanly it's amazingly it can do that but you can parse it out and this this place is just very still virtually all day my case if my blood sugar gets very low or I get very tired thoughts can start up again I mean self-referential thoughts can start again and so what we think we know how that why that's the case there are two centers in the brain that appears to watch over this network being shut down and they're probably very low in the priority list for energy allocation for glucose allocation and so they probably get dropped off first if it's I have to run away from the lion or I need to make sure by default mode network is an operating so I gave a quiet mind you better go for the lion thing and so the brain seems to recognize the brand of smart things recognize this is in fact okay i can stay down here feed this and let that go for now and I think that's what happens when those come back up again so the brain it's not dead but it is not acting it's been it's just not there but it's there naturally absolutely yeah and that was one maharshi's genius he said forget about the objects objects of your consciousness your thoughts and sensations and breath and forget about those you'll never resolve those if it if you could resolve them Woody Allen wouldn't many great movies so its echo in life that you can't resolve those things so you just go back and just focus on the subject it's all about the subject anyway you can try to understand it don't beat it into death but just understand it and keep asking questions about it and eventually the brain seems to pick up on these questions like the window my thing we talked about well you say well the brain sees this it seizes in fact it's you know thousands of leases or his eyes for thousands of sighs I said well why I'm all excited about this one and eventually the brain will learn its way through this thing you give that enough still data points the brain will focus on this tasking networkers over here pretty much as opposed to this default mode network it will just not go here because if this is so much more sweet useful functionally compelling and this is really not do much value so we've learned how to parse out those kind of thoughts you can also do this is semantic basically it's informational processing informational memory and this is mostly episodic you know I had this bad experience type of memory and you can lose this and you can still keep this in fact this function is even better no contraire what we broke off from the chimpanzees six million years ago basically plus or minus and for the first you know four or five million years we've mastered taking a rock and sharpening one side of it so we weren't we weren't doing exceptionally well things are accelerated for them but as far as we know this whole symbolic logic is probably 75,000 years old with the most so out of six million years this evolved probably 75,000 years ago so a relatively very short time evolutionarily and it wrote it really kicked into operation strongly probably 30 years thirty thousand twenty thousand years ago when we formed agriculture we moved from hunting and gathering the more complicated structure societies and we developed an eye there's we killed a zebra over there and we decide you can have half the zebra and I've been member though that I've given you half the zebra so next time when you kill a zebra and I don't then you'll be sure back with me we developed this I symbolic logic we first started to scratch into ochre that we had us you know we could use symbols to represent things but that's the evolution of symbolic logic which is relatively very recent and that's how we were four five and a half million years and we developed this going structure and you can say while it was is it still useful I mean evolved and it served some purpose because it manifested you say well okay has it has it fulfilled its usefulness when we had to divide up who's going to do the farming tasks it was very important and we got complicate Harkle societies very important but now you watch what goes on up here and almost nobody would agree that it's really a productive useful aspect I mean compared to what takes place in this tasking network what takes place in this network network now is there are no lines and tigers and bears from those people what's up there now is just Oh what did Mary say no what's John thinking us about me was John thinking that about me we developed this massive prefrontal cortex largely based on relationships you know does she like me does he like me what did they say that thing that I do to screw up in LS presentation whatever it is and it's all imagined problems from the past or projected outcomes in the future which in my experience I'm always wrong about I mean I had no problem putting go future forecasts because I would know good at it if you watch your future forecasts I was over a loafer Brazilian because I was always wrong some way it was never exactly correct so you realize after well this is just not a useful process it's always a problematic process so right now I would say most people since a really good study at UVA that i hadna blog post about exactly this about how much people hate this internal referral narrative I mean they had a bunch of students and the the end of the study of the published in science of a big journal they could shock themselves on the ankle or they could sit there by themselves for 15 minutes and entertaining entertain themselves with their thoughts with no toys had to just sit there and many of them chose to shock themselves in the ankle with a painful shock rather than be subjected to having to just sit there with their own thoughts so this is not you know a good thing they lead students and they did people from the farmers market the church in Charlottesville and they found the same thing with all them people don't like this self-referential intro narrative so if it's become so unpleasant and so maladaptive it causes all of our stress and suffering concerns why don't we just say can we get another operating system can we evolve out of this operating system into something it's you know version 2 or version 3 this is a relatively recent adaptation it came in for a reason during agriculture but now we've been good at agriculture nobody I mean not many people in many parts of the world are worried about food but they do obsess about everything else and so you know for me it was it was a good trade I mean getting rid of the obsessive self-referential suffering causing unhappiness and moving off into a place which is so much sweeter and you're so much better functional your life goes along so much more smoothly that did before it to me it's a bit the next evolutionary step for a better operating system yes that was good you know before we chipped rocks and then we found a way to do agriculture we've now moved into a whole different world in the last 10,000 years dramatic evolution in our species is happening too fast for evolution to catch up with it so I'm proposing we just start looking at it and say can we find a way to get a new operating system a better operating system I I didn't find I was any good at that I mean as much as I tried to understand my