Neuroscientist David Eagleman With Sadhguru: In Conversation With The Mystic

Listen to neuroscientist and author, David Eagleman, in conversation with Sadhguru as they discuss a variety of subjects, ranging from different parts of the mind, the concept of time, quantum mechanics, religion, and meditation. The conversation is laced with humor and incisive logic, and moves towards an interesting climax where David Eagleman acknowledges that science and mysticism meet at a certain point.

Transcript

Good evening everyone. I said good evening. Participants – Good evening. Tell us about the chant. Sadhguru – The chant, These are certain types of invocation. In the sense, The distinction between an invocation and a prayer is, Prayer is an effort to talk to whatever other dimensions that people believe in. Invocation is a way of inciting a certain dimension of who you are for a particular type of activity. So this chant is mainly talking about how birth is sweet but death is compassionate. Because if you cannot die, That's not a good thing, You know. You don't want to die right now but suppose you cannot die at all, What do you do with it? It'll become a serious problem. Though birth and life is very sweet, Death is a great compassion if it comes at the right time. Meeting and mingling is very sweet but memory is a great compassion. And if one transcends the process that we refer to as time, Then the whole existence is compassion for you. That's what the chant is, I mean, Generally saying. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan – So I'm very interested in the intersection of our worlds, Science and mysticism. Sadhguru – I thought we live on the same planet. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan – Well, We'll see. So I go into the lab every day and I study how the brain, Which is encased in silence and darkness, How it constructs our reality. The reason we know that this has something to do with the brain is because if the brain is damaged, Even in small ways, Your reality changes. And if you take drugs or alcohol or other sorts of things, Viruses in the system, Your reality can change. So I'm interested in finding where our perspectives overlap in this because your interest is… one of your interests is also understanding reality, How we perceive it, How it's individualized to us. So can you tell us about that? There is existence outside and there is you or me as individual human beings. We have not seen the world. We know it only the way it's projected in the firmament of our minds. When we say mind, In English language, Mind is just one word and supposed to encompass everything. But in the yogic terminology, We have sixteen parts of the mind which function distinct functions. And there are whole lot of practices and processes through which one takes charge of this sixteen dimensions of mind. This sixteen for simpler understanding can be brought into four, Four sections. The first dimension of the mind is we are referring to as buddhi or what is generally considered intellect. It is the intellect. I think modern societies, Particularly modern education has become too overly focused on the intellect, Aristotle, You know. I'm not talking about your boy. Because of we got too engrossed in… we got too mesmerized by our own logic and we have invested too much in human intellect, Leaving out the other dimensions of intelligence that functions within us. When we say intellect, It is the logical realm of what's happening in our minds. Or in other words, In your intellect, You can't make your intellect agree two plus two is six. It has to be four, Otherwise you'll think it's crazy. So it's factual. It grasps the facts of life and assimilates and makes an analysis of that and lets us penetrate through the world. Or in other words, Intellect is like a knife. The sharper, The better. Life is an instrument which is used for cutting things open. So this is one way of exploring the world by dissection. This is how, You know, At least in high school you must have dissected something, Maybe an earthworm or a cockroach or a frog. I don't know how far you went. This is one way of knowing things. You definitely grasp something, But you never grasp the intrinsic nature of life by dissection. So there are other dimensions of intelligence. And another aspect of the intellect is the second dimension of the mind, We call it as ahankara which in English language would translate as the identity. What is the identity you have taken? Your intellect is always a slave of your identity. What you identified with, It is only around that it functions. Simple things. People are identified with things that they have not even seen and huge emotions are there. Their life is guided by those things. For example, All of us belong to some nation today. There was a time hundred years ago, Many people did not belong to any nation, But today everybody belongs to some nation and everybody belongs to some football club also because both have flags and emblems and works. So nationality is a new idea. It's just about hundred-fifty, Two-hundred years that we have this strong sense of nationhood. We've shifted from our ethnic, Racial and other kinds of identities to national identity. Just the moment you believe I belong to this nation, The emblem of that nation, The flag of that nation, The anthem of that nation brings genuine emotion. Nobody's pretending it's real. It's real because people are willing to die for it. It has to be real. But it's just an identity. You could just switch it anytime. You can move to another country and take that on and it becomes yours. So the moment you identify yourself with something, Your intellect is completely always protecting this identity and working around this identity. So the identity, If we want to continue that analogy, If intellect is the knife, Identity is the hand that holds the knife, How steady or unsteady this hand is will determine what this intellect will do or undo. The next dimension of the mind is called as manas. So this is not just in one place, This is the entire body. Manas is a huge silo of memory. So when I say huge silo of memory, Whatever memory you may have in your brain, I know you're a brain fan. Whatever memory you may have in your brain, Your body has a trillion times more memory than that. You definitely don't remember how your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather looked like, But his nose is sitting on your face right now. It remembers how your forefathers looked a million years ago, Your body still remembers, Has not forgotten. Definitely it is not the capability of your brain. So in terms of memory, The manas is phenomenal and it's right across the body. Every cell in the body carries enormous memory. Memory to a point for the origin of life on this planet and beyond, All that memory is carried in this body. So this is manas. If there is no memory, Intellect would be defunct. It's like a car without gas. Because there is memory, Intellect is on. This memory flows through the hand of identity and whatever is the identity, The memory takes on that color accordingly and then it plays up in the intellect and intellect functions. The fourth dimension of the mind is called chitta. Chitta means it's pure intelligence, Unsullied by memory. There is absolutely no memory, Free of memory, It's just pure intelligence. When we say pure intelligence, All kinds of things have been said with all due respect to everybody's beliefs and faiths and whatever. All kinds of things have been said to people that God is generous, God is love, God is this, God is that. Suppose you had… nobody told you anything and you just paid attention to all the creation around you, How a flower blossoms, How a leaf is, How an ant moves. If you paid enough attention, One thing you… that you would definitely come to is whatever is the source of creation is a goddamn intelligent thing. Intelligence, Intelligence, Intelligence, Everything is smacked with phenomenal intelligence beyond what our quite phenomenal brain cannot perceive. So this is a dimension of intelligence within us, Which is the basis of our creation in a way. If you eat a piece of bread, Over the afternoon it becomes a human being because this intelligence exists within you and me. So if you touch this intelligence, In a very mischievous way, The yogi or the yogi… yogic culture says, If you touch your chitta, If you touch this dimension of intelligence, Then divine becomes your slave. You don't have to think what you want, You don't have to seek what you want. If you touch this intelligence, Everything that you wish to know is yours. It's just you have to just direct your focus and it's all there because there is a dimension of chitta. Every human being might have accidentally at some point touched this, Which makes suddenly one spark of magic in somebody's life. This is because they've touched this dimension of intelligence unconsciously. Now the question is only about how to get there consciously and to stay there. So these aspects of the mind are not entirely located here, It is right across the system. I kind of think this is the endeavor of science, Is to take the intelligence all around us and across our system and try to understand the principles of that. It's a way of going out and trying to understand the blueprints around us in a way that can be made conscious. And we've made lots of progress that way and we've walked on the moon and we've cured lots of human suffering that way by viewing this deep intelligence, Which I totally agree with you about, As something that we can make understandable, Take it from the ineffable to the effable. And that's part of a… it's part of what's… maybe the biggest part of what's made our world what it is today. If I can intervene, When you say understandable, That means we can put it into the parameters of logic. What if there is a dimension of intelligence within you, Which does not fit into the parameters of logic? Trying to fit everything into the parameters of logic means the surface intelligence, Which is the intellect, Which is our survival mode. If we don't have an intellect, We wouldn't survive in this world. What is a survival instrument? We are trying to put all dimensions of life through that and it has to pass through that sieve, That will completely skew the process. I would want to know that the things that are available to the intellect can't encompass the intelligence of a flower and of a birth and of a body and so on. I take the point that there may be limits to our intellect, But I don't know where those limits are and I don't know how to guarantee that there are borders there beyond which there is something else. See, Science has done incredible things in the last hundred years, No question. Our life is the way it is today. The comfort and convenience that all of us are enjoying is essentially because of the outcome of the scientific endeavor on the planet, There's no question about that. But at the same time, The limitation of science is we are trying to touch a dimension which is beyond physical nature with a physical stick. Dr. Mark Chisholm Something that you and I had talked about before is this issue of time perception. It's one of the things I study in my lab and I was mentioning to you that I think it's one of the most stubborn psychological filters we have, By which I mean time seems to be a construction of the brain because we can easily manipulate it in the laboratory so you think something lasted longer or shorter or something happened in a different order. And there are many physicists like Einstein who were very clear on this point that time doesn't actually exist, But we're trapped inside of it. And so this is an interesting example of using our intellect to sort of come up against a glass wall and say, You know, There seem to be things past this wall and it's impossible for me to know what it would be like to be free of time, For example. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan See, Time is a very relative experience. Every human being would know this in some context. On a particular day, If you are very, Very joyful, Twenty-four hours passed off like a moment, On another day you're depressed, Twenty-four hours seems like a yawn. They say how long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you are. Somebody says, Just one minute, Wait. So the basis of time as I perceive it, You must pardon me because I'm… I'm uneducated, Okay? The only thing I know, I mean being uneducated is not a easy thing. Yes, Sir, Because from the first moment you're born, Your parents, Your teachers, Every other adult around you, Everybody is busy wanting to teach you something that has not worked in their life. Yes. Everybody's trying to instruct you on something, It doesn't matter what. The only thing that they know better than a just-born infant is they know some survival tricks, The adults. They don't know anything else about life. They have not perceived any… life any better than a child. They just know a few survival tricks. They know how to make money, They know how to build this, They know how to do that, But they do not know life in any sense because all these other things are just accessories of life, They're not life. Life is something that's throbbing within you. So when we come to time, In the yogic way of seeing things, We just see life as a dance of time and energy. It's a certain amount of time and a certain amount of energy. Actually in the local languages, The expression for death is very beautiful. We say, Kala mai tanna, That means his time got over. When we… in normal language, When we say somebody passed away, We don't say it as we are saying it in English, We say, His time got over. Actually that's all that happened, Somebody's time got over. Now to put this time and energy together in a proper… weave it together well, If your time gets over, When your still energy is vibrant, We say this is an untimely death. If your energy gets over when your still time is on, It's a vegetative life. To the art of putting this time and energy together so that both of them play together, Dance together well, Is a successful life. So when we say time, There are many, Many things we can do with energy but as far as time is concerned, It's ticking off for all of us at the same pace, In that sense. I know there are… there's research, I'll come to that. It doesn't matter what we say but our time is ticking off at the same time. We may think many things, We came to this talk, We went to the cinema, We went to the university, We went here and there but as far as physical body is concerned, It's going straight to the grave because it is keeping time. You may forget, You're happy, You forgot that you're sixty-five or seventy, You felt like you were eighteen because today you're joyful but your body is keeping time. Your brain can be easily fooled but body is properly keeping time, Never you can fool this body, All the time keeping time because time is a consequence. Time is not a factor by itself. Time is a consequence of cyclical movements in the physical reality. We know time, If the earth spins once, We say it's a day. If the moon goes around us, We say it's a month. If the earth goes around the sun, We say it's a year. Our idea of time has come essentially because of the cyclical movements of everything that's physical around us. This is the nature of physicality. Physicality is essentially cyclical, Whether it's atomic or cosmic, Everything is cyclical. The moment you're identified with physical nature, Time is a big factor. If you dissociate yourself with your physical nature, If you sit here and if you have a little space between you and your physical body, Because what you call as my body is an accumulated process. It is something that you accumulated, It's just a piece of the planet. If a little space comes between you and your body, Suddenly time is not a factor. To such an extent, We have any number of people, This may be very difficult for a western audience to digest, But I have seen yogis who have not moved from the place they were sitting for over six months, Seven months, Just in the same place. By any normal standards, Your body should not survive that, But once they sit down, They won't move, Just like that, Not moving at all. Because once you distance yourself from your physiological process, Time is not a factor. Right now you're sitting here, It's not your watch which is keeping the time, It's your body. If I make you sit here for three hours, Your body says it's enough. But suppose you did not have a body, We're going to sit here for three thousand years, What's the problem? So essentially, Because of your rooting in your physical platform, Which you call as the body, Which you built over a period of time, From the accumulations that you gathered from this planet, That is the basis of experience of time. If you distance yourself from that, There is no consequence of time on you. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan What is the you that can be separated from the physical? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Is it a fact that you gathered your body over a period of time? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan It's a fact that this body gathered together over a period of time, And it may be that I emerge as a consequence of that, This feeling of I, As opposed to me doing the gathering. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Tell me, You've been having lunch and dinner or…? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Have I been having lunch and dinner? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Yeah. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Yeah, This dynamic accumulation has been eating plenty, Yeah. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan So what you… what you refer to as my body right now is an accumulation of food, It's a heap of food. Not a pleasant way to describe you, But it is. What you call as my mind, Largely in people's experience, Is an accumulation of impressions over a period of time, Agreed? So if you have to gather this much of impressions and this much of body, Something more fundamental must be there, Isn't it? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Houston, Texas is an accumulation of roadways and buildings, But we wouldn't say that there was… Houston was there and then gathered the… Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan No, No, You are not a piece of geography. You are not a piece of geography, Are you? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan You are… you are… Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Well, It may be exactly that, A physical… a physical being. I'll tell you why from my perspective that seems like a possibility. It's because we're across the street from the world's largest medical center and every day, There are thousands of people there whose geography is changing because of Alzheimer's or stroke or tumor or traumatic brain injury and who they are changes. It doesn't seem like there's something fundamental that outlasts damage to the tissue. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan See, You're talking about thought and emotion. The biggest mistake we have made is we have given too much significance to human thought. Whatever you think is only happening from the limited data that you have gathered, Yes or no? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Agreed. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Yes. So, The data that you and me have gathered, However big we may think it is, In terms of the cosmos, It's miniscule, It's nothing. It's really not of any consequence. So, From this miniscule of data that we have gathered, We're generating some thought which could be useful in making our lives. It could be useful in creating a few things. It could be useful fundamentally for our survival and to enhancement of our survival process, All this. But it doesn't give you access to life. Thought and emotion is psychological drama that's happening within you. You can conduct it any way you want. You're talking about somebody had a tumor or Alzheimer's or an accident or something and the drama went wrong. The drama can go wrong even without any of those ailments. You ask people, People's drama goes wrong without any accident or injury or ailment, Just like that drama goes wrong on a daily basis for a lot of people. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan We usually give that a name though, Something like depression or a psychotic break. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan That's a business. Not one I'm making any money on. I'm saying there's only this much, Either your… your faculties are taking instructions from you or they have become compulsive for some reason, All right? Either your body and mind you can conduct it consciously or it's become compulsive. That's all that's happening. Whether you call it physical ailment or mental ailment, All that's happened is just this that your fundamental faculties of existence on this planet is your body and your mind. These two things you have lost grip over them. So it can become this kind of ailment or that kind of ailment or whatever, But fundamentally you have lost charge. That's all that's happened. If your body and your brain took instructions from you, Would you create depression, Would you create illness, Would you create anything? You would create highest level of pleasantness for you, Isn't it? We certainly would if there were a separate you that could gain that control. See, We can come to this like this. There is something called… because I… I see that you keep referring my brain. If you say my brain, That means it's yours. What is yours can't be you, Right? It's a colloquialism that we use because I need to refer to this one and here. I need to specify which brain I'm talking about. See, When I say my hand, I know even without my hand I can still exist. Similarly, If certain parts of the brain are gone, Our ability to think and feel the way we were doing it earlier may be gone, But still that person is not gone. That's the question. So if I lose a little part of my finger, I'm still me, But if I lose a chunk of brain tissue that same size, I can be someone completely different. I can lose… No, No, You're talking about personality. Personality is again an acquired thing. Beyond personality, I can lose memory, I can lose consciousness of course, I can lose the ability to perceive reality the way that we do now. I might become color blind because of the lesion, Because damage to a particular part of my brain, I lose the ability to understand what objects are. Okay, Let's come to this. See suppose somebody became color blind because of an injury or whatever that happened to them unfortunately. That person still knows, I have become color blind, Isn't it? He's still there. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan It's true for the person who becomes color blind, But it's not true for… for example, A person who is born color blind, They don't even have a concept that they… that they could be, They don't have a concept of color. So a per… let's say a person who's born blind entirely, They don't even have a concept of vision. So who's the you for them? Do they… See, Even a person who has visually impaired, Who's never seen the world around, He still exists within himself. He's as much a man or a woman as anybody else can be. It's just that if all of us were blind, We would be quite a fine society without eyes. Yes, Isn't it? Only because somebody has and I don't have. In comparison, I have a problem. Otherwise, If none of us had eyes, You think we wouldn't have found our way around? We would have. Maybe not the same way, In a different way. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan Oh, I totally agree because in so many dimensions… Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan There are mammals who are flying by, You know, Sound. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan Yeah. Well, There are so many dimensions that we are blind to now. So what we call visible light is just a one-tenth trillionth of the electromagnetic spectrum that's out there. We only detect a little bit. In some branches of physics, It seems there might be between ten to thirteen spatial dimensions, Not just these three and yet we're trapped in these. We are moving away from consciousness to perception. But my point is we're already blind to most of the world, So I agree with you that… Okay, So let's move back to perception. See, What you… what an individual life is, You cannot disagree that your life… You're a piece of life, I'm a piece of life, Everybody is. What kind of personalities we have acquired, What kind of likes and dislikes we have acquired, What kinds of gods and demons we have acquired, What kinds of other things we have acquired is a social process. That's happened to us, Cultural and social process. If you were born in a different part of the world, It would be entirely different. Depending upon what we are exposed to, These are impressions that we have taken in, Phenomenal amount of impressions. Everything that aside, Let's look at one fundamental, Whatever you gather, You can only claim it's mine, You cannot say it's me, Isn't it? Whatever you gather. How do you mean? You mean your body? You say… Anything, Anything, Anything. I can say this is my chair. If I sit here every day and then I say this is me, Then there's a problem. I think there's a possibility that it's exactly what happens, That the stuff that this piece of life can end up controlling becomes me. The reason I think of this as my hand is because it's… most of the time is under the control. My hand is okay, No problem. My hand is okay, Me is the problem. What did you say, Me? My hand means it belongs to you, No problem with that. When it becomes me, Then it leads to a completely distortion of perception. Okay, I think… So you're on… You're talking about identity, What you identify yourself as. Yes. See, You can… the nature of the mind is such, It is looking for some… because human intellect and human intelligence has broken out of a certain bond which was there for every other creature that they could function like an automated machine through certain instinctual process. What has happened with the human being, With the process of evolution is he's… the human being has broken out of that instinctual process and there is an intelligence which has to function consciously. But functioning consciously means every moment of life is an exploration which is too scary for a whole lot of people. So the best thing is identify with something which gives you some sense of what you are. But this… some sense of what you are, Which you took on based on your social and cultural backgrounds, What you took on, Makes sense for your survival process but not for explorative process. It doesn't explore life. It keeps you sane. It's a good solace. It keeps you… it helps you to sleep well in the night but it doesn't awaken a different dimension of knowing. It doesn't awaken the possibility of exploring dimensions which are not yet within you. So if this has to happen, The most important thing is to be able to sit here, Not identified with anything. Because as I said, It's so hard to remain uneducated in this world because everybody is busy wanting to teach you something. This is all I did in my life, To remain uneducated, Not to be influenced by parents, By family, By religion that's happening around you, Culture that's happening around you, Education that people are forcing on you, Just to be the way creation intended you to be simply. See, I may not fit into the university milieu but I'm okay, You know. Just simply the way you were born, Not tangling up your intelligence to any particular thing, Either your nationality or your religion or your race or your creed or your family or any kind of identity or your gender or whatever, Simply to be able to view your life just as a piece of life. If one does this, Then you will see perception will explode in ways that they have not imagined possible. Now as a physical body, You're unable to not be influenced by the clothing of your culture, By… No, This is a statement, This is not a compulsive thing. But you don't dress as somebody who's Chinese or an Eskimo or something. When I'm in the North Pole, I will, I think. So you can't… So from my perspective, There's this issue of brain plasticity, Which is to say that we absorb what's coming in. And I think it's exactly consistent with your description about who you are in the end is an accumulation of all these perceptions. There's also the case that we come to the table with some pre-programming in our DNA, Which I think is consistent with what you're talking about is the memory of all of your ancestors leading up to this point. But because we are creatures that go around and vacuum in our cultures and we speak this particular language and we are males and we dress in certain ways, It's hard to avoid that. Now I'm guessing you're going to say, But you don't identify with it. Is that right? See, What is a social requirement is one thing. I just saw you going into the women's room. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan And you too, By the way. Sadhguru laughs Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan Because that was the only bathroom available. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan Yes. Sadhguru So, By social norm, You do certain things. Because in the room that we were sitting, There was only women's room. I don't know why they mocked it like that. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan I don't know. So, You went in, I went in, Every other male went in, Only the female did not go. So, Now what you do for the norm that exists so that you don't collide into situations is one thing. What you identify with is another thing. So, The moment you identify with anything for that matter, Starting from your body to everything else, What is your body is the limited body, What you call as family is a larger body, What you call as community is a much bigger body, What you call as a nation is a much bigger body, What you call as humanity is a much bigger body. This is how human identities go. People think it's better to be identified with a nation than to be with an individual when there is a war or when there's some situation. People think it's better to be identified with the whole humanity. But any identity limits you. It takes away the fundamental possibility of what this life is. Identity is required for survival process to manage day-to-day situations, But it is not an exploratory process because the intention of science is to know. See, Technology is a fallout. Unfortunately in this world, Nobody would fund science if it did not spin technology which is a very unfortunate thing because human intelligence wants to know it need not be useful. It simply wants to know. So technology is useful and what is useful today, Tomorrow you may realize is very destructive, It may take away our life. That's… So technology has to be judiciously looked at what to apply, What we should not apply, But that judiciousness is gone because everything is commercialized and it's on full force. Everything that we do after fifty years we come back and say we did the wrong thing, Now we're doing the right thing and again after twenty-five years we come back and say then we did the wrong thing, Now we're doing the right thing. Every… every stage of life we seem to know it perfectly well, But after some time looking back we know we didn't… we did not know nothing, We missed too many pieces. So technology is something that we have to judiciously do. Science must happen rampantly. Mesticism must happen rampantly because this is simply exploratory. This is not about seeing how to make it useful, But today modern science has become a slave of technology. If you don't make it useful, Nobody is going to fund you anymore. You simply say I want to know, Nobody is interested in this. How can it be turned into an enterprise? That's all they're interested in. This is a wrong way to approach science because science is a… is… is a fundamental need within a human being wanting to know. It's the nature of human intelligence. It is not something that somebody made up. It's not a bunch of scientists who made this up. This is a fundamental need within human intelligence wanting to know. It is the nature of a human being, If he sees something new he wants to know what this is, Whether it's a small thing or a big thing. So to continuously sustain that wonder, That sense of wanting to know is the basis of science and mysticism. It is only the fundamental approach is different in the sense, Science is trying to achieve everything through physical means by taking physical quantities, Going by the physical laws. But physical is like the peel of the fruit. It has no purpose of its own. The peel is useful only as a protective layer to the fruit. Once the fruit is eaten, Peel goes to the trash can. See, Right now the fruit is inside, So this body is very important. We have to feed it, We have to decorate it, We have to dress it up, We have to pamper it in so many ways. Tomorrow morning if the fruit is gone, Nobody is interested in this body anymore. Nobody wants to transact with this anymore. Only because there is something else inside, Body is so… such great significance. Once this is gone, What is this? This is just like a fruit peel. People want to get rid of it at the earliest. At least in America they dress it up. In India within four hours you must get rid of the body, That's the rule. Because once it's dead, Leave the dead to the dead, You know somebody said long time ago. Some… once, As long as they're alive you do whatever. Once they're dead, You're done. Because the peel is meaningless without the fruit. Right now the fundamental flaw in this approach is though it's produced phenomenal results in terms of well-being for us, Comfort for us, Convenience for us, The kind of comfort and convenience we're enjoying no other generation ever has known on this planet. This is a fruit of science or technology rather. In spite of that, Will it lead to human well-being, That's a question mark. Certain convenience will come, But will well-being come, That's a question mark because if you look back on the humanity, Let's say hundred years ago or thousand years ago how people were and how people are you today, Are you more joyful than them, Are you more blissed out than them? So are you more blissed out than previous generations? It's not true. We're in much more comfort but we are not in much more joyful states or pleasant states within ourselves or in essence our well-being or the fundamental quality of our life has not changed, Though the physical quality of our life has changed like unimaginable proportions in the last fifty years. So we are trying to approach everything through physical means. If you go through physical means, You will hit that glass wall somewhere. I think in my perception, I'm not a scientist, I don't know all of it, But in my perception I think the physicists are near the glass wall. They might not have hit it, They're near. That's the unknown question, Right? We have no guarantee how far we'll get in science and we may run by glass wall I assume you mean we run to a place where we say we can't go further. Where the present faculties will not be good enough. The present faculties of five senses and the brain will not be good enough. That we hit a long time ago. So for example, Things like quantum physics, Quantum physics you can't understand it, But you can write it down in equations that make predictions accurate out to fourteen decimal places. So we think it's pretty good and we can build new things out of it that we can see things much smaller and much farther away than we ever could before. We understand the wondrousness and the subtleness of everything around us much better than we did before, But the actual physics a human can't understand. We just make tools to get where we need to go with it. So we've already hit that point and certainly it's the case with the human brain which is made up of almost a hundred billion specialized cells with thousands of trillions of connections between them and every second… I like the way you're saying it with the passion. Like some people are talking about food or something else. Well, I'm a brainy instead of a foodie. You feed on the brain. Yeah. But the reason… the reason it's easy to be passionate about it is because it's a system of such unimaginable complexity that it bankrupts the language. We have no way that a human could perceive a system of that complexity and yet each of us has it. There's this three pound organ that we're carrying around, But we've already hit that point a long time ago in science where we realize we can make new strains of mathematics. We can make computer simulations, But we'll never get it. I'll never get the brain. All I can do is take the… you know, The way… the way that you explained the sixteen aspects of the mind, You simplified it down to four. I'm… You know, The best I can do is take the thousands of trillions of connections in the brain and make some cartoony model that my impoverished intellect can sort of get its… get a sense of. They're