Know Thyself - E22 - Dr. Daniel Siegel: The Nature of Self, Identity & Belonging

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Dr. Daniel Siegel, author of "Intraconnected", explains why individualism creates suffering, and how to create a more compassionate world. He describes the transition for me to "mwe", and why developing an inclusive identity is the key to solving conflict on the planet. He shares his story losing his memory in a traumatic accident, and how it set him free. Reminding us that when we are less attached to our identities, we can live a more liberated & joyous life. He also explains how to create harmony within by using his method called the "Wheel of Awareness", and understanding the principles of Interpersonal Neurobiology.     ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 2:04 The Separate, Solo Self  7:54 Why Individualism Creates Suffering  15:42 Losing my memory set me free 21:22 Top down vs. Bottom up processing 31:28 Developing an inclusive identity / solving conflict  37:39 From ME to MWE - Intraconnected 46:43 The Self is Love  53:41 Attachment Styles  1:03:35 Interpersonal Neurobiology  1:08:31 Practical Application: The Wheel of Awareness 1:21:54 Conclusion ___________   Dr. Daniel Siegel:    Dr. Siegel is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several honorary fellowships. Dr. Siegel is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization, which offers online learning and in-person seminars that focus on how the development of mindsight in individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes. His psychotherapy practice includes children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. He serves as the Medical Director of the LifeSpan Learning Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Blue School in New York City, which has built its curriculum around Dr. Siegel’s Mindsight approach.   Website: https://drdansiegel.com Wheel of Awareness: https://drdansiegel.com/wheel-of-awareness/ "Intraconnected" The Book: https://drdansiegel.com/book/intraconnected-mwe-me-we-as-the-integration-of-self-identity-and-belonging/ ___________   Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg   Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927     André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/   Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the United States, the most individualistic culture on the planet has more stuff than pretty much any place on the planet. We have more misery than any other place on the planet. And I don't think those are coincidences. When there's threat, when there's scarcity, when there's a feeling like not enough is going on and I'm in danger, we have a drive to try to predict so we can protect. And in that drive to predict, we want certainty, but life is full of uncertainty. So to know thyself is really to take the word self in there and begin to open it up from being a noun to a verb and from being singular to being plural. And then things start to change where instead of uncertainty being something you fear, you realize that the synonym for uncertainty is freedom and possibility.

Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast where every single week we get the privilege and opportunity to sit down and be in conversation with an individual who can help us know ourselves. the world at deeper and deeper levels. My guest today is a very fascinating individual, somebody that I am very much so looking forward to having this conversation with. He is a clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine. He's the director of the MindSight Institute. He is a pioneer in an emerging field called interpersonal neurobiology. And he's the author of multiple New York Times bestselling books in the fields of parenting, the mind, and the nature of what it means to be human. His newest book called Interconnected is available now,

and we are going to be diving into these topics today surrounding the nature of self, belonging, and identity. So without further ado, the goal of this conversation is to extend an ancient invitation into these modern times and explore these topics with the diligence that they deserve. So without further ado, Dr. Daniel Siegel, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, André. It's great to be here with you.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So without further ado, I would love if you can open up with some context as to what is your definition of the solo self. What is the solo self? And how does the construct of a mental solo self, how is that analogous to a cancer in modern society? Yeah. Well, it's great to be here on your podcast called Know Thyself. So I'll get to your question by beginning with your title. No, you know, the idea of what we can open up to and really feel in the sense of kind of this deep nosis, G-N-O-S-I-S-S, which is kind of experiential knowing, but also noetic knowing, noisis, which is kind of conceptual knowing.

So that's the know, but thyself, thy meaning your, and then self, what is that self? In the journey that this body called Dan has been on, it's been kind of an amazing thing to become a part of the field of mental health where for the last 70 years we've been saying, you know, you need self-actualization, you need self-understanding, you need self-empowerment, you need self-improvement, you need self-compassion, you need all these self-insights. And yet not that much positive has happened from the field of mental health, unfortunately. And I think part of that is because of this issue you're raising that the self is constructed as separate in modern culture. Maybe not the way Socrates mend it with know thyself and maybe not the way contemplative teachings teach it and maybe not the way indigenous wisdom really conveys the idea

that we are much bigger than the individual self. But in modern culture, derived originally from Western origins, we have a view of self, which we can get into, as separate. And when it's only coming from your body, then what do we call that? So in this journey of the book Interconnected, I said, well, let's just at least name this with a term we can refer to, the solo self, that this source of the center of experience is centered only in your body. And then we go from there and you can say, well, why is that a cancer you're asking? And why do I talk about that?

in the book, you know, as a physician, we deal with all sorts of medical problems of the body itself. And when we have a condition where part of the body has gone rogue and stops working with the rest of the body as a collaborative part of a larger hole, you know, then you can call that an autoimmune disease where you're attacking yourself, in quotes. But you can also call it cancer. because what happens with cancer is a cell which is participating as part of a larger system. This cell that's a part of the larger system, it is now growing out of control. It's what we can say is differentiating itself. It's making itself different or unique and saying, hey, I don't need to collaborate with other cells that are part of my organ or part of the organ system I'm in, like the cardiovascular system or, you know, the blood system where you can have cancer.

in any of these ways that it grows out of control, takes over, and then destroys the other systems. So the proposal in the interconnected book is that the modern cultural construction of the center of experience called self as separate is actually leading to some of the major pandemics we're facing, not only how we've mishandled COVID-19, but even its origins, but also the pandemics of racism and social injustice, of polarization and misinformation, of loneliness, of the addiction that comes from being drawn to these digital objects we have. And even the pandemic of climate change, where humanity has excessively differentiated itself from the rest of nature.

And we're seeing the chaos and rigidity that arise when you don't integrate is the term, when you don't balance differentiation on the one hand with linkage on the other that we'll just name as integration so a solo self is cancer because it's excessively differentiated yeah i love the understanding and you share in the book as well how anthropologists have been calling the culture in the states that we have is the most individualistic that there ever has been whereas in other places like japan it's more collectivistic and i just love the understanding how individual individualistic we've become in our pursuits and how we relate to the world around us is in a direct correlation to a lot

of the pandemics that we're experiencing. And I think it's really interesting. I actually wanted to bring this up. Shout out to Alana Matta, who's a dear friend of mine that shared this with me. The nature, the definition of nature is the following. The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations. So inherently in the definition of nature is saying that humans are separate from it. Isn't that strange?

So strange. Yeah, so strange. That's a great example of excessive differentiation through language, you know? And that's very powerful. Thank you to your friend. And also, for all of us, we need to realize the words we use

have a lot of power because they sit on top of concepts and categories that the mind uses to try to understand the world. And so when we see a definition like that, even like the simple phrase, self versus other, you know, I mean, oh, wow, well, oh, my, this is myself. And anything that's not myself isn't just not worthy of respect or dignity or taking care of it because it's the other.

And especially when we're under threat, that self versus other distinction, that belief that there's an in-group or as an out-group leads us to be very distrable. in the world, unfortunately. Yeah, absolutely, both on an individual and collective level. So I would love for you to share how does this construct of the solo self and the origins of why it kind of exists, and especially in the culture that we exist, how is that, how does that create and promote more individualistic suffering on a personal level?

