Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life - How To Take Back Control Of Your Life | Deepak Chopra

When you start that reflective self-inquiry, ask yourself, [music] "Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? What am I grateful for?" Go into the stillness [music] of meditation. You have what wisdom traditions have called revelation, [music] revealed truth. Now, you know, that sounds very grand. I would say just call it insight. Meditation, [music] mindfulness, awareness of body, awareness of mind, awareness of mental space, awareness of the web of relationship, awareness of that which we call the universe, it leads you [music] ultimately to the awareness of awareness. And when you discover that, that's nirvana. Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Today's guest is a multiple time New York Times best-selling author, practicing medical doctor, and world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. One of the most widely recognized luminaries in the field of human spirituality, he has written an absolutely staggering 90 books, and he shows no signs of stopping, often working on multiple books at the same time. He's the founder of the incredibly active nonprofit, The Chopra Foundation, which conducts wide-scale research into human well-being, and he's the founder of Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality. He's also a clinical professor of family medicine and public health at the University of San Diego, and he teaches meditation all over the world, including at his own meditation center. Demonstrating his unprecedented reach, he's created meditation retreats with Oprah and shared the stage with the Dalai Lama and countless other eminent leaders in the space. Oprah said of him that he is a man who invites you to see deeper into your own soul. So, please help me in welcoming the man that Time magazine named as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century, the author of the national bestseller Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, the one and I assure you only, Deepak Chopra. [cheering] Deepak, I'll I'll first start by saying it is so good to have you, man. Thank you. Thank you. [applause and cheering] Thanks for having me. [clears throat] So, thank you so much for joining me. Um I've had the good fortune of actually sitting in the audience when you were doing one of your guided meditations. Oh, really? Meditation is something that completely changed my life. Um what I love about your story though is that you took a pretty weird route to getting where you are now. And I'd love to walk through some of that because you started as a a pretty straightforward medical doctor. What was that like? When did you begin to think that there might be something more? So, I took my training in internal medicine. I got board certified in it and then I went on to train in something called endocrinology, which is the study of hormones. And then in neuroendocrinology, which is actually brain chemistry. And when I was training, this is in the '70s, in the mid-'70s, uh we had a new technique called radioimmunoassay. Just been discovered. [snorts] Um the people who actually created the technique were one Nobel Prize in medicine. Rosalyn Yalow was the scientist, I remember. You could measure for the first time uh chemicals they're called peptides in the brain. And what I immediately recognized with the help of my colleagues was that um brain chemistry was the clue to the connection between what was happening in your inner life and what was happening in your bio body. These chemicals called neuropeptides. Neuro means in the brain. [snorts] Peptides they're proteins. And they're actually the molecules of emotion. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, opiates. People are addicted to opiates these days. But you make your own opiates, too. And so in fact, once we started looking at these chemicals, we realized that they were also immunomodulators. They modulated the immune system, fine-tuned it. If you have a very aggressive immune system, you get things like um autoimmune illness, allergies. If you have a very sleepy immune system, you're more prone to infections and cancer. But these peptides are neuroimmunomodulators in that they modulate the activity fine-tune the activity of the immune system. So suddenly I saw the connection between mind, body, and spirit. But then I was also actually intrigued by the fact that you could have two patients who had the same illness, [snorts] saw the same doctor, got the same treatment, and had completely different outcomes. One could survive, one could die. And in between, there was a wide range of outcomes. So that led me to mind-body medicine, ultimately to integrated medicine. So when you first start looking at that, what was that sort of process of discovery? I know that you were a child of the '60s. I know that you did LSD. Like how much of this is um showing you that there's something beyond um traditional medicine? And And how do you begin to piece those pieces together? Well, I did LSD when I was in medical school and um twice. I was not even 20 at that time. And uh it did give me the insight that our normal everyday experience of what we call reality is the hypnosis of social conditioning. That actually reality