Full Transcript for Consciousness Is the Cure: Consciousness & Human Potential Ep 5 with Dr. Anoop Kumar

world, there's so much matter out there, right? And somehow through this matter, I have to realize some degree of happiness, joy, basically the subtle stuff that's related to consciousness. Happiness, joy, fulfillment, consciousness itself, enhanced potentials within us. All of this has to come through matter because matter is apparently primary. How do you figure that out? Well, even to know the matter of our body, we need experts. We can't look into our own bodies. We need to go to those experts that have dissected the body and have x-rays and CT scans and all kinds of things, right? So even our own territory is out of our league when we believe that matter is fundamental. Now flip the situation. Let's say consciousness is fundamental. Now, all of a sudden, eight billion people on the planet have direct Non-mediated access to the most fundamental resource in the cosmos with no middleman. That's a power equation. That's a power equation. Because in consciousness, in this infinite field of consciousness, which is what we're presuming by saying consciousness is fundamental, I'm not saying my consciousness or your or his or her or their consciousness is fundamental. I'm not talking about an individual locus. I'm saying consciousness. The non-local field of intelligence is fundamental. And what we call matter is a pattern within this field of consciousness. And we have access to this infinite field through our own personal locus. There is a bridge that connects that. That is a question of capacity, of power, of what is possible, of abundance, rather than scarcity, fear, lack of access. That is why I say it's the most powerful and important concept and understanding in the world. And secondary to that, it filters down to every single knowledge field. speaker-0: So if this is such bad news, if the materialist angle is such bad news for us as human beings, how did we get to the point where it became so dominant? Because it hasn't always been dominant, right? speaker-1: I think it's a relatively new phenomenon, actually. I mean, these views of not just materialism and and the fundamental nature of consciousness, which might be called objective idealism or analytic idealism, it's not just these two. There are many things in between. There's panpsychism, there is pan experientialism. I'm not an expert on all of these. I'm just looking at the two main categories of matter and consciousness. And if you look at almost every other culture, there has been. A great exposition of this. I know in the culture that I was exposed to growing up, the Indian culture in Advaita Vedanta, there is a great emphasis on the nature of consciousness. Well, a loose translation. In English we're calling it consciousness, ⁓ being fundamental, the non material being fundamental, and the material being a representation of that. So I think that has actually been the case throughout history, not exclusively, but in many different forms. If you even if you look at the history of healthcare, if you look at Ayurveda, If you look at traditional Chinese medicine, if you look at even chiropractic, other forms of medicine that developed in the US, all of these have a view that there is something more fundamental than matter. And that matter is either an expression of that or secondary to that, or at best sitting side by side with that. Allopathy comes along and says, uh-uh, all that is out, it's unscientific. Because very particular reasons, the people that are researching is other didn't have either didn't have access to this. Or they didn't want to give access to this. And therefore, we have a materialist model. So I think it's a it's a result of a couple things. One is choice, choosing models that are more limiting, but also there's a certain subtlety of mind that is required to realize this, right? To to have a certain relaxation of the mind that can let go of form and structure and realize that which is formless and fundamental. That can also require some work. So I think. It's an admixture of reasons. It's not it's not just one particular one. speaker-0: So that subtlety of mind that you talk about that is required to cognize, perhaps you could say, this primacy of consciousness, does that relate to the point you were making earlier on about, well, potentially we have access to this fundamental level of consciousness? How do those two things go together? The access angle? speaker-1: Well, at a fundamental level, the view of the primacy of consciousness is not is yes, access important, but what it says is we are this. Access or no access, we are this. Just like the materialist view would say, we are matter, right? Whether we realize it or not, whether I understand science or philosophy or not, whether I dissect the human body or not, we are matter. That's that view. Similarly, the other view is that consciousness is fundamental, right? The best example is the dream. The dream is made out of mind. It doesn't matter if the dream characters recognize it or not, it is made out of mind. And the dream scientist may do all the studies and find the atoms and the particles, and it still would not contradict the fact that those atoms or particles are made out of mind. Right? Now, for the dream character to recognize it, there are certain practices, there are certain lines of thinking or certain lines of releasing the mind that is required to go from that educated slash miseducated. local mind to a more relaxed state that can directly see the nature of things beyond concepts. So that's where the access comes in. That localized mind that has been miseducated to believe in only the form or fundamentally the form and believe that the formless results from the form in some way, that has to be untrained in a certain sense. Not to lose what it knows, but to more deeply contextualize it by relaxing into a deeper state. And thereby, because it becomes boundless, being able to recognize the boundless. speaker-0: So the the paradigm shift, if

you if we want to get into that, if the paradigm shift that you're talking about and that maybe you're you're looking for is a function of experience then. It's not necessarily an intellectual conclusion that will bring about this paradigm shift. speaker-1: I think has to be everything. You know, it it has to be everything. Now, the exper like, for example, if people today experience that we are matter, we are, we are fundamentally a local thing that began on a certain date and will end at a certain date. I would say most people don't think about that intellectually. They may just kind of feel that or experience that, right? But just feeling that and experiencing that is not enough to create the sciences. It's not enough to create medical science, not enough to create engineering. That has to be put into concepts, put into frameworks, it has to be researched, data has to be collected. And out of that, you develop the science and the technology and therefore the civilization. And I think it's the same here. The experience is certainly fundamental. It cannot just be intellectual. Because if it's intellectual, the science that develops will be very limited. The technology that develops will be limited, even dangerous, perhaps. So the experience absolutely is fundamental and It has to be translated into concepts, frameworks, data, and ultimately technology. speaker-0: Let's get into your particular area of medicine. ⁓ you say in your book, Michelangelo's