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Now I know a lot of people who are meditators and none of them are slackers. We work very hard at this love affair. And a lot of it’s very complicated. I mean, if you’re doing cognitive neuroscience, or affective neuroscience, in a lab with regular human beings, and you have a family, and you have a body, and you have parents or children, you’re living what Zorba the Greek called, “The full catastrophe of the human condition.” It’s just part and parcel of being human. How you are in relationship to it makes all the difference. So if you think that mindfulness is going to make you such a gentle, compassionate, empathic person, that you’ll lose your edge, frankly, I don’t know anybody who’s lost their edge by cultivating mindfulness.
And sometimes, the non-doing, if you think, “Well, maybe it’d be better if I didn’t go to school today.” If I was like 14. “Maybe I’ll take the day off.” But maybe a day of daydreaming outside of school would be much more valuable than whatever you learn in school. Maybe. I’m not advocating quitting school. But what I’m saying is that we really don’t know how we grow most effectively into the fullness of ourselves. The old term for this was self-actualizing. Yeah, not a bad idea, how are we going to go about that? And the answer is moment by moment and trusting your own intuition, and how it interfaces with others. So this is not about losing your edge. This is about thinking that maybe the you that thinks that you’re going to lose your edge, you might want to take another look at that you, because that you may be inhabiting the full flowering of what really would be of benefit to both of you and the world.