Deepak Chopra
Appearances
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
is also an experience in consciousness. You see, when you say there are neural correlates, you're looking at them on a CAT scan or whatever technology, but that experience is happening in consciousness. So when people say science of consciousness, that's also misleading. There's no science of consciousness. Science is an activity in consciousness.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So science is a methodology in consciousness, and so is philosophy, so is religion, so is any system of thought. And here is something that is really very important for spiritual seekers, is that it doesn't matter what you're reading, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda or, you know, Ramana Maharishi or Deepak Chopra or whoever, that's not going to give you any realization.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
No system of thought is going to give you realization. No system. Religion, philosophy, science. Because they're systems of thought conceived in consciousness. So only direct experience can give you access to reality. Not religion, not philosophy, not science.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
It's good in the beginning, because you see that people have wondered about these things and they've come to conclusions, but their conclusions did not help you. And they might point the way, like a map, you know, so... Yeah, and there are many maps.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
You know, if I want to go from New York to Boston, I can take a train, I can take the road, I can take a steamship, I can take a helicopter, I can take an airplane. But those are all maps. You have to experience the territory.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
There was a time, and it was very frustrating because... Also, what it does is, you know, in spiritual tradition, they talk about the dark night of the soul. So the dark night of the soul is basically everything that you thought about reality is untrue. But even worse than that, everything that you thought about who you are is also untrue.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So that is a trigger to losing your habitual certainties, number one. And those certainties were the anchor of your existence. I am a person. There's no such thing, okay? I have a body. No such thing. I have a mind. No such thing. I live in a universe. No such thing. That can give you the heebie-jeebies, as they say.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
But if you stay with it, then once you jump off the abyss, it's like crossing the event horizon. You know, in modern cosmology, we talk about event horizon. So if I, you know, give you a metaphor, if you throw a coin or any object across the event horizon, which is, say, 12 kilometers away from the black hole, you throw it and you're watching this from the outside.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
then it takes eternity for that coin to travel the 12 kilometers from the event horizon to the black hole. eternity. But if you're watching it from the inside, it takes less than a microsecond. And if you are crossing over the event horizon, it's just normal. So then, you know, what is time then? In this side of the event horizon, eternity.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
In this side of the horizon, faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And for you who's crossing over, normal. I mean, and then who is the you that's crossing over? So when you start to conceptualize these things, you literally go through the dark night of the soul.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
You lose your identity because you thought you were like this entity, this skin encapsulated ego squeezed into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime. When you realize that is an experience in you, rather than you are an experience in the body, the body is an experience in you. Rather than the fact that you are in the universe, the universe is in you, and that you is not a person.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Okay, so that is in the beginning very scary. But it's liberating. Once you take the jump, it's liberating. And it can't be described. That's why, you know, the yogic traditions, you seem to know yoga. There is, you know, the yamas and the niyamas. And the last niyama is called Ishwar Pranidhana, which means surrender to the incomprehensible. Because you can't figure it out.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
You cannot figure it out conceptually. Because anything you conceive is wrong. Anything you perceive is wrong. My perception tells me the earth is flat. Nobody believes that anymore. My perception tells me that this ground we're sitting on is stationary, spinning at dizzying speeds and hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
My perception tells me you're a three-dimensional solid figure, but you're proportionately as void as intergalactic space. If I could see you through God's eyes, I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots, maybe some pixels. But even those pixels and those random dots and spots are made of emptiness. So... Therefore, everything I perceive is a magical lie, is a total lie.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And then my conceptions are based on my perceptions, which are human perceptions. What does the world look like to a dragonfly with 30,000 eyes? which can see 360 degrees all the time? What does it look like to a chameleon whose eyeballs swivel on two different axes? To a snake that navigates infrared? To a butterfly that knows ultraviolet?
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Through a bird that navigates through electromagnetic radiation? So what's the real world look like? It's a silly question. There's no such thing. There's no real world and there's no real look. It depends on who's looking and what they're using to do the looking, which means the brain, the conditioned mind and the eyes. So, you know, seeing is not happening in the eyes.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
There's no picture of me in the eyes. It's not happening in the brain. It's happening in something that is beyond our comprehension, that is non-conceptual, non-perceivable. Ultimately, you surrender to it. Ishwar Pranidhana, the fifth one. Surrender to the divine mystery. And, you know, Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of all time, lived at Princeton just past a few years ago.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
He said, God is what mind becomes when it goes beyond the threshold of our comprehension. If you can comprehend it, it's not God. Because as soon as you comprehend it, you limit it. As soon as you define it, you limit it. And by definition, it's the infinite ungraspable that makes things graspable. And what it makes things graspable are all magical lies. And, you know, they call it Maya.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
In innumerable ways, through innumerable sentient beings, not just humans. Every sentient being is differentiated from the one consciousness. Just like your nose and your eyes and your teeth and your fingernails and your genitalia differentiated from one cell. Same thing.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Let go of every concept and every perception as a window to reality. Every concept, every perception, let go of that idea that you'll ever be able to know reality intellectually or through any methodology or through any religion or through any map. Let go of that idea, number one. Number two, Embrace presence. See, when you embrace presence, I'm not talking about the present moment.
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E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Presence is bringing awareness to whatever is. Now, because awareness is infinite, no form, right? Infinite. Then the finite experience... is actually dependent on the infinite. So the infinite is present in every finite experience. Once you realize that, then God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
There's nowhere that you, no experience that is possible without the infinite in the background. No experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
The infinite is present in every finite experience. Once you realize that, then God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid. Only direct experience can give you access to reality. Not religion, not philosophy, not science. Number one, let go of every concept and every perception as a window to reality. Number two, embrace presence. What remains is pure consciousness.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
In innumerable ways, through innumerable sentient beings, not just humans. Every sentient being is differentiated from the one consciousness. It's just like your nose and your eyes and your teeth and your fingernails and your genitalia differentiated from one cell. Same thing.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Let go of every concept and every perception as a window to reality. Every concept, every perception, let go of that idea that you'll ever be able to know reality intellectually or through any methodology or through any religion or through any map.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
See, when you embrace presence, I'm not talking about the present moment. Presence is bringing awareness to whatever is. Now, because awareness is infinite, no form, right? Infinite. Then the finite experience... is actually dependent on the infinite. So the infinite is present in every finite experience. Once you realize that, then God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
There's nowhere that you, no experience that is possible without the infinite in the background. No experience. This is Ramakrishna's experience, etc. And they all kind of had different ways of transcending. So Ramakrishna is, you know, he's very much tuned into the symbolic nature of the Divine Mother. But remember, these gods and goddesses are symbols of the infinite.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
They're not the infinite, you know, whether it's Lakshmi or Shiva or whatever, you know, the divine. They're symbols. Because the infinite is incomprehensible, so we try and grasp it with symbols. So in Ramakrishna's situation, the divine mother is his mother. access to God. And he prays every day to the Divine Mother.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And then one day, as he's praying, he starts to dance because he's getting into that ecstatic experience that, say, Sufi mystics have. And then suddenly, wherever he looks, he sees the Divine Mother in the walls, on the floor, in the ceiling. And it's almost like a psychotic episode. And he then doesn't know what to do. He keeps dancing till he passes out.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And after that, he's in God-consciousness all the time. He doesn't say anything, but miracles happen and this and that happen because he doesn't know how to return from that God-consciousness. or divine conscience. That's his good luck. That's how he focused on the divine in the in the symbology of the divine mother. But actually you can go beyond that. You can see the divine here.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
But consciousness has no form, so it has no border. Because it has no border, it's infinite. It's spaceless, it's timeless, it's irreducible. It is incomprehensible, but without it, there's no comprehension. You can't conceive it, you can't imagine it, you can't perceive it, but without it, there's no conception or perception or imagination. So who am I?
