Transcript

Most Replayed Moment: 6 Daily Habits That Expose Your Fake Values - Deepak Chopra

0:00 Uh In your life, if someone's Dies. Good forbid. Um

0:08 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. you embrace the g any time you recoil Or deny

0:24 Resistance creates even more stress. So what we call stress is resistance to existence. In the moment. Okay.

0:34 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 avo avoid suffering in that case is to

0:52 Take the news. It's a it's a step in awareness. The awareness of the mind is not the The mind. Who is it that or what is it that knows a thought?

1:06 That is what you need to shift. Two. Okay. Once you shift from The experience. To the awareness in which the experience is happening.

1:18 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

1:33 Assumed self. Do your Fundamental self. Which is infinite, which is without cause. Which is not subject to birth and death, which is spaceless, timeless

1:45 Incomprehensible, infinite, irreducible, and fundamental. It feels almost like I'm stepping out of myself. And looking at myself. Correct. Looking at

1:59 The projection of projection of myself. Yeah, we're getting myself. You're looking at the projection of yourself. She's really looking at your avatar. And it it's very hard to do because we're we are we are increasingly becoming avatars, especially with things like social media. Yeah. Yeah. We've been we're being reinforced. Like, you know, I have Uh two million followers or a million followers or five hundred thousand followers that following my avatar. So we don't know who we are. You confused yourself with the avatar. And the battle is all between

2:26 Ovatars wanting. Importance. How does one resign from that battle and take back my peace. Actually the opposite of that is creativity.

2:39 the 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 alg biological. biological robots. And that's by the way part of our evolution. It's it's not something all animals

3:01 But the animals have an 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, you know, as the culmination of this life experience. We regret the past.

3:17 We anticipate the future, we're never in the present. When This is the only place we are. Right now is the present. Escape it. The worst use of imagination is stress.

3:32 The best use of imagination is creativity. Creativity is a disruption. In the algorithm. It's a discontinuity. Fundamental creativity, not you know, usual Innovation like iPhone thirteen instead of iPhone twelve with a better camera.

3:47 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

4:00 relationship and story. But it's 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 Swift.

4:19 These are original original creativity is a disruption. In the algorithm. Avatar my avatar.

4:28 Getting into this So if Avatar war. With other with other avatars. My antidote to that is

4:35 My own creativity. Your own creativity. Yeah. You know, every moment you have a choice. To repeat the past or be a pioneer. Of creativity of the future.

4:48 And that happens, by the way. It happens individually, it happens collectively. We change world views. Yeah, the world is not flat anymore. The ground is not stationary anymore.

5:00 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. If you I could see you as you really are. I'd see a huge emptiness with the few scattered dots and spots. And some random electrical discharges and at the most fundamental level

5:22 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

5:41 Athletes. musical performance Um Any any break. from ordinary reality.

5:49 Is ineffable. And Healing. Actually. That's why uh the recent resurgence in psychedelics is very interesting because

6:01 You know, it 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. Mm. The five points of suffering.

6:15 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.

6:25 Have one solution. First one. Find out who you are. How does one find out who they are? Transcendence. Not in terms of there's no here's another thing. There's no system of thought

6:39 No system of thought. Religion, philosophy or science that'll get you into Noing. true reality because systems of Thought.

6:49 are just that systems of thought What is it that gives rise to thought That is what you want to No. And that's been the eternal quest.

7:02 in spiritual traditions. I'm not talking about religious dogma or ideology. There you know, these days it's very fashionable for people to say I'm not When you have a spiritual experience, number one transcendence. You find your identity be f beyond space and time. Number two, emergence of Platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, named after Plato.

7:28 or uh love, compassion, joy, equanimity. And number three, loss of the fear of death. That's Jesus, that's Mohammed. That's Rumi, that's Buddha, that's every luminary that you have s can study. Since

7:45 People. Created systems of thought. So how does what's the easiest way to tra you know, there's someone listening to this right now. They are driving up the motorway. They're a lorry driver. Take some time every day.

7:59 to be unoccupied. Even spiritual pursuit is an occupation. Yeah. So take a little bit of you know what's I think it was Kafka or somebody who said all of human problem. Humanity's problems come from our inability To sit quietly and do nothing.

8:17 We 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 I pull over the The lorry that I'm driving up the motorway. And I said, Do you know what? D Pack told me to take some time for myself, so I sit. In the lorry for fifteen minutes every day.

8:36 How is that gonna help me to transcend It starts a process. We begin to ask yourself Who am I? I'd reflect on this these questions every day. Who am I? What do I want?

8:51 What is my purpose? What am I grateful for? And who am I? Without these constructs. It's

9:00 It's a Big mystery. Right? Who you are? Ultimately you realize You're the awareness in which all experience happens.

9:11 But you're not the experience. The experience is in time. You're not in time. And that 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 and the Republic and you'll see That you know this was part of Every

9:31 Yeah. But it was few luminaries. People romanticize even about this. India is a spiritual country. Well India's been violent. Forever. A few luminaries the stages of the Upnishad, then we have romance around them.

9:48 Greek culture, you know, oh Bob, you know the Greeks were the most civilized in the world. Well, yes, Socrates and Parmenides and You know Pythagoras and uh I can name a few, but the rest of the country Even in those times.

10:08 No, they had slavery, they had sexism, they had uh He's Uh the the source of the Olympics where they used to sacrifice uh humans and you know, we're still performing it even in our days, we're still repeating that cycle.

