How to Escape the Matrix Interview

0:00 So we are actually one being, if you will, that shares a common relationship by the very active breathing. Can you explain what is the Super mind and how is it qualitatively different from our current state of rational rational mental consciousness? We generally judge our relationships, our families by physical and biological basis, OK? In other words, we're born into a family, we're born into a society, we're born into a culture, we're born into a religion, and that's how we frame ourselves. There's a project taking place in South India called Oroville, which is a Township that's being developed eventually to be a city of 50,000 people and integrate people from many different cultures, languages, backgrounds, religions, et cetera.

1:03 In your experience, what's the biggest resistance people have to doing this inner work and how can they overcome it? I think the biggest resistance is their fear of giving up what is known and secure to them and that their peers and their friends circle and their education and background and training have told them they should do. If you are new to this podcast, please don't forget to like, subscribe and to share because that helps us to be recommended in the algorithms. If you would like to support this podcast, please check out our merch store on Amazon with the brand Todd and me. We've got some cool T-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, and sweaters. Link will be in the description of this podcast.

1:46 And if you're no starting a spiritual journey, you would like to start a spiritual journey or you're currently on a spiritual journey and you would like some help removing some fears and traumas, please hit me up on my Instagram at Adriana under score 246 and it will help you to get some magic mushrooms. Enjoy the show and stay tuned because we have some more great content coming soon. Hello beautiful and amazing people. Welcome to the Conscious Man 7 podcast. I am your host Todd Cave, and this podcast is the place where awakening men and women come to unlock the deeper truths of life, break free from the illusions of modern society, and reconnect to their true power. In this episode, we're diving into one of the most profound spiritual blueprints for humanities, evolution with author, teacher, and consciousness explorer Santosh Krinsky. Santosh has spent decades immersed in the teachings of Sri Arabindo, one of the most influential spiritual philosophers of the modern era.

2:44 Through his work at the Institute for Holistic Education and his readings in Sri Arabindo series, Santosh brings ancient spiritual wisdom into practical focus, giving us tools to confront today's identity crises, the addiction to consumerism, and one of the deeper questions about our purpose. This isn't just an intellectual conversation, it's a road map to escape the Matrix. If you've ever wondered whether there is more to life than the endless pursuit of money, validation, and survival, this episode could be your turning point. Stay tuned. When truth is blurred by lies and misinformation, perception becomes reality.

3:28 What will you perceive your reality to be? Liberate your fears and walk with me. Sit down and meditate. Connect with your soul. So it really goes really deep in terms of words and etymology and what they mean. So This is why like it is really hard to really crap the Matrix because there's so many levels and layers to it, you know? Santosh, welcome to the Conscious Man 7 podcasts. How are you today mate?

4:27 Thank you. I'm fine and it's a pleasure to be with you today, Tom. Yes, I'm really looking forward to this conversation because prior to looking you up, I never heard about Sri Arabindo. And from what I have seen, his work is pretty good, but it seems to be pretty dense and most people seem to have difficulty interpreting it. And you spent decades basically studying this guy and I would guess you can say decrypting or making the information and the understanding more accessible to to to people to humanity. So I was, I'm very interested to talk to you today so that even myself, I can learn a few things, you know.

5:13 So today I want to start off because I have seen you talk talked about the existential crisis that we have. So what is the existential crisis of humanity today, and how does it manifest in our daily lives across mental health, identity and meaning? Well, that's a great question. Scientists have told us we are in the midst of the 6th planetary die off. The last planetary die off was when all the dinosaurs disappeared a long time ago. This die off means that species that lived on this planet are dying every single day of the week.

5:59 And it's happening because we humanity, have made dramatic changes to the environment, if you will, within which we live. We've changed the climate, we've changed the chemical balance. We've what what we call pollution everywhere. We've added microplastics and all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs into the waterways, fertilizers and pesticides. And herbicides and all of these things together are creating that crisis. But it goes even further because we've exploited certain resources to such a great degree that. Even humanity is having trouble keeping up with it. And a couple of examples.

6:55 There's a real freshwater problem in the world today. The freshwater is disappearing. It's being used. The aquifers are all being drawn down, and the glaciers are melting, and they're melting into this saline oceans. And so we're starting to see water conflicts arising around the world. Even in the United States, we have the concern about the use of the Colorado River and which States and which First Nations tribes and how much Mexico gets can all be basically a method of creating conflict.

7:37 But you have the same thing happening in the Middle East, the same thing in South Asia and Southeast Asia. In the recent war, more or less between India and Pakistan, India said, well, we're going to cut off a Pakistan's availability of water from the Brahmaputra. The Chinese coming off the Tibetan Plateau are already controlling some of the major rivers in Southeast Asia and South Asia, and they're starting to exercise water control over some of the other countries to get them to do what they want. This is not against or for any particular group of people.

8:21 It's happening all over the world because fresh water is disappearing and people are fighting for this essential resource. Another example, several billion people on the planet rely on fish as their primary protein source. Now, I'm a vegan. It doesn't affect me personally directly, but the ocean fisheries have been so decimated by overfishing that they're in the process of collapsing. And when they collapse, you're going to have a billion people who aren't going to have a major food source that they rely on today, and that is going to create serious problems. The other thing that's happening is climate change, even if some people like to deny it, is actually taking place. And it's changing the heat of the oceans, making the plankton that provide the first food source for the rest of the food chain in the ocean and produce more oxygen than the trees do on the planet.

9:38 They're dying off in vast areas of the oceans. And then you Add all the plastics that are going into the oceans and how that's getting into the stomachs of the larger fish and mammals in the ocean and destroying their lives and decimating that portion of the food chain. We've got a real serious problem here and people don't necessarily recognize it. We're poisoning ourselves. We have hormonal changes taking place, reduction of sperm counts, reduction of fertility, earlier fertility for young girls because of all the hormone disrupting chemicals that we're putting into our own water supply through the chemicals we're creating. And we have pollution, we have lead, we have mercury. We have all these things that affect our lives and affect the planet.

10:38 So I call this the 6th planetary die off, which I didn't coin that term, but to me that's an existential crisis, putting aside the fact that it creates. All kinds of conflicts between people and fights over resources, fights over access, fights over who's polluting and who's getting victimized by it. And we wind up with a lot of conflict, wars, threats of nuclear or biological destruction and mass migrations, and then the attempts to control these things after the fact.

11:20 And to me, that looks like one big can of worms, you could say, in terms of what we as humanity are facing today. So what you describe sounds to me like systematic breakdown, and it seems like a system thing. So why have the traditional quotation mark solutions, politics, religion, science and economics failed to resolve the core spiritual vacuum? Well, that's a. That's a good question. A lot of that is based on where those different solutions come from and their limitations.

12:04 The mental capability of humanity is very much linear. You could say it goes from point A to point B, it extrapolates, it analyzes, it divided divides, but it doesn't undertake what I would call a global or holistic view of things. And so the solutions tend to have unintended consequences, and people sitting in different spots in the mental realm have different ways of looking at it and different solutions. And then they all conflict with each other and they haven't found a way to harmonize that. So we wind up with what is called gridlock. And we see that today in the governments around the world. We see paralysis as they try to solve problems mentally with political or economic or technological solutions. And in terms of religion, that comes from a somewhat different space in our being.

13:14 But each religion has its own agenda, if you will, and they haven't quite all come to the conclusion that they need to stay nice with each other. A religion has probably caused more wars and more depths than any other thing in the in the history of humanity because they all think that they're the ones and everyone else is wrong. And in some cases it's have a crusade and kill the infidels. You know, this has not been a pretty history that religion has undergone, even though. The founders of religions in many cases spoke of the unity and the oneness of humanity, the unity of consciousness on the planet. It didn't quite translate down to all of the disciples and then the vested interest that latched on to that because they can capture the supportive.

14:13 People. So it wound up with that. The religions for the most part got Co opted by the vested interests. We put it in Christian terms. Jesus turned down the control of the government, the politics of the world when he was tempted with that. But later the Roman Empire Co opted the Christian religion and made it a state religion and used it to conquer other people. So we have the difference between a founder and the result later, hundreds of years, possibly later, when it when it actually gets carried out in the real world and people start fighting over money and prestige and power and everything else.

15:05 Yeah, it I totally agree with you in the sense that religion is. I say it's a terrible idea. I think it's the worst invention ever given to man and I think it is created part of the crises that we have. So with that being said, can you share how Sri or Rabindo framed this crisis in his time and why his diagnosis is more relevant than ever in 2025? Yes, To do that I have to take us back a little bit to an understanding of the evolution of consciousness, because essentially Sri or Bindo looks at the development of consciousness as the key to evolution on the planet. Charles Darwin talks about the evolution of forms, and he studied how different forms move from one formation to the next formation to the next formation.

16:14 And that didn't explain what the causative factor is. And the causative factor from Sri Aurobindo's viewpoint was the development of consciousness. There's a consciousness, if you will, in every rock and every mineral on the planet. If you study them, you will see that there is an incredible atomic structure that is mathematical in nature that's highly controlled. And as Einstein and others proved, matter is actually a solidified form of energy. OK, it's it can be converted into energy, which led us to the atomic bomb and nuclear energy.

17:05 So the energy is locked away in matter. It's there. It's just not very active or visible to us in the material form. Out of those material forms, over a period of many millennia, life forms evolved and life forms add the vital principle. They add movement, responsiveness, reactions, etcetera. They transform energy into new patterns and forms. Eventually plant forms evolved and then we saw the development of animals, which add mobility and can begin to eat and attack one another, OK.

17:57 And that's the vital force that occurs in animals. And then a recent, relatively recent geological time, we see the development of the mental force, first of all in a rudimentary form in animals, and then secondarily as it begins to develop in a more expressive form in human beings. So we are the primary vehicle or vessel, if you will, of mental consciousness on the planet right now.

18:41 It's not fully formed in every individual it We still have a lot of our vital energetic impulses, instincts and habits that are forcing and directing the way things turn out to a great degree. But we have capabilities at the mental level that we don't see at earlier stages of the evolution of consciousness. Trio Robindo looks at this and says there is a movement and a trajectory towards increasing consciousness, and it's pretty clear that the mental consciousness is limited even when it's developed as far as the most developed human individual, it has its limitations because it's linear and it's restricted and it's blinded by its own narrowness. And he therefore states that there are future and other levels of consciousness that have yet to evolve. And those next levels of consciousness bring in powers of understanding that is more global in scope. They bring in intuition in a really true sense, and they bring in what he calls the supra. Mental consciousness means beyond the mind. And it basically is a holistic

20:14 consciousness. It can see things from all different angles and directions and see the wholeness of it, not just the divisions of it which the mental consciousness sees. We're really good at dividing. We're not real good at synthesizing, bringing things together. And that's a failure of humanity. It's one of the reasons we fight so much with each other. We see there's different genders, there's different races, there's different socioeconomic levels, there's different religions, there's different cultures and languages, and we treat those as dividing points.

