Richard Taite

I mean, one is,

the fascinating finding, um, that I think has been taught in indigenous cultures for thousands of years.

So it's not new and contemplative cultures that look inward with prayer or meditation have also uncovered this reality, which is that while we may think who we are as these bodies that are doing the meditating or praying, um,

that in fact, who we are, if you just put that in quotes, is much bigger than the body, certainly much broader than the brain.

So I think the thing that connects the plane of possibility, which I'll describe in a moment, to this question of where do we go from here, bringing people some kind of sense of an inner compass that will help guide them in these VUCA times

bring a feeling of well-being and belonging that you you are doing in your centers um the connection i mean this is going to sound strange and when the pathway toward this was coming up i never knew where it would lead um and never i never would have thought it would have led to where it ultimately led but but um you know originally i was just trying to uh

I was a young academic and I was just trying to have a bunch of my old teachers and their teachers.

And I brought 40 scientists basically together from my research training years together in a room.

And I said, you know, what's the connection between the mind and the brain?

And everyone could say something about the brain, but no one had a definition of the mind.

And so back then, 1992, you know, I was kind of struck by that because I was just a young kid

professor and i figured somebody from psychiatry or psychology or all these different fields that had something to do would would say what their definition of mind was and no one had it so they were really getting kind of upset with each other because they were trying to describe what their life's work was about studying the mind but we're kind of i think shocked to realize no one said what the mind actually is so i asked them to come back one more week and in doing that um

I had to spend that week just like mad trying to figure out what am I going to say to these 40 teachers of mine, now colleagues of mine, about why we should meet to discuss what's the relationship with the brain.

On the one hand, this organ in the head,

and its connections with the body.

And this thing called the mind, are they just the same?

Is it true what Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, that the mind is just what the brain and the head does?

Well, that didn't seem like a big enough story to answer lots of questions about our mental lives.

So ultimately it's a long story, but the short version is when an anthropologist talks about the mind, she's talking about something happening in a culture

When a sociologist talks about mental experience, they're talking about what happens in a group.