The Path | Michael Puett | Talks at Google

MICHAEL PUETT: Thank you so much.

And thank you all of you.

It's wonderful to be here at Google Cambridge, a tremendous honor.

And thank you all so much for coming.

So what I'm going to be talking about today is something that may at first glance seem a little odd.

I'm going to be talking about, yes, ideas from about 2,000 years ago, from China, and arguing that they are not only incredibly important, but actually offer a fundamental challenge to a lot of things we take for granted, and a fundamental challenge that we should even take very seriously.

Now before I begin, let's lay out why this may seem like such an odd thing to do.

First of all and most obviously, we kind of think we know how we should live our lives.

So it's not entirely clear why we would need to be reading text from 2,000 years ago anyway.

I mean, we know.

The way to do it is to look within and to find yourself.

And we often tell ourselves this.

I need to find myself.

I need to find who I really am.

And I need to live my life according to what's best for me.

And when I do find myself, find my true self we'll often say, I need to love myself and embrace myself for who I am, accepting my weak side-- we all have weak sides-- but accepting of course my good sides too, and then trying to develop a life in which I can be me according to what is my good sides

and minimizing my bad sides, and what will allow me to be happy and a good human being.

And we all think that's clear.

And the problem is just doing it, looking within and finding oneself.

And we have all sorts of techniques for doing that.

But basically that's what we should do.

And putting this in a larger historical context, if one tends to think about these ideas of being true to oneself, we would tend to think something along the following lines, that these are prototypical modern ideas.

And luckily for us we live in a modern age so we can do this.

We can look within.

We can live our lives according to what's best for us.

And sadly, most humans, we tend to assume, weren't able to do this.

And if you look at why, we would often tend to say well, you know, they live in these traditional societies.

And in those traditional societies, people were told what to do.

They just were born into a society.

They were told what to do.

And they had to live their lives accordingly.

So they couldn't live within and they couldn't find themselves and they couldn't be true to themselves.

And, let's also be honest, if you think of perhaps the culture that most exemplifies, in our stereotypes, what such a traditional world would be like, yeah, it's kind of China, right?

And if you think of traditional China, it kind of fits all of our stereotypes of what a traditional world would have been.

In China, we often think that you're born into a society, and that these ideas that we label Confucianism that tell you, you have to follow a bunch of rituals, and those rituals will socialize you into playing your proper social position.

And if you do them well, you'll live in a harmonious world because everyone will be doing what they're told to do.

And it's sort of the antithesis of what we would tend to think of as being a good way to live.

And following our stereotypes a bit further, we do tend to have a more positive view of another side of Chinese culture, which we tend to label Daoism.

And that's the side where we think, OK, you're socialized into playing your social role by doing a bunch of rituals.

But then luckily they had something called Daoism too that enabled them to sort of go off, leave their social roles for a bit, and commune with the larger natural world.

But even there we often tend to think, yeah, but still in Daoism, they're still saying it's a harmonious world out there.

And we're training ourselves to accord with it.

And so even if it's not as confining as our social roles, we're still just learning to accept the world as it is, which means we're not doing things on our own.

We certainly aren't finding ourselves.

We're certainly not living our own lives.

So China kind of exemplifies our stereotypes of a traditional world, both in the Confucian focus on social roles and even in the more positive way we tend to think of it, Daoist notion of sort of harmonizing with the larger natural world.

So if all of that is the case, it seems like I have kind of a tough job in front of me arguing that actually some of these ideas from China should be taken very seriously.

And I am indeed going to argue that.

In fact, I'm going to argue something much more than that.

I'm going to argue that when we take these ideas seriously, they really force us to question a lot of what we take for granted about human beings, about how to live a good life, and even about our grand visions of history going from a traditional world to a modern society.

A grand set of claims, and let me jump right in.

Now to make my argument, let me begin with that thing I began with, the self, this thing that we're supposed to look within and find and live our lives according to.

So that's one view of the self, a view of the self that all of us are born with one true self that we should find.

Let's talk about early Chinese notions of the self.

What do they think the self is?

So let me jump in.

Now I'll forewarn you, the first few steps of this are going to seem very bleak, but bear with me.

You'll get to the exciting part soon.

But here's the bleak part.

Are we, as human beings, a true essential self that we should be trying to find?

No.

What we are, are big bunches of messy stuff.

Messy bunches of energies, dispositions, emotions, desires faculties.

And all of us are equally messy bunches.

That's what we're like.

And that's what we're like when we're born, a big bunch of messy stuff.

And because we're these messy stuffs, what we are as human beings, minus all the things we're going to be talking about momentarily-- our danger is we're completely passive in the world.

Because as these messy stuffs, we interact with other messy stuffs, other people.

And when we do so, we are constantly dragging out responses from each other.

