Latest / Sri Aurobindo Studies / How to Escape the Matrix Interview

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How to Escape the Matrix Interview · Sri Aurobindo Studies

• 0:00
  So we are actually one being, if you will, that shares a common
• 0:06
  relationship by the very active breathing.
• 0:11
  Can you explain what is the Super mind and how is it
• 0:14
  qualitatively different from our current state of rational
• 0:19
  rational mental consciousness? We generally judge our
• 0:24
  relationships, our families by physical and biological basis,
• 0:34
  OK? In other words, we're born into
• 0:36
  a family, we're born into a society, we're born into a
• 0:39
  culture, we're born into a religion, and that's how we
• 0:43
  frame ourselves. There's a project taking place
• 0:47
  in South India called Oroville, which is a Township that's being
• 0:53
  developed eventually to be a city of 50,000 people and
• 0:57
  integrate people from many different cultures, languages,
• 1:01
  backgrounds, religions, et cetera.
• 1:03
  In your experience, what's the biggest resistance people have
• 1:07
  to doing this inner work and how can they overcome it?
• 1:11
  I think the biggest resistance is their fear of giving up what
• 1:16
  is known and secure to them and that their peers and their
• 1:20
  friends circle and their education and background and
• 1:23
  training have told them they should do.
• 1:27
  If you are new to this podcast, please don't forget to like,
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• 1:51
  spiritual journey and you would like some help removing some
• 1:53
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• 1:57
  under score 246 and it will help you to get some magic mushrooms.
• 2:01
  Enjoy the show and stay tuned because we have some more great
• 2:04
  content coming soon. Hello beautiful and amazing
• 2:08
  people. Welcome to the Conscious Man 7
• 2:10
  podcast. I am your host Todd Cave, and
• 2:13
  this podcast is the place where awakening men and women come to
• 2:17
  unlock the deeper truths of life, break free from the
• 2:20
  illusions of modern society, and reconnect to their true power.
• 2:24
  In this episode, we're diving into one of the most profound
• 2:28
  spiritual blueprints for humanities, evolution with
• 2:31
  author, teacher, and consciousness explorer Santosh
• 2:35
  Krinsky. Santosh has spent decades
• 2:37
  immersed in the teachings of Sri Arabindo, one of the most
• 2:41
  influential spiritual philosophers of the modern era.
• 2:44
  Through his work at the Institute for Holistic Education
• 2:47
  and his readings in Sri Arabindo series, Santosh brings ancient
• 2:52
  spiritual wisdom into practical focus, giving us tools to
• 2:55
  confront today's identity crises, the addiction to
• 2:58
  consumerism, and one of the deeper questions about our
• 3:02
  purpose. This isn't just an intellectual
• 3:04
  conversation, it's a road map to escape the Matrix.
• 3:08
  If you've ever wondered whether there is more to life than the
• 3:11
  endless pursuit of money, validation, and survival, this
• 3:15
  episode could be your turning point.
• 3:17
  Stay tuned. When truth is blurred by lies
• 3:22
  and misinformation, perception becomes reality.
• 3:28
  What will you perceive your reality to be?
• 3:33
  Liberate your fears and walk with me.
• 3:39
  Sit down and meditate. Connect with your soul.
• 4:08
  So it really goes really deep in terms of words and etymology and
• 4:13
  what they mean. So This is why like it is really
• 4:17
  hard to really crap the Matrix because there's so many levels
• 4:20
  and layers to it, you know? Santosh, welcome to the
• 4:23
  Conscious Man 7 podcasts. How are you today mate?
• 4:27
  Thank you. I'm fine and it's a pleasure to
• 4:29
  be with you today, Tom. Yes, I'm really looking forward
• 4:33
  to this conversation because prior to looking you up, I never
• 4:39
  heard about Sri Arabindo. And from what I have seen, his
• 4:44
  work is pretty good, but it seems to be pretty dense and
• 4:48
  most people seem to have difficulty interpreting it.
• 4:52
  And you spent decades basically studying this guy and I would
• 4:57
  guess you can say decrypting or making the information and the
• 5:01
  understanding more accessible to to to people to humanity.
• 5:06
  So I was, I'm very interested to talk to you today so that even
• 5:10
  myself, I can learn a few things, you know.
• 5:13
  So today I want to start off because I have seen you talk
• 5:17
  talked about the existential crisis that we have.
• 5:20
  So what is the existential crisis of humanity today, and
• 5:25
  how does it manifest in our daily lives across mental
• 5:29
  health, identity and meaning? Well, that's a great question.
• 5:37
  Scientists have told us we are in the midst of the 6th
• 5:41
  planetary die off. The last planetary die off was
• 5:46
  when all the dinosaurs disappeared a long time ago.
• 5:50
  This die off means that species that lived on this planet are
• 5:55
  dying every single day of the week.
• 5:59
  And it's happening because we humanity, have made dramatic
• 6:06
  changes to the environment, if you will, within which we live.
• 6:13
  We've changed the climate, we've changed the chemical balance.
• 6:17
  We've what what we call pollution everywhere.
• 6:21
  We've added microplastics and all kinds of pharmaceutical
• 6:25
  drugs into the waterways, fertilizers and pesticides.
• 6:32
  And herbicides and all of these things together are creating
• 6:38
  that crisis. But it goes even further because
• 6:41
  we've exploited certain resources to such a great degree
• 6:47
  that. Even humanity is having trouble
• 6:50
  keeping up with it. And a couple of examples.
• 6:55
  There's a real freshwater problem in the world today.
• 6:58
  The freshwater is disappearing. It's being used.
• 7:02
  The aquifers are all being drawn down, and the glaciers are
• 7:07
  melting, and they're melting into this saline oceans.
• 7:11
  And so we're starting to see water conflicts arising around
• 7:15
  the world. Even in the United States, we
• 7:18
  have the concern about the use of the Colorado River and which
• 7:24
  States and which First Nations tribes and how much Mexico gets
• 7:29
  can all be basically a method of creating conflict.
• 7:37
  But you have the same thing happening in the Middle East,
• 7:40
  the same thing in South Asia and Southeast Asia.
• 7:44
  In the recent war, more or less between India and Pakistan,
• 7:49
  India said, well, we're going to cut off a Pakistan's
• 7:55
  availability of water from the Brahmaputra.
• 7:59
  The Chinese coming off the Tibetan Plateau are already
• 8:04
  controlling some of the major rivers in Southeast Asia and
• 8:08
  South Asia, and they're starting to exercise water control over
• 8:14
  some of the other countries to get them to do what they want.
• 8:17
  This is not against or for any particular group of people.
• 8:21
  It's happening all over the world because fresh water is
• 8:24
  disappearing and people are fighting for this essential
• 8:29
  resource. Another example, several billion
• 8:35
  people on the planet rely on fish as their primary protein
• 8:40
  source. Now, I'm a vegan.
• 8:43
  It doesn't affect me personally directly, but the ocean
• 8:48
  fisheries have been so decimated by overfishing that they're in
• 8:55
  the process of collapsing. And when they collapse, you're
• 8:59
  going to have a billion people who aren't going to have a major
• 9:02
  food source that they rely on today, and that is going to
• 9:07
  create serious problems. The other thing that's happening
• 9:11
  is climate change, even if some people like to deny it, is
• 9:16
  actually taking place. And it's changing the heat of
• 9:21
  the oceans, making the plankton that provide the first food
• 9:27
  source for the rest of the food chain in the ocean and produce
• 9:33
  more oxygen than the trees do on the planet.
• 9:38
  They're dying off in vast areas of the oceans.
• 9:42
  And then you Add all the plastics that are going into the
• 9:45
  oceans and how that's getting into the stomachs of the larger
• 9:51
  fish and mammals in the ocean and destroying their lives and
• 9:57
  decimating that portion of the food chain.
• 9:59
  We've got a real serious problem here and people don't
• 10:03
  necessarily recognize it. We're poisoning ourselves.
• 10:08
  We have hormonal changes taking place, reduction of sperm
• 10:13
  counts, reduction of fertility, earlier fertility for young
• 10:18
  girls because of all the hormone disrupting chemicals that we're
• 10:24
  putting into our own water supply through the chemicals
• 10:27
  we're creating. And we have pollution, we have
• 10:30
  lead, we have mercury. We have all these things that
• 10:33
  affect our lives and affect the planet.
• 10:38
  So I call this the 6th planetary die off, which I didn't coin
• 10:45
  that term, but to me that's an existential crisis, putting
• 10:49
  aside the fact that it creates. All kinds of conflicts between
• 10:54
  people and fights over resources, fights over access,
• 10:58
  fights over who's polluting and who's getting victimized by it.
• 11:04
  And we wind up with a lot of conflict, wars, threats of
• 11:10
  nuclear or biological destruction and mass migrations,
• 11:15
  and then the attempts to control these things after the fact.
• 11:20
  And to me, that looks like one big can of worms, you could say,
• 11:25
  in terms of what we as humanity are facing today.
• 11:31
  So what you describe sounds to me like systematic breakdown,
• 11:38
  and it seems like a system thing.
• 11:41
  So why have the traditional quotation mark solutions,
• 11:45
  politics, religion, science and economics failed to resolve the
• 11:50
  core spiritual vacuum? Well, that's a.
• 11:53
  That's a good question. A lot of that is based on where
• 11:58
  those different solutions come from and their limitations.
• 12:04
  The mental capability of humanity is very much linear.
• 12:12
  You could say it goes from point A to point B, it extrapolates,
• 12:17
  it analyzes, it divided divides, but it doesn't undertake what I
• 12:23
  would call a global or holistic view of things.
• 12:27
  And so the solutions tend to have unintended consequences,
• 12:33
  and people sitting in different spots in the mental realm have
• 12:39
  different ways of looking at it and different solutions.
• 12:42
  And then they all conflict with each other and they haven't
• 12:46
  found a way to harmonize that. So we wind up with what is
• 12:49
  called gridlock. And we see that today in the
• 12:52
  governments around the world. We see paralysis as they try to
• 13:00
  solve problems mentally with political or economic or
• 13:05
  technological solutions. And in terms of religion, that
• 13:11
  comes from a somewhat different space in our being.
• 13:14
  But each religion has its own agenda, if you will, and they
• 13:19
  haven't quite all come to the conclusion that they need to
• 13:24
  stay nice with each other. A religion has probably caused
• 13:28
  more wars and more depths than any other thing in the in the
• 13:31
  history of humanity because they all think that they're the ones
• 13:36
  and everyone else is wrong. And in some cases it's have a
• 13:41
  crusade and kill the infidels. You know, this has not been a
• 13:46
  pretty history that religion has undergone, even though.
• 13:50
  The founders of religions in many cases spoke of the unity
• 13:54
  and the oneness of humanity, the unity of consciousness on the
• 13:59
  planet. It didn't quite translate down
• 14:02
  to all of the disciples and then the vested interest that latched
• 14:07
  on to that because they can capture the supportive.
• 14:13
  People. So it wound up with that.
• 14:16
  The religions for the most part got Co opted by the vested
• 14:21
  interests. We put it in Christian terms.
• 14:25
  Jesus turned down the control of the government, the politics of
• 14:31
  the world when he was tempted with that.
• 14:35
  But later the Roman Empire Co opted the Christian religion and
• 14:42
  made it a state religion and used it to conquer other people.
• 14:46
  So we have the difference between a founder and the result
• 14:52
  later, hundreds of years, possibly later, when it when it
• 14:57
  actually gets carried out in the real world and people start
• 15:00
  fighting over money and prestige and power and everything else.
• 15:05
  Yeah, it I totally agree with you in the sense that religion
• 15:10
  is. I say it's a terrible idea.
• 15:13
  I think it's the worst invention ever given to man and I think it
• 15:19
  is created part of the crises that we have.
• 15:23
  So with that being said, can you share how Sri or Rabindo framed
• 15:27
  this crisis in his time and why his diagnosis is more relevant
• 15:32
  than ever in 2025? Yes, To do that I have to take
• 15:37
  us back a little bit to an understanding of the evolution
• 15:42
  of consciousness, because essentially Sri or Bindo looks
• 15:49
  at the development of consciousness as the key to
• 15:56
  evolution on the planet. Charles Darwin talks about the
• 16:02
  evolution of forms, and he studied how different forms move
• 16:09
  from one formation to the next formation to the next formation.
• 16:14
  And that didn't explain what the causative factor is.
• 16:21
  And the causative factor from Sri Aurobindo's viewpoint was
• 16:25
  the development of consciousness.
• 16:28
  There's a consciousness, if you will, in every rock and every
• 16:33
  mineral on the planet. If you study them, you will see
• 16:37
  that there is an incredible atomic structure that is
• 16:42
  mathematical in nature that's highly controlled.
• 16:46
  And as Einstein and others proved, matter is actually a
• 16:55
  solidified form of energy. OK, it's it can be converted
• 17:01
  into energy, which led us to the atomic bomb and nuclear energy.
• 17:05
  So the energy is locked away in matter.
• 17:09
  It's there. It's just not very active or
• 17:13
  visible to us in the material form.
• 17:18
  Out of those material forms, over a period of many millennia,
• 17:23
  life forms evolved and life forms add the vital principle.
• 17:28
  They add movement, responsiveness, reactions,
• 17:33
  etcetera. They transform energy into new
• 17:38
  patterns and forms. Eventually plant forms evolved
• 17:44
  and then we saw the development of animals, which add mobility
• 17:51
  and can begin to eat and attack one another, OK.
• 17:57
  And that's the vital force that occurs in animals.
• 18:02
  And then a recent, relatively recent geological time, we see
• 18:11
  the development of the mental force, first of all in a
• 18:15
  rudimentary form in animals, and then secondarily as it begins to
• 18:21
  develop in a more expressive form in human beings.
• 18:25
  So we are the primary vehicle or vessel, if you will, of mental
• 18:37
  consciousness on the planet right now.
• 18:41
  It's not fully formed in every individual it We still have a
• 18:47
  lot of our vital energetic impulses, instincts and habits
• 18:54
  that are forcing and directing the way things turn out to a
• 19:00
  great degree. But we have capabilities at the
• 19:03
  mental level that we don't see at earlier stages of the
• 19:07
  evolution of consciousness. Trio Robindo looks at this and
• 19:12
  says there is a movement and a trajectory towards increasing
• 19:17
  consciousness, and it's pretty clear that the mental
• 19:22
  consciousness is limited even when it's developed as far as
• 19:27
  the most developed human individual, it has its
• 19:31
  limitations because it's linear and it's restricted and it's
• 19:36
  blinded by its own narrowness. And he therefore states that
• 19:42
  there are future and other levels of consciousness that
• 19:46
  have yet to evolve. And those next levels of
• 19:52
  consciousness bring in powers of understanding that is more
• 19:58
  global in scope. They bring in intuition in a
• 20:03
  really true sense, and they bring in what he calls the
• 20:07
  supra. Mental consciousness means
• 20:10
  beyond the mind. And it basically is a holistic
• 20:14
  consciousness. It can see things from all
• 20:19
  different angles and directions and see the wholeness of it, not
• 20:23
  just the divisions of it which the mental consciousness sees.
• 20:27
  We're really good at dividing. We're not real good at
• 20:31
  synthesizing, bringing things together.
• 20:34
  And that's a failure of humanity.
• 20:36
  It's one of the reasons we fight so much with each other.
• 20:40
  We see there's different genders, there's different
• 20:43
  races, there's different socioeconomic levels, there's
• 20:47
  different religions, there's different cultures and
• 20:50
  languages, and we treat those as dividing points.
• 20:55
  Whereas a different consciousness, A holistic
• 20:58
  consciousness, we'll see them all as part of a vast picture of
• 21:04
  oneness, where each part is an essential part of a bigger
• 21:09
  picture, and that they all need each other and belong together
• 21:14
  and need to be working in harmony with one another.
• 21:17
  And so that's Srioro Bindo's direction is to say, let's
• 21:22
  encourage and support consciously the evolution of
• 21:27
  consciousness to the next stage, which nature is going to work
• 21:31
  out eventually. But we're in an existential
• 21:34
  crisis, so we need to actually have people who are ready to
• 21:38
  focus on this and do it and be receptive to it to move it along
• 21:43
  a little faster so that we don't destroy ourselves before that
• 21:47
  can happen. Very, very interesting you said
• 21:51
  about what Sri said. And since you mentioned it
• 21:56
  before, let's delve into the evolution of consciousness.
