Know Thyself - E171 - 18 Insights to Awaken Your Mind, Heal Your Heart, and Remember Your Soul (Compilation)

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

In this special compilation episode, we explore the deeper dimensions of human consciousness. Featuring insights from Deepak Chopra, Tim Ferriss, Sadghuru, Dr. Lisa Miller, and others, this episode is a journey inward — from sensing what cannot be seen, to feeling what we’ve long avoided, to awakening to what we truly are beyond all stories. Through wisdom, science, and lived experience, we discover that the next evolution of humanity isn’t about becoming more — it’s about remembering the awareness that’s already here.20% off Pique Life Tea:https://www.piquelife.com/knowthyselfGet 15% off Magnesium Breakthrough from BiOptimizershttps://www.bioptimizers.com/knowthyself Use code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off!Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________00:00 Intro01:12 Dr. Tara Swart - Beyond the 5 Senses: 34 Hidden Abilities09:36 Dr. K - Reality of Intuition and Cultivating It13:12 Deepak Chopra - Awakening to Your True Nature15:13 Dr. Iain McGilchrist - Paying Attention To Access The Realm Beyond21:25 Ad - Pique Life23:05 Dr. Sue Morter - Transcending and Integrating the 5 Senses26:13 Zach Bush - Remembering Our Innate Intelligence30:08 Dr. Lisa Miller - Becoming a Spiritual Parent39:29 Michael Beckwith - Divine Intelligence + The Power of Being Alone41:55 Ad - BiOptimizers43:17 Dr. Sue Morter - Healing the Emotional Body (And Feeling it Fully)48:10 Tim Ferriss - Shutting Down Sensitivity Because of Trauma56:03 Rainn Wilson - Purpose of Pain and Suffering on Our Path1:02:04 Dr. K - The Difference Between Safety and Comfort1:04:37 John Vervaeke - Self-Deception, Cultivating Wisdom and Find Meaning1:17:05 Pete Holmes - Balancing Being Spiritual and Being Human1:19:24 Dr. John Demartini - Setbacks Are Not in the Way… They’re ON the Way1:24:24 Yung Pueblo - Learning to Love Better: From Arguments to Allowing1:29:10 Joe Hudson - Best Way to Gain Emotional Awareness1:32:00 Peter Crone - Freedom is Available Here and Now1:38:44 Sadhguru - Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously___________Watch the Full EpisodesDr. Tara Swart: https://youtu.be/exAAKSeHP9EDr. K: https://youtu.be/zj40FT631P4Deepak Chopra: https://youtu.be/ZhIQ5bzv-0wDr. Iain McGilchrist: https://youtu.be/LZ5C11mlTH4Dr. Sue Morter: https://youtu.be/p0TWCSEPl3AZach Bush: https://youtu.be/3q0He3UOwVIDr. Lisa Miller: https://youtu.be/HTppdV4Mnt4Michael Beckwith: https://youtu.be/r3wrUmE1L3wTim Ferriss: https://youtu.be/NxmUCGuapNwRainn Wilson: https://youtu.be/t_LvB6W4NmEJohn Vervaeke: https://youtu.be/NOwnb6CkFlQPete Holmes: https://youtu.be/PSPMP7DPEqMDr. John Demartini: https://youtu.be/dVR01alAe8oYung Pueblo: https://youtu.be/bwom9Y6ybcgJoe Hudson: https://youtu.be/dhlupWyTNYMPeter Crone: https://youtu.be/VCi93m9lloMSadhguru: https://youtu.be/FMoXXb-wKE8Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

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 explain why you believe that, you wouldn't be able to tell me, but it will be true. You actually have this innate intelligence that knows exactly what you need. There's something too bad. The brain is actually filtering down the capability of the mind and consciousness so that we can exist in this material plane. Let go of every concept and every perception. that you'll ever be able to know reality intellectually,

let go of that idea. You start to see these really beautiful things that are far more spectacular than the sum of its parts. Instead of being heaven and earth, it's like heaven earth. It's like there's only one thing happening here, and it's good, and it's you. You know, there's this intelligence of love just flowing through us if we allow it to take place, you know.

There is a far more profound force of life guiding us that brings an adventure that is so beyond our imagination. To start off, how many human senses do we have? What a leading question. So I think most people know of five, and then there is this phrase, the sixth sense, and sometimes people think that's intuition, but interestingly, a lot of people actually think it's balance.

So I saw a scientific journal paper that said, humans may have up to 22 to 33 senses and that started me doing a full literature review and I've ended up creating a table of 34 senses now some of them are non-conscious things like the pH of your blood but it still speaks to the fact that we have so many more senses than most people realise

and if we're not even conscious of them then we're not actively tapping into them something I think is also quite interesting is some of the senses that animals have that we don't have, like echolocation or just superior sense of smell in dogs and cats. And dogs and cats can actually even smell impending death. So in care homes, they often go and sit by people who are about to die. And this actually makes sense scientifically because when you're dying, cells die off in a certain order and that releases a certain smell and dogs and cats are sensitive to that. There was a famous nurse.

who actually smelt her husband's Parkinson's disease years before he was diagnosed. And that has been used to create a chemical swab test to help diagnose Parkinson's disease earlier. So basically, some humans have, you know, a superior sense of certain senses. Some animals have senses that we don't have. I just think it opens up a very interesting, you know, sort of curiosity about what more we're capable of. Yeah, it also really invites the inquiry around what are the potential latent faculties, you know, what's potentially lying dormant within our DNA in a culture and society that we're so prevalently, like, disconnected from our body and the sensitivity of our senses. Just, it's interesting to see what could still be there yet to discover. Now, when you say up to 34, could you like walk us through maybe what a few of those might be?

because seems like we got five senses. At first glance. Yeah. So some of the other ones are balance, which I mentioned is equilibriumoception. The fact that you can close your eyes and touch your nose without having vision relies on something called pro pro preoception, which is how you know where your joints and limbs are in space

when you can't see them. There are obviously appetite and waist senses, stomach fullness, bladder fullness, the 34 can be separated into introceptive and extroceptive. So ones where the stimulus comes from outside and ones where it's things going on inside the body, which you're less usually conscious of. I think one that's really interesting is chronoception,

which is the passing of time. And there's a subjective element to this, and the ancient Greeks knew this, because they have two different words, chronos and chiros. And one's the objective passing of time, like the 24-hour clock and the light-dark circle. And one is your sense of, oh, it feels like, you know,

like we just saw each other yesterday kind of thing. Or, you know, I may feel like that. You may say it feels like it was years ago. So that's the subjective part. It's fascinating because it's been said in so many different ways that perception is reality, right? And the way that our senses perceive reality becomes reality to us in so many ways.

And you spoke to, you know, bats with echolocation, dolphins with sonar and all the different ways in which different species and different animals have the capacity and cultivated the ability to navigate their own reality. Yeah. It also makes me think of, I believe, David Eagleman's work doing, being able to train humans to detect True North. And so, yeah, so I believe I was talking with Annika Harris on this podcast about some of that research. and they were able to significantly statistically show how they, by wearing this belt, training for a while after a few weeks, we as humans could detect where true north is

with just our body, which is fascinating. So it's like just, it's interesting to see what is yet to be discovered in that realm. Exactly, because I was just about to say another sense that we don't have, but maybe I'm wrong, is magneto reception, which is how migrating birds know where to, you know, how to navigate these long distances. So, yeah, who knows? And then we have all of these a bit more hard to empirically verify subjective experiences within our consciousness of, like, synesthesia, where a lot of artists or creatives have this phenomena. So what is synesthesia?

And then we can maybe explore a bit more of these interesting, kind of slightly esoteric ones. Yeah. Yeah, you've actually just reminded me that I wrote about synesthesia in the book. And that's when two different senses kind of become. confused or overlapping. So like you can taste music or you can smell color. So it's all, that's just a really strange combination. So again, the fact that that can happen in some human brains just leaves it very open to what else can change. Take me down the deepest part of the rabbit hole. Like what do you really think is possible within human consciousness? And I'm not going to ask you to verify, validate it with science, because I understand that a lot, largely,

it can't be. But yeah, is there anything that you think is, that you like to share at the depth of that? Yeah, I mean, I think these abilities which we call the clairs, so Claire audience, Claire sentience, Claire cognizance, and Clairvoyance. And most people would have heard of clairvoyance, and that's either being able to see the future or see something that's happening, like, in a geographically very remote location, that you shouldn't be. able to know about. Claire audiences is hearing things and so knowing, you know, having an intuitive sense about something because you hear it and that's possibly what's going on when I say I experience thoughts in my head that I don't think are my own. I'm not hearing a voice outside of my head like

people do in schizophrenia but I asked somebody else who says he's Claire Audient and he said I experience it like a voice inside my head. And Claire cognizant, is just a deep sense of knowing and probably what I'm kind of getting at when I say trust your instincts. And Claire sentience is a feeling of knowing in your physical body. So I think that these four Clare's

that I've mentioned are potentially things that humans are currently capable of but don't know if they are or how to use. And, you know, Dr. Bruce Grayson, who studies near-death experiences, he said something really interesting, which was that potentially the brain is actually filtering down the capability of the mind and consciousness so that we can exist in

this material plane. Aldous Huxley and the Doors of Perception also is famous for speaking of the brain as a reduction valve. The sheer amount of stimulus and information that is around us would be completely overwhelming if it wasn't for the narrow aperture. It's like looking through life through a straw. Like that's our experience of life relative to the amount of information that's surrounding us. So it makes sense.

