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♪♪ - Hello, I'm John Cleese.

The inquiry into human consciousness is, in many ways, the Holy Grail of this Global Spirit series.

Just remember, for centuries, consciousness was only talked about by spiritual types, but by the end of the 20th century, quantum physicists, the real top science guys, began their own studies of this rather weird thing called consciousness.

Suddenly, they were claiming that consciousness is quite possibly the single connecting force of the entire universe.

So here we go.

Sit back, take a deep breath, as we join our trusted guide and host, Phil Cousineau, heading off to the outer frontiers of consciousness in this most engaging episode of Global Spirit, the first "internal travel" series.

[percussive music] - Consciousness is often understood as awareness or mindfulness, not only of ourselves, but also of our connection to the natural world.

Here on my daily walk at this street corner in San Francisco is a fascinating building built by the Vedanta Society in 1906 as a visible symbol of mankind's yearning for higher consciousness.

The architecture, in keeping with the ancient vedic roots of Vedanta, teaches that all religions are one and all lead to the same truth.

So here, the trident of Shiva sits above the crescent moon of Islam alongside the onion dome of Orthodox Christianity all resting atop a turn-of-the-century Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion.

More than another pretty building, this bold architectural statement integrates both eastern and western ideas to make visible the invisible world of consciousness.

Since the study of consciousness is such fertile terrain for a Global Spirit program, we've invited Sraddhalu Ranade, a scientifically trained Vedanta teacher from India, to come to the U.S.

To join us in a unique conversation with Peter Russell, with his specialized background in physics and experimental psychology from Cambridge university.

Welcome to Exploring Consciousness: East and West.

Peter Russell, Sraddhalu Ranade, welcome to Global Spirit.

- Thank you.

- Let's begin with a bedrock question, Sraddhalu.

What are we talking about when we're talking about consciousness?

- In the most accessible vocabulary, it's awareness.

But when we normally speak of awareness, we recognize awareness as a phenomenon emerging from our existence as a body and as a mind.

But there is a different way of looking at things where one can look at the awareness as the essential reality and mind and body themselves as a phenomenon.

But in the evolutionary journey, because awareness has been emerging slowly across the different levels, it looks like awareness is a product of the development of the brain.

But if we go deep into any field, whether it's physics, you go down into quantum mechanics, or you take Artificial Intelligence, and you go to the very cutting edge of things, you always come to some point, some barrier where you find reality itself is dependent on awareness.

And so it seems as if approaching these borders that awareness is something different and not a product of processes and may even be at the very substratum of all processes.

And that's what we mean when we say, "Consciousness with a capital 'C.'"

And, Peter, how about yourself?

What do you think we're talking about when we talk about consciousness?

- Well, for a start, I think we use the word in many different ways.

And we talk about a person being, you know, conscious when they're awake but unconscious when they're asleep, but when they're asleep, there's experience, and when they're dreaming, there's experience.

So I use the word consciousness very similar to you in terms of awareness, and it's that which is the essence of every experience.

It's what we know so well.

I mean, we all know we are conscious.

And in some ways, I think having the noun is a mistake.

When we say consciousness, we've made a noun, and I think that misleads us a bit.

We think there's a thing called consciousness or a thing called awareness, whereas for me, there's a process going on.

There's the process of the arising of experience.

I'm having this experience of here in this studio now, or I have the experience of thoughts or feelings.

There's this continual unfolding of experience happening in awareness, you could say, or that I am aware of.

So for me, it's more of a process than a thing.

And it's probably the one thing we cannot doubt, is that we are aware.

I could be right now be sitting in the matrix, and this could be an illusion, but I would still be aware.

It's what always is with us, and in a sense, it's our essence.

It's our personal essence, the fact that we are aware.

- Mm-hmm.

Sraddhalu, you belong to the Vedantic tradition, which is thousands of years old and as well as the tradition of the teachings of Sri Aurobindo.

Can you describe your early life, your early influences?

- Mm-hmm.

I grew up as a child in the Sri Aurobindo ashram.

And the ashram is a spiritual community presently of about 2,000 people, all of whom are aligned to a spiritual purpose, a spiritual intention, a realization and manifestation of a spiritual potential.

So there is a very different kind of upbringing and a very different environment.

The values were very different.

And one of the unique things of the ashram community life was, there was no exchange of money.

I never really used money as a value system until the age of 25.

And so we grew up in a mind-set where we valued things for their intrinsic merit: people, objects, experiences.

And it was a very different way of looking at life.

And growing up and then coming out and seeing what the world is like was a bit of a culture shock to see that people are so stuck with values based on numbers and not on their intrinsic experience.

So there were many aspects of life and experience which were different.

But that was really the base in which I grew up.

- Peter, how about yourself?

You have a unique background as well.