• 22:00
  So can you explain the stages of consciousness evolution as
• 22:05
  described by him, but and then also from the inconsistent, the
• 22:10
  Super mind, which you kind of touched on just now, just now?
• 22:15
  I'd be happy to do that. So essentially there is a
• 22:20
  material consciousness, and we're talking about on the
• 22:23
  planet here in, you know, on Earth, and something that we can
• 22:28
  relate to because the consciousness of the universe
• 22:32
  and what it's all about is beyond our scope.
• 22:35
  Obviously, I don't think anybody can say why and what the
• 22:39
  universe is about and where it's going and why it's going there.
• 22:43
  But starting with the consciousness of the planet, the
• 22:46
  first thing we see is the development of the material
• 22:52
  forms. OK?
• 22:57
  After that, we see a refinement of those material forms and we
• 23:03
  start seeing things like crystals and really highly
• 23:08
  organized material. And if you ever looked at what a
• 23:14
  a crystal's form is under a microscope, you'll see it
• 23:17
  dramatically varies from the raw, like rock that you'll find
• 23:23
  on the on the ground somewhere. It's very, very well organized
• 23:29
  and that's why crystals are actually used.
• 23:33
  For things like microphones and radio transmission, because they
• 23:37
  have capacities that ordinary rock does not have, there's
• 23:42
  another sort of slice of consciousness there in the
• 23:47
  crystals. People don't think about that.
• 23:50
  They just say, oh it's a crystal, but it actually
• 23:53
  represents the next stage of material form consciousness at a
• 23:58
  higher level than just plain rock.
• 24:02
  After that we see the development of single cell
• 24:05
  plants and they gain the power of transmuting sunlight into
• 24:13
  energy and biological energy in particular, which material
• 24:20
  consciousness doesn't have. OK, your rock isn't going to
• 24:24
  take the sunlight and turn it into biology, but plants can do
• 24:28
  that. And then they start creating
• 24:34
  oxygen, which allows animal life to evolve.
• 24:40
  Animal life then uses the oxygen to survive and it has a
• 24:48
  symbiotic relationship with the plants because the plants need
• 24:54
  the carbon dioxide and we exhale and the other animals exhale
• 24:59
  carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen.
• 25:03
  We don't survive without the plants.
• 25:05
  The plants don't survive without us.
• 25:08
  So we are actually one being, if you will, that shares a common
• 25:15
  relationship by the very active breathing.
• 25:20
  So animal consciousness adds movement, mobility, incipient
• 25:30
  ability to react and desire and go after things, as opposed to
• 25:36
  plants which need things to come to them, if you will, that they
• 25:40
  need to absorb. And then we see the first stages
• 25:45
  of the mental development starting to happen with various
• 25:50
  animals that are able to devise plans, in some cases use tools.
• 26:02
  There's some birds and some and certainly primates that are tool
• 26:08
  using beings at a very rudimentary level.
• 26:12
  And then the next stage you come to is the first stages of human
• 26:16
  development where a lot of that is refined and modified.
• 26:20
  Our tool making skills, our speech skills improve over what
• 26:26
  animals have. And at a certain point, as
• 26:30
  humanity develops, we gain what we call the higher reason, which
• 26:34
  is a skill set for thinking beyond the immediate situation
• 26:43
  and need planning, articulating and looking back into the past,
• 26:51
  reflecting and eventually self reflection.
• 26:54
  Where we can actually look at ourselves and reflect on what is
• 26:59
  our goal, what is our purpose, what is our significance, what
• 27:02
  are we here to do? Is there life after death?
• 27:07
  I mean, all these questions come up as a result of the mental
• 27:11
  consciousness developing beyond the basic mental consciousness
• 27:17
  and beyond the developed reason, there are other powers of
• 27:22
  consciousness. And we see in humanity certain
• 27:26
  individuals who begin to express these additional powers
• 27:34
  rudimentary, They're not fully formed.
• 27:37
  But you see things like people who have the ability to read
• 27:46
  emotions from each other, who are able to be empathetic, who
• 27:51
  have the ability of communicating with others in
• 27:57
  other parts of the world, who have distance vision, who can go
• 28:01
  into lucid dreaming, who can have clairvoyance to some
• 28:06
  degree, who can predict the relationship of things at a
• 28:13
  level that the rudimentary animal or even the lower levels
• 28:18
  of human consciousness have not yet attained.
• 28:21
  Now, some of these are very rare, and some of them people
• 28:26
  fake for personal gain. So people say, well, it's all
• 28:32
  fake. Well, it's not all fake.
• 28:34
  There are real individuals who can do this.
• 28:37
  There are examples. For example, a case that I read
• 28:43
  about was there was a soldier in the First World War and his
• 28:48
  sister lived, you know, thousands of miles away.
• 28:52
  And at a certain point in time, she suddenly got a feeling that
• 28:58
  said that her brother had just died.
• 29:02
  And then she got the confirmation from the Army later
• 29:06
  that he had died on this place and this time and under these
• 29:10
  circumstances. And it corresponded with that
• 29:12
  feeling she had. Now, how does that happen?
• 29:17
  There is a power of consciousness.
• 29:20
  Nikola Tesla talks about wireless energy moving
• 29:26
  throughout the universe and being able to harness it, which
• 29:29
  is why we now have cell phones. Well, at a different level,
• 29:34
  human beings are able to pick up subtle vibrations and send out
• 29:39
  subtle vibrations across distance when they have gotten
• 29:45
  to the point of developing these other powers at the next level
• 29:50
  of consciousness. Beyond that, we see further
• 29:56
  developments where people can become conscious of the whole
• 30:02
  world. I mean, they can really gain a
• 30:05
  consciousness of unity and oneness.
• 30:08
  And those individuals, in many cases, we identify as great
• 30:13
  seers and sages and religious founders, you know, people who
• 30:19
  really have an experience that goes beyond the ordinary, who
• 30:24
  see things differently, great artists in some cases.
• 30:29
  And those represent powers beyond our ordinary cognition in
• 30:35
  our daily lives. And it doesn't mean that people
• 30:40
  can't develop it. It just means they haven't
• 30:43
  developed it yet. And I'll get, I'll give you an
• 30:45
  example. A child is born and its first
• 30:52
  efforts are gaining control of its physical body.
• 30:57
  It learns how to crawl. It learns how to pull itself up.
• 31:01
  It learns how to walk. It learns how to develop
• 31:04
  coordination of the physical body and interrelate it with
• 31:09
  their brain. Along the way, they start to
• 31:12
  develop their vital needs and personality.
• 31:15
  And if anyone's had children, they know about the terrible
• 31:19
  twos. This is when the personality,
• 31:24
  the vital nature, begins to want to see what its boundaries are
• 31:28
  and how it can assert itself in the world.
• 31:32
  And then as they develop, they begin to integrate those things
• 31:36
  more. And at some point their mental
• 31:39
  development begins to take place and some of them go on to
• 31:45
  careers in engineering or technology or philosophy or
• 31:49
  humanities or writing or whatever it might be
• 31:53
  communication as they develop their mental powers.
• 31:59
  So it's not beyond comprehension to believe that as humanity
• 32:10
  gets, as an individual gets ready, as their stage of life
• 32:16
  develops, as their capacities reach a certain point, they're
• 32:23
  able at that time to take on and develop the next level of
• 32:28
  consciousness. We see that within ourselves up
• 32:31
  to the level of mind, and we see some individuals who can go
• 32:36
  beyond the rudimentary mind that we now see because for whatever
• 32:43
  reason, they're receptive to it. They've gotten their framework
• 32:48
  ready to receive and deal with those powers, and they start to
• 32:53
  express them. OK, so it sounds like you were
• 32:56
  talking about something called the Super mind.
• 32:59
  So can you explain what is the Super mind and how is it
• 33:03
  qualitatively different from our current state of rationale
• 33:08
  rational mental consciousness? So as Sri Robindo explains it,
• 33:13
  because obviously if you haven't yourself necessarily experienced
• 33:18
  it, you have to take some of this a little bit on the
• 33:22
  experience of others, OK. And so as he explains it, and
• 33:27
  actually going back beyond that to some of the ancient seers and
• 33:32
  sages, they talk about a knowledge consciousness.
• 33:36
  In Sanskrit, it's vignana, which is the term for the
• 33:43
  consciousness at the next level behind mind or manas.
• 33:48
  And that consciousness is one with the, you could say the
• 33:56
  universe, but at least with the planetary existence, it can see
• 34:02
  and feel and experience things in a wholeness, in a
• 34:06
  completeness that the mind doesn't have.
• 34:09
  The mind works in straight lines and it works with either or
• 34:14
  black and white, very limited perception.
• 34:19
  It's more or less, and I use this example recently for some
• 34:22
  other purpose, but there's a famous story of five different
• 34:29
  people observing an automobile accident from 5 different
• 34:32
  locations on the ground, and they each come up with a
• 34:37
  different story about who caused what and what the sequence was.
• 34:41
  They're each seeing it from their mental awareness and
• 34:44
  consciousness. But now if you put a super
• 34:48
  observer, if you will, above them, say at a window above the
• 34:54
  street, he can see all five of those observers.
• 34:59
  He can see the actual automobile accident coming together.
• 35:04
  And he's the one who can actually harmonize the five
• 35:08
  different viewpoints together because he sees them all and he
• 35:12
  sees how they fit together with the actual event.
• 35:15
  Super mind is basically the Super observer if you will in
• 35:19
  that example. OK, very, very interesting.
• 35:23
  So the Super mind, the way you describe it, songs like how
• 35:27
  people say like infinite consciousness or that field that
• 35:34
  where is nothing and everything exists at the same time, it
• 35:38
  sounds a little bit like that. What you're talking with that
• 35:41
  state where you have total awareness is that.
• 35:46
  Does that make sense the way I'm trying to describe it?
• 35:51
  I think it does make sense to a certain degree, but there's so
• 35:55
  much confusion about those states that seem like they're
• 36:00
  otherworldly and they take you out of the world.
• 36:03
  But the Super mental consciousness should not
• 36:08
  necessarily take you out of the world.
• 36:10
  It just gives you another viewpoint so that you see both
• 36:15
  the oneness, the unity of everything and the diversity
• 36:21
  that makes up that unity. And that that's a much more
• 36:26
  complex picture than going shifting from you're involved in
• 36:31
  the diversity and all the different analysis that we do at
• 36:36
  the mental level or you shift over here and now you see
• 36:39
  everything is a oneness. Super mental consciousness is
• 36:43
  able to integrate oneness with diversity, unity with diversity,
• 36:51
  and so they're both present concurrently and not in conflict
• 36:56
  with each other. OK, that's interesting because
• 37:01
  from my understanding we live in kind of bit of a binary system
• 37:07
  and I always thought it was the binary which which is really the
• 37:12
  separation from the infinite consciousness.
• 37:16
  But you're saying then that the Super mind integrates both of
• 37:20
  those together. So it's like bringing the
• 37:22
  separation in with the oneness so that you can see both sides,
• 37:28
  but still you can see on top at the same time to get a holistic
• 37:32
  view. Does that sound a bit more like
• 37:36
  what you're trying to explain? Yes.
• 37:40
  The whole idea of that binary is really a mental way of looking
• 37:46
  at things. And the supra mental way of
• 37:51
  looking at things would be to recognize that there is a
• 37:54
  oneness and a diversity that are one thing.
• 37:59
  And I'll give you an example. You go to the ocean and you take
• 38:05
  a glass and you fill it with ocean water, OK.
• 38:10
  When you fill it with ocean water, the water is the same in
• 38:15
  the ocean and in the glass, but there's a separation.
• 38:20
  It's an artificial separation. And if you immerse that glass of
• 38:27
  water into the ocean, the water is flowing in and out of that
• 38:32
  glass and it's still a full glass of water, but it's also
• 38:37
  part of that infinite ocean. So it's it's a different way of
• 38:45
  reflecting on things and, and that's part of what helps us to
• 38:50
  solve the existential crisis eventually, because this linear
• 38:56
  gridlocked view of things is impossible for us to solve all
• 39:02
  these crises we spoke about earlier.
• 39:07
  OK. OK.
• 39:08
  So in your view, how does our transition to the next state,
• 39:13
  the next phase of consciousness related to modern movements like
• 39:17
  transhumanism, AI or digital immorality?
• 39:23
  I think that every one of the movements represents an attempt
• 39:30
  by humanity to move beyond its limitations.
• 39:34
  And to that extent they are all part of that aspiration for
• 39:39
  something great or something more harmonious, something
• 39:42
  that's going to help us become better human beings and relate
• 39:48
  to one another more effectively and solve some of the problems
• 39:53
  that we've created with our mental framework.
• 39:56
  So I think there's a lot of benefit from each of these
• 40:03
  directions. They don't any one of them
• 40:06
  necessarily. Solve the problem.
• 40:09
  Because many of them are still immersed in the mental
• 40:12
  consciousness and certainly with AI.
• 40:15
  And it's interesting. I recently did an interview with
• 40:19
  ChatGPT and I actually posted a lot of questions and had it
• 40:27
  provide answers. And I'm turning that into a
• 40:29
  book, my dinner with ChatGPT, because it's really fascinating
• 40:34
  and it's pretty clear it's limited by the mental framework
• 40:38
  and it's not the solution to this new consciousness.
• 40:43
  It is simply an extension of the mental consciousness, although
• 40:49
  it has so much more information available to it that it can make
• 40:56
  connections that we find hard to make on our own right now.
• 40:59
  And it may help us to evolve as we widen our understanding based
• 41:06
  on what we can get from it. You know, I I at first I was
• 41:13
  started to, to, I once used the word fear, but I was very
• 41:17
  conscious of artificial intelligence.
• 41:20
  But I am now starting to think that artificial intelligence is
• 41:24
  pretty much like a gun. A gun can be used to save
• 41:27
  someone and a gun can be used to kill someone, just like a knife,
• 41:31
  any weapon, and I think it is basically the user how you use
• 41:36
  it. So how I see artificial
• 41:39
  intelligence is that if you input the right information into
• 41:45
  it, therefore you become like the architect in like any
• 41:49
  matrix. You can actually create
• 41:53
  revolutionary and magnificent things because you are starting
• 41:58
  to think on another level as like a planner and the, and the
• 42:02
  artificial intelligence can do all the, the heavy lifting for
• 42:05
  you, right? Instead of you having to go and
• 42:08
  read hundreds and hundreds of books, you can be.
• 42:10
  And The thing is what you realizable AI is you have to be
• 42:13
  very specific because if you're not very specific, it comes and
• 42:16
  gives you information you're like that, I don't want that.
• 42:18
  So then it forces you now to think on a higher level to say,
• 42:22
  OK, I want is like you want to create a play and you're writing
• 42:27
  a script, but in your script you'll be very detailed script.
• 42:31
  And the more detailed you are, the better information you can
• 42:34
  get. So I actually think that the we
• 42:38
  can actually use AI to solve many problems and create
• 42:44
  revolutionary things that I think will amaze us if we use a
• 42:51
  higher level of mind to start a program.
• 42:53
  It because from playing with it, I realized that the more stuff
• 42:57
  you feed it better it actually gets So it's almost like I guess
• 43:04
  you can call it like a child that you're raising where you,
• 43:07
  you, you, you know, you try to represent to be a good parent,
• 43:11
  then you're trying to be a good custodian then of it.
• 43:14
  Then on the flip side, you can use it for total nefarious
• 43:19
  things where they're saying that the straight that Ukraine data
• 43:24
  or Russia, they used AI to help with the precision of the
• 43:27
  targeting. So then that could be a way.
• 43:29
  Now we're use it as a weapon to to cause harm where you know,
• 43:35
  you're feeding it specific detail stuff to maim and to to
• 43:39
  kill while not on the flip side, you can use it to heal call like
• 43:45
  look for illnesses, to find complex calculations and stuff.
