Speaker 1: The water is there in the ocean, it is there
Speaker 1: in the wave, It is there in the raindrop, It
Speaker 1: is there in the river, It is there in the puddle,
Speaker 1: it is there in the rainbow. But it is all water.
Speaker 1: So awareness is the essential ingredient that we call life.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, creative effort to
Speaker 1: make a life worth living. This podcast is about how
Speaker 1: other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how
Speaker 1: they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our
Speaker 1: guest on this episode is somebody I probably don't need
Speaker 1: to introduce, but I do have a long introduction. It's
Speaker 1: Deepak Chopra, the founder of the Chopra Foundation, which is
Speaker 1: a nonprofit entity for research on well being and humanitarianism,
Speaker 1: along with Chopra Global, a modern day health company at
Speaker 1: the intersection of science and spirituality. Deepak is a world
Speaker 1: renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He's Board
Speaker 1: certified in internal medicine, endochronology, and metabolism and a Fellow
Speaker 1: of the American College of Physicians Edition. He's a member
Speaker 1: of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. He serves as
Speaker 1: Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San
Speaker 1: Diego and hosts the podcast Daily Breath, The World Post
Speaker 1: and the Huffington Post. Global Internet Survey ranks Deepak Chopra
Speaker 1: number seventeen of the most influential thinkers in the world
Speaker 1: and number one in medicine. He's the author of over
Speaker 1: ninety books translated into forty three languages, including the book
Speaker 1: discussed here, Living in the Light Yoga for Self Realization. Hi, Deepak,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's pleasure to be
Speaker 1: with you. Rick, It's an honor to have you on.
Speaker 1: We're going to be discussing your latest book, Living in
Speaker 1: the Light Yoga for Self Realization. But before we do that,
Speaker 1: we'll start the show like we always do with the parable.
Speaker 1: In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their
Speaker 1: grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 1: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery in love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops,
Speaker 1: thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Every experience is not just
Speaker 1: what you just said, but every experience, by definition is
Speaker 1: through contrast. You can't have enough without a down, you
Speaker 1: can't have a heart without a cold. You can't have
Speaker 1: good without bad. You wouldn't know the difference. You can't
Speaker 1: have pleasure without pain. So experience by definition is by contrast.
Speaker 1: The more self away you are, and that's a very
Speaker 1: important point. The more you reflect on questions like who
Speaker 1: am I, what do I want? What is my purpose?
Speaker 1: What am I? Grateful? For then you automatically choose the
Speaker 1: evolutionary direction instead of the destructive direction. I don't even
Speaker 1: use words like good and bad. Is just the evolution
Speaker 1: or entropy. Yeah. In the Buddhist tradition, the term is
Speaker 1: often skillful and less skillful, or you know, bad is
Speaker 1: ignorance and good is indictment. Yeah, exactly. So you just
Speaker 1: mentioned something there about awareness, and you say in the
Speaker 1: book that yoga teaches that awareness is the ultimate healer,
Speaker 1: no matter at what level it occurs. Say more about
Speaker 1: the role of awareness in healing, in moving towards the light,
Speaker 1: and just living a better life. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: we have to define what awareness is, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people actually be first on what is awareness. They
Speaker 1: confuse it with the mind. Awareness is not the mind
Speaker 1: because if you have awareness of the mind, then it
Speaker 1: can't be the mind. Whatever you're aware of is separate
Speaker 1: from that which you're aware of. So the awareness of
Speaker 1: the mind is not the mind. The awareness of the
Speaker 1: body is not the body. The mind and body and
Speaker 1: the world are objects of experience. Awareness is the ultimate
Speaker 1: subject of experience. To go even further, awareness and consciousness
Speaker 1: are synonymous. So what is that awareness or consciousness? Is
Speaker 1: that in which all experience occurs. Number one. Number two,
Speaker 1: awareness or consciousness is that in which all experience is known.
Speaker 1: And number three, which most people find it hard to understand,
Speaker 1: awareness is that out of which all experience is made.
Speaker 1: So the mind is a modified form of awareness. The
Speaker 1: intellect is a modified form awareness, our ego identity is
Speaker 1: a modified form of awareness, our energy a modified form
Speaker 1: of awareness. The body, which is a perceptual experience, is
Speaker 1: a modified form of awareness. And the world, which is
Speaker 1: also a perceptual experience, is a modified form of awareness.
Speaker 1: So once we understand the definition of awareness, then says
Speaker 1: what is it and how do we find it? Can
Speaker 1: we find awareness objectively? The answer is not, you know,
Speaker 1: how can you find something that is the subject of
Speaker 1: all experience objectively? So you know, just as the eyes
Speaker 1: cannot see themselves and the teeth cannot bite themselves, awareness
Speaker 1: cannot be observed objectively. It is an experience. We have
Speaker 1: an all experience, which is fluctuations of awareness that we
Speaker 1: call body. Mind and the world their fluctuations in the
Speaker 1: form of sensations, sense, perceptions, images, feelings, and thoughts. When
Speaker 1: these quiet turned down to a point where the mind
Speaker 1: becomes totally island. There's no experience of sensation, perception, or anything.
