Good morning, my friends.

For those who don't know me, my name is Meng.

And for those who know me, my name is still Meng.

Surprise.

I'm Google's Jolly Good Fellow.

And one of the people I blame for my jolliness is Dr. Jon

Kabat-Zinn.

When I was young, I read his first book, this book.

And this book deepened my interest and my understanding

of meditation.

And it is from this meditation that I found inner peace and

happiness, and I've been jolly ever since.

So it's Jon's fault.

I blame you.

And Jon has been a hero to me ever since.

Now Jon has accomplished many great things in his life.

He has a very long bio, and I'm not sure I want to go

through his whole bio.

So I'll just mention one thing.

If history remembers Jon for only one thing, that will be

for being the first person to successfully bring meditation

into mainstream medicine.

And I believe his impact on humanity can

only grow over time.

And we're honored to have Jon give a meditation class today.

My friends, I give you Jon Kabat-Zinn.

[APPLAUSE]

JON KABAT-ZINN: So what a nice turnout for this time of day,

when there are all sorts of other gala events happening, I

guess, on campus.

I guess the meditators, or those interested in

meditation, know that sometimes more hoopla is not

necessarily where it's at.

Nice to see somebody with a US rowing shirt.

One of the adventures that I was in some time ago had to do

with training the US Olympic rowing team in mindfulness,

back in 1984 at Lake Casitas.

And it was really quite an interesting experience, in

part because rowers compete sitting down.

So learning how to sit is not in some

sense relevant to them.

They also compete going backwards, which is very

interesting.

And if you're not in a single, then you're competing with

other minds and other bodies in the same boat.

And to get that into some kind of harmony and synchrony is

non-trivial, and doesn't just have to do with the body.

When the mind and body become one, then the boat and the

water and the wind and all the minds become one, and

something very interesting happens.

So I'm really touched that you've come out in the middle

of the workday to partake of a--

what do you want to call this, a class or a workshop on what

could most easily be described as much ado

about almost nothing.

It's not quite nothing, but it's not so much about doing

as about being, or as the Taoists would

call it, it's non-doing.

And there is a way in which that seems awfully

anti-American, since we're such go-getters, and it's all

about doing, and getting it done, and crossing off

everything on your to do list.

But if we get out of touch with who's doing the doing,

actually that can be quite tragic.

And not just from the point of being so stressed out because

you're always running on a treadmill and--

have you noticed there's no end to work at Google?

There's no end to the workday.

I mean you guys define it, because the campus is

structured so that you'll never have to go home.

You can have a real life, if you want to separate life into

that kind of a way.

But it's actually, even before there was Google, the digital

revolution is actually delocalizing everything, so

that there's no workplace anymore, really, because you

can work anywhere.

There's no work week anymore, because, I

mean, there's no workday.

So all the boundaries are being confused.

But we're still really saddled with a Stone Age mind in a

Digital Age world.

And that Stone Age mind, unless it has a certain kind--

unless it engages in a certain kind of self-education, can

really wind up getting stuck in some realms of serious

confusion, suffering, being lost, and in fact maybe even--

and I just want to throw this out as a possibility--

impeding creativity, imagination, real

thoughtfulness, real breakthrough-type leadership

sensibilities, because we're not running on all cylinders.

Or, to use even I think a better metaphor, and one that

I like a lot, is that we're living in a

multi-dimensional universe.

And if you listen to the cosmologists, and the string

physicists, and the vacuum energy physicists, and so

forth, we're living in a universe that's not even

4-dimensional, it's more like 11, or 26, or whatever it is.

And we still haven't really grokked Einstein's

contribution of spacetime as four dimensions.

So if we are not in touch with the multiple dimensions of our

own being-- and there are many hidden dimensions to being

embodied in the human lifetime for an unbelievably short

period of time--

then, in fact, we're kind of in some way trying to get

somewhere and get all this doing done

without tuning the apparatus.

It would be like the Philadelphia philharmonic or

some great orchestra, let's say San Francisco Symphony

orchestra, playing Beethoven without tuning

first. And no matter--

they could have the greatest musicians with the greatest

instruments in the world, and they still tune first, to

themselves and to each other.

And so in a sense, I like to say meditation, in some sense

you could say it's like tuning your instrument before you

take it out on the road.

and tuning it in the morning can make a big difference in

how the whole day goes, just on a kind of mundane level,

never mind all the hidden dimensions of possibility,

imagination.