Yeah. Well, I'm thinking about know thyself as a term. and I'm just thinking about everyone who might be sharing in our conversation, André, that you and I are having right now and the conversation that could be had as a human family. And what comes to me about that is that there are, on the one hand, many forces pushing us toward the modern cultural construction of a self as separate, the soul of self, that include, you know, a longing for certainty. in a world and a life that's filled with uncertainty. And then you can say, well, why does a solo self have certainty? Well, if you can say who I am is this body, then I can get an illusion of control

or the artist Rashid in the entry to the Brooklyn Public Library, she has this incredible quote, having discovered the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander, right? Well, the flimsy fantasy of certainty, certainty. It's just a powerful phrase, but it's what drives us because when there's threat, when there's scarcity, when there's a feeling like not enough is going on and I'm in danger, you know, we have a drive to try to predict so we can protect. And in that drive to predict,

we want certainty, but life is full of uncertainty. So we lock down things like what we do with our lives or who we think is in our in group, who is in our out group, or what we think the self is or not. And what we do, and this is a strange way to term it, but we nounify. That is, we make the self a noun instead of a verb. And when we noun, we make it like an entity, a thing, that when it's an entity identity, it has the illusion of certainty. So that's part of the reason we come here. Now you can say, well, the other side of your question, really is what's the problem? Why does that lead to human suffering? Why does it lead to suffering in nature? Because when you're clinging to a falsehood that the self is separate or that the self is a noun instead of the self is actually a verb and filled with uncertainty,

then when you cling to that, you basically imprison yourself. And literally your self is imprisoned into a nounified rigid state. You can say, well, come on, come on. We need some kind of certainty in life. What's wrong with at least saying yourself is in the body? Well, here's what's wrong with it. Then you say, well, okay, my parents told me myself, Danny, is in this body. I go to school, I become Dan or Daniel, you know, and they say there's Daniel in that body. And, you know, it wasn't until I had this accident, you know, that I talked about in the book where, you know, something happened and I lost my identity from a horse accident.

and fortunately I didn't die or break my neck but you know it was kind of a wake-up call that if knocking my head on the ground was a horse accident and I was dragged on the ground could knock out my experience of identity but I was wide awake but yet without a name without words and it was really joyful actually even though I had all these injuries you know then what is identity. Well, what that taught me and what it can teach all of us is that identity is constructed. An identity that goes, hey, I am only in this body gives me a feeling like, okay, I can control it. It has certainty. That's great. That's the reason it gets reinforced. But what's the downside of it? The downside is I start living where I said, well, this doesn't feel quite right. Something's not right.

But I don't know what. I mean, I was told I'm Dan in a body, Danny. Here's this guy. you know, I'm supposed to do things. What am I supposed to? I guess I'm supposed to get stuff. Okay, let me get stuff. Let me get 20 units of stuff. All right, well, I'm still unhappy. So what do I do?

40 units of stuff. Now I've got the 40. I'm still unhappy. Maybe I should produce stuff so other people buy this stuff. So I'll have 4,000 units of stuff and they'll buy the 40 units of stuff. Well, then they're going to realize they're unhappy, so they want to get 80 units of stuff. But I'm the one producing this stuff. So now I've got more stuff.

because they're buying my stuff and I'm getting an individual, you can see where it goes, right? So it's this endless loop of desperation where there's a fundamental flaw in the whole system, which is the self is erroneously defined as in your body. And that leads to this perpetual loop that I think in indigenous teachings they talk about, it's misguided and you lose the reality of our connectedness to one another. In contemplative teachings, we teach you about the false way that a self is created in human life and that part of meditation is to unlearn that. And for me, it happened by accident and a horse accident.

But there's a lesson about that that the messages we get in a culture, like in the United States, the most individualistic culture on the planet has more stuff than pretty much any place on the planet. we have more misery than any other place on the planet. And I don't think those are coincidences, you know, that we're busy, busy, busy rushing around. So to know thyself is really to take the word self in there and begin to open it up from being a noun to a verb and from being singular to being plural.

And then things start to change where instead of uncertainty being something you fear, you realize that the synonym for uncertainty is freedom and possibility. So everything begins to shift. And then it's a whole change in how you realize the center of experience called self has lots of elements to it that include the inner aspect of the body. Enjoy your body, you know, feed your body well, sleep your body well, really take care of your body. That's the inner self.

but we also have an inter-self that is a part of our deeply verb-like unfolding emergent identity that we can embrace. Wonderful. So good. So good. It's just like as you've been touching on the limited identification of a small portion of who we are as a self, if we perceive that to be the whole of us, then we will do so many things in the particular. protection and survival of that small identification, right? And so having that expanded self of sense of self and identity is where you can mitigate. I feel like a lot of the suffering that you're speaking to. So it's powerful and I want to dive deeper into how we can go about doing that before we do, because you touched on it briefly, your experience with a horse accident and how it affected your default mode network.

If you care to share a little bit more about that experience, because I think it's very fascinating that a lot of individuals sometimes go for years and years, decades on a path of inquiry, self-inquiry, and meditation to realize expanded sense of self in our inherent inter and intracconnectedness. And you had an accident that just kind of knocked it on your head, so to speak. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny, Andre, because the way this came up, I mean, when I was, just before I turned 20, I had this terrible accident. I was working for the World Health Organization. Ironically, I was studying Curanderos, and I was going up to interview the Queen of the Mushrooms. And in the Netflix documentary by Michael Pollan, they actually feature this Queen of the Mushrooms in the documentary, even though it wasn't really in his book,

how to change your mind, but it was in the documentary. And that's who I was going to interview. But on the horse ride with two colleagues up to meet her in Waxaca, you know, the saddle got loose and then went to the horse's belly to a full gallop. My feet stayed in the stirrups. And then my head was dragged for, they tell me, you know, about 100 yards. And they thought I had died. And then they thought, you know, when I was moaning, that had broken my neck.

And I did destroy my face. But the bigger thing was I had no identity for about 24 hours. So, you know, later we'd learn, you know, what are the neural mechanisms inside the network of neurons we call the brain in your head, you know, and how does that help construct a narrative self so we can talk about that. But I had that experience right when I was turning 20, and I kind of forgot about it. I could feel a shift in who I was, and it was kind of lighter and more humorous, and I never took the name people would say to me. I sort of initially was like a joke, like why are they calling me, Dan, that's kind of funny. It's just a constructed thing. But then I kind of forgot about it on a

conceptual level until decades later. I mean, literally probably over 30 years later, yeah. I was asked to give a talk as part of a conference with Houston Smith, who's, you know, a religious scholar, and Jack Cornfield is a mindfulness scholar and some other folks. So Jack Cornfield was running the conference, had me to lunch, just the two of us. I had never met him before. And he said, well, how did you find out about mindfulness? And I said, I actually, don't know anything about mindfulness. He goes, that's not true. He goes, I can see you knew something about it. You know something about it. I said, no, I'm new to this whole field of contemplation. I don't meditate. I'm new to it. I'm new to it. I don't know anything about it. He goes, no,

you know something about it. And then for some reason, after 30 plus years, I told him the story of the horse accident. And then he had to go and I had to go and we went our separate ways. But a couple hours later, I get a phone call. And it's Jack. And he goes, I can't stop thinking of what you said. I said, what? He said, the horse accident. I said, what about it? He goes, don't you understand that, just like you're saying, Andre, people meditate for decades to get what you got by accident. And I literally said to him, I said, why would people want to break their nose and lose their teeth meditating? And he starts laughing his head off. He goes, you have no idea what I'm saying. I said, Jack, more than not knowing what you're talking about, what you're talking about doesn't

