The Equation of Consciousness & The True Self | Swami Sarvapriyananda @ South Park Commons

[SPEAKER_01]: Namaste and good evening, everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: Great to be here with all of you and thanks to Aditya and South Park comments for organizing this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm here primarily out of curiosity, just like many of you out here.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so what we're going to do now is for the next 20 minutes or so, I'm going to speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do a kind of a TED talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've done two TED talks and each time I promised that I won't do it Then one more because the most difficult thing that I've done is these TED talks it's around 20 minutes And it takes me 20 minutes to get started.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I promised to be crisp I was told again and again these are very smart people.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to repeat yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to tell jokes You keep they are interested already.
[SPEAKER_01]: So All right
[SPEAKER_01]: Sri Ramakrishna used to tell this parable about the washaman and the diamond.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's this traditional Indian washaman.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are from India.
[SPEAKER_01]: He heard the term thobi.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've collected sea-order tea laundry, goes to the riverbed and washes it and scrubs it dry with the rock, and then clean it and gets it back to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this poor washaman, he found a diamond.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though what a diamond was, he had never seen one in his life, but he knew this is not an ordinary rock.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every facet of this story is fascinating, I mean because it's connected to our topic to the subconsciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't know what it was, but he thought it was a particularly pretty rock, and he used it to scrub dirty laundry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, what he was still curious, so he took it to the vegetable seller, his friend, and asked him, what's this?
[SPEAKER_01]: The vegetable seller also was not all that much more educated, or wise in the ways of the word, so he also didn't know what it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he said, it's a pretty rock.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll give you 10 rupees for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the luckily this washam and didn't sell it to him like you take consciousness to the physical list who will say yeah the consciousness I mean I know what it is it's a product of the brain don't sell it to him he'll need short change you
[SPEAKER_01]: He took it at a different people, long story shot.
[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, the Washerman took the diamond to a diamond merchant who said, wow, this is the largest, uh, most amazing raw diamond that I've ever seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll give you a million rupees for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the Washerman's poverty was ended.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found out the real value of the diamond and that's the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: The idea being we all have this diamond already.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vedanta, the particular school of philosophy we're talking about today, tells us about what we already have.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just introduces us to its depth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just like that washam and not only do we already have consciousness, we are already using it all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The washam and was using it, but using it just to scrub dirty laundry.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are using consciousness too, we are using it right now, we are seeing, we are thinking, we are listening, we are conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Vedanta says, and many of these schools of philosophy in the and Eastern schools of philosophy, they say that this is truly a diamond, and we do not know what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's depth, it's profound nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if only we would know what it is, what is that we already have, our real nature, our core nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would really solve our problems at the deepest level.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what Vedanta does is like the diamond merchant.
[SPEAKER_01]: It introduces us to what we already have.
[SPEAKER_01]: It introduces us to what we already are.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a saying in Hindi, among the monks in the Himalayas.
[SPEAKER_01]: Raptas, the procti, attainment of what is already attained.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nivitasya, Nivitinsanskrit means, it removes what was never there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gives you what you already had.
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like a con job.
[SPEAKER_01]: Snake oil salesman of the wild west who was arrested and they produced before the sheriff, the sheriff produced it before the judge charged him with giving imaginary cures for real diseases and real cures for imaginary diseases.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now this is something really, really deep and valuable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Since we're going to talk about something which is already there, consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is experiential, just now Abhinav is talking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's talking about hard practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, Swami, what you talk about sounds very intellectual, but what about hard practices?
[SPEAKER_01]: By which he means experiential.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know consciousness is experiential.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, there's no that experience except conscious experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what you're going to talk about right now for the next few minutes,
[SPEAKER_01]: I will introduce us to the key concept of Advaita Vedanta, which opens up the rest of the whole philosophy for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this, I would urge us to look at our own experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing of what I'm going to say now, for the next 15 minutes, is going to be out of outside, anybody's experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: We all know about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: All that I'm going to do is draw attention to the diamond, draw attention to what we already have.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Since mostly your techies, a neat equation is helpful.
[SPEAKER_01]: I read somewhere Stephen Hawking told a said that the brief history of time here is publisher told him, each equation will have your readership.
[SPEAKER_01]: We lose readers.
[SPEAKER_01]: How few readers would we go over?
[SPEAKER_01]: We put in one equation.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here it's just the opposite.
[SPEAKER_01]: People here love equations.
[SPEAKER_01]: So here is an equation for us, which will serve us throughout the stock.
[SPEAKER_01]: C plus O is equal to E as simple as that.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is experience?
[SPEAKER_01]: All that we have.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever is happening is experience for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is this experience?
[SPEAKER_01]: It is analyzable into consciousness plus object.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you go a little bit deeper into it, it's a very interesting claim.
[SPEAKER_01]: What would be the definition of an object?
[SPEAKER_01]: Anything that we experience is an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, this table is an object because I see it, I can touch it.
[SPEAKER_01]: My shirt is an object, I can see it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very interestingly, my body is an object too because I can experience it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can see it, I can touch it, I can smell it, taste it, every sense organ operates on the body.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it's experienceable, it's an object because it is experienced.
[SPEAKER_01]: But even more interestingly, and here is where it gets really interesting is,
[SPEAKER_01]: our internal experiences, which are generally classified as subjective, as internal, as mind, belonging to realm of mind and consciousness, like a thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you just think ABCD now, or you just think AI, by the way, AI for me is a Dwight Dick intelligence, artificial intelligence.
