E155 - Dr. K: How Eastern Wisdom & Neuroscience Unite to Unlock Human Potential

What if the key to healing, fulfillment, and inner peace isn’t found in choosing between science or spirituality, but in weaving the two together? In this conversation, Dr. K bridges the timeless wisdom of the East with the empirical insights of the West, exploring everything from attention and emotion to enlightenment, desire, and the true self. We dive into why so many feel lost in today’s world, how modern distractions suppress the soul, and what ancient traditions already knew about the mind and healing. From shadow work and mystical experiences to the deeper meaning of dharma and the illusion of the personality, this episode invites you to see yourself through a more integrated lens. Own Your Health with Function Health. Here's $100 off your membership: https://www.functionhealth.com/knowthyself Try Nourish with Up to 36% Off: https://mudwtr.com/knowthyself Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 0:00 Intro 2:01 What Eastern & Western Science Lacks 7:32 Knowledge vs Wisdom & Making True Change 14:17 Opening Ourself Up to Deeper Knowing 20:00 Examining Who We Are At Our Core 26:57 Mystical Experiences that Transform You 36:40 Problem of Modern Distractions 42:10 Practices for Cultivating a Concentrated Mind 45:13 Ad: Function Health 47:00 Your Attention is Being Bought 54:09 The Spiritual Cost of a Suppressed & Distracted Mind 56:55 Why So Many Young Men Struggle 1:02:06 You’re Not Depressed, You’re Unhappy 1:05:53 Ad: Mudwtr - Nourish 1:07:15 The Foundation: Healing Deeper Wounds with Shadow work 1:18:08 Create a “safe” environment for someone to heal 1:20:50 False Gurus & Spiritual Hijacking 1:32:50 Karma & How Thoughts Hold You Back 1:40:12 Discerning the Intention Behind Actions 1:47:06 The Paradox of Striving on the Spiritual Path 1:54:00 spiritual practices for accumulating good karma 1:58:17 Reality of Intuition & Cultivating It 2:04:19 Beneficial vs harmful chakra practices 2:07:55 What is Enlightenment 2:13:54 How Samadhi Changes the World 2:19:28 The Purpose of Earth & Waking Up 2:28:48 Defining Who We Are At Our Essence 2:32:45 Past Lives & Reincarnation 2:38:15 How Personality Relates to Awakening 2:40:20 Self Improvement vs Self Acceptance 2:43:29 Discovering & Living Your Dharma 2:55:04 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG Dr. K's Meditation Guide https://bit.ly/4a90rPX https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  If you look at your life and your life sucks, there is a 99.999% chance that your thinking is habitual. So let's dive in a little bit. At 21 years old, I started doing neuroscience research on meditators. And I thought what happened to me was BS.

• 1:19André Duqum?

  What had happened to you?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  I changed.

• 1:21André Duqum?

  Or mystical experiences?

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely. There's one fundamental weakness in the eastern traditions and one fundamental weakness in western science. And the one thing that I always found shocking is that you as a human being have one resource, which is your attention. So what's happening is the more we use technology, the more our mind becomes weakened in terms of focusing. Literally, we have a society of people that cannot control their attention.

• 1:46André Duqum?

  So the reclamation of our attention is essentially the reclamation of our life?

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:50André Duqum?

  I want to ask you about enlightenment.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  This is honestly Andrea, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so...

• 1:55André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean that.

• 1:56André Duqum?

  The same way.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  So here's kind of what we do know. Experiences of Samadhi radically transform your relationship with yourself and your relationship with the outside world. So there are certain practices that you can do which will accumulate spiritual energy. Now we get weird, okay? So...

• 2:18André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Know Thyself. I'm very looking forward to this podcast because our guest today has this unique depth and capability to integrate and synthesize the eastern inner sciences with western medical practices and to be really a bridge for understanding both. He has this unique combination of being a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, but also spending over seven years on and off at ashrams studying the contemplative practices. And so he has this incredible ability to help us understand what it means to be human and achieve human well-being. Dr. Kay.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 3:00André Duqum?

  So good to have you, man.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, when you say the ability to achieve, I mean, we can try. Your mileage may vary. So I think that's true of both western medical practice and eastern contemplative practice.

• 3:14André Duqum?

  So to set the stage a bit, from failing out of college due to gaming addiction to spending seven years on and off on the summers at various ashrams, becoming a psychiatrist, what did you fundamentally see lacking in both eastern and western approaches that that's really important to kind of set the stage for?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  What a beautiful question. So I think there's one fundamental weakness in the eastern traditions and one fundamental weakness in western science. So the biggest problem with western science is that it doesn't work for people. I know that sounds weird. But literally what I mean is when we do a study on neuroscience, we're learning about the average brain. We're not learning about your brain. This is why we have clinicians, because the science doesn't translate to a person. It requires a human being who understands the science of medicine, and then they have to tailor what works or what doesn't work

• 4:13Speaker 02

  for you. So each patient with their doctor walks an individual journey of applying scientific principles. And remember, science is about the average, right? So gravity is like universal. Similarly, like if we look at like which, what parts of the brain do what? Those are general rules. So you require a tailoring down. This is why I think there's a, there's a fundamental misunderstanding in the world today that we're all learning about science. But we don't realize that even if you understand neuroscience, it's not going to teach you about your brain. It's going to teach you about the average brain. So there's a gap in translation. That's literally why we see that even if we understand something about neuroscience,

• 4:58Speaker 02

  if you explain that concept to someone, they can't DIY it directly in their life. So if we sort of look at the eastern traditions, that's exactly what they did. Right? And I think the, one of the best ways to understand this is, so like Freud, for example, had no way to look inside someone's mind. So he would sit with another person, he would listen to their words, and he would use their words to infer what is going on in someone's mind. But I'm sure you know that there's a difference between what you say and what you think. Right? There's like a huge gap there. So that's sort of what the eastern contemplative practices did. A yogi sits in the Himalayas, doesn't talk to anyone, and he has the one tool that can actually observe the mind.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  You can observe your mind. I don't even know if you have thoughts. I don't know if anyone, everyone listening out there could be bots. And if y'all are watching us on the internet or whatever, like, I could be an AI. Like, there's no way of you knowing. Right? So the fundamental problem with mind is that the West has no way to detect it. We have no way to measure it. And Western science is all about measurement. So we have to be able to track things, blood tests, x-rays, whatever. So in the East, we have the one direct way to observe mind, which is internally. So that's why eastern contemplative practices, all DIY, right? No one else can do it for you. If you come to my office, I can therapize you as a psychiatrist. I can do surgery. I mean, I'm not going to do surgery on you, but a doctor can do surgery.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  So Western science is about doing things to you. Eastern contemplative practices are all about doing things yourself. But there's a big problem. Because if anyone who makes a claim about eastern contemplative practices says something, you have no idea if they're right or wrong. Right? So you have no way of measuring whether someone who makes a claim, if it's like BS or not. Right? Because there's not like a Western apparatus to verify whether something is successful or not successful. So over on the West, we can verify things, but everything is general. Nothing is tailored to you. And over on the Eastern side, we have a lot of practices, but which ones work well? Do they work? Do they not work? Do they work better?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Do they not work as good? And I see this as a huge problem when people engage with spiritual traditions. Because if you go to an ashram or something, or you go to a teacher, and you have difficulty doing a practice, does that mean that you need to try harder? Or that the practice doesn't work? Or that the practice isn't suited to you? We have no way of really knowing. And the one thing that I always found shocking is that I'd almost never encountered a guru who works with like a disciple and says, you know what? I'm not the best suited for you. You should go learn from somebody else. Like, I have a recommendation. We do that all the time in medicine. You should go see my friend who's like an orthopedic surgeon and like he can take care of you. But there's no like referral systems in the guru system.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  There's no, there's no referral systems within gurus, right? So what that ends up meaning is that a lot of people who walk eastern paths are not actually like on the right path for them. And then they sort of say things like, oh, meditation doesn't work for me. Well, maybe you should have a different teacher or use a different kind of practice. And there's a whole like mechanism and like science behind that, which most people, I think, don't know or understand or teach.

• 8:20André Duqum?

  Hmm. Yeah, there is this pedestalization of the intellect and logic throughout all, you know, more and more of the world, I would say, but obviously Western side of things. And I've heard you speak to this distinction between Vidyas and Gyan, and how it's important to understand the difference between the two, because they're not the same, and yet we conflate information as knowledge, as wisdom. And so how do you kind of distinct between the experiential knowing that we can have gnosis in the body versus what we can empirically validate and information and knowledge in the external world?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a great point, and I love Sanskrit because, you know, there's this apocryphal saying that Eskimos have 100 words for snow. So anytime you have a culture that understands something very well, they will have a very sophisticated language for it. So what I love about Sanskrit is I think it is the most sophisticated language for describing subjective experience. So even like the word meditation, for example, is like one word in English, but it gets translated over to at least a dozen, if not more, words in the Sanskrit language. So you mentioned Vidya and Nyan, and I think it's a fantastic thing to start with.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So these are both words that get translated as knowledge in some way, but I would say that Vidya is information and Nyan is understanding. So information is objective, is transmissible. So if I tell you like, you know, my car is parked over there, like you can sort of, you don't really know that, but I can transmit it. It's also, so it's objective and it's transmissible. Nyan is subjective and non-transmissible. Now, the tricky thing is that in the West, we value Vidya over Nyan. We say like, unless you can prove it to me, I don't care, right? So like, that's why science is so big. The big advantage of science is that it's verifiable.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  But I think the shortcoming is, if we look at information, information doesn't change behavior, and it doesn't change your life. I can tell you, hey, you should stop eating hamburgers. It's bad for your cholesterol. And I've tried. I worked as an addiction psychiatrist for a while. I still arguably do. And like, explaining to patients that this is bad for you does not elicit change. So Nyan is what changes a person, but it's untransmissible, which is the whole problem. Like, that's why we train psychiatrists, because even if I've walked my own journey, I can't like, upload that to your brain. And so that's sort of the dichotomy. I think Nyan is actually a lot more valuable. That's what we kind of call understanding, right?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  You can have, I run into this quite a bit, where there's like MBAs who have a degree but don't understand like how to run a company. So that's the difference between like Vidya and Nyan.

• 11:06André Duqum?

  What is the difference between someone's disposition, I guess, and somebody who understands a concept and puts it into practice versus where it stays in the intellect and doesn't have the capacity to be integrated? Because I've heard you speak to how like, a book will say information, but it's awakening what's the knowledge you already have within you, in a sense, would be gnan.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  So I guess the practical problem that I run into a lot is how do you take information and create change? So the moment that you have gnan, the moment that you understand something, you have no choice but to change, right? So like, if I take a five-year-old, and I remember one time I was eating sushi with my kids, and they'd never had wasabi before. And like, they see this green paste, and they're like, oh, this is green tea ice cream. Like, this is delicious. And I'm like, no, it is not green tea ice cream. And they're like, no, but it's like, it smells good. And like, so, you know, they want to eat it. And so, obviously, like, she's like spooned, took her spoon, and I didn't let her eat it. I was like, okay, just taste a little bit. And the beautiful thing about wasabi

• 12:08Speaker 02

  is you can see information turn into understanding if you watch a child try wasabi for the first time. Because the first second it touches your lips, you're like, what are you talking about, bro? And then it sort of hits the back of your head. You know, if you, that's what it does for me. And then it's like, oh, my God, I'm so glad. And they're like, kind of like, you know, it's wild for them. So if we sort of think about it, information doesn't change behavior. And the moment that you have experience, the moment that you have gnan, you cannot not change. So once the child has tried wasabi, if I give them a spoonful, they're not going to eat it, right? Everything, the way that they treated wasabi before experience and the way that they treat it afterward is completely transformed.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  That is the value of gnan. Now, if we, we can also talk about other examples of this. So like, my favorite thing is like love. So especially nowadays, people are struggling to like, date and stuff. And everyone has these ideas of what relationships are. They have all this information, especially driven by like, social media and short-form content about what you should be and what, how the other person should be. And they have all these ideas about what a relationship is.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  And once you actually experience love, once you experience a healthy relationship, you know what it is and you know what it isn't. So information is something that's transmissible. Once you understand something, there's change that can't be avoided. Now, the question really becomes, how do I move from one to the other? So I can read a thousand books on meditation. It doesn't make me enlightened. I can also use an app for 10 years. It doesn't make me enlightened. So how does that transmission happen? I think there are two mechanisms. We can sort of look at the Western mechanism and the Eastern mechanism. So the Western mechanism, so we know that the moment you manipulate information is like how we get understanding of it.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  So literally, the parts of your brain that encode information, so when I say something to you, it's going to enter through your sensory, it's going to enter through your ears, go to your auditory cortex, go to your hippocampus, which is where your short-term memory lives. So you're like, okay, like, I kind of get this. That memory gets consolidated and really integrated into your brain when you start to manipulate it. So what I'll tell people is like, you know, don't memorize. I work with a lot of people who have ADHD and struggle to like study and things like that. So don't like memorize information. What you need to do is play around with it. And what we sort of notice is if there's anything in your life that you play around with, right? So if you're like, if you really love food, for example, and you play around with cooking,

• 14:43Speaker 02

  you're going to understand it way better than a cookbook can teach you. So it's really the manipulation of information, the organization of information, which is why I think this is terrible, but you know, there's a trend nowadays for people to summarize, like, I read 10 books on business habits. Here's the TLDR. That's going to go right into your short-term memory and it's going to get wiped when you go to bed. You have to play around with it to really learn it and understand it. That's sort of the Western perspective. I'll pause for a second. We can go into the Eastern if you want, but any thoughts, questions? No, I would love, yeah, go, keep going. So the Eastern is where things get weird. Okay. So from the Eastern perspective, what I have really discovered and what I think is true

• 15:28Speaker 02

  is that there's this, okay, we're going to go off the rails from like a scientific perspective. Okay. So there's this like collective unconscious that has all of the understanding of everything. And it's so interesting because what I'm about to say is going to sound crazy, but I encourage people to

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Really pay attention to what I'm saying and study it for themselves. So what I realized a long time ago, so I was like, so I'm kind of like a scientific by nature. And one of the things that always confused me is if I read a book, why don't I understand it? Right? So if I, if my mind scans words on a page and I do that once, it doesn't stick. If I do it twice, it doesn't stick. If I do it three times, it doesn't stick. But there are other times where I read it once and it does stick. So if the information is really in the book, I should be able to read it and then I should know it. But that's not what happens. So what really happens is the, the stuff on the page, and if you read a book and you'll notice that you kind of get it.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  It triggers something within you. The understanding doesn't exist in the, you can't have understanding in a book, like literally. Because if the understanding was in the book, anyone who read it would get the understanding. You can have information in a book. But the understanding comes from within you. And the book serves as a trigger for your internal understanding. Ah, now it clicks. We even have subjective, you know, experiences that we'll describe, like the light bulb went off. It clicked for me. So clicking is nyan. And then, once you understand that, okay, hold on a second. This understanding comes from within me, then we can really experiment with it. So now the question becomes, what are the circumstances that allow things to click for me more?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  And this is really when, when you get into contemplative practice. And there are certain practices that you, you do that will have things click for you more. And then you can discover a couple of other things. The first is that stuff can click for you without you reading anything. So if you've ever been creative, if you've ever like woken up one day and you're like, oh, this is what's going on. Right? So that doesn't come from an external trigger. It comes from somewhere within you. And then through that process of experimentation, and I tried a lot of different practices and things like that. What I sort of, now the understanding that I have is there's like a conduit between you and Brahman, which is the cosmic consciousness. And the more that that conduit opens, the more access to that information that you have.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  And when you read a book, if you're distracted, your conduit to Brahman is weak, right? So your, it's not there. Attention is critical for the conduit to Brahman. And so, once that conduit is open, it's like, I'm plugging in my ethernet cord, and now I'm connected to the internet, so now it clicks for me. And literally what I'll do is, you know, I work with all kinds of people, degenerate gamers, but also like CEOs of very successful startups and things like that. And the more that I've found that they can connect to Brahman, when I teach them those kinds of contemplative practice, their, their like, understanding of things and their performance in the real world like drastically improves.

• 18:34Speaker 04

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• 19:35André Duqum?

  I might try to ask you to verbalize a concept that isn't fully conceptualizable. But when you speak to the collective unconscious and this Brahman and this field of all-knowing, and our ability to connect to it and be able to have cognition, what I think the Buddhist term as direct, non-conceptual valid cognition. So the things that we can know irrespective of stimulus coming from the external world like you're speaking to, how do you, for a very logical mind, explain what that field is that we can open our channel up into deeper as you're speaking to?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think it's a tough thing, but I think I've got you. Okay? So this is something that I struggled with a lot. So like, just to give you all some background. So when I first went to India, it was the worst time in my life. I was just in deep despair. And then, you know, something changed. Like, I had some experiences and stuff, and I was like, hold on a second. Like, this is wild. What is going on? So then, when I was 21 years old, I started doing neuroscience research on meditators, specifically in the EEG lab. And I thought what happened to me was BS. And so then, I started to, but I couldn't deny the change. But I was like, how on earth does this work?

• 20:47André Duqum?

  What had happened to you?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  I changed.

• 20:49André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Like, something fundamental within me, like, changed. I had a couple of experiences in meditation that reframed my understanding of reality, reframed my understanding of who I am. And I'm not trying to sound woo. I mean, like, this is the-

• 21:02André Duqum?

  Were they more mystical experiences?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 21:04André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Right. So I just had experiences, and this is, by the way, this is not like crazy. So this is like, well-verified. So we know, for example, that certain mystical experiences will alter things, like in the default mode network and things like that. But basically, I was like, what the hell is going on? I want to understand. Even though it happened to me, I didn't believe it, in a sense. So I started this, like, scientific path of, okay, if something is true, if this happened to me, there must be something, either I'm crazy, or this is true. That's option number one. If it is true, it must have mechanism behind it. Because I don't believe, and this is also what these texts say, this isn't like, random stuff, right? There is, there are spiritual laws, for lack of a better

• 21:46Speaker 02

  term, that observe like, scientific, that observe or restricted to scientific mechanisms, basically, right? So like, the spiritual laws don't change from day to day, in the same way that the law of gravitation doesn't change from day to day. So these should be understandable or verifiable. So when I went down that road, that's when I sort of tried to figure out, okay, what the hell is this consciousness thing? Like, how does this work? How does this connect to people? And this is where I would say, it's gonna be hard to explain, but I'll... Okay, so if I look at you, Andre, what are you?

• 22:17André Duqum?

  I'm a guy. I'm a dude guy.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 22:20André Duqum?

  No, I'm joking. Who am I? What am I?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  What are you?

• 22:24André Duqum?

  What are you?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Who are you is like, ah.

• 22:27André Duqum?

  What am I?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  I mean, like precisely, like scientifically, like what are you? What constitutes you?

• 22:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, there are many different ways in which we could cut the onion and the different layers of myself from...

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Okay, hold on a second. So that's important.

• 22:43André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  So the first thing, right? Scientifically, is there is more than one layer of you.

