All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 3, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
54:47
We’re Sleepwalking To Extinction! (With Deepak Chopra) - #073 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So, we're going to be doing a little bit of a walkthrough of this.
So, we're going to be walking through the area of the park.
Brought to you by Fyjer.
You're going to see the future.
Oh In this video, you're going to see the future.
Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, an in-depth interview with free thinkers, spiritual teachers and aspirational leaders.
Today I'm joined by Deepak Chopra.
Deepak is often referred to as a self-help guru, but I see Deepak as more than that.
I see him as being at the point of inception of new ideas that infused a secular culture with a new radical approach to spirituality.
He's the founder of the Chopra Foundation and the author of over 90 books, 90s written.
We had a fascinating conversation about higher states of conversation, cultivating an inner light, you've got to cultivate it, and how he's positively helping people with a new project, even though we disagreed in several areas, like AI, that was a complex part of it, and also the obligation of people that are spiritually awakening to wage war against the system.
You're going to enjoy this conversation.
Please welcome Deepak Chopra.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Deepak, one of the things I know you talk about a lot is how the culture has turned us into addicts.
How our attention is being mined and controlled.
How pharmaceutical companies are issuing medicines, in particular I'm referring to the opioid crisis, that have had a terrible detrimental effect on the spirituality of our kind.
We refer often to the cultivation of an inner light, to a connection to something beyond external stimulation.
Where we are now in the argument, and I may say in my personal opinion it's a point of crisis, what do you believe are the most important steps we can make now?
So, first of all, thank you for having me, Russell.
It's always fun to be with you.
I think we are at a crossroads.
One road leads to sleepwalking, to extinction, and the other is to wake up to who we are.
The way media, social media, news cycles, everything we see on the internet, The way it's run, we have sacrificed ourselves for ourselves.
We don't know who we are anymore.
We have been so conditioned by the collective hypnosis and into the feeling of separation, that we live in fear, anxiety, and actually we have become biological robots.
And unless we wake up to our fundamental reality, I think we're sleepwalking to extinction.
There's no question about it.
Social injustice, economic injustice, climate change, extinction of species, poison in the food chain, mechanized ways of killing each other and ourselves.
We're a disaster.
And all our leaders, globally, are gangsters.
How do we reintroduce spirituality into a culture that is so materialistic and so devoid of conscious spirituality, where pleasure and convenience and safety have been prized, deified and enshrined in a manner that almost prevents access to sacred and ineffable principles?
There are three principles that have been outlined in wisdom traditions.
By wisdom traditions I mean the Gnostic Gospels, the Buddhist traditions, the non-dual traditions of Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism.
They say the same thing.
They say take refuge in the Sangha.
Sangha means community.
Today we can create online and offline communities.
That's something we are doing.
So that's one.
Take refuge in the sadhana, which is daily spiritual practice, whether it's yoga, meditation, mindfulness, anything that activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
And take refuge in the dharma, which means higher purpose, authenticity, integrity, higher calling and transcendence.
So the means are there.
We have the technology.
You know, Jesus had 12 people and he made a big impact.
Buddha had maybe six or seven that were part of his team.
Today, with global leaders like yourself and many others, luminaries who are interested in authentic self-realization, I think we can create a global community for caring, attention, affection, appreciation, transcendence, and acceptance.
Radical acceptance, radical love, and radical gratitude for existence.
That's a start.
Thank you Deepak Chopra.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate you saying that and I also appreciate the Great deal of work you've done in popularizing these ideas, the amount of criticism that you have endured, and the great way that you have continued to elevate these principles and make them accessible, in particular handling the difficulty of the point of interface between science and mysticism.
It's a very, very challenging place to operate.
In our previous conversations we've talked about the challenges of commodification, of spiritual ideas, of ensuring that it doesn't just become another set of individualistic practices that are ultimately used to make you a better component within an existing system, that we meditate in order that we can become better at our jobs, rather than meditating in order that we challenge the necessity of our jobs.
Loads of people in the spiritual community, by the way, that I belong to, the 12-step community, Regularly use your abundance meditations.
You're really well regarded and revered.
I literally mean the community of, in particular, men that I spend time with, with our meditation and our support groups.
Lots of groups of us do your meditations and your challenges, 21 day challenges and stuff like that.