make any sense. Why would someone want to hurt themselves? He goes, not hurt themselves. Lose their identity and then there was a pause. I said, well, why would someone want to do that? And he laughs and laughs. He goes, that's one of the central features of actually deep meditation. I said, well, there was a shift

in my sense of being in the world when I didn't take that identity so seriously. And I really feel very comfortable talking to you about this. And then he says, welcome to the family. And, you know, he and I are now closest to friends, but it was an

amazing moment because I never would have thought the horse accident had any kind of advantages, particularly even conceptually. But now, if you think about what likely happened inside my brain, it literally knocked, with there's repetitive hitting probably the central area of the brain called the default mode that constructs our narrative self. And yet sensory experience where senses fill awareness is on the side of the brain. and probably remained intact. So I had, you might call it global amnesia. That is I had a huge amnesia of not knowing where I had been or who I am.

And I didn't have words, you know, because probably had a dominance on my left side of my brain. But in the 24 hours afterwards, it was a profound experience of like, you know, people would give me a glass of water and the light would stream through the glass. And I would laugh and giggle. And it was like they'd try to put like what now. I would call vegetables on a plate, and the plate was like this round saucer, and it was like hilarious, and I'd lift up the vegetables, and their colors would, like, explode in my experience. And, you know, I mean, I had a relative who had a drug addiction problem.

So because of that, I had a psychological aversion to ever taking any kind of substance that would alter my brain state. So I'd never experienced any kind of psychedelics or anything like that. So people will hear this and say, well, it was like you're on a trip. And I said, yeah, I guess it was my own, as I say in the book, it was my own version of getting stoned. Quite literally. Literally, yeah. Wow.

So, so fascinating. I would love to also segue this into, can you explain top down versus bottom up processing? Yeah. Well, this is a good segue to it because the phrase top down and bottom up, they can be used in different ways. One way that's totally legitimate to use is like where in the body is something happening Is it coming from the lower areas?

We call it bottom from the bottom upward, or is it coming from the higher parts of the brain downward? So that's a great way to use it. But there's another way to use it, which I find equally useful, and also it's valid, which is when something that's happened before that you've learned, then becomes encoded and then stored. And in the storage, it starts becoming a filter that then, makes it so that what you experienced before and learned then shapes how you presently perceive things

because it's a top down, top down meaning top from prior experience, pushing down on the current in the moment, present moment input of energy flow that gets filtered by prior learning. So that would be a top down way. So the simple way to remember that is we perceive what we believe. Right. So our beliefs actually shape our perceptions. now right before perception is something called sensation. So if we can get with, like, let's use the example of my horse accident, you know,

someone brings me what we would now use the top-down linguistic terms, glass of water, right? So those symbols are top-down. You and I speak English, you know, we say glass of water. You know, I guess if I can remember my Spanish, it would also the Agua, you know, it would be Spanish, but it's you know the issue is that they're linguistic symbols they're not actually the water in the glass right but we have a word so that would be top down but in that accident state it was i was living bottom up so they bring this thing over that you and i would call a glass of water i didn't have a name for it but i have sensation that's bottom up and the sensations are hilarious and they're so broad because

nothing is filtering them it's as if i've never seen a glass of water before I certainly don't have a name for it. And since it's bottom up, it has this freshness to it. It's like beginner's mind. So what I tried to describe in the book was the idea that, you know, especially with modern languages like English, you know, we have a lot of nouns. So we do a top-down constraint of experience and we make everything like an entity rather than a more verb-like bottom-up unfolding that we can't really.

they control or contain, but it has a freshness to it with this beginner's mind. So bottom up would be sensory input. Now, we do live in a body, and it does have its own limitations and constraints. So you could argue everything is constructed to some degree because we live in a body. But I think it's fair to say that it's possible to have experiences, like I did after the horse accident, where sensation is freed from prior learning. And even though you're living in a body, you do have this kind of freshness without much filtering. That's powerful.

You said when sensation is freed from prior learning, I feel like, and I would love to get your perspective that a lot of the joy and peace that we can cultivate comes when we can experience reality and not the conclusions we've placed on things. And we see a tree or a bird and we know the scientific name of it. Then it's like, okay, we think we figured it out. We think we know what it is. and we take away that beginner student mindset of witnessing what is spontaneously arising in the moment and allowing that to be so fruitful. And, you know, how the vast majority of the human population is operating within top-down processing of, and of course it serves its purpose, right?

But the overuse of top-down processing is how would you correlate that to not being able to, experience the freshness and joy of life. Well, Andre, that's so beautiful. Let's just pause what you just said. It's just so beautiful. Yeah. I would just say yes. But I can feel in my body just the beauty of what you just said.

And to just sense from a bodily point of view, whatever arises from what you just said, Andre, for everyone listening, you know, each of us have the capacity to distinguish top down from bottom up. You don't have to almost get killed on a horse accident or take psychedelics or whatever. You know, you don't have to... Every moment we have the opportunity to really awaken to this distinction. How am I filtering incoming experience versus how am I just being present with sensation? Now, your question is like, well, how do people get burdened with that? And I was thinking about all the polarization in the world now or even, you know, I'm thinking about Greta Thurneberg, you know, the inner adolescence coming with such despair about the climate and then just saying, I can't stand this anymore.

I've got to do something about it. And then just by herself saying, you know, we're going to have Fridays, you know, for really working on the climate. suddenly millions of people are doing this with her. You know, she could be present through her despair and just say, this is what I need to do in her view. Yet when you would get adults around who might say, yeah, look, the climate is a problem, but we have this issue and that issue and this issue. When people would drop beneath those top-down opinions and perspectives and drop with bottom-up, then we could feel each other and feel like, okay, we are.

nature, unlike that definition you talk about. We are nature. So how do we take care of one another? And we have a fun term we, you know, which is me plus we. But the idea is, you know, we is that, okay, you have a body and it has top down processing, but we can be responsible human beings on the planet and say, thank you top down learning. Now, how do I get with a broader reality that comes from bottom up, you know, and you can call this systems intelligence or systems knowledge or it's really a way of coming back to what you asked earlier. It's really a way of embracing the fact that uncertainty is a synonym for freedom, you know, and so top down tries to give us that flimsy fantasy of certainty. Bottom up, you say, I can't control things. I can't be certain

of things, but I'm willing to be present for things. And you drop into that. And I'm a scientist, but I'm going to say this as a scientist. There's lots of reasons to believe that the fundamental thread of the tapestry of reality is based not only on connection, but on love. And so then what you do is you go, wow, you mean if I drop out of that top-down fantasy that I've constructed, that many people construct of certainty, and drop into, uncertainty and access freedom and possibility that what arises is something that will drive

my behavior towards love, which means kindness and compassion and caring and a greater good. And, you know, I think the answer is yes. So then hopefully with that top-down concept, you can say, ah, I'm willing to let go of top-down because love will guide me. And I really deeply, deeply, deeply believe in that as just a scientist with looking at the data. But then from an experiential bottom-up place, it's what people describe when they get into this open awareness, this field, which is a field of linking and love and, you know, the ways that we can just trust that. So beautiful. And it's interesting to see all the typical struggles that we would face.