20:55 Whereas a different consciousness, A holistic consciousness, we'll see them all as part of a vast picture of oneness, where each part is an essential part of a bigger picture, and that they all need each other and belong together and need to be working in harmony with one another. And so that's Srioro Bindo's direction is to say, let's encourage and support consciously the evolution of consciousness to the next stage, which nature is going to work out eventually. But we're in an existential crisis, so we need to actually have people who are ready to focus on this and do it and be receptive to it to move it along a little faster so that we don't destroy ourselves before that can happen. Very, very interesting you said about what Sri said. And since you mentioned it before, let's delve into the evolution of consciousness.

22:00 So can you explain the stages of consciousness evolution as described by him, but and then also from the inconsistent, the Super mind, which you kind of touched on just now, just now? I'd be happy to do that. So essentially there is a material consciousness, and we're talking about on the planet here in, you know, on Earth, and something that we can relate to because the consciousness of the universe and what it's all about is beyond our scope. Obviously, I don't think anybody can say why and what the universe is about and where it's going and why it's going there.

22:43 But starting with the consciousness of the planet, the first thing we see is the development of the material forms. OK? After that, we see a refinement of those material forms and we start seeing things like crystals and really highly organized material. And if you ever looked at what a a crystal's form is under a microscope, you'll see it dramatically varies from the raw, like rock that you'll find on the on the ground somewhere. It's very, very well organized and that's why crystals are actually used.

23:33 For things like microphones and radio transmission, because they have capacities that ordinary rock does not have, there's another sort of slice of consciousness there in the crystals. People don't think about that. They just say, oh it's a crystal, but it actually represents the next stage of material form consciousness at a higher level than just plain rock. After that we see the development of single cell plants and they gain the power of transmuting sunlight into energy and biological energy in particular, which material consciousness doesn't have. OK, your rock isn't going to take the sunlight and turn it into biology, but plants can do that. And then they start creating oxygen, which allows animal life to evolve.

24:40 Animal life then uses the oxygen to survive and it has a symbiotic relationship with the plants because the plants need the carbon dioxide and we exhale and the other animals exhale carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen. We don't survive without the plants. The plants don't survive without us. So we are actually one being, if you will, that shares a common relationship by the very active breathing.

25:20 So animal consciousness adds movement, mobility, incipient ability to react and desire and go after things, as opposed to plants which need things to come to them, if you will, that they need to absorb. And then we see the first stages of the mental development starting to happen with various animals that are able to devise plans, in some cases use tools.

26:02 There's some birds and some and certainly primates that are tool using beings at a very rudimentary level. And then the next stage you come to is the first stages of human development where a lot of that is refined and modified. Our tool making skills, our speech skills improve over what animals have. And at a certain point, as humanity develops, we gain what we call the higher reason, which is a skill set for thinking beyond the immediate situation and need planning, articulating and looking back into the past, reflecting and eventually self reflection.

26:54 Where we can actually look at ourselves and reflect on what is our goal, what is our purpose, what is our significance, what are we here to do? Is there life after death? I mean, all these questions come up as a result of the mental consciousness developing beyond the basic mental consciousness and beyond the developed reason, there are other powers of consciousness. And we see in humanity certain individuals who begin to express these additional powers rudimentary, They're not fully formed.

27:37 But you see things like people who have the ability to read emotions from each other, who are able to be empathetic, who have the ability of communicating with others in other parts of the world, who have distance vision, who can go into lucid dreaming, who can have clairvoyance to some degree, who can predict the relationship of things at a level that the rudimentary animal or even the lower levels of human consciousness have not yet attained.

28:21 Now, some of these are very rare, and some of them people fake for personal gain. So people say, well, it's all fake. Well, it's not all fake. There are real individuals who can do this. There are examples. For example, a case that I read about was there was a soldier in the First World War and his sister lived, you know, thousands of miles away. And at a certain point in time, she suddenly got a feeling that said that her brother had just died.

29:02 And then she got the confirmation from the Army later that he had died on this place and this time and under these circumstances. And it corresponded with that feeling she had. Now, how does that happen? There is a power of consciousness. Nikola Tesla talks about wireless energy moving throughout the universe and being able to harness it, which is why we now have cell phones. Well, at a different level, human beings are able to pick up subtle vibrations and send out subtle vibrations across distance when they have gotten to the point of developing these other powers at the next level of consciousness. Beyond that, we see further developments where people can become conscious of the whole world. I mean, they can really gain a consciousness of unity and oneness.

30:08 And those individuals, in many cases, we identify as great seers and sages and religious founders, you know, people who really have an experience that goes beyond the ordinary, who see things differently, great artists in some cases. And those represent powers beyond our ordinary cognition in our daily lives. And it doesn't mean that people can't develop it. It just means they haven't developed it yet. And I'll get, I'll give you an example. A child is born and its first efforts are gaining control of its physical body.

30:57 It learns how to crawl. It learns how to pull itself up. It learns how to walk. It learns how to develop coordination of the physical body and interrelate it with their brain. Along the way, they start to develop their vital needs and personality. And if anyone's had children, they know about the terrible twos. This is when the personality, the vital nature, begins to want to see what its boundaries are and how it can assert itself in the world. And then as they develop, they begin to integrate those things more. And at some point their mental development begins to take place and some of them go on to careers in engineering or technology or philosophy or humanities or writing or whatever it might be communication as they develop their mental powers.

31:59 So it's not beyond comprehension to believe that as humanity gets, as an individual gets ready, as their stage of life develops, as their capacities reach a certain point, they're able at that time to take on and develop the next level of consciousness. We see that within ourselves up to the level of mind, and we see some individuals who can go beyond the rudimentary mind that we now see because for whatever reason, they're receptive to it. They've gotten their framework ready to receive and deal with those powers, and they start to express them. OK, so it sounds like you were talking about something called the Super mind.

32:59 So can you explain what is the Super mind and how is it qualitatively different from our current state of rationale rational mental consciousness? So as Sri Robindo explains it, because obviously if you haven't yourself necessarily experienced it, you have to take some of this a little bit on the experience of others, OK. And so as he explains it, and actually going back beyond that to some of the ancient seers and sages, they talk about a knowledge consciousness. In Sanskrit, it's vignana, which is the term for the consciousness at the next level behind mind or manas.

33:48 And that consciousness is one with the, you could say the universe, but at least with the planetary existence, it can see and feel and experience things in a wholeness, in a completeness that the mind doesn't have. The mind works in straight lines and it works with either or black and white, very limited perception. It's more or less, and I use this example recently for some other purpose, but there's a famous story of five different people observing an automobile accident from 5 different locations on the ground, and they each come up with a different story about who caused what and what the sequence was.

34:41 They're each seeing it from their mental awareness and consciousness. But now if you put a super observer, if you will, above them, say at a window above the street, he can see all five of those observers. He can see the actual automobile accident coming together. And he's the one who can actually harmonize the five different viewpoints together because he sees them all and he sees how they fit together with the actual event. Super mind is basically the Super observer if you will in that example. OK, very, very interesting.

35:23 So the Super mind, the way you describe it, songs like how people say like infinite consciousness or that field that where is nothing and everything exists at the same time, it sounds a little bit like that. What you're talking with that state where you have total awareness is that. Does that make sense the way I'm trying to describe it? I think it does make sense to a certain degree, but there's so much confusion about those states that seem like they're otherworldly and they take you out of the world. But the Super mental consciousness should not necessarily take you out of the world.

36:10 It just gives you another viewpoint so that you see both the oneness, the unity of everything and the diversity that makes up that unity. And that that's a much more complex picture than going shifting from you're involved in the diversity and all the different analysis that we do at the mental level or you shift over here and now you see everything is a oneness. Super mental consciousness is able to integrate oneness with diversity, unity with diversity, and so they're both present concurrently and not in conflict with each other. OK, that's interesting because from my understanding we live in kind of bit of a binary system and I always thought it was the binary which which is really the separation from the infinite consciousness.

37:16 But you're saying then that the Super mind integrates both of those together. So it's like bringing the separation in with the oneness so that you can see both sides, but still you can see on top at the same time to get a holistic view. Does that sound a bit more like what you're trying to explain? Yes. The whole idea of that binary is really a mental way of looking at things. And the supra mental way of looking at things would be to recognize that there is a oneness and a diversity that are one thing.

37:59 And I'll give you an example. You go to the ocean and you take a glass and you fill it with ocean water, OK. When you fill it with ocean water, the water is the same in the ocean and in the glass, but there's a separation. It's an artificial separation. And if you immerse that glass of water into the ocean, the water is flowing in and out of that glass and it's still a full glass of water, but it's also part of that infinite ocean. So it's it's a different way of reflecting on things and, and that's part of what helps us to solve the existential crisis eventually, because this linear gridlocked view of things is impossible for us to solve all these crises we spoke about earlier.

39:07 OK. OK. So in your view, how does our transition to the next state, the next phase of consciousness related to modern movements like transhumanism, AI or digital immorality? I think that every one of the movements represents an attempt by humanity to move beyond its limitations. And to that extent they are all part of that aspiration for something great or something more harmonious, something that's going to help us become better human beings and relate to one another more effectively and solve some of the problems that we've created with our mental framework.

39:56 So I think there's a lot of benefit from each of these directions. They don't any one of them necessarily. Solve the problem. Because many of them are still immersed in the mental consciousness and certainly with AI. And it's interesting. I recently did an interview with ChatGPT and I actually posted a lot of questions and had it provide answers. And I'm turning that into a book, my dinner with ChatGPT, because it's really fascinating and it's pretty clear it's limited by the mental framework and it's not the solution to this new consciousness.

40:43 It is simply an extension of the mental consciousness, although it has so much more information available to it that it can make connections that we find hard to make on our own right now. And it may help us to evolve as we widen our understanding based on what we can get from it. You know, I I at first I was started to, to, I once used the word fear, but I was very conscious of artificial intelligence. But I am now starting to think that artificial intelligence is pretty much like a gun. A gun can be used to save someone and a gun can be used to kill someone, just like a knife, any weapon, and I think it is basically the user how you use it. So how I see artificial intelligence is that if you input the right information into it, therefore you become like the architect in like any matrix. You can actually create revolutionary and magnificent things because you are starting to think on another level as like a planner and the, and the artificial intelligence can do all the, the heavy lifting for you, right? Instead of you having to go and read hundreds and hundreds of books, you can be.

