Dandapani - How To Raise Your Consciousness

Full transcript: Dandapani on London Real

4:00 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dandapani, the Hindu priest, speaker and entrepreneur. After graduating university with a degree in electrical engineering, you left it all behind to become a monk under the guidance of one of Hinduism’s foremost spiritual leaders. For 10 years you lived a life of serious personal discipline and daily training at your guru’s cloistered monastery in Hawaii.

4:22 When your vow expired, you opted to travel the world and teach ordinary people the spiritual tools you learned and how they can be applied in everyday life. Dandapani, welcome back to London Real. Thank you, Brian. It’s an honor to be back here. Thank you for having me.

4:36 My pleasure. You know, we were here just under three years ago and we had this incredible call, and it seems that a lot of people listened to it. Hey, you know, Brian, I travel all around the world and I speak, and the one thing I consistently hear all the time, people come up to me and go, “I watched it. I heard about you on London Real. I watched the London Real interview.

4:59 It changed my life. Loved it.” So thank you for that, dude. My pleasure. You know, yeah, I was just so glad.

5:05 You know, it was two guys having a curious conversation about life and each other. It was very much not it. Right, yeah. And when we met in Napa, exactly, yeah, we had dinner together and had a long conversation. Yeah, it was the same kind of thing, just continued.

5:19 Right, discontinued in London. Oh yeah, and we’ve already been having conversations about all the different aspects of your life, and so I’d love today to just kind of continue where you left off and catch up a little bit. I might rant a little bit. Do it. I was like, hey, I love the rants.

5:33 I might rant a little bit too. I think we need to, and I want to cover a bunch of things. Yes, sure. Tell me about what your world’s been like the last couple of years and how you know, what do you do now with most of your time? Because you do travel the world, really, and teach, right?

5:48 Yep, I do. And you know, the rest of the time I’m home in New York and focusing on a couple of things, really trying to build up my online presence. I really do want to cut down a little bit on the traveling. I have a daughter now, a six-month-old daughter, actually. Thank you.

6:03 Yeah, so you definitely want to spend more time with her and less time traveling. So I’ve been building up my online presence, building an app, and we’re gonna launch that hopefully in a month or so, and the app will deliver content on that. But one of the big features about the app is creating rituals. There’s a whole ritual section, because when I lived as a monk it was all about rituals throughout the day, right? And a lot of times I think people have this misconception that, you know, if you practice something in the morning, people say to me, you know, Dandapani, if I practice meditation for 10 minutes every morning, is that gonna affect my life?

6:38 And I’d be like, yes, but what are you doing the remaining 23 hours and 50 minutes? You know, if you’re doing things that counteract what you’re doing in the morning, then it doesn’t help. If you exercise for 10 minutes in the morning and the rest of the day you’re eating fish and chips and drinking beer and pizza, what, laying on the couch, is that gonna help? So the whole app is about helping people create rituals throughout the day, the same way that I have rituals in my life, and as a monk I was trained to have rituals.

7:04 So I’ve been really focusing on that and creating proper content. Right, in my first book, I have a draft, just finished it last Thursday. So, okay, yeah, so we’re gonna get that published hopefully sometime. I’d love to see it. Okay.

7:16 And then our project in Costa Rica, where we’re building a retreat center. And who is your typical client? Is it kind of the CEO of the up-and-coming tech startup? Is it sports people? Is it no, everyday people?

7:30 Yeah, my typical client that I work with, my personal clients, are entrepreneurs. So they’re entrepreneurs from small to large businesses, small meaning 10, 15 million, and then people that own billion-dollar companies. So those are the people that I work with, and I also work with a couple of athletes as well, in a couple of sports, very successful athletes. So what do they struggle with mostly? What’s the biggest challenge usually when they come to see you?

7:58 I think, you know, it’s interestingly, because the people I work with have kind of changed over the years, and I would say in the last two, three years the people I’ve worked with, what they really want to know is I think they’ve come to the realization that they know very little about the mind. They’re experts in their areas, but they know very little about the mind and they really want to understand the mind better so that they can leverage their mind to be even better at what they do. So they’re either people that run finance companies or investors or entrepreneurs of tech entrepreneurs or whatever they are, businesses, a whole range of them, including some couple of athletes that I work with as well.

8:37 All of them want to leverage themselves better and they feel like they have a lack of understanding of how their mind works, and that’s one thing they approach me for. And the other thing is how do they develop concentration even more. That’s something that I always talk about, is developing focus. Now, how could those people not understand the mind? I mean, you know, in this day and age we’ve got access to all sorts of great YouTube videos, including mine and yours.

9:01 Yeah. You know, we’ve got all this research. I mean, some of these people live in Silicon Valley. How come they can’t figure out the mind and then they come to you and to help them? Because you don’t know what you don’t know.

9:13 And the thing is, you know, you can go and troll the web or YouTube and you get bits and pieces here, but unless you have a structured approach to learning and someone guiding you and training you, you never really learn. Right, you have an academy where you take people through a process, and that’s so important, right, to have a teacher that walks you through it. And when I joined the monastery, my guru took me step by step. He was able to look at me and see what I needed and push me in that area, challenged me here.

9:40 But when you go on YouTube or you go online, you read a few things, you don’t get the same effect, you know? And I think a lot of these people want that. They want me to work with them and push them and highlight little things about their mind so they can have that conversation and then really refine it, and that’s really what they’re looking for. Hmm, which is hard to get from 20 different YouTube videos, right? Yeah.

10:03 We were talking earlier about how, you know, maybe these days people have a propensity when they go to learn something to kind of want to get the thing as quick as possible, and some people, you were even telling me, they want to learn it so they can teach it as soon as possible, which, I mean, in your opinion is kind of a flawed way to become a master. Yeah, right, and you almost miss the whole concept of learning process. You missed the point. Yeah, of doing that.

10:33 Can you talk about what you meant? Yeah, so two things here, Brian. One is wanting a quick fix to learning. You know, I spoke yesterday in Munich to a group of entrepreneurs and we had a private fireside chat. I’ve been working with them for about seven years, and so we had, you know, about 15 of them in the room.

10:48 We had a little fireplace, we were chatting, diving deep into some of the content they’d been learning with me, and one guy asked me, “Is there a quick fix to having more energy in life?” I’m like, there’s no quick fix in life. That’s the first thing you have to understand. And I think technology trains us to think there are quick fixes. So I can go on my phone, I live in New York City, I can order something on Amazon.

11:11 Actually, last week I went on Amazon, ordered something at 10:30 at night, and the next morning at 8 o’clock in the morning FedEx busted my door and it was there. It’s crazy, right? So I can get things instantaneously. through technology. And then because we’re so trained to getting things as soon as we want them, that we apply that to our life and we think that, yeah, we can change overnight.

11:36 And then people out there selling hacks, there’s this hack, that’s that hack, how we’re gonna hack this, how we’re gonna hack business, how we’re gonna hack the mind, how we’re gonna hack the body. But it doesn’t work that way. You have a child and your child is growing slowly and learning slowly. There’s no way to hack your child. Can you make your three-year-old boy, right, you know, three-year- old boy learn to walk faster?

11:58 Or well in triple integrals by tomorrow? Why don’t you hack him? It doesn’t work, right? And then why us adults, do we think we can hack everything? It’s not sustainable, right?

12:09 And then the other thing about being a teacher is that, you know, that’s another thing that’s being sold out there besides hacking. It’s like, you know, let me certify you to be a yoga teacher, let me certify you to be a life coach. I know you’re 19 years old and you’ve never had any experiences in life, nor have you achieved anything that pushed you beyond the limits of your imagination, but let me certify you as a life coach after a three-day weekend program.

12:34 And I think when you go with the idea that I’m going to learn something and then take that content and teach it, you never really learn. When I went to the monastery and to learn from my guru, I went purely to be a student. First of all, I went there with the knowledge that I knew nothing. I wanted to learn from him, and then once I learned from him, my goal was to strive to implement everything as best as possible. I had zero intent to teach, all right?

13:01 And I feel when you take that approach, you learn the best. And some of the people that I work with purely have that approach. They have zero intention to teach. They just really want to learn. And so when you go with that intention, then you learn really well, because then you’re not thinking, because if you go thinking, “I want to take this knowledge and teach it,” then when you listen to the person speaking to you, the first thing you’re gonna think is, “That’s really good, that’s interesting, I think I’m gonna share it that way.

13:29 I should really include that in Chapter Five of my course.” Yes. And I think I’ll add that little bit to this, and then I can teach it that way. So then you’re not processing, you’re taking it, you’re repackaging it, and you’re thinking how to sell it. I’ll give it out again.

13:43 And that very much contrasts your experience in the monastery, which, first of all, the only reason you went is because you were massively inspired and moved by your guru, and you were ready to pretty much give your life over for ten years. And I did. And you did. You know, and even for two years he made you wait until you could come, right? And so first of all, you had a teacher that you chose, as someone who pretty much lived the whole life and walked the walk.

14:12 He completely that, right? Yeah. And then he made me wait and he gave me so many challenges and tests along the way to see how serious I was as a student. I did everything he told me. Did it.

14:24 What did he tell you to do? So he told me to find my way from Perth, Western Australia, to Hawaii, and I was a student in college, had no money, so I got a job washing dishes at an airport, literally planeloads of dishes, you know, after I’d finished engineering classes, I’d go to the airport and work for five, six hours washing dishes, saving up money. He’d teach me how to concentrate, teach me how the mind works. We communicated over email, he’d give me homework to do, give me a task that was really painful, like coloring.

14:54 I’m like, why am I coloring? You know, I want to color pictures. And but I just did everything. I trusted him. I trusted the process.

15:03 I did the work and I fulfilled it, and I finished the work and I went back to him and I said, “Gurudeva, it’s done. What’s next?” You know, and he wanted you to do these kind of seemingly mundane things. Yeah, and I never complained about them. Right, it seemed mundane, but I trusted him.

15:19 He was my teacher, and if he told me to scrub the floor, I’d scrub the floor, you know? And I’d scrub it really well, better than he could imagine I could scrub it, and then I’d go and say it’s done. And I might do a little bit more than I think I can. But nowadays people, like we were chatting earlier, you know, if someone wants to learn martial arts, they want to learn that quick swirl 360 kung fu kick in the air or something, you know. No one wants to go and do the hard work, and that’s all about the quick fix, you know, how can I get from A to B as quickly as possible?

15:52 It doesn’t work that way. Yeah, I mean, these days people watch the UFC and they want to go to jujitsu class and learn like the special gogoplata choke or a check hook in boxing. But if you go to an old-school boxing coach, he’ll literally make you do footwork for like a year, right, or throw a jab in the air for a year. And then where you go, you know, to China, no hats, you, you know, stick your hands in sand for a year. They’re waiting to see if you’re willing to put in the time, and if you can maybe get to a quiet mental space as well.

16:22 Yes. And it’s not only about training, it’s about training the mind. Right, the mind needs to adjust. In the mind, it’s like a muscle, it needs to reshape itself to be able to take on a new way of thinking and a new way of behaving, and you know, progressively hold that new shape, and that only comes through repetition and patience and slow, hard work of doing the same thing over and over again. You know, one of my good friends is an Olympic gold medalist.

16:48 She won the gold medal in beach volleyball, and she told me, and she had an amazing teacher, a coach, she said, and she said at one time the coach made her work on the volleyball court, do your footwork for six months with no ball. So they trained for six months on the sand with no ball, and it was beach volleyball, and you know, she did whatever her coach told her to do. She said she grumbled, but she did it. But that’s the training that most people just don’t want to go through, you know?

17:17 And I think so many teachers out there are selling quick fixes, and because they have never been trained themselves properly, so they just, they’ve got a quick fix learning to get from A to B, so then they go and teach a quick way to get from A to B. You know, they don’t understand this whole traditional path of slowly learning and developing yourself over a period of time. It’s what really creates mastery. In a certain level in the monastery, living a celibate life in a cloistered monastery away from your family, friends, your relatives, you know, waking up early in the morning, strict discipline and training, eating three meals a day, it takes thirty-six years before you’re qualified as a teacher.

18:01 Thirty-six years. So if I lived only ten years, I’m not even anywhere close to that, and I’m still a student. Yeah, yeah. Tell me about this process of going to the monastery and being the monk, and you know, what you learned kind of in retrospect by doing that whole process, you know, by separating from the world, and then those first few years, because, you know, in our previous conversation, you know, you were talking about how it was very difficult stripping yourself away from all of these kind of worldly comforts and routines you had gotten used to, but then by doing so it got your brain into a different space, and I think that’s why people seek you out, because you come at things straight from a different angle and from a different perspective, and you’re the first one to say I’m not the guru, but you see things differently that we don’t, because we didn’t have to kind of sacrifice, I guess, in that way.

18:59 And you know, I think the biggest thing for me is that I had such an amazing teacher, and you know, my guru trained me remotely before I joined the monastery, and then when I, the first three years I lived with him, he trained me intensely, and unfortunately he died three years after I joined, so I stayed for seven more years. But in the three years that I was with him, he personally worked with me and really broke me, so to speak, broke all the patterns, and I’m not saying all the patterns, but definitely a great deal of them, and then helped me to recreate new patterns in my mind and really taught me about my mind and how it works, and he showed and gave me tools, right? He gave me enough homework that I could reincarnate for the next five, like five more lives and I still would struggle to accomplish all the work he’s given me.

19:48 What kind of tools was he doing, and how was he breaking you? By challenging me. So, for example, you’re 23 at the time. Yep. 23 now, just came from Perth.

20:00 Yeah. And now you’re given the next ten years of your life. Well, I went in there for life. I never thought I would leave. My intention was to be a monk my whole life.

20:08 I had no plans to leave, not be a monk, never. So after he died, three years later, you know, was a really difficult time for the monastery. There was only 27 months, and everybody, two generations amongst, and everybody came, that because of him they were seeking self-realization or they wanted to serve, but because of him they joined that particular monastery to be his student. So in the 52 years of teaching, it was just 27 monks with him that he knew intimately, that he trained.

20:37 And when he died, it was a great loss and a real difficult period. And I think within two years where he lost about eight or nine months left, you know, I stayed seven more years and I felt that, you know, a parson has aligned as it was before. So my vow expired and I chose to leave, and but I had no intention ever of wanting to leave the monastery. I would be, if he was alive, I’d still be there as a monk. Right.

21:06 Wow. So it wasn’t that I went in there, I was gonna do ten years and then leave and go travel and teach. That was never my intention. Okay. Yep.

21:13 When I left, I was like, you know, I had to do something now, right? New. And so those first few years he kind of goes to break you. And you know, it’s really about, he’s able to, because he only had a few students and he always wanted a few students so that he could understand you, right? If you have 20,000 students you can’t get to know them, but if you have 27 you can know each one intimately.

21:35 So he got to know me, or to understand me, he got to see my habits, my weaknesses. You know, one thing, you know, that he worked with me to really teach me to be non-attached. So one way, you know, all the monks lived in a hut that was ten feet by ten feet by ten feet tall, so four walls, two windows, the door, just a futon mattress, a pillow, a blanket and an oil lamp, no toilet and electricity, no plumbing, nothing in there. And that was the big hut, right?

22:04 Also three minutes by three minutes, that was considered the big hut. And I I lived in one for a few months and then he would move me to another place. He’d moved me to get to an office and he says, “I want you to sleep here in the meeting room,” and I’m like, okay. So I wrapped up my little, rolled up my futon mattress and I went and slept in the meeting room, and I remember a giant centipede, like about eight inches, falling from that conditioning. I’d sleep under that air conditioning vent because it was Hawaii, was warm.

22:30 I wanted to be a little bit : remember one fell on my chest and ran across my body, you know, and so I’m just laying there sleeping in the meeting room, and then I’d be there for a month with nowhere to put my stuff. I’d tuck it under a table somewhere, you know, what are the clothes I had, robes I had. And then he’d move me into another little closet somewhere, and a little storeroom, and make me sleep in the storeroom. And then he would move me to a hut in the forest which was only three feet wide and maybe seven feet deep, and it was a metal sheet that was nailed on one side and folded across and nailed on the other side.

