Transcript: Jeff Lieberman on Science and Spirituality at TEDxCambridge 2011

And 13.7 billion years ago, at the Big Bang, everything that we ever found in the entire universe was one infinitesimal, undifferentiated, pure energy.

All of us are energy. A human being is a very complex pattern of energy. So, I stand here as a 33-year-old, basically motionless, but when you look up-close at any single part of me, I’m moving the speed of light, and I’m the age of the universe.

So, the question for me is: I know this conceptually. Why don’t we feel it? Why do we walk around and we’re so sure that we’re a human being all the time, and we never feel like we’re energy, because it sounds awesome? And I think the reason that we don’t notice it is because we are so distracted by the human levels of our experience that we fail to notice what is always sitting beneath. And so, I want to look at those distractions.

Take five seconds, and think about something that you’re going to do tomorrow.

So, what you just did is something that, as far as we understand, no other organism in the entire universe can do. You just built an alternate reality inside your head. You just made a prediction about the future that has never happened in reality. And this powerful prediction, when you can compare alternate realities, allows you to plan for the future. And from agriculture to your retirement, this has changed the face of the planet. It’s probably the most significant, evolutionary step forward since walking upright.

So, I want to look at this tool in your head, because your mind is a thought-generating machine, to make proliferate predictions about the future, to guide and goal-orient your behavior.

What does this machine look like in all of our heads, in 2011? So, another experiment: Take ten seconds, and stop thinking. OK. Did anyone make it? Ten seconds? I make it about two, and then I start strategizing about how I’m going to stop thinking; I think about that the whole time.

All right, so what this means is you have such an evolutionarily advantageous tool that it’s become completely compulsive, but you’ve got to remember, no other organism does this at all. And the side effect of having the most evolutionarily advantageous tool in the entire universe sitting in your head is that you have no control over it. And when you have no control and you compulsively generate all these possible realities, you always compare them to where you are, to try to goal-orient your behavior, and this creates an entirely new class of human suffering. Things like jealousy and regret about something that happened in the past, and anxiety about your future, no other organism can feel.

And so, I want to understand if it’s possible to totally eliminate those sources of suffering from humanity. This is just a brief list of all those possible sources of suffering. In order to find out if it’s possible to remove those sources, we have to take a kind of scientific, experimental objective at ourselves, we have to take a look at all the layers of our own experience, and try to be as objective as possible about them. This is amazingly difficult, because we’re so emotionally involved in our own lives, and as any of you know, if you go to a movie and you’re emotionally involved, two minutes into it, you totally forget that you’re at a movie, and the lights turn on at the end, and you’re shocked back into reality.

So, this is even more difficult, because we have to look at our own movie, the movie inside our consciousness. So we’re going to do two quick experiments, and this only will give you a taste of something that takes much longer to understand the depth of.

So, the first one is your sight. From what we understand in physics, all light is a vibration of electromagnetic field. And none of those light waves intrinsically have any color. There’s just this change in frequency. But once those waves go into your eye and into your brain, you create the subjective experience of color.

Now, what this means is that you all think that you are seeing me out here, with a red shirt on, but this red only exists in your head, and so, this entire picture you’re seeing is happening inside your head, in a movie inside your consciousness. And if you remove a little bit of the attention from me directly, you can start to have some attention on yourself, noticing that you are seeing me inside your head.

So, let’s do a second experiment. It’s even more subtle than that one.

Read this sentence twice, silently to yourself.

[The voice in your head]

[“I can hear the voice in my head reading this sentence”]

OK, so it’s weird, right? But you can get this very weird, subtle perspective that you can look at your own thought process objectively. You’re actually listening to the soundtrack of thoughts inside your head, in your movie of consciousness.

