 this episode of Skeptico. A show about what yoga is really all about. Inhale, arms up to the sky. Good. Remember, this is not a competition, although you two seem to be the best in the class. It's really important in this pose that you arch your back and keep it flat at the same time. I feel like those are opposing ideas. No, they're not, because you're arching your back up while it's flat. And what yoga is really all about. But it's a little more than a metaphor, because if we're taking information and we're actually rendering physical things around us, now that's a game and that's a simulation, but it's just so far more advanced. That's what Elon Musk was trying to say, right? No, I think they're saying something different. I mean, you can't have it both ways. If it's more than a metaphor, it's not a metaphor. I go back to your definition of what yoga is. It's the cessation of the whirlpools of thoughts and feelings in the river of consciousness. You're talking about God in divine here, right? Mr. MIT tech entrepreneur. You're way past any kind of Elon Musk simulation. I think we get into this kind of backdoor materialism where we kind of want to have it both ways. That's part of it. But part of it is that we don't have the language to express what these things really are. So we have to express them in language that we might actually understand. That first clip was from the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall and it has an appearance of Russell Brand, who I think is one of the most terrific people producing content on the planet at this moment. So that alone is reason enough to revisit that old movie. And the second clip was from today's guest, Riz Virk, who's written quite an amazing book about Yogananda, the author of Autobiography of a Yogi, one of the most important books for a Western yoga audience ever. That's kind of without even debate. So this was a really great chat with a really great guy who's been on the show a couple of times for, very, very sharp. And I hope you stick around because I think you'll enjoy it. Welcome to Skeptica where we explore controversial science and spirituality. Riz Virk is back. He's here to talk to us about his new book, Wisdom of a Yogi, Lessons for Modern Seekers from Autobiography of a Yogi. It's a really interesting book. Can't wait to talk about it. Riz, in case you don't remember, very, very successful tech entrepreneur from MIT, many VC startups, absolute pioneer in video gaming, founder of the PlayLab startup accelerator, actually on the campus of MIT. I mean, just kind of a major player and all that. And then goes back, gets a Stanford MBA because, well, why not? Working on a PhD because, well, why not? And then along the way started writing books. He's probably best known for this one I have up on the screen, the simulation hypothesis. We talked about that a while back. We're going to be talking about this one today, Wisdom of a Yogi. Riz, thanks for coming back. Thanks for being here. Sure. Well, thanks for having me back on. I've always enjoyed our conversations. Looking forward to it. Who was Yogananda? Well, so Swami Yogananda was born in the 1890s, I think it was 1893. And he came to America when he was a relatively young Swami in 1920. So it was over 100 years ago. And some, like his biographer has called him the first modern Guru because he was really the first Indian Swami or Yogi to come to the west and really establish a presence here. And he actually lived in America for most of his adult life. Now there had been other Indian Swamis who had visited and given talks and maybe opened a center or two. But Yogananda was unique in that, you know, he, once he got here, he crisscrossed the country. He gave meditation and yoga classes and lectures all over the country, sometimes to sold out audiences of thousands of people. He was the first Yogi to be welcomed at the White House by President Coolidge. And so, you know, he came to Boston originally to give a talk at the World Congress of Religions back in 1920. And he ended up in Los Angeles and in Southern California. And then in the last decade of his life, he ended up working almost exclusively on writing his book, Autobiography of a Yogi, which has gone on to become one of the top spiritual books of the 20th century written in English and has sold millions and millions of copies. And basically it inspired a whole generation of folks to learn about Eastern wisdom and about yoga and meditation particularly during the 60s and 70s. So during the counterculture movement, the paperback version of Autobiography of a Yogi was passed around probably more than almost any other book out there. And in fact, folks like George Harrison from the Beatles, he would have stacks of these books and he would just give them away to people every time he thought somebody needed a regrouping. And so it was a book, not with techniques per se, but it was a book about swamis and sages and yoga and its history and what it means. And it gave people a glimpse into this kind of wondrous land of magic that we might call Old India today. Steve Jobs was a huge fan. When he died, according to his biographer, it was the only book on his iPad. And at his funeral, according to the CEO of Salesforce.com, he gave away these little wooden boxes and when they looked inside the box, there was a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi and so that was kind of his last message and his gift to people. So it's just been tremendously influential over the years and so has Yogananda. There's a yoga studio on every corner now in America but when he got here, Yogananda was relatively unknown beyond a few stereotypes and so you can credit him with at least bringing the philosophy of yoga to the US. Okay, so super influential book at the time, Autobiography of a Yogi and then there's kind of some strange synchronicity that leads you to become the author of this book published in India. Your whole background is kind of interesting, right? You were raised in a Muslim family. There's a lot of friction then and still today between Muslims and Hindi's in India and yet you're the guy selected to do this. Also this book touched you deeply and affected you from their very early age. You're into meditation, you're doing this and then the Steve Jobs thing is interesting. I think way beyond it, you're kind of downplaying a little bit. There seems to be this kind of strange inexplicable link between Yogananda and technology. All these tech folks seem to be hooked up with Yogananda and not exclusively so but I can speak from my own self as well and many others. So there's a lot to kind of unpack there. Maybe start with a little bit of your background and then how that led you to meditation and then how it eventually led you to this book. Yeah, absolutely. I was born in Pakistan which of course was part of India back in the time when Yogananda was alive for most of his life and they even lived in the city of Lahore which is right near where I was born and where we're from but I moved to the US at a very early age so pretty much I grew up in the Midwest and during that time I became interested in meditation and yoga and I should admit that at the time I was very ambitious. I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I was hoping to go to good college and so I would look at these different meditation techniques and say will this help me to have better concentration and to be more successful in my academic work or in my career down the road but I didn't actually read autobiographical yoga I'd seen it at the bookstore many times when I was in high school and back then it was like here's this funny Hindu looking guy with long hair and a robe and I picked it up and browsed through it but it never quite moved me until after I had graduated from MIT and I actually became an entrepreneur and for the next decade or two I was pretty much involved in starting high tech companies first in Cambridge and then in Silicon Valley in Cambridge, Massachusetts the area around MIT and during that time I was living a bit of a double life during the day I would be working on my business I would be a tech CEO and I would be out even traveling giving talks on different technology ideas and in the evenings I would be reading books like autobiography of the yogi and I would be going places like the Monroe Institute learning about auto body experiences and so I kind of like the joke my life was a little bit like without being famous a little bit like Shirley McClain where she would like in her book she described in the 70s how she would fly to a city and do like a show, a dance on stage and then the next day she would go visit a channeler and so I had a lot of that going on but I was recommended to read the book autobiography of the yogi by a meditation teacher here in Boston who was like a tall white guy so it was just funny that he recommended to me that I should read this book and that I think it shows the cross cultural influences of this book because oftentimes this book was written in English and now it's become very popular in India itself it's an example of what a scholar sometimes called a pizza fact I don't know if you've ever heard of that where something like pizza originated in some small area region in Italy and then it came to the US and it became a really big thing and then it went back because the original pizza was nothing like what we think of as pizza now but now in Italy the pizza looks a lot like what we think of as pizza here and so anyway that was my background and then as you mentioned I ended up running a startup accelerator at MIT and I actually had some health problems and I can go into those later but during that time I decided to refocus a little bit on my life, on my writings and that's when I wrote the simulation hypothesis which was based on this idea that our virtual reality will eventually get so good it'll be like the matrix and we won't be able to distinguish between the two and there was a period during that time when I was writing these books that I couldn't do much so I was kind of laid up on the couch so I did what I do every few years I read autobiography of Yogi again and I said well I'm looking for other books that are kind of like this and turns out there aren't that many books that are just like this that give you these kind of tales of swamis with superpowers or what are called cities in the ancient Indian traditions and so I wrote a few blog posts about Yogananda and about his you know about his book his life and other books that were similar from other Indian gurus and swamis and then I just kind of forgot about it I did it just because I mean I was sitting on the couch and I had not much else to do at that point and then I you know went on with my writing and I started my PhD in academic career and then suddenly out of the blue I got an email from Harper Collins in India and they said well it's the 75th anniversary