Dr. Laleh Quinn has a Ph.D in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. She has been a neuroscience research faculty member in the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD for 25 years. She also teaches mindfulness meditation to students, faculty, and friends.
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Adam Jacobs: So I did want to ask you, (I have a lot of questions for you). I've asked you them many times in the past already, and I feel like we have a lot to learn from each other in many ways. And how I first got acquainted with you was some of the writing you did for the Essentia Foundation, which I immediately found to be very compelling, interesting, and well written.
Laleh Quinn: Thank you.
Adam Jacobs: And one of the things that I find fascinating about your story and your position is that you held this scientific position deep within the academy, and yet your thinking started diverging from what the Academy thinks. And what is it like the experience for someone in your position when you're sort of expected to hold a certain set of beliefs and when those beliefs start changing, what does it feel like as a scientist to be in that kind of scenario?
Laleh Quinn: Yeah, I mean, I kind of call myself a recovering materialist because it really is like that where there's so much indoctrination and desire on your own part to fit in with the group that you're in, and they're extremely influential. And I wanted to be intellectually rigorous. I wanted to fit into the intellectual elite academy, and it seemed like the only way to do that was to follow suit. And so I was perfectly willing to do that.
And in fact, I kind of adopted the materialist paradigm in my own heart for a long time. It was the way to play the game correctly. And not just that, but I'm also a skeptic. And so I am a skeptic at heart. At bottom, I'm a skeptic, and I don't want to be duped. I don't want to be gullible. And anytime I would bring up something that was slightly off the materialist train route, I would get immediately shut down and laughed at. So I just stopped talking about it. This was when I was a philosopher in grad school, and it seems odd that philosophers would be the ones that are so extremely closed off to questioning their own assumptions, but in my experience, they've been some of the worst.
And so I went along with it, and I also went about it by not promoting anything that would be too far outside the materialist paradigm in my dissertation. My dissertation was on consciousness, and whether we could have a scientific explanation of it, whether we do have a scientific explanation and whether we can have a scientific explanation of it, instead of saying, there are all these other possibilities out there, why don't we try and discuss some of these? I just kind of tore down all the theories that were out there already, showing how they're not really accounting for what's most important with respect to consciousness, in my opinion, which is our personal experience, our first-person experience that was always left out, this was in the nineties. It's still left out of the main theories of the day.
So if you look at, say, information integration theory of the type that this is really, they're subtly trying to bring it in, but it's still not there. And so I feel like I just left it aside. I left the whole consciousness thing aside for a long time. I ended up being a neuroscientist, and so I just focused completely on that, which was a very different tact for me. And that took up most of my time for the last 25 years. And I kind of stopped thinking about philosophy because I was so involved in neuroscience. And so when you ask, are you stuck in the materialist paradigm, basically in my field in neuroscience, it didn't really come up at all.
It's not something anybody talks about. So you're just going along trying to understand how the brain works, and it's not really amenable to these high philosophical queries. I spent my time recording brain activity from rats as they were performing behavioral tests and trying to understand what different brain regions are doing, what their function is, how neurons are encoding their environment, how neurons are encoding learning and memory. And I was just not thinking about those other big issues until about five years ago.
Adam Jacobs: So, let me ask you a follow-up question about the academy and the mentality of a lot of the folks who are involved in it. So I was just thinking as you're talking for myself, I do think personally that the brain is an absolutely astounding, fascinating organ, certainly worthy of study, but I also think that isolated by itself with the background assumptions that, for instance, there's no free will, life has no ultimate meaning, there is no survival of the consciousness after death. For me, all of a sudden the brain becomes much, much less interesting to me. It's just a thing that's doing another thing amongst many in the universe. Yes, we happen to have them, and yes, it's very advanced in certain ways, but who cares at a certain point? If there's no meaning, then there's no meaning in brain research. What compels all these folks to want to dive so deeply into these ideas or to this kind of research?