How did you come to pursue the extraordinary intersection of consciousness, science, and the spiritual life?

- Mm.

Well, I started off as a scientist.

I was--as a child, I was fascinated by science and mathematics and went to university studying maths and then theoretical physics partly 'cause I was good at it, but I'd always been interested in it, but in the background, there was always this interest in the mind and consciousness.

And at university, that just kept growing.

And the question was, you know, what is consciousness?

Where does it come from?

And I could see that nothing I was studying in physics was eventually gonna lead me to understand consciousness.

I could, you know, understand the hydrogen atom from first principles, but there was nothing there that said that evolution of hydrogen would ultimately give us conscious beings.

So I moved into psychology, but that didn't help either.

I learned a lot about the brain but, again, nothing much about consciousness.

So I actually went to India, 'cause I realized the people who probably had studied consciousness were the people who'd sat in meditation a lot and studied it firsthand.

It's like that's the way you really study consciousness is to observe it, observe our own consciousness rather than observing the brain.

And that was really a turning point in my life.

I realized two things then.

One: there was something to spirituality.

I'd rejected religion as a child.

It was just a load of weird mumbo jumbo.

Like, "you expect me to believe that?"

And when I was in India, I realized there was a common thread underneath all the spiritual traditions, which was about a change of consciousness, changing how we see the world and that all the problems that we are facing in one way or another came back to human consciousness, human thinking, human ego.

And that really got me deeply interested in spirituality-- well, spirituality and consciousness.

And so since then, that's been my life but bringing in my scientific training.

So I think we can look at consciousness in a scientific way.

And I don't mean by that just putting electrodes on the scalp.

I mean that process of investigation whereby we can make a hypothesis.

You know, if I have this attitude in my mind, here's an experiment.

What happens?

And we can compare it.

You do a similar experiment.

We can pair our results.

And that's science, is different people doing studies and seeing, "do we have a consensus?"

And when we have a consensus, then we say, "yes, we have some knowledge."

So I've, like--i've brought my scientific training to the study of consciousness.

- But did your interest in the spiritual dimension of consciousness put you at odds with the scientific community?

- Um, not really, because I sort of-- I don't interact much with the scientific community.

They ignore me.

[all laugh] but I'm certainly at odds with the prevalent scientific views about the cosmos.

But they sort of, you know-- "oh, he's just"-- they leave me alone.

- Yes, that's something I share in common with Peter.

I grew up in a school where we had no examinations.

The whole approach of teaching was very different.

And you were free to develop your potential in whatever way.

And temperamentally, I'm a scientist and a teacher.

So I found myself very early on experimenting, thinking, and trying to understand things in this way.

And I also never experienced this gap between science and spirituality.

For me, it was always a quest for reality.

And science just goes through a certain methodology and a rational, sensory, verifiable approach, whereas--and I would say objective approach-- whereas the spiritual experience goes straight into subjective experience.

But you're still looking for reality.

- I don't see it as a conflict.

We're talking about the one reality from two different perspectives.

Science is taking the material objective perspective, delving into the nature of reality from the outside, and spirituality is delving into the nature of reality from the inside.

It's looking at the reality of our own experience.

I think the conflict comes from a confusion.

It's really between science and religion rather than between science and spirituality.

A lot of religion is what I call "decayed spirituality."

It's when it sort of-- the fire that was there has got lost, and people hang on to teachings and doctrines and dogmas and think they're talking about the external world, when the world was created, or how it was created.

There's certainly a conflict there between religious doctrines and science.

But spirituality's not talking about that.

Even when spirituality talks about creation, I see they're talking about the creation of experience, the creation of phenomena.

And they're just two different approaches to the one underlying unity.

- For many people, the approach to understanding consciousness goes right through the self or the ego.

Is that a proper means, or is that an obstacle to understanding real consciousness?

Sraddhalu?

- I think you can use anything as a starting point to explore consciousness.

In principle, everything in this universe is a starting point.

And your ego also, your thoughts, your emotions, even your material existence can be a starting point.

It's just that you have to keep going deeper and deeper.

And eventually, you come back to the same one truth, because that's the essential truth of it all.

So wherever you start, go deep enough, and you'll get to the same thing.

- Peter, do you agree?

If you go deep enough, do you reach the universal?

- I think so.

It's interesting.

I mean, if you read different texts, sometimes it looks as if they're describing different shades of the universal.

So that's why I say, "i think so."

It looks like it, but I'm not 100% sure.

It would seem to be the case, but maybe coming from different cultures, we may even bring some of that cultural conditioning with us so that when we touch the universal, we may actually experience it in different ways.

I don't know.

I'm not actually sure on that.

- And then there's the equally mysterious question, if there is such a thing as consciousness, where is it?

Can we place it?

Some traditions say it's in the head; others, in the heart; some, in the belly.

Do we have to find it in a certain place?

- If you just follow the subjective experience, you find you can shift the location of your awareness.

Generally, we find ourselves centered somewhere here in the forehead behind-- a little bit somewhere inside, location of the brain.

But when you have an intense pain in some part of the body, you forget you have a head.

Your whole attention goes there.

You become that part of the body even.

And then you swing back.

You're not aware of what happened.

But if you observe this process, you can direct your awareness consciously to any location.

You can move your attention until you feel yourself centered in the chest, and your head is above you, or you can shift yourself into the belly, and the chest is above you.

You are there.

You can even push yourself out of the body.

And you are here somewhere, and the body is behind you.

You are not body.

And yet you're at the center of awareness.

You can even project that center of awareness far away and see things, experience the universe from that point.

All of these are possible, and once you experience something like this, you never again say, "oh, my consciousness "is in this location, in the pineal gland or in the pituitary gland."

They look a little childish.

- [chuckles] Yes.

Peter, for you?

- I take a rather different view.

I come back to the fact that all my experience is in consciousness.

I mean, right now, that, you know, I'm experiencing this studio, it's a representation in my mind of what is out there, and I am living in this representation my brain has created.

And this sense of I-ness is always at the center of my experience.

And if I'm functioning like this, the center of my experience feels like it's in the head, but I think that's an illusion caused by the fact that I'm seeing the world and hearing the world.

And so the center of my world is somewhere behind the eyes, between the ears.

And so I center-- I have the illusion of being in my head, but really, I'm always in the center of my experience, and the center of my experience is centered in the head, then, because that's where my information is coming from.

If I move into a more body awareness, then the awareness can come down here, which is much more the center of my body or in the heart.

If I move into a love feeling state, then my center moves correspondingly.

And as you say, if you have a pain, then that is where the focus of your awareness is.

But it's all an illusion.

I don't think consciousness is in space and time.

I think space and time are actually in consciousness, and in this space-time reality we create for ourselves in our mind, we always place ourselves at the center.

So for me, I would say the question is the wrong way around.

It's not, "does consciousness exist somewhere in the world," but, "how does the world exist in my consciousness?"

And I am naturally always at the center of that just as you are at the center of your consciousness and you're at the center of yours and you have your own representation of the world in which I am out here.

- So how do you relate these two centers of consciousness?

Your center in there, his center in there, what connects them?

- What connects them?

We're connected insofar as we're both observing the same reality and we're both modeling the same reality, and presumably, my representation of reality is very, very similar to his.

- Is he as a center of awareness different from you as a center of awareness?

- Not ultimately, no.

I think ultimately, we're all the same.

- Where?

- Hmm?

- Where?

I'm just taking his questions to their logical conclusion.

- Where?

- Where are we all the same?

- Oh, how are we all the same?

- Okay.

[all laugh] - I would say we are all the same in that we are all experiencing beings.

My actual experience is different from yours and everybody else's.

And in my experience, I create this sense of being an individual self, which has all these qualities and personality, et cetera.

But the "I" that has those is the same.

So my deepest sense of I-ness, what I call am-ness, that deepest sense of my being, beyond all qualities, to me, must be the same as yours and yours, because there's nothing to distinguish it.

So when I say, "I," in its most profound sense-- not, "I, Peter Russell, blah, blah, blah."

But when I say, "I" that essence of I-ness, it must be the same as what you mean by the essence of I-ness and what you mean, what we all mean.

And so I think that's something we all share.

- Many traditions ascribe consciousness to other species than human beings, the plant and animal world, the world of nature, and so on.

Do we share consciousness with other species, and if so, how so?

- If you accept that everything in the universe exists in consciousness, or if you accept that consciousness is a substratum of all reality, of all experience, then everything is conscious.

And the difference is only in degrees of the expression of consciousness.

In the human form, with an organized brain, we are able to express our experience.

But consider a person who has a brain damage and cannot speak or cannot control his body, and there are many examples of that, people who are paralyzed.

They're fully conscious inside.

They just can't express themselves.

And if all the human species were like that, we would never know what it means to communicate consciously.

And if an alien species came, they would say, "oh, these are vegetables.

They're not human."

But it's the same thing.

If you go down to the animal level, you see in dogs, in monkeys, a sophistication of emotional experience, even a kind of a intellectual, logical expression.

But they do not have the capacity to organize it and express the way human beings can.

So you can even state it in a different way.

The consciousness sleeping in matter wakes up in plants, feels in animals, and thinks in the human.

And we are nothing but thinking, feeling, living rock, because we're eating plant.

Plant is made of rock.

It's the same molecules which have been rearranged.

Molecularly, we are not-- atomically, we are no different from rock.

