Dr. K talks Meaning, Purpose, and Motivation | BASED Stream

[Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] m [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] d [Music] oh [Laughter] [Applause] [Applause] m [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] d [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Applause] [Music] [Applause] m [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] alrighty chat welcome to another healthy gamer G stream. My name is Dr. Alo Kenoa. Just a a reminder that although I am a doctor, nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. Everything is for educational or entertainment purposes only. If y'all have a concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. Okay, so I am super excited to be streaming today. I haven't been this hyped about streaming, I don't know, since since when? I don't know. So today we are going to be talking about purpose, motivation, and uh, something else. I don't, I don't remember what. Meaning, purpose, and motivation. Okay, so here's what makes me excited. So today we are not going to pull punches, right? So today, so sometimes when I stream, I have to be like, compassionate and I have to be like, oh my God, your life is so hard, oh my God. But today, we're going to like, we're going to tell it how it is. Like, so this may be a slightly more based stream than usual. Um, and so, so the other thing is, like, in this community, people are getting like more knowledgeable and we're learning some of the basics. So like, we're going to actually explain like what I think the right answers are. And the challenge with explaining the right answers is that sometimes the right answers make people feel bad, right? Like it, it's kind of, you know, like, so sometimes there's like a, there's like a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. And but sometimes the right way to do things is, it, it can be bruising for the ego. And so I'm not, I'm not saying I'm going to be an [ __ ] today, but we're going to like, if you guys want like, if y'all have real questions and you want real answers, that's what we're going to do today. So there are a couple of things that we're going to talk about in relation to that. The first is that today I'm going to include a few Easter eggs. Okay, so over the course of today's stream, I was thinking about some like what we're going to talk about and what I'm actually going to do is include somewhere between probably two and four Easter eggs, which if you are paying attention to, you will pick up. These are Easter eggs that are going to be about the way that your mind functions. So I'm going to teach y'all four lessons about what the mind, the way that the mind functions, and four ways that if you are not careful, your mind will lead to incorrect conclusions. But I won't say this is lesson number one, this is lesson number two, this is lesson number three. This is a little bit more. So we're going to answer like a question and there'll be a little nugget of knowledge in there for people who are paying attention. And if you really want to like put, get your [ __ ] together, you have to have a mind that functions well. Okay, so if y'all pay attention, you'll pick these up. If you miss it, it's not a big deal. Okay, so, okay, we're okay with that? So we're going to be looking at a couple of posts from across L Reddit. Um, but before we dive into that, a couple things. First of all, are there Palworld enjoyers? So in, in, in the vein of Easter eggs, maybe it's because I, I downloaded Palworld across the weekend, um, or over the weekend, but like, are there, are there Palworld enjoyers in chat today? Um, yeah, yes, no, yes. Okay. Um, so if there are, you know, it, I can't tell if the game is good or is like, is going to turn into. So there, there's a part of me that's afraid that it's going to turn into some microtransaction [ __ ] hell. Okay, but let me, let me tell y'all, you know, why I love Palworld. So I think for a long time, the Pokemon franchise has had a monopoly on this kind of gameplay. And I think this, this may be kind of an unfortunate take, but I, I think what I've disliked about Pokemon is since they've had a monopoly on this kind of gameplay and Pokemon has become synonymous with this sort of catching sort of thing, their games have decreased in quality. Like they've gotten like worse and worse and worse. And that's because they've got no competitor in the space. So I'm thrilled that Palworld is doing well. And my hope is that the Pokemon franchise will get their [ __ ] together and actually start making good games. Because I'm sure that they're, they're panicking over there that there's this game that has come out which has basically taken the idea of Pokemon, but like actually made a good game out of it. Um, you know, and it's not that like I like Pokemon. Like I got my kids a Pokemon game, I got them Pokemon Arceus because I wanted to play Pokemon. I thought this was great, but the game is like, it's so trash on so many levels. Like it's a really fun game in some ways, but there's just like the attention to detail with like interface problems and like you can't skip dialogue and like all this kind of stuff. Like the graphics are junk. And it, you know, in Palworld, it's like, it's pretty cool. Like I, I built this harness and then I got attacked by the, who are these guys? I love it. The, the, the Pal Resistance Freedom Movement or some [ __ ]. So I got, and it was all buggy as hell. And it's, it's kind of like, even Palworld is kind of like a, there's like some stuff about it that's trash, right? It's early access, so I guess that's okay. But it, it's kind of fun to run around and catch things and, and you know, we'll, we'll see how it goes. Like, but there's a part of me that really hopes that they don't turn it into this microtransaction hell where it's like, okay, to get the highest level sphere and do this or some grindy [ __ ] show, which I, I'm not a fan of. Um, but anyway, it's kind of, you know, it's kind of whatever. Um, okay, so in relation to other things, uh, so it, so I wrote a book. I don't know if you guys know this. So I wrote a book and the book is actually for your mom. So, uh, I wrote a book called How to Raise a Healthy Gamer, which may confuse a lot of people because like, maybe y'all don't have kids. Maybe I'll do. So the first thing is that people are very surprised to discover, that I was surprised to discover, that the average age of our audience is 32. And we have people in their 60s and 70s that watch our content, which is like, wild, right? So people like, my, my mom. Um, and so the reason that I wrote a book about how to raise kids is because when I was sort of thinking about why does this community exist in the first place? Like, if I could go back in time and what would I do? If I could go back in time, like 40 years, what I would actually do is write a book about parenting. Because I think the problem with with my upbringing is not that my parents were bad, they were great, they're wonderful parents, but they were just outgunned. They're outgunned by like technology because they don't know how to deal with it. So, so I know it's kind of weird that it's kind of like not our quote unquote target audience, which people were telling me and they're like, oh, you know, write a book for your community. Don't worry, all those are coming. The next two books are going to be for y'all. And I've already, I started working on those about a year ago. But the reason I wrote this one first is because when I think about this community, the most important thing is, if I could go back in time and help your parents, that is actually the way that I would help you the most. And so what I'm thinking about is not just y'all, but the kids who are 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 right now, we're getting into our community. And what their parents need to understand to protect their kids from the invasive stuff in technology. Okay, so if y'all have kids, definitely check out the book. Um, it's actually for the next 48 hours, there's a 25% discount for members at Barnes & Noble. So it's How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. So, you know, if y'all are interested in supporting the work that we do, it's a very, very good book. Um, there are a couple of other things. So you can also get the book for your parents, right? So if you find, if you're like a gamer or you're someone who like uses technology and your parents are like, man, like stop using the technology. Like, oh my God, like the social media is ruining you. And you're like, yeah, but see, here's the problem is that if you have a problem with technology and your parents are writing your ass on it, you can't ever, and you know you have a problem, you can't ever admit that it's causing you a problem. Because if you ever admit, yeah, this is like causing problems in my life, you give them ammo. They're like, see, I told you I was right all along. I look, I told you games are not good, they're ruining your mind, you're going to ruin it, ruin it, ruining it. And then you can't ever. So then you're [ __ ] stuck holding this defensible position of, yeah, no, it's not that big of a problem. That's what happened with me. I knew I was [ __ ] up my life, but if I ever told my parents, if I ever admitted it to them, that that gives them license to take it away. It empowers their position and it weakens mine. So if y'all are in this situation, get your parents this book. Because what we try to do is teach parents like communication skills. So the other thing that I think this book would be useful for is, so there's a big part about communication skills in this book. That's really what a central part is about. So if y'all are interested in developing in communication skills in terms of your relationships, if you have a loved one who's got a problem with like video game addiction, or you have a loved one who's like got problems with mental health or whatever, if you have people in your life that you have difficulty communicating with, the book will help for that, right? So it assumes a context of parent-child relationship, but the stuff in the book like applies to just about any relationship. So these are a lot of the techniques that I use when I'm, I'm kind of raising my own kids. They're also techniques that we've used, uh, in, we've got like studies that are running right now about like the efficacy of these techniques and stuff that looks pretty good. But it's also stuff that like, I'll use in my marriage. It's just about the fundamentals of, and this is kind of what the book is about, is like, this is how you form an alliance with someone so that the two of y'all are on the same page instead of being antagonistic. And then this is how you communicate with them to like sort of understand them, help them out, and things like that. And then there's a section on boundary setting, which is is really designed for more of the parent-child relationship, but can be applied, can be adapted some. And, and maybe if, I mean, if enough people get it and then y'all really want us to, maybe what we can do is consider like adapting a portion to different kinds of relationships. Um, so if y'all are interested at all, highly recommend it. You know, I think it's like the reason we wrote it is because we think it's pretty good. Um, and it certainly helps us out. So y'all can, there's a 25% uh discount off of all pre-orders at Barnes & Noble for a period of 48 hours. Okay, next thing that I wanted to talk to you about before we dive in is on Friday, we streamed with Dr. Thorderson. I'm just curious, what y'all thought about that? The title of the book is How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. Um, what do y'all think? Um, um, um. Okay, did y'all catch the stream with Dr. Thorderson? It's, it's getting released in March. There's a pre-order. There's a pre-order sale right now. Okay, so someone was saying it's awesome. It was amazing. Uh, there will be an audio version of the book. I will be recording it myself next week. Um, more spirituality, please. Okay, we're going to get into that today. I liked the stream a lot. Okay, so some, some people are saying it was okay. So, so let me ask y'all, what do you think would make it better? Okay, so I need more depth. Thank you very much. Caught it but couldn't finish it. Okay, I think she should have been involved in the Reddit analysis. Great. Thank you very much. Um, do the in recording with the accent? I don't know if my publisher is Penguin Random House. I don't know if my publisher would be okay with that. Would like, okay, let her talk longer. Okay, cool. All right, so, so here's the, here's, okay, so that's cool. So we're going to pass that feedback along. So by the way, so we got some feedback already and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Um, but we think that there are things that we could do better. So I think a lot of people liked it and, um, I think she's fantastic. And so, uh, it's actually really interesting how I, and we'll talk about how we found her later. Gruy actually found her at the American Psychiatric Association National Conference. And everyone there was like sipping some Kool-Aid and she was like, y'all are doing it wrong. Like this is crazy. Like this, mental health does not need to be this particular way. So she's quite revolutionary in a lot of her ideas and she's quite based. And so Gruy was like, this is a based take. And so she really liked it. And so she like introduced herself afterwards. And, and she's awesome. So, okay, so we're, we're trying to, we'll see if she's willing to come on again. Um, and then we also want to think a little bit about how we can help y'all more. Okay, okay, audio issues. Yeah, we're working on that. Don't worry about it, chat. All right, so let's get to stuff. What do y'all say? Okay, let's see if my things are right. All right, so this is what I'm going to do. Do first, what we're actually going to do is we're going to just take a quick look at the posts, okay? And then once we look at all of the posts, the titles, then we'll kind of go through them in detail, okay? So, oh my God, see if does this work? Yes, thank God. All right, change my mind. Dharma or duty, ikigai, jihad, whatever you want to call it, as the solution for duka suffering is just huffing copium in disguise. So we're going to talk about this. Is this whole concept of finding meaning or purpose or whatever, just like some gigantic source of copium? Number two, I can't find meaning, meaning in life. I feel that I'm slowly becoming a nihilist. I have no friends, no family, nothing to live for. The, for the sake of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sad or depressed. I'm not trying to lay out a sob story, but I fail to understand the point of this money, fame, or even virtue. Why does it matter? Like, I'm not even 20 and I feel like I've lived to 60. Okay, bored of life. Does anyone else struggle to find meaning in life? Right, so now we're even talking about, okay, I have great friends, I have a solid job, I like my co-workers, I have a good social life, but I struggle to find any meaning in life. And then here's one. So why should I live if I don't want to? Right, interesting question. I already know everything I should do, but nothing compels me to want to do them. How do I move myself forward in life if nothing feels exciting or rewarding enough to do it all? All right, so these are the topics and y'all will notice that these are sort of related, right? So we're swimming around this concept of like, what the [ __ ] are we doing in life? Like, what's the point? Where does the motivation come from? Where does the purpose come from? Like, where, like, how, what about what I want to do? What I should do? What is dopamine have to do with it? Is there some bigger picture? Is this all just some kind of like scam, right? Religion is the opiate of the masses. It's all just copium. I'm depressed, I'm not depressed, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm doing everything right, but my life feels empty. We're going to deal with all of it and we're going to tackle all of these different things. Okay, so let's start with, so the other thing, by the way, is if y'all are new, so here's a, here's a criticism that I've been getting recently, so which is that like, stop talking about the same crap over and over and over again, Dr. K. So that's fine. So I'm going to assume we're going to do a very quick kind of recap of core things that we've discussed in the past, but one of the things that we're going to do today is like, I'm not going to explain the basics. I'm going to assume that y'all know the basics. Okay, so if y'all don't understand what I'm talking about, I apologize. Go watch something else. We have resource packs and stuff that y'all can access that will teach y'all some of the basics. Okay, so let's start. Are y'all ready? Okay, okay. Change my mind. Dharma, duty, ikigai, jihad, whatever you want to call it, as the solution for duar suffering is just huffing copium in disguise. I anticipate encountering the rebuttal of no true Scotsman, that I simply haven't discovered my true unique Dharma yet, and that I will happily tolerate any suffering for. I don't believe there's copium strong enough to huff that's worth the unavoidable pain of life. There's arguably an easier rebuttal of this is a problem only you have, but let's walk around that for now. So the first thing is that I think what this person is talking about, so let's just dispense with this right away, so that you know, if someone says, okay, Dharma, Dharma, which is the Sanskrit word for duty, and we'll get to why it's not really duty, they'll say like, okay, like if you don't believe that your Dharma can alleviate suffering, that's because you haven't found your real Dharma yet, and that's just until you find your real Dharma, then that's your problem, right? You're not trying hard enough. So this is an argument that I think is like a pretty good argument, uh, that we have to be careful of. So I think that like, let's just talk about this for a second. So like, I have a problem with this argument too. So I, I think I agree with this person's argument, that's what I mean. So there's like, you know, when I was like starting my spiritual journey, I would talk to people about things like prayer, right? So like prayer never worked for me. And I had people tell me like, yeah, that's just because you're not praying hard enough, right? Like the problem is that you're not doing it right. It's not that we're wrong and praying and believing in God will absolutely God, bhagan, God will fix all of your problems. You just put it to God. And I'm like, I put my problems with God and nothing [ __ ] changes. They're like, that's because you're not praying hard enough. You're, you have to have more belief, more faith. No, it's not that this organism that we have no scientific proof for, you can talk to it, let not talk to you, let's all this kind of stuff. Like, okay, you can argue that there is proof, whatever. I'm not trying to say religion, it is not that this being in the sky, this flying spaghetti monster, is that is not wrong, you are wrong, you are not praying good enough, right? And when we talk, talk about Dharma, the same thing happens. A lot of people will say like, oh yeah, like the reason that you think that Dharma doesn't work is because you didn't find it yet. Okay, so I'm with you there. But that's not what we're going to do. Okay, don't worry about it. So let's get back to it. If I had both Dharma, Duka on a set of scales, the Duka might as well be something very dense, like a black hole. I personally don't care to work and suffer more for Dharma, and not even to save, not even to save to attempt to save humanity from the unavoidable Duka of existence. There are countless worthy altruistic causes available. I am not burnt out already with basic existence, and I'm not interested in additional labor. So like, just F this whole thing, right? Like, it's just not worth it. There's nothing so valuable that I would want to go through what I have lived and suffered so far, and that's before we even account for future suffering. So there's nothing that I can perceive that makes the [ __ ] life that I've lived worth it. And it doesn't even have to be [ __ ], right? Doesn't have to be very, very bad. It can just be an average life, but it's still not worth it. I can agree with Eastern Buddhist schools of thought when it comes to suffering and perhaps attachment. However, they couldn't commit to the rational conclusions. Okay, now we have to be a little bit careful, because if we think someone else is not willing to commit to rational conclusions, we got to be super careful about that, right? So the mind is really tricky. It says, oh yeah, this is the rational conclusion, but others are not willing to commit to it. It's not that they're the, the problem is that they're not willing to commit. It's not that they are right and I am wrong. They just can't face the truth the way that I can, right? If I explain, I expect I would be banned. Oo, but savvy readers who know. Oh, very okay. If you're in the know, you're in the know. And they're the people who are the enlightened ones who know. And then we get, we get, oh my God, we get canceled if we speak it out loud because is secret truth be. Oh, okay. However, cycles of reincarnation conveniently exist. Oh my God, they're so convenient. I don't believe in it. I'm not enlightened enough to have encountered the alleged evidence of it. And one life is already an experience I could have done without. And that the only exit to transcend through Nirvana and supporting monasteries. I don't know where this comes from, but okay, sure. We'll talk, talk about Nirvana and stuff later. Okay, if the school of thought of thought religion didn't perpetuate itself, then they wouldn't continue to exist. This is true. I, I don't know if I, I don't know if I agree with that, but we'll, so let's just dispense with this for a second. Okay, I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. There's just a different perspective. So if you look at some of the perspectives from the karmic religions, okay, it's not, so see if something is true, you don't need a self-perpetuating thing to keep it going. So something that is true will be discovered and rediscovered. Even if all of the monasteries fall apart, someone else, if something is true, right? So if we had this apocalyptic, if we had this apocalypse that happened and we got sent back to the Stone Age as the human race, we would still discover gravity. We would still discover electricity. We would still discover all the same stuff. If it's true, we don't need a lineage to perpetuate what is true. Okay, I've talked with psychotherapists and heard varying ranging responses ranging from agreement to disagreement on Dharma as the solution to Dukka. But what are others' thoughts on the matter? Sorry for the walls of text. I'll check back later on this post if I remember. Okay, thanks for the insights. I'll ruminate over whether or not letting go of all attachments is a pic victory and investigate the differences between disassociation and being free of all attachments.