in a human experience that just dissolve with this simple switch in perception and opening and awareness. I think that we live in a culture that tells us we need to like love ourselves so much. And I feel like the perspective shift is that we don't need to love ourselves. We need to realize ourself is love. Yeah. Yeah. And the way that you're speaking to is really, is a really beautiful, subtle but powerful shift

in understanding. I think this is such at the core root of the divisiveness that is so prevalent in our culture. today. And I actually want to share a quote from the book, Interconnected, which is available now. This is the first time I've ever heard a quote from this book. This is... Wow. Incredible. Let me open this up. And yeah, I think it just flows nicely into what we're talking about. This is page 232. The world is not always kind, not always compassionate, not always integrative. our human history of survival-based evolution leans us towards tribalism, and adding to this tendency is our genetically inherited,

neurally-reinforced propensity toward in-group and out-group evaluations. For these evolutionary and survival-based reasons, our species has culturally evolved with practices of exclusion that externally tell us to what and to whom we can belong. And I think that is just so powerful. And yeah, I just would love for you to riff on that and see how important is it for us to develop an inclusive identity in the pursuit of mitigating so much of the divisiveness that we have between in and out groups. Yeah. Wow.

Thank you for reading that. And the first thing I think to begin with in your question is people, I think go along with how they're thinking and how they're dividing people up and the feeling they have like, this is my in-group and I'm going to really protect them or bad person's in the out-group and I'm going to really keep myself away from them at the most neutral or worse, you know, do things to harm them. So because people tend to rationalize why the way they feel and the way they think is good, we have an interesting challenge because we do have evidence that for probably around 50 million years of primate history

we've done this in-group, out-group distinction thing, hostile to the out-group, kind to the in-group. So it's been with us for a long time in our evolutionary history. So for the last 200,000 years as human beings, as that branch of the primate line, you know, we've made it more sophisticated, right? This in-group, out-group stuff. But we do have something called allop-parenting. And what all-a-parenting is, is, you know, unlike other primates or other mammals, you know,

we actually share caregiving with other members of our community besides just the mother or the father. You know, and that all-o means other parenting is the person who takes care of you and your kid. You know, that al-a-parenting is really important. because it means the human mind needed to really tune into other minds, right? And that beginning of empathy to really sense the mind of someone else allowed us to become incredibly collaborative. We then harness the neural machinery that allowed us to make representations of other minds to probably understand our own internal world for what's called insight.

So this becomes really, really, really important. And then probably around 30 to 40,000 years ago, I was just in the Grand Canyon. And we actually saw some, they were kind of like rock drawings from the Zuni individuals, indigenous people who still live there, actually. But we know in other settings that for 40,000 years, 40 to 30,000 years, we've actually made drawings. So we make representations of experience and mental life. And this alloparenting story just tells us that, you know, we are creatures. that we're telling stories and we're having empathy and insight most likely. And 15,000 years ago, we have evidence that, you know, there's someone who had damaged their

arm and we patched up their arm. And we knew that if we did some action now at this moment and time, then in the future, that person would be better. So we could have acts of compassion. It took energy. It took time. But we took care of each other. Now, I say all that because with the 50 million year history of primates, you might go, oh my God, we're really in trouble. There's no hope. But with the last at least 40,000 years, we're storytelling creatures. And part of the story of not just genetic evolution, but cultural evolution, is that through story and through the way we communicate with each other, like this podcast, through conversation,

you can actually start shifting cultural evolution in a different direction than it's going in terms of being at business as usual. say in modern times is the individualistic construction of the solo self. So what you can then see from all that is that this passage that you just read invites us to say, you know, we may have a body that has a vulnerability. It has a vulnerability to do in-group, out-group distinction for sure for 50 million years. It has a vulnerability to construct a view of self-exceptive. you know and that's in modern culture and here's the good news even if those are mental constructions the solo self that lead to all these pandemics the good news is if the mind has created the problem if we can get out of our own way our own vulnerabilities and stop beating up on each other and on our

inner selves too and say well you know i must be an unopathic person because i'm doing in-group out-group distinctions no you say take a deep breath you say i'm a human being being, so of course my brain may automatically do that. And I'm a human being with the brain, especially the higher parts of the brain, that can have something called cortical override. I can take my initial impulse, which may be to divide and see in-group and out-group distinctions, but I can actually rise above that to the extent where actually I stopped seeing the differences and I start realizing we're all in this flow together. So, you know, you might read that passage or the whole book and say, you know, something, this is too idealistic. But I actually

think it's realistic. I do think that the human mind is incredibly capable in its interiority, in terms of neuroplasticity for change, in terms of its relationality, in terms of how we collaborate with each other. These conversations about the self being more than a solo self, but being both a me, the interior, and a we, are connections with the people on the planet. It's a conversation that I think can actually not only change the way we live culturally, it will change the very brains of children, of adolescents, of adults, that when you start seeing how these changes reinforce each other, I'm very hopeful in a very, I think, practical way that we can do this.

The issue is, will we do it? Powerful. And what do you feel like is the biggest proponent to us being able to actually do that? Is it just having these conversations on bigger and bigger skills? You know, there's so many different ways in which it could do. What do you see are the most kind of effective modalities in which we can actually plant that seed in many places? Yeah. I mean, part of it, you know, I'll give you an example.

Part of it is starting where people are. And I had this incredibly good fortune of working with the congressman Elijah Cummings, who was from Baltimore. and Elijah was a black man who was very concerned about the black, white tension and violence that was going on in his hometown in Baltimore. So he had me come and together. We did this workshop where we had people from the black community, people from the white community have never met with each other before. We brought them into a room and the tension was so intense you could just feel it in the room. And then I did this process called The Wheel of Awareness, which was just this 25. minute reflective practice where people are able to see the things they're aware of on this

metaphoric rim of a wheel and then drop into pure awareness on the hub of the wheel and then we let the practice come to an end and then people start talking to each other from a place of love and a place of connection and Elijah was like blown away he couldn't believe that just these are not meditators These are just citizens of Baltimore who, with this simple invitation, to find that space that's in each of us, this open, pure awareness, where, you know, connection, open awareness and love, which spells the acronym Cole, you know, that's kind of what is in that hub. Now, in that case, we were all at a workshop. You can't have everybody in a workshop, so what do you do? So for me, the answer is offering people's steps, very practical steps, and there are two appendices. in the book that just offered the wheel

in these integrated movement series. But the idea is that when we're walking around in the community and we can see someone who is of a different political party than we are or a different religion than we are or a different skin color than we are or your different socioeconomic status to really feel what that feels like.

