 The last 35 years has been to elucidate the nature of consciousness. I'm an endocrinologist, started off as an internist, went on to do neuroendocrinology and I was seeing the interface between consciousness and biology. And sometime along the way, I started to go back to the ancient wisdom traditions of India, which thought of consciousness in a completely different manner. According to modern current interpretation of science, our consciousness is a by-product of our brain. Just like your pancreas secretes pancreatic juice and your stomach secretes hydrochloric acid, your gallbladder makes bile, your brain somehow secretes consciousness. So if you have thoughts and feelings and emotions and desires and instincts and drives and imagination and creativity, it's just the dance of molecules. Now that paradigm is coming under deep questioning and that is coming through the very technologies that we are talking about. You know nanotechnology is giving us a hint into what's really happening in the universe. The universe is a nanotechnology workshop in the mind of God, in the infinite consciousness from where we all come. Everything that we call a structure in the ecosystem or in biology or in brain or in the physical world, everything that we call a structure is actually a process. There are no structures in the universe. Everything is in flux. The human body, for example, your body is recycling every year. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms you have in your body weren't there a year ago. You recycle your stomach every five days. You liver every six weeks. You're skeleton every three months. Your DNA, which holds the memories of millions of years of evolutionary time, the actual stuff, the raw material that makes up the DNA, the carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen, the oxygen, it comes and goes every six weeks like migratory birds. So at the end of one year, you've recycled your entire body and you do it through processes like eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, and importantly, your thoughts. How you think, how you cognize, thinking, eating, breathing, they're all one process. So right now you have in your physical body at least a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ or Buddha or Genghis Khan. In just the last three weeks, a quadrillion atoms have gone through your body that have gone through the body of every other living species on this planet. So think of a tree in Africa, a squirrel in Siberia, a taxi driver in Manhattan. You have stuff in your body that was there only three weeks ago, which raises a big question of identity. If you think you are your physical body, then which one are you speaking of? I'm giving you this lecture right now using my year 2010 model and the last time I came to India, last time I came to India, I brought with me the same suitcase but not the same physical body. What is the identity that we all have? The original identity, the potential consciousness from where we come. You go beyond the appearance of molecules, you enter a subatomic cloud, you go beyond the cloud. What do you end up with? You end up with a handful of nothingness. This is the basis of all our technology. Right now if you can surf the information highway on the internet, if you can speak to somebody on their cell phone, if you can text a picture or a photograph to somebody in China, all these technologies are based on a fundamental premise in science and that is that the essential nature of the material world is that it's not material. That the essential stuff of the universe is non-stuff. That everything you call matter comes out of an infinite void. So what is this nothingness from where we all come? Is it just a void or could it be the womb of creation? Is it possible that nature goes to exactly the same place to create a galaxy of stars or a cluster of nebulas or a rainforest or a thought? What's a thought? Where does it come from? And today there are a number of really good scientists and I work with some of them. Stuart Hammeroff, Sir Roger Penrose, who was the thesis advisor to Stephen Hawking and Sir Roger Penrose, Stuart Hammeroff, and many others are proposing that consciousness as that potential mind before the subject object split is actually part of the fundamental Planck scale space-time geometry of the universe. That if you go to the most fundamental levels of activity in the universe, say 25 times smaller, 25 times smaller in order of magnitude of an atom, you enter this level called Planck scale space-time geometry where everything disappears but what remains are the fundamental building blocks of nature, spin, charge, space-time, gravity, as potential. These are the fundamental building blocks of the whole universe, the physical universe but what Hammeroff and Penrose are also suggesting as that this level also has embedded, entangled with it, the fundamental building blocks of mind, what we call platonic values which include truth, goodness, beauty, evolution, mathematical truth, mathematical truth embedded at the fundamental levels of nature which gives rise both to mind and to matter and that what we call mind, your mind, my mind is actually an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information in the total universe. This has huge implications, this scientific insight has huge implications so the new insights are saying to us if we understand the body as a process and the universe as a process and see that at fundamental levels, your mind, your body, your environment, your relationships and the whole ecosystem is a single process and that is the great insight that the Vedic Rishis of India had. They said that the ground of the individual, Atman, is also the ground of the universe, Brahman and what they call the universe is Brahman, the manifestation of that consciousness as it interacts with its own self and differentiates into everything that we call space time, energy, information and the world of objects. What I'm going to do is very quickly show you what the implications of this idea is that instead of regarding consciousness as an epiphenomenon and emergent property of evolution, we begin with consciousness, with Brahman as the original ground of existence that differentiates into everything that we call reality from our cognition to our behavior, to our perception, to moods, emotions, nature's forces and biological expression and then we understand well-being in the context of that larger world view and this is some of the work that I'm associated with at Gallup University or Gallup organization, we look at the relationship between financial well-being, community well-being, physical well-being, social well-being, financial well-being, community well-being all entangled with each other for example, if you have a happy friend, then your chances of being happy go up 15 times. If your happy friend has a happy friend, they go up another 10% and if your happy friend has a happy friend who has a happy friend whom you don't know, they go up exponentially. Why? Because consciousness is a field. You know, in Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says, I am the field, I'm the knower of the field. Kshetra and Kshetra Gya, that field differentiates and Shrodinger said, the great scientist Shrodinger, one of the original pioneers of quantum physics, he said consciousness is a singular that has no plural. So understanding that, I think we are ready to move to the next phase of our evolution to understand spirituality as it should be understood, not through belief, not through faith, but through experience and through knowledge and scientific validation. And if we do that, then we will be able to understand many questions. What makes us happy? What brings us well-being? What is the meaning of death? Why do we have darkness inside us? Why is it there? What goes wrong in the differentiation of consciousness into the whole process of expressing itself in a multidimensional universe? And how at this stage of our evolution, the universe is becoming self-conscious through the human nervous system. This is the new model that we'll be exploring, the relationship between mind, brain, body, relationships, ecosystems and the universe as a single process. You know, healing ultimately is the return of the memory of wholeness. Health, healing, holy, they are the same word. So ultimately, there is only one kind of healing. It is the holiness that we experience when we come back to our ground state. Thank you.