 Welcome back everybody to our third and final day of our 39th annual conference here at the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, our first fully online one. This is your president Andy Gervage speaking to you on our third morning. And I'm coming to you from Portland, Oregon. I'd like to start as we have every session with a land acknowledgement Portland, Oregon. We have a lot of arrests on the traditional village sites of tribes, including the Multnomah, the Kathlamat, the Clackamas, the Chinook, the Tualatin Kalapua, the Malala and many other tribes and bands. As the original caretakers of this land we wish to begin by acknowledging their presence their dignity and continued struggle for respect for restoration and reparations. I'm here because they were here first. We are here able to speak with you today from this space because they were here in displaced to a large extent from this lab and so it's the desire of this organization and of me personally to do what we can to help rectify that one way is really really attending to inner transformations and taking so much of what we've learned and shared with each other over this weekend, and making sure that it's moving down into the body and that we are just in a cognitive space of receiving that that we're also in a place of integration, being sensitive to the very powerful and also very subtle energies that have been moving through and in inhabiting this conference and so this morning's session is absolutely geared towards that. This is a slightly different setup than some of the other sessions we've been in everyone is here because we want to have some interactivity and we're going to be doing some breakout rooms and things. And so you are all in just a regular zoom room that probably looks a lot like what you remember and have experienced in other zoom meetings. And so if you could do us a favor and make sure that you stay muted. If you have questions or comments please go ahead and put them into the chat there will be a time for group sharing and participation a little bit later and we'd like to still manage that because of the amount of people that will be in the session. Mostly through the chat. And there will be a time if you want to speak directly to Gertrion or others where that will be will make that available as well and we are going to do some small breakout sessions where you will be speaking to one another but during the main session if you can please keep your microphone muted. That would help eliminate any crosstalk noise that would sort of disrupt the session. Excuse me as far as your camera. That's up to you we are also broadcasting this to our Twitch channel. And so if you two things if a bandwidth becomes an issue and things are becoming glitchy maybe kill your camera for the time being until you go into the breakout rooms because that would help a little bit as well and if you'd like to maintain privacy and not have your image and name broadcast out on to our Twitch channel. I think about that as well but your camera being on is optional for you but we do request that you turn your microphone off for now. There is a live captioning button on the bottom right that is not all the way the right is kind of in the middle of your screen if you would need captioning services and you would benefit from those. If that would make the panel more accessible to you then please do click on that. As we talked about Marjory yesterday these captions are not perfect they're 80 to 90% perfect and can sometimes be extremely distracting and so if you find them distracting go ahead and leave them off as well. Since we are in a zoom room you actually do have the capacity to change your name. So if you'd like to please keep your name as close to the name you registered with so we can do control of security for the room but if you'd like to go ahead and add your preferred pronouns to your name as well. You just have to click on the right next to your name that more button and you can rename yourself and add that. Okay now to our session. So excited to have Gertron sing Kalsa here with us I'd like to introduce him briefly and then we'll jump right into it. Gertron is going to guide us in a simple but powerful breath meditation to bring us into the stillness, the presence of stillness and joy and then connect us with our own hearts. And then with all the nature of which we are always a small but essential part, then he's going to share ideas on personal embodiment stillness and the nature of becoming a show we are deeply connected to one another and to the entire cosmos through his own experience, the experience of others, and these meditative techniques you will reach joy, help us reach joy stillness and presence, perhaps remind us of how we need to connect to nature in a time when so many of us feel disconnected. We have a brief bio about Gertron and then personal anecdote and then we will shift it over to him Gertron sing Kalsa PhD is an affiliated scholar at Chapman University in Orange, California. There he collaborates with the Institute for Quantum Studies on projects from leading edge applications of quantum foundations and the nature of consciousness and our ability and excuse me our capacity as human beings. He has worked with Chapman's Fish Interfaith Center since 2013 contributes to original research and meditation breath and wellness, he's developed several global training programs and meditation. It's application to leadership wellness and personal transformation. He's the premier trainer for practitioners or the yoga awareness since 1969. He's an advocate for breath for breath walk to integrate meditation walking eco immersion and engagement with nature is a wonderful book called the 21 stages of meditation that you should check out we'll drop a link to that in the chat later as to his site, Gertron.com. He's been a personal he's been a dear friend and a mentor of mine for the past 10 years. He's been intimately involved with this organization, some of you who joined earlier heard Richard Choket mentioned his affiliation with the organization and speaking to us at a conference which was put together and inhabited by Richard and Brian real our former president Gertron has had such a profound influence on Brian's life as well and so the past, you know, 10 years of this organization and its leadership and its direction and its focus have been infused with the wisdom and the compassion and the joy that Gertron brings to the table and and it's absolutely ship the and change the course of my life and change the course of the direction of this organization, both with myself and with our former president, Dr real. And so I thank