← Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Vishen Lakhiani: The Truth About Manifestation for Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
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- [00:01]
Hala Taha
Today's episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Airbnb. Open Phone, Shopify, Mercury, Built Indeed, and Boulevard. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or@younginprofiting.com deals. Yeah, fam. If you think meditation is just about sitting still and zoning out, get ready to rethink everything in this YAP classic. We're revisiting one of my most powerful conversations with Vishen Lakhiani, the visionary founder of Mindvalley and the author of the Six Phase Meditation Method. Vishen went from struggling with low self esteem to becoming a world renowned leader in personal growth. His secret was unlocking the power of his mind through a structured meditation framework that rewired his thoughts, sharpened his intuition and elevated his performance. In this conversation, Vishen breaks down why the law of Attraction might be misleading you, the steps to develop intuitive clarity and how to use his Six Phase method to manifest with precision and purpose. This isn't about wishful thinking. It's about building a system for success from the inside out. If you're ready to level up your mind and your life, this episode is for you. So let's dive right in.
- [01:23]
Alex
So, Vishen, like I mentioned, you are one of the biggest experts in the world in the field of human consciousness. So I'd love to start off with how you first discovered the power of your mind. Digging around, I found out that you grew up in Malaysia and you were actually an insecure and pimply kid. So talk to us about that.
- [01:40]
Vishen Lakhiani
Hello? That's mean. You just, you just brought that right out. Calling me an insecure pimply kid.
- [01:47]
Alex
To my surprise, I mean, now I feel like you're like on the COVID of Maxim magazine and things like that. But when you first came into this world, it wasn't quite like that, but you were able to kind of change even your physical representation in the world. So I'd love to understand how you discovered the power of your mind as a. As a kid.
- [02:07]
Vishen Lakhiani
It's not like I discovered it with one book. Okay. Or I discovered it with one. One seminar. Rather. My dad had this. My dad never went to university, but he had this white bookshelf in our home in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and he would educate himself on books by Napoleon Hill, by Bob Proctor, by Jose Silva, about all of these legendary people from the 50s and 60s and 70s and growing up in Malaysia in the 80s, there was no Internet, there were only three television channels, all of which served up the stupidest crap. So most of the time I had Nothing to do with. And what I ended up doing was browsing through my dad's bookshelves from the early age of 12 or 13. Now, I discovered books by Bob Proctor, I discovered books by Jose Silva, I discovered Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill became like a lifeline for me. I would read those books cover to cover, underlying everything. But while a lot of these books spoke about attitudes and mindset, the real magic came from reading the book Silva Mind Control by Jose Silva. Okay, so let's go back to that pimply kid. So Jose Silva, he developed a protocol for training people to access altered states of mind. Now, today we know altered state training is everywhere. In Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheel's book, Stealing Fire, they say the altered state economy is a trillion dollar economy. From CEOs to US military, people train in altered states for performance and so on. But back then in the 60s and 70s, it was less known. So when people spoke about altered states, they were talking about meditation, they were talking about hypnotherapy, they were talking about biofeedback, early 1970s style biofeedback. Now that was what Jose Silva dabbled with. He found that using an electroencephalograph, an EEG machine which you could strap to your skull, he could train people to go into levels of mind, the alpha and theta level of mind, where most people are semi asleep, but he could keep them awake. And he noticed interesting faculties of mind developing. For example, when you're at Alpha, at the Alpha level of mind, where your brain is beating at 7 to 14 cycles per second. So usually right now, as we are talking, our brains are at the beta level, 14 to 21 cycles per second. But if we get a little bit relaxed through box breathing or through meditation, we go down to Alpha. Now, at Alpha, interesting things happen. Not only are you more relaxed and not only does stress disappear, but you seem to be able to program and command your body and your beliefs. This is what Jose Silva found interesting. So at Alpha, he developed ways to program people. Like you were programmed with VCR back in the day. Program people to give up addictions, program people to even heal their body. And one of the most interesting programming is programming the skin. So it turns out that of all the organs in the human body, the skin is that organ most susceptible to the human mind. Hypnotists can hypnotize someone and say, imagine you are on a beach and the sun is shining down on you, and your skin is getting redder and redder with the sun, and that person will actually tan somehow on Command tan on command. So when I started reading about Jose Silva's work, and one of the things that Jose Silva would talk about is how in his classes he would hypnotize someone, pick up a marker and tell that person that marker was a red hot poker. Put it on their skin and a burn bubble would form instantly. And then he would put his hand on the burn bubble and command it to heal. And it would heal. Now this may seem cruel in today's era, but I guess in the 1970s in Texas, that was just how you educated people. So the skin is susceptible to the human mind. So this is what I did. Using a technique by Jose Silva, I decided to see if I could command my acne to disappear. So from the age of 13 onwards, I was cursed with bad acne. Now, I'm not using the word curse loosely. It literally came from a belief. I remember I was 13 years old, I looked in the mirror one day and I saw a pimple. And this was, we had a little mirror in our dining room in my home in Malaysia and a well meaning aunt came up to me and says, oh, you're a teenager now, you got your first pimple, it's going to get so much worse. And then she said something completely unscientific, but I believed it. She said, oh, and by the way, Bishan, you, you know, as a teenager, I also know you have dandruff and what's going to happen now? And she proceed to explain this to me in her signs. Your dandruff is going to fall on your face and it's going to get infected and your dandruff is going to cause even more pimples to grow. So good luck, happy teenagehood. And I believed it. And the next thing you know, for year after year after year, my face is covered in pimples. I have no confidence in myself. In school, the bullies are calling me pimple face. I was afraid to even make friends or ask a girl out. My entire teenage life. I went out five times. Five times, that's once a year.