building a simulator, Brain simulator, You know? Yeah. Andrew Markham is busy building this simulated brain. All that is fine, We're looking at the physical mechanics of what's happening. The complexity of what's happening is beyond the physical mechanics. See, Looking at the physical mechanics of the brain, The neuronal function and the electric thing that's happening, The waves that are flowing, Whatever things happening is fantastic because of the complexity of what it is, The sophistication of what it is. It is the gadget, No question. Okay? This human gadget is the gadget on the planet. Of what we have seen, This is the most sophisticated gadget on the planet, There's no question about that. Keeping that aside, But even this brain can be manufactured with something as simple as a piece of a carrot or a bread. So, I'm saying there is an intelligence here which can create a brain. Why are you ignoring that intelligence? I think that's the heart of science is to try to understand what that is. What I mean by that is, You know, So we have different approaches in science to get there but studying the genetic code and understanding how the heck with 27, 000 genes can you unpack a human being because whatever the truth is of what's happening spiritually, If there's a separate you or not, What we know for sure is that you can unpack a human being from these four letters of amino acids. I mean these base pairs that make these proteins and somehow that all gets unpacked, Fueled by bread and carrots and so on. You know, These kind of questions have always been on human mind. It happened almost 15, 000 years ago, Adiyogi, That means the first yogi, He had seven disciples. These seven disciples are full of questions. They are… some of them are astronomers, Some of them are serious mathematicians, Things like this. They have million questions. After some time, Adiyogi is bored with their questions because whatever they ask, It's just a product of their intellect. They're not able to ask a question beyond that. So, They ask, What is the nature of this, Your cosmos, Where does it begin, Where does it end, How big is it? He is just bored. So, He says, Your… your cosmos, I can pack it into your mustard seed. The entire cosmos, I can pack it into your mustard seed, He said. Then they were flabbergasted by this. Then they said, What is it made of? If you can pack such a huge cosmos, Which we do… we can't even imagine where it begins and where it ends into your mustard, He said, What is it made of? He was completely bored even not to utter a word, He simply said like this. Five elements, Just these five elements, The entire universe is a play of these five elements. If you master the five elements, You have a key to every aspect of creation. If you don't master the five elements, If you approach it from outside, As you approach it, It will take on a trillion new forms. As you try to study it, It can take on a trillion new forms as you're looking at it because that is what it is capable of. Just five things. Five million things would be difficult. Five I'm sure you and me can study, Isn't it? At least I'm capable of five. You are talking in millions and billions but I'm five. Are you going to tell me what the five are? Are you going to tell me what the five elements are? You know, These five elements, It's called earth, Fire, Water, Air, Space, These are five things. Maybe, I mean maybe, Maybe that'll work in the end. Everything is just within this. Everything that you call as physical creation has substance of some kind. This is earth and all of it is in movement, That's called air. All of it ascribes to some temperature, That is fire and in everything there is water which is the cohesiveness. If there is no water, There is no cohesiveness in anything and all of it is held together by what we call as akash. Here we're calling it as space. In English language it doesn't really describe what we are saying but it's called akash. Maybe a more closer word in English language would be ether, Etheric space or whatever they're calling it as. So these are the five things, Whether an atom or a subatomic particle, Everything is made of these five things. So you don't have to study the trillions of things which are manifestations of these five. If you understand these five things, If you have grasp over these five things, Then everything becomes accessible. So the fundamental, The most basic process, Unfortunately the word yoga conjures completely wrong images in America. The most fundamental aspect of yoga is called bhootasuddhi. This means cleansing of the elements so that you can feel them separately in your own system. This very body is seventy-two percent water and twelve percent earth, Six percent air, Four percent fire, Remaining is space. If you take charge of these things, What you need to know, Everything that is life is here because modern physicists are saying as you sit here, Every subatomic particle is in communication with the rest of the cosmos. If it is so, You just have to become alive to it. You just have to become receptive to it. Rather than going around the cosmos and studying, If you sit here, It's reverberating because the nature… I think there is some constructional theory, Something coming up in California. I don't know, You must be acquainted with these things. So… Dr. Peter Hulme I've read… I've blurbed the book actually on the back. So fundamentally what they're saying is whether it is the smallest thing or the biggest thing, Everything the fundamental design is same. It is only the complexity and sophistication which is improving. Between an amoeba and you, The fundamental design is same. It is much more complex and sophisticated but essentially life-making design is same. So if it is so, The most fundamental materials which make this life and every other physical aspect of what we see in this creation, If we know the ingredients and how they happen, Then you have a key to every aspect of life. But if you try to study the creation itself, As you study they will multiply into billions and trillions. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan It seems it might depend what your goal is. So if you want to create a drug for cancer or build a helicopter, You need to do something with those five elements or break the world… Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan It's not about exploration, It's about utility. What is the use of life? Let me ask you a question. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan I would love to know. I've wondered that question and I get it that science isn't getting me there. I mean I don't… I've been in science my whole out of life but I don't know. I get much more towards that question when I read literature which was my first love before I went to science. So I take the point that science doesn't help me on that front at all. What would you say? I've wondered what the point is. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan No, No. When we're looking at everything as… See right now, This is an unfortunate reality which is… doesn't agree with my aesthetics of life. Right now, Science has moved from an exploratory process to an exploitative process. If you see an atom, How to use it? If you see a bacteria, How to use it? If you see an elephant, How to use it? If you use a whale, How to use it? Of course the next thing is if you see a human being, How to use them. This is where it's going. Everything how to use it. This is not what life is about. You may get to know how to use every damn thing but still life won't get any better. If you know how to keep this one, Life will get better, Believe me. If you just know how to sit here blissed out, Life will get better. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan I see that point. Let me ask you, I'm curious what you think is reality out there because I think we… I think you and I come from the same perspective that we're very limited in what we can actually see and that an animal would see reality differently than you and I and you and I might see reality differently also. If one of us has synesthesia and so when we hear music, We see colors, Things like that, Then we might have very different realities. So what would it be like if you could get beyond the physical trappings? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan See, Language is… language can go only thus far whether it's science or literature, It can go only that far. When you speak any language, It must make logical sense. If it does not make logical sense, People are leaving right now. Yes? Because language has this… language is deeply enslaved to the fundamental logic which is a product of our intellect. Without it we could not speak. So now you're asking about something which is not going to be logically correct. So I'm not willing to make a fool of myself here talking about something that's not going to make sense to them right now, But we will talk about it in a… in a different way. This happened. Adiyogi had a family, The first yogi. So some disciple of his from South India carried a basket of mangoes. Have you tasted Indian mango? Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan Yeah. I've been to India. Okay. So it's… during this season right now, Unfortunately I'm in America. This time of the year, Mango is the only religion in the country. Everybody is head-to-toe mango, Okay? So mangoes drive us crazy. In southern India we have over two hundred varieties of mangoes. So different days they want to eat different types of mangoes and they want to cook mango, They want to… Everything is mango, Okay? People have come up with facial creams, Mango creams and everything. So somebody carried a basket of mangoes and came all the way to Himalayas to offer it to their guru. But by the time they came, The basket one by one, Mango is going bad. Either they threw it away or they ate it up, Something happened. By the time they came there, Only one mango was left. One beautiful South Indian mango. I'm talking about it like you talk about brain. Believe me, It's sweet, Not like the brain. So now Adiyogi has a wife and two children, Two boys. Now one mango, Mango is not like an apple, You can't cut it into half and give it to two people. Tch, It can only be eaten like this, You know. If you cut it, It won't go equal anyway. So what to do? Both the boys came running, We want the mango, Each one wants the mango. So they didn't know what to do, Then they said what? They have to set up something, Who gets the mango? They said, Okay, Let's have a little race. Whoever wins the race gets the mango. Because these are Adiyogi's children, It's not a hundred meter dash. They said, Whoever goes around the world three times first, They will get the mango. So the younger boy immediately set off, Racing around the world, Wanting to make three rounds and he went away. The older boy was a little obese. He just sat there. He didn't move, The parents were surprised. Then they thought maybe he's given up on the mango. The young boy wants to get it, He's running, This boy has given up. But this boy sat there for some time, Then he got up. He went around his father and mother three times and said, Mango. They said, What? You didn't even run? What do you mean? The race is about going around the world. He's going around the world, I went around my world. You are my world. I've gone around, I deserve the mango. They couldn't argue with this logic, So they gave him the mango. He ate. And the boy, The younger boy came and you know, Things happened, Fireworks. Fireworks happened, He became very furious, All those things are another story. But what I'm saying is, There is a subjective reality and there's an objective reality. When I say subjective reality, I'm not talking about just your thought and emotion, Like you are talking about, Cognitive reality can be different. What is smell for somebody is taste for someone else. What is sweet for somebody is bitter for somebody else. What's light for one person is darkness for another creature. Here I see one creature right behind staring at me. So this perception is… these five senses are tuned for our survival. If survival is what we are seeking, Sense organs are fine. But once you're looking at life as an exploration, You want to know life, Not just live life, You want to know. When you want to know, Five senses are no good. They are not sufficient faculties to know. Right now, This brain… I'm not trying to downgrade it, It's