Laleh Quinn: Oh, wow. What causes neuroscientists to want to study the brain? Yeah. Well, I can only talk about myself, and I wasn't honestly interested in free will and meaning and purpose. It's a fascinating area. If you're someone like me who's kind of interested in solving puzzles and getting into something very, very complex and trying to figure it out, it's basically being very geeky and nerdy. And so when I found neuroscience, I was just enamored by what the brain could do and how it was doing it, and I wanted to understand it. When I look back now, it's a little strange that I was so compelled to study neuroscience.
I was a philosopher of mind, and I thought, well, maybe in order to really understand how the mind works, we should know how the brain works. So, I decided to do that against my advisor's will. I decided to study the brain because philosophers tend to think maybe you do that, that studying the brain basically being a factoid finder. You're finding little facts about something that's very complicated and interesting and so maybe they were right about that, but I wasn't listening to them. I was really interested in those factoids and how something like this could work. And there's a culture of excitement about being explorers with respect to the brain,
And I loved that aspect of it. And again, I was a little bit disillusioned with my philosopher colleagues, and when I went to neuroscience, there was so much, it was wide open expanse. There are many brain regions that people have either not gone to at all to understand or have been very little studied. And then also on top of that, there's so many different aspects of neuroscience that you have to learn. And so it's a huge project from creating electronics to training animals, to doing data analysis, to doing brain surgeries.
I'm a brain surgeon, so I would implant electrodes into the brains of breath. There were so many aspects of it. It was fun, to be honest, fun, and exploratory. And I would get extremely excited every time I'd put my electrodes in some brain region that people didn't really study very much, and I'd find something that was extremely interesting. It is an unexplored territory, so why are you an explorer? Why do you want to go to some distant land? Has nothing to do with free will. It's just like the land is there, let's go and see what's there. That kept me very occupied for a long time,
Adam Jacobs: And I appreciate that. I appreciate the way you're articulating it also because it does make sense, and it's very human to want to conquer and explore and understand. I guess it's just a subjective thing for me that in the absence of a bigger picture for me, it starts to lose its value. But in any event, you were happily doing this research, and then something changed. And I know that there was a sort of catalyzing event that happened, and even though I know the story for the benefit of the folks watching, would you recount it?
Laleh Quinn: Sure, sure. Actually, the catalyzing event came a little bit later. It was about 10 years ago, I would say now, maybe 11 that okay, and here's where maybe I wasn't seeing a big enough picture. And then the constraints of science and academia were starting to get to me. But I started having migraine headaches.
Adam Jacobs: Oh, okay. I didn't know this part.
Laleh Quinn: This was after my beloved dog passed, and I know other dog lovers would understand when something like that can be a catalyzing event. My dog passed away, and I began having really bad migraine headaches, migraines with aura, everything.
My doctor, God bless him, prescribed mindfulness-based stress reduction for me. He said, I think you have anxiety, and I think it got worse after your dog passed, and so I think maybe you should try this. And I went to mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is an eight-week course, and they had it at UCSD. And I went there, and I learned how to meditate, and I learned how my thoughts were affecting my life, and that I even had thoughts that I didn't even know were kind of controlling me and guiding me. It was a big aha moment for me to realize that there was a distance between myself and my thoughts.
And when I had that epiphany, things started changing in my life. So that's one catalyzing event was just realizing that through meditation, there was a different way to go about living. than the way that I was living. And multiple things changed at that point, including I was no longer a horribly offensive driver. I didn't get angry when people cut me off anymore. Weird things were happening. I was like, wow, this is not just stress reduction. There's some other things going on here.
One of the things that went on was I started opening up to what you might call the spiritual world and the spiritual path. I wasn't on that until that point. I began this immense quest to learn everything I could about spirituality, including going on several silent retreats and attending a guru's ashram with 500 Indian people who had no cell phones for five days. And I just dove into the spiritual world, and I listened to everything. One of my favorite interviewers is Rick Archer’s Buddha at the Gas Pump, and I think I listened to 400 interviews or something like that. I was just incredibly interested in learning and growing and all of that. And one of the people on his show was Suzanne Giesemann, who is a medium for some reason. So this was probably five years into my spiritual journey or something I learned about mediumship, and it hit me.
