Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Dr. Neil Theise: Overcome the Illusion of Separation

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Dr. Neil Theise (professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine) joins us to discuss how his adult stem cell and interstitium research led him to his "theory of everything", how complexity actually helps simplify our understanding of the universe, the illusion that humans are separate individual beings, and the scientific explanation of mysticism. He explains why philosophy, religion, and quantum mechanics fall short without incorporating intuition and human experience, how low-level randomness allows for adaptation, and why we can’t live forever no matter what we do. Dr. Theise opens up about his mother’s metaphysical experience with talking to dead people, his depression that stemmed from coming to terms with his sexuality, the impact of being a child of Holocaust survivors, and where his personal faith comes into play within his scientific work. He also breaks down healers and shamanism, chaos and information theories, the real definition of compassion, and the function and importance of microbiomes. Dr. Neil Theise' Book, NOTES ON COMPLEXITY: https://a.co/d/aByhTg5 BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You two are sitting there and you look like objects in your room and I'm over here. And if we're in the same room, I'd be a third object in your room. Our boundaries are our skin. And that's the way we think of ourselves. But at the cellular level, where are our boundaries? So you're shedding skin cells into the environment all the time. The dust in your room is in large part just your dead skin cells, which is a little disgusting. But I'm a pathologist so I'm okay with it.

But now we know about the microbiome, which are... are the bacteria and other living things that line the surfaces of your body and all the crevices inside your body. And we know that without our microbiome, if we were completely sterile, we would die within days. Our skin would start to crack, we'd get infections, we'd be unable to absorb food, our immune systems would go haywire. So we're not a living human body without our microbiome. And current estimates are 50% of your cells, or your human cells. and 50% of your living body necessarily are these bacteria and other stuff. So at the cellular level, where are your boundaries?

All the people who share a home and their pets all share a single microbiome. You come in with your own microbiomes, but within a very short time, this has been studied and measured. Your microbiomes emerge into one single system. So at the cellular level, where are your boundaries? They're the boundaries of the spaces we occupy with other people and animals and whatever. At the molecular level, where are your boundaries? Simplistically, we breathe out carbon dioxide.

Our carbon dioxide of our bodies goes out to the plants. They take it and make it part of their bodies and give us oxygen. At the molecular level, the boundary of our bodies is the entire biomass of the planet. At the atomic level, we see ourselves as being these isolated individuals walking around on this rock we call planet Earth. But there is no atom in our bodies that we didn't breathe, eat, or drink from the planet. So are we separate individuals walking around on the surface of planet Earth, or are we the atomic substance of the Earth that in three and a half billion years have self-organized, according to the rules of chaos and complexity theory,

into living things that think of themselves as separate. When Curiosity went to Mars and I was blown away and 14-year-old geek, you know, like, oh boy, if I could have been a part of NASA, the brilliance of the scientists and engineers at NASA that they could send this robot to Mars, that's true. But equally, equally true is that it took three and a half billion years for Earth to figure out how to organize itself so that it could reach out and touch its name.

100%. At the quantum level, there are no boundaries. Each of us is fully an expression of the universe, one single large unity within which there's no separation. It's Myambialics breakdown. She's going to break it down for you

because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break. Hi, I'm Myambiolic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. Welcome to our breakdown. the place where we break things down so you don't have to. How about this? Can you break down our entire existence?

The unity of everything and the danger to the establishment that it is. This episode ends with me on the floor. Like most should, but don't. We're speaking to Dr. Neil These. And if I were to read you his title, you'd be like, what? How does she end up on the floor talking about? everything in the world. He's a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He's a pioneer in adult stem cell plasticity. He was one of the researchers and professors

who discovered what's been called, I think he said, the 80th organ. He's one of the researchers who identified the human interstitium, which is the fluid cavity that surrounds all of your organs and essentially your entire body. He's a longtime student of Zen Buddhism and also mystical, Kabbalistic thought. And he has studied complexity theory. But it's basically the theory of the unity of our experience as scientifically and psychologically grounded beings. It's an unbelievable, it's an unbelievable conversation.

I'm just saying it. Like, it's unbelievable. Should we talk a little bit about the insertion? like why that's so important? Well, I mean, glaze over it right now. Well, I don't want to glaze over it, but I also,

I need people to hear how we get there because we literally make this man go on a journey from the atomic quantum level to the mystical, like the mystical transcendental level and it connects to

what connects our entire body with our emotional system. He basically explains why. We are not separate. Everything is connected. Yes. And separation is but an illusion. The thing that I love about Dr. Thies is that he is not coming at his approach to understanding the mind-body connection from any particular perspective other than one as a pathologist and an observer. This is not a man coming from a particular religious or political perspective. It is plain as day to this level of thinker. And also, he's funny.

He's gentle. Like, I just want to, like, have a cup of tea with him. Get your popcorn. This is a long one. I could have talked to him a lot longer. Don't worry. Near the end, we get to shamans and altered states of reality and... Boundaries.

Like, literally, what, what, psychological. Have you ever had an experience where you're like, I cannot physically be around that person without it feeling like it's going to make me throw up, need to flee, or crawl out of my skin? He literally explains what that means. He also explains the supernatural and things that cannot be explained. And why you can't explain them and shouldn't dry. Let's do this. Let's welcome Dr. Neil Thees, author of Notes on Complexity. Welcome to the breakdown. Break it down. It's so nice to have you here.

It's so nice to be here. Thank you both. We are both very interested in you as a scientist, as a writer, and just as a human being, there are many, many unicorn aspects to you. I'm just going to come out and say that right away. You know, your book notes on complexity, a scientific theory of connection, consciousness, and being. it just came out

and, you know, the best way I can describe it, not that you're asking me, but I'm going to go ahead and say it, the best way I can describe it, it's kind of like, it's the most important aspects of chemistry, physics, and philosophy

and how they all relate to our actual human experience. Does that feel safe? Yeah, that's as good as I've heard. I've been looking for an elevator pitch for two years with my agent and my editor and my publishers. And yeah, that's great. Okay, good. So you have a very interesting, you know, kind of path. I mean, your whole career feels like a very interesting path. I actually, you know, you're a professor of path and, you know,

you've been a pioneer in stem cell plasticity and stem cell research, which I think, you know, has gotten it's kind of fair share of sort of cultural interest as it should. But in particular, what Jonathan and I were really intrigued by was the interstitium research that you were part of from a handful of years ago, which I don't feel is unrelated to sort of the work that you do. And I think where I think we should start is, and I'm not asking this from, you know, a facetian. place. Why write this book, meaning you have so many different avenues of your life that deserve their own books, both your personal journey.

You've been a student of Zen Buddhism. For many decades, you originally started as a potential rabbinical student. You, you know, have held space with one of kind of the greatest, you know, mystical rabbis of our generation. Rebsalman. And so you have all these interesting paths and, you know, your stem cell work is fascinating. Your interstitium work is fascinating. But this book is kind of like your theory of everything. So what made you say like this is where I want to put my deepest thought and essentially giving birth, you know, to this child that is this book? Good question. The general answer is that.

I've been giving talks on this stuff for a little over 20 years now. All this material, the entire book, is basically a book version of a talk that I started giving in around 2002, 2003. In the author's note at the beginning of the book, I talk about how my stem cell research led me to meet this artist, Jane Prophet. And as part of an art science interdisciplinary collaboration, people wanted to record. how we would speak to each other to see how a scientist and an artist. What's it like when they talk? How do they communicate? Exactly. Exactly. And the thing is, it doesn't always work. But she were and I were the instinct of our mutual friend who put us together, Peter Ride, and he actually just wanted us in a room together. But he curates these

kinds of things. It did back then. It doesn't always work. But he had an instinct that it would with us because any interdisciplinary collaboration, and I'm sure both of you have experienced this many times, positive and negative, you have to have people who are willing to speak about what they do and be able to communicate, but also listen quietly while the other person introduces their language. And so we just conversed, telling each other what we did. And when I started to talk about cells moving around the body as we were starting to research and define the language I was using were called to her how complexity theorists talk about ants forming columns. And I said, what's complexity theory? And so it was often running from there. And most of my career, I do sort of

wander around. It's because I basically follow my nose. I'm not good at picking one thing and then diving down for several decades. What's interesting catches my attention, and I go after it, and suddenly complexity was something that was catching my attention. And as I dug, it unfolded that it wasn't just about bodies and cells and colonies and ants. It turns out to be about the whole universe. And so I started giving talks on that, starting with my Zen group, actually, I think in 2003.

and then it just unfurled. But I didn't think I would ever be able to write a book. I can speak about it in 45, 50 minutes with a Q&A after. And I've spoken about it in front of hardcore scientists, fifth graders. My nephew when he was in fifth grade wanted me to come and talk to him about his class. And they got it. They had to hold the buses at the end of the day because the student, They called all the parents and told them we're holding the buses because the kids want to keep asking me questions.

