Most Replayed Moment: 6 Daily Habits That Expose Your Fake Values - Deepak Chopra

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Deepak Chopra: So, in your life, if someone dies—God forbid—do you suffer, grieve? Grief is a natural process and has a life cycle. You don't hold on to it; in fact, you embrace it. Anytime you recoil or deny, resistance creates even more stress. What we call stress is resistance to existence in the moment. If you don't resist the experience in the moment, it's passing by.

So, something really bad happens at work. Your boss tells you you're fired. The mindset required to avoid suffering in that case is not a mindset; it's a step in awareness. The awareness that the mind is not "you." Who is it that knows a thought? That's what you need to shift to.

Once you shift from the experience to the awareness in which the experience is happening, you're independent of it. That's what the eight limbs of yoga are about. It's a process, a shift in identity—from your assumed self to your fundamental self, which is infinite, without cause, not subject to birth and death, spaceless, timeless, incomprehensible, irreducible, and fundamental.

It feels almost like I'm stepping out of myself and looking at myself. Correct? Looking at the projection of myself. You're looking at the projection of yourself, which is very hard to do—looking at your avatar. And it's very hard to do because we're increasingly becoming avatars, especially with things like social media.

We've been reinforced—like, "I have two million followers, a million followers, 500,000 followers." That's following my avatar. So we don't know who we are. You confuse yourself with the avatar, and the battle is all between avatars wanting importance. How does one resign from that battle and take back my peace?

Actually, the opposite of that is creativity. Creativity is the opposite of determinism. If you don't want to be a biological robot or an algorithm—which is what we are now, biological algorithms, biological robots—and that's part of our evolution. It's not something bad; all animals have it, but animals have an advantage. They live in the present moment. But you and I have an imagination that can see into the future, that can even look at death as the culmination of this life experience. We regret the past. We anticipate the future. We're never in the present. But the present is the only place we are right now. There's no way to escape it, but in our imagination, we escape it.

The worst use of imagination is stress. The best use of imagination is creativity. Creativity is a disruption in the algorithm. It's a discontinuity. Fundamental creativity—not usual innovation, like an iPhone 13 instead of an iPhone 12 with a better camera. That's not what creativity is. Creativity is a death and a resurrection. It's a death of context, meaning, relationship, and story, and a new meaning, relationship, and story. Whether that's Einstein coming up with the theory of relativity, or quantum physicists breaking every rule we knew in Newtonian physics, or a great piece of art like Beethoven's Fifth. These are original. Fundamental creativity is a disruption in the algorithm.

To this idea of my avatar getting into this sort of avatar war with other avatars, my antidote to that is my own creativity. Your own creativity. Every moment, you have a choice to repeat the past or be a pioneer of creativity for the future. And that happens individually and collectively. We change worldviews. The world is not flat anymore. The ground is not stationary anymore. The world is not material anymore. Every technology you use is based on the new idea that the essential nature of the physical world is not physical.

If I could see you as you really are, I see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots and some random electrical discharges. At the most fundamental level, there are no boundaries. Boundaries are perceptual. When we experience spiritual ecstasy, which is ineffable, there are no boundaries. That's why people in near-death experiences, people with psychedelic experiences, people with peak experiences—athletes, musical performances, any break from ordinary reality—is ineffable and healing. That's why the recent resurgence in psychedelics is very interesting because it takes you away from your identity of being squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime.

Point number four of the five points of suffering is confusing your selfie with yourself, your ego identity. We've talked about that. And number five is death. But all of them have one solution: find out who you are. How does one find out who they are? Through transcendence. There's no system of thought—religion, philosophy, or science—that will get you into knowing true reality because systems of thought are just that: systems of thought. What is it that gives rise to thought? That is what you want to know. That's been the eternal quest in spiritual traditions.

I'm not talking about religious dogma or ideology. These days, it's very fashionable for people to say, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." It means the same thing. When you have a spiritual experience, number one, transcendence—you find your identity beyond space and time. Number two, emergence of platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, named after Plato—or love, compassion, joy, equanimity. And number three, loss of the fear of death. That's Jesus, Muhammad, Rumi, Buddha—every luminary you can study since people created systems of thought.

So, what's the easiest way to track? There's someone listening to this right now—they're driving up the motorway, they're a lorry driver. Take some time every day to be unoccupied. Even spiritual pursuit is an occupation. Take a little bit of time every day to sit quietly. I think it was Kafka or somebody who said all of humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly and do nothing. We'd rather electrocute ourselves. We're always doing, doing, doing. We have human doings; we're not human beings anymore.

So, if I take—I pull over the lorry that I'm driving up the motorway—and I say, "Do you know what Deepak told me? To take some time for myself." So I sit in the lorry for 15 minutes every day. How is that going to help me to transcend? It starts a process. You begin to ask yourself, "Who am I?" Reflect on these questions every day: "Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? What am I grateful for? Who am I without these constructs?" It's a big mystery, right? Who you are. Ultimately, you realize you're the awareness in which all experience happens. But you're not the experience. The experience is in time. You are not in time. And this requires a different kind of education. It's not part of our culture. It used to be part of cultures.

If you read Plato and The Republic, you'll see that this was part of every culture, but it was few luminaries. People romanticize even about this in India's spiritual country. Well, India's been violent forever—a few luminaries, the sages of the Upanishads. Then we have romance around them. Greek culture—you know, "Oh, the Greeks were the most civilized in the world." Well, yes, Socrates and Parmenides and Pythagoras, and I can name a few, but the rest of the country—even in those times—they had slavery, they had sexism, they had the source of the Olympics where they used to sacrifice humans. And you know, we're still performing it even in our days—we're still repeating that cycle with what you call cheerleaders, the virgin vessels of the past. We haven't changed much.

What else in terms of starting your day? Daily habits. Number one is sleep. Now, we know by the way that lack of sleep is the number one predictor of premature death from cardiovascular disease. Lack of sleep is also a predictor of Alzheimer's. Lack of sleep interferes with your creativity. Lack of sleep causes inflammation. So that's for sure. Number two, I think, is any practice that quiets the mind—meditation, reflection, contemplation, sitting quietly, watching your breath, etc. Number three is exercise. Number four is mind-body coordination—that's different than regular exercise. Yoga practice and martial arts, breathing practices, Tai Chi, Qigong—they actually activate a different part of your nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system, which causes self-regulation in the body. So it's not just exercise; it's something that puts mind and body together—even gymnastics or things like judo. And I mentioned martial arts, but yoga is my practice.

Then, your emotional and physical environment, your social environment, because we live as social beings. So if you have toxic relationships, it's going to cause physical toxicity. Then nutrition—we now know that food that causes inflammation, refined, manufactured, processed food with chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, insecticides, pesticides—it's poison. It's like putting Agent Orange in your body. So organic food, farm to table, maximum diversity of plant-based foods. Now we know a lot about micronutrients. We know about biological rhythms. But ultimately, I think spiritual experience is very important because no matter what you do, no matter how healthy you are, there is old age, there is infirmity, and there is death. So unless you face those right head-on when you're healthy—not when you're in a crisis, not when somebody dies in your family—then everybody panics.

I had a crisis in my life when I was six years old. My father was in England; he was training to be a cardiologist. I was living with my grandfather. One day, we got a telegram that my father had passed all his exams; he was now a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians—big deal in those days. We got a telegram. My grandfather wanted to celebrate. So he took me and my little brother to a carnival, then to a movie—I even remember the movie: Alibaba and the 40 Thieves. Then we went to a fancy restaurant, and then in the middle of the night, he died. And they took him for cremation, brought his ashes back in a little jar, about the size of this coffee cup, a little bigger. And one of my uncles said, "What happened? Yesterday he was taking the kids to a carnival, and today he's a bunch of ashes."

My little brother—he was four years old—he started to lose his skin. His skin started peeling off. I went into a panic, and my uncles took my brother to every physician. They couldn't find a diagnosis until somebody said, "You know, he's missing his parents. He's feeling vulnerable. He's losing his skin, shedding his skin because that's a metaphor for his vulnerability. He'll be fine when his parents come back." And sure enough, as soon as they came, my brother was healed.

At six years old, I had an existential crisis. Went on to become a doctor. But what happens? You go to medical school, the first thing you see is a corpse. You're supposed to understand life by dissecting a body. You know, it's the way we're trained. You start off by looking at a human being as an anatomical structure rather than a process in consciousness. So it took me a long time—you know, going through medical school, training, myself going through crises, smoking, addictive behavior, alcohol. I remember resuscitating a patient, putting a pacemaker, putting him on a respirator, and then going outside to smoke a cigarette. And then I was disgusted with myself. I threw away my cigarette. That evening, I threw away the scotch, and I decided that I wanted to understand who I am.

If you made you prime minister or president of the world, you know, if there was one significant change you could make to lead us more towards that better future of enlightenment? I would say an education that does not sacrifice self-awareness. We have information overload right now. I don't need information overload. I can Google it or now go to ChatGPT or something like that. What I need to know is, "Who am I?" How do you feel about ChatGPT? It's good. I think it's very good. And I think it's unavoidable also. I actually went to a demonstration recently by Microsoft on something that's coming soon. It's called Prometheus. It's way beyond ChatGPT. Interesting. It put most of us physicians out of business because it makes the best diagnosis, gives the best information. What happens then in terms of your purpose and your meaning?

Well, we have more time for creativity—fundamental creativity to create joy in the world. I think the essential message is, if you're not joyful, you wasted your life. I see entrepreneurs all the time, young guys coming up to me with amazing ideas, but they're talking about exit strategy before they've started the business. It's like dividing the loot before there's a train to rob. But they're already talking, and we're living in a hustle culture. You know, I have five exits. You keep exiting, exiting, exiting, and you're still hustling, and you're dying. And that's the final exit. You're still a hustler. So I say make joy and self-understanding, self-awareness, the fundamental purpose of existence, and everything else will follow.

Where's your joy? Where do you derive it from? The fact that I exist and I'm aware of existence—that's a perpetual surprise to me. I was looking at emotions and what's the healthiest emotion you can have? It's not love, it's not compassion. It's not even joy. It's awe. It's wonder. Why do we exist? And why do we have the awareness that we exist? If you're perpetually surprised and full of wonder and joy, you return to innocence. And what we've lost to this world today is the loss of innocence. How do I get my innocence back? Are you married? I'm in love. Okay, well, when you have a child, you'll see it—you'll see it. A child is spontaneous, in the moment, joyful—unless it's wet or hungry, but that's a different situation. But it's joyful, looking. I was the other day in a train—you know, from Orlando airport to baggage claim. Everybody was stressed in the train, wearing masks, panicked. A mother on the phone, full of anxiety. And she had a little baby in the crib. And this baby was looking around in total amazement. Finally, it caught my eyes and gave the most amazing smile. And the whole room lighted up, just looking at that innocence. We have lost our innocence. And we take it away from our children.

You know, children love laughter. They love stories. They love surprises. They love to play peekaboo. When's the last time you were surprised? I can't recall being surprised. When I feel I want some joy, I just look at children playing. Is there a way to bring that joy back into our lives as a practice? That innocence? Play. Play. Not drama. As adults, play is seen as a waste of time. No, play is when you find creativity and joy. I'm not talking about drama. I'm talking about play. Play for the sake of play. Now, even sports has become competitive. But when you played because you were playing, when a musician is playing, they're not thinking of the end. When you're singing a song, you're not thinking of the ending of the song. You're in the song. When you become the song, when you become that which you're playing, when the music and the musician become one, when the knower and the known become one, when the observer and the observed become one, when the lover and the beloved become one—that's transcendence, that's joy, that's play.

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Steven Bartlett: What you just listened to was a most-replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

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