Is Consciousness a Miracle? | Harvard’s Cognitive Scientist Prof. Steven Pinker & Sadhguru

Consciousness consists in brain activity 86 billion neurons possibly 100 trillion synapses you don't say I'm the brain this means there is somebody beyond that we don't look at brain as something different it is just body with a different levels of functionality we know that when the person dies their Consciousness goes out of existence Consciousness is that which is the very basis of our creation or where is the proof well I am the proof I don't believe in miracles extra sensory perception we know it doesn't exist an entity that we cannot perceive through sense perception this is what we refer to as Consciousness science should never conclude what we do not know cannot exist so before we decided what should we talk about and after going through Dr pinker's profile while uh we went back and forth on what title we should keep so Dr pinket CHS is consciousness a miracle we were giving him Consciousness a miracle so he just put a question mark on that and you tweeted last night so I would love to hear from you what in your view Consciousness means and why the question mark yeah there is a some of you may have heard of B's law of headlines which is that in a newspaper magazine any headline that begins with a question mark has the answer no uh and I think that would that applies to our at least to uh uh my opinion of the resolution for today the the question is consciousness a miracal no so what what is consciousness uh well as Louie Armstrong was once asked uh to Define Jazz and he said if you have to ask you'll never know um so we we all know what Consciousness is it is our waking awareness it is the experience that we are all having uh right at this moment is consciousness a miracle uh no and here's why Consciousness uh is uh consists of patterns of activity in the brain uh we can be a bit more specific but I won't go go into a detail but there's reason to think that it can be uh specified as uh rhythmic synchronized patterns of activity perhaps in the uh the gamma range are higher involving Loops between the thalamus prefrontal cortex parial uh cortex and and other brain regions why do we think that well findings in Neuroscience that go back almost a century or more uh my compatriot Dr Wilder Penfield the Montreal neurosurgeon this street named after him now uh found that during neurosurgery when the brain was exposed part of the skull removed and as we all know the brain has no pain receptors so that uh brain surgery can be done while the patient is conscious and he found that when he stimulated the cortex with an electrode he could cause the patient to have a vivid lifelike experience they could think that they were at at a their 8-year-old birthday party for example so electricity causes Consciousness not a miracle uh drugs cause cause affect conscious ious that's why we take mood altering drugs or whether recreational or U therapeutic uh if so chemistry causes Consciousness um if a part of the brain is removed through surgery because of a tumor uh in uh through a head injury or a stroke then a part of Consciousness is affected and the person may lose the experience of uh seeing color or recognizing objects or even envisioning themselves at some future time depending on where the lesion is this is not just a correlate but we know that brain the intact brain wiring is necessary for Consciousness it's not just uh two things happening at the same time because if a part of the brain is damaged the person no longer uh has the corresponding experience and say if the optic nerve is cut the person's blind um we also know that if we allow the brain to um function normally that the patterns of activity that correspond to Consciousness are increasingly capable of being read that any conscious experience has a corresponding brain signature and through functional magnetic resonance imaging and machine learning uh we're getting closer and closer to be able being able to read out someone's Consciousness from their pattern of brain activity again not not not a miracle uh it's uh patterns of electromagnetic um uh signatures from blood flow all of these are physical uh entities and picked up by a very strong magnet and another physical entity and we can see what the person is thinking uh you might be skeptical that the brain as a physical object is capable of supporting Consciousness given how mind bogglingly intricately complex human thought perception emotion is but and indeed if we uh opened up the skull and it was filled with Spam then you might say that that Consciousness really is a miracle but it's not filled with Spam it's filled with tissue uh that is certainly commensurate in its complexity to the complexity of Consciousness 86 billion neurons possibly 100 trillion synapses what a neural network like that is capable of is of stupendous complexity as we are reminded by the progress in artificial intelligence based on what are sometimes called artificial neural networks that is it is possible by interconnecting circuits with some of the properties of brain tissue to duplicate or at least approximate many of the the uh Feats of uh of human intelligence and Consciousness uh finally we know that when when the um physiological activity of the brain uh ceases that is the person dies their Consciousness goes out of existence now how do we know that well of course you can't know it for sure and many of the world's religions uh promise people that their Consciousness Will Survive the death of the brain um but if uh if that were true and if at least there were some kind of uh connection contact information transfer between this alleged continuation of Consciousness after the cessation of physiological function uh you would be able to have seances where you communicate with the souls of the dead as they did not least at at Harvard 120 130 years ago uh now we now know that this is all flimflam this is stage magic and there is a way to verify whether you really are communicating with the souls of the Dead you can ask Aunt Hilda uh where she hid her jewelry um the soul of Aunt Hilda communicating from the the spirit world could tell you under the third floorboard in the closet and the jewelry would be there if that happened I would believe that Consciousness can survive the uh death of the brain uh that has never happened and I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that it never will uh thank you now uh no admittedly I think one of the reasons that it is tempting to think that Consciousness is a miracle despite all of the uh overwhelming evidence that it consists of neural activity is there does feel to be a bit of a of a qualitative Gap philosophers call it the explanatory Gap namely why should all that neural activity actually feel like something if you know if it's your brain this is a uh a a mindboggling um Enigma conundrum and it leads to late night dorm room conversations like how do I know that the red that you're seeing when you see red is the same as the red that I see when I'm seeing red and how do I know that you're not a zombie that you're not actually uh you might have circuitry that duplicates intelligent Behavior but for all I know there's no one home that you're just a robot how do you know that I'm not a zombie um there many conundra like these conundrums um uh where our mind just doesn't feel satisfied that something like neural activity could give rise to that which we feel from the inside on the other hand I'm a cognitive psychologist I'm interested in how the mind works and I know that there are a lot of things we have trouble map wrapping our mind around that doesn't mean they're Miracles uh what happened before the Big Bang well physicists will tell us that's probably not the right question because time came into existence with the big bang but still I can't help but thinking of this itty bitty little speck just sort of sitting there for many many years and then suddenly it explodes now that's not physicist will tell us that's not actually what happens you got to stop thinking of it that way but I can't help thinking about it that way I've got the brain that I have you likewise uh I there are many other uh facts that I know are true but that I have trouble appreciating again it doesn't mean they're Miracles but people are tempted to think that they're miracles in the case of the Big Bang it was well you first there was God he went Shazam the whole universe came into existence that's a kind of a tempting way of satis satisfying our frustration our cognitive hunger for an intuitive explanation where it just may be that our mind doesn't work in a way that is harmonious with what our best science tells us I'll give one more example since I am a uh a psychol linguist I'm interested in language so meaning word meaning I can say uh Andromeda galaxy I have now made some sort of contact with an object that is you know thousands of millions of light years away how is that possible how could I be by the mere Act of uttering a sound actually have some connection to this object in in space or Julius Caesar so me and juliia Caesar we got a relationship I just referred to him and it's kind of hard to think how that could be possible uh it is possible but and we are tempted therefore to imbue words with magic that it is because of that uncanny relationship between words in the world that people in many cultures fall for prayers and incantations and curses the belief that actually saying something can change the state of the world so I'm going over these just to make the point that that the human mind is very good at thinking certain kinds of thoughts other kinds of thoughts even though our best science tells us certain facts it just doesn't sit well with our intuitions and the I think the the appropriate response is so much the worse for our intuitions why would we think that our intuitions are going to harmonize with what our best science tells us there is a tendency to turn these this puzzlement this kind of head scratching into Miracles but that is a fallacy and so even though that there's that one last ingredient about Consciousness sometimes it's called the explanatory Gap sometimes called the so-called hard problem of Consciousness that's a bit of a joke because the so-called easy problem is anything but easy uh but uh the fact that neural activity the the system undergoing neural activity has an experience uh is something that is hard to wrap our mind around but it is a fallacy to say well it's not intuitive to me therefore it's a miracle not a miracle thank [Applause] you so G you're responsible namaskaram good evening to every rather saying a response I would uh as all of you know same things can be looked from many different directions first of all uh what is a miracle if you put filth in the soil it becomes a miracle if you put a put a piece of bread into this this becomes a complex human body this is a miracle this one way of looking at it when we say a miracle when what we see the phenomena that we see is not easily available