Dan Siegel: How the Self is Made

Dr. Daniel Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. As an interpersonal neurobiologist Dan is focused on the creation of self—and his latest book, IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging takes his lifelong pursuit to understand the Venn diagram between personal reality and collective identity even farther: In it, he explores questions of consciousness, the importance of connection, and the world of quantum physics as it relates to our relationship with the external world. For Dan, the science of energy, which animates us all, is the study of the continuum of possibility to probability. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM DAN SIEGEL, M.D.:

IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind

Follow Dan on Instagram

Dan’s Website

ELISE:
So tell me about the impetus for this book. What was the big question that you were trying to answer?

DAN:
You know, the big question I was trying to address in the book Intraconnected was what does it mean to define a self in our modern society, and how Intraconnected might that way that we define the self actually be creating problems in our lives individually, in families, and our communities, even on the planet. And so it was a journey to try to look at a simple word, you know, self that seems pretty self-evident, but it turns out to be really fascinating and also formative in what happens to us. So that's basically how the book got started.

ELISE:
Yeah and I love this whole thing in some ways, although it seems like the story of you falling off a horse and knocking yourself unconscious and losing your sense of self was a story that you filed away or an experience that you had that was powerful, but that wasn't the focus of your career, and yet it's the pivot point for this book, right? Like you sort of re-came to it?

DAN:
Exactly, that's exactly right. You know even in the initial writing of this book that had no place in the first draft, and then I tried out a different approach and it wasn't really there. Then it was like a 300 page rhyming, fictional story of a person named Sam. And Sam does have an accident in Sam's adolescence, the same age I did. And I said, well, this is interesting. This rhyme is coming out of me, and Sam is having the same accident I had. So maybe there's something there. And then when that book didn't turn into a book, that was gonna be published by the publisher, it, you know, was going back to it and extracting the science on each of these episodes of Sam's life. And then it became pretty clear that, you know, even though it was chronological and so towards the adolescent period of it was a lifespan rhyme, uh, you know, it was, it, it seemed, I needed to put that more toward the beginning of the book to say that my personal encounter with losing a narrative separate individualized self, may give us little hints into the idea that the self is constructed. It's not some automatic thing.

ELISE:
Yeah and I think that we can all understand conceptually this idea of, you know, you hear in my spiritual adolescence when I really didn't have any grounding in that world at all, and I would hear things like, we're all one. I'm like, that's nice. I guess like when we die, we return to some sort of source point. Like, that sounds comforting, but this idea, this that you're teasing out in the book of "No, we're all one, we're having these separate what seem like separate, distinct experiences, but we're all sort of a coalescing of energy and potential in a physical body. I mean, it's very heady and I think people get scared, right? Because we're all very attached to who we are. And, and how do you tease out like, no, you still exist and we're part of a larger system?

DAN:
Yeah, exactly, you know, the, that's exactly it, Elise, you know, it is a big deal. In fact, when I read the audio version of Interconnected, the audio engineers started getting really spacey as I was reading the book, and we had to stop and see what was going on that he couldn't do the engineering. So I had to explain to him what the book was about and, you know, where we were going in the book. And so that he could actually do his engineering instead of having the book be a transformative expansive experience, which it was for him and hopefully will be for readers and that, you know, and that was kind of the challenge of writing the book, which is partly probably why it came out initially as a rhyme, you know, to really try to get at ways we have these top down filters, these things we've learned that are kind of like constructive filters that say, oh, yeah, yeah, this is right now who Elise is, this is who Dan is, but then to open those up, even in the course of reading a book, you know, that's, that's what my, my hope was, was that it would be both a conversation, meaning a turning together, turning our attention towards what is the self, but also the self of the reader could actually begin to expand as they were reading.

ELISE:
Yeah.

DAN:
So that was, that's kind of what I had in me as, as the book was now being written in this fourth iteration, you know, which I was really happy with after I read the audio version. I'm glad it got to stage four.

ELISE:

I thought you did a beautiful job and I think when people hear about quantum physics, their eyes either glaze over or they immediately go to sort of like, oh, pseudoscience, even though that's these are the frontiers of science and our understanding of like, our relationships affect matter, right? Or we have this innate or this ability to affect, I can't even explain it, I'll leave it to you, but can you talk about the potential of energy and then how we are bringing it down into the world and the possibilities and probabilities?

DAN:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, and it's really important, I think what you're saying about, you know, some people might find it way out there or too much and certainly, you know, I work in lots of different worlds, so, you know, one of the worlds is the world of academics and science and you know, and some academics will say, you know, why are you making a proposal that isn't absolutely proven to be true? And I said, well, it's for people to explore things and see how it sits with them, and it's not, you know, and so I referred a very hard one, empirical science in the realm of energy flow that is physics, this study of energy things, like electrons and photons, and then try to correlate that with, and finding the common ground with a view of the mind as what's called an emergent property, which is a mathematical term. You know, something is a rising from the interaction of elements of a system. And that system science says there is emergence. So the proposal from 30 years ago was that the mind is an emergent property of energy flow that has lots of different aspects to it. One is subjective experience, the felt texture of being alive. The other might be consciousness, certainly a third one is information processing. Like if I say hello Elise, and you say, hello Dan, you know, that's energy flow that's symbolic in nature. We're greeting each other with hello, you know, if we spoke, you know, Spanish, we'd say hola, you know, which would be different, but it would still be energy in a formation that's symbolizing something, that's information. And then there's a self-regulatory process called self-organization that assembles this regulation of how this unfolding occurs. Anyway, that's a long story, but the bottom line is from that definition of the mind, you could actually then say what a healthy mind was.

So I'd been working with that for 30 years. So it was pretty natural to go to physicists and say, here's the proposal that seems to be true. The mind is an emergent property of energy. You are an expert in energy. What's the science of energy? And then they say, well, energy, am I drilling down saying, what is it? What is it? Energy they say is the movement from possibility to actuality. Basically along this probability graph where you can go from wide open possibility, which is the lowest probability to, you know, these areas of limited, you know, possibility, which is higher probability to absolute certainty. Like if we had a million words we shared, and I'm thinking one of them, your chance of knowing is one out of a million. So that's pretty low probability. One out of a million near zero. Once I say ocean, it's a hundred percent, you know, I said ocean, I said ocean, it's become an actual from a pool of possible. And then if there were just five oceans, I was about to say Pacific, Atlantic, et cetera, you would've a one out of five chance of knowing. So that's like a little a plateau. That's like a filter. And there's only five actualities that might emerge from that filtering plateau. I was with these 150 physicists and I drew out this graph, I said, is this what you mean? And they go, well, that's the way you would visually depict it. We don't usually do that, but sure, that's what we mean.

And then I said, well here's this practice I've been doing called the Wheel of Awareness, where I'm exploring people's mental experience of integrating consciousness, integration you can define as differentiating things in a system and linking them. So with my patients and then my students and then workshop participants, you know, I would have them integrate consciousness. And now I've done it with 50,000 people in person before the viral pandemic. And the results fit that graph. And it looks like, in fact, a thought would be like a peak on this graph of an actuality, thinking would be just beneath the peak, a certain state of mind would be like a filtering plateau. And then when you get way down to the bottom with the quantum physicist called, you know, the quantum vacuum or the sea of potential, it's the generator of diversity. It's as Arthur Zions, the emeritus quantum physicist from Amherst calls. It's the formless source of all form. And then it correlates exactly with what all these people have said, pure awareness in the hub of this wheel feels like to them: timeless, open, expansive sense of love connection for some God, this feeling of being at home, peace, joy, over and over and over again.

People who have never meditated before. They feel connected and they feel this sense of love. So you know, as a scientist, it was just fascinating to give a standardized stimulus, if you will, the wheel of awareness practice, to all of the planet, get people from all sorts of backgrounds, thousands and thousands of people to say what they were experiencing and find these similar experiences no matter what their background was from a scientific point of view, that's an interesting data set. Then I went looking for what kind of science of the mind could explain it. So then of course, you go to brain science, well, nothing really helps us understand the timelessness of that hub of the wheel, but when you get to physics, you find out that we live in these two realms according to physicists. This isn't me making this up.

In fact, the Nobel Prize was given this year for one aspect of this in physics, you know, where in the Newtonian realm of large objects, like these bodies we live in or the planet we live on, you know, Isaac Newton 350 years ago figured out certain properties that are true and they have mathematical equations that can predict, you know, the location of properties and things like gravity and stuff like that. But when you get to small things like the size of an electron or photon, those subatomic sized things are micro states, small states, and their probability fields, they aren't the noun like entities we have, like the body we have is like a thing, you can weigh it, walk around with it and stuff, but energy in the form of electron is a probability field, and there is no noun, right? It's a verb. And in that verb like realm of the microstate world, which we've been able to study for about a hundred years, the idea of separation of time and space like we have in the Newtonian realm doesn't really apply.

In fact, there is no time in the quantum realm. There's no what's called arrow of time or directionality of change, for all sorts of different reasons. But the, the issue is that we have these two realms, and just like you and I could go walking in a park in the air, and on top of the ground, we could also dive into a lake, and it's a different property to be swimming than to be walking. And no one freaks out and says, oh my God, there's the water realm and there's the land realm. How could this be? What's going on here? You know? But we do have a micro state realm of timelessness and a macro state realm of being time bound.