And yet it does seem really, in some sense, outside of the

common norms of our culture.

And so, whether it's in the Bay Area or sort of less

charged places like that, it's very easy to kind of accrete a

kind of feeling on the part of other people that there's

something weird about stillness, or about silence,

or about self-reflection, about non-doing.

And I want to say there's nothing weird or anti-American

about this at all, or un-American about this at all.

It's in some sense a recognition of sanity, and

that doing and being have always been intimately

interrelated, and without some kind of deep reflection, well,

where do you think scientific breakthroughs or engineering

breakthroughs come from?

They all come out of the human mind.

And very often they come serendipitously, in the middle

of the night or in dreams or whatever.

And there have been Nobel Prizes that have come just

from like a dream, like a snake eating its tail, and

voila, you've got the benzene ring and all

the molecular orbitals.

And there are lots of instances like that, that in

science, it's not what you know.

It's what you're willing to know you don't know, and then

to linger at that sometimes very uncomfortable place of

having banged your head, and banged your head, and banged

your head, and gone through a lot of different kinds of

solutions, none of which actually lead to

any kind of a solution.

And all of a sudden you just like, OK.

And you don't try to force anything anymore.

And you just open.

And you go, in some sense, beyond thinking.

You go beyond thinking.

It's not like you're discounting thought, but in

some sense you're giving yourself over to something

that's just much bigger that we never get educated around.

It never hardly is ever mentioned.

Sometimes it might be called intuition.

Sometimes it might be called creativity.

I call it awareness.

When was the last time you had a course in awareness, or it

was even mentioned as important in school, aside

from, say, people yelling at you if you were looking out

the window and the teacher caught you doing it and said,

pay attention, as if paying attention was some kind of

military discipline, and a bad thing.

So from the point of view the meditative traditions, the

entire society is suffering from attention deficit

hyperactivity disorder, certifiable diagnosis.

From the point of view of the meditative traditions, because

it's all about doing and there's no

recognition of being.

So in a sense, there's no place to rest.

And what this work is really all about is saying, there is

plenty of place to rest, and there's plenty of time.

It's not like, oh, you've got to squeeze this into your busy

day, because awareness is boundless and infinitely

available in every moment, no matter what you're doing.

So if the doing is coming, in some sense, out of being, out

of awareness, then it's not like, well, I have to find an

hour to meditate, and if I can find an hour then

to hell with it.

Because that's a kind of idealization, that's what in

some traditions they call a gaining idea, that now I'm

going to meditate to get better at something.

I'm going to meditate so that I can be more like a samurai

mind, cuts through all, discerns all problems clearly,

cuts through the Gordian Knot of it and goes right to the

solution, breakthrough after breakthrough.

And of course, that's an idealization.

Non-doing really means non-doing.

And radically speaking, it means giving up wanting

anything else to happen in even the next moment, never

mind at the end of the day or at the end of a year, in terms

of the bottom line, and being willing to just stand in how

things are in this moment.

Now, I would like this to be interactive and

conversational.

I can talk for hours about this stuff--

I mean, really, I'm embarrassed to say it--

because it's so much--

well, I would say that for me, meditation is an act of love,

and, as I was implying, an act of sanity, just to stop for a

fraction of a second and drop.

Sometimes I even bring a tennis ball in,

like drop into being.

You think, well, if I do that, maybe I'll lose my mind.

I don't want to go into my mind.

Many people I knew and grew up with were Nobel laureates.

And I asked one, George Wald, actually, at Harvard, who won

the Nobel Prize for color vision, and we--

he was my yoga student, and meditations

through many years.

But before that he said, I don't want to get into

meditation.

I spent my whole life fine-tuning my thinking mind

so that it works.

What if I go into meditation, I lose my mind?

I say, yes, what if you go into meditation

and find your mind?

Imagine.

You're a big boy, George.

You've already won the Nobel Prize.

Why are you so worried about losing your mind?

We're talking about befriending your mind.

We're talking about, in a sense, making friends with

this aspect of being that is as worthy of paying attention

to as the cones and rods in the eye.

So he got into it.

And in his old age, he'd sit on the beach and

bang a drum and chant.

And he was really into it.

It didn't make him any stupider.

So what I think might be best today is if we actually,

rather than me just talking endlessly about this from one

angle or another and really have it be kind of

advertisement, that we actually practice a little

bit, like a laboratory, and we drop in on our own minds, in

this moment.