Medicine, you say the picture of health that medical science paints is remarkably incomplete. So can we dive a little deeper into your specialty, your field? What is that incompleteness? How do we complete it? What would the effect be if we do complete it? speaker-1: It's very simple and I think it's something that almost everybody would resonate with. When allopathy, so I'm trained in emergency medicine, I'm board certified in emergency medicine, I am through and through allopath in that sense, right? In terms of my medical training. When allopathy defines you, it defines you as a bunch of parts. Period. How do we define human beings in allopathy? We call it anatomy. Naturally, anatomy is what the human being is in the eyes of allopathic medical science. And how do we define that? It's a bunch of parts. It can be macro parts like the head and neck, the extremities, the trunk, etc. It can be microparts like cells. It can be even smaller, right? It can be molecules, it can be particles, it can be elementary particles. Nevertheless, at any scale, The human being is defined as a bunch of parts. In other words, there's no fundamental difference in anatomy between a human being and a human body. And I believe everybody will know what I'm saying when I say if a person feels that healthcare doesn't see them, you know, you hear people saying, well, healthcare doesn't see me, or my doctor doesn't see me. This is exactly what's happening. The diagnosis is that because we are trained to see people as a bunch of

parts. Now, I'm not speaking to the humanity of physicians. Of course, we're people like everyone else. We can build rapport, we can see you as human beings. I'm speaking to the training. When it comes to diagnosis and treatment, the training is to see people as a bunch of parts. That is an incomplete view. If we want a full view of the human being, we have to stop believing that a human being is only a machine. We have to see that there is intelligence, there is ambition, there is hope, there is love, there is fear, there is subtle forms of energy. All of these are required to complete the picture of the human being. That is the most critical step in actual healthcare transformation where we become a healing system that helps people become independent of the system rather than having to return to it repeatedly. speaker-0: It's reminding me this whole idea of collection of parts. It it's that idea that the doctor gives you a something for your skin condition, but the thing that they give you for your skin condition gives you a heart problem. And then you go to a heart expert, and the heart expert gives you something for your heart problem. But now you've got a liver problem because there's a side effect from the heart medicine. So you go to a liver expert, and it's almost like that lack of holism is what you're what you're talking about here, right? speaker-1: Yes, and lack of holism and lack of how we understand holism, because you can understand holism in a couple of different ways. Yes, there's this whack-a-mole tendency, right? You go to the heart and then you go to the liver and then you knock out the skin problem and then you knock out the neurological problem. And you can say, well, holism is looking at the body as a whole. Well, no. Holism is looking at the human as a whole. And so it's not just about addressing all of the physical things together. We have to get to a place in healthcare where we say, What is the constitution of a human being? That's where we have to go. speaker-0: I'm just wondering how on earth you got through medical school, because I know that these ideas are are there from your childhood, your upbringing. And that must have driven you crazy to have these ideas in your head, in your background. Did you not feel the whole time, we're going in the wrong direction here? speaker-1: You mean while I was in school, in medical school? Yeah, why speaker-0: While you were being trained in a in a method of approaching healthcare that was so antithetical to your deep beliefs. speaker-1: Well, I knew what I was getting into because I'd been through elementary school, middle school, and high school. You know, I saw it all along. This wasn't new. and when I decided to go to med school, I knew exactly what I was doing. And in fact, I went with the perspective of, let me see how medicine sees this thing. Because I'd heard about, you know, healthcare and medicine ⁓ being a vaunted profession and very respectable. And I was really intrigued as to how such a profession Would see education or the human being or human nature, where it was really important, right? Because we're talking about people who are sick or people who are dying, and we're talking about birth and death. And we're talking about deep questions, even though we don't talk them, talk about them in that sense. But through addressing medicine, through the field of medicine, we are touching on all of these deeply. So I went with that question. I kind of knew what I would see because. You know, the fundamental beliefs in medicine are no different than the fundamental beliefs in fourth grade or third grade, which is that it's a bunch of parts and you look at it and you put them together in some different ways and you get results. You can manipulate those ways, you can control those ways to get results. But in medicine, it's much more voluminous. There are many more parts and there are many more interactions, but the fundamental principle is exactly the same. And I remember when I saw that, I was like, I was disappointed. I remember that. I was like, I was hoping that some miracle would have happened and it would have been something different entirely, but I saw that it was it was mainly a question of volume of knowledge and the quality and the depth of human nature was not really there. And so the difficulty for me was not intellectual, because I knew what I was getting into, but it was emotional. It was feeling that clash, you know, and it's like What do I do now? Like what do I do with this? Like I knew what I was getting into, but now that I'm here, I felt relatively clear ⁓ within myself, but what do you do with that? You know, that so it was more emotional, the the struggle and and what to do with that. speaker-0: And what did you do? How do you manage that emotional aspect of this apparent clash? speaker-1: I talk to people like you, Joe. I write, I speak. and it's and I and I broaden the lens. It's not just about healthcare and healing, but you know, consciousness in in the big picture of our world. ⁓ I think it's a it's a very important story. It's interesting, you know, around medical school is when there was there was a pretty big change in my life towards the end of medical school, ⁓ where I I began to see things quite differently, radically. It was a radical shift within myself. And it took me many years to start to get accustomed to that. But once that happened, it was as if I had no choice. It just started pouring out of me. ⁓ and I think that's a good thing because I don't know if within myself I could have, you know, written books and spoken and keep on spreading this message as best as I can. But it got to a point after that where Nothing else made sense. Everything else seemed crazy, you know, to to not acknowledge something that seemed so fundamental. And yet, because of my training in medic medical school, I could understand why people thought the way they thought. And so that's why I tried to