And I think we're living at a time, especially in the next few years, like where these studies, these research, unleash, you know, AGI into the picture, what's going to be possible in discovering what it means to be human fundamentally. Because it, just the perception shift, when it opens the door off for people a little bit, that life is so much more mystical than we perceive. it allows us to look at life with a sense of awe and wonder again, you know? Not even just wishful thinking or hopeful thinking, but that, no, like this life, like there's a vast intelligence that we can, that we are a part of and can tap into.

That is a much more exciting place to live life from. From the materialist view, you could say, when you say you're making a decision from intuition, it's based off of pattern recognition that 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 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 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 patients. 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 like 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. How does one cultivate that in their life? So I think Agnachakra practice is at the top of the list. I think they've helped him 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, Thratica is really good. That's a great place to start. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower.

Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? Oh, more like habanier, yes. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Since we were young, we've been put into these conceptual boxes of understanding the world, right? And even to our self,

of strongly identifying with our form, with our thoughts, our emotions, and our body. What do you see is the most direct path to awakening to who you are beyond that? Let go of every concept and every perception as a window to reality. Every concept, every perception.

Let go of that. idea that you'll ever be able to know reality intellectually or through any methodology or through any religion or through any map. Let go of that idea. Number one. Number two, embrace presence. See, when you embrace presence, I'm not talking about the present moment. Presence is bringing awareness to whatever is.

Now because awareness is infinite, no form, right, infinite, then the finite experience is actually dependent on the infinite. So the infinite is present in every finite experience. Once you realize that, then God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid. There's nowhere that you, no experience that you, no experience that is possible without the infinite in the background. No experience.

Everything you see, the perception is made possible because the infinite, incomprehensible, borderless, fundamental, irreducible, spaceless, timeless, unimaginable, is present in that consciousness. So then God is not difficult to find. Impossible to avoid. I love that.

That's intoxication. Yeah. Have you ever gone people watching? Have you ever just sat somewhere and watched people go about their life? Quite a lot, yes. I'm curious because in the deeper studying of the contemplative practices, you have the ability to train your faculty of attention and the kind of quality of attention you pay.

Many different practices, one could be staring at a candle, and being able to, which seems like an impossible task at first, maintain 20 seconds of concentration, let alone 10 seconds, without distracted thought. And it can be a cultivated practice to where the penetrative nature of your attention and awareness can glean you insights about that to which you're paying attention to. And that can be taken from a candle flame to all of life around us,

especially other people. And it's fascinating to the degree, in which we pay attention, what comes to mind, what comes into our awareness when we pay attention in a certain way, where you might just see people walking about in their daily life and their hustle, bustle, and struggles to the deeper things that you can attend to and pay attention and become aware of within their experience,

their emotional landscape, things that you become much more sensitive to that you just weren't previously aware of. And I find that fascinating because In many ways, I've seen attention as our spiritual currency, if you will. That's why we pay it. We pay attention. And it's what we do with our life in any given moment. And so I just find it so important to focus on this a bit more because attention is an area of life and an aspect of being human that is the faculty in which we engage with and derive meaning through life.

And I'm just curious if anything comes to mind as, yeah, how you, how you pay attention changes what you become aware of and therefore can also change how you interact with and steward life around you in a sense. It is a sense in which attention, well, I say it is a moral act because it has moral consequences in how much. or what you see in a person, and it's been compared to love by two French philosophers Simon Vé and Louis Lavalle, that attention is the pure attention that you pay to another, is a kind of love that you give that person. And in it, that other person can become more revealed. they can become more themselves. And I think there are people also who have practiced very much what you describe, which, alas, I haven't over a long period,

and who are therefore able to see things in people very clearly what is going on for a certain person very well. It's a kind of psychic phenomenon, I suppose, and I don't claim to have it. But I do know people who can exercise, and see their way into the nature of things. This was in a way what the poet Wordsworth did. He was much mocked for paying attention to very simple, ordinary things, to a small tree, not the big ones,

or a lump of rock in the middle of mountains, but focusing on these things for a while, as well as, of course, all the rest of it, and seeing into them, You see, one of the things I think is that we may feel that it's important to get to know a realm that is conceived of as beyond the one we inhabit. And that may well be real, I believe it is real. But I think the mistake is to think that we would get to find it by turning our backs on the realm that we find ourselves in. Instead, I think one sees deeply through the realm that one is in.

So we don't find the infinite by turning our backs on the finite, but by looking more deeply into the finite. And we, in other words, treat the world as having what I call translucency. And it's not quite the same as transparency, at least not in the way I use it. So transparency would just be that I was able to see through a landscape or see through you and see something else beyond. But very importantly, I also see you and the landscape as well as what is beyond. And it's rather like looking at a painting and your eye can stop on the surface of the painting or it can go through the painting, not in such a way that you don't see the painting. In fact, you see the painting more really than ever,

but you are thereby granted access to something that in one sense lies through and beyond that painting. Does that make any sense? Yeah. Yeah, it makes me think of how, why is there a felt experience that music and poetry seem to get us at what something truly is in its essence other than prose or typical language, right?

Yes, yes. And it also just, yeah, it makes. makes me think of the ability to pay attention and become aware of the context in which something arises. What makes this room useful is really the empty space in between all of the things, right? Yes, yeah. And so it's like the awareness of the nuances, the space for the silence in between the notes of a song that make it what it is. Yes. Hey guys. If you've listened to the show for a while, you know that I love the products from this company called Peak Life. I'd recommend their tea all the time. And they have another set of products that are focused on hydration that I absolutely love and have been drinking almost every day. Peaks deep hydration protocol. This is now your average hydration hack. It's a synchronized day-to-night electrolyte protocol designed to restore your nervous system. Strengthen your skin barrier and give you a youthful glow from the inside out. This protocol is a two-part ritual. You start your day.

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plus a free gift to elevate your routine. Go to peaklife.com slash know thyself to grab yours now. That's peaklife.com slash know thyself. Thank you, Peek, for sponsoring the show. Back to the show. I suppose when you think about how enchanting our five sensory experiences that plugs us into this reality, which is incredible and amazing and so helpful,

but it also can be very illusory if we don't also turn the gaze inwards. What do you think about that kind of dichotomy? Well, it is. is this both and, right? It's like when we start to recognize what you're describing and we want to,

I know for me, 25 years ago when I first started meditating and coming into another realm and then these exalted experiences started happening, multidimensional, you know, transcendental experiences that were occurring,

I immediately wanted to just meditate all the time. I just like, let this world go, let me drop in to this beautiful space that I was discovering and the realms that it had to offer. And huge openings were happening that were blowing my circuits that my five senses were used to operating on. So I had no choice. I couldn't use them for a while. There were times that I couldn't get out of bed because the vibration was so intense and so blissful and so beautiful. I didn't want to get out of bed. But when I did have to go back to the clinic and be working with patients and managing life in those terms, I'm

I had to be very selective and how I went about doing that in ways that were comforting to the system that was trying to adapt to this. What I came to know was that, you know, the embodiment of what I was experiencing in these transcendental states was only made possible

when I would engage in the outer world to its most refined capacity. I could sit and meditate and enjoy all sorts of realms. And when it comes time to get out into the world, we have to infuse that light or that energy into the circuits that we're used to running on with our five senses. And as a byproduct, those five senses get up-leveled and we become enhanced in a totally different way.

