The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: E241: Stress Is Killing You! 5 Proven Steps To Reverse Its Effects: Deepak Chopra

We've created a world that's very dangerous right now.

I think we're on the brink of a possible extinction.

Deep October right here.

One of the world's biggest experts on health, wellness.

Time Magazine's one of the top 100 icons of the century has also written 93 books.

When you look at the direction of travel as a civilization, what advice do we need now?

War, greed, stress.

Humanities problems come from our inability to sit quietly and do nothing.

We're always doing, doing, doing.

We have human doings.

We're not human beings anymore.

Take some time every day to be unoccupied.

Ask yourself, who am I?

Or do I want?

And what is my purpose?

People don't ask these questions.

They only know that they suffer and they want an immediate solution, which is, you know,

something like a 90-degree accent.

And that's what we've created.

Every experience shapes our biology.

When you look at a situation, do you see an adversity or an opportunity?

How is this determined by a childhood?

If your parents were complaining, condemning, criticising,

playing the victim, you will see every situation as an adversity.

Can be changed?

Yes.

How?

There are actually many studies on what is called the happiness equation.

Number one is...

This is your 93rd book.

If you were to write one last book, what would be the top line message?

I hate to use this word.

It's misinterpreted, but the title would be...

Deepak, as I was reading through your work, a certain word came up over and over again,

and it was the word purpose.

So I wanted to start this really by asking you, what is your purpose?

What mission are you on?

You've written... I'm hearing this is your 93rd book.

If there is an umbrella that one could call your purpose, what would it be?

For the last 35 years, I've used our non-profit foundation,

Chopra Foundation, with the mission statement of reaching a critical mass of people.

In my mind, a billion people for personal and social transformation

for a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful world.

So those words are very carefully chosen.

Peaceful, sustainable, healthier, just, and joyful.

So everything is under that umbrella.

Going back to the start of your story,

what do I need to... that profound purpose, that mission you've been on for the last 30 plus years,

where does that stem from?

What's the earliest domino that fell to put you on course to pursue that as your life's work?

I trained in internal medicine and then endocrinology, which is a study of hormones.

And then I went on to study neuroscience and neuroendocrinology.

I saw the relationship between what happens in our consciousness and particularly emotions

and how that affects our biology.

As a physician, I was always impressed by how giving information to a patient affected their

metabolism. If I told somebody, you had cancer, just the word cancer, you could see immediately

their blood pressure go up, their heart rate speed up, their platelets get sticky,

and a whole cascade of events in their biology, which was essentially inflammation and propensity

to disease, just hearing bad news and interpreting it and having an emotional response to it.

I remember giving that news to a patient and then immediately realizing that I'd made a mistake.

I was reading the wrong chart.

So I immediately apologized and I saw his biology change in a moment.

And now, 40 years later, we realized that every experience you have, every experience,

doesn't matter what the experience is. It could be emotional, but it could be food,

it could be sleep, it could be exercise, it could be breathing or yoga.

Right now, this conversation, we're having this conversation and you and I are exchanging

information in our frontal cortex of the brain and genes are going on to facilitate the neural

networks that make this happen. But then there are people listening to us, maybe hundreds of

thousands, their brains are being activated. So I realized that you couldn't localize the mind.

If you ask a neuroscientist, conventional neuroscientist, where is the mind?

They'll point to their brain, but the brain only has the neural correlates of the mind.

The mind itself, you can't localize. It's both embodied. It's a relational and embodied process.

So, you know, the mind doesn't exist by itself. It exists in relationship to other minds.

So it's relational and embodied in the brain, but in your biology and it regulates the flow

of energy and information in our bodies and in the ecosystem of relationships. Now, if

our identity, fundamental identity, which is that of the separate self, which is a socially induced

hallucination in my opinion, because the separate self doesn't exist, period. But that

hallucination or that idea of the separate self creates anxiety. It also creates anger because

of trauma in the past. So anger is nothing but the memory of trauma, hostilities, the desire to get

even. Anxiety is the anticipation of trauma again in the future. Blaming yourself as guilt, guilt

leads to humiliation. Humiliation and the combination of everything I've said leads to depression,

which is the number one pandemic of our time, not COVID, depression, stress, hostility, resentment.

That causes inflammation. So, you know, suddenly I had this idea that if we went back to some of

the wisdom traditions of the world that said our essential nature is, as the Buddhists say,

inter-beingness. We are, you know, famous statement of Thich Nhat Hanh, we are inter-beings

that inter-rise in the inter-isness. There's no isolated self. But that isolated, fearful self has

created the trauma that we see in the world that actually manifests as war, terrorism,

eco-destruction, greed, leaders who are only interested in power-mongering, influence-peddling,

cronyism, corruption, and their own self-interest. So we've created a world that's actually

very dangerous right now. And I thought in my naive day about 35, 40 years ago, if we had something

that could actually collectively shift consciousness, and actually I was

one of the founders of an association called Alliance for a New Humanity. And we had people

from civil society, lawyers, attorneys, people from the United Nations with this idea that we

could reach a critical mass of people for a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful

world. But even the organization faltered because there was schism within the organization, you

know, people, again, power-mongering and fighting within the organization for dominance or, you

know, leadership in a very selfish way. So the organization faltered. It didn't go anywhere.

I decided to continue on my own. So when you talk about this separated self, you're referring to

identity. I'm referring to identity, which is, you know, identity, our crisis today and has been

of identity. And identity on a personal level is this, the person, you know, the story that I

tell myself about who I am and that I accept about myself. Correct. And for a country they have their

own identity, they accept that they are the United States of America and we are this and this is

who we are. Correct. And then that causes separation and a disconnectedness. You talked about how you

created an organization to try and combat this and get to that critical mass. And then the

organization itself failed, which makes me think, is this not just innate in humans that we are

greedy, selfish, power-mongering, corrupt at our core? It's been our evolution since

hunter-gatherer times. And it got worse in the industrial age. And then I think

it got even worse with the wars, you know, the First World War, Second World War. But if you read

history, the history is one of violence ever since human beings have existed. Other species of

violent too, but not in the way we are for power or for money or for this idea of extreme nationalism,

which is a form of tribalism, in my opinion, or the whole history of colonialism is just that.

And now we've reached a point with the information age where, you know, it's kind of

nothing is secret anymore. And yet the intensity of what's happening in the world,

look what's happening in Ukraine or right now what's happening in Pakistan or what's happening in

India or what's happening in Korea, look at any place in the world. Maybe you leave a few places

like New Zealand or, you know, Bali or a couple of places like that. The rest of the world is

actually in extreme turmoil. So we have medieval minds and modern capacities. Now that is not a

good combination. A medieval mind restricted to a little area in medieval times caused havoc there.

