The Soul of Leadership | Deepak Chopra | Talks at Google

and I'm delighted to welcome to the Googleplex author physician doctor of Seoul and a modern-day guru of human empowerment dr. Deepak Chopra [Applause] dr. Chopra began his life as a physician a doctor of the body but very soon he realized that his true calling was in being a doctor of the spirit in fact his versatility is clear from the fact that he's a member of the American College of Physicians he's a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and a scientist at the Gallup Organization and as soon as he realized this shift in how he wanted to touch people he started speaking and writing about it and so prolific that he's written fifty five books eighteen of them on the New York Times bestseller list on a variety of topics on mind-body spirituality help human empowerment and along the way and check this out when you get your phones he's created an Android app called authentic yoga which is it all give it a try and here to speak about his latest book the soul of leadership which you should all have copies for I want you to join me in giving a warm namaste to Deepak Chopra somebody Time magazine called one of the top hundred heroes and icons of the century the poet prophet of alternate medicine please join me with the one number state to talk [Applause] hi so thank you very much for having me and I have enjoyed the last 1 hour walking around this campus being exposed to the spirit of this place and I can authentically say that Google has a soul there are a lot of places that have no soul whatsoever so very happy to be here how many of you actually ever think about the souls how many of you don't think there is such a thing good just to okay let me start with a little story and then we'll get into you know addressing the topic of today the story goes back when I was about 7 years of age in India my father was an army doctor my little brother at that time was about 4 years of age my mother was the best mother in the world and we read in the newspapers we were living in a small town then small town in the center of India called Jabalpur and the news paper said that mr. Nehru who was the first Prime Minister of India and the heirto madman Gandhi was coming to our little town this remember about 15 years post-independence to open an automobile factory there was a great hero for Indians at that time a visionary statesman as I said the spiritual heir to madman Gandhi so there was a lot of excitement and in our family there was only one discussion over breakfast lunch and dinner and that was what was the color of the sari my mother would wear for the occasion and my father would of course tease her and say that no one was going to notice the color of a sari so in the day mr. Naro arrived my mother in a beautiful pink sari and my father in his army uniform with his World War two medals my little brother then for now the Dean of Harvard Medical School and me we were on this on the streets at 4 o'clock in the morning before the Sun rose and by about 6:30 7:00 there were millions of people on the street and in India when I say millions it means millions ok doesn't mean thousands or tens of thousands it means millions seething masses of humanity wherever you could see there were people people on treetops people hanging by window ledges people on buses people on each other's shoulders rambunctious rowdy and really very noisy and about nine o'clock mr. Nero's motorcade came by our street he was dining in a jeep wearing a white Nehru jacket as we now call it this is a Nehru jacket and he had a rose a red rose in his lapel which was his signature his trademark and there was a Jeep in the front and there was a jeep and the back a motorcycle or two pretty simple and it slowly turned the corner and came by us and as it went past mr. nervous seemed to turn around look at my mother and he took his rose out and he threw it at her and the crowd gasp and stepped back almost except for my mother who kind of stepped forward like a queen picked up the Rose held it up to great applause and looked at my father and says daddy what did I tell you and now let's go home so in that moment as seven year old I kind of thought why she's a great leader and the real leader in the family although my father were the medals and all that we went home and she emptied one room completely took away all the furniture except for one table and on the table she put of ours and the rose and for next three weeks for the next three weeks people came to our house to look at the Rose it was quite something they would come in India you know when you go to a house of veneration or a sacred place you take off your shoes etc so they would come and take their shoes off and tiptoe into this room in silence and they would just look at the Rose after three weeks the Rose started to fade and my mother had a party she invited all her friends and at the end of the party everybody got a faded rose petal and you should have seen the attitude when they accepted that it was like they were getting a diamond or a jewel so afterwards we asked our mother my brother and I what was so special about those rose petals and she said something you know and some things you remember forever that became the genesis of this course that I now teach at the Kellogg School of Management called the sort of leadership she said those rose petals was symbolic of the soul of India and at that time I didn't really understand what that meant the soul of a country as I mentioned you when I came here I felt that Google as a soul when I go to Detroit I don't feel that you know there's something very special when you think of Seoul and I'll tell you what that means but my mother explained that the leaders in a sense are the symbolic soul of a group consciousness that they represent the dreams and the creativity and the longings and the aspirations and the intentions of a collective consciousness and that collective consciousness could be a small unit a family it could be company business it could be community it could be a country it could be a political party it could be the whole world but they they the leader somehow embodies the collective dream and so when somebody like a Martin Luther King jr. says I have a dream obviously is not speaking of a personal dream alone it says the dream of greats zeitgeist of an emerging longing for transmission for transformation for change for movement into a higher consciousness so that kind of stayed with me as a theme you know that the soul represents a deep aspect of our core consciousness later I went on to study medicine and like anyone else being programmed indoctrinated into a completely completely materialistic worldview I really became like most of my colleagues a great technician who knew everything about the human body and not necessarily a healer because I knew nothing about the other aspects of human consciousness so I used to wonder why you could have two groups of patients or two patients who had the same illness the same treatment the same physician and yet have completely different outcomes that's well known in medicine so even though we know so much about biological systems as as organisms that follow the laws of chemistry and physics and mathematics if you will there's something very unpredictable about human biology and its response to illness so later I started to train in a field called endocrinology for those of you who may not be familiar with that it's the study of hormones and then transferred to the field of neuro endocrinology which is brain chemistry and when I was in my training this was a very interesting time because for the first time as biologists we were addressing the unsolved mystery of consciousness so we're all conscious beings we're sitting here listening to each other our consciousness is responsible for our perception and for our thinking and for our emotions and our thoughts and our feelings and our longings and aspirations our memories and nobody as yet has figured out the mechanics of consciousness it's the one totally unsolved mystery in biology when I was in medical school we had very simple notion of consciousness the human brain or the brain produces consciousness just like your gallbladder produces bile and your pancreas produces pancreatic juice in your stomach makes acid your brain makes thoughts so if you have thoughts and feelings and emotions and imagination it's the dance of molecules but actually the more we understand about the human brain or the brain in general the deeper the mystery of consciousness gets for example your brain is actually more or less like a network of synaptic layers of tracks that have firings electrical firings so right now if I asked you to imagine the sunset can you see one but there's no picture of a sunset in your brain if I go to your brain all L see is some electricity that's all or if I ask you to imagine a sound or ask you to remember something I won't see any images or sounds of textures in the brain all we see is neural networks that fire electricity similarly we have no idea what causes perception for example when you see this color what color is this red right and yet there's no red beam of light coming from here to your eyes some invisible electromagnetic radiation with a particular frequency that has no color it hits your retina it causes generation of electricity which goes to your brain and in your brain there's no red color and you see red so here is the red this is in science since biology is called the hard problem of consciousness there's a soft problem which has been solved which means for every mental activity there is a corresponding neural correlate so if I tell you to imagine a sunset I'll see which part of the brain acts up there is no part of the brain that does not represent some kind of mental activity but how we experience sound touch sight taste and smell how we imagine how we think what is the mechanics of insight or intuition or creativity no one has figured it out a great English scientist by the name of Sir Arthur Eddington he said the best explanation is that something unknown is doing we don't know what we have no idea of the origins of consciousness the materialistic interpretation is not valid anymore there are scientists like Sir Roger Penrose who was the thesis adviser of Stephen Hawking who suggests that consciousness is actually a fundamental activity of the universe at Planck scale space-time geometry Planck scale meaning 10 to the power of minus 33 centimeters or 25 times smaller an order in magnitude than an atom so if you got smaller smaller smaller to Planck scales and to what you might call the basement of the universe everything disappears you end up with a nothingness a void and so the big question is what is this emptiness from where the whole universe is constantly arising and into which it is constantly subsided so people like Penrose and many others in fact we have a conference coming up called sages and scientists at our centre in another 10 days we're bringing together some of the greatest scientists of the world to talk about the mystery of consciousness there's a number of scientists who are suggesting that at Planck scale space-time geometry at that level everything disappears matter energy space time the world of objects and what you get is a field of possibilities which has the fundamental building blocks of the material universe has possibility spin charge space-time gravity but only as possibility not as things themselves and at that level there is also platonic truth which is things like mathematical truths and musical truths and truth goodness beauty harmony evolution and therefore the fundamental levels of the cosmos contain the building both of matter and of mind and that our personal consciousness is a little drop in the ocean of consciousness so you know Sufi mystics like Rumi say you're not just a drop in the ocean you're the ocean in the drop so this is where science is taking us right now that our consciousness that part of us us that manifests as our mind and as our body the projects itself as the body and then the environment is actually non-local non-local means it does not exist in space-time that it exists as a transcendent entity which is outside of space-time so right now as you're listening to me try this as you're listening to me turn your attention to the listener so as you're listening to me just become aware of who's listening and if you feel some kind of awareness the subject of experience that's your soul it's not your mind which might be saying I wish I'd gone to the bathroom before the lecture or whatever else there's a consciousness of presence and awareness in which thoughts come and go in which perceptions come and go in which ideas come and go in which the molecules of your body come and go and so the great wisdom traditions of the world particularly in the East have said hold on to that presence is the only part of you that's real because everything else is is impermanent pattern of behavior of that consciousness so when you were a baby that consciousness was there it's there now it was there when you were a teenager it'll be there when you're an old person and because it's transcendent and does not exist in space-time its eternal and it's part of an impersonal field of awareness which is a field of possibilities which is proliferating with uncertainty because the laws of nature disappear here which is a field of correlation infinite harmony in as part of the universe that's why we call it universe one song okay one symphony it's a field of intentionality it's a field of creativity that's the worldview I hold personally and that's the basis of everything I do whether it's medicine or teaching Business School or teaching people the the principles behind intuition and creativity and all of that that your brain is actually a place that represents events that happen in consciousness and that consciousness is the source of all the things that make us very different in that from other animals in that we have the capacity for self-awareness we ask ourselves questions like Who am I where did I come from you have a soul does God exist a fact that we have insight and intuition and imagination and creativity and freedom of will these are not attributes of neural networks which are basically you know just networks they're neurons they're physical things and networks don't experience time or the past or the future or have aspirations and longings now having said that every event that you experience in consciousness does have a representation in the brain so in the next five minutes I'm going to make your other experts on neuroscience so if if this was your brain let's say you can make a fist the wrist represents the spinal cord okay this part of the thumb the base of the thumb here represents something called the reptilian brain the limbic brain is inside but the reptilian brain is also called the midbrain it evolved around 300 million years ago so if you are close to a reptile and you make a sudden noise or a certain movement the reptile has something called a startle response little if you're very close it'll attack you if you're a little further away it'll slither away and this has become over evolutionary time which has become what is called the fight-or-flight response which means when an animal is threatened it's either attacks or it runs so when I was in medical school the way we remember the functions of the reptilian brain because it has other functions as well where the 4f speeding fighting fleeing and reproduction okay so this is and it's all totally automatic because there's no thinking involved it's reflexive now if you open your fist up like this then you see where my thumb is here this inside of the brain is called the limbic brain which is our emotional brain and when we feel connected then the limbic system is functioning well we experience love and compassion and we experience goodness we experience kindness we experience joy we have equanimity or peace of mind and you can see that when you're having those experiences the limbic brain actually is firing very coherently when you feel disconnected off you feel fearful or you feel threatened then the limbic brain gets totally dis coherent and you experience things like hostility resentments anger fear shame guilt depression the limbic system is not working properly okay this is a hundred million years old the first one is 300 million years old and then you have this huge part this is the cortical brain okay which is only four million years old in evolution so it's brand-new this part of our brain and this part of our brain which as I said is four million years old and it grew explosively in the last fifteen thousand years first with oral language which is using noises to communicate with each other and then with written language which is only five thousand years old which means using squiggles to communicate with each other and now with the internet which is since 1995 commercially only 15 years old we are seeing a very rapid explosive growth of this part of the brain in fact children who play with video games and good that digital technology you can see that the neural networks are growing so fast that it would have taken a hundred years of evolution to do that in a few months so we are now through technology literally seeing the explosive growth of this part of our brain the cortical brain which has self-awareness and can actually override the midbrain and can heal the limbic brain so that one feels positive emotions and this is giving us great insight into where the future of self repair systems because all biological systems know how to heal them self repair self evaluate so since have this opportunity and I don't want to miss it I'm going to just show you a couple of things I'm going to take it can I do that take you through a little bit of meditative experience so put your feet on on the on the ground with your feet firmly planted I sit relatively erect just five minutes and I'll show you the power of consciousness okay and take your hands and open them up and put them in your in your lap like that and close your eyes and bring your awareness first into your heart which is right in the enter of your chest and for a minute or so experience gratitude which is think of all the things for which you are grateful for your family your friends etc all the things that you would count as your blessings now think of people in your life that you feel great love for okay now leave all that and just observe your breath just observe it as it goes in and out and notice that as you observe it it spontaneously starts to slow down and now you can mentally tell your breath to slow down even more slow down now bring your awareness into your heart and see if you can listen to your heartbeat see if you can sense your heartbeat either as a sound or a sensation just focus and see if you can sense your heartbeat as a sound or a sensation and now move your awareness should be heart into your open hands into your fingertips and see if you can bring your heartbeat into your hands can you feel the throbbing of your heartbeat in your hands increase the temperature of your hands see if you can feel some warmth or tingling or throbbing in your fingers now bring your awareness into your face and see if you can transfer your heartbeat to your face and increased blood flow in your face feel some warmth in your cheeks and now just can your total body quickly so go with the limbs the legs the feet the shoulders the knees the hips the spine the neck now bring your awareness into your abdomen into your stomach intestines into your lungs as they expand and contract back into your heart relax into your body and take a minute to open your eyes so I took all of five minutes really no more than five minutes to take you through a series of mental events where you put your attention and had a certain intention how many people could feel that they could hear their heartbeat how many people could transfer it to their hands you know when you did that you altered blood flow and circulation and you actually lowered your blood pressure by 10 to 15 points 80% of drugs are given for that range of hypertension how many people could move the blood into their cheeks against gravity through intention okay so all I'm saying is within five minutes you can use your conscious mind to override your midbrain which means this part which is the fight right response totally you can activate the limbic brain just by thinking of love compassion kindness joy or people in your life and you can literally rewire your whole brain through practice and this is just five minutes of instruction this is a new field in science it's called neuroplasticity and the operating phrases neurons that fire together wire together so you know great Yogi's in India have been doing this for thousands of years where they can change their body temperature just with the flicker of an intention lower their heart rate change body circulation lower blood pressure change autonomic responses and today we are finding out so much about this part of our brain this is cortical brain which is something called the there's this little island there called the insula which is like a hub you know where like say happen Airport terminal like Chicago where all the flights come in and go so the insula is like a hub and it sends messages to all the different parts of the brain and the body and receives messages okay and everything functions as an integrated whole and you can learn to actually influence her to self-regulate that so you're no longer victimized by the midbrain into reactive responses you just stop you watch the impulse and you let it go you activate limbic brain you activate intuition by asking questions you activate creativity by incubating and gathering information so for the first time we have a deep understanding we can watch what's happening in the brain through PET scans and cat scans and with the newer technologies like this for example which I have in my pocket which tells me how many calories I'm expending how much energy I'm using how long I sleep at night you can wear headbands to monitor your brainwaves from a distance and this morning I was at Cisco and I spoke to a hundred countries hundred leaders over 150 leaders in over a hundred countries and through bio regulation and biofeedback training them to rewire their brain for higher consciousness it's no longer mystical it's science the two operating new discoveries in science one is neuroplasticity that just by changing your patterns of inner experience you can rewire your brain and the other is what is called gene regulation after I've finished at Cisco this morning I went to meet dr. Elizabeth Blackburn who got the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2009 to talk about the fact that our so-called genes are not fixed entities you know the human genome has about you have about 23,000 genes there are some worms that have more genes and 65% of your genes are the same as a banana so you know it's not her genes that make us who we are it's how we think how we behave how we consciously learn to live our lives you can change or upregulate 500 genes that code for diseases like heart disease certain types of cancer autoimmune illnesses gene regulation and neuroplasticity are giving us a new idea of the human body it's not a structure it's a process there are no structures in the universe everything is a process and every process occurs in the field of consciousness so based on that I created this course for leaders which is based on inner work and here's my first slide which is that your consciousness which is literally your soul if you will your non-local self is simultaneously manifesting as your moods emotions environmental situation this behavior biology social interactions personal relationships perception and even the environment and nature's forces because nature's forces outside you and nature's forces inside you are the same the same electrical storms that create lightning in the clouds also the same electrical storms create thoughts in your brain there's no difference between the day between nature's forces outside or inside very totally consistent with the eastern wisdom traditions and with that as a basic understanding I created this acronym which is how do you rewire the nervous system to create literally the hardware in the brain for leadership learn and listen look and listen inside so we create something in our leaders called the soul profile you know Howard Gardner who is one of the pioneers in leadership from Harvard Business School you may be familiar with his name because he was the person who originally talked about multiple intelligence so you know most people when they talk about intelligence its IQ well we have musical intelligence we have mathematical intelligence they are body intelligence we have spatial intelligence we have creative intelligence none of which is addressed in our educational systems whatsoever now when I came here and Ming showed me around I could see a lot of very interesting playful creativity in this environment whether it's the the garden outside or you know your Google Maps or just the way things are placed here and decorated here there's a lot of creative playful energy here and that is an extension of the consciousness here you know it's the collective creativity that is manifesting at that so when you look inside your inner world and you ask yourself questions like Who am I what do I want what's my purpose what kind of contribution do I want to make to my family to the world to the community what are my unique skills and talents how do I put them to use what's really fun for me what our peak experiences what do I look for in a good friendship what do I bring to a relationship who are my archetypes my heroes my heroines in history in mythology and religion that kind of reflection starts a process in you that creates a vision automatically and when we do it collectively that vision can be very empowering so based on a soul profile then we create teams that are emotionally bonded with that limbic aliy resonate with each other and that limit system resonating with limbic system this is well known phenomenon now that when you look at teams that win particularly sports teams you know when you see the Super Bowl or whatever it's the teams are pretty close to each other as far as talent is concerned what makes it when is the emotional connection in the team you know do they have emotional intelligence are they're free of toxic emotions like resentments grievances you know as Nelson Mandela once said holding a resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemy so how do you become emotionally free how do you get in touch with your own feelings how do you get in touch with the feelings of others how do you resolve conflicts through creativity Einstein once said no problem can be solved at the level of consciousness at which the problem was created you have to move to the next level of consciousness so that brings us to expanding awareness and understanding both hierarchies of needs and hierarchies of responses the midbrain acts just through fight/flight the limbic brain can act through emotional dysfunction reactivity you know the controlling and manipulating a situation either by being nice or being nasty or being indifferent or playing the victim and we learn these habits very early in childhood so when you're about three years of age and you're out shopping with your mother and you want a lollipop and she says no I I'm not going to do that because you've got one yesterday what do you do first thing you says you play nice mommy I love you I'll give you a kiss will you please buy me the lollipop and if she doesn't and the second thing what do you do you play nasty you throw a tantrum you lie down hoping to embarrass her you still don't get the lollipop then you go home and she can't find you you're hiding in the closet and she says aren't you going to come for lunch and you say leave me alone you pout you see you get stubborn indifferent and if that doesn't work you finally go to your mother and you say you play the victim you nice to my brothers and sisters you're not nice to me so by now she's fed up and she gives you the lollipop and your little brain says it works and by the time we are 8 years of age and this is I'm not exaggerating this is these are psychological studies the average leader is an emotionally male at the age of eight years because the average leader reacts either from the mid rate or the dysfunctional limbic brain if you can go beyond those two you have what is called centered awareness where you're present where you're mindful you know we have somebody here from mindfulness Without Borders where we're teaching this nonprofit organization is going across the world teaching people young children mindfulness to be aware of the moment to be aware of what's happening in their body to be aware of their breath to be aware of their environment but also to be aware of their inner world their feelings their inner images their thoughts their ideas and all so easy to teach so when you have access to this and you go beyond fight/flight and reactive responses you stop being controlling and manipulative through being either nice or nasty or indifferent or stubborn or playing the victim then you have access to higher states of consciousness intuition which is a form of intelligence that is contextual relational holistic nurturing doesn't have a win-lose orientation goes beyond cause effect because it eavesdropped on context and when you have context then you have creativity true creativity can never be programmed into a computer because there's no algorithm for creativity okay true creativity comes from the discontinuity it comes from your soul and Beyond creativity is eavesdropping on the higher mind the bigger mind that is in a way correlating everything in the ecosystem we are part of an ecosystem the world is our extended body and so when you see the contexts the meanings the relationships the archetypal themes that run the bigger context you have creativity higher vision a sense of mystery sacredness and then only then you can dare to dream and take action so we start as human beings then you become human feelings than human thinking's and finally human doings where our world is totally the opposite everybody is doing doing doing there's very little thinking it's mostly about me there's hardly any feeling and it's mostly dysfunctional and there's no being so wisdom traditions say the highest state of human intelligence is being just being the second highest state of human intelligence is the feeling that we call love and compassion the third highest state of human intelligence is the thinking that is creative that can create new meanings new contexts new relationships and new themes and the least intelligent state of being is doing but finally when you do you do it on the basis of being feeling thinking what in Eastern traditions we call karma yoga the right thing at the right time process orientation about and not outcome orientation empowerment leaders know how to empower themselves and empower others and we find that people who feel empowered they have three major characteristics one they have great self-esteem they don't confuse self-image with self-esteem self-image is what other people think of you self-esteem kumkum ghost comes from a deeper level by asking the questions that are asked earlier great leaders have great self-esteem they have values they live up to their values and they use their strengths now as part of Gallup as a senior scientist there we actually all know what our strengths are so for example if you ask me what are your strengths I would say I'm a futuristic person I look into the future I'm adaptable I feel connected and I like to connect other people I maximize the use of my energy and not don't waste it and I'm strategic these are my five strengths but you know when we work with teams we identify everybody strengths and then we create teams that complement each other's strengths so when you have teams that complement each other's friends where everybody expresses their you big strength you have powerful leadership at Gallup we also found out that if the people do you work with so if your manager for example your immediate superior if he or she ignores you your rate of disengagement goes up by forty five percent twenty percent of the u.s. workforce is not only disengaged they're actively disengaged which means they come to work unhappy and with the express purpose of making other people unhappy okay that's twenty percent there's another forty five percent that are disengaged they come to work because they have to make a living the punch in and the punch out but they're not interested in what they're doing between the disengaged and the actively disengaged the cost to the US economy is about three hundred and eighty billion dollars a year if your supervisor or manager doesn't ignore you but criticizes you your disengagement actually falls to twenty percent which means your performance improves because you would rather be criticized than ignored you don't exist when you're ignored now you're being criticized you at least exist on the other hand if you are using your strengths and somebody acknowledges your strengths and notices your strengths and complements your strength your disengagement falls to less than one percent so this has huge economic implications our career well-being in the United States more people die on Monday morning at 9 o'clock than any other time of heart attacks this is an extraordinary accomplishment for which only the human species can take credit there is no other animal that knows the difference between Monday and Tuesday and so you know career well-being is dependent on very simple things are you using your strengths do you have friends that you work with are you playful do you have a good time do you have self esteem and then you know this career well-being is linked to social well-being we found at Gallup this not making up this data if you have a happy friend your happiness goes up by 15% if you're happy that friend has a happy friend whom you don't know it goes up by another 10% if you're happy friends happy friend has a happy friend whom you don't know goes up another 10% so why is this it's because consciousness is a field it's a field just like electricity is a field you know Werner Heisenberg one of the original developers of quantum physics he said consciousness is a singular that has no plural just like the same electricity is coming through my blackberry and through your computer and through this light a single consciousness is expressing itself through all the diversity of living organisms and that's why when you want to connect we feel love and compassion of the highest truths we feel happy so Google the perfect place to create networks of global happiness you know where people actually know how to make each other happy and there's a lot of research on that again from Gallup you know you are happy when you find a creative solution when you find meaning and purpose when you make somebody else happy when instead of a problem you see an opportunity so you know we know all the science the statistics behind it and how happiness actually is brings on neuro chemistry of immunomodulation your immune system your endocrine system your thoughts your feelings and your biology is an integrated network of energy and information and your mind as that process your mind is a process that regulates the