Know Thyself - E155 - Dr. K: How Eastern Wisdom & Neuroscience Unite to Unlock Human Potential

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

What if the key to healing, fulfillment, and inner peace isn’t found in choosing between science or spirituality, but in weaving the two together? In this conversation, Dr. K bridges the timeless wisdom of the East with the empirical insights of the West, exploring everything from attention and emotion to enlightenment, desire, and the true self. We dive into why so many feel lost in today’s world, how modern distractions suppress the soul, and what ancient traditions already knew about the mind and healing. From shadow work and mystical experiences to the deeper meaning of dharma and the illusion of the personality, this episode invites you to see yourself through a more integrated lens.Own Your Health with Function Health. Here's $100 off your membership:https://www.functionhealth.com/knowthyselfTry Nourish with Up to 36% Off:https://mudwtr.com/knowthyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________0:00 Intro 2:01 What Eastern & Western Science Lacks7:32 Knowledge vs Wisdom & Making True Change14:17 Opening Ourself Up to Deeper Knowing 20:00 Examining Who We Are At Our Core26:57 Mystical Experiences that Transform You36:40 Problem of Modern Distractions42:10 Practices for Cultivating a Concentrated Mind45:13 Ad: Function Health47:00 Your Attention is Being Bought54:09 The Spiritual Cost of a Suppressed & Distracted Mind56:55 Why So Many Young Men Struggle1:02:06 You’re Not Depressed, You’re Unhappy1:05:53 Ad: Mudwtr - Nourish1:07:15 The Foundation: Healing Deeper Wounds with Shadow work1:18:08 Create a “safe” environment for someone to heal1:20:50 False Gurus & Spiritual Hijacking 1:32:50 Karma & How Thoughts Hold You Back 1:40:12 Discerning the Intention Behind Actions1:47:06 The Paradox of Striving on the Spiritual Path1:54:00 spiritual practices for accumulating good karma 1:58:17 Reality of Intuition & Cultivating It2:04:19 Beneficial vs harmful chakra practices2:07:55 What is Enlightenment 2:13:54 How Samadhi Changes the World2:19:28 The Purpose of Earth & Waking Up 2:28:48 Defining Who We Are At Our Essence 2:32:45 Past Lives & Reincarnation 2:38:15 How Personality Relates to Awakening 2:40:20 Self Improvement vs Self Acceptance 2:43:29 Discovering & Living Your Dharma 2:55:04 Conclusion ___________Episode Resources: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGGDr. K's Meditation Guide https://bit.ly/4a90rPX https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep. Flip. Or that. And enjoy. Via rail, love the way.

If you look at your life and your life sucks, there is a 99.999% chance that your thinking is habitual. So let's dive in a little bit. At 21 years old, I started doing neuroscience research on meditators. And I thought what happened to me was BS. Would it happen to you? I changed. Or mystical experiences?

Absolutely. There's one fundamental weakness in the Eastern traditions and one fundamental weakness in Western science. And the one thing that I always found shocking is that you as a human being have one resource, which is your attention. So what's happening is the more we use technology, the more our mind becomes weakened in terms of focusing. Literally, we have a society of people that cannot control their attention.

So the reclamation of our attention is essentially the reclamation of our life. Absolutely. I want to ask you about enlightenment. This is honestly, Andrea once in a lifetime opportunity, so. Wow. Yeah, I mean that. In the same way. So here's kind of what we do know.

Experiences of samadhi radically transform your relationship with yourself and your relationship with the outside world. So there are certain practices that you can do, which will accumulate spiritual energy. Now we get weird. Okay, so. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to know thyself. I'm very looking forward to this podcast because our guest today has this unique depth and capability

to integrate and synthesize the Eastern inner sciences with Western medical practices and to be really a bridge for understanding both. He has this unique combination of being a Harvard trained psychiatrist, but also spending over seven years on and off at ashrams studying the contemplative practices. And so he has this incredible ability to help us understand what it means to be human and achieve human well-being. Dr. K. I guess so. So good to have you, man.

Yeah, I mean, when you say the ability to achieve, I mean, we can try. Your mileage may vary. So I think that's true of both Western medical practice and Eastern contemplative practice. So to set the stage a bit. from failing out of college due to gaming addiction to spending seven years out of office, you know, on the summers at various ashrams, becoming a psychiatrist. What did you fundamentally see lacking in both Eastern and Western approaches that's really important to kind of set the stage for?

What a beautiful question. So I think there's one fundamental weakness in the Eastern traditions and one fundamental weakness in Western science. So the biggest problem with Western science is that it doesn't work for people. I know that sounds weird. But literally what I mean is when we do a study on neuroscience, we're learning about the average brain. We're not learning about your brain. This is why we have clinicians because the science doesn't translate to a person.

It requires a human being who understands the science of medicine and then they have to tailor what works or what doesn't work for you. So each patient with their doctor walks an individual journey of applying scientific principles. And remember, science is about the average, right? So gravity is like universal. Similarly, like if we look at like what parts of the brain do what, those are general rules. So you require a tailoring down. This is why I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding in the world today that we're all learning about science.

but we don't realize that even if you understand neuroscience, it's not going to teach you about your brain. It's going to teach you about the average brain. So there's a gap in translation. That's literally why we see that even if we understand something about neuroscience, if you explain that concept to someone, they can't DIY it directly in their life. So if we sort of look at the Eastern traditions,

that's exactly what they did. Right? And I think one of the best ways to understand this is So like Freud, for example, had no way to look inside someone's mind. So he would sit with another person. He would listen to their words. And he would use their words to infer what is going on in someone's mind. But I'm sure you know that there's a difference between what you say and what you think, right?

There's like a huge gap there. So that's sort of what the Eastern contemplative practices did. A yogi sits in the Himalayas, doesn't talk to anyone. and he has the one tool that can actually observe the mind. You can observe your mind. I don't even know if you have thoughts. I don't know if anyone, everyone listening out there could be bots. And if y'all are watching us on the internet or whatever, like, I could be an AI.

Like, there's no way of you knowing, right? So the fundamental problem with mind is that the West has no way to detect it. We have no way to measure it. And Western science is all about measurement. So we have to be able to track things, blood tests, x-rays, whatever. So in the East, we have the one direct way to observe mine, which is internally. So that's why Eastern contemplative practices all DIY, right? No one else can do it for you.

If you come to my office, I can therapy as a psychiatrist. I can do surgery. I mean, I'm not going to do surgery on you, but a doctor can do surgery. So Western science is about doing things to you. Eastern contemplative practices are all about doing things yourself. But there's a big problem. because if anyone who makes a claim about Eastern contemplative practices says something, you have no idea if they're right or wrong, right?

So you have no way of measuring whether someone who makes a claim if it's like BS or not, right? Because there's not like a Western apparatus to verify whether something is successful or not successful. So over on the West, we can verify things, but everything is general. nothing is tailored to you. And over on the eastern side, we have a lot of practices, but which ones work well? Do they work? Do they not work? Do they work better? Do they not work as good? And I see this is a huge problem when people engage with spiritual traditions. Because if you go to an ashram or something or you go to a teacher and you have difficulty doing a practice, does that mean that you need to try harder or that the practice doesn't work or that the practice isn't suited to you.

We have no way of really knowing. And the one thing that I always found shocking is that I'd almost never encountered a guru who works with like a disciple and says, you know what, I'm not the best suited for you. You should go learn from somebody else. Like I have a recommendation. We do that all the time in medicine. You should go see my friend who's like an orthopedic surgeon and like he can take care of you. But there's no like referral systems in the guru system.

there's no referral systems within gurus, right? So what that ends up meaning is that a lot of people who walk Eastern paths are not actually on the right path for them. And then they sort of say things like, oh, meditation doesn't work for me. Well, maybe you should have a different teacher or use a different kind of practice. And there's a whole mechanism and like science behind that, which most people, I think, don't know or understand or teach. Yeah, there is this pedestalization of the intellect and logic.

throughout all, you know, more and more of the world, I would say, but obviously Western side of things. And I've heard you speak to this distinction between Vidya and Guyan and how it's important to understand the difference between the two because they're not the same and yet we can flate information as knowledge, as wisdom. And so how do you kind of distinct between the experiential knowing that we can have nosis in the body versus what we can empirically validate and information and knowledge in the external world?

Yeah. So it's a great point. And I love Sanskrit because, you know, there's this apocryphal saying that Eskimos have 100 words for snow. So anytime you have a culture that understands something very well, they will have a very sophisticated language for it. So what I love about Sanskrit is I think it is the most sophisticated language for describing subjective experience. So even like the word, the word meditation, for example, is like one word in English, but it gets translated over to, to at least a dozen, if not more words, in the Sanskrit language.

So you would mention Vidya Nyan, and I think it's a fantastic thing to start with. So these are both words that get translated as knowledge in some way, but I would say that Vidya is information, and Nyan is understanding. So information is objective, is transmissible. So if I tell you, like, you know, my car is parked over there,

like you can sort of, and you don't really know that, but I can transmit it. It's also, so it's objective and it's transmissible. Nyan is subjective and non-transmissible. Now, the tricky thing is that in the West, we value Vidya over Nyan. We say, like, unless you can prove it to me, I don't care, right? So, like, that's why science is so big.

The big advantage of science is that it's verifiable. But I think the shortcoming is, if we look at information, information doesn't change behavior, and it doesn't change your life. I can tell you, hey, you should stop. eating hamburgers, it's bad for your cholesterol, and I've tried. I worked as an addiction psychiatrist for a while. I still arguably do. And explaining to patients that this is bad for you does not elicit change. So Nyan is what changes a person, but it's untransmissible, which is the whole problem. Like, that's why we train psychiatrists because even if I've walked my own journey,

I can't, like, upload that to your brain. And so that's sort of the dichotomy. I think Nion is actually a lot more valuable. That's what we kind of call understanding, right? You can have, I run into this quite a bit where there's like MBAs who have a degree but don't understand like how to run a company. So that's the difference between like Vidya and Yan. What is the difference between someone's disposition, I guess,

and somebody who understands a concept and puts it into practice versus where it stays in the intellect and doesn't have the capacity to be integrated? Because I've heard you speak to how like a book will say information, but it's awakening what's the knowledge you already have within you, in a sense, would be Gian. So I guess the practical problem that I run into a lot is how do you take information and create change?

So the moment that you have Nyan, the moment that you understand something, you have no choice but to change, right? So like if I take a five-year-old, and I remember one time I was eating sushi with my kids, and they never had wasabi before, and like they see this green paste and they're like, oh, this is green tea ice cream. Like, this is delicious.

And I'm like, no, it is not green tea ice cream. And they're like, no, but it's like, it smells good. And like, so, you know, they want to eat it. And so obviously, like, she's like spooned, took her spoon. And I didn't let her eat it. I was like, okay, just taste a little bit. And the beautiful thing about wasabi is you can see information turn into understanding. If you watch a child try wasabi for the first time.

Because the first second it touches your lips, you're like, what are you talking about, bro? And then it sort of hits the back of your head, you know, if you, that's what it does for me. And then it's like, oh my God, I'm so glad. And they're like kind of like, you know, it's wild for them. So if we sort of think about it, information doesn't change behavior. And the moment that you have experienced, the moment that you have Nyan, you cannot not change. So once the child has tried wasabi, if I give them a spoonful, they're not going to eat it. Right.

Everything, the way that they treated wasabi. before experience, and the way that they treat it afterward is completely transformed. That is the value of Nyan. Now, if we can also talk about other examples of this. So, like, my favorite thing is, like, love. So especially nowadays, people are struggling to, like, date and stuff. And everyone has these ideas of what relationships are. They have all this information, especially driven by, like, social media and short form content

about what you should be and how the other person should be. And they have all these ideas about what a relationship is. And once you actually experience love, once you experience a healthy relationship, you know what it is and you know what it isn't. So information is something that's transmissible. Once you understand something, there's change that can't be avoided. Now, the question really becomes, how do I move from one to the other? So I can read a thousand books on meditation. It doesn't make me enlightened.

I can also use an app for 10 years. It doesn't make me enlightened. So how does that transmission happen? I think there are two mechanisms. We can sort of look at the Western mechanism and the Eastern mechanism. So the Western mechanism, so we know that the moment you manipulate information is like how we get understanding of it. So literally the parts of your brain that encode information. So when I say something to you, it's going to enter through your sensory, it's going to enter through your ears, go to your auditory cortex, go to your hippocampus, which is where your short-term memory lives.

So you're like, okay, like, I kind of get this. that memory gets consolidated and really integrated into your brain when you start to manipulate it. So what I'll tell people is like, you know, don't memorize. I work with a lot of people who have ADHD and struggle to like study and things like that. So don't like memorize information. What you need to do is play around with it. And what we sort of notice is if there's anything in your life that you play around with, right? So if you're like, if you really love food, for example, when you play around with cooking,

you're going to understand it way better than a cookbook can teach. So it's really the manipulation of information, the organization of information, which is why I think this is terrible, but, you know, there's a trend nowadays for people to summarize. Like, I read 10 books on business habits, here's the TLDR. That's going to go right into your short-term memory, and it's going to get wiped when you go to bed. You have to play around with it to really learn it and understand it. That's sort of the Western perspective.

I'll pause for a second. We can go into the Eastern if you want. but any thoughts, questions? No, I would love, yeah, keep going. So the Eastern is where things get weird, okay? So from the Eastern perspective, what I have really discovered and what I think is true is that there's this, okay, we're going to go off the rails from like a scientific perspective, okay?

So there's this like collective unconscious that has all of the understanding of everything. And it's so interesting because what I'm about to say is going to sound crazy, but I encourage people to really pay attention to what I'm saying and study it for themselves. So what I realized a long time ago, so I was like, so I'm kind of like a scientific by nature. And one of the things that always confused me is if I read a book, why don't I understand it? Right. So if my mind scans words on a page and I do that once, it doesn't stick.

If I do it twice, it doesn't stick. If I do it three times, it doesn't stick. but there are other times where I read it once and it does stick. So if the information is really in the book, I should be able to read it and then I should know it. But that's not what happens. So what really happens is the stuff on the page and if you read a book and you'll notice that you kind of get it, it triggers something within you. The understanding doesn't exist in the book. You can't have understanding in a book, like literally.

Because if the understanding was in the book, anyone who read it would get the understanding. You can have information in a book. but the understanding comes from within you. And the book serves as a trigger for your internal understanding. Ah, now it clicks. We even have subjective experiences that we'll describe. Like the light bulb went off. It clicked for me.

So clicking is neon. And then once you understand that, okay, hold on a second. This understanding comes from within me. Then we can really experiment with it. So now the question becomes, what are the circumstances? that allow things to click for me more. And this is really when you get into contemplative practice. And there's certain practices that you do that will have things click for you more.

And then you can discover a couple of other things. The first is that stuff can click for you without you reading anything. So if you've ever been creative, if you've ever like woken up one day and you're like, oh, this is what's going on. Right? So that doesn't come from an external trigger. It comes from somewhere within you. And then through that process of experimentation, and I tried a lot of different practices and things like that, what I sort of, now the understanding that I have is there's like a conduit between you and Brahman, which is the cosmic consciousness.

And the more that that conduit opens, the more access to that information that you have. And when you read a book, if you're distracted, your conduit to Brahman is weak, right? So it's not there. Attention is critical for the conduit to Brahman. And so once that conduit is open, it's like, I'm playing. plugging in my Ethernet cord, and now I'm connected to the internet. So now it, like, clicks for me. And literally what I'll do is, you know, I work with all kinds of people, degenerate gamers,

but also like CEOs of very successful startups and things like that. And the more that I've found that they can connect to Brahman, when I teach them those kinds of contemplative practice, they're like understanding of things and their performance in the real world, like drastically improves. I might try to ask you to verbalize a concept that isn't fully consent. conceptualizable with, but when you speak to the collective unconscious and this Brahman and this field of all knowing and our ability to connect to it and be able to have cognition, what I think

the Buddhist term as direct nonconceptual valid cognition. So the things that we can know irrespective of stimulus coming from the external world like you're speaking to, how do you, for a very logical mind, explain what that field is that we can open our channel up into deeper as you're speaking to you. Yeah. So I think it's a tough thing, but I think I've got you. Okay. So this is something that I struggled with a lot. So like just to give you all some background. So when I first went to India, it was the worst time in my life. I was just in deep despair. And then, you know, I something changed. Like I had some experiences and stuff and I was like, hold on a second. Like this is wild. What is going on? So then when I was 21 years old, I started doing neuroscience research on meditators, specifically in an EEG lab.

And I thought what happened to me was BS. And so then I started to, but I couldn't deny the change, but I was like, how on earth does this work? What had happened to you? I changed. Okay. Like something fundamental within me like changed. I had a couple of experiences in meditation that reframed my understanding of reality, reframed my understanding of who I am. And I'm not trying to sound woo.

I mean, like this is the- Were they more mystical experiences? Absolutely. Okay. Right. So I just had experiences of, And this is, by the way, this is not like crazy. So this is like well verified. So we know, for example, that certain mystical experiences will alter things like in the default

mode network and things like that. But basically, I was like, what the hell is going on? I want to understand. Even though it happened to me, I didn't believe it in a sense. So I started this like scientific path of, okay, if something is true, if this happened to me, there must be something either I'm crazy or this is true. That's option number one. if it is true, it must have mechanism behind it.

Because I don't believe, and this is also what these texts say, this isn't like random stuff, right? There are spiritual laws, for lack of a better term, that observe, like, scientific, that observe or restricted to scientific mechanisms, basically, right? So like, the spiritual laws don't change from day to day in the same way that the law of gravitation doesn't change from day to day. So these should be understandable or verifiable.

