Spirituality Upgrade: Exploring Energy, Experience & Reality – Deepak Chopra & Abdul Holdijk : 953

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with.

Dave Asprey, formerly Bulletproof Radio.

This is a special episode recorded at the Milken Conference in Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates. Deepak, I've been wanting to interview you for a long time. I've been a fan of your work, I think since at least number 70 of your 89 or 90 books you've written so far. And you've really changed the world of awareness. So it's a real honor to have you on the show. Thank you for making time.

Thank you.

Your new book, the one that I wanted to talk about today, Metahuman is really interesting. Even the title kind of blows my mind. And let's just get into it. What is a metahuman?

Meta means beyond, and human, in this case, refers to the human mind. So metahuman is. Is what is beyond the human mind. Right now, what I'm exploring in metahuman is that the physical world is not real and nor is the mental world real.

The reason I'm in Oman is that I'm presenting at an event specifically around consciousness and about having conscious business leaders. And I met a fascinating, fascinating guy here and decided, you know what? I am going to interview him. His name is Abdul Hai Holdyk. You've taught for decades.

Yes. One of the interesting things I teach, I don't know if you know about, is a typology that I find actually very useful is the Enneagram.

Oh, the single best categorization scheme. So talk about the Enneagram.

Well, the Enneagram. I just talked at an international Enneagram conference in Cairo. I'm one of the founders of the. The branch in. In Cairo.

Oh, beautiful. Well, define what it is. A lot of listeners may not know about it.

The Enneagram is a typology of human behavior which is not too simple and not too complex.

Well put.

Because if you ask somebody who's in the business world and you say, what's your disc? You know, they do these tests or your mbti, and they'll say, well, maybe I'm a this, but they can't remember. Yeah, it's too complicated. Right. The Enneagram is simple enough that people can sort of remember the nine types, and there are some subtypes, and it really is a. It's a very practical system. Now, I was fortunate that I studied with some of the people who founded the Enneagram, Russ, Hudson and Riso. But then I found a teacher who separated the. The sort of spirituality of the Enneagram from its practicality and I'm a pragmatist. I won't do anything that doesn't work. And even in Sufism, you, you know, we're not going to believe anything unless you, you actually sense it or you've seen it or it's worked for you.

Yes, that is so good.

And in the Enneagram, I keep telling people this in my courses. I say the only time I understood my wife and is when I studied the Enneagram. I keep telling people this in my courses. I say the only time I understood my wife is when I studied the Enneagram. I find it very. A very good method for understanding ego behavior. So even if you're. When you were saying, for example, achievement in yoga or enlightenment first, this is a typical behavior of a certain Enneagram time, right? Because it's the external success which is the driving force behind the person. And once you understand it, you can really understand behavior, even in terms of religious belief, why you believe certain things, you know, you get new ages. Everything is love. I said I'm sorry. But you know, God created love as an opposite to hate. So everything love, it's not everything love, right? So you gotta, you gotta kind of understand how that operates. And, and I find this method a very sort of quick and dirty method for figuring out where you're kind of hung up. It's not you. And one of the things I try to teach people because I do typologies in homeopathy, for example, I say, you know, you have a skeletal system, so maybe the Enneagrams describes your skeletal system. Homeopathy might describe your circulatory system. So it's you, but it's not you.

It's an aspect of you.

It's an aspect of you.

Humans have a tendency to reify their experiences. All you're experiencing right now and all people who are listening to us are experiencing in terms of sound, noise, in terms of vision, color, shapes and forms. The rest is a human story. Body, mind, universe. So when you look at the Milky Way galaxy at night, what is really happening is sensations, images, perceptions and thoughts are being modified into that experience, which you and I call the Milky Way galaxy out there, but is actually occurring in human consciousness. And human consciousness is one tributary of an infinite consciousness.

How do we establish to discuss anything in reality if nothing's really there? And it's all based on the perception of who sees it? How do we actually have an objective discussion about anything?

Okay, so look at a chair before you call it a chair. It's an experience. You can't have a chair without an experience. In our case, it's a human experience. Okay? So instead of calling it a chair, I call it an experience. Then ask yourself, where is the experience happening? Okay. Where is the experience of the chair happening? Okay? And that's the same. Where's the experience of this microphone happening or this hand happening?

It's only in your head. Because if you're not looking at it.

