How to Achieve Higher Consciousness from the World's Foremost Experts
Inside the walls of the Vatican, America’s Doctor sat down with the world’s greatest experts to contemplate one of the greatest mysteries of our minds: consciousness. From Deepak Chopra and Bob Roth, to former CEO Fred Matser and philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup, Dr. Oz dives deep into the spiritual understanding of how the brain works, and how we all can achieve higher consciousness. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
So when you experience love, compassion, joy, equanimity, focus on a good diet, get a good night's sleep, and manage your stress, and move, basically, you can change 99% of the genetic population, and even the 1% that's human genomes, you can upregulate the genes.
So literally speaking, you can change your body.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
There are those times in your life that you've learned something that you know you'll never, ever forget, and it comes in the most unlikely of places oftentimes.
So...
I was at this conference at the Vatican where I expected to learn about things that were going to be life-changing.
And inside the conference room, there was lots of that going on.
But one of the evenings, there was a party hosted.
And as I walked in, as I walked to the front entrance, Deepak Chopra was there, who was a member of the conference.
And we had been agreeing we were going to talk later on when it was a little less crazy.
And there was a gentleman next to him, in fact, two gentlemen.
That seemed very ordinary, interesting folks, but nothing that fancy.
And Deepak said, you need to talk to these two people because they're going to tell you things that are going to completely explode your brain.
And for that to be said by Deepak Chopra, of all people, someone who I've learned to love, but I grew up listening to his PBS specials.
I mean, God knows how much money I gave to the public television trying to get access to his tapes that he used to make.
And I loved him because he could take my science-based mind and translate ideas that I needed to understand in a way that I was receptive to them.
My left brain...
Respected the right brain more after hearing Deepak.
And for him to call these other two guys and applaud them as he did meant a lot to me.
So I began talking to them.
And pretty soon it was evident to me that these were big thinkers.
One of the words that was used was is-ness.
Like the word is and then this.
And is-ness means you have to be inspired and informed by is-ness.
And I was curious, what is this is-ness?
And so I'm going to, today, share interviews with Deepak Chopra, Bernardo Kastrup, who's a computer scientist, philosopher, one of the two men I met at that bar.
You do interesting things in a bar, Italian bar, a little upscale.
And Fred Matzer, who's a CEO, been very successful, but at this point has become a CEO of Consciousness.
And what these three men shared with me in these discussions was a whole different way of thinking of consciousness.
And then I'm going to bring a full circle back to talk to one of the foremost leaders in meditation and consciousness, Bob Roth, who I want to have in studio, sort of putting the icing on the cake, helping us understand why this is all so special.
He, by the way, was the one who interviewed Katy Perry because he taught her meditation.
And I wanted everyone to understand from her how it changed her life and could change all of ours.
So let's get started with Deepak Chopra.
Deepak, it is remarkable that this Vatican Conference has been able to attract all kinds of luminaries.
And even for you, you'll run into folks that you haven't seen for a while or folks you've interacted with for a long time.
How have you enjoyed that aspect of the conference?
It's been amazing.
I've seen lots of people that I haven't, as you said, Ran into a long time as we were coming for this podcast.
We ran into Olivia Harrison.
She's the widow of George Harrison from the Beatles.
And it brought back amazing memories.
George and I traveling all over India, our meditations together, etc.
Many adventures.
And of course, the conference is unique, as you know.
My interest right now is low-grade chronic inflammation, how it pertains to 95% of all illness.
Since only 5% of chronic illness right now, the disease-related gene mutations that are penetrant are only less than 5%.
The rest are related to how we live our life.
So the connection between genomics, epigenetics, microbiome, 99% of the genetic information in your body is not even human.
You can't change your human genes, but you can change the population of your microbial genes.
That's a revolution.
Give us some concrete examples of how you do that.
So if microbiome is the next big breakthrough and you have the opportunity to change your biome, how do you know which way to change it?
