The Resilient Mind - How to Transcend the Mind: Unlock Higher Awareness and Inner Freedom - Deepak Chopra

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Deepak Chopra is a world-renowned author, speaker, and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine and personal transformation. Blending ancient wisdom with modern science, Chopra has become a leading voice in the global movement for holistic well-being. Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalDownload Mindset App for free and listen to 5000+ of the World's Greatest Motivational Speakers and Thought Leaders: https://bit.ly/mindsetxTheResilientMind Subscribe to Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to How to Transcend Your Mind with Deepak Chopra. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. I trained in internal medicine and then endocrinology, which is study of hormones. And then I went on to study neuroscience and neuroendocrinology. I saw the relationship. between what happens in our consciousness and particularly emotions

and how that affects our biology. As a physician, I was always impressed by how giving information to a patient affected their metabolism. You know, if I told somebody you had cancer, just the word cancer, you could see immediately their blood pressure go up, their heart rate speed up, their platelets get sticky, and, you know, a whole cascade of events in their biology, which was essentially inflammation and propensity to disease,

just hearing bad news and interpreting it and having an emotional response to it. I remember giving that news to a patient and then immediately realizing that I'd made a mistake. I was reading the wrong chart. So I immediately apologized, and I saw his biology change in a moment. And now, you know, 40 years later,

we realize that every experience you have, every experience, it doesn't matter what the experience is. It could be emotional, but it could be food, it could be sleep, it could be exercise, it could be breathing or yoga. But right now, this conversation, you know, we're having this conversation and you and I are exchanging information

in our frontal cortex of the brain and genes are going on to facilitate the neural networks that make this happen. But then there are people listening to us, maybe hundreds of thousands, their brains are being activated. So I realized that, you know,

you couldn't localize the mind. You know, if you ask a neuroscientist, conventional neuroscientist, where is the mind? they'll point to their brain. But the brain only has the neural correlates of the mind. The mind itself, you can't localize. It's both embodied.

It's a relational and embodied process. So, you know, the mind doesn't exist by itself. It exists in relationship to other minds. So it's relational and embodied in the brain, but in your biology. and it regulates the flow of energy and information in our bodies and in the ecosystem of relationships. Now, if our identity, fundamental identity, which is that of the separate self,

which is a socially induced hallucination in my opinion, because the separate self doesn't exist, period. but that hallucination or that idea of the separate self creates anxiety. It also creates anger because of trauma in the past. So anger is nothing but the memory of trauma. Hostility is the desire to get even. Anxieties, the anticipation of trauma again in the future. Blaming yourself is guilt.

guilt leads to humiliation, humiliation and the combination of everything I've said leads to depression, which is the number one pandemic of our time, not COVID, depression, stress, hostility, resentment, that causes inflammation. So, you know, suddenly I had this idea that if we went back to some of the wisdom traditions of the world that said our essential nature is, as the Buddhists say, inter-beingness, We are, you know, famous statement of Ticknaut Han, we are inter beings that inter arise in the inter-isness. There is no isolated self.

But that isolated, fearful self has created the trauma that we see in the world that actually manifests as war, terrorism, eco-destruction, greed, leaders who are only interested in power-mongering, influence-pedaling, cronyism, corruption, and their own self-interest. So we've created a world that's actually very dangerous right now. And I thought in my naivety about 35, 40 years ago, if we had something that could actually collectively shift consciousness. And actually I was one of the founders of a neuroscientist.

called Alliance for a New Humanity. And we had people from civil society, lawyers, attorneys, people from the United Nations, with this idea that we could reach a critical mass of people for a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful world. But even the organization faltered because there was schism within the organization. You know, people, again, power mongering and fighting within the organization for dominance or, you know, leadership in a very selfish way. So the organization faltered. It didn't go anywhere.