The difference is only the awakening of consciousness, which has organized these molecules in a way that it can express itself.

- Peter, how do you understand these different stratas of consciousness or the awakening metaphor?

- Surprisingly, in a very similar way but from a very different perspective.

I mean, first of all, I think there's no doubts animals are conscious.

I mean, when people-- people say to me-- scientists, they say to me, "oh, you know, only human beings are conscious."

My retort is, "well, why would you "give a dog an anesthetic when you operate?

"why would you want to make a dog unconscious "if you don't believe it's conscious in the first place?"

I mean, we clearly-- you know, we imagine a dog feels pain.

We imagine a spider would feel something if we pulled its legs off.

It makes us feel--we have a sort of an empathy there.

- And even with plants, we feel that.

- Yes.

So when people say only human beings are conscious, I think what they mean is only human beings are conscious that they are conscious, that they have self-consciousness.

And even that is dubious, but I think that's what they mean, that we are conscious that we are conscious.

But there are other animals which recognize themselves.

I mean, the mirror test of consciousness is, you know, you show an animal a mirror, and does it see it as another animal or itself?

And elephants, chimpanzees, apes, orangutans, dolphins, whales, they all pass that test.

They clearly recognize themselves as a being.

The question is, how far down does consciousness go?

And like you, I believe it has to go all the way down.

But this comes back to what we touched on very briefly earlier.

The current scientific worldview says that matter is fundamental.

But the physical world-- not even matter.

We don't even know what matter is.

But physicality, the material world is fundamental, and the material world isn't conscious.

Rock is dead.

That's the current view.

And so somewhere up the evolutionary line, something magic happened.

And unconscious, inanimate rock somewhere became conscious, 'cause we're clearly conscious.

And that is a huge, huge problem for science.

And to me, this is the biggest challenge to the scientific paradigm, the scientific worldview, because consciousness is the one thing we cannot doubt and the one thing we cannot explain from a scientific point of view.

So you have a real anomaly here, a real problem.

And at the moment, science is trying to work out, "well, maybe it comes from this in the brain.

Maybe it comes from that."

They're chasing things around the whole time.

I think they're gonna have to face the fact that the whole worldview is ultimately wrong and that consciousness is always there.

Now, I don't mean the sort of, you know, like our consciousness, thinking, but there is an element of interiority, subjectivity.

There's nowhere you can draw a line and say, "above the line, "consciousness comes in.

Below the line, there's no consciousness."

It's always there.

But as life has evolved, so the interior world has evolved with it and got richer and richer and richer until now we have, you know, the incredibly rich interior worlds that we live in.

But it's always been there, I think, always been there right from the very beginning.

- I want to bring in a different perspective on the way we're putting this question.

We're looking at it from a theoretical, philosophical perspective.

"are they conscious?"

But I'll ask you, what do you feel?

What's your experience when you relate to the plants and animals?

And all of us without exception-- all of us as children have felt that plants were alive, even stones and the water and the forest and animals and the universe is alive.

And we have felt it.

It's only as we grew older and perhaps the environment and adults, they taught us to ignore that feeling and that experience and pretend as if it's all dead out there, and we are the only things alive.

And we've been fooling ourselves, because we knew deep down inside, and we still know deep down.

And you know because somewhere within you, you are part of that oneness of consciousness.

- It's curious.

That's the realm of what poets and painters and artists have to do.

The artistic creative process begins there.

You have to grant consciousness to the world in order to animate it.

- The true artist is revealing what he sees, which is beyond this physical sight, what he feels and experiences beyond appearances.

And that's what he brings into his painting or his poetry or his music, because otherwise, he would be no different than a camera.

The camera just captures the surface.

It doesn't capture the experience, which is what the true artist brings in.

- So, Peter-- - He reveals what you already know deep inside you, and that's why you find the painting so wonderful, because it gave form to your experience.

- So, peter, do scientists need more poetry?

[all laugh] - They need more of what gives rise to the poetry... - Wonderful.

- Which is, they need that inner experience of the connection with the world rather than looking at the world objectively through those eyes, which is a valid way of looking at the world and has its uses.

They need that heartfelt connection, that resonance with the world, the recognition that the whole world is alive even if they don't necessarily see, you know, pieces of dead wood as alive, they don't have to go that far, but just to be in nature and recognize nature, the whole living universe, that we are part of that.

And that, to me, brings a sense of awe back in, and I think that's what we need is that sense of awe.

And it's that-- it's another way of putting what you're talking about.

Where all the great art comes from is that awe of the world.

- If we truly granted consciousness to other species, the entire natural world, how would that affect the way we actually live?

Would we have to treat other species differently?

- If we accept this, if we recognize this, automatically, our relationship with the whole universe changes, and it changes spontaneously.

If I'm conscious that the plant feels, then I don't just go and grab leaves.