• 22:50André Duqum?

  Yep. We could look at the biological. We could look at the neurological.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so give me all the pieces. So biological.

• 22:55André Duqum?

  Emotional.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Emotional.

• 22:57André Duqum?

  Mental.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Mental.

• 22:59André Duqum?

  Energetic.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  What is that?

• 23:01André Duqum?

  It gets again into the, a bit of the non-physical. So humans have a bioenergetic field.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:08André Duqum?

  That's, you can verify and test.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:11André Duqum?

  And fundamentally, the awareness that I exist.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Okay, cool. So a couple of basic layers there, okay? So the first is like, you have matter, right? So like you, like, but, so you have matter. We are all biological. Then we get into some weird stuff. So then there's this thing called the mind. But we actually don't know that you have a mind, right? We don't know that. But if you ask human beings, we all share this delusion that we have a mind. Now, this is really weird because I don't know you have a mind. You don't know I have a mind. But every human being on the planet and animals appear to have minds. So the first thing is that there's a fundamental divide here, which like science really struggles with. But I think if you really use the principles of science without bias, you absolutely get here.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Which is that, so the basis of science is like observation. That's what human beings do. And we develop these things called instruments, which help us observe, right? So X-ray machines, blood tests, whatever. So we can make an observed statement that there is a part of you that is not physical, that cannot be measured, cannot, you know, that's your mind. Then we get into neurological, which maybe connects the physiologic to the mental. In the middle is neurology. Now, some people will argue that neurology exclusively creates the mind. I don't think that that is a fair scientific conclusion. I think it's a reductionist scientific conclusion, but nothing in our neurology explains the quality of subjective experience.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  There's no reason why the brain needs to be self-aware for the brain to function. In fact, we know that because you have nerves in your stomach that are acting and doing all kinds of stuff, interpreting information, creating peristalsis, creating, like, not creating gas, but managing gas and all that kind of stuff. And you don't need to be aware of it at all. So there's something else going on. So if you look at you, there's a layer of you that is subjective, personal, non-physical, right?

• 25:11André Duqum?

  Like the taste of chocolate, the color of a rose, you can't cut your mind, brain open and find that anywhere.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So there is a subjective quality. So if we look at Western science, so if we are, if I were to draw a line in the middle, and I would say that in the material realm, we can explore, right? So I can develop a telescope to, even though my eyes can perceive certain things, I can develop an instrument to see something that is not visible to the human eye as a telescope. I can also develop a microscope, which is a tool that allows me to observe things in the physical world that do not appear to be present in perception. And this is my favorite example of this. So I did some public health work many years ago, and there was, one of my professors was doing, trying to build wells in Africa, okay?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  So they were trying to build wells, and they were explaining to the, the population that they were working with that, like, hey, you guys need to build like a cement well, don't just build a regular well. And then they were like, why? And he's like, well, so you guys have a latrine over there, and you have your drinking water over here, and since it's like sand or dirt or whatever, like, you have bacteria that travel through and into your well. And if you go through the trouble of building this cement well, the bacteria won't hurt you anymore, like you guys won't get sick. And then they're like, what do you mean bacteria? And he's like, well, in water, there are these tiny little invisible creatures that you don't see that make you sick. And then they're like, well, like I drink water every day, like I'm not sick every day. Like, how does that? If you kind of think about it, it's crazy, right? So he's there and he's like struggling to explain this to them.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  So there's a lot of stuff in the material world that we require technology to be able to detect and understand. Our basic eyes are not sufficient to detect it. So then, once we enter the subjective realm, there are similar technologies that we can use to to get knowledge of things that are not visible to our basic level of consciousness. Okay. So these are things like you can say meditation is a really good example. Psychedelics could be another good example. We can talk about that. But basically, in the same way that we must develop technology to enhance our perception of the material world, there are practices or technologies that can be used to enhance our perception in the subjective realm.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  So once you do that and you go, once you develop your telescope and once you look through your microscope and look through your telescope, you will discover that there is like this thing out there. That's the best that I've got. That has like all of the knowledge. And I know it sounds crazy, but that's why like these are things that have to be subjectively experienced. And the reason I kind of explained this way is I think this is a scientific mechanism of subjective discovery, that you have to do certain kinds of practices. Like Agnichukka practice is like a good example, which we can go into. And, and like, once you do these practices, you literally like know things that you're not supposed, you can't know. And I would even say that like, anyway, we'll get to that later, but so I'll pause there.

• 28:14André Duqum?

  This is setting the stage really beautifully, I think, because we can look throughout history and see that there are realms of existence that we previously just did not have awareness of, that we eventually did become aware of.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:27André Duqum?

  And similarly, this five sensory world where we have experience with through our senses of less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum is very enchanting to perceive that all we can experience is reality through our senses. And, but again, you go into these deeper subjective experiences and you can experience things that aren't of the five senses that feel valid and true and powerful.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You experience them.

• 28:53André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:54André Duqum?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:56André Duqum?

  So you had various experiences that kind of blew blew your mind open a bit.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:03André Duqum?

  Yeah. And on contact, it sounds like it kind of reoriented you. What do you think happened to you? I mean, you could look at it again through the many different levels, biologically, neurologically. There's something so potent when you taste something beyond what you've intellectually kind of just known and garnered. And I think that can transform us on contact. And so what happened to you more specifically?

• 29:29Speaker 02

  On what level?

• 29:30André Duqum?

  Like, you had a mystical experience, or many of them.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 29:34André Duqum?

  Did you, did your logical mind rustle with trying to make sense of them?

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's what, I mean, that's what I've been doing for 20 years.

• 29:39André Duqum?

  Yeah. Do you, have you ever talked about them? Do you, like, what happened in your experience?

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Do you want me to share my subjective experience?

• 29:48André Duqum?

  Would you like to?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:50André Duqum?

  Is that comfortable?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  I don't ever share.

• 29:51André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  It's okay for you to ask.

• 29:53André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  But I don't share.

• 29:54André Duqum?

  No, great.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  We can talk about why if you want, but.

• 29:56André Duqum?

  Yeah. So how do you think about states and stages of consciousness then? Because you can have an expanded state experience and relate it according to your stage of evolution in a sense. How do you discern?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I, I think I can talk about, once again, what you're talking about. I must admit, the language that you use, I recoil.

• 30:16André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Okay. So I think that.

• 30:18André Duqum?

  What specifically, so I can know?

• 30:19Speaker 02

  I'm not quite sure.

• 30:21André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  But like this spiritual woo-woo stuff. Okay, so I know that sounds weird, but I know it's weird. I know, I'm not saying you're a bad person or anything like that. I think what you're saying is true. I think what you're saying is correct. I think there's a fundamental problem because people who talk about spiritual mechanisms are usually not trained in science. And people who understand science usually do not, they'll use like a meditation app, but they usually do not go into the Himalayas to learn like tantric upasana from like some dude who has like been there for anywhere between 70 and 700 years. They just don't do that. These two worlds are so separate.

• 30:58André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  So what I like to do is be precise about the language. And I'm not saying you're not being precise. This is like a personal arrogance and frustration that I have with like the spiritual world of like, people just toss around these words like elevating consciousness, like what does that mean?

• 31:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Like specifically.

• 31:17André Duqum?

  Yeah. And I would actually love to see if you have what you, a version of.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So let's talk about mystical experience and how it transforms you. Okay. That's what you want to, okay, cool. So first thing is let's talk, let's start with neuroscience. So we know that when you engage in certain states of meditation, and our neuroscience in this, by the way, is in its infancy. And there's another reason for that, which is that when we do studies on meditation, we don't take a yogi from the Himalayas and study what happens to him. We usually take like 30 people and we'll put them through a mindfulness course over the course of 12 weeks and observe some changes. So it's kind of like, you know, if you have an artist who's been practicing for 30 years, if we're studying art scientifically, we're going to take a bunch of 18 year olds, give them a paintbrush, teach them how to paint, and then we're going to try to see what they make.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  So a huge problem with our studies on meditation is that they're done on novice meditators, not expert meditators. But that being aside, I can clip that if you want. So here's what happens. When you attain a certain state of consciousness, and by a state of consciousness, we can describe this as well. It starts with a one pointedness of the mind, right? So if you look at our general experience, our mind has lots of thoughts, lots of emotions. We're like a light bulb instead of a laser beam. The energy is the same, but it is diffuse. I'm thinking about this. I'm worried about this. There's a lack of one pointedness. So the first step on the road of consciousness. Is diffuse mental activity or even absence of mental activity during sleep and things like that. Next step is what I would call the flow state.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  So flow state is when the mind is functioning, but it is one pointed and has a particular goal. Flow state feels good, our productivity improves. There is equal activation of our emotional centers and logical centers of the brain. We're very goal directed. We're not really using willpower because we're like in flow. So there's no effort or there's some effort, but it's not like trying to rein in my diffuse mind. Okay, that's next step. Still mental function, you still have somewhat awareness of who you are, but you lose some sense of time. Right in flow state. Then we go to the state of, and I would call flow state something like dharana. So dharana is focusing on one object. So putting your mind on like one thing and like focusing on that.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  And then we move into dhyan. So dhyan is when there is a dissolution of self. So my subjective experience kind of moves outside of my body and becomes melded with the object that I am focusing on. So we sort of see this dissolution of self. If you've entered like a state of meditation, you know, you can say like some days like, oh yeah, I've been meditating this week. It hasn't been working. Like, what does that mean? And then sometimes you meditate and you're like, oh my God, like this feels great. What does it feel like? It feels like kind of like nothing, but in a good way. Right? So that's the state of dhyan. So that's the second level. Now neuroscience changes start to happen along this, this course. So you start to see autonomic changes.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  So our cortisol levels go down, sympathetic nervous system kind of deactivates some usually for most people. But depending on Kundalini practices and stuff, you can activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is part of the, the goal. So you basically get a, like an evening out of your physiology. You also start to see, um, you know, so in the flow state, you see balancing of logical mind and emotional mind. They're both active. Then you start to see destruction of the default mode network. So this is our, the part of our brain that gives us a sense of identity. So you start to like dissolve, like you experience without being me, like I'm just here, but I'm not me. I'm just like something else. So this, we know really, really well, actually scientifically. So if you look at

• 34:54Speaker 02

  meditators, their default mode network will deactivate. Here's the really cool thing. So psychedelics are an awesome way to study some states of meditation because they're the first time that Western science can induce a certain kind of meditative state in a normal person. So you can separate out the long-term effects, like as you become slowly more enlightened, like who knows what's going on in your brain. So what we know is that if you give someone a psychedelic and you're looking for clinical improvement, just seeing things, colors, whatever, even having visions does not correlate with clinical improvement. If you want to heal trauma, if you want to recover from like treatment refractory depression, there's one experience that correlates with, with literally psychiatric

• 35:38Speaker 02

  healing, which is ego death. So the more ego death someone experiences during psychedelic treatments or practices, the more likely they are to heal. And that same thing happens in meditation as well. You experience some degree of ego death. That's a deactivation of the default mode network. And then the third, the last kind of area that we can sort of touch on a little bit is endogenous DMT production. Now, this is where we get into super like extrapolated science. Like this is something I've been working on for a while, but we know that the, the brain produces DMT, which is the active ingredient in.

• 36:12André Duqum?

  Ayahuasca, chikuna leaf.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Is it ayahuasca?

• 36:15André Duqum?

  Yeah, there's one, the, the leaf has, has that.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  So it's, and so we know that it gets produced. And the really interesting thing is if you look at the neurochemistry of DMT production, we don't know where it comes from. People will say it comes from the pineal gland. We don't know that. But one thing we do know is it's, it's, it's produced from serotonin. So you require a really high level of serotonin to drive that metabolic process forward. And this is also why, like, as people become more and more technologically dependent, our serotonin balance gets messed up, technology and things like that, which is why no one's getting like enlightened through meditation apps. Their dopaminergic, serotoninergic balance is a little bit off. So if you look at all these yogis and stuff, the reason you need a very specific diet that's very serotonergic, there's a serotonergic diet, there's certain practices that fix

• 37:02Speaker 02

  your gut health. So serotonin comes from the gut predominantly, is developed from tryptophan. And so you need a certain kind of like tryptophan metabolism, you need a certain kind of serotonin metabolism. You can't be depressed, right? So you can't be anxious or things like that. Those imply serotonin imbalance. And so, once you kind of like, become a yogi, and you're like, free of depression and anxiety and all that stuff, then you've got ample serotonin in your brain that turns into DMT, then you get to really explore the weird conscious realm. So that's even beyond default mode network activation. So, once you get there, then you have subjective experiences of consciousness. I mean, subjective experiences of like weird stuff and dimensions and like astral travel and all that shit. That's like, super weird.

• 37:45André Duqum?

  So let's, I want to, I want to return back to the base, we'll build our way up.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:49André Duqum?

  You mentioned how, and I've, you know, very much so felt this throughout my own practices, how there's something inherently pleasurable about the concentrated mind.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 37:58André Duqum?

  And when you spoke to one pointed focus and single pointed focus, and you look a little bit more macro in terms of society and throughout culture, how is the theft of our attention, causing, and like, depriving our sense of self-awareness?

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great. So, once again, I'm going to answer a slightly different question. So let's talk about attention, why people are unhappy, one point in this, we'll get there. You've got all right pieces, I love it. I'm going to just reframe a little bit, if that's okay.

• 38:23André Duqum?

  Feel free to at any point in the future.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me know if this is annoying. Is this annoying?

• 38:26André Duqum?

  No.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:27André Duqum?

  No, just, yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's talk about, first of all, let me ask you, when you say, one pointed mind is pleasurable.

• 38:33André Duqum?

  Yes.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  What's up with that?

• 38:35André Duqum?

  Being concentrated on something is much more inherently pleasant in my own internal experience.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Why?

• 38:41André Duqum?

  Because I suppose it's not distracted, which, which usually is unpleasant. There's a subtle feeling, I suppose, of anxiety inherent in a distracted mind.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Okay, cool. So let's like, tunnel down into that a little bit. When you are anxious, what is going on in your mind?

• 38:59André Duqum?

  It's scattered, so it's jumping from place to place.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Okay. Let me know if this is inappropriate. Have you had an orgasm before? Once or twice. Okay, so when you have an orgasm, what is going on in your mind? Uh, nothing. Okay, right, so you're presumably focused or even in this transcendent state. So if we sort of think about it like orgasm, and I know this sounds vulgar, but literally if you look at the meditative texts, they describe orgasm as one of the four ways to spontaneously achieve samadhi, which is like a temporary state of enlightenment, right? And why do we all feel so good, hopefully, presumably? Right, so there's, if we look at it, orgasm is like a really quick way to get a completely one-pointed mind. And if, exactly what you said, the more anxious you are, so what I've observed as a psychiatrist

• 39:46Speaker 02

  is that the speed, flow, and direction of your thoughts is like, all of those are amplified when we're anxious, when we're depressed. Even in terms of psychosis, someone's mind is not calm. So a calm mind usually means a one-pointed mind, so orgasm is usually the thing that people connect to the most easily. But then also in like a flow state, it's less than, it's less one-pointed in a flow state, because your mind still is doing multiple, it's doing one thing at a time, but it moves from one thing to another to another. So what we sort of notice is that one-pointedness of attention feels good, and complete one-pointedness of attention feels blissful. Okay, so that's why orgasm, like people love orgasm, flow state feels really good, but there's a gap there.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  So there are ways to achieve the one-pointedness of orgasm in your daily life, and that's when you have 45-minute orgasms, but you're not having sex. You just have these profound positive experiences, which I think in the eastern tradition, we call samadhi. But I think if you look at those states, like literally there is a mechanism in your body for you to produce the subjective bliss of orgasm. Whatever that mechanism is somehow gets activated by certain spiritual practices and certain spiritual trainings. This is why we call enlightenment bliss. So it's like, it's weird, because we call it anand, which means bliss. We also call it enlightenment, which means knowledge, right?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  We also call it things like freedom, moksha, liberation. But like liberation, knowledge, and bliss are not like in the same ballpark, but there is, there is one state that is all, the essence of all three of those things. Now let's talk about technology, okay? So that's the background. So what does technology do? The first thing that it does is it diffuses our attention. So we love technology because it concentrates our attention for a little while. Right? So when I'm like watching a fantastic TikTok about like a cat meowing in a really cute way, my mind becomes completely one-pointed on that. So over time, what we're actually doing is the mind becomes weakened because the one-pointedness is triggered by a sensory experience.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Okay? So I'd say that like forcing your mind to focus is hard. Getting it to focus automatically is really easy. But the more that I take the elevator, the weaker my legs get. So what's happening is the more we use technology, the more our mind becomes weakened in terms of focusing. And that's literally what we see. So if we look at increases in anxiety, increases in depression, increases in loneliness, literally, we have a society of people that cannot control their attention. What they hate more than anything else is boredom, and everything is boring except for TikTok. And the moment that you lose control of your attention, then if you have anxious thoughts, you cannot rein them in. You can, the moment you have depressive thoughts, so then what happens is like I can't control my attention.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  So if I start to think anxious thoughts, start to think depressive thoughts, I go down a rabbit hole of that kind of stuff. The only way I can get out of it is to watch another TikTok. So now this feels bad to be anxious. I want to run away from my anxiety. I'm going to turn to my phone. Then, once again, the phone pulls my attention away from all of the negativity. So now what's happening is it's almost like a mental cycle of becoming addicted to opiates, where my body hurts, I have to take a pill to make it go away. But the more opiates that I take, the more it alters my mu receptors and the more sensitive to pain I become, the more dependent I become. So what we're sort of seeing is like addiction to technology, because there is a weakening of our attentional capability.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  And then if we're not using the technology, we're suffering. And the only antidote we have is this. So we turn to this again, and then we get weaker and weaker and weaker. And we're really hitting like a critical state here, which is why we have like, you know, mental health, epidemiology, there's like global pandemics of loneliness, suicidality, anxiety, depression, all these things are getting really bad. And I think it's due to this fundamental attentional loss.

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• 44:51André Duqum?

  In respects to the remedy for this and how we can cultivate practices that directly support us to have a more concentrated mind throughout our life, is Trattica? Or what practices would really support people to be able to instill as a daily habit throughout their life that can have them?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  So basically, I'm going to answer in two ways. One is, it doesn't matter. So any practice that trains your focus is going to help. So dharana is like a focusing practice, so meditating on something. And with that, let's get to fundamentals, okay? So dharana is when you tell your mind to do something. It's like training a dog. You tell it, "I'm going to look at this." And the mind is like, "I don't want to look at that." And then you pull it back, like a leash. You pull it back, you pull it back, you pull it back. That's the fundamental thing that needs to be trained. And this is what we know from like studies, like fMRI studies and EEG studies on various types of meditation, that that's the common element is like restraining our mind. So that's one thing. So the reason I like Trattica for a couple of reasons.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  One is that Trattica is interesting enough from a sensory practice and is not just focusing on Your breath, so it's a different like anchor. So we're very, a lot of our like, energy is in our eyes. We're very like visually focused right now. If you look at cellphone usage, like, you know, sure, people listen to audiobooks, but we're using our eyes a lot. We're like a very eye-heavy society, so I think that's a good alumbina or like pillar to use. So I like using the eyes. It feels cool to do. It also feels challenging in a way that evokes some good like ego activation. Because I want to be able to stare at a candle flame without closing my eyes. That feels badass.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  It's very easy to get like a sense of accomplishment when you like do it for a long time. The other thing that's really good about trataka is it gives people a very quick example of a sensory experience that is, that technology cannot give them. So we think that there are seven colors that the human eye can visualize. If you do trataka, you will easily realize there are more than seven colors that we can see, which sounds like a wild statement. But when you do unthirti trataka, which is you stare at a candle flame for somewhere between one and five minutes without blinking, then you close your eyes and you'll see colors in your mind that are not quite the same colors that we can see in the visual spectrum.