Where is the knowing of the head happening? How do you know there's a head? Okay. How do you know there's a brain? Where is that knowing happening? So when we say awareness is the common ground of all experience. A mosquito's experience, a butterfly's experience, a tree's experience, it has to be aware before it responds to the world. Okay? We now know that trees communicate with each other. Honeybees go to a grove, come back and do something called a waggle dance. And every other honeybee knows exactly where to go to find that flavor of honey. So they're all having different experiences in a species specific branch of an infinite consciousness. Now, you and I agree that's a chair. Because when you were born, you didn't think it was a chair. You didn't think at all. All you were experiencing were shapes, colors and forms and sensations. Your parents told you, that's a chair. Okay? That experience in consciousness then reified itself. Reified means it became something concrete as a reality. But in fact, it wasn't. In fact, every experience, now, even these words and this experience, every, it's a discontinuity, which means every time I look at you and look away and look at you again, I'm taking a snapshot, like a selfie or something like that. What creates continuity in the movie that we call the world is the presence of consciousness. So consciousness gives continuity to perceptual snapshots. Humans have language to express that, and they use different languages with the same meaning. So once you imbue an experience with the meaning, it becomes the world. It becomes an object. That chair is an object. We agree. But before it's an object in experience, the experience is perceptual activity, not in the brain, because the brain is also perceptual activity in consciousness. How do you know there's a brain? Why? Because you experience it. Not in the brain. Brain has no experience, by the way. This is the biggest conception, misconception. Ask any neuroscientist who knows what they're talking about. If I put a knife through, the brain doesn't feel anything. Okay? So brain doesn't feel pain, it doesn't feel pleasure, it doesn't feel anything. All the brain represents is what are called neural correlates of experience nces and these are symbolic representations in the same way as this video is, in the same way as a book is. When I read Shakespeare, Shakespeare is not in the ink, but I experience Shakespeare's consciousness in the ink. So everything you see is a symbolic representation of your real self, which is a conscious agent. Now in spiritual traditions they call that the soul. It's not a word that cognitive scientists are comfortable with. So they call it a conscious agents. So we are in a matrix of conscious agents collectively projecting the universe, the human universe, not a butterfly universe, not a snake universe, not a bat universe.

You know, I'm an academic, so I like to define my terms.

Okay.

So people are very sloppy with the words spirit, soul, emotional body, energy. So I, from my energetic practice and my holistic practice and my Sufism and my thing, I've set up this model and you'll see tomorrow on the, on the slides what one of my enneagram teachers taught me. All models are false, but some may be useful. George Box.

Well said.

Right. And so I don't care how sophisticated your model is, it's false because it cannot encompass all of reality.

It's a model.

It's a model.

Unless you have a life size map of the country, in which case it's not useful.

Exactly. Okay. And so the model here is that the energy body, and this is traditional for almost all alternative medicine, is a regulator. It regulates the emotional, mental and physical body. So whenever there's a trauma to any part of the body, whether it's mental, emotional or physical, the energy body is the mediator. It decides on the basis of what it thinks is the best solution. This is what we call the self healing capacity of a human being. They have fantastic self healing capacity. The energy body has that capacity, but it also has the capacity to put symptoms where it will do least damage to the system.

Okay.

Yep.

Because it's trying to regain a balance. So if for example, you get a concussion or something, it will decide whether it's just going to give you headaches or it's going to give you depression. And in homeopathy we have a hierarchy in terms of the seriousness of the symptoms. It's going to try and put it in the least damaging place place, but it can get stuck there. And once it's stuck, what you really want to do is just unstick it.

Okay.

And you can use Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, whatever it is to get the system unstuck and it will then do the work to unstick itself.

It's designed to regulate itself because it's.

Regulated, designed to regulate itself. So the remedies or the, the medicines which contain nothing are a kind of energetic push to the system. And you know, like in Germany for example, you can buy homeopathic remedies over the counter. And currently there's a kind of pushback from modern medicine against homeopathy in particular. But you can find, you know, because that's part of what I do, you can find primary care clinics in Calcutta that treat 1.2 million people per year. And they do satisfaction surveys on the results of homeopathy versus and they get amazing results. And it's not a perfect system. Nobody said it was. It might not work for you, it might work for somebody else. But when you've seen it work, then you see, you realize that all it needs is a little bit of a push and it starts regulating and it.

Works better than placebo in many of the studies I've seen. And then there are also the skeptic studies who say, look, it doesn't work like that. And one thing I've learned after 20 plus years of working with various people in functional, integrative, anti aging medicine and all that, is that there's three variables. Anytime you're dealing with this. There's the patient, there's the condition, and then there's, well, we'll call it four things. I said three. But there's the patient, the condition, there's the healing modality, and then the practitioner. And how important is the practitioner in homeopathy versus other types of medicine?