I would feel it as if somebody grabs my hair and pulls it out.

Recognizing the plant's own sensitivity, I would relate to it.

I would perhaps even tell it, "may I take this leaf?"

And you'll find this in all indigenous traditions of the world.

And it's not that they were taught, "this is what you must believe.

This is what you must do."

It's--you grow up with that sensitivity, and you respect the sensitivity, and your relationship is different.

- Would it be too much to say then that the task for all teachers, whether they be mystics or scientists, poets, painters, musicians, is to wake up that sense of awe and wonder so that we realize something that's dormant there anyway?

- Yes, that's one way of looking at it, or the other way you can say is, "don't suppress and destroy that sense of wonder which was already inherent in every child."

- Yes.

- We need to preserve and nurture it rather than-- - Yeah.

I wouldn't necessarily all teachers, 'cause a lot of teachers are trainers, and they're training particular skills, which may not refer to this.

But I think all teachers and all trainers, whatever they're doing, must be careful not to suppress that initial wonder and awe that's there, that natural intelligence that's there.

- Wonderful.

Could I read something that you wrote that I find very compelling and get your response to it now in this context?

- Yes, I'd be interested to know what you're compelled by.

- "consciousness is the essence of everything we know.

"it is the creator of our world.

"this is the God that we intuitively knew existed but never quite found."

Could you expand on that?

- Yeah.

By that, I mean-- first of all, the first bit comes back to the fact that we are living in this representation.

We are creating our world, not creating the world out there, but we are creating our experience in consciousness from consciousness by consciousness.

So the world we know is a world that's created in the mind by consciousness.

And that creator, our own innermost essence, that thing we call "I" that is the creator of this world I experience.

And there can be no better name for that than God.

And many traditions, you find they come down to this statement, you know, "I am God," or in Sanskrit, the Upanishad's "atman is brahman," which means that this deep sense of I-ness, that pure I-ness, is the source of everything, and it's clearly the source of everything in my experience.

But when I say, "the God we never quite found" is what's happened, particularly in the European, Middle Eastern monotheistic traditions, the culture has said that the Divine is out there, you know?

To put it very simply, there's some guy out there looking over the world and saying, "be good, or I'll come and slap you" sort of thing.

That's putting it very crudely, but we've made God out there, and so we've looked for the divine outside of ourselves in one way or another rather than recognizing that this essential self, once we know it, it has all the qualities of the divine, and that's why it transformed people.

That's why the great spiritual traditions have formed from people who've discovered that firsthand and that relief that comes from just that, "ahh."

- The problem really starts with this word "God" and what people understand by it, and a lot of the difficulty that modern science faces with this comes from the original Abrahamic traditions teaching God created the universe.

And the way people understand that is, there's this being out there, and one day, he says, "let's make something," and he puts out the universe.

And now you're looking for him inside the universe or outside the universe, and you don't find him.

But if you set that aside and just go back to the present understanding of physics when it says, "big bang from a singularity," the thing from which the universe emerges, that's what we mean when we speak of God.

But that thing is not out there.

It's in the universe.

It's the very substratum, reality, existence of the universe, because there is nothing other than that.

But it's also transcending the universe, because it's spaceless, timeless, even though it flows out to become space-time.

It becomes space-time, so it is transcendent and yet immanent.

That's what we mean by spirit or God.

- Is that leaning towards the mysterious meaning of the great Vedic phrase "tat tvam asi," "thou art that?"

You, in a mysterious way, are the mystery that you're looking for.

- Yes.

And the thing is, we start with this person that I think that I am.

And in the journey of life, it's as if that changes, it deepens, it widens, it frees itself from partial, temporary, and even false identifications.

And it goes a certain distance, and then it's too late.

My life ends.

But if I could speed up the process, if I could continue that and go all the way to the most essential sense of I-ness, and then we can say, "I am that."

And there's a way of looking at it if you go maybe a more philosophical and even from a physics point of view.

If you look at where this universe came from, and even if you take the modern explanation that there was a Big Bang, if you go back to the moment of the Big Bang, and the whole universe is absorbed into that singularity, you find that time and space are born with the Big Bang.

The singularity itself is beyond time, beyond space.

The concept of time and space don't exist.

So where did this universe come from?

From a timeless, spaceless-- well, we'll use the word "singularity," but what does it mean?

It means a one which is indivisible.

That's a very important point.

When we speak of oneness in the mind, we think of one object, and I can split it into two.

But this is singularity's indivisible oneness, spaceless, timeless.

And if everything comes from that, what's everything made of?

It's made of that.

And if everything in the cosmos were to go back to its origin, to its essence, it would all return to the same indivisible oneness, spaceless, timeless.

Tat tvam asi, that art thou.

- Wow.

Thank you for that.

