EP 161: Exploring Interpersonal Neurobiology | Dan Siegel MD

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. And today I'm really happy, very excited to share a conversation with, with a colleague with whom I've had many conversations now. Dr. Dan Siegel of UCLA School of Medicine and the Mindsight Institute, one of the more brilliant thinkers and clinicians of our time and one of the leading figures in the development of a field called interpersonal neurobiology, which is actually integrating many, many different academic disciplines into a much more expansive view of, of our human journey. And I love his definition of mind. You know, he often points out that if you look at mainstream science per se, we don't really have an agreed upon definition of what we mean by mind. When we talk about mind, what do we mean? And so he likes. The definition that he puts forward is a flow of energy and information within, in other words, within ourselves and, and between, with others. So that's this idea of the interpersonal nature and that, you know, we all really, even our sense of self exists within a relational matrix, which is why grieving is so challenging and so difficult. Because when we lose a close loved one, you know, part of our self structure has been fractured and torn and we have to really reweave a sense of who we are in the world and so forth. And that can be a very long and difficult process, process of grieving. And so, you know, this idea that we live our lives inside this skull encapsulated brain or even within the confines of this skin encapsulated body is really a myth. We're relational creatures. We live energetic in a relational matrix. And the conversations with Dr. Dan Siegel about the relationship between the brain and mind and consciousness and how this plays out in our lives, in the world of our, our relationships at the micro level and the macro level. It's just always so fascinating. And also his work is so very applicable and practical. And I love his version of a mindfulness and awareness technique called the Wheel of Awareness, which is incredibly powerful and we always discuss it in our conversations. And so anyway, I'm really proud to be able to share this conversation with you that I had with Dr. Dan Siegel.

Welcome, Dr. Siegel.

Thank you, Fleet. It's great to be here with you. Please call me Dan.

I will. It's great to be here with you and have another conversation. I feel very fortunate. We've been able to have a number of conversations for summits and I'm really interested in our topic today. So I'm going to share your bio though first with our audience and and then we'll get into the conversation.

All right, great.

So Dan Siegel, M.D. is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co director of its Mindful Awareness Research center, or marc. He is also the Executive Director of the mindsight Institute and organization that focuses on the development of mindsight teachers insight, empathy and integration to individuals, families and communities. Dr. Siegel has published extensively for both the professional and lay audiences. His five New York Times bestsellers are Aware of the Science and Practice of Presence, Mind A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, Brainstorm, the Power and Purpose of the teenage brain and two books with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D. the whole brain Child and no Drama Discipline. His other books include the Developing Mind, the Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, Mindsight, the Mindful Brain, the Mindful Therapist and Becoming Aware Of. He has also written the yes Brain and the Power of Showing up with Tina Payne Bryson and Dr. Siegel most recent book is that just came out recently from Norton is Intra Intra Connected we, which is me plus we as the integration of self identity and belonging. So I think it's probably pretty clear to people by now why we're excited to be including you in this summit and having this conversation today. So Dan, we are exploring in this summit the many vehicles humans around the world have employed for millennia and currently.

To access expanded or non ordinary states of consciousness and their potential for healing and transformation or what we might call psychological or spiritual evolution. So I'd like to explore all this with you through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology, the emerging disciplinary, interdisciplinary field for which you have played a leading role. To begin with, could you define the field of interpersonal neurobiology for us? Just give a sense of what that field's all about? What's its origin and its purpose?

Sure. Well, imagine bringing any disciplined way of understanding reality into one framework to allow us to gain insights into the nature of who we are, of the mind, of mental health, of the way the world functions. That's what interpersonal neurobiology is. So it's definitely interdisciplinary. It's transdisciplinary. It's basically what E.O. wilson might call a consilient approach, which means we look for the common ground across independent pursuits. So in the book you mentioned, Intra Connected, it's an interpersonal neurobiology view of self that takes indigenous teachings, contemplative insights, insights from meditation, and ways of understanding through science. For example, the science of psychedelic use, or the science of how we understand the brain develops, or what is the relationship between mental life and neural functioning and relational functioning. And then we bring all that together to look at how things unfold, like consciousness. So, you know, that's what interpersonal neurobiology is. We have a library of books, textbooks, that I've overseen the publication of as the founding editor. And we have a whole, you know, way you can apply this to mental health, to education, to parenting, to the ways organizations function, governments look at ecosystems. And in the interpersonal neurobiology view, we're not a form of doing something. We inform things about, looking across disciplines to understand how things operate, how health emerges, and what the mind may actually be defined as being.

Well, I think that could be one theme of this summit anywhere. We're kind of looking for or looking to discover that consilience between these many different vehicles human beings have been using for millennia to access expanded states or non ordinary states, as well as looking for the differences and understanding those. So before we start talking about expanded states, I'm wondering if, from the perspective of interpersonal neurobiology, how would you describe consciousness and where do you locate it in terms of the embodied experience, the skull, encapsulated brain, as well as the neural networks of the heart and the gut? You know, that part, as well as in the interrelational, interconnected, relational field. So how would you describe consciousness and where do you locate it?