to a logical process we say this is miraculous of course the word miracle has been taken to another place by religious groups and stuff but essentially in human experience a miracle means you saw yesterday you planted a seed and today is become a beautiful flower it's miraculous because you can of course there is somebody there who can explain exactly how filth became a flower how a stinking filth became a fragrant flower can be explained but not easily available to human logic so we say this is miraculous calling something miraculous does not mean it is not available to any reason calling something miraculous essentially means we appreciate the magic of life well our parents gave us very stingy people they gave us only one cell each hello they could have given us a million and made life easy but they gave us only one and here we are sitting talking all this this is a miracle well we can always talk about how CS multiplied what happened this this this but you can't do this in a drum you can't put this in a barrel and do this so this is a miraculous process that it's happening so one way of looking at it is you can explain everything about life another way is just everything in life is magical and miraculous what is logical how I see logic is logic is the most fundamental aspect of our intelligence if you don't have a firm sense of logic you will be all over the place but logic is the foundation we make a strong foundation for this building not to live in the foundation of course in America they call this basement in India we call it a dungeon so we don't live in the foundation we make a strong Foundation because we want to build something else on it so in this sense whatever comes out of this Earth is quite miraculous how a worm like Caterpillar becomes a butterfly just about anything look at it from Human Wonder there is a miraculous process to it we can explain some physical aspect of how it happens but what intelligence makes this happen it is quite miraculous there's no question about it about Consciousness I think uh I don't know how it is seen I'm you must uh Steve you must understand one thing is uh I've have strived hard to remain uneducated and also stried very hard to remain uncivilized why this is so is because most of the striving in people's lives is to become educated to become civilized in my experience how I see this is anything accumulated diminishes your perception both your education and civilization is an accum ulated process once you accumulate these things and identify with those things your ability to see life as is becomes seriously impaired from this context it's very difficult to remain uncivilized and uneducated because from the moment you're born your parents every other adult the moment they see a child parent adults have a kind of an urge they want to educ educate the child teach them ABC 1 to 3 Mary had little lamp something well these things didn't matter to me I didn't care whether Mary had a lamb or not so consciously remaining uninfluenced by all the information that's thrown at you in so many different ways school is not the only place where it happens at home anywhere you go people are throwing stuff at you to remain uninfluenced by that is a lot of work education is lot of work I understand this remaining uneducated is a lot more work I'm telling you because every moment somebody is trying to educate you knowingly or unknowingly so having said that to be able to look at life just the way it is then this word Consciousness I think there is a little bit of uh uh probably the way I'm looking at it it is very different we if we talking about a human being being conscious right now that all of you are conscious in that sense that is yes you're conscious only Bala can throw you off by using his magic of anesthetics that is conscious human beings being conscious of course if you're not conscious there's nothing here for you but consciousness English word Consciousness doesn't really represent that but generally we think we are talking about an intelligence beyond our own intellect which is functioning within us right now when I say functioning well you can explain the physical process of many things but a piece of bread doesn't look like you feel like you nor does it have your intelligence but if you put it inside in some way it becomes you this is a miraculous conscious Pro process of Consciousness see first of all human mind this brain Centric approach we don't look at it that way we see as there is a physical body there is a mental body when I say a mental body every cell in your body has enormous memory far more memory than your brain can ever hold because this remembers how your forefathers were a million years ago it's not forgotten a thing even though skin texture it's not forgotten to that extent so every cell in the body carries enormous memory and the kind of functions that it is doing is unbelievable so it has Intelligence and it has memory essentially in human understanding what we call as mind is a certain combination of memory and intelligence so that is spread right across the system whether human beings have learned to use that or no because this whole whole thing about in the in the today's modern education process we are made to believe only thought is intelligence no no our thought is rudimentary because it's only functioning from the little data that we have collected the data that I have collected how much ever I have collected it is still a minuscule in this Cosmos it is like in the morning also we were talking about this if I give you a trillion piece jigsaw if you put put five pieces together you say this is a bear if you get eight you will say this is an elephant if you get 12 you will say this is a dinosur if you get 15 maybe you will call it a whale I don't know just arriving at conclusions every time we get a piece of information is not the way to conclude about what we are referring to as Consciousness being conscious you being conscious let's use different words so that there is a distinction right now let's say you're aware I'm just replacing the word conscious uh replacing the word conscious with being aware you're aware in The yogic Sciences we call this prna you are right now prna if you fall asleep you are not conscious or you're not aware let's use the word awareness to make a distinction but beyond intellect this intellect how it functions is operated by what we are identified with depending upon what we are identified with accordingly the intellect whals itself right now people are fighting for nation nationhood people are fighting for religion people are fighting for race people are fighting for whatever they believe in simply because they're identified with it and in their intellect this says this is the way there no two ways about it two groups of people are two individuals when they're calling both of them believe this is it otherwise they won't risk their life hello when somebody pitches their life for something you must believe that it matters to them and they believe that's it unfortunately it is just that it is your identity which makes you use your intelligence in this form so there are various dimensions of memory which plays out through this identity Beyond this there is an intelligence which is unsolid by memory this is what we refer to as chitt and generally that's what I would understand as Consciousness you being aware is different Consciousness is different what is the nature of this where does this come from as I said I have strived for a whole lifetime to remain uneducated it's not easy try and see try and see how your parental influence your cultural influence your religious influence your whatever else else is around you doesn't play in your mind at this moment try and see whichever way you try to think it'll work because your thought works from data and data has come from all these sources to be able to simply be here without allowing the data to play up in your mind it takes a lot of work so from that context I'm saying what we are referring to as Consciousness is that which is the very basis of our creation well somebody may call it God it's up to them because they're trying to personalize that in their life because they can't relate to anything which is not in a human form they're saying that but there are so many people of Indian origin here they have man God they have woman God they have cow God they have snake God they have monkey god they have every crawling cre you know creeping every kind because uh according to wherever they were living they made that into their God essentially what they are looking for is personification of the source of what is happening because we cannot explain this Source because logically we cannot conclude the only ways to experience how will you experience what are the differ way ways to experience there are four aspects in yoga this is called as karma K Gana B what this means is these are four dimensions of your existence you have a physical body so through action you can realize certain things you have an intelligence through your intelligence you can realize certain things if you realize through your action we call this karma yoga if you realize through your intelligence we call this Nana yoga if you realize through your emotion we call this bti Yoga Yoga of devotion or emotion If You Realize by transforming your inner energies we call this K yoga these are the only four things you can do no matter what you you do whether you do religion or you do intellectual stuff you do education you do devotion you do whatever you can use your body or your mind or your emotion or your energy this is all that's happening these four things all these four are Pathways but at the same time is there anybody here who is just one big body and don't have a mind or don't have an emotion or energy no we are a combination of this four things why are we so different because we are a unique combination of these four things in one person the body may be dominant in another person their emotions may be dominant in another person their intellect may be dominant each person has a different mix of the same things but these four things are the possibility of knowing so what we are referring to as Consciousness is that aspect of creation which is intelligent but unsullied by memory without memory it doesn't have an intent it doesn't manifest without memory it doesn't have a direction it's just there if it finds little memory it finds expression oh where is the proof well I am the proof because if you want to prove everything with logical steps as I said logic is the foundation of our living here but Foundation is not the place to live so first of all if we separate what is awareness and what is consciousness I think a lot of this different opinions will go away about Miracle well those who want to enjoy their life appreciate life and really experience life they will look everything from a magical eye those who want to dissect life they will look at it from a logical aspect of life uh it's not a question of right and wrong it's just two