shifts as your consciousness shifts. So, to put it metaphorically, um I had my first glimpse of the matrix. And I decided that I wanted to not know what we know, but what is the source of knowing. Okay, it's not what you know. You know, what you know these days you can look it up. Go Google it. So, it's not important what you know. Anybody can find out anything about anything these days. You know, I can look up how many galaxies there are in the universe or how does epigenetics work or how does the brain function. That's not the key to creativity. The key to creativity and higher consciousness is how do you know what you know? What is the source of knowing and experience? What is it that knows the experience of the body? [snorts] What is it that knows the experience of the mind? What is it that knows the experience called the color red and where is that experience happening? A [snorts] lot of people will tell you it's in the brain, but I can assure you there's no colors in the brain. There's no color red. When you look at the red color there's no color here in the brain. Or if you imagine the color or if you imagine a beautiful sunset or if you imagine what your experience is with your mother or anybody, emotions. The brain only shows chemical activity. That's called the hard problem of consciousness. So, what is the source? Define that for us. There's some sort of leap that is not understood between um how these there's some threshold event of all of these atoms clustering in this thing that we call a human, in this thing that we call a human brain, but there's still an unknown moment at which we become conscious. Is that what you're talking about? No, the hard problem of consciousness is simply stated in one sentence. How do chemicals and atoms and neurochemistry or neuroelectricity produce this experience? There's no explanation for this. You're looking at me right now. All that's coming to your eyes are invisible photons. There's no red waves coming to your eyes, okay? Invisible photons. They have no color. They have no shape. They don't even have units of mass. Okay, [snorts] so they're not They They don't have any dimensionality. The photons that you're use you're exposed to right now that are giving you the experience of your own body of me and this room, that's all that's coming to you is electrical information. All that's going to your brain is an electrical current. It's called an action potential. But you're experiencing this room. You're experiencing your own body. You're experiencing thoughts. In fact, you're experiencing seeing what we call reality, everyday reality. Believe it or not, no the No neuroscientist can tell you how that happens. They can look at what they call neural correlates. A correlation is not a causation, as we know. If the rooster crows in the morning and the sun rises at the same time, we don't assume that the rooster caused the sun to rise. [snorts] Okay, but they are correlated. So, your mind, your brain, and the physical world are correlated experiences in a deeper realm of existence which is not in space or time. Okay, so I want to drill deeper on that. So, what is the thing that drives you? Is it to end human suffering? What's that like if you had to put that in a nutshell? Yes. Um the purpose of all healers [snorts] and ultimately of all physicians should be to alleviate suffering. Now, we've done a pretty good job with alleviating what we call suffering that occurs from acute illness. You break your leg, [snorts] get an orthopedic surgeon to fix it. You get pneumonia, you take an antibiotic. So, we've done a good job on what we call the physicalist level for acute illness. But, then there's something called chronic illness, diabetes type 2, inflammation, cancer, heart disease, autoimmune illness, uh accelerated aging, uh propensity to infections. And we haven't done a good job there because what we are realizing right now that only 5% of disease-related gene mutations are fully penetrant, which means they guarantee the disease. A gene mutation is a genetic mistake. So, good example, Angelina Jolie had a BRCA gene and she had a mastectomy as a prevention, double mastectomy, because that gene predicts that she would have gotten breast cancer. For that, by the way, there are new technologies that are emerging, including gene editing, so even now that's possible. Not for cancer, but for things like sickle cell anemia, you can cut and paste a gene. about CRISPR? Yeah, CRISPR. You can cut and paste a gene just like you do an email. You read the barcode, That's crazy. delete the gene, and then insert the healthy one. It'll affect 5% of people. 95% of gene mutations that cause illness are related to lifestyle. Sleep, managing stress, and whether you meditate or not, you exercise or not, uh maybe you do yoga or not, breathing techniques, the quality of your emotions, nutrition, personal relationships, social interactions, environment, connection with nature influence your gene activity. We call it epigenetics. So, we're beginning to do a good job there, but we're not there. Let's say you got rid of all chronic illness. [clears throat] And acute illness, would humans still suffer? And the answer is yes, because unlike other species, we have something which is actually quite bizarre. It's called existential suffering. We wonder why we exist. We wonder why we get old and can we prevent that? We wonder why we get infirm and lose our memories as we get old. Can we prevent that? But we also are afraid of death. Okay. Can we prevent that? And the answer is biological death is based on a false premise, which is you are your biology and you are your body and you are a mind. Where I'm going with the hard problem of consciousness is you're not your body, you're not your mind, you're not the experience of the world, you're the consciousness in which all this experience occurs. To observe a thought is to know that you're not a thought. To observe an emotion is to know that you're not the emotion. To observe the body is to know that you're not this bundle of sensations and perceptions. So, who are you? What is it that knows a thought? What is it that knows a perception, the color red? Is there a color red anywhere in the physical universe or is it just an experience? I guarantee you no scientist can tell you that the color red exists as a physical entity in the universe. It's an experience in human consciousness not in the consciousness of a bat who doesn't see colors but experiences the echo of ultrasound. So, what is the color red to a bat? this is a good place to go back to your LSD experience. So, looking at psychedelics and the impact that they have on people's existential dread over dying. So, I know they they've done studies giving it to terminal cancer patients and from what I understand it has a pretty radical [clears throat] shift in people's level of fear. As somebody who's never done psychedelics, what what is that experience of the dissolution of the ego? Like where does it taking people? What like is there a way for you to sort of metaphorically explain what's happening there? Yes. When you realize that everything you thought was real is not real. When you also realize that who you think you are is not real. I'm not Deepak Chopra with this body mind ego identity that this is a very provisional identity. If I say I'm my body mind you know, I was once a fertilized ovum. Then I was a zygote, an embryo, a baby, a toddler, a young adult and now this and this will disappear. But when you realize that all your name, your form and everything you see is provisional [snorts] two things happen. To some people they have immediate what we could only metaphorically call the dark night of the soul. They go into a deep depression [snorts] because everything they thought was real is no longer real, including their own name, form, body, and mind. Some people get so scared that they have a bad trip. Some people cross that threshold and discover nirvana [snorts] or enlightenment. And they say, "Wow, I thought I was I was squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime, but I'm a timeless being that can morph myself into any experience, including the human experience, which is amazing. But the human experience is also that which causes existential depression. So, the causes of human suffering, since you brought it up, are brought up in Eastern wisdom traditions as number one, you suffer because you don't know who you are. You confuse yourself with your body-mind experience. Number two, you grasp and cling at experiences which are evanescent and transitory and dream-like. You say, "What happened to your childhood? It's over. What happened to yesterday? It's over. What happened to 5 minutes ago? It's over. What happens to these words by the time you hear them? They don't exist." So, you know, Wittgenstein, the German philosopher, said, "We are asleep. Our life is a dream, but once in a while we wake up enough to know that we are dreaming." So, what do you wake up to when you cross this threshold? You wake up to your true self, which uh is not body or mind, but the awareness in which that experience is happening. So, grasping and clinging at a dream is the second cause of human suffering. The third is uh being afraid of anything that's unpleasant, pain. Abandonment, being treated by someone uh not respectfully. So, that's, you know, there's aversion to certain experiences. Third cause of suffering. Fourth is identifying, which is related to it, with your ego identity. And fifth is the fear of death. Now, they're all connected. They're all the same fear. And they are not knowing who you are. This is the biggest question that humans or everybody should be asking. Who am I? What am I? Am I the changing experience of this body, which is a perceptual activity? Am I the experience of the changing mind or the changing personality? Because you don't have the same personality when you were a kid or maybe even 10 years ago. What is it at the basis of this? When you start that reflective self-inquiry, ask yourself, who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? What am I grateful for? Go into the stillness of meditation, you have what wisdom traditions have called revelation. [snorts] Revealed truth. Now, you know, that sounds very grand. I would say just call it insight. You know, meditation, mindfulness, awareness of body, awareness of mind, awareness of mental space, awareness of the web of relationship, awareness with that which we call the universe. It leads you ultimately to the awareness of awareness. And when you discover that, that's nirvana. Now, are