of when the autobiography came out which was 1946 and they said well you know we don't want to reprint it because there's so many copies out there but we want to write a new book for a new generation of people who can about the lessons in that book and we think you're the right person to write it and I said me why do you think I'm the right person to write it first of all I'm not a swami I'm not even Indian from that perspective right I'm a Muslim and I'm a tech entrepreneur and they said well because your books bridge the gap you know between the modern world of technology and some of these ancient ideas and that's very true and in fact I drew inspiration on Yogananda when I even wrote the simulation hypothesis and so they said you know we want to be able to talk about these lessons with more in a more modern setting because you know his stories which he wrote in the 30s and 40s all took place in the early 1900s or late 1800s and so you know we can definitely reinterpret them for today's readers and so I ended up pulling in a lot of stories from my own life as an entrepreneur as well as stories from other people I interviewed college professors students entrepreneurs Hollywood producers all kinds of folks who were inspired by the book and so you know when that happened at first I didn't feel like I was up to the task but then I realized I just had one of these strong clues as I called them which you know I had this electric feeling that said okay this is a task that was put in front of me and so it's a task that I should actually accept or like I like to say in a video game it's like a quest and so I ended up writing this book for HarperCollins India and it came out there a few months ago and just came out now in the U.S. just this month as you define yoga as being about let me make sure I get this love this the ultimate definition the cessation of whirlpools of thought and feeling in the river of consciousness explain that yeah so today you know we think of yoga primarily in the west as the asanas or the physical postures and what's interesting is at the time yoga Nanda wrote his book and if you read his book there's very little about asanas and physical postures and when he built his organization and he taught thousands of people yoga he was actually teaching a kind of meditation right and he did have some physical exercises called some energization exercises and so I thought that was interesting so I went back to you know his explanation of the yoga sutra which was written by Patanjali a long time ago I don't know how to forget what it was at least probably a thousand years ago perhaps and if you read the yoga sutra Patanjali talks about the eight limbs of yoga and only one of those limbs is the asanas or the physical postures there's the yama and niyamas which are like the do's and don'ts of being a yogi right then there's like meditation concentration which are slightly different there's pulling back of the senses there's and there's pranayama which many practitioners of yoga may be familiar with which is controlling your breathing to try to achieve this within your energy field and within your body and so I went back to the original definition that Patanjali gave for yoga I mean the word yoga means yoke or union but the definition he gave was much more interesting he said yoga chitta vrittis naroda okay and so I looked at all the translations of that and they kind of got the words if you look at those words in yoga it means whirlpool and naroda means to stop or to still right and so yoga was defined as the stopping or the stilling of these things called vrittis now what the heck are these things called vrittis well they say it's a whirlpool of chitta what is chitta I mean these terms are really hard to bring into english right and so chitta is mind stuff and so it's often translated as whirlpools of thought and so I looked at and I said well there's a little bit more than just that there's also like feelings and emotions and in a lot of the translations to english whether it's from sanskrit hindi or to bed in the buddhist traditions we lose that and it's just about the mind but really if you go back to the original words it's about the fact that we get excited we think about things we have desires we have fears and when we do all of these things we have strange little storms of these swirling whirlpools and you can't really have a whirlpool without it being in something and so that's why I kind of redefined it a little bit to say yoga is the feeling of the whirlpools of thought and feelings in the river of consciousness because you know if you have a whirlpool there's got to be a river or something that's swirling but a nice way to think about it is the snow globe gets everywhere and you can't really see the scene but if you just let it settle you know all of those things settle and you can see clearly and that snow globe is like what the ancient sages called the cosas the cosas are like our energy fields there are like five different cosas and they these vrittis these thoughts feelings desires that we hold on to all the time they harden into the samskaras which are imperfections in the field they become tendencies they basically they become the karma right so there's a link between karma future lives past lives and just stealing of the whirlpools of thought and feeling and so any practice and this is my contention and this is what I believe Patan Jolly was saying any practice which stills the vrittis is a form of yoga and you know that could be you know a prayer whether it's a Christian that could be you know tai chi that could be different breathing exercises that could be simple meditation that could just be going out by the ocean right and by the Pacific Ocean and just letting yourself calm down anyone who's had a good physical yoga session knows that often at the end you will do shivasana which is either translated to either corpse pose or a translation I like better peaceful pose and you just lay there and you realize something is still like something that used to be like this is now still I never knew what it was until I really looked into you know this definition of yoga so so one of the lessons there's like 14 lessons in the book and one of the lessons is to practice everyday no matter how much time you have you can practice yoga as long as you practice something that causes a stealing of the storm of this mind stuff that's all over in our field I think that's quite brilliant very nuanced and the way you explained it here will give people a little bit of an insight into the book in terms of there's a lot going on here with Rez and his experience with this spirituality and I think that this also links back to this idea I have about the tech link because one of the connection that I kept making in your book is connecting it to the modern yogis that I really like and respect and one of them I've mentioned to you before Michael Singer of course best-selling author untethered soul soul millions and millions of copy Oprah kind of guy but also a tech billionaire at least at one point he was actually you know PhD economics who gets a TRS-80 from Radio Shack back in the day and starts writing software you know he would give the exact same definition although yours is even better of how there is this energy moving through us and we are blocking it so our whirlpools of thoughts and feelings are what are disrupting what is already perfect and I think the way you laid that out and the way you described it right here is terrific and I think it plays to this logical rational aspect of yoga that I think you kind of just swim in naturally because that's your world and I think a lot of people when they come at it from a purely spiritual standpoint they go wait a minute this is almost sounding too techie but to people like you you're like oh no there's this and then there's some scars and that leads to karma and even though if it's not even though if the language isn't perfect or it isn't you know at least it is there's a logical rational explanation for almost materialistic but in a post-materialistic way do you resonate with any of that in terms of your attraction to yoga in that way? Yeah you know I think there is this link between tech and tech entrepreneurs and yoga and you know Yogananda one of the things that he did that was different when he was teaching yoga was he called it the science of religion right and so even though he used a lot of religious language and he wrote and taught in the US so a lot of his book you know uses biblical and Christian analogies but in the end he called yoga a science of religion and that I think is what appeals to people who have you know more engineering oriented minds or more technical minds now that's not to say that everyone in the tech world is enamored with this stuff but you know what's happened is as we've recognized the benefits just like the the physical benefits of yoga are kind of stripped of their spiritual significance nowadays and it becomes just like a physical practice similarly meditation has become popular now if you go to Silicon Valley and a lot of big companies you know they will have mindfulness as a key part of their HR department's offerings like Google and you have many you know yogis and swamis who speak that talks at Google for example and of course part of it you know there's a lot of you know there's certainly a lot of folks who have come from India into Silicon Valley because it's the biggest kind of you know area for immigrants in the tech industry but part of it is you know we've seen the benefits of mindfulness and so so because of that it's gotten wider acceptance particularly within the tech industry but probably because we do so much you know in our minds in the tech industry right so we're trying to break down things we're trying to define like I remember when I was in high school and you know we had a TRS-80 in my junior high school and my math teacher would let my best buddy and I skipped the math lessons so we could like modify games but I remember you know one day one of my teachers asked you know what is a program I said well it's a set of instructions in a logical order and she said yeah except take out the logical order it's a set of instructions right and so I think for those of us who are trying to figure out how this stuff works you know it's very appealing in that way and that you know ties to some of my thoughts about Yogananda as well and actually I'm kind of getting there because there seems to be attention throughout the book as to whether or not you believe all the stories as being historical and factual and you've already laid a couple of things written for an American audience written to a piece to a Christian sensibility so I think this is fundamental and I don't think he can dish it off too much is this allegorical is it factual is it fabricated where do you ultimately come down on that with all the stories as a