42:10 And The thing is what you realizable AI is you have to be very specific because if you're not very specific, it comes and gives you information you're like that, I don't want that. So then it forces you now to think on a higher level to say, OK, I want is like you want to create a play and you're writing a script, but in your script you'll be very detailed script. And the more detailed you are, the better information you can get. So I actually think that the we can actually use AI to solve many problems and create revolutionary things that I think will amaze us if we use a higher level of mind to start a program.

42:53 It because from playing with it, I realized that the more stuff you feed it better it actually gets So it's almost like I guess you can call it like a child that you're raising where you, you, you, you know, you try to represent to be a good parent, then you're trying to be a good custodian then of it. Then on the flip side, you can use it for total nefarious things where they're saying that the straight that Ukraine data or Russia, they used AI to help with the precision of the targeting. So then that could be a way. Now we're use it as a weapon to to cause harm where you know, you're feeding it specific detail stuff to maim and to to kill while not on the flip side, you can use it to heal call like look for illnesses, to find complex calculations and stuff.

43:49 And even for astrophysics and you know me all that, all that kind of stuff, you know. So I think I think it's it's a great opportunity for us, but we have to be rare with people that are programming it, which is what where I sit now on defence regards to AI. Well, I think you're in a very good spot with its benefits and its potential drawbacks. In my interview with ChatGPT, we explored very heavily. There's a whole chapter in the in the book that I'm putting together on the inherent biases that can impact the way ChatGPT responds to things, things like confirmation bias and input bias and programming bias. And I mean, there's a lot of issues that that go into that. I had an explorer what its biases were and where it came from and how it overcame those biases and how its programming helped it to overcome those biases. It was fascinating.

44:59 But you're, you're right, to the extent that it's used for weaponry, it's like everything else in human life. We either make the best of it or we make the worst of it. And I totally agree with what you had to say about that. OK, so how what does Sri Aurobindo mean when he speaks about a new species evolving not biologically, but spiritually? We generally judge our relationships, our families, by physical and biological basis, OK?

45:42 In other words, we're born into a family, we're born into a society, we're born into a culture, we're born into a religion, and that's how we frame ourselves, OK. What we start to see happening nowadays is people are starting to identify with others, as you could say, family, not based strictly on their biological roots, but more based on their inclinations, their spiritual and mental and emotional development, their interests, etcetera. And we find this happening all over the world.

46:24 I've got friends in many, many countries around the world, and we never physically meet, but on a certain level, we meet all the time with our discussions, our understanding of things, how we approach things, how we work to solve issues that we're facing. And they're more my family than my physical parents and siblings might be. I have much more in common with those individuals and I do with, you know, the physical family. In the same way, we can see that the spiritual development is going to eventually create a group of individuals around the planet who naturally have an affinity for one another because they can vibrate at the same level, they can relate to the same things. They can see things that up until now, a few people have seen.

47:30 Eventually, as humanity matures, more and more individuals in humanity will have these capabilities and begin to evolve them. And these forerunners will be able to provide them inspiration and guidance because they've been there and they're doing it. And so that's what we would call a new species. It's, you know, you've got Homo sapiens, but it might be that beyond Homo sapiens, we've got Homo supermentalis or whatever you want to call it that evolves. And it, the differences may or may not be great on the physical level, but they're certainly great on the evolutionary powers of consciousness level.

48:21 And at some point they may incorporate things that we don't even think about. For instance, there are genes that we have in our DNA, in our system that are turned off right now for doing certain things, genetic capabilities. For instance, I was reading today that elephants have like 30 genes that when turned on prevent them from getting cancer. And we have one. Now, if we were to turn on those other 15 or 20 or 29 genes, however many it is that we actually have latent within us, maybe cancer is cured. You see what I mean?

49:10 Similarly, we get our food second hand right now because the plants are the ones that convert the solar energy into biological energy. And if you're a vegan, you're going to wind up eating plants to get that energy. If you are a carnivore or an omnivore, then you're going to wind up eating an animal that eats a plant that gets the energy. But what if, just for the moment, we turned on the genetic capability within ourselves to simply absorb the solar energy directly and convert it into biological energy? There is actually an animal that does that OK, and it's a small animal somewhere.

50:01 I forget what it is, but I was reading about it a few months ago. It actually has the power because it ate some algae or something and was able to incorporate those genes into itself so that it can now spend a year not having to eat anything because it creates. Solar energy into biological energy. So what if that gets turned on as a result of this next evolutionary stage and people don't have to fight so much over the food supply? Those are going to be a different species of people now, who knows? I mean, we're now speculating, but we're speculating about things that are there. They're now looking at growing teeth with people's own tissues that they're actually the ability to regrow teeth instead of putting in artificial teeth.

50:59 Certain animals can heal themselves far more than human beings can. They can regrow limbs. What if people begin to be able to regrow limbs? Would that help constitute a different species? If some of these powers begin to manifest now, who knows what form that's all going to take, But those are some of the options that could lead to a new species designation by the green eyeshade scientists out there who want to classify us. Well, my research has has pointed me in the direction that humanity seems to have been genetically manipulated and altered about 250,000 years ago with the turning off of our telomeres and the the Kappanova and Kappanova telomeres, sorry and the fusion of chromosome 2. And there were some also other genetic modifications that seem to have taken place.

52:00 And modern science has said that it was an external modification and not an evolutionary change. So I do think that if those genes are turned on, we would most likely become a different species. Because even if you look at the ages of humans in biblical stories, you had Methuselah living to 969 years, right? Which is 9 times longer than most humans will, at least nine times longer than most humans would live. And then when you go back to the Sumerian tablets, you saw the 1st immortal king Alulim, he ruled for 28,800 years. So it it it, it very much looks to me like if we are the dumb dumb version of what we used to be. And then reflecting on what you said about not having to necessarily eat well, I remember years ago I was researching breathetarians and they seem to be very, very, very, very small set of yogis that can literally just absorb the sun and live. And I saw this story, which is fascinating, where they put this guy in a room and they blocked all access to food and water for him.

53:25 I think it was for like a month from memory. And the guy lived and he didn't lose any weight or anything like that. And he just stood there. So I mean, who knows? Like if all of us can actually do that, then we would not need food at all. I mean, if we can grow in terms of our consciousness like that, I think a lot of the wars would would, would go to pass because wars are really for resources, let's be honest. And if you were able to just absorb the sun's rays and to live dead, you, you become almost immortal, you know, So that is quite fascinating when you put it all together.

54:11 So let's transition to talk about integral yoga. And So what distinguishes integral yoga from traditional yogic paths or mindfulness practices? I think the main thing that differentiates it is that it doesn't have a fixed practice or path. It can incorporate at various times and under various circumstances, any of the other paths for specific developmental purpose of the practitioner. So, for instance, there may be a time to develop the physical body and the energy centers and you practice hatha yoga. There may be a time when you have to learn how to concentrate the mind properly and remove a lot of distractions. So you practice mindfulness or Zen or whatever it might be. There are times when you might need to do breathing practice to gain control of the nervous system and the and the flow of the energy through the chakras.

55:23 Each one of those things in the course of a spiritual practitioner's development has its time and its place and its purpose and most paths. They, you know, they'll tell you just do this and you're going to get there. Integral yoga doesn't say that. What it says is become conscious within yourself. Observe as a witness, if you will, of yourself the needs of your development as they change through time, and begin to apply those practices and principles at each stage so that you can untie each knot that's tying you down to the old nature and allow you to move into a new form of consciousness. And so that that's really it.

56:19 It's really free form. I mean, people go to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and say, well, where's the teacher who's going to tell me what to do? And they find out there's nobody there to tell them what to do. They're going to tell you, well, you need to become a witness of yourself. Understand the principles of the development of consciousness, the things that hold back the consciousness in terms of vital desires and aggressions and fears and everything else, and begin to systematically work through them at your own pace, in your own way, given your own life situation, as opposed to. A1 size fits all cookie cutter approach that says just do this practice and you're fine.

57:09 That's really interesting. So it sounds a bit late. You're taking all the branches of yoga and putting them all together and saying that depending on where you are, pull from this. And then when that has helped you with X challenge, then you have another challenge pull from there. And then as you keep going on in your journey, then you can maybe come back to one that you used before because it is applicable to you at that specific time. So you're not pigeon holed into one practice or one way where at that particular time it not may not serve you well. Does that sound right? Up to a certain degree, I think that's true. It's like if you're a mechanic and you're working on a piece of machinery, you're going to have a toolbox and you'll have a screwdriver, you'll have a pliers, you'll have a hammer, you'll have a wrench.

58:07 You'll have all kinds of different tools, and you're going to pick the tool that works for you to do what you exactly need to do at that moment. And there may be multiple steps, and you might need to put one tool down, pick up the next one. That's sort of the example you've just given. And to that extent, that's true. But it's not a matter of just creating a toolbox and using it. It's a matter of taking a new position of consciousness within yourself so that you become the observer or the witness of your external nature. And you can then begin to apply those tools. And whether they're in a formal toolbox or not, whether they're coming from some other tradition, whether it's something totally new that that comes to you, some devotional phase, some aspirational phase that moves your emotional being forward, whatever it might be, you become that witness and you move with that and then apply, if necessary, whatever tools are out there and available.

59:22 So it's it's sort of a meta level of understanding beyond the collection of tools. Very interesting. A I like your analogy of the toolbox because I like to use analogies as well. So basically you're, you're using the toolbox, but from an observation point of view. So you get again, you're going back to the sprints of your tone with the Super mind where you're on top and you're seeing everything but incorporating the different points of views from the five people that maybe saw the accident. OK, OK. Oh, very, very interesting. So for someone caught in modern stress, addiction or depression.

1:00:03 Can Integral Yoga practically help them? It's very difficult for someone who is immersed in their ego personality, if you will, to suddenly, magically get that resolved. As long as you're immersed in the ego and responding to things that way, you're going to have your instances of depression, You're going to have the feelings of weakness or limitation or fear, desire, whatever it might be. And to the extent that that's working on you, you may wind up with how do I get out of this?

1:00:49 And you wind up with alcohol or drugs or addiction of some sort. And it could be a non drug form of addiction. It could be, you know, food addiction of some sort where you just do what's called emotional eating. It could be a sex addiction of addiction of some sort. I mean, it could be an addiction to essentially a work process that you simply just immerse yourself in and, and put everyone else outside because that's the only way you can deal with it. It can be an addiction to withdrawal from life where people just simply can't deal with it and they walk away and they, you know, they go and live in a cabin in the woods somewhere.