you familiar with the term panpsychism? Yes. So, I had never heard of that before and the cop-out, but Interesting. So, I I was going to ask if that is So, as I understand it, panpsychism is basically the consciousness itself is um a force almost like gravity. So, it is everywhere. There is no um moment where enough atoms come together that you have enough complexity that consciousness arises that it is truly fundamental. And when I was reading Metahuman, that's what I thought you were saying. I thought you were saying it is this thing that just is um ever present. So, if that's not what you're saying No, it's not, but I'm glad that scientists are going in that direction, including some very big and very important thinkers and luminaries in both philosophy and science are going in that direction. What they're saying is just what you said. That what we call consciousness is organized matter. And that wherever there's matter there is consciousness, from atom to galaxy. Okay, so mind and matter go together from atom to galaxy. That's panpsychism. Okay, and it's got very good adherents, proponents, luminaries, and important minds saying that. It's a breakthrough because now you're not saying consciousness just in the brain. You're saying it pervades the universe in the same way as gravity and atoms and electrons. But I'm saying actually there are no atoms, there are no electrons. Gravity and force fields are human constructs. So, matter is a useful construct. I'm going beyond panpsychism into what is called non-duality, which means there's only consciousness. It's modifying itself into sensations, perceptions, images, feelings, and thoughts. And we give names to that. We give We give a name to a shape and a color and a sensation. We call it a cup. We call it a hand. We call it the Milky Way galaxy. We call it atoms and force fields. Very useful constructs. Otherwise, you wouldn't know how to navigate everyday experience. If I tell you I'll meet you at the corner of 56th and Broadway you assume that's real, but we made up that um that notation. Just like we made up latitude and longitude and Greenwich Mean Time. We didn't say Botswana Mean Time. Uh we made up the galaxies. We made up the body. We made up gravity and force fields. By we, I mean a species of consciousness that is called human. So now my question becomes, if that is the case and all that exists is consciousness, is there something behind that? Like why has consciousness given rise to humans? And do you see it going through like an evolutionary thing? Like how how do we get here? And maybe more importantly, why do we get here? I don't know if I can answer why other than entertainment, but but but I can tell you what the the the thinking behind this is. Is there anything behind consciousness? No. You can't get behind consciousness. that is base level, that's it. Yeah, but that's called pure consciousness, okay? Now, everyday experience is modified consciousness. So right now what you're experiencing is what we call the waking state of consciousness. [snorts] Okay. What do you mean by that? The awareness that I'm aware? No, the awareness that is experiencing a physical body and [snorts] a physical world with eyes open is called waking state of consciousness. Okay? [snorts] So awareness is modifying itself every time you open your eyes into this experience, right? And you call it the physical world. Now, if you close your eyes, you have another state of consciousness where you don't actually experience the physical world. You experience sensations, images, thoughts, emotions, stories. It's like a dream. As soon as you close your eyes, you're experiencing you might call it daydreaming, but there's no difference between a day dream and what you dream at night. The physical world has disappeared. There's only a mental world. Then you go deeper at night, even the mental world disappears in what we call deep deep sleep. Now, that is the highest intelligence, by the way, because in deep sleep, there's unconscious processing going on, there's creativity going on, there are correlations being made, there are toxins being removed, there's a whole resetting of your memories and consolidation of that. So, in deep sleep, even though there's no experience of a physical or a mental world, it's a very intelligent, highly highly correlated state in which unconscious processing is occurring. Memories are being consolidated. Imagination is being refined, etc., even though you have no conscious experience. So, think of these three states metaphorically, like you would think of water [snorts] becoming ice as the physical world. Okay. Water as water, fluid, dreamy, water as vapor, even more dreamy and fluctuating and ambiguous, and contradictory, and difficult to grasp. But if you want a little bit beyond that, I'm speaking metaphorically, you'd end up with the what is called the quantum vacuum, which [snorts] is the fundamental ground of existence, according to science. Okay. But you can do that subjectively. You can move from the physical world to the dream world to the sleep world, and beyond to what is called fundamental consciousness, which is the source of all knowing, all experience. In wisdom traditions, it's called undifferentiated consciousness. How does that differ from non-duality? It is