you for being here so sorry and I appreciate your friendship and leadership so much. And with that, we are going to turn it over to you, Dr Gertron St. Thank you. You said it all. Of course I prefer to under promise and over deliver. But in this case, it's actually each of us that are delivering for a self is kind of an experiential sandwich, where we have one type of experience that we'll start with in just a couple minutes, which is a meditation that, well, make your own experience. But throwing yourself in and put aside whatever else is going on and all those lovely thoughts that all of us have and very deep and lovely and precise ways in just, as we say, immerse, immerse into it, and let the immersion itself evolve a kind of experience of vocabulary in you. Afterwards, we'll go and we'll have a few words have you extract a few phrases. I think it's an honor to share, and it's an honor to share these few things that I will, but it's exciting. My core thing is always. It is amazing to have awareness. It's a gift that we all share breath. I probably taught a million people are so over the years, many years, you know, for in Latin America from the tip of South America, the top of North America, Europe, Asia, all over the place. One thing we definitely share breath, we don't have that the conversation doesn't progress. But since it's so fundamental, the teeniest change in breath, the slightest change in pattern, the engagement of awareness with that can create a profound adjustment inside. So if you want to bridge the inner in the outer the inner ecology in the outer, if you want to be in dance at the borderland between the global and the local breath is a lovely way a fast ramp to make a shift. So it doesn't take years and years of practice, years and years of practice are recommended. But I've always wanted to find something that match the time we're in. We have many transitions as people have said, what's different as we're connected the tribes can reconnect across time, people across the world. And importantly, we're having breakthroughs in the science side, and many ways in all these different types of breakthroughs are starting to talk and be in the same room, and it's accelerating everything. So as we open the keys to life and genetics and all of that. We have to equally open the keys to the heart. When these two come together, then I think many of the visions that people here have expressed and that I'd love to hear in the conference will progress the best they can. We can't force it, but we can be it, and we can be with the flow. So that's my orientation for today and I'll show you a slide show. The slide slides, not too many that give you kind of a core idea of how nature itself has awareness. We have the awareness. What is the dance what is the rhythm between them. So let's explore it together. So we're going to start with an actual meditation we're going to breathe and the breath is going to be through the nose. And we're going to do it in equal segments as I'll describe in the video. And just throw yourself into the space that happens and we'll go to the breakout room, share for a few minutes what the experience was, and then we'll go on from there. So, if we could queue up the first meditation, let's all do it together. Here we go. We all need little joy and energy during this time. And there's a lovely thing using breath work. It's powerful, especially if you combine it with a sense of focus and pattern and then take that with movement. So pattern, focus and movement. And when you do that, you start becoming aware of your patterns in a fact. You can repatter your patterns. So here's a simple example of the power of a breath work and how it can apply to you in your day. It opens the gate of the heart and for joy. You can do this in nine minutes. You can repeat the nine minutes if you like twice. Just keep it in the sequence. So I'll show you what it is. We're going to do a movement that looks like I call it catwalk. Because it's funny. It's like a cat. So you move your shoulders a little like swimming, but kind of like cats. So we do eight beats this way, inhaling in eight segments. And then we exhale through the mouth for four beats and hold for one, hold for one, and then begin again. We repeat that pattern. That's focus, breath, pattern and movement. Then we switch and we bring all the results of that with a very simple, calming hand position, hand mudra. Relax in front of the heart with the thumbs up and then you simply keep the eyes a little bit open looking down. And listen to the music that just lets you glide yourself along. After we focus on that way, mindfully, present, noticing what's happening. Then we relax even further. Relax your hands down into the lap or on the knees. And then we change the music again where you allow yourself to feel spacious, connected. The aliveness of life flowing through you as you open up that gateway to the day to be your best self and your most elevated self. Let's do it together. Here's how we start. So you hear the music begin. Now just inhale and then as you exhale bring your hands in a simple lock. First joints, thumbs up and bring yourself to your heart. Eyes a little open looking down and just meditate here at the heart. Calm breath. And as you listen to the music, be attention to your heart. Become present and very mindful of your sensations, your senses, your energy. Now continue to meditate as you come into your heart and into your center. Let your hands relax into your lap over your knees. And let yourself expand. Let yourself just drift, open, open to the world. Hand shake between you and the world flowing together. Meditate calmly. Go deep and go far. And now at the end and consolidate all that you've gained and all that you've changed. Inhale up, turn left and right. Exhale and one more time. So in about nine to ten minutes you can in fact repattern. You can refocus and you can uplift and you can open up the gateway of the heart to feel a little bit more joy, a little more aliveness and a lot more intention to the patterns that you create each day. You can repeat that twice. So about nine minutes, nine minutes, eighteen minutes, a little relaxation, twenty minutes, something to help you. I look forward to sharing with you much more about breath work and the amazing effectiveness of that. Especially of all the different kinds of breaths that we can use and all the different patterns that we have. A special one called the master breath. So you can really learn how to easily shift. Even a short time in your day or longer practice if you want to go deeper and further. Gautran at Gautran.com. Have a great day. You know, I think that