ELISE:
Yeah. It's so wild and this is why I think, and you go to great lengths to talk about this, but you think about, and everyone I think can relate or touch this, this idea, the chaos of creation, right? Like this idea that everything is possible, and it hasn't been yet transmitted or transformed into words, thoughts, ideas, constructs. And that is an overwhelming idea, right? Chaos is the formation of creation, and yet it is scary. And as you mentioned, the other side of that is a fixed certainty, a hundred percent probability. And when we think about ourselves, you see this in people too, become more atrophied or fixed in their identity, right? More predictable, more certain, more stuck on this opposite end of creative chaos, wanting to control a world that doesn't really wanna be controlled, but denying the reality that there's this chaotic base to each and every one of us.

DAN:
Yeah, exactly. And I think it's that drive to have some kind of predictability, you know? Because why, because that gives us a sense of certainty so that we can feel like there's gonna be some kind of safety. If you can predict what's gonna happen with certainty, then you're more likely to survive. You know? So, so it's not that there's anything wrong with that, but what it does is it makes us vulnerable to, you can call it noun-ifying, to making things into being like a fixed entity when in fact there's also, you know, the quality of verb, like what you're calling chaos, verb like potentiality and unfolding and emergence that, you know, if you're someone who wants to really know for certain how, is it or is the artist Rashid calls it a flimsy fantasy of certainty, you know, when you let go of that flimsy fantasy, which is trying to help you feel safe, but when you let go of it, what happens is instead of fearing uncertainty, you come to realize that the synonym for uncertainty is freedom and possibility.

And that's where even in the in, well, in the Interconnected book, you know, I talk about this way as a human family with 8 billion of us now, you know, a lot of us to do this work. But when you allow yourself to go on this journey of life and let go of the understandable drive for certainty that unifies you into a self that's called Elise or a self, that's called Dan, that's a fixed thing, you know, and it's why I put on the bottom of my screen these days, A, B, C, D, you know, a body called Dan, because you know, what's present on an internet call is not just an entity Dan Siegel, you know, it's just a body there that people call Dan. But what happens in the communication, the relationship is a verb like unfolding. And you know, we don't know exactly where it's gonna go. Even this conversation I'm having with you. We don't know where it's gonna go. And if we, you and I, participate fully, then we'll be changed because of what happens in these next few minutes.

ELISE:
Yeah and it's, it's so interesting. My dad's a physician, my mom's a nurse. I grew up literally working in the hospital and working filing charts and thinking about the body and its material reality. And I'm not a scientist by any means, but it's so interesting. This is the foundation, right? Of our medical complex. And this matter matter, changes matter and this disavowal of energy, right? And it's interesting reading that you're, you're big awakening came from falling off a horse and knocking yourself unconscious. I fell off a horse this summer and I broke my neck and I knocked myself unconscious and I was fine, a walking miracle, but I ended up with, at the same time, diagnosed almost simultaneously with something called microscopic colitis and, worked with the gastroenterologist, yada, yada, yada. What seemingly cured me or what, the only thing that really helped me was the work of two energy healers. And it's a conversation for another day and a longer story. But having just gone through this experience where I was begging for steroids, like begging my doctor for steroids, he wouldn't give me steroids, something happened that was not perceptible to me, that wasn't like a biological mechanism that finally brought me relief. And I don't really understand it either, but it's just not part of our world. Right?

DAN:
And you know, and certainly when you get acupuncture, you know, there are these meridians of energy flow that when they get changed, huge things can happen. So, and you know, even when I was in medical school, it was not a part of the regular curriculum, but a few of us took a course from a healer from Japan and we learned how to do energy work using our hands without ever touching the body. And you can move energy around the patient's body in ways. And you could feel when there was a stuck place and you know, we didn't talk about it much because people would've thought it was woo woo, but you could feel when you received it yourself, that there was something going on. Who knows exactly what it is. But I mean, the studies anyway, the acupuncture show, even though we can't tell exactly what it is, it's doing something very big.

ELISE:
Yeah and you write about, you know, the five inputs of the body that we all know so well, but the fact that we can, we of course we can read each other's energy and perceive people's energy. That's an undeniable reality. And yet it's not something that we really discuss. Like it's easy to understand when someone's upset, regardless of how they might be visibly presenting, but this dimension that we understand, talk about or have honored.

DAN:
Well, absolutely. I mean if you just take the simple English word connection, you know, and you say, well what is really a connection made of like, you know, when we get disconnected from our body, the body can do all sorts of things and it's not a sense of harmony that things can get stuck. We can have pain, we can feel numb. You know, you can go to either extreme and yet when we talk about being connected to your body, there's a kind of freedom that happens with that. Or talk about a relationship. You know, you can be in a family and feel connected to your family members, but you can also be in a family and feel not connected to them, you know? And so what does it mean to have a connection or not have a connection? In a way it's the way energy swirls become woven with each other without losing their integrity.