different ways of doing the same thing [Applause] I I certainly share the sense of wonder of Amazement of astonishment at natural phenomena which tempts us to use the word miracle a seed growing into a plant a um a pregnant woman giving birth to a child uh who grows up to be a person these are truly wondrous and I will sometimes uh in fact use the language of a miracle I'll say it's a miracle now I actually don't mean that it's a miracle uh it is language that helps to convey my awe and wonder but there is a big difference between literally believing that it's a miracle and using the language of Miracles namely what happens when you actually have to affect it causally so let's say you and and I I will speak to you s Guru you are when it comes to Turning seeds into edible food um we know that many civilizations when there was a crop failure when there was a drought when there was uh a famine when Locust came and and uh ate ate the grain they would utter prayers they would uh sacrifice a goat sometimes they would sacrifice a Virgin uh they would pray pay for a miracle fortunately you don't do that you quite admirably have a foundation that literally gets your hands dirty uh there's nothing miraculous about dirt and you have my admiration for taking dirt seriously because the transformation of a seed into a stock of uh wheat is not a miracle it depends on having the right dirt and hats off to you for uh taking dirt seriously likewise if you have the miracle of a child and the child has a disease like leukemia you could uh pray to a saint you could climb up the stairs of a cathedral on your knees you could set up a shrine you could as we say pray for a miracle that would be I would submit an immoral thing to do knowing that there are ways of uh keeping that Miracle of a child in existence by giving it the right a drug that would get rid of the leukemia or cure the infection and so even treating a child as a miracle even treating a plant as a miracle metaphorically poetically when it actually comes to uh action to the need to do something to perpetuate this miracle uh it is very important not to take the miracle language literally but rather to see it as a matter of cause and effect to worry about uh rainfall and soil and fertilizer and farming practices to worry about the child's health the appropriate drugs the appropriate nutrition the appropriate uh loving environment now when it comes to Consciousness this is true uh even more significantly so Bala you're an professor of anesthesia you're an anesthesiologist so you manipulate people's Consciousness I assume not with prayers with seanes with sacrifices but you actually apply physical cause and effect you inject chemicals in people's bloodstream you put a mask over people's faces and they breathe certain gases um you know if I were a patient undergoing surgery and and uh needed general anesthesia um my Consciousness would be turned off I would very much like for it to stay off while I'm open on the operating table I would very much like for it to come back when the operation is done uh I sure hope you don't treat all of that as a miracle I sure hope you don't say prayers I hope you don't make sacrifices I hope you control the mixture of gases and the timing and and treat it as a matter of cause and effect please say yes if you say no I'm going to have my surgery done at Mass general not Beth Israel Deaconess I think we got the distinction between uh what you are saying and what sguru is saying so s wants to respond I think you want to pass a mic to well uh I think uh we're coming from two different contexts uh that's why I said uh probably in the Western religions the word miracle is being [Music] used uh for lack of words don't uh because I already kind of excuse myself saying I'm uncivilized Miracle is a way of duping people I'm not talking about the word miracle in that context that's why I said there's a different way to look at life if you look at everything as logical steps our logical steps progress with whatever data we have nobody can claim they have data about everything that's life and the whole phenomena of creation nobody has neither the religious people nor the men of science know where the existence or the cosmos begins and where it ends nobody knows hello nobody knows but somebody is bombastic enough to explain it all happened because of one person up there another is trying to piece it together piece by piece but how many pieces ever you gather because today modern science is recognizing this is a ever expanding Universe if it's an ever expanding Universe it doesn't matter how many pieces of the jigsaw you collect you still don't have a full picture so in that context I'm saying we go as far as our logic and our data takes us from there there is a blind spot which we do not know we just hope it happens and sometimes we are found if you do certain things certain things happen sometimes it doesn't happen but the important thing is using the word miracle as a way to full people to believe things and working through a logical process for all the phenomenal activity that we do in the world uh there is no contest about that there is no any difference about that but coming to the Consciousness once again I would like to distinguish your awareness of yourself right now and Consciousness are two different entities altoe your awareness is definitely a consequence of all the things that are happening in the brain I I not looked because I don't have one you know I'm only experiencing it through other people so uh I do not know all that but definitely it's a consequence of what's Happening things are firing up we know I may not know exactly where how it's firing up I know things are fired up within us which is creating a certain awareness so this awareness is a consequence of activity not just the brain I wouldn't go about that I think there is a brain right across from your toes to your head everywhere there is different levels of brain I don't want to call it brain we call this mental body there is memory and there is intelligence right across so only if all this fires up then you have an experience of Life how much it fires up will determine how profound an experience of life you have this is a different aspect we're talking about Consciousness that is not exactly an appropriate word in English language because that's the only word we have as far as I know normally we call this chitt chitta means an intelligence without memory it has no intent but you can create any intent for it with the same Life Energy somebody will do evil things with the same Life Energy somebody will do wonderful things because it has no intent it's simply there it empowers you whichever way let's say it's like electricity you can make sound out of it you can make light out of it you can make whatever you want out of it just like that the fundamental Force which drives us has no intent so when we say Consciousness we are referring to that aspect of intelligence which has no intent because it has no memory but if you give it memory it will immediately gain an intent and a direction thank you thank okay I I would certainly Echo and endorse and reinforce the uh idea that we are we meaning Humanity we meaning science are ignorant of a vast uh array of topics even as we learn more we become more aware of what we're ignorant of uh we have to be prepared to change our minds that's in the very nature of science as as we've just learned through living through the uh coid pandemic where in the early weeks there were all kinds of things that we believed like you got to wash your groceries and you you can't touch your your face and uh the that turned out even our best experts were wrong but it's in the nature of science that best experts are wrong because we start out ignorant of everything and we have to learn it as we go along and uh the more we learn the more real we realize how much there is to learn and there's much about the functioning of the brain to put it mildly that we don't understand including many of the phenomena of Consciousness but it's just crucial not to translate our ignorance into a belief in uh Miracles uh there is the um the well-known fallacy of the god of the gaps that is that which you don't understand at a particular point in scientific development you are are tempted to invoke a source of Miracles namely God it used to be Zeus hurling Thunderbolts when people didn't understand how lightning worked uh it used to be life when before people uh before we had the theory of evolution and likewise uh as uh for for people who know nothing about brain science the idea that Consciousness is a miracle is very tempting and even as we learn more but still don't know some things it is tempting fallacy to bring in miracles for our ignorance but we the best attitude toward toward ignorance is certainly humility there are many things that science doesn't understand but part of that humility is acknowledging there are certain things we don't understand uh and just in the nature of us as not sub omniscient beings we are not Divine we uh we we we do experiments we propose hypothesis a lot of them are wrong uh we need to build bigger and bigger scientific instruments uh even when we do there'll be questions that we can't answer and the right attitude is there's some questions that we of which we are we are ignorant and that is the part of the humility is not inventing miracles to fill those gaps but rather acknowledging that uh that ignorance now when it come let me switch to a question of whether there is um Consciousness through the body as opposed to activity in the brain and admittedly certainly true that the the English language does not give us enough words to point to the different phenomena that we think about ask questions about seek to explain and philosophers have tried to refine our vocabulary there's no reason to think that ordinary conversation would provide the vocabulary to make sense of Consciousness any more than it does for the various tissues of the body the various molecules in the brain the various phenomena physics you got to invent jargon when it comes to Consciousness uh there you distinguish s Guru between Consciousness and awareness um and there is indeed a distinction between access to information I don't know if whether awareness is the right word for that and the subjectivity the qualitative aspect of Consciousness sometimes called the raw feels just the saltiness of salt and the redness of red and uh uh and and so on so awareness you since there it is tempting for Specialists including philosophers to invent jargon to and of necessity because the phenomena you study in depth aren't just going to have labels sitting around from from everyday conversation uh for example the philosopher Ned block has uh distinguished between what he calls um um uh phenomenal Consciousness and access Consciousness access Consciousness may or may not be what you were referring to as awareness access Consciousness would be the jargon term for having access to information so as just an example I do have access Consciousness say to the color of your suit to the uh presence of people in this room I can talk about it I can imagine it I can answer questions about it I don't have access to the um particular geometric shape on my retina that your suit projects I don't have I know that's in the brain but I just can't talk about it I don't have access the exact sequence of muscle contractions of my tongue that allow me to speak my brain does somewhere it's unconscious there's no need for me to think about it because it's automatic and and it happens so there's a lot of activity in the brain to which we don't have access and there is some to which we do have access uh so that's one refinement of the uh the vocabulary of Consciousness that we inherited just from the English language uh the contrast to access Consciousness is phenomenal Consciousness and that is the qualitative the um the the so-called hard problem sometimes called sensient the although there too sadly English doesn't give us precise technical terms to make sense of our experience when a uh computer scientist at Google thought that one of their large language models was sensient um he was using sent in a sense that is very different from the one that I think philosophers would want to reserve it for namely the actual phenomenal or subjective or qualitative aspect of Consciousness because there's no way even no matter how smart your AI program is you can't really know whether it's there's some someone home actually feeling something as opposed to it just producing intelligent responses in context that's another as that's another reason why the hard problem is called hard uh just because it's very hard to know how could we ever tell whether a perfectly lifelike robot a perfectly intelligent AI program was Consciousness in the phenomenal sense in the sensient sense in the um qualitative sense of there's someone somewhere in there that's actually feeling something like how would you know and in fact this is often another way in which we humans make sense of these conundrums that are not intuitive is we explore them in fiction in in science fiction in the fictions that philosophers uh create called thought experiments but as a an example that may be familiar to a number of you there was several decades ago in Star Trek the Next Generation there was a plot that revolved around whether it would be morally acceptable to disassemble Lieutenant Commander Data uh an Android to reverse engineer him would that just be dismantling a machine or would it be snuffing out a uh Consciousness a senscience a living life now this is it's great entertainment it to think it through and one of the things fiction does is it allows us to ponder uh uh philosophical uh puzzles and that being another good way to to uh illustrate it and another way of showing that our vocabulary as we use it in ordinary conversation may just not be up to the task of the sharp distinctions we want to make as thinkers as scientists as uh philosophers as thoughtful people finally one more observation I think that there is a way to make sense of the question of is say Consciousness distributed through the body or does it consist of brain activity I think the answer is brain activity and we can actually imagine the circumstances that tease them apart I mean when someone steps on my toe I um feel the pain in my toe but there's every reason to think that what is happening is a pattern of activity in my brain I localize it in my toe but the crucial events The crucial natural physical events consist of activity in the brain how do we know because often ampute will have Phantom limb pain they'll still feel the foot even though there ain't no foot uh and that can happen uh we have all kinds of bodily uh hallucinations we have outof body experiences we have dreams where it's not the body uh people who are quadriplegic where the the body is no longer functioning still have full Consciousness often of their body in Phantom Li limb experiences conversely if there's if the brain isn't is uh active if someone is in a deep vegetative state if they are in a deep coma uh you know we can't know because there's no one to ask but the fact that their uh foot continues to have blood flowing into it does not mean that there is someone somewhere feeling that foot as best we know if the brain areas for the foot are not active uh there is no one or nothing that corresponds to consciousness of the foot so the Consciousness doesn't need the foot foot uh it does need the brain as far as we know and that's a reason to uh to uh conclude that Consciousness consists in brain activity not the uh distributed through the body now of course the body is connected to the brain via um via nerves because there are sensory transducers there are little itty bitty cells in the skin that respond to changes in temperature and pressure by transmitting nervous impulses to the brain likewise in the eye there are photo receptors rods and cones that that transduce light energy into neural activity there are hair cells in the inner ear that translate uh transduce vibrations into neural impulses but it there always has to be something that converts the body uh the energy impinging on the body into neural impulses that are carried by nerves into the brain or there's no consciousness how do we know well if again you're an anesthesiologist even in the case of uh U the anesthesia that that my dentist does injects a chemical into my jaw and he can drill at my teeth and I don't feel anything I mean the teeth are still there but no more consciousness of pain in my teeth thank goodness uh likewise if I if there is um nerve damage if there is a pinched nerve uh if there is uh a severed nerve if there's severed spy Accord the part of the body that cannot send physical signals to the brain there is no longer any consciousness of suggesting that it's uh it's the brain via information transmitted into the brain uh that is the the seat of Consciousness everything that we perceive uh through five sense organs of course it is processed in the the brain which is uh not just today's understanding it's always been so in most parts of the world and um the brain that we talking about where was it manufactured it was manufactured in this body by this body we did not buy it or import it from somewhere it was made from this body it didn't come to us from elsewhere so the evolution of the brain with within the individual human being happened in this body so essentially the way we look at this is we don't look at brain as something different it is just body with a different levels of functionality significant levels of functionality a whole lot of people may be walking around this University without their brains functioning but their livers kidneys and hearts are functioning without that they wouldn't be walking so I'm not questioning whether the brain is significant in doing all these processes no question at all about that but is it the be of everything no because there are still so many aspects of Life which are unexplained so someday when we have the data we will explain but you can gather data only about physical aspects of life so essentially if we have concluded that the whole existence is just physical well today morning we were talking to all the physics they're all talking about over 90% or 99% of everything seems to be empty it is not physical so this in the yogic culture we look at it this way we see that everything was nothing it was called Shiva that means it was that which is not this that which is not went into a ripple because of a certain influence of energy and once it went into a ripple it gathered GS memory once it gathers memory it finds an intent and a direction from this various miraculous levels of I'm using that word very consciously miraculous miraculous levels of multiple millions and millions of forms of creation happened just the life on this planet is so absolutely mind-boggling that the numbers and the variety of life that's happened if you look at the whole Cosmos we don't even know what is what so this happened and this is still functioning in every bit of life in everything even in a single atom over 99% is supposed to be or 93 or 94% is supposed to be empty what is this emptiness so this is what we refer to as Consciousness which is the basis of everything well you can Define it as space you can call it as uh nothingness you can call it as dark matter or dark energy whatever but essentially it is that which is not when we say that which is not it is not physical in nature which is fundamental to all physical creation so can we explain this logically yes to a certain point we can maybe all the way we can but explanation and reality are two different things we can always explain everything we can always explain the whole phenomena of human life but the reality of human life is totally different it's experienced by different people in different ways let's say there are two uh siblings same genetic material same home same school but they don't function the same way because the way they receive the way they process is different well that is not what we're talking about but the important thing to understand is Human Experience is coming not necessarily only from the brain activity but to what extent do we delve into that aspect of life which is no information but has Intelligence when this intelligence fires suddenly human beings do things that other people never thought is possible that's when people think it's miraculous I am not using the word miracle in the religious context of saying I did something like that and it happened not in that context but something that you cannot find logical explanation because as you said what that go God Gap is it what the Gap Gap god of the gaps god of the gaps no we are not talking about God of the gaps either the gaps are there because of ignorance that we know but there are dimensions of Life which are not physical in nature what is not physical in nature neither can you define or describe nor perceive through five senses right now everything that we know is through five senses what is wrong with five senses nothing wrong it is just that for different creatures these senses are different what is light for you for a whole lot of creatures it is Darkness what is Darkness for you is light for them because the sense organs are designed as it is necessary for our survival process based on your require survival requirement accordingly it is designed so what you see what a grasshopper sees what dragonfly sees are very different because these sense organs are designed for our survival process and our survival process may be very different from one creature to another in that context what we call as brain is just that receptive process or that uh uh reception place where it receives all these impulses from senses to what extent means in a day in a day even if you walk around the place unconsciously or reasonably unconsciously still you're receiving you know millions of gigabytes of memory going into your system and all this is being