non-dual. It's all modes of knowing, all knowers, and all things known. It is fundamental ground of existence of the total universe. Okay, so non-duality is to put it really simplistically that there is no subject-object. It's just all one thing, which I'm assuming you would say is pure consciousness. The subject-object division is artificial. [snorts] Reality is one wholeness. It includes all subjects, all objects, and all modes of knowing. What we have access to is a human mode of knowing. You know, in my book Metahuman, I talk about the butterfly, the painted lady, who smells the world through her antenna. Okay, tastes the world through her feet, sees the world with 30,000 lenses that move like a kaleidoscope. Okay, hears the world through her wings. What is reality to that little species? Some insects see the world 360°. Okay, because they have these what we call complex eyes with multiple lenses. You can only see within a certain range, but there are insects that can see 360°. So, what is reality? Reality What we call reality, what today's science calls reality, comes under the heading of naive realism. Einstein was a naive realist. And I'm not saying this in a derogatory fashion. It's It's It's a word in the science of philosophy. Naive realism means that the physical world exists exactly as perceived by the five human senses. Now, obviously that's not true. Other species experience the world through different modes of sensory perception. The second aspect of naive realism is that the physical world, as perceived by the five human senses, would exist even if no one was observing it. Well, how do you prove that? And firstly, it's naive because we know that the world is more than what is perceived by the five human senses. So, this leads us to a solution, actually, [snorts] of the hard problem of consciousness, which is get rid of the idea that the world is physical. What we call of the world as physical, even your physical body, is a perceptual activity. And that [snorts] perceptual activity, for you and me, is a human perceptual activity through human consciousness, not through bat consciousness, not through mosquito consciousness, not through plant consciousness, which would fit in with panpsychism, but nondualism says go beyond that. There's only one consciousness that is differentiating, you know, undifferentiated consciousness differentiating into these different species of consciousness that form a matrix of conscious beings that are collectively projecting this universe. Now, I know that you said that you can't [clears throat] answer the question why, but do you ever contemplate why? Like, why we would come into all these manifestations, why they would have such different experiences? say that consciousness fundamental, then it must have a desire, and the desire must be I need to experience myself. And consciousness being undifferentiated, timeless, spaceless, boundless, can only know itself through experience. So, it modulates itself into these different varieties of experience, almost infinite. And we call it the universe, universe, one song, but in that one consciousness. Let's reground this now. So, you do some really interesting personal practices. So, I get it, this is all an illusion, but you do monastic retreats, you shave your head, you shave your eyebrows, you do a week of silence. yes. So, walk me through, what's the power in that? The power in that is to suddenly start to become comfortable with questioning your habitual certainties. If I ask you, what is this? You'd say it's a cup, right? Well, if you were a baby, you wouldn't know this is a cup. This is a shape, this is a color, this is a form, this is a sensation, this is a taste, and it's noise. The rest is a story. It's a human story we created, just like we created money or Wall Street or nation states or colonial empires, and we take that for reality. So, when you when you have time to be still, question your habitual certainties, you'll realize that actually we know nothing. Nothing. Everything we know is made up. It's a human construct, and once we are embedded in that human concept, we call it reality. We don't question what is the source of this experience. So, taking retreats, practicing mindful awareness of body, of mind, of mental space, of the web of relationship, the mystery of existence, [snorts] it takes you slowly deeper to your true self, which is the orchestrator of everyday experience. What's the importance of silence? As Rumi said, God's language is silence. Everything else is poor translation. So, is it uh listening to the subconscious? So, for instance, part of the reason that meditation has been so powerful for me is and I get what you're saying about correlation, but as you said, it's very strongly correlated. So, breathing from my diaphragm, being quiet, um takes me out of the sympathetic nervous system and into the parasympathetic, um allows me to reduce my stress. You've done a lot of research into that, which is really really fascinating. And it creates a quiet in my mind so that I can tap into the subconscious while I'm awake, which has been very powerful, makes me feel far more creative. I'm getting far-flung connections that I wouldn't otherwise get in my mind. Um so, it's been very advantageous. Is that the same experience for you