How AI Can Elevate Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Well-Being with Deepak Chopra

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Deepak Chopra
What we call anger is the memory of trauma. Hostility is the desire to get even. Guilt and shame is blaming yourself and the depletion of energy that happens with those emotions is actually what we call depression.

00:00:21 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts dont strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we dont have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But its not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolves. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is returning for the second time on the podcast. It’s Deepak Chopra. He is the founder of the Chopra Foundation, a non profit entity for research on well being and humanitarianism. And Chopra Global, a modern day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality. Deepak Chopra is board certified in internal medicine, endocrinology and metabolism. He’s a fellow at the AmErican College of Physicians and a member of the AmErican association of Clinical Endocrinologists. He serves as clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He’s also the host of the podcast Daily Breath and the author of over 90 books, including the one discussed here, digital how AI can elevate spiritual intelligence and personal well being.

00:02:09 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Deepak, welcome to the show.

00:02:10 – Deepak Chopra
Thank you for having me again, Eric.

00:02:12 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, pleasure to have you back on. We’re going to be discussing a couple of different things here. We’re going to be discussing a new book you wrote called Digital how AI can elevate spiritual intelligence and personal well being. We’re also going to talk about a new initiative you have called the Never Alone initiative. But before we get into all that, we’ll start like we always do, which is with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:03:07 – Deepak Chopra
My life is about two freedom from suffering and how can you live the best life possible, as in the phrase follow your bliss? Joseph CAMpbelL so when I talk about digital Dharma, or dharma in general, which is a difficult concept for most people, dharma is how do you fit into the order of the universe? Ultimately, who you are beyond all the labels and definitions and stories about you, and ultimately who you are, is a field of infinite potential. You are immeasurable. You are infinite. You are timeless. You are eternal. And only your stories are in the realm of the finite. So how do you get to that place which is independent of the good and bad opinions of the world? How do you get to that place which is fearless? How do you get to the place where you feel beneath no one, and not necessarily superior to anyone either? How do you get to that place of ultimate freedom to follow your bliss, the best life possible?

00:04:28 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a beautiful answer. And I’m going to dive in for a second on this word dharma, just a little bit for a second, because dharma, as you said, is sort of our path or the path, yes. And you’re talking about this timeless awareness that is inside of us that is bigger than our personal stories. Would that be an accurate way of saying it?

00:04:52 – Deepak Chopra
Yes.

00:04:53 – Eric Zimmer
So, given that, is my dharma different than your dharma?

00:04:57 – Deepak Chopra
Well, if you understand dharma also as life purpose, then dharma exists at several levels. And you could almost say it’s an extension of Abraham Maslow’s idea of the hierarchy of needs. So your dharma is to be secure. Safety and survival for yourself. Your dharma is also to seek personal pleasure, whether, you know, personal pleasure through the five senses, because we are essential beings. Your dharma is also about changing adversity into opportunity. But those are very basic levels. Survival, safety, transformation, power, self esteem. Those are very basic. Beyond that, your dharma starts to move in a direction which is more spiritual. Love and belongingness, creative expression and insight and intuition and imagination, higher consciousness and transcendence, which is enlightenment. So, yes, along the way, we choose different paths, but ultimately, the peak of the mountain is total freedom and unleashing your infinite potential. That is common to you and me. Along the way, you know, many paths leading to the peak of the mountain.

00:06:25 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a great way of summarizing. I really like that, that we’re all going to have our different paths up to the mountain. But at a certain level, there is this timeless, infinite thing that is the same in me as it is in you. But on our way to that, we are actually very different. And our paths will reflect and should reflect that difference.

00:06:46 – Deepak Chopra
Correct.

00:06:46 – Eric Zimmer
So before we get into your latest book, Digital Dharma, I want to spend a little bit of time and talk about something called the Never Alone initiative. Can you share with me what the never alone initiative is?