It just affected me deeply. And one of the reasons was because she was so logical minded, such a skeptic. She's a naval commander, and she wasn't into any of this kind of stuff, and all of a sudden, she was getting messages from her daughter-in-law who died. And I was listening to this, and it sparked something in me to go on a quest to actually discover if we go on after we die. And so that took me to reading the Near Death Experience literature, reading the out-of-body experience literature, and then having my own experiences with a friend who had an NDE. So she came into my life at this time, which is also kind of odd. So, a person who I became close with had actually had an NDE, so I had firsthand experience from her of what and very trustworthy her life completely changed kind of your standard NDE.
And I just became enamored and obsessed. I attended mediumship workshops. I found out that I had a few little skills myself, nothing to talk about, but I was on a quest, and this was going on for several years. And then I think the catalyst that you're talking about happened, which is when my dear friend and colleague passed away at 50. And interestingly, I had been having chats with him about all of this stuff. He was not your standard materialist neuroscientist but he was pretty close. And I would have discussions with him, and I could see his eyes light up sometimes, but it's hard for these people to really get on board.
Adam Jacobs: Yes, I've noticed.
Laleh Quinn: And so when he passed, though, I think I had been primed with all the work that I had been doing to open up and to really let myself believe that we go on after we die. It was a belief right at that point. So I began having experiences with respect to him that ultimately took me over the edge to where I
Adam Jacobs: Just tell us the Radio one.
Laleh Quinn: Oh, the radio one, okay. Well, there are several radio ones. I'll tell you. The first radio one was when he passed away in October. It was February 14th. And I was driving from San Diego to the Bay Area around San Francisco to visit my dad, who was in hospice and on my way. So I was distraught about my friend's passing, and I was distraught about my father's imminent passing. But I was also so hopeful because I had been having a lot of experiences already prior to this radio experience, and I was very open, but I really wanted to hear from him, from my friend who had passed.
And so I said, okay, if you're really with me and you're around me, just send me a sign, which this is something that I had been doing for a while, but send me a sign today that I'll really understand and that will make me realize you're with me. And basically just that at that moment, I was driving, and I looked to my right, and a car passed me. And on the license plate of that car, it said Camelot. And instead of an E, there was a heart. So it said Camelot. And as that passed me, I was like, oh, wow, that's really amazing actually, because my dad, who I was going to visit, his nickname for me as a child was Wart, which is the nickname that Merlin gave to King Arthur.
So Camelot is important to me, and it was significant, let's put it that way. So I was like, oh, that's beautiful. I love that sign. Thank you, but can you give me something else? I'm still not that sure. And so I said, I love this theme, Knight of the Round Table. And also, just to add on to that, my friend who passed one of his favorite places in the world, which is a place that, the only place that he actually took me to when I went to visit him is a place called King Arthur's Flower in Vermont, which is where he's from. And he used to send me the gifts that he would send me, were always from King Arthur's flower.
Okay? So those two things had gone, and I'm still like, let's just kind of make this certain, okay, so if that's really, I want you to play a song on the radio that has the word night in it. And I was thinking Knights and White Satin, I think I said it out loud, play Knights and White Satin if you're really here with me. And I didn't realize at that point that Knights and White Satin wasn't K-N-I-G-H-T. It's N-I-G-H-T. And so, actually, that song didn't play, but the next song that came on the radio was After the Gold Rush by Neil Young,
Adam Jacobs: Great song.
Laleh Quinn: And do you know how that starts?
Adam Jacobs: I dreamed I saw the Knights in Armor saying something about a queen?
Laleh Quinn: Yeah
Adam Jacobs: That's pretty solid.
Laleh Quinn : Okay. So that came on. I mean, I'm feeling it now that bliss, that the tingles, the joy, the understanding that this is real, that he's here, that we go on, that he's somehow able to do this stuff, which is amazing. I dunno if it's him on his own or if there's a team or how it works, but it was just I was hot driving back. I was high. And then truck after truck started passing me with that was Knight Transportation. It just kept going.
