Seeing the Nature of the Mind: Lessons from a Tibetan Buddhist Monk’s Talk at Google

Tibetan Buddhist Monk Kalu Rinpoche speaks at Google, September 2022

In late September, about 300 other Googlers and I attended a lunchtime talk at work titled “Seeing the Nature of Your Mind” by Kalu Rinpoche, a 32-year-old Tibetan Buddhist Monk. If your immediate reaction is “don’t I know my own mind and why do I need to attend a talk on this subject”, you are not alone. You are also far from alone if, like folks at Google and other tech companies, you constantly deal with long hours, the pressures of multi-tasking, and endless deadlines at work. I’m sure you can relate if like me, you’re frequently unable to switch off your mind after work.

Or as Kalu Rinpoche puts it, “Habitually, we follow our thoughts and stories as they continuously arise and this prevents us from directly experiencing ourselves, our loved ones, and all of our human experience.” I ask you to ponder the following three questions:

1: When was the last time you were absorbed in thought about a work-related issue at the dinner table or when out with family and your spouse or kid had to repeat themselves to get through to you?

2: When was the last time you woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep because your mind kept tossing around issues from work?

3: And when was the last time when instead of stepping back from work, seeing big picture, evaluating your options calmly and deciding on a course of action, you instead made a hasty, spur of the moment decision based on “gut feeling”? If you think this doesn’t hold true for you, think again: Nobel Prize winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow asserts that we almost exclusively think “fast” and on autopilot, moved by motivations and biases we are unaware of. It’s only about 2% of the time that we think “slowly” (mindfully!) and make well-thought-out decisions.

It turns out that seeing the nature of our own minds can really help us with all three questions above. But how? When I posed that question to Kalu Rinpoche in the Dory (online chat), I thought he would ask me to watch my breath or watch my thoughts or adopt some other meditation technique. While his response didn’t discount any of these techniques, it was both surprising and obvious.

As Kalu Rinpoche puts it, there’s a long answer and a short answer. The long answer? Limit sensory overload: too much time on screens big and small (!), following the news, watching Netflix, reading books, and so on. (The next time you watch a Netflix movie as a family, ask yourself if you are really present with each other.) In other words, our minds are overstimulated and find it hard to shut down. To jumpstart things, he strongly recommends a solitude retreat from time to time, which you can do from home (read about my 7-day at-home retreat from last year) or at a nearby retreat center. Think of this as a periodic detox you can repeat from time to time.

If you find the idea of putting away your smart phone as unrealistic and only for Buddhist monks, think again. Here’s a Business Insider article by Lola Shub, a high schooler from Brooklyn, about how she and her friends have given up their smart phones for good:

“Here’s something I noticed right away when I no longer had an iPhone in my pocket: All those moments when I normally would have reflexively pulled it out — riding the subway, waiting in line at the store, going to the bathroom — were now moments of silence. For some people, this could become a problem. It’s a lot, just sitting with your thoughts, and I know that can be hard. But it’s also a really wonderful thing to practice and learn how to do.”

If a teenager from New York can do it, so can you.

And what is Kalu Rinpoche’s short answer? The nature of the mind is constant and effortless awareness, knowing and emptiness. Emptiness meaning to preconceived notions, judgments, reactions to the opinions of others, and attachment to your opinions. The mind is like the sky, but conscious. But to get there, you have to reduce sensory over-stimulation and inner chatter.

As Brooklyn teenager Lola Shub puts it “Learning to be OK with yourself without your phone, without the constant commentary of others — to just be — is an important thing to achieve, or at least to attempt in a conscious way. It’s also an incredibly powerful thing, appreciating the moment.”

Even corporations practice mindfulness from time to time. I quote from this article on Inc.com Google Just Made a Brilliant Announcement That Could Save It Millions of Dollars. It’s a Lesson in Emotional Intelligence:

“How Google Used the Pause* to Handle Pressure and Make Better Decisions: The pause is the most important of all the tools in your emotional toolbox. To take a pause simply means that you take time to stop and think before you speak or act. On an individual level, a pause can help you to deal with pressure and make better decisions, preventing you from saying or doing something you’ll later regret. It can do the same for an organization.”

To get started, you may need a long pause or a solitude retreat to build up momentum. It’s like going on a vacation to relax versus just going for a walk in the neighborhood. As for me, I’m inspired by both Kalu Rinpoche and Lola Shub to cut back on sensory overload and take a pause. I am not ready to give up my smart phone yet, but maybe I will glance at it only at lunchtime instead of starting each day with it in my hand. Hope you are inspired to do the same.

*It’s no coincidence that Google’s internal mindfulness program which organized Kalu Rinpoche’s talk is called gPause. More on gPause in a future post.