stored processed whatever in some Minds it may be well done in some Minds it may be randomly done but it is all being recorded nobody is missing it so this process is a tremendous process for the brain to handle but the fundamental existence of who we are is it only because of brain derived neurological activity or electrical makeup of things that would be uh believing in a miracle that's not a miracle that is a simple process which is creating fantastic things for us no question fantastic things it is done to ourselves and to the world in many many ways nobody is questioning the efficacy of that brain but the important thing is we when we talk about my brain obviously we talking about someone who owns the brain also you don't say I'm the brain you you're saying this is my body this is my brain this means there is somebody beyond that is this a body no an entity that we cannot Define an entity that we cannot describe an entity that we cannot perceive through sense perception but we know we're here we know we exist well if we think it's only because we are thinking and processing We Exist no we exist even without that uh we do have our five senses each one of which relies on a uh ingenious little bit of tissue that converts physical energy into neural impulses I mean and we might have more than five senses depending on how you count um but what we don't have and this is also relevant to whether Consciousness is a miracle is extra sensory perception ESP that is access to states of the world not mediated through some physical transmission of uh of signals uh ESP often uh held to comprise Telekinesis the ability to uh move objects or cause physical changes through brain power Clairvoyance the uh ability to sense the state of the world without without any uh causal chain of transmission of information precognition the ability to foresee the future uh and um uh telepathy the ability to sense other people's thoughts and there is a lively tradition going back Millennia of believing that uh ESP exists and uh we know it doesn't exist I me if we know anything that that every attempt to demonstrate one of the varieties of extrasensory perception has shown been shown to be over interpretation of coincidences interpreted post Hawk you remember the uh hits you you uh bury all of the the misses and false alarms um sometimes actual fraud and flimflam as in the self-designated uh CL Clairvoyant who turn out just to use cheap stage magic they often fool the physicists because physicists are as Fool by stage magic as anyone else the ones they don't fool are fellow magicians who can easily expose uh the tricks uh the fact that there is no ESP one more bit of evidence is we have never all it would take is a tiny bit of U statistical precognition you don't even need to foresee events exactly but just uh beyond the base rate probabilities and you could get get arbitrarily Rich by in the Futures Market you could short or or uh or or long you know Bitcoin or Tesla stocks and if you could really see into the if someone somewhere out there could really see the future they'd be the richest person uh on Earth because it would not take very much predictive power uh uh to uh outsmart the rest of the the rest of the market no such person exists more evidence that Consciousness is not a miracle that the senses really are the only way in which we can derive information about empirical uh reality uh if someone were to show that ESP existed I would have to revise a lot of my beliefs about the the nature of Consciousness and mental activity uh we're in no way referring to such things like ESP or magical ways of knowing things no I'm talking about the fundamental existence of of who we are do we exist I think in most human beings experience unless they're lost in their logic if you simply sit here you know you exist so this knowing that I exist is not a derivative of neuron neuronal and electrical activity in the brain alone even beyond that we exist because there are states where all this can come down to almost nothing and still you exist actually you exist much more I am hearing a lot of experiments going on with uh halogenic and mushrooms and stuff in the universities not by the students by the professors so they are saying that uh when they have these spectacular experiences the brain activity is actually come down not gone up as everybody would have believed so there are States see one important thing is we should not conclude especially science should never conclude what we do not know cannot exist that'll not be a good thing to do yes but but nor should we make up stuff for which we have no reason to believe it exists thank you that was great uh conversation but um I think there are millions of people around the world you know even who have experienced the States of uh the deeper states of meditation it's not just one or two from different schools they've experienced which are not explainable by current ways of examining uh them because we don't have the tools for it so we're not able to explain the deeper states of meditation and the states they live in so that is not made up right so how do we experience that is an unknown thing so we have that's all you're saying this be open and examine that in a way that can we understand that or not well we may not understand it in the sense that it involves such um unfathomably intricate patterns of brain activity leading one brain pattern leading to another brain pattern uh in ways that we may not understand I don't know if we don't understand it in the sense that it must involve some new form of energy or some kind of uh contrad ition of the idea that it's all brain activity but brain activity can be really really complex and there's an awful lot we don't understand including the effects of meditation now what I am very skeptical of is that any state of meditation for example can result in Clairvoyance or telekinesis or telepathy or precognition and I assume you're not I I'm sure you're not I assume you're not stating that meditation can accomplish that no not at all so for example Matthew brain I think Steven Lis is here he examined his brain and uh they've looked at their um brain activity functional MRI Etc and they showed a relaxed Alert state where everything is fired up and this man is this is like a trait for him it's not like a state examination and they could see that that relaxed alertness leads to fired a brain completely but still relaxed so that is not the usual pattern that happens in Normal person who is not meditating right so for example yes so I'm not proposing that the clar wi that is very different I'm just saying that these are rare and uh these kind of brains it seems like they're just completely fired up but still very very relaxed so that is a I think that's a great state to be in no that's interesting I I uh admire myff Park I had an event with him in Paris which we talked about the historical uh processes that that lead to uh peace and indeed there may be aspects of brain function that we don't understand that could be illuminated by meditation understood as one complex pattern of brain activity leading to another complex pattern of brain activity all within their Realm of the natural see U the things that we're talking about clareo telepathy these are childish tricks that's not what we're refering to the English word meditation doesn't Define anything this is a problem because when it comes to subjectivity English language is very poor when it comes to objective World English language is phenomenally effective having said that if someone closes their eyes and sets generally people say oh he or she is meditating you can close your eyes and do japana samadi well these are all distinct states which are thought and transmitted in a systematic way not just some uh you know some mumbo jumbo way that uh I I try to redefine the word miracle but you're sticking to the religious form of Miracle I'm not going there let's leave that word let's say magical experiences because magic can still be explained but it's still magical in our experience leaving that aside we can clearly transmit this aspects distinctly from one to the other if they come to a dhana initiation we will do only dhana if they come to danana we'll do only danana if they come to samama we do only samyama distinctly different states that one a human being can experience is all this about electrical activity someday I think uh you know the scientists must invest enough time to study these things not with the attitude ude of proving or disproving it but just by looking at it just simply looking at it without making conclusions because conclusions are coming from what present things that we know what data that we have the very the very fundamental of science is that whatever we know right now is not everything that is the fundamental of science we are seeking because seeking comes from the most fundamental realiz realization that we do not know that's why we are seeking seeking is genine only if we see I do not know if I'm seeking this or that I already know it is there I'm looking for confirmation that's not seeking we're just making it up so essentially it is very important if these two disciplines have to meet it's because these two disciplines meeting is very important for human well-being just with thinking that improving Ming the economies of the world which is wonderful changing the social structures of the world which is fantastic providing Medical Care this that everything is fantastic but still human beings will still not attain to any sense of fulfillment or fullness of experience of Life unless they turn inward this turning inward is not about watching the electrical processes in my brain it is about looking at something far more fundamental Within Myself if if we conclude that there is nothing more fundamental apart apart from electricity well then a light bulb lights up that's Enlightenment we should not look at it that [Music] way now uh because we must understand this whole thing is coming from uh I'm sorry if I making some generalization it is a generalization but I'm saying this contextually see this whole uh the European thing about Enlightenment or a Period of Enlightenment has come because they were under the tyranny of dogmatic belief systems when they broke away they felt liberated but such a thing never existed in the East we never fac such things there were no anything dogmatic ruling us thinking and you know thinking to whatever extent we can was always free for us so we never thought thinking free is Enlightenment for us Enlightenment is a much more profound process so breaking away from dogma and thinking freely it's a basic human right I don't call that Enlightenment but because of that background your resistance for the word miracle is essentially coming from the religious you know stuff that has happened people claiming all kinds of Miracles happening from here there God is talking to me and all this stuff we are not talking about that we are not talking about Clare w we are not talking about telepathy please