23:06 So imagine a cylinder that’s cut in half lengthwise. So if I sat in there on my butt, I’d have maybe about three inches before my head, between my head and the top of the roof, and I could crawl in and lay in it but I couldn’t sit up in it. I could sit cross-legged in it. And I stayed in there a few months and he just kept moving me every few weeks. I, well, that one I stayed six months and then he moved me somewhere else and moved me, and then eventually I just realized, you know, I had a few of his books, I had some beads, you know, even in the monastery ended up collecting little things, and after moving a few times it was like, I want any of this stuff, and sent my robes, toothbrush, I’m good to go.

23:47 And then he stopped moving me. He was teaching you. Yes. As soon as I realized, like, I don’t need any of this stuff in my life, and you know, and I didn’t complain about moving again, then he stopped moving me. It was really interesting because I was to remember us being in my office one day, and I loved the room I worked in.

24:08 He called me up one evening, he had gone to the beach to edit because he was writing a book, he was driving back with a couple of monks. He called me, it was about six something at night, and says, “Dandapani, I want you to move to the” window for us, that’s where that little hut was on stilts, but you know that was three feet high, and I said, “Oh, okay, Gurudeva, I’ll move there tomorrow morning, I think.” And he, for him there was no tomorrow, everything is now.

24:34 “No, you can move that now.” And it was really getting dark outside and there’s no frickin lights in the forest, and I said, “It’s getting dark outside, Gurudeva.” “But you have a flashlight, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” I just hung up the phone on him and you know, grabbed my flashlight, I ran to my current hut, grabbed all my stuff and I went to this forest, and you know, there was this little tiny cylindrical hut in the forest that you know, I cleaned it out and had, you know, had gone dusty and cobwebby because no one had lived in that for months.

25:10 Oh yes. And I just pushed my things in there and crawled in there, you know, that night is sleeping and geckos would fall, get in that, run across your body and you know you’d scream, but if a monk screams in the forest and there’s no one that I heard the monk scream. That’s a good question. It’s a good question, right? So yeah, I was teaching you to also kind of disassociate from your body and your own comforts, and the own comforts, right, you get used to being comfortable and that’s the problem, right?

25:37 You know, you stay in an apartment for long enough, you stay in the city for long enough, you’re comfortable, you know where to go buy your milk, your bread, you know your surroundings, to get comfortable, you get used to it. And you know, one of the biggest teachings he taught me is about awareness and the mind. You’re not the mind, rather you’re pure awareness traveling through different areas of the mind, and your goal is to take your awareness from your conscious mind, move it through the conscious mind through the subconscious into the superconscious areas of the mind, which is the most refined areas of your mind, to experience in deeper in the states and ultimately self-realization, God realization.

26:13 But awareness travels in the mind, but when you get stuck physically in a certain place and you get used to your surroundings and your comforts, your external environment is a reflection of how your awareness is working in your mind. That means your awareness is stuck in the particular of the mind, because there’s really no separation between your inner state and your outer state. And what he was teaching me is that by moving me around, making sure I never got comfortable long enough in one place to stay attached, he was teaching me that to not allow my awareness to get stuck in a particular area of mine and in the particular area of the mine and stay in a rut, and that I could actually prime a break my awareness free from bit earlier than I really grab hold of it and take it deep within myself and experience deeper states of mine on the superconscious and ultimately self-realization, which is what we’re all looking for, right?

27:08 I don’t know if it’s everyone is looking for it, you know, because I think people are aware what it is, they haven’t defined it for themselves, but I think ultimately people are looking to have a better life and a better experience. And I doubt there are people out there that just want to be miserable. People want to be comfortable, they want to be happy, they want to be joyous, but are they looking for self-realization? I don’t know. But one thing that probably most people do suffer with is having their awareness associated with that outer self.

27:41 Yes. Okay. Yeah. And you know, social media encourages that, all right? I mean, if you go on most people’s timelines, a lot of people’s timeline, it’s amazing, you can scroll through and it’s just a thousand, there’s a thousand posts and it’s nine hundred and ninety-nine pictures of themselves, selfies.

28:01 And I think social media has made people extremely selfish, and all people think about is themselves, you know, here’s what I’m doing, look at me here, look at me. That just be kind of the opposite of what being in a monastery is. He totally, it’s all about serving, right? You know, and you look at also public figures and celebrities and influencers, they constantly post pictures of themselves and the amazing life traveling all around the world, and you know, I see, and I know some of these people, and they never post pictures of their students, so you know who’s following them.

28:36 It’s always about them. That’s, it’s about, and it’s really about serving. But it’s easy to lose that in this kind of hyper social media where we’re all on our mobile phones, we have all that instant gratification. Yeah. And yet without serving, you’ll end up kind of having this really weird, miserable life.

28:56 You really, it is all ultimately about serving and serving humanity, serving the environment. You know, you can’t serve if you’re always thinking about yourself. You know, I get tons of messages on social media and email, people always saying, you know, “I need help. Can you help me with this? Can you help me with that?

29:15 I have a problem, I need your help, can you advise on this?” I never get emails of anybody sending me and say, you know, “Dandapani, I listen to your content, it really helped me. Thank you so much. How can I be of service to you? What can I do for you?”

29:29 Wow. That’s like, I’ll follow them. I get any of those messages. when I went to my guru, it was always, “Gurudeva, what can I do for you? How can I help you?

29:40 How can I be of service?” And sometimes I didn’t have to ask because I intuited what needed to be done next, and that’s the state of responsiveness right there. As a monk, three qualities were really important to cultivate: humility, obedience and responsiveness, right? Humility, obedience and responsiveness. Humility is the state of knowing that I don’t know anything.

30:01 You take that, you adopt the attitude that I am at the beginning of the path, I know nothing, I’m super enthusiastic and I want to learn and grow. Obedience is a meeting to your teacher because you trust him or her, and also obedience to your superconscious mind, which is your intuitive mind, the great annoying of your mind that knows everything, that’s the area of your mind, the superconscious, that knows, that’s the all-knowing part of you. Be obedient to that superconscious, and when you get an intuitive flash that tells you, do this, which quite often people refer to as a gut feeling, I call it an intuition, because the gut kind of more is more related to your instinct of mind.

30:39 So your intuitive, be obedient to that. What if that conflicts with what your master’s telling you? It doesn’t. Okay. I mean, if you have a good teacher, right, if you have a good teacher, then the teacher’s also working from an intuitive state of mind and that shouldn’t count, how conflict, and I never found a conflict with my teacher.

30:55 Right. And did you all go sleep with the bugs, but you knew that there was no intuitive issue with that? Yeah, there was no, it was my intellect that was pushing back and my instinctive. So if you broke the mind down to three parts, you’d say there’s the instinctive, the intellect and the intuitive. So my intuitive mind knew that that was the right thing to do, the intellect was saying, “It’s getting dark outside, I mean, I have to walk through the forest, can we do it in the morning?”

31:21 That’s things like it’s reasoning, and the instinctive mind says, “No, I’m afraid to go live in the forest because some animals gonna come eat me at night, right? You know, it’ll be a missing monk and who gasps.” Right, right. And usually, usually your instinctive mind will be in disagreement with what your master teaches you. Totally.

31:37 Their job is to force you into the fears, right? Because the instinctive mind likes the same thing, it’s the nature of the animal mind, right? It loves repetition. The intellectual mind likes new things. That’s why the intellectual mind can be fascinated with the internet and gets caught in the internet, because it’s always serving you something new online, whereas the instinctive mind loves repetition.

31:59 That’s why a cow, for example, it’s an instinctive animal, it can wake up every day and eat grass. It wakes up and goes, “Like, grass, amazing.” It never gets up and goes, “Like, god damn it, I want granola, give me bacon and eggs today.” No, eat grass every day for 20 years and be totally happy with it. Imagine if we ate the same thing for breakfast every day for 20 years, we’re probably going to like put something different on it, right?

32:25 But the instinctive mind loves the same thing, and the instinctive mind staying in this hut, in the ten by 10-foot hut, gets comfortable, it knows its surrounding, and that’s what the instinctive mind wants, right? It wants familiarity, it wants everything to repeat itself in the right way, and when it does that it feels safe and secure. And that’s why, you know, just to go slightly off-topic a little bit, in the monastery and in the military they have rituals and routines, because if you look at the instinctive, intellectual, intuitive, one of the things you want to do is to make the instinctive mind be totally safe and secure, and by that you create routines amongst of routines.

33:07 Soldiers have routines, you feed them at the right time every day, right? When that happens, the instinctive mind of a soldier and of a monk becomes safe and comfortable, they don’t have a fear and flight feeling, so now they can move out of the instinctive mind and into the intellectual mind or the intuitive mind. So a soldier can go into battle and not live in the fear of, like, you know, the fight-or-flight area of the mind, and he can be in the intellectual area of mind.

33:38 So you see, “I see the enemy coming this way, maybe I’ll go around this way and shoot him from the back.” Okay. Okay. Right, because if not, he’s an instinctive mind, he’ll go, “I’m gonna fight, I’m gonna run,” and by creating routines and rituals you make the instinctive mind feel secure and calm. Okay.

33:58 Yeah. So those are the three parts of the mind. You want to talk about responsiveness, you know, so after you’ve got humility, obedience, when you hear your intuition speaking to you, the next step is be responsive, respond, to do something. If your teacher tells you to do something, go and do it. Respond.

34:17 Be responsive, and you don’t have to sometimes wait for instructions. If you see something on the floor that shouldn’t be on the floor, pick it up. Don’t wait for somebody to tell you to pick it up, go do it, all right? And that’s the state we were amongst, we trained to have the state of responsiveness. You see a dirty dish in the sink, go wash it.

34:36 Yeah. It’s not yours also, you know, but wash it. Learn to serve. Are these the three good traits that are good for humans as well? I think so, yeah.

34:44 Humility, obedience and responsiveness. People hate them. Second one, obedience, don’t tell me what to do, all right? That’s the ego coming out of this, right? It’s like, don’t tell me what to do, right?

34:58 And people get so defensive, like, “You can tell me what to do.” I know, I don’t care, I have no big problem being told what to do. I’m happy to take instructions, right? And humility is hard for people. Oh, I’m very humble guys.

35:10 And you know, along with the selfie generation is also this everyone’s an expert, and the loudest voice wins, and yeah, my opinion now, you can make a career off of an opinion. You can. And all you have to do is post great pictures and, you know, you see this beautiful timeline of, you know, a highlight reel of somebody’s life, and it’s so easy to convince tens of thousands of people that you’re an expert at something, you know, with the right photos and some votes and people believe that you’re the next best.

35:43 And then people look at me and I get messages and go, like, “You know, Dandapani, you’re an amazing sage.” When did I become a sage? I don’t feel like a sage. No, I’m not even a guru or a teacher. I like to think of myself only as a student.

36:04 What does Webster’s dictionary define a sage as? Probably an enlightened human being. I’m feeling like I’m an enlightened human being. You’re just 10 years ahead of us. I wouldn’t even say so.

36:18 Maybe in a particular area, because I’ve had training in it, right? In the same way that I could say, you know, you’re twenty years ahead of me in interviewing people and knowing how to put a good show together, you know, conversation, but that’s your area that you worked hard and trained yourself. You spent decades and years working on this and refining it every day, talking to people, listening, seeing how we can do this better. And look at this, a beautiful space you’ve created.

36:47 You know, three years ago you were in a completely different space in a smaller office, and now I walk into this place and it looks so amazing. You need bright souls working for you, that are enthusiastic and happy with what they’re doing. You have such an uplifting office space, and I mean, look what you’ve created in three years. You know, what an accomplishment. Congratulations, Brian.

37:11 Thank you, man. Yeah, I think what people find fascinating about you is that you did this thing for 10 years that most people would never do because it looks so difficult and committing and giving their life away, and then you became one of the few people to come out and then talk about it, and so I think you give us this perspective that in a weird way seems so obvious, and yet we can’t figure out on our own because we’re so busy with the distractions and serving the intellect with Google search and posting our Instagrams and ordering our food on delivery and going to the coffee shop, you know, that for some we can’t see the forest for the trees. Is that a decent assessment of?

37:55 Yeah, but sure, people don’t take time out for themselves. Right, something I’ve been saying lately to a lot of people is that nobody spends time with themselves, and when I say to people, they go like, “Oh, I have alone time every evening when I walk my dog for half an hour, that’s my alone time.” And you’re like, no, that’s walking a dog. “When I’m at the gym working out, that’s my alone time.” I’m like, no, that’s being at the gym.

38:20 Alone time is you sitting down in a chair at home or on the floor cross-legged in a, er, no music, no journal, no podcast, your eyes closed, and spending time in contemplation and reflection, not meditation but in actual reflection and really having a conversation with yourself, the same way we’re having a conversation, getting to know each other and each other’s opinions and thoughts. You have a conversation with yourself, and people don’t do that, right? They don’t spend any time doing that.

38:48 If you don’t spend any time doing that, how would you know what’s important in your life, where are you struggling, and what you need to focus on next, and what you need to work on? You’re so busy from the moment, from the moment the alarm rings, they reach over to the side table, grab their phone, turn off the alarm, look at all the notifications and then start stroking that phone. This is how people get pleasure in the morning, stroking their phone. Yeah, so, and then every 10 years someone has a quote/unquote midlife crisis when they realize that they’re living the life that they’ve never contemplated, they’ve never planned, they’re not connected with, right?

39:30 And then that’s kind of life, and then you’re on your deathbed looking back saying, “What did I do? Why did I value these things?” And they’re wondering why. It’s because they never spent the time in solitude with themself. Do the work now so you can spend the rest of your life living a life that’s in alignment with your purpose.

39:48 Once you figure out what you want and what your purpose in life is, then you can spend the rest of your life living a life in alignment with that purpose. And you know, I’m talking about death, man. You know, when my guru was dying, one of the last things he said on his deathbed was, “What an amazing life. I would not have traded it for anything in the world. What an amazing life.

40:08 I would not have traded it for anything in the world.” Now, what words to hear from a dying man, you know, to be able to look back on your life and say that was freaking spectacular. Wow, isn’t that great? Yeah, I’ve never actually heard of anyone saying, yeah, I believe he said that, don’t you know, and how many people could say that? And for me, you know, I, you know, you’re why could he say that?

40:30 Because he lived a life that was in alignment with his purpose. He knew clearly what he wanted. You know, he was often when he was 10 years old, he grew up in Lake Tahoe, I mean in Northern California, his mother died I think when he was 8, 9, and then his father died, and at 10 he was adopted by a close friend of the family. At 10 years old she asked him, when she adopted him, “What do you want to do with your life?” I don’t want a question to a centennial, all right?

40:56 And you know what his answer was? “I want to dance.” And the people that trained him in dancing in his early teen years were mystics from Europe. They not only taught him how to dance, but they taught him how the mind works, the body works, the nervous system. He had such strict discipline, and he shared with me a story once that he was in a class with a few teachers, with the teacher, you know, with a few students learning, and there was a knock on the door and the teacher opened the door and there was a student at the door, and the student was five minutes late, and the teacher looked at the boy, 11, 12 year old boy I think, and said, “Obviously you’re not serious about learning,” and he closed the door, and they never saw that student again.

41:37 Old school, huh? But by the time my guru was about 16 or 17 years old, he was the premier danseur of the San Francisco Ballet Company, one of the best, if not the best, ballet dancers in America, and then he left. He jumped on the first ship to sail from America to India to pursue his enlightenment, but he was so clear what he wanted, he wanted self-realization, and then he spent some time in Sri Lanka, a few months, and then he finally felt that he could attain the self-realization he wanted.