And maybe initially there's, oh, they're in the out group. I don't want to be a part of them. They're not in my in group. But take a deep breath around that. and then to open up and it's in the book i call it an identity lens to let that identity lens widen so instead of having your in-group at the most limited be inside your skin you know that it's just you you're the only one in your in group and that's not just friends and family but now you open up say

it's all human beings and you widen it even further to all living beings to plants to fungi to animals, you know, and then things start to shift because unfortunately the research shows that when you're under threat, these circuits that allow you to have this wider sense of compassion literally shut down. So then it becomes our responsibility to say, okay, I'm under threat. So my end group is very tight because I'm really tightening my identity lens. Take a few deep breaths. If you do the wheel practice, access the hub. And then open it up. You know, and so this is something, I think, to put it simply, people can learn they have an identity lens. People can learn they can work with it. And it's not to get rid of the me. This is not

me to we. It's me plus we is me. And I think that gives people a lot of freedom. Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction that it's not either or, right? That it's like you don't have to sacrifice the self that you identify as a body. It's just your body and there's a lot more that than just the small limited version of who you've identified as. And so how did that distinction come about? I know when you were coming up with me, it's a funny term. But I think it's really important to also understand that it's yes and, you know, it's you and the collective.

And it doesn't have to sacrifice the self that you've known necessarily. Oh, exactly. Exactly. I mean, it literally came, you know, I was working with some of these issues years ago. And so I gave a talk called me to we and one. of the students, one of my, we have online classes and she was there in person, but she was an online student. And she said, you know, you really make me mad. I said, why don't make you mad? She goes, you're a hypocrite. I mean, you're giving a talk, me to we. Didn't she tell us that

feeling the senses of the body is important? I go, yeah, it's really important. She goes, isn't that me? I said, yeah, that's you. She goes, well, and shouldn't I know the history of this body in terms of my attachment experiences? I said, absolutely. She goes, well, that's me. I said, yeah, that's you. On and on, we went about taking care of the body, sleeping the body. enjoying the body. And she said, well, look at the title of your talk. Me to we is a phrase that means get rid of me and only go to we. I said, you know, you're absolutely right. I go, so that's an error. I'm sorry. She goes, we'll come up with something else. So I said, well, okay, how about not only me, but in addition, add we? She goes, that's too clunky. So I said, okay, well, integration is a process

where you differentiate and you link. But in the linkage, you don't lose the differentiation. So it's not like blending. It's a very special quality of integrating. So it's more like a fruit salad than a smoothie, you know, you're not grinding everything up, making an homogenous. So I said, so I guess if you had to integrate me and we, you'd go, me and we together is me. And she goes, that's it. You know, so it was out of that little conversation that I said, okay, and then I put it into the Wheel of Awareness Practice as part of the practice at the end. And people started really resonating with it with exactly what you said, Andre. They said, I don't have to choose between it's either me or we.

But there was no word in English at least, or any language we could really find, you know, that has the integrity of both me and we as one word. Because us is like we. It's like, well, we're just collective. So it's not going individualist to collective. It's something. and it's an integrated identity. And it kind of relates to where the word intra-connected comes from.

Yeah, please share that. Yeah, which was, you know, I was working with some system scientists, and we were trying to study these things called relational fields. And so anyway, we took ourselves as a team to a retreat, and the retreat was in Colorado, and three days of the week-long retreat was in isolated locations in a forest. And we were there for three days, and it was a very profound experience.

We come out, and we're around this circle in the forest, sharing what the experience was like, and all my wonderful colleagues were saying things I could really resonate with, like I was interlaced with the forest, or I was interconnected, or they referred to Ticknod Hahn's beautiful term, I was interbeing with the forest. I was interwoven, all these interwords, and then it was my turn.

And I'm kind of like, you know, a nut about words. So I said, I resonate with what you're all saying. It's so exciting to hear it. And at the same time, I can't use the inter, prefix, which implies a betweenness, because the experience that happened was, after a couple hours, I was the trees, I was the creek, I was the sky, I was the body called Dan, and I was all of it. So the connection was not between. It was like a within this. It was like a, it was a, it was intracconnected. And they go, yeah, interconnected, fine. And then we left the forest and I got

back to technology, got to my computer, I was taking some notes on what the experience was like. So I would type in intraconnected and the word processor would continually autocorrect it to interconnected. And I thought, God, what's wrong with my word processor? And there is no word intraconected. So then I thought, well, that's really peculiar and maybe significant that if the, at least the English language doesn't have a word to talk about the connectivity within the whole, only connectivity between the parts, who's speaking for the whole, right? The WHOL-E. So then I said, okay, well, then I guess I should turn this into a book, and I really wanted to call it Mui, but my publisher said, no one knows what M-I means, so make that

the subtitle. So it's interconnected, and then it's M-E, you know, me plus we, as the integration, right, because it's really integrated of self-identity and belonging. powerful and it's such a beautiful shift in language i'm also big on language and just the word interconnected relates to a separate self being connected with something else separate and there being a threat of connection but intra you're speaking to this natural coherence conciliance withinness that is within both exactly yeah exactly earlier you said and as you go on your journey and you start to dive deeper into the nature of self You, I have, and most people somehow do also have the experience that there's a spontaneous

bliss, peace, joy, love that seems to be the fabric of our truest existence. And you, somebody who speaks the language of the modern science in modern times, I think is such, what you're doing is so important for the evolution of humanity and the way that I see it, because you're crossing the bridge from ancient wisdom traditions that have set these things for thousands of years into a time where people can really understand and digest information in the language that they've learned. So you're really serving a beautiful purpose here. And so I just want to thank you. Well, thank you. And also, if you can, just how from your scientific understanding are you able to say that the self is made of love? And yeah, well, first of all,

thank you for sharing that, Andre. And I, as you know, I started the book with indigenous elders. and their view of what these times, these modern times, especially times of the pandemic or the virus, what they urge us to do. And I was so honored to, there was a documentary film made, and I met with the filmmaker, and got permission from the individuals and the filmmaker and everyone to transcribe the film

so I could put their voices right in the book. And it was like an incredible opportunity to really honor, thousands of years of independent teachings because these different indigenous cultures hadn't spoken with each other. And they over- I share a few examples of like what different, you know. Yeah, I mean, just the idea that, you know, that who we are is nature, you know, and that-

And the different tribes from where they were. Oh, from where they were. So some were from the Inuit in what we now call Canada. Yeah. Some were from the Aboriginal in what we call Australia. In New Zealand, there were people from Maori. There were people from South America. I refer to the Tauna from South America also.

There were folks, also I'm leaving one group out from the Celtic tradition, but they were living in France, not in Ireland, but they were from the Celtic tradition. And from Mongolia, those are some of the folks. And it was a deep, deep teaching about seeing ourselves in systems terms I would use from a scientific point of view. They didn't use the word systems, but that we are fundamentally woven with nature. And, you know, from your question about love, each of them spoke about love. you know and love was and there was also a group from hawaii and they were even talking about aloha and

the whole the feeling embedded in some of the terms from the different cultures were all about how love is this universal force of life so in contemplative teachings maybe they don't refer to love exactly like that but they see the power of compassion training and and you know how was once attending a compassion training with a Buddhist scholar. And he said he never uses the L word because his work is being used in corporations. And they, like this parliamentarian that was saying he never wanted to use the word love when he got in touch with love in the hub of the wheel because people think he's weak. That word love for some people, I guess, in the corporate setting or the government setting,

is thought of as weakness, which to me it's like the exact opposite. you know, when you get in touch with, as a scientist, I'll say this, with what feels like the universal force of life is love. And being in touch with it is the opposite of weakness. It's courage and strength. So if we have like structures, governments, corporations, where love is banned, I mean, think about how decisions are made, about taking care of the individuals in that system

or taking care of the people in a country or, you know, take care of nature that we're all fundamentally part of. So it's almost like, you know, in systems terms, a system is components that interact with each other and the whole system is that combination of the node of the system and the way energy information is shared within the system. It's almost like the node, which is the body, has confused itself as the whole of the self when in fact the system is the self and we are aspects of it, you know, and whether you're, you think of that in spatial terms like okay your body's there my body's here or in time terms like our bodies are here now who was here 200 years ago who's going to be here 200 years from now

you know when you let time and space stop being dimensions of separation then what begins to happen is you start feeling into the love that links us across all those dimensions and and then things like facing death start to feel very different. I feel very different about the death of this body since I've written this book. And my deepest hope for this conversation we're having here, and the book is really just like a conversation, you know, inviter, you know, is to say, well, gosh, what would happen if it became where indigenous teachings, contemplative teachings, and scientific teachings and the larger frame of kind of the rationalism of modern culture plus the spiritual traditions from thousands of years ago, what if these all stop being separate?

