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EFTA02645872 | EFTA02645873 religious experience, not the dogma, not the ideology, not the institution—but transcendence, going beyond subjectobject split. Number two: the emergence of platonic values as a result of that experience, like the desire to know the truth, goodness, beauty <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/beauty> , harmony, love <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/relationships> , compassion, joy, equanimity, gratitude <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/gratitude> and humility, wonder, curiosity. It's very human but it gets overshadowed by everyday experience. And number three: a loss of the fear <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/fear> of death, because that happens to experience, not to the consciousness in which that experience occurs. I think they didn't understand that, honestly, so they rephrased it as "Do we need God?" So I said, "Listen, before I even go there, can we have a conversation?" So they were very gracious. We all got together with the board or whatever and we had a conversation. I said, "Honestly, God is a very loaded term and if by God we mean some imagined deity or some dead white male in the sky then it's not something that we can even address because we don't have that conception of God as an imagined deity." Matt: You mean that's not something you personally can address? Deepak: Yeah I can't address it, nor can my partner. They said, "Well if you make that clear up front, then it's fine, but we still want to maintain God in the title." So I was keen to have this conversation because Michael and I have been going back and forth for 30 years now, and I thought, Michael's come to a very good place with me personally. So we agreed to the title. But if you go to the Eastern wisdom <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/wisdom> traditions—Buddhism, Vedanta, Shaoism, all the Eastern traditions—then God is pure consciousness, period. So the debate, you're right, they were talking about the mythical God and we were talking about that which is inconceivable as consciousness but makes every concept possible. So I can give you a background on that because monotheistic religions are at war all the time amongst each other, and all of the problems in the world right now are a consequence of that. But nobody talks about "What is a religious or spiritual <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/spirituality> experience?" Hundreds of millions of people across the world don't have that idea at all that the monotheistic religions propose. In fact, if you go deep into the teachings of Buddhism, etc., the word God is not mentioned. Only consciousness is mentioned. Vedanta, only consciousness is mentioned. And it's a very different take on consciousness. So, if you'll allow me for a moment to explain that. So when I was a kid, I grew up in India with a father who was agnostic or atheist, who was trained in England as a cardiologist. He went on to become a very famous person. He discovered high altitude mountain sickness. When the Indian and Chinese army were fighting in Tibet he was putting catheters in people's hearts and measuring their cardiac pressures. He described high altitude pulmonary edema and hypertension. My mother was what you might call a Hindu. But even when she told us stories as kids and she talked about all these mythical gods and goddesses, she emphasized the fact that these are mythical, imaginary, symbolic expressions of deep aspirations in human consciousness to understand reality. Now she was also, by the way, she wasn't a very educated woman like my father was. But she had enough ideas in her upbringing to say that the world you experience as everyday reality is not real. She would say that probably because she had heard it an amount of times. But when you're a child, that sticks with you, that the world you experience is not real. So that's my childhood <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/child-development> background until I went to medical school. Medical school, I embraced everything that my father had taught about reality being physical, material. He was actually more than—he was almost like Michael Shermer in the earlier days when I was growing up. Matt: How did your parents <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/parenting> get along? Deepak: Oh he was a very loving person. Matt: Completely different philosophies. Deepak: Yeah but he was an amazing person in terms of being a physician. I mean this is long before technology. He could listen to a heart with a stethoscope and tell you, which you may or may not know, the PR interval, which means the difference in microseconds between the atrial and the ventricular beat, which you could verify on an 2 EFTA_R1_01882483 EFTA02645873
April 16, 2026 at 8:52 PM