42:07 He gave away his belongings, he went to these caves called the caves of Jelani in southern Sri Lanka, in the jungles, and he promised himself he would fast and meditate till he attained enlightenment. He was this 19 year old boy in the late 1940s in a cave in southern Sri Lanka. So when you’re so determined, it’s when you’re so clear what you want in life and you’re so determined to get it and you’re willing to give up everything and everyone for it, then you’re living a life in alignment with your purpose, and then you can spend the rest of your life in sync with who you are, as opposed to chasing so many different things around you that sparkle, whether it’s, you know, I want to be like that person and I want to do this and that sounds fascinating, maybe I’ll try that for a few years.

42:53 You know, you meet kids nowadays that are 18, 19, 20 years old, when you ask them what do you want to do, what are you studying in university, “Oh, I think I’ll do science and, you know, and then I might major in this, but I was also thinking about taking a year off, you know, travel a little bit and then come back, and I’m not sure, maybe I’ll do arts, I’m kind of interested in this topic.” I don’t know what you want to do. It’s your, we have one life, you don’t get a second shot at this.

43:22 Get clear what you want. You know, and how do you do that if you don’t have the benefit of being able to go to a monastery where after a couple of years of these routines and this lack of any type of comforts you kind of have to figure it out, right? Well, you kind of go crazy or you leave. I would say, you know, for the monks that came to the monastery, they already knew what they wanted before they came, because my guru wasn’t accepting pupils that didn’t know what they wanted.

43:50 So you went to the monastery for the purpose of wanting to realize, wanting to get self-realization or attain self-realization. So everyone that came in was already clear what their purpose in life is. Okay. Monastery is about training them also. So for me, I was clear what my purpose in life on Earth, about eight, nine years old, I knew exactly what I wanted.

44:09 Okay. And ever since then it was really about finding the right teacher to train me, the right environment and how to go about doing this. Okay. Now, yeah, what about someone who just can’t figure it out? We hear it all the time, the 18 year old, 19 year old doesn’t know what they want to do.

44:22 What should they do to try to figure that out? The first step is really have an intense desire to really want to figure it out, because, no, a hundred percent, 99.999999 times, more lines in there, of these people that say, “I can’t figure it out,” don’t have enough of a desire to want to figure it out. Thinking like, “Ah, Dandapani, I really want to know my purpose in life.” Hang on a second. “Ah, oh well, they don’t have to figure it out.”

44:52 Right, this is kind of, so many options for your time and for the unknown future that, right, it’s like, it’s not like you have to, but didn’t you do, right? You do. But if you look at the most successful people, one of their traits is this intense desire to want that something, whether it should be the best soccer player, to win an Olympic gold medal, or to be the best martial artist. They want that, they desire it so badly. How many people truly desire to want to know what their purpose in life is?

45:27 Because if they really want it, they will figure out a way to find it. They don’t have enough of a desire, they have a passing desire, maybe they’re going through a difficult time so they kind of a few months look around and no. But you have to have that burning desire, you have to say that, “I really want to know and I’m not gonna stop till I figure it out.” Then you’ll find out. And can you accelerate that process by booking time with yourself, to spend time with yourself, by practicing these rituals, by making your bed, by doing some of these other things you teach?

46:02 Yeah, for sure. I wouldn’t say accelerate, you know, I think you, it would all help, all right, but you need to put the effort in and you need to have to want the desire. You can’t stop until you get it, and most people don’t have the patience or enough perseverance to keep going with something until they attain it. You know, they push for one or two months and then they burn out and then they say, like, “I’m not gonna try it anymore, it’s not important.”

46:26 If that’s what ends up happening is, you know, what you said early is that people get to the end of life or they hit low depression points every 10, 15 years, and then they get to the end of life and they look back and they go, “Where’s my life about?” They can’t even tell you what they did in their life because it’s just a mishmash of five million different things. Yeah, most people I think are under the illusion that they’re living their life when in fact their life is mostly being lived for them.

46:51 I think that other people are making 99% of their choices. Yes. And this is the most, people, they don’t live their life because they don’t know what they want. The greatest blessing of knowing what you want in life is that you know who and what you don’t want in life, and that is such a blessing, all right? And it really pays for you to figure this out as early as possible in your life, right?

47:11 But you must have the desire to want to know. You told this great story, I think you were out at a late dinner with, you know, some entrepreneurs and their wives, and you said at the end of, like, a midnight, and you said, right, “What’s everyone’s purpose here?” Yeah. You said, like, two people couldn’t tell you, two other people spoke for five minutes, which means they didn’t know. If one of the wives said something and then she started an argument, yeah, she attacked her husband, it was just a mess.

47:35 Was it just mad? Because no, and you know, they’re all in their 50s and no idea. You know, one guy had created a billion dollar company from scratch, they had no idea what his personal is how does that happen? Because you’d see him on Instagram and everyone’s following him and they’re like, “I want to be like him.” Yeah, but you know, they have no idea what the purpose was.

47:53 I mean, he knows how to create a business, but the thing I’ll say, Brian, you have to understand that, and we never get, first of all, we never get taught that we need a purpose in life. So when you go to school, nobody tells you that you need a purpose, and then second, they don’t tell you you need a purpose, and second is they don’t teach you how to figure out your purpose in life. So most people grow up thinking that they don’t need a purpose, but you do.

48:17 But if you look at all the mundane things that you do in life, it’s all driven by purpose. No mercy. When was the last time you got in a car just to go for a drive? Probably never, right? None of you live in London, right?

48:31 When you get in the car to go somewhere, it’s because I have a purpose, you’re gonna meet somebody or have dinner, get to a location. In all the mundane, go to the bathroom, there’s a purpose. You never get to the bathroom and go, “I’m not sure why I’m here.” All right, all the mundane things we do in life are driven by purpose, so why shouldn’t life have a purpose? Yeah, I was just thinking of, I had a guy in here named Gary Vaynerchuk, you probably know him.

48:52 Yeah, I am not personally, but I know. Yeah, I think he said one time he was working at McDonald’s and he was working at the fries and McDonald’s, and he was thinking, “I can’t wait to get done with this job because I hate it and I just want to get on to something, doing something with my life,” and he was next to a guy who was on the fries who was loving every minute of his day making fries, and he couldn’t understand this guy, and later he asked him, “So what’s going on with you?” And he said, “One day I’m gonna own 500 McDonald’s franchises, so I need to know every single job in this place, and this is all part of that process, so I am enjoying this right now.”

49:24 And I think Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “Every rep I was smiling because they’ve got me closer to Mr. Universe.” Those are people, yeah, they know their purpose. They know their purpose and they’re willing to do the hard work, right? They’re willing to do all the little things that they need to be done to make that whole. Because I think, you know, with the Instagram highlights and stuff, you see only one aspect of it, of that life, you know, the glory, the giving the talks, the crowds of fans, and then you go, like, that’s what I want.

49:53 But you don’t see the 99% of the pie that it requires to make that. So someone might see an Instagram timeline, go, “Wow, 500 franchises of McDonald’s,” but they don’t, and that’s only 1% of the story and the glory, but the 99% of the story is him frying french fries for three months to really understand how to get them fried the right way, how often to change the oil and all kinds of stuff, and they don’t see that, and that’s the hard work that leads to the success, doing all the little mundane things, that boring repetition, you know, and really taking time to learn and understand, and how many people want to do that work, Brian? Everybody wants a quick fix, and everything that’s being sold out there is a quick fix.

50:42 I can certify you as a life coach, you’re 20 years old, you know, here’s how you get your yoga teacher qualifications, and I’ll certify you as a health coach, and are you reading specialists, come and do this course and you’ll be an Ayurvedic specialist. Wouldn’t you tell me that story about that guy and the sushi and the rice, what was that? Yes, there’s a documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and he’s spent like 60 years of his life perfecting the perfect piece of sushi, which is basically a raw piece of fish on a piece of rice and he hands it to you, but for him 60, 60 years, and it’s an art, and when you walk through there he, like, walks through the kitchen, they’re like, “Who’s that?”

51:24 He’s like, “My brother.” And I think what he’s doing, he’s making rice, he’s got to make rice for five years before he even gets to touch a piece of fish, and this is all about mastery, and that’s what they’re there to do, and it’s also training the mind, right? And in that five years of making rice, that’s gonna be, after nine months the brother’s gonna go, like, “Why the hell am I here? I don’t wanna make rice, I want to learn sushi,” and 99.9% of the people are gonna go, like, “I’m leaving this place, this is an absolute waste of time.

51:50 I’m gonna go over there where there’s this sushi school that I do the three-month course, and I’m gonna get graduated and certified, and then I can go start my own sushi place, all right? I’m not gonna sit here, make rice for five years, what a bunch of horse crap.” Right, and that’s it. And my guru was the same way, you know, he would test monks, give them, you know, you go there to learn how to realize the self, experience God deep inside of you, next thing you know you’re doing, like, some mundane crappy job, and you go, like, “I’m going, no, I’ll do it, whatever you want me, wash the toilet, mow the lawn, prune the trees, tell me what I need to do.”

52:29 Did you think about leaving? Did you ever want to go? Oh yeah, that many times. Any monk that tells you he never thought of leaving is, like, 100 percent leaving. Every expert that I’ve worked with personally, in the right coach, whether they’ve created a multi-billion dollar company or the best athlete in the world, have thought at some point, “Can I do this?

52:53 You know, should I quit?” Do you know Joe, what did Joe de Sena, another spot to racing, I’ve had on the championship, I did an interview with one and I’ve met him a few times, we were chatting one day and I said, “You know, Joe, do you ever feel like quitting, you know, when you’re running one of those crazy races?” And he’s like, “All the time.” But he said, “My goal is to get to that tree ten feet away, and when I get to that tree, my next goal is to get to the other tree that’s 30 feet away.”

53:21 But how can you never think about quitting? You do. Hannah, but hopefully you’re aligned with your purpose. Yeah, and you know, this is gonna take a lot of hard, mundane, frustrating, potentially just completely “why am I even doing this” type of work, then that’s how you’re ultimately gonna get to that enlightenment. Enlightenment, and even then, what do they say after enlightenment?

53:42 Well, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Exactly. After enlightenment, carry water, chop wood. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

53:50 And if you understand the mind, right, it works on patterns, right? Because right now my mind is shaped like this, and if I want to go to the next version of me, I need to break this, right, that mold, and then heat it up and re-mold it again, and that process of breaking in order to reshape it is where I go, this is really difficult, this is painful, I don’t really want to do this, and then it needs to reshape again, and then you get comfortable, the mind gets comfortable with being in this new shape, version 2.2, and then to get to 2.3 you need to break that shape again, and that’s when you go, like, “Oh, this is difficult, this is crappy, oh, I think I should stop,” and then it needs to re-mold again, and that’s the part of growing, right? And you just realize after a while that every time you move yourself to the next best version of you, you’re going to go through that process of everything in your body readjusting, the patterns in your mind need to break and adjust.

54:48 Your every system in the body is comfortable now with how life is currently, but if you want to go to the next version of you, it needs to adjust to everything, your muscles, your body, your nervous system needs to adjust to the next version of this. And where were you when you first started with London Real? You have decided, care to be on camera? All right, and look at you now. But every time you’ve moved to the next stage of what you’re doing, you’ve had to readjust, your body had to readjust, because it’s familiar with what you are familiar with, the old space and everything around it and how things were, and now you’ve got an amazing team in an amazing place, but everything, and you had to readjust.

55:27 And the same with me, right? Every time I’m moving to the next better version of me, every part of me needs to adjust, and that breaking in order to create something new is the painful part, and that’s where most people go, like, “I’m done with this.” They just shy away from it, and shy away from it because it’s too painful, it’s too much work, and then you think like, “I can’t do it, I should quit.” And so in the monastery it was always about breaking them all and creating a new mold.

55:54 And how did you do that, besides moving you to uncomfortable places to stay? How else would they break that mold? Ah, you know, there’s so many, so many things, you know, that he, I think he understood the mind so well and he was able to look at me and tell right away what areas of the mind I had which were rigid, and then he would go about breaking, either moving me from one hut to another or giving me a job that I think I couldn’t do. One time he told me that he, you know, yeah, after every year he took a group of people on a retreat to different parts of the world, been doing it for 40 something years, and a year after I joined the monastery was this, just as a young grasshopper monk, right, he said, “You are in charge of my travel study program.”

56:41 Like, I don’t know anything about travel and taking a group, you know, organizing this. And you said, “Next year I want to take 72 people, which includes you and me, to Europe on a 12-day trip. You have a year to plan it out, including doing all the other jobs that you have and all the other duties.” Like, okay, I’ll do this. I thought, building a website, advertising it, and after about a nine and a half months or nine months, I had 19 people signed up, a long way from 72, right?

57:13 And I was like, and I remember one of the senior-most saying, “You know what, we should cancel the trip because we have deposits for 72 people and at some point we’re gonna miss the cutoff here and I’ll get our money back. Let’s cancel the trip, get the money back.” Some monks were saying, “Oh, you know, we wish we could make it 25 people because we’re 19, we could probably get six more. If it took nine months to get nineteen, maybe we can get six more in the next three months.”

57:39 And I went to Gurudeva and I said to him, “You know, like what should we do? I’ve been working on this for about nine months and I have nineteen people and we have like three months left to go.” And he said, “We’re gonna get 72 and I’m gonna show you how to get 72.” So he taught me how the mind works, he taught me about the power of affirmation, which we talked about on the previous episode, and how by using affirmation I could create in my mind and shape my mind to attract the things I wanted into my life.

58:06 So I started to do that and some of the other things that he taught me, and four days before we left, exactly 72 people. You know, one of the most amazing experiences in my life, but it taught me the power of my mind and how if I understood the mechanics of it and how it all worked, I could create what I wanted in my life, but you have to understand, and then you have to have the desire. And that’s how he trained me, because ordinarily I would have gone, like, yeah, okay, I’ve got 19 people in nine months, I know I wanted 72, I’ll get up to, like, maybe I’ll make my goal 23, 25, it’s doable, I’ll probably fall short and get 24, but that’s okay.

58:52 That’s how most people see, and after nine months you’re not gonna go, “I’m gonna go from 19 to 72, no way.” But so he broke that way of thinking in me. He showed me that nothing is impossible, that you can attain it if you really want, and that you have that affirmation practice that you can use. Yep. Yes, exactly.

59:11 And you do affirmations a bit different, you have to have three things that you do. Yeah, that makes them special. You are a good student, aren’t you? Try to remember something. No.

59:21 Then three, three things: concise, choice approach, positive words, clear visualization and feeling, and feeling being the most important component, because feeling is emotion, and emotion is energy, and energy is magnetic. You know, Tesla, you know, I think I’ve been, I said this in a previous episode, Tesla had the saying, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” I think Tesla’s an amazing human being, and I think he was more like a mystic scientist than anything else, and you know, and if I were to elaborate on that statement, I would say that everything is made up of energy, and that energy is vibrating at a certain frequency, and your job is to match the frequency of what you want, because that’s harmony, right?

1:00:06 If your team here can match your frequency, then you’re all in alignment and on the same page, and then you work together. It’s like a flock of birds that just flow in harmony. You see them flying in the sky, they never crash into each other, no bump into, “Hey Frank, watch out.” You know, they all fly in harmony. And in the monastery the monks were trained to match Gurudeva’s frequency, to be in the same space of mind that he is, so that we could flow into areas of consciousness that he was functioning in, and the same way that if you want to attract something in your life, you need to understand what that frequency is that you want and then change the energy in your body to match that frequency, and when you do, you attract that.

1:00:54 It’s like the old radios, right? You tune, it’s the station is seventy-four point five FM, and if you get to seventy-four point four FM, you get static and music, seventy-four point six, static and music, seventy- four FM, 74.5, e four point two, two static. And so your goal is to tune your energy to match the frequency of what you want, and then that’s when that attraction comes. A lot of people talk about this law of attraction and stuff, but they don’t really understand it or explain it properly, and I think sometimes the New Age will can just get away by saying all kinds of how the law of attraction, and you know, do this and do that and it will attract it into your life, but there’s no practical step.