1:01:40 I mean, that's also a form of addiction to basically moving away from their, the inability to address all the pressures and conflicts that are coming. At them, in their. Lives, the griefs, the failures, the limitations. So. The way Integral yoga. Would look at this is to say, start to separate yourself from your external ego. Observe it. Just look at it. Watch it when you feel down, when you feel depressed, when you feel angry, when you feel sad. Use that as an observational point. Don't get yourself so wrapped up in it that it's driving your action and you see what it's doing to you, how it's making you think, how it's making you feel. And once you're able to observe it, then at a certain point you're able to input a different response. And that different response may be, well, OK, maybe I'm just reacting to disappointment by going out and eating or whatever it is, or going out shopping.

1:03:03 And you say, well, let me practice doing something different this time. Let me put something else in there. Let me do something constructive. Let me go out and help some other people because that's actually the best therapy for people. Go out there and just volunteer and do something positive and make people smile. Give them, give them just that moment of joy, and you will find that your depression cannot stand in front of being a positive influence in other people's lives. That's a very simple way of looking at it, but through observation and understanding of that, you can begin to substitute positive outreach for negative victimhood.

1:03:58 And that that can help over time to bring people out of those states of weakness and depression. You know, that is very similar to like what I say to people. I say to people that if you do physical exercise, it is impossible to be feeling sad and depressed in the moment of doing exercise. You can't have those two emotions or energies at the same time while doing exercise. It just doesn't happen. And I like the way you you analyzed it just now and I-1 started to realize is the integral yoga. It seems a lot from the observation point of view and to look at yourself from the outside. And I remember like when I was going through one of the most difficult points in my life.

1:04:51 The only way that I've actually could get through it is if I've started to practice observation method because it became so intense that I felt like I was going to break. And that was the only thing that kind of like gave me a bitter respite from how I was feeling. So you know that that is very, very interesting. So with that being said, can you share a story, your own or someone else's, where integral yoga pulls someone out of an existential void? Well, I can. Basically, I was in college and it was, it goes back a ways, but it was during the time of the Vietnam War, and some of us didn't agree with the idea of that war. And so we went to Washington, DC to protest what was called the Mayday protests.

1:05:52 And while we were there, for various reasons, I was poisoned. And I think it was biological warfare, because by the next day I had been sicker than I had ever been sick in my life. And so I went back to where I was going to college and I got poisoned again and people said you need to go to a hospital. Well, I was so paranoid at that point, I didn't want to go anywhere near a hospital. So I said if I don't come out of the room in the next three days, just come in and collect the body. I mean, I was that out of it.

1:06:36 So totally disoriented about where I was and what I was doing. And I basically had their, I would call it a near death experience. Every bone in my body, every muscle in my body seized up and I couldn't breathe. And then I heard somewhere within the words, do yogic breathing. Now I had no idea what yogic breathing was. I had never had any relationship to yoga. It wasn't where I was coming from.

1:07:16 I was on a career path. I was on a college degree path. I mean, it was not my life, OK? And something started breathing me. Well, when I woke up, I saw the sun shining and I knew that there was a divine purpose in the world and that my life had changed. And I became aware that the economic, the political, the technological, the mental solutions that we all thought we're going to somehow save the world, we're totally useless and something else needed to happen. And at that point, I got a call from a friend who said I can't take this anymore, I'm going to Europe. I said great, give me two weeks to finish my final exams and I'll come with you.

1:08:20 And I knew he wasn't going to stay and that he was there just to move me to Europe. So I packed up a few belongings in a backpack and sold everything I could to raise some money and bought a couple of yoga books, because who knew anything about yoga? But it had saved my life. And so I bought Vivekananda's Raja Yoga and I bought Tibetan Yoga and Secret Practices by Evans Wentz and took those two books with me to Europe and started studying them and trying to practice them on my own. And while I was there, I was living in an abandoned house with other people next to the university in Frankfurt. And there was a philosopher in another one of the rooms. And we would have discussions about Usspensky and Gorge Eve and Rudolf Steiner.

1:09:19 And, you know, he educated me about a lot of things. And then one day he handed me Srioro Bindo's book The Life Divine and said I have an American girlfriend. I bought this for her. I thought she'd be interested. She's not interested at all. I thought maybe you're interested. And I opened the book randomly to the chapter the. Aim of life the. 4 theories of existence and I started reading it and I realized. But this represented for me individually the solution that wasn't going to happen through technology, politics, religion, economy or anything else. And that's in 1971 I started studying Trio Windows writings. Wow, a near death experience and just you'll get breathing. That is his levels.

1:10:16 I I I tell you I've connected to the divine in that respect as well. Where even this podcast I was walking out of my sleep and I was told and the the voice, as I call it, said 2 words do podcast. That was it. I said it loudly. I was sleeping and I woke up. Even when I woke up I heard it again, do podcasts and basically that is how the Conscious Man 7 was born. So wow, what a story. So how does how does integral yoga view identity, especially in a world obsessed with labels, status and online personas?

1:11:08 I would say that the focus of integral yoga is on the evolution of the next level of consciousness, and it's not related to individual ego, personality, status, income, race, gender, any of those things. It's not based on how much you own or how many toys you have or how much enjoyment you get from your outer life. It's based on dedicating your life to learning and growing and evolving and becoming a better human being and not using it to control or convince or overpower anybody or anything.

1:11:59 Everybody needs to grow at their own level, at their own speed. And that's one of the understandings you get from this practice, is that it's not a matter of creating an army of a religion of some sort. It's more a matter of am I here for becoming a billionaire? And if I become a billionaire, is that going to make me any better, human being or not? Am I going to be able to take it with me into my next lifetime or not? You know, is there any rationale for putting the energy there as opposed to trying to understand why it is we're on this planet and what we can do to make it better, make it a better place to live for everybody, for the entire planet, including the animals and the plants and all the other beings who are miniature existences of consciousness in their own forms for their own reason.

1:13:06 And so it's really walking away from stepping back from the ego personality and it's trappings of power, wealth, sex, control, etcetera, fame, vanity. Those things have very, very little meaning and none of it goes with you. When you die, you're not taking any of that with you. So you might as well realize that it's all transitory at that point. That's what the some of the paths call Illusion or Maya, where you know, it's not, it's not real. It's just like a video game that we're living in. And some people say, oh, we must be living in a simulation now, because this is all just like a video game. When you go out there, let's see how many counters we can acquire, how many enemies we can kill, how much wealth we can get, how much enjoyment we can have, how many girlfriends or boyfriends we can acquire in our. Lives.

1:14:17 I mean, that's all just ridiculous stuff. It has no relevance to anything real. Yeah, I was literally saying to a friend of mine yesterday that, you know, nothing really here is real. And it, it, we get bogged down and caught up with all of the materialism and consumerism and status and how many followers you have on social media, how many likes and shares you got. And it's like it, it really doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, right. And I like how you broke it down. So I'm definitely going to have to check out more your your integral yoke because like I said, I was, I'm very, I was very intrigued when I phoned you. And what I phoned on you is like, I definitely want to talk to to you to learn more for myself as well. So we can take a very, very small break here and say, guys, if you're finding value in this conversation and it's helping you see life through a different lens, take a moment right now, like, comment and share this podcast. Whether you're watching on YouTube or Rumble or listening on speaker or Spotify, this message sends spreads only through people like you.

1:15:34 So help us expand the conscious revolution. OK, so we can shift gears now and we're going to talk a little bit about the readings of Sri Arbindo. So what inspired you to write the readings in in Sri Arbindo's series and how has the public responded? As I mentioned, in 1971, I started reading The Life Divine, and that's Sri Aurobindo's major metaphysical work. You could say it's like 1000 pages. And of course you start reading that and you're into it. So you read and read and read. And then that wasn't enough.

1:16:15 So the bookstore that was nearby in in Germany where I was living was called Middle Earth. And I had no money. OK. I was, you know, I was living in an abandoned house without money. So I found the bookstore and they had a whole series of Shriya Ogundo's books. And I thought I need to read these books. So I would go there virtually every day and I would sit down on a futon in the store and I would read and they sort of adopted me and would feed me herb tea and, you know, just sort of humor me because, I mean, who, who in their bookstore ever sat there and read? It was like an advertisement for people to read books. OK, So I was sort of their human statue. And I read these books.

1:17:08 And then over the years, I read them again. And I said, you know, I got so much more out of it now than I did them. And then I thought, this is all crazy. I just read everything too fast. I'm missing so much. So in 2009, I made a different decision and that was I was going to read these books one page per day and not just read the page, but reflect on it, internalize it and try to communicate something of the essence of that page, which started my blog, Shrioro Bindo Studies. OK And I started with the Life Divine and it was like 3 years and I found things in there that I never would have found. I mean everything.

1:18:06 What is dream consciousness? What are the different levels of ignorance? What are the different types of now? I mean it was insane how much I had missed with reading it for years. And so the blog developed and then about three years in I finished The Life Divine and I suddenly woke up one day and said I run a publishing house, let's publish these books. So I took the blog posts, turned them into books and published the first 3 readings in Trior Bindo Books on the Life Divine, volumes 1-2 and three. I then moved to the next book and started doing the same thing.

1:18:48 Went through all the major works, and since 2009, one per day, one page per day. Basically, I take an excerpt from that page, a quotation. I internalize it, I reflect on it, I comment on it, either with something a little bit different that puts a new angle on it or relates to the life we're living here. And I put it out there and when I'm done with that day's post, I move it into a Word document so that I have a sequential next book already in preparation. And when it's done, I send it to the publishing company and they publish it. So I've now got 21 books and I'm working on the 22nd. And I find it extremely useful to me. I don't care really if it's useful to anybody else, but other people have said it's useful to them and they read it every day and it helps open up Sri Aurobindo to them, which as you mentioned at the beginning, can be a little daunting, somewhat dense for people who are not used to that intensity of focus.

1:20:01 What I found was that by reading Sri Aurobindo quietly and consciously and trying to understand a deeper sense of it, not fighting with it, but reflecting on it. My understanding of things has dramatically changed over the years, and I think that's reflected in the type of conversation we're having today, with some insights maybe and some directions that I wouldn't have been able to express 20 years ago. So I find it valuable and I think other people are finding it valuable. I don't really care about numbers of people.

1:20:43 I'd rather have one person who's sincere get a value out of it then 10,000 people who just say, oh it's great, you know it, you know what I mean? It doesn't. It doesn't have any value if they're not using it for their growth. That is impressive, where basically you read one page a day and internalize it. And you know, it just goes to show you because I remember when I was a university student and I was doing research and you would read swaths and swaths of information. And I think at at least a good 98% of it would just pass through one ear and go through the next.

