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

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... Any time you'd recoil or deny, resistance creates even more stress. 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 if something really bad happens at work, I get a really bad... 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 step in awareness. The awareness of the mind is not the mind. Who is it 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. 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, yeah.

You're looking at the projection of yourself. She's very hard to do. You're looking at your avatar.

It's very hard to do because we are increasingly becoming avatars, especially with things like social media. We're being reinforced, like I have 2 million followers or a million followers or 500,000 followers that's following my avatar.

So we don't know who we are. You're confused yourself with your avatar. And the battle is all between avatars wanting importance.

How does one resign from that battle and take back my piece?

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. 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 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. The worst use 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. But 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 avatar war with other avatars. My antidote to that is my own creativity.

Your own creativity. Every moment you have a choice to repeat the past or be a pioneer of creativity of the future. 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. 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 empty with a few scattered dots and spots and some random electrical discharges. At the most fundamental level, there are no boundaries. Boundaries are perceptual. 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 it takes you away from your identity of being squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime.

Point number 4, the five points of suffering. Point number 4.

Point number 4, confusing your selfie with yourself, your ego identity.

We've talked about that. Number 5 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 transcend? 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.

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. Take a little bit of what's it? I think it was Kafka or somebody who said, All of human's problem, 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 are human beings. We are not human beings anymore.

I pull over the lorry that I'm driving up the motorway, and I said, 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?

It starts a process. You begin to ask yourself, Who am I? I'd reflect on these questions every day. Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? What am I grateful for? Who am I without these constructs? It's a big mystery 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. This requires a different education. It's not part of our culture. It used to be part of cultures. If you read Plato in the Republic, and you'll see that this was part of every culture. But it was few luminaries. People romanticized even about this in India's spiritual country. Well, India has been violent forever. A few luminaries The sages of the Upnishad, then we have romance around them. Greek culture, oh, Bob, the Greeks were the most civilized in the world. Well, yes, Socrates and Parmenides and Pythagoreus, I can name a few, but the rest of the country, even in those times, they had slavery, they had sexism, they had these The source of the Olympics where they used to sacrifice humans. We're still performing it.

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? 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 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, qigong, they actually activate a different part of your nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system, which causes self-regulation in the body. It's not just exercise. It's something that puts mind and body together, even gymnastics or things like judo, and I mentioned martial arts, but yoga is my practice. Then emotional, your emotional and physical environment, your social environment, because we live as social beings. If you have toxic relationships, it's going to cause physical toxicity. Then nutrition. We now know that the 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. 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. 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 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 A movie, I even remember the movie, Ali Baba and the Forty Thiefs. Then we went to a fancy restaurant, and then in the middle of the night, he died.

They took him for cremation, brought his ashes back in a little jar about the size of this coffee cup, 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. My 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. My uncles took my brother to every physician. They couldn't find a diagnosis until somebody said, 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. Sure enough, as soon as they came, my brother was healed. At six years, I had a crisis, existential crisis. Went on to become a doctor. But what happens? You When 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.

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. 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.

If I made 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 ChatGPT or something like that. What I need to know is who am I.

How do you feel about ChatGPT? 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 way on 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, 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 started the business. It's like dividing the loot before there's a train to rob. But they're already talking. 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. That's the final exit, you're still a hustler. I say, make joy and self-understanding, self-awareness, the fundamental purpose of existence and everything else will follow.

Where's your joy? Where is that? Where do you drive 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 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 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. 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 Bagage Claim. Everybody was stressed in the train, wearing masks, panicked, a mother on on the phone and full of anxiety. 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. The whole room lighted up just looking at that innocence. We 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 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? Yeah.

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. 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.

What 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.