科学家Jeff Lieberman：我是谁?_【重建巴比塔】

一个真正想去造福世界的人的力量，当他们把众人的利益放在首位，即便那意味着要牺牲自己，有多少人现在能够做到？如果全世界70亿人都这样做呢？也许阻碍我们解决所有问题的根源在于自己是脱离于世界的个体，也许是做出改变的时候了。...

【TED演讲】Jeff Lieberman：科学与灵性

演讲原文：http://bea.st/inevolution/?p=264

Three years ago was a turning point in my life, because I finally had everything I thought I needed to be fulfilled, and I still had this voice in my head saying “I’ve got to do more to be happy”. The more that I looked at my own suffering deeply, the more I saw it in every single person around us. We have trouble standing in lines, we’re impatient with our own children. It’s as if we all think the future holds the promise for our fulfillment. I come from a scientific background, and so I wanted to use that background to understand the real root and source of why there is so much suffering. Where it’s led me has totally changed my views of the current scientific paradigm. More importantly than that, it’s changed my views on what it means to be a human being, and to be alive. I want to share this theory with you, and it is way out there, so I ask you to have a critical but open mind for the next 14 minutes, because you might not actually be what you think you are.

3年前是我人生的一个转折点，因为我终于拥有了我所渴望的一切。但脑海里仍有个声音对我说“我需要更多才能快乐”?越多地去审视自身的痛苦，我越看到同样的痛苦，也困扰着我身边的每个人。我们不愿意排队，我们对自己的孩子没耐心，就好像我们以为未来的某一天，自己终会坐享其成。

我是研究科学的，所以我想用科学去读懂人类受苦的根源，但这彻底颠覆了我对现代科学所了解的一切。更重要的是，改变了我对于“人”的理解和生存的意义。我希望和你们分享这个理论，这可以会非常难以置信。所以我请求你们在接下来的十四分钟当中，你可以批判，但请你保持一颗开明的心。因为很有可能：人，根本不是你所了解的那个“人”

So who am I? I’m a human being, and I am 33 years old. But if you take a microscope and you look at any part of me, you see cells. I am a community of fifty trillion cells doing a magic dance, but if you look at any one of those cells with an even closer microscope, you see twenty trillion atoms. So I am also a community of a thousand trillion trillion atoms, but when you look at those atoms really up close they fade away, and all you see is energy. And 13.7 billion years ago, at the Big Bang, everything that we’ve ever found in the universe was was one infinitesimal, undifferentiated, pure energy.

All of us are energy. A human being is a very complex pattern of energy. I stand here as a 33 year old basically motionless, but when you look 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 are so sure that we are a human being all the time, and we never feel like we are energy? Because it sounds awesome. 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. So I want to look at those distractions.

Take five seconds, and think about something that you are going to do tomorrow. 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. This power for prediction, when you can compare alternate realities, allows you to plan for the future. 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.

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?

Another experiment: take 10 seconds and stop thinking…

…Did anyone make it 10 seconds? I make it about two and then I start strategizing about how I’m going to stop thinking and then I think about that the whole time. 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 and goal orient your behavior. 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. 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.

那么我是谁？我是一个人，今年33岁。但如果用显微镜观察我身体的某一部位你会看到细胞，我的身体是由50万亿个舞动的细胞组成。如果再用高倍的显微镜去观察这些细胞，你会看到20万亿个原子，就是说，我的身体是由100000000000000000000000000000个原子构成。你若再近距离的观察这些原子他们会逐渐消失，剩下的只有飘忽不定的能量。

137亿年前，大爆炸发生时，宇宙中曾经所存在的一切，仅为这些极小的，未分化的，纯粹的能量。

我们就是能量，人的身体就是一个复杂的能量格局。一个33岁的我一动不动地站在这里，但当你观察我身体的任何一部分，我正在以光的速度移动，并且我与宇宙同始同在。

那问题是我明白这个概念，但我们为什么感觉不到？为什么一直以来我们如此确定自己只是个“人”，而从未感觉自己是能量？能量听起来多牛叉！

我认为感觉不到真实的自己的原因在于我们把所有的精力都放在了人类层次的一些琐事上，以致于忽略了潜藏于内心深处的力量。

先看一下我们是怎么分心的：花5秒钟去想想你明天要做什么。你刚刚所做的，据人类所知，全宇宙还没有其他生物可以做到。你刚才在脑袋里创造了一个虚拟现实，并对现实中还没有发生的未来做了预测。这种假设的能力当你用几种有可能发生的现实做比较时，你也在规划着未来，大到农业发展，小到你的退休。这改变了地球上的一切，这估计也是人类进化史上继直立行走之后的最重要的里程碑。