Well, one way to change it is to focus on maximum diversity of plant-based foods.
If you just do that, and you don't have to get rid of meat altogether, just lower your intake of meat.
Try not to get meat that has been fed hormones and chemicals and antibiotics.
Go for a week on a purely plant-based diet with diversity.
If you're really compulsive about it, there are many people these days who are doing artificial intelligence techniques.
Look at the microbiome, which tells you what diet is most appropriate for you.
But the fact is, if you can change 99% of the information, genetic information in your body, and the remaining, you know, 1% that is human genomes, you can regulate them too, up and down.
We did a study where we just published where a week of meditation actually upgraded the human genome 17-fold.
So genes that were involved In self-regulation or homeostasis went up, some of them, 17-fold.
Genes that were involved in inappropriate inflammation went down significantly.
There's no drug that can do that.
So when you experience love, compassion, joy, equanimity, focus on a good diet, get a good night's sleep, and manage your stress, and move, basically— You can change 99% of the genetic population And even the 1% that's human genomes, you can upregulate the genes.
So literally speaking, you can change your body.
You know, Mehmet, I turn 71 and a half right now.
And biologically, I don't feel a day older than 35. I have normal blood pressure.
All my biological markers are 30 years less than what they should be.
When you speak of this in the Vatican, where we're right now speaking, and church leaders, but there's folks from Latter-day Saints here, there's rabbis here, you begin to appreciate that there's tremendous wisdom in a lot of these faith-based practices.
How do they respond when they realize, my goodness, simple things like prayer can make a big difference?
Well, they respond with great enthusiasm.
But last time I was here, Pope Francis actually said, we need to focus on tenderness.
And it was a phrase I hadn't heard for a long time.
So I realized that, you know, the world is right now inflamed.
The opposite of inflammation is love and tenderness.
And if we could make this the mantra, because when I say inflamed, it's not just our bodies are inflamed, our minds are inflamed, our microbiome is inflamed, our brain is inflamed.
But everything that we do out there, from war, terrorism, climate change, extinction of species, poison in our food chain, it's inflammation.
So let's cool it.
Wow.
We'll send you out on the stage to do battle advances to form mankind.
Thank you.
Appreciate it, Deepak.
Thank you.
So Deepak Chopra has a remarkable ability to capture your mind, in part because he's poetic in how he explains the world around you.
Bernardo Kastrup, who he introduced me to that evening and who I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with, and that's the little clip you're going to hear in a second, We're good to go.
I'm getting closer.
Not to understand what it is, but to understand what it means to have it.
And just to read this off his website, his exploratory journeys through the thoughtscapes of philosophy of mind, ontology, which is meaning neuroscience of consciousness, because again, he's speaking as a scientist, as well as psychology and the foundation of physics influences us all.
So just take a listen.
It's going to catch you completely off guard.
These minutes may be as important to you as they have been to me.
Bernard, I was minding my own business last night and a good friend, Deepak Chopra, came up to me and said, you really need to go talk to this guy, Bernard.
And I went over and you were with a mutual friend, Fred, now a mutual friend.
And I observed you talking about consciousness in a way that caught my attention because it came from a very left-brained scientific mind, which helped me understand it better and maybe gave me more confidence than what you're saying wasn't airy-fairy.
But it turns out that you've written a bunch of blogs.
I've read a few from Scientific American, some of which have stimulated a fair amount of critique.
As you delve into the issue, perhaps the biggest mystery of all, which is consciousness.
So I'd love to have you explain to everybody what the big fuss is all about.
The big fuss is that when we try to explain something, according to our culture, we try to reduce it to something else.
We try to explain one thing in terms of another.
And we assume that we can explain consciousness in terms of something else.
The problem is that you always have to end somewhere.
You can't explain one thing in terms of another forever.
So there is something that is a primitive.
It's a fundamental in nature.
And there is this general implicit assumption in our culture that consciousness is not a fundamental.
And then we can't explain it because nothing else seems amenable to reduce it.
