 So welcome to this month's depadaptation Q&A. I'm Professor Jen Berndell, the founder of the Depadaptation Forum, and I host these Q&As every month with someone who I invite to explore different dimensions of depadaptation or rather explore issues which I think are really important for the depadaptation community. So today I'm very, very happy to have Professor Henk Barendrecht join us and I met Henk, not through academia, but when I participated in one of his vipassana retreats last year and I discovered the importance of insight meditation in so many ways. So much so I've reached a point where I think it's really important to anyone who's doing any scholarly work to actually better understand their own minds. So Professor Barendrecht, Henk, it's wonderful that you're joining us today. Thank you very much. The pleasure is mutual. Super. So just a little bit of context, Henk. I mean, and for anyone who will be tuning in later and watching this, depadaptation as a concept and framework and now community involves people or invites people to consider the breakdown of this way of life as either likely now because of environmental pressures or inevitable or already occurring in some parts of the world, but to not then have that view to then sort of turn away from that trouble, but to actually find ways of staying compassionately, creatively, cleverly and responsibly engaged in trying to reduce harm. So that's the framework of depadaptation, the concept of depadaptation and that's the ethos as well of the people in the community. And for many people, it's a spiritual or it has a spiritual dimension to it because when you question the society you live in, which is what happens when you begin to look at where we're headed and the damage that we've done and that we are doing, it really, really does challenge you to then think about what's important, what's almost transcendent as well. So I'm really pleased you've joining us today to share your wisdom in many ways, Henk. So to start off with, I would love to hear a little bit of background because you were a professor in mathematics and I think neuro-psychology at the University of Nye, I don't know quite how to pronounce it. I was a professor of the foundations of mathematics and computer science. And I was not involved yet with neuro and mind. Okay, that came later. Can you tell me a little bit about your journey towards then being involved with the work on the mind and also your prioritization of working as a Buddhist teacher and a vipassana facilitator? How you move towards that? When about 48 years ago, I started to meditate, not immediately. I started with Zen meditation and then in California and then coming back to the Netherlands seven years later, I started to do seriously vipassana meditation. And after the first retreat, I saw the potential of meditation, the potential for peace in your own mind, peace with others, with the world. And I thought, this is very powerful. I would like to devote fully my time to this. But then I thought also, I started a successful career in mathematical logic. If people see that when you meditate, you stop your career, they will think, nothing for me, that's even dangerous. So I decided, let me do mathematical logic. Let me keep investigating things. And on the side, I keep meditating for PR reasons also because I love mathematics as well. And then 20 years later, I got the Spinoza Prize, which is the highest scientific prize in the Netherlands. And then I thought, now I can make the switch. I was 55 then. Now I can make the switch because people will not say that I wasted my time. And then I used part of the money of that prize to investigate meditation. Wow, that's really, I haven't heard that before. And it's really interesting to hear that you were conscious of the implications for people around you, I suppose, close to you, but also colleagues and beyond, about if you just said, wow, meditations where it's at, I'm just leaving my career completely. You wanted to retain those connections and that status. It sounds like in order to be able to reach out to people, to communicate to people about the benefits of meditation, when you say it's PR, it was so that they wouldn't think the meditation is just about hiding away somewhere. Yes, yes. And also it did help me with doing mathematics, with meditation you can reduce the stress of daily life, even before the climate crisis and other crisis. There is stress of daily life that's well known. So you can concentrate better and your mind becomes more flexible. So it did help me and I got prizes, so it worked out well. I see, so all these up-and-coming mathematicians would say, what's his secret and you would say, meditate. Yes, you could do also other things to concentrate. Even reading a book is already an act of concentration. Playing music or listening to music is an act of concentration. Meditation, and in particular vipassana, goes towards sustainable concentration because it looks deep in us. Are there hidden fears? Are there hidden desires? And those may disturb you daily life so that more often you're not in a concentrated mood. So vipassana is in-depth, sustainable and the concentration meditation of other types of meditation is the immediate concentration. So for what I didn't realize about vipassana insight meditation before I attended your retreat was that it's really about bringing attention to our feeling processes and our thought processes. So it was quite different from the kind of meditation I had been told about in practice which was much about, which was more about just finding finding peace in the moment and uncluttering the mind. So I see that now as I remember you talking about basic exercise one that then moving on to the next which is to then spot the thoughts like oh and label the thought and then notice if it was pleasant or unpleasant thought and then