take a rational approach to teasing these things out. speaker-0: And do you get anywhere with your colleagues when you discuss this or have you sort of given up on that? speaker-1: Well, no, I definitely haven't given up on anybody. ⁓ I I don't think it's kind of a case to be worked on. I think the what I see myself doing is speaking to people's potential. I believe when you speak to people's intelligence, their intelligence comes on. I believe if you speak to people's fear, their fear comes on. And so what I try to do is speak to what I feel is true. And I see responses from people. Now some people get defensive. You know, they're like, well, I don't want to talk about that or I just kind of you know put it off. With most colleagues, because we're we're friendly, they think of me as like, ⁓ the wellness guy. It's a very kind of superficial glaze of of what I do. It there no, there's no particular understanding. A few have actually looked into my work, have read the articles, asked me questions, and they are fully on board. They because almost every physician realizes that there is much that healthcare doesn't know. And I don't just mean that in in the sense of science. Science, of course, isn't is always evolving. And there's always more that we don't know. That's not what I mean. I mean stuff that we don't want to look at. Right. And there's stuff that healthcare doesn't want to look at. For example, how we define the human being, because it doesn't even know where to go from there. How do we even start to define the rest of the human being? Because mind is something that's totally different. It's not what we've been entrained on since kindergarten. So how do we start to bring notation to mind to bring it in as a part of anatomy? These questions scare people, right? And it and to answer those questions, we have to spend a lot of time. And if you really get into it, it takes up enough time that it's not paying your salary like it used to. So all of these very real practical things come into view. But I would say most physicians I speak to, they agree with me superficially and generally don't go much beyond that, except for a few who really engage me deeply. speaker-0: And perhaps it's not just physicians and the medical world that it scares. I wonder about patients as well. I mean, if somebody did go into their doctor's office, their primary care physician, and the that doctor started talking about spiritual health, etc., the the materialist paradigm is so ingrained that the patient would do a runner. They would they would leave. Who is this doctor? It's it's a it's a patient thing as well, isn't it? speaker-1: Well, I think it's a mistake to believe that it's a spiritual view. ⁓ and I think that's one of the evolutions in spirituality that has to happen now. There was a period, I don't know where, maybe from the sixties or seventies on to now, you know, the last maybe sixty years, something like that, where there was a role for what is called spirituality. ⁓ and that's because we weren't looking at things deeply enough. And when you aren't looking at things deeply enough, you need to create a word. For what is looking into something more deeply. But I believe that we have advanced beyond needing that kind of separate category. To me, what spirituality was supposed to represent is simply a deeper view of the world. It's the exact same thing that science represents. And science is trying to investigate the same things that spirituality has said. Spirituality is trying to bring the experience to what science is trying to investigate. To me, they're the same field. You don't have a subjective without an objective. You don't have an objective without a subjective. This whole thing is a misnomer. We don't need two categories, right? I I'm not saying we have to change formally the lexicon, but within ourselves we have to realize that that these are redundant, science and spirituality. There is only knowledge, and there is only an approach to knowledge that has to include the subjective and the objective. There's no other way to approach knowledge. And so when you look at it that way, this approach I'm talking about is not spiritual at all. It's a very call it rational, call it scientific, call it spiritual if you want, but have the understanding that there's nothing uniquely spiritual about it. We're simply advancing our knowledge of the human being. And this is already accepted. Integrative medicine is probably one of the most popular forms of medicine today in the public. Right? Almost every, probably half or more of every major medical center in the United States will have center of integrative medicine, center of complimentary medicine, one or the other. Now, their understanding might not be deep. You know, they're still trying to squeeze in non-materialist views into a materialist view to make it palatable to the to healthcare professionals and also somewhat to the public. But that's what education is. We have to advance our understanding, advance our education, go beyond this idea that this is science over here and that is spirituality over there, and simply say, you know what? We haven't been looking at the human being completely. Here's why. Here's the background, here's the history of it, here's the Flexner report of nineteen ten. We need a better report now to talk about the state of things and let's advance our knowledge. And we see that mind is important. We're going to include it in our picture of the human body, for example, of the human being. speaker-0: So that's actually a very optimistic view, because we usually think of paradigm shifts as wow, that's gonna take a while, that's gonna take some effort, that's gonna take such a change of thinking, but you seem to be saying, actually, the shift that's required is not that big a deal. speaker-1: It it's happening. The shift is happening. That's why we're even able to have this conversation. That's why there's an audience for

this conversation, is because the shift is happening. Now we need to tweak it. We need to bring more clarity to it. Because as I said, what happened is there was this materialist view based in the Flexner report of the last hundred years or so that was really entrenched and allopathy. And people start to realize it's a little tight. It's like a straitjacket. It doesn't fit. I don't feel comfortable. I'm not being seen, you know. They started to feel all these things and they realized, well, what about that culture over there? What about this over there? How come everybody else is talking about all the stuff and we're not? Hmm. So then came along what? Alternative medicine. Right? It's like, well, you know, there's an alternative way of seeing this. Let's look at all of those specialties. And then we realized, well, do we really have to pick one or the other? We don't. You know what? It's complementary medicine. It's not alternative. So we can do this materialist stuff that we think is the real science. And then we can do the other stuff as we want. And then we start to realize: you know what? That stuff is actually really important. What is called lifestyle is really important. Meditation actually has an effect, right? Love, fear, these have real effects on our biochemistry. So wait a second. This is not just even complimentary. You know what? It's integrative medicine. And so now integrative medicine is the new thing. Eventually. We will become just medicine and eventually we will become healing. And then there'll just be health. This is the progression that we are going down. But in integrative