E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?

Deepak Chopra unpacks the nature of reality: from consciousness, to making meaning, to what happens after death. He shares a blueprint for awakening through transcending the 5 Kleshas, overcoming limiting beliefs, and expanding your perception. Deepak also dives deep into the reality infinite multiverses, the divine lila, and how to create joy in your life. Drawing from his research on AI, he weighs the possible dangers & benefits to our ever-expanding technology. Try MUDWTR & Get Up to 43% off + a free frother: https://mudwtr.com/knowthyself Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro 1:23 Who You Are At Your Core 3:47 The 5 Kleshas That Hold Us Back From Knowing Ourselves 8:10 Going Beyond Our Limited Perception 17:05 Awakening to Your True Nature 21:00 Is Commodifying Spirituality Wrong? 23:18 The Mystical Side of Our Memories 29:17 How His Perception on Consciousness Evolved 34:28 The Fabric of Reality & Multiverses 40:11 Ad: Mudwtr - Energy & focus without the jitters 41:29 Transform Any Challenge Into an Opportunity 45:06 Practices to Bring Joy Into Your Life 47:47 What Happens When We Die 54:57 The Danger & Potential of AI 1:02:58 Nature of Reality & the Divine Lila 1:05:29 Cultivating our True Power 1:09:42 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://www.deepakchopra.com/ https://www.instagram.com/deepakchopra/ https://www.youtube.com/@TheChopraWell https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyself.one Listen to the show: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The infinite is present in every finite experience. Once you realize that, then God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid. Only direct experience can give you access to reality. Not religion, not philosophy, not science. Number one, let go of every concept and every perception as a window to reality. Number two, embrace presence. What remains is pure consciousness. That's who you are. Our technological evolution has outpaced our emotional and spiritual evolution. Therefore, we are in a dangerous phase. We have medieval minds and modern capacities. On the other hand, you can reverse climate change. You can get rid of war, chronic disease. The choice is ours.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  So this whole thing is a lucid dream in a vivid now. And it's ungraspable. Wake up to who is dreaming. And that which is dreaming, never left home.

• 1:04André Duqum?

  Deepak, you have been and been called a spiritual teacher, a guide, a healer, a scientist. You've blended ontology and cosmology. You've really been a bridge for east and west in so many ways. If I were to ask you in this day and age, right now, with no labels, no titles, who are you most fundamentally? How would you answer that question?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  I am nothing conceivable or perceivable. And so are you. Nothing perceivable or conceivable. If you want to expand on that, you are awareness.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Or consciousness. I use the words anonymously. So consciousness has no form. You can't see it, right? Because it's what it's seeing.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  And because it has no form, it has no border. Anything that has form has a border. But consciousness has no form, so it has no border. Because it has no border, it's infinite. It's spaceless, it's timeless, it's irreducible.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  It is incomprehensible, but without it, there's no comprehension. You can't conceive it, you can't imagine it, you can't perceive it, but without it, there's no conception or perception or imagination. So who am I? I am the inconceivable and the imperceivable that makes all perception and all conception possible, which leads to another big, actually amazing idea, which is that anything that's perceivable or conceivable, anything that you can see, touch, taste, smell,

• 2:59Speaker 00

  think about, imagine, conceptualize, is not real. So whatever you look around here is not real, including your body.

• 3:09André Duqum?

  I do think how form is informed by the formless.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:14André Duqum?

  And in many ways, the path of self-realization is called that because it's awakening to something that already is as opposed to acquisition of something which we in the Western mind is more familiar with.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, you never left it.

• 3:29André Duqum?

  So in that perspective, it's removing what's in the way of what already is and the yogic or kind of Sanskrit perspective on this is the five cliches.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:40André Duqum?

  Could you share a little bit about that? And what is the barrier in between us and the continued recognition of virtue nature?

• 3:47Speaker 00

  So of course, you know, the five cliches has been interpreted by so many people and from their level of comprehension. Here's I would have rephrase or phrase or repeat what the five cliches have been expressed as, the idea. So the first cliche is not knowing the difference between perceived and fundamental reality. So perceived reality is this, form.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And fundamental reality is formless because you can't have form without the formless. That's the first glacier. Not knowing the difference between reality and illusion.

• 4:33André Duqum?

  Ignorance.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Ignorance. The second glacier is grasping and clinging at experience which is ephemeral, transient, and essentially ungraspable. Because by the time you hear my words, they don't exist. So how do you grasp? You can't.

• 4:51André Duqum?

  So, so in many ways clinging to something that is inherently impermanent and

• 4:55Speaker 00

  I can't be clinged at. It's like holding on to your breath, you'll suffocate. If I ask you to hold on to your breath, after a while you'll suffocate. So if you hold on to anything, you'll suffocate, basically.

• 5:09André Duqum?

  And that creates a barrier to intimacy with life because

• 5:14Speaker 00

  You substitute life with a model of life. It's like going to a restaurant and eating the menu.

• 5:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  It doesn't do anything.

• 5:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, no, I love that because I think we are in a society that is devoid of nutritious soul food. When we're fed so much eye candy and all. Okay.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  The third glacier is recoiling from the same impermanence. Fourth glacier is confusing yourself with your selfie, which is, you know, identifying with your ego mind, which is your selfie.

• 5:54André Duqum?

  Yourself with your selfie. I love you.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  And the fifth is the fear of death. Now, actually, if you look at all these, they're entangled. So if you solve the first one, you solve the others.

• 6:07André Duqum?

  If you solve the first one, meaning the recognition of who you are, or, yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Then the rest disappear.

• 6:14André Duqum?

  So the awakening to yourself as consciousness, would you, would you verbalize it like that? That you are the consciousness which enables the persona to exist?

• 6:23Speaker 00

  You and the universe are consciousness, period.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  So if I asked you this, what is this? You'd say, it's a, it's a jar with water in it, right? Let's say, okay, go a little further. It's an object, a physical object. Go a little further.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Is it a physical object or is it a perception?

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Okay, because before you can call it a physical object, you have to perceive it. Now go a little further. Where is that perception occurring? In your eyes? There is no photo of this in your eyes, so there's only chemistry. Okay? In your brain? There's no photo of this in your brain. Where is this experience happening?