• 47:14André Duqum?

  It's like a negative inversion of it?

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. Right? So it looks like a negative. So it's this weird purplish, greenish, bluish. It's absolutely a color, but it's not like a regular color that you can see. So those are three of the reasons that I like it. So it's something that feels different from breath meditation, which people get bored of. It's not really mindfulness. It's like, kind of like feels badass. It's challenging to do. And it feels difficult to do in a non-boring way. Like you really have to strain yourself. And then the fifth reason that I've never explained to anyone is that trataka is also a shudhi practice for the agnya chakra. So that means it's a cleansing practice for your third eye, which means that if you do trataka, we don't tell people this, but if you do trataka, their connection to the intuition and the Brahman and their own understanding of their problems will decrease.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry, increase. So they will like start to realize they're doing wrong things in their life. So it'll push them in the direction of spiritual growth, whether they like it or not.

• 48:08André Duqum?

  Sweet. I'm really looking forward to exploring that and topics around intuition and whatnot.

• 48:14André Duqum?

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• 49:40André Duqum?

  And the first 1,000 of you listeners will get $100 credit towards your membership. Visit functionhealth.com/knowthyself or use code KNOWTHEYSELF100 at signup to own your health. As always, you can go to knowthyselfpodcast.com/partners and find them there as well. I hope you enjoy it. Back to the episode. Since we're here, what are your thoughts on how our thoughts are being commoditized and bought and sold in this neuroeconomic kind of fashion? Because when you dig deeper into this, you see this sort of matrix in how our attention and our mind and our thoughts are constantly being shaped and fought for. And so, yeah, what do you think is important to remind people of there?

• 50:24Speaker 02

  So I think the first thing to understand is that our attention is being farmed. Okay, so like, literally, we have become attention farms. So if you look at like, ad revenue from a platform, how does any like, social media, TikTok, YouTube, whatever, how do they make money? They make money by having your attention. So they generate advertising revenue. The other thing that people in advertising have understood for a long time is if I can control your sensory organs, I can control your wants. So what we're starting to see is that you, as a human being, have one resource, which is probably the most valuable thing you have in your whole life, which is your attention. If you can focus your attention on a book, in a study guide, you will get an A.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  If you can focus your attention on work, you will make money. If you get distracted, your attention is literally like the most valuable thing. And if other people can get your attention, if they can get your eyes, if they can get your attention, they can get you to buy things, they can make money. So literally, like, the most valuable thing you've got is your attention.

• 51:29André Duqum?

  So the reclamation of our attention is essentially the reclamation of our life?

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely, right? And that's like, in a very literal sense. I don't mean that metaphorically. It's like, and right now, what we're seeing is that people have claimed your attention. And once they have your attention, algorithms start this process of like, what's called online radicalization, happens to everyone. It's called online drift, actually. So over time, like, your thoughts will be shaped by these algorithms. And then you'll vote a particular way, you'll get angry with a particular group of people. And so the key thing that's going on there is like, first of all, they're shaping your attention 100%. You're losing control of your life, right? Because you don't want to spend six hours on TikTok. But like, you end up doing it anyway, and you're not even sure how or why. So what's happening is, as people take control of your attention, they're taking control of your life,

• 52:17Speaker 02

  they're inducing certain kinds of behaviors, they're making money, your life is objectively getting worse. And I mean objectively as in, this correlates with increases in mood disorders and anxiety, things like that, loneliness, suicidality. So it's like, terrible.

• 52:32André Duqum?

  Anthropologically, what does losing our idle time and this continual numbing of negativity lead to individually and on a bigger scale as well?

• 52:41Speaker 02

  I mean anthropologically, I can't answer.

• 52:43André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  But I can tell you psychiatrically, neurologically, spiritually. Right, so, and you gotta let me know if I'm being an ass about poking at your question. I just, I'm trying to be a little bit precise. I don't, I'm not trying.

• 52:53André Duqum?

  No, it's good.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  I think they're great questions. So, what was the question again?

• 52:57André Duqum?

  Losing idle time, numbing negativity.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  So, you know, idle time is really important. So I think a really good example of the value of idle time is dreams. So when our brain gets to idle, we have dreams. So if you literally look at the way that we sleep, we have four stages of sleep and then we enter REM sleep. And at the beginning of the night, you're like mostly stage one. And at the end of the night, as you go through multiple sleep cycles, the percentage of your REM sleep increases. So the first two hours that you sleep, you get maybe five to 10 minutes of REM sleep. The last two hours, you get way more. I don't know exactly what the number is. I'd guess 30 to 45 minutes. So when we look at REM time, REM sleep, what's going on? That's when we dream. We see a lot of emotional activation. So your brain, in the same way that like if you eat something, your gut is gonna pull

• 53:44Speaker 02

  out the good stuff and literally discard the bad stuff. So our mind does that as well. Our brain does that as well. And it does a lot of emotional processing with idle time. So when your brain, when you're idle, your brain is not idle. It's not like, you know, the blood flow to your brain decreases when you're doing nothing. It actually stays about the same, even increases rapidly when you're like literally asleep and not doing anything. So idle time is time that the brain uses to clean things out, especially things like emotional processing, consolidating things into memory. And so I think what we're starting to see, getting to your question of like anthroposocietally, what's happening? As the idle time of our mind decreases, we no longer, we are no longer processing

• 54:29Speaker 02

  the emotions of every day. So I'll give you an example of what I mean. So like back in the day. We would go hunting and you and I would go hunting. And like, let's say like, I shoot my arrow and I miss the deer. And then you shoot your arrow and then you hit the deer. And then I feel, I'm like, damn, that Andre guy. He's so, he's better looking, his hair is better, he's better with accuracy. This girl that I like is gonna like him more. And then you and I, we're carrying the deer and we walk back to our camp and we've got two hours for my mind to do nothing. Basically, it emotionally processes on its own. And we know this because the brain has the ability to detain homeostasis. That's what we do. And we do homeostasis with emotions as well. Emotions don't last forever. They normally just equilibriate.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  And my, my favorite example of this, which I've said a thousand times, is like, the perfect wedding day doesn't last for a lifetime. The happiness of a perfect wedding day does not last for a lifetime, right? You were happy, you had a great birthday party when you're seven, it's not like you're still happy. So emotions just naturally go away. So in the past, what used to happen is we would process those emotions, they'd go away, and then I'd be okay by the time we get to camp. Now, what's going on is that throughout the day, we have no idle time. So when I have idle time, I pick up my phone. When I pick up my phone, it both suppresses certain emotions, and once emotions get suppressed, they do not get processed. So I'm storing them away like in my unconscious. And then it also evokes other emotions. So when I'm looking at it, and you'll notice this, if you look at your like algorithms,

• 55:55Speaker 02

  you're not gonna feel good all the time. They're gonna show you something that makes you feel really good, and then next, they're gonna show you something that pisses you off. And then they're gonna make you feel good, and they're gonna make you feel bad, they're gonna make you feel all kinds of things. Because what these algorithms are figuring out, I don't think it's like intentionally evil, by the way, I think they're just learning, that the more engaged you stay with something is the more emotionally activated you get. So now, what's happening is we have a life where something bad happened at work, but instead of processing it, I'm using my device, which is evoking more emotions and suppressing those emotions, so they don't get processed. And then over time, these emotions just pile up, pile up, pile up. And that's why we see like societal depression, societal anxiety.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  You know, South Korea's birth rate is super low because people like, I think on some level, they don't have the capacity to like fall in love anymore. Like, that's like a foreign thing, even if we look at dating nowadays, like, people don't fall in love very easily anymore. So there are huge negative effects of losing our idle time, because our brain used to use that.

• 56:59André Duqum?

  When you think about the accumulation of these impressions that our subconscious is always recording and taking for and is not having space to express or to process, what is the, what is the direct spiritual cost down the line of not letting these impressions sort of rise to the surface and stay out? Like, what happens as they start to continue to accumulate over years and decades?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  So spiritually and scientifically, I'd say, so I'm going to use spiritual language, but I'd say bad karma. Okay, so anytime you have some event happen in life, so if I get, since you got the deer and I didn't, now I have like, like you're a winner and I'm a loser, right? So this is like a polarity that has been created of like, you're good and I'm bad. That karma needs to be reversed, right? So once I feel like a loser, literally, I can go to psychotherapy and I can have a therapist process that so I no longer feel like a loser. We all know that that's a thing, right? But we're basically correcting that karma. And I think psychotherapy and stored emotions is just one example of if I stop doing this, I'm going to accumulate a lot of what I would call in spiritual language,

• 58:06Speaker 02

  negative karma. And that's absolutely scientifically like paralleled. My emotional suppression leads to all kinds of negative outcomes, leads to a sense of hopelessness, leads to a sense of lack of self-efficacy, which in turn will then karmically, like if I feel like I'm hopeless and I can't do anything, my median income will decline, my relationships will worsen. So it's basically a massive accumulation of bad karma because we're not balancing it. We're not fixing that karma.

• 58:34André Duqum?

  And that bad karma or accumulation there, would you say directly links to our experience of suffering in life?

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Technically, no, but practically, yes. So what that bad karma is going to do, the suffering is in a sense independent, but technically there are ways to not link those things, but I think practically, yes. So if I feel like a loser and then I don't believe that I'm capable of something, that will have ripple effects for tomorrow, the next day, the next day, the next day, the next day. And then generally speaking, the amount of suffering in my life will increase. If anyone is watching this and you know that if you don't take care of a problem, it almost never goes away and it almost always becomes worse, right? So like anytime you do not settle your karmic debts, they're going to come back again and again. And we, what we're seeing in society is a cycle of avoidance of like karmic debt.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  So now like this thing is going wrong, I'm gonna run away from it. And the more that you run away from it, the more the negative karma piles up. And then you get trapped in the cycle. And this is what like my patients come to me with sometimes is they're just getting, they're getting it from all sides. They're getting crushed at work, in romantic relationships, at home. They feel depressed, their body isn't working right. They've got weird autoimmune things. So all this negative karma is piling up because you're not settling it.

• 59:53André Duqum?

  Cause I know you support and work with so many young men. What have you observed in, in regards to the lacks, the lack of rites of passages, alexithymia, digital isolation? Like what is it specifically with young men that they, in this generation are prone to, to suffer because of these different things?

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  I noticed that you had a couple of different anchors in that question.

• 1:00:17André Duqum?

  Because I think there's a lot of conflating, different contributing factors to the like depression and suicidal rates in young men and all these things. And so, yeah, what do you feel is most prevalent to speak to here? I know alexithymia is something that you speak to, but as it relates to everything we just covered with the lack of attention and.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  So I think there's a couple of different things going on. The first is that I think the core of the problem is that men have become spiritually bereft. There's no like spirituality within men generally anymore. So what started to happen, I think that's the core of the problem. And as men that I work with, like in the back of my mind, what I'm always thinking about is how do I get this person spiritually connected? Because the moment that happens, all kinds of positive things start to come about. So what does that even look like? What do I mean by spiritually bereft? So there's so many dudes out there who don't know what the fuck they're doing. So like, they don't feel good. They don't know what they want. And since they don't really know what they want, they like look to other people and they're like, I think I want this. I think I want cars.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  I think I want to get laid. I mean, the number of men I've worked with who are incels and virgins and will go to a prostitute because they like, I'm tired of being a virgin. I don't want to be a virgin anymore. They'll go to a prostitute. It's not like their problems get fixed, they get worse. So there's like a group of people who like. Like have no compass. So then they go in this direction. They're like, oh, this thing will make me happy. This thing will make me happy. And but when they say they want that, their heart isn't in it. So they're not like able to work hard enough to achieve anything. So then they feel like burnt out and they try to force themselves. They try to learn efficiency. They try to learn optimization. They long for discipline. They want willpower. None of that stuff is going to save them. So like, I'm not a fan of develop. I don't have discipline. I don't have willpower. I don't think you need it. I know it's crazy.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  But if you like are inspired and passionate, all of the people that they want to mimic. And they think like, okay, if I become a CEO, if I do this, then I will be happy. All the people that they want to mimic are driven by something that's completely different. So I think that there's a lack of, first of all, understanding what they want. Now, why is that? That's for two reasons. One is men are alexithymic. So what that means is that they're they're colorblind to their internal emotional state. So we suppress basically all of our emotions except for anger. Therefore, we don't know how we feel. And so in the absence of that internal compass, we fill in that void through our perception.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  So then I look, when I don't feel like doing anything, I look around, I'm like, what is this guy eating? Oh, that guy looks like he's having fun. Maybe I'll eat that too. And then maybe I'll have fun. But I'm not going based on what appeals to me. I'm copying other people. Which is why I think the podcast space has exploded so much because there's a lot of people there who are directionless, who are looking for wisdom, looking for guidance. I'm not saying the podcast space is bad. I think you're doing great work. I'm guilty of being in that space too. Right? So I think they're they don't they're not internally connected. They're emotionally colorblind. So then they fill it with like these external perceptions. And then when they try to do those things, the internal fire isn't there. So then they fail. They don't follow through. They kind of end up back to square one. Then they go looking for discipline, but that isn't going to give them passion.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  And so I think this is basically what's going on is like men are looking for answers. But what they really need is direction, like they need to find that internal direction. And that they're not connected to either.

• 1:03:43André Duqum?

  What do you think as the utility you could focus on with young men, but as generally as a human being, the balance and necessity of the transcendental meditation work and what you could say is waking up versus the growing up and the shadow work. So yeah, how do you think of that, both through the therapeutic lens and the meditative lens, as how they support things that the other doesn't?

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  So I think it's an issue of sequencing usually. So if you look at like transcendental meditation, I don't mean like the Mahayushi Mahesh Yogi, I mean transcendental experiences through meditation. There are a couple of, there's some really interesting literature from old stuff about this, but generally speaking, most people will get there by fixing their lives first. So a lot of the successful people that I work with, they got everything they wanted in life and they're still not happy. So then they come to me and they're like, I'm depressed. And I'm like, okay, like, what are you depressed about? And they're like, I don't really know. I just don't feel good, but I have everything that I want. My family is good. My career is good. I have plenty of money. Like, I just don't know what I want. So even if you look at sort of this eastern system of moksha and how

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  to attain enlightenment, it's dharma, artha, gama, moksha. So dharma means do your duty. Artha means get wealthy. Gama means engage in pleasure. And then enlightenment comes last. So you kind of can't meditate on an empty stomach. It's very hard to. And so for a lot of people, what I find is when I work with them, so I had a patient come into my office one day after about working together for two years. And he says, Dr. K, like, we've been working and he's been making, we had a couple of breakthroughs. He's doing way better in his life. He's like, I'm still depressed. I feel like I'm not any better than I used to be. And then I said, what do you mean by depressed? And he's like, well, and then I sort of assess him clinically. Are you having trouble getting out of bed? Are you going to work? Are you like in your relationship? He's like, relationship

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  is fine. I'm not tired when I wake up. I'm just depressed at the end of the day. And I was like, bro, you're not depressed. You're unhappy. There's a difference. So if we look at shadow work, healing, trauma, all that kind of stuff, you got to fix all that stuff first, right? So there's like fixing your car and then there's driving to the top of the mountain. So I kind of see it as sequential usually. So oftentimes as a psychiatrist, what I'll do is when someone comes in, I will treat their depression first. And then we cross this like midpoint where now we were going from negative 100 to zero, we're fixing what is broken. And for that, things like shadow work and stuff like that is very important. And then, but once we cross that zero, once you're kind of healed,

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  then you start the spiritual journey of zero to 100. Exceptionalism, like not optimization, but becoming what you're really meant to be. Like, starting to flower, like you gotta fix yourself first, and then you can build something.

• 1:06:29André Duqum?

  I like that conceptualization of getting to baseline being zero, then doing that work. What is that distinction between being unhappy and depressed? Because you mentioned there was a difference there.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, depression is a pathologic state, right? It is a sickness of the mind. So, and the happiness, like you can be not depressed and unhappy. Like, you can be at, like, neutral, but there's nothing wrong with you. I'd say, actually, that's where most people are, is that there's nothing wrong with you. So if we look at depression, what do I mean by pathology of the mind? Is people who are depressed will have a cognitive distortion that, oh, my family would be better off if I was dead. They wouldn't have to deal with me, this is where suicidality comes from. You know, I had a patient who would keep a noose in his basement, and like, his family loved him. He had a great family. But he's like, you know, just like, just in case, like, you know,

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  if I ever become a real shitter, then I can just hang myself and my family will be fine. Right? Like, they'll be better off without me. Like, so that's what I mean by depression. It is a pathologic in nature, has a lot of cognitive distortions, a lot of cognitive biases. But even if we get rid of that, you can be functionally working really well. Like, you're not sick. Your mind is not distorted, but you're unhappy. Does that kind of make sense?

• 1:07:45André Duqum?

  Yes.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  And I think what really confuses people is, you know, half the people who come into my office are not depressed, they're unhappy. But the language that we use is depression.

• 1:07:55André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  The other really interesting example of this is there are some people who are depressed, but it is still not pathologic, because they genuinely have bad lives. So if you have a really objectively bad life and you are sad, that is not a malfunction of the mind, that is an appropriate reaction to your circumstances. And I think helping those people is very different. Generally speaking, SSRIs and medications and things like that, I do not recommend in those cases. You have to build a life that's worth living.

• 1:08:25André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think what is so appreciated in the eastern...

• 1:08:30André Duqum?

  Healing kind of modalities is they treat people as the individual that they are. And so like when you speak to this being a sequential process, which varies depending on if you have generally a bad life or you need to more focus on your shadow work. Yeah, that's, that's really important. I'd like to focus kind of on the zero to 100 now.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:08:53André Duqum?

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• 1:09:38André Duqum?

  to get extra protein. And I find myself continually coming back to it because it feels good in my body and it just works. You guys can try it today with a money back guarantee and save up to 36% off with a subscription plus a free shaker and free shipping when you go to mudwtr.com/ know thyself. Link in description as always. Or for our latest deals with our partners, you can always go to knowthyselfpodcast.com/partners. I hope you enjoy. Back to the episode with Dr. K. So now we're at baseline. You know, we're doing our, we've done our shadow work and we feel generally good. And so what is your model then of raising consciousness from zero to 100? And I would just, in addition to that, if it's not too

• 1:10:23André Duqum?

  much, what is like the actual yardstick for your own degree of enlightenment or unenlightenment?

