Kade made it through the registration queue, got his badge and packet. Sam was still halfway back in her line.
[sam] I'll catch up with you later.
Kade nodded. With the Nexus link over their phones, they could always keep in touch. He headed into the massive plenary hall, grabbed a seat near the back, and pulled out his slate.
A moment later the lights dimmed and a voice boomed out over the loudspeaker. "Please welcome His Royal Majesty, the King of Thailand, Rama the Tenth."
WTF?
Kade looked down at his slate, tapped into the conference program.
Buddhism and Neuroscience: From Singular to Connected Paradigms of the Mind and Brain. His Royal Majesty Rama X & Professor Somdet Phra Ananda, Chulalongkorn University
At the end of the plenary hall and on giant screens to either side, a smiling forty-something man in an immaculate white suit with an embroidered golden sash took the stage. Monks in orange robes throughout the audience came to their feet, applauding, as did other Thais, and then the entire audience. Kade followed their lead.
Rama X held up his hands and motioned for the crowd to be seated.
He spoke in English, welcomed them to Thailand, praised the organizers and attendees, remarked on the history of the conference center which his grandfather had erected. And then the talk turned in a direction Kade had not expected.
"I am a Buddhist," the king said, "as are more than ninety percent of my countrymen. As is the custom of young men of my nation, I spent a time in my youth in the orange robes of a monk."
Interesting.
"I learned many things through the experience of serving as a monk. Two of them are relevant today.
"The first is that the most essential Buddhist practice – meditation – is a practice of investigating the mind. Through that investigation we gain peace, freedom from attachments, reduction in suffering, and compassion for others. And most relevant to today, we gain tremendous insights into how our minds actually work."
We do with Nexus too, Kade mused.
"The goals of neuroscience and Buddhism are nearly the same, while their methods are both different and complementary to one another.
"The methods of science are statistical, quantitative, reproducible, reductionist, and, as much as possible, objective."
He paused.
"The methods of meditation, on the other hand, are qualitative, subjective, reproducible often only through hard work disciplining and quieting the mind, and yet equally profound."
Drugs are faster, Kade thought. Mental tools.
"I have a deep respect for the scientific method," Rama said. "Decades ago, the fourteenth Dalai Lama was asked: 'What if neuroscience proves that Buddhism is in some way incorrect?'
"'Well,' he replied, 'in that case we would need to change Buddhism.'"
The crowd laughed. Rama X smiled.
"What I would ask you to consider is the complementary idea. What if Buddhism shows that some of the basic assumptions of neuroscience are imperfect? That a new paradigm would prove superior? Then I would hope you august scientists would be willing to change your scientific approach."
No one laughed this time. There was silence.
Rama X smiled wider.
"Let me put one idea in your minds as to what this new paradigm might be. And here I turn back to the second thing I learned as a monk."
He paused for effect.
"We are all one."
More silence.
The King chuckled. "I am not hearkening back to the Woodstock Festival of North America."
There were a few answering chuckles.
"Nor have I been smoking hashish."
Nervous laughter rippled through the room. Kade found himself chuckling out loud.
"What I mean is that we all exists as parts of groups and collectives larger than ourselves. Tribes. Communities. Organizations. Institutions. Families. Nations. We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. We are their components."
He's right, Kade thought.
"For the experienced meditator, this connection is intuitively grasped. The process of meditation pierces the illusion of solitary individual existence and reveals to us that we are all part of things much much larger than any individual."
Wow, Kade thought. The King of Thailand is a hippie.
"Here neuroscience can take direction from Buddhism. Individual minds matter. Yet in an age where billions of minds are webbed through technology, where information can travel from one person on one side of the globe to a billion on the other side of the globe in a heartbeat, there are other layers of cognition which matter.
"Everything important in our world requires the efforts of large numbers of individuals. Indeed, to overcome our planet's most pressing problems, we are required to think not as individuals, not even as nations, but as a single humanity."
Like Einstein, Kade thought. The problems we currently face can't be solved at the level of thinking that created them.
Rama X went on, "Yet the dominant paradigm of neuroscience is still that of the individual brain. That is only the beginning of the understanding of the human mind, not the end product.
"If I have one wish for this conference, it is that a few of you would rethink your work through a new lens, a new paradigm – that of the connectedness of all brains and all minds on Earth, both the connectedness that already exist," – here, the king paused – "and the even greater connectedness that we'll develop in the coming years as neuroscience and neurotechnology progress."
Greater connectedness that we'll develop? thought Kade. Is he talking about brain-to-brain communication? About Nexus?
"For now, I thank you for listening to the thoughts of a layperson. As both a Thai and a Buddhist, I welcome you to Thailand, and I open these proceedings." He momentarily bowed his head.
The orange-robed monks in the audience were on their feet in a moment, followed a split second later by the other Thai attendees, applauding thunderously. Kade found himself on his feet as well, genuinely surprised and impressed.