Most Replayed Moment: 6 Daily Habits That Expose Your Fake Values - Deepak Chopra

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

So in your life, if someone dies, God forbid, do you suffer?

Deepak Chopra (0:10)

You grieve, which is a natural process, and it has a life cycle. You don't hold on to it. In fact, you embrace it. You embrace the... Anytime you'd recoil or deny, resistance creates even more stress. So what we call stress is resistance to existence in the moment, okay? If you don't resist experience in the moment, you know, it's passing by.

Steven Bartlett (0:40)

So something really bad happens at work. I get a really bad, you know, my boss tells me I'm fired. The mindset required to avoid suffering in that case is to take the news.

Deepak Chopra (0:52)

It's not a mindset. It's a step in awareness. The awareness of the mind is not the mind. Who is it that or what is it that knows a thought? That is what you need to shift to.

Once you shift from the experience to the awareness in which the experience is happening, you're independent of it. And that's what actually those eight limbs of yoga are about. It's a process, a shift in identity. We started with that, a shift in identity from your assumed self to your fundamental self, which is infinite, which is without cause, which is not subject to birth and death, which is spaceless, timeless, incomprehensible, infinite, irreducible and fundamental.

Steven Bartlett (1:52)

It feels almost like I'm stepping out of myself and looking at myself.

Deepak Chopra (1:56)

Correct. Looking at the projection of yourself. You're looking at the projection of yourself.

Steven Bartlett (2:04)

She's very hard to do.

Deepak Chopra (2:05)

Looking at your avatar.

Steven Bartlett (2:07)

It's very hard to do because we are increasingly becoming avatars, especially with things like social media. We're being reinforced. Like, you know, I have 2 million followers or a million followers, 500,000 followers that's following my avatar.

Deepak Chopra (2:20)

So we don't know who we are. You confuse yourself with the avatar. And the battle is all between avatars wanting importance.

Steven Bartlett (2:29)

How does one resign from that battle and take back my piece?

Deepak Chopra (2:35)

Actually, the opposite of that is creativity.

The creativity is the opposite of determinism. If you don't want to be a biological robot or an algorithm, which is what we are now, we are biological algorithms, biological robots. And that's, by the way, part of our evolution. It's not something, all animals. But the animals have an advantage. They live in the present moment. But you and I have an imagination that can see into the future, that can even look at death as the culmination of this life experience. We regret the past. We anticipate the future. We're never in the present when it's the only place we are right now is the present. There is no way to escape it, but in our imagination, we escape it. So the worst use of imagination is stress. The best use of imagination is creativity. Creativity is a disruption in the algorithm. It's a discontinuity, fundamental creativity, not usual innovation like iPhone 13 instead of iPhone 12 with a better camera. That's not what creativity is. Creativity is a death and a resurrection. It's a death of context, meaning, relationship and story, and a new meaning, relationship and story, whether that's fundamental creativity, that's Einstein coming up with the theory of relativity or the quantum physicists breaking every rule that we knew in Newtonian physics, or a great piece of art, Beethoven's fifth. These are original. Original creativity is a disruption in the algorithm.

Steven Bartlett (4:25)

To this idea of my avatar getting into this sort of avatar wall with other avatars, my antidote to that is my own creativity.

Deepak Chopra (4:39)

You know, every moment you have a choice to repeat the past or be a pioneer of creativity of the future. And that happens, by the way, it happens individually, it happens collectively. We change world views. The world is not flat anymore. The ground is not stationary anymore. The world is not material anymore. Every technology that you use is based on the new idea that the essential nature of the physical world is it's not physical. If I could see you as you really are, I'd see a huge emptiness with a few scattered dots and spots and some random electrical discharges. And at the most fundamental level, there are no boundaries. Boundaries are perceptual. So when we experience the spiritual ecstasy, which is ineffable, there are no boundaries. That's why people in near death experience, people with psychedelic experience, people with peak experiences, athletes, musical performance, any break from ordinary reality is ineffable and healing actually. That's why the recent resurgence in psychedelics is very interesting because, you know, it takes you away from your identity of being squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime.