The Nature of Reality - Deepak Chopra at MIT

good afternoon welcome to a very special ex talk today with dr. Deepak Chopra we'll be speaking on immersive realities of learning and creativity my name is Molly Ruggles I'm with open learning and with the residential education unit there and I'm thrilled to be hosting this event I want to make a few just brief thank-yous to people who have made this happen today Kenzo lot Sheryl Barnes great help from Emma Crist and Laura White and Gillian Welsh who really got this thing going so this afternoon what we're going to experience with dr. Chopra is part of a broader wider array of xtalks which have been hosted this year we've been looking at widening the diversity of people who are sharing and we had an educator with University 42 a fellow who used to be a Buddhist monk it's a very interesting initiative online initiative we also hosted a CA CEO of a startup and talent acquisition so we're really sort of looking at getting out of our silo and looking at some interesting things that are happening throughout teaching and learning so great to have you all here great to have you here dr. Chopra and I think Ken or dr. Chopra will take it from here [Applause] so thanks Molly yes I'm Molly said class with Sanjay Sarma this fall on storytelling in virtual reality and other new forms of Technology when we think of the future of Education and educators essentially as storytellers and people seeking to engage in an audience how is technology going to change the way we tell stories which got us more broadly thinking about how any of us tell ourselves story which got us introduced to all kinds of fascinating collaborators including dr. Chopra who I'm very glad it has agreed to come share his wisdom with us so we're going to ask him to talk for a little bit the the students in the class are in this room now we invited a broader audience but at some point at the end in the mingling if you want to introduce yourself there are students who have been spending the semester with me and Sanjay looking at the crowd of how immersive worlds work and how we come to understand ourselves and the universe in new modalities so with that I'm very delighted to introduce dr. Chopra he's going to speak for a little while and then to moderate the Q&A section we have another special guest here who is Professor David Newman who is a cherished member of the MIT faculty she is the Apollo professor of astronomic s-- and has been spending most of her life thinking about how humans might live in space and beyond and she is back from a two-year stint during the Obama administration as number two in command of NASA so we're delighted dave is here and she's going to moderate a Q&A session with Deepak after he makes some introductory remarks so we have a very large view of the universe here in this room so with that dr. Chopra welcome and thank you thank you do I need to go there okay so thank you Ron and thank you everyone for being here and giving me this opportunity to share some thoughts with you I don't even know where to begin because there's so much to explore I'll give you a very short history of my background and then get cut to the chase on what is reality immersive augmented virtual or real so my background went to medical school in India but my training in medicine and internal medicine endocrinology neuroendocrinology neuroscience in Boston in all the various hospitals associated bu Tufts and Harvard and this was almost I'd say in the 70s so we're talking about long time mid 70s and at that time there was a major revolution going on in my field which was neuroendocrinology Roslyn yellow had won the Nobel Prize long with I think it was his name was Solomon I forget for radiomen USA so we were measuring everything that we could possibly measure in the body and it was at this time and I was working with similar icland Tufts that one of my colleagues who later became the chief of brain chemistry at the NIH Candace pert she's no longer with us she used the in some little workshop we were having together she used the expression molecules of emotion and then this is the time that you know the Nobel Prize had been awarded for radium you know I say we were looking at everything from opioid receptors to serotonin and oxytocin and dopamine all of that so it made sense that these molecules were not only media's mediators of emotion but there were everywhere in the body not just in the brain you know so this led me to start thinking about where is mind where is consciousness and does it influence our by biology at this point I was also doing clinical work and anyone who's a physician will tell you that you can have two patients who have the same illness who get the same treatment the same diagnosis and the same doctor and they have variable outcomes biologies at least the way we look at illness it's not predictable the way other science is there are variable responses then some extreme patient can recover completely patient can die you have no idea what's going on so I started to extend my interest into how mind influences biology and where is mind so you know fast neuro scientists they say the mind is what the brain does and if you ask other people from other traditions they'll say the brain is what the mind does and so what is the relationship between mind and and where is mind at this time I also found colleagues who were willing to explore outside the box and one of my colleagues was friends was from UCLA and we started discussing is there a good definition of mind in science and there isn't you know the but she came up with a very good definition that so far has not no one has objected to so here it is the mind is an embodied and relational process the mind is an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information in an ecosystem of relationships it's not kind of complicated but if you really understand this then you'll see that mine has no location okay right now I'm speaking to you I'm using my mind okay you are responding by analyzing what I'm saying so you're using your mind and there are biological correlates to this right so as I'm have right now I think our frontal cortex your frontal cortex and my frontal cortex is in relationship at the moment but if this was an emotional conversation it would be a different location in the brain you know the limbic system or whatever if we were scared and running out from this room our reptilian brain would get activated but whatever is happening in our mind has a biological correlate there's no experience that doesn't have a biological correlate somewhere in the brain whatever the experiences this experience this conversation imagination thought memory realizes biological correlates but of course it's not just the brain since these neuro peptides in these molecules are floating all over the place and they are actually made by other parts of our body today when you say our God feeling about such-and-such you're not speaking metaphorically your gut makes the same molecules your brain makes when you have that feeling in fact your gut feelings may be more accurate because gut cells haven't learned how to doubt their own thinking which the brain has you know brain is skeptical so I came to the conclusion that there is no location for mind it just appears in the brain as linguistic thought usually in English with an Indian accent but if we think of mind as the flow of energy and information that is both embodied and relational and this process is occurring in an ecosystem of relationships without relationship there is no mind so then this led me to what's the source of mind okay what's the source of any experience and that's where I am right now so if you go to Wikipedia and you type out and I'm bypassing a lot of stuff that I could have said because even though time is a human construct we have to keep to it I'm bypassing a lot but if you go to Wikipedia right now and you type out what are the open questions in science today about a hundred and fifty questions show up guess what's the first question that shows up the first question that shows up is what's the universe made up and why is that an open question because as you probably know at least the cosmologists know 70% of the universe is dark energy which is just a mathematical term for the observation that the space between galaxies is expanding so it's a mathematical construct dark energy to explain the observation that space is expanding faster than the speed of light right now and what is expanding is the space between galaxies we don't know what this phenomenon is Einstein called it the cosmological constant okay leave that aside but that leaves 30% of the universe remaining or which 26% is mysterious dark matter and why is it called dark matter because it's invisible and why is it invisible because at least current scientists believe that it's not atomic and so if it's not atomic why do we call it matter and the reason is it explains most of the gravity in a galaxy so galaxy is held together by this mysterious mathematical construct dark matter 26% just to accommodate the equations of mathematics okay so that leaves 4% of the universe which is atomic of which 99.99% is invisible interstellar dust which is in all probability hydrogen and helium that hasn't coalesced to form heavier atoms so that leaves only point zero one percent of the universe Oh point zero one percent of the universe that's visible and according to current cosmology if you go again I do all my research on online but you can google this how many galaxies are there in the universe in the visible universe the latest estimate is guess what the latest estimate of the number of galaxies is two trillion how many stars are there 760 liyan now I am sure at MIT they know how to write that I don't 700 followed by lots of zeros okay and uncountable trillions of planets exoplanets all of that is point zero one percent but as you know that as you go deeper into the nature of what we call matter it becomes non material whatever its nature is you know particles and waves are the same thing and unlike particles which have units of mass and energy waves are waves of probability where did they exist that we've talked to physicists they'll say in hilbert space now what is hilbert space so it's a multi-dimensional infinite space or formless space which houses the wavefunction which ultimately determines the appearance of matter where is it and if you want your career the answer is shut up and calculate okay you're not so these are not scientific questions but the fact is we the only thing we can say with certainty about the universe what's it made of is it's made of nothing and you know you have all kinds of models for this you know quantum vacuum etc leave that to the physicists but everybody will agree that the fundamental whatever is fundamental that is giving rise to the visible universe is nothingness so that leads to the second question if it's made of nothing why does it look like this okay why's does it look like this this this and that brings us to the second open question in science which is what's the biological basis of consciousness because without consciousness there's no experience now people who don't think about these things so they're very kind of nonchalant about this you know the consciousness is something that the brain is secreting just like your gallbladder makes bile the stomach produces hydrochloric acid your pancreas secretes pancreatic juice this three-pound whatever it is mostly water fat and a few molecules produce this thought it produces insight it intuition it produces creativity produces vision it produces imagination how there's no answer for that there's no answer at this moment for any experience that you can have right now you're listening to me all that's going to your brain is an action potential molecules of air are vibrating in your eardrum they're setting an electrical current to your brain there's electrochemistry and you hear me where is the sound is there sound is sound of fundamental intrinsic expression of the universe or is sound and experience where are you having the experience of this room right now so what's her coming - your eyes are invisible photons within a particular bandwidth within a particular bandwidth invisible photons we can't see them they have no color they have no shape what's happening in your eyes is electrochemistry what's going to your brain is an action potential what you're experiencing is a room you can go out at night and you can experience see the Milky Way galaxy you can look at your body you're experiencing this body where or what is doing this there's no explanation for any perceptual experience you have or for any mental experience you have there's no explanation we know the biological correlates we know the neural correlates we can map them out we can actually stimulate them and produce an experience without knowing how that happens this is the amazing ability of our science that we can map a biological correlate we can even map it digitally now through augmented reality and extend those experiences without knowing how the experiences produced so here's and I'll shut up after this okay I came to the conclusion which qualifies me as either psychotic or totally off-the-wall you know I realized that I wanted to hang out only with psychotics geniuses and sages because when you bring them together then there's some emergence of a new a new insight bring together diverse people so here's my conclusion there is no such thing as a body or a brain or a mind or a universe it's all virtual reality and it's what we call the universe is a human construct is a story four modes of knowing and experience in consciousness which are modified forms of consciousness so let me just take you down the rabbit hole a little bit okay think of your mother right now see her in your mind listen to her voice you're having an experience think of a favorite song John Lennon imagine you hear something you're having an experience right think of a beautiful sunset on the ocean and look at it in your mind's eye you're having an experience in your brain there's no sunset there's no mother there's no sound there's no color in fact the brain can't even feel itself it has no receptors for its own experience so where is this experience happening you know I talked to of technologists and say where is seen happening and some of them say it's happening in my eyes and you know I asked them we are your eyes nine point five centimeters apart 2.5 centimeters by 2.5 centimeters by the time light gets into your retina it inverts if there was an image in your retina you'd see 2 of me upside down and curved