a fantastic thing. This brain is nothing without the five senses. It is these five agencies which are gathering information and feeding up this brain all the time, Both every moment of your wakefulness and sleep, This is happening. If you walk from here to there, If somebody is wearing a strong perfume or something else, You may notice it, Otherwise generally you may not notice. But if you walk from here to there, Your olfactory cognition is taking in probably two hundred different smells if you walk from here to there. It is just that you have not paid enough attention to decipher that and your other faculties are overriding that. Suppose you did not have eyes, Ears, Nothing. If you shut them off for some time, You will see suddenly your nostrils become so very sensitive, You can just smell out how many people are there. If you bring your dog here, He almost knows how many people are here. He doesn't know just some human smell. He knows individually distinct smell of each person that is here. We also have that because our neurological system is way more sophisticated than that of a dog, But there are other overriding factors which have diminished that. But if you wish, You can develop that to a certain level. So cognitive distinctions are there and cognitive confusion is there as you… what's that word about smell becomes a color and color becomes… Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan-Santhosh – Synesthesia. Okay, Whatever. Now, It's anesthesia, Synesthesia, Something is lost. Something is mixed up like a drink. A man who is just out of the bar may feel that way, You know. Everything may become colorful or not colorful depending upon his mood on that day or what he had. So these things are happening because you can impair these things or enhance these things with a little bit of chemical stimulation or injuries or diseases or… this is an essentially a chemical soup. What kind of a soup is the question? So our whole effort in the yogic system is how to keep it very equanimous and exuberant at the same time. The problem with most people is if they become equanimous, Become… they become death-like. If they become exuberant, They keep flipping all the time. To be equanimous and exuberant means your sense organs and you can function in a certain way. You are vibrantly alive, But you are absolutely equanimous. If this one thing happens, Suddenly your sensory perception will not be the limit for you. There are other dimensions of perception which will not come into one's experience unless there is a certain level of striving. For example, Two-hundred years ago I heard ninety-seven percent of United States population was illiterate. Today, Probably almost hundred percent literacy in the country, How does this happen? It's the infrastructure of school rooms and human infrastructure of teachers and many other things and books and whatever. If this infrastructure was not built, Even today we would be in the same condition, Isn't it? Similarly, For turning inward, There is no infrastructure. Few individuals may be doing it somewhere, But there is no large-scale infrastructure in the society as to look at life just as life, Not as to how it is useful. Life need not be useful. It's a phenomena beyond our use. It is a phenomena to be experienced. We have come here to experience life, Not to use life, Isn't it so? We have come here to experience life, Not about how to put this to use. This is not a work donkey. I'm trying to understand this issue about knowing. So where we clearly have overlap in the way we go about it is wanting to know things, Wanting to understand everything around us, But there's a sense in which we're not limited by our intellect because I have the opportunity to ride on the back of all the other humans on the planet, Those that have come before me. It's a collective intellect that's now encoded on Wikipedia and in millions of books and I have an opportunity to take experiences from across the world, Places I've never been, Ideas that I would have never thought of and so on and feed all that in. So it's a much richer diet, First of all. The much richer data. It's a diet of data. I mean it's what shapes my next thoughts is what I've taken in. No, It's… It is just that today we have access to much larger data than maybe hundred years ago, All right? But still, We've already looked at this, It's still a minuscule, Isn't it? I agree. Compared to the whole cosmos, Still minuscule, But it's moving in the right direction. The unslakeable thirst for knowledge that humans have means that there's this ratcheting up each generation. So it's not that I'm… It is of course the case that I'm limited in my thoughts to the impressions that I've had, But I have a much bigger fire hose of impressions now that can build on the scaffolding of the generations before me, The things they've already figured out so that I can start at the next level and move on… Start at the next level for what, Towards what end? That's a good question. I mean it's… It's the… Toward the end of knowing in the way that… In the way that science cares about knowing. So putting aside usefulness of technology, Just the way that scientists ask questions. Richard Feynman, The physicist said, Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out of it, But it's not why we're doing it. So it's a way of knowing and it's a way of… It's a collaborative way of knowing where we link arms across space and across generations as well to try to get somewhere. I'm in no way trying to disagree with that or in any way discredit that. It's a tremendous effort, But I'm saying if knowing is the purpose, Because wanting to know how much time and energy somebody is willing to dedicate to that may be questionable from person to person, But everybody wants to know, There's no question about that. But knowing everything by intellect, We will know the surface of everything but never the real source of everything or the core of everything because the only piece of… the only doorway to our experience is this human mechanism. You don't know the world any other way than the way this one is projecting right now within itself. Yes? Participant – Agreed. Sadhguru – There is no other way. You don't know how that is. You only know the way it is happening within you, Isn't it? I don't know how you are really. I only know the way your picture is right now projecting in my brain or my system and how I'm perceiving it. As you know, You have drilled holes into people's brains and impaired something, Something and put electric current and whatever you've done. I'm not saying you are the person, I'm saying these things have been done. You definitely know by interfering with a certain physical process, The whole perception could change. The world has not changed but perception has changed so in his experience everything has changed. So that dimension of life is only useful for survival. When I say survival, Everything that we are doing is survival. To survive better, To enhance our survival to a better status or in a enhanced way of survival process. But once you've come as a human being, It doesn't matter how well you survive, Still it is not good enough, Isn't it? It's never going to be good enough because survival is not going to fulfill a human being. It doesn't matter how big our homes get, How big our cars get, How energy efficient it gets, How better we dress, How better we eat, Still we will feel it's not enough because that's not the direction in which the life wants to go. So here's the part I'm trying to understand is this issue about knowing, This issue about seeking knowledge. Let's say either in science or in mysticism, We depend on our senses for that, Yes? Or are you saying that… I'm saying they're not dependable. Agreed. They're not dependable. But isn't it all we have? Or you're saying there's this other aspect to the mind. Yes. See, See for example, Suppose you or me were lost in the jungle as infants, Okay? If something edible came, We definitely would take it and put it in the mouth. We wouldn't try our ears first, Then nostrils and then sudden by accident discover the mouth. No. We just know how to eat. No question about that. So I'm saying everything concerned with our survival is inbuilt. It's there. This is millions of years of memory which is there within us, We know how to survive. But we wouldn't know how to read, We wouldn't know how to do so many other things which would become a part of our life. Do you remember when you're two or three years of age when they tried to teach you that alphabet, The damn A, How complicated it was? It was so complicated just to get it right. You had to write hundred times to get it. Today with eyes closed you can do it because of a certain striving, Isn't it? Similarly, Anything beyond survival, If we have to have it in our lives, A certain striving is needed. And I said, Striving for inward perception is something unfortunately that's been banished in modern societies because we are on the thrill of technology. It's a fantastic thing but you will see as time progresses, As technology becomes better and better, Human beings will become more and more frustrated. If you have not noticed this, Just look out and see, You will see eight-year-old, Ten-year-old kids bored. In your generation or my generation we would have never seen, We never knew what is damn boredom is. When you're eight or ten you were just bubbling with life and on but today you see ten-year-old kids are just bored with it because they've seen the damn cosmos through their phone screen. They know it all. So I'm saying all this excess may not lead to betterment of life and it will not. Good and convenience will come but well-being will not happen. The purpose of enhancing human experience on this planet will not happen. It will only entertain us intellectually big time, Which it is, No question. I'm not saying it's wrong but I'm saying it's limited. It may be the thing that allows people to make a deeper pursuit in exactly analogy with the idea of building school houses throughout the country. It would have been thirty years ago that it would be difficult for you to speak to many people but now you have 500, 000 followers on Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. As I was telling you, I was in a very large gathering of people and somebody asked me, Sadhguru, What about all the gurus, Ancient gurus who were there, What about them? I said nothing, Nothing. I am the greatest guru because when Krishna was there, He could speak to… he was a very gentle human being. Probably he could speak to fifty people at a time. When Gautama came, He stood up and spoke more loudly. Maybe hundred people. Vivekananda came, He had a big voice. Maybe he spoke to two hundred people. Look at here, Right now I'm speaking to 50, 000 people and if I want I can speak to the whole world sitting here, So I'm the greatest guru ever. Because technology has definitely facilitated that, No question. But at the same time, Technology doesn't have discriminatory powers. You can… as you can deliver well-being, You can deliver disaster through technology by itself. It doesn't have a mind of its own. It is a certain capability and all machines and whatever we have created technology, From a bicycle to a spacecraft or a computer or whatever, Essentially only what we can do, Enhancement of that, Because we can speak. Now a microphone has come, A telephone has come, Because we can see a telescope has come, A microscope has come, Only what we can do, We are enhancing it with various machines and gadgets we are creating. We have not created one machine or gadget to do something that we ourselves cannot do in a rudimentary way. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan I agree with that. Sadhguru So I'm saying you're only enhancing your five senses. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan For now, Yes, But… Sadhguru No, It can… Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan As you know… Sadhguru See, Right now it can happen. Right now with a phone I can talk to somebody in India, It may… technology may come, I can smell the food that they're cooking in India. If I'm missing home, They can turn on the phone and I can smell the food from India, It may happen. I'm not saying it's beyond that, It's very much possible it may happen, But I can do it without a phone also. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan So you're very interested in inner engineering. My interest is in outer engineering and as you know, I've built a vest in my laboratory with vibratory motors on it and we're experimenting now with feeding in new kinds of data streams into the brain because the brain appears to be flexible enough to take in any kind of new data streams and have a sensation of it. So if I feed in weather patterns from the surrounding 200 miles or if I feed in real time stock market data, You can in theory develop a sense of the economic movements of the planet, Things like this. Now we're just at the foot of the mountain on this, But it may be that there are whole new kinds of human senses and that would be a proof of principle of developing something that goes beyond, That makes a new kind of sense, Essentially takes these peripheral devices and adds new ones and eventually we'll probably build new kinds of sensors and plug them right into the brain. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan But still they will only enhance your present capabilities, Not something new, Not entirely new. I don't know, If I could actually have an individual experience of weather patterns 200 miles wide as I'm walking around, I'm tapped into that, I think that's a new human experience. It's not something you have before. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan I'll tell you, This is something that happened almost forty, Forty-five years ago when I was living on a farm. So there is a man, A middle-aged man in the village who is, You know, He can barely hear, Ninety-five percent gone. Just if you shout at him, He hears something. So because he cannot hear, He cannot say anything, He just dumbens, Stares at things. So everybody thinks he's a fool and you know, Things happening, He's not valued in the village. So I took him as my man Friday and I said, You stay on my farm and work for me. So he was with me. What I found was, One morning he gets up and gets the plow and the, You know, Those are the days, Not tractor days, He still plow with the animals. So he gets the animals and the plow ready. I said, What are you doing? He said, I'm getting ready to plow. I said, Where are you going to plow? It's dry. He said, It's going to rain today. I look at the sky, It's clear sky. He said, Nonsense, Where is it going to rain? He said, No, It's going to rain. He simply sits there like this because nobody… no social communication, He can't hear. He simply sits there like this the whole day. If there's no work, He just sits in one place unmoving and he just knows and you won't believe it'll rain. The day he says it'll rain, It will rain. Then I sit up, Okay, I'm doing all this yoga, I'm not getting this, This guy. So I sat there day after day, Day after day turning my hand like this, Turning like this, Trying to feel this, Trying to feel that, Feeling the earth, Looking up, Looking down, Everything. I applied myself for eighteen months and today in tropical climate, With mask closed, I will sit and say today it's going to rain means ninety-five percent it's going to rain. It's just a keen observation of everything, That's all. You just… because he could not hear, He just sharpened the other aspects so much, He just knows when it'll rain and always bang on. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan Maybe he had one of my vests on. Sadhguru Laughs Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan Possible. But he was not sparkling like you. I'm curious on a completely different topic, When you look at other faith traditions, When you look at the the the rabbi sages and imams and people all over the world of different traditions, What do you see in common? Sadhguru The common is they all believe something that they don't know because I think the main reason why every human being is not a natural seeker is they have not realized the immensity of I do not know. Only if you see I do not know, The possibility of knowing arises, Longing to know arises, Seeking to know arises, Then knowing becomes a possibility and a reality. Everything that you do not know, If you just believe, You destroy the possibility of knowing altogether. But belief is a… is something that builds confidence into a human being, Makes him far more sure-footed than others. But confidence without clarity is very disastrous, Both for the individual and the larger humanity and the planet itself. See, Suppose let's say my vision is not clear, It is but I'm just saying, Suppose my vision is not clear, I want to walk through you but I can't see clearly but I'm very confident. You know what a disaster I will be for you, All right? If I understand my vision is not clear and I don't have this foolish idea of confidence, Then I will walk gently and seek somebody's help. I'll have some humility to walk through people in a certain way, Otherwise I will see how to clear my vision, What I have to do for that. But if you have no clarity and you have confidence, It's a dangerous… it's a… it's TNT. It's bound to explode on humanity somewhere. It keeps happening here, There, We are just looking at eruptions, Small eruptions, But it's bound to happen somewhere large scale. But at the same time, As human intellect is sparkling like never before, For the first time in the history of humanity, More human beings are thinking for themselves than ever before. All these thousands of years, One village or one town with a few thousand people means only one guy would think, Others would just take instructions from him. Now almost everybody is able to think how clearly… how… how much clarity or confusion is a different thing, But at least they're thinking. As this evolves, I believe in the next fifty to hundred years as more and more human beings start thinking for themselves, Then you will see believing in something will be completely out of vogue because essentially believing something means, With… with all due respect to everybody, Essentially believing something means you are not sincere enough to admit that you do not know. We all have to come to this much, What I know, I know, What I do not know, I do not know. This is a fantastic way to be. And I do not know person, Cannot fight with anybody. That's the biggest thing. I know, Always there is a fight. So all these religious processes which have ended up as religions, At one time when they started, Started as an individual experience for somebody, That person shared his experience with a few people around him, Maybe a dozen or maybe a hundred or maybe a few thousand, He shared and over a period of time it gets organized and becomes something totally, Totally different. So it has a huge responsibility of handling psychological well-being of the human beings in the sense… See, Human beings are psychologically always confused and they don't know where to be, What is their well-being and for every small thing there is confusion, You know. It's something that I realized when I went to the university, I… I refused to… I'm sorry, I'm speaking in a university. I refused to sit in the classrooms because it was too uninteresting for me. So I sat in the garden outside, Under a tree. Once I planted myself there, Everybody knew that I'm there every day without fail, Under the tree. Where all kinds of debates and discussions we started and people started coming to me with all kinds of problems. You know, Students having their own problems, Their education problems, Boyfriend, Girlfriend problems, Parental problems. As I sat there and I heard through everybody's everything, In these three years that I was there I must have heard thousands of people about their problems. It became like a problem point, Anybody has a problem, They come to me. I realized I was the only freak who did not have a problem. Everybody had a problem, It made them normal. I did not know what's a problem. It's not that everything was perfect but it's just that I didn't view it as a problem. I just saw situations are there, Some work for me, Some don't work for me. But everybody has a problem. If you really look at it, The problem with humanity is just this. From a… from being a monkey or a chimpanzee to a human being, It's actually a small change, You know. From a chimpanzee to a human being, There is only 1. 23% DNA difference I believe. That's not much, Isn't it? We could forget sometime who we are. But what a phenomenal change in the intelligence that we have compared to a chimpanzee or a monkey. So the problem is just this, We have a intellect which is sharp and we don't know how to hold it. Whichever way we touch it, It cuts us. All the suffering, Human suffering on the planet is manufactured in their own mind. From outside how much suffering is happening, You tell me. Nothing much, It's all generated… it's all self-help. This is because this evolutionary process has happened so rapidly. As Charles Darwin went about describing, A goat became a giraffe, It took many million years, A pig became an elephant, Many, Many million years. But from monkey to man, It happened rather quickly, Tch, To a point where people think there is a missing link somewhere, Okay? So quickly that we have still not gotten used to this intelligence. We are struggling as to how to manage this intelligence and this intelligence is the basis of people's suffering. If you remove half the brain, Most of them will be peaceful. Yes or no? Hey, You are the expert, You must tell me. You know, In mental asylums when people are completely out of control, They are doing lobotomy, Remove part of the brain, They become peaceful. So right now, Just to be peaceful and happy is such a huge challenge for most human beings, Simply because they are not able to conduct the… the sparkle of their own intelligence. If they were little dumber, They would be peaceful. Yes. So the problem is not of… the problem is of plenty. The problem is not of paucity, It is just that a certain level of intelligence, Which we are not able to handle because there is no stable platform. There is an intelligence here for which there is no stable platform. Unless you create a stable enough platform, This intelligence will not become… will not work for us, It will work against us, Simply because it's a sharp knife. If you don't know how to hold it, It will cut you up. Why we do not give a knife to a child's hand is not because knife is dangerous, Because child's hand is not steady enough, He could become dangerous to himself or to somebody. So this process of perception and understanding and consciousness, All these things are questions being asked by the intellect. Intellect is always looking at the world only in pieces, In bits and pieces because all the information that comes to the intellect is coming through sense organs and sense organs perceive everything only by comparison. Without context, They cannot perceive anything. For example, If I touch this glass, It feels cool to me. It is not that I know what is happening with this glass, It is just that my body temperature is in a certain way, Because of that I feel it's cool. If I lower my body temperature and touch this, This would be warm to me. So sense organs are giving a perspective only in comparison, Which is useful for survival. What this means is, Suppose you're six feet tall, You stand like a tall man, You walk like a tall man, You feel like a tall man, You are a tall man. You went to another society where everybody is eight feet tall. Suddenly you stand like a short man, Walk like a short man, Feel like a short man, You are a short man. So I'm saying this perspective of compar… knowing everything by comparison is only useful for survival process. Now that science, Science in its essence is interested in knowing, Not about enslaving the world. How to use it is not the question. How to know this is just an intrigue that from nowhere we just pop up and full-scale drama and suddenly we pop out and don't know what. For this we have simplistic answers. Okay, You will go to heaven, Okay you will go to hell, The people that you don't like will go to hell, Of course you and me will go to heaven. So these things are there. This is… We are trying to handle our ignorance with solace. Solace is what you're seeking, You must believe something. Belief is a good thing because today modern psychiatrists are here trying to solve these problems that human beings are having with their intelligence which are turned against themselves. Essentially all human suffering is their own intelligence having turned against them, That's all it is. So psychiatrists are trying to handle but they can only handle one client at a time and they need lot of furniture and all this. But religions and faiths have managed people for a long time, Heads off to them for that because they have given solace and balance to people for a very long time. But solace is one thing, Solution and seeking is something totally different. If you're talking about seeking to know, Then belief systems are of no consequence. If solace is what you're seeking, Yes, You must believe something because instead of going to weekly psychiatrists' sessions, If you simply believe something, Everything will just settle down within you. It's a fantastic tool that way. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan This is a place where I feel like science and mysticism have a real meeting ground is that this three words of, Of I don't know and sometimes science gets a bad reputation about this and people say things like, Well, Scientists have proven this or that but scientists never use the word proof or truth or you know, We know this is the way it is. Instead, You know, These, This capacity to hold on to multiple hypotheses at the same time and say, I don't know what is the right answer is part of the scientific temperament. It's an important part of the fabric of everything we do in science is this understanding that mother nature is way bigger than we are and that we in our lifetimes might not get anything but one step closer to in the direction of truth. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayanan The process, The methodology implied by science is not one lifetime. If you come for million lifetimes, Still you will not know because the phenomena of creation is such as you're studying it, It will multiply into a million more. That is the nature of creation. The same things can become so elaborate. I think this is what is happening to science. What they thought is one thing, They looked into it, They found a million and they thought, Okay, We got a million. They looked into that million, It became a billion, Endlessly it's going on because that is the nature of creation. So looking at the physical phenomena and wanting to know the source of creation is… I'm just saying the seeking is fantastic but the methodology will only throw out useful technologies. But how many technologies do you need to live well, I'm asking. Okay, Your iPhone S6 is good enough, Do you want S8 tomorrow morning? What are you going to do with it? Even the damn S6, Most people are not using… using three percent of its capabilities. Yes or no? Most people are not using three percent of that phone's capability. Look, I think our science is too young still to know whether we are always going to confront a multiplication of problems or not. I don't say they're problems. There'll be more things to study, That's all. Yes but sometimes people call that weenie science by which I mean once you understand the structure of the atom and so on, You could measure the neutron to finer and finer resolution but who cares because that's not the fundamental problem anymore. And we're still at such a young age that we don't know whether science will keep bifurcating into more and more interesting questions or whether it'll just become weighing things and it doesn't matter because now we kind of get the core of it. We might not know that for a hundred years or a thousand years but I don't know for certain that we are doomed to infinite complexity. It may be that we can put together a very clear… What I'm saying is you're fundamentally employing sense organs. I agree with that. Sense organ is the basis of all scientific pursuit. I'm saying sense organs are not reliable instruments. You asked all. I just… I think that the pursuit of science is really trying to surmount our sense organs, Is trying to figure out this… How would they surmount? By understanding laws of nature that we don't know why they're true but they seem to be correct like quantum mechanics, Like basic Newtonian physics by figuring out why force equals mass times acceleration. Why is that true? Nobody knows but that's the way that people pursue trying to understand it's a way of reaching into the cosmos and figuring out that there are laws that go beyond my sense organs. I have no way to smell or touch F equals MA and yet it seems to hold and that's the sense in which we go beyond the little peripheral devices that we come to the table with and try to understand what's past that. It is true that we have to translate things into equations and equations we might write down or we might hear if we're a blind person but in theory that's something that's beyond our basic sensory apparatus. See we distribute this, We… just for convenience I'll make it into four, Okay? We look at creation as four different dimensions. Sthula which means the gross physical creation, Sukshma which means subtle, That means you cannot perceive them through sense organs but if you hone your attention to a certain level then you can perceive that so this is called as vishesh gyan which means an extraordinary perception or it's called vijnan today in India in local languages. The word for science is vijnan, Okay? That means it's vishesh gyan. Vishesh gyan means extraordinary perception. So we are perceiving things that our sense organs could not perceive but still they are in the realm of physicality and all physicality is perceivable through sense organs if they are honed well. If you may not be able to perceive, Some other creature on the planet is able to perceive. I think… Yeah, Many different creatures have totally different slices of their ecosystem. That means it's still physical reality. So what is called as sthula is gross reality which all of us can see and hear and smell. What is considered as sukshma, Still physicality but so subtle that your eyes and ears are not good enough for that but if you're willing to pay attention you can perceive. Then next is called as shunya which literally translates as emptiness in English but emptiness is not the word. It is… It is physicality without form. There is no form. All physical has defined form but shunya means physicality has reached a place where there is no form to it, It's just physical or it's fundamental material of physicality. The next is called as shiva which means that which is not. That means that which is not physical at all. So existence is seen as these four components and how to perceive these four dimensions. There's a whole methodology. Why I'm saying this is if only scientists who have pursued things so far into physical reality, If they pay little attention to the most fundamental physicality which is themselves, If they turn inward rather than constantly looking through a telescope or a microscope, If they spend equal amount of time turning inward, I think something phenomenal could come out of it. Dr. Jay Harness, Ph. D. For many scientists the reason they turn outward is as a way of understanding what this is all made out of which would include understanding something about what a piece of life is. Let me ask you this, When you say, I am a piece of life, You are a piece of life, I can hear that and understand it a particular way but I want to know what you mean by a piece of life. Because what you drink is life, What you eat is life, What you breathe is life. All this we're gathering and this is a piece of life which has acquired a certain level of information, Built its own kind of software unconsciously and its own tendencies and its own character and its own personality. But that's a bubble. It's like if you blow sub-bubbles, Each bubble has a character of its own. When they burst, The most essential ingredient of the bubble was the air. Where is it? It's all there. So this is all air and the bubble is a piece of air. Similarly, This is all life. This whole cosmos is a living cosmos. Here I'm a piece of life and I have… this is… life has given me this privilege that I can hold this piece of life within myself and experience it as if I'm by myself everything. It's a fantastic privilege but we should not abuse this. And… and do you see that as being illusory, The idea that you're a piece of life and I'm a piece of life, Given that we share atoms and when I'm breathing out and you're breathing in and so on we're exchanging atoms, Do you… do you… do you see that as an illusion that there is a you and a me or is that… are we all the same life? See, The thing is right now, You know, All these apps have come and different kinds of softwares have come. So this is easy to understand today because people are using this thing as if they're live, Okay, And they're alive in their own way because a certain amount of information has been calibrated in a certain way to do certain things and it's almost alive. I think most people have a better relationship with their WhatsApp with… than with their family, Okay? Yes, People are so engaged with it because it has a character of its own and it's even predicting what's the next word you will type, Which your family cannot do, Your friends cannot do probably. So this is just like that. It has accumulated a certain amount of information. This vast life that's available, Around it we formed a bubble. This is my bubble, That's your bubble. What is the content of the bubble? It's the same stuff. But what is the surface of the bubble? My surface is entirely different from yours and it has its own characteristic, It has its own flavor, It has its own tendencies. So this is an unconscious software that every one of us are building with phenomenal amount of information that we are acquiring as we sit here. The five senses are gathering a phenomenal amount of… the amount of information that one gathers in twenty-four hours of time. If you spend a million years, You can't process it. That much information we are gathering. This is what traditionally we refer to as karma. It's all twisted out in America I'm seeing, The word karma. Everybody's calling themselves karma now. You know, People are named karma. I heard some people were named karma. So we will… Suppose we see right now the… we don't know how the outside weather also is quite good I think in the evening. At least the air conditioning is good, Everything is nice, You're fine. Everybody is troubling you here but you're sitting here miserably. Then we say, Ayo, It's just karma. What it means is the word karma literally translates as action or doing. So we say who you are right now is entirely your doing. The way you have structured yourself, Knowingly or unknowingly, The kind of womb that you were born in is also an unconscious choice because you created a certain type of tendencies, That's where you moved in search of that kind of tendencies. What… what facilitates that? So this software is building up all the time unconsciously. So only thing that I want to say now is whatever you can do unconsciously, If you are willing, If you are willing, You can do the same thing consciously. If you can build so much software unconsciously, If you are willing, You can restructure that consciously. I can show you millions of people who restructure themselves in a matter of few weeks. I can show you few people where the very shape of their face will change in twenty-four hours time, Simply because they start a certain process. Entirely their whole personality is altered within a matter of one or two days of doing certain processes because distancing yourself from your genetic memory, There's an entire process. Most Indians have forgotten, Otherwise it was there in every family. Whenever somebody dies or even when your parents are alive, There are processes how to distance yourself from your genetic memory. Because this is very important, If you want to be a unique fresh bubble of your own, Then you must distance yourself from genetic memory, Otherwise you will see at eighteen you are a great rebel, You don't want to be like your parents and this and that. You see when you are forty-five, Suddenly you start walking like your father, Talking like your mother, Stuff is happening to you, You don't know because don't underestimate these people. They won't give up so easily. Your grandfather may be dead and gone, But the guy wants to live through you. So the thing is to distance yourself from genetic memory so that you don't become a cyclical pattern of repetitiveness. You want to be a fresh life. That means you have to recalibrate your software consciously. Anything that you can do consciously, You can