So when I went down that road, that's when I sort of tried to figure out, okay, what the hell is this consciousness thing? Like, how does this work? How does this connect to people? And this is where I would say, it's going to be hard to explain, but I'll... Okay, so if I look at you, Andre,

what are you? I'm a guy, I'm a dude guy. What does that mean? No, I'm joking. Who am I? What am I? What are you? Who are you? He's like, ah.

What am I? I mean, like precisely, like scientifically, like, what are you? What constitutes? you. Yeah. There are many different ways in which we could cut the onion and the different layers of myself from...

Okay, hold on a second. So that's important. Yeah. So the first thing, right, scientifically, is there is more than one layer of you. Yep. We could look at the biological. We could look at the neurological. Okay, so give me all the pieces.

So biological? Emotional. Emotional. Mental. Mental. Energetic. What is that? It gets, again, into the...

bit of the non-physical. Okay. So humans have a bio-energetic field. Okay. That's, you can verify and test. Okay. And fundamentally, the awareness that I exist. Okay, cool.

So a couple of basic layers there. Okay? So the first is like, you have matter, right? So like you, like, but, so you have matter. We're all biological. Then we get into some weird stuff. So then there's this thing called the mind. But we actually don't.

know that you have a mind, right? We don't know that. But if you ask human beings, we all share this delusion that we have a mind. Now, this is really weird because I don't know you have a mind, you don't know I have a mind, but every human being on the planet and animals appear to have minds. So the first thing is that there's a fundamental divide here, which like science really struggles with. But I think if you really use the principles of science without bias, you absolutely get here. Which is that, so the basis of science is like observation. that's what human beings do. And we develop these things called instruments,

which help us observe, right? So X-ray machines, blood tests, whatever. So we can make an observed statement that there is a part of you that is not physical. That cannot be measured, cannot, you know, that's your mind. Then we get a neurological, which maybe connects the physiologic to the mental.

In the middle is neurology. Now, some people will argue that neurology exclusively creates the mind. I don't think that that is a fair scientific, conclusion. I think it's a reduction to scientific conclusion, but nothing in our neurology explains the quality of subjective experience. There's no reason why the brain needs to be self-aware for the brain to function. In fact, we know that because you have nerves in your stomach that are acting and doing all kinds of stuff, interpreting information, creating

parasolsis, creating, like not creating gas, but managing gas and all that kind of stuff. And you don't need to be aware of it at all. So there's something else going on. So if you look at you, there's a layer of you that is subjective, personal, non-physical, right? Like the taste of chocolate, the color of a rose, you can't cut your brain open and find that anywhere. Absolutely. So there's a subjective quality. So if we look at Western science, so if I were to draw a line in the middle, and I would say that in the material realm, we can explore, right? So I can develop a telescope to, even though my eyes can perceive certain things, I can develop an instrument

to see something that is not visible to the human eye as a telescope. I can also develop a microscope, which is a tool that allows me to observe things in the physical world that do not appear to be present in perception. And this is my favorite example of this. So I did some public health work many years ago.

And there was one of my professors was doing, trying to build wells in Africa. Okay. So they were trying to build wells And they were explaining to the population That they were working with that like, hey, you guys need to build Like a cement well, don't just build a regular well And then they were like, why?

And he's like, well, see, you guys have a latrine over there And you have your drinking water over here. And since it's like sand or dirt or whatever, Like you have bacteria that travel through and into your well. And if you go through the trouble of building this cement well, the bacteria won't hurt you anymore. Like you guys won't get sick. And then they're like, what do you mean bacteria?

And he's like, well, in water, there are these tiny little invisible creatures that you don't see that make you sick. And then they're like, well, I drink water every day. Like, I'm not sick every day. Like, how does that? If you kind of think about it, it's crazy, right? So he's there and he's like struggling to explain this to them. So there's a lot of stuff in the material world that we require technology to be able to detect and understand. Our basic eyes are not sufficient to detect it.

So then once we enter the subjective realm, there are similar technologies that we can use to get knowledge of things that are not visible to our basic level of consciousness. Okay. So these are things like you can say meditation is a really good example. Psychedelics could be another good example. We can talk about that. But basically in the same way that we must develop technology to enhance our perception of the

material world, there are practices or technologies that can be used to enhance our perception in the subjective realm. So once you do that and you go, once you develop your telescope and once you look through your microscope and look through your telescope, you will discover that there is like this thing out there. That's the best that I've got. That has like all of the knowledge. And I know it sounds crazy.

But that's why like these are things that have to be subjectively experienced. And the reason I kind of explained this way is I think this is a scientific mechanism of subjective discovery, that you have to do this. certain kinds of practices. Like, Agnachukkah practice is like a good example, which we can go into. And, like, once you do these practices, you literally, like, know things that you're not supposed, you can't know. Yeah.

And I would even say that, like, anyway, we'll get to that later. But so I'll pause there. This is setting the stage really beautifully, I think, because we can look throughout history and see that there are realms of existence that we previously just did not have awareness of, that we eventually did become aware of. And similarly, this five-sensory world where we have experience through our senses of less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum is very enchanting to perceive that all we can experience is reality through our senses. But again, you go into these deeper subjective experiences and you can experience things that aren't of the five senses that feel valid and true and powerful. Absolutely.

You experience them. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you had various experiences that kind of blew your mind open a bit. Sure. Yeah.

And on contact, it sounds like it kind of reoriented to you. What do you think happened to you? I mean, you could look at it again through the many different levels, biologically, neurologically. There's something so potent when you taste something beyond what you've intellectually kind of just known and garnered. And I think that can transform us on contact. And so what happened to you more specifically? On what level? You had a mystical experience or many of them.

Okay. Did your logical mind wrestle with trying to make sense of them? Absolutely. I mean, that's what I've been doing for 20 years. Yeah. Have you ever talked about them? Do you, like, what happened in your experience? Do you want me to share my subjective experience?

Would you like to? No, I don't ever share. Okay. It's okay for you to ask. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't share. No, great. We can talk about why if you want.

Yeah. So how do you think about states and stages of consciousness then? Because you can have an expanded state experience and relate it according to your stage of evolution in a sense. How do you discern? Yeah. So I think I can talk about once again what you're talking about. I must admit the language that you use, I recoil. Okay.

So I think that. What specifically so I can know? I'm not quite sure. Okay. But like this spiritual woo-woo stuff. Okay. So I know that sounds weird, but I know it's weird. I'm not saying you're a bad person or anything like that.

I think what you're saying is true. I think what you're saying is correct. I think there's a fundamental problem because people who talk about spiritual mechanisms are usually not trained in science. And people who understand science usually do not. They'll use like a meditation app, but they usually do not go into the Himalayas to learn like Dantric Upasana from like some dude who has like been there for anywhere between 70, in 700 years.

They just don't do that. These two worlds are so separate. Yeah. So what I like to do is be precise about the language. And I'm not saying you're not being precise. This is like a personal arrogance and frustration that I have with like the spiritual world of like people just toss around these words like elevating consciousness. Like what does that mean?

Yeah. Like specifically. Yeah. And I would actually love to see if you have what you, a version of. Absolutely. So let's talk about mystical experience and how it transforms you. Okay, that's what you want to do. Okay, cool. So first thing is, let's start with neuroscience. So we know that when you engage in certain states of meditation, and our neuroscience in this,

by the way, is in its infancy. And there's another reason for that, which is that when we do studies on meditation, we don't take a yogi from the Himalayas and study what happens to him. We usually take like 30 people and we'll put them through a mindfulness course over the course of 12 weeks and observe some changes. So it's kind of like, you know, if you have an artist who's been practicing for 30 years, if we're studying art scientifically, we're going to take a bunch of 18-year-olds, give them a paint brush, teach them how to paint, and then we're going to try to see what they make. So a huge problem with our studies on meditation is that they're done on novice meditators, not expert meditators. But that being aside, I can clip that if you want.

So here's what happens. When you attain a certain state of consciousness, and by a state of consciousness, we can describe this as well, it starts with a one-pointedness of the mind, right? So if you look at our general experience, our mind has lots of thoughts, lots of emotions. We're like a light bulb instead of a laser beam. The energy is the same, but it is diffuse. I'm thinking about this. I'm worried about this. There's a lack of one-pointedness.

So the first step on the road of consciousness is diffuse mental activity or even absence of mental activity during sleep and things like that. Next step is what I would call the flow state. So flow state is when the mind is functioning, but it is one point. and has a particular goal. Flow state feels good. Our productivity improves. There is equal activation

of our emotional centers and logical centers of the brain. We're very goal directed. We're not really using willpower because we're like in flow. So there's no effort, or there's some effort, but it's not like trying to rein in my diffuse mind.

Okay? That's next step. Still mental function. You still have somewhat awareness of who you are, but you lose some sense of time, right? In flow state. then we go to the state of,

and I would call flow state something like dharana. So dharana is focusing on one object. So putting your mind on like one thing and like focusing on that. And then we move into Dian. So Dian is when there is a dissolution of self. So my subjective experience kind of moves outside of my body

and becomes melded with the object that I am focusing on. So we sort of see this dissolution of self. If you've entered like a state of meditation, You know, you can say like some days like, oh yeah, I've been meditating this week. It hasn't been working. Like, what does that mean? And then sometimes you meditate and you're like, oh, my God, like this feels great. What does it feel like?

It feels like kind of like nothing, but in a good way, right? So that's the state of the on. So that's the second level. Now, neuroscience changes start to happen along this course. So you start to see autonomic changes. So our cortisol levels go down. Sympathetic nervous system kind of deactivate some usually for most people. But depending on kundalini practices and stuff, you can activate the sympathetic.

nervous system, which is part of the goal. So you basically get a like an evening out of your physiology. You also start to see, you know, so in the flow state, you see balancing of logical mind and emotional mind. They're both active. Then you start to see destruction of the default mode network. So this is our, the part of our brain that gives us a sense of identity. So you start to like dissolve, like you experience without being me. Like I'm just here, but I'm not me. I'm just like something else. So this we know really, really well. scientifically. So if you look at meditators, their default mode network will deactivate. Here's the really cool thing. So psychedelics are an awesome way to study some states of meditation

because they're the first time that Western science can induce a certain kind of meditative state in a normal person. So you can separate out the long-term effects, like as you become slowly more enlightened, like who knows what's going on in your brain. So what we know is that if you give someone a psychedelic and you're looking for clinical improvement. Just seeing things, colors, whatever, even having visions does not correlate with clinical improvement. If you want to heal trauma, if you want to recover from like treatment, refractory depression, there's one experience that correlates with literally psychiatric healing, which is ego

death. So the more ego death someone experiences during psychedelic treatments or practices, the more likely they are to heal. And that same thing happens in meditation as well. You experience some degree of ego death. That's deactivation of the default mode network. And then the third, the last kind of area that we can sort of touch on a little bit is endogenous DMT production.

Now, this is where we get into super like extrapolated science. Like this is something I've been working on for a while. But we know that the brain produces DMT, which is the active ingredient in. Iwaska chikuna leaf. Is it ayahuasca? Yeah, there's one, the leaf aspect. It has that. So it's, and so we know that it gets produced.

And the really interesting thing is if you look at the neurochemistry of DMT production, we don't know where it comes from. People will say it comes from the pineal gland. We don't know that. But one thing we do know is it's produced from serotonin. So you require a really high level of serotonin to drive that metabolic process forward. And this is also why, like, as people become more and more technologically dependent, our serotonin balance gets messed up, technology and things like that,

which is why no one's getting like enlightened through meditation apps. Their dopaminergic serotonergic balance is a little bit off. So if you look at all these like yogis and stuff, the reason you need a very specific diet that's like very serotonergic, there's a serotonergic diet. There's certain practices that fix your gut health. So serotonin comes from the gut predominantly is developed from tryptophan. And so you need a certain kind of like tryptophan metabolism.

You need a certain kind of serotonin metabolism. You can't be depressed, right? So you can't be anxious or things like that. those implies serotonin imbalance. And so once you kind of like become a yogi and you're like free of depression and anxiety and all that stuff, then you've got ample serotonin in your brain that turns into DMT, then you get to really explore the weird conscious realm. So that's even beyond default mode network activation.

So once you get there, then you have subjective experiences of consciousness. I mean, subjective experiences of like weird stuff and dimensions and like astral travel and all that shit. That's like super weird. So let's, I want to return back. to the base, we'll build our way up. Yeah. You mentioned how, and I've, you know, very much so felt this throughout my own practices,

how there's something inherently pleasurable about the concentrated mind. Okay. And when you spoke to one-pointed focus and single-pointed focus, and you look a little bit more macro in terms of society and throughout culture, how is the theft of our attention causing and, like, depriving our sense of self-awareness? Yeah, it's great. So once again, I'm going to answer a slightly different question. So let's talk about attention, why people are unhappy.

One point in this. We'll get there. You've got all right pieces. I love it. I'm going to just reframe a little bit if that's okay. Feel free to you at any point in the future. Let me know if this is annoying. Is this annoying?

Okay. No, just, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about, first of all, let me ask you, when you say one point in mind is pleasurable. Yes. What's up with that? Being concentrated on something is much more inherently pleasant in my own internal experience. Why?

Because I suppose it's not distracted. which usually is unpleasant. There's a subtle feeling, I suppose, of anxiety inherent and a distracted mind. Okay, cool. So let's like tunnel down into that a little bit. When you are anxious, what is going on in your mind? It's scattered, so it's jumping from place to place.

Okay. Let me know if this is inappropriate. Have you had an orgasm before? Once or twice. Okay. So when you have an orgasm, what is going on in your mind? Nothing. Okay.

Right. So you're presumably focused or even in this transcendent state. So if we sort of think about it like orgasm, and I know this sounds vulgar, but literally if you look at the meditative text, they describe orgasm as one of the four ways to spontaneously achieve samadhi, which is like a temporary state of enlightenment, right? And why do we all feel so good, hopefully, presumably? Right. So if we look at it, orgasm is like a really quick way to get a completely one point in mind. And if exactly what you said, the more anxious. you are. So what I've observed as a psychiatrist is that the speed, flow, and direction of your thoughts is like all of those are amplified when we're anxious, when we're depressed. Even in terms of psychosis, someone's mind is not calm. So a calm mind usually means a one-pointed mind. So orgasm is usually the thing that people connect to the most easily. But then also in like a flow state, it's less than, it's less one-pointed in a flow state because your mind still is doing multiple, it's doing one thing at a time, but it moves from one thing to another to another.

So what we sort of notice is that one pointedness of attention feels good. And complete one pointedness of attention feels blissful. Okay. So that's why like people love orgasm. Flow state feels really good, but there's a gap there. So there are ways to achieve the one pointedness of orgasm in your daily life. And that's when you have 45 minute orgasms. but you're not having sex.

You just have these profound positive experiences, which I think in the Eastern tradition we call samadhi. But I think if you look at those states, like literally there is a mechanism in your body for you to produce the subjective bliss of orgasm. Whatever that mechanism is, somehow gets activated by certain spiritual practices and certain spiritual trainings.

This is why we call enlightenment bliss. So it's like, it's weird because we call it Anand, which means bliss. We also call it enlightenment, which means knowledge, right? We also call it things like freedom, moksha, liberation. But like liberation, knowledge, and bliss are not like in the same ballpark, but there is. There is one state that is all the essence of all three of those things. Now let's talk about technology. Okay, so that's the background. So what does technology do? The first thing that it does is it diffuses our attention. So we love technology because it concentrates our attention for a little while. Right. So when I'm like watching a,

fantastic TikTok about like a cat meowing in a really cute way, my mind becomes completely one-pointed on that. So over time, what we're actually doing is the mind becomes weakened because the one-pointed is triggered by a sensory experience. Okay. So I'd say that like forcing your mind to focus is hard. Getting it to focus automatically is really easy. But the more that I take the elevator, the weaker my legs get. So what's happening is the more we use technology, the more our mind becomes weakened in terms of focusing. And that's literally what we see. So if we look at increases in anxiety, increases in depression, increases in loneliness, literally we have a society of people that cannot control their attention. What they hate more than anything else is boredom. And everything is

boring except for TikTok. And the moment that you lose control of your attention, then if you have anxious thoughts, you cannot rein them in. The moment you have depressive thoughts, So then what happens is like I can't control my attention. So if I start to think anxious thoughts, start to think depressive thoughts, I go down a rabbit hole of that kind of stuff. The only way I can get out of it is to watch another TikTok. So now this feels bad to be anxious. I want to run away from my anxiety. I'm going to turn to my phone.

Then once again, the phone pulls my attention away from all of the negativity. So now what's happening is it's almost like a mental cycle of becoming addicted to opiates where my body hurts. I have to take a pill to make it go away. But the more opiates that I take, the more it alters my mu receptors and the more sensitive to pain I become, the more dependent I become. So what we're sort of seeing is like addiction to technology because there is a weakening of our attentional capability. And then if we're not using the technology, we're suffering.

And the only antidote we have is this. So we turn to this again and then we get weaker and weaker and weaker. And we're really hitting like a critical state here, which is why we have like, you know, mental health, epidemiology, there's like global pandemics of loneliness, suicidality, anxiety, depression, all these things are getting really bad. And I think it's due to this fundamental attentional loss. In respect to the remedy for this and how we can cultivate practices that directly support us to have a more concentrated mind throughout our life, is Trataka or what practices would really support people to be able to instill as a daily habit throughout their life that can,

you know, have them. So basically, I'm going to answer in two ways. One is, it doesn't matter. So any practice that trains your focus is going to help. So dharana is like a focusing practice. So meditating on something.