because the retina is curved so whatever is happening in your eyes the experience of seeing me is not happening in your eyes then you'll say it's is happening in the brain so how does this room fit inside your brain how does the Milky Way galaxy fit inside your brain the brain is 10 centimeters by 15 centimeters by 7 centimeters you know it's easy to bypass all these questions but the fact is need a perceptual experience nor mental interpretation of perceptual experience is explainable through science today and the reason is science can only measure that which is measurable and if consciousness is formless made out of nothing and if the universe is also formless made out of nothing maybe the universe is the experience consciousness is having by modifying itself as a perception if I tell you look there look there every act of perception every act of perception is a snapshot and what holds them together is the presence of being your consciousness that holds these snapshots together and creates a movie and that movie includes the movie that you call your body because once upon a time your body was a zygote then it was a baby a toddler there's no such thing as a body the body is a perceptual activity in consciousness and a modified form of consciousness consciousness modifies itself into sound into sensations into perceptions into images into thoughts then human beings create a story around it and we are storytellers so according to deep historians seventy thousand years ago and I don't know if this is accurate or not but you know this the current thinking seventy thousand years ago humans evolved imagination okay so that you see these cave buildings and you see teams etc and then about maybe fifteen to twenty thousand years humans evolved language before that language was very rudimentary it was calls of danger and mating calls which still other species have birds and other species so humans evolved a different kind of language fifteen thousand years ago oral language and that language was one that started with storytelling in fact the first language the first stories were according again to deep historians were gossip so gossip started the human experience so in so sleeping with so-and-so so-and-so can't be trusted so and so and then that quickly evolved into constructs like money money is a construct there's no such thing we made it up another construct latitude and longitude another construct Wall Street another construct nation-states another construct gender another construct body-mind universe these are human constructs for modes of knowing and experience in human consciousness which has a narrow bandwidth available to it so you look at the experience of other species look at the experience of a butterfly known as the Painted Lady this butterfly experiences smell through her antennae this butterfly tastes food and nectar through her feet the taste buds are in the feet it hears through the flapping of its wings it has 30,000 lenses in her eyes that move like a kaleidoscope giving it an experience of shimmering shapes forms and colors presumably what is reality to that species that we call a butterfly and even the word butterfly is a human construct for a human experience all our text taxonomy of atoms molecules force fields gravity these are human constructs for modes of experiencing a narrow bandwidth of human experience but there are eagle soaring in the sky there are insects with a hundred eyes a bat navigates the its reality through the echo of ultrasound a chameleon the eyeball swivel on two different axes you can't even remotely imagine what this room looks like to a chameleon a snake senses infrared what is that experience a bat senses the echo of ultrasound what is the most fundamental reality is what we call the universe a human construct for a human experience in a narrow bandwidth of experience when in fact the bandwidth of consciousness is infinite because consciousness has no form you can't study consciousness like you study science or do anything in science how do you look at something that has no form hence all these attempts virtual domain whatever quantum meant virtual particles but where is in what is reality prior to all systems of thought prior to mythology prior to philosophy prior to religion prior to theology and prior to science is science not an activity in consciousness where our experiments designed if not in consciousness where our theories conceived if not in consciousness where our observations made if not in consciousness so if you have just give me two minutes and I'll give you a little experience if you want shall we try it okay so I can't Walker okay just let's go over some perceptual experiences in the five senses and then let's actually look at where this experience is happening okay so when I said think of a sunset on the ocean let's do it again you're thinking of a sunset on the ocean before you think of that experience mentally there was no experience but as soon as I said think of it then you as a conscious being modified yourself into that activity as an image okay think of your mother when her voice you then as consciousness modified through intention that experience subtle mental experience right but when you look at something that's a perception if you were a baby born into this world today you have already arrived at an interpreted world the world has been interpreted for you you know in first God created the universe this is religion this is this this but now if I ask you what is that tell me what that is a shoe as a baby would you experience that as a shoe all you would see is a color a shape of form which is a modification of consciousness as that perceptual experience that we call color where is color can you locate color anywhere in the world there's no location for color right there's not there that's electro magnetic waves it's not there from there to my brain and there's no color in the brain either now you can take that for any sensation any perception same thing so consciousness is modifying itself into still frames of experience and then consciousness is interpreting them as the movie the virtual reality that we call mind-body and universe as a human construct there is no universe it's a human construct there is no body it's a human construct for a mode of knowing and perception there are no electromagnetic fields or molecules or atoms or waves of particles these are human constructs for modes of knowing and experience in human consciousness so we made it up the whole thing and if you realize it's virtual then birth and death are also constructs if consciousness is formless and infinite it's not in time only experiences in time and the experience is a snapshot every time you have the experience and what strings together these snapshots in the movie is your is you as awareness your body is not the container awareness your body is an experience in the wareness your mind is an experience in awareness the world the physical world is an interpretation of a perceptual activity in awareness so this then what is awareness awareness is that in which all experience occurs all experiences known and out of which all experience is made the interpretation of that experience is mind body universe we are a species of consciousness in a virtual reality and this is the ultimate virtual immersive dreamscape