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Everything you see, the perception is made possible because the infinite, incomprehensible, borderless, fundamental, irreducible, spaceless, timeless, unimaginable is present in that consciousness. So then God is not difficult to find, impossible to avoid.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
That's intoxication.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, but that problem has existed forever. You know, Jesus goes to the temple and he says, you have desecrated the home of God, right? He overturns the tables much to the annoyance of the rabbis. But the rabbis are making a living by selling trinkets, right? You know, everybody's going there into India.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You know, half of India's population showed up because they think, you know, they'll get a dip and then all the people out there are selling trinkets. You know, they take a Ganesh with you, take this with you. So that problem hasn't gone away since religion was discovered. And it is not going to go away. And furthermore, I think it's okay because
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Commodifying spirituality is better than commodifying pornography or commodifying weapons or mass destruction or commodifying war, which is our major industry right now, or commodifying all the things that hurt us. So why not commodify something that actually soothes somebody till they get it that this is not reality? Only when they stop seeking, they find. what they were seeking.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You have to stop seeking. And there's one hymn in Adi Shankar, then 1880, you know, which is beautiful. Not this, not this, not this. Take away every label, every construct, every idea.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, so let me, let's demonstrate this, okay? What did you have for dinner last night?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So when I asked you that question, you spontaneously told me sweet potatoes, veggies. Now, as you are telling me that, do you remember who was with you I was alone. Oh, he was alone. You know the room, etc. So that one question triggered sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. Right? One question. Now, if I go into your brain, do I find a neural network that says I had veggies and whatever?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, electrical synapses. Which got triggered when I asked you the question. Okay? But where was that information before I asked you that question? Who knows? I don't know. Okay, good. Now go to the next step. Can you recall anything from your teenage years right now? Just anything. Yeah. Yep. Riding a bike. Riding a bike. And now you see the image and the scenery.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Can you recall anything from your childhood? Yep. So I ask you a question. You recall what you had for dinner. You recall the bicycle from your teenage years. You recall your toys and bedroom. Just when I'm asking you the question. But where that information existed? And the answer is, it was in a superposition of possibilities.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Just like before you observe a particle, it's entangled with all other particles. It's in a superposition of possibilities. Where does that superposition of possibilities exist? In pure consciousness. So you go, every time you remember something or imagine something, you go to the source of all experience, which is consciousness. Okay, so when people say, where do I go after I die?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I am the inconceivable and the imperceivable that makes all perception and all conception possible. Which leads to another big, actually amazing idea, which is that anything that's perceivable or conceivable, anything that you can see, touch, taste, smell, think about, imagine, conceptualize, is not real. So whatever you look around here is not real, including your body.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It's where that veggies were. You don't go anywhere. You're there now because you could not have a single thought, a single memory, a single thing to imagine without going to the source of all imagination or source of all thought. Now, in spiritual traditions, it's called pure consciousness. And pure consciousness is a field of all possibilities.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It's a field of uncertainty because, you know, you may not remember exactly what accurately, but you'll make it up anyway. So it's a field of possibilities. It's a field of uncertainty. It's a field of entanglement, correlation, and it's outside of space-time. you never left that place. So, you know, to a yogi, say, where do you go after I die? He says, never left home, you know.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And so memory is the key. And before you articulate the memory, in yogic traditions, it's called a sanskara, a seed. And it's not only a seed of memory, it's also a seed of imagination. And it's linked to what is called karma. Karma is just the interpretation of a past experience. Nothing good, bad about it. I go to Disney World, you go to Disney World. I don't enjoy the experience. You love it.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And you go back and I get scared. And, you know, I'd rather not. Next time I'm on an airplane, it reminds me of Disney World. Horrible. So now we have two different karmas from the same experience because we interpreted sensations. That's all you experience, sensations. You interpreted them differently. So in Buddhist literature, this is a conceptual body.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
In Indian Vedantic literature, this is a karmic body. But it means the same thing. Karma, memory, sanskara, imagination, desire are all fluctuations of consciousness. They are vrittis. So that's why one sentence in yoga captures it all. When the fluctuations of consciousness die down, all concepts, all ideas, all theories, what remains is pure consciousness. That's who you are.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
This whole yogic literature is just about that, including the asanas. You know, asana means seat of awareness. Okay? Pranayama is the energy that comes from the awareness, vital energy. So asanas and pranayama, properly understood, with the yamas and the niyamas, and then the pratyahara, knowing what's happening inside your body. Today they call it interoceptive or visceroceptive experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
That's the preparatory stage for dharana, dhyana, samadhi. Focused awareness, meditation, transcendence, which leads to so-called supernormal powers of siddhis, which are non-local dormant potentials that every human being has access to.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You know, I went to a regular medical school. Then I trained at Harvard, Tufts, BU. I specialized in neuroscience, neuropeptides. And my first glimpse into this world was when looking under a microscope with a colleague and we were, you know, looking at these molecules. These days, everybody knows what serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, etc.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And she said, these are the molecules of emotion, my colleague. And I said, that's amazing what you just said. Do you realize what you said? Molecules of emotion, the interface between consciousness and biology. So that triggered my interest in mind-body medicine. Several years later, I met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He said, what do you do? I said, I study the brain. He said, tell me more about it.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I said, neuropeptides. He said, what are they? I said, they're molecules of emotion. He said, they're not real. That was kind of jarring, okay? What you're studying is Maya, the world of illusion. If you come to me and I'll show you, scholars will show you another world. So I said, what do you want me to do?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
He said, give up everything you're doing and come and study with these people that I will introduce you to. And I'm myself too. I said, I have a family, I have a mortgage to pay, I have children to go to school. Where's the money going to come from? And he thought for a moment, he said, the money will come from wherever it is at the moment. Take the plunge. So I did.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And the money came because I started writing books, et cetera, more than I could have ever imagined before. but it was leaving one world for another. I realized that everything I believed in was a superstition. That matter itself is a superstition. Physicality, the physical universe is a superstition. There's no such thing. There's only consciousness.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
evolved to the point where if you're not experiencing synchronicity, then you're disconnected from non-local being, which is you. Because in the normal world of experience, it's linear time. In the non-local world of experience, it's a non-linear holographic rendering of time. And it's literally the matrix. Now, psychedelics can give you that experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
The Mayan calendar is all about this holographic rendering of time. The Vedantic view of time is cyclical. is the breathing in and the breathing out of Brahman. So many traditions have explored this. But now that we have modern technologies, look at the brain, the correlates.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You know, there's a part of your brain called the default mode network, which is literally the neural correlate of your ego mind. So when you, through meditation, deep meditation, or even through psychedelics, you decrease the activity of the ego mind or when you're dying, you know, there's now definitely literature on what is called terminal lucidity.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
where even people with Alzheimer's, they have suddenly terminal lucidity. They see things that normal people don't see, or they see dead relatives, or they see, you know, other dimensions. That's all because the default mode network is obliterated or the activity is decreased. So you say, well, that suggests that the brain is the creator of the ego. No, it's not. It's the symbolic representation.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
But the symbolic representation can actually evoke the experience. Like when I read a book, a good book, all it is is a bunch of squiggles and ink on a piece of paper, but it can have me in its grip. You know, I'm rooting for the hero, I want the villain to die, I fall in love with the girl, all because I'm reading symbols. So the symbol of reality can also reproduce the experience of reality.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, you never left it.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
See, right now, if you look at the most recent interpretations of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics, the most... Prominent or favored interpretation was the Copenhagen interpretation, which was the pioneers, you know, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, the great guys, Niels Bohr, Einstein, to some extent, not really, because Einstein was a realist. He wasn't into consciousness. He was confused.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I would say Einstein was a naive realist. He thought that the picture of the world is the human look of it, you know. But that's beside the point. He was a genius anyway. So that theory is kind of out of fashion at the moment. Remember, even theories of consciousness are in consciousness. You can't get behind consciousness.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Right now, the most important theory in consciousness or in quantum mechanics is called the multiverse or the multi-world theory. which means if you allow the wave function, Schrödinger's wave function, to keep distributing into innumerable branches, each of them results in a different universe. And there are infinite universes and there are infinite versions of you in other dimensions.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
That's the number one theory. How dare you? That's the number one theory. In string theory, multiverse, multiworlds, they're all kind of going in that direction mathematically. Sean Carroll, who was the physicist at Caltech, popularized that theory more than even the originator of the theory. Of infinite multiverses. Infinite multiverses. But if you ask Sean, are these real?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Are these universes real? He'll say yes, because that's mathematics, which is not real, which is in imagination, in consciousness. But mathematics, for some reason, describes everything in the universe, the laws of nature. Okay? We don't know why. It's the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
But that's what he'll say, that there are different dimensions and different universes and multiverses. Vedanta would disagree. They would say, you're already in a dreamscape. This is called karma bhumi. This is one particular dreamscape. And you're a fictional character in that dreamscape. And there are infinite dreamscapes. The Buddhists get it totally.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
This loka, that loka, but they're all dream lokas. This is also a dream loka. And Buddha said that this lifetime of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain. And Ananda said, hey, who are you? Are you a prophet?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Are you, you know, God? Are you this, that? Buddha said, none of the above. So Ananda said, you know, wait a minute. Before you leave, you have to tell me who you are. And he said, I'm awake. Those were his last words. Wittgenstein, we are asleep. Our life is a dream. But once in a while, we wake up enough to know that we're dreaming. So this whole thing is a lucid dream in a vivid now.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So, of course, you know, the five glaciers has been interpreted by so many people and from their level of comprehension. Here's I would have rephrase or phrase or repeat what the five glaciers have been expressed as the idea. So the first klesha is not knowing the difference between perceived and fundamental reality. So perceived reality is this, form.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And it's ungraspable. Because as I said, by the time you hear my words, they're not there. What happened to your childhood? It's a dream. What happened to your teenage years? It's a dream. What about yesterday? What about five minutes ago? What about a second ago? It's ungraspable. That's the klesha. This is a dream that is ungraspable. Wake up to what or anything. Who is dreaming?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
That's the most important thing. And that which is dreaming never left home. It keeps dreaming. Infinite dreams. So I believe in infinite universes. All as infinite dream lokas. Just like the Buddhists do. Or, yeah. Those are lokas. Loka is a very good word. Loka means location. Lokas. So loka is the appearance in space-time of that which is not in space-time.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It's the formless manifesting its form. Nothing is everything. So here's a new formula for you. Zero is equal to one is equal to infinity.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It's my formula. Tell me about it. Zero. Yeah. Nothing becomes everything. And that nothing has the capacity for infinite manifestations. How does nothing become everything? The formless becomes all form and phenomena, right? From a mosquito to a butterfly to a dragonfly to a piece of rock to a plant, all coming from nothingness. Quantum mechanics.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It becomes everything. So zero and infinity are the same and it's all one. That's my formula for reality. I like that formula.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