• 43:49
  And even for astrophysics and you know me all that, all that
• 43:57
  kind of stuff, you know. So I think I think it's it's a
• 44:00
  great opportunity for us, but we have to be rare with people that
• 44:04
  are programming it, which is what where I sit now on defence
• 44:07
  regards to AI. Well, I think you're in a very
• 44:11
  good spot with its benefits and its potential drawbacks.
• 44:17
  In my interview with ChatGPT, we explored very heavily.
• 44:22
  There's a whole chapter in the in the book that I'm putting
• 44:24
  together on the inherent biases that can impact the way ChatGPT
• 44:31
  responds to things, things like confirmation bias and input bias
• 44:37
  and programming bias. And I mean, there's a lot of
• 44:42
  issues that that go into that. I had an explorer what its
• 44:46
  biases were and where it came from and how it overcame those
• 44:52
  biases and how its programming helped it to overcome those
• 44:56
  biases. It was fascinating.
• 44:59
  But you're, you're right, to the extent that it's used for
• 45:03
  weaponry, it's like everything else in human life.
• 45:08
  We either make the best of it or we make the worst of it.
• 45:10
  And I totally agree with what you had to say about that.
• 45:16
  OK, so how what does Sri Aurobindo mean when he speaks
• 45:22
  about a new species evolving not biologically, but spiritually?
• 45:28
  We generally judge our relationships, our families, by
• 45:38
  physical and biological basis, OK?
• 45:42
  In other words, we're born into a family, we're born into a
• 45:45
  society, we're born into a culture, we're born into a
• 45:48
  religion, and that's how we frame ourselves, OK.
• 45:54
  What we start to see happening nowadays is people are starting
• 45:58
  to identify with others, as you could say, family, not based
• 46:04
  strictly on their biological roots, but more based on their
• 46:10
  inclinations, their spiritual and mental and emotional
• 46:16
  development, their interests, etcetera.
• 46:20
  And we find this happening all over the world.
• 46:24
  I've got friends in many, many countries around the world, and
• 46:28
  we never physically meet, but on a certain level, we meet all the
• 46:34
  time with our discussions, our understanding of things, how we
• 46:41
  approach things, how we work to solve issues that we're facing.
• 46:47
  And they're more my family than my physical parents and siblings
• 46:53
  might be. I have much more in common with
• 46:57
  those individuals and I do with, you know, the physical family.
• 47:03
  In the same way, we can see that the spiritual development is
• 47:11
  going to eventually create a group of individuals around the
• 47:15
  planet who naturally have an affinity for one another because
• 47:19
  they can vibrate at the same level, they can relate to the
• 47:23
  same things. They can see things that up
• 47:27
  until now, a few people have seen.
• 47:30
  Eventually, as humanity matures, more and more individuals in
• 47:36
  humanity will have these capabilities and begin to evolve
• 47:40
  them. And these forerunners will be
• 47:43
  able to provide them inspiration and guidance because they've
• 47:50
  been there and they're doing it. And so that's what we would call
• 47:55
  a new species. It's, you know, you've got Homo
• 47:59
  sapiens, but it might be that beyond Homo sapiens, we've got
• 48:05
  Homo supermentalis or whatever you want to call it that
• 48:09
  evolves. And it, the differences may or
• 48:12
  may not be great on the physical level, but they're certainly
• 48:16
  great on the evolutionary powers of consciousness level.
• 48:21
  And at some point they may incorporate things that we don't
• 48:25
  even think about. For instance, there are genes
• 48:30
  that we have in our DNA, in our system that are turned off right
• 48:36
  now for doing certain things, genetic capabilities.
• 48:42
  For instance, I was reading today that elephants have like
• 48:45
  30 genes that when turned on prevent them from getting
• 48:50
  cancer. And we have one.
• 48:54
  Now, if we were to turn on those other 15 or 20 or 29 genes,
• 48:59
  however many it is that we actually have latent within us,
• 49:04
  maybe cancer is cured. You see what I mean?
• 49:10
  Similarly, we get our food second hand right now because
• 49:15
  the plants are the ones that convert the solar energy into
• 49:20
  biological energy. And if you're a vegan, you're
• 49:24
  going to wind up eating plants to get that energy.
• 49:29
  If you are a carnivore or an omnivore, then you're going to
• 49:34
  wind up eating an animal that eats a plant that gets the
• 49:40
  energy. But what if, just for the
• 49:43
  moment, we turned on the genetic capability within ourselves to
• 49:48
  simply absorb the solar energy directly and convert it into
• 49:52
  biological energy? There is actually an animal that
• 49:56
  does that OK, and it's a small animal somewhere.
• 50:01
  I forget what it is, but I was reading about it a few months
• 50:04
  ago. It actually has the power
• 50:08
  because it ate some algae or something and was able to
• 50:12
  incorporate those genes into itself so that it can now spend
• 50:17
  a year not having to eat anything because it creates.
• 50:22
  Solar energy into biological energy.
• 50:25
  So what if that gets turned on as a result of this next
• 50:28
  evolutionary stage and people don't have to fight so much over
• 50:33
  the food supply? Those are going to be a
• 50:36
  different species of people now, who knows?
• 50:39
  I mean, we're now speculating, but we're speculating about
• 50:43
  things that are there. They're now looking at growing
• 50:46
  teeth with people's own tissues that they're actually the
• 50:51
  ability to regrow teeth instead of putting in artificial teeth.
• 50:59
  Certain animals can heal themselves far more than human
• 51:03
  beings can. They can regrow limbs.
• 51:06
  What if people begin to be able to regrow limbs?
• 51:09
  Would that help constitute a different species?
• 51:14
  If some of these powers begin to manifest now, who knows what
• 51:18
  form that's all going to take, But those are some of the
• 51:24
  options that could lead to a new species designation by the green
• 51:29
  eyeshade scientists out there who want to classify us.
• 51:34
  Well, my research has has pointed me in the direction that
• 51:39
  humanity seems to have been genetically manipulated and
• 51:42
  altered about 250,000 years ago with the turning off of our
• 51:48
  telomeres and the the Kappanova and Kappanova telomeres, sorry
• 51:52
  and the fusion of chromosome 2. And there were some also other
• 51:56
  genetic modifications that seem to have taken place.
• 52:00
  And modern science has said that it was an external modification
• 52:04
  and not an evolutionary change. So I do think that if those
• 52:12
  genes are turned on, we would most likely become a different
• 52:17
  species. Because even if you look at the
• 52:21
  ages of humans in biblical stories, you had Methuselah
• 52:26
  living to 969 years, right? Which is 9 times longer than
• 52:31
  most humans will, at least nine times longer than most humans
• 52:35
  would live. And then when you go back to the
• 52:37
  Sumerian tablets, you saw the 1st immortal king Alulim, he
• 52:42
  ruled for 28,800 years. So it it it, it very much looks
• 52:48
  to me like if we are the dumb dumb version of what we used to
• 52:52
  be. And then reflecting on what you
• 52:56
  said about not having to necessarily eat well, I remember
• 53:00
  years ago I was researching breathetarians and they seem to
• 53:04
  be very, very, very, very small set of yogis that can literally
• 53:11
  just absorb the sun and live. And I saw this story, which is
• 53:17
  fascinating, where they put this guy in a room and they blocked
• 53:21
  all access to food and water for him.
• 53:25
  I think it was for like a month from memory.
• 53:28
  And the guy lived and he didn't lose any weight or anything like
• 53:34
  that. And he just stood there.
• 53:36
  So I mean, who knows? Like if all of us can actually
• 53:42
  do that, then we would not need food at all.
• 53:46
  I mean, if we can grow in terms of our consciousness like that,
• 53:50
  I think a lot of the wars would would, would go to pass because
• 53:55
  wars are really for resources, let's be honest.
• 53:57
  And if you were able to just absorb the sun's rays and to
• 54:02
  live dead, you, you become almost immortal, you know, So
• 54:07
  that is quite fascinating when you put it all together.
• 54:11
  So let's transition to talk about integral yoga.
• 54:16
  And So what distinguishes integral yoga from traditional
• 54:21
  yogic paths or mindfulness practices?
• 54:26
  I think the main thing that differentiates it is that it
• 54:31
  doesn't have a fixed practice or path.
• 54:37
  It can incorporate at various times and under various
• 54:41
  circumstances, any of the other paths for specific developmental
• 54:46
  purpose of the practitioner. So, for instance, there may be a
• 54:52
  time to develop the physical body and the energy centers and
• 54:56
  you practice hatha yoga. There may be a time when you
• 55:00
  have to learn how to concentrate the mind properly and remove a
• 55:04
  lot of distractions. So you practice mindfulness or
• 55:08
  Zen or whatever it might be. There are times when you might
• 55:12
  need to do breathing practice to gain control of the nervous
• 55:17
  system and the and the flow of the energy through the chakras.
• 55:23
  Each one of those things in the course of a spiritual
• 55:26
  practitioner's development has its time and its place and its
• 55:31
  purpose and most paths. They, you know, they'll tell you
• 55:35
  just do this and you're going to get there.
• 55:39
  Integral yoga doesn't say that. What it says is become conscious
• 55:44
  within yourself. Observe as a witness, if you
• 55:49
  will, of yourself the needs of your development as they change
• 55:56
  through time, and begin to apply those practices and principles
• 56:04
  at each stage so that you can untie each knot that's tying you
• 56:10
  down to the old nature and allow you to move into a new form of
• 56:15
  consciousness. And so that that's really it.
• 56:19
  It's really free form. I mean, people go to the Sri
• 56:22
  Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and say, well, where's the
• 56:25
  teacher who's going to tell me what to do?
• 56:28
  And they find out there's nobody there to tell them what to do.
• 56:31
  They're going to tell you, well, you need to become a witness of
• 56:36
  yourself. Understand the principles of the
• 56:40
  development of consciousness, the things that hold back the
• 56:44
  consciousness in terms of vital desires and aggressions and
• 56:49
  fears and everything else, and begin to systematically work
• 56:53
  through them at your own pace, in your own way, given your own
• 56:57
  life situation, as opposed to. A1 size fits all cookie cutter
• 57:04
  approach that says just do this practice and you're fine.
• 57:09
  That's really interesting. So it sounds a bit late.
• 57:13
  You're taking all the branches of yoga and putting them all
• 57:17
  together and saying that depending on where you are, pull
• 57:22
  from this. And then when that has helped
• 57:24
  you with X challenge, then you have another challenge pull from
• 57:29
  there. And then as you keep going on in
• 57:31
  your journey, then you can maybe come back to one that you used
• 57:34
  before because it is applicable to you at that specific time.
• 57:38
  So you're not pigeon holed into one practice or one way where at
• 57:45
  that particular time it not may not serve you well.
• 57:48
  Does that sound right? Up to a certain degree, I think
• 57:52
  that's true. It's like if you're a mechanic
• 57:56
  and you're working on a piece of machinery, you're going to have
• 58:01
  a toolbox and you'll have a screwdriver, you'll have a
• 58:04
  pliers, you'll have a hammer, you'll have a wrench.
• 58:07
  You'll have all kinds of different tools, and you're
• 58:11
  going to pick the tool that works for you to do what you
• 58:15
  exactly need to do at that moment.
• 58:17
  And there may be multiple steps, and you might need to put one
• 58:21
  tool down, pick up the next one. That's sort of the example
• 58:24
  you've just given. And to that extent, that's true.
• 58:27
  But it's not a matter of just creating a toolbox and using it.
• 58:33
  It's a matter of taking a new position of consciousness within
• 58:38
  yourself so that you become the observer or the witness of your
• 58:43
  external nature. And you can then begin to apply
• 58:47
  those tools. And whether they're in a formal
• 58:51
  toolbox or not, whether they're coming from some other
• 58:55
  tradition, whether it's something totally new that that
• 58:58
  comes to you, some devotional phase, some aspirational phase
• 59:06
  that moves your emotional being forward, whatever it might be,
• 59:10
  you become that witness and you move with that and then apply,
• 59:17
  if necessary, whatever tools are out there and available.
• 59:22
  So it's it's sort of a meta level of understanding beyond
• 59:27
  the collection of tools. Very interesting.
• 59:32
  A I like your analogy of the toolbox because I like to use
• 59:35
  analogies as well. So basically you're, you're
• 59:38
  using the toolbox, but from an observation point of view.
• 59:42
  So you get again, you're going back to the sprints of your tone
• 59:45
  with the Super mind where you're on top and you're seeing
• 59:49
  everything but incorporating the different points of views from
• 59:52
  the five people that maybe saw the accident.
• 59:55
  OK, OK. Oh, very, very interesting.
• 59:57
  So for someone caught in modern stress, addiction or depression.
• 1:00:03
  Can Integral Yoga practically help them?
• 1:00:06
  It's very difficult for someone who is immersed in their ego
• 1:00:14
  personality, if you will, to suddenly, magically get that
• 1:00:20
  resolved. As long as you're immersed in
• 1:00:24
  the ego and responding to things that way, you're going to have
• 1:00:29
  your instances of depression, You're going to have the
• 1:00:32
  feelings of weakness or limitation or fear, desire,
• 1:00:39
  whatever it might be. And to the extent that that's
• 1:00:43
  working on you, you may wind up with how do I get out of this?
• 1:00:49
  And you wind up with alcohol or drugs or addiction of some sort.
• 1:00:54
  And it could be a non drug form of addiction.
• 1:00:57
  It could be, you know, food addiction of some sort where you
• 1:01:01
  just do what's called emotional eating.
• 1:01:03
  It could be a sex addiction of addiction of some sort.
• 1:01:07
  I mean, it could be an addiction to essentially a work process
• 1:01:15
  that you simply just immerse yourself in and, and put
• 1:01:20
  everyone else outside because that's the only way you can deal
• 1:01:24
  with it. It can be an addiction to
• 1:01:28
  withdrawal from life where people just simply can't deal
• 1:01:33
  with it and they walk away and they, you know, they go and live
• 1:01:38
  in a cabin in the woods somewhere.
• 1:01:40
  I mean, that's also a form of addiction to basically moving
• 1:01:47
  away from their, the inability to address all the pressures and
• 1:01:55
  conflicts that are coming. At them, in their.
• 1:01:57
  Lives, the griefs, the failures, the limitations.
• 1:02:01
  So. The way Integral yoga.
• 1:02:04
  Would look at this is to say, start to separate yourself from
• 1:02:12
  your external ego. Observe it.
• 1:02:15
  Just look at it. Watch it when you feel down,
• 1:02:20
  when you feel depressed, when you feel angry, when you feel
• 1:02:23
  sad. Use that as an observational
• 1:02:27
  point. Don't get yourself so wrapped up
• 1:02:30
  in it that it's driving your action and you see what it's
• 1:02:35
  doing to you, how it's making you think, how it's making you
• 1:02:38
  feel. And once you're able to observe
• 1:02:41
  it, then at a certain point you're able to input a different
• 1:02:48
  response. And that different response may
• 1:02:52
  be, well, OK, maybe I'm just reacting to disappointment by
• 1:02:58
  going out and eating or whatever it is, or going out shopping.
• 1:03:03
  And you say, well, let me practice doing something
• 1:03:09
  different this time. Let me put something else in
• 1:03:11
  there. Let me do something
• 1:03:14
  constructive. Let me go out and help some
• 1:03:16
  other people because that's actually the best therapy for
• 1:03:20
  people. Go out there and just volunteer
• 1:03:23
  and do something positive and make people smile.
• 1:03:27
  Give them, give them just that moment of joy, and you will find
• 1:03:32
  that your depression cannot stand in front of being a
• 1:03:39
  positive influence in other people's lives.
• 1:03:43
  That's a very simple way of looking at it, but through
• 1:03:46
  observation and understanding of that, you can begin to
• 1:03:50
  substitute positive outreach for negative victimhood.
• 1:03:58
  And that that can help over time to bring people out of those
• 1:04:02
  states of weakness and depression.
• 1:04:07
  You know, that is very similar to like what I say to people.
• 1:04:11
  I say to people that if you do physical exercise, it is
• 1:04:15
  impossible to be feeling sad and depressed in the moment of doing
• 1:04:20
  exercise. You can't have those two
• 1:04:24
  emotions or energies at the same time while doing exercise.
