Dandapani - Master Your Mind

Full transcript: Dandapani on London Real

5:54 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 of our time, Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Yes, Swami.

6:13 For 10 years you lived a life of serious personal discipline and training at your guru’s cloistered monastery in Hawaii. Eight years ago you decided to venture out to teach her lessons in New York City and the rest of the world, and make your spiritual tools applicable in everyday life. Dandapani, welcome to London Real. Thank you, Brian. Like I said, it, having having me on here on your show, it’s an honor to have you here.

6:36 You know, I was joking with the guys before that I think it was like eighteen months ago, you, me and Esther Perel were cooking food in a kitchen in Napa Valley. Yes, what a scene that was. Right, now what a great conversation too, right? Yeah, and we had a crazy conversation and dinner afterwards, and that’s how I met you and Joe to say none, Phil Mckernon, all through that event. So I’m just really glad to have you here.

6:59 Great to connect again. Yeah, and I really knew it was important to have you on. I’m sure you meet people all the time that want to spend more time with you, and so there’s this sense about you that I just want to get to know you better and listen to you a little bit more, even though you don’t have any kind of air that I need to listen to you, but it seems like you have some knowledge, and so that’s kind of what I wanted to have you on the show. Oh, thank you.

7:24 That intro probably threw people a bunch of curveballs, because that’s quite a story. But, um, when you hear something like that, what do you remember? I mean, as far as growing up and that whole path that led you to to Hawaii? I would say the biggest thing is that I was very clear at an early age what I wanted to do. I’d wanted to be a monk since about four or five years old, and and ever since then it was really a quest to find a teacher that could train me.

7:52 And I met many wonderful teachers along the way, many gurus and monks, and I went to listen to them talk and I’d always leave saying, I’m gonna do everything they told me to do, which I did for about four or five days, and then all the inspiration, motivation went away and I’d fall back to who I was, and that’s where the problem was. They couldn’t sustain the change that I wanted. It was until I met my guru, Subramanya Swamy, and you said his name really well, by the way.

8:17 Thank you, I practice. A Gurudeva, we call him, which is, and I was, until I met him, that I finally met someone that had really simple, practical tools and had a very systematic approach to spiritual growth and personal development and very goal orientated approach as well, and I loved his teachings. So I decided to all be a monk in his monastery. Okay. Now go back to four years old.

8:43 How do you know it for that you want to become a monk? Because there’s not really the monk cartoon, the monk action-movie, so how did you, those kung-fu with David Carradine got true, he wasn’t your kid, I think what, so when I was a kid, but was it older then, but no, actually, we lived in Malaysia and a Sri Lankan monk had visited our home and my mom invited him in. Traditionally in our culture we would give him out some clothes and some money and some food, and then, you know, mission well in this way, and as soon as I saw him I said to myself, that’s me.

9:13 I really recognized the robes he was wearing, the markings on his head, the beads, and everything about him just resonated with me, and he was my fireman. You know, like kids go up and say, like, I want to be a fireman, I want to be this and that’s reckon, you know, everything about him just stood out to me and I said, that’s me. What do you think attracted you to him? Was it a, a peacefulness about him, or the fact that he wasn’t chasing after certain goals?

9:39 I don’t think any of that. I think it was just more the, his, his dress, and I think what it did was it triggered a memory of a past life, and I believe in reincarnation and I believe I must have been a monk in a past life, either once or twice. Oh, many times before, and that’s why it was so easy for me to want to become a monk and such. But was until I was actually a little bit old, that I think I was eight or nine years old, that I realized it wasn’t really about being a monk, it was about enlightenment, and that was what I was seeking.

10:10 The monk was the quickest, most efficient pathway to enlightenment. So the initial trigger was reminding me of the path that I was dedicated to, om, dedicated to, but the goal really wasn’t to be a monk, the goal was enlightenment, and and that came about because I realized in an early age of, you know, maybe eight, nine years old, that everything in life is transitory. You know, everything goes through a process of being created, exists for a while, and then it goes away.

10:41 That’s, he got enlightened now on my highlight, it goes off about five or ten seconds, no way they’d let enlightenment alarm. That’s right, hugged my to know where we are in life and officially know that, okay, I love that. This is a sign. It’s all I’m saying here time. I think we were talking about you know, you knew you’re gonna become a monk because of former lives?

11:04 Yes, and also the, the point that I think you know, the, it wasn’t really about being a monk at the end of the day, it was enlightenment I was looking for, because one of the things I realized in the early age, that everything in life is transitory in nature, so things I created, things exist for all, and then things go away. I remember was about eight or nine, my parents were taking me to my cousin’s house to a birthday party, very excited about it, could see my cousins and balloons and cakes and play, getting the car, driving over there, super excited, played for four, five hours, getting the car, driving home, I remember looking out the window and going, it’s over, and this is life, everything goes through this cycle. I remember was about eight or nine, looking out the window very clearly one night, and just the college, my dad was driving us home and going like, this is it.

11:51 Everything is created, everything exists for a while, and then everything goes away. What’s the constant in life? It’s a way just here on this planet to go through that cycle, and I go like, that’s a waste of time. It really is. So what’s the constant in life?

12:06 What what is it in life that doesn’t change? And I wanted to find out, and that was really the quest of my spiritual path. Do you think it’s rare for young men like yourself to be seeking enlightenment, where are people seeking it in all sorts of ways they don’t even know we think they are sometimes? Yeah, I don’t think it’s right, it’s rare if you believe there’s only one life, because then who’s calling the shots, right? Why is one kid seeking enlightenment and other kids searching something else?

12:34 But if you believe in the process of reincarnation, that we’re a soul living in a physical body, reincarnating, evolving over a long period of time, then one soul has just pursued a particular path and gone down it further than another person has. So for me it’s just the natural next step. Okay. Yeah, it doesn’t make me any more special than the next person. Okay.

12:59 This is what I decided to focus on, so just picked up where I left off from my previous life and just kept going. Okay, that was eight or nine, you were in Malaysia at the time? I was in Malaysia. Oh yeah. Okay, and then my family migrated to Australia when I was a teenager, so did a couple of years of high school and I went to university, did engineering, met my guru after two years of being in engineering school, wanted to leave and join his monastery.

13:25 He didn’t allow me, he wanted me to finish my degree. How do you meet a guru? I’m sure there’s not like an online site, meet your guru. Back actually, I try to, I’m just like everybody else, you know, there was no turning back then. He actually found me.

13:39 He was visiting Australia and was visiting Perth where I was living in Western Australia, and my family incidentally knew his guru really well, because his guru lived in northern Sri Lanka and the town called Jaffna, and were all disciples of his teacher, so we went to meet him and it really was love at first sight, and when I saw him, we met each other, we just connected, and he was there for less than 24 hours and we built a strong friendship, and there’s almost as if two old friends were meeting each other again and again. It’s a past life stuff? Exactly, right.

14:15 I mean, there’s some people that you known your whole life, your cousin, right, for example, you might have known for 40 years that you’re not even close with, and then there’s a stranger that you meet and within two hours you feel like you’ve known your whole life and you feel super close to them. It was like that with him, as soon as we met, we were just so connected. Okay, I did a little research on him, he’d seemed like a really charismatic guy, really amazing individual, quite uh, quite a story, and just to give you a quick one-minute inside into slide, so he was one in Lake Tahoe in northern California in 1927.

14:47 He was often when he’s quite young, his dad died when he was about eight or nine, he’s actually smothered a person in the year so later his father passed away and he was adopted by a close friend of the family at ten years old, and she asked him, what do you want to do with luck in life? And he said, I want to dance. So ten years old, he was very clear what he wanted, and so he started learning dance, and the people that trained him and dance with mystics from Europe.

15:07 So not only did they teach him how to dance, but they also taught him how the mind works, how the body works, how his nervous system works and how energy flows through his nervous system. And so he had amazing mystical training at such an early age in the 1930s, and then by 16, 17 years old he was the premier dancer for the San Francisco Ballet Company, was the best ballet dancer in America at that time, decided to quit at the peak of his career when he was about 18 years old, eighteen or nineteen, jumped on the first ship to sail from San Francisco, from America to India after World War Two, took three months to get that, made his we’re just made his way to Sri Lanka. I studied with a few mystics around there and then finally gave away all his belongings and possessions, went into these caves in this mountains in southern, in the jungles in southern Sri Lanka and promised himself he would fast and meditate till he attained enlightenment.

15:54 This was a 20 year old American boy in the 19 late 1940s, very brave, and then ended up becoming one of Hinduism’s foremost spiritual leaders. Wow, right? His guru in Sri Lanka, who brought him into the Hindu faith, initiated him as a Hindu monk and sent him back to America to bring Hinduism to the West, and so he established the first Hindu temple in America and brought yoga and meditation into Hindu teachings to the West, and yeah, so led a pretty dynamic life till he died in 2001.

16:28 A very, blessed to have known him and actually lived with him and studied with him fully. I would say the greatest years of my life, you know, I don’t think anything would ever top that, right? So you finally found the guru that was gonna keep you motivated more than four or five days? Yeah, and I really wasn’t looking for motivation, you know, Brian, I was really looking for tools. It’s like people always ask me, are you a motivational speaker?

16:52 At once, it’s right away off the bat, I say no, I don’t motivate people. What I do is share with them tools and I share with them a process and how to find, define a goal, because once you have a process and you have a goal and you have tools, then you can apply in your life and you can lean on your own spine. And my guru always used to say that to the monks, don’t lean on me, lean on your own spine, because if you lean on me and I go away, you’ll fall down.

17:17 So lean on your own spine, and gavest tools and you gave us a process and he showed us how to apply the tools in our life so that we can solve our own problems and solve our own challenges and and make progress in our growth. And a lot of people in my industry who do self development and coaching don’t do that, you know, because it’s, it’s not a good business model. A good business model, this way you have somebody coming back to you again, you create reoccurring revenue.

17:42 So you don’t solve their problems and you inspire them, because you know the inspiration will go after a few weeks and they’ll come back and buy more. It’s a drug, right? Right. It’s a good business model though. Okay, you make a lot of money from it.

17:55 You’re trying to provide real tools? Yes. They can make change, and these are the things you’ve learned by being in the monastery for 10? Exactly. I don’t want people coming back to me, I want them to solve their own problems, you know, figure out their life and use the tools in their life to create what they want.

18:10 But that, a lot of people don’t do that, and I finally found a teacher that could do that for me, and I’m so grateful. So you meet him in Perth, you were two years into your degree but you didn’t join them then, you finish your degree, painfully? Yes. Okay, on his insistence, or your parents, or his? So as soon as I graduated, well, I didn’t even wait for my graduation ceremony, I found out that I passed my last exam, what my ticket, flew to Hawaii and left it all behind.

18:37 How old are you? 23, 24, I would say. Okay, and was a traditional Hindu monastery, what I’m, what does that actually mean? It means that when you actually go to a monastery, you, you leave everything behind. So you leave your family, your friends, your relatives, all your possessions, gave away all my CDs, we had seen these back then, any money in the bank, you’d have to take it out, give it away, so you basically burn the bridge behind you, you don’t leave any safety net that you can go home to just in case monk life doesn’t work out.

