EPISODE #979 Meditation Hacks Get You Into A Peak State in Less Time - Vishen Lakhiani

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Vishen, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dave. It's so good to be back. I think the last time I was in your show was maybe two or three years ago when probably came out.

It was like episode 309 or something and we're up to almost a thousand. So you were actually overdue on it. And you were at the 2021 7th Annual Biohacking Conferen via video because of the travel complexities that still existed back then. How's travel for you now? Where are you? Where are you today?

Now I'm in Estonia. Everything is completely free, everything is completely open. We just had Mindvalley University here. We had 1500 people show up and you know, there's no such type of requirement of any type. It really feels that life is back to normal.

Isn't that so relaxing?

Just to feel absolutely relaxing.

Vishen, a lot of people know your work online because you show up and you talk about all the great stuff you're doing with mindvalley, but unless they've read your book, they probably don't hear you say, oh yeah, I have a degree in electrical engineering and computer science and I've been meditating since I was 26. And that's why you and I think make such fun friends, because we both have that kind of a background. And yes, there are nerds who said, I'm going to apply nerd thinking to personal development and some crazy stuff can happen.

Exactly.

Tell me about what happened when, you know, you went from a junior hire just overnight, in seven months, just so listeners get grounded in what you've had happen in your life.

So firstly, Dave, you and I have a lot in common. Right? And you know, there's an entire chapter in the book, the Six Phase Meditation Method that is inspired by an experience we did together. 40 years of Zen. Right. And so you're mentioned in the book. There's this incredible crazy story that I write about about that journey we had together and the power of forgiveness, of forgiving the earlier versions of yourself and forgiving people who have traumatized you or brutalized you or wronged you. But that's. We'll cover that later. So I'm a computer engineer by training, electrical engineering, computer science. Moved to Silicon Valley after graduating from the University of Michigan to strike it and immediately hit the dot com bubble bursting. And so I lost the 30 grand I borrowed from my dad. And then September 11th hit, the economy went even shittier and I found myself so broke I was renting a couch from a friend. So in that time, I took a dialing for dollars job that was just awful. No base salary. I had to sell technology to lawyers and I had to call up lawyers from San Antonio so they would hand you the San Antonio Yellow Pages. I had to call every lawyer up from A to Z and try to interrupt these guys and get them to listen to my pitch and get them to buy this case management technology software. And it sucked. And I heard more Texas lawyers tell me to fuck off in a given day than I ever imagined I would. So I graduated from an elite university and I'm wondering, this is horrible. Like my life absolutely sucks. And I was so depressed because I was only making one sale a week and my commission was something like 600 bucks. So that's $600 a week, which is not enough to survive in the Bay Area. So I get on Google and I try to find a way to fix my situation. Google was a search engine that was less than a year old at this point. And I can't remember what I typed in, but I discover this class called Silva Ultramine. Now, I heard the Silver Method and many of you users may have heard of the Silver method. It's this old 70s, 80s, one of the original personal growth methodologies in America. Silva ultramind was a derivative of that from the Founder, something he put together before he died. It was a way of using altered state training to train people to awaken intuition and then to get really powerful manifesting. So he's teaching people how to tap into theta waves and delta waves. It's crazy, crazy, crazy stuff, okay? If you don't have an open mind. So I see that the class is happening in la and I figure, you know, this class promises a lot. My life kind of sucks right now. I might as well try it. So I go to la and I'm the only person who shows up because they didn't know how to, how to fill a room. So I go there, I do the class, I'm the only person. So the instructor gives me really personal service and I go back to my job in San Francisco. And the first thing I do is on Monday, rather than just randomly call A to Z on the yellow Pages, I go into an altered state. And they teach you to do it using a finger technique. You have three fingers together like this, and you, you, you put a command in your subconscious to lower your brainwave frequency, right? So they're teaching you and you do the same thing. At 40 years of Zen, they're teaching you how to tap into alpha levels of mind and get left right brain coherence. But then what happens is they teach you how to go super deep into theta. That's the level of intuition. And now you're super deep in theta, but you can keep your eyes open. You learn that I'm running my finger down the yellow pages and I intuitively am guessing who to call. Now you can't explain it. It feels like you're guessing. But what I notice is that instantly that Monday itself, I double my sales. And then I doubled it again. And then I as I started adding more and more and more techniques, techniques for compassion. Where you see the person you're trying to sell to, you radiate love to them. You command the universe. You to make the sale easy if it is in the best interest of everyone concerned. I use the technique for manifesting. You go into an altered state. This time it's delta. And so you do this before going to bed. And then you use a technique to program reality to shift to your desired reality. And at the end of four months, I've been promoted three times and I was made VP of Sales. I was only 26 and it was mind blowing. And so I stay with the company for 18 more months. I become one of their top people. And then I leave to do my own thing because I felt unfulfilled. And I decide I want to be a Silver ultramind facilitator. So I get certified, I build a little affiliate website. I'm selling the CDs and I couldn't find the right domain name. So I buy this domain name called mindvalley. And for five years, mindvalley is just a website where people sign up to take Silva ultramind classes from me. And after those five years, I think something shifted in me. I decided I wanted to go bigger. And that's when the Mindvalley of today emerged. Today, mindvalley is the leading personal growth platform in the world. Like we have, so many of our brands are so well known. LifeBook, WildFit, Silver, UltimateStaire, Jim Quick, Super Brain. All of these brands are now on Mindvalley. And now we have about 20 million students and we do about 100 million in revenue. And. And we've been able to get there with no VC funding. Now how will be able to do that? Well, as I continued going into this meditation practice, I interviewed over a thousand people. You were interviewed by me like three or four times. I put together a lot of these different ideas. I even built an AI that helps consolidate and identify personal growth techniques, ideas to figure out what is best for 40 year old males in Estonia suffering from this particular outcome and so on. And through that journey of discovery, I developed a meditation protocol called the Six Phase. And I just want to acknowledge phase three was inspired by our journey together at 40 years of Zen. And I, I say that in the book because I always honor the teachers I learned from. And so the six phase became really popular. I released it free on YouTube. It got really popular and before I know it, Tony Gonzalez of the NFL was talking about it. Reggie Jackson of the NFL LA Clippers, Bianca Andreescu, who beat Serena Williams and won the US Open was talking about it. And then rock stars like Miguel was speaking about it in Billboard magazine. He would be doing the Six phase with his team before running a concert. Entrepreneurs were talking about it. There was just this one guy, amazing dude in Britain. He built a dog food company called Bella and duke. They hit 100 million in revenue. He stopped me at a conference I was speaking at and said a six faced helped him build that $100 million business. And so why does it work? Well, it works because meditation sucks if you're a high performer. Because if you're right, your brain, it is near impossible to keep your brain static. Just focus on your breath. There's so much in life you want to, you want to control. The six phase is not passive meditation, it's active meditation.