So when we talk about consciousness, we see it as one of four facets of the mind that we try to really articulate. One is subjective experience. So the felt texture of life as it unfolds, what does it feel like? What's the sense? What's the subjectivities? What some people would say. And then you could say, well, if you have a felt sense of life, how do you know you're having a felt sense? And that's where consciousness comes in. Your awareness is a kind of knowing. So if I say, hello, fleet, you've got the sound, hello, fleet. But then you have the knowing of the sound. So those are two distinct aspects of things. So consciousness has both the knowing, which is sometimes called awareness, and the known, which is the object of awareness. The hello fleet would be the known, the knowing would be the awareness. So that's consciousness. And then you have something called information processing. So if I said, goodbye, fleet, it would still be sound waves moving, but goodbye is quite distinct from hello, you know, and probably would create a whole different physiology in you if I said goodbye, please, you know, right now. So that we have information that is the formation of energy that has symbolic value. One's a greeting when you come to join someone. One's a greeting of goodbye when you're leaving someone. So anyway, information then can be processed. And so the third facet of mind is information processing. How swirls of energy have symbolic value or meaning. They represent or represent something other than themselves. And then a fourth facet of mind, we look at complexity theory and look at self organization as an emergent property of complex systems and say that the capacity for energy flow, in the case of the mind to regulate its own becoming might be an emergent property of systems of energy flow that ultimately we see the mind as comprised of. So, you know, emergence is a scientific term that comes from the mathematics of the study of complex systems, which are systems that are open, capable of being chaotic and non linear, meaning a small input at an initial time leads to a relatively large result. So if you're a complex system, we know you have emergent properties. Something is arising from the interaction of the elements of the system that's greater than the individual elements. That's called the emergence. And that synergy that's something greater than the individual parts may be actually the source of subjective experience, it may be the source of consciousness, it may be information processing, it's certainly self organization. And so our stance as a hypothesis, it could be completely wrong, it could be partially correct, it could be wholly correct. We don't know. But the hypothesis is that the mind can be defined as an emergent process that's arising from energy flow. And that one facet of mind of these four is the self organizing, emergent, embodied and relational process that's regulating energy and information flow. And then you can go from that definition to say what a healthy mind is by looking at how you optimize self organization.

So looking at that aspect of your broader description of mind that you call consciousness.

Would you also call that an emergent property? Because the notion of there's one thing, that there's mind functioning, there's subjectivity, there's the sensory experiences happening, there's informational processing going on. But that self awareness that I'm aware that there's a subjective experience happening, that seems to be a unique thing. And we all have that to a degree, but then we also talk about, you know, higher degrees of awareness. So how is that, are we talking about then sort of meta awareness, aware of being aware Could. Is there a distinction there?

Yeah, I think there is a distinction on a number of levels from what you just said. I mean, one is to say that I think it's fair to state that no one knows really what consciousness is made of. I was once at a meeting with a deep practitioner of meditation and a deep practitioner of neuroscience research. And they were both students, but they were deeply devoted to what they were doing. And we were among a number of faculty at this meeting we had. And so I said, this is so cool, and how would you define what consciousness is? And both of them kind of looked at each other, and we said, we have a neuroscientist and a meditation expert. We're so eager to hear what you have to say. And they just said, I don't know. You know, I lived in a cave for three years, and all I know is I got very distracted, but I'm not sure what consciousness is. And that was totally honest. And the neuroscientist said, well, that's why we're studying it. We have no idea what it is. So, you know, this was recently. And so what I would I give you that story to say that we have to be very humble about it, like these two young students were, and say, you know, we can describe the experience of knowing as what we mean by the word consciousness or the word aware. And then we can ask the question, what might it be? Because no one knows what it is. So, you know, I have this practice called the wheel of awareness that had come up because I was trying to bring two consilient ideas together with my patients. One was the notion that consciousness is needed for intentional change. The other is the notion that a process called integration, which is where you differentiate and link when you differentiate in link. Let's just name that integration. When you have integration, well, being arises. And there's a long line of reasoning behind both those things, but they look like concilian ideas from independent pursuits. So then I said, well, what if you brought those two together and you integrated consciousness? So then I brought my patients around a table, and the outside of the table had a wooden rim. The inside was glass. And we said, okay, what if we put the awareness of consciousness in the center, and it was glass, so we kind of called the center of the hub. No one wanted to call the table of awareness. So we called the wheel. And then the rim would be like the rim of a wheel, if you will. And then it was a singular spoke that we. We used as a metaphor for attention. And then they moved it around the rim, to differentiate the different elements, like energy flow from outside the body that we call our five senses energy flow from inside the body called sixth sense mental activities, probably brain activity in your head. And then, you know, you've got a relational sense. And then we would even bend the spoke around into the hub itself. And in that journey of doing that with my patients, they started getting over anxiety, mild to moderate depression, trauma, facing death, the panic of facing death. And then I started teaching to my students. They started using it for themselves as therapists. Then for their clients, they started getting better. So then I decided to do workshops. And I'm a scientist, and I did it in a very systematic way, always presenting it the same way. And then I would take a recorder and record people responding to what it was like. And then I asked my assistant, how many have I done this with? And before the pandemic, it was 50,000 people in person, did the Wheel of Awareness in person. And so then it was like, wow, I had all these recordings and I was trying to figure out what was going on. So then I laid out the findings and was searching for some aspect of science. I began with neuroscience that could correlate with the subjective experience of the wheel of awareness. And I couldn't really find anything. I mean, there was a leading theory of consciousness which is about, you know, integrated information theory. But while I love integration, it's what I've been writing about for decades, it didn't really fit fully with what people were describing. What were they describing in the Hub of Awareness, for example, in that hub, they would describe things like this.

Empty but full, incredibly peaceful. God, home, joy, connected to everything and everyone.

