The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Tony Morrison, in all of our education, whether it's in institutions or not, in homes or streets or whatever,

whether it's scholarly or whether it's experiential, there's a kind of progression.

We move from data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom.

And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them,

that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others,

while respecting each category of intelligence is generally what serious education is about.

And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you'll see that it's easy,

seductive to assume that data is really knowledge or that information is indeed wisdom,

or that knowledge can exist without data,

and how easy and how effortlessly one can parade and disguise itself as another,

and how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge

wisdom without any data is just a hunch so Dharma practice is, begins by collecting data, a lot of data, to know ourselves as a sensory system, to know life as experience, to know life as a Nietzsche.

And the philosopher, Thomas Nagel, now very famous essay, an attempt to define conscious experience. What is conscious experience?

It's like, it seems obvious, but very contested terrain philosophically. And even in our Buddhist tradition very a lot of different takes on what that even means.

Zonagel says an organism as conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism, something it is

like for the organism, something that it is like.

Well, what, what is it like?

That's data.

That's the Dharma.

What is it like?

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