Mental Health: What You Need To Know | The Big Bang Theory’s Mayim Bialik, Jonathan Cohen & Sadhguru
foreign [Music] if you learn to cut it with little distance you don't have to bring joy in your life you'll be bursting with it all the time can you talk a little bit about Mental Health a very intense form of attention this is what inner engineering is about what do you like to eat no I'm in America so obviously I'm not eating what I want [Music] thank you what do I do with a big doctor doctor doctor neuroscientist well it is uh it's really our our pleasure and a great honor to speak to you thank you so much for um being such a huge part of you know a larger understanding of of mental wellness and um hopefully a path that we are all in some way on towards Enlightenment it's really an honor to speak to you maybe we can start by um talking a little bit about sort of what your perspective is on mental health you know it's obviously a very popular idea and it's something um you know that's become a real part of our modern Consciousness but the challenges of mental Wellness have been around since as long as humans have been around if not earlier can you talk a little bit about sort of how you see this sort of mental health situation that we find ourselves in it's about physical health and mental health I've always been a part of human existence and uh if we pay attention has always been a part of every other life's you know life also I'm saying every other mammal at least if not I don't know if the worms and insects have mental health issues but I'm sure they have physical health issues so what I see is if they have physical health they also have mental health issues it is just that as human beings we are slowly becoming more of Mind than body so our focus on mental health is more uh you know gradually shifting from physical health to Mental Health physical health was a big issue when nourishment was a challenge and uh you know scarcity of food and shelter and things like that now those things to large part of the population at least unfortunately still significant population is left out of that but at least with a large part of the population physical what is needed for physical health is largely taken care of but we are still not having physical health America spends nearly 3.5 trillion dollars on health care that shows even physical health is not manifested as it should in an affluent society because essentially affluence means that initially we are seeking choice of nourishment and once that is taken care of we are looking at choice of Lifestyles with both these things achieved if there is so much ill health obviously we are doing something fundamentally wrong why when you're asking me a question about mental health I'm talking about physical health is in my perception I don't separate mind and body because what you call as mind is a certain combination of memory and intelligence tell me one cell in your body which doesn't carry memory tell me one cell in your body which is not intelligent it is doing tremendously intelligent things every moment of our life things that we can never figure in our brains ourselves are doing isn't it every one of them and memory wise how your forefathers looked a million years ago still even your epithelial cells still remember the skin tone they have not forgotten a thing so both memory and intelligence is at a phenomenal level in every cell in the body so we don't see mind as bar and body as two separate things it is just that there is a physical body and there is a mental body or we can put it this way in modern terminology there is hardware and there is software if the hardware is corrupted there is no way the software will run well if the software is corrupted the hardware will not run well this is well understood so having said that there are for present focus on Mental Health there are genetic issues with people there are social issues and there are individual issues of course of thought and emotion going out of control so when we say genetic we can say somebody is pathologically you know designed in a certain way that some things are off and those things may look particularly off if they're living in certain type of societies in certain other societies those things may be just looked at as okay that's how he is kind of thing but in some societies where everything is straight jacketed that person may look totally odd and sticking out and he cannot be in that Society he must be locked up somewhere it'll come to that so genetic aspects can be overcome today you are in the science I am not the person to tell you but today we know this but in the yogic Sciences we have always seen it this way I have been saying this to people give yourself to me for 24 hours I will see that your genetics have no influence on you you can be away from that if you do certain things with yourself genetics are there but you can be away from that today I think they are using some term as epigenetics or whatever you can how you use your genetic information is your choice there is genetic information you look the way you look I look the way I look this is genetic information but how we use this how we feel about it how we think about it how we act upon it is essentially ours whether we get trapped in this genetic information or We rise about this and make use of this genetic information is Left To Us so this transformation is always possible yogic Sciences are fundamentally focused towards this because when we talk about a human being can become liberated what we are saying is Liberation is from the burden of memory memory just not conscious memory alone every cell in your body carries evolutionary memory genetic memory uh karmic memory articulate and inarticulate forms of memory conscious and unconscious forms of memory all these memories together make you a body of memory and that determines how you are right now if you rise above that if that does not decide who you are right now then we say you're liberated so the whole science of yoga is always focused towards this Liberation that the past should not determine who you are if your parentage determines Who You Are you have not lived your life you have just been just an offspring like any other creature you're an offspring you are not a human being it is only to this one species that we attach the word being because all other creatures are ruled by their memory we can choose how to be right now it doesn't matter who my grandmother was but I can choose how I want to be right now this other creatures don't have they will go by the Revolutionary and genetic memory they have no freedom to rise above that so this is why we are a being because we can decide how to be if we did decide how