But now globally, that medieval mind, that tribal mind and our modern capacities, it's a terrible

combination. Everybody, everybody listening to this now in some way is suffering. You know,

in some way. Yes. Everyone's suffering is slightly different. But if you zoom out far enough,

it's pretty much all the same to some degree. Yeah. If you had a, you know, a young person

come to you and they were, I don't know, they don't even have to be young 16 years old, maybe 30,

maybe 45. And you had to give them some broad advice on how to suffer less for the remainder

of their life. What advice would you give them? You know, we've reached a stage in our evolution

where people don't ask these questions. They only know that they suffer and they want an

immediate solution, which is, you know, something like an antidepressant or whatever. And that's

what we've created with the materialistic interpretation of the universe. Wisdom traditions

tell us we suffer because in that fact, in the Eastern wisdom tradition, we suffer five causes,

not knowing who we are, number one, not knowing the nature of reality, no isolated self, clinging

and grasping at experience, which is ephemeral. You know, experience is ephemeral. It's transient.

You can't catch it. Like regret or even this experience, you know, if I ask you, you can't

hold on to this experience. If I asked you what happened to your childhood, you'd say it's a dream.

If I asked you what happened to last night, it's a dream. What happened to this morning,

it's a dream. What happens to these words by the time you hear them, they don't exist.

And we try to cling on to that. We try to cling on that. Then we also recoil from that. If it's

unpleasant, we confuse ourselves with our ego identity, which is socially induced and we fear

death. Those are the five causes of suffering. So wisdom traditions say you have to figure out

what is reality. And when you figure out what is reality, and you can't do that at 16 unless

you have been groomed, you know, in wisdom traditions, you were groomed for wisdom.

And that started what we call self-education, which is what yoga is, by the way. Yoga means union

with the self. Misinterpretation of yoga is this, it's just the physical pastures.

But the eight limbs of yoga are all intended to find your true self. So there are principles of

social intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical posture, breathing techniques, withdrawal

of the senses, focused awareness, meditation, transcendence. Once you get to these last three

aspects of yoga, transcendence is the key. You find out who you are really, the self

which knows the self, not bamboozled by social constructs.

So let's go through those five things. Number one, not knowing reality. Reality is not local,

it's infinite. So what do I need to understand then to avoid that form of suffering? I need to

understand that it's not localized and therefore that means that you are infinite. You're at one

level. I'm everything and nothing. And you're everything and nothing and actually you experience

love. Love not as a sentiment, but the ineffable interconnectedness with all that exists. People

have those experiences with psychedelics these days, or you can actually give somebody an experience

like that with even VR, because we are already in a VR. Number two. Number two, clinging, grasping,

that which is ungraspable. Every experience is ungraspable. So the awareness of an experience

is not the experience. The awareness of a thought is not a thought. The awareness of a thought is

independent of the thought. If you identify with the awareness instead of the thought, which is

like a cloud going through the sky, you don't either attach yourself to it or you don't identify

with it. It takes training. So in the Rig Veda, let noble thoughts come to me from every side,

because your thoughts are not your production. Your thoughts are socially constructed and they

recycle through you and yet we identify with them. So number two is identifying with that which is

ephemeral, transient, ungraspable. Number three. On number two, so we need to

not attach, not associate with thoughts, not associate with experiences in order to be

free from suffering. You can associate with them, but you're not attached or identified to them.

You can associate with thoughts. So if you've had a trauma in your early life or something,

or you've been through something not so good, or you've been dumped by your boyfriend.

And then we would identify with that and actually that epigenetically, by the way,

that's intergenerational. Now we know that in the Holocaust, for example, during the invasion of

the Netherlands by Nazi Germany, there was famine amongst the Jews. And now

three generations, four generations after that, the people's descendants who were traumatized,

they have diabetes, because somewhere in their body, there's a memory of famine. So they're holding

on to carbohydrates, they have insulin resistance, etc. If you take a mouse and you expose it to a

smell that it likes, for example, lavender, and then you give it a mild electrical shock for seven

generations, the mice will be fearful of that particular smell. I've been to a cow farm in

Hawaii where they used to have electrical wires as fences, mild electrical shocks. Now they don't

have the wires, but the descendants of those cows that were traumatized, they won't cross over that

fence or they won't cross over where the border was. So this is another mystery. Where is memory?

Most people, if you ask them, where is memory, they'll point to the brain. If I asked you,

what did you have for breakfast today? What did you have for breakfast?

So a really good question. I had a salad with some chicken and avocado.

So now where was that memory before I asked you the question? There's nowhere in the brain you

can point out that memory was, but as soon as I asked you the question, the neural networks go

fire. But where is the memory retrieved from? The only place is consciousness, but consciousness

can't be localized. You know, when people get brain injuries, car crashes, they lose their memory

sometimes. Yeah, so radio is damaged, you don't listen to the music. Doesn't that prove that it's

in the brain somewhere? Is Shakespeare on your movie screen or your television set?

Is actually anything you read in the book, is the author in the book?

It's that, you know, you confuse the instrument with the user of the instrument.

The fault of the instrument is not a reflection on the user of the instrument.

Shakespeare and that would live on like the CD or like the video cassette.

Yeah, but where is that mind that localized in the CD?

In the brain somewhere, isn't it? No, the brain is just like your CD set.

What happens in the brain is called the neural correlates of experience in CE.

There's, as I said earlier, there's no experience in the brain.

That's where you can put a knife through it. The brain has no self-awareness.

When you think about some of these neurological diseases like dementia, Alzheimer's,

what does that present evidence for in terms of, I mean, I guess a lot of people aren't really

clear at the moment where Alzheimer's and dementia starts or what's causing it.

Alzheimer's now we know is due to accumulation of a substance called amyloid in the brain.

So about there are 40 genes that predispose you to for Alzheimer's,

or which three are probably fully penetrant, which means they predict the disease because

that's genetic determinism. The rest are related to things like lack of sleep or inflammation

or stress or a diet that causes inflammation or lack of unregulated biological rhythms, etc.

So there are identifiable causes for Alzheimer's. But again, Alzheimer's is and these neurological

diseases, all diseases like that. We're talking about two different things. We're talking about

consciousness as a fundamental reality. And then we're talking about the instrument

that we call the brain. Now, I should say to you, though, that what I'm saying is not necessarily

accepted by mainstream science, but mainstream science cannot answer the hard problem of

consciousness or where experience happens and is not interested. Right now,

the two most promising things in medical science, whether three or four, one is what we call gene

editing and CRISPR. So you'll be able to cut and paste genes soon the way you cut and paste emails.

But that'll affect maybe five, six percent of genetic determinism. The rest is lifestyle.

Epigenetics. So that's where we are in medical science. And with machine learning and artificial

intelligence, I think we'll be able to predict disease and make it more, everything will be more

personalized, predictable, preventable in the future. But we are talking about two different

things right now. We're talking about biology. And we're talking about the hard problem of

consciousness. We'll get on to the pillars of well-being. I wanted to finish those five

points of suffering. Yes, we call the five clasias. Clasias. Yeah, in Sanskrit.

So that we were on number three, right? Recoiling from experiences that we interpret as unpleasant.

