Thank you. Thank you for coming in such large numbers. I'm sorry for those who are in the sun, but I imagine you there.
Today I want to talk to you about desire, because desire has many meanings, but perhaps for me the deepest meaning is that desire is love meeting will. Love meeting desire — that is, the deep sense of who we are, but meeting it in the sense of realizing it. So desire is what then becomes necessary to realize in one's life what one feels inside oneself. So desire is something that obviously machines do not have; only conscious beings like us can have desire. But the deepest desire that all of us feel is often the desire to get to know ourselves: who are we? Why are we here? What have we come to do? Who are our children? The people we love? What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of the universe?
And as a child, one of the most powerful desires I ever felt was to build a model airplane after I saw one. I was 11 years old, and I didn't know that toys could fly. I only knew that big airplanes fly, right? I didn't have the image that you could — little cars go on the ground, but how can a little car fly, right? So how does an airplane fly? When I saw a flying toy, I fell in love with this model airplane; I wanted to build one too. So this powerful desire became action, and this action led me to understand how to build model airplanes, to buy a book — in short, it's a long story that led me to do the things I did in my life, especially the first part of my life. The desire to do new things, to create, to invent, was the powerful spring I had. Deep down, I thought that if I had achieved all the goals one can achieve in this world, I should have been happy. And instead, no — instead, I was unhappy. And for years, for years, I pretended to be happy. I pretended to be happy, and at a certain point I told myself, "Wait a minute — what can I do about it? I have to accept that I am unhappy, and I have to accept that I am the one who created my unhappiness." So I took this fundamental step when I was about 46, 47, 48 years old, and in that period of my life I understood that to take this important step — which then led me to change my life — it took honesty, honesty toward oneself, to recognize that I was pretending. That is, recognizing that I was pretending and understanding that instead of pretending to pretend, I had to understand why I was not happy. At that time I was running a company, so I couldn't go to work with a long face, right? I had to play the part of the company boss and so on, right? But inside I felt like dying when I looked inside, and so I didn't want to look inside.
By being an entrepreneur I also learned an important thing: whether the company works or not, the fault is mine, because I was the boss. So how could I blame the others? It's easy to blame others, and often we do it. But I realized, there too, I accepted that I had done something wrong because there was a problem in the company that clearly I had caused, but I didn't understand what I had done to create this problem. And that was where I discovered that the most fundamental problem was that I had not done something when I should have done something. See? It's even worse — that is, this is what indifference does: indifference toward other people's problems, indifference toward ourselves, indifference toward the situations we have. That means not doing something when we should do something, and so often the deepest cause of our problems is precisely this: not doing something when we should have done it. Well, so there it's a matter of doing something more, of choosing, of understanding what one should do. Ah, but to understand what one should do, one has to go inside oneself, one has to search in depth.
And so when I found myself in this situation of being unhappy with myself, yet understanding that I had to act, that I had to accept my unhappiness and I had to do something — at that time I also wanted to understand what consciousness was, because I was studying neural networks to build computers that learn by themselves and things like that. So I was reading neuroscience books, and none of the neuroscience books mentioned the word consciousness. I'm talking about 40 years ago. In fact, until 10 years ago, neuroscience books never mentioned consciousness; only some books now that write about neuroscience occasionally mention the word consciousness, but in those years it was an unknown word. And instead I asked myself, "Wait a minute — the electrical signals of the brain, the biochemical signals of the brain, how do they end up being perceived in me in the form of love? Is love electrical signals in the brain?" The taste of food is electrical signals in the brain, but that makes no sense. There must be at least a transformation from the electrical signals of the brain to what we experience. And so this was something that haunted me, and I had the desire to understand. I had the desire to understand, and this desire to understand, in my opinion, is also a prayer. When one strongly desires something purely to know, purely to overcome suffering and understand it — to understand what I did to suffer, instead of pretending nothing happened — that is a true prayer. I can say it now; back then I didn't know that at that time I was what today I call a scientism believer, that is, I believed in scientism, which is a form of religion. It is the idea that everything that exists is what moves in space-time, so the objects that move in space-time, us, the interactions — we are machines, according to scientism. We are machines, so when the machine breaks, it is fixed from the outside; there is not much we can do from inside, and when the machine is permanently broken, we are no longer there. So this idea that we are machines comes from scientism, comes from believing that everything that exists is what exists in space-time, that there is nothing else. And this form of idea essentially comes from physics, the physics that studies these things and demonstrates that at this level material objects behave according to laws that are deterministic, at least for relatively short times, and that it is possible to calculate what happens in this reality, in space-time, with precision, and therefore to say that everything is governed by laws. Extending this reasoning to everything, including our interiority — which, by the way, starting from this principle, our interiority was eliminated from the outset, because if one starts by saying that we are objects, everything is objects moving in space-time, then what we have inside us does not exist. So scientism actually eliminated interiority a priori; it eliminated a priori the fact that we are far more than a machine.