So first of all, I love this post. Okay, and the stuff that I argued against in the middle, that's not actually what I want to talk about. I'm just sort of pointing out. I'm not going to address those things, but it just because I'm not addressing it doesn't mean that I agree with it. There's a different perspective. Okay, so if we want to understand this, what we really have to do is start by understanding these terms. So there is a huge problem when it comes to spirituality, which is that a lot of people think they understand spirituality, but they don't really understand spirituality. Now, this can't be the, the no true Scotsman argument, right? So this is Dr. K saying, oh, you don't really understand spirituality, that's why you misunderstand things. If you really understood the real spirituality, then you would understand what we're talking about. So I'm not saying that I'm right, but let, let me explain this. Okay, so right now, let's try to understand the dissemination of these concepts, like Dharma and Dukka. How are these concepts taught? How do people learn about them? So we learn about them usually through things like people, random masses, like myself, or on the internet, speaking about these concepts, or you read some best-selling book, right, where someone talks about this, or you watch lectures, or you listen to podcasts, or whatever. So the way that we learn about things like Dukka are through easily disseminable materials. And the goal of all of these materials is to be easy to disseminate. So when we make a YouTube video, or we stream on Twitch, or whatever, right, one of our goals is that we want people to be able to understand it. So we transmute, we transmute the knowledge into being easily accessible. Okay, now this is a huge problem because originally these concepts were not taught intellectually. These concepts were taught in tandem with practices. So this is like night and day. So I'm going to give you all an example. If I want to teach y'all about swimming, I can write a book about swimming, I can make a YouTube video about swimming, I can make a Twitch stream about swimming, I can do all kinds of stuff about swimming. But if we look at how do we actually learn how to swim? We have to get into the water at some point. So the biggest reason why there is a misunderstanding of these concepts is because these concepts were originally taught in conjunction with practices. And we would take kids that were about eight or nine years old, we would send them to an ashram or a monastery where they would have daily meditative practices in which this philosophical angle was combined. There is an experiential component, a practice component, along with the intellectual or philosophical component. And when you combine these two things, then you understand it. But that's not what we have today, right? So what we have today is people writing books where the intellectual mind reads it, and then we try to make it accessible to the intellectual mind, right? So we don't include any experiential knowledge because if you include any experiential knowledge, the intellectual mind won't understand it. So we are a society that is learning spirituality the way that some people learn about sex, through watching pornography. I'm going to watch this porn over and over and over again, and then eventually I, the more I learn, the more I educate myself, the better I will get at sex. This is what's happening in with spirituality in our current existence because everyone wants to sell books. And if I say things that people don't understand, then no one will buy the book. So instead, what I do is I take all the stuff that's true that's based on experience and I remove it from my explanation. So today, what we're going to do is add what is missing from this understanding. Okay, does that make sense? Do you all have questions about that? You all get this? So like the experience comes with the knowledge, and now all we're doing is we're sending 50% of it along and we're leaving out the rest of it. Okay, so now let's understand some of these concepts. Okay, so first thing is, let's understand the relationship between Dukka and Dharma. And in order to understand the relationship between Dukka and Dharma, we have to understand what Dukka truly means. So the other problem that we run into is that these words are translated as English words, and then we think we understand what they mean. And this is another problem that the mind has. Is when the mind gains an intellectual understanding of something, it believes that it understands it, right? So if you spend time on the internet, you will find this all over the place where someone hasn't done something, but they dismiss it because the mind understands it. This won't work for me, this works for you, this doesn't really work, that doesn't work. Here's the reasons why it doesn't work. The mind doesn't actually have experience, it has an intellectual understanding, and it believes that its logic is correct. Okay, so we have to be super careful about that. So let's understand the word Dukka. So what does Dukka mean? Comes from the word Du, which means bad, and Kha, which means empty space. Uh, sorry, which means space. So literally, what Dukka is, is empty space or bad space. Okay, it is, it is a bad space. It is space where space does not belong. Okay, so if y'all want to understand really what Dukka is, if you've ever been to a restaurant and you've sat at a table that is wobbly, right? There's the wobbly table. There is a space where it does not belong, right? There's some, like, this is like, this is the floor, this is where the table should be, but instead there's some gap. And in this gap, in this, this is the bad space, this is the space where wobbliness happens. And so if we look at like anything, um, if, so if we look at sort of like the nature of Dukka, Dukka is basically like space where it doesn't belong or a bad space. So I'll give you all like a simple example of a couple of other simple examples of Dukka. So let's say I eat a slice of pizza. Now, this, the slice of pizza is supposed to bring me joy, right? Like I want to eat a slice of pizza, I'm really hungry, it looks delicious, it smells delicious. But the moment that I take a slice of pizza, I feel guilty. I'm like, man, like I should have eaten a salad, I shouldn't eat this. So even in pleasurable things, instead of us being able to have this experience of pizza, which is supposed to be full of pleasure, that's why we ordered it in the first place, there's actually this little space over here where there's like guilt. This is Dukka. And our whole life is designed to get away from Dukka. So even things like altruism, right? So if we look at someone like a soldier who dies for their country, so someone who dies for their country is also trying to move away from Dukka because it, for this person, the ideal of the country is greater than themselves, right? So like, even as we engage in negative things, we're still trying to get rid of this like emptiness within us. We're always trying to get rid of emptiness within us. There's a great book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté, in which he talks about addiction as an attempt to fill up the void within us. We feel empty on the inside, and so we go in looking for things to fill the emptiness. Another very simple example of Dukka is boredom. So when there is some, when there's boredom, nothing for the mind to think about, I'm looking to fill the mind with something. Let me play something fun, let me watch something fun, let me do something, let me do, let me fill up this emptiness. This emptiness feels bad, this is bad space, this is what Dukka is. Now let's talk about Dharma. So Dharma gets loosely translated as duty, but that's not really what it is, okay? So if we talk about Dharma, what does Dharma mean? The root of the word Dharma is Dhr, and Dhr means support or constant. Okay, so to act in accordance. So this is kind of how this works. All right, so what is Dharma? So if you look at the world, you'll find that there's all kinds of circumstances, and the circumstances will always change. And so if you're trying to figure out how do I live in this world, like your circumstances change every single day. There's different kinds of people, different kinds of personalities, different kinds of socioeconomic status. So what's the right answer? We have no idea because everyone's an individual. So as people sat down and explored this, they realized there are some constants in life. And as you start building a life based on constants, things will go better for you. So one way that I think about Dharma is Dharma is about harmony. To live in a way that is harmonious. So this is also something that the Greek philosophers, I, I think it was Greek philosophers, so they came up with this concept of Telos, which is like, I think the purpose or virtue or something. I'm a bit rusty on this stuff. So they kind of said like, okay, what is, what is the difference between a good chair and a bad chair? Does the object fulfill its purpose? So a chair is designed to sit on. So if a chair can support someone's weight, it is fulfilling its Telos, and this makes it virtuous. What's the purpose of a table? To be able to hold stuff up. What's the purpose of a plant? To be able to provide shade or fruit or whatever, right? So they made these very simple observations that there's like a certain way that objects are supposed to be, things are supposed to be, and when they fulfill that purpose, that this makes them good and virtuous. This is the purpose of something. Now let's talk about Dharma. So the first thing to understand is Dharma is about constancy. So when we say support, we don't, what we mean is like, support is in the thing that holds other things up. This is what Dharma truly is. Okay, so Dharma is like the way that we, let me think about this. Um, okay, well, pause there. All right, so let's talk about the relationship between Dharma and suffering. Now that we've understood what these two things are. Okay, so this person says, okay, Dharma is a copium. It's copium, right? It's just something that people, it's, so if we think about what is copium? Copium is like, basically a false thing that people kind of choose to believe that alleviates their suffering in some way. So there are a couple of things to understand. If we really look at the Sanskrit literature, the path to happiness or the alleviation of Dukka actually has four steps: Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha. So already, in a sense, this person is correct that Dharma doesn't fix Dukka. It's one of the four pieces that fixes Dukka. So this is Dharma, which is roughly translated as duty, and then Artha is wealth, Kama is pleasure, and Moksha is liberation. So if you want to be free from Dukka, these are the four things that will alleviate, look, in some capacity. So let's run through them, okay? And then we'll get to Dharma last. So we know, so even the yogis sort of figured out that all right, so like, if we look at the world today, like what's the problem in the world today? Like half the problems of half the people, or maybe half the problems of 90% of people on the planet could be solved with wealth, right? I think this is like, we kind of know this. That we have a mental health crisis, which is really rooted in an economic crisis. So the amount, and this, this by the way, is like something that we don't quite, we don't quite acknowledge. So everyone talks about like the Boomers, right? The Boomers talk about how like Millennials and Gen Z are like ruining everything. And you see all these articles, like, oh my God, like people aren't having babies. And I recently heard that like Vladimir Putin was pleading with Russian women to have seventh or eighth children. I also have heard, you know, I've read articles about this, I don't know if it's true or not, that China is starting a policy, well, they, they are subsidizing people to have kids. And then we have all these like doomsday articles, like Millennials aren't buying houses, Millennials aren't having kids. Oh my God, Millennials are so lazy, Gen Z is so lazy. Everybody's so lazy. No, this is wrong. Gen Z, Millennials, we are actually like the best generation on the planet. Like from an objective standpoint, let's understand why we're the hardest working, right? So we work harder than any generation above us. We work more hours, and yet we get less for it. We have inherited a world that has gone to [ __ ]. So what's happened? This is important to understand. So human beings used to struggle, and then we developed technology. And for a while, as we developed technology, technology just gave us a net benefit in society. The goods of technology outweighed the bads. So these things like pollution didn't really bother us too much because the world was like, generally speaking, like there wasn't too much tech, there wasn't too much pollution. And so we increased efficiency, things got better and better and better and better and better. So what happened is we had a, a hundred years of human beings being able, okay, we had a group of human beings who for 100 years had technological advancements that could supplement the half-assedness of their efforts. And now what's happened is technology has caught up with us. Technology no longer rapidly improves our situation. In fact, technology is starting to be harmful. We've developed such a beast that is now hurting our mental health. And we are the first generation that is dealing with this problem. So it's not that we're doing a bad job, we're actually doing an awesome job. It's just that we were playing this game with a handicap in our favor, right? So the, the, that doesn't make sense. We're playing this game with an advantage, right? We're playing in tutorial mode with no perma-death. And now this is starting to catch up to us. And so everyone is panicking because the systems that used to work are no longer working. Why are they no longer working? Because there was some artificial thing that was propping this stuff up, and now it doesn't work anymore. Okay, so we're not lazy. But anyway, going back to what we're talking about, so if we go back to Dukka, oh sorry, so if we go back to Dukka, Artha is one of the things that will alleviate suffering, okay? So this is something that the yogis figured out. The second thing that they noticed alleviates suffering is Kama. So pleasure alleviates suffering to some degree. So even when we're talking about the pizza, so if we sort of think about, I'm hungry and I want pizza, look at all of this Dukka. And then I eat the pizza, and it doesn't fix the problem, but at least it gets rid of, like, 50%, right? Like now I have the guilt over here, but at least I feel full, I no longer have the hunger, I have some degree of pleasure, dopamine, whatever. So this alleviates Dukka. Dharma alleviates Dukka as well. So this is important to understand. It's not that one of these things fixes. In fact, the whole point, the reason they came up with four is because you need all four, or arguably just Moksha, but we'll get to that in a second. And so the way to alleviate suffering is some amount of like wealth, right? So you have to have some security. You can't be hungry all the time, or thirsty all the time, or wet or cold all the time. You need some degree of pleasure. Like, let's enjoy our cup of coffee, let's, let's go on vacation. Like these are all things that alleviate suffering, obviously, right? But we don't sort of think about it that way. The problem is that in our modern society, we only focus on these two. So everyone's like, oh my God, like let's be Alpha bro, like I'm make money, I'm, I'm, I'm a [ __ ] ladies or dudes, I'm a [ __ ] everything that moves. Like, let's go bro, like I'mma buy a fancy car, I'm go to, I'm going to fly first class, I'm going to go to watch, like, oh my God, like let's make that money. I'm a side hustle, I'm going to hustle my side hustle. Oh my God, like let's go bro. And we have a society that glorifies this. And yet, if you look at these people, right? Like, if you look at these people who are like very successful, are they, do they behave like contented individuals, or are they getting into stupid fights with random ass people on the internet because they're so [ __ ] insecure that they can't tolerate any kind of criticism from a stranger who they're never going to meet? You have millions of dollars, and yet you have to pick a fight with someone on the internet. Like, what? How are you not content? Clearly, you're not content because then you have a silent majority of people in the world who are relatively intent, or maybe silent minority. And what, how do they spend? They just don't spend their time arguing with dumb asses on Twitter, right? This is insufficient. Why do we get caught up in this? Because we know that from this part, right? So if this is, if this is the circle of Dukka, right? We get Artha, does this, Kama, does this, Dharma, does this, and arguably Moksha, does either this or for all of this, which we'll get to. So we chase it because it does fill the hole, but it only fills the hole to a certain extent. And now we can see this post, right? So, um, I do get happiness from things like love, friends, sex, accomplishment, even day-to-day activities, but it is insufficient. Very common, right? Good, y'all, y'all are figuring [ __ ] out. Good job. Now let's talk about Dharma. So how does Dharma help suffering? So Dharma, the real advantage of Dharma is not necessarily that it alleviates suffering, it is that it makes suffering tolerable or even choosable. In life, we've got two options. If you wake up on any given day, any time, for any decision ever, ever, you have two options. You have a painful option and you have a pleasurable option, or you have a less option, or you have a more option. If you look at any choice, right? So what am I going to eat? Am I going to eat pizza or am I going to eat a salad? There's a pleasurable option and there's a painful option. Am I going to wake up today and am I going to out, or am I going to spend 45 minutes on my phone? Am I going to play a video game or am I going to study? Anytime you look at life, your mind always has choices. And the problem is because of our dopamine circuitry, okay, we tend to gravitate towards the pleasurable option. It's hard to choose the painful option. So since it's hard to choose the painful option, what we do, we're going to, oh man, look, look, you need to just start doing stuff, man. Like we got to work, you got to like brain hack yourself, motivation hack yourself, dopamine detox yourself, you got to like hit yourself in the nuts, right? Like, look, I, this is real. I saw this once where some guy was like, here's the reason that we're not disciplined. This is what you got to do. You got to take a $10,000 bill and you got to put it on your fridge. And you have to make a, a decision, you have to commit. And anytime you don't work out and you don't get those gains, bro, you take that $100 bill and you burn it. And then you have to punish yourself. You have to punish yourself if you don't do the right thing, man. That's how you get disciplined. You have to commit to it. But [ __ ] bro, if I could commit, like what do you think is going to happen? I'm just not going to burn the $100 bill. If I was disciplined enough to burn the $100 bill, then I would be working out to begin with. Y'all get that? So we have a pleasurable option, we have a painful option, and this is why we get so obsessed with willpower, brain hacking, oh my God, let's brain hack, bro, brain hack, yeah, let's go, right? Discipline. And it's not that these things are bad. I'm a fan of all these things, but there is a simpler way to do all of this stuff. So generally speaking, we can.

