Deepak Chopra unpacks the nature of reality: from consciousness, to making meaning, to what happens after death. He shares a blueprint for awakening through transcending the 5 Kleshas, overcoming limiting beliefs, and expanding your perception. Deepak also dives deep into the reality infinite multiverses, the divine lila, and how to create joy in your life. Drawing from his research on AI, he weighs the possible dangers & benefits to our ever-expanding technology.Try MUDWTR & Get Up to 43% off + a free frother:https://mudwtr.com/knowthyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro 1:23 Who You Are At Your Core3:47 The 5 Kleshas That Hold Us Back From Knowing Ourselves8:10 Going Beyond Our Limited Perception 17:05 Awakening to Your True Nature21:00 Is Commodifying Spirituality Wrong?23:18 The Mystical Side of Our Memories29:17 How His Perception on Consciousness Evolved34:28 The Fabric of Reality & Multiverses40:11 Ad: Mudwtr - Energy & focus without the jitters41:29 Transform Any Challenge Into an Opportunity 45:06 Practices to Bring Joy Into Your Life47:47 What Happens When We Die54:57 The Danger & Potential of AI1:02:58 Nature of Reality & the Divine Lila1:05:29 Cultivating our True Power1:09:42 Conclusion___________Episode Resources: https://www.deepakchopra.com/https://www.instagram.com/deepakchopra/https://www.youtube.com/@TheChopraWellhttps://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyself.oneListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX
Chapter 1: What is your true nature?
That's who you are. Our technological evolution has outpaced our emotional and spiritual evolution. Therefore, we are in a dangerous phase. We have medieval minds and modern capacities. On the other hand, you can reverse climate change. You can get rid of war, chronic disease. The choice is ours. So this whole thing is a lucid dream in a vivid now. And it's ungraspable. Wake up to who is dreaming.
And that which is dreaming never left home.
Chapter 2: What are the 5 Kleshas that hold us back from knowing ourselves?
Deepak, you have been and been called a spiritual teacher, a guide, a healer, a scientist. You've blended ontology and cosmology. You've really been a bridge for East and West in so many ways. If I were to ask you in this day and age right now, with no labels, no titles, who are you most fundamentally? How would you answer that question?
I am nothing conceivable or perceivable. And so are you. Nothing perceivable or conceivable. If you want to expand on that, you are awareness. Or consciousness, I use the word synonymously. So consciousness has no form. You can't see it, right? Because it's what it's seeing. And because it has no form, it has no border. Anything that has form has a border.
But consciousness has no form, so it has no border. Because it has no border, it's infinite. It's spaceless, it's timeless, it's irreducible. It is incomprehensible, but without it, there's no comprehension. You can't conceive it, you can't imagine it, you can't perceive it, but without it, there's no conception or perception or imagination. So who am I?
I am the inconceivable and the imperceivable that makes all perception and all conception possible. Which leads to another big, actually amazing idea, which is that anything that's perceivable or conceivable, anything that you can see, touch, taste, smell, think about, imagine, conceptualize, is not real. So whatever you look around here is not real, including your body.
I do think how form is informed by the formless. Yes. And in many ways, the path of self-realization is called that because it's awakening to something that already is, as opposed to acquisition of something which we in the Western mind is more familiar with.
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Chapter 3: How can we go beyond our limited perception?
Yeah, you never left it.
So in that perspective, it's removing what's in the way of what already is. And the yogic or kind of Sanskrit perspective on this is the five kleshas.
Yes.
Could you share a little bit about that? And what is the barrier in between us and the continued recognition of virtue nature?
So, of course, you know, the five glaciers has been interpreted by so many people and from their level of comprehension. Here's I would have rephrase or phrase or repeat what the five glaciers have been expressed as the idea. So the first klesha is not knowing the difference between perceived and fundamental reality. So perceived reality is this, form.
And fundamental reality is formless because you can't have form without the formless. That's the first klesha. Not knowing the difference between reality and illusion. Ignorance. Ignorance. The second klesha is grasping and clinging at experience, which is ephemeral, transient, and essentially ungraspable. Because by the time you hear my words, they don't exist.
So how do you grasp? You can't. So in many ways, clinging to something that is inherently impermanent and ever-changing.
And don't be clinged at. It's like holding on to your breath, you'll suffocate. If I ask you to hold on to your breath, after a while you'll suffocate. So if you hold on to anything, you'll suffocate, basically.
And that creates a barrier to intimacy with life because...
