An excerpt from a talk by Neil Theise, a pathologist at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and author of Notes on Complexity, delivered during Pinchbeck's online course The Future of Consciousness. Theise argues that being inconsequentially small and being a complete expression of the entire universe are two simultaneously true descriptions, and that holding both is what human life consists of. Most of the excerpt is a family history: his father was sent from Germany to England on the Kindertransport while his grandparents were deported to Riga and killed. Visiting the site of the mass grave, Theise concluded his grandmother died believing her decisions had been wrong, though she was in fact the only one of her siblings who did not lose a child. He draws an ethic from it about acting without knowing outcomes.
Guest: Neil Theise
In brief
- Theise argues that the smallness of the individual and the individual's status as a full expression of the whole universe are both true at once, and that the practical work is moving between the two.
- He says he only found the concluding argument of Notes on Complexity after a much younger friend confronted him with anger about the world his generation was leaving behind.
- Theise recounts that his grandmother kept her older son with her rather than sending him to Amsterdam, a choice that placed him in a work camp he survived rather than a death camp.
- He describes sustained experiences of his grandmother's presence, corroborated by a shamanic teacher, that ended after he asked relatives to light candles and set out photographs of her descendants on the anniversary of her deportation.
- Theise concludes that decisions must be made from present conditions with as much wisdom as can be mustered, without expectation of ever witnessing whether they helped.
Full text
and so the flip side of being inconsequential and Tiny is that we each of us is in every moment a full expression of the entire universe um and nothing you know pure just as it is and so from that perspective impermanence and the balancing job between us is what it is to be human um because you can't live if you live in one world will you get this but if you live in the other world as I said my mother couldn't you know feed or clean herself but how do we use that shift so the more that idea gets out there potentially you know when I wrote the book I actually landed on the stuff I just said at the very end because I was uh markk and I were out with some friends drinking a little and a 26-year-old friend of ours who got a little disinhibited let loose with this anger about how our generation screwed up the world for him and um and I thought if my book doesn't have something to say about that then why even bother um the have I told you I think I told you about when when we spoke spoke Daniel about my grandmother in Ria yeah go ahead should I tell that story abely go for it so um so my father was born in Germany we're Jewish that was not a good combination in the 20s and 30s um my father was sent to England on something called the Kinder transport the British rescue 10,000 they paid the German government for 10,000 Jewish children who were sent to England and rescued that way his parents were both sent to Ria as most German Jews were where they were killed either in the forests um in or in work camps uh and a few years ago I went to Ria and discovered that when I was there between the museum the ghetto itself was just a workingclass neighborhood that still exists I could find the house where my grandmother and all her cousins were crowded in before they were killed um and stuff online I could actually find out everything that happened to my my grandparents and my uncle who survived all that and um my uncle they had thought about sending him to Amsterdam he was too old for the kinded transport but my grandmother couldn't send her other son away so she kept him and he told us later that if she had sent him to Amsterdam he would have been sent to awit or trinka and he would have been killed but going to Ria he was in a Work Camp Camp so he had the chance to survive and he did he Liv wound up in Poland and has I think they 14 great grandchildren now so when I found the actual spot the mass grave where my grandmother was shot I thought who was she in that last moment and in a Flash I sort of the the thought came to me oh I think I've met my grandmother um in her last moment I think her thought was we made all the wrong decisions and I've lost my boys I've lost my husband and now I'm going to be killed and that that's what she died with and um what she couldn't know is that she was out of all her siblings and cousins she was the only one who didn't lose a child so she actually made the right de decisions but she didn't know that I have a shamanic teacher as one does this sort of just he wandered into my life uh 13 years ago um and he's Adept at traveling the astral plane and you know stuff like that um my grandmother's name was uh Elisa um but everyone called her lisian and um so he shows up the day I'm I'm now going to Germany for family reunion invited by the town uh where my family comes from it was the 80th anniversary of Crystal KN and they invited us all to come back um so I was on the way there and he comes online because he's military I usually I only get to talk to him online and um he and he was worried about me being in a place as dark as R was for me and he said said you know you're not alone I said what do you mean he said well there's a woman with you who is it I don't know it's funny I'm getting two different names Lisa lison I said that's my grandmother he said well she's sort of close in on your right side long story short I go to Germany and I think and I ask him is she still here with me but I'm starting to develop a sense of her presence although that could just be me telling myself a story but at one point I turned to the Elder of Our Generation and I I say to her do you believe in ghosts and she said of course I do I said I think I brought my mother my grandmother back from Ria and she said a I already knew that um so I wondered whether I was bringing her back to her hometown our family lived there for five generations maybe that's what I was doing but she came back to um New York with me um um and I was having a vivid sense of her and I checked in with my Shaman and he was like yeah she's still around and then one day she wasn't so I checked in with him he said no she's not with you let me look around and then he came back to me he goes oh she's with your mother so my mother didn't actually leave after all this that's the afterward in her book she's your mother's taking her around to see the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren um and then I felt her come back and I checked and yes she came back and I this was crystal KNX was the end of November so we're coming up on the two the anniversary of the two-day train ride to Ria from Germany and I reached out to all my cousins and told them what was going on and I said let's all light candles on those two days and put out pictures sorry put out pictures of all her descendants and you know send a note of see you did well and gratitude um and that's when she went away and she's been gone since so the lesson I take from her relates to the complexity stuff you have to try to you have to see what you can do you have to try your best to make decisions based on what your experiences are but you have to make those choices knowing that you can't know which are going to be the right ones all you can do is respond to what you have what you're encountering in the present moment with as much wisdom as you can muster and hope something happens and even if you come up with something that helps you may not be a witness to the help that it brings you have to do it without expectation that you'll ever know and I think that's to me that's kind of where all of this Science and Mathematics um and philosophy and practice comes down to is just that um and that's what we have to face the current moment with and um
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.