notice if there was craving or aversion towards or about that thought or it could also be a sensation as well. And I was wondering is has when you say that meditation has been useful in mathematics has it also do you think helped to observe that when you have an idea in mathematics the way you find an idea pleasant or unpleasant and if there's any aversion or craving to to that is there does it build that ability to look at your own thinking as you're engaging in intellectual work? Yeah this is a refined question to start with let me tell you that mathematics uses intuition a lot even more than rationality. We all are more or less rational and some professionals a little bit more but not much more than anybody. But mathematics is so complex that when we want to find a solution to a problem or a proof of a putative theorem it's way too large to think about it in a rational way. We have to follow our intuition and with our intuition we search even unconsciously and then when we sniff something useful that may sound pleasant may feel pleasant then we zoom in and then rationally we check it we do need rationality that for sure but intuition is as important as well I could give a lecture on mathematics for you but we will not change the topic because we may lose some people or I can do it another time. Okay thank you. What about between rationality and intuition? Yeah I hadn't heard that said before and that makes perfect sense because of complexity and how the human mind can process complexity and I think we've probably all had aha moments after leaving a problem going walking going cycling or waking up in the morning and then aha you know so that that relates to what you've just said. I advise my students if I may interrupt to have every day an aha we say in Dutch aha er lep needs according to the German so an aha experience. Okay even a little one that's fine and everyone is able by opening a book or to have a little even going to YouTube to Kurzgesagt in a nutshell you have your little aha er lep needs of learning something new there's so much in life and in the world even in the state of the world. Yeah so there's a the um it's this wonder it's this wonder of being alive this appetite for for experiencing life yeah so um thank you so I'm may I say one more thing about mathematics that it is not so much a quantitative science but more a qualitative science and that's unknown to the general public so the numbers it's almost an abuse of mathematics we are about qualities and to make it easy to imagine you know what's an equilateral triangle or angles of 60 uh I show my finger this is an equilateral triangle now there's a quality all the sides are equal no quantity is involved I mentioned the degree of 60 with the angles but that's an after fact or that the sum of the angles in the triangle is 180 while 180 is just a convention if you cut out of a triangle the three angles when you're in kindergarten and you put them next to each other they form a straight line wow that's special that's quality and that you call it 180 that's that's a convention I see yeah it's it's interesting that I mean the natural sciences rely on mathematics so much and within that field then obviously the natural sciences that comprise climatology as well and within climatology computer models which are so based on mathematics um are talked about as if they um tell you how reality is and will be and it's really interesting to see that some people who work in the field of climate modeling say no no no no don't there's this this is a lens this is a and and it's it's not like some uh pure truth about the situation but of course it's difficult then to to to have conversations about the climate climate reality in in the public sphere because um some people want to just say no the model is really accurate and therefore we must act and other people say well actually um we should look at say the paleo record and it's actually more worrying in terms of what it suggests how current temperatures should become so it's interesting to hear from you about about mathematics in that way but but Hank what I'm really interested in is the extent to which for you the philosophy and practice of insight meditation uh could relate or in your experience already does relate to this field what's now being called eco anxiety or climate anxiety um and if you have any any thoughts on that yes I prepared something to say about mathematical models oh yeah shall we come back to that later it's oh no no no no I'm I'm sorry I shouldn't have moved on I would be happy to hear your thoughts on on climate models and our mathematical models in general yeah models are models and in some cases the world fits very accurately on it and in other cases they fit in less accurately on it so there are climate skepticist or skepticist or skepticist you know what I mean they say it's not sure that the disaster will happen to us because it's a model and then the model is not linear and the predictability is not 100 percent you know that argument whether that's the wrong remark we should not ask is it sure that there will be a disaster coming we should ask is it sure that there will be not a disaster coming because if I make a bridge if I'm an engineering company and I make a bridge my clients want to be sure up to maybe one million or one trillions that when traffic goes off the bridge doesn't collapse now in that case we are in a not good situation we cannot say at all that there will not become a disaster soon arrive disaster soon you see what I'm trying to say yes and yes in legal terms you have to say do not start to speak from this side but just start to speak from the other side I've heard it being called I've been I've heard it being described as the burden of proof and where quite a lot of scientists think that the burden of proof that we're headed for societal collapse because of climate