- [06:59]
Alex
Wow.
- [07:00]
Vishen Lakhiani
But when I was 17, after reading these books, it occurred to me, why can't I heal my skin? So I decided to practice the Silva method techniques. I learned how to get myself into a rested state of mind, the alpha state. And then using a visualization model called the three Scenes Protocol by Jose Silva, I would visualize my skin healing. And by the way, if you guys want to learn this, just Google vision, creative visualization, healing and you'll find it. I did a video on this. I put it up on YouTube because I felt it was my duty to share this with other people. Right. And the Silver Method, just so I can be open about this, 20 years later, I would acquire the rights to the Silver Method and plug it into Mindvalley. So the official Silver Method is now part of Mindvalley. But what happened is in five weeks, I healed my skin. In five weeks, I had five years of acne. It disappeared. In five weeks, you can command your body to heal. Now, when that happened, I asked myself, what else can I do? And the next thing I wanted to do was to compete at the US Open Martial Art Taekwondo Competition. Taekwondo as Korean karate. So I started practicing the same technique to train my skill as a martial artist. And I accomplished that. I ended up representing my country also at the age of 17, at the 1993 US Open Taekwondo Championships in the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center. That when I experienced that evidence that I could command my skin to heal, that I could qualify for the US Open, my life changed. And since then, no other form of education has mattered except the education of learning how to apply your mind to make your dreams into reality. And yes, I do have a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. That's how I built up mindvalley. But nothing else I learned in university is comparable to the education I learned from those books on my father's bookshelf.
- [08:46]
Alex
What a powerful story. I love that. So something that I found interesting when I was researching is that you're of Indian descent, but you really aligned to the Silva Method, which in your own words you've said is like the Tex Mex of meditation. Right. So curious to why you didn't really go with your ancestors way of meditation and why you felt like you aligned to Silva Method.
- [09:10]
Vishen Lakhiani
Well. Well, first, Alex, explain Jose Silva. He lived in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas. These are border towns. So that's why I jokingly call it Tex Mex Meditation. But it is not the Taco Bell of meditation. It's more like the Chipotle of meditation. It's so delicious. It's so good, you want to just nibble on it every single day. So that's the Silver Method. And I would later grow up and become a Silver Method instructor, build a website to get people into my class. That website I called Mind Valley after Silver Mind Control. And that is how Mindvalley started. Today, we are the world's biggest personal growth platform. And someday I believe we'll be the world's biggest education company. So why Silver Method over meditation from Hindu culture. Well, I still do practice meditation from Hindu culture. One of the books that has completely transformed my life now this was when I was 21 was autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. And my own meditation protocol, which I've now, which is the subject of my latest book. Six Phase Meditation actually pulls from many different heritages. It pulls from Zen Roshi, Buddhism. It pulls from loving kindness, Buddhist concepts. It pulls from gratitude studies. It pulls from Silver Method. It pulls everything together into a daily practice called the Six Phase.
- [10:21]
Alex
Yeah, so I want to back up a little bit, Vishen. I want to talk about your journey to America. We talked about how you grew up in Malaysia and you ended up coming to America when you were 26. You really had like a life altering situation that really set you off to your life's journey. That's how you ended up really going off and starting Mind Valley and all the cool things that you did. But I have a lot of young male listeners and a lot of them are not in a good place right now. They're still trying to find their way. And so I'd love to really unpack your story and help them understand that you didn't start off just crushing it. So tell us about your journey to America and what happened.
- [10:59]
Vishen Lakhiani
So in that scenario, based on what you told me, rather than me tell you about my journey, can I rather just give direct advice to your young male listeners?
- [11:07]
Alex
Yeah, why not?