whole take the whole package well you know there's a lot of stories that seem pretty fantastical to particularly to those of us in the west and even during the Yogananda's time you know his relatives would be like what are you doing wasting your time with this mystical nonsense like get a job there's technology there's science you know there's all this stuff you know motion pictures there's all this new stuff going on why are you obsessed with past but you know some of these stories are about levitating swamis they're about swamis that appear in two places there's a story of a man of a Muslim Fakir holy man who was taught by a Hindu Yogi how to control a particular entity like a jinn or what we would call a genie and this this jinn would actually take physical objects and the guy's name is Afzal Khan could say Hazrath which is the name of the entity take that and then later when the guy's Afzal Khan is not there so they couldn't accuse him of stealing it Hazrath could just make it disappear and it would appear in another place and so you know some people think of these stories as fiction as allegorical and so I interviewed a lot of people including Yogananda's biographer as well as people who are devotees who totally believe in these stories and you know the most interesting interview I did on that was probably with Diana Walsh Pasoka who you may know you know she wrote a book called American Cosmic she's a professor of religion at University of North Carolina in Wilmington and you know she's an expert in Catholic history and she said that in her own life you know she read Yogananda's book when she was like young like five or six because they had a copy at the house she grew up in San Francisco so they had like this kind of stuff and she said she believed all the stories and then when she went into academia and she studied religion so this was interesting for me she said they teach you not to believe these stories right they say it's study religion as a sociological phenomenon which basically means the miracles didn't happen but let's study religion that's just weird that's just the wokeness of modern religious studies has become I mean you can't take that seriously they have the whole postmodernism silliness I mean what Pasoka is saying there actually from your book the question of whether they're real or not may be beside the point I completely disagree but I'd like to hear your opinion on it and I'd like to really kind of hone in on whether or not you believe that all the stories add up to being historically accurate and I just don't see how they can in the sense of when you even say it's westernized or it's written for a Christian audience I mean that immediately kind of puts you over the line and then let alone the fact that if we do go and read his biographer he isn't doing quite the same kind of stuff when he's over in the United States and he still is doing enough miracles I think for us to be interested in what lies beyond these extended consciousness realms but it doesn't bode well for taking the stories as factual accounts as historical accounts well let me just finish the Pasoka story so then she said that later because she's a scholar of Catholic history she was given access to the Vatican's private library and she basically read the canonization records of Joseph of Cupertino who was supposedly floated and she said she saw the records of the devil's advocate the person who was supposed to disbelieve this stuff and prove that this was wrong and that he's not a saint and she said she saw signatures of like a thousand people saying they all witnessed this right and so she's come to the conclusion that well maybe these things might have happened right that it's not so it's not so you know left or right yes or no it's not so you know black or white in that sense or like Fatima where you know 70,000 people claim to have seen weird things in the sky or like modern UFO encounters that these things may have happened so as I went into it you know I used to one I believe some stories and not others and I think you know that that's sort of where I came out in that what I found was that Yogananda went to a lot of effort to try to show the provenance of these stories so for example the guy who controlled the Jinn who would like take these material objects and make them disappear he was told that story by his guru Sri Yukteswar who he trusted and Sri Yukteswar told him because Yogananda was in a dormitory in this little town called Serempur just outside Jakarta and he said in this room I witnessed this myself and I witnessed not just Hazrat taking things but getting things falling from the sky that were like a huge feast now you know of a huge feast of meals from somewhere with golden plates that eventually disappeared and that guy Afzal Khan became kind of a what they call a carer of Bengal like people knew about him in North Bengal and they're like stay away from that guy because he'll steal tickets or jewelry but he won't do it in front of you so nobody could ever charge him now what happened with Afzal Khan though was interesting and this is where we get to the allegorical part of the story too eventually the guy who had taught him the technique found him and realized what he was doing and he tested him and he said you're using Hazrat for your personal gain and that's not why I taught you these techniques therefore I release Hazrat from you and so then he could no longer control the gin or the genie except for certain things like when he needed food and he issued a public apology so theoretically one could track down this it was in a newspaper in Bengal you could track this down if you really wanted to now what I found interesting about that was first of all the colorful story of the gin and the genie and so I started to say are there other things like this other stories of this happening that people might verify but also when he gave him the powers he said this is because of your good karma but you have a tendency to be avaricious to be greedy if you will so be careful and of course he wasn't careful now imagine if you were playing a video game to use that analogy and the test was will you be greedy the engine would give you the ability to do something like this where you could automatically get whatever you want to see if you're going to be greedy and so isn't it interesting that here's the story that's actually as much about karma as it is about miracles the karma of the particular guy Afzal Khan where the universe manifested for him a strange way to test specifically what he needed to work on in this life and in this case he failed the test if you will and so you could imagine someone having made up that story in order to teach that lesson and yet at the same time like I said Yogananda went to great lengths so I asked around of my relatives in Lahore and I said are there any stories because we used to have random stories of Jinn but they were more like the boogeyman type stories like don't go out there don't pee on a tree because there might be a Jinn there and if you pee on them they're going to possess you and we found this story that took place in Lahore so there's a very famous tomb of a saint called Datta Darbar in Lahore it's like one of these big like very big tourist area and underneath it there's two other guys buried there one of whom is a white guy from Britain and so the story of this white guy is he went there and said there's something I don't understand about these Islamic stories and the Quran and even the biblical stories like the Queen of Shiva she came here and Solomon supposedly was controlling a Jinn and her throne arrived before he before she did how's that possible the throne was big and she didn't bring it with her and they didn't have a caravan and so this guy British guy was like if anybody can answer me that question I'll convert to Islam here if any like bearded imam and so he goes to the Datta Darbar tomb because somebody told him go there and he goes there and he runs into this bearded Sufi guy and the Sufi guy says okay I'll tell you the answer but first I want you to drink some tea and he says okay or something what do you want to drink he goes I'll have some tea and he goes like this and in his hand he materializes like a cup and saucer he gives it to the guy and the guy looks at the saucer and he almost faints like a cup and saucer from England and I'm sitting here in Lahore and then he goes back to ask the guy about it and the guy disappears now what the heck happened there that's very similar to other stories that I've uncovered about some people with jinn and how things move from London to here and this guy he became a Muslim he lived there his whole life and his tomb is there you can go there and see one of two or three people buried in this very interesting area and so it's stuff like that that makes me think these are more than allegorical that these things could have actually happened now is there a guy named Babaji who has lived a thousand years materialized up in the Himalayas and he still looks 24-25 so I said well are there other references to this guy beside just Yogananda and I found some I found a guy named Sri M who claimed to his guru was a guy named Mahesh Warnath he called Babaji as well but he said that Mahesh Warnath who he met in approximately 1960 I'm doing some math was the same guy that brought Yoga's Guru's Guru Lahiri Mahasai to this palace we'll talk about this palace in another time for initialization for initiation and that was a hundred years earlier in 1860 and he was still teaching him at that point and then you have guys like Trilanga Swami who's actually very well known and Yogananda would say things like he was 300 pounds and he walked around naked and Banaras and everybody knew him one pound for each year because he was almost 300 years old and then I went and looked at the sites and places dedicated and there are references to him being 280 years old when he died in the late 200s and with some records from the British folks it was just really interesting so I came to the conclusion that these things could be happening they are like superpowers but this ties to my theory around the simulation why I think these things could happen do I believe every story? Yogananda was a great collector of stories in fact that was in addition to being a child prodigy of spiritual techniques which he very much was he collected spiritual techniques he tried a lot more even than what are listed in the autobiography in his biography from his brother and these other biographies to see all this crazy stuff that he used to try as a kid which reminded me of things I used to try but his real talent, one of his real talents was collecting stories whenever there was a saint that could do something amazing he would be there in Calcutta and he would see them or everywhere he went he would collect these stories and he would recounted these stories decades later in detail