emotions and try to you know truck go back say well why did I react that way to her in this particular situation you try to D convolute that psychologically and I think we've we've psychology community in some ways for me is broken down you look at DSM 5 the latest description of what's a psychotherapeutic melody and the chairman of that you probably know the story the chairman that resigned for their published dsm-5 because he said everybody fits some place in one of these dsm-5 designations there's nobody who is not psycho pathologize herbal that you can't make them into a problem and I think that's where we've come with psychology I mean they don't have a way to deal with almost anything so they just pathologize everything I mean if you went to this conference of with some very bright people here you could probably psychopathologies virtually everybody about everybody here would flunk some place in dsm-5 I know if I was a kid now I'd have a hard time not seeing the school psychologist so I just think that part of the system's broken down we had been trying on the ferry firsts and it was a parallel path here for some of the big area people so as to do a psychological training program for how to deal with people with non duality and what happens now if you have non duality you go to a typical psychologist to be depersonalization disorder first diagnosis he's me schizophrenia but now they've got a more elegant technical depersonalization disorder and I say guilty as charged you know as if you if your person is this I that's back there causing all these problems I that's the person that I out ID'd that I wanted that to go away and you can deconstruct that but it's not pathological on the contrary we need to understand that it's really maybe the next best step I don't think psychology and let's say look a different way maybe Nura scientifically and how these things emerge are they going to understand what's really going on because they've got a big phenomena here with a real problem that people don't like what's going on this thing I'm a complete virgin I'm virginal psychedelics but but the guy do videos with we put some dialogues which rich door and I he's used them all I'm use many of them and he's written books on them he's well known for this so rich Doyle he know he's a professor at Penn State and we do we did maybe 30 some dialogues because I a virgin and he's not and so we bring very different perspectives to a lot of questions in this work we say well if you're experiencing something psychedelic is that true and it turns out it is true I mean if we talk about what I my world looks like and what he's his world psychedelics looked like and he says the same thing if I talked to people who use a lot of psychedelic say so yeah that's exactly what my thing is so we've crossed compared a lot but I do find this this is I get stoned for this little fair amount that when I work with people one-on-one I find it if they've done some serotonergic psychedelics if they've done especially the more learning focus psychedelics they done I wash if they done magic mushrooms there's a learning that goes into that that makes the process of being bundled much much much easier you might will have any good numbers yet statistically but you might take as much as you know eighty percent of the time out of time required to do this change by doing that works to be able that's about what we've gotten within 900 hours someone's gotten to a place where it would take most people 10,000 hours without psychedelics and and we don't know certainly it gives people because there's some scary places even without psychedelics just doing non-dual meditation for a long time you get some really scary places and it may just be that you've seen those scary places before on psychedelics and so you aren't afraid anymore and you just say welcome to Sookie I know the brain can make up all kinds of worlds this is just another world of brains manifesting chemically we're gone chemically endogenous Lee your exogenously and so you just say well okay this is not a problem we don't we don't know scientifically yet if in fact somehow were conditioning those synapses between different neurons by having psychedelic exposure so then the chemicals then your body your natural endogenous chemicals work better work differently but it certainly does almost one hundred percent of time if someone's done it doesn't 20 isn't better than 5a hundreds of I don't know one guy than 2,000 high-dose LSD things and he's not there that's not that's not solving his problem but it some exposure is helpful and I'm not pimping for psychedelics but but that is you know conclusion you come to at least anecdotally what I do now sensors you know the doer is not much much use anymore I still have a price I still get up in the morning like I always have for two hours and whatever manifests manifest me spontaneously I just sit there and whatever happens happens my first yoga training was that you just spontaneously look postures generate and so I spontaneous you let whatever Austin does it need to come up they come up whatever chanting needs to come up my big chanter chanting comes up if I need to meditate I meditated it's breathing practice breathing practices happen and every day it's different and every day something happens I mean people say oh I'm done like stop beneath am enlightened now whatever for me it never stops and you got 50 trillion synaptic interconnections if only you know two percent of those you still got trillions of neurons involved in this thing this is a complicated rearrangement we're doing up here and takes a long time to get rid of those plus all your old memories but I find every day every day a key turns in Lock something happens something changes a new piece of insight you thought you understood and saw before but now you see something that's different than it was yesterday clearer ended her way so yeah I still do it a couple hours a day people do all kinds of extrapolations from chance events if you look at the history of awakened people who speak at these conferences it could have been walking across the park in London it could have been walking down a road kicking a stone against the bamboo the fence which is one of the big then what awakenings one guy went to war house I mean just so people sometimes often confuse oh I did this thing and therefore this is the important event I kicking stones against the bamboo is what it is so I just stand here old and kick stones against the bamboo and they'll make work me up doesn't work that way but I think this may have been just incidental but then who the government's in the brain he talks here dr. several times synonym brain I can think of something right now very famous researcher be a big long terms of Arc Tichenor also scientist neuroscience worth the first good neuroscience almost almost had his name oh let me think of it but I mean he came to a talk two years ago here and I gave my second don't like plus or minus talk and he got a whole roll in Griffiths who runs the soul cyber program at Hopkins yeah he was all talking and so they were both in my session and so we gathered afterwards out in the hallway and total it up I started