另一个小实验：试着花十秒钟什么都不想。有人坚持了10秒吗？我坚持了大概2秒，然后剩下的时间我一直在想：怎么才能什么都不想。这意味着人类的进化给予了我们这份特别的却无法掌控的能力。但你要知道没有任何其他生物有假设的能力，并且这进化来的超能力也是有副作用的。就仿佛全宇宙都在你的脑子里，却由不得你来支配。

当你无法控制你脑子里在想什么，你被迫创造了这些，均有可能发生的现实，你不停地拿这些可能性与现状做对比，试图计算出下一步怎么走，但这也成就了新人类痛苦的根源。比如嫉妒、后悔于过去或担忧于未来，这都是只有人类才会感受的。我想知道有没有根除这痛苦的可能。

为了搞懂是否有根除痛苦的可能，我们需要用科学实验来了解自己，我们必须摘下有色眼镜毫无批判的去审视我们所有层面的经历。但这也出奇地难，因为我们在生活中投入了太多太复杂的情感。有些人能体会，当你在电影院全身心地沉浸其中，几分钟过后，你完全忘记了自己在看电影，直到影片结束耀眼的灯光把你打回现实，你仍有些神魂分离。但要我们站在另一个角度，去观看自己主演的电影“生活”就越发的难上加难。

下面的两个小实验，只能让你初尝到一个需要经年累月才能理解的意义。

In order to find out if it is possible to remove those sources, we have to take a kind of scientific experimental objective look at ourselves. We have to 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. As any of you know, if you go to a movie and you are emotionally involved, two minutes into it you totally forget that you are at a movie, and the lights turn on at the end and you are shocked back into reality. So this is even more difficult because we have to look at our own movie, the movie inside our consciousness.

We are going to do two quick experiments, which will only give a taste of something that takes much longer to kind of understand the depth of.

The first experiment is with sight. From what we understand in physics, all light is a vibration of electromagnetic field. 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. What this means is that you all think that you’re seeing me out here with a red shirt on, but this red only exists in your head. This entire picture you are 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 lets do a second experiment that is even more subtle than that one. Read this sentence twice, silently to yourself…

第一个实验是关于视觉的，我们在物理学中发现所有的光源都来自于电磁场的震动，光的本质没有任何颜色，只有频率上的变化，但当光源反射到你的眼中再传输到你的大脑，你的大脑创造了主观的颜色。这意味着你所看到的身穿红衣的我，但这个红色仅存于你的大脑之中。你所看见的整个画面仅发生在你的脑海里，就像你意识在播放电影，而如果你把注意力从我身上移开，你会开始注意到你自己，那个正在你大脑里看着我的你自己。

那下面的第二个实验，比第一个更加奇妙。

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

Now imagine that I do this process for thousands of hours, and I just try to look as objectively as possible at my thoughts, my emotions, my perceptions, and even the way that my brain has modeled space and time. The more I pull the attention away from the thoughts and perceptions, the more I seem to notice myself noticing these things inside my consciousness. Eventually maybe I can pull all of the attention way 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 have seen it all in front as not me. Yet the one thing that remains is this feeling of existence. I am remains. This feeling of I am. What I find when I sit in that state is that what my identity is, is beyond perception. It cannot be perceived, but it is still experienced. 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.

试着在心里默读这个句子两遍“我能听到我脑海里正在读句子的声音。”是不是很诡异？之所以诡异是因为你从这个微妙的角度能够客观地观察你的思维，你实际听到的是自己在脑袋里给自己的想法配的音。

试想一下，接下来的数千个小时如果我继续这个实验，我会尽可能地客观的观察我的思想、情绪和观念，甚至我的大脑对时间和空间的认知。越是把注意力从我的思想观念上转移开，我越更多地意识到另一个自己正在暗中观察着自己。最终我或许可以把注意力从一层又一层的想法、认知、身体和感官中抽出来，剩下的只有毫无感知的意识，直到什么都不剩。我看到了那些摆在眼前曾经属于我的标签并不是我，唯一剩下的只有这种存在的感觉。

I Am只是一种存在感。我发现在这时“我”的定义早已超越了意识可理解的范畴。“我”到底是什么？虽然令人难以理解，但它无时不刻地与我们同在。“我”即是宇宙的根源，“我”潜藏于我们生命的每一瞬间。就像鱼儿可能永远不知道自己游在

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.