00:07:01 – Deepak Chopra
I’ll share with you how it started. So it started during COVID or just when Covid came. And I and some of the people in our foundation, we learned that suicide was the second most common cause of death among teens. We also learned that every 40 seconds, somebody in the world was dying from suicide. And even when he says second most common cause of death amongst teens, the first common cause is accidents and drugs, which is also linked to depression. So depression, anxiety, anger, hostility, shame, humiliation seems to be actually the pandemic right now. The teens were saying that it’s difficult to get through a day without crying. So we launched never alone as a community platform with four basic ideas. Attention, deep listening, affection, deep caring, and love. Appreciation, noticing the uniqueness of everyone, and acceptance, accepting everyone just as they are because they’re so unique. And then we actually used an emotional chatbot, an AI chat bot, to talk to the teens. And we were able to intervene in 6000 suicide ideations, and there were 20 million conversations happening geniusly. But over the years, what we’ve also realized is that there are superior AI platforms in dealing with depression proteins, and that probably was not our expertise. So what we have moved in the direction of never alone is a whole program called freedom from suffering, where you’re never alone, because it’s obvious that people are hyper connected and still lonely. So, you know, now we are creating programs on never alone for people to actually be educated on how they can lead a life which maximizes their potential but also connects them, you know, in the spiritual relations of the east, they say if you have maximum diversity, shared vision, emotional and spiritual bonding, and complementing each other’s strength, no problem is unsolvable. So never alone has become a platform, not only for young people, but people of all demographics, to create online and offline communities just based on the forays that I mentioned. Attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance, but also to educate them on how service, community, and some kind of reflection or spiritual inquiry or introspection practice can help elevate their lives and create freedom from suffering for them and for others. So community, spiritual discipline, and selfless service.

00:09:55 – Eric Zimmer
It’S a beautiful idea. So along with the never initiative, the healing practices that you talked about, attention, appreciation, acceptance, and affection. You also talk about sort of four toxic beliefs that are leading many of our young people to these states of despair. No one cares about me. I don’t matter. I’m weak and powerless, and I’m destined to be a victim. Talk to me about why those four beliefs felt like the key toxic beliefs you guys wanted to focus on.

00:10:28 – Deepak Chopra
It’s basically Eric’s social conditioning and cultural conditioning and parental conditioning. And we keep recycling those ideas, you know, so generation after generation, we recycle those ideas that ultimately lead to trauma. And every distress in any person can be traced to trauma, either in their childhood years or maybe even before that. You know, what we call intergenerational trauma. So what we call anger is the memory of trauma. Hostility is the desire to get even. Guilt and shame is blaming yourself, and the depletion of energy that happens with those emotions is actually what we call depression. They’re all related. Ultimately, everything can be traced back to trauma. You look at the putins of the world, or you look at, you know, the tyrants of the world. They are the ultimate, final expression of a traumatic experience that they had when they were children. So this is very important to understand that mainly emotional spirit. Let’s not even not talk about spiritual intelligence, but our emotional intelligence is shaped by our childhood experiences. And those who have been traumatized inflict trauma, only hurt people, hurt other people. This is a deep understanding, which then tells us there’s a more compassionate way to understand people who we think are toxic. And the first responsibility is get over our own toxic, limiting beliefs.

00:12:06 – Eric Zimmer
Another question I have related to this, and I’m curious what you think about this. We have, on one hand, seen an unprecedented amount over the last, let’s call it, decade, of discussion about mental health. The stigma has certainly lessened to a great degree. Maybe not around all mental disorders, and maybe not around suicide specifically, but around anxiety, depression. We talk about these things in a way we never did. The stigma isn’t there in the way that it once was. And yet, by most measures, things are getting worse in young people’s mental health. And so I’m just curious how you think about the role of lessening stigma and worsening mental health. And is there a connection? Is there a way in which the way that we’re talking about these things isn’t helpful? Are we talking about them too much? Are we missing the boat? Or is this just sort of a lagging indicator, so to speak, when we.