And when someone is able to blend both sets of circuits into one, we start to move as the bridge between the worlds, recognizing that there's really only one world here. We just were leaving half of it out, more than half of it out, but a portion of it out as we were trained to operate on our five senses because our parents and their parents and their parents were doing the same. So the idea of two worlds becoming one is simply awakening to the fact that we were limiting and marginalizing the good.

greater part of who we are. So by bringing them together, it is instead of being heaven and earth, it's like heaven earth. It's like there's only one thing happening here and it's good and it's you and it's unfolding. And so let's embrace the wholeness of our being and let that be true and watch what happens in our lives. They change dramatically. When you get, you know, 10 birds in a flock, they line up in a V and they do a two-dimensional structure. But it's always structured. And that one in front peels off and joins the back and they move up. And so they're sharing the leadership in a very simple geometry. But you put 10,000 birds together. They're now not just doing a multidimensional shape. That thing is in motion. And so a murmuration is that extraordinary

phenomenon where 10,000 will start to express sacred geometries at the scales of a kilometer and, you know, of stacked birds in motion. And they create these super-comer. complex structures of sacred geometry and swirling motion. And so they'll create double helices. They'll create, you know, aceshedrons and all of this in motion. And so that intelligence is something that was called quorum sensing at the biologic level. And so when you get enough diversity or enough inputs into a single space, you start to see these really beautiful things that are far more spectacular than the sum of its parts.

And it's such a good example of the stacking geometries of centripy. You know, centripy is the movement towards order from chaos. And so it's this true synergy where there's one plus one equals four, not two, you know. And this is where I think we have fundamentally broken our contribution, you know, moving from contributor back to consumer in our human systems as we break those interrelationships of tens of thousands. and we turn it into a nuclear family. And now you're a husband, you're a wife, and those are your children,

there's your white picket fence. Everything inside this fence is yours, everything outside of it is not yours. And so now you've isolated yourself from the 99.99% of nature, that is the Mother Earth, that was intending to be your mother in the first place, and in that concept of ownership

as a solution to scarcity, we'd create more scarcity. And so the murmuration of a bird is showing if we would just let go of the belief that we're not protected, and the nature's against us, and we need to consume so that there's enough. Letting go of that and increasing the number of connections, we return perhaps at the local level to a village model.

But we're starting to have the technologies at our fingertips that are going to remind us of what it feels like to be wholly connected to the whole organism of humanity. And so cell phones and the tech world, Zoom, whatever it is, is leading us back to this possibility that there's more beauty with more connection. And right now we're relying on very low vibration technology. 5G networks compared to what happens in a human cell is like we haven't even reached kindergarten.

The technology inside of a human body is so far beyond our comprehension. And so when we all have, you know, this moment of amazement when a man comes along and says, I've filled a steel tube with solid rocket fuel and I lit it on fire and it shot up into the air. And then it fell back on Earth. And everybody's like, oh my God, that's so genius. That's, we should put billions of dollars into that project. Meanwhile, there's a woman that is undernourished in the squad or villages of Philippines who creates a silent space inside of her called a womb.

She surrenders that to the divine. She blinds herself to the very process that's going to unfold within her and she, with progesterone so that her immune system itself can't even see what's about to unfold, fully surrendering that to create her. And this creative force takes a single human cell and turns it into 70 trillion human cells that self-organized into a body of a child that nine months later somehow emerges from her body. Quantum entangled with a identity that has been here since the beginning of time, and there's no headlines. It's unbelievable.

Like, what the heck are we doing? We have failed to appreciate the miracle of life. And for that, we have so desecrated that life. How? Did you blam? No. The Devil Wears Prada 2. He's the movie event 20 years in the making. Honestly, can't with the secrets anymore, so I think we just should tell her.

Will you two please spit it out already? This Friday, be the first to experience it only in theaters. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. Oh, because we're a team now? That's a nice story. The Devil Where's Prada 2 in Theaters Friday. I mean to take synchronicity as real information. Learning that mystical experiences are the most profound, valid form of knowing

allowed us to find our child on the other side of the earth. My husband and I, for five years, wanted to become parents. And being a scientist, I went to the best in vitro doctors in the whole country. And this chase through what I call achieving awareness tactics, strategy research, was not leading us to becoming parents. not becoming a parent was profoundly depressing. But in our suffering, in the depth of the existential probe brought by suffering, what I've come to see actually as a developmental depression,

I started to notice glimmers of love, glimmers of guidance coming through people I'd never met before on a bus. This one fellow sat down next to me on the bus and said, hey, lady, quite unusual man, you look like just that type of lady that would go all around the world adopting kids, big smile, and then he got off at the next stop, but gentlemen had boarded and exited the bus for one stop, and he was a fully able man who rides a bus for one stop. The day after, perhaps the most excruciating, synchronities are not always what we want

to hear. Syncronicities are not always a friend of the ego, right? Synchronicity doesn't say you get what you want. It announces where you're going. Perhaps the most painful synchronicity was when I came home after in vitro from the team who had invented in vitro. And there, as I walked towards our front door on the front step, was a little smudge. I looked closely. It was a dead duck embryo. So clearly I'm coming from an in vitro and there's a dead duck embryo on my doorstep.

What else could that mean? far too unprobabilistic to have happened by chance, and my heart sank. And I knew this in vitro would not hold, and I was not this time going to be a mother. Very depressing. And so I went right from the front step to my office, fell asleep on the couch, and took a nap. Tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck. I heard tapping at my door, a sound I'd never heard before. I go up to the glass door, open it up.

And there's the mama duck. who's brought me a worm. She lost her baby, and she knew I lost mine. Two little dead embryos. What does that mean that all of life is part of the synchronistic symphony? This trail angel that day was Mama Doc. It wasn't what I wanted to hear,

but it said, you are loved, you are not alone, and you're on the path. Synchronacies continued lining our journey, the guy on the bus, the duck, many. In my heart, something was softening, and I sensed that parenthood was not necessarily a child who looked like me or had our personality, but that parenthood was something far more profound, that spiritual parenting was about profound love and commitment, that there was a child out there for us, was the message coming through.

My husband and I traveled to a woman, a clergy person's daughter, who had united 800 children with their parents. And she leaned forward and she said, what do you want in a child? I said, oh, well, I don't care if it's a boy or a girl. I certainly don't care what race or ethnicity the child is. Just a child who can love. And my husband leaned forward and said, yeah, all that, but kind of a girl. In this journey, the more the synchronicity's directed us, the more we got the picture,

that there was a child out there for us. And not as we'd planned, not as a quick and easy concept. even though we were healthy and even though there was no medical reason, we were not conceiving. But there was a child out there for us. I started having mystical experiences. One night, I sat up in bed, time and space opened up, and a very profound presence, not scary, but quite profound and loving. And the voice said, if you were pregnant now, would you adopt?

And I said, truthfully, in my heart, you don't lie to a presence like this. No, no, I wouldn't. And there was not a sense of judgment, there's not a sense of punishment, but simply that this for now is as it is. And time and space closed back up. We continued on our journey, more synchronicities, more guidance. And the presence came back a second time. The presence returned. Exact same experience.

I sat up in bed in the middle of the night, time and space opened up, and a very sacred, very serious and profound presence came. and said, if you were pregnant now, would you adopt? And I knew in my heart, I said, I'm getting closer. I was aware that there was some form of ego death, some sort of muting of this radical control and achieving awareness, that I was moving out of a illusion of control. But I'm not there yet, no. Again, not judgmental.

It is as it is. Time and space closed. And each time I look over and my sweet husband's, you know, out cold, totally asleep. So then received from my big cousin, Jane, a call. I have some dear friends in the Lakota community, and they have allowed me to invite you to a healing ceremony. I know you're looking for your child. I think you should come to the healing ceremony. It felt so aligned and so true.

So I canceled all my meetings at Columbia and my class, hopped on a plane and flew out to South Dakota to participate with much gratitude in the Lakota healing ceremony. In the Inipi that night, each woman was invited to share why she had come. Big Jane, it was most welcome, spoke for me. She said, this is my cousin. And she has come looking for her child. I'm wondering if we could help her. And for the first time, I felt I was in the right place. After five years of in vitro offices, medical offices, I knew I was in the right place. The women in the Anipi, he looked me in the eye, they understood, and they said, yes, we can help you. The medicine man's wife then led us through ceremony, and we sent the prayer that night after five years a call came to my machine back home in New York. We have found the Miller's child.

From the other side of the world, our son was found. The same night, clearly, far too unprobabilistic to have happened by chance. It was a form of sacred healing. It was a form of deep consciousness moving to find our boy. So beautiful. Our beautiful boy. Now, if I had ignored the synchronicity,

he'd still be in an orphanage. Actually, right now, he would have been adopted into the army or hundreds of thousands of boys have been killed. We said yes to the synchronicities. Thank you, God. Thank you, source, guiding source of all life. What appeared as a synchronicity

was showing us direction to our child. We must say yes to this guidance, and we must know it as real. Ah, the presence came back a third time. I got home, a video came. There he was, our spiritual child. I fell in love. I felt a soaring, euphoric love.

The second I saw this little boy on video with his radiance, he seemed to glow. That night that I'd seen him in video, I went to bed and woke up to the presence. The president said, if you were pregnant now, would you adopt? And I said, absolutely, resolutely, this is our spiritual son. At very night, we conceived. His spiritual twin, who was my husband's kind of a girl.

You can't write it better than that. Because it's written by source by God. Yeah. And it was the path to becoming parents of spiritual twins. And it was also the path of shedding illusions of radical control that we somehow get pregnant or make life. Just because you run in vitro and put all the pieces together doesn't mean that we humans have made life. The breath of life is divine. It's a gift.

We can't force it. And the edges, therefore, of life and death are where we realize that we do not have radical control. Materialism is a very incomplete vision of the world. And there is a far more profound force of life guiding us that brings an adventure that is so beyond our imagination. I know we're surrounded by divine intelligence. Not divine intellect, but divine intelligence. And it uses the intellect, uses. the physical body, uses the mind to weave through whatever's going on to reveal a healing,

a destiny, a slam dunk, a poem. I was reading about a doctor who had to do a very intricate surgery on an infant's heart. And he said he prayed. The procedure took hours. What he said for him was like five minutes. And they were patting him down, you know, with the sweat. But he said he felt something on his hand guiding him. And he was able to do this surgery.

So whether it's that or a slam dunk, you know, there's this intelligence of love just flowing through us if we allow it to take place, you know. It feels like a real litmus test and yardstick for seeing where our own growth is in life and our own development is how we feel with ourselves when we're alone. Oh, I love this. Man, even in podcasting, it's easy to come on here and put on a show for an hour or two. You know, it's easy for us to go to work maybe even and put on a face, you know, of different things. We cannot lie to ourselves. Nope. For extended periods of times, you know, it's going to show up and distorted energy in so many different ways.

So what comes to mind when you think about that? I have said over the period of time that if you're not in love with yourself, when you're by yourself, you're going to be hell with other people because you're going to become an emotional stalker. you're going to try to make that other person make you happy. So you have to learn how to be alone, not lonely, but you have to learn how to be alone and actually love this person and actually self-reflect, even on the areas that you don't like,

to actually look at them square in the face, embrace it, and be willing for that energy to change. So you have to like yourself with you by yourself or you're not going to like yourself in relationship because you'll manipulate that relationship in some kind of way to make yourself feel better. But at the end of the day,

if you don't like yourself when you're by yourself, it's going to be a problem in the world. So it's inner work. So it's a wise thing to spend a period of time by yourself. I love my alone time. I love it.

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our job is not to feel good, but to get good at feeling. And I'm just curious how you think about the emotional body and emotions and how they lead to physiological dysfunction and how there's parts of us that are just yearning to be felt fully because I've had many friends who have had psoriasis or like a rash or like some sort of persistent, you know, thing happening with their body.

And they did like an emotional release session or they fully felt something. And then instantly within overnight or a couple of days, it like completely goes away, which just seems like a miracle, but it's just how things function. And so any other thoughts of how. how emotions tie into that process. Absolutely. You know, this feeling code is about allowing people to move from emotional states to feeling states.

Think of it like we're designed to be in this feeling state. We're supposed to be present with self constantly. All of it, we were supposed to be, you know, raised in a culture that was doing that and the indigenous peoples were much more inclined to this. And, you know, we've just been carried away for many reasons outside of that system, of that flow. And so what happens when we're not using that bandwidth of energies

that is the emotional body, when we're not using it the way that it was meant to be used, which is the feeling body, if we're not using it as a feeling body and sensing and perceiving all parts of self and embracing them and noticing when we start to withdraw, when we're, you know, just a toddler, that we're in environments that teach us to not withdraw, but to just open your heart and lean right back into that and keep going.

If we're not taught to do that, we shut down the system, we sort of regulate it down into a lower vibrational expression of itself. And so this feeling body in a lower vibrational expression of itself comes out as emotion. It's like a default system. So that if I'm not paying attention to the felt sense of truth as it's moving through me, me and I shut it down, I'm going to have an emotional reaction. And if I gather enough of those emotional reactions, I'll eventually have an emotional outburst or breakdown. And in the midst of the emotional outburst or breakdown, I have a possibility of dropping back into that deep

sense of feeling that will actually be the healer. And so by default, we end up having these emotional breakdowns or what have you that bring us into our heart buckle us over send us you know to to the bed or you know to something to seeking some sort of reprieve and and by design it's going to default and open us back up into our feeling self we're just going to lay there and feel sorry for ourselves even if we're feeling sorry for ourselves or at least we're feeling instead of instead of constantly shoving it under and you know just just in a in a modality of survival of ship moving past it and sweeping it under the rug. So what we're doing is saying, let's feel more. So when we learn to do that consciously and intentionally, there is an

experience of deep joy. It's not that you don't have emotion, for goodness sakes. It's there. We're made of bliss. We're meant to be experiencing joy, right? And if we release those layers and drop into the true self, it's the healer and it's joyful and it's, it's, it's, it's, and it is Ananda, it's this true essence. And in that healing state, skin issues, digestive issues, sinus issues, headaches, is what it was for me, they disappear because we're dropping into the true self and allowing for that full expression to continue to do its thing. out through the layers of all of our, all of the layers of our being, right out to the surface of

our physiology. And so I think that feeling is one of the most potent things. It is the most potent thing, I would say, that we can do on a physical level to open the floodgates for this continuum, this quantum flow that is trying to happen through us as it is through everything, as it is through the trees, through the fauna and flora on our beautiful planet. It's happening without interference. So it can be also that for us. Our own unpacking of emotions that have been shoved down by misinterpretation of what we were supposed to be doing in those early years as we arrived.

Around COVID, I put out the most difficult podcast I've ever put out about childhood sexual abuse that I endured from age two to four. Sounds like weekly basis or so by this son of a babysitter. Not great. So very common. That doesn't lessen the impact. Incredibly common for both girls and boys. And just a quick sidebar on that when I put out the episode,

which was a conversation between my friend and Debbie Millman. It's amazing graphic designer. has this fantastic podcast that started way before mine, so she's an OG, design matters. She was terribly abused as a kid. And her approach to healing herself was very different from mine. And I asked her if she'd be open to a conversation,

and I said, look, up front, I'm not sure I'm ever going to publish this. My parents don't know, family doesn't know, none of my friends know. I mean, it was very difficult for me to decide to publish it. glad I did, but when it came out, I got texts or voice memos or voicemails from, I would say, a quarter to a third of my closest male friends who were either on the verge of crying or crying, telling me the story they had never told before to anyone, which was them having had a very

similar experience. It is so common. And in any case, the reason I bring that up, is that I think in response to that, being sensitive is just liability. I don't know if, there's this guiding phrase that I think is helpful, whether it's true or not is another question. But when you're, say, prepping or at a university and they're prepping people for a psychedelic experience, they say, nothing inside you wants to hurt you. So you're like trusting in that as a basic matter. him and then depending on the school of thought and the facilitator about this sort of inner healer guidance right the idea that you don't need to reach out to external experts all the time that

you actually have this innate intelligence that knows exactly what you need there's something to that but the reason I bring it up is that my two-year-old self knew that hypersensitivity given what was happening was just effectively like psyche suicide on some level so So that got cauterized. And the sensitivity, any type of emotional engagement with the world was just viewed as weakness. I later justified that as it being this irrational distraction from the hyper-efficient human mind that is the pinnacle of all evolution. And we can just run things based on this sort of hyper-rationalist framework.

And there's something to be said for that. You can do a lot with that tool. But if it's your only tool, there's collateral damage. And a lot of that collateral damage is in relationships. Because human relationships are not rational, which is why I find, like, efficient market theory and the idea that, like, all the stock, you know, people in the stock market behave rationally according to self-interest. I'm like, have you seen humans anywhere?

What gives you any basis for that? But let me come back from the stock market. I'm just using that example and say that I was not able to. bring those emotions back online and it was not even a an agenda item. That's not what I was after, right? But after a number of deep psychedelic experiences in 2012, 2013, I remember I was on a flight and I was watching a documentary called Pressure Cooker, which is an outstanding documentary, quite emotional, but I just started bawling on the planet. And I don't think at that point I had cried in 20 years. And I was just like, what fuck is happening here?