Love, peace, timeless, infinity, eternity. And no matter where I went on this planet, the only place I didn't go was Antarctica. But, you know, I went to North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand. And it didn't matter whether someone had never meditated before or they were meditation teachers. It didn't matter if they were old, if they were young, if they were very educated, not educated, rich, poor. We had an incredible range of diversity of the people participating. So as a scientist, that was really important because, you know, we didn't want to say, this is biased by this or that, you know, particular demographic. So then the question was, well, what's going on? If this is a human experience or if this is. Let's even broaden it. This is the experience of consciousness. What does that mean to be empty but full? What does that mean to be timeless? So in going on a journey to Try to understand that. I happened to be invited to be a junior faculty at a meeting of 150 physicists to talk about spirituality and science. And, you know, I had the chance to learn from my students. The students were physicists, you know, professors of physics, graduate students of physics. And I kept on drilling down what is time? That people might feel it was timeless in that hub, and what does it mean.

To say something is an emergent property of energy? What is energy? And they said the most amazing things to me. But the main things for our discussion here are their definition of energy is the movement from possibility to, to actuality, which kind of blew my mind wide open, because then you could graph that out. And I like to kind of visualize things. So I drew out a graph, showed it to them. They said, yeah, that's what we mean. We don't have that graph, but that's what we mean. And so I took the graph of probability, because a quantum, a unit of energy, is a probability field. And you can map out its probability from near zero probability to 100% probability. So in actuality is up at a peak at the top of this graph where you've gone to an actual thing. But if you imagine like a million words, we could say that's in this pool of all possibilities that the physicists call the sea of potential or the quantum vacuum. It's the literally the formless source of all form. So when I heard that, I went, oh my gosh, everyone's saying it's empty but full. It's empty of form, but full of possibility. And then I started checking into the time part. Why would they say it was timeless? And it turns out in some quantum physicists views, that because of the second law of thermodynamics, where the law basically says things are tending toward entropy, it turns out that that only applies to the large object world that Newton studied. And this large object world, yes, the second law of thermodynamics, things tend to fall apart, is true. And because of that, there's something called an arrow of time. Now the arrow of time is a term indicating a directionality of change. And because of the second law of thermodynamics, that arrow of time, that directionality of change, only exists in this one realm of large objects. When you get to really small objects, you know, Newton figured out these laws 350 years ago. But for small objects, we started learning about these 100 years ago. Units of energy like electrons and photons, they're so small, that's called the micro or Microstates. These microstates don't have the second law of thermodynamics. And the time variable isn't a part of quantum equations. Quantum equations are even more accurate than Newtonian equations. And so what we had then is essentially, and I was so grateful that this was on the COVID of scientific American in July 2018, the month before my book Aware came out. Which kind of makes this hypothesis pretty straightforward, saying, here's where I think consciousness emerges from. When the probability position of energy is in the. This in our graph, it looks like a plane of possibilities. That's what we call it. It's this generator of diversity. It's all the things that could be are resting there as potentialities. It's the timeless. Literally, there's no time variable in this quantum space. And so it's kind of like you can be in land and walk in, you know, the air and you drop. Something goes down. But if you're swimming in the water, you drop a ball, it floats. Well, those are two very different properties in one reality. It turns out we have one reality, but two realms. And the hypothesis which could be wrong, it could be partially correct, or it could be wholly correct, I. I don't know. But the hypothesis is that awareness emerges when the energy position is in the plane of possibility. The quantum vacuum, the sea of potential, the form, the source of all forms, the generator of diversity. And this is a timeless space, in a way, spaceless, because the Nobel Prize was given just this year for the notion of non locality. Not the notion, the reality of non locality. Which means that in the quantum realm, what in our Newtonian bodies we see a separation of space and time. It doesn't pertain to the quantum realm.

Well, that's a beautiful guided journey through that. And what in. I mean, we've been hearing about quantum physics for a long time. Some people have popularized it, made very quick associations to spiritual work. And some of those have been a bit shallow. But I think that the work is deeply matured and especially through the lens of your work. So it's wonderful to hear it described that way. And in many spiritual traditions, and including my own, we talk a lot about form and formlessness. And in between those, there can be, you know, there's a complete formless world of complete pure potentiality and non form. And then there's the world of form that we think of the very material universe. And in between those, there can be kind of words, more visionary worlds and more archetypal worlds and so forth. And, you know, there can be various levels there. But I wonder if we can come back through coming at it from where we are in this world of form with the various vehicles for, for accessing what are often called expanded states, not ordinary states. And you know, we're calling the summit expanded states of consciousness. Maybe the right term is expanded states of mind, Expanded states of awareness. I think maybe that's an open question and certainly your wheel of awareness practices is one such vehicle. But I'm wondering if from the perspective you've been talking about and from interpersonal neurobiology, if you could talk about what we might mean by the kind of, you know, when we're using expanded states. Because an altered state can be anything. It could be getting drunk as an altered state. So we're talking about expanded states or non ordinary states that have this potential for healing and transformation and spiritual evolution and so forth. And it would seem to be that one characteristic or some factors is there's some kind of increased neuroplasticity that produces flow states that allow the brain to maybe differentiate and link in new ways, that allows for the recognition of new patterns, deeper insights, transpersonal experiences, and different ways, new ways to make sense of the world as well as this kind of. It seems like there can be almost an organic neurobiological healing going on just by the increased neuroplasticity. So I'm wondering if you could talk about it from that multidisciplinary field perspective. What do we think these expanded states or non ordinary states are and how do they lead into this potential for positive change? Whether it's healing existing traumas or it's just, you know, expanding our awareness and developing a more expanded worldview or new ways of being in the world.

