Pinker’s refusal to call consciousness a miracle is a necessary defense of logic against the temptation of spiritual shortcuts. He reminds us that a gap in our current knowledge is not an invitation to invent the supernatural.
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의식을 기적으로 봐야 할까요?Añadido:
Consciousness uh consists in [music] brain activity. 86 billion neurons, possibly 100 trillion synapses. You don't say I'm the brain. This means there is somebody beyond that. We don't look at brain as something different. It is just body with a different levels [music] of functionality. We know that when a person dies, their consciousness goes out of existence. Consciousness is that which is the very basis of our creation. Oh, where is the proof? Well, I am the proof. I don't believe in miracles.
Extra sensory [music] perception, uh we know it doesn't exist.
An entity that we cannot perceive [music] through sense perception.
This is what we refer to as consciousness. Science should never conclude what we [music] do not know cannot exist.
>> [music] >> So, before we decided what should we talk about and after going through Dr. Pinker's profile, uh we went back and forth on what title we should keep.
So, Dr. Pinker chose Is consciousness a miracle? We were giving him consciousness a miracle. So, he just put a question mark on that. And you tweeted last night, so I'd love to hear from you what in your view consciousness means and why the question mark.
Yeah, there is a Some of you may have heard of Betteridge's law of headlines, which is that in a newspaper or magazine, any headline that begins with a question mark has the answer no.
Uh and I think that would that applies to our at least to to uh my opinion of the resolution for today, the the the question. Is consciousness a miracle?
No.
So, what What is consciousness?
Uh well, as uh Louis Armstrong was once asked uh to define jazz, and he said, "If you have to ask, you'll never know."
Uh So, we all know what consciousness is.
It is our waking awareness. It is uh the experience that we are all having uh right at this moment. Is consciousness a miracle? Uh no, and here's why. With consciousness uh is uh consists of patterns of activity in the brain.
Uh we can be a bit more specific, but I won't go go into the detail, but there's reason to think that it can be uh specified as uh rhythmic synchronized patterns of activity, perhaps in the uh the the gamma range or higher, involving loops between the thalamus, prefrontal cortex, uh parietal uh cortex, and and other brain regions. Why do we think that? Well, findings in neuroscience that go back almost a century or more, uh my compatriot Dr. Wilder Penfield, a Montreal neurosurgeon, there's a street named after him now, uh >> [clears throat] >> found that during neurosurgery, when the brain was exposed, part of the skull removed, as we all know, the brain has no pain receptors, so that uh brain surgery can be done while the patient is conscious, and he found that when he stimulated the cortex with electrode, he could cause the patient to have a vivid life-like experience. They could think that they were at at a their 8-year-old birthday party, for example.
So, electricity causes consciousness, not a miracle.
Uh drugs cause cause uh affect consciousness. That's why we take mood-altering drugs, or whether recreational or uh therapeutic.
Uh if So, chemistry causes consciousness.
Uh if if a part of the brain is removed through surgery because of a tumor uh in uh through a head injury or a stroke, then a part of consciousness is affected, and the person may lose the experience of uh seeing color or recognizing objects, or even envisioning themselves at some future time, depending on where the lesion is.
Uh This is not just a a correlate, but we know that brain the intact brain wiring is necessary for consciousness.
It's not just uh two things happening at the same time, because if a part of the brain is damaged, the person no longer uh has the corresponding experience. And say if the optic nerve is cut, the person's blind.
Um We also know that if we allow the brain to uh function normally, that the patterns of activity that correspond to consciousness are increasingly capable of being read, that any conscious experience has a corresponding brain signature. And through functional magnetic resonance imaging and machine learning, uh we're getting closer and closer to be able being able to read out someone's consciousness from their pattern of brain activity. Again, not not a miracle.
Uh it's uh the patterns of electromagnetic um uh signatures from blood flow. All of these are physical entities and picked up by a very strong magnet, another physical entity, and we can see what the person is thinking.
Uh you might be skeptical that the brain as a physical object is capable of supporting consciousness, given how uh mind-bogglingly intricately complex human thought, perception, emotion is.
But >> [clears throat] >> And indeed, if we o- uh opened up the skull and it was filled with spam, then you might say that that consciousness really is a miracle. But it's not filled with spam. It's filled with tissue uh that is uh certainly commensurate in its complexity to the complexity of consciousness. 86 billion neurons, possibly 100 trillion synapses. What a neural network like that is capable of is of stupendous complexity, as we are reminded by the progress in artificial intelligence, based on what are sometimes called artificial neural networks. That is, it is possible by interconnecting circuits with some of the properties of brain tissue to duplicate or at least approximate many of the the uh feats of uh of of human intelligence and consciousness.
Uh Finally, we know that when the um physiological activity of the brain uh ceases, that is, the person dies, their consciousness goes out of existence.
Now, how do we know that? Well, of course, you can't know it for sure, and many of the world's religions uh promise people that their consciousness will survive the death of the brain. Um but if uh if that were true, and if at least there were some kind of uh connection, contact, information transfer between this alleged continuation continuation of consciousness after the cessation of physiological function, uh you would be able to have seances where you communicate with the souls of the dead, as they did not least at at uh Harvard uh 120, 130 years ago.
Uh Now, uh we now know that this is all flimflam. This is stage magic. But And there is a way to verify whether you really are communicating with the souls of the dead. You can ask Aunt Hilda uh where she hid her jewelry. Um the soul of Aunt Hilda communicating from the the spirit world could tell you under the third floorboard in the closet, and the jewelry would be there.
If that happened, I would believe that consciousness can survive the uh death of the brain. Uh That has never happened, and I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that it never will.
Uh Thank you.
Now, uh now, admittedly, I think one of the reasons that it is tempting to think that consciousness is a miracle, despite all of the uh overwhelming evidence that it consists of neural activity, is that there does feel to be a bit of a uh of a qualitative gap. Philosophers call it the explanatory gap. Namely, why should all that neural activity actually feel like something if, you know, if it's your brain? This is a uh a a mind-boggling um enigma, conundrum, and it leads to late-night dorm room conversations like, "How do I know that the red that you're seeing when you see red is the same as the red that I see when I'm seeing red?"
And "How do I know that you're not a zombie, that you're not actually uh you might have circuitry that duplicates intelligent behavior, but for all I know, there's no one home, that you're just a robot." "How do you know that I'm not a zombie?" Uh There are many conundra like these conundrums um uh where our mind just doesn't feel satisfied that something like neural activity could give rise to that which we feel from the inside. On the other hand, I'm a cognitive psychologist. I'm interested in how the mind works, and I know that there are a lot of things we have trouble map- wrapping our mind around. That doesn't mean they're miracles. Uh What happened before the Big Bang?
Well, physicists will tell us that's probably not the right question, because time came into existence through the Big Bang. But still, I can't help but thinking of this itty-bitty little speck just sort of sitting there for many, many years, and then suddenly it explodes. Now, that's not physicists will tell us that's not actually what happens, and you've got to stop thinking of it that way. But I can't help thinking about that way. I've got the brain that I have. You know, likewise, uh I uh there are many other uh facts that I know are true, but that I have trouble appreciating. Again, it doesn't mean they're miracles, but people are tempted to think that they're miracles. In the case of the Big Bang, it was, well, you know, first there was God, he went Shazam, the whole universe came into existence.
That's a kind of a tempting way of satisfying our frustration, our cognitive hunger for an intuitive explanation where it just may be that our mind doesn't work in a way that is harmonious with what our best science tells us. I'll give one more example since I am a uh a psycholinguist, I'm interested in language. So, meaning, word meaning. I can say uh Andromeda galaxy.
I have now made some sort of contact with an object that is, you know, thousands of millions of light-years away. How's that possible? How could I be, by the mere act of uttering a sound, actually have some connection to this object in in space? Or Julius Caesar.
So, me and Julius Caesar, we got a relationship. I just referred to him.
And it's kind of hard to think how that could be possible. Uh it is possible, but and we are tempted therefore to imbue words with magic. Uh it is because of that uncanny relationship between words and the world that people in many cultures fall for prayers and incantations and curses, the belief that actually saying something can change the state of the world. So, I'm re- going over just to make the point that that the human mind is very good at thinking certain kinds of thoughts, other kinds of thoughts, even though our best science tells us certain facts, it just doesn't sit well with our intuitions.
And they I think the the appropriate response is so much the worse for our intuitions. Why would we think that our intuitions are going to harmonize with what our best science tells us?
There is a tendency to turn these this puzzlement, this kind of head-scratching, into miracles, but that is a fallacy. And so, even though that there's that one last ingredient about consciousness, sometimes it's called called the explanatory gap, sometimes called the so-called hard problem of consciousness, that's a bit of a joke because the so-called easy problem is anything but easy. Uh but uh the fact that neural activity, the the system undergoing neural activity has an experience, uh is something that's hard to wrap our mind around, but it is a fallacy to say, "Well, it's not intuitive to me, therefore it's a miracle." Not a miracle.