talking and guys whose name I can't think of said how are you he asked Rowan hit but we talked and he left and roll still there and we start talking Rowan said well his question is what position were you in what yoga posture were you doing and I told him told roll on what I was doing the posture he said that's exactly what he predicted that it would be it would be one aspect of that posture would be what would trip you over and so I can't think of the guys name I can see his face his crate guy anyway but he predicted what what what elements the posture would have in it that would have caused me to flip over so it may have been something non incidental that it was exactly that posture at that particular time was the last it had to fall I don't know over the course of 25 years and 20,000 hours of practice what what what exactly happened at that moment I was very singular I was just watching on a DIY basis what was happening with self-referential thought and the only question was is it gone or not and as long as it was up there then I wasn't it wasn't done and so I had many waking and experiences and lots of stuff happen along the way but all my teacher says forget about the experiences it's not about experiences are traps you'll find yourself trying to go back and replicate an old experience and we now know from a bunch of studies we don't remember anything from the past accurately even things like 911 early gadot we just don't remember them well after a year forget about that being in that good memory but i spent like years trying to get back to my first experience so I learned it was not gonna get me there I just kept practicing and asking the questions and inquiring and letting go and surrendering and I'm not this body I just kept going and going going I thought it wasn't going to make it I just thought it was I just wasted 25 years of two hours a day or more for nothing and surrender became very important I mean surrender turned out to be huge and i could tell i wasn't surrendering everything I was holding back for my two daughters and so I just held on to them and I could tell that was a sticking post i had not let go of my attachment to my daughters and so once i got them when they were okay and safe and it's cool I let go I said okay whatever happens to me and I had no idea what's going to happen i really had not the foggiest was going to happen i was prepared to lie along curb and slobber if I thought turned out to be I had to know the truth so I let go senator my daughter's come please turn everything turned out I needed somebody's surrender to us rent or marsh I said you take him and two days later it happened so it was you know yeah you keep letting go of every attachment you have until you find your last attachment and then that's what mine was and I let go that last attachment and soon thereafter bang so that to me was a singular event that made it all go I've been letting go of other attachments but I came down to my last one I knew what it was I just wouldn't call it and I did well I might to me I anthem or faiz it I mean into the brain as being a living entity because it is a living entity we have this little tiny CPU up on top this writer in the elephant metaphor that I use it's a very tiny little thing little CPU can do seven plus or minus two piece of information solve one problem at a time and down here we have you know the wonder of the universe 100 billion neurons between sniping interconnections massive parallel processors there's a reason we evolved to have this press secretary with not much capability and have this thing offline so you don't know what's going on the problem is we we believe we know what's going on by listening to what's going on in the blah blah blah in fact it has doesn't have a clue what's happening I mean the stuff off line is massively complicated and probably goes on continuously we just don't have any idea what's happening until we can get somebody you know I think we're getting towards EEG that can really do good measurements deep in the brain we're getting very close on that will have a better better marker but we just don't really know what's going on to their other than we just listened to our stories about ourselves and it's always wrong she was hostile she was completely hostile to the whole thing this was back in the 70s and 80s and it wasn't you know part of the mainstream at all part of almost any stream at all there was friends it was doing yoga and some meditation but not broad population like now she was very threatened by it very hostile to it she told me one time fiber started to teach you to leave me so great hostility towards his name it didn't the hostility didn't really end until there was a billionaire standing in our living room and when she saw the billionaire standing in our living room she said well there must be something to this because we got a billionaire our living room right now and that changed a little thing and you do it is difficult for your partner because your partner is used to you being a certain way and having buttons that you learn how to push on each other you have you know you each now how the other person respond to certain things and you expect that behavior to always be there whether it's it's productive or non-productive it sits there and so suddenly one person stops responding that way they don't respond the buttons don't work anymore and first thing is well he's got another woman or whatever but it was worse than that I mean it wasn't worse another woman it was something they don't understand you don't understand what what doesn't understand and it's weird there's no institutional support for nobody understands it and you're doing this weird thing all these hours it just doesn't make any sense to a wife the most wives so a lot of minute divorce and a lot of them travail and trauma but they don't understand I empathize with them but in the end it does work out at least in our case I mean and you do get to you end up seeing each other much more clearly I mean I if you don't come to your relationship with your partner or your kids or something without a storyline without some way they have to be for some way they used to be that you're holding against them if you just come to them where they are right now sorry different stuff can change you see their person much more clearly that's the only way to really love and to be compassionately this big discussion about compassion I mean if I come to you as a someone who has something money I'm giving it to you down there to help you so I can get karma points or sin points or anti sin points that's not compassion to me it's not love I mean love comes when there's nobody here there's nobody there it's just this love this total love expressing and there's nothing in the way of it there's no story line there's no I love you if you give me that I'll give you this that you give me something back again so much of its a marketplace but if you just come to somebody completely openly a whole other quality of love compassion whatever emerges that is so totally different from what you used to think love was or what compassion was so totally different and so much more useful and real and you know present you