• 1:04:28
  It just doesn't happen. And I like the way you you
• 1:04:33
  analyzed it just now and I-1 started to realize is the
• 1:04:38
  integral yoga. It seems a lot from the
• 1:04:40
  observation point of view and to look at yourself from the
• 1:04:44
  outside. And I remember like when I was
• 1:04:48
  going through one of the most difficult points in my life.
• 1:04:51
  The only way that I've actually could get through it is if I've
• 1:04:54
  started to practice observation method because it became so
• 1:04:59
  intense that I felt like I was going to break.
• 1:05:03
  And that was the only thing that kind of like gave me a bitter
• 1:05:08
  respite from how I was feeling. So you know that that is very,
• 1:05:14
  very interesting. So with that being said, can you
• 1:05:16
  share a story, your own or someone else's, where integral
• 1:05:21
  yoga pulls someone out of an existential void?
• 1:05:25
  Well, I can. Basically, I was in college and
• 1:05:34
  it was, it goes back a ways, but it was during the time of the
• 1:05:38
  Vietnam War, and some of us didn't agree with the idea of
• 1:05:44
  that war. And so we went to Washington, DC
• 1:05:48
  to protest what was called the Mayday protests.
• 1:05:52
  And while we were there, for various reasons, I was poisoned.
• 1:06:01
  And I think it was biological warfare, because by the next day
• 1:06:06
  I had been sicker than I had ever been sick in my life.
• 1:06:11
  And so I went back to where I was going to college and I got
• 1:06:18
  poisoned again and people said you need to go to a hospital.
• 1:06:23
  Well, I was so paranoid at that point, I didn't want to go
• 1:06:27
  anywhere near a hospital. So I said if I don't come out of
• 1:06:30
  the room in the next three days, just come in and collect the
• 1:06:33
  body. I mean, I was that out of it.
• 1:06:36
  So totally disoriented about where I was and what I was
• 1:06:42
  doing. And I basically had their, I
• 1:06:48
  would call it a near death experience.
• 1:06:53
  Every bone in my body, every muscle in my body seized up and
• 1:06:59
  I couldn't breathe. And then I heard somewhere
• 1:07:03
  within the words, do yogic breathing.
• 1:07:07
  Now I had no idea what yogic breathing was.
• 1:07:11
  I had never had any relationship to yoga.
• 1:07:14
  It wasn't where I was coming from.
• 1:07:16
  I was on a career path. I was on a college degree path.
• 1:07:21
  I mean, it was not my life, OK? And something started breathing
• 1:07:26
  me. Well, when I woke up, I saw the
• 1:07:31
  sun shining and I knew that there was a divine purpose in
• 1:07:38
  the world and that my life had changed.
• 1:07:42
  And I became aware that the economic, the political, the
• 1:07:50
  technological, the mental solutions that we all thought
• 1:07:55
  we're going to somehow save the world, we're totally useless and
• 1:08:03
  something else needed to happen. And at that point, I got a call
• 1:08:07
  from a friend who said I can't take this anymore, I'm going to
• 1:08:11
  Europe. I said great, give me two weeks
• 1:08:14
  to finish my final exams and I'll come with you.
• 1:08:20
  And I knew he wasn't going to stay and that he was there just
• 1:08:24
  to move me to Europe. So I packed up a few belongings
• 1:08:29
  in a backpack and sold everything I could to raise some
• 1:08:33
  money and bought a couple of yoga books, because who knew
• 1:08:39
  anything about yoga? But it had saved my life.
• 1:08:43
  And so I bought Vivekananda's Raja Yoga and I bought Tibetan
• 1:08:50
  Yoga and Secret Practices by Evans Wentz and took those two
• 1:08:55
  books with me to Europe and started studying them and trying
• 1:09:00
  to practice them on my own. And while I was there, I was
• 1:09:04
  living in an abandoned house with other people next to the
• 1:09:08
  university in Frankfurt. And there was a philosopher in
• 1:09:11
  another one of the rooms. And we would have discussions
• 1:09:15
  about Usspensky and Gorge Eve and Rudolf Steiner.
• 1:09:19
  And, you know, he educated me about a lot of things.
• 1:09:23
  And then one day he handed me Srioro Bindo's book The Life
• 1:09:26
  Divine and said I have an American girlfriend.
• 1:09:30
  I bought this for her. I thought she'd be interested.
• 1:09:32
  She's not interested at all. I thought maybe you're
• 1:09:35
  interested. And I opened the book randomly
• 1:09:39
  to the chapter the. Aim of life the. 4 theories of
• 1:09:42
  existence and I started reading it and I realized.
• 1:09:47
  But this represented for me individually the solution that
• 1:09:54
  wasn't going to happen through technology, politics, religion,
• 1:09:58
  economy or anything else. And that's in 1971 I started
• 1:10:03
  studying Trio Windows writings. Wow, a near death experience and
• 1:10:11
  just you'll get breathing. That is his levels.
• 1:10:16
  I I I tell you I've connected to the divine in that respect as
• 1:10:22
  well. Where even this podcast I was
• 1:10:26
  walking out of my sleep and I was told and the the voice, as I
• 1:10:30
  call it, said 2 words do podcast.
• 1:10:34
  That was it. I said it loudly.
• 1:10:38
  I was sleeping and I woke up. Even when I woke up I heard it
• 1:10:44
  again, do podcasts and basically that is how the Conscious Man 7
• 1:10:51
  was born. So wow, what a story.
• 1:10:56
  So how does how does integral yoga view identity, especially
• 1:11:02
  in a world obsessed with labels, status and online personas?
• 1:11:08
  I would say that the focus of integral yoga is on the
• 1:11:12
  evolution of the next level of consciousness, and it's not
• 1:11:17
  related to individual ego, personality, status, income,
• 1:11:24
  race, gender, any of those things.
• 1:11:28
  It's not based on how much you own or how many toys you have or
• 1:11:34
  how much enjoyment you get from your outer life.
• 1:11:37
  It's based on dedicating your life to learning and growing and
• 1:11:44
  evolving and becoming a better human being and not using it to
• 1:11:53
  control or convince or overpower anybody or anything.
• 1:11:59
  Everybody needs to grow at their own level, at their own speed.
• 1:12:03
  And that's one of the understandings you get from this
• 1:12:06
  practice, is that it's not a matter of creating an army of a
• 1:12:11
  religion of some sort. It's more a matter of am I here
• 1:12:18
  for becoming a billionaire? And if I become a billionaire,
• 1:12:24
  is that going to make me any better, human being or not?
• 1:12:29
  Am I going to be able to take it with me into my next lifetime or
• 1:12:33
  not? You know, is there any rationale
• 1:12:37
  for putting the energy there as opposed to trying to understand
• 1:12:43
  why it is we're on this planet and what we can do to make it
• 1:12:47
  better, make it a better place to live for everybody, for the
• 1:12:50
  entire planet, including the animals and the plants and all
• 1:12:55
  the other beings who are miniature existences of
• 1:13:02
  consciousness in their own forms for their own reason.
• 1:13:06
  And so it's really walking away from stepping back from the ego
• 1:13:14
  personality and it's trappings of power, wealth, sex, control,
• 1:13:21
  etcetera, fame, vanity. Those things have very, very
• 1:13:27
  little meaning and none of it goes with you.
• 1:13:32
  When you die, you're not taking any of that with you.
• 1:13:36
  So you might as well realize that it's all transitory at that
• 1:13:41
  point. That's what the some of the
• 1:13:44
  paths call Illusion or Maya, where you know, it's not, it's
• 1:13:50
  not real. It's just like a video game that
• 1:13:53
  we're living in. And some people say, oh, we must
• 1:13:56
  be living in a simulation now, because this is all just like a
• 1:14:01
  video game. When you go out there, let's see
• 1:14:03
  how many counters we can acquire, how many enemies we can
• 1:14:07
  kill, how much wealth we can get, how much enjoyment we can
• 1:14:11
  have, how many girlfriends or boyfriends we can acquire in
• 1:14:17
  our. Lives.
• 1:14:17
  I mean, that's all just ridiculous stuff.
• 1:14:20
  It has no relevance to anything real.
• 1:14:25
  Yeah, I was literally saying to a friend of mine yesterday that,
• 1:14:29
  you know, nothing really here is real.
• 1:14:32
  And it, it, we get bogged down and caught up with all of the
• 1:14:38
  materialism and consumerism and status and how many followers
• 1:14:43
  you have on social media, how many likes and shares you got.
• 1:14:47
  And it's like it, it really doesn't mean anything in the
• 1:14:51
  grand scheme of things, right. And I like how you broke it
• 1:14:55
  down. So I'm definitely going to have
• 1:14:57
  to check out more your your integral yoke because like I
• 1:15:00
  said, I was, I'm very, I was very intrigued when I phoned
• 1:15:03
  you. And what I phoned on you is
• 1:15:06
  like, I definitely want to talk to to you to learn more for
• 1:15:09
  myself as well. So we can take a very, very
• 1:15:12
  small break here and say, guys, if you're finding value in this
• 1:15:16
  conversation and it's helping you see life through a different
• 1:15:20
  lens, take a moment right now, like, comment and share this
• 1:15:24
  podcast. Whether you're watching on
• 1:15:26
  YouTube or Rumble or listening on speaker or Spotify, this
• 1:15:30
  message sends spreads only through people like you.
• 1:15:34
  So help us expand the conscious revolution.
• 1:15:37
  OK, so we can shift gears now and we're going to talk a little
• 1:15:40
  bit about the readings of Sri Arbindo.
• 1:15:43
  So what inspired you to write the readings in in Sri Arbindo's
• 1:15:50
  series and how has the public responded?
• 1:15:54
  As I mentioned, in 1971, I started reading The Life Divine,
• 1:16:00
  and that's Sri Aurobindo's major metaphysical work.
• 1:16:04
  You could say it's like 1000 pages.
• 1:16:07
  And of course you start reading that and you're into it.
• 1:16:10
  So you read and read and read. And then that wasn't enough.
• 1:16:15
  So the bookstore that was nearby in in Germany where I was living
• 1:16:20
  was called Middle Earth. And I had no money.
• 1:16:24
  OK. I was, you know, I was living in
• 1:16:26
  an abandoned house without money.
• 1:16:29
  So I found the bookstore and they had a whole series of
• 1:16:34
  Shriya Ogundo's books. And I thought I need to read
• 1:16:38
  these books. So I would go there virtually
• 1:16:41
  every day and I would sit down on a futon in the store and I
• 1:16:45
  would read and they sort of adopted me and would feed me
• 1:16:50
  herb tea and, you know, just sort of humor me because, I
• 1:16:54
  mean, who, who in their bookstore ever sat there and
• 1:16:57
  read? It was like an advertisement for
• 1:16:59
  people to read books. OK, So I was sort of their human
• 1:17:03
  statue. And I read these books.
• 1:17:08
  And then over the years, I read them again.
• 1:17:11
  And I said, you know, I got so much more out of it now than I
• 1:17:15
  did them. And then I thought, this is all
• 1:17:20
  crazy. I just read everything too fast.
• 1:17:23
  I'm missing so much. So in 2009, I made a different
• 1:17:29
  decision and that was I was going to read these books one
• 1:17:33
  page per day and not just read the page, but reflect on it,
• 1:17:40
  internalize it and try to communicate something of the
• 1:17:43
  essence of that page, which started my blog, Shrioro Bindo
• 1:17:50
  Studies. OK And I started with the Life
• 1:17:54
  Divine and it was like 3 years and I found things in there that
• 1:18:02
  I never would have found. I mean everything.
• 1:18:06
  What is dream consciousness? What are the different levels of
• 1:18:09
  ignorance? What are the different types of
• 1:18:11
  now? I mean it was insane how much I
• 1:18:13
  had missed with reading it for years.
• 1:18:18
  And so the blog developed and then about three years in I
• 1:18:23
  finished The Life Divine and I suddenly woke up one day and
• 1:18:27
  said I run a publishing house, let's publish these books.
• 1:18:32
  So I took the blog posts, turned them into books and published
• 1:18:38
  the first 3 readings in Trior Bindo Books on the Life Divine,
• 1:18:42
  volumes 1-2 and three. I then moved to the next book
• 1:18:46
  and started doing the same thing.
• 1:18:48
  Went through all the major works, and since 2009, one per
• 1:18:53
  day, one page per day. Basically, I take an excerpt
• 1:18:59
  from that page, a quotation. I internalize it, I reflect on
• 1:19:04
  it, I comment on it, either with something a little bit different
• 1:19:08
  that puts a new angle on it or relates to the life we're living
• 1:19:13
  here. And I put it out there and when
• 1:19:16
  I'm done with that day's post, I move it into a Word document so
• 1:19:21
  that I have a sequential next book already in preparation.
• 1:19:25
  And when it's done, I send it to the publishing company and they
• 1:19:28
  publish it. So I've now got 21 books and I'm
• 1:19:31
  working on the 22nd. And I find it extremely useful
• 1:19:37
  to me. I don't care really if it's
• 1:19:40
  useful to anybody else, but other people have said it's
• 1:19:43
  useful to them and they read it every day and it helps open up
• 1:19:50
  Sri Aurobindo to them, which as you mentioned at the beginning,
• 1:19:53
  can be a little daunting, somewhat dense for people who
• 1:19:57
  are not used to that intensity of focus.
• 1:20:01
  What I found was that by reading Sri Aurobindo quietly and
• 1:20:07
  consciously and trying to understand a deeper sense of it,
• 1:20:10
  not fighting with it, but reflecting on it.
• 1:20:16
  My understanding of things has dramatically changed over the
• 1:20:20
  years, and I think that's reflected in the type of
• 1:20:23
  conversation we're having today, with some insights maybe and
• 1:20:29
  some directions that I wouldn't have been able to express 20
• 1:20:33
  years ago. So I find it valuable and I
• 1:20:37
  think other people are finding it valuable.
• 1:20:39
  I don't really care about numbers of people.
• 1:20:43
  I'd rather have one person who's sincere get a value out of it
• 1:20:48
  then 10,000 people who just say, oh it's great, you know it, you
• 1:20:53
  know what I mean? It doesn't.
• 1:20:55
  It doesn't have any value if they're not using it for their
• 1:20:58
  growth. That is impressive, where
• 1:21:03
  basically you read one page a day and internalize it.
• 1:21:07
  And you know, it just goes to show you because I remember when
• 1:21:10
  I was a university student and I was doing research and you would
• 1:21:13
  read swaths and swaths of information.
• 1:21:16
  And I think at at least a good 98% of it would just pass
• 1:21:22
  through one ear and go through the next.
• 1:21:24
  And it's only from reading and rereading and rereading again
• 1:21:29
  that you start to say, ah, OK, this is starting to make sense.
• 1:21:33
  Then you take out your highlight and your highlight and stuff.
• 1:21:35
  And it sounds basically this is what you've done to make it
• 1:21:39
  accessible to people. And I guess 1000 pages will no
• 1:21:44
  wonder you could, you could get several books, right?
• 1:21:47
  Because like, I mean, the only book that I have read that is
• 1:21:51
  equivalent to that why I listen to the audio book is life and
• 1:21:54
  teaching of the master, the Faris.
• 1:21:56
  And that's a trilogy. That book.
• 1:21:59
  I reckon it's probably about 1000 pages because the audio
• 1:22:02
  book is 24 hours. And that is a lot of
• 1:22:07
  information. And I would, I'm, I'm going to
• 1:22:09
  have to re listen to that now listening, talking to you
• 1:22:14
  because that book was next level and one of the most, like I
• 1:22:19
  would say, mind blowing books I've ever, ever read.
• 1:22:22
  And I'm going to have to do like what I was doing at university
• 1:22:26
  where I had to reread and reread.
• 1:22:27
  So I'm going to have to re listen and re listen because
• 1:22:30
  it's true. You do miss a lot of
• 1:22:31
  information, you know. So of all of the works you've
• 1:22:36
  explored, which text do you feel contains the deepest key to
• 1:22:40
  humanity's next leap? And where do you think it's
• 1:22:43
  often overlooked? Well, I think the deepest I
• 1:22:50
  would have to say is the Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.
• 1:22:54
  And and that's because it's, it starts out from the human
• 1:22:59
  aspiration, what it is that humanity actually is seeking
• 1:23:04
  outside of all the external enjoyments and accoutrements
• 1:23:09
  that we try to acquire. But he says it's God, light,
• 1:23:13
  freedom, immortality are the bases.
• 1:23:18
  And then he goes on to say that all problems of existence are
• 1:23:21
  problems of harmony. OK, We just haven't figured out
• 1:23:25
  how to understand the oneness and the harmony of everything.
• 1:23:30
  And then he goes on to explain in the next couple of chapters
• 1:23:34
  the different ways humanity has tried to solve this, sort of in
• 1:23:41
  the extremes. There's what he calls the
• 1:23:43
  materialist denial, which means the materialist says it's all
• 1:23:48
  just here, we need to just acquire and do and enjoy, and
• 1:23:53
  there's no other life. There's no other purpose
• 1:23:56
  whatever. In the extreme.
• 1:23:58
  I mean, there's middle grounds. And then the other one is the
• 1:24:02
  acetic denial. OK, where someone says that's
• 1:24:07
  all an illusion and I just have to escape it all and become
• 1:24:11
  liberated. And his response in the 4th
• 1:24:15
  chapter sets the tone of where it's going.
• 1:24:19
  And it's called reality omnipresent.
• 1:24:23
  And so the escape is not an escape and the materialist
• 1:24:30
  illusion is not real. They're both part of the greater
• 1:24:35
  oneness of consciousness. And then he begins to explore
• 1:24:39
  the evolution of consciousness. The.
• 1:24:41
  Type of ignorance that we live under, the types of knowledge
• 1:24:45
  that we can explore and develop and gets into.
• 1:24:50
  I mean an ever expanding and deepening understanding until he
• 1:24:55
  comes to. The idea of the evolution of a
• 1:24:59
  Gnostic being, a being that lives in this holistic
• 1:25:05
  consciousness and the development of a collectivity of
• 1:25:08
  humanity, of Gnostic beings, which he calls the divine life.
• 1:25:15
  And it's 1000 pages. Everything is in there.
• 1:25:20
  And that's why I did it a page at a time, because I found
• 1:25:24
  things that I never found just reading it.
• 1:25:28
  And just reading it is not easy for most people.
• 1:25:30
  I mean, you wind up needing a grounding in Greek philosophy
• 1:25:36
  and Vedic studies and Christianity and Buddhism.
• 1:25:41
  I mean, you gain these understandings the more you read
• 1:25:46
  and reflect on it. But it's not something that most
• 1:25:50
  people bring with them to that book.
• 1:25:53
  It's something they gain if they take a serious interest.
• 1:25:58
  The way you describe this book, I am, I'm very surprised that
• 1:26:03
  more people never heard of Shree or Bindu because I'll be honest,
• 1:26:06
  I have never heard of him before prior to talking to you and
• 1:26:10
  doing the research on him and you.
• 1:26:13
  And I'm wondering if it's because he's from the East and
• 1:26:18
  because we're in the West, then it is more of a disconnect.
• 1:26:23
  And maybe in the East, he's very well known in that sort of level
• 1:26:29
  of mind and consciousness because because they think
• 1:26:32
  differently from us for the most part.
• 1:26:33
  So is that is, is that a fair assessment?
• 1:26:36
  That is because we are Westerners and he's from the
• 1:26:39
  East End. That is literally no connection
• 1:26:42
  between us knowing about him and stuff like that.
• 1:26:46
  I'm not sure that's actually what's going on.
• 1:26:49
  You know, there are Nobel laureates who have sighted him
• 1:26:54
  with great positive reviews, Harvard Nobel laureates, for
• 1:27:01
  instance, and others from Europe.
• 1:27:05
  I think it's more that Sri Rabindo never tried to create a
• 1:27:10
  movement, a religion or any kind of proselytizing work.
• 1:27:16
  And so you basically have to stumble across what he's doing
• 1:27:22
  in order to find it. And that's sort of a self
• 1:27:24
  selection mechanism for people who are reaching a stage where
• 1:27:29
  they can actually benefit from it as opposed to just, you know,
• 1:27:34
  having that on their arms as a shoulder patch that, you know,
• 1:27:39
  you know what I mean it, it has nothing to do with that.
• 1:27:42
  It's really not quantity, but it's when an individual reaches
• 1:27:48
  that point. I mean, I was plucked out of
• 1:27:50
  college literally by being poisoned and waking up to a
• 1:27:55
  realization that there was a different purpose to life and
• 1:27:59
  shipped halfway across the world in order to come in contact with
• 1:28:02
  Shrioro Bindo. I mean, it's not like everyone's
• 1:28:08
  going to hear about him and he's in everyone's tongues.
• 1:28:12
  It's not like that. It's really people need to
• 1:28:17
  really be on a serious search and then the right things get
• 1:28:20
  attracted to them or they get attracted to it.
• 1:28:25
  Either way, there's this sort of secret process that takes place.
• 1:28:31
  They call it the law of attraction.
• 1:28:33
  And they've sort of misinterpreted what that's all
• 1:28:36
  about. But the law of attraction really
• 1:28:39
  does work. When you are ready to hear
• 1:28:43
  something and you're sincere, you'll hear it, and not until
• 1:28:47
  then. And it may not influence your
• 1:28:51
  current mode or level of life or your action, but it means that
• 1:28:57
  somehow you're moving into a new evolutionary cycle in your own
• 1:29:01
  life. And someday it'll be of use to
• 1:29:04
  you. And you'll say, Oh yeah, that's
• 1:29:07
  that's really what I need to do right now.
• 1:29:12
  I conquer 100% with what you said because I'll be honest with
• 1:29:16
  you. I the stuff that I talk about
• 1:29:19
  when I'm interviewed and also when I'm interviewing people.
• 1:29:23
  I remember when I first started the process and my flatmate in
• 1:29:27
  England, he said to me used to call me Toddy.
• 1:29:29
  He said toddy man. He says, what are you going to
• 1:29:32
  do with all this information? I said mate, I right now I just
• 1:29:37
  tried to figure figure stuff out and like right now I'm, I'm
• 1:29:41
  lost, I'm confused and I'm just reading.
• 1:29:43
  I'm reading, I'm reading books and listening to books like it
• 1:29:46
  was food and my life depended on it.
• 1:29:49
  Never would I have guessed in a million years that when I
• 1:29:53
  started that process 8 1/2 years ago, I would have a show called
• 1:29:58
  the Conscious Man 7 podcast talking about the things that I
• 1:30:02
  was learning. And every book I found came to
• 1:30:07
  me either from listening to a previous podcast or at the time
• 1:30:10
  when YouTube was still good and the algorithm was unbroken.
• 1:30:13
  I would get recommendations for books and I would just like
• 1:30:17
  listening to these audio books. And I'd be wow, that's levels.
• 1:30:20
  And then another would appear. And every time I was going
• 1:30:23
  through something in my life, another book would appear or
• 1:30:26
  somebody would tell me about a book or just pass me, but
• 1:30:29
  randomly. It was insane.
• 1:30:31
  So I totally agree with you. I don't know if subconsciously I
• 1:30:37
  was projecting to the universe to attract these things or it
• 1:30:41
  was just my path, or it could be a combination of both.
• 1:30:44
  But I completely agree with what you said.
• 1:30:47
  Just know that when you're on a particular path and you're
• 1:30:51
  searching, you end up finding and you know you started when
• 1:30:57
  you were poisoned. My journey started 20 years ago
• 1:31:01
  when they had an accident and I brought my foot when I fell off
• 1:31:04
  my motorcycle. So, you know, you never know how
• 1:31:07
  things are going to wear a coat and you never know why things
• 1:31:12
  happen to at particular times. And you got poisoned and got
• 1:31:15
  went, went to Europe. I fell off my motorcycle.
• 1:31:18
  And then I had to have reconstructed surgery on my foot
• 1:31:21
  8 1/2 years ago, which led me down the path to eating books
• 1:31:25
  and consuming books like my life depended on it.
• 1:31:28
  So let's transition and talk about the Institute of Holistic
• 1:31:33
  for Holistic Education. So what is the mission behind
• 1:31:37
  the Institute for Holistic Education?
• 1:31:41
  We founded the institute with the idea that it would help
• 1:31:46
  integrate spirituality into daily life.
• 1:31:50
  And the idea here is that this isn't, you know, a lot of
• 1:31:55
  people, when they practice religion, they go to church or
• 1:31:58
  temple or synagogue or a mosque, whatever it is they're doing.
• 1:32:03
  And they're there and they do their prayers.
• 1:32:07
  And then when they walk away from that, they become different
• 1:32:11
  people, OK? It's like it's really hard to
• 1:32:15
  find Christ in a lot of Christians outside of Sunday
• 1:32:21
  when they're in the church listening to the sermon, you
• 1:32:24
  know, it's like that. And so the idea of integrating
• 1:32:28
  spiritual spirituality into daily life is that we carry it
• 1:32:34
  around with us all the time. We don't just do it on Sundays
• 1:32:40
  or Saturdays or Fridays, whatever your day is to do that.
• 1:32:45
  And we don't just do it during times of prayer.
• 1:32:49
  You know, some people pray every morning at 3:00 in the morning
• 1:32:52
  or six in the morning. Some people pray five times a
• 1:32:55
  day, whatever it is. But what are they living when
• 1:33:01
  they leave that prayer behind for the day or for the few
• 1:33:07
  hours, whatever it is? What are they living when they
• 1:33:11
  walk out of the church or the temple or the mosque?
• 1:33:13
  Are they actually living that principle?
• 1:33:19
  Are they living that love each other as brethren, which all the
• 1:33:24
  religions at some point say, take care of the immigrant, feed
• 1:33:30
  the hungry, heal the sick? These are these are core
• 1:33:35
  principles of how to care for others.
• 1:33:38
  And I didn't see that happening in most places.
• 1:33:45
  And this is a generalization. It's not universal.
• 1:33:49
  I mean, there are definitely people and groups and
• 1:33:53
  organizations that really try to do this, but we wanted to speak
• 1:33:58
  to people who are not affiliated necessarily with a particular
• 1:34:03
  religion. They can be, we don't care, but
• 1:34:09
  basically who want to explore the development of
• 1:34:12
  consciousness, want to explore how to turn your life into that
• 1:34:18
  and how to become that next evolved level over time, whether
• 1:34:26
  in this life or the next. A lot of what we do as the
• 1:34:31
  institute is actually the daily blog and podcast that I do where
• 1:34:38
  we're exploring these concepts. Like I think yesterday or the
• 1:34:42
  day before it was on how to deal with anxiety and worry.
• 1:34:47
  OK. There have been recent ones on
• 1:34:51
  dealing with depression. There have been other ones
• 1:34:56
  dealing with larger issues of the human scale, not the
• 1:35:02
  individual scale, and so it's a broad range of things that the
• 1:35:09
  institute tries to bring forward and hope that people will find
• 1:35:15
  benefit in and reflect on. OK.
• 1:35:18
  So can you describe a specific transformation or impact story
• 1:35:24
  you've seen through the Institute's work?
• 1:35:26
  Mostly I see it within myself and my wife, actually.
• 1:35:32
  We are different people than we were 15 or 20 or 30 years ago,
• 1:35:38
  dramatically different in the way we see things, the way we
• 1:35:43
  relate to things, the way we try to interface with people and
• 1:35:47
  deal with the world. At the same time.
• 1:35:52
  We have some friends who we've made here in Hawaii, and one of
• 1:35:59
  them is a PhD candidate and teacher, and he comes here
• 1:36:07
  Friday evenings for a meditation session.
• 1:36:11
  And he mentioned that he was listening to the podcast on his
• 1:36:17
  way to the university here on a regular basis.
• 1:36:22
  And it was like the day of the podcast was exactly what he
• 1:36:26
  needed to hear to deal with his situations that day.
• 1:36:29
  It was like it was being written for him.
• 1:36:34
  And so that's an outside example where somebody outside felt
• 1:36:39
  like, yes, this is today's thing that I need to hear and deal
• 1:36:44
  with. And one of them, he said he
• 1:36:45
  played like dozens of times because it was so relevant to
• 1:36:50
  his struggle at the moment because he was really struggling
• 1:36:55
  on certain things. And so I don't know, you know,
• 1:37:00
  we don't have a lot of direct relationship with people out
• 1:37:05
  there in the cyberspace. We don't do advertising and we
• 1:37:09
  don't do a lot of interactions. We get comments from people, but
• 1:37:15
  that's about it. We get a lot of friend requests,
• 1:37:21
  people who have found it and wanted to be part of it.
• 1:37:24
  That's great. I don't know what they do with
• 1:37:27
  it. I don't know how it's changed
• 1:37:28
  their lives, if at all. So I I do it because it changes
• 1:37:33
  my life and that's all I can be really responsible for.
• 1:37:40
  I'm not trying to change anybody else's life.
• 1:37:42
  If it happens and they're doing it themselves and this can help
• 1:37:46
  them, that's great. If they have a different way to
• 1:37:50
  do that and it works for them, that's also great.
• 1:37:56
  But I'm not here trying to count save souls or anything like
• 1:37:59
  that. It's I'll be happy if I can save
• 1:38:02
  my own soul. You know, there's something that
• 1:38:07
  my mother said to me and she said to me that you never know
• 1:38:11
  how you actually impact people's lives because because I've been
• 1:38:15
  doing podcasting for a few years and I have had messages from
• 1:38:19
  people in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran. These are non-english speaking
• 1:38:25
  countries. And they've said to me, Todd,
• 1:38:28
  like stuff you talked about that you talk about has helped me
• 1:38:32
  tremendously. You've made me look at things in
• 1:38:36
  a different way. And funnily, they're all Muslim
• 1:38:38
  countries as well. Not to think about it, but I
• 1:38:40
  digress. And they said to me, Todd, I
• 1:38:44
  just want to let you know that you have, because of you have
• 1:38:48
  actually started to do XY and Z. And a lot of them said, well, I
• 1:38:52
  started to realize that I need to get the body moving, do
• 1:38:56
  physical exercise, read books, look at the food that I eat and
• 1:39:00
  stuff like that. And I've showed my mother some
• 1:39:02
  messages sometimes, as you said, you see, son, This is why I keep
• 1:39:05
  telling you, even though you may feel like you're not having an
• 1:39:08
  impact in the world, you actually are.
• 1:39:11
  People may just not necessarily tell you, but all you need to do
• 1:39:15
  is keep showing up, keep representing, keep doing the
• 1:39:18
  things that you know are right and you should do.
• 1:39:22
  And the universe will just take care of everything else.
• 1:39:26
  And you know, it just is, is like the ripple effect.
• 1:39:29
  You throw the Pebble in the, the, the water, the pond, you
• 1:39:33
  don't see how far it goes because it would just be there,
• 1:39:38
  but the vibration, the energy goes and then it goes to the
• 1:39:40
  bank and then comes back. So you may not see a combat for
• 1:39:44
  years and years, but she said, son, it will always come back.
• 1:39:48
  So keep doing what you're doing. So I am certain from this
• 1:39:52
  conversation, things you've spoken about that people's lives
• 1:39:56
  are definitely impacted. And I'm sure that people
• 1:39:59
  listening to this in my audience will look at things differently
• 1:40:05
  because you've made me see things in a different way just
• 1:40:08
  from the. The analogy you gave with the
• 1:40:10
  accident and the Super minor stuff like that.
• 1:40:12
  So let's go to one level as and because I want to know how does
• 1:40:17
  the institute implement 3 or Windows principles in real world
• 1:40:22
  education or healing systems? As I said, the main work is the
• 1:40:27
  blog and the podcast, which we do every single day of the week.
• 1:40:34
  So it's seven days a week. And by the way, the books that
• 1:40:38
  I've written are all available free of charge as individual
• 1:40:43
  blog posts on the daily blog organized by the book that we're
• 1:40:49
  analyzing in date order and in sequential order.
• 1:40:53
  And people can search by any subject.
• 1:40:56
  I mean, you want to look up rebirth, or you want to look up
• 1:41:00
  hallucination, or you want to look up consciousness.
• 1:41:04
  It'll show you all the references out of several
• 1:41:07
  thousand blog posts where it shows up and it's all free.
• 1:41:12
  I mean, we don't charge anything for that.
• 1:41:14
  And that's really the main work that we do.