Wow. So it has this general appeal. But to write a book, I thought it had to be like four or five hundred pages and fully annotated and like a real text. So I wasn't going to write it. My mom, as she declined over the last few years of her life, started having interesting metaphysical experiences, shall I say, talking to dead people, Spirit Guides from the Universe showing up, instantaneous enlightenment experiences. So I wanted to write about that.

And my agent Amanda Annis, and I sent that out, got interest, but all of the positive interest, they said, but why would we want to hear about this from this guy? And a couple of those publishers went online and heard my talks, and they said, oh, we'd want to hear what that guy has to say, so he has to write that book. So that's why I wrote his book now,

because it's the only way to get to tell the story of my mom. But then once I was in it, this was just my mom leading the way, as usual. And Amanda and the folks at Spiegel and Grau, my editors and my publisher, helped show me, no, you could do it this way. Just make a book version of your talk. And that's why it's,

so compact. Yeah. Well, it's, it's compact, but I'd like to underscore, it's very dense. I mean, it's, it's, I don't want to say that it's not approachable because I think you write beautifully. And I think you write in a way that, that a lot of people, especially people who are, I'd like to say, you know, kind of amateur scientists, meaning people who have an inquisitive mind, people who want to think deeply, people who want to understand how philosophy, religion, and quantum mechanics actually are one thing, you know, connect. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by superpower.

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Maybe you could explain to us a little bit, you know, I'm very, interested in simplicity, but I'm also very interested in complexity. So I'm interested in simplicity in terms of, you know, understanding, living in a culture of constant consuming, right? And the notion that we're sort of driven, you know, in many cases, in an ant-like fashion, you know, to kind of constantly be working, doing. And I think that my interest in simplicity doesn't feel in opposition to your notion of complexity. Can you talk about why complexity actually gives us an understanding of the universe as more accessible and in many ways simpler? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, a common, when you Google people talking about complexity online or, you know, articles and magazines for lay

people, there are a few out there. Often the thing is complexity is actually simple and such things, Because it is. I mean, if it weren't simple, I'm not primarily a mathematician. I wouldn't be able to get this and do this. But it is simple. Just to place it, complexity describes how things that interact with each other give rise to larger scale structures on the global level as they interact locally. And what preceded it scientifically, which many of your audience probably have at least heard of,

is chaos. Chaos theory and fractals. And with computers being developed and computer modeling being possible in the 60s and 70s, I guess it's the 70s, chaos theory was first elaborated. And that entered the popular culture fairly quickly, most importantly probably because of the book Chaos by James Glick, which became a bestseller. Complexity theory followed, but that hasn't really entered the popular domain. And what they noticed when they were playing around with chaos is that mathematically or computationally in computer models, there was this zone that wasn't perfect order like we think of it, billiard balls or complete disorder like molecules randomly in a gas, or what had now been recognized as chaotic system, as a different type of order. At the boundary between order and chaos, there was another realm. and that was the realm of complexity.

And it turns out that's the realm in which life is described. It's an information-rich processing realm. And the math there describes all living systems and all things that arise from living systems interacting with each other. So it describes how ants form colonies or humans form cities and neighborhoods and cultures and economies. But as I said, this is what Jane recognized and pointed me towards. Just as ants follow these rules to form a colony, the cells in our bodies follow the very

same rules to form our organs, tissues, and bodies. The question then for me was, well, our cells then things. A colony from a distance looks like a solid shape, even if it might be moving. You go up close and it's just ants. you see a flock of birds in the skull. It looks like a thing unless you know it's birds. A murmuration of starlings can surprise you because you hear a noise, you look up

and there's this giant balloon or shit, and then you realize, no, no, no, it's just birds. But you go in close to the bird or the ant or to my finger pointing. The bird and the ant and the finger disappear, the way the colony of the flock and my fingers disappear as you go to the cellular level and they just become a colony or a flock of cells.

And cells are just self-organizing molecules, and those are just self-organizing atoms all the way down to the quantum realm. And so complexity describes these all very simply. And the simple rules are, one, too few you don't get complexity. Numbers matter is how you describe it. Numbers matter is rule number one. Three ants don't make a colony. But 25 ants do, because if you buy an ant colony, back in my day from the back of one, of a comic book, then they dig tunnels, they have a little cemetery where they put the bodies of dead ants, they make food lines. But as they die off, you start to lose that complexity. And if you have 250 ants, it's way more complex. And if you have 25,000 ants, it's way more complex. In human terms, a village is not a city, is not a megalopolis. But the same mathematics describes them.

So across all these things, that's rule number one. It's very simple. The more you have, the more complex you have. The more diversity of interactions between those individuals, the more complexity. Rule number two is there has to be what are called feedback loops, negative and positive feedback loops. And a negative feedback loop doesn't mean bad. It means that things stay within a balance. what's called homeostatic zone, a healthy area. So the air conditioner turns off when the room is

cold enough and then turns back on when the room heats up. And so it stays in this nice comfortable round. That's a negative feedback loop. The positive feedback loop would be something like if the room gets warmer, the heater in the room turns up and the room gets warmer still and it gets hotter and hotter and hotter. And you can have those in a complex. system, but the negative feedback loops have to predominate to keep things in balance. And there's a nice example of this that everybody knows in humans. You get a fever. That's a positive feedback loop. Your body temperature getting hotter and hotter in order to help optimize fighting off an infection. But when the infection is cleared, the negative feedback loops come back in and bring you back

into that nice, healthy range. So there have to be negative feedback loops that predominate. and says, you shouldn't have a fever, and it turns off the fever, and we wonder why we keep getting sick. What gives you? I don't know. Okay, sorry. Yeah. No, exactly. Well, and one of the things that's interesting, whenever I talk to people, I get different ways in which they relate to this material. And in all the podcasts I've done for the book so far, this is the first one where someone has pointed at integrative medicine. And so now that's one of the things I research. We're just getting warmed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm just. I'll go there. Oh, we'll take you there. Talk about rule four, randomness is key. What is it about

randomness? This is my favorite one, and this was actually what caught my attention when I first started to study it. If you have a bunch of things interacting with each other, let's say ants, then if they're completely, if the rules that govern their interactions allow for complete freedom, complete randomness, you just have a bunch of ants wandering around. They don't, actually start to form food lines, for example. But if you have no randomness in the system, that if the environment changes, the system can't reorganize itself to adapt to the changing environment. So in terms of the food line, an example of this is from a distance, you look at a food line and it looks like a straight line. But if you bend down and look more closely, you see that

there's always a few ants that aren't following the line. And when I was a kid, These are the ants I thought that were evolutionarily challenged. I just felt sorry for them. I'm pointing at the evolutionarily challenged ant. Right, right. Stick around to the end. We're very important. There you go.

I think we all are, and anyone probably listening to your podcast, probably, to some extent. I prefer the word divergent ant. Though every ant has the potential to be divergent, but that's a separate thing. So you look at the third line. Looks like a straight line. Go closer. there's a few ants, three, four percent, that aren't following the line. It turns out that if you step your foot in the middle of the line, it's the divergent

ants that will most rapidly find another route around your foot. Or they're the ants that are going to find a new food source when this food source that all the other ants are busy carrying back to the colony, they'll find the new food source. So it's this low-level randomness that allows for adaptation. And that means that it's the low-level randomness that allows things to be alive. Stuart Kaufman, who's one of the founders of complexity theory and probably the leading thinker in terms of how it applies to biology, talks about how this randomness, this low-level unpredictability, gives rise to what he calls the adjacent possibles.

In every moment, because there's this unpredictability, there's not one single machine-like outcome of the present moment. Living things are not machines, despite how our culture for a couple of hundred years has used that as the dominant metaphor. But our bodies are not machined. They have a low level of randomness. So there's always going to be a little fuzziness in what the next possible moment could hold. It's not infinite.

It's not anything can happen. That would be total randomness. And you wouldn't get self-organization. But it's small changes. And so he refers to these as the adjacent possibles. And moment by moment, one of these is selected for the next moment. The cloud of adjacent possibles disappears. And with the inherent randomness, there's a new cloud of adjacent possibilities.

This means that living systems, whether it's our bodies or our political parties or our economies, you can give an idea of what the possible range of futures are, but you can never predict precisely because it's not like billiard balls. It's not like a machine. The other implication is that sometimes one of these adjacent possibles is death. The very same thing that makes it possible to be creatively adaptive and alive also risks, and this is a mathematical thing because you're at the edge of chaos, you can step out of the zone of complexity and have a mass extinction of it, either partial or whole. And that's also full of new potentials.