- [11:08]
Vishen Lakhiani
So forget my journey. My journey is my journey. You are going to have your own journey. My journey is meaningless to you. And I don't need to talk about my journey. Rather what I want to talk about is what happened to me and what I figured out when I was younger that helped me build a business where I could support myself. I tried to break it down into a couple of different principles. The first thing to know is this. If you're young, you are blessed with youth. Most people only figure it out at the age of 38. So I want you to know, even if you're 32 right now and you haven't figured it out and you are still living paycheck to paycheck or you still are at a job you dread, you're still young. Okay? Most people figure it out at 38. I figured it out at 39. It was only at 39 that I was done with going through cycles where the company would boom and then would Copenhagen bankruptcy where I had predictable income. I only figured it out at 39. So I just want everyone here to know that whatever standard you may be holding yourself up to, because it's easy to look at a Mark Zuckerberg and go, wow, this guy became a billionaire at 25. Or Kendall Jenner. No, those are anomalies. Most people, including myself, only figure it out at 38. Now, I believe you can accelerate figuring it out by remembering a few principles. Okay? Now the first principle is this. You must, must, must, must, must know your minimal livable income. Your mli, that's the word I coined. Your MLI is the minimum amount that you need to survive, lead a decent, healthy life. Once you know your mli, all your decisions on starting your business need to basically revolve around how can you cover your mli and knowing your MLI will also let you know when you can safely quit whatever day job you have if you're not loving it. So in my case, I worked for a company that had really bad culture. It was seriously bad. I mean, we had office politics, there was racism in the office. I was a person of Indian origin working in this office in New York. And I remember just experiencing horrendous culture, horrendous racism. But I couldn't quit. I couldn't quit because I needed the salary. And I had a girlfriend who was European. We lived together. And because she was European, she couldn't legally work in the US So I had to earn enough money for both of us. Now here's the thing. Back then in New York, this was maybe 2000, 2003. I was earning $7,500 a month. That's a pretty decent salary. Rent was 2,800. We couldn't afford 2,800 on rent. So we had a two bedroom apartment. We lived in one bedroom and I had a close friend living in the other bedroom. We didn't even have privacy. But this is what I knew. My minimal livable income for me and My girlfriend was $4,000 a month. Four grand. Four grand means we could afford to pay our share of the rent for that shared apartment. We could afford cable bills. We could afford Netflix. This is back when Netflix was CDs that they shipped to you. We could afford to eat out at a decent street side New York restaurant. I could go out for bar nights once a week with my friends. I could eat a Subway sandwich for lunch. I could eat a White Castle for dinner. Don't judge me.
- [14:21]
Alex
No judgment.
- [14:22]
Vishen Lakhiani
And I could have Starbucks for breakfast. $4,000 a month now, because I knew that I could set my mind on a goal. How could I make $4,000 a month. So the first thing I did is I got qualified as a meditation instructor. Now I could teach a class on meditation in New York. I could buy advertisements on Google AdWords, have people call me on the phone, and then I would pick up the phone and I would talk to them about the meditation class. And half of them would sign up on a $300 class. They would pay me via PayPal. And by paying doing this, I was able to generate an extra $1,000 a month or so in profit. That's not bad. Remember, I needed 4,000. Now I was at 1,000. So now I needed to do something else. I needed another form of passive income. $3,000. That was the gap I needed to fill. So the first lesson is here. Once you know your mli, you can focus like a laser on climbing towards your MLI. That little meditation class, I taught it once every two months. I made $2,000 profit. So that's 1,000amonth. But guess what? It meant I only had to work for two days every two months to hit 25% of my MLI. That's pretty damn good, right?
- [15:31]
Alex
Yeah.
- [15:32]
Vishen Lakhiani
Okay. Now the next thing is when you take a baby step, a beautiful thing happens. Napoleon Hill in his book Think and Grow Rich said, if you don't know how to start your entrepreneurial journey, if you don't know your path to riches, just guess, take a baby step. Baby steps don't have to be accurate, but baby steps show intention. And one baby step may send you in the wrong direction. But guess what? You will learn. You will autocorrect, but take that step. The first baby step was teaching meditation classes. The second baby step was I bought a domain, mindvalley.com. the third baby step was I taught myself how to build a webpage. And I started building a website for my meditation classes. And you know what? Not a single person bought anything. But I took a next baby step. I figured out how to use Google AdWords and drive people to my webpage. And again, not a single person bought. But I took another baby step. And this baby step is I bought a book on email autoresponders. And this time, rather than come to the web page and try to sell them in the meditation class, I said, give me your email address and I'll send you a nine part lesson series on how to get meditation right. That's it. And all of a sudden people started signing up. Now I had an email list. Then from the email list I would introduce them to my classes. Now my classes were selling out. My first month with this model, I lost 300 bucks on Google AdWords. My second month, I lost 800 bucks. My third month, I was making $4 a day. So $4 a day isn't much. But it started scaling. It went from $4 a day, which is. What is that, four times 30, about $120 a month, to $12 a day. Back then, I had to count it in dollars per day. But soon it hit 3,000amonth. And