this conversation of what you call intersectionality really makes my heart sore. I always think that the change happens the most kind of with the boundary. You know, there's a boundary in ecologies and a lot of change happens there. There's a boundary in dialogue where we earnestly come together across our particular bubbles of the world. And we seek to ask, what is the right question? And then we don't just pose the question when we are the certain dance between these two areas in the boundary. We allow the question to reveal itself. We can't get beyond frames and have no mind moving or anything else, but we can create a moment. It reminds me of Victor Frankel, a psychologist. When he said, well, between stimulus and response, there's always a point of stillness in which we have a choice we have a freedom, we have an experience of enacting our free will and embodying that sense into our action in the world. Rumi who has almost a love relationship with that which is beyond talks about it as a guest coming in and embodying into the heart and into our life. So there's a sense of liveness of aliveness while being alive because being alive is not a big deal. You're alive and then you're not. You and I can experience aliveness. There's something about that that brings out our greatest creativity, our ability to listen, our ability to connect and even to merge, to feel at least, that we are joined in a way that I don't make a list of. I don't just categorize. And for that moment, it's a very precious thing. So this first meditation, I see in your chats, yes, energy is moving. There's a place it's about flow. And sometimes we don't flow as well because things are out of balance. We're too busy in our mind. Some would say meridians are blocked different ways of thinking about it. And then we come to a place where we suddenly shift that. And at least for a moment, we put our toe into that boundary between the local and the global in the personal and the vastness. And they're not fighting each other. These things exist like a jazz band of infinity, jazz of cuddling we used to call it cuddling just means awareness. So awareness in my experience has a kind of special place, but it's not just contained in the neurons. It's part of nature itself. And that has fascinated me since I was the tiniest little kid. In Canada, with my grandmother who immigrated escaped actually from the purges in Russia. We would sit there and she say fly with the crows. And I would immerse in the nature from that small time to later. When I was walking in the woods of Oregon. The labs of engineering and school and mathematics, the beautiful pleasures of poetry that comes from mathematics in the way it plays in combines allows incredible experimentation. I always remember the outer lab is necessary to share something like we saw in that beautiful film of gathering. You see little footprints of the way change happens so that we can understand it in an external way and share it. But also, we have an equally valid internal experience. Trillions of intersections between our neurons billions of primary neurons. All of these things create a dance. So the goal for me is not to reach an attainment that's far beyond to go some other place. I find that what is awareness and who we are isn't some sense, but right here with feet on the ground in our culture in our time in this family, and at the same time. Everywhere. And nature itself shows that same signature. Beyond many particular philosophy tradition metaphysics and that there is breath. There is the energy and flow. So that's what these two meditations are that we're doing today to give you a comparison and ask you to explore that for yourself, and to see what you can learn and what we can share in these two experiences. So what I'd like to do with our time today and to solve your time is to go actually to a slideshow. It's only eight slides so it's not too long. But I'll give you kind of a core idea. When I say the real gift of being alive the gift of infinity of God, whatever you'd like to say is this ability to have agency in the ability to have choice. Just don't imagine you control everything. You're in a dance in a relation in a stream in a lineage. We're in a certain moment. So whether you go to philosopher like Jasper who says there are axial moments where the entire context of the waiver interacting changes. We're here I think I would just say I am an intersectionality in between this and that. The roles of Chapman is exactly that to go between the quantum physics, the interface center, the sense of psychology, the neuroscience, hard to do because our stories in our labels are very different when we get deep into any expertise. So we need an ability to get to a stillness and to understand the nature of each of our minds and our tendencies. And then we can share in the most profound and beautiful way. It's like love. When you finally see someone I live still lives in love. There's a process in which you kind of forget yourself. And then you come back out. And yet, there's a uniqueness to that self that always abides with us. So let's take a look at this slide show. This is just to introduce and say that besides breath being universal for me. There is a dynamic between what I'll call parts and holes holes are irreducibles. And if you in tune to this, you can find a perspective, mainly exploring it, both with meditation and in the labs in physics both ways. We're starting to gain a new perspective on nature itself. The nature of nature and how we're all connected. So this is why we're going to kind of try this breath work we just did and went on the second one call I call it a master breath, because it adjusts you into a beautiful way you're nervous system, your cognition. And it goes into the dance between the parts and the holes. And that really gives you ability to feel healing intuition joy, even prosperity because you continue to make wise choices. And to finally realize not just the, what let's call it the true self in the heart where you sense your personal self, but also your unique self. So here's the next slide. Here I'm saying look, our intuition is there that we have a profound connectivity and holism. Next slide. Next button. But mostly from trying to go between the intersection of science and shared things we can look at together. Science is as many people here have said, starts by saying wait a minute, mostly we reduce things in the parts and then we reconstruct them. So cloud is a bunch of molecules and dust and water and we can make a very good model from that, you know, reductinism has its day and has a lovely use actually. And if only you study things by sampling