Thank you.
>> [applause] [applause] >> Sadhguru, your response, please.
Namaskaram. Good evening to everyone.
Rather saying uh a response, I would uh as all of you know, same things can be looked from many different directions.
First of all, uh what is a miracle?
If you put filth in the soil, it becomes a miracle. If you put a put a piece of bread into this, this becomes a complex human body. This is a miracle. This one way of looking at it.
When we say a miracle, when what we see, the phenomena that we see, is not easily available to a logical process, we say this is miraculous.
Of course, the word miracle has been taken to another place by religious groups and stuff, but essentially, in human experience, a miracle means you saw yesterday you planted a seed and today it's become a beautiful flower.
It's miraculous.
Because you can of course, there is somebody there who can explain exactly how filth became a flower, how the stinking filth became a fragrant flower can be explained, but not easily available to human logic, so we say this is miraculous.
Calling something miraculous does not mean it is not available to any reason.
Calling something miraculous essentially means we appreciate the magic of life.
Well, our parents gave us very stingy people. They gave us only one cell each.
Hello? They could have given us a million and made life easy, but they gave us only one and here we are sitting talking all this. This is a miracle.
Well, we can always talk about how cells multiplied, what happened, this this this.
But you can't do this in a drum.
You can't put this in a battle and do this. So, this is a miraculous process that it's happening.
So, one way of looking at it is you can explain everything about life.
Another way is just everything in life is magical and miraculous.
What is logical?
How I see logic is logic is the most fundamental aspect of our intelligence.
If you don't have a firm sense of logic, you will be all over the place.
But logic is the foundation.
>> [clears throat] >> We make a strong foundation for this building, not to live in the foundation.
Of course, in America they call this basement, in India we call it a dungeon.
So, we don't live in the foundation. We make a strong foundation because we want to build something else on it.
So, in this sense, whatever comes out of this earth is quite miraculous. How a worm like caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
Just about anything. Look at it from human wonder, there is a miraculous process to it.
We can explain some physical aspect of how it happens, but what intelligence makes this happen, it is quite miraculous. There's no question about it.
About consciousness, I think uh I don't know how it is seen and you must Steve you must understand. One thing is I have strived hard to remain uneducated and also strived very hard to remain uncivilized.
Why this is so is because most of the striving in people's lives is to become educated, to become civilized.
In my experience, how I see this is anything accumulated diminishes your perception.
Both your education and civilization is an accumulated process.
Once you accumulate these things and identify with those things, your ability to see life as is becomes seriously impaired.
From this context, it's very difficult to remain uncivilized and uneducated because from the moment you're born, your parents, every other adult, the moment they see a child, parent adults have kind of an urge, they want to educate the child, teach them ABC, 1 2 3, Mary had a little lamb, something.
Well, these things didn't matter to me. I didn't care whether Mary had a lamb or not.
So, consciously remaining uninfluenced by all the information that's thrown at you in so many different ways.
School is not the only place where it happens, at home, anywhere you go.
People are throwing stuff at you.
To remain uninfluenced by that is a lot of work.
Then education is a lot of work, I understand this.
Remaining uneducated is a lot more work, I'm telling you, because every moment somebody's trying to educate you, knowingly or unknowingly.
So, having said that, to be able to look at life just the way it is, then this word consciousness, I think there is a little bit of uh uh probably the way I'm looking at it is very different. We If we're talking about a human being being conscious right now, that all of you are conscious, in that sense, that is, yes, you're conscious.
Only Bala can throw you off by using his magic of anesthetics.
That is conscious human beings being conscious. Of course, if you're not conscious, there's nothing here for you.
But consciousness, an English word consciousness, doesn't really represent that, but generally we think we are talking about an intelligence beyond our own intellect, which is functioning within us right now. When I say functioning, well, you can explain the physical process of many things, but a piece of bread doesn't look like you, feel like you, nor does it have your intelligence, but if you put it inside in some way, it becomes you.
This is a miraculous and conscious prosco- process of consciousness.
See, first of all, human mind, this brain-centric approach, we don't look at it that way. We see as there is a physical body, there is a mental body.
When I say a mental body, every cell in your body has enormous memory, far more memory than your brain can ever hold.
Because this remembers how your forefathers were a million years ago.
It's not forgotten a thing. Even the skin texture, it's not forgotten to that extent.
So, every cell in the body carries enormous memory and the kind of functions that it is doing is unbelievable.
So, it has intelligence and it has memory.
Essentially, in human understanding, what we call as mind is a certain combination of memory and intelligence.
So, that is spread right across the system.
Whether human beings have learned to use that or not.
Because this whole thing about in the in the today's modern education process, we are made to believe only thought is intelligence.
No, no. Our thought is rudimentary because it's only functioning from the little data that we have collected. The data that I have collected, how much ever I have collected, it is still a minuscule in this cosmos.
It is like in the morning also we were talking about this. If I give you a trillion piece jigsaw, if you put five pieces together, you say this is a bear.
If you get eight, you will say this is an elephant. If you get 12, you will say this is a dinosaur. If you get 15, maybe you will call it a whale. I don't know.
Just arriving at conclusions every time we get a piece of information is not the way to conclude about what we are referring to as consciousness.
Being conscious, you being conscious, let's use different words so that there is a distinction. Right now, let's say you're aware. I'm just replacing the word conscious.
Uh rep- replacing the word conscious with being aware. You're aware.
In the yogic sciences, we call this pragna.
You are right now pragna. If you fall asleep, you are not conscious or you're not aware.
Let's use the word awareness to make a distinction.
But beyond intellect, this intellect, how it functions is operated by what we are identified with.
Depending upon what we are identified with, accordingly the intellect veils itself.
Right now, people are fighting for nation nationhood. People are fighting for religion. People are fighting for race. People are fighting for whatever they believe in. Simply because they're identified with it and in their intellect this is this is the way.
They're not too aware about it.
Two groups of people or two individuals, when they're quarreling, both of them believe this is it. Otherwise, they won't risk their life. Hello? When somebody pitches their life for something, you must believe that it matters to them and they believe that's it.
Unfortunately, it is just that it is your identity which makes you use your intelligence in this form. So, there are various dimensions of memory which plays out through this identity.
Beyond this, there is an intelligence which is unsullied by memory. This is what we refer to as chitta and generally that's what I would understand as consciousness. You being aware is different. Consciousness is different.
What is the nature of this? Where does this come from?
As I said, I have strived for a whole lifetime to remain uneducated. It's not easy. Try and see.
Try and see how your parental influence, your cultural influence, your religious influence, your whatever else else is around you doesn't play in your mind at this moment. Try and see. Whichever way you try to think, it'll work because your thought works from data. And data has come from all these sources.
To be able to simply be here without allowing the data to play up in your mind, it takes a lot of work.
So, from that context I'm saying what we are referring to as consciousness is that which is the very basis of our creation.
Well, somebody may call it God. It's up to them because they're trying to personalize that in their life.
Because they can't relate to anything which is not in a human form, they're saying that. But there are so many people of Indian origin here. They have man God. They have woman God. They have cow God. They have snake God. They have monkey God. They have every crawling creep, you know, creeping, every kind.
Because according to wherever they were living, they made that into their God.
Essentially, what they are looking for is personification of the source of what is happening.
Because we cannot explain this source.
Because logically we cannot conclude, the only way is to experience. How will you experience? What are the different ways ways to experience? There are four aspects in yoga.
This is called as karma, kriya, gnana, bhakti. What this means is these are four dimensions of your existence. You have a physical body. So, through action, you can realize certain things.
You have an intelligence.
Through your intelligence, you can re- realize certain things. If you realize through your action, we call this karma yoga.
If you realize through your intelligence, we call this gnana yoga.
If you realize through your emotion, we call this bhakti yoga, yoga of devotion or emotion. If you realize by transforming your inner energies, we call this kriya yoga.
These are the only four things you can do, no matter what you do. Whether you do religion or you do intellectual stuff, you do education, you do devotion, you do whatever. You can use your body or your mind or your emotion or your energy. This is all that's happening. These four things. All these four are pathways. But at the same time, is there anybody here who's just one big body and don't have a mind or don't have an emotion or energy? No. We are a combination of these four things. Why are we so different? Because we are a unique combination of these four things.
In one person, the body may be dominant.
In another person, in their emotions may be dominant. In another person, their intellect may be dominant. Each person has a different mix of the same things.
But these four things are the possibility of knowing.
So, what we are referring to as consciousness is that aspect of creation which is intelligent but unsullied by memory.
Without memory, it doesn't have an intent.
It doesn't manifest. Without memory, it doesn't have a direction. It's just there. If it finds little memory, it finds expression. Oh, where is the proof? Well, I am the proof.
Because if you want to prove everything with logical steps, as I said, logic is the foundation of our living here.
But foundation is not the place to live.
So, first of all, if we separate what is awareness and what is consciousness, [clears throat] I think a lot of this different opinions will go away. About miracle, well, those who want to enjoy their life, appreciate life and really experience life, they will look everything from a magical eye.
Those who want to dissect life, they will look at it from a logical aspect of life. Uh it's not a question of right and wrong. It's just two different ways of doing the same thing.
>> [applause] >> I I certainly share the sense of wonder, of amazement, of astonishment at natural phenomena which tempts us to use the word miracle. A seed growing into a plant, a um >> [clears throat] >> a pregnant woman giving birth to a child uh who grows up to be a person. These are truly wondrous and I will sometimes uh in fact use the language of miracle.
I'll say it's a miracle. Now, I actually don't mean that it's a miracle.
Uh it is language that helps to convey my awe and wonder. But there is a big difference between literally believing that it's a miracle and using the language of miracles. Namely, what happens when you actually have to affect it causally. So, let's say you have and and I'll I will speak to you, Sadhguru. You are when it comes to turning seeds into edible food, um we know that many civilizations, when there was a crop failure, when there was a drought, when there was a famine, when locusts came and and ate ate the grain, they would utter prayers. They would sacrifice a goat. Sometimes they would sacrifice a virgin.
Uh they would pray for a miracle.
Fortunately, you don't do that. You quite admirably have a foundation that literally gets your hands dirty.
Uh there's nothing miraculous about dirt. Uh and you have my admiration for taking dirt seriously because the transformation of a seed into a stalk of uh wheat is not a miracle. It depends on having the right dirt. And hats off to you for uh taking dirt seriously. Likewise, if you have the miracle of a child and the child has a disease like leukemia, you could uh pray to a saint. You could climb up the stairs of a cathedral on your knees.
You could set up a shrine. You could, as we say, pray for a miracle. That would be, I would submit, an immoral thing to do. Knowing that there are ways of uh keeping that miracle of a child in existence by giving it the right uh drug that would get rid of the leukemia or cure the infection.
And so, even treating a child as a miracle, even treating a plant as a miracle, metaphorically, poetically, when it actually comes to uh action, to the need to do something to perpetuate this miracle, uh it is very important not to take the miracle language literally, but rather to see it as a matter of cause and effect. To worry about uh rainfall and soil and fertilizer and farming practices. To worry about the child's health, the appropriate drugs, the appropriate nutrition, the appropriate uh loving environment. Now, when it comes to consciousness, this is true uh even more uh significantly. So, Bala, you're an professor of anesthesia, you're an anesthesiologist.
So, you manipulate people's consciousness.
I assume not with prayers, with seances, with sacrifices, but you actually apply physical cause and effect. You inject chemicals in people's bloodstream, you put a mask over people's faces and they breathe certain gases. Um you know, if I were a patient undergoing surgery and and uh needed general anesthesia, um my consciousness would be turned off. I would very much like for it to stay off while I'm open on the operating table. I would very much like for it to come back when the operation is done.
Uh I should hope you don't treat all of that as a miracle.
I sure hope you don't say prayers. I hope you don't make sacrifices. I hope you control the mixture of gases and the timing and and treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Please say yes. If you say no, I know have my surgery done at Mass General.
>> [laughter] >> Not Not Beth Israel Deaconess.
I think we got the distinction between uh what you're saying and what Sadhguru is saying. So, Sadhguru wants to respond, I think. You want to pass the mic to him?
Well, uh I think uh we're coming from two different contexts.
Uh that's why I said uh probably in the Western religions the word miracle is being used uh for lack of words. Don't uh because I already kind of uh excused myself saying I'm uncivilized.
Miracle is a way of duping people.
I'm not talking about the word miracle in that context. That's why I said there's a different way to look at life.
If you look at everything as logical steps, our logical steps progress with whatever data we have.
Nobody can claim they have data about everything that's life and the whole phenomena of creation. Nobody has.
Neither the religious people nor the men of science know where the existence of the cosmos begins and where it ends.
Nobody knows. Hello?
Yes. Nobody knows.
But somebody is bombastic enough to explain it all happened because of one person up there.
Another is trying to piece it together piece by piece.
But how many pieces ever you gather?
Because today modern science is recognizing this is a ever-expanding universe. If it's an ever-expanding universe, it doesn't matter how many pieces of the jigsaw you collect, you still don't have a full picture.
So, in that context I'm saying we go as far as our logic and our data takes us.
From there, there is a blind spot which we do not know. We just hope it happens and sometimes we have found if you do certain things, certain things happen.
Sometimes it doesn't happen. But the important thing is using the word miracle as a way to fool people to believe things and working through a logical process for all the phenomenal activity that we do in the world, uh there is no contest about that. There is no any difference about that. But coming to the consciousness, I once again I would like to distinguish your awareness of yourself right now and consciousness are two different entities altogether.
Your awareness is definitely a consequence of all the things that are happening in the brain. I've I've not looked because I don't have one, you know. I'm only experiencing it through other people.
So, uh I do not know all that. But definitely it's a consequence of what's happening.
Things are firing up, we know.
I may not know exactly where, how it's firing up. I know things are fired up within us, which is creating a certain awareness.
So, this awareness is a consequence of activity, not just the brain. I wouldn't go with that. I think there is a brain right across from your toes to your head, everywhere there is different levels of brain.
I don't want to call it brain, but we call this mental body. There is memory and there is intelligence right across.
So, only if all this fires up, then you have an experience of life. How much it fires up will determine how profound an experience of life you have. This is a different aspect. We're talking about consciousness. That is not exactly an appropriate word in English language because that's the only word we have as far as I know.
Normally we call this chitta.
Chitta means an intelligence without memory. It has no intent. But you can create any intent for it. With the same life energy, somebody will do evil things. With the same life energy, somebody will do wonderful things because it has no intent. It's simply there. It empowers you whichever way.
Let's say it's like electricity. You can make sound out of it, you can make light out of it, you can make whatever you want out of it. Just like that, the fundamental force which drives us has no intent.
So, when we say consciousness, we are referring to that aspect of intelligence which has no intent because it has no memory. But if you give it memory, it will immediately gain an intent and a direction.
Thank you.
>> [applause] >> Okay.
I would certainly echo and endorse and reinforce the uh idea that we are we meaning humanity, we meaning science are ignorant of a vast array of topics. Even as we learn more, we become more aware of what we're ignorant of. Uh we have to be prepared to change our minds. That's in the very nature of science. As we've just learned through living through the uh COVID pandemic, where in the early weeks there were all kinds of things that we believed like you got to wash your groceries and you can't touch your your face and uh the [clears throat] that turned out even our best experts were wrong. But it's in the nature of science that makes ex best experts are wrong because we start out ignorant of everything and we have to learn it as we go along. And the more we learn, the more we we realize how much there is to learn and there's much about the functioning of the brain, to put it mildly, that we don't understand, including many of the phenomena of consciousness. But it's just crucial not to translate our ignorance into a belief in miracles.
There is the um uh the well-known fallacy of the god of the gaps. That is that which you don't understand at a particular point in scientific development, you are attempted to invoke a source of miracles, namely God. It used to be Zeus hurling thunderbolts when people didn't understand how lightning worked. Uh it used to be life when uh before people before we had the theory of evolution.
And likewise, uh as uh for for people who know nothing about brain science, the idea that consciousness is a a miracle is very tempting. And even as we learn more, but still don't know some things, it is tempting fallacy to bring in miracles for our ignorance. But we the best attitude toward toward ignorance is certainly humility. There are many things that science doesn't understand, but part of that humility is acknowledging there's certain things we don't understand.
And it's just in the nature of us as not sub-omniscient beings. We are not divine. We We We We We do experiments. We propose hypotheses. A lot of them are wrong.
We need to build bigger and bigger scientific instruments.
Even when we do, there'll be questions that we can't answer. And the right attitude is there's some questions that we of which we are we are ignorant. And that is the part of the humility is not inventing miracles to fill those gaps, but rather acknowledging that uh that ignorance.
Now, when it come Let me switch to a question of whether there is um consciousness through the body as opposed to activity in the brain. And admittedly, it is certainly true that the the English language does not give us enough words to point to the different phenomena that we think about, ask questions about, seek to explain.
And philosophers have tried to refine our vocabulary. There's no reason to think that ordinary conversation would provide the vocabulary to make sense of consciousness any more than it does for the various tissues of the body, the various molecules in the brain, the various phenomena of physics. You got to invent jargon.
When it comes to consciousness, uh there you distinguish, Sadhguru, between consciousness and awareness. Um and there is indeed a distinction between access to information. I don't know if whether awareness is the right word for that and the subjectivity, the qualitative aspect of consciousness, sometimes called the raw feels, just the saltiness of salt and the redness of red and and and so on.
So, awareness you since there it is tempting for specialists, including philosophers, to invent jargon to and of necessity because the phenomena you study in depth aren't just going to have labels sitting around from from everyday conversation.
For example, the the philosopher Ned Block has distinguished between what he calls um phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Access consciousness may or may not be what you were referring to as awareness. Access consciousness would be the jargon term for having access to information. So, as a just an example, I do have access consciousness say to the color of your suit to the presence of people in this room. I can talk about it. I can imagine it. I can answer questions about it.
I don't have access to the um particular geometric shape on my retina that your suit projects. I don't have I know that's in the brain, but I just can't talk about it. I don't have access to the exact sequence of muscle contractions of my tongue that allow me to speak. My brain does somewhere.
It's unconscious. There's no need for me to think about it because it's automatic and it and it happens. So, there's a lot of activity in the brain to which we don't have access and there is some to which we do have access.
Uh so, that's one refinement of the uh the vocabulary of consciousness that we inherited just from the English language.
Uh the contrast to access consciousness is phenomenal consciousness and that is the qualitative, the um the the so-called hard problem, sometimes called sentience, the although there too sadly, English doesn't give us precise technical terms to make sense of our experience. When a uh computer scientist at Google thought that one of their large language models was sentient, um he was using sentient in a sense that is very different from the one that I think philosophers would want to reserve it for, namely the actual phenomenal or subjective or qualitative aspect of consciousness. There's no way even at no matter how smart your AI program is, you can't really know whether it's there's some someone home actually feeling something as opposed to it just producing intelligent responses in context. That's another That's another reason why the hard problem is called hard uh just because it's very hard to know how could we ever tell whether a perfectly lifelike robot, a perfectly intelligent AI program was consciousness in the phenomenal sense, in the sentient sense, in the um qualitative sense of there's someone somewhere in there that's actually feeling something. Like, how would you know? And in fact, this is often another [clears throat] way in which we humans make sense of these conundrums that are not intuitive is we explore them in fiction, in in science fiction, in the fictions that philosophers uh create called thought experiments. But as a an example that it may be familiar to a number of you, there was several decades ago in Star Trek The Next Generation, there was a plot that revolved around whether it would be morally acceptable to disassemble Lieutenant Commander Data, uh an android, to reverse engineer him. Would that just be dismantling a machine or would it be snuffing out a uh consciousness, a sentience, a a living life? Now, this is it's great entertainment it to think it through and one of the things fiction does is it allows us to ponder uh um philosophical um puzzles.
That being another good way to to uh illustrate it and another way of showing that our vocabulary as we use it in ordinary conversation may just not be up to the task of the sharp distinctions we want to make as thinkers, as scientists, as philosophers, as thoughtful people.
Finally, one more observation. I think that there is a way to make sense of the question of is say consciousness distributed through the body or does it consist of brain activity?
Um I think the answer is brain activity and we can actually imagine the circumstances that tease them apart. I mean, when someone steps on my toe, I um feel the pain in my toe, but there's every reason to think that what is happening is a pattern of activity in my brain. I localize it in my toe, but the crucial events, the crucial natural physical events consist of activity in in the brain. How do we know? Because often amputees will have phantom limb pain.
They'll still feel the foot even though there ain't no foot. Uh and that can happen.
Uh we have all kinds of bodily uh hallucinations. We have out-of-body experiences. We have dreams where it's not the body.
Uh people who are quadriplegic where the the body is no longer functioning still have full consciousness often of their body in phantom limb limb experiences.
Conversely, if there's if the brain isn't is uh active, if someone is in a deep vegetative state, if they're in a deep coma, uh you know, we can't know cuz there's no one to ask, but the fact that their foot continues to have blood flowing into it does not mean that there is someone somewhere feeling that foot. As best we know, if the brain areas for the foot are not active, uh there is no one or nothing that corresponds to consciousness of the foot. So, the consciousness doesn't need the foot. Uh it does need the brain as far as we know and that's a reason to uh to uh conclude that consciousness consists in brain activity, not the uh distributed through the body. Now, of course, the body is connected to the brain via um via nerves because there are sensory transducers.
There are little itty-bitty cells in the skin that respond to changes in temperature and pressure by transmitting nervous impulses to the brain. Likewise, in the eye, there are photoreceptors, rods and cones that that transduce light energy into neural activity. There are hair cells in the inner ear that translate uh transduce vibrations into neural impulses, but it there always has to be something that converts the body uh the energy impinging on the body into neural impulses that are carried by nerves into the brain or there's no consciousness. How do we know? Well, if again, you're an anesthesiologist, even in the case of uh um the anesthesia that that my dentist does, injects a chemical into my jaw and he can drill at my teeth and I don't feel anything. I mean, the teeth are still there, but no more consciousness of pain in my teeth, thank goodness.
Uh likewise, if I if there is um nerve damage, if there's a pinched nerve, uh if there is a severed nerve, if there's severed spinal cord, the part of the body that cannot send physical signals to the brain, there is no longer any consciousness of suggesting that it's uh it's the brain via information transmitted into the brain uh that is the the seat of consciousness.
>> [applause] >> Everything that we perceive through five sense organs, of course, it is processed in the brain, which is uh not just today's understanding, it's always been so in most parts of the world.
And uh the brain that we're talking about, where was it manufactured? It was manufactured in this body by this body.
We did not buy it or import it from somewhere. It was made from this body.
It didn't come to us from elsewhere.
So, the evolution of the brain within the individual human being happened in this body. So, essentially, the way we look at this is we don't look at brain as something different. It is just body with a different levels of functionality.
Significant levels of functionality. A whole lot of people may be walking around this university without their brains functioning, but their livers, kidneys, and hearts are functioning.
Without that, they wouldn't be walking.
So, I'm not questioning whether the brain is significant in doing all these processes. No question at all about that. But, is it the be-all of everything? No, because there are still so many aspects of life which are unexplained.
So, someday when we have the data, we will explain. But, you can gather data only about physical aspects of life.
So, essentially, if we have concluded that the whole existence is just physical, well, today morning we were talking to all the physicists, they're all talking about over 90% or 99% of everything seems to be empty. It is not physical.
So, this in the yogic culture we look at it this way. We see that everything was nothing. It was called Shiva. That means it was that which is not.
This that which is not went into a ripple because of a certain influence of energy and once it went into a ripple it gathers memory. Once it gathers memory it finds an intent and a direction from this various miraculous levels of I'm using that word very consciously. Miraculous Miraculous levels of multiple millions and millions of forms of creation happened.
Just the life on this planet is so absolutely mind-boggling that the numbers and the variety of life that's happened. If you look at the whole cosmos, we don't even know what is what. So, this happened and this is still functioning in every bit of life in everything. Even in a single atom over 99% is supposed to be our 93 or 94% is supposed to be empty. What is this emptiness?
So, this is what we refer to as consciousness which is the basis of everything. Well, you can define it as space. You can call it as nothingness.
You can call it as dark matter or dark energy, whatever. But essentially it is that which is not. When we say that which is not, it is not physical in nature which is fundamental to all physical creation.
So, can we explain this logically? Yes, to a certain point we can. Maybe all the way we can. But explanation and reality are two different things.
We can always explain everything. We can always explain the whole phenomena of human life.
But the reality of human life is totally different. It's experienced by different people in different ways. Let's say there are two siblings. Same genetic material, same home, same school. But they don't function the same way because the way they receive, the way they process is different. Well, that is not what we're talking about. But the important thing to understand is human experience is coming not necessarily only from the brain activity, but to what extent do we delve into that aspect of life which has no information but has intelligence.
When this intelligence fires suddenly human beings do things that other people never thought was possible. That's when people think it's miraculous. I am not using the word miracle in the religious context of saying I did something like that and it happened. Not in that context. But something that you cannot find logical explanation because as you said, what did got God gap is it? What was the Huh? God of the gaps. God of the gaps. No, we are not talking about God of the gaps either.
The gaps are there because of ignorance that we know.
But there are dimensions of life which are not physical in nature.
What is not physical in nature neither can you define nor describe nor perceive through five senses. Right now everything that we know is through five senses.
What is wrong with five senses? Nothing wrong. It is just that for different creatures these senses are different.
What is light for you? For a whole lot of creatures it is darkness. What is darkness for you is light for them.
Because the sense organs are designed as it is necessary for our survival process.
Based on your required survival requirement accordingly it is designed.
So, what you see, what a grasshopper sees, what a dragonfly sees are very different because these sense organs are designed for our survival process. And our survival process may be very different from one creature to another.
In that context, what we call as brain is just that receptive process or that reception place where it receives all these impulses from senses. To what extent means in a day in a day even if you walk around the place unconsciously or reasonably unconsciously, still you're receiving you know, millions of gigabytes of memory going into your system and all this is being stored, processed, whatever. In some minds it may be well done, in some minds it may be randomly done. But it is all being recorded. Nobody is missing it.
So, this process is a tremendous process for the brain to handle.
But the fundamental existence of who we are, is it only because of brain derived neurological activity or electrical makeup of things?
That would be believing in a miracle.
That's not a miracle. That is a simple process which is creating fantastic things for us, no question.
Fantastic things it is done to ourselves and to the world in many, many ways.
Nobody is questioning the efficacy of that brain. But the important thing is we when we talk about my brain, obviously we're talking about someone who is owns the brain also.
You don't say I'm the brain. You You're saying this is my body, this is my brain. This means there is somebody beyond that. Is this a body? No.
An entity that we cannot define. An entity that we cannot describe. An entity that we cannot perceive through sense perception. But we know we are here. We know we exist.
Well, if we think it's only because we are thinking and processing we exist, no. We exist even without that.
>> [applause] >> Uh we do have our five senses, each one of which relies on a ingenious little bit of tissue that converts physical energy into neural impulses.
We might have more than five senses depending on how you count. Um but what we don't have, and this is also relevant to whether consciousness is a miracle, is extrasensory perception, ESP. That is access to states of the world not mediated through some physical transmission of of signals.
ESP often held to comprise telekinesis, the ability to move objects and cause physical changes through brain power.
Clairvoyance, the ability to sense the state of the world without any causal chain of transmission of information.
Precognition, the ability to foresee the future.
And um telepathy, the ability to sense other people's thoughts. And there is a lively tradition going back millennia of believing that ESP exists. And we know it doesn't exist. I mean if we know anything that that every attempt to demonstrate one of the varieties of extrasensory perception has shown been shown to be overinterpretation of coincidences interpreted post hoc. You remember the hits. You you bury all of the the misses and false alarms.
Sometimes actual fraud and flimflam as in the self-designated clairvoyants who turn out just to use cheap stage magic. They often fool the physicists because physicists are as foolable by stage magic as anyone else.
The ones they don't fool are fellow magicians who can easily expose the tricks.
The fact that there is no ESP, one more bit of evidence is we have never All it would take is a tiny bit of uh statistical precognition. You don't even need to foresee events exactly, but just beyond the base rate probabilities and you could get arbitrarily rich by in the futures market. You could short or or or long Bitcoin or Tesla stocks. And if you could really see into the If someone somewhere out there could really see the future, they'd be the richest person on Earth cuz it would not take very much predictive power to outsmart the rest of the the the rest of the market. No such person exists.
More evidence that consciousness is not a miracle, that the senses really are the only way in which we can derive information about empirical reality.
Uh if someone were to show that ESP existed, I would have to revise a lot of my beliefs about the the nature of consciousness and mental activity.
Uh we're in no way referring to such things like ESP or magical ways of knowing things. No.
I'm talking about the fundamental existence of who we are.
Do we exist?
I think in most human beings experience unless they're lost in their logic.
If you simply sit here, you know you exist.
So, this knowing that I exist is not a derivative of neuronal electrical activity in the brain alone. Even beyond that we exist because there are states where all this can come down to almost nothing and still you exist. Actually you exist much more. I'm hearing a lot of experiments going on with hallucinogenics and mushrooms and stuff in the universities, not by the students, by the professors.
>> [laughter] >> So, they are saying that when they have these spectacular experiences, the brain activity is actually come down, not gone up as everybody would have believed. So, there are states.
See, one important thing is we should not conclude, especially science should never conclude what we do not know cannot exist. That will not be a good thing to do.
>> [applause] >> Yes, but but nor should we make up stuff for which we have no reason to believe it exists.
>> [applause] >> Thank you. That was great conversation, but um I think there are millions of people around the world, you know, even who experience the states of the deeper states of meditation. It's not just one or two. From different schools they've experienced which are not explainable by current ways of examining them because you don't have the tools for it.
So, we're not able to explain the deeper states of meditation and the states they live in. So, that is not made up, right?
So, how do we experience that is an unknown thing. So, we have That's all you're saying is be open and examine that in a way that can we understand that or not.
Well, we we may not understand it in the sense that it involves such unfathomably intricate patterns of brain activity leading one brain pattern leading to another brain pattern in ways that we may not understand. I don't know if we don't understand it in the sense that it must involve some new form of energy or some kind of contradiction of the idea that it's all brain activity. But brain activity can be really really complex and there's an awful lot we don't understand including the effects of meditation. Now, what I am very skeptical of is that any state of meditation, for example, can result in clairvoyance or telekinesis or telepathy or precognition.
And I assume you're not I'm sure you're not I assume you're not stating that meditation can accomplish that. No, not at all. So, for example, Matthieu Ricard's brain, I think Steven Laureys is here. He examined his brain and they've looked at their brain activity, functional MRI, etc. And they showed a relaxed alert state where everything is fired up.
And this man is This is like a trait for him. It's not like a state examination and they could see that that relaxed alertness leads to fired up brain completely, but still relaxed. So, that is not the usual pattern that happens in normal person who is not meditating, right? So, for example. Yes.
>> So, I'm not proposing that they are clairvoyant. That is very different. I'm just saying that these are rare and these kind of brains it seems like they're just completely fired up and still very very relaxed. So, that is a I think that's a great state to be in.
That that's interesting and I I admire Matthieu Ricard. I had a defense with him in Paris in which we talked about the historical processes that that lead to peace. And indeed there may be aspects of brain function that we don't understand that could be illuminated by meditation understood as one complex pattern of brain activity leading to another complex pattern of brain activity all within the realm of the natural.
See, the things that we are talking about, clairvoyance, telepathy, these are childish tricks. That's not what we are referring to. The English word meditation doesn't define anything. This is a problem.
Because when it comes to subjectivity, English language is very poor. When it comes to objective world, English language is phenomenally effective.
Having said that, if someone closes their eyes and sits, generally people say, "Oh, he or she is meditating."
You can close your eyes and do japa, tapa, dharana, dhyana, samadhi, shunya, samyama.
Well, these are all distinct states which are taught and transmitted in a systematic way, not just some uh you know, some mumbo jumbo way that I I tried to redefine the word miracle, but you're sticking to the religious form of miracle. I'm not going there.
Let's leave that word. Let's say magical experiences.
Because magic can still be explained, but it's still magical in our experience. Leaving that aside, we can clearly transmit this aspects distinctly from one to the other. If they come to a dharana initiation, we will do only dharana. If they come to dhyana, we'll do only dhyana. If they come to samyama, we do only samyama. Distinctly different states that one a human being can experience. Is all this about electrical activity? Someday I think you know, the scientists must invest enough time to study these things not with the attitude of proving or disproving it, but just by looking at it.
Just simply looking at it without making conclusions because conclusions are coming from what present things that we know, what data that we have. The very the very fundamental of science is that whatever we know right now is not everything. That is the fundamental of science. We are seeking.
Because seeking comes from the most fundamental realization that we do not know. That's why we are seeking.
Seeking is genuine only if we see I do not know. If I'm seeking this or that, I already know it is there. I'm looking for confirmation. That's not seeking. We are just making it up. So, essentially it is very important if these two disciplines have to meet.
It's because these two disciplines meeting is very important for human well-being.
Just we thinking that improving the economies of the world, which is wonderful, changing the social structures of the world, which is fantastic, providing medical care, this, that, everything is fantastic, but still human beings will still not attend to any sense of fulfillment or fullness of experience of life unless they turn inward.
This turning inward is not about watching the electrical processes in my brain. It is about looking at something far more fundamental within myself. If If we conclude that there is nothing more fundamental apart apart from electricity, well, then a light bulb lights up. That's enlightenment.
We should not look at it that way.
>> [applause] >> Now, uh because we must understand this whole thing is coming from I'm sorry if I'm making some generalization. It is a generalization, but I'm saying this contextually.
See, this whole the European thing about enlightenment or period of enlightenment has come because they were under the tyranny of dogmatic belief systems. When they broke away, they felt liberated.
But such a thing never existed in the East. We never faced such things. There were no anything dogmatic ruling us.
Thinking and you know, thinking to whatever extent we can was always free for us. So, we never thought thinking free is enlightenment.
For us, enlightenment is a much more profound process. So, breaking away from dogma and thinking freely, it's a basic human right. I don't call that enlightenment. But because of that background, your resistance for the word miracle is essentially coming from the religious you know, stuff that has happened, people claiming all kinds of miracles happening from here, there. God is talking to me and all this stuff. We are not talking about that. We are not talking about clairvoyance. We are not talking about telepathy. Please use the telephone. Don't compete with the telephone company, all right?