You can't explain it in terms of something else.
My position is that consciousness itself is the fundamental.
You can explain everything else in terms of it, but you don't explain it in terms of anything else.
Perhaps the biggest mystery in the Bible for people of faith is consciousness.
We never quite understand what it is, except that it connects us to God.
Maybe God created it.
I'm sure theologians could articulate in different ways how religions cope with consciousness.
But it also befuddles medicine.
Because we can understand much of how the brain works, but we don't really appreciate consciousness.
So your specialty is, again, computer science?
That's my education, yeah.
Your education, but you've become a philosopher.
I'd like to tap into that a little bit.
For the left-brain folks listening right now, what is consciousness and what evades us?
What could it do for us if we could really tap into it?
What is difficult is to deduce the qualities of our experience, how it feels to have a bellyache, how it feels to taste an apple, to reduce that to the properties of matter, like mass, chart, momentum, geometrical relationships, and so on.
That turns out to be, I would claim, impossible at a fundamental level.
That's why it befuddles us, because we keep on trying to explain it.
I would say, don't try to explain consciousness.
Explain everything else in terms of consciousness.
And then we are faced with some observations that people would say, well, given these observations, consciousness cannot be a fundamental.
Like if I knock you in the head, something will happen to your consciousness, right?
And my action is a very material, physical action.
Or if I drink alcohol, something will happen to my consciousness.
And we all seem to be sharing the same world.
If it was only consciousness, why can't I just change it at will, by an act of will?
Or why would I share the same world with you?
All of these things can be tackled.
One by one, according to a philosophy that has consciousness as the sole fundamental.
It's just that people don't have the patience to go through the steps of reasoning to explain all this.
They want to just, you know, immediately go to a sort of an aphorism that would explain it all.
That's impossible to do.
You have to have the patience to walk through the rationale.
The entire culture is leading us in another direction, a direction that has no end in sight.
It's a catch-22 at the end.
We just have to be a little patient to explore alternatives, and they are very reasonable, and they're even very grounded in empirical data, empirical evidence.
Take us down those paths, because it doesn't seem that accessible to me.
I've struggled my whole adult life with the idea of consciousness and the irritating reality that I can't get my mind around it, which maybe is the wrong goal for me.
All there is, as far as you or me or anyone else is concerned, is consciousness.
Everything that we have in our lives are qualities of experience.
Whatever we never experienced, directly or indirectly, might as well have never existed, never existed for us.
Yet we create this abstract construct, that there is something outside consciousness, which in turn generates the qualities of experience depending on how it's arranged.
Like if you arrange atoms in a way that we call a brain, Magically, out pops consciousness.
That's the difficulty.
If we stay with what experience gives us, which is experience is fundamental.
Any five-year-old kid knows that.
Everything else is an abstraction.
Everything else is an implicit theory, so to say.
If we stay with what experience gives us, then I think it becomes quite clear that what the brain is is the extrinsic appearance, the image of We're good to go.
Just as their image.
Your brain only exists insofar as it can be experienced, as qualities of experience.
Even the output of an fMRI scan only exists insofar as somebody looks at it, insofar as somebody experiences it.
So I think what we're dealing with are just two classes of experience.
First-person experience, what it feels like to be inside the boundaries of a dissociative process.
And second-person experiences, what the I'm just trying to translate this.
I know what I know and you don't, but then I intuit what you might know and make that part of my life as well.
You don't know what I know, but what I know is accessible to you in the form of an image.
That image is my brain activity.
That image is a content of consciousness.
What I know is also a content of consciousness.
So there are two types of contents of consciousness.
The ones I know directly and the ones I experience indirectly through the way they look like from a second person perspective.
But it's all consciousness.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first let's take a quick break.
So when people battle you in your editorials, on social media, what are the most singing arguments they're making?
What side are they articulating?
It depends.
I use some arguments based on quantum mechanics, which are very charged culturally because, well, we have to admit it, there has been a lot of abuse of quantum mechanics.
