How to Live in the Light with Deepak Chopra

don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how

they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is somebody I probably don't need to introduce, but I do have a long introduction. It's Deepak Chopra, the founder of the Chopra Foundation, which is a nonprofit entity for research on well being and humanitarianism, along with Chopra Global, a modern day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality. Deepak is a world

renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He's Board certified in internal medicine, endochronology, and metabolism and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians Edition. He's a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. He serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and hosts the podcast Daily Breath, The World Post

and the Huffington Post. Global Internet Survey ranks Deepak Chopra number seventeen of the most influential thinkers in the world and number one in medicine. He's the author of over ninety books translated into forty three languages, including the book discussed here, Living in the Light Yoga for Self Realization. Hi, Deepak, Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's pleasure to be with you. Rick, It's an honor to have you on. We're going to be discussing your latest book, Living in

the Light Yoga for Self Realization. But before we do that, we'll start the show like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery in love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things

like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Every experience is not just what you just said, but every experience, by definition is through contrast. You can't have enough without a down, you

can't have a heart without a cold. You can't have good without bad. You wouldn't know the difference. You can't have pleasure without pain. So experience by definition is by contrast. The more self away you are, and that's a very important point. The more you reflect on questions like who am I, what do I want? What is my purpose? What am I? Grateful? For then you automatically choose the evolutionary direction instead of the destructive direction. I don't even

use words like good and bad. Is just the evolution or entropy. Yeah. In the Buddhist tradition, the term is often skillful and less skillful, or you know, bad is ignorance and good is indictment. Yeah, exactly. So you just mentioned something there about awareness, and you say in the book that yoga teaches that awareness is the ultimate healer, no matter at what level it occurs. Say more about the role of awareness in healing, in moving towards the light,

and just living a better life. So, first of all, we have to define what awareness is, and a lot of people actually be first on what is awareness. They confuse it with the mind. Awareness is not the mind because if you have awareness of the mind, then it can't be the mind. Whatever you're aware of is separate from that which you're aware of. So the awareness of the mind is not the mind. The awareness of the body is not the body. The mind and body and

the world are objects of experience. Awareness is the ultimate subject of experience. To go even further, awareness and consciousness are synonymous. So what is that awareness or consciousness? Is that in which all experience occurs. Number one. Number two, awareness or consciousness is that in which all experience is known. And number three, which most people find it hard to understand, awareness is that out of which all experience is made.

So the mind is a modified form of awareness. The intellect is a modified form awareness, our ego identity is a modified form of awareness, our energy a modified form of awareness. The body, which is a perceptual experience, is a modified form of awareness. And the world, which is also a perceptual experience, is a modified form of awareness. So once we understand the definition of awareness, then says what is it and how do we find it? Can

we find awareness objectively? The answer is not, you know, how can you find something that is the subject of all experience objectively? So you know, just as the eyes cannot see themselves and the teeth cannot bite themselves, awareness cannot be observed objectively. It is an experience. We have an all experience, which is fluctuations of awareness that we call body. Mind and the world their fluctuations in the

form of sensations, sense, perceptions, images, feelings, and thoughts. When these quiet turned down to a point where the mind becomes totally island. There's no experience of sensation, perception, or anything. What's left is awareness. When you take away everything, you're not what's left is awareness. Now, when we look at its properties, and we only look at it and understand it through experience, not objectively, then awareness is a field

of infinite possibilities. Awareness is something that is synchronistic. It organizes everything simultaneously. For example, a human body or any biological organism can think, thoughts, play a piano, guild, gems, removed oxens in the case of a female, make a baby, all at the same time. It doesn't operate through cause and effect. It operates synchronistically. We call that non local correlation.

It's a infinite possibilities two nonlocally correlated or synchronistic, three unpredictable, four creative, five self organizing, six self regulating, and seven self evolving. Because awareness doesn't have any properties that we can identify perceptually or cognitively, then awareness is also transcendence. It's when everything goes away that's what's left. And also it's not in time. Every experience is in time, but

awareness is not in time. So when you know the communist phrase we used to describe awareness is I I was five years old, I was ten years old. I was a teenager. I was happy, I was sad. I'm a mature adult. I'm afraid of death. So every experience is preceded by I. The experience is in time, but awareness is not in time. I was there when you were a five year old, with a different body, a different mind, different emotions, and different experiences. The experiences come

and go. In fact, the experiences of perceptual snapshots, of cognitive snapshots. Awareness is the spaceless, timeless factor in every experience. Well, we dove into the deep end of the pool right out of the gate, didn't we, You asked me, I know, I did. I did so. I think what we're saying is awareness in its use word modified, So in its

unmodified state. Is you can correct this, But it's not exactly a container, but we could think of it is that in which everything else occurs and arises from correct that in which everything occurs and arises. In fact, the experience of the whole universe arises and subsides in awareness in the form of perceptual activities. Every perception is a snapshot of experience, and then the continuity that we have of existence is because there's a storyline between every snapshot.