and environmental pressures is on those people who wish to start preparing for such an eventuality rather than the burden of proof being on those who say no that's doomism and so yeah the precautionary principle but also then just in as you say in engineering and construction is to is to try and make sure that things will not collapse the same issue was 50 years ago about smoking the tobacco industry kept saying it has not been proved for 100% that tobacco causes cancer no the question should be the other way around is it safe to smoke and finally the lost and it took 50 years and we don't have 50 years for the climate so but we should move the burden of proof the other side and that may help yeah that may help the good thank you and thank you for that and then and thank you for interjecting and bringing bringing us back to the question of models and the use of mathematics and such like and so yeah I wanted to hear about your thoughts on which which is now being recognized by psychologists as a as a thing with a name rightly or wrongly eco-anxiety climate anxiety some people have also called it eco distress affecting people of all ages from young people to to the elderly and and having all kinds of effects so for some it's a motivator and for other others it's not and it seems to be like it's going to be a companion for the people on this call and perhaps the people watching this video a companion for the rest of our lives um and increasingly so for other people who who wake up to the climate crisis so what's where does where do you think buddhist philosophy and meditation meditative practices come in on that first I would like to generalize the eco-anxiety because we do not only have an eco crisis we have a financial crisis we have an energy crisis we have a poverty crisis or rather the balance of who has money and who doesn't is not equal that's a definite crisis when eight people own as much as all the seven billion minus eight other people that's so um so there are many crisis do you mind I speak about also also about them absolutely because many I will not enter details but many people say that the climate crisis is the result of underlying malfunctions in our society which come about because underlying malfunctions or misunderstandings in our own psyche you know that we've all these are symptoms of deeper malaise right on because now I want to go to the even deeper uh crisis namely that life in general is a split a split like a dancer a female dancer can sit with one leg forwards and other leg backwards maybe you have seen that in the theater in dutch we call it an spaghat life is a split because on the one hand we like to take care of ourselves we have our hygiene we collect food we have shelter and on the other hand we are mortal so that's a tremendous split and many people have been writing about it and Nietzsche describes it as sitting on a tiger and we can be thrown off at any moment and we don't realize that we sit on a tiger so we better many people hide themselves from the truth but Nietzsche didn't want to do that he said I prefer to suffer uh and look at the truth and in some sense vipassana goes that way we want to know the truth but then there is an even more wider problem Buddha solved the problem of the fear of death by meditation but he solved a much bigger problem namely we want to be always in control and death is frightening because we are not in control of that but we are not in control of so many more things we may fall in love with someone and then that person doesn't want that's one issue but every day it happens that we encounter something in which we are not master of the things and vipassana teaches us to be at ease with that to make a long story short one stowa epictatus said it already give me the power to change what can be changed give me the patience to undergo what cannot be changed and give me the wisdom to distinguish those two yes yes so any so that that's helpful so yes in any life there is the the ups and downs and the the various different problems and we you started talking about all the different problems in the world inequality poverty financial crisis as well as environmental crisis but then there's the this original insurmountable stressful and a thing that we can be anxious about which is that we're alive and we know we're mortal we're going to die and also that we we are we experience ourselves as separate and therefore insecure and wanting to control and and even if things all seem perfect we'd still have that problem and and the vipassana meditation helps bring an attention to our inner worlds ox note the the notion of it also invites a different way of thinking about the nature of self and who we actually are i was wondering if you could say something on that yeah this so first of all very good summary you made but now again you jump a bit too much forward you're a very good student so you know what's coming i would like to intermittent something the fact that we cannot control everything we like to control is very fundamental and it will happen every day and we have to learn to get in in peace with that we better are right so vipassana has two goals namely bring down the daily stress concentration serenity that's the first one and the second goal is insight understanding the mechanisms of your own mind of the mind of others and mechanisms of the world and that's for long term or renewable sustainable peace so later i will describe you mentioned torred in the introduction i will describe basic exercise one that's for concentration to get serene and basic exercise two to get inside now i come to your question self we will get a different few on ourselves on ourselves we do exist but we do not exist as a fixed entity that's once and for always like this and it goes on in time because then certainly we have a problem when we have to die because what happens