Oh, that's such a great question, Fleet.

Let me begin with what I said earlier was, you know, we're in such a place of learning that we have to be super humble about things we say and, and really do what exactly? What you're doing is ask more questions than make statements. You know, in the book called Mind Journey to the Heart of Being Human, every chapter I wrote, you know, was a question, you know, saying, I don't, I don't know. Let's look at this together and let's see what, what might you be consilient with this in the book Intra Connected, this last one, you know, it was all about. So it is all about self, identity, belonging. It takes a really deep dive into indigenous teachings from thousands of years ago, contemplative teachings from thousands of years ago. And then it says, you Know, what can we use as those deep invitations into the idea of self identity and belonging as ways of understanding what consciousness is? You know, what do we experience both in awareness and the thing we're aware of? And then it looks at how identity comes from that. So here would be my response to you about this question of neuroplasticity and change.

The nervous system is fascinating. You know, we are only getting a little glimpse at how it works, but some of that little bit we do know suggests that, you know, the connections among neurons with experience can be strengthened or weakened. So when we talk about neuroplasticity, the plastic word of that, part of the bigger word, neuroplasticity is about change in response to experience. So that's what something means to be plastic is it's not a piece of man made material. It's actually the ability to adapt to experience, to change. So neuroplasticity can happen at least four ways. You know, you can, in some areas of the brain, even after childhood, you can grow new neurons called neurogenesis. You can grow new connections among neurons, synaptogenesis, you can modify those synapses, make them stronger or weaker. You can actually lay down myelin, which is a sheath that allows connected neurons to communicate in a much quicker way that is 100 times.

Faster. They can.

Have the speed of the conduction going down their long lengths, but the refractory period is 30 times shorter. So when you multiply 30 times 100, you get 3,000. So they're 3,000 times, you know, more effective, if you will, in having this action potential, this electrical charge, go down the length. And that's how we believe the nervous system functions with this electrochemical energy flow. So when you have networks where you have about 100 billion neurons, where your average neuron is connected to 10,000 other neurons, you know, that's like trillions and trillions of connections. And when you put the number of firing patterns on and off together, it's a number larger than the atoms in the known universe. So that that's not the neurons, that's the number of possible firing patterns. So the thing up in our head, if we just, yeah, if we just stay there, those combinations are incredible what they could do. So.

When the brain learns, you change the way the connections are. And the more you learn, the more you develop what you can call top down filters that allow you to take what you learned before, make what we call mental models or representations, these schema of how things are. So if you hear a dog barking in the distance, you Hear the bark, you know, you know, I've got a dog and she's barking because she's trying to protect me from some, you know, probably squirrel that's trying to intrude on our garden, you know, so you can hear the bark and you know right away, dog. But if you never saw a dog before, if you never heard a dog bark before, you'd hear this sound and you wouldn't know what to do with it. But because you know that's the bark of a dog, because you know, I'm in from what it looks like, I'm in a house, it's my dog. So when you, you know, you filter it through, you go, okay, Dan's got a dog, you know, and they're doing all this thing in the pandemic and he's at home, okay, he's not a sound studio, whatever you could do. But you would filter it from prior learning. So those top down filters have us learn from our parents, our teachers, our peers, our society. And before you know it, the more we have learned, the less we can see.

Because you perceive what you believe and you believe what you've been taught. So this conundrum really of the human brain means that we have got to do something to release ourselves from the prison of a learned past that keeps on filtering oncoming sensation, which is as bottom up as it can be, into these perceptually organized filters of reality. So how do you do that? Well, you do that in dreaming.

You know, that's how you do it in the Wheel of Awareness. We do it when we get into that hub and we start experiencing these different sensations of that realm, of the quantum realm. You know, I had someone do the Mystical Experiences scale for people who did the Wheel of Awareness. He's a researcher in psychedelics. He got the same score as if they were on psilocybin, right? And everyone was saying, oh, I'm stoned, I'm stoned, I'm stoned. So, you know, I think when the brain is really focused, it does certain things to release certain neurotransmitters that make neuroplasticity more likely even the fourth. I said there were four ways you change your brain. You can actually change what are called the epigenetic regulators that regulate how the brain will actually respond to experience. So we don't know which of those four might be highlighted by intensive psychotherapy, by meditation, you know, by maybe perhaps, you know, psychoactive use, like psychedelic use. And, you know, but it isn't just the medication, it's the Overall, you know, situation of the mind, meaning the, the way there's a state of mind as you get ready for an experience, let's say in therapy and the way in which that setting is, is really setting up. So as a therapist I do this all the time. I know they talk about set and setting, but you know, in therapy it really is the set and setting that makes a difference. It isn't just that you're saying something miraculous as a therapist, the whole setting and the way you allow, I think the patient, the client to enter a state of, you could call it altered consciousness in that they're starting to feel something they don't usually feel in everyday life and then they start to get beneath those filters of prior learning. And if you could do it skillfully enough in joining with your client, it's not that you make something happen in the joining, then there's this transformation.

So I'm glad you brought up set and setting because that was one of my next questions. So.