19:04 And I spoke to my family maybe twice a year on the phone, never spoke to any of my relatives and friends again. Wow, so it’s a real renunciation, and people don’t realize what that actually involves. And why, why do that? What is the logic behind closing yourself off? You stay on the compound for 10 years, you do sometimes we travel, we travel to other monasteries, my guru get invited to go speak at certain places and he would take a couple of months with him, so every now and then we would leave and travel.

19:34 Okay, but go into town and buy supplies. Okay, ten years, you’re not seeing family or friends or anyone. No, really is a new life. Yeah, you live in a cloistered monastery and it’s, it’s like almost someone hit the restart button, right? And which is the idea now that’s engineered for what to happen.

19:55 Okay, you know, what, what do you saw it behind the existence of a monastery? Well, thank you for asking that question, nobody ever asked me that before. The whole reason behind it, and I, I can only speak for Hindu monasteries, right, every faith has monks and they all have different philosophies and different beliefs, but in Hinduism the whole purpose of monastic life and that staying away from family and friends and material things, it’s about conservation of energy.

20:21 So we believe that energy is always flowing out of us to people and things around us, and one of the ways to get enlightenment is to first stop the loss of energy, then you harness that energy from going out of you, you would draw it until you concentrate a new channel and energy up your spine into your head to awaken higher states of consciousness. But in order to do that, you need to conserve as much energy as possible. The more people you have in your life, the more things you have in your life, the more you and energy you expend.

20:53 It’s almost like if you take a space shuttle that once you go into space, what’s it strapped on to? A rocket, right, which is filled with fuel. As soon as it gets past its atmosphere, what happens? Releases rockets, rockets fall away and the shuttle just keeps going. And you could almost say what you’re trying to do is take your awareness and move it up your spine into your head, into deeper states of consciousness, and to be able to do that you need tremendous amount of energy, and that’s why monks have very few possessions, a few people in their life, and they practice celibacy as well.

21:26 So celibacy is really about conservation of energy, at least in Hinduism. We don’t look at sex as a bad thing, I mean after all we wrote the Kama Sutra, so we even have a manual for doing it, right? Right. But it was all about conservation of energy, right? So celibacy, minimizing material possessions, minimizing the number of people in your life.

21:50 So a lot of times they say on, you hear people say that material things are bad, we didn’t believe so. Every month I joined a monastery, got a set of robes, a set of beads, earrings, and a MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro, exactly, every monk was issued a Mac. So we even believe that material things were bad, we believe that the simplification of it, keep a few things that you really need, a few things that you want, and and live your life that way. Okay, and it’s all about preventing the loss of energy.

22:19 Okay, so you join the monastery, yeah, what is that, what are those first few days, right, I like the first few months and then the first year or two, I’m guessing you’re super excited, you’re 23, 24 years old, I’m going away, I’m gonna dive in, I got this guru, I can levitate, hey balls, you’re wondering when you can start doing these things, right? Is that you still remember what those first few months are like? Is there monk hazing going on? I mean, is it totally there is.

22:44 Yeah, because you go in and you’re excited, because everything you know about monastic life is what you’ve read in books, what you’ve seen, Hollywood movies and watched a few episodes of Kung Fu, David Carradine, and you know, like, this is what monks do, right? The candles, the rice paper, totally walking slowly, sweeping the sidewalks, talking in this very soft, all right, and it’s nothing like that at all. And you go in and you’re excited and then the reality sets in after a few months, after a year, you realize that this is gonna be the rest of your life.

23:16 You’re gonna be living in a cloistered monastery, leaving a cell, leading a celibate life away from family, friends and everything you know, the simple things of like food and drinks that you’re accustomed to, chocolate and fruits, so your favorite dishes, your favorite drinks, just going to the beach, the things that you just want to do or been used to be used to doing for the first quarter century of your life, you don’t get to do anymore. And then that reality sets in there, that’s, and it’s quite painful because the subconscious needs to adjust, because the first 23 years of your life, it’s grown-up thinking is that in a way accustomed to a certain way of life, then you can go to your kitchen and open the fridge and just like have access to all kinds of food that you wants, reach in and grab something, walk down the street, feel like a cup of coffee, walk into Starbucks and just grab something.

24:06 No, you can’t. And everything inside of you needs to adjust to a different way of life, and that’s quite painful. And there’s no rice paper and candles and martial arts. What is the day, the day like in a monastery? We, we had to be in the temple by 5:30 in the morning, so you could wake up at any time.

24:25 Some monks will cover it, five, some at 4:45. I used to get up between 4:00 and 4:15 in the morning, get up, take a shower, I do some practices on my own in my little hut. I lived in a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot tall square hut in the forest, and five lady would come to the temple, we’d have a ceremony together for about half an hour, then we meditated as a group for one hour. And people often think that monks meditated all day, we did not. Then we exercise from 7:00 to 7:30, for half an hour a day, to encourage to do.

24:58 Then we had breakfast, and then the monastery broke, the monks broke up into five groups, there were five departments. One looked after the graphic design and web development, one looked after the finance and the endowments and paying the bills, one looked after the church congregation, one looked after the land, and we all went to work. So we worked till 12:30, thirty to one, we were each assigned a place in the monastery to clean, so some clean the toilets, the pathways, the rooms.

25:25 One to one thirty was lunch, one thirty to three we took a little nap, a little siesta, and then three to six we went back to work again in our respective departments, and then six to seven was the free time to do whatever he wants, among exercise, some did carpentry, and then 7 to 9 we watched TV and then I went to bed. You you know the schedule like the back of your hand. Oh, did it for ten years. Ten years. And my shoulder was a little bit different after three and a half years, after my guru died, I took on a little bit more of an intense schedule.

25:57 Temple in the monastery had a 24-hour vigil system, so every three hours there’s a monk on duty in the temple, and this has been going on for about 46 years now. The monk was in the temple worshiping, doing chants, meditating, yoga, and it was really a shift, and my shift was from midnight to 3:00 a.m. So I would go to bed about 8:30 at night, wake up at 11:30, come in from my hot shower, change, get dressed up like this, being the temple by midnight, it couldn’t be a second late, and then I had to do another three hours, be awake from midnight to 3:00 and doing my spiritual practices, and then go to bed again by 3:30, wake up at 7:30 in the next morning and go on with my day.

26:39 Okay, so you’re holding a constant vigil in honor of him dying? Or there was always a vigil, it was always that. Okay, yeah, you took that on? Yeah, and I did that for about six and a half years, which was pretty intense. That exhausting?

26:51 It was, and actually me and another monk did it, and so we did it, I did it for a month and he did it for a month and we switched on and off, but waking up at 11:30 at night, you know, for six and a half years and going in, doing practices from midnight to 3:00, and was probably one of the most intense things I’ve ever done. Okay, cuz that’s the time when you want to sleep the most, right? And all of this makes you start to examine yourself, right? You go inside because there’s not this artificial stimulus that we’re so used to.

27:23 So I’m having a hard day, I get on Twitter, I’m a little bit depressed, I get a Starbucks coffee, I do this, I can, you know, call up a friend of mine and have a quick chat. So the rest of us are kind of putting these artificial stimuli, I call them like patches, really hatches, you know. Okay, cuz if you’re not feeling well, where do you go? Online, right? You look at people standing at the bus stop for ten minutes waiting for the bus, they get uncomfortable with being with themselves, they pull out the phone and they snot engaging with something.

27:51 Is to actually be with you, it’s probably one of the most challenging things you can face in life, and the whole purpose for the monastery is do you strip everything in everyone away from a person and they only left with themselves. You give then two sets of ropes, put them in a little hut and you go like, here, live with yourself. And becomes extremely painful because there’s no escape. Talk to me about that. There’s no pain, there’s no patch, right?

28:18 Right, there’s no, it’s topics comfy, there’s no food, we have three meals a day, no snacking in between, and you don’t even eat your favorite foods, you just eat what’s served to you. So where’s the escape? There’s no escape, right? And so what did you start to learn about yourself? Everything.

28:34 You see all the beautiful things about yourself and you see all the ugly things about yourself, and the way to survive right off the bat is to learn to accept you for who you are, and if you don’t accept yourself for who you are, you will never make it in the monastery. You just really have to put one two arms around yourself and go, this is me, accepting. Doesn’t mean condoning it, it’s just acknowledging that this is where you are right now. You’re made up of good things and not-so-good things, and it’s okay.

29:03 And always looked at myself as a building under construction, there’s still work going on, the scaffolding, those tools lying around, their nails, but it’s a work in progress, and and that’s the first thing you have to do as a monk is accept yourself for who you are, because as soon as you’re going, you’re going to see everything, and if you don’t accept yourself for who you are, you’ll want to leave. Can you talk to other monks about this stuff? We were encouraged to talk only together and other monks, because they were all going through the same thing and they were all going through their own.

29:34 You feel their energy, like, can you feel some people are struggling with themselves or having a hard day, or maybe some guys have a couple of bad years? Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, is if you only have a guru to talk to, I mean, it seems like you could get stuck. Well, every now and then we would chat with each other, but we were encouraged really to talk only to the guru, because you don’t really want one monk dumping his problems on another monk who’s going through his own stuff.

29:58 Nobody wants to see that. No, exactly. Depressed monk owns like terrible. And what would the some of the things that your guru said to you, do you remember, like, she kind of, you know, I don’t know, counsel you at these times? He always defaulted back to, are you doing your practices every day?

30:16 And my answer whenever I went to see him was always no. I had fallen behind in my practices, you know, and then I would just get up and leave. But what else was there to talk about? They put it right back on you. He put it right back on me, and that’s what I loved about him, you know, and I met so many teachers along the way who want to solve your problems, who want to fix you, when I, you know, who are like almost a messiah figure that can wave a wand and like fix you, and he always put it back on me and that’s what I loved about him, because that’s at the ultimately at the end of the day what I wanted.

30:51 I want to be in charge of my life, I want to be in charge of my future, I want to be in charge of how I feel and my own happiness, and he put it back on me and gave me tools. What would the practices that he wanted you to do? Well, it’s almost like going to see a doctor, right? There’s just no one medicine for one ill man. So depending on what I was going through, he, he dished out the right medicine.

31:16 He might give me certain practices to do where there was meditation or process of accepting myself, Hawaiian, working with my subconscious mind, either dealing with my past, and he would give particular tools and he would say like, okay, I want you to go do this every day for an hour, and then I’d do it for two weeks or three weeks or a month, and then I might stop, do it, and then problems would arise and they go see him and tell him the problem coming up, and that’s like, hey, he’s still doing your practice? And they’re like, oh no, I stopped last week. Oh, what do you want from me, get back to work.

31:51 Yeah, well, I mean, if I go see a doctor and it gives me pills, then I take it for two weeks and then I stop taking them, and then I have symptoms again, and then I go see the doctor and I’m like, symptoms came back. Are you taking your pills? No, I’m not. Well, what do you want me to do, shove them down your mouth? Take the pills.

32:08 I think, I think we were having dinner in Napa, you said to someone like, we were taught how to do so many basic things that sometimes humans aren’t taught, like we were taught how to focus or taught how to go to sleep. I think you might have one time when we were having dinner, good Mike. Yeah, thank you. I remember you said that now, you’re like, we’ve never been taught how to go to sleep. Yeah, we’re taught how to go to sleep, we were taught how to wake up, we were taught what to do, and we slept like during to sleep period, would you actually do just sleep?