Okay. But see, once again, the awareness of the experience is not the experience. So once you

can observe the experience, you're free of the experience. You don't identify with the experience.

Oh, that's an interesting thought. Passing by the screen of my consciousness, like a cloud in the

sky. I'm not the cloud. I'm the sky. I'm not the play on the screen. I'm the screen.

So an example would be, so the sentence is it recoiling from experiences that

unpleasant. They're unpleasant. So give me an example. Someone in my life, someone in my

family dies. Yeah. So obviously you're scared, right? Because you identify with the experience.

But everybody dies. I mean, trillions of people have died. You're not the only one who's going to

die. And then what dies is another mystery. The body dies. The seeds of memory recycle,

because what is memory, but it's information. And that's recycled through collective consciousness.

As soon as you're born, you're already born into an interpreted world, a world with memory,

a world with imagination, a world with non-local consciousness that is now localizing through

your brain as this process that you call the body. The body-mind is a process in consciousness.

Consciousness itself is not subject to time. Only, you know, time is an experience we have.

As soon as we have subject-object split. So as soon as there's subject-object split,

which is artificial in nature, is a unified activity, then time is born. The experience

of time is born. So in your life, if someone dies, God forbid, do you suffer?

You grieve, which is a natural process, and it has a life cycle. You don't hold on to it. In

fact, you embrace it. Any time you recoil or deny, resistance creates even more stress. So

what we call stress is resistance to existence in the moment. If you don't resist

experience in the moment, you know, it's passing by. So something really bad happens at work. I

get a really bad, you know, my boss tells me I'm fired. The mindset required to avoid suffering in

that case is to take the news. It's not a mindset. It's a step in awareness. The awareness of the

mind is not the mind. Who is it that, or what is it that knows a thought? That is what you need to

shift to. Once you shift from the experience to the awareness in which the experience is happening,

you're independent of it. And that's what actually those eight limbs of yoga are about. It's a process,

a shift in identity. We started with that, a shift in identity from your assumed self

to your fundamental self, which is infinite, which is without cause, which is not subject to

birth and death, which is spaceless, timeless, incomprehensible, infinite, irreducible, and

fundamental. It feels almost like I'm stepping out of myself and looking at myself. Correct.

Looking at the projection of myself. You're looking at the projection of yourself.

She's looking at your avatar. It's very hard to do because we are increasingly becoming avatars,

especially with things like social media. We're being reinforced. I have two million followers,

or a million followers, or 500,000 followers, that's following my avatar.

So we don't know who we are. You confuse yourself with your avatar. And the battle is all between

avatars wanting importance. How does one

resign from that battle and take back my peace? Actually, the opposite of that is creativity.

The creativity is the opposite of determinism. If you don't want to be a biological robot

or an algorithm, which is what we are now. We are biological algorithms, biological robots.

And that's, by the way, part of our evolution. It's not something, all animals. But the animals

have advantage. They live in the present moment. But you and I have an imagination that can see

into the future, that can even look at death as the culmination of this life experience.

We regret the past. We anticipate the future. We're never in the present when this is the only

place we are right now is the present. There is no way to escape it. But in our imagination,

we escape it. So the worst use of imagination is stress. The best use of imagination is

creativity. Creativity is a disruption in the algorithm. It's a discontinuity,

fundamental creativity, not usual innovation like iPhone 13 instead of iPhone 12 with a

better camera. That's not what creativity is. Creativity is a death and a resurrection.

It's a death of context, meaning, relationship, and story, and a new meaning, relationship,

and story. Whether that's fundamental creativity, that's Einstein coming up with the theory of

relativity, or the quantum physicists breaking every rule that we knew in Newtonian physics,

or a great piece of art, Beethoven's fifth. These are original, original creativity is a

disruption in the algorithm. To this side, do you have my avatar getting into this sort of avatar

wall with other avatars? My antidote to that is my own creativity.

Your own creativity. Every moment you have a choice to repeat the past or be a pioneer

of creativity of the future. And that happens, by the way. It happens individually. It happens

collectively. We change world views. The world is not flat anymore. The ground is not stationary

anymore. The world is not material anymore. Every technology that you use is based on the

new idea that the essential nature of the physical world is it's not physical. I could see you as

you really are. I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots and some random

electrical discharges. At the most fundamental level, there are no boundaries. Boundaries are

perceptual. So when we experience the spiritual ecstasy, which is ineffable, there are no boundaries.

That's why people in near-death experience, people with psychedelic experience, people with

peak experiences, athletes, musical performance. Any break from ordinary reality is ineffable

and healing, actually. That's why the recent presurgence in psychedelics is very interesting

because it takes you away from your identity of being squeezed into the volume of a body

in the span of a lifetime. And point number four, the five points of suffering. Point number four.

Point number four, confusing yourself with yourself, your ego identity.

We've talked about that. And number five is death.

Death. But all of them have one solution. First one, find out who you are.

How does one find out who they are? Transcendence.

There's no, here's another thing. There's no system of thought,

no system of thought. Religion, philosophy, or science that will get you into knowing true

reality because systems of thought are just that, systems of thought. What is it that gives rise to

thought? That is what you want to know. And that's been the eternal quest in spiritual traditions.

I'm not talking about religious dogma or ideology. These days is very fashionable for people to say

I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. It means the same thing. When you have a spiritual experience,

number one, transcendence, you find your identity beyond space and time. Number two,

emergence of platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony named after Plato,

or love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and number three, loss of the fear of death.

That's Jesus. That's Muhammad. That's Rumi. That's Buddha. That's every luminary that you have

can study since people created systems of thought.

So how does, what's the easiest way to try? There's someone listening to this right now.

They are driving up the motorway. They're a lorry driver.

Take some time every day to be unoccupied. Even spiritual pursuit is an occupation.

So take a little bit of, you know, what I think it was Kafka or somebody who said all of human

problems, humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly and do nothing.

We'd rather electrocute ourselves. We're always doing, doing, doing. We have human

doings. We're not human beings anymore. So if I take some, I pull over the lorry that I'm driving

up the motorway and I say, do you know what? Deepak told me it takes some time for myself.

So I sit in the lorry for 15 minutes every day. How is that going to help me to transcend?

It starts a process. We begin to ask yourself, who am I? I'd reflect on these questions every

day. Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? What am I grateful for? And who am I without these

constructs? It's, it's a big mystery, right? Who you are. Ultimately you realize you're the

awareness in which all experience happens, but you're not the experience. The experience is in

time. You are not in time. And this requires a different kind of education. It's not part of our

culture. It used to be part of cultures. You know, if you read Plato in the republic and you'll see

that, you know, this was part of every culture, but it was few luminaries. People romanticize

even about this in India's spiritual country. Well, India's been violent forever.

A few luminaries, the sages of the Upanishad, then we have a romance around them. Greek culture,

you know, the Greeks were the most civilized in the world. Well, yes, Socrates and Parmenides and,

you know, Pythagoras and I can name a few, but the rest of the country, even in those times,

you know, they had slavery, they had sexism, they had these, the source of the Olympics where

they used to sacrifice humans. And, you know, we're still performing even in our days, we're

still repeating that cycle with what you call cheerleaders, the virgin vessels of the past.