So, in a family where people are too merged and you feel like there's something not right here, people are too close. What you can tell, if you take a little bit of a step back often is that there isn't an honoring of the differentiated individual that's there who then becomes linked in the sharing of communication where each one is hearing the other, they're being influenced by the other, so they're resonating, but they're not mimicking the other in the sense that they don't have to become identical to the other, which would be the case of excessive merger. And in the o other side of it, if they're not sharing communication, someone can speak and they can just act as if the other person didn't speak. And that's a massive lack of linkage. So when you look at it that way, you can say there's a fundamental process of differentiating, of being different or unique or specialized on the one hand and then linked on the other. And when that balance of differentiation linkage doesn't happen, then you have all sorts of troubles of chaos and rigidity. And that may be one thing that you experienced, you know, that's, that the healer was picking up. I think it's states of integration, that's a word you can use to define this balance of differentiation and linkage. And that what we do in healing is we're promoting the integration of energy flow within the person and within the person and the world of other people and the world of nature.

ELISE:

I love that, and I think as you were just talking about that the mergence or the lack of coherence or lack of cohesion or connection that we feel with other people, that's the sixth sense, right? This, not necessarily underdeveloped, but maybe not as well understood, I think you described it as the other senses teach us how we relate with our world or an environment, and then the sixth sense is sort of the understanding of what we, ourselves are feeling. It's that that inner work, which I would argue many of us are disconnected from, I think most people have no idea what they're feeling most of the time.

DAN:
It's so true. Right? And you know, it's interesting that that that sixth sense, that interception sense of the body, whether it's the still body or the motion body, however we're feeling the body one way would be like to feel right now your heart, whether you could feel the beating or not, just to focus attention on the heart, you know, and the studies are very clear when you actually place your attention on the heart region and then you allow that attention to stream the sensations of that region into your awareness, you get a very different physiological state of calm and clarity than when you're distracted. You're just doing all sorts of other things. So you know, the, the focus on the heart is one example, focus on the breath would be another one, you're always breathing of course, just like your heart is always beating.

But when you focus attention on the breath and bring that sensation of the breath into awareness, that's called focal attention. Lots of things start to change in a positive way. Now, some people, let's say we've had like an accident where they almost, you know, drown or something, you can get a panic attack from that. So it's not for everybody, but in general for most people it's a very calming thing. So you could say, well why would the focus of my attention change anything? Well actually attention is this process that directs energy flow. So you can say where attention goes, neural firing flows and neural connection grows. So literally you are like a neuro sculptor when you learn to use your attention, especially with awareness, which holds it in place for long enough for it to actually have a more significant impact, but also once things are in awareness, you have a choice on knowing am I really focusing attention where I want it to be? Oh I'm distracted, how do I return to the focus?

And then what's interesting about it is when you add that focus of attention to other things like opening awareness up, so it's not always lost in what you're attending to, but it, you start sensing this wider receptive state and then you build into that a third component building kindness. Those three: focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention, studies show that when you do that you get all sorts of amazing changes in the body. You reduce stress hormone, you improve the immune system, you allow your heart to be healthier, actually you actually reduce inflammation in the body. You talked about micro colitis, you know, you can microscopic colitis, you can reduce inflammation, uh, by these practices that include these three pillars. And you do that by changing the regulatory molecules sitting on top of DNA.

So what you do with your mind actually changes the molecules of health. Even the enzyme lamase that repairs and maintains the ends of your chromosomes. So it slows the aging process. So when you do a regular three pillar practice is what I call it, you know, opening awareness, focusing attention, building kind intention, this is a practice I do every day. It's called the wheel of awareness. But you can do however you wanna do it. This happens to have all three in one practice. You know, you actually start changing your body's health status based on what you do with your mind. And then when you put connection in there and you realize, well if you're being told by society that you're a solo self, you're just separate and you just now like separate entity, it kind of digs in you as something's not quite right. Even if you're not aware of that feeling and starts creating stress in us. Because we are built to be connected to each other and to nature.

And so this is where the good news is, even though a lot of the problems we face today may be due to this constricted sense of self as separate, we can course correct and change that as a human family and open it up to really seeing the self as much broader than the body, bigger than just the individual and a part of this larger, I, you know, I say it's a me in your body and a we in your relationship. So it's a we, you know, it's just a fun way to remember what an intra-connected self really is.

ELISE:
Yeah. And I think there's so much conversation about killing the ego and yada yada yada. And but this idea of like the solo self or this idea that we all are uniquely gifted or uniquely positioned or that there's a lot of beauty and value in our individuality and that the idea isn't necessarily to, is not to destroy that, it's to just reconnect it to a bigger collective identity. Right? I mean, I'm not misunderstanding that. Right?

DAN:
No, I think it's beautifully said, Elise. And I think it's so important because you're describing the the need to realize that yes, we have a body and we do have an inner aspect of self, and this was part of the challenge of writing the book was to say, you know, this, this view of interconnection is not saying, oh there is no self get rid of the ego self is an illusion. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that you have an inner center of experience. So let's just say what you know from viewing the different sciences, what do we mean by self? We mean a SPA, it's a sensation center, it's a perspective center, and an agency center that is one center of experience that has the three qualities of subjective sensation, the feel of it, perspective, you know, the point of view and agency. What are you acting on behalf of, right?