use the telephone don't compete with the telephone company all right so but is there something more profound to human existence than physiological and psychological drama in my experience 100% there is thank you so you've written a lot of books and we wanted to ask additional questions so we'll move on from this so one of the books that you wrote was Enlightenment now and that book was um Bill Gates called it as book of the century and it's basically you make a case for reason science humanism and logic and uh sorry in progress thank you for correcting me so what you have said is over the centuries people have become better they leave better their income has gotten and they're happier and all of that and also you're saying sometimes blips happen during the lifetime like for my lifetime if I look at this over the year centuries yes things have improved a lot of good things have happened but still when I'm living for me what is real is the current um uncertainty exists or the wars and Etc that is happening so just knowing that we have progressed is enough when there is uncertainty like that what do we do just knowing is that enough for to correct ourselves course correction yes the um so Enlightenment now one me a lot of unearned friends among Buddhists but it isn't about that kind of Enlightenment it really is about the uh ideals that came out of the Enlightenment of the 18 Century um the uh I tried to document that progress was not a matter of optimism not a matter of seeing the bright side of seeing the glasses half full but it was an empirical hypothesis that could be tested that is if we agree on what uh what is good and I think most people would agree that it's better to be you know alive than dead better to be wellfed than hungry better to be uh well than sick better to be affluent than poor better to be educated than illiterate and ignorant better to be happy than unhappy and so on all of these things can be measured and if they've increased over time that would be progress and I had 75 graphs and most of them have increased over time now never in a straight line never even monotonically which is to say always increasing and never decreasing all of them have uh dips along the way now having been reminded of the fact that progress is a real empirical phenomenon it's natural to think and people in the 19th century did think that there is a force in the universe that somehow lifts us ever upward now this would be uh a miracle and as you can probably tell from my remarks so far tonight I don't believe in miracles and this progress wasn't a miracle the reason that there are fewer famines is that the people like sad Guru advocated conserving soil and uh vigorous hybrids and synthetic fertilizer and crop rotation the reason that lifespans expand uh more than doubled is because of Sanitation and antibiotics and blood transfusion and and uh for every one of the dimensions of progress there was a cause if we understand those causes uh correctly and it's not easy to do it because lots of things happen at once so it's not so easy to disentangle them and figure out what the the uh primary cause was but the uh the benefit of understanding progress is that we can uh have more of it that is not by relying on any Miracle but by doing the things that worked in the past and that are likely to work in the future conversely it means that if those causes of progress are neutralized we could get stasis or regression and indeed there are periods in which various um uh events happen that are regressions not progress the the war in Ukraine is a prime example and I would say that that is uh exactly what you what would happen if one of the causes of the increase in peace over the last 75 years namely the replacement of a valorization of national glory and Greatness by the well-being of men women and children uh it is that change in ideas that helped Drive uh the rate of War down but if you have a leader that is drunk with the opposite ideology who believes that National Glory spheres of influence um National greatness civilizational grer is the ultimate value and uh if people die then so much the worst then you you won't have increased progress toward peace you might have backtracking toward war and that's that's what we are seeing uh in Ukraine for example likewise in the um extension of the human lifespan again not a miracle it happens because we have uh vaccines and and antibiotics and sanitation if the germs evolve faster than we can develop um vaccines and and antivirals and antibiotics then lifespan can go down as it did during the uh pandemic fortunately reason and science together with humanism I argue are the three drivers of the progress we've we've observed um pushed back and the pandemic is now um under greater control and the increase in longevity appears to have resumed there's also comment that mental health pandemic is on the rise par me the mental health pandemic is on the rise right now so the the mental health Mental Health well in some countries in some demographics yes so in uh sorry American um uh teenagers and young adults um there has been a an increase in uh anxiety and depression this uh more so for uh young women than young men more so for left-wing young women than rightwing young women um so this is a uh a phenomenon that is occurs with some sectors and more so in the United States than in other countries now this is we don't understand why but uh again because the progress that we have seen including increase in happiness and a decrease in suicide worldwide but it doesn't happen everywhere all the time um that would be a miracle and it's not a miracle and if there are causes of unhappiness anxiety that are more concentrated in some countries some demographics some ages some periods we should work very hard to find out what they are so that we could undo them well there's no question uh the kind of progress we have made in the last 100 years in terms of Comforts conveniences that we have achieved through progress of Science and Technology we are the the most comfortable generation ever in the history of humanity nobody had it this good especially for women and children it's never been this good ever in the history of humanity there's simply no question about that but one important thing that's happened is in previous generations basic survival was such a challenge because basic survival was such a challenge it kept everybody focused there was not much struggle in the mind because daily getting my bread when it's a struggle you don't have much to drive yourself nuts all right you don't have enough time to drive yourself crazy but as the survival issue is settled in the human being you will see more and more struggles on the psychological level because the physical struggles are gone now the struggle moves into the software Department from Hardware so this struggle we may see as mental illnesses and so many kinds of sufferings that people are going through which unfortunately leads to a very high rate of suicide today in the world almost in many countries but unfortunately in most affluent countries it it is at the highest so our Economic Development and social Liberties everything is fine but still if we don't address how a human being experiences oneself how to manage Human Experience we are engineering the whole world the way we want it fantastic no question what is one person's Miracle is another man's engineering I'm fundamentally from the engineering background so what is an airplane is a miracle for one person is a engineering for another person so the whole thing goes the same way with us also because this is the most sophisticated machine on the planet have we engineered it well have we made it the way we want it because a well engineered something means when we say this building is well engineered we are saying it works well for the purpose for which we are here when we say my car is well well engineered we are saying it works the way I want but is your mind is your body working the way you want if it did would you have any suffering would you have any uh you know uh struggles within you obviously it's not working the way you want your own intelligence is turning against you and torturing individual people uh people don't need any help from outside normally you know people come to me uh sguru my mother-in-law I can't take it anymore my husband like this my wife is like that my boss is like this I say you do one thing you come here no mother-in-law no husband no wife no boss just you you come I will give you a nice place to stay and good food to eat you don't have to do anything just just stay in the room just be joyful that's all I just make some random checks on you if you're miserable we'll stop feeding you because I don't believe in feeding misery so you leave them in one place for 24 hours they will be twisting themselves in so many ways so you don't need any outside help when there is outside help you think it's because of this person I'm miserable because that person I'm miserable no the problem is you do not know how to handle your own faculties your own memory your own imagination what is it that people are suffering what happened 10 years ago they're still suffering what may happen day after tomorrow they're already suffering essentially you're not suffering life you are suffering two most important faculties which are distinct and a great privilege for the human being which no other creature has a very wiid sense of memory and a fantastic sense of imagination these are the two things we are suffering without this we wouldn't even be human we would be like any other creature so when you mind your own mind troubles you and makes you suffer you can call it anger you can call it stress you can call it anxiety or more serious ones essentially it is your intelligence turning against you this means you do not know how to hold it you do not know how to hold yourself this great privilege of being human when I say the great privilege at least according to evolutionary Sciences you are supposed to be the peak of evolution that means you're on top of the world but are you feeling like you're top of the world most people are not they're dragging their feet and going around with great suffering within themselves this suffering is not because of life around you this suffering is your inability to handle yourself so one important aspect of our education process should be we are always thinking about how to conquer everything around us it's important we also bring this into our life our society that how to manage this in such a way that it never turns against me this is very important if we don't learn this if we do not pay attention to this how not to turn my own memory my own imagination my own intelligence against myself if this awareness does not arise within us then we may have everything and we will suffer people can live in a palace and they're living miserably this is happening all over the place so in previous generations a lot of people like to see in previous generations people were very peaceful very happy it's