Inherent in this, then, is the idea that people may want to say we can live forever. People are actively talking about online all the time, that we can extend human lifetimes for infinity. No, you can't. You're a living thing. You're constrained. There will be a mass extinction event from within or without that will kill you. Sorry. And there's no such thing as a fountain of youth.

So when I give this talk to medical personnel, I've noticed there's often sort of a settling in the room when I say this. And I think it's because I'm making concrete the fact that they're not there to keep people alive forever. If that were the benchmark for medicine, everyone practicing the healing arts would be a failure. It's about nurturing the creative adjacent possibles so that there may be a next moment and a next moment. Jonathan, would you like to tell him all the things that you're doing for your longevity?

I don't think I should live forever, but just a little bit longer. And that's probably playing with rules number one, two, and three. Three is feedback on the local level, not being global, you know. So, yeah, you can enhance the potential. for creative opportunities. What you're defining is also, you know, one of,

I mean, I hope it's not, you know, obnoxious to point out. What you're talking about is also the basis of the evolutionary process as we know it, which is that differentness is what leads to challenges to a system that then allow for adaptation

and essentially, you know, in the most plain terms, a survival of the fittest, meaning if you have, you know, if you have a new thing, I'm just going to call it a thing because you like that word, and I do too, if you have a thing that's going to do things a little bit different, it creates enough of a challenge to the system to create either, you know, compensatory things around it or the potential for this to be the new thing. I wonder if you can talk a little bit, and we will fully circle back. I got whole thing about how I'm going to circle back to integrative medicine and everything. And my Dr. Thee's theory of everything, which is what I think your next book will be. This is my new thing is I predict

what books people should. I mean, I know what I want you to write about. So we'll work on that next. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit, you know, when you were speaking about, you know, chaos theory. And, you know, when I was at UCLA, you know, already many moons ago, people were doing, you know, inkblot research. And I was like, what? And it was like this crazy thing where there were literally people in the physics department who would study the patterns of what happens if you drop ink, you know, on a piece of paper. And the way that it spread, like there's a whole, there were labs studying this. And I remember my mind was blown. I mean, I was studying neuroscience, which was the level that I wanted to understand. But there were people literally making mathematical

predictions and quantum decisions about ink, you know, that kind of movement. And, you know, I couldn't help when you were talking about, you know, the era when this kind of science sort of started, right? It was also an era where, you know, if you've ever seen any images of fractals and fractal kind of, you know, geometry, it's very trippy. It's very psychedelic. It's a lot of the imagery that many artists who have had transcendental experiences, whether with, you know, LSD or with psilocybin, you know, there are these images of repeating patterns that are intricate and complex. And I'm wondering if there's any sort of alignment with, you know, this sort of notion that science has to move along at some sort of pace. I mean, it's all just a, it's a construct of our

existence that we will have theories and we will have movements. So if this hadn't been, been discovered by any individual person, it still existed. It still would have sort of come into our consciousness. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about sort of the, you know, the notion of fractals and what the expanding consciousness also of the world, in particular the United States, was like. Because for me, when I look at, you know, scientific progress, it did. It, it mirrored civil rights. It mirrored, you know, what was going on on a societal level. So, I'm curious how you see sort of complexity, you know, sort of starting to thrive intellectually at a time when we were thriving in really explosive ways. I have an instinct to respond in two ways. Number one, I'm very cautious, given the kind of parallels I'm drawing between philosophy, religion, and science to be careful not to stumble into mistaking similarities as more than metaphor.

Sure. At the same time, I think there's a truth in there. The way I think to explore it, no one's ever asked me that question. So this is me working in real time. What's special about fractals is that it's a kind of geometry that could not be revealed prior to the development of computers. You generate fractals by putting the appropriate equations into a system. which are not resolvable like you easily. Like you can put in the equation for right triangles,

Pythagorean theorem, A squared equals B squared, A square plus B squared equals C square. And there you have a right triangle described in all its properties. You can use trigonometry to describe curves. And you have it all there, and you don't have to run it over time in a computer to see what the shape is.

You can just plot it and see it. fractals could be seen because you could have programs that would continually repeat their operations. They were open-ended and never came to a full stop. And some of those equations, Benoit Mandelbrot is the man who basically discovered these and presented these to the world, showed that you had these extraordinarily beautiful images. But what's special about them is that they repeat themselves over scales. So you look at it from this distance and you see a fractal, and then you go in really closely to look at the tiny little filigrees,

and they look like the same fractals. And then you go in closer and look, and they're more fractals. And mathematically, it's an infinite regress. So you just get, it's called self-similarity across scales. And so a piece of a triangle doesn't look like the same triangle you took it at it. It could if you section it just right, but it doesn't necessarily. And what was important about the discovery of fractals, and to some extent it came from the study of the natural world, is that we see them all over the place.

Once you've seen them, you see a picture of them, you sort of look up and go, oh, look at the fractal nature of the way a trunk of a trunk of a trink. tree goes up and they branch. And each of those branches looks like a smaller version of the Trump. And they branch. And each of those twigs looks like a smaller version of the branch. It doesn't go on infinitely, obviously. It ends in a leaf. And this, again, the simplicity of things. You can look at, you know, a picture from my work. I could take a photograph to highlight the arteries and veins in an organ. And if I said to you, if I made it black and black and white and showed it to you and said, this is a picture of the Mississippi Delta. You'd go, sure. Because they're the same fractal system. Or you're flying in the cloud and you see these

cumulus clouds and they're all fluffy. And then you fly in closer and you see the same fluffies. You don't, and you can't seem to get at it because it just keeps revealing smaller and smaller versions of the same thing. So that's the special nature of fractals and we have them in our system. And fractal mathematics describes the way electrical conduction happens in the heart, the way your airways branch in your lungs, the way your blood vessels branch in your body, et cetera. And that's the mathematics that describes chaos. So complexity, it's not quite in the zone of chaos, but it's also not quite in the zone of order. And Roger Lewin, one of the authors of an earlier book on complexity for a lay audience. 20 years ago, talked about, it's almost as though chaos and order are pulling at each other.

And what erupts at that place where they're pulling at each other is life. David Packard, who came up with this phrase, the edge of chaos to describe what complex systems are and where they lie mathematically, went from there to say that not only is it how, what describes life, but what's, from an information theory point of view, which I don't go much into in the book because it's really not my domain. But one way of thinking about life,

we now know that information is a measurable thing in the universe. It's a quantity. It's not just a word we have for facts, or, you know, zeros and ones. It's a property of the universe. And the richest information... Can you explain that before you go on?

Because I feel like I'm not going to understand what you say next, unless you explain what that means. Information. What did he say, Jonathan? Information is a measurable thing in the universe. It's not just like, oh, we have information. But what does it really mean? This goes under the category of information theory.

This is where I turn from polymath into dilettante, dancing on the edge there, like edge zones. So you can mathematically describe information content. in the world. And this gets into, it's sort of, you know, it's properly within both mathematics and physics.

It describes physical systems. A lot of what Stephen Hawking was going at when he developed his theories of black holes in the beginning is, can information be lost or not? If something falls into a black hole, isn't information lost? and if I'm not mistaken, what he said is, no, no, no, it is maintained in hawking radiation that radiates out. And so it was an information theory question.

There's information content in the universe, and it can be measured and quantified and described by equations. And where information processing is most rich is in living systems. So you can think of in terms of, you know, the air conditioner, what information does it need to pull from the room, what's the temperature? That's it. It needs one bit of information. And I'm not sure whether I mean bit technically. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. But for a living thing to be alive, what do we have to monitor in order for our body to adjust to make it to the next moment? We've got to be worrying about the tiger coming at us. We've got to worry about, do we have enough water? Will we have enough water tomorrow? What's the temperature? Is it raining? Is it too dry? Are we in size? Are we in

Are we in shape? Are we able to, you know, turn off the conscious experience of like, oh, my God, there's clothing on my body and it feels weird, but we have to tune that out to be able to just do the next thing. Right, right. So the complexity of information processing is another thing described by complexity. And you can restate complexity in terms of information theory like this. So David Packard went down that route. And the result was he talked about evolution as being a drive towards greater richness of information process.

Not in terms of survival of the fittest, but in terms of optimizing and increasing information processing. And those are not the same thing. They're complementary. But it's another aspect of how to think about evolution and life. It's the evolution of information process. This is going to take us off track, but maybe we'll do a little dog leg and then come back. Dog leg? A little like roundabout. Oh. You know?