so whit can shine the great German philosopher he said we are asleep our life is a dream but once in awhile we wake up enough to know that we are dreaming and so what do we wake up to we wake up to the consciousness in which the dream is being projected the dream that we call mind-body Mars moon those are human constructs for human modes of knowing and experience the problem occurs as people says so did I make it up is this but this is part of the virtual reality see this part this brain body is an instrument for observation it's not the observer this is an instrument for observation and every species a different instrument gives it a different virtual experience so species biological species are species of consciousness now I end with just one remark I was you know I've written three books with rudy' chances at neuroscientist at Mass General Harvard and this morning he was talking about DNA entanglement to me and how his experiments are showing that even at the level of DNA everything information energy what we call space-time they're all entangled as possibilities ok so I'm going to finish by asking your question just now and before I ask the question I'm going to give you the answer so the answer to my question which I'm going to ask you in two seconds is yes so whatever the question is just say yes will you not till I ask the question okay are you aware right now a little more enthusiasm that's all we have awareness okay so are you aware right now okay now I'm going to ask you the same question but this time don't answer it till I raise my hand okay are you aware right now are you aware is a thought the answer yes is a thought you are not the thought you are the awareness in which the thought comes and goes your the awareness that modifies itself as a thought now you can extend that to every sensation image feeling or thought that you are all we experience is sensations images feelings and thoughts the rest is a story and we have the best story right now we call it science but it's still a story what is reality before this story it's awareness modifying itself and it is awareness that conceives constructs governs and becomes the story that we call everyday reality so this perceptual reality there's the interpretation of perceptual reality which is the story and there is the storyteller which is consciousness so consciousness is fundamental it is without cause it is formless being formless it is infinite being infinite it is not in time the observer is not in the body because the body is an observation your body is an observation the observer is actually there is only one observer and it is formless and infinite and there are innumerable modes of observation and they are species specific and their culture specific and their story specific and there are innumerable things observed but actually it's the same thing being observed you experience multiplicity which is consciousness knowing itself as experience consciousness is the subject and the object so the mind is not doing the brain the brain is not doing the mind the mind and the brain are being done simultaneously by a formless a causal fundamental irreducible infinite formless virtual being and for lack of a better word let's just call it it okay in the past people have called it God now the Unified Field the singularity you can go on and on you know quantum entanglement those are all stories thank you very much I took longer I think that's fantastic hello everyone I'm David Newman and uh glad to be here Wow some Q&A please think we can sit down we've asked some some questions and we'll give the audience time to interact a bit as well I had to get started I'm a little blown away I'm still contemplating my consciousness but I'll give it a start with them a recent article the future is accelerating and will humans fit in I have a few questions for you on that in terms of a you go through that our contact about the digital brain layer with a hundred billion neurons to effortlessly communicate so that my questions from that article we know the future is accelerating but what will it mean to be human well humans will evolve to metahumans and what we will do is will extend the range of our perceptual experiences through immersive augmented reality so that we can actually increase a bandwidth of experience in almost forever infinitely we will evolve as a hybrid of biological expression as this body mind extending our range of experience to other bandwidths available to us in consciousness now recently in Dubai for example I met the first cyborg and he was in his twenties he was born colorblind and so he decided to implant some antenna in his brain he shaved his head and he can hear in colors okay so he transports the hearing perception into a color he took a snapshot of my body which was a symphony of colors okay so he doesn't he's he hears colors now he tried to get a passport and the British government wouldn't give him one because they said we don't have a provision for a cyborg only for human beings he took them to court he won and he has a British passport so I had a question for him I said you know I then he didn't stop there by the way he started extending his range of experience to ultrasound to infrasonic to ultraviolet so I asked him I said if when you experience say infrared or ultraviolet are you having the experience of a honeybee for example that navigates through ultraviolet he says no because I'm having it through a human brain I don't know what the experience of a honeybee is honey bee whether it comes from a grove it does something called a waggle dance for a few seconds and it communicates to other honeybees through mind where to find the honey just through this waggle dance that lasts a few seconds what is that mode of communication he said it's inaccessible to us even when we we extend the range of our senses we do it in terms of human constructs so you know realities is a trickster and I think we will evolve in and play better tricks with our perceptual experience ultimately to the point where we will begin to understand ourselves as totally formless beings having a perceptual experience so I I think that is the potentiality of raising our consciousness yes but I wonder if we will enter into the consciousness of other beings well again we do with our dogs with the horses with other mammals even though we don't know what the sound of my voice sounds to a dog but we have a communication but the dog doesn't have a construct you know I asked Obama I said does your dog know that you're the President of the United States already sitting in the Oval Office right obviously the dog has no constructs but there's a relationship in consciousness he might have since I was at that White has a lot when you have all those security you always you know this isn't normal like going I recover Lord you know as you I don't get to know very well I scream on the street how did we evolve constructs stories without that there wouldn't be this universe that we are experiencing right now with your email and virtual you know communication instantly you send somebody a emoticon and they get a dopamine hit even if they're in South Africa or when I see tweets from the president I get an adrenaline hit even though I'm not in Washington right so it's all interwoven in the web of relationship whew I wanna go to