And then I got home to my mom's house, and I went into the room that I stay in when I visiting her and two books were facing out on the bookcase, which is unusual. They're faced out. And both of them had the word knight in the title. One was called Knight with a Briefcase, and I forget what the title of the other one was, but it had Knight in the title too. And then the other book that was out was called The Meaning of It All by Richard Feynman. And again, I was just floored by this. I mean, it's too much, right? If you have a chain like that events, the odds of something happening, honestly, I don't care about the odds, but whatever the odds,
Adam Jacobs: But I'm going to ask you about them in a second if that's okay. Yeah. You don't care about them.
Laleh Quinn: Yeah. I mean, we should care about them. But for me, the odds don't matter. For me, what mattered was I knew that I was getting what I asked for. Each thing was so incredibly meaningful to me that it is hard to put that into a statistical analysis. The meaning aspect of these things is hard to put in a statistical analysis. You can maybe try and determine what the odds are of asking for a song and having or asking for a word in a song and having it unites kind of an unusual word to have in a song.
You don't want to ask for something like love, or that wouldn't be statistically interesting. And then putting them all together and having them be meaningful. So, how do you statistically analyze the meaning of these things? For me Camelot was already meaningful to me because of my dad. and that I was going to visit my dad in hospice who was dying, and that maybe my dad was also involved in this as he and the King Arthur's flower. I mean, how do you statistically analyze those things? So I don't think you can, and I wouldn't try to do that. I don't think that's the way to test mediumship capability or the fact that somebody is still with us.
I think there are other ways that we could test it, but this way, this is more Jungian. This is a causal synchronicity. And the only person I know who's tried, I could be wrong, but the only person I know who's tried to analyze this kind of phenomenon is Gary Schwartz, who wrote a book called Super Synchronicity. And there, I think he talks about these kinds of chains of signs you get and the statistical probability of having something like that happen. So that's something to look at if you're looking,
Adam Jacobs: I mean, obviously, this was a very significant experience for you, life-changing in some ways. But let's put on our skeptic hats again for a second. And if earlier incarnation, Dr. Quinn was talking to you now, she'd be like, what are you talking about? I mean, if you have enough events that take place in the world that, some are going to line up in unusual ways, and just like somebody always wins the lottery, even though you've got a billion to one chance. So humans create meaning and you created a meaning out of this random situation.
Laleh Quinn: And our brains are expert pattern recognizers, right? So I'd probably tell myself, you're being, there's a word for patternicity: the brain's ability to find patterns where there aren't any. Yeah, I would probably be like, you're suffering from that because you poor thing, you're very distraught. You want this to be true. You're in a gullible state. And it's not just my young self that would tell me this. My friends tell me this. My skeptical friends tell me this. And the thing is, so if it was just that one incident, I think I would still be querying whether this was real, and I would continue on my quest.
And so I love the idea of a quest, too, because that's also along with King Arthur and the Holy Quest. So, I've been on a quest for many, many years. It's not just one single incident that has made me tip over. I mean, it's uncountable now. And I am writing a book on this because there's so much that has happened to make me get to this point, and it'd be impossible to talk about it in 20 more minutes or whatever to tell you all of the different things. But I'll tell you generally my procedure to try and understand whether this was all real or not because I, at heart, am an experimentalist; I'm a skeptic. I'm an experimentalist. I have a hypothesis if I want to test it, I know how to do that.
And so I wanted to test the hypothesis of whether we go on after we die. And I started doing that prior to my friend's death. And I was attending mediumship workshops. I was reading the NDE literature. I was immersing myself in talking to people who had near-death experiences, gathering the evidence, gathering the evidence for years. And the evidence is overwhelming. So I mean, you've interviewed Jeffrey Long, you've interviewed these people who have studied these things forever. Bruce Grayson, I was just reading everybody's stuff, right, doing the research.
I'm a researcher. So I researched for a really long time. And then not just research, because for me, the research is very compelling, and it opened my mind to, wow, this really is a possibility. But for me to come to a knowing about it, I had to have enough of my own experiences to really get there. I had so many experiences, some of which were, I want to go general here, but I would receive messages. I received messages from my friend who passed off things that I wasn't aware of, and I would need to corroborate that because it seemed very out of the ordinary. And so I would look for corroboration. And the way that I looked for corroboration was to find exceptional mediums. But I wouldn't only go to one medium and have them corroborate. I would go to three mediums and have each one of them corroborate.
