Laurie Anderson: About Time with Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi

Tim McHenry:

Do you feel like you’re running out of time? Are you able to stop time? If so, how? Welcome to about time, an audio series from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art that aims to reframe the concept of time and perhaps our perspective on life. I’m your host, Tim McHenry. Many objects in the Rubin’s collection of Himalayan art reflect the Buddhist concept of the present, highlighting the illusionary nature of the past and future. 

In this four part series, performance artist, electronic music pioneer, filmmaker, and all around creative genius Laurie Anderson curated a series of conversations to tackle questions about time. Laurie’s guests were poet Jane Hirschfield, novelist Tom McCarthy, philosopher the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, and writer Benjamín Labatut. This is a recording of a 2024 in-person program, one of many organized and hosted by me at the Rubin.

In this episode, we hear Laurie Anderson engage with the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, the president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the leading arguments put forward in favor of having AI in our lives is that it will save us all time. What will we do with the time that we are given? And does that freed up time have a moral value? So many questions, too little time.

Laurie Anderson:

I have millions of questions for you, but one of the things you said, and I’ll just read one sentence from your book with you’re quoting a teacher who said, don’t ask questions, he would say, no. The answer is not where you’re looking. That’s a dead end. Look further and deeper refine your questions. So I went through all my questions and I was like, well, I don’t have time to refine these questions. They’re all going to be a little bit idiotic. But one of the things that we were talking about in the earlier sessions here was how divided many cultures are now, especially our own in terms of, you could think of it in terms of time. Half of the people or maybe roughly half are thinking it’s too late and the other half are thinking somewhere in the past. If we could just get back there, it’s okay and we could be there again. So we’re going to be coming back and forth to that idea. But I’d like to begin by asking you what it’s like to be teaching ethics at MIT.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

I think the intersection of time and space, of exploring ethics, I think we are at a time when it’s most relevant in a place like MIT because the field of science and technology has taken pride in itself since its inception. I would say at least in the last hundred years, this blend of science and technology for being amoral by design. That the idea is that it should not take sides and it should think about bigger questions. But now increasingly, especially after the projects during the second World War, the atomic bomb designs and so on, and since then, now that certain technology that has entered consumer life, social media and certain aspects of those platforms that is posing challenges and threat to civic institutions, you need to start thinking about who or which agency should be held responsible or feel some sense of responsibility about it.

And that’s where I think this question of ethics is important. And I don’t do normative ethics. I don’t want to tell people or dictate them about ethical life and so on. The way the center and I approach ethics is more on the idea of promoting ethical imagination, and that’s the expression that I like to use. It’s primarily giving them certain tools and creating an environment where they can collectively and individually reflect on the idea of what would it mean to truly introduce it in ethical principles. So if you’re designing something rather than the way companies work, which is you design, you deploy, if something goes wrong, then you start thinking about, well, what we could have done. Here thinking of ethics at design state itself. So not thinking of ethics as a block in this road to discovery or invention, but thinking of it as an added variable that allows us to make things better in a certain manner. So ethical imagination is what I would say. It’s not even so much about teaching ethics, but creating new models for learning ethics.

Laurie Anderson:

Yeah, it’s interesting that you use the word deploy because that’s one of the things that does scare me a little bit about corporate language, getting so many of their terms from the military as we do too. I copy that and people are like, let’s hit the ground running with that one. And you’re just like, you’re just moving furniture around an office. It’s not a military campaign, but we got this vocabulary that we have to fight somehow. But in terms of design and ethics, that just reminded me of something I haven’t thought of in a really long time. It’s a quote of Lenin, which he said, ethics is the aesthetics of the future. And I’ve always been very puzzled by that. I mean, I love this idea that in the future we’ll just all be good to each other and that will be enough that will be just beautiful enough and we won’t have to design anything or make beautiful stuff or art, things like that. On a design level, what do you think of that sort of connection between ethics and aesthetics? 