Huge difference.

It's not even meditation at all. It's six different practices that you layer on that put you in a hyper optimized state.

But by the way, I'm just getting questions from our live audience. Yes, Vishen is going to be at the biohacking conference this year. Biohackingconference. I'm excited about that too. It's gonna be really fun. And you're actually gonna teach people the six phase from the stage, which is really cool. So there were just lots of questions about that. So yeah, biohackingconference.com guys, if there's still some tickets left, but it's a smaller venue this year, so that's cool. But back to, back to what happened with you there. You went through and you've had some great success. And even then, like your book where you talk about what we did together at 40 years of Zen and you talk about your whole experience where I'm getting the story of you becoming VP of Sales. That book was 2017 Code of the Extraordinary Mind and you actually outsold J.K. rowling for a short period of time.

Yeah.

So which is Great.

Dude. I want to. I want to share this on your podcast, because I thank you for this. Okay, so. So, guys, this is one of the coolest Dave Asprey endorsements I think you're ever going to hear. Okay, now, now. So Dave and I had an amazing time at.

The 40 years.

Yeah, the 40 years of Zen thing in 2015. And so in 20. In 2017, I go back. I go back. It's summer 2017, and I'm actually going back with a documentary crew because we're creating a documentary on altered states. So I'm there with my documentary crew, and there at Dave's facility in Seattle, they asked me if I want to do some unique trainings. Right. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say what, but I want to dabble with some unique training.

There's some forms of training we shouldn't talk about because I'm trying to replicate them. Will harm themselves. It's not that I'm trying to.

It's.

If you go to Buddhist monastery, there's actually a locked cabinet of books, like, don't go there because you'll die books. That kind of training.

So. So I got to dabble with one of those trainings. So I'm sitting in the room, and then Dave's neuroscientists are there with me. And all of a sudden, I feel that one of the scientists is shaking my chair. Like, my chair is going back. What the fuck is this guy doing? I'm trying to meditate here. And so I open my eyes in irritation. No one is touching my chair. In fact, my chair isn't shaking at all. I'm shaking. My body is shaking. And then all of a sudden, I see, like, I've. In my mind's eye, I see this, like, red, cloudy fog. And I see a voice talking to me. And the voice says, in. In. In. It's not speaking in words. It's speaking in thought bubbles, okay? Like, this is your dharma. This is what you're meant to do in the world. This is what you need to do. This is what you need to do. This is what you need to do. And by the way, the way you are trying to manifest is wrong. That's not how you manifest. Do not see pictures. Do not see pictures. Rather think about the vibe of that which you want to manifest and give a consciousness to that which you want to manifest. That was the rough interpretation. Completely different from anything I'd ever read about or thought about, but it was crystal clear. So I'm taking this in and Then I come out and the neuroscientists come to me, your neuroscientists, and say, hey, what was going on? And then they show me my brainwave charts. And apparently what was going on in my brain was very different from what they had previously seen. So I'm pretty excited that I was able to impress the scientists by my brain waves. But that whole thing that I saw in my mind with this new way of manifesting, it just seemed to. It felt made up. I felt like maybe I was just having a really wicked dream, right? So I forget about it. I ignore it. I go back home to Malaysia. It's now September, one month later. So it was August when we did this, when we were there filming documentary. I'm now back in Malaysia. It's September 17th. I remember that date because it's one day before my son's birthday. So I'm sitting at my computer, I'm working, and I get this intuition. Check your Amazon page. So I'd written a book that had come out one year before, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. In fact, there was a big blurb by you on the COVID of the book, and the book had done well. It hit the New York Times, was like number four in the New York Times, and it fell off the list. And it was just. It was just. Just a book. Nothing. Nothing truly special. And so I didn't want to check my Amazon page because once you're done with a book, any author will tell you you're done. Like, that's not. It's now your publisher's problem. You want to focus on the next thing you are done.