[SPEAKER_01]: That thought by our definition is also an object because you experienced it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our emotions are also objects because we experience just because you experience it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You see, I feel it, depression, unhappiness, pain, joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, because you feel it, it's an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever we can experience is an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by this we also get a definition of a neat, neat definition of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: which is no small feat because, if you look at consciousness studies today, they are just struggling for definitions.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a plistaur of definitions, all of which fall short, I'll give you a neat definition which works just like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That which experiences objects is consciousness, that which illumines, reveals experiences is consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: a philosopher, Arindam Chakrawati, he defined an object as an object is anything that objects to your consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, think of consciousness as a field and it runs out there and it runs into forms like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It runs into sound like my speech.
[SPEAKER_01]: It runs into thoughts.
[SPEAKER_01]: It runs into memories.
[SPEAKER_01]: It runs into desires, into sensations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are objects.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like the field running into something.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment the field runs into this, I see.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment the field runs into this sound, I hear.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think, I remember, I want, I hate, I love, all of those are experiences that they're generated when consciousness hits an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the equation.
[SPEAKER_01]: C plus O is equal to E. Consciousness plus object is equal to experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we will abandon this equation at the very end, but right now it'll serve our purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, let's now do the experiential toxing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we'll just say some things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Notice and check in our own experience, is it a fact?
[SPEAKER_01]: What did he say?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I get it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it true?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, C plus O is equal to E. Let's look at our E experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: I see, I see so many things and the things which I see are very different.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yet, in all of them one thing is common, I am conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I see you, I am conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I see them, I am conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I see what was outside, I am conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: The consciousness is constant, diffuse, separate the consciousness analytically from the objects, the object's keep changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And therefore, the experience is keep changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the consciousness is constant, it's one consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the same consciousness which sees this, and the same consciousness which sees this.
[SPEAKER_01]: even more dramatic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Check with our own experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are stop seeing and I just listen.
[SPEAKER_01]: How dramatically different is listening from seeing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Seeing is a kind of vivid experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Chutmay eyes are just listening.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's another kind of vivid experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very different experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet what continues?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is common?
[SPEAKER_01]: utterly the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness when you flush out all objects, the bare awareness, at least, conceptually, we can understand it has to be the same thing, which experienced objects, called forms and experience it through the eyes and we got the experience of visual experience of seeing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The auditory experience of hearing, the olfactory experience, the gustatory experience, the tactile experience, their all experiences and they are dramatically different from each other, but here the first take away, the first insight we get is consciousness is one and the same and common to all of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one common observer observing the sense, not like a little guy
[SPEAKER_01]: So that observer that light, this is called in Vedant.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called the witness consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Witness not in the sense of a guy watching through binoculars or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's just like light.
[SPEAKER_01]: Illuminating whatever comes in front of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So...
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, just by the way, if you are up on your consciousness studies theories, there are many, many theories.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them is a global workspace theory, a street consciousness as a stage, like a stage, and whatever comes in a stage is lit up, and that whatever it comes from the stage and the lit up is then conveyed to the rest of the brain, which are neurological processes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very similar to one of the approaches in a way that I'm actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, consciousness is the first takeaway.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is one and common to all our experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I see, I hear, I smell like taste that I touch one consciousness behind all of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I think internally, when I imagine, when I enjoy, when I suffer, when I remember, when I desire, when I hate all those are dramatically different objects and dramatically different experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Imagine the experience of loving and the experience of hating, so different.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, the claim is that there's one light experiencing both.
[SPEAKER_01]: After all, do we not say, I hate it, but now I love.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, the I is common, it's not that somebody else's some other entity hated and some other entity is loving.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, the same entity claims both experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: If experiences have changed, then the objects that were experienced have changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is not changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the same consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: In all my actions, indeed, in all my waking, dreaming, and here is an interesting claim.
[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, sleep also.
[SPEAKER_01]: The presence of objects, all these objects is illumined by the same light of consciousness and the absence of all the objects.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you sweep up all the objects, empty the room, empty the stage, the global workspace of consciousness that empty space, the absence of objects is also revealed by the same consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: We just call it sleep.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the Vedantic understanding of sleep.
[SPEAKER_01]: Would be analogously, Vedantic understanding of general anesthesia?
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a huge area we can talk about.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the take away one consciousness Illumining all our experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Second insight into this consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these are new insights.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're learning something here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one consciousness is also continuous, none of the objects are continuous, none of the experiences are continuous.
[SPEAKER_01]: The very thing that we say our day is full of experiences is because they are discontinuous and they are, they keep changing, why do they keep changing?
[SPEAKER_01]: The answer is the objects presented to consciousness keep changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness itself neither changes, it's one and it is continuous.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this one witness consciousness is also a continuous consciousness in contrast to the object with change, our experiences with change.
[SPEAKER_01]: Third, not only is it continuous, but also unchanging.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a claims, but I can immediately demonstrate that they have to be true.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I mean by continuous and unchanging?
[SPEAKER_01]: The river is continuous, but it continuously changes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's flowing.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have all heard the stream of consciousness theory now in literature and in psychology.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we understand from a Vedantic perspective, such a thing is impossible.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you say stream of consciousness, you mean a stream of conscious experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you mean a stream of objects floating through consciousness, giving rise to a stream of experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this consciousness is not only one, not only continuous, without a break,
[SPEAKER_01]: Suppose you say there's no break in consciousness, a break would be defined as a break in the presentation of objects.
[SPEAKER_01]: A break would be defined as, for example, deep sleep or general anesthesia.