the topic of spirituality and and music we have folks here from from MIT we have a lot of folks who I think work on cyborgs and robotics we have lots of folks and colleagues and students in the class from Berklee School of Music as as well and I question was was posed to define the concept of spirituality in connection with with music okay so let's do that let's do that first on a very simple straightforward level which is scientific there is data that if somebody enjoys music and you of them narcan narcan is a narcotic in the antagonists they lose their enjoyment for that particular piece of music so music creates opiates in your brain that have receptors in other parts of the body and that are immuno regulators so music therapy is going to be a very big deal because it directly reaches to experience without interpreting it ok so that's that the physical aspect of any sensory modulation can change your biological expression and music is what creates for those of you who are musicians a flow state so when you're listening to music you're not waiting for the end of the symphony you're right where it is in the present moment there's no anticipation there's no memory there's no regret there's no resistance you are in a flow state and that flow state can be achieved through music poetry sex many other things meditation self-awareness reflective self inquiry but the state that we call separate me and the other me and subject an object that's apparently created in a part of the brain cause the default mode Network which is getting a lot of attention right now so the more you think of yourself as separate the bigger your default mode network the more you feel squeezed into the body in the span of a lifetime and in the volume of a body but in flow States you don't feel any of that so when people experience flow States and say at leats and in a game or during music or during poetry or dance or martial arts or meditation or mindfulness that flow state there's loss of ego identity for that moment okay there's loss of personal idea for that moment and there's no resistance there is no memory there's no regrets there's just flow and music does that okay and today that my talk this morning at Harvard Rudy was telling me that people who experience music the default mode network goes down you enter a flow state but it happens with any experience of transcendence any experience where thought comes to a standstill his flow and therefore the state of least entropy and by spirituality I think that's another word that is so misunderstood I think it's very tragedy we should just keep one word and that is self-awareness the awareness of your consciousness which is the only constant in every changing experience so when you are fully aware of that which is aware which was the experiment I did with you are you aware you can stop any moment and say who are what is having this experience and you realize your body your mind and the world go together as an experience but what is orchestrating the experience is totally without form it has that as spirituality music poetry art in general is the language of the soul science is the language of the mind I like I think related question here on are there what are the key elements in seeing a person's reality through metaphysical principles and behind this it's a a person wanting to an educator providing deep and unique realization for multiple cultures around the world the common language for every experience is experience itself if you start asking who are what is having this experience then you realize that the world has held together this world is held together by a story by construct so reality so-called everyday reality which is our perceptual reality being virtual is objective revision and as we evolved in our spirituality will extend the range of our experiences and even have intraspecies experiences you know there are people in shamanic traditions that communicate with birds that communicate you know they're so out of our realm that I asked talked to herbalists and they predict the effect of these herbs on the biology and the same and you know when you look them up they're pretty right this is anti-inflammatory this is does this this does this say how do you do it and you know the shamans are met they say we speak to the plant we communicate with the plant and then of course they have their rituals with ayahuasca etc which basically get rid of all constructs and once you get rid of constructs in the plant and you your body your mind and the Milky Way galaxy is all one activity so that's where music will take any sensory experience can be transcended to its source which is consciousness I think I think I might be coming back to constructs but we wanted to dive into um creativity and maybe we're revolutionary ideas come from what is creativity the best way I can think of creativity is that it is a confluence of meaning context relationship and story before that it's all ambiguous you know the baby I was talking about it's all experiencing shimmering colors shapes form sounds no constructs then the poor kid is told you're American you're male you are this nationality this religion and you're bamboozled now into a false identity for the rest of your life and then you start to defend it okay and you go to war for it too so what is reality before the story before the story is the mechanism that actually creates and holds together this experience we are without the story this is just a shimmering kaleidoscope of colors shapes forms sounds textures smells all of that which are modified forms of consciousness so the this is if we get this then there's no limit to human creativity I think what happens is when you put together people from different disciplines because we all think in our narrow boxes if I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and that's all I think about if you're an astronaut that's what you're thinking about right now and you're studying Mars all of that so when you put together from different disciplines science math biology neuroscience mathematics and humanities art music and even cultural stories you put people together you have them share a common problem and you are asked them to solve it emergence happens it's so interesting that all you have to do is put people from different disparate disciplines in a room together they have a shared vision they are emotionally and spiritually connected if they come up with a new story that's what creativity is it's a shift of context meaning relationship and story from this to this and there's no transition so true creativity and I'll say the risk of of you know getting the wrath of mechanism mechanist true creativity cannot be simulated by a computer because it's all computers are algorithms and true creativity is a true disruption the algorithm has to break okay so of course for those of you are mathematicians here you know about girls theorem right girls theorem says that there are theorems in mathematics that cannot be proved but that are true they are intuitive insights so creativity is a disruption in the algorithm of logic okay this is good I'm sure there's gonna be lots of questions coming up I'll just I'm gonna ask one more and then I'm gonna open it up you've touched on this but people wanted you to think a little bit more to your ideas on quantum entanglement and consciousness so when I speak about quantum entanglement I get in trouble with physicists because I'm not a physicist you know my last book there was with a physicist who God is PhD from MIT so I feel a little safer in talking about quantum entanglement so for those of you are not familiar with quantum entanglement it has a big history and it there's a there's a war between what we call realists and what we call people who think in terms of only consciousness Einstein was a realist realist means he believed the world is real you his famous remark the moon would still be there if no one was looking at it and then he described the mathematics for quantum entanglement or nonlocality it's called the einstein-podolsky-rosen equation and then Bell's Theorem these are mathematical ideas that say that at the most fundamental level of existence whatever that is quantum vacuum whatever you want to call it at that level space time energy information and matter all exists simultaneously as possibility and then the differentiation occurs that creates this experience that we are having subject and object so leave that aside quantum entanglement but just look at draw experience sensations images feelings thoughts think of somebody that you dislike just now maybe that person really bothers you and you have an image you have a thought you have an emotion you might even have a sensation in your body because your blood pressure might be going up okay as you're thinking of this person - as I am right now okay so our sensations images feelings and thoughts are also entangled if you come to a cocktail party and I say to you you know that man there he just won the Nobel Prize in Physics and then you come five minutes later and I tell you you know that man there he's wanted by the Mafia for whatever you two will perceive that person totally differently because you have a different story so your sensations your images your emotions and your thoughts and your perceptions of reality are based on the story you're telling yourself and that's in the real entanglement real entanglement is the entanglement of sensations sense impressions images feelings thoughts now realism is in trouble because you know if you ask people who will achieve including Einstein he couldn't explain entanglement so he said spooky action at a distance you know and he dismissed it even though it was his formulation okay so these days there are three types of realism one is called naive realism which is the world is exactly the way you're perceived well obviously that's not true different species perceive the world differently so we can throw naive realism out the second kind of realism is called representational realism the the well is real but there is a representation of it in the brain some kind of cryptographic digital code that gives me the experience of a real world but then that it runs into the hard problem of consciousness how does this neural correlate correlate with this experience so representational realism is out and the third is called scientific realism the world is made of molecules and atoms and force fields in gravity well then why do we experience it like this you know how does how to force fields and gravity and strong and weak interactions give me thought insight intuition emotions love compassion joy equanimity the fear of death where is all that happening how do force fields explain that so scientific realism result I don't think there's any realism that is viable that's a perfect segue to entertain your questions anyone please please introduce yourself and then a year create a church called the wave of the future and I'm encouraged that is a church not a organization company and he says that the big party featured something at least but they finally find Authority maybe work yeah maybe we'll rephrase them yes so there's some physicists just that he's an artificial intelligence person and virtual reality person I've read about him he says the future of God is technology and basically and he might be right but you have to explain where does technology come from ok technology is now part of the human evolution we can't do with it without it right we are totally dependent on technology for everything whether you take an airplane you go to the airports and the text message email whatever we are dependent on it so technology is here to stay it's here to evolve if you think technology is not here to stay and you don't want to have anything to do with it then Darwin will say we are irrelevant you don't need that you adapt what you're you're not going to part be part of the future of the human species so technology is our our gateway to understanding reality which brings in big questions what is the internet where is the internet you know you have all these servers everywhere connecting everything to everywhere thing else I would say that the Internet is now our global brain ok and that through the internet and technologies as we expand these technologies to virtual immersive experiences we are creating a global brain which has everything the sacred and the profane the divine the diabolical we have technologies right now you can talk to people who can reverse climate change restore ecosystems even bring back extinct species so you know the future of technology if we use it right we could we don't have to leave the junkyard of infinity to go to Mars but right now we have a junkyard you know we have climate change we have eco destruction extinction of species radical poverty social economic injustice it's a mess I mean if you really think about it the human species is insane and if we don't agree then we are declaring our own insanity in order to first find a cure we have to find the diagnosis and right now the diagnosis is we are creating an insane asylum with war terrorism climate change refugees eco destruction extinction of species because of a misperception of me and the environment those trees are your lungs the rivers and oceans are your circulation this air is your breath the earth is recycling as your body so you don't have a body in the universe the body and the universe are one entity are the same entity you have a personal body you have an extended body they're equally yours and unless we have this spiritual shift in our sin in our psyche we will use technology for our destruction or we could create God because God is a human construct in the same way as the universe is a human construct at the very beginning when you talked about consciousness and the mind being mediated through relationships first thing I thought of was the deliberate use in the criminal justice system of solitary confinement and how that is intentionally depriving prisoners of human relationships and how cruel that is and it's horrifying to me especially what you just were talking about all of the things that are going the criminal justice system to deprived and dehumanized a huge segment of our population relationship to each other and to the world at large and society is just completely impaired depending on whatever it is that they've done them yes so solitary confinement is the cruelest thing you can do to a human being or any other life form you know this brings in the bigger question of what is the meaning of love or compassion or joy or equanimity so in eastern wisdom traditions these are