them, engaging them, breaking them apart, breaking up an egg and just staring at the shells, you might never know there's a chicken is it takes time to evolve that. And so we're usually told, well, you can't even sample you can't sense anything without disturbing it. True. That's one way. That's called a von Neumann measurements a hard measurement. It's a hard way of sensing. It's coming up to your love at the end of the day, full of lists, you've got a list. Oh, you're entering your x or your this I have that to do. That's like a hard measure it's a sample that puts us in a certain constraint like we've been talking about. So in science, that was pretty much the way we've made amazing discoveries. But now, next. There's a change of foot. This is where we've been. You can see all the local little blue microscopic parts, be parts inside of us to but this is parts we can experience outside. And those push themselves up into that larger hole so we make an emergent hold out of the complexity in the interaction between all of our parts. Next. What we now have discovered is, we actually have ways to measure that do not disturb the system enough to break it apart. And we can measure it again and again. There is an ability to say, wait a minute, there is such a thing as wholeness, a whole a state a situation of wholeness that is literally not break down a not able to be described by any collection of algorithms from parts. The sense of wholeness is something very new. Intuitionally from whitehead philosophers, all the way to the Greeks, there's always that intuition of us, but to be able to actually find it and share it in the science. That's new that started in the 60s. And that's what we're seeing here. The whole, as a whole, without breaking it down, actually can influence across all the parts at once. In parts it takes time like squeezing it to. Squeeze it from here to here, move this meridian to here. But there's another thing, another process that's absolutely natural, we all have. You don't get it in a special place except maybe realizing it in the dance of your heart. So, next slide. So, along with this comes this idea that everywhere we go at all scales. There is this kind of image we use of a yin and yang, where they're complimentarity. It's not one or the other. It's not a fight. There's a kind of a dance and it makes up our experience and our capacity to sense both the local and this global. And in that dance, we get awareness in a sense of self in the real sense. Next. There we go. So now I just showed in the back of this we're talking about the yin and yang, the two parts here that we're looking at is the bottom up wholeness, bottom up into wholeness and wholeness down. Next. So this is a static image of that same process where you can see kind of on the light side over there the one that we can easily see like when the lights are on. We can see the direction of the parts, the forces, our roles, all the particulars that are beautiful to attend to. We can get that our senses help us do that. And yes, we play with our senses and we have all the illusions of course we learn how to handle that conversation with our partners. And then on the right side to kind of dark. Whoops, go back. We can see there the dark. It doesn't mean bad or this, it just means unseen, because a lot of these processes of the whole. Don't speak or show up in the same way that it does when we're in our parts. There's a different sense of experience of language. A lot of times when we kind of merge into that wholeness, we say we've left that cell for our perspective behind. We just merge, call it gnosis. I tend to say that in that stage when we're fully merged is called sentience like a readiness to be aware, but you're not conscious, not in the way you are when you are conscious of something over in the parts of your relationship. And so sometimes you put aside the things and you merge, and then there's this rhythm. And the rhythm is the key thing that creates the most powerful meditations that I know. And allow access to that in an easy way and give us an access to the heart. Now here you see a yellow all the way around. Well, what's on the line between the two sides of most yearnings and what surrounds the whole process and holds the dance, the beautiful dance that is in nature in life in our heart and between you and I, when we're in the state to connect and do it with compassion and with love. It's awareness. The word kundalini where I thought widely just means awareness, it's your awareness it's natural. So it's different than consciousness it's a different function. Awareness can allow you to hold multiple states, same time in the quantum world, that's hard because if you have one, you have another, and then you look, you collapse into one that's the idea. So awareness, you can actually have what I would call, you know, a virtualization I don't just mean digital imagination. There is an ability to capture a sample of your own self through time. Each moment where the future is totally not determined you can't control it, but you can engage and help create with it. So that's where this is here. This is the dance that gives us awareness. This is such a profound thing. Thousands of years we've never been able to actually measure wholeness and find out it's dynamic through time with the parts. So that's what we call a paradigm shift, who in his talks a lot about that in the social aspect. And here I'm just saying look, for a big shift like that, at least in science, you have to have new measures new questions you have to find paradox and love them. Because it's you asking nature a question in the response coming. So, in my world, I love being full of paradoxes, because then it looks like the miracles occur. And yet in the end we find this is a constant process. So how do we let go of that old mindset. All this new perspective from the side side is the becoming picture of nature. And this little bit of breath work that we're doing is to enhance your ability to be on both sides of the yin and yang to be in yourself to allow, not just to flow of things, but a flow of the self. In a pathway, let's call it a meaning. I can even call it destiny. You know, some of us do hide from paradigm shifts, it does create a lot of changes in business and this and how we look at we have to be a little humble about that. I'm like the chicken on the right, though, I love paradigm shifts. That's my paradigm paradigm shifts. All right, the next slide. And this is just a simple way the key thing here is cosmic rhythm, one that's any in ourselves, and in the total universe. And when we have that rhythm, and when we're not too noisy, but we engage it