And then, you know, I had a shaved head as I do now. I probably looked even more like a skin head because my neck was a lot bigger. And I'm like, people are going to freak out? I'm just like, oh my God, what's happening? And I just noticed all of these sensitivities coming back online. And I had mixed feelings about it at the time. I was just like, oh, like, what is this? It's very uncomfortable. And I don't know what's happening underneath all this. Is this good? Is this bad? I'm about to have a fucking mental breakdown. I don't know. Ultimately, that sensitivity,

like superpowers are always, and I'm not saying it's a superpower, but I do notice things and feel things that other people don't, right? And I think that's part of what makes me pretty good at language learning. So there are upsides to it, but the reason I ultimately decided to double

and triple down on that is to learn how to work with that hypersensitivity. And also recognizing, and this is true with any type of really intensive therapy, it doesn't have to involve psychedelics, doesn't have to involve any drugs. But a lot of folks are worried they're going to lose their edge. It's true with people considering meditation too, right? Am I going to lose my edge? Am I going to have no motivation?

These things that I'm good at that form a lot of my mind. identity, am I just suddenly going to lose my grasp on these and be lost at sea? Typically, that's not the case. Like, 99 times out of 100, pulling a rabbit out of a hat for a number, that's not the case. And the way that I look at it is as having a wardrobe, you've worn this jacket, it's a great jacket, but it's like, you know, a cigar-smoking leisure jacket's like, well, do you really need to wear that to the beach?

Do you really need to wear that to Christmas? Like, there's a time and a place for it. It's just not all the time. So you take that off, you put it in your wardrobe, right? Psychologically speaking, it's always there. So what I've learned is that I can work with the sensitivities, and they've been invaluable in trying to become more socially intelligent with just conflict resolution and de-escalation and intimate relationships,

becoming a better friend. I mean, I feel like I've always been a very good friend, very loyal, but being a more empathic friend. Because if you have armor up, you're keeping a lot out, but you're keeping a lot in as well. Right. There's a barrier.

So for me, learning how to work with it, if I need to put blinders on and just be a racehorse, I can do that. I go into the wardrobe, I take that jacket down, and throw it on,

and I'm good. Like, I can go into that mode. So I think the fear of losing, that often prevents people from exploring richer terrain that they can explore and expanded capacities that they can use for a richer life. And look, I don't have all the answers. I don't want to make it sound like I'm preaching off the mount. It's not that at all.

I mean, I'm fumbling around. Everybody's making it up as they go. But that is, I would say, that embracing, that sort of uncorking and then embracing. of the sensitivity has been fundamental, not just to me feeling better in the world, but feeling intact as who I am, right? Because I had disavowed that entire part of myself for so long. The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health

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and make an impact. Register today at fightforbrainhealth.ca. So much suffering that's happening, too. God must encompass all of that as well. I think of the purpose that pain and suffering play on the path of spiritual growth. And what are your thoughts on the purpose that pain and suffering play

on our own spiritual growth and evolution? That's such an important question. I truly believe that's one of the top three most important questions that anyone working in this space can be asking. Because of the mental health epidemic, and especially with young people, there is a disconnect between pain and suffering and life and resilience.

and when you have a deeper understanding the purpose of suffering and misfortune and tests and difficulties, it can give you such a greater resilience to live a much more full, deep, vibrant life, especially for young people undergoing mental health issues. What is the purpose of our physical reality? Let's just suppose put all your skepticism out, the window. And let's just say that there is pure, beautiful, cosmic source understanding, light beyond time and space, infinite, and that will call it God. And this God wants what's absolutely best for us. Why does this God put 7, 8 billion of us into this physical universe,

into these flesh suits for 70, 80, 90, 100 years, why does this happen? You know, in a certain way, this must be the perfect soul-growing laboratory. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been created. Again, we're taking the supposition that there is this all-encompassing, beautiful, loving light that,

and this is just the beginning of a journey of great continuation. So what is the purpose of our physical reality? It is to struggle and grow. We're here to struggle and grow. This is why oftentimes atheists say, well, I don't believe in God necessarily, but I can understand that we might be an avatar inside of a video game. This might have a meta, you know, construct element to it.

And when we die, we wake up outside of this kind of three, 3D hologram reality because video games are kind of a great metaphor for being a human being on planet Earth. You struggle, you suffer, you have limited lives, you beat the beast monster, and you overcome, and you hop from ledge to ledge, and you drive your car here without crashing or whatever to move forward. And this is what it is to be a human being. And there are some terrible tests out there that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

God, one can only guess at God's infinite wisdom. It's one of the big kind of metaphysical and philosophical questions of all time. If there is an all-loving God, why is there so much suffering on the planet? But for the majority of us, again, our suffering and our tests and our difficulties are the things that we end up being the most grateful for. And that's because they've allowed us to mature and grow and grow wiser and grow closer to God and develop those spiritual qualities we talked about before, like kindness and generosity and joy and humility and honesty.

That's what this 3D construct world is for. We've got a short, you know, there's a metaphor in the Baha'i faith. There's some mystical writing that it's like, this physical world is like a banquet hall, and it's a sparrow flying through the banquet hall, and it flies through, and it bumps against the windows, and it eats some grapes and some pie, and it flies through, and it flies on out, and that's life is a sparrow flying through a banquet hall. I just love that image for some reason. I'm not exactly sure why, but that's, that's, that's, that's, that's,

That's what we're doing here. That's the purpose of physical reality. And, you know, the Buddha said, life is suffering. You can also translate it as there is suffering. We are in suffering. And guess what, there's a way out of suffering from non-attachment. And we can be freed from so much of our own suffering. You talked about humanity being in its turbulent adolescence, which is very true. And humanity is going to head to rehab. You know, we're going to have to fall down hard and split our head open and there's going to be some suffering. And hopefully we come out on the other side, you know, having some wisdom, some serenity and some focus.

Well said. I really like the understanding how suffering in many ways is like the price of admission for the illusion of separation. That's so well said. Like separation is, of course, an essential. like without separation, we don't have the experience of otherness. So it's like the infinite consciousness needs to descend into its many different differentiations to go on a data collection process and to experience itself,

to become itself in so many ways. Then part of that process is forgetting that is our true nature and the bashing of our heads against the wall and the pain and the suffering that is inevitable on the path to realizing who we are in our true nature. is coming to a place of feeling safe within our own experience, 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. 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. But that's contrary to 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, which is people conflate safety with comfort. So I remember when I was working at,

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. what's important is that you are safe, not that you feel safe, in a sense. So you take a look at, you know, sort of the enlightenment, I mean that period of European history, you know, the 17th and 18th century, that has given us our fundamental grammar for how we think about ourselves in the world. It gave us a story about why people are religious. Well, people are religious because they're not clear thinkers, right?

And people become atheists when they become their analytic and clear thinkers. Or they're religious because they're in, you know, very dire circumstances. Once they're sort of economically situated, then they stop being religious. And when I'm a scientist, actually look at the research done by and large by atheists, by the way, showing that that's not why people are believers or not believers. That's not why. People are believers because they have lived with other people that they consider credible, trustworthy individuals that are wiser than themselves.

And what we do with those people is we, in turn, their perspectives. You, you and I, we reflect on ourselves because we have internalized how other people reflect on us. And we imitate them doing it. And that's how we get our ability to know ourselves. We get it by internalizing other people. So if your parents were particularly religious and you found them wise, you will be so. If they were atheistic and you found them credible, you will be so. Now, why does that matter to the mean crisis? Well, you know, how the way. restarily lost God by Ederstadt. If you look at countries that are by and large secularist, there's a high correlation between being secular and how much people live alone. They live by themselves, right? And when we live by ourselves, we lose that network. We lose that network that gives us a greater capacity for metapestival awareness. And one last connection, and then I'll shut up again, I was privileged to take part in a published paper,

high-impact journal, led by Iger Grossman, somebody I know. We got as many of the wisdom researchers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers in one place either physically or virtually, we called ourselves the wisdom task force. It sounds really exciting. And we actually turned out a consensus paper

on what wisdom is. And one of the core features is perspectival metacognition, the ability to take multiple perspectives on a situation and reflect on yourself through alternative perspective. So as we've become alone, we've become lonely, we've lost wisdom and we've lost that, that we've lost that prospectival metacognition that's at the central of wisdom. All of that has contributed to the meaning crisis. All right.

So in the realization that this is what's happening, we, observe the many different compensatory behaviors that arise, such as parisocial relationships, consumer identity, new age spirituality without rigor. A lot of these things arise out of that space of individualism and not being connected to like what you were speaking to with community and so many different things. And so if you had to boil it down, which is probably unfair to try to make you do, for the reason of why collectively this meaning crisis is happening, what would you say are the main contributors?