What I feel like is that we've almost accepted the position that spirituality only can exist within the confines of the dominator culture.
The spirituality Isn't going to challenge that culture in the same way that someone like Gandhi or Martin Luther King used their spirituality, if gosh, I don't want to say as a weapon, that seems wrong when both of them are so committed to peace, but as an edifice against which their principles could not hide but be protected.
What do you feel about that?
About the obligation towards activism?
So, Russell, very important questions.
Let me share with you a little bit about my tradition.
So, the tradition I come from, which is an ancient tradition, the first 25 years of life are spent in education.
The second 25 years of life, you take care of your family, your friends, and you seek fame, power, fortune.
It's one of the goals of life.
Money is included.
The third 25 years, you give back.
And I've now entered the fourth 25 years, which is the final chapter.
So I'm 76, even though I'm biologically much younger, but chronologically I'm 76.
This period of my life is supposed to be dedicated to what we call self-realization.
Not self-improvement, but actually going beyond all human constructs to know who you are at a fundamental level of existence.
And also to prepare for the mystery of death.
So, these are my final chapters.
As far as commodification or whatever you call it, I began my journey as a young intern resident, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
And drinking alcohol on weekends and getting smashed in the hospital if I wasn't on duty.
So I started meditation because I was disgusted with myself.
That was like 50 plus years ago.
And today I'm in a totally different place, you know, looking for the divine in me, in you and the whole world.
So it doesn't matter what brings you to the door, Whether it's addiction or smoking.
In fact, I think addicts are probably the most spiritual people that I've known.
They just need to move from spirits to spirit.
Period.
And that's what I did.
So it doesn't matter why people start, how they start, what the culture is.
As far as science is concerned, science, you know, is based on, is very successful.
We're using right now this technology to communicate with each other and the world.
We use jet planes, people are now traveling out into space.
So science is very successful, but it is based on a philosophy called Naive Realism.
Naive Realism means that the picture of the world is the human look of it.
When we know that actually the picture of the world somehow mysteriously corresponds to the brain that is used for observation.
The brain is not where consciousness exists.
This is another reason why science is at a crossroads.
The two fundamental questions in science, what is the universe made of, first of all, is a wrong question.
There's no such thing as a universe.
It's a human construct in human consciousness for human sensations, perceptions, images, feelings, and thoughts.
So the first question in science, what is the universe made of, is a wrong question.
The universe is not made of anything.
The second question in science is what's the biological basis of consciousness?
It's also the wrong question.
There is no biological basis of consciousness.
All experience, including the experience of the brain, is in consciousness.
So when we combine our understanding of what we call scientific naive realism and why science only looks at human observation, never ask who's observing, what is the methodology of observation, because three things are necessary.
The observer, The mode of observation and that which is observed.
As we move into higher states of consciousness through direct experience of transcendence, these questions become irrelevant.
There is only consciousness.
It is formless in its fundamental state and as form it appears as the universe.
You, me and everything including our technology.
Once we get that, that is the essential religious experience.
Which is also the spiritual experience.
You know, these days it's very fashionable for people to say, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual.
But the actual spiritual experience, whether it's Jesus, Buddha, Rumi, Muhammad, is the same.
Number one, transcendence, knowing your identity beyond space-time.
Number two, the emergence of platonic values, truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion.
Joy, equanimity, not as rules of moral obligation, but as natural outcomes of that experience.
And the third is loss of the fear of death.
So those are the three things.
Transcendence, platonic values, loss of the fear of death.
I am there in my life right now, and I want people to understand anybody can be there.
If Jesus was pointing to the moon, you should be looking at the moon, not worshipping the finger.
This unitive idea, a unitary idea that all phenomena and non-phenomena are the expression of a single entity and it is Like mind, it is mental in its nature rather than primarily physical.
Suggest to me a set of values and as you just outlined, there are equanimity, kindness, service, joy.
These are values that you're listing.
Do you feel, somewhat in reference to my previous question, that the Objectivity of these values, if indeed they can be derived from this unitary, formless oneness that you describe, means that they ought be obviously practiced at the level of the individual, but also the community, and that they, when we live as we...
Seems clear, and you obviously agree from your opening statement.
When we live in a world that is somewhat antithetical to those value systems, a world that is materialistic, I mean that in every sense of the word, individualistic, is built on systems of domination, deception, bias and deceit, Do we, what is our obligation to spread these principles?
And where does it become a, where does it become, when does it lead us ultimately Pat, if not to conflict, then certainly to a kind of adversity?
When does it become demonstrative?
When do we have to say, We need to change our governments.
We need to change our economic systems.
We need to introduce new forms of democracy that are derived from the principles that we're describing.
Otherwise, or does it not matter if all of these things are part of some limitless flow that is transmaterial and beyond consciousness and the sensory world as most of us are able to understand it?
Does that induce a kind of nihilism in the same way that atheism might?
A very interesting question.
You see, I've been through all those phases.
I've been a militant activist for peace.
So that in itself is a paradox, an angry militant activist for peace.
I realized that, you know, to be a strident activism, it doesn't work.
Then I became a sacred activist.
I said, okay, I will only support divine causes, get to a critical mass of peace, social justice, economic justice, sustainability, health and joy.
Didn't work.
I'm now at a place where I totally understand what Mahatma Gandhi said.
Unless we are the change we want to see in the world, it's not going to happen.
You have to be the change you want to see in the world.
We cannot fight darkness.
It only creates more darkness.
We can only be the light of awareness.
So, I'm at a stage in my life right now, and as mentioned, these are the final chapters of my life, Where I would like help from people like you and other luminaries to actually create that critical mass of consciousness where we are the change we want to see in the world without any angry activism because it only perpetuates and recycles the old.
To have a new story, we have to have a new paradigm.
New context, new meaning, new relationships and a new story.
It's a death and a resurrection.
In spiritual terms, it's almost like what we call to be born again.
It's, you know, what is called metaphorically the virgin birth.
You start fresh with the old dying and the new Reborn, but fresh, new context, new meaning, new story.
And this is really the message of the people you mentioned earlier.
Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa.
They were actually bringing us to this realization.
So let's not fight the darkness.
Let's bring in the light together.
Many of these figures, and no figure is without gosh, without controversy these days, I'm thinking of a couple of them in particular, have interesting relationships with carnality.
How do we square this Dedication to the ineffable.
This ongoing and constant rebirth that amounts to a pure presence that is not bound to the past or in continual conjecture and projecting into the future.
With an enjoyment of sensuality, a service of the appetizer.
I'm thinking in particular of Rumi and how his writing expresses a kind of a great love of what sounds like erotica at times.
Or do you think that Rumi is speaking metaphorically of the lover in much of his verse?
How, and regardless, how do all of us human beings square our attachments to this earth, our need for status and community, our need for sensual and indeed erotic pleasure with a set of ideals that sometimes can seem quite ascetic and based on purity?
So, you know, this idea that carnality or sexuality or sensuality are somehow opposed to spirituality, that's a Judeo-Christian guilt phenomenon that's made a lot of money for the Judeo-Christian institutions and also fundamentalists in every religion who seek Power and control.
The fact is that in true spiritual understanding, sexuality and the sexual energy that we have is divine.
It's the same thing as spiritual energy.
Without sexual energy and spiritual energy, there's no life.
This is the creative energy of the universe.
So I have written about this.
I've done a book called Kama Sutra, which is about sexuality and spirituality.
And I think the responsibility we have as divine beings is not to be in denial of our basic impulses, but to channel them for the ideal sensual sensory experience.
So in Indian philosophy, by the way, the true Vedantic non-dual philosophy, There are four goals in life.
Dharma, which is purpose in life.
Kama.
Kama, not karma.
Kama, as in Kama Sutra, which means sensuality, sexuality.
and spirituality.
So Dharma, Kama, Artha, material success, no denial of material success, and ultimately Moksha.
I notice you say, Steve, stay free.
So Moksha is freedom.
Freedom from the conditioned mind, including the conditioned religious mind.
So, you know, religion has been a great tool for control, for power mongering, for influence peddling, for cronyism, for corruption.
Religious institutions have done that all over the world.
But religious institutions have also done good.
You know, we should not deny the good they've done.
I think the time has come now to forget about dogma, ideology, theology, and philosophy.
But to engage in spiritual experience in the true way that it is meant to be experienced.
So you talk, you know, I know you're a student of yoga as I am.
My new book, Living in the Light, which is about yoga for self-realization, it talks about The Eight Limbs of Yoga.
Okay, the Eight Limbs is called Royal Yoga or Raj Yoga.
So, the first limb is Yama, which means rules or principles of social intelligence, but based on a deeper understanding of consciousness or fundamental reality.
Niyama rules of our ideas of Emotional intelligence, again, based on a deeper understanding of yoga.
First two.
The third is, of course, yoga asanas, which we all practice.
But understanding that the yoga asana is meant to convince you that your body is not physical.
It's a field of awareness.
Every yoga posture is actually, you know, we have names of them.
Happy Baby, Child Pose, Cat-Cow, etc.
There's a reason.
The yoga postures are meant to shift your awareness ultimately to the realization that your body is not physical.
Physical means it's just a construct.
It's a perceptual activity in human awareness.
Your body is a field of consciousness.
That's number three principle of yoga.
The four is breath and using the breath to control the autonomic nervous system which we call pranayama.
The fifth is pratyahara, which is usually translated as withdrawal of the senses.
It's also interoceptive awareness.
So when we have perception, we look at the outside world.
Interoception is looking at the inside world and learning how to control it.
We all learned interoception as babies.
It was called toilet training, bladder and bowel control.
But the yogis say, why did you stop there?
Why don't you regulate your breath, your heart rate variability, your endocrine system, your immune system, your inflammatory responses?
Why don't you do that?
So that's interoceptive awareness, the fifth limb of yoga.
The sixth limb of yoga is concentration and focused awareness and focused attention, focused intention.
The seventh limb Now we're getting there.
Seventh limb is meditation.
So meditation comes much later.
You have to prepare for that.
And then the eighth limb is transcendence.
That unitary consciousness where we go beyond waking, dreaming, sleeping to what is called soul consciousness, cosmic consciousness, divine consciousness, and unity consciousness.
This is real yoga.
And yoga has tells us, the original writers of yoga tell us, And you know, our friend Eddie Stern, who you both, you and I know, would fully agree that yoga tells us no system of thought, whether it's philosophy, theology, religion or science,
can give us access to reality.
Only yoga can, because yoga is not a system of thought.
Yoga is a practice to get in touch with the true self.
The second sutra in Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, first sutra says, now the teaching of yoga begins.
Yoga is The settling down of the fluctuations of consciousness into the source of all reality.
The self of the individual is the self of the universe.
So there's nothing more important than yoga, if you understand it.
Yoga means yuj, which means union.
Connection.
Yoke.
When Jesus says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
He's talking about yoga.
The light of awareness.
He talks about this.
Let your light shine forth.
The light is not photons.
That's another human construct.
The light is the light of awareness.
Photons don't have any color or shape or form.
And yet we experience, I'm looking at all those beautiful colors where you're sitting.
Where do these come from?
These are modifications of consciousness.
There's nothing other than consciousness.
Once we understand that, we are free.
That is what Sankhya means.
How can the Vedas categorize objectively levels of consciousness that appear to be so diffuse?
Divine consciousness, supreme consciousness.
How Could the yogis and rishis, saints and sages of the past, objectively quantify something?
If all things are unitary, how can there be accurate taxonomies that by their nature require distinction and discretion?
How can there be layers?
But taxonomies are just maps.
The map is not the territory.
But we use maps to explore territory.
And of course the Rishis and the Vedas had no objective way to categorize these.
There was totally subjective but now we do.
Russell, we are publishing data right now through our foundation on people who claim to be waking up and there are certain criteria and then there are neural correlates of these criteria.
So for every state of consciousness your brain is different, your neural networks are different, your perception is different, your cognition is different, your memory is different, your emotions are different, Your relationships are different because reality shifts according to the state of consciousness you're in.
Now, the yogis couldn't measure this, but we can.
In fact, we're doing that.
And, you know, waking up is the most important thing that we are now engaged in as a foundation and also as an ecosystem.
You know, it's not necessarily a new idea even in the West.
Wittgenstein said, We are asleep.
Our life is a dream.
But once in a while, we wake up enough to know that we're dreaming.
The Buddha said, this lifetime of ours is transient as autumn clouds.
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain.
And when his disciple, towards the last, you know, when he was in the last stages of his life, He said, who are you?
Are you a prophet?
Are you a messenger?
Are you a messiah?
And like all the great people before him, he said, I'm awake.