00:13:10 – Deepak Chopra
Talk about the stigma? I think the only way to remove the stigma is that there’s no one that has not had a, at some point in their life, mental distress. If somebody says, I’ve never had any mental distress, then, you know, they’re either lying or they’re in denial. The range, though, of mental distress starts with mild anxiety and then deeper degrees of sadness, and then there’s psychosis and schizophrenia and ultimately even suicidal ideation. So it’s a broad spectrum of people who feel sad, basically. Broad spectrum. They all have to. First of all, when we remove the stigma, we can say one way to handle the stigma is everyone has had something or the other within this range of what we call depression or sadness. That’s how we handle the stigma. Why we are not so successful is we are trying old methodologies, okay? We try psychotherapy, we try medication, and they work, but in a very limited way. And treating depression is not just above the neck. You know, we think we have to treat something here in the brain. Okay? Treating depression is a total body experience. It includes good sleep, it includes exercise, it includes healthy relationships, includes a good diet, it includes mindfulness practices, how do you breathe, how do you relate? So it’s a total body mind, exercise experience all at the same time. There’s a lot of new research on our autonomic nervous system, which is the part of our nervous system which is below our conscious awareness, and yet it dominates us. Okay? So there are two parts of the autonomic nervous system. One is in the survival mode, which is called the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight or flight response. And right now, the world is on sympathetic overdrive means stress. There’s another part of the nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is getting prominence now. It’s called the rest rejuvenate and digest system. Basically, it’s the healing system of the body. There’s one dominant nerve there. It’s called the vagus nerve. And now we are recognizing that the vagus nerve can be activated through eye exercises, through facial expressions, through tone of voice, through singing, through chanting, through deep breathing, through heart awareness, through interoceptive awareness, which means how do we practice awareness of what’s happening inside the body? Through laughter, through social engagement. And activating the vagus nerve is probably the healthiest way to get rid of depression because it enhances our social interactions, but it also makes us feel healthier and joyful. And anything we can do to improve that will be helpful in tackling this pandemic rather than focusing just above the head.

00:16:42 – Eric Zimmer
Later in the book, you’re talking about wholeness in general. And you talk about that, a real picture of depression is a many causes, many cures. That’s it type thing. Right. And I’ve certainly had depression at different points throughout my adult life. And that’s been, my experience is lots of different things cause it. It’s hard to tweeze apart what they are, but it’s multicolored, and it has taken a variety of really just sort of trying everything from lots of different approaches as what’s turned out to be the most robust sort of ongoing support for it. That also, not only by taking that approach, lessens depression, but just increases overall well being in so many categories.

00:17:29 – Deepak Chopra
Yeah. And there’s so many new disciplines now like nutrition and psychiatry. You know, some people will respond to just changes in their diet, and there’s no universal way of predicting which diet will work for you. But now with the advent of AI and the ability to measure biomarkers and even things like heart rate variability and other things, you know, sleep patterns, activity levels, breathing patterns, looking at metabolic rates, and using AI to actually correlate biological parameters with moods, we can have very specific intervention now, since you mentioned that. By the way, in addition to digital Dharma, which I’m holding in my hand right now, I have a new project called Digitaldepoc AI. It’s not an app. You can go on your browser anytime. And you can ask me a question in either Arabic or English or Spanish, and you’ll get my voice answering your question, and you won’t know the difference between me and my voice, but you’ll research 95 of my books, 35,000 questions that I’ve answered over four decades and everything I’ve done on YouTube or social media, and give you a very precise answer. Try it yourself afterwards, Eric, Digitaldepug AI and see if you have a question about mental health, well being, health in general, and spirituality, and test it out. Here it is. Companion to digital dharma.

00:19:09 – Eric Zimmer
This better not be digital Deepak I’m talking to right now. I expect real Deepak for these interviews.

00:19:14 – Deepak Chopra
Well, I’m not going to answer that question.

00:19:18 – Eric Zimmer
It’s crazy what these things can do. I just. I mean, I don’t have 93 books, but I have hundreds of hours of podcast interviews and me talking. I fed them to a similar thing and ask this clone of me questions, and it answers like me, but even more coherent. It’s stunning. It’s frightening and amazing. It’s not publicly available like digital Deepak. I keep him walled off.