[SPEAKER_01]: The absence of an experience of absence, not an absence of experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: What would be an experience?
[SPEAKER_01]: What would be an absence of experience?
[SPEAKER_01]: As such, it says your thing is inconceivable.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is possible is an absence of objects presented to consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've probably all the objects, and you have something like deep sleep or what we call unconsciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it is continuous, but it's also unchanging.
[SPEAKER_01]: The nature of consciousness as this steady illumination does not change.
[SPEAKER_01]: You might say, why not?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there any logical reason?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there is.
[SPEAKER_01]: If there is a change in consciousness itself, the question would be, is it noeable or unknowable?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it experiential or inexperienceable?
[SPEAKER_01]: If it is experienceable, then that change becomes an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: You see, so experience is consciousness plus object is equal to experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: If there is a change in consciousness, that change if you know it, if you experience it, it becomes an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then it is not consciousness, something presented to consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you say, no, there is a change in consciousness,
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, don't talk about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Makes no sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: So consciousness, again, the claim would be, it is one illumining every experience that we have external and internal, intellectual, emotional, physical, mental.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of those experiences is the take good, bad, horrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: All experiences are illumined by that one consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, they are there, experiences are there because of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise, we wouldn't have experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although Vedanta would say, that's also an experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like opening a rise, it's an experience closing a rise, it's also an experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an experience of absence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Trenchisness did not go out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one more.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is not changed by experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: All these are new.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you look back upon it, you will say that we're pretty obvious.
[SPEAKER_01]: But till now, it was not obvious, we all talk about, oh, I've been traumatized by my experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm shattered by my experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you look little more closely, that trauma, do you experience it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, that's why I'm talking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're experiencing it, then the trauma must be an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something that I was not there earlier.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's there now.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you are there earlier, you are there right now and you will be there afterwards also.
[SPEAKER_01]: So whatever happens happens in the object, whatever is experienced is an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore consciousness itself is not enriched, degraded, diminished by experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am making a logical argument.
[SPEAKER_01]: Show me different.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not denying that our bodies are damaged by experience, they can't be, they are all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: COVID can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our minds are traumatized by experience, a nasty word, an unpleasant comment on your Facebook page can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can traumatize your mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: But even that would be an object for you,
[SPEAKER_01]: all this safe, tricelessly so.
[SPEAKER_01]: It cannot be damaged by experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes all experience possible, but it itself cannot be damaged by experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It cannot be enriched either.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's already what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then, another thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Vedanta we call consciousness the light of lights.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in Vedanta, light would be anything that reveals something.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something was in darkness, if it's revealed, that which reveals it is called a light.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the room was in darkness, now the lights have come on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a light, because it revealed what was in darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the same sense, the sun is the light.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moon is the light, the stars are the lights.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, language is a light.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have to tell you this.
[SPEAKER_01]: All AI right now, at least, in the age of LLM's language is a light.
[SPEAKER_01]: all that it reads.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what AI is do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vedanta would say, yes, it's using a most powerful like that is language.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of human experience, consciousness plus object, encoded into language, fed into the AI.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a light.
[SPEAKER_01]: Language is a powerful light.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our senses are like eyes, a light switch-revealed forms, ears are like switch-revealed sound and so and so forth, because they reveal something which would be otherwise
[SPEAKER_01]: The mind is a light which reveals whatever the senses dump into it, the information, but ultimately consciousness is the light of the mind also.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because, finally, whatever is experienced is an object presented to consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And consciousness, there's no light of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is the light of lights.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it's a very beautiful, open-ish-addict verse which says, that shining everything else shines by its light.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything here is revealed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness shining, everything else shines.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything else means mind and senses and language and the world shines for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the light of consciousness, everything here shines.
[SPEAKER_01]: you shining everything else shines after you by your light, everything here is lit up.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is consciousness, light of lights.
[SPEAKER_01]: One more, we can go we could go on and I'm saying all of these are new, they're not quite understood only faintly so by the modern philosophy of mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: So these are really
[SPEAKER_01]: There are very ancient insights, but we've been bringing into the dialogue with the modern philosophy of mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll find these are at least they should be treated as extremely important claims, very at least provocative claims.
[SPEAKER_01]: One more.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is what is called Sanskrit opera or Shavich means direct.
[SPEAKER_01]: immediate.
[SPEAKER_01]: To see something I need eyes and there has to be a light and I have to be forms which are seeable by my eyes, my mind has to pay attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these need to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: These instrumentation has to be in place then I can see or hear or touch.
[SPEAKER_01]: But consciousness is direct.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need anything else to experience consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lunchessness is the ground of all experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes what makes all experience possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's direct.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's choiceless.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot not be conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: In another way, Descartes famous proof of Codgy Tourism, I think, therefore I am.
[SPEAKER_01]: It cannot be, even if you doubt it, you're just proving it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So consciousness is choiseless.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot not be conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot decide.
[SPEAKER_01]: Swami, have you heard of general anesthesia?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But without the word, that's also consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's consciousness of an absence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this consciousness, summing up, I've run out of time, this consciousness, which is the one light of all our experiences, one, which is continuous without introduction, even in so-called general anesthesia deep sleep, claim.
[SPEAKER_01]: Number three, it is unchangingly continuous, there's a difference between being continuous and not changing, it's unchangingly continuous.
[SPEAKER_01]: Number four, it is not affected, degraded, improved, enriched damage by our experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Number five, it is the light of lights.