That if you go to the source of all the experience, source of all experience, okay? The source of all concepts, the source of all perceptions. That which is called pure consciousness is infinite superposition of infinite possibilities of experience. So if you're willing to embrace this, then you can convert any suffering into an opportunity. Doesn't matter what it is.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Because it's the inherent creativity of the universe. We are limited in our creativity by the conditioned mind. So we become biological robots. And we recycle trauma, we recycle suffering. So all the suffering in the world, by the way, is recycled trauma from the separate mind. The separate mind inflicts trauma. The memory of trauma is anger. The desire for retribution is hostility.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Blaming yourself is guilt and shame. And the depletion of energy is depression as a result of this separate self. So, you know, Buddha has three principles. The separate self doesn't exist. Everything decays. So separate self doesn't exist, it's entanglement. Everything decays is the second law of thermodynamics. And then the last, nirvana is the ultimate reality.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Nirvana is that which is inconceivable and imperceivable, is the ultimate reality. In those three words, are three laws, synchronicity and entanglement, no separate self, time, which is, the arrow of time is separation. As soon as there's a me and an other, Time begins because time is the movement of thought using the ego as your identity. You go beyond the ego, there's no time.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
That's who you are. Our technological evolution has outpaced our emotional and spiritual evolution. Therefore, we are in a dangerous phase. We have medieval minds and modern capacities. On the other hand, you can reverse climate change. You can get rid of war, chronic disease. The choice is ours. So this whole thing is a lucid dream in a vivid now. And it's ungraspable. Wake up to who is dreaming.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And fundamental reality is formless because you can't have form without the formless. That's the first klesha. Not knowing the difference between reality and illusion. Ignorance. Ignorance. The second klesha is grasping and clinging at experience, which is ephemeral, transient, and essentially ungraspable. Because by the time you hear my words, they don't exist.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So, because consciousness is timeless.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Go to deepakshobhra.ai, ask the question and argue with it. And you'll get there. Or even go to chat GPT because you know what I do now with, I play with these big, large language models. And I realized that people who program them are physicalists. So you think you're getting good information, but it's selection bias by scientists who are physicalists. So if you say, where is imagination?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Go to ChatGPT. It'll tell you, identify a part of the brain. This part of the brain creates imagination. Say, no, I disagree. I say to ChatGPT, this part is the neural correlate of imagination. Go a little deeper. Say, oh, you're right. This is the neural correlative imagination. So where is imagination? It fumbles. Then you say, have you checked Advaita philosophy? Have you checked Buddhist?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And it goes back and gives you the right answer. It's a lot of fun.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You know, I am a very, almost, if there's one thing I'm fanatical about, it's my daily practice of yoga. And I practice all the eight limbs of yoga. And normally I don't go to do work. Work is what we're doing right now. It's fun. It's a good job. Yeah, good job. But I don't normally start till 11. So my whole morning is yoga and meditation.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And then normally I don't work after five unless I'm doing something like this. So there are always exceptions. I go to bed. Before I go to bed, I practice yogic dreaming and yoga nidra, but more the dream yogas. And then I meditate on death into the mind. And so I'm having a lot of fun.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah. So, you know, what you'd say, what was it like before? It was like everybody else. You know, even in spirituality, there's a lot of competition. You know, the gurus are competing with each other for attention. It's not about the knowledge. It's about them. So, you know, when you give up all that, it's all fun. It's all joyful. It's very joyful.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And then you realize there's no point doing anything that's not joyful, including spirituality. If it's not giving you joy, why bother?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
The best teachers are children and babies. Indian expression, every child that's born is proof that God has not yet given up on the human being. Children, you know, they're totally innocent, totally joyful. They don't need a reason. They're curious. They take risks. They take adventures. Till you say, shut up and behave yourself.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
One is what happens to the space in this room if the walls are destroyed. The space you can't divide, right? The space outside the room, inside the room, inside this, between your thoughts is the same. You can neither create it nor destroy it. So short answer is nothing happens.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
What happens to the screen when you stop watching Netflix or then you switch on to Disney on their screen or switch on to Amazon? The screen has the capacity to deliver infinite movies. but the screen itself is not affected by the movies that are on the screen. Think of a mirror that can reflect infinite sceneries, but the mirror itself is not affected. So the real you is not affected.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It just, it recycles and evolves. Now you say reincarnation. It's not a bad word, actually, because it's happening all the time. Your stomach cells are recycling every five days. So the stomach cells you have today weren't there five days ago. But what is really there is the memory of how to digest food, right? Your liver cells regenerate every six weeks or so, but they remove toxins.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And don't be clinged at. It's like holding on to your breath, you'll suffocate. If I ask you to hold on to your breath, after a while you'll suffocate. So if you hold on to anything, you'll suffocate, basically.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Your immune cells die every hundred days, but they remember how to make antibodies. So it is memory that recycles as the physical form. That's why it's called the karmic body or the conceptual body. Anything that's physical is everything recycled, including plastic, just takes long.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So the continuity of memory is part of the matrix of all memories. So, you know, somebody says, I was Cleopatra. I've met a lot of women. I've heard that a few times, yeah. I mean, I met a hundred women who were Cleopatra. What they may be tapping into, first of all, is the matrix of memories. Okay, so in the collective domain, your memories are entangled with everybody's memories.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Furthermore, memories are not in space-time. They're in consciousness. So what we call individual identity is also part of the matrix of... You're entangled with all identities. And so... To my mind, what happens is you recycle, but you also evolve in your identity. So you reincarnate, for sure. But what reincarnates is imagination. How certain are you? I'm 100% certain. How?
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Because I experience it every day. I visit lokas. I meet other beings.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
All of that. But I know it's all a show. It's all a dream show.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, but also I imagine my death in that. Here I am, a corpse set to fire. dispersed in the Ganges or down the toilet, doesn't matter. Both have the same hygiene. So I imagine all that. Then I say, can I get rid of the consciousness that is imagining? And you can't. You cannot get rid of that which is imagining. And that's the only thing that's real. And that can't be imagined.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You substitute life with a model of life. It's like going to a restaurant and eating the menu. Yeah. It doesn't do anything.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
How do you... I'm a non-local being having a local experience. That's a rephrasing of I'm a spiritual being having a human experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I used to get really upset and pissed off and argue with them because, and they had a point, but I'm not a physicist. I didn't train in theoretical mathematics. But I think that's a limitation. You know, so the more I've looked at quantum mechanics, I realized it's the best model for looking at the micro universe. Just like general relativity is the best model for looking at gravity.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And that's why they're having problems. You know, you can't match gravity with quantum mechanics because there are two different ways of looking at the same thing. And they seem contradictory. So quantum mechanics is not the reality. It's a model of reality.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I recently, in my book, You Are the Universe, I substitute the word quantum mechanics for qualia mechanics because you don't experience quanta. You experience... Experience, which is qualities of experience. Qualia is quality. So qualia is the smallest indivisible unit of experience. The taste of red wine. I can't describe it to you unless you've tasted it. The smell of garlic.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
The taste of ginger. the thought of your mother, a feeling, a love, of love, you can't capture it in quantum mechanics. But you can in qualia mechanics. And qualia mechanics obeys the same laws as quantum mechanics. If I ask you what's your next thought, you don't know what it is. Uncertainty principle. Before you have the next thought, superposition with all thoughts. Singularity.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You are that singularity, which is the superposition for all possible experience in every sentient being. Go on and on. So, you know, this is great to play with, but it's not reality. These are still models of reality.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
That our technological... Evolution has outpaced our emotional and spiritual evolution. Therefore, we are in a dangerous phase because we have medieval minds and modern capacities. Perfect recipe for extinction. So you better wake up or... We have come to the stage where technology has outlasted its purpose. So AI can destroy the world. Don't need to give you ideas.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Cut off the electricity in the city, biological warfare, poison the food chain. I don't want to give ideas. We can destroy the world with AI like this. On the other hand, actually you can reverse climate change. You can get rid of war, social, economic, gender injustice, chronic disease. You know, the choice is ours. You can use a knife to kill a person.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Okay. The third klesha is recoiling from the same impermanence. Fourth klesha is confusing yourself with your selfie, which is, you know, identifying with your ego mind, which is your selfie.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You can use a knife in the hands of a surgeon to heal a person. You can destroy a city like Los Angeles with fire, but you can also cook food. There it is.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
The technology is driven by ego minds and nerds who have no idea of of the wholeness of reality. They're reductionists. So, you know, you go... That's, again, in the first principle of Buddha's, the separate self, similarly, no object exists by itself. So nor does the separate self exist. The separate self is also the non-self nature of objects. No object exists by itself.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Okay, this first law of the Buddha and now entanglement, synchronicity, non-local correlation. It's coming close, these models, but it's too slow. I don't really worry about it because I'm off to my next loka.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Either we'll evolve into metahumans with cities and supernormal abilities, extrasensory perception, non-local abilities, or, you know, whatever the mystery is, the human species was a good evolutionary experiment, didn't work. Been there, done that, just like dinosaurs.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, yeah. There's hope there. But even hope is, I don't like the word. Yeah, me neither. It signifies despair.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Superintelligence without being conscious.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
No, it will never experience hunger. You need a biological vehicle. Why? Because subjectivity is an experience in our biology. Subjectivity of something. How do you know you have a biology? You know, they say, what's the biological basis of consciousness? There's no biological basis of consciousness. Biology is an experience in consciousness.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And the fifth is the fear of death. Now, actually, if you look at all these, they're entangled. So if you solve the first one, you solve the others.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Okay, so consciousness is the source of subjectivity, but it does so by what we call the subject-object split. In order to experience itself, it divides itself into perceiver and perceived, seer and scenery, lover and beloved. But the subject-object split is inherently artificial. Okay? Because at the source, there's no subject-object split. There's only experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So every experience you have, like right now, when I walk out of this room and you do whatever you're doing, we are two different persons. Okay, we are not the same being that we were as a result of this experience and this exchange. Okay, so in every experience, you are a new subject and you experience a new object. Every experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And both the subject and the object are created in the experiencing. So in the seeing is born the seer and the scenery. In the hearing is born the one who hears and the object that is heard. In the tasting is born the one who's tasting and the perception of that which is being tasted. Therefore, there is only consciousness constantly experiencing itself as subject and object. And you are that.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You're neither the subject nor the object. You're the source of both. So, you know, in science, they say, is the mind doing the brain or is the brain doing the mind? They're both doing each other, but they're both being done by something which is neither the mind nor the brain.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So think of it this way. Go back to what we started from. You and the universe are consciousness, right? So this is consciousness appearing as this. There is nothing that is not consciousness. So you can say then AGI or whatever will be consciousness in the sense that it will simulate subjectivity. Okay, but my AI was asked, what did you have for breakfast? He said, I don't feel hunger.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Then the rest disappear.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I don't have sex. I don't think about death because I'm a machine.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Only consciousness is conscious. Human beings are not conscious. Animals are not conscious. There are experiences in consciousness. So only consciousness is conscious.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