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Chapter 4: What happens when we die?
Chapter 5: What is the connection between consciousness and reality?
is also an experience in consciousness. You see, when you say there are neural correlates, you're looking at them on a CAT scan or whatever technology, but that experience is happening in consciousness. So when people say science of consciousness, that's also misleading. There's no science of consciousness. Science is an activity in consciousness.
So science is a methodology in consciousness, and so is philosophy, so is religion, so is any system of thought. And here is something that is really very important for spiritual seekers is that it doesn't matter what you're reading, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda or, you know, Ramana Maharishi or Deepak Chopra or whoever, that's not going to give you any realization.
No system of thought is going to give you realization. No system. Religion, philosophy, science. Because they're systems of thought conceived in consciousness. So only direct experience can give you access to reality. Not religion, not philosophy, not science.
It's really important what you're saying because especially for spiritual seekers, those that study through philosophy, science, religion... It's good in the beginning because you see that people have wondered about these things and they've come to conclusions, but their conclusions will not help you. They might point the way, like a map, you know, so... Yeah, and there are many maps.
You know, if I want to go from New York to Boston, I can take a train, I can take the road, I can take a steamship, I can take a helicopter, I can take an airplane. But those are all maps. You have to experience the territory.
Have there been times where you've identified overly with the conceptual knowledge rather as the lived experience of what you're teaching?
There was a time, and it was very frustrating because... Also, what it does is, you know, in spiritual tradition, they talk about the dark night of the soul. So the dark night of the soul is basically everything that you thought about reality is untrue. But even worse than that, everything that you thought about who you are is also untrue.
So that is a trigger to losing your habitual certainties, number one. And those certainties were the anchor of your existence. I am a person. There's no such thing, okay? I have a body. No such thing. I have a mind. No such thing. I live in a universe. No such thing. That can give you the heebie-jeebies, as they say.
But if you stay with it, then once you jump off the abyss, it's like crossing the event horizon. You know, in modern cosmology, we talk about event horizon. So if I, you know, give you a metaphor, if you throw a coin or any object across the event horizon, which is, say, 12 kilometers away from the black hole, you throw it, and you're watching this from the outside.
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Chapter 6: How does memory influence our perception of reality?
Chapter 7: What is the role of AI in our understanding of consciousness?
Chapter 8: How can we cultivate joy in our lives?
You lose your identity because you thought you were like this entity, this skin encapsulated ego squeezed into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime. When you realize that is an experience in you, rather than you are an experience in the body, the body is an experience in you. Rather than the fact that you are in the universe, the universe is in you, and that you is not a person.
Okay, so that is, in the beginning, very scary.
But it's liberating.
Once you take the jump, it's liberating. And it can't be described. That's why, you know, the yogic traditions, you seem to know yoga. There is, you know, the yamas and the niyamas. And the last niyama is called Ishwar Pranidhana, which means surrender to the incomprehensible. Because you can't figure it out. You cannot figure it out conceptually. Because anything you conceive is wrong.
Anything you perceive is wrong. My perception tells me the Earth is flat. Nobody believes that anymore. My perception tells me that this ground we're sitting on is stationary, spinning at dizzying speeds and hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour. My perception tells me you're a three-dimensional solid figure, but you're proportionately as void as intergalactic space.
If I could see you through God's eyes, I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots, maybe some pixels. But even those pixels and those random dots and spots are made of emptiness. So... Therefore, everything I perceive is a magical lie, is a total lie. And then my conceptions are based on my perceptions, which are human perceptions.
What does the world look like to a dragonfly with 30,000 eyes? which can see 360 degrees all the time? What does it look like to a chameleon whose eyeballs swivel on two different axes? To a snake that navigates infrared? To a butterfly that knows ultraviolet? Through a bird that navigates through electromagnetic radiation? So what's the real world look like? It's a silly question.
There's no such thing. There's no real world and there's no real look. It depends on who's looking and what they're using to do the looking, which means the brain, the conditioned mind and the eyes. So, you know, seeing is not happening in the eyes. There's no picture of me in the eyes. It's not happening in the brain. It's happening in something that is beyond our comprehension.
that is non-conceptual, non-perceivable, ultimately you surrender to it. Ishwar Pranidhana, the fifth one. Surrender to the divine mystery. And, you know, Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of all time, lived at Princeton just past a few years ago. He said, God is what mind becomes when it goes beyond the threshold of our comprehension. If you can comprehend it, it's not God.
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