[I am]

So imagine that I do this process for thousands of hours, and I just try to look, as objectively as possible, at my thoughts, and my emotions, and my perceptions, and even the way that my brain has modeled space and time. The more that I pull attention away from the thoughts and the perceptions, the more I seem to notice myself noticing these things inside my consciousness. And eventually, maybe I can pull all of the attention away from all of those layers of thoughts, perceptions, my body, my sensations, and there’s nothing left to perceive, there’s nothing left that I can consider myself, because I’ve seen it all in front as not me. And yet, the one thing that remains is this feeling of existence. “I am” remains. This feeling of “I am”.

And what I find when I sit in that state is that what my identity is, whatever it is, is beyond perception, it cannot be perceived, but it is still experienced. And this “I am” is the root of our entire existence. “I am” is latent in every single aspect of our existence, but just like a fish might never notice the water that it swims in, we might never notice the “I am” because it’s covered.

“I am” is a completely empty experience, it’s devoid of any content, and when I experience it directly, on its own, there’s the possibility for a realization: “Maybe I’m not a human being that has consciousness. Maybe I’m consciousness that is shaped into a human being.”

And when I see this totally empty experience, there’s no content, form, structure, there’s not even a model of space and time that is generated in the mind. And we’ve seen those conditions before, 13.7 billion years ago, when the entire universe was an undifferentiated, pure energy. And so, just maybe there is the potential to realize directly I am that energy, I always have been that energy, and I always will be that energy.

Einstein said that thoughts suffer from an optical illusion of consciousness, this illusion that there’s a separate person inside an environment, when in reality, there’s just energy in motion, everywhere. And just like an ocean is water in motion, we can call a certain part of that ocean a wave, but it gives us the illusion that the wave is a separate entity in the ocean. But a wave is not in the ocean. A wave is the ocean.

And similarly, we might not be waves. Maybe we’re the ocean. Maybe all of us are energy, and we can realize that directly. Now, this experience could never be reduced to words, because it makes words, but it could be experienced, and I think it’s such an important experience that people have been trying to name it for thousands of years, and they call it spiritual enlightenment.

[You are not what you think]

And I think the first human beings started realizing that they were fundamentally energy about 2,500 years ago. And all of them say the same thing. They say it is the complete ending of human suffering. Well of course it’s the end of human suffering! All suffering is based on the illusory separation that there’s an individual in the environment, that there’s a person that has to survive, that this specific collection of 1,000 trillion trillion atoms has to hold itself together.

But if I realize directly that I am energy, and I realize that the body and the mind are a temporary manifestation of that energy, then I can fully accept the death of the body and mind as something that does not happen to me, because I was always energy and I always will be.

And if I were to experience that directly, this voice in my head that tells me I have to do certain things in order to be fulfilled loses all of its power. At this very moment, I never have to listen to that voice again, and so everything in life becomes a game, for fun, a play. And we’ve all experienced that, but it’s very hard to remember, because we were so young, and maybe we were at the beach building a sand castle, and the entire world faded away because we were only building it to build it, and we weren’t trying to get somewhere else. We hadn’t even learned how to plan.

And so, the only moment that mattered to us was right now. I think this experience is so important and powerful that every religious tradition at its core has been trying to convince us of its importance. And if it’s true, if the true end of all human psychological suffering is actually possible, it is the most important thing science could be studying.

When we look at monks and nuns who have meditated or prayed for thousands of hours, we see remarkable shifts on their brain scans. Trillions of neural connections have changed configuration. And along with this quantifiable objective change in the operating system of the brain, they describe a feeling of undifferentiated, infinite oneness. To me, that sounds like they’re having the direct experience of being energy.

Now, enlightenment science and enlightenment engineering would study these ancient technologies of prayer and meditation as data sets, to understand what has to change in the structure of a human brain for a human being to understand that they are energy directly. And we still have no idea how much modern technology could completely change our ability to understand that. Maybe it’s possible that, within our lifetimes, we could actually eradicate human suffering. And what would the world look like then, if every single one of us felt complete, felt whole, and felt interconnected?