Maybe just before that though, the philosopher and cognitive scientist John Verbecki has a well known lecturer and that's out there on the web, it's called Metaphor Flow and the Axial Revolution. And he's looking at how the whole axial revolution change. One of his positive it had happened from people having mystical experiences, experiences of great neuroplasticity leading to new eggs and major human evolutionary change. And he described a similarity or a consilience between what shamans do, what happens with psychedelics, with plant medicine and other things. And one of, if I remember correctly, focused on there's some disruption of attention, some shift in attention that inculcates or inducts some kind of flow state and that allows us to become unstuck from those top down frames, those patterns. And because we get unstuck from those, then the brain is then able to connect the dots in different ways, leading to new connections and the recognition of new patterns. And we experience those, those recognitions as insight, as mystical experience, as visions, as maybe even in the form of guides or deities. But essentially it's the brain make connecting and discovering, if you will, new patterns. So that's one side of it and I guess the set and setting influence of that, you know, where, where is the, you know, the, the subjectivity in this and where are we kind of actually beginning to discover, you know, a more objective sense of new maps of consciousness, new maps of reality of the universe and you know, so there's the guided. I, I don't know, I'm kind of making this question up as I'm speaking, but see where you go with it.

Yeah, no, no, I, I think this fits all together just as a hypothetical framework that if you're talking about mystical experiences, you know, my Dear friend John O', Donoghue, who passed away about 15 years ago, he, he used to call himself a mystic. And I would ask him, you know, John, what does it mean to be a mystic? And he would say, someone who believes in the reality of the invisible. So if we go back to what we said about these filters of experience that are top down, meaning that they've been learned from the past, limit what you can see, and use John's notion of the invisible, then a mystical experience makes the invisible, the previously invisible, visible.

And what does that mean? It means that the filters. One way of interpreting that is that the filters you used to have that prevented you from seeing something that was there all along.

Are now disrupted, dismantled, undone, relaxed, released, whatever words you want to use. You know, we, we have a diagram where we see this as plateaus. You drop down toward the plane of possibility. In this diagram view, when you're releasing that filter, releasing that plateau that serves can be useful. You don't always have to say, what's that noise? That's noise. You say it's a dog. You go on to pay attention to what Fleet and Dan are saying.

So there's nothing wrong with plateaus, but when they're prisoners, then it's a problem. So relaxing. That drops you into the plane of possibility. And where, what is that? That's open awareness. Now, depending on what other stimuli are coming at you, both from the outside world and the inside world, you can configure what you experience from that plane of possibility in new ways. So, you know, once I did a week long, you know, retreat with Stan Groff doing holotropic breathing, you know, and Stan was the most experienced researcher in lsd, but it became illegal, so he didn't do LSD anymore. But he had to figure out something so he can continue his studies of consciousness. And he found the holotropic breathing, rapid breathing for about three hours to loud, loud music. And I had the opportunity to interview a whole bunch of people because he invited me there as the first scientist to actually explore that with him. And it was absolutely fascinating to listen deeply to what people experience and see the incredible range of people who did the quote, same experience. That is, we were all in the room. Half of us were the, were the, the assistants or ally or guide. Half of us were doing the breathing loud, same music Loud, loud, loud. Breathing, breathing, breathing. People went through the different things. They were profound, the things that happened, and they were all over the map of what happened. So, you know, did one person return to an age 500 years ago when they lived in a castle and they were being chased, you know, by marauders? Maybe she did, I don't know. Or maybe. Maybe that isn't her history. And maybe she actually went back there or maybe she just watched a film about that and now she was reenacting the memories. I don't know. Or some people were in a prison and being tortured and some people were in ecstasy and making love with people, you know, in. In their space and time in the future, you know. You know, so people would say, well, do you think that really happened? I would say, you have to have an open mind. I have no idea. They. In a. Are they in a time portal going backwards in time and forward in time in our Newtonian time? Maybe. Is it their imagination? Maybe. I don't know. You know, and for the people who absolutely believed it to be what happened, they'd get mad with me. They say. They would say to me, did this happen? I go, I don't know. They go, don't you believe in me? I say, I believe you had the experience. I don't. I don't know. You know, and I'm sure there's someone listening right now says, dan, you're hopeless. You people go back to a castle and you don't even believe it. You know, I'm actually totally open to it. I just don't. I need to. I'm a scientist. I have to, you know, as Adam Grant says, think again. I'm open to not knowing. And if it happened, that's awesome. And if it didn't happen in the brain generated it, that's awesome too, you know, so it's all good. And the issue is that people felt the freedom afterwards and they felt a kind of opening and, you know, living a kind of looser and more, you know.

Less encumbered life, at least for that week that we were together. Um, so I don't know. And, and, and, you know, I guess if you were wanting to study this rigorously, you could try to figure out some way to prove whether or not that person was in the castle. I don't know how you do that. You know, that's a whole nother thing. But, but, but it was fascinating, the incredibly different amounts of stuff, and you could never. There were people. It's a huge room. There would be people going through their experiences near me. And I would hear them, you know, when I was like a guide and I would go, wow, that person's really having. You know, my mind would make a narrative about what they were going through, and then they. They'd let me interview them. Right. Because that, that's what I was able to do. And, and it was nothing like what I thought. 0 I figured, you know, this person is being beaten and agitated and terrible. No, they were like having this ecstasy in. In their. Their experience. And I. And because I was afraid I was going to sit down, it's going to be like this really painful thing. And it was just the opposite. So, you know, I don't know. You can never tell. It's the subjective experience the person is having in their awareness and their own information processing. It's their mind. And you can't know from the outside.