So I, a messy self, am standing here and someone yells at me.

I get angry.

Well in this way of thinking, what happens is that loud voice, that angry voice, draws out from me, pulls out from me an energy of anger.

When someone smiles at me, and that pulls out from me an energy of happiness.

And all I am throughout the day is being passively pulled by things that happen immediately around me-- people I encounter, things they do, little actions they take, tones of voice.

And I'm simply passive in this, being dragged out constantly.

And if that sounds bleak, it gets worse.

Because the further argument is that's what we're like.

But we don't simply get pulled in different directions all the time.

Because even worse, it turns out, is that we tend to fall into patterns of responses from a very young age.

So that person yells at me and it draws out my anger.

Someone else simply doing something that for whatever reason emotionally reminds me of that moment will equally draw out that anger.

And we will tend to fall into these patterns and ruts such that we're not even really responding to things that are actually happening around us.

We're responding by patterned responses.

Things happen to draw out, for whatever reason based in these patterns I fall into, anger and happiness and joy and sadness, constantly.

And these patterns can become so rigid, so reified, that they can become determinant of who we are.

So we begin experiencing the world on a moment by moment basis according to these ruts and patterns.

And if this isn't bleak enough, it gets worse yet still.

Because once these patterns and ruts set in, they not only can continue for months, years, decades, they not only can continue and determine us for our entire lives, they can be passed on.

Because things that I do in my parents and ruts, I will pass on to the next generation because I will be playing out these same patterns and ruts that I was falling into from a young child.

Many of those came from the interactions I had with my parents.

I will play them out when I have children.

And my poor children will grow up playing out these same things.

And they can go on generation after generation after generation.

That's what we're like as human beings.

Now if they're right-- and I might add parenthetically, there are now tons of psychological experiments saying this is exactly right.

We like to think we're these individuals with free will making decisions throughout the day.

It turns out tons of experiments are showing that, no, this portrait you see from early China is basically right.

We're these passive creatures playing out these patterns and ruts all the time.

So if they're right, and if these psychological experiments saying they're right are onto something-- and I clearly think they are-- note immediately, when we tell ourselves, oh my goal then should be to look within, find my true self, and embrace myself and love myself for who I am, and simply be true to myself, being

sincere and authentic to what is truly right for me, all of that sounds great.

But no, if they're right, what we're loving, what we're embracing, what we're trying to be true and sincere and authentic to is just a bunch of ruts and patterns, the last thing, from this point of view, that you would want to be embracing.

Because if they're right, if we are these patterned, rutted creatures, your goal isn't to love that, to embrace that, to simply say oh, I'm just the sort of person who gets angry at little things, but I'm the sort of person who likes to think big.

So I should just find a place where I, given who I am, can fit well in this world.

From this point of view what you're really saying is, I have fallen into patterns and ruts where these little things get me angry.

And I'm going to just love that and embrace that.

In other words, I'm not going to make any attempt to change that whatsoever.

And ironically then, our grand vision of how to live a liberated life, how to be true to ourselves and sincere, from this point of view, is just chaining ourselves.

We're chaining ourselves to this set of ruts and patterns we've fallen into.

So, following up the full argument then, if they are right and if our vision of ourselves therefore is potentially restraining, constraining, dangerous even, what do they recommend doing?

Well, now we get to another one of those surprising ideas-- rituals.

Remember the beginning of the talk I mentioned that we tend to think of rituals as being part and parcel of these traditional societies, part and parcel of a world where we'll be born into a society that would tell us what to do.

And rituals we tend to think are the things that socialize us into doing those sorts of things.

So rituals kind of perfectly exemplify why we don't like traditional worlds.

They perfectly exemplify what we don't like about a traditional society because we don't like being told what to do.

We should decide for ourselves as opposed to rituals that socializes into certain ways of being.

So, as I've noted, their vision of the self is rather different.

So let's now talk about their vision of ritual.

Yes, they talk about rituals a lot, and they think they're important.

But here's what they say about rituals.

Rituals are not there to socialize you into a certain way of being.

The reason you do rituals is to break you from your patterns and ruts and to open up other possibilities.

That's why we do rituals.

Let me give you a very clear example from their time, before we follow up the implications for what it would mean for us.

But here's one of their rituals just to give you a sense of what they're talking about.

So we fall into patterns and ruts, right?

Here's a very common one we tend to fall into, father-son relationships, father-son relationships in which patterns and ruts can play out for generations in which the father will be hopefully both trying to be a good father, but perhaps being in the dominant position of the relationship, perhaps a little arrogant and aggressive, the son both

trying to live up to the father, but feeling himself always failing, and vis a vis this authority figure.

And these relationships can play out for generations, oftentimes very tension filled.

So what do they recommend to deal with these sorts of patterns?

