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A few lines from Wordsworth’s “Prelude” come to mind: “There is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements, makes them move in one society.”100 I think of the continual flux, the deconstructing and cohering of patterns of connection in the brain, moment by moment. Whether you call it Tao or dharma or God or I-don’t-have-the-slightest-idea, there is certainly a sense that we are participating in something quite extraordinary and mysterious. This time together has been like a bell ringing for five sessions over two and half days. The bell has now rung, but the reverberations have the potential to go out infinitely. We do not know what the consequences are of having eavesdropped on this conversation in His Holiness’s portable living room, but whatever the consequences may be, they will have something to do with all the questions that didn’t get answered. The challenge is to ask where those questions come from in the first place, and what your job on the planet is, whether it has to do with children, with trauma, with the military, with government, or with something else. The challenge is to ask, “What is my job on this planet, in this moment, given who I am and everything I know—including whatever has come from this dialogue? Might this inquiry begin to cohere and synchronize for us, individually and collectively, into some deeper manifestation of what it might actually mean to belong to Homo sapiens sapiens, the species that knows, and knows that it knows, in other words, the species of awareness and awareness of awareness?” Or will we go back to sleep on our way home? I was so touched by what Richie said, and I want to bow to him for holding seemingly different worlds in a way that truly has heart. I value our friendship tremendously and am deeply appreciative of the opportunity to have been able to work together to develop this meeting and host it together.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation)