About Episode 5: "The Case Against Reality & The Causes of Suffering"

if we can cut the corpus closer maybe the bad activity from those neurons that's making this hemisphere go bad won't get over to this other hemisphere and make it go bad that was the idea so we're gonna cut the corpus close and said only one hemisphere at a time goes down an epileptic seizure so they did this surgery I was friends with one of the surgeons who who did this Joe Joe bogan a brilliant surgeon and and it was a success so they cut the corpus closer and the the epileptic seizures disappeared or were much much less less harmful but what they found was these people had interesting differences from the rest of us so in one experiment you have this a split brain patient looking at a computer spring looking straight at the middle of the screen and you just flash up a phrase like the word the phrase keyring so key appears over there ring appears over there there looking right in the middle so key appears to the left of where they're looking ring appears to the right of where they're looking now it flashes up there for like a tenth of a second so it's really fast and if you ask a person a normal person what did you see they'll say I saw Kieran no problem very very easy with these patients the split brain patients they'll say oh I saw the word ring you say well you know can can you help me out here what kind of ring you know doorbell ring a wedding ring a key ring I don't know I I just saw the word ring and you say okay well um I'm gonna blindfold you I'm gonna give you a little box with all sorts of things there's gonna be little you know pencils and spoons and keys and rings and keeping all sorts of stuff isn't in the box I want you with your left hand while you're blindfolded to reach in feel with your hand and and pull out the thing that you just read and so the person does that and their hand pulls out a key and while they're still blindfolded you ask them okay what's in your hand and they'll say I don't know I don't know what's in my left hand and and then you pull off the mask and you say what's in to have a look what's in your hand go oh there's a key well you said that you saw the word ring why are you why did you pull out a key I don't know and what you have is evidence that when you cut the corpus callosum there was one hemisphere that saw the word key and could pull out a key with the left hand this turns out the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and so the right hemisphere saw the word key the left hemisphere saw the word ring nobody there is no consciousness that saw the phrase key ring so here we have and then the experiments get really interesting you can ask questions to the right hemisphere and to the left hemisphere separately and in one patient that a friend of mine vs Roma Condren the medical doctor in San Diego area and a brilliant researcher at UC San Diego professor um in one one patient that he studied the left hemisphere believed in God and the right hemisphere was an atheist so so here we have within one skull two separate consciousnesses with two separate personalities and actually two separate goals in life there are some there was one one of these patients the left hemisphere wanted to have a desk job as a draftsman the right hemisphere wanted to be a racecar driver completely different personalities in one head so so even so each of us feels like I am one individual one self one entity and I'm separate from other people that I'm talking with but even inside your own head there's evidence that you're not just one you're at least two and those two different parts of you those two different personalities could have extremely different goals in life they could have different conscious experiences they could have different religious views and and so sometimes if you feel like there's maybe an internal conflict going on it may be that there's in fact experiencing that you're not just one there are two different personalities that that are that are negotiating with each other so we have the experience of a single unified person that you know that's me that's dawn or or you know that that's Deepak where this Jennifer each of us most of the time feels like I'm a single unified person but we now have this clean neuroscience evidence that in addition to being one you're also too and they can be radically different and yet somehow when the corpus callosum is there and the two separate personalities with their separate religious views you interact in the right way you get the illusion or perhaps the reality of a new unified coherent person as well so that tells us all that right there tells us that almost all the intuitions we bring to this question of what does it mean for me to be at myself an identity and separate from other selves almost all of our intuitions are probably radically wrong and need to be you know addressed and and corrected by you know this neuroscience data and it and actually we need a theory now of what what is consciousness what ourselves and how could it be that two separate selves like as represented by my left and right hemisphere could by their interaction create a new unified self is that really true or not is that an illusion that I'm a unified self or not so the top level that's you know you may want to probe further on this but but that top level you can you can see how complicated this question is yeah there's so many questions I have and I'm sure Deepak does as well so I'm gonna go to you in a moment Deepak there were a couple of thoughts done I think I remember it might have even been in one of your classes where there was another example of somebody with dissociative identity disorder where they shifted from one identity to another and in one identity they would have an allergy to orange juice and in another identity they would have no anaphylaxis am I remembering that correctly there are many examples of that kind of thing of course this is where Deepak is as a medical doctor is quite quite expert but absolutely there are cases of that there's also cases of Anna signo Jia where you can deny that you have a paralysis in the left side of your body and then come out of it so it's almost like there's a person that inside of you that knows you're paralyzed but there's another person that can't deal with it and doesn't know that you're paralyzed so you that's very very interesting the notion of self yeah and so Deepak I would love to know your thoughts it was funny I was recently reading your book super brain and in it you get into the concepts of the brain versus the mind and how if we allow it to the brain controls us however if we connect to the mind or what we could theoretically from Eastern principles call consciousness then we can begin to tap into the true potential of our brain how do you perceive what an identity is and is it something that can evolve especially when you respond to dawn and many things he said and to your question also but multiple personalities can have multiple different diseases allergies in one diabetes and one more to the other which is very perplexing I've even read that there's the change of color in the eyes when in multiple personalities when we switch from one to the other leave that aside I want to now actually talk about comment and what Don said Sierra Nevada interesting conversation right now because Don has his foot in two camps right now he has his foot in the scientific can which at the moment is based on an ontology that assumes that physical reality is real that you know but at the same time Don has written a book called the case against reality so you know and yet right now he's using physicalist arguments the question that you asked and they have a deep insight these physical arguments have a deep insight into I think we're going with this question of identity because I understand totally what on the same would also have my own practice and I'll tell you what I've learned for practice also what the great wisdom traditions say about identity which is very important so everything that Don has said in the spiritual traditions of non-duality which include Kashmir Shaivism made on the aspects of Buddhism they're all non dual so there's no in reality there is no difference between mind brain body universe and consciousness there's no difference they're all different modes of consciousness knowing itself I'll repeat that they're all different modes of consciousness knowing itself so consciousness knows itself symbolically as the mind it knows itself symbolically as the brain it knows itself symbolically as the body and the world and incidently only in humans because humans ask these questions there's no other species that asked these questions so these are human constructs and we are dealing with human questions not with the question that caterpillar would ask or a dolphin or her or any other living being and yet those beings have consciousness too so this brings us to the definition of consciousness in the wisdom traditions and there are many okay so one definition is function of consciousness is consciousness is the fundamental ground awareness in which experience happens experience happens that's one definition consciousness by itself is not the contents of consciousness it is the container of the contents of consciousness which are actually modified forms of consciousness as sensations which is feelings thoughts perceptions so consciousness is also the knowing element in every experience you can't have any experience without consciousness including the one we are having okay so it is the knowing element in every experience it is the fundamental awareness and which experience happens it is the potential for experience it is also the contents of experience which are the modified expressions of consciousness so in these traditions we divide reality and now I'm taking a little digression into symbolic and non symbolic okay symbolic reality is everything that Don is speaking about it's symbolic reality and in this symbolic reality we use the rules of mathematics we use the rules of quantum mechanics we use the regular science theories observations experiments validation falsification etc of course science gets more and more sophisticated so we discard Newtonian science for relativity and then problems kind of reconciling that with quantum mechanics notwithstanding all the all the problems that the scientific method has trying to explain reality there are problems including you know what is there a cause for the Big Bang what happened in the plant Planck epoch why is the universe so fine-tuned for mind and life and our own consciousness with mathematical precision why was cosmic inflation so precise that it it was off by a little decimal we wouldn't be having this conversation why is the cosmological constant off by a power of 1 by you know magnitude of 1 to the power of 120 lots of problems all of this new science is based on approximations and yet they work I mean we are using technology right now to have this conversation using technology every time I pick up my smart phone so what the heck is going on ok and I think if we take what we've learned from science and what we learn from the wisdom traditions that all of this that we are doing would be impossible without consciousness the scientific method would be impossible without consciousness mathematics is a human experience in consciousness so experiments are designed in consciousness theories are conceived in consciousness observations are made in consciousness so we can't get rid of consciousness no matter what we do and how we approach the question of identity now given this I question of identity in my spiritual practice the first question even before starting meditation is Who am I I is the operating way the second question is what is it that wants to know the answer to this question right now okay I mean do my neural networks we can answer to the question Who am I is my genetic information and in my entangled microbiome which includes other species is that asking the question what is asking the question and you go deeper and deeper and deeper with this question so when I go deeper in this question as have millions of others before me in these spiritual practices one of the things I do is at night I look at myself as a toddler going to school I recognize that little guy but it's not me okay that's an image now a memory that's coming of somebody that was called Deepak when he was seven years old I mean I can go back maybe six years but not beyond that or earlier you know I don't remember how I learned to walk but I did I don't remember how I learnt to speak but I did I'm speaking right now I don't remember my ABCD okay I don't remember one two three four I don't remember my life as an embryo I don't remember my life as an infant all of those were my identities at one time right different body different mind different personality hopefully personality grows right and there's nothing about this brain this body that was there when I was born you know two days ago my kids were at home and they said you know dad do you use the pool I said no so why don't you use the pool I said I haven't swum for 25 years hey come