it's amazing to me how he did that these stories are meant to inspire they're meant to open up a westerners mind that in a physical world miracles are still possible so that's kind of where I came out is I think some actually happen Chris do you realize you just kind of went full circle there again as you do in the book which is terrific because I think you're really struggling with it those way that every reader of this western reader at least has struggled with it since the time they first got it is like he is very meticulous in terms of documenting the origin of these stories and all that kind of stuff but at the same time it does look like so much of what we've come to understand as spin a little bit you know as telling a good as motivation a good yard right but I really want to hone in on this it's kind of a sticky point for me I love Diana Mose Pesulka her book American Cosmic is super important she's been on the show a lot to go in there maybe we'll touch on that at the end but no it's not beside the point it is the point and it is the point two ways you know quick story I remember several years ago I was interviewing this guy it kind of becomes the punching bag now on the show but he's at Ohio State University religious studies guy and he's written a book on Scientology and I've thoroughly researched this and yes L. Ron Hubbard really was in the desert with Jack Parsons and they really did this ritual to bring forth the horror babel on to bring forth the antichrist into this world but it doesn't really matter if that's real or not it only matters that they believed it and it's like an exaggerated point to your point which because I kind of said well you're just completely wrong of course it first and foremost matters beyond all else whether there is any possibility that this is real whether there are any extended consciousness realms in which these entities can exist and can affect us down here that is the question that is not beside the point that is the point and then maybe another just quick story from an interview that I just did and everybody knows this but we kind of forget this is that it's the same problem we have with Bible I mean there's stories in there and we're told that some of them are allegorical but we're told quite definitively from religious scholars that some of them are historical and some of the main stories like and the one I always pick out is also Pontius Pilate so Jesus is doing the sit with Pontius Pilate and Pontius Pilate who is deep state right he's Roman and he says man I can't see anything wrong with this guy and he goes to those darn Jews out there and they're hammering no you got to kill him I wash my hands and what did the Jews say let his blood stain our people now and forever if you believe that that story is historical you got a real problem I mean how can you not be anti-Semitic and also if you look at that story from a historical perspective because history is important and we have to understand history for trying to put in context how would we possibly believe in any way that story it just it doesn't ring true in so many ways so two points one I think it is the opposite of beside the point as to whether or not these stories are true but number two I think we have to hone in on where there is exaggeration I think you do a great job of explaining why and how they might have been exaggerated but I think we got to know that I mean I think that's a key part of this what do you think well I do think that it's not entirely beside the point you know I mean I ask people okay is there a guy named Baba G which by the way you know when I read that what that just means is you know honored father and Baba means father G is like an honorific you give to someone like Yogananda G or you know I might say Alex G right and so it's not a real name and many of them said well that's sort of beside the point it doesn't really matter if it is or isn't did Yogananda just use this you know this mythical figure who lived hundreds of years in the Himalayas as the founder of his lineage in order to get credibility but that's why I went to look for other people who might have seen him and that in I call river Yoga River right because there's so many tributaries branches that it's very hard to find what is authentic and what is an authentic and so for me it is important but that these things are possible right but stories do get exaggerated over time with followers I mean did Buddha's mother really give birth without any pain standing up in the field like it's you know told well that was 2000 years ago probably she had some pain while she was at it to the to the Prince Artha who would later become the Buddha that doesn't attract from you know my belief that the Buddha did have mystical experiences and he did he did basically become awake he figured out that this whole world was a kind of a dream and so you can see you can have both of those in the same overall tale it's you've got to be a little bit careful when you have followers and devotees who build up or accept every specific thing in a Bible gets because when you look at who are the people that compile these stories and where did they come from and things like that so you know but but but for me it is important to these superpowers you know one that they have a lesson and two whether they actually occurred or not and I've come to believe that many of them could have certainly have occurred I don't think it's like I'm not a western materialist in the sense that these things just didn't happen so for example I interviewed another professor this was for my UFO stigma in academia study I was studying why academics had such a stigma around studying UFOs and they said either in social sciences or in the heart sciences but they said they use the term that's been popular in the media recently since the recent UFO disclosures you know which is this ontological right there's been this term ontological shock which John Mack certainly popularized I don't know if he was the first one to use it with experiencers but people are experiencing too much ontological shock with these stories of not just craft in the sky but the U.S. government has these UFO craft right but basically they said it's okay as a scientist social scientist or a professor in the academy respectable professor to treat UFOs as a sociological phenomenon right it's okay to tell the history of the UFO groups or of Scientology or these other groups but it's not okay if you cross the line and say this is an ontological phenomenon which means that this is a real thing and they said then you've crossed the line you've kind of gone native you've gone rogue right you're off the reservation if we can call it that and so he said that he studies Christian early Christian theology and he says you know there's only two types of people who study early Christian theology the people who say it didn't happen because it doesn't happen today therefore it didn't happen then and then the people who say who are Christian devoted and say it was God who did the miracles and he said what if there's something in between what if they actually happened and it may or may not be exactly how it's presented to us in the Gospels today but that you know many many people saw these miracles what if there is some ontological reality and some other way and some other laws and that's what I like about yoga because in yoga these cities are superpowers they are part of the tradition but they are also you know sometimes stumbling blocks right they're stumbling blocks to our spiritual progress so it's an interesting tradition in that way and they really go and Patanjali lists a whole bunch of different cities you know in his yoga sutra and he says yes these things may happen pay attention to them but don't get too obsessed with them and and that's you know the story of the Jinn is a perfect example of that right it shows you but but if you fundamentally believe that this is not all there is which is you know I'm quoting from Battlestar Galactica here you know the sylons believe in a god and he said what is the most basic article of faith that this is not all there is and that pretty much describes every religion right the most basic article of faith is that this is not all there is then you have to accept that there might be other beings and other planes of consciousness that we can't see whether it's shamanic it's Judea Christian or it's Hinduism or Buddhism in the eastern tradition of the soul reincarnating they all believe that there are these other planes of existence and you know in the Islamic tradition the Jinn play play a pretty you know central roles in many in many in their cosmology anyway as other beings who exist so so I have come out where I think you know many of these things may happen they may happen in ways that we don't understand I mean if you have objects going from London to India at the time which by the way I found other references interesting stories of the same kind of thing and it's usually a Jinn involved who is doing it that I consider to be a little you know relatively credible although you never know because we weren't there but if that happens then there is something beyond what we can see we don't know exactly how it works and so you know our science which is not that old really when you think about it just doesn't understand how a lot of this stuff works we think we know like 90% of the laws of physics right yeah we don't know 90% matter but we know 90% of all turns out it's more like 3% 5% in my opinion and a thousand years from now we'll realize that this stuff could have happened that the theological interpretations may not be the exact they may have been exaggerated they may be extra theological to make their own traditions look good but that doesn't mean these things couldn't have happened that's really the point is what you just hid there what is Samadhi well you know so Samadhi is a super conscious state as defined within the Hindu Swami traditions and that is the goal of many of the esoteric practices and many of the yogic practices is to get to Samadhi which is basically the word yoga is union and so Samadhi is union with the divine and so at one point when Yogananda was younger he asked his guru do you promise to show me God yeah I promise to show you God and then you know a few years later Yogananda young Swami he was very impatient like well I still don't know God did you show me God and he went up to him and he touched him like somewhere around his heart and Yogananda felt this this kind of warmth and this joy and then he got into what he calls or what I like to call a little Samadhi which is like an experience of the big Samadhi which is he got into the more conscious state where he could see everything that was going on around him you know even beyond the walls and down the street but he felt this love this indescribable bliss and love and you know he stayed in that state for a