And with that fundamental, let's get to fundamentals, okay? So dharana is when you tell your mind to do something. It's like training a dog, you tell it, I'm going to look at this. And the mind is like, I don't want to look at that. And then you pull it back, like a leash.

You pull it back, you pull it back. You pull it back. That's the fundamental thing. that needs to be trained. And this is what we know from like studies, like FMRI studies and EEG studies on various types of meditation, that that's the common element is like restraining our mind.

So that's one thing. So the reason I like Thratica for a couple of reasons. One is that Thratica is interesting enough from a sensory practice and is not just focusing on your breath. So it's a different like anchor. So a lot of our like energy is in our eyes. We're very like visually focused.

Now, if you look at cell phone usage, like, you know, sure, people listen to audio books, but we're using our eyes a lot. We're like a very eye heavy society. So I think that's a good alumina or like pillar to use. So I like using the eyes. It feels cool to do. It also feels challenging in a way that evokes some good, like, ego activation because I want to be able to stare at a candle flame without closing my eyes.

That feels badass. It's very easy to get like a sense of accomplishment when you like do it. for a long time. The other thing that's really good about Thratica is it gives people a very quick example of a sensory experience that is that technology cannot give them. So we think that there are seven colors that the human eye can visualize. If you do Thratica, you will easily realize there are more seven, more than seven colors that we can see, which sounds like a wild statement. But when you do Unthar Thratica, which is you stare at a candle flame for somewhere between one in five minutes without blinking, then you close your eyes and you'll see colors in your mind

that are not quite the same colors that we can see in the visual spectrum. It's like a negative inversion of it. Yep, exactly, right? So it looks like a negative. So it's this weird, purplish, greenish, bluish. It's absolutely a color, but it's not like a regular color that you can see. So those are three of the reasons that I like it. So it's something that feels different from breath meditation, which people get bored of.

It's not really mindfulness. It's like kind of like feels badass. It's challenging to do. do, and it feels difficult to do in a non-boring way. Like, you really have to strain yourself. And then the fifth reason that I've never explained to anyone is that Thrataka is also a Shuddi practice for the Aghya chakra. So that means it's a cleansing practice for your third eye, which means that if you do

Thratica, we don't tell people this, but if you do Thratica, their connection to the intuition and the Brahman and their own understanding of their problems will decrease. Or sorry, increase. So they will, like, start to realize they're doing wrong things in their life. So it'll push them in the direction of spiritual growth, whether they like it or not. Sweet. I'm really looking forward to exploring that and topics around intuition and whatnot. Hey, everyone, we'll get right back to Dr. Kay. I hope you're loving it. I know I did. I wanted to share something with you all that's really changed the way I look at my health.

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or use code Know Thyself 100 at sign up to own your health. As always, you can go to know byselfpodcast.com slash partners and find them there as well. I hope you enjoy it back to the episode. Since we're here, do you, what are your thoughts on how our thoughts are being commoditized and bought and sold in this neuroeconomic kind of fashion? Because when you, when you dig deeper into this, you see like this sort of matrix and how our attention in our mind and our thoughts are constantly being shaped and fought for. And so, yeah, what do you think is important to remind people have there. So I think the first thing to understand is that our attention is being farmed. Okay? So like literally, we have become attention forms. So if you look at like ad revenue from a

platform, how does any like social media, TikTok, YouTube, whatever, how do they make money? They make money by having your attention. So they generate advertising revenue. The other thing that people in advertising have understood for a long time is if I can control your sensory organs, I can control your wants. So what we're starting to see is that you as a human being have one resource, which is probably the most valuable thing you have in your whole life, which is your attention. If you can focus your attention on a book and a study guide, you will get an A. If you can focus your attention on work, you will make money. If you get distracted, your attention is literally like the most valuable thing. And if other people can get your attention, if they can get your eyes, if they can

get your attention, they can get you to buy things, they can make money. So literally, like, the most valuable thing you've got is your attention. So the reclamation of our attention is essentially the reclamation of our life. Absolutely. Right. And that's like in a very literal sense. I don't mean that metaphorically. It's like, in right now what we're seeing is that people have claimed your attention. And once they have your attention, algorithms start this process of like what's called online radicalization happens to everyone. It's called online drift, actually. So over time, like, your thoughts will be shaped by these algorithms and then you'll vote a particular way. You'll get angry with a particular group of people.

And so the key thing that's going on there is like, first of all, they're shaping your attention 100%. You're losing control of your life, right? Because you don't want to spend six hours on TikTok, but like you end up doing it anyway and you're not even sure how or why. So what's happening is as people take control of your attention, they're taking control of your life, they're inducing certain kinds of behaviors. they're making money, your life is objectively getting worse. And I mean objectively as in this correlates with increases in mood disorders and anxiety, things like that, loneliness, suicidality. So it's like terrible.

Anthropologically, what does losing our idle time and this continual numbing of negativity lead to individually and on a bigger scale as well? I mean, anthropologically, I can't answer. Okay. But I can tell you psychiatrically, neurologically, or spiritual. Right? So, and you got to let me know if I'm being. and asks about like poking at your question.

I just, I'm trying to be a little bit precise. I don't, I'm not trying. No, it's good. I think they're great questions. So what was the question again? Losing idle time, numbing negativity. So, you know, idle time is really important. So I think a really good example of the value of idle time is dreams.

So when our brain gets to idle, we have dreams. So if you literally look at the way that we sleep, we have four stages of sleep and then we enter REM sleep. And at the beginning of the night, you're like mostly stage one. and at the end of the night, as you go through multiple sleep cycles, the percentage of your REM sleep increases. So the first two hours that you sleep, you get maybe five to 10 minutes of REM sleep.

The last two hours you get way more. I don't know exactly what the number is. I'd guess 30 to 45 minutes. So when we look at REM time, REM sleep, what's going on? That's when we dream. We see a lot of emotional activation. So your brain in the same way that like if you eat something, your gut is going to pull out the good stuff

and literally discard the bad stuff. So our mind does that as well, our brain does that as well, and it does a lot of emotional processing with idle time. So when your brain, when you're idle, your brain is not idle. It's not like, you know, the blood flow to your brain decreases when you're doing nothing. It actually stays about the same, even increases rapidly when you're like literally asleep and not doing anything. So idle time is time that the brain uses to clean things out, especially things like emotional processing, consolidating things into memory. And so I think what we're starting to see,

getting to your question of like anthroposciately, what's happening. As the idle time of our mind decreases, we are no longer processing the emotions of every day. So I'll give you an example of what I mean. So like back in the day, we would go hunting and you and I would go hunting. And like, let's say like I shoot my arrow and I miss the deer.

And then you shoot your arrow and then you hit the deer. And then I feel, I'm like, damn, that Andre guy, he's better looking, his hair is better, he's better with accuracy, this girl that I like is going to like him more. And then you and I, we're carrying the deer and we walk back to our camp and we've got two hours from my mind to do nothing. Basically, it emotionally processes on its own. And we know this because the brain has the ability to attain homeostasis. That's what we do.

And we do homeostasis with emotions as well. Emotions don't last forever. They normally just equilibrate. And my favorite example of this, which I've said a thousand times, is like, The perfect wedding day doesn't last for a lifetime. The happiness of a perfect wedding day does not last for a lifetime, right? You were happy, you had a great birthday party

when you're seven. It's not like you're still happy. So emotions just naturally go away. So in the past, what used to happen is we would process those emotions, they'd go away and then I'd be okay by the time we get to camp. Now what's going on is that throughout the day,

we have no idle time. So when I have idle time, I pick up my phone. When I pick up my phone, it both suppresses certain emotions, and once emotions get suppressed, they do not get processed. So I'm storing them away like in my unconscious.

And then it also evokes other emotions. So when I'm looking at it, you'll notice this if you look at your like algorithms, you're not going to feel good all the time. They're going to show you something that makes you feel really good. And then next they're going to show you something that pisses you off. And then they're going to make you feel good and they're going to make you feel bad. They're going to make you feel all kinds of things. Because what these algorithms are figuring out, I don't think it's like intentionally evil,

by the way. I think they're just learning that the more engaged you, you stay with something is the more emotionally activated you get. So now what's happening is we have a life where something bad happened at work, but instead of processing it, I'm using my device, which is evoking more emotions and suppressing those emotions so they don't get processed. And then over time, these emotions just pile up, pile up, pile up. And that's why we see like societal depression, societal anxiety.

You know, South Korea's birth rate is super low because people like, I think on some level, They don't have the capacity to, like, fall in love anymore. Like, that's, like, a foreign thing. Even if we look at dating nowadays, like, people don't fall in love very easily anymore. So there are huge negative effects of losing our idle time because our brain used to use that. When you think about the accumulation of these impressions that are subconscious is always recording and taking for and is not having space to express or to process, what is the direct

spiritual cost down the line of not letting these impressions sort of rise to the surface and stay out. Like, what happens as they start to continue to accumulate over years and decades? So spiritually and scientifically, I'd say, so I'm going to use spiritual language, but I'd say bad karma. Okay. So anytime you have some event happen in life, so if I get, since you got the deer and I didn't, now I have like, you're a winner and I'm a loser, right? So this is like a polarity that has been created of like, you're good and I'm bad. That karma needs to be reversed, right? So once I feel like a loser, literally,

I can go to psychotherapy and I can have a therapist process that so I no longer feel like a loser. We all know that that's a thing, right? But we're basically correcting that karma. And I think psychotherapy and stored emotions is just one example. If I stop doing this, I'm going to accumulate a lot of what I would call in spiritual language, negative karma. And that's absolutely scientifically like parallel.

by emotional suppression leads to all kinds of negative outcomes, leads to a sense of hopelessness, leads to a sense of lack of self-efficacy, which in turn will then carmically, like if I feel like I'm hopeless and I can't do anything, my median income will decline, my relationships will worsen. So it's basically a massive accumulation of bad karma because we're not balancing it.

We're not fixing that karma. And that bad karma or accumulation there, would you say directly links to our experience of suffering in life? technically no, but practically yes. So what that bad karma is going to do, the suffering is in a sense independent, but technically there are ways to not link those things, but I think practically yes.

So if I feel like a loser, and then I don't believe that I'm capable of something, that will have ripple effects for tomorrow, the next day, the next day, the next day, the next day, and then generally speaking, the amount of suffering in my life will increase. If anyone is watching this and you know that if you don't take care of,

of a problem, it almost never goes away and it almost always becomes worse. Right. So like anytime you do not settle your karmic debts, they're going to come back again and again. And what we're seeing in society is a cycle of avoidance of like carmic debt. So now like this thing is going wrong. I'm going to run away from it. And the more that you run away from it, the more the negative karma piles up. And then you get trapped in the cycle. And this is what like my patients come to me with sometimes is they're just getting, they're getting it from all sides. They're getting crushed at work, in romantic relationships, at home. They feel depressed.

Their body isn't working right. They've got weird autoimmune things. So all this negative karma is piling up because you're not settling it. Because I know you support and work with so many young men. What have you observed in regards to the lack of rights of passages, alexathemia, digital isolation? Like what is it specifically with young men that they in this generation are prone to suffer because of these different things.

I noticed that you had a couple of different anchors in that question. Because I think there's a lot of conflating different contributing factors to the, like, depression and suicidal rates and young men and all these things. And so what do you feel is most prevalent to speak to here? I know Alexothymia is something that you speak to, but as it relates to everything we just covered with the lack of attention. So I think there's a couple of different things going on. The first is that I think the core of the problem,

is that men have become spiritually bereft. There's no like spirituality within men generally anymore. So what started to happen, I think that's the core of the problem. And as men that I work with, like in the back of my mind, what I'm always thinking about is how do I get this person spiritually connected? Because the moment that happens, all kinds of positive things start to come about. So what does that even look like? What do I mean by spiritually bereft? So there's so many dudes out there who don't know what the fuck they're doing.

So they don't feel good. They don't know what they want. And since they don't really know what they want, they like look to other people and they're like, I think I want this. I think I want cars. I think I want to get laid. I mean, the number of men I've worked with who are in cells and virgins and will go to a prostitute because they like, I'm tired of being a virgin. I don't want to be a virgin anymore. They'll go to a prostitute.

It's not like their problems get fixed. They get worse. So there's like a group of people who like have no compass. So then they go in this direction. they're like, oh, this thing will make me happy. This thing will make me happy. But when they say they want that, their heart isn't in it. So they're not able to work hard enough to achieve anything.

So then they feel like burnt out and they try to force themselves. They try to learn efficiency. They try to learn optimization. They long for discipline. They want willpower. None of that stuff is going to save them. So like, I'm not a fan of development. I don't have discipline.

I don't have willpower. I don't think you need it. I know it's crazy. But if you like are inspired and passionate, And all of the people that they want to mimic, and they think, like, okay, if I become a CEO, if I do this, then I will be happy. All the people that they want to mimic are driven by something that's completely different. So I think that there's a lack of, first of all, understanding what they want.

Now, why is that? That's for two reasons. One is men are elixothymic. So what that means is that they're colorblind to their internal emotional state. So we suppress basically all of our emotions except for anger. Therefore, we don't know how we feel. And so in the absence of that internal compass, we fill in that void through our perception. So then I look, when I don't feel like doing anything, I look around, I'm like, what is this

guy eating? Oh, that guy looks like he's having fun. Maybe I'll eat that too, and then maybe I'll have fun. But I'm not going based on what appeals to me. I'm copying other people, which is why I think the podcast space has exploded so much because there's a lot of people there who are directionless. who are looking for wisdom, looking for guidance. I'm not saying the podcast space is bad.

I think you're doing great work. I'm guilty of being in that space too. Right? So I think they're not internally connected. They're emotionally colorblind. So then they fill it with like these external perceptions. And then when they try to do those things, the internal fire isn't there.

So then they fail. They don't follow through. They kind of end up back to square one. Then they go looking for discipline, but that isn't going to give them passion. And so I think this is basically what's going on is like men are looking for answers. But what they really need is direction.

Like they need to find that internal direction. And that they're not connected to either. What do you think as the utility you could focus on with young men, but generally as a human being, the balance and necessity of the transcendental meditation work and what you could say is waking up versus the growing up and the shadow work. So yeah, how do you think of that,

both through the therapeutic lens and the meditative lens, as how they support things that the other doesn't? So I think it's an issue of sequencing usually. So if you look at like transcendental meditation, I don't mean like the Maharashi Maheshiyahashi yogi. I mean transcendental experiences through meditation. There are a couple of, there's some really interesting literature

from old stuff about this, but generally speaking, most people will get there by fixing their lives first. So a lot of the successful people that I work with, they got everything they wanted in life. And they're still not happy. So then they come to me and they're like,

I'm depressed. And I'm like, okay, like, what are you depressed about? And they're like, I don't really know. I just don't feel good, but I have everything that I want. My family is good. My career is good. I have plenty of money.

Like, I just don't know what I want. So even if you look at sort of this eastern system of moksha and how to attain enlightenment, it's Dharma, Arta, Kama moksha. So, Dharma means do your duty. Artha means get wealthy. Kama means engage in pleasure. And then enlightenment comes last. So you kind of can't meditate on an empty stomach.

It's very hard to. And so for a lot of people, people, what I find is when I work with them. So I had a patient come into my office one day after about working together for two years. And he says, Dr. Kay, like, we've been working and he's been making, we had a couple of breakthroughs. He's doing way better in his life. He's like, I'm still depressed. I feel like I'm not any better than I used to be. And then I said, what do you mean by depressed? And he's like, well, and then I sort of assess him clinically. Are you having trouble getting out of bed? Are you going to work? Are you like in your relationship? He's like, relationship is fine.

I'm not tired when I wake up. I'm just depressed at the end of the day. And I was like, bro, you're not depressed, you're unhappy. There's a difference. So if we look at shadow work, healing, trauma, all that kind of stuff, you got to fix all that stuff first, right? So there's like fixing your car and then there's driving to the top of the mountain. So I kind of see it as sequential usually. So oftentimes as a psychiatrist, what I'll do is when someone comes in, I will treat their

depression first. And then we cross this like midpoint where now we were going from negative 100 to zero. we're fixing what is broken. And for that, things like shadow work and stuff like that is very important. But once we cross that zero, once you're kind of healed, then you start the spiritual journey of zero to 100. Exceptionalism, like, not optimization, but becoming what you're really meant to be, like starting to flower.

Like you got to fix yourself first and then you can build something. I like that conceptualization of getting to baseline being zero, then doing that work. what is that distinction between being unhappy and depressed? Because you mentioned there was a difference there. Yeah. So, I mean, depression is a pathologic state, right? It is a sickness of the mind. So, and happiness, like, you can be not depressed and unhappy.

Like, you can be at, like, neutral. But there's nothing wrong with you. I'd say, actually, that's where most people are, is that there's nothing wrong with you. So if we look at depression, what do I mean by pathology of the mind? Is people who are depressed will have a cognitive disqualification. that, oh, my family would be better off if I was dead. They wouldn't have to deal with me.

This is where suicidality comes from. You know, I had a patient who would keep a noose in his basement and like his family loved him. He had a great family. But he's like, you know, just like, just in case like, you know, if I ever become a real shitter, then I can just hang myself and my family will be fine, right? Like, they'll be better off without me. Like, so that's what I mean by depression. It is a pathologic in nature, has a lot of cognitive distortions, a lot of cognitive biases.

But even if we get rid of that, you can be functionally working really well. Like, you're not sick. Your mind is not distorted, but you're unhappy. Does that kind of make sense? And I think what really confuses people is, you know, half the people who come into my office are not depressed. They're unhappy. But the language that we use is depression.