It's continued creation, not sales or something that exists.

Exactly. So I'm frustrated. I don't want to check Amazon. But the calling is so high. I check Amazon and I'm like, what the fuck? I am. It's. It's. My book is number one. Or rather, my book was number two in the world, but it was number one the day before. Now we can see this because Amazon has something called Amazon Author Central, where authors can go and look at all the data in the book. I'm like, what? Number one in the meditation category? No, my book was number one in all of Amazon. And then I look, I'm the number two author in the world. There was some Spanish author ahead of me, but I'd overtaken Hillary Rodham Clinton, J.K. rowling and Tolkien. Hillary's book had just come out. I'd overtaken her. The collective works of J.K. rowling and Tolkien. I'D overtaken them. That was the number of people reading my book on that particular day. And then for two days, it stayed at number one. Then it fell, then it went back up to number one for another three days in November. And to this day, I have no idea how that happened. There was no promotion, nothing. Something just happened. And my book became the Kindle version, at least became the number one book on Amazon. So I took this as a sign, Holy shit, I have this power. But I just chosen to ignore everything I experienced at 40 years of Zen. So I went back, I started meditating, and I started using these techniques, using the exact techniques that I learned in that book. I integrated some of these with the six phase. And that's when my life really started shifting.

Now, do you think it was your meditation that triggered that interest in the book globally or what caused that?

So. So there's always. When something like that happens, you can attribute it to luck. There's always like a physical, a conscious thing that happened. It turned out like. Like, this is what I think happened, right? Amazon Kindle, I think, had decided to feature the book randomly that decided to feature the book so that. No, we done nothing. And Amazon Kindle counts a book as read if you go past 10 pages. So typically, when Amazon Kindle features a book, what happens is that most people don't get beyond 10 pages. But the code of the extraordinary mind, the first 10 pages, was so compelling, people crossed them, and so it counted as a red. And so for some reason, most people who buy books don't read books. But people who are buying my book were reading past page 10, and it got all of these view counts, and it became the number one book in the world.

That's incredible. It's.

If you read my books, you will see what I do in the first 10 pages. It's now a technique.

It's funny, when people talk about a certain mind state, we'll say things like, oh, I was in alpha or beta or theta or something like that. These are musical notes. And the challenge for me doing in 40 years of Zen and the challenge of any specific meditation, like six phase. And it's not what note are you playing it in? It's what is the song like? How do you organize all of the different beautiful things so you get not just the right sound or the right instrument, but the right instrument and the right part playing exactly as the other thing. So it's more like having someone who's orchestrating a symphony in it. And it turns out there's some really Advanced math there. So we're doing our best to communicate these days, saying, oh, I'm in a delta state or an alpha state or a gamma state or whatever. But that's sort of like saying, I had a. A little tuning rod and I hit my tuning fork and I was like, okay, that's great. But that wasn't a song. And the six phase meditation is like a complex song that you're creating, and it's a song in your brain waves. And all meditations are creating specific patterns that can be played, some of them in a way, at different frequencies of brainwaves. But it's really around the complex math underlying it that is creating some of these abilities. Some of the stuff that Joe Dispenza talks about, some of the things that the Dalai Lama has put challenges out there saying, I'll give you $100,000 if you can help me hit this state. And the state is with a note and a pattern that's different than the note. And it's that pattern that seems to be the magic. And I think you tapped into something interesting with six phase. So tell me a little bit more about this. I think our listeners are going, all right, vision, can you tell me how to do it? Now, of course they're all going to buy your book, but that's. That's a different thing than here.

Yeah, I'm going to give you guys a rough idea. Okay, so let's say you're going to the gym. You're going to the gym. You want to know. And so Mindvalley has a fitness methodology called 10x, right? And when you're doing 10x on particular days, whether you're doing the Alpha protocol or the Gamma protocol, there's a particular sequence of muscles. So there's a leg workout, then a shoulder workout, then let's say a chest workout. In the Alpha protocol, now, when you're doing the leg workout, there are like maybe three or four different ways to do a leg workout. It doesn't matter which one you choose. The important thing is you work out your legs, then you work out your shoulders, then you work out your chest. It doesn't matter whether you're doing shoulder exercises like this or like this. It just matters that your shoulder is getting the stimulus. Now, in the sixth phase, it's a simple. It's a similar concept. There are six different aspects of being human that we want to give a stimulus to. And by a stimulus, I mean a simple tweak that enhances that aspect of yourself. The first three phase, 1, 2, 3 have to do with your awareness and your functioning in the present moment. This is what the great spiritual sages of the world talk about. This is what Eckhart Tolle talks about when he speaks about the power of now. But the power of now is incomplete because part of being human in the modern Western world is to also be future oriented. We do not have the luxury of just sitting under a Bodhi tree and focusing on the beautiful butterflies flying around. No, we got, we got sports games to win. We got a fricking world to change. And that is envisioning the future. Now people get this wrong, but Ken Wilber, who is the number one most cited American academic, wrote a beautiful essay called Egolessness. And in Egolessness, Ken Wilbrah said the great spiritual sages and saints of the world were not feeble minded milquetoes. We mistake it. We think they were. They were not. They were people driven by their ego. Jesus brought bullwhips. Muhammad conquered entire continents. These were people who embraced their ego and created revolutions that changed the world. They rattled the world with the force of their ego. And what Ken is saying is that we like to think that to be spiritual you got to be passive. Bullshit. That's not the way at all. There's a theory out there that if Jesus was reborn today, he'd be a billionaire. He'd be doing something to change the world. Not necessarily some guy in a monastery. Now think about that. And if that shakes you up a bit, there's nothing wrong. But just understand that Jesus was a badass. He literally brought a bullwhip into the temple to threaten the money lenders. Like he went against the freaking Roman Empire.