We haven't changed actually much. What else in terms of starting your day, like daily habits,

so you talk about sleep is being incredibly important. Here are the daily habits. Number

one is sleep. Now we know, by the way, that lack of sleep is the number one predictor of premature

death from cardiovascular disease. Lack of sleep is also predictor of Alzheimer's. Lack of sleep

interferes with your creativity. Lack of sleep causes inflammation. So that's for sure. Number

one. Number two, I think is any practice that quietens the mind, meditation, reflection, contemplation,

sitting quietly, watching your breath, etc. Number three is exercise. Number four is mind-body

coordination as in that's different than regular exercise. You yoga practice and martial arts,

breathing practices, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, they actually activate a different part of your nervous

system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system, which causes self-regulation in the body.

So it's not just exercise. It's, you know, something that puts mind and body together,

even gymnastics or things like judo and I mentioned martial arts, but yoga is my practice.

Then emotional, your emotional and physical environment, your social environment, because

we live as social beings. So, you know, if you're, if you have toxic relationships,

it's going to cause physical toxicity. Then nutrition, we now know that, you know, that

food that causes inflammation, refined, manufactured, processed food with chemicals,

antibiotics, hormones, insecticides, pesticides, it's poison. It's like putting poison,

putting agent orange in your body. So organic food, farm to table, maximum diversity of plant

based foods. Now we know a lot about micronutrients. We know about biological rhythms. But ultimately,

I think spiritual experience is very important because no matter what you do, no matter what you

do, no matter how healthy you are, there is old age, there is infirmity and there is death.

So unless you face those right head on, when you're healthy, not when you're in a crisis,

not when somebody dies in your family, then everybody panics. Okay. I had a crisis in my life

when I was six years old. You know, my father was in England. He was training to be a cardiologist.

I was living in my grandfather. And one day we got a telegram that my father had passed all his

exams. He was now a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, big deal in those days. We got a

telegram, my grandfather wanted to celebrate. So he took me and my little brother to a carnival,

then to a movie. I even remember the movie, Alibaba and the 40 thieves. Then we went to a

fancy restaurant. And then in the middle of the night, he died. And they took him for cremation,

brought his ashes back in a little jar about the size of this coffee cup, a little bigger.

And one of my uncles said, what happened? Yesterday he was taking the kids to a carnival,

and today he's a bunch of ashes. My little brother, who later became the Dean of Education

at Harvard Medical School, he was four years old. He started to lose his skin. His skin

started peeling off. I went into a panic. And, you know, my uncles took my brother to every

physician. They couldn't find a diagnosis. Till somebody said, you know, he's missing his parents,

he's feeling vulnerable, he's losing his skin, shedding his skin because that's a metaphor for

his vulnerability. He'll be fine when his parents come back. And sure enough, as soon as they came,

my brother was healed. So at six years, I had a crisis, existential crisis, went on to become a

doctor. But what happens? You go to medical school, the first thing you see is a corpse. You're

supposed to understand life by dissecting a body. You know, it's the way we are trained. You started

off by looking at a human being as an anatomical structure rather than a process in consciousness.

So it took me a long time, you know, going through medical school, training, myself going through

crises, smoking, addictive behavior, alcohol. I remember resuscitating a patient, putting a

pacemaker, putting him on a respirator, and then going outside to smoke a cigarette. And then,

you know, I was disgusted with myself. I threw away my cigarette. That evening, I threw away the

scotch. And I decided that I wanted to understand who am I. It's almost like in that moment you

observed someone that was so full of life, just moments earlier, turn into, as you said, ashes

in a jar, scattered in the wind. And you go, where is the, where is my granddad? Yeah. He's not local.

Non-local. Right. Which is our essential nature, actually, to be non-localist, to be connected

with all that is. And Indian poetry, and poets in general, from William Blake, you know, we are

led to believe a lie when we see with and not through the eye that was born in a night to

perish in a night while the soul slept in beams of light. So when we look through the conditioned

mind, that's a lie. When you look beyond the conditioned mind, that is light.

Do you think you'd be doing the work you are today if your granddad hadn't passed away when

you were six in those circumstances? I think that was a very pivotal moment at six years of age.

Existential crisis. Most people don't have that at the age of six. Because it brought you a bunch

of questions, didn't it? Really profound questions about the nature of life and

existence. Existence and love and...

To go, Indian poet, love is not a sentiment, it's the ultimate truth at the heart of creation.

That you and the other are the same being in different uniforms.

Do you have a ponder if some of your beliefs are, if that moment really was pivotal,

that some of your beliefs might have been a way to justify your sadness?

Yeah. Denial is a way of justifying sadness. I don't think belief is...

belief in many ways is a cover up for insecurity. You know, if I said, do you believe in electricity?

He said, no, I see that device, that transistor, that TV set, electricity, gravity is my experience.

So, I don't believe in belief, but faith is something else. Faith is the knowingness of the

invisible without which there is nothing visible. The invisible is the source of all things visible.

So, when your day comes, when my day comes, when we're no longer...

I'm preparing for it right now.

You're preparing for it?

Yes. In my tradition, there are four stages of life. First, 25 years, they're called ashrams.

Ashram is a place to rest or that which you identify as your home. First, 25 years, education.

Second, 25 years, family, children, fame, fortune, if you want.

Third, 25 years, giving back. Now, fourth, self-realization, preparation for death.

How does one prepare for death?

By knowing and experiencing your non-local self.

Is that what people would call spirituality or death spiritual?

But authentic experience, I'm not talking about dogma or self-righteous morality

or jealousy with a halo or cunning hypocrisy, we all pretend to be spiritual.

But if you've had the experience and you know yourself as non-local,

then the unknown is the only place to be. The known has already happened. It's a prison.

And what do you believe happens once you die?

I think the dream continues. The dream continues in a different frequency domain of consciousness.

These days, actually, if you'd look at some of the theories of the universe,

mathematical theories.

Current materialistic view is that the visible universe is about two trillion galaxies,

706 trillion stars, uncountable trillions of planets.

Based on that current estimate with the James Webb telescope and all this,

our planet is not even a speck, one grain of sand in all the beaches of the world.

So the other day I went to a beach, picked up a grain of sand and a breeze

came. It drifted off and the beach didn't notice that one grain was missing.

That's planet Earth, two trillion galaxies.

But I recently interviewed a Caltech professor of physics,

Sean Carroll, who sits on the desk of Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of all time.

Einstein sat at that desk for a while.

Sean Carroll believes there are infinite universes, infinite universes.

It's incomprehensible, the idea that there are infinite universes.

But I believe they are, and that you and I have a cosmic journey that is infinite.

And infinite means infinite.

Infinite is incomprehensible, it never ends.

You change uniforms, you change experiences.

Hopefully you evolve like a spiral staircase, but it's a never-ending horizon.