And we could see the conceitings, the common ground that is shared. Then you start saying, well, then you live from love. You live from this place of possibility. And, you know, sometimes I hear those words like, oh, God, you're, you're, you're, being so optimistic, but I actually think I'm being realistic. I do believe the human potential to tap into that place of love is there in every human being on this planet. And there's pervasive leadership where every human being, in whatever way fits with their own gifts and their own opportunities can bring this shift into the world. Beautiful. I'm right there with

you. I'm holding that vision. We'll see whether or not it happens, but do as much as we can in the process to help push that along. Yeah. Wonderful. I think could you, just because I want to, and it's on my mind right now, you briefly mentioned how attachment styles inform our personalities and how we construct the nature or the identity and selves that we hold. And that informs a lot of how we relate to others, of course. And so would you mind sharing just because I'm obviously a big fan of your work and understanding of this. And I think it would be powerful to share. a little bit about the nature of attachment styles and how it informs our personality. Yeah, absolutely. Well, a couple of things. The first is to say that, because you're bringing two really

interesting terms together, attachment and personality. So I want to make sure that, you know, we honor some of the deep science in each of those and they're actually quite overlapping. So So attachment is a word we use for parent-child relationships, and each of us carries with us an attachment history, you know, how we were treated by our parents, what the family environment was like, different attachment figures besides our parents we may have had, how they've impacted our growth. And there are basically three S's that attachment is filled with. one is that our attachment figures because it's plural not just one or can be plural anyway more than one our attachment figures keep us safe so protected from harm they see us meaning they sense the mind beneath our behavior right and they soothe us meaning when we get distressed we need our parents our attachment figures to really have us reach equilibrium again when we have those three

3 S is met reliably, and when there's ruptures to that, it's repaired, because there's no such thing as perfect parenting. If you write parenting books, believe me, you know, then you get the fourth S, which is security. And essentially, secure attachment is a form of resilience. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it makes it more likely. You'll have rewarding relationships to other people. You'll be able to be having insight into your own inner processes. You're going to be able to regulate your emotions well.

So it's basically a positive thing to have secure attachment, right? And in the United States, about 55 to 65% of the population with their primary caregiver, the caregiver with whom they're spending the most time, have secure attachment. Now, there's two fields of attachment research, broad fields. I'm trained in what's called developmental attachment, and then there's kind of social psychology attachment, which studies romantic relationships and adults initially. And that's a different branch of the field of attachment. That branch uses the word style.

The branch I'm trained in, developmental attachment, we try not to use the word style. So we'll say attachment categories or attachment groupings or attachment patterns or attachment strategies. But for the most part, we try to avoid the word style. And as my mentor in this area, Mary Main told me, Dan, you can't use the word style because attachment is not a shoe. So there's no shoe styles. there's no attachment. And you can imagine these two groups generally don't talk to each other that much. However, I have had lots of opportunity to talk to people in the personality, social personality

grouping. I call it romantic attachment. They say don't reduce us to romance. It's not just about romance. And they're equally as valid. It's just a different approach to understanding it. Even though the constructs from the originators, you know, John Bolby and Mary, Mary Ainsworth, you know, are used in both groups. So I'll speak to attachment categories, and I'm a developmental attachment researcher,

and that's the world I work in, even though I'm familiar with both worlds. But they actually don't overlap. Unfortunately, it would be so great if we just say that. So from the developmental attachment point of view, you basically have four categories of attachment. 55 to 65% get secure attachment. Yay, and that's with the primary caregiver. About 20%, so 1 in 5 have what's called an avoidant attachment. childhood. And that goes on in adulthood to present itself in an instrument I work with called

the adult attachment interview to look like what's called dismissing. In avoidance, what you see in this 20% of the population is the caregiver is very emotionally distant. They deal with the physical needs of the child, but they don't really see them. That's the key thing. Then in about 15%, there's another grouping which may have more fluidity to it called ambivalent attachment. And in this group, the parents inconsistent. Sometimes the kid is seen, sometimes not. But because of this inconsistency, they're rarely soothed easily. So they kind of rev up the attachment system, the ambivalently attached kids who go on to have, as adults, what's called preoccupied attachment.

They have kind of left over garbage. So those are the two non-secure attachment forms, which in the former literature called insecure, and I try not to use that term because people think these are insecure people. they're not. They just had experiences with their caregivers that were not secure. So they had a strategy and organized strategies to just survive. Then overlapping those three secure, not secure ambivalent, non-secure avoidant, you can have, we thought it was 15 percent. Recent studies show it's more like closer to a third, unfortunately, disorganized attachment. And this is where even if you've had the baseline of the other three patterns,

now you have an experience of terror of your caregiver. So it leads to what's called a biological paradox, and this leads to dissociation where your mind fragments, and you have no organized strategy because your caregiver is supposed to be the source of comfort and safety, but now they're terrifying you, even unintentionally, like they're screaming at the top of their lungs or they're drunk or themselves involved in domestic violence,

or they're abusing you. So there's a whole range, not always abuse or neglect. But that disorganized attachment goes on to have adult unresolved trauma or grief usually. You know, that's the thing, unresolved loss. And they get disoriented when talking about loss or trauma. So those are the categories of attachment.

And, you know, the next book I'm writing with some colleagues, which I've been working on for like over 15 years, is actually about personality. So this is why you hear me making this distinction. So personality is a word we use for patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior that persist across time and context in an individual. And the preliminary research, this book we're writing, hopefully we'll set up a research paradigm, But the preliminary research suggests that personality, those patterns of emotion and its regulation, thought, you know, what you pay attention to think is important, behavior, how you interact with other people especially. That's what we call personality, that that is actually shaped primarily by temperament.

And that the rigidity of your personality, I can talk about this more if you want, but gets dug in if you have non-secure attachment. So it isn't that, and this is our theory, but it could be wrong or partially true or totally true. We don't know. So it's a hypothesis. That attachment doesn't shape personality. Temperament shapes personality. What's temperament? It's inborn that is not learned tendencies or proclivities or propensities of your nervous system.