So, but is there something more profound to human existence than physiological and psychological drama?
In my experience, 100% there is.
>> [applause] >> Thank you. So, you've written a lot of books and we wanted to ask additional questions. So, we'll move on from this.
So, one of the books that you wrote was Enlightenment Now and that book was Bill Gates called it his book of the century and it's basically you make a case for reason, science, humanism, and logic. Right. And sorry, and progress. Thank you for correcting me.
So, what you have said is over the centuries people have become better, they live better, their income has gotten better, and they're happier and all of that.
And also you're saying sometimes blips happen during the lifetime. Like for my lifetime, if I look at this, over the year centuries, yes, things have improved, a lot of good things have happened. But still, when I'm living, for me what is real is the current uncertainty that exists or the wars and etc. that is happening.
So, just knowing that we have progressed is enough.
When there is uncertainty like that, what do we do?
Just knowing is that enough for to correct ourselves? Course correction?
Yes, the um So, >> [clears throat] >> enlightenment now will make me a lot of unearned friends among Buddhists, but it isn't about that kind of enlightenment.
It really is about the uh ideals that came out of the enlightenment of the 18th century.
Um the uh I tried to document that progress was not a matter of optimism, not a matter of seeing the bright side, of seeing the glass as half full, but it was an empirical hypothesis that could be tested. That is, if we agree on what what is good, and I think most people would agree that it's better to be, you know, alive than dead, better to be well-fed than hungry, better to be uh well than sick, better to be affluent than poor, better to be educated than illiterate and ignorant, better to be happy than unhappy, and so on. All of these things can be measured, and if they've increased over time, that would be progress. And I had 75 graphs, and most of them have increased over time. Now, never in a straight line, never even monotonically, which is to say always increasing and never decreasing. All of them have dips along the way.
Now, having been reminded of the fact that progress is a real empirical phenomenon, it's natural to think, and people in the 19th century did think, that there is a force in the universe that somehow lifts us ever upward.
Now, this would be a miracle, and as you can probably tell from my own remarks so far tonight, I don't believe in miracles.
And this progress wasn't a miracle. The reason that there are fewer famines is that people like Sadhguru advocated conserving soil, and vigorous hybrids, and synthetic fertilizer, and crop rotation. The reason that lifespans expand more than doubled is because of sanitation and antibiotics and blood transfusion and and uh for every one of the dimensions of progress, there was a cause.
If we understand those causes uh correctly, and it's not easy to do it because lots of things happen at once, so it's not so easy to disentangle them and figure out what the the uh primary cause was, but the uh the benefit of understanding progress is that we can uh have more of it. That is, not by relying on any miracle, but by doing the things that worked in the past and that are likely to work in the future.
Conversely, it means that if those causes of progress are neutralized, we could get stasis or regression. And indeed, there are periods in which various um uh events happened that are regressions, not progress. The The war in Ukraine is a prime example.
And I would say that that is uh exactly what you what would happen if one of the causes of the increase in peace over the last 75 years, namely the replacement of a valorization of national glory and greatness by the well-being of men, women, and children, uh it is that change in ideas that helped drive uh the rate of war down. But if you have a leader that is drunk with the opposite ideology, who believes that national glory, spheres of influence, um national greatness, civilizational grandeur is the ultimate value, and uh if people die, then so much the worse, then you you won't have increased progress toward peace. You might have backtracking toward war, and that's that's what we are seeing uh in Ukraine, for example. Likewise, in the um extension of the human lifespan, again, not a miracle. It happens because we had uh vaccines and and antibiotics and sanitation. If the germs evolve faster than we can develop um vaccines and and and antivirals and antibiotics, then lifespan can go down, as it did during the uh pandemic. Fortunately, reason and science, together with humanism, I argue are the three drivers of the progress we've we've observed, um pushed back, and the pandemic is now um under greater control, and the increase in longevity appears to have resumed.
There's also comment that mental health pandemic is on the rise. The The mental health The mental health pandemic is on the rise right now, so What What is mental health? The mental health. Oh, mental health. Yeah. Well, in some countries, in some demographics, yes.
So, in uh uh Amer- sorry, American um uh teenagers and and young adults, um there has been a an increase in uh anxiety and depression. This uh more so for uh young women than young men, more so for left-wing young women than right-wing young women. Um so, this is a uh a phenomenon that is uh occurs with some sectors, and more so in the United States than in other countries. Now, this is We don't understand why, but uh again, because the progress that we have seen, including increase in happiness and a decrease in suicide worldwide, but it doesn't happen everywhere all the time.
Um that would be a miracle, and it's not a miracle. And if there are causes of unhappiness and anxiety that are more concentrated in some countries, some demographics, some ages, some periods, we should work very hard to find out what they are so that we could undo them.
>> [applause] >> Well, there's no question uh the kind of progress we have made in the last 100 years in terms of comforts, conveniences that we have achieved through progress of science and technology, we are the most comfortable generation ever in the history of humanity. Nobody had it this good.
Especially for women and children, it's never been this good ever in the history of humanity. There's simply no question about that.
>> [cough and clears throat] >> But one important thing that's happened is in previous generations, basic survival was such a challenge.
Because basic survival was such a challenge, it kept everybody focused.
There was not much struggle in the mind. Because daily getting my bread, when it's a struggle, you don't have much to drive yourself nuts.
All right.
>> [laughter] >> You don't have enough time to drive yourself crazy. But as the survival issue is settled in the human being, you will see more and more struggles on the psychological level, because the physical struggles are gone. Now, the struggle moves into the software department from hardware.
So, this struggle we may see as mental illnesses and so many kinds of sufferings that people are going through, which unfortunately leads to a very high rate of suicide today in the world, almost in many countries, but unfortunately, in most affluent countries, it it's it is at the highest.
So, our economic development and social liberties, everything is fine. But still, if we don't address how a human being experiences oneself, how to manage human experience, we are engineering the whole world the way we want it.
Fantastic, no question.
What is one person's miracle is another man's engineering. I'm fundamentally from the engineering background. So, what is an airplane is a miracle for one person is a engineering for another person. So, the whole thing goes the same way with us also, because this is the most sophisticated machine on the planet. Have we engineered it well?
Have we made it the way we want it?
Because a well-engineered something means, when we say this building is well-engineered, we are saying it works well for the purpose for which we are here. When we say my car is when well-engineered, we are saying it works the way I want.
But is your mind, is your body working the way you want? If it did, would you have any suffering? Would you have any uh you know, uh struggles within you? Obviously, it's not working the way you want. Your own intelligence is turning against you and torturing individual people.
Uh people don't need any help from outside. Normally, you know, people come to me, uh Sadhguru, my mother-in-law, I can't take it anymore. My husband like like this, my wife is like that, my boss is like this. I say, you do one thing, you come here. No mother-in-law, no husband, no wife, no boss, just you.
You come.
I will give you a nice place to stay and good food to eat. You don't have to do anything.
Just Just stay in the room. Just be joyful. That's all.
I just make some random checks on you.
If you're miserable, we'll stop feeding you.
Because I don't believe in feeding misery.
>> [applause] >> So, you leave them in one place for 24 hours, they will be twisting themselves in so many ways.
So, you don't need any outside help.
When there is outside help, you think it's because of this person I'm miserable because that person I'm miserable. No, the problem is you do not know how to handle your own faculties, your own memory, your own imagination.
What is it that people are suffering?
What happened 10 years ago, they're still suffering.
What may happen day after tomorrow, they're already suffering.
Essentially, you're not suffering life.
You're suffering two most important faculties, which are distinct and a great privilege for the human being, which no other creature has. A very vivid sense of memory and a fantastic sense of imagination. These are the two things we are suffering.
Without this, we wouldn't even be human.
We would be like any other creature.
So, when you find your own mind troubles you and makes you suffer, you can call it anger, you can call it stress, you can call it anxiety, or more serious ones. Essentially, it is your intelligence turning against you.
This means you do not know how to hold it. You do not know how to hold yourself. This great privilege of being human. When I say the great privilege, at least according to evolutionary sciences, you are supposed to be the peak of evolution. That means you're on top of the world.
But are you feeling like you're top of the world?
>> [laughter] >> Most people are not. They're dragging their feet and going around with great suffering within themselves.
This suffering is not because of life around you.
This suffering is your inability to handle yourself. So, one important aspect of our education process should be we are always thinking about how to conquer everything around us. It's important we also bring this into our life, our society, that how to manage this in such a way that it never turns against me.
This is very important.
If we don't learn this, if we do not pay attention to this, how not to turn my own memory, my own imagination, my own intelligence against myself, if this awareness does not arise within us, then we may have everything and we will suffer. People can live in a palace and they're living miserably. This is happening all over the place.
So, in previous generations, a lot of people like to see in previous generations, people who are very peaceful, very happy. It's not true, believe me.
Uh it's not true. It is just that past, because of the distance in in Southern Indian languages, there is a saying, "A far away hill looks smooth and wonderful."
With past, there's a distance. Because there's a distance, everything about it is wonderful, you know?
But if it's here, then there is a struggle because you have to tread through the whole thing.
This process of suffering our own memory, our own imagination, our own intelligence is essentially because the necessary awareness as to how this function, what can we do about it, is not subjective. Objectively, we may know how it functions. We may be reading it on the MRIs and EEGs and this and that, but human individual human beings do not know how it works within me. What can I do about it? How should I hold my intelligence in what context so that it always works for me, never against me?
>> [applause] >> So, there are very very wise and another way of putting the point is to quote Franklin Pierce Adams, "The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory."
Now, I'm I do want to to to update one point is that globally, suicide rates have come down by a lot, by like 40% over the last 30 years for the period for which we have data. Uh not in the United States. United States suicide rates have gone up since their low point in the late 1990s. Again, we don't completely understand why. I I hope we will, but but it's important to to keep in mind that the United States in many ways has its own national pathologies that are not true of other affluent democracies and not true of of the world. And in terms of suicide, in most countries, not all, rates of suicide have come down by a lot, including India.
One of the I'm going to respond.
About about the suicide rate, those countries where there was economic distress and people who are taking their lives out because it was simply not able to survive, in those countries, it's come down. But where there is economic well-being for at least two, three generations, in those countries, it's gone up. That's what we have noticed.
Well, not all because India has gotten far more affluent in the last 30 years and the suicide rate has come down.
Um But the um the >> [laughter] >> But the the people who um been GDP per capita in India, it's it's one of the economic success stories of the last 30 years.
The one of the factors that seems to drive the For people who've looked at what has driven suicide rates downward, one of them is urbanization. That rates in in many countries are much higher in rural areas, partly because you often get women who are in arranged or forced marriages, who are ripped away from their family, their friend, they're living under the control of their mother-in-law in a uh in a town which they have no social contacts and they will sometimes in their lives. When you have the freedom in a city to uh develop friends and social contacts, to be to to choose your social circle, that leads to the social connections that make suicide much less likely.
Uh talking about talking about India, uh See, I'm very closely involved with the Indian society, its economy, how it works.
India has made huge progress in the last couple of decades, no question about that.
But that progress belongs to a small percentage of people.
There are many Indias. You can at least identify five layers of India.
So, one layer of India is doing phenomenally well.
Another level of India is benefiting from the first layer.
Third layer, little bit of trickle down, but down under, where nearly 55% is in agriculture, there it's bad.
So, most of the suicides which are happening in India today is unfortunately in the agricultural sector.
Well, we are working on this. There is no immediate solution as such. It's a not overnight thing.
>> [applause] >> So, there is um It's a great conversation. I think people want to ask questions, but I just wanted to ask you one last thing before I hand it over.
Um let's keep it short. One, you were you were talking about dirt, right? So, um there's a certain sanctity to it from the point of view, is it really dirt?
Should we call it as dirt that is useless, or should we call it as soil that is giving life?
Uh no, I I called it dirt just to emphasize its physicality and indeed the fact that of course dirt has negative connotation.
I was [clears throat] Yes, as opposed to soil.
I was using it deliberately and ironically to not to denigrate soil. I think soil deserves our utmost admiration. It's it's the basis of life.
But rather to remind people that it is physical stuff that we depend on. And by choosing the word that reminds that doesn't have that noble halo, it is a way it was a way of emphasizing my point that physical stuff matters. We tend to denigrate it. We shouldn't.
Soil is important. Uh maybe we shouldn't call it dirt, but calling it dirt reminds us >> so that's why I wanted to ask >> Yes, well, calling it dirt is just a reminder that we should think twice about some of the things we take for granted. Uh and indeed choosing a uh >> [clears throat] >> a synonym with a better connotation may be a way of changing those attitudes, but in an argument like the one that I'm making, it was a reminder that we shouldn't treat physical stuff as tawdry um as as beneath our dignity to discuss and to take seriously.
>> [applause] >> Well, very much so. I'm I knew when you uttered the word dirt, you were speaking in that context, but uh uh in the Eastern cultures, in most Eastern Asian cultures, particularly in India, we always refer to soil as mother soil.
When we will never say simply soil, we'll say thaimannu. That means it's mother soil.
Because the word mother does not mean our biological mother, that which is the source of who we are is mother.
Well, in your computer there's a motherboard.
That doesn't mean it delivered the computer. It is just that it is the source of everything that's happening there.
So, in that sense, soil is the largest living system, not just on this planet, but in the known universe, it is the largest living system. A handful of soil has 8 to 10 billion organisms. It's a massive living system. In many ways, it is the foundation of life for who we are.
It is just that our attitude towards soil has become like this, that we built Let's say we built one house for our ourselves.
One floor, and then our family expand expanded, so we want to build the next floor.
So, we decided, why do all this? Just take the foundation stones and build the first floor.
Well, this is going to be a disaster.
That's the approach that we have right now, because nearly 85% of the nations on the planet still treat soil as a resource, not as a source of life, not as a living system, just as a resource that we can use whichever way we want.
50% of United States soil has disappeared in the last 70 years.
And 27,000 species of organisms are disappearing every year. This is the amount [clears throat] of extinction that's happening. In another 25 to 40 years time, every UN agency is warning that there will be no agriculture, because once the organism quantity goes down in the soil, it becomes like sand. Desertification is one of the main issues. There's a whole agency for combating desertification called UNCCD, who are partners with us in making this happen.
Having said that, there is a It's okay to tell a joke, right?
Not serious.
>> [laughter] >> Uh this happened in 2016.
In 2016, a few scientists sought an appointment with God.
Don't don't go by this. I'm not a that kind of a believer, but I'm just telling you a joke.
They sought an appointment with God, and they got the appointment. They went there, and they told him, "Hey, old man, you're doing great with creation, but everything that you we can do, now we can also do. So, it's time you retire."
So, God said, "Oh, is that so? What is it that you can do? Give me a demo."
They said, "Look at this." And they took some soil, made a vague image of a human infant. They did this, that, and that, and the child cried alive.
God said, "That's very impressive, but first get your own soil."
>> [applause] >> You can go to um I think we have time for maybe one or two questions. So, I think mic runners are there, so they should go.
>> [snorts] >> Mic runners need come here.
>> [laughter] >> Yes. One of the central tenets of the Hindu religion is that uh something survives uh after death. And you mentioned uh that uh consciousness is uh eliminated at the time of death, and I'd like to sort of cite to you several examples to the contrary.
Uh So, I'm standing here today, and I have witnessed myself change over decades.
I I've I've seen myself go from childhood to where I am today.
And uh but something within me has stayed the same that has witnessed the change.
So, that's one argument. The other, as a sleep physician, I can tell you is that when I go to sleep and wake up in the morning, I'm aware if I had great sleep or bad sleep, or I was totally unconscious.
So, again, there was something deeper inside me that sort of witnessed all those stages of sleep.
And finally, you know, when I experience life through this different senses, and I keep going back, there seems to be something within the rearmost portions of my brain that's witnessing it. I'm witnessing you making your arguments, and I'm sensing them, but there is something way behind that has stayed stable.
So, I think that's the central tenant of our religion, uh Vedanta, it's called, that whatever it is in my consciousness that survives my demise is also the same in you as well, and in all of us.
And I'm wondering if you have any answer to that.
>> [applause] >> Well, I I I was with you until you made the leap to uh what survives after you die, because all that all that other stuff, like the part of you that uh uh goes to sleep, uh go uh passes out of consciousness, comes back into consciousness.
I mean, that's still your functioning brain. The part of you that you like to think is continuous from your childhood to your adulthood, again, your brain's been working the whole time. So, yeah, I'm with you for all of that, but that says nothing about what happens when the brain permanently ceases to function.
Now, by the way, this is not to say that there aren't uh puzzles, conceptual mysteries about what philosophers call the problem of personal identity. So, for example, if an 18-year-old uh commits a crime, should he >> [clears throat] >> still be in jail when he's 65? Is it in a sense the same person? Do is it morally justifiable to make the 65-year-old suffer for what the the 18-year-old did, or is there some sense in which that was kind of not the same person uh because the brain brain was different. And there are many other uh puzzles that philosophers, Derek Parfit probably being the most famous, have explored.
None of them, though, I would say cast doubt on the idea that uh the a functioning brain is absolutely necessary for consciousness, and that when the it stops functioning, consciousness ceases.
Okay. Can I say something about it?
Uh one thing that I would like to correct is we must understand that uh you call something a religion only if you're forced to believe something that is not in your experience.
So, the Vedanta that you refer to and the Hindu culture and traditions that you refer to have no belief systems.
It is a land of seeking.
You're supposed to seek.
This is the reason why in that culture there are no commandments. Nobody can give us commandments. Who can give commandments to Indians? They're full of questions.
So, uh this is a process of seeking. How many ways of seeking? Well, we came up with thousands of ways of seeking, different ways for each individual how to seek.
But the fundamental is the fundamental of seeking, as I already said once, is that you have realized that you do not know.
That's why you're seeking.
Because most human beings do not understand the significance of I do not know.
I do not know is the basis of longing to know.
And longing to know is the basis of if at all if you know one day, at least a possibility of knowing opens up only because we realize I do not know. Having said that, the important thing about what you're saying, this is a university. I don't know if this is a place for going to this aspect, because you talked about beyond death, what happens.
And it need not be just an assumption or something that you believe.
The fundamental is this. As we sit here, this is my body, that is your body.
100%.
This is my mind, that's your mind. Here and there we may overlap, but this is my mind, that's your mind. But there is no such thing as my consciousness and your consciousness.
There is only one consciousness. You have captured some, I have captured some. We have methods and ways how you can capture a larger bubble, so that suddenly everything about you is enhanced. I can show you a hundred thousands or millions of people who are at one level of living, suddenly they move to another level of experience and living simply because they managed to blow their bubble a little bigger.
So, this bubble, the film of the bubble, is essentially information.
This information in in the culture that you come from, we call this karma.
Karma means, as we sit here, our body is doing activity, this is one kind of karma, physical karma. Our mind is doing things, this is mental karma. Our emotions are doing stuff, that is emotional karma. Our energy is doing things, that's this energetic karma.
Four dimensions of karma are happening to us in wakefulness and sleep nonstop.
Now, how identified you are with those things will create tendencies within you.
These tendencies we very rightly refer to as vasana.
Vasana is a perfect word for this because the word vasana means smell or odor.
So, what kind of vasana you have depends on what kind of tendency you develop.
What kind of tendency depends on what kind of information that you gathered in so many unconscious ways.
So, this information determines what kind of a person you are, but what kind of a being you are. When I say what kind of a being, see you are the only life on this planet which is referred to as a being. Not because human beings had the dominance over language. No, it is because you are the only one who can determine how to be. All other creatures respond instinctively to whatever their requirements are and whatever the external stimuli is.
So, what you're referring to as what is beyond life, what is beyond this body, beyond this psychological drama that we're going through is just a bubble of information that may travel. But, there are ways to You also know having you mentioned Hindus, that means the objective of that culture is to attain liberation or mukti. What this means is you deprive yourself or you demolish all this karma or this information that you have gathered or distance yourself in such a way that this bubble doesn't carry on. That's a whole process. Now, this is too far-fetched for you because I'm going too rapidly. There are too many loopholes in this, but this can be properly put across and it can be made to be experienced, not just talking about it.
>> [applause] >> Can I just have a follow-up? Um your book Blank Slate, the it is a very popular book and you talk about there is no blank slate. People come with certain, you know, you also talk about the behavioral genetics portions of it.
40% if I Sorry if I'm wrong with the percentages.
You talk about genetic influences is 40% and 10% is environment and there is unknown. There is another 40 to 50% is unknown. Am I saying the right percentage? In the In the differences among people, yes. 40 So, what is that unknown that we have? That 50% is unknown pieces that influences behavior.
What do we attribute that to? It is It is unknown, so but I can give you the some possibilities. One of them is random events in the development of the brain in utero or afterwards that the genes don't have nearly enough information to specify the wiring of the brain down to the last synapse and there may be some >> [clears throat] >> stochastic, that is say random, processes in the growth of neurons and their interconnections where the genes keep the uh the the brain development in a band of functioning, but there's a lot of random variation within those boundary conditions.
There may be effects of arbitrary events as you live your life that have cascading effects, chaotic effects perhaps, that add up. Just to By the way, to be concrete to specify what it is we're talking about, imagine two identical twins. I'm sure many of you, probably all of you know some twins, and I'm not talking about the exotic cases where they're separated at birth, reunited in adulthood, and they have all of these amazing similarities. That is interesting in terms of reminding us of the importance of genes. But, now consider the twins, the ordinary twins like the ones you all know, that maybe some of you are, who who are brought up together, who have the same brought up in the same neighborhood, same parents, same older sibs, same younger sibs, same number of books in the house, same number of TVs in the house. Are they literally identical? No, they're not identical and any of you know twins know they're not. Now, where do those differences come from? They didn't come from their genes. They I mean, unless there were new mutations after conception, they didn't come from the environment as we usually think of in the environment. That's the puzzle and that's what we don't know.
To me, it signifies an enormous and underappreciated effect of random causes, whether whether they are random causes in brain development, in brain functioning, or in environmental experiences that have larger effects than we appreciate.
It would It is, I think, one of the great surprises that behavioral genetics has revealed to us.
Sadguru, can we influence these random variations?
That's what it seems. Now, that's what I would conclude. It is possible that there are subtle aspects of the environment that are very difficult to measure that have predictable non-random effects. That seems unlikely. That seems to be a kind of prayer.
I think it's more likely that there's a a lot more randomness than we intuitively think of.
The significance of being a human being, not a human creature, is just this.
All of us definitely come with a certain amount of information from our parentage.
We pick up much more through our childhood and maybe adolescence and stuff.
But, still will we limit ourselves to the information that's come to us and what we have gathered or will we go beyond that is what human being is about.
If we are just a replica of parentage in whatever way, small modifications in this and this, human life is gone waste.
Because this is why you are a human being.
That means you can transcend whatever your body speaks, whatever your mind speaks, beyond that you can transcend and make yourself into something well beyond what the information that the body and the mind carries. If you do not exercise this choice, in many ways human possibility has gone waste.
Because we're not exploring the possibility of being a being, we are just trying to be a better creature than others. In competition, we may earn better, we may qualify better, we may run better, we may jump better, but this is just being a better creature which all the other creatures are doing.
Every other creature is striving to be competitive and being better than another one.
So, this possibility that you can actually distance yourself from your genetic information.
We can show you any number of examples where even the shape of their face will change within a matter of few days. If they go through certain initiation processes, you will see the very shape of their face will change. Distinctly noticeable for everybody. You can I can show you pictures. I can show you people who how they were and how they are today. Because once the genetic information, there's a distance between you and that, suddenly there are phenomenal changes. And in the culture that you're talking about, there are death rituals. We We are doing these things to distance ourselves from our parentage. Because if the influence of parental genetics are too heavy on us, we will not be a fresh life. We will just be a copy.
So, we want to be a fresh life. So, all the time there are many processes, many methods, both when they're living and when they're gone. Both ways we have methods with which we distance ourselves from our own genetics. Because without that there is no new life. It's just a repeated life.
So, this whole process of doing things with the genetic memory, the energetic memory, the chemical memory in the system. Well, Bala is doing research right now on how your chemistry can be changed within 4 to 6 weeks of doing a simple 21-minute practice is well established. Nobody can question that because our idea of truth has to come from lab. This This idea must go.
Truth comes from life.
Life and deeper experiences of life.
>> [applause] >> Is everybody here experiencing life at the same level of profoundness?
Definitely not, isn't it?
So, can we enhance this? Definitely yes.
How many will enhance it? It's a question of willingness. It's a question of how much life you're willing to invest in enhancement of your experience. Most people are interested in enhancement of their social presence, their economic presence, and other things. But, essentially all the things that we are doing.
See, why we want education, why we want wealth, why we want relationships is we believe these things will enhance the experience of life, isn't it?
Hello? It may or it may not, that's a different matter. But, the hope is that it'll enhance. In some ways it will enhance, in some ways it may not help.
These things are happening, that's individual. With some people, they may make use of their education and wealth in a fantastic way. Whole lot of people make misery out of their money.
These are different people.
So, what we make out of enhancements of social and other structures is different, but enhancement of life, the very life that I am, the very being that I am, enhancing that, there is a way. There is a methodology.
There are cultures who have invested millennia of effort in this direction, which cannot be wiped out, and that is the most important thing uh, right now in the world, because science and technology has brought more comfort and convenience that people are ready for. Unfortunately, they're not able to enjoy their comfort and convenience. Today, the problem is not of hunger. The problem is of overeating.
All right? At least a third of the people are suffering from obesity and stuff. So, it's important that this time we know how to enhance this life, not enhance just our life situations, and our lifestyles.
>> [applause] >> Thank you, Sadhguru. Thank you so much, and wonderful, and thank you all.
>> [music and applause] [music] [applause] [music] [music]
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