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

“我”即是空，它完全没有任何的实质性，但当我亲身经历过它之后，才会有可能意识到。

或许我不是个“有意识”的“人”，或许我是一个“化成人形”的“意识”。

当我看到这空空如也的“我”既没有故事，也没有形态，甚至连时间空间的概念也没有，我们其实对此再熟悉不过了。

Einstein said that thoughts suffer from an optical illusion of consciousness. This illusion that there is a separate person inside an environment, when in reality there’s just energy in motion, everywhere. Just like an ocean is water in motion – we can call a certain part of that ocean a wave but that gives us the illusion that the wave is a separate entity in the ocean. A wave is not in the ocean, a wave is the ocean. Similarly we might not be waves, maybe we’re the ocean. Maybe all of us are energy and we can realize that directly.

This experience could never be reduced to words – because it makes words, but it could be experienced. I think that is such an important experience that people have been trying to name it for thousands of years. They call it spiritual enlightenment. I think that the first human beings started realizing that they were fundamentally energy about 2500 years ago. All of them say the same thing – it is the complete ending of human suffering. 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 a thousand trillion trillion atoms has to hold itself together. However, 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 that the death of the body and the mind was never something that happened to me, because I was always energy and I always will be.

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. Everything in life becomes a game, for fun; a play. We’ve all experienced that, but it’s very hard to remember, because we were so young. 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, so the only moment that mattered to us was right now. I think that 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.

137亿年前，宇宙中只有未分化的纯粹的能量，或许我们会意识到你我就是那个能量，从始至终，我们一直都是，并且永远都会是能量。爱因斯坦曾说：“思想总是被意识的幻觉折磨”这种幻觉让你觉得你是个独立的人，但实际上你是无处不在、无时不刻都在运作的能量。就像海洋是由流动的水组成，我们可以命名海洋其中一片为海浪，但这也使我们产生错觉，认为这一片海浪是脱离海洋的个体。但一片海浪并不在大海之中，这一片海浪就是大海。同样我们或许也不是海浪而是整片的海洋。这样我们能直观地理解我们都是不可分割的能量，这种领悟是无法用语言解释的，因为是它创造的语言，你只能去体会它。

几千年来，人们试图为其命名，有人叫它——灵性开悟。据我所知，大约在2500年前已有人类开始意识到我们的本质是能量，从此以后所有开悟的人都在说：“灵性的开悟会终结人类的痛苦。”毋庸置疑这将结束人类的苦难！

所有的痛苦都源于个体与整体分离的幻觉，幻觉让你觉得你是一个为生存而挣扎的人，幻觉让你相信你身体里兆亿的原子只是肉体。然而如果我意识到我是能量，我的身心只是能量所塑造的短暂的幻影，我将欣然地接受死亡，我的心智即是幻想，因为真实的我将永远是能量而已。如果我这样思考，那个在我脑海里操控我的声音将变得苍白无力，从今以后我再也不用被那个声音所控制。

人生继而变成了一场精彩的游戏。我们小时候都有过类似的经历，但你可能记不清了，多年前，或许在某个海滩，当我们建造沙滩城堡时整个世界都不复存在了。因为当初的我们心无杂念，我们甚至还没学会如何计划，所以唯一重要的一刻就是现在。

我认为这种领悟是如此地至关重要，以致于所有的宗教都在试图说服我们它的重要性。如果这真的能够终结人类心理上所遭的罪，这将是科学史上最伟大的成就。

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. 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 are having the direct experience of being energy. 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. 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 eradicate human suffering.

What would the world look like then, if every single one of us felt complete, felt whole, and felt interconnected?

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. What is the actual power of a human being to really benefit the world, when they are 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 seven 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. Maybe it’s time we change our minds.

从冥想了数千个小时的出家人的脑电图中我们可以看到异常明显的变化，上万亿连在一起的神经元结构发生了天翻地覆的改变。随着大脑中枢神经量化的、客观的变化，他们形容自己有一种无二无别、无穷无尽、混为一体的感觉。在我听来，这像是他们直观地体验了作为能量的本质。

灵性科学必须从古老的冥想和祈祷中研究出如何改变人类大脑的结构才能使人明白他们实际上是能量，我们仍不知道还要多先进的科学技术才能使人类彻底醒悟，或许在有生之年我们可以结束人类的一切苦难。这会是怎样的一个世界：如果世上每一个人都能感到人与人心连心的完整，当你不再为了自身而挣扎，你人生的着重点即会改变。因为你会觉得全世界就是你自身，你会把被人的痛苦当作自身的痛苦，继而想去帮助他们。

一个真正想去造福世界的人的力量，当他们把众人的利益放在首位，即便那意味着要牺牲自己，有多少人现在能够做到？如果全世界70亿人都这样做呢？也许阻碍我们解决所有问题的根源在于自己是脱离于世界的个体，也许是做出改变的时候了。