10:26 with the what you call cheerleaders, the 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?

10:41 Daily habits. Number one is sleep. Th and 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 a predictor of Alzheimer's. Lack of sleep interferes with your creativity. Lack of sleep causes inflammation.

11:01 But that's For sure. Number one. Number two, uh I think is uh

11:08 Any practice that quietens the mind, meditation, reflection, contemplation Sitting quietly, watching your breath, et cetera. Number three is exercise. Number four is mind body coordination, as in That's different than regular exercise. Your yoga practice

11:27 And martial arts Breathing practices. Tai Chi, Chigong. They actually activate a different part of your nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system which Causes self regulation in the body.

11:41 So it's not just exercise. It's you know, something that Puts mind and body together. Even Gymnastics or Um I

11:50 Things. Like Judo and I mentioned martial arts, but yoga is my practice. uh then emotionals your emotional and physical environment, your social environment, because we live Yeah.

12:07 So you know, if you're if you're you have toxic relationships it's going to cause Physical toxicity. Um Then nutrition. We now know that you know That food that causes inflammation.

12:21 Refined, manufactured processed food with chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, insecticides, pesticides. It's poison. It's like putting poison to putting agent orange in your body. So organic food Palm to table, maximum diversity of plant based foods. Now we know a lot about micronutrients, we know about biological rhythms.

12:46 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

13:02 Right, head on. when you're healthy, not when you're in a crisis, not when somebody dies in your family, then everybody panics. Yeah. I had a crisis in my life. When I was six years old.

13:17 And my father was in England. He was um uh training to be a cardiologist. I was living my grandfather And one day we got a telegram that My father had passed all his exams. He was now

13:31 Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Big deal in those days. We got a telegram my grandfather uh wanted to celebrate, so he took me and my little brother to a carnival, then to a uh to a movie. I even remember the movie, Alibaba and the Forty Thieves.

13:49 And then uh we went to a fancy restaurant and then in the middle of the night he died. And uh they took him Little jar about The size of this coffee cup.

14:04 A little bigger. And one of my uncles said, What happened? Yesterday he was taking the kids to A carnival and Today is a bunch of ashes.

14:14 My little brother who later became the dean of education at Harvard Medical School, we was four years old. Started to lose his skin. His skin started peeling off. I went into a panic. And you know, my

14:29 Uncles took my brother to every Position. 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.

14:41 shedding his skin because he's 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.

14:58 Well what happens? You go to medical school the first thing you see is is a 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

15:19 So it took me a long time, you know, going through medical school, training myself going through crises, smoking, addictive behavior, alcohol. I remember Um res uh resuscitating a patient, putting a pacemaker, putting him uh On a respirator and then going outside to smoke a cigarette.

15:42 And then You know? I Was disgusted. Yeah.

15:47 I threw away my cigarette. That evening. I threw away the scotch. And I decided.

15:56 That I don't want to understand who am I. If I made you Prime Minister or President of the World Yeah, if there was A s one significant change you could make to lead us more towards that. Better future of enlightenment.

16:12 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?

16:28 How do you feel about chat G T P chat G P T. I think it's very good. And I think it's unavoidable also. I actually went to uh uh demonstration recently by Microsoft on something that's Coming soon. It's called Prometheus. It's way beyond chat GPT. Interesting.

16:49 Most of us physicians out of business. Yeah, because it makes the best diagnoses, gives the best information. What happens then in terms of your purpose and your meaning? Well We'd we'd have more time for creativity.

17:05 Fundamental creativity to create joy in the world. I think The essential messages If you're not joyful. You wasted your life, Mr. I you know, I see entrepreneurs all the time, young guys coming up to me with b amazing ideas. But they're talking about exit strategy.

17:27 Before they've started the business. It's like you know, 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.

17:45 And they're dying. And that's the final exit, you're still a hustler. So I make joy. And said Understanding self awareness the fundamental part of

17:57 purpose of existence and everything else will follow. Where's your joy? What is that? Where did you derive it from? The fact that I exist and I'm aware of existence is

18:10 That's a But 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

18:22 Joy. It's Oh. It's Wonder.

18:29 Why do we exist? And why do we have the awareness that re exists? If You're perpetually surprised.

18:41 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?

18:55 I'm in love. Okay, well when you have a child you'll see it. You'll see it. You know, a child Is spontaneous.

19:06 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 a in the train uh you know from Orlando Airport.

19:22 Everybody was stressed in the train, bearing masks, panicked, a mother. On the phone. And Full of anxiety and she had a little baby.

19:34 In the Crib and This baby was looking around. And Total amazement. Finally it caught my eyes.

19:41 And it gave the most amazing smile. The whole room lighted up. Just looking at that. Innocents.

19:52 We have lost our innocence. And we we To be. Take it away from our children. So you know when

20:02 Children love laughter, they love stories, they love surprises, you know, they love to play peekaboo. When's the last time you were surprised? Can't recall. Yeah. Being surprised.

20:20 So When I feel when I feel I want some joy I just look Yeah. Children. Playing.

20:26 Is there a way to bring that joy back into our lives as a practice? In a sense. Clay. Mm.

20:34 Not drama. As adults play is seen as a waste of time. No, please. Is when you find creativity and joy. I'm not talking about drama, I'm talking about play.

20:47 Play for the sake of play. Now even sports has become competitive. But when you played because you were playing. When a musician Is

20:58 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.

21:11 That which you're playing. When the music and the musician become one, when the knower 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.

21:27 What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. Uh