that's when. So I started this in January. It was November. I remember just before Thanksgiving, 2003, I hit that number of 4,000amonth. And that's when I went to my boss and I quit. I lovingly quit. I said, hey, I appreciate you, love you for everything you've taught me, but this culture isn't for me. I want to do my own thing. I quit. And he's like, what are you going to do? I'm like, I'm going to teach meditation. He's like, there's no money in that. I'm like, I don't know. Let's see. I love it. And I went. And now we come to the next lesson. If you do what you love, your odds of success are going to multiply. But again, you can't be stupid about it. You got to. I like the Japanese model of ikigai. You must find something you love, but it must be something that you are truly good at. If I love teaching meditation, but I sucked at it, I wasn't going to make money. If you love creating photography, but you suck at it, you're not going to make money. And the third thing is this. It must be able to make you money. So find what you love, what you can be good at, and what can make you money. So I had found all three. I love teaching meditation. I was good at it, and it could make me money. Once you find that, my God, the wheels of motion start kicking in. That little business went from 4,000amonth to. Eventually it became a business that hit 100 million in revenue a year with no VC funding. Now, that took, by the way, that number. It took 20 years. 20 years from the time I quit my job to have a business, which me and my employees own, all of it. So we have no VCs. It's just me and my employees. Every single person working at my company owns a piece of the business. And that business has 100 million in revenue, but it took 20 years. But you just keep innovating and innovating and innovating. And what I'm proud of is that I still love that business because I pick something I truly love doing. I love teaching meditation. My newest book is on meditation. It's 20 years later and I still love this subject. I love exploring the human mind. I would do this even if I didn't get paid for it. But remember the humble Stop. It all started with me calculating my minimal livable income, taking a baby step, getting qualified and teaching a meditation class, figuring out my first passive income, teaching meditation, then my second Passive Income, a website that could recruit people into the seminars. The third passive income was I started selling CDs on the website. Before passive income, I thought, well, I'm only teaching in New York. What about teachers in Columbus, Ohio or Silicon Valley? What if I list their classes, I help them fill their classes and I take 20%. You see, it starts building up. But today, more than ever, it is easy to build a business. The main message is know your minimum livable income, focus on that, and bit by bit climb your way to that level. Once you hit that minimal livable income, you can quit your job and you can dive into your business. And that's when it's going to start taking off. But before you hit your minimal livable income, it does help to have a steady paying job. In fact, a study shows, this study was in the book Breakthrough Company that people who start a company while having a steady paying job are 30% more likely to succeed. Don't just quit your job cold turkey. I built my little meditation business on nights and weekends.
- [20:32]
Hala Taha
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- [26:04]
Alex
I grew my YAP media social media agency. My podcast everything was as a side hustle. I used to work in corporate and that's the smartest way to do it and I feel like you just gave such good practical advice and I love how it wasn't just about like affirmations and wishing and hoping like it's real action but part of that action. Correct me if I'm wrong, Vishen is really following your intuition. Right. You keep talking about baby steps, but how do you know what steps to take? It's really about following your. Your gut, trusting your intuition. Can you talk to us about that?
- [26:36]
Vishen Lakhiani
Well, intuition, I believe, is there was a study done, so let's talk about science. Right. Because I know your audience, and as soon as you start talking about intuition, half of them are going to go intuition, that bs. So there's science that actually shows there is a faculty within our minds that seems to allow us to perceive information outside our physical brains. We don't really understand how it works. If you want to look up the science, the Ganzfield test studies at the University of Edinburgh, for example, they found that in situations where people should be able to guess the probability of an outcome by 25% if you could get that person into a rested state. Right. Like in a sensory deprivation chamber, the actual correct guessing rate was 33%. That's huge. You're going from 1 in 4 to 1 in 3. But you can't explain how that guessing is happening. Now, another example is this. Professor John Mihaloski at the Newark College of Engineering did a study on CEOs and intuition, and he found that there's a correlation. CEOs who performed better in intuition tests also deliver more profits to their company. So, firstly, what you think about intuition or not, there's something to it. Napoleon Hill. In fact, the guy whom I quoted earlier when we spoke about Baby Steps didn't just speak about the practical aspects of growing a business like Baby Steps. In his book Think and Grow Rich, he spoke about a concept called Vibes. Vibes. And if you listen to what he says, he's speaking about intuition. He said the most successful man I I interviewed had learned to resonate their rate of thought at a different level, to pull in ideas, insights beyond the ordinary rate of thought. Yeah, that's a paraphrase of a quote from Napoleon Hill. So there is something there. And by the way, this quality of intuition is accelerated when you have a meditation practice.
- [28:24]
Alex
Yeah. So again, I think my listeners are beginners at this. So I think what would be helpful is to understand right brain and left brain thinking and then also to understand what does intuition actually feel like.
- [28:37]
Vishen Lakhiani
So a good way to start is to develop a meditation practice, the Six Phase Meditation. It's a book. It's 13 bucks on Amazon. If not, just you can listen to the Guided meditation Six Phase directly on the mindvalley app. It's free. So download the mindvalley app, create an account. You don't have to pay a thing. When you go to click on programs and you will notice that the six phase program, I recently made it completely free because I wanted to give it as a tool to entrepreneurship. Go to the program and you will learn. I will guide you over six days on how to enhance your states of awareness, how to access deep states of mind, how to increase your creativity and intuition. Okay? So it's there. I also teach you the exact creative visualization protocol I use to heal my skin and qualify for the US Open. You can use that protocol to build your business as well, to put you in the right frame of mind as an entrepreneur. Everything in that is science based. Okay, so go and check that out. Now, there are two types of intuition. One is a gut hunch. You're trying to decide between two people to call because you have a sales call, you have limited time and you just sense that this call is going to go better. Listen to that sense. After my first Silver class, the person who was teaching me silver. When I turned 27, I moved to Silicon Valley. And at that point I could afford to attend the Silver class. So I remember flying to LA to take a class by the Silva Method. And Jose Silva, the founder, had died in 1999. So this was way, way past that. This was maybe 2002. But this instructor was a pharmaceutical sales rep who had learned, I believe, from Jose. And she showed me how to use intuition to close sales. And the tactic was really interesting. You get into a restful state of mind, a meditative state of mind. As I said, intuition emerges when you are in a rested state. Now back then we used the Yellow Pages. So in my sales job, I have to call lawyers from A to Z in San Antonio, Texas. So first a lawyer like Abernathy and then Arzu and so on, right? A, A, A And then you go all the way down. Rather than just call, I would get into a rested state. Imagine as if I could run my finger down the phone book. So all of this is just imagination. And as I was running my finger down a name that I was meant to call where the odds of closing the sale were higher because this lawyer needed that service. I would just imagine like that name would light up. So I'd run my finger down the phone book and then, oh, that lit up. You feel like you're playing a game. And I would only call those lawyers. Now my facilitator said, listen, just test this out. Just test out the names that you feel you have a hunch to call and tell me if Your sales track record increases. Here's the crazy part. As soon as I tried this technique, instantly my sales doubled. Sales don't just double overnight, it doubled and it stayed at that level. There is something to it. So I had a thousand names in the yellow page that I couldn't possibly cold call everyone. But from cold calling the names, and these were cold calls that I felt an impulse on, my sales literally doubled. Now how do you explain that? The thing is, science can't explain that. But studies are showing that there is a correlation between this quality that we call intuition and business success.
- [31:42]
Alex
Yeah, something that I thought was really interesting when I was studying your work is this idea of negative intuition and how a lot of leaders actually don't follow their gut and it can cause some problems. Can you talk to us about that?
- [31:55]
Vishen Lakhiani
So negative intuition. This is from Professor John Mihalasky, Newark College of Engineering. The book that this is from is called Executive esp. So one thing about me is I know what I'm saying may be controversial to some. So I'm always going to start scientific studies and give you the places where you can go and dig in and research. Okay. Executive esp. What John Mihalaski found is that if you give the CEO scorecards and they have to guess what's on the card, a circle or a triangle or a square, typically There are some CEOs who guess way above the 25% rate of probability. These CEOs he deemed them as high intuition. And he also found that high intuition correlated with higher profitability in the company. Now interestingly enough, there were CEOs who while you should be guessing 25% correct, they were guessing less. 19, 21, 22% correct. This is weird. It's like they are unlucky. So even the odds of probability were against them. It turned out these CEOs were having the worst profitability in their company. So it seems to be that there are people who are actually second guessing their intuition and we can't explain it. We don't know why, but have negative intuition. But don't worry about that. Typically I don't believe anyone has negative intuition. I believe what rather happens is that we second guess ourselves. There is some part of ourselves where maybe we, we have self doubt or it's some childhood trauma, but we are second guessing ourselves and that can be a mistake.
- [33:21]
Alex
Yeah, 100%. We've got to trust our gut and not self sabotage. So I want to dig into your six phase meditation, a few more questions just because you've got so much interesting Stuff out there that I want to talk about. I've heard you say that the concept of manifestation and the law of attraction, a lot of people get it all wrong. They think it's about wishing for what they want. And in a recent interview, I heard you say that the universe does not give you what you want. It gives you what you are. And I thought this was like, such a powerful concept that I really want my listeners to understand.
- [33:55]
Hala Taha
So.
- [33:56]
Alex
So why is that? Why doesn't it give you what you want? But it's. But the universe gives you what you are.
- [34:00]
Vishen Lakhiani
So that quote came from an interview I did with the Reverend Michael Beckwith. He is a incredible spiritual teacher, and he was in the movie the Secret. So interestingly enough, Reverend Beckwith, he has been in more documentary films than any other spiritual teacher alive today. The guy is just a visionary. And one day he was speaking at an event I was putting on in Portugal, and I happened to catch him for breakfast, and I said, hey, Michael, you were in that movie the Secret 20 years back. Based on what you've learned over the last two decades, is there anything that you would say differently to your audience? And he goes, absolutely. Vishen I would tell people that the law of attraction is bunk. I'm like, what? He goes, the universe doesn't give you what you want. Rather, the universe will give you who you are. And he says, this is the law of resonance, and this is what I want people to understand. Now, what he means by that is that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, deep inside, you need to believe, you need to act, you need to have the habits of a successful entrepreneur. The universe gives you what you are. Remember I told you the story about that aunt who made me believe that my skin was going to break out in pimples? And it did. Well, in science, this is called a placebo effect. What we believe about our bodies actually manifests within our bodies. This is another example. I believed from that day onwards that I was a teenager that was going to be cursed with pimples. I didn't want it, but I believed I was that person. The universe gave me what I believed, who I believed I was. When I believed that I could heal my skin, the universe gave me what made reality, who I believed I was, a person who I could heal my skin. This is why we sometimes get what we don't want. This is why the law of attraction is not really something I talk about, but the law of resonance. What you believe you are, you get. And so the trick is to learn how to slowly by slowly improve the quality of your beliefs, to develop healthier and healthier and healthier beliefs layered upon healthy beliefs. And what you start seeing is that your life expands in accordance with these beliefs.