Speaker 1: What's left is awareness. When you take away everything, you're
Speaker 1: not what's left is awareness. Now, when we look at
Speaker 1: its properties, and we only look at it and understand
Speaker 1: it through experience, not objectively, then awareness is a field
Speaker 1: of infinite possibilities. Awareness is something that is synchronistic. It
Speaker 1: organizes everything simultaneously. For example, a human body or any
Speaker 1: biological organism can think, thoughts, play a piano, guild, gems,
Speaker 1: removed oxens in the case of a female, make a baby,
Speaker 1: all at the same time. It doesn't operate through cause
Speaker 1: and effect. It operates synchronistically. We call that non local correlation.
Speaker 1: It's a infinite possibilities two nonlocally correlated or synchronistic, three unpredictable,
Speaker 1: four creative, five self organizing, six self regulating, and seven
Speaker 1: self evolving. Because awareness doesn't have any properties that we
Speaker 1: can identify perceptually or cognitively, then awareness is also transcendence.
Speaker 1: It's when everything goes away that's what's left. And also
Speaker 1: it's not in time. Every experience is in time, but
Speaker 1: awareness is not in time. So when you know the
Speaker 1: communist phrase we used to describe awareness is I I
Speaker 1: was five years old, I was ten years old. I
Speaker 1: was a teenager. I was happy, I was sad. I'm
Speaker 1: a mature adult. I'm afraid of death. So every experience
Speaker 1: is preceded by I. The experience is in time, but
Speaker 1: awareness is not in time. I was there when you
Speaker 1: were a five year old, with a different body, a
Speaker 1: different mind, different emotions, and different experiences. The experiences come
Speaker 1: and go. In fact, the experiences of perceptual snapshots, of
Speaker 1: cognitive snapshots. Awareness is the spaceless, timeless factor in every experience. Well,
Speaker 1: we dove into the deep end of the pool right
Speaker 1: out of the gate, didn't we, You asked me, I know,
Speaker 1: I did. I did so. I think what we're saying
Speaker 1: is awareness in its use word modified, So in its
Speaker 1: unmodified state. Is you can correct this, But it's not
Speaker 1: exactly a container, but we could think of it is
Speaker 1: that in which everything else occurs and arises from correct
Speaker 1: that in which everything occurs and arises. In fact, the
Speaker 1: experience of the whole universe arises and subsides in awareness
Speaker 1: in the form of perceptual activities. Every perception is a
Speaker 1: snapshot of experience, and then the continuity that we have
Speaker 1: of existence is because there's a storyline between every snapshot.
Speaker 1: So I'm watching a movie. For example, the old fashioned movies,
Speaker 1: you know, you had twenty four frames a second or
Speaker 1: twenty eight trames a second. I remember the time when
Speaker 1: you may or may not. I'm old enough to remember
Speaker 1: Charlie Chaplin movies. They were very jerky because the real
Speaker 1: wasn't moving fast enough. Today we have digital movies, and
Speaker 1: so they go at the speed of light. But even then,
Speaker 1: between every digital on, there's a digital off. Awareness is
Speaker 1: in the off, but it's also in the on simultaneously,
Speaker 1: and right now you know, you're looking at me. This
Speaker 1: is a digital framework that we are looking at. But
Speaker 1: I think the whole universe ultimately is a digital workshop
Speaker 1: in an undivided formless, eternal infinite awareness. Awareness doesn't have
Speaker 1: a phone, so if it doesn't have a form, it
Speaker 1: has to be infinite. By definition, anything that has a
Speaker 1: form is finite, and so we are that at our
Speaker 1: fundamental level, we are infinite awareness. It's modified forms a body,
Speaker 1: mind and the world. So you know, just like a
Speaker 1: wave accurs in the ocean occurs, it's rises subsides into
Speaker 1: the ocean. The ocean is always there. Just say it's
Speaker 1: the wateriness of the ocean. The water is there in
Speaker 1: the ocean, it is there in the wave, it is
Speaker 1: there in the raindrop, it is there in the river,
Speaker 1: it is there in the puddle, it is there in
Speaker 1: the rainbow. But it is all water. So awareness is
Speaker 1: the essential ingredient that we call life. Another analogy I've heard,
Speaker 1: and again, as you mentioned, these are all ways of
Speaker 1: describing something that we can't describe. It's ineffable. Another way
Speaker 1: I've heard it described is that awareness is sort of light.