little while and then he came back and then later he asked his master when will I need God and his master says well did you expect a guy with a beard that is you know that if you can get to that state of becoming one with God because of the love and the compassion and so you know I found this an interesting description now there's other descriptions for how do you get there you move up the Kundalini energy up the spine up the chakras to the crown chakra and once you get there you get to what's called this breathless state so in the yogic tradition Samadhi is associated with the breathless state also within the Buddhist traditions you know they don't focus so much on moving up the spine right they do it more from a you know meditation point of view and interestingly enough it gets back to the definition of yoga that I talked about earlier Patanjali key later than the Buddha and the Buddha said you know that if you if something is subject to a rising it is subject to cessation that's it right I mean that is the same secret yoga if stuff comes up all of our karma is based on all this stuff that we do our actions and our thoughts and our feelings like that is the fun of so they take a very different approach they don't necessarily talk about we talk about nirvana as the term that's used but for we you know we use enlightenment in the west for this this kind of a state where you can remember you can remember that everything is just a dream and so you know I was actually I looked around I interviewed some guys there was a guy named Ryan who runs a website called Krio Yoga Online and he was a disciple of a guy named Roy Davis and Roy Davis was one of the direct disciples of Yogananda and there's a few of these guys who went off and started their own organizations like Swami Kriyananda started the Ananda Foundation Roy Davis went off and helped start the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment San Jose and he says when when when Roy was younger you know he was like a young young buck with Yogananda trying to learn these spiritual techniques Yogananda was with another guy named James Lin who became the leader of SRF after he died and he was one of the few that Yogananda said he could achieve this spiritual state and he asked something and Yogananda said wait what did you ask and a young Roy says well I want to I want to get to Samadhi and he looks over Yogananda looks over at James Lin who became kind of a buddy in a way he knows his disciple and he laughs he experiences Samadhi and they both laughed and then later when he was alone he went up to Roy Davis and he did the same thing he like touched him on his heart and he felt this indescribable wave of love and that's where it's interesting because I think sometimes we miss that in the English definitions of this stuff we're talking about how it works mechanistically our thoughts instilling our thoughts but when you do what's beneath is actually this light Yogananda talks about the world being of light and then the light of the creator which is what sustains and creates this world which also comes with love and compassion so you can't separate the emotions from the thoughts and we try to do that because that's the western tradition right western tradition is materialistic there's thoughts in the body and then there's the feelings which are just chemicals in the body anyway but in the yogic traditions they're all kind of interwoven together is what I was able to glean from all this again man you're bringing it now because this does really back to the earlier point though if we break it down logically what we want to know with yoga is is it true at a fundamental level that you're talking about here not whether particular stories are true but whether the supernatural part of it is real whether there are these extended consciousness realms and then what are those extended consciousness realms and now let's return to Mr. Rieswerks definition because I think this it's much more profound than it might have seemed and it seemed pretty damn profound from the beginning so if Yogananda is telling us that Samadhi which again from the scientific standpoint is something we can kind of say okay this is a real phenomenon it happens in this world right and there's tons of contemporary accounts of people experiencing it exactly the way that you said and then we could have process how we would process accounts and the fact that experiences do matter you know we do take those into account with people whether you're having grief or depression or joy those are experiences and we do count those in science but so he's saying Yogananda is saying Samadhi is love and merging with God and the divine in the river of consciousness so now back to your definition of what is yoga the cessation of whirlpools of thought and feeling in the river of consciousness so now we can substitute that back in like you just did and I think we really see where you're going with this so you're not trying to play some middle ground phony materialistic kind of trick like maybe it really is just no you're saying it's about merging with God and divine get over it I don't even have to know what that means completely what God and divine is to say there's all these accounts that is possible and the way to get there is the stilling the water from these whirlpools and I think you already said that but I just want to put an exclamation point on it there is you know you live in two worlds you have your whole life because you wanted to be an entrepreneur that was important to you not only on a personal level but I'm sure on a social level you're an immigrant you never at any point play the race card in any way yoga nanda doesn't seem to be playing the race card in any way and anyone deserves to only imagine what he experienced but by the same token you had to experience all that you know coming over here an immigrant and your parents being immigrants and all that stuff there's kind of a lot to unpack there in terms of how you do have to kind of play it straight for all your MIT friends and your VC friends and all the rest of that stuff that does come through in the book and I think it's it's totally legit I get it but do you want to speak to that at all yeah sure I mean that is something that I think you know those of us who live in two worlds right sometimes have to do and I would say I did that more earlier in my career when I was more worried about my career right as I would keep the two separate but you know I was recently at Rice University with Jeff Kreipel who you may know and you know he writes books about superheroes and impossible experiences in the archives he ordered the he organized the archives of the impossible which has all of Whitley Streber's letters which are like you know thousands of letters and Jack Ballet's letters are there now John Mack's letters are going to be there as well I think they're still working on those but but he you know he talks about the Clark Kent versus the Superman side and he says you have to show the Clark Kent side to the world particularly in academia in order to you know have a respectable job because you know they want Clark Kent but if you're interested in these other things like superpowers etc you know you don't necessarily show that up front but you have to have enough of both when you're teaching this stuff in order to be acceptable one of the reasons why I wrote the simulation hypothesis is because I felt they bridged the worlds in a way that other things other models of the world don't I mean it's hard to go you can go to physicist at MIT and say well let's talk about what it would mean if the world was a simulation you can also go to you know Buddhist monks and talk about what this idea that the world is an illusion and how that relates to this idea of the simulation and so you can actually bridge using this metaphor you can bridge these different worlds together and that was part of the reason why I wrote that book was because it was bridging my different worlds which is the world of video games the world of science the world of like spiritual seeking and the world of science fiction and you kind of pose it all together in a way that you can have an intelligent conversation and there are folks who like when Nick Bostrom first proposed the simulation argument back in 2003 there were many atheists that went to him and said well you know I was a staunch atheist but if the world is a simulation anyone outside the simulation anyone who's like a programmer or super user would look to us like it's supernatural so maybe at least it's possible right whereas before they were just like these staunch atheists they were like no that's it it's not possible that there's anything any of this stuff could ever have actually happened but yeah in my own life you know I when I was younger I probably hid it a lot more than I do now now I'm just kind of out there I'm a little bit older also you know went through yeah certainly you know there was a little bit of that immigrant story and being in a minority and how that affects you when you're growing up and you know even after 9-11 but by then I was well on with my career and so you know I don't think that affects me too much these days but in fact if anything I'm kind of return to my roots right I grew up at West and so I was very you know very western oriented but I started to explore more of the India and Pakistan and the Sufis and Islamic traditions now as well so Yogananda was a bridge between east and west and there was a Swami that he used to go to the levitating saint he called him but funny thing is a lot of lessons that he taught Yogananda had nothing to do with levitation which he ascribed to a specific kind of breathing technique forceful breathing called Bastrika and he said that to a young Mukunda which is Yogananda's given name was and he said to a very young Mukunda who just go and visit the Swami all his dour followers were like why do you let this kid come in who just sits around and laughs at all your stories and stuff and you know he said to Yogananda that he was getting letters from America and they were curious about yoga they're rediscovering India but much better than Columbus did because Columbus thought he was going to he thought he had arrived in India and lived in the west and so Yogananda came from India brought the teachings here became more of an inspiration here he was actually better known here and now it's like it traveled backwards right I mean when you said for westerners who might be skeptical well you've got modern Indians who are in the same way right you know Rudyard Kipling had that line about east is east and west is west and neither the twin shall meet well except that these days you know you can't say the west is material and the east is spiritual and there's as much materialism you can find as much business as much technology you can find in India or China and the streets of Shanghai or in Bombay as you'll find in Los Angeles or New York and so the world has become you know much much more integrated in that sense but there are still these philosophies and that's you know I find my role in life a little bit to to try to bridge these different worlds because even though east and west have been bridged the philosophies themselves haven't been bridged who is Danian Brinkley and what did you learn from him so Danian Brinkley he's a guy who got struck by lightning back in how way back in like 1975 I think it was and he wrote three times yeah three times he's been dead like four times now and I mean you know like when I went through some heart issues which I'll talk about in a minute he was going through some so we were on the phone talking you know about that but he's been dead almost five or four times now and you know when Raymond Moody was putting together his book about near death experiences you know he had Danian at him somewhere in North Carolina or South Carolina and you know Raymond described realized that his near death experience had you know many of the different ages the commonalities across near death experiences and for me I first heard about Danian through his book and he was giving talks and now I've gotten to know him quite a bit he's become a friend but to me one of the most profound aspects of his experience was the panoramic holographic 360 degree life review and this is when he says that there was a being of light doesn't say it's an angel or it wasn't a being of light who was basically guiding him through what happened to him up to that point in his life and he replayed every single experience in like full color detail and more than that it felt like he was there but he had to experience it from the point of view of the other people that were that he was interacting with and he had been a bit of a bully he was a big kid used to beat up other kids and he went into the military and so he actually shot people and during his first life review in 1975 or wise I think he actually had to experience what it was like to have been beaten up by himself and he realized not just the physical pain but the emotions that the other people were going through and what it was like to be shot and killed by him but more than that to see the ripple effect of that on that person's life if somebody dies there they may have a wife they may have parents siblings what ripple effect does it have so it was basically the lesson of the life review as I take it is that this is how your actions ripple out and so the life review is kind of giving you the purpose of life it's how you're supposed to treat other people and of course this ties into karma well when I was in Silicon Valley we were able to take a video game and record it but we were also able to put on a virtual reality helmet and we could see what it was like if you were a video game character who shot another we could replay that so you could actually see the bullet coming towards you and so that was where this idea of the simulation and recording because I'm a scientifically minded guy so if it's going to replay every scene that scene all that has to be recorded somewhere and not just your scene but the other people's scenes too because sometimes the life review will pull up these other what other people felt and it turns out in Islam and even in the Bible there are recording angels recording angels depending on who you talk to and whether you're talking about the Bible or the Quran either just record the name of people who get into heaven or like in the Islamic traditions the scroll of deeds and the recording angels have names and they're supposed to write down all your good deeds and your bad well now that's a metaphor 2000 years ago you could talk about angels writing stuff down if today you were to say you wouldn't say there's an angel for every person there's like 7 billion times 14 billion angels you would say that we're just going to record everything and then you're going to review it like you might at the end of a video game session and so for me talking with Danny and hearing about his life review was an interesting link between my making that connection with what the religions have been telling us what near-death experiences have been telling us and I do believe that they saw their life experiences and I believe the life review is real it's not just the neurons why do you believe that see this is again back to the point pushing back on Diana Walsh Plisulka it doesn't matter if it's true or not no it does matter well in this case I think it does matter the reason that we care the reason I care so much about near-death experience science is I think it really paints the way forward I'm not big on at the end when you go this kind of middle ground between science and spirituality I think what we're headed towards is a post-materialistic science which embraces the science methods and the curiosity of science and the openness of science but gets away from these falsified ideas that's the important thing about near-death experience science is number one we got Max Planck 100 years ago saying consciousness is fundamental and everyone sitting around are wringing their hands and going is it really true and then we have near-death experience science saying oh consciousness survives death the most parsimonious explanation for that is consciousness is fundamental and then the other thing when I interview like good near-death experience research they all say the same but the one who says it most clearly is like Jeff Long who has a database of 4,000 near-death experience contents and he says Alex you know the one thing that gets kind of lost in this and one of the tunnels and life reviews and all the rest of this is back to your point earlier back to yoga Nanda's point love love love love 90% something like 90% of the respondents say that is the most predominant most important experience they get from the experience so this is where I think science can lend a hand and I think it merges perfectly with how we are to understand the most important things of what yoga Nanda is trying to tell us in the book yeah I mean I do think that you know near-death experiences and near-death science and even looking at you know when there's no brain activity for a period of time and the coherency of these experiences but also the message that they bring back right and so you know yoga Nanda used a metaphor of a different metaphor than that was used in the past in the past like the Buddhist traditions and even many of the Hindu traditions used the idea that the world is like a dream and Tibetan dream yoga is all about learning to do lucid dreaming waking up in the dream so that you can do lucid dreaming while awake and realize that all of this is Maya or illusion Maya doesn't just mean illusion it means carefully crafted illusion like when you go to see a magic show you like like put out your disbelief so that you get entranced by the show or if you're you know watching a science fiction movie and you really want to get into it you got to put aside your disbelief while you enjoy the actual world or the movie but that the world is like that and you know he had an experience where yoga Nanda had an experience where he was meditating and suddenly he was on a ship in World War 1 a German guy and he got shot and he felt what it was like to die and he came back and tears were streaming from his eyes and he was like you know Lord why do you allow such suffering and the answer that he got back very clearly was that you know life and death are relatives within the cosmic dream that if you look at the newsreels of World War 1 and you think of how movie projectors work they're projecting the screen and you get so entranced by it that you think everything is real but you forget there's a movie theater around you and so he used the movie projector as his you know metaphor and it was a new metaphor it was using new technology at the time and in the world he said is made of light and that science was also reaching this conclusion that there's a great great quote from autobiography of yoga that I have in wisdom of yoga which is let it be from science then if it must be so let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material world it's warp and wolf is Maya and I believe that your depth experiences are actually a great way for people to understand that consciousness is separate from the physical body you know and for me since you know we live in a world of the internet social media and video games I like to use and I believe Yogananda would use more modern metaphors if he was around today he wasn't a traditionalist like there were many traditionalists who ruffled their feathers by teaching yoga to large groups of people and audiences using correspondence courses like these were things that were a big no-no in the yoga tradition I get all that and I think that's important and it ties back into this point we were talking about in terms of technology and also there's a pragmatism to Yogananda and it comes through in his biography more than autobiography but in his biography he's like okay how do we get this done guys I didn't come over here to learn the American get it done ethos and then not to apply it but I want to talk about metaphor because we talked about this last time you're on and we kind of don't exactly sync up on this we've already used a bunch of metaphors it's like a river you know life is like a river it's like a dream it's like a movie now so video game okay it's like a video game great and that's your background it's still a metaphor it's metaphorical right and I guess the reason that I kind of pull back on that and want to exaggerate that is pull it up and you alluded to this but there's people out there that are that take it as way more than a metaphor they take the simulation hypothesis and the idea that we might be in a video game is way way more than a metaphor and you mentioned Nick Bostrom we can also throw Elon Musk in there so that's really what you're kind of pushing against and I kind of feel I want you to come down one way or another on whether or not this is truly metaphorical or if it is in some way somehow pointing towards something that is more than metaphorical well I think it's both the metaphor is the way into this right like I think if Yoganano were alive today he would say it's like a movie but it's like a stage play but everybody has their scripts and they can make choices but we're all playing it together at Shakespeare in Shakespeare's time the actors were called players and we're all playing this together and in the Hindu traditions the world is the Lila or the divine play the play of the gods or a stage play in a sense so there's this multiple uses of this word play and in the Quran even they talk about we have created this world for you as a time as a game as a sport right and so these metaphors I think are more than just metaphors