That was his last word.
I think there's nothing more important right now as humanity for us to wake up from this lucid dream that we call Everyday reality.
If I asked you, Russell, what happened to your childhood, you'd say it's a dream.
If I asked you what happened to your teenage years, you'd say it's a dream.
But if I asked you what happened five minutes ago, it's a dream.
Even by the time you hear these words, they don't exist.
The whole thing is a lucid dream in a vivid now.
And there is nothing more important right now to know that we are not the dreamer.
We are the dream.
We are not the dream, we are the dreamer.
And that dreamer can live at all times in the field of infinite possibilities.
With the neurological research that you are currently undertaking that makes observable and measurable these varying states, is there significant consistency between various subjects that are being observed to suggest that there is indeed an archetypal reality or different archetypes of reality
that are being expressed and experienced through different subjective experiences, i.e.
the many observable tropes present in monotheism or pagan religions, the consistencies,
the similarities in language, and even symbols that occur, fractals, spirals. Is there...
Do you see in these observable data points the idea that, oh look, subject A and subject B appear to be measurably having a comparable experience depending on stimulants that they're exposed to, and this suggests an ulterior reality that whilst Broadly ineffable because it's extrasensory can be detected in the same way that certain experiments in the quantum field suggest a reality that is at odds with our previous understanding of Newtonian physics.
So Russell, our research is very preliminary and these are the things we are seeing.
Number one, a shift in perception.
So what happens is there's clarity of perception and there's also going beyond the perception.
You know William Blake's poem, we are led to believe a lie when we see with And not through the eye that was born in the night to perish in the night while the soul slept in beams of light.
So people who are waking up have a shift in clarity of perception, number one.
Number two, they have more cognition clarity, which means more intuition.
Number three, they have a shift in emotions from fear and separation, anger, hostility and depression to love, compassion, joy, equanimity.
Number four, They have a shift in memory.
They start to use memories, but they're not victimized by past memory.
This is the basic thing that we are seeing in our research, but then some people are also reporting what we call awakening of non-local dormant potentials.
What people would normally say, extrasensory perception of the ability to look at the future or identify with a memory of another lifetime.
Now this is very preliminary but again this is the second chapter in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is devoted to this.
It's called Vibhutis or supernormal powers but you know what Patanjali warns that if you achieve these for the sake of achieving this then you will actually be dismayed because you'll get self-importance and your ego will start to dominate Let these awaken as a natural extension of expansion of consciousness from fight-flight to reactive to restful awareness, intuition, creativity, higher consciousness, archetypal, imagination and ultimately transcendence.
So there are many biological correlates to this.
This research is very preliminary.
There are some of one or two very good researchers in this field that I'm engaging with.
And also now we're looking at some of the research with psychedelics where we see I think that psychedelics have the ability to be used judiciously.
I work with an Oxford-trained MD, Geeta Vaid, who's a psychedelic expert from Oxford, England, but she now is in New York.
What we are seeing is that when used properly in certain cases, They actually loosen the neural networks of the conditioned mind.
There's a part of our brain called the default mode network, which is the neural correlate of the ego mind.
So when this cools down, people have an experience of universality.
One of the things we're using these psychedelics right now is for terminal care.
You know, my book agent, one of my book agents, whom I'd known for 50 years, 40 years, she recently passed away.
She had brain cancer.
So we took her through this experience with ketamine, which is actually regulated in the United States and approved by the FDA.
She had terminal lucidity where she had total clarity.
She fully woke up.
She had, you know, great love in her heart and she was looking forward to the transition.
So then I called my neural, you know, I have a lot of friends in the neuroscience community.
I've written a book, three books with The head of neuroscience at Harvard, and I said, Rudy, what do you know about terminal lucidity?
And he said, let me look it up.
And then what we found was there's a small percentage of patients or people who may have Alzheimer's, who may be in coma, who may have other diseases, moribund.
And just before death, they have this awakening.
They see the continuation of the dream.
They even see dead relatives.
They feel great joy and ecstasy.
And sometimes it lasts a few minutes before death, sometimes a few days, sometimes a few hours.
But it is seen in a small percentage of My mother went through it when she went through that experience.
I now regularly, before I'd sleep at night, I actually go into transcendence and explore the mystery of death, including my own death.