not true believe me uh it's not true it is just that past because of the distance in in uh in southern Indian languages there is a saying a far away Hill looks smooth and wonderful good past there's a distance because there's a distance everything about it is wonderful you know but if it's here then there is a struggle because you have to tread through the whole thing this process of suffering our own memory our own imagination our own intelligence is essentially because the necessary awareness as to how this function what can we do about it is not subjective objectively we may know how it functions we may be reading it on the MRIs and eegs and this and that but human individual human beings do not know how it works within me what can I do about it how should I hold my intelligence in what context so that it always works for me never against [Applause] me very very wise and another way of putting the point is to quote Franklin Pierce Adams the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory now um I do wanted to U though uh update one point is that globally suicide rates have come down by a lot by like 40% over the last 30 years for the period for which we have data not in the United States the United States suicide rates have gone up since their low point in the late 1990s again we don't completely understand why I I hope we will but uh but it's important to to keep in mind that the United States in many ways has its own National pathologies that are not true of other affluent democracies and not true of the world and in terms of suicide in most countries not all rates of suicide have come down by a lot including uh India one of going to respon about about the suicide rate those countries uh where there was economic distress and people were taking their lives out because it was simply not able to survive in those countries it's come down but where there is economic well-being for at least two three generations in those countries it's gone up that's what we have noticed well not all because India has gotten far more affluent in the last 30 years and the suicide rate has come down um but the um the for the the people who um I mean GDP per capita in India it's it's one of the economic success stories of the last 30 years the one of the factors that seems to drive the for people who've looked at what has driven suicide rates downward one of them is urbanization that rates in in many countries are much higher in rural areas partly because you often get um women who are in arranged or forced marriages who are ripped away from their family their friend they're living uh under the control of their mother-in-law in a uh uh in a town which they have no social contacts and they will sometimes in their lives when you have the freedom in a city to uh develop friends and social contacts to be to to choose your Social Circle that leads to the social connections that make suicide much less likely talking about talking about India uh so I'm very closely involved with the Indian Society it's economy how it works India has made huge progress in the last couple of decades no question about that but that progress belongs to a small percentage of people there are many indias you can at least identify five layers of India so one layer of India is doing phenomenally well another layer of India is benefiting from the first layer third layer little bit of trickle down but down on where nearly 55% is in agriculture there it's bad so most of the suicides which are happening in India today is unfortunately in the agricultural sector so we are working on this there is no immediate solution as such it's a not an overnight thing that is um it's a great conversation I think uh people want to ask questions but I just wanted to ask you one last thing before I hand it over um let's keep it short one you were me you were talking about dirt right so um there's a certain Sensi to it from the point of view is it really dirt should we call it as dirt that is useless or should we call it as soil that is giving life uh no I I called it dirt just to emphasize its physicality and indeed the fact that of course Dirt has a negative connotation yes I was Miracle as opposed to soil I was using it deliberately and ironically to not to denigrate soil I think soil deserves our utmost admiration it's it's the basis of life but rather to remind people that it is physical stuff that we depend on and by choosing the word that reminds that doesn't have that Noble Halo uh it is a way it was a way of emphasizing my point that physical stuff matters uh we tend to denigrate it we shouldn't soil is important maybe we shouldn't call it dirt but calling it dirt reminds us linguist so that's why I wanted to ask yes well calling it dirt is just a reminder that we should think twice about some of the things we take for granted uh and indeed choosing a a synonym with a better connotation maybe a way of changing those attitudes but in an argument like the one that making it was a reminder that uh we shouldn't treat physical stuff as um tody um uh as as beneath our uh dignity to discuss and to take [Applause] seriously very much so I'm I knew when you uttered the word dirt you were speaking in that context but uh uh in the Eastern cultures in most eastern Asian cultures particularly in India we always refer to soil as mother's soil when we will never say simply soil we'll say Tha that means it's Mother's soil because the word mother does not mean our biological mother that which is the source of who we are is Mother well in your computer there's a motherboard that doesn't mean it delivered the computer it is just that it is the source of everything that's happening there so in that sense soil is the largest living system not just on this planet but in the known universe it is the largest living system a handful of soil has 8 to 10 billion organisms it's a massive living system in many ways it is the foundational life for who we are it is just that our attitude towards soil has become like this that uh we built let's say we built one house for our ourselves one floor and then our family expand expanded so we want to build the next floor so we decided why do all this just take the foundation stones and build a first floor well this is going to be a disaster that's the approach that we have right now because nearly 85% of the Nations on the planet still treat soil as a resource not as a source of life not as a living system just as a resource that we can use whichever way we want 50% of United States soil has disappeared in the last 70 years and uh 27,000 species of organisms are disappearing every year this is the amount of Extinction that's happening in another 25 to 40 years time every UN agency is warning that there will be no agriculture because once the organism quantity goes down in the soil it becomes like sand desertification is one of the main issues there's a whole Agency for combating desertification called unccd who are partners with us in making this happen having said that there is a it's okay to tell a joke [Laughter] right uh this happened in 2060 in 2060 a few scientists sought an appointment with God don't don't go by this I'm not a that kind of a Believer but I'm just telling you a joke they sought an appointment with God and they got the appointment they went there and they told him hey old man you done great with creation but everything that you you can do now we can also do so it's time you retire so God said oh is that so what is it that you can do give me a demo they said look at this and they took some soil made a wig image of a human infant they did this that and that and the child cried alive God said that's very impressive but first get your own soil we go to um then we have time for maybe one or two questions so I think mic Runners are there so they should go mic Runners didn't come here yes one of the central tenants of the Hindu religion is that uh something Sur survives uh after death and you mentioned uh that uh Consciousness is uh eliminated at the time of death and I'd like to sort of site to you you several examples to the contrary uh so I'm standing here today and I have witnessed myself change over decades I I've I've seen myself go from childhood to where I am today and uh but something within me has stayed the same that has witnessed the change so that's one argument the other as a sleep physician I can tell you is that when I go to sleep and wake up in the morning I'm aware if I had great sleep or bad sleep or I was totally unconscious so again there was something deeper inside me that sort of witnessed all those stages of sleep and finally you know when I experience life through the different senses and I keep going back there seems to be something within the rear most portions of my brain that's witnessing it I'm witnessing you making your arguments and I'm sensing them but there is something way behind that I stayed stable so I think that's the central tenant of our religion uh vidanta it's called that whatever it is in my Consciousness that survives My Demise is also the same in you as well and in all of us and I wondering if you have any answer to that well I I was with you until you made the leap to uh what survives after you die because all that all that other stuff like the part of you that uh uh goes to sleep uh go U passes out of Consciousness comes back into Consciousness I mean that's still your functioning brain the part of you that you like to think is continuous from your childhood to your adulthood again your brain's been working the whole time so yeah I'm with you for all of that but that says nothing about what happens when the brain permanently ceases to function now by the way this is not to say that there aren't uh puzzles conceptual mysteries about what philosophers call the problem of personal identity so for example if an 18-year-old uh commits a crime should he still be in jail when he's 65 is it in a sense the same person is it morally justifiable to make the 65-year-old suffer for what the the 18-year-old did or is there some sense in which that was kind of not the same person uh because the brain brain was different and there are many other puzzles that philosophers Derek parfett probably being the most famous have explored none of them though I would say cast out on the idea that uh a functioning brain is absolutely necessary for Consciousness and that when it stops functioning ing Consciousness ceases can I say something about uh one thing sir I would like to correct is we must understand that uh you call something a religion only if you are forced to believe something that is not in your experience so the vedanta that you refer to and the Hindu culture and traditions that you refer to have no belief system it is a land of seeking you're supposed to seek this is the reason why in that culture there are no Commandments nobody can give us Commandments who can give Commandments to Indians they're full of questions so uh this is a process of seeking how many ways of seeking well we came up with thousands of ways of seeking