You abuse it left and right, have been doing so for many years.
How so?
People who do not necessarily understand quantum mechanics promote certain implications of quantum mechanics that are not necessarily accurate.
This happens.
But then when you do rigorously and carefully explore what the implications actually might be and you start flirting with similar conclusions, articulating in a different way, not as wide-ranging, but similar conclusions, It gets too close in the cultural dialogue to the abuse.
And then they think you're abusing too.
It's very difficult to discern sometimes for some people when you're doing it correctly and when you're just fooling around with it.
So I get attacked a lot when I do talk about quantum mechanics.
But I don't need to talk about quantum mechanics.
I do that because it gives some empirical basis for what I'm saying.
There are other empirical basis, though.
There's neuroscience, provides some basis for what I'm saying.
And pure...
Logical argumentation.
I think the idea that consciousness is the fundamental entity of all reality is much more parsimonious, much more economical than this abstraction we call matter outside and independent of consciousness.
We don't need this theoretical entity that cannot be proven or disproven to explain the world.
We can do that much more parsimoniously.
I think that alone would already win the game.
But there are several lines of empirical evidence as well.
To reduce it to practice, there are two big themes for me.
One, what created consciousness?
Whatever theory of nature you adopt, there will always be one entity in nature for which we cannot answer this question.
Right?
Because then there is the creator.
If you answer that question, then there is the creator, which precedes that which is created.
I would say nothing created consciousness, because everything arises within consciousness as patterns of excitation of consciousness.
This would be entirely equivalent to people who adopt the idea that the quantum field is the fundamental entity of nature, or Or super strings.
Or, you know, there is always a fundamental that has not been created.
I would say consciousness has never been created.
Creation is a process that happens within consciousness.
So then it begs the issue of the different faiths, all of which have their ways of, well, most of which created God as a figure that probably represents consciousness, if I'm understanding correctly.
How do you weigh those?
Because the individual faith systems do believe they have insight into what consciousness is about through their God, or in the cases of, you know, Some of the Eastern religions, it's a bit more ambiguous, but to those people it's not.
You know, we have no reason to believe that we can apprehend all the relevant aspects of nature with our intellectual capacities, right?
We are highly evolved monkeys, evolved on a planet, on the periphery of a typical galaxy.
I think the role of religion is to give us validation to access a part of our psyches that may transcend the intellect, that may transcend our ability to organize our thoughts linearly.
And the idea of God may be a symbol of For an intuition that transcends intellectual apprehension, that there is something of a consciousness nature, consciousness-like nature, that underlies and precedes the reality that we know in this life, and which has no beginning and no end.
So, we either believe all religions...
Or no religions?
If we need to believe religions literally, then I would say I don't believe any of them.
I think literalizing religion is a disservice to religion.
It flattens it.
It makes it small, a shadow of what it can be.
But if you say religions are symbolic narratives, That's pointing at the moon, but you should look at where it's pointing to and not at the finger that's pointing.
Then I would say, I adopt all religions, because I think they're all pointing more or less in the right direction if you just have the eyes to see it.
Incredibly powerful.
Bernard, thank you very much.
And continues good luck with your academic battles.
Thank you.
That's Bernardo Kastrup.
Now, when I met him, and you can see what a showstopper his ideas are, he was actually talking to a gentleman named Fred Matzer, who's a CEO. You think, okay, he runs a company.
What's the big deal?
He's become a leading humanitarian as well as a businessman.
He's a founder and co-founder of a wide range of charitable foundations.
I think there are 19 overall that span the fields of healthcare and environment, conservation, peace, all kinds of things that you're sort of celebrating for.
And I wanted to understand, how does a CEO... Go there, because that's not usually what you're worried about.
You're usually focused on the price of your stock.
And it turns out he's become an expert in consciousness, in part working with Bernardo.
So take a listen.
Fred, thank you for being here.