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Sure. So a couple of small nuances. I would say shadow work moves you from zero to 50 specifically. Okay. So let's talk about that for a second. Let's talk about zero to 100. So I think there's pathologic treatment. Okay. So this is like, I'm depressed, I'm suicidal. It's a malfunction of the mind. We can correct those cognitive biases. We, and by the way, the people, the reason people feel that way is because they have so much suppressed emotion, like it has to come out. And I'll give you just one example of that real quick. I know you're asking about zero to 100, but just to give people a sense of what the difference is. So I once had a patient whose parent died of cancer. And so they were left with one parent and the parent, because they had also lost their spouse, every day after work would go to the bar for a couple of hours,

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  like literally two hours, would have some beers, would come home and then be a parent. And so when I asked this patient, I was like, you know, how do you feel about your dad? Like, who did this? And so he said, well, my dad did the best that he could. So my patient is super compassionate, understanding. This guy just lost his wife. Like, you know, I have a ton of compassion for that. And one day, like about six weeks in, I sort of realized, I was like, you never, when I ask you how your dad did, you don't say he did a good job. You say he did the best that he could. Did your dad do a good job? And this was like a really important moment because like, you know, he didn't do a good job. So here's, here's my patient who's lost one parent to cancer. And then the other parent is like not even coming home after work.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  So the parent needs to be doing twice the parenting. They need to be doing the parenting of two. And they're out at a bar for two hours. Like, sure, they're having their struggle. They can have their struggle and do a bad job for you. So this kind of like guilt at being mad at their dad had been so deep and subsurface that it was creating this constant sense of depression. So once we like broke out of that, then they started to feel better. Does that kind of make sense? So that's what like healing those deep wounds can look like. Now, shadow work is a little bit different. That we can say can get you from zero to 50. And the reason for that is because in life, in order to progress, we take parts of ourselves and we amputate them. Okay?

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  So like, there is no doubt in my mind, Andre, that I have done something to piss you off today. Are you pissed off at me?

• 1:12:46André Duqum?

  No.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 1:12:47André Duqum?

  Because you're a nice guy. I like, I'm enjoying our conversation.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so, so see, like-

• 1:12:52André Duqum?

  And also, there's, uh, a moment, an experiential moment doesn't have to persist into a continual experience.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Great. So you just gave me the answer that I was looking for because it means I pissed you off today. Okay, so let me, let me repeat back your words. You're a nice guy. I agree, I'm a nice guy. Is it okay for you to be pissed off at nice guys?

• 1:13:13André Duqum?

  No.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Right? So if I'm an asshole, then you can be pissed off at me. So already, there's a slight separation. Second thing that you said, not second thing, third thing you said is, even if I'm upset with you in a moment, I don't have to let that become my future, right? I don't have to let this moment of frustration become my future because you're, Andre, you're so spiritually developed, right? So you're not gonna hold on to that. But if we really pay attention to what you said there, absolutely, I pissed you off today. I'm not saying I did, but just playing with you. Maybe I'm doing it now. So, so you know-

• 1:13:43André Duqum?

  Damn it, I love you.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Right? Right? So, so you're spiritually developed, so you're like, you let go of the pissed off, but we, but it still happened. So if we look at that right there, so you're a very high-functioning, well-functioning, kind, good, spiritually-developed human being.

• 1:13:58André Duqum?

  Keep going.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  But in that process of becoming a host, right? So like, you've hosted me in a very beautiful, loving, caring way. You have to take parts of yourself and you gotta wall them off. And what generally happens is if we really want to achieve 100%, we cannot wall off a single part of ourselves. So the totality of success and perfection in our life requires a totality of like, being, right? You can't lop off anything. So if we sort of think about, you know, courage and fearlessness, courage is acknowledging that you have fear. And someone who is courageous will outperform someone who is fearless. Someone who's ignorant and doesn't acknowledge they have fear, has no fear, won't take their enemy seriously, like they'll get

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  stuck in situations where their arrogance like causes them problems. Whereas courage requires fear to have, you have to have an acknowledgement of that. And that fear is important information, too. It's a warning. It's a danger. So shadow work is like the sacrifices that we make to become successful.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Undoing those sacrifices. So as we, you know, when I was, take your pick of age, nine, 12, 15, 18, 21, 26, 28, I was always told that I should be a doctor, right? And there were certain things that I wanted in life that I walled off. And so I made sacrifices to become a doctor. And now I'm re-engaging in those things. So shadow work moves us from zero to 50. It's about reintegrating the parts of ourselves that we lopped off in order to get as far as we have.

• 1:15:33André Duqum?

  Another interesting, I guess, texture of that could be the frightened parts of ourselves that has become so identified and has now masqueraded as our voice of reason. So like, we can have these alienated parts of ourselves, but then also like the ones that are, I feel like, a little bit more tricky to navigate is the ones where we're literally like looking through the world as them. And so what do you think about those in regards to the shadow work?

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Tell me about yours.

• 1:15:57André Duqum?

  Uh, let's see.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  That, that statement sounds like it comes from experience.

• 1:16:01André Duqum?

  Um, oh yeah, I mean, there's, there's many, let me see, there's many different things that, that could come to mind. Um, I would say like many people who first kind of moved to LA and especially stepping into more of what you might say is a spiritual or a personal development space, um, there can become this subconscious pedestalization and importance on appearance of the thing. Like, in all the topics of life, one could say the spiritually focused topics and individuals like, uh, could be the most attractive thing in a sense.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:16:39André Duqum?

  And so it, the, I think, in, in different parts of my path, I've kind of conflated spiritual knowledge, information, and appearance of well-being with actual superiority. Um, and so when looking through that lens, you don't realize, I don't, I didn't realize I was like doing it.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:16:57André Duqum?

  But through the reflection of others, through my men's group, through conversations on this podcast, I kind of got, get to see myself in a mirror and reflection and, and see those parts, I guess, more, more accurately.

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  Beautifully said. So we're gonna have you answer the question, okay? You've already started us off. You're half, we're halfway there. So, when you say, "see myself," uh, well, actually, first you said, "I look through this lens." What is that lens? Let's be precise with our language. What is the lens?

• 1:17:23André Duqum?

  That lens specifically is, well, fundamentally inadequacy, in a sense.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Okay, great. So- The lens is not actually inadequacy. Sure. Okay, so inadequacy is tied to what? This is the lens that you're looking through. And it's interesting because you use the language of see myself through others' eyes. So what are we talking, what is the lens? Well, the moment that it gets corrected, when you see yourself through others' eyes, right? Mm hmm. It gets corrected through spiritual practice. So what is the lens? It's ego. Yeah. It's ahumgata. Yeah. So ahumgata is the sense of I. You cannot be inadequate, except without comparison. Yep. In order to make a comparison, there has to be a you and there has to be a we. Right? I don't wake up today and be like, fucking right hand, you're so pathetic. And left hand, you're so beautiful. They're both part of me. The moment that I separate them out and I elevate one and I decrease the other,

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  that is a literal, a scientific function of the ahumgata or the ego. So this is what you're talking about is basically attachment with ego. Mm hmm. The more you are attached to your ego, and this is where you talk about spirituality and the ego in the spiritual realm, which one of my teachers was awesome. He said, there's two kinds of ego. There's regular ego, and then there's the ego of having no ego. Which is the most distasteful. I am so, I'm egoless. I am so enlightened. I am above everybody else. Look at all these, this guru is so popular, but I know more than them. I'm, ah. Right, so that's all ego. And now we're really getting there, right? So shadow work will take you to zero to 50.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  And then if you want to go to 50 to 75, you must eliminate your, or get rid of your ahumgata for the most part, or get control of it, we should say. Right, so the question, I don't remember what your original question was, but I think like, you know, when do we get caught up in stuff? Yeah. And the language, I want you to go back and like, you know, rewind and listen to the language that you used, because it's the language of ego. So I see myself through the perspective of me, me, me. And the moment that I step out of that, either through spiritual practice, which deactivates the default mode networks, or the sense of self disappears, now I can see myself as an object. Right? I'm not attached to it. Or when I see myself through other people, when I utilize empathy. Now I'm putting myself in the other shoes, but I'm seeing myself from the outside.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Once again, so these are all mechanisms that will give you perspective on your ego.

• 1:19:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  When we are trapped within ego, we don't realize that it's ego. Like if I talk to a narcissist and narcissist is like, this person did it wrong and this person did it wrong. And this, I'm surrounded by assholes. If you're surrounded by assholes, like you're the common denominator, right? So that attachment with ego is what blinds us to the perspective. And it's so interesting because the examples that you gave in your personal life are all examples of stepping outside of ego. Spiritual practice, conversations through podcasts, new perspectives. It's all ego related.

• 1:20:16André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's interesting because we could really think of this as a linear process, but I think it comes in waves. And, you know, we're using the easy terminology of 50, zero to 50 and 50 to 75. It's fascinating with these different parts of our identity that we're unconscious to the process of which we're looking through our ego. And it's so slippery. And once we think we've gotten beyond it to a certain degree, it's right there in some other contexts often.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well said. So that, you know, that's a really brilliant thing. So like, it's interesting, right? So the, when we think we've conquered it, it tricks us again. The thought that I've conquered my ego is ego.

• 1:20:49André Duqum?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  That's the mechanism of tricking you, right? So the moment you say to yourself, I've conquered it. That's your ego telling you, hey, you're getting really good at finding me. You're getting really good at controlling me. I don't like that. I'm going to tell you that you've won. So you stop fighting the battle.

• 1:21:04André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's an interesting matrix of mind that we live in. I just think also through the process of maturation and coming to a place of feeling safe within our own experience. Like these things start to bubble up to the surface. Has that been your experience working with people? Like, is the safety the kind of the precursor to being able to perceive and heal and let go of these things?

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  I mean, if you work with someone besides me, sure. So like, I will make you unsafe.

• 1:21:30André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  Right? Like, what am I doing with you?

• 1:21:33André Duqum?

  I, I don't feel threatened in any context.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  So good, I'm glad. Right? So do some shadow work and then we'll talk. I don't feel threatened. I'm fucking with you, man. So, but I, I mean, I, I think that honestly, my, my approach tends to be like challenging, unsafe. You know, the most common, the, the best feedback that I get from my community is I feel personally attacked. So I think we actually live in a world where we like, I know this is gonna sound crazy, but like, we prioritize safety too much. So what is the, why would you wanna be safe? Andre? Like in a situation, I'm not talking like, I'm gonna mug you, you know, but like, why is safety?

• 1:22:11André Duqum?

  I would say maybe if through the lens of comfort, then we don't have to face off with the fearful parts of ourselves, the, the things.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  But that's contrary to the work that we need to do.

• 1:22:19André Duqum?

  No, exactly. But that, that's why I use a language of comfort. I think there is you, whether or not you admit it, create a, a safe space even for confrontation to occur. And so maybe you don't agree so, but, but it seems like when you work with individuals, there is an inherent, hey, I'm with you along this process. And even if I'm confronting you with something, uh, we're, we're getting at truth here. And it's not me against you, it's us for looking at this neuroses together.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  It beautifully said.

• 1:22:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  So I, I rescind my earlier statement. I defer to your precision of language. Love the fact that you use the word comfort. So the, the reason I, I think you're a hundred percent correct. So what I try to offer people is compassion. But I think the word safety.

• 1:23:05André Duqum?

  Sure.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Just like, I mean, love it, love it, love it, love it, love it. Which is, people conflate safety with comfort. So I, I remember when I was, um, you know, working at, at Harvard and stuff, I, I one day talked to the head of security at MIT. And then I was talking to him about safety on campus. And, you know, one thing that he told me really stuck with me, which was like, it's my job to make students safe, not make them feel safe. Those are two very different things.

• 1:23:33André Duqum?

  Huge distinction.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  Huge, right? And, and so love the precision in your language that, yeah, when I heard the word safety, I thought about comfort. Right? That's oftentimes people, when they, when they, when we talk about safety, we oftentimes mean comfort.

• 1:23:47André Duqum?

  It's very interesting too, because through the pleasure of this podcast, I've been able to meet a lot of great spiritual teachers and gurus and sages, however you want to describe.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Where does that leave you?

• 1:23:58André Duqum?

  Just a humble student on the path. No, the reason I bring it up is because there are so many different textures of teachers, some that are extremely loving and others that are very intense and fierce. And it's easy from the mind to place judgment on what somebody's intentions are or how spiritually awakened they are. But I think in developing our capacity to pay attention to the subtleties, we can actually see how, yeah, it's just what you mentioned. What's important is that you actually wake up, that you are safe, not that you feel safe in a sense.

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think there's so much good stuff there. One is an awareness of your reactions, right? So your vasanas, your mental conditioning, will cause you to react to someone in a particular way. And so awareness of that kind of thing. The one thing that I would push you a little bit on is just because you make a judgment doesn't mean that it's wrong.

• 1:24:53André Duqum?

  Of course.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  You know, so like I think there are many people also in this spiritual realm who will say like, oh, like I'm being judgmental, therefore it is bad. Therefore, I will let the guru take advantage of me because that is.

• 1:25:07André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah. There's a middle way here.

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  So I think that unfortunately, in the spiritual capitalism that we live in, there are plenty of false gurus.

• 1:25:18André Duqum?

  Can you speak to that? Because this wellness industry, I mean, depending on how you look at it, is a four, five trillion dollar industry. And there is this capitalistic notion of spirituality. Where does that go wrong in so many ways?

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  So I think it basically, it's, it gets hijacked. So I think this is when it goes wrong. One really common pattern is someone who has some degree of spiritual development that is authentic, then the ego, so the problem with spiritual development is that it gets harder over time, not easier. We have this idea that as I become more competent, I get better. So my experience has been the opposite, that the more developed you become, the harder things get. So it's kind of like climbing to the top of Mount Everest. Like, once you climb the first 10,000 feet, like, it's hard, but the next 10,000 feet is harder, the next 10,000 feet is even harder. This is where we get, and then I think subtler forms of ego come into play.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Right? So there's the regular ego, then there's the ego of having no ego. Then we get to the super dangerous territory of Siddhis. You know what a Siddhi is?

• 1:26:22André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  So, once you develop Siddhis, it becomes really hard to navigate in the world.

• 1:26:29André Duqum?

  What are those for people that don't know?

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Siddhis are, I guess you could call them psychic powers. So this is my favorite. So what I love about westernization of spirituality is we like talk, we love the part that we understand, and we just wipe away the rest of it. And there's this bizarre cultural appropriation that's going on with spirituality. So Bhadanjali's Yoga Sutras, right? So everyone's like Ashtanga Yoga, Eight-Limbed Yoga, yoga's great, yoga's great. There are scientific studies on yoga. And Bhadanjali sort of like wrote the Bible of yoga. I guess in the West, people kind of call it that, right? But he has, the third chapter of his book is, so he talks about what is an asana? What is a yoga posture? What is the mind? Like, there's this conscious, the right knowledge, wrong knowledge. Basically, everything is like, super scientific, super acceptable.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  And then he's got a very small section, chapter three of his, his, his text is like really small. It's the shortest one. And he's like, by the way, here are all the psychic powers you can develop. Here's time travel. Here's conquering death. Here is teleportation. Here's these things. And he says, if you, as you develop, here are the ways you develop them and don't get distracted by them. And it's just like this tiny little thing. It's like an aside. He's not saying like, if you pay this exclusive price for this workshop, I'm going to teach it to you. He's like, by the way, if you do all the shit at the beginning, and you do pranayama, and you do all these spiritual practices, these things will happen. It is a warning, just don't mess around with it. Right? So as you get better and better and better, and as Siddhis and things like that develop,

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  like, it becomes harder, not easier. So like, and people, and it's, because it's so hard, right? Because if people are like, if I had a billion dollars, I would start fixing things. And if you develop a Siddhi, your capacity to make the world a better place becomes way easier. But it's, it has all kinds of like negative stuff that goes with it. Because then suddenly like, I am saving things. And who am I? How, like, it's kind of weird, but you can even judge yourself where like, if I could save someone and I don't, what does that make me? So the ego that you deal with becomes subtler and subtler and subtler. And there's also an element of shakti there that the moment that you externalize your shakti, so I can add money to my bank account, I get compound interest, I become

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  a millionaire, I have $10 million, the moment that I start spending huge swaths of money, my bank account will drop. So there's also a process on the spiritual road of like, as you grow and as you progress, you're building this like mountain of compound spiritual interest money stuff, energy shakti stuff. And if you start expending it in the utilization of Siddhis, it will expend a gigantic amount of money. And we can talk about why that is and what happens and stuff, but.

• 1:29:11André Duqum?

  So that's why it's particularly dangerous from ego to ego of no ego to that part of the Siddhis, is that could go wrong very quickly in a sense.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Very quickly, right? So the higher you are, the easier it is to fall and the more that it hurts. So I think in the spiritual capitalism realm, we have people who are not quite grifters, but I think they understand spiritually, spiritual things of India, but they haven't like done the work. Then you'll have people who have done the work and then since this, the lineage of gurus is basically sort of like not broken, but it's like hard to find now. You have a lot of people who don't have proper guidance. And so they fall off the path, even though they accomplish, they fall off the path very easily. And then you have the people who don't fall off the path, but they're rare and usually hard to find, let's say. We'll say most of them are not in the public eye, I would say.

• 1:30:04André Duqum?

  Not that it's not possible, but very few of them probably have an Instagram.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but some of them do. So I don't think you can make the judgment that just because you have an Instagram, doesn't mean that you're not spiritually developed.

• 1:30:18André Duqum?

  Yeah. This is one of those things where it's hard to externally verify, but what do you think is the most clear barometer of actually gauging the, like how true a teacher is?

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's a great question. It's a really, really challenging thing. So I have developed my own internal scientific rubric using multivariate regression analysis to spot a fake guru. Okay? So.

• 1:30:43André Duqum?

  What the hell does that mean?

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Okay, great. So let's talk about science, right? So, so like I said, people who do the spiritual stuff are not trained in multivariate regression analysis. So let's talk about multivariate regression analysis for a second. When we're doing science, we'll do something like a randomized control trial. And then what we'll do is we'll realize, okay, like, what are the variables that contribute to this outcome? And you can sort of say like, you know, so any studies that say, oh, ADHD is like 50% genetic, that is through multivariate regression analysis. They look at someone who has ADHD and they look at all the factors that are contributing. And you can attribute some variables are worth way more than others. Does that kind of make sense? Like, the equation of ADHD involves 50% genetics, 25% upbringing, 25% like technology use.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  So the first thing that I would say is the way to spot a fake guru, the only barometer that really works is internal spiritual development. So game recognizes game. Once you know something, like if you're a chef, you can eat, it doesn't matter, it can be some grandma who's cooking you an omelet in the middle of like Romania, and you know good food when you see it.