In all medicine, the practitioner plays a huge role.

Thank you.

Okay.

It doesn't matter what it is. And for people who say, well, it's placebo. I said, yes, exactly. I've been to medical conferences where I've been asked to speak about homeopathy. And the drug company tells me 43% is placebo and 52% is the drug. I said, well, why aren't you using the placebo?

Right. It's a lot more fun, it's a lot safer.

Right, right. So yes, homeopathy, consciously, the fact that you would have to sit for an hour and a half and talk about all aspects of your life is a healing situation and that's placebo. Right. Because again, we're stimulating the self healing capacity of the body. So if I can use the placebo, why.

As I delved deeper into neuroscience and neuropeptides, you Know, I became fascinated, you know, because when I was getting my training, it's in the 70s, it was a revolution in science that we had a technique called radio immunoassay. We could look at chemicals in the body. I had a colleague we were looking at in the lab. Oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin. These are molecules of emotion. What happened is I was so charged, psyched by this experience that, you know, now we have a molecular basis for thought or feeling. I went to a spiritual master in India and very passionately shared this with him. And he smiled and he said, those molecules aren't real. They are human names for an experience. Okay. And I thought about that a lot. Then I delved into Buddhism, then I delved into Kashmir, Shaivism, Then I went into straight into Vedanta, the non dual traditions of the world. At this time I was deep in meditation. I had many spiritual masters in my 30s, early 30s. Before that I was smoking and drinking and all of that. You know, it was fashionable to do that as a doctor. Okay. But now I was in deep meditation. And I had many spiritual masters, one in particular, but many. I met many healers that were discounted by modern science. And yet I was trying to figure out what were they doing because I was seeing changes. Yeah, it works.

So there are a few plants that I use because again, I'm kind of using a synergistic approach. Because if I feel that you have to remember that people come to me when they have a pathology, I'm not treating healthy people. But if I want to maintain somebody's health, I do recommend certain kinds of plant extract, like ginkgo, for example.

Yeah.

Berberis is a very good one.

Oh yeah.

I love berberis goldenseal, which is limited because they had some problems with that. But I usually order my herbs from England from the herbal apothecary.

There definitely are some herbs that get that come from China that aren't tested. And there's purity issues.

Yes.

What do you do for jet lag?

For jet lag, we have a couple of homeopathic formulas. We use arnica, for example.

It's an anti inflammatory.

Yes. And. Well, the idea for me is that it's not natural to fly at 30,000ft above the earth's surface. And your energy body doesn't like it. And so when you arrive, your energy body is out of sync with your physical body. It kind of has to take time to. To sink itself. And anything you can do to. To sink it is good.

Do you have like a chant or.

No, the thing is, is that I'm aware of these kind of things because of my teachers. Okay, the first teacher I had the German, he visited me in Germany and I had this old VW that we drove. And you know the autobahn, there's no speed limit, right? And so there's a minimum speed limit, 60 kilometers. And so he didn't allow me to go faster than 60km because he said it was inhuman.

Wow.

And we also had an architect. My wife studied with a very famous vernacular architect in Egypt, Hassan Fatim. He builds mud brick domes and things like that. And he said it's unnatural to build higher than three floors because you lose contact with the earth. So when we fly, I usually take a lot of vitamin C, I take a lot of supplements and I take sometimes melatonin to adjust. Yeah.

The signal in your body of whether you're integrated or not is very simple actually. Do you have all the energy that you need to do everything you want? Do you have all the. Are you experiencing a joyful, energetic body right now? Are you experiencing a loving, compassionate heart right now? Are you experiencing a reflective, alert mind right now?

You.

Do you have lightness of being? Are you in flow right now? If you can say 10 out of 10 in these four, you can have a very good life and a long life. Now you can do all the things you want to, to augment that. Take the, the new short chin peptides, neural hacking and all of that. As long as it's an integrated into your experience of joy. You can extend this indefinitely, theoretically. Remember, the infinite cannot be conceptualized. That's why we use symbols, okay? And we create images of God. Because we can't actually, we cannot create a model of infinity, okay? And yet mathematicians do it all the time. They use zeros and this. And they're very happy because now they've got us, you know, the signature for it.

You can do math with the signature.