So I'm watching a movie. For example, the old fashioned movies, you know, you had twenty four frames a second or twenty eight trames a second. I remember the time when you may or may not. I'm old enough to remember Charlie Chaplin movies. They were very jerky because the real wasn't moving fast enough. Today we have digital movies, and so they go at the speed of light. But even then, between every digital on, there's a digital off. Awareness is in the off, but it's also in the on simultaneously,

and right now you know, you're looking at me. This is a digital framework that we are looking at. But I think the whole universe ultimately is a digital workshop in an undivided formless, eternal infinite awareness. Awareness doesn't have a phone, so if it doesn't have a form, it has to be infinite. By definition, anything that has a form is finite, and so we are that at our fundamental level, we are infinite awareness. It's modified forms a body,

mind and the world. So you know, just like a wave accurs in the ocean occurs, it's rises subsides into the ocean. The ocean is always there. Just say it's the wateriness of the ocean. The water is there in the ocean, it is there in the wave, it is there in the raindrop, it is there in the river, it is there in the puddle, it is there in the rainbow. But it is all water. So awareness is

the essential ingredient that we call life. Another analogy I've heard, and again, as you mentioned, these are all ways of describing something that we can't describe. It's ineffable. Another way I've heard it described is that awareness is sort of light. If you think of the TV. Right, awareness is the screen beautiful. Then everything else that's happening gets projected onto that screen, But the screen changes temporarily, but the screen

remains what it is. It's not like if I watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that now my screen is forever colored by Willy Wonka, right, Not in the ultimate sense. Now we know that in the mind sense, right, the mind does get conditioned, but this awareness remains unconditioned. So right now it's actually a modified form of the screen. The screen has the software, the electrons, and the photons that are coming on and off. Now, once this program

is finished. Actually, the seeds of this experience will still be in the computer hardware, so awareness, even the experience, doesn't die. The memory of the experience remains in the let's say the seeds in the screen, because I can retrieve it. Let's take a simple example. Can you remember what you had for dinner last night? I can? Okay, so what was a delicious baked salmon and a salad that my partner Jenny made? Now may I ask you?

Can you remember any experience from your childhood or your adolescents? Not many, but some sure yes. So where was that memory before I ask you the question? And most people, you know, when I talk to scientists, they say it's in the brain. But that's where I have a problem with neuroscience. Where in the brain is that thing that you ate last night? There's nothing you will find. But when I ask you the question, many neural networks go

into action, and suddenly you retrieve the memory. The memories an awareness not in the brain, yep, because awareness is not in time. Being consistent with your habits is the engine that drives your transformation and growth. Think about it. You can't feed your good wolf one big meal a year and expect it to thrive. Consistent steady bits of food fuel a good healthy wolf, but it's hard to

create consistency. You might listen to this podcast on a Thursday feel really inspired, but then life takes over and by Saturday night you've forgotten all about it. That's why I'm hosting a free live Q and a town hall zoom meeting on Thursday, February twenty third, where I'll be answering your questions about how to take what you know and turn it into what you consistently do. Head to one you feed dot net slash town hall to register

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yourself feel selfish, then let's talk. The things we do consistently are more important than the things we do once in a while. In this free town hall session, you'll ask me your questions and I'll help you find what works for you. You might look at things differently and create the structure to help you do the thing you really want to do. And if you don't have a specific question, just come listen to the conversation. A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.

Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by doing just a little bit. To register for this free zoom session on February twenty third, go to one you feed dot net slash town hall. That's when you feed dot net slash town hall. I hope I get the chance to meet you there. We could all use the occasional nudge, a little wake up from the autopilot we fall into in our day to day routine. That's why we send brief text reminders to listeners of the show

for free. The texts help you stay on track with what you're learning from the podcast episodes we release on Tuesdays and Fridays. They periodically prompt you to pause for a second and become more present and mindful, and encourage you to engage with the week's podcast topics in a bite sized, short and simple manner. We've heard from listeners that these texts help them take a moment to reconnect

with what's important amidst the business of daily life. Someone said it feels like a little bit of wisdom is being whispered into my psyche, which I thought was cool. So, if you'd like to hear from us a few times a week via text, go to one you feed dot net slash text and sign up for free. Let's change direction a little bit and talk about meditation for a minute. You frequently run meditation programs. I think you and Oprah have one. It's something you've taught about for a long time.

Share with me why to you meditation is so important. Well, so on a very basic level, meditation allows you to experience awareness, go beyond thought. So I have always realized that no system of thought can give you access to awareness. You have to go beyond all thought, and you've got to go beyond the condition mind. You know the secret passages, the so called dark alleys, the ghost filled attics of your condition mind, which goes back thousands of years. Right now,

you have conditioning as a result of your ancestors. In fact, they're all alive in your body as a genetic activity in your body and epigenetic activity, and this conditioning goes back to your childhood. It even goes back to the womb. But actually the conditioning goes back historically to the economics and the stories of your ancestors, culture, economics, religion, all kinds of things. The body, in fact is the condition mind,

according to spiritual traditions. So meditation helps you go beyond all this and allows you to enter this realm of possibilities, which is self regulating, self evolving, creative at meditation now on a very fundamental level. Therefore, and now there's enough science. Thirty years ago people kind of poop pood meditation a little bit in the West, not understand that it has

thousands of years of history. But meditation even of at a very superficial level, things like blood pressure, heart rate variability, heart rate, immune function, endocrine function, inflammatory proteins all down. So meditation allows self regulation, self heeling, both of body, mind, emotions and relationships on a very simple level. On a deeper level, it allows you access to higher states of consciousness.

Beyond waking, sleeping, and dreaming. There are other states of consciousness that spiritual traditions talk about So there's waking, which is the obvious state in which we are, presumably now, But these spiritual traditions called the waking state a lucid dream in a vivid now. Because again, just bear with me for a moment, Wittgenstein said, our life is a dream. We are asleep, but once in a while we wake

up enough to know that we're dreaming. The Buddha's main message was awakening, awakening from the everyday reality that we call a lucid dream. If I ask you what happened to your childhood, you'd say, it's a dream. But if I ask you what happened last night, it's a dream. What happened five minutes ago? To dream, what happens to These words, By the time you hear them, they don't exist. So the whole thing is a dream, and it's the

most superficial state. The second stage is the dream state that we have at night, which is more fuzzy and more amorphous and not clear. Okay, that's a higher state of consciousness because you're getting to the source of fluctuations of awareness that we call the mind. Deep sleep is still higher because now there's no fluctuation, and you're nonlocal, which means you're not having any experience. Nonlocal means now you're transcended body and mind. But beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping,

spiritual traditions identify a fourth state. In English, we could call it transcendence. As a fifth state that spiritual traditions, transcendence means going beyond perceptual activity, nonlocal, everything is correlated, etc. The fifth state in these traditions is called cosmic consciousness. When you're in local and nonlocal awareness at the same time, which means your body is asleep, but you're aware of the sleep. Your mind is in dream state, but you're

aware that it's his dreaming. So when you have nonlocal and local awareness simultaneously, that in these traditions is called cosmic consciousness. It's you know, in Christian traditions, I'm in the world and not of it. Beyond cosmic consciousness, there's still another state called divine consciousness, when you become aware of the awareness in every object of experience. Okay, this is a very interesting state where you commune without communicating.

It's a psychic phenomena, etc. Etc. Divine consciousness, and beyond that is a state called unity consciousness, which is enlightenment when you realize that awareness is actually single, it cannot be divided, and the whole universe is a projection of that awareness. Now you know, if you are you'd actually call it God, or you'd call it Allah or Brahman or i'n so for these are words that have been

used in different religious traditions. So I think the sort of summarize you're saying that meditation has very practical benefits to the mind, the body, and it's also the portal to these deeper states of consciousness, to this level of awareness. Eric, it is actually meditation gives you access to the religious experience. Now these days it's fashionable to say I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. But actually, if you look at the

religious experience, there are only three components to it. First is transcendence, which we just spoke about. Second is the spontaneous emergence or what we call platonic qualities, truth, goodness, beauty, love, compassion, joy, equanimity. And the third is the loss of the fear of death. This is the experience of Jesus, this is the experience