So let's now have a look at a short video clip.

[percussive sitar music] ♪ - When we look at the movement of meditation or contemplation, there is one essential turn of consciousness, a turn inwards, which is common to all systems and all practices.

But the true movement of contemplation begins when we turn towards an ideal.

The ideal may be freedom, perfection, truth, justice, beauty, love, or some perfect knowledge.

Whatever it is that we seek for, it is something beyond our reach, something which may even, from all external evidence, appear to be impossible.

And yet somewhere deep inside us, we know.

We know that it's possible.

We know that it's true.

Even we know that it exists right now somewhere, and I just have to find it.

But this is perfected when we transcend even the ideals and go all the way to the source of the ideals, which is in that which we call the divine, God, the absolute, the most essential, reality.

And it is then that the contemplation acquires its highest fulfillment and its highest potential.

And we realize here that the higher we aim at, the wider the impact and the more lasting the impact and also the more powerful it is.

And the truth that you seek is felt already somewhere deep inside you as if it is there, it's real, it exists.

- Thank you for that fascinating film clip.

Sraddhalu, do you consider meditation central to your life?

- Yes and no.

People understand different things with the word "meditation."

This one word is used to cover a very wide range of practices and experiences.

And the one thing common in all of them is a shift of consciousness, an inward turn, an interiorization where you as if disengage from the surface sensory reality and turn inwards towards a more subjective experience of yourself and the world.

You can meditate to solve a problem, to just find a solution, or you can meditate to acquire peace, or you meditate to find your soul, or you meditate to get free of the whole universe and the phenomenal experience, et cetera.

And all of these would be called meditation.

But after all that which you have experienced, how does it finally impact on reality and your experience of reality and your action in reality?

So somewhere along the way, we have to look at the overall purpose of being here and being oneself.

And if we put it in a certain context, we can say our purpose is not only to realize what we are, who we are, and our deepest potential, but to manifest that potential.

So when you turn to this movement of manifesting to express that divinity in life through your thoughts, through your emotions, through your actions, in your very being and in your becoming, at that point, you don't normally call it meditation.

You call it action.

[chuckles] So ultimately, it's this manifestation which completes.

Whereas the inward turn helps you find yourself, the outward turn from the deepest is what fulfills the inner realization.

And at that point, you are the meditation at every moment effortlessly flowing from that status.

- Thank you.

Let's turn to a short video clip of you, Peter.

[birds squawking] [kettle whistling] - These days, most of my writing comes out of meditation.

And I feel that when one's working with sort of fairly deep levels of the mind, one's touching universal principles, and so I trust that what I'm discovering, what I'm writing about in terms of what goes on in the mind, the structures, how the ego gets created, et cetera, I trust that's universal.

The meditation is my source for the information, and then the writing is trying to express that in ways that can convey those very powerful but very abstract experiences to other people.

In order to know what I have to write or know how to express it, I have to go within and allow it to come up, to express itself.

If I'm just writing from the surface level, it doesn't work.

But if I'm allowing it to come up, and it's like it's almost asking, "okay, how does this insight, this understanding, how does it want to express itself?"

So it's like pausing.

And a lot of my writing is pausing, feeling what needs to be said, writing it, then going back, pausing, feeling what needs to come up, and trusting that flow from within.

- Thank you for that fascinating film clip.

And for you as well, Sraddhalu?

- Yes.

It's only when what you write or speak comes from an experience that it has the power to change and to touch.

In a sense, the experience must flow out and take form as words.

It's not that I try to translate and express what I think I have felt.

It's the experience itself that must flow out-- that's what he was saying-- trying to feel what it wants to express as.

- Yeah.

- And that's part of the thrill, that there's an exploration going on here of our own spirit, our own soul, our own consciousness.

And then that leads to another way for us to explore this topic of consciousness.

Is it sudden, or is it gradual?

Is it both, like the wave particle?

For some, it seems to be a series of gradual awakenings.

For others, it's a sudden epiphany, what maslow called "the peak experience."

How does it happen?

- There's always a series.

Even if you have a sudden awakening, it's never the end, because the reality is infinite potential.

And whatever you have experienced is just the beginning.

There's so much more.

So if somebody says, "i've got it, and it's stopped, and it's finished," they're wrong.

[laughs] but how does it happen?

There are many ways.

It can happen because something inside was as if awaiting, building up, festering, if I may use the word, while the whole outer being was completely unaware of it.

And then one day, it just breaks through and pop and says, "I'm here."

And then people don't know where and how, but they just got it.

Or sometimes it's already put out an influence.

And something in my surface being feels this sense of urge, purpose, direction, something missing that I must find, but I don't know what it is.

And there's this kind of a quest.

And that thing behind of which I'm not fully conscious is influencing my quest and leading me until at some point the two things join, and I say, "oh, I have discovered it."