Adam Jacobs: And they did corroborate for you, like you, okay?
Laleh Quinn: Absolutely, a hundred percent. Not only that but then there were also a couple of friends of his who also corroborated What I had heard; this is something like, this is new knowledge. I wasn't sure I was receiving the proper knowledge. And I got corroboration from five different people.
Adam Jacobs: What kind of corroboration?
Laleh Quinn: So when you go to mediums, you ask, well, me anyway, I ask my loved one who passed, Hey, tell me through the medium whether what you're telling me is true or whatever, have the medium tell me. And so you go to a medium, and you don't tell the medium anything.
The mediums that I went to didn't even know that the person who passed was a male, was in his fifties and was a close friend and colleague of mine. They didn't know anything. They didn't know anything. And then three mediums tell me, oh, this is a dear friend. It's a male. He passed too soon. And then said, the things that I, the things are a little bit personal, but the things, they were corroborated. I give you an example of something that's not personal so that you can see what I do with mediums to test them.
One time, I was talking to one of my favorite mediums, and I asked my friend in spirit to let her know whether he liked the new toenail polish I was wearing because I wasn't sure of the color. And I wanted to see whether he actually liked it. And I got the feeling that he did, but I wasn't sure I wanted the medium to tell me. And the next day I had the reading with the medium, and in the middle of our reading, she was even confused. And she said she stopped and she said, wait a minute. This is kind of out of left field, but you need toenail polish on. And I said, yeah. And she's like, this is just weird, but he is. Let's just go with this. He likes it. So that's the way I test them. I go in, and I have something. I want to know whether what I'm hearing, what I'm feeling, what you're saying is true, and tell me through the mediums and they have. And so that's, again, that's just another layer. I mean, I'm such a skeptic, and this is such a huge deal. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And with this one and with this one, it's not just that. It's also very personal. I don't want to be wrong here.
Adam Jacobs: The stakes are huge.
Laleh Quinn: The stakes are huge. I want to prove to myself I'm a good case because I'm such a skeptic. And not only, I mean my friends be like, how many signs do you need? I have a lot of friends who are totally open to this and do believe in this stuff, and they think I go overboard as far as trying to get evidence for all of this. But I've gotten evidence through different domains. And when I add it all up, there's no doubt in my mind anymore. I mean, I can go on and on. I've had many mediumship readings. And then not just that. So let me tell you another story that was even more significant, I would say, than the King Arthur Camelot story.
So, once this all started happening, my life began to change quite a bit. One of the messages that I seemed to get from my friend who passed was that I wasn't in the proper relationship. So, I had been in a relationship with my ex for 25 years at that point, and I had no intention of leaving. I figured I was going to be there for the rest of my life. I was content. It was fine, but I was getting indications from him that it wasn't right for me. And I was starting to believe that. But it was very hard for me.
And I ended up not just getting messages from him about it, but getting messages from a friend of his who started telling me things like I'm getting these messages from him about you being in a gilded cage, that you're a bird trapped in a cage. And one of the reasons why I would never have thought about leaving my past relationship was because we had bought a house four years prior. It was my first house ownership, and I adored my house. I had this beautiful garden that I always wanted to have.
It was my love. I put everything into this garden, and it was so beautiful, and it gave me so much joy that I couldn't imagine leaving that place. And so I started getting these signs though, about being in a gilded cage, and I was still like, I can't do this. I don't think I can leave this relationship. And so I did the same thing that I do, which is, okay, if you really want me to leave this relationship friend of mine in spirit while I'm driving to this cabin that I like to go to write, I want you to play this song Freebird on the radio for me on the way. And Freebird is a song that I had not heard on the radio for, I don't know how many years, decades, maybe I was listening to satellite radio. The stations that I listened to have, they didn't play Freebird.
And so I was driving to the cabinets an hour long drive, and I kept switching the station to see if Freebird would come on. I had three different stations that I would listen to, and I gave up. There were two miles left to go, and I gave up. And the last mile on the road to the cabin is this beautiful winding, winding road. As soon as I turned onto that road, Freebird played. And it was an 11 minute long song, and it took 11 minutes for me to get to the cabin. The song ended when I got there. And again, I am feeling it now. The chills, the joy of getting a confirmation like that.