I decided to continue on my own. We've reached a stage in our evolution where people don't ask these questions. They only know that they suffer and they want an immediate solution which is something like an antidepressant or whatever. And that's what we've created with a materialistic interpretation of the universe. Wisdom traditions tell us we suffer because, in fact,

in the Eastern wisdom tradition, we suffer five causes. Not knowing who we are, number one, not knowing the nature of reality. no isolated self, clinging and grasping at experience, which is ephemeral. You know, experience is ephemeral, it's transient, you can't catch it. Even this experience, you know, if I ask you, you can't hold on to this experience. If I asked you what happened to your childhood, you'd say it's a dream. Or if I asked you what happened to last night, it's a dream.

What happened to this morning, it's a dream? What happens to these words, by the time you hear them, they don't exist. then we also recoil from that if it's unpleasant. We confuse ourselves with our ego identity, which is socially induced, and we fear death. Those are the five causes of suffering. So wisdom traditions say you have to figure out what is reality. And when you figure out what is reality, and you can't do that at 16, unless you're being groomed. You know, in wisdom traditions, you were groomed for wisdom.

and that started what we call self-education, which is what yoga is, by the way. Yoga means union with the self. Misinterpretation of yoga is just the physical postures. But the eight limbs of yoga are all intended to find your true self. So there are principles of social intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical posture, breathing techniques, withdrawal of the senses,

focused awareness, meditation, transcendence. Once you get to these last three aspects of yoga, transcendence is the key. You find out who you are really, the self which knows the self, not bamboozled by social constructs. So let's go through those five things. Number one.

Not knowing reality. Reality is not local, it's infinite. So what do I need? to understand then to avoid that form of suffering. I need to understand that it's not localized and therefore that means that you are infinite. You're at one level. I'm everything and nothing. Everything and nothing and actually you experience love. Love not as a sentiment, but the ineffable interconnectedness with all that exists. People have those experiences with psychedelics these days. or you can actually give somebody an experience like that with even VR

because we are already in a VR. Number two? Number two, clinging, grasping that which is ungraspable. Every experience is ungraspable. So the awareness of an experience is not the experience. The awareness of a thought is not a thought. The awareness of a thought is independent of the thought. If you identify with the awareness instead of the thought,

which is like a cloud going through the sky, you don't either attach yourself to it or you don't identify with it. It takes training. So, you know, and the Rig Veda, let noble thoughts come to me from every side because your thoughts are not your production. Your thoughts are socially constructed

and they recycle through you. And yet we identify with them. So number two is identifying with that which is ephemeral, transient, ungrasperable. Number three. On number two, so we need to not attach, not associate with thoughts, not associate with experiences in order to be free from suffering. You can associate with them, but you're not attached or identified to them.

You can associate with thoughts. So if you've had a trauma in your early life or something or you've been through something not so good or you've been dumped by your boyfriend. And then we would identify with that. And actually that epigenetically, by the way, that's intergenerational. Now we know that, you know, in the Holocaust, for example, during the invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany, there were a lot of, there was famine amongst the Jews. And now three generations, four generations after that, the people's descendants who were

traumatized, they have diabetes because somewhere in their body there's a memory of famine. So they're holding on to carbohydrates, they have insulin resistance, etc. If you take a mouse and you expose it to a smell that it likes, for example, lavender, and then you give it a mild electrical shock. For seven generations, the mice will be fearful of that particular smell. I've been to a cow farm in Hawaii where they used to have electrical wires as fences, mild electrical shocks.

Now they don't have the wires. But the descendants of those cows that were traumatized, they won't cross over that fence or they won't cross over where the border was. So this is another mystery. Where is memory? Most people, if you ask them, where is memory? They'll point to their brain.