[SPEAKER_01]: All knowledge is light, and this is that which light's up knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can, there's a question there, the difference between consciousness and knowledge, experience and knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, it is also direct, immediate,
[SPEAKER_01]: And one more, most important, it is you.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what Vedanta calls at Mother Self.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Vedanta, the Self is not the body.
[SPEAKER_01]: We start with, nobody denies that we are conscious, but we think we are bodies with consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vedanta wants to push us to the position that we are consciousness experiencing bodies and minds.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this consciousness, which we are talking about now, is the self.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen, but consciousness is other things else.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, we haven't go there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't find consciousness anywhere except in yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Take a look around.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, they're all conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they?
[SPEAKER_01]: All you can see of them is their body.
[SPEAKER_01]: All you can hear of them is their language.
[SPEAKER_01]: All you can observe is their behavior.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way we experience consciousness within ourselves, we cannot, to experience consciousness elsewhere would be to make consciousness an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, all of this is just developing the idea of consciousness plus object is experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, this is not even Advaita.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still very gross dualism because you split the world into consciousness and object.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just stop here.
[SPEAKER_01]: The next step in Advaita would be to ask the question, what is the relationship between consciousness and object?
[SPEAKER_01]: C and O.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they separate?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they, in some sense, one is one, the source, the other, the product?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you say, object is the source and consciousness is the product, you'd get materialism.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you say consciousness is the source and object is the product, some kind of consciousness is produced the material universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get religion, theism, God produce the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the common definition of God in every religion which believes in God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you say they are parallel, they are strictly separate entities.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get the ancient Sangya philosophy which says there are two realities in this universe,
[SPEAKER_01]: And their parallel reality is the interact.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where do they interact in us?
[SPEAKER_01]: We are combination interactions of consciousness and object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each has serious problems, each approach.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you can say they are interdependent realities.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mind only school of Buddhism, the emptiness school of Buddhism will say consciousness and object rise and fall together.
[SPEAKER_01]: each of the mysterious problems.
[SPEAKER_01]: The view which I am recommending, which I am talking about today, the Adwaita non-dolistic view says that object is an appearance, not a product of consciousness, object is an appearance in consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So consciousness plus object is equal to experience, but now this object is in some sense consciousness itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness appearing to itself as object.
[SPEAKER_01]: generates experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in one sense, all underlying the whole equation, consciousness, object, and experience is consciousness itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is called the non-duality of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Generally, I don't give talks like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be one and a half hours with jokes and stories or not, but this audience is different.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've reduced it to the bear bones, the equations.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, I'm actually curious could you tell us a little bit more, I use that word swamiji, could you tell us a little bit more about what that means and in your tradition?
[SPEAKER_00]: Swamiji just means a muck.
[SPEAKER_01]: has been dissolved so called a swammy or king would be called a swammy but we are kings without empires and then the king without kingdoms yes so a master teacher monk and in different traditions not just the non-dual tradition of Vedanta dualistic traditions non-dual traditions all kinds of Hindu traditions the monks are called swammy in that sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: but is an interesting question in another sense, is that what I talked about just now is not academic.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's another brilliant thing about generally about Indian culture that this is taken very seriously.
[SPEAKER_01]: So these monks who belong to different schools, so I belong to the non-dualistic school of Vedanta, but they are like practicing philosophers.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they take it seriously and they try to live by it and realize it and sort of reframe their life
[SPEAKER_01]: I do it in this philosophy, but there are other philosophies also, and there are thousands of these people, thousands of us, so they are like specialists.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you don't need to be a specialist in AI to use chatGPTR and Gemini, but you do need specialists to make and maintain and to queue up and to understand that AI like you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So everybody doesn't have to be like you.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can be end users of what you are producing, but they have to be some specialists.
[SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, we have monks or specialized scholars, the monks are called Suamis.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to move to the question of intelligence and the elephant and every silicon rally room these days is artificial intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I find it fascinating as someone who studied computer science and AI as like it is one of the first technologies that we've made that we don't
[SPEAKER_00]: fully understand in some sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is to quote Richard Feynman what I cannot tell they do not understand and it creates a little bit of a sense of a mystery and fear and why is language so powerful and we've been able to do so much with it and yet it's so limited in so many ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the first thing I want to approach about AI is to level set a definition of working definition in the room of what intelligences, which is the best definition I've seen from the computer science world is
[SPEAKER_00]: representation and problem solving.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is when an agent wants to change the state of its perceived reality from one state to another state, it is the ability to take the universe and its experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: represented in a meaningful way and traverse that representation to the desired state.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we sort of a practical, imperfect, the practical working definition of what intelligence is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious actually before we get deeper.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that how you would think of intelligence?
[SPEAKER_01]: quite similar.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me translate what you said into Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have an agent, you have representations, you have decision making, producing knowledge that would be the side of intelligence.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in Vedanta, you have consciousness, of course, which we just talked about.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, again, in our own experience, there are two kinds of entities among objects.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, consciousness plus object is equal to experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we look at the objects which we are experiencing right now, there are two kinds.
[SPEAKER_01]: One is physical, public, third person experienceable objects like this table, like this microphone, but like this body, our physical bodies, our entities which are public, doctor can experience your physical body and knows more about our physical bodies than we do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we have also another kind of very different kind of object in our experience, which we call
[SPEAKER_01]: They have to begin with, they're probably non-local.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know exactly where they are located.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe in a different space.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're entirely private.
[SPEAKER_01]: We code what's going on in our minds in language and then that's what we train AI's in.