to be then I'm asking both of you a simple question if you had a choice how to be would you choose to be to be Blissful or miserable I'm Blissful yes of course Jonathan sometimes wants to be miserable no that is you may be your religious dance um I have a follow-up question um first of all that's so beautifully said and um you know what you're talking about takes an amount of effort that I think a lot of people especially in our modern day and age people are often resistant too and I think um while Psychiatry and um you know the Sciences have tremendous value and are life-saving and life-altering in ways that you know even even we could never imagine um there is you know a strong turning to um you know prescription medication often as the first thing to do when you're feeling disease right or when you're experiencing suffering and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about um you know what the purpose is of looking for Holistic Solutions and kind of approaching problems with this sort of holistic philosophy as opposed to the first thing that you do being you know to ask for medication which is often what people have been trained to do in this culture and often what practitioners are trained to do first that is uh because they want to support the economy it's a it's a business all right it's one of the largest businesses so somebody has to support it if you don't buy any medicine how to run the economy that's a different matter all I'm saying is you're talking about there is a problem and then there is a solution but we must understand when it comes to our problems whatever as individual people we are going through problem is manufactured by us I am not interested in finding Solutions I am interested in people learning how not to create a problem why you create a problem and find a solution because that's how the economy runs for you go on creating more problems and finding more solutions and it just goes on but human life is completely gone in this problem solution drama that's happening in everybody's life so I'm saying a simple thing see I was talking to a group of top level psychiatrists in UK and they were telling me that there are 72 varieties of mental ailments which have been identified it is okay if it's for study or understanding the scientists who are involved in it they name it this way that way but as an individual person if you have 12 of the 72 what to do as an individual person there is only one thing is your intelligence working for you or against you you already answered this question if you had a choice you would be blissful if your intelligence was functioning in favor of you you definitely create the most wonderful things within you but if it's working against you once your intelligence is turned against you there is no damn thing in the universe which can save you nothing so you can put a chemical and feel good for some time whether you get it in prescription or in the back street people are finding various kinds of solutions all right so where you find the chemical there are a whole lot of people that have met groups of people in Los Angeles that I have met they watch that the drugs that they have found in the back streets of Los Angeles or a solution for everything all right so we need to understand this this whole thing about mental ailments there are pathological issues genetic issues other things but the social issues or in just the way we respond to what's around us are we responding consciously or are we in a compulsive state of reaction this is a fundamental difference the line between sanity and insanity is so thin between health and ill health also also is so thin if you keep Crossing it for fun one day you don't come back that's when you complain so you don't cross that the society has to develop this discipline that has to create a culture that there is no uh you know virtue in acting crazy right now I don't see much of this I'm uh you know like whatever the movies and things that are happening what I see across the world particularly it started with Hollywood I think but now it's across the world that how do you handle your emotions if you get something angry you take the pots in the kitchen and throw it at somebody or at the wall at least is this the way you handle your emotions is the way you handle differences between people either you must punch them in the face or shoot them in the head there is no other way to handle this so this is a whole culture and people are surprised why is there so much violence well look at the games the children are playing they are shooting Comic characters right from the age of five six they're two shooting Comic characters and cartoon kind of images when they turn 18 they will come off age they would like to shoot something real that is beginning to happen yeah they are telling me over 230 shootings have happened since the beginning of this year that's more than one per day so I am saying people are thinking it's the guns it's the human beings yes for those human beings guns are available that's another issue but the important thing is human being if I have a kitchen knife should I poke you everybody has a knife in their in their homes should we take it up and poke our neighbor why is such a thing coming because societies cultivating such a culture that violence is a part of our life all right so violence against yourself is mental illness well you may be doing it in an uncontrollable way maybe it's not in your hands right now at such a time you may need some chemical support from outside I'm not saying medicines are completely useless no they are useful for many people they would not be able to manage themselves or doctors would not be able to manage them without chemical you know inputs that is accepted but for a whole lot of things human beings if they take responsibility for their health and they develop simple tools as to how to manage my body how to manage my chemistry see today everybody knows because of medical sciences that Human Experience of life asset basis has a chemistry attached to it there is a chemistry there is a chemistry of Joy there is a chemistry of Love there is a chemistry of blissfulness there's a chemistry of stress anxiety misery for everything there's a chemical basis so essentially this is the most complex and sophisticated chemical Factory on the planet the human mechanism now the question is are you a great CEO or a lousy CEO but our education systems our social Customs have nothing about this we are busy wanting to conquer the world without any sense in ourselves but now the way we are empowered with science and technology if we do not take charge of ourselves we are going to be the biggest disaster already we are an impending