with this thing but actually it happens every day when somebody denies something i think i thought i had to write to also this fist has to collapse a bit so this self will be seen not as static but as dynamic and when we really are at ease with the dynamic fuel of self then we have released a big big tension maker stress maker i do want to hear about those basic exercises just because i i think you it's really important but i just want to say before we go to that we would love to have questions from deep adaptation forum participants so please do type your questions now into the chat box and then and then i'll come to you in about five minutes if there are questions so hank um yeah i think for people who know the passenger exists but haven't done it then telling us a little bit more about it those two basic exercises would be would be really helpful yes and the first basic exercise you will find also in zen and in all types even in transcendental meditation uh that is you choose a meditation object and we usually take the breath to be focused on but you can choose something else but let's keep it with this now by breath we do not mean the actual oxygen that goes into you and goes down because you cannot observe it you observe the breath as you can observe it and that's the belly that moves out and back so we say rising falling or some people breathes a little bit higher that's fine the chest is rising and falling so the breath is really the physical sensations of the body that are changing so that's the object to be observing now you do that rising falling rising falling in the beginning naming using words is useful because it keeps you with the exercise but the name is just the name when i say the taste of a mango it's a particular taste but the name is not so nice it's the actual mango you know that so after you can follow it for some time you try to do it nameless okay and you observe it now the human mind is so flexible that after doing this two three times you're already busy with your shopping list or with your to-do list or with the book that you're writing many people feel ashamed at that moment no need to feel ashamed this is creativity in you nevertheless for a few moments you were not or maybe even for five minutes you were not aware that period is called ignorance you do something and you do it even well without being aware remember driving in a city and you cross the bridge and you say hey i'm already at the other side of the Thames or whatever and i didn't realize i was driving over the bridge but you didn't make an accident so you did it well so one of the things is we like to have less moments of ignorance you know why because in these teeny moments we make important decisions and if in these teeny moments that is desire or aversion that we don't even know we may become a racist or we may buy the wrong car house or whatever so destroy the whole biosphere right yeah because there are a lot of ignorance ignorances in there now what do we do when we realize oh shopping list so then you smile you relax and you return let me repeat so basic exercise one is following the object then for sure you will get sidetracked and when you realize that develop a friendly attitude oh yes and you go back so each time when it happens to be sidetracked has a bonus in the bonuses you develop a little bit more friendliness general friendliness towards yourself towards others and the world so that's useful that has to be used and then you repeat at infinitum so you practice this and i'm not in favor of practicing i like to go to retreats when you do this for a week or 10 days you gain so much power that is hardly gainable when you do every day half an hour at home other people other teacher says well meditate at least five minutes even if when you're sitting on the toilet because five minutes of being aware is a gain so actually i do that also but you can do both but i would advertise retreating you heard it here first folks now all right this comes you down basic exercise one because you get more and more focused on on the object then comes basic exercise two which is typical for vipassana you observe the breathing it's very similar to basic exercise once even easier than basic exercise one you get sidetracked you don't know it yet you're still ignorant and then oh shopping list or oh bad mood i was in this morning and then you resmile relaxed and return and repeat so the only difference is that now you put your attention for a few moments basically let's say one two seconds to the visitor that was visiting you and taking you away from the meditation object and then you will see that you have many visitors that's all right one student said i have thousand and one visitor well you put them all in one bag and then that big bag is your big visit and you put it you don't you cannot destroy the bag you put it in the refrigerator and deal with it later one by one preferably and you can go back to your breath this is the basic two exercises what i found really helpful was when you uh distinguished between um on the one hand an experience or a thought that would be pleasant or unpleasant and what might be wholesome or unwholesome and how we might assume that something pleasant is wholesome and something unpleasant is unwholesome and and to actually bring attention to to that and not assume that i found it very useful to bring attention to what was happening in my mind with all those visitors and and also how much of my mental chatter and ramblings was um because i was averse to something or craving something but also after vipassana in normal so-called normal life um it helped me understand um how i how i am in the world when i read something on an email and in the news or i meet someone and have a conversation just to um yeah notice noticing is that pleasant is that idea pleasant unpleasant do i have any aversion to it