• 1:31:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, those who know, knows who know.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. Right? So that is the most important thing. Second thing is I've noticed that there's a trend of people who will talk a lot about things that they won't teach you. Okay? So like, some people will say like, oh, like, you know, they're like, and there's some amount of, they talk a lot about what they know without sharing what they know. And I'm arguably guilty of this as well. But, but, but I'm better than everyone. I mean, that's why like, I don't even pretend to be a guru. I try really hard to tell people like, I'm not a guru, like, don't treat me as a guru. I'm just a dude. But I think that that's a really important part where there's a sort of this idea of like, oh, like, there's all this wonderful stuff, but like.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  You have to pay $10,000 to get it. Now, the really tricky thing is that there are some instances. I've had meditation teachers. I've paid everywhere from zero to like five to six figures for meditation training of different kinds. And I don't think that just because you pay a lot of money means that it's a scam.

• 1:32:51André Duqum?

  Right, right.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  But I think that there's a pattern, which is I'm gonna talk a lot about the things that I won't tell you.

• 1:32:57André Duqum?

  Yeah, but yeah, it's just an interesting point there, too, that there's almost this expectation that somebody shouldn't charge for anything like spiritually focused, which I understand where that's coming from, but also like spiritual folks aren't supposed to be inept and only live in a cave and not have not have financial success. Like, I don't know how we kind of separate those two often. So it's an interesting balance of just like.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that there definitely is this idea. I mean, we see this, what, we're like, I show up on the internet and I say, I'm here to help people. And then if I like try to charge anything, then like people get really upset. They're like, if you're helping people, like, why are you charging things? And this is something, it's so stupid, but I didn't realize. So I used to do everything for free. And then this, I know this is gonna sound crazy, but then I learned the hard way that if you do things for free and you do it for a lot of people, it costs more.

• 1:33:48André Duqum?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:49Speaker 02

  Feeding one person.

• 1:33:50André Duqum?

  And there's also probably an inverse relationship to how much people value it.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's actually a really beautiful study on that. So I don't remember the reference. I've been looking for it for years, haven't been able to find it, but I read the study. So it's a great study on fraternities and how much people value the fraternity that you join in college and how much you value the fraternity correlates not with how good the fraternity is. So there are objective measures of how effective it is, like some fraternities have people who become president of the United States and some people have fraternities that, some fraternities that people don't go anywhere. The number one thing that correlates with people's value of a fraternity is how hard they get hasted. So there's one fraternity that is an absolute shit fraternity, ties up all their pledges naked on a tree with rope and pisses on them. Those, the people who go through that are the ones who are like, this fraternity is

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  the best. So there's absolutely this, there's a great research that I have been able to find on wine and prices.

• 1:34:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  Where if you blind people to the price of wine, they can tell the difference between good wine and bad wine, but the moment that you show someone the price, they think more expensive wine is better. So yeah, you're spot on that. There's all this stuff around pricing and spirituality and what's worth it.

• 1:35:00André Duqum?

  Okay. Yeah, I feel like we covered that. I guess just backtracking to like the 75 to 100, like the, where the rubber meets the road and what you both mentioned in regards to karma and vasanas.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  I'm having a blast.

• 1:35:12André Duqum?

  Good.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  Sorry, I interrupted you, but.

• 1:35:15André Duqum?

  Pod, you know, we're, yeah, we're picking up momentum. This is fun. This is my sweet spot in life is I love this so much.

• 1:35:23André Duqum?

  But as it relates to karma and vasanas, in terms of like what's coloring our perception in life, what is the, what is the link between the two? And what's important to know about how they function for those that want to spiritually grow? Does that make sense?

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I wouldn't tie that necessarily to 75 to 100, but let's talk about karma and vasanas. So fun. Okay. So first thing is what most people, so everyone who talks about the theory of karma, most of the critics of theory of karma don't really understand one fundamental karma aspect of the theory, which is that 99% of the karma that you and I do is mental. So if we think about what the theory of karma is, karma is one thing. It's scientifically verified, by the way. Cause and effect, that's it. They're like, hey, causes have effects. And also all effects have causes. There's a chain of causality. This is a fundamental feature of existence, right? Which I don't think is like a scientifically wild statement. Okay?

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  So then if you sort of think about it, what is the, do thoughts have effects? Do emotions have effects? Yes, absolutely. So we know from like literally this very well studied thing called cognitive behavioral therapy, that if we can intentionally alter your thoughts, your depression will improve, your anxiety will improve, your ADHD will improve, like things will get better. So most of the karma that we actually do is in our head. Now we're seeing this in society with like online radicalization and people going down the incel rabbit hole. Their thoughts are being nurtured in a particular way that creates their life. Okay? That's the first thing. So the second thing is that avasana is a mental habit.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  So now we go to neuroscience for a little bit, that when your neurons fire in a particular way, they're likely to fire in that way again. So once you do something like, if you brush your teeth with your right hand, you don't wake up tomorrow and brush it with your left hand. So what, this is what a lot of people don't realize is like, if you look at your life and your life sucks, there is a 99.999% chance that your thinking is habitual. If I take a snapshot of the thoughts that you have on a day, and I take a snapshot over 100 days, what I will see will be very different. I'm, you're gonna wake up in the morning, you're saying things the same shit. I'm alone, I'm a virgin, I'm a loser, I'm this, I'm that, I'm whatever, right?

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  And even in a narcissist, I'm great, other, I don't wanna see, I don't want other people to see how un-great I am. You know, what you'll notice is that your thinking is like very habitual. The big mistake that people make is that they think, the reason I am thinking this way is because reality is this way. My thoughts are a reflection of reality. So here's the thing. That is not true. If your thoughts were a reflection of reality, I would be farting rainbows right now, right? So you can think all kinds of things, and this is also where I like, I don't like some of these like visualization people and spiritual capitalism, like manifestation visualization. Like, thinking doesn't get you shit, like in life, bluntly, right? So I can think, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want, I wanna wake up every

• 1:38:34Speaker 02

  day, I wanna stop playing video games. I was there, didn't get me shit. Maybe your mileage may vary, you may have a more profound mind than I do. But generally speaking, thinking isn't worth a whole lot, right? Most of our thoughts, we have like a bazillion thoughts a day, what is there to show for it? Nothing. So most of our thinking is actually neuronal patterns, which we also know from cognitive behavioral therapy, if you can modify those patterns, your life will change. So in the way that those patterns develop is it's a vasana. So, sorry, when we think in a particular way over and over and over again, it becomes a habit of our thinking. We think the habit of our thinking reflects reality and it doesn't. So this is the key thing. If you want to break free of this. So first of all, if you break free of it, it's huge because breaking free of your patterns of thinking is literally how people become exceptional.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  So I once was in this beautiful class on Nobel Prize winning experiments in physiology and medicine. So we just looked at all the experiments that won people Nobel prizes. The one common thread of how you win, literally how you win a Nobel Prize is you think in a way that has never been thought before. We all had this habitual way of thinking. This is the way we thought the world worked. The moment that you break out of that pattern, like literally you get a Nobel, I mean, not literally, not every time and for everybody. But if you're a scientist and you see what is in front of you, instead of using your prior conceptions of what you thought existed in physiology, that's when you win a Nobel Prize. So, actually you have to demonstrate that that's true.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  So I think what a lot of people don't realize is their vasanas are like holding them back in a really profound way. So I'll give you all like one or two simple examples. So, you know, I've had patients who will get cheated on by their spouse. Now, after they realize they got cheated on, they realize, oh my God, the warning signs were there. I ignored them. Why did you ignore them? Because of vasanas. Because you had a habitual way of thinking. You thought, okay, when my husband or wife stays out late, they're working. That's a habitual pattern of thinking. It's not seeing the world as it is, right? You're ignoring all these signs. So a lot of our thinking is just habitual. And so if you want to break free, if you really want to like start living your life well, you have to break out of your habitual thinking. So when, you know, when you get...

• 1:40:47Speaker 02

  Another simple example, I got rejected from medical school like 120, 140 times. And if I had let those pile up and I let those, each rejection, create a habit of thinking, I would not have applied for the third year in a row. I would have given up. So what you really have to do, vasanas are basically, breaking your vasanas is breaking apart your mental karma, breaking apart the past. I know now I'm going to sound like some guru. So that you can build a new future, but genuinely, that's what it is. And CBTs does the same thing. Right? So what we want to do is break apart our mental habits of thinking so that we can think fresh, so we can look at our circumstances freshly and then act accordingly.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  So just because I'm 32 and I'm a failure in life, doesn't mean that I need to be a failure at 64. Nothing about the past determines the future in a very concrete way. And so you can change that thinking by changing your vasana. And the way that you disable a vasana, really simple, really frustrating, and really hard, and really great. Ask yourself, have I had this thought before? If you've had the thought before, it is an echo of a prior thought, is not coming from now. And what people will discover is that 99% of your thinking is not from today, here, now, or the world that you actually live in. It is from an echo of the past.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  At the top of the list is, I'm a loser. At the top of the list is, the capitalist world is ruining everything, right? And like, why? Because the price of a Kit Kat bar went up by like 12 cents. Or it actually shrunk from like four ounces to like 3.8, right? And so we get triggered in all of these ways. But getting triggered by the capitalist shrinkflation, which I get triggered all the time by, by the way, doesn't actually improve the world or fix anything in any way. It doesn't like, help me get better at anything. So you can take action by all means, but anyway. So, most people will have like, mental habits that they don't realize, and it really binds their life.

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• 1:43:44André Duqum?

  There is a, the subtlety that you're speaking to here is really important to hone in on because on the spiritual path, or I suppose in sincere, authentic discovery, the focus is on not just what's being done, but the consciousness in which what is being done, like the mental volition. And so, yeah, what do we not realize about how karma is generated from the volition or intention behind what we're doing? There's this analogy of two people, you know, who, who kill somebody. One's a doctor trying to save their life. The other was maliciously trying to kill them, right? Two same outcomes, somebody died, two completely different internal motivating factors.

• 1:44:25André Duqum?

  And so I think part of being on the spiritual path is, is a deeper sensitivity to our, our mental volition and the intention which driving our behavior. So how important is it to, to reveal what that is? You tell me. I mean, I think it's paramount personally is why I'm asking it. Yeah, I know. I mean, that's, that's an opinion is a question that you want me to reflect on. So just state your opinion. Tell me how it works. Well, we, we could pick apart any example, like the one I just gave about the, the action, when there is a sincere desire for somebody's like.

• 1:44:58André Duqum?

  Whether it's a compliment or you do something for somebody that is generally, one is genuinely for the betterment of that person with zero expectation of return, of seeing, being somebody who's a giver, or there's no expectation of being perceived for what you are doing versus somebody who gives somebody something with the string attached, for example. Those are two different dispositions where in the external reality, it seems like the same thing happened, somebody got a gift. But in terms of the internal experience and what it's cultivating or what it's perpetuating in terms of karmic momentum, or whether it's freeing you from previous echoes of the past

• 1:45:40André Duqum?

  like you spoke to, those are like, it's putting you on two different paths spiritually in a way, directions.

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  Yes. Love the question. So let's dive in a little bit. So I think this is where like the conversation is not two paths, it's subtlety. So they're all actually on the same path. So the intention, I do not believe, is what creates the karma. So I think this is where like, if we're talking about 75 to 100, we gotta be like super precise here, okay? So what creates the karma is an attachment of any kind. So this is something where I think like, if people want to like understand spirituality, one thing I highly recommend is to study the teachings of the Buddha. And this is what's really wild. Have you read the teachings of the Buddha or studied the teachings? So like, very few people have done that.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  Most people have all these ideas about Buddhism, but they don't come from the Buddha. And the reason for that is because what the Buddha really said would not fly in modern society at all. So a really great example of this is the two arrows, where this is a really famous thing that I didn't really study the teachings of the Buddha. I learned it derivatively and it's like, if something bad happens to me, like if I get dumped, that's what life sends me, I can't control that pain. The pain that I can control is calling myself a loser. So when life shoots one arrow at me, I shoot another arrow at myself. And that's really where my suffering comes from. The pain is over here, but suffering is the attachment to the pain, the longing for something else. So that makes perfect sense as a psychiatrist. I'm like, oh, you've been dumped.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  Don't beat yourself up. Don't love yourself, right? So we'll sort of say this kind of thing. But what the Buddha said is that applies to good stuff, too. Don't be grateful for good things happening to you. Don't feel pride when you do a good job. Like, don't get a trophy. Like, don't do any kind of attachment to anything that happens to you from the outside world is a bad karma.

• 1:47:38André Duqum?

  That makes sense, especially how many of us obviously have, for good reason, preference for praise over blame. But our attachment to both equally, in a sense, take us away from our center.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely, right? So in the preference comes from, so this is what he said. He said that if you pay attention, the praise is not a problem. It is the greed that the praise creates. That is the attachment. So if I save you, to even, if I work really hard to save your life and I attach myself to, I really want this to happen. Not out of any selfish reason, but out of a selfless reason. The really wanting is the karmic bind. And this is why most of the spiritually profound people on the planet aren't doing shit directly. They're not out there like feeding the poor and stuff like that. I always wondered this, why are all these like spiritually advanced people sitting in caves in the Himalayas? They're trying to break free from the cycle entirely.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  And breaking free from the cycle doesn't mean making the world a better place. Wanting to make the world a better place is absolutely a karmic attachment. So the way that I break apart your example is there are different levels of karma, right? So if I have an ego and I want praise, if I'm a nice guy and like not a good guy, if I'm a nice guy and I'm like, oh, Andre, I will pick you up from the airport. Andre, your girlfriend dumped you? Let me take care of you. Oh, my God. Your friend's haunting me again and again. No problem. I'm going to get you flowers and eventually I will buy myself, I will punch the hole on coupon and I will get myself one free sex. That's what I'm looking for. So that attachment, whether, attachment to negative stuff is bad.

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  But attachment to positive stuff is bad, too. And where we are in society, like, we can't say that. But if you really want to understand what karma is, is to do things with no expectation, not even a good expectation. And I think that, like, as a doctor, that works wonders. So when I, like, show up in my office, I try my best to, like, can I help this person? I don't even know. I'm just gonna try to do my best. If they get better, if they get better. If they don't get better, I'm gonna try to, like, learn. Like, you, you start responding in a very, almost mechanical way to the environment. So if this patient doesn't get better, I will respond to that in certain ways. But all of the responses are without any thread of, like, continuity, for lack of a better term. So if I save 10 lives, I'm not a good doctor.

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  If I, 10 people die, I'm not a bad doctor. If I save a life, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna study this, and I'm gonna see, what did I do well and what did I do poorly? If a patient dies, I'm gonna ask myself, what did I do well and what did I do poorly? This is equanimity. To not change your reaction to life based on what happens. That is how you break free of karma.

• 1:50:24André Duqum?

  There is a Taoist maxim that says, "The master does nothing yet leaves nothing undone." And I'm curious what your thoughts are on being somebody who has a lot of activity in the world, but does not generate further karma because of the place in which you're doing things without the sense of being a doer. And so you do what needs to be done. You do what you ought to do in your environment. I would love for you to talk about that state of being and your thoughts on it.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Well, two or three things. One is a beautiful Taoist maxim. I think that's exactly what I was talking about, never heard it before. Second thing is, let's be clear, I'm not one of those people.

• 1:50:58André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. But maybe strive to embody some of that. In your life.

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, who knows? So I stopped striving to be that a long time ago.

• 1:51:06André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  Right? So like, if I'm embodying it, like, great.

• 1:51:10André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Speaker 02

  And also, like, if not, like, okay. Right? So like, I'm, I'm content to be one of the eight billion people on the, or the 7.9999 billion people who's just floundering in the world, attached with karma, like, whatever. So.

• 1:51:24André Duqum?

  Do you really believe that fully?

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26André Duqum?

  Because I feel like there's parts of you also that is ignited by the fire of self-transformation. And like, you clearly have sought these things and these paths of self-realization for many reasons.

• 1:51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there have been parts of me that have done that, and I did that for a while.

• 1:51:40André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  And then I was like, you know what? Nah, so I'll tell you, I know it sounds crazy, but, so this happened very specifically, like, I like, I have like a moment. Okay, so I came back from the ashram at the age of 21. And for two years in college, I was just like terrible with girls. Joined a fraternity, would go to parties, would get hammered. I remember one time I went on this date with this girl, I asked her out, like, the night before, we grabbed bubble tea the day after. And like, I had such a huge set of beer goggles on, like, I thought she was beautiful the night before, and I'm like, she's not, not attractive or anything. Just in the morning, it was not pleasing to me, and I was like, what have I done? Just a string after string of terrible relationships. So then I go to India, and I'm, okay, going to become a monk, like, ah, all these materialists and people who want to be doctors, I'm better than them. And I'm going to be celibate.

• 1:52:26Speaker 02

  Ah, so I can't be a loser if I don't try to get laid. So then I came back and I was like, haha, I'm gonna be celibate. And then I met my wife. And so it's so funny, because, you know, in meeting her, I realized that a lot of what made me fail with women was like, all of these like fucking attachments that I had. And so then I was like, okay, I'm just like, there's no chance, I'm not gonna ask her out, I'm never gonna ask her out, I'm never gonna try to get laid. I found her incredibly physically attractive, and I was like, this is a test of my spirituality. So then I, I went up.

• 1:52:57André Duqum?

  I love this Indian accent that comes out every time something profound happens.

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  This is the only way I can keep my ego in check. I just have to like laugh and make fun of myself, like constantly, because I'm just, I'm an idiot, man, like, just a phenomenal idiot. So then I go to her and I ask her on a date, I didn't realize we were dating, like, I didn't ask her on a date, I was like, hey, you want to hang out sometime? And it was a date and lasted like 10 hours, I still didn't understand it because I'm dumb. But I think at some point I was like, and then I told her, I was like, I'm going to become a monk. I cannot love you. Oh, I cannot. It is tragedy. Look how tragic I am. I have to pursue. I cannot give up spirituality for you. I have to strive for it, right? Strive for something great, Andre. Strive for that. Have that hunger, have that fire for that spiritual transformation.

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  And then I was like, you know, she's hot, bro. So then I struggled for a long time and she was patient with me. She was like patient with all my working things out. And one day I'd be like, oh, you're great. And the next day I'd be like, I'm going to be monk. And so eventually I realized, okay, like in this life, sure, do I want spiritual enlightenment? Great. Sounds great. But in this life, not in this life. So I resigned myself and it's kind of weird. I realized like I had an attachment to detachment. And instead what I did is I detached myself and allowed myself to be attached. Does that kind of make sense?

• 1:54:14André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  I was so hung up on, I want to be detached. And then I was like, fuck it. Let's just be attached. Let it go. And so I decided to have kids. And the moment they were born, I knew the meaning of fear. And I was like, hey, this is what life is. I'm going to become enlightened. Like I'll work, I'll worry about it. I'm going to procrastinate, bro. I'm going to just like do this thing as best as I can. I'm going to enjoy life. I'm going to love my kids. I'm going to be terrified for my kids. Um, I did this thing with my kid the other day. So she's like, she wore shorts that were too short. And I was like, these shorts are too short. And it's this like crucial moment of fatherhood when you're like, you can't wear shorts that short. And then she was like, no, it's totally fine. And I was like, okay, I'm going to make you a deal. And I didn't say, I did say that. That's what I thought in my head. She doesn't get consent.