Use all of this crap over here to overcome this. Or what we can do is, Dharma lets us choose the painful option. This is the real advantage of Dharma: it makes suffering more tolerable. It allows us to even pick the path of pain. So let me give you all a simple example. So I don't like working all night, right? Like, no one likes, very few people like working all night. So there's a 24-hour period of the day. I enjoy things like relaxation. And yet, when I'm on call as a physician, because, because I care about my patients, and because I have this duty as a medical professional, as a medical doctor, to take care of other human beings, this allows me to tolerate pain.

So the classic example that I use, if we look at a human being, let's say that someone points a gun at me, okay? So if I look at the gun, what does the gun mean? The gun means pain, theft, death, badness. So what is my natural inclination? Is to avoid this thing. I'm going to move away from the gun, if at all possible, okay? Or I'll fight them. Whatever. Like, if you're a super chat, you can fight them. Fine. Whatever. But this is something that we, if there's a painful stimulus, we tend to move away from it, right?

Now, let's say that there is a loved one over here. Now, suddenly, like, this whole relationship changes. So even though the gun still means the same thing, this doesn't change. Like, if I get shot by a gun, like, it's still going to hurt a lot. I could die. Whatever. But this Dharma is what? If I love this person over here, then I put myself in the path of the gun to protect this other person. So the world hasn't changed. The circumstance hasn't changed. I'm just choosing the hard path. I'm choosing the painful path. And it's what allows you to do the hard thing.

And so when you sort of look at, like, all of these posts, right? "I already know everything I should. Nothing compels me to want to do. How do I move forward if nothing feels exciting or rewarding enough to go for it?" Now, we see the problem. This person is stuck over here. Their mode of operation is to be driven by pleasure. And now you're, you're in a real problem. This is a real problem.

So a lot of us have been conditioned to be controlled by pleasure, right? So which video game do you play? Do you play the boring game or do you play the fun game? I play the fun game, dumbass. That's why I play it. I don't play some shitty ass game. I play the fun game. Which food do you eat? Do you eat the tasty food or the not tasty food? I eat tasty food, dumbass. I don't want to eat the untasty food, right? So this is what happens. We get conditioned to pleasure. And once we get conditioned to pleasure, we open ourselves up to one hell of a problem.

Because in the world that we live in today, we have so much access to pleasure that we can start to develop tolerance or numbness to pleasure. So as I play a video game for one hour, it's fun. Second hour, less fun. Third hour, less fun. Fourth hour, I don't even know why I'm playing this thing anymore, but I can't stop. And now we're really stuck. Because if we've been conditioned to move towards pleasure, but we develop a tolerance to pleasure, then we're stuck. Because now I don't get the pleasure, and that's the only thing that gets me moving in the first place. So now I need pleasure to act, but I don't feel the pleasure anyway. So now, now what do I do? I can't do anything. I'm stuck. Everyone's just sort of like existing instead of like being motivated towards anything.

And we see this. So I've seen this a lot as an addiction psychiatrist where there's this idea in opiate addiction called "chasing the dragon." And why do opiate addicts chase the dragon? It's because the first time they got high, holy, it was so amazing. And I'm just chasing that pleasure, chasing it again. Every subsequent time you get high, it's never that good. It's never that good. It's never that good. But every once in a while, "Oh my God, it's so good." And so you chase that pleasure over and over and over again. But the problem is that the world does not give you the same unit of pleasure, the same magnitude of pleasure, as you engage in it over and over and over again. If that worked, we would not have any of these problems.

So what do we do? We must move away from pleasure, right? We can't be driven by pleasure because it doesn't work. So how do we move away from pleasure? This is where Dharma comes in. Dharma allows us to choose the painful path. And so there's research that supports this very simple concept. So we know in, in addiction psychiatry, is that in order to become sober, you have to have a good enough reason to become sober. You need something called a competing interest. So this is why when we sort of talk about, we talk about addictions, right? So I'll tell, like, a really interesting story.

So when I was learning to become, I was in medical school at the time, and I was trying. Anyway, so I'll tell the, I've told it before, but I'll tell it again because we maybe have a lot of new people. So I was a med student and I had a patient. Let's go to this. So I was a first-year medical student and I had a patient who was trying to get to quit smoking, okay? So I, I went to them and I said, "Hey, do you know, do you know that smoking is bad for you?" And they're like, "Yeah." And I was like, "Bro, I'm a medical student, man. Let me tell you, it is going to cause lung cancer. It damages your respiratory epithelium. It puts oxidative stress. Look at all these facts. Look at all the signs. See, I'm so smart. I'm medical. I'm going to be a doctor one day." Didn't you know? And the doctor's like, "Wow, doc, that sounds really bad." I'm like, "So are you going to quit smoking?" And he's like, "Yeah, doc, I'm going to quit smoking."

Patient comes back a month later. I'm like, "How's it, did you quit smoking yet?" And he's like, "No, I, I, I haven't been able to. You know, I, I know I'm supposed to." And I was like, "Okay, I did not doctor you enough. Nah, let me doctor you more. Not only lung cancer, you will get stroke, you'll get heart disease. It causes all of these problems. I'm telling you, it is causing all of these problems. Isn't that enough for you to quit smoking?" And he's like, "No." Didn't work, right? Because information doesn't help us overcome addictions. What we need in addictions is something called a competing interest.

So this is something we have to understand. Anytime we're dealing with an addiction, if we stop the addiction, it sucks. It's painful. Like, literally painful. Your body goes through withdrawal. In the case of opioid addiction, you literally just experience whole body pain. You start having diarrhea. You start to be feeling nauseous. You can vomit. You get chills. It, it feels worse than cancer. I've had patients who've been addicted to opiates. I've had patients who have had stage four metastatic cancer, and these people will say, "Withdrawing from opiates is worse than stage four metastatic cancer." This is what I've heard from them.

So how do you get this person to stop? Because anytime you stop, you go through so much pain, you have to have a reason. So I got wise, right? So I started to learn this. I was still learning. I, I don't do this now. So eventually, this person came back. And then I decided, "Okay, let me get to know this person." So I got some advice from people, and they were like, "You have to give them a reason to quit." So I, as this person, "Hey, what do you, what do you like? You know, what do you care about in life?" And they're like, "You know, I have, I have two awesome daughters. They're amazing and things like that." And I'm like, "What are you looking forward to?" "Well, one of them is going off to college, you know, and like, I know that my job as a dad is is done when these things happen." And we sort of got started talking about walking them down the aisle. And they said that, you know, "A dream to walk my daughters down the aisle one day."

Then I asked this guy a question. I said, "When you walk your daughters down the aisle, do you want to be wheeling an oxygen tank behind you?" And the dude was like, "What? What is this kid saying?" And I'm like, "Yeah, well, if you, you know, if you don't stop smoking, you know, at a minimum, you may be wheeling an oxygen tank behind you. But there's a decent chance you won't be able to literally walk down the aisle because you could be in a wheelchair, right?" So this is like, the guy was like, "Right." So, so this made an impact. And I softened it up. I was a first-year medical student at the time. So then I became a psychiatrist. I learned how to use that same principle without bludgeoning people. But this is a competing interest. You have to have a reason to tolerate the pain. This is what Dharma is. Dharma is a reason to choose the painful path.

Now, as we do this, right? What happens to our life? So if we look at the suffering, the Duka in our life, where does the Duka in our life come from? Where does the Duka in our life come from? So as I, I'm living life and I choose pleasure over pain. I'm going to game, okay? Study. And then I'm going to eat pizza versus a salad, right? And then I'm going to stay at home because I feel anxious instead of going to a party because this makes me feel anxious. So I'm not going to do it. I'm going to avoid. What is, what happens to my life, right? So this is my life. And as I move towards pleasure more and more and more and more and more, my life starts to feel emptier and emptier and emptier and emptier. And then eventually, I have life where it's not, it's like, "What am I, what am I doing here? I don't know. I'm not doing anything worthwhile."

So then the question becomes, how do you move down this path? Dharma is very, very efficient at moving down that path, okay? So it isn't that Dharma fixes suffering. It's that Dharma is one of the four components that will reduce your suffering. Now, there's a couple of other things to consider. So let's just go through the post to make sure I didn't leave anything out. Um, so yeah, does that make sense? Okay. So let's pause for questions for a second, and then I'll continue because we've got a couple of other angles. Um, okay, so what, what questions do you all have? Okay, Mocha Gu. So we'll talk about Mocha in a second. "How do I know I found my Dharma?" We'll talk about that too. Does anyone have questions about what we, does, is anything unclear about what we've discussed about the relationship between and Dharma? This is the first thing to understand. How do you find? Okay, so we'll talk about how to find said purpose. Okay, y'all about to get [ __ ]? Okay, so let's talk about how to find your purpose in life. Dr. K. Okay, this is great. You're saying, "Dr. K, let me understand you all, right? You're saying I got to find my purpose. Is the way that I choose the hard thing in life, right? Because Dharma, it's my Dharma that allows me to eat a salad instead of a slice of pizza. I'm with you. But how do I find that purpose? What is the greater purpose in life that allows me to choose salad instead of pizza? Right? How does that tie to this broader idea of life and purpose and the existence of humanity and the stars and we're all stardust? Dr. K, how do we, how do we translate this into, 'I'm going to not have cheeseburger. I'm going to have just a hamburger. I'm going to cut out the cheese from my life. I'm going to cut out the soda from my life.' I don't understand. How does it get to this broader purpose?"

So let's remember that Dharma is not this bigger, broader purpose. See, this is the, this is the thing that really upsets a lot of people. We have this idea that Dharma is something that is grand. "Oh my God, like, I'm going to sacrifice. I'm going to live my life for something." Don't live your life for nothing. Live your life for something. Follow me on Instagram. We're a group of people who live our lives for something, not for nothing. Not for nothing. You got to, you got to wake up in the morning. You got to want it. You got to need it. You can't just, you can't just watch porn all the time. You got to, you got to want it, right? This is what the [ __ ]?

So here's the crazy thing. Dharma is not something that is grand. Remember, Dharma means support, constant, or, yeah, support or constant. So what is your Dharma in life? Everyone thinks that it's some grand thing. And if I have some grand thing, like if I have kids, then I will be able to like work really hard. And that works for some people. But I would not recommend that you have children for the sake of finding your Dharma. Okay? So the first thing is that, you know, what you need to do to increase the harmony of your life. So if you're trying to find Dharma, the first thing to understand is about it. It is about increasing harmony. What do I mean by harmony? So if we look at the wobbly table, right? This space is a disharmony. It is things that don't fit. So if you look at your life, what you will find is that if you are not living in accordance with Dharma, there will be a lot of disharmony. There will be a lot of space that is created around you, and there will be friction.

So let's just understand a couple of things. So when you wake up, do you, are you, do things feel fluid to you? I know this is going to sound kind of weird, but like, do things feel fluid and easy? Is your life harmonious? Do you wake up feeling refreshed and then are able to do what you need to do for the day? Tasks that you need to get done? You start working on, or is everything in your life a friction, a friction, a friction, a friction, a friction? See, this is the way that, I don't know if y'all can hear my belly rumbling, but this is a friction too. So I skipped a meal today, and so this has created friction. So this is what's really important to understand. The first D is not about anything grand.

Now, the reason that we look for a grand Dharma, a Dharma with a capital D, right? "I'm going to do something with my life." Is because this is very ego-gratifying. Because if I'm a little [ __ ] person, I need to accomplish something very big, right? When I was failing out of college, I had dreams to go to Harvard. When I was premature, I was like, "I'm, I'm going to go to Harvard and I'm going to be the best. I'm going to be the smartest. I'm going to be the greatest. Everyone's going to look at me and they're going to be like, 'Oh my God, that guy went to Harvard.'" And the big irony is, when it's, I [ __ ] gave up that [ __ ]. I was like, "[ __ ] this, I'm a [ __ ] loser. I'm just going to try to do the best that I can in life. And let's see if I'm grateful. Hopefully, after three years of applying to med school, maybe one day, some, after getting, get rejected from 120 med schools, maybe one day I will even get a chance to be a doctor. That's enough." Give up on your big dreams. And the irony is that when I started doing that, I could focus on the work instead of focusing on whatever fulfilling my dreams. Right? I don't know if this makes sense, but like, you can have a big house, but like, you still have to build it one brick at a time. And there's a weird thing that happens when we have big dreams. Big dreams sabotage our ability to work. Everyone's like, "Oh man, like, aim for the stars." No.