Yeah. Now I can do postulate, eternal inflation, collapse of the wave function, multiple universes, all because I have these symbols. Okay? So I can postulate, it's pretty neat that only humans can do that. So the thing that happened to these great, we call them prophets or sages or luminaries, is number one, they transcended models. Number two, as a result of the experience of what can only be called infinite, they had the emergence of what we today might call Platonic values. Truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equality, equanimity. Not as moral injunctions, which becomes hypocrisy with the halo. You Know, it was their natural way of being. And number three, equally important, they lost the fear of death.

Talk to me about spiral dynamics, which is part of what you're, what you've incorporated into your teachings.

Yes, spiral dynamics is interesting because it kind of maps out evolutionary developments in value systems, in, in cultures. So it allows you to map out the predominant culture system and values that you may be living in. Now what's interesting about that is, is that as a person who has lived in a highly conformist culture and at the same time teaching in an environment where you're taught to be an individualist, which is the predominant Western paradigm, and then you have the sort of cutting edge, at least now, sort of cutting edge of the Western paradigm is the green movement. And they map out the value systems in these. And people want to feel secure in their value system. They don't want the system overturned and a totally new value system to appear. And it's one of the reasons why I think fundamentalism has arisen in many of these societies because it's a kind of retraction to the familiar values that they hold. And it doesn't really have a lot of tolerance because the values are this skin that I was talking about, you know, the outer forms. And so it's very problematic. And many of the students that graduate from the American University are conflicted because they have one kind of value system and then they have to go home and live in another value system. So marriages used to be arranged, right? So now you're educated in a system where you're an individual and you're free to choose your mate out of romantic love, which is, of course, Hollywood values. But, but that's a problem, right? And then you have green meme kind of values where there are no hierarchies, where everybody is equal, where there is no better and no worse, which is another kind of value system.

Right.

And in, in they, they map this out. So it's great for conflict resolution. And it explains a lot of political problems because, you know, when the Americans invaded Iraq for the first time to re. Establish democracy, well, that's a value system, right? And you can't re. You can't do that in a society that's split along ethnic and religious lines. So what happened is everybody votes Shia or Sunni because they don't understand democracy. It's not in their value system. It takes 50 to 100 years for a society to evolve into a new value system.

This is another important point for people. The experience and the awareness of experience are related, but independent so if you say right now you're having the experience of me and the microphone and this conversation, okay, you're not attached to it, after it's finished, you go have your lunch and maybe call your significant other or whatever, and this will be gone. But if you identify with this experience permanently, then you're in a trap, okay? Because you think this experience is reality, but this is actually a perceptual activity constantly changing. You can't even hold on to it. So who or what is having this experience? The very fact I can put attention my toes and then think of the Empire State Building means the me is independent of the experience of the Empire State Building and of my toes.

Wow.

Okay.

Okay. How much. How much time? How much investment of energy? How long does it take to become metahuman?

None.

Is that because time doesn't exist?

Yes. And you have to get in touch with that part of you which is timeless. And, you know, some people take it, it's. It's very fascinating to me. It's like a fruit that's ripening and then one day drops. It was the time, and then reality is no longer what you thought it was. Now, some people tap into it in a fragmented way. Autistic savants, mathematical geniuses, musical geniuses. Actually, now that I'm so intrigued by this, I actually look at these anomalies. I know a kid now who can read his mother's thoughts. So he looks, he's on a computer. Mother is reading a book in the back. And he doesn't have access to what she's reading. And I have given the mother letters to read, numbers to read, actually even nursery rhymes or whatever stories to read. He's typing them on the computer with a little difficulty because he has mind body dysfunction, autism, etc. But he's typing out exactly what she's doing. So finally I went to him, I said, how do you do it? Simple. Kid says, I love my mother so much, I can get inside her consciousness. And then I see what she sees and I type it out for him. It's not a big deal. Now, of course, he has very limited access to this reality because he's on the spectrum and other realities are edited out for him. So, you know, there's a very kind of thin line between savants, geniuses, psychotics, sages and enlightened masters. And those who are experimenting with lsd, they all hit the same markly group.

Is the air you're breathing making you sick? Just because you don't see mold doesn't mean it Isn't there? My friend Jason Earle has been on a mission for over two decades to help people understand the hidden role of indoor air in their health. He's one of the world's leading experts on mold and indoor air quality. And he created the Got Mold Test kit to make professional grade air testing skills simple and accessible. It uses cutting edge air sampling tech that top inspectors trust, and it's engineered for you at a fraction of the cost. It takes just minutes to get samples using the patented Biovac air sampling pump. Then you send them, prepaid to one of the most prestigious microbiology labs in the world. No guesswork, no paperwork and no hidden fees. You get fast results, intuitive reports and great support. And since you keep the pump, you can retest anytime for less. It even comes with a lifetime warranty. Mold may be invisible, but its impact isn't. This kit helps you understand your environment so you can take action for your health. Go to gotmold.com and use code DAVE10 to save 10% and see what's in your air. Because the best biohackers don't guess. They test.