This was a little bit disruptive. Just a little bit.

Yeah, he, he was disruptive as heck. And so if I'm glad you didn't.

Say disruptive as hell because that would have been the funniest thing you'd have ever said.

And you look at Paramahansa, you look at Paramahansa Yogananda. He didn't, he didn't just sit down and meditate across India. He wrote a best selling book, Autobiography of a Yogi. He traveled by boat to America to spread his Kriya yoga to millions of people. That's disruptive as hell. They all had that spark of disruption in them that is envisioning the future. They saw. They were not content with the world the way it was right now. During their time, they needed to change the world. Buddha became Buddha. Not because he wanted to meditate under a Bodhi tree. He became The Buddha, because he saw that the world was unjust, that his rich family was in the palace while the masses were poor, and he wanted to change that. So they all sought change. Change is the future. But you cannot create change unless you support bliss. Because all the research shows, and this is research coming out from Harvard, that if you can embrace bliss in science, they measure it as positivity quotient. You perform better. So your positivity quotient is your ratio of positive times to overall time. If you're mostly positive 80% of the day, you're probably high in positivity quotient. If you're more depressed, your positivity quotient might be 20%. But it is so important in a book. There's a book called Positivity Quotient by Shijad Sharmin, and he cites some stunning statistics. Salespeople who are positive are 55% better at closing a sale. Doctors who are positive, 19% better at diagnosis. Students who are positive do better in exams. And you know what? One of the most stunning things in the book is that teams that are positive, the positivity of your team is the most important factor to a team's success. It's crazy, right? Yet we shake this. We, we, we say, no, you know, I'm going to be happy when I hit my goal. The trick is you got to be happy, blissful, positive, before you start racing towards the goal. So the six phase, phase one, two, three is about raising your emotions in the now. And then Phase four, five, six is about changing the future. So phase one, the three, the three things that we look at for, for. For present state optimization. The first one is compassion. If you can train your muscles of compassion, if you can train yourself to be kind, you are going to do better in life. And so my friend Nasser, he runs one of the biggest YouTube and Facebook sites in the world, NAS Daily. I'm sure you guys have heard of NAS Daily. Nasser is Israeli. He travels around the world creating these incredible videos showing you extreme, extraordinary individuals in the world. And yesterday, NASS released a video about how he's broken laws in 40 countries. And he asked us the question, am I a nice person? No. He went to North Korea, where you can get jailed if you film a military member. He filmed a military member. He then went to another 30 countries where you are not allowed to fly drones. But he flew a drone, breaking the law to get a drone shot. And he said, am I a nice person? Absolutely not. Nobody would say I'm a nice person, but I'm a kind person because nice people don't get things done. Nice people. Nice people will let the status quo shut them up. He said, if I was a nice person, I would still be living in a village, in an Arab village in Israel. I would not be a person right now with like 50 million fans on Facebook. And so you want to remember this. Compassion doesn't mean you're nice. People don't have to like you. It means you're kind. And there's a big difference. Okay? Jesus wasn't nice to, to the Romans. He helped bring down the entire freaking empire. So, so you train your muscles of compassion, and this means you are loving your kind. You're loving your kind. It doesn't mean you take shit. It doesn't mean you're a pushover, but it means you're loving and kind and that you are able to. And you also see the world as loving and kind. So you feel safer, you're more polite, you're more gentle, you tip better. That's the first one. Now, phase two is gratitude. According to scientific studies, gratitude is the human characteristic most associated with overall well being. Of all the characteristics out there, gratitude is the one that's most going to give you well being. So you use a unique protocol in phase two to amplify gratitude. And then phase three was sparked by the research you introduced me to at 40 years of Zen, which is forgiveness. You forgive bit by bit by bit, every single day. Everyone who has wronged you in the past. And the protocol we use in phase three is derived exactly from 40 years of Zen. With your permission.

Absolutely, with my permission.

We modify it a bit. We modify it a bit. So you can do it in the comfort of your bed, Right?

That's fine. You don't have to have electrodes to do it that way. And we talked about that and something else that you built in there that also is a 40 years of Zen process thing. You have to do gratitude before you forgive someone, because this isn't taught in any other mystery school or, you know, yogic tradition that I'm aware of. They talk about forgiveness is good. They talk about gratitude is good. But what I've seen from the neurofeedback data is very clear. If you do gratitude first, it's like a spark that then enables the stuff that happens with forgiveness. So yours is the only book that I'm aware of that talks about doing it in that order, which is critical. So thank you for putting that out there because the world needs to know that you got to be grateful. For the person you're pissed off at if you're going to forgive them.