Do they recommend sitting down and chatting it through and having a good, nice talk through about all the problems?

Well no, because they would say if we're patterned, rutted creatures, you can talk and talk and talk.

But you'll simply return to the same patterns and ruts because they're so much a part of our whole way of being, our whole way of emotionally experiencing those around us.

So here's what you do instead.

You do a ritual.

And in the ritual what will happen is the father and the son go to the edge of the ritual space, and they stop.

And then they walk in without blushing.

Now that may seem like a really odd thing to have as part of a ritual, but here's why.

Because when they walk in the ritual, they're no longer who they were before.

The son is now his own grandfather.

And the father is now the son of his own son.

And the son, but now the grandfather, sits in the richly proper position facing south.

And his own father, who's now his son in the ritual, faces him looking north.

And the father pays proper senses of developing a proper relationship to his own son, except it's his father in the ritual.

And the idea is all of these tensions that he has had with his own father that can't be worked out now because the father is passed away, he now works out again, in a ritual context, but with his own son.

And his own son, from a very young age, also has to play the role of being the father, learning from a young age what it's like to be in a position of authority, the incredible responsibility that comes from that, but equally the dangers of falling into a sort of arrogance that comes from being in a position of power.

And from a young age, he has to experience that, but looking at his own father as if he were the son.

And by doing this, by forcing this role reversal, but more importantly by forcing this role reversal where each actually has to relate to the other in precisely the most difficult position of the relationship, the idea is what you are doing is breaking the kind of patterns that are playing out outside that ritual space.

Then you stand up in the ritual and you walk out, and you're back to being father and son and the same old patterns begin to recur again.

Of course, the father starts yelling at the son, the son starts getting rebellious, blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

But then you go back.

And the idea is by doing this ritual over and over again, being forced to play the opposite role vis a vis that very person, what you doing is breaking those patterns over time.

And by doing so-- and this is really the key point-- you're opening up the possibility for a different form of relationship outside the ritual.

And let me emphasize that latter point.

Note immediately, this ritual is not socializing you into playing the role in the ritual.

The son is not being socialized into playing the role of being the father to his own father.

The father is certainly not being socialized into the role of playing a son to his own son.

The point of the ritual is the break.

The point of the ritual is to say you, for that brief period, act as if you're a different person, relating to another one in a different way.

And that break forces a shift, forces a rupture in the usual patterns that dominate us.

And that opens the possibility for something else.

And what is that something else?

What that something else is means if we're these patterned, rutted creatures, if you begin to break them, what you begin to realize over time is that on the contrary, we are also very messy creatures who have fallen into patterns, also meaning therefore that you begin to realize that these are all alterable and changeable.

And slowly what begins to happen is all of these patterns and ruts that dominate oneself outside the ritual space become shiftable and malleable and workable.

And note, this one ritual example I gave you is only one of a ton you're doing all the time, which are constantly forcing these breaks, constantly forcing one-- and I'll use one of their terms-- not to find oneself but to overcome the self.

Now immediately you might say, OK, even if we grant that this is kind of intriguing and kind of perhaps on to something about the self, and even a kind of intriguing definition of ritual, it's not really something we can take seriously beyond that because, well, we don't do rituals.

I mean, we don't have rituals where we do role reversals.

And so even if it worked for them, well, that's good.

But still, what are we supposed to do with this?

Well, here's the next stage of their argument.

I suspect if you took a lot of these figures and plucked them into contemporary society and said do an ethnographic analysis of what humans are like nowadays, these radically modern liberated selves, and tell us what you would think.

I suspect what they would say is, they're human beings like all human beings as we're describing them.

They're these patterned, rutted creatures who are just following out these patterns and ruts all the time.

And part of these patterns and ruts include things that become reified as customs or conventions.

But they're still just different forms of patterns and ruts because we all do them without thinking about them.

And that's what we're like.

Or putting it in their eyes, they would say yeah, they're just like we're describing them, patterned rutted creatures perhaps even worse because they're so convinced they are being true to themselves and living their own lives that they don't even realize the degree to which they're patterned and rutted.

And therefore what would they say to break them?

Well, they'd began with the very things they were looking at, customs and conventions.

Because you see the ritual I just described actually comes from an earlier one, an earlier one that was actually just a custom that they made into a ritual in the sense they're talking about.

And what this would mean for us is the following.

We like to think we're liberated living our lives on our own.

If we're patterned and rutted, note also among these patterns and ruts are these endless conventions that we just play out all the time without thinking about.

Let me give you a standard example from America.

You see someone you know walking down the street.

They say hey, how's it going it.

And you say oh, pretty good, how are you doing?

And the other person goes oh, pretty good, yeah.

And then you walk along.

