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Most people think about their health when something goes wrong.
Next Phase Human is for everyone who wants to start thinking about it before that moment arrives.
Hosted by Dr. Sandhu — a cardiologist with a focus on prevention, longevity, and whole-body wellness — this podcast brings together physicians, researchers, and wellness professionals for honest, evidence-based conversations about the topics that actually move the needle on your long-term health.
Each episode covers the intersection of cardiovascular wellness, modern medicine, lifestyle optimization, and human performance — translated into practical, approachable conversations for professionals, business owners, and anyone serious about living better longer.Topics include heart health, metabolic health, sleep, stress, nutrition, longevity diagnostics, wearable technology, recovery, burnout, and the future of preventative care.
This is not clickbait wellness. This is a forward-thinking physician who believes the best healthcare happens before you need it.
New episodes weekly.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Of course.
Appreciate you.
I appreciate being here.
So,
in terms of opening questions, I just wanted to-
Yep
... wide open question, attention in today's world.
Yep.
I know everyone talks about struggling with it.
There is an epidemic of lack of focus.
Absolutely.
So you always say, "Where awareness goes, energy
flows."
Yep.
Can you elaborate in the simplest terms on what that actually
means-
Yeah
... in practically day-to-day life?
Yeah.
So
I'll keep it as concise as I can.
In understanding the mind, we have to look at the mind as two things.
There's the mind, and there's awareness.
And you can look at the mind as having different areas of happiness, joy,
food, technology, and awareness as a glowing ball of light, you can
imagine. So the mind doesn't move, but awareness moves within the mind, and
wherever that awareness goes within the mind, it experiences that area of the mind.
And where awareness goes, that's where energy flows.
So as awareness
recurringly goes to the anger area of the mind, that's where energy's flowing, and
that area becomes strengthened. So similarly, externally,
when our awareness goes to one thing
repeatedly, that's where our energy is going.
And we build a energetic connection with that particular thing.
And energy has no ability to discriminate between what's positive and
negative. So if my awareness is always going to an upset area of the mind or always
going to my phone, I'm building an energetic connection to
that phone. So you can imagine like a energy tube that connects me with my
phone, and the more it goes there, the
stronger that connection gets and the harder for me it is to
become detached from it. And that's how we build attachments with people and things
in our life.
So the goal ultimately is to really control where awareness
is going, so you can control where energy's flowing, and you can control
what you're building connections with and what you're nurturing in your life.
Perfect. So in the neuroscience terms, it's-
Yeah
... the neurons that are firing together, they're wiring together.
So you're creating a circuit that-
Like that, yep.
Perfect.
Yep.
And just a little bit on-
And just to go back on the phone thing, if you gave me your
phone without the case
and you asked me to drop it from five feet, I'd happily
do it
on the floor. I have no attachment to it.
But if you asked me to hold my phone five feet off the floor and drop it, I
wouldn't do it.
True.
Because I'm attached to it.
Yes.
And there was a attachment test you can do.
It's just grab something, hold it over the toilet, and see if you'll open your
fingers. It shows you how attached you are to those things.
And it's our energetic connection that builds these attachments.
I have no energetic connection with your phone.
So for me,
if it falls and breaks, I don't care.
So-
Yeah
... in other words-
Yeah
... have these phones become an extension of our mind?
Absolutely, yes.
So they have.
Yes. Everything happens in the mind first.
Everything is created in the mind before it's created in the physical form.
If I'm sitting on the couch, I go like, "I'd like some ice cream."
Then you're like, "Ah, couldn't be bothered." Keep watching the show for another 15
minutes. I think again, "Really want some ice cream."
"Eh." And then another 10 minutes go by, I get up and go get some ice cream.
Everything starts in a thought form, gets repeated over and over again, gets
strengthened, and then appears,
manifests physically. So even with the phone, it's an
extension of our mind because that's the area of the mind awareness is going to.
And it's addicted. It's created these pathways and deposited energy
that's become so magnetic that it has the ability to pull awareness
there perpetually all the time.
So in today's day and age-
Yeah
... I hear this all the time: "I can't meditate." It's almost become an
identity statement.
Yes.
Why do you think is that?
Because the Western world has approached meditation in the wrong way.
In Hindu philosophy, there's eight steps to enlightenment.
Step six is concentration, and step seven is meditation.
Everybody in the West teaches meditation first, and they don't teach concentration.
What's one and two?
One and two is lifestyle design because if you don't have your lifestyle
set up, how then could you have an environment that supports
you
to grow?
You don't have enough money, you don't have proper housing,
medical care, and all of these things, and all of that come under one
and two of lifestyle design. The first critical step
towards any form of growth, whether it's inward or personal growth, is to have your
environment set up. You need to have sufficient amount of money.
You need to have a home, food on the table, and not be worrying
about these things. Only then can you actually begin a journey inward.
So does that mean you have to chase material first for spiritual
attainment?
You could probably do it in parallel, potentially-
Okay
... if you're mature enough and have the ability to.
But if not, yes, material things would have to go first.
Because if I can't pay my rent every month, how do I sit down in the morning and
meditate for an hour or even 10 minutes?
When I sit down, I'll be going, "I can't pay my daughter's school fees today, this
month."
So what are those eight steps, just for our listeners?
Yeah.
Just if someone was to walk this path-
Yeah
... they just want to plan the road.
Step one is restraint.
Mm-hmm.
How do I prevent the hemorrhaging of energy?
And we talked about today in your symposium.
We all have energy inside of us, and most people focus on building
energy by eating well, sleeping well, exercising,
meditating, but they're not looking at where they're hemorrhaging
energy. So if we used analogy of a bucket, if I want to fill a bucket with
water, I need to make sure it doesn't have any holes in it.
So similarly, step one is what are the guidelines I put in place in my
life, five to 10 guidelines that prevent me from losing
energy?I surround myself with uplifting
people.
What are other things? I consume only content that uplifts me or that's
neutral, and a series of guidelines.
Then step two is, now that I have energy contained,
step two is how do I refine that energy?
Right. So what are the practices I can do to refine that energy that I've contained
from hemorrhaging?
Meditation, journaling,
chanting, breathing techniques.
Step three is
yoga, as it's known in the Western world, or asana posture practice.
So I have energy in my body. Now I want energy to flow through my body, and
it flows through the nervous system.
You can look at your nervous system like garden hose.
If you've ever watered the garden and see water trickling out, there's probably a
kink in your hose. As soon as you straighten the hose, water flows out.
And the nervous system is the same way.
As we go through our day, we build emotional clogs in our
nervous system from encounters we have, challenges we have.
The act of stretching is almost like straightening the nerves, like the
garden hose that allows energy to flow through nicely.
So first step, containing energy, second step, refining energy, third step,
getting the hoses, the nervous system straightened out.
Step four, harnessing that energy.