And so that began the process of my leaving my last relationship, and then one of the mediums that I was regularly going to end up being my partner. So my friend and spirit got me out of this, is how I think about it; it got me out of my last relationship and into a new one that was actually much deeper, much stronger, and much more real. And so I don't know how to put it, again, that's not something that you can scientifically study. The meaning of something like that and the way that that happened and the feeling of being guided and protected and kind of loved in that kind of way to help me live my best life. That's what it feels like for me now. And it happens on a regular basis
Adam Jacobs: When you meet with mediums. And let me ask you in this context, you and I have discussed in the past, despite the fact that there are elements within the scientific and philosophical communities that have essentially embraced trans materialism, and I've spoken and met some who, it's fascinating. They believe that there is an immaterial existence, but not necessarily that that even has meaning either. So, for me, it's like a big step in the right direction, but it sort of ends at this sterile point. Okay, so my question is this, could it be that the medium that you go to speak with is you and the medium share some kind of energy, or she is reading your mind, you are concerned with something. And it's not that there's any departed soul anywhere. It's simply that, yes, there is an immaterial dimension to information, and it's shared in some kind of quantum way or whatever. And maybe it's that.
Laleh Quinn: Yeah, totally. Yes, I understand. I mean, I have been thinking about that because Bernardo Kastrup, who you've interviewed, is a great proponent for getting us out of the materialist stronghold.
Adam Jacobs: Amazing.
Laleh Quinn: So now we're incredible. But what it seems to me is what's happened is we've gone from everything is matter and so purposeless to everything is mind and so purposeless, I mean, it's weird. And I think he would admit to that. And he's a naturalist, and he's a reductionist. And so for his worldview to work, basically, there can be no purpose. There can be no teleology, there can be no divinity. And I think because those aren't natural.
Adam Jacobs: I did ask him if what he describes is the same as what people mean by God when they talk about God. And he said, yes, but okay, yeah, keep going.
Laleh Quinn: I think the God that they have in mind is not the same kind of God that you're talking about. I don't think it's a transcendent God. I think it's a God that is just equated to all that. Is that just mine,
Adam Jacobs: Pantheistic
Laleh Quinn: Pantheistic as opposed to panentheistic, right? So that God is just consciousness. And if you believe that consciousness that a particle has consciousness, consciousness need not have any kind of attribute that we would attribute to God or that others would attribute to God, maybe you and I would attribute to God, right? Love, connection, purpose, meaning a soul journey. None of that is ascribed to by the idealists that are out. They're academic idealists,
And they're not ascribing to anything beyond what they define as God. And so I think it's missing a great deal. And one of the things that I heard, I don't mean to focus on Bernardo Kastrup so much, but one of the things that I heard him say, which made me very sad actually, and I'd love for us to be able to mitigate this for all the people who listen to him, is that his worst fear was to go on after death as Bernardo troop. That's his worst fear, and he's happy that it won't happen. And there was kind of a mirth about people who believe that there's a personal soul that continues after we die. And I was thinking about, and where does that come from? And I think where it comes from is that he hasn't had the types of experiences that maybe some of us have had to indicate these kinds of things. And so I'm not sure I can argue, have a theory that can counter, I don't make me debate Bernardo troop. I wouldn't be able to handle it. He is just way too smart.
Adam Jacobs: He's very smart. But you and I, we should work on this. We should develop an additional step for the idealists.
Laleh Quinn:Â I think we should because it's gaining a lot of traction, and it's becoming something that even Christoph Koch is now ascribing to, and it's like they can only make the baby step because they're still within the confines of academia. They're still afraid of being laughed at by their colleagues, which they're going to be, I mean, it happens, right? It's going to happen. I mean, Tononi's work shows that there might be consciousness everywhere. Like pantheism was ridiculed by a large number of his peers as being pseudoscientific
Adam Jacobs: The worst thing you can say to a scientist.