on get into the pool so I get into the pool I start swimming the brain that learned how to swim 20 years ago this it doesn't exist anymore this brain which didn't exist then remembers how to swim there is mystery upon mystery upon mystery when you ask the question Who am I I cannot relate to this killed I cannot relate to the teenager nervously biting his nails when he saw a pretty girl I cannot relate to the young ambitious doctor in the emergency room who was actually blood thirsty for wounds so he could refine his surgical skills I can't relate to those all those characters so what is my identity and I still say hi hi so this is a very difficult problem that you have asked here's what the wisdom traditions say since every identity you assume is a provisional identity and furthermore is changing at the speed of light why because qualia which are the basis of experience actually move at that speed I tell you to think of your mother think of the Empire State Building you move from one location to another location without going through the space in between how did you do that I tell you to think of a rainbow immediately see in image if I close my eyes I see nothing other than blackness open my eyes and the blackness is this three-dimensional theater of space-time and causality but in fact it's real nature is it is black electromagnetic radiation has no color electromagnetic radiation has no form so when I close my eyes I am seeing reality when my open eyes I'm not see reality I'm constructing reality as has been said so many types okay so many tons so Who am I is every identity I seek is provisional it's not real okay number one number two my identity is entangled with your identity because I exist only in relationship as that physical psychological emotional being I exist only in relationship not only is my identity entangled with the odds it's entangled with the trees and the sky and the Sun and the stars and the insects and the bees and the ecosystem of existence the entangled microbiome which in this scheme would be the symbolic representation of entangled sentient beings expressing their consciousness as this universe in fact multiverses all species specific and in humans even culture and mathematics specific we create everything that we experience but we are not a creation we are the source in which this is happening and now finally is there such a thing as an individual that's the basic hallucination what we call the individual is actually a differentiated consciousness from a single source and differentiation is not separation you know like when when a single cell a pluripotent cell a fertilized ovum divides 50 times to make a human body okay 50 times when you have a human body trillions of cells one becomes 2 becomes 4 exponentially suddenly 50 trillion cells more than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy each cell is a differentiate itself the is differentiated the brain is another differentiation the hair is another the fingernails mother the nose another the liver they are not separate they differentiated ok that's why the together entangled you know the stomach doesn't say why should I die jest food for the brain what's it doing for me the liver doesn't say why should remove toxins from this body what's it doing for me it's one activity and it's a differentiated entangled activity there's no separation differentiation is not separation so in the Buddhist philosophy the word is we are inter beings that inter rise in the inter isness there is only the internal isness and what is the internal is nuts it is the entanglement of conscious agents in Don's words that is the only reality and we are differentiated from that not separate from that okay furthermore what we call existence because it is not in space-time its spaceless timeless inconceivable infinite formless fundamental reality since it's not in space in time it's timeless by definition it's immortal or or all timeless is a better word because immortal suggests duration and time which itself according to dawn is an artifact okay so it's timeless existence number 1 which means birth and death are constructs based on caller false identity ok there's no such thing because the construct itself is based on a false identity existence is timeless also existence is invisible you know this morning I was looking up how long have spiders been around millions of years but they've been around almost as long as insects have in their own and insects have been around as long as the same type as plants have been around they all came together ok so while we give lip service to mechanistic Darwinian I do Darwinian evolution I actually believe that evolution is the creative play of consciousness it's the creative play of consciousness it's qualia shuffling and reshuffling for maximum diversity of a experience and that's what we are here for backs among diversity of experience we squeeze it by identifying ourselves into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime which is a total illusion so that's I think it got a sponsor what Don is saying so I'm hearing you both say something similar coming from two different angles and one thing I would love to know Deepak and I'm sure this is probably weighing on your mind and our viewers Minds as well is why do we have the experience of being separate to your point we have all these intertangled qualia we all come from the same were differentiated but were these inter beings rather than different beings so why do we have suffering why do we have people who are impoverished and other people who have not and my question to you Don is is there an evolutionary advantage that we don't see where our brains tricked us into thinking it was better to see ourselves as separate and if so is there a way to repair that so as a society we can evolve and heal if we are as Deepak says all inter beings I would first love to hear deep hugs response to why do we have the solution of separateness from from this framework I'm very interested in that I according to what I know and according to the traditions that I come from why is it and so on unanswerable because even explanation is a human construct okay explanation is a human construct who invented that idea he says you need an explanation for existence who says you need an explanation for awareness of existence in fact the Vedanta says there is no explanation for existence or awareness of existence but you can make it up and if you make it up it becomes true for you so what they do is they say it's the creative play of consciousness for maximum diversity you can't have joy without