0:00Hi, Jeff. This is Deepak. So I got your two messages, and I just finished my morning yoga
0:07class, and I have to meet somebody at 8, and then I'm taking a flight to Nantucket. And
0:15actually, I'm really looking forward to this. There's a lot of excitement around this Nantucket
0:22project, and it seems the whole town is coming. And a friend of mine, Elizabeth Bagley, who
0:28is with Hillary all the time, and is leaving the campaign trail to come. And I'm staying
0:35at the home of Johnson and Johnson, whatever that is. The Kennedys are coming, and it's
0:41like the talk of the town. And the local newspaper has written an article, apparently, that I'm
0:47the biggest charlatan in the universe. But notwithstanding that, I'm really looking forward
0:54to it. They have seven cameras. They're going to do two filmings, one tonight and one tomorrow
1:01night. So let me first address the two things that you spoke about. One is that meditation
1:07can be dangerous. So, you know, there's lots of misconceptions about meditation. And I think
1:14my last book, I'm going to do this present book, You Are the Universe. Then I have to do
1:20a book with Rudy on the healing response. And, you know, apparently my MGH appointment is
1:28coming through as scientist, MGH, and co-director of whatever this Brain Institute will be. So
1:38I'm doing a book with Rudy on the healing response. But I think I'll do one more book after that,
1:47probably. And it should be the Encyclopedia of Meditation. Because there are hundreds of
1:53meditations, and most people don't even know most of them these days. You know, the most
1:58popular is what they call awareness. Or even worse, they call it mindfulness. But it's not
2:08really the right word. Because the awareness of a thought is not a thought. The awareness
2:15of the mind is not the mind. And the awareness of awareness is the deepest level of being.
2:24So, you know, nobody knows all these meditations. They don't talk about them. And there are traditions.
2:31But I will write a whole encyclopedia. That will be probably, hopefully, maybe. I don't know. But
2:40I want it to be the last book. Okay. And then I'm done. So that's my take on meditation. Yes. You know,
2:49simple meditations can cause depression, psychosis, all kinds of things. If one has an unstable
2:56personality, as I've always mentioned, there's a thin line between sages, psychotics, geniuses,
3:02and rebels. These are people you can vilify, you can praise, you can attack, but you can't
3:10ignore them, because they change the world. So yes, I have a lot of respect for depressives,
3:18depressives like Van Gogh and many others. Even Chopin was a depressive. I think he was jilted
3:28by a girl and then he became a philosopher. In any case, so I will write on meditation. On
3:33the mathematical formalism or structure for soul, I'm going to think hard about it. Because,
3:40you know, it would be great to have Gromov as an ally, but I also don't want to encroach on his
3:50territory, which people get so upset when you do, because frankly speaking, you don't even know what
3:57their territory is. And I just tried to understand that theory once and I didn't understand it at all. But I
4:06think we're on to something here very, very, very important. And that the universe we experience is a
4:16human construction. And that not only is all civilization a human construction, that is obvious, right? We
4:27created civilization, music, art, science, etc. It's a human construction that came about as a result of
4:37experience and the knowing of experience and the interpretation of experience and the labeling of
4:46experience and the classification and coding of experience. All the semantics that actually allowed us to
4:53understand also the regularities of experience, which we then call natural laws. And then we, you know,
5:00manipulated those experiences and recreated civilization. But in the same way, we have created stars and galaxies
5:08and the entire universe because all we have access to is experience and the knowing of experience. And that experience
5:18occurs in a fundamental awareness because you can't have experience without awareness. And that includes your
5:27body. How do you know you have a body? Well, you sense it. How do you sense it? Sensations, images, feelings,
5:34thoughts, sense, perceptions. What are these? These are activities in awareness, of awareness, and actually
5:43modified forms of awareness itself. Similarly, the mind. It's a subtle form of the same thing. The ego is the
5:51same thing. The intellect is the same thing. And then because of our ability to, you know, kind of parse
5:58this out into bits and pieces and parse it out and call these activities which are essentially sense perceptions,
6:12sensations, images, feelings, feelings, thoughts. That's raw experience and awareness. And then, you know,
6:19because of our ability to, as I said, parse it out, classify it, manipulate it, we conceptualize. Also in awareness,
6:32also in consciousness, mind, body, universe, stars, galaxies, Big Bang, the whole history, which we're creating
6:41right now. We're creating it right now based on our imagination. Had we existed, this is what we would
6:50have experienced. Had we existed as a species called human, then this is what we would experience. But we
7:02didn't exist as a human species. And therefore, we can't say what it would have looked like, okay, or what it was,
7:10because what we have is human experience. Similarly, as we move forward, this is the universe evolving.
7:20What we're saying is, if you're around a million years from now, then this is what it will look like. But that
7:28there's nothing like the look of the universe. It's only a way of looking through an experience that we call
7:37human being through an experience that we call human mind. The human mind, the human body, and the universe are all
7:47objects of experience and the knowing of experience. And that's happening in awareness. And awareness can't be seen,
7:55touched, tasted, or smelled because it is the one that is having those experiences. It has no form. And having no form, it is not in
8:05space-time. And that's fundamental reality. If there is one, that's who we are. We are a species of awareness.
8:15And all the animals of the world, all the plants of the world, they are part of the human universe.
8:22Anything that we can give a name to, that's part of the human universe. Whether it's a giraffe or a hippopotamus or a
8:32plankton or an algae or a bacterium, we have created a name for a modality of experience and a knowing of
8:41experience. And then we call it that. And so the entire universe is a human construct, the one we experience.
8:53Are other animals having an experience? Well, I have no idea what the experience is to a species of consciousness that I could call a bat.
9:09You know, what does the world look like to a bat or taste like or smell like? The bat itself is also a species of consciousness.
9:19But I know it as a species of consciousness in the human universe. In fact, now that I think about it, since other species
9:28presumably have no language, they live in a dream world of sensations, images, maybe some feelings and thoughts. And they are living in that dream.
9:38And they don't conceptualize the dream and objectify it as the objective world. We too are living in a dream, which we call the world.
9:51So going back to your philosopher that you quoted the first time I met you, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was Bertrand Russell's favorite student, by the way,
10:05and before the first world war. And
10:10Wittgenstein said, our life is a dream, we are asleep. And once in a while, we wake up enough to know that we are dreaming.
10:22So I think the most important task right now is to wake up to the dream and understand that we are a species of awareness.
10:33One rivulet, and probably the biggest one, the Ganges or the Nile, amongst many rivulets of a fundamental, formless entity, which we can call awareness, the thing in itself, Immanuel Kant's.
10:52We have to rephrase it, though. And otherwise they'll say, oh, he's not just talking old philosophy and it's no longer relevant, at least.
11:01That's the Dawkins and the Crouses of the world and even Neil Tyson and all these guys, Brian Cox in England, they just dismiss philosophy as useless.
11:13But the ability to think is an extraordinary ability, the ability to reflect and the ability to express language,
11:21this language, which has given us a clue to the human universe, the construct in consciousness that we call the universe, the physical universe, the construct in consciousness that we call a body, the construct in consciousness that we call a mind.
11:43So whilst my body or that which I call my body has been on this tour selling a ridiculous book with a pretty girl called Radical Beauty,
11:56I actually have been exploring all this and I'm going to articulate it to the best of my capacity tonight at the Nantucket project and again tomorrow and we'll see where it goes.
12:11And I do think Gromov could be a huge help in creating a model of that, but in his language, which we should respect and, you know, honor.
12:25So that's it. And this long message, but you gave me a lot of food for thought. Take care. I'm sending you lots of love and I'll be in touch.