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

I think it’s a very sort of intimate connection. I think deep down ethics also evokes questions of observation, beauty, the sense of harmony, synergy, those are all sort of, again, it can be a functional design question, but they’re primarily questions of aesthetics, how to make things actually better. Because again, ethics in some ways is a human invention. It’s a human construct. You don’t find ethical norms, for example, in other species, we can project and say animals respect each other or they may respect boundaries and so on. But it’s largely a human construct.

Laurie Anderson:

I’d like you to talk a little bit about some of the kind of wellness programs that are going on because I think so many of them have that economic model of I’m going to be a better person on this sort of cost benefit analysis level of how I’m going to spend my time, that type of trading.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

Sometimes I’m sure when you get invited to speak, people want to know five bullet points that the audience is going to walk out of.

Laurie Anderson:

Yeah. Could you give us those five bullet points?

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

I hate that. I literally hate that. I’m like, why do you have to put it in the context of audience walking out with five things? Why not, audience came in and they dropped 10 things. Why does that have to be accumulation of five things rather than dropping 10 things? But it’s such a consumer mindset that we have become accustomed to that. Even you’re coming to a Buddhist teaching on emptiness and you want to know what are the five things you can walk away with it, you can guess. Doesn’t that take away the entire objective of a retreat? I think one of the challenges with emotions, there’s a lot written about it. There’s a lot of talk about it, but I think one of the territories that I think we are not exploring very well is the idea of freedom from certain kinds of emotions. We spend a lot of time speaking about managing emotions and managing emotions is good if you need to survive.

Managing emotions is useful, but we as humans, even if you take the most sort of, I call it very cross sort of representation of human aspiration, which is Maslow’s hierarchy. Even if you take that model, the idea is that after certain kinds of management, you have to get into the process or experience of actualization of things and actualization requires some sense or some experience of freedom from things. So we spend so much time managing emotions, rotating the kinds of emotion day in and day out, that we actually, again, to reuse the word imagination, that we can’t imagine a life free of toxic emotions. We have simply taken it for granted that yes, stress can be minimized or fear or anxiety can be minimized, but we have to live with it that we can’t get rid of it. And I think that’s a shame. That’s a shame on the aspects that we assume of what it means to be human.

Humans are very funny creatures that regard as you may have experienced, right? So we love to take credit for anything good, but if any point somebody tells you they point out your imperfections or inadequacy, we oftentimes resort to the statement, oh, I’m just a human being. When somebody tells you that you did an excellent job at something, when somebody tells you, oh, you are so generous, so kind, so brilliant. How many times have you responded to that compliment by saying, I’m just a human being? So to begin thinking, begin imagining that we don’t need to simply manage certain things, if we recognize that it shouldn’t exist, that if certain toxic emotional states are occupying tremendous bandwidth in my mind, yes, let’s begin reducing it, but aspire to get rid of it.

Laurie Anderson:

It’s a very basic thing to Buddhism that we are all basically good and that there were things that came out of that that didn’t require rules so much. But my background in one way was the Swedish Evangelical Covenant Church, and we did have rules, so that’s why I was just hoping you had five of them for us, but we only really had one. And the sermons would just be the guy where the teacher would say, it’s a really good idea to just be nice to people. That’s about it. You’ll have a better life, then let’s go down and drink coffee, in the fellowship, we just go drink a whole lot of coffee. That was the whole thing, just be kind to other people. That was a lot actually.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

If you had to abide by just one rule, I think that’s a great rule to have. In fact, there’s a story about this Indian Buddhist teacher, Atisha, who’s credited with the bringing mind training tools to Tibet. And the story is that when he was in Tibet, rather than asking people in the morning when he would greet and he’d say, hello, how are you? Or even the word tashi delek that you heard earlier, he wouldn’t greet people like that. The first sentence that would come out of his mouth when he saw people was, have you been kind today? It’s not about any other sort of metrics around how you’re living your life, but have you been kind today? I think that’s a good rule to begin with. And if you want more of it, I’m sure there are institutions including Buddhism that can give you 300 of those. But kindness I think is a good place to begin.