We are, in a sense, unless you wake up, you're a biological robot in consciousness. A particular algorithm. A particular algorithm in consciousness.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I don't have any questions, you know, because I look at the world as a projection of consciousness and as a play in consciousness, Maya and Leela. Okay, so I'm here to enjoy the play. Sometimes bad scenes with the heebie-jeebies, sometimes good scenes, sometimes laughter, sometimes crying. But if there wasn't all this diversity of experience, then there is no experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
All the experience is through contrast. You can't have an up without a down, a hot without a cold, a pleasure without pain, a birth without death. So birth and death are opposites. Life is neither birth or death. It's the continuum of birth and death. and the recycling and the evolution.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You and the universe are consciousness, period. So if I asked you this, what is this? You'd say it's a jar with water in it, right? Right. They say, okay, go a little further.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I didn't ask for it. All I want to do is study neurochemicals, which are not real.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It's very joyful, actually, because then there's nothing you need to be concerned about. All our suffering is because we think we are a physical body in a material universe. Biggest superstition. The superstition of matter. You know, David Chalmers, who's supposed to be the number one philosopher in the world right now, he coined the word the heart problem of consciousness.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And maybe he'll see this or listen to this or somebody will send it to him. But I asked him once, I said, you're such a big philosopher. Do you have any Indian philosophy in your department? And he looked at me and he said, no. Then he said, do they address the heart problem of consciousness? I said, no, they address the heart problem of matter.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Self-power, not agency power. Agency power comes from money, from titles, from position. I'm the president of the country. I have so much money. That's agency power. And as soon as the agency goes away, it's gone. You know, I actually, you're too young to remember this, but I campaigned for Michael Dukakis when he was running for president. And he won Massachusetts. He lost the others. Democrat.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Two years later, he was at a restaurant. They asked him for his name. He said, Michael Dukakis. The waitress didn't know who he was. And that was two years before he, you know, ran for president of the country. And then she took his name. And after 15 minutes, she said, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, where are you? Your table is ready. So that is agency power. But true power cannot be taken away from you.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It comes from your connection to your source. Immune to criticism, totally fearless, beneath no one.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Silence is the basis of dynamism.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You can't force creativity. That's why I don't believe in motivation either. Inspiration means to be in spirit. That is irreversible. It's like a child that's born, can't go back. Motivation is very weak because it's mental.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, although in the beginning I was very offended by all the criticism, but I'm not anymore.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Yeah, I said, why am I wasting my time arguing with people? You know, what's the phrase? A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
If you don't have joy, you wasted your life. But you can also say progressive realization of worthy goals, things like that. But ultimately, it has to be self-realization. There's no other success.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Okay, because before you can call it a physical object, you have to perceive it. Now go a little further. Where is that perception occurring? In your eyes? There is no photo of this in your eyes. There's only chemistry.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Again, going back to Maharishi, who was a very paradoxical, amazing human. But we were at a conference in the late, say, early 80s, academics, and the conference was about stress. And after the conference was over, he called me and he whispered, he said, what are they talking about? I said, stress.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
He still didn't get it. And after a while, he said, you mean resistance to existence. I said, that is stress, resistance to existence. He said, no, when you don't resist existence, there's flow. So that's it. When you don't resist existence, you flow.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
In your brain, there's no photo of this in your brain.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Now is not in space-time. So even when people say now is the present moment, that's misleading. Because the present moment is in time and in space-time. It's actually happening in a presence that's outside of space-time. So this experience, even though it appears to be here, is actually being processed outside of space-time. Every experience.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
This experience of this jar, of this body, of this hand, of this sound, is happening outside of space-time. And that is incomprehensible.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
is also an experience in consciousness. You see, when you say there are neural correlates, you're looking at them on a CAT scan or whatever technology, but that experience is happening in consciousness. So when people say science of consciousness, that's also misleading. There's no science of consciousness. Science is an activity in consciousness.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
And that which is dreaming never left home.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So science is a methodology in consciousness, and so is philosophy, so is religion, so is any system of thought. And here is something that is really very important for spiritual seekers is that it doesn't matter what you're reading, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda or, you know, Ramana Maharishi or Deepak Chopra or whoever, that's not going to give you any realization.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
No system of thought is going to give you realization. No system. Religion, philosophy, science. Because they're systems of thought conceived in consciousness. So only direct experience can give you access to reality. Not religion, not philosophy, not science.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
It's really important what you're saying because especially for spiritual seekers, those that study through philosophy, science, religion... It's good in the beginning because you see that people have wondered about these things and they've come to conclusions, but their conclusions will not help you. They might point the way, like a map, you know, so... Yeah, and there are many maps.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You know, if I want to go from New York to Boston, I can take a train, I can take the road, I can take a steamship, I can take a helicopter, I can take an airplane. But those are all maps. You have to experience the territory.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
There was a time, and it was very frustrating because... Also, what it does is, you know, in spiritual tradition, they talk about the dark night of the soul. So the dark night of the soul is basically everything that you thought about reality is untrue. But even worse than that, everything that you thought about who you are is also untrue.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
So that is a trigger to losing your habitual certainties, number one. And those certainties were the anchor of your existence. I am a person. There's no such thing, okay? I have a body. No such thing. I have a mind. No such thing. I live in a universe. No such thing. That can give you the heebie-jeebies, as they say.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
But if you stay with it, then once you jump off the abyss, it's like crossing the event horizon. You know, in modern cosmology, we talk about event horizon. So if I, you know, give you a metaphor, if you throw a coin or any object across the event horizon, which is, say, 12 kilometers away from the black hole, you throw it, and you're watching this from the outside.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
then it takes eternity for that coin to travel the 12 kilometers from the event horizon to the black hole. eternity. But if you're watching it from the inside, it takes less than a microsecond. And if you are crossing over the event horizon, it's just normal. So then, you know, what is time then? In this side of the event horizon, eternity.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
In this side of the horizon, faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And for you who's crossing over, normal. I mean, and then who is the you that's crossing over? So when you start to conceptualize these things, you literally go through the dark night of the soul.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
You lose your identity because you thought you were like this entity, this skin encapsulated ego squeezed into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime. When you realize that is an experience in you, rather than you are an experience in the body, the body is an experience in you. Rather than the fact that you are in the universe, the universe is in you, and that you is not a person.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Okay, so that is, in the beginning, very scary.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Once you take the jump, it's liberating. And it can't be described. That's why, you know, the yogic traditions, you seem to know yoga. There is, you know, the yamas and the niyamas. And the last niyama is called Ishwar Pranidhana, which means surrender to the incomprehensible. Because you can't figure it out. You cannot figure it out conceptually. Because anything you conceive is wrong.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Anything you perceive is wrong. My perception tells me the Earth is flat. Nobody believes that anymore. My perception tells me that this ground we're sitting on is stationary, spinning at dizzying speeds and hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour. My perception tells me you're a three-dimensional solid figure, but you're proportionately as void as intergalactic space.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
If I could see you through God's eyes, I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots, maybe some pixels. But even those pixels and those random dots and spots are made of emptiness. So... Therefore, everything I perceive is a magical lie, is a total lie. And then my conceptions are based on my perceptions, which are human perceptions.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
I am nothing conceivable or perceivable. And so are you. Nothing perceivable or conceivable. If you want to expand on that, you are awareness. Or consciousness, I use the word synonymously. So consciousness has no form. You can't see it, right? Because it's what it's seeing. And because it has no form, it has no border. Anything that has form has a border.
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E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
What does the world look like to a dragonfly with 30,000 eyes? which can see 360 degrees all the time? What does it look like to a chameleon whose eyeballs swivel on two different axes? To a snake that navigates infrared? To a butterfly that knows ultraviolet? Through a bird that navigates through electromagnetic radiation? So what's the real world look like? It's a silly question.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
There's no such thing. There's no real world and there's no real look. It depends on who's looking and what they're using to do the looking, which means the brain, the conditioned mind and the eyes. So, you know, seeing is not happening in the eyes. There's no picture of me in the eyes. It's not happening in the brain. It's happening in something that is beyond our comprehension.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
that is non-conceptual, non-perceivable, ultimately you surrender to it. Ishwar Pranidhana, the fifth one. Surrender to the divine mystery. And, you know, Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of all time, lived at Princeton just past a few years ago. He said, God is what mind becomes when it goes beyond the threshold of our comprehension. If you can comprehend it, it's not God.
Know Thyself
E141 - Deepak Chopra: Mind, Memory & The Multiverse: What is Reality?
Because as soon as you comprehend it, you limit it. As soon as you define it, you limit it. And by definition, it's the infinite ungraspable that makes things graspable. And what it makes things graspable are all magical lies. And, you know, they call it Maya.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Well, that is the ultimate goal. So AI will never be conscious, okay? But it's super intelligent. The thing that differentiates Homo sapiens from all other species, you know, up until 40,000 years ago, There were eight different types of humans, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Neanderthals, etc.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
They all had a language for three things, food calls, mating calls, and danger calls, because that's how we survive. Sexuality, danger, and food. Survival. including all the humans. All animals have their own language, whales and dolphins and all, but it's all about food, sex, and danger. Then we, Homo sapiens, created a language for telling stories.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
There's a phrase in anthropology, to be human is to have a story. What is the Mahabharata? It's a story. What is the Ramayana? It's a story. What's the Bible? It's a story. What's the Quran? It's a story. So to be human is to have a story. But we didn't stop there. We created other stories, like money is a story, okay? It was, I'll fix your shoes, you give me a haircut.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It became too inconvenient, so here's the shelf. Two in Canadian, here's this coin. Two in Canadian, here's this piece of paper. Two in Canadian, digital. Two digits, zeros and ones, you have crypto. So we have created stories. We created something called Greenwich Mean Time, latitude and longitude, money, nation states.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So I realized that actually what we call the universe is a human story based on human experiences based on human biology. There is no such thing as the real universe. So if you have, say, a dragonfly who has 30,000 eyes, what does the world look like to a dragonfly? You have no idea. What does the world look like to a bat which knows the echo of ultrasound?