Because now that we have good roads on the highway and cars
are speeding, we need to put speed signs, speed bumps, traffic lights.
If not, cars would just fly through the highway.
Mm-hmm.
So step four is harnessing it. Step five is withdrawing it.
So you want to withdraw it to a central location. Step six is focus.
When you have a meeting with your team, you dedicate a space
to meet.
You can't just say, "We're having a meeting at 10:30." "We're having a meeting at
10:30 in meeting room number two on the second floor, and this is our
agenda." So pulling all our energy into our spine, which is our central
location, that is focusing. Step seven is
meditating on that energy, concentrated
energy, and step eight is
becoming one with that concentrated energy.
But it's a systematic, sequential step
towards experiencing your pure energy inside of you, which
has never been created or destroyed.
But in the West, we like things that are sexy and fun.
Let me do an ayahuasca retreat or a Vipassana retreat.
No one wants to do the hard work of taking it step by step,
but that's the only way to assure sustainable
progress and growth.
Perfect. And
we talked a little bit about-
Yeah
... anxiety and stress.
Yes.
So in your terms, in the terms of focus and energy-
Yeah
... can you explain how we drive ourselves into anxiety and
stress? So if someone comes to me tomorrow and say, "You know what?
I am really stressed," how do I break it down to him
and say, "Okay, this is your way out"?
Yep.
There is no quick fix, right?
Mm-hmm.
And I would take a methodical approach of first
teaching them about awareness in the mind, and then teaching them what
is the movement of awareness in the mind that
results in stress, and then how do I prevent awareness from
doing that? Because awareness is moving in a particular way within the mind
that's creating the outcome of anxiety, that's creating the outcome of fear
or stress. Now I just need to prevent awareness from doing that.
And that's really where the teaching, the
sequential teaching should be. See, most people approach
stress and anxiety as, "Okay, let me learn how to breathe.
Let me meditate." I never recommend those because those are patches at the
end of the day. I'm not understanding that what's the mechanics of
what is happening inside that's resulting in this.
If I eat mushrooms and my stomach bloats,
and then I take medicine to deal with the bloating, I'm not
solving the problem.
If my awareness is doing something in my mind that results in
anxiety and then I meditate,
it's exactly the same thing like the mushroom example.
I just need to stop eating mushrooms.
Mm.
My awareness needs to stop jumping from one unfinished thing to
another, to another, to another in an uncontrolled way that results in anxiety.
And we're trained to do that with digital devices and social media.
Because I love gardening and plants, but when I go on Instagram,
Instagram shows me
a plethora-
Right
... of things that takes me from being upset to being
fearful, being concerning, to happy, to laughter,
silliness, all within a space of a couple of minutes.
Think of the impact it's doing emotionally on our mind.
Our mind's not built to
go rapidly between all of these emotions.
If you look at life 100 years ago, you may have a crisis and then maybe in a state
of fear or worry or sadness for a period of time of a few
days. But never will we ever been put
in a position where we would go to extreme areas of the mind within
such short spectrums of time. And when you repeat the process,
it results in anxiety and stress. So the short answer to
your question is that
take a systematic approach in educating the client.
Teach them about awareness in the mind.
Help them understand what awareness is doing in the mind that results in stress,
that results in anxiety, that results in fear, or that results in worry.
So in practical terms, if someone is living in a future problem-
Yep
...
the real practice would be to anchor them in the present to that-
To bring awareness back. Because whatever they're thinking about in the future,
it's the example that I gave with my guru when he was seven years old coming back
in the car and it was snowing really heavily.
This was in 1934, and he thought they were going to get stuck in the snow
and miss their radio program. He saw his awareness going into the future,
creating a situation that hasn't happened in his mind, where they were stuck in the
snow. Now awareness came back to the present and he's goingWe're stuck.
I'm going to miss my show. I'm not going to hear it.
There's not going to be another episode.
And then going through that whole cycle of emotions.
And when he realized that what he was worrying was only
future-based and hasn't even happened yet, he was able to bring his
awareness to the present and go, "I'm all right, right now.
We're not stuck in the snow. It hasn't happened yet." Which gives me the choice
to actually do something about it.
And if most people could look at the things that they were worried or feared about
on a daily basis, "Oh, I might fail my exam.
What if I don't get good enough grades?" Well, it hasn't happened yet,
right?
Right.
And you can see what awareness is doing.
It's going to the future, creating a situation in your mind,
thinking, "I didn't get good grades." Well, the exam's
still three months away.
Right.
And the repeated process-- What were you saying about neutrons and the thing?
What was the phrase?
It's the neurons that-
Yeah
... that fire together, they wire together.
Yeah. They fire together, wire together. I like that. So it's the same thing.
So imagine if my exam is three months from now, and every day,
five times a day, I thought, "What if I fail or don't get the grades to get me into
college?"
How much firing and wiring together am I doing five times a
day, every day for three months?
So the control of awareness prevents us from allowing us to do that.
So I'm just going to perseverate on this for-
Yes
... maybe one more minute.
No, of course.
And
so
I get this pushback
in talking to someone, I'd get this pushback.
Oh, it's easy to say,
but it's really hard to do. And I can understand, like you said, if you've
practiced distraction for years, or if you've practiced to live in anxiety or
stress for years-
Yeah
... what's your first step to walk out of it in the practical terms?
What do I go home and tell them, "Okay, start doing this." Like, the reason
people talk about breathing is-
Yeah
... it's okay.
It's doable.
It's very doable, it's practical-
Yeah
... and yes, you slow down your body.
The mind has to follow a little bit on that.
Yeah.
It doesn't stay that way, but-
Yeah
... you're going to get relief. So what do I tell them?
Okay, you can do the breathing, but
this is the actual treatment.
Yes.
Where do we start?
The honest answer, I think you have to look at each individual and go,
how mature are they?
Mm-hmm.
And how badly do they want to get out of it?
Because the less mature soul is not willing to do
the treatment.
So the desire has to be there?
The desire-
Number one
... has to be there.
So we established desire.
Yeah.
Now?
You have to establish and evaluate at what scale the desire is, right?
How badly do I want to fix this? People want to solve problems at the
height of the problem,
and then after that, they couldn't care less about dealing with it.
Mm-hmm.
Everyone comes and sees me
when at the peak of whatever they're going through, whether it's a marriage crisis,
"I just sold my business. I have no identity of who I am as
an entrepreneur." Then they come and see me, and once they've gone past that,
haven't solved the problem,
then they don't need me anymore.
We just need a Band-Aid.
We just need a Band-Aid. So I think for a less mature soul, the breathing, the
meditation is helpful. For a more mature person that has a greater
desire of, "I want to actually recalibrate my
mind and sustain that change," then the treatment is
the way to go forward. And that's why, when I work with professional athletes and
entrepreneurs, these are individuals that are driven to make
concrete changes. That desire has to be there, and if it's not-
Then it's not going to work
... it's not going to work. And that's why these motivational speakers work so
well. It's a patch, right? You inspire them, you get them motivated-
Right
... they do it for a little while, and then it just fades and...
