The Reality of Human Existence and Spirituality | Vishen Lakhiani

So let me tell you what we're going to be covering today. Today you're going to learn why in the Western world, we get tricked into seeing the world from a particular lens, and that is the lens of the physical world, that everything that is real is that which we can touch. But in indigenous cultures of the world, they don't just function in the physical world. They have practices and rituals that help them go deep into. Into the world of spirit, of mind, of soul. For example, I once went to spend a week with the Achua people in Ecuadorian Amazon. And there we sat with shamans who would give us ayahuasca, and we would go on these incredible trips in our head. And medicine like that can awaken you to this whole different parallel universe that often the Western mind isn't aware fully existing. But these worlds are as real to us as the physical world. Close your eyes for a moment. Bring back a memory of someone you truly love. It could be a pet, it could be a loved one. Just think of someone you truly love. Think about the memory of that person, the last hug or kiss that that person gave you. That person isn't here. You are not physically seeing that person. But the memory, the feelings, those are real. Human beings do not just exist in a physical world. We are dualistic beings. We exist in flesh, but also in consciousness. However, while we know this, most of us don't understand how dualistic we are. How much of our lives, how much actually are pure consciousness. And what you're going to learn today is you're going to go on an incredible journey. We're not just going to touch on meditation. You're going to learn about altered states. You may open your eyes now, for example, lucid dreaming. Can you awaken in your dream and be in a dream world that is even more rich than the physical world? That means in this dream world, if you sip a cup of hot chocolate, it is so real, so delicious, it is tastier and better than any other hot chocolate you've ever tried in the physical world. And you'll remember it, just like in the physical world. But get this, guys, zero calories. That is lucid dreaming. But we're going to go beyond that. We're going to talk about arousal. How many of you here have ever had sex? If you have, you know that when you are making love to someone, often when there's a deep connection, you are in an altered state. You feel different. You are experiencing the world in a different way. We create so many taboos around sex, but if you look at the great spiritual teachers like for example, Abraham Hicks. Esther Hicks in her Abraham Hicks books wrote that the number one experience that souls want when they enter the human body is the sexual experience, because it is the closest that a soul has to realizing it's a soul. We're going to talk about ecstasy, then we're going to go even further and we're going to talk about what if consciousness was so real that our consciousness can leave our physical body. This is sometimes referred to as out of body experiences or astral projection. So we're going to cover some pretty deep topics. Now here's the thing though. These topics are real, but in the western world we often diminish them with the words woo woo. So I know, and I've had conversations with people here in this audience and they're like, you know, I never bothered to come to mindvalley before because I thought this stuff is so woo woo. And I'm an engineer and I can't be around this. But the thing is, the world is changing. I just spoke at Google recently and we spoke about meditation and deep connection and the space between human beings. I was just on the Microsoft podcast, the official podcast for Microsoft employees, and they wanted to interview me on crystals. Think about that. Now I know nothing about crystals, right? But it was interesting that that was one of the questions I got. So why is it that so many of us are resistant to these ideas? Well, there's a philosophical concept by Ken Wilber called the pre trans fallacy. Now Ken Wilber says this. I'm going to try to explain it without flip shots. We live in an era of rationality. The rational mind is what is building the world today in many ways, or so it appears, from Silicon Valley to Wall street, it is about the rational mind. And as we enter this era of the rational mind, rationalists look back at other subcultures in the human experience or pre rational cultures and consider them obsolete. So the rational mind Wall street banker might look at the indigenous shaman in the Amazon rainforest who prays to the spirit gods and meditates and prays before he kills an animal and say, you know, I understand that that's your culture, that's cool. But there is no science behind that. So the rational mind looks at pre rational ideas and considers them obsolete. Now in many cases this is actually good. In many cases this is actually good because a lot of these pre rational ideas are insanely dumb. If you open the religious books of the world today, there's a lot of love and there's a lot of goodness in them. But there's also a lot of obsolete ideas. There are pre rational ideas, for example, that suggest that if you're gay you are somehow wrong in the eyes of God. They are pre rational ideas that suggest that we are born a sinner. All of this is nonsense, of course, because it disconnects people. It actually takes away from the true essence of our soul, which is unity, which is connectedness. So the rational mind is not wrong here to look at pre rational ideas and say a lot of this stuff. It's kind of magical thinking. But at the same time, there's a new emergent era in human culture and that is called transrational. And transrational is the era we are going into now. Transrational says yes, okay, the magical thinking that was cool 2,000 years ago, that they are spiritual ideas that are powerful that we need to look at. And these spiritual ideas are increasingly being studied by science. So what are trans rational ideas? So pre rational is Moses parted the Red Sea. Pre rational is that if I do a particular dance I can make it rain. Rational is Silicon Valley. Rational is the microchip. Rational is Wall Street. Transrational is the new emergent field we are going into. And that's the field where we talk about spirit, we talk about lucid dreaming, we talk about meditation, we talk about mindfulness, we talk about the human mind's ability to heal itself with the placebo effect. All of these are being studied by science. Ten years ago when I started teaching, teaching meditation, I was embarrassed to tell my friends. Today 44% of Fortune 100 companies are offering meditation classes to their employees. Ten years ago I couldn't talk about lucid dreaming. Today when you go to a big Silicon Valley conference like summit series, they are lucid dreaming instructors at the conference. This is the realm of transrational. This is the realm where Ray Dalio, the number one hedge fund manager in the world, says that his superpower to make billions of dollars comes from meditation. Transrational is the realm where Tom Bilyeu, the founder of the billion dollar company Quest Nutrition those, nutrition Boss and the YouTube show Impact Theory. When I ask him, where do your ideas come from because you've created a billion dollar company? He says, well it comes through a process I call thinkitation. And I said, what is that? And he goes, well I meditate. And I think that's transrational. Now the purely rational mind can. Because you exist at this level, you are unaware of the level above you transrational, you're unaware, but you know the level below you. Magical thinking or pre rational. So the rational mind, the people who use words such as this is too woo woo. This is too Kumbaya. They're actually merging both because they cannot see the difference. They merge both. So they assume that lucid dreaming and meditation and astral projection are the same as the belief that Moses parted the Red Sea, or that you are born a sinner, or that gay people are wrong because some dude in the sky said so 2,000 years ago. That is called the pre trance fallacy. It's a philosophical idea that explains why some people are afraid to embrace these concepts. But when you understand the fallacy, you start to see how what we're going to talk about is, is actually really, really, really rational. In fact, it is the ultimate truth. And this physical world is the one that is actually an illusion.