You're not just going to let him die like that, are you? My shoulder, Angell. Don't listen to that guy. He's trying to lead you down the path of righteousness.  I'll come off it. You'll come off it. You. You. You. You infinity. Ah. That's Cronk from The Emperor's New Groove, struggling with whether to do the right thing. It's a topic we talk about with today's guest, Himalayan yogi expert, Steve Briggs. Steve, I think you're down with this, but our culture, we've lost that. I mean, again, when I talk to people in religious studies, they go the exact opposite of that. They say, of course, there isn't a moral imperative. Of course, there isn't a judgment between right and wrong. I challenge whether or not that's true. I'm saying scientifically, you guys are men of logic, men of reason, men of science. I think you're misinterpreting the data in a fundamental way. Well, I can come back to that comment I made about my definition of evil in the very beginning, and that is the act of denying another person their right of freedom, their free will. Stay with us for Skepticoe. Welcome to Skepticoe, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today, we welcome Steve Briggs back to Skepticoe. Steve is really a remarkable guy. I hope you remember him from his last interview. You can check that out. He has a couple of books, one that we're gonna talk about today, I just showed it on the screen, The Tale of the Himalayan Yogis. This is a book of fiction, unlike his first book, but I wanted to just as an introduction remind you that even though this is a book of fiction, this is a book written by a guy who spent years and years in India working at a professional level, but also working with yogis, would regularly go on retreat with some very mystical kind of crazy yogis that we all imagine in the mountains. And also working with people who were interested in meditation because Steve was a meditation teacher, a transcendental meditation teacher in India. So this is a fantastic opportunity to have him back on to just warning him to kind of drag him into this discussion. I've been having about evil and about these extended realms and about what we might learn about them. And I was really reminded to recontact Steve by Ben, a friend of mine who is an emergency room physician here in San Diego and kind of vouched for Steve because I said, hey, there's a guy you might wanna talk to. You're planning on going to India to do this kind of spiritual journey kind of thing, even though Ben is a Mormon, he liked to expand his spiritual horizons. And he said, hey, he came back and he said, Steve is the real deal and he connected me with some people over there. It's a fantastic experience. I'm not promoting Steve as like a tour guide or anything like that, but he's the real deal. He really knows a lot of stuff about what he's gonna be talking today about in terms of yogis and their understanding of these extended realms and what we might learn about that. So Steve, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining me. Well, thank you, Alex. And anytime I can talk about India, I mean, it's a place I love. And I consider it my second home and I hope if I ever have a chance, I'd love to live there again. I spent seven years there and it was that they were the best years of my life. Well, remind folks, if you will, about those seven years, what you did experience and then as I alluded to, how do those experiences connect with the book that these folks might check out? Well, those seven years, I was teaching meditation as you mentioned and it was to the corporate people and into Fortune 100 people. And they had factories all over the country and over the course of the time we were there. We taught thousands of people and we taught them in virtually every state in the country, South and North Himalayas, everywhere and the big cities, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi. And then when we were not doing a course, we had a tendency to head off to the mountains because the Himalayas are really thought of as the wellspring of spirituality in the East and maybe for the planet in general, I couldn't say. And when we get up there, we met some pretty cool people. Guys who, yogis have been living in caves for 20 years. One guy had been in silence for seven years and we were sharing notes back and forth. And as I met these people, very unusual lifestyles and sometimes very austere, spending the winter at 12,000 feet with a vow never to light a fire or cook food. I got to know a handful of these people, maybe eight, 10, 12 of them. And over the years, we kept going back and seeing them again and we became friends and they realized that we were serious because people come, even Indians that go to a place like Gangotri to source the Ganges River. They go there for two hours and leave and we go up there for three weeks. And so it made an impression on them. They shared a lot with me about their inner experience, about their lifestyle, about what it was all about for them and their experiences of higher states of consciousness. And so I got to kind of see a little bit of the inside rather than just the long hair and the loincloth. And I found that these guys were fascinating human beings and a couple of them I used as prototypes, if you will, for some characters in the book. They tell him land yogis. So tell me a little bit more.  