Perfect.
Yeah.
So for someone who can't focus-
Yeah
... this is another thing I hear all the time in today's world. I'm sure you do.
Yeah.
I can try, but I can't focus.
Is it the same remedy for that, that you're going to have to-
You have to-
... where do you start training your awareness?
You have to learn. You have to learn the mechanics. Do you drive a stick shift car?
I have, but not right now.
No.
But I have, yes.
You have.
What are the key ingredients you need? You got three pedals, right?
You got the clutch, the brake, the accelerator, and you got the gears.
Steering wheel, left, right, hold it straight, go forward.
Once you know how the clutch and the accelerator work together with
the gear, all three things at the same time, you can drive the car.
Mm-hmm.
You don't need to know about the fuel injection, how the carburetor works, none of
that stuff.
So I think in a fundamental, basic way, we need to give people understanding that
you've got the mind, you've got awareness. The mind doesn't move.
Awareness moves within the mind. And depending on what awareness is doing,
it's creating distraction, focus, anxiety, stress, fear, worry.
And by understanding the mechanics of that, all I need to know is I define
focus as my ability to keep my awareness on you.
If it shifts away, I'm getting distracted.
My ability to hold it on you is my ability to focus.
And when you can break it down and keep it that simple, and people can understand,
they can begin the process of learning to focus.
I think what I realized, Dr. Sandhu, is that I left the monastery about 16 years
ago or something like that, and in the first few years was very observant on
where the world was. I lived in a monastery in a
very high intense training. We were training people
for-
Mm-hmm
... excellence.
Right.
And then what I saw is that
what sells, what generates revenue,
not the stuff I'm teaching.
Because no one wants to do the hard work-
Mm-hmm
... of learning awareness in the mind.
If I taught about meditation and different breathing techniques
I learned as a monk, and how to wrap my leg around my neck and breathe
out of my left nostril while chanting this ancient mantra,
I'd sell 20,000 courses.
Yes.
If I tell people, all you need to do is learn about awareness in the mind, they go
like, "Oh, that's not good enough. That's too simple.
Give me something a little bit more exciting."
A little more... I get it. This is the era we live in, right?
It is. And people don't want to do the basic work, and it's not
complicated. It's so simple. You have to do it.
You have to understand it, and you have to do it.
And nothing I've shared here on this podcast is complicated.
No.
I've talked about a ball of light moving in the head.
My daughter, who was five at one time, could understand thatHer friends could
understand that.
No, absolutely.
So your goal is to hold the ball of light on one thing, and we have to practice
this.
And if it moves away, bring it back.
Yes.
It's doing the reps-
It's doing reps, yes
... again and again.
Yes. You don't need to learn a thousand things.
You need to learn a few things and go really deep in it.
And I talk about going narrow and deep as opposed to shallow and wide.
And we live in a society where we want to go shallow and wide.
Right.
We want to touch the surface of a thousand things so we can say
we've read this book, we've done this course, I've done that retreat.
Can you practice it?
Exactly.
Yeah.
How does it change my life?
Yes. My mom can cook amazing South Asian
meals.
She's practiced it for decades, and she's fed her family. Right?
But she hasn't done
100 different cooking classes. She learnt a few recipes,
and she's mastered the techniques, and now is an
excellent cook.
That's the mastery that you want to get to.
You want to pick a few things and go narrow and deep on those.
Be really good at those.
Be really good at that. But these are fundamental things, right?
Everybody should learn to focus because it helps us in our relationship,
whatever it is we're pursuing. It's a fundamental, basic skill every human
needs.
Perfect.
Yeah.
So we live in a world where
one thing we keep talking about, "I don't have time."
How do you connect time and energy?
Now, which one comes first? So if I say, "I don't have time," is
it really I'm expending too much time or energy on one thing?
Yeah.
How do you differentiate?
Well, I think, too, with the time thing, when people say they don't have time,
it's not that they don't have time, they just have misguided priorities,
and they're just doing too much.
If I did 100 things in my life going on at the same time,
I can't divide that into 24 hours. But if I had
five things that were focused on in my life,
I can have time for those five things.
The key is simplification of our life.
We are just doing way too much.
So people feel anxiety and stress because they're perpetually needing to shift
from one thing to another. And
how's that related to energy? We talked about the concept of where
awareness goes, energy flows, right?
Mm-hmm.
So let's look at a very, very simplified view of time management.
I sleep eight hours a day. I work eight hours a day.
I dedicate two and a half hours for family, and then other things for
personal care, whatever. And part of the two and a half hours for family, I
lock in there every day. I write it down in my book.
I'm going to spend 45 minutes having dinner with my family.
So as long as I physically sit at a dinner table with my family for
45 minutes, I can literally check off the time management box because I've
clocked 45 minutes.
Right.
I've fulfilled the time management.
My question is, where's your awareness during those 45 minutes?
Because if I'm having dinner with you and you're my family, I'm having dinner with
you, and as you're talking to me, my awareness is drifting and going somewhere
else, that's where my energy's flowing.
Right.
So even though I'm physically present, I can check the time management box,
energetically, you don't feel my presence.
True.
You know Dad's here
sitting in front of you. You see him, but mentally, energetically,
he's absent.
So that's what people perceive as disconnect.
As a disconnect. So when people say, "I feel a disconnect,"
they're not physically disconnected, they're energetically disconnected.
And that's the world we live in today, where when you're having coffee with
someone, their awareness cannot be on you for an
extended period of time. It's always going somewhere else.
So if you think you have coffee with someone for an hour,
out of that one hour, how many minutes truly was energy
actually flowing towards you and not somewhere else?
I think that would just be fascinating to find out.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So you said we are doing too many things, right?
Yes.
So how do I know what are my top
five priorities in life?
I have every shiny thing, okay, attracts you.
Yep.
And this is the world we live in, so a lot of us have different options in front of
us.
Yep.
So how would I know what's my core
top priority?
Yep.
And then, okay, one, two, these are my top five in order, and
everything else I can sort of give up. How do I figure that out?
One thing to touch about the shiny thing, then I'll circle back to this, is that I
have a saying that goes, "Opportunities are not opportunities if they're not
aligned with purpose."
Because I get a lot of-
True
... opportunities coming my way.
Right.
And I go like, "Wow, this sounds like an amazing idea or
opportunity, and can make money from it," or whatever it is.
And then I go, "Is it aligned with my purpose in life?" If it is not,
then that's part of something that I need to let go.
So
when we can learn to focus as a fundamental step one 101,
then we can be in a state of self-reflection long enough
to actually understand what it is we want in our life.