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  And I was like, I'm going to wear my shorts as short as you wear your shorts. And so I hiked my shorts up and they were like, you know, strapped around. She's like, ew, disgusting. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to go see your friends. I'm going to hang out with your friends. I'm going to show up as your dad. Your dad's going to be dressed like this. And was I attached in that moment? Absolutely. Was it good parenting or traumatizing parenting? I don't know. But in that moment, I'm just going to be whatever kind of feels right in that moment. By all means, reflect and stuff, but you don't have to do that stuff 24 hours a day. You can be a degenerate like eight to 12 hours a day and you can meditate for a couple of hours a day. It's okay. I don't know if that answers your question.

• 1:55:37André Duqum?

  Yeah. No, it's interesting because on one hand, you could perceive this sense of. What a gift this life is and how there's a sort of sense of urgency from one perspective to utilize the gift of being in a human body that can transmute these different karmas and and wake up. And you're speaking to also, because I know you still do practices and you still like, you're still, regardless of whether or not we declare we're on a path of sorts, we're on the path regardless, right? But yeah, I was just kind of curious about your perspective of that state of being

• 1:56:17André Duqum?

  that does and has a lot of activity in the world, but doesn't have the perception of being a doer behind them driving so much.

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think it's weird how you get there. So I've sort of gotten there. And so like, it's interesting because if I look at myself objectively, my spiritual practice has intensified in the last two or three years in a way that it hasn't been since like I was like 22 in India. So for 10 years, I was basically coasting the whole med school, Harvard, and all that kind of stuff. And then a couple of years ago, I sort of realized like, I need to get kind of back into it and that hunger was there. But I think I also realized the time scale also through some experiences, like the time scale of this is like lifetimes. So, once I really understood that, once I had nyan of that, the urgency disappears, the ability to procrastinate returns. And then you do

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

  the thing, but then like, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna hope for what comes. And even then, I acknowledge that attachment, that there's some degree of hope, but the more you acknowledge your attachments, the more they dissipate. So the most attached person in the world doesn't realize they're attached. They think they're right. So-

• 1:57:23André Duqum?

  As a bar, that's important to-

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I think that like, you know, most people, I think it's a fair, objective statement to say that on some level, I have some degree of spiritual development. I think it's clear in terms of the impact that I have, because I don't work harder than anybody else. It's not clear that I'm smarter than anybody else, but there's some, there's some spiritual force, which I totally get, which is cultivated within me and is like expressing itself through me.

• 1:57:50Speaker 02

  So that's absolutely true. Like, you know, there's a lot of Shakti accumulation and things like that, that I do on a very regular basis. I think that shows.

• 1:57:57André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think, I know you have this jovial degradation of like, oh, I'm just this dude on the path. I think it's important to be also impartial about where are strong suits and our gifts and, and what's unique about, I guess, our ability to serve and share too.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm from an impartial perspective, I'm exceptional. Right? Like, I mean, like, literally. So like, if you look at, you know, I was, I was thinking about this, like, many years ago, where I used to be like, a complete loser. Like, at the age of 27, I was, I had no money. I was, I was dating my wife. So that was great. She was like financially supporting me. And I remember going to a Christmas party and like, meeting one of my friends from high school. And we were like catching up. And I was like, oh, like, what are you, what are you up to now? And she's like, oh, I'm an ophthalmologist. And she's like, what are you up to? And I was like, I'm applying to medical school for the third year in a row. So if you look at the, you know, what are the statistical odds for someone who at 27

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  has a crappy GPA, no money, no anything, to within a span of 10 years be like, arguably the most followed psychiatrist on the planet? I don't, I think that that is like, there's not ego, right? This like, that's a statistical improbability. And for that to happen, am I a complete lucky outlier? Absolutely a possibility. But when I look at the tantric work that I've done, the Shakti accumulation, then it makes perfect sense, because I've been accumulating Shakti for 20 years, and it starts to manifest.

• 1:59:22André Duqum?

  What is that?

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  So the way that I, what is what?

• 1:59:24André Duqum?

  Accumulation of Shakti.

• 1:59:26Speaker 02

  Here, so there are certain practices that you can do, which will accumulate spiritual energy. Now we get weird. Okay, so.

• 1:59:33André Duqum?

  Finally.

• 1:59:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there is energy on the level of matter, right? So we have matter, we have energy, and then we have energy in the spiritual realm. So is in that weird conscious plane. And when you, so you can do a bunch of labor materially, but it may not manifest the way that you want, right? I can do all the right things. I may still end up without a girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. I applied to medical school 120 times, nothing happened. So.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  So if we look at things happening in the real world, material efforts are scientifically insufficient to create a material change necessarily. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. So the scientist part of me looks at this equation and says, there's no question marks in the theory of gravity, right? The equation of gravity is, there's no like question mark, like we can figure it out. But in the real world, if we fail to achieve, that must be mean that there's a variable that we are not detecting. I think the best representation of that variable is Shakti or spiritual energy. And for the Thantric practices that I have done, the way I describe it, and here's why it's, I think it's so hard to understand scientifically, because you have to understand the mechanism.

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  So imagine I have a field and there's a river. So I start digging a trench, but I start digging like an irrigation ditch between the field and the river. So the first 99 feet that I dig, there's zero water irrigating the field. That last bit of earth that I dig, and suddenly one bit of effort, one unit of effort irrigates my entire field, even when the 99 units of effort irrigated at 0%. So this is why I think Shakti is hard for people to understand, because you usually have to do a lot of work for a very long period of time, and then it hits this critical threshold, where then suddenly stuff in your life just starts like going really well.

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  And the reason is because you're accumulating energy at that spiritual level, which then reflects down into the material plane.

• 2:01:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, I agree, and internally in my experience, 100% feel that as well. And it's interesting to look at, I mean, we spoke into this many times throughout the conversation. One of the most incredible logicians of all time, Kurt Gödel, has incompleteness theorem, which simply put means truth transcends proof. And so how there is a reality that we, of course, can't conceptually always convey, that doesn't mean that it's not true, of course, just like we spoke to the quality of experience and this accumulation of Shakti energy, whatever words we want to use, which end of the day is futile anyways, it's not the thing in itself, is real. I'm curious how intuition comes into this, because we spoke to this earlier.

• 2:02:18André Duqum?

  It is one of those things that, from the materialist view, you could say is simply an accumulation of subconscious implicit learning. And where, when you say you're making a decision from intuition, it's based off of pattern recognition that's subperceptual, perhaps. But there is an alternative, kind of deeper, energetic, slightly more Wu, explanation of intuition in third eye, or third eye and Agna Chakra cultivation. And so, how do you think about the cultivation of intuition and its ability to direct our life in a beneficial path?

• 2:02:54Speaker 02

  Beautiful question. So I don't think it's either/or. So I think there are neuroscience mechanisms of intuition. I think this is a failure of language. So I'd say there's two types of intuition. There's the neuroscience intuition and there's the spiritual intuition. I don't think they're qualitatively the same. I think they're quite different. So if we look at our brain, our brain processes a ton of information and then floats things to our conscious awareness in a illogical form. So you can like walk into a room and immediately notice there's tension in the air. That's an intuition. If I ask you to explain why you believe that, you wouldn't be able to tell me, but it will be true. That's because the second you walk into a room, there's all kinds of auditory processing, visual processing.

• 2:03:39Speaker 02

  There's all kinds of like, you know, patterns in your, in your brain that trigger. So that's one kind of intuition. There's another kind of intuition, what I think we call intuition, that is transcendental knowledge. That's what I would call it. So intuition, fine, comes from the brain. But transcendental knowledge, which is frequently what people call intuition, and the reason they say that is knowledge that you have that you have no business of having. That's how I would define it. So one is like, what are all the patterns that your brain has learned that is triggering, that is giving you an idea of what is going on? And even qualitatively, it feels quite different. So I would call intuition that is transcendental and knowing. So like, if you go, and people know this, right? So like-

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  You will sometimes know something is like true. It's not an intuition. It's like, is this your gut? So sometimes I'll have patients, you know, I once had a patient who came in and said, you know, like I have this like really bad feeling that something is going to happen. And then I was like, I, so we do a lot of spiritual work too. And so I asked her, I was like, okay, so like, is something bad going to happen to your kids? Like, do you know something is going to bad? Because if you know something bad is going to happen, then we have to go down a different route. But is this like, do you know this is going to happen? Or you're like worried? And she's like, oh, no, it's not going to happen. I'm worried. And even the way she sort of says it, she's like, oh, no, it's like not like a, it's not like a premonition of the future. And so then, then we did the psychiatry instead of the spirituality.

• 2:05:02Speaker 02

  But, um, and so there's a huge qualitative difference between the gut and transcendental knowledge. And this is also where a lot of people like confuse the two because they've heard of transcendental knowledge. They experience that they're experiencing good gut intuition. And then they think that those two are the same. And your gut can be right, but I would call the transcendental knowledge, I call it a knowing.

• 2:05:24André Duqum?

  Do you have an example of that type of knowing in your life? And, um, how does one cultivate that in their life?

• 2:05:32Speaker 02

  I don't share examples.

• 2:05:33André Duqum?

  Sure. Or maybe somebody else, or, I mean, you kind of gave it, you know, that, that sense of knowing.

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, I think the best example is the one from everyone who's listening. So I imagine most people who listen to your podcast know exactly what I'm talking about. If they don't, like, not a big deal. Second thing is how to cultivate that I can absolutely answer. So I think Agnichakra practice is at the top of the list for cultivating conduit to the divine or cosmic consciousness or whatever. If you're, if the kind of connection you want is knowledge. So depending on which chakra you use, you will get a certain chunk of the divine. And if you want knowledge, then Agnichakra practice. So that involves third eye practices. So it starts with Thiratika. This is where like I made a whole guide about this and we talk about this stuff a lot on our memberships and things like that. But Agnichakra practices are intuitive practices.

• 2:06:23Speaker 02

  I think they've helped me become a way better psychiatrist because sometimes when a patient walks in, like I just have a sense of what's going on with them. Is that my training or is that the spiritual practice? I personally believe it's the spiritual practice because even though I trained at Harvard, so did the other 50 psychiatrists I know who trained there. But they're not able to do what I'm able to do. And I sometimes meet people on the spiritual path who can do that. I think it's qualitatively different. So third eye practices, Agnichakra is really good. I mean, sorry, Athractica is really good. That's a great place to start. But then there's other practices like Anulom Vilom is really good.

• 2:06:58André Duqum?

  What's that?

• 2:06:59Speaker 02

  So it is alternate nostril breathing done without the fingers. So when alternate nostril breathing, like I'll breathe in, and if you pay attention, you'll get a sensation of coolness that goes up to the third eye. And then when you breathe out, it kind of goes out this way. So there's like the frontal sinus over here. So you kind of feel the air going in and out like a triangle. You sort of visualize that. And ideally, what you're trying to do is feel it. Most people may not be able to feel it right away. You'll feel it up to here or up to here. But as you practice more and more and more, you'll feel it go higher. And then Anulom Vilom is that same practice without using your fingers. So just when you breathe, you concentrate on the left nostril inhalation. Then when

• 2:07:41Speaker 02

  it, when you exhale, it goes out the right nostril. So you just put your attention like a, like a

• 2:07:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47Speaker 02

  triangle and going up to the top part, which is where another interesting principle is the more physical your meditation practices, the less shakti you will accumulate most of the time. So if you look at a meditation practice like Nadi Shuddhi or alternate nostril breathing, you're using your hands, you're closing off your nose, that is going to have a stronger physiologic effect and a weaker spiritual effect. So the more subtle your practice becomes, the more potent it'll become.

• 2:08:18André Duqum?

  For those that have started experimenting with various practices and start gaining awareness to more subtler realms of their, of their being or their energetic body, I would just love to get your opinion, both through the Western lens and Eastern lens on chakras. And because it's something that is very easy to disregard.

• 2:08:40André Duqum?

  And we don't have great scientific or would you say any scientific evidence for?

• 2:08:44Speaker 02

  I would say we don't have great scientific evidence for.

• 2:08:46André Duqum?

  But what is the reality of them?

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  So first reality is that you should be skeptical. I think it's a completely reasonable place to start. So here is what we sort of know about science. So there are some practices, for example, where there's like, I saw a trial on a Nahat Chakra, Heart Chakra meditation for depression. Very small trial, but showed positive results. We haven't gotten to the point where we can really do like massive trials of 10,000 regular meditators, 10,000 Heart Chakra meditators. That's really where you would see the effect size. So the trials just aren't there yet. The research has not progressed in that direction. There are blips of understanding of this.

• 2:09:27Speaker 02

  Now, is a clinician 100% real in the sense that there are certain meditating? There's good literature about this. There are certain meditative practices which induce psychiatric illnesses if done wrong. Those are the practices that mess with Kundalini and your chakras. So when I was training, my guru once told me, or one of my gurus told me, like, I can teach you chakra practice, but you need to come into the woods with me for a month and you're going to get hypersexual. So if you do this practice where there are people around, you're going to start like doing behaving really bad. So the guru was literally like, come into the woods with me and you're going to get really horny and we'll do something special that I won't tell you. Right? So it's like so shady. And but what I realized later as a psychiatrist, there's good case reports and stuff like that.

• 2:10:12Speaker 02

  As you do these more energetic practices, the likelihood of things like bipolar breaks, mania, meditation-induced psychosis actually increases. And so there are safe meditation practices, which is what you'll get on an app, like mindfulness and guided meditations. But if you do chakra-oriented practices, there is good evidence that some, here's what the data shows, there's good evidence that some meditations will mess you up. Now, what we don't have is studies on those meditations done under the guidance of a guru, done the way that they're supposed to be. And I realized many years later that, okay, so as I do Muladhara root chakra practice, hypersexuality is the root chakra is where our sexual tendencies come from.

• 2:10:54Speaker 02

  And so like that hypersexuality, that mania is like transient and part of the kundalini rising through the chakra. So I think that there's like some evidence that the practices done wrong will mess you up. Very, very minor evidence that these practices work in a sense, but they're never measuring like kundalini awakening, right? They're measuring like depression. That being said, I do think they're real, pretty confident. And then if you, if you really want to understand chakras, you need to do chakra practice and then have like transcendental experiences. Then you'll understand them like very, very easily like, cause you'll see them, you'll feel them, you'll like have a, an experience of them. Um, I don't know if that answers your question, but.

• 2:11:37André Duqum?

  Um, okay. I want to dig deeper.

• 2:11:39Speaker 02

  This is honestly Andrea, a once in a lifetime opportunity, so.

• 2:11:42André Duqum?

  Wow. I feel the same way. Why do you say that? Just because of the topic of exploration and how?

• 2:11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I said, I go on like neuroscience bro podcasts all the time.

• 2:11:51André Duqum?

  Uh, so, okay. So can I, I want to ask you about enlightenment.

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:11:59André Duqum?

  Do you, do you, maybe you can help me define what your perception of enlightenment is, but then also do you see it as a dynamic process or a point to which you arrive and then you're there, once you, once you're there? Like, is it a stage of consciousness that you just finish the job in a sense?

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think, yes, I think that is the easier way to understand it, that you are done at some point, right? So there is, um, yeah, I think, I think you, you finish. So, so if we look at the, so here's kind of what we do know. Okay. So first, or no, in this, let's look at different sources of information. So one is that there is absolutely a tradition where people say you reach a point, which is muksha. Muksha is enlightenment, liberation.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  And that's not samadhi. So they'll even define samadhi as a very high state of meditation, where samadhi is temporary enlightenment. So the first experiences are to experience enlightenment for brief periods of time. Maybe even longer periods of time as you practice spiritually, you'll like get into these states. And I think this is what's really challenging is that when a lot of people have experiences in meditation, I think oftentimes they don't realize like this is just the beginning of the journey. So a good example is like mindfulness. So mindfulness is like, we think that that is meditation. That's not meditation. That is the equivalent of like stretching before a marathon. So mindfulness is technically sakshi bhav, which is the witnessing attitude, which is

• 2:13:34Speaker 02

  like the first, it's like putting on your running shoes. That's the, that's where you start the journey. That's not the end of the journey. The problem is that very few people have started the journey in that way. And then, once you start that journey, you will go into other states of consciousness and things like that. You will attain things like samadhi. And then there is, but then the problem with samadhi, and I think number of people who've experienced samadhi on the planet is pretty small, but the number of people who have come down from samadhi is really high. So then that means one of two things. Either enlightenment is not possible and the highest we can get is samadhi, or there is some way to be in samadhi forever. I think the latter is true because if you experience samadhi and you continue to practice,

• 2:14:17Speaker 02

  there's a good chance you will experience it again and again and again, and longer and longer and longer. And then, once you experience samadhi, you realize that samadhi is like, it's a temporary state.

• 2:14:28André Duqum?

  Which might, may last for what, hours or days absorbed in that state?

• 2:14:32Speaker 02

  I would say for most, I mean, I don't know about, I would say like moments to minutes. And if you've gone above 10 minutes, that's, I think, quite rare, but maybe not.

• 2:14:42André Duqum?

  And the internal experience of that would be what? In terms of if somebody's experiencing samadhi, it is complete dissolution of self? No experience?

• 2:14:50Speaker 02

  No, dissolution of self is prior to samadhi. It's before samadhi.

• 2:14:53André Duqum?

  So what's happening in samadhi, just so?

• 2:14:55Speaker 02

  I would say, imagine, literally, the best example I have is imagine coming for 45 minutes. Like the sensation of that for like 45 minutes, like waves of orgasmic bliss just going through your body for like 45 minutes. The other interesting thing is that it also comes with, no pun intended.

• 2:15:17André Duqum?

  What else does it come with?

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  You.

• 2:15:21André Duqum?

  We're reaching climax in this conversation.

• 2:15:23Speaker 02

  It's all about it. So, so it also comes with, like, understanding of things. So there is a bliss element, there's a freedom element. I think that's why we use these three words is translation is like, you know, stuff that you otherwise shouldn't know and like, like, big volumes of stuff. So I think it's like, sorry. See, that's, that's, that's the divine. I don't know if you get this, but that's the divine keeping us grounded by like, you feel the degeneracy energy, keeping us like, you see now why I'm degenerate? Because if I'm not degenerate, we like, get too far. You get what I'm saying?

• 2:16:00André Duqum?

  That's good. We need a balance to keep it balanced.

• 2:16:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Like, absolutely a grounding force that is like, keeping us anchored here. I don't mean that, you know, it really is. So, you know, I think there's, there's just gigantic chunks of like, understanding that you'll come back from. You'll lose some of it, but you'll get, you'll keep some of it.