[Letting go]

When you let go of individual survival, all of your priorities change, because you actually see the entire world as your body, you see the suffering of others as your own suffering, and you want to help. And what is the actual power of a human being to really benefit the world, when they’re able to put the priorities of the whole system in front of themselves, even if that means they have to die in the process? How many of us can do that right now? What if 7 billion of us did that?

Maybe the one thing that keeps us from actually solving all of the other problems in the world is this persistent flawed thought that we are separate from the world. And maybe it’s time we change our minds.

Thank you.

SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:

Jeff Lieberman’s talk titled “Science and Spirituality” explores profound insights into the nature of human consciousness, the interconnectedness of all existence, and the potential for ending human suffering. Here are the key takeaway points from his talk:

1. The Quest for Fulfillment: Jeff Lieberman shares his personal journey, highlighting how he reached a point in his life where he had achieved what he thought would bring fulfillment but still felt a nagging sense of emptiness and the need to do more.
2. The Universal Suffering: Lieberman observes that suffering is pervasive in human existence. People are often impatient, striving for a better future, and he seeks to understand the root causes of this suffering.
3. The Nature of Reality: Drawing from his scientific background, Lieberman delves into the concept of human existence. He breaks down the human body from trillions of cells to atoms, ultimately emphasizing that all matter is fundamentally energy.
4. The Illusion of Distraction: Lieberman suggests that humans are so engrossed in the distractions of daily life, thoughts, and perceptions that they fail to recognize the underlying reality of their existence as pure energy.
5. The Power of Prediction: He highlights the unique ability of humans to create alternate realities in their minds, make predictions, and plan for the future, which has driven significant progress in human evolution.
6. The Compulsive Nature of Thought: Lieberman points out that this predictive capacity has become compulsive, leading to the emergence of new forms of suffering like jealousy, regret, and anxiety, which are unique to humans.
7. Eliminating Sources of Suffering: He proposes the idea of eliminating these sources of suffering through introspection and understanding the layers of human consciousness objectively, a challenging but essential endeavor.
8. Shifting Perspective: Lieberman demonstrates the shift in perspective from perceiving oneself as a human being with consciousness to realizing that one is consciousness shaped into a human being.
9. The “I Am” Experience: He describes an empty, content-less experience of “I am” that lies beyond perception and that has the potential to transform one’s understanding of existence.
10. The Ocean Analogy: Drawing parallels to an ocean, Lieberman suggests that humans may not be waves in the ocean but rather the ocean itself, indicating a profound interconnectedness with all of existence.
11. Spiritual Enlightenment: He argues that spiritual enlightenment, a realization of being energy, is the end of all human suffering and that it has been a central pursuit across various religious traditions.
12. Scientific Exploration: Lieberman proposes the idea of “enlightenment science” and “enlightenment engineering” to study the transformation of the brain during deep meditation and prayer, suggesting that modern technology could further our understanding of these states.
13. The Potential for Eradicating Suffering: He envisions a future where human suffering could be eradicated, and individuals would feel complete, interconnected, and prioritize the well-being of the entire system.
14. The Power of Unity: Lieberman discusses the potential of individuals letting go of individual survival instincts to benefit the world as a whole and how this collective shift in consciousness could solve many global problems.
15. The Flawed Notion of Separateness: He suggests that the persistent belief in human separateness from the world might be the root cause of many global issues and calls for a change in perspective.

Jeff Lieberman’s talk challenges conventional notions of reality and consciousness, advocating for a shift towards a deeper understanding of interconnectedness and the potential for ending human suffering through a spiritual awakening and scientific exploration.

Related Posts

• Transcript of JD Vance’s Commencement Speech at the U.S. Naval Academy – 5/23/25
• Transcript of This Is What the Future of Media Looks Like: Hamish Mckenzie
• Transcript of Elizabeth Banks’ Commencement Speech At the University of Pennsylvania
• Transcript of Jon M.Chu’s Speech At USC Commencement 2025
• Transcript of Emotional Intelligence: From Theory to Everyday Practice – Marc Brackett