It's a cute expression. Because they are like, they're a little shaped and then they go around. I didn't know that. They're a little hunches. Anyway. Dog leg. Some would say that the advancement of our modern day society has actually limited our ability to, or corrupted, our fundamental human ability of information processing, knowing what to prioritize.

knowing what to prioritize and what not to, hence the epidemic of mental health crises and crisis of purpose and meaning. I mean, it's a complexity overload, but not in the way that you talk about complexity in a layperson's terms. It's a complexity overload. Yeah. And one of the ways I think about this, when I think about any question someone asks me about, well, how do you deal with this in terms of complexity?

I go back to the first four rules. and to me, what sticks out is our communications have become increasingly complex. And in the early days of the internet, that meant greater diversity. But then the tools by which we access, this diverse amount of information, started to create algorithms that started to pair back the negative feedback loops. of normal human interaction. No, that's false. We're not going to buy into that. That's true. That has a lot of evidence for it. I'm fine just the way I am. Right. And so this is like a cancer of information process. So what happens when positive feedback loops predominate is you can still get self-organization, but it's no longer creative and adaptive. So in a banking system, you eliminate

too many of the negative feedback loops of legislative control of how banks work, and you get a great depression, you get a great recession, you get an economic bubble, which is an self-organizing thing, it's that bubble, but it's not adaptive. It's rapidly expanding, energy expending, and it collapses. Cells in the body that stop responding to other cells, according to local controls of negative feedbacks become a cancer. What does cancer do? Expans and then energy depletion and collapse. I think that when you look at social media, where I'm thinking, you know, who am I? I'm a liver pathologist. But being caught up in the middle of it and seeing how the algorithms are doing things to my Facebook feed, because I'm so old I use Facebook and not much else,

It's a pruning away of the negative feedbacks that told us as a community, this is trustworthy, this is not. You can look at something like Nazi Germany, any autocratic society, where they start pruning away of freedom of the press, means that you're pruning away the negative feedbacks that allow people to assess truth versus untruth. And we're in a system now that random things can be pumped up into appearing true because the algorithms have removed the constraints on that that would allow us to distinguish truth from untruth. Totally agree with all of that. And when you talk about cancer of information processing, you're talking primarily about digital information. But it's also social. You know, those are not separate things. 100%. It's the main way in which we interact with other people. I was also thinking about our physiological changes and the environments that we live in and our separation from nature

as a cancer of information processing and how it would remove our inherent knowledge and ability to know, oh, I need temperature control or sunlight or, you know. No, I completely agree with you. And I had intuitions about this stuff. going back to when I was like, when I first moved to New York City, I grew up in West Hartford, which was borderline at that time suburban to rural. I mean, there were cow pastures close. Those are all shopping malls and condominiums, but still. But I felt like I had a direct connection to the ground, to the sky. And when I first moved to New York City, it was to attend grad school.

I had only gotten into one grad school, and it was in New York. So, okay. I used to like visiting here, but the idea of being here, and I was explicit cut off from birds and grass and trees. I was far enough away from Central Park that I didn't, and busy enough with school that I didn't, you know, I got into this box. that was also for a variety of reasons when I had my first major depression. And a lot of that was simply about being gay. And that was when I was starting to come to terms with it. And medical school was not a really great place in which to do that.

But at the same time, I felt untethered. From our arrival, I felt untethered. And when I mentioned before about, you know, describing to be a little, living thing you have to be monitoring so much. We evolved within the natural world setting. We evolved to be sensitive to starlight and moonlight and sunlight and the patterns of growth and death in the world around us and all of that. And we've lost that once we started establishing cities. And that started with extractive agriculture, you know. So I think in the last 10,000 years, we've been getting more and more abstracted

from the world we arise from. I don't think it's a surprise that that was like, you know, 10,000 years or so ago, and then you start to have five or six thousand years later these, you know, what we call the great religions, they're popping up all over the place. And I think it was the necessity after a few thousand years of abstraction.

to find ways to reconnect, even within the midst of that abstraction. And that's what I think that a lot of the spiritual traditions are doing. They're going inward to find those connections, even as outward we're pulled away. That's a lot. No, that's, I mean, not enough as far as we're concerned in this room. It's beautifully said. It's really beautiful.

And that is where I wanted to go next because to my understanding, you know, you are a person of a complex faith, you know, for lack of a better description. And also, you know, from the bit that I know about you, you've had at least, you know, the experiences that I've heard you, you know, most familiar with. You know, you, you contemplated rabbinical school. You know, you were a somewhat serious student of, you know, let's say you're ethnic and cultural, you know, and historical kind of faith. You know, you're, faith. And also you've, you know, chosen a life committed to Zen Buddhism in particular, which has a lot in common with many mystical aspects of the Jewish tradition. And one thing that I keep

coming back to from the second you started speaking, sort of everything you described, is that there is a unity in complexity and there is a concept of a oneness. And there is a concept of a oneness. which for me and for my, you know, religious leanings, tend towards a very, you know, specific and in many cases mystical concepts of the oneness of both God and the universe, right? And for me personally, my understanding of what is divine is the exact structures that you're talking about, the systems that you're talking about.

Like I find the beauty in the fact that everything breaks down to atoms and neutrons, and, you know, all, like, that to me is, I don't need any more proof. Like, people always ask, like, how can you be a scientist and a person of faith? Like, it's not, there's not even a question for me, because as sure as electrons exist, I am observing them, trying to come up with equations to understand them, you know, I mean, it's like, it's a non-issue for me. But you said something really interesting in one of your, one of your talks. And what you said was that, you know, religion, God,

This seems to be an arena that people are very uncomfortable kind of talking about because we don't have an equation and we don't have a way to quantify and we don't have this kind of like proof. And I wonder if you can speak about, you know, in the complexity of everything that you see, everything that you study, where is the kind of, you know, peace that you find in being a person of really any divine faith? Good question. So to me, and I think I discussed this fairly explicitly in the afterwards of the book, all these concepts are useless to bring me peace, to give me resilience. To me, they're pointers at something that has that potential. But in the book, I talk a lot about Einstein. I talk a lot about Heisenberg, and I talk a lot about Kurt Gödel, who was a lot of where I go in the last half of the book. He's also, I think, not as well known a figure in 20th century thought, in modern thought, as he should be, because he's fascinating.

And maybe my chapter on him will. someone will go, oh, that would make a good movie. Oh, look who I'm talking to. But never mind. Gödel himself acknowledged verbally. Einstein and Heisenberg, I don't think, ever actually did. Their incredible knowledge and their incredible intuitions about the nature of existence did not save them from vast amounts of suffering, both the suffering they felt and the suffering they caused.

because being smart about the concepts is just not enough. When we're talking about that connection to the world that makes you feel whole like we were just describing, the ideas of how to do that don't do it. It's the experience of connecting to the world, whether it's by getting out of your city and going for a walk in the woods, or maybe it's just going to Central Park,

or maybe it's just showing up for the person who's your neighbor. in a fully present way, the way you'd be fully present if you were looking at a bird and a tree and with every fiber of your being. Those experiences reveal the unity of things. One way to get at it is contemplative practice, which is where I, the reason you can get there through many ways, devotional practice. And my mom is an example of that, to some extent the book about her is going to be a case study of the impact of deep devotion. she felt directly connected. I needed something a little bit more,

and what drove me was being a child of Holocaust survivors. And that drove me in two ways. One was that growing up in the Jewish faith, in a very rich, warm environment, it wasn't something that the kids in my family and my community were feeling oppressed by it for the most part. We were the first generation. after the Holocaust. We were, you know, we were the treasure. We were the future. But how could that

have happened? And I remember when I first discovered Jewish mysticism, it was in the novel, the source by James Mishner that someone gave me. And there's a chapter on it on Jewish mysticism. And it talked about, you know, unification with God. And I thought, oh, maybe there's a God's eye view from which all of this makes sense. And the job of the mystic is to try to get that God's eye view. So to me, that was the impetus, and that wasn't accessible to a Jewish suburban gay kid in West Hartford in the 1970s. Then I discovered Zen Buddhism, and that was a way to meditate because I read how people with enlightenment experiences, quote unquote, sounded like they were 15th century, 16th century mystics. So that's how I went down that path. What I discovered in the process

is that when you go inside to experience the world through your own mind, what you find is there is a mind that precedes everything. Little tiny flashes maybe I get of this as being a direct experience, but I know that that's the root to have that experience. And what arises from that experience of unity is a greater resilience when you come back to this. and in the community of Holocaust survivors, there were people who survived broken,

and there were people who survived with the capacity for great resilience and joy. And coming of age in New York as a gay man during the AIDS crisis, many, many people died terrible, horrible, pain-ridden, fear-filled deaths, but I know people who died in bliss states. The ones who were in the latter category

had some sort of direct experience of things, a direct understanding. So what I hope for with a book like mine is exactly what you said. People who have an interest in science who share our cultural notion that science, empirical science and mathematics are the surest way to know the true nature of reality. Quantum physics and Kurt Goetle with his incompleteness theorem show that they are not sufficient. and you also need intuition and experience. And there are ways to cultivate those intuitions and experiences. And that's the piece that's missing from our culture, I think.