Laleh Quinn: Yeah, exactly. So even if you're willing to take the baby step, which I'm really, I'm so grateful and thankful that these people are doing that, because at least it's getting us a step further. It really is. And it's wonderful that there are these spokespeople who are so incredibly brilliant and eloquent and in their, they're actually wonderful, I think, because they're willing to change and be open-minded. And so I am very grateful that they're out there and doing the work that they're doing. Just they're, I, there's so much effort being put into it. It's wonderful.
Adam Jacobs: We're short on time. The good thing is that every time I feel like you and I have a conversation, we have a lot to talk about, and it's very productive. But let's see. I'm interested in sort of summarizing your journey to date through the lens of, and you don't have to make this too personal if you don't want to, but we've spoken in the past about the idea of growth through pain and challenge and difficulty. And even though this is a, for you, it's an elevation, it's a moving towards a higher awareness and consciousness and so on and so forth. But it does not come without its scars. What can you say to people who are watching who also either have or want to embark on a spiritual quest? How is it worth it? And for people who are suffering with whatever they're going through, what can you tell them about what you've discovered about the nature of the world?
Laleh Quinn: So the first question, is it worth it? First of all, I don't think we have a choice. Oftentimes, whether we're going to go through something like that or not, the universe or God, or whatever you want to call it, tends to have a mind of its own. And often, we don't have a choice of what we're going through. What I can say about my own experience is I wouldn't give up the suffering that I've gone through, for anything in the world would have gotten me here if I didn't suffer. I mean, we can go back to square one. If I didn't suffer that deeply from the loss of my dog, which was true, I lost a limb. I know dog lovers understand this, and other pet owners understand this who have a soulmate pet. That's one of the worst losses you can have. Of course, losing a child is worse. That hasn't happened to me. But if I hadn't gone through the pain of that event, I wouldn't have learned how to meditate.
I thought it was a direct cause that directly caused me to learn how to meditate. And that opened up my entire world to something completely new. So I'm thankful to her for being a guide for me, and also giving me an amazing sign that she gave me after she died, but then my friend passing again, horribly tragic suffering from that, I've been given an incredibly new life, a new way of seeing the world, a hopefulness, a joy that I never had before. It's, they say the extent of your joy is proportional to the extent of your suffering. So sometimes you have to get down in there in order to reach something else.
And these things that were put through, I believe, are there to kind of carve away what's remaining of our egoistic blocks to reality and to the divine. And sometimes it's hard, they have to be chiseled away, and it's really hard, but they get chiseled away. And when they do, then something else is in there that can come out and explore the world in a different way. And in a way, that's much more connected, much more out of ego consciousness because of the things that I've gone through in my life. You realize what's important in life.
That's what the suffering is about. You realize what's important in life and what's important in life is not about me. And so that's what all of this has taught me. Even though I've been given all these so many gifts from what I consider to be my, I think we all have a team in spirit that's helping us anyway. And I've been given so many gifts, and I know that I'm not alone. It's like a band of brothers. I wouldn't know this stuff if I hadn't gone through all the tragedy. I think that's, and it helps to, it's common humanity, right? We're all in it together. And when you understand suffering, you understand the suffering of others. And that's what we are here to help each other get wherever it is that we're going, which is somewhere.
Adam Jacobs: Yes, it is. I think that's a very hopeful way to wrap up our conversation. I want to thank you so much for your time and for your work. I'm really looking forward to that book. Please let me know when it's coming out. And thank you. Thank you for all that you do, and I look forward to the next time we talk again.
Laleh Quinn: You too. Thank you so much, Adam.
Adam Jacobs: Alright, have a great day.
Laleh Quinn: Take care. Bye.
Adam Jacobs: Bye.
How many angels dance on the head of a pin? Experience will teach you the zen of it all..
Wonderful interview, thank you. I have briefly interacted with Bernardo and agree he's incredibly smart but have observed how that can also bring its own form of suffering.
Have you ever spoken to Donald Hoffman of UC Irvine? His interview with Lex Fridman (#293) is highlighted by breaking Lex's brain with the assertion that brains do not produce consciousness, consciousness produces brains. Great example of a classically trained person struggling with an entirely new paradigm. https://youtu.be/reYdQYZ9Rj4?si=6dVYpv6kcMDMC1DC&t=9001