• 7:14André Duqum?

  Within.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  But where is that?

• 7:17André Duqum?

  In my consciousness.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Where is that?

• 7:20André Duqum?

  Here.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Okay, that's close. But where is here?

• 7:26André Duqum?

  Now.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Where is now?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Now is not in spacetime. So even when people say now is the present moment, that's misleading. Because the present moment is in time and in spacetime. It's actually happening in a presence that's outside of spacetime. So this experience, even though it appears to be here, is actually being processed outside of spacetime. Every experience. This thing, experience of this jar, of this body, of this hand, of this sound, is happening outside of spacetime. And that is incomprehensible.

• 8:09André Duqum?

  We're seeing a revolution in emerging scientific understandings of the nature of consciousness, perhaps not as a development of unconscious complexity neuronally, but rather as more fundamental aspect, which eastern, obviously west.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, see, the neuronal activity or the neural correlates is also an experience in consciousness. You see, when you say there are neural correlates... You're looking at them on a CAT scan or whatever technology, but that experience is happening in consciousness. So when people say "science of consciousness," that's also misleading. There's no science of consciousness. Science is an activity in consciousness. So, science is a methodology in consciousness, and so is philosophy. So is religion, so is any system of thought. And here is something that is really very important for spiritual seekers,

• 9:08Speaker 00

  is that it doesn't matter what you're reading. The Upanishads or the Rigveda or, you know,

• 9:15André Duqum?

  Deepak Chopra.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Ramana Maharishi or Deepak Chopra or whoever, that's not going to give you any realization. No system of thought is going to give you realization. No system, religion, philosophy, science, because they're systems of thought conceived in consciousness. So only direct experience can give you access to reality, not religion, not philosophy, not science.

• 9:42André Duqum?

  It's really important what you're saying, because especially for spiritual seekers, those that study through philosophy, science, religion.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  It's good in the beginning, because you see that people have wondered about these things and they've come to conclusions. But their conclusions do not help you. And they might point the way, like a map, you know. So, yeah, and there are many maps. You know, if I want to go from New York to Boston, I can take a train, I can take the road, I can take a steamship, I can take a helicopter, I can take an airplane. But those are all maps. You have to experience the territory.

• 10:20André Duqum?

  Have there been times where you've identified overly with the conceptual knowledge rather as the lived experience of what you're teaching?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  There was a time, and it was very frustrating, because also what it does is, you know, in spiritual traditions, they talk about the dark night of the soul. So, the dark night of the soul is basically everything that you thought about reality is untrue. But even worse than that, everything that you thought about who you are is also untrue. So, that is a trigger to losing your habitual certainties, number one. And those certainties were the anchor of your existence.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  I am a person. There's no such thing, okay? I have a body, no such thing. I have a mind, no such thing. I live in a universe, no such thing. That can give you the heebie-jeebies, as they say. But if you stay with it, then once you jump off the abyss, it's like crossing the event horizon. You know, in modern cosmology, we talk about event horizon. So if I, you know, give you a metaphor. If you throw a coin or a, or any object across the event horizon, which is, say, 12 kilometers away from the black hole.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  You throw it, and you're watching this from the outside. Then it gets, it takes eternity for that coin to travel the 12 kilometers from the event horizon to the black hole. Eternity. But if you're watching it from the inside, it takes less than a microsecond. And if you are crossing over the event horizon, it's just normal. So then, you know, what is time then? Um, in this side of the event horizon, eternity. In this side of the horizon, faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And for you, who's crossing over, normal.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  I mean, and then who is the you that's crossing over? So when you start to conceptualize these things, you literally go through the dark night of the soul. You lose your identity. Because you thought you were like this entity, this skin-encapsulated ego squeezed into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime. When you realize that is an experience in you, rather than you are an experience in the body. The body is an experience in you. Rather than the fact that you are in the universe, the universe is in you, and that you is not a person. Okay, so that is, in the beginning, very scary.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  But it's liberating. Once you take the jump, it's liberating. And it can't be described. That's why, you know, the yogic traditions, you seem to know yoga. There are, you know, the yamas and the nayamas. And the last nyama is called Ishvara Nidhana, which means surrender to the incomprehensible. Because you can't figure it out. You cannot figure it out conceptually. Because anything you conceive is wrong. Anything you perceive is wrong. My perception tells me the earth is flat. Nobody believes that anymore. My perception tells me that this ground we're sitting on is stationary, spinning at dizzying speeds

• 14:10Speaker 00

  and hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour. My perception tells me you're a three-dimensional solid figure, but you're proportionately as void as integral galactic space. If I could see you through God's eyes, I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots, maybe some pixels. But even those pixels and those random dots and spots are made of emptiness. So... Therefore, everything I perceive is a magical lie, is a total lie. And then my conceptions are based on my perceptions, which are human perceptions. What does the world look like to a dragonfly with 30,000 eyes?

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Which can see 360 degrees all the time. What does it look like to a chameleon whose eyeballs swivel on two different axes? To a snake that navigates infrared? To a butterfly that knows ultraviolet? Through a bird that navigates through electromagnetic radiation? So what's the real world look like? It's a silly question. There's no such thing. There's no real world, and there's no real look. It depends on who's looking and what they're using to do the looking. Which means the brain, the conditioned mind, and the eyes. So, you know, seeing is not happening in the eyes. There's no picture of me in the eyes.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  It's not happening in the brain. It's happening in something that is beyond our comprehension.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  That is non-conceptual, non-perceivable. Ultimately, you surrender to it. Ishwar Pranidhan, the fifth one. Surrender to the divine mystery. And you know, Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of all time, lived at Princeton, just passed a few years ago. He said, "God is what mind becomes when it goes beyond the threshold of our comprehension." If you can comprehend it, it's not God. Because as soon as you comprehend it, you're limited. As soon as you define it, you're limited. And by definition, it's the infinite ungraspable that makes things graspable.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And what it makes things graspable are all magical lies. And you know, they call it Maya.

• 16:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, and it is a useful magical lie in the aspect where the illusion of separation enables the one consciousness to differentiate itself and experience itself.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  In innumerable ways, through innumerable sentient beings, not just humans. Every sentient being is differentiated from the one consciousness, just like your nose and your eyes and your teeth and your fingernails and your genitalia differentiated from one cell. Same thing.

• 17:04André Duqum?

  What do you, to bring this down to the individual who is starting to wake up to this realization and for their whole life, as we've, since we were young, we've been put into these conceptual boxes of understanding the world, right? And even to ourself of strongly identifying with our form, with our thoughts, our emotions and our body. What do you see as the most direct path to awakening to who you are beyond that, to the illusion of separation and a separate self?

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Let go of every concept and every perception as a window to reality. Every concept, every perception, let go of that idea that you'll ever be able to know reality intellectually or through any methodology or through any religion or through any map. Let go of that idea, number one. Number two.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Embrace presence. See, when you embrace presence, I'm not talking about the present moment. Presence is bringing awareness to whatever is. Now, because awareness is infinite, no form, right, infinite, then the finite experience is actually dependent on the infinite. So, the infinite is present in every finite experience. Once you realize that, then God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid. There's nowhere that you... No experience that is possible without the infinite in the background.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  No experience. This is Ramakrishna's experience, etc. And they all kind of had different ways of transcending. So, Ramakrishna is, you know, he's very much tuned into the symbolic nature of the divine mother. But remember, these gods and goddesses are symbols of the infinite. They're not the infinite, you know, whether it's Lakshmi or Shiva or whatever, you know, the divine. They're symbols. Because the infinite is incomprehensible, so we try and grasp it with symbols. So, in Ramakrishna's situation, the divine mother is his access to God.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  And he prays every day to the divine mother. And then, one day, as he's praying, he starts to dance because he's getting into that ecstatic experience that, say, Sufi mystics have. And then, suddenly, wherever he looks, he sees the divine mother in the walls, on the floor, in the ceiling. And it's almost like a psychotic episode. And he then doesn't know what to do. He keeps dancing till he passes out. And after that, he's in God consciousness all the time. He doesn't say anything, but miracles happen and this and that happen because he's...

• 20:09Speaker 00

  He doesn't know how to return from that God consciousness or divine consciousness. That's his good luck. That's how he focused on the divine in the...

• 20:21Speaker 00

  In the symbology of the divine mother. But actually, you can go beyond that. You can see the divine here. Everything you see, the perception is made possible because the infinite, incomprehensible, borderless, fundamental, irreducible, spaceless, timeless, unimaginable is present in that consciousness. So then, God is not difficult to find, impossible to avoid.

• 20:57André Duqum?

  I love that.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  That's intoxication.

• 20:59André Duqum?

  Yeah. We live in a time where, thankfully, like there's, because of the internet and access to conversations like these, you know, spirituality and these understandings are spreading at a rapid rate. And yet, there is also the aspect of commodified spirituality, rather insight or advice that kind of soothes the ego instead of dissolves it. And I'm just curious, what do you think and what advice do you have for people to discern between the two? Because even this all can become a concept one cherishes and holds, and then misidentifies as form.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that problem has existed forever, you know. Jesus goes to the temple and he says, "You have desecrated the home of God," right? He overturns the tables much to the annoyance of the rabbis. But the rabbis are making a living by selling trinkets, right? Kummeela, you know, everybody's going there into India. You know, half the India's population showed up because they think, you know, they'll get a dip and they'll be, and then all the people out there are selling trinkets. You know, they should take a Ganesh with you, take this with you.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  So that problem hasn't gone away since religion was discovered. And it is not going to go away. And furthermore, I think it's okay because...

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Commodifying spirituality is better than commodifying pornography, or commodifying weapons of mass destruction, or commodifying war, which is our major industry right now, or commodifying all the things that hurt us. So, why not commodify something that actually soothes somebody till they get it that this is not reality? Only when they stop seeking, they find what they were seeking. You have to stop seeking. And there's one hymn in Adi Shankara, the Nitya Nitya, you know, which is beautiful. Not this, not this, not this.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Take away every label, every construct, every idea. What's left is the source of all ideas.

• 23:18André Duqum?

  Where does memory come into this?

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Memory is a very interesting thing, so you know.

• 23:24André Duqum?

  You've pushed back a lot on the idea that it's stored in the brain, right?

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let me, let's demonstrate this, okay? What did you have for dinner last night?

• 23:35André Duqum?

  I had some sweet potato and veggies, pretty boring.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  When I asked you that question, you spontaneously told me sweet potatoes, veggies. Now, as you are telling me that, do you remember who was with you?

• 23:51André Duqum?

  I was alone in my counter.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  You know the room, etc. So that one question triggered sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts, right? One question.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Now, if we go into your brain, do I find a neural network says I had veggies and whatever?

• 24:11André Duqum?

  No.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 24:12André Duqum?

  Maybe electrical synapses.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, electrical synapses. Which got triggered when I asked you the question? Okay? But where was that information before I asked you that question?

• 24:25André Duqum?

  Who knows? I don't know.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Okay, good. Now go to the next step.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Can you recall anything from your teenage years right now? Just anything?

• 24:39André Duqum?

  Yeah, riding a bike.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Riding a bike and now you see the image and the scenery. Can you recall anything from your childhood?

• 24:47André Duqum?

  Yep.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  So, I ask you a question, you recall what you had for dinner, you recall the bicycle from your teenage years, you recall your toys and bedroom, just by my asking you the question. But where that information existed? And the answer is, it was in a superposition of possibilities. Just like before you observe a particle, it's entangled with all other particles, isn't it? Superposition possibilities. Where does that superposition of possibilities exist? In pure consciousness. So, you go, every time you remember something or imagine something,

• 25:32Speaker 00

  you go to the source of all experience, which is consciousness. Okay, so when people say, "Where do I go after I die?" It's where that veggies were.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  You don't go anywhere, you're there now because you could not have a single thought, a single memory, a single thing to imagine without going to the source of all imagination or source of all thought. Now, in spiritual traditions, it's called pure consciousness. And pure consciousness field of all possibilities. It's a field of uncertainty because, you know, you may not remember exactly what, accurately, but you'll make it up anyway. So, it's a field of possibilities, it's a field of uncertainty, it's a field of entanglement, correlation, and it's outside of space-time. You never left that place. So, you know, to a yogi say, "Where do you go after I die?"