00:19:45 – Deepak Chopra
I think we should have a digital Eric publicly available based on your podcast. Yeah.

00:19:51 – Eric Zimmer
Well, maybe the digital Eric needs to interview the digital Deepak, and we need to see what kind of craziness comes. Exactly. So let’s talk about AI. That’s your latest book, Digital Dharma, how AI can elevate spiritual intelligence and personal well being. You say early in the book that the reason that this idea of AI being able to help with well being and spiritual awareness is that few of us would link the two words consciousness and machine together. Why do you feel that AI is a tool that can help us become more spiritually aware, can help our spiritual development and our personal well being?

00:20:37 – Deepak Chopra
I think a lot of people are very savvy into what AI is and because they’re interested. But the general public in large does not understand what we call AI. The general public. And I would say in one word, anybody who understands air will say it’s not sentient, it’s not even intelligent. It’s not, certainly not conscious. What it is is a large language model. And this is very important to understand because our entire experience of the human universe is based on language. About 40,000 years ago, the human species, homo sapiens took a different road than all other species, including other hominins, or hominids, as they’re called. There were eight different kinds of humans up to, say, 40,000 years ago, when historians, deep historians, tell us something happened called the cognitive revolution, and that is homo sapiens. You and I, our ancestors, they took a different road than even the other hominids. We created a language for telling stories. All the other species and biological organisms have language, but the language is only for three mating calls, Mitchell. Reproduction, food calls, and danger calls. That’s how the species survives mating, reproduction, food, and avoiding danger. Then this particular species, which is us, we created a language of telling stories. There’s a phrase, to be human is to have a story. And the first stories were gossip. And the most common stories today are gossip that never went away. But then there was another story. It was called money. Another story called latitude, longitude, colonialism, empires. The entire human experience is built on stories, which then became other stories, which we call models. The models of physics, the model of mathematics, the model of biology, the models of philosophy, the model of science, the model of technology. There’s no human being who has access to all these stories. AI gives us access to the greatest minds of humanity from the beginning of the hunter gatherer age, through the greek Enlightenment and the european Enlightenment and the eastern sages of the upanishads. So there’s no human being who can have access to this kind of knowledge base. And this gives us a direction for wisdom. So there’s data, there’s information, there’s knowledge, and there’s wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge that can uplift us, that can improve our lives, that can even ultimately create a more peaceful, just sustainable, healthier and joyful world. And AI is a tool. It’s giving us all these roadmaps. But we have to remember that the map is not the territory, just in the same way as the menu is not the meal, you have to eat the meal, you can’t eat the menu, and you have to travel these different paths that AI is pointing to. So AI is a tool for everything that you can possibly do to improve your well being and spiritual intelligence. There’s a dark side to it, because that’s a dark side, is there? With any technology, even the invention of fire and then automobiles and then jet planes and the Internet, you know, the divine and diabolical is the human story. They go together. You started this conversation with that. You know, you can live a good life or you can live a bad life. They go together. You can’t have one, just like you can’t have up without down, hot without cold, you know, plus without minus, etcetera. All experiences. By contrast, it’s your choice. Which path do you want to travel? And, you know, so far, the spiritual path has been the path less traveled. When we think of spiritual people, we think of luminaries, Jesus Christ, Buddha, you know, Socrates, the sages of the Upanishads or of the Bible. But now that path is available to all of us.

00:24:54 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that people often miss about AI, is that it is, in a very real sense, us. Right? I mean, it is the collective human knowledge, both in its great degree of profoundness and, you know, nonsense. AI has been trained on all of that.

00:25:16 – Deepak Chopra
I think you point to something very important. Don’t even call it artificial intelligence. AI stands for augmented human intelligence.

00:25:24 – Eric Zimmer
And so what you’ve made an attempt to do is to use AI for good, which I think is wonderful. I’ve been actually, you and I are involved in another project. You don’t know this, but rebind AI, of course. I did a book for them on the Tao Te Ching.

