Stress Is Hurting You! 5 Proven Steps To Reverse Its Effects: Deepak Chopra
Guests: Deepak Chopra
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
We've created a world that's very dangerous right now. I think we're on the brink of a possible extinction. Deepak Chopra right here. One of the world's biggest experts on health, wellness. Time magazine is one of the top 100 icons of the century. He's also written 93 books. When you look at the direction of travel as a civilization, what advice do we need now? War, greed, stress, humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly and do nothing.
We're always doing, doing, doing. We have human doings. We're not human beings anymore. Take some time every day to be unoccupied. Ask yourself, who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? People don't ask these questions. They only know that they suffer and they want an immediate solution, which is, you know, something like an antidepressant. And that's what we've created. Every experience shapes our biology. When you look at a situation, do you see an adversity or an opportunity?
How is this determined? By your childhood. If your parents were complaining, condemning, criticizing, playing the victim, you will see every situation as an adversity. Can it be changed? Yes. How? There are actually many studies on what is called the happiness equation. Number one is happiness. This is your 93rd book. If you were to write one last book, what would be the top-line message? I hate to use this word. It's misinterpreted, but the title would be... Deepak.
As I was reading through... your work, a certain word came up over and over again, and it was the word purpose. So I wanted to start this really by asking you, what is your purpose? What mission are you on? You've written, I'm hearing, this is your 93rd book. If there is an umbrella that one could call your purpose, what would it be? For the last 35 years, I've used our non-profit foundation, Chopra Foundation, with the mission statement of reaching a critical mass of people, in my mind, a billion people, for personal and social transformation for a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier and joyful world.
So those words are very carefully chosen. Peaceful, sustainable, healthier, just and joyful. So everything is under that umbrella. Going back to the start of your story, you know, What do I need to, you know, that profound purpose, that mission you've been on for the last 30 plus years, where does that stem from? What's the earliest sort of domino that fell to put you on course to pursue that as your life's work? I trained in internal medicine and then endocrinology, which is study of hormones.
And then I went on to study neuroscience and neuroendocrinology. I saw the relationship between what happens in our consciousness and particularly emotions. and how that affects our biology. As a physician, I was always impressed by how giving information to a patient affected their metabolism. You know, if I told somebody you had cancer, just the word cancer, you could see immediately their blood pressure go up, their heart rate speed up, their platelets get sticky, and, you know, a whole cascade of events in their biology, which was...
essentially inflammation and propensity to disease, just hearing bad news and interpreting it and having an emotional response to it. I remember giving that news to a patient and then immediately realizing that I'd made a mistake. I was reading the wrong chart. So I immediately apologized and I saw his biology change in a moment. And now, 40 years later, we realize that every experience you have, every experience, it doesn't matter what the experience is, it could be emotional, but it could be food, it could be sleep, it could be exercise, it could be breathing or yoga.
But right now, this conversation, we're having this conversation and you and I are exchanging information together, in our frontal cortex of the brain, and genes are going on to facilitate the neural networks that make this happen. But then there are people listening to us, maybe hundreds of thousands, their brains are being activated. So I realized that you couldn't localize the mind. If you ask a neuroscientist, conventional neuroscientist, where's the mind?
They'll point to their brain. But the brain only has the neural correlates of the mind. The mind itself, you can't localize. It's both embodied and... It's a relational and embodied process. So, you know, the mind doesn't exist by itself. It exists in relationship to other minds. So it's relational and embodied in the brain, but in your biology. And it regulates the flow of energy and information in our bodies and in the ecosystem of relationships.
Now, if... our identity, fundamental identity, which is that of the separate self, which is a socially induced hallucination in my opinion, because the separate self doesn't exist, period. But that hallucination or that idea of the separate self creates anxiety. It also creates anger because of trauma in the past. So anger is nothing but the memory of trauma. Hostility is the desire to get even. Anxiety is the anticipation of trauma again in the future.
Blaming yourself is guilt. Guilt leads to humiliation. Humiliation and the combination of everything I've said leads to depression. which is the number one pandemic of our time, not COVID, depression, stress, hostility, resentment, that causes inflammation. So, you know, suddenly I had this idea that if we went back to some of the wisdom traditions of the world, that said our essential nature is, as the Buddhists say, inter-beingness. We are, you know, famous statement of Thich Nhat Hanh, we are inter-beings that inter-arise in the inter-isness.
There's no isolated self. But that isolated, fearful self has created the trauma that we see in the world that actually manifests us. War, terrorism, eco-destruction, greed, leaders who are only interested in power mongering, influence peddling, cronyism, corruption, and their own self-interest. So we've created a world that's actually very dangerous right now. And... I thought in my naivete about 35, 40 years ago, if we had something that could actually collectively shift consciousness, and actually I was one of the founders of an association called Alliance for a New Humanity.
And we had people from civil society, lawyers, attorneys, people from the United Nations with this idea. that we could reach a critical mass of people for a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful world. But even the organization faltered because there was schism within the organization. You know, people, again, power mongering and fighting within the organization for dominance or violence. or, you know, leadership in a very selfish way.
So the organization faltered. It didn't go anywhere. I decided to continue on my own. So when you talk about this separated self, you're referring to identity. I'm referring to identity. Identity. Which is, you know, identity, our crisis today and has been of identity. And identity on a personal level is this, the person, you know, the story that I tell myself about who I am and that I accept about myself. Correct. And for a country, they have their own identity.
They accept that they are the United States of America and we are this and this is who we are. Correct. And then that causes separation and a disconnectedness. You talked about how you created an organization to try and combat this and get to that critical mass. And then the organization itself failed, which makes me think, is this not just innate in humans that we are... Greedy, selfish, power mongering, corrupt at our core. It's been our evolution since hunter-gatherer times.
And it got worse in the industrial age. And then I think it got even worse with... with the wars, you know, the First World War, Second World War. But if you read history, the history is one of violence ever since human beings have existed. Other species are violent too, but not in the way we are for power or for money or for this idea of, you know, extreme nationalism which is a form of tribalism in my opinion or the whole history of colonialism is just that and now we've reached a point with the information age where you know it's kind of nothing is secret anymore and yet um the intensity of what's happening in the world.
Look what's happening in Ukraine, or right now what's happening in Pakistan, or what's happening in India, or what's happening in Korea. Look at any place in the world. Maybe you leave a few places like New Zealand or Bali or a couple of places like that. The rest of the world is actually in extreme turmoil. So we have medieval minds and modern capacities. Now, that is not a good combination. A medieval mind restricted to a little area in medieval times caused havoc there, but now...