So that SPA in modern culture, we stick it in just the individual. And when it's only an individual that's named that the solo self, well when you expand that sense of self, you're saying we're not getting rid of the inner aspect of SPA. You have a sensation perspective and agency on behalf of the body. For sure. So we're not saying get rid of that. We're saying that your center of experience is much broader than the brain, bigger than the body. It is including the whole of the body and your relationships with whom, with who it would be with people and the planet.

ELISE:
Absolutely. And it’d interesting because at the end when you were talking about the work of Kean and Lehe and this idea that we have the three stages, the socialized mind, the self authoring mind, and the self transforming mind. And I wanna talk about those with you, but it feels like everyone, and we're having a collective crisis right now or we're in the midst of like ongoing crises, hat seem to be breaking us down on a global level and reminding us that we are all on one boat here, we're all on one planet but that your accident, for example, or we see this in people's lives with loss, change, transition, this a fracturing that has to happen in some ways to the self to those ideas of certainty or predictability in life to get people to open, do you feel like in your practice you see this happening to people on an individual and now we're seeing it on a collective social level as well?

DAN:
Yeah, I do. I really do. I think the reason this conversation you and I are having here needs to be a conversation that could benefit everyone is that, you know, we have this thing and Lehe and Kean talk about this, you know, about the immunity to change this resistant to trying on new ways of being once we're adults, you know, kids may already know this, adolescents may begin to forget it. And then adults, we forgot it all together in modern culture. What are we forgetting? Is that in fact who we are is more than just our individual bodies? So this conversation is so important for humanity to have because business as usual in modern culture has not worked.

Whether you're looking at social injustice, you're looking at misinformation and polarization. You're looking at the way we handle our relationship with nature and the loss of biodiversity and the climate catastrophe. We're in the middle of, you know, all those things can be attributed to, if not just worsened by the view of a solo self. And we have a limited amount of time, but we still have time to actually change the way we conduct ourselves on earth. And you can say, well I don't wanna accept the fact that the human mind has created these problems. Well you may not wanna accept it, but all the sciences point to that being the truth. So then you may say, well I feel too guilty, I just wanna watch TV and you know, distract myself. Well that's okay to watch TV, but we have some work to do.

And it's hard work because it is just what you're saying, it's getting over the immunity to change. And what I hope, you know, this view of interconnected can do is say you're not just, you know, connected to people around you. You're not just interconnected even with nature. Inter meaning between you are nature. That's the intra part of it. That word came from a time I was on a retreat with some system scientists from MIT and we were out in the forest of Colorado by our individual selves. But we came to experience this connectedness and when we came out of the forest, everyone said, oh, I was interconnected and interdependent and interlaced and then it was my turn and I couldn't use the inter word because the experience was I was the creeks water, I was the trees trunks, I was the sky and the clouds. I was the body called Dan. I was all of it. And it was connected for sure, but it wasn't between, it was within. So I just said to the group, I said, well I guess I was intra-connected. And then when I typed it out, you know, on the computer and I finally got back out of the forest, it kept on changing it to interconnected and there was no word in English. It turns out for the connectivity within the whole. So this is where, you know, interconnection is just a simple word or we as a simple word, we are a me in a body. We don't get rid of that. We are a we in our relationships with human beings with the whole of nature. And so that me plus we, you don't lose the integrity of either one by combining them as a we, you know, you get this fun little word.

So that's the journey, how do we actually with due speed, because this is a timely issue, start to live in modern culture, which is taken over the planet. Basically live in a way that is really about the truth of who we are. That we are a me and we are a we, and that if we live that way, we wouldn't treat each other as enemies, we would treat each other as relatives. You know, you don't get along with every relative the same way, but if they're in your family, they're your family. And if we then saw all of nature as the family of nature, you know, we would treat earth not like a trash can, but a sanctuary. And we would do this together. And we are incredibly collaborative, we're incredibly creative and yes, we can use competition, but what we can do in our competition is make it so we're competing to really deal with, you know, diseases and famine and all the problems we face. So when you win the competition, everybody benefits. You know, that's possible.

ELISE:
And you, you brought up the word competition and you, I loved how you wrote the stories of our lives are not only what we say in our mind and to others, but also how we live our lives. The layered stories of our life become embedded in the actions we carry out in the world. When as a community we share the foundations of these stories. When the values and meanings, interpretations and beliefs are conveyed collectively in communications with one another, culture is created. And we think about that great cultural lie of scarcity, competitiveness, that we are naturally endured against each other. That if you have something, it means I don't get it. That's one of the great myths of our culture that's, persistent, right? When really we, as we reevaluate science and look back at who we have been historically and who we are now, we're far more conciliatory, collaborative and loving than we ever give ourselves credit for. Like the individualist, that myth has been so enduring, the rugged individualist, et cetera dominates our consciousness in a way that crowds out all of the other potential that we have.