Laurie Anderson:

I’m going to switch over to death. I was really interested in your description of what happened to you at Varanasi and seeing all of the bodies of the dead people. Speaking of different ways to view time, could you talk a little bit about what you saw there and what it meant to you?

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

Let me begin by paraphrasing a dear friend and mentor of mine, Thomas Keating. Thomas and I, we used to have a lot of elaborate conversations, and death was one of the topics that would come up and he would say, Tenzin, death has a very bad PR in the West. We all have to go through it. We see it all around us, but it’s somehow very cosmetic. And the thing about Varanasi, for those of you who haven’t been there and so on, it’s kind of a first teaching on naked awareness. There’s no cosmetic enterprise to dead bodies. They’re there, they’re decaying, they’re burned. And it’s sort of this very vivid side, sometimes traumatic side, but very vivid side in terms of what happens to the human body. But you also see all kinds of drama that occurs around the process of cremation and so on and so forth.

But there were two things at that early age. It was a recommendation by my teacher to go in, spend time on cremation grounds. One was it gave you a different sense of what it meant to have a body. And you understood firsthand the temporal nature of this body changed the sense of relationship of how you identified with the body. It gave you a different sense of responsibility with what to do with the body. It wasn’t so much as individuals these days talk about image issues with the body, loving your body or hating your body, which has become a big challenge in the contemporary world. But it gave you sort of this realistic understanding of what this body was and what you did with your time in this body. And it was the first teaching on time that human beings are perhaps the only species that we know of that is so aware of its own mortality.

Yes, we deny it. Sometimes we exaggerate it, sometimes we romanticize it, meaning we have all this relationship with mortality. But the realistic understanding of mortality, to be able to view it in such a way that it enriches every life breath that you have so that every moment that you’re living, you recognize that this is the time because time and in this day and age, either we have too much of it or we have too little of it. We never have enough. We humans have a very difficult time grasping the concept of enough. And time is one of those things. It’s constantly fleeting at one moment in your life. We’ve seen there’s abundance of time. Next moment, it’s fleeting too fast, but it’s the only resource that is not going to come back. And this linear understanding of time, the only resource, your money, your health might get repaired at times with time itself.

Laurie Anderson:

And we have such shallow understanding of it. I mean, constant questions starting with what time is it? I mean, what time is it is a really amazing question. I was just asking about Varanasi because also a friend of mine when she went there, she said, I didn’t have that much of a connection to reincarnation with these ideas, but when I saw the body being, when I saw the head, the charred head chopped off the body, I thought final place. And she was very shocked that she thought that because she has this vague idea that she might come back in some form. But how does this idea for you of reincarnation affect your idea about time?

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

I think the worldview of reincarnation is interesting because it challenges the linear sense of time and space that we live in. Even with the book, oftentimes people I would be taking advice from, they would say, well, it’s not chronological. And I would start thinking this thing called chronological chronology. It’s an interesting view of time. Why should it just move in this particular direction? And the Buddhists have, I would say, a very circular or spiral view of time, and we go back and forth in different forms. But reincarnation is an interesting thing because it’s not, again, unique to Buddhism. Most Indic traditions have that, but there’s a distinctions that people oftentimes overlook between rebirth and reincarnation, rebirth, everybody’s going to come back and everybody’s going to come back as a version of themselves. But rebirth is where you’ll come back. But all of it is propelled by your karmic propensities.