• 1:41:18
  We're not a charitable organization in the sense of
• 1:41:22
  we're not out beating people and we're not out healing the sick
• 1:41:26
  or doing any of that stuff. We're trying to have an impact
• 1:41:30
  at the level of consciousness, so.
• 1:41:33
  That. Those who are in a position to
• 1:41:37
  feed people, those who are in a position to heal, people are
• 1:41:40
  motivated and focused on doing those things.
• 1:41:44
  So it's sort of a a meta level of activity as opposed to on the
• 1:41:50
  ground doing it. Now we do support projects like
• 1:41:56
  there's a project taking place in South India called Oroville,
• 1:42:01
  which is a Township that's. Being developed eventually to be
• 1:42:05
  a city of 50,000 people and integrate people from many
• 1:42:10
  different cultures, languages, backgrounds, religions,
• 1:42:13
  etcetera, to build a community that's sustainable, that is a
• 1:42:18
  laboratory for new ways of doing things.
• 1:42:23
  And we're very big supporters of that project because we feel
• 1:42:28
  like it's an extremely valuable way to explore what human beings
• 1:42:36
  can do when they come together. Now, as with anything, you know,
• 1:42:42
  the mental and emotional and vital disruptions come.
• 1:42:45
  And it's not simple. I mean, no one has solved the
• 1:42:49
  problems of human governance yet, but they're trying.
• 1:42:52
  And that's the interesting thing.
• 1:42:55
  They have things like dream Weavers and heart weavers
• 1:42:59
  circles where they bring people together to explore all the
• 1:43:03
  different angles of particular things that are getting in their
• 1:43:08
  way and find solutions that work.
• 1:43:11
  So they're not perfect, but it's it's a great experiment.
• 1:43:15
  We support that. And the other thing we do is I'm
• 1:43:20
  involved with some companies that publish books that
• 1:43:25
  distribute natural products to to the natural product stores
• 1:43:29
  around the country in the United States.
• 1:43:31
  And we try to bring people products that promote
• 1:43:35
  consciousness and that give them different ways of looking at
• 1:43:40
  sustainability and making a difference in terms of how we
• 1:43:45
  deal with the environment, how we deal with each other.
• 1:43:48
  Very interesting because we're going to talk a little bit more
• 1:43:50
  about the project in South India, but let's transition to
• 1:43:55
  modern day challenges. So in what ways can the
• 1:43:59
  evolution of consciousness directly address materialism,
• 1:44:03
  consumerism, and identity laws in modern society?
• 1:44:08
  It's a good question. The consumerism and materialism
• 1:44:15
  side of things is actually the easier part in as much as once
• 1:44:22
  you begin to undertake what Trior Robindo calls the
• 1:44:27
  adventure of consciousness and joy, where you're really focused
• 1:44:33
  on that and you become captivated by that adventure.
• 1:44:38
  All these outer material things take on a much smaller
• 1:44:42
  importance in your life. And another example for you,
• 1:44:46
  when you're a little child and you're playing with your toys
• 1:44:49
  and your dolls and your toy cars and your various games, when you
• 1:44:57
  get to a next stage of your growth and development, they
• 1:45:01
  suddenly fall off from you and you're involved with something
• 1:45:05
  else. You're involved with
• 1:45:06
  relationship, you're involved with hobbies, you're involved
• 1:45:08
  with interests. And then when you get through
• 1:45:11
  that stage, then suddenly you may be starting a family and
• 1:45:15
  you're involved with raising children and building
• 1:45:18
  relationships and, and having a career of some sort.
• 1:45:21
  At each stage, the prior stuff, your material stuff has fallen
• 1:45:27
  away from you and you don't miss it because you've focused your
• 1:45:31
  attention elsewhere. And so when you take up this
• 1:45:35
  adventure of consciousness, you suddenly become less enamored of
• 1:45:41
  and less concerned about material well-being, or let's
• 1:45:46
  say, not well-being because you should have well-being.
• 1:45:50
  But material consumerism that is just there for exploitation of
• 1:45:56
  resources or vanity or pride or for some feeling of that's who I
• 1:46:03
  am as opposed to who you really are inside.
• 1:46:06
  Because that's why people collect things.
• 1:46:09
  You know, someone's got 20 Rolls Royces in their garage.
• 1:46:13
  It's not because they feel satisfied with who they are and
• 1:46:16
  themselves they. Feel like they have to make a
• 1:46:19
  show of who they are by having all this collection of material
• 1:46:24
  goods. OK, you have a gold toilet.
• 1:46:27
  Well, OK, but that means you have very little self worth
• 1:46:31
  internally. You see what I mean?
• 1:46:34
  And so as you take up this adventure, those things fall off
• 1:46:40
  automatically. Now you come to the loss of self
• 1:46:44
  worth that you spoke up, and that's a little more complex.
• 1:46:48
  And the reason it's a little more complex is that people are
• 1:46:52
  so tied up in the education and training and expectations of
• 1:46:57
  their friends, their family, their society, their culture,
• 1:47:00
  their religion, their political philosophy, that they don't know
• 1:47:06
  how to have a self worth. They're told that their self
• 1:47:10
  worth comes from being this particular profession or doing
• 1:47:15
  this particular thing or having this particular relationship.
• 1:47:19
  They don't have a self worth. To get a self worth, you have to
• 1:47:24
  be able to walk away internally, separate yourself from those
• 1:47:28
  things and say I am not the career, I'm not the engineer,
• 1:47:36
  I'm not the politician, I'm not the.
• 1:47:41
  Person working in the restaurant I am.
• 1:47:44
  A conscious being and myself worth comes from that
• 1:47:49
  consciousness. And I'm not a particular race,
• 1:47:53
  I'm not a particular gender, I'm not a particular career, I'm not
• 1:47:58
  a particular religious acolyte. I'm someone who is a living
• 1:48:05
  being with a unique conscious expression.
• 1:48:10
  And that begins to develop as they grow internally and they
• 1:48:16
  realize how illusory all those other things can be.
• 1:48:21
  I completely agree with that because as I started this
• 1:48:27
  journey, the things like consumerism and material stuff
• 1:48:33
  became less and less important to me.
• 1:48:36
  Well, one of the reasons because they were all taken away from me
• 1:48:38
  in the process, because no one goes through, as I call it, the
• 1:48:44
  refinement period without having massive losses.
• 1:48:48
  When you've had massive losses it, it really forces you to, to,
• 1:48:54
  to analyse if those things are important or not.
• 1:48:58
  And from the removal of those things, you start to realise
• 1:49:02
  they're very illusory, as you said.
• 1:49:04
  And then for me now, obviously I still like good clothes and good
• 1:49:09
  shoes and stuff, but I, I don't like, I am not like how I used
• 1:49:13
  to be where I would want to go and get that thing and get that
• 1:49:17
  thing. As long as I'm well shaved, I'm
• 1:49:20
  in great shape, clothes fit me nice and the colours match, I'm
• 1:49:24
  good to go for the worst part. So let's build a little bit on
• 1:49:29
  what you were talking about and how can spiritual development
• 1:49:33
  become a viable alternative to escapism?
• 1:49:35
  So like drugs, social media and work workaholism.
• 1:49:40
  I think that's again, a matter of the natural interest growing,
• 1:49:47
  not out of any sense of obligation, but out of a sense
• 1:49:52
  of joyful interest. You know, there are people out
• 1:49:58
  there who they love running, OK? And they just go out and run and
• 1:50:06
  they get this, what they call runner's high.
• 1:50:09
  And some of them, you know, go out there and they run in races
• 1:50:14
  and they do really well in races.
• 1:50:15
  And then pretty soon people are telling them, oh, well, you
• 1:50:18
  should compete and you should do this and you should do that.
• 1:50:21
  And then it turns into really a drag for them.
• 1:50:25
  Some of them really suffer under that.
• 1:50:27
  They pushed themselves way beyond their level of interest
• 1:50:31
  and and things start to break down and they suffer mentally.
• 1:50:37
  We had an an instance in the Olympic Games a few years ago
• 1:50:41
  where one of the top gymnasts didn't compete in some of the
• 1:50:46
  final events because she said that I lost my mental balance to
• 1:50:53
  be able to do this and I was just going to injure myself.
• 1:50:57
  And that took a lot of courage because she walked away at that
• 1:51:02
  moment from the top position in the world of gymnastics and said
• 1:51:11
  my mental framework is more important than this achievement.
• 1:51:19
  And then a few years later, she came back with a whole new
• 1:51:22
  energy and attitude. And of course, she became
• 1:51:24
  predominant in her field again because she was always a great
• 1:51:29
  gymnast. But we see this happening that
• 1:51:34
  as as long as you're doing it out of joy and out of natural
• 1:51:38
  inclination, it will change your life.
• 1:51:42
  The minute you turn it into an obligation or a discipline that
• 1:51:49
  you're doing out of some fear or sense of duty or into some form
• 1:51:56
  of materialistic approach where you're going to get some outer
• 1:52:02
  benefit out of it, you've lost a lot of that spark and it doesn't
• 1:52:09
  help you as much. So I usually tell people who
• 1:52:13
  ask, I can't speak for your life, but my life, I love
• 1:52:19
  getting up in the morning. I get up at 3:00 in the morning
• 1:52:23
  and I come down and I work on my blog post and my podcast and
• 1:52:28
  then I take up whatever my business career is and I enjoy
• 1:52:34
  my life. Every bit of it.
• 1:52:37
  And I don't drive around in Porsches and Mercedes.
• 1:52:40
  They have no relevance to me at. All.
• 1:52:46
  I just don't care about that. And what I do care about is, am
• 1:52:52
  I becoming a better human being today than I was yesterday?
• 1:52:56
  Am I learning? Am I growing?
• 1:52:58
  Am am I experiencing something new?
• 1:53:02
  I observe my dreams, I observe my relationships, I observe what
• 1:53:07
  I do. And if it's not going to bring
• 1:53:11
  joy, if it's not going to bring conscious growth, I try to find
• 1:53:16
  a way out of it. You know, I completely agree
• 1:53:22
  because, like I I am a fitness coach and I also do the podcast
• 1:53:29
  and I absolutely love doing both of them to the point where I get
• 1:53:34
  to a stage sometimes because I work so much that I have to
• 1:53:37
  remind myself I need to go to sleep because I have done
• 1:53:41
  literal all nighters. Sometimes I end up going to bed
• 1:53:44
  at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and I just what would happen to
• 1:53:49
  his body would shut down at that level.
• 1:53:51
  But because I like it so much is like a like that that runners.
• 1:53:55
  How you talking about? Like when I got it this morning,
• 1:53:58
  I was like, OK, great, I'm going to do weighted muscle UPS this
• 1:54:02
  morning and then I'm going to do some finalize these questions to
• 1:54:05
  talk to you today. And I was like proper excited.
• 1:54:11
  I I didn't have that like I need to talk to Santosh today.
• 1:54:15
  It was like, Nah, mate, I got up 345, meditated, went to the gym.
• 1:54:20
  I was on time, left on time was like, boom, let's go have
• 1:54:23
  breakfast and then work on finalizing these questions to
• 1:54:25
  talk to you and me. I just love what I do to the
• 1:54:30
  point where like, like I said, I have to remind myself, OK, Todd,
• 1:54:34
  it's getting a little bit late. We need to go to sleep because
• 1:54:36
  we have to do the other stuff tomorrow, you know?
• 1:54:40
  So what are the practical daily steps someone can take to align
• 1:54:45
  with this consciousness shift that you were talking about?
• 1:54:52
  I would say the first thing is to get in touch with the inner
• 1:54:56
  aspiration. What is it that you really feel
• 1:55:01
  important in your life? Aspiration Is that flame in your
• 1:55:04
  heart? What is it that really gives you
• 1:55:07
  joy? What is it that if you didn't
• 1:55:11
  have to go to work at some job somewhere, if you didn't have to
• 1:55:16
  do this thing or that thing, what is it that really sparks
• 1:55:20
  you? And try to understand why it
• 1:55:24
  sparks you and how it sparks you.
• 1:55:27
  And then try to incorporate that into what you do during the day,
• 1:55:33
  even if it's only for a very short time.
• 1:55:36
  And that is the first step and all the rest of the steps follow
• 1:55:41
  from that. You know, when we started, you'd
• 1:55:43
  ask, well, what, what are, you know, how does integral yoga
• 1:55:47
  different than any other? And I said, well, it's, it
• 1:55:50
  doesn't have a fixed path. And that's what I'm saying here.
• 1:55:54
  Now, every individual has their own path and it starts with who
• 1:56:00
  you are. And what is that flame in your
• 1:56:03
  heart that's going to drive you to do something, to learn
• 1:56:08
  something, to grow in some way in your life, to be better in
• 1:56:13
  what you do, what you think, what you feel, what you express,
• 1:56:17
  how you relate. And as you do that, it doesn't
• 1:56:21
  need a label. It doesn't need to be called
• 1:56:23
  integral yoga. It doesn't need to be called
• 1:56:26
  spirituality. That itself is the path.
• 1:56:31
  And as far as I can tell, that's the most advice anyone can give
• 1:56:35
  anyone else. Great advice because in my case,
• 1:56:42
  this is what I, I say this now openly.
• 1:56:45
  I found my purpose in life. My purpose in life is to get
• 1:56:48
  people in shape and to do this podcast to help with the
• 1:56:53
  evolution of human consciousness.
• 1:56:55
  And I used to be a civil engineer.
• 1:56:57
  I used to I the last, I, the last major project I worked on
• 1:57:01
  in London was for the Crossrail project worth £16 billion.
• 1:57:06
  Great job and I loved it. I never saw myself doing
• 1:57:09
  anything else but engineering. And while I did love it, no, on
• 1:57:14
  reflection, it wasn't my actual passion.
• 1:57:16
  It I used to get up and like I said, I used to love going and
• 1:57:20
  billing stuff when we have massive concrete pours and stuff
• 1:57:23
  like that. But now I get up with this like
• 1:57:28
  Joy, like I am going to do a podcast today and I never feel
• 1:57:36
  like it's a drag. Even when I'm going back and
• 1:57:39
  forth with my editor to, to, to finalize the production.
• 1:57:44
  It is like, it's just like, I just want to get it right.
• 1:57:47
  You know, like tweet this, tweet that.
• 1:57:48
  So it does. Yeah, it is work, but it doesn't
• 1:57:52
  feel like work for me, you know, to the point where my mom says
• 1:57:55
  like Todd, remember, you need to rest, right?
• 1:57:59
  She says, I know you like what you're doing, but Please
• 1:58:01
  remember to rest right, because you train really hard.
• 1:58:04
  So I'm like, OK, OK, my OK boy. So it'll be, I do agree The key
• 1:58:10
  right now I I've realizing in our evolution right now is to
• 1:58:15
  find your purpose in life. And when you find your purpose
• 1:58:18
  or as a Japanese from philosophy called the Ikigai, you find that
• 1:58:24
  it is a game changer in your life.
• 1:58:25
  You know? So how can communities or
• 1:58:30
  spiritual collectives accelerate this evolution, and how?
• 1:58:35
  A spiritual collectivity is no greater at its essence than the
• 1:58:43
  collection of individuals and their spiritual focus.
• 1:58:47
  There. They may not all be doing the
• 1:58:49
  same thing in the same way, but if they have an affinity and
• 1:58:55
  they join forces, they create a dynamic that supports each
• 1:59:02
  other's growth. And so it can become the, the
• 1:59:07
  sum becomes greater than the parts, as they say.
• 1:59:11
  And to the extent that such communities rise up around the
• 1:59:15
  world and begin to create affinities with one another, the
• 1:59:19
  sum of those communities is greater than the whole and it
• 1:59:23
  has a greater impact. And, and I'll, I'll give you an
• 1:59:26
  example here. Some years ago there was a
• 1:59:32
  organization called TM Transcendental Meditation and
• 1:59:36
  they decided that they would train a lot of meditators and
• 1:59:42
  the meditators would go to would collect as a big group and go to
• 1:59:47
  a particular city or country and practice meditation there for a
• 1:59:51
  while and see if they could lower the average crime.
• 1:59:55
  Rate in that community and they actually showed some interesting
• 1:59:59
  results from that. It was, you know a few 100 or a
• 2:00:02
  few 1000 people doing this, but without telling anybody.