So because our cognition, it's so intelligently adaptive by being really dynamically self-organizing and complex and multi-leveled. And that makes it so powerfully adaptive, right? And it orients us and it binds us to the world. It's also profound engine of self-deception. We are profoundly capable. And this is a lot of work on irrationality and rationality.

We are so prone in ways of ways, of which we are, myself included, I'm saying we, to dynamics of self-deception, much of which we are ignorant. So, you know, one thing that people do, and this shows up in social media. People have probably heard of this, but that doesn't mean you're not being affected by it because it largely affects you unconscious, confirmation bias. You will tend to only look for evidence that confirms something you want to believe is true, and you will tend to not find salient. That means it attracts your attention and makes you interested, you will tend to discount

or reduce the salience of things that might challenge your belief. And so, right, when you go on social media where you have the pretense that you're interacting with independent other people who could challenge you,

but in fact, you're selecting who and what you can hear from. So you're pretending that you're getting critical feedback and you're not. You can magnify the confirmation bias and engage in something sort of like confirmation porn, right? And so we are, and that's just one of many examples. We are beset

by self-deception. So, and this is not largely a matter just of belief. Like you were talking about earlier, it's how we taste things, it's how we perceive things, it's our state of consciousness, our traits of character. So we need practices. We can't just change our beliefs. We have to change our skills, our traits, our states, and our relationships. And so we need to, practices to do this. Now there is no panacea practice. There's technical reasons for that. There's no one practice that can alleviate all of your problems of self-deception because every practice has a bias built into it. So what you need are you need practices that complement each other that work in opposite directions. So for example, I went to the Tai Chi. They had a meditation

practice. Meditation makes you stand back and look at how you're framing the world. Now that's good, but if I always only do that, I'm in trouble. I also need to put my glasses back on and see if I can now see more deeply. Well, that's contemplation. So you need to be moving between a meditative practice and a contemplative practice. You need to complement a seated practice, like the meditation and the contemplation, with a moving practice, mindful practice, like Tai Chi Chuan. See, they all, they compensate and correct and constrain each other.

So you need a, it's like an ecology of organisms, right? You need an ecology of practices, and you need role models. Remember what I said, you have to internalize other people. So you need an ecology of practices. You need a common unity, a community of role models, and you need an overarching story that orientes you and helps you navigate and narrate. You need a mythology in the positive sense of the word. What used to do that for us was religion.

Religion, religio, religion was about when it's working. because religions can go wrong, just like everything else can go wrong, politics can go wrong, the market can go wrong, right? Science and technology can go wrong, right? But we'll talk about when it's working. What religion is doing is it giving us a tradition, a community, a mythos, and an ecology of practices for addressing self-deception and enhancing that connectedness that we, that religio that's at the core of meaning in life.

it was a place for people to go to cultivate wisdom in a way that transferred back into, that was crafted over generations to transfer back into their lives in a regular and reliable way. Now, for a lot of historical reasons and a lot of moral reasons, and I'm not here to challenge those, and I'm not here proselytizing. As you said, we've thrown out that Christian framework. But as you said, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We've taken away all of that functionality. So now, and wisdom is not optional.

Wisdom is not optional. When we are confronted by challenges, when we're confronted by absurdity, alienation, anxiety, when we get confused between having and being, when we idolize things inappropriately, when we're disconnected, when we feel like our world and our reality is beset by bullshit, right? We have very little resources.

So I'll ask my students, where do you go for information to hold up their phone like cyborgs? I'll say, where do you go for knowledge? And they're a little bit jaundiced about this, right? The university science. And then I say, where do you go for wisdom? And there's an anxious silence. And they look at me like, tell me. where I should go.

And that's a dangerous position for somebody to be in, right? So we lost all of that functionality. We tried to replace it. We've tried to replace it with various isms, pseudo-religious ideologies with nationalism and Nazism and Nazism and communism. And we drenched the world in blood because ideologies can't do it. Commercialism, celebrity worship. All of this, all the stuff we've been talking, we try to fill it, and it doesn't have the function.

Yeah, we've so largely in modern society, traded nutrient-dense behavior with those vapid and poor substitutions. Oh, I love that phrasing. Wow. Love it. But yeah, you're speaking to, like, you know, for example, porn instead of real intimate connection with another. So to speak, sitting around the campfire, real intimate personal connections with social media. The innumerable examples of this, right? And so in search of soul food, we have these poor substitutions.

It's like we're lacking nutrient density quite literally. Yeah. And we're malnourished. Yes. Yeah. And so that's a really important thing that I want to continue to highlight. Yeah, I want to. This is a beautiful metaphor.

Sorry, it really sparked something in me. Because one of the things that can happen is you can be malnourished without being hungry because you're eating a lot of junk food, right? So let me play with this for a second. One of the things is that people can often be beset by the meeting crisis without realizing that they are because they're malnourished, but they're not currently in distress. And what they don't realize is like when you have nutritional malnourishment, your physiological resilience, your ability to resist disease or to heal from trauma is radically reduced. Now, until the disease or trauma comes along, you don't notice it. But when it comes, you're in a disaster.

It's the same thing for the meaning crisis. People are sort of drifting around, I'm okay, right, until something happens. And then they realize, and I see it at the university, like I said, there's no depth of resilience. And COVID showed that. When so many people were thrown back into a genuine challenge to their everyday routines, many people went like in, like they got into very dire. I predicted one of the negative things, I predicted, sorry, this is one of these weird things where you're happy about something to, you predicted because you're a scientist, because you're a human being and you hate that it came true. I predicted a massive increase in spirituality, which happened. I predicted a mental health tsunami that would happen. Those are the indications. Spirituality is a terrific symptom of the meaning crisis. COVID hit. There was no resiliency and the meaning. crisis then demonstrated. Conspiratuality, conspiratorial, spiritual ideations. Yeah. So if you, if I was, I was privileged to watch a really good documentary where somebody

went to QAnon meeting. And what's really interesting is it's got exactly the, the structure of a Christian service. There's like a, there's a sermon, that there's singing, there's readings, there's social networking. It's not just a conspiracy theory. It's a shared worldview that gives people a orientation, a sense that they've cut through the bullshit to something that's real. They're connected to themselves to other people. There's something that matters. It feeds the meaning crisis and it feeds it with a pernicious narrative. It's something else here now.

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i'm curious as like on your human journey with a wife and kid and how has like shadow work how is healing human trauma coincided with the awareness of non-duality It informs, like, my therapy. Like, I do parts work therapy, and I'm actually in the process of doing some pretty heavy therapy and unpacking all of those things, drama, feelings, the past, all that stuff. So that's part of it. I can spiritually bypass when is desired.

Like, sometimes it's not just nice. It's, like, the top of the mountain to go, like, I have no parents. Jesus actually says that in the Bible. they found them and they're like, what are you doing? Your parents have been looking for you. And Jesus is like, these are my parents. And I'm like, that's hardcore. Can you imagine?

Your parents are like, where the hell have you been? I'm like, I don't have parents. That is so badass. So I can do that. And I do spend most of my time doing that because I don't know. That's what I'm feeling. But then I do spend a lot of time, obviously, playing the character of Pete. I notice that people are pretty good at forgiving other people, but I really work on forgiving myself.

Like, I can say, like, Andre, if you got really mad at Chelsea, I'd be like, okay, yeah, Andre, he belongs, and they're having their thing, and maybe I didn't like it, but like I can allow that. But then if I do something bad, like, if I was rude to Chelsea, I'd be like, I'm such a piece of shit, you know, like, no, we're all lawfully unfolding, and we all have our baggage, and we all have our mental illness or whatever you want to call. We all have our blind spots. We all have our shadow. And like when I'm doing my therapy, it's really powerful to stand as naked awareness and look sort of dispassionately at Pete. It helps me heal to be like, okay, sure, that's not who I really am. But I sure I'm losing a lot of sleep, not being that guy. I'm not. You know what I

mean, like, let's work on that. So I do work on myself a lot. And the thing my wife and I talk about probably the most is our feelings and why we're feeling them. So there's a lot of human experience. I think that's so powerful because we often fall into the habit of judging and shaming emotions. We don't want to feel signals and judgments we don't want to have in our experience. But you're inviting the perspective that there's an intelligent, hidden order. There's a design that is actually very useful and necessary for you to come back into your center into what you really value. So we can perceive all of these challenging experiences in life

actually with a lot of grace and gratitude. They're on the way. Yeah. Not in the way. Yeah. I'd like to address this. Just popped in my head. So I have the opportunity to speak to all different types of groups.