32:38 We were taught how to be awake, we were trained how to meet up in the dream world and study together and continue to educate ourselves. We were taught how to breathe, how to eat, how to shower, all kinds of things, you know. We’re just born into this world and people go like, here, Linnea nursery rhymes, Linea ABCs, 1 2 3s, go to school, learn geography, learn history, science, the periodic table. Why? Whenever you’re ever gonna use the periodic table again?

33:06 But simple things with like basic life, human skills, we never get taught. Who teaches, did you ever go to sleep? How many people out there struggle to go to sleep? Millions, right? Because they assume everybody knows how to go to sleep.

33:20 How do you go to sleep? How do I go to sleep without any problems? Did you have a process that they talked about? They do this, this, this, this. Yeah, and it’s a simple process.

33:29 You lay on your back with your hands by your side, the palm is facing upward, you visualize your nervous system and you visualize all your energy coming into your nervous system and flowing from different limbs into your spine. So imagine all the energy in your leg, your left leg being absorbed into the nervous system, flowing up the nervous system into spine, and then the same thing with your right leg, your left upper torso and your right side of your upper torso, in your arm here, pulling into your spine, and your whole body gets just asleep, because when you relax in other system you relax your muscles, and when you relax your muscles the whole arm goes limp. And this was a teaching that you learned in the monastery?

34:16 Yeah, and then you just fall asleep, and the next thing you know it’s time to wake up. I mean, you’ve had great sleep because my guru wanted well rested monks that could help him fulfill this mission. So in order to do that, he needed to make sure that when they slept their batteries got charged to 100 percent, not 75 percent. How terrible is it when you wake up in the morning and your smartphone’s only got 30 percent of battery life and you go, ah, should have charged it, right?

34:43 Because you want to wake up and you want a hundred percent of you on your phone, not thirty percent. So most people go to sleep and wake up with like 60 percent of battery in their life, and for me my goal is to go to sleep, be fully rested and wake up with a hundred percent of energy so that I can go and have a dynamic day and do things that I want to do. Okay, and eating, taught you how to eat as well? Yes. Can you how to focus on eating, how much to eat, and we had a rule in the monastery that your first serving should fit in both hands, if you’re still hungry go back, and whatever fits in one hand, one hand.

35:20 Well, you don’t have to big hands, but a simple rule like that. Eat slowly, do you visualize the food, you think about these things, you eat slowly, you chew your food properly. When we had lunch, we sat together and had lunch, we weren’t watching TV, we weren’t doing anything else, when reading a book, we just focused on eating and enjoying our food. I had some scrambled eggs before you got here and I was eating them, and I was eating them fast because I was getting ready for you, and I was like, I bet Dandapani would be like, try and enjoy your eggs, think about your eggs, think about where they came from, you know.

35:55 Know my guru would say similar things, like enjoy your food, you know, nourishes you, and take time and actually enjoy eating it. The meditation was an hour a day, which most people thought you might be meditating 12 hours a day, but you said before that you were preparing for that meditation. Yes, the entire day. Exactly, and you explained how that. Yeah, and this is the concept people don’t get right.

36:17 People think that the more you meditate the better it is. So 20 minutes of meditation is not as great as three hours of meditation, and it’s actually not how we work. For us, we believed in quality as opposed to quantity. We spent the whole day preparing to meditate. So in Hindu philosophy, what comes before meditation?

36:38 Concentration. Concentration comes before meditation, so you need to learn how to concentrate in order to meditate, and we believe that you can’t meditate if you can’t concentrate. So we spent the whole day focusing on concentration. So when I spoke with someone in the monastery, I spoke with another monk, I gave them my undivided attention. When I worked on my laptop, I focused on working on my laptop.

37:00 When I swept the sidewalk, I focus on sweeping the sidewalk. So throughout the day I’m practicing concentration. Now when I go to sit down to meditate, I’m really focused and I can have a dynamic meditation session. And I always used a simple analogy of, you know, take Usain Bolt for example, the sprinter, right? I don’t know much about him except you won three gold medals, fastest man on earth from Jamaica.

37:23 I can make an assumption, and tell me if I’m wrong, that his whole day is structured, that he eats the right kinds of food and drinks the right amount of water, he goes to the gym, if you look at the boy, he’s ripped, right? Probably works out, runs every day, I’m sure sprinters do all kinds of things, but his whole day is preparing him for what, nine point five seven seconds or whatever it is his world record is, not the other way around. People come up to me all the time, Brian, and they say, it’s on the potty, I’m so stressed out, I’ve got so much happening in my life, do you think if I meditate for five minutes in the morning, you know, oh, help my whole day?

37:58 I’m doing like, well, what are you doing the remaining twenty three hours and 55 minutes? That’s what I want to know. Because if you try to meditate for five minutes in the morning and the rest of the day you just live a chaotic life, that’s not, yeah, it’s a good start, but it’s not really helping you. It’s like eating a carrot in the morning and then hamburgers and fries all day and hoping to have a healthy diet. You have to understand that your whole day, your lifestyle, is what’s gonna support your meditation practice at the start, and then if then your meditation practice grows and then it turns around and supports your lifestyle, right, but not the other way around.

38:33 You don’t create a meditation practice to support your lifestyle, you create a lifestyle first, meditation second, then meditation affects the lifestyle, not the other way around. Everybody in the West has got it backwards. And what should we be doing with our lifestyle to make it to where it’s maybe more meditation friendly? Well, a couple of things I would say. One is simplify your life.

38:55 Everybody is so busy, everybody’s got a lot of things to do, we don’t actually have a lot of things to do, right? We like being distracted, user them, we don’t have to think about ourselves. Well yeah, and we, we don’t have priorities in life, most people don’t have clear priorities in life. You know, I, for me, my goal is to simplify my life, simply find a number of people in my life and simplify the number of things in my life. We only have a finite amount of energy each day, right?

39:22 But every year we have more people in our lives, is that a fair statement? More Facebook friends, even more people are you connected with? Yeah, but your energy stays the same, so that’s not a proportionate growth. If your energy is increasing every year proportionately with the number of things and people in your life, then we don’t have to talk about this, but you know, energy level is the same but the amount of people and things in your life were growing almost exponentially, so where that doesn’t work.

39:50 So for me it’s always about simplifying first the people and things into your life, into who and what’s most important, taking that finite energy that you have each day and focusing. Second step is learning out of focus and concentrate that finite amount of energy into the people and things that truly matter. Now you start to create a lifestyle that you actually love, because you’re invested into people and things that matter, and the byproduct of that is happiness.

40:15 And you said happiness is not a goal. That’s correct, yes, happy, that’s not a goal, and if you ask most people what do you want in life, they say, all want to be happy, right? Would that be a fast theme, literally they didn’t US Constitution, I think, the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit of happiness, I always say you should never pursue happiness. Don’t pursue happiness, pursue a lifestyle where the byproduct of that lifestyle is happiness.

40:41 So happiness comes as a byproduct. I spend time with the people that I love, what is my by-product? I’m happy. I spend time with people I don’t like, I’m not happy. So don’t pursue happiness, pursue a lifestyle that gives happiness, but in order to then to pursue that lifestyle, you need to be clear what you want in life, what’s your purpose in life?

41:03 And people don’t know this because they don’t spend any time with themselves. You said you’re marked, I think one time you sat down with a bunch of entrepreneurs, and we’ll get to later where you went after the monastery, because now you, you travel the world speaking with, you know, a high caliber entrepreneurs, and you asked him what’s their purpose in life and nobody could answer. Although I’m sure they could give you their business model like the back of their hand, but they don’t even tell you their purpose, right?

41:27 No. I remember a few years ago I was in Australia and spoke at an event with some very, very successful entrepreneurs, and they took me out to dinner afterwards and there was four guys and two ladies and two wives, and they everybody else had left. In that dinner was like 12:30 in the morning, maybe our third or fourth glass of wine, and I asked everyone, that is a wine now, sorry, you drink wine now? I do actually. I had my first glass of alcohol in the monastery.

41:55 Oh, I never touched alcohol at all until I joined the monastery, and we brewed our own beer in the monastery. I don’t say meant to be, I don’t know if you know that or not, know what’s it, what is Omo? Yeah, they, they invented beer, right, and and champagne, right? Or probably, yeah. Okay, so you were no monster and started drinking when the monastery side of drinking and so I was having wine with these entrepreneurs and I asked him, I think it was like 12:30 in the morning, I asked just everyone at the table, what’s your purpose in life?

42:24 Nobody could answer. Two people said, I don’t know. Two guys rambled on for five minutes, which meant then, no idea. One lady had known, one of the wives said I don’t know, the other wife started talking and then she broke down and attacked her husband. There you go, simple question, what’s I hope is in life?

42:43 No idea. What color is your tie, Brian? I think it’s red. It’s red, right? I mean, not very difficult to answer, but people don’t know because they never spent any time with themselves.

42:55 I always say, you know, people, people make time for everything and everyone else in their life, but they never make time for themselves. If you go up to someone who you know and say, like, did you like ketchup for coffee, let’s, let’s do coffee. No, like, oh, I can’t this week, but I can next week. How about Thursday 7:00 p.m.? Perfect, I’ll see you at this place.

43:15 When was the last time someone is willing to take time out of their life to spend time with themselves? So if I wanted to get to know you, and we’ve had one dinner and we had a great conversation, we’re spending time here, if I wanted to get to know you, I would have to spend time with you. We’d have to meet up for coffee, a glass of wine, I really want to get to know you, maybe we meet up once a week, every Friday night we go out for a glass of wine, we chat for a couple hours, after yeah, get to know you really well, you get to know me really well, but it requires me spending time with you.

43:43 So if you want to get to know yourself, you need to spend time with yourself, but in, in a way that you can inquire, right? So people say to me things like, I walk my dog in the park, that’s my time with myself, and you’re like, no, it’s not, that’s you walking the dog. And we go like a heist, you know, they go for a jog, that’s my alone time. Now that’s you jogging, avoiding traffic, watching where you’re stepping so you don’t trip and fall over. Spending time with yourself is sitting down, closing your eyes, not interacting with the outside world and actually going inside and having that conversation, the same conversation I would have with you and say like, hey Brian, so where, where did you grow up?

44:22 You know, you said California, do you like to surf? No, hate the water. I love the water. Tell me, right? And people don’t have that conversation, because they don’t have that conversation with themselves, they don’t end up knowing what they want in life, because they don’t know what they want in life, they can’t focus that finite amount of energy, and then they don’t live a lifestyle that brings them happiness, and most people end up being happy, unhappy as a by-product.

44:48 And so what is the tool that you suggest people use to start? Is it that focused meditation? Is it just being with themselves alone, asking questions? Yeah, I would say just, you know, take five minutes out of the day every morning, and maybe even just do it Monday to Friday and take the weekends off, you know, wake up in the morning, shower, go to a quiet place in your home or apartment, sit down for five minutes, close your eyes, you can do a couple of breathing exercises and maybe just take a few deep breaths or relax itself, and then it’s not having that conversation with yourself, same conversation.

