Michael Pollan
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
When was Buddhism invented?
Buddhism originated in northern India between the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.
Yeah, it's old.
And that's it.
You said 2,000.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then you were like, that's not right.
That's it.
All right, love you.
Love you.
Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness.
It is the only thing we truly know, the only thing we have certain actual first-hand experience of.
And yet we don't understand it at all.
We don't know what it's made of.
We don't know how it works.
We don't know why it exists.
And the closer we look at it, the weirder consciousness gets.
The more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail.
I find that so delightful that something so close could remain so mysterious that such a central question about the universe is happening inside of us all of the time.
Now, that's not to say we haven't tried to understand or that we haven't learned a lot from those efforts.