And a lot of them are business entrepreneurs and leaders that have ambituary. And the word ambition means a condition of both-sidedness, ambidextrous. If you can see both sides simultaneously, you actually expand the space and time horizons and accomplish the most because you're objective. But sometimes people with their amygdala create a fantasy. A fantasy is a positive without a negative. A nightmare is a negative without a positive. So our migla wants to avoid the nightmare and seek the fantasy.

It wants to avoid the shame and seek the pride. the pride. So it's constantly trying to look for advantage over disadvantage, pleasure over pain. It's hedonic. So it's basically trying to set a, it thinks is a goal that has more advantage and disadvantage, more positives, negatives, more pleasures and pains, more support and challenge. And by doing it, he creates a fantasy. Our intuition is designed to counterbalance that, to make his whole, to see things as they are, not as we're skewing. So our intuition brings brings up anxiety, fears, phobias to balance the philia. It balances it with a phobia and a nightmare and anxiety and doubt and uncertainty and feelings of self-sabotage and all those things. All of those are

important feedback systems to let us know that we're not pursuing a real objective, we're pursuing a fantasy. So we think it's a weakness, but it's not. It's a flawless response to guide us to set real objectives, not fantasies. Now, the ratios of goals can skew all the way from a fantasy, which is all positive, no negative, fantasy, illusion, mania, to an objective, which is a perfect balance of positive negative. And there's a whole spectrum in between. The most more fantasy it is, the more our nightmares come to wake us up. If it's up here, you get a little bit less anxiety. But once you get to the very top, there's at the very top, there's no anxiety. Because what strategic planning in the executive center in the brain is for, to mitigate the

anxieties and to calm and dampen the fantasies. The executive center uses glutamate and GABA, the facilitator, inhibitory transmitter to neutralize whatever is stimulated and inhibited in our fantasy. So it's trying to calm it down. Our intuition is counterbalancing our gut impulse to seek and our gut instinct to avoid. So our intuition is a negative feedback. Those are positive feedbacks that dramatize and polarize. The intuition is a negative feedback to neutralize and bring things back into objectivity

where you see both sides. Imagine being in a relationship with somebody, and you expected them to be positive, never negative, happy, never said, you know, one-sided. They're never going to live up to that. But when you expect them to be a two-sided individual and to live according to their own highest values, you have a realistic expectation

and can have a fulfilling relationship. But if not, you have a fantasy about who they're going to be. They're going to be more positive, negative, and they're going to live in your values, not their own. And these are distortions. The same thing with goals, just like in relationships. We set goals that are not really goals and objectives. They're fantasies.

And then we have anxieties. Anxieties and fears and phobias are not our enemy. People say, you need to get rid of that. No. They're there very precisely and deconstructed there to make sure that you're not going after delusions and fantasies to set real objectives. The executive center is designed to strategically plan. to transform fantasies into objectives to maximize the potential and actualization of our potential

so we can achieve. And that's what ambition really is. The ability to see both sides and have both sides in the pursuit. When you are able to embrace the pain and the pleasure equally in the pursuit of some purpose, you're not in your passions, you're in your mission. You're not in your sufferings. You're in your servings. And that's what liberates people from a lot of the frustration.

in the so-called achievement world. I went into meditating and paying attention to my habits because I needed to save myself. Like I was like, you know, heading towards a train wreck. And in the act of saving myself and changing my life immediately, I noticed that my relationships were very surface level and that I could do something about it,

that I can improve them, that as I deep in the way, that connection with myself, I could, you know, like, just have more, like, appreciation for my wife, like, get to know her again. And, like, the same thing with my friends, with my mom and dad, like, being able to deepen those connections, really, it was directly tied to me being able to grow and build peace in my own mind. Yeah, so I think that bridge, that bridge between personal growth and how that impacts the way you show up in your relationship and how you can learn how to love better, just feels important to talk about. Yeah, when you say that, it just brings to mind how often we drag our history and who we think somebody is and how they should show up based off who they've been in the past in every single moment.

And in that perspective, it's like we're not actually even engaging with somebody who, as they are in the moment, we're engaging with how we want them to be, how we expect them to be. And that, like, just sucks intimacy out of the equation. Yeah, because then you're like, what, I'm literally interacting with an illusion? Like, I'm literally like taking all these projections. forming them, bringing them into this present moment, and then I'm not even like, not even talking to you. I'm probably talking to the person who hurt me seven years ago. That sucks.

That's not a good way to live. I think developing awareness just helps you honestly learn how to listen because you can, it's so easy to get caught in the mode where, let's say there's tension between us, and you're speaking, I'm trying to listen to you, but already, instead of listening to you, I'm thinking about how am I going to retort? How am I going to sort of try to prove,

my point using the words that you're saying, as opposed to just taking a moment to fully appreciate where you're coming from, to just suspend my need for dominance, suspend my need for, you know, to just be right and just accept that you also have a very valid perspective. And then I should take the time to hear it. And then hopefully you'll give me that opportunity as well. Often we're under the presumption whenever arguments arise in particularly the romantic relationships, but also any conversation where we have differing opinions, we feel like it's me versus you, and we're trying to win instead of trying to understand.

And shifting that perspective instead of me versus you, it's us versus the problem. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like it's a big, it logically makes sense, but it's so you have to untangle yourself from your emotions, from your reactions to be able to even try to practice that because it's difficult. As soon as we get into an argument,

you know, we're very much so driven by our evolutionary need to survive. So when we get into an argument, we feel like we may be cast aside by the group. We may, you know, like we're under threat in some way. So immediately we feel like we're walking into a battle, but you have to remind yourself, like, who are you arguing with? Like, I'm arguing with the person I love.

This is my best friends. Like, this is my roommate. This is like the homiest of homies. Like the person I love the most. you know, so why am I acting like I'm under threat? And now let me try to shift my energy to try to do my best to see things from their perspective. And this is why, like, you know, in this book I talk about a very specific form of compassion where you intentionally try to let go of your perspective for a moment and step into the shoes of another person to see things from their view. And you find that when you do

practice that and you're able to give that to each other, the tension evaporates. When I can really see the series of events from your point of view, and then you can see mine, we're like, oh, that's why this happened. And I think that's only something that can happen when you really try to let go of winning. Just question it a little bit more, you know, and just create a little bit of a crack of awareness and inquisitiveness and curiosity when faced, you know, with these difficult situations. Yeah, I think it's really hard because the mind is so tricky. And I think when you're questioning, like, where is this coming from? You know, starts that the mind will literally jump through illogical hoops to be able to make it so that

this tension that I'm feeling is your fault, even if you have nothing to do with it. Show me an awakening guy having a road trip with two young kids in the backseat, and I'll show you a human. So allowing yourself the intimacy, though like the full intimacy of humanity I think really is a great way to to like see the parts of yourself that are emotionally not invited you know find yourself on the plane

with somebody with some kid crying but any I think emotional intimacy and relationship is like a really great place for it and delving into all the places that are uncomfortable there just the same way you delved in through your meditation practice into all the uncomfortable parts of your consciousness

do the same thing but just do it in relationship is usually like a very effective way to go. And so that would include something like business because business is a whole bunch of relationships. And there's this endless question is like, right, if I'm awakened, I should be able to live on top of a disco and be happy. But because I'm awakened, I'm not going to live on top of a disco. Like I don't want to, like, why would I invite that into my life?

Occasionally live on top of a disco. you know, go into the places where it's uncomfortable in humanity, whether that's like living on top of a disco or going to a Dodgers game or, you know, there's a Tibetan teacher I was learning about and he would, you know, I think maybe he wasn't maybe a Bhutan, but he would, you know, six months in caves, meditating away and then he'd come to America with his students and they'd all go to like soccer matches were all that like they'd all get in fights and they would like you know so like allow yourself that intimacy with your own humanity or with other people's humanity and recognize that all of it

is in you there's just no way you can't have all of that in you yeah there's definitely like dear friends who have really live in one and don't live in the other and that's that's okay with me it seems to be okay with them i just don't think it's it's it's just not as fulfilling it's it's interesting because we might proclaim that I want to strive for enlightenment, failing to recognize the I as the barrier into that state. Yeah, and the greatest thing about that I statement is that every way you look at it, it can disappear. You know, there was this Irish mystic Wu Wei Hui, I think he said,

oh, you can try to crack your ego, you could try to destroy your ego, go ahead and burn it with a thousand surrenders. The only problem is it never existed. that's like, wow, that's where there's freedom. And then there's also freedom in, okay, let go of your ego. There's also, like, because it's illusionary and it's nature, almost any way you look at it can show you

some aspect of freedom if you look at it. It's so amazing when you get beyond the story of herself that have been passed down quite literally, possibly for many people, for generations and generations and generations. Yeah. And you discover the unique creative pulse that lives within you that is like that one of the eight billion faces a diamond. And then it's beautiful because you then get to be a true representation of your unique

perspective in life. And however that shows up, you know, and if you're an artist, that means that your music is going to be not recreateable because it's unique to what wants to come through you. You describe this energy when you work with people in your mastermind and they feel physiologically lighter. It reminded me of the section of this book I read. I don't know if you've heard on having no head by Harding. But it's great. It's a book on non-duality, pretty thin. He describes in the recognition of one's true nature, some things that cascade.

