Infinite Potential – Episode 6: AI / Robert LoCascio – Part One

Conscious AI / Robert LoCascio – Part One
Artificial Intelligence, AI, is now a reality.  It lives with us in our pockets, in our homes, and in our…minds?  We take on this brave new world in two parts, linked by one critical question: will AI ever be truly conscious?
In Part One, we speak to founder & CEO of LivePerson, Robert LoCascio, who has had decades of pioneering experience in creating and using Artificial Intelligence to better our life here on earth. Join me today as we look behind the curtain at how AI is really made and what it can tell us about ourselves.

 

The Hidden Power of “Follow Your Bliss”

By Deepak Chopra, MD

When you take the popular phrase “Follow your bliss” and trace it back to its source, something more powerful was intended. In a late interview the famous expert on mythology Joseph Campbell first used the phrase, saying “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you.”

 

This implication that bliss is a personal path, and that the path is pre-determined, is much more than “do what you really like to do,” which is how most people interpret “Follow your bliss.” Let me expand on this point by showing that “bliss” is much more fundamental than almost anyone realizes. It holds the key to transforming the mind.

 

Doing what you really like to do is certainly a good idea; it is much better than the opposite, doing what you have to do even if you don’t particularly like it. But no one can engage in pleasurable activity all the time. The human mind brings us experiences of pleasure and pain, and since the two are paired as inescapable opposites, mental tension and conflict are inevitable no matter how positive and pleasant you try to make your life be. (For deeper background, please see my most recent post, “Can You Make Your Mind Your Friend?”)

 

Campbell deeply understood the cultural and spiritual roots of “Follow your bliss.” He emphasizes the universal quality of bliss in the same interview. “Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” This gives enormous power to the life you are supposed to be living, and it also points out how to get there.

 

Bliss in the ancient Indian tradition is Ananda, one of the three primal aspects of creation.  “Sat Chit Ananda” is often translated from the Sanskrit as “eternal bliss consciousness,” which is the foundation of existence. What is implied is that existence ,consciousness, and joy belong together without beginning or end. That’s very different from the modern scientific assumption that the mind, especially the human mind, evolved over billions of years from inert, mindless matter.

 

Campbell knew what Ananda was, and in a simple way he tells us that if you get hold of bliss and follow it, you will arrive at the essential nature of the mind, which is blissful by nature. Therefore, existence itself is blissful by its very nature.  Such a declaration, if true, would totally overturn our everyday experience, because it seems obvious that a person’s existence can be filled with problems, obstacles, struggle, conflict, and trauma.

 

For “Follow your bliss” to be sound advice is workable only if these negative experiences are in some sense unreal, by which I mean that they mask the actual nature of reality. Only the individual can prove the truth or falseness of Ananda, and this is done by following the invisible thread of consciousness to its source. If the restless, discontented mind, tossed between pleasure and pain, has a blissful source, it has to be reachable if it is to do any good.

 

Let’s say that you want to follow your bliss as far as it can take you. There are essentially three stages on such a path.  Stage 1 is the experience of personal joy, which all of us have known at least once in our lives. These moments touch the lives of people who fall in love or who achieve a triumph or who simply find themselves overjoyed for whatever reason. You grab and hold on to Stage 1 bliss as long as you can, but eventually the moment passes.

 

A change occurs in Stage 2. Instead of possessing an experience of joy, the joy possesses you. By this I mean that it is more impersonal. In Stage 1, bliss is all for me, the ego-personality. In Stage 2, you rise above personality. The Latin roots of the word “ecstasy” mean “to stand outside.” That’s how Stage 2 bliss feels. You go outside your normal boundaries.

 

Stage 2 feels light and sometimes out-of-body. Religious awe falls into this category, along with wonder before the beauty of Nature, or its immensity. There can be a sense that time has stopped or that your mind has expanded into a new space that is free, open, untroubled, peaceful, and forever calm. But the essential aspect of Stage 2 bliss is that it possesses you, not the other way around.

 

Stage 3 is the experience of Stage 2 bliss on a permanent basis, so that it becomes the default state of your awareness. Every person’s mind has a default state already, a set of grooved-in reactions, responses, beliefs, and attitudes that make up their personal story. Stage 1 bliss occurs inside this default setting, while Stage 2 takes a brief vacation from it, and then Stage 3 leaves the old default setting behind completely.

 

At that point, “Follow your bliss” has accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: liberation. There are many terms for this state, such as enlightenment, waking up, Nirvana, Moksha, or the peace that passes understanding. The important thing is the experience, which begins simply enough, by focusing on the bliss you can create in your life, valuing it, and beginning to experience, usually through meditation or Yoga, a settled sense of the quiet, peaceful mind.

 

The mind’s quiet is actually an open space in which creation begins to vibrate, at first beyond our perception. But over time this vibration is perceived and grows. The vibratory quality of creation is what Ananda adds to the other two terms, Sat Chit, which are the infinite creative potential of pure Being, existence in its original state before any activity has begun.

 

Only when you are aware of your essential nature in bliss can the complex problems of the mind and all its suffering be solved once and for all. Your mind will become your friend, because you experience bliss even under circumstances that used to bring pain, confusion, and conflict. “Follow your bliss” has a transformative power, which Joseph Campbell understood and wanted to tell us about.

 

Originally published by San Francisco Chronicle

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com

In loving memory of Charity Sunshine Tillman Dick

Remembering Charity Tillman Dick, Sages and Scientists alumnus 2013.

Topic: Discourses from the Undead

A journey through the precipice of life and death

 

Speaker Bio: Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick is a soprano, composer and writer. She has performed extensively across Europe, Asia and the United States sharing the stage with noted artists and musicians including Jessye Norman, Eva Marton, Joshua Bell, Patti LaBelle, Condoleezza Rice, The Fray and Bono at venues including Lincoln Center in New York; The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio; The National Palace of the Arts in Budapest, Hungary; and Il Giardino Di Boboli in Florence, Italy. Some of her operatic roles include Gilda in Rigoletto, Violetta in La Traviatta, and Ophelia in Ophelia Forever. Charity’s performances have been broadcast internationally on CNN, CBS, PBS, and the BBC. After receiving a diagnosis of Idiopathic Pulmonary Hypertension in 2004, Charity served as the national spokesperson for the Pulmonary Hypertension Association where she testified before Congress, worked to raise awareness and expand federal research funding. Charity has since undergone two double lung transplants at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Charity is a contributor at FIVE and The Huffington Post, where she blogs about the issues she’s passionate about: life, music, health, religion and organ donation.

 

2019 WMIF | 1:1 Fireside Chat: Rudolph E. Tanzi and Deepak Chopra

 

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi moderated the Fireside Chat with Chopra Foundation Founder, Deepak Chopra, MD at the World Medical Innovation Forum (April 10, 2019), Boston, MA

Moderator: Rudolph Tanzi, PhD Vice-Chair, Neurology, Director, Genetics and Aging Research Unit, MGH; Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology, HMS

Deepak Chopra, MD, Author and Founder of The Chopra Foundation

Can Your Mind Be Your Friend?

Although we don’t often put it this way, the most important relationship in everyone’s life is with the mind. The late Stephen Hawking drew the world’s attention by leading a life totally of the mind, his physical activity reduced to eye motion and blinking. The body without the mind is inconceivable, however. We cannot exist without thought. So it’s important to ask how best to relate to our minds.

I’m thinking of the most basic issue: Is the mind friend or enemy? Leave aside for the moment the traits that make it fascinating to be human: love, creativity, intelligence, evolution, and self-awareness. These traits make the human mind unique among all life forms on Earth, but we also suffer uniquely. Our minds are the source of anger, fear, envy, depression, grief, and hopelessness. If a friend brought suffering into our lives, it wouldn’t matter how happy he made us at other times—suffering trumps friendship, especially when you consider that the mind is capable of confusing us so deeply. The last thing the mind seems to understand is itself.

Your mind cannot be your friend unless the problem of inner suffering is solved. There are countless ways that the mind preys upon itself—the standard handbook of psychiatric diagnoses lists literally thousands of specific maladies. But it isn’t clear that anyone’s mind, even that of the most cheerful, gifted, prosperous, physically healthy person, has found a secure way to be happy. The human mind engenders irrational fears, ungoverned impulses, sexual cravings, wishful thinking, and futile dreams—all geared to make the world “in here” a morass of confusion and conflict.