Now if you think about that-- and I've actually asked lots of people to think about it-- you'll often say things like, yeah, that's kind of a weird thing we do because in fact I'm usually not feeling pretty good right then.

I'm usually when I'm walking down the street, I'm anxious and angry and fearful of this and worried I'm not getting enough done and angry with what's going on with my partner and blah blah, blah, blah, blah-- in other words, a typical day.

And then I see someone I say, oh, things are pretty good.

And if you think about it, it seems kind of odd.

We're being inauthentic.

Or maybe I should just say, if someone says how's it going, I should just stop and say oh my god, I'm anxious and fearful and angry and lay the whole thing out.

Well, if you take these ideas from China seriously, they would say the precise opposite.

No, we shouldn't be authentic at that moment.

We shouldn't try to spill out who we truly are at that moment.

Actually on the contrary, we should make the convention into a ritual.

Which means you don't simply by rote say oh, pretty good.

How are you?

You actually, if you think of it as a ritual, think of it as a rite.

Where yes, at that moment, you're walking down the street.

You're anxious, fearful, angry, all the things we just mentioned, the typical roiling set of emotions that are often sadly dominating us.

And then at that moment what you do is you act as if you're a different person relating to this other messy person who's probably equally angry, resentful, and blah, blah, blah in a perfect way where, at that moment, yes, everything is good.

I'm connecting with this person.

This person is a really close friend.

Everything is wonderful.

Not because it is.

It's not.

Not because even that person is a close friend.

He or she probably is not.

Rather, you're acting as if they are.

And why do you do that?

Because if you do that, and keep doing this, all these little conventions, you begin working on and breaking them, acting as if you're a slightly different person.

What you begin to notice-- and I mean begin to notice within a few days.

And it's amazing how quickly you begin to start sensing this.

You start sensing the degree to which yes, you are patterned and rutted, because you will note the little things that you're doing that are in fact affecting others all the time without you noticing it, because we're just playing out these patterns.

It's affecting them because they're playing out their patterns.

And you begin to notice, by these little breaks, that on the contrary, if you shifting things slightly, saying oh pretty good in a slightly different tone of voice, walking in a slightly different way, you'll notice it affects people around you in a slightly different way too-- often times without them noticing it.

They're patterned.

They're just responding by ruts.

But then you being working on it.

And you begin to notice the degrees to which, for example, relationships that we're in-- we have all these problematic relationships.

At home, you have a partner where you just go through the same fight every single night.

In the office place-- I'm sure never here-- but in the office place you have a difficult coworker.

And it just seems to go on endlessly.

Of course it goes on endlessly.

It's patterns.

These are ruts.

But how do you break them-- little alterations, little shifts.

And you begin to notice, smiling at a time when you wouldn't otherwise smile, doing something you wouldn't otherwise do begins to actually alter your relationship-- suddenly, slightly.

But then you do it a little bit more.

And slowly these relationships start shifting, exactly like doing a ritual where you're forced to do a role reversal.

Now it's slightly different because you're sort of creating these alterations as you go.

But it actually accomplishes the same goal.

You're breaking these ruts.

And then where does this take one?

Well as these ruts begin shifting, you also notice something else too.

Your relationships, by definition, begin to shift.

But you also begin to notice that who you thought you were, this true self that was just you with all of the witnesses, the fact that we get angry at things, et cetera, is incredibly alterable too, because you begin physically feeling differently.

You begin physically feeling differently as you begin interacting with others differently.

You begin experiencing the world differently.

And it becomes ever more workable.

And you begin altering that.

And slowly what you're learning-- not cognitively but in practice-- is that yes, we are messy selves.

We are messy selves that fall into these patterns and ruts.

But the flip side of that-- finally getting to the good part-- is if we are messy-- and I think we are-- that's changeable.

That's alterable.

And you begin to realize we've fallen into entire ways of being passively.

And you begin to realize by altering those and changing those and shifting those, at the very ludicrously mundane level of just ordinary things we're doing on a daily basis, out of that, slowly, you begin changing yourself, changing your interactions, changing your relationships.

And then you start becoming active in the process.

Then you begin working on how these relationships are affecting those around you and you.

And the more you work, you begin forging a different self.

And if everything is malleable, you can start forging different worlds.

And I mean that in a strong sense, forging entire worlds where instead of interacting with others de facto in ways that are often very harmful, you're actually acting in ways that are enabling them to flourish and you as well.

Now that seems like a strong statement, but let me give again another of their examples before I bring it to our own age.

So I mentioned this guy Confucius that we tend to associate with Confucianism, this idea that we should just follow a bunch of rituals to train us into being certain types of beings.

And as we've noticed, they had a very different notion of ritual.

So let me now say a few more words about Confucius.

If this notion of ritual is what he's advocating, where does it take us?