We're not a machine. Science and math don't explain everything. And one of the ways to get there that's been useful for me is when the mind turns inward, what does it find? It finds a greater mind. And that's the mind, we call it in our writing, fundamental awareness, that's just pure awareness, out of which space time itself arises, out of which the quantum foam and the quantum particles arise, out of, and self-organize themselves the way ants and cells do

into atoms, into molecules, into the whole universe. So it's a pointer that this is the structure of reality and underlying it all is this one fundamental awareness that's pure awareness. And as it contemplates itself, we spring into existence. systems. Okay. First of all, you're fucking awesome. You're blowing our minds. Second of all, wait for it. I'm going to bring it back to something you mentioned, like, kind of in passing. When we talk about mind-body syndrome, and when we talk about this sort of like, you know, very kind of recent, you know, in terms of sort of like clinical literature, you know, journalistic and longitudinal study literature.

You know, we finally sort of have science waking up to a very specific experience in the universe that for a very long time, some might argue for as long as we've existed as conscious, you know, homo sapiens sapiens, that we have had. and known about. And, you know, when you mentioned, I think it was in one of your videos, when you mentioned, you know, kind of like starting to delve into like mind-body work, you know, for me, for Jonathan, for people who have sort of, you know, by hook or by crook, you know, have had to have a very intimate relationship with our emotional systems and our physical systems. And this is a set of skills that many of us come to, not because we want to, but because we have to.

And what I think is so interesting is, you know, when you talk about exactly what you spoke about, this combination of, you know, the mathematical, the chemical, the physical, I mean, you, you were explaining, you know, ATP in your book, right? And also, you know, you as a scientist and you as a person, you're also holding that there's this other element of our awareness and of our consciousness that is not distinct from that. And, you know, I have a list of things that the hippies might have been right about. And, you know, this is one of them that our emotional system and our physical system is not, they're not distinguishable from each other. And it's like, oh, thanks. We finally have the science, you know, to prove it. And I cannot help but link it back to,

you know, this notion of an interstitial, an interstitial, I made it a Jewish word. word, an interstitial system that, you know, you were part of this incredible research. I think it kind of was published in 2018. You know, for me, it's all connected because it's all you. And what this research found, and it was a, you know, a large, beautiful team, you know, what it found was sort of the words and the numbers and the histology that matches what many of us have felt, have experienced, and have been working on, which is. is that there is a system in the body. There's a physiological system that is related to organs,

to structures, and to systems that breathe, that literally have movement related to breath in terms of their health and in terms of their sickness, you know, their dis-ease. And people who do fascia work, for example, like, we know these people. I've had this. work done. And in simplest terms, you know, what fascia work does is it it pulls your skin, what it feels like is it feels like your skin is being pulled off your bones, like, which isn't a thing. But the work that you did is so powerful because what it shows is like what people experience when they have work done that implies that the fluid cavity essentially that runs, you know, through your whole body, that it surrounds organs that when you breathe, it matters, when you

constrict it matters, when something is wrong and it impedes your emotional sense of existence, there's a physiological way to also cause rest and contemplation in the body. And that is literally what in particular Buddhism has known for thousands of years. There also is a Kabbalistic tradition. There is a mystical Jewish tradition that mirrored in many ways. You know, when they say like three stars, like three men came from the East, like the East people, like the East. So I wonder, can you, I know I just said like a lot and possibly too much, but can you speak a little bit to your, you know, kind of collaborative work surrounding the notion of what, you know, the mind-body system has been trying to convince people matters. Right. So, you know, first off, just the fact that we... Yeah.

That, that, this phrase, mind, body, you know, that goes back to Descartes, which said, mind, body. Not one. And clearly that's not true. Oh, Descartes. Yeah. Oh, that guy. You know, and, you know, the other half of that, the mechanics of the universe, that's Notonian mechanics. but most people don't realize that Newton wrote far more many pages about alchemy than he did about physics. So this was not his problem.

So when we talk biologically about the interstition, what we found was that when you take bits of tissue out of the body to look at it under the microscope, you do things to cut a very thin slice on the slide. You fix it with chemicals that bind molecules together so they hold their relationships, even as you're slicing down. And then you stain it with pretty colors so you can see the individual bits. And part of that process is drying it. Tissue preserves, let's say, in mummification because you're drying it. And something that has no water in it, no bacteria are going to be able to go in there and live and eat it because they need water like the rest of us. So it dehydrates.

And so when you look at tissues that are rich in collagen, it always looks in the body like a wall. So when you set around our organs and between our organs, everywhere in the body where you have collagen in layers, below the epidermis of the skin, which is the outer layer, below that, you have the dermis and it's this dense collagen. But if you look at it under the microscope, like I do every day, there's always cracks, little. spaces between the collagen bundles, and we know that collagen is so stiff that when that needle goes through, that, sorry, that knife goes through to make the thin slide, it cracks. And so we've seen these in tissues since we started looking, you know, at human tissues in a modern way, probably 150 years ago or so. And that's artifact. That's just artifact because collagen is stiff. Some colleagues of mine had this new fancy endoscope. So, you know, looking for colonoscopies, if coming up that way,

or looking at your esophagus or stomach, et cetera, going down, where you could do microscopy in the living tissues by injecting fluorescent dye in a vein. And all the fluid in your body lights up. And when they looked at areas where they could get into the connective tissue of the body, there were all these spaces that were bright. That doesn't look like anything in this dense collagen network, and it turns out because this is the nature of the living tissue, with fluid flowing freely through it, all through your body. It's one single network of mostly collagen, but you don't see it when you make a slide to look at it under the microscope because it all collapses. The cracks that we thought were artifact were the remnants of the actual living

tissues. And so what we showed in our paper is that the connective tissue of the body has this fluid going through it. Now, I had a rolfer named Debbie Green. She was also my yoga teacher, and she would be working my fascia. And, you know, I would sometimes need a towel to bite down on because my body is, you know, I've got issues. And she'd say, well, there's fluid in the fascia. And I'd say, no, there's not. I can show you under the microscope. And she'd say, yes, there is. I can see. under my thumbs. And I'd say no, and we just were like, we'll agree to disagree. And I actually have a picture of fascia in the original paper for her, because she was right. What I was looking at to say it wasn't there is because the artifact, you know, we dehydrated the tissue. The fluid was

gone. The living tissue, it's right. Now, when I, when we, when we presented this, it went viral as the possibly the 80th organ. We didn't put that in the paper, but that came out in the in the fuss and bother. And there was no other science news that week. You know, Stephen Hawking had died two weeks before. So that had already passed from the news. They needed something to fill it. Fasher World was up in arms because, and the osteopaths,

and many different traditions. Because they'd been talking about this for 40, 50, 60, 70 years. What do you mean this is new? Well, in allopathic medicine, what we mean, you know, when we think of Western medicine, This was new. It wasn't in our literature, except for little hints here and there. And I realized, oh, the reason isn't because it didn't exist and they didn't see it.

It's because my medical community was preventing it from being published. But then I was in China because I do liver pathology and liver disease, and I was there for a liver conference. And a liver guy there who I found out, I didn't know this, was the head of a Chinese version of, NIH for traditional Chinese medicine. And so he got the first question out of honor, out of respect for him. And his question, his first question was, so how have people responded to your work?

And I said, well, you know, some people are like, you're crazy, what do you mean there's spaces here? And other people, Fasher World, was angry because, you know, they'd been saying this for decades. And he smiled and nodded and said yes, and we've been speaking about it. it for 5,000 years, referring to traditional Chinese medicine. Correct.

So the interstition, what is it? It's a fluid-filled path through the body that we didn't know about that's four times the size of the cardiovascular system, crosses all organ boundaries, all tissue boundaries, and it's a communication network, which in complexity terms is increasing the diversity of interactions of how the body can speak to itself, right? And so what we're talking about is communication. And so what I realized very soon by these interactions was the interstitium metaphorically can act as the space

by which all these different traditions of health and healing can speak to each other. Because we all have hands on the elephant. We all have a view. But having the anatomy allows us. that everyone recognizes as something they've been talking about, but we couldn't ever specify, became an interstitium.

It has that potential to be an interstitium across cultures of health and healing. And then you step back and think in terms of complexity. It's the spaces between, it's the local spaces where interactions happen between neighbors that allow for the arising of, complex systems, living systems, creativity, and adaptation. So that's a metaphor.