• 2:00:07
  The crime rate actually did go down in some of these places.
• 2:00:11
  I mean, it was. Very clearly now, it wasn't a
• 2:00:15
  double-blind one of those studies that.
• 2:00:17
  The. Scientists are going to say is
• 2:00:19
  great, but they did enough of these with enough corresponding
• 2:00:23
  statistical results that you could say, well, there's
• 2:00:26
  something there probably. OK, being a scientists, you
• 2:00:31
  know, you're going to say, well, who knows?
• 2:00:34
  You know? But when you understand how
• 2:00:38
  consciousness works, and then you see these consistent results
• 2:00:41
  across a pattern of different places and times and cities and
• 2:00:47
  the statistical analysis that's done by third parties, by
• 2:00:52
  governments. You say, well, OK, maybe there's
• 2:00:55
  something there. So spiritual communities, people
• 2:01:00
  working together, pulling together and pushing a movement
• 2:01:08
  of consciousness forward within themselves and thereby creating
• 2:01:14
  an atmosphere in their community, whether it's a small
• 2:01:18
  community or not, can be a tremendous value.
• 2:01:21
  And for how humanity evolves and the crises we're facing, I
• 2:01:29
  support more and more of these type of communities coming up
• 2:01:33
  and whether they're physically contiguous to one another, where
• 2:01:37
  the people are living together, or whether they form communities
• 2:01:40
  across the world. As I spoke about earlier about
• 2:01:43
  just people with a similar affinity, That vibration of
• 2:01:48
  consciousness is rotating through the world and having its
• 2:01:52
  impact, like what you might call the 100th monkey thing.
• 2:01:56
  When I always ask people, I said, whether you believe in the
• 2:01:58
  100th monkey thing or not, we know that vibrations are
• 2:02:01
  communicable, just like diseases are communicable.
• 2:02:04
  And who knows where the tipping point of humanity is, where
• 2:02:08
  enough people are doing this throughout the world, under
• 2:02:12
  whatever name or guise or path or whatever they want to call
• 2:02:16
  it. To create that phenomenon where
• 2:02:19
  all of humanity suddenly can see it differently and do something
• 2:02:25
  differently without anyone proselytizing, teaching or
• 2:02:29
  converting them. Yes, You know, that is similar
• 2:02:34
  to instead of looking at our differences, look at our
• 2:02:37
  similarities. And that allows us to work
• 2:02:41
  together. Because I find that today in our
• 2:02:44
  society, there's a lot of polarization.
• 2:02:47
  And because of the systems like government, religion, gender,
• 2:02:53
  XYZ, you name it, we don't actually realize that we have a
• 2:02:58
  common enemy and the enemy is the system and the system is
• 2:03:02
  rigged against us. So instead of we're like, I
• 2:03:06
  guess, going to to to task of each other, or you're a Jew, I'm
• 2:03:11
  a Christian now you're a Muslim, XYZ black, white, Indian,
• 2:03:14
  Chinese. Let's just come together and
• 2:03:16
  realize, well, we're all being oppressed here.
• 2:03:19
  Can we not just come together and say we're together and
• 2:03:22
  create independent systems so we can be self-sufficient, right.
• 2:03:25
  So what you're talking about is exactly what I talk about where
• 2:03:29
  you don't have to agree with everything someone says, but the
• 2:03:32
  things that you do agree with you level upon those, right.
• 2:03:36
  But I do agree is definitely a consciousness shift that needs
• 2:03:40
  to occur so that you can actually instead of looking at
• 2:03:45
  the spec in your brother's eye, you look at the log in yours 1st
• 2:03:49
  and then realise that he is you and you or him.
• 2:03:52
  And you say you know what mate? Well, I don't agree with you on
• 2:03:54
  that, but I agree on this. So let's work on that and let's
• 2:03:58
  create a better world and a better system and a better
• 2:04:00
  society. So let's talk a little bit about
• 2:04:04
  how you see the future of humanity.
• 2:04:06
  So what is your vision for humanity's future as
• 2:04:10
  consciousness continues to evolve, individually and
• 2:04:14
  collective and collectively? I guess from my viewpoint, the
• 2:04:20
  evolutionary process towards what we might call the Gnostic
• 2:04:26
  being and Gnostic communities, which we spoke about earlier,
• 2:04:30
  it's a multi 100 year process. And that's not a long time only
• 2:04:38
  because if you look at how long nature takes to evolve the next
• 2:04:43
  level of consciousness from matter to life and from life to
• 2:04:47
  mind, and now from mind to super mind, while each stage comes
• 2:04:51
  faster than the one before it, you're talking millions of years
• 2:04:57
  for the first stages and hundreds of thousands of years
• 2:05:02
  for some of the later stages to get to a next level.
• 2:05:06
  The fact that we're now talking about maybe 3 or 400 years for
• 2:05:11
  this to spread widely and really take hold of humanity is not a
• 2:05:18
  long time in any individual human life.
• 2:05:21
  It's like, Oh my God, it's never going to happen in my lifetime.
• 2:05:27
  But there are interim steps, and there are appearances and
• 2:05:34
  outcroppings of these new ways of seeing things that occur all
• 2:05:39
  along the way. It's just that the tipping point
• 2:05:43
  for humanity is still way out in the future, where we don't need
• 2:05:48
  to have all this fighting and competition and arguing and
• 2:05:56
  power struggles. That's going to take a while
• 2:06:00
  because you've got an embedded structure there and anyone who
• 2:06:02
  tells you that. Magically, it's all going to
• 2:06:05
  change in five or ten years. It's probably delusional, OK?
• 2:06:10
  It isn't going to. Happen, but we can work towards
• 2:06:14
  it and we'll see signs of it and people with like affinities who
• 2:06:19
  are evolving in that direction can find support with one
• 2:06:24
  another as it happens. So really the question is, how
• 2:06:28
  do we, does humanity survive that transitional period with
• 2:06:34
  all the crises we're facing? And that becomes the Seminole
• 2:06:39
  question. And some people are optimists
• 2:06:43
  and some are pessimists. I'm on the optimistic side.
• 2:06:47
  I think that no challenge is put in front of us that isn't
• 2:06:52
  intended to have a solution. And that's because I think that
• 2:06:57
  the universe, as it's evolving, as it's evolving with and
• 2:07:03
  through us and through our planet, isn't here simply to
• 2:07:06
  bring a dead end of total destruction on things.
• 2:07:11
  And it may not be in. Our lifetime.
• 2:07:16
  It may be that humanity gets itself blown up and there has to
• 2:07:20
  come a new cycle of civilization, but I'm hopeful
• 2:07:25
  that we see signs that a new consciousness is starting to
• 2:07:30
  emerge. We see people concerned about
• 2:07:33
  the environment. We have see people concerned
• 2:07:36
  about developing consciousness. We see people taking up the the
• 2:07:41
  gender disputes, the racial disputes, the power structures
• 2:07:47
  that have unequally brought. A.
• 2:07:51
  Lot of the resources of the planet into a few what I would
• 2:07:55
  call greedy hands. Rather than sharing it among
• 2:07:58
  humanity. But we have people working on
• 2:08:02
  this, we have people talking about it.
• 2:08:04
  You see people talking about Ubuntu, which is from Africa,
• 2:08:10
  the idea that we all succeed or fail together.
• 2:08:15
  And they actually did an experiment once where they told
• 2:08:20
  some young children in Africa, well, whoever gets there first
• 2:08:24
  gets all the fruits or the chocolate, whatever it was, that
• 2:08:28
  was the the gift there. And the none of the children
• 2:08:33
  started running. They all held hands and went
• 2:08:35
  together. And to me, that was extremely
• 2:08:40
  illuminating because it represents an advance of
• 2:08:44
  consciousness that the West has never understood, but that
• 2:08:49
  people in the West are starting to look at, which is something
• 2:08:53
  totally new. The West has always taken the
• 2:08:55
  position that we know better than everybody else and they're
• 2:08:59
  going to do what we want to do because we've got better
• 2:09:01
  weaponry and we've got better control of resources.
• 2:09:04
  That's all illusion. And when you look at something
• 2:09:08
  like the First Nations people who say we should be thinking of
• 2:09:13
  how we treat our heirs down to 7 generations into the future, and
• 2:09:24
  you look at Ubuntu, where we all do this together and we all
• 2:09:29
  succeed together, We all share the fruits together.
• 2:09:33
  These are stages of consciousness that have already
• 2:09:37
  developed in different parts of the world.
• 2:09:40
  And the West is finally starting to look at these things and say
• 2:09:45
  maybe there's a way to survive with some of these practices.
• 2:09:50
  And that's what gives me hope that we're going to survive to
• 2:09:54
  the next evolutionary stage 3 or 400 years from now.
• 2:10:00
  Yes, you know, I, I am, I'm an optimist as well.
• 2:10:03
  I've got a mate who is a bit of a black pill.
• 2:10:05
  He thinks we're all doomed. And he's he's more focused that
• 2:10:10
  we need to wake people up. But I keep telling him that we
• 2:10:13
  need to wake ourselves up first. I mean like individually,
• 2:10:16
  because then you wake yourself up and you become the light, you
• 2:10:21
  become very attractive. So the morph always runs to the
• 2:10:25
  light or surrounds itself to the light.
• 2:10:27
  So when you become the light of the world, you actually touch,
• 2:10:31
  move and inspire people to actually do the same thing that
• 2:10:33
  you were doing. So there's why I say to him, I'm
• 2:10:36
  a lot more optimistic because the things that I can control is
• 2:10:40
  my own development. And when I focus on that, then I
• 2:10:45
  know that I will attract people in my life and the opportunities
• 2:10:48
  that I want because I am at that frequency of vibration, because
• 2:10:53
  the law of attraction is real. But he is more because he's a
• 2:10:57
  scientist, he tends to more look at the hard data and saying,
• 2:11:02
  well, the numbers are just not on our side.
• 2:11:04
  So we're all doomed, you know? So in your experience, what's
• 2:11:09
  the biggest resistance people have to this inner work and how
• 2:11:13
  can they overcome it? Well, first let me address that
• 2:11:19
  point about the numbers aren't with us because the mental
• 2:11:28
  rearranging of life on the planet didn't occur because
• 2:11:32
  everybody did that. It occurred because a very small
• 2:11:36
  number of people had a new way of looking at and dealing with
• 2:11:41
  things, rightly or wrongly. It was just that was the stage
• 2:11:44
  of evolution. It didn't take large numbers of
• 2:11:48
  people, it took people who had evolved to that next mental
• 2:11:52
  level to be able to implement that.
• 2:11:55
  Not everybody is an engineer. Some people have to just move
• 2:11:59
  the cement, OK? And you don't need a large
• 2:12:04
  number of engineers to organize a project that moves a lot of
• 2:12:10
  cement. OK, so it's not numbers, it's
• 2:12:16
  consciousness. As more evolutionary development
• 2:12:22
  takes place, each level of consciousness has not only more
• 2:12:26
  knowledge, but also more power. Of.
• 2:12:29
  Action, more power of influence. As you're talking about.
• 2:12:33
  You become the light of the world and people are attracted.
• 2:12:37
  You say that's true. And I really do understand and
• 2:12:42
  appreciate that, that as I grow, as you grow, as someone else
• 2:12:46
  grows, we start to vibrate at a certain level and even secretly
• 2:12:53
  it starts to. Change how the world responds
• 2:12:57
  because we are part of that world and we help.
• 2:13:01
  Create the collective. Vibration of the world.
• 2:13:05
  And so it's not about large numbers of people, it's about
• 2:13:11
  the right people doing what they can do within their lives and
• 2:13:16
  radiating that out in a joyful, sincere, non judgmental way.
• 2:13:28
  So it's not a matter of changing someone else's opinion.
• 2:13:33
  We don't have to change anybody's opinion.
• 2:13:36
  If they're immersed in materialism, they're not going
• 2:13:39
  to change because you come and tell them, oh, materialism's
• 2:13:42
  bad, it's not going to work. They're going to say, well, I
• 2:13:47
  want that fast car. I that that's what I want to do.
• 2:13:50
  OK, well, that's fine. You can't change people from who
• 2:13:55
  they are. They have to grow out of the
• 2:13:58
  toys into the next level and the examples of people who are
• 2:14:03
  living that next level, who are satisfactorily living it and who
• 2:14:09
  are happy and joyful and have good lives and try to really be
• 2:14:15
  positive people in the world. Eventually when they hit that
• 2:14:20
  roadblock in their lives and they say, you know, maybe I'm
• 2:14:23
  not as fulfilled as I would like to be, Maybe there's more to my
• 2:14:28
  life. Maybe this midlife crisis means
• 2:14:32
  that I need to do something different.
• 2:14:35
  I have to get away from the rat race, as they call it.
• 2:14:40
  Maybe at that point they'll just remember well, I met these
• 2:14:43
  people and they were really so upbeat and positive about their
• 2:14:48
  own lives, and they weren't messing with my head.
• 2:14:50
  They were just being who they are.
• 2:14:54
  And maybe that has some influence on them.
• 2:14:57
  Who knows? But I don't think that we can
• 2:15:00
  change people's opinions now. You know, I was a vegetarian
• 2:15:06
  from, I don't know, I was a teenager.
• 2:15:10
  I became a vegetarian when I moved out of my parents house.
• 2:15:16
  And then I was sort of what you would call a Hindu vegetarian
• 2:15:21
  means dairy was part of it, you know, cheese and milk and yogurt
• 2:15:27
  and things like that. And then about 5 or 6 years ago,
• 2:15:30
  I don't know exactly why, my wife and I just decided we're
• 2:15:36
  almost vegan, let's just be vegan.
• 2:15:41
  And so we gave up dairy and we became vegan.
• 2:15:45
  No one pushed us to it, no one argued with us.
• 2:15:49
  It was just something we evolved into, and later we realized that
• 2:15:55
  we became conscious of the suffering of the animals in the
• 2:15:59
  dairy industry and all of the negative health impacts of
• 2:16:03
  dairy. And it was like those things
• 2:16:07
  just suddenly woke up in us and we said, OK, we're vegans now.
• 2:16:12
  I don't go out and tell anybody what to eat.
• 2:16:15
  OK? They want to eat meat or they
• 2:16:17
  want to eat dairy. As long as they don't force it
• 2:16:20
  on me, I'm happy that they're doing what they're called to do
• 2:16:24
  right now. But someday they may wake up and
• 2:16:29
  say I want to be a vegetarian, and another day they may wake up
• 2:16:33
  and say I want to be a vegan for their own internal reasons.
• 2:16:38
  And when they're ready, then they'll do it.
• 2:16:40
  And they'll do it with joy and they'll do it with conscious
• 2:16:44
  awareness. And that's more important than
• 2:16:48
  telling somebody this is your discipline and you need to do
• 2:16:51
  it. Because that's always
• 2:16:53
  transitory. And I've met a lot of people who
• 2:16:56
  said, well, I was vegan for five years and then I couldn't deal
• 2:17:00
  with that. It's like, OK, whatever, you
• 2:17:04
  know? So it's evolutionary, not
• 2:17:08
  disciplinary. In your experience, what's the
• 2:17:11
  biggest resistance people have to doing this inner work and how
• 2:17:15
  can they overcome it? I think the biggest resistance
• 2:17:19
  is their fear of giving up what is known and secure to them and
• 2:17:25
  that their peers and their friends circle and their
• 2:17:28
  education and background and training have told them they
• 2:17:32
  should do. The question of what I should do
• 2:17:37
  to fit in to my circle is the biggest obstacle.
• 2:17:44
  Once you stop worrying about what you should do, and you
• 2:17:49
  start reflecting on what inwardly is your inner
• 2:17:56
  aspiration or spark, the change can come very quickly.
• 2:18:01
  But until that point, you know, it's like your parents tell you,
• 2:18:06
  oh, you should get a career. And someone else tells you, oh,
• 2:18:09
  you should do this and you should do that.
• 2:18:12
  And your society tells you you need to fit in and you need a
• 2:18:15
  job and you need this and you need that.
• 2:18:19
  It's very hard. People become really fearful
• 2:18:22
  about breaking away from that and changing.