Yeah, the sequence is important. The sequence is important. Okay. So here's what people get wrong about meditation. They think meditation is about clearing your mind. It's about focusing on your. Oh, God, that is so irritating. Because that is not the most optimal way to meditate. And you know, in a research. I was talking to Dawson Church. He's a meditation researcher. He said his analysis. He's what?

Sorry, he's been on the show too.

Yeah, Dawson. Dawson. Amazing. He said in 30% of those cases, when they study people who are meditating like that, they're not really meditating, they're asleep. And so what we're doing over here is we're introducing a concept called transcendent practice. A transcendent practice is any practice where you close your eyes, you step away from the physical world, and you go within. And some people say, oh, that's not meditation. Well, I don't care. It's a transcendent practice. It's just that if I call the book the Six Phase Transcendent Practice Method, nobody would know what it means. So I have to use a catchphrase. But it's compassion. And compassion. We use a protocol from Zen Roshi Buddhism, and then it's gratitude. And this is a protocol that I worked on based on all the research and gratitude. And then forgiveness protocol from 40 years of Zen. The total time for this is seven minutes. And now that gives you the balance, eight minutes for phase four, five and six. Now, phase four, five and six are all about the future. So phase four is basically envisioning your life three years ahead. And you use various techniques. At the basic level, creative visualization. At an advanced level, a technique called merging. And merging is the name I gave for the technique that came to me when I had that surreal experience at 40 years of Zen in 2017 when I felt someone was shaking my chair. Right?

So it's called merch. They download all kinds of stuff. There's a certain state you get to towards the end of the week of 40 years of Zen, I download my. My table of contents or some of my books when I'm in that same state. So just stuff just intuitively appears, Right. So, okay, this came to you and that was step five is the merging.

Step four. Step four is. So you're. You're creating a reality. You're creating a reality, a container of what you want in your life three years out, and then you are merging with that container. That's the Best way to describe it. But you're giving that container a consciousness of its own so it can activate itself without you, without you constantly thinking about it. It's a pretty. Pretty advanced practice, but it's what I love. Now, phase five is Segment intending. It's commanding your perfect day. We use a concept, an idea called Segment intending from the spiritual writer Esther Hicks. And it's where you intend every hour of your day to unfold in a specific way. Now an advanced version of this is from Barry Morgellon. Remember what Barry teaches. I think you're commanding how you want your day to unfold that particular day.

There are some number of people listening who are like, I don't have. I don't have one of those.

What are those then? You're speaking. You're speaking. So I live in Estonia, which is the country with the highest number of atheists in the world, right? We are 82% atheists. So it's quite normal. In that case, you are connecting with whatever you believe is your own inner source of power, right? It may be your principles, it may be valor, it may be. It may be your. Your. Your inner resourcefulness, your inner ninja. Whatever you, whatever you call it, there's always something that reminds us of an ideal to aspire to. Look for me sometimes when I don't want to connect with God, I connect with the spirit of Tony Stark, Iron man, because Marvel Cinema mo inspire me.

So the sixth phase was you reach out to a higher consciousness, which could be the spirit of Tony Stark, if you're into that. But it's likely to be Jesus or Buddha or Allah or whoever.

The thing is, we tend to look things in a very binary way. You're atheist, therefore you don't believe in God. Look here in Estonia, this is the country with the highest number of atheists in the world. But if you go and speak to Estonians, they believe in the spirit of the earth. They believe in the spirit of the forest. It's a very nature loving country. 51% of the country is still forested. Anything grown here in Estonia is automatically organic because the land, the forest is so pure, so clean. Everybody has a forest house or a countryside house that they go to to escape the city. And people believe in the spirit of the forest. When I go and live in, I sometimes rent Airbnbs and go camping with my kids. And very often, like the owner, the Airbnb will show me and go, hey, so this is an energy vortex. You want to meditate here. Now, these are people who are atheists, but they believe in energy vortexes, and they say they can feel these vortexes in the ground. Well, great. Well, that energy is what you're calling on.

Do you know how to feel those? Do you see those Vishen vortexes?

I don't feel the vortex as much, but what I've gotten really sensitive to, and this came from training with psilocybin. That's a whole other story, is feeling the energy of other people.

Yep. That's a different practice than Earth energy and all. I naturally gravitate to some of those things. Like, I hired a feng shui master to come in and look at the land on the farm here. And she came into my desk and she's like, you sit there. I'm like, yeah, why? And she just kind of shook her head and she's like, there's two. And there's things called ley lines on the Earth which are kind of like acupuncture meridians for the planet. And she said, there's two of them crossing right where you put your chair. And that should cook most people. I'm like, I don't know. I just get my work done here. But for some reason, I gravitated to a place like that, and cats will do the same thing. So there's all these things where you and I, as computer science guys would say, well, that's crazy. But then when you take a subset of people, if 20% of people can see the color blue and no one else can see the color blue, does that mean that the color blue doesn't exist? Or does that mean that different people have different abilities to sense things, or they've learned to do it differently? I believe it's the latter. That different people, some people see stuff, some people feel stuff, some people do stuff, some people create stuff. And that's. If you were to design a species, you'd actually want specialization of skills.