called divine emotions love compassion joy equanimity and they come from a deeper and understanding that love is not just a sentiment it's the deepest truth at the heart of creation which is the entanglement of relationship that's all there is there there's no such thing as a thing it's only a web of relationship and so that kind of mentality comes from a different construct a different story I and the other when the other is also me but in a different form and at the ultimate level the real entanglement is the entanglement of love and relationship so love is the ultimate truth and compassion is the desire to alleviate somebody suffering like what we call what we call empathy is the ability to feel what another is feeling and then compassion is the desire to alleviate it and then love is the action that is prompted and that you know it sounds like almost a cliche to say that love will cure anything but even criminal behavior is a cry for love which an abuse person who is recycling the abuse basically because it's been going on for generations as a result of poverty or whatever economic conditions or social injustice or all these constructs we have you know race gender these are constructs so we have a long way to go but then there are people like Nelson Mandela who within a prison isolated for over 20 years and had a visions that kept them going that vision that story kept them going and they had inner strength so they didn't think of it as isolation they actually thought it as solitude that connected them to the bigger reality very big difference between solitude and loneliness go ahead please they are from their mind they have so we do interventions mérimée different feedback on their range show them that what they do actually some sort of connection but mistreatment of them scalable we have and I wonder if you have a idea how [Music] that way I see in the next five years or definitely in the next ten years immersive virtual reality experiences or immersive augmented reality experience start to treat initially anxiety for beers eating disorders even autism spectrum because when you take a kid and you give him a virtual reality experience of what normal facial expressions are and that feeds back on the nervous system rewires the new nervous system so I don't know where this is going to go with things like schizophrenia but I think it's the most promising area is to create an immersive experience of what it feels like emotionally to be what we call normal and what is outside the spectrum so there's some initial work and in phobias I'm looking at it for inflammation for example if you can give the person an experience which is their perceptual their own body they're watching and this leads to a lot of interesting ideas actually I don't think in the future you will be using pharmaceuticals you'll be giving people the immersive experience and that'll totally start to shift how they interpret the world or interpret their body one more thing I want to say about this is that I forget right now when you come to me if technology and competing more like a motive of the feelings of connections like the like connection with nature connection with others but it also it's like using technology in that way kind of absolve people like personal responsibility like meditation going on nature like the actual experience like it's not really a logical problem but I don't worry about because like like it here you're kind of stressed out like for months on end but your body like will adapts like oh it back you like childhood happy memories like naturally so you know over the years what I have observed is well-being is very simple very simple well-being is homeostasis or self-regulation so one extreme is self-regulation homeostasis and the other extreme is inflammation and as human biological organisms we dance between these two extremes and the six things you can identify that will restore well-being and it's only six thank God are the following number one is sleep okay sleep is the best way to regulate your body and it's both dream sleep light sleep and REM sleep all are important and there's lots of data what happens to amyloid what happens to telomere is what happens to gene expression what happens to inflammation and what happens in each phase of sleep so sleep number one number two stress management which could be meditation mindfulness and there are many kinds of meditation reflection looking at your own stories mindfulness of sensory experience mindfulness of body mindfulness of viscera that's what the Yogi's do anybody who does do yoga regularly gets to know their body very well including visceral space so mindfulness of body mindfulness of perception mindfulness of mental space mindfulness of the web of relationship mindfulness of being mindful so that that it's a whole range of practices I'm at the moment putting together the encyclopedia of all the world's traditions of meditation because the goal of meditation is to bypass thought that's it if you think of what is the goal of meditation ultimate is to go across the filter of the story then you can create a new story if you want ok so meditation but stress management in general music poetry arts all of that is also part of stress exercise is part of stress management so that would be number two number three would be movement and mind body coordination that's where the martial arts and yoga come in because as you become adept at these things you realize that your body is actually awareness that's all it is it's made out of awareness so the mind-body techniques that come from these great traditions of the martial arts that would be added to movement the fourth is emotions so if you are experiencing love compassion joy equanimity homeostasis if you're experiencing anger hostility not even anger hostility which is a peculiar human trait because again because we tell stories if you kick a dog a stranger kicks a dog the dog also has memory it will attack you five years from now if you see the same dog but the dog won't ruminate or plan for five years how to get either okay that's a story okay so hostility guilt depression and shame are stories and they take you away from home assists emotions regulate bad nutrition now that we know that two million genes in our body are not human genes okay they are microbial genes and you can change them you have only 25,000 human genes you have two million bacterial genes so technically speaking you're a bacterial colony hanging on to a few human cells you know we are the awakening of bacterial consciousness right okay so nutrition will change your biology within a few days within a few days you can change two million microbial genes in your body and these days the artificial intelligence techniques to analyze the microbiome you can do it through a I finally connection with nature so you know we have four types of rhythms in our body circadian rhythms as the Earth spins on its axis seasonal rhythms as the earth goes around the Sun lunar rhythms which are in relations the movement which is Sun Moon and Earth and then gravitational rhythms and all these by the way all these rhythms are entangled with each other if you restore circadian rhythm you have jetlag you take a walk on the beach barefoot or you walk on the ground barefoot or on grass not on country and barefoot you're restoring