• 2:18:25
  And so at some point, the need, the inner need has to exceed the
• 2:18:35
  inner fear. And when you reach that tipping
• 2:18:39
  point, then you say, I just have to do this, and you make that
• 2:18:45
  change. OK, so it basically it's, it's
• 2:18:50
  really the inner calling. And I, I've realized that most
• 2:18:55
  people, including myself, we, we ignore the inner calling because
• 2:19:00
  of all the programming that we receive.
• 2:19:02
  So yeah, I totally agree with what you were saying.
• 2:19:05
  So if you had one message to offer the world before a major
• 2:19:10
  global awakening, what would it be?
• 2:19:14
  Be real and be real to yourself. Don't worry so much about what
• 2:19:22
  others expect. Be who you are.
• 2:19:26
  You know, there are many people who, you know, have a situation
• 2:19:31
  where they're called to the arts and their parents are saying, Oh
• 2:19:37
  my God, there's no career in that.
• 2:19:39
  You know, you can't do that. Just become a lawyer, a
• 2:19:43
  scientist or something. Be real, follow your heart,
• 2:19:50
  follow your inner guidance. That's the only thing that can
• 2:19:55
  save humanity from its current crisis.
• 2:19:57
  I think, you know, there's an example of what we've been
• 2:20:01
  talking about. There's a book out called called
• 2:20:04
  to Heal, and it's about an African shamanic healer.
• 2:20:09
  And she had a a strict education, you know, she grew up
• 2:20:16
  and. She came from a family of
• 2:20:20
  shamanic healers, but she didn't want to do that.
• 2:20:23
  And so she went out and she got an education.
• 2:20:25
  She tried to follow a career in different paths.
• 2:20:28
  And everything wound up blowing up on her.
• 2:20:31
  And she started having serious health problems.
• 2:20:34
  I mean, serious. Like she was incapacitated in
• 2:20:37
  various ways. And one of her associates was a
• 2:20:44
  shamanic healer. And she said you will continue
• 2:20:48
  to have these obstacles in your path and you will continue to
• 2:20:52
  have health problems until you realize what your true destiny
• 2:20:57
  is. And when you take up being a
• 2:21:00
  spiritual healer, all of that will disappear and you will find
• 2:21:04
  yourself fulfilled. And eventually she did that.
• 2:21:09
  And her story is in that book. So it was really heartening to
• 2:21:13
  me to to see that even people who try to avoid their inner
• 2:21:20
  calling because of expectations of the outer world and society
• 2:21:25
  and what they think they want. Eventually, if that inner
• 2:21:32
  aspiration is true, they will find a way.
• 2:21:40
  And that is, you know my message.
• 2:21:43
  Find who you are. And be who you are.
• 2:21:47
  Just live it and live it with that inner joy that comes from
• 2:21:52
  knowing you are authentic. Not superficial.
• 2:21:59
  OK, so if this conversation is resonated with someone, what
• 2:22:04
  should where should someone start?
• 2:22:07
  You know if something has awakened deep inside of them and
• 2:22:11
  what would be the first steps that they should do?
• 2:22:18
  Following the principle of integral yoga, I would say they
• 2:22:23
  should start where they are and it's not a matter of picking up
• 2:22:29
  a particular path, religion, book, or anything else.
• 2:22:34
  Once you awaken to that need, find out what is being attracted
• 2:22:39
  to you and what you're being attracted to along that path and
• 2:22:44
  follow it as long as it's guiding you.
• 2:22:48
  Someone called this the pathless path.
• 2:22:53
  And it's really true that, you know, everyone wants you to say,
• 2:22:58
  OK, you woke up, now you do these things.
• 2:23:00
  But my approach to that is totally different.
• 2:23:03
  And it's like you woke up now find out within yourself what
• 2:23:07
  you've awakened to and then do that, whatever it is.
• 2:23:13
  OK. So I think that's great advice
• 2:23:15
  actually. So you mentioned before Orville
• 2:23:19
  the international community, so how does it reflect with Sri
• 2:23:24
  Arubindo's ideals? Orville was actually not
• 2:23:32
  conceived by Sri Orobindo himself.
• 2:23:35
  It was conceived by his Co worker who is affectionately
• 2:23:39
  called the mother Mira Alfasa. She was a French woman who
• 2:23:46
  basically was receiving a teaching through her entire
• 2:23:51
  young life and childhood through dreams and when she went with
• 2:23:56
  her husband to India, she recognized Shri Ravindo as the
• 2:24:01
  teacher who was teaching her all these things.
• 2:24:04
  She became his Co worker and she developed what's called the Sri
• 2:24:07
  Aurobindo Ashram and became the caretaker of several 1000 people
• 2:24:14
  who decided to live and work there.
• 2:24:17
  And during the Second World War, she invited in their families
• 2:24:20
  and started a school, the International Center of
• 2:24:23
  Education. And eventually, she said, you
• 2:24:26
  know, there should be a place on the planet where money doesn't
• 2:24:30
  rule, where it's a laboratory exploring new ways of life that
• 2:24:34
  brings people of different cultures together and begins to
• 2:24:38
  work out what trio Robindo called the ideal of human unity,
• 2:24:44
  which is the name of one of his books.
• 2:24:48
  And so she founded the idea of Oroville and worked with some
• 2:24:54
  architects and engineers and developed a plan for it.
• 2:24:58
  Got some people busy purchasing the land on sort of it was a
• 2:25:04
  desert eroded plateau nearby and turning it into what is today a
• 2:25:12
  green paradise. I mean, they've got millions of
• 2:25:15
  trees there and they've got water and they've got a
• 2:25:19
  beautiful environment and they've built structures and
• 2:25:22
  they've built community and they've built projects and
• 2:25:25
  there's like 600 projects going on there.
• 2:25:28
  Because every individual comes with their own view of what it
• 2:25:31
  is they want to work on. It's sort of almost a divine
• 2:25:35
  anarchy you could say, because someone comes there and says,
• 2:25:39
  well, I want to work with Spirulina and someone else says,
• 2:25:41
  well, I want to work with recycling and someone else comes
• 2:25:45
  and says I want to work with, you know, water conservation,
• 2:25:50
  whatever or energy. They're they've set up a solar
• 2:25:54
  mini grid in the community. Now it's like all these projects
• 2:26:00
  are at work and somehow, although they don't work with
• 2:26:05
  each other, they work together and around and supportive to one
• 2:26:10
  another in terms of the big picture that that gets created.
• 2:26:15
  So I'd say it's the corollary to what Trio Robindo spoke about.
• 2:26:23
  But it was the mother's implementation of an experiment
• 2:26:27
  in human unity, rather than a more.
• 2:26:32
  Philosophical, broader brush approach.
• 2:26:35
  It was well, let's just try something.
• 2:26:40
  OK. So you alluded to a few things
• 2:26:42
  that I want to ask me next question.
• 2:26:44
  So can you elaborate on that in terms of how do Orville's
• 2:26:48
  projects differ from the high tech, high cost approaches in
• 2:26:52
  the developed world? The main thing is that Orville
• 2:26:56
  starts at what I would call the basic ground roots level.
• 2:27:02
  And the idea is the solutions they work on should be able to
• 2:27:07
  be implemented with local modification almost anywhere in
• 2:27:14
  the developing world. When you look at the projects
• 2:27:17
  that the World Bank for instance has dropped into Asia and Africa
• 2:27:22
  and South America, these are big high money, high tech projects
• 2:27:27
  and they spend 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars and they
• 2:27:31
  put some project in place. But then they after some time,
• 2:27:36
  they can't be maintained. They cost too much to maintain.
• 2:27:39
  The people don't have the necessary skill set to maintain
• 2:27:43
  that level of tech. And it becomes difficult.
• 2:27:49
  And in many cases, it becomes a way that local leaders use it to
• 2:27:54
  enrich themselves at the expense of their people.
• 2:27:57
  In other words, it's just almost like graft that's taking place,
• 2:28:01
  corruption. So at Oroville, they start with
• 2:28:07
  small things and say, OK, well, they did a reforestation project
• 2:28:11
  and that's a good example. It was a totally denuded, eroded
• 2:28:16
  plateau. And they looked at, well, what
• 2:28:20
  is it going to take to turn this into a living biosphere?
• 2:28:25
  And then they looked at what are the native plants and trees that
• 2:28:29
  would normally grow in this area so that they didn't introduce
• 2:28:34
  foreign plants into the environment, but plants that
• 2:28:39
  were going to grow and thrive in that area.
• 2:28:42
  And they carefully tended trees and plants where they would
• 2:28:49
  water each one individually with drops of water on a daily basis.
• 2:28:54
  To start with, because there was no water, they started building
• 2:29:00
  cannabs or you know, ways to block the water, capture the
• 2:29:05
  monsoon flow, utilize it effectively.
• 2:29:09
  They put in some bore wells to tap the water that was under
• 2:29:13
  there and they conserved it. They organized it and they
• 2:29:17
  created a thriving biosphere that not only had these trees
• 2:29:22
  that they planted, but eventually they attracted the
• 2:29:27
  native understory brush that would grow there in the native
• 2:29:31
  animals and insects and everything else, and they
• 2:29:34
  created a holistic regional forest.
• 2:29:40
  Out of something that was totally just bare eroded.
• 2:29:44
  Land. Now the lesson of that is it was
• 2:29:48
  all done at the grass roots. Now you've had things like in
• 2:29:53
  Haiti, they had the hurricane that destroyed a lot of their
• 2:30:00
  trees. And so the world organizations
• 2:30:05
  have a project and what they do is they take little tree
• 2:30:08
  seedlings and they drop them from airplanes and they get
• 2:30:11
  maybe a 20 or 25% rate of the trees actually taking and
• 2:30:18
  growing. Well, the Oroville Group went to
• 2:30:23
  Haiti and a couple of other places with their program and
• 2:30:26
  taught people how to do this and look at the native growth in
• 2:30:32
  that area. Not transplanting what grew in
• 2:30:35
  India, but what grows in Haiti or what grows in Africa or what
• 2:30:39
  grows in Rajasthan and said this is the methodology for you to
• 2:30:47
  redevelop the native forestry here.
• 2:30:50
  They had like an 80 to 90% success rate versus the 20 or
• 2:30:57
  25% success rate that high tech was doing with their dropping
• 2:31:02
  seedlings from airplanes. These are noted examples that
• 2:31:07
  have been documented, and they've gotten some grants from
• 2:31:11
  different places to do those things and help those areas
• 2:31:16
  rebuild their forests in a holistic way.
• 2:31:21
  High tech has its value. Oroville has some high tech
• 2:31:26
  industries. They've got a solar mini grid.
• 2:31:28
  They've got technology that they're using to build various
• 2:31:34
  things in the community, but they're not wedded to it at the
• 2:31:38
  expense of understanding what it takes to develop for the world
• 2:31:47
  that isn't high tech, which is most of the world.
• 2:31:52
  And the needs of people at the ground level.
• 2:31:58
  Well, it sounds very much like something that I talk about in a
• 2:32:02
  sense where I think that the one of the main issues with
• 2:32:07
  government is that it is run from a central tower, a central
• 2:32:11
  tower. And if it was more like how it
• 2:32:14
  was many, many, many thousands of years ago, more, it was more
• 2:32:18
  like villages where each village sort of takes care of themself,
• 2:32:22
  you would get a lot more transparency.
• 2:32:25
  You get a lot more efficiency because you know, the local
• 2:32:30
  mayor, because he lives next door to you, you know, the, the
• 2:32:32
  local shaman, you know that he's not doing dodgy stuff because he
• 2:32:37
  lives just two streets down the road, you know.
• 2:32:39
  So I think that the model that you're talking about is
• 2:32:42
  definitely one of the solutions that should be looked at in the
• 2:32:47
  future. Santosh, this has been an
• 2:32:51
  awesome, awesome conversation. I knew from the when we first
• 2:32:55
  spoke or before we started recording, I says I have a
• 2:32:58
  feeling this is going to be a really good conversation.
• 2:33:01
  And it turned out because this is way like I normally do 2
• 2:33:04
  hours. But because it was such a great
• 2:33:07
  conversation, I just let it flow because you have your wealth of
• 2:33:11
  knowledge. And with that being said, please
• 2:33:15
  tell the lovely people at The Conscious Man 7 where they can
• 2:33:17
  find you. Tell us about anything that you
• 2:33:20
  want to plug or any projects you're involved in and all of
• 2:33:23
  that good stuff. Well, thank you.
• 2:33:27
  I have to say I was extremely pleased by our interaction and
• 2:33:33
  conversation. I know you worked on preparing
• 2:33:37
  certain questions. I didn't do anything.
• 2:33:39
  I just said, I'm just going to see what happens and respond.
• 2:33:43
  You know, as the questions come. I was very, very pleased by how
• 2:33:51
  much you bring to this conversation and how much you've
• 2:33:55
  helped me evoke what I might be able to share with others.
• 2:34:01
  So thank you. And in terms of, you know,
• 2:34:05
  anyone who's interested in what we do, probably the easiest
• 2:34:09
  place to go is Sri Aurobindo Studies.
• 2:34:14
  That's SRIAUROBIND o.wordpress.com.
• 2:34:24
  And that's my main blog that I've been running since 2009.
• 2:34:29
  And I believe there are links there to the podcast, which is
• 2:34:34
  actually the blog post turned into verbal 2 days later.
• 2:34:40
  OK, so if you want to hear it, you go there, but I think I've
• 2:34:47
  got a link there and otherwise they can e-mail me at
• 2:34:53
  santoshksantoshk@msn.com and I respond to emails so.
• 2:35:04
  Well, firstly, thanks for your kind words and I try my best to
• 2:35:09
  bring as much as I can to the conversation and to do enough
• 2:35:15
  research to, to, to, to make it interesting for people and stuff
• 2:35:20
  like and as, as, as guys, you know, I am an online fitness
• 2:35:25
  trainer. I help spiritually incline
• 2:35:27
  people burn fat and build muscle.
• 2:35:29
  So summer is going to be here in a few days.
• 2:35:33
  So if you would like to get into the best shape of your life,
• 2:35:36
  it's not too, too late, but you need to act now.
• 2:35:39
  So if you're interested in getting into the best shape of
• 2:35:41
  your life and growing mentally, spiritually and also physically,
• 2:35:46
  hit me up on my Instagram at Adriano under score 246 or my
• 2:35:50
  name Todd Cave. And if you also would like to
• 2:35:58
  remove some fears and traumas, I can also help you do that.
• 2:36:01
  I can help you to to get some magic mushrooms.
• 2:36:04
  So hit me up on my socials again at Adriana under score 246 on my
• 2:36:09
  name Todd gave and I will help you to get some magic mushrooms
• 2:36:12
  because we have a lot of deprogramming to do as Sri so
• 2:36:17
  pointedly explained today. And if you would like to support
• 2:36:20
  this podcast, you can do that by visiting visiting our merch
• 2:36:24
  store with the name Todd and me in the Amazon store.
• 2:36:28
  And as you can see, I have all one of those shirts today.
• 2:36:30
  We have hoodies, tank tops and sweats and as you can see, I
• 2:36:36
  have on the conscious man shirt today.
• 2:36:42
  So if you would like to support this podcast because it really
• 2:36:45
  does help us with things like video editing and stuff like
• 2:36:48
  that, link will be to the Amazon store in the description of this
• 2:36:52
  podcast. And you can help us to grow,
• 2:36:54
  help us to do some more research and get some more amazing guests
• 2:36:58
  like Santosh on the platform, you know, and if this episode
• 2:37:03
  sparked something in you, share it, send it to a friend, Tiger
• 2:37:08
  Saw social media and subscribe for more episodes like this.
• 2:37:11
  Dive deeper into Santosh Krinsky's work through his
• 2:37:15
  YouTube channel, his books, and the Institute for Holistic
• 2:37:19
  Education. Remember, transformation spreads
• 2:37:22
  when you take action. Thanks for listening to the
• 2:37:25
  Conscious Man 7 podcast. See you in the next one I
• 2:37:28
  remember. Keep smiling, keep shining, and
• 2:37:31
  keep being the change you want to see.
• 2:37:33
  Speak to you soon, my fellow brothers and sisters.
• 2:37:37
  Cheers and namaste.