fully both in the body in interactions in intuition. We have a rhythm like you see in that little infinity sign there. So when we're dealing on the left side of the parts. We create context context can become a role. They're part of the container in cultures. So there is tremendous ability, a huge sensitivity we have we're on stage, or we're watching the stage. We feel completely different our context is there, or as one person said, you go into the courtroom and you want to decide what sentence should be given here. And if you smell a bad smells a classic experiment, you're, you change the context and patch it. Now, that's important. That's part of the play that happens there. But maybe in the parts you get a goal or focus, and then you give it over into the whole you go for a moment and you merge, you start to allow. In a local you can call it merger sentence, you go into the aspects of yourself which are always here, the wholeness. When you enter that. Oh, sometimes we have wonder merger different emotions that invite and signify that. And then we can come back into a kind of manifesting in the dance. And that's myoga we'd say it's at the heart, heart has a triangle up and a triangle down the emerging parts the whole, and the whole coming into here. So we say oftentimes it meets at the heart. We feel who we really are that's the south. Then we have an increased ability, awareness, alignment agency. Next time. So that's that same infinity that dance that goes on that rhythm. And I just want to emphasize on this. So there's two ways of observing the size. One is a strong observation the guy with the hammer over there, breaking the egg waiting for something to happen. And then there's the gentle one who doesn't disturb it leaves the egg until the chick comes out. So we have this thing you care hard enough is really the one who initiated out and showed how we can sample through time in the present, the past, the future and how they combine. And so we used to call that the Adam of Holism, you know the whole, the first place in which the irreducible can be experienced when that happens when these two parts dance together these two complimentary ways that we can sense. That gives us a dialogue with our own self. It's a beautiful place. And it creates awareness in the now I capitalized now. It's like William Jane saying more than just the present, you can have an extended present there's an interaction that goes on. And we know that's true now, then we can actually measure that and we have a way to at least see its footprint. Next slide. So for me, this is my playful slide. We have in the bottom, the complexities that we always do. And this implies as we pay attention to it, that we have more somatic wholeness and somatic intelligence body intelligence and consciousness experience consciousness. And then we have wholeness top down when we have an increased ability to sense holes, and to allow them into us at the self that stays zero. And we just tend to grow. You go along that's what we have stage one or two but those aren't like boundaries. That's why I put at the top stage infinity. This is the process of constant revelation, where you don't really know for example, your unique self, except as it reveals itself in each moment in all the context, it's not a fixed thing. I call it here awareness and destiny growing in stages moment by moment, because we have free will to create to sense a now whole interval through time, and with others. And that's when we realize this thing I call unique self. Next slide. And because in all of this. We're really asking our own nature and nature a question and trying to listen through experience so they're to me. Without experience. I don't believe in having a big concept without an experience experience can evolve in its own way. And then we respect and we share. Click. And then handshake you just saw between the future and the past will lead us I think to new questions. How much can we actually sense as shorts. In his experiment. How do we sense from the local and the non local how does that work. And even we can create now. New states of light, for example, that help bring in that sense of wholeness. There's experiment not published yet. We're able to take a low order like an infrared photon, and by a little clever manipulation, suddenly it interacts with its own alternate states and produces a gamma ray, we go from one electron to a gigabyte. I mean that's huge where did that energy come from. Well, it's a question everybody's exploring just now. It suggests that we have the local energy, but we have a kind of interaction with a different kind of energy from the whole. We can call it weak energy but it's not weak, it just means the way we measure has to be helpful the way we connect is there. So they even think about it as interesting. Sometimes we can revitalize. We can find these extra sources of energy, not just from adrenaline and red bull and all that, but from being in that subtle relationship with this dance. And then you can in the science show. I obviously did not give you all the math and this and the ways of measuring and all that that's going down with a whole lots of language in the science. But it's fascinating that this ability is here for us to be in this complimentary sensing. Now I was looking at our time looks to me like we should go ahead. And I'm looking at anything you put there in the in the chat, by the way. Let's go to this experience now, rather than me framing it anymore. And this second meditation is a little bit longer, it's about 23 minutes. And we'll take you into what I call putting pearls on the necklace. And we'll talk about that all together after you do the meditation so let's try the second experience and find where it takes us. I want to share this excellent meditation sequence for you using the breath and in particular the master bath. And we'll take the energy of master bath and we will take it to three centers in the body. And your body knows when you pay attention to any one part where it is, it opens up in different ways. It responds immediately to simple attention. And that's what we're going to use in the three centers. And we're going to use movement. So we're going to simply bounce the arms so that they go down about 30 degrees and up like so, up and down equally as we do the master bath. So you can hear the sound is equal in and out. And then we'll receive. And each time we receive, we open up, we let go, we allow in, we don't try to grasp, we just witness and we simply expand in our wholeness without any particular direction, but just a sense of presence, being in your true self and allowing that the things that cannot