Does that mean what people call reincarnation of some sort?

Or is it even beyond that?

Yeah, but what is reincarnation?

See, everything recycles, matter recycles, we agree.

Energy recycles, we agree.

Information recycles, we agree.

If consciousness is what gives rise to energy, information and matter,

and energy, information and matter are human constructs for modes of awareness and consciousness,

why would consciousness not recycle?

Why would it be the only exception?

It wouldn't be the same consciousness, though, would it?

It would be bits of the...

No, it's a consciousness with seeds of potential manifestation.

Seeds of desire and seeds of memory.

Now, if you want to be totally, you know, you want to use the spiritual language,

which is not fashionable, but is fashionable to karma, memory and desire.

So karma is past experience and interpretation of past experience.

If you go to Starbucks, have a cup of coffee, that's karma.

Now, depending on your experience, you like it or not,

you decide to go back to Starbucks or not to go to Starbucks,

you go to whatever the other places and get a cappuccino.

So memory recycles as desire and desire recycles as karma.

Karma simply means experience.

Don't think of it good, bad.

And this is the software or awareness that recycles and evolves in cosmic time.

Now, this is the theory, but you have to experience it.

So I asked you, what did you have for breakfast?

But now I could ask you, do you remember a happy episode from your teenage years or your childhood?

And immediately the memory comes.

Where was it?

Not in your brain.

You know, I hadn't skated.

I learned skating when I was eight years, ice skating.

I didn't skate for 30 years.

At the age of 38, with my two little kids,

Rockefeller Center, ice there, picked up a pair of skates, started to skate.

Every cell in my body, including my brain, had recycled a few million times.

Where was that memory of skating?

Big mystery.

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Over the last couple of how long, maybe four months,

I've been changing my diet, shall I say.

Many of you who've really been paying attention to this podcast will know why.

I've sat here with some incredible health experts,

and one of the things that's really come through for me,

which has caused a big change in my life,

is the need for us to have these superfoods, these green foods, these vegetables,

and then a company I love so much,

and a company I'm an investor in,

and a company that's sponsored this podcast and that I'm on the board of,

recently announced a new product,

which absolutely spoke to exactly where I was in my life,

and that is Huell, and they announced Daily Greens.

Daily Greens is a product that contains 91 superfoods, nutrients,

and plant-based ingredients,

which helps me meet that dietary requirement

with the convenience that Huell always offers.

Unfortunately, it's only currently available in the US,

but I hope, I pray, that it'll be with you guys in the UK too.

So if you're in the US, check it out, it's an incredible product.

I've been having it here in LA for the last couple of weeks,

and it's a game changer.

What is the thing that you believe to be true

that most people disagree with you on?

Right now, my interpretation of what I call quantum healing,

quantum mechanics, I wrote a book called Quantum Healing in 1988.

It was vilified.

I reissued it a few years ago,

because now we have science,

and I'm doing a book with a quantum physicist at the moment,

where I believe that our biology,

like everything else, is quantum mechanical.

It goes, every experience shapes our biology,

and experience happens in the moment.

So your body is changing in the moment,

depending on the experience you're having,

at a very fundamental level.

Pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, eating, breathing, digestion,

metabolism, elimination, thinking, feeling, aspiring,

fearing, every experience shapes our biology.

We are the metabolic product of experience,

and experience doesn't happen in isolation.

It happens in the matrix of relationship.

So what people disagree with me is this whole interpretation

I've been attacked by, you know, mainstream scientists,

but I have been persistent because I'm a physician,

and I see people, and, you know,

I'm not sitting in a lab dissecting rats,

or doing designing experiments theoretically,

but you see people, and as you said, people suffer.

And, you know, if you're a physician,

that should be a job to address suffering,

not be a technician who can fix everything

about the human body,

know nothing about the human soul or the human experience.

This morning I was at an event,

and I had a guy come up to me after,

and he said, I'm 40 years old now, Steve,

and I'm in a job, and I don't like it.

It really doesn't like his job that he's in.

He's, I'd say, trapped as maybe a strong word,

but he feels unable to take the leap towards a life

that he feels will fulfill him.

He referenced being scared of what his friends might say.

And he just, there was almost this desperation

in his face as he spoke to me.

He was seeking words of advice from me to him

to help him out of that situation of,

like, I'm 40 years old, I've got a partner,

I've built this life, but it's not resonating with who I am,

and I just, I could feel the suffering.

That's a lot of people that are listening to this right now.

That's what our social structures have created.

And yet, you know, the people like Joseph Campbell,

who coined the expression, follow your bliss,

follow your joy, follow your purpose,

follow your meaning, follow your dharma.

You know, in Buddhism, they say three things will save you.

One is take refuge in the community of conscious beings,

take refuge in a higher purpose,

and take refuge in transcendence.

And if you do that, your life will be meaningful,

and meaning is what drives us.

You know, there are actually many studies, by the way,

recent studies on what is called the happiness equation.

I'll give it to you.

H is equal to S plus C plus B.

So H stands for happiness is equal to S, set point in the brain.

The set point in the brain is when you look at a situation,

do you see an adversity or an opportunity?

How is the set point determined by your childhood?

If your parents were complaining, condemning,

criticizing, playing the victim,

you will see every problem, every situation as an adversity.

Condemn, complain, criticize, and play the victim.

On the other hand, your parents or your caretakers,

or your ecosystem or relationship,

when you were growing up, first three, four years of life,

they were looking at opportunities.

They were always, you know, engaging in compassionate,

empathetic conversation and joy and laughter and celebration.

Then you'll have a set point for happiness.

This set point determines 50% of our daily happiness experience.

Can the set point be changed?

Yes, by self-awareness, by reflective inquiry, by mindfulness,

by actually knowing that you have a problem.

Most people don't even know they have a problem.

So that's 50%.

So S plus C, conditions of living,

primarily material conditions of living, money.

So if you're extremely poor, you will suffer.

If you're extremely rich, that doesn't guarantee

that you'll be happy.

In fact, what a lot of rich people do is

they confuse their self-worth with their net worth.

So I wrote a book before this called Abundance

that was inspired by Bob Marley, one of his lyrics,

where he said, some people are so poor, all they have is money.

So happiness, when it pertains to money,

is 10% of your daily experience.

If you win the lottery, you'll be ecstatic in the beginning.

In six months, you'll plateau.

In one year, you'll be back to your set point.

So even if you win the lottery, in five years,

you might be worse off because now you're worrying about taxes.

You want to put your money in the Bahamas or something.

And it's become your identity, money.

If you're all billionaires, money is their identity.

They confuse self-worth with net worth.

So that's 10%.

Now we have 40% remaining.

That's the choices we make every day.

There are two kinds of choices we make every day.

Once for personal pleasure, sex, alcohol, entertainment, movies, shopping.

Shopping is the number one choice for pleasure, by the way, in the world.

That's why we call people consumers.

A very ugly word to describe a stardust being with self-awareness.

But does pleasure bring you happiness?