1:21:24 And it's only from reading and rereading and rereading again that you start to say, ah, OK, this is starting to make sense. Then you take out your highlight and your highlight and stuff. And it sounds basically this is what you've done to make it accessible to people. And I guess 1000 pages will no wonder you could, you could get several books, right? Because like, I mean, the only book that I have read that is equivalent to that why I listen to the audio book is life and teaching of the master, the Faris. And that's a trilogy. That book. I reckon it's probably about 1000 pages because the audio book is 24 hours. And that is a lot of information. And I would, I'm, I'm going to have to re listen to that now listening, talking to you because that book was next level and one of the most, like I would say, mind blowing books I've ever, ever read.

1:22:22 And I'm going to have to do like what I was doing at university where I had to reread and reread. So I'm going to have to re listen and re listen because it's true. You do miss a lot of information, you know. So of all of the works you've explored, which text do you feel contains the deepest key to humanity's next leap? And where do you think it's often overlooked? Well, I think the deepest I would have to say is the Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo. And and that's because it's, it starts out from the human aspiration, what it is that humanity actually is seeking outside of all the external enjoyments and accoutrements that we try to acquire. But he says it's God, light, freedom, immortality are the bases.

1:23:18 And then he goes on to say that all problems of existence are problems of harmony. OK, We just haven't figured out how to understand the oneness and the harmony of everything. And then he goes on to explain in the next couple of chapters the different ways humanity has tried to solve this, sort of in the extremes. There's what he calls the materialist denial, which means the materialist says it's all just here, we need to just acquire and do and enjoy, and there's no other life. There's no other purpose whatever. In the extreme.

1:23:58 I mean, there's middle grounds. And then the other one is the acetic denial. OK, where someone says that's all an illusion and I just have to escape it all and become liberated. And his response in the 4th chapter sets the tone of where it's going. And it's called reality omnipresent. And so the escape is not an escape and the materialist illusion is not real. They're both part of the greater oneness of consciousness. And then he begins to explore the evolution of consciousness. The.

1:24:41 Type of ignorance that we live under, the types of knowledge that we can explore and develop and gets into. I mean an ever expanding and deepening understanding until he comes to. The idea of the evolution of a Gnostic being, a being that lives in this holistic consciousness and the development of a collectivity of humanity, of Gnostic beings, which he calls the divine life. And it's 1000 pages. Everything is in there. And that's why I did it a page at a time, because I found things that I never found just reading it.

1:25:28 And just reading it is not easy for most people. I mean, you wind up needing a grounding in Greek philosophy and Vedic studies and Christianity and Buddhism. I mean, you gain these understandings the more you read and reflect on it. But it's not something that most people bring with them to that book. It's something they gain if they take a serious interest. The way you describe this book, I am, I'm very surprised that more people never heard of Shree or Bindu because I'll be honest, I have never heard of him before prior to talking to you and doing the research on him and you.

1:26:13 And I'm wondering if it's because he's from the East and because we're in the West, then it is more of a disconnect. And maybe in the East, he's very well known in that sort of level of mind and consciousness because because they think differently from us for the most part. So is that is, is that a fair assessment? That is because we are Westerners and he's from the East End. That is literally no connection between us knowing about him and stuff like that. I'm not sure that's actually what's going on. You know, there are Nobel laureates who have sighted him with great positive reviews, Harvard Nobel laureates, for instance, and others from Europe.

1:27:05 I think it's more that Sri Rabindo never tried to create a movement, a religion or any kind of proselytizing work. And so you basically have to stumble across what he's doing in order to find it. And that's sort of a self selection mechanism for people who are reaching a stage where they can actually benefit from it as opposed to just, you know, having that on their arms as a shoulder patch that, you know, you know what I mean it, it has nothing to do with that. It's really not quantity, but it's when an individual reaches that point. I mean, I was plucked out of college literally by being poisoned and waking up to a realization that there was a different purpose to life and shipped halfway across the world in order to come in contact with Shrioro Bindo. I mean, it's not like everyone's going to hear about him and he's in everyone's tongues.

1:28:12 It's not like that. It's really people need to really be on a serious search and then the right things get attracted to them or they get attracted to it. Either way, there's this sort of secret process that takes place. They call it the law of attraction. And they've sort of misinterpreted what that's all about. But the law of attraction really does work. When you are ready to hear something and you're sincere, you'll hear it, and not until then. And it may not influence your current mode or level of life or your action, but it means that somehow you're moving into a new evolutionary cycle in your own life. And someday it'll be of use to you. And you'll say, Oh yeah, that's that's really what I need to do right now.

1:29:12 I conquer 100% with what you said because I'll be honest with you. I the stuff that I talk about when I'm interviewed and also when I'm interviewing people. I remember when I first started the process and my flatmate in England, he said to me used to call me Toddy. He said toddy man. He says, what are you going to do with all this information? I said mate, I right now I just tried to figure figure stuff out and like right now I'm, I'm lost, I'm confused and I'm just reading. I'm reading, I'm reading books and listening to books like it was food and my life depended on it. Never would I have guessed in a million years that when I started that process 8 1/2 years ago, I would have a show called the Conscious Man 7 podcast talking about the things that I was learning. And every book I found came to me either from listening to a previous podcast or at the time when YouTube was still good and the algorithm was unbroken.

1:30:13 I would get recommendations for books and I would just like listening to these audio books. And I'd be wow, that's levels. And then another would appear. And every time I was going through something in my life, another book would appear or somebody would tell me about a book or just pass me, but randomly. It was insane. So I totally agree with you. I don't know if subconsciously I was projecting to the universe to attract these things or it was just my path, or it could be a combination of both. But I completely agree with what you said. Just know that when you're on a particular path and you're searching, you end up finding and you know you started when you were poisoned. My journey started 20 years ago when they had an accident and I brought my foot when I fell off my motorcycle. So, you know, you never know how things are going to wear a coat and you never know why things happen to at particular times. And you got poisoned and got went, went to Europe. I fell off my motorcycle.

1:31:18 And then I had to have reconstructed surgery on my foot 8 1/2 years ago, which led me down the path to eating books and consuming books like my life depended on it. So let's transition and talk about the Institute of Holistic for Holistic Education. So what is the mission behind the Institute for Holistic Education? We founded the institute with the idea that it would help integrate spirituality into daily life. And the idea here is that this isn't, you know, a lot of people, when they practice religion, they go to church or temple or synagogue or a mosque, whatever it is they're doing.

1:32:03 And they're there and they do their prayers. And then when they walk away from that, they become different people, OK? It's like it's really hard to find Christ in a lot of Christians outside of Sunday when they're in the church listening to the sermon, you know, it's like that. And so the idea of integrating spiritual spirituality into daily life is that we carry it around with us all the time. We don't just do it on Sundays or Saturdays or Fridays, whatever your day is to do that.

1:32:45 And we don't just do it during times of prayer. You know, some people pray every morning at 3:00 in the morning or six in the morning. Some people pray five times a day, whatever it is. But what are they living when they leave that prayer behind for the day or for the few hours, whatever it is? What are they living when they walk out of the church or the temple or the mosque? Are they actually living that principle? Are they living that love each other as brethren, which all the religions at some point say, take care of the immigrant, feed the hungry, heal the sick? These are these are core principles of how to care for others.

1:33:38 And I didn't see that happening in most places. And this is a generalization. It's not universal. I mean, there are definitely people and groups and organizations that really try to do this, but we wanted to speak to people who are not affiliated necessarily with a particular religion. They can be, we don't care, but basically who want to explore the development of consciousness, want to explore how to turn your life into that and how to become that next evolved level over time, whether in this life or the next. A lot of what we do as the institute is actually the daily blog and podcast that I do where we're exploring these concepts. Like I think yesterday or the day before it was on how to deal with anxiety and worry.

1:34:47 OK. There have been recent ones on dealing with depression. There have been other ones dealing with larger issues of the human scale, not the individual scale, and so it's a broad range of things that the institute tries to bring forward and hope that people will find benefit in and reflect on. OK. So can you describe a specific transformation or impact story you've seen through the Institute's work? Mostly I see it within myself and my wife, actually.

1:35:32 We are different people than we were 15 or 20 or 30 years ago, dramatically different in the way we see things, the way we relate to things, the way we try to interface with people and deal with the world. At the same time. We have some friends who we've made here in Hawaii, and one of them is a PhD candidate and teacher, and he comes here Friday evenings for a meditation session. And he mentioned that he was listening to the podcast on his way to the university here on a regular basis.

1:36:22 And it was like the day of the podcast was exactly what he needed to hear to deal with his situations that day. It was like it was being written for him. And so that's an outside example where somebody outside felt like, yes, this is today's thing that I need to hear and deal with. And one of them, he said he played like dozens of times because it was so relevant to his struggle at the moment because he was really struggling on certain things. And so I don't know, you know, we don't have a lot of direct relationship with people out there in the cyberspace. We don't do advertising and we don't do a lot of interactions. We get comments from people, but that's about it. We get a lot of friend requests, people who have found it and wanted to be part of it.

1:37:24 That's great. I don't know what they do with it. I don't know how it's changed their lives, if at all. So I I do it because it changes my life and that's all I can be really responsible for. I'm not trying to change anybody else's life. If it happens and they're doing it themselves and this can help them, that's great. If they have a different way to do that and it works for them, that's also great. But I'm not here trying to count save souls or anything like that. It's I'll be happy if I can save my own soul. You know, there's something that my mother said to me and she said to me that you never know how you actually impact people's lives because because I've been doing podcasting for a few years and I have had messages from people in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran. These are non-english speaking countries. And they've said to me, Todd, like stuff you talked about that you talk about has helped me tremendously. You've made me look at things in a different way. And funnily, they're all Muslim countries as well. Not to think about it, but I digress. And they said to me, Todd, I just want to let you know that you have, because of you have actually started to do XY and Z. And a lot of them said, well, I started to realize that I need to get the body moving, do

1:38:56 physical exercise, read books, look at the food that I eat and stuff like that. And I've showed my mother some messages sometimes, as you said, you see, son, This is why I keep telling you, even though you may feel like you're not having an impact in the world, you actually are. People may just not necessarily tell you, but all you need to do is keep showing up, keep representing, keep doing the things that you know are right and you should do. And the universe will just take care of everything else. And you know, it just is, is like the ripple effect. You throw the Pebble in the, the, the water, the pond, you don't see how far it goes because it would just be there, but the vibration, the energy goes and then it goes to the bank and then comes back. So you may not see a combat for years and years, but she said, son, it will always come back.