medicine, we're we are kind of reaching this asymptotic wall. And that wall is still that we're trying to pack in what all of these philosophies and traditions around the world have been saying for thousands of years into a materialist view. We're still trying to squeeze it into that box, saying, yes, meditation, wonderful, and meditation works because it changes these molecules and so on and so forth. We're always trying to put it in terms of the mechanistic view. We have to finally let the boat capsize and say, you know what? It might not be that matter is fundamental. It might be that at least consciousness and matter sit by side, or dare I say, And if consciousness is then fundamental, that opens the door for a kind of healing that we don't even believe is possible. speaker-0: I wonder about this word stress that we keep hearing in medicine in recent decades. It just seems to me that the fact that the world of medicine, the convention the world of conventional medicine has accepted the idea that stress is such an important factor in so many of the big killers, the diseases that you know. ⁓ have such an impact on our society in particular. That would not have been the case fifty fifty years ago, perhaps even less than that. That seems to me to be a a signal, perhaps, a first step on this journey that you're talking about, the the acceptance of the primacy of stress to disease. speaker-1: Yes. I'll modify it. It wasn't the case fifty years ago in allopathy, but it was the case in almost every other place around the world, in every other culture. So yes, I think allopathy starting to realize or having realized really that stress is very important is a perfect example of what is called mind-body medicine, right? So we've expanded the category of what is important from just body to the mind. And through this idea of stress, it's kind of a bridge to deeper states of mind, deeper states of consciousness. And ultimately the question of what is truly fundamental? Which by the way is not something that requires an answer. We don't have to have an ideology that consciousness is fundamental, matter is not. But we need to live with that open question that what is truly fundamental? Do I have access to this? How can I access this? speaker-0: Do you have a definition of health? speaker-1: Health is the horizon of human potential. speaker-0: Whoa I love that the horizon of human potential The fulfillment of human potential, we might say. speaker-1: Well, I see health as a horizon because there's no endpoint. We keep moving towards it. The movement towards health is what we call healing, which is the process of realizing our wholeness. And so, even in a strictly physical sense, right, if you have a cut, if you have a laceration, the skin parts, that one skin becomes two. Healing is the wholeness of the two. Becoming one again is healing. If the chambers of the heart are beating asynchronously, that difference, that separation, is healed. By them beating in synchrony again. They're coming together as one whole. Psychologically, if we have aspects of ourselves that are disintegrated, not integrated, healing is bringing them together again. So healing is always the process of becoming whole, even in a strictly materialist sense or in a strictly idealist sense or anything in between. Health, then, is that horizon that we see, that wholeness that we never fully know. It and say, you know what? Wholeness 100%. I've reached it. It's like saying there was a commercial I saw a long time ago that says, I've done it. I reached the end of the internet. I surfed everything. It's like, no, there is always more, right? That's it, there's always something more. And I think wholeness is like that. There's never an end because it's not in space and time. And so healing is this journey of realizing our wholeness and realizing health evermore. speaker-0: How does the concept of enlightenment relate to what you're talking about? speaker-1: Enlightenment is seeing things more truly as they are. It's that simple. It's the light coming on within oneself and within the cosmos. They're one and the same at the deepest level. And thereby seeing the cosmos and oneself more as we really are. Just like health, to me, enlightenment is not a fixed period at the end of it. It is more about enlightening, just like it's more about healing.

One doesn't say, Well, either I get a hundred percent of health or nothing. No, it's a healing journey. It's an enlightening journey. speaker-0: Everything that we've been talking about so far has focused on health. It's so much bigger than that, as you've been saying, and it just resonates so much with me coming from the education field, as opposed to you coming from the medical field. particularly the idea of parts. And, you know, this is what we do in school. You talk about mis-education. And we give people a little bit of history and we give them a little packet of geography and a little packet of French and a little packet of physics and a little packet of biology. And what's missing then is know thyself. That's how it's that's the the connection that I'm getting up from health to education. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. And and the operative word is little. They are little packets indeed. And you know, to know anything, you need the knower. To perceive anything, you need the perceiver. To observe anything, you need the observer. Science knows this deeply and truly, which is why we try to eliminate what's called bias in science, because we know the observer is an inherent aspect of any observation. The mistake we make is that Once we get to a certain point, yes, we want to eliminate that bias, but we also have to realize that the objective can never truly be known from the standpoint over here if I don't account and include the observer. If I eliminate the observer completely, I don't know anything anymore. So bias, eliminating bias is actually an attempt to know the observer. We think it's to remove the observer from the equation, but that's not true because if we actually did that, there would be no observation. So we want the observation. We want to know what is more true. We need the observer for that. So what we have to do is actually study the observer. That's self-knowledge. That's know thyself. It's a scientific process. That's why I said this whole business about spirituality and science, I think it's absolute nonsense. There are no two such fields. You need the subjective and the objective together. Yes, there's a place. Where the subjective and objective meet and integrate. And that can be called neither a subject nor an object, because there is no duality there. And that's what's referred to as enlightenment or what I'm speaking about as non-local consciousness, the primacy of consciousness and such. That has to be a part of education, not as ideology, but simply as experimentation. Right? So to know that thing out there, I need to know myself. What we see as the world. Is not the world. What we see is what our eyes are capable of seeing. What we see is the eyes and the brain interpreting light. We are not seeing the world, which is why different species can see different versions of the world. So the question we're ultimately arriving at through education is what is this world fundamentally prior to the neurological interpretive mechanism? And to know that, we have to know the knower just as much as we're trying to know the know. speaker-0: That leads nicely into a piece that you recently wrote called