with silence or is there something I'm missing? No, all of that is very important because the moment you start going into the direction of pure consciousness, you go also in the direction of homeostasis, which is self-regulation. You go in the direction of healing. You activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Talk to me about some of the science around there that that your um your research has bared about cuz it's pretty impressive. We had uh we tested people who were in a one-week retreat. Uh we called it the seduction of spirit, which is a nice name. And at the end of the week and before the week, we tested them for gene activity and inflammation and many other things. We found that genes that cause self-regulation and [snorts] healing uh go went up some 17-fold over baseline. Genes that cause um inflammation, which is the common background in chronic illness and chronic inflammation is the background, genes that cause chronic inflammation went down. The level of the enzyme telomerase, which influences how we age at a genetic level, telomere length went up significantly. In some cases, 40%. Now, this can all be explained through what we call epigenetics. And it's a revolution, and many people have replicated these findings now. Um our study was done in collaboration with scientists from Duke and Harvard and UCSF and UCSD and Scripps and so on, but other people are replicating, finding similar data, if not exactly identical data. So, this is a big revolution. Now, for people that don't know epigenetics, can you give them just a quick breakdown? Yeah, you're born with 25,000 genes from your parents. You also have 2 million to 20 million bacterial genes in your gut. These bacterial genes are called the microbiome. The human genes are the genes you have. They interact with each other to produce all the metabolites in your body and produce what you call a biological organism and maintain its health. Epigenetics says that daily experience influences the activity of your genes. So, you're born with a deck of cards, but now you know how to learn how to play the deck of cards uh so you can win the game of life, if you want to use that metaphor. And the so gene activity is influenced by the things I mentioned: sleep, managing stress, exercise, yoga, breathing, pranayama, introspection, uh mindful awareness, emotions, nutrition, connection with nature. [snorts] We can change our gene activities. That ability to change the activity of the genes, you can't change the cards you were dealt with. [snorts] But you can change their activity, but you can also change your microbiome by changing your diet. So, you can actually change much of your gene not only expression, but the genetic information in your body. You can change the microbiome. The entire gene population by changing your diet and following lifestyle. You can [snorts] change the expression of your genes. That's epigenetics. Epi means above and epigenetics, there's the sheet of proteins above the genes that responds to every experience you have, mental, physical, perceptual, emotional. All right, now walk us through some of the things that you do from going around with the begging bowl to daily yoga. Like give us some prescriptive stuff for winning at the game of life. [snorts] Okay, well going around with the begging bowl and all that was just to experience myself without my identity, Deepak Chopra. You shave your eyebrows, you walk with a begging bowl amongst other beggars and you You were doing this in South Korea, right? Yeah, in Korea, yeah. And you get No, sorry, in Thailand, in northern Thailand. But there are monasteries in South Korea like that, too. So it brings you to who am I without my PR. Who am I without this identity? That is the purpose of some of these retreats. But of course, that's once in a while. I take a week of silence also once a year. But here's what I do every day. I start my day with four questions. Who am I? What do I want? Who wants to know? What is my purpose and what am I grateful for? Then I go into about a two-hour meditation very early in life, which is going to stillness. Now do you answer those questions or that's what the meditation is for? That's what the magic You live the questions, consciousness moves you into the answers because consciousness is infinite [snorts] and has infinite correlations. You don't have to worry about the answers. You know, it's an ancient thing. Ask and you shall receive. The unexamined life is not worth living. So, you just practice that every day. Then I do about 1 and 1/2 hours to 2 hours of stillness meditation. It includes mindful awareness of body, mind, and all of that. Then I do yoga. So, it takes me about 3 hours to do my morning routine. I normally don't start my day till 11. Today is an exception for you. Thank you. Uh and then I normally don't work after 5 other than when I'm giving a talk or on a tour or doing media, but normally 11:00 to 5:00. And on weekends, I write and reflect. And I enjoy my life. So, what are you doing if you're working from 11:00 to 5:00? One, what is work? And then two, when you're enjoying your life, what does that look like? When I'm in New York, I walk the streets and I taste and smell and experience the colors and flavors of every country by walking on Broadway. I can go