Here I am in San Diego teaching to a small group of people, quite well educated medical
scientists and computer scientists.
I thought that I would give you the opportunity of getting to know me more and what I am teaching
to special groups and that opportunity is very special, but I thought somehow I should
make available to you.
Off late I have been recommending this book The Brain by David Eagleman.
He has a lot of videos and I am very interested in him because of his ability to present complex
things in a very palatable and understandable way and I am interested in him for yet another
reason because he wonders why, the brain is very important but nobody cares.
In the very first page, in the introduction he says, ‘Given the centrality of the brain
to our lives, why people never study it?’
They are only interested in celebrity gossips and reality shows and I know the answer.
The answer is people are unconscious.
Now that’s not what I am going to be focussing on in this session.
What I want people to do is to read a book like this.
It is very useful, lot of information.
I may do sporadically some videos on his teachings, not just to repeating his teachings but then
to give you my perspective on the brain, from a spiritual point of view.
Let’s start with understanding the world through the brain.
The brain is our instrument through which we see the world.
He calls it in the very first page on the introduction.
We navigate the world.
We see the world like here I see a palm tree and then there is an oak tree and then there
are a bunch of other trees and we navigate it through this brain, no eyes seeing that.
The perceptual process is very complex.
How do we differentiate the oak tree from the palm tree and then there are some other
plants as well.
Now, understanding everything through the physiology of the brain is needed and we have
done it too much or too little.
But what we need to do it is something more.
What we need to do is ask more deep questions and here is Eagleman saying that, ‘Our dreams
and our waking lives emerge from its billions of zapping cells.’
So he says that our dreams and our waking lives emerge from the zapping of the cells.
Here is what you have to understand.
It’s only half truth.
Why?
The zapping of the cells do not create an experience.
Electricity is not experience, nor the chemicals, neuro transmitters can give you meaning.
How does meaning emerge?
Out of chemicals or out of synopsis?
That is a billion dollar question.
We do not know.
So how do we know, a tree as a tree and not as an animal?
An Eastern scientist, a Guru would ask the question like how do we know, how do we know
a thought comes first or the knowledge comes first.
Can there be knowledge without a thought or is the thought word?
Is there a relationship between a thought and a word or can we understand the thought
without a word thought?
This investigation seems to be philosophical but it is not philosophical.
It is experiential.
When you go deep into this question and analyse there are a lot of things that you will come
to know.
Something will open up and knowledge, an on demand knowledge which is within you will
pop out.
Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras will talk about ways of focussing on ideas or thoughts or
anything.
The more you focus on anything the more revelatory it will become.
Even a single syllable, if you focus on a syllable because syllable is everything.
My own definition of intelligence which led me to create phonemic intelligence, thank
God that I had the opportunity to do some research with fantastic people at Harvard
where I was able to preliminarily prove that the phonemes carry intelligence, syllables.
The syllables are like the carrier of intelligence.
The syllables put together the word and the word has a meaning attached to it, whether
it is arbitrary or innate is another question.
I am not going to go into that.
But ultimately focusing on each phoneme individually you will open up to a world of understanding
and that you won’t get through words, sentences and pages and several books which you happen
to read on what you can get just by understanding a syllable, you can understand things that
cannot be put into words because word knowledge is not complete knowledge.
That’s why you will find Shakespeare in his Hamlet saying, ‘Words, words, words,
words will not give you the highest understanding.’
So the zapping of the cells are necessary, I am not criticising Eagleman.
That is what our current understanding is.
Our understanding is true.
But we do not know what is in the synapses and how the synaptic gaps are related to meaning
and what is the meaning of meaning and that leads you to consciousness.
Remember this is just the beginning of the investigation.
We are not going into the Chakras which are associated with consciousness of different
kinds and how they put together the thought and sound and how to separate the sound and
thought and how to separate the speech and sound and where the thoughts arise and what
kinds of thoughts arise from which chakras- these are all complications because the Yogis
were just not involved in perception as we call as perception.
They are interested in non physical intelligence.
For them the brain is not the creator of consciousness.
For them the brain is only a receiver of consciousness.
Consciousness is out there in the space and the brain receives it.
So everything gets very complex but it is very rewarding too because you will end up
in acquiring great knowledge by just focusing on the syllable.
We are living in a very beautiful age.
The brain science is evolving and I have learnt a lot through brain science because my training
is in mysticism religion, the religions of the world and then I started reading about
the brain on my own and with some formal training while I was a PhD student in the University
of Pittsburgh.
But then I built upon it and I am still learning and I see it’s so fascinating.
But this book is an wonderful book.
He says that he has written this book only for people who are not scholars so that they
can understand a lot.
So the question is consciousness is everything?
It is not just chemistry.
It is not just electricity.
It is something very mysterious and the mystery is just in the syllable.
The syllable, just for analogy’s sake is like a Boson, like the Boson is the creator
of this world.
That’s why they call Boson as the God particle.
The intelligence particle here is the syllable and the syllable carries the highest intelligence.
Even when ‘I’ the consciousness of ‘I’ and about which he talks about in the first
‘Who am I?’ and that reminds me of Ramana Maharshi.
Karl Hume went to see him.
In those days, in 1940s he went there.
Karl Hume had diarrhoea.
He was travelling in a ship.
Three months, four months later he reached India to see this great man who is considered
the most enlightened person who recently visited the earth-plane.
On seeing him, although he had diarrhoea and great discomfort, Karl Hume paid the greatest
tribute to Ramana Maharshi by saying, ‘He is the whitest spot in the white sky.’
He never asked any question.
He had lot of questions that he wanted to ask him but all the answers came to him by
looking at this man and he returned to the West after great understanding and experience
from the visit to Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai in Southern India.
Now there is a level of learning that takes place at the non physical level.
A guru, a truly enlightened guru has the capability of giving that experience to people and that’s
the reason why as on a side, I decided to do a Live program for all of you as you know.
To come back to this ‘Who am I?’
When he understands it and he gives a perspective which is interesting to know, how everything
is changing it is not that you are changing because as the brain never remains the same.
I am glad that he has put this title as ‘Who am I?’
Who are you?
You are not the same person.
Now the quantum physics says the same thing that Heisenberg’s theory of uncertainty,
everything is uncertain.
Also I want you to look at another video that I made and you are not who you think you ought
to be, because there are three kinds of ‘I’ living in you.
One is your robot ‘I’ your identity as a doctor he was sitting or as a scientist
she is sitting.
I am a scientist, I am a doctor.
No that is a robot understanding.
But if you just put more attention, I am not that my occasion, I am more than that and
given the fact that everything moves, every time the brain changes and the energy around
changes and then there is the particles are everywhere and not located at one place.
So in that way there is another ‘I’ that come to you.
And the third ‘I’ and not the third ‘eye’, the number 3 eye that I am talking about is
the divine ‘I’ where I am that I am.
When Jesus says how can you come to God, it is only through me, I am the way that I am.
So the lesson here is that we have to learn brain science along with mysticism and you’ll
have a great understanding by bringing them together.
I’ll do more videos, than I have thought I would give that video for you so I had to
go back and do other things.
So I will periodically do some more videos on this topic again.
Look forward to that.
God bless!