right they are ways for us to understand something that's actually pretty profound but that's very difficult to express in words now when it comes to the simulation metaphor I think the video game is the ultimate metaphor because there's a player and there's a character so it gives that perfect sense of what's inside what's outside and the sense that everything around you is part of the illusion now where I come down is you know I I got into this and we talked about this last time where I was playing a virtual reality ping-pong game and it was so realistic that I decided I tried to put the paddle down on the table I tried to lean against the table I almost fell over because there was no table and so I projected where our technology be and the way that video games work is that we render based on information and all my explorations into quantum physics hasn't convinced me that there is a material world basically the material world is information that gets rendered for each of us individually and for all of us together and that's why I use the video game metaphor but it's a little more than a metaphor because if we're taking information and we're actually rendering physical things around us now that's a game and that's a simulation but it's not like our laptops our devices are not like our laptops it's just so far more advanced than what we have available that when you say you have to say it's a video game in a thousand years and that's what Elon Musk was trying to say no I think they're saying something different they're saying you can't have it both ways if it's more than a metaphor it's not a metaphor so when I say when I say life is like a river there's no question that it's metaphorical and you couldn't push me and I said well it's really more than a metaphor you know it's this I'd say no it's just metaphorical I go back to your definition of what yoga is it's the cessation of the whirlpools of thoughts and feelings in the river of consciousness you're talking about God and divine here right Mr MIT tech entrepreneur you're way past any kind of Elon Musk simulation you know super computer kind of stuff it I don't think I think we get into this kind of back door materialism where we kind of want to have it both ways it's not just having it both ways I mean yes that's part of it but part of it is that we don't have the language right to express what these things really are so we have to express them in language that we might actually understand right so imagine trying to explain the real recording to someone 200 years ago that's kind of what we're like today we're trying to explain something that's profound and perhaps divine and we're trying to explain it using the English language you know which we've done that though we've done it successfully you did it in your book Yogananda did it in his book there's been thousands of spiritual books and direct teachings throughout the ages that have explained it we don't lack the language we don't need as metaphors and so did everybody else and they're metaphors he never says this is a little bit more than a metaphor this is closer to it we don't need it by virtue of the fact that again your definition of yoga doesn't need any kind of MIT computer game understanding forward looking deep sea it doesn't need any of that well depends who you talk to right because it is a metaphor to my definition is a metaphor river of consciousness right that is a metaphor and so that metaphor works for certain people but it doesn't work for other people and so we live I mean whether we like it or not the dominant paradigm in our society today is a material if you go back to Galileo's time the dominant paradigm was theological religious you know Catholic church paradigm and he was talking about things that seem to be outside of that dominant paradigm but today we're talking about things that are outside of the dominant paradigm and so we have to somehow bridge the gap and I see that as part of my part of my mission is to I see it as your mission I just think you should go about it more directly what would you have to think about transhumanism and the transhumanist agenda if you buy into that I don't know how anyone cannot buy into that at this point but what would what do you think you would say about that well I think he would use you know the modern technology as a way to talk about yoga and to get people interested in yoga techniques that's exactly what he did back then he talked about Einstein relativity talked about quantum mechanics and light and projection as a way to explain what you know the movie projector analogy and what what he had learned in his meditation so I think today like today for example here's an example I was at a little gathering at Arizona State University and these were all kind of technology oriented you know academic and the title of this talk or this discussion group was when will the first person live to be 150 years old who will that person be what technologies will be because it's going to happen soon right that was kind of the point and I said and I think Yogananda would do this exactly and I said I question the assumption that there's nobody that's lived to 150 already because you know there are tons of stories not just like a few of people in the yoga traditions who use yoga techniques to get there and so you know I think Yogananda would say you don't need transhumanism you can get there using yoga but he would use it to say what is it you want transhumanism to do for you okay this yoga can actually do that already using about he would call it a technology right see back then he called it the science of religion because that's what was acceptable today I think he would call it the technology of spirituality is what yoga because today we all use technology so much more than we did back then that I think people understand that that idea much more and he would say yoga is a kind of technology so Riz in the book Wisdom of a Yogi you do a terrific job of kind of your mission from the beginning is pulling out these various accounts and turning them into lessons that have a pragmatic real world kind of application what are some of the lessons that are really resonating with people sure I'll tell you a couple the first lesson in the book is called you don't have to go to the you know Yogananda spent a lot of his boyhood he had a vision of these these kind of meditating swamis in the mountains and he said who are you and they said we are the swamis of the MLA's and it was such a strong vision that he knew right then and there he wanted to be a monk and so he had this vision of the future so he spent his childhood trying to run away from home run away from Calcutta to go to the Himalayas and find a guru to the point where he was in high school and he and his buddy got on the trains they you know put on European clothes and there was this chase across northern India because his older brother would always go and fetch him back because you're too young to ever run away you know and so he had to promise his father he would you know at least graduate high school before he went down right and so in the end you know he did eventually leave Calcutta and tried to go to one of these holy places but when he met his guru he ended up being in Sarampur which is only 12 miles from Calcutta where he had grown up and so you know the lesson there is you don't always have to go some place far away to find your spiritual practice or your mission in life and you know I interviewed people and this happened with Steve Jobs first of all he went all the way to India and he went into his little hostile room where he was staying and somebody had left a copy of autobiography of a yogi and then when he came back that became the book that he read every year now he wasn't necessarily you know a disciple per se it was just that he believed in the stories and what they were trying to say about consciousness I mean he did more Zen meditation than anything right in terms of you know his actual practice but he went so far away and I remember a guy named Peter who was a Hollywood producer and he went all the way to Rishikesh and back in I don't know the 80s I think it was and he went there and he went to a bookstore and he found autobiography of the yogi and he looks at the picture of you know he's got this very serene face with his eyes that are kind of glowing and he goes wait I've seen that picture before and it was in the LA Times newspaper and turns out there was you know a yogi on the center like right down the road from where he lived in Hollywood in his spiritual practice and so we always think we have to go somewhere else but start with where you are and you will find things around you that speak to you and even in my case you know I found some teachers early on that helped me with different aspects of consciousness and it was right there in Boston right around MIT where I was and so that's one of the lessons another important lesson is sometimes the universe gives you a task and ready or not that is your task to do and you might not feel the best qualified to do that task so when Yogananda was asked to come to America in 1920 he was a young he's a pretty young swami he wasn't like you know the Yogananda the Guru Ji that everybody thinks about today and he rarely ever gave talks except to some kids he had a school for kids when he set up and he had never given a talk in English now think about that he was asked to go represent the Hindu religion in America in Boston at this religious conference and yet even though he wasn't the most qualified he had this intuition these clues just like he had this in the intuition earlier I mentioned that he would be a wandering monk now in that case we often get these visions of our future like if you had asked me in high school what are you going to do in life I said I'm going to be a software entrepreneur then I'm going to be a writer I feel like there's a script that we have written for ourselves but it's a broad script in Yogananda's case he became a wandering monk just not wandering around in Malayas he was wandering all around America and that's where he spent most of his time and so I feel like we get the essence of these things but we may get the details wrong and then sometimes we're called to do something we don't feel qualified and Yogananda didn't feel qualified but he had a vision of these people that he took to be Americans and that was an inner inner vision and then it was accompanied by an outer invitation like someone actually invited him after he had that vision and he realized that's what my vision was telling me that I need to go to America and there were all kinds of obstacles to him getting here like it was World War I was just finished and he literally had to find the first boat out of India he didn't have a visa he didn't have a it was full he didn't have a ticket he didn't have any money his father didn't want to go I mean it was just