- [36:05]
Alex
Yeah, it's so interesting, and I feel like this is such a great segue into your four levels of personal growth, because essentially meditation and the law of attraction and manifesting, it's all personal growth. Right. It's all self improvement in a way. So I'd love to understand the four levels of personal growth and why you can't just like, start off at like, the highest level.
- [36:25]
Vishen Lakhiani
So different people at different levels, right? In their. In their personal growth. Just like if you want to teach someone financial independence, the way you teach someone who is in debt and wants to get out of debt is different from how you teach someone who has a million dollars and wants to learn how to grow that million dollars. So it's the same with personal growth. At the lowest level, you have people at victim mentality. Now, I doubt anyone listening to this podcast is at victim mentality, because people at victim mentality don't invest in their growth. They believe the world is horrible and life is unfair and they continue toil and struggle. That's victim mentality. The world is happening to them. They are a victim of circumstance. At a certain point, you get to level two. Level two is where you understand that to some degree, you can control the world. You can set goals and you can move towards those goals. You can decide, for example, I want to take care of my body, I'm going to embrace my body, I'm going to set a goal to go to the gym twice a week. And you can commit to that and do that, and to some degree, you have control over that aspect of your life. So people who listen to podcasts, people who embrace personal growth, tend to be at level two and higher. That's why you're listening to this podcast, because you know that there's something here you're going to learn that's going to further give you control over your life. Now at level three, it gets even more interesting. At level three, you start understanding that it's not just that you can control the world. At level three, you start understanding that to some degree you are part of this larger world. You're not just moving towards goals, that there are faculties within you, the faculties of intuition, the faculties of understanding, the law of resonance, the faculties of being able to access altered states of mind. You start understanding that all of these are open to you and you are not just Physical, but there's a world inside you. So it's not just that the world is outside you, the world is inside you. My protocol, the six Phase Meditation, is based on this concept. It's teaching you what is called a psycho spiritual transcendent technique that takes you to transcend means to get out of the physical world, but go inside the world, to go inside you. You learn how to hack your feelings of bliss, how to hack gratitude, how to elevate compassion, how to forgive, how to visualize your goals. All of these are happening at level three. You understand that there's a world inside you that you can master. And at level four, level four, very few people get to. Level four is the God mind. Level four is where the outside world and the inner world is all one and you can manipulate reality. This is Neo from the Matrix. This is Jesus Christ. This is Paramahansa Yogananda. There are very few people at level four. Level four is the God mind.
- [39:06]
Alex
So I was going to ask you if you think you're at level four, but I doubt it.
- [39:10]
Vishen Lakhiani
No, I'm not at level four. No, no, no. But I'm at level three. I'm at level three.
- [39:13]
Alex
Most people think they're level three, but they're probably. And that probably means that most people are not a level three if you're at a level three.
- [39:20]
Vishen Lakhiani
So let me tell you, Michael Beckwith, to go back to that wonderful man, he said something, he says, when you give people a map like this, it's very useful because once you have a map, you can navigate better. So hopefully this map lets you navigate where you are. But here's the thing, people. Michael Beckwith also says this. Ken Wilber says the same thing. Most people overestimate themselves by one level. So if you think you're at like a level 3.5, you're probably at level 2.5.
- [39:46]
Alex
Yeah.
- [39:46]
Vishen Lakhiani
If you think you're at level 3, you're most likely at level 2 because there's so much depth to how, how much you can dive into this, these philosophies.
- [39:56]
Alex
Yeah. So it's really interesting for level three, I listened to you on. I listened to like 10 interviews to prepare for this interview. I always do that. And I heard you talking about how level three, actually, the universe, with little of your control, will destroy parts of your life in order to achieve what you actually want. So, for example, I saw this in my journey. I've been podcasting for four and a half years. Everything in the last five years has changed. My relationship changed, my friends Changed. My career obviously changed. And a lot of it, I felt like I had very little control over it. I had this goal and then the universe would just destruct anything in my way of getting that goal. Right. So I'd love to understand if you believe that. Do you believe that the universe destroys things that will get in your way towards your goals? If you really believe and want it.