Reincarnation is where you, again, one has experienced some degree of freedom so that it is not exactly driven just by karmic propensities. There is some will again in terms of where will I be and what form will I be? So, but the beauty of reincarnation or rebirth or reincarnation is also that it truly helps you understand perspective, meaning, because it tells you you’re not always going to come back as humans. So now you have to take your perspective as other species. One of my teachers, people used to come to him oftentimes, again, people romanticize this idea of past life and so on. He would say, I don’t understand why people come asking about their past lives. If I tell them they were pigs or dogs in their past life, then they’re not thrilled. They want to know there were kings or generals or emperors in some way, but that’s not how rebirth works. So I think it’s a beautiful sort of synthesis of perspective, of time, of space, and it truly takes you out of this linear understanding of time and space to be able to give you a broader view of how the world functions.

Laurie Anderson:

I think anybody whose mind jumps around a lot, like most of ours, the idea that things have a narrative is kind of crazy. Just remembering something that from 10 years ago and suddenly it reminds you of this and then you’re here and we’re jump cutting all the time all the time in a really complicated ways. So how we live in time is almost a kind of dreamscape of trying to understand consequence. I did ask one of my teachers once about the Great Wheel of Karma, and I said, what happens if I’m going to admit just being kind of a bit of a pessimist in certain ways when everybody leaves this planet, let’s say, where there’s no people left, what happens to the big wheel of karma? And he had a ready answer, strangely. I said, oh, he said, yes, I do. I said, that’s why the Buddha talked about many universes

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

In certain parts of the United States, Silicon Valley and so on. I’ve been observing that individuals actually are not that much interested in historicity of things. They’re not much interested in history because dealing so much with the current and the future, but they don’t understand the influence of the past to the present to the future. But also they’re very much concerned about, as we were talking about this earlier in terms of the irony of things that they’re concerned about being original. So I was giving example of a CEO of tech company who wanted to do something around compassion, and we were having this conversation and he would preface every sentence by saying, I think I have come up with an idea or I think this way. And so I told this gentleman, I said, you do realize that there’s at least 800 years of literature on what you’re talking about just in the Western civilization, just among the Greeks and other. He said, no, no, no, no. But I’m thinking of it in a new way, improved a new and improved way. And the thing is, how do you know you’re thinking of it a new way unless you have a reference point of some sort. So I think it’s a disservice in some form or the other where we want to be original, we want to have the novelty, and one way of getting about it is by divorcing ourselves from any historical context.

Laurie Anderson:

So how are you interested in changing that or trying to.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

Yes, I think they will have to change that because one of the things that we are also recognizing when we get to this in terms of the AI conversation, that a lot of it is driven by large language models criteria. But one of the things that is going to come up that’s already coming up is for engineers to recognize that humans learn a lot more from contexts than just for language. So we have to come up with large context models. And when you come into large context models, then you have to contextualize every aspect of language or vocabulary or sentence structures and taxes, and then you get back again into history. Thanks.

Laurie Anderson:

Whoa. I was just reading about a type of AI translation that was not having to do with definitions of words, but that would read the entire paragraph and get the gist of what was being said. So they make basically like what they call word clouds, like they might make a word cloud of the word love, and then in French, they would make a word cloud os amour and then they would ship these things until love and amur were talking to each other and all the other things that weren’t love or that were close to love, that were variations on love would somehow match because they said, these are human feelings that are going to have their opposite number in other languages, but they’re not going to necessarily match that word that we’re using for it. So I thought that was a really monumentally radical way of thinking about translation.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

I think. So yeah, I think it’ll be helpful to create those kinds of reference points. But again, one of the things is that it’s not unique. We just don’t think about it in those terms, these, but if you look at the Greeks, when they try to define love, there are four different understandings of love from eros to agape, and it becomes almost like an aspirational trajectory. They’re not suggesting that humans should deny one kind of love over the other kind of love, how do you understand it? But in our society, it’s a different kind of thing. But a friend of mine who was, I think she was the chief editor for Oxford Dictionary, and she spent a year at Stanford when we were doing this fellowship together, and she came one day to me and she said, I’m fascinated by Gen Z. And I said, why? And she said, well, they use six different words for gender and they use six different words for love. And so you recognize that with this whole conversation around fluidity, that also changes our understanding between how we see love and so on.