And here's where it took him.

Let me describe the way he, Confucius, is described.

The way he is described in a work c the "Analects," which is a work beautifully put together by his disciples basically to describe him, what he was like as a person.

And if we tend to think of him as this kind of ritual fuddy duddy telling people, do rituals, do rituals, do rituals and be socialized into your position, it's a very different portrait.

Here's the way he's actually portrayed.

He is portrayed as someone intensely joyous, incredibly joyous, incredibly charismatic, the sort of person that people just want to be wound.

And the reason they want to be around him is because of what he's become so good at doing.

And he'll be described as someone who can simply walk into a situation and has become so good, because he's been training himself through a lifetime of this ritual work, that he can immediately sense all the patterns and ruts playing out in that situation.

And he'll do little things to alter the situation, little things like a tone of voice, the way he holds his body, the way he'll quote from lines of poetry, that will bring out different responses from those around him, that will enable all the sort of tensions and complexities of the moment to be shifted.

And in that moment, suddenly you create this pocket where people begin to connect well, sense each other well, begin to flourish.

And the idea is by doing that moment by moment, he's become this intensely joyous person that it's joyous to be around because he's just so good at connecting with people and working with people and shifting situations for the better.

And by doing this on a moment by moment basis, the further argument is this is what he's able to do at a larger level too.

He's able to with the immediate people he encounters, but at a larger level, able to do it with more social problems because he can sense the patterns that are creating the dangers and the difficulties, and can sense how to begin shifting them and altering them and working on them.

We have, again, a very mundane level, because the argument is it really comes down to basic ways of experiencing the world and interacting with those around us.

That's how he's described.

Or to put it in stronger terms, the vision is he was every bit as patterned and rutted as all of us.

But he's held up as an example of someone that if you do these rituals and are constantly trying to break these patterns and ruts, and train yourself accordingly, you can become that sort of a person.

The term they use is sage.

And the argument isn't that we'll become sages.

Their argument is, it's a lifelong process that will never succeed.

But that is the vision of a life.

The vision of a life in a nutshell is precisely not that we should be looking within, finding ourselves, embracing ourselves for who we are, being sincere and authentic to this true self.

The visions of the self is, think of yourself as something you forge, either passively, in which case you fall into these rights and that's it.

And they'll just dominate your life until you die.

And sadly, you'll pass them on to the next generations.

Or you forge your life actively and consciously through these constant daily interactions that you're constantly working on.

And the full argument is, if you do that, if you're committed to that as a vision of the self, then what you're really committing yourself to is a constant-- to use again an odd term in our terminology-- kind of a training exercise.

To give yet another example that is from our own time, if you try to think of places where we do the sorts of things they're talking about, they're actually kind of easy to find.

But we don't really do them in our daily life.

Think for example of learning a sport or learning a musical instrument.

It involves incredible amounts of work and training.

But what you're achieving is something beyond simply playing well.

So here's an example, learning the piano.

So if you're learning the piano, you don't just sit down to the piano and play spontaneously and play well.

That's just painful.

What you do on the contrary is you train yourself-- incredibly, incredibly hard work, hours a day training yourself to do the basic chord progressions, to learn to feel the key.

And as the years go by, you begin to sense the keys.

You begin to sense how, if you play slightly differently, you can bring out certain moods in those around you.

If you play a little softer or a little more strongly, you can affect the room in different ways.

And as the years go by, you get so good at doing this that you're able to do it, in their terms, spontaneously.

You've trained yourself to spontaneously sense the music, sense the room, sense the situation, sense how to alter the mood of the room.

And through that training, you're spontaneously able to so sense the world around you that you're able to play with this incredible degree of power, the power in the sense of altering the world for the better.

That is the vision they're talking about.

And that sense that you've gotten-- and we've all done something like this, if not a piano, then a sport or something like this-- there's a sense of incredible-- yeah, I'll use the term-- joyousness that comes when you're so in the moment, so sensing a situation, and so able to alter that situation just by sensing things so well.

So if we kind of know what they're talking about by things we do like when we learn a piano or learn a musical instrument, note the final point that I want to emphasize.

All of the examples I suspect that we would tend to think of when we kind of realize, oh yeah, I kind of understand that you can train yourself to be the sort of person they're talking about, these are things we kind of tend to do on weekends to feel better, right?

Like on weekends, OK, I'll play the piano.

Now I'll play the sport.

And then I'll go back to my normal, everyday life.

What in a sense they're saying is the following.

Suppose you take that same vision of what it takes to train yourself, but apply it to your everyday life such that your everyday life becomes a training exercise, training yourself to sense situations, sense patterns, since these ruts that we and those around us have fallen into, and train yourself to sense this, begin to work on this, alter this, shift this.