- [40:45]
Vishen Lakhiani
Let me tell you what, what I was talking about. I was talking about an idea I coined in my first book, the code of the extraordinary mind. The idea of the beautiful destruction. And the beautiful destruction is this. Okay, so again, this is an imaginary exercise. There's no scientific evidence for this. But play along with me. There are two parts to you. There's your soul and then there's your conscious mind. And very often your soul has made. Imagine that before you were born, if you believe in life after death, the life before or life before birth, before you were born. Imagine if your soul decided that there were certain things you had to experience in this life, that there was this business that you were meant to start, that there was this woman or man that you were meant to fall in love with and make beautiful babies with, that there was this city you were meant to live in. Okay? Now, in your conscious life, you get pulled in different directions through the pushes and tussles of culture and beliefs and religions and race and education and media. You end up in a different city from the city where the love of your life is living. You end up in a different field from the field in which you're supposed to build a world changing business. It is at these moments, I believe, that the soul will launch into what is what I call the beautiful destruction. It will destroy an aspect of your life. You can move to that new city, you can move into that new relationship, you can move into that new career path where what you are meant to experience is going to experience. I've seen the beautiful destruction happen so many times. The beautiful destruction sometimes is the universe messing up our life so that we can move on to something greater. We end up in hospital with a health issue, but from that we change the way we take care of our body. We go through bankruptcy and business A, but that gives us the launchpad to launch business B, which is the business that changes the world. We have the person we are in love with break our heart, but this beautiful destruction causes us to find the person that we are meant to marry and be in love with for the next 50 years. So this beautiful destruction happens all through life. And I think there's a beauty in viewing life like it, because every time something bad happens, you don't necessarily see that it's a bad thing. Rather, the question you ask yourself is not why is this happening to me? But why is this happening for me?
- [43:06]
Hala Taha
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- [47:22]
Alex
That'S such A better way to approach things. And I. I felt that with my own life. Almost every single negative rejection or failure always has a silver lining. Right? You always learn from it, and. And things always get better as a result and kind of redirects where you actually need to go. So one more super interesting idea from level three that I've heard you talk about and definitely don't want to misquote you, but I know that Edison said ideas come from space. Right. He's literally said this. And I find it really fascinating to think that ideas can come from outside your mind and that you can actually get ideas from the universe, so to speak. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
- [48:04]
Vishen Lakhiani
Well, again, this is. This is philosophy. This is not science. Right. Intuition has been proven by science, but we don't know, is it coming from outside our mind, or is there some form of information transfer? If you guys actually Google that, the Nobel Prize was just issued for the idea of nonlocality. If you want to really go down the rabbit hole, go read about nonlocality in physics. But the universe is a lot more complex and weird than we tend to think. What we learn about physics doubles every seven years. And I believe that our brains can receive information from outside our brain. So when we're in a meditative state of mind, some people say it's not really intuition, it's just that your brain is processing differently ideas, buried memories are emerging. But I've seen situations where, especially in studies like with Mikhalaski, with the Ganzfield test experiments, where stuff that your brain shouldn't know, like what is on the other side of that card, stuff that your brain shouldn't know seems to come to you. We can't explain it, but that could be a form of new physics. I remember that the. The physicist Nassim Haramin said, spirituality is nothing more than physics we have yet to find an equation for.
- [49:13]
Alex
And aren't there a lot of, like, CEOs and innovators who have said that they feel like they've gotten ideas from the universe, from space?
- [49:21]
Vishen Lakhiani
Yeah, pretty much like every. Every major Silicon Valley CEO I know right now, if I can be really honest, every major Silicon Valley CEO, I live in Estonia. Every Estonian CEO, I'm in Dubai right now. Every freaking Dubai billionaire and CEO I hang out with, every single one has an altered state practice. So what are altered state practices? There are four things. Meditation is the first one, and that is the best one. The second one is neurotraining, where you actually go into laboratories where they strap electrodes to your brain and they help put you into altered states. The third one is plant medicine. Ayahuasca, psilocybin are very common. And the fourth one is breathwork. Every single CEO I know has an altered state practice. I'm telling you, the most successful people in the world are doing it. In fact, John Butcher, who's one of the Most successful American CEOs I know, he's the guy behind the Precious Moments brand. John has seven companies under his belt right now. He said any CEO does not have an altered state practice is at a competitive disadvantage. And it is these altered state practices where insights, where intuitions, where ideas come from. Even CEOs who say they don't believe in intuition have an altered state practice. Let me give you an example. I had Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory interview me, right? And he says, I don't believe in intuition. To me, everything has to be proven by science. So I gave him the science and I said, go look it up. But Tom Bilyeu does do this. He has a meditation practice where he sits down and he just lets ideas form in his head. He calls it thinkitation. And very often from his thinkitation practices, incredible new ideas form. I mean, Tom Milieu is a genius. He's starting so many different companies in Web3 and in media, but it's coming to him when he sits still and goes into an altered state. The only difference is I believe that some of these ideas are coming from outside the faculties of our brain. He believes it's coming from your inner state. That's it. But we don't have to argue about that to use it. We don't have to understand how it works to actually start utilizing these practices in our life.