Well, that's really interesting, even in light of everything you've been talking about, about this sea of possibility and, you know, the plateaus of frames of reference and then letting go where we can open to new possibilities and new connections and so forth. Because you just said something like, were they really there in the castle? Did they really experience it or did their brain create that? Well, that. That's really an interesting question, whether there's any difference there, because I wish I could remember the person's name right now. I feel bad about that, but someone's recently been doing some writing and their hypoth. The name might be Hammond, I'm not sure. Some hypothesis that based on what we know about evolutionary science, that that really the brain has evolved in the way it has to obscure the vastness and the chaos of reality from us because we basically couldn't handle it. And so if you think about, from that perspective, or you think about some of the work of Stan Grof and some of the others that did extensive LSG journeys, including someone more recently doing that over the last 20 years, Christopher Bache, you know, the mapping out all these various dimensions into kind of complete, formless realms. You know what, that whole question of subjectivity and is the brain creating this or is it reality? Like, that begs the question of what is reality? I guess.

Absolutely. Now, is he the philosophy professor who did all those private LSD trips?

Yes, that's him. Yes, Christopher Bass. I actually interviewed him earlier today for the summit quite fast.

And now he and I did a whole podcast interview together.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were interviewed. It was really fun and, and he was really excited about this stuff. I just presented and to him it was concilian with his whole experience. So that's really neat. Yeah. You know, listen, I think that when you read Michael Pollan's book, you know, how to Change youe Mind, or watch his Netflix documentary, you know, things happen and fleet, you, you helped me explain this, right? In his book, he doesn't talk about the queen of the mushrooms in Watla as far as I can remember, but in his documentary he features her. Now what I start the whole interconnected book saying before his documentary ever came out, was that what happened to me because I had an addicted relative. So I was psychologically very reluctant to ever use any kind of, you know, psychologically altering substance. So I didn't. But I was working in Mexico for the World Health Organization. I was going, I was studying Coronado, so I was studying folk healers. And so I was going to interview that same queen of the mushrooms. And I was going on a horse up from the state of Veracruz, the state of Oaxaca, where she lived, and the saddle and the horse went to the horse's belly. I was dragged for, they tell me, about 100 yards. And besides, you know, destroying my face, I, I lost my identity. I never met the queen of mushrooms, but I could finally meet her in his documentary. So anyway, that's the part I want to say about this. Besides the fact that having no identity, I was like wide awake and aware, but had no narrative identity and things were just like amazing because nothing had any names. Probably all my top down filters were gone. So I was like, it was my own kind of getting stoned, you know, being dragged on the rocks. So I'm watching this documentary, right? So I'm, I'm, I'm a colleague of Michael. So I, I, I text Michael, I'm texting him, I'm finishing your documentary now. It's really cool. And just as I'm about to write that, I get a text from a friend of mine who's a lama, a Tibetan lama. And she writes to me, hey Dan, can we get together, you know, next week I'm going to be in town and, and she says, and have you seen Michael Pollan's documentary? I said, that's so funny. I am just finishing it and I'm just texting Michael right now, what you think? She goes, oh, I thought it was awesome. I said, okay, I'll tell him. So I text to her, then I text to Michael, then Michael writes back to me, that's amazing. Now what's the chance of all that stuff converging on the same like 5 minute period on a Sunday morning. You know, you just got to wonder sometimes, right?

Yeah.

So Michael goes, that's cool. I got, you know, accredited by a llama.

And you know, it's a good, good endorsement for your film. So. So, you know, but when you drop into that plane of possibility.

All sorts of stuff, you know, our host on that podcast I was on with Chris, you know, does synchronicity, you know, and I think Bernie Bateman is named. And so what we, what, what we, what I, what I suggest about synchronicity is that you drop into the plane of possibility. Either you're more open to the random, you know, associations that then you just attribute or, you know, things that coordinate, or that's one possibility. And it's just like Isaac Asimov apparently said, it's all just attributing chant things with meaning, but they have no meaning. That's possible. Another view, in fact, is that it might, might, might, might, and it might not. So I'm saying possibly. It might possibly relate to something called non locality and entanglement, where people who are somehow have energy configurations that are related to each other, like Michael and I might, or Lama and I might, you know, have something that is, that resonates or influences itself from what we call a spatial distance, maybe even a distance across time. But let's just stay in the time zone we're in, you know, that you, you have this spatial thing and you become more open to the reality of entanglement that the Nobel Prize was given for entanglement, not for the mind, but for energy patterns. But if the mind is an emergent property of energy, then as a scientist, I just have to ask the question, why do 85% of people that I've interviewed, thousands of people about this, I said, have you ever had something that was so specific in communicating with someone who wasn't right in front of someone physically distant from you, but you're in relationship with. And the specificity of the communication was so clear that this was not just one of those random things. So, you know, it's 85. Say yes. Now when you ask the details, it's pretty specific.

And then what the Asimov argument is is what if you ask the opposite, how many times did you have something specific you thought was going to happen, but it didn't happen? And then you calculate that number, you calculate the number of times it happened and then it's all random. So that could be. But I have a hard time believing that.