That's the other type of experience.

The difference between the normal life and that of a seeker, if I may use the word, is that the seeker is conscious that he is seeking something different.

He may not always be conscious of what he's seeking, but he knows there is something different, and he knows that he will recognize it when he finds it, whereas the normal life is just driven, compelled by instincts, pushes, circumstances, nature, and you are a puppet just drifting with the water flow.

You don't know where you are going.

- Peter, you've commented on the developments in quantum physics that the great realization is that the essence of the phenomenal world is not matter but consciousness, consciousness at bedrock.

Why is this so exciting to you?

- Because it shows that what all the great metaphysical, spiritual people have been saying for years is correct.

We've dismissed them because we've been caught in the worldview that the ultimate essence is somehow material in nature.

But I think we are coming to a point where, from the western scientific perspective, using western philosophy, western logic, beginning to point to the fact that the ultimate nature is spirit, consciousness, whatever you want to call it.

And that's important, 'cause it means that we are deeply connected with the whole cosmos, deeply connected, and that my own innermost essence is the essence of everything.

And I think this is a huge revolution which is-- we're just seeing the first signs of, that just people are beginning to recognize this.

We're not there yet, but I think in, who knows, 20, 30, 40 years' time, there will have been this shift.

And we'll be seeing the universe in a very, very different way, very different way.

- I see you nodding.

[both laugh] - Let me give you an elaboration of this idea.

All of us here are looking at this, and we say this is red, Okay?

Why are you seeing it red?

Oh, science says the light goes into your eyes, and it touches the retina, and then it sends signals to the brain.

But your retina is different from my retina, is different from everybody's retina.

Each is unique.

And the rods and cones are uniquely arranged.

And the whole bundle of fibers which connects the retina to the brain is uniquely different in each one of us.

And the brain cells and the way they are connected to each other, uniquely different in all of us.

So what makes it for the consistent experience of the red color when all our brain wirings are completely different?

And by the way, they are changing.

The wiring that was ten years back is not the same, but you still see this as red.

So what's seeing the red?

It's not the retina.

It's not the brain.

The brain is only processing signals, but where does the seeing of red happen?

It's not in the brain.

It's in the consciousness that's plugged into the brain.

And all of us seeing red-- the same red-- means it's the same consciousness.

And because it's one cosmic mind, if I may use that word, which sees this as red, therefore, through your mind, it sees red; through my mind, it sees red, and so on.

So who's really seeing this universe?

That one consciousness.

It's seeing through this machinery of our separate eyes, seeing from different angles but seeing the same thing.

So cosmic mind is looking through our eyes upon what?

Itself, its own body, its own consciousness.

It's consciousness meeting consciousness, looking at itself variously, which is our experience of the universe, of reality.

And as it's looking through, we are only the participant.

We are not seeing.

It's seeing through us.

But in the mechanism, the machinery through which it's looking, if we ascend and clear the machinery, make it wider and freer so that a higher and purer status of consciousness can see, then we experience the seeing differently.

A worm in this room will at best sense the moisture and temperature of this room.

It will be blind to everything else.

A frog would see much more.

A monkey would see much more.

We see more than the monkey.

And if, in our consciousness, we could ascend a few degrees more, we would see so much more as a clairvoyant, for example, sees auras and many other things.

And even it's possible if we enter all the way and unite with the essential consciousness, then we will see this world the way it sees the world, as the body of the Divine, if you may call it that.

The whole universe is the sacred body of that divinity, that essential consciousness.

- Peter, is everyone capable of reaching this level of consciousness?

- I don't know.

- [laughs] - That's why we asked.

- Yes.

When we say, "everyone," I could--i don't know.

There may be people who have certain defects in cognition which may limit them, but I would say every normal, healthy person is capable of it.

And because we're not-- for me, we're not talking about reaching some-- I think this is the big mistake we make, that there's somewhere to get to.

There's something to reach.

I see it much more as a recognition of what is already there but is overlooked, because we're so engrossed in what we're doing, our experiences, our thoughts and planning, and all this stuff.

We're so engrossed in that, we don't notice the observer, the awareness that's there all the time, so it's--there's nothing to be reached.

So all it requires is-- and it requires quite a bit of letting go to actually notice what has been there all along.

- You're right.

- When you ask this question, can everyone get there, we are already that, essentially.

Obviously, all of us can get there.

What prevents us from getting there, to ourselves, is just all these layers of our habit, fixations, I would even use the word "hypnosis" with the world and a superficial identity.

We're hypnotized and identified.

I am my body.

I am my emotions.

I am my thoughts.

But that's the wrong-- but habitual identification.

And it's just a question of, so to say, waking up, disengaging, letting go.