your circadian rhythm and so now people have developed technologies where you could be sitting here and you could be sitting on this chair and the cushion could be grounded through the grounding wire of that outlet you know where you put your computer and you would decrease inflammation in your body so all the six things that I've said sleep stress management exercise movement mind body coordination emotions nutrition and grounding we have technology today to accelerate that okay so I look at my sleep score every night and then you know that's feedback for me and then I know intuitively what I did to disturb my sleep so that gives me feedback so all these technologies enhance feedback to consciousness so you can modulate your behavior but behavior I mean your thoughts your feelings your emotions the way you imagine the way you relate all are connected in that realm I think technology is a blessing to learn about ourselves there was gonna get this question over here think what they hand up here go ahead okay we've come to [Music] we think your experiences send it again about your venture into I was wondering about yours meditation sort of coaches everybody but we are is also about this or an ass element we decide not to be so of course this is connected to so many so many things you brought up in that question there's not one question many questions but let me try to answer that has anyone looked at what people are talking about these days out-of-body experiences as anyone looked at the literature on how the body experiences well okay we talked so the real mystery is not the out-of-body experience it's the in body experience there's no one there inside that body the body is an experience in consciousness okay so the real mystery is how do we find ourselves as embodied beings because there's no observer inside the body the body itself is an object of observation the real mystery is not the non-local experience the real mystery is the local experience how do if we find ourselves in the body without being in it okay so that there is an element of this embodiment which brings you closer to the real reality which is not which is the ultimate source of all experiences which is consciousness so when I did my vr project I was of course I'm a student of Eastern wisdom traditions I was thinking you know why did the Buddha get enlightened under a tree I mean they always talk about the Bodhi tree right and you can go to India and you can look at the tree so what was so special about the tree and you know there's a there's a part of Buddha's history where he comes out of his meditation and he holds a flower in his hand and there are about seven or eight of his students looking at the flower and he doesn't say anything you know he he just holds the flower that's it for all of them to see and then Ananda his favorite student he smiles back at the Buddha and Buddha smiles back and that's the lecture is over it's called the famous silent sermon where he didn't say a word and only one of the students got it so the other students went to this guy on earth that said we saw a flower what did you and the Buddha saw something else and another said yes I saw rainbows I saw sunshine I saw Earth I saw water I saw the biosphere I saw the stars and galaxies I saw the infinite void all pretending to be a flower and so Buddha got enlightened under the tree because he saw the whole ecosystem he was the first ecologist the birds the bees the the bacteria everything is one activity entangled so that was why I wanted to do this VR experience I wanted to give people and the experience of what the Buddha was experiencing under the Bodhi tree I don't know how successful it was but you know for now given the what we know of immersive augmented experiences this is a long way to go I last week I was with company in Hollywood called immersive dreamscapes anyone heard of this so immersive dreamscape is the company now founded by Steven Spielberg and some others but their CEO is from originally from Disney Imagineering where I teach a course on imagination and what they took me through a trip and you would love this you would love this I went to another galaxy I went to another planet I was in a space shuttle I could actually do there were these alien life-forms that suddenly showed up I could at them and they would respond and then it started to rain and I got wet okay and all this while it was virtual and then all I did at the end is take out by headset and the gloves and whatever else I was wearing and then this world seemed totally alien to me you know because you are just so easily into another reality Wow so the future is very good for treating medical diseases inflammation starting with mental disorders but ultimately physical ailments because what we call the physical body is a perceptual experience you change the experience you change the body so you know wisdom traditions healing in shamanic traditions there have only one basis for it that your body is the metabolism of experience change the experience you change the body the physical body transforms so there's an expression in Ayurveda if you want to know what your experiences were in the past look at your body now if you want to know what your body will look like in the future look at all the experiences you're having now and how you're interpreting them and what are the stories you're telling we want to try to get in one one last question we're in custody right here yeah but we'll get the last question [Music] and people should be whereas their other people yes particularly and I was wondering sorry when I may be repeated doing questions of censorship and free speech I don't believe in censorship personally I also think that as we move into the future there are not going to be any secrets okay so once there are no secrets once everything is open and transparent it already is I mean every you know every photo lives on the internet every video every projection this one lives forever on the Internet so there will be no secrets and I'm finding amongst people of your generation that they don't care so much about donating their data they don't care so much about privacy and that this is a new era that we are coming into that will make things like spying and hacking all this is now a reaction to what is happening in the world but ultimately that will won't be any need to hack or spy everybody will know everything and so what is the story we're going to tell we will it's it's a question of stories one story risks our extinction the other story is a true resurrection of the original state of one ecosystem functioning with perfect precision and harmony and evolving at the same time we are the only species who messed it up now it's our duty to to be transparent and come up with a new story thank you so you've inspired so many of us in this in this room and just a real privilege to spend 90 minutes with you also on behalf of all of us thank you so much thank you

Channel: The Chopra Well

Views: 132,876

Keywords: deepak chopra, meditation, sleep, “sleep, spiritual, enlightenment, consciousness, wellness, well-being, spirituality, soul, mind, body, health, mental health, anxiety, stress, wisdom, peace, religion, belief, love, joy, awareness

Id: CHmnPVApfFE

Length: 83min 21sec (5001 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018