Richard Taite

And so we teach together and I just teach from this interpersonal neurology space.

He's a deep scholar of Buddhism, you know, and as well as a psychologist.

And so we just have so much fun to see the consilience, common ground between

what he's learned in his own years as a as a deep person he's one of the main people brought you know mindfulness to the west he's actually john cabot's in his first teacher you know uh in this area or one of the teachers yet john also had a zen teacher um so anyway so it's been fascinating so that you know that experience as i've reflected on it since speaking to jack you know helped me try to look at the neural correlates of identity

And why, you know, a kid who's almost 20 getting on a horse, this terrible accident happens, his head is banged for like 100 yards, you know, on gravel, you know, would temporarily just dismantle certain areas of the brain, including an area called the default mode network.

And...

you know, and, and so what we'd learn later on, this was now whatever, when, well, when I

When that happened, it was like 1977.

But, you know, later years, decades later, we'd learn this area of the brain gives you this sense of an individual identity.

So in this book called Intra Connected, what I ultimately did was took the horse accident and said, like, what in the world happened there?

Like, what is identity that if you knock your head around for 100 yards, you know, you will lose it?

and then when you're MacArthur's it comes back but even after it came back and this is what I said to Jack it had this lightness of

experience almost like milan kundera's you know title that book the unbearable lightness of being and i never took it really very seriously so when people would call out my name hey dan inside of me i'd be like laughing my head off because i i i knew that that's of course this convention we have call me dan whatever and i'm this body's called dan but it was such a superficial

Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing.

You know, I don't know how Jack knew to ask.

And, you know, I didn't that was, you know, opening up something I never really talked to anyone about.

I always thought it was just some thing that happens and thank God I'm alive or maybe it was an existential issue.

And certainly those things could be true, too.

But, yeah, it worked out OK.

What I found in my own life too, because that accident was a long time ago, what I found is that this wheel of awareness practice that I do every morning, I do it like religiously every day, when my colleagues, my patients, my students, when they do the wheel regularly, what happens when you distinguish pure awareness from the thing you're aware of,