We enjoyed a spectacular event last night and shared some insights.
Mostly I listened to you spoke.
And use this phrase, isness.
And I'd love if you could explain that to the audience.
Yeah, well, I think a state of isness is when you really are not thinking, you're just here in your being, and where you allow yourself to be thought.
And I often use the comparison with Mozart, who didn't think about his music.
He just was sitting or dreaming, and then the music became, in a way, clear to him.
And he was able to listen to it.
And he was blessed enough to live in a time where they were able to write down what he heard so that he could share it with the audience.
Be more specific if you can, because as you told the tale of creative people, take Mozart as an example.
He had the ability to free his consciousness to sense some creativity, something that was out there that most of us maybe could access too, but we can't free ourselves to see it.
And then he had the wherewithal to bring it back so they could write it on sheets that could then be held for the rest of known history.
How do some people capture that?
Yeah, well, so it is that you are in a state of being where you allow yourself to be thought, where the information comes in, and then with your thinking capacity, You execute what you heard.
That is divine inspiration.
So when you're all the time thinking and God wants to talk with you, the line is occupied.
So both is okay.
So it's on the inspiration, you get inspired.
And on the inhalation and on the exploration, you think and you act.
You're a corporate CEO. Used to be used to be used.
Give us history.
What happened 35 years ago?
And I know you mentioned nutmeg somewhere in there.
Oh, this is a long time ago.
I had to go in the business of my dad, who had Parkinson's disease and could not speak, so he had stiff form.
So I was there at the beginning as his translator, and in the mid-20s, I succeeded him, and a few years after, he died.
Then I wondered myself if I needed to continue to be in that business while many people were suffering.
So I had a chance to work for Red Cross and got a high job to be involved in the fight against diarrhea death.
Five million children in the mid-80s died related.
Diarrhea.
Yeah, related to the dehydration that goes with diarrhea.
So during that period, I met a friend, and he knew that in our family also we had diabetes, and said, I have an American healer here.
And he does great work.
He is a friend of Jonas Salk.
And Jonas Salk was the inventor of, you know, the polio vaccine.
And the other also had invented that the condensed nutmeg had a specific effect on the brain.
So it was that he gave me a lot of water to drink, eat a lot of vegetables, and then a minusculeous portion of nutmeg he gave to me.
And when that, in a way, kicked in, I, in a way, came in another reality.
Like, it was a feeling of sheer love.
And an enormous clarity.
And in the meantime, when I looked at the watch, when it started, it was, say, 3 hours, 15 minutes, and 12 seconds.
When I went to what we call sometimes the other side, which I would call the infinite, it took zillions of years.
And in the meantime, it felt very realistic.
At a certain moment, after those zillions of years of a wonderful experience of clarity and a kind of feeling of bliss, I thought, who am I? And then I looked at my watch and we were 12 seconds later.
But when I said, in the experience, there is no me, there is no I. It's just you, in a way, you implode with the whole and all.
And there's no matter, I do not know what it is, but it is just a feeling.
So when I came out, I came to understand that I'm here to learn about unconditional love because that's what I would say was the experience.
And I'm here to develop my consciousness to understand and experience unconditional love and live accordingly.
Now, don't ask me if I'm doing it, because in life I go 10 steps forward and 9 steps back.
So I go flat on my face many, many times.
But you're headed in the right direction.
And sometimes if you're headed in the wrong direction, it's going backwards the right way.
Yeah, sometimes it's 10 forward, 11 back, you know.
Well, to finish as you emailed me last night, miles of smiles and sprinkles of twinkles.
That was inspired and very informed.
Thank you very much, Fred.
So when I emailed Fred Batzer to share that little bit with you, he responded, let's be inspired and informed by isness.
Those are his actual words.
I thought it was pretty cool.
And then he signed off miles of smiles and sprinkles of twinkles.
And they're kind of uplifting.
Isn't that interesting, Lisa?
It was like three in the morning I read that, by the way.