But what is it that distinguishes us from a machine? What distinguishes us from a machine? The fact that we are conscious. But the fact that we are conscious — how can we know it? We know that we are conscious inside ourselves, but we don't know whether other people are conscious. See? Consciousness has a property that the computer does not have, nor does matter. Matter: one takes measurements in the laboratory, or takes them in space-time with instruments, and takes measurements. In other words, information can be collected with instruments, and this information then follows laws — that is, they are measurements of important parameters that are then governed by laws, and so with physics we can show how things work. But this applies to objects that have no interiority; it does not apply to humans. It applies to humans only if a human behaves like a body that does not think and cannot act on matter. And in fact, it is not easy to act on matter, because there are cases in which some people manage to have an action on matter — it's just that it's very... it's not controllable, and yet it happens every now and then. When it happens every now and then, it's a case, and nobody even talks about it. Oh well, we have company from the bells, so...
If life gives you bells, listen to them. They are also beautiful... Yes. Thank you.
So, how was this problem solved? A problem that was truly a problem I deeply wanted to understand. It was solved through a spontaneous experience of consciousness that, in one minute, maybe two minutes, explained to me that we are not the body. And I'm telling you about it because it is through this direct knowledge of who we are that we know consciousness, and it is what allows us to know, allows us to know through a lived experience.
It is consciousness that allows us to know. If we were not conscious, we would be machines that behave like a machine without understanding anything, without knowing anything, even if they have information, like robots that can behave the way we have taught them to. So machines are structures to which we can give a little piece of our behavior, which they imitate. But they don't understand anything, while we do. That is the fundamental difference.
But anyway, going back to how I understood, the situation was this: I was on vacation in Taos in 1990. We had a house, we went skiing during the Christmas holidays, and that was the only vacation I took. One night I woke up around midnight, I was thirsty, I went to get a glass of water, and when I got back into bed, before falling asleep, before entering the hypnagogic state, an incredible energy came out of my chest.
But it was physical energy, it wasn't an idea, it was energy, and it was love, and it was sparkling white light coming out of me, and my consciousness was in this light, I was this light. Wow! But the thing is, I was astounded, no, it's not like something happens that you don't understand and one is captivated, 'captivated' is the word in English, but you are tied to what is happening, you live the experience, but it's an extraordinary thing.
Then this energy bursts, it's everywhere, and now this sparkling white light also smells of peace and joy, so it's love, peace and joy, and my consciousness is everywhere, inside me and outside me, so I am the observer and the observed, so I observe myself outside of me, but do you understand? But how is it possible? How is it possible?
And a thought comes forward, the thought was: Ah, but this is the energy, the substance of which everything is made. Everything means the universe. I am a point of view of the universe observing itself. But wow! Naturally, this experience then ended.
The next day, if I were truly a scientist, I would have gone to the psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist would have given me a little pill and told me, 'Look, take this little pill and you'll be fine.' Instead, this experience was so powerful, so full of meaning, so full of truth, and also full of the desire to understand what it meant. It made me understand that I was absolutely not who I thought I was.
I thought I was separate from the world. All of us grow up with this idea. We think we are a body separate from the world, acting in this world, and then maybe remains, maybe not, depending on which religion we believe in. Ah, but that's all, right? But how can I be outside of me? Well, the sense of me in the past was in my head, so how can I feel myself outside of me?
This means that scientism doesn't work, because according to scientism we are only the body, there is nothing more than the body. So my consciousness outside the body made no sense. In any case, this is the first experience I have ever had of what are called spiritual experiences, that is, the sense of being the whole, the sense of connecting with totality.
And today I have a theory that explains, completely changes the meaning of the nature of reality, and explains what I felt, what other people have felt, even though what I felt I know, what other people felt, they have to tell me themselves. And this theory also explains why our experience, which we know to be private, we know to be private, and which means that only I can know inside me what I feel.
I cannot give others the experience, what I feel, the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts, I can describe them, but by describing them with words I reduce them, I reduce them enormously, especially the deepest feelings. Sometimes we can't even put into words what we feel, that is, there are no words to express what we feel.
And so, through direct knowledge, we know more than we can say. For example, I had a cousin, and when I was growing up, this cousin of mine was extremely good mechanically, he could figure out all sorts of things, etc., but he couldn't explain when... he'd just say, 'I do this, then this, and then this.' And I'd say, 'Hey, what did you say?'