through Koreatown, Indiatown, Chinatown, eat Little Italy, Little Spain, Little Portugal, and savor the sensuality of the experience. And I spend a lot of time doing that. By work, I actually don't have any work right now other than I write books and give speeches, which is how I learn myself, you know. I'm whatever I'm struggling with and trying to solve, I write it down and then, you know, if I see some clarity, then I publish it. [snorts] That's work, but it's I don't think of it as work. I think of it as play. Now, you've said that you no longer think about aging. Um you think that the pursuit of that whole line of inquiry is a mistake. What did you mean by that? No, I don't not think of aging. I'm 73. My next chapter is death. So, you know, so I think about aging. I'm not bamboozled by the construct. Okay, because I don't think consciousness being formless and infinite is subject to either birth or death. This is a vacation we're having um in on planet Earth right now. And so, might as well enjoy it. But death is not the end of con- Consciousness is the end of a certain storyline in consciousness. A certain interpretation of perceptions, images, feelings, and thoughts. And the storyline is, of course, the conditioned mind. As soon as you're born, you say, "Oh, you're Indian. You're male. You come from a wealthy or poor family. This is your religion." And now, you're bamboozled from your true self into this provisional identity. So, I don't it's not that I don't think about death. I ask myself, "What is beyond my provisional identity?" And I dwell in that, and that has a very interesting outcome, which is the outcome in every spiritual tradition. There are only three things that happen, by the way, in a religious or traditional experience. One is transcendence. You know that you are not an entity in space and time. [snorts] That your true self is formless, infinite, unbounded, borderless, unfettered, free consciousness. Number one. Number two, you have the emergence of what usually are referred to as platonic truths, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equanimity. And number three, loss of the fear of death. There's nothing more important than having those three experiences. And they've been part of every wisdom tradition for thousands of years. Talk to me about love. It's interesting for somebody that started with neurochemistry, who could probably give me a very detailed breakdown of the neurochemicals involved with love. It's of course oxytocin and serotonin. But those are models. Again, they are constructs. Love is not a sentiment. Love is not an emotion. Love is the ultimate truth at the heart of creation, which is unity consciousness, one consciousness differentiating into infinite modes of experience, infinite knowers, infinite modes of knowing, infinite phenomena known, all generated within the one self. Just like when you were just a fertilized ovum, you were one stem cell. Stem cell, pluripotent stem cell. [snorts] It became eyes, it became nose, it became fingernails, it became heart, it became brain. So, that one cell differentiated into all these different cells, each with its own modality of experience. Like that, the one mind or the one consciousness differentiates itself into what we call the universe with every species of consciousness knowing the universe in its own unique way. Because ultimately there's no universe. It's another construct. When you're meditating, are you seeing images? So, love. Love is the ultimate truth. But what is that like that help help me differentiate between consciousness being sort of the floor and love being the floor. Are they one in the same? Like Pure love, pure consciousness, pure knowing, pure creativity are the same thing. Interesting. Cuz I think of And look, I get it. This is me trapped in sort of the human experience, but I think of love as a as a molecule of emotion. I think of it as an experience. It's hard for me to wrap my head around It's the source of those molecules of Well, molecules of emotion are human constructs, but it is the source of the feeling that you get. So, I think of my mother right now who's long gone. And as soon as I think the word mother, I see her image. And it's not in my brain. There's only chemistry in my brain. The image is in my consciousness. As soon as I think of her, actually I can hear her voice. There's no sound in my brain, but I can hear her voice in my consciousness. As soon as I think of her, I feel an emotion. There maybe there's oxytocin in my brain, but I'm not experiencing oxytocin. I'm feeling this immense emotion of joy just by thinking of her. I can even smell her skin when I was a baby. Where did all this come from just by thinking of the word mother? Okay? The word mother in pure consciousness created this whole gestalt of experiences. I call this qualia entanglement instead of quantum entanglement. Qualia means quality of experience, sensations, images, perceptions, feelings, thoughts. Ultimately, that's all there is. Qualia or qualities of experience, we reify them, we objectify them, and we call them molecules. What was your mom like? She was the most amazing storyteller. And every day she would tell us a magnificent story before we went to bed. But she would stop at what is called a cliffhanger. And then she'd