And I just want to kind of riff off. I'll just list these off and see how it resonates. So a complex of interrelated psychophysical changes, including whole body alertness in place of the heady, intermittent sort, a reduction of stress, particularly in the region of the eyes and mouth and neck as if one were at last letting them go. A progressive lowering of one's center of gravity, as if losing one's head were finding one's heart and guts and feet, which are now rooted in the earth. A striking downward shift of one's breathing as if it were a belly function.

In fact, a general come down as if all the good things one had vainly strained after in the heights were awaiting one in the depths. And balancing this descent, a general uplift, including a sense of excitement. exaltation, an upsurge of creativity, a new childlike spontaneity and playfulness, above all, a lightness, and finally perhaps a calming of fears, a marked reduction of greed and anger, a smoothing out of personal relations, more capacity for selfless love, more joy. Amen. So these are like the fruits of the recognition.

And it's so beautiful, and that's why I say life is revelatory, right? Those qualities that get listed there very articulately, they're there. So someone might hear that list that you just read and they're like, I want that. Well, now you're fucked. The wanting of there, yeah. The eye that you think you are that doesn't have that is the suffering, is the barrier to those qualities that already exist.

Like I tell people, freedom is there. Like I really, really just connected with someone recently on Instagram and she's in this really beautiful transition in her life wanting to find more stability financially. And so the way she said is like, you know, I'm really finding my divinity, my goddess nature, and I'm wanting to create abundance. Which all sounds beautiful, right? And I said, if I could just, you know, help you with language, you can't create abundance.

What that shows me is that you're reinforcing the fact that you're what you're dealing with, which is what she shared is she doesn't have it. So it's like, oh, I don't have it holding onto the scarcity, but I'm going to create it. That's the work. That's the exhaustion. No, abundance is. So it reveals itself in the absence of the idea of me as somebody who doesn't deserve it, doesn't know how to get it, has never had it, money doesn't grow on trees.

Like whatever people have as a form of programming, which is the obstacle to the richness of all of these qualities and characteristics that are already there. One of the things that I really loved that I discovered in my work that I see is ever present. First of all, the breathing thing. It's one of the things that I will always say when I'm working with someone and say, that was a nice breath. they're like, oh, I just felt my whole system softened, right?

So you've come out of this excitory sort of fight or flight state where you're like vigilante to like, oh, there's nothing more about. So immediately the physiology starts to mirror that. The absence of ease is dis-ease, right? So dis-ease eventually cascades into the physiology. This is why I'll always tell people it's a bold statement. You cannot be healthy. No matter what you buy, hyperbarics, cryogenic chambers,

red lights, all the peptides in the fucking world, unless you free your mind. You have to do that first if you want to access vitality. Because you're always then perpetuating a state of dis-ease where everywhere you go. You are in a prison. And if you're in a prison, you can't access what it means to be radiant. You're in a world of survival.

And if you're in survival, then you have to be in a mild to severe state attention, vital flight. You're not going to digest food properly. You can't have the radiance that is available in connection with people because you're too busy trying to survive or not upset people or not get into trouble. all of the mechanisms that we talked about, right?

But that list is so beautiful because that's what happens in the absence of you. And this is where it's become so, it's so hard to articulate language, right? The paradox of like, okay, well, the you that you're looking for is in the absence of the you that you think you are. You know, and it gets kind of complex, right? But it's really not because when you start to see the illusion of how you've delineated yourself has some form of limitation in any arena your worth, your capacity to love or be loved, your value, your safety, whatever it is.

When all of that's gone, all of these qualities emerge because they've always been there. So for this girl, she really appreciated this woman, singing, she's like, oh my God, I never looked at it like that. You're right. If I'm trying to create abundance, I'm saying, one, I don't have it.

So then my form of resistance to life right now is creating suffering. I'm creating time, right? because it means something I have to do, that's the whole world of manifestation, is incumbent upon me to do something to get what I want, which creates time, which creates stress. I'm not where I want to be. That creates urgency versus no, it's all there. And in the absence of me, it becomes revealed effortlessly.

So I tell people there's always somewhere to get to until you realize there isn't. And they're both appropriate, right? Because as long as you think there's someone to get to, that's where you're currently at. And so you can't force not getting somewhere. because that would be the ego still trying to do it, you know, to look good in terms of like being spiritual or whatever. It's like, oh, no, no, kumbaya and I fucking meditate and I'm vegan roar or whatever. You know, that could be the ego's way of just like trying to still garner love that that person never felt as a child. It's still an addiction to some sort of constraint. So the compassion is to

let everyone be exactly where they're at right now. As I said before, like not knowing your path there's your path right now. But there's a suffering that comes with like, no, but I should, or what's my purpose or what's my Dharma? I don't know. Where are you at just right now? And can you be sufficiently big enough as a being to allow your current form of human iteration to be where it's at?

You are so funny. I haven't been very funny today. You've been so funny. I laugh so unexcated. I've had so much fun back here. And I was hoping that you could speak. to your relationship with humor and how important it is to you. And what have you witnessed people's relationship to seriousness and humor and how integral it is to your life?

And have you always had like a good sense of humor? So, suppose I said my grandmother is serious, what would you think? She's on the way out? Yes or no? Hello? If I say my grandmother is very serious, what would you think? You think, oh, she's on the way out, something wrong with her. If you're serious, what should I think?

Same problem, you're on the way out of life. Hello? You are... The question he asked. You are serious because you have no perspective as to what a tiny speck you are. It's the magnanimity of creation. For this tiny speck, we have an individual experience. Hello?

See, we think an amoeba is microscopic. What nonsense is that? Is it really life and this and that? But you're worse than an amoeba in the cosmic scale, isn't it? You're even more microscopic. Then an amoeba in your scale, what an amoeba is in the cosmic scale, you're worse than that are much, much, much smaller than that. So for this tiny creature in this universe,

there's an individual experience. What a blessing. But don't take it very seriously. Because it's just playing like that. It'll go poop. You're like a pop-up on the planet. You pop up and you'll pop out. You know, on your computer screen or your phone screen these days,

pop-ups come and pop-up. This is just a pop-up. Don't take it too seriously. Before you and me, countless number of people have walked this damn planet. Where are they? All top soil, huh? This happened, let me tell you. This is a serious thing, okay?

Tavred. You not. You missed a lot. Shankar and Pili and his wife were driving. They were married for over 25 years. Crash the car and he died. So he went to heaven. The wife was injured after two weeks.

She died. And she came, and she also went to heaven. She came there and screamed at him, Shanku. He said, what? The vow was only till death do us apart. What the hell are you doing here with me? Hello? The wab is only till death do us apart, isn't it?

But after death also they follow you. Because you're that blood is serious about everything. No, you and me can get blown away. This moment, if both of us vanish from this planet, nothing will happen. Everything will go fine. Actually, it may go better without us. Hello?

Yes or no? No, no, no, without me, what will happen? Nothing, things will go on. Something they will do. People, before you came, people were living, right? Hello? Before you were born, people were living. If you die also, people will live.

If you simply vanish, people will still live. A plain load of people just vanished some time ago, you know? Nobody knows where they went. Some people cried, but they're living, isn't it? All of us forgotten. We're living initially every... All of us were excited. What happened?

What could have happened? do these 200 plus people. How many times have you thought of them in the last 10 days? No. That's how it is. Even for you and me. It's the same thing. They'll cry for three days and they'll be okay.

So don't take yourself so seriously. This is, this will only happen to you. If you have absolute passion for every life around you, but total dispassion towards yourself, then you will live a balanced life. But right now people have total passion towards themselves. Dispassion towards others. This is dangerous.

That's a crooked world. It's all about me. I don't care what happens to that one. This is different. Absolute passion towards every life. Dispassion towards this one. Then you'll live with ease without any trouble. Whatever happens, if you live, you'll live well.

If you die, you'll die. Important. Because these are only two things you can do. Yes? To live and to die. What else can you do? You think you're doing many things. No, you're only doing this, you're living and you'll be dying one day.

Doing both of them gracefully and wonderfully is important.