be spoken to come into you. So let's just do this together. It's a short energetic set and we use it with music. So let's begin. It's up and down like two basketballs. As you exhale, bring your hands crossed, eyes are still closed, focusing through the brow, but feeling the navel area. And then you continue. Hold your breath briefly. And then let your breath go. Relax the breath and extend your hands like this, like you're receiving from all eyes are closed, meditated the brow, feel your hands, feel the space around your body. And simply breathe meditatively, sense everything, faster and faster. Bend your breath for a moment and then let the breath go and go back to the motion with the master breath. Let's make sure the breath is equal across your hands, right over your heart center. Sit straight and begin the master breath. Relax the breath, bring your hands out again in the posture of reception. Go and expand. You see, you've opened up all parts of your body for all contractions, stress, faster and faster parts of yourself, your body. Breathe slow and meditate. Now once again, your breath relax and go back to the master breath. The breath relax and then hands together like this, kind of appear to the brow point. So your thumb tips touch the brow between the eyebrows, palms together, facing up. And as you focus there, continue the master breath. Spend the breath and focus right at the brow point where your thumb tips are. So spend the breath briefly and relax the breath. A little more vast, all three centers. Let the natural flow and energy now expand past the surface of your body, expanding out, including all those that you may love, all those that you are connected with and beyond and beyond your stillness and presence. Deeply still, notice what it's like to have pivoted your stage, shifted, opened, so you can sense more subtly, more clearly. Anything else stretch up? Turn left and right. Thank you for creating that experience together. Please put your comments and just take a moment to compare your own experience from the first experience to this one. Notice where you are and how those flow and what we can learn from those. So I can see from our hosts, we just have a few minutes, but I'll look on the chat and if we have enough time, then you also can just come in and ask questions. But here's a thought for you. When we get into that profound place of stillness and our work, our whole in our self and our heart, we have that freedom to make an action, a choice to allow in. And when you create from that place, it's a kind of activism in itself. Because it's like a fractal, you actually can place a free will and a choice and a presence that ripples, you can call it, through time and space at all scales. That's the amazing thing about these new discoveries. It's cross scale. Always wondered how do we get to the micro can we get to the macro question is how can we not be in the dance of these two. So this meditation is part of hopefully giving you some experience around that depth and the way that we do it. I say, if you flow your glow. If you glow, you'll let go. And if you flow and let go to good things. Then awareness enters as a very special guest into the heart. So I'm really happy to be with you here as I explore the anthropology of the self and myself explores the anthropology of all. So if you have any comments, if there's any time left, please make the comments. Thank you so much for being here or to read. Bertrand all start us people are gathering themselves and we're approaching on 30 but I think we can go a few minutes over here just for a time of reflection and connection and so folks are welcome to turn their cameras and mics on if they want, or continue to post their thoughts in the chat but I'll start with just a. Thank you for leading us through that very calming and centering and rooted time. Nicole Torres our journal managing editor talks regularly about being a radical organization and she says the word radical means rooted rootedness and so what what a radical rootedness you've helped remind us of and bring us back to and I have and so deep gratitude for that a question I have relating to your slideshow and excuse me the image of the the strong versus gentle observation and the hammer. I'm thinking about, you know, repatterning and awareness and in your book you talk about, you know, one of the things is the in the third stage is getting us in touch with the transcend itself and you've been mentioning these things in the in as a religious scholar Houston Smith talked a lot about the differences and this is for the sake of time I'm simplifying this but the difference between Eastern and Western. Experiences of ego and he says that when the when the in the East, the ego has not been cultivated to be this massive thing and so when one goes to study meditation. The, the, the, the yogi, the guru has a little hammer and they can just tap that. And then things breaks apart right and then one is goes through that that as you talk about in your book that kind of disturbing and unsettling period of entering into a place of non ego but in the West or egos are, are these massive things that we've cultivated through the years and so the guru hits it with that subtle hammer and nothing happens and so you have to get the jackhammer out to to break into that thing so I just wonder if you can speak to a little bit about that about in your experience working with different people in this concept of repatterning and centering on awareness and the different struggles we all have culturally personally and otherwise to get into that space and navigate the the subtle versus the strong observational energies. You know I think when we make our stories and we try to understand and we form language right word clouds. Then there's always a struggle. If you go back to when things were said, there's the East and the West and then they shall never meet in between, you know the never the change shall meet, except we are. And sure enough, we all have egos, even in the East, back some big ones, and in the West, so big ones. So, I'd rather not think of them as polarized into isms or difference I just say this is a process in its in that sense it's very universal. Some of the techniques everywhere when I'm in Latin America with shamans when I'm India with yogis when I'm here with quiet walks when throw walks through the woods and says oh I love to walk and become lost where there are no fences. And then when I return. I feel so much more in my heart. You're right. This is a very universal thing so yes, there is processes of letting go, but I would say the East and West happens in the West and the East and West