Globally, that medieval mind, that tribal mind, and our modern capacities, it's a terrible combination. Everybody listening to this now in some way is suffering. Yes. In some way. Yes. Everyone suffering is slightly different, but if you zoom out far enough, it's pretty much all the same to some degree. Yeah. If you had a young person come to you and they were, I don't know, they don't even have to be young, 16 years old, maybe 30, maybe 45, and you had to give them some broad advice on how to suffer less for the remainder of their life, what advice would you give them?
You know, we've reached a stage in our evolution where people don't ask these questions. They only know that they suffer and they want an immediate solution, which is, you know, something like an antidepressant or whatever. And that's what we've created with a materialistic interpretation of the universe, which, Wisdom traditions tell us we suffer because, in fact, in the Eastern wisdom tradition, we suffer five causes. Not knowing who we are, number one.
Not knowing the nature of reality. No isolated self. Clinging and grasping at experience, which is ephemeral. You know, experience is ephemeral. It's transient. You can't catch it. Like regret or... Even this experience, you know, if I asked you, you can't hold on to this experience. If I asked you what happened to your childhood, you'd say it's a dream. Or if I asked you what happened to last night, it's a dream. What happened to this morning, it's a dream.
What happens to these words, by the time you hear them, they don't exist. And we try to cling on to that. We try to cling on that. Then we also recoil from that if it's unpleasant. We confuse ourselves with our ego identity, which is socially induced, and we fear death. Those are the five causes of suffering. So wisdom traditions say you have to figure out what is reality. And when you figure out what is reality, and you can't do that at 16 unless you have been groomed.
In wisdom traditions, you were groomed. for wisdom. And that started what we call self-education, which is what yoga is, by the way. Yoga means union with the self. Misinterpretation of yoga is this, it's just the physical postures. But the eight limbs of yoga are all intended to find your true self. So there are principles of social intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical posture, breathing techniques, withdrawal of the senses, focused awareness, meditation, transcendence.
Once you get to these last three aspects of yoga, transcendence is the key. You find out who you really are. The self which knows the self, not bamboozled by social constructs. So let's go through those five things. Number one, Not knowing reality. Reality is not local. It's infinite. So what do I need to understand then to avoid that form of suffering? I need to understand that it's not localized. And therefore that means... That you are infinite.
You're at one level. I'm everything and nothing. everything and nothing, and actually you experience love. Love not as a sentiment, but the ineffable interconnectedness with all that exists. People have those experiences with psychedelics these days. Or you can actually give somebody an experience like that with even VR because we are already in a VR. Number two? Number two, clinging, grasping that which is ungraspable. Every experience is ungraspable.
So the awareness of an experience is not the experience. The awareness of a thought is not a thought. But, The awareness of a thought is independent of the thought. If you identify with the awareness instead of the thought, which is like a cloud going through the sky, you don't either attach yourself to it or you don't identify with it. It takes training. So, you know, in the Rig Veda, let noble thoughts come to me from every side. Because your thoughts are not your production.
Your thoughts are socially constructed and they recycle through you. And yet we identify with them. So number two is identifying with that which is ephemeral, transient, ungraspable. Number three. On number two, so we need to... not attach, not associate with thoughts, not associate with experiences in order to be free from suffering? You can associate with them, but you're not attached or identified to them. You can associate with thoughts. So if you've had a trauma in your early life or something, or you've been through something not so good, or you've been dumped by your boyfriend.
And then we identify with that. And actually that epigenetically, by the way, that's intergenerational. Now we know... that in the Holocaust, for example, during the invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany, there was famine amongst the Jews. And now three generations, four generations after that, The people's descendants who were traumatized, they have diabetes because somewhere in their body there's a memory of famine. So they're holding on to carbohydrates, they have insulin resistance, etc.
If you take a mouse and you expose it to a smell that it likes, for example, lavender, and then you give it a mild electrical shock, for seven generations the mice will be fearful of that particular smell. I've been to a cow farm in Hawaii where they used to have electrical wires as fences, mild electrical shocks. Now they don't have the wires, but the descendants of those cows that were traumatized, they won't cross over that fence or they won't cross over where the border was.
So this is another mystery. Where is memory? Most people, if you ask them, where is memory, they'll point to their brain. If I asked you, what did you have for breakfast today? What did you have for breakfast today? It's a really good question. I had a salad with some chicken and avocado. So now where was that memory before I asked you the question? There's nowhere in the brain you can point out that memory was. But as soon as I ask you the question, the neural networks go fire.
But where does the memory retreat from? The only place is consciousness, but consciousness can't be localized. You know when people get brain injuries, car crashes, they lose their memory sometimes. Yeah, so radio is damaged, you don't listen to the music. Doesn't that prove that it's in the brain somewhere? Is Shakespeare on your movie screen or your television set? Is actually anything you read in the book is the author in the book. It's that, you know, you confuse the instrument with the user of the instrument.
The fault of the instrument is not a reflection on the user of the instrument. Shakespeare and that would live on like the CD or like the video cassette. Yeah, but where is that mind that localized in the CD? In the brain somewhere, isn't it? No, the brain is just like your CD set. What happens in the brain is called the neural correlates of experience, NCE. As I said earlier, there's no experience in the brain. That's where you can put an eye through it.
The brain has no self-awareness. When you think about some of these neurological diseases like dementia, Alzheimer's, What does that present evidence for in terms of, I mean, I guess a lot of people aren't really clear at the moment where Alzheimer's and dementia starts or what's causing it. Alzheimer's, now we know, is due to accumulation of dementia. of a substance called amyloid in the brain. So about there are 40 genes that predispose you to force Alzheimer's, of which three are probably fully penetrant, which means they predict the disease because that's genetic determinism.
The rest are related to things like lack of sleep or inflammation or stress or a diet that causes inflammation or lack of unregulated biological rhythms, etc. So there are identifiable causes for Alzheimer's. But again, Alzheimer's and these neurological diseases, all diseases like that, We are talking about two different things. We are talking about consciousness as a fundamental reality, and then we are talking about the instrument that we call the brain.
Now, I should say to you, though, that what I am saying is not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, but mainstream science cannot answer the hard problem of consciousness or where experience happens and is not interested. The two most promising things in medical science, well, there are three or four. One is what we call gene editing, CRISPR. So you'll be able to cut and paste genes soon, the way you cut and paste emails. But that'll affect maybe 5%, 6% of genetic determinism.