Yeah. The other really interesting example of this is there are some people who are depressed, but it is still not pathologic because they genuinely have bad lives. So if you have a really objectively bad life and you are sad, that is not a malfunction of the mind. That is an appropriate reaction to your circumstances. And I think helping those people is very different. Generally speaking, SSRIs and medications and things like that,

I do not recommend in those cases. You have to build a life that's worth living. Yeah, I think what is so appreciated in the Eastern healing kind of modalities as they treat people as the individual that they are. And so, like, when you speak to this being a sequential process, which varies depending on if you have generally a bad life or you need to more focus on your shadow work, yeah, that's really important. I'd like to focus kind of on the zero to 100 now.

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You can always go to know-lyselfpodcast.com slash partners. I hope you enjoy back to the episode with Dr. K. So now we're at baseline. Sure. We're doing our, we've done our shadow work, and we feel generally good. And so what is your model then of raising consciousness from 0 to 100? And I would just, in addition to that, if it's not too much, what is like the actual yardstick for your own degree of enlightenment or unenlightenment?

Sure. So a couple of small nuances. I would say shadow work moves you from zero to 50 specifically. Okay. So let's talk about that for a second. Let's talk about zero to 100. So I think there's pathologic treatment. Okay.

So this is like I'm depressed, I'm suicidal. It's a malfunction of the mind. We can correct those cognitive biases. And by the way, the reason people feel that way is because they have so much suppressed emotion. Like it has to come out. And I'll give you just one example of that real quick. I know you're asking about zero to 100. But just to give people a sense of what the difference is.

So I once had a patient whose parent died of cancer. And so they were left with one parent. And the parent, because they had also lost their spouse, every day after work, would go to the bar for a couple of hours. Like literally two hours would have some beers, would come home and then be a parent. And so when I asked this patient, I was like, you know, how do you feel about your dad, like, who did this? And so he said, well, my dad did the best that he could. So my patient is super compassionate understanding. this guy just lost his wife.

Like, you know, I have a ton of compassion for that. And one day, like, about six weeks in, I sort of realized I was like, you never, when I ask you how your dad did, you don't say he did a good job. You say he did the best that he could. Did your dad do a good job? And this was like a really important moment because, like, you know, he didn't do a good job. So here's my patient who's lost one parent to cancer. And then the other parent is like not even coming home after work. So the parent needs to be doing twice the parenting.

They need to be doing the parenting of two. And they're out at a bar for two hours. Like, sure, they're having their struggle. They can have their struggle and do a bad job for you. So this kind of, like, guilt at being mad at their dad had been so deep in subsurface that it was creating this constant sense of depression. So once we, like, broke out of that, then they started to feel better. Does that kind of make sense?

So that's what, like, healing those deep wounds can look like. Now, shadow work is a little bit different. we can say can get you from zero to 50. And the reason for that is because in life, in order to progress, we take parts of ourselves and we amputate them. Okay. So like, there is no doubt in my mind, Andre, that I have done something to piss you off today.

Are you pissed off at me? No. Why not? You're a nice guy. I'm enjoying our conversation. Okay. So see, like, it's interesting. And also there's a moment experience.

At an experiential moment doesn't have to persist into a continual experience. Great. So you just gave me the answer that I was looking for because it means I pissed you off today. Okay? So let me repeat back your words. You're a nice guy. I agree. I'm a nice guy.

Is it okay for you to be pissed off at nice guys? No. Right? So if I'm an asshole, then you can be pissed off at me. So already there's a slight separation. Second thing that you said, not the second thing, third thing you said is even if I'm upset with you in a moment, I don't have to let that become my future. I don't have to let this moment of frustration become my future because you're,

Andre, you're so spiritually developed, right? So you're not going to hold on to that. But if we really pay attention to what you said there, absolutely I pissed you off. I'm not saying I did, but just play with you. Maybe I'm doing it now. So, so you know. Damn it. Right?

Right. So you're spiritually developed. So you're like, you let go of the pissed off, but we, but it's still happened. So if we look at that right there, so you're a very high functioning, well functioning, kind, good, spiritually developed human being. Keep going. But in that process of becoming a host, right? So like you've hosted me in a very beautiful, loving, caring way, you have to take

parts of yourself and you've got to wall them off. And what generally happens is if we really want to achieve 100%, we cannot wall off a single part of ourselves. So the totality of success and perfection in our life requires. requires a totality of like being, right? You can't lop off anything. So if we sort of think about, you know, courage and fearlessness, courage is acknowledging that you have fear. And someone who is courageous will outperform someone who is fearless. Someone who's ignorant and doesn't acknowledge they have fear or has no fear, won't take their enemy seriously, like they'll get stuck in

situations where their arrogance, like causes them problems. Whereas courage requires fear to have, you have to have an acknowledgement of that. And that fear is important information too. It's a warning, it's a danger. So shadow work is like the sacrifices that we make to become successful undoing those sacrifices. So as we, you know, when I was, take your pick of age, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 26, 28, I was always told that I should be a doctor, right? And there were certain things that I wanted in life that I walled off. And so I made sacrifices to become a doctor. And now I'm re-engaging in those things. So shadow work moves us from zero to 50. It's about reintegrating the parts of ourselves that we lopped off in order to get as far as we have. Another interesting, I guess, texture of that

could be the frightened parts of ourselves that has become so identified and has now masqueraded as their voice of reason. So like we can have these alienated parts of ourselves, but then also like the ones that are, I feel like a little bit more tricky to navigate is the ones where we're literally like looking through the world as them. And so what do you think about those? in regards to the shadow work. Tell me about yours. Let's see. That statement sounds like it comes from experience.

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's many, let me see, there's many different things that could come to mind. I would say, like many people who first kind of moved to L.A., and especially stepping into more of what you might say as a spiritual or personal development space, there can become this subconscious pedestalization and importance on appearance of the thing. Like, in all the topics of life, one could say the spiritually focused topics and individuals, like, could be the most attractive thing in a sense.

Absolutely. And so I think in different parts of my path, I've kind of conflated spiritual knowledge, information, and appearance of well-being with actual superiority. And so when looking through that lens, you don't realize, I didn't realize I was like doing it. Great. But through the reflection of others, through my men's group, through conversations on this podcast, I kind of get to see myself in a mirror and reflection and see those parts, I guess, more accurately. Beautifully said. So we're going to have you answer the question. Okay.

You've already started us off. We're halfway there. So when you say see myself, well, actually first you said, I look through this lens. is that lens? Let's be precise with our language. What is the lens? That lens specifically is, well, fundamentally inadequacy in a sense. Okay, great. So the lens is not actually inadequacy. Sure. Okay. So inadequacy is tied to what? This is the lens that you're looking through. And it's interesting because you use the language of see myself through others' eyes. So what are we talking? What is the lens? With a moment that it gets corrected when you see yourself through

other's eyes, right? It gets corrected through spiritual practice. So what is the lens? It's ego. Yeah. It's Ahamgar. Yeah. So Ahamqad is the sense of I. You cannot be inadequate except without comparison. Yeah. In order to make a comparison, there has to be a you and there has to be a we.

Right. I don't wake up today and be like, fucking right hand, you're so pathetic and left hand, you're so beautiful. They're both part of me. The moment that I separate them out and I elevate one and I decrease the other, that is a literal a scientific function of the Aham Gata or the ego. So this is what you're talking about is basically attachment. with ego. The more you are attached to your ego, and this is when you talk about, you know, spirituality and the ego in the spiritual realm, which one of my teachers was awesome. He said, there's two kinds of ego.

There's regular ego, and then there's the ego of having no ego, right? Which is the most distasteful. I am so, I'm egoless. I am so enlightened. I'm above everybody else. Look at all these, this guru is so popular, but I know more than them. I'm, right? So that's all ego. And now we're really getting there, right? So shadow work will take you to zero to 50. And then if you want to go to 50 to 75, you must eliminate your, or get rid of your Aham God for the most part,

or get control of it, we should say. Right. So the question, I don't remember what your original question was, but I think like, you know, when do we get caught up in stuff? And the language, I want you to go back and like, you know, rewind and listen to the language that you used

because it's the language of ego. So I see myself through the perspective of me, me, me. And the moment that I step out of that, through spiritual practice, which deactivates the default mode networks or the sense of self disappears. Now I can see myself as an object, right? I'm not attached to it. Or when I see myself through other people, when I utilize empathy, now I'm putting myself

in the other shoes, but I'm seeing myself from the outside. Once again, so these are all mechanisms that will give you perspective on your ego. When we are trapped within ego, we don't realize that it's ego. Like if I talk to a narcissist and a narcissist is like, this person did it wrong and this person did it wrong and this, I'm surrounded by assholes. If you're surrounded by assholes, like, you're the common denominator, right? So that attachment with ego is what blinds us to the perspective. And it's so interesting because the examples that you gave in your personal life are all examples of stepping outside of ego. Spiritual practice, conversations through broadcast, new perspectives.

It's all ego related. Yeah, it's interesting because we could really think of this as a linear process. but I think it comes in waves and, you know, we're using the easy terminology of 50, 0 to 50 and 50 to 75. It's fascinating with these different parts of our identity that we're unconscious to the process of which we're looking through our ego. And it's so slippery. And once we think we've gotten beyond it to a certain degree, it's right there in some other contexts often. Yeah, well said. So that's a really brilliant thing.

So like, it's interesting, right? So when we think we've conquered it, it tricks us again. The thought that I've conquered my ego is easy. Exactly. That's the mechanism of tricking you. Right? So the moment you say to yourself, I've conquered it. That's your ego telling you, hey, you're getting really good at finding me.

You're getting really good at controlling me. I don't like that. I'm going to tell you that you've won. So you stop fighting the battle. Yeah, it's an interesting matrix of mind that we live in. I just think also through the process of maturation and coming to a place of feeling safe within our own experience, like these things start to bubble up to the surface. Is that been your experience working with people? Like, is the safety, the kind of the precursor to being able to perceive and heal and let go of these things?

I mean, if you work with someone besides me, sure. So, like, I will make you unsafe. Uh-huh. Right? Like, what am I doing with you? I don't feel threatened in any context. Good. I'm glad.

Right? So do some shadow work, and then we'll talk again. I don't feel threatened. I'm fucking with you, man. So, but, I mean, I think that honestly, my approach tends to be, like, challenging, unsafe, you know, the most common, the best feedback that I get from my community is I feel personally attacked. So I think we actually live in a world where we like, I know this is going to sound crazy,

but like we prioritize safety too much. So what is the, why would you want to be safe, Andre? Like in a situation, I'm not talking like, I'm going to mug you, you know, but like, why is safety? I would say maybe if through the lens of comfort, then we don't have to face off with the fearful parts of ourselves, the things. But that's contrary to. are the works that we need to do.

No, exactly. But that's why I use a language of comfort. I think there is you, whether or not you admit it, create a safe space even for confrontation to occur. And so maybe you don't agree so, but it seems like when you work with individuals, there is an inherent, hey, I'm with you along this process. And even if I'm confronting you with something, we're getting at truth here. And it's not me against you.

It's us for looking at this neuroses together. It beautifully said. So I rescind my earlier statement. I defer to your precision of language. Love the fact that you use the word comfort. So the reason, and I think you're 100% correct. So what I try to offer people is compassion. But I think the word safety, just like, I mean, love it, love it, love it, love it, love it.

Which is people conflate safety with comfort. So I remember when I was working at Harvard and stuff, I one day talked to the head of security at MIT. And then I was talking to him about safety on campus. And, you know, one thing that he told me really stuck with me, which was like, it's my job to make students safe, not make them feel safe. Those are two very different things. Huge distinction.

Huge, right? And so love the precision in your language that, yeah, when I heard the word safety, I thought about comfort, right? That's oftentimes people, when they, when we talk about safety, we oftentimes mean comfort. it's very interesting too because through the pleasure of this podcast I've been able to meet a lot of great spiritual teachers and gurus and sages however you want to describe and where does that leave you I'm serious just a humble student on the path no the reason I bring it up is because there are so many different textures of teachers some that are extremely loving and others that are very intense and fierce and it's easy from the mind to place judgment on on what somebody's intentions are or how spiritually awakened they are.

But I think in developing our capacity to pay attention to the subtleties, we can actually see how, yeah, it's just what you mentioned. What's important is that you actually wake up, that you are safe, not that you feel safe in a sense. Yeah, so I think there's so much good stuff there. One is an awareness of your reactions, right? So your vasanas, your mental conditioning will cause you to react to someone in a particular way.

And so awareness of that kind of thing. The one thing that I would push you a little bit on is just because you make a judgment doesn't mean that it's wrong. Of course. You know, so like I think there are many people also in the spiritual realm who will say like, oh, like I'm being judgmental, therefore it is bad. Therefore, I will let the guru take advantage of me because that is. Yeah, yeah. There's a middle way here. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that unfortunately in the spiritual capitalism that we live in, there are plenty of false gurus. Can you speak to that? Because this wellness industry, I mean, depending on how you look at it, is a $4,000 trillion industry, and there is this capitalistic notion of spirituality.

Where does that go wrong in so many ways? So I think it basically, it gets hijacked. So I think this is when it goes wrong. One really common pattern is someone who has some degree of spiritual development that is authentic. Then the ego, so the problem with spiritual development is that it gets harder over time, not easier. We have this idea that as I become more

competent, I get better. So my experience has been the opposite, that the more developed you become, the harder things get. So it's kind of like climbing to the top of Mount Everest. Like once you climb the first 10,000 feet, like it's hard, but the next 10,000 feet is harder. The next 10,000 feet is even harder. This is where we get. And then I think subtler forms of ego come into play. Right. So There's a regular ego. Then there's the ego of having no ego. Then we get to the super dangerous territory of Siddi's. You know what Siddi is?

Yeah. So once you develop Sidthes, it becomes really hard to navigate in the world. What are those for people that don't know? Sidthes are, I guess you could call them psychic powers. So this is my favorite. So what I love about westernization of spirituality is we like talk. We love the part that we understand. And we just wipe away.

the rest of it. And there's this bizarre cultural appropriation that's going on with spirituality. So Butanjali's yoga, yoga, right? So everyone's like Ashtanga yoga, eight-limbed yoga. Yoga's great. Yoga's great. There's scientific studies on yoga. And Bethanjali sort of like wrote the Bible of yoga, I guess, in the West, people kind of call it that, right? But he has the third chapter of his book. So he talks about what is an asana, what is a yoga posture, what is the mind? Like, there's this conscious, the right knowledge, wrong knowledge. Basically everything is like super scientific, super acceptable. And then he's got a very small section, chapter three of his, his text is like really small.

It's the shortest one. And he's like, by the way, here are all the psychic powers you can develop. Here's time travel. Here's conquering death. Here is teleportation. Here's these things. And he says, here are the ways you develop them and don't get distracted by them. And it's just like this tiny little thing.

It's like an aside. He's not saying like, if you pay this exclusive price for this workshop, I'm going to teach you to you. He's like, by the way, if you do all the shit. at the beginning, and you do pranam and you do all these spiritual practices, these things will happen. It is a warning. Just don't mess around with it.

Right. So as you get better and better and better, and as Siddi's and things like that develop, like it becomes harder, not easier. So like, and people, and it's because it's so hard, right? Because if people are like, if I had a billion dollars, I would start fixing things. And if you develop a Siddi,

your capacity to make the world a better place becomes way easier. but it has all kinds of like negative stuff that goes with it because then suddenly like I am saving things and who am I how like it's kind of weird but you can even judge yourself where like if I could save someone and I don't what does that make me so that the ego that you deal with become subtler and subtler and subtler and there's also an element of shakhti there that the moment that you externalize your shakhth so I can add money to buy bank account I get compound interest I become a millionaire I have 10 million dollars the moment that I start spending huge swaths of money, my bank account will drop. So there's also a process on the spiritual road of like as you grow and as you progress,

you're building this like mountain of compound spiritual interest money stuff, energy, shakhti stuff. And if you start expending it and the utilization of Siddh, it will expend a gigantic amount of money. And we can talk about why that is and what happens and stuff. So that's why it's particularly dangerous from ego to ego. of no ego to that part of the cities, is that could go wrong very quickly in a sense. Very quickly, right? So the higher you are,

the easier it is to fall and the more that it hurts. So I think in the spiritual capitalism realm, we have people who are not quite grifters, but I think they understand spiritual things, Vidya, but they haven't, like, done the work. Then you'll have people who have done the work. And then since the lineage of gurus is basically sort of like, not broken,

but it's like hard to find now. You have a lot of people who don't have proper guidance. And so they fall off the path, even though they accomplish, they fall off the path very easily. And then you have the people who don't fall off the path,

but they're rare. And it's usually hard to find, let's say. We'll say most of them are not in the public eye, I would say. Not that it's not possible, but very few of them probably have an Instagram. Yeah. But some of them do.

Yeah. So I don't think you can make the judgment that just because you have an Instagram doesn't mean that you're not spiritually developed. Yeah. This is one of those things where it's hard to externally verify, but what do you think is the most clear barometer of actually gauging the, like how true a teacher is? Yeah. So it's a great question. It's a really, really challenging thing. So I have developed my own internal scientific rubric using multivariate regression analysis to spot a fake guru.

Okay. Okay. So. What the hell does that mean? Okay, great. So let's talk about science, right? So like I said, people who do the spiritual stuff are not trained in multivariate regression analysis.