Oh, I get it. It's also a great Dave Matthews song. You know, I can't help but think of the notion of the creation of the universe. There's a mystical, there's a Kabbalistic notion that there was light in a vessel and that light was shattered and the light was scattered. and the light was scattered all over the universe, and our job as humans is to gather all of these bits of light and to sort of reassemble this vessel, you know, in some way. And I also thought of the Leonard Cohen quote.

There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And like that's, which obviously he draws heavily. Can I throw in another one? Do it. And Robin Alpenter of Bratislav said, the only heart which is whole is the heart that has been broken. That is true.

Which to me is the set, because the cracks are where the like. That's right. So this is my next question. So the fashah thing, which we've, we've spoken about here and we will continue to speak about. And Jonathan is an energy person and I consider him a healer, even though he's very humble about it. But what else are we allowed to say to people? Like, I promise this is true without having. to sort of wait, you know, for this like next level. Like do we wait another 5,000 years? And and I think, you know, so another key piece, which I haven't mentioned of the universe as a complex system. And this is for us, I think this is really fundamental as a fundamentally

important. So at this level of scale, we are. separate bodies. You two are sitting there and you look like objects in your room and I'm over here. And if we're in the same room, I'd be a third object in your room. Our boundaries are our skin. And that's the way we think of ourselves. But at the cellular level, where are our boundaries? So you're shedding skin cells into the environment all the time. The dust in your room is in large part just your dead skin cells, which is a little disgusting. But I'm a pathologist so I can, you know, I'm okay with it. But now we know about the micro-referrales. But now we know about the micro- microbiome, which are the bacteria and other living things that line the surfaces of your body

and all the crevices inside your body. And we know that without our microbiome, if we were completely sterile, we would die within days. Our skin would start to crack. We'd get infections. We'd be unable to absorb food. Our immune systems would go haywire. So we're not a living human body without our microbiome. And current estimates are 50% of your cells are your human cells and 50% of your living body necessarily are these bacteria and other stuff. If you put a bunch of people in an apartment and have them live together, hmm? Did you say 50%? 50%. That's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. It's actually down. The estimate used to be around 90%. Do I even? Do I exist?

It's really the question. Right. So at the cellular level, where are your boundaries? If people who share a home, all the people who share a home and their pets all share a single microbiome. You come in with your own microbiomes, but within a very short time, this has been studied and measured, your microbiomes emerge into one single system. So at the cellular level, where are your boundaries? They're the boundaries of the spaces we occupy with other people and animals and whatever. At the molecular level, where are your boundaries?

Simplistically, we breathe out carbon dioxide. Our carbon dioxide of our bodies goes out to the plants. They take it and make it part of their bodies and give us oxygen. At the molecular level, the boundary of our bodies is the entire biomass of the plant. At the atomic level, We see ourselves as being these isolated individuals walking around on this rock we call planet Earth. But there is no atom in our bodies that we didn't breathe, eat, or drink from the planet. So are we separate individuals walking around on the surface of planet Earth,

or are we the atomic substance of the Earth that in three and a half billion years have self-organized, according to the rules of chaos and complexity theory, into living things that think of themselves as separate. I use this example in the book. It's kind of one of my favorites. When Curiosity went to Mars and I was blown away and 14-year-old geek, like, oh boy, if I could have been a part of NASA,

the brilliance of the scientists and engineers at NASA that they could send this robot to Mars, that's true. But equally, equally true is that it took three and a half billion years for Earth to figure out how to organize itself so that it could reach out and touch its name. 100%.

At the quantum level, there are no boundaries. Each of us is fully an expression of the universe, one single large unity within which there's no separation. So how does this affect fashion? Well, in Faster World, they asked me about this stuff, so they asked me different questions. And, you know, when you come in and you want to work on a broken bone, you can do, you know, mechanical stuff at this level of scale. Pin it, you know, we can do cellular interventions.

We can do cell transplants. You know, we can do molecular interventions. We give medicines. At every level of scale, the body exists in all these different ways. And at each level of scale, there are ways to observe and experience. experience the body and to interact with it. And so when a skilled healer comes into a room, they are sharing a space with their client, their patient, the other person in the room. And their boundaries are already, they're not two separate humans. We're never separate.

We just focus at this level of scale so obsessively that we think we are. But at the energetic level, when you have a healer come and bring their body in proximity to your body, it's one system. It's one energetic system. It has to be. They're not separate. And so, yes, a skilled practitioner can sense things and can influence things, and healing can arise out of the interactions between these two people.

Or on a larger scale, communal, socially, things like that happen. So it's all because we're so bound up in our day-to-day scale of observation. I'm lucky as a pathologist. I get to practice every day looking at the body at another level of scale. Airplane pilots are lucky. They get to practice looking at the world at a higher level of scale. We all know it when you're in an airplane and you're watching as you come in for a landing. You're above the world.

You're above the world. You're above the world. And then it's almost a visceral feeling sometimes that you get the shift where suddenly you're in the world. well, can we think of the body as layer after layer after layer till you get down to the quantum realm and you're just the universe. Dr. These, I don't know where I end and you begin, literally. That's what I'm feeling like.

No. But equally true, you're your body and I'm my body. Both are true. Well, it's funny. So, and it's funny that you bring this up because, you know, one of the things that I think so many of us, especially those of us who come from complicated childhoods, those of us who come from intergenerational trauma, those of us who, you know, you give an example, are struggling with sexual identity or

gender identity, people who, you know, are living in a place where boundaries are curious, a place where boundaries are often uncertain. You know, that notion is both a psychological one, but I don't think it's always wrong to say that that's also a physical one. And you, you, you mention in passing, on one of your videos, you mentioned in passing, you know, a shaman thing. And in your book, you do not mention by name, but you, you mention healers who have had a profound impact on your life. You know, I have interacted with shaman's for, you know, various reasons. John has as well. And we usually kind of like joke about it because most people are like, that's crazy. And maybe it is. But, you know, what Jonathan and I have experienced is that, I mean,

I'm not speaking for you. Should I speak for you? You usually do. We joke also that in LA, it's become trendy, but like 20 years ago, not everyone had a shaman in the Rolodex. My question about, you know, that kind of healer, you know, and I think a lot of people talk about shamans now because people talk about ayahuasca and everybody's, you know, learning about shamans in a different way, not just from Carlos Castaneda books, which is how, you know, I learned about shamans for the first time when I was a teenager. What'd you say? But now from Goop. Yes, now you can learn about shamans from Goethe Paltrow herself. But, but I do think it's an, it's an important point that in the same way that five years ago, 40 years ago, 80 years ago, a thousand years ago, you know,

in the same way that we are continuing to learn about these kind of intersections of places where people have access to a different concept of boundaries. I think it's very important. I worked with a healer. I think I've talked about this here. It sounds ridiculous to say. I worked with a healer and the first time that we worked together, she said, I'm not comfortable even putting my hands on your feet. And I said, what do you mean? That's why I'm here. It's like why I was sent to you was because I need hands on work and I'm told that you do something. I had never been to a healer before. And she said, I'm not going to be able to put my hands on your feet because your body's not allowing me to. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I came here. And, you know, what ended up happening

was, was years of work with this woman who has since gone on to another realm. But I learned more about what she meant and what that means to have a body that says no, when I don't. when I'm literally laying with my eyes closed on a table. And it was something that I didn't understand. And when people hear that, they're like, she just wanted to take your money. And, you know, what I've learned is something that people like Jonathan know, people like you know, is that there literally is something to these kinds of healers.

Can you say whatever you're comfortable telling us about your experience with people who heal on that level? To some extent, this is that next book about my mom. If in this book, I'm saying that the whole world is nothing, is non-material, is pure fundamental awareness that organizes itself into things that think of themselves as existing independently and materially, then why wouldn't there be non-material realmsial realms and non-material beings that are also arising from that consciousness, that I can experience in consciousness, like in dream states or trance states or meditative states. And what was happening

with my mom, I think, this is the way I think of it. And in my experiences with having inadvertently met a shaman and getting pulled into some of those practices. She was having encounters with non-material realms and non-material beings. And part of, I speak in the book about how one has to be careful discussing things like this in terms of insights from meditation, because how do you distinguish them from delusion and psychosis, et cetera? I mean, there's that. We have to, I'm a scientist.