[SPEAKER_01]: But our minds are directly accessible only to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Internally, first person, each person has a private world.
[SPEAKER_01]: an objective world, Vedanta would see that's also an objective world, see how it's different from our common discourse, our common discourse would be, this is an objective world, that what you've got in there is a subjective world Vedanta would say no, no, no, both are objective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the definition of object, whatever is presented to you is an object, the world is presented to you, physical object, the mind is presented to us, subtle object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, the consciousness in the mind, it functions as an agent.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Vedanta, that would be the ego.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's part of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can, in fact, we can all experience our ego's right now as the sense of i.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that ego uses the mind and the body to make changes in its state of experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes representations that making representations is what is called in Vedanta the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a part of the mind is concerned with knowledge and determination.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm translating from this Sanskrit.
[SPEAKER_01]: this that part of the mind which is concerned with knowledge and determination that this is this that which experience which we have I get it experience which we have I will get it now I get it now that change that happened in the intellect so that's like the higher part of the mind there's a processing part of the mind representing part of the mind
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is also the agent part of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are all parts of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ego is a part of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: The intellect, intelligence is a part of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: The processing of sensory information, memory is part of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Memory is also part of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of this is our internal objective, you know what we call the subject basically.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the answer would consider that also to be object, because it's all lit up by consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yes, and here is the new step forward in Vedanta Vedanta is very old, thousands of years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: But new things can happen because of inputs from AI, from people, the work that you are doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vedanta would immediately say, look, this goes to prove that the mind is also an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because now you are able to replicate, imitate, replicate the activities and outputs of the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not the subject.
[SPEAKER_01]: Notice the one thing that I'm here is the elephant in the room.
[SPEAKER_01]: I use this argument and I'm sure many people here would push back vehemently against it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Notice the one thing that these AIs cannot do.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can compose stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can take decisions.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can write the way more taxi.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they can drive way more better than us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one thing they cannot do.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are not conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: You might push back on that, we'll argue about that later on, but they're not conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wonder why to train an AI to be creative to write short stories or to do your emails or write an academic assignment, it's very, very difficult.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are complex tasks, which you have spent billions of dollars in budget and thousands of training hours to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is very simple, which is defined it.
[SPEAKER_01]: All it does is give first person experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness gives first person experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all it does.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why can't you replicate that?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the answer from Vedanta is it points to the utterly different nature of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is not like the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not another object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until now, we were able to duplicate the activities of natural objects, that's what our machines do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now there's a revolution.
[SPEAKER_01]: You, you guys, you are duplicating the attributes and activities of the subtle objects, which is the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: but that's still not consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think this difference, this failure of AI to approximate or to replicate consciousness if that's the fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: It points to the correctness of this analysis, the consciousness and object, and the mind is also putting the category of the object.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, to do the push back, I don't know, I don't know that my waymo is any less conscious than I know this about the next person.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, in my heart, there is a feeling, there is a sense of connectedness, and you can rationalize that as mirror neurons and whatnot, but I think there is a genuine
[SPEAKER_00]: Something you cannot just dismiss of what is, do, do brains generate minds, right, do, and, and, and, another way to put it is like, I don't think most of us can experience really what you're talking about, right, which is the mind as a subtle object, like, I think of my mind as maybe my personality most of the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it just takes once,
[SPEAKER_01]: just pointed out like that the diamond merchant pointed it out to the wash of man.
[SPEAKER_01]: We just, it has to be pointed out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Think of it's heart right now and think, am I not able to experience that thought?
[SPEAKER_01]: Isn't it a first person experience, a flash of pain, a memory, or proves the smell of Madeline's in the hand in the morning for breakfast, it's an experience and it
[SPEAKER_01]: they are both lit up by consciousness and it's not something, this is what I'm pointing out, it's not something isoteric, that monks, after ten years of 20th of meditation, you begin to experience your minds as object, no all of us, we experience our minds as object, it's just that we don't think, we don't frame it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why we think, I am this
[SPEAKER_01]: This body, not only we identify ourselves with our minds, we identify ourselves with our bodies.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I am this body, I am this mind, and the rest of it is not me.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other begins when my, at the edge of my fingertips, beyond this fingertips is the other.
[SPEAKER_01]: Inside this skin and in the mind is me.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't have to say, no, that's not logical.
[SPEAKER_01]: Without it says, be logical, encyclological, look at our own experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever is like you experience is not you.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an object.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of it's like a cloud hanging around you.
[SPEAKER_01]: If your body and your mind, your personality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even the word personality comes from the Greek for person, for mask.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the even personality is not you, not you.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not persons.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not saying which I love.
[SPEAKER_01]: The person will never be free, but you can be free of the person.
[SPEAKER_01]: while still putting on the mask, even when you put on the mask as long as we are aware it's a mask, we're free of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: To interact with this world, you cannot, you cannot but have masks.
[SPEAKER_01]: You must have a body to interact with physical beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: You must have a mind to interact with thought and emotion.
[SPEAKER_01]: You must have senses to interact with forms and sounds and tastes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So all of that is good.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are powers.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are super powers which we all have.
[SPEAKER_01]: But who do these powers belong to to consciousness?
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's something special about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I can go on.
[SPEAKER_01]: The latest issue of scientific American.
[SPEAKER_01]: 29 theories of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is consciousness?
[SPEAKER_01]: To answer that, they said 29, not theories.
[SPEAKER_01]: 29 categories of theories.
[SPEAKER_01]: Robert Lawrence Cohn in that closer to truth podcast, he has categorized the landscape of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: 325 theories.
[SPEAKER_01]: 325 series in science.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first thing he says is in science we say we have an explanation when we narrow it down to one acceptable peer reviewed theory and we say okay this works can be revised later but right now this works it goes to the textbooks and all it is scientific knowledge if i have 325 theories
[SPEAKER_01]: And I still say we need one more, the right one, or 29 theories according to scientific American in February, it just is another way of saying, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a profound mystery, we just don't know what consciousness is.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you say AI can be conscious, it runs up against what's called the hard problem of consciousness, that a series of objective processes will produce another object.
[SPEAKER_01]: It cannot produce the subject.
[SPEAKER_01]: The brain processes, the brain's generate consciousness, that's the sort of mainstream view.
[SPEAKER_01]: Brains have something to do with consciousness, nobody can deny that, but do they generate consciousness?
[SPEAKER_01]: The philosophical problem, in principle, philosophers of mind will tell you today, also, thanks to David Chambers, you'll tell you, you're making a category error.
[SPEAKER_01]: The last things that we can observe are my new electrical or neurochemical activity in the brain, thanks to modern technology.
[SPEAKER_01]: but from there to the experience of speech, of light and sound and pain and thinking and understanding those experiences and electrical minute electrical activity which cannot be observed without the most sophisticated machines, isn't there a gap?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's an enormous gap, this is called explanatory gap.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I've used many views on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's like Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, and all the work convinced that this is an illusion, that it is nothing other than, you know, if you say that there's an electrical discharge and there's lightning, they are the same thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: they are but this is I would say this is an example counter example to what I am seeing but my answer to that would be this is not a good example because electrical discharge and the lightning are both objects they can be related they can even be identical but the object in the subject are utterly different.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the failure of AI to be conscious, the failure of science, brain science, neuroscience, the failure of modern consciousness studies to agree upon even a set of consciousness theories that just shows that our framework with which we are trying to understand consciousness is not adequate.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're trying to understand the true subject, the real subject as another object.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why the philosophy is called it a category error.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for putting up with my skepticism.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been, and understandably.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to address another thing that's just in the air with us all, it's fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is an interesting time we live on and every level from intellectual to practical, to economic,
[SPEAKER_00]: things are changing very few, if anybody really knows how they're going to end up and our minds just love certainty, they love patternization, they love knowing what's going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: What?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've talked about the underlying reasons for it, I'm just curious what advice would you have for us to deal with the general anxieties of the era and the transition we're going through now.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, actually better than me because you're anxious and uncertain, you think somebody dressed peculiarly will have a better answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, certainly not.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are the you guys of the experts, and it's from you guys that I've heard three kinds of answers, which covers the entire spectrum.
[SPEAKER_01]: From AI YouTube here, I want name names.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are the cutting edge of AI.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just telling you about those guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cutting edge of sound the famous AI is an operating today.
[SPEAKER_01]: AI YouTube is all it's going to be major and it's going to be great Swami.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry, it's going to be amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one side, one span of the spectrum.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other end is going to be major and it's going to be horrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's another group.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in between the spectrum, it's not going to be all that major.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to go through a boom now, it'll go bust.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we'll have some residual effects.
[SPEAKER_01]: It will be maybe not even as important as evolutionary as the internet itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: It'll be big, but less big than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the various, and you know all these opinions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one good thing about it is also it's not like the industrial revolution we will try to see the effects of it 50 years later or maybe in your children's time because AI so fast and the cycles are so fast now you will see the answers to these questions in next we will see I will also if I'm around we'll see in the next 5 10 15 years definitely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Selflessness is more paying than selfishness.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to continue.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love is more paying than desire.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to continue.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'd have to learn these lessons again and again into an individual level and a societal level.
[SPEAKER_01]: Focus is more paying than distraction.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Swami, the whole of Silicon Valley built on the model, you know that you distract people that pace.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean for ourselves in our own lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: Focus is more paying than distraction.
[SPEAKER_01]: And self knowledge is more paying than knowledge of the other.
[SPEAKER_01]: Knowledge of the other is of course important.
[SPEAKER_01]: The AI is an interesting thing which is bought self knowledge and knowledge of the other together.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why it's so fascinating and mysterious.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're making things which are just like ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fear, let me give you the Vedantic analysis, fear comes from the other, the Upanishad say, the very existence of the other is the source of fear, even desire comes after fear, desire comes from sense of incompleteness, the very existence of the other implies one thing that there is something that I am not, there is a limit, is an end to myself, to my being, because I stop
[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, I am limited.
[SPEAKER_01]: This implication that I am small, there is something that I am not.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is something outside me.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is something beyond me.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the source of fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: The French philosopher Sartzi said, Hell is other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: What Vedanta does, it reverses that.
[SPEAKER_01]: If consciousness plus objects, Vedanta says, You are everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Atman is Brahman.
[SPEAKER_01]: If consciousness plus object is equal to experience, but the objects are also nothing but consciousness appearing to itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then all objects and all experience, which means all of life itself, is consciousness, is you.
[SPEAKER_01]: In some way, nothing in this world, and nobody in this world is apart from you.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the the widest sense of the self that we can get.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I say, I am consciousness itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like I'm a spark of consciousness in a vast material universe, separated from everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's alienation.
[SPEAKER_01]: But no, I am that light in which the universe appears, plays around and disappears, giving me these all these various experiences, and that which appears in me, and only in me, in me means in consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Show me something which is the universe where you can experience an object apart from consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot.
[SPEAKER_01]: The entirety of the world, known and unknown, knowledge and experience are different, known and unknown.