I remember last time you told me, you'd have like a newspaper from like five years ago that was his last contact with the outside world. But then what would you do? You'd like camp nearby and you'd engage in your own meditation practice? Well, there are places there that have been pilgrimage sites or they call them Yatra. Yatra is a Hindi or Sanskrit for pilgrimage that have been active for thousands of years. And obviously in the years before buses and cars, people would walk and it would take six months to get from the planes to these piranhas. That would be an evaded kind of place. And with cars, we can drive right up to a place like Ghotri and then from Gangotri, it's another 15 kilometers to get to the actual source of the Ganges. So some of these yogis were living at Gangotri itself and some of them were living further up the river. And so I met, when you got to Gangotri, for example, they had guest houses because thousands of people go to these places, thousands of Indians that come in on buses. So they stay for a couple of hours, maybe a couple of days and then they leave and they go to the temple and they do pooches for their ancestors and that sort of thing. But we kind of hung around, got to know them and then we go up further where it was very austere, where you'd either stay in a tent or a tea stall, something I know, or there was a couple of tiny, tiny ashrams that were like one room basically, they still call them ashrams. They'd let you stay overnight. And if you made a contribution, great if you didn't make any care. So that's how we kind of got to befriend these people. And sometimes it was tricky because they didn't speak very, maybe very little to no English and my Hindi sketchy at best, but sometimes they were very well educated. One guy had been a professor of some Vedic graduate literature at Calcutta and his English was impeccable. He translated the Brahma Sutras into English. So it just depended on, but in every case, there's sort of a universal language in the spiritual realm where you can make a connection with people if you are open and they're opened as well. So it worked out quite well. Well, that's just fascinating.  I have to follow that path. You don't have to live in a cave to be a yogi. You can live in New York City.  We're all on the path and we reach, we're all at our own stage of the path. So it's not like we're all moving exactly at the same pace to doing exactly the same thing, but we have a common goal. So we're very much kind of brothers in that sense. Anyone who's on a spiritual path, I embrace and distinct more power to you because we're in an age in the world where it's easy to go the other direction. In fact, society is kind of flowing one way and people who are trying to make progress spiritually are basically swimming upstream and it can be a challenge. The project that I'm really on right now and I want to pull you into is that I just think we have to do better in terms of bringing some of the best Western reason, logic, science to trying to understand this extended consciousness realm that we're talking about. And I think it's a worthy project, especially when I juxtapose contrast it with what we're presented. I mean, I talked to so many biblical scholars, religious scholars. It is so out to lunch, so ridiculously disengaged with even consciousness, even the understanding that we are more than this biological robots and meaningless universe thing that I always harp on. They're not even past that. So they don't even have a chance. They don't even have a nose in the tent to begin to understand this stuff. And then on the other hand, we have kind of this religious, cultish craziness that we can all see that demands that we adopt these just irrational belief systems as the only way of understanding this extended consciousness realm.  And I think it forces us to ask the question is, why aren't we doing better? Why aren't we applying our best methods of logic and reason?  You're an MBA, right? Am I right, Steve? So you're an MBA, advanced degree, successful business.  You're still asking all the questions that we all ask. So I thought this was really, really kind of a great opportunity with your book, which is so challenging, I think in some ways because of some of the things that it says about the extended consciousness realms and hell and demons and evil and things that might be happening and might be interacting in our world. And you're talking about it in a very sober straightforward way as many have talked about before, but that's the conversation that I thought it would really be fun to engage in. Well, let me say one thing about quantitative approach. And there's a guy named Dr. Fred Travis and he's got this little portable neurophysiological apparatus that he hooks up to any meditator, any person who's practicing something that they feel is extending their consciousness or expanding their consciousness. And he looks at it in terms of all the different brainwave functions and all the different things that go on in the brain. And he's found some very fascinating things. So there are some people doing some very good work to find out how the changes are actually manifesting in the human brain. So Dr. Fred Travis has done 25 years worth of work to determine the sort of thing. And I think he's come up with some nice things. If I were a neuroscientist, like he, I could articulate it better, but I'll just say that there are a few people that are starting to dig a little deeper. That's almost like a level one discussion to me. And that is establishing that we can verify by the means that we have, that we accept as being scientific that there is this extended realm. And I think that's a necessary step because we have science that is really locked into this idea that that can't possibly be happening.  