Exactly, exactly. So there's a whole emerging feel on this. There's an anthropologist called Erica Bourguignon who wrote a paper in 1973 about a concept called perceptual diversity. And this is really interesting. Perceptual diversity is the. The ways we perceive the world outside the five senses. And she said 70% of indigenous cultures have perceptual diversity, but modern cultures do not. Because we are told, if science can explain it, it's wrong. It's absolutely wrong. But I can tell you, I meet people who. There's a ley line in my apartment. Right. And I meet people who are intuitive, and they're like, what's going on here. And I'm like, you detected it? I've never told them, but they just feel that energy. And as I've trained my perceptual diversity, I've been able to feel and see some pretty really cool things. Like for example, when I'm with someone that I deeply care about, I can touch them without touching them. I can literally sit still, move my hand in certain ways, and they feel like I'm touching them. That's perceptual diversity. I'm somehow connecting with their field or whatever you want to call it. And we can train ourselves to do this. I just had Donna Eden, the energy healer here in Tallinn. I took a four hour walk with her. She sees something like 11 different layers of the human energy body. That's perceptual diversity. And it is sad that we are telling people that that isn't real just because the majority can't see it. All of us need to train our perceptual diversity. Now, when you do things like 40 years of Zen or the six phase, that perceptual diversity starts expanding.

There's a really cool book and if you haven't read it, you would love it. And it's called the Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman. And what he argues really, really clearly is that all life, including humans, evolved in order to not see all of reality. And it's very simple when you think about it. If you had a life size map of Estonia, how would you use it? You couldn't use it because you would unroll it. It would be as big as the whole country. Right?

Exactly.

So by necessity, whatever you can perceive is a teeny, teeny, tiny fraction of reality. And he goes through every like quantum physics based, every philosophical based approach and says, look, it's really clear. Everything and every one of us is just getting teeny, teeny tiny flashes of it. And then evolution causes that to happen so that you evolve to create an interface to reality. But what that means is that you can actually install new apps on your interface. And as an example, you look at your phone and you say, I'm going to click my email, but you don't think to yourself. And then all the steps through the wireless protocols and all that, you don't have to. So to your mind, you're doing email, but it's hiding enormous complexity. Our conversation right now is hiding enormous complexity. Everything is. But you can install a different app on your email. That means when you do six phase meditation or 40 years of Zen, or go for a walk in the sun or Change your beliefs or anything you're actually adding, or better yet, read any book. It installs a new app, which is a new interface to reality. So what we're doing is we're collecting these to find the apps that work best on your computer. Maybe you use Evernote, maybe you use OneNote, maybe you like Gmail, whatever. The same things happen in your mind, in your eyes, in your hearing. And so of course we can learn new skills, of course we can install new apps. And that's why I do this show, right? When people hear the ideas that you just shared about six phase here, they're getting a new app, at least the beginning of the install, they buy your book. They, okay, now I've got the file. And then they do it a few times, and now it's installed. And then they see the world that way. And that's the same path you've been through. Down, I've been down, and every human alive has been down. We just don't see it that way.

Exactly. I've lived in the Amazon rainforest with the Achuar tribe, right? And they have a level of perceptual diversity that would baffle most people. They communicate through long distances with their dreams, this tribe. So I went there with Lynn Twist, and she was called to work with the tribe because she started seeing them in her dreams. They were calling her. And when she finally started describing her dreams to people who were familiar with the tribes of the Amazon, she identified the tribe. And when she flew in to visit them, they said, welcome, we were expecting you. Now, the Achuar are one of many dream cultures. You also find this in Malaysia, the country where. Where I was born. And it's baffling. It's baffling how they do it. They wake up at 5am, the entire family gathers around the fire. I've done experienced this and done this. They drink a tea, a particular tea that makes them vomit because, you know, there's lots of bacteria. They're in the Amazon. If you drink, if you drink the water, you got to purge yourself. And then after going and vomiting. So just like we brush our teeth, they simply go and they puke. They come back around the fire and they discuss their dreams, the meaning of the dreams, who visited each other in the dreams. And if they got any other messages from tribes across hundreds of miles in the jungle, it's fascinating. But that is a form of perceptual diversity. They are communicating over vast distances through aspects of cognition that we have yet to understand. But they are not the only one we see this in blind kids who develop the ability called echolocation. So there are these things happening around the world where blind children learn to make clicking sound and then use echoes to navigate the world. It is incredible how this happens.

Yes.