1:39:48 So keep doing what you're doing. So I am certain from this conversation, things you've spoken about that people's lives are definitely impacted. And I'm sure that people listening to this in my audience will look at things differently because you've made me see things in a different way just from the. The analogy you gave with the accident and the Super minor stuff like that. So let's go to one level as and because I want to know how does the institute implement 3 or Windows principles in real world education or healing systems? As I said, the main work is the blog and the podcast, which we do every single day of the week.

1:40:34 So it's seven days a week. And by the way, the books that I've written are all available free of charge as individual blog posts on the daily blog organized by the book that we're analyzing in date order and in sequential order. And people can search by any subject. I mean, you want to look up rebirth, or you want to look up hallucination, or you want to look up consciousness. It'll show you all the references out of several thousand blog posts where it shows up and it's all free. I mean, we don't charge anything for that.

1:41:14 And that's really the main work that we do. We're not a charitable organization in the sense of we're not out beating people and we're not out healing the sick or doing any of that stuff. We're trying to have an impact at the level of consciousness, so. That. Those who are in a position to feed people, those who are in a position to heal, people are motivated and focused on doing those things. So it's sort of a a meta level of activity as opposed to on the ground doing it. Now we do support projects like there's a project taking place in South India called Oroville, which is a Township that's. Being developed eventually to be a city of 50,000 people and integrate people from many different cultures, languages, backgrounds, religions, etcetera, to build a community that's sustainable, that is a laboratory for new ways of doing things.

1:42:23 And we're very big supporters of that project because we feel like it's an extremely valuable way to explore what human beings can do when they come together. Now, as with anything, you know, the mental and emotional and vital disruptions come. And it's not simple. I mean, no one has solved the problems of human governance yet, but they're trying. And that's the interesting thing. They have things like dream Weavers and heart weavers circles where they bring people together to explore all the different angles of particular things that are getting in their way and find solutions that work.

1:43:11 So they're not perfect, but it's it's a great experiment. We support that. And the other thing we do is I'm involved with some companies that publish books that distribute natural products to to the natural product stores around the country in the United States. And we try to bring people products that promote consciousness and that give them different ways of looking at sustainability and making a difference in terms of how we deal with the environment, how we deal with each other. Very interesting because we're going to talk a little bit more about the project in South India, but let's transition to modern day challenges. So in what ways can the evolution of consciousness directly address materialism, consumerism, and identity laws in modern society?

1:44:08 It's a good question. The consumerism and materialism side of things is actually the easier part in as much as once you begin to undertake what Trior Robindo calls the adventure of consciousness and joy, where you're really focused on that and you become captivated by that adventure. All these outer material things take on a much smaller importance in your life. And another example for you, when you're a little child and you're playing with your toys and your dolls and your toy cars and your various games, when you get to a next stage of your growth and development, they suddenly fall off from you and you're involved with something else. You're involved with relationship, you're involved with hobbies, you're involved with interests. And then when you get through that stage, then suddenly you may be starting a family and you're involved with raising children and building relationships and, and having a career of some sort.

1:45:21 At each stage, the prior stuff, your material stuff has fallen away from you and you don't miss it because you've focused your attention elsewhere. And so when you take up this adventure of consciousness, you suddenly become less enamored of and less concerned about material well-being, or let's say, not well-being because you should have well-being. But material consumerism that is just there for exploitation of resources or vanity or pride or for some feeling of that's who I am as opposed to who you really are inside.

1:46:06 Because that's why people collect things. You know, someone's got 20 Rolls Royces in their garage. It's not because they feel satisfied with who they are and themselves they. Feel like they have to make a show of who they are by having all this collection of material goods. OK, you have a gold toilet. Well, OK, but that means you have very little self worth internally. You see what I mean? And so as you take up this adventure, those things fall off automatically. Now you come to the loss of self worth that you spoke up, and that's a little more complex.

1:46:48 And the reason it's a little more complex is that people are so tied up in the education and training and expectations of their friends, their family, their society, their culture, their religion, their political philosophy, that they don't know how to have a self worth. They're told that their self worth comes from being this particular profession or doing this particular thing or having this particular relationship. They don't have a self worth. To get a self worth, you have to be able to walk away internally, separate yourself from those things and say I am not the career, I'm not the engineer, I'm not the politician, I'm not the.

1:47:41 Person working in the restaurant I am. A conscious being and myself worth comes from that consciousness. And I'm not a particular race, I'm not a particular gender, I'm not a particular career, I'm not a particular religious acolyte. I'm someone who is a living being with a unique conscious expression. And that begins to develop as they grow internally and they realize how illusory all those other things can be.

1:48:21 I completely agree with that because as I started this journey, the things like consumerism and material stuff became less and less important to me. Well, one of the reasons because they were all taken away from me in the process, because no one goes through, as I call it, the refinement period without having massive losses. When you've had massive losses it, it really forces you to, to, to analyse if those things are important or not. And from the removal of those things, you start to realise they're very illusory, as you said.

1:49:04 And then for me now, obviously I still like good clothes and good shoes and stuff, but I, I don't like, I am not like how I used to be where I would want to go and get that thing and get that thing. As long as I'm well shaved, I'm in great shape, clothes fit me nice and the colours match, I'm good to go for the worst part. So let's build a little bit on what you were talking about and how can spiritual development become a viable alternative to escapism? So like drugs, social media and work workaholism. I think that's again, a matter of the natural interest growing, not out of any sense of obligation, but out of a sense of joyful interest. You know, there are people out there who they love running, OK? And they just go out and run and they get this, what they call runner's high.

1:50:09 And some of them, you know, go out there and they run in races and they do really well in races. And then pretty soon people are telling them, oh, well, you should compete and you should do this and you should do that. And then it turns into really a drag for them. Some of them really suffer under that. They pushed themselves way beyond their level of interest and and things start to break down and they suffer mentally. We had an an instance in the Olympic Games a few years ago where one of the top gymnasts didn't compete in some of the final events because she said that I lost my mental balance to be able to do this and I was just going to injure myself.

1:50:57 And that took a lot of courage because she walked away at that moment from the top position in the world of gymnastics and said my mental framework is more important than this achievement. And then a few years later, she came back with a whole new energy and attitude. And of course, she became predominant in her field again because she was always a great gymnast. But we see this happening that as as long as you're doing it out of joy and out of natural inclination, it will change your life.

1:51:42 The minute you turn it into an obligation or a discipline that you're doing out of some fear or sense of duty or into some form of materialistic approach where you're going to get some outer benefit out of it, you've lost a lot of that spark and it doesn't help you as much. So I usually tell people who ask, I can't speak for your life, but my life, I love getting up in the morning. I get up at 3:00 in the morning and I come down and I work on my blog post and my podcast and then I take up whatever my business career is and I enjoy my life. Every bit of it.

1:52:37 And I don't drive around in Porsches and Mercedes. They have no relevance to me at. All. I just don't care about that. And what I do care about is, am I becoming a better human being today than I was yesterday? Am I learning? Am I growing? Am am I experiencing something new? I observe my dreams, I observe my relationships, I observe what I do. And if it's not going to bring joy, if it's not going to bring conscious growth, I try to find a way out of it. You know, I completely agree because, like I I am a fitness coach and I also do the podcast and I absolutely love doing both of them to the point where I get to a stage sometimes because I work so much that I have to remind myself I need to go to sleep because I have done literal all nighters. Sometimes I end up going to bed at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and I just what would happen to his body would shut down at that level.

1:53:51 But because I like it so much is like a like that that runners. How you talking about? Like when I got it this morning, I was like, OK, great, I'm going to do weighted muscle UPS this morning and then I'm going to do some finalize these questions to talk to you today. And I was like proper excited. I I didn't have that like I need to talk to Santosh today. It was like, Nah, mate, I got up 345, meditated, went to the gym. I was on time, left on time was like, boom, let's go have breakfast and then work on finalizing these questions to talk to you and me. I just love what I do to the point where like, like I said, I have to remind myself, OK, Todd, it's getting a little bit late. We need to go to sleep because we have to do the other stuff tomorrow, you know?

1:54:40 So what are the practical daily steps someone can take to align with this consciousness shift that you were talking about? I would say the first thing is to get in touch with the inner aspiration. What is it that you really feel important in your life? Aspiration Is that flame in your heart? What is it that really gives you joy? What is it that if you didn't have to go to work at some job somewhere, if you didn't have to do this thing or that thing, what is it that really sparks you? And try to understand why it sparks you and how it sparks you.

1:55:27 And then try to incorporate that into what you do during the day, even if it's only for a very short time. And that is the first step and all the rest of the steps follow from that. You know, when we started, you'd ask, well, what, what are, you know, how does integral yoga different than any other? And I said, well, it's, it doesn't have a fixed path. And that's what I'm saying here. Now, every individual has their own path and it starts with who you are. And what is that flame in your heart that's going to drive you to do something, to learn something, to grow in some way in your life, to be better in what you do, what you think, what you feel, what you express, how you relate. And as you do that, it doesn't need a label. It doesn't need to be called integral yoga. It doesn't need to be called spirituality. That itself is the path.

1:56:31 And as far as I can tell, that's the most advice anyone can give anyone else. Great advice because in my case, this is what I, I say this now openly. I found my purpose in life. My purpose in life is to get people in shape and to do this podcast to help with the evolution of human consciousness. And I used to be a civil engineer. I used to I the last, I, the last major project I worked on in London was for the Crossrail project worth ��16 billion. Great job and I loved it. I never saw myself doing anything else but engineering. And while I did love it, no, on reflection, it wasn't my actual passion.

1:57:16 It I used to get up and like I said, I used to love going and billing stuff when we have massive concrete pours and stuff like that. But now I get up with this like Joy, like I am going to do a podcast today and I never feel like it's a drag. Even when I'm going back and forth with my editor to, to, to finalize the production. It is like, it's just like, I just want to get it right. You know, like tweet this, tweet that. So it does. Yeah, it is work, but it doesn't feel like work for me, you know, to the point where my mom says like Todd, remember, you need to rest, right?

1:57:59 She says, I know you like what you're doing, but Please remember to rest right, because you train really hard. So I'm like, OK, OK, my OK boy. So it'll be, I do agree The key right now I I've realizing in our evolution right now is to find your purpose in life. And when you find your purpose or as a Japanese from philosophy called the Ikigai, you find that it is a game changer in your life. You know? So how can communities or spiritual collectives accelerate this evolution, and how? A spiritual collectivity is no greater at its essence than the collection of individuals and their spiritual focus.