DAN:
Absolutely. And you know, it's so interesting at least when you say that because you can say, well why do we tend to do that? Because you're absolutely right. It gets crowded out and we tend to do that. Why do we tend to, we don't have to, but why do we tend to, and one way to say it is like this cycle where scarcity induces this separation. And in the scarcity and separation we start to get very self protective of our family, of people like us. And we've had, you know, 50 million years it looks like a history of in group outgroup distinction in the primate nervous system. So we quickly say, who's in my in group? I'll protect you, but if you're in my out group, I'm gonna shun you. Or worse, you know? And so that's our, that's our genetic legacy. You know, we probably survived by small bands of primates that hung out with each other and we're collaborative.

And then when we became humans, we have this thing called Alo parenting. Alo means other parenting, you know, the caregiver, meaning unlike other mammals, you know, we share caregiving roles for the infant. We let others take care of it besides mothers for example. Now that's a big deal because then we had to see the mind of each other. And once you could start sensing the intention where the attention was, what's in the awareness, you know, what's going on, the feelings, the memories, the perceptions of another human being, you started to develop maps of the mind basically those are all mental states and then you could even map out your own mind. So things got really complex really fast in human history. Now we're only around about 200,000 years compared to 50 million years, you know, of these primates or ancestors. So, you know, now you've got this situation where you have really intricate capacity for compassion, empathy, insight for mapping out time, thinking about past, present, future, asking existential questions like, why am I here? How did I get here? What's the purpose of being here? And now we're probably pretty distinct from certainly this dog sleeping here by my feet, you know, and probably by other primates. And so now you have this very complex hierarchy of social systems that we live in and in modern culture then when there's scarcity, you start using all that architecture to say, oh, I know who I am, I know who my family is, I just need to get entities, stuff, so that if I can hold onto the stuff because I can't hold onto a process, I can't hold onto a verb, I can’t hold onto a noun. And with all this existential angst I have, at least if I noun notify things and say the meaning of life is to have stuff and I'll build a fence around my stuff so it doesn't mix up with your stuff. And if there's scarcity, you won't even steal my stuff. You may not even know I have this stuff that I have. It's behind the fence, you know?

And so now we're living behind the fence and the people in the in group are having fun behind the fence and we don't wanna know the people outside the fence. And it's the in group/out group history we have. But nullification intensifies that because when you have an identity as an entity, you get the illusion of certainty and that illusion of certainty gives you a sense of safety. So when there's scarcity and you feel unsafe, this is why we gify. And this I think is at the heart of why we have a solo self, an entity like self only in the body that's equated with the individual. And so as we loosen that up and let it go, and certainly the reason I had Kehan and Lehe’s work about the immunity of change is, you know, we have to work not just with children adolescents, but with adults. And they've done fantastic work with adult change.

And at the same time we have to go beyond even the notion that, oh, I'm an aware individual. I think we need to go throughout all of humanity and start saying, how do we get back to exactly what you're saying? That we are incredibly collaborative And the the good news is that all the studies of compassion, of awe, of gratitude, these are previously called self-transcendent emotions, but they're really something you would call self-expanding emotions. All, all the studies show that brings individual wellbeing as well as collective wellbeing. So we kind of know the direction it's filled with awe, gratitude, and compassion and we can have collaboration as the heart of who we are. But as we become more verb like there's gonna be less ownership of identity, there's participation in identity. Rather than ownership.

ELISE:
Even that subtle linguistic shift from expanding from transcending to expanding is so critical I think because it, it grounds you in the body of let's get bigger, let's open ourselves up, let's slip this trap door. And because this idea of transcendence, you know, that also is a very old cultural idea of we have to get off of this planet and get to heaven. We have to overcome nature, we have to transcend ourselves and our base desires to get to God. And it's one of the root causes I think of why we perceive nature as something to dominate and pillage and own rather than being part of nature. Even though we are linguistically not part of nature according to the dictionary, but expanding rather than transcending. Like there's nothing to transcend, like we are here, this is it, this is, this is, I'm not saying this is the end all be all, because I believe in energy and I believe that there's more, but there's no going somewhere else.

DAN:
Exactly. Well this is the interesting shift and it's even, building what you're saying, you know, it's this shift from making something happen where you control it or letting something happen where you release it. And, and the interesting thing about just these last 30 years of, you know, being on this journey is there is a state of, you know, openness of receptivity. This hub of the wheel, if you want to have a metaphor for it, you know, which looks like you're really tapping into that plane of possibility, this generator of diversity, which can be ized as G-O-D, you know, this generator of diversity is the plane of possibility. It's this quantum vacuum I think. And, and it's like a portal through which integration is released to unfold in the world. So you don't have to say, oh my God, how do I become the, you know, orchestra conductor and make this life, you know, become integrated?