say, "Tomorrow, I want you to end the story for me. Make sure it's a love story with a happy ending." That's interesting. And that's what influenced my entire life. I decided that all stories are provisional, and the best stories are love stories. That's really interesting. Is that something that you continued with your kids, or is that something that No, no, I continued it with my kids, for sure. That's interesting. Do you think that that brings an awareness to storytelling in and of itself, or is it most powerful because it primes you to focus on something beautiful? It actually does all of the above, you know. Um humans are different in that we are storytellers. So, they we uh until about 30, 40,000 years ago, when we had rudimentary language, there were eight different types of humans, some maybe more. We are Homo sapiens, which means the wise ones. We gave ourselves that name. Nice and humble. Homo erectus, Homo neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, on and on. They all had a rudimentary language for um danger calls, mating calls, uh [snorts] food. But then we created a language for telling stories, and we decimated every other species. Because with stories, we created money, we created empires, we created colonial states, we created Wall Street, we created technology, we created cyber hacking, and whatever else, mechanized death. This all the result of our ability to take raw experience, which is perceptions, and make a story out of it. So, once you realize that, you also realize that all stories are provisional. You're not your stories, you're the the author of the stories, and that includes all stories, including the story that you are a biological organism in a theater of space-time and causality, [snorts] and this is real. That's a story. Why is it so important to tell yourself a story about gratitude? I know you tell people to focus on that. Gratitude opens the door to abundance consciousness. When I'm feeling grateful for what I already have, I feel fulfilled and joyful. And if you have gratitude, you can't experience hostility at the same time. What do you think the future of medicine is? I think the future of medicine is self-regulation. What do you mean? Meditating? And yoga and practices that stimulate the vagus nerve and is create mind-body coordination. So, uh meditation, yoga, tai chi, chi gong, martial arts, knowing how to regulate your mind and body as one unit, but in addition to that, VR, artificial intelligence, and the most amazing technology that can enhance that experience of self-regulation. There's already data that you can help children with autism through VR. Uh by changing their facial expressions and giving them feedback to, you know, what an emotional uh wholeness could be. Or you can change the image an anorexic person has when they look at a mirror. Or you can get rid of a phobia through VR. Or burns. If somebody has burns, you create an environment where they experience cold. You're in snow and so on. All through VR. Wow. It's more effective than any burn treatment. And so I see as we create more excursions into AI. I have a AI version of myself already. That I talk to. So I can continue what I'm doing after I'm dead. Wow. And then I'm also very engaged in VR. And immersive um experiences in virtual reality. Because I believe that we are already in a virtual reality. And we can modify it through extending virtual reality. So I think the future of medicine is the most amazing technology with the most amazing understanding of consciousness. That's incredible. Where can people find your massive library of books? Uh I think better to go to deepakchopra.com or just go online and you can find my library. I do have a library called Chopra Library. Um and if you want to find it, it's also called I S H A R online.org. And this is the most comprehensive library on everything to do with integrative studies or integrative medicine or integrative cultures. It's I would say there's nothing like this. Uh it's the Wikipedia of integrative medicine. It's called the Chopra Library. It doesn't have just my work. It has the work of everybody in the field of integrative studies. Whether they're scientists, philosophers, humanitarians, or just people like me who shoot the breeze. What's the impact that you want to have on the world? I just want people to say there was this guy, he's gone. Now, let's pick up from where he left and see how we can continue this exploration. Nice. Ex- You know, the journey has no ending. The point of arrival is always now. I like that. All right, guys. It is a vast world that this man creates. I won't even say inhabits, that he creates. He's written on so many topics and has extended this notion of non-duality to so many people and really helped reach countless lives and get people to think in new ways. You can think of him as a human dose of LSD. So, I highly encourage you guys to check it out to change your consciousness. And yeah, hopefully end human suffering. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you. [applause] You got it. Thank you. They are not suffering life. They think they're suffering life. They're not suffering life. They are suffering the two most fantastic faculties that human beings alone have. A vivid sense of memory and a fantastic sense of imagination.