If I asked you, what did you have for breakfast today? What did you have for breakfast today? It's a really good question. I had a salad with some chicken and avocado. So now where was that memory before I asked you the question? There's nowhere in the brain you can point out that memory was. But as soon as I ask you the question, the neural networks go fire. But where does the memory retrieve from?

the only place is consciousness, but consciousness can't be localized, recoiling from experiences that we interpret as unpleasant. Okay. But see, once again, the awareness of the experience is not the experience. So once you can observe the experience,

you're free of the experience. You don't identify with the experience. Oh, that's an interesting thought, passing by the screen of my consciousness, like a cloud in the same. sky. I'm not the cloud. I'm the sky. I'm not the play on the screen. I'm the screen. So an example would be, so the sentences recoiling from experiences that unpleasant. They're unpleasant. So give me an example. Someone in my life, someone in my family dies.

Yeah. So obviously you're scared, right? Because you identify with the experience, but everybody dies. I mean, trillions of people have died. you're not the only one who's going to die and then what dies is another mystery the body dies the seeds of memory recycle because what is memory

but it's information and that's recycled through collective consciousness as soon as you're born you're already born into an interpreted world a world with memory a world with imagination, a world with non-local consciousness that is now localizing through your brain as this process that you call the body.

The body mind is a process in consciousness. Consciousness itself is not subject to time. Time is an experience we have as soon as we have subject-object split. So as soon as there's subject-object split, which is artificial, in nature is a unified activity, then time is born. The experience of time is born. So in your life, if someone dies, God forbid, do you suffer?

You grieve, which is a natural process and it has a life cycle. You don't hold on to it. In fact, you embrace it. You embrace the, any time you recoil or deny, resistance creates even more stress. So what we call stress is resistance to existence in the moment. If you don't resist experience in the moment, you know, it's passing by. A shift in identity.

We started with that. A shift in identity from your assumed self to your fundamental self, which is infinite. which is without cause, which is not subject to birth and death, which is spaceless, timeless, incomprehensible, infinite, irreducible, and fundamental. You know, every moment you have a choice to repeat the past or be a pioneer of creativity of the future. And that happens, by the way, it happens individually, it happens collectively. We change world views.

You know, the world is not flat anymore. The ground is not stationary anymore. The world is not material anymore. Every technology that you use is based on the new idea that the essential nature of the physical world is it's not physical. If I could see you as you really are, I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots and some random electrical discharges.

And at the most fundamental level, there are no boundaries. Boundaries are perceptual. So when we experience the spirit, ritual ecstasy, which is ineffable, there are no boundaries. That's why people in near-death experience, people with psychedelic experience, people with peak experiences, athletes, musical performance, any break from ordinary reality is ineffable and healing, actually. That's why the recent resurgence in science.

psychedelics is very interesting because, you know, it takes you away from your identity of being squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime. And point number four, the five points of suffering. Point number four. Confusing your selfie with yourself, your ego identity. We've talked about that. And number five is death. Death.

But all of them have one solution. First one. find out who you are. How does one find out who they are? Transcendence. There's no, here's another thing. There's no system of thought, no system of thought.

Religion, philosophy or science that will get you into knowing true reality because systems of thought are just that. Systems of thought. What is it that gives rise to thought? That is what you want.

No. And that's been the eternal quest in spiritual traditions. I'm not talking about religious dogma or ideology. You know, these days is very fashionable for people to say I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. It means the same thing. When you have a spiritual experience, number one, transcendence, you find your identity beyond space and time. Number two, emergence of platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, named after Plato. or love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and number three, loss of the fear of death. That's Jesus, that's Muhammad, that's Rumi, that's Buddha, that's every luminary that you can study since people created systems of thought. Take some time every day to be unoccupied.

Even spiritual pursuit is an occupation. So take a little bit of, you know, I think it was Kafka or somebody who said, all of human problems, humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly and do nothing. We're always doing, doing, doing. We have human doings. We're not human beings anymore. It starts a process. We begin to ask yourself, who am I?

I'd reflect on these questions every day. Who am I? What do I want? what is my purpose, what am I grateful for? And who am I without these constructs? It's a big mystery, right? Who you are. Ultimately, you realize you're the awareness in which all experience happens.

