Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K) (90:32)
Absolutely right. So the beautiful thing about yoga and Tai chi is that they force you to observe yourself, because once you stand on one leg so you can do a simple like. So I'll challenge everybody in your audience to Just raise their arm. That's it. I just want them to raise their arm. And we're just going to continue talking. Okay? We're just going to have a conversation, and over time, what's going to happen? You don't have to do it because I want to converse with you. You won't be able to converse, Right. So people are going to pay attention if they're still doing it. And then the longer we go, they're not going to be able to hear anything we're saying. We are forcing our attention over here, so the change of our attention becomes really, really important. Anyway, that was talking about tai chi and chronic pain, but you asked a question about physical and spiritual evolution. So the first thing to understand is why have we stopped physically evolving? Because we started shaping our environment. So evolution happens in order for us to adapt to our environment. But once I start building cars, creating air conditioning, having cell phones, what we are doing is we are shaping our environment to let whatever I am now continue to exist. This way, I don't need to grow, right? If I shape my environment around me, if I'm a narcissist and I surround myself by people who will say, yes, you're great, you're great, you're great. I will never need to conquer that narcissism. So I think there's a couple of things going on in terms of spiritual evolution, and those things are somewhat reliable to completely crazy. So take this with a grain of salt. So I think the first thing is that first stage of spiritual evolution is that since we're shaping our environment in this way, our environment is making lots of changes to our brain and lots of changes to our mind. So this is why we have a mental health crisis. Like, it's so weird, right? Science is progressing. We have more neuroscience papers than ever before. We have so many FMRI labs and things like that. Our understanding of the brain and the mind is increasing, but people are getting worse. So the next stage of evolution that we need in your own life, I use the word loosely, but maybe not so much, but is actually like evolving your mind, right? And I know that sounds kind of weird, like evolving your brain, like learning how to change yourself, which is what evolution is to survive and thrive in this level of the world around us. So this starts with stuff like ego, like, we talked about emotional regulation, not letting these samskars or emotional baggage pile up. You have to do a ton of mental training to survive in today's world. Then there's, like, other weird things going on. So, like, the Other weird stuff is like when you start talk to talk more about these spiritual traditions. So, weird stuff. There's a study that was done on DMT that 92% of DMT users will encounter otherworldly beings. Now, we have no scientific evidence of this exception. I think this is kind of could be argued as scientific evidence. I'm not saying it's complete evidence, but now what we have is we have something like a telescope where if I look through a microscope, if I look through a microscope and I see a lot of bacteria, you can't see that with the naked eye. But if I use this technology, I can see something that my normal perception cannot allow me to see. So I think what we're starting to do with meditation is this is a spiritual technology and there are some meditation techniques that will give you insight into your past lives. That has been very helpful for some of my patients with trauma, that they have this trauma that doesn't come from this life. It actually seems like it sort of comes from past life. I can go into detail. I know it's unbelievable. But there's a great researcher out of the University of Virginia who's been looking at past life research. Occasionally some crazy scientists will get into this stuff. So I think that we are sort of being able to detect things that are kind of beyond it. And I think this is where things get kind of weird. But like, it's so strange. But if I was talking to a bunch of my friends who are neuroscientists or neurologists, and I was asking them, what proof do we have that thoughts exist? From a scientific perspective, we have none. We can't detect thoughts. Right. What does an FMRI or an EEG detect? EEG detects electrical activity in the brain. FMRI detects blood flow. Neither of those things are thoughts. So it's kind of weird. But we have no proof of the existence of thought. So I was trying to figure out, okay, what's going on then scientifically, Some people think it's like imagination. I think what's going on is that there's a certain realm of human experience which we can't detect with an instrument yet. So this is subjective experience, it's consciousness, it's thinking. And so I think that we don't have a measurement of consciousness, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This is where a lot of people, I think, disagree with me. So some people will say since we can't detect it scientifically, that means it doesn't exist. I think that human beings can Observe it. It's a conserved human experience. Everyone can observe their own thinking. I think it exists. We just haven't developed the ruler for consciousness yet. So the other area of spiritual evolution is to evolve your consciousness. So to take your conscious experience, use some of these more esoteric meditation techniques, which is usually how this is done, like kundalini, sadhana and stuff like that. So as you do these weird kind of like chakra sadhanas and stuff like that, you will start to have, it's hard to describe, a change in your subjective experience of the world. So as I move through the world, right, I try, but I also, like, start to see, okay, bad stuff happens to me. I'm not so worried about it anymore. This is a negative karma. That's sort of the logical way to explain it, but that's not how it feels on the inside. So I recognize that there are periods of my life where like, negative karmas are manifesting. So I'm like, let them come, let them come, let them come. Like, I'm going to work through it. I have to work through this stuff. There's some kind of bad energy out there, and I realize how indefensible that is, but I really think that's what's going on. And so a lot of people are needing to evolve. They're hungry for this evolution. They're hungry for, like, this world around me. Even if we talk about growth and goals and ambitions, this is not satisfying. They need to grow in a different dimension. And I don't mean that like, oh, there's like alternate. I mean, like, there is material growth, there is professional growth, there is academic growth, and there is growth just within you. To be able to experience different kinds of things, to be able to understand, like, how you connect to other people. That's a level of spiritual evolution. And when I work with my patients, what I oftentimes will start with is like, meditations to help them treat depression. But eventually it's like, okay, if you're depressed because you think you're a loser, let's see if we can cultivate an experience of cosmic connectedness. And if you have that experience, and this is also what we know from psychedelics, you can use a psychedelic that's not healing specifically. You can ask someone what happened to you when you were using the psychedelic. If they had an ego death experience, that correlates with improvement in treatment, refractory depression, that correlates with improvement in trauma. But if all you see is colors and synesthesia and stuff like that, clinical symptoms don't appear to get better. And this is what we know from our traditions, right, Is like as you have these higher senses of consciousness, the ahamkara, the ego starts to dissolve, your atman blends with the cosmic soul. And like we can sort of duplicate that in a lab now, at least the subjective experience of it. Then that gets to the question of is that subjective experience real or not? I think it's absolutely functionally useful. We can detect the change, we can detect the health benefit in it. So I think that spiritual evolution that we're seeing is like at the level of consciousness. And hopefully I've tried to explain that in a somewhat mechanistic or technical way.