Sounds like the good fairy or something who's coming in to, you know, bless you or I don't know.
But I tell you, when you have a doctor, Deepak Chopra, and you have a hard-nosed businessman, Fred Matzer, and you have a computer scientist, Bernardo Kastrup, and they're coming together because they're arguing the biggest unsolved questions of our time are what are the elements of the universe...
And what is the essence of consciousness?
Something that if you're reading any spiritual book is the biggest mystery of all in the Bible, right?
What's the coolest factor?
There's a consciousness there.
And our ancestors had a consciousness that came up with oral tradition ideas, concepts of heroes.
Somehow we've created something as human beings that is spectacular.
You and I have been thinking a lot about Jordan Peterson and his thoughts.
I mean, this is your expertise area, so...
Hardly an area of expertise, but definitely an area of deep inquiry.
It's what excites me most.
So these guys are right in my wheelhouse.
What surprised you the most as we have embarked on this journey of understanding consciousness?
You've spent your whole life studying theology and grew up in a strong faith-based tradition.
I never thought of consciousness as much as the religion itself, but consciousness seems to be this superset.
It overlaps in all the different levels of religion.
One of the things that came up when I was talking to Bernardo was that we're all looking at people pointing to the moon.
The moon is the goal.
Each religion points to the moon.
Spiritual leaders point to the moon.
And we look at the person pointing instead of looking at the moon, which is what the whole point of the point was in the first place.
And that was actually what I was going to say when you were asking me a question.
Oh, come on.
And then you answered it for yourself.
So you see how hard it is to be with your wife?
Imagine how difficult it is on a radio show if you're working together.
What else do you want to say then?
Nothing.
Come back, you won't speak.
But it drives all perception, right?
Yes, I agree.
I totally agree.
And it's shared by all.
We all have a consciousness that overlaps everybody else's.
And agnostic or not, and that's actually the other thing that sort of caught my attention.
I was trying to find out, are they religious or not?
If they're focused on consciousness.
And Bernardo said, well, I'm either agnostic or I believe in all religions.
Which is when he gave me the line that I just stole from you.
But you weren't even there.
How do you know he said it?
Because you told me four times.
You see, when I like to me, it comes up over and over again.
And actually, one of the nice things about being with you is we often have a lot of God's language, which all the folks I spoke to said is silence.
It's also death on the radio, or in a podcast, for that matter.
I'm going to bring in Bob Roth, who is one of the nation's foremost teachers of meditation, has tremendous insights into mindfulness, which is where meditation will hopefully take you.
And this is not some religious, cultish thing.
In fact, what's most special about him is he's so normal-looking.
You could never imagine he could do all this, but he taught me and you, and I want to bring him in.
So, you were at the conference also.
I knew you were coming today, so I didn't torch you in Rome, so you can enjoy the Vatican a bit.
But since I've got you in my clutches now, TM is something that you've taught to a lot of luminaries, many of whom I've spoken to subsequently and say changed their life.
I'm in that group as well.
I'd love if you could explain to the audience how TM and other efforts to quiet the mind work together, and also how it gets you into that space of mindfulness.
Well, it's an analogy you've heard me use, which is of the ocean.
We have waves on the surface of the ocean and silence at the depth.
And we use that as an analogy for the mind, the surface of our mind.
They call it the monkey mind.
It's like the waves, or the gotta, gotta, gotta mind.
And the purpose of meditation throughout the ages was to bring some calm to the mind.
And so there are basically different types of meditations.
There's one that's called focused attention, which trains the mind.
If you use the analogy of the surface of the mind, it's like that choppy and the depth of the mind is silent by its nature.
So there are different approaches.
One is how to clear the mind of thoughts, how to calm the monkey mind.
That's focused attention.
The other is called open monitoring.
It's sort of a...
An observational tool, that's a lot of mindfulness techniques of how to watch the waves rise and fall, watch your thoughts dispassionately, not get upset by the content.