And one of the most amazing things I saw is I went to the ashram of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in Chennai, India, and there they are training young children to read by touching a book with their hands. And so they brought a child to the villa where I was staying because they wanted to show me that there were no tricks, there were no strings. I checked the table. There was nothing under the table. They gave me a piece of paper, and they asked me to write down a random sentence. So I wrote a completely random sentence. And they asked me to write the sentence in different col. Every word had to be a different color. They gave me a box of, like, 20 Magic Markers. So I wrote a sentence along the lines of a rainbow is nothing more than a slide for unicorns. Totally random sentence. And then this blindfolded kid sitting across the table, she can't see anything. She, with her blindfold on, grabs the colors as if she knows what pencil is, what color, and replicates everything I wrote, word for word, color for color. And then to really baffle me, they take a straw that's cut up into little pieces, they put it on the table, and the girl concentrates, and those little pieces of straw start moving in different directions. And now they're showing me how this girl can move light objects with her mind. At this point, I don't even know what to think. But I've witnessed these things in the Amazon. I've witnessed these things in India. There's so much that we think we know about reality that we make assumptions about. So there's a whole new field called quantum biology that's emerging. There are books on it, quantum biology. And they talk about how animals like the robin, the European robin, is able to sense the Earth's magnetism to such a ridiculously profound degree that it's able to fly thousands of miles during winter and then return safely in the spring. And there's no way the robin's physical biology could determine that because, you know, the author of the book says, like the robin's physical cells could detect maybe 1 billionth of a magnetic field. There's no way physically. And so they believe that something is happening at a quantum level. So there are multiple levels of reality, quantum mechanics, string theory, that we don't understand. But the interesting thing is this. If you. If you look at the book the Case Against Reality. How we perceive the world is based on how we evolved here as animals on planet Earth. An alien culture in a different planet will likely perceive reality in a completely different way. They may not even be a physical mass culture. They may be ethereal, they may be completely astral, they may be what we describe as ghost or spirit. There's nothing that suggests that an alien culture needs to have a physical body like we do. If we can feel energy, they could be alien cultures that are pure energy. And so the whole idea of perceptual diversity I find absolutely fascinating.

It's neat because we also have cognitive diversity. And one of my spiritual teachers along the way, I've always had a hard time perceiving certain things that other people can perceive. So if I know three people who don't know each other and they all see the same whatever, vortex or something, that's actually science. And it's highly unlikely that they're just randomly doing it. Just like it's equally unlikely that the blindfolded girl would replicate what you did in the right colors. Like that's, that was not random, right? So you could do what most Westerners do and what I would have done as a young man. I say that can't happen. Therefore it didn't, therefore insert insult of you, right? And this is still how most of the Internet around health information works, as we both well know, right? You just deny stuff that you don't like. But if you're curious and scientific about it, that whole observation requires curiosity.

So let me tell you a crazy story here. So I was speaking at the Puebla Ideas Festival in Mexico in April, and it was me and then it was Neil Degrasse Tyson, right? And I love, he's an extremely respected man, the modern day Carl Sagan. And so I was speaking about intuition and Neil was speaking about the universe. Before my talk, I went to Neil and I said, neil, tell me what you think about intuition. And he was adamant, no science for it, it doesn't exist. And I said, neil, but what about the University of Edinburgh, the Gansfield test experiments, Duke University? And he said, no, those experiments are not legit. Not legit, not legit. And what I got from that is that, dude, there is science for it. But some scientists simply refuse to look at the evidence if it cannot be explainable in quantum mechanics or Newtonian physics. Now Neil said. So Neil gave a really interesting example. He says, look, here's how it works. If you have a thousand people and you ask them to flip a coin and Then everyone who gets head stays and everyone who gets tails has to leave. After one flip, you have 500 people left, and then you have 250, then you have like 125, then you have like, say 60, then you have 30, then you have 15, then you have 8, then you have 4, then you have 2. And of the 11 flips, there's one person, and that person will go, oh, my God, I must have magic manifesting thing because I flipped ahead 11 times in a row. And so Neil says, and therefore we conclude our mind is affecting reality. Okay, legit point. So what I spoke about in my speech was another really bizarre case I saw. It was a lady in Texas called Helen Hadsell. So remember I told you I Learned about the 6 phase through the work of Jose Silva, the mind science pioneer. Helen was his PR manager. Helen now passed away, but in 2009, I went to visit her because she was known as a local witch. Now why was she known as a local witch? You can Google this Helen Hadsell contest queen. You will find all of these articles in Texas newspapers. She would win every competition she took part in. She won houses, seven trips to Paris, boats, refrigerators, microwaves. There are articles after articles after articles in newspapers in Texas talking about this local witch. They didn't call her a witch. They called her a magician or a sorceress or a queen, with respect, because everyone knew her. If she went into a sweepstakes competition or a lucky draw, she would just win. And they asked her, how are you doing it? And she said, well, I just command it. I command my reality. And this is another really interesting aspect of perceptual diversity, where you seem to influence probability that I think science is ignoring. Neil says, you know, it's a coin flip. But no, a coin flip cannot explain the phenomenal luck of Helen Hensel.

I believe that you are right, especially if you say, okay, go do that one. Enter that contest. And she goes and she does it. The. The funny thing is, if you look back at Viking, Viking mythology and really almost any tradition, you always have Loki, like the trickster God, right? It is always out there somewhere. And that energy oftentimes shows up when you get extreme skeptics like Neil Degrasse, which is like anything that's not what I believe is false. And I don't know how scientific that is, but he's definitely good at talking about the science that most of us agree on. But the idea that, okay, sometimes it's hard because things aren't as linear as everyone expects and that's part of even time itself is probably something that we invented as we evolved because it's highly functional for our survival in our interface on reality. It doesn't mean it's real. It just means it's something that we chose to perceive in order to best navigate whatever world we live in. And some of the quantum physicists are saying, yeah, it doesn't really appear that time is that real, but we're still figuring it out, and that's why it's very surprising. But the realm of neuroscience and EEG or quantum biology, like hardcore real biology versus this manifestation and the witches and all that stuff, there's probably more overlap than most people would consider because we're all looking at the same ultimately the same reality, really different lenses.