It does, but it's transient.

And you have the danger of being addicted to pleasure

if you have an addictive personality as I did.

So pleasure brings happiness transiently.

There's another choice you can make that actually is called fulfillment

when you have meaning, purpose in your life.

And if you know how to make other people happy

by giving them attention, which means listening,

appreciation, noticing their uniqueness, affection, letting them know you care,

and acceptance, radical acceptance.

You can't change another person.

So you feel better, which is what we're trying to do all the time,

changing other people so we feel better.

Impossible.

You can't change yourself even if you try.

So acceptance.

And what would you say to that guy?

What should I have said to him in terms of advice?

Because he did really good.

You should actually have told him, let's take a day off

and let's go fishing or let's go into, you know, have a picnic

or let's go to see a comedy.

Let's go to see it.

Just take, discontinue and try this, a little moment of being,

not doing, not thinking, not feeling, not speaking.

I take a week of silence every year.

Now I'm taking even longer.

So sometimes I'm thinking, you know, a month in silence,

but you know, I'm 76.

So that's my different stages of life too.

In the hope that that might help him realize

that he's playing the wrong game

or he's thinking about the wrong game.

In the hope that, you know,

one thing you can do to alleviate anybody's suffering,

to some extent, is fully accept them and listen to them.

Don't give them advice.

You know, people feel better if you just listen to them.

And there's neuroscience that their amygdala cools down.

If you just listen with deep empathy,

which means you feel what another person feels.

There's some biology around this.

You know, when you feel what another person feels

and you deeply listen,

there's a phenomenon called limbic resonance.

Your emotional brain resonates with their brain.

And then if you deeply listen to them

and you let them know you care for them,

there's another thing that happens.

It's called limbic regulation.

And then the third step is limbic revision.

The neural networks rebuy.

So acceptance, affection, appreciation, and attention.

That's what you do.

Don't give them advice.

People go to therapists to get advice.

Therapists don't do that.

They listen.

Good therapists listen.

Interesting.

And in the old traditions,

you know, that's why people went to confession.

They basically, you know,

revealed their so-called sins to the priest

and they felt better.

One of the things I've read about,

I read you talk about is this,

the role that affirmations and positive self-talk

and those kinds of things can have on our healing.

To some extent.

Anything mental is weak.

This is what I've wondered,

because a lot of like, you know,

books in like Instagram will say,

look in the mirror and say nice things to yourself.

Oh, yeah, it doesn't work.

It's mental.

Mind is weak.

You have to go deeper.

It's, you know, to say,

if you're trying to force yourself to be positive,

that's exasperating.

That's very stressful.

But instead of forcing yourself to be positive,

observe your thoughts and observe

both negative and positive thoughts.

And you see that all experiences by contrast,

you can't have one without the other.

You know, it's like a pendulum can't swing

only in one direction.

It has to swing in two directions.

Heart is meaningless without cold.

Pleasure is meaningless without pain.

Joy is meaningless without suffering.

Birth and death are actually not even opposites.

Birth and death are opposites.

Life is the continuum of birth and death.

You can't have one without the other.

In biology, there's something called apoptosis,

programmed cellular death.

When a cell forgets to die, it becomes cancer.

That's what it is.

A cancer cell doesn't die when it's supposed to.

Normally, our cells are dying constantly,

so you can be born again.

That's the literal meaning of born again.

What do you think of, what do you think success is then?

If we're stepping away from this identity

which can cause so much suffering, what is...

For me, success is the progressive realization

of worthy goals, number one.

And worthy goal, that's a subjective measure.

So for me, that's...

It could be taking care of my dog.

Could be my worthy goal.

If it gives you pleasure, yes, taking care of your dog.

But if money is your goal for the sake of making money,

then you'll never be happy.

But if money is your goal,

so you can actually make a difference in people's lives,

including your own and your family.

But also, community and large, that's a worthy goal.

So it's number one, progressive realization of worthy goals.

Number two, the ability to love and have compassion.

And number three, actually, which is for me the most important,

to always go back to your creative source.

Once you have this ability to go back to your creative source,

you will be successful, no matter what.

Don't be bamboozled by the hypnosis of social conditioning.

Don't be in a rush to conform.

You know, there are studies that if you gallop,

I'm on the advisory board of Gallup.

If you have a house that's $50,000,

and you're offered a house that's $500,000,

but your neighbors have million dollar homes, you won't move.

You're always comparing yourself to the other person.

This is how we are socially programmed.

Rush to conform, comparison with others.

And you know, if your child doesn't conform,

then he's not a good student.

And I used to, but my son was growing up,

he always was reading comic books and, you know,

I'm engaging in games and sports,

and my was very poor at mathematics,

and my wife would constantly complain

that he's not good at school.

I said, wait a minute, he'll do what he's enjoying.

Let him do what he's enjoying.

He ended up creating a sports company,

a comic book company,

and now he has a very successful business

called the Religion of Sport with Tom Brady,

one five Emmys.

Wasn't a good student.

So I said, don't focus on your weaknesses,

focus on your strengths.

And if you have a child who loves to play tennis,

it's poor at math, get him a tennis coach.

And one day he might get a mathematician to be his accountant.

When you look forward at the direction of travel

that we're on as a civilization,

what advice do we need now?

The most.

Don't get stuck in melodrama.

This whole world is full of drama, drama.

Everything that sells is drama.

News is not news anymore.

It's opinion and drama.

And all the violence in the world is drama.

And you know, you read about drama,

shooting, killing, incest, all crazy stuff.

And we're addicted to trauma actually.

And then we complain about it.

Redicted to trauma or drama?

Yeah, both.

And what's the cost of being addicted to trauma and drama?

Suffering.

Because?

Because you sacrifice yourself for the drama of being a conformist.

Does this mean we should, like, you know,

I'm thinking about my relationship with technology

and social media and news feeds and stuff?

Well, technology is neutral, you know, and it's inescapable.

It's part of a revolution.

If you don't adapt to technology, you'll become extinct.

So it's part of a revolution.

How do we use technology, you know, in my field?

AI, machine learning, precision diagnosis, and even intervention.

I believe technology is a great gift.

But again, technology can destroy the world too.

This is what it means to be human.

Humans are a very interesting species.

Our fall from grace is exactly what, you know,

mythical traditions tell us the knowledge of good and evil.

We ate the fruit.

It's hard to go through life these days and not be tempted by drama.

It's even someone who, you know.

It's a process.

It's a process.

What is that process?

Growth.

You know, people, some people do grow.

Some people do evolve.

And I think, ultimately, that is the purpose of our existence

is to keep evolving.

Do you ever get tempted by drama or distracted?

Not anymore.

I used to.

I used to.

I used to engage in debates.

It was like, you know, big high for me to win a debate.

How long ago?

Well, I started in school and I left debating only recently.

I was just five years ago.

I was debating Richard Dawkins in Mexico.

And I felt foolish after that.

You know.

So you made the decision not to debate anymore?

Not to engage in debate anymore.