• 2:16:21Speaker 02

  So that's what I, there's a sense of freedom, there's a sense of like bliss, and then there's a sense of knowledge. So that's samadhi, and I think ego death is like, the step one. So I don't think that people, I've never heard of someone having a psychedelic experience that I think is samadhi. So I think you can get to early states, and then even then, but Dhanjali describes like, different states of samadhi. So they're not, they're not all the same. So there's, I mean, there's a whole like, once you get to the top of Everest, like, there's a whole other Everest, and then another Everest, and then another one. So they just go higher and higher and higher. Yeah, so that's how I would describe it. And oh, here's the thing, so you were asking about the permanency of it.

• 2:17:01André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Speaker 02

  So this is what's kind of hard to understand. It's absolutely temporary. It is for one moment at a time. And moksha is one moment at a time forever. It doesn't actually have duration. It's just one moment duplicated again and again and again, but not for infinity, not for 1,000 years. It is just one moment after one moment after. It's just this moment and then this moment and then this moment and then this moment. And even that's wrong because it's not and then. It is this moment, this moment, this moment, this moment. So I think when you're able to take that, I don't know if that makes sense, and experience Samadhi, I think that's what Moksha is.

• 2:17:42André Duqum?

  Let's say if everybody on planet Earth right now was in a safe environment and they experienced the bliss of their self that was not derived from any external circumstance or event happening, how do you think that would radically transform how we relate to the world and the dissolution of the thought that happiness is going to be derived externally?

• 2:18:03Speaker 02

  I mean, so I think there's no question that, at least in my mind, that experiences of Samadhi radically transform your relationship with yourself and your relationship with the outside world. So you begin to realize that we're all living in the matrix, which lets you chill out intensely. Now, for that to happen across the globe, I have no idea. I think there's a decent chance that, so you may say like, oh, life becomes a paradise. I think there's a decent chance the human race dies out. So people who are like, have attained Moksha, very rarely are conducive to life. So there's even--

• 2:18:39André Duqum?

  They're not having more kids and--

• 2:18:41Speaker 02

  I mean, they can have kids. They are having kids, but, but the thing that makes life go is generally speaking, attachment. The site, life is karma, right? Like, it's like this action leads to this, leads to this, leads to this. So the moment that you, like, if everyone became enlightened tomorrow, I think everyone would be sitting in caves in the Himalayas, except they don't need to be caves in the Himalayas. Maybe they go on for a time, like, who knows? And then if they have another kid, that kid is maybe not enlightened, so I don't really know. It's a really interesting thought experiment. But, but I think that there's a reason why people will say oftentimes after enlightenment, you will have one final birth where you wipe away all your karma. So Buddha hung around for a little while post Enlightenment. There's a great story about some teacher, some student comes to him and he's like, you know, I've been to all these other people.

• 2:19:26Speaker 02

  Will you teach me? And he's like, sure, I'll teach you. And then the guy is there for like a year or whatever. And then he's like, I haven't learned anything. Spits in Buddha's face and then he's like, F you, I'm gone. And then his disciples are like, oh, Bo, you can't do that to the... And so they start getting on him and Buddha's like, no, like, let him go. Like, that's fine. It's just a karma that had to be completed. So he did what he needed to do and now he's gone and I'm done. Maybe the human race dies out.

• 2:19:49André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think I was just, because we have so many notions around what success and how happiness is going to be derived. And so even if it being a momentary experience of our true nature or bliss of self, or whatever words you want to use there. Yeah, you spoke to how it can radically transform our relationship to self and other.

• 2:20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think we even have some like really interesting neuroscience like hints, right? So the whole problem is that we have this belief that happiness comes from outside of us. And this is driven by our dopaminergic circuitry. So the nucleus accumbens has a craving and when you satisfy the craving, you get dopamine. That feels like pleasure. So we go on chasing things that give us pleasure. If you loved your first hamburger, you're going to want a second one, you're going to want a third one. Now, the whole tragedy of life is that we develop tolerance. So your second burger is never going to be as good as your first one. So we develop tolerance. So chasing dopamine is never going to work because there's a fundamental biological constraint that will never allow it to function.

• 2:20:51Speaker 02

  I love playing video games for the first hour, second hour, and unfortunately I have patients who are like, man, cocaine is so great. But like the first hit is great, the second is great, and then you're chasing that high for the rest of your life. So that's just a fundamental limiting factor of dopamine. If we look at enlightenment, I think that's more serotoninergic, where there is a sense of contentment or peace that is internal and independent of getting things.

• 2:21:16Speaker 02

  And what we also know, this is what's really interesting, is that dopamine and serotonin are inversely related. So if I play video games all day, I will get dopamine, but I'll feel terrible at the end of the day. I'll be like, oh, my God, I'm so dumb. I like wasted my whole day. I should have been productive. And then if you like work really hard for like a day and you're like engaged with it and you did something good, like I remember I used to, you know, be on call for like 30 hours. So like you go to the hospital and it like you're working for 30 hours, then you walk out and you feel you're tired, you were angry at times, you were like, you know, it was a negative experience, but you feel so good. That's serotonin. So I think what starts to happen is as we sort of engage, if people have that experience,

• 2:21:59Speaker 02

  and this is true of like in psychiatry too, of like, I worked really hard and it feels so good. This is how I help people get out of addiction, is they start to feel really good about their lives outside of that dopaminergic dependency. And once you start to feel really good towards it, you naturally gravitate towards it. So I think if people were to experience that stage of samadhi, it changes their idea of where goodness in their life comes from.

• 2:22:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, there is that pulling roughly quoted from the Gita about detachment is not having nothing but and nothing having you. And like, I think renunciation is thought of like literally letting go of all your material desires versus the interstate of how you relate to the external world and things.

• 2:22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's not forget Krishna had arguably up to a thousand wives. So he wasn't forsaking anything in terms of material pleasures. There's an interesting like post hoc sterilization of that. So nowadays, if you ask Hindus, they'll be like, oh, he was just supporting them financially. It's like, I wasn't there and you weren't there, but they use the word wife. So I think it comes with certain things.

• 2:23:07André Duqum?

  I guess from the macro perspective, it seems like the, the goal articulated through many spiritual paths is the dissolution of the self and the stopping of the cycle of samsara, which you spoke to like in that thought experiment, if like attachment is sort of what keeps the game going. What do you think this like realm, I know it's kind of a meta question, but what do you think like this realm is like this earth school? Do you, from a spiritual perspective, like, do you see this dimensional reality as serving a specific purpose for our evolutionary path?

• 2:23:45Speaker 02

  It's cleaning up spilled milk. So if you want to understand, so like this is, it's so great. So, love this question. Love the podcast too. So here's what I think is honestly going on. Like, are we living in the matrix? Absolutely. So here's what's going on. So we're a real thing. And then we have a false identification with the body and the false identification with the mind. That I am like 100% convinced of. There's good scientific evidence of this as well. Once again, if we look at psychedelics and psychedelic healing, we know that the more attached you become to your life, your body, a narcissist is highly attached to their ego, to the perception of other people.

• 2:24:26Speaker 02

  We literally know that if you become less narcissistic, you will become better at relationships. You may not make as much money, but you will be happier for sure. And people will like, like you more, and you will make plenty of money. So generally speaking, if we look even at money, there's some highly narcissistic individuals who make a ton of money. But generally speaking, if you take the average person, you make them less narcissistic, they will become more successful, even professionally and monetarily. So we know that disidentification with the self is like healthy for you at a minimum. Then we know from psychedelics that dissolution of the ego is trauma transformative in terms of healing. Okay, so that, all that is there.

• 2:25:09Speaker 02

  Now then, that, that doesn't, that just explains potentially a mechanism of shit going on in our brains. Now, what's the real nature of it? So when you have those dissolution experiences, there is a subjective experience of something beyond this world. That's the real nature of reality. And we get falsely identified. And this is where I think there's a really interesting logical principle, that the more aligned with the truth you are, the more things improve. Right? So like, if I have a huge cognitive distortion that I'm the sexiest person on the planet, my congruence with life will not work well. I won't, people won't like me, I won't get hired, I won't make money. Right? So does it kind of make sense? Like, if I believe like- Let's take psychosis. If I believe like you're a demon,

• 2:25:53Speaker 02

  that's not congruent with reality, that won't work well. So I think that the more aligned we are with truth, when we like send a ship into space, if we use the equation of gravitation in the right way, then that ship will function in the right way. So I think the more aligned we are with truth, like the better we move in the world. So I think if you take that general principle and you apply it to this, we realize that, okay, my true self is really not me. I'm not my body. I'm not my mind. I'm this other thing. I think that's true. Now, how did we get here? So they say that the Brahman was desirous of experience. So the Brahman was like this formless nothingness, and it wanted to be a something. And then it manifested. So it was this ocean and it became a drop. But the moment that it became a drop, it got stuck.

• 2:26:37Speaker 02

  So we like spilled some milk and now we're stuck in this cycle. It created karma. But the moment that you create cause and effect, you have causes and effects and you're kind of trapped in this cycle for a while, and eventually it'll dislute. We'll get there. And even if you look at some of these creation myths, so now we're like, we really don't know if this is true, but it's fascinating because if you look at texts on bindu visarga, they say that there's a point of infinite matter, energy, and consciousness, infinitely dense point that expands and explodes and creates the universe. And that there's a period of expansion and distribution of matter, energy, and consciousness. Then it reaches a critical point, and then it starts to collapse, and it goes back down to bindu visarga.

• 2:27:22Speaker 02

  And so that sort of sounds like a singularity. It kind of sounds like the Big Bang. I think it's really fascinating. There's a great exercise I did many years ago on that I've wanted to reproduce, which is like, I want to take quotes from physics textbooks, and I want to take quotes from creation myths, from like Rishi's seers, and then see if you can attribute which one is to which, because a lot of them really sound very similar. So I think we're sort of living in Maya or illusion, like something like The Matrix. And there's a part of us that's real and we're essentially running a simulation. Why did we do that? For the same reason that we love creating and playing video games. There's a certain enjoyment to the ups and downs of an artificial world.

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• 2:29:03Speaker 02

  The fake version of us.

• 2:29:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, I remember thinking of this, like the phrasing it this way, that suffering is the cost of admission for the illusion of separation. As, as you go on the spiritual path, like, and you hear it expressed in this way, like to the ultimate, I suppose, desire is to get outside of the cycle and the wheel of samsara and the suffering. But for those that feel like this life is inherently joyful and that there is a lot of really amazing parts to, to wrap our head around why the dissolution of our own uniqueness, in a sense, is like a good thing, like a desirable. I feel like some people would be confused around that. Like, why, why would not being here be preferable over being here, in a sense?

• 2:29:48Speaker 02

  I think the problem is in your wording.

• 2:29:50André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:52Speaker 02

  The wanting for dissolution doesn't lead you anywhere, right? So I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but you're like, the desire for, for being nothingness, that's the problem. That's never gonna work. As long as you have a desire for dissolution, you're trapped. So, and I think that's kind of what's weird is like, no, the whole point is that you should not have a preference for non-existence to existence. That's true detachment. That whatever happens, like, look, we're all here. Might as well enjoy it. And if things happen badly, that's fine. Things happen great, that's great too. But like, whatever.

• 2:30:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, it feels more spacious in that way that enlightenment is viewed as sort of a natural return, a natural return of like, of a larger cycle and, and almost an inevitability in a sense. I think, as opposed to like, the forest will, I gotta wake up.

• 2:30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I think that, you know, you can force yourself to calm acceptance, but it's never gonna work.

• 2:30:48André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 2:30:49Speaker 02

  Right? So like, all you can do is resignation. So it's like, look, man, we're trapped. So we might as well make some sexually explicit jokes and have a good time and meditate a little bit and like, that's what it is. And like, don't eat, like, is there more to it? I don't know. You don't know. We're just here. So we might as well like, enjoy ourselves. Enjoy the ride, because you don't know when it's gonna end, when it isn't. You know, and I think all this like longing for enlightenment, like, I think it's great. It's great to get you started. And maybe it's great for other people to finish, but like, I, I couldn't get that far. So I was like, man, not in this lifetime. Like, I'll do it later.

• 2:31:26André Duqum?

  Yeah. Yeah, I just appreciate, I guess, the level of, um, it's like a coming back into right relationship, like you said, with gravity in a ship of like, our own desire.

• 2:31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I think it's normal to, you know, cause you're talking about this dichotomy. Like, do I, do I long for dissolution? Why would I want to destroy this uniqueness? And like, you shouldn't want that.

• 2:31:48André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 2:31:49Speaker 02

  Right? And then the whole point is that it was desire, like, the Brahman wanted us to exist. And here we are saying like, bad job, Brahman. Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna undo this, right? Like, you created this video game and I'm gonna erase it. And so I think that too, like, there's no way to escape that attachment. You see what I mean? Like, it doesn't matter if you're longing for enlightenment or longing for a car. It's still longing. That's still the problem. And there's, there's no way, you will never become enlightened if you desire enlightenment.

• 2:32:16André Duqum?

  Is there a correlation you haven't spoken to about like video games and how it's so much related to life?

• 2:32:25Speaker 02

  So I wonder if there's a cosmic waking up happening. So I don't think it's like a coincidence that, although I don't, I have no basis for this. This is just me farting with my mouth. But I think that there's like a couple of weird macro trends going on. So one is like, there's a desire for meditation. The second is we are creating artificial worlds. We are creating artificiality. So like, we're creating AI, we're creating video games. And I think that like, as this is happening on a global scale, we're starting to really, I think some people are starting to get a sense of what makes, what's real. So we, and AI can duplicate so many things, but it's not human. It's not conscious. So it's kind of weird because we're getting this like evolutionary cycle where we have

• 2:33:10Speaker 02

  no choice but to realize what is consciousness. Like, the whole world is moving in that direction because an AI can talk like you, it can walk like you, we can have video of you, but it won't be you. So then what is you? And then at the same time, we have all these people meditating. So we're sort of, we're creating a problem that makes it clear what makes a human and what doesn't make a human, what part of a human is duplicatable with a machine. And at the same time, we are also having subjective experiences of something like samadhi, hopefully, if you're lucky, through all these meditation apps. So I think there's like, we're kind of getting it from both sides.

• 2:33:49André Duqum?

  Yeah. On the pursuit of, I guess, exploring what's really real, modern science really rejects the notion of metaphysics in so many ways. And yet there's also the dogmatic acceptance of religious views of the afterlife and of what a soul is. And I'm just curious, what do you, how do you define who we are in our essence? Like, to really know thyself, the core of who you are, do you think we have a self that is at the core, beyond all of these thoughts and emotions?

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. So, so the first thing is like, there are a couple of funny things about science because people will make, say that science doesn't know what's after death. That's technically not true. Okay, I know this is kind of crazy, right? We know what happens when people die because we've had people who've died who have been revived. Like, that's like a medical fact. Like, you can have someone who's deceased and then you do chest compressions. They have some asystole or something like that and their heart starts beating again. And literally, they come back to life. Like, this person was dead. Right? Like in a hospital, like this happens like every day. People die every day and then they come back. And they have a conserved experience, right? This is not like, we don't get taught this in schools. Cause you can make the argument that if you like, you're imagining it.

• 2:35:00Speaker 02

  But you have human beings across the whole globe that die, come back and then they tell us, "Hey, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. It felt really great." Like this happens to people. Now, this is what I think is really tricky is science will say, "Well, that's just the brain." But that's not really a scientific view. That is a biased view, not based on data, but we have a presumption that all there is is the brain. But if you start with the axiom that all there is is the brain, then you say that the brain creates all experiences. That's not a falsifiable statement. Does that kind of make sense? So there's all kinds of things that we assume, that we think we know, that we really don't know. We actually know what happens after that. It's not a mystery. Right? So now the only issue is that how long do people die before they come back? That's a separate issue.

• 2:35:43Speaker 02

  But we actually know people have died and they have some subjective experience of at least the process or death or maybe even post-death. So we don't know how to line up that subjective experience with the fact that the body is dead for 60 seconds. So did that happen in the first second of dying? Or did that actually happen after that? We don't know that. That's the first thing. So I think that what's, what's real is like our, I do believe that our subjective experience, the capacity to experience is what is our truest version of the self. Okay, so to know thyself is to not know anything outside of you. To know thyself is to sit with that which has no object, but still exists.

• 2:36:26Speaker 02

  So you're not your body, because I can take a piece of your body off and you'll still be you. You're not your mind. Your mind changes over and over and over again. The one thing that is you, the one thing that literally defines you, and I don't, maybe this is philosophy, I don't think it is, is that you always experience yourself. And you can never experience me. And that's what fundamentally makes you you. We can change your body, we can change your mind, we can change your finances. We, you know, I'm Dr. K now, but I was All Oak before. And then if I give up my license, do I stop being a doctor? Like, I don't know. Like, so all of the attributes of our life and all the ways we define ourselves are literally not permanent.

• 2:37:07Speaker 02

  The one permanent part that is you is you experience your life. And if you want to know thyself, you should spend time with all of that instead of all of the other stuff that people waste their time on, which is body, mind, career, whatever.

• 2:37:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's in that examination of the unchanging background throughout all states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep and the various forms of consciousness that we can start to experience what is really true and unchanging, Craig? Because everything else is ephemeral and subject to impermanence. Now, would you say, like, in terms of the continuity of that self throughout what we would perceive as time, what you might say that experiences is beyond time? In terms of past lives, in terms of what comes next after death? How do you, what are your, what are your personal thoughts around that? If you want, if you're open to sharing?

• 2:38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm pretty sure that, so this is also where like things get a little weird. But I've found, so I've had a set of patients that will have refractory mental illness. And by refractory mental illness, what I mean is mental illness that does not respond to treatment. I've had a handful of patients that if I do past life psychotherapy with them, they are, we can't say cured, they go into remission for extended periods of time. I personally believe they're cured, but that's not like a scientific statement. We don't really know what's going on. So one thing that I've found as a clinician is that when I treat, if someone has, and I don't, this is a minority of people, by the way. Because there are some people that like other, they go to other people and they come to me.

• 2:38:45Speaker 02

  And then, not to say that I'm better than than other people, it's just that. Yeah, it just worked differently. I suck at treating a lot of people, too. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. But so I do think there is at least clinical utility. There's a great guy, I forget his name, who does research on this from University of Virginia, who I think is a psychiatrist and like explores all these things. There's actually a fair amount of evidence that past life psychotherapy can be like healing. Now, that doesn't mean that past life is real. It just means that if you treat it as if it's real and you do psychotherapy around whatever it is, it doesn't indicate that it's true. It just means that if you deal with it, if it's true, it leads to good clinical outcomes. So, but I think it's real. So I think that there is, if we look at us like we have matter, right? You have matter, you have energy.

• 2:39:30Speaker 02

  That doesn't get created or destroyed. And then it can't be created, it just can be transformed. And then you've got this third thing, which is the capacity of subjective experience. So when you die, where does that go? So this is where there's some debate between Hindus and Buddhists. So Buddhists will say that in the same way that your body will become, the matter of your body will become a thousand different things, there's no unis, but chunks of you will live on and manifest as other droplets. I can take a drop of water out of the ocean, put it back in the ocean, pull another drop of water out of the ocean. Is that the same as the previous drop? I don't know. The Hindu view is that there's a part of you that retains some degree of karma and then inhabits another body.