See Through Both Veils on your on your Substack or a video you did. And you talked about these two veils that we need to see through. The first veil being a reality beyond what we usually perceive, which is very much kind of what we've been talking about so far. ⁓ What is the second veil that we need to see through? speaker-1: So the first veil is to see beyond perception itself, right? As I said, as long as there's a subject and an object, we are seeing a perceptual world. But there's a place of integration that is beyond the subject and object in which we go beyond the interpreted perceived world, right? That's seeing beyond the veil of perception. That's the first veil. But that doesn't mean that we're supposed to say that, well, there is no perception, there is no world, there's only infinite consciousness, it's all light. And just, you know, sit and decompose the physical structures. No, that's not the idea. We can say, yes, this is fundamental, or this seems to underlie this perceptual world. And we can also say, what is the narrative of this beautiful perceptual world and sometimes ugly perceptual world that fits for our civilization, that helps us move forward? Right? That's also important. It's not about closing our eyes to what's happening around us. And so there, the second veil is what is the narrative that is most accurate and most helpful for our civilization? And that happens primarily because of education. There is a veil there, as you said, when we teach little packets of things, we look at the world through a small people and we pick up the narratives that are very small, that are seen through these small people. Doesn't matter who they're coming from. They can come from people with doctorates, they can come from people with from people who have. ⁓ public personas who have large platforms, it doesn't matter. If it's coming from a view through a small peephole, it's a very limited narrative. And therefore, the civilization is going to be limited. Look around at our civilization. You can see that it is one dominated by scarcity and fear in many cases. And the level of knowledge, especially across all fields, I would say is very low. Certainly in medicine, the level of knowledge is low about the human being, which is why there's so many conditions we can't heal. And why every year there are new diagnoses that are popping up. So that second veil is to say, hey, given that there is perception, given that we are experiencing the world, what's happening? speaker-0: In that video you talk about history being reinterpreted as myth and the stories that we traditionally told being dismissed. Can you say a little bit more about that? speaker-1: Yes. A lot of the ancient civilizations, civiliz civilizations from the past, describe things like gods in the

sky, beings from the sky, beings coming and mingling with people. In fact, even I believe I'm not an expert in this, but even in in some of the old Hebrew texts, it describes things like this. And I believe one of the Vatican translators, his name was ⁓ I think it's Moro Biglino. Moro is his first name, M-A-U-R-O, I believe. Biglini or Biglino, something like that is his last name. He used to do a lot of translations for the Vatican until he started to realize that wait a second, this isn't the way it's been said. These are actually make much more sense if we consider these are actually living beings that have capacities like chariots in the sky or flying capacities, machines that can fly, ways to interact with human beings, actual interactions with societies. It's actually describing history. It's not a kind of mythology. And in fact, mythology wasn't. wasn't meaning something that is made up or false until relatively recently. So I think we need to relook at history through this lens. When there are so many cultures around the world telling these stories, but more recently all of this has become, well, that's not possible. Well, you know, there are no extraterrestrials. We have this kind of modern story, which of course is changing now. There's this kind of slow release of new information considering these these possibilities. I think we need to relook at that history and see What is the most true narrative or the more true narrative about our history, about who we are, about what has happened, and how we have arrived at the state we have today? speaker-0: So it's like a distortion has taken place, a dismissal brought about perhaps by a a materialist mindset. ⁓ you also say that this dismissal, if you like, ⁓ has really damaging effects in terms of children. I mean you talk about a lot of what we call mental illness, is because we're not teaching kids what's actually happening in the world. speaker-1: That's quite a serious speaker-0: Side effect of all this. Can you say a little more about that? speaker-1: Yes. You know, even the phrase mental illness, ⁓ I think it's I don't think it's a helpful phrase. I think it it's a misleading phrase. First of all, the very idea of mental illness, the the mind being ill, I can speak from from the perspective of a physician in healthcare. Healthcare and specifically allopathy, the knowledge base, as I said, is a physical knowledge base. We literally define the human being as a physical thing. Mind is nowhere in the picture of what a human being is. At best, it is something secondary that the brain does, right? The mind is something the brain does, for example. So if you have an illness like a kidney problem, and you go to the doctor and say, and the doctor says, Well, you know, you have a kidney problem. And you say, Well, what's the kidney doctor? I don't know what that is. ⁓ you know, it's it's an organ here, it sits on the flanks and it Filters out ⁓ the blood and it creates urine and it releases the things you don't need. Okay, where is it again? It's over here. It's on these two sides. Okay. That's that's the expertise of the physician. ⁓ we say you have a lung problem, it's pneumonia. Pneumonia, what's that? Well, it's it's when there's an infection and inflammation of the lining of the lungs, and therefore the oxygen exchange doesn't happen as well. Okay. Where where are those lungs, Doctor? They're right here, both sides of chest, right here. Okay, I have a lung okay, got Doctor says, Well, you know, you have a mental illness. Mental illness, what is that? Well, it's a problem with the mind. Okay. Doctor, what is the mind? speaker-0: Ha ha. speaker-1: Doctor, hello? Alright, at least tell me where is the mind? So what are we talking about exactly? You know, it's not the actual domain of biomedical science. Yes, we can say people are suffering, absolutely. We need to help people who are suffering, absolutely. We need to offer resources to people who are suffering, absolutely. But I think we need to ask a question as experts, how much do we really know what we're talking about? And how much of this is really in the domain of brain, neurotransmitter, et cetera? There's now what's called the biopsychosocial model. many decades old, which acknowledges that the bio, I mean, it should be, if anything, it should be socio-psycho-bio and not bio-psychosocial. Because a lot of these are problems that are created, as you were alluding to and as I said before, by our beliefs in the society and the modes of practice that result from those beliefs, right? Including that we are physical creatures, but also including that, hey, we need shelter, we need food. We need an open environment to learn and to grow. And without these, for example, if we