Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Good - so I want to do something right now
that I know they normally reserve for churches.
I've never been to church myself, so this is what I've heard.
I want you to take a second
and look to everybody to your left and right and introduce yourself.
We've been sitting together a few hours, after lunch, we're tired - so 30 seconds.
You get 30 seconds of my time.
So say your name, where you're from.
My parents are up there. Say hello.
Hey, Mom and Dad. How are you? Love you.
(Chattering)
So where you're from, your major, name,
favorite pet, favorite food,
anything you like to do in Ann Arbor,
local food, things like that.
Two more seconds.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.
Okay, bring it back, please.
Shh. These are my 12 minutes.
(Laughter)
So what I want to do now,
the reason I had you do that - beside from make friends,
hopefully get married, invite me to the wedding -
is I want you guys to follow in a little exercise with me.
We'll have to get a little loud for this.
So I'm going to list off a few things,
just things that we go through in our daily life,
and the more I talk about -
like if you agree, like the first thing, just start clapping a little bit.
So I showered this morning - you start clapping.
This is all to solicit response for me; I like when people clap when I'm on stage.
But the more you agree or have done these things
in the last 24 or 36 hours,
or whatever time frame I say,
I want you to get as loud as you can or just increase in volume.
So, at some point, you can't clap any louder,
I want you to scream, whistle, do whatever you can.
And then I'm going to bring us down after that.
Okay?
So who's sent a text message in the last 20 minutes?
(Clapping)
Who has sent an email in the last hour?
(Clapping)
Who's worried about finals next month?
(Clapping)
Who's worried about their next -
keep it going, don't stop, don't wait for me.
I can talk over you.
Who's worried about their next paycheck?
Who's worried about the future?
Who can't forget the past?
Okay? Now bring it down.
(Laughter)
So that noise is sort of the noise of our lives, right?
Everywhere we go, everything we do,
we sort of operate on that noisy level.
We're worried about the past, but we can't forget the future.
We think about schoolwork, but we're worried about our job.
We love Mom and Dad so much;
we can't stop fighting with our sister or brother.
I love mine - I'll throw that out - they're great people.
So I bring this up now because it seems like our lives our getting noisier.
You know, people say,
"There's never a good time for bad news."
But it seems like there's really never a good time for good news anymore.
You can get an email in the morning that can change your entire day.
Even with a cellphone in your pocket,
it can be a text message from a friend, from Mom and Dad,
an email from a professor,
a phone call from somebody.
We're consistently and constantly plugged into our lives,
yet we never really get a chance to unplug from our lives.
So I'm a meditation instructor.
That was left out of the introduction.
And what I found now, though,
is when people come to me, and they say,
"I want to meditate. I want to destress my life."
The biggest thing is this time crunch.
They say, "I can't think about tomorrow without seeing the rest of my life."
And I think that this is intimately related
to our relationship to technology.
Like I was saying about the cellphone, Facebook updates, text messages -
things are coming so fast
that we're sort of losing perspective
on how long things really take to come to fruition.
And so the first question that people always ask me is
"What is meditation?
I can't clear my mind."
Well, meditation can be clearing your mind,
but it's not necessarily clearing your mind.
People say, "You know, I'm not a spiritual person.
I don't believe in God."
Well, some meditation is spiritual,
some meditation makes you believe in God,
but not all meditation.
You know, we're comfortable with ideas like dance or karate
or even weight training or working out.
We know that not -
you say working out, you like to work out long.
Do you like aerobics classes?
Lift weights?
Do you mountain climb?
So whenever someone brings up meditation,
the first thought is,
you know, Zen, clear your mind or destress yourself.
But there's an important implication to this though;
regardless of the meditation -
if there's chanting, if it's silent;
if it's, you know, guided,
or it's just by yourself in your room, nobody else there -
there's this element of turning off the world around you,
deliberately - cellphone put away,
computer, closed.
You know, sign on the door:
"In here meditating. Don't interrupt."
It's a time when you get to just close your eyes
and plug into yourself and see what's going on.
We don't have this in our lives.
I really think that there is a dearth of solitude in what we're going through -
you know, our daily lives, class, all of that.
And I say that because, you know,
we're ostensibly more connected now to the world than we've ever been.
So people say, "What do you mean 'There's a dearth of solitude?'"
Or people say - excuse me -
They say, "I agree with that.
You know, I'm always on my cellphone.
I'm always chatting with somebody."
You can Skype with a friend who's studying abroad in Turkey
while at the same time downloading your lecture notes
and texting another friend who's in a different classroom.
We're constantly communicating.
But I read a statistic recently
that said the average American adult
spends over eight hours a day on the computer.
The last time I checked,
eight hours on a computer is not a very social thing.
That doesn't even factor in
the amount of time you do spend on your cellphone,
the amount of time you spend watching TV or watching DVDs.
So if it was total screen time
and if they took it on a college campus
instead of the US,
I would think that number would go up drastically.
And eight hours is already a pretty shocking number.
Am I right?
And I say this because it seems like, on one hand, we're lacking solitude,
but on the other hand, we're constantly doing solitary things.
But I would argue
that our solitary activities as they are now are not structured,
and that's a problem
because when we do find ourselves with nothing to do,
we don't know how to handle that.
Without, you know, clapping your hands and agreeing with this -
you can just raise your hand in your heart -
how many people feel at the end of the day -
turn their cellphone off, finish their homework,
and they're just sitting in bed or about to get into bed -
that sort of collapse,
that "What am I going to do with my night now?
Should I call so and so?
Should I respond to this email.
Should I start getting in touch with someone?
Should I go bother my housemates?