No.

Because nobody changes the mind.

The debaters don't change the mind.

The audience doesn't change the mind.

In fact, they get reinforced by the opinions they came with.

So if we do want to try and change people's mind.

Because the change, if you want peace in your life, be peaceful.

If you want love in your life, give love.

Whatever you want, engage in that.

I think that's the only thing you can't.

You have to be the change that you want to see in others.

And then people respond.

Not by what you say, not by what you do, but just by your presence.

You've written 93 books, as I said earlier.

I think this is your 93rd.

I've been told this book about.

Yeah.

Living in the Light.

New book.

Yoga for Self-Realization.

I guess my question, you know, I can't comprehend the concept of writing so many books.

I've like, I wrote my first one and then I'm currently writing my second one.

And I've been, it's just consuming all of my time.

And I went off to Bali.

I spent a month there writing it in Ubud.

I'm sure you enjoyed that.

I love it.

I always go there to write.

It was amazing.

But my question to you, you know, I think this book is fantastic.

And I think that we'll talk a little bit about yoga in a sec.

But your 94th book.

It's coming this year.

It's called Quantum Body with the Quantum Physicist.

So I feel kind of good about that because I've been talking about that for now, since 1988.

That's 12 plus 23.

That's over 30 years.

I've been vilified, attacked, everything about that.

And I realized that people are territorial.

You know, the physicists say, who the heck is he talking about quantum physics?

The biologists say, he's not trained in biology.

He's a physician.

Who the heck is he talking about biology?

And yet my experience tells me that your body is non-local.

It follows the principles of quantum mechanics.

And now found some, some supporters who know the math.

And, you know, even the body can be understood mathematically now.

I don't know if you're familiar with this theorem called Gerdl's theorem, which says,

it's a very famous theorem.

And, you know, Gerdl was a German mathematician who was Einstein's favorite colleague when they,

the both immigrants to America at Princeton.

But he came up with a theorem which says there are theorems in math

that are true, but you can't prove them.

And they're disruptions.

They're, they're basically mathematics is platonic truth describes everything in the universe.

And yet there are theorems that don't follow algorithms when a mathematician thinks of them.

He said, where did this come from?

They don't know.

They can't even prove it.

But it seems intuitively true.

And if they follow the theorem, it leads to new creativity.

So I think creativity is inherent in the universe.

We are aspects of that creativity and with self-awareness, we have source to that creativity.

But that creativity will never happen if you don't take time to actually incubate

in discontinuity.

In my life, I figured it out nine steps intended outcome.

Number one, information gathering.

Number two, information analysis.

Number three, incubation, taking time off, go to Bali, play golf.

If you're a Republican, that's mystery school for Republicans or whatever.

So incubation and that is a time you settle with uncertainty.

And then there's that Eureka experience insight.

So incubation leads to insight, which is a disruption.

It's something totally new, new context, new relationship, new story.

And then if the insight is accurate, then you're inspired, not motivated.

Motivation is mental inspiration, as the word says, in spirit.

Then you implement it, then you integrate it, and then you have a death and a resurrection.

These are my nine steps to creativity.

I just made them up.

Information intended analysis, information gathering, information analysis,

incubation, insight, inspiration, implementation, integration, incarnation.

I use that for writing my books.

I can tell, yeah.

And if you were to write one last book, if I said Deepak, you could write one more book, that's it.

You can only write one.

It's going to be your last ever book.

Which subject matter would you think was the most important subject matter to write that last book

about and what would be the top line message of that book?

I hate to use this word.

It's misinterpreted, but the title would be enlightenment.

Explain.

What do you mean?

Like why would, why enlightenment and what would the book be about?

It's the only solution ultimately to know truth with the capital T.

You're not your body.

You're not your mind.

You're not your emotions.

They're all like clouds passing through the sky.

You know, when, when I read some of the great luminaries,

Wittgenstein, our life is a dream.

We are asleep, but once in a while we wake up enough to know that we were sleeping.

Buddha, when he died, he said, this lifetime of ours has transient his autumn clouds.

To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.

A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain.

As I look back now, my life, 76 years, it's a dream, but it's been a good dream with the few

nightmares here and there, but it's been a dream and I feel the only solution is to wake up.

Now, you know, when the Buddha was dying, people asked him, who are you?

Are you a messiah?

Are you God or your messenger?

He said, none of the above.

He said, who are you?

He said, I'm awake finally.

I think that's our ultimate destiny to wake up.

What do we need to do to wake up?

We need to question our everyday reality and human constructs.

They're useful.

Money is a useful construct.

Latitude, longitude are useful constructs, but they're still constructs.

They're not reality.

What is the source of these constructs?

When you get to the source, you realize that your capacity for creativity is infinite.

Your capacity for love is infinite.

Your capacity for compassion is infinite.

Your capacity for compassion is infinite.

Your capacity for healing is infinite.

And ultimately, you are infinite having a dream right now.

If I made you prime minister or president of the world, you know, if there was one

significant change you could make to lead us more towards that better future of enlightenment.

I would say an education that does not sacrifice self-awareness.

We have information overload right now.

I don't need information overload.

I can Google it or now go to chat GPT or something like that.

What I need to know is who am I?

How do you feel about chat GTP?

Chat GPT.

It's good.

I think it's very good.

And I think it's unavoidable also.

I actually went to a demonstration recently by Microsoft on something that's coming soon.

It's called Prometheus.

It's way beyond chat GPT.

Interesting.

It'll put most of us physicians out of business

because it makes the best diagnosis, gives the best information.

What happens then in terms of your purpose and your meaning?

Well, we have more time for creativity.

Fundamental creativity to create joy in the world.

I think the essential message is if you're not joyful, you wasted your life.

I see entrepreneurs all the time.

Young guys coming up to me with amazing ideas.

But they're talking about exit strategy before they've started the business.

It's like dividing the loot before there's a train to Rob.

But they're already talking.

And we're living in a hustle culture.

You know, I have five exits.

You keep exiting, exiting, exiting, and you're still hustling and you're dying.

And that's the final exit.

You're still a hustler.

So I see joy and self understanding, self awareness,

the fundamental purpose of existence and everything else will follow.

Where's your joy?

Where do you derive it from?

The fact that I exist and I'm aware of existence, that's a perpetual surprise to me.

I was looking at emotions and what's the healthiest emotion you can have?

It's not love.

It's not compassion.

It's not even joy.

It's awe.

It's wonder.

Why do we exist?

And why do we have the awareness that we exist?

If you're perpetually surprised and full of wonder and joy, you return to innocence.

And what we've lost to this world today is the loss of innocence.

How do I get my innocence back?

Are you married?

I'm in love.

Okay.

Well, when you have a child, you'll see it.

You'll see it.

A child is spontaneous.

Is in the moment.

Is joyful unless it's wet or hungry, but that's a different situation.

But it's joyful.

It is looking.

I was the other day, I was in the train from Orlando airport to baggage claim.