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  I tend to lean into that one. It's something that makes way more sense to me, also through some of my meditative practices and things like that. I think that's correct, but I have, I think that the Buddhist view is probably technically more correct. And I think they're, they're not contrary. I think on some level, they're like sandwiched on top of each other. So in the same way that, you know, you have, yeah, I think even your consciousness can be subdivided into different levels. So there's probably a package that gets, moves between bodies. And then there is another layer that gets distributed.

• 2:40:45André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's interesting to parse through our own internal dialogue around this because we have this innate desire for continued existence and also specialness. And, uh, and so the Buddhist view, I think bums people out a lot of times, you know, when they, but, uh, But it's interesting also how, I think it's Neils Bohr who said, "The opposite of something true may be something false, but the opposite of a profound truth might very well be another profound truth." And so like, both these perspectives can be right in different contexts and different ways of understanding. Would you agree with that?

• 2:41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think when you say we have an innate desire, so I think this is where we go back to where we started, which is like, what are you? Not who are you, what are you? So when you say an innate desire for existence, which part of you has that?

• 2:41:38André Duqum?

  That ego.

• 2:41:39Speaker 02

  Ego can have it, but I think it comes from biology, right? So we have an instinct towards preservation. But that desire is not us, that is just a mechanism of the body. So like, in the same way that my GI system digests food, my cells want to live and want to procreate. That doesn't mean that we have an innate desire. I think that's actually a mistake. So the body wants to procreate, fine. And so I think a lot of that difficulty can be resolved if you understand these levels and understand that I have a desire to be unique. So I have a desire to live, that comes from the body. I have a desire to be unique, that comes from your ego. And the witnessing part of you has no desires. It's just experiencing it all, it can't have a desire.

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  The wanting must require, the wanting is balanced by a getting, and a getting requires an ego. So as you start to develop spiritually, it's not you that wants it, you'll say like, oh, like my body needs nourishment. Right? You can feel that want, but it's not you that wants it. It's like, I, you know, the body needs nourishment. You can also say the ego, right? So like, my ego needs some amount of this. I think there are some highly developed spiritual individuals who have, in a sense, large egos, but I don't think they're trapped by their ego. I think they use their ego like a dog on a leash. And there are times where to exist in the world in the public way that they do, it requires a functional ego,

• 2:43:07Speaker 02

  because otherwise, your mission won't be able to be completed, because you'll get taken advantage of and people will hijack you and things like that.

• 2:43:15André Duqum?

  Yeah, I feel like we have this notion often of enlightened and it means complete dissolution of personality versus the attachment to that personality and like how the, how we relate to desire or our personality just changes and it starts serving the unchanging part of ourself. Would you agree? And then like, I'm just curious your thoughts on how the relationship to our own personality and uniqueness, which is different for each person on the planet, um, yeah, changes as we awaken to that more unchanging ground awareness of our being.

• 2:43:45Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, so I would say first thing is that the people who have egos and are still, I use the word spiritually developed, it's, I don't know if they're enlightened or not. Now, I would say that, you know, as you become more awakened, like I start to, I mean, I don't know if I'm more awakened, but I've changed the way that I view myself, which is like I've, I started to view myself as like, I'm kind of like a somewhat competent, but somewhat idiotic like dog, right? So like, I can appreciate, like, it's like a dog that's like, you know, pretty good at certain things, but also like, you know, messes up and is clumsy or whatever. And you can just accept yourself for who you are. You know, I don't need to be different. Like, I'm great at some stuff. I'm gonna try hard. I'm gonna do a good job.

• 2:44:27Speaker 02

  But I think you're right that it's, it's about relating to your personality. I don't think my personality has changed. It's just, I've realized I'm flawed and like, that's okay. Just because it's okay, doesn't mean that I'm not trying to change it, right? So like, should, what should this instrument that is all oak be doing? This instrument that is all oak should try to do better in life. I should try to work harder. I should try to help people and like, that's okay. But also, I'm not, I don't need to get caught up in it, if that kind of makes sense. And on a given day, if I feel like taking a day off, then I'm gonna take a day off because, hey, I get that. I don't know if that kind of makes sense, but I think it's like, you're right that it's about, not that my personnel, I mean, sure, it's special and unique and all that kind of stuff, but so is everybody

• 2:45:09Speaker 02

  else. So not really that I'm special. I'm just, I'm a certain constellation of things and that's okay. That doesn't make me good or bad. It's just what I am.

• 2:45:18André Duqum?

  Got it. There is that saying that no amount of self-improvement will make up for a lack of self-acceptance. Do you agree with that?

• 2:45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:29Speaker 02

  I think so. I think make up for is the key word because or phrase because I don't think one is a substitute for other. But I think that a healthy amount of self improvement certainly makes the self acceptance way easier. Right? So like if you look at someone, I'm kind of speaking clinically, when I'm working with someone who's like, kind of quite literally a failure at life, we're talking like maybe late twenties, no job, no career, no living at home, whatever, like they don't have much to show. Self acceptance is very hard to teach that person. Whereas if they start to put together their life and they actually make improvements, what they discover is that even if they improve their life drastically,

• 2:46:14Speaker 02

  there is some amount that will never be perfect. And then it's in that dichotomy that self acceptance becomes easy. So I think this is where, you know, you have to improve to realize the limits of improvement and what it gets you and what it doesn't get you. And that's when self acceptance comes in. That improvement is never perfection, improvement is never control, improvement will never get you all the way there. There will always be a gap because you are not perfect. Then the question becomes, what do you do with that gap? And some people will say, some people, it's not uncommon. Some of the most successful people that I work with, love that gap, depend on that gap, because it

• 2:46:57Speaker 02

  is the lack of self acceptance that motivates them, gets them to try harder. The fact that they hated themselves and hated their life is how they went from zero to 95. And heaven forbid I give that up, because then where would I be? I'd be back at zero.

• 2:47:13André Duqum?

  I would love to get your perspective on Dharma and how we have so many notions about purpose, finding our purpose, living in our purpose in the West. But what is really important to remind people of what Dharma is and its understanding and articulation from the Eastern view?

• 2:47:32Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's a big question. But let's, let's give it a shot. Okay. So the first thing is that Dharma is duty. But

• 2:47:42Speaker 02

  I think it's hard to understand in some ways and in some ways it's really easy. The first thing about Dharma is that if you look at doing something difficult in life, Dharma is what allows you to do difficult things. So the reason Dharma is important is that if you live a life of self-gratification, your capacity to do things is very restricted. So if like, if all I want is pleasure, I can't do a lot of things. And what people who chase pleasure, what the kinds of lives they find themselves in is not very free at all, right? So I can't work hard, I can't like push myself to do things, I can't really like create anything that requires effort. So it's very restrictive.

• 2:48:25Speaker 02

  So then the question becomes, then the second problem is like, okay, so how, if I'm not chasing pleasure, how do I motivate myself, right? Because if I wanna, and I see this a lot with people like in medical school. So these are kids that, you know, decided to become doctors when they were like 12. And they worked really hard, they spent Friday nights at the library, they go to medical school, their friends are like going on vacation and they're $300,000 in debt, and then they go to residency, they're like 31 years old, they're making $60,000 a year, they have $300,000 in debt and they like haven't been on a real vacation ever. And they have friends that are doing stuff. So then we get into a second phase, which is, okay, if I'm not going to chase pleasure, there's this idea of chasing delayed gratification. So I'm going to sacrifice today to be happy tomorrow.

• 2:49:10Speaker 02

  That too doesn't really work, because oftentimes what ends up happening is people move the goalposts. So it's like then the next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing, and when is it enough? So some people go through life forgetting how to enjoy themselves, because there's this idea that I'll retire and then I'll have a good time. I'm going to trade the best 40 years of my life, between the ages of 20 and 60, to have 10 years at the end where I've got, I need a hip replacement, but I can travel the world. So there's this delayed gratification, which is still just chasing pleasure. So the real antidote to that is Dharma.

• 2:49:53Speaker 02

  So Dharma is what allows you to do hard things, it gives you a motivating force that allows you to embrace difficulties in life. And my favorite example of this is I have daughters, and so if someone were to, heaven forbid, like threaten them in some way, that same thing, if someone pulled a gun on me, like, I wouldn't want to deal with that. I wouldn't be like engaging with them. I'd try to run away or whatever, right? But if someone pulls a gun on my daughter, then I'm stepping in the line of the gun. And it becomes easy. It becomes simple. It's like, there's no question, like, 100%. I can have fear. I can have worry. I can have anxiety. I can have all kinds of negative states. And I'm like stepping into the path of that. So dharma, and it makes sense to people, right? Why would I do that? Because my daughter's involved.

• 2:50:36Speaker 02

  So dharma, everyone in life is like trying to figure out how to optimize, how to be efficient, how to use AI so they don't have to work hard. Everyone wants to not expend effort or maximize the gain that they get from it ever, which is still greed at the fundamental. So dharma allows you to not do that. So when you do dharma, it opens up your options. So if you're no longer running away from pain and suffering or whatever, and even then, your brain, it's fascinating, your brain makes this calculation about suffering and like benefit and cost. So even the kids in medical school, they do this out of selfishness. But they think, okay, if I sacrifice a year of my life, I will get two years of pleasure.

• 2:51:21Speaker 02

  It's still chasing themselves to break out, I'm sorry, it's still chasing pleasure at the end of the day. It's just delayed gratification. It's not giving up gratification. So dharma is fundamentally what allows you to give up gratification and live in a different way. So it completely expands your options. The other problem is that a lot of people confuse dharma with should. And a lot of people will be like, I should do this. This is my dharma. I should do it. It's psychologically a different thing. Dharma comes from a deeper part of you. Shoulds come from mental conditionings of society. So when I, when my parents were like, you should become a doctor, there was no passion to become a doctor. I ended up becoming a doctor for completely different reasons.

• 2:52:05Speaker 02

  And, but I did it out of dharma. And then it became easy. Like, from failing out to being at the top of my class became really easy if you're doing it in service to something. One last point about dharma is that we know from addiction psychiatry and plenty of like neuroscience and stuff that in order to give up something good, you have to replace it with something. So like addiction is about conquering addiction is about wanting something more than what the addiction gives you, right? So the addiction gives me like avoidance and all this kind of stuff, but I want a life. I want to be able to live. I want to be able to hold my head up high. I want these kinds of things. And so Dharma kind of moves in that direction where Dharma can be the substitute for all

• 2:52:48Speaker 02

  of the other desires that you have, to do your duty. And I think your duty is determined a lot by the harm, being in harmony with your environment. So my duty as a doctor is different from my duty as a husband. So I'm not my wife's therapist, right? If I try to be my wife's therapist, it's a mess. I've tried, doesn't work. So I think like the more people start living in service to their Dharma, which then there's a whole question of how do you find your Dharma? The better off your life will, you may experience more pain, but like your life will feel good and it'll be easy to live. So it's kind of like strong that way.

• 2:53:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, it seems like a bit of a lubricant in terms of your experience of life. There is that, again, that saying from the Gita that when you protect your Dharma, your Dharma protects you. And it's just fascinating what comes on the path when you're living in alignment with that. It does beg the question of how does one move from shoulds to like authentic Dharma and discovery of that? What have you found for people as the biggest catalyst to really discovering and living in that?

• 2:53:52Speaker 02

  So the biggest catalyst is controlling your indriyas or your sensory organs? So if we look at where do shoulds come from? So let's be precise and scientific about this. Where do shoulds come from? Shoulds come from your perceptions. So when I get told by my grandmother, oh, you'll be wonderful doctor one day. When my dad tells me when I'm nine years old, pulls me and my brother aside, says, one of y'all is going to be a doctor, one of y'all is going to be a lawyer. Like, so when I, so if you look at most of what you want, right? And even when you say to yourself, I should do this, where is that idea coming from? It's coming, the should is a friction between the internal you and societal expectation. That's literally what the word means. So finding your Dharma is first getting rid of all of your shoulds and seeing what is left.

• 2:54:36Speaker 02

  Now, the problem is that When we are faced with shoulds, that creates negativity within our brain. It creates anxiety, it creates fear, it creates lack of desire, right? Then we have to use willpower. So there's this fundamental tension. And then what happens is since the should creates an anxiety, my brain needs some way to fix that. That's why we turn to dopamine. That's why we turn to pleasure. That's why we give into wants, right? The way I combat the should is by going towards a want. Because the should makes me feel bad. I don't want to study. I should study. And so there's a fundamental polarization, right? The moment I create a positron, I create an electron. So there's your dharma. And then when you get lost of that, you fill it up with shoulds.

• 2:55:20Speaker 02

  And then you have these compensatory wants. And then you have a struggle, which is the core struggle that most people have. I should do this. I want to do this. Once you get rid of the shoulds, and you also get rid of the want. So once you get rid of the shoulds, then the wants will go away too, because they're created by the shoulds. They're created as an alternative or an avoidance of a should. So the reason I love playing video games is because I don't want to work. So there's a certain amount of quietness and involution that is necessary for that. So to get away from your shoulds. And so the first thing that I would tell people is like, you know, if there's something in your mind that you should do, you'll notice that there's always a want. So just step away from all that and just sit. Dharma will come from within.

• 2:56:05Speaker 02

  So when we get rid of your societal conditioning, you will discover that there are natural driving impulses. And the more that you give into those natural driving impulses, it's not a want and it's not a should. I would say the best language to use is feel like. So I'll give you like a really simple example. I feel hunger, but I don't need to satisfy it with a burger. That's a want. I don't have to, I should eat a salad. I want a burger and hunger. Does that kind of make sense? That's how you triangulate to the dharma. So the hunger, and then what you do is you pay attention to what satisfies the feeling. It's not a desire and it's not a should. I will feel proud if I eat a salad. That's wrong direction.

• 2:56:50Speaker 02

  I love it when I eat a burger. That's the wrong direction. What makes me feel sated? What makes me feel content? How do I remove the hunger? And so if you look at like sattvic food from ashrams.

• 2:57:05Speaker 02

  You'll feel a lack of fulfillment from the dopaminergic standpoint, but your body will feel good. And so Dharma is about feeling, and feeling comes within, should comes without. Want is to run away from yourself. Does that kind of make sense?

• 2:57:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:19Speaker 02

  So that's how you find Dharma.

• 2:57:21André Duqum?

  It's freeing to reflect on how it does spring forth from within. And like the, I guess the, you mentioned you're kind of like setting both aside to be able to sit with yourself and actually listen to what those deeper feelings are is so essential. And I just think that as people are growing on their path and they make space for more of that silence and to be able to sit in that quiet and pay attention to those things, what we desired so heavily from our shoulds in terms of desiring to improve our life come in a different context, but more naturally when living in Dharma, that feels more aligned and joyful with our natural state.

• 2:57:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that when people start, so kind of three comments. One is when people start living in accordance with their Dharma, their life almost always improves over time. In the short term, it can be really rough, but people get happier, they usually become more successful, their relationships improve, their mood improves, basically everything gets better. The second thing to keep in mind is that living in accordance with your Dharma is usually initially very painful. So, and the way it's painful is because it's boring. So I would say that like the reason people don't sit with themselves is because it's boring. So the first stage of Dharma is going to be like really, really unpleasant. And there's a beautiful kind of analogy to this, which is like in the Hindu mythology, there's this concept of churning the ocean.

• 2:58:42Speaker 02

  So there are the gods and the demons or the devas and the asuras, and there's like ambrosia at the bottom of the ocean. And so they're like, we want, we got to get that ambrosia. So they start churning it and the first thing that comes up is poison. So I think there's a beautiful analogy that we also find in psychotherapy is that if you want to get to the ambrosia, if you want to get to the light at the end of the tunnel, there's going to be poison in the middle. And usually for even psychotherapy healing, like we talk about the trauma first and then we feel healed afterward. In the same way, to find your Dharma is going to be a painful process for a while. And the reason it's so hard for people is they don't know, and you can't know, that on the other side of this boredom is going to be like some sense of fulfillment. We don't usually think that the more bored I am, the more fulfilled I will be, but that's

• 2:59:27Speaker 02

  absolutely the connection. And since we don't understand that, that's why we run away from boredom and never find our purpose.

• 2:59:34André Duqum?

  That makes sense and is just so important as we close out here, like the continual unending questioning of our pleasure-seeking and fulfillment of our dopaminergic activities will always end in the feeling of poison after, but you're inviting the flipping it on its head and drinking the poison first, and then the pleasantness of experience comes as a byproduct after that.

• 2:59:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:59:56André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:56Speaker 02

  Right, so I think contentment comes from living in accordance, in harmony with your karma, but it's not pleasurable.

• 3:00:07André Duqum?

  This was such an incredible conversation, and I've just love all the nuances and the playfulness and the challenging and all of it throughout. And yeah, you just have such an incredible capacity for staying grounded when exploring the mystical and the esoteric and the eastern, and still not being bereft of the soul food and the dense, you know, really transformative insights of the inner sciences. And so, these are like, this kind of conversation is my favorite to have on the podcast, and it's just a pleasure to meet you and become, you know, get, become friends, and we'll run it back in the future, I'm sure, and yeah.

• 3:00:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely, man.

• 3:00:48André Duqum?

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 3:00:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was an absolute pleasure being here. Like, I know this is on some level work, but it didn't feel like it.

• 3:00:54André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:55Speaker 02

  And, and you're just, you're spectacular, man.

• 3:00:57André Duqum?

  Oh, thanks.

• 3:00:58Speaker 02

  Like, I'm not even gonna attribute it to a particular quality, there's something in you that's just great.

• 3:01:04André Duqum?

  Oh, thank you, man. Good, I didn't sleep too well last night, so I felt like I wasn't gonna be as sharp today, but I'm glad you feel that.

• 3:01:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's good, so your frontal lobes were exhausted, so you got angry with me, and then, otherwise it doesn't work.

• 3:01:18André Duqum?

  Any last thoughts of where people can, anything from the context of this conversation, or just where people can stay connected with you, anything else you wanna share before?

• 3:01:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so people can check out our YouTube channel. I think there are two things that, that we've done that are more aligned with this conversation. So we tend to be very like psychiatry, mental health focused, but we do have a, a membership side where we discuss a lot of like weird esoteric concepts, where we talk about metaphysics. And the nature of the soul and stuff like that. And also tie it back to improving your life, mental health and things like that. And then we do have a meditation guide that we get into some of these things with. So if people want like more about more in line with what we do. Like I mentioned to you, I don't usually get to talk about this. There are some cases, some small cultish little places where we get into a little bit. So if people are interested, they should check that out.

• 3:02:05André Duqum?

  Sweet. We'll link all that down in the description. Thank you so much, my friend. And everybody who's been tuning into this episode of the Know They Self Podcast. Let us know if you care to in which ways this episode was uniquely resonant with you. What came up for you and appreciate you, love you and be well. Until next time.

• 3:02:33Speaker 04

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