And what you're training yourself to do is to [INAUDIBLE] the ability, over time, to, yes, create these worlds around you within which people can flourish.

You do it by not finding the self but overcoming the self.

You do it by not trying to be sincere and true to yourself, but, at the beginnings, acting as if you are different types of people, but slowly therefore over time constructing the self.

And the goal is to achieve something like what they would call [INAUDIBLE].

Not again that we achieve it, but something along those lines of becoming the sort of person so attuned to everyone around one that, at an immediate level and a larger social level, that you're able to sense situations and create these worlds within which people can flourish.

In short, if we are malleable creatures-- and again, psychological experiments are showing that we are-- in practice we tend to lose that because we become patterned and rutted.

But take it seriously, and suddenly everything that we thought was stable becomes changeable.

Or to put it, again, in very strong terms, when we go back and like to think, yes, we are a liberated people because we can decide for ourselves how to live our lives, as opposed to those traditional people who couldn't, the intriguing thing is maybe in part it's sort of the opposite, that with our grand visions of how

to live liberated lives by being true and sincere to ourselves, we, ironically, are creating very stable selves-- in their terminology, patterned and rutted selves.

And assuming a very stable world around us, whereas a lot of these other ideas that have arisen in world history were about recognizing the degree to which the world isn't really stable.

We create stable worlds.

But therefore, since we do it passively, often very dangerous, destructive, discriminatory ones in which people are not able to flourish.

And take it seriously, you realize the world is really incredibly malleable.

And we are, in part, creating that world, often poorly, often passively.

But if you change that and begin living your life the way they're describing it, suddenly you realize that these worlds can be created by the little tiny things that we're doing all the time.

In short, if we take this idea seriously, it forces us-- at least offers, I would say, a fundamental challenge to our vision of the self, our vision of what it means to be a liberated individual, our vision of what we think of as the modern world, and perhaps makes us realize that, on the contrary, our vision of the self is a vision.

It has certain implications.

Some of them at least are potentially restraining and dangerous even to us and those around us.

And some of these old ideas from the traditional past-- in this case China, but I'll expand this.

A lot of ideas from around the world can suddenly be taken seriously again because they're not confined to a so-called traditional world, but we realize actually they're operating from a very different vision of the self, but one that's really on to something fundamental.

And if we take them seriously, yes, it forces us to challenge our assumptions, and perhaps opens us to a very powerful vision of what it would mean to live life well in the sense of enabling those around us and ourselves to flourish through the seemingly simple mundane stuff that we do on a very basic, everyday level.

In short, these ideas are incredibly powerful because they challenge our assumption and offer a very practical vision of what, on a daily basis, we could be doing that would allow us, over the course of a lifetime, to become very different and hopefully incomparably better types of human beings.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE] Great, thank you.

And I would love to hear questions, comments, thoughts.

Please-- please, yes.

AUDIENCE: I was thinking about why we might concentrate a lot on paying attention to the self, like what our wants and desires are.

And the difference between now and the past, one difference, is the economy, if I might go there.

MICHAEL PUETT: Yes, absolutely.

AUDIENCE: The economy then, everybody could basically follow one of a very, very small number of patterns as a male or as a female.

Now we're in an economy where there is such a diversity of paths and everybody can't do the same path.

And so you teach undergrads, right?

MICHAEL PUETT: Yes.

AUDIENCE: And all of them are like, OK, where's mine?

I can't follow what everybody else is doing.

So how do those play out?

MICHAEL PUETT: I think that's beautifully put.

And I think it's a perfect example of where we are in a sense, because on the one hand, we have a world that should be open for incredible possibilities, as you said, a world in which seemingly endless number of paths are available to us.

And yet the chilling thing if one takes these ideas seriously is how in practice, we can so imprison and constrain ourselves in terms of that work.

So getting back to the key of your question, they would argue if it's true that the world seems to us incredibly open, why do we not live our lives that way?

And why on the contrary are we not pursuing all these possibilities that are really potentially available to us, but on the contrary falling into these incredibly dangerous ruts?

And I would say that's true of us individually, but I would put it in a larger social level too.

We live in a world that is becoming unbelievably stratified, where people's lives are unbelievably-- not only routinized, but actually held into certain socioeconomic positions, and are surprisingly unchangeable.

So given what would seem to be the reality of a very open world, and equally the reality of a world that we seem to be creating isn't going on, why not?

And going back to their ideas, they would say, well, it comes down to the ways that we live our lives, and at a larger level, the kind of social worlds that we've accordingly created, which we now think of as grand and liberatory, but ironically are creating a completely different type of world, which surprisingly we don't even seem to notice.

So thank you, wonderful question.

Thank you.

Yes please.

AUDIENCE: First of all I'd like to apologize on behalf of the site for the construction noise.