No, it's about getting that stuff out of the way where you let it come through you. And the vital force of life really is love. And I'm saying this as a scientist from all these people who reported this in the hub of the wheel, it feels as if that the tapestry of life is about connection and love. And then when you begin to just drop into that and let that come through the body you were born into all sorts of things change. Like for this body called Dan writing this book, intra-connected has changed my whole stance towards death, you know, because it, it, it took the noun like part of self, of reifying self and the fear of death of course, because the body gets about a hundred years to live and that's it. And then if you think that's what the self is, is just the body, of course you're freaking out about dying. But once you drop out of that illusion of separation and open up to the intra-connected nature of things across not only space but time, then the fact that this body gets a hundred years is just one part of a much bigger story of who you are.

ELISE:
Yeah. And I believe that, I'm with you so wholeheartedly and regardless of people's beliefs about the other side or whether we continue to exist after our physical bodies are gone. You know, one of the other powerful points of this book and this idea of self is that we're engaging with each other, right? We're, we live in each other's minds. We live in each other's memories. There's a legacy of each of us, an imprint of all of us all over the place and other people and in the world, regardless of whether we're physically present. And it's hard to say, it's hard to distinguish, oh, that's Dan's book from Dan, or those are Dan's thoughts, not Dan. We get so trapped in that material reality, we forget about this broader idea of who we are and how we show up in the world.

DAN:
Beautiful. Yeah. It's so beautiful because imagine, and this would be my deepest dream, you know, and even this morning I woke up after a wonderful dinner last night, but the, the conversation across generations, my 93 year old mom was there and a 25 year old young man was there. And you know, we were talking about all sorts of things about the world and history and stuff, but it was very painful conversation about where humanity is at this moment and where we might go in a negative way in the, in the very near future. And so it was a very heavy conversation and I had some really rough dreams. But when I woke up, I thought, you know, it's like how do we approach these challenges? And I have a dear friend named Joanna Macy, who you know, has been an activist for a long time, and I was with her recently. And, she was talking about how how many of the activists that she knows are feeling exhausted and burning out. And, we talked about the difference between approaching things in the world that need to be dealt with in a positive way as a threat versus if we shifted our mindset and instead took it on as a challenge. Because a threat leads you to fight, fight, fight. And it's exhausting over time or to flee, and that's exhausting over time or to freeze, meaning you don't know whether to fight or to flee, tighten up your muscles and it's exhausting. Or the fourth f fight, flee, freeze. The fourth of those is to faint, to feel totally helpless and collapse. Those are all exhausting in their own unique ways. So what I said to Joanna is I said, what if you thought of as a challenge or even thought of it as a dance partner, and you took on the challenges and danced with it.

You said, what's the music of today? And what that gives you a chance to do, first of all is make sure you don't burn out. If you have the courage to care, you need to really take care of the inner experience of being someone who cares so that you can thrive as you really strive for making changes in the world. And then when you do that, you know, then it becomes like a dance partner. These challenges. So rather than dreading them, you say, okay, bring it on. What's the dance for today? And you kno that's my hope really for this conversation is that, you know, especially we go through this lifespan journey of how the self is shaped into separateness in modern culture and these different stages looking at brain development and attachment and all sorts of things. But the bigger issue is, okay, now what do you do with that? You know, how do you take that and say, okay, I see all the moments that culture through my parents, through my teachers, through my workplace, through my friends, through the social media, through the larger, you know, press. You know, how does it keep on making the word self as equal to the individual? And even someone listening to us now might say, well that's an obvious thing. The self and the individual are synonyms. They're the same thing. So what we're saying is, no, you know what, if you had a center of experience that you could have an identity lens and you could focus this close up and say, yeah, I have a body. I'm not denying the body, I'm not even trying to transcend the body. I'm trying to expand my experience of self. So I say, I do have a body now I widen that lens like on a camera and I said, wow, I'm connections to people I know people I don't know, people are not even like me.

Maybe people share different opinions than I have then to all humanity. And then to widen it even further and say I'm a part of all living beings and then widen it even further to say I'm a part of all living beings that have ever existed or will ever exist. And then when you need to, you narrow that lens down. So when you get in your car and you see a red light, you know, you do, as I say, you know, you press on the brakes so you're not one with everything in the intersection, you know, so you need to be able to adjust this, you know, identity lens. So in a way, Intraconnected as a book that introduces the idea of an identity lens introduces the idea that you are empowered to adjust it as needed. And if we keep it excessively focused on the individual as the only source of self, then we're gonna be in deep trouble on earth. And it's, you know, it's a win-win thing because you will benefit individually by having this lens that you can adjust people around you and nature around you will benefit and the whole of earth is going to benefit.

ELISE:
Yes. Agree.

