![]() ![]() I’ve been asked to give a speech honoring the memory of my close friend and mentor, Francisco Varela, and his vision of a new kind of science of the mind and brain. Startled at first, I immediately feel relieved, and my stage fright starts to dissipate. Smiling sheepishly, he breaks into a laugh, and his laughter proves contagious as everyone joins in. And then the Dalai Lama sneezes - a loud sneeze that fills the auditorium. My legs shake midway through my speech, and I hold onto the lectern for support. Before us is an audience of over a thousand people. ![]() To the Dalai Lama’s right are two well-known Buddhist scholars and meditation teachers. Between us sits a row of prominent psychologists and brain scientists. At the center, to my left, sit the Dalai Lama and his English translator. ![]() Walking onto the stage of Kresge Auditorium, I feel dizzy. Thirty-two years later I find myself, not exactly calm and composed, about to give a keynote speech to open a two-day conference at MIT called “Investigating the Mind: Exchanges Between Buddhism and the Biobehavioral Sciences on How the Mind Works.” 1 I am to speak immediately after the opening remarks by the Dalai Lama. So it’s not surprising I also marked the passage telling the story of how the Buddha’s wicked cousin, Devadatta, sent a rogue elephant to trample him, only to find the animal tamed by the Buddha’s emanating love and calm composure. The serenity and confidence of enlightenment enthralled me. It was the 1970s, after all, and my father had already taught me breath-mantra yoga meditation and read to me at bedtime from Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. Something about this drama of enlightenment appealed to me. Like father, like son: the red ink I marked on the paragraphs describing the aspiration to attain enlightenment and become a Buddha hasn’t faded against the yellow paper. He told me they were important ones he wanted to remember and find again. I asked my father why he sometimes marked sentences in books he was reading with a red pen. I read it in the backseat of our old blue Volkswagen station wagon, as we drove along Highway 400 from York University in Toronto (where my father taught Humanities) to our home in Bradford, Ontario, about 40 miles north. I still have the copy, a 75-cent paperback, with my name in my own handwriting on the first page. When I was eight years old my father gave me Gautama Buddha: In Life and Legend by Betty Kelen. ![]()
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