or desire towards it um and so it's been that's why i said earlier i think it's it's almost like the pastner uh could be compulsory for anyone doing any scholarly work so they better understand what's going on inside their heads mindfulness training of eight weeks is kind of the beginning of vipassana and they do it now in elementary schools in in the united states in in italy and our people so what you're referring to is the classification of visitors and one very important visitor is the feeling tone of what comes to us something that come to us are pleasant and other things are unpleasant and we meditators should be like botanist biologists that describe everything that comes so flour nice smell a rose so you're writing your book rose has a nice smell put it away mushroom stinky the way you're writing your book stinky so with this care you look to all your visitors that will help a lot then you described you were a very good student last year jam you described the distinction between pleasant and wholesome pleasant and unpleasant is brought in by nature as a reward system for our behavior so food and sex is pleasant because nature wants us to be strong and to multiply to make a long story short right and we are conditioned by this but it's not always wholesome the hedonist mistake and we are all hedonists the hedonist mistake is to identify pleasant with wholesome then there are the calvinist and in holland we have a lot of calvinist and a little bit each of us is a bit of calvinist that thinks that unpleasant is wholesome because that purifies the soul that's all thanks for reminding us of that yeah that's also not the case hatred for example is unpleasant but it's also unwholesome but discern can be unpleasant and now come back to the topic of climate crisis discern for the climate is unpleasant but when you do it in an equanimous way it is wholesome so pleasant and wholesome overlap you know those mathematical drawings of overlapping sets the so-called Venn diagram definitely and for me that that has been my motivation with the deep adaptation conversation is to help people face something which is unpleasant which is but to try to find wholesome ways of engaging in it I want to go to questions now so I just want to say again I don't know why this is is this cultural or is it accidental but we often have more questions from from from men than women on these calls so please if you're if you do consider to ask a question of Hank but our first question having said that is terry over to you and your your question so there you go um thank you very much Dr very I'm bad at pronouncing names I'm sorry Hank thank you very much for this morning I'm enjoying this immensely I guess I'm veering a little to the analytic left brain side of the conversation but I just wanted to ask it seems obvious to me many times that science and technology as we know them as they come out of the modern era into the contemporary world they seem to have played I would say root causal roles not at least ethnic roles and bringing us into the crises we're facing for example four cycles of industrial revolution driven by science so my question is to what extent if that's true to what extent is it really even reasonable to think of science as the pinnacle of rationality having brought us to this outcome because we're certainly not in a rational place it seems so that's kind of my question to what extent are modern and contemporary science and technology even barely rational in light of the crises that they've at least contributed to well terry thank you for your question the point is that homo sapiens he or she is not rational he or she has some rationality but has also impulses that are much bigger than the ratio in many cases as a scientist and a mathematician you have to develop the rationality and the intuition but also the rationality to to overcome your greediness to prove a certain thing that you like to be true so that's the first thing then with successful science and mathematics we build tools but then the unwise human beings make use of the tools in order to control nature but control is always limited there can be legal limitations ethical limitations ecological limitations financial limitations and some things are sheer impossible so we have to learn that some things are not controllable and when we have learned it then we can change but it's not an easy task and i'm very happy that you gathered together to support this deep adaptation that we need to understand this as a human race thank you yeah within the deep adaptation forum there's a there's a discussion group on philosophy so there are a number of discussion groups on all kinds of areas food and agriculture therapeutic practices government policy education but also there's one on on philosophy and then terry's engaged in that feel it in your marrow and bone yes i i i mean you can ration i think even many politicians know rationally that we should do this but then still they do that because in their bones they want to be reelected that's disadvantage of democracy not that i'm in favor of another form but we have to realize that so hang on that issue it's um earlier this year i read the taotei ching for the first time in my life and i'm 47 years old and it was like i can't believe i've got to this stage in my life and i haven't read this and it's also how i felt about your vipassana retreat last year and so i'm wondering how how do we should we be concerned or interested in how to spread awareness of this philosophy and these practices or or is that not a wise way of of being right now um because there is we have economic systems and political systems like you've just said which uh seem to be pushing us in the wrong directions um and and yet it's very clear to you and many other people that there's another way of being there's another way of experiencing self and other and