Scientist completely disagrees with Sadhguru on meditation and brain activity

we should not conclude especially science should never conclude what we do not know cannot exist that will 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 if we conclude that there is nothing more fundamental apart apart from electricity well then a light bub lights up that's Enlightenment we should not look at it that [Music] way 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 I'm very skeptical of is that any state of meditation for example can result in Clairvoyance or telekinesis or telepathy or precognition we are not talking about clairo we are not talking about telepathy please use the telephone don't compete with the telephone company all right 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 es 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 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 mean 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 physicist 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 arbitrarily Rich by in the future's Market you could short or or uh or or long you know Bitcoin or Tesla stock 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 refering to such things like ESP or magical ways of knowing things no I'm talking about the fundamental existence 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 has 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 will 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 AC around the world you know even who 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 he saying just 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 contradiction 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 ricard's 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 tra for him it's not like a state examination and they could see that that relaxed alertness leads to fired up 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 they claro 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 I uh admire myff P I had an event with him in Paris in which we talked about the uh 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 the realm of the natural see uh 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 taught and transmitted in a systematic way not just some uh you know some 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 uh initiation we will do only dhana if they come to danana we'll do only danana if they come to samyama 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 scientist must invest enough time to study these things not with the attitude 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 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 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 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 is 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 WS 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 the book of the century and it's basically you make a case for reason science humanism and logic prog and sorry and 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 that 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 uh 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 18th 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 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 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 U 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 they 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 wore 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 Grandeur is the ultimate value and uh if people die then so much the worse 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 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' 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 oh 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 right-wing 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 [Applause] 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 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 Focus there was not much struggle in the mind because daily getting my bread when it's to 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 has 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 when 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 with 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 find 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 if you 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 with 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 suffer 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 want 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 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 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 the the people who um I mean GDP per cap 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 see I'm very closely involved with the Indian Society its economy how it works India has made huge progress in the last uh 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 under 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 well we are working on this there is no immediate solution as such it's not a overnight thing so 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 sensitive 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 yes 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 uh maybe we shouldn't call it dirt but calling it dirt reminds lingu so that's why I wanted to ask yes well calling it 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 I'm making it was a reminder that uh we shouldn't treat physical stuff as um TDY 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 Soy 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 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 treats soil as a resource not as a source of life not as a living system just as a resource that we can use use whichever way we want 50% of United States soil has disappeared in the last 70 years and 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 2016 in 2060 a few scientists sought an appointment with God don't don't go by 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 I think 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 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 cite to you several examples to the contrary uh so I'm standing here today and I have witnessed myself Chang 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 to 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'm 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 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 65y 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 Consciousness ceases can I say something about uh one thing sir I would uh like the correct is we must understand that uh you call something a religion only if you're 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 systems it is a land of seeking you 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 move to another level of experience and living simply because they manag 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 em 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 you develop what kind of tendency depends on what kind of information that you gathered in so many unconscious ways so 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're 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 mcti 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 farfetch 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 [Applause] it I just have a followup um your book blank slate the is it's 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 percentage in the in the differences among people yes 4 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 may be 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 SI 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 uh effect of random causes whe 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 these random variations 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 non-random 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 age 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 can 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 established 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 want wealth why we want relationships SE we believe these things will enhance the experience of life isn't it hello it may 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 Millenia 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 has brought more comfort and convenience that people are ready for unfortunately they're not able to enjoy their comfort and convenience today the 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 s Guru thank you so much and wonderful and thank you [Music] all

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Keywords: Scientist completely disagrees with Sadhguru, sadhguru, Scientist, sadhguru vs scientist, sadhguru vs, science, sadhguru science, sadhguru vs science, sadhguru debate, mad scientist, Scientist completely disagrees with Sadhguru on meditation and brain activity

Id: 0EFMZZ9jZ4k

Length: 55min 38sec (3338 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024