Speaker 1: If you think of the TV. Right, awareness is the
Speaker 1: screen beautiful. Then everything else that's happening gets projected onto
Speaker 1: that screen, But the screen changes temporarily, but the screen
Speaker 1: remains what it is. It's not like if I watch
Speaker 1: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that now my screen
Speaker 1: is forever colored by Willy Wonka, right, Not in the
Speaker 1: ultimate sense. Now we know that in the mind sense, right,
Speaker 1: the mind does get conditioned, but this awareness remains unconditioned.
Speaker 1: So right now it's actually a modified form of the screen.
Speaker 1: The screen has the software, the electrons, and the photons
Speaker 1: that are coming on and off. Now, once this program
Speaker 1: is finished. Actually, the seeds of this experience will still
Speaker 1: be in the computer hardware, so awareness, even the experience,
Speaker 1: doesn't die. The memory of the experience remains in the
Speaker 1: let's say the seeds in the screen, because I can
Speaker 1: retrieve it. Let's take a simple example. Can you remember
Speaker 1: what you had for dinner last night? I can? Okay,
Speaker 1: so what was a delicious baked salmon and a salad
Speaker 1: that my partner Jenny made? Now may I ask you?
Speaker 1: Can you remember any experience from your childhood or your adolescents?
Speaker 1: Not many, but some sure yes. So where was that
Speaker 1: memory before I ask you the question? And most people,
Speaker 1: you know, when I talk to scientists, they say it's
Speaker 1: in the brain. But that's where I have a problem
Speaker 1: with neuroscience. Where in the brain is that thing that
Speaker 1: you ate last night? There's nothing you will find. But
Speaker 1: when I ask you the question, many neural networks go
Speaker 1: into action, and suddenly you retrieve the memory. The memories
Speaker 1: an awareness not in the brain, yep, because awareness is
Speaker 1: not in time. Being consistent with your habits is the
Speaker 1: engine that drives your transformation and growth. Think about it.
Speaker 1: You can't feed your good wolf one big meal a
Speaker 1: year and expect it to thrive. Consistent steady bits of
Speaker 1: food fuel a good healthy wolf, but it's hard to
Speaker 1: create consistency. You might listen to this podcast on a
Speaker 1: Thursday feel really inspired, but then life takes over and
Speaker 1: by Saturday night you've forgotten all about it. That's why
Speaker 1: I'm hosting a free live Q and a town hall
Speaker 1: zoom meeting on Thursday, February twenty third, where I'll be
Speaker 1: answering your questions about how to take what you know
Speaker 1: and turn it into what you consistently do. Head to
Speaker 1: one you feed dot net slash town hall to register
Speaker 1: for this free live session with me. During this town hall,
Speaker 1: you'll ask me your specific question and I'll answer it.
Speaker 1: It's that simple. So if you would like my help
Speaker 1: creating some tools to deal with real life when it
Speaker 1: gets in the way of your best intentions, let me
Speaker 1: help you. If changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle
Speaker 1: to make time for things because life is so busy,
Speaker 1: if it's easy to get caught up with your to
Speaker 1: do list, you feel consistently behind and taking time for
Speaker 1: yourself feel selfish, then let's talk. The things we do
Speaker 1: consistently are more important than the things we do once
Speaker 1: in a while. In this free town hall session, you'll
Speaker 1: ask me your questions and I'll help you find what
Speaker 1: works for you. You might look at things differently and
Speaker 1: create the structure to help you do the thing you
Speaker 1: really want to do. And if you don't have a
Speaker 1: specific question, just come listen to the conversation. A little
Speaker 1: bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.
Speaker 1: Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by
Speaker 1: doing just a little bit. To register for this free
Speaker 1: zoom session on February twenty third, go to one you
Speaker 1: feed dot net slash town hall. That's when you feed
Speaker 1: dot net slash town hall. I hope I get the
Speaker 1: chance to meet you there. We could all use the
Speaker 1: occasional nudge, a little wake up from the autopilot we
Speaker 1: fall into in our day to day routine. That's why
Speaker 1: we send brief text reminders to listeners of the show
Speaker 1: for free. The texts help you stay on track with
Speaker 1: what you're learning from the podcast episodes we release on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Fridays. They periodically prompt you to pause for
Speaker 1: a second and become more present and mindful, and encourage
Speaker 1: you to engage with the week's podcast topics in a
Speaker 1: bite sized, short and simple manner. We've heard from listeners
Speaker 1: that these texts help them take a moment to reconnect
Speaker 1: with what's important amidst the business of daily life. Someone
Speaker 1: said it feels like a little bit of wisdom is
Speaker 1: being whispered into my psyche, which I thought was cool. So,
Speaker 1: if you'd like to hear from us a few times
Speaker 1: a week via text, go to one you feed dot
Speaker 1: net slash text and sign up for free. Let's change
Speaker 1: direction a little bit and talk about meditation for a minute.