45:21 Then people, the next natural question is, what do I talk about, right? Well, what would you talk about if you met a stranger at a bar? Would you just sit there and stare at them? Would you ask questions? What’s your name?

45:32 How are you feeling? What do you think about the election in America? Ask yourself these questions, have a conversation the same way you would have with a stranger with yourself, and when you have that conversation every day, the initial conversations would be very superficial of feeling, today I’m hungry, didn’t like the show we watched last night, and then after a week we’re not gonna be talking about that. If we met every once a week for six months, by month three or month four our conversation to be so much deeper, right?

46:05 We’ll be talking about much more personal stuff, and then you’d really get to know yourself, right, and you’re diving deep and just trying to find out what you really want, what motivates you, right, who you are, how you’re treating the people you love, exactly, how you’re treating yourself, all right. And that conversation doesn’t happen on day one, sometimes it does, but most of the time it doesn’t, it comes after the fifth or sixth or seventh conversation, when you feel comfortable, when you can trust the other person with more deeper personal stuff, the same way you have to trust yourself. Soon, yeah, once you close your eyes and go inside of you, you realize that you’re gonna see things that you love and things that you don’t love, and you have to be prepared for that, and most people can’t handle that.

46:46 They can close the eyes and go in and see all the things they love about themselves, but they’re things that aren’t pleasant makes them open the eyes and go, this is absolutely useless, I could definitely use my time in much more productive ways, and then they get up and they leave. That’s the reaction when they kind of see something they don’t want to, thank you, a second, why am I sitting here, it’s an absolute waste of time, I got a to-do list, I can go get none, this is a waste of time, and temporary, temporarily feel better or feel like you accomplished a goal or something, when in fact you still don’t know why you’re here, what your purpose is, etc. Exactly.

47:20 So same way like you get to know someone you love, right, you see all the good things about them and all the not-so-good things, this is part of the package, right, but you love and accept them because you love that person. The same way you need to take that approach with yourself, but you can’t know what you want until you spend time with yourself. Mmm, and you’re an expert because you did that for 10 years. So I’ve been doing it my whole life, even before that, you know, as a child growing up, I spent a lot of time with myself inquiring for what I wanted and what’s my purpose in life, and then became very, very clear about it from a know that’s why I could leave everything behind and go pursue that.

47:57 Okay, yeah, so I spent 10 years in the banking industry and just almost six years ago I walked out and didn’t know what I was going to do. London Real ended up flowing from that. Yeah, but when I, when I ended up looking back, I noticed that I had funnily enough started a meditation practice about three or four months before I left, and I had been deeply unhappy for like three years. Matter of fact, the day I left I called my clients, that said I’m not, I’m, I’m leaving because I’m not happy, and they, one of them, one of my clients said, Brian, you haven’t been happy for two years, and it hit me in my gut, and I was like, here I am, thought I was kind of putting an act on a professionalism, and all my clients knew that I hated being there.

48:38 Yeah, my colleagues too, and they hated me for hating it, because I was just coming in and dragging my feet. But when I look back, this this was a definite correlated piece here, and I think it’s because I got around into my head and I was able to maybe subconsciously have conversations that said, if you hate it so much, then why don’t you stop doing it? Because in the meantime I was giving all these Western reasons why I should keep going out of, there’s money, everyone thinks you have a great job, this is what you’ve always wanted, but when I started meditating something inside me was just like, you got to get out of here, and so yeah, it was obviously super powerful, you know, and you were getting to know yourself, right, that process of meditation and closing your eyes and going with them and you’re facing everything inside of you.

49:21 Yeah, happy doing what I’m doing, I need to leave, but that doesn’t come if your eyes are open and you’re always patching yourself with some kind of external stimulus and not facing who you are and what you are, and it takes tremendous amount of courage to do that, you know, to actually go in, see what you really want, and then even more courage and to pursue it, because it took a lot of courage, I’m sure, to leave the banking in the financial world, the world that you knew, you felt safe, you know, you knew how it worked, and go do something completely different, a talk show, what the heck, this is like totally not anywhere close, early close to what you were doing. Yeah, it’s a little strange in retrospect. It was also my way of trying to reconnect with the human race, well because I was living in a very isolated existence, and so this is a weird way of just like, now I’ve found a way, I’ve actually engineered the fact that I get to come to contact with people like you and and, you know, explore and expand, and what a great position you made.

50:25 I mean, you get to meet so many wonderful people and talk to them and have all these great conversations. Yeah, and in retrospect now it makes sense, but yeah, at the time it’s hard to get out of that rat race. Yeah, and I think what happens to most people is, is when they finally realize it, it’s after they’ve been 20 years in the wrong thing or ten years in the wrong relationship or blah blah, and then when they hit some, it’s such this step function where they’re like, oh my gosh.

50:46 Yep, and that’s like these midlife crises or something, cuz it will give, sooner or later, won’t it? Yeah, I mean, and sometimes it doesn’t, it just goes for a long period of time, but yeah, eventually it does, and people don’t do much about it, you know. People, I meet so many people all the time to tell me that unhappy with their life and they want to change something, but never go around to doing anything about it, and they just live that life they want to live.

51:13 Very few people actually have the courage to follow through and do what you’ve done. You talk to me about the rest of your time in the monastery. I’m sure when your guru died that was probably very difficult for you, and you know, I think you said before, even for other other priests in the monasteries, and they don’t know if they want to stay, they want to go. I’m sure there’s strange monastery politics in there too, quite magnified, right, cause you’re like a little culture, they live in a monastery.

51:39 No, but I just did it, I’m assuming, but I’m here sitting right, right. Yeah, I can imagine. What was all that like and then how did that end up with you leaving after 10 years? Yeah, so basically, you know, my guru died, was extremely difficult time for all the monks, probably I know for me it was the most painful experience I’ve ever gone through in my life and probably will be. And we loved him so much.

52:03 Yes, he loved them so much. I mean, imagine giving up everything and everyone in your life to go study with one person and live with one person, that’s even more committed than a marriage. In a marriage you can still go out with your friends and eat the food you want to eat and drink the drinks you want to drink, do the things you want to do. This is a total renunciation, you know, of going and dedicating your life to one person and one purpose, so those are tremendous amount of love, death, so it was very painful when he died and it was very painful for the monks as well, and after he died I felt that the monastery went through a big change, because everybody was going through a process of how do we deal with this, and I think he trained us for a lot of things but didn’t train us to handle his death, you know, his loss.

52:54 And I would say, you know, 2/3 of the monastery probably threw themselves into their work and their service so that they were doing that, and then a third of the monks probably, and this is my take on it, a third of the monastery threw themselves into their spiritual practices and got deeper into it, and after a while the third of the monks left the monastery, film within the first two years we probably lost about six or seven months, and there were only 27 months there, so there was a lot to lose. It’s a shock. Yeah, it was, it was very difficult, so I stayed for seven more years.

53:28 I felt that we were kind of going down very different paths, no, and and after my vows came up for renewal, and the vows expired every two years and you could renew them, so on my tenth year I decided not, not to renew my vows and I decided to leave. So that difficult, or was that, was the most difficult decision I’ve ever made in my life, for sure. Going into the monastery was an easy decision, leaving, I don’t think I’ve ever made such a difficult decision.

53:57 Took me about three years to come to that decision that it was not working out anymore, but remember the goal was not to be a monk, right, the goal was enlightenment. The monastic path was the most efficient way to get there in my view, so I still have my goal of enlightenment that I’m seeking, the path is just slightly different, well, not slightly different, quite different. I’ve chosen now to be a householder, I’m no longer a monk, I’m a priest, and as a priest I can get married, have children, have a business, being an entrepreneur and money, but the goal was still enlightenment.

54:36 Okay, the road to get that is different. How do you leave the monastery, what happens, is there some, there, there must be some type of, you know, trauma when you get out of there and go into the world? What, what was that like, and did the rest of the monks, is it kind of like, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, or are they like, we love you, goodbye, or what’s the vibe like? It makes some mixed emotions. Okay, yeah, some kind of selling them out.

55:00 Yeah, well, I mean, people know that’s all with the sort of in our tradition the vows last two years and you renew them every two years, and after 10 to 14 years you can take lifetime vows, so the expectation is it ever, and after two years if you don’t want you can leave, that’s why they make it renewable, so someone’s not happy that you’re leaving and that’s their own fault, don’t make the vows renewable end, right? So the first 10 to 14 years is actually when you can choose to leave, it’s almost like you’re dating before you get married and take lifetime vows, so so some were happy, there’s not happy in the sense, some wished me well, others were not thrilled about it, but you know, you make your choice and I left, and my vows expired, so everything was legit, so to speak.

55:49 My guru had set up a system where when you leave the monastery, especially if you’re long serving monks, you keep your two sets of robes, your beads, here, they give you $1,000 cash, a MacBook Pro and a one-way ticket home. It was he sponsored by Apple? I don’t know, he might have been. Oh no, we love the Macs. Okay, he’s like the next, well, we did a lot of desktop publishing, we put all our teachings online, so we which we used to Macs because we just loved how it would and used all the Adobe products of Photoshop, InDesign, we edited movies in Final Cut Pro and we programmed, we knew HTML, JavaScript, CSS.

56:27 We both, yeah, the monasteries filled. Yes, I think had the largest website in the state of Hawaii in terms of content and size. Okay, which the monks all built themselves. So you not playing around, he had a really good mission. Oh yeah, we didn’t mess around, we knew technology really well inside out, thanks.

56:42 And so they were gonna buy me a one-way ticket from Hawaii, the monastery was on Kauai, back home to West Australia, didn’t want to go back to Australia because my guru told me a long time ago a monk should never return to the place from which he came from, because the people that will never treat you there will always treat you the way you were before you left. Your parents will look at you and go like, oh Brian, you’re my son, they don’t see all the changes you’ve gone through, just, you know, your whole community would just look at you exactly the same way they did the day you left, are supposed to who you are ten years later. So I decided to move to the mainland U.S.

57:18 I landed in California in LA at midnight, was my bag and my money, and I checked into a backpacker motel and yeah, I roomed with six German backpackers that night, and the next day went out and bought stuff that all of you have, like shoes and pants and t-shirt. My goal was to take the thousand dollars that I had and create a life from it and not to borrow any money, because I felt that if I borrowed money now I’d always know how to borrow money, but you want to make money, then I’d always know how to make money, and that was it. That was eight years ago.

57:52 Yeah, what were those first few weeks like? I mean, are you hitting the casinos, so you know, so cuz drugs, you know, everything, come on, pubs every night, getting posted, but like you are dealing with that, obviously you all of a sudden now have access to a lot of these things. Yeah, did you try to kind of regulate yourself? Yeah, first thing to do, this is like monk one-on-one for leaving the monastery, for any monks out there who are listening thinking of leaving the monastery, this is what I recommend you do first.

58:25 Thing to do is to establish a ritual, because if you understand how the subconscious works, this is a very simple analogy of the subconscious mind. Subconscious mind really stores all your patterns and have, you know, any habit patterns you have, your memories all get started to subconscious. When you have an intense experience in your life, you can look at the subconscious as a piece of metal, imagine a metal bowl that I wanted to change the shape, what would I need to do?