DAN:
Well, this issue though ofa threat state versus a challenge state, it's really crucial for all of us to, you know, we're about to enter the third year of the pandemic, or no, the fourth year. We're finishing the third year. I can't even believe that, but it's true and so, you know, we have a, I don't wanna say this in a burdening way, but we have a responsibility to take care of our inner selves to care, to take care of each other in a way that, you know, little insights from science can be really helpful. Like the fact that there's a difference between a threat mind state and a challenge mindset state. They're super different in terms of the physiology in your nervous system. And when we understand how the nervous system functions, then you go, wow, I cannot sustain the threat state and I'm really exhausted and burning out.

But if I shift my mind, my intention and my frame of mind towards a challenge state, then it just creates a very different way of approaching something that on the one hand can cause distress. This challenge state causes what's called stress EU is good. And you know, a stressful life happens when you have a meaningful life. So what you wanna do is become empowered as Louis Pastor says or said, you know, chance favors the prepared mind. So these different books I write, you know, they're all about trying to help us as a human family to prepare our minds with whatever interpersonal neurobiology, views different disciplines, you know, coming into common ground, whatever those views are, that can actually let us have a prepared mind to deal with the, the chance things that happen in a way that we don't burn out and we continue to create a generative world.

ELISE:
Yeah. I mean, speaking of consilience, don't you feel like one of the, one of the walls that we are perpetually running into is this idea we want one system, right? For so long it was Newton. Like we want one set of laws that govern all of our reality. And it's really hard for people to accept that there could be multiple systems or things that are imperceptible or complexities beyond what we can see or currently understand, even though that's the arc of science, right? Is we learn more every day, every year?

DAN:
Yeah. Well, I have a dear friend named John O’Donahue, whose body died about 15 years ago. And John and I used to teach together a lot, and he would call himself a mystic. So I'd say, John, you know, what does it mean to be a mystic? He was an Irish Catholic priest, a poet of philosopher at his doctoral degree philosophy. And you know, I would say, what's a mystic? You know, and he would say, well, in his Irish broke, he'd beautifully say, a mystic is someone who believes in the reality of the invisible. And I said to him after I paused for a bit thinking about that, I said, you know, I'm trained as a scientist, which he knew, and he's not a scientist, he wasn't a scientist and a clinician. And, the whole base of science is to realize that not everything that you see with your eyes, is the limitation of reality. In other words, there are lots of things that are real that you just don't see with your eyes, but we live in bodies. And if you can grab it with your fingers or smell it or taste it or touch it or see it, you hear it, you go, then that's real. But if you can hear it, it's out of your five senses. You go, well, it's not really real, is it? Well, that's not very scientific, you know? And when Michael Faraday proposed electromagnetic fields, people thought he was nuts, and yet you can't see them. But everything is based on them. That's electronic these days. So, you know, there may be fields. In fact, that's how energy functions in probability fields.

And we don't see them with our eyes. And so they're not in the, in the, in the macro state, Newtonian sense of having a body, they don't quite fit into, you know, what we would see in our everyday eyesight. But this, well, I have this word mindsight, but you can see the more subtle aspects of reality with this thing called mindsight, and if you begin to kind of like, once said this to John when we first met, it's kinda like the difference between day, day vision and night vision. You know, when you're just blasting lots of lights around and your eyes have day vision going okay, you can see certain things. Sure. But then as your eyes start to adjust, let's say when it's dark outside, you start to see things that with day vision before we're invisible to your eye.

But now as your eyes adjust to night vision, they've become very clear, you know? And so this is kind of the same thing as the Newtonian realm. It was day vision and the quantum realm is like night vision, you know, it's all there, you know, only you need to just drop into this mind side ability to start picking up things that are, they're just more subtle, you know? And so in their subtlety with data vision, you just don't see them. But you have this other capacity, it's other way. And the same thing is true with your identity lens. Sure, you think you're at least in your body, and I'm Dan in my body only, but if you think that that bodily experience is the only thing that is with subjective experience and sensation perspective and a point of view or agency, your mistaken identity is limiting itself. Right? It's taking this self as the individual only.

ELISE:
A hundred percent. Well thank you. This was wonderful.

DAN:
Beautiful. Well, thank you. This has been absolute honor to be here with you, Elise.

ELISE:

That’s really heady stuff, I know, and he guides us all through it in Intraconnected: Mwe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging and I think we’re really at the very beginning. It is interesting because Albert Einstein keeps coming up, both, I think as we would imagine him today, sort of this grandfather of science and our understanding of the world and someone who could articulate how matter and energy work. And he is also someone, and Dan quotes him a few times, that is pointing to the face that we are at the very beginning of our understanding of how the world functions. He has one quote from him here, where Albert Einstein says: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us, universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feeling as something separate from the rest, a kind of of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourself from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and foundation for inner security.” So, there we go. That’s Albert Einstein, who gave us a formula for energy (Energy = Mass X The Speed of Light^2), is also articulating a much, much bigger version of our reality and our intra-connectedness.