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know what that means." I said, as I look across the religions of the world, the common features I see are: Number one: transcendence—as a religious experience, not the dogma, not the ideology, not the institution—but transcendence, going beyond subject-object split. Number two: the emergence of platonic values as a result of that experience, like the desire to know the truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equanimity, gratitude and humility, wonder, curiosity. It’s very human but it gets overshadowed by everyday experience. And number three: a loss of the 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 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 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

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