The rest is lifestyle, epigenetics. That's where we are in medical science. And with machine learning and artificial intelligence, I think we'll be able to predict disease and make it more, everything will be more personalized, predictable, preventable in the future. But we are talking about two different things right now. We're talking about biology and, And we're talking about the heart problem of consciousness. We'll get onto the pillars of wellbeing.
Wanted to finish those five points of suffering. Yes, we call the five kleshas. Kleshas. Yeah, in Sanskrit. We were on number three, right? recoiling from experiences that we interpret as unpleasant. Okay. But see, once again, the awareness of the experience is not the experience. So once you can observe the experience, you're free of the experience. You don't identify with the experience. Oh, that's an interesting thought, passing by the screen of my consciousness, like a cloud in the sky.
I'm not the cloud, I'm the sky. I'm not the play on the screen, I'm the screen. So an example would be, so the sentence is recoiling from experiences that... Unpleasant. They're unpleasant. So give me an example. Someone in my life, someone in my family dies. Yeah. So obviously you're scared, right? Because you identify with the experience, but everybody dies. I mean, trillions of people have died. You're not the only one who's going to die. And then what dies is another mystery.
The body dies. the seeds of memory recycle. Because what is memory but it's information. And it's recycled through collective consciousness. As soon as you're born, you're already born into an interpreted world, a world with memory, a world with imagination, a world with non-local consciousness that is now localizing through your brain as this process that you call the body. The body-mind is a process in consciousness. Consciousness itself is not subject to time.
Time is an experience we have as soon as we have subject-object split. So as soon as there's subject-object split, which is artificial, in nature is a unified activity, then time is born. The experience of time is born. So in your life, if someone dies, God forbid, do you suffer? You grieve, which is a natural process and it has a life cycle. You don't hold on to it. In fact, you embrace it. You embrace the... Anytime you recoil or deny, resistance creates even more stress.
So what we call stress is resistance to existence in the moment. If you don't resist experience in the moment, it's passing by. So something really bad happens at work, I get a really bad, you know, my boss tells me I'm fired. The mindset required to avoid suffering in that case is to... Take the news. It's not a mindset. It's a... It's a step in awareness. The awareness of the mind is not the mind. Who is it that... Or what is it that knows a thought?
That is what you need to shift to. Okay. Once you shift from... the experience to the awareness in which the experience is happening, you're independent of it. And that's what actually those eight limbs of yoga are about. It's a process. a shift in identity. We started with that, a shift in identity from your assumed self to your fundamental self, which is infinite, which is without cause, which is not subject to birth and death, which is spaceless, timeless, incomprehensible, infinite, irreducible and fundamental.
It feels almost like I'm stepping out of myself and looking at myself. Correct. Looking at the projection of yourself. The projection of myself. You're looking at the projection of yourself. She's very hard to do. You're looking at your avatar. And it's very hard to do because we are increasingly becoming avatars, especially with things like social media. Yeah, yeah. We're being reinforced. Like, you know, I have 2 million followers or a million followers or 500,000 followers.
That's it. They're following my avatar. So we don't know who we are. You confuse yourself with your avatar. And the battle is all between avatars wanting importance. How does one... resign from that battle and take back my peace? Actually, the opposite of that is creativity. The creativity is the opposite of determinism. If you don't want to be a biological robot or an algorithm, which is what we are now, we are biological algorithms, biological robots.
And that's, by the way, part of our evolution. It's not something all animals, but the animals have an advantage. They live in the present moment. But you and I have an imagination that can see into the future, that can even look at death, you know, as the culmination of this life experience. We regret the past. We anticipate the future. We're never in the present when it's the only place we are right now is the present. There is no way to escape it, but in our imagination, we escape it.
So the worst use of imagination is stress. The best use of imagination is creativity. Creativity is a disruption in the algorithm. It's a discontinuity. Fundamental creativity, not usual innovation like iPhone 13 instead of iPhone 12 with a better camera. That's not what creativity is. Creativity is a death and a resurrection. It's a death of context, meaning, relationship, and story. and a new meaning, relationship, and story. Whether that's fundamental creativity, that's Einstein coming up with the theory of relativity or the quantum physicists breaking every rule that we knew in Newtonian physics, or a great piece of art, Beethoven's Fifth, These are original, original creativity is a disruption in the algorithm.
To this idea of my avatar getting into this sort of avatar war with other avatars, my antidote to that is my own creativity. your own creativity. You know, every moment you have a choice to repeat the past or be a pioneer of creativity of the future. And that happens, by the way. It happens individually. It happens collectively. We change world views. You know, the world is not flat anymore. You know, the ground is not stationary anymore. You know, the world is not material anymore.
Every technology that you use is based on the... new idea that the essential nature of the physical world is it's not physical. If I could see you as you really are, I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots and some random electrical discharges. And at the most fundamental level, there are no boundaries. Boundaries are perceptual. So when we experience the spiritual ecstasy, which is ineffable, There are no boundaries. That's why people in near-death experience, people with psychedelic experience, people with peak experiences, athletes, musical performance, any break from ordinary reality is ineffable and healing, actually.
That's why the recent resurgence in psychedelics is very interesting because— You know, it takes you away from your identity of being squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime. And point number four, the five points of suffering, point number four. Point number four, confusing your selfie with yourself, your ego identity. We've talked about that. And number five is death. Death. But all of them have one solution. First one, find out who you are.
How does one find out who they are? Transcendence. How does one transcendence? There's no, here's another thing, there's no system of thought, no system of thought, religion, philosophy, or science that will get you into knowing true reality. Because systems of thought are just that, systems of thought. What is it that gives rise to thought? That is what you want to know. And that's been the eternal quest in spiritual traditions. I'm not talking about religious dogma or ideology.
These days it's very fashionable for people to say, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. It means the same thing. When you have a spiritual experience, number one, transcendence. You find your identity beyond space and time. Number two, emergence of platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, named after Plato, or love, compassion, joy, equanimity. And number three, loss of the fear of death. That's Jesus, that's Muhammad, that's Rumi, that's Buddha, that's every luminary that you can study since people created systems of thought.
So what's the easiest way to track? There's someone listening to this right now. They are driving up the motorway. They're a lorry driver. Take some time every day to be unoccupied. Even spiritual pursuit is an occupation. So take a little bit of, you know, I think it was Kafka or somebody who said all of humans' problems, humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly and do nothing. We'd rather electrocute ourselves. We're always doing, doing, doing.