world and universe um yeah so looking around it seems like there's so much of those moments of ignorance just what what what should we do what what short remark on the taotei ching and on meditation and buddhism lautei was on the same level as buddha but he didn't tell how he reached that level but he did something else he described how one should rule a country with that state of mind buddha on the other hand he had an algorithm to reach the state of serenity and the sustainable serenity but he didn't say what you have to do then he said enjoy your life but lautei so together they are very powerful and that's why in china buddhism and taoism came together and fused to chan the buddhist form of meditation that later becomes in now this was just the introduction of what you said now your question is what yeah what is your question we should learn from this right no my question is um you you'd mentioned and it's it's difficult to not criticize politics economics modernity um because it's what's causing so many of the problems and so um there's this incredible wisdom as well as the the algorithms you mentioned algorithm of of meditation and is it is it a valid conversation for us to have how do we help people become aware of this philosophy and these practices in pursuit of not just trying to help them in their own suffering but actually to have some sort of collective almost political impact through spreading these ideas and practicing i would go to education start at young age to make children realize that they have a mind state an italian colleague he teaches three-year-olds and you may think that mind state is one of the visitors by the way one of the five types of visitors and you may think that it's quite abstract for a little child to understand what is a mind state no little john was angry and the teacher ah little john you have an angry mind state later he was happy you have a happy mind state so little john knew what mind states were three years old he came home he did something naughty his mother was angry mom you're having an angry mind state the mother was flabbergasted and asked where he learned it and he said at mindfulness in school and the mother is now also taking mindfulness so that should happen more or yeah may that happen more i mean i should not say sure but may that happen more and can i just pick up on that you say may that happen more not assured because there's a you have a you you stay away from ideas of either obligation or impact at scale is that right there's sort of a deep acceptance in you no exactly yeah it's a good good point very good point in my heart i would say this should happen more but the whole theory of meditation is that you should not you better not enforce things because that is not going to work but the deep wishes that this happens more and i'm giving retreats or online retreats the end of october there will be another online retreat which costs a bit usually my retreats online cost only two euros for the contribution to zoom so and and and the rest is generosity so i'm willing to do it for you for under four for yeah i will um i'll put in links at the in the both in the event page but also at the bottom of the youtube video so everyone here you can you can follow up with hank if you're interested or tell people and friends colleagues and three-year-olds you know now you haven't you haven't worked that one out for three-year-olds yet hang so it's the british parliament recognizes mindfulness now there was a big report on that so i see that's good news i think that's one of the few parliaments that was so wise they didn't act to that last year but anyway they have that belief in mindfulness i say so we're going to have to have a bigger population size sample size to because at the moment that's not proving statistically useful positive outcomes so um i wondered hank we've only got a few minutes and so are there things that you think are really might be useful to share could be useful to share for people in the deep adaptation community so this is a community of people who want to stay compassionately active creative in the face of societal collapse whenever that may come and of course in some parts of the world it's happening already um yeah are there any thoughts before we we part i would suggest that you but also your sister how should i call it uh group what was the name extinction uh rebellion that so-called laws and the laws are advices to the world if you behave according to that then things will go better not that you have the legal support for it but it's something like the human the Helsinki human rights declaration and maybe later countries will follow it if you have a list of readable well formulated laws that are good for the extinction rebellion but now back to you keep forgetting those were deep adaptation there are also could be slogans uh like Shaila Catherine a good American teacher of vipassana she calls it focused and fearless so we have to have easy sounding deep words for this to grow so i'm i'm being now a pr person here right so that's one thing to advise then education yeah and then i'm happy to join you in another configuration to to make more plans but let's start with these two also due to thank you there's a narrative and messaging group uh in the deep adaptation forum so i'll i'll put a link into this and say at the end invitation to to have deep and powerful slogans which people can relate to quickly i'll give it some thoughts as well um any any other comments otherwise we've we've come up to the hour and um so it's otherwise it's it's it's it's time to say goodbye okay so good thank you very much um Hank indeed and i really look forward to either well hopefully in person one day um and prior to that then online experiencing your vipassana uh once again so thank you everyone for joining and um i wish you well thank you bye bye bye bye