And the third is self-transcending or transcendental meditation, which is a mindfulness technique, you could say, which gives access to that source of thought.
I'm a big advocate that people, that we shouldn't silo, that we should train ourselves and our children different tools that do different things.
There's different outcomes, different brainwave signatures, different effects on the physiology.
And so I like to see this one integrated whole.
The brain is three pounds, 2% of the body weight, So much of what we do in life is exercising from the neck down.
So meditation techniques, legitimate meditation techniques, address the exercise you could say from the neck up.
There's last more to come after the break.
You were responsible for getting Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, both of whom meditate, and they were actually singing your praises.
Behind your back, by the way, I should say.
And one octave.
That's right, one octave.
It was off key.
Not Katie.
Well, Katie says something very interesting.
She said, she always gets asked, why don't you take a nap or just sleep a little bit extra?
And she said, well, that's like brushing your teeth.
And meditation, TM in particular for her, is like flossing.
And she winked at Bobby and said, it's, you know, people have interesting breaths sometimes.
They don't floss enough.
So, you conducted the panel admirably, by the way, kept it centered into how a highly functional person who had big-time problems just quieting themselves, which is true for a lot of us.
You don't have to be highly functional, not highly functional, but, you know, oftentimes people who are really peripatetic or all over the place can create beautiful things, but they also, it's like a Maserati, when the spark plugs aren't working, everybody can hear it.
So I'd love to hear your impressions of that interview and what your takeaway was from hearing from her and other luminaries who had joined you.
Well, I taught Katie to meditate about seven years ago in India when she was getting married to Russell Brand, which was a story in itself.
Stay tuned for that.
He's a big meditator too.
Yeah, he's great.
It's helped him overcome heroin addiction.
It saved his life.
So Katie at the time was an outward directed pop star.
She was 26. She was just on her way up and she was just all over the place.
No center.
No basis.
And so her way of downloading was to get drunk or to drink or party.
And it was killing her.
Exhausting her.
and really jeopardizing her career.
And she came into learning TM very skeptically.
She comes from a very religious background, and I emphasize it's not a religion.
And so she learned it.
And right from the beginning, there was a, she just, in that analogy, she just dipped right in.
She just, like, settled right in.
And she's found it to be more than anything else, like a reference point.
Instead of being outward directed, self-referral.
So she has a reality of an inner rather than just outer.
Oh, I'm known because I sold a gazillion albums, but last year I sold a gazillion two, and so now I'm not happy with myself because that's a horrible way to live.
So this just gives her that inner perspective.
How did her family react to the meditation?
Because there are a lot of people out there who think that there's some conflict between TM and a particular faith.
This was mild compared to the other stuff that Katie was doing.
Her parents were happy.
She thought, okay, TM would be good.
Actually, I had a talk with Her mother, when we were in the Vatican, offered to teach her to meditate.
I teach a lot of fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslim clerics to meditate, and I just go to the research.
I said, you know, a lot of the branding on this, on the internet, was from 40 years ago when there was no research.
And so, oh, it's a religion or it's a this.
There's so much data, and that helps, you know, resolve the problem.
And we're in public schools now all over the country, and they've looked at every, you know, they've investigated it.
So it's not in conflict with any religion?
No, it's not in conflict with any religion.
In fact, it supports every religion.
Because you're calmer, you're more yourself, and you're more creative.
What did Katie's mother say?
This time?
She said, let's talk.
Oh!
Yeah, let's talk.
And then she started telling me about Jesus.
But that's fine, because that's fine, because she can have her faith.
As I said that time, you know, your faith is completely different than meditation.
It's just, this is, as we talked about in You, Mehmet, and Lisa, on your shows, beautifully done.
You know, you've got to eat right.
You've got to exercise.
You've got to take care of your mind.
You've got to do good in the world.
You've got to love people.
But you can't ignore the head.
So forget that.
If you don't like the word meditation, just call it technique X. How about the Bob Roth technique?