- [51:20]
Alex
It's so interesting. I. I love this topic. So you have a new book that was released earlier this year, the Six Phase Meditation Method. The proven technique to supercharge your mind, manifest your goals, and make magic in minutes a day. So I think that you made this for high performers, right? Because a lot of high performers have a hard time meditating, including myself. I've had many meditation experts on the show. It's really hard for me to get into a meditation practice. Even though I consider myself pretty spiritual and successful, it's hard for me to meditate. So why does meditation. Why is it so hard for high performers?
- [51:56]
Vishen Lakhiani
So every high performer I know meditates. The problem is the ones who are doing it well are applying what is called active meditation. They're using meditation to solve problems. To visualize their projects, to come up with ideas. The ones who are struggling are confused because they think meditation is just focusing on your breath, clearing your mind and trying to remove all thought. That's mindfulness, but it's different. So there's passive meditation and active meditation. If you're an entrepreneur, odds are passive meditation bugs the hell out of you because your brain is constantly racing. Well, then don't do passive meditation. It's like you not liking yoga and saying all exercise sucks. I will never go to a gym, I will never lift weights because I tried moving my body once in these stretchy positions and it wasn't for me. So there are two types of meditation, Passive or hermetic meditation. This is useful if you're the type that can actually still your mind. Most entrepreneurs can. And then active meditation, this is from people like Jose Silva, like myself. And active meditation is about turning problems into projects, about facing the world head on, building, creating, seeing and visualizing your goals, crushing it in life and in sales. That's the meditation that entrepreneurs should be doing. Now, when you do the six phase, you're going into active meditation. But it's done in such a way where you also get the benefits of passive meditation, which are primarily bliss, blissfulness, compassion, and attitudes of forgiveness.
- [53:20]
Alex
Got it. So I know that you break down six phase meditation into two chunks or pillars, right? So you have the pillar of happiness and the pillar of vision. Why don't we start with the pillar of happiness? What's incorporated in that?
- [53:33]
Vishen Lakhiani
Okay, so phase one has to do with compassion. Okay? Compassion is a superpower. Phase two has to do with bliss, happiness. Phase three is applying forgiveness to make you unfuck with able and unfuckwithable. Simply means that negativity can't touch you and you are forgiving of negativity in the past. These three are all about the present. Then you go to the future and the future. Phase four is about seeing your life three years out. Phase five is about commanding your perfect day. And phase six is about asking for a blessing or support from whatever higher power you believe in.
- [54:03]
Alex
Got it.
- [54:04]
Vishen Lakhiani
And it sounds simple, but you can go really deep into it. And when you master it, it completely changes the way you show up. So the six phase has been used by sports stars, by athletes. There's so many crazy stories about the six phase out there. One entrepreneur, he is the founder of Bella and Duke, the dog food company. He approached me at a conference in London and he said he's doing the six phase for four years and it helped him take Bella and Duke to $100 million in sales. And he said it's because all of these practices, they tied so well to his business. For example, the compassion practice, he said, made him create a really loving, loving office space where people could bring their pets, their dogs to the office space. And all of this, he said, transformed him. And he says he credited it partially with helping him take his dog food brand against the odds to 100 million in revenue.
- [54:54]
Alex
Wow. That I know that with your visualization part or the vision part of the six phase meditation, you recommend to really focus on the next three years. And I thought that was really fascinating. Why three years?
- [55:07]
Vishen Lakhiani
Bill Gates. Bill Gates, who's actually my former boss, love him or hate him, I think the man is wonderful. Bill Gates said, we tend to overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in three. By focusing on a three year time horizon, you give yourself more space to really dream, to really, really, really look at what you want to create in your life.
- [55:26]
Alex
Yeah. So where can people learn more about the six phase meditation? What are the best ways?
- [55:31]
Vishen Lakhiani
Well, get the book six phase Meditation method. The book is wonderful. And you can get the app free on the on mindvalley. Download the mindvalley app and then go to programs and you'll find the six phase perfect.
- [55:42]
Alex
Awesome. I'll stick all of those links in the show notes.
- [55:44]
Hala Taha
Yeah.
- [55:45]
Alex
Fam. Alright, so vision at the end of the show we asked two questions. Then we do something fun at the end of the year with them. So the first one is what is one actionable thing my young and profits can do today to become more profiting tomorrow?
- [55:58]
Vishen Lakhiani
Figure out your mla.
- [56:00]
Alex
Very good. And what is your secret to profiting in life?
- [56:04]
Vishen Lakhiani
Making sure that you've designed your life in such a way where you feel happy and blissful every day and the people around you feel happy and blissful because they are. They are around you.
- [56:15]
Hala Taha
Awesome.
- [56:16]
Alex
Vishen, it was so lovely to talk to you. I feel like our listeners learned so much from you. I'm going to stick all of your important links in the show notes so they can find you, follow you, get your book. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting podcast.
- [56:28]
Vishen Lakhiani
Thank you. Hala, thank you for this wonderful conversation and I appreciate the amount of work and diligence you did in actually researching your guests. That is rare in the podcast world today and kudos to you for doing it.
- [56:37]
Alex
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
- [56:39]
Vishen Lakhiani
Take care. Bye.
- [56:47]
Hala Taha
Sa.