disaster you know both in terms of environment and these days it's fashionable to become talk about World War III see this is almost like World War One happened World War II happened so three must happen number system this is all right in two generations we have seen two world wars now the third generation must see the third world war otherwise they will miss out all the action how to make movies without a World War but now the way we are empowered if we go for such a foolish thing we cannot say somebody is mentally ill all of us are absolutely said Guru in a society that you described that has these mental challenges these have this sickness how do people start to change can you tell us about indoor engineering and how people can start to take steps towards uh being more well and that freedom that you talk about see when we talk about engineering let's talk about just engineering engineering essentially means we create a machine which does what we wanted to do if you create a machine to do one thing if it does another thing that's not a well-engineered machine it doesn't fail it does what you wanted to do that's a well engineered machine so we're talking about this this is the in terms of design and its manifestation it's the greatest piece of engineering on the planet do you agree with me yeah this is the question is it is so complex and the management is from inside if you don't manage it well this piece of engineering can be a big mess for yourself and the rest of the world one human being can do terrible things to the entire Humanity right now we have this that kind of capability a thousand years ago if one human being went little off he would do some damage to somebody next to him or to himself but right now one human being can cause massive damage to the entire world the way we are empowered so when this is the case engineering yourself in a way that you want you don't have to engineer yourself the way I want but fortunately if you if you keep our things aside whatever social and other influence aside when I asked you that question if there was a choice is blister choice or Misery the choice everybody says it's blissfulness shall I tell you my problems my problem is this this is the 40th year 40 years ago this happened one afternoon I was sitting somewhere with my eyes open and suddenly I realized that you know tears of blissfulness are just flowing and I'm just sitting there for hours without being with no sense of time what I think is a few minutes is passing off his hours then I sit down and think what's happening to me my logical mind tells me maybe you're going off The Rocker I ask my friends what do you think is happening to me they say come on what did you pop did you pick up the mushrooms in the mountain did you do this did you do that then I experimented with this and I realized if I keep my hands off my psychological process every cell in my body drips ecstasy when I realized this this is 40 years ago I sat down and planned that in two and a half years at that time the human population was 5.6 billion I sat down and made a plan in two and a half years time I will make everybody Blissful because who would not want it who will not want it even both of you guys said you want it all right but see today people say we have touched over two billion people whatever but that's not my idea of humanity eight billion people are there today why is it this is because the cycles of misery are such once you get into the Trap it keeps you going and there's a whole society supporting that people are telling you your misery is normal your misery is not normal your ill health is not normal every cell in the body is designed to create health why would they turn against us we're doing something wrong isn't it something fundamentally wrong is misery normal no every child is bursting with joy if you just feed him enough he's bursting with joy what happened what happened is we did all the wrong things first and foremost thing that's happened is this we have something called as education education is an extruder machine which is trying to turn out the same kind of nuts and bolts from every human being and we're turning out more nuts than bolts the important thing is one fundamental thing we missed out on is in education we are giving so much significance to memory and no significance to human attention see when you're in school you get good marks for whatever nonsense you read if you can puke it on the examination paper you get the marks if you pay attention you never got the marks so this is a basic flaw in our way we are bringing up our children the way we are raising whole generations of people all of us are victims of it one way or the other all right because everywhere your memory was rewarded your attention was not rewarded because in this universe in this life things open up only where you pay intense attention where there is no attention nothing happens the same old cycle happens so I am saying right now misery is a certain cycle it may be a genetic cycle it may be a karmic cycle or maybe it may be an individually manufactured cycle it doesn't matter how but essentially it's a cycle if you want to break any cycle you need a very intense form of attention so inner engineering first aspect of it is learning to pay attention to yourself when I say yourself not your persona not your thoughts not your emotions not like that to the life that you are see first we are life then we have thoughts emotions our psychological dramas and then how we manifest that in the world many many things all right but fundamentally we are life everything else is secondary but there is no attention to that life at all our personalities our psychological drama has completely drowned the life that we are essentially life is naturally exuberant and alive and joyful this is the nature of everything not just human life but instead of being alive with life we have become such a big psychological drama now we don't know how to direct the drama that is illness isn't it if you could direct your drama the way you want then you would create a joyful drama for yourself or something that you enjoy if you enjoy misery it's fine with me but you will do something that is good for you but right now the drama itself is going out of control because drama has become bigger than the life that you are this needs to change means you need to engineer yourself in its right perspective because this is how life is happening just because we are given a certain intellectual capability unfortunately instead of using it to our benefit we are making it such a big problem every problem that we have created on the planet whether it's environmental or political or Wars and stuff and discrimination