flow of energy and information not only in your body but in your relationships so mind is an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information and now the mind is entangled you know because of the internet because of Technology because of Google we have an entangled mind you know what's happening in Egypt is affecting us and what's happening here is affecting people in Afghanistan its entangled both in space and in time because through culture and through history and through religion and mythology our mind is entangled with the past it's entangled with the few it's entangled with each other when we begin to understand entanglement and the power of entanglement we have the means to use technology for create creative problem-solving right now if I were to say there are four problems in the world that really need to be addressed immediately one is conflict war terrorism the second is ecology devastated ecology the third is radical poverty where you live in a world where 50% of people live on less than $2 a day 20% on less than $1 a day you can never have social justice and peace unless we address this and the interesting thing is we have the collective creativity the collective intelligence to actually solve these problems to me technology now is the solution combined with a higher consciousness that feels connected and responsible because action without love is meaningless and love without action is totally irrelevant where when you combine the two and you use technology and the understanding of entanglement there is no problem that we cannot solve and you know technology is also unstoppable if you if you are following the growth of technology you'll know that technology the capacity of Technology is doubling every year the internet became commercially available in 1995 we are in 2010 15 years and see where we are I can go on a computer with my little gadgets and see how my friends across the world how they are sleeping how well they're sleeping how well they rested what their cardiovascular system is what their brainwaves are doing and we help each other to grow to evolve to to hear to self-regulate and all the data shows that when we come together to do these things we are enormous ly successful because we are empowering each other we take responsibility then for calculated risks taking initiative and solving problems and doing it playfully and creatively and finally we understand synchronicity you know one of the persons to talk about synchronicity when you examine the lives of great leaders say tell me how did you become so successful and you know this work has been done by porous and Collins and by others almost everybody says I was lucky or they say I happen to be in the right place at the right time or they say if they're religious they say God was on my side or it seemed the state of grace or it was many coincidences well called young the Swiss psychologist and Wolfgang Pauli the pioneer in quantum physics they actually talked about synchronicity as a fundamental property in the universe where at-at the most transcendent level everything is happening all at once you know there's no linearity in the universe how does a human body which has a hundred trillion cells each of them doing a hundred thousand activities per second keep track of every other cell instantly how does a human body think thoughts player piano kill jumps remove toxins make a baby instantly all at the same time the sub mysteries that are yet to be solved I think we are moving to an era where we are going to understand non-local intelligence transcendent intelligence soul or spirit as the primary activity of the universe that operates synchronistically and when you extend your boundaries when you take away your labels you know if you take away every label you've given yourself then you are an infinite consciousness you know field of possibilities and you start to see the environment as an extension of yourself this environment is very good actually it feels very good because you can see it's an extension of your collective psyche and your collective consciousness so that in a nutshell is the basics of what I think the future of leadership should be that consciously we should create and rewire our nervous system so that through what is called long term potentiation we firing the neurons to wire the neurons to actually make leadership second nature to us but true leadership where we unfold our potential we unfold the potential of others for greatness and we use the principles of higher consciousness to heal ourselves and to heal the world and no one is in a better position than you guys because you're really laying down the neural networks of the planetary mind that is evolving right now you know the planetary mind is evolving and boundaries are breaking whether there are national boundaries or ethnic boundaries or religious boundaries they're going to break it's unstoppable and this is the divine manifesting through us as our technologies a planetary mind thank you very much [Applause] sure we have about ten minutes so there's a microphone at the back if you can step up to the microphone that'd be fantastic thank you for coming I have a question I as I'm listening to you today I'm bringing that to some of the events that I see going on in the world and some of those are very help hopeful obviously we just happen in Egypt and what's happening through Middle East is a great example where this is coming together but then as I think more locally to our nation and our leadership I really see that going in a very bad direction and use of propaganda and technology and just poor poor leadership I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that if you remember what I said in the beginning the leader represents the collective consciousness there we can't blame the leader we are we are the creators of the leaders so you know in Mattapan Gandhi's word words can you be the change you want to see in the world and you know I am a very careful observer of what's happening in political leadership in Washington for every congressman there are 28 lobbyists just for health care there are 14 lobbyists for every congressman special interest groups military-industrial complex pharmaceutical companies manufacturers of equipment but I can tell you what's going to happen is because of the new technologies in a way the democratization of media is happening the media right now is totally controlled by special interest groups but as we begin to create our own media and democratized media as we have television networks on the internet if people create their own content and if the content is good reaches critical mass you will see a turn but it'll take a while it takes a generation to do this so I agree with you would you say we're kind of right now headed in the wrong direction and it'll turn around or do you actually just disagree with me and you think no I think there's a lot of creativity at work and as the creativity unleashes itself the darkness also tries to keep up with it and there's this a time of what we call phase transition you know water comes to steam that's a transition there's a lot of boiling in the cauldron well thank you for your work here and positive force thank you sir yeah thank you very much for coming you know here we it is a great place and I know we all very much enjoy working here but at the same time we're all extremely busy and and I think we often have very little time to even reflect on what consciousness is or even attend talks like this and I think most of us start early in the morning run run around meetings all day write code and late at night we're still thinking about our job and in creating all this you know goodness that we're doing here but what's your advice for us to kind of sometimes break out of that mold you know smell the roses as you said I would say and I can give you data to prove this by the way that from Gallup where we gather this kind of data that in an environment like this which is very ambitious but also very creative take time to play during the day you know find time to get together to be playful to speak to each other to exercise to reflect to meditate doesn't it take that but take 20 minute break make it part of your policy from what I know in Google you guys participate in a lot of decision-making and you should do that you should you know get together as groups and create some rituals rituals of playfulness rituals of reflection rituals of exercise rituals of mind body stuff and it's Tai Chi or yoga or breathing techniques and you your productivity will go up I mean there's no question that productivity goes up according to Gallup we should be socializing six hours every day and that includes at work which means purposeless activity playful activity but if you actually look at probably all of our calendars are just completely full all the time change it if there's any place where it can be changed as here all right thank you because you have a collective voice you talked about letting go of labels and just being can you give us some examples of how to do that I'm a daughter I'm a sister I'm a friend I'm an employee so your sister you're a friend you're a daughter you work here these are the many masks these are the many roles that your spirit plays so when you observe your different draws that you play you recognize there's a part of you that is not the roles it's taken on that role in a day I play many roles I play the role of a doctor of a teacher or writer of a son or a father but I have learned to reflect and watch myself another great Indian teacher Krishnamurti is to say the highest form of human intelligence is the ability to observe yourself without judging yourself so the more you observe yourself without labeling yourself the more you'll realize that actually you're a field of possibility at your fundamental core being and these roles are great and you should play them well but if you get sucked into the melodrama of the role then you lose your spirit thank you and I have a question that comes from my mom and my wonderful mom this is her question what's the best way to imagine what you want without ever having the experience of it well all imagination comes from some kind of memory either personal or archetypal or collective the best raw material for imagination is mythology because mythology represented the Widman with the word myth in English is related to the word mata or mother or mat Rica or matter or meter or time or measurement or music these all words that come from myth so what's myth it's the collective imagination of our ancestors that has lived through time and when I was a little child my mother would read to me stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana because that was the imagination of the impossible you know the monkey-god flying in the air with the Himalayas in his hands it stretches your imagination but read the Bible and you'll see it's archetypal the myths the stories of Moses or David or Goliath or or Joshua or read the Greek mythology the Egyptian mythology that's where the raw materials of our imagination exist but now they're extending into outer space as well Princess Leia Luke Skywalker Darth Vader yeah so you know there is no other place to enrich your mythology then the stories of the collective mind right civility so thank you dr. Chopra for will be a coming to Google and elevating our collective consciousness in a short time and you heard this advice please go out and socialize or play thank you [Applause]

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 118,319

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, The Soul of Leadership, Deepak Chopra, deepak chopra meditation, deepak chopra sleep meditation, meditation, what is to soul of leadership

Id: oJ4hL9a_VB0

Length: 63min 54sec (3834 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2011