1:01:42 So actually understanding the science of how these things work, but once you really understand and then put the hard work into it, these amazing tools have been around for millennia, monks have been using it for thousands of years. There’s a, be concise, concise, positive, with concise positive words, clear visualization, quick visualization and corresponding feeling, right? The feeling is emotion. So when I say corresponding feeling, if you want something, you need to match the frequency.

1:02:09 If you want what you want, so remember what Tesla said, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. Everything is made up of energy, that’s why, and that energy is vibrating at a frequency. So if I want to be in harmony with you, I need to feel how you feel. How does Brian sit and how does he talk and how does he stand? And I, it seemed like actors, that’s what they do, right?

1:02:28 Actors, they, somebody needs to play Cleopatra or King Richard or whatever it may be, they try and feel that person, right, or even James Bond. James Bond has a certain way that he walks and talks and that, so many people have played James Bond, right? What, six or seven people have, but you never go, “Oh, that doesn’t feel like James Bond.” They all have that James Bond walk, because what have they done? They’ve really moved their awareness into that area of the mind and they started to feel the character, how he says, how he talks, you know, the little things that Bond does, you know, how he adjusts his coat, and then you forget that that person is playing James Bond.

1:03:06 You look at that person you go, “That’s Bond.” And that’s really what it is with affirmation, is you trying to change your energy in your mind to match what did I see, one, and when those two things are vibrating at the same frequency, then you attract it. Is that a big thing for a lot of your clients, getting them to do this? Depending on what they want, right? And it’s always about giving the right medicine for the right hand.

1:03:30 Some people don’t want to manifest things. And yeah, I mean, a lot of the people that I work with are extremely successful already in what they do, but what they really want to do is have a better understanding of their mind and really understand their mind deeper and be better at that, and a lot of them also, you know, curiously now, you know, reaching out to me because they really want deeper understanding of spirituality. Why am I here? You know, I run a multi-billion dollar company and I’m one of the best players in the world in my field, and what’s my life about?

1:04:06 You know, why am I here on this planet? Is there reincarnation? Is it one life to be Dionysus game over? Am I going to come back? How am I going to reincarnate?

1:04:16 Is there God? What? Is it a guy in heaven with a beard? What is self-realization? They have no answers to this, and you’ve got to tell us the answers to these things.

1:04:27 Of course. Do you think we’re reincarnated? I just, I do believe in reincarnation, because I don’t believe one life is enough to create who we are today. So I wanted to be a monk since I was four years old. You know, my, I grew up in Malaysia, and one day a monk appeared at my home, right, and he knocked on the front door and my mom invited him.

1:04:50 He was dressed in orange, it’s similar to me, markings on the forehead and everything, and you know, my mom greeted him the traditional way and gave him some food and water and some money and some clothing, and you know, in turn he gave wisdom, and then he left. But when I saw him I said, “That’s me.” Kids want to be firefighters and soccer players, but most people never end up doing that. I saw this and I’m still dressed this way, you know, 40 years later.

1:05:19 So how does a four year old boy, a five year old boy, see this and be so determined and hang on to this determination, and not only just want to live that life but really pursue it and constantly? I mean, there’s so many things I can do as well, all right, but I choose to do this, and I feel that I’ve done the work in past lives, and that’s why it’s so easy for me to do this. I can go live in a monastery away from my family, my friends, wake up at 4:00 in the morning, lead a disciplined life, eat three meals a day, lead a celibate life in the monastery, all the training and everything that comes with the traditional monastery living, room, easy, no problem.

1:05:57 Not saying there’s no challenges in that, there are a lot of challenges, but that’s something I can do very easily. Why? I feel I must have done it before in the past, and that’s why, you know, at a young age I have been so determined to do this, and I feel that’s the, for me, the answer to that is reincarnation. And what are the options, Brian? One is that that’s one life, we’re born, we die, game over, nothing happens, or we die and then this judgment and then there’s heaven and hell.

1:06:26 That’s option one. Option two is we’re going through a process of reincarnation. I don’t like option one because who gets to call the shots? Why is one person born to a million dollar, billion dollar family, has everything they need, and then another person is born in the slums and in some village in China, India, or poverty in America and some poor little American town? But happiness isn’t determined by either one, is it?

1:06:54 It isn’t. But you know, if I had the choice I’d rather be born in a comfortable family than in a slum. Yeah. All right, so who gets to call? If it’s God determining that, then God’s a jerk.

1:07:09 It doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t make sense to me. And is it genetic? Some people go, that’s genetic, it’s DNA. Like, no, it’s not. There’s nobody in my family or previous generations of my family that were a monk or priest, and none of them were entrepreneurs.

1:07:25 They all worked for the government or did some job or another, and I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a priest, I was a monk, so it’s not genetic. There’s nobody in my family’s line that remotely wants to do what I want to do, so how can it be genetic? I don’t think Steve Jobs’s dad was an entrepreneur. Barack Obama’s dad was a politician. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of interesting people in this very intimate environment, and even though my science background tells me that, you know, there isn’t even a consciousness and then, of course, when you’re dead you’re biologically dead, do you still do believe that?

1:08:04 Something inside me believes there’s something more going on here, and then there are just the people, they’re kind of these sources of energy. Okay. And that doesn’t make any sense, but also as a scientist and engineer I also can’t deny some of my observations, and some of my intuition is saying there’s much more going on here than what this science tells me. Consciousness is just a great kind of big red herring. What is that?

1:08:30 How come we can’t explain that scientifically? We can’t. So if you can’t do that, what else can’t we explain? So it makes me, you know, open to some of these other ideas. A couple of things to think about.

1:08:42 I also have an engineering background, as you know. Yeah, law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, so at the point of death we obviously are not just only energy, we, I mean humans are not only energy, with obviously our energy, but we’re also intelligent energy because we have the ability to create, right, which a lot of species on this planet don’t have, that ability to create. We have intelligence, right? We can make smart phones, we can make decisions, we could put something, I’m gonna make a plane fly, a piece of metal fly through the sky while carrying people.

1:09:17 That’s special. So where does that intelligent energy go at the point of death? Death is just disappears and that you cannot be destroyed. So where’s that intelligent energy going? Is it morphing itself into, all of a sudden you’re making planes and now you’re sitting as a piece of rock dust in a hole?

1:09:38 Yeah, it doesn’t make so much sense. Second is, you have two kids, right? Two and zero. When you look at your kids you can see that one portion of your child is made up of things that you put into him, another portion your wife put into him, and then there’s another portion of your child that’s not influenced by you or your wife. Where’s that portion coming from, right?

1:10:07 He has personality, he has traits that you go, like, “Oh, what is that coming from?” So obviously he’s brought that from the previous life, and it’s really easy to observe this in children, adults harder, but in the first four years of a child’s life they’re telling you everything about their previous life. So Brian, if you took your, you know, your wife and your kids and you went on a month off London Real, “I am tired of doing these interviews, I’m going on a break,” my need to do that.

1:10:39 That’ll be the day. Yeah, all right, so you take a month off, you go to Asia, right, you travel around, you go to India, you’re gonna hike the Himalayas, you go to Cambodia, Indonesia, yeah, a fabulous time with your family for a month. All right, you come back home to London. What will you be talking about in the first few days after you come home? My trip.

1:10:59 Your trip, right? You’ll tell your friends, you’ll tell your team, you’ll show photos. So you imagine if you went on a vacation, who are you talking about afterwards? Yeah, so you live for 80 years and you died and you reincarnated, what would you talk about? Your last trip.

1:11:16 So your kids are telling you all the time about the previous life, and because parents are so close-minded they go, like, “Oh, it’s so cute that Johnny is talking about being a soldier. You know, must have seen something on TV or his friends at candy told him about being a soldier.” No, he’s telling you about his last life. My son Caden, yeah, acts out entire monologues in front of me and my wife. I kid you not, like, he stands on the king-size bed and we sit and watch him, in his own language he acts out these entire monologues as if he’s telling the story.

1:11:52 I’ve got a medicine man somewhere and there’s different characters and he’s realizing and seeing things around the thing and he speaks, and I mean, it’s something to behold, and I’m like, maybe he’s trying to tell us something, but she’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and I’m like, everything inside of me tells me, yeah, but there’s something going on here. He’s telling you what he did in his past life, because when you go for a vacation for a month, you talk about it for one or two weeks afterwards. So imagine if he lived, Caden lived 80 years in a previous life doing something that he was passionate about and really involved in, that’s what he’s trying to tell you, and the problem with parents is that they have their own agenda, they’re not open-minded enough or know enough to look and go, “What is he doing?”

1:12:37 I’ll tell you a little story. Those, I just encourage me, I applaud afterwards. Yeah, I don’t even, I think he knows what I’m plotting for, he’s just communicating. He is, yes. Yeah, he is.

1:12:45 And then, you know, and kids are also very psychic at that age, right? In the early years they’re able to look into what we call the astral plane and see beings that don’t exist in the physical plane and communicate with them. Even so, we believe there’s a physical plane in Hinduism and then there’s also an astral plane which exists right here, right now, but it’s outside our visual spectrum. So imagine if my eyes can see between 20 and 40 kilohertz, I’m making up some numbers, I don’t know what the spectral Africa that I do.

1:13:13 All right, how did your engineering school was long to go, the astral plane exists a little bit outside. Have you seen the movie Ghost? Lyrics way ahead, of course. Yeah, so you know when Patrick Swayze dies, Whoopi Goldberg can see into the astral plane, right? So she can see, like, dead people, so she could communicate with Patrick Swayze and other ghosts, and she was like this channel or something like that, and kids are that way too.

1:13:36 Not all kids, but a lot of kids can see, and that’s why when you say like your son’s like almost like he’s talking to somebody, he’s able to see, they’re able to see into that plane for a little bit of a period, a few years, and enough that I kind of lose that ability as they develop the intellect and really get anchored into the physical plane. And then we just condition them out of it too. It’s not doing that. Are you doing it? Yeah, work on your homework, just tears, Nolan, stop talking to your imaginary friend, all right?

1:14:03 No, they’re talking to somebody. So they’ve just come, so when you die you leave the physical plane, you go into the astral plane, you will, you know, somewhere else you’re functioning in the astral plane till it’s time to reincarnate again. So when you come back from the astral plane you go back to the physical plane, there’s a transition period, it’s not binary, it’s not a 0 1, and then there’s a little transition period and the spots of you that are still connected to that will, and you can see and you can communicate with people, and that’s probably who you just, I’m just talking to.

1:14:33 Best thing you can do with children is just be completely observant and see what are they trying to tell you, and really observe, because once you understand what the traits and the characteristics are, you can cultivate it, if you’re humbled enough. Yeah, all right, you can cultivate it. Yeah, yeah, tell me about concentration, because I don’t want to get him not doing those things, but I also have a stepdaughter, she’s 14, and you say a lot of people were never taught to concentrate.

1:14:59 Yeah, and it’s a great point. I was never taught, but it’s because I must have figured out how to do it that I could get through, like, engineering school and I can get to things, so I found that I reverse-engineered it somehow, but how can people think about the fact that they need to maybe learn how to concentrate? just how they need to learn how to find their purpose and be active about it. And so it just takes someone playing the piano. If I wanted to learn how to, if I wanted to play the piano, I need to first learn how to play the piano, have someone teach me, and then the second thing I need to do is practice, practice playing the piano.

1:15:33 How much do I practice? Well, depending on how good I want to be. I want to play for my own at home on the weekend, I might have to practice 20 minutes a week. If I want to play for Julliard, it might be seven hours a day, seven days a week. So the same thing with concentration, right?

1:15:46 Concentration is a science and art. A science because there are clear steps that you need to take to work towards a goal, and then art because it requires repetition and practice, right? So I always say that concentration is a science and art, and learning at a constant rate, you have to understand the mind, right? So as I said before, that you’re not the mind, rather you’re pure awareness moving through different areas of the mind, and I define concentration as my ability to keep my awareness on you for an extended period of time until I make a conscious choice to shift it to something else.

1:16:22 So most people allow someone or something outside of them to control where the awareness goes. So I’m chatting with you, my phone goes bing, I’m picking up, my awareness gets right there, and now the notification comes, my awareness goes there. I see a noise out there, I hear noise out there, my awareness goes over there, right? So my ability to keep my awareness on you or something for an extended period of time is my ability to concentrate. So the first step in teaching your children to concentrate is really teaching them about the separation of awareness and the mind.

1:16:53 They’re not the mind, rather they are awareness moving within the mind, and once they understand this, then you define to them what concentration is, which is keeping awareness on one thing at a time, and then you stay dedicated and like, “Hey, are you here?” Step down and say, “Honey, every time your awareness goes away, can you bring it back?” Or if you’re having a conversation with her and you see her awareness drifting away, thinking about something else, you say, “Honey, can you bring your awareness back to me?”

1:17:17 And then you train them. But you know, one of the biggest lessons I learned in recent years, a couple of years ago I was speaking at an event in South Korea, and so it was called the World Knowledge Forum, about 3000 people, a lot of dignitaries and everything, and I was one of the speakers, and one night they had a special dinner, get-together dinner, and they only invited like 60, 70 people. There were prime ministers and presidents of countries and the athlete coming, say, well then they started and I had some drinks and we were just chatting, nice chatting with a couple of people, and this guy comes up to me, it was like, “Who are you and what’s all this outfit about, right?

1:17:54 What do you speak?” Very direct, very direct and American. I, “How did you guess?” So I tend to say hi, and it was Reince Priebus, Trump’s former chief of staff, White House chief of staff, and I’m not a Trump supporter and probably lose about 5,000 fans for saying that, but that’s okay, who cares. So I tend to him, and obviously, you know, I, my guru taught me a long time ago in the monastery to treat everybody the same.

1:18:24 I’m saying I treated him with respect, and you know, and so he started chatting with him and where I lived, the biggest thing I learned that year was from this man, and in that conversation with him, earlier that day Ban Ki-moon, the former UN Secretary, had talked on the environment and how we had the tipping point right now and if we don’t do anything, when there’s trouble. So it kind of brought up the topic for some reason, we were chatting and, and, and, right, it’s something initially interesting to me. He said the problem with Ban Ki-moon’s talk is he did not make the case.

1:19:01 And I said, “What do you mean by that? Can you explain? I don’t understand this phrase.” And he said, “How do I tell the single mother in Pennsylvania that has two jobs and three kids that she needs to care for the environment, because all she can think about is getting through one job, going to another job, any money coming back, looking after three kids, feeding them, getting sure they do the homework, get them ready for the next day, and then just like crashing in exhaustion and then doing the whole thing again.

1:19:29 She doesn’t care about the environment. How do I make the case to her? And once I can make the case to her, then she’ll buy in.” And that, the trade of making the case really changed my life, because I realized I was traveling around the world teaching people about the mind and concentration, but I never made the case why. So if you want to teach your 14 year old stepdaughter how to concentrate, it’s not enough to go up to her and say, “Honey, you know, I learned about concentration from Dandapani, honey, here’s how to do it.”

1:19:56 You have to make the case to her, why does she need to concentrate, and once you can make the case to her, then she buys in and then she’ll go, “Please teach me,” all right? And a lot of times parents go up to the kids and say, “Okay, son, you need to learn how to concentrate, I watched this YouTube video, I took down the points, because you need to learn how to concentrate.” Oh yeah, that’s another one of 1,000 things you’re telling me to do. You need to make the case to them, and once again, I thought, which means find out what they want in life and show them that this will get them what they want faster or get them what they want.

1:20:30 You get 10 more monk points for that. Really? Yeah, you can catch them in the late. I’ll find that it aligns with their purpose even better. Exactly.

1:20:39 Okay, you really understand the concept, and that’s really what it is, right? So for example, you go up to a child that loves to play Nintendo and you say to him, “I can help you get a better score on your Nintendo.” Talk to me, right? If you want to. And one of the things I teach people to do in learning to concentrate is develop willpower, all right?