[SPEAKER_01]: appears in consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's say all of these are utterly obvious when we consider it, but we never consider it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We never think in this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are the consciousness in which what we call the universe, other people, our own lives, they appear, they play around and they disappear.
[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, all of life is not different from consciousness and you are that consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like all of the ocean is not different from water and you are the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not the water in one wave or one part of the ocean, your water itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: All waves are you.
[SPEAKER_01]: The entire ocean is you.
[SPEAKER_01]: and what the beauty of Advaita Vedanta is, it's very hard headed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what I'm saying here sounds political, it's not political, but not meant to be political.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's meant to be literal and argued out in pain-staking detail with any questioning, any possible question and it's not new, thousands of years, and it's developed in various forms.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just limited to Hinduism.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some form of non-dual understanding, you find in Taoism, you find in Buddhism, you find in all the major spiritual traditions of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that I we happy to claim soul position of this amazing wisdom, but it's not true.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm glad it's not true because that makes it more probable that it's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's it's been known to human beings since the dawn of history before pre-histotic times and convinced up that this knowledge has been around in some way or the other.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we are thinking about in terms of science, consciousness studies AI, this is new, even quantum theory, this is new, I have a nice anecdote to relate, I'll take names, I've made this very interesting person, a helmet, he's the head of quantum computing at Google.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, he told me this, I think, personally, he bet the physicist, Penrose, Roger Penrose, he's saying, Sir Roger, ultimately all of this, the data we are talking about, even in quantum computing, it has to be grounded.
[SPEAKER_01]: It has to be stored in matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: It has, it manipulates matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's where it has to be grounded.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it is all, even knowledge is grounded in, in something, something material, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: and Roger Penrose is, ah, but you see, I do not understand what matter is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roger Penrose he says, I'm uncomfortable being called a materialist because I don't understand matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: So matter is mysterious.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a philosopher, Galen Strossen.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at up, he wrote this article, tongue-in-cheek in the New York Times, the hard problem of matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, there's no hard problem of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the first fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's pre-fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a bit like pre-boding.
[SPEAKER_01]: So pre-fact, before all facts, we are conscious.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's only to consciousness that facts reveal themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this consciousness, two consciousness matter reveal itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: We do not understand consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why we say it's hard problem consciousness because we have made up our minds that consciousness is produced by brain and now we don't understand how brains can produce consciousness hence hard problem of consciousness but why not do it the other way around consciousness is fundamental matter appears to consciousness question should be what is this matter which appears to me and this is when you when you start investigating matter that's physics and that's becoming more and more mysterious and here is the funny part of it
[SPEAKER_01]: In the last 20 years, a science journalist said, I've been attending physics conferences here in the United States and in Europe in the last 20 years, 25 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a new, entrant, a new character in these conferences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most unexpected character in physics conferences across the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'd never expect consciousness to make an appearance in physics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is supposed to deal with the most fundamental realities of the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: Consciousness is supposed to seem to be a higher order product of biologic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why in physics, it's coming back this Vedantic perspective?
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not surprised.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a sign of advancing knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: If consciousness plus object is experience and the object is also somehow nothing but consciousness when we investigate the object, somehow it will ground out in consciousness again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, here we are using consciousness in a much deeper sense than our empirical consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: My last sort of questions, it's going to be about practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: many of the people here are what I would call spiritually curious and they have tried some degree of seriousness, a lot of different practices.
[SPEAKER_00]: How would you recommend as an individual?
[SPEAKER_00]: I go about finding the right spiritual practice for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spiritualic curious, in Vedanta this is called a jikyasu and in quieter, a seeker.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're curious in a desulted fashion it's a deletant.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as you said, many are curious in a serious fashion.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in a serious fashion is what is called a spiritual secret.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Vedanta is seeking is turned towards what I am, what am I?
[SPEAKER_01]: Who am I or what am I?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the Vedantic inquiry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what might seem, as you said, it seems very intellectual.
[SPEAKER_01]: The implicit thing being that it's not practical, it's intellectual.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we are consciousness, this intellectual inquiry into what
[SPEAKER_01]: But you're right, it's also supported by a series of other practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: So meditation is a supporting practice here.
[SPEAKER_01]: All this spiritual query, this realization that I am consciousness and not the body, not the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is possible when the mind is calm.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the mind is scattered, it is not possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, no great inquiry is possible if the mind is scattered.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at scientists, it could be your steps, many of you in the tech sector, you are work colleagues.
[SPEAKER_01]: A work colleague is a person who is tremendously focused.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that means the mind is channeled towards one thing, not skipping around.
[SPEAKER_01]: I heard that many people in Silicon Valley they are not fans of their own products, the social media and all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a documentary, the social dilemma I think, so focus is a spiritual practice and there is a whole range of meditative practices whose primary theme is the training of attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once we had a retreat on meditation, and the philosopher I mentioned are in them Chakrabati said when I told him this, we're going to do this retreat on meditation, non-dual meditation, dualistic meditation, Buddhist mindfulness meditation, several kinds of practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, it's good, do each one independently as the tradition demands, but then at the end look back upon and try to see what was common to all of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the end of the three days retreat, we found it was quite obvious what was common to all these range of meditative practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that one common factor was the training of attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ability to attend, what are we attending to and how much attention we are putting on it?
[SPEAKER_01]: The poet said, the mind in its own place can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the crucial factors of making a heaven out of hell is focus.