Speaker 1: You frequently run meditation programs. I think you and Oprah
Speaker 1: have one. It's something you've taught about for a long time.
Speaker 1: Share with me why to you meditation is so important. Well,
Speaker 1: so on a very basic level, meditation allows you to
Speaker 1: experience awareness, go beyond thought. So I have always realized
Speaker 1: that no system of thought can give you access to awareness.
Speaker 1: You have to go beyond all thought, and you've got
Speaker 1: to go beyond the condition mind. You know the secret passages,
Speaker 1: the so called dark alleys, the ghost filled attics of
Speaker 1: your condition mind, which goes back thousands of years. Right now,
Speaker 1: you have conditioning as a result of your ancestors. In fact,
Speaker 1: they're all alive in your body as a genetic activity
Speaker 1: in your body and epigenetic activity, and this conditioning goes
Speaker 1: back to your childhood. It even goes back to the womb.
Speaker 1: But actually the conditioning goes back historically to the economics
Speaker 1: and the stories of your ancestors, culture, economics, religion, all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. The body, in fact is the condition mind,
Speaker 1: according to spiritual traditions. So meditation helps you go beyond
Speaker 1: all this and allows you to enter this realm of possibilities,
Speaker 1: which is self regulating, self evolving, creative at meditation now
Speaker 1: on a very fundamental level. Therefore, and now there's enough science.
Speaker 1: Thirty years ago people kind of poop pood meditation a
Speaker 1: little bit in the West, not understand that it has
Speaker 1: thousands of years of history. But meditation even of at
Speaker 1: a very superficial level, things like blood pressure, heart rate variability,
Speaker 1: heart rate, immune function, endocrine function, inflammatory proteins all down.
Speaker 1: So meditation allows self regulation, self heeling, both of body, mind,
Speaker 1: emotions and relationships on a very simple level. On a
Speaker 1: deeper level, it allows you access to higher states of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Beyond waking, sleeping, and dreaming. There are other states of
Speaker 1: consciousness that spiritual traditions talk about So there's waking, which
Speaker 1: is the obvious state in which we are, presumably now,
Speaker 1: But these spiritual traditions called the waking state a lucid
Speaker 1: dream in a vivid now. Because again, just bear with
Speaker 1: me for a moment, Wittgenstein said, our life is a dream.
Speaker 1: We are asleep, but once in a while we wake
Speaker 1: up enough to know that we're dreaming. The Buddha's main
Speaker 1: message was awakening, awakening from the everyday reality that we
Speaker 1: call a lucid dream. If I ask you what happened
Speaker 1: to your childhood, you'd say, it's a dream. But if
Speaker 1: I ask you what happened last night, it's a dream.
Speaker 1: What happened five minutes ago? To dream, what happens to
Speaker 1: These words, By the time you hear them, they don't exist.
Speaker 1: So the whole thing is a dream, and it's the
Speaker 1: most superficial state. The second stage is the dream state
Speaker 1: that we have at night, which is more fuzzy and
Speaker 1: more amorphous and not clear. Okay, that's a higher state
Speaker 1: of consciousness because you're getting to the source of fluctuations
Speaker 1: of awareness that we call the mind. Deep sleep is
Speaker 1: still higher because now there's no fluctuation, and you're nonlocal,
Speaker 1: which means you're not having any experience. Nonlocal means now
Speaker 1: you're transcended body and mind. But beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping,
Speaker 1: spiritual traditions identify a fourth state. In English, we could
Speaker 1: call it transcendence. As a fifth state that spiritual traditions,
Speaker 1: transcendence means going beyond perceptual activity, nonlocal, everything is correlated, etc.
Speaker 1: The fifth state in these traditions is called cosmic consciousness.
Speaker 1: When you're in local and nonlocal awareness at the same time,
Speaker 1: which means your body is asleep, but you're aware of
Speaker 1: the sleep. Your mind is in dream state, but you're
Speaker 1: aware that it's his dreaming. So when you have nonlocal
Speaker 1: and local awareness simultaneously, that in these traditions is called
Speaker 1: cosmic consciousness. It's you know, in Christian traditions, I'm in
Speaker 1: the world and not of it. Beyond cosmic consciousness, there's
Speaker 1: still another state called divine consciousness, when you become aware
Speaker 1: of the awareness in every object of experience. Okay, this
Speaker 1: is a very interesting state where you commune without communicating.
Speaker 1: It's a psychic phenomena, etc. Etc. Divine consciousness, and beyond
Speaker 1: that is a state called unity consciousness, which is enlightenment
Speaker 1: when you realize that awareness is actually single, it cannot
Speaker 1: be divided, and the whole universe is a projection of
Speaker 1: that awareness. Now you know, if you are you'd actually
Speaker 1: call it God, or you'd call it Allah or Brahman
Speaker 1: or i'n so for these are words that have been
Speaker 1: used in different religious traditions. So I think the sort
Speaker 1: of summarize you're saying that meditation has very practical benefits
Speaker 1: to the mind, the body, and it's also the portal
Speaker 1: to these deeper states of consciousness, to this level of awareness. Eric,
Speaker 1: it is actually meditation gives you access to the religious experience.
