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

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00:33In your life, if someone dies, God forbid, do you suffer?

00:41You 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.

01:03If you don't resist experience in the moment, it's passing by.

01:13So 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?

01:25It's not a mindset. It's a step in awareness. The awareness of the mind is not the mind. Who is it that or what is it that knows a thought? That is what you need to shift to. Once you shift from the experience to the awareness in which the experience is happening, you're independent of it.

01:52And 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.

02:22It feels almost like I'm stepping out of myself and looking at myself.

02:27Correct. Looking at the projection of yourself. You're looking at your avatar.

02:37And it's very hard to do because we are increasingly becoming avatars, especially with things like social media. We've been reinforced, like, you know, I have two million followers or a million followers or 500,000 followers—they're following my avatar.

02:51So we don't know who we are. You've confused yourself with the avatar, and the battle is all between avatars wanting importance.

03:02How does one resign from that battle and take back my peace?

03:08Actually, the opposite of that is creativity. 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, by the way, is part of our evolution. It's not something all animals do.

03:37But 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 as the culmination of this life experience. We regret the past, we anticipate the future, we're never in the present, when this is the only place we are. Right now is the present. There's no way to escape it but in our imagination we escape it.

04:02So 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.

04:22That'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.

04:36To this idea of my avatar getting into this sort of avatar war with other avatars, my antidote to that is my own creativity?

04:47Your own creativity. Every moment you have a choice to repeat the past or be a pioneer of creativity of the future. And that happens, by the way, it happens individually, it happens collectively. We change worldviews. The world is not flat anymore. The ground is not stationary anymore.

05:13The 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 that 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.

05:36And 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 experiences, people with psychedelic experiences, people with peak experiences, athletes, musical performance—any break from ordinary reality is ineffable and healing, actually.

06:05That's why the recent resurgence in psychedelics is very interesting because it takes you away from your identity of being squeezed into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime.

06:44And point number four on the five points of suffering. Point number four?

06:48Confusing yourself with yourself—your ego identity. We've talked about that. And number five is death. Fear of death. But all of them have one solution. First one: find out who you are.

07:02How does one find out who they are?

07:05Transcendence. 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.

07:27What 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.

07:47When 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.

08:06That'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.

08:20So what's the easiest way to—there's someone listening to this right now. They are driving up the motorway, they're a lorry driver.

08:28Take some time every day to be unoccupied. Even spiritual pursuit is an occupation. So take a little bit of—you know, what I think it was Kafka or somebody who said all of humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly and do nothing.

08:48We'd rather electrocute ourselves.

08:50We're always doing, doing, doing. We are human doings; we're not human beings anymore.

08:55So if I pull over the lorry that I'm driving up the motorway and I say, "You know what, Deepak told me 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?

09:12It starts a process. We 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?

09:32It'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. Now, this requires a different kind of education. It's not part of our culture. It used to be part of cultures.

09:54If you read Plato in *The Republic*, you'll see that this was part of every culture. But it was few luminaries. People romanticize even about this: "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.

10:14Greek culture: "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 are still performing—even in our days, we're still repeating that cycle with what you call cheerleaders, the virgin vestals of the past. We haven't changed actually much.

11:01What else in terms of starting your day, like daily habits? You talk about sleep as being incredibly important.

11:09Here 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.

11:33Number one. Number two, I think, is any practice that quiets the mind: meditation, reflection, contemplation, sitting quietly, watching your breath, etc. Number three is exercise. Number four is mind-body coordination, which is different than regular exercise.

11:55Yoga practice and martial arts, breathing practices, Tai Chi, Qigong—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 things like Judo—I mentioned martial arts, but yoga is my practice.

12:28Then emotional—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.

12:59It'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 how healthy you are, there is old age, there is infirmity, and there is death.

13:31So 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.

13:52I was living with my grandfather. 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, *Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves*—then we went to a fancy restaurant.

14:21And 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 or a little bigger. And one of my uncles said, "What happened? Yesterday he was taking the kids to a carnival, and today he's a bunch of ashes."

14:43My little brother, who later became the Dean of Education at Harvard Medical School—he was four years old. He started to lose his skin. His skin started peeling off. I went into a panic and my uncles took my brother to every physician. They couldn't find a diagnosis.

15:07Until somebody said, "You know, he's missing his parents. He's feeling vulnerable. He's losing his skin—he's 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.

15:21So 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 start it off by looking at a human being as an anatomical structure rather than a process in consciousness.

15:48So it took me a long time—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.

16:11And then I was disgusted with myself. I threw away my cigarette that evening, I threw away the Scotch, and I decided that I wanted to understand: Who am I?

16:30If 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?

16:39I 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 ChatGPT or something like that. What I need to know is: Who am I?

16:58How do you feel about ChatGPT?

17:01It'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. It'll put most of us physicians out of business because it makes the best diagnosis, gives the best information.

17:28What happens then in terms of your purpose and your meaning?

17:31Well, we'd have more time for creativity. Fundamental creativity to create joy in the world. I think the essential message is: If you're not joyful, you wasted your life. I see entrepreneurs all the time—young guys coming up to me with amazing ideas.

17:53But 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: "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.

18:18So I say make joy and self-understanding, self-awareness, the fundamental purpose of existence, and everything else will follow.

18:31Where's your joy? Where does that—where do you derive it from?

18:35The 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.

18:59Why 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.

19:22How do I get my innocence back?

19:24Are you married?

19:25I'm in love.

19:26Okay, well, when you have a child, you'll see it. You'll see it. A child is spontaneous, is in the moment, is joyful—unless it's wet or hungry, but that's a different situation. But it's joyful. It is looking—the other day I was in a train from Orlando airport to baggage claim.

19:54Everybody 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 lit up just looking at that innocence.

20:23We have lost our innocence, and we take it away from our children. Children love laughter, they love stories, they love surprises. They love to play peek-a-boo. When's the last time you were surprised?

20:46I can't recall being surprised.

20:50So when I feel I want some joy, I just look at children playing.

20:56Is there a way to bring that joy back into our lives as a practice, that innocence?

21:00Play. 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.

21:23But 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 about the ending of the song—you're in the song. When you become the song, when you become that which you're playing, when the music and the musician become one, when the knower and the known become one, when the observer and the observed become one, when the lover and the beloved become one—that's transcendent. That's joy. That's play.

21:58What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

22:14The Diary of a CEO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you can save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies.

22:28The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.