happens in East. And we had to drop this idea that they're so separate the culture is yes yes yes we all we have our languages. When I went to one gentleman as an India and coming into Northern India, and he invited me over after going to the Golden Temple having a healing and immersion in the pool of healing. And he had just very sweet so humble when he came up talk about an aura was beautiful. And I could feel that invitation from his whole self I couldn't deny the invitation. So I went to his house he had almost no monies or anything very few things right. So I wasn't going to rich person's house it was just a person person, not rich not for person. And I could tell that because the manner in which he engaged authentically, and he took out a little. He took it out of the way, they said to be from a tree, where we're not, it was a sound during the seeks. shook it and found that this poison fruit could be made sweet, when he just touched it took it, gave it to his companion. And so there's actually is a tree like that is barriers from there is very precious it's a gift given to the family. And he sliced that, and he put it in the small pieces, and along with some good curry. We enjoyed the taste of that lineage that moment in which awareness burst out in a simple fruit and became a story in that area. Now is this capacity to meet and now, now is the time we need to mature as human beings now is the time we need to step forward and take care of the earth now is the time we have to take care of each other. Now is a special moment where we can place a seed that like a fractal goes all over and like a pearl is contained and beautiful from all the irritations that we may face. There are more moments of this, so that the pearls of experience, where our whole self is present with another in love and compassion in reality becomes a very long string of pearls. That's how I look at it. I'd love in our final minutes for some other folks to come on and maybe ask a few questions but I'll ask this as a follow up. We talked last night about another aspect of your presentation about this interface between the, the very particular and experiential and the universal. And one of the things we struggle with an anthropology is, is, are there universals are there anything. Is there anything that has a capacity that we can engage as fully human or as just as aspects of this conscious matrix. We talked about the breath as the interface between those two and you said something very fascinating about, you know, regardless of if we practice Kundalini or Wim Hof method or regardless of our thoughts on breath work, regardless of our thoughts on these things we have breath. I noticed today when I was doing these exercises you asked about some things we noticed that regardless of my cognition regardless of what I thought or was anticipating when I was doing this practice. This morning I was experienced a transformation of consciousness it was actually happening while we were doing it really regardless of what my precognition was about what my expectation was and so can you speak a little about that about the importance of breath as this. If not universal as this really gathering space entity I know in the religions I study spirit wind and breath both in the Greek and in the Hebrew, the same word for both of those so can you maybe speak to the importance of that. Yeah, first, I agree Andy. It is obviously universal then it's lovely because when I talked about boundary, the breath is both conscious and unconscious, and we can very easily change it into a pattern. So at first pattern we did, you know an 841 combination of a simple breath. And then the second one where we had the master breath at 120 beats a minute. It's quite different. When you do the last one, I can look in instruments and see the change in telomeres and getting you know more regenerated in heart rate variation, much faster but more smooth internally, so that we can sense and open the senses processes to me are very shared it doesn't matter where if you are in what culture how you talk with them. And all the special knowledges that you learn by all the experiment within life and that culture yes of course those are different right. But the key thing is that even nature itself has the same complementarity we're not separate from nature in any form or imagination of the word. We're not going anywhere, except the vastness of this amazing thing we've been seeing nature, at least from the science side through one side of the glass. Now with this sense and allowing in wholeness, it's like suddenly whoa from black and white color. So, and I saw Molly was asked me to comment, you know that is a natural when you get into the meditation that sometimes you said, you know, image of the things just just arrived the issue where she said conjure. It feels like country feels like a miracle because when you're in that space, you can't grab things. So you have to glow get yourself together. And then you start forming a new relation to the mind into you and your awareness, you become an active agent, someone gifted with this moment. And look, teenager they get the keys to the car you know they've been wanting it they're ready they can go everywhere. There's insurance, and there's other drivers. So I think in the ways we mature and we're getting the keys to this planet and to our genes and to awareness. This is a beautiful time to connect to form those pockets that we have together and to accept without any fear at all, the accountability that we each have in this moment. Sharon, much love to mute unmute yourself Sharon. How much I appreciated this and how glad and happy I am to see you go to Sharon. Yeah, slowly we've worked long together. We owe each other another conversation soon. It's wonderful to see the connection between you two you've been together for a while, some great comments in the chat from Mark Flanagan our co organizer of the of this conference that speaking about having a transcendence moment as well despite cognitions and not being aware of his connections fully and in his mind, and how active it can be and so the awareness of our awareness is something that can come in this kind of practice and interesting feedback loop. I appreciated the marks comments when he was talking about yoga and his experience. You know, in 1970, when there's a lot of wool going on a lot of beauty a lot of chemicals a lot of stuff going on back in the 60s. When we were talking about a Korean Asian is and I said from then I said, listen, when we come to that profound a change in all of us in our context and our ability to engage with each other. It'll be a time of massive polarity. It's