of Buddha, This is the experience of mom. The sufi is every seer in every tradition, But these poor fellows, men and women, when they try to explain it, nobody understands it because it's so you know, as you said, ineffable. So it's like, you know, somebody is pointing to the moon, you start worshiping the finger instead of wanting to say,

how can I find the moon itself? How can I have that religious experience or spiritual experience if you don't like the word religious or god whatever, how do I have that experience myself? Now, imagine that you had that experience, loss of fear of death, spontaneous compassion, love, joy, equanimity, truth, goodness, beauty, harmony,

and transcendence. What's left? You're all set. It's freedom. So it's also freedom, freedom from all conditioning, including the fear of death, because death happens to experience, not to the awareness, like death happens to the program on the screen, but not to this free. So you practice meditation every day. I think your yoga and meditation is a two to three hour a day practice. Talk to me a little bit about what type of meditation you are doing. What

are you doing when you're meditating? I know that you initially, I think, came into this space through transcendental meditation. Maybe is what you were originally taught. I'm just kind of curious what you do today and maybe how your approach, your method to meditation has changed over the years. I first do some body awareness and some breath awareness, which these days is frequently referred to as mindfulness. You know,

to be aware of your body, of your breath. Okay, that I do for however long, so I'm very familiar with every sensation in my body. Then I do some reflection, and the reflection goes very deep. Who am I? Am I? The changing body? Am I? The awareness of the body? Am I? The changing mind? Am I? The awareness or the changing mind? Am I? The changing emotions? Am I? The changing personality? Etcetera, etcetera. It takes me quite a bit of time, so I do that reflection inquiry, it's

called inquiry. Second, then I ask myself what do I want without looking for the answer, noticing sensations, images, feeling, thoughts, I notice them, let them go, but because they arise and subside in the same way as breadth or any other fluctuation. Then I ask myself what is my purpose? Then I ask myself what am I grateful for? Then

I do mantra practice similar to transcendental meditation. And finally, when I transcend, which because I've been doing this for forty years, I can go to that state of pure consciousness where there is deep stillness or transcendence, I rest in that awareness. So that becomes my identity. My identity is not my mind, not my body, not my personality, not the fluctuations of the changing world, but the awareness. And I can anchor myself in that identity any moment

I want, like right now, I could do that. I could be anchored in that awareness while I'm speaking to you. This whole process takes a little time, and then at night, before I go to sleep, I spend some reflective time on the meaning of death because this is my final chapter. You know, in my tradition there are four chapters. First twenty five years education, second twenty five years, fame and fortune.

I can say I've been there, done that, twenty five years giving back even there, I've been there, done that. This is my final chapter. So I'm preparing for death. So is that what the final chapter is? Final chapter is called self realization, not self improvement to know the self in its infinite dimensions and is stage two the fame and fortune also the stage where most people are also involved in family all of that. It's also called householder.

These are called ashrams. Ashams are locations in consciousness where you rest, which is your identity. So in the second phase, it's your ambition, your life goals. In this tradition again there are four goals in life. So first goal in life is life purpose dharma. Second goal in life is fame and fortune, or third goal in life is karma pleasure you know, including sexual pleasure, and final goal in

life is freedom from all of that. I want to ask you another question about meditation, because you've been teaching meditation for people for a long long time. Do you think everybody has the ability to get to transcendence in meditation? Is it simply a matter of putting in enough time? What do you think contributes because it seems pretty clear that some people naturally settle easier than others into a deeper state. How do you think about everyone's capacity? Do

we have different capacities in that? Yeah, we do, you know. I remember teaching Elizabeth Taylor meditation and after thirty seconds. She said, how long do I have to do this? She was actually upset. Okay. Then I remember teaching Mike Chael Jackson the same thing, and he transcended like that. It was like he was performing thriller or something like that. So there's a wide range. Some people nothing, some people

immediate transcendence, and some people just relaxation. Okay, Now it is true that artists in general actually have a pretty good idea, and also sports people because they've had peak experiences. You know, I taught meditation long time ago to Joe Namath when he was at the highest level of his peak career, and he said, well, I've experienced this. This is what happens to me when I'm playing. You know, time slows down, sounds disappear, even though the crowd is