We have human doings. We're not human beings anymore. So if I take some, I pull over the lorry that I'm driving up the motorway and I say, do you know what? Deepak told me to take some time for myself. So I sit in the lorry for 15 minutes every day. How is that going to help me to transcend? It starts a process. You begin to ask yourself, who am I? I reflect on these questions every day. Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? What am I grateful for?
And who am I without these constructs? It's a big mystery, right, who you are. Ultimately, you realize you're the awareness in which all experience happens. But you're not the experience. The experience is in time. You are not in time. And this requires a different kind of education. It's not part of our culture. It's not part of our culture. It used to be part of cultures. You know, if you read Plato and the Republic and you'll see that this was part of every culture.
But it was few luminaries. People romanticize even about this. You know, India is a spiritual country. Well, India has been violent forever. A few luminaries, the sages of the Upanishad, and we have romance around them. Greek culture, you know, oh, Bob, the Greeks were the most civilized in the world. Well, yes, Socrates and Parmenides and Pythagoras, and I can name a few, but the rest of the country, even in those times, They had slavery, they had sexism, they had the source of the Olympics where they used to sacrifice humans.
And we're still performing, even in our days, we're still repeating that cycle with what you call cheerleaders, the virgin vessels of the past. We haven't changed actually much. What else in terms of starting your day, like daily habits? So you talk about sleep as being incredibly important. Here are the daily habits. Number one is sleep. Now we know, by the way, that lack of sleep is the number one predictor of premature death from cardiovascular disease.
Lack of sleep is also a predictor of Alzheimer's. Lack of sleep interferes with your creativity. Lack of sleep causes inflammation. So that's for sure. Number one. Number two, I think, is any practice that quietens the mind, meditation, reflection, contemplation, sitting quietly, watching your breath, et cetera. Number three is exercise. Number four is mind-body coordination, as in that's different than regular exercise. You yoga practice. And martial arts, breathing practices, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, they actually activate a different part of your nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system, which causes self-regulation in the body.
So it's not just exercise. It's something that puts mind and body together, even gymnastics or gymnastics. things like judo and I mentioned martial arts but yoga is my practice then emotionals your emotional and physical environment your social environment because we live as social beings. So if you have toxic relationships, it's going to cause physical toxicity. Then nutrition, we now know that food that causes inflammation, refined, manufactured, processed food with chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, insecticides, pesticides, It's poison.
It's like putting agent orange in your body. So organic food, farm to table, maximum diversity of plant-based foods. Now we know a lot about micronutrients. We know about biological rhythms. But ultimately, I think spiritual experience is very important because... No matter what you do, no matter what you do, no matter how healthy you are, there is old age, there is infirmity, and there is death. So unless you face those right head on, when you're healthy, not when you're in a crisis, not when somebody dies in your family, then everybody panics.
I had a crisis in my life when I was six years old. My father was in England. He was training to be a cardiologist. I was living with my grandfather. And one day we got a telegram that my father had passed all his exams. He was now a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Big deal in those days. We got a telegram. My grandfather wanted to celebrate, so he took me and my little brother to a carnival, then to a movie. I even remember the movie, Alibaba and the 40 Thieves.
Then we went to a fancy restaurant, and then in the middle of the night, he died. And they took him for cremation, brought his ashes back in a little jar about the size of this coffee cup, a little bigger. And they took him for cremation, And one of my uncles said, what happened? Yesterday he was taking the kids to a carnival, and today he's a bunch of ashes. My little brother, who later became the dean of education at Harvard Medical School, he was four years old.
§02Transcript — part 2
He started to lose his skin. His skin started peeling off. I went into a panic. And, you know, my uncles took my brother to every physician. They couldn't find a diagnosis. till somebody said, you know, he's missing his parents. He's feeling vulnerable. He's losing his skin, shedding his skin because that's a metaphor for his vulnerability. He'll be fine when his parents come back. And sure enough, as soon as they came, my brother was healed. So at six years, I had a crisis, existential crisis.
Went on to become a doctor. But what happens? You go to medical school, the first thing you see is a corpse. You're supposed to understand life by dissecting a body. It's the way we are trained. You started off by looking at a human being as an anatomical structure rather than a process in consciousness. So it took me a long time, you know, going through medical school, training myself, going through crises, smoking, addictive behavior, alcohol.
I remember resuscitating a patient, putting a pacemaker, putting him on a respirator, and then going outside to smoke a cigarette. And then, you know, I was disgusted with myself. Yeah. I threw away my cigarette. That evening, I threw away the scotch. And I decided that I wanted to understand who am I. It's almost like in that moment, you observed someone that was so full of life just moments earlier turn into, as you said, ashes in a jar. Scattered in the wind.
And you go, where is my granddad? Yeah. He's not local. Non-local. Right, which is our essential nature actually. To be non-localist, to be connected with all that is. Indian poetry and poets in general, from William Blake. We are led to believe a lie when we see with and not through the eye that was born in a night to perish in a night while the soul slept in beams of light. So when we look through the conditioned mind, that's a lie. When you look beyond the conditioned mind, that is light.
Do you think you'd be doing the work you are today if your granddad hadn't passed away when you were six in those circumstances? I think that was a very pivotal moment at six years of age. Existential crisis. Most people don't have that at the age of six. Because it brought you a bunch of questions, didn't it? Really profound questions about the nature of life. Existence. Existence and love. Mm-hmm. Chagor, Indian poet, love is not a sentiment, it's the ultimate truth at the heart of creation.
That you and the other are the same being in different uniforms. Do you ever ponder if some of your beliefs are, if that moment really was pivotal, that some of your beliefs might have been a way to justify your sadness? Yeah. Denial is a way of justifying sadness. I don't think belief is... Belief in many ways is a cover-up for insecurity. If I say, do you believe in electricity? He says, no, I see that device, that transistor, that TV set. Electricity, gravity is my experience.
So I don't believe in belief, but faith is something else. Faith is the knowingness of the invisible without which there is nothing visible. The invisible is the source of all things visible. So when your day comes, when my day comes, when we're no longer… I'm preparing for it right now. You're preparing for it? Yes, in my tradition, there are four stages of life. First 25 years, they're called ashrams. Ashram is a place to rest or that which you identify as your home.
First 25 years, education. Second 25 years, family. Children, fame, fortune, if you want. Third, 25 years, giving back. Now fourth, self-realization, preparation for death. How does one prepare for death? By knowing and experiencing your non-local self. Is that what people would call spirituality? Yeah, spiritual. But authentic experience. I'm not talking about dogma or self-righteous morality or jealousy with a halo or cunning hypocrisy, which all pretend to be spiritual.
But if you've had the experience and you know yourself as non-local, then the unknown is the only place to be. The known has already happened. It's a prison. And what do you believe happens once you die? I think the dream continues. The dream continues in a different frequency domain of consciousness. These days, actually, if you look at some of the theories of the universe, mathematical theories... Current materialistic view is that the visible universe is about 2 trillion galaxies, 706 trillion stars, uncountable trillions of planets.
Based on that current estimate with the James Webb telescope and all this, our planet is not even a speck, one grain of sand in all the beaches of the world. So the other day I went to a beach, picked up a grain of sand and breezed, came, it drifted off, and the beach didn't notice that one grain was missing. That's planet Earth, two trillion galaxies. But I recently interviewed a Caltech professor of physics, Sean Carroll, who sits on the desk of Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of all time.
Einstein sat at that desk for a while. Sean Carroll believes there are infinite universes, infinite universes. It's incomprehensible, the idea that there are infinite universes. But I believe they are, and that you and I have a cosmic journey that is infinite. And infinite means infinite. Infinite is incomprehensible. It never ends. You change uniforms. You change experiences. Hopefully you evolve like a spiraled staircase, and, But it's a never-ending horizon.
Does that mean what people call reincarnation of some sort? Or is it even beyond that? Yeah, but what is reincarnation? See, everything recycles. Matter recycles, we agree. Energy recycles, we agree. Information recycles, we agree. If consciousness is what gives rise to energy, information, and matter, and energy, information, matter are human constructs for modes of awareness and consciousness, why would consciousness not recycle? Yeah. Why would it be the only exception?
It wouldn't be the same consciousness, though, would it? It would be bits of the... No, it's a consciousness with seeds of potential manifestation, seeds of desire and seeds of memory. Now, if you want to be totally, you know, I want to use the spiritual... language, which is not fashionable, but is fashionable to karma, memory, and desire. So karma is past experience and interpretation of past experience. If you go to Starbucks, have a cup of coffee, that's karma.
Now, depending on your experience, you like it or not, you decide to go back to Starbucks or not to go to Starbucks. You go to whatever the other places and get a cappuccino. So memory recycles as desire. And desire recycles as karma. Karma simply means experience. Don't think of it good, bad. And this is the software or awareness that recycles and evolves in cosmic time. Now, this is the theory, but you have to experience it. So I asked you, what did you have for breakfast?
But now I could ask you, do you remember a happy episode from your teenage years or your childhood? And immediately the memory comes. Where was it? Not in your brain. You know, I hadn't skated. I learned skating when I was eight years, ice skating. I didn't skate for 30 years. At the age of 38 with my two little kids, Rockefeller Center, ice there, picked up a pair of skates, started to skate. Every cell in my body, including my brain, had recycled a few million times.
Where was that memory of skating? Skating. big mystery. What is the thing that you believe to be true that most people disagree with you on? Right now, my interpretation of what I call quantum healing, quantum mechanics, I wrote a book called Quantum Healing in 1988. It was vilified. I reassured it a few years ago because now we have science. And I'm doing a book with a quantum physicist at the moment where I believe that our biology, like everything else, is...
It's quantum mechanical. Every experience shapes our biology, and experience happens in the moment. So your body is changing in the moment depending on the experience you're having at a very fundamental level. Pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, thinking, feeling, aspiring, fearing, every experience. shapes of biology. We are the metabolic product of experience. And experience doesn't happen in isolation.
It happens in the matrix of relationship. So what people disagree with me is this whole interpretation. I've been attacked by mainstream scientists. But I've been persistent because I'm a physician and I see people. And, you know, I'm not sitting in a lab dissecting rats or doing designing experiments theoretically. But you see people, and as you said, people suffer. And, you know, if you're a physician, that should be your job to address suffering, not be a technician who can fix everything about the human body, know nothing about the human soul or the human experience.
This morning I was at an event and I had a guy come up to me after and he said, I'm 40 years old now, Steve, and I'm in a job and I don't like it. It really doesn't like his job that he's in. He's, I'd say, trapped is maybe a strong word, but he feels unable to take the leap towards a life that he feels will fulfill him. he referenced being scared of what his friends might say. And he just, there was almost this desperation in his face as he spoke to me.
He was seeking words of advice from me to him to help him out of that situation of like, I'm 40 years old, I've got a partner, I've built this life, but it's not resonating with who I am. And I just, I could feel the suffering. That's a lot of people that are listening to this right now. They are. That's what our social structures have created. And yet, you know, the people like Joseph Campbell coined the expression, follow your bliss, follow your joy, follow your purpose, follow your meaning, follow your dharma.
In Buddhism, they say three things will save you. One is take refuge in the community of conscious beings, take refuge in a higher purpose, and take refuge in transcendence. If you do that, your life will be meaningful. And meaning is what drives us. There are actually many studies, by the way, recent studies on what is called the happiness equation. I'll give it to you. H is equal to S plus C plus B. So H stands for happiness, is equal to S, set point in the brain.
The set point in the brain is happiness. When you look at a situation, do you see an adversity or an opportunity? How is the set point determined by your childhood? If your parents were complaining, condemning, criticizing, playing the victim, you will see every problem, every situation as an adversity. Condemn, complain, criticize, and play the victim. Okay. On the other hand, your parents or your caretakers or your ecosystem of relationship when you were growing up, first three, four years of life, they were looking at opportunities.
They were always engaging in compassionate, empathetic conversation and joy and laughter and celebration. then you'll have a set point for happiness. This set point determines 50% of our daily happiness experience. Can the set point be changed? Yes, by self-awareness, by reflective inquiry, by mindfulness, by actually knowing that you have a problem. Most people don't even know they have a problem. So that's 50%. So S plus C, conditions of living.
primarily material conditions of living, money. So if you're extremely poor, you will suffer. If you're extremely rich, that doesn't guarantee that you'll be happy. In fact, what a lot of rich people do is they confuse their self-worth with their net worth. So I wrote a book before this called Abundance that was inspired by Bob Marley, one of his lyrics where he said, some people are so poor, all they have is money. So happiness, when it pertains to money, is 10% of your daily experience.
If you win the lottery, you'll be ecstatic in the beginning. In six months, you'll plateau. In one year, you'll be back to your set point. So even if you win the lottery, in five years, you might be worse off because now you're worrying about taxes. You want to put your money in wherever, you know, in the Bahamas or something. And it's become your identity, money. If you're, you know, all billionaires, money is their identity. They confuse self-worth with net worth.
So that's 10%. Now we have 40% remaining. That's the choices we make every day. There are two kinds of choices we make every day. One's for personal pleasure, sex, alcohol, entertainment, movies, shopping. Shopping is the number one choice for pleasure, by the way, in the world. That's why we call people consumers. A very ugly word to describe a stardust being with self-awareness. But does... Pleasure bring you happiness? It does, but it's transient.
And you have the danger of being addicted to pleasure if you have an addictive personality as I did. Okay, so pleasure brings happiness transiently. There's another choice you can make that actually is called fulfillment. When you have meaning, purpose in your life, And if you know how to make other people happy, by giving them attention, which means listening, appreciation, noticing their uniqueness, affection, letting them know you care, and acceptance, radical acceptance.
You can't change another person so you feel better, which is what we're trying to do all the time, changing other people so we feel better. Impossible. You can't change yourself, even if you try. So acceptance. Acceptance. What would you say to that guy? What should I have said to him in terms of advice? Because he did really look like he was struggling. You should actually have told him, let's take a day off and let's go fishing or let's go to, you know, have a picnic or let's go to see a comedy.
Let's go to see it. Just take, discontinue and try this. a little moment of being, not doing, not thinking, not feeling, not speaking. I take a week of silence every year. Now I'm taking even longer. So sometimes I'm thinking, you know, a month in silence. But, you know, I'm 76, so that's my different stages of life too. In the hope that that might help him realize that he's playing the wrong game or he's thinking about the wrong game. In the hope that, you know, one thing you can do to alleviate anybody's suffering to some extent is fully accept them and listen to them.
Don't give them advice. People feel better if you just listen to them. And there's neuroscience that their amygdala cools down. If you just listen with deep empathy, which means you feel what another person feels. There's some biology around this. You know, when you feel what another person feels... and you deeply listen, there's a phenomenon called limbic resonance. Your emotional brain resonates with their brain. And then if you deeply listen to them and you let them know you care for them, there's another thing that happens.
It's called limbic regulation. And then the third step is limbic revision. Their neural networks rewire. So acceptance, affection, appreciation, and attention. That's what you do. Don't give them advice. People go to therapists to get advice. Therapists don't do that. They listen. Good therapists listen. Interesting. And in the old traditions, you know, that's why people went to confession. They basically, you know, revealed their so-called sins to the priest, and they felt better.
One of the things I've read about, I've read you talk about is this, the role that affirmations and positive self-talk and those kinds of things can have on our healing to some extent anything mental is weak this is what i've wondered because a lot of like you know books and like instagram will say look in the mirror and say nice things to yourself or yeah doesn't work it's mental mind is weak you have to go deeper it's you know to say if you're trying to force yourself to be positive that's exasperating that's very stressful But instead of forcing yourself to be positive, observe your thoughts.
Observe both negative and positive thoughts, and you see that all experience is by contrast. You can't have one without the other. It's like a pendulum can't swing only in one direction. It has to swing in two directions. Heart is meaningless without cold. Pleasure is meaningless without pain. Joy is meaningless without suffering. Birth and death are... actually not even opposites Birth and death are opposites. Life is the continuum of birth and death.
You can't have one without the other. In biology, there's something called apoptosis, programmed cellular death. When a cell forgets to die, it becomes cancer. That's what it is. A cancer cell doesn't die when it's supposed to. Normally, our cells are dying constantly so you can be born again. That's the literal meaning of born again. What do you think success is then? If we're stepping away from this identity, which can cause so much suffering, what is?
For me, success is the progressive realization of worthy goals, number one. And worthy goal, that's a subjective measure. So for me, it could be taking care of my dog. Could be my way to go. If it gives you pleasure, yes, taking care of your dog. But if money is your goal for the sake of making money, then you'll never be happy. But if money is your goal, so you can actually make a difference in people's lives, including your own and your family, but also community in large.
That's a worthy goal. So it's number one, progressive realization of worthy goals. Number two, the ability to love and have compassion. And number three, actually, which is for me the most important, to always go back to your creative source. Once you have this ability to go back to your creative source, you will be successful, no matter what. Don't be bamboozled by the hypnosis of social conditioning. Don't be in a rush to conform. You know, there are studies that if you Gallup, I'm on the advisory board of Gallup, if you have a house that's $50,000 and you're offered a house that's $500,000, but your neighbors have million-dollar homes, you won't move.
You're always comparing yourself to the other person. This is how we are socially programmed. Rush to conform, comparison with others. And, you know, if the child doesn't conform, then he's not a good student. And I used to, when my son was growing up, he always was reading comic books and, you know, engaging in games and sports. And I was very poor at mathematics. And my wife would constantly complain that he's not good at school. I said, wait a minute, he'll...
He'll do what he's enjoying. Let him do what he's enjoying. He ended up creating a sports company, a comic book company, and now he has a very successful business called The Religion of Sport with Tom Brady and won five Emmys. wasn't a good student. I said don't focus on your weaknesses, focus on your strengths. And if you have a child who loves to play tennis, poor at math, get him a tennis coach. And one day he might get a mathematician to be his accountant.
When you look forward at the direction of travel that we're on as a civilization, what advice do we need now? The most? Don't get stuck in melodrama. This whole world is full of drama, drama. Everything that sells is drama. News is not news anymore. It's opinion and drama. And all the violence in the world is drama. You read about drama, shooting, killing, incest, all crazy stuff. And we're addicted to drama, actually. And then we complain about it.
We're addicted to trauma or drama? Yeah, both. And what's the cost of being addicted to trauma and drama? Suffering. Because? Because you sacrifice yourself for the drama of being a conformist. Does this mean we have, we should like, you know, I'm thinking about my relationship with technology and social media and news feeds and stuff. Well, technology is neutral, you know, and it's inescapable. It's part of our evolution. If you don't adapt to technology, you'll become extinct.
So it's part of our evolution. How do we use technology? You know, in my field, AI, machine learning, precision diagnosis and even intervention I believe technology is a great gift but again technology can destroy the world too this is what it means to be human humans are a very interesting species our fall from grace is exactly what mythical traditions tell us the knowledge of good and evil we ate the fruit It's hard to go through life these days and not be tempted by drama.