So let's understand. Saying this, we have this part of our brain that has to do with motivation, okay? So we have our prefrontal cortex and we have our nucleus accumbens, okay? So we're going to do a quick side note on motivation and why this is going to screw you, okay? So the nucleus accumbens is our source of motivation, okay? And the PFC is our source of value generation. So what the PFC does is it gen, it tries to assess the value of an action. And then what it does is, if the value generation is in favorable, then it will go and it'll motivate you to do it. So if I have a big dream, okay? And let's say I want to go to Harvard because that's what I wanted to do. And then I wake up one day, and my brain is looking at going to Spanish class. "Should I go to class this morning? What percentage of attending Spanish class this morning, what percentage of progress have I made towards my dream of attending Harvard Medical School?" Maybe this, even if I'm lucky, it's probably less than this statistically, you know, it's probably like, you know, one millionth. It's just one class. It's this. So then our PFC looks at this and it says, "How important is this for fulfilling this goal?" And it's like, you know what? It's basically insignificant. So we're not going to do it. It's not worth it.

And if y'all are stuck in life doing the same time-wasting activities, I will bet you money that when you try to do something else, your mind tells you it is not worth it. It is not enough. So if we look at this concept of enough, where does the concept of enough come from? The concept of enough comes from the ratio of this to the box that we're filling. The bigger our dreams, the less, the less enough any given task will be. Okay? So the first thing to understand is this principle. And how Dharma with a capital D, finding your purpose in life, purpose, purpose with a capital P, baby. "This is why I'm on the earth. I'm here to do this work, son." And until you're ready to do the work, capital P, this is not what Dharma is. Dharma is smaller than that. Dharma is tiny. Dharma is emptying your trash can. Increasing the harmony between you and the life around you. Emptying your trash can. You don't have to eat healthy or get swole, but adding a a serving of fruit or vegetable. Dharma is a tiny little thing. Being slightly less of an [ __ ] to the people around you, right? We're not saying that you have to be a saint. Be slightly good in some ways. These are tiny little things.

So your first Dharma is to take care of yourself. Your body is a temple, and you should treat it as such. So what do you do for your body? Do you take care of it every single day? Because this is the only thing. You're the only one who's responsible for taking care of this, right? No one else is going to knock down your door and is going to make you take care of your body. Your poor body, just think about this for a second. Your poor body, who does it have looking out for it, right? You're in charge of it. And how do you treat this thing? Do you take care of it? Do you exercise every day? Do you stretch every day? Do you sit in, in a, the chair for nine hours a day? Oh, I have to do it for work. Okay. What happens after work? Well, then I'm tired. But what about your poor body? Who's going to take care of your body if you don't take care of it, right? So this is what happens. We don't. But it's hard. You're right. So that's because you're going down the route of pleasure. This is adik, right? You're the only one who can take care of your body.

So the first thing is, take care of yourself. And this is where I would say, like, if you guys are starting, okay? Start with a 1-hour walk every single day. So I've done this in the hardest parts of my life. I have taken walks. So this has been in the heat of over 100 degrees in India, taking a 1-hour walk, come high water. And there's also been in 18-degree weather in Boston when it's like snowing outside and stuff like that, right? So it's like, rain or shine, like, take a walk, right? If it's unsafe, don't do it. So there's days that I did not take a walk because it's, there's black ice and I'll slip and fall and whatever. But like, just take a walk, all right? Eat healthier. And now this is where the mind is going to be like, "But what do you mean? Like, how healthy should I eat? This serving of thing." Everyone's like, on the internet, is like, "You do this protocol and do this protocol and then, like, this is what I'm going to do." Bros, like, "Okay, so like, we know that cruciferous vegetables are very friendly. They alter your cytochrome P450. We need fiber." With the problem, the problem is that in cruciferous vegetables, when we eat cruciferous vegetables, we have a problem because we are bound by our digestion. Okay? So I, I have the ultimate, I have the ultimate, I, the ultimate body hack to get you all the fiber that you need. You take an enema and you fill it with broccoli with protein powder and then you shove it off your ass and then you just go straight. You're going to bypass. You're going to bypass the stomach. See, the stomach is the, the thing that restricts how much nutrients you can take, how swole you can get. 200 grams of protein, right off the ass. That's what we're going to do now. And if it's not 200 grams, you should [ __ ] the [ __ ] up, right? The eat healthier, come on. You know you don't need some Harvard-trained doctor to tell you what it means to eat healthy. Eat healthier. Take care of your body. You know what to do. One serving of fruit and vegetable. One walk for an hour. Okay? This is number one for taking care of your body.

Number two for finding your Dharma. So let's talk for a second about why it's hard to find your Dharma. So the second thing that we have to really consider is that there's a, there's a challenge with finding our Dharma today, which is that our attention is externalized. So there's this weird problem where when we look at, like, okay, like, "How am I supposed to find what I do with my life?" So this is kind of weird to understand, but the more that we externalize our attention, right? So if I spend my time watching TV, playing video games, responding to emails, talking to people around me, like, I spend all of my mind. My mind is not with me anymore. So even when I'm doing productive things like cleaning and cooking and whatever, in order to be efficient, I'm listening to a podcast, right? Because I got to use that time. And I was this way, like, so when I was like starting med school, right, or trying to, towards the end of getting into med school, I'd be super efficient. So it's like listening to some lecture in the morning, listening to a lecture when I'm walking to the train, in the train, I'm going to pull out my notes. When I get to school, it's headphones back in, walking to the lecture, then attending the lecture, then going to the library, reviewing the lecture, right? And it's this is what it is. Constant, constant, constant externalization of attention in the guise of productivity. And as I spend all of my time outside of myself, I lose my connection with myself. And as I start to lose my connection with myself, I wake up one day and I ask myself, "What should I do now?"

When we have, when we ask this question, "What should I do?" we can get a source of information from two sources: one is from inside, and one is from outside. Now, the problem is that the more that I look to the outside for this answer, the more friction I will create. Let's understand why. You are a unique human being. You are just you, right? No one else knows your mind. No one else has your experiences. No one else has your personality, your advantages, your disadvantages. So the rest of the world tells you, "You should be this." The world says, "You should be this." And they say, "Here's how to do it." But there's always going to be a discrepancy between the advice or what the world tells you to do and you. There's never going to be a 100% translation. This is why we need clinicians instead of basic science research to help people with addictions. We have all this neuroscience figured out. We have all the psychology figured out. But when you translate science to an individual life, you require a clinician. You have to take all that scientific knowledge and apply it to you.

And there's another problem here is that as we externalize our attention, the internal mind gets piled up with crap, okay? So we see this, like, cycles that start to emerge. So as I, as I spend more and more time, let's say, like, watching stupid stuff on the internet, I start to procrastinate. And then I feel guilty. And then I start to feel behind. And then I'm start to feel a little bit insecure, right? Because I'm looking at all these people on social media who have these ripped bodies and so much more money than I do, and they're so much thinner, and they have thigh gaps, and I don't have a thigh gap, right? And I start to feel worse about myself. And then what happens? So as I feel worse about myself, spending time with myself becomes difficult because I'm just, I become a cesspool, right? And we even see it in, in this one. So like, um, "There is nothing so valuable that I would want to go through what I have lived and suffered so far, and that before we even account for future suffering." This person has suffered intensely on the inside, right? And if you look at all these posts, like, "Why should I live if I don't want to? What's the meaning of life? I'm slowly becoming a nihilist." Whether you're sad or not sad, some people are sad, some people aren't sad. This is pile, this stuff piles up. As the internal environment piles up, we gravitate more towards the external environment because I don't like sitting with me.

So one good example of this is boredom. What is boredom? Boredom is just existing with yourself. That's literally what it is, right? When you have no external thing to occupy your mind, you get bored. What do you have? You have just yourself. The most boring thing on in the world is being with yourself, right? So we are so gravitated towards the external environment. And this can become a vicious cycle, by the way, because as this negativity piles up, we have technology which suppresses our amygdala and limbic system. So when I'm feeling bad, if I go to technology, what technology will do is it'll cover this stuff up. It'll suppress those parts of our brain. It doesn't fix anything. So then what happens is I procrastinate for one more day, and I feel guilty. And then when I go to bed at night, "Oh my God, all this stuff comes rushing back." And what is my antidote to deal with this? Run away from it. Run away. Run away. Run away. Run away. Run away as far as you can.

So we gravitate towards the outside. As we gravitate towards the outside, we get disconnected from ourselves. And as we become a pile of [ __ ] on the inside, we don't like this. How do I fix it? I'm going to turn to the outside. Tell me how to fix it. And that's where they're like, "[ __ ] yeah, baby, I'm glad you showed up here, cuz let me tell you what, son. When you were pathetic, this is what you got to do to fix your life. You got to be alpha. You got to be look maxing. You got to be jaw surgery. You got to be a foot taller. You need a dick that's one foot bigger, right?" And sorry, I'm, I'm sort of adopting a male perspective on this, but this is true of women as well. So this is where, like, once again, we got to wear this particular makeup. We have to use these cosmetic brands. I need to get eye surgery. I need to get Botox. I need to have a thigh gap. I need to be able to cook this kind of meal. I need to be a girl that's different from the other girls, right? I got to be a boss babe. I got to sell Amway products. I got to be my own boss babe. I got to wear these particular high heels. And by the way, the internet loves this, right? Because the internet has figured out, "Hey, if we can make you insecure, we can sell you [ __ ]." And the more insecure you are, the more time you will spend on our platform running away from this.

So the more insecure you become, you don't like yourself. So you start moving out into the world. And then when you don't feel good about yourself, when you don't feel insecure, the world has answers for you. They say, "This is what you should do." "Oh, you don't feel pretty? Wear these pants. Buy shapewear, which literally takes the parts of your body that you don't like and compresses them." We've moved back like 300 years or 200 years back to the Victorian era of corsets, where we, we are using physical things to adjust the shape of our body. Shapewear, Botox, thigh gaps, makeup, take your pick. "Something is wrong with you, and we will fix it." And as you disconnect from yourself, you end up chasing all of these things. And then we end up with an adoric lifestyle. And what does that mean? An adoric lifestyle? That means on any given day, we are doing something random that we think is the right thing to do, right? "Okay, I need to work on my career. I need to get sexier. I need to make more money. I need to become taller. I need to be a gamer girl. I need to be more of an earner. And dudes only like women who put out, so I need to put out more, right?" The rest of the world says, "Do this. Do this. Do this." And since you have no internal compass, and by the way, they're all competing, right? So one person says, "Go this way." One person says, "Go this way." One person says, "Go this way." One person gets, says, "Go, go, go this way." And some of us get stuck. We get stuck between a thousand different things. We have a, a group of instruments that we bought on the internet that are collecting dust. We have art supplies in our basement. We're trying to save up money for some kind of cosmetic surgery. We've lost complete touch with ourselves. We have no sense of internal compass. Then how can we find our purpose? "It's my purpose. I'm unique. My karma is unique. My body is unique. My mind is unique. The world that I live in is unique." Everything about you is 100% unique. How are you going to find an answer from some guru on the internet? Right? And y'all may say, "But Dr. K, aren't you a guru?" [ __ ] no, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm telling you how it is. You decide what to do.

And then we also have something else, which is that sometimes, if we're super chads, we actually check all these boxes. "I got the career. I got this. I got this. I got this. I got this." And then we end up here. This is insufficient. Ah, now. Oh, did I make a new one? Okay. So now we get to MOA, right? So Dharma, MOA. But before we get to Mocha, we're going to talk a little bit more practically. So let's talk more practically. If, if you're in this situation, what do you do? How do you find your Dharma? So what you need to do is introspect. Spend more time with yourself. Because let me explain something to y'all. The world can't tell you what you, what you want. The world cannot tell you what you want. Boy, does the world want to tell you what you want. Boy, does the world try to convince you that this is what you want. This is literally, we have an industry called advertising. And what does the industry of advertising do? It tries to convince you to want things. And not just advertising, we also have this other kind of thing called propaganda, which we're trying to shape your thinking. Everyone is trying to shape your thinking to believe this and do that and buy this. The one thing that they don't want, oh my God, what is the worst kind of user on any app or platform? The one who uninstalls and no longer participates. Oh [ __ ]? Because then we can't control you. If you leave the platform, we can't influence you in any way. You've been lost to us. Don't leave, baby. Come back. Come back and let us feed your insecurities and then solve them with, without our $150 yoga pants. Let me tell you something. The world is becoming increasingly materialistic and capitalistic. That's why we need to be spiritual. And the way that we are going to be spiritual is to buy these yoga pants. These have the energies of the powerful yoga. They have $150 and they will allow you to be free from capitalism. Free shipping and handling of orders over $160. So for yoga pants, I'm sorry, it does not qualify for free shipping. It is $259.5 for shipping. Or you can buy one other thing. We have jock straps, which hold your junk in a particular place. And that one is only $18.95. And then you will get free shipping. So order it and be less materialistic. Yeah. Okay, great. Introspection. Spend time with yourself. Go for a walk. Take care of your body. These are the first Dharmas. These are your starting Dharmas.

And now we're going to really go off the rails. Before we talk about MOA, here's the last thing that people don't tell you about Dharma. Your Dharma is waiting for you whether you want it or not. Now I'm going to completely leave science behind and I'm going to go to something that I'm 100% confident in, but probably won't make sense. I'm going to break ranks with all of my other colleagues who are teaching about meditation on the internet by distilling things to that which is understandable or believable. So there's a difference between what is believable and acceptable and what is true. And now I'm going to depart from the believable, the scientific, and move towards the truth. Now, this is not truth in the objective truth. This is just what I think is the truth. I'm 100% confident in what I'm about to say, but I'll be the first to say that I could be [ __ ] wrong because there's no science behind it, right? So maybe I'm delusional.

So your Dharma waits for you. And this is the cool thing about life. Life is just like a video game where you don't get your Dharma with a capital D until you fix the Dharma with the little D. You don't get your tutorial. You, you don't get to fight the raid boss until you're done with the tutorial. This is how life is. I observed it in my own life. I've observed it in hundreds of people that I've helped. Your Dharma is waiting for you, but you're not ready for it. And so thankfully, the universe is in your favor, and they're not going to just set you up to fail. It's waiting. You have to complete the tutorial before level one comes. And when you finish level one, you become level two. And when you become level two, then you go to level three. And then you go to level four. And then you'll end up getting the raid boss. And here we are, addicted to pornography, eating unhealthy food, and we're like, "What? Where's my purpose? I don't know what my." That's because you're not [ __ ] ready for it. And if it faced you, you would get crushed. That's the truth. When you are ready, things will happen.