[SPEAKER_01]: Scattered mind hell is easy, but it's hellish at the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: At first it might seem easy and pleasant, but focused mind it converts hell into heaven.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one essential practice, apart from the inquiry meditation.
[SPEAKER_01]: then third action.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now there is a jargon is spiritualizing action, but let me put it in a way which will be as secular as possible, altruistic or selfless action.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is very helpful for self inquiry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our main obstacle, you know, to self inquiry, is our identification with this
[SPEAKER_01]: without the ones made to say that I'm limitless consciousness to realize that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's already true, but I don't want to see it because I think I am just this thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am so attached to the mask.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to ignore the reality, the very profound reality behind the mask.
[SPEAKER_01]: To extremely powerful way of relaxing, letting go of our depth grip on the personality is being selfless.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's some kind of actual service.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somebody told me the motto for MIT is mind-on-hand,
[SPEAKER_01]: If not only you must learn, it must do it, you will learn by doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And sorry, I shouldn't have said they might, that's East Coast.
[SPEAKER_01]: I should have said stand for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So actual selfless action.
[SPEAKER_01]: It has a great effect in purifying the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then this non-dual philosophy becomes more and more obvious.
[SPEAKER_01]: So these are some of the practices and I must mention this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know it's a pretty secular audience, but there is a great wisdom to the theistic traditions of the world belief in God.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got it protected, it's very valuable.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's
[SPEAKER_01]: not see we believe we have the power of belief that's that's the whole thing on which the advertisement industry is predicated on you convince us of all sorts of nonsense but we it's a powerful powerful it's a great power to believe in something what we deeply believe in guides our action so the power of belief even if I say I don't know that God exists all right believe that God exists start there
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a great, great practice, helpful for the non-dual realization also.
[SPEAKER_01]: So four practices, the enquiry itself, the who am I enquiry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Second, attention training, which is a secular way of talking about meditation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Third, altruism, which is a secular way of talking about spiritualizing action.
[SPEAKER_01]: and last but not least is no secular we have talking about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a universal we have talking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever our religion, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, even Buddhists, James, who might not be classified under theistic religions, but there is a deep element of faith, a faith in something higher and noble or at least, that's extremely important.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of our
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of our problems, a lot of our sufferings, a emotional, and this deep faith in a higher power, it helps.
[SPEAKER_01]: You talk about fear and the need for safety with Genstein defined.
[SPEAKER_01]: Religion is the search for, is the quest for ultimate security.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just the opposite of fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: We want something that will take us beyond fear for sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Notice how these four practices take us, oh, it takes us beyond fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: Selfishness is connected deeply to fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: Selflessness, when it's not my, I have no acts to grind.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm here just to be helpful.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll be fearless.
[SPEAKER_01]: One is most fearless when it's acting in the benefit of others.
[SPEAKER_01]: logically, if I'm acting from my own benefit and if I'm killed in the process or wiped out, then I don't get the benefit.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if I don't want a benefit from it, I want to be of service to others and willing to exhaust myself, my wealth, my time, my energy, achieving that goal, because you will benefit from it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So fearlessness and selflessness, they go together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Second, the devotional practices
[SPEAKER_01]: The faith in God, fearlessness and the faith in a higher power, they go together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not fashionable to say these, but it's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: Psycho look, I'm telling the psychiatrist, Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Association.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had a meeting with faith leaders and psychiatrists to face the post-COVID spike in mental illness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they said, somebody asked, till now you're hostile to religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Psychiatricism or the religion is a kind of pathology.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now are you friendly to religions all of a sudden and they said no It's not that we say that God exists.
[SPEAKER_01]: We suddenly we start believing in God the APA started believing in God not at all But you cannot argue with the data and The data shows people who have some kind of genuine religiosity in that spirituality in them in a whatever tradition They are more resilient to mental illness and if they do get mental illness They recover better or cope better with that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So fear
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's helpful, it doesn't have to be in a particular religion whatever I would traditionally whatever you come for to build with and then third concentrated mind fearless, restless mind, fearful and finally, this inquiry, who am I, it takes you beyond fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: It shows you this consciousness which cannot be damaged by experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you have to be afraid of?
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing in this world can affect you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Christian and the Gita says, centered in which the heaviest of sorrows cannot shake you.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's your own real nature, the diamond which we already have.
[SPEAKER_01]: Recognize that and you'll see it's obvious, it can't affect me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, it won't be pleasant if you get sick, physically, it won't be pleasant if people treat you unfairly, but still, there is a eye of the storm,
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, and last question, I'm curious, what is your practice and how has it changed actually since you moved America and then since you moved to New York?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: My practice is sort of fixed because I'm a monk, so it's sort of central.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spirituality is what I do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm a specialist in that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why you become a monk.
[SPEAKER_01]: But practically, if you say, what is your practice?
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you do all day long?
[SPEAKER_01]: One is this self-inquiry practice, which I study and reflect on by the unthan meditative on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a regular meditation practice morning and evening.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a devotional practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the service practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the service is to be a school when I was in India.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is so this work that I'm doing right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's part of my spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't have two lives like a spiritual life and a secular life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all one life and that's very nice.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so I just have to take care that whatever I'm doing has to be part of one of these four practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: What did they call the four yoga?
[SPEAKER_01]: Giana yoga, the way of inquiry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bhakti yoga, the way of love and devotion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rajay yoga literally means the royal yoga, the yoga of attention, meditation.
[SPEAKER_01]: and karma yoga, the way of service or action, spiritualizing action.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's my service.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's my spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it really doesn't change much little bit tweaking from India to United States and now in New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not very different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for being here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.