You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.

So you know, when people say what happens to us after we die? The answer is you were never born. All you did was take a picnic called the Human Experience. And you know, in the Vedanta, infinite universes come and go in the vast expanse of consciousness like motes of dust dancing in a beam of light. That's a good metaphor.

Do people get mad when you say this?

Yes.

I mean, it doesn't make me mad at all. I'm in alignment with you. But a lot of people think, but you know, my children passed away, my parents passed away, like, oh, the pain, oh, the suffering.

And you're saying when your children were there or your father was there, your parents, where was the experience happening of your children, your father and your body? That was a perceptual snapshot. You know, I recently I just heard from a nursing student that I knew when she was 19, okay? And I was 23. We had intense conversations about consciousness, brain, this, that and the other. Then she went off to la. I was in Boston. I never heard from her, you know, for 42 years. Then suddenly someone, someone gave her my contact information. I heard from her and I now can see in my awareness that kid, that was Deepak show present intern, and she is a nursing student. It's all a dream. Where is that experience? Even now as I think of, who was that guy? That's still called Deepak Chopra and this guy, they have no connection to each other.

Okay.

There's not single molecule in my body, not a single peptide in my brain, not a single activity atom in my brain that was present in that experience. I learned skating, ice skating, at the age of seven, then I didn't skate for 40 years. And then I picked up ice skating and went to a rink. I was skating. Where was that memory? Now, if you ask traditional neuroscientists, where is it? They'll point to the head. But actually, if you ask a really good neuroscientist what's where is the memory in the head? Distributed. But as symbolic correlates of experience. The experience is not in the body. The body is just a signature. Symbolic. And it's a changing signature. Because, you know, that body I had as a 20 year old is not this body. The brain that learned to skate is not the brain that remembers how to skate. So the brain does not remember. You remember. And then you cause the collapse of the wave function that you call a memory, and that causes a signature in the brain.

I mean, generally what we say is the only way to improve the world is to improve yourself.

I very much share that value. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion across a bunch of areas. I didn't even know we'd go, but when I met you at this event and I heard just the incredible diverse things you've worked on and the fact that you have a college level course, the who am I kind of perspective, I said, all right, we've got to talk on the show.

Thank you for inviting me.

Thank you for being here. Is there a place people can go to find more about your work? A website or social media or something?

I don't do social media.

I was guessing you didn't.

I was d. I do face to face, but not Facebook.

All right, I've heard of that. Face to face, it's like faxing, right?

Yeah, yeah. And, and again, that's part of my traditional teaching. You know, the way you really get something is that you connect with somebody and that connection can be maintained through time and space. But you know, the whole principle of a transmission line, and it's almost in all the religious traditions, it's because you, you kind of plug in.

Yeah.

And it's that connection. So I, I, you know, I usually operate in obscurity.

All right.

But you can, you can check out, I have a small website, h2rc2.com.

H2rc2.com.

Yeah, it's holistic and homeopathic. Resource center and consulting and I put it down to a scientific formula. H2RC2.com I was so sure there's going.

To be a Star wars joke in there somewhere.

No?

Abdul, thank you.

Thank you very much.

If you like today's episode, you know what to do. Go out there and try homeopathy. I'm seeing some people who are saying I've done 100 ayahuasca journeys or at what point do you say it's not working? What's the appropriate dosing frequency to go on one of these journeys? Whether it's LSD or mushroom, I think.

Even one good experience is good enough. Whether it's mushrooms or psilocybin or ayahuasca or whatever. Some people who have a lot of brain trauma and repressed memories are tortured by them. Maybe more. I personally would say either with a very traditional shamanic expert or these days, you know, you have psychotherapists with very good training that I know who work at universities and have grants to look at this stuff and it's a big revolution. Yeah, beautiful.

Deepak, I appreciate your 90th book, Metahuman. I appreciate your time and your work and your willingness to go out there and say things that are on the edge of what we know and be willing to face critics who say whatever.

And then I'll soon be dead and they can say all they want.

Well said. Thank you for being ugly and honored.

It was great to be with you. Thank you.

Dave, if you liked today's episode, you know what I'm going to ask you to do? Go read Metahuman.

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

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.