Maybe they're having more fun than me.
Am I missing something?"
I see this as a problem.
I see this as we are disconnected from ourselves so much
that the one opportunity in the day that we get to plug into ourselves,
we immediately run away from it.
And this doesn't only happen when we're going to bed.
It happens, you know, if you're on the bus.
Who here rides a blue bus? Raise your hand.
Have you ever looked out and just seen 35 people all sitting like this?
(Laughter)
I'm fortunate: I get to ride the blue bus and the AATA, the Ann Arbor buses.
Nobody speaks to each other on the buses anymore;
everybody's like this,
sitting by themselves,
doing something,
but they're avoiding themselves.
And so when people ask me,
"What is meditation?
I can't clear my mind; I can't focus."
I say, "It's an opportunity to ask yourself how you're doing.
It's an opportunity to say to yourself,
'I'm dedicating this time to you today to hear what's going on on the inside.'"
You know, there was a rumor going around backstage
that I was going to wing this talk.
Everybody was saying,
"Oh, you know, the meditation guy's so zen,
he's going to step up top, he's just going to go off the cuff."
(Laughter)
And on one hand, that's kind of true.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But to say that, though, implies the mind.
It says that to go off the cuff or to wing it -
there's two implications to that, excuse me.
The first is that I'm using the mind to give this talk -
that somebody's standing up there
and he's just going to assimilate everything that happened today,
use what he's learned before
and start talking about it.
The other implication is that I'm unprepared.
And I have to tell you that both of those are untrue.
To start with the latter,
the preparation for this talk, at least for me, has been my whole life.
The readings we've done.
We've all taken tests before.
You don't get an A by studying the night before;
you get it by doing the work before.
For me, it's everything I've been through that led to this talk.
But most importantly, the last four years of my life,
I've spent at least two hours meditating every day.
That's number one.
Number two -
for the last two weeks, when I found out I was giving this talk,
I spent about four hours meditating every day.
So there's a different type of preparation.
But to address the former point, the point about the mind,
I think is almost more important.
And it's more important to me
because I'm not using the mind to give this talk.
The beauty of spirituality or the beauty of meditation
is we get to begin to move from here and begin to go to here.
Because when I step in this audience, actually, when I see you guys,
I'm not nervous right now,
I see - well, I can't really see anything, there's so many lights -
but I feel that, well, I know that there's about 1% of you who I know,
who I know intimately:
friends, my family,
people who I really love and care about
because I've been able to spend time with them.
There's about 10%, I'd say, who I know from living in the dorms, being in class,
who I know on a passing basis, who I care.
But the point of an event like this is so we can open up our hearts,
we can let the people who step on this stage inspire us,
which I think's hilarious that I was asked to give a talk at an event like this,
that's number one,
and number two, I mean, look at the room right now.
The point of an event like this is so when you do go home -
when you do have that moment at the end of the day
where you can stand there
and you turn off your cellphone,
you turn off your computer, like I said -
you don't feel that crunch.
You don't feel like "I didn't do anything productive today.
What's going to happen in the future."
You have ideas that you can begin to assimilate inside your heart.
It's almost without the mind.
And I was speaking to my mom's friend who's here today - her third TEDx event.
And she comes here specifically to be inspired.
But if you don't take that element to sit down with yourself,
if you keep tweeting about what you're doing and where you're at,
if you don't start to assimilate your experiences,
that time crunch happens.
Because you're sitting here but thinking about being there.
Once you start thinking about being there,
you think about what happened before you get there.
And so when I talk about meditation,
it's really this great opportunity to just say,
"Stop. Here I am.
What have I been through?
What do I want to go through?
And how do I feel right now?"
One of the reasons why we cherish our closest friendships
is because these are the people
who know what we're thinking even when we're flustered.
I mean, we all call our friends in times of need.
And you talk, you justify every part of the argument,
and then you say,
"No, man, you just don't like her."
Or "No, man. You've got to get over it.
You've got to go do something else.
Like, you lost, big whoop."
And they say something that we already know,
but we're so adept at lying to ourselves
or putting barriers up -
most of the time we don't even know what barriers we're putting up.
And what meditation and spirituality says is
"No. Stop.
Don't put the barriers up.
Work on the barriers.
Work on getting through to yourselves
that in any given situation you stop using your mind,
you stop using your intellect, your judgment faculties,
and you just start moving from the heart."
And I have 55 seconds - I'll be quick.
Again, it's such an honor to be here.
I'll end on this note.
Last week, I drove with a friend to Flint.
Somebody wanted to start meditating there,
and to begin our practice in meditation,
you have to start three days in a row
and sit with a preceptor, or somebody who's a teacher,
for a half hour every day.
And every night we went there -
this woman's a character; I love her to pieces -
she had so many questions for us,
but she kept saying, you know,
"Why would you sacrifice the time to do this?
How do you sacrifice the time to do this?
My daughters are in school; they're so busy,
this, that and the other."
All I'll say is don't be afraid to invest time in yourself.
Yeah, I'm taking sixteen credits this semester.
Yes, I have out-of-school obligations, family obligations,
the meditation obligations, things like that.
But before I began, the preceptor who started me said,
"You know, it's a two-hour-a-day practice."
He said, "It's a two-hour-a-day practice."
And I looked at him; I was like, damn, what am I going to do with two hours?
When do I have two hours to do this?
He said that the time you put in, you get back at least double.
And so whether or not your path is meditation
or it's yoga, going for long bike rides or anything like that,
start investing time into yourself
and I promise that you will get that time back.
Thank you so much, everybody.
It's been a blessing.
(Applause)