MICHAEL PUETT: That is fine.

AUDIENCE: There is one aspect of finding yourself that it strikes me still has value, and that is we have different values.

And so finding your values, not necessarily what makes you feel good, but what you feel detracts from you if you were to turn against it.

For example, if you value the helping of others and you only pursue wealth, for reasons other than donation, then you are not being true to your values.

And that is, I think, worthwhile to pay attention to.

But I agree that the find yourself seems to often mean the self in the sense of wanting to escape from rather than the self in the sense of what values are fundamental to me.

MICHAEL PUETT: Yes, perfectly put, and I actually agree completely.

So were we to conceptualize the self in the sense of the self that we are creating through the little works that we're doing all the time, then I think the notion of finding a self works great.

In other words, finding a self in that sense would be an active constructive process of, as you said, developing the values that we want to be guiding our lives.

The danger, as you said, is so often when we use the term finding ourself, we are using it in that opposite sense.

We're using the sense of, I need to find my true authentic self that I should just embrace and love for who I am.

And the problem is in practice, even if we say, and part of that is I'm the sort of person who values certain things, danger is with that way of thinking, actually the way we live in our daily lives perhaps is not at all according to the values that we like to think we hold, that in fact the daily ways we're living and the ways we're affecting others can often directly contradict what

we claim to be our own values.

So getting back to the heart of your question, yes, if we can think of the self as something we are working on, constructing, and the values of the self being something that we as human beings are constructing through our daily life and therefore hopefully embodying in the way we live, then it's a wonderful notion of the self.

Sadly, it tends to be not the vision of the self that we tend to think about when we're actually living nowadays.

AUDIENCE: It's a form of surrender to love the self you have rather than the self you aspire to.

MICHAEL PUETT: Yeah, that's perfectly put-- perfectly put.

I mean, this sounds so great to love myself, embrace myself.

But the danger exactly as you said is, well no, you're just embracing the set of patterns and ruts I've fallen into.

And the goal should be aspirational.

It's to create a great self, a great self that can work well in the world and help those around one.

And that's the vision of self I fear we're losing, precisely with our vision of always being true to yourself and sincere to yourself and authentic to yourself.

Ironically, we're creating the exact opposite type of a world.

Great, thank you.

Thank you.

Please yes.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

At the end you have this beautiful vision that the sage's path is like creating spaces that cause joyousness in others.

That was my understanding.

But we also, at the beginning, you point out that if we're just bundles of stuff, the other bundles of stuff are what can cause us to get into these patterns and ruts.

So like other bundles of stuff yell at me, and then I-- And I have this stereotype-- I don't know much about Chinese philosophy-- but I have a stereotype like Chinese philosophers were hermits.

And listening to your talk, I sort of could understand how, to some extent, I wonder, like, when I was hearing this, well I can protect myself from the other bundles of stuff by just not leaving my house and creating patterns in my own house that I can control, because you ultimately can't control the other bundles.

I guess sort of how do you take that jump from hermit to joyousness?

MICHAEL PUETT: Yeah, no, it's a great question.

And what they would say-- and I would agree with them on this-- is that doing the approach of sort of locking oneself in one's room and not interacting with others in the long run is actually going to be completely disruptive, that really the only way to work on these patterns and ruts is through interactions.

And yes, the simple fact-- and I think you're right about this-- that so many of our patterns and ruts are formed with what other people are doing around us, who are equally patterned and rutted.

The key is what we're training ourselves to do is both act in ways that hopefully will break patterns and ruts with those around us, but we're also training ourselves not to be affected in the same dangerous ways, they would put it, by those around us as well.

So we turn to that example.

If that person is yelling at me, that will draw out even someone who's not yelling but using a tone of voice that for whatever reason emotionally reminds me of someone who used to yell at me.

That would draw a certain response.

So part of the training exercise is you're training yourself not to passively respond that way-- in other words, not to respond by those same patterns and ruts.

And when that person does something, you're training yourself not to be so affected by it.

And in the long run what you really train yourself to do is the next step too, which is to realize probably if that person is doing something like either yelling or some kind of strong kind of voice, it probably is coming as well from something you're doing too-- unconsciously.

You're just playing out your usual patterns and ruts.

But that's creating the situation where that person gets angry.

You get angry in return.

You're doing something too.

And so you're training yourself not to be affected by that person in that way.

But you ultimately want to train yourself to be able to act in ways that will actually shift that person too.

So that person's anger isn't arising, it's then generating your anger.

And that sounds incredibly difficult, and it is, but the key is it can only be done in practice.

So you don't want to sit out in your room and think that's the way to avoid all these difficult relationships.

No, it's only by working on these difficult relationships all the time that you train yourself both to respond well to others, but again, respond well in this strong sense of responding in ways that will bring out better sides of them as well.