Yeah, me too. So, you know, to Your Oaxaca experience, you know, two things there that I think fit. One, you had a disruptive experience, right? You. You fell up, you got dragged by this horse right in your head. So there was a major disruption. And my experience, I was in Oaxaca in my early 20s, and it's a very magical place. There have been places I've been in the world that you kind of wake up in the morning. The Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru, Oaxaca and the area. Some of the outlying areas around Oaxaca. You wake up in the morning and you feel. Took some psilocybin mushrooms or something, but you haven't. There's something in those environments that is really kind of imbued with that more fluid reality and luminosity. It's like even the mountains that shine with a kind of luminosity. And so I think there's some potential contributing factors there. But to this other, to the notion of the synchronicity and whether that connects with, you know, non locality and so forth. Back again, one of my first questions of you talking about where do you locate mind? Where do you locate consciousness? What about the relational field itself? And I know that's a particular emphasis in interpersonal neurobiology. Can we talk about the relational field being conscious or the consciousness of the relational field? And as well then you could talk about the intelligence of the relational field. And then there could be some patterning operating in there that has its own intelligence that is collective, that it's not generated from my individual brain necessarily. My brain's participating in it.

Absolutely. Well, I mean, let's just remember as a starting place that when Michael Faraday proposed there are electromagnetic fields that people couldn't see with their eyes, they thought he was out of his mind. Not that they knew what the mind was, but they thought he was nuts. Right. And turns out he was right on that. Electromagnetic fields do exist and all of our electronics are based on them. Now, so the word relational fields, that phrase is suggesting that besides, you know, Fleet being there, Dan being here and you being where you are watching us, that there is a field that's created. We don't know how to study it. You know, I'm working with these people at mit, Peter Sangay and Metabol, and Otto Sharmer is an associate of theirs to, you know, where we talk about relational fields, we don't know how to measure them. You know, you can walk in a classroom and feel it.

And when we, when we found a field that was very. What's called generative, we. We had like five sample teachers where all the other teachers and the, and the administrators of the school could say, that classroom, I don't know what it is, there's something going on there. So we brought all those teachers in for a three day conference for just them, you know, and we were with them as scientists and we said, what do you do? And they all said the same thing, which is really interesting. I don't know, I just do it. And I have a theory about it, you know, which is about integration, but we haven't studied that yet. But, but the issue is that you can walk in a classroom and feel the field. You can go into a room where there's a family sitting, it can be tense and, you know, agitated, or you can feel light and airy and full of love, you know, so we have this subjective experience of feeling the field. Now you're asking the question if there is such a field, and let's assume there is, but that's still an open question. Does it have awareness? And certainly in indigenous teachings, the answer would be absolutely yes, that nature has a consciousness.

You know, you could debate back and forth, well, how could nature have a consciousness that doesn't have a brain? Well, this is saying that the experience of awareness is beyond the brain. Now, I once had a philosopher, Michelle Bitbol, come to this, this event I was at, actually it was that spirituality and science event in Italy. And he's a philosopher and a physician and a, and a physicist. And, and he spent three hours trying to convince me and I think he won in the end. Something which I had a hard time believing that even an amoeba has consciousness and it doesn't have a nervous system, you know. But he said there is something that emerges from a complex being that is in a sense, the feeling of being itself. So if the feeling of being itself is what is meant by consciousness, which is what if I'm understanding Michelle's three hour presentation to me was all about, then a forest for sure has a feeling of being itself. And then a relational field in a room which is full of tension is going to have a certain feeling of being itself. And in, in contrast, the generative field, which is full of love and compassion and connection, it's going to have a feeling of being itself. You know, if you go to Pando Populace, which is a forest in Utah in the United States of America, it's, excuse me, it's 48,000, 48,000.

Trunks of quaking aspen trees, and when you dig beneath the surface, you find it's one root ball.

Exactly.

And when you Test the DNA. It's the same tree. So. Well, on the surface you go, wow, 48,000 trees. Awesome, awesome. It's one tree, right? And so that would be the ultimate relational field is it has an appearance of differentiation but massive integration in the wholeness of it. That's where the interconnected word. Just after that, I was up in the Colorado mountains with actually Peter and Metta on this retreat. Peter, Sangay and Metabol. And you know, we were alone for three days in the, in the woods and then we got back together and everyone had. Instead of being alone, it was all one time. But when people use the interconnected word interlaced, interdependent, interwoven, inter being. From Thich Nhat Hanh came time for me to speak. I couldn't use the inter term. I'm a stickler for words in their meaning. So I said it really wasn't the sense that this body was in the forest and I was connected. It was. I was the trees, I was the creek, I was the sky, I was the body. It was a connectedness within the whole. So I guess I would say I was, I was.

I guess I would say I was intra connected, you know, and everyone's kind of nodding and all's fine. Then we closed down the meeting and then we went back to our, our, you know, place we were staying. And I got out my computer, I was typing up some notes and I said, yeah, the feeling was I was intraconnected. And the computer kept on changing it back to interconnected. And when I tried to see what was wrong with my computer, it turns out there is no word intraconnected. So I thought, wow, if in English we don't have a word to speak about the features of self, which is subjective experience, perspective and agency on behalf of the whole, we can only speak about the part, then we're continue to perpetuate this lie of a separate self. So I think in some ways what you're asking about, about the consciousness of the whole is, is the interconnected nature of things. And I'll bet you that if we can drop out of the filters of separation that being told you're a separate self gives you. You start feeling the wholeness of things. And that has a, that has a quality of feeling what it is which is the interconnected whole. It's a me inside your body, a we in your relationship. Sure. But when you put the whole thing together from the perspective of the whole, the spa, the subjective sensation, the perspective, the agency, that's the spa of self. And there is an interconnected whole that you can feel that spa of selfness in.