like all these things and eventually they all kind of melted out of the way and he ended up going to America and doing very well in that talk and tying back to my earlier story about when I was asked to write this book at first my first thought was I don't feel qualified to be the one to write this book but then the more I thought about it the more I realized this was a task it was literally placed in front of me out of all my books right this is the only one where literally it was like somebody came to me Harper Collins India in this case we want you to write this book so it was a different experience for me and I'm not necessarily shy about I think I can accomplish a lot of things but I had doubts as well and so as part of that I wanted to go and see where Yogananda wrote his book and it was in Encinitas right not far from where you are and it was overlooking the Pacific Ocean and what's called Swami's Beach now and it was during COVID and I wasn't able to it wasn't open to the public but luckily SRF opened it just for me and gave me a nice private tour during the time when I was still trying to find the inspiration to write this book and I went in to his office with a couple of months and I was able to stay there as long as I wanted and right there is overlooking the Pacific Ocean and I meditated and I had a vision while I was there and I very clearly saw Yogananda there with a stack of papers on his book which I assumed was his writing of autobiography and to my horror he took this stack he looked at me almost mischievously honestly he took it out the French doors and he threw the papers off to the wind in the Pacific and I was like what are you doing as a writer like especially in those days you didn't have you know backup I don't want you to kind of breeze past this non-ordinary experience because at one hand you're saying very ordinary stuff like the folks from SRF let you in and a lot of people can go now and tour it and they've left it all like it is that there's some weirdness about the SRF folks but won't go there but you have make sure because you have a non-ordinary experience an encounter with in your understanding of it Yogananda in this extended consciousness realm which is just a placeholder because we don't even know what that is but that's what you're talking about here Yeah I mean I was meditating in the room with my eyes closed and it was a spontaneous vision and I consider it to have been an actual connection but now it's a vision that was tailored to me because I'm a writer right and I was there seeking inspiration for my writing and so then I saw him throw off these you know these papers and I was like they're going to go everywhere in the Pacific and then all the papers turn into little white doms and took it out and he's like turning to me and he says you see your pages the message they carry the message long after you're gone and that's why you have to write this book and so it kind of helped me you know one not hold on so tightly to this idea to let go a little bit but two to realize that this was a task that the universe had given to me and that I could accomplish it thinking about Yogananda's own life and what he accomplished over so many years and so that was a non-ordinary experience that I had while writing this book so yeah I have another lesson and if we have time I'll give you one more which is that sometimes you know setbacks are part of your path because it's easy for us do you hear these stories about whether it's successful author or guru like Yogananda especially with Yogananda and he tells all these marvelous stories and you think well the guy didn't have any problems wow it was just a magical life it was divine intervention and all this stuff happened but one of the things that I really learned from his biography looking at his life in addition to his book was he had setback like everybody else in fact he had a pretty major setback after he had been in U.S. for 15 years he had brought his buddy Swami Durananda over and he was teaching a lot of the classes while Yogananda was traveling out everywhere and they had this big scandal that came up and the guy thought his wife was having an affair or doing something nefarious with Swami Durananda and he supposedly went up and hit he punched him on the nose and this became like a huge media storm like if you think of what we call a viral story today like all the Hearst newspapers you know we're spreading this story Hindu Swamis are cooking American women and you know and this is back in the 1920s early 1930s and you know Yogananda was going to be pulled from Miami lectures because there were all these guys that were going to physically beat him up and after that Swami Durananda laughed and took a lot of people from Yogananda's organization and it kind of fell apart a lot of things fell apart for him and it was almost like he wasn't sure what to do next and he went to Mexico and meditated and he was kind of praying please let me just go back to India all this craziness here and all this effort in the west maybe I'm not meant to be here and he clearly got the message that he still had to work to do here but that setback was a key part of how he spent the next 20 years of his life while he was alive which is he started teaching a smaller number of students and then he started thinking of ways to get his work out there and he spent in the last almost 15 years of his life or maybe not last but 15 years writing autobiography of the Yogi and he realized that that was what was going to spread his message and so this idea that if you have a major setback that that by itself is a problem is not necessarily true the setbacks may be part of our story if he hadn't had that setback you may not have spent so much time writing this book you would have spent more time teaching and building the organization and doing all these other things he'd been doing for the past so many years and you know something like that happened to me in my own life and I talk about it in the book I was kind of at the height of my career as an entrepreneur I sold multiple companies became a venture capitalist I was running a startup program at MIT and then I had some health problems I literally had to have heart surgery triple bypass and right before I was to give the big talk at the end of our play labs accelerator at MIT it was like a major setback and basically it meant that you know I couldn't do anything for a while and I was literally stuck at home for many months and I had to keep going back to the hospital and every time I would start to recover and I think I'm going to jump back in the business world things would go south again and that's when I realized that the message that I was being given pretty clearly during right after surgery and afterwards I spent too much time in the business world fighting what I like to call our outer tigers referencing the story of the tiger swami the tiger swami had spent a lot of his life you know out battling these tigers physically fighting these tigers and at one point he got a message that it was enough now he should start focusing on his inner tigers of doubt and spears and his desires and focus on but he actually got the message from his father through a swami and he didn't listen and he ended up getting mauled by this one tiger in his last fight and he literally took him six months and if you've ever seen anybody get heart surgery and I was never mauled by a physical tiger but it felt very similar like they cut you up completely open you up and then you got to get back together and it took me about six to nine months to recover and then after that I realized that the message I was given was that it was time for me to get on with the second part of my life my career which is to be a writer my writing and that's you know the tiger swami then decided he had no more interest he had fought his outer tigers and there's nothing wrong with that I had fought my outer battles in the business world and that's part of your karma it's the stuff that you're drawn to but then sometimes it takes a major setback to course correct you to then get on with it and say okay you fought your outer tigers now it's time to fight we are inner tigers and for me it was to put down all this stuff that I had been thinking about and I knew I was going to be a writer and so the lesson is setbacks may be part of your story take them in stride and understand that they may have meaning well beyond the physical the physical thing or the obstacle that gets in your fantastic and at Riz you know as we move to wrap this up if people do go to Zen entrepreneur.com they're going to find all your books there what else are they going to find links to my podcast a lot to my articles that I've written on a bunch of different topics you know science fiction on spirituality on simulation where else would we direct people on this Zen Entrepreneur.com you got a lot of good stuff on entrepreneur stuff yeah I got a lot of entrepreneurship articles I mean that was my day job as an entrepreneur for many years and as an an investor and I wrote a book called startup myths and models which is kind of a collection of lessons that I learned over 20 plus years of being in Silicon Valley and being an entrepreneur and all the myths that people have about how startups work and so you can download free chapters from pretty much most of these books on my website and so there's also a podcast called the simulated universe where I interviewed a number of other folks who have explored this idea and then you've got videos some of my videos are up there as well including I think links to like my talk at Google here you can see some articles are up for Stanford and a few other places and so there's there's quite a bit there and there's even a couple of my UFO articles as you mentioned as well and then there's my blog on medium which I haven't been updating as much lately but there's quite a few articles that I put up on that over time as well so it's been absolutely fantastic having you on again the book you're going to want to check out wisdom of a yogi lessons for modern seekers from autobiography of a yogi Riz thanks again so much best luck with the book I think it's going to sprout wings just like your apocryphal story said and you never know where it's going to go but this is the kind of book that if you pick it up there's no doubt going to be some stuff I think that's going to resonate with you right where you are right now because it kind of talks again all these different lessons one of them is going to hit you right with right what you need at the moment I have a feeling so thanks again thanks so much for having me back on thanks again to Riz Burke for joining me today on skeptico the question I up from this interview is have you read autobiography of a yogi and what did you think about the book what lessons did you learn let me know your thoughts until next time take care bye for now