Transcriber: Carlos Arturo Morales Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
This is where we live, Planet Earth.
It's a rather small planet in a very large universe,
but we care a lot about this planet
because it's frankly the only one that we have.
We are not very good at living in harmony with this planet,
or with each other on this planet.
Actually, we're rather busy, seemingly, destroying the only home that we have.
We're also rather busy killing each other,
spending large chunks of our budgets and our resources
on war and weapons.
Half of us live in poverty, on less than 2 euros per day.
One in eight of us is chronically undernourished.
Some of us are doing very well:
85 individuals own as much wealth as the poorest
3.5 billion people on the planet, which is half of us.
We're seemingly depleting the resources on the planet as fast as we can
and leaving a bit of a polluted mess behind.
We're a little confused about what to do about this.
We don't really even agree on what the problem is.
We're not very good at paying attention, a lot of us don't.
We're not very good at listening to each other.
A lot of us are afraid of saying what we really feel
and what we really think.
So, what can we do?
How can we possibly start acting more intelligently together.
Where can we start?
What should we do?
Well, we could start right here, right now,
with a fundamental ability that all of us have
of how we make sense out of things.
Something is here, we're living in some kind of reality.
We're not totally sure what it is.
We're certainly trying to find out and we have some excellent theories,
but even the most advanced scientific theories
Quantum mechanics, string theory, eleven dimensions,
parallel universes, entanglement.
We're not really sure which ones will end up being the right ones.
But even if we don't necessarily understand
the ultimate nature of reality,
we can say some definite things
about the way that we make sense of it.
Something happens, there are events, processes going on.
We perceive them through our senses and then through our nervous system.
For example, photons hit receptors in my eyes
and nerve signals will send them to my brain
and my brain will try to construct objects
of what supposedly am seeing.
And it will fill in some of the blanks of the things I didn't actually see,
but which I thought I saw.
I attach words to the things I experience:
this is the floor, this is a screen.
I can talk about it.
We can construct theories,
bodies of knowledge about what we think we know.
And we can end up deciding what it means.
And then we can respond to what that means.
This is called abstraction, this process.
Here, I use abstraction as a verb, as something that we do.
We abstract, we move from what is real
further and further away into what is symbolic.
And we do this so much, so often and in so many layers,
that we often will forget that we're doing it,
and we might forget what was there in the first place.
We might think that our ideas are reality,
and they aren't.
Even if you're very smart and your ideas are very good,
they're still ideas.
"The map is not the territory."
It's very useful to make maps of how the world is laid out
and we can use those maps for navigating through the world.
But the moment that you forget that they're just maps,
then you're likely to get lost.
Your GPS will not always bring you to the right place.
But it's this ability to think abstractly and to make maps of the world
that has made us humans the most advanced species on the planet.
At least, we think so.
We examine the world around us, we try to understand it,
gather knowledge.
We use this for communicating to each other,
to teach and to discuss what really is there
and what's going on and what we are going to do.
And this is also what allows us to create technology
which allows us to influence and transform the world around us.
It's however also this ability to abstract which makes us a little bit crazy,
sometimes.
We take things literally, as if they're exactly like we say they are
or like they look like they are.
We oversimplify things
and then we act on those oversimplifications.
So, a lot of our problems come from that,
but how can we start moving beyond that?
Well, we can be aware that this is going on for one thing,
that a lot of our problems are coming from oversimplified abstractions.
So, we can be aware of it and what else?
Well, we can realize that words
are not necessarily the things they are talking about.
Words are very useful,
I'm using words right now to talk to you.
We could say that words are like pointers that point to something.
If I talk about the moon,
it's like I'm pointing to the moon with my finger.
However my finger is not the moon,
you need to follow the finger to look at the moon.
And that's not the moon either, that's a picture of the moon.
A lot of confusion and conflict disappears
once we're able to access the more silent level of our awareness,
the more nonverbal direct experience through our senses,
being quiet, paying attention,
observing, listening,
feeling.
And the thing is that if you can stop and pay attention,
there's a space, there's a moment
where you can choose how to respond.
If you are aware of both what you're perceiving from the world
and you're aware of your own stored information
and thoughts and feelings and knowledge,
you can choose what it means and what to do about it.
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space lies our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
It doesn't matter how horrible the things are that happened to you.
Viktor Frankl was a holocaust survivor,
he was in a nazi concentration camp during the Second World War.
Most of his family members died in Auschwitz.
And yet, he chose to use his experiences
to create a philosophy of choice and freedom.
Nelson Mandela said it too:
"No one can take from me the ultimate freedom,
the freedom to decide how I will respond to what happens."
Mandela was 27 years in prison in isolation for political reasons,
forced to do hard physical labor everyday
and yet he created something very positive from that.
We don't always control what happens in our lives,
we might not even always control what emotions we have about it,
but we always have the opportunity to choose what it means
which then will influence how we will respond,
how we'll act and how we will then feel about that.
And your life is mostly the result
of how you've responded and how you've acted.
If you've been fired from your job and your car just broke down,
and it's raining and you have a cold,
and your mother in law is coming visiting tomorrow,
it doesn't matter how long the list of bad news is,
you always have the chance of deciding what that means.
You can make it really bad or you could make it good.
The situation and the circumstances might be exactly the same,
but your choice will create a different outcome.
Many problems in the world
are the result of fixed negative conclusions
that we've made about each other
and we don't really work very well together if we're all reacting
to simplistic pictures and labels that we have in our minds
that don't really correspond to reality.
Reality is fluid, always in motion.
Reality has many nuances, it's never just black and white.
Life is complex.
The current world is mostly the result of abstract ideas in action.
Sometimes it's the result of fixed negative ideas that collide.
But our accomplishments also come from our abstract thinking.
Imagine if instead of fixed ideas, we can move beyond the words,
beyond fixed ideas, beyond our own belief systems
and we can deal a little more with what actually is there, together.
"Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field."
I will meet you there.
If we can all be aware
of our own ideas and the ideas of others,
without having to instantly judge them
or take them as reality,
or react to them,
we can be free to make better choices.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)