Well, I think we're getting kind of towards the end of our time here and I want to circle back to your latest book, but I gave you a little experiential. I've done a lot of deep dialogue work called console Practice. Sitting in small circles for many years, but also doing a lot of dyadic work using the same principles. And often couples will use that and really develop deep intimacy and talk about weaving this third presence that emerges from that work. And sometimes they'll set an empty seat, an empty cushion representing the third presence. And there may be an outside witnessing council and people begin to really feel if they're doing the work over time that there develops a relational field that holds a relationship even when one of the partners maybe is kind of checked out for one reason or another. But in doing the work in council the witness field, sometimes someone will. It's almost like they're challenged to channeling what they call the voice of the third. Now go take that seat. And they'll speak from the voice of the relationship to that couple, the people working. And you know, you can tell sometimes it feels a little conceptual like you know, but sometimes you're just like, you just, I mean it just hits you like it's that the person who took the seat has nothing to do with them. It's the relationship speaking. Right. And so you know, there, I think there's a lot of ways that people have, have, have experienced these things in a lot of the psychedelic experiences as well as other means of entering these non ordinary states and a deeper path that can happen with that. There's often, you know, there's a letting go of one plateau to open up. You know, there's a letting go of certain identities. You know, some people have what they call an ego death experience. And you know, actually Chris Bates, who we bash, who we referenced, talks about going through a dying at level of the personal ego, the collective, the, the archae, the, the archetypal and so forth. So in, in your we model, in your recent book Intraconnected, you know, bringing together the me and the we and I and I realized that it overcomes some of the, the problematic areas of trying to sort of demonize the ego or something or, or I'm going to do surgery on myself and get rid of the self or something. So it's in some ways it's a kinder model. But that we that emerges, I would assume there's a possibility that that is something that re self organizes really beyond the personal identity, I mean. Or does. I mean, as long as we have a body, we got to come and live from this personal identity. But some of these experiences would actually kind of go beyond that frame of reference, I assume. And maybe in the context of the wheel awareness practice.

Yeah, I absolutely fleet. I think that you know, in contemplative practices people talk about, you know, the relativistic and the universal and the relativistic I think meaning the me and the universal being more like the we. And it might even relate to Newtonian is relativistic and quantum is universal in indigenous teachings. You know, there is in the, for example in the Potawatomi, the in. In what we call North America that Robin Wall Kimmerer talks beautifully about. There is a need for the individual to recognize their own gifts, to develop those gifts and have that responsibility. But then that as they develop their own individual gifts, they're giving back to the larger whole for the greater good. So that's the me and the we. And yes, I think, you know, as Buckminster Fuller, you know, writes about beautifully, there's synergetics, that is, there's a synergy where something is much greater than the individual parts that comes together. So the idea of me that you can have an inner and we, that there's an inter. When you bring them together, it does create something larger even than the combination of the me and the we. And that's the interconnected whole. And then even from the individual body you act on behalf of the whole, from the relationship you act on behalf of the whole, recognizing the importance of individuality and differentiation, while also the importance of linkage is honored. So in some ways integration, you know, is where.

There'S a kind of portal, a gateway through which this can arise from consciousness. So when we let people access this plane of possibility, which I think psychedelics do, I think walking in the park with awe can do that in a forest. I think the experience of gratitude and compassion along with all these what can be called self expanding emotions help that the wheel of awareness practice is a very specific one where you're differentiating the knowing in that hub from the rim. All these things I think allow you to drop beneath those filters, enter this open state where all sorts of new combinations can arise depending on the set and setting. That open state will determine different outcomes. So this is why I think your question about set and setting is so relevant. Because it isn't just, you know, like oh, you know, take some pills and that's going to work. No It's a whole process of freeing the mind by accessing the hub of the wheel. I mean, I do the wheel every day, so I kind of have these mini experiences of transformation every morning when I do the wheel. And you can too. It's not like I own it. I mean, please do it and let me know how it goes. But when you drop into that hub of the wheel, time disappears. You get this incredible energy flag like a waterfall. And it's this sense of, and there's just kind of this sense of you have become potentiality and then you become like a portal through which stuff happens through the body you happen to be in. And it's a whole different way of living the day.

Well, this has been incredibly, incredibly rich exploration. And it really is kind of set the stage in context for so many other rich conversations in this summit. And I feel like it's really informed the whole kind of quest we're on for both understanding the differentiation and recognizing the consilience across these vehicles for entering these non ordinary states and their potential for healing and transformation. So I just can't thank you enough for being part of our summit, Dan, and.

Wish you all the best. And how can people find out more about your work and about the Wheel of Awareness practice?

Well, thanks Fleet. I mean, just come to our website, which is Dr. For Dr. D R Dan D A N Siegel S I E g e l drdansiegel.com and then you know, you'll do the wheel. You can do other things. There's all sorts of, you know, things to tap into. Not only courses, but you know, short videos, other meditations, lots of ways of really diving into interpersonal neurobiology. Wow.

Well, whatever one is looking for in life, from the most cosmic to just health and well being, spending a couple minutes a day resting in that hub is incredibly valuable. I just can't imagine my life without having access to that. And your Wheel of Awareness has made it so accessible for so many. So thank you for that.

My pleasure. Thank you. It's an honor for you to be, well.

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