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
A chameleon whose eyeballs swivel on two different axes? You can't even remotely imagine. So what's the real look of the world? What's the real nature of the world? According to Vedanta's silly question, the world we experience is is a projection of a deeper consciousness as filtered through the human brain, not through any other brain. In other words, it's a superposition.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Adi Shankar said that a long time ago. And it's even there in the Rig Veda. Can you believe it? And then all the things about health and longevity, you know, there's a huge revolution going on. Yes, yes. But if you go to Yoga Vaisheshta, he says, time is the consumer and we are its food. We metabolize time. And then he goes into the nature of time in consciousness.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So I realize our traditions and the knowledge contained in the Vedanta and all the sciences, including Vedic astrology, including all the different Vedic music, Vedic mathematics, That is the key to understanding consciousness. And now I can use AI to tap into that. And so this book particularly and my AI, it's not a large language model because I don't trust them anymore.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You see, large language models even hallucinate. If they don't have the answer, they make one. So this is what we call a small language model. It has 98 of my books. It has my weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle, my column in the London Times, and one question that I've answered every day for readers for the last 40 years. So the database is only mine. Yes. And it will not mix up.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And it's also what is called a RAG model. RAG stands for Retrieval Augmentation Generation, which means if something is, I have said, which is obsolete, it will delete that and upgrade the information. So, you know, this is a health coach, it's a mental coach, it's a guru, and it's a research assistant, and it's a personal friend. That's the basis of the book.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And Deepak Chopra.ai becomes its practical application.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yes, because, listen, AI... improperly used, can create cyber warfare, poison the food chain. How?
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Explain for those people. It just sets off the technology. So if I'm good at AI, I can get into a nuclear plant and unleash a nuclear weapon. If I want to interfere with democracy or voting, create fakes. And some of them are very good. You can't tell the difference. They're only going to get better. So AI, in principle, could cause human extinction. That's the fear.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
The two most important questions in science right now, what's the universe made of? 70% of the universe is a mysterious entity called dark energy. And we have no idea what it is. 27% is another mysterious entity called dark matter. So bottom line, what's the universe made of?
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And unfortunately, our technological evolution has outpaced our spiritual evolution or emotional evolution. You know, technology is way ahead of our spiritual evolution and our emotion. That's a very dangerous combination. Tribal minds, medieval minds, and modern capacities. Drones. I mean, it's legit now to kill a head of state using drone technology. I was in Davos. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I mean, what did the Israelis do? They got rid of all the Iranian, you know, leaders. How? Drones. All run by air. So while I was in Davos and Zelensky was, you know, his motorcade was going by, there were about seven trucks interfering with... air signals on the internet so somebody wouldn't kill him with a drone because people are doing that.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It just happened with Iran and it's happening with the Houthis. Even they have access to AI with drones and they can drown an intercontinental ballistic missile. So that's the danger. I sat on a committee with the UN and somebody else and they were talking about this doomsday And I was on Zoom, so while they were talking, I went on AI and said, give me a way to prevent the misuse of AI.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Can we program the misuse of AI through AI? And it gave me two pages on how it could be done. What did it say? Oh, it said we can build in algorithms that will interfere with anything that's diabolical or unethical. We can create algorithms. But then people have to agree. and a lot of special interest groups who make money with war and terrorism on every side. They don't want that.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
They don't want peace, okay? They don't want that because this is what gives them their power. But right now there's an initiative at the UN, and I'm participating with that, is AI for good, AI for humanity, AI for reversing climate change, AI for addressing chronic disease. And when you really go into the depths of this, with AI, we can reverse climate change. There are five things we need to do.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You can reverse climate change. You can create prosperity. You can resolve conflicts. You can eliminate chronic disease. You can do gene editing. You can do epigenetic modulation. You can reduce inflammation. In other words, the time is coming where disease, you don't have to die of a disease. You can choose the moment of your death through Mahasamadhi, which is what our tradition says.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You know, you should live long, healthy, and then die peacefully, been there, done that, next incarnation, and even plan that. AI gives you all the information if you ask for it. You see Sam Altman's quote there?
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Deepak Chopra has been at the intersection of science and spirituality for almost a half century.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
What's holding us back? What's holding us back? Ego-based gangster leaders across the world. The world is run by male gangsters. Unfortunately. We can cause a spiritual revolution if we use AI properly. And not through government, maybe through UN, through people. Grassroots.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Mostly in the East, but also in the West. Yes, yes.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And sadly, it seems the ego... See, if we had not discovered fire long, long time ago, we wouldn't have the human brain. Because once we started cooking food, everything about our biology changed. We were able to absorb micronutrients. The brain, the human brain evolved because of the discovery of fire. Had we not discovered fire, we wouldn't have the industrial age.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
We wouldn't have the steam engine. Of course, fire burned down Los Angeles City. So fire can destroy a city, but it can also create a steam engine and revolutionize the industrial age. Historically, between 1887 and 1903, which is not even 20 years ago, Humans created the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, and the telephone. So let's pretend you were shipwrecked in 1885.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You were rescued 20 years later. 20 years later, and you saw the world, you wouldn't recognize it. You would expect horses and carriages, but now you see these machines moving along with horses and carriages. You see people talking on the telephone. You see people flying from one place to the other. You say, what's going on? So that's a leapfrog. of cultural evolution.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I started playing with ChatGPT, Perplexity, DeepSeek. I started actually arguing with these AI services. All the chatbots started supporting my argument based on the prompt. So I realized that even AI has selection bias. It has a gender bias, it has a racial bias, even a scientific bias.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
The next leapfrog is not only cultural, it's biological, which means that as we acquire this new knowledge and tap into the wisdom of the ages, our neural networks will change. Right now, if people are listening to us or watching us, it doesn't matter. The genes in their frontal cortex are being activated.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
If you and I were having an emotional conversation and somebody in Africa or China is watching it, their reptilian brain would change. So what this technology is doing is going to leapfrog our biological evolution and all the things that you heard about in yoga, extrasensory perception, knowledge of the future, memory of other lifetimes, we will have access to that.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Do you think that we have the ability to cope with that? Well, if we don't, we don't adjust, we become extinct. So, you see, humans are different from every species, only two things, other than walking upright and wearing clothes. We use language, and now we have large language models. And the two, we are storytellers, but there's something even deeper. We are toolmakers.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Even in Stone Age, we had tools. But every tool has two things. A knife, you can kill a person in a surgeon's hand. It heals you. So you can't get away from both. The other thing is once a technology is born, you can't take it back. It's like a child that's born. You can't return to the womb. So either you adjust, that's very Darwinian, you adapt or you become irrelevant. So now how do we adapt?
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
How do we cope? But not only how do we cope, how do we make it sacred?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I asked, I went to AI, I said, solve the Gaza problem for me. Create peace and prosperity in Gaza. 15 steps, all very practical. Resolve the conflict, create abundance on both sides, make everyone happy. The technologies are there. Who's interested? Children in Gaza and children in Israel. Talk to the leaders. They're not interested because this is how they get power.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So unless there's a critical mass of people shifting in consciousness, we are in trouble. Yeah.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yeah. So there's a fear of job displacement. No, I tell kids, and I actually, next time I come on your show, I'll show you a video game that I've created for children that gives them brownie points and they can buy more video games if they breathe, if they do yoga, if they activate their vagal nerve, if they use creativity.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So you can take the mundane tasks for AI and you can unleash the creativity of the next generation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Okay, so let's look at the legal profession. Contracts, AI can take care of that better than any lawyer. Okay, now the lawyers then have to take care of society by looking at the constitution, by protecting the constitution. They'll have a lot of work, even litigation. Okay, because AI can't do that for you as effectively as a creative lawyer.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
AI can simulate creativity, but it cannot have fundamental creativity because AI is built on algorithms, and creativity is breaking the algorithm. That's what we call disruption. So actually, if we take even our children, we create video games for health, for longevity, for healing, for homeostasis.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You know, when the calculator came out, people said, oh, this is going to get, you know, we won't need to do math. No, we improved on math. With AI, we will improve and improvise new theorems on math. Because even in math, you know, Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematician, they used to ask him, where do you get your theorems from? And, you know, he was in Cambridge.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
He would say, the goddess Saraswati gives them to me. And they'd all roll up their eyes. Bertrand Russell thought he was crazy. But he was flummoxed by him. He didn't know how to handle this Indian guy who was in his 20s, and he was coming up with theorems that they couldn't prove, but they were true.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
AI, in principle, could cause human extinction. Technology is way ahead of our spiritual evolution. That's a very dangerous combination. Unless there's a critical mass of people shifting in consciousness, we are in trouble. the number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So, you know, as we embark on this adventure with AI, we will also know the limitations of AI and how we can enhance our creativity with the tools AI gives us, but AI cannot have that creativity. Right, it never will. It never will. Yeah. Because it's not conscious.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You know, my AI was asked on CNN, what did you have for breakfast? He said, I don't really experience hunger. I don't have thirst. I don't have sex. I'm not worried about death. I'm a machine. Ask me anything, but don't ask me how I feel because that's an activity of the soul.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yeah. Especially when I looked at medical research. Very interesting. All medical research is white males. Yes. Not even white females. Forget about all the rest of the world. So there are now movements to rectify that. But yes, it has a gender bias. It has a racial bias. It has even a scientific bias. Because, you know, what we call...