everything has come from Human mind isn't it what a fantastic instruments look at the way you're using it this has happened because mind has become the master you should be the master of your mind then you will use it the way you want right now the psychological process is a cycle of what information and data you have gathered from that there is a cycle that cycle is ruling you that cycle is dominating you if it's happening little well for you you think it's great the moment it turns into a tornado then you are sick that is not the point the important thing is you are not above it you are beneath it that is a problem I mean there's so much to to unpack one of the things that really comes out is this idea that we've normalized an illusion if the core nature of the human existence is to exude Bliss to be able to feel Joy at a very high level then most of the population believes that that's not true so they're they're in an illusion they're they're not free they don't have the capability or they have the capability but they don't have the uh the understanding that there there can be another way so part of the first step is to say wait a second the struggle that one finds themselves in there is an alternative you know sometimes we can't start to change until we know there is a change that's possible see instead of being a human being we are still being human creatures this is the problem we have not established our way of being when I say establishing our way of being it is not that we have to think of something how to be I must be Blissful this is not an idea or a philosophy there is enough scientific evidence to show only when you're in a pleasant state of experience your body and your mind will function at its best there's no question about it and if you have to be successful in anything that you're doing your body and your mind should function at its best only then you're successful now what is this pleasantness of experience see if your body becomes pleasant we call this health if it becomes very pleasant we call it pleasure if your mind becomes pleasant we call this peace if it becomes very pleasant we call it Joy if your emotions become pleasant we call this love if it becomes very pleasant we call it compassion if your very life and it is become pleasant we call this Bliss if it becomes very pleasant we call it ecstasy if your surroundings become pleasant we call this success only in creating pleasantness in your surroundings you need the cooperation and capabilities to create that but to make body Pleasant mind Pleasant emotion Pleasant energy is Pleasant is 100 your business creating pleasantness in the surroundings you need the cooperation of the people and the forces around you otherwise it will not happen but to make body mind emotion and energy is Pleasant it's totally our business this is what inner engineering is about tools not philosophy not teaching not ideology not belief system tools to make it happen as human beings we have become the most dominant species not because we are the strongest because of our ability to use tools isn't it so we are talking about subjective tools without a tool suppose whatever Furniture you're sitting on if I ask you to unscrew that with your hands you may lose all the 10 nails and it won't come if you put your teeth to it you may lose some of them it won't come out but if I just give you a screwdriver in a minute you will take it out that is the power of the tool so in engineering is not a philosophy not an ideology not a teaching not a new religion it is a tool just learn to use it this has been fascinating I mean I have a million other questions but um can I ask you one final question before we say goodbye yes I'm curious what what brings you Joy why something should bring you Joy well I'm curious because I think a lot of people you know see your presence and you know experience your energy and you know you you have something that I want that Jonathan wants you know there's there's something very attractive about the way you have you know composed yourself and your thought and these tools um but I am curious sort of on on a personal level what brings you Joy like what do you what do you like to eat what music do you like what's joyful for you no my joy doesn't depend on what I eat now I'm in America so obviously I'm not eating what I want so uh see see this is the this is where the problem is we always think something brings us joy see when you were a five-year-old girl you were simply bubbly isn't it what happened to that when you're five if you were so Bubbly by the time you're 40 you should be ecstatic in in natural process of growth I am saying but just the reverse happens simply because there is no separation between what is you and what you gather when I say what you gather one thing is you gather this body you are not born like this slowly you gather this body and then you gather the impressions of the Mind and then you gather people and things around you relationships wealth money whatever else what you gather must serve you well but unfortunately what you gather you carry it on your head the burden of it see it's like this some someone was talking about this so I painted some bricks in gold color and ten bricks so say this is gold bricks you carry it because this person was always somebody else is wearing one kilogram or two kilograms of jewelry and they were struggling so I said here I'm giving you gold bricks they were not gold I painted them gold and put it on your head and walk all the time enjoy it so whether they just mud breaks or gold breaks the weight is same and the trouble is same your neck will break after some time so the problem is what we carry we don't understand that we need to carry it with a little distance we carry it as ourselves see this body what was soil became food what was food became your flesh and Bone but now in your experience it makes you feel this is you what you gather can be yours can never be you isn't it so what you gather can belong to you can be yours but it can never ever be you so your physiological process and psychological process if you learn to carry it with little distance you don't have to bring joy in your life you'll be bursting with it all the time I'm not eating the food that I want to but I'm still joyful oh thank you said girl you brought me and Jonathan tremendous Joy getting to hear your wisdom and um it's really such an honor to speak with you Jonathan anything else you want to say uh it's so nice to speak with you we look forward to being in person and having a longer conversation one day thank you I'm in L.A sometime this next month hope to catch up let's do it we would love that thank you so much thank you no one's got him [Music]