00:25:43 – Deepak Chopra
Wow.

00:25:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:25:44 – Deepak Chopra
That’s wonderful.

00:25:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:25:46 – Deepak Chopra
Yes, rebind. I did a book on buddhist thought. So it goes together with your.

00:25:54 – Eric Zimmer
What I loved about that project is that it was a chance to use this technology, like you said, for good. I’m a pretty big believer that the horse doesn’t go back in the barn once it’s out. Right. And so then the question is, what can I do with a horse that’s good and trying to figure that out. I think that most of us are just experimenting right now, trying to figure out, like, what is good, what is helpful, what works.

00:26:19 – Deepak Chopra
I believe that technology is part of the evolution of the human species, and once the technology comes, it can’t go back. Just like a child that’s born, you can’t return to the womb. It’s there. You can’t unlearn language once you’ve learned it, you can’t unlearn how to walk. Once you learned how to walk. The same thing holds true for technology. Either you adapt and use it to the best or you become irrelevant. That’s a darwinian principle.

00:26:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So one of the things that we do know about AI, and I think maybe people make a bigger deal out of it than it actually is, and yet it’s real. It happens, is this tendency of AI to sort of hallucinate things. When you were working on digital Dharma, you know, to what extent did you find AI things that turned out not to be useful? Obviously, in the book, you’ve put in the prompts and the things that worked and that were useful were you, as you were going through that also discarding things where you were like, wait a minute, that’s, you know, that isn’t quite right or that isn’t useful.

00:27:30 – Deepak Chopra
Large language models that are out there, whether it’s chat, GPT, or it’s whatever other models, bing, etcetera. And I use all of them. When you pose a question that has never been asked before or a question that’s not familiar, even though it’s couched in language that is not familiar, then the AI makes up the answer. And that’s what hallucination is. And, you know, there are many times that happens. It’s not that common, by the way, but it’s something that will improve over time. But that’s why I created my digital twin, I would note, access any other material right now other than the material that I have created over four or five decades, there’s no possibility of hallucination. If you go to, say, digital epoch AI, that is what differentiates our AI from all other AI’s right now. So, yes, hallucination is a problem, but it’s being understood and it will ultimately be solved. But if you restrict the search engines to just a particular domain, then hallucination is unlikely. And as we speak now, there are things being developed called small language models instead of large language models. So you have AI just for, say, genetics, AI just for neuroscience, AI just for mathematics, where the chance of hallucination would be much less.

00:29:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of really interesting things yet to come are, is exactly in that area where we say, instead of you being trained on everything that it can suck up, we’re going to train you on like you did. I’m going to train you on my books, which means if you’re going to say something, it is going to be something I have already said because I’ve sort of hemmed you in here to a certain degree. Yeah. So you talk about that. The guru role can be renovated for our times using AI. Say more about that.

00:29:37 – Deepak Chopra
Traditionally, in, in India, the guru was a spiritual guide and also embodied the wisdom that the guru imparted. Today, the whole realm of GUrus has become more cultish. It’s more about the Guru than about the wisdom. And sometimes the Guru and the wisdom imparted, you know, I can recycle ancient wisdom. There’s no problem with that. I can speak the language. Am I embodying it is the traditional GUru. So what AI does now, because it has access to all the wisdom, it gets the cultish, you know, Guru worship out of the way, which I think is more germane for our times, you know, and I’ve always felt that even when I took it, that, you know, people who practice, say, religion, like Christianity or Buddhism, you know, and they think of Jesus as the MesSiah, which is very appropriate to their religion. But if I was a follower of Jesus and Jesus was pointing to the moon, I would look at the moon instead of worshipping the finger. Okay, so this is what happens with us. We like the experience and the wisdom that is being imparted to us, and then we make the person who’s the messenger, the divine entity. That messenger may or may not be a divine entity, thats fine. But if Jesus had an experience, I want to learn how to have that experience. Okay. Rather than just, you know, believing his experience, Buddha had an experience. I want to know what that experience is. How can I get that experience rather than being a worshipper of Buddha? Now, thats your choice. You can do that, too. You can worship the messenger, but can you actually get the message and can you embody it in your own life? And I think AI helps us do that.