Laurie Anderson:

One of the things that also stuck out for me in your book was how you can be a bit over zealous about changing the world. And I just want to read this short thing. Thought it was really beautifully written. 

Is it near when you call the world this house of cards? I think so anyway, I love that description of the world. We charge ahead to meet the enemy, but as long as our own minds are clouded and agitated, we inevitably fog the lens. We not only seem more chaos in the world, we contribute to that chaos. That filter means we don’t even get an accurate diagnosis of the problem whether inside us or out in the world to be able to change effectively. And I could really relate to that because I feel like I know what’s kind of wrong with the world somehow, but in order to push against that, I feel I need another way to think about it.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

I think one of the emphasis in many of the spiritual practices, but especially in the contemplative tradition, is this process of refinement. But part of the process of refinement is two things through which humans learn the most. One is perception and the other is perspective. And perception and perspective, they’re constantly driven by our biases, implicit biases, belief biases and so on. Meaning what I see is not what I see. What I see is what is informed by my historical data of things and I project, and that’s what I see. And sometimes that also changes my ability to take another person’s perspective, this precursor to mental pliancy or mental flexibility and so on. So I think the beauty of the contemplative practices in that regard is that it’s constantly interrogating this idea that is this perception enough or is this perspective enough? Can you go on refining it? Can you go on correcting it? Because again, humans are only as good as our ability to self-correct. If we lose that ability to self-correct, then there is no growth, there’s no spiritual growth, there’s no mental growth. And so I think that’s where the push is, which is how do you refine your perception and perspective? And by doing that, you are constantly integrating the biases that are,

Laurie Anderson:

Especially when we don’t exactly know what perception is. That’s the most mind boggling fact that I’ve learned in the last few months is that, so when you look at a forest, what forest are you thinking about or you kind of click into without seeing it so much as you just go, that’s a forest. Because comparing it to forests all the way back to the very first time you saw a little drawing of a forest in your 4-year-old book, I mean, what is seeing? So it’s very, very mysterious in many ways.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

And also the emotional tone that’s oftentimes there behind perception. Imagine one day you wake up and it’s a beautiful sunny day like, this flowers are blooming and so on, and you go out and it’s a lovely day and people smile at you and you smile back at them, and it’s a wonderful world. Next morning you wake up another spring day, but you had a bad cup of coffee or you got into an argument with somebody at home, mind is a bit agitated. You walk out and people are smiling at you, and the first thought that comes to you is what the hell are you smiling at? And you ask yourself what has changed? The external environment is pretty much similar to that of the previous day, but now the mind is agitated and it is interpreting the perception, the signals in a very different manner because of the difference in emotional tone.

Laurie Anderson:

I agree, but I also have to say that in terms of perception and emotion, and that’s when I can, that seems like the only time I can learn anything when I’m just open to something that’s to grief.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

Grief. If you look at many societies and you look at the organized period of grieving or mourning, it was a designated period of a month, two month or so on because it wasn’t just about grieving for the person or mourning for the person, but all the other forms of learning about yourself that takes place in the context of grief. Today we are trying to sort of artificially either shorten it too much or we prolong it too much. I think finding the right balance in that regard, and it’s hard to talk about balance when you’re in a state of sorrow, especially in a state of deep sorrow. But sorrow is truly a deeply sort of opening experience.

Laurie Anderson:

I’ve just been thinking about Mexico and how some of the first statues were made of mud, and that just really crumbled. And then the next sort of generation of statues were made of wood and that got very brittle, it was always breaking. And the next generation was corn and maize has a cellular structure that’s more stable, it can resist more. And now our statues are made of data and they look a lot like us. They kind of in a way talk a little bit like us, but who they are, if they are anyone or they’re just a bunch of large language models, is how do you look at what’s going on in that world?