But you're not the experience. The experience is in time. You are not in time. And this requires a different kind of education. It's not part of our culture. it used to be part of cultures you know if you read Plato and the Republic and you'll see that you know

this was part of every culture but it was few luminaries people romanticize even about this in India's a spiritual country well India's been violent forever a few luminaries the sages of the Upanishad then we have romance around them

Greek culture you know the Greeks were the most civil in the world. Well, yes, Socrates and Permanides and, you know, Pythagoras, and I can name a few, but the rest of the country, even in those times, you know, they had slavery, they had sexism, they had these, the source of the Olympics where they used to sacrifice humans. And, you know, we're still performing, even in our days, we're. is still repeating that cycle with the what do you call cheerleaders, the virgin vessels of the past. We haven't changed, actually, much.

Here are the daily habits. Number one is sleep. Now we know, by the way, that lack of sleep is the number one predictor of premature death from cardiovascular disease. Lack of sleep is also a predictor of Alzheimer's. Lack of sleep interferes with their creativity. lack of sleep causes inflammation. So that's for sure. Number one.

Number two, I think, is any practice that quietens the mind, meditation, reflection, contemplation, sitting quietly, watching your breath, etc. Number three is exercise. Number four is mind-body coordination, as in that's different than regular exercise. Yoga practice and martial arts. breathing practices, Tai Chi, Chi Gong. They actually activate a different part of your nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system,

which causes self-regulation in the body. So it's not just exercise. It's something that puts mind and body together, even gymnastics or things like judo, and I mentioned martial arts, but yoga is my practice. then emotional's, your emotional and physical environment, your social environment, because we live as social beings. So, you know, if you have toxic relationships is going to cause physical toxicity, then nutrition.

We now know that food that causes inflammation, refined, manufactured, processed food with chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, insecticides, pesticides. It's poison. It's like putting agent orange in your body. So organic food, farm to table, maximum diversity of plant-based foods. Now we know a lot about micronutrients. We know about biological rhythms.

But ultimately, I think spiritual experience is very important because no matter what you do, no matter what you do, no matter how healthy you are, There is old age, there is infirmity, and there is death. So unless you face those right head on, when you're healthy, not when you're in a crisis, not when somebody dies in your family, then everybody panics. I had a crisis in my life when I was six years old. My father was in England.

He was training to be a cardiologist. I was living in my grandfather. and one day we got a telegram that my father had passed all his exams. He was now a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Big deal in those days. We got a telegram. My grandfather wanted to celebrate. So he took me and my little brother to a carnival, then to a movie.

I even remember the movie, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Then we went to a fancy restaurant, and then in the middle of the night he died. and they took him for cremation, brought his ashes back in a little jar about the size of this coffee cup, a little bigger. And one of my uncles said, what happened? Yesterday he was taking the kids to a carnival, and today he's a bunch of ashes. My little brother, who later became the dean of education at Harvard Medical School, he was four years old. He started to lose his skin. his skin started peeling off.

I went into a panic and, you know, my uncles took my brother to every physician. They couldn't find a diagnosis until somebody said, you know, he's missing his parents, he's feeling vulnerable, he's losing his skin, shedding his skin because that's a metaphor

for his vulnerability. He'll be fine when his parents come back and sure enough, as soon as they came, my brother was healed. So six years I had a crisis, existential crisis, went on to become a doctor. But what happens? You go to medical school, the first thing you see is a corpse. You're supposed to understand life by dissecting a body.

You know, it's the way we are trained. You started off by looking at a human being as an anatomical structure rather than a process and consciousness. So it took me a long time, you know, going through medical school, training, myself, going through crises, smoking, addictive behavior, alcohol. I remember resuscitating a patient, putting a pacemaker, putting him on a respirator, and then going outside to smoke a cigarette. And then, you know, I was disgusted with myself.

I threw away my cigarette. That evening, I threw away the scotch. And I decided that I wanted to understand who am I. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.