1:20:57 So if you go up to a child that loves, you know, a boy or girl that loves to play basketball or soccer, for example, like you know how the last, a soccer game is 90 minutes and in the last 10 minutes everyone on your team is tired and you know you guys are struggling because it’s an exhausting game, I can show you how to develop willpower so that in the last 10 minutes you can keep going and you can summon up all that will and energy to just keep pushing when everybody is falling behind. And that boy loves soccer and he will say, “Please teach me,” right? Even mean, you know, so you need to connect that together and you need to make the case of why they need to learn to concentrate.

1:21:35 You know, and for adults, for me the way I’ve been making the case to them is that ultimately we all want to be happy, right? I think that’s a fair statement to say. I say happiness should never be pursued. Don’t pursue happiness, but rather pursue a lifestyle where the byproduct of that lifestyle results in happiness. I spend time with my family, I feel happy.

1:21:57 Have a glass of wine with someone I like, a love, I feel happy. So I don’t pursue happiness, I pursue a lifestyle, all right? I create, design a lifestyle for myself where the byproduct is happiness, these different experiences. Now how can I be fully present in those experiences, all right? How can I be fully present here with you so that I can get the most of this experience?

1:22:20 I do that by being concentrated. So by learning how to concentrate and keep my awareness on you for an extended period of time, I can fully experience this interview with you, I can fully experience you. The byproduct of that, if I feel satisfied, I feel happy. Fast forward 50 years from now, or fifty-five years from now, I can look back on my life on my deathbed and go, “What an amazing life. I would not have traded it for anything in the world.”

1:22:47 And that’s the case for being concentrated, so that you can truly enjoy every experience in your life and be present, and being present means being able to be concentrated. And even so many people, and I’m gonna rant here for a second, so many people post this little thing on Instagram and Facebook, “Be in the now, be in the moment, be present,” and it annoys the crap out of me, Brian, because they never tell you how to do it, right? Being present is a byproduct of being concentrated.

1:23:15 You cannot be present unless you learn to concentrate. What does being present mean? It’s being in the moment, right? And people talk about in mindfulness, everybody in the world is talking about mindfulness, and they say we need to practice mindfulness. That’s the biggest in the world, you do not practice mindfulness.

1:23:33 That’s an error. I actually went, and my English is not great. I don’t think it’s great. Pretty good. That’s all right, it’s not too bad.

1:23:40 I did the ESL, badly scraped through that, and I went to an Oxford Dictionary and Webster’s dictionary to see, to define, to look at the word mindfulness and see what it means, because you know, if I want to understand an English word and I don’t really know the definition, I look in the dictionary, and it says something about having complete attention of, on a moment-to-moment basis, right? And that’s being concentrated, all right? So mindfulness is a byproduct of that concentration, so you cannot practice mindfulness, but what you can do is practice concentration, and by being concentrated you can be mindful of each moment, but you cannot be mindful of what’s happening each moment unless you’re concentrated.

1:24:29 So you don’t practice mindfulness, you learn and practice concentration in order to be mindful. Mindful is the state of being observant of a moment, a moment, that’s what observation is, you’re aware of each moment. And so I concentrate on nothing, or I just concentrate on what I am doing at that moment? You concentrate on what you’re doing or who you are engaged with. Okay, right.

1:24:52 And if I am meditating or just with myself, I’m concentrating on my breath, or am I trying to concentrate on nothing, or no? And I mean, that’s moving to the topic of meditation, right? And obviously there’s so many types of meditation. In the meditation that I was trained by Gurudeva on, my teacher, well, it’s really about concentrating. You cannot empty your mind, and this is a big false belief about meditation, about emptying your mind.

1:25:18 No, focusing on your breath, how long you want to focus on your breath for. You know, concentration for us was really about focusing on one thing in your mind, all right? And I simply define meditation, and a little way to say that, meditation is having a meeting with your energy, all right? So your energy is always flowing out of you to people and things around you, so when you can withdraw that energy, concentrate it and focus on it, that’s the process of meditation.

1:25:48 So having a meeting with energy. You have meetings with your staff, how often? Every morning I have a meeting with myself, sometimes it’s Excel, but with your team? Oh yes, so every morning we do, and then once a week we have a longer one. Yep.

1:26:01 So you have different desks around the office, I see, and everybody’s sitting at their desk. When you have a meeting, do you just stand there and yell at everyone, or do they all gather in one place? Yeah, we gather. You gather, right, and everyone comes to one place, you meet, you have an agenda, right? I assume you don’t just say, like, “I’m not sure, we’re going to talk about this morning.”

1:26:17 You have an agenda, you infuse an agenda into your team, and then you keep them in the meeting room, you send them back to their desks, they go back. They go back. Meditation is the same way. Energy is always flowing out of you to people and things. It’s about pulling energy to one place, having an agenda for that energy, telling what that energy needs to focus on, changing the vibration of the engine.

1:26:37 Tesla, Lincoln, Delta, energy, frequency, vibration. Pull all the energy in one place, you change the frequency of that energy to the frequency you want, and then you send it back out again. Sports teams do this, they gather on the side of the field, the coach says, “Okay, we had a plan, you went out, you played, now everybody’s off the plan, come back in, regroup, get back on the plan, or change to a modified plan, go back out, do the same thing.” Companies do this, right?

1:27:05 So meditation is having that meeting. But you know, going back to mindfulness, mindfulness, it’s not something you practice. You practice concentration, and that’s something that’s never taught. And you know, the app that I’m creating that I was telling you about is really to teach people not only to have the course on their own concentration that I booked in the course is about, it’s about teaching, and it’s called Unwavering Focus. It’s not only about teaching concentration, but the special feature of the app is that we have a whole ritual section in that.

1:27:34 So I’ve broken the day into four parts, there’s the morning into six-hour segments, so this morning, afternoon, evening and at night, and in each of those four segments I help people create rituals. In the morning you make the bed, you give your spouse, your partner, your undivided attention, and then in the afternoon there’s a couple of other rituals, and the evening, listen, rituals, and the night, the rituals. And every time you do a ritual you rate yourself.

1:27:55 So if you make the bed you can rate yourself zero, one, two, three. Zero, I didn’t make the bed. When I threw the sheet over the bed, too, I kind of made it, kind of nice. Three, I made it like the Four Seasons. So every day you do your ritual, it’s the chop wood, carry water thing, but you rate your ritual, and then after two weeks, a month, a year, we have a graph and data that you can read to see how well you’re performing your rituals, in which part of the day are you doing better, which part of the day you’re not doing so well.

1:28:21 And you concentrate while you’re doing this? Yes, just like you did in the monastery, when you’re sweeping, you’re sweeping. Yeah, when you’re cooking, you’re cooking, when you’re cleaning, you’re cleaning. Yeah, and that’s being mindful. And that’s being mindful, but you can’t be mindful unless you can concentrate on what you’re doing, because mindfulness, if you, and I would suggest with people listening to this interview, go online, go on to Webster’s or Oxford Dictionary, actually look up the word mindfulness and see how it’s defined.

1:28:46 It’s about being aware on a moment-to-moment basis. The only way to do that is to be concentrated, and that’s what being mindful is, and that’s what being present is, is to be able to be completely engaged and full attention on to who and what you’re engaged with. That’s the state of concentration. The byproduct of that, you can be aware of what’s happening on a moment-to-moment basis. And these rituals that you’re gonna teach on your app, you know, gets me in the, the more I can do these rituals and do them well, it gets me into this habit of mindfulness and concentration.

1:29:19 Is that the idea? Exactly. So take an Olympian, for example, a sprinter. So it was Usain Bolt, I don’t know very much about this man, but I’m gonna make a few assumptions, Brian, you tell me if my assumptions are off. Okay.

1:29:32 Fastest man on earth, right? I’m sure every day his life is disciplined. He runs every day, this is when he was still competing, runs every day, he goes to the gym, he’s ripped, right, there’s not an ounce of fat on him, he eats healthy, drinks a lot of water, I’m sure he stretches, gets quick sprints, you don’t want to pull a muscle so he stretches. Is that fair question? He does.

1:29:53 There was legs. Yes. Yeah, so his whole day is filled with rituals preparing him for nine point five eight seconds or whatever the time was, right? And that’s how you should look at your life, your whole day needs to be filled with rituals so that ultimately when you’re doing something, when you’re spending time with your family having dinner, that half an hour you can be completely concentrated and present. But you can’t expect to be all over the place, distracted all day, and then go home for dinner at 8:30 at night and hope to sit with your family and concentrate for half an hour and have dinner, when for 23 hours and 30 minutes you’ve been practicing distraction.

1:30:33 You need to look at your life the same way, and the Olympian might look at his or her life, where the whole day is filled with rituals. And in the monastery we meditated as a group for one hour a day, that’s all we meditated. People always think that monks meditate all day and they’re slowly sweeping the sidewalks, but we don’t make it 108. What are we doing the rest of the day? Gurudeva taught us to practice concentration, not to practice mindfulness, practice concentration.

1:30:59 So if you’re talking, speaking with another monk, you give that person your undivided attention. If you’re sweeping, you do that. If you’re programming, which we all had Macs, you know, program, then you give the computer your undivided attention. So 23 hours of practicing concentration. So when we sat down to meditate, what state of mind do you think we were in?

1:31:17 It was so amazing when you sat in the room with those 27 monks and Gurudeva, it was laser focus, everybody was concentrating, that’s what we practiced all day. And I think people take a different approach right now, they think, you know, if I meditate for 10 minutes in the morning, I’m good, I’m Zen, and the rest of the day I can just do whatever I want to do, and the rest of the day is constant multitasking, so I’m doing many things at once in a full way. So what do you become good at?

1:31:41 You become good at whatever it is you practice, because practice doesn’t have the ability to discriminate between what’s a positive practice and whatever what’s a negative practice. So if you practice something negative all the time, you become really good at it. So if you practice distraction all the time, 10 hours a day, what do you become good at after six months? Distraction. Anybody practicing anything for 10 hours a day becomes really good at it, and the truth is, with 24 hours in a day, most people sleep what, seven, eight hours, so you don’t wake for sixteen, and out of the sixteen hours are they only practicing distraction for seven or eight hours?

1:32:12 Probably more like 13 or 14 hours a day of practicing distraction. So if you do that seven days a week, imagine if you practice playing the piano 14 hours a day, seven days a week, how good would you be after seven hours, six months? Really amazing, you think? Yes. So how good are people at distraction?

1:32:30 If you look at most people out there, damn, you’re talking about mastery. They have mastered the art of distraction. These people are to be acknowledged and respected because of the dedication and devotion they have given to the art of distraction, but they don’t even know that. They don’t even know. How humbled are they?

1:32:54 So really concentrate, and that’s your ultimate message, is concentrate right now on everything you’re doing and be there in a full way, be mindful of everything you do, even your distraction, be mindful of. Or if you’re just, if you’re gonna go watch a video, go watch that video, yes, be present in watching the video, right? But you know what, at that event in South Korea, Hillary Clinton also spoke at the event, and she said something really interesting.

1:33:20 She said apparently there’s some research to show that young kids these days can only concentrate for a length of seven seconds. And she made a statement after that saying, how do you expect to solve problems in the world if your attention span is only seven seconds? You know, concentration is at the very core of all human endeavors and success. You know, you’ve interviewed some amazing human beings, how concentrated are they in what they do, all right? How can you solve problems if you can’t stay with it long enough to come to a solution?

1:34:00 And that’s why I really hop on understanding the mind first and then learning to concentrate, because I feel if humanity can learn to do this, they can be better, they’re better athletes, better artists, better martial artists, better singers, performers, sports people, engineers, doctors, because at the center of success is your ability to harness the power of my mind and direct it in a single-pointed process. It’s one thing, stay with it long enough so that you can come to solutions, create beautiful things, but if you can’t concentrate you can’t do any of these things, and we can’t solve the problems of the, well, environmental problems, so many environmental things going on these days. Why are we ignoring the environment?

1:34:43 Because people are selfish and people don’t have the vision to see beyond themselves and into the future. So Brian, let me, I’m gonna ask a series of questions, you give me, and some of these answers are probably very obvious, but humor me and answer. Please, as long as I get some more monk points, I’ll do this. You look at tons of monk points here, you’re doing pretty well, I think you’re up to 55 now. You can catch them in a verified it.

1:35:06 And I’m interested, do you love your kids? Yes. Some years from now your children will have kids, potentially, unless they become nuts. Well, you love your grandkids? Yes.

1:35:19 Yeah, and if you were so blessed to be able to see your great-grandkids, would you love them? Yes. How much would you love your great-grandkids? So imagine yourself in the future, you saw these little ankle-biters running around. I mean, I’ve seen my grandparents, the way they looked at me and their grandkids, and I can just see the light up in their eyes, so I’m sure I would be over the moon.

1:35:42 Great-grandkids, we’re talking? Yeah, I mean, I met my great-grandma once, but yeah, I mean, that’s a whole nother level of seeing, right? Something even younger and more beautiful. So yes, you probably love them more than your grandkids. I mean, this would be like an amazing, yeah, yeah, I guess that gets tricky where you say that, but right, I mean, you kind of know what I’m saying.

1:35:59 You do, not like you would love one more than the other, but it would be amazing to have that experience to know your great-grandkids, right? It’s a special thing. Now the next question is, and I’m not saying to you but in general to the general you, what are you doing so that you can create an environment where those grandkids, great-grandkids that you love so much can thrive? And when I ask people this, nobody says anything, and every now and then somebody will say, “Yeah, I’m doing something that most people don’t.”

1:36:28 Right, so if you’re gonna love your great-grandkids so much, you know, and when I look at your face when you describe that, your great-grandkids, you just lit up. It’s like, wow, I would love to hold my great-grandpa. So what are you doing to help create an environment where they can live and where they have clean water, clean air and clean food and they can thrive in? Because if we keep excuse my friends screwing mother nature in the back, you know, we’re not gonna have a planet where our great-grandkids can thrive and live in, right?

1:37:01 It just shows the selfish nature of humans, that we are masters of living in the moment and thinking of purely by ourselves and screw the future and screw it. And you know, people, you know, talk about the future of humanity is in space, you know, we need to be more money into space programs and explore space. I know very little about space, Brian, but as far as I know, and people can correct me here, there is no planet like Earth anywhere in the known galaxy, and we’ve been doing space exploration for what, 40, 50 years on this planet.

1:37:36 We have oceans, we have jungles, we have deserts, we have mountains that touch the scrape the sky, snow clad mountains, we have aurora borealis, we have rainbows, we have rain, with waterfalls, with humans, we have animals, we have insects and creatures, we have things living in the ocean that we can’t even see because they’re too deep. We have the most beautiful planet in the known galaxy and we’re pissing on it so that we can go to Mars and explore a planet that has no oxygen and gravel. Why the, are we dumb or are we dumb?

1:38:18 We have everything we need here, and if we can’t take care of what we have, how can we take care of what we find? We have the most beautiful thing in the world right here in our house and we can’t take care of it, so we expect to go somewhere and find something and then take care of that. It’s so ridiculous. There’s nothing like Earth in this whole world. We’re so blessed to live on this planet, right, and yet we don’t take care of it.

1:38:46 So how can we change that conversation, because there’s people talking about this, but there’s equally a certain number of people that just say, no, no, no, let’s just have the phone now, let’s, you know, you know, it’s real oil now, well you have loot the world now, hey, that. And I think the way to stop is to uplift human consciousness, right? You can teach again, you know, going back to the making the case, right? If you really look at it, right, if you, if you try to tell people about, then, right, yeah, you can make the case and sell it to them and say, like, “Hey, you know, we need a great place for your grand-grandkids to live in,” and stuff, you can talk about the environment, how much problem we’ve got, but I think ultimately what we need to do is uplift human consciousness so that people can stop thinking about themselves all the time and learn to self-serve, serve humanity, how people give, make a difference in the planet, you know, and that’s when, you know, if you’re so self-absorbed in yourself and you can’t see what’s around you, you don’t know what other people need or want, want to help, you don’t know what the environment needs, and I think by uplifting human consciousness we get to people to start thinking that it’s not only about me but we, there are other people living and we live in this planet and we all share it and we all need to help each other because we can’t get through it alone.