suffering you can't have up without down you can't have hot without cold you can't have pleasure without pain all experiences I can trust and that's what creates this creative experience and as long as you don't take it personally because you're not a person anyway you can enjoy this experience you can use it you can downgrade the illusion you can get rid of the illusion in fact in every perceptual act I look here I look there that's a snapshot of perception that's a snapshot of perception in between is the formulas you can't have experienced a form and phenomena without the formulas so the formless is the only reality in fact Madonna says if you can see it touch it taste it smell it conceptualize it imagine it name it it's not real the only thing that's real is that your name or conceptualize or imagine or see or perceive or even think about that is the only reality now that going all the way ok but bottom line is we can while we are all here you be gone everybody we have fictional characters in a collective dreamscape the goal of existence is to wake up from that so we can either upgrade the illusion or downgrade the illusion all the while doing that we are the choreographer the director the producer the hero and the village of the whole show for the snake eating its own tail right now I turned it over back to you I think that I hear what you're saying Deepak I think that's really true is that we are the creators where we don't even realize we wake up every day and we're saying how our movie is going to go we're in this big program before dawn answers do you ask the question well why is there suffering so yeah this is the answer from the Vedanta they say five causes of suffering but they're very precise by the way through the experiential knowledge not scientific knowledge experience the process not knowing reality first point is called the first really pleasure the case against reality dance number one principle is the first force of suffering you're confusing reality it's a Moloch representation of reality mmm let's cause of suffering second cause of suffering grasping and clinging to experience which is ephemeral and evanescent as soon as we finish this zoom call that experience is over it's gone forever you can't grasp so second pause is grasping at experience which is evanescent transient ephemeral uncatchable third is recoiling from the same thing being afraid of the same thing fourth is identifying with the skin encapsulated ego which is a socially induced hallucination and the fifth is the fear of death okay these are the five causes of suffering in the non-dual traditions and the solution is one won the case against reality fascinating very fascinating thank you deeply that's really really interesting it the what you're saying really corresponds precisely with the mathematical models that my colleagues and I are developing in which as you say there's just a field of awareness in which experiences arise and that's what our mathematics actually says we use probability spaces and what they are are these spaces that that are just potentials until you actually have a particular experience that happens and so so you can think of the probability space as a mathematical can copy of the model of the idea of unawareness without content and then the particular experiences that you have are the events that happen within that probability space so the the mathematics there aligns with what you're saying and in our fundamental theory of conscious agents and its dynamics there are no separate cells there the notion of a self is actually not part of the fundamental mathematical apparatus that we have selves are constructs that systems of conscious agents can can make and they're just made on the fly and they can dissolve but they're not they're not fundamental aspects of the mathematics at all they're just among the various symbols that we make and so the now the so everything seems to align up with what what you're saying now as a scientist it's very interesting that you know you say that asking the question of why is so as a scientist right I'm trained to ask why all the time right and of course when we do that you know when Einstein asked why you know he he came up with stuff right when scientists asked why they come up with interesting things and it does change our reality as you said we get our technology so there is some payoff there is some payoff for asking why and then asking why he was asking for rigorous answers to the question why right so Einstein like when Einstein was trying to understand gravity he had this brilliant idea if I was in an elevator and the elevator was just free-falling and I had a nap praticed to weigh myself in the elevator I would find that I was weightless so if I'm in a free-falling elevator I would weigh nothing in the elevator and you can actually do the experiment they've done it and then it's true when you're free falling you ain't nothing inside elevator it took him eight years of hard work to turn that really interesting intuition into the mathematics so he turned it into mathematics but it you know took even a brain guy like Einstein eight years of hard hard work to do that and when he finally wrote down the equation of general relativity that was really cashing out the meaning of if I'm an elevator industry falling I'll be weightless one thing that that mathematics entailed the Einstein didn't understand but it was discovered by a guy named Schwarzschild a year later he is that there are things called black holes now my Stein was appalled he he thought that was terrible he didn't like it and for decades he disbelieved it so so what's interesting here and in to pursue this in terms of asking what is awareness and what what is this game of consciousness and so forth because in Einstein's case here's this genius he had this really deep insight he turned it into math and realized that his insight had all sorts of consequences that he didn't like that he didn't want but it turned out we find black holes and without black holes our galaxy wouldn't exist and and we probably wouldn't be here either and so so there the question of asking why so as a scientist this is an interesting point for me right because we're after asking questions why and coming up with explanations but I agree I agree that no scientific theory can explain everything every scientific theory starts with miracles what we call them are assumptions the the foundational assumptions of our theory but that's where our theory stops and then explanation only starts from those miracles and so you're absolutely right that science no