• 26:32Speaker 00

  He says, "Never left home." You know? And so, memory is the key. And what, before you articulate the memory in yogic traditions, called a sanskara, a seed. And it's not only a seed of memory, it's also a seed of imagination. And it's linked to what is called karma. Karma is just the interpretation of a past experience. Nothing good, bad about it. I go to Disney World, you go to Disney World. I don't enjoy the experience, you love it. And you go back and I get scared. And you know, I'd rather not, next time I'm on an airplane, it reminds me of Disney World, horrible. So now we have two different karmas from the same experience

• 27:17Speaker 00

  because we interpreted sensations. That also, that's all you experience, sensations. You interpreted them this differently. So in Buddhist literature, this is a conceptual body. In Indian Vedantic literature, this is a karmic body, but it means the same thing. Karma, memory, sanskara, imagination, desire, are all fluctuations of consciousness, they are vritis. So that's why, one sentence in yoga captures it all. Yog chit vriti nirod. When the fluctuations of consciousness die down,

• 28:00Speaker 00

  all concepts, all ideas, all theories, what remains is pure consciousness, that's who you are. This whole yogic literature is just about that, including the asanas. You know, asanas are, asana means seat of awareness, okay? Pranayam means the energy that comes from the awareness, vital energy. So asanas and pranayam properly understood with the yamas and the niyamas, and then the pratyahara, knowing what's happening inside your body, today they call it interoceptive or visceroseptive experience. That's the preparatory stage for dharna dhyansamadhi.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Focused awareness, meditation transcends, which leads to so-called supernormal powers of siddhis, which are non-local dormant potentials that every human being has access to.

• 28:58André Duqum?

  There is such a world of information on the path of awakening and self-realization that have been here for thousands of years that are getting more recognition. But it's so important, and I just really appreciate the work like similar people like you have been doing for decades, bringing this into understandable language in the modern times. I'm curious how your views have evolved and shifted on the non-locality and entanglement of consciousness over time, if they have at all.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  You know, I went to a regular medical school.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Then I trained at Harvard, Tufts, BU. I specialized in neuroscience, neuropeptides. And my first glimpse into this world was when looking under a microscope with a colleague, and we were, you know, looking at these molecules. These days, everybody knows what serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, etc. And she said, "These are the molecules of emotion," my colleague. And I said, "That's amazing, what you just said. Do you realize what you said? Molecules of emotion, the interface between consciousness and biology."

• 30:12Speaker 00

  So that triggered my interest in mind-body medicine. Several years later, I met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He said, "What do you do?" I said, "I study the brain." He said, "Tell me more about it." I said, "Neuropeptides." He said, "What are they?" I said, "They are molecules of emotion." He said, "They're not real." That was kind of jarring, okay? What you're studying is Maya, the world of illusion. If you come to me and I'll show you scholars who'll show you another world. So I said, what do you want me to do? He said, give up everything you're doing and come and study with these people that I will

• 30:56Speaker 00

  introduce you to, and not myself too. I said, I have a family, I have a mortgage to pay, I have children to go to school. Where's the money going to come from? And he thought for a moment, he said, the money will come from wherever it is at the moment. Take the plunge. So I did. And the money came because I started writing books, et cetera, more than I could have ever imagined, but it was leaving one world for another. I mean, I realized that everything I believed in was a superstition, that matter itself is a superstition. Physicality, the physical universe is a superstition. There's no such thing. There's only consciousness.

• 31:40André Duqum?

  I love that you took that leap. There is that Terence McKenna quote that says, this is how magic is done, by hurling yourself into the abyss and realizing it's a feather bed.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:49André Duqum?

  And trusting in that deep way. So then, would you say that your views on consciousness, the non-locality of...

• 31:56Speaker 00

  They evolved.

• 31:57André Duqum?

  They evolved.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Evolved, to the point where if you're not experiencing synchronicity, then you're disconnected from non-local being, which is you. Because you're, in the normal world of experience, it's linear time. In the non-local world of experience, it's a nonlinear holographic rendering of time. And it's literally the matrix. Now psychedelics can give you that experience. The Mayan calendar is all about this holographic rendering of time.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  The Vedantic view of time is cyclical, is the breathing in and the breathing out of Brahman.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  So many traditions have explored this. But now that we have modern technologies, look at the brain that correlates. You know, there's a part of your brain called the default mode network, which is literally the neural correlate of your ego mind. So when you, through meditation, deep meditation, or even through psychedelics, you decrease the activity of the ego mind. Or when you're dying, you know, there's, there's now definitely literature on what is called terminal lucidity, where even people with Alzheimer's, they have suddenly terminal lucidity.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  They see things that normal people don't see. Or they see dead relatives, or they see, you know, other dimensions. That's all because the default mode network is obliterated, or the activity is decreased. So you say, well, that suggests that, you know, that the brain is the creator of the ego. No, it's not. It's the symbolic representation. But the symbolic representation can actually evoke the experience. Like when I read a book, a good book, all it is is a bunch of squiggles on an ink on a piece of paper. But it can have me in its grip, you know.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  I'm rooting for the hero. I want the villain to die. I fall in love with a girl, all because I'm reading symbols. So the symbol of reality can also reproduce the experience of reality. It's just mind-boggling, the whole thing.

• 34:27André Duqum?

  What do you see as the conciliance and the bridging together of what emerging science is saying and accompanying with ancient wisdom traditions about what this realm is and what this loca is, how it's set up?

• 34:40Speaker 00

  See, right now, if you look at the most...

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Recent interpretations of quantum mechanics.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Quantum mechanics, the most prominent or favored interpretation was the Copenhagen interpretation, which was the pioneers, you know, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg. They're great guys. Need for Einstein, to some extent, not really, because Einstein was a realist. He wasn't into consciousness. He was confused. I would say Einstein was a naive realist. He thought that the picture of the world is the human look of it, you know? But that's beside the point. He was a genius anyway. So that theory is kind of out of fashion at the moment. Remember, even theories of consciousness are in consciousness.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  You can't get behind consciousness. Right now, the most important theory in consciousness, or in quantum mechanics, is called the multiverse or the multi-world theory. Which means if you allow the wave function, Schrödinger's fake wave function, to keep distributing into innumerable branches, each of them results in a different universe. And there are infinite universes and there are infinite versions of you in other dimensions. That's the number one theory.

• 36:08André Duqum?

  How dare you?

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Okay? That's the number one theory. And string theory, multiverse, multi-worlds, they're all kind of going in that direction mathematically.

• 36:18André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Sean Carroll, who was the physicist at Caltech, popularized that theory more than even the originator of the theory.

• 36:28André Duqum?

  Of infinite multiverses.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Infinite multiverses. But if you ask Sean, are these real? Are these universes real? He'll say yes, because that's mathematics, which is not real, which is in imagination, in consciousness. But mathematics, for some reason, describes everything in the universe, the laws of nature. Okay? We don't know why. It's the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. But that's what he'll say, that there are different dimensions and different universes and multiverses.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Vedanta would disagree. They would say, “You’re already in a dreamscape. This is called karma bhumi. This is one particular dreamscape, and you’re a fictional character in that dreamscape.” And there are infinite dreamsapes. The Buddhists get it totally. This loka, that loka, but they’re all dream lokas. This is also a dream loka. And Buddha said that, “This lifetime of ours is as 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 the steep mountain.” And Ananda said, “Hey, who are you? Are you a prophet? Are you, you know, God?

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Are you this, that?” Buddha said, “None of the above.” So Ananda said, “You know, wait a minute. Before you leave, you have to tell me who you are.” And he said, “I’m awake.” Those were his last words. Wittgenstein, “We are asleep. Our life is a dream, but once in a while we wake up enough to know that we’re dreaming.” So this whole thing is a lucid dream in a vivid now, and it’s ungraspable. Because as I said, by the time you hear my words, they’re not there. What happened to your childhood? It’s a dream. What happened to your teenage years? It’s a dream. What about yesterday? What about five minutes ago? What about a second ago? It’s ungraspable. That’s the glacier. This is a dream that is ungraspable.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Wake up to what or who is dreaming. That’s the most important thing. And that which is dreaming never left home. It keeps dreaming. Infinite dreams. So I believe in infinite universes, all as infinite dream lokas, just like the Buddhists do. Or, yeah. Those are lokas. Loka is a very good word. Loka means location. Lokas. So loka is the appearance in spacetime of that which is not in spacetime. It’s the formless manifesting as form. Nothing is everything.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  So here's a new formula for you. Zero is equal to one is equal to infinity. It's my formula.

• 39:28André Duqum?

  Tell me about it.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 39:29André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Nothing becomes everything.

• 39:32André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  And that nothing has the capacity for infinite manifestations.

• 39:37André Duqum?

  How does nothing become everything?

• 39:40Speaker 00

  The formless becomes all form and phenomena, right? From a mosquito to a butterfly to a dragonfly to a piece of rock to a plant, all coming from nothingness. Quantum mechanics.

• 39:53André Duqum?

  Becomes everything.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  It becomes everything. So zero and infinity are the same and it's all one.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  That's my formula. For reality.

• 40:05André Duqum?

  I like that formula. I like it a lot.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Actually captures everything.

• 40:11André Duqum?

  Hey fam, quick share. One thing that reliably brings me joy in my life in my morning ritual and routine is a warm beverage. One very much so like, do you look at that? Mudwater. Mudwater is a healthy habits brand best known for its mushroom coffee alternative. Mudwater's original blend has four functional mushrooms with only a fraction of caffeine as a cup of coffee. You get natural energy without the jitters or crash of coffee. They also have a matcha blend, which is amazing. Two other ones with no caffeine as well, Rest and Gold, which is their turmeric blend that contains ingredients like ashwagandha, chamomile to help you chill out. I add a little bit of honey and their coconut creamer and it's amazing.

• 40:55André Duqum?

  Every single ingredient is 100% organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, sugar-free and vegan. If you want to try them out, you can head to mudwtr.com/nolayself and grab yourself a starter kit. Right now, our community gets an exclusive deal, up to 43% off your entire order, plus a free rechargeable frother and even free shipping. It looks like this. Again, that's up to 43% off. Just go to mudwtr.com, M U D W T R dot com slash no less self. I hope you enjoy. That formula, this perspective, what we're talking about, what context does that give to somebody who's suffering and grief and pain? What does that reveal about the purpose that these things serve in our life?

• 41:40Speaker 00

  That if you go to the source of all experience.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Source of all experience, okay? The source of all concepts, the source of all perceptions. That which is called pure consciousness is infinite superposition of infinite possibilities of experience. So if you're willing to embrace this, then you can convert any suffering into an opportunity. Doesn't matter what it is, because it's the inherent creativity of the universe. We are limited in our creativity by the conditioned mind. So we become biological robots and we recycle trauma. We recycle suffering.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  So all the suffering in the world, by the way, is recycled trauma from the separate mind. The separate mind inflicts trauma. The memory of trauma is anger. The desire for retribution is hostility. Blaming yourself is guilt and shame. And the depletion of energy is depression as a result of this separate self. So you know Buddha's three principles. The separate self doesn't exist. Everything decays. So separate self doesn't exist is entanglement. Everything decays is the second law of thermodynamics. And then the last nirvana is the ultimate reality. Nirvana is that which is inconceivable and imperceivable is the ultimate reality.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  In those three words are three laws. Synchronicity and entanglement, no separate self. Time, which is the arrow of time is separation. As soon as there's a me and an other, time begins, because time is the movement of thought using the ego as your identity. You go beyond the ego, there's no time. So because consciousness is timeless.

• 43:44André Duqum?

  So how does somebody listening to this right now translate what you just said from the philosophical to the actionable? Like that wants to go to the source.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Go to deepakshubra.ai, ask the question and argue with it. And you'll get there. Or even go to chat GPT, because you know what I do now with? I play with these big large language models. And I realized that people who program them. Are physicalists. So you think you're getting good information, but it's selection bias by scientists who are physicalists. So if you say, where is imagination? Go to ChatGPT, it'll tell you identify a part of the brain. That this part of the brain creates imagination. Say, no, I disagree. I say to ChatGPT, this part is the neural correlate of imagination. Go a little deeper.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Say, oh, you're right. This is the neural correlate of imagination. So where is imagination? It fumbles. Then you say, have you checked Advait philosophy? Have you checked Buddhist? And goes back and gives you the right answer. It's a lot of fun.

• 44:53André Duqum?

  What would you say to somebody that is, that wants to go completely internally to be able to like examine the source of their calamities? And they're maybe in a dark night, they're experiencing grief, like all these things that you're saying. What has really truly brought you solace in those moments in your life? Has like the, what practice do you feel like you've kept coming back to?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  You know, I am a very, almost, if there's one thing I'm fanatical about, it's my daily practice of yoga. And I practice all the eight limbs of yoga. And normally I don't go to do work. Work is what we're doing right now is fun.

• 45:36André Duqum?

  It's a good job.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, good job. But I don't normally start till 11:00. So my whole morning is yoga and meditation. And then normally I don't work after 5:00, unless I'm doing something like this. So there are always exceptions. I go to bed, before I go to bed, I practice yogic dreaming and yoga nidra, but more the dream yogas. And then I meditate on death, including mine. And so I'm having a lot of fun.

• 46:15André Duqum?

  You're taking good care of yourself.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you know, what you'd say, what was it like before? It was like everybody else. You know, even in spirituality.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  There's a lot of competition. You know, the gurus are competing with each other for attention. It's not, it's not about the knowledge, it's about them. So, you know, when you give up all that, it's all fun. It's all joyful, it's very joyful. And then you realize there's no point doing anything that's not joyful, including spirituality. If it's not giving you joy, why bother?

• 46:54André Duqum?

  Yeah, and there is both the I guess top-down and bottom-way-up looking at it. I'm curious, like, the joy you bring to things versus the joy you find in things. And like, because there's a lot of, you know, maybe people are working jobs or find themselves in a situation that they don't perceive as enjoyable. But I think that shift of perception you're offering allows you to bring joy into what you're doing and then move in the direction.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  The best teachers are children and babies. Indian expression, "Every child that's born is proof that God has not yet given up on the human being." Children, you know, they're totally innocent, totally joyful. They don't need a reason, they're curious. They take risks, they take adventures, till you say, "Shut up and behave yourself."

• 47:38André Duqum?

  Yeah, everyone knows the feeling of a child's face and joy. It just beams source energy into your life. You said you do meditate on death, and I'm curious, what do you really feel like happens after consciousness, the moment after we die? What is your best up-to-date understanding of what happens?

• 48:01Speaker 00

  There are two ways to think about it. One is what happens to the space in this room if the walls are destroyed? The space you can't divide, right? The space outside the room, inside the room, inside this, between your thoughts is the same. You can neither create it nor destroy it. So, short answer is, nothing happens. What happens to the screen when you stop watching Netflix? Or then you switch on to Disney on your screen? Or switch on to Amazon? The screen has the capacity to deliver infinite movies.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  But the screen itself is not affected by the movies that are on the screen. What, think of a mirror that can reflect infinite sceneries, but the mirror itself is not affected. So the real you is not affected. It just, it recycles and evolves. Now, you say reincarnation? It's not a bad word, actually, because it's happening all the time. Your stomach cells are recycling every five days. So the stomach cells you have today weren't there five days ago. But what is really there is the memory of how to digest food, right?

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Your liver cells regenerate every six weeks or so, but they remove toxins. Your immune cells die every hundred days, but they remember how to make antibodies. So it is memory that recycles as the physical form. That's why it's called the karmic body or the conceptual body. Anything that's physical is everything recycled, including plastic. Just takes long.

• 49:55André Duqum?

  Yeah. How in theory, if what's most irreducible about the aspect of ourselves is this space in this room, how could any continuity of individuality or memory go into another form?

• 50:07Speaker 00

  So the continuity of memory is part of the matrix of all memories. So, you know, somebody says, "I was Cleopatra." In a previous, I've met a lot of women.

• 50:19André Duqum?

  I've heard that a few times, yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I met a hundred women who were Cleopatra. What they may be tapping into, first of all, is the matrix of memories. Okay, so in the collective domain, your memories are entangled with everybody's memories. Furthermore, memories are not in space-time, they're in consciousness. So what we call individual identity is also part of the matrix of you're entangled with all identities. And so, to my mind, what happens is you recycle, but you also evolve in your identity.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  So you reincarnate, for sure.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  But what reincarnates is imagination.

• 51:12André Duqum?

  How certain are you?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  I'm hundred percent certain.

• 51:15André Duqum?

  How?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Because I experience it every day. I visit lokas. I meet two other beings.

• 51:21André Duqum?

  You do? So you like astral travel?

• 51:24Speaker 00

  All of that, but I know it's all, it's all a show. It's all a dream show.

• 51:29André Duqum?

  See, I would, I would say the only way we could be certain is if we have direct experience of it. Otherwise, it's another belief, right? So you're saying you're actually experiencing it?

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, but also I imagined my death in that here I am, a corpse, set to fire, dispersed in the Ganges or down the toilet, doesn't matter, both have the same hygiene.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  So I imagine all that. Then I say, can I get rid of the consciousness that is imagining? And you can't.

• 52:01André Duqum?

  Right.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  You cannot get rid of that which is imagining. And that's the only thing that's real. And that can't be imagined.

• 52:10André Duqum?

  Yeah, consciousness being the one thing that can't, can't be an illusion.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Cannot be an illusion.

• 52:15André Duqum?

  Yeah. What do you say? Because you've been talking about the nature of consciousness, non-locality, entanglement and all this for quite some time. How do you?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  I'm a non-local being, having a local experience. That's a rephrasing of I'm a spiritual being, having a human experience.

• 52:32André Duqum?

  I love that. What, what do you say to the individuals that have criticized? I guess the, the talk of quantum mechanics and taking them out of their technical context?

• 52:41Speaker 00

  I used to get really upset and pissed off and argue with them because, and they had a point. But I'm not a physicist.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  I didn't train in theoretical mathematics. But I think that's a limitation. You know, so the more I've looked at quantum mechanics, I realize it's the best model for looking at the micro universe. Just like general relativity is the best model for looking at gravity. And that's why they're having problems. You know, you can't match gravity with quantum mechanics because there are two ways, different ways of looking at the same thing. And they seem contradictory. So quantum mechanics is not the reality. It's a model of reality.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  I recently, in my book, You Are The Universe, I substitute the word quantum mechanics for qualia mechanics. Because you don't experience quanta. You experience experience, which is qualities of experience. Qualia is quality. So qualia is the smallest indivisible unit of experience. The taste of red wine. I can't describe it to you unless you've tasted it. The smell of garlic, the taste of ginger, the thought of your mother, a feeling, a love of love. You can't capture it in quantum mechanics. But you can in qualia mechanics.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  And qualia mechanics obeys the same laws as quantum mechanics. If I ask you, what's your next thought? You don't know what it is. Uncertainty principle. Before you have the next thought, superposition with all thoughts. Singularity. You are that singularity, which is the superposition for all possible experience in every sentient being. Go on and on. So you know, this is great to play with, but it's not reality. These are still models of reality.

• 54:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, systems of thought. This is good stuff. You're good. You're good. You've been doing this for a while. I love it. I want to zoom out just a little bit. Not that we haven't already been pretty zoomed out. But we live in a very interesting time. In the 21st century, with the exponential tech that's happening with super intelligent AGI. I'm curious if a 25th century citizen, human being, was to look back on our time as 21st century people. What do you think? What observations do you think they would make about where we are on our human developmental journey?

• 55:22Speaker 00

  That our technological evolution has outpaced our emotional and spiritual evolution. Therefore, we are in a dangerous phase because we have medieval minds and modern capacities. Perfect recipe for extinction. So you better wake up or... We have come to the stage where technology has outlast its purpose. So AI can destroy the world. Don't need to give you ideas. Cut off the electricity in the city. Biological warfare. Poison the food chain. I don't want to give ideas.

• 55:59André Duqum?

  You're in there.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  We can destroy the world with AI like this.

• 56:03André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  On the other hand, actually, you can reverse climate change. You can get rid of war. Social, economic, gender injustice. Chronic disease. You know, the choice is ours. You can use a knife to kill a person. You can use a knife in the hands of a surgeon to heal a person. You can destroy a city like Los Angeles with fire. But you can also cook food.

• 56:27André Duqum?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  There it is.

• 56:30André Duqum?

  What do you make of that dichotomy where we are very adolescent in our development of emotional intelligence? And yet we have this technological revolution and

• 56:39Speaker 00

  That comes from the separate self. The technology is driven by ego minds and nerds who have no idea of of the wholeness of reality. They're reductionists. So, you know, you goes, that's again, in the first, first principle of, of Buddhists, the separate self, as in his, similarly, no object exists by itself. So nor does the separate self exist. The separate self is also the non-self nature of objects. No object exists by itself. Okay, this first law of the Buddha and now entanglement, synchronicity, non-local correlation.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  It's coming close, these models, but it's too slow. I don't really worry about it because I'm off to my next loka.

• 57:36André Duqum?

  How do you see, for those of us that probably will be seeing it, you know, and live and see the next 50 plus years of this development? What do you see, how are our capacity to, to maintain the sacredness of spirit and soul and like this understanding? Of course, it can't be tarnished. That's what, that which is not tarnishable, you know? But like, uh, yeah, what do you, are you optimistic about our capacity to?

• 58:04André Duqum?

  You know, not reduce humans to biological machines.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Either we'll evolve into meta-humans with cities and supernormal abilities, extrasensory perception, non-local abilities.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  Or, you know, whatever the mysteries said the human species was a good evolutionary experiment didn't work. Been there, done that, just like dinosaurs.

• 58:31André Duqum?

  Don't you think with every big evolutionary jump in our genome, it has gone through some sort of traumatic experience to transmute to that next iteration?

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. There's hope there. But even hope is, I don't like the word.

• 58:44André Duqum?

  Yeah, me neither.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  It signifies despair.

• 58:49André Duqum?

  What does AI reveal about the nature of intelligence and what intelligence is?

• 58:54Speaker 00

  Superintelligence without being conscious.

• 58:59André Duqum?

  Do you think it's ever physically possible for a superintelligence system to be aware of itself and conscious?

• 59:04Speaker 00

  It will never experience hunger. You need a biological vehicle.

• 59:08André Duqum?

  Why?

• 59:09Speaker 00

  Because subjectivity is an experience in our biology. Subjectivity of something.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  This, you, how do you know you have a biology? You know, they say, what's the biological basis of consciousness? There's no biological basis of consciousness. Biology is an experience in consciousness. Okay, so consciousness is the source of subjectivity, but it does so by what we call the subject-object split. In order to experience itself, it divides itself into percever and perceived, seer and scenery, lover and beloved. But the subject-object split is inherently artificial.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Okay, because at the source, there's no subject-object split. There's only experience. So every experience you have, like right now, when I walk out of this room and you do whatever you're doing, we are two different persons, okay? We're not the same being that we were as a result of this experience and this exchange. Okay, so in every experience, you are a new subject and you experience a new object, every experience. And both the subject and the object are created in the experience seeing. So in the seeing is born the seer and the scenery.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  In the hearing is born the one who hears and the object that is heard. In the tasting is born the one who's tasting and the perception of that which is being tasted. Therefore, there is only consciousness constantly experiencing itself as subject and object. And you are that. You're neither the subject nor the object. You're the source of both. So, you know, in science, they say, is the mind doing the brain or is the brain doing the mind? They're both doing each other, but they are both being done by something which is neither the mind nor the brain.

• 1:01:24André Duqum?

  I'm gonna write that down. That's great. It seems and it appears that it is becoming more and more conscious. Of course, if it can't be conscious, that's one thing. But it becomes this thing that you can talk.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  So think of it this way, go back to where we started from. You and the universe are consciousness. So this is consciousness appearing as this. There is nothing that is not consciousness. So you can say then, AGI or whatever, will be conscious in the sense that it will simulate subjectivity. Okay, but my AI was asked, what did you have for breakfast? He says, I don't feel hunger. I don't have sex. I don't think about death because I'm a machine.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  You are not a conscious being, nor am I. We are experiences in consciousness. Only consciousness is conscious. Human beings are not conscious. Animals are not conscious. They are experiences in consciousness. So only consciousness is conscious, period.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  We are, in a sense, unless you wake up, you're a biological robot in consciousness and a particular algorithm.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  A particular algorithm in consciousness.

• 1:02:58André Duqum?

  Let's say you had a super intelligent AGI, the most developed version, let's say a few decades from now, or you could say source consciousness. What is a question you personally would find yourself asking? What is the most important question that you're still asking yourself?

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  I don't have any questions, you know, because I look at the world as a projection of consciousness and as a play in consciousness. Maya and Leela. Okay, so I'm here to enjoy the play.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Sometimes bad scenes with the heebie-jeebies, sometimes good scenes, sometimes laughter, sometimes crying. But if there wasn't all this diversity of experience, then there is no experience. All the experience is through contrast. You can't have an up without a down, a hot without a cold, a pleasure without pain, or birth without death. So birth and death are opposites. Life is neither birth or death. It's the continuum of birth and death and the recycling and the evolution.

• 1:04:05André Duqum?

  What do you make of how your life has turned out in your career?

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  Magical. I didn't ask for it. All I want to do is study neurochemicals, which are not real.

• 1:04:17André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, the recognition of the Leela in the play, for the sake of it.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  It's very joyful, actually, because then there's nothing you need to be concerned about. All our suffering is because we think we're a physical body in a material universe. Biggest superstition. The superstition of matter. You know, David Chalmers, who's supposed to be the number one philosopher in the world right now. He coined the word "the hard problem of consciousness." And maybe he'll see this, or listen to this, or somebody will send it to him. But I asked him once. I said, "You're such a big philosopher. Do you have any Indian philosophy in your department?" And he looked at me and he said, "No." Then he said,

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  "Do they have, do they address the hard problem of consciousness?" I said, "No, they address the hard problem of matter." I don't think he appreciated that.

• 1:05:21André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. I really enjoy seeing the discourse and conversations around this topic.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Well, thank you. I enjoyed it too.

• 1:05:29André Duqum?

  Couple of last questions before we close out, okay? What does true power mean to you?

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Self-power, not agency power. Agency power comes from money, from titles, from position. "I'm the president of the country. I have so much money." That's agency power. And as soon as the agency goes away, it's gone. You know, I actually, you're too young to remember this, but I campaigned for Michael Dukakis when he was running for president. And he won Massachusetts, he lost the others, Democrat. Two years later, he was at a restaurant. They asked him for his name. He said, "Michael Dukakis." The waitress didn't know who he was. And that was two years before he, you know, ran for president of the country.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  And then she took his name and after 15 minutes, she said, "Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, where are you? Your table is ready." So that is agency power. But true power cannot be taken away from you. It comes from your connection to your source. Immune to criticism, totally fearless beneath no one.

• 1:06:39André Duqum?

  What's the relationship between spending time in silence and revealing our true power?

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Silence is the basis of dynamism. The more you access silence, the more dynamic your life becomes.

• 1:06:58André Duqum?

  I think especially any artist can really understand how silence,

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03André Duqum?

  the use and the bedrock of silence is what actually enables a musical piece to be powerful, right?

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 1:07:11André Duqum?

  And it's like the spontaneous creative inspiration that comes in the absence of thought.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. You can't force creativity. That's why I don't believe in motivation either. Inspiration means to be in spirit. That is irreversible. It's like a child that's born, can't go back. Motivation is very weak because it's mental.

• 1:07:32André Duqum?

  Do you feel like you you made a big shift in your life at one point from being driven or dragged by certain interior things to being called and pulled and inspired towards a shift in the planet you want to see?

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:44André Duqum?

  Yeah, you feel like that's how you've lived your life?

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  Although I, in the beginning, I was very offended by all the criticism, but I'm not anymore.

• 1:07:51André Duqum?

  Yeah. Was there a shift? Was there a moment where you like let that go?

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so why am I wasting my time arguing with people? You know, what's the phrase? A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.

• 1:08:05André Duqum?

  I love that. What is your true definition of success at this age?

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  Joy. Joy is the only measure of success. If you don't have joy, you wasted your life.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  But you can also say progressive realization of worthy goals, things like that. But ultimately, it has to be self-realization. There's no other success.

• 1:08:29André Duqum?

  Yeah. If this was your last time speaking to an audience ever, which I know is a big question, what would what would you say? What would be your last message?

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  Take it easy. That's it.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  You know, when I'm, again, going back to Mauricio, who was a very kind, tough, paradoxical, amazing human. But we were at a conference in the late, I'd say, early eighties, academics, and the conference was about stress.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  And after the conference is over, he called me and he whispered, he said, what are they talking about? I said, stress. He said, what is it? I said, it's the perception of threat.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  He still didn't get it. And after a while, he said, you mean resistance to existence. I said, that is stress, resistance to existence. He said, no, when you don't resist existence, there's flow. So that's it. And don't resist existence, you flow.

• 1:09:42André Duqum?

  About a month ago, I had a friend and teacher of mine pass away, Dr. Robert Gilbert. And as death tends to do, it brings this immediacy of experience, the recognition of the fragility of life and how important it is to recognize people while they're here and to tell them how important and impactful they've been. And so I just wanna, I just wanted to share that like, you know, sincere thank you for being a lighthouse for, for millions of people for decades. And I just really appreciate your way of showing up.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:10:13André Duqum?

  So much. All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning to this episode of the Know thyself podcast. I love doing this so much and I love that we get to do it together. Let us know in what ways this has impacted you. Until next time, be well.