So great.

Thank you.

Yes please.

AUDIENCE: I guess we often tend to assume that the notion of the self is divorced from society as a concept that arose in the Enlightenment in Western Europe.

I just got back from a couple of weeks in Iran where I learned a great deal about the role of martyrdom in Shiite Islam and the very live sense of martyrdom as something to be of very high value.

And obviously that's a very different view of the self, sacrificing the self for the greater good.

To bring this back to China, I think we also tend to think of this sort of blossoming of the self as something recently that has evolved out of the Chinese revolution, and that during the Chinese revolution, again, we tend to think there was a very different notion of the self and self-sacrifice.

But again with the development of capitalism in China, fairly clearly a more Western like view of the self as something to be enhanced, fought for, separated from society seems to have developed very, very fully.

Can you comment on sort of more recent Chinese history and how you see these ancient traditions, the role of the self, relating to more modern trends in China?

MICHAEL PUETT: Yes, great question.

And until recently, the way I would have said is, sadly from my point of view, a lot of these ideas were rejected.

And what I mean by that is the following.

For much of the 20th century, these ideas were very strongly rejected.

So all the ideas I mentioned at the beginning, that we are modern people-- and luckily for us, rejecting these traditional ideas-- these and such a vision of a modern world destroying a traditional world became all pervasive.

And during the imperial period, these ideas became pervasive in the world, absolutely in China too.

And you had a succession of governments explicitly devoted to the claim, we're going to modernize.

And to modernize we're going to destroy traditional society altogether.

So texts like these were burned.

The old temples were destroyed.

It was an explicitly modernist paradigm, and particularly of course under Mao, under the Cultural Revolution, literally these texts were burned.

The idea was to destroy the past.

Then as you said more recently, there was a reaction against Maoism and an incredible embrace of neoliberal capitalism, much more actually than in America.

And China became a world where sort of everything was up for sale.

Everything was about money and power.

And as you said, a vision of the self very comparable to ones that we hold-- in fact, if anything, more extreme.

Now the interesting thing-- and I mean now meaning the past something like eight years-- all of this is beginning to change.

And there's now a very self-conscious debate going on in China of, have we lost our values.

Have we simply become a world where everything comes down to money and power?

And all of a sudden, all of these old rituals are coming back.

The temples are being rebuilt. These texts

are being read again.

There's a huge blogosphere in China.

And now all these passages that we've been alluding to today, they're actively being debated and discussed in the blogosphere.

And all of it is coming back.

Now how this will play out, I have no idea.

But I suspect at the minimum what's going on now-- and I would put this more globally as well-- there's increasingly a view that this one restrictive notion of the self, which really became a global vision of the past century, is now being questioned in a lot of quarters.

And in China itself, a lot of these ideas are actively coming back.

And it's going to be, I think, an exciting moment.

Certainly in China, but I suspect globally, when for the first time really in a long time, the vision of the self that's been so dominant is coming under question.

And a lot of these ideas from the past are once again being taken seriously.

And at the minimum, this will mean another generation will grow out not be told this vision of the self is the right one, but actually allowed to take from very different traditions.

And the fact that this is going on yet again finally in China as well is something I think it incredibly exciting.

Yeah, it's a great question.

Thank you.

Yes please.

AUDIENCE: This seems like an interesting prism perhaps through which to view traditional Western religion as well, that one can be cynical and look at it sort of, it looks like hypocrisy, these New Testament lessons that seem very idealistic, not really matching the way people normally live their lives.

But you know, once a week you go to church.

You listen to these things.

It's like a ritual where, I think in your framework, where you practice being someone else, being someone better.

Does that seem-- MICHAEL PUETT: I agree completely.

One of the things that's intriguing when you begin looking at these ideas is you begin realizing that not just Chinese ideas, actually if you look at so-called traditional practices in general, a lot of the rituals were doing exactly this.

And so a lot of the religious rituals that we today would say oh, those are silly because it means we're being inauthentic.

We're being insincere.

We're being hypocritical as you said because we're being asked to act as something that isn't what we're really feeling at that moment, that's precisely the point.

The whole point of these rituals is yes, you enter a space and you are no longer the person that you were before.

You are acting as if you're a different person in a different world.

And the goal of that is to change for the better.

So yes, I think a lot of these ideas work not only for China, I think they work in general.

I think they're really on to something profound about why rituals work.

They work not just to socialize us into a way of being-- in fact you can put it more strongly, when rituals become that is precisely the point at which you get reactions against them.

When rituals are alive and powerful, what they're doing is helping break us from our patterns and ruts.

And I think this applies equally well to Western religions as well.

So yes, thank you so much.

Great.

Well thank you so much.

This has been a tremendous time and a wonderful experience.

Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]