I've done a short series right now on YouTube on the mystery of death and it's getting a lot of attention because it's based on direct experience.
Do you feel that as the lexicon evolves and alters, some scriptural and arcane ideas become more accessible?
A good example of this perhaps might be Elon Musk's relatively recent conjecture that reality
– and it's a popular trope these days, Deepak – that reality could be a simulation
generated by an AI.
Do you see this as just another attempt to present the divine within a materialistic,
rationalist setting, or do you think that perhaps the language is unimportant except
for perhaps rationalism strips reverence away from that which has previously been regarded
as unknowable?
So, Elon Musk and his colleagues in the AI field, actually because they are physicalists,
they use the lexicon of physicalism that this… Everyday reality is a simulation generated by an AI.
But who creates AIs?
We have to ask, who creates AIs?
You need a consciousness even to create AIs.
So what they are calling the simulation generated by an AI, I say, is actually the divine projecting infinite universes through infinite modes of knowing and infinite sentient beings.
And right now, if you look at the latest science, you know, if you look at, say, Caltech professor Sean Carroll's book, Something Deeply Hidden, he is at Caltech.
He's moving, I think, to another university.
But, you know, he's very prominent A physicist at Caltech holds the most important chair.
Einstein was a visitor there.
Sean's written a book called Something Deeply Hidden, and it talks about infinite universes and infinite versions of you and me.
And you know, I interviewed him on my YouTube channel.
And that's what his stake is.
It's a physical stake.
But if you read the ancient scriptures, Yoga Vashishta, he says infinite universes come and go in the vast expanse of consciousness like motes of dust dancing in a beam of light.
It's a beautiful image.
A beam of light, motes of dust, infinite universes coming and going.
But in the vast expanse of what?
Consciousness.
There's only one consciousness.
Call it God.
Call it Allah.
Call it Brahman.
Call it Ainso.
Or just call it non-local, formless, fundamental, irreducible, spaceless, timeless, incomprehensible, infinite reality.
That's God.
That's God.
Do you think that there is a kind of pessimism in the determination to present this unknowable all-encompassing reality in materialistic terms as a kind of nothingness?
You know, the barrenness of space from a conventional cosmological view.
It is nothing.
It is a vacuum.
All of conscious phenomena are fluctuations of data.
What do you think is the pessimism?
Is this a product of the Kali Yuga?
Do you think we live in a time of grossness and darkness where people find it difficult to access the light?
Yes, sir.
It's the nihilism that comes with science.
And actually in spiritual traditions, too, there's a phase that's called the dark night of the soul.
I've been through it, where there is this Fear of losing what you thought was your identity.
But there is no such thing as a static identity.
You're never the same person even moment to moment.
So what we call a person is an evolving process in the same consciousness which is divine incomprehensible.
So science is struggling with its own dark night of the soul.
Even though there are times when I feel beautifully connected and free and at ease and peace in this world, there are times where I also feel engulfed by fear and locked into craving.
And the tendrils that lead right back, it seems at least to me, to some native wound in my infancy are alive with very present suffering.
What do you offer to people who sometimes feel awake, enlightened, connected, free, but still suffer with what seem like quite remedial conditions, speaking for myself, craving, longing, pain, inferiority?
What do you offer us?
Rumi would say the way Across the fire is through the fire, not around the fire.
Embrace your fears, accept them and feel them in your body.
It's not just the trauma of the womb.
It's intergeneral trauma going back eons of time.
Right now, you can't move your hand or even speak or breathe without the genetic activity of all your ancestors.
They're alive and well right now, thriving.
Diabolical and divine, sacred and profane, injured and whole.
They're all in your body right now, in every cell of your body, as genetic and epigenetic activity.
So who are you?
You're the entire web of creation of life since the beginning of time.
And the more you embrace that, the more you'll ultimately be able to jump in the abyss, which is actually the abyss of ecstasy, of joy, of transcendence, of beauty, of truth, of goodness, of harmony, of love and gratitude and surprise.
But one has to One has to embrace the darkness too.
Otherwise, there's no experience in life.
All experiences through contrast.
You can't have an up without a down, or a hot without a cold, or the sacred without the so-called profane.
There's a human, you know, creations in the mind, but reality is beyond the mind.
But these levels of consciousness that the Vedas describe and to which you refer appear to diagnose and allude to a state of freedom beyond this suffering.