Speaker 1: Now these days it's fashionable to say I'm spiritual, but
Speaker 1: I'm not religious. But actually, if you look at the
Speaker 1: religious experience, there are only three components to it. First
Speaker 1: is transcendence, which we just spoke about. Second is the
Speaker 1: spontaneous emergence or what we call platonic qualities, truth, goodness, beauty, love, compassion, joy, equanimity.
Speaker 1: And the third is the loss of the fear of death.
Speaker 1: This is the experience of Jesus, this is the experience
Speaker 1: of Buddha, This is the experience of mom. The sufi
Speaker 1: is every seer in every tradition, But these poor fellows,
Speaker 1: men and women, when they try to explain it, nobody
Speaker 1: understands it because it's so you know, as you said, ineffable.
Speaker 1: So it's like, you know, somebody is pointing to the moon,
Speaker 1: you start worshiping the finger instead of wanting to say,
Speaker 1: how can I find the moon itself? How can I
Speaker 1: have that religious experience or spiritual experience if you don't
Speaker 1: like the word religious or god whatever, how do I
Speaker 1: have that experience myself? Now, imagine that you had that experience,
Speaker 1: loss of fear of death, spontaneous compassion, love, joy, equanimity, truth, goodness, beauty, harmony,
Speaker 1: and transcendence. What's left? You're all set. It's freedom. So
Speaker 1: it's also freedom, freedom from all conditioning, including the fear
Speaker 1: of death, because death happens to experience, not to the awareness,
Speaker 1: like death happens to the program on the screen, but
Speaker 1: not to this free. So you practice meditation every day.
Speaker 1: I think your yoga and meditation is a two to
Speaker 1: three hour a day practice. Talk to me a little
Speaker 1: bit about what type of meditation you are doing. What
Speaker 1: are you doing when you're meditating? I know that you initially,
Speaker 1: I think, came into this space through transcendental meditation. Maybe
Speaker 1: is what you were originally taught. I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: curious what you do today and maybe how your approach,
Speaker 1: your method to meditation has changed over the years. I
Speaker 1: first do some body awareness and some breath awareness, which
Speaker 1: these days is frequently referred to as mindfulness. You know,
Speaker 1: to be aware of your body, of your breath. Okay,
Speaker 1: that I do for however long, so I'm very familiar
Speaker 1: with every sensation in my body. Then I do some reflection,
Speaker 1: and the reflection goes very deep. Who am I? Am I?
Speaker 1: The changing body? Am I? The awareness of the body?
Speaker 1: Am I? The changing mind? Am I? The awareness or
Speaker 1: the changing mind? Am I? The changing emotions? Am I?
Speaker 1: The changing personality? Etcetera, etcetera. It takes me quite a
Speaker 1: bit of time, so I do that reflection inquiry, it's
Speaker 1: called inquiry. Second, then I ask myself what do I
Speaker 1: want without looking for the answer, noticing sensations, images, feeling, thoughts,
Speaker 1: I notice them, let them go, but because they arise
Speaker 1: and subside in the same way as breadth or any
Speaker 1: other fluctuation. Then I ask myself what is my purpose?
Speaker 1: Then I ask myself what am I grateful for? Then
Speaker 1: I do mantra practice similar to transcendental meditation. And finally,
Speaker 1: when I transcend, which because I've been doing this for
Speaker 1: forty years, I can go to that state of pure
Speaker 1: consciousness where there is deep stillness or transcendence, I rest
Speaker 1: in that awareness. So that becomes my identity. My identity
Speaker 1: is not my mind, not my body, not my personality,
Speaker 1: not the fluctuations of the changing world, but the awareness.
Speaker 1: And I can anchor myself in that identity any moment
Speaker 1: I want, like right now, I could do that. I
Speaker 1: could be anchored in that awareness while I'm speaking to you.
Speaker 1: This whole process takes a little time, and then at night,
Speaker 1: before I go to sleep, I spend some reflective time
Speaker 1: on the meaning of death because this is my final chapter.
Speaker 1: You know, in my tradition there are four chapters. First
Speaker 1: twenty five years education, second twenty five years, fame and fortune.
Speaker 1: I can say I've been there, done that, twenty five
Speaker 1: years giving back even there, I've been there, done that.
Speaker 1: This is my final chapter. So I'm preparing for death.
Speaker 1: So is that what the final chapter is? Final chapter
Speaker 1: is called self realization, not self improvement to know the
Speaker 1: self in its infinite dimensions and is stage two the
Speaker 1: fame and fortune also the stage where most people are
Speaker 1: also involved in family all of that. It's also called householder.