matter how deep we dig we will always face a miracle no matter what Theory we have and that that means that there is the interesting thing about science so on the one hand it's turned out to be an extremely profitable enterprise we're talking right now because of what science has discovered on the other hand we know as scientists that it will always have this incredibly fundamental limit that we can never get around there will always be a miracle at the very very start of any scientific theory so so yes I'm I'm on on the same page as a scientist I must say the ish to ask why questions doesn't go away and there there are questions for example like why is it that I can experience what I call my experiences my headache my taste of chocolate but I can't experience your experiences there does seem right to be this inability so even if you have known someone for many many years and you can empathize your if your husband you know you a child that you've known and raised so you know them very very well and yet there's this feeling that my experience my headache or my wife or my husband can empathize with that with that headache but they can't have my headache they can have their headache but I can't have mine so I'd be interested in what you and Jennifer think about that I have two responses on the headache question because you actually hinted them when you have extreme empathy when you let's say your child is injured and slapped you wince right you for that moment your neural networks and that child's neural networks are I would say entangled at that moment they're entangled because you're having the same sensory experience almost now of course in the non-local traditions in yoga there's a whole chapter in Patanjali on yoga Sutra Patanjali called cities and release where when you get rid of your local identity you have access to other people's experiences when you transcend your local identity you have access to non-local experiences because actually all experience is non-local anyway you know we think it's local because we think it's happening in the head but the head is happening in the lawn local to the neural network is also an experience in the non-local so ultimately entanglement without personal separate identity can actually give you access to other people's experience even their experiences of other species so in there are meditations in this these traditions on how to have snake consciousness so how to have butterfly consciousness so how do you have tree consciousness because they all have some aspect of consciousness but one thing that I think we could conclude on this because what this idea of explanation and what Dan said that we can't stop wanting to explanation I think there's some truth in every mythology in every mythology and the mythology that I was thinking of right now is the Garden of Eden okay suddenly there's a tree that says there's the knowledge of good and evil there and you know God says to humans don't want each of that tree of knowledge of good and evil but of course humans are as godlike as they can be I mean no other species would say I want to know the secret of the knowledge of good and evil no other species I can't imagine even a primate doing that only a human so the humans did that and they came up with the idea of exploitation okay as soon as they ate the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which is separation basically it's the fall from grace it's not understanding separation and differentiation the distinction that created the need for explanation we became godlike and we are right now through this technology okay we have created I mean we have created everything we now have thinking of creating quantum computers which means you the speed of light is not a limitation anymore okay you can actually being Scotty up from here to whatever another galaxy at theoretically right so we have created the knowledge which is godlike we take constructs we embed ourselves in them and we create this thing that we call the universe so whilst I say there may be no explanation for anything we are the only species that can come up with explanations and they work that's the bizarre thing that even our incomplete explanations with approximations at best they work so I would say it's a great mystery and at the work of the scientists and mystic is both explored the mystery live the mystery and never give up asking why even though they may not be an answer right yeah I think gentleman that we could do an entire episode on the observer principle because everything we've been discussing since episode one is that we are having this conversation dawn is finding his mathematics you are finding what you're looking for based on Eastern traditions Deepak because you're looking there and until we can fully understand and begin to grasp that idea that what is in front of us is there because we're looking for it and that gives rise to bigger inquiries about what has a see reality and if all of this does become made manifest through our consciousness I would love to do an entire episode of you are both game on how we can begin to repaint reality or paint reality for whatever we want let us be the Mozart let us be the Picasso of our life and how from a scientific and spiritual standpoint can we intersect these ideas to put the paintbrush back in our hands so that we can begin to harness the godlike powers that we have to create this reality that isn't even happening let's do it all of that this is actually Dawn's domain as well but for today I think if you don't mind I'd like to suggest the title the case against reality and the causes of suffering and right at the top in mind below that the case against reality and the causes of suffering we are not saying that we have a solution we just say there's a connection I got it okay and next time go deeper into exactly what you say this is this is lovely I'm really enjoying having some good mysteries for us elves anyway that's right this is um you know I'm learning and that's that's what's in it for me I'm really learning here this is them eyes and I'd love at one point guys if you're ever open to it to discuss where the universe came from from a spiritual versus scientific BIGBANG right now we go on for hours guys so thank you any of this conversation people enjoy these informal remarks from we believe it exactly as it is so thank you guys again for another engaging and dynamic

Channel: The Chopra Well

Views: 1,592

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Id: oSUmePoi-co

Length: 40min 44sec (2444 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020