For example, what we're working on now is this really interesting model where the motivation, and it actually matches with the 3S is interestingly, the motivation. the motivation for agency and empowerment, which if it's frustrated, it leads to anger, that is basically where you're seen. So the scene one will really activate that. This is ABC. There's a motivation for bonding, which is different from agency,

but there you want to be sued. And when bonding and connection doesn't happen, you feel sad or separation distress. And the third one is a sense of certainty, you know, so you can try to guarantee safety. And when you don't get that, and that's the safety S of those S's, you know, then you have fear or terror. And interestingly, when I sit down in workshops, I'll say to people, how many of you say your home base is either sadness, fear, or anger? You get, you know, about 90% saying one of those is their home base.

Wow. Another 5% say two of their home base. And then some people say all of them. So the vast majority, 90% of people find, I have a tendency to one of these, and there are these subcortical circuits, circuits beneath the cortex that look like they may be the basis of temperament that hasn't been identified yet. So it's kind of a new model of how temperament would go forward into personality. And then your drive for those three things, agency bonding or certainty would be dug in deeper if you have non-secure attachment. So it isn't that attachment is not influencing personality. it's that it's making your personality

like more intense and more like a prison than a playground. Wow. That's a lot. I don't think you wanted all that stuff. No, I'm happy to. That was beautifully explained. Yeah, I just, like I told you before, as incredible, like a researcher,

you are equally as an educator and articulator of these ideas. Thank you. Powerful. And so what is the field of interpersonal neurobiology and how that inter correlates with what we would has been speaking to. Yeah, well, that's a term I made up interpersonal neurobiology for something

that was happening 30 years ago, which was to bring a bunch of scientists together and say, hey, what if all these different sciences from math to anthropology could come together in a collaborative way and share the insights from those independent pursuits and find a common ground that we could have a field that brought everybody together?

And then ultimately it was not just these academic scientific disciplines, but we invited people in music and poetry and history and philosophy and contemplative practice, indigenous teachings. So anybody who is like in a discipline way is trying to really understand and know thyself, you know, is welcome into the discussion. And then what we do later on, E. Wilson would come up with this book called Consilience, where then we said, oh yeah, that's what we've been doing. This is great. He's got a term for it. It's a term from the 1800s, which means when independent pursuits come up with common findings. So we look for conciliants across all these different things I just mentioned

and then build a framework. And people said, what are you doing? And I had to name it. So I said, well, it's kind of between and it's within. So I guess that's interpersonal. And this was the decade of the brain, 1992 when it was starting. So I said, I guess it's neurobiology, you know, but I would change the name now if I could. But we have 80 textbooks.

I'm the founder of a series of books that other people write. You know, so we now have 80 textbooks in the Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology. So I've been told I cannot change the name, which is fine. As long as people realize it's not a branch of neuroscience or neurobiology. It's just a term, a phrase, interpersonal neurobiology, for this conciliant framework for understanding reality. Powerful. Is there one insight that you just, you find, between the most, that's most profound between the ancient wisdom traditions that you spoke to

and newer scientific understandings. Yeah, I mean, you know, I've talked to a lot of indigenous elders about this, and I have had the deep opportunity to teach with contemplative scholars of various sorts. And though they don't name this, it seems embedded in their wisdom traditions or contemplative practices. indigenous teachings from thousands of years. And that's a process we can name as integration, that when you honor differences and promote linkages, we're just going to name that integration.

Even math doesn't have a name for that. But math does say that this process of balancing differentiation on the one hand and linkage on the other leads to what's called optimal self-organization. So harmony and health and well-being seem to arise when you can do that. So, you know, we have these nine domains of integration we look at, but in terms of what goes across all these different things,

integration seems to be the base of well-being. And when integration is blocked, either by blocking differentiation, blocking, you know, linkage or blocking both, you then go almost like a river to two banks. If the central flow of that river of integration is harmony with flexibility and adaptability and all that, that one bank away from that is chaos and one bank away from that is rigidity.

And then you go, oh my gosh, and you look at, in my field, mental health, every symptom of every syndrome is chaos, rigidity or both. And then when you do, for example, brain studies of people with that, quote, condition, they have impaired integration in their brain. And then if you look at things like mindfulness practice, what does it do? It integrates the brain. and a study in 2015 by Smith and colleagues showed that an integrated brain is the best predictor of well-being. So, you know, the proposal from 30 years ago was kind of a weird proposal, integration is health, but it turned out to be not only conciliant with, you know, all these different views of reality, but empirical studies since then have just supported that.

We wouldn't say proven, because that's a big thing to say it's proven, but it's the hypothesis that has zero research to go. against it and tons to support it. Wonderful. Powerful, powerful, powerful. So, yeah, this, everything that we've been diving into today, I just think is so important for the times that we live in and people actually being able to make a real-time shift in this process of integration that you're speaking to, understanding what is the nature of the mind, what is the nature of the self, and how we can find integration and promote ultimate well-being, which you spoke to so beautifully. And so to kind of, as we're wrapping up, what are some practices or tools that you found most well promote the process of integration?

Well, you know, in the book, there's this integrated movement series where nine domains of integration are looked at and the relevance to interconnection are there. The one practice, if you're saying one practice, would be the wheel of awareness where we start with consciousness and then basically say, look, if consciousness. This is needed for personal change and consciousness is needed for public change and planetary change, which I think it is. And we've just said it looks like integration is the base of well-being. What if we brought those two conciliant ideas together and what if we said, okay, how do we integrate consciousness? So this is what happened, you know, when I was a therapist. I said, okay, how do I apply this in working with the people I have the privilege to work with? So I said, well, I guess you'd integrate consciousness.

Well, how would you do that? Well, you would differentiate, let's see, let's see, you differentiate the knowing of being aware from the knowns that are different from awareness. Like if I say, good afternoon, Andre, you know, you have the sound, good afternoon, Andre, and you have the awareness of the sound. Those are different.

So in a metaphor kind of way, actually in my office, there's a table that, but we still have, you know, where there's a center glass of the table and there's an outer wooden rim. So I would bring my patients, my clients up from the chair where they were sitting. I say, here, come around the table. They go, okay, what are we doing? I say, well, and they used to be doing weird things. I said, you know, we're going to integrate consciousness.

And they go, what? And I go, yeah, just try this out. Picture awareness in the hub of this table. No one wanted to call it the table of awareness. It became a wheel. And there was a, the rim is the wooden part. and then the singular spoke, which represents attention. And then we would differentiate, for example, on the rim, you know, four segments of the rim,

all energy flow patterns, some energy from outside the body that you pick up with seeing and hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Then you go to the second segment of the rim, which is energy flow from inside the body, muscles, bones, genitals, organs, heart, lungs, intestines. then you move this book over again to the third segment of the rim, which are mental activities, likely brain activity in your head. And this would be like emotions and memories and hopes and dreams and longings, thoughts, images, stuff like that. You explore those in different ways.