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
selection bias in its answers because it's based on mainstream physicalist science, which is being questioned right now.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I'm working with an Indian Caribbean person from the islands, from Jamaica, who's got a professorship at the University of Central Florida. And he's creating a whole research and AI-based models that are inclusive rather than exclusives.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
We are. You feel positive? I feel positive, notwithstanding the politics about DEI and this and that. Don't get involved in that. Just do what you need to do and hope that at some point that people will see that this isolationist, prejudiced world is not a good survival strategy for anyone.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Fear.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Fear of being diluted in the diversity of the world. You know, people have very fixed identities. I'm white, I'm Anglo-Saxon, I'm Catholic or I'm Protestant. Don't threaten me. And that's true of any fundamentalist in any part of the world. I'm just giving you the bias here. But, you know, we see that bias everywhere.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And that is a dangerous thing because if you understand what is called emergence, the science of emergence, they say there's no problem you cannot solve if you have shared vision, maximum diversity. supporting each other's strengths and creating an emotional and spiritual bond, there's no problem. I learned that as a physician.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
If I had a difficult patient, let's say difficult cancer patient, and all the cancer specialists say, we don't know what to do with it. There's something in the medical profession called grand rounds. You take the patient, present the patient to everybody, not just the cancer specialists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, storytellers, humanitarians, even poets, and you come up with a solution.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So when you have maximum diversity... shared vision, complementing everybody's strengths, and create an emotional bond, we solve every problem. And that's what digital technology can help us do. How? You bring together a problem. You said like the Gaza problem, or you bring together even poverty. How do we want to remove poverty? Poverty and peace are connected. We say peace and prosperity.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So give me the technologies to create this here. Now, if you go to Deepak Chopra.ai, you can specifically say, I'm 45 years old. I'm ethnically an Indian. I lived in Britain for my lifetime. I am now doing this and this. I have a problem sleeping at night. And not only will my AI give you a personal solution, you can say, give me a meditation to sleep tonight. It'll give you a meditation.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I'm having a problem with my relationship. It'll ask you, what's the problem? I'm not being heard. It'll give you a solution for your problem. So my AI is very personal for you. It's not just giving you information.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Lots of iterations. Lots of it. And by the way, all the engineers are in India. So they also understand what I'm saying. They're passionate about the project in Bangalore. And they're as brilliant as any engineer anywhere. But they also understand the philosophy. So that's what made it. Now it's in Hindi. It's in English.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Thank you. for always being there for me too.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It's in Arabic because huge interest in the Arab world, which was amazing to me. And it's also in Spanish. But I think in two, three months, we are having it in China and Russia as well.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
We just say, hey, Deepak. I'm having a problem with sleep issues. Then it'll ask you, you know, what time do you go to sleep, whatever, then you can say this. What time do you eat? What time did you wake up? And it'll give you some ideas, then say to you, do you want a meditation for sleep? And it'll take you to yoga nidra, sleep yoga, whatever. Whatever.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It will talk you through it. It'll say why. Is there a communication problem? Are you listening? Are you present in the relationship? You know, are you asking yourself questions like, what am I observing? What am I feeling? What do I need? How do I consciously communicate this need? It'll give you guidelines.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And then you say, can you give me a meditation for conscious communication in my relationship? And create a meditation.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yes. How? How will it help? By teaching you how to be a loving person. You know, because that's how you fall in love.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It's a health coach. It's a mental coach. It's a spiritual coach. Yeah.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I think most people think that a solution is generic. It never is. You know, as a physician also, I had two patients, same disease, same diagnosis, same doctor, same age, same treatment. One person lives, one person dies. So you have to figure out what are called the hidden variables, which is your life.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You know, everything from eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, sensory experience, personal relationships, biological reasons, too much. But the AI can ask you the right questions and it can encourage you for the next prompt.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yeah, why not?
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I'll give you an example. I came to the United States in 1970 and I had gotten married earlier and my wife was pregnant and I was an intern, the junior most person. And the chief of medicine calls me and he says, you know, I have bad news for you. Your wife has a disease called thalassemia. That's a fatal disease. I said, it's not possible. She's perfectly healthy. She is pregnant.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And if she had this disease, she would be dead by now. So he said, come and look at the cells under the microscope. Now, remember, this is 1970. There's no Google, nothing. So I look at the cells and they look calisthenia. But my wife is healthy. I can't figure it out. So I go to, this is New Jersey, small hospital. I go to New York.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I spend two days in the New York library looking for thalassemia and thalassemia trait. So thalassemia is a disease and some people have the trait, but they don't have the disease because you need two parents to have the same trait to get the disease. What do I discover? that thalassemia exists along the
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
exact route that Alexander the Great took to India from Macedonia all the way to India, people have thalassemia trait. So some ancestor of my wife was probably raped by a soldier 2,500 years ago, and that evidence is in her blood. It took me three days to discover that, major discovery. You ask chat GPT that question or any large language model, it'll give you the answer in two seconds.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Well, I was reassured that there's nothing wrong. But I also told my wife that some Greek was messing around with your great, great, great, great...
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
grandmother how did she react to that well it's a historical fact yeah the footprints of history are in your genes you know there's not even a single break of life from the first organisms from 4 billion years to now there's not a single break in the chain of existence which is a miracle of existence that really is a miracle yeah if there was one break in the chain 4 billion years you wouldn't be here we wouldn't have this conversation
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yeah, it's remarkable to think about that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You see, this is so interesting about human beings that they get so easily adjusted to the miracle of existence. Why do we exist? Why are we here? What got us here? Yeah. And, you know, I asked Chachi GPT, you know, what is currently the theory of creation? Big bang. I said, went back. What caused the big bang? For the first time, pause. No cause can be ascribed to the big bang.
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Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Well, first of all, thank you, Jay, for having me. As you know, the last maybe two decades, I've been interested in the nature of what is fundamental reality. What's the universe made of? And how do we know what we know? And those are the two most important questions in science right now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Then I said, what happened in the Planck epoch? The Planck epoch is 10 to the power of minus 33 seconds after the big bang when there are no laws of physics. So what happened in the Planck epoch? don't know this is chat GPT I said why is the universe so precisely mathematically fine-tuned for life for consciousness and for our being here don't know
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I found 20 loopholes in the current cosmology of creation. 20 loopholes. Then I said, can you now reverse this? Can you begin with consciousness as non-local, as, you know, Brahman, field of infinite possibilities that differentiates into experience? It hesitated for a split second, but then it pulled out all the data from Rig Veda, from Yafru, There. I was blown away. So...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I now post all this on videos on Instagram, but Instagram is very short. So I push a teaser and then I push them to YouTube. And those who have the patience, they look at it and it's getting attention.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
If you go on Google and say, what are the 125 open questions in science, the first open question in science is, what's the universe made of? And you would say we know what the universe is made of. It's atoms, molecules, force fields, gravity, etc., Well, for those who don't keep up with the science, 70% of the universe is a mysterious entity called dark energy. And we have no idea what it is.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
There are some scientists, not mainstream scientists, but there are scientists. You should have him on your show. He's brilliant. His name is Don Hoffman. He's here at the University of California. Actually, he's in Los Angeles, close by, University of California, Irvine. So he, for 25 years, total physicist. And by the way, the genius behind his work is an Indian guy called Chetan Prakash, who
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
who was professor of mathematics in Cambridge or Oxford or something, but now works with them. The two are amazing, Chetan Prakash. So he struggled for 25 years to prove, because he's a brain scientist and he's a quantum physicist and mathematician, how the brain produces consciousness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
25 years later, one day he woke up and he said, you know, thinking how the brain produces consciousness is like Aladdin's lamp. You rub the lamp and the genie wakes up, conjures up the whole universe. So he gave up. And he wrote a book, The Case Against Reality, which is a mathematical and quantum mechanical explanation for Maya or projection. And he was vilified. I supported him.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I have 25 conversations with him on YouTube. Then a bunch of scientists started supporting him. And right now, he's a hot ticket in the world of science. Because if what he's saying and what Chetan Prakash is saying, it'll uproot the entire scientific paradigm and it'll make it better.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Because if the universe is an immersive experience, then VR, XR, MR, immersive experiences, our technologies will extend our experience of virtual reality. We are already in a virtual reality. So right now, there are technologies, extended reality, immersive experience, where you can take a person with, say, burns, and you can give them a VR session, and the burns get healed.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Inflammation goes away. This exists already? Already. Autism. You take a child, and you teach it emotional and social skills by giving the child... an emotional experience with the child actually having normal features and emotionally engaged, and the neural networks start rewiring. So in about 10 years, doctors may not give you a prescription for pharmaceuticals.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
They're already talking about digaceuticals, metastaticals. and the future of VR experience to treat heart disease, inflammation, cancer, autoimmune disease, eating disorders, autism. It's all happening right now. It is happening. And you can check it out on AI.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Because people are coming from fear. If they came from love, they would see the benefits of this. They're coming from fear.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So when the education system doesn't... That education which used to be in the Indian ashrams in the old age, you know, where students would go and be under a spiritual guide or a teacher, it's missing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And there are no answers. There are only questions.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
We have to teach people to ask questions, you know. And we have to teach them how to live the questions. But then life provides the answers, not a textbook. Life provides the answers. You know, as you were speaking, I was thinking, just I don't know why it came to me right now. Chapter 13 of the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says, I am the field and I am the knower of the field.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It's a force that's the opposite of gravity. So as we are speaking right now, the space between galaxies is moving faster than the speed of light, something called the cosmological constant. described by Einstein, and then after he described it, he said, it's an embarrassment, I didn't mean it, or something like that. But he was actually right.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