And so the whole practice, really-- and all the systems eventually use different methods but to achieve the same thing-- is to put this surface "I" in some relation with the true inner or higher "I" which is already there.

- And you say, "hypnotized."

I think it's very true.

We're hypnotized by our culture, to do, to have, to find things, to get things, to have experiences.

And this ultimately, I think, is the belief system that's driving the world crazy.

And what all the spiritual traditions have pointed to is the fact that this belief system doesn't really work.

It actually just creates more disharmony, more dissatisfaction, and that ultimately what we're looking for, that deep contentment, that feeling good, which is ultimately the bottom line of what we all want, comes from actually getting in touch with our own essence rather than going out there.

- You've suggested in your writings that it may be helpful to have examples.

You've written, "throughout history, "there have been those few saints and mystics "who have evolved inwardly "to higher states of consciousness, "but the times we are living through now make it imperative "that many more of us now complete "this inner evolutionary journey into full wakefulness."

Peter, are we in a crisis of consciousness?

- Yes.

And I think it's becoming very clear to people that we are, because if we look at it, every aspect of the crisis, whether we're talking about global, economic, environmental crisis, social crisis, everything comes back in one way or another to human consciousness, to human thinking, human decision, human values, human beliefs.

It all comes back to us.

I mean, why?

I think it's because the crisis is clearly one that requires our awakening.

It's because we are half asleep that the crisis is happening.

And for the first time in human history, we have the potential for a global spiritual awakening.

In the past, you know, if you were fortunate, you may have been born into a village or a community where there was some wise teacher, if you were fortunate.

Most people just probably had the traditional religion that they grew up with.

Now we have access to all the world's spiritual traditions, and we can sift through and find, what is that core spiritual understanding?

And we are rediscovering that for ourselves, and so there is a global spiritual renaissance happening, and there's no single leader.

There's no single teaching.

But we are all honing in on the same wisdom.

And now there are millions of people on their own spiritual search.

And we're all helping each other.

There's a positive feedback going on.

What you discover, you know, you write about, you talk about, it feeds me.

What I discover, I feed to other people.

We're all learning from each other, even just people sitting in their own families or schools.

And it's that collective learning that's creating a collective awakening.

So I think we are, millions of us, on this path now of waking up and many, many people coming to really key realizations, inner awakenings on that journey.

- We could ask what caused the crisis.

And then we have to go back one step deeper and recognize that there is a certain intention in evolution, in nature, in life.

And having consolidated all the stages up to now with the human intellectual development, it's as if nature wants to push forward, to break through to something further into a spiritual consciousness beyond intellect.

And so in the hearts of every human being, there is this urge and this push, a pressure felt, and we don't know why.

Everybody feels a sense of time is short, there's something important to be done, a kind of restlessness.

Not everybody can articulate it, but this push is there.

And that's the evolutionary push that's pushing in us.

And at that point, we have a choice.

It's like there's this huge momentum of nature trying to make a leap, and we have a choice.

We can catch that tidal wave and flow with it, or we can miss the opportunity and be shattered by it or drown in it.

But if we are conscious, and we consciously align ourselves, then like a surfboard rider, we can ride the wave.

And there's a huge potential in the present circumstance for progress.

That's why there is almost, like, a crowding of souls wanting to take birth now, because the pace of change, the pressure itself is so great.

It was not so before, and it won't be so after.

And we'll look back afterwards and say, "you know what?

"that was the most important opportunity of all our lives across the millions of years."

You see, it's-- in evolutionary terms, this kind of a transition has never happened before.

We have had other types, from rock to plant, plant to animal, animal to human.

But all of them were driven by the instinct of nature.

This is the first great transition where we are conscious and can participate in the leap.

Once we make this transition, further transitions, we'll be already in a superconscious state, and there won't be this kind of a struggle.

So in every way, this is a unique opportunity and a unique transition.

- There's nothing more creative than consciousness.

- And it's all in there within us.

- Yeah.

- It just needs to be woken up?

- It is awake.

- We have to awaken to it.

- It is awake, yes.

It is awake, 'cause we are awake, but we are not yet awake to our wakefulness.

- Yes.

- Ah, wonderful.

Peter, Sraddhalu, many thanks for helping us explore this infinitely rich subject of consciousness.

It's at the very heart of Global Spirit.

So thank you for helping us down this meandering road to being more conscious of our own lives.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

- So was that all old stuff to you?

Even so, I think it's nice to know that wherever you find yourself snooping around spiritually, from the garden of the Zen center to the Christian monastery to the Himalayan cave, if you go deep enough, you'll come to the same place.

I'm still John Cleese, and I do hope you're enjoying this unique series and trust that you will join us again soon for another memorable episode of Global Spirit, the first "internal travel" series.

♪♪ ♪♪ Mars Attar and the Attar family.

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