Then ultimately in the beginning model, you go to the fourth segment of the rim, which is your sense of relationality to people on the planet. But in an advanced step, and I talk about this. in a book Aware and then there's a guide to do it in becoming aware, you learn how to bend the spoke around before you move over to that fourth segment and you aim attention right into the hub. For some people, they like that visual image. Other people like sending the spoke out, pulling it back in to the hub. Other people like to just leave the spoke in the hub. Other people like to dissolve the spoke and just be in the hub. It's all the same visual metaphor. How do you just

rest in pure awareness in the hub, right? This metaphor for the knowing. And that's where like amazing things happen. And, you know, before the pandemic, I did this. Literally, my assistant added up with over 50,000 people. And when, you know, they would take the microphone and say, this is what happened to me in the hub, that's where people talked about. I felt connected before, you know, more than ever before. I felt there's open awareness, which, of course, it's the hub. That's what it is. And I felt love. and you know it's where it's where the shift happens where you pull away from the rim which is i think where the constructed solo self rests and you're able to drop into the space of energy

and in these various books including interconnected i talk about this you know when people would say phrases like it's empty but full over and over again they'd say i said well what do you mean by that they go well i don't know what i mean but it's what it is it's empty but it's full can say more no okay thank you you know over and from all of the world i mean i did this literally everywhere but antarctica you know everywhere people could be never meditated before in their lives people could be at the beginning of their careers their end of the careers this gender that gender this religion that religion running monasteries it didn't matter they would say this and

And so I thought, well, where's the science of empty but full? And, you know, I had already proposed years ago that the mind was an emergent property of energy flow. And I had the opportunity to be with 150 physicists for a week once in a old monastery, now a retreat center. So I said to them, well, you know, what's time? Because I had the time to ask them. And I said, what's energy?

And they said this thing, energy is the movement from possibility to actuality. So I took a piece of paper in my journal. I started mapping it out with some students. I showed it to the physicist. And they said, yeah, that's what we mean. But you're putting that with mental experience and consciousness. We don't really know anything about that. But that fits with the physics.

So it's basically where at the bottom of this graph, you have the maximal possibilities are sitting there. and then when an actuality arises from that pool of possibilities, it goes up to a peak on this graph where it's 100% certainty. So that would be an actualization. But when you drop back into the pool of all possibilities, you know, that's where you have this thing where there are no actualities. It's as Arthur Zion, as a physicist who was there,

and later I would present this model to him, he was so excited about it. But he calls it the sea of potential. It's also known as the quantum vacuum. We call it in the graph this plane because it's the shape of a plane, plane of possibility. So the plane of possibility correlates with, as Arthur Zines would say, the sea of potential.

And he also calls it the formless source of all form. And then I went to him, I said, so it's empty but full. And he goes, exactly. And then I went, oh my God. So the graph that I drew for the physicist looks like it corresponds to the image of the wheel in the following way that actualizations like a thought, I'm separate, becomes a peak on the rim. And if I have like even below the rim a subsection of how many things might arise, we call that a plateau,

I might have a plateau of the separate self and only thoughts of I'm separate, I'm separate, you're part of my end group, you're the out group. All that would be in the graph, these plateaus and peaks. but when you drop into pure awareness, the hub, instead of like a plateau and peak as a point on the rim, it looks like pure awareness at least correlates with the plane of possibility, which, according to the physicist, correlates with their sea of potential, the quantum vacuum. So then it became really, really, really exciting because you could look at the science of energy, look at the proposal mind is an emergent property of energy and then see consciousness itself, the awareness of consciousness, as the position in this probability distribution curve was in the

plane of possibility and that's where awareness arose. Why that's the case? I have no idea. No one has any idea. But when you have a thought or when you have a notion, it becomes a plateau and then when a thought arises from that notion, it becomes a peak. And then you can begin to work with this distribution where people can realize, oh, in that moment, in that state of mind, I was in a certain plateau, I had a plateau of separateness and contraction, and I thought those were the others, and I didn't care about those people because their belief systems or their skin color or their whatever, you know, and I need to get out of that plateau, which has become a prison for me, and access other possibilities which are resting in the plane.

and so as we give people access to this, then what arises from there is basically this portal of integration to arise. And in that sense, love is sitting there in the plane of possibility. It's all about linkage. Love and linkage would be the kind of physics view of what love is. But, you know, when you realize that this plane of possibility seems to be the portal through which integration can arise, when we let go of that flimsy fantasy of certainty

and drop out of the view of, you know, identity as entity to try to guarantee some image of certainty. And then you get out of that nannification of a plateau view of self. You drop into the plane of possibility and then you let love happen. You don't make it happen. Integration naturally arises. And then you are like a conduit through which love just expresses itself. So good. So beautiful.

So poetic. It's, I love it. How long is the process of the wheel of awareness if you were to guide? 25 minutes. Okay. You know, and we give it away for free. Our accountant thinks were insane. Maybe we could have a sample platter here, but we'll guide people to a website.

Yeah, Dr. Dansego.com, you know, the web, our accountant says, why are you giving away for free? He said, because the world needs it. So, you know, I mean, so you can go there, do the wheel of awareness. There's all sorts of, you know, things we have programs and ways of, you know, Basically taking interpersonal neurobiology, we're like the brick and mortar home for it, and saying, look, everybody's invited. This is a big conversation that's important. And everyone needs support by collaboration and finding their own gifts, as they say in the Potawatomi Nation, as Robin Wall Kimmer says in Braiding Sweet Glass, grass, everyone's responsible for knowing their own differentiated gifts, we would use that word, you know, and then giving it back for the greater good.

So in interpersonal neurobiology at the MindSight Institute, we're just basically all about saying, you know, this is a human journey we're on. And let's do this together because we can. And the big question is, will we? And this is giving people the collaborative oomph, having the courage, the collaboration, the creativity, to find the different ways that we have pervasive leadership.

Each of us can contain leadership. To try to really shape our conversation away from business as usual, which didn't work. That's fine. We don't have to beat up on ourselves. Say, that didn't work. That recipe didn't work. Okay, let's cook a different meal.

You know, let's do this. And together, we can do this. Wow. So good. So powerful. I feel my sponge is full from the value that has come from this podcast. Is there anything else on your heart that you want to share before we start to wrap up? You know, I think these days it's possible to feel really a lot of despair.

You know, it really is. And I was meeting with a dear friend and mentor of mine, Joanna Macy. She's 93, the age of my mom. And she was saying, Dan, you know, a lot of her students, a lot of her colleagues are burning out from caring so much. And when I said to Joanna, which I'll maybe say here is just a thing, you know, is that in the bodies we live in, if we have the courage to care, then we may see the challenge. in the world more as threats and say, oh my God, it's a threat. I've got to fight it. I've got to fight it back.

I'm going to run from it. I'm going to flee or I'm going to freeze or I'm going to faint. And all these reactions to threat are part of what's called a reactive state of the brain. They're exhausting. They're not meant to live for more than a few seconds, a few minutes, maybe an hour. But if we're in this for the long haul, then we need to change our mindset from what's classically known as a threat state to a challenge state so that the things we see that are important to work on all these pandemics we're talking about social injustice climate change every all those things

we need to have a challenge mindset and so what i said to joanna which i'll say to you is you know we can see every morning when we wake up that this is a dance we're in and how does the challenge become a dance partner and what's the music for today and then we say okay Okay, come on. Let's have a little, let's have a dance. Let's do the cha-cha. Let's do the rumba. Let's do a poda-do. Let's do a duet that is just, we don't know where it's going to go. And if you let love and integration come through you, then the dance will move us in the right direction. So good. So good. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing and the way that you're sharing. Thank you. connected, all the links will be down in the description below. People can find you on your website as well, which will be linked down below. Again, Dr. Dan, thank you so much for being here. And for

everybody that's been tuning into the Know Thyself podcast, thank you for coming on this journey with us as we discover the true nature of self-identity and our place as we belong here on this earth. Thank you so much. Until next time, be well.