Speaker 1: These are called ashrams. Ashams are locations in consciousness where
Speaker 1: you rest, which is your identity. So in the second phase,
Speaker 1: it's your ambition, your life goals. In this tradition again
Speaker 1: there are four goals in life. So first goal in
Speaker 1: life is life purpose dharma. Second goal in life is
Speaker 1: fame and fortune, or third goal in life is karma
Speaker 1: pleasure you know, including sexual pleasure, and final goal in
Speaker 1: life is freedom from all of that. I want to
Speaker 1: ask you another question about meditation, because you've been teaching
Speaker 1: meditation for people for a long long time. Do you
Speaker 1: think everybody has the ability to get to transcendence in meditation?
Speaker 1: Is it simply a matter of putting in enough time?
Speaker 1: What do you think contributes because it seems pretty clear
Speaker 1: that some people naturally settle easier than others into a
Speaker 1: deeper state. How do you think about everyone's capacity? Do
Speaker 1: we have different capacities in that? Yeah, we do, you know.
Speaker 1: I remember teaching Elizabeth Taylor meditation and after thirty seconds.
Speaker 1: She said, how long do I have to do this?
Speaker 1: She was actually upset. Okay. Then I remember teaching Mike
Speaker 1: Chael Jackson the same thing, and he transcended like that.
Speaker 1: It was like he was performing thriller or something like that.
Speaker 1: So there's a wide range. Some people nothing, some people
Speaker 1: immediate transcendence, and some people just relaxation. Okay, Now it
Speaker 1: is true that artists in general actually have a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea, and also sports people because they've had peak experiences.
Speaker 1: You know, I taught meditation long time ago to Joe
Speaker 1: Namath when he was at the highest level of his
Speaker 1: peak career, and he said, well, I've experienced this. This
Speaker 1: is what happens to me when I'm playing. You know,
Speaker 1: time slows down, sounds disappear, even though the crowd is
Speaker 1: cheering and everything is gorgeous and it's effortless. I didn't
Speaker 1: know this was meditation. I called it flow. If you
Speaker 1: read a description of mystical experience and flow states, you
Speaker 1: see we may not be talking about the exact same thing,
Speaker 1: but we're talking about something that shares a lot of
Speaker 1: characteristics with each other. Performance is momentary peak living. It
Speaker 1: comes through meditation for someone who has difficulty settling let's say,
Speaker 1: you know, which I think is more and more people today,
Speaker 1: given the pace of our culture and how bombarded we
Speaker 1: are with things, There's still value in the process doing it,
Speaker 1: even if maybe I'm not getting to transcendence, or even
Speaker 1: if it's more challenging for me. I'm not one of
Speaker 1: those people that settle easily. You know. I tried TM
Speaker 1: god how long ago now, thirty four years ago. So
Speaker 1: meditation has been sort of challenging for me. But I
Speaker 1: found it precisely for that reason, to be particularly valuable
Speaker 1: to me. If you just sit through it and consider it,
Speaker 1: I've done it. There's no such thing as a good
Speaker 1: or bad medication. That was the biggest thing for me,
Speaker 1: I think, was that I was frustrated with what I
Speaker 1: felt was my inability to do it, because I thought, well,
Speaker 1: my brain should be stopping, but it wasn't. When I
Speaker 1: learned to just relax and be like, yeah, let it go,
Speaker 1: just sit here, relax relax the way now that you're
Speaker 1: bringing it up. These days, people get that experience with
Speaker 1: psychedelics like psilocybin and mushrooms and kindamine. What it does
Speaker 1: is loosens the neural networks of the condition mind. But
Speaker 1: I'm not recommending that that's the way to start magication,
Speaker 1: but people do have those experiences. All right, let's talk
Speaker 1: about your latest book, Living in the Light, Yoga for
Speaker 1: Self Realization. You're talking about yoga more broadly than the
Speaker 1: way most people in the West would think of it,
Speaker 1: which is a series of poses that we go through
Speaker 1: which are called asanas. But you're talking about something called
Speaker 1: raja yoga, which is also I think you say, is
Speaker 1: translated as royal. So talk to me about royal yoga.
Speaker 1: So you know, in my room where I'm sitting right now,
Speaker 1: which is my library, I have about numerous books on yoga,
Speaker 1: and all yoga books that are well written are actually
Speaker 1: derived from the original teachings of a great seer. We
Speaker 1: don't even know how long we live. Some people say,
Speaker 1: you know, a few hundred years BC, but we don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's a mythical figure, but his teachings have
Speaker 1: been recycled over thousands of years. His name is Patanjali,
Speaker 1: and Patanjali's yoga is what yoga is, and it has
Speaker 1: eight limbs, and the third limb is the arsenas of
Speaker 1: the posture path. Angeli starts in the first chapter with
Speaker 1: two aphorisms. First aphorism says, now the teaching of yoga begins.