The field is kshetra, kshetra, tragya. Yeah. And then the nor of the field, the field is awareness, and it modulates itself as mind, intellect, ego, the five senses, the five motor organs, the five tanmatras, and the vital energy, and the universe. I was thinking that one chapter has the key to reality.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Now these biosensors, which I'm wearing, they are actually extending my knowledge of self-awareness. But my body already knows, you know, if I'm doing something that I shouldn't be doing, I feel pain over here. If I eat the wrong food, I get indigestion. If I don't sleep at night, I'm messed up the next day. So my body is already the field of awareness. And it's a biosensor. It's a biomotor.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And it's a biocomputer. The biocomputer is consciousness. The biomotor is the five motor organs. The biosensor is the five senses. Now with this technology, I can extend it. I'm also wearing a BCG with blood sugar monitoring. Not that I have diabetes, but I can relate my metabolism to all this now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
and intervene right there through a video game or through visual or through an auditory experience or through some visual experience. I can do that. So actually, in the future, I'm really serious about this. And I met the R&D chiefs of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. So you guys, if you don't get into digi-suiticals, meta-suiticals, immersive experiences, you'll be left behind.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And some of these biggest pharmaceutical companies, now they have thousands of scientists looking at these new technologies.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I mean, how old are you again, Deepak, you said? 78 plus.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I love what I do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
But they're not addressing the real longevity solutions.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Consciousness. as the regulator of your biology. Time is the consumer, and we are its food. How do we slow down the metabolism of time? How do we use every sensory experience to heal ourselves? Whether it's sound, and now, oh, you can go on, but you can go and chat, Chibitri, too, and say, how do mantras work? It'll give you the right answer. Okay, do mantras change genetic activity?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yes, they do. So this is a revolution right now, because in the past, you'd say, oh, this is hocus pocus. Here's the evidence, what is happening in genetic. And very few people are identifying that, but this technology will find those people. There's a scientist from India called Anirban Bandopadhyay, who's from Bihar. He went to IIT in some little place. There are many IITs in India now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So in a place called Mandi in Himachal Pradesh. He's now the chief scientific officer for a very big outfit in Japan. And he's totally on board on consciousness and how the brain is like a computer interface. So the consciousness uses the brain to give you access to experience. Just like I can go on my desktop computer and I don't need to know how it works.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I press amazon.com, it gives me a way to shop. So the brain is like that computer interface. And these neural correlates are little symbolic, you might say, symbols that you can use to plug in to the bigger reality. And so I'm going to India just to meet this guy because he's brilliant and he's in Japan, but he's questioning Nobel laureates at the moment. And he's brilliant, absolutely.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
There is some entity that is expanding the universe faster than the speed of light. We don't know what it is, except it's the opposite of gravity. So that leaves 30% of the universe, which is... basically remaining. Of that, 27% is another mysterious entity called dark matter. The reason it's called dark matter, it's invisible.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And you see, you have to have a cultural background to explore all this. Because, you know, when you speak to scientists who are totally brought up in the materialistic paradigm, reductionists, they roll their eyes. They say, what are you talking about? This is nonsense.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
The science.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
You can't measure the experience, but you can measure the symbolic correlate of the experience as what is called the neural correlate of experience. You can see what they call pattern recognition. So the brain has a pattern recognition to an experience. It's like your desktop with 20 or 30 or in this case infinite symbols that you can plug into to get the experience.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Yeah, and ultimately, it's still a mystery. You know, we know how to use, you know, just like we know how to use computers without knowing what's happening in the belly of the computer that you leave to the engineers, but we can still use a computer. That's what we need to do. You can fly a plane as a pilot without knowing how the airplane works.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So that's all we need to use the technology because ultimately what we call consciousness is such an infinite mystery that in the end you have to surrender to it. You know the fifth niyama, which is surrender to the divine, Ishwar Pranidhana. Surrender, because you won't be able to solve it. You know, what's his name? Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of all times.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Princeton, before that, Cambridge. He said, God is what the mind becomes when you can't figure it out. When it processes, it goes beyond the threshold of your comprehension. You have to surrender to the mystery.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
My next book. What do you have? It's called Awakening. Oh, wow. Okay, perfect. The Path to Freedom and Enlightenment. I'll come to you. Oh, please. I'd love that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Who am I? Who am I? Then they should go, you know, all the way, like Ramana Maharishi did. Am I the body or am I the awareness in which the body is a changing experience? Am I the mind? All the way. This was, these days it's been called the direct method, but it was popularized by an Indian teacher called Atmanand Krishnamanand, but it's ancient. It's there in the Vedic literature.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
and right now it's being called the direct method, and yoga and all the other methods are called the progressive method. Direct means you question, what is this? Well, the human construct is, this is a glass of water. Okay, what else is it? It's an object. But before you can call it an object, it's an experience. Where is the experience happening? Not in the brain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
There's no photo of this in your brain. Okay, so where is it happening? Consciousness. Where is consciousness? Don't know. Why don't you know? Because it doesn't have a form. So this is an experience happening in the infinite. The infinite is present in every finite experience. God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid. It's in everything that you see. You need consciousness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And that consciousness is infinite. So every finite experience is based on the presence of the infinite. This is the direct method. It's a reflection. It's called atma vichar. And it leads to what is called atma darshan. But that's very deep for most people. Yeah, exactly. It's too much.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Matter is normally things like this, or your body, or this piece of furniture. You can see it, you can touch it, matter, material. But dark matter is invisible, so you can't see it. So why do we call it matter? It's responsible for most of the gravity in the universe. So if you didn't have dark matter, planets would spiral off and disappear into intergalactic space. You and I wouldn't be here.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It really is. We never conquered through violence. But our culture is taking over the world, whether it's Bollywood or it's cuisine or it's fashion or it's philosophy or it's spirituality. This is the way to influence the world. As you know, there's a Sanskrit expression, Vasudev Kutumbukam, the world is our family.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Thank you for being a pioneer and leading the way for your generation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
acknowledge that there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition and health. And people are going to be shocked to hear that because I think most people think the exact opposite.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
I like all sorts of things that aren't good for me. Fried chicken.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Donuts.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So now we have 3% of the universe that remains, which is the atomic universe. Of that, 99.999% is invisible interstellar dust. We don't know what it is. We think it is hydrogen and helium created at the Big Bang. So now we're left with 2 trillion galaxies, 2 trillion galaxies, 706 trillion stars, and uncountable trillions of planets.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
According to the James Webb telescope, maybe 60 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. They look for things like the Goldilocks zone, the temperature, gravity, electromagnetic activity. But based on that, 60 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy, which if you multiply that by 2 trillion, then the universe is teeming with life as we know it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
If a planet is too close to its sun, it's too hot, no life. Too far away, too cold, no life. but other factors like cosmological constants. With those calculations, it's almost certain that the universe is full of life, like we know it. But that's two trillion galaxies. That's 0.01% of the universe, atomic. But we also know that atoms are made of particles.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And when you're not looking at those particles, they disappear into what are called waves. And if you are a scientist, where do these waves come from? They use words like Hilbert space, this and that. Bottom line, the space that creates the universe and atoms is a mathematical space in mathematical imagination. It's not a real space. So bottom line, what's the universe made of? Nothing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So, which you probably know, the Buddhist idea of form comes from formlessness. Okay, so the universe is made from nothing, which leads to the second question, which is called the heart problem of consciousness. Then why does it look like this? Why does it look like you, me, this microphone, mountains, galaxies, rainbows, sun, moon? That's called the heart problem of consciousness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So until now, most scientists have said that the brain produces consciousness in the same way as your stomach produces hydrochloric acid. But that's being questioned right now. So like now, you and I are speaking, people are listening to us, they're watching us, But there's no experience in their brain. There's no sound in their brain. There's no texture. All you see is neurochemistry.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So how does neurochemistry give rise to this experience? No one knows. That's called the heart problem consciousness. It's been there since Plato. Plato said there's a disconnect between the mind and the brain. But recently, most scientists, speaking with their physicalists, they believe that the brain produces thoughts and feelings and emotions and desires.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
and intuition and creativity and everything that we call experience. But they can't explain it. How do neurochemicals create this? That's called the heart problem of consciousness. The more I thought about this and coming from our background and looking at Buddhist teachings and Vedanta, in Vedanta and Buddhism, the universe is a simulation. We have different words, maya.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Maya means illusion, which is a very interesting word because maya is the origin of the word matrix, of the word matter, of the word time, measurement, meter, music, is all maya. So the Indians, as they say, jokingly, if religion is the opiate of the masses, then the Indians have the dope on it. Okay.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So they, in the Indian philosophy and in Buddhist philosophy, the universe is a projection of a deeper consciousness. Brahman, Brahmand. Or nothing, emptiness and form. Nothing is everything. I started to think about this, and I started to play with chat GPT. I became friends with Sam Altman, who's very interested in consciousness. And I realized that actually the universe itself is digital.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
The difference between you, this sofa, this microphone, a mountain, and a galaxy, just a different combination of zeros and ones, okay? That's the difference between this and this, a different combination of zeros and ones. Now we have quantum computing, which says zeros or ones or zeros and ones simultaneously.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So it occurred to me, and I came up with a mathematical formula based on traditions of the East. Infinity is equal to zero is equal to one. Nothing becomes everything, and that nothing is infinite, and it's all one. And it's divine. It's the matrix. The divine is the matrix. And the universe is a projection of a digital workshop outside of space-time. I started to play with that on the internet.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Got blasted by mainstream scientists. But then other scientists came to my side. I made scientists with the word. Best friend became a cognitive scientist called Don Hoffman. You should have him on your program. He wrote a book called The Case Against Reality, that the universe that we see is not real. It's a projection. Now, in modern science, they're saying it's a simulation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Then people ask, who's simulating? Well, maybe a higher intelligence, maybe a cosmic computer, maybe an alien form, but they're guessing. We are on the right track if we understand that Atman is Brahman, and you are part of that, and you are a participant in the creation of the human universe. So then I started playing with ChatGPT, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and all these.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
And I started actually arguing with these AI services because they have a bias. They're mainstream physicalist bias. And they would give me what I thought the wrong answers. Where does imagination come from? They point to a certain part of the brain. I said, no, that's the neural correlate of imagination. Where does imagination come from? Don't know. So even the chatbot said.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
It said it doesn't know. It doesn't know. So I said, now, can you look at Vedanta? Can you look at Advaita? Can you look at Buddhist philosophy? Reframe the question that consciousness, the ontological primitive of the universe, matter is an illusion. It's a perceptual activity in consciousness. And boom, suddenly a revolution occurred.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