I have to be careful about this. That's also culturally independent, meaning, you know, when I studied psychological anthropology at UCLA, we were taught about tribes. in this case in North Africa, who when someone believes that they are hearing and seeing things that are not there and that they've been possessed by she demons, that's actually a culturally appropriate,

you know, reaction to certain circumstances. And those people were treated as very special shamans and healers. And so all of these things are very culturally dependent. Right, right. So it remains tricky. But for me, I had this shamanic teacher over here, who my mother knew nothing about. Basically, she lost her short-term memory

for the last eight years of her life. That was the primary thing. And she lived in this perpetual bliss bubble, kind of an awakened state by the end. But you can't exist in an awakened state because you won't know how to feed yourself. So she needed 24-hour home care, et cetera. But she would come and report to me things

about someone she met while she's out and about wandering other realms and I'd get the report for my teacher how he met my mother and they would independently tell me about the same conversation. What? So, so, you know, my mother knew someone back home had died before I did because another dead person, um, uh, cut his stay short, which he was happy about. He was sort of boring her. Um, because he had to go welcome this person. I thought this person would be 104. That can't possibly be him going to welcome her because she and then I go home and get a message that that's exactly what happened. So I have little tethers for it's like, okay, there was an experiment that someone set up

that I didn't know about and we got the result and like, okay, there it is. But going back to what I was saying about pre-urbanization, pre-extractive agriculture, what did we do with our time? You know, my understanding, you probably know more about this having training in anthropology than I do, that the few societies of hunter-gatherers that have been left that we could go interfere with

by studying, thereby disrupting, but whatever, that's what we do. They spend very little time hunting and gathering. You don't have to spend all your life day in and day out. So in the absence of any distractions, what have you got? You've got talking, you've got playing, you've got having sex, maybe you have some war, and you have a lot of sitting about. And everybody has attentive capacities to the world around us. And if we didn't have our phones distracting us continually,

all of us who have lived long enough to remember not having cell phones, we remember, we remember We had states of mind where we were more alert to what was going on around us. And we missed that because our phones are now taking our attention. Well, in a world like that, where there was nothing to take your attention except social interaction and the natural world, some people would be sensitive to it, some people would be more sensitive to it. Everyone can play the piano. Some people will be able to play chopsticks rather than make noise.

Some people will be able to play some simple tunes. and occasionally there's a Mozart. I think what shamans are is that they're on the range of human capacity for understanding the world around us, including the non-material realms. And they were the adepts that either came to it by training or instinct.

It can run in families. I think that's some of what's going on in my mom's case. And so those people would have these abilities. We find it strange now because all of us are so abstracted. We've got no framework within which to understand who they could be and what they're experiencing and why. So to me, when I talk about shamanism, what I'm talking about is the awareness, the potential awareness that almost everybody has for experiencing the world around us deeply. and sometimes experience things that go beyond the material.

I couldn't put that in this book because that would be a problem. You're like, if this isn't complex enough, get a load of this. Yeah, yeah. And it's not something that's amenable, I think, to scientific and mathematical rigor. So this book, to some extent, I didn't realize that. this until after I'd written it, that, oh, my God, I'm trying to write a takedown of materialism. For the last 20 years, I haven't framed what I'm doing as that, but in writing the book, I realize that's part of what I'm doing, is materiality is a scale-dependent, choice-dependent

state of affairs. And yeah, everything, I'm tapping my computer. I'm tapping my camera now. everything seems solid. Just what all the mystical and metaphysical traditions say. The world appears solid, but it ain't. It's a projection. I mean, it's all just a projection. I don't think that science and the mystics are in conflict the way that they have been presented for so many years.

I think more and more science is moving towards trying to understand many of the aspects that the mystics and natural Chinese medicine have been trying to trying to communicate. So in that way, I think it's hopeful. You know, your friend's work who's trying to understand the influence of the microbiome and different disease states or afflictions, we're studying more and more about using fMRIs to understand brainwave states to try to access different realms of consciousness. and understand that we can control the autonomic nervous system

and that it's not necessarily something that's totally outside of our control and get us more back in touch with the realms of nature that are influencing us and trying to understand. So it's still, I think, of course, not mainstream medicine, but the conversation and people who are bringing this to the forefront are changing the paradigm of what it means to be scientifically valid versus, you know, outside of that criteria.

And listen to the metaphor. inherent in saying mainstream. Mainstreams come from small little tributaries that gradually collect together to create the mainstream that's the river, right? My, you asked me before, and I never answered it because I went off on one of my fractal loops about the cultural state of affairs

at the time that chaos and fractals and complexity were starting to emerge. What came to mind with that is what was going on at the beginning of the 20th century, the time in which quantum mechanics and relativity were coming up. The Industrial Revolution, Newtonian mechanics, and finally World War I, in terms of Europe, really shattered the social hierarchy that had the church, which depending on which location might have been a different church, but it was pretty just a handful,

who were all tied up in the power and structure of knowledge. There was no knowledge in Europe that was independent of church hierarchy. And when that started to break apart with the shattering of the monarchies, with the shattering of the church hierarchies, you had this explosion of political, political systems of thought, whether it's fascism, communism, democracy, and all the various subtypes, et cetera, this is because the economic order had been completely disrupted. So now you had free range to think of anything.

Quantum mechanics and relatively displacing, you know, returning humans to the center of attention. How you choose to observe something changes the nature of reality. It could only have happened in that kind of milieu when all the constraints were, we're coming on. So I think there are, science always reflects the society in which it's arising. Of course, it has to because it's an emergent property of that society. Societies are complex systems and one of the things they give rise to these global structures are what's the nature of their economies, what's the nature of their politics, what's the nature of their science, what's the nature of their art. So yeah, going back to that question, I think it's all

Well, and also, you know, to kind of take that one step further, I mean, I mean, I always, I always say Marx was right. But even to go beyond, you know, sort of that the, that particular revolution, you know, the next revolution, which we, you know, know, know, as the sexual revolution, right? And like the summer of 69 and Sergeant Pepper and like, oh my gosh, weed, you know, like all these things that then became, you know, an explosive movement. And in particular, you know, one that did give birth to an aspect of mysticism and an aspect of transcendental exploration, which, you know, 60 years later, right, we're coming back to in a way that is now, it's scientifically formulated that you may need psilocybin with a therapist holding your hand and telling you you're worthy, you know? Like that's because I think what a lot of people have. Or that you have the health insurance to cover it. Also that, right? So there's also an elitism inherent, or you can get it on the street because we all are trying to connect somehow. Like numb it out, make it hurt less, like fill the God-shaped hole, whatever it looks like. But, you know, people of my parents' generation, my parents were also first-generation Americans. You know, the notion was like, you're, you are, you're the miracle generation. You can do anything. You can think anything. And then you can think outside of the bounds of what your teachers told you. Like, discharges. obedience was an act of liberation, you know, for a generation of liberal, you know, liberal students

all over the world. And it's not surprising, and I don't mean to get political, it's not surprising that then what came from that was a tamping down and regulation of research into LSD, you know, because what they said is you cannot send people who have had a transcendental experience to war. They will not walk in to war if they know that we are all connected. on that level. Well, yeah, and this is... They're coming to get me. Do you hear the sirens? They're coming to get me.

One of the things I find really fascinating is that the mysticisms within religious hierarchies that are established are always suppressed and sometimes exterminated. If what I'm saying is correct, that the mystical impulse and the mystical experience shows the unity of everything. That's really dangerous to ordered hierarchies in which you separate things into good and bad, correct and incorrect. In the world of boundaries,

this came to me in a dream once and I was like, oh, this is a really good dream. Let me see if I can get it right. I heard someone saying to me in my dream, boundaries are where we give and we receive. In the realm of the boundless, meaning the fundamental unity, there are no boundaries, and therefore there is nothing to give and to receive. And that's why compassion arises from the experience of the of the boundaries because you don't have to ask what does this person need, what should I withhold, what, you know, that's the compassion we do, do I give someone money on the street or do I call 911 or, you know, that's compassion. But real compassion, my hand hits the stove and it turns out it's hot and my other hand leaps to pull it back. It doesn't stop and pause and think,

should I do this? Will this put me in danger? Actions that arise from that sense of unity, that's real compassion. And this is a Buddhist frame for this. What some Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhism will talk in particular about wisdom and compassion being the two main pillars of whatever. I can't think of the word.

Wisdom is seeing the world as it is without delusion. Complexity theory and good all things. theorem and quantum physics and biology, et cetera, et cetera, to me, give us now the frame to see the world without delusion in a more complete way. And the result of that is compassion. So the wisdom is seeing the nature of true reality and cultivating a direct experience of it. What arises from that is true compassion. And that's what heals the world. That's what restores the sparks. That's a mic drop.