58:48 I need to heat it up, right? I heat up the metal bowl, gets really red-hot, and then I can hammer it into any shape I want, and then when it cools down it takes on the new shape. So when you have an intense experience in your life, you could say your subconscious mind is heating up, and during that, and it’s a beautiful opportunity to reshape it. So when people go through intense experiences like near-death experience of birth of a first child or something traumatic, you see they make a lot of people do make huge changes in their life.

59:21 So I realized that leaving the monastery is probably one of the most intense experiences I probably go through, and my subconscious was very moldable. So what I did as soon as I left was to create rituals and patterns so that I could change the shape of this metal, which was still hot, because I knew after a few months it would cool down and take on a new shape. Yeah, so if I left the monastery and hit the strip clubs and the casinos and and the bars, that would be the biggest impression in my subconscious, and then a few months later when my subconscious kind of cooled down and took on a new shape, I would have all those patterns ingrained in my head, which would be really hard to break.

59:55 So when I came out, I kept very strict rituals, conducts of how I lead my life to the best of my ability, and a lot of those rituals I still do today. Interesting. This subconscious, you know, I talked about how I learned a lot from all of my guests that sit here, and like one of the things I picked up from, from Mimi icon and though, you know, Mimi and Alex, and even from, like, I’ve got a 71 year old old man who lives in a castle up in Scotland, he also does affirmations, and I’ve found them to be really powerful.

1:00:32 I said them out loud on my way to the tube this morning, I do it every day, and so I know they’re powerful, but I have never thought why they’re powerful and how that whole subconscious works, and I just wonder if I could get your thoughts on that. Yeah, sure. Monks have been using affirmations forever, mantras as they call it in Sanskrit. We, we use these beads to chant on, and a lot of times people say these are prayer beads, but we actually, yeah, you could say they’re prayer beads, but we’re actually more like affirmation, on mantra beads.

1:01:01 So we use these to actually program a subconscious. So we chant on each bead, we chant an affirmation, I am happy, I am confident, and we repeat the same chant over and over again, and 108 beads in here, so you can imagine how your subconscious gets programmed, and you memorize like 108 different, well, just one chant, one chant, one chant over and over again. So it’s I’m happy or I’m confident, you repeated 108 times. So with that affirmation, three ingredients are necessary: concise chants, or positive words, clear visualization and a corresponding feeling.

1:01:35 And most people don’t understand this, when it comes to affirmation they just say the words but no visualization and no feeling. So for example, if I say I love apples, concise chants of positive words. Now when I say the word I, my mind knows I’m talking about me. When I say the word love, my mind knows that he likes it, he enjoys it, here daughter, that’s what love means to him. When I say the word apples, my mind gets confused because it’s searching my entire hard drive, my entire subconscious from the day I was born, for every occurrence of the word apple.

1:02:08 Red apple, green apples, the yellow apples, Honey Crisp apples, Red Delicious, Fuji apples, Washington apples, the Apple MacBook Pro, like a MacBook Air, and for watch I watch, Apple iPhone, Apple iPad. What Apple’s is he talking about? I have no idea. Mmm, right, so words alone it’s not enough, so that’s why we have visualizations. And when I say I love apples and I visualize a bright red apple, my mind goes, oh, that’s what he’s talking about.

1:02:34 I love apples, he loves bright, right, Atmos just a particular type of animal, it’s a Washington or Honey Crisp apple which has a little yellowish tint to it. Okay, so that’s why words and visualization are important. Okay, and then feeling. Feeling is emotion, emotion is energy, and you know the famous scientist Tesla? Yeah, not personally, but obviously through reputation.

1:02:57 He had this beautiful saying which kind of encapsulate some Hindu philosophy really well. He said that to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. So to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, vibration. Everything is made up of energy that’s vibrating at a certain frequency, right? So the chance molecules and atoms that are vibrating a certain frequency binding it together, creating a certain matter.

1:03:25 So what we believe is that if you, your subconscious is filled with patterns that are vibrating at a certain frequency, anger could be vibrating at twenty kilohertz, happiness at thirty kilohertz, I don’t know what the numbers are, just making stuff up in terms of numbers, but everything is vibrating at a certain frequency, and if you can go into your subconscious and create a pattern, infuse it with energy that’s vibrating at a certain frequency, you can attract things of a similar nature to it. So if I go into my subconscious, I repeat an affirmation which it has a concise chant of positive words, clear visualization, I infuse the feeling into it, what does it feel like, right? And it starts to vibrate in my subconscious with that Pat at that frequency, now it attracts anything of a similar vibration or similar frequency towards it.

1:04:16 So give you a very simple example, boy dates girl, they go out for two years, they have a great intimate relationship, they break up. Boy hangs out with his friends to get over the relationship, the goal that’s, you know, a chocolate shopping wine therapy was they go friends for six months, finally says I’m over him. She starts dating again, who does she attract into her life? Quite from the similar guy, you know, different person but with the same vibration, same type of person.

1:04:49 I’ve had so many people come up to me, boys and girls say, I keep attracting the same type of person into my life, common thing I hear all the time. Why? Because you date John, dates, ooh, they have two years of a relationship, Sue has vibrations that have experiences, emotional experiences that are vibrating at the frequency of John in his subconscious. They break up, those experiences are still vibrating at the frequency of John in her subconscious. Now she goes to date, who does she attract?

1:05:22 Another John named Peeta of a similar frequency, and that just happens. So energy doesn’t know how to discriminate between what’s good for you and what’s not good for you, it’s just energy, so anything of a similar frequency gets drawn to you. So if you know how the subconscious works and you know how to program it using affirmations with the clear chant, concise chant of positive words, clear visualization and a corresponding feeling, feeling being the most important component because it’s the actual energy that attracts, then you can draw, bring into your life anything you want.

1:05:56 Do you have a certain set of affirmations that you do, would you do them every morning? I do, yeah, I do them every morning and night. I have one affirmation for my personal life, one for my family life and one for my business. Just a single one or a list of them? A single one, a single one.

1:06:12 Yeah, because you want to train, you want to program the mind, right? So if your affirmation is like a page long, it’s very hard to, to shape it, so it needs to be concise and and positive, and then visualize that concise thing in however you want it manifested, right? So for example, if you you do this show, your affirmation, this, I will interview fascinating people that can be very, they can give great insights to my listeners, and I just made that on the spot.

1:06:47 You will come up with something, right, hey, but it’s concise, and then you visualize yourself sitting here with your crew, the camera, talking to different people. Obviously you can’t see what they look like, so you don’t know who they are, so just visualize a person sitting here, maybe a faceless person, long hair, bald, markings on his heads and then rosy herbs beads, right? So that’s your visualisation. And now your feeling, what does it feel like? And the feeling you can know because you’ve interviewed so many people, how do you feel after an interview?

1:07:17 Do you walk away like, wow, that was really insightful, I learnt a lot, this is wonderful? Take that same feeling and hold that feeling in your mind as you repeat that affirmation, with the visualization. Okay, creates a pattern, your subconscious that starts to vibrate at that frequency, and you might have interviewed hundreds of people and there’s some interviews that you go, I know I wasn’t that great, but there’s some that you go like, this is probably one of my best.

1:07:42 Take the feeling from your best interview and insert that into affirmation, guess now it’s gonna be vibrating at that feeling, and then you’ll start attracting anything of a similar vibration to its it. Okay, now there’s the movie The Secret that says all you have to do is think about it and it shows up on your doorstep. Do you subscribe to that, or do you subscribe it, there’s going to be a lot of action on the top of that? Oh, I think there has to be a lot of action, like I haven’t watched the movie or I’ll read the book, but I do believe that my guru had a beautiful saying where he said, where awareness goes, energy flows.

1:08:11 So if you put your awareness on something, that’s where your energy is flowing, and that’s what’s gonna start manifesting in your life, but it needs to be follows through your action. And I think a lot of people just think about things and have cop-out lines like, the universe will manifest it for me, like that’s the biggest cop-out ever. Do the work, manifest it yourself, don’t wait for a handout, go out there and create it, but put energy into it, right?

1:08:37 So I always tell people the way to look at energy is looking at in to the same way you look at water. If I took a watering can and I watered a garden bed, what would grow, the weeds or the flowers? They both grow, right? The water doesn’t order discriminate between the weeds and the flowers. Energy, it’s the same way too, if you put energy into something it’ll grow whether it’s positive or negative, and the way to put energy into something is to put your awareness on it.

1:08:58 So where awareness goes, energy flows. You keep your awareness on something, that’s where your energy is flowing, and if your energy is flowing there, it starts to manifest in your life, regardless if it’s positive, I get, if it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is keep your awareness there. So if you can think about something long enough over and over again, energy starts to flow, that it starts to manifest in your life, but you also need to do the work.

1:09:18 I can’t just sit in, just think about it all day, you need to also then support it with, with actions. Okay, yeah, the past eight years of your life moved in New York City, which is the city that’s too crazy for me anymore, I can’t live there anymore. Yeah, I lived there when I was young, when I was your monastery age, for you, I look at New York City, and it was amazing for that time and I was so glad I went there, but now I go back, I can stay for a few days and then it’s just too intense for me.

1:09:42 Either that or I’m not meditating enough, I don’t know. But what have you learned in the last eight years, about maybe about yourself, about the world, and they spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs, but you know, what can you tell us about that, that part of your life? Yeah, I chose to live in New York City because one of the things I heard in the monastery all the time was that people would visit, we would share with them teachings and tools, one of the common responses was that, well, it’s so easy for you to practice all of these things, you live in a peaceful monastery in Hawaii, how hard is it to be Zen?

1:10:14 Well, you’re right, I couldn’t really argue that. So one of my goals was to live in a city that was busy, complicated, and to actually put the tools into practice myself. And when I came to New York City, is that this is a perfect place for next monk, really was because it’s a, the best testing ground for everything that I’m teaching, and I love it. What, what worked and what didn’t work in New York, or New Yorkers, New Yorkers? I don’t really teach New Yorkers, I actually don’t teach in, you know, had all my works around the states, all around the world, but in terms of what works for me, I realized that I needed to simplify my life even more.

1:10:58 So every year, and we talked about this briefly just now, every year I work on simplifying my life, especially around November, December time, this time of the year, I, I look at all the people in my life, I look at all the things in my life, and look at all the things that I’m doing, and I simplify it and make a list of all the people that I interacted with and I reduced that list. People, I’d rather have 50 people that I close to me that I can invest energy, instead of 5,000 people that I’m just diluting managing. New York has taught me to simplify my life, even though I’m just constantly simplifying it, and that’s why I love the city.

1:11:38 Hmm, and for people that, that can’t simplify their life, they can’t, why not? Yeah, that’s my graduation, boy, not with my mom, I need to always call her back, it’s my auntie, I need to call her back, even though she’s drawing the energy out of me like a vampire is, use your vampire. Soon I think people can’t do that because they don’t, they never look at life as being finite, you know, nobody likes to talk about death, nobody likes to think about dying, so they always imagine that they’ll live forever, but if you knew life was finite, you start making tough decisions, right?