different ways for each individual how to seek but the fundamental is the fundamental of seeking as I already said once is that you have realized that you do not know that's why you seeking because most human beings do not understand the significance of I do not know I do not know is the basis of longing to know and longing to know is the basis of if at all if you know one day at least the possibility of knowing opens up only because we realize I do not know having said that the important thing about what you're saying this is a university I don't know if this is a place for going to this aspect because you talked about Beyond Death what happens and it need not be just an assumption or something that you believe the fundamental is this as we sit here this is my body that is your body 100% this is my mind that's your mind here and there we may overlap but this is my mind that's your mind but there is no such thing as my Consciousness and your Consciousness there is only one Consciousness you have captured some I have captured some we have methods and ways how you can capture a larger bubble so that suddenly everything about you is enhanced I can show you hundreds and thousands or millions of people who are at one level of living suddenly they mve to another level of experience and living simply because they manage to blow their bubble little bigger so this bubble the film of the bubble is essentially information this information in in the culture that you come from we call this karma karma means as we sit here our body is doing activity this is one kind of karma physical Karma our mind is doing things this is mental Karma our emotions are doing stuff that is emotional Karma our energy is doing things that's emot this energetic Karma four dimensions of karma are happening to us in wakefulness and sleep non-stop now how identified you are with those things will create Tendencies within you these Tendencies we very rightly refer to as wasana wasana is a perfect word for this because the word wasana means smell or odor so what kind of vasana you have depends on what kind of tendency develop what kind of tendency depends on what kind of information that you gathered in so many unconscious ways so this information determines what kind of a person you are but what kind of a being you are when I say what kind of a being see you are the only life on this planet which is referred to as a being not because human beings had the dominance over language no it is because you are the only one who can determine how to be all other creatures respond instinctively to whatever their requirements are and whatever the external stimuli is so what you're referring to as what is beyond life what is beyond this body Beyond this psychological drama that we going through is just a bubble of information that may travel but there are ways to you also know having you mentioned Hindus that means the objective of that culture is to attain Liberation or MTI what this means is you deprive yourself or you demolish all this Karma or this information that you have gathered or distance yourself in such a way that this bubble doesn't carry on that's a whole process now this is too farfetched for you because I'm going too rapidly there are too many loopholes in this but this can be properly put across and it can be made to be experienced not just talking about it [Applause] I just have a followup um your book blank slate the is a very popular book and you talk about there is no Blank Slate people come with certain you know you also talk about the behavioral genetics portions of it 40% if I sorry if I'm wrong with the percentages you talk about genetic influences is 40% and 10% is environment and there is unknown there is another 40 to 50% is unknown am I saying the right person in the in the differences among people yes so what is that unknown that we have that 50% is unknown pieces that influences Behavior what do we attribute that to it is it is unknown but I can give you the um some possibilities one of them is random events in the development of the brain in utero or afterwards that the genes don't have nearly enough information to specify the wiring of the brain down to the last synapse and there maybe some stochastic that is say random processes in the growth of neurons and their interconnections where the genes keep the uh the the brain development in a um band of functioning but there's a lot of random variation within those boundary conditions uh there may be effects of arbitrary events as you live your life that have um uh cascading effects chaotic effects perhaps that uh add up just to by the way be concrete to specify what it is we're talking about imagine two identical twins I'm sure many of you probably all of you know some Twins and I'm not talking about the Exotic cases where they're separated at Birth reunited in adulthood and they have all of these amazing similarities that is interesting in terms of reminding us of the importance of genes but now consider the twins the ordinary twins like the ones you all know that maybe some of you are who who are brought up together who have the same brought up in the same neighborhood same parents same older sibs same younger sibs same number of books in the house same number of TVs in the house are they literally identical no they're not identical and any of you know twins no they're not now where do those differences come from they didn't come from their genes they I mean unless there were new mutations after conception they didn't come from the environment as we usually think of uh in the environment that's the puzzle and that's what we don't know uh to me it signifies an enormous and underappreciated uh effect of random causes where whether they are random causes in brain development in brain functioning or in environmental experiences that have larger effects than we appreciate uh it would it it is I think one of the great surprises that behavioral genetics has revealed to us s Guru can we influence random radiations uh that that's what it seems now that that's what I would conclude it is possible that there are subtle aspects of the environment that are very difficult to measure that have uh predictable nonrandom effects that seems kind of unlikely that seems to be a kind of prayer uh I think it's more likely that there's a a lot more Randomness than uh we intuitively think of the significance of being a human being not a human creature is just this all of us definitely come with a certain amount of information from our parent AG we pick up much more through our childhood and maybe adolescence and stuff but still will we limit ourselves to the information that's come to us and what we have gathered or will we go beyond that is what human being is about if we are just a replica of parent age in whatever way small modifications in this and this human life has gone waste because this is why you are a human being that means you can transcend whatever your body speaks whatever your mind speaks beyond that you can transcend and make yourself into something well beyond what the information that the body and the mind carries if you do not exercise this choice in many ways human possibility has gone waste because we are not exploring the possibility of being a being we are just trying to be a better creature than others in competition we may earn better we may qualify better we may run better we may jump better but this is just being a better creature which all the other creatures are doing every other creature is striving to be competitive and being better than another one so this possibility that you can actually distance yourself from your genetic information we can show you any number of examples where even the shape of their face will change within a matter of few days if they go through certain initiation processes you will see the very shape of their face will change distinctly noticeable for everybody you I can show you pictures I can show you people how they were and how they are today because once the genetic information there's a distance between you and that suddenly there are phenomenal changes and in the culture that you're talking about there are death rituals we we are doing these things to distance ourselves from our parentage because if the influence of Parental genetics are too heavy on us we will not be a fresh life we will just be a copy so we want to be a fresh life so all the time there are many processes many methods both when they're living and when they are gone both ways we have methods with which we distance ourselves from our own genetics because without that there is no new life it's just a repeated life so this whole process of doing things with the genetic memory the energetic memory the chemical memory in the system while Bala is doing research right now on how your Chemistry can be changed within four to 6 weeks of doing a simple 21 minute practice is well establish nobody can question that because our idea of Truth has to come from Lab this this idea must go truth comes from life life and deeper experiences of [Applause] life is everybody here experiencing life at the same level of profoundness definitely not isn't it so can we enhance this definitely yes how many will enhance it it's a question of willingness it's a question of how much life you're willing to invest in enhancement of your experience most people are interested in enhancement of their social presence their economic presence and other things but essentially all the things that we are doing see why we want education why we we want wealth why we want relationships SE we believe these things will enhance the experience of life isn't it hello it may or it may not that's a different matter but the hope is that it will enhance in some ways it will enhance in some ways it may not help these things are happening that's individual with some people they may make use of their education and wealth in a fantastic way whole lot of people make misery out of their money these are different people so what we make out of enhancements of Social and other structures is different but enhancement of Life The Very life that I am the very being that I am enhancing that there is a way there is a methodology uh there are cultures who have invested Millennia of effort in this direction which cannot be wiped out and that is the most important thing right now in the world because Science and Technology olog has brought more comfort and convenience that people are ready for unfortunately they're not able to enjoy their comfort and convenience today the problem is not of hunger the problem is of overeating all right at least a third of the people are suffering from obesity and stuff so it's important that this time we know how to enhance this life not enhance just our life situations and our lifestyles thank you sir thank you so much and wonderful and thank you [Music] [Music] all

Channel: Sadhguru

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Id: pCGDQPZYmQM

Length: 110min 27sec (6627 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023