And if y'all really pay attention to this, you will see this. So there's something that's really interesting is happening. The better I get at life, the harder my life becomes. Holy [ __ ]! Right? So at the beginning, what was my job? It's just get this pile of a mess to go to class. That was level number one, right? And I failed at that for so many years. And then once it was, "Go to class," it's like, "Okay, let's actually do these applications." And then what's the next level beyond that? It's like, "Okay, when you fail, when you get 40 rejection letters from medical schools, every single envelope." And by the way, I even figured this out. So when they send you a big envelope, it's an acceptance. When they say send you a little envelope, it's a rejection. And it was so traumatizing to open up. Traumatizing for me, in a privileged sense, to look at that letter and know, "[ __ ], this is another rejection. This is another rejection." This is, but there's a chance, right? This is what was so painful about it. Is there's a chance that maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is an acceptance. And I held on to a little bit of hope. And then I opened that thing, and it was another rejection. And then with each rejection that I got, it became harder and harder and harder to hope. And then the hope was gone completely. And then next year rolls around. And then I ask myself the question, "I feel like I have no hope. I have 40 rejections. What's the chance that something could happen?" Very low. Am I going to act in accordance with my hopes, or am I going to act in accordance with something else? My prefrontal cortex is telling me that this is a waste of time. Am I going to listen to it or not? That was the next level. And so I beat that level. I applied for a second year, didn't get in. Applied for a third year, got into medical school. And then, like, it was easy, right? So from going from a 2.5 GPA and 119 rejections to medical school, to winning two awards, which I didn't even go to the award ceremony because it never dawned on me that I would win an award because I'm the kid who is last in the class and [ __ ] barely scraped in by some grace of the universe or God or dumb luck RNG, right? I'm playing some Goa game in life where I'm buying these lottery tickets, and then eventually I got one. This is not the kid who wins two awards when they, they graduate from med school. And then has my life become easier? No, it's become harder, harder, and harder, and harder, and harder, and harder. Because now, what is my job? Do I get to sit here and take care of myself? No. I have to sit here and take care of you because this is my Dharma. Because if I'm not going to do it, who else is going to do it, right? So this is what Dharma is about. It's what are you going to do? If you don't do this thing, who else will do it? And if the answer is no one, that is your Dharma in a nutshell. Who's going to take care of you? [ __ ] no one. So you have to do it. Who's going to take care of your dog? Who's going to take care of your cat? No one. Then you have to do it. And then as you level up, the game gets harder. Everyone wants a Dharma with a capital D. They suck, trust me. You do not want it. It's harder, not easier. And this is why people have trouble finding their Dharma. So you're disconnected with your yourself. And then the other thing is, honestly, you're not ready for it. Because let's say, let's just say hypothetically, for a moment, right? That there was some great big task that you're supposed to accomplish. Could you handle it right now? And this is what's really tricky, right? Because there's a, there's a balance between, okay, as I can handle something, right? So as you move towards that great or good, it gives you some sense of purpose, alleviates some degree of suffering, allows you to choose the hard task, and then you level up, and you level up, and you level up, and you level up. And in the people that I work with, they walk this path too, where the more successful you become, the more people turn to you for guidance and support and help. You become the financial pillar of your family because you're the only one who's managed to get a job. And the weight that you carry grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. And this is what's [ __ ] awesome about it. Is then you get to decide, are you going to lift that weight or not, right? This is where Dr. K becomes, are you going to lift weight, son? And then you have to decide, do you want to give into this thing or don't give into this thing? But this is the thing. Everyone's like, "What's my Dharma? How do I find my Dharma?" Your Dharma, you know what your Dharma is. You just don't want to do it. Oh yeah, I don't want to like take care of myself. I don't want to like become more compassionate. I don't want to stop wasting my time on the internet. I want some big fancy Thea. Let me get, let me take a fancy one. Can I have a fancy Dharma? I don't want. Oh my God, I don't want to clean things up. I don't want to be nice. I want to be an [ __ ]. Can I be a narcissistic [ __ ] on the internet? Play. Thank you. You [ __ ] know what you need to do. Come on.

And then this is where the PFC comes in and says, "But that's not enough." Now, here's the thing to understand. So you have to watch out for when your mind devalues something. This is trickery of the mind. You don't want to do something. And along comes your PFC, and your nucleus accumbens is like, "We don't want to do this." And the PFC is like, "All right, bro, I got you. I'm going to tell you it's a waste of time. I'm going to tell you it's not enough." See, problem solved. Now you are rationally, "Thank God, we're being rational. We have a rational explanation as to why cleaning your [ __ ] room is never going to be enough." Thank God we don't have to do it. And oh my God, this rational explanation, it's lit, son. Let me tell you, I have the best product for you. PFC comes to the nucleus accumbens. "I have this thing called rationality, and we can use rationality to justify whatever degenerate lifestyle you want." Let's go rational. "Oh, meditate? Forget that. It doesn't work. I tried it." See, this is the other thing about the mind. It thinks it understands. "I tried it. It doesn't work for me. Period." How long did you try it? How hard did you try it? How much instruction did you get? "Oh, no, no. It doesn't work. I am right, and it is wrong." Very tricky.

So your Dharma, first of all, is hard to get to because we don't introspect enough because we call introspection boredom, right? It's crazy. Just be with yourself for a while. See what happens. Do that. Start to connect with in here, and then this will tell you what you want. This will tell you what you should be doing. And then instead of this, we turn to the outside world, which tells us all kinds of crap about what, what we should be doing, right? "Oh, you should do this." And by the way, let me, let me get you like, there's this very special product that I have that will help you do it. In order to look max. Oh, you're having trouble with dating? You should be look maxing more. And by the way, buy this thing that'll help you look max. Okay? And then we get pulled into a thousand different directions. Then we're like, "What is my Dharma?" Or we even tell ourselves, "Dharma is copium." No. So like, I don't, I mean, it can be copium, certainly, right? So if our mind gets, takes advantage of it, and it can be, absolutely can be copium. But I don't think it's copium. It's just how to live.

A harmonious life, right? How to live in accordance with everything around you. And this is what, what they sort of mean by that constancy. Because if we look at life, life is an interaction between stuff. And when you operate in line with that interaction, your life is harmonious. When you operate with friction, your life is not harmonious, right? So even if we look at something like a jacket, a jacket creates harmony between me and the environment. That's all it does. So as we engage in this, this harmony, moving, uh, engaging stuff, we'll, our life will be better.

Now, people may ask, does that mean that I should like, do what people around me want? No. So pay attention, right? So when do you set boundaries? When do you not set boundaries? You look at what this does to the harmony of your life. Does acceding to this person's requests increase the harmony of my life or decrease the harmony of my life? And what is your Dharma? Just ask yourself, does this increase the harmony of my life or decrease the harmony of my life? If it increases the harmony, it is Dharma, and you should do it. And it's not something so grand. And later on, you'll get grand stuff. Don't worry. Unfortunately, you will get grand stuff. You don't want grand stuff. Grand stuff is harder. Raid boss has way more hit points than the tutorial mobs, okay?

So, what questions before we move on? Okay, so there's some questions like, um, okay, so but I, even if it's a reality check, I still don't want to do anything of what he is saying. We'll, we'll get to that in a second. Um, what's the difference between friction and healthy challenges? So the question is, what happens to your harmony at the end? See, when I, when I, let's talk about setting boundaries. So when I accede to someone who's toxic, what, what does my life look like for the next 10 years if this person is in my life? Right? So if it, if they're, if it's not good, then I should, if it reduces my harmony, then move away from it. And that's the whole point. Is when we talk about healthy challenges, right? Dharma is the thing that allows you to embrace the pain for the sake of something greater. And it starts with you. So should you exercise? Yes. Why? Because you're the only one who can take care of your body. So you should take care of your body. What about pushing your boundaries? Well, that's, that's fine too, right? It, it's not about to adhere to a boundary or push a boundary or whatever, because like, your situation is unique, right? So we can't say you should push boundaries or you shouldn't push boundaries. My point is, look at the things that only you can take care of. And those are the things that you could take care of. If they're hard or difficult, or they result in anxiety or avoidance, or whatever, like, that's fine. They're just going to be hard. And so do it anyway. And then people will say, but it's hard to do it anyway. Fine. Right? So you have to start somewhere. That's why I kind of said, everyone's like looking for some, see, this is the mind wants some complex thing. Y'all want me to make, you guys don't want to do this, okay?

So let's go through a couple of things. All right, so I say, take a walk, eat healthier, um, exercise, right? Socialize some, right? Even engage in pleasure. By all means, attain wealth and security. This is what you should do. This is Dharma. Do all these things. Now, this is what the mind. So you guys want some really complicated thing, right? So pay attention to your mind. Your mind is like, I'm over here. I don't think this is going to work. So Dr. K, build me a path to go from here to here. But I don't want to do that. Because the more I build you the path, the more this becomes. And then this is eating healthy. And then your PFC won't like it. And who, what the [ __ ] do I know? How am I supposed to build a path for what you're supposed to do with your life? I don't know. But what I have seen is that as you start to take steps in the direction and you introspect, you need to listen to yourself. Because the rest of the world will tell you to do this, to do this, to do this, to do this. But they don't know you. I don't know you. I can't map out a life for you. I know y'all want me to, but I would be wrong. What do I know? I mean, some of y'all are 36, some of y'all are 63. How am I supposed to give you generic advice that'll work for all of you? So connect with yourself first and foremost. Do something. Take care of yourself. And then the other stuff will come.

So this is the other thing that I've noticed is that you're not actually doing it alone. There's a lot of help. So you want to fill in all this stuff. This stuff, the world is going to do for you, buddy. You just need to do your part. And you will find the support that you need. This has been my experience, the experience of the majority of people that I've worked with. I want to say 100% of people that I've worked with, but I'm sure there's some kind of cognitive bias going on in my mind that cannot be trusted when I say that that's what I believe. But scientifically, it sounds like BS. BR, come on. Okay, I think I'm going to be stuck forever. It seems good.

So now we understand. See, this is what the mind does. See, this is very important to understand. So when your mind tells you something like, I'm going to be stuck forever, or it won't be enough, or this won't work, what does your mind letting you do with that thought? What is the end result of that thought? That means that you don't have to eat healthy today, do you all see that? Very important to understand. Any kind of conclusion that your mind comes to, you have to look at, what is the direction that the conclusion wants me to go? And what y'all will find 90% of the time is that the mind is telling you things to craft the life that it wants, not that you want. That it wants. You may say, but what do you mean by it? Well, just pay attention to your mind. What does it want? It wants video games. It wants pornography. It wants unhealthy food. It doesn't. It intellectually understands some of these vague consequences, but it doesn't. It's like, I don't want that. But I don't want unhealthiness. Or I want pizza more than I want to be healthy. So it always moves towards what it wants unless it is trained. You have to be control, in control of it, okay?

So you must be rigorous. And this is the basic problem that we have, is that we trust our mind. But you think about it for a second, who is responsible for conditioning your mind? The world. And oh my God, do they love to condition you? Because if they can control your mind, they can control your actions, right? Because your mind controls you. You don't control it. So all I have to do is control the mind. This is why advertising is literally a thing. They do studies where they look at different kinds of colors and they look at, okay, if I make this advertisement with these two colors, it'll induce people's behavior more. They, it's become a precise science, man. So one of my colleagues was an empathy researcher at Mass General Hospital in Harvard Medical School. He started a company in which he hooked people up. So he was an empathy researcher. So he'd take an EEG, heart rate monitor, all kinds of other physiologic monitors. He started a company where he hooked people up to all this stuff and he had them watch advertisements. And then people would pay him to figure out which advertisement works the best. And this isn't some focus group, low-tech, noob-level [ __ ]. This is like, we're going to hook you up to the most sophisticated scientific equipment that exists and measure what this advertisement does to you. We're going to do it to 50 people and we're going to tell you out of these 10 variants of the ad, this is the one that works the best. His company got acquired by Nielsen, very successful company. So, so the world wants to convince you. And then your mind is, we just trust our mind, right?

So let's take a quick look at a post. I don't think he's evil or anything, by the way. Um, okay, so let's take a look at this one. "I already know everything I should do, but nothing compels me to want to do them. How do I move myself forward in life if nothing feels exciting or rewarding enough to go for it?"

So this problem is very simple. See, this is what's tricky. Do your wants control your life? So this is why everyone wants motivation. Everyone is like, how do I find motivation? How do I find motivation? How do I find motivation? Because if you are motivated, that is a natural inclination within you to move in a particular direction. So everyone is looking for motivation because they are lazy. And when they find the person who is the most motivated, is the laziest. You may say, what the [ __ ] does that mean, doctor? Okay, just hear me out. Because when you are motivated, you don't need to push yourself because there's a natural inclination. You don't actually control. You. The mind wants something and you're like, okay, you go for it. Oh my God, I hope I want to study today. Oh my God, I hope I want to study today. I hope I want to read instead of playing a video game. I hope I want to socialize instead of watching porn. I hope, I hope, I hope I'm motivated towards all these things because we have no control over ourselves. When you have no control over yourself, you pray for motivation in the right direction. And this is what happens, right? So when we have no control over our actions and we rely on motivation, then we're screwed. If we do not want things, because if we want something, then we'll do it. And now what's happened is my life falls to what I want. And now you're really screwed. Because who controls what you want? Do you control what you want? Hell no, right? That's the one thing that we can be 100% certain about is I don't get to control what I want, right? For a hundred years, people tried to do this with the homosexual community where we're like, hey, you were attracted to this person who is the same gender as you. We are going to fix that. We are going to change what you want. We are going to control what you want. And you can control what you want. Doesn't work. You don't control what you want.

So now the question becomes very simple. Do you want to live a life where you are directed by your wants, or do you want to live a life where you are not directed by your wants? Does your desire control you, or do you control your desire? And you got to have a thousand reasons to, to that you should do it. And now we'll kind of get in more detail to the post. "I look at these goals and feel no strong pull towards them." Right? So that's the thing. This person is looking for gravitation. I should do all this stuff, and I look at these goals and there's no strong pull. It's just, ah, that doesn't sound exciting or fulfilling at all.

Now, let's tunnel down into the mind. This is tricky. So when the mind does not want something, it will convince you that this is, this doesn't sound exciting or fun. You won't enjoy this. So now we don't have to put forth effort, right? Let me convince you that this is not going to be worth it. And we just trust the mind, right? So this person is like, [ __ ] in a couple of ways. We all are. Because what we should do, the world has programmed us that we should do all of this kind of stuff, right? And then we don't want to do it. So there's no internal drive, right? There's no motivation. And then we're kind of stuck. "I break up within months because I get bored." So this is a basic problem of, you are not in control of your mind. Your mind is in control of you. Very simple.