1:12:14 We’re having this interview, but if someone walked in here right now and said, all of us have half an hour to live, you’re gonna keep going with the show, you’re gonna leave, your crew might leave, right, there might go like, Brian, thank you, I gotta go, right, right, they might call their families, then I go with the loved ones, but if somebody walked in here and said, we all have 50 years to live, nobody would leave. I really just keep doing this, like 50 years, so I can spend another a little bit more time with you. So when you realize that life is not short, and everybody says life is short, it isn’t actually, because if I told you we’re going for to jail for a day, you go on, like, a day.

1:12:51 If I said to you 10 years, you’d feel like 10 years in jail, so 10 years then becomes a really long time. So if you had 10 years to live, that’s still a very long time, but I realize a life is finite, this is one clear thing in light of it, there’s a definitive end, and because life is finite, even though I believe in the process of reincarnation, I only know I have one life, has done the Pawnee. Next life it could be a six-foot tall blond haired girl named Sally, I have no idea.

1:13:20 That could be fun too. That could be very, very fun, who became a monk, right? But this life, I have one life, has done to Pawnee, and I want it to be an amazing life, so because of that I prioritize what’s important. I need to simply find my life to who and what’s important in my life, take the finite amount of energy I have each day and invest it into those things. Now I create a life that I enjoy living, the byproduct of that is happiness.

1:13:47 So when people say to me, life is too busy, I can’t simplify, no, it’s you don’t want to, you have the choice. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head saying you have to associate with this people, you have to do these things, no, you choose to do them. Like parents say to me all the time, oh, it’s crazy with children, they take them to school, I’m getting basketball, they got golfing, they’ve got this, they’ve got that. I’m like, what are you training your child to be, James Bond?

1:14:15 James Bond is the only person I know that can do everything. You know, why don’t I just learn one thing, learn to play the guitar? Why? You people create messy lives, complicated lives, right, I don’t need to, and do we do it as a way of avoiding ourselves? One, one reason I’m sure, and then also another reason through peer pressure, you know, social pressures of like, I want to keep up with the Joneses, they doing this, so we should do this as well.

1:14:42 I don’t, I do what I feel I need to do. People say this to me all the time, you know, I hang around with entrepreneurs and other people like you and I have met, they’ve come up with Snapchat, you need to be on Snapchat, if you’re not on Snapchat your business is not gonna grow. I’m like, I don’t need to be on Snapchat. I do Instagram, I do Facebook, I do a little bit of Twitter, and that’s it. I don’t care what comes up tomorrow, I’m not gonna do it because I can’t sustain it, all right, that’s gonna take a little bit more on my energy each day and I only have this much energy, and I need to divide it between all the people and things that I love.

1:15:17 Right, law of thermodynamics states you cannot create or destroy energy but you can transfer it from one thing to another, transform it from one thing to another. So I can’t create more energy, I only have this much, because come 11 o’clock tonight I’ll be exhausted, ready to sleep, so I got this much, hundred-percent, I need to know where I’m dividing. I always tell entrepreneurs to look at energy the same way they look at money, it’s a finite resource, there needs to be wisely managed, wisely reallocated and wisely invested.

1:15:43 In finance, man, you know this. Mmm, right, if I gave you $100,000 and I said, invest it in four companies, you said okay, and one started to do bad, would you leave your money in there, take it out? You take it out and put it somewhere else. But if you had infinite amount of money, you’re a printer sitting there printing out Benjamin Franklins every second, then you go like, why not just throw my money away. But no matter how rich you are, you only have so much money, right, and you become thoughtful before you invest that money.

1:16:16 Energy is the same way, you only have so much, so why don’t you ask the same questions before you invest energy into someone or something, whether that someone or something is deserving of it? Because if I said to you, Brian, hey, I’m starting a new business again, you start up going, could you invest $50,000 into it? Might well, tell me a little bit more about it, what’s your business model, what’s your plan for it, you know, what will be my return on my investment?

1:16:43 You ask questions before you gave me the money, is wouldn’t hand me the money. So I think people don’t ask those questions when they invest a finite amount of energy, and they just throw it all over the place and then, then nothing grows. Yeah, now you, you speak to entrepreneurs all the time, you go into Paris now, you’re going to Australia multiple times in multiple months, what is something that comes up more often than the rest when you speak with these, you know, quite successful entrepreneurs, they’re running companies, you know, with millions and profits, that kind of thing, and and also does that relate to focus, because I know you learned a lot about focus and as s-something you can transfer to them, to them?

1:17:18 Yeah, I would say a lot of these entrepreneurs, these people that own companies, are very focused, they’re very clear business-wise where they want to take their companies, what they want to achieve, they’re very clear that way. They’re not clear about their personal life, they’ve never invested that much time figuring out what their purpose in life is, where are they going as an individual. you know, do they have a plan for their future, that’s what one thing they’re not clear off.

1:17:45 Another big thing I see happening a lot these days is that their employees or their team members can’t focus. We’ve got a generation of human beings now that growing up that are trained to be distracted, so now they’re coming to the workplace. I was in Kenya a month and a half ago, in Nairobi, being in an event, business owned I came up to me and goes, you know, my employees can’t focus, do you think you can help them? And go like, have you ever thought them how to concentrate and also us?

1:18:18 No, and I’m like, that’s where we need to start. We need to start by teaching them how to concentrate, because what companies do is they bring in processes and systems to stop them from being distracted, like turning off social media while you’re patching the problem, right? You should rather be teaching them how to concentrate, so then you don’t have to turn off social media, you can leave it on, but they know when to focus and when to shift their focus.

1:18:43 So I think that’s a huge problem, seeing a lot nowadays in the workplace, and a lot of businesses do approached me asking them, asking me to help them treat and teach their employees how to focus, how to concentrate, right? Cuz I always say, you know, Brian, then you’ve heard me say this before, when we grow up we get told to concentrate and then we get taught how to write. I mean, did you get formal classes and concentration when you were growing up? But you probably got told, write, focus on this, concentrating your homework, but nobody teaches us how to do it.

1:19:14 But then when you want to learn a piano, you want to learn how to drive a car, play tennis, we take lessons, we learn how to do it, and then we practice it to be good at it. If you don’t practice it, you don’t become good at it. So people don’t learn how to concentrate and they don’t practice concentration, so if you don’t learn it and they don’t practice it, how would you be good at it? Where are they good at? Distractions, because they practice it all the time.

1:19:35 If you practice something 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day, after six months you’d be an expert at it, which is what you were doing in the monastery, you were focused on every single activity. Yes, that was really the, that was the meditation in disguise. Exactly, that was the preparation for meditation. I wouldn’t call it a meditation, was the preparation for meditation, because meditation is born out of a prolonged state of concentration, right? So you need to learn to concentrate first, you can concentrate and then you can meditate.

1:20:03 Meditation comes out of a prolonged state of concentration, so we learnt concentration throughout the whole day, we practiced it, everything that we did, so when we sat down we were all ready to get into a state of meditation. We learn how to concentrate better. I would say one simple way, normally I go through a process of teaching people how their mind works first, because once you know how the mind works, you can control it, once you can control it, you can focus it.

1:20:27 But since we’re during an interview and time is of the essence, I would say a simple way what most people can do is practice doing one thing at a time. So if you’re speaking to somebody, give them your undivided attention. You know, if you’re driving, focus on driving, don’t text and drive at the same time. If you’re doing emails, just do emails, don’t be on the phone and doing emails at the same time. So if you bring this method of just doing one thing at a time throughout the day, you learn to concentrate and you actually become so much more efficient.

1:20:57 Multitasking is a myth, it doesn’t exist. That’s true. Yeah, so just do one thing. So I bring that into my whole life. If I’m having a cup of coffee with someone, my phone’s in my pocket, it’s not sitting on the table, having a cup of coffee with the other phone, and I give that person my undivided attention, and I do this throughout the whole day and I practice concentrations, so then eventually you just become good at it.

1:21:22 You become good at whatever you practice. Practice also doesn’t have the ability to discriminate between what’s good and not good for you, whatever you practice you become good at. I like that metaphor, the subconscious mind in the bowl, and it’s interesting because when you have these traumatic events, you know, maybe you change cities or maybe a death in the family or maybe so, it’s kind of thing a lot of, you know, it’s, it’s a chance to mold that bowl, you know, as a lot of people, when they’re in this transition, sometimes they’ll just try to not be into it, maybe they’ll medicate a bit or do this or drink or go back to these things because they don’t want to deal with this, this process, but if you use it as an opportunity to make yourself better, its subconscious better, it’s an amazing time to create change, and if you do affirmations during that time, it’s the bowl’s hot, right?

1:22:08 Anything you hit it with will start to change its shape. So whenever I’m going through an intense time in my life, I go, perfect time for change. Alright, it’s hard to recognize sometimes, right? It’s also that when the greatest time for growth as well, you know, it’s a lot of times stressful, but it’s hard, sometimes hard to recognize that it’s actually an asset because it feels like a liability. It’s also I’ve been trained to do that, right?

1:22:32 So I had ten years of life training, and most people aren’t trained how to love life, they’re trained to do everything else but life itself, which is really sad, because when I think about it, everybody has a life but nobody’s taught how to live life. You were almost given like an owner’s manual for those ten years. Exactly, the brain is in the body and light and interaction with the world. Yeah, and energy and how to manage energy and how to be. You see, it’s so sad though, because you think about it, right, Brian, you get one shot at life, you don’t get two chances, you have one life and then it’s over, regardless if your philosophy or religious upbringing, whether you believe in afterlife or reincarnation or heaven and hell, you have one life as you, and when it’s over it’s over.

1:23:20 So for me I wanted to be an amazing life. One of the last things my guru said on his deathbed was, what an amazing life, I would not have traded it for anything else in the world, and I thought to myself, what a great thing to hear from a dying man. What an amazing life, I would not have traded it for anything in the world. That’s what I want to say when I’m dying, because for every ten people that say, John the party is wonderful, there’s ten more that think I’m a jerk, and it’s okay, I don’t care what people say about me.

1:23:52 The end of the day, you know, I speak all over the world and people usually get the audience to do a little feedback poem just for their own personal use, and I always ask for those comments back because I wanted to see, and it’s amazing to, to read those things, because they’ll be like ten comments that are really wonderful and then like five that go, oh, he’s a fake, he’s, he doesn’t like women, he thinks women on grade, he thinks this, he thinks that, he’s not real, he’s not authentic, I don’t believe him, he doesn’t know his material. It’s amazing thing. I like, yeah, everybody has an opinion, but my opinion counts at the end, my opinion in my life is what matters most to me, that when I’m dying I’m able to look back in my life and go, this is a spectacular life, I, I lived it to the best that I could and this was amazing, and if I was to be born again it would be hard to top this life.

1:24:51 That’s how I would like to die. So in order to do that, I need to be clear, I need to be clear what I want in my life. Do you ever miss the monastery? Yes, I missed, I miss the lifestyle. I realize I, I was born to be a monk, which is in my DNA, it’s what I’ve built myself up, I feel, over many lives, and I miss the lifestyle of the simplicity, team, which is very hard to sustain and in the modern day.

1:25:22 Well, yeah, all those things I do miss. We ever go back? No, yeah, I mean, I’m quite happy with the path that I’ve chosen. My wife and I are creating a retreat center in Costa Rica. Yes, so kind of almost rebuilding the monastery, so to speak.