00:31:56 – Eric Zimmer
In essence, what you’re saying is that AI allows us in this case to separate the message from the messenger. Would that be a way of saying it.

00:32:06 – Deepak Chopra
Yeah, it does. It does. And not only to separate the message, to embody the message, if it resonates with us now in spiritual traditions, the message is actually very simple. It’s wisdom, courage, and embodying that. And compassion. Wisdom, courage, compassion, embodying that. And, you know, if you look at the spiritual experience these days, Eric, it’s very fashionable for people to say, I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual. It’s kind of sounds cool, but it’s, the religious experience and the spiritual experience are identical. It’s finding an identity which is transcends space and time. Your true identity outside of space and time, timeless, eternal soul or whatever. Number one. Number two, spontaneous ethical morality. Truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equanimity. That’s the second. And third is loss of the fear of death. This is common to all the religions. Okay, the experience. Now, people forget that that’s the experience. They just like the message, so they love the messenger, which is appropriate too, you know, because the message sounds amazing. But how can I have that same experience? How can I find my true self? How can I have spontaneous ethical behavior, not imposed, I don’t have to follow the Ten Commandments, but spontaneous ethical behavior. And thirdly, how can I lose the fear of death? Because that’s another part of the whole journey, spiritual journey, something called the dark night of the soul. So, you know, you and I, or anyone out there is ultimately going to get old. Consider old already, because I’m 78 chronologically, not biologically. You get old, you have infirmity, and then there’s death. That will never go away. No matter how healthy you are, no matter how much money you have, no matter what kind of relationships you have, you will get old, you will get infirmity, and you will die. That’s where spirituality comes in.

00:34:12 – Eric Zimmer
I’m going to take us a slightly different direction for a second, but this is a question that’s been on my mind lately. As somebody who is chronologically also getting older, everybody’s. Yes, I guess that’s true. All of us. I think there are different points in our lives where it becomes a little bit more kind of in your face, so to speak. And I was the sort of person that thought that I didn’t have much fear of death. Something has happened in the last couple years where the fact that I’m going to get old, I am getting old, am going to die, has become more salient. Do you feel like sometimes that the only way to truly get through that fear is to actually encounter it for real? Yes.

00:34:56 – Deepak Chopra
And somehow I was lucky enough to have that imparted to me in my childhood. You know, my mother would say that since everybody is headed in the direction of dusty death, to be in denial of it is actually to create more fear. But to be aware that death is stalking you every moment of your life. You look behind and the prince of death is behind you. Then you look behind again, and he’s closer. There was some french philosopher, he said, I forget the name right now. He said, we are all on death row. The only uncertainty is the method of execution and the length of reprieve. So I’m very conscious of the prince of death behind me and getting closer. That makes every moment absolutely very precious. Because when I die, particular storyline will die, but not the consciousness that weaves infinite stories for itself.

00:35:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Like I said, it’s the sort of thing that I’ve thought a lot about. And maybe it’s just looking over my shoulder and seeing like he’s gaining ground has caused me to be a little bit less nonchalant about it than I was before. But I have also been sort of framing it in the sense of like, okay, well, now is a new chance to reckon with it yet again, right? Because it’s going to keep coming.

00:36:22 – Deepak Chopra
And it’s a chance to ask yourself, who am I? Am I that fertilized egg? Or am I that baby or toddler or teenager, young adult, mature adult, all the way to dusty death? In fact, if you identify with anyone of those stories, then you are actually denying something much more profound. Who you are is not your current storyline. In fact, we worry about children that don’t develop. Right. If your child didn’t develop into teenage years, you would worry. If you were stuck at teenage years, you would worry also. So evolution is part of our journey, and change is part of our experience. And actually change and flow is what consciousness does. And we want to get stuck at a particular stage of development, which would be very worrisome. We would all be frozen mummies in a universe that would be a museum.

00:37:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Let’s talk about something else you talk about in the new book, where you talk about two companions. I and it explain that for us.

00:37:32 – Deepak Chopra
That analogy is taken from an ancient aphorism in the vedantic tradition where you have the metaphor of two birds and they’re identical. The birds are identical. One bird is enjoying the fruits of pleasure and pain. So you see one bird pecking at a fruit and basically going through life, pleasure, pain, both. You can’t have one with it. And the other is watching silently, not participating. And there. So we have these roles. One is we are totally immersed in the role, and that’s our ego identity, our personality, or whatever we think, our self images created by social constructs. But there’s a deeper awareness that is the background against which this change occurs. Right now, people may be listening to us or watching us on the screen. Okay, but what is really here that is not changing? This program is changing. Our conversation is changing. After you finish with me, you’ll have another program. There could be infinite number of programs on this screen these days. It’s easier to understand that, you know, you have Netflix and you have Amazon. You have this, that you can have an infinite number of programs that are all changing, but the screen is a constant. So it is the constant non change in the midst of the changing scenery. You are not the scenery. You are the seer, in which the scenery appears. That’s a profound spiritual insight, that the more you identify with the scenery, you’d be overwhelmed by it, which is the common condition in the world right now. But if you actually identified with the seer, which is the non changing factor, in the midst of the changing scenery, you would have peace, equanimity. You would recognize that it’s your destiny to play an infinity of roles. But you’re not the roles you play.

00:39:32 – Eric Zimmer
And so the eye is the bird that’s pecking at the pleasure and pain, and then the. It is the bird that’s watching that phrase. It is a strange phrase to try and identify with, I know, but it.

00:39:48 – Deepak Chopra
Is that non local being or spirit that you are. You know, John Wheeler, one of the greatest modern scientists, he said, we are the bit of the. It. The. It is non changing, and we are the bits of it that constantly change and transform.

00:40:07 – Eric Zimmer
So we are nearly out of time. But I wanted to give you a second to just tell us briefly about something called the sages and scientists symposium that you have coming up.

00:40:18 – Deepak Chopra
Thank you for asking that question. So, September 13, 14th and 15th at Sanders Theatre, which houses 1000 people, we are bringing together for three days thought leaders in the field of well being, in the field of humanitarianism, and in the field of astrobiology. So it’s about the future of well being, the future of humanity, and the future of the cosmos. You may or may not know that current astrobiology, biology, which is a new discipline, there are departments of astrobiology, many universities, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Arizona, that are now positing that there are 60 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy, in the same way as you and I are advanced civilizations, and there are 2 trillion galaxies. So this is actually current science. You can look it up, go to AI and whatever and look it up. So this is a very surprising thing right now that you know that we are part of a past tapestry of life that seeds the entire universe. That’s the finale of the conference. But it starts with the future of well being. Genetics, epigenetics, CRISPR gene editing messenger RNA, all of that. Then it goes into, you know, how can we create peace and social and economic justice? How can we tackle climate change? How can we create health and well being? That’s the future of humanity and finally, the future of the cosmos. So we invite anyone who wants to attend sagescientist.org dot.

00:41:59 – Eric Zimmer
If I were not going to be in Europe at that time, I would be seeing you there. But it sounds like a wonderful conference. We’ll have links in the show notes, and if you just search sage and scientists and Deepak, I’m sure you’ll find it. Deepak, thank you so much for coming on. It’s a pleasure to see you again. And in about eight minutes from now, when you release your next book, we will maybe do it again.

00:42:24 – Deepak Chopra
Okay. Yeah, it’s coming. The next book is.

00:42:29 – Eric Zimmer
I’m sure it is.

00:42:30 – Deepak Chopra
Unveiling the matrix.

00:42:32 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. All right. Take care, Deepak. Thank you. Bye.

00:42:51 – Chris Forbes
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