So we've met for the first time physically.
Mm-hmm. Right.
We've spoken on the phone before.
If I wanted to get to know you, and if I lived here in Bakersfield, and just say
every Friday
at 3:00 PM, we went out for a glass of wine or a cup of coffee or something for two
hours,
and we did this religiously every week.
After six months, we'd get to know each other really well.
Initially, our conversation's a very surface level. You're married, you got kids.
Mm-hmm.
How long you been a doctor? All that kind of stuff.
Right.
As time went on, you know what drove me, what inspired
me, what are my passions are, what are my struggles.
Similarly, I would know about you.
But the only way I would get to know you is by spending quality
time with you.
Right.
When was the last time an individual spent quality time and
self-reflection with themselves?Now people will say to me and push back and go
like, "Oh, when I walk my dog at night, that's my alone time." I'm like, "No,
that's walking your dog, picking up poop on the sidewalk, avoiding traffic." "When
I am at the gym, that's my alone time." No, that's lifting weights.
When have you sat in a room by yourself, no music,
no podcasts, no books, it's just you, like you and
me having a conversation going, how am I?
Am I happy? What do I want in life?
Why are we so afraid to do that?
Because most people live in the conscious mind, and as soon as
you go past the conscious mind, you come to the subconscious mind,
and the subconscious is the storehouse of the past.
So you see everything that's in there.
I spent 10 years living as a celibate Hindu
monk in a cloistered traditional monastery.
So three meals a day, waking up at 4:00 in the morning, going to bed at 9:00 at
night.
Initial years, I spoke to my parents twice a year on the phone, no emails, no
letters. Never spoke to any of my friends again.
People would ask, as a young 20-something years old, "What was the
hardest part? Was it being celibate?
Was it living in the monastery, eating only three meals a day?" I said, no.
The hardest part was every night I would go back to my hut, which was 10
feet by 10 feet, and there was no electricity, no plumbing,
no internet, no phone, nothing,
and it was just me by myself.
And who did I get to know?
Me.
And that was the most painful, difficult thing because I had nothing to
escape to. Today when you see someone on the
platform waiting for the subway to come, they'll pick up their phone and look
at it. Because if not, they'd have to sit there with their own
thoughts.
Right.
And that's difficult. So people don't want to spend time with themselves in
self-reflection.
Two reasons. One is I don't think people are ever taught to even do that-
Right
... as a child. Second is, as you look inward, you're going to see the wonderful
things about you and the not so wonderful things about you.
Which means now
you're either going to do something about it or-
Not do something
... not do something about it. So it's better to just go external and get
engrossed with everything else. But if you don't look inward, how then would you
know what your priorities in life are?
The answers are not external, and I'm not trying to be philosophical or
spiritual here.
Right.
Right?
Look at it this way, right? If I had a business
and my business is growing, and I feel like I need to brand my business, so I hire
a branding company to brand my company.
They would come and not immediately arrive at my doorstep and tell
me what my company brand is. They would interrogate me, for lack of a better word.
Right.
They'd ask me questions, they ask my leadership team questions, get all that
data, go back, process it, come back with that
information, have another round of interviews, might go on for three, four
months. And after about four or five months, they'd come back and go, "Your color
is blue, and the hex code is A43156."
Mm-hmm.
"And here's the font that you need to use, and these are the sizes, and these are
the only colors you can use. And here's your tagline," and this and that.
Right.
You spending time with yourself, not in meditation, but in self-reflection and
inquiry, is you branding yourself.
And you can't come out with a brand identity, which is your purpose and
your sub-purposes, without actually
having that conversation.
Perfect. That's actually helpful, and I think
if we go a little further into it-
Yeah
... you work with high performers.
Yeah.
Quite a few of them.
Yeah.
How do you tell them to manage their energy or time?
Yeah.
Or does one come before the other?
I think a lot of them come to me because they've heard about the energy.
They're very disciplined about their time already.
Mm-hmm.
What they're new to is the concept of energy and the
concept that where awareness goes, energy flows.
Mm-hmm.
I had
the good fortune many years ago working with one of the best soccer players in the
world for three seasons, and he had approached me and said,
"When I'm at home, I have my phone, my iPad, and the TV
on at the same time."
And I realized that-
It's a more common scenario than we think
... and here he is playing at the highest level of soccer.
And he goes, "I realize I can't concentrate.
And when we're one-nil down at halftime, we're just about to go back for the second
half of the game, and our coach is telling us, 'Okay, guys, we're one-nil down.
We've really got to focus.'
How do we do it? No one's ever taught us how to focus." They've told us to focus,
and sports seem to do this all the time, right?
In basketball, you see a little timeout.
Mm-hmm.
Everyone gets off to the court. Coach is scribbling on the board.
"Okay, guys, go back out there. Let's just get focused."
What does that mean? How do you actually focus?
And how can you focus if you've not spent any time practicing
focus?
There's so many high, top-level professional athletes, I'm talking at
the toppest, highest level,
that in their bus going to the stadium
are on social media.
What does it mean?
Why do I say on social media? Because when they're on social media, their
awareness now is jumping to different areas, right?
Mm-hmm.
You're scrolling through your feeds, you're going to a happy area, unhappy area,
sad area, funny area, laughing area, whatever different areas of the mind.
You're training awareness to jump all around your mind.
If the bus ride's 30 minutes, that's what you're training.
So now when you go on the field to perform, what has your
awareness been trained to do? Jump all over the place.
Right.
What's it going to be good at doing? Jumping all over the place.
When you sit with your family, what's awareness going to be doing?
Jumping all over the place. So even though I'm here with you at the dinner table,
my awareness has been trained not to be at one place at a
time. It's been trained to move every 10 seconds,
15 seconds to any area of the mind. And that
stress of awareness moving around the mind creates this
anxiety and the stress, and that eventually feeds into the body and
every part of people, and they just start to break down.
So in real terms-
Yeah
... if I want to train my awareness-
Yes
... say, an exercise to train my awareness-
Yes
... to focus, where would I start?
Really simple, which most people can't do.
Practice doing one thing at a time.
If
there's the mind and there's awareness, and awareness moves within the mind, and
the mind doesn't move, and I repeat myself a lot as you can hear-
Right
... because it's the only way people are going to learn.
If I made it my only practice throughout the day to keep my
ball of light on you-
Mm
... on whoever or whatever it is I'm engaged with, and when it drifts away,
I bring it back.
Mm.
It drifts away, I bring it back.
And if you could just do that, you'll start getting better at
focus. And what you'll notice is that the duration it drifts away,
and before you become conscious that you're no longer paying attention, becomes
shorter and shorter. So I'm talking to you, you respond, my awareness drifts away.
It could drift away for a minute, two minutes even.
But the more I practice this, that duration goes away.