1:25:38 And what is the aim for that retreat center? The idea is to have people, adults and children, come and learn skills that I learned in the monastery, because I felt that, I mean, how else are people gonna learn this, Brian? I mean, who’s gonna give up everyone in their life, everything in their life, go be celibate and go live in a monastery? No, I don’t see a line of people in front of me. So the idea with Costa Rica is to have a place where I can share monastic tools and teachings to, to householders, and how great if we could train children, how great if we could teach a two-year-old or three old to understand their mind, to learn how to focus, to develop their willpower, to become clear of their purpose in life by the time they were five or six or seven or eight years old, instead of waiting until they’re 50 to figure out what life is about, when they live so much more joyous life, they knew right from the start what they wanted, but we need to be taught, we need to be trained how to, to figure these things out, and the whole idea with Costa Rica’s to provide that for people who are serious, not just everybody.

1:26:45 Okay, and they’ll come down for certain periods of time, yeah, it’ll come for like five days or seven days or nine day periods, and put him in a hut and do the go of old school on them. Not entirely old school. Yeah, we’re kind of branding it as a, as a luxury monastery for non-monks, I jokingly say. Okay, okay, yeah, so it’s not a monastery, we call it an ashram. There’ll be about eight or nine rooms that come places for people to stay, but they will go through a very, somewhat rigid process of three meals a day, no snacking in between, there’ll be rituals, there’ll be disciplines to follow throughout the day, exercises, classes, so it’s not a spa where you go get a massage, you need a carrot and drink some juice and lay by the pool.

1:27:30 This is a place to learn about yourself and to be trained like you are in a monastery. He’s just not giving up the will and in your life, tell you to do it, you know. Nowadays, what, what are your metrics of your own success? I mean, you’re obviously pushing yourself to do a lot of traveling and to speak in front of a lot of groups, and you were telling me about some of them, you know, just before the show. I mean, you must have some things in your mind like, I want to get this stuff done, but like how do you judge your own, evaluate your own success?

1:27:57 Success in what way? Where it’s business? Yeah, or just your own personal and business goals, like do you have a thing that I want to be doing this much in the next year, or when you, when you come to the end of the year, when you’re simplifying, how will you evaluate whether that was a good year for yourself? Good question. I don’t do that very much.

1:28:20 I have a 50 year plan for myself, right, that I’ve created from my life, and a 300 year plan for Costa Rica, my project in Costa Rica, and my whole goal is working towards that. So my primary goal right now is earning enough money to build and establish this place in Costa Rica financially, right, so I do the best I can each year and that’s it, but I don’t have a number each year that I’m trying to target, I hit, and maybe I should, but maybe I need to be trained in business, I don’t know, only on monk training. So I do my best every day and whatever that brings forth I’m content with.

1:29:05 Okay, yeah, I was, and that could be people could be listening just going like, this is terrible, but maybe I need business training, I don’t know, I just, yeah, I could totally see why you’re doing that and going with your energy as well. Yeah, I spent the summer and I go also with what I feel, right? Yeah, yeah, I just have to be very careful about, I say no sometimes if I feel like I’m crossing the line too much into a place where I’m losing myself, right?

1:29:28 So I spent two weeks in Barcelona over the summer, and it’s, it’s interesting to be around the, the Sagrada Família church, you know, which was built by an architect who had like a hundred and fifty year plan, you know, it’s still being built, so, and he was okay with that, he’s like, this isn’t gonna be built in my lifetime, he said, my, my benefactor like doesn’t have a timeline, that he meant like God. Yeah, and so it’s very powerful when you put your goals outside of your own lifetime, and sounds like you’re doing this with a 300 year plan, your place in Costa Rica, because then you can, you can think big, and then it’s no longer about you, you probably make more intelligent decisions. Exactly, and that’s a key thing, right, it, it should not be about you.

1:30:12 Well, at least in what I’m doing, you know, it shouldn’t be about me, and the thing that way I came up with the 300 plan is that we have a property, a 16 acre property in Costa Rica, and there’s a land next door that has a beautiful tree on it, gigantic, gigantic tree, I mean it’s literally about 15 feet wide, and when you stand underneath this big tree and you look up at this massive trunk, you go like, wow, what an experience, that’s been here for hundreds of years, that’s seen everything, you know, and you’re like, this is such an amazing experience, and most of Costa Rica has been deforested, so thinking to myself, how can someone have this experience? The only way someone can have this experience is if 300 years ago some guy said, I’m gonna create a forest of these trees, protect it, not for me because I’m not gonna be alive to experience it, I’ll be dead by the time this tree gets big, but three hundred years from now someone’s gonna have this amazing experience, and I need to create this for someone down the road, for your children, your great-grandchildren and their great-grandchildren, and they’re gonna have it, I’ll never enjoy it but they will, and that whole idea came out of that.

1:31:21 How did I create something that’s not about me but it’s about the future? And a lot of people talk about creating a legacy, but it’s always surrounding themselves, this is what I’m leaving behind, I want the world to remember me for this. My guru was, I loved my guru, he, you know, I was a near plan. You know, he’s building it, he was building a temple in the monastery that would last a thousand years because it’s built out of solid granite, but when I, one of the things I loved about him, when he was dying he said, get rid of all my stuff, just burn it, get rid of everything.

1:31:51 He said, I don’t want people to remember me, I don’t want a shrine built to me, why people come and go like, he’s the guy that built all of this. He wanted people to remember the teachings and the tools, he said that’s what needs to live on, this is what will change the world, I was just a guy in between that was just carrying on these teachings and tools, and and I think when you think that way, that’s when you have people’s best interest in mind, when it’s not about me, when, when I die I’m gonna tell whoever is that, burn all my stuff and get rid of everything. I mean, I don’t want my picture on the wall, I don’t, because it, it can’t be about me and has to be about something greater, because as soon as I want my picture on the wall then it’s just about my motives and I will have my own personal wants and needs and then I’m not thinking selflessly about the big picture.

1:32:38 Get rid of all my stuff, throw me, throw my ashes in the river and call it good. Yeah, when I hear people talk about legacy sometimes I wonder, yeah, if they’re kind of missing the point, because it’s maybe you’re not about it’s not about you at the moment but it’s about you later, so it is ultimate about what you did and left behind, and I always question like, are those going to be the most well intentioned goals? They’re not, because I need a lot of successful entrepreneurs and a lot of men talk about their legacy, it’s all surrounding them and their name and what they are leaving behind and their impact, but then it ties to them always, so then are you really making a difference when you can truly think selflessly and go on what does the world mean and what do people need and how can I best serve?

1:33:23 As a monk we were trained in selfless service, that’s, you know, being humble, and so like we serve with no intention of reward, no intention of name, anything associated with it, is give for the sake of giving because you want to make a difference, right? And when you approach with that attitude then you can genuinely see what’s best for everyone. Yeah, and do the right thing. Do you have people in your mind that you consider successful, when you’re like, okay, that person was successful, is your guru in that nature or does that word itself?

1:33:55 My guru I would say probably isn’t that nature, but he was a monk, right, so it wouldn’t apply to a lot of people. For me he would be my ideal. I don’t see, I see people being successful in different categories of life, and what I’ve done for myself is I’ve created a small group of eight to ten people around the world that are successful in different categories of life that I value, and I surround myself with these people so I can learn from them. One person I feel that I know that lives in Southern California is very successful family wise, he’s also an amazing entrepreneur but admire him for the way he lives his family life.

1:34:34 He has five children, he said to me a year or so ago that his seventeen year old son is his best friend, and I said, teach me about that. How do you make your seventeen year old son your best friend? How do you go surfing with your 17 year old son three times a week and still ground him when he misbehaves and still have that, you know, friendship with him? I want to learn that. To five children, I want my son to be my best friend, not a stranger.

1:35:01 So he’s my mentor when it comes to family, then there is another person that’s a mentor when it comes to marketing, another person that comes to, to business, and another person when it comes to this, because there’s no one person that can be everything, right? It doesn’t mean you’re good in one area, you’re supposed to be good in every area. So I have different, a few individuals, men and women that mentor me in different aspects of life, who I feel have achieved success in my mind in that particular area, relative to what I think success is, and then I keep them in my life and then I use them as well upon which I can dip all my life into.

1:35:43 Okay, yeah, that’s seventeen-year-old, someone’s powerful, that is strong family, right? So yeah, yes, and and I love it and I’ve stayed in this house, I see how he interacts with his children, how they love him, how he cares for them, know, like, I want to be a dad like that. You see good dad. Of all your daily practices, which is the one that you chalk up to, you know, to be the probably the best one for you, or the one where you’re like, this is the one that I can’t miss?

1:36:09 When I do miss, I noticed I’m a different person, but I just make sure that this is the most important one, my morning ritual. Okay, yeah, so when I wake up in the morning, I shower, I change and I go to my, my meditation room, my apartment in New York, and I do my ritual that can last anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half. I struggle when I travel, I’ll be honest with you, jet lag, time changes, getting hotels, strange to concentrate in or just getting the time sometimes, but mostly I can make it work, but just I’m a human like everyone else.

1:36:45 People see me in the robes and beads, face paint, and they think I live in the monastery for ten years, that I’m walking water and can meditate for ten hours straight. I don’t, I get tired, I get sleepy, and every now and then I get cranky, and you know, when I travel and I’ve got off thirty hour flight from New York to Dubai and Dubai to Sydney, I’m a little jet-lagged, I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I got to go speak tomorrow and I wanted to sleep, film, it’s, it’s hard to meditate when you’re tired. And what is your morning routine consistent

1:37:49 All right, finish the process of sleep, when you wake up, make your bed. Can you do that? Can you do that every day for a month? No, I got. Then why do you want to learn breath control?

1:37:58 Why do you want to learn meditation? You thought it would make you better. Why is making your bed important? Because you finish what you begin, right? And when you finish what you began, it develops willpower.

1:38:07 One of the ways to develop willpower in life is to finish what you begin. So I bring that practice into everyday life. If you have time to make breakfast and eat breakfast, then you have time to wash the breakfast dish. It’s not about washing the breakfast dish, it’s about developing willpower, finishing what you begin. So you bring that into the daily life, into the rituals, and that’s what the whole day in the monastery was, right?

1:38:27 We took our teachings of philosophy and we inserted it into all the things that we did, sweeping the ground, you know, wiping the table, programming, designing stuff, anything, things on Final Cut Pro, we brought all the teachings and tools into that. So throughout the day we were developing all these qualities, so when we sat down to meditate, we were ready. Now I’ve been practicing for 23 hours, preparing for 23 hours, now you’re ready to run the race and meditate.

1:38:55 Look, people don’t want to do the practice, Brian. No one wants to do the simple things. If I had a course online that taught people all these amazing monk stuff of chanting and cross nostril breathing and like how to pull your energy in, how to be celibate and harness your sexual forces, I’d be making millions of dollars. I’d make you fly to New York and interview me, but you don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that.

1:39:23 Tell people to make that bed and they look at me, knots, like, too simple, can’t make your bed, don’t come see me. That’s how my guru trained me. Yeah, you know, he, he made me do all the basic things and I’m so grateful to him, I wouldn’t be here today if he didn’t take that approach with me, and I and I loved him for having the courage to say that to me, you’re not gonna learn what you want to learn, I’m gonna teach you what you need to learn, because I’m to teach you and I’ll tell you what you need to learn.