"I just do it and then think, all right, what else do I do with my life?" Okay, fine. So the first thing to do if you are in this situation where you don't want things, but you should do them, is you must control your mind. So meditation is the number one thing, right? So why is meditation the number one thing? It is the practice of you gaining control of your mind instead of your mind controlling you. So literally, what we do in meditation, it's the most direct form of practice. If my mind wants to think about something else, no, we're going to think about this. The mind is like, I want to go over here. You're like, no, we're going to think about this. So then what happens as you meditate more and more and more is you become, your actions become independent of your wants. See, this is a big problem where we are all trying to cultivate a particular want, but we are fundamentally not in control of it. How do I get inspired? How do I get motivated? How do I get this? How do I get this? How do I get this? Right? I want to make it easy on yourself. No, you just, you decide. When you say jump, the mind should jump, right? We don't go through life with like our hands doing whatever the [ __ ] they want. I want to do this right now. And I tell my hands to stop. And my hands are like, no, [ __ ] you. But this is what happens with our mind. Our mind is run wild. We don't control it anymore. So it decides it wants something and we're like, okay, fine, you're the boss. Because if we don't listen to it, it punishes us. It makes us bored. Oh my God, don't play a video game. Why not? What'll happen? I'll be [Music] bored.

So you guys want, if you guys want to really train your mind, you want to teach your mind a [ __ ] lesson. Next time you take a flight, don't take anything to do. Just don't take anything to do. What am I going to do? Nothing. There's nothing to do. I, I understand they have some very high quality magazines in the seat pocket in front of you, some really just top-notch literary production, there's just really award-winning stuff, man. You know what's going to happen? Nothing. Nothing is going to happen. You'll survive. You'll be bored, right? Don't take your phone into the bathroom. All of these things. What, what, what do you get from using your phone? Not very much. It costs you more than it gives you. But our, our mind is in control of us. So all these things are hard. So if you, if you don't want to do something that you should do, the interesting answer is, you just need one thing to fix this problem, which is learn to be bored. Learn to not let your wants control you. And the most direct way to not let your wants control is use boredom. I want this. So what? Right? So I went through a practice where I gave up ice cream for 10 years. Ice cream was my favorite thing. And by the way, when we're talking about real medit, we'll get to this in a second. You may say, but Dr. K, 10 years? Oh my God, that's so long. Yeah, that's right. So if you really want to get good at this stuff, the time, the time scales that we're talking about for a lot of the spiritual stuff, like finding your Dharma and stuff like that, we're talking about decades or even lifetimes if this is to be understood. But in our current society, we want everything to be done within days, if not weeks. We can't even wait a week for a shipment of something we need. Overnight delivery, right? And the world is accommodating us, making it easier and easier and easier to give into our wants. And they love doing it, by the way. Because the more that they can make it easy to give into your wants, the more impulsive your life will be, right? They can capitalize on the impulse. I feel like buying something. Let me just click a button and then it'll be bought. Easy. Oh, thank God. Woo, thank God that they can have an impulse and we can get their money in that amount of time. I'm not saying capitalism is evil or anything. I love overnight delivery. It's great. Love it. I'm just saying, let's understand what the society is doing to us. Let's understand what technology is doing to us.

So in order to gain control of your wants, you need two things: one is meditation, the second is the tolerance of boredom. Once you learn to be bored, now just think about this for a second. Think about the value of being bored. If you no longer have to retreat from boredom, do you need to use your phone? No. Do you need to play a video game? No. Do you need to watch pornography? No. Can you go to the library? Yes. It's boring at the library. Dr. K, oh my God, it's so boring. Well, boredom doesn't bother you anymore. So ain't no thing. Your life will be transformed with this one very simple trick. Learn to be bored. Be okay with being bored. Get very good at being bored. And then eventually, something cool will happen. As you're bored, your mind will finally come crawling to you and it'll say, please give me something to do. It's like, all right, son. Let's learn physics. And your mind is like, okay, fine. And then you will be in control of your mind, and it will not be in control of you.

Okay, wait. There's a difference between you and your mind. Absolutely. You are not your mind. Mind, right? Your mind is thoughts and emotions. That's not you. You are that which always experiences the fluctuations of your mind. Your mind changes, but you don't change. Okay, let's talk about a couple of other things. So people are asking how to meditate. So last thing. So we haven't talked about Moksha either. So let's talk about Moksha and meditation. So as these people have discovered, right? So there's a lot of suffering in the world. Can't find meaning in life. And even as we pursue things like money or fame, I already, I, I checked all the boxes, right? None of this works. It's not enough. Yes, you are correct. The yogis figured out the same thing.

So at the very beginning, in the first phase of unhappiness in life, the mind seeks particular things that it believes will make it happy. And why does it do that? Because they do make it happy for a time. So I think to myself, oh my God, I'm alone and I love her. I need her. She's the only one in the world for me. I just want her to date me. I want her to say yes, please. And our mind wants this thing. I mean, love, this is what everyone talks about in the movies. Oh my God. And then the person says yes, and it's beautiful for three weeks. And then I realize, oh my God, this is a human being. They are not what I idealize them as. And our minds are so stubborn that it can take us years to discover that this is a different person from whom I thought they were. They continuously tell us, hey, I'm not who you think I am. I'm not who you think I am. I'm not who you think I am. And yet our mind goes on ignoring it, ignoring it, ignoring it. Sometimes we even get married and we have kids, and then we wake up one day and we realize, holy [ __ ], this is not the person that I thought they were. So when someone tells you who they are, pay attention.

So at the beginning, we seek particular things and we get some amount of happiness for some amount of time, but it's never enough, right? We see this a lot with the content creators that we work with. Have 100,000 subscribers? Oh my God, go you. Yeah. Are you happy now? No, I need 200,000. Are you happy with 200,000? No. This person started, they just came on the scene and they've been streaming for six months. I've been streaming for two years and they have 18, 180,000 and I have 200,000. I even have more than them, but I'm still unhappy. So this is the problem with fulfilling desires and chasing your wants is that it's never enough. It is the nature of a want to be temporary, and the satisfaction of a want to be temporary. How long does the happiness from a, the perfect wedding last? We have all these Bridezillas and groomzillas now, right? I want this, I want this, I want this. And even though you ruin all your relationships and you go into debt to get your perfect wedding, what happens a month later, six months later? So wants are temporary. And so the first stage is the mind thinks, okay, I will satisfy this want. This is Kama, pleasure. And then next stage is we start to realize that there's security. That, okay, it's not just about fulfilling my desires. I need some way to support this life that I live. I'm a human being. I have needs. These needs to be, these needs need to be met. If the needs are not met, this will create stress. So we seek pleasure and we try to avoid pain. This is where Artha comes in. Artha is wealth. So Artha protects us against the negative things in life and lets us move towards pleasure, right? So these two things are tied. And yet, even if we have Artha and we have Kama, if we have pleasure and we have wealth, we are not perfectly happy. And there are many people out there who are very wealthy who are not perfectly happy. So this is where Dharma comes in. Now we have to have a greater purpose. We have to be on this Earth for, or something. It's greater than me. I need to make the world a better place. There's a lot of fulfillment that comes from that. Great. And then sometimes we do all three of these things, and we are still not happy. So we have people, right? So let's take a quick look. "Does anyone else struggle to find meaning in life? I have great friends, a good solid job where I like my co-workers, a good social life, but I struggle to find meaning. I get so focused in this train of thought that it depresses me. People sometimes say to find happiness in the small pleasures in life. I do get happiness from these things: love, friends, sex, accomplishment, even day-to-day activities like eating and running. However, I can't help but think that these are just evolutionary tricks and with no intrinsic meaning. It's a really sad way to go through life, but I can't stop, but I can't stop thinking about it." I think that's what this person means to say, right?

So this is what happens to some of us as we do everything that we're supposed to do, and then we even think about things like, maybe this is an evolutionary trick. So let's understand something. If we really want to understand Moksha and the real purpose of life, we have to understand the bounds of different dimensions of the self. Now, I know that sentence makes no sense, so let me explain it. So when we talk about evolution, which part of us is subject to evolution? Primarily our physical body, right? So if we sort of think about like, where does evolution act? Evolution acts on the physical body. Like this desire for procreation, hunger, thirst, all of these things are physical in nature. Now we start to touch on the psychological realm through evolution, but really, like if we sort of think about life like a bacterium, right? So we don't know that a bacterium has thoughts or emotions. Maybe it does, who knows. But it certainly has that physicality. It has hunger, it has thirst, it has the desire to procreate. We have those plasmids, baby, right? For those of you all that know microbiology. So these fundamental things about procreation and the propagation of life, live, exist on a very basic level. You don't need to be human to have those. And so this is the problem. Is we are more than bacterium. We have layers of self that transcend the physical realm. We have layers of existence that are non-physical. So when we look at all of these evolutionary things that were driven towards hunger, thirst, whatever, we can satisfy those, but then only the body will be satisfied.

Now we enter the mind. And now we have some animals that also have emotions and stuff like that, right? Dogs can get angry, they can get sad, they can get happy, they can get excited, they can be loving. And so we must also satisfy the mind, okay? Now we even look at that, right? Friends, accomplishment. These are satisfactions of the mind. Which part of us wants to be accomplished? Our mind does. Our ego does. So we can go on satisfying all of those things. And if that is all that a human being was, then we would be happy, right? It makes sense. This simple logic. If this was sufficient for happiness, this would make us happy. And if you look at an animal, right? We don't really know this. Maybe animals are unhappy. But generally speaking, if you have a dog, so I had three dogs growing up, and they tend to be pretty happy. If you take care of their physical needs and you take care of their emotional needs, that's all they need. They don't have existential crises that we know of.

So now, if we look at a human being, what is different about a human being? So animals have thoughts and emotions. They have some degree of ego, right? They have their place in the pack, their social hierarchies. Do humans have anything that animals don't have? Now, this is up for debate, but we're going to, just for the sake of simplicity, to try to answer this question, we're going to say yes. So the human being is a little bit different because the human being has something that we call awareness. And maybe animals are somewhat aware too. Actually, everything has some degree of awareness, but we have more awareness than animals, let's say that. And what is awareness? So awareness is that which experiences everything else. So you have this part of you that is the essence of you. And it's not your physical body because your physical body can change over time. It does change over time, but you're always you. You were you when you were one year old. You were you when you were 15 years old. You're going to be you when you're 50. It's always you, but the body changes. The mind also changes. Happy one day, sad the next day. But what's, what's you? You are that which experiences. You are just raw subjective experience. The one thing that separates you from everything else is that you have the capacity to be aware of all of these things. And so this is where Moksha comes. Because we can satisfy the body, we can satisfy the mind, and it is not enough because there's a part of us that hasn't been satisfied. Does that make sense? If we are only a physical dimension and we are only a mental dimension, then fulfilling these two things should make us perfectly content. And we can see that roughly speaking with animals, making some assumptions there, which are arguable on a philosophical level, on a scientific level. So there must be something else because we're still not happy. This is what the approach that the yogis took. And they're like, why am I not happy yet? What's going on? I have everything, right? This is what happened with Buddha. All of his physical needs are met. He's loved, he's respected, people are proud of him, he's been groomed. So he has love, he has respect, emotions are satisfied. Yet he wakes up one day and he's unhappy.

Now we get to Moksha. So if you are someone who is in this state where you have checked all the boxes and you are still unhappy, there's only one thing left, which is liberation. Now, if y'all want to understand what liberation is, we're going to teach you now. The question is, how? So this is what I want y'all to understand. You can exist outside of a sensation of body and outside of a sensation of mind. So even though you can trigger this part of you, so if you electrically stimulate the temporoparietal junction, you will trigger something called an out-of-body experience. We figured out neuroscientifically where the out-of-body experience comes from. So all this weird stuff that happens in, in spirituality, some of it we figured out how to trigger. So we figured out how to trigger transcendental states. This stuff that happens in spirituality, we figured out how to do some of it with, with things like psilocybin and psychedelics, stimulating the temporoparietal junction, sometimes works for out-of-body experience. We figured out a couple of these things. But if you really want to understand what the nature of liberation and, and true contentment and happiness is, meditation is the path to do it. Maybe prayer. There are other ways to do it, but we're going to talk about meditation because first of all, that's the tradition I come from. And secondly, it is the one that is the most stepwise where if you do A, B, and C, the same thing will happen. If I drop an apple, it'll fall. If you drop an apple, it'll fall. If anybody drops an apple, it'll fall because gravity is a uniformity of the earth. And so in this way, consciousness is also a uniformity of all human beings. So you can discover this. So there are a couple of steps to this, okay? We'll teach y'all.

So the first is that if we look at our attention, the simplest way to experience pure consciousness is something called. So this is very simple. If I close my eyes, what happens to my other senses? So if I close my eyes, my awareness, the awareness that was being utilized by the eyes, then gets moved over to the other senses. So if I'm listening to a piece of music and I close my eyes, I will hear the music more intensely, right? And so then what happens is if I'm, let's say I'm getting a massage and then there's, I close my eyes and there's complete silence, then I will feel the massage more deeply. So whichever sense we get rid of, the attention moves to the remaining senses. Now, what happens when we get rid of all five senses? Where does the attention go? It has no object for focus. I'm not looking at anything. I'm not seeing anything. I'm not hearing anything. I'm not tasting anything. I'm not feeling anything. All we are is attention. And then people will say, okay, so where does the attention go? The attention goes into the mind, right? So we can be lost in thought, fine. But then eventually thoughts can cease too. So thoughts have the capacity for cessation. And you know this because sometimes you zone out and you're not thinking about anything and you're just kind of, you zone out, right? So there are periods of time where our mind does not think. So sleep is a one, a good example of this, when we're not dreaming, zoning out. So this is why we start with Pratyahara. And then we do something called Dharana. Dharana is the focusing of your attention on a single thing. So you all may notice this when you meditate. So let's say I do a practice called Trataka. Trataka is fixed point gazing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the tip of my nose, okay? So if I look at the tip of my nose and I keep looking at it, eventually my thoughts will cease. At the very beginning, I'll have all kinds of thoughts. But if I gaze at the tip of my nose and I keep looking, keep looking, keep looking, the thoughts will all stop and I will be fully focused on that. And then we enter into. So what is Dhyana? So our mind has a very simple principle, which is that it will acclimatize to a stimulus. So when I put my shirt on, I feel the shirt, but after a few moments, I no longer feel the shirt. So the way that meditation works is we push everything else to the side and we focus on one thing. And then eventually, my mind acclimatizes to that thing and I lose that thing. And then all I am is raw attention without an object. This is the first path to meditation.

Now, when you enter this state of mind where all you are is attention without any objective focus, it feels cool. It is somewhat blissful. And as you spend more and more time in this state, you will no longer feel Dukkha. Dukkha will disappear. Suffering will be gone, right? And this is where the mind will rebel with all kinds of things. It'll ask, but what about this? And what about my job? And what about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? I don't [ __ ] know. I'm not saying that Dukkha is designed to make your life function, or meditation not designed to make you function with whatever goals your ego has. That's not the purpose. This is a fundamental of human beings. It is not like a construction that is designed to make your ego gratified. This is what it is, right? If you eat something, the hunger goes away. If you get a hug, you feel loved. That part is satisfied. To satisfy that which is left, this is the way. What are the implications for your life? You decide. If you want to know if you're hungry, eat something. If you're feeling lonely, go get a hug. If you're discontent with life and you're filled with Dukkha, do this thing, it'll go away. What does that mean for life? You figure out, bro. I don't know. But this bliss state cannot be considered pleasure. It's not pleasure, it's bliss. Okay? This is not the same as riding a roller coaster. It's a different experience. It's just attention without focus, just pure, raw attention. And the, the interesting thing is that if y'all really want to learn how to do this, this is not like an eight-week thing. So I'm going to walk y'all through an advanced meditation practice. And just to give you all a sense of like, how long it took me to do this, I would say somewhere probably between three and 20 years. I will explain what 20 years of meditation actually gets you, okay? And this is where if y'all say like, but I need it tomorrow, well, good luck, right? So it's like the body ages at the rate that it ages. You can't speed up puberty. Like that's just the scale at which stuff happens. And the scale at which the meditative stuff happens, if you really want Moksha, moves incredibly slowly with very little gain along the way. So this is what's so powerful about this stuff. Is see, when the mind expects a gain, that's when you run into problems. That's when it's very hard to be disciplined. Because if, if the expected gain is like high and you don't get it, it actually destroys your motivation. Because I didn't get what I was investing in. I've been buying this chick flowers for so many days in order to get laid. How many, how many times do I need to take this person out on a date? Not chick, dude, whatever. I've been coy with this person and trying to get this person to break up with their girlfriend and start dating me for so long. When do I get what I want? That's, I'm sorry, the spiritual scale is incredibly long. And there's a beauty to that. It's like, it's awesome once you understand. I'll try to explain it. Because here's the thing, if there is an expected gain, then the mind enters the picture. Because if you're meditating for something, then your mind will want it. And then once it gets it, it says, ah, thank God. But to completely get rid of mind, because that's what we're trying to do, you have to operate on a scale where the mind is just completely gone. You have to do something for no point over and over and over again. And that is when you will discover. I don't know if that makes any sense to y'all, because it's weird. Because as long as there's an expected gain, the mind will motivate you towards it. And if it doesn't get the gain, it'll motivate you away from it. And even if it does get the gain, it'll want more next time. If you have, if I'm meditating for a transcendental experience, this is interesting. The, the first transcendental experience in meditation is the, is easy. The second transcendental meditation experience in meditation is the hardest. Because the first time you have a transcendental experience, there's no expectation of the mind. The mind is out of the way. And once it's out of the way, then you can transcend it very easily. But the moment that you have a transcendental experience, the mind wants again. Holy crap, that was so cool. Let's do it again. And then it sits down and it has that expectation. And with that expectation, the mind remains active. When the mind is active, you can't transcend it. The whole reason you had the first one in the first place is because the mind was not there. So the second one is the hardest. And the cool thing is that we want to transcend mind completely. So it operates at a scale where unless you are disciplined enough, the mind will give up. Which is good, because that's the only way it works.

So now we're going to teach y'all like, just, I'm going to give y'all a practice. And this is a practice to be done for a decade, ideally twice a day for 20 minutes for a decade. And then if it doesn't work, y'all can come back and say, hey, Dr. K, you're full of [ __ ]. Okay, fine. Do it for a decade. 20 days, every single, uh, 20 minutes, twice a day for 10 years. This is the, the scale at which meditation truly operates. Om chanting. If you do for a decade, I'll walk you through what happens. So when we first chant, oh, we're going to teach y'all very simply. So, oh, is just from a fully open mouth to a fully closed mouth. And we're exhaling in that vein. That's it, okay? Ah. [Music] Do it with me. [Laughter] [Music] A. Ah. [Music] Easy, right? So now we get to the subtlety of it. When you really want to learn Om chanting, we're going to use this. We're going to talk about the phases. There are so many levels to Om chanting, and we'll understand what they are. So I will give y'all an example, okay? So when we do Om chanting, okay? So in the first phase of Om chanting, we are just doing the practice. So you're chanting for about 20 minutes. You have to chant for 20 minutes. You can do like yoga and Nishi and stuff like that. So I'd say Surya Namaskar for five minutes, Nar should the for five minutes, and then Om chanting for about 10 minutes, twice a day for 10 years. So in Phase number one, we're just doing it. We're just making the sound. Phase two, pay attention to vibration. So what you will notice is a vibration in your body. And this is where it's useful to maximize the vibration. So I'll give you all an example, okay? [Music] So. [Music] [Laughter] Ah. Okay, maximize the vibration. And what we want to do is feel the vibration in your body. We're focusing on feeling, not sound. Step number three, notice the localization of vibration. Okay? So what you will notice is when I say A, I'm going to give you all the answers now, but if you don't, you have to discover this on your own. But well, just to illustrate one technique, okay? Ah. So when you chant "ah," you will notice the vibration is maximal around your navel. In "uh," the vibration is between the throat and the chest. And then in "m," the vibration is going to be somewhere between your chin and the top of your head. So as you chant "oh," you will notice an ascending vibration that starts at your navel and goes all the way to the top. And so when we're meditating, we're not just chanting anymore. We are focusing on the movement of vibration. I guess this is step four, right? So first you notice it in the three areas, and then this is why it takes so long because you need the ability to detect the differences. And then you will notice it traveling up. So each Om chanting is like a vibrational energy that is ascending in your your body. Now, you will notice all kinds of interesting things. So now what we want to do is you will notice that this vibration is lurchy or not smooth. This is a natural thing that you'll discover. It'll feel off at some point. You're like, I'm not, this doesn't feel right. In the same way that when you sit uncomfortably in a chair, the chair feels uncomfortable, the "m" vibration will feel off. Now we get to the hard stuff. This stuff may take a couple months, but it's honestly easy sauce. So now we have to make the perfect vibration. This is very difficult to do to chant "oh" in a way where each part of the "ohm," the vibratory, so you're not going to be able to hear it, you can probably hear it too, but it's hard to do on the hearing level, to feel the ascent of the vibration to be smooth and without a jerk. So I'll give you all just one example of something that will mess up your own vibration, which is a locked jaw. So when I chant "oh," now I want y'all to pay attention. So I want y'all to pay attention to your jaw. When you go from "ah," you'll notice that at some point you go from, you'll notice a, a shift in the locking of your jaw. You move modally from one movement to another movement to make that smooth is possible, but is [Music] difficult. And then what you will notice is to avoid the locked jaw, you require relaxation of the jaw. So now I'm chanting, but all of my attention is in relaxation of the jaw to avoid that bump. Okay, there's more. We haven't even got into the fun stuff yet, okay? So now we make a perfect vibration from bottom to top. This will take probably months, if not years, of practice to be able to do. Let's say months. I think this is still months. All right, so now we have a perfect vibration. And then we get to the fun stuff. So then what we do is decrease the volume and vibration. So once we have tuned ourselves to the perfect "ohm," we start to slowly decrease the vibration. And the way that this works is as you do this vibration, you will start to notice something else. So you paid attention to the locked jaw. You have an even amount of breath with "a," "u," and "m." So that's another goal. So when we're talking about the perfect vibration, locked jaws, one even seconds of "a," "u," and "m," and then even beyond that, we have 5.2, which is the right level of silence between rounds. You will know what the right level of silence is. You have to find the right level of silence. And then something cool will happen. So this may be around the time that you get your first weird spiritual experience. So in my case, for example, after I was done with the practice, I'll just share this today just to give you all an example. I noticed a pair of eyes. So I had my eyes closed, and I noticed a pair of eyes floating to the surface that were looking back at me. So when you close your eyes, you have like a screen in front of you, okay? And then what I noticed is that there's like a pair of eyes that are like looking at me. And I had never seen it before, and it freaked me the [ __ ] out. And I was like, oh, okay, this is what people are talking about, right? Like they're looking back. I'm doing something and something is noticing and is looking at me. Then what happens is we will decrease. So you'll notice these weird things as you do this. You will, you will sort of find the perfect vibra, and then you will start to feel something else. And then what happens is you will notice that there's something else that you're feeling. There's another sensation that is not vibratory, which if the human body is like this, let's say I'm sitting cross-legged, okay? And I'm in a meditative posture. So the vibration goes up like this. But then what you'll start to notice is that there is like this column within you. And the column is like, it's just a feeling. And then what happens is in order to enhance the sensation of the column, in order to be able to detect the column, you will

Notice that the vibration interferes with your ability to detect the column. And so then, what happens is you need to make the vibration smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And then, as you notice that this vibration becomes smallest, so then we're going to chant "Om" very quietly. Then you will notice the column more, more, and more, and more. And you will start to observe a nonphysical structure. This is Sushumna. This is the channel through which your Kundalini Shakti rises. And then you will get to the phase where we're going to stop there.

But then, eventually, what'll start to happen is within Sushumna, you will notice an upward energy. But it is not physical. It is not vibration. The other thing that'll happen is when we meditate, let's say I'm sitting like this, my arms are like this, okay? What you will notice is that the vibration that you feel starts at the front of your body. But as you practice more, it'll move towards the back. And the quieter that you you'll also notice that Sushumna is back here. There's something posterior to the vibration. The vibration will be at the very front of your body. So Sushumna is posterior. And the more quiet you become with your "Om" chanting, the more you will detect Sushumna in the back. And then you will notice the upward movement there. And this will take at least, I would say, between one and three years, at least, if you do this practice only.

And then, along the way, stuff will happen. You will see things in the chash. 100%. Actually, I don't know if it's 100%. I'm I'm confident that this will happen. I don't think I'm unique. But this is the level of meditation that no one talks to you about. People don't. And then the the other problem is that the people who do talk about it are not trained in science. So they, I think they have difficulty like breaking it down, right? So maybe they're good at it. But this this is what I've seen. So like when I read texts about the esoteric forms of meditation, people don't break it down into these stages and stuff like that. I I just haven't seen that. Maybe someone's doing it.

How does this relate to Kundalini? This is the discovery of Kundalini. Over this is the opening door. And this is the beginning and the end of Kundalini Yoga. It is a bit scary. It's not a bit scary. It's very scary. This will completely change the way that you live your life because you will discover. So I don't know if this makes sense. So we're going to leave one last thing, which is going to be the craziest. And if y'all disagree with me, please let me know because I've been talking about this for inquiring about this. So about a year ago, I had some weird experiences in meditation. And then I started asking my friends who are neuroscientists, psychiatrists, "Do we have proof of the existence of thought?" And to date, I haven't had anyone give me a convincing answer as to yes. Right?

So when I asked my friends who are like neuroscientists, these are people like researchers at Harvard Medical School, right? So they're like, they kind of know what they're talking about. And like we all kind of agree that we don't, we don't really have proof. We have implications of thought. So we can even measure thought, but we have no proof of its existence. So we have, what is the proof? Things like EEG. This is electrical activity. It's electrical stimuli, stimuli. We have things like fMRI, which is blood flow to different parts of the brain. PET, PET scans, right? This is the activation of different water molecules. So we have have all these physical things. And then we correlate them with thought. So what we do is we do an EEG and then we ask someone, "What are you thinking? What are you feeling?" Right? So how do we know that the amygdala is where our negative emotions come from? Because we'll ask people, we do brain scan, we see, "Oh, there's activity in the amygdala. What are you feeling?" "You're feeling fear." Okay, cool. We know that this is where fear comes from. But there is a subjective level of experience. There is a subjectivity to you which cannot be measured in a physical form.

And now we run into a very big problem. Because if we look at science, science has no way to measure thoughts, right? We have no thought-detecting device. We can measure some things that correlate with thought. But the reason that we know that thoughts exist, we actually don't know that they exist. It's just a delusion that the entire human race shares. And there are people who are like, you know, hard biologists in terms of neuroscience, who think that this thing doesn't actually exist. It literally is a shared delusion. It doesn't exist. And in the physical sense, it doesn't exist. So then something interesting happened. Is once science failed to detect thought, we started to develop all of this instrumentation in the physical world. But we stopped exploring thought. We all of our scientific exploration is in the physical dimension, right? Let like fMRI and EEG. We can detect energy and we can detect matter. This is all we can detect.

So then the question, it's really interesting. The question is, okay, what about the subjective stuff? What about the subjective experience? We can't explore that scientifically. Not yet. And so we stopped exploring it. But what happens when you start exploring it? So you have to be the one who explores it. A scientist can't do it for you. You can apply the scientific method to internal subjective experiences. And this is what happens in meditation. People are saying, "What does this have to do with Kundalini?" This is the way that Kundalini was discovered. And so when we're talking about Moksha, it is operating at this level.

So eventually, what is Moksha? So what is the point of the meaning of life? It doesn't have a meaning, actually. This is the most important discovery. Which is no, not a problem. See, we only think that like finding the meaning of life is only a problem if you're operating in the mind. Like, "Oh my God, what am I doing? Like, what the [ __ ]?" You know? Imagine that you existed only for a day, right? Life just is. Meaning is something that the human mind attaches to it. Meaning is like when we look up at a cloud in the sky and we see that this is a dog or this is a piece of popcorn, right? This is something that a mind is attaching. The cloud is just the cloud. Life is just life. It just is. A rock is just a rock. There's no good rock or bad rock. It's the meaning that that we attach. The mind, the mind needs meaning. And the problem is that we are so operating within in mind because all of this technology, all of this externalizing stuff is all feeding the mind. It's all mental in nature. Emotions, thoughts. This is the world that we live in. Logic, reasoning. This all mental. But there's a layer of existence that ex that is beyond mind or outside of mind, which is just pure consciousness, attention. And when you start exploring this, you will start to be content. This is what leads to Sukha, Ananda, Moksha. And when you realize that that is actually the truest form of reality and that the rest of the stuff is less real, that's when you're done. You're done with the cycle of liberation and whatnot.

Now, the problem is that when we're talking about things like this, and this is a great post, by the way. I I didn't mean to bash this person at all. So I don't believe in it and I'm not enlightened enough to encounter the alleged evidence of it. Okay, fine, right? So this is this is a born of logic. This is logical. But then like the whole point is that once we, once you start operating at this level, like once you experience this consciousness, it's amazing how suffering in life starts to slough off. It just starts sublimating. And I I I mean, like we see this, right? We see the scientific evidence of this that people who meditate are more content with life. We can literally measure their quality of life and their quality of life improves, even though the circumstances of their life don't improve at all. There's studies that show that you don't make, if you do an eight-week meditation study, it's not like this person makes $10,000 more at the end of eight weeks, but their quality of life is better. Their health hasn't substantially changed. Their relationship, there's been no change in their life. The external life looks exactly the same. The internal life is different. And the quality of life improves. And so this is what Moksha is. And if you guys really, really want to go there, go there. But you're not going to get there in eight weeks. You're not going to get there in eight months. I've been doing this [ __ ] for 20 years.