Speaker 1: And the word yoga, by the way, is related to
Speaker 1: a Sanskrit word called huge, which means union, union with
Speaker 1: the self beyond all conditioning. So he says, now the
Speaker 1: teaching of yoga begins. And then he says the second
Speaker 1: sentence in the whole teaching is yoga is the settling
Speaker 1: down of the fluctuations of the mind into pure awareness.
Speaker 1: What we just spoke about transcendence. Then in the remaining text,
Speaker 1: it describes eight limbs. The first limb in Sanskrit is
Speaker 1: called yama. In the book, I use the word social
Speaker 1: intelligence because that's what they are, Okay, they are rules,
Speaker 1: not even rules, principles of social intelligence based on awareness
Speaker 1: or conscious living. The second limb is called niyama, which
Speaker 1: is emotional intelligence. The rules and there are five principles
Speaker 1: in each, so you know, instead of using those words
Speaker 1: Yama and niyama, I call them social and emotional intelligence.
Speaker 1: But then Patanjali jumps right into what we call the
Speaker 1: arsenas or the physical postures, because he says the physical
Speaker 1: postures meant to shift your experience of your body from
Speaker 1: a physical object to a field of awareness, which is true.
Speaker 1: I mean, how do you know you have a body?
Speaker 1: You're aware of it, right, So, and then when you
Speaker 1: look at all the yoga and as the postures child pose,
Speaker 1: happy baby, pigeon, pose, cobra, etc. These are actually shifts
Speaker 1: in awareness. So you're actually shifting in awareness by becoming
Speaker 1: aware of your body into a different state of consciousness.
Speaker 1: So you know, he doesn't minimize the importance of the postures,
Speaker 1: but bear in mind that the postures are about five
Speaker 1: percent of his writing of yoga. That's the third principle,
Speaker 1: the fourth principle. Now he starts with physical first rules
Speaker 1: of social and emotional intelligence. Third principle immediately physical because
Speaker 1: that's the most obvious. But then the fourth principles is pranayama,
Speaker 1: which is breath and how to use breath to control
Speaker 1: your autonomic nervous system. These days we are very familiar
Speaker 1: with stress as sympathetic overdry. But actually, if you read potentially,
Speaker 1: he shows you how to use breath to induce different
Speaker 1: states of energy hyper excitement, vigilance, energy decrease in energy, cooling,
Speaker 1: the body warming, the body, controlling blood pressure. All of
Speaker 1: that is there just through breath. That's the fourth. The
Speaker 1: fifth principle, which is very interesting, also is called pratjara,
Speaker 1: but in English we can call it interroceptive awareness. So
Speaker 1: perception is when you look at the outside world. Interraceptive
Speaker 1: is when you get to know what's happening inside your body. Now,
Speaker 1: we all actually train in introceptive awareness when we are babies.
Speaker 1: We call it toilet training, you know, so we can
Speaker 1: even train our animals and pets. You know, you take
Speaker 1: your dog out, dog nose can only be outside the
Speaker 1: house or whatever. So that's intraceptive awareness. But potentially doesn't
Speaker 1: stop there. He says, why do you only stop after
Speaker 1: training your bowels and bladder. You can actually control your
Speaker 1: heart rate. You can do that with your breath. You
Speaker 1: can do that with every organ in your body. That
Speaker 1: now is picking up actually a lot of interest in
Speaker 1: the scientific world, because intraceptive awareness stimulates a part of
Speaker 1: our nervous system in English called the biggest nerve. The
Speaker 1: vaggest nerve is self regulating nerve. It counteracts the sympathetic
Speaker 1: overdrive from stress. So that's the fifth limb of yoga.
Speaker 1: And then he says, once you've done all these, now
Speaker 1: you're ready for transcendence. And it then identifies the sixth,
Speaker 1: seventh and eight. Six is focused attention, which he calls
Speaker 1: the harna, how to concentrate on anything. Then Dan which
Speaker 1: is meditation, which we just spoke about. So he comes
Speaker 1: very late into the magicity process, seventh limb, and then
Speaker 1: the eighth is smadi transcendence. And then you have been
Speaker 1: liberated from the condition mine. You're living in the light,
Speaker 1: so to speak. So those are the eight limbs called
Speaker 1: Raja yoga in English royal yoga. But that's not all
Speaker 1: of yoga. There's karma yoga, there's Bugti yoga, there's yan yoga.
Speaker 1: It's a complete science of the self. And so is
Speaker 1: Patanjali associated only with the royal yoga. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1: Actually he's associated with the Royal Yoga more than anything else.