Everybody was stressed in the train, wearing masks, panicked, a mother on the phone and

full of anxiety and shed a little baby in the crib.

And this baby was looking around in total amazement.

Finally, it caught my eyes and it gave the most amazing smile and the whole room lighted up.

Just looking at that innocence.

We have lost our innocence and we take it away from our children.

So, you know, when children love laughter, they love stories, they love surprises.

They love to play peek-a-boo.

When's the last time you were surprised?

I can't recall being surprised.

So, when I feel I want some joy, I just look at children playing.

Is there a way to bring that joy back into our lives as a practice, that innocence?

Yeah, play, play, not drama.

As adults, play is seen as a waste of time.

No, play is when you find creativity and joy.

I'm not talking about drama, I'm talking about play.

Play for the sake of play.

Now, even sports has become competitive.

But when you played because you were playing, when a musician is playing, they're not thinking of the end.

When you're singing a song, you're not thinking of the ending of the song.

You're in the song.

When you become the song, when you become that which you're playing,

when the music and the musician become one, when the known and the known become one,

when the observer and the observer become one, when the lover and the beloved become one,

that's transcendence, that's joy, that's play.

Living in the light, yoga for self-realization, this is your fourth phase of life

and you're into your self-realization phase.

Do you know the book, The Body Holds the Score?

The Body Holds the Score.

There's a lot of similarities between obviously your philosophy and that book about how,

I start, I think, everything as a skeptic.

So breath work and a lot of spiritual things.

I start as an ultimate skeptic.

I need science, I need evidence, I need proof.

And as I read through that book and watched some videos of that,

one of the things that it's proven is phenomenal for your mental well-being,

is things like acting, yoga.

They talk about psychedelics and things like that as well,

but one wouldn't assume that there's a profound amount of scientific evidence that yoga and acting

have really positive mental health implications.

Why is yoga so good for us as humans?

Yoga means union, union with yourself.

And yoga has eight limbs as I talk about in this book.

And ultimately all those eight limbs are meant to give you only one insight.

You and the universe are made of awareness.

You're not made of energy, you're not made of matter,

you're not made of information, you're made of awareness.

Awareness is non-local, fundamental, not subject to birth and death,

infinite and formless.

So befriend your non-local, formless self.

You know, again, I go back to poetry.

Acting is great, poetry is even better.

Rabindranath Tagore, one of my favorite poets said,

in this Playhouse of Infinite Forms, I caught sight of the formless.

And so my life was blessed.

Befriend the formless, and then the forms will be seen as expressions of the formless.

Without the formless, there is no form.

Form is the morphing of the formless into space-time and causality,

this theater of space-time and causality where we are playing as avatars.

That is something for me to think about tonight.

It's become abundantly clear to me over the last couple of years in particular,

as more people know who I am because of this podcast,

and I do teach them to stuff on TV,

that you can cause yourself such a tremendous amount of suffering

by getting more and more attached to your avatar,

and like your avatar becoming more of a defined thing.

And I think I've spent a lot of my, definitely the last two and a half years,

trying to resist as much as I can this temptation of becoming my avatar.

And doing that on a practical level, I thought, you know, well,

resist labels, Steve.

So don't be anything, don't like in terms of your bio,

you know, your professional bio.

Don't be those things.

You're 32, right?

30.

30, wow.

But that's pretty young to have that awareness.

Yeah, because I could see how I could cause myself a ton of suffering

and build a life which wasn't really who I am

by being a social media CEO, for example.

Yeah, success at an early age.

Yeah.

You confuse your celebrity with yourself, yeah.

Outside of me just like saying to myself,

okay, I'm going to write books and I'm going to do this theater

and we'll do this music show and I DJ now

and I do all these other bits and pieces.

I was in psychedelics for a while with a Thai Life Sciences

as a creative director and an investor.

And outside of me doing lots of stuff,

which is I thought was the antidote to not, to resisting my label.

You're telling me that the real antidote to resisting my label

is like a higher sense of enlightenment.

Right.

I would suggest a book for you at your stage.

You'd find it very useful.

It's called The Wisdom of Insecurity.

Interesting.

By Alan Watts.

The more you embrace insecurity and unpredictability,

the more access you'll have to the unknown.

And the unknown is the source of all creativity.

The known is the prison of the past.

We have a closing tradition on this...

That's funny.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast

where the last guest asks a question for the next guest.

Look at what the question is.

I'll show you.

You're the first person to ever see that question.

Can you see it?

What is my biggest insecurity?

I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw of a gravesite.

And there was a sign on the gravesite.

And I said to whoever was standing by the gravesite,

where you are, I was, where I am, you will be.

So embrace the idea of death.

And if you do it, you'll see it's death that makes life possible.

Because death is creativity.

Have you struggled with the idea of death?

All my life, since six years.

And that will read its head to some degree when your parents passed?

Yes.

And now I'm at a stage where I'm embracing it, totally.

How did that impact you, losing your parents?

As someone that's been sensitive and insecure about the concept of death?

I would say grief, sadness, longing.

But our longing can be the way too.

How long ago was that, that you lost your parents?

Oh, my parents only in the last 20 years.

Grandfather with whom I lived in the first few years of my life.

He was like a parent.

My grandparents were my parents because my parents were in England at that time.

And I was, I and my brother were left with our grandparents who brought us up.

And that, by the way, was a big, that fear of abandonment also is a driver.

The fear of abandonment is a driver.

And there is no cure for that other than don't think about yourself all the time.

Anytime you, by the way, you were suffering.

Ask yourself, who am I thinking about?

You're thinking about your avatar.

Very true.

Deepak, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

This was one of the best conversations I've had.

Oh, thank you so much.

That's a huge honour.

You really are.

You've been someone that I followed from afar, but have had tremendous admiration for.

And everyone that I've encountered, that's encountered you.

You know, we have mutual friends.

We're sort of in business together in many respects through the healing company.

That's great, actually.

They're lovely people.

Yeah.

And it's been an honour that you'd come here and spend some time with me today.

And that's been my privilege.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Deepak.

Thank you.

As you might know, the show is now sponsored by Airbnb.

I absolutely love Airbnb.

Always have.

Always been a, you know, saved my life on so many occasions.

And my team, when we first got in touch with Airbnb,

were talking about how most people don't realise that their place,

where they currently live, could become an Airbnb.

And I guess the second question there is,

how much could your place be worth?

And it turns out you could be sitting on an Airbnb gold mine without even knowing it.

Some people Airbnb their entire homes when they're away.

That's what I did in New York.

Whenever I left New York, my place was on Airbnb and people rented it out.

Sometimes for a day, sometimes for two days, sometimes for a week.

And it's a great way to cover some of the bills while you're away.

So whether you're looking to go on holiday,

or you just want some extra cash for bills,

or you want to buy something nice for a Valentine that you love,

whatever it might be, head over to Airbnb.co.uk slash host.

And you can find out how much your current property where you live

can earn while you're not there.

I suspect it might blow your mind because it's certainly blew mine.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.