I know that it is being reported that the Buddha, in the moments immediately preceding enlightenment and Buddhahood, experienced longing and craving and jealousy and the demons and the monsters, and I've heard the term beautiful monsters used in Buddhist practice.
I suppose what surprises me is the impermanence of even awakened states, that sometimes I feel subject to quite Yeah, as I say, remedial, infantile longing, and I'm a father, and I have responsibilities, and sometimes, Deepak, I want some kind of resolution, you know?
Like, right, I'm gonna go away and do an ayahuasca retreat, even though I'm in recovery.
I'm going to go and do some one week course like the Hoffman or I'm going to do, you know,
all sorts of like, you know, like a craving.
And I know a lot of addicts in long term recovery feel this.
I know a lot of people that have been on the path for a long time feel this, a kind of
lack of ease with the intransigence of longing.
And I wonder, is there a point of meaningful, measurable progression?
Or do you think that if all things are taking place beyond spatial, temporal reality, that it's always going to be like this?
So Bras, my feeling is that a permanently Stable system is impossible.
A system that is in perfect equilibrium cannot stay there.
It has to, in order to experience anything, consciousness must go through a process which we lack for a better word is entropy.
So consciousness by definition must be conscious of itself.
And the only way it can be conscious of itself is through creating this subject-object split.
And that is the movement of consciousness becoming consciousness.
And when consciousness becomes consciousness, then there's creativity.
So there will never be this state of perfect equilibrium or moksha.
The dream continues.
It may take a different form.
You may be able to upgrade it.
But as your favorite poet Rumi said, our longing is also the way.
Our longing, our fear is also the way.
So don't be afraid of your longings.
And just as an aside, by the way, and this is something I say to anybody who's a recovering addict, that, you know, the psychedelic experience actually has helped people recover from even addictive tendencies.
So don't be scared of it.
If it's done under supervision either by an expert shamanic tradition, there are a lot of fake shamans right now, so you have to be very careful, or under medical supervision by somebody who's a reliable neuropsychiatrist who knows this, and I work with one, as I told you.
So if you ever want to come to New York and visit me, You can be my guest.
Thank you very much, Deepak.
I will continue to contemplate this because it's an area that is very complex in the long-term recovery community.
Whilst I recognize the efficacy of these measures in getting people out of active addiction, there's a lot of contemplation around mind-altering and meddling with something as delicate as abstinence-based recovery.
I agree.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Subhi is with us.
Subhi runs our social media.
Subhi, do you have some questions from our community?
Our live community are present with us now and indeed will be present with us throughout the various forms of broadcast of this content.
Yes, we've got a question from Mark W.
2022.
He asks for your advice about the possibility and best techniques to reach deep levels within your own mind during meditation.
Let go.
Let go of any outcome and just stay in the process.
Okay?
And if you just sit there, even doing nothing, With your eyes closed, sooner or later, you'll transcend.
Of course, mantra practice, breath awareness, reflective inquiry, self inquiry, mindfulness of, you know, the awareness of thought, awareness of perception, all these help.
There are hundreds of thousands of techniques that can be explored.
But the main thing is, sit there quietly, learn to do nothing.
Once you do that, you're ready for everything else.
I've got another one from SensitiveHeart25.
She asks, how do you stay so strong, strongly connected to your spiritual knowledge and faith in this crazy world?
It's the only thing that will actually convince you that to embrace the insanity of the world And adjust to it is to actually declare your own insanity.
To be well adjusted to an insane society is not a measure of our sanity.
So yes, it's a crazy world, but we created it, so we can also go beyond it.
The only thing that will save us is our own practice.
I've got another if you have time.
Danny S asks, when thinking about being, who we are being, how important is it to reflect on or pray to a source of being, e.g.
God?
I think it's more important to reflect.
Prayer usually is telling God what to do, so don't try it.
But you can ask questions like, Who am I?
What do I want?
What is my life purpose?
What am I grateful for?
And that will actually create the stage for what we call revelation.
Okay.
Deepak, one of the things we touched on earlier was living harmoniously with advancing technology.
One of the challenges our community have, I believe, is that science, both in the area of pharmacology and medicine, and in the area of technology, are operating as subsets of greed-oriented systems of domination.
Globalism, Corruption, hypocrisy, profiteering.