So let's talk about multivariate regression analysis for a second. When we're doing science, we'll do something like a randomized control trial. And then what will do is we'll realize, okay, like, what are the variables that contribute to this outcome? And you can sort of say like, you know, so any studies that say, oh, ADHD is like 50% genetic, that is through multivariate regression analysis. They look at someone who has ADHD. and they look at all the factors that are contributing,

and you can attribute some variables are worth way more than others. That kind of makes sense. Like the equation of ADHD involves 50% genetics, 25% upbringing, 25% like technology use. So the first thing that I would say is the way to spot a fake guru, the only barometer that really works is internal spiritual development. So game recognizes game. Once you know something, like if you're a chef,

you can eat, it doesn't matter, it can be some grandma who's cooking you, an omelet in the middle of like Romania, and you know good food when you see it. Yeah, those who know knows who know. Exactly, right? So that is the most important thing. Second thing is I've noticed that there's a trend of people who will talk a lot

about things that they won't teach you. Okay? So like some people will say like, oh, like, you know, they're like, and there's some amount of they talk a lot about what they know without sharing what they know. And I'm arguably guilty of this as well. But, but, but, but I'm better than everyone. I mean, that's why, like, I don't even pretend to be a guru.

I try really hard to tell people like, I'm not a guru. Like, don't treat me as a guru. I'm just a dude. But I think that that's a really important part where there's a sort of this idea of like, oh, like, there's all this wonderful stuff, but like you have to pay $10,000 to get it. Now, the really tricky thing is that there are some instances. I've had meditation teachers. I've paid everywhere from zero to like five to six figures for meditation training of different

kinds. And I don't think that just because you pay a lot of money means that it's a scam. Right, right. But I think that there's a pattern which is I'm going to talk a lot about the things that I won't tell you. Yeah, but yeah, it's just an interesting point there too, that there's almost this expectation that somebody shouldn't charge for anything like spiritually focused, which I understand where that's coming from, but also, like, spiritual folks aren't supposed to be inept and only live in a cave and not have, not have financial success. Like, I don't know how we

kind of, yeah, separate those too often. So it's an interesting balance of just like... Yeah, so I think that there definitely is this idea. I mean, we see what, we're like, I show up on the internet and I say I'm here to help people. And then if I, like, try to charge anything, then, like, people get really upset. And they're like, if you're helping people, like, why are you charging things? And this is something it's so stupid, but I didn't realize. So I used to do everything for free. And then this, I know this is going to sound crazy, but then I learned the hard way that if you do things for free and you do it for a lot of people, it costs more.

Feeding one person. And there's also probably an inverse relationship to how much people value it. Yeah. There's actually a really beautiful study on that. So I don't remember the reference. I've been looking for it for years. I haven't been able to find it, but I read the study. So it's a great study on fraternities and how much people value the fraternity that you,

join in college, and how much you value the fraternity correlates not with how good the fraternity is. So there are objective measures of how effective it is. Like some fraternities have people who become president of the United States and some people have fraternities that, some fraternities that people don't go anywhere. The number one thing that correlates with people's value of a fraternity is how hard they get haste. So there's one fraternity that is an absolute shit fraternity ties up all their pledges naked on a tree with rope and pisses on them. The people who go through that are the ones who are like, this fraternity is the best. So there's absolutely this, there's a great research that I have been able to find on wine

and prices, where if you blind people to the price of wine, they can tell the difference doing good wine and bad wine, but the moment that you show someone the price, they think more expensive wine is better. So yeah, you're spot on. There's all this stuff around pricing and spirituality and what's worth it. Okay, yeah, I feel like we cover that. I guess just backtracking to like the 75 to 100, like the, you know, the, you know, the, where the rubber meets the road and what you both mentioned in regards to karma and Vassanas.

I'm having a blast. Good. Sorry. I interrupted you, but. Fine. You know, we're picking a momentum. This is fun. This is my sweet spot in life.

I love this so much. But as it relates to karma and Vassanas, in terms of like what's coloring our perception in life, what is the link between the two and what's important to know about how they function for those that want to spiritually grow? Does that make sense? Yeah, so I wouldn't tie that necessarily to 75-200, but let's talk about karma and Vassanas. So fun. Okay.

So first thing is what most people, so everyone who talks about the theory of karma, most of the critics of theory of karma don't really understand one fundamental karma aspect of the theory, which is that 99% of the karma that you and I do is mental. So if we think about what the theory of karma is, karma is one thing, it's scientifically verified, by the way, cause and effect. That's it. They're like, hey, causes have effects. And also, all effects have causes. There's a chain of causality. This is a fundamental feature of existence, right? Which I don't think is like a scientifically wild statement. Okay. So then if you sort of think about it, what is the effect, do thoughts have effects? Do emotions have effects? Yes, absolutely. So we know from like literally this very well

studied thing called cognitive behavioral therapy that if we can intentionally alter your thoughts, your depression will improve. Your anxiety will improve. Your ADHD will improve. Like, things will get better. So most of the karma that we actually do is in our head. Now, we're seeing this in society with, like, online radicalization and people going down the in-cell rabbit hole. Their thoughts are being nurtured in a particular way that creates their life. Okay? That's the first thing. So the second thing is that Avasana is a mental habit. So now we go. to neuroscience for a little bit, that when your neurons fire in a particular way, they're likely to fire in that way again. So once you do something like, if you brush your teeth with your right

hand, you don't wake up tomorrow and brush it with your left hand. So this is what a lot of people don't realize is like, if you look at your life and your life sucks, there is a 99.999% chance that your thinking is habitual. If I take a snapshot of the thoughts that you have on a day and I take a snapshot over 100 days, what I will see will be very different. You're going to wake up in the morning and you think things the same shit. I'm alone.

I'm a virgin. I'm a loser. I'm this. I'm that or whatever, right? And even in a narcissist, I'm great. I don't want to see, I don't want other people to see how ungrate I am. You know, what you'll notice is that you're thinking is like very habitual.

The big mistake that people make is that they think The reason I am thinking this way is because reality is this way. My thoughts are a reflection of reality. So here's the thing. That is not true. If your thoughts were a reflection of reality, I would be farting rainbows right now. So you can think all kinds of things. And this is also where I like, I don't like some of these like visualization people in spiritual capitalism, like manifestation visualization.

Like thinking doesn't get you shit like in life, bluntly. Right? So I can think I want this, I want this, I want to wake up every day, I want to stop playing video games. I was there, didn't get me shit. Maybe your mileage may vary. You may have a more profound mind than I do. But generally speaking, thinking isn't worth a whole lot, right? Most of our thoughts, we have like a bazillion thoughts a day. What is there to show for it? Nothing. So most of our thinking is actually neuronal patterns, which we also know from cognitive behavioral therapy. If you can modify those patterns, your life will change. So in the way that those patterns develop is it's a vasana.

So, sorry, when we think in a particular way over and over and over again, it becomes a habit of our thinking. We think the habit of our thinking reflects reality and it doesn't. So this is the key thing. If you want to break free of this, so first of all, if you break free of it, it's huge because breaking free of your patterns of thinking is literally how people become exceptional. So I once was in this beautiful class on Nobel Prize winning experiments in physiology in medicine. So we just looked at all the experiments that won people Nobel Prizes. The one common

thread of how you went, literally how you win a Nobel Prize is you think in a way that has never been thought before. We all had this habitual way of thinking. This is the way we thought the world worked. The moment that you break out of that pattern, like literally you get a Nobel Prize, I mean, not literally, not every time and for everybody. But if you were a scientist and you see what is in front of you instead of using your prior conceptions of what you thought existed in physiology, that's when you win a Nobel Prize. So I actually have to demonstrate that that's true. But so I think what a lot of people don't realize is their vasanas are like holding them back in a really profound way. So I'll give you all like one or two, a simple example. So, you know,

I've had patients who will get cheated on by their spouse. Now, after they realize they got cheated on, they realized, oh my God, the warning signs were there. I ignored them. Why did you ignore them? Because you had a habitual way of thinking. You thought, okay, when my husband or wife stays out late, they're working. That's a habitual pattern of thinking. It's not seeing the world as it is, right? You're ignoring all these signs.

So a lot of our thinking is just habitual. And so if you want to break free, if you really want to start living your life well, you have to break out of your habitual thinking. So when you get another simple example, I got rejected from medical school like 120, 140 times. And if I had let those pile up and I'd let those each rejection create a habit of thinking, I would not have applied for the third year in a row. I would have given up.

So what you really have to do, vasanas are basically breaking your vasanas is breaking apart your mental karma, breaking apart the past. I know now I'm going to sound like some guru so that you can build a new future. But genuinely, that's what it is. And CBTs, it does the same thing. Right? So what we want to do is break apart our mental habits of thinking so that we can think fresh. so we can look at our circumstances freshly and then act accordingly.

So just because I'm 32 and I'm a failure in life doesn't mean that I need to be a failure at 64. Nothing about the past determines the future in a very concrete way. And so you can change that thinking by changing your Vassana. And the way that you disable a Vassana, really simple, really frustrating, and really hard, and really great, ask yourself, have I had this thought before? if you've had the thought before, it is an echo of a prior thought is not coming from now. And what people will discover is that 99% of your thinking is not from today, here, now, or the world that you actually live in.

It is from an echo of the past. At the top of the list is, I'm a loser. At the top of the list is the capitalist world is ruining everything, right? And like, why? Because the price of a kick-cat bar went up by like 12 cents. Or it actually shrunk from like, four ounces to like 3.8, right? And so we get triggered in all of these ways. But getting triggered by the capitalist shrinkflation, which I get triggered all the time by it, by the way, doesn't actually

improve the world or fix anything in any way. It doesn't like help me get better at anything. So you can take action by all means. But anyway, so most people will have like mental habits that they don't realize and it really binds their life. There is a, the subtlety that you're speaking to here is really important to hone in on because on the spiritual path or I suppose in sincere, authentic discovery, the focus is on not just what's being done, but the consciousness in which what is being done, like the mental volition. And so, yeah, what do we not realize about how karma is generated from the volition or intention behind what we're doing? There's this, you know, analogy of two people, you know, who, who kills somebody. One's a doctor trying to save their

life, the other was maliciously trying to kill them, right? Two same outcomes, somebody died, two completely different internal motivating factors. And so I think part of being on the spiritual path is a deeper sensitivity to our mental volition and the intention of what's driving our behavior. So how important is it to reveal what that is? You tell me. I mean, I think it's paramount, personally, is why I'm asking it. Yeah, I know. I mean, that's an opinion is a question that you want to reflect on. So just state your opinion. Tell me how it works. Well, we could pick apart any example, like the one I just gave about the action. When there is a sincere desire for somebody's, like, whether it's a compliment or you do something for somebody that is generally, one is genuinely for the betterment of that person with zero expectation of return of seeing being somebody who's a giver or there's no expectation of being perceived for what you are doing versus somebody who gets.

somebody something with the string attached, for example. Those are two different dispositions where in the external reality, it seems like the same thing happened. Somebody got a gift. But in terms of the internal experience and what it's cultivating or what is perpetuating in terms of karmic momentum or whether it's freeing you from previous echoes of the past like you spoke to, those are like, it's putting you on two different paths spiritually in a way, directions.

Yes. Love the question. So let's dive in a little bit. So I think this is where like the conversation is not too path. It's subtlety. So they're all actually on the same path. So the intention I do not believe is what creates the karma. So I think this is where like if we're talking about 75 to 100, we got to be like super precise here.

Okay. So what creates the karma is an attachment of any kind. So this is something where I think like if people want. to like understand spirituality, one thing I highly recommend is to study the teachings of the Buddha. And this is what's really wild. Have you read the teachings of the Buddha or study the too? Very few people have done that. Most people have all these ideas about Buddhism, but they don't come from the Buddha. And the reason for that is because what the Buddha really said would not fly in modern society at all. So a really great example of this is the two arrows where this is a really

famous thing that I didn't really study the teachings of the Buddha. I learned it derivatively It's like, if something bad happens to me, like if I get dumped, that's what life sends me. I can't control that pain. The pain that I can control is calling myself a loser. So when life shoots one arrow at me, I shoot another arrow at myself. And that's really where my suffering comes from. The pain is over here, but suffering is the attachment to the pain, the longing for something else. So that makes perfect sense.

As a psychiatrist, I'm like, oh, you've been dumped. Don't beat yourself up. Don't love yourself. Right. So we'll sort of say this kind of thing. But what the Buddha said is that applies to good stuff too. Don't be grateful for good things happening to you. Don't feel pride when you do a good job. Like, don't get a trophy. Like, don't do it. Any kind of attachment to anything that happens to you from the outside world is a bad karma. That makes sense, especially how many of us obviously have, for good reason, preference for praise over blame. but our attachment to both equally, in a sense,

take us away from our center? Absolutely, right? So, and the preference comes from this. So this is what he said. He said that if you pay attention, the praise is not a problem. It is the greed that the praise creates. That is the attachment.

So if I save you to even, if I work really hard to save your life, and I attach myself to, I really want this to happen, not out of any selfish reason, but out of a selfless reason, the really wanting is the karmic bind. And this is why most of the spiritually profound people on the planet aren't doing shit directly.

They're not out there like feeding the poor and stuff like that. I always wondered this. Why are all these like spiritually advanced people sitting in caves in the Himalayas? They're trying to break free from the cycle entirely. And breaking free from the cycle doesn't mean making the world a better place. Wanting to make the world a better place is absolutely a karmic attachment. So the way that I break apart your example is there are different levels of karma. Right.

So if I have an ego and I want praise, if I'm a nice guy and like not a good guy, if I'm a nice guy, and I'm like, oh, Andre, I will pick you up from the airport. Andre, your girlfriend dumped you? Let me take care of you. Oh, my God. Your friend's owning me again and again, no problem. I'm going to get you flowers. And eventually I will buy myself.

I will punch the hole on coupon and I will get myself one free sex. That's what I'm looking for. So that attachment, whether attachment to negative stuff is bad, but attachment to positive stuff is bad too. And where we are in society, like we can't say that. But if you really want to understand what karma is,

is to do things with no expectation, not even a good expectation. And I think that like as a doctor, that works wonders. So when I like show up in my office, I try my best to like, can I help this person? I don't even know.

I'm just going to try to do my best. If they get better, if they get better. If they don't get better, I'm going to try to, like, learn. Like, you start responding in a very almost mechanical way to the environment.

So if this patient doesn't get better, I will respond to that in certain ways, but all of the responses are without any thread of, like, continuity for lack of a better term. So if I save 10 lives, I'm not a good doctor. If I, 10 people die,

I'm not a bad doctor. If I save a life, what am I going to do? I'm going to study this, and I'm going to see, what did I do well and what did I do poorly? If a patient dies, I'm going to ask myself, what did I do well and what did I do poorly?

This is equanimity. To not change your reaction to life based on what happens. That is how you break free of karma. There is a Dallas maxim that says, the master does nothing yet leaves nothing undone. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on being somebody who has a lot of activity in the world, but does not generate further karma because of the place in which you're doing things without the sense of being a doer.

And so you do what needs to be done. You do what you ought to do in your environment. I would love for you to talk about that state of being and your thoughts are on it. Well, two or three things. One is beautiful Taoist Maxim. I think that's exactly what I was talking about. I never heard it before.

Second thing is, let's be clear, I'm not one of those people. Yeah, yeah, I know. But maybe strive to embody some of that in your life. Yeah, I mean, who knows? So I stopped striving to be that a long time ago. Okay. Right?

So, like, if I'm embodying it, like, great. Yeah. And also, like, if not, like, okay, right? So, like, I'm content to be one of the 8 billion people on the, or the 7.999 billion people who's just floundering in the world, attached with karma, like, whatever. So. Do you really believe that fully? Yeah.

Because I feel like there's parts of you also that is ignited by the fire of self-transformation. And, like, you clearly have sought these things and these passive self-realization for many reasons. Yeah. So there have been parts of me that have done that. And I did that for a while. Uh-huh. And then I was like, you know what? Nah.

So I'll tell you. I know it sounds crazy. But so this happened very specifically. Like I have like a moment. Okay. So I came back from the ashram at the age of 21. And for two years in college, I was just like terrible with girls. Joined a fraternity, would go to parties, would get hammered.

I remember one time I went on this date with this girl. I asked her out like the night before. We grabbed a bubble tea the day after. And like I had such a huge set of beer goggles on. Like, I thought she was beautiful the night before. And I'm not, I'm not attracted to me. Just in the morning, it was not pleasing to me. And I was like, what have I done?

Just a string after string of terrible relationships. So then I go to India. I'm going to become a monk. Like, oh, all these materials and people who want to be doctors, I'm better than them. And I'm going to be celibate. Huh. So I can't be a loser if I don't try to get late. Right?

So then I came back and I was like, ha, ha, I'm going to be celibate. And then I met my wife. And so it's so funny because, you know, in meeting her, I realized that a lot of what made me fail with women was like all of these like fucking attachments that I had. And so then I was like, okay, I'm just like, there's no chance. I'm not going to ask her out. I'm never going to ask her out.

I'm never going to try to get laid. I found her incredibly physically attractive. And I was like, this is a test of my spirituality. So then I love this Indian accent that comes out every time something profound this is the only way I can keep my ego in check. I just have to like laugh and make fun of myself like constantly because I'm just I'm an idiot, man. Like just a phenomenal idiot. So then I go to her and I asked her on a date.

I didn't realize we were dating. Like, I didn't ask her out on a date. I was like, hey, you want to hang out sometime? And it was a date and it lasted like 10 hours. I still didn't understand it because I'm dumb. But I think at some point I was like, and then I told her, I was like, I'm going to become a monk. I cannot love you.

Oh, I cannot. It's a tragedy. Look, how tragic I am. I have to pursue. I cannot give up spirituality for you. I have to strive for it, right? Strive for something great, Andre. Strive for that.