Even someone who, you know... It's a process. It's a process. What is that process? Growth. Growth. You know, people... Some people do grow. Some people do evolve. And I think ultimately that is the purpose of our existence, is to keep evolving. Do you ever get tempted by drama or distracted? Not anymore. I used to. I used to, I used to engage in debates. It was like, you know, big high for me to win a debate. How long ago? Well, I started in school and left debating only recently.
I was just five years ago, I was debating Richard Dawkins in Mexico. And I felt foolish after that. So you made the decision not to debate anymore? Not to engage in debate anymore, no. Because? Nobody changes their mind. The debaters don't change their mind. The audience doesn't change their mind. In fact, they get reinforced by the opinions they came with. So if we do want to try and change people's mind... Be the change. If you want peace in your life, be peaceful.
If you want love in your life, give love. Whatever you want, engage in that. I think that's the only thing. You have to be the change that you want to see in others, and then people respond, not by what you say, not by what you do, but just by your presence. You've written 93 books, as I said earlier. I think this is your 93rd I've been told this book about. Yeah. Living in the Light. New book. Yoga for Self-Realization. I guess my question, you know, I can't comprehend the concept of writing so many books.
I've like, I wrote my first one and then I'm currently writing my second one and I've been, it's just consuming all of my time. And I'm, I went off to Bali. I'd spent a month there writing it in Ubud. I'm sure you enjoyed that. I love it. I always go there to write. It was amazing. But my question to you, you know, I think this book is fantastic. And I think that we'll talk a little bit about you in a sec, but... Your 94th book. It's coming this year.
It's called Quantum Body with the Quantum Physicists. So I feel kind of good about that because I've been talking about that for now since 1988. That's 12 plus 23. That's over 30 years now. I've been vilified, attacked, everything about that. And I realized that people are territorial. You know, the physicists say, who the heck is he talking about quantum physics? The biologists say, he's not trained in biology, he's a physician. Who the heck is he talking about biology?
And yet my experience tells me that your body is non-local. It follows the principles of quantum mechanics. And now I've found some supporters who know the math. And even the body can be understood mathematically now. I don't know if you're familiar with this theorem called Gödel's Theorem, which says it's a very famous theorem. And, you know, Gödel was a German mathematician who was Einstein's favorite colleague when they were both immigrants to America at Princeton.
But he came up with a theorem which says there are theorems in math that are true, but you can't prove them. And they're disruptions. They're basically mathematics as platonic truth, describes everything in the universe. And yet there are theorems that don't follow algorithms. When a mathematician thinks of them, he said, where did this come from? They don't know. They can't even prove it, but it seems intuitively true. And if they follow the theorem, it leads to new creativity.
So I think creativity is inherent in the universe. We are aspects of that creativity, and with self-awareness, we have source to that creativity. But that creativity will never happen if you don't take time. to actually incubate in discontinuity. In my life, I've figured it out. Nine steps. Intended outcome, number one. Information gathering, number two. Information analysis, number three. Incubation, taking time off. Go to Bali, play golf. If you're a Republican, that's mystery school for Republicans.
or whatever. So incubation. And that is a time you settle with uncertainty. And then there's that eureka experience, insight. So incubation leads to insight, which is a disruption. It's something totally new. New context, new relationship, new story. And then if the insight is accurate, then you're inspired, not motivated. Motivation is mental. Inspiration, as the word says, in spirit. Then you implement it, then you integrate it, and then you are a death and a resurrection.
These are my nine steps to creativity. I just made them up. So information, intended analysis, information gathering, information analysis, incubation, insight, inspiration, inspiration, implementation, integration, incarnation. I use that for writing my books. I can tell. Yeah. And if you say, if you were to write one last book, if I said Deepak, you could write one more book, that's it. You can only write one. It's going to be your last ever book.
Which subject matter would you think was the most important subject matter to write that last book about? And what would be the top line message of that book? I hate to use this word, it's misinterpreted, but the title would be Enlightenment. Explain. What do you mean? Like, why Enlightenment? And what would the book be about? It's the only solution, ultimately. to know Truth with a capital T. You're not your body, you're not your mind, you're not your emotions.
They're all like clouds passing through the sky. You know, when I read some of the great luminaries, which can shine, our life is a dream, we are asleep, but once in a while we wake up enough to know that We were sleeping. Buddha, when he died, he said, This lifetime of ours is transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain.
As I look back now, my life, 76 years, it's a dream. But it's been a good dream with a few nightmares here and there. But it's been a dream and I feel... The only solution is to wake up now. You know, when the Buddha was dying, people asked him, who are you? Are you a messiah? Are you a god? Are you a messenger? He said, none of the above. He said, who are you? He said, I'm awake, finally. I think that's our ultimate destiny, to wake up. What do we need to do to wake up?
We need to question our everyday reality and human constructs. They're useful. Money is a useful construct. Latitude, longitude are useful constructs. But they're still constructs. They're not reality. What is the source of these constructs? When you get to the source, you realize... that your capacity for creativity is infinite. Your capacity for love is infinite. Your capacity for compassion is infinite. Your capacity for healing is infinite. And ultimately, you are infinite having a dream right now.
If I made you prime minister or president of the world, if there was one significant change you could make to lead us more towards that better future of enlightenment? I would say an education that... does not sacrifice self-awareness. We have information overload right now. I don't need information overload. I can Google it or now go to chat GPT or something like that. What I need to know is who am I? How do you feel about ChatGPT? It's good. I think it's very good.
And I think it's unavoidable also. I actually went to a demonstration recently by Microsoft on something that's coming soon. It's called Prometheus. It's way beyond ChatGPT. Interesting. It'll put most of us physicians out of business because it makes the best diagnosis, gives the best information. What happens then in terms of your purpose and your meaning? Well, we have more time for creativity. Fundamental creativity to create joy in the world.
I think the essential message is if you're not joyful enough, You wasted your life. I see entrepreneurs all the time, young guys coming up to me with amazing ideas, but they're talking about exit strategy before they've started the business. It's like dividing the loot before there's a train to rob. But they're already talking and we're living in a hustle culture. You know, I have five exits. You keep exiting, exiting, exiting, and you're still hustling and you're dying.
