Again, when I was studying this at Stanford, when I was studying philosophy of mind, we learned that actually that whole school of behaviorism that dominated American academic psychology for 50 or 60 years can be refuted with a joke. It’s tough when a whole system can be refuted with a joke, but […]

    In a similar fashion, Darwin spent about 25 years in very meticulous, rigorous, careful observation of biological phenomena. Of course, in the Galapagos, we all know about that, that no, it wasn’t just the Galapagos; he was doing years of study, observing, observing, observing. Then in 1859 he came up with his great […]

INTRODUCTION: Alan Wallace is not a typical monk. He’s a monk who cannot sit still in one place. So even while he was a monk, he went on to get a degree in physics. Then he went on to study neurosciences and psychology, and eventually he got one of those PhD thingies, as some of […]

  QUESTION: People are saying that life is more complicated and more stressful now, and I believe it. I don’t have anything to measure it against. And also the same with war, that people go to war and they come back having experienced things that they might not have lived through in other wars. There […]

  I’m going to stop, actually, at this point, and take a few questions. We have some time for questions, and then we’ll stop for the evening. Obviously, you can see that I’ve just gotten started. (laughter) I hope you’ve just gotten started. I’m not joking. Because this doesn’t stop. It’s called your life, and […]

    So I go in there, and I knew them all because it was a small community and everybody likes each other. But I was, of course, terrified. It’s like a lot hangs in the balance. Somebody says, “What’s this ‘he who dies before he dies does not die when he dies’?” This is […]

    So learning, and out of that learning, growing; and out of that growing, healing, which in my vocabulary, the way I define healing is coming to terms with things as they are. Coming to terms with things as they are. Very different from curing. There are very few cures in medicine, but the […]

    Even if there’s something going on, even if you’re in pain from your lower back and you’ve had it for a long time, or even if you have cancer at the moment, or you’re a cancer survivor, or you have heart issues of one kind or another, whatever it is… the sum total […]

  There are now wonderful studies that are showing that that actually impedes or reduces any objective measure of performance. That doing two things at once detracts from the quality of either of the one. Doing five things at once, or being that scattered in your mind – you don’t even have to be doing […]

  Or another way to put it, sometimes, maybe – no offense meant, but “How did I get born into this family?” or “Who are all these crazy people? Why am I the only sane person?” You know, when you’re in a family, no one else can know the kind of genetic disease of that […]