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

Because we are talking about time, one thing that I am wondering, curious, concerned about is the notion of free time. One of the arguments that you keep hearing from folks who are designing AI is that humans will have a lot more free time once you start delegating task and work and so on. And my question is, humans again don’t have very good history as a collective to use free time. Well, it ties again to the whole idea of what is a good life, what’s a purposeful life and so on. But this issue that it’ll be a real sort of commodity in terms of time. And if you were not working, if all your needs were met, if for some magical reason the universal basic income model starts panning out in some ways all your needs are met, what would you do with your time and can you sustain that model of using time under the end of life because at the same time you’re trying to live for 200 years. It’s not just that you’re worried about just the next 40, 60 years of your life.

Laurie Anderson:

Well, I think that’s one of the ways that technology rushes in and says, you can be an artist. And you can be a musician. Anyone can be, and I love this idea. I really do, because I got into a strange conversation about this last week with, I’ve been working the Machine Learning institute in Adelaide for about six years now on artificial intelligence. There were the two designers of this machine learning. They’re writing the algorithms, and then there was a person who was an artist and a musician. One of the designers said to this guy, he says, well, you’ve spent that 10,000 hours practicing. What good is that when you can just make something like this, everyone can make a great photograph and we can all make great photographs now. We can make videos, we can make films. Anyone can do that for not very much money. It’s amazing what to do with free time. You know how you’re in an awkward moment and suddenly everybody turns to you and you’re like.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

You are the artist in the room.

Laurie Anderson:

Yeah. So I was just saying, and I am the artist who has spent the 10,000 hours doing stuff, and I have to say that while it’s a really nice idea that your brain can just go, I’m going to make that movie and it’s there, it’s suddenly from my box to your box. It didn’t go through the air even. It didn’t go through. It’s just pure digital information. It’s like, boom, done. And I find that having a body is very, very informative if you just try to keep doing stuff with it and seeing and noticing things with your eyes, smelling stuff, using your haptic senses, all of the stuff it’s called, I don’t know, practicing or whatever it’s called, but it does, having a body is a big advantage because there’s a struggle involved in it as well. And just the rub of how difficult it is to do things and that’s all bypassed when it’s just make a movie, boom, it’s done. I’m not sure that’s what people would use their free time for though. This is my fear.

Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi:

But there are other aspects of it I think that will come up in mental illness. For example, one of the challenges is a simple observation again, that our sense of identity for at least since the Industrial Revolution has been tied to our work, to the point that if you are in between jobs, or even if you’re taking a sabbatical and somebody says, what are you doing? You never say you’re just enjoying your free time. You say you’re working on a project or you’re working on a creative project, or you’re in between projects where you’re going this sense of identity that is so deeply tethered to the idea of work to the notion of work. And remember in most theistic traditions, work was given as a punishment. So it’s not like you’re designed to work, but why is it that our sense of identity is tied to it and when we don’t have it, what is the mental wellness costs are? 

Laurie Anderson:

I remember when I was starting out as an artist and I was filing my income tax, and after about four years of doing this, the IRS got in touch with me and said, if you have this situation again next year, you have to declare your work a hobby. So I said, it kind of is a hobby really on a personal level. I could say that one of my friends who’s no longer with us, but he was a producer named Hal Wilner, and I have to say, this guy always had all the time in the world. I thought, I want to be like that. He was never like, whoa, no. He was like, Hey, come over to my studio. I’m going to play you. And there’d be six hours later he’d be listening. He had reset his whole thing and he just became so expansive and he was not worried in the way that most of the rest of us are about what am I doing here? What am I accomplishing? He was just not doing that and he got a lot done.

Tim McHenry:

Thank you for listening to About Time. If you liked this program, you’ll enjoy the Rubin’s AWAKEN podcast which explores the dynamic path to enlightenment. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or online at rubinmuseum.org. And be sure to follow us on social media @rubinmuseum.

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About Time was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About Time was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

And until next time.