Speaker 1: The other upni shots, including you know, the most famous
Speaker 1: of them, the bugwad Gueta, which is like a bible,
Speaker 1: is all the yogas, and that is also a very
Speaker 1: interesting text. The bugwad Gueta starts with a battlefield. The
Speaker 1: battlefield is a Kurukshetra and there's a war going on
Speaker 1: between the forces of good and evil. And so there
Speaker 1: are two characters that are there in the bugwad Geita.
Speaker 1: One is Arjuna, the war and then there's Krishna, who's
Speaker 1: the unconditioned awareness, and Arjuna is the conditioned mind. So
Speaker 1: you know, most commentaries on the bug with Gita don't
Speaker 1: go into this, unfortunately, even the ones that are written
Speaker 1: by some really good scholars. So the battlefield is on,
Speaker 1: you know, their forces are ready to fire at each other.
Speaker 1: The bugles are blowing the people that have drawn up
Speaker 1: these arrows, and Arjuna looks across and he has a
Speaker 1: panic attack. He says, you know, to Christiana, he says,
Speaker 1: how can I kill these people? They're they're my cousins,
Speaker 1: they're my brothers and sisters. And Krishna then, for the
Speaker 1: eighteen chapters of the Githa, actually shows him how to
Speaker 1: vanquish the demons that are his own shadows. They're not enemies,
Speaker 1: they're his own shadows. And the battlefield of good and
Speaker 1: evil is within the conditioned mind. And then he teaches
Speaker 1: all the four yogas, the Royal Yoga included, so eighteen aptors. Actually,
Speaker 1: even though the metaphors sometimes suggests there's a lot of violence,
Speaker 1: isn't the whole teaching is yoga. That's a fascinating interpretation
Speaker 1: which I had not heard of. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's helpful to go through the other types of
Speaker 1: yoga real quick, because I think this is important. Right.
Speaker 1: There's a royal yoga, there's Bakti yoga, which I believe
Speaker 1: is sort of considered the path of love. Perfect yeah,
Speaker 1: love as the means to enlightenment, choice based on love.
Speaker 1: And then Karma yoga, I believe is service, is a
Speaker 1: path selfless service. And then what's the fourth jan yoga?
Speaker 1: It is to correct the mistakes of the intellect. So
Speaker 1: what is the mistake of the intellect? As I am
Speaker 1: separate from the world, and you know, the intellect creates
Speaker 1: what we call subject object split. So the yan yoga
Speaker 1: is also called the Razor's edge. Actually, you know some
Speaker 1: said Mom, the great novelist wrote a book called the
Speaker 1: rais Edge, and it starts with that, Beware of the
Speaker 1: Raisa's edge. The path to enlightenment is like the Raisa's edge.
Speaker 1: You could fall either way because the more intellectually become,
Speaker 1: the most smart you become, the more ego driven you become.
Speaker 1: So that's the riskiest part of yoga is ya yoga.
Speaker 1: You have to be a little sophisticated through the other
Speaker 1: forms of yoga to engage in the yoga of the intellect. Now,
Speaker 1: I've often heard that those different types of yoga are
Speaker 1: particularly helpful because a person may find that they are
Speaker 1: better suited to one of them. Do you find that
Speaker 1: that's how it goes for a lot of people, as
Speaker 1: they pick one and they go deep, or are most
Speaker 1: people who are really practicing sort of practicing across all
Speaker 1: of those. I think people find the yoga of love
Speaker 1: the most fulfilling. It doesn't require discipline, and love actually
Speaker 1: makes you feel good. Yeah, there is a center here,
Speaker 1: and I think they're primarily Bakti bag also includes singing
Speaker 1: and chanting the wood enchantment actually comes from that on
Speaker 1: chant how to become one with the divine within through
Speaker 1: chanted and now we find that actually when you chant
Speaker 1: or sing, you're stimulating the biggest Snow, that's also very interesting,
Speaker 1: very joyous. We've only got a couple of minutes here.
Speaker 1: I know you have a hard stock. I want to
Speaker 1: ask you kind of one final question, and it would
Speaker 1: be what lesson do you think it's been hardest for
Speaker 1: you personally to learn in life not to be easily
Speaker 1: offended by criticism, you know. But one day I realized
Speaker 1: a long time ago, actually, you know that if I
Speaker 1: was offended by criticism, then I had no choice other
Speaker 1: than to be offended for the rest of my life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or be silent. Right well, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: your time. It has been a pleasure to have you on.
Speaker 1: I feel like I could have done this for a
Speaker 1: long time, but I appreciate it. As I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: the book is called Living in the Light Yoga for
Speaker 1: some Realization, and it's kind of in ways a two
Speaker 1: part book that you write the first part, and then
Speaker 1: one of your yoga teachers, Sarah Platt Finger writes the
Speaker 1: second part, which is more focused on the asanas themselves.
Speaker 1: So wonderful book, and Deepak. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: your time. Eric really joined to talk to you. Thank
Speaker 1: you be bad. If what you just heard was helpful
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