Have that hunger. Have that fire for that spiritual transformation. Oh. And then I was like, you know, she's hot, bro. So then I struggled for a long time. And she was patient with me. She was like patient with all my working things out. And one day I'd be like, oh, you're great. And the next day, it'd be like, I'm going to be monk. And so eventually I realized, okay, like in this life, sure, do I want spiritual enlightenment? Great. Sounds great. But in this life, not in this life. So I resign myself. And it's kind of weird. I realized like I had an attachment to detachment.

And instead, what I did is I detached myself and allowed myself to be attached. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. I was so hung up on I want to be detached. And then I was like, fuck it. Let's just be attached. Let it go. And so I decided to have kids.

And the moment they were born, I knew the meaning of fear. And I was like, this is what life is. I'm going to become enlightened. Like, I'll worry about it. I'll repressinate, bro. I'm going to just like do this thing as best as I can. I'm going to enjoy life. I'm going to love my kids.

I'm going to be terrified for my kids. I did this thing with my kid the other day. So she's like, she wore shorts that were too short. And I was like, these shorts are too short. And it's this like crucial moment of fatherhood when you're like, you can't wear shorts that short. And then she was like, no, it's totally fine. And I was like, okay, I'm going to make you a deal. And I didn't say that.

That's what I thought in my head. She doesn't get consent. And I was like, I'm going to wear my shorts as short as you wear your shorts. And so I hiked my shorts up. And they were like, you know, strapped around. And she's like, ew, disgusting. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to go see your friends. I'm going to hang out with your friends.

I'm going to show up as your dad. Your dad's going to be dressed like this. And was I attached in that moment? Absolutely. Was it good parenting or traumatizing parenting? I don't know. But in that moment, I'm just going to be whatever kind of feels right in that moment. While all means reflect and stuff, but you don't have to do that stuff 24 hours a day.

You can be a degenerate like eight to 12 hours a day. And you can meditate for a couple hours a day. It's okay. I don't have that answer is. your question. Yeah. No, it's interesting because on one hand, you could perceive this sense of what a gift this life is and how there's a sort of sense of urgency from one perspective to utilize the gift of being in a human body that can transmute these different carmas and wake up. And you're speaking to also, because I know you still do practices and you still, like,

you're still, regardless of whether or not we declare we're on a path of sorts, we're on the path regardless, right? But yeah, I was just kind of curious about your perspective of that state of being that does and has a lot of activity in the world, but doesn't have the perception of being a doer behind them driving so much. Yeah, so I think it's weird how you get there. So I've sort of gotten there. And so, like, it's interesting because if I look at myself objectively,

my spiritual practice has intensified in the last two or three years, in a way that it hasn't been since like I was like 22 in India. So for 10 years, I was basically coasting the whole med school, Harvard, all that kind of stuff. And then a couple of years ago, I sort of realized, like, I need to get kind of back into it and that hunger was there. But I think I also realized the time scale, also through some experiences, like the time scale of this is like lifetimes. So once I really understood that, once I had nyan of that, the urgency disappears, the ability to procrastinate returns. and then you do the thing, but then like, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to hope for what comes. And even then, I acknowledge that attachment that there's some degree of hope.

But the more you acknowledge your attachments, the more they dissipate. So the most attached person in the world doesn't realize they're attached. They think they're right. As a bar, that's important to. Absolutely. And I think that, like, you know, most people, I think it's a fair objective statement to say that on some level, I have some degree of spiritual development. I think it's clear in terms of the impact that I have because I don't work harder than anybody

else. It's not clear that I'm smarter than anybody else. But there's some spiritual force which I totally get, which is cultivated within me and is like expressing itself through me. So that's absolutely true. Like, you know, there's a lot of shakti accumulation and things like that that I do on a very regular basis. I think that shows.

Yeah, I think I know you have this jovial degradation of like, oh, I'm just this dude on the path. I think it's important to be also impartial. about where our strong suits and our gifts and what's unique about, I guess, our ability to serve and share too. Yeah. So, from an impartial perspective, I'm exceptional, right? Like, I mean, like, literally. So, like, if you look at, you know, I was thinking about this, like, many years ago where I used to be, like, a complete loser.

Like, at the age of 27, I was, I had no money. I was dating my wife, so that was great. She was, like, financially supporting me. And I remember going to a Christmas party. and like meeting one of my friends from high school and we were like catching up and I was like, oh, like, what are you up to now? And she's like, oh, I'm an ophthalmologist.

And she's like, what are you up to? And I was like, I'm applying to medical school for the third year in a row. So if you look at the, you know, what are the statistical odds for someone who at 27 has a crappy GPA, no money, no anything, to within a span of 10 years be like arguably the most followed psychiatrist on a planet?

I don't, I think that that is like, There's not ego, right? That's a statistical improbability. And for that to happen, am I a complete, lucky outlier? Absolutely a possibility. But when I look at the tantric work that I've done, the Shakti accumulation, then it makes perfect sense because I've been accumulating Shakti for 20 years and it starts to manifest. What is that?

So the way that I, what is what? Accumulation of Shakti. So there are certain practices that you can do which will accumulate spiritual energy. Now we get weird. Okay, so. Finally. Yeah. So there is energy on the level of matter, right?

So we have matter, we have energy. And then we have energy in the spiritual realm. So it was in that weird conscious plane. And when you, so you can do a bunch of labor materially, but it may not manifest the way that you want, right? I can do all the right things. I may still end up without a girlfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend, whatever. I applied to medical school 120 times.

Nothing happened. So if we look at things happening in the real world, material efforts are scientifically insufficient to create a material change necessarily. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. So the scientist part of me looks at this equation and says there's no question marks in the theory of gravity. Right? The equation of gravity is a, there's no like question mark. Like we can figure it out.

But in the real world, if we fail to achieve, that must be mean that, there's a variable that we are not detecting. I think the best representation of that variable is Shaktir's spiritual energy. And for the thonthric practices that I've done, the way I describe it, and here's why I think it's so hard to understand scientifically because you have to understand the mechanism. So imagine I have a field and there's a river. So I start digging a trench, I start digging like an irrigation ditch between the field and the river.

So the first 99 feet that I dig, there's zero. water irrigating the field. That last bit of earth that I dig and suddenly one bit of effort, one unit of effort irrigates my entire field, even when the 99 units of effort irrigated at zero percent. So this is why I think Shakti is hard for people to understand because you usually have to do a lot of work for a very long period of time and then it hits this critical threshold where suddenly stuff in your life just starts like going really well. And the reason is because you're accumulating energy.

energy at that spiritual level, which then reflects down into the material plane. Yeah, I agree. And internally, in my experience, 100% feel that as well. And it's interesting to look at, I mean, we spoke into this many times throughout the conversation. One of the most incredible logicians of all time, Kurt Gordle has incompleteness theorem, which simply put means truth transcends proof. And so how there is a reality that we, of course, can't conceptually always convey.

That doesn't mean that it's not true. true, of course, just like we spoke to the quality of experience and this accumulation of Shakti energy, whatever words we want to use, which end of the day is futile anyways, it's not the thing in itself, is real. I'm curious how intuition comes into this, because we spoke to this earlier. It is one of those things that from the materialist view, you could say, is simply an accumulation of subconscious implicit learning, and where when you say you're making a decision from intuition. It's based off of pattern recognition that's subperceptual, perhaps. But there is an alternative

kind of deeper, energetic, slightly more woo explanation of intuition in third eye or third eye and Agna chakra cultivation. And so how do you think about the cultivation of intuition and its ability to direct our life in a beneficial path? Beautiful question. So I don't think it's either or. So I think there are neuroscience mechanisms of intuition. I think this is a failure of language. So I'd say there's two types of intuition. There's the neuroscience intuition and there's the spiritual intuition. I don't think they're qualitatively the same. I think they're quite different. So if we look at our brain, our brain processes a ton of information and then floats things to our conscious awareness in a illogical form. So you can like walk into a room and immediately notice there's

tension in the air. That's an intuition. If I ask you to to explain why you believe that, you wouldn't be able to tell me, but it will be true. That's because the second you walk into a room, there's all kinds of auditory processing, visual processing, there's all kinds of like, you know, patterns in your, in your brain that trigger. So that's one kind of intuition. There's another kind of intuition, what I think we call intuition, that is transcendental knowledge.

That's what I would call it. So intuition, fine, comes from the brain, but transcendental knowledge, which is frequently what people call intuition. And the reason they say that it is knowledge that you have that you have no business of having. That's how I would define it. So one is like, what are all the patterns that your brain has learned that is triggering

that is giving you an idea of what is going on? And even qualitatively, it feels quite different. So I would call intuition that is transcendental and knowing. So like, if you go and people know this, right? So like, you will sometimes know something is like true. It's not an intuition.

it's like, like, is this your gut? So sometimes I'll have patience. You know, I once had a patient who came in and said, you know, like, I have this, like, really bad feeling that something is going to happen. And then I was like, so we do a lot of spiritual work too. And so I asked her, I was like, okay, so like, is something bad going to happen to your kids? Like, do you know something is going to bad? Because if you know something bad is going to happen, then we have to go down a different route.

But is this like, do you know this is going to happen or you're like worried? And she's like, oh, no, it's not going to happen. I'm worried. And even the way she sort of says it, she's like, oh, no, it's not like a, it's not like a premonition of the future. And so then we did the psychiatry instead of the spirituality. But, and so there's a huge qualitative difference between the gut and transcendental knowledge. And this is also where a lot of people, like, confused the two because they've heard of transcendental knowledge.

They experience it, they're experiencing good gut intuition. And then they think that those two are the same. And your gut can be right. But I would call the transcendental knowledge, I call it a knowing. Do you have an example of that type of knowing in your life? And how does one cultivate that in their life? I don't share examples. Sure.

Or maybe somebody else. I mean, you kind of gave it, you know, that sense of knowing. Yeah. So I think the best example is the one from everyone who's listening. So I imagine most people who listen to your podcast know exactly what I'm talking about if they don't, like not a big deal. Second thing is how to cultivate that I can absolutely answer. So I think Agnachra practice is at the top of the list.

for cultivating conduit to the divine or cosmic consciousness or whatever, if you're, if the kind of connection you want is knowledge. So depending on which chakra you use, you will get a certain chunk of the divine. And if you want knowledge, then Agnachakra practice. So that involves third eye practices. So it starts with Thrataka. This is where like I made a whole guide about this and we talk about this stuff a lot on our memberships and things like that. But Agnachukkah practices are intuitive practices, I think they've helped me become a way better psychiatrist because sometimes when a patient walks in, like I just have a sense of what's going on with them. Is that my training or is that the spiritual practice? I personally believe it's the spiritual practice because even though

I trained at Harvard, so did the other 50 psychiatrists I know who trained there, but they're not able to do what I'm able to do. And I sometimes meet people on the spiritual path who can do that. I think it's qualitatively different. So third eye practices, Agnachra is really good. I mean, sorry, Thratica is really good. That's a great place to start. But then there's other practices like Unlome-V-Lum is really good. What's that? So it is alternate nostril breathing done without the fingers.

So when alternate nostril breathing, like I'll breathe in. And if you pay attention, you'll get a sensation of coolness that goes up to the third eye. And then when you breathe out, it kind of goes out this way. So there's like the frontal sinus over here. So you kind of feel the air going in and out like a triangle. You sort of visualize that. And ideally what you're trying to do is feel it. most people may not be able to feel it right away.

You'll feel it up to here or up to here. But as you practice more and more and more, you'll feel it go higher. And then Undelom Vloam is that same practice without using your fingers. So just when you breathe, you concentrate on the left nostril inhalation. Then when you exhale, it goes out the right nostril.

So you just put your attention like a triangle and going up to the top part, which is where another. other interesting principle is the more physical your meditation practices, the less Shakti you will accumulate most of the time. So if you look at a meditation practice like Nadi Shuddi or alternate nostril breathing, you're using your hands, you're closing off your nose. That is going to have a stronger physiological effect and a weaker spiritual effect. So the more subtle your practice becomes, the more potent it'll become. For those that have started experimenting with various

practices and start gaining awareness to more subtler realms of their of their being or their energetic body. I would just love to get your opinion both through the Western lens and Eastern lens on chakras. And because it's something that is very easy to disregard and we don't have great scientific or would you say any scientific evidence for? I would say we don't have great scientific evidence for. But what is the reality of them? So first, the reality is that you should be skeptical.

I think it's a completely reasonable place to start. So here is what we sort of know about science. So there are some practices, for example, where there's like, I saw a trial on anahath chakra, heart chakra meditation for depression, very small trial, but showed positive results. We haven't gotten to the point where we can really do like massive trials of 10,000 regular meditators, 10,000 heart chakra meditators. That's really where you would see the effect size. So the trials just aren't there yet.

The research is not progressed in that direction. There are blips of understanding of this. Now, is a clinician 100% real in the sense that there are certain meditative, and there's good literature about this, there's certain meditative practices which induce psychiatric illnesses have done wrong. Those are the practices that mess with kundalini and your chakras. So when I was training, my guru once told me, or one of my gurus told me, like, I can teach you chukkah practice, but you need to come into the woods with me for a month and you're

going to get hypersexual. So if you do this practice where there are people around, you're going to start like behaving really bad. So the guru was literally like, come into the woods with me and you're going to get really horny and we'll do something special that I won't tell you. Right. So it's like so shady. And but what I realized later as a psychiatrist, there's good case reports and stuff like that, as you do these more energetic practices, the likelihood of things like bipolar, breaks, mania, meditation-induced psychosis actually increases. And so there are safe meditation practices, which is what you'll get on an app like mindfulness and guided meditations.

But if you do chakra-oriented practices, there is good evidence that some, here's what the data shows. There's good evidence that some meditations will mess you up. Now, what we don't have is studies on those meditations done under the guidance of a guru, done the way that they're supposed to be. And I realized many years later that, okay, so as I do Mooladara root chakra practice, hypersexuality is the root chakras where our sexual tendencies come from. And so like that hypersexuality, that mania is like transient and part of the kundalini

rising through the chakra. So I think that there's like some evidence that the practice is done wrong will mess you up. Very, very minor evidence that these practices work in a sense. But they're never measuring like kundalini awakening, right? They're measuring like depression. That being said, I do think they're real, pretty confident. And then if you really want to understand chakras, you need to do chakra practice and then have, like, transcendental experiences. Then you'll understand them, like, very, very easily.

Like, because you'll see them. You'll feel them. You'll, like, have an experience of them. I don't know if that answers your question. Okay, I want to dig deeper. This is honestly, Andrea once in a lifetime opportunity. Wow. Yeah, I feel the same way.

Yeah. Why do you say that? Just because of the topic of exploration and how... Yeah, like I said, I go on like neuroscience bro podcasts all the time. So, okay, so I want to ask you about enlightenment. Okay. Do you... Maybe you can help me define what your perception of enlightenment is,

but then also do you see it as a dynamic process or a point to which you arrive and then you're there once you're there? Like, is it a stage of consciousness that you do? just finish the job in a sense. Yeah. So I think, yes. I think that is the easier way to understand it, that you are done at some point, right? So there is, yeah, I think you finish. So if we look at the, so here's kind of what we do know.

Okay. So first, no, and let's look at different sources of information. So one is that there is absolutely a tradition where people say, you reach a point, which is moksha. Moksha is enlightenment, liberation. And that's not samadhi. So they'll even define samadhi as a very high state of meditation, where samadhi is temporary enlightenment.

So the first experiences are to experience enlightenment for brief periods of time. Maybe even longer periods of time as you practice spiritually, you'll like get into these states. And I think this is what's really challenging is that when a lot of people have experiences in meditation, I think oftentimes they don't realize, like, this is just the beginning of the journey. So a good example is like mindfulness. So mindfulness is like, we think that that is meditation. That's not meditation.

That is the equivalent of like stretching before a marathon. So mindfulness is technically Sakshy Bhav, which is the witnessing attitude, which is like putting on your running shoes. That's where you start the journey. That's not the end of the journey. The problem is that very few people, have started the journey in that way, and then once you start that journey,

you will go into other states of consciousness and things like that. You will attain things like samadhi. And then there is, but then the problem with samadhi, and I think number of people have experienced samadhi on the planet is pretty small, but the number of people who have come down from samadhi is really high.

So then that means one of two things. Either enlightenment is not possible and the highest we can get is samadhi, or there is some way to be in samadhi forever. forever. I think the latter is true because if you experience Samadhi and you continue to practice, there's a good chance you will experience it again and again and again and again and longer and longer. And then once you experience Samadhi, you realize that Samadhi is like it's a temporary state. Which may last for what hours or days absorbed in that state?

I would say for most, I mean, I don't know about, I would say like moments to minutes. And if you've gone above 10 minutes, that's, I think, quite rare. But maybe not. And the internal experience of that would be what, in terms of if somebody's experiencing Samadhi, it is complete dissolution of self. No experience. No, dissolution of self is prior to Samati. Okay.

It's before Samati. So what's happening in Samadhi? Just so. I would say literally the best example I have is imagine coming for 45 minutes. Like the sensation of that for like 45 minutes. Like waves of orgasmic bliss just going through your body for like 45 minutes. The other interesting thing is that it also comes with, no one pun intended. What else does it come with?

You. We're reaching climax in this conversation. So it also comes with like understanding of things. So there is a bliss element. There's a freedom element. I think that's why we use these three words as translation. It's like you know stuff that you otherwise shouldn't know and like big volumes of stuff. So I think it's like,

see, that's the divine, I don't know if you get this, but that's the divine keeping us grounded by like, you feel the degeneracy energy keeping us, like you see now why I'm degenerate? Because if I'm not degenerate, we like get too far. You get what I'm saying? That's good. We need a balance.