And that's the final exit, you're still a hustler. So I say make joy and self understanding, self awareness, the fundamental purpose of existence and everything else will follow. Where's your joy? Where does that, where do you derive it from? The fact that I exist and I'm aware of existence, that's a perpetual surprise to me. I was looking at emotions and what's the healthiest emotion you can have? It's not love. It's not compassion. It's not even joy.
It's awe. It's wonder. Why do we exist? And why do we have the awareness that we exist? If you're perpetually surprised and full of wonder and joy, you return to innocence. And what we've lost to this world today is the loss of innocence. How do I get my innocence back? Are you married? I'm in love. Okay. Well, when you have a child, you'll see it. You'll see it. You know, a child is spontaneous. is in the moment, is joyful, unless it's wet or hungry, but that's a different situation.
§03Transcript — part 3
But it's joyful. It is looking. The other day I was in a train, you know, from Orlando airport to baggage claim. Everybody was stressed in the train, wearing masks, panicked, a mother on the phone and full of anxiety. And she had a little baby in the crib and This baby was looking around in total amazement. Finally, it caught my eyes, and it gave the most amazing smile. And the whole room lighted up, just looking at that innocence. We have lost our innocence, and we take it away from our children.
So, you know, when... Children love laughter. They love stories. They love surprises. They love to play peekaboo. When's the last time you were surprised? I can't recall being surprised. When I feel I want some joy, I just look at children playing. Is there a way to bring that joy back into our lives as a practice? That innocence? Play. play, not drama. As adults, play is seen as a waste of time. No, play is when you find creativity and joy. I'm not talking about drama, I'm talking about play.
Play for the sake of play. Now even sports has become competitive. But when you played because you were playing, when a musician is playing, they're not thinking of the end. When you're singing a song, you're not thinking of the ending of the song. You're in the song. You're in the song. When you become the song, when you become that which you're playing, when the music and the musician become one, when the knower and the known become one, when the observer and the observer become one, when the lover and the beloved become one, that's transcendence, that's joy, that's play.
Living in the Light, yoga for self-realization. This is your fourth phase of life and you're into your self-realization phase. Do you know the book The Body Holds the Score? Yes, yes, of course. There's a lot of similarities between, obviously, your philosophy and that book about how... And I was, you know, I start, I think, everything as a skeptic. So breath work and a lot of spiritual things. I start as an ultimate skeptic. I need science. I need evidence.
I need proof. And as I read through that book and watched some videos of that, one of the things that it's proven is phenomenal for your mental well-being is things like acting, yoga. They talk about psychedelics and things like that as well. But one wouldn't assume that there's a profound amount of scientific evidence that yoga and acting... have really positive mental health implications. Correct. Why is yoga so good for us as humans? Yes. Yoga means union, union with yourself.
And yoga has eight limbs, as I talk about in this book. And ultimately, all those eight limbs are meant to give you only one insight. You and the universe are made of awareness. You're not made of energy. You're not made of matter. You're not made of information. You're made of awareness. Okay. Awareness is non-local, fundamental, not subject to birth and death, infinite and formless. So befriend your non-local, formless self. Again, I go back to poetry.
Acting is great. Poetry is even better. Rabindranath Tagore, one of my favorite poets, said, In this playhouse of infinite forms, I caught sight of the formless, and so my life was blessed. Befriend the formless, and then the forms will be seen as expressions of the formless. without the formless there is no form form is the morphing of the formless into space-time and causality this theater of space-time and causality where we are playing as avatars that is something for me to think about tonight um It's become abundantly clear to me over the last, I don't know, over the last couple of years in particular, as more people know who I am because of this podcast and I do some stuff on TV that you can cause yourself such a tremendous amount of suffering by getting more and more attached to your avatar and like your avatar becoming more of a defined thing.
And I think I've spent a lot of my, definitely the last two and a half years, trying to resist as much as I can this temptation of becoming my avatar. And doing that on a practical level, I thought, you know, well, Resist labels, Steve. So don't be anything. Don't like, in terms of your bio, you know, your professional bio, don't be those things. You're 32, right? 30. 30, wow. But that's pretty young to have that awareness. Yeah, because I could see how I could cause myself a ton of suffering and build a life which wasn't really who I am by being a social media CEO, for example.
Yes, success at an early age. Yeah. You've confused your celebrity personality. with yourself yeah outside of me just like saying to myself okay i'm gonna write books and i'm gonna do this theater and we do this music show and i dj now and i do all these other bits and pieces i was in psychedelics for a while with um at high life sciences as a creative director and an investor and outside of me doing just doing lots of stuff which is i thought was the antidote to not to resisting my label you're telling me that the real antidote to resisting my label is like a higher sense of enlightenment yeah Right.
I would suggest a book for you at your stage. You'd find it very useful. It's called The Wisdom of Insecurity. Interesting. By Alan Watts. The more you embrace insecurity and unpredictability, the more access you'll have to the unknown. And the unknown is the source of all creativity. The known is the prison of the past. We have a closing tradition on this. That's funny. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest.
Look at what the question is. I'll show you. You're the first person to ever see that question. Can you see it? What is my biggest insecurity? I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw. of a gravesite. And there was a sign on the gravesite. It said to whoever was standing by the gravesite, where you are, I was. Where I am, you will be. So embrace the idea of death. And if you do it, you'll see it's death that makes life possible. Because death is creativity.
Have you struggled with the idea of death? All my life, since six years. And that reared its head to some degree when your parents passed. Yes. And now I'm at a stage where I'm embracing it. Totally. How did that impact you, losing your parents? As someone that's been sensitive and insecure about the concept of death? I would say grief, sadness, longing. But our longing can be the way too. How long ago was that, that you lost your parents? Oh, my parents only in the last 20 years.
My grandfather with whom I lived in the first few years of my life, he was like a parent. My grandparents were my parents because my parents were in England at that time. I and my brother were left with our grandparents who brought us up. And that, by the way, that fear of abandonment also is a driver. The fear of abandonment is a driver, and there is no cure for that other than don't think about yourself all the time. Anytime, by the way, you are suffering, ask yourself, who am I thinking about?
You're thinking about your avatar. Very true. Deepak, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This was one of the best conversations I've had. Oh, thank you so much. That's a huge honor. You really are, you've been someone that I followed from afar, but I have had tremendous admiration for and everyone that I've encountered that's encountered you has been so, you know, we have mutual friends. We're sort of in business together in many respects through The Healing Company.
That's great, actually. They're lovely people. Yeah. And it's been an honour that you'd come here and spend some time with me today. It's been my privilege. Thank you. Thank you so much, Deepak. Thank you.