1:40:07 The only way you can produce London Real episodes is because you have an amazing team, there’s no way you can do this if you’re a one-man show. Is that a fair statement? Yes. I used to try and nearly kill me, right? Yeah, in the same way I have a small team that helps me in, there’s no way I can do what I do if I didn’t have the support that I have, all right?

1:40:24 So we all need one another, all right? And we need to understand that all the food that you get so easily in the grocery store comes through a chain of hundreds of people, from the farmer to the driver to, you know, the people that package it so you can bring it to you so that you can walk in this store and just pick it up and put it in your basket and take it back home, right? So we need each other and we need to start thinking. My suggestion, as you know, when you wake up in the morning, ask yourself, how can I make a difference in the world today?

1:40:54 How can I make a difference in someone else’s life? Make that your goal every day, every morning you wake up, one of your goals should be, today I’m going to uplift someone. It’s going to be Joe, it’s going to be Ruth at my office, and I’m gonna do something nice for her or something nice for him, because then it starts to train you to think about someone else, and then start thinking, what can I do for the environment today? Maybe I won’t use as much water, maybe I’ll see, if I see trash on the ground I’ll try to recycle it, I’ll put it away.

1:41:25 You know, maybe more mindful about what I’m consuming, maybe I won’t use the straw today and I’ll just drink out of the cup, so I won’t pollute the world with straws. But unless we start thinking about more than ourselves, it’s gonna be a really tough battle. Do you also think that concentrating and being mindful and just also doing these virtual practices are also the way of getting us to a higher level of consciousness? For sure, because you know, if you can’t look at yourself and say, concentrate on you long enough, how can you understand you and how can you see the problems within you, and then how can you evolve to the next level?

1:42:03 We talked earlier before the show, Brian, about how, you know, this thing that, you know, like you and I have, at least, of striving to be the better versions of ourself, right? Every day I’m trying, every day, every day trying, every day. Yeah, it’s hard, it’s a lot of hard work. I wake up every day and I give life 100%. I go pedal to the metal from the moment I wake up to, like, crash at night.

1:42:27 It is not one day that I don’t push this, you can ask my wife, and that’s something she’s always concerned about, like, you push yourself too hard, but this is my life, right? I give it everything every day, and for me to be the better version of myself, I need to be concentrated long enough so that I can turn my gaze inward, look at myself and go, where are my flaws, be humble enough to say I have these problems, and then stay concentrated long enough on it so that I can overcome them and be a better version of me. But some of these problems have taken, in my case, why I believe in reincarnation, have taken many lifetimes to create.

1:43:09 So I have problems that I can solve in a day, I promise, that sometimes require me a few months, and then problems that I have, characteristic traits that I have within me that I’ve been working on for decades, Brian, right? People see me dressed up like this and they go, like, “Ah, spent 10 years in the monastery, discipline, waking up in the morning, he must be perfect.” And people say things like, “Oh, don’t apologize, the master, concentration master, managing your energy,” and he’s, you know, people say in text, “Oh, you’re a sage and an enlightened being.”

1:43:41 What? I never claimed to be a master at concentration. I am fairly decent at it, but I’m not. I have, I am flawed in so many ways and I have so many problems and I have so many traits and personality traits that I really need to change, but some that I’ve taken dec lifetimes to create are so hard and within me that it’s going to take a while to reshape them, and in order to stay on it long enough to reshape it, I need to be concentrated, because if it’s taken me five lifetimes to create negative trait A, then it’s not going to take me one day to change it, it might take me 10 years, so 20 years to change that personality trait.

1:44:24 So I need to stay concentrated long enough on that, constantly working on it, massaging it for 10 years with focus till it changes. So if I can’t concentrate, how am I going to change? I’m gonna work on it for a day, two days a week while I’m inspired, and then I move on to the next thing. So concentration helps us to look within, first of all, be concentrated long enough to identify the positive strengths and the negative weaknesses, build the positive, work to change the negative, and then in order to change the negative, it’s gonna take time and we need to stay concentrated long enough to keep working on it, to keep massaging it.

1:45:03 You know, so in some, you could take five years to change and some things could take 20, 30 years to change. I have worked on certain things that have taken me 30 years to change. Me too, right? Yeah, and it’s, you know, and it’s painful, it’s sad, it’s disappointing, because you go like, 30 frickin’ years, come on, you know? And how many times in those thirty years have I failed, I couldn’t even begin to tell you, right?

1:45:27 And every time I fail, I’m like, “Oh my god, I’ve been working on this for so long, why can’t I get over it? It’s not like I’m not trying.” You know, and sometimes you cry, sometimes you decide you’re just like, “Oh my god, what is it going to take to overcome this?” But I never give up, right? I stay concentrated on it and I just keep working, because I know my personality traits that I don’t like are no match for my willpower.

1:45:54 Somebody is going to break one day and it’s not gonna be me, so it, that personality trait’s gonna break and give up. Oh, I am, and I’m not gonna give up, there’s absolutely no way, this is never going to happen. I will fight with it till it’s dead, till I’m dead, and then if I have to reincarnate and keep working on it, I will come back and I will keep working on it, that personality trait, till I overcome it, but I’m not going to give up, right? And, but for that I need to be concentrated, and unless I can stay focused on that one thing long enough and work on it, it’s never going to change.

1:46:27 That’s why concentration is at the key of all, you know, human growth and endeavors and change, and part of really uplifting human consciousness. So anyone can do anything they want to if they concentrate and give it enough time, and it might take a lifetime or two, but you can get there. You can, haven’t you? How many people have you interviewed? Over 500, and I’ve seen a lot of your shows and some of these people, amazing things.

1:46:54 How long have they stayed with something to achieve it? Oh, I mean, some of them just, yeah, the darkness, the brutal Mastretta loneliness, yeah, the failure after failure after failure that very few people see. Yeah, luckily we get to talk about it in here, all right. Yeah, it’s, it would move it, it would crush most people, but they were, I, they had a purpose and that’s what got them through, and they were focused on it, right? They stayed with it, they stayed with it till it manifested, and not only till it manifested.

1:47:23 You know, you said something to me earlier before the show, you said, you know, chop wood, carry water, until you achieve enlightenment, and then after you realize the self, you chop wood and carry water, all right? So these people get to the top, they get to where they want to go, and then they keep doing it, it’s not like they stop, all right, because to maintain that state and to even go beyond, you have to keep working with yourself. So the one thing that they have is the ability to stay concentrated long enough with that thing, even if it took them 20, 30 years to actually get where they want to get.

1:48:01 So if you can’t be concentrated, if you’re distracted all the time, you’re never gonna get that powerful. Yeah, I think we have this crisis, some of my guests have said we’ve got 50 years to figure this out or it’s gonna be too late, the environment. Yes, and I think I agree with you, I think we have to fix this problem from the inside out and get a massive shift in human consciousness. That’s kind of the only way, because we’ve done the logical arguments, we’ve done the emotional arguments, we have to give it a daughter.

1:48:30 Yeah, doesn’t do that, doesn’t do it. You think about your grandkids, I mean, that doesn’t seem to do it, which is hard to believe. Yeah, and we’ve got older people, 67 year old people and governments, business making these decisions, strange, and then it’s like, but wait a second, like you said that simple exercise, think about your grandkids or your great-grandkids, yeah, look at the world they’re gonna live in. It, I mean, it’s pretty crazy. So what else can we do?

1:48:51 The only other way is to go in from the inside then and get them to another level of higher realization, of higher consciousness, and it starts by getting people to stop thinking about themselves so much, right? Right, we need to learn to serve and not think about ourselves and think about everything and everyone around us and the environment, and only when we can get to do that can we start to think, like, can we see, oh my god, that’s a problem. But if I’m always looking at me and thinking, “I’m gonna take this selfie, and that wasn’t a good one and let me take another one,” then I don’t see what’s around me and I don’t see the problems.

1:49:25 You know, for me one of the saddest things, you know, I live in New York City and walk around Manhattan on trash day, you know the, you know, I mean Manhattan’s on a grid and, like, every corner there’s trash cans overflowing with trash. Every day there’s bags and bags and bags of trash all along the street, and I think to myself, this is one city and eight million people, the amount of trash we generate, it’s mind-blowing. Where is all this trash going?

1:49:52 It’s getting buried, and then people don’t see, and the people just consume. You go to Starbucks, you buy a coffee, a cup, you drink, you just throw it away without any thought of where that is going and how is that being impacted. By bottles of water, then you just take water from home in the water bottle, you know, consumed. What about sand is just, it’s, it is devastating to think, you know, the seven billion plus people on this planet, how many are truly doing anything, you know, to care for the planet?

1:50:24 And yeah, who is walking towards the edge of the cliff, it’s very scary. Yeah, tell me about you, what are you gonna be doing in ten years? I know you’ve got this place down in Costa Rica, you know, are you gonna disappear from our world, are you gonna be down there holding your own monastery, being the guru? Yeah, what is your plan? Definitely no plans to be, it’s not my job, it’s not what I signed up for in this life.

1:50:50 My job is to share, continue to share the teachings of my guru. I owe him my life, you know, it is and has been the greatest honor of my life to serve him, you know, it truly has. Okay, you get emotional thinking about him? Yeah, I mean, sounds like an incredible guy. He changed my life, he completely changed my life, so my job is to give back, to serve him, and how can I serve him?

1:51:20 I want to be a good student, right, to do everything he told me to do, to put all his teachings into practice, and the second is to share it with the world and help uplift human consciousness, and that’s my job. My primary job is self-realization, that’s number one, even above serving my guru, that’s number two. My number one goal is self-realization. I have a lot of work to do on myself, Brian, I’ve got a long way to go, and part of creating this project in Costa Rica is to to work on my personal enlightenment.

1:51:55 You know, there’s a monk that lived in India called Ramana Maharshi, died in 1950, it’s an amazing person, he had a beautiful saying which I really loved. He said, “Your greatest contribution to humanity is your own self-realization, your own enlightenment. As you uplift yourself, you have to lift everyone else around you, all right? A version 2.2 of Brian is better than version 2.1, right? As you could move from 2.1 to 2.2, and by 2.2 you can affect so many more people in a different way.

1:52:26 So my goal is to work on myself in Costa Rica, really work towards my self-realization, be a better human every day. Second, serve my guru, shags teachings with the world. We’re creating a spiritual sanctuary with 33 acres, we’re creating a botanical garden, part of wanting to teach people about the environment and protect species, the sanctuary for animals, but not just a garden that people can come and enjoy, it’s a spiritual educational garden. So rather than just walking through it and looking at beautiful trees and plants and animals, we’re going to teach people about different things, and the garden is broken up into seven segments, and as you walk through the path going from one segment to another, you learn about different states of mind, and in each garden you’ll learn about one tool.

1:53:10 Here’s how you develop willpower, and in this part of the garden you learn about your subconscious and how to work with your past, and in this part of the garden you learn about your intuition and how to cultivate intuition. So when you finish walking through this garden, you leave with a bunch of tools. So everyone that comes will not only have a beautiful experience of walking through the garden, but they’ll have to leave with tools to uplift their consciousness, which then hopefully gets them to view the world in a different way and start doing work, right?

1:53:41 And it sounds like Disneyland for the mind. It’s, I can, can I steal that? Yeah, you can have it. I want to come, I want to come this time. You’re welcome.

1:53:50 Let’s bring it to him. It sounds amazing, and it sounds like, you know, if I was to visit this version of this, you know, a hundred years ago somewhere, it would be one thing, but if I actually had watched you, like, on London Real and then knew all what you were all about, it feels like when I arrived in Costa Rica I’d be like, wow, this is, I really want to see what this guy created, because you know your motives are so genuine and real. It seems like you really want to construct these things for people to feel, you know, and we, you know, I mentioned last time to you we have a fifty year plan and we have a 300 year plan.

1:54:24 Tell me about the three year, yeah. So I went to La Sagrada Familia, the church in Barcelona, okay, that Gaudi started in the 1920s, and I got fascinated with him building this thing that was never gonna be built when he was alive and it was gonna take over a hundred years, and he said that’s okay because my investor is not in a rush, and its investor, I guess, was God. Yeah. And so I love this concept of one a 100 year plan, and so few years ago I said I have a hundred year plan for London Real, which means it doesn’t have anything to do with my ego or my legacy, because it’s around way after I’m gone, and it’s not about sinning, it’s about serving, you know, it’s about a goal that’s bigger than my accolades and my profit or my anything.

1:55:05 And so when I heard your 300 year plan I was like, now that’s next level. I really want to hear about this. I’ll tell you how it came about. Well, first of all, I have to give credit to my guru, because you know, when he died he told us amongst get rid of all his stuff and not create a museum for himself, because he didn’t want people coming there and making it all about him, like where you go to the monastery and all of a sudden you see, oh, this is Gary Davis’ shoe, and this is this robe, and these are the beads.

1:55:32 You know, he wanted it to be about the teachings, it wasn’t about him, because he was trying to extinguish celebrity culture. He was trying to distinguish, so celebrity culture, exactly. And that’s, you know, this whole culture around influencers and public figures and celebrities is a real problem in today’s world as well, and he was trying to get rid of that, it wasn’t about him, it was about the teachings and tools. So that’s something I really want to keep in mind, you know, when you go to Costa Rica you’re not gonna see a statue of me anywhere, a painting of me, or, you know, in the god, and, you know, a little sign that says “Dandapani did this.”

1:56:04 No, forget about me, it’s really about serving. The 300 year plan came because my wife and I, we had 16 and a half acres of land and we saw the property next to us and we really loved it, but we didn’t have the money to buy it, and on that property we saw a giant tree, huge, it was like 4 meters wide at the base, must be 300 years old at least, and I remember the first time, like five, six years ago, and now we bought the property, so we have 33 acres, and that tree. Remember what my wife and I, standing at the base of the tree, I’m like, wow, what an amazing experience, and at the bottom there’s a giant tree at least 300 years old, and I thought to myself, how do I have this experience of being so humble to something so big and old, right?

1:56:49 A couple of ways. One, then nobody deforested it, Costa Rica, which I think 70 or 80 percent of Costa Rica was deforested for cattle, honey, right? So a lot of these trees got cut down. Second is 300 years ago somebody planted this tree, protected it, knowing that they would never experience it, because by the time they died the tree would only be two feet wide, but they planted it so that somebody 300 years from today will have the experience I’m having, they will be able to stand and go, like, wow, isn’t Mother Nature amazing, this is so cool.

1:57:26 So I will never have this experience, Brian, because the trees that I plant will be about this big by the time I’m dead, but you know, your great-grandkids that you love so much, that your face lit up when you thought about them, they will stand in front of this tree one day, 200 years from now, 300 years from now, and have that experience, and that’s why we have the 300 year plan. How can I create something that’s beautiful, that’s there to serve the environment, that’s there to serve humanity, and then make sure that it’s protected and that it’s endowed financially so that it can keep going? You know, and one of the flags I get quite often on online is that, you know, people are puzzled that I am selling an online course on meditation.

1:58:12 People go, “Meditation should be free, it shouldn’t be sold.” Like, where do you come up with that stupid notion? You know what should be free? Water, because we need water to survive, we don’t need meditation. But why isn’t water free?

1:58:27 Because someone has to go to the mountain or some river or a well somewhere and collect the water, then they need to send it to your house so that you can go and the water comes out of the tap, so they have to build pipes. I need to filter the water because a bear pooped in the forest and it’s probably in the water, so they need to clean the water, build pipes, filtration system, run the filtration system, pay some guys or girls to be there managing the filtration system, send the water, build pipes, big huge trenches through cities, put all the pipes, maintain the pipes, send it all the way to your house so you have the convenience of turning the tap open and getting fresh water. So you have to pay for that, everything requires money.