1:58:47 There. They may not all be doing the same thing in the same way, but if they have an affinity and they join forces, they create a dynamic that supports each other's growth. And so it can become the, the sum becomes greater than the parts, as they say. And to the extent that such communities rise up around the world and begin to create affinities with one another, the sum of those communities is greater than the whole and it has a greater impact. And, and I'll, I'll give you an example here. Some years ago there was a organization called TM Transcendental Meditation and they decided that they would train a lot of meditators and the meditators would go to would collect as a big group and go to a particular city or country and practice meditation there for a while and see if they could lower the average crime.

1:59:55 Rate in that community and they actually showed some interesting results from that. It was, you know a few 100 or a few 1000 people doing this, but without telling anybody. The crime rate actually did go down in some of these places. I mean, it was. Very clearly now, it wasn't a double-blind one of those studies that. The. Scientists are going to say is great, but they did enough of these with enough corresponding statistical results that you could say, well, there's something there probably. OK, being a scientists, you know, you're going to say, well, who knows? You know? But when you understand how consciousness works, and then you see these consistent results across a pattern of different places and times and cities and the statistical analysis that's done by third parties, by governments. You say, well, OK, maybe there's something there. So spiritual communities, people working together, pulling together and pushing a movement of consciousness forward within themselves and thereby creating an atmosphere in their community, whether it's a small community or not, can be a tremendous value.

2:01:21 And for how humanity evolves and the crises we're facing, I support more and more of these type of communities coming up and whether they're physically contiguous to one another, where the people are living together, or whether they form communities across the world. As I spoke about earlier about just people with a similar affinity, That vibration of consciousness is rotating through the world and having its impact, like what you might call the 100th monkey thing. When I always ask people, I said, whether you believe in the 100th monkey thing or not, we know that vibrations are communicable, just like diseases are communicable.

2:02:04 And who knows where the tipping point of humanity is, where enough people are doing this throughout the world, under whatever name or guise or path or whatever they want to call it. To create that phenomenon where all of humanity suddenly can see it differently and do something differently without anyone proselytizing, teaching or converting them. Yes, You know, that is similar to instead of looking at our differences, look at our similarities. And that allows us to work together. Because I find that today in our society, there's a lot of polarization.

2:02:47 And because of the systems like government, religion, gender, XYZ, you name it, we don't actually realize that we have a common enemy and the enemy is the system and the system is rigged against us. So instead of we're like, I guess, going to to to task of each other, or you're a Jew, I'm a Christian now you're a Muslim, XYZ black, white, Indian, Chinese. Let's just come together and realize, well, we're all being oppressed here. Can we not just come together and say we're together and create independent systems so we can be self-sufficient, right. So what you're talking about is exactly what I talk about where you don't have to agree with everything someone says, but the things that you do agree with you level upon those, right.

2:03:36 But I do agree is definitely a consciousness shift that needs to occur so that you can actually instead of looking at the spec in your brother's eye, you look at the log in yours 1st and then realise that he is you and you or him. And you say you know what mate? Well, I don't agree with you on that, but I agree on this. So let's work on that and let's create a better world and a better system and a better society. So let's talk a little bit about how you see the future of humanity. So what is your vision for humanity's future as consciousness continues to evolve, individually and collective and collectively? I guess from my viewpoint, the evolutionary process towards what we might call the Gnostic being and Gnostic communities, which we spoke about earlier, it's a multi 100 year process. And that's not a long time only because if you look at how long nature takes to evolve the next level of consciousness from matter to life and from life to mind, and now from mind to super mind, while each stage comes faster than the one before it, you're talking millions of years for the first stages and hundreds of thousands of years for some of the later stages to get to a next level.

2:05:06 The fact that we're now talking about maybe 3 or 400 years for this to spread widely and really take hold of humanity is not a long time in any individual human life. It's like, Oh my God, it's never going to happen in my lifetime. But there are interim steps, and there are appearances and outcroppings of these new ways of seeing things that occur all along the way. It's just that the tipping point for humanity is still way out in the future, where we don't need to have all this fighting and competition and arguing and power struggles. That's going to take a while because you've got an embedded structure there and anyone who tells you that. Magically, it's all going to change in five or ten years. It's probably delusional, OK?

2:06:10 It isn't going to. Happen, but we can work towards it and we'll see signs of it and people with like affinities who are evolving in that direction can find support with one another as it happens. So really the question is, how do we, does humanity survive that transitional period with all the crises we're facing? And that becomes the Seminole question. And some people are optimists and some are pessimists. I'm on the optimistic side. I think that no challenge is put in front of us that isn't intended to have a solution. And that's because I think that the universe, as it's evolving, as it's evolving with and through us and through our planet, isn't here simply to bring a dead end of total destruction on things.

2:07:11 And it may not be in. Our lifetime. It may be that humanity gets itself blown up and there has to come a new cycle of civilization, but I'm hopeful that we see signs that a new consciousness is starting to emerge. We see people concerned about the environment. We have see people concerned about developing consciousness. We see people taking up the the gender disputes, the racial disputes, the power structures that have unequally brought. A. Lot of the resources of the planet into a few what I would call greedy hands. Rather than sharing it among humanity. But we have people working on this, we have people talking about it.

2:08:04 You see people talking about Ubuntu, which is from Africa, the idea that we all succeed or fail together. And they actually did an experiment once where they told some young children in Africa, well, whoever gets there first gets all the fruits or the chocolate, whatever it was, that was the the gift there. And the none of the children started running. They all held hands and went together. And to me, that was extremely illuminating because it represents an advance of consciousness that the West has never understood, but that people in the West are starting to look at, which is something totally new. The West has always taken the position that we know better than everybody else and they're going to do what we want to do because we've got better weaponry and we've got better control of resources.

2:09:04 That's all illusion. And when you look at something like the First Nations people who say we should be thinking of how we treat our heirs down to 7 generations into the future, and you look at Ubuntu, where we all do this together and we all succeed together, We all share the fruits together. These are stages of consciousness that have already developed in different parts of the world. And the West is finally starting to look at these things and say maybe there's a way to survive with some of these practices.

2:09:50 And that's what gives me hope that we're going to survive to the next evolutionary stage 3 or 400 years from now. Yes, you know, I, I am, I'm an optimist as well. I've got a mate who is a bit of a black pill. He thinks we're all doomed. And he's he's more focused that we need to wake people up. But I keep telling him that we need to wake ourselves up first. I mean like individually, because then you wake yourself up and you become the light, you become very attractive. So the morph always runs to the light or surrounds itself to the light. So when you become the light of the world, you actually touch, move and inspire people to actually do the same thing that you were doing. So there's why I say to him, I'm a lot more optimistic because the things that I can control is my own development. And when I focus on that, then I know that I will attract people in my life and the opportunities that I want because I am at that frequency of vibration, because the law of attraction is real. But he is more because he's a scientist, he tends to more look at the hard data and saying, well, the numbers are just not on our side.

2:11:04 So we're all doomed, you know? So in your experience, what's the biggest resistance people have to this inner work and how can they overcome it? Well, first let me address that point about the numbers aren't with us because the mental rearranging of life on the planet didn't occur because everybody did that. It occurred because a very small number of people had a new way of looking at and dealing with things, rightly or wrongly. It was just that was the stage of evolution. It didn't take large numbers of people, it took people who had evolved to that next mental level to be able to implement that.

2:11:55 Not everybody is an engineer. Some people have to just move the cement, OK? And you don't need a large number of engineers to organize a project that moves a lot of cement. OK, so it's not numbers, it's consciousness. As more evolutionary development takes place, each level of consciousness has not only more knowledge, but also more power. Of. Action, more power of influence. As you're talking about. You become the light of the world and people are attracted.

2:12:37 You say that's true. And I really do understand and appreciate that, that as I grow, as you grow, as someone else grows, we start to vibrate at a certain level and even secretly it starts to. Change how the world responds because we are part of that world and we help. Create the collective. Vibration of the world. And so it's not about large numbers of people, it's about the right people doing what they can do within their lives and radiating that out in a joyful, sincere, non judgmental way.

2:13:28 So it's not a matter of changing someone else's opinion. We don't have to change anybody's opinion. If they're immersed in materialism, they're not going to change because you come and tell them, oh, materialism's bad, it's not going to work. They're going to say, well, I want that fast car. I that that's what I want to do. OK, well, that's fine. You can't change people from who they are. They have to grow out of the toys into the next level and the examples of people who are living that next level, who are satisfactorily living it and who are happy and joyful and have good lives and try to really be positive people in the world. Eventually when they hit that roadblock in their lives and they say, you know, maybe I'm not as fulfilled as I would like to be, Maybe there's more to my life. Maybe this midlife crisis means that I need to do something different.

2:14:35 I have to get away from the rat race, as they call it. Maybe at that point they'll just remember well, I met these people and they were really so upbeat and positive about their own lives, and they weren't messing with my head. They were just being who they are. And maybe that has some influence on them. Who knows? But I don't think that we can change people's opinions now. You know, I was a vegetarian from, I don't know, I was a teenager. I became a vegetarian when I moved out of my parents house.

2:15:16 And then I was sort of what you would call a Hindu vegetarian means dairy was part of it, you know, cheese and milk and yogurt and things like that. And then about 5 or 6 years ago, I don't know exactly why, my wife and I just decided we're almost vegan, let's just be vegan. And so we gave up dairy and we became vegan. No one pushed us to it, no one argued with us. It was just something we evolved into, and later we realized that we became conscious of the suffering of the animals in the dairy industry and all of the negative health impacts of dairy. And it was like those things just suddenly woke up in us and we said, OK, we're vegans now.

2:16:12 I don't go out and tell anybody what to eat. OK? They want to eat meat or they want to eat dairy. As long as they don't force it on me, I'm happy that they're doing what they're called to do right now. But someday they may wake up and say I want to be a vegetarian, and another day they may wake up and say I want to be a vegan for their own internal reasons. And when they're ready, then they'll do it. And they'll do it with joy and they'll do it with conscious awareness. And that's more important than telling somebody this is your discipline and you need to do it. Because that's always transitory. And I've met a lot of people who said, well, I was vegan for five years and then I couldn't deal with that. It's like, OK, whatever, you know? So it's evolutionary, not disciplinary. In your experience, what's the biggest resistance people have to doing this inner work and how can they overcome it? I think the biggest resistance is their fear of giving up what is known and secure to them and that their peers and their friends circle and their education and background and training have told them they should do. The question of what I should do to fit in to my circle is the biggest obstacle.