What do you, this is a, you know, abstract question. What do you wish for? What do you wish for in terms of medicine, in terms of health? Like, what do you hope that your work can add to in the realm of sort of what I think a lot of us are experiencing as, you know, a collective overreacting? overwhelm, you know, an over-stimulation of information, of technology, complexity in ways that are not comfortable. What is your kind of vision? We know what one path of kind of understanding is. And I also know that that's not your field. You know, you're a pathologist who also has, you know, this incredible set of experiences and worldviews and perspective. But I'll listen to you first. What's your wish for the world of

wellness and kind of health and the way we approach our lives right now. There's a part of the afterward in the book that got written right at the very end of the last minute. It was almost like the next to last revision passed before final publication. And Mark, my husband and I were hanging out with this young friend who was in his 20s, and we had been drinking a little bit. There was maybe a little disinhibition. And he spilled it about his anxieties and his fears and about how we older people have screwed everything up and left him with very little.

And I thought to myself, if I don't have something to say to him in this book, then why am I bothering? So, which made me realize I have to say something to that. And I think that's what it is. We can't avoid mass extinction events. they happen. I had my two little strokes a couple of months ago, which I mentioned. It's like, well, I had my two little strokes. I have a friend dealing with, from my Zen community. We were

Zen students together. We came on board together. And she's in clinical trials now for recurrent breast cancer. And we were talking about this. And her oncologist said to her, you're very unusual because most of my patients keep asking, why me? And that that's their question. And my friend responded, that's not my question. My question is why not me? That's right. And I realized when I had my strokes, you know, they were minor. I'm lucky, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but all the bad things that happened to me. In my younger years, I would ask, why me? Why is happening to me? But after 35 years of Zen practice, the question is, why not me?

Things happen. They just do. But if we could see it from a frame of reference that allowed us to go, okay, this is what's next. The Buddhist concept of impermanence, that is directly derivable from complexity theory, too. That's in the book. You're living this terrific moment. It will end. You're living this horrible moment. It will end. Can you just go, this is this moment, this is the next moment. You may not survive. What do I do with my grandparents who were killed in the forests of Riga? they were German Jews, and that's where they were killed. If they, you know, because of World War II, I exist. If it weren't for Hitler, I wouldn't exist.

My father would never have met my mother. The world just keeps turning. So what are the adjacent possibles? Be content to be aware of the adjacent possibles. And do what you can playing with the rules. If you want to be formal about it, the rules of complexity give you hints to bolster creativity to cultivate adaptation.

But mass extinctions also happen, and that's being alive. And that's not a bad thing. Amazing. Amazing. Well, I think Dr. Thys wins as most awesome guests we've ever had. Thank you. Thank you so much.

I can't tell you how I've, when they told me you were interested in a podcast, I thought, oh, these are people. We've got so much to talk about. But I wasn't sure because you never know what an interviewer is going to do. Well, we don't, I mean, we try not to think of ourselves as interviewers. Jonathan actually found you for us. And, you know, I think we're. Thank you, Jonathan.

You're very welcome. I don't actually forget how I found. you, but I was like, this guy we've got to speak to. Yeah, no, we just consider ourselves fellow travelers on this road. So thank you so much for speaking to us. And we wish you only good things with the book and

continued healing, Refu Ashlemah on your stroke, your stroke incidents. Thank you. And to all of us for everything. I mean, thank you. Break it down. No. No. No. No. It's not

helpful. no one can hear you. You're not by your microphone. That's how I feel it to the interview. I'm on the floor. Still, no one can hear you. I'm on the floor. I'm on the floor. Because that interview is so great. I can't even sit in my chair. You love a scientist with the background and spirituality.

I love a scientist. Who also has experience with shamans. He's too much. He was perfect. If there are scientists out there who also love shamans and are working on how to scientifically explain what the mystics have known for years and expand our understanding of consciousness, well-being, and how the body is really just a reflection of the universe. He's everything. As a whole. Please reach out. Okay.

I just need to say one thing. I mean, I need to say many things. There's so many things. One of the things I need to say is, like, I had never thought about. life before the internet in the way that he talked about it. Meaning, of course, it's like, oh, we used to just, like, you didn't know who was in that movie. You didn't know who that guy was. You would just never know.

What was the name of that guy? I don't know. That was like... There's a lot more I don't know. That's right. There's a lot more I don't know. But I had never heard... I had never heard that kind of analysis of, like, what a complete shift, you know.

You had a lot more time to contemplate the stars. Yeah. And the moon. I mean, not even like contemplate, just like we were in connection with a different, you know, aspect of our existence. And I know that like my kids and maybe a lot of people listening are like, that's just hand-wringing. This is just evolution. This is all part of it. But I really loved the way that he talked about, you know, what that kind of interference kind of does to a system that is already so incredibly. complex. He wrote a whole book about it. The book, Notes on Complexity, a Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being. I highly recommend the book. And also, he's got so many fascinating talks. Please check out Neil Thies. And I have nothing else to say. There's nothing else

to say. This is our last episode. That's it. I got nothing else to say. Well, it's a good thing that I'm a divergent member of our group, and I'm going to find a solution. To make more episodes, so not to worry. Also, I think we should definitely mention a couple incredible things that he said. Every aunt has the possibility to be divergent. Most of them are sheep, so they don't. Most ants are sheep. That's the T-shirt we need to drop.

Adjacent possibilities. I loved that concept. Chaos and order are pulling at each other, and that's where life happens. Maybe there's a God's eye view from where all of this makes sense. Also, quantum foam. Also, Descartes was wrong. He basically said that and he was right. Also, information is a measurable thing in the universe.

Hands on the elephant. Let's end there. Jonathan, what's the hands on the elephant? We all have our different hand, like the different hands on the element are the different perspectives. And it's so big and vast that you can't really see all the sides of it. Well, it's found in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jane texts. A group of blind men hear that a very strange animal called an elephant has been brought to town.

And they have to try and, you know, figure out, like, what is it? What does it look like? And so one says, this is like a snake because he's touching the trunk. And the other one's holding the ear and he's like, it's like a fan. You know, it's like a giant fan. And another said, it's like a tree trunk, you know, as he's holding the leg. And then one man places his hand on the side of the elephant and says, no, it's just a wall, you know. The tail is a rope.

And the tusk is hard and smooth like a spear, you know? It's all of those things. We're all just trying to explain what we're doing here, who we are and how we exist. And the only heart that is whole is the one that's been broken. And if that doesn't teach you a little bit about boundaries, I don't know what will. The boundaries of the body are the biomass of the planet. Neil Thees is a freaking genius from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

It's my and Bialyx breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break. I have a couple fun questions. Can I ask you a couple fun questions? Oh, please.

You met your husband at a different light bookstore. Can I ask which one? Was it the one in the Castro? No, it was the one down in the village. Okay, got it. In Greenwich Village. Okay, yes, I figured. It was the same people.

No, it was a very sad, it was a very sad day when that closed in San Francisco. And so when I read in your book that that's where you met, that just seemed like such a sweet story. I'm curious, is your husband scientifically inclined? No, he's an artist type and a foodie. When I met him, he was here to Assistant Direct Burnvis on Broadway from Canada. And then he stayed. And we met.

And that was 35 years ago. And I met him, the day I came out to my parents, I went to a different light bookstore. And, you know, when I was a kid, Einstein was my hero. And every day, every year I would celebrate by bringing a cake in on Einstein's birthday to school. Eventually, I sort of let this go. I think early in medical school, I was like, this is looking silly. And Einstein had become a little more problematic at that point.

I was in analysis recovering from, you know, suicidality and depression and medical school. and was ready to come out to my parents finally and went to a different light bookstore, knew the book I wanted, but was so anxious, I couldn't find it. He was the bookstore clerk. Went home. And it was Einstein's birthday. And it turned out when I looked, the day after I thought,

I should remember this day. It's like my birthday, my new birthday. And I realized, oh, my God, it was Einstein's birthday. Wow. And then I went back to the bookstore and I snagged them a few months later. We moved in after our first date. And that's been it. That's an amazing story.

What is the tattoo on your left arm? This one. Yes. What is it? That's a long story that has to do with my mother and requires some images that. If we ever get to meet one day, I'll give you that story. Amazing.

But that's a whole publicistic. I was going to say. It's a whole semantic. Okay, got it. Got it. None of my tattoos, all of my tattoos are expressions of these paths that I'm on. Okay, I'm not going to ask you to take your shirt off, but where are the other tattoos? I've got a buck over here.

Oh. And I've got a fourth chakra on my back for the divine mother. This is the shamanic thing. I've got a warrior being over here I'm connected to. This is, do you know Ben Shahn, the artist, Jewish socialist artist from the 1950s? Oh, yes, I think I know who you mean. And he has a book called The Alphabet of Creation. Yes.

So this is his alphabet of creation superimposed on a Zen brush circle. So this is fundamental awareness giving rise to material reality. via the alphabet.