are fed stories that are small, if we are distracted so our attention is always externalized and never looking at ourselves. If this happens repeatedly, that person becomes constricted within a shell and they become susceptible to believing all kinds of things and to not having a certain sense of grounding. And that can easily be. translate into something called mental illness, especially with the proliferation of diagnoses that are happening all the time. speaker-0: We've talked about what you call the most important topic in the world, the primacy of consciousness. And I think what we've just got into relates to what you call the second most important topic in the world, and that is conspiracy theories. Yes. Now, not a lot even those who are interested in conspiracy theories, that's quite a high ranking. If I can put it like that. Yeah. That you're putting it. Number two in the entire world. Number justify that. Justify that for us. speaker-1: So I used to say it was ETs, just so you know. I used to say number two was ETs. And the reason I used to say that is because ETs, if they're real, as I believe they are, extra if they've been existing for you know as long or longer than our civilization, they're often

likely to have advanced technology. Some of them. I mean, it's not just one ET, right? They're how many billions of habitable plants are on ⁓ in the cosmos, and that's just speaker-0: Extra terrestrials. speaker-1: Our idea of habitable, right? So it's probably far beyond that. So it's very likely that many of these species have advanced technologies, have a much, much deeper understanding of mind and consciousness that is taught than which is taught in school. And so we'll have all of these technologies and we'll be able to connect all of this: consciousness, technology, mind, world, ecology. They will have likely made these connections a long time ago. So I used to say, Primacy of consciousness still one because of the power dynamic it involves, right? How you just go from becoming small and completely dependent on external experts to all of a sudden having a vault of resources within you of the fundamental nature of reality, actually. So that's still number one. But number two, I thought, was the practical application of that, which would really be seen with ETs coming to the picture. The reason ETs got displaced by the entire category of the conspiracy theory, and I want to be clear. I'm talking about the category, I'm not talking about any one conspiracy theory. Is because there is a conspiracy theory about probably every major topic in the world, including ETs. Right? So if ETs are important, what's really important is understanding what's really happening, right? And you cannot do that until you also reconcile what the conspiracy theory is about that topic. Because The conspiracy theory is a big red flag. It's a big stop sign, right? For a lot of people, especially people who identify as intelligent and identify as educated with advanced degrees, that's a I don't go there sign. It's like, ⁓ no, if I go there, I'm not intelligent, I'm not smart, I'm crazy, I'm mentally ill, you should stay away from me, you know, I'm gonna lose my job. And so people just put on the brakes and they simply consume what the standard narrative is out there. And so ETs are actually just one example of that. You know, how many other topics are there across AI, across healthcare that all have some kind of major conspiracy theory attached to it, which all feed into an even bigger theory, something like that, which is an idea of global control. I'm not an expert in these individual theories, but I see a big red flag in the category as a whole when educated people are afraid to discuss this in public. Even though they're discussing it privately. That is the reason I think the conspiracy theory, the entire category, is the second most important topic. speaker-0: It's almost like there's a link between this second most important topic, if we're calling conspiracies conspiracy theories that, and the first most important topic, the idea of consciousness as primary. It seems as though what motivates or perhaps what's at the foundation of both of them is the idea that some

great truth is being withheld in some way. I can't help thinking that the people who dive deeply and get almost obsessed by this particular conspiracy theory or that particular conspiracy theory, it's caused in part by the sense that I am being denied the truth about the world. And that surely is also very relevant when we talk about the materialist paradigm and a consciousness-based paradigm. And We could also say that we are being denied a great truth about the world if we are merely being fed the story that we are nothing more than a collection of cells. speaker-1: I would say it a little bit differently. I think that can happen, but I think it's more that the stories that we're being given don't fully capture who we are, don't fully reflect or resonate with who we are. And the nature of the human being is to know, right? The nature is to want to know, to be curious. Every child, when they're born, is curious, right? That is. In a way, taught out of children by a certain kind of education. But every child is curious, looking around, exploring, wanting to know. And if a person is naturally free and open, they're naturally learning. They're looking around, they're always learning things. And so when we're given narratives and habits that limit that, it's only going to be it's only natural that people who aren't fully suppressed are going to want to look out more and more. There is that link, as you said, which is to see the primacy of consciousness. Once a person has been kind of ⁓ in this materialist education, and once they start to believe these as facts and as science rather than as philosophical opinion, which is what both primacy of consciousness and the primacy of the physical world, they're both philosophical views. Now, is there scientific support for both of them? Yes. Depending on the assumptions you make, you can find scientific support for both. But ultimately, the position that one or the other is fundamentally science. is not rational. It's not true. There's science to support them both, but that it's not fundamentally a scientific position. And so I think what happens is we're looking for these rational reasons to justify the things that we're going into. And that is because we realize that the rational reasons we've been given are not actually the whole story. They're not resonating fully with what we are. That openness, that curiosity starts to dim. And so the person starts to venture into these areas. You're right that there is this connection, as we said. They both look beyond the obvious, whether it's the nature of consciousness, it's beyond the obvious once the once that person has kind of been developed into that materialist paradigm. But if not, it's there open for everyone to realize. I could imagine some civilization where that was just natural and they were never educated out of that. Think about the child who learns to say, This is your nose. This is my eye, this is my chin, this is your shoulder. What are they learning? They're learning that what they are is a physical thing, right? Are children taught to say, this is sadness, this is joy, this is bliss, this is openness, this is courage. No. And so that is a kind of materialist education that's happening. So I don't think the materialism is fundamental, it's just what is fundamentally taught in our