cheering and everything is gorgeous and it's effortless. I didn't know this was meditation. I called it flow. If you read a description of mystical experience and flow states, you see we may not be talking about the exact same thing, but we're talking about something that shares a lot of

characteristics with each other. Performance is momentary peak living. It comes through meditation for someone who has difficulty settling let's say, you know, which I think is more and more people today, given the pace of our culture and how bombarded we are with things, There's still value in the process doing it, even if maybe I'm not getting to transcendence, or even if it's more challenging for me. I'm not one of those people that settle easily. You know. I tried TM

god how long ago now, thirty four years ago. So meditation has been sort of challenging for me. But I found it precisely for that reason, to be particularly valuable to me. If you just sit through it and consider it, I've done it. There's no such thing as a good or bad medication. That was the biggest thing for me, I think, was that I was frustrated with what I felt was my inability to do it, because I thought, well,

my brain should be stopping, but it wasn't. When I learned to just relax and be like, yeah, let it go, just sit here, relax relax the way now that you're bringing it up. These days, people get that experience with psychedelics like psilocybin and mushrooms and kindamine. What it does is loosens the neural networks of the condition mind. But I'm not recommending that that's the way to start magication,

but people do have those experiences. All right, let's talk about your latest book, Living in the Light, Yoga for Self Realization. You're talking about yoga more broadly than the way most people in the West would think of it, which is a series of poses that we go through which are called asanas. But you're talking about something called raja yoga, which is also I think you say, is translated as royal. So talk to me about royal yoga.

So you know, in my room where I'm sitting right now, which is my library, I have about numerous books on yoga, and all yoga books that are well written are actually derived from the original teachings of a great seer. We don't even know how long we live. Some people say, you know, a few hundred years BC, but we don't know. I mean, he's a mythical figure, but his teachings have

been recycled over thousands of years. His name is Patanjali, and Patanjali's yoga is what yoga is, and it has eight limbs, and the third limb is the arsenas of the posture path. Angeli starts in the first chapter with two aphorisms. First aphorism says, now the teaching of yoga begins. And the word yoga, by the way, is related to a Sanskrit word called huge, which means union, union with the self beyond all conditioning. So he says, now the

teaching of yoga begins. And then he says the second sentence in the whole teaching is yoga is the settling down of the fluctuations of the mind into pure awareness. What we just spoke about transcendence. Then in the remaining text, it describes eight limbs. The first limb in Sanskrit is called yama. In the book, I use the word social intelligence because that's what they are, Okay, they are rules, not even rules, principles of social intelligence based on awareness

or conscious living. The second limb is called niyama, which is emotional intelligence. The rules and there are five principles in each, so you know, instead of using those words Yama and niyama, I call them social and emotional intelligence. But then Patanjali jumps right into what we call the arsenas or the physical postures, because he says the physical postures meant to shift your experience of your body from a physical object to a field of awareness, which is true.

I mean, how do you know you have a body? You're aware of it, right, So, and then when you look at all the yoga and as the postures child pose, happy baby, pigeon, pose, cobra, etc. These are actually shifts in awareness. So you're actually shifting in awareness by becoming aware of your body into a different state of consciousness. So you know, he doesn't minimize the importance of the postures, but bear in mind that the postures are about five

percent of his writing of yoga. That's the third principle, the fourth principle. Now he starts with physical first rules of social and emotional intelligence. Third principle immediately physical because that's the most obvious. But then the fourth principles is pranayama, which is breath and how to use breath to control your autonomic nervous system. These days we are very familiar

with stress as sympathetic overdry. But actually, if you read potentially, he shows you how to use breath to induce different states of energy hyper excitement, vigilance, energy decrease in energy, cooling, the body warming, the body, controlling blood pressure. All of that is there just through breath. That's the fourth. The fifth principle, which is very interesting, also is called pratjara, but in English we can call it interroceptive awareness. So

perception is when you look at the outside world. Interraceptive is when you get to know what's happening inside your body. Now, we all actually train in introceptive awareness when we are babies. We call it toilet training, you know, so we can even train our animals and pets. You know, you take your dog out, dog nose can only be outside the house or whatever. So that's intraceptive awareness. But potentially doesn't stop there. He says, why do you only stop after

training your bowels and bladder. You can actually control your heart rate. You can do that with your breath. You can do that with every organ in your body. That now is picking up actually a lot of interest in the scientific world, because intraceptive awareness stimulates a part of our nervous system in English called the biggest nerve. The vaggest nerve is self regulating nerve. It counteracts the sympathetic overdrive from stress. So that's the fifth limb of yoga.