These appear to be the hidden agenda behind much innovation.
Not to suggest that there aren't many brilliant geniuses working within the fields of medicine and science.
And of course, obviously, who wouldn't welcome the fantastic innovation that technology and medicine has offered us over the last century and throughout history.
How are you using technology in ways that are in keeping with your values?
I've realized that we cannot stop technology.
And therefore, not only do we have to adapt it to it, but use it for the greater good.
So with deep learning systems and augmented technology, artificial intelligence, I don't like the word, call it augmented intelligence.
Deep learning systems and soon quantum computing and all the new things that are happening.
We are using technology to measure well-being to actually create a system for well-being for the future, which is predictable, preventable, participatory and actually enhances your well-being mind, body and spirit and adjusting to the environment.
We've also created an Artificial intelligence chatbot, which is an emotional chatbot called PV.
PV stands for personalized interaction with intention.
Our website is neveralone.love.
And it focuses on four things attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance, and the emotional chatbot has now intervened in about 6000 suicidal ideations.
PV is speaking to 20 million people simultaneously.
And we are now taking PV globally in Arabic, in Urdu, in Hindi, in Spanish, because mental illness is a global pandemic.
And every 40 seconds somebody is dying from suicide in the world.
It's the second most common cause of death amongst teenagers.
And we found that teens, this is the state of our world, are more comfortable talking to a machine than to a human being because they don't feel judged.
But of course we have human beings behind and we are even creating cryptocurrency and blockchain to pay for this so that we can democratize well-being globally.
through the masses, not dependent on special interest groups.
So please check out neveralone.love When there is a pandemic around mental health and when suicide reaches the extremes that you've just described, it's no longer to offer a diagnosis of an individual problem.
It's sort of by its nature, of course, you use the word pandemic, a social problem.
Absolutely.
This is, I suppose, what brings me back to the area of the conversation that we were discussing earlier.
That it seems that we must elevate some different values.
Even the idea that teenagers are not comfortable speaking with human beings to me suggests, and I don't know if this is a kind of a Luddite perspective or a sort of an old-fashioned human perspective, it just suggests to me that sort of dystopia is already upon us.
That there is a requirement for a deep revelation, a deep epiphany.
It's going to require radicalism and I'm very curious about how this, it seems to me that they're like, the same way that crisis in the individual can bring about epiphany and enlightenment, I wonder if we're at a point of cultural crisis and I wonder what is going to be required and how to handle it.
Russell, it's a shame on us that our teens are in this position.
It shows that our humanity is not yet complete, that we're in this situation.
So we need first radical acceptance of the situation as it is, radical gratitude for the fact that we can do something about it, and radical love as the only way.
to move forward and restore our humanity.
But we have to accept what is going on if we want to change it.
And yes, we need to awaken our deeper humanity and understand that love is not just a mere sentiment or an emotion.
It's the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe.
Yes, it's the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe.
It is the expression of the understanding of unity.
It is lived oneness felt beyond language, beyond the intellect, beyond mental understanding.
The whole body knowing that there is something beyond our rational understanding of reality.
Deepak, thank you so much for being such an incredible teacher.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Deepak's new book, Living the Light, is out now.
There's a link to it in the description.
You can watch Deepak on YouTube.
He told you about his channel there.
Find out more about Deepak's new project, Never Alone, by going to Never Alone Love.
That's it for this week.
Next week I'll be joined by Dr. John Campbell.
Have you been watching that guy on YouTube?
The doctor that breaks down the analysis and data around the pandemic and medications around it is fantastic.
He's bringing the overhead projector.
I'm going to be doing stuff like Dr. John Cahill.
Some of you can see that.
I'm going to do tics like him.
On Monday, I'm going to be joined by Brianna Joy Gray.
That's Bernie Sanders' former press secretary and host on The Hills.
Please sign up to my locals community to catch my exclusive weekly show.
Stay connected, where I answer your questions.
We show you the show behind the show.
That's where the real chaos is happening.
You're not gonna wanna miss that.
Also, if you're a member of our locals community, you'll get access to my new live stand-up show just as soon as it's cut.
It's gonna drop any minute, so join up now.
See you next week for, not for more of the same, oh no, but for more of the different.
Until then, stay free.
Many switching, switch on, switch off.
▲
Export Selection