1:39:52 Like, oh great, that’s when I knew I met a good teacher, because everybody else told me what I wanted as I wonder Linda’s like, okay, come, let’s go, let it wait, a minute, that was too quick. You mentioned the celibacy, is it as hard as it sounds? Is it what it is, hard? Okay, well, it’s, it’s what keeps us alive on this planet, right? It was so easy to turn off, it wouldn’t exist as a species, you know.

1:40:19 It’s a, that’s the most powerful force in the world, it created you, created me, created up the seven billion plus people on this planet. How do you take that energy in Hana sit and reach, handle it, you know, to open higher states of mind? No, it takes a tremendous amount of willpower. How do you develop the willpower? You finish what you begin.

1:40:42 How do you finish what you begin? You make the bed in the morning, right? All right, is that, see how it all ties in? Yes, yes I do. Is that one of the hardest things to channel this, the celibacy?

1:40:51 Yes, like for sure. Okay. Yeah, and it really is, because it’s, it’s a natural part of life, nobody teaches you, right? So this is another thing, you know, you, you grow up, you hit puberty at 12 or 13 years old, whatever it is, boys and girls go through this, who talks to you about sexuality, you know, who trains you and how to harness that sexual energy? You might have some sexual education class in school if you live in the West, if you grow up in Asia, where I grew up in Malaysia, nobody even talked about it at all.

1:41:21 So now suddenly you have this sexual energy inside of you, healthy teenager, you learn from your friends, now you go on the internet and you watch stuff, you know, education. You’re given the most powerful force in the world, the force that can create another human being. Tell me something that’s more powerful than that. You can actually go and make another human being that can create Tesla, they can create Facebook, they can create Apple, Microsoft, you can create another human being.

1:41:54 You give this human being this force to do that but no manual on how to use it, and then you say, good luck, hope you have a good life. It’s crazy, you wonder why people struggle in life, there’s no basic training. We go through entire teenage life suffering, I’m not knowing how to handle this amazing, tremendous force inside of it, and then, you know, you grew up in certain cultures to tell you it’s bad, you know, sex is bad, if you think about it, it’s the work of the devil.

1:42:26 No, one’s natural part of life, the key is to understand it and learn to work with it and be able to harness it and direct it in, in the best way possible to do the things that matter to you. In my expert at it, for sure not. Have I been trained? Yes, and I do my best, I had, but we like every other human being, we all struggle, we keep trying. Yeah, yeah, what have you changed your mind about in the last year?

1:43:01 Whatever I changed my mind about, oh, I would say that I need to simplify my life even more. Okay, I thought I had simplified my life quite a bit, but in the last year I realized it’s not simple enough, which means reduce even more the number of people in my life, reduce even more my business, become more narrow and focused in my business, in my personal life, in my family life, in, and gain clarity. One thing, in the second thing if I may add, the second thing is to this, also be clear about am I happy doing what I’m doing, and it’s very important for me to spend more time evaluating that.

1:43:48 Yeah, because you’re, you know, you have this goal of financing this retreat in Costa Rica? Yes. And so that’s it, you obviously feel very passionate about not retreat, but so then it means that sometimes you’re probably doing some things that you would still want to do, but maybe you’re like, I want to do this because it’s a means to my end, and so you have to be very careful about those. You’ve been reading my diary. No, you’re right, because it comes down to that, sometimes saying I’m very passionate about it, I want to create a life in Costa Rica where I can go back to doing what I truly loved doing and also help people, and sometimes I end up pushing myself a little bit more than I wanted because I need to get so well the money that I need to, to create this thing.

1:44:30 Yeah, plus you go around and you speak with groups and these entrepreneurs and these high-power, you know, business people, you know, not always the best energy, you know, like that, you know that with it, a lot of times they start off with these goals in mind that maybe you don’t even clearly thought out, and you know, like, I want an IPO, I want to be a billionaire, that’s everybody wants to be, but they don’t even know why. And so you’re dealing with this room, probably a lot of this really weird misplaced energy and that’s got of that’s gotta be absorbed by you to a certain extent. I would say fortunately for myself, I’ve really worked hard on becoming very clear of what I want, and I think I worked hard also in programming my subconscious, that I can honestly say to you, right, that the people I work with, super uplifting people.

1:45:14 Okay, the people I enjoy being, and I’m sure they’re entrepreneurs out there that are the way you describe them, but touch with the ones that I work with and spend time with, people I truly love spending time with, they’re really good people, and I think also they wouldn’t be seeking me out if they were just purely manager, and I think a lot of them also looking for a greater purpose in life, a greater understanding of themselves, to be able to come and pick someone with stripes on his head and have men come talk to that company. Yeah, energy attracts energy, we’re recording about that with the guests I have on the show. Mm-hmm, yeah, you’re right, my energy attracts the energy that’s more similar to me, so right.

1:45:53 And I met people who look at me and going, I don’t want anything to do with him, with this priest, who is he? And then other people go like, come, come speak to my company, come speak to my bank, you know. But another says go now, so so I think, yeah, me, me doing what I need to do for myself I has created a certain attraction of a certain type of people into my life, which I’m very grateful for. Okay, good said upon you. Always ask everyone who comes here a couple questions at the end of it.

1:46:22 You asked, if you could make a phone call to the twenty year old Dandapani, and I guess you’re still in Perth maybe at that time? Yes, and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell them if you could actually speak to him and say, this is something you might want to keep in mind? If I could say anything to ya, anything, I would say disobey Agur’s instructions, go to the monastery at now and be with him, go earlier, do it. Okay, why? Oh because my time with him was so precious in terms of what I learnt, was only three years you have with him.

1:46:56 Yeah, three years could have had an extra two, exactly. And we communicated while I was in Perth in uni through email, and email was just kind of coming out back then, so would email, which other than every now and then talk on the phone, but I’d rather be by his side learning, so I would have, that’s the one thing I would have said to myself. Okay, on that same note, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received, could been from him or someone else? I would say from my guru for sure.

1:47:23 I was something that he said which I’ve memorized and it’s been my mantra to myself almost daily, and there’s nothing more important in life than knowing who you are, the path that you’re on and its final end. So there’s nothing more important in life than knowing who you are, the path that you’re on and its final end. Okay, and to me this is priceless wisdom for, for anybody out there. If you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you want, you don’t know your path there and where you’re going in life, and life is so precious, Brian, people don’t realize how precious life is, can go away in a twinkle of an eye, and once you realize how precious it is, then comes the intensity of wanting to focus on who you are and what you want in life.

1:48:14 That last part is interesting, the final, you know, so who you are, the path you’re on, and then it’s fine and its final end ends, because every path takes you somewhere, ya know, where you’re going, not just be following it for, know, no end, only the monk business, right? Yeah, will come up to me all the time and say, I’m on the spiritual path, and they’re going like, where’s just virtual path going, you know? I don’t know. And I said, when was the last time you got in a car and said, I’m going for a drive without any direction, any destination?

1:48:43 Oh, I think I’ll take a left over here, I’ll drive for another two miles, maybe I’ll hang a right here, why, cuz it feels good. You don’t, you get in the car, you know where you’re going, and then you figure out the path to get that. So why is it any different when it comes to life? But the path, you can’t know the path until you know the destination, figure out the gophers, the goal defines the path, then you build your pillars or your surroundings, your environment to help you stay on the path to get to the goal, but you have to start with the destination for.

1:49:12 Hmm, last part of that question, yes, to that twenty year old that’s out there watching us right now, listen to us from anywhere in the world who doesn’t know what they want to do in their life, who’s thinking maybe the monastery is the place, maybe it’s not, maybe the business world is the place, what advice do you give to them about how they can try to find that answer out? I would say create a routine in the morning, and the best routine is wake up, don’t engage with the outside world using your electronic devices, wake up, shower, go sit down somewhere in your home quietly for five minutes each day, close your eyes, don’t read a book, don’t listen to podcasts, this is your time with you and you only, and get to know yourself, ask yourself questions of what do I want, you know, where do I want to go in life, what makes me happy, who makes me happy, what am I passionate about, and keep asking yourself these same questions over and over again every day for five minutes in the morning, write down your answers in a little journal and make this a ritual that you don’t break.

1:50:16 I can guarantee you after a few weeks, after a few months, you’ll really get to know yourself and you’ll start to figure out what’s important in your life, and once you know then what’s important in your life, you can figure out your goal, your goal defines your path and then your path defines your surroundings, what you, how you want to create your life around you, and this is the greatest gifts you can give yourself, but you need to take that step, and the greatest impetus for doing that is to realize that life is finite, then you’re only here on this planet not for a brief, not for a short amount of time, but for a finite amount of time, and for me I use that as an impetus to do what I want to do in life, because someone once said to me at an event I spoke at in Dusseldorf recently, I know I need to do this but I don’t, so what, what do you recommend?

1:51:05 This is well, tell yourself every day I have a clock that’s ticking, get an app for the countdown, if you’re 20 years old, just say you’ll live up to 90 years old, so put 70 years in there and hit stop, and every day just watch that numbers countdown and then you’ll realize that you don’t have much time left. Yeah, one of our guests we had on recently, his name’s Kevin Kelly, he started Wired magazine back in the 90s, and he has the number of days on his iMac ticking down, so you can go to an actuary, even actuarial account, it says you’ve got, you know, 23,000 days. I got an app on my iPhone, 96 years, I’m checking out.

1:51:38 Okay, it’s counting down, time to get busy. Yeah, well, that’s an impetus, right, if you want an impetus, to use life as an impetus, because that’s the one thing nobody can escape. Yeah, yes, yeah, so use it an impetus and then create that ritual in the morning to get to know yourself. It’s not the pony, I was looking forward to this for many weeks, you did not disappoint by any means. Thank you.

1:52:01 When, when I listen them to your story and hear about your experience in the monastery and how you know you took this 10 year journey inside your own brain and and and came out knowing yourself better, you know, it makes me think about my journey here on London Real and makes me think about even, you know, psychedelic episodes I’ve gone through, are you doing this hard work and you’re getting this information about yourself that’s not pleasant and yet you have to just deal with it, and you, you engineered that through this monastery and this practice that what you were doing, and it’s, it’s deep important work that you’re doing, and it’s fantastic to talk to you and just to, to see you after you’ve done it and just to talk about some of these really basic things, and even that advice from your guru of, are you doing your practices, are you making your bed, and you know, I appreciate you telling me those things as opposed to the opposite nostril breathing, because again that’s the fancy stuff that we want to see, just like the fancy app on the iPhone that’s gonna solve our problems, when it’s really this, this hard work, this deep insightful work, the simple work or a simple work.

1:53:05 It is simple. Yeah, yeah, simple, hard but simple, and it’s where we need to get, and so it’s nice to hear you talk about these things. I’ve adopted some of these practices into my life because they just work for me, but I want to try to do them even more and after talking to you I’m so glad, but I think everyone’s gonna get a ton out of this, so I appreciate it very much. I’m very glad we hooked up. You too, and thank you so much for having me a show.

1:53:28 Thank you for asking such thoughtful questions, I really, really appreciate that.