It goes from two minutes to 90 seconds, to 60 seconds, to 30 seconds, to 15
seconds, to eventually you even see yourself starting to
drift and bring it back. And then eventually it just doesn't go
anywhere because you become good at what you practice.
So you're rooted in present. Right?
You're rooted in the present. I don't have to try to focus.
Not because I was a monk or
I'm anybody special, it's what I practice.
The same way the soccer player is really good at playing soccer because it's what
he's practiced.
Right.
He sucks at playing basketball. He's never practiced it.
I've practiced keeping awareness on one thing at a time so I can be
completely present with you. But if you practice allowing awareness to go
everywhere, and you do that 10 hours a day, you'd be a master at it.
So in practical terms, the analogy-
Yeah
... like you gave is your day-to-day repetitive things.
Yes.
Try to stay present with them when you're talking to your spouse
or eating food.
Yes.
Just the whole act of eating food can be pretty magical.
Amazing.
Just take a moment to share with you.
I was on a four-and-a-half-week tour around the world speaking and running my
retreat, and at one point I ended up in Sri Lanka at this resort.
I spoke at an event. I went to have dinner, and I sat at dinner, and the
table next to me there was this Asian couple.
They had three plates of food in front of them, husband and wife.
They had their phone in front of them,
and they never talked to each other for the half an hour I sat at the table next to
them. And he would pry his awareness, it's an
amazing study of awareness and the mind, pry his awareness from his food, move it
from the phone to the food. He'd open his mouth, grab the chopstick,
stuff enough food in his mouth, then he almost looked like he
disconnected his jaw to open his mouth even bigger, shoved more
food in there. I swear to God, this was the most fascinating thing I saw on
my whole trip. Turned around and then just chewed his
food for four or five minutes and on the phone till he
realized at some point he had no food left, turned around, did that,
and he took literally five, six seconds to shove as much food as he could in his
mouth, and then go back to his phone. And he and his wife never talked.
Didn't see what he was eating,
didn't communicate,
but this is the level of addiction that people are-
So we see so much of this day-to-day life-
Yeah
... in households. People are becoming distant from-
Yes
... each other, from their kids.
Yeah.
So this is the disintegration we are seeing.
Yeah.
What's the right way? If I want to say,
"Okay, I'm seeing it in front of me," how do I address
it for someone I love? Oh. Okay.
Yeah.
Phones have become these new shiny objects-
Yeah
... that hijack our awareness.
Yes. Thank you for using the right term. I really appreciate that.
Perfect. So how do I prevent that
phone from hijacking my awareness?
I train the people around me, the people that matter most to me, my family, my
close friends. They never pull out their phone.
I was in Santa Monica yesterday when I flew in.
I spent two and a half hours with a really close friend, had breakfast with him,
went for a walk on the beach.
Not once did he pull his phone out in front of me,
and I'm sure he might do that with other people.
With me, he's trained not to do that. It's just not allowed.
You pick me or you pick the phone.
My time is precious, right?
Right.
I am going to die one day-
Yes
... and if I'm going to give you a few minutes of my time,
then be present at least. So I've trained the
people around me, and then
that's the approach I take. And part of training them is
telling them,
"I love you.
I value you. You matter in my life. I want to be completely
present here with you, give you my energy, my time,
listen to everything you have to share with me.
I'm not doing this for a selfish reason.
I truly love and care with you."
And that act of doing that tells the other person, and they feel how
much you love them. My guru was the first person to teach that to me, and he
taught that by being a role model. Every time he spent time with me,
he gave me his undivided attention.
I felt the intensity of his love
and presence that filled me with so much love and
care and support that I go, "What a gift
to give someone else,"
the gift of presence. But you can only do that by being focused
because presence is a byproduct, it's an outcome of
the ability to focus. You don't practice being present, you practice being focused.
How do I get muscle? I lift weights.
Right.
Right. I focus on lifting weights. The muscles come as a byproduct.
You want to be present, you learn to focus, and it's one of the greatest
gift of giving someone,
showing someone that you care, that they matter.
So it'll be fair to say, if I want to get better at anything
in life, I've got to do a lot of reps on this
thing called focus.
Yes.Absolutely
And it'll translate to every other skill.
To every other skill.
My guru gave this beautiful analogy once.
I went up to him in his office, and in a conversation, he reached to
his Kleenex box, and he grabbed a tissue,
and he put it on the table, and he laid it out.
And I'll use that same example, but in the case of focus.
Focus is in the middle. If I uplift focus and get better at
focus, and I lift the middle of the tissue,
every corner of the Kleenex gets uplifted
as well. As you work on increasing focus, you
build better relationships with people because people feel your
presence. You're better at every skill that you do, whether it's
medicine or sports or anything that you do.
You can perform it better.
The high cost of distraction is awareness has to engage
with A, disengages with A, goes to B, engages with
B for a few seconds, disengages with B, comes back
to A, has to find out where it got disengaged, reconnect with
that,
do that for a few seconds, disengage with A, go to C now, start
C for a few seconds, or you know.
Then disengage with C, go to B, find out where it left in B.
Think of how taxing that is on the mind and how much
energy it consumes.
Absolutely, even in-
Just talking about it is exhausting.
Exactly. And even in neuropsychology, that's what is
task switching. It expends so much energy.
So much.
Your brain gets way tired-
Yes
... that way.
Absolutely. And if you look at life, Dr.
Sandhu, is we have a finite amount of energy each day. And why do I say that?
Because at some point tonight, we're going to be exhausted, and you're going to
say, "I'm done. I'm going to bed." Depending on how well you sleep, your energy
builds back up,
and then you spend it throughout the day till you have no energy left.
So, if you only have a finite amount of energy, why would you perform
tasks that are high energy-consuming? You wouldn't.
Our whole goal in society is to find more energy-
Right
... LED lights, lamps, light bulbs because they consume less
energy than the old incandescent-
Right
... light bulbs, or cars that use less fuel
than the old ones.
But then yet, when it comes to mentally,
we're doing the complete opposite. We've gone the other way.
We're doing tasks in our mind that consume so much energy
that leads to mental stress, mental health, physical
aging
because of all our life forces being sucked up
into
our mind.
So, I just want to-
Yeah
... hone in a little more on one point because I do see that question coming
up. So, I can tell someone, "Okay, we need to spend time with ourselves
to know ourselves better."
Now, the pushback that I'm going to get is,
"I'm so busy. I have job. I have this.
I do this. And then I have kids at home, and then I have family.
And if I go and close the room and sit with myself, I'm doing injustice to my
family who's been waiting for me all day." How do you reconcile that?
Okay.
I have a simple question for your audience.
If my task for you is that you wake up in the morning,
and as soon as you open your eyes and before you reach over and touch the one that
you love the most, your phone-
Unfortunately, that's true for a lot of us, right?
It totally is. You don't reach and caress your spouse. You caress your phone.
You sit there and you just go, "Hi, baby. How did you sleep last night?
Look at, you've been active all night."
And don't touch your phone. Get up, answer the call of nature, find a quiet corner
in your house or a room, and spend five minutes, not in meditation,
in conversation, asking yourself, same way I would have a conversation with you,
how am I feeling? Am I happy? What do I want out of life?
And you may not have answers, but that's the practice.
Do that every day for five minutes.
Now, the pushback is, "I don't have time for that. I've got a busy life.
I got family. I got kids."
Now, those people that push back, just say Joe pushes back on me on
that, and I call Joe and I say, "Hey, Joe, you want to catch up for dinner
tomorrow?" He says, "I can't tomorrow, but next Thursday I'm free.
Let's get together." So, I go and have dinner with Joe on
Thursday for two hours, get a nice meal, couple of drinks. We enjoy.
We had a great conversation. Now, let me ask you this question.
How many five-minute segments are there in two hours?
24. So, which means if I skip the dinner, I could have
sat with myself for five minutes each day for 24 days straight.
Did I do the math right on that?
Absolutely.
So, I'll say yes to dinner, but I'll say no to five minutes with myself.
Why is that?
So, it's what we value.
It's what we value, what we prioritize. We don't want to know who we are.
I'll say yes to dinner. I'll go out for three-hour dinner.
How come you can find time to go out for a three-hour dinner with your friend,
but yet if I ask you to spend five minutes with yourself,
you couldn't do it?
Have you been out for a three-hour dinner with friends, family?
Happens to all of us. You're having a good time, you forget time, right?
That's-
Three hours. That's 36 five-minute segments.
That means you could sit with yourself every day for more than a month if
you skip that one dinner. Priorities.
All our priorities are skewed.
And those five minutes will make me better with my family-
Absolutely
... and everything else that I value.
Yes, because you better know yourself, right?
You run a business.
Mm-hmm.
Don't you want to study who your
clientele is, your audience, your market?
And the better you understand that, doesn't your business do better?
Absolutely.
Right?
Yep.
You don't go sell lawn mowers. You go your niche.
The narrower and deeper you go in your business, and the better you understand the
niche and who you are and what your company is about and what
services you provide and who are your ideal target
clients that really can value your work and are happy to pay you for
your work,
the better you do. It's no different.
The more I get to know me,
the better I can serve the people and things that I love.
I bet I can serve my business
So that five minutes that I'll spend with myself, just to reiterate for our
listeners-
Yep
... that will be the act of highest love to my family.
Yes, simple way of this,
version 2.2 of you can serve your family better than version 2.1 of you.
Well said.
iPhone 18-
Yes
... probably does a better job than iPhone 11. No one would argue.
So why wouldn't version 18 of you do better than version 11 of you?
That's so true.
Yeah.
So I want to shift a little bit-
Yeah
... shift gears here.
Social media-
Yes
... is a big
change in our society.
Yeah.
What is it doing to our awareness and energy, and how do I go about
it? Should I not even
touch social media? Not practical for some jobs.
Yeah.
How do I go about it?
I think you define the relationship with it.
I lived in New York for 11 years before I moved to Costa Rica.
And I lived in an apartment with my wife, and I
never owned a shovel.
Didn't need a shovel.
Mm-hmm.
I moved to Costa Rica, I have 33 acres of land, I have
beautiful gardens that we have planted 9,000 trees and plants.
I have a big shed with multiple shovels and garden
tools.
When I want to plant a tree, I take the shovel out, I dig a hole, I plant
the tree, I put the shovel back.
My phone, I've defined a relationship with my phone
as a tool.
I need it for my business,
and occasionally I use it to entertain myself,
or find news or whatever it is. And when I'm done with the
tool, I put the tool back. And I think when we can define our
relationship with the phone and what its purpose, its role in
our life is,
then I think we can have a better relationship with it.
For me, it's a shovel. I don't carry my shovel around in Costa Rica all day.
I only pull it out when I need to dig a hole.
So for me, my phone,
if I don't need to post
or do anything, I don't use the phone.
The phone is there specifically to fulfill certain task,
and then it's completely out of sight when I'm
with my family,
especially with my daughter. I want my daughter to know that when I'm with
her, she has my complete undivided attention.
She feels the entire
force of my love and energy coming through my undivided
attention to her, so there's no phone.
So in today's-
And just to one point-
Mm-hmm
...
a few days ago, I was at home and we were in
my office, and my phone was there on the table, and it binged.
And I was playing with my daughter, and then it binged again.
My daughter got up to pick up the phone to see.
I think she said, "Dad, someone's trying to text you." And I go, "It doesn't
matter."
She goes, "Don't you want to see who it is?" I said, "No, I'm with you.
Why would I want to see who else is trying to reach me?"
So then she came and sat down, and we just kept playing.
It's clear in her mind now
who's number one.
What's priority.
What's priority. For me, it's her.
And-
Yeah
... so in today's day and age-
Yeah
... a lot of us are sort of, there's no better word to say,
but addiction.
Yes.
Okay.
Absolutely.
So if you're not doing anything every two minutes-
Yeah
... you got to pick up the phone.
It's the cigarettes of the-
Look at something
... of the '90s, right?
Exactly.
And the social media companies are the tobacco companies of the '80s and '90s.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So how do we wean people off this? Where do I start?
By being a role model. I think it has to be top-down.
I think if you're trying to target the bottom market of everybody, it's not going
to work.
The honest answer, it really comes down to the evolution
of a person. How mature is someone, and how receptive are
they to seeing it? Right. And most people, like the gentleman and his
wife at the restaurant,
why even bother?
Nothing I say would even make a difference.
So for me, I role model it to people.
I role model it to my family, to my friends, to all the people that matter to me.
So like I'm having breakfast with my friend and walking with him, he never pulled
his phone out once because he knows
I'm not upon him to see it.
So now he may want to take it back and go and give it to his loved ones or
to his other close friends that I don't know.
So it's dripping it down-
It's-
... from someone you love.
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And then within companies, it needs to start with leadership.
The company owner and the leadership team need to adopt it
for it to spread down the company. Because if you talk about the task shifting and
how much energy consuming, think if you had 50 employees or 100 employees,
and everyone is distracted. How much energy are they wasting?
What if you
adopted a model where you paid employees
only for the time that they're actually focused?
Think how much money you would save.
This is California. We'll be in trouble.
You know what I'm saying?
It's true.
Yes. No, it is true, and we are all guilty-
Yep
... to a certain extent.
Yep.
So the kids, let's come to teens and kids-
Yep
... and they want phones.
Yep.
And as parent, you're faced with this crossroads.
Okay, my kid has a phone.
Do I restrict them? "Okay, you can't do this," or, "You can't have
the phone from this to this hour." Or teach them awareness?