Keep a balance. Absolutely. Like it's absolutely a grounding force that is like keeping us anchored here. I don't mean that, you know, it really is. So, you know, I, I think there's just gigantic chunks of like understanding that you'll come back from. You'll lose some of it, but you'll get, you'll keep some of it. Uh-huh.

So that's what I, there's a sense of freedom. There's a sense of like bliss. And then there's a sense of knowledge. So that's samati. And I think ego death is like the step one. So I don't think that people, I've never heard of someone having a psychedelic experience that it, I think is samati. So I think you can get to. early states

and then even then But d'angeli describes like different states of samadhi so they're not all the same so there's I mean there's a whole like once you get to the top of Everest like there's a whole other Everest

and then another Everest and then another one so they just go higher and higher and higher yeah so that's how we would describe it and oh here's the thing so you were asking about the permanency of it yeah so this is what's kind of hard to understand it's absolutely temporary

it is for one moment at a time and mokshha is one moment at a time forever it doesn't actually have duration. It's just one moment duplicated again and again and again. But not for infinity, not for a thousand years. It is just one moment after one moment.

It's just this moment and then this moment and then this moment and then this moment. And even that's wrong because it's not and then then. It is this moment, this moment, this moment. So I think when you're able to take that or not if that makes sense and experience samadhi, I think that's what Morkshire is.

Let's say if everybody on planet Earth right now was in a safe environment and they experienced the bliss of their self that was not derived from any external circumstance or event happening, how do you think that would radically transform how we relate to the world and the dissolution of the thought that happiness is going to be derived externally? I mean, so I think there's no question that, at least in my mind, that experiences of samadhi radically transform your relationship with yourself and your relationship with the outside world. So you begin to realize that we're all living in the matrix, which lets you

chill out intensely. Now, for that to happen across the globe, I have no idea. I think there's a decent chance that, so you may say like, oh, life becomes a paradise. I think there's a decent chance that the human race dies out. So people who have attained moxha very rarely are conducive to life. So there's even... They're not having more kids and... I mean, they can have kids. They are having kids, but the thing

that makes life go is generally speaking attachment. Life is karma, right? It's like this action leads to this, leads to this, leads to this. So the moment that you, like, if everyone became enlightened tomorrow, I think everyone would be sitting in caves in the Himalayas,

except they don't need to be caves in the Himalayas. Maybe they go on for a time, like who knows? And then if they have another kid, that kid is maybe not enlightened, so I don't really know. It's a really interesting thought experiment. But I think that there's a reason why people will say, oftentimes after enlightenment, you will have one final birth where you wipe away all your karma. So Buddha hung around for a little while post-enlightenment. There's a great story about some teacher, some student comes to him and he's like, you know, I've been all these other people, will you teach me? And he's like, sure, I'll teach you. And then

the guy is there for like a year or whatever. And then he's like, I haven't learned anything. Spits in Budda's face. And then he's like, F you, I'm gone. And then his disciples are like, Oh, Beau, you can't do that to the... And so they started getting on in the Buddha's like, no, like, let him go. Like, that's fine. It's just a karma that had to be completed. So he did what he needed to do, and now he's gone and I'm done. Maybe the human race dies out.

Yeah, I think I was just... Because we have so many notions around what success and how happiness is going to be derived. And so even if it being a momentary experience of our true nature or bliss of self or whatever words you want to use there, yeah, you spoke to how it can radically transform our relationship to self and other. Yeah, and I think we even have some, like, really interesting neuroscience like hints. Right?

So the whole problem is that we have this belief that happiness comes from outside of us. And this is driven by our dopaminergic circuitry. So the nucleus accumbens has a craving. And when you satisfy the craving, you get dopamine. That feels like pleasure. So we go on chasing things that give us pleasure. If you loved your first hamburger, you're going to want a second one. You're going to want a third one.

Now, the whole tragedy of life is that we devolved. develop tolerance. So your second burger is never going to be as good as your first one. So we develop tolerance. So chasing dopamine is never going to work because there's a fundamental biological constraint that will never allow it to function. I love playing video games for the first hour, second hour, and unfortunately I have patients who are like, man, cocaine is so great. But like the first hit is great, the second is great. And then you're chasing that high for the rest of your life. So that's just a fundamental limiting factor of dopamine. If we look at enlightenment, I think that's more serotonergic, where there is a sense of contentment or peace that is internal and independent of getting things.

And what we also know, this is what's really interesting, is that dopamine and serotonin are inversely related. So if I play video games all day, I will get dopamine, but I'll feel terrible at the end of the day. I'll be like, oh my God, I'm so dumb. I like wasted my whole day. I should have been productive. And then if you work really hard for like a day and you're like engaged with it and you did something good. Like I remember I used to, you know, be on call for like 30 hours. Like you go to the hospital and it like you're working for 30 hours. Then you walk out and you feel you're tired.

You were angry at times. You were like, you know, it was a negative experience, but you feel so good. That's serotonin. So I think what starts to happen is as we sort of engage. If people have that experience and this is true of like in psychiatry too of like I work. really hard and it feels so good, this is how I help people get out of addiction, is they start to feel really good about their lives outside of that dopaminergic dependency. And once you start to feel really good towards it, you naturally gravitate towards it.

So I think if people were to experience that stage of samadhi, it changes their idea of where goodness in their life comes from. Yeah, there is that pulling roughly quoted from the Gita about detachment is not having nothing but in nothing having you. And, like, I think renunciation is thought of, like, literally letting go of all your material desires versus the inner state of how you relate to the external world and things. Yeah, let's not forget, Krishna had arguably up to 1,000 wives. So he wasn't forsaking anything in terms of material pleasures.

There's an interesting, like, post hoc sterilization of that. So nowadays, if you ask Hindus, they'll be like, oh, he was just supporting them financially. It's like, I wasn't there and you weren't there, but they use the word life. So I think it comes with certain things. I guess from the macro perspective, it seems like the goal articulated through many spiritual paths is the dissolution of the self and the stopping of the cycle of samsara, which you spoke to, like in that thought experiment, if, like, attachment is sort of what keeps the game going. What do you think this, like, realm? I know it's kind of a meta question, but what do you think like this realm? is like this earth school do you from a spiritual perspective like do you see this dimensional reality

is serving a specific purpose for our evolutionary path uh it's uh cleaning up spilled milk so if you want to understand so like this is it's so great so love this question uh love the podcast too so here's what I think is honestly going on like are we living in the matrix absolutely so here's what's going on so we're a real thing and then we have a false identification with the body and the false identification

with the mind that I am like 100% convinced of there's good scientific evidence of this as well once again if we look at

psychedelics and psychedelic healing we know that the more attached you become to your life your body a narcissist is highly attached to their ego to the perception

of other people we literally know that if you become less narcissistic you will become better at relationship you may not make as much money, but you will be happier for sure,

and people will like like you more, and you will make plenty of money. So generally speaking, if we look even at money, so there's some highly narcissistic individuals who make a ton of money, but generally speaking, if you take the average person,

you make them less narcissistic, they will become more successful, even professionally and monetarily. So we know that disidentification with the self is like healthy for you at a minimum. Then we know for you, psychedelics, that dissolution of the ego is trauma transformative in terms of healing. Okay, so all that is there.

Now, then that doesn't, that just explains potentially a mechanism of shit going on in our brains. Now, what's the real nature of it? So when you have those dissolution experiences, there is a subjective experience of something beyond this world. That's the real nature of reality. And we get falsely identified. And this is where I think there's a really interesting logical principle that the more aligned with the truth you are, the more things improve.

Right? So, like, if I have a huge cognitive distortion that I'm the sexiest person on the planet, my congruence with life will not work well. I won't, people won't like me. I won't get hired. I won't make money. Right? So that kind of makes sense.

Like, if I believe, like, let's take psychosis. If I believe, like, you're a demon, that's not congruent with reality. That won't work well. So I think that the more aligned we are with truth, when we, like, send a ship into space, if we use the equation of gravitation in the right way, then that ship will function in the right way. So I think the more aligned we are with truth, like the better we move in the world. So I think if you take that general principle and you apply it to this, we realize that, okay, my true self is really not me. I'm not my body.

I'm not my mind. I'm this other thing. I think that's true. Now, how did we get here? So they say that the Brahman was desirous of experience. So the Brahman was like this formless nothingness, and it wanted to be a something. And then it manifested. So it was this ocean and it became a drop.

But the moment that it became a drop, it got stuck. So we like spilled some milk and now we're stuck in this cycle. It created karma. But the moment that you create cause and effect, you have causes and effects and you're kind of trapped in this cycle for a while. And eventually it'll disillusion. We'll get there. And even if you look at some of these creation myths,

so now we're like, we really don't know if this is true. But it's fascinating because if you look at texts on Binduwisat, They say that there's a point of infinite matter, energy, and consciousness, infinitely dense point that expands and explodes and creates the universe. And that there's a period of expansion and distribution of matter, energy, and consciousness. Then it reaches a critical point, and then it starts to collapse, and it goes back down to Binduwisarga. And so that sort of sounds like a singularity. It kind of sounds like the Big Bang. I think it's really fascinating.

There's a great exercise I did many years ago. one that I've wanted to reproduce, which is like, I want to take quotes from physics textbooks, and I would take quotes from creation myths from like Rishis,

seers, and then see if you can attribute which one is to which, because a lot of them really sound very similar. So I think we're sort of living in Maya or illusion, like something like the Matrix,

and there's a part of us that's real, and we're essentially running a simulation. Why did we do that for the same reason that we love creating and playing video games? There's a certain enjoyment

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The fake version of us. Yeah, I remember thinking of this, like, the phrasing it this way that suffering is the cost of admission for the illusion of separation. As you go on the spiritual path, like, and you hear it expressed in this way, like, to the ultimate, I suppose, desires to get outside of the cycle and the wheel of samsara and the suffering. but for those that feel like this life is inherently joyful and that there's a lot of really amazing parts too to wrap our head around why the dissolution of our own uniqueness in a sense is like a good thing, like a desirable,

I feel like some people would be confused around that. Like why would not being here be preferable over being here in a sense? So I think the problem is in your wording. Yeah. The wanting for dissolution doesn't lead you anywhere, right? So I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but you're like,

the desire for being nothingness, that's the problem. That's never going to work. As long as you have a desire for dissolution, you're trapped. And I think that's kind of what's weird is like, no, the whole point is that you should not have a preference for non-existence to existence.

That's true detachment. That whatever happens, like, look, we're all here. Might as well enjoy it. And if things happen badly, that's fine. If things happen great, that's great too. But like, whatever. Yeah, it feels more spacious in that way that enlightenment is viewed as sort of a natural return,

a natural return of like a larger cycle and, uh, in almost an inevitability in a sense. I think as opposed to like the forced will, I gotta wake up. Yeah. So I think that, you know, you can force yourself to calm acceptance,

but it's never going to work. Uh-huh. Right? So like all you can do is resignation. So it's like, look, man, we're trapped. So we might as well make some, sexually explicit jokes and have a good time and meditate a little bit and like that's what it is and like don't eat like is there more to it i don't know you don't know we're just here so we might as well

like enjoy ourselves enjoy the ride because you don't know when it's going to end when it isn't you know i think all this like longing for enlightenment like i think it's great it's great to get you started and maybe it's great for other people to finish but like i i couldn't get that far so i was like man not in this lifetime like i'll do it later Yeah. Yeah, I just appreciate, I guess, a level of, it's like coming back into a right relationship, like you said, with gravity and a ship of like our own desire.

Yeah. And so I think it's normal to, you know, because you're talking about this dichotomy. Like, do I long for dissolution? Why would I want to destroy this uniqueness? And like, you shouldn't want that, right? And then the whole point is that it was desire, like the Brahman wanted us to exist.

And here we are saying, like, Bad job, Bramon. Like, I'm going to undo this, right? Like, you created this video game and I'm going to erase it. And so I think that, too, like, there's no way to escape that attachment. You see what I mean? Like, it doesn't matter if you're longing for enlightenment or longing for a car. It's still longing.

That's still the problem. And there's no way you will never become enlightened if you desire enlightenment. Is there a correlation you haven't spoken to about, like, video games and how it's so much related to life? So I wonder if there's a cosmic waking up happening. So I don't think it's like a coincidence that, although I have no basis for this. Okay, this is just me farting with my mouth. But I think that there's like a couple of weird macro trends going on.

So one is like there's a desire for meditation. The second is we are creating artificial worlds. We are creating artificiality. So like we're creating AI. We're creating video games. And I think that like as this is happening on a global scale, we're starting to really, I think some people are starting to get a sense of what makes, what's real. So we, an AI can duplicate so many things, but it's not human.

It's not conscious. So it's kind of weird because we're getting this like evolutionary cycle where we have no choice, but to realize what is consciousness. It, like the whole world is moving in that direction because an AI can talk like you, it can walk like you, we can have video of you, but it won't be you. So then what is you? And then at the same time, we have all these people meditating. So we're creating a problem that makes it clear what makes a human and what doesn't make a human.

What part of a human is duplicatable with a machine? And at the same time, we're also having subjective experiences of something like Samadhi, hopefully, if you're lucky, through all these meditation apps. So I think we're kind of getting it from both sides. Yeah. on the pursuit of, I guess, exploring what's really real, modern science really rejects the notion of metaphysics in so many ways. And yet there's also the dogmatic acceptance of religious views of the afterlife and of what a soul is.

And I'm just curious, how do you define who we are in our essence? Like, to really know thyself, the core of who you are, do you think we have a self that is at the core beyond all these thoughts and emotions? Yeah, I think so. So the first thing is, like, there are a couple of funny things about science because people will make say that science doesn't know what's after death. That's technically not true. Okay, I know this is kind of crazy, right?

We know what happens when people die because we've had people who've died who have been revived. Like, that's like a medical fact. Like, you can have someone who's deceased. And then you do chest compressions. They have some acystole or something like that, and their heart starts beating again. And literally they come back to life. Like, this person was dead, right? Like, in a hospital.

Like, this happens, like, every day. People die every day, and then they come back. And they have a conserved experience, right? This is not like, we don't get taught this in schools, because you can make the argument that if you're imagining it, but you have human beings across the whole globe that die, come back and then they tell us, hey, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

It felt really great. Like, this happens to people. Now, this is what I think is really tricky, is science will say, well, that's just the brain, but that's not really a scientific view. That is a biased view. not based on data, but we have a presumption that all there is is the brain. But if you start with the axiom that all there is is the brain,

then you say that the brain creates all experiences, that's not a falsifiable statement. Does that kind of make sense? So there's all kinds of things that we assume that we think we know, that we really don't know. We actually know what happens after death. It's not a mystery. Right?

So now the only issue is that how long do people die before they come back? That's a separate issue. But we actually know people have died, and they have some subjective experience of at least the process or death are, or maybe even post-death. So we don't know how to line up that subjective experience with the fact that the body is dead for 60 seconds.

So did that happen in the first second of dying? Or did that actually happen after that? We don't know that. That's the first thing. So I think that what's real is like our, I do believe that our subjective experience, the capacity to experience is what is our truest version of the self. Okay.

So to know thyself is to not know thyself. is to not know anything outside of you. To know thyself is to sit with that, which has no object, but still exists. So you're not your body, because I can take a piece of your body off and you'll still be you. You're not your mind.

Your mind changes over and over and over again. The one thing that is you, the one thing that literally defines you, and I don't, maybe this is philosophy, I don't think it is, is that you always experience yourself. And you can never experience me. And that's what fundamentally,

makes you you. We can change your body. We can change your mind. We can change your finances. We, you know, I'm Dr. K now, but I was All Oak before. And then if I give up my license, do I stop being a doctor? Like, I don't know. Like, so all of the attributes of our life and all the ways we define ourselves are literally not permanent. The one permanent part that is you, is you experience your life. And if you want to know thyself, you should spend time with all of that instead of all of the other stuff that people waste their time on, which is body, mind, career, whatever. Yeah, it's in that examination of the unchanging background

throughout all states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep and the various forms of consciousness that we can start to experience what is really true and unchanging, because everything else is ephemeral and subject to impermanence. Now, would you say, like, in terms of the continent, of that self throughout what we would perceive as time, what you might say that experiences is beyond time in terms of past lives, in terms of what comes next after death, what are your personal thoughts around that if you want to, if you're open to sharing?

Yeah, so I'm pretty sure that, so this is also where like things get a little weird, but I've found, so I've had a set of patients that will have refractory mental illness. and by refractory mental illness, what I mean is mental illness that does not respond to treatment. I've had a handful of patients that if I do past life psychotherapy with them, they are, we can't say cured.

They go into remission for extended periods of time. I personally believe they're cured, but that's not like a scientific statement. We don't really know what's going on. So one thing that I've found as a clinician is that when I treat, if someone has, and I don't,

this is a minority of people, by the way. because there are some people that like other they go to other people and they come to me. And then not to say that I'm better than other people, it's just that, yeah, it just work differently. I suck at treating a lot of people too. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. But so I do think there's at least clinical utility. There's a great guy, I forget his name, who does research on this from University of Virginia, who I think is a psychiatrist and like explores all these things.

There's actually a fair amount of evidence that past life psychotherapy can be like healing. Now that doesn't mean that past life is real. It just means that if you treat it as if it's real and you do psychotherapy around whatever it is, it doesn't indicate that it's true. It just means that if you deal with it, if it's true, it leads to good clinical outcomes. But I think it's real. So I think that there is, if we look at us like we have matter, right? You have matter. You have energy.

That doesn't get created or destroyed. And then it can't be created. It just can be transformed. And then you've got this third thing, which is the capacity of subjective experience. So when you die, where does that go? So this is where there's some debate between Hindus and Buddhists. So Buddhists will say that in the same way that your body will become, the matter of your body will become a thousand different things.

There's no eunis, but chunks of you will live on and manifest as other droplets. I can take a drop of water out of the ocean, put it back into the ocean, pull another drop of water out of the ocean. Is that the same as the previous drop? I don't know. The Hindu view is that there's a part of you that retains some degree of karma and then inhabits another body. I tend to lean into that one.

It's something that makes way more sense to me, also through some of my meditative practices and things like that. I think that the Buddhist view is probably technically more correct, and I think they're not contrary. I think on some level, they're like sandwiched on top of each other.

So in the same way that, you know, you have, yeah, I think even your consciousness can be subdivided into different levels. So there's probably a package that gets moves between bodies. And then there is another layer that gets distributed. Yeah, it's interesting to parse through our own internal dialogue around this because we have this innate desire for continued existence and also specialness. And so the Buddhist view, I think, bums people out a lot of times, you know, when they...

Yeah. But it's interesting also how I think it's Niels Bohr, who... who said the opposite of something true may be something false, but the opposite of a profound truth might very well be another profound truth. And so, like, both these perspectives can be right in different contexts and different ways of understanding. Would you agree with that? Yeah, so I think when you say we have an innate desire,

so I think this is where we go back to where we started, which is like, what are you? Not who are you, what are you? So when you say an innate desire for existence, which part of you has that. That ego. Ego can have it, but I think it comes from biology, right? So we have an instinct towards preservation.

But that desire is not us. That is just a mechanism of the body. So like in the same way that my GI system digests food, my cells want to live and want to procreate. That doesn't mean that we have an innate desire. I think that's actually a mistake. So the body wants to procreate, fine. And so I think a lot of that different.

can be resolved if you understand these levels and understand that I have a desire to be unique. So I have a desire to live. That comes from the body. I have a desire to be unique. That comes from your ego. And the witnessing part of you has no desires. It's just experiencing it all. It can't have a desire.

The wanting must require, the wanting is balanced by a getting. And a getting requires an ego. So as you start to develop spiritually, it's not you that. wants it, you'll say like, oh, like my body needs nourishment, right? You can feel that want, but it's not you that wants it. It's like, you know, the body needs nourishment. You can also say the ego, right? So like my ego needs some amount of this. I think there are some highly developed spiritual individuals who have, in a sense, large egos, but I don't think they're trapped by their ego. I think they use their ego like a dog on a leash. And there are times where to

exist in the world in the public way that they do, it really, requires a functional ego because otherwise your mission won't be able to be completed because you'll get taken advantage of and people will hijack you and things like that. Yeah, I feel like we have this notion often of enlighten it means complete dissolution of personality versus the attachment to that personality and like how the how we relate to desire or our personality just changes and it starts serving the unchanging part of ourself. Would you agree? And then like, I'm just curious your thoughts on how the relationship to our own personality and uniqueness, which is different for each person on the planet,

yeah, changes as we awaken to that more unchanging ground awareness of our being. Yeah, so I would say first thing is that the people who have egos and are still, I use the word spiritually developed, it's, I don't know if they're enlightened or not. Now, I would say that, you know, as you become more awakened, like I start to, I mean, I don't know if I'm more awakened, but I've changed the way that I view myself, which is like I've, I started to view myself is like, I'm kind of like a somewhat competent, but somewhat idiotic, like, dog. Right? So, like, I can appreciate, like, it's like a dog that's like, you know, pretty good at certain things, but also, like, you know, messes up and is clumsy or whatever. And you can just

accept yourself for who you are. You know, I don't need to be different. Like, I'm great at some stuff. I'm going to try hard. I'm going to do a good job. But I think you're right that it's, it's about relating to your personality. I don't think my personality has changed. It's just, I realized I'm flawed. And like, that's okay. Just because it's okay doesn't mean that I'm not trying to change it. Right? So, like, should, what should this instrument that is Alloak be doing?

This instrument that is Alloak should try to do better in life. I should try to work harder. I should try to help people. And like, that's okay. But also, I'm not, I don't need to get caught up in it, if that kind of makes sense. And on a given day, if I feel like taking a day off, then I'm going to take a day off because, hey, I get that. I don't know if that kind of makes sense.

but I think it's like, you're right that it's about not that my personnel, I mean, sure, it's special and unique and all that kind of stuff, but so is everybody else. So it's not really that I'm special. I'm just, I'm a certain constellation of things. And that's okay. That doesn't make me good or bad. It's just what I am. Got it.

There is that saying that no amount of self-improvement will make up for a lack of self-acceptance. Do you agree with that? Yeah. I think so. I think make up for is the key word or phrase because I don't think one is a substitute for other. But I think that a healthy amount of self-improvement certainly makes the self-acceptance way easier. Right. So like if you look at someone, I'm kind of speaking clinically, when I'm working with someone who's like kind of quite literally a failure at life, we're talking like maybe late 20s, no job, no career, no living at home, whatever.

like they don't have much to show, self-acceptance is very hard to teach that person. Whereas if they start to put together their life and they actually make improvements, what they discover is that even if they improve their life drastically, there is some amount that will never be perfect. And then it's in that dichotomy that self-acceptance becomes easy. So I think this is where, you know, you have to improve to realize the limits of improvement. and what it gets you and what it doesn't get you. And that's when self-acceptance comes in.

That improvement is never perfection. Improvement is never control. Improvement will never get you all the way there. There will always be a gap because you are not perfect. Then the question becomes, what do you do with that gap? And some people will say, some people, it is not uncommon. Some of the most successful people that I work with love that gap, depend on that gap, because it is the lack of self-acceptance that motivates them, gets them to try harder.

The fact that they hated themselves and hated their life is how they went from zero to 95. And heaven forbid, I give that up because then where would I be? I'd be back at zero. I would love to get your perspective on Dharma and how we have so many notions about purpose, finding our purpose, living in our purpose in the West. but what is really important to remind me people of of what Dharma is and its understanding and articulation from the Eastern View? Okay, so that's a big question.

Okay. But let's give it a shot. Okay. So the first thing is that Dharma is duty. But I think it's hard to understand in some ways, and in some ways it's really easy. So the first thing about Dharma is that if you look at doing something difficult in life, Dharma is what allows you to do difficult things. So the reason Dharma is important is that if you live a life of self-gratification,

your capacity to do things is very restricted. So if all I want is pleasure, I can't do a lot of things. And what people who chase pleasure, what the kinds of lives they find themselves in, is not very free at all. So I can't work hard. I can't like push myself to do things. I can't really, like, create anything that requires effort. So it's very restrictive.

So then the question becomes, then the second problem is like, okay, so how, if I'm not chasing pleasure, how do I motivate myself, right? Because if I want to, and I see this a lot with people like in medical school. So these are kids that, you know, decided to become doctors when they were like 12. And they worked really hard. They spent Friday nights at the library. They go to medical school. Their friends are, like, going on vacation and they're $300,000 in debt.

And then they go to residency. They're like 31 years old. They're making $60,000 a year. They have $300,000 in debt. And they, like, haven't been on a real vacation ever. And they have friends that are doing stuff. So then we get into a second phase, which is, okay, if I'm not going to chase pleasure, there's this idea of chasing delayed gratification.

So I'm going to sacrifice today to be happy tomorrow. That, too, doesn't really work. Because oftentimes what ends up happening is people move the goalposts. So it's like then the next thing and then the next thing and then the next thing. and then the next thing, when is it enough? So some people go through life forgetting how to enjoy themselves because there's this idea that I'll retire and now I'll have a good time. I'm going to trade the best 40 years of my life between the ages of 20 and 60

to have 10 years at the end where I've got, I need a hip replacement, but I can travel the world. So there's this delayed gratification, which is still just chasing place. So the real antidote to that is Dharmah. So Dharmah is what allows you to do hard things. It gives you a motivating force that allows you to embrace difficulties in life. And my favorite example of this is I have daughters. And so if someone were to heaven forbid like threaten them in some way, that same thing.

If someone pulled a gun on me, like I wouldn't want to deal with that. I wouldn't be like engaging with them. I try to run away or whatever, right? But if someone pulls a gun on my daughter, then I'm stepping in the line of the guy. And it becomes easy. It becomes simple. It's like there's no question. Like 100%.

I can have fear. I can have worry. I can have anxiety. I can have all kinds of negative states. And I'm like stepping into the path of that. So Dharma, and it makes sense to people, right? Why would I do that? Because my daughter's involved.

So Dharma, everyone in life is like trying to figure out how to optimize, how to be efficient, how to use AI so they don't have to work hard. Everyone wants to not expend effort or maximize the, gain that they get from an effort, which is still greed at the fundamental. So, Dharma allows you to not do that. So when you do Dharma, it opens up your options. So if you're no longer running away from pain and suffering or whatever, and even then, your brain, it's fascinating.

Your brain makes this calculation about suffering and benefit and cost. So even the kids in medical school, they do this out of selfishness. But they think, okay, if I sacrifice a year of my, my life, I will get two years of pleasure. It's still chasing themselves. It's still chasing pleasure at the end of the day. It's just delayed gratification. It's not giving up gratification. So, Dharmah is fundamentally what allows you to give up gratification and live in a different way. So it completely expands your options. The other problem is that a lot of people confuse Dharma with should. And a lot of people will be like, I should do.

this, this is my Dharma, I should do it. It's psychologically a different thing. Dharma comes from a deeper part of you. Shoulds come from mental conditionings of society. So when my parents were like, you should become a doctor, there was no passion to become a doctor. I ended up becoming a doctor for completely different reasons. But I did it out of Dharma.

And then it became easy. Like, from failing out to being at the top of my class became really easy if you're doing it in service to something. One last point about Dharma is that we know from addiction, psychiatry, and, you know from addiction in psychiatry and plenty of like neuroscience and stuff that in order to give up something good, you have to replace it with something. So like addiction is about, conquering addiction is about wanting something more than what the addiction gives you.

Right. So the addiction gives me like avoidance and all this kind of stuff. But I want a life. I want to be able to live. I want to be able to hold my head up high. I want these kinds of things. And so Dharma kind of moves in that direction where Dharma can be the substitute for all of the other desires that you have to do your duty.

And I think your duty is determined a lot by being in harmony with your environment. So my duty as a doctor is different from my duty as a husband. So I'm not my wife's therapist, right? If I try to be my wife's therapist, it's a mess. It's tried. It doesn't work. So I think like the more people start living in service to their Dharma, which then there's a whole question of how do you find your Dharma?

The better off your life will, like you may experience more pain, but like, you may experience more pain, but like your life will feel good. And it'll be easy to live. So it's kind of like strong that way. Yeah, it seems like a bit of a lubricant in terms of your experience of life. There is that, again, that saying from the Gita that when you protect your Dharma, your Dharma protects you protects you. And it's just fascinating what comes on the path when you're living in alignment with that.

It does beg the question of how does one move from Shuds to like authentic Dharma and discovery of that? what have you found for people as the biggest catalyst to really discovering and living in that? So the biggest catalyst is controlling your indrias or your sensory organs. So if we look at where do shoulds come from. So let's be precise and scientific about this.

Where do shoulds come from? Shoulds come from your perceptions. So when I get told by my grandmother, oh, you'll be wonderful doctor one day. When my dad tells me when I'm nine years old, pulls me and my brother aside, says one of y'all is going to be a doctor, one of y'all is going to be a lawyer.

So if you look at most of what, you want, right? And even when you say to yourself, I should do this, where is that idea coming from? It's coming, the should is a friction between the internal you and societal expectation. That's literally what the word means. So finding your Dharma is first getting rid of all of your shoulds and seeing what is left. Now, the problem is that when we are faced with shoulds, that creates negativity within our brain. It creates anxiety, it creates fear, it creates lack of desire. right, then we have to use willpower. So there's this fundamental tension.

And then what happens is since the should creates an anxiety, my brain needs some way to fix that. That's why we turn to dopamine. That's why we turn to pleasure. That's why we give in to wants, right? The way I combat the should is by going towards a want. Because the should makes me feel bad. I don't want to study.

I should study. And so there's a fundamental polarization, right? The moment I create a positron, I create an electron. So there's your Dharma, and then when you get lost of that, you fill it up with shoulds, and then you have these compensatory wants, and then you have a struggle, which is the core struggle that most people have. I should do this, I want to do this. Once you get rid of the shoulds, and you also get rid of the wants, so once you get rid of the

shuds, then the wants will go away too because they're created by the shuds. They're created as an alternative or an avoidance of a should. So the reason I love playing video games is because I don't want to work. So there's a certain amount of quietness and involution that is necessary for that. So to get away from your shoulds. And so the first thing that I would tell people is like, you know, if there's something in your mind that you should do, you'll notice that there's always a want. So just step away from all that and just sit. Bottom will come from within.

So when we get rid of your societal conditioning, you will discover that there are natural driving impulses. and the more that you give in to those natural driving impulses, it's not a want and it's not a should. I would say the best language to use is feel like. So I'll give you like a really simple example. I feel hunger, but I don't need to satisfy it with a burger. That's a want. I don't have to, I should eat a salad.

I want a burger and hunger. Does that kind of make sense? That's how you triangulate to the harma. So the hunger and then what you do is you pay attention to what satisfies the food. feeling. It's not a desire and it's not a should. I will feel proud if I eat a salad. That's wrong direction. I love it when I eat a burger. That's the wrong direction. What makes me feel sated, right? What makes me feel content? How do I remove the hunger? And so if you look at like

satvic food from ashrums, you'll feel a lack of fulfillment from the dopaminergic standpoint, but your body will feel good. And so Dharma is about feeling. And feeling comes within, should comes without. Want is to run away from yourself. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. So that's how you find barma. It's freeing to reflect on how it does spring forth from within.

And like I guess the, you mentioned kind of like setting both aside to be able to sit with yourself and actually listen to what those deeper feelings are is so essential. And I just think that as people are growing on their path and they make space for more of that. silence and to be able to sit in that quiet and pay attention to those things. What we desired so heavily from our shoulds in terms of desiring to improve our life come in a different context, but more naturally when living in Dharma, that feels more aligned and joyful with our natural state. Yeah, so I think that when people start, so kind of three comments. One is when people start living in accordance with their Dharma, their life almost always

improves over time. In the short term, it can be really rough. but people get happier, they usually become more successful. Their relationships improve, their mood improves. Basically, everything gets better. The second thing to keep in mind is that living in accordance with your Dharma is usually initially very painful. So, and the way it's painful is because it's boring.

So I would say that, like, the reason people don't sit with themselves is because it's boring. So the first stage of Dharma is going to be, like, really, really unpleasant. And there's a beautiful kind of analogy to this, which is like, in the Hindu mythology, there's this concept of churning the ocean. So there are the gods and the demons or the devas and the Asuras, and there's like ambrosia at the bottom of the ocean. And so they're like,

we got to get that ambrosia. So they start churning it, and the first thing that comes up is poison. So I think there's a beautiful analogy that we also find in psychotherapy is that if you want to get to the ambrosia, if you want to get to the light at the end of the tunnel, there's going to be poison in the middle.

And usually for even psychotherapy healing, like we talk about the trauma first and then we feel healed afterward. in the same way to find your Dharma is going to be a painful process for a while. And the reason it's so hard for people is they don't know and you can't know

that on the other side of this boredom is going to be like some sense of fulfillment. We don't usually think that the more bored I am, the more fulfilled I will be, but that's absolutely the connection. And since we don't understand that, that's why we run away from boredom and never find our purpose.

That makes sense. And it's just so important as we close out here, like the continual unending questioning of our pleasure seeking and fulfillment of our dopaminergic activities will always end in a feeling of poison after, but you're inviting to flipping it on its head and drinking the poison first, and then the pleasantness of experience comes as a byproduct after that. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I think contentment comes from living in accordance in harmony with your karma, but it's not pleasurable. This was such an incredible. incredible conversation and I've just love all the nuances and the playfulness and the challenging and all of it throughout and yeah you just have such an incredible capacity for staying grounded when exploring the mystical and the esoteric and the eastern and still not being bereft of of the soul food and the and the dense you know really transformative insights of the inner sciences and so these are like this kind of conversation is my favorite to have on the podcast. And it's just a pleasure to meet you and become, you know, become friends. And we'll run it back in the future, I'm sure. And yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was an absolute pleasure being here. Like I know this is on some level work, but it didn't feel like it. Yeah. And you're just, you're spectacular, man. Oh, thanks. Like I'm not even going to attribute it to a particular quality. There's something in you. That's just great.

Oh, thank you, man. Good. I didn't sleep too well last night. So I felt like it was going to be. be as sharp today, but I'm glad you feel that. Yeah, I mean, it's good. So your frontal lobes were exhausted, so you got angry with me. And then otherwise, it doesn't work. Any last thoughts of where people can, anything from the context of this conversation or just where people can stay connected with you, anything else you want to share before? Yeah, so people can check out our YouTube channel. I think there are two things that we've done that are more aligned with this conversation. So we tend to be very like psychiatry mental health

focused, but we do have a membership side where we discuss a lot of like weird esoteric concepts where we talk about metaphysics and the nature of the soul and stuff like that and also tie it back to improving your life, mental health and things like that. And then we do have a meditation guide that we get into some of these things with. So if people want like more about more in line with what we do, like I mentioned to you, I don't usually get to talk about this. There are some cases, some small, cultish little places where we get into a little bit. So if people are interested, they should check that out.

Sweet. We'll link all that down in the description. Thank you so much, my friend. Thanks a love, man. And everybody who's been tuning into this episode of the Know They Self podcast, let us know if you care to in which ways this episode was uniquely resonant with you, what came up for you, and appreciate you, love you, and be well. Until next time.