And when I started out, I wanted some kind of like general advantage. Fine, right? I wanted to be able to study better. I was a skeptic. I'm still a skeptic. But then there are some experiences that you have which change your understanding of things. That's how life is. I didn't believe in love until I fell in love. That's just how it works. And a thousand people who have never been in love, you can't convince them that love exists until they experience it. So now y'all are really only left with one question, which is, what are you willing to try to experience it? And for you to understand the time scale of these things is long, right? It's very long, especially with our conditioning. And this is the other problem that we run into. If you look at all these meditative practices, what you'll find is that these people have very rigorous lifestyles. Why? Why are they vegetarian? Why are they celibate? They even control the nature of violence in their mind. You don't think negative thoughts, right? You train your mind to not even think negatively about someone else. Why do they avoid all psychoactive substances? Not only all psychoactive substances, they have very specific diet. It's not just vegetarian where you're eating this highly processed pea protein, whatever the [ __ ] they're eating. Very specific foods, low amounts of grains because they've sort of discovered, they've discovered all the stuff about gut microbiome because in order to attain these states of mind, you need a mind that operates at a very specific way biologically. You need a very specific pH, right? So a lot of these practices, so there are some practices that I've done that you take one breath every six to eight minutes. Other practices, you take 200, 40 breaths a minute. What's going on here? It's changing our respir. We're inducing respiratory acidosis and respiratory alkalosis. When we induce respiratory acidosis and respiratory alkalosis, it changes the function of our brain. And then they eat very specific things. And I'm telling you, when you all start operating at this level, you will never feel Sushumna if you are not have the right diet.

So then what happens is we get to the phase of like, you know, when people are talking about bodybuilding, right? So if I'm if I'm lifting, minimum requirement to lift properly as people will say is one gram of protein per kg or pound of body weight, depending on who you talk to. And to them, it is, no, it's it's silly to try to work out unless you're going to have this diet because in order to support this physiological growth, you need a certain nutrient. Simple, right? You can't be eating processed food in 5,000 calories and expect the bodybuilding to work properly. Low carb, high protein. This is what you need. The meditators were the same. They sort of figured out the same thing. What's the equivalent of one gram of protein per kg or pound of body weight? It's all the meditative diet. This is why they eat what they do in monasteries. Because unless you do it, it just, you won't get there. You can do all the same effort. You can take two people, they work out the same amount. They both work out six hours a week. One of them eats their protein requirement, one of them doesn't. The result that the two get will be drastically different. This is the other thing that we do not understand about meditation. Everyone who's like talking about meditation, they don't adhere to the diet. They don't adhere to an abstinence of psychoactive substances. And it's even things like they'll avoid potatoes, eggplant, and tomatoes, garlic, onions. These things, you won't feel Sushumna as easily, right? So if you want to detect all this stuff, if y'all really want to understand what Moksha is, this is the way to do it. It's been described, right? And it works. And it's cool. The thing is, it requires a level of dedication and focus that like most of us don't have. Our mind is not happy with that. It's like, "What, what am I going to, what but what about all the [ __ ] that I care about?"

I mean, this is where I like just think about it for a this silly. You can meditate for 20 minutes twice a day for the rest of your life without impacting any part of your life. You can have the same career that you have now. You can have the same relationships that you can have now. You can have the same degree of degeneracy that you have now. You can play, spend all days playing video games. You can do all that. I do not buy that you do not have 40 minutes of the day that you can carve out every single day for the rest of your life. You can do it. And then the question becomes, well, why should I? That's for you to decide, right? So you have to decide, do you want to experience the ultimate reality, right? I make it sound so grandiose. And if you do, then work for it. And if you don't, then that's okay. And also, do you want to let your wants control what you do? And this is the real value of it. This is why it's so op. Because you set a target for yourself, you make a commitment, and then you start to follow along. And then the rest of life becomes easy. Because compared to that, can you imagine how hard it would be to to do 20 minutes of practice twice a day for seven years with no benefit? What will your willpower have to become in order to do that? All kinds of benefits will come along the way, but they're not the purpose. They're actually distractions. So as you start to walk this path, there's also a description of siddhis, psychic powers, the ability to read thoughts, time travel, and all this other kind of stuff. These are all distractions. That's what they say. And once you start walking the path, you'll understand.

Questions before we wrap up for the day. So Jackie in here is saying, "What special thing happened to you after you asked your colleagues about the proof of thought?" So that's like after you saw the eyes. So two things. One is the proof of thoughts, and I was just curious, right? Because the more I thought about it, I was like, "Do we have proof of thoughts?" That's a little bit separate. So I, and the second thing is, I'm not going to say more. And the reason is because saying more is going to be an engagement of the mind. You'll create, I'll create curiosity and expectation, and that's going to hurt you in the long. It would be harmful to tell you. The other thing is, it'll diminish my own power. So one of the things that I found is that the more I talk about my spiritual practice, the less potent it becomes. Even disclosing this one experience, I'm going to be paying for for the next three months. That's all I'm willing to pay. So your mind is curious, fine. But what, what, let's just play the tape through the end. Let's say, "Oh my God, I know I saw this and I saw this and I saw this." What's that going to do to you? You're going to get so excited. The mind will get excited. "Oh my God, let me do it. This sounds cool. I want to experience that." But now I've created a curiosity in the mind. That curiosity won't last. It'll be harmful in the long run. Second thing is, people will become more skeptical. Which in a sense is fine, right? "What is this guy talking about? This guy is crazy." Okay, fine. But it doesn't help anyone. See, the more I talk it up, the more it creates false expectations for some people, creates skepticism. What's my goal here? My goal is for y'all to meditate. You just do this thing for yourself. And it's not to experience the ultimate reality. We're talking about evidence-based stuff, right? Be less anxious. Have a little bit more willpower. Strengthen your frontales. I don't want to do anything to sabotage that, even to satisfy curiosity. The most dangerous, insidious thing is that'll grow my ego. Because anytime I say something, "I did this," it grows the ego. That's I have to, I have to deal with that later. So this like meditators don't, this is the problem, right? Is like meditators don't, we don't talk about these experiences. And for good reason. And when you meet another real meditator, you will know. They will know. You guys can tell, you know, when someone is spiritually developed. You learn how to detect it. And they can see it in you. That's enough.

Will you see benefits from meditating 20 minutes a day if you don't abide by the yogic diet? Absolutely. So this is the cool thing, right? So if we talk about the scientific benefits of meditation, no one is controlling diet in these studies. People are eating whatever the hell they want. So you'll get the scientific benefits. It's the spiritual stuff that we have no studies about. So you'll get reductions in depression or anxiety, improvements in quality of life, all that kind of stuff, you'll get. So that's why like I feel comfortable, you know, saying this is fine to do. You can meditate for 20, 20 minutes a day.

Why should I do this meditation or should I do a different one? See, you guys are kind of missing the point. So like the mind is looking for the optimal. And so someone is saying, "Okay, should I do a different one?" Well, why would you do? Well, what if one's better? What does better mean? Well, better means that I'll I'll get some spiritual experience in a year instead of 10. You're still giving into the mind. You're giving into the mind. You're giving into the mind. You want efficiency. You want optimization. The mind wants to optimize everything. It wants to put in the least amount of effort for the most amount of gain. And that optimization is great when we're talking about the material world.

How do I start though? We've already told you. Chant "Om." We've even given you the steps. That once you do one step, we've given you the next couple of steps. This is the other cool thing is that once y'all do this for a while, you'll learn that people will help you out. Your karma will support you. Is it not withholding from people you love to not share this? No, it's not withholding. Not at all. No. Am I not sharing something? Sure. Do, if you want to classify it as withholding, sure. But it's like, it, it's not. I'm not depriving you. If you want to call withholding, fine. I I don't think I'm depriving anyone of anything, right? So it's kind of like, am I, if my kids want to eat candy all day and I love them, am I withholding by not giving them candy even though I have a bank account that has $1,000 because I can buy them as much candy as they want? Is that withholding? Sure. Is it depriving? No.

What do you mean your karma will support you? So what happens is once you start walking this path, like literally people will come out of the woodwork and they will help you on your journey. Once you demonstrate the dedication, people will come. And you will find opportunities around you. You'll run into people. You'll get invited. And the only thing you need to do is once you start meditating regularly, pay attention to the signs. So if you have opportunities, take them. There are many paths. There are thousand paths, million paths. You don't have to chant "Om." "Om" is just the simplest.

Okay, what if you feel anxious for people to see you chanting "Om" even though you know you shouldn't? So then the question, you decide. What if, what if you feel anxious? Okay, so what are you going to do? Are you going to do it or are you going to not not do it? But I feel anxious. Okay, what's the consequence of feeling anxious? You feel anxious. So you have to decide, are you going to avoid things that make you feel anxious? But it's difficult and it hurts. Fine. Can you do things that are painful? If you want to practice doing things that are painful, do yourself a favor. Whatever food you would eat, eat something that is less tasty. You can just level that up too, right? You just level it up. So if you would add, let's say, 10 grams of salt to whatever you're eating at eight, learn to tolerate discomfort, okay?

Do you believe meditation retreats help get through the mind more efficiently? Depends on the retreat. See, I think there's, there's a big problem in in the meditative tradition today, which is that the majority of teachers we have who teach meditation, and you can even make the argument about me, are not good at it. So let's understand historically what was required to become a meditation teacher. The Zen tradition required 30 years to become a meditation teacher, to become a master. And you don't teach until you're a master, right? Because teaching something halfway, you can do more harm than good. So teaching should be done by masters. And in the Zen tradition, it takes 30 years. So if we look at something like the Hindu tradition, you had this class of people, this caste, right? I'm not saying right or wrong about the caste, it's just how it was, of Brahmins. And Brahmins started learning meditation around the age of four or five. And they grew up with it in the household. It was a family job that you inherited. And before you, when you're around maybe 24, 25, you can go out on your own and you can be your own Brahmin. But you've been, you've been practicing meditation for 20 years. These are who the meditation teachers used to be. And even then, Brahmins aren't Med, actually technically Brahmins, even that's insufficient. Technically, the real meditation teachers were Swamis. And that also is like, it's like a 20-year training.

See, now what's happened? The reason that meditation is so misunderstood and people don't really benefit from it on a spiritual aspect is because in order to become a meditation teacher, what do you need nowadays? Everybody wants a certification. "I'm a certified meditation teacher." This is kind of funny. So I was invited to speak at a conference. And someone asked, so the people at the conference were asking me, like, you know, "What certifications do you have in meditation?" I was like, "I don't have any. I've got a medical degree, but I'm not." No one gave me a piece of paper, right? They don't do that in the IMS. So now what started to happen is this is absurd. You take a meditation course. And at the end of, let's say, six months, because these things aren't decades, right? Because who's got time for that? No one says, "By the way, you've not spiritually grown enough. The dedication of your practice has been insufficient, or your karma has been insufficient to where you are not allowed to teach this. You haven't, you sure you do the practices, but you haven't, you haven't attained enough in spirituality to be able to teach." No one says this. So you have people who are certified. And what do you have to do to be certified? Show up. You don't actually have to attain anything, right? So think about it this way. Why are there so many meditation teachers who don't, cannot teach spiritually, on the spiritual level? Many people can teach from like a, you know, MBSR or whatever. I'm not saying that that's bad. Talking about spiritually. So imagine that we had people who taught how to play video games. So take your favorite video game, Valorant or whatever, right? And then you've got to rank. And in order to teach, do you have to attain a particular rank to teach? No, you just have to attend class and queue up for 80 matches. And if you attend class and you queue up for 80 matches, whether you win or you lose, we're going to certify you as a Valorant teacher. And then you can go out and you teach people. This is how we teach meditation. There's no indicator of quality or competence. There's just completion. Okay? And I'm not saying that there aren't good meditation teachers. There can be. Lot. Everyone's teaching to the best of their capacity. Myself included. I'm not some enlightened master, by the way. So maybe I'm doing it wrong. I'm certainly doing it wrong. Almost certainly. So I fall into this. But this is what's happened. Is we've adopted this Western style of teaching, which is that you pay money, you go through a course, and then we're going to give you, we're going to slap you with a label. We're not going to. Because how do you measure competence in meditation, right? Because at the end of that, imagine what would happen if someone was like, "Yeah, you don't get, you don't get to graduate." But I already paid the $3,000. Do I get a refund? I don't know. It's not how it works. We've adopted this Western system. And the Western system is fine when we're looking for physiologic changes, right? Because then you just do the practices. And there's no need for spiritual growth. That's just how it is. It's, you know. So like, I I think this is where there's a lot of misunderstanding about meditation. And people think they understand it, which is another thing that the mind does. Loves to think it understands something because it understands it to the best of its ability. But the mind is not good at detecting its own ignorance. That's why Dunning-Kruger exists.

What is my karma? We'll see. But it ain't going to be pretty from here on out, let me tell you what. Ah, yeah, we'll see. Um, okay, so thanks a lot, y'all. And we will see y'all. I don't know when we're streaming next, but I hope y'all are doing well. Um, uh, okay. Um, yeah. So just before we wrap up, just a couple of announcements. So reminder that we have our book, which is on sale. So it's 25% off on Barnes & Noble. How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. So if y'all are interested in learning a little bit about, so if you guys have parents that you want to communicate better with, you can get them this book. If y'all have young kids, we teach a lot about technology addiction and neuroscience. And the last thing is, if you have loved ones who are struggling with things like gaming addiction and you want to have conversations with them, this book can definitely help with that on the outside edge. If y'all want to learn about our basic approach to communication, but in a different context, the book can absolutely be helpful. So if you want to learn how to connect with other people, there's a lot of very good techniques in there that you y'all can learn.

So I hope that today has been helpful to y'all. I recognize that things were a little bit different, a little bit more unfiltered, a little bit less scientific. And I encourage you all to just take what we shared with a grain of salt, right? Because who am I? I'm not, I'm no arbiter of truth. I've tried to include science where it's relevant. But if y'all really want to understand these Eastern concepts, we have to adopt an Eastern perspective. There's a whole context, right? You can't take something out of context and then, you know, like, "based." What does "based" mean? Well, it depends on the context, right? "Based" means something within this language. Um, and so I encourage you to explore on your own. And the one that I like the most, sort of being a skeptic, is that like, you know, I don't have to have faith in this stuff. I just had to have faith in my teachers to a certain degree to try it myself. But I encourage you all all to try this stuff and consider some of these perspectives around, okay, what is the nature of happiness, right? Where, what is the nature of suffering? Explore this. Don't take someone's word for it. Look at your own life. Look at what causes your suffering, what doesn't cause your suffering. Even when you alleviate your suffering, how long does it alleviate for? And is there any way to permanently alleviate some kind of suffering? And the more that you explore this stuff, I think that there's been a consistent discovery by many, many different people that when they walk this path, we basically find something very similar. But even if you don't find something similar, if you find something drastically different, that is awesome because that means that there's a different perspective from everybody else who's come before you, right? Not everyone, I'm sure that people found different things. But, um, and so give it a shot. So I, I come here to share my perspective on things, and that's what people ask for, so that's what we're going to do. My hope is it's helpful, but I'm not saying I'm right. And really, even if I think I'm right, like I don't know your life, I don't know your circumstances, I don't know what happens in your mind. So the best that I can do is to try to offer you a roadmap that you have to test for yourself. All right, we'll see y'all when we see you. Take care.