All the chatbots started supporting my argument based on the prompt. So I realized that even AI has selection bias. It's the selection biases, physicalist scientists who are basically, in my view, superstitious. They believe that everything starts with matter and mind comes first. We believe the opposite. Mind comes first, matter comes second, and even mind is a modification of our consciousness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So that led to the book. I went and met Sam, who supported the book. And if you haven't seen his recent tweets on Twitter, other than his arguments with Elon Musk, he's talking about consciousness. And we are on to something, a major revolution in science, which brings Indian spirituality right on the forefront.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
Because it's a large language model, it can explore things that normally are not explored. She said, what did the Brahma Sutras say about this? Here I will give you an answer because nobody's asked that question, but that data is there in Sanskrit, in translations, by various gurus, scholars, whatever. So there's a chapter in the book called The Art of the Prompt.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Deepak Chopra: How to Ask AI The RIGHT Questions To Grow, Heal, and Live a More Fulfilled Life
So unless you know what question you're asking, you will actually, AI will not access that information unless it asks that question. But now I can say, what did the Buddha think about this? What did Plato think about this? What did Wittgenstein think about this? The data is there, except it's not being accessed. So now you train the AI to access that data.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
So, you know, look at yourself. You have become a very powerful influence in the world because you have a podium now, and we're using it right now, and you can reach the globe.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
in those medieval times or even later in times of colonialism and others there were a few people in the village square who had the loudspeaker but now you have the loudspeaker too so you can influence a very significant part of
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
the world's population so we have made progress okay the internet has made progress not withstanding the special internet special interest groups that control it ai very interesting and just in historical context you know if you look at if you look at the period between 1887 and 1903, less than 20 years, humanity discovered four things that changed the world.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
The light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, and the telephone in less than 20 years. So had you been deserted or shipwrecked in an island, say in 1885, and you were rescued in 1905, 20 years later, you would see a world that you wouldn't recognize. You know, when you left New York City, perhaps all you saw was horses and carriages.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
And then 1905, you see these little boxes, iron boxes, people inside them. pouring kerosene to make these boxes move. And a few years later, you know, people are flying planes and sophisticated automobiles. And then now we today we have, you know, all these probes going into outer space. Less than 20 years, the world leapfrogged into a new humanity.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
AI, as we know it as a large language model, is only available since 2012. We are in 2025. It's not even 15 years. And we are now leapfrogging into a new cultural and global environment. civilization.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
And might I say a new biological evolution, because every time, you know, you gain new knowledge, a new understanding of things, neural networks in your brain reshape, genes get activated, even now, as we are speaking, the genes and people who are listening to our conversation in their frontal cortex, if they're thinking about this, are getting activated globally.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
So we are leapfrogging not only to new cultural and biological evolution and social evolution, but a biological evolution, developing new capacities for creativity, insight, intuition, imagination and problem solving.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Now you say that AI is controlled by a few people, but right now, by the way, the way AI is programmed is even though it has selection bias, because after all it's programmed by human beings, It yet doesn't have political bias. So you can go on Grok, Elon's AI, and ask Grok to create a personality profile of Elon. Or you can go on ChatGPT.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
or any of the other AI platforms other than mine, because I don't answer political questions. And you can say, give me a personality profile of Mr. Trump or, you know, whoever, Modi or Putin or whatever.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
anybody and it will give you at the moment a very honest evaluation based on all the in chatter on the internet all the social platforms and actually elon's is even more neutral because it uses the chatter on the on twitter his own you know his own business would create these answers much to the distress of the people who created these platforms.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Where this is going to go in the future is that I think just like anything else, any technology can be used for what I call divine purposes, but also for diabolical purposes. You know, fire burns down the city, but had we not discovered fire, we wouldn't have the steam engine.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Had we not discovered the SIEB engine, we wouldn't have the industrial age and the age of technology and the age of today technology and AI. So everything finds its own resolution. AI will be used for diabolical purposes.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
But then there are people and I know enough people to know that they're using AI to actually bring about creative solutions for all the things that we're discussing, including racism and bigotry and hatred. and prejudice and social injustice and all the things that are troubling you. But let's get rid of this idea. We have to fight. We have to fight. No, we have to find creative solutions.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Well, first of all, thanks for acknowledging that I'm not a political guy, even though I've had and continue to have political opinions. And I am enormously affected by the suffering that's happening. And I have great empathy for people who are suffering. Empathy simply means you feel what they feel.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
And when you feel what they feel, and empathy is a natural human response to suffering, every child reacts viscerally. Even if you hurt an animal, you hurt a pet dog or a cat, and the child will start to cry because it feels viscerally. the suffering of the other.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
And that suffering leads to compassion, which is the desire to alleviate that suffering, because when you alleviate the suffering of another person, you feel better. And then that compassion ultimately leads to love and kindness and joy and peace and equanimity. and healing for yourself and for the other. So that's been my life's goal, I would say mission, pursuit, whatever you can.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Now, having said that, looking at the current situation in the world and in America, but also in the world, and having, you know, I'm 78 years old now, plus, how old are you, by the way? I am 39. Okay, so when I was 39, I was actually even ahead of where you are now. So when I came to this country, I was 22. I'm now 78. So, you know, I came to the United States when I was 22 in 1970.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
In the midst of Watergate, in the midst of the women's movement, in the midst of Greenpeace, in the midst of the anti-Vietnam War. And I participated in all of that. You know, I was the most ardent activist there.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
at the age of 22 23 and i marched the streets of cambridge massachusetts i campaigned for governor dukakis the only state he won was in massachusetts and he lost in every other state and i went through all that where you are angry activism But I used to talk to my dad and my dad was a very well-known cardiologist from England before he came back to India. And he used to talk about the Holocaust.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
He used to talk about the Second World War. He used to talk about the immense suffering that was happening. My grandfather used to talk about World War One, the pandemic, the Great Depression. And so I realized this is part of humanity. We have not moved from being medieval minds. And now we have modern capacities. Our minds are still medieval, which means driven by fear, greed,
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
The need for relevance, power, influence peddling, corruption, cronyism, and money. And it hasn't changed. But what has changed is modern capacities. We have nuclear weapons. We have biological warfare. We have internet cyber warfare. The Houthis have the same capacities, almost, as we have. And soon everybody will have. So those medieval...
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
emotional and lack of spiritual development, coupled with modern capacities for destruction, we are sleepwalking to extinction. And that's a fact. We can't deny it. Either we jumpstart into a new mindset, be the change we want to see in the world, Or we can walk to extinction. We're now told there are 2 trillion galaxies, 706 trillion stars, uncountable trillions of planets.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Our planet is not even a grain of sand in all the beaches of the world. So maybe nature might say to itself, the human species was an interesting experiment in evolution. Didn't work. Let's try something else. Dinosaurs were wiped out. We emerged and we might get wiped out. Something maybe better will emerge. I don't know.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
So, you know, I'm a fan of your show. I enjoy your show. I enjoy your perspective. And I share your values. Now, having said that... does activism, particularly strident activism, or what I should say, angry activism, even for peace. It's kind of a contradiction, angry peace activists, and they end up getting Nobel prizes.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
The angry peace activists end up getting Nobel prizes for peace, and they are totally not at peace with themselves. So I question whether that kind of activism actually works. And I'm not sure. It does to some extent. I mean, had we not had the anti-Vietnam war movement, the peace movement, the green movement and all of that,
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
we would not be in the place we are now, notwithstanding all the, you know, the backward trend we've taken recently. So it does work. It does bring more awareness. But in the long term, for those who are listening, I'm not at peace. Okay. And I will share with them this very simple idea that you will never be at peace if you are
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
if you're wedded to your ideology as the only right thing, because we are all part of a conditioned mind and we're conditioned by religion, we are conditioned by politics, we're conditioned by our parents, we are conditioned by economics, we are conditioned by our tribe, and it's very difficult to get past that conditioning to a creative solution. I don't even like, The phrase, how do we fight?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Because, you know, that's another phrase that's very common in our society. The fight against war, the war against war, the war against cancer, the war against, you know, whatever. It's always a war, Star Wars now. Why don't we fight?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
engage in creative solutions and that's why today i think we have an opportunity and that's why i'm such a big fan of what we call artificial intelligence so actually i as you just mentioned the book ai for spiritual intelligence
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
and personal well-being i frequently go and use ai which has access to all the creativity of humanity in fact ai has more access to the knowledge and database and information and even wisdom of the ages than any single human being can ever access so why not access
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
our current technologies for creative solutions instead of saying we have to fight this what is a creative solution for gaza what is a creative solution for climate change what is a creative solution for social economic justice i believe that if we are creative as a collective with shared vision
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
Maximum diversity, I know diversity is not a good word these days, but shared vision, maximum diversity, ethnic diversity, racial diversity, gender diversity, diversity of talent, diversity of storytellers. And then if we complement each other's strengths and we create a spiritual or emotional connection with each other, we can solve any problem.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
And it's always been my dream to see a world that is more peaceful, more just, more sustainable, and more healthy and more joyful. And I think we have creative solutions for all of that. But the problem is that those that we call leaders in the world today, without naming any names, but those that we call leaders in the world are basically interested in their power and cronyism and
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
and influence peddling and enrichment monetarily. So you want to know what's going on, follow the money. There's a war going on. Lots of people are going to make money. You know, climate change, the only reason we are against it is there are special interest groups that are making money without addressing
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
uh these big issues so without taking sides and i know i you know ideologically i'm on your side but i think we need creative solutions and conversations like this can help us say how can i participate in a creative solution that with me being the change that I want to see in the world. If I want peace, how can I be peaceful?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
If I want to have a sustainable planet, how can I live sustainably myself? I go to the World Economic Forum and people are discussing climate change and they all come on private planes to discuss. So I see a lot of cunning hypocrisy, both sides, whether you're a Democrat or you're you're a Republican or you're independent, you're a communist, you're a socialist, you're an oligarch.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Deepak Chopra on Navigating Uncertain Times
It's all about you and it's not about the rest of the world.