Yeah. And the world is waking up. You know, Dave, when I got on your podcast in 2015 or 2016, I spoke about intuition and people literally went to my Amazon page and gave me a one star rating on my book the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. But today, today we talk about intuition freely on your podcast.

It's true. Going back, oh, 10, 12 years when I started blogging, coming from Silicon Valley, and yeah, I had yoga and meditation and modafinil in my LinkedIn profile and people thought I was batshit crazy. But I was successful enough in my career then that I just didn't care. And from there I've just constantly been talking about it and there's always this wave of really angry skeptic people who make it their business to tell other people that their reality is false. And there's a name for people like that. They're mostly narcissists with the scattering of sociopaths in there. And when people do six phase meditation or 40 years is in, or any forgiveness based practice that actually works, you actually forgive the kid who bullied you in fifth grade, who made you that way. Right. Did you have to go through that when you were doing your, when you do your, your daily six phase or you're doing what, what we did at 40 years of Zen or anything else. Did you have bullying as a thing?

Yeah, I did. I did. I had to forgive not, not just students, but teachers who believed me because I went to Malaysia, which, which I went to school in Malaysia, a government school, a public school. And the schooling system in Malaysia is broken and decrepit and just one of the worst in the world. I didn't come from a rich background. My mother was a public school teacher and I went to a public school and it was horrible. So I had to forgive not just students, but my teachers.

That is so good. Almost everyone has to forgive a teacher. Even if you had good teachers, there's always a time when a teacher just, you know, was tired or said something that stuck for you. And the teachers even know, like you were enraged or you were hurt or whatever. And sadly, most of our perceptions on reality are programmed by emotions. And most of our emotions run rampant in the first seven years of life before there's any prefrontal cortex to interpret reality. So then you walk around with just this crazy belief. And the truth of the matter is, Vishen, if you and I look at the same situation, you're going to see something different than I see. We might have common words to describe it, but the emotional context of it will be very different based on our upbringings and based on our experiences. And you multiply that times only a few billion people. It's no wonder that we probably shouldn't have the right to tell other people what to see or what to do or how to speak, because they might live in a different world than us.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, if I can share one last thing which, which is really fascinating me right now, and I think it's important to speak about, is plant medicine. I have been experimenting with psilocybin. Legally, of course, just want to state that as a way to tap into perceptual diversity. And I found that under tiny doses of psilocybin, like, like a 0.5 to 1 gram, something incredible happens.

One gram of psilocybin, that's not a tiny dose. One gram is a full dose.

Well, if you do a. If you do a. If you. If you're in a place like Amsterdam, you know, they. They suggest that a full dose, if you want to go, to go visit space, is 3.5 grams, 1 gram. So normally, normally I'm closer towards 0.5, but it depends on your body mass as well. Right. I believe. And so what happens is that I now set my goals under psilocybin. And the goals that come to me are so clear, it's like they're coming from the soul. They are free from all societal programming. So I go, I do a light dose of psilocybin. Typically for writing down goals, I'll do 0.5 grams. I sit down, meditate, and I set my goals for my relationship, for my business, for my work. I did it on December 30, before the kickstarting of this year. And it's amazing the insights that you get. They seem to come from somewhere else. Truly amazing. So I just wanted to recommend that if people have access to that, to try. There was a rumor recently, I read this on Reddit, that there was a leaked report or something that the Biden administration is looking to legalize it for therapeutic purposes within the next two years. I hope that happens because this will be one of the greatest things to happen to humankind.

It's already legal in some states, but just because states make it legal doesn't mean the federal government agrees. But that's why in the US the federal government has limited power. A lot of people have forgotten that. But you know, in any right, they aren't expressly given zone by the states. That's why Colorado could make it legal. And if you can use substances that increase your ability to grow neurons in the brain, you're going to make permanent changes more quickly. And since you and I vision are both all about hurry, meditate faster, the argument that says increased neurogenesis while doing six phase meditation or anything else on that list is going to be a better, higher return on investment of every minute you spend meditating. That's what I do. That's what I've done for 20 years. That's why I can do a lot of what I do. If I was rigidly stuck biochemically and doing six phase meditation, I'd get a different result than if I took care of my biology and I enhanced my flexibility and then I did the meditation. Do you agree with that? Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, in a way, yes.

Nice. So I love it that you're doing that. I would encourage listeners, don't go straight to plant medicine if there's other work you haven't done, including EMDR and tapping and things to start the forgiveness process. And then do the six phase meditation, which would be really, really helpful because that has forgiveness with gratitude first, which is such a big thing. So that's why I think your book is going to be really, really successful and I think it's going to change a lot of people's lives because, well, you've got enough data on how it works and because it actually does work.

Yep. Thank you, Dave.

You got it.

So I hope you guys check it out. It's called the Six Based Meditation Method in America, but in Britain it has a slightly more cheeky title because you know what how Brits are like, it's called no Bullshit Meditation. But if you simply go to Amazon, you type in six phase vision, you'll find it. And if you, if you get the book, there are some incredible like, I mean like mind bogglingly good bonuses. Free access to some incredible mindvalley programs. Mindvalley.com books forward slash six phase. The number six P H A S.

E. Okay, got it. Vishen, as always, thank you. I'm so looking forward to seeing you at the biohacking conference. Get getting a chance to hang out. And in the meantime I will be experimenting with my wait to see you again. Take care.

Take care, Dave. Bye.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.