I think teach them. With my daughter, she doesn't have a phone.
She's seven, and I just gave her a phone two months ago.
It's one of my old employee's iPhone,
I don't know, 10 or whatever it is.
Mm-hmm.
And so she has wifi at home, and she has an Apple
email ID, so she gets iMessage.
She doesn't use her phone. So when I was traveling for four weeks in Europe
and Asia and everywhere, I kept messaging her, and then I talked to her one night.
I was like, "Why haven't you checked your messages?" Like, oh.
So because I don't care about my phone
She's learning
She's learning it doesn't matter.
I'd rather watch my favorite show on TV or play with
my friends or do something else. It's
not important.
But we have to role model it, right?
I can't tell you, look, Sandeep, how many parents come up to me and say,
"Can you teach my children how to focus?" I'm like, "You can't focus."
Right.
So how can you ask your child to do something that you're not doing yourself?
If
you, not you you, but the general you-
Mm-hmm
... are addicted to your phone,
then how do you expect your children not to be addicted to your phone?
So you have to set the precedence. You have to set the role model of
saying, like, "Hey, my phone doesn't matter to me.
When I need to work or I need to do something, I pick it up, but if not, it's out
of sight."
And you're here, and I'm completely with you.
I think parents want their kids to be something that
they're not willing to be themselves.
So the message doesn't look like the messenger,
and the kids see.
Absolutely. You put it succinctly and perfectly.
So in terms of social media-
Yeah
... the kids will have some exposure to it at some point.
Yeah.
It is the Wild West out there.
Yes.
And it affects their sense of self-worth, self-esteem.
Yes.
How do we
train kids for that? We can't totally shield them all the time.
No.
So they are going to head into that world.
How do I best prepare my kid for that, my teen?
By you doing the work on yourself first.
By you spending the time to discover who you are,
what your purpose in life is, what your priorities in life are,
simplifying your life to your purpose and your
priorities, and being a role model to them about it.
Because now you're showing them that-- When my daughter looks at me,
she goes,
"Yeah, Dad has
multiple social media accounts, a following and everything, but he obviously
doesn't care about it. He's more interested in me, Mom,
our dogs, the gardens, and a bunch of other things."
So I'm role modeling to my daughter what's
important. I'm not telling her social media is bad.
I'm just showing her to
help her define where I put my priorities and where I'm
investing my time and energy. Because I
think if we take the approach going, "Social media is bad, we need to block times,"
we're kind of missing the point.
Right.
What about if we took the time to help our children
discover what their purpose is in life is?
If your son loves playing tennis and that's his passion, if he's
so absorbed in that, why would he care about
anything else in life? And that's the approach I take.
I need to get clear what I want in life and show role
model it to my daughter and others that
there's a whole world outside the screen.
And just a sub-part to that question-
Yeah
... social media can be filled with toxic comments.
Yes.
And you see this, unfortunately-
Yeah
... in the society that we live in. And sometimes kids are on the receiving end
of it and-
Yes
... sometimes the kids can be, I mean, it's hormonal, it can be pretty mean about
it.
Absolutely.
How would you tell your kid to handle that?
I know I sound repetitive.
Yes. I'm
sorry I'm belaboring this, but-
No, I-
... I want to kind of-
Yes
... drive this point home-
Yeah
... because this is a question that I feel, as a parent, I think
about it, and I'm sure there's a lot of other parents who are thinking the same
thing.
And why I'm being repetitive is because
I made a promise to myself that I would not go out there
and patch people's problems.
Mm-hmm.
That I would show the treatment.
Mm-hmm.
And not everybody's going to buy the treatment.
Right.
But long-term, that's going to create the biggest impact in the world.
So with my daughter, and she goes to school, and she has kids saying
things to her, and I think it's more prevalent with girls than with boys.
I think boys just go out and punch somebody-
Right
... and then that's over.
Right.
There's not much-
That's physically handled very quickly.
Physically handled very quickly.
Whereas with girls, it's very emotional and verbal.
So I go back to with her, it's like, okay,
first obviously expressing empathy and
compassion and love and then the next day asking her,
"Where did so-and-so take your awareness to?"
"She took my awareness to an upset area of the mind or a sad area of the mind."
"And why do we allow our awareness to go there?"
"Because I didn't control it." And I go back to the mechanics of it.
Because ultimately what I want to do is empower my daughter to
understand that she can't control her environment around her or what happens
to her, but she can always choose how she responds to
everything. But if I focus on trying to cut off things
that might harm her,
it's a fruitless task.
Right.
It's unending. What I want to train her is show her that
she can choose how she responds to each and everything in her
life. And
how do I do that? By training her about awareness in the mind, and then it's her
practicing.
And I used to be reactive to things.
Now,
hardly.
Could that be the
one way of saying free will?
Free will, right. I get to choose. I get to choose how I respond.
I can't choose what happens to me or what is said to me, but I can
always choose how I respond. And that, ultimately, is the
treatment. And I think parents are taking the approach of patching.
Social media only certain times, you're not allowed to go on these feeds,
you're not allowed to subscribe to this. You're patching the problem.
You're not teaching them how-
The fundamental
... the fundamental things. Because it's not social media, but what if they go to
school tomorrow and something else happens, someone says something, or if they go
to the store and the shopkeeper's rude to them,
it's endless.
So one final question-
Yeah
... I want to come to isWe touched up a little bit on that,
but so I'm a doctor.
Yep.
So I see a lot of patients every day.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of professionals like this, doctors, nurses, lawyers.
Yeah.
A lot of professionals. They don't really have a choice as to who
they interact with sometimes.
Yes.
And some days you're going to see people on their worst days.
Yeah.
It's not their fault.
How do I, from the concept of someone
basically being an energy vampire for you-
Yeah
... when I don't have a choice professionally
to choose, okay, I get to walk away here.
Yeah.
But I have to deal with everyone and try to help them the best I can.
Yeah.
How do I protect my energy?
By being affectionately detached.
By controlling awareness and controlling your compassion.
If I allow my awareness to go and get
absorbed in your problem, now I'm in your area of the
mind, and I'm experiencing what you're experiencing.
Mm.
But if I can hold my awareness where I am in my center, wherever that
center is, and still express empathy and
compassion but not get involved,
then
I can still help you. It's almost like I'm walking down the sidewalk, I stop in
front of a store, I look in through the window, and I tell the shop
owner that something's about to fall off the shelf.
It's very different than going in the store and helping him to
put the thing back on the shelf again.
So as a priest,
very few people come and tell me about their wins.
Right.
Most people come and tell me about their problems, and it's not usually
small problems.
Right.
These are very emotionally charged, childhood trauma or
sexual trauma or this, or family or marriages.
If I allowed my awareness to get engaged in their problem, I would be completely
depleted. So I hold my awareness where I am, I create that
separation of energetically, and
then I can listen. I can express empathy and compassion to a certain
point, and
then I don't get emotionally involved.
It's an art, but it comes from learning to control awareness again.
So it's just bringing your awareness back to you-
Yes
... as you're in the situation?
Yes, exactly, and not getting emotionally involved, which
means emotion is energy,
and where awareness goes, energy flows, and if I allow my awareness to go and get
involved in that problem, then I don't.
So I keep my awareness with me, and I respond with kindness, with
gentleness, with empathy and compassion.
So, do we have five more minutes? What's our time?
About three minutes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Three minutes?
Yeah, yeah.
Make it short.
Yeah.
So I'll just do a rapid fire.
Yeah.
Five questions. Most impactful daily habit?
Controlling awareness, keeping awareness on one thing at a time.
Modern habit destroying clarity.
Consuming too much information all the time.
So-
Can I just elaborate on that really quickly?
Yes, please. Yes.
Imagine I'm creating a house. In
my house, there's one room dedicated to being a library.
Every day I put 10 books in there. I don't index or categorize them.
After a year, I get 3,650 books. Will I ever be able to find anything?
No.
No.
Right? Think of the average person and how much information an average
person consumes. They're on the toilet, they're scrolling.
They're on the bus, in the car, they're listening to a podcast.
They're in the gym, they're listening to something. They're never disconnected.
You're putting 1,000 books in your subconscious every single day.
After six months, you've got tens of thousands of books of
information in there. None of it is organized, categorized,
indexed in any form. You've not reflected on how you're storing.
You haven't eliminated any information. You've got information overload.
You try to go into the library now to pull a book out,
and you can't make a decision because you can't find anything,
and that's the problem we live in, and that's why most people can't make decisions
today.
So discipline in what we consume information-wise.
Yes.
You have a kitchen?
Mm-hmm.
Kitchen sink?
Mm-hmm.
Do you have a strainer that stops stuff from going-
Right
... into to clog the drain? Why do you protect your kitchen drain
but don't protect your mind?
Fair point.
Yeah. We're so protective of our kitchen drain-
Right
... not letting stuff go in there and clog it.
Yet we have so indiscriminate, we don't have a filter to prevent
what's going into our mind. Start by having a filter.
Fair enough.
And the filter is driven by your purpose and priorities.
If it's not aligned, don't let it in.
So what is the false belief about happiness today?
Have we defined happiness wrong?
I
don't know how to answer the question.
I would say, the more aligned we can live our life with
our purpose and our priorities, the happier we will be.
Everything else, I think, gives a sense of happiness that is
fleeting. But what's fundamentally fulfilling and
rewarding is living in alignment with what
truly matters to us and who truly matters to us.
One skill if I could teach every child in the world.
Focus.
Training awareness.
Training awareness in the mind. If this was the last conver-- If
aliens were sitting outside their star waiting to take me to their planet, and this
is the last thing I could say to you, I would say learn about awareness in the mind
and practice controlling awareness and doing one thing at a time.
That would be my last final message.
And so the podcast is, of course, Next Phase Human.
So humans have evolved-
Yep
... come to a certain stage where we are in the
era of human evolution.
Yep.
So the next phase human is how do we better ourselves
physically, mentally, spiritually.
So in your mind, from your philosophy, what would be the
next phase human?
What would the next phase of human look like?
Yes.
We've gone from the instinctive area of the mind for millennials-
Mm-hmm
... to an intellectual area of the mind.
Mm-hmm.
The next phase of human would be a human that
has a good, solid understanding of the
intellect. And then the third phase, which is the final phase, is they start to go
into an area of the mind called the superconscious, where they become intuitive,
which is very different than the intellect.
That would be the subsequent phases of now
getting a good, solid understanding of the mind and the intellect, which we don't.
Right now, it's filling the library, and then eventually we realize that our
library is too full and we need to organize it, and that's the next phase human.
The third phase human, the final phase, is we go into this intuitive area of the
mind where creativity, deep spiritual insights, and
experiences lay for us to experience.
But we just need to go there sequentially.
We need to go from instinct to intellect to intuitive, and we're moving into the
intellectual phase now with the advent of schools and
books and digital devices and education.
So what does the path from intellectual to superconscious look like?
An organized subconscious, because superconscious works through a
clarified subconscious. If you look at it as a three-story building, the
instinctive mind at the bottom, the intellectual in the middle, and the intuitive
on top. For intuition to
reach the conscious mind at the bottom, the ground floor, it needs to go through
the subconscious. If the subconscious is cluttered with too much information,
unresolved emotional past, intuition can't come through.
But intuition is always present, even in the worst of human beings.
We all have these states of mind. So how do we organize the
subconscious so that intuition can work through?
And intuition works through a clarified subconscious.
In the monastery, contrary to what people think of pursuing the superconscious,
our goal was to work with the second floor.
To clean up the second floor.
Yeah. How can I get to the third floor?
The third floor wants to come down,
but once I organize the second floor...
Imagine, I'll take
30 seconds.
Imagine Earth,
the ground that we walk on is the conscious mind, the clouds in the
sky, the sky is the second floor, and the sun
is the third floor, the intuition.
The sun's rays are always there, but if the sky is filled with
clouds, sun's rays don't get through.
It's not going to get through.
But if I poke a hole in the cloud, you'll see a ray coming through.
So intuition, superconscious, is always there.
It's just we have such a muddied and cluttered subconscious mind
that intuition can't come through.
So it's knowing myself is where it'll start cleaning the second floor.
Yes. So as soon as you dull,
harness the conscious mind by closing your eyes, regulating your breath, sitting
still, which is the start of meditation, you get to the second
floor, and now you go like, "What a mess." And then you stop the job and you don't
go further. But the work is with the second floor, because once I can organize the
second floor and get to know myself and organize all of that, I can move
awareness through the second floor into the third floor, into the superconscious
area of the mind, and experience higher states of consciousness.
And the deeper I go, and the more my ability to focus and hold
awareness in a superconscious area of the mind for an extended period of time, the
more I experience it. The more time we spend together, the more you experience each
other.
Right.
But if I go to the superconscious only for 0.1 second, what would I experience?
Not much. But my ability to have unwavering focus
and hold awareness in the superconscious mind for an extended period of
time, the deeper I see
who I truly am.
So in terms of your analogy, if I know really these 10 books is what I want-
Yes
... and the rest is not aligning with my purpose-
Then that's what you study
... those are the 10 books I'll focus on.
Exactly. I rarely read because I only read books that are aligned with my
purpose. I don't need to learn 10,000 different things.
I just want things that can help me go down my path to where I'm
going. Carpenter doesn't need to learn about lawnmowers.
Fair enough.
Well, this has been very insightful.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
I thank you so much-
You're most welcome
... for your gift of time.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate you.