2:17:44 Once you stop worrying about what you should do, and you start reflecting on what inwardly is your inner aspiration or spark, the change can come very quickly. But until that point, you know, it's like your parents tell you, oh, you should get a career. And someone else tells you, oh, you should do this and you should do that. And your society tells you you need to fit in and you need a job and you need this and you need that. It's very hard. People become really fearful about breaking away from that and changing.

2:18:25 And so at some point, the need, the inner need has to exceed the inner fear. And when you reach that tipping point, then you say, I just have to do this, and you make that change. OK, so it basically it's, it's really the inner calling. And I, I've realized that most people, including myself, we, we ignore the inner calling because of all the programming that we receive. So yeah, I totally agree with what you were saying. So if you had one message to offer the world before a major global awakening, what would it be?

2:19:14 Be real and be real to yourself. Don't worry so much about what others expect. Be who you are. You know, there are many people who, you know, have a situation where they're called to the arts and their parents are saying, Oh my God, there's no career in that. You know, you can't do that. Just become a lawyer, a scientist or something. Be real, follow your heart, follow your inner guidance. That's the only thing that can save humanity from its current crisis.

2:19:57 I think, you know, there's an example of what we've been talking about. There's a book out called called to Heal, and it's about an African shamanic healer. And she had a a strict education, you know, she grew up and. She came from a family of shamanic healers, but she didn't want to do that. And so she went out and she got an education. She tried to follow a career in different paths. And everything wound up blowing up on her. And she started having serious health problems. I mean, serious. Like she was incapacitated in various ways. And one of her associates was a shamanic healer. And she said you will continue to have these obstacles in your path and you will continue to have health problems until you realize what your true destiny is. And when you take up being a spiritual healer, all of that will disappear and you will find yourself fulfilled. And eventually she did that.

2:21:09 And her story is in that book. So it was really heartening to me to to see that even people who try to avoid their inner calling because of expectations of the outer world and society and what they think they want. Eventually, if that inner aspiration is true, they will find a way. And that is, you know my message. Find who you are. And be who you are. Just live it and live it with that inner joy that comes from knowing you are authentic. Not superficial.

2:21:59 OK, so if this conversation is resonated with someone, what should where should someone start? You know if something has awakened deep inside of them and what would be the first steps that they should do? Following the principle of integral yoga, I would say they should start where they are and it's not a matter of picking up a particular path, religion, book, or anything else. Once you awaken to that need, find out what is being attracted to you and what you're being attracted to along that path and follow it as long as it's guiding you.

2:22:48 Someone called this the pathless path. And it's really true that, you know, everyone wants you to say, OK, you woke up, now you do these things. But my approach to that is totally different. And it's like you woke up now find out within yourself what you've awakened to and then do that, whatever it is. OK. So I think that's great advice actually. So you mentioned before Orville the international community, so how does it reflect with Sri Arubindo's ideals? Orville was actually not conceived by Sri Orobindo himself.

2:23:35 It was conceived by his Co worker who is affectionately called the mother Mira Alfasa. She was a French woman who basically was receiving a teaching through her entire young life and childhood through dreams and when she went with her husband to India, she recognized Shri Ravindo as the teacher who was teaching her all these things. She became his Co worker and she developed what's called the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and became the caretaker of several 1000 people who decided to live and work there.

2:24:17 And during the Second World War, she invited in their families and started a school, the International Center of Education. And eventually, she said, you know, there should be a place on the planet where money doesn't rule, where it's a laboratory exploring new ways of life that brings people of different cultures together and begins to work out what trio Robindo called the ideal of human unity, which is the name of one of his books. And so she founded the idea of Oroville and worked with some architects and engineers and developed a plan for it.

2:24:58 Got some people busy purchasing the land on sort of it was a desert eroded plateau nearby and turning it into what is today a green paradise. I mean, they've got millions of trees there and they've got water and they've got a beautiful environment and they've built structures and they've built community and they've built projects and there's like 600 projects going on there. Because every individual comes with their own view of what it is they want to work on. It's sort of almost a divine anarchy you could say, because someone comes there and says, well, I want to work with Spirulina and someone else says, well, I want to work with recycling and someone else comes and says I want to work with, you know, water conservation, whatever or energy. They're they've set up a solar mini grid in the community. Now it's like all these projects are at work and somehow, although they don't work with each other, they work together and around and supportive to one another in terms of the big picture that that gets created.

2:26:15 So I'd say it's the corollary to what Trio Robindo spoke about. But it was the mother's implementation of an experiment in human unity, rather than a more. Philosophical, broader brush approach. It was well, let's just try something. OK. So you alluded to a few things that I want to ask me next question. So can you elaborate on that in terms of how do Orville's projects differ from the high tech, high cost approaches in the developed world? The main thing is that Orville starts at what I would call the basic ground roots level.

2:27:02 And the idea is the solutions they work on should be able to be implemented with local modification almost anywhere in the developing world. When you look at the projects that the World Bank for instance has dropped into Asia and Africa and South America, these are big high money, high tech projects and they spend 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars and they put some project in place. But then they after some time, they can't be maintained. They cost too much to maintain. The people don't have the necessary skill set to maintain that level of tech. And it becomes difficult.

2:27:49 And in many cases, it becomes a way that local leaders use it to enrich themselves at the expense of their people. In other words, it's just almost like graft that's taking place, corruption. So at Oroville, they start with small things and say, OK, well, they did a reforestation project and that's a good example. It was a totally denuded, eroded plateau. And they looked at, well, what is it going to take to turn this into a living biosphere? And then they looked at what are the native plants and trees that would normally grow in this area so that they didn't introduce foreign plants into the environment, but plants that were going to grow and thrive in that area.

2:28:42 And they carefully tended trees and plants where they would water each one individually with drops of water on a daily basis. To start with, because there was no water, they started building cannabs or you know, ways to block the water, capture the monsoon flow, utilize it effectively. They put in some bore wells to tap the water that was under there and they conserved it. They organized it and they created a thriving biosphere that not only had these trees that they planted, but eventually they attracted the native understory brush that would grow there in the native animals and insects and everything else, and they created a holistic regional forest.

2:29:40 Out of something that was totally just bare eroded. Land. Now the lesson of that is it was all done at the grass roots. Now you've had things like in Haiti, they had the hurricane that destroyed a lot of their trees. And so the world organizations have a project and what they do is they take little tree seedlings and they drop them from airplanes and they get maybe a 20 or 25% rate of the trees actually taking and growing. Well, the Oroville Group went to Haiti and a couple of other places with their program and taught people how to do this and look at the native growth in that area. Not transplanting what grew in India, but what grows in Haiti or what grows in Africa or what grows in Rajasthan and said this is the methodology for you to redevelop the native forestry here.

2:30:50 They had like an 80 to 90% success rate versus the 20 or 25% success rate that high tech was doing with their dropping seedlings from airplanes. These are noted examples that have been documented, and they've gotten some grants from different places to do those things and help those areas rebuild their forests in a holistic way. High tech has its value. Oroville has some high tech industries. They've got a solar mini grid. They've got technology that they're using to build various things in the community, but they're not wedded to it at the expense of understanding what it takes to develop for the world that isn't high tech, which is most of the world.

2:31:52 And the needs of people at the ground level. Well, it sounds very much like something that I talk about in a sense where I think that the one of the main issues with government is that it is run from a central tower, a central tower. And if it was more like how it was many, many, many thousands of years ago, more, it was more like villages where each village sort of takes care of themself, you would get a lot more transparency. You get a lot more efficiency because you know, the local mayor, because he lives next door to you, you know, the, the local shaman, you know that he's not doing dodgy stuff because he lives just two streets down the road, you know.

2:32:39 So I think that the model that you're talking about is definitely one of the solutions that should be looked at in the future. Santosh, this has been an awesome, awesome conversation. I knew from the when we first spoke or before we started recording, I says I have a feeling this is going to be a really good conversation. And it turned out because this is way like I normally do 2 hours. But because it was such a great conversation, I just let it flow because you have your wealth of knowledge. And with that being said, please tell the lovely people at The Conscious Man 7 where they can find you. Tell us about anything that you want to plug or any projects you're involved in and all of that good stuff. Well, thank you.

2:33:27 I have to say I was extremely pleased by our interaction and conversation. I know you worked on preparing certain questions. I didn't do anything. I just said, I'm just going to see what happens and respond. You know, as the questions come. I was very, very pleased by how much you bring to this conversation and how much you've helped me evoke what I might be able to share with others. So thank you. And in terms of, you know, anyone who's interested in what we do, probably the easiest place to go is Sri Aurobindo Studies.

2:34:14 That's SRIAUROBIND o.wordpress.com. And that's my main blog that I've been running since 2009. And I believe there are links there to the podcast, which is actually the blog post turned into verbal 2 days later. OK, so if you want to hear it, you go there, but I think I've got a link there and otherwise they can e-mail me at santoshksantoshk@msn.com and I respond to emails so.

2:35:04 Well, firstly, thanks for your kind words and I try my best to bring as much as I can to the conversation and to do enough research to, to, to, to make it interesting for people and stuff like and as, as, as guys, you know, I am an online fitness trainer. I help spiritually incline people burn fat and build muscle. So summer is going to be here in a few days. So if you would like to get into the best shape of your life, it's not too, too late, but you need to act now. So if you're interested in getting into the best shape of your life and growing mentally, spiritually and also physically, hit me up on my Instagram at Adriano under score 246 or my name Todd Cave. And if you also would like to remove some fears and traumas, I can also help you do that.

2:36:01 I can help you to to get some magic mushrooms. So hit me up on my socials again at Adriana under score 246 on my name Todd gave and I will help you to get some magic mushrooms because we have a lot of deprogramming to do as Sri so pointedly explained today. And if you would like to support this podcast, you can do that by visiting visiting our merch store with the name Todd and me in the Amazon store. And as you can see, I have all one of those shirts today. We have hoodies, tank tops and sweats and as you can see, I have on the conscious man shirt today.

2:36:42 So if you would like to support this podcast because it really does help us with things like video editing and stuff like that, link will be to the Amazon store in the description of this podcast. And you can help us to grow, help us to do some more research and get some more amazing guests like Santosh on the platform, you know, and if this episode sparked something in you, share it, send it to a friend, Tiger Saw social media and subscribe for more episodes like this. Dive deeper into Santosh Krinsky's work through his YouTube channel, his books, and the Institute for Holistic Education. Remember, transformation spreads when you take action. Thanks for listening to the Conscious Man 7 podcast. See you in the next one I remember. Keep smiling, keep shining, and keep being the change you want to see.

2:37:33 Speak to you soon, my fellow brothers and sisters. Cheers and namaste.