society. So when we look beyond the obvious, we look beyond the obvious material and we see, hey, there's something deeper. And similarly, when we look at the narratives, we see, hey, there's something deeper. speaker-0: You spoke earlier about how people are afraid when it comes to the whole question of conspiracy theories. And as soon as something is labeled a conspiracy theory, like you said, that's a red flag, I'm an intelligent person, I can't go there. It reminds me a little bit of something Dean Radin said. He's the like the godfather of the academic study of paranormal activity. And he said that when you get these conventional scientists in private, they are much more willing to be open to the paranormal or this happened or that happened. And they might even sometimes come up with stories of their own, inexplicable phenomena that just don't match the materialist paradigm that they vigorously defend in public. Have you come across things like that? speaker-1: A hundred percent, all the time with colleagues, all the time with colleagues. Colleagues know that there is in in medicine, for example, we know that there is a great amount of corruption with pharmaceutical companies, for example. Just how much we disagree on. Most people haven't really looked into it to that extent because it's gonna ultimately come to a question of this is my career, this is what I'm doing. You know, we talked about evidence-based medicine. I remember talking to a colleague and they said, Yeah, you know, that's all true, but how it's compromised. Pretty much every major journal editor has talked about the corruption in publishing, which is not to say all studies are false or corrupt. We have to be we have to be careful. We have to stay in the very difficult, uncertain position of we don't really know many times about these studies. Some are true, some are not. Sometimes you cannot know because we don't know what data has been left out. Anyway, so when I talked to this colleague, what they said is, yeah, you know, it's it's compromised, but it's the best we have. So it's not that people don't know, but it's the question of what do we do? And the fear comes in where it's in the case of medicine, hey, I'm a physician, I'm a rational person, I'm a scientific person, I follow the evidence, right? Evidence-based medicine becomes almost like a brand at that point. It's like you don't want to be seen as against evidence-based medicine. You have to actually upgrade the level of evidence. So that fear plays a big role. I've experienced it myself. As I went through this, I had pretty radical views, you could say, compared to the

mainstream. And I've steadily tried to rather than just vomiting it out in one big lump, I've tried to steadily articulate a rational kind of position to create stepping stones for people who are afraid, who have been afraid just like myself, so that you don't have to make that giant 10 meter leap. Maybe you can take a half meter at a time and through reasoning meet that fear. speaker-0: Let's talk a little bit about your personal journey. We've touched on it, the medical school angle. Can we broaden that out and can you give an overview of your life journey and you how you came to some of these beliefs that you now held hold? speaker-1: Alright, let's start with the beginning of a lifetime. I was born in Washington, D.C. We moved back to India when I was ⁓ I think around six to eight months of age and lived there for almost five years and then came back to the Washington DC area. ⁓ my father was a biochemist, and ⁓ so we moved back here and and I pretty much grew up there in the DC area. And Early on. So I noticed the difference when I came from India back here. Right. So because for a while we lived in the village there. So bare feet, outside, you know, beautiful fruit trees and paradise, as far as I was concerned. You know, very hard work, laborious for my grandmother. ⁓ but for a kid, it was absolutely paradise. And I remember coming back and when we were living in the apartment in Maryland. I remember standing on the balcony and and people watching, and I remember feeling like people were in boxes. It almost seemed like they were isolated. They were in boxes. That's what it felt like. And it I didn't put words to it. It was just a sensation that I put words to much later. ⁓ so I think I started to notice this difference. And I think quintessentially, we would describe it as this east-west. I don't think it's actually true. I think it happened within people of any country. There are different kinds of people. But I definitely noticed this difference. ⁓ And later, my family got into Vedanta, right? The the which is the Indian philosophy that describes the nature of the human being and their relationship with the cosmos. And so I started to develop a language at that point for some of these sensations that I'd had. And I became very curious about mind and about world at a young age, probably in elementary school. And At that time, I used to sit in on all the adult classes, the open issue classes, which are the, you know, the the kind of heavy philosophy, the detailed, subtle philosophy and the Gita classes. And I would just be sitting there as a kid. It's not that I was my parents were there and they were involved, so I was just there. But I was soaking up a lot of these things and I had a lot of questions. And I found school to be much, much less interesting. Because, as you said, little packets of externalized disconnected knowledge. versus deep packets of unitive knowledge that are bringing the subject and object together. Now I didn't realize that I didn't have the language at the time, but that's what it was. It was these unitive views as opposed to these separate externalized views. And so I started to pull on that thread and eventually I would become very bored with school, painfully bored, and at some point decided to go back And go to medical school with this perspective of, okay, let's see. Let's see. Let's go to what everybody says is the ultimate bastion. You know, ⁓ at least some people do, maybe not everybody. ⁓ especially in the Indian community, that's considered, you know, medicine is considered like one of the highest, noblest professions. I think as it is generally as well. Like I said, I went and and I was rather disappointed at the level of knowledge that was being offered. And around that time in medical school, ⁓ I had an experience which I guess will be classified as a near-death-like experience. I've I've talked to many people, I've talked to the IANS, the International Association of Near Death Studies about this, and I guess that's how it would be classified. ⁓ where I had a choice to leave the lifetime, I had a choice to leave the body and chose not to. But when I returned, everything had changed. My perception had changed. my understanding and recognition of who I was, what I was, what the world is, of space, time, everything had changed. And it took me about ten plus years to kind of regain my footing again. ⁓ and that was that was just before the end of med school. So that happened throughout my residency, which is, you know, one of the most intense times of your training. And it was after that that I told you that I I essentially didn't have a choice. I had to start producing it and bringing it out. And Here's where we are today. speaker-0: Wow, that's quite a journey. I'm curious why you chose emergency medicine of all the options that a medical professional has? speaker-1: Well, I can tell you the prospective story and the retrospective story of that. Prospectively, I didn't know what I really wanted to choose. And I struggled with that. What I thought at the time, the reasons were one, I was doing a rotation and we got called down to the emergency department ⁓ for a patient to admit a patient to the hospital. I think I was doing my internal medicine rotation or something. So our team came down, and when I when I came to the to the ER and I looked around, it seemed to be full of light. Like there was some kind of transcendent quality to it that I had never experienced before in a hospital. Everything was glowing, everything was of the nature of light. And I think I didn't intellectualize it. I don't even think I I registered it at a thought level, but I think that a big I think that pushed me into the direction in a at a subconscious level of choosing emergency medicine. ⁓ retrospectively, so beyond that, I really can't give you a good reason. ⁓ it there's something that moved me towards it. I also think Actually, another thing I think is like I