Let’s set aside the complex solutions that have been offered to end human suffering, which would include traditional religions, modern psychotherapy, self-help, and positive thinking. If the most basic question is whether the mind is our friend, and if we have all experienced the negative traits of the mind just outlined, it seems clear that the mind isn’t our friend. This wasn’t a hard answer to arrive at. Even if you don’t think in terms of friend or enemy, anyone who leads a productive life has found a way to adapt to the negative side of the mind—that’s what it means to be a mature, rational adult. You and your inner enemy have called a truce or at least a stalemate so that you don’t have to fight a new skirmish every day.

If the mind isn’t our friend, what is it and why do we put up with it? Those two questions have an answer: The mind is a construct, and we put up with it because we feel stuck with the construct, not realizing that anything that can be made can also be unmade. The confused, conflicted, irrational, and self-defeating aspects of the world “in here” go back to malleable factors like old conditioning, family teaching, ingrained habits, unfounded beliefs, memories of old traumas, social pressure, and an X factor we call predisposition. Just as some gifted children are born with inexplicable musical or mathematical talent, everyone is born with inexplicable character traits, likes and dislikes, and everything else that makes each new human unique.

The X factor cannot be explained to everyone’s satisfaction—genes are the fashionable explanation in the West, karma in the East—but the other ingredients “in here” are mental constructs that can be changed. People overcome all kinds of things that they don’t want, from lack of love to bad memories to the habit of overeating. The human potential movement symbolizes the intention to change in a positive direction, and even if success is far from assured—old conditioning is incredibly stubborn and persistent—the vision of self-improvement dominates life almost everywhere that opportunity exists.

But there’s a hitch. If we rely on the mind to undo the ills created by the mind, isn’t this a self-contradiction? We are asking an unfriendly, unreliable, baffling agent—our own mind—to solve the very suffering it clings to.

The futility of asking the mind to heal itself was faced centuries ago. The crucial question was whether a person can go “in here,” survey the jumble and wreckage and general disarray of the mind, and decide with clarity what should be done. The answer is tricky, because no one is an honest broker when it comes to their own mind. The landscape “In here” is littered with things we like and things we dislike. Why should we trust ourselves, burdened with the conditioning that keeps us stuck, to be impartial? Indeed, the mind is so complex that you’d have to be omniscient to sort everything out.

Then there’s the problem of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We don’t want to discard the mental constructs that enrich human life: art, music, philosophy, science, etc. Centuries ago, faced with surveying what lies “in here” in a fair, impartial way, it was discovered that the mind couldn’t know itself, much less heal itself. Objectivity was impossible for several reasons. Every person has a life story and an agenda of hopes and ambitions that color their view of themselves. The ego plays a dominant role in all our decision-making, and it has its own agenda, which is self-protection. Everything “in here,” it turns out, is entangled with everything else. The whole entangled mass is “me,” the person my mind has constructed since birth. This “me” is the last person anyone should trust to be impartial, fair, and wise.

So, the way forward to end suffering had to somehow bypass “me,” with my old conditioning, my confusion and conflict—in other words, the entire mind-made system. This bypassing can actually be done, amazingly enough. The mind, as we usually relate to it, is constantly active. But when it is quiet, the mind returns to its essential “stuff,” the way a roiling ocean settles down into being still water. The stuff that the mind settles into, its very essence, is awareness. The great discovery about mind in the ancient world is that consciousness, in its pure, unbounded, inactive condition, is the ground state of mind, before the whole process of making constructs begins.

From this insight arose the teaching known as non-doing. Suffering takes work, memory, struggle, and attention. Non-doing takes none of these, and so the theory was that consciousness by its very nature contains no suffering. If left to itself, consciousness will undo mental constructs and make the mind our friend at last.

This process of healing and rehabilitation depends, as you can see, on the theory being right. Generation after generation has experienced suffering. Life has been built around mind-made constructs, which we cannot do without. There is no guarantee that consciousness, left to itself, will preserve what we value most about being human while getting rid of mind-made suffering. What if we wind up being passive and totally detached from real life? In the next post we’ll discuss how the end of suffering actually comes about once the mind has been exposed for what it really is. The bottom line is transformation, nothing less.

(To be cont.)

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com