not going to be smooth at all. It's not you're going to some set heaven people have an idea. We're going to some set place I haven't this stability. It's a dynamic dynamic stability, and it's going to evolve in beautiful ways that we cannot predict. So you should be resilient. Have this capacity to have compassion where it should not be happy. Have kindness where you forgot the word have a place where you can literally show up as oh yeah, a human being Hugh light. That means mind human light filling your mind with be in presence and in action. Human beings are glowing light of manifestation and action, and we share that universally in our own ways. That's the beauty of being human. And I see Mark, you're going to pop as popped in Mark would you we're going to maybe close down the next three four minutes here we went a little bit over time but that's great. Would you like to chime in and maybe help. This is great. I was going to say last time I saw you your turn was in New Mexico summer's probably in 2010 or something, but it's been a while. But yeah, I resonate with what you're saying about the Aquarian age not necessarily being all, you know, butterflies and light that it's dynamic. I think that, you know, both of us having had the influence of you on that he framed it away that isn't necessarily unfolding. But, but yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I know people would say, once we get through this will have 5000 years of, you know, peace or something right like in you guys right. Well, listen, those are just. Why do that someone said well but how do I go here here we have different ideas of how we are. I'm really simple idea. I think the older get the simpler I get. Well, maybe complex with quantum but generally simpler. And I think if you can be in your own heart hole if you can recognize when you are or not. Whatever exists or doesn't exist. When you die will admit you with open arms. You don't need to figure it out. You just walk off out a little bit and let that heart out. Yes, that's true. I loved when I saw the inauguration with Biden, the man to the poet was fantastic. Did you not think that yes, and watch when she pauses because of her history and she couldn't speak in the beginning and so on. She squints her eyes she'll go she'll squeeze it, not Blake she'll go like that. And what she's doing she's checking in my in my whole heart. So she's got a rhythm the dance I talked about with the cosmos the dance in the inning, she showed it in an embodied way, which made her poetry reach so many hearts. And I'm sure if she continues that she'll remember very well for that. Oh, by the way, a shout out to Hargo, he was the brilliant musician who created the master breath music with me. Yeah, it's available. Love it. Wow. So, Charlie, I have a question and following up on what Marcus saying. I agree with him. I see us moving toward the aquarium ideals in terms of the challenges on equality, and the challenges against prejudice and all the things that have happened to us. And that to me implies that those values are increasing. But I also think at the same time that the age of Aquarius is going to be one of intense science and astrologers are saying that, and that in some ways Star Wars, the movies may give implications of what the future could look like what do you think of that. Well, that quite is with as much fantasy but the idea that we're moving out, and that there are that we will be doing things that we're just seeing an imagination now. That's the beauty of our ability to imagine, you know, to imagine the unseen and to do that one human beings can imagine and have an experience of a thing we call infinity to be able to even to imagine a word like that or to sense or to model it is amazing that we can do that. So I think we're going to have a pretty good time but we always have groundedness. Okay. So when they look at the genes and stuff like that of the astronauts who up there the longest, you find that they express all the genes they set a fish up it's this incredible little fish. And when they looked at the fish in it or running around you know and then they looked at it afterwards. It started expressing thousands of little proteins of stuff from their gene adapting. And yet when we're up there in space right now at this point, we still can't control the muscle, the calcium, the different things you know we're we're deeply rooted as we keep saying in this so we go and go to Mars and moon and all this. It's going to be an interesting way. I think we have to go with heart I have to we have to go with humility and we have to go with science. I'm very pro science I don't see any contradiction at all. Between science, not scientism, but science and the ability to observe that way, and the ability we can observe inside of how they come together. I think this is a time of coming across the boundaries. We're in a beautiful rip time that has a huge power to draw us deep into the sea. And this is a time that I think anyone who feels that way should step up. And by the way you certainly have sharing. Yeah, going with from the Palestinians and in the Jewish tradition and bringing the women together across boundaries. Gertron, thank you so much for this. I just again couldn't think of we couldn't have scripted a better way to sort of ground us and move us towards the close of this conference. Sharon Mark Shagoy and Mark planning in Kia others that have been present here I see I'm Gina and so many others. Jordan's great presentation Marjorie just the presence of all these people to help sort of make this moment sacred and meaningful Mark planning and says blessings Gertron thank you for sharing your presence this morning deep boughs to you I just want to say, I greatly appreciate the cultural outflow of joy and ease so happy and that really translated to us and so thank you for sharing that with us and helping us to set the space and sort of designate the container towards that kind of awareness of our own awareness. We're going to be moving over to our other session now. And I just want to thank you all again for being here. Thank you all for joining us in 15 minutes. And that is a reading of a text by Stephanie Kane from Indiana University, and the text is an engineered tabloid from the spheres of unintentional agencies that will be in about 15 minutes. Thank you all for rolling with the time change and the sort of fluidity of what it is to kind of enter these spaces together I know Sharon. It's been quite a bit and it's been wonderful to have you all to just navigate that I know I know it's quite a lot. And happy new moon as well marks this. Blessings to all will see you shortly.