also do… anything that you can do unconsciously, You can also do consciously, If the necessary striving is there. What does it take for people to have that level of striving? It depends how far they want to go. If you… if somebody comes and asks, If I want to know the entire… not the new physics, What has happened till now, If I want to know how long does it take? If a fresh student comes and asks, Is there a time you can say? No, You can say, Okay, Start on a science undergrad, Let's see. If he does undergrad and he thinks he's beginning to know everything, Then you start telling him this is not it, You got to do your masters. If he does that, You will say then you have to do your PhD. After your PhD, You are declared that you don't know much. That's right, That's the path of wisdom in science is learning how little you know. So, The most… the most basic thing that one can do, How long does it take means, The most fundamental thing is, First of all, To know that there is another dimension of faculty within us, That there's another way of perceiving things, That there is something beyond… not as a belief, Not as a conclusion, Not as something that is said in some scripture or by some guru or some teacher or whatever, But by yourself to know beyond this body, Beyond this mind, There is something within you. This experience, If this has to happen, I would say if you are willing to dedicate just thirty hours of absolutely focused time, If you give me, In thirty hours' time, We can bring you to a place, We can give you a tool through which you know something beyond your physicality. Not that thing is you don't have to jump into a conclusion, But something beyond your physical nature will become alive within you and you know there is something beyond physical nature. If that is enough inspiration for you to continue your pursuit, Then how long it will take the entire pursuit, You cannot say each individual is his own. They're saying enough. Okay, I have a message that we're going to go to Q&A now and Trent, Is there a pattern to the Q&A in terms of people getting microphone or should they just shout? Okay, I see there are microphone runners and people raise their hand. Okay. I thought they were announcing dinner time. Good evening Sadhguru. So my question is directed towards you. So I've heard from you in past that for this path of seeking, One does need a guru, One needs someone to show the light. So how does one select a guru? How does one know who's the right person to take him through that path? I've got an app for that. See, If I give you a torch light in your hand, Still does not mean you're going to find your way home, Okay? A torch light just shows how you see it, Whether you right… walk the right path, With how you handle this, All this is entirely left to you. But it lights up. The torch light lights up so that you don't step into a drain or you don't step into a ditch, It lights up the place. But with the torch light, Many people have walked to their death. Yes? That's what people have. And headlamps on, They've gone crash-striped. So this is just lighting up the place. What you do is always left to you. So which is the best light? Today I think LED is doing well. So who is the best light? It is… You should not make a conclusion like that, Who is the best light on the planet. I told you give me thirty hours. If it works very well for you, If it enhances your life, Let's try sixty hours. If it works, Really fantastic, Let's try a little more. Let's go in installments. I don't want anybody to be hanging on to me thinking I'm their savior or something. That's not the way to go for it. Experiment with it. If it works, Let's put more energy and more time into it. If it works further, Let's put more energy and more time into it. I think that's the way to go. Not today coming here and making a decision, Okay, This is my man. This is not marriage, Okay? Good night. Right here, First I would ask David for a question. I don't want to discount science from mysticism or mysticism from science, But what I want to know through this discussion what I had been thinking about is as you say, You observe how can I… I have a question for David first. Have you ever studied someone who has observed themselves from outside, Like suspending yourself from within you and observing you? And to Sadhguru, What would be the best technique to achieve that level of human intelligence that you suspend yourself out of yourself and observe yourself? So it depends exactly what we mean by observing yourself from the outside. There is what's called an out of body illusion that people can have. It's a little complicated to explain the setup, But it has to do with wearing some video goggles and putting a camera behind you. And so you're now seeing your body with your goggles. You're seeing your own body there and somebody scratches your back and you can see your back getting scratched over there and you're feeling it also, But you're seeing your own body in the distance and this allows people to sometimes have a very clear experience where their body is there, But they feel like I am six feet behind over here. So there's a neuroscience group in Europe that was able to induce this illusion when people were even lying down and that gave them the opportunity to stick them into a brain scanner and measure brain activity while they were having this out of body experience and thought they were six feet away from their body. Brain imaging is limited in the sense that what we can say is, Well, There are particular sets of Christmas lights that light up when you're having that kind of experience, But unfortunately that's where science gets a little bit stuck because we can describe the neural correlates of subjective experience, But we don't know yet why they're identical to that subjective experience. So the answer to your question is it has been measured, But the answer is not satisfying. I must tell you my experience of this, I don't subject to these indignities anymore. Five years ago it happened that somebody wanted to… I was in some institute in India and it was a little bit of an obligation, I said, Okay, They wanted to study my… you know, Measure my gamma waves in my brain. I did not know I had gamma waves in my brain. They said, No, You have, We want to study, You meditate. I said, I don't know any meditation. They said, You teach meditation to everybody. I said, Yes, I teach them because they don't know how to sit still. You teach them methods of sitting still. If you want, I'll sit still. But their problem is their scientific study, They want the name of the meditation, The method and what happens to the gamma wave, Something, That's how the process is. Then I sat still, They put some fourteen electrodes to me and I sat there. After some time, Maybe fifteen, Twenty minutes, They… with some metallic object they started hitting my knee. I thought, Okay, Part of their experiment and I sat there. Then they… my ankles, You know that funny place, That very painful place, They're hitting that place. I thought, Okay, It's their experiment, Damn experiment, It's painful. But it became very persistent and extremely painful. Then I slowly opened my eyes, Okay, Why am I being beaten up like this? I opened my eyes and they were all giving me a weird look. I said, Did I do something wrong? They said, According to our instruments, You are dead. I said, That's a great diagnosis. And then they said, You are either dead or you are brain dead. I said, No, No, That's too insulting. I'll take the first diagnosis. I'm dead, I'm okay. If you really… if you give me a certificate that I'm dead, I can live with that. If you give me a certificate I'm brain dead. That's not a good thing. So I… I don't know what this thing was about but what I'm saying is, All instruments created by us are definitely lesser instruments than this one. It can't be more than that. Though a telephone can speak that far and I can only speak this far, All this, But they are lesser instruments in terms of sophistication. In terms of a particular action, They may be bigger than us. A bicycle can go run faster than I can run, A motorcycle can go much faster. Well, There is an aircraft which can fly. Yes, All that is there. But in terms of sophistication, There cannot be anything more sophisticated than who we are because we cannot create something more sophisticated than ourselves. Whatever we create will be a by-product of who we are. So in that context, Using instruments to measure… Yes, You can… You can very easily fool the brain, You know, It's very simple. There are many, Many techniques like this in yoga. Like I mean, David is talking about… He was talking to me about how you could trick the mind that a smell can become a sound, A sound can become something else. The whole lot of… Without all these gadgets, There are many ways that you could trick the human mind. And the magicians of the world have mastered this thing. You know, Simply like this, They pick things out of your pocket without you knowing what's happening to you because there is a certain way that you can use the faculty to go behind that and do certain things. But apart, In terms of fundamental sophistication, There is nothing more sophisticated than this gadget. This is the gadget and this is the only form of experience you have with the world. When I say this is the only form of experience you have, Right now can you see me, All of you? Just use your hands and point out, Where am I? Oh, You got it all wrong. You know, I'm a… I'm a mystic from South India. Now, This light is falling upon me, Reflecting, Inverted image in the retina. You know the whole story. Where do you see me now? Within yourself. Where do you hear me now? Within yourself. Where have you seen the whole world? Within yourself. Everything that ever happened to you, Happened only within you. Right now, Someone next to you, If they touch your hand, You think you're feeling their hand, No. You're only experiencing the sensations in your hand. You do one thing, You make somebody touch you like this five times, Just observe this. After that no hand, That person is not here, Simply sit here, You can create the same sensation. Either you can do it with external stimuli or you can internally manufacture anything that you want. What you call as mental problems or mental diseases is just that they're creating many things without external stimuli. All the time it's happening. It's happening to everybody in so many different ways. When it goes out of control, We call it an ailment. Otherwise almost every human being is… various experiences they're creating without any external stimuli. If you go through your dream, A dream is as true as a reality when you're going through it, Isn't it? I was… you know, We started a school a few years ago and this eight-year-old boy, I just walked into the school, This eight-year-old boy comes and said, "'Sadhguru, Is life real or is it a dream? ' I looked at him, This is an eight-year-old, You have to come with the truth, You know. I said, "'Life is a dream, But dream is true. '" Go, Sadhguru, You're always like this only. But that's a fact. Life is a dream, The way it's happening within you right now, It's a dream. But the dream is true in your experience. But this dream, You can make it whichever way you want, Whichever way you want. In the sense… You okay with the joke? Dr. Raghuram G. Rajan-Bhajan-Shivarajan In the sense what? I didn't hear. On a certain day, A lady went to sleep. In her sleep, She had a dream. In her dream, She saw a hunk of a man standing there staring at her. Then he started coming closer and closer and closer. He came so close, She could even feel his breath and she trembled, Not in fear. Then she asked, What will you do to me? The man said, Well lady, It's your dream. Thank you. If you want to say something, Please. So it's your dream, You can make whatever out of it and we can make this into a fantastic dream for ourselves and for everybody on this planet. Science and technology has done wonderful things for us to enhance our dreams, But I want the scientists to meditate. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Reviews

Good information shared between two experienced professionals… thank you! 😎

I adore Sadhguru’s words of wisdom which resonate with my soul.

Yes, some scientics are starting to meditate ☺. Great talk. Thank you. Namaste.

An excellent exchange of ideas.

Delightful reflections of life as we percieve it