1:59:09 Like someone wants to buy London Real’s courses by Brian Rose, as an academy, why are we paying for this? Well, he has people to feed, they work for him, need, what, I have a life, they want to go out and have dinner tonight, maybe a glass of wine, and you know, buy the family something nice. So Brian needs to charge because he has electricity, he lives in London, rent’s ridiculous. So that’s why we charge for the things. You’re comfortable with the economics because it’s reality, because they have a reality, and the people that think that something shouldn’t be paid for are living in delusion.

1:59:44 They can’t, like, “Well, I know some guru living in India, he doesn’t charge for anything, everything is free.” Yeah, because he’s got 40 millionaires that are funding him, he has a congregation of 5000 people putting money in the coffers, the same way that the church has a donation box and people walk in the church, drop money in the donation box. How does the church pay for electricity? Government gives the church free electricity, right? Pay for water?

2:00:13 The priest goes to the bathroom and flushes after he pees, somebody needs to pay for that water. And your guru had funding to set out for you nurse? Yeah, exactly. People just need to kind of, they need to understand, they need to understand. I think here’s the biggest misunderstanding: they feel that when you spray quality and money don’t mix, that if you’re spiritual you shouldn’t make money, that money is evil and money is bad, and being spiritual means you don’t care about money, being spiritual means you should live in poverty, in simplicity, then you can’t have nice things, you can’t surround yourself with nice things.

2:00:52 And I used to have that mindset before I went to the monastery. It’s Gurudeva that changed my mindset, because he surrounded himself with the best things. MacBooks for every monk, the best, not only MacBooks, the best Macbooks, iPhones for every monk. And there was, he was having an interview with a reporter who wasn’t very nice and respectful, and she asked him, like, because whenever he traveled he stayed in 5-star hotels, and this reporter goes, “You know, you’re a monk, you’re a nun, see it, Hindu monk, so when you travel, why do you stay in 5-star hotels?”

2:01:27 Gurudeva David looked at her and said, “Well, because there are no six-star hotels.” What did he mean by that? Because there wasn’t nothing better. If there was a six-star hotel, I’d go stay in a six-star hotel. So the best for him allows him to deliver his message.

2:01:44 The best, yes, it’s an uplifting environment, he’s in the right space of mind. But what he meant by that is that why are you staying, if I start talking, because there’s nothing about it in those days, I’d go stay in it. But the understanding here also brings all the things, a few things I learned in this area from him, and one is that if you strive for the best on the outside, you’re gonna strive for the best on the inside. If you compromise on the outside, you’re gonna compromise on the inside.

2:02:10 As you’re working towards self-realization, you’re gonna get along the way and you’re like, “Yeah, this is good enough. You know, I felt a sense of peace, a centeredness, a feeling of calm, this is really good, I’m very satisfied with that, it’s good enough.” No, it’s not good enough, right? And you start compromising on the outside, you’re gonna compromise on the inside. The other big thing I learned from him is that money is not a bad thing.

2:02:36 There’s nothing wrong with money, and it doesn’t mean you can’t be spiritual, that you can’t have money. One of my goals in life is to make as much money as possible. Really? It truly is. One of my goals in life is to make as much money as possible.

2:02:50 Now ask me why. Why? Thank you for asking. I never thought you’d ask. Why?

2:02:56 Because with money I can impact humanity and I can impact the environment. One of my mentors, my entrepreneur mentors, his name is Steve Hall, somebody I really love and admire, he said to me a beautiful phrase: profit is for the purpose of impact. Profit is for the purpose of impact. I cannot create impact if I don’t have the money, right? Because if I want to build an online course about concentration, I want to build an app that can help people create rituals in their day to be better at concentration, we’re at the contents in English and I want to get it translated in different languages, make it available for free for underprivileged people, I need to pay service, I need to pay technical people, I need to pay the guy that’s filming, like the guys that are filming this, you pay them, right?

2:03:44 Are they doing charity, right? Yes. And they want to be paid well, all right? And I have to pay all these things, that requires money. How can I impact humanity, the environment, the world, if I don’t have money, right?

2:03:58 If I can make as much money as possible, I can take that and I can impact. Profit is for the purpose of impact, and my goal is to impact humanity and in that impact environment, for that I need money, right? The right use of money, it’s not a bad thing. The profit is used to make a difference, just serve selflessly, it’s a beautiful thing. And that said, and if profit is also used for your own personal enjoyment, that’s also not bad.

2:04:30 If you want to stay in a nice hotel or go out for a nice meal with your family or go on a wonderful holi, that’s not a bad thing. But you know, if you feel like you need to have five hundred Ferraris, consider having two and then using the rest of the money to make a difference. Why do people think money is evil and think that spirituality and money cannot work together? I have no idea. You know, I don’t know where that notion came from.

2:04:53 You know, so many people have just such confused understanding about spirituality and the spiritual path. They also think material things of that, you know, that if you’re spiritual you shouldn’t have material possessions. The reason monks, at least in our tradition, don’t have material possessions, I don’t, I wouldn’t say we don’t have, we have a few material possessions, we obviously had a Mac, iPhone. The reason is that material things can consume energy.

2:05:19 So in Hindu philosophy we believe we have a physical body and within our physical body is an energetic body, and in the energetic body we have what’s called a nadi, it’s an energetic tube. Almost imagine a garden hose that connects me to my iPhone, to my possessions and to people, and through that garden hose energy flows out of us. So if I had a hundred possessions I would have a hundred tubes and there would be a little bit of energy flowing through each of those tubes, so I’d be losing energy.

2:05:51 But if I had two possessions, then I’d only have two tubes and energy flowing out to those two things. So monks have fewer possessions so they have less loss of energy. One of the goals for the monk is conservation of energy, hence why monks are celibate. In Hinduism sex is not considered bad. Obviously we wrote the manual on sex, the Kama Sutra, so you know, if you want to have sex, here’s the book, right?

2:06:17 So we have no problem with sex. There’s a billion Hindus in the world, obviously they’re thriving in this, right? All right, so sex is not considered bad. Why the celibacy? The celibacy is about the conservation of energy, because the sexual fluid is considered to be sacred and powerful, right?

2:06:34 The 500 people, don’t people that you interviewed, human men and women that are impacting the world, right, each one of them is created from one tiny sperm and one tiny egg, that’s all it took, came together, met, nine, ten months later you got this human being that’s changing the world, right? I always ask people this, this is London Real, right? How many jugs of sperm have gone down the shower drain, onto a blank head, onto a bed sheet, some way, all right?

2:07:03 Can you imagine if it took one sperm and one egg to create so-and-so who’s impacting the world, what about the jug of sperm? Dude, did you find you had more energy when you were celibate? Yeah, for sure. All right, so as a monk, the goal is conservation of energy through managing and harnessing and channeling the sexual fluid, which we never get trained to do. So people struggle, everyone struggles, I struggle, you know, anybody that doesn’t struggle with it is lying, because it’s the natural need of humanity to create, to procreate, right?

2:07:37 That’s how the species survives, and we need to procreate so that we can come back, even monks can reincarnate so they can attain enlightenment, right? Monks come and carnate people on procreating, right? So we need to procreate, so natural, that it’s one of the hardest things to harness and overcome, and they didn’t teach you how to do that. That’s one thing they didn’t teach you how to do, not growing up. Okay, but they’re not in the monastery?

2:07:59 Yes they do, they do teach you how to do that, because asking someone to be celibate without teaching them how to harness and manage their sexual fluid energies, if you don’t teach them how to do it, then problems arise. All of a sudden the altar boy starts to look like Cindy Crawford. Right, now I’m showing my age because I don’t know who the latest super, all right. Yeah, you’re not showing your age. Well, nope.

2:08:20 So just to finish that point, so harnessing the sexual fluid, conservation of energy, having a minimal material possessions, conservation of energy. Again, the whole goal is to first conserve energy, second a cute, first I would say, let me back up, say the first goal is to prevent the hemorrhaging of energy, the loss of energy, second conserve it, third accumulate. One of the goals in life is to accumulate as much energy as possible, take that accumulated energy and focus it towards what you want to manifest in your life.

2:08:54 And I always say to people, life is a manifestation of where you invest your energy. Whatever you put energy into will start to manifest in your life. So energy, the best way to look at energy is to look at energy the same way you look at water. So if I took a watering can and I water the garden bed with the weeds, do the weeds grow, the flowers grow? Both, right?

2:09:11 Yeah, because water can’t tell the difference between the weeds and flowers. Energy is the same way too. Whatever I put energy into will grow. If I put energy into something negative it will grow, if I put energy into something positive it will grow. Energy has no ability to discriminate between positive and negative.

2:09:25 Whatever I put energy into will grow, so your life is a manifestation of where you put your energy into, where you invest your energy. So the more energy you invest into something, the more it will grow. So then comes to the topic which I call, I’ve, you know, when I talk and do some of my workshops, I call it the, that the workshop, the economics of energy. How do you manage energy? So first step, stop hemorrhaging energy, second step, conserve it, third step, accumulate, take that accumulated energy and you invest it into what you want to grow in your life, all right?

2:09:59 And that’s one of the goals, and that’s why you have a minimal amount of material things, but for some. And that’s the reasoning behind it, but somehow humanity, without understanding this, has gone like, “Oh look, the monks don’t really have possessions, so material things are evil, they’re bad.” There’s nothing not uplifting about a Ferrari. When I stand next to a Gaudi, I go, “That’s a nice car,” and I don’t go like, “Oh my god, this is depressing.” I feel uplifted, right?

2:10:27 I walk into a five-star hotel, I feel uplifted, there’s nothing wrong. Right, so don’t confuse that kind of Spartan practice to conserve energy with the lack of interest in money, which can be used to do anything you want and maybe even push forward a great message. Exactly. Yeah. Right, you look at what you do, how many people have benefited from London Real, yeah, how many messages do you get, people telling you that you’ve impacted, that like thousands of thousands, and I think like a quarter billion people have watched this show.

2:10:57 So one of the knowing things in my life is when I travel around the world, people come up to me every place I go, “Oh, London Real was so amazing.” Like, what about me? London Real, London Real, I stop it, enough already, all right. But you’ve taken your efforts, your time, the amount of energy you sacrifice, your money you’ve poured into this, you probably got two points where you and your wife going like, “Oh my god,” right? In the same way, and you invested your heart and your soul into creating this so that you can impact it, impact humanity and change thousands of lives, millions of lives around the world, and the same way, right, you know, without money we can’t impact, and there’s nothing wrong with money, there’s nothing wrong with material possessions.

2:11:40 Like I said, if you have five hundred Ferraris then that’s something else, you know, it’s okay to have one Ferrari and put the rest of the money into impacting humanity. Yeah, funny enough, this is a big hang-up with many of my students in my accelerator, and they don’t, they’re not necessarily monks either, you know, but that when it comes to their relationship with money, it’s something they have a real struggle with. They think money is dirty, and when I try to convince them that money is actually fuel, it’s potentially energy they can use to spread their message and help more people.

2:12:07 Also I teach them, when you actually charge people money for a service, they’re more apt to actually engage in that service and change their life. It’s counterintuitive in that sense. Unfortunately most of the world has this kind of weird impression, I think what it does is it stops them taking action a lot of times, and it’s just another reason to kind of ease back into the Instagram feed and not confront the internal demons. So, and they don’t want to invest part of what they have to gain something, right?

2:12:35 You know, you know, quite often people in India have a problem with me making money through this. The Western, I think people are kind of used to it, you know, like everybody is selling something in America so people are used to it, but like people in India can watch and go like, “Oh, why is he charging for this? Why is it money for that?” I remember one guy wrote in from India and said, “You know, I wanted to buy your course but it was too expensive.” All right, and you know what, you’re charging a lot of money for a mitt, you know why you’re charging money?

2:13:03 It’s too expensive for me, sign, let’s say his name was Roger something, I’m coming from a sign Raj, sent from my iPhone 8 Plus. Like, wait a minute, you have money for an iPhone 8 Plus but you can’t buy my 200 dollar course? That shows your priority, right? If you really believe that this thing can change your life and impact you, then spend money and do it, and if you can’t afford it, go work and earn the money. My guru said to me, you know, when we first met and I told him what I wanted, you know, I said, “I want self-realization.”

2:13:42 One of the first things I said to my guru, it’s not the first thing I said, “I want self-realization, can you help me?” He said, “Yes, but,” he says, “I don’t hand out anything, you have to work for it.” I said, “How will I work for it?” He asked me, “What are you willing to do for it?” and I said, “I’ll give you my life.” All right, and I did.

2:14:01 I was still in university, I said, “I’m ready to come right now, give up, you know, everything, everything, to come do this,” and then he made me wait a couple of years, and then I had to get from Perth to Hawaii, and I said, “Okay, you know, I don’t have the money and I’m gonna go work and get the money.” He says, “Yeah, go work, earn the money.” So I worked, earned money, I earned school fees, I had enough money to fly myself, you know, all the way from Western Australia, which is in the boonies, you know, all the way to Hawaii, but it went and the money.

2:14:31 So if you don’t have the money to sign up for a London Real Academy online course, go, “I’ll work and earn the money.” You know, there’s no job, find a job, clean something, I tell somebody, you’ll clean their yard, do whatever it takes. That’s the thing, you know, going back to the early conversation, having that desire. When you want something really badly, you will go and do whatever it takes to do it. If I had to lick the floor of the airport to earn money to go see my guru, I would lick every corner of an airport floor.

2:15:00 Yeah, it’s a great concept called pay price to action, one of my mentors coined, and it’s, are you willing to sacrifice something to get something? And so when people say, “Yeah, Brian, your stuff is expensive,” I’m like, yeah, I want to see if you’re willing to invest in yourself and into me, and if you are, I’m willing to invest my time and your guru, I think, was saying something similar to you. But you know, and people, you know, one of the comments I always get messages, it’s like, you know, you’re charging, you know, so much for your course, what did your guru charge you to teach you?

2:15:34 I think I like, yeah, true, he didn’t charge me anything actually, he didn’t ask for a dollar from me, not a cent, but he did ask for my life. So yeah, you’re right, I didn’t pay him any money, I just gave him my life. I didn’t talk to my family, my friends, my relatives, I gave up all the food I love eating, all the drinks I love to drink, I love going to the beach, I gave that up, I gave up watching movies, listening to my favorite music, eating chocolate, I gave up having a relationship, having a family, everything you could possibly imagine and everything you have in your life at the convenience of, at your fingertips, I gave up for this.

2:16:18 So you’re right, I did not pay a cent, and you’re complaining to me about a few dollars, you know, and like you said, it’s an excuse, you know, and it shows people’s commitment level, you know. The people are so easy to say, “Oh, I don’t have it,” go get it. I think, you know, that I have a friend in India, you know, he must be in his 60s now, late 60s, really amazing guy, entrepreneur, has a very successful company building furniture. I love this man, I love his story, you know, and he grew up really poor, he sold paintings on the sidewalks in Delhi, and then he found his way to Nepal, he started a little business with a partner, you know, had a little store, the partner cheated him, left him with nothing, and he ended up coming back to India, working on the streets, and then he just worked hard and, you know, worked and worked and worked, and now he has an amazing business with, you know, six, seven hundred employees, you know, and even at his age he still works every day, Mahad.

2:17:28 So, you know, here’s an example, someone had absolutely nothing and then built his way to something. And the Oberoi hotels in India, beautiful high-style hotels, Mr. Oberoi, the founder, and a story goes something like that, inaccurately, you know, grew up in a really poor village and the village had like some famine or disease, his mother gave him like a few rupees and said, “You’ve got to leave before you get this disease and die,” and I believe the story goes like this and I could be wrong, but he left, traveled around, worked in a hotel, became really good at accounting, got promoted, to, got promoted to the front desk, finally saved up some money, bought a little hotel, and, you know, years later now you have one of the most beautiful hotels in India.