like the idea of having to know the emergent aspects of things, right? I didn't like the idea of just dealing with the heart or just dealing with the GI system or just dealing with the brain. I like the idea of seeing the whole human being and knowing and recognizing what is going right or wrong at at the most critical level. That idea appealed to me. ⁓ and the range also. Right. It's not just the organ system, but the age. I can see a two-week old one minute, five e five minutes later, it can be a hundred year old. Right? Man or woman, old or young, anything. And that kind of holism in its own way, I think, appealed to me. Retrospectively. I would say it has brought me a tremendous amount of love because I see the suffering. I see every place the system fails. Right. When it's 2 a.m. and there's a snowstorm and nothing is open and the car breaks down and the person is homeless and people are people are upset with them or ignoring them. Guess who says yes? The emergency department. We say yes, come in. We will see you. And to me, there's something sacred about that. We cannot say no. We don't say no. And the emergency department never closes. Never. Never. The other departments can close in some kinds of emergencies. The emergency department doesn't close. And I think there's something sacred and humane about that that touches me. And I also think because of the extremes of what I see, because of the failures in the system I see, I almost think I need it to keep communicating like this. Because otherwise, many times it feels like I would just I see the way things are, you know, and there's a place within myself that is at peace and content with what is. But when I walk into the E D and I see it, it starts to spin I'm like, no, gotta speak again. So I think there's that element of it too. speaker-0: Here's another thing I'm curious about you, Anoop. You are an Indian classical singer and I'm curious about whether your music connects somehow to all the things that we've been talking about for the last hour. speaker-1: What Life is music. Life is that's it, huh? Life is music. I mean, it's everything. It can't be fully understood rationally. I'm a very rational type person in the sense that I like to try to advance things rationally because I think at least at face value, that's what it looks like. You know, but there is a music beneath this. And I believe that when I connect with people, it's actually the music that's connecting. It people a lot of people when they listen to me or interact with me, I hear That makes so much sense. Yeah. The way you break it down, it makes so much sense. But I believe it's the underlying vibration of the music actually that makes it make sense. and I think the visuals of life, the states, the dreaming, the weaking, the sleeping, you know, the the state of consciousness, ⁓ the individuality and the collectiveness, the cosmos and the individual, like all of the like this is music. This all flows as one ocean. And if it's only rational, it misses the majority of what it is. speaker-0: One thing that we do have to talk about before we finish is AI. The podcast police will be on our case if we ⁓ if we don't at least mention it. Seems to be that it's ⁓ almost against the law to not mention AI on a podcast. Now you recently had a conversation with AI about this whole idea of consciousness being primary. How does AI relate to this conversation we've been having? speaker-1: Yeah, I've had I've had many probably over the last couple of years. one that comes to mind is this was probably a couple of years ago, and I posted about this on my Instagram, I believe, and on LinkedIn. I asked about ⁓ the relationship between matter and consciousness. And I asked for all of the theories and the philosophies and and it listed this was Chat TPT, and it listed, I don't know, 15 or 20 different philosophies talking about the relationship between matter and consciousness. Guess which was the only one? The only one it left out was that consciousness is fundamental. It's the only thing that exists fundamentally, and matter is a pattern of it. Every other thing was there, right? That's a huge problem. When the one that's being left out is the one that gives human beings the most agency, that's a big problem. ⁓ what else can I say about AI? You know, I always like to contrast AI and NI. NI being natural intelligence. ⁓ I think what people forget in all of these apparently wonderful things that AIs are doing and these large language models are doing. Let's not forget who created these. We did. Right? And I, us human beings, created AI. And now we're lost in the dance of AI and marveling at how they are, how much more intelligent they are. We have Elon Musk talking about how in just a few years AI will surpass the intelligence of AI. What a joke. What a terribly small understanding of what intelligence is. Right. And this is this is a person who's responsible for much of the technology that's being developed in the world. I saw a post recently by Jensen Huang, who I believe is a CEO of NVIDIA, one of the biggest AI companies, or at least developing the structure for it. He said, soon, I don't remember it exactly, but it was something like it was just last week, something like, We are developing the largest infrastructure for intelligence on the planet. What a joke! How misguided and small is this understanding of what intelligence is to think that data centers are the actual infrastructure of intelligence and not consciousness itself. So I think we have to we have to be here with eyes open as to what people with huge platforms and huge amounts of money. And small levels of understanding are saying, We have to say we have to call the emperor who's naked, despite the fact that they're dancing around with what they think are majestic clothes. Intelligence is something far beyond what LLMs can mimic. They're wonderful at mimicking language. They're parrots, right? That splice language here and there. Great, and it's useful in that. Let's not mistake that for intelligence. speaker-0: Where can people find your work if they want to look into this more deeply? speaker-1: The the best place, the meeting ground is my website, anupkumar.com, an o p k u ⁓ ar.com. And there I have probably a bit of everything of all this, bringing it all together. And from there you can sign up for the substack in which I elaborate on particular topics. speaker-0: Anup Kumar. Thank you. speaker-1: Thank you, Joe.