And then he says, once you've done all these, now you're ready for transcendence. And it then identifies the sixth, seventh and eight. Six is focused attention, which he calls the harna, how to concentrate on anything. Then Dan which is meditation, which we just spoke about. So he comes very late into the magicity process, seventh limb, and then the eighth is smadi transcendence. And then you have been liberated from the condition mine. You're living in the light,

so to speak. So those are the eight limbs called Raja yoga in English royal yoga. But that's not all of yoga. There's karma yoga, there's Bugti yoga, there's yan yoga. It's a complete science of the self. And so is Patanjali associated only with the royal yoga. Yeah, you're right. Actually he's associated with the Royal Yoga more than anything else.

The other upni shots, including you know, the most famous of them, the bugwad Gueta, which is like a bible, is all the yogas, and that is also a very interesting text. The bugwad Gueta starts with a battlefield. The battlefield is a Kurukshetra and there's a war going on between the forces of good and evil. And so there are two characters that are there in the bugwad Geita. One is Arjuna, the war and then there's Krishna, who's

the unconditioned awareness, and Arjuna is the conditioned mind. So you know, most commentaries on the bug with Gita don't go into this, unfortunately, even the ones that are written by some really good scholars. So the battlefield is on, you know, their forces are ready to fire at each other. The bugles are blowing the people that have drawn up these arrows, and Arjuna looks across and he has a panic attack. He says, you know, to Christiana, he says,

how can I kill these people? They're they're my cousins, they're my brothers and sisters. And Krishna then, for the eighteen chapters of the Githa, actually shows him how to vanquish the demons that are his own shadows. They're not enemies, they're his own shadows. And the battlefield of good and evil is within the conditioned mind. And then he teaches

all the four yogas, the Royal Yoga included, so eighteen aptors. Actually, even though the metaphors sometimes suggests there's a lot of violence, isn't the whole teaching is yoga. That's a fascinating interpretation which I had not heard of. Thank you for that. Maybe it's helpful to go through the other types of yoga real quick, because I think this is important. Right. There's a royal yoga, there's Bakti yoga, which I believe

is sort of considered the path of love. Perfect yeah, love as the means to enlightenment, choice based on love. And then Karma yoga, I believe is service, is a path selfless service. And then what's the fourth jan yoga? It is to correct the mistakes of the intellect. So what is the mistake of the intellect? As I am separate from the world, and you know, the intellect creates what we call subject object split. So the yan yoga

is also called the Razor's edge. Actually, you know some said Mom, the great novelist wrote a book called the rais Edge, and it starts with that, Beware of the Raisa's edge. The path to enlightenment is like the Raisa's edge. You could fall either way because the more intellectually become, the most smart you become, the more ego driven you become. So that's the riskiest part of yoga is ya yoga. You have to be a little sophisticated through the other

forms of yoga to engage in the yoga of the intellect. Now, I've often heard that those different types of yoga are particularly helpful because a person may find that they are better suited to one of them. Do you find that that's how it goes for a lot of people, as they pick one and they go deep, or are most people who are really practicing sort of practicing across all of those. I think people find the yoga of love the most fulfilling. It doesn't require discipline, and love actually

makes you feel good. Yeah, there is a center here, and I think they're primarily Bakti bag also includes singing and chanting the wood enchantment actually comes from that on chant how to become one with the divine within through chanted and now we find that actually when you chant or sing, you're stimulating the biggest Snow, that's also very interesting, very joyous. We've only got a couple of minutes here.

I know you have a hard stock. I want to ask you kind of one final question, and it would be what lesson do you think it's been hardest for you personally to learn in life not to be easily offended by criticism, you know. But one day I realized a long time ago, actually, you know that if I was offended by criticism, then I had no choice other than to be offended for the rest of my life. Yeah, or be silent. Right well, thank you so much for your time. It has been a pleasure to have you on.

I feel like I could have done this for a long time, but I appreciate it. As I mentioned earlier, the book is called Living in the Light Yoga for some Realization, and it's kind of in ways a two part book that you write the first part, and then one of your yoga teachers, Sarah Platt Finger writes the second part, which is more focused on the asanas themselves. So wonderful book, and Deepak. Thank you so much for your time. Eric really joined to talk to you. Thank

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