2:18:14 So it’s not like if you don’t have anything you can’t get somewhere, that you have to live in this mindset that I’m poor and I don’t have a chance and I don’t have an opportunity. How many people have you met that started with nothing, you know, and no matter where you’re born, whether in some poor town in America or a village in India or China or somewhere in Africa, everybody has a chance. It really comes down to your desire and how badly do you want it.

2:18:42 You know, one of the, you know, we lived in a traditional monastery and because my guru was very traditional and cultural, the monks only listened to Hindu music, so chanting, Hindu devotional songs, we didn’t listen to any western music, blues, which as anything, but he had a CD and it was a Frank Sinatra CD, and his favorite song in that was “I Did It My Way.” And I loved that about my guru, because he was so not what everybody thought a monk would be, you know. He adopted technology when technology came out, obviously, you know, been running a monastery for 50 something years before computers, personal computer, the first Mac came out, he bought it, you bought the best one, it doubted it, the monks learned Photoshop and InDesign and Final Cut Pro, we added in movies and Premiere and After Effects, and we learned JavaScript and HTML, CSS, we did podcasts, blogged, before any of those things were popular.

2:19:40 You know, he did it his way, and he was sometimes jokingly singing to the monks in the monastery, “I did it my way, my way,” and I love it because he believed in himself, he believed in this mission, his purpose of why he was here, and he was going to do it his way, you know, and by doing it that way he impacted the world. And you know, the reason, you know, I want to do it my way is because I believe in what I’m doing, I believe in my guru’s work, I’m gonna share, I’m gonna share it, and the way I’m going to share it. I’m gonna say, or I’m gonna say, I’m gonna speak how I speak.

2:20:18 If you don’t like it, I don’t care, I really don’t care, you know. When I get it loose, go back to being nothing, don’t have anything, I know how to do that. Second, nothing to fear, have no home, have no, sleep in the forest in a hut with centipedes and geckos running across your face. Yeah, no problem, I can do that. Have no money?

2:20:42 Yeah, I did that, so that doesn’t scare me. You’ve got a 300 year plan, you’re planting trees. No, I’m glad. Entry’, don’t care about other people’s opinions. Yeah, I don’t care, it’s a beautiful, freeing thing.

2:20:54 Did you do that? And I’m every, you saying that, you know. Yeah, and you know, for me it’s, I have a very clear mission and I’m going to fulfill this and nothing’s gonna stop me. What scares you, if anything scares me? Um, I would say myself.

2:21:13 You know, somebody, I would, I did an event in Munich, an event I organized, another like 150 people that came to it, and you know, somebody, one of the last questions actually, somebody else in a second last question, somebody stood up and said, “What is your biggest challenge?” You know, “Oh, it’s living in New York City, a great challenge for you, it’s a big city, and is that your biggest challenge going from ten years in Hawaii?” And I’m looming, and I said, “No, living in New York City is really easy.

2:21:40 I never feel challenged by the city. I don’t, I love being there, I’m in harmony with it. My biggest challenge is me.” You know, I am creative, I have tons of energy, I have big dreams, big goals, my ability to harness my energy to stay focused, not get distracted and not do too many things, and channel that energy to a very clear, refined purpose. It is one of my goals, and that becomes a struggle sometimes when you’re super creative and you have ideas and you’re driven, and really driven, and and my fear, if I have one, is that, you know, I am concerned that sometimes I can’t harness my energy and I’m not focused, and all these things that I’m really working to improve myself.

2:22:36 So even you are working on your focus? Yes, I can be so much better concentrating. Brian, I really had, you know, it’s nice to hear that. Yeah, I have a long way to go, I really do, you know. I have so much work to do to be better at concentrating, and there’s so much work to do to be better at learning to understand my energy and harnessing my energy and channeling my energy.

2:23:01 If you only knew how much work I had to do on myself, you’d be worried for me. What would we be surprised to learn about Dandapani? Something you do in your downtime that would just surprise us, or shocker? Um, I like watching movies when I relax, you know, because for me I work so hard, like I said, you know, I said today, pedal to the metal, I go 100 percent, I’m making decisions every five seconds, so at the end of the day I just want to be entertained.

2:23:35 What kind of movies do I like to watch? People obviously will say like National Geographic, which I do, I love National Geographic, I love animals and I love the environment, but I love American action movies. Like what? Oh, I love the stupid action movie. It’s not the real, I, I don’t like when one person is strangling another person, it’s filmed so real, I don’t want to put those things, those emotions in my head, but give me Die Hard to, Bruce Willis shooting a whole bunch, planes, cars blown up, cars chasing, well, you just go like, that’s just so Hollywood, America, it’s not real.

2:24:13 Right now you don’t look at it and go like, “Oh my god, I’m so scared.” You just look at it and go like, “Yeah, you know, I had to, you like hating yourself again,” which is, imagine what else, but those kind of movies, right? So I love watching, Dolly, you know, just love watching a movie where I don’t have to think. I don’t know, watch a movie at the end of the day where I have to figure out the plot and go like, what’s his intention, I see the bad guy, ah, I see them.

2:24:37 I just let me watch a few things blow up and a few car chases and I’m gonna see. You’re focused on whatever they want to show you in that movie, so your brain can be completely in it. Exactly. Thinking about something? Yes, and that’s, I am just exhausted and then today I really am and I just want to be entertained.

2:24:53 You know, and I love watching, you know, like musicals, The Greatest Showman. I know, quick, was it Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody? Yeah, things like that. Yeah, you know, I can be entertained and watching, there’s not too much thinking involved, right? Sorry, a little bit of your break.

2:25:10 Yeah, no, that’s fine. And it keeps you awake at night, nothing? I know, Brahma, during asleep, nowadays my six month old daughter, if she wakes up. Okay, but my wife is doing an amazing job, sleep training. Huh, okay.

2:25:27 So, and anything that bothers you when you go to bed at night about the world or things that make you concerned about the world she’s gonna grow up in? I wouldn’t say at night when I go to sleep, you know, I definitely, good, I feel like I go to sleep peacefully and apparently worry about anything. I mean, every now and then it’s like some business thing, need to get the app done or what, something is not working, you might be on my mind a little bit, but those are kind of transient things that pass by.

2:25:59 I would say during the day and then especially when I walk around and I just look at all the trash, like I was saying, everywhere, just how we live our lives, you know, with no care or regard to environment, the number of cars on the street, and just, you know, how we consume things, which is like constantly consuming stuff, and people are producing things and selling things and consuming, and we live in a society where we throw away everything, nobody fixes anything anymore. If there’s something wrong with your monitor, it’s cheaper to buy a new one than to get it fixed, because the environmental cost isn’t in there, is it? It isn’t, right?

2:26:43 And so you throw it away and that, that, why isn’t it? Because I’m worried for your children, learn from my child, like what will they going to grow in? Yeah, you know, we should be worried, and this whole, you know, there was a New York Times article recently about everyone’s personal plastic footprint, and it made me start thinking, I mean, if you really think about all those Starbucks cups you throw away and the distance of that, okay, the straws are important, but what about all the other stuff?

2:27:09 Yeah, that’s part of your personal footprint. I mean, is it hundreds of thousands of pounds of stuff every year? It’s something to think about. Open your refrigerator and look in there, everything you purchase comes in some kind of a plastic container, plastic bag, bottle, you know. Now having like China is not buying recycled items from America, so we’re just burning everything, you know, people think it’s getting recycled and it’s not.

2:27:39 And every time you go to the store, take a bag. You know, plastic bags should be banned in the world, period. To not take a bag when you go to the store is the height of laziness and selfishness and a lack of concern for the environment, because this is a simple step, you know. You can buy bags now that really fold into, like, a little wallet, right, and you open it and say it’s a bag, take one of those, put it in your purse, put it in your back pocket, that’s saves plastic being consumed.

2:28:13 But you know, people don’t think about it because they’re selfish, right? Oh, and again going back, we need to uplift human consciousness, and that is a worry for me, you know, it really is. So sad that, you know, for thousands of years, for tens of thousands of years on this planet and we did pretty okay, and in the last few decades we’ve just turned around and we’re screwing it in the back. It’s so sad. So, so sad.

2:28:40 Yeah, and thank you for talking about that, because it’s a concern of mine and something we talk about a lot, and our next movie is gonna be about that as well. So Dandapani, I always ask people a few questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you, if you could take all the knowledge you have now and make a phone call to the 20 year old Dandapani, a nice young man probably in Perth who maybe has this dream of one day being a monk, still trying to figure things out, what would you tell him?

2:29:07 20 years old? Um, go to the monastery right now, go be with my guru. Yeah, that would be what I would say, and I know you asked me this question three years ago and it’s the same answer I’m giving, because that’s what I want. So I would just go and be by my guru’s side and stay with him and live with him and serve and learn from him. That’s what I would do.

2:29:31 Beyond that would be number one, get it even faster, even faster, guru earlier. Yeah, but you know, at the end of the day everything worked out in the right timing. Yeah, this is how it is. I had a guest on my show, I mean Ido Portal, who’s a fantastic human mover, and he once said to me, he said, “Brian, when you find the right master, learn whatever they have to teach you.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about at the time, I was like, what if they’re a bricklayer, and what if they make milk for a living, then that has nothing to do with what I want.

2:30:03 But now I understand, and you find the right master, learn whatever they have to teach you, because they’re ultimately teaching you about life and about yourself, right? And you’re so lucky you got to meet that guy. I’m so blessed, like I said, you know, greatest blessing in my life, you know. Every now and then before I had my daughter, people would come up to me and say, “Oh, when you have a child, you know, things change, and it’ll be the, it’s the most amazing experience in the world to have a child.”

2:30:35 And now that I have a child I can say it is not the most amazing experience in the world. I love my daughter, but the most amazing experience in the world is experiencing God within yourself, to experience your higher self inside of you, to go in so deep and see this thing and experience this thing that is so pure, which is the essence of every human being. That is the most precious experience in the world and it’s worth sacrificing everything for, and it’s worth just dedicating your life to this, because at the essence of you, at the essence of everything is this pure energy that makes up all of us.

2:31:18 The greatest blessing in my life has been to have lived with my guru, to be initiated as his student, that he would choose me as one of his few initiated students, to have served him, to have loved him, and to continue to love him even though he’s not here, and continue to serve him and to be his student and continue to learn from him intuitively, and him speaking to me on the inside, I feel him guiding me every day in my life. That has been the greatest blessing of my life, you know, and I think it’s such a rare thing to find a teacher like that. I’m honored to have that relationship, but if you’re ever lucky to have one, devote yourself to him or her, even be a good student, be humble, be obedient and be responsive.

2:32:06 And he taught you how to access that state within, so within you? Yes, he taught me the path to that, he gave me the tools and then it was up to me to do the work. Grane, he said, I can share with you the tools, I can share with you the goal, I can share with you the path to the goal and to use the tools to help you be on the path to get to the goal, but the work you have to do, I’m not gonna do any of the work, this is you, it’s all up to you, you know. And he says, “I don’t hand things out, you’ve got to work for it.”

2:32:39 I said, “Fine, I’ll work for it, I’ll do whatever it takes, I’ll give my life,” you know. And I think that’s a different, big difference, right? People are looking for handouts and there are so many teachers out there that promise the students this and promise that and give them that, you know, “I will deliver, I will give you this, I promise you you’ll get this.” No, am I gonna promise me anything? I said, “I’ll give you the tools, I’ll show you the steps, do

2:33:34 That’s the start, trying to understand ourselves. Yes. Yeah, yeah. The cross beginning the process of uplifting consciousness. Turned upon me, I didn’t think it was possible to top our previous conversation but I think we’ve done it.

2:33:48 So and so I just want to say, you know, who would have known that that cooking with you in Napa Valley, you know, some four or five years ago would have led to this, but it did, and obviously kind of felt some cool connection that night, and this all started off with a cool conversation that wasn’t recorded, you know, and then we’ve done a couple more now that are recorded, but I really appreciate everything you do and the way you continue to push yourself and the way you continue to say what’s on your mind, because a lot of the things you say aren’t, quote unquote, popular, you know, and but we don’t need to hear what’s popular anymore, you know, there’s too much of an echo chamber out there and there’s too much of bad behaviors being promoted, you know, through means and technology and being rewarded.

2:34:36 So we need the hard truths and we need them sooner than later, and it’s funny how your messages really mesh with a lot of other people that come on here who, again, come from very different backgrounds, but uh, so glad and I’m really honored to be back here, Brian, and thank you most of all for doing this, during this means, not just our interview just had but for creating London Real, and you know all the struggles that you might go through to create this, to maintain this, to continue to grow it, refine it and make it better, and that’s a sacrifice and your contribution to humanity, and I know for a fact, because people, like I said, people constantly tell me this, everywhere I go, how much London Real has impacted, the interview that we’ve had have impacted their lives, and I’m sure it’s the same for others.

2:35:26 So for everyone that’s watching London Real, take a moment to say thank you to Brian Rose, and also take a moment to be selfless, send Brian an email and his team and say, what can I do for you? If you’ve got something from him and from his team and from all the work that they’re doing, give something back, don’t be a selfish prick and think about yourself. Learn to say how can I help you, what can I do for you, right? Give something back. If you’re getting so much from someone or some team or some organization, then ask yourself what you can do for them.

2:36:04 Okay, stop being selfish. Well, thank you for that, and the same back to you, you know. I look forward to people contacting you and asking what they can do for you. This app sounds really exciting, is coming out very soon, right? Yeah, it’s been fine on the app store, yes, on the app store, and I’ll pull in Android, okay, and then more info on your website.

2:36:25 Yeah, right. And I would agree that, be of service and ask what you can do for someone else, it’s actually the step that we’re all looking for, we just don’t know it. And so, yeah, it’s nearly eight years now and I feel like I feel like some days I’ve been in a monastery for eight years, has been a lot of very strange growths and pain in myself, but I feel like I’m still growing every single time, and this show and this community and people like you are just the most amazing thing ever in my life, and I’m now just dedicated to doing this and being of service in this way and learning, and it is definitely not the path of least resistance.

2:37:05 Being a banker was easier and probably more fun, but nowhere near as fulfilling, you know. So, and how much more are you impacting the world now than as a banker? Yeah, a lot more, more positively, yeah. So, and again, thank you for coming here. The last time in that conversation, you know, we just want to come on and have great conversations with great people, we never know what’s gonna happen, but it changed a lot of people’s lives, and that’s because you came in here and we’re, you bore you.

2:37:31 So I’m so glad, thanks for that, and thank you for creating an environment where I can be me, you know, and accepting me for who I am and not having a preconceived notion because I’m dressed this way that I need to be something that I’m not, and you know, you do a wonderful job of having no expectations of me, and also you are the guest, and I watch some of your other interviews, you don’t go there thinking like, “Oh, don’t apologize for monkey, it’s a priest, so you know he must be sweeping the sidewalks quietly.” And you create an environment where your guests can be themselves, which is great, you know, and that’s how we should treat everyone, right? Create a space where they can be themselves and then we can have proper conversations and understand people.

2:38:15 Understanding leads to empathy, empathy leads to compassion and compassion leads to love. You cannot love someone if you can’t understand them, and in order to understand them you need to accept them for who they are, all the good parts and all the bad parts, and acceptance doesn’t mean condoning, it’s a signal, a junk those different pieces, it doesn’t mean you approve of it, you just understand that this is the current status and that status hopefully changes and improves. Yeah, you figured out exactly what we’re doing here.

2:38:48 Why, let’s say, walk a mile in a man’s shoes, you know, or a woman’s shoes, and you understand them. So yeah, that’s what we’re trying to do, just create these conversations, getting other people into your mind and realizing they’re not that much different than you, understanding them like you said, you have to condone it, and then get us all to this level of more compassion, more love. I think we’re gonna make it, but it’s gonna be really close and it sort of require all of our work and all our got concentration data Bonnie.

2:39:15 Yeah, but I think we’re gonna make it, but we’ve got to work hard and however I can support you, let me know, and if there’s anything I can do for you to support you and your wonderful work, just tell me. Well, you can give me a hug right now and we wrap this up. Thank you so much, brother. Appreciate it.