So when we come back with, like you're talking about this Dr. Fred Travis or we have it from a number of different sources. We have the guy in the UK, David Nutt, who does the psilocybin experiments and puts people under the FMRI and instead of their brain lighting up like a Christmas tree, like we'd expect, it goes the other direction and it's suggesting that these people are having a more direct contact with consciousness and that's what's causing their extended experience.  So my point really, and this is I'm belaboring this, but I really want to make sure that everyone understands the distinction. I'm saying let's get past that. So the first point is just to say, is it real? We say, okay, it's real. There is not only consciousness, there's this extended consciousness. And the point, level two always to me is to say, well, why is there all this bullshit? I mean, it seems kind of obvious the science that's been said for thousands of years, cross culture, the position we have is ridiculous. Why do we keep getting nudged in this direction and pull this way and that way? And then the third is, which I really want to talk about is, let's see what the yogis are saying, but let's also contrast that with this material over here, even though it's channeled or this material over here, even though it's a survey of people who've had ET experiences or people that have ND experiences. Let's really try and put our arms around this in a real systematic way. And that's where I think we need to be at. But what do you think? What are your thoughts about that in general? One thought is early on, Alex, when I met my guru, my teacher, he said to the group I was with when I was with him in Switzerland, he said, there's several ways that you can get validation for something like extended consciousness. One, personal experience. Two, a tradition that is longstanding that is involved with that. And three would be taking a scientific approach. So I think our best way is to kind of go with the first one, right? Personal experience either my own right now or the yogis who confided in me. And I'll just tell you one quick story. A guy named Maharaj, he lived for 10, 12 years at Gangotri in a hut. He had dreadlocks that fell to it down to his feet. He lived there a year round. He had an assistant, Chayra, the disciple who took care of him and spoke perfect English. Maharaj didn't. And so I said to his assistant, I said, well, I'll ask him if you will ask Maharaj, what does he do at night when he sleeps? This is the point of question. It wasn't an innocent question on my part. I wanted, I was testing. And I didn't tell him anything more. I said, what do you do, Maharaj, when you sleep at night? And Maharaj pointed up to this guy, he says at night, I travel to that planet and that planet and that planet and other places. And my yogi friends are there and I visit people being souls. And then I come back. I said, okay, that's cool because when my teachers started talking about extended consciousness, when Maharaj, the teacher I hooked up with in 1972, he said that the inner experience that yogis have is far beyond what you or your friends are having. And so he said, if a person is enlightened or fully realized in the self, then they don't sleep the way the average person sleeps. They're fully awake when they're sleeping and they're fully conscious and they're having possibly more exciting, expansive experiences than when they're in their waking state activity. So I asked that question to find out what he was doing in sleep. And sure enough, he wasn't unconscious. He was fully conscious and having extended consciousness experiences if we take those experiences that he was describing as valid. And I have no reason to not believe the guy because he didn't have to impress me. I don't even think he particularly wanted to talk with me for the first few times. When I asked him that question, that kind of perked his interest a little bit. So I, I felt, okay, this guy's probably the real deal because that's not your average experience. So it validated something that you would hear. It resonated with me. And it was also something that I had had some taste of those experiences. This was 25 years ago, but I had had some tastes of those experiences. So I said, okay, that jibes a little bit with what I've experienced. And it also matched up a little with the tradition that Mara, she was saying that true yogis never really sleep. They're awake, they might be lying down, but they're awake, they may leave the body, they yoga non to describe traveling through the universe when he was either meditating or quote, asleep. And he was fully conscious, of course, at least from my point of view. And I think, yeah, so. That's great. And I think our mutual friend, Rick Archer on boot at the gas pump, that's one of his kind of probing, I don't wanna say trick questions, but validating questions too, because that's something that's been kind of bandied around in the non dual community and stuff like that. And Rick in general has done a fantastic job of kind of bringing, trying to corral the cats of spiritual awakening in a way and try and pin some of these things down. I feel there are benchmarks that many people experience along the way, but it's like snowflakes. Every single one of us has the uniqueness to us. And so I don't think that two people are ever gonna have the identical experience on the path at the same point in the path and maybe even have the same path in general, but I do feel that there are some commonalities that are worth noting. And I felt that Maharaj's experience, that to me was a green light. Okay, let's hang out with this guy if he's willing and we talk, we would bring him firewood and stuff. So to kind of show that we were trying to be helpful. He talked to us for days and days and I'll give you one more validation possibly for him. They have these huge Sadiw conventions, if you will. They had one in the state of Orissa and the king of Nepal came down there and the king hunts in his royal hunting grounds in Nepal and he had shot a tiger, a couple of deer and a couple of other animals and they skin these animals. And the- This is what year now? This is when? This was in 1994 before the assassination of the king, before they switched over to anocracy a couple of years later. And so that the Sadiw is the yogis value very much deer skin and tiger skins. For some subtle reasons it protects their energy. I'm not really sure that I should try to even- Go there, right? Right, but it's interesting. Traditionally they'll often sit on a- Absolutely, they meditate on skins. So the king of Nepal was attending this Sanyasi a yogi convention in Orissa and there were literally 50,000 yogis in a gather. It was a big deal. And Maharaj was there and everyone was just kind of milling around and the king of Nepal decided, okay, it's time to give out the skins to various Sadiw's who, and I don't know how he selected, but he's walking around, he gave a deer skin to this guy and he gave another deer skin to this guy and he kept walking around because the cherished one was the tiger skin. And he walked around and he looked, I don't know how easy value anybody's looking at people and looking at people. And he walked up and he stopped in front of Maharaj, presented the tiger skin to him. The tiger skin still had the head, by the way, on the skin. And to this day, the last time I saw Maharaj, he was sitting on that tiger skin for meditation and he chants, he likes to chant the Deity Sutras, Deity Sri Lali Tambikash, or Sahasranam, that sort of thing. And he didn't tell me the story. His assistant told me the story when he wasn't there. I don't know if he would ever tell me that story because he's a humble person. I don't think he really wanted to do his own horn. But okay, okay, well, that's pretty cool because if the king of Nepal picked him out out of 20,000 people, there must have been some hopefully valid reason for that. So that was- Well, we would think, but then- Who can say? It opens up a whole big, you know, million ways to go. The king, the king, and how do we organize? And then the Chinese come into Tibet and they pull the monks out of the bang and they're commies, but we should forgive them. I mean, I don't even know, I don't want him to begin to go there. Well, if we want to go into the realm of evil, I'll leave that up to you. I'm happy to give you my feelings and my opinions on it because that's the theme that you mentioned that you've been- That's where I want to go. That's exactly where I want to go. And I'll tell you why. And I'm writing this, I'm actually writing this book and the title of the book encapsulates what it's about. Why evil matters. And the premise of the book is that evil is a lens. It's an inescapable lens to these extended consciousness realms. So almost like the stories you tell, we can kind of get lost in the goodness or the wonderfulness and all the wonderful love and light and the king gave them the thing. Well, let's talk about evil. Let's talk about fear. Because I think it brings another dimension into this. It's this big element in our human experience, a huge element. And in some people's lives, it completely dominates. They are so locked up in fear and that their ability to function is impeded. Let me bring up a quote from your book, The Tale of the Himalayan Yogis and let's go to the fear. And here are three different little snippets from the book. And the first is what can fear do to the fearless but fear them? Which I think is kind of interesting in saying that they're feeding off the fear. And then another quote is like attracts like. Well, if we think about the most basic human emotions, love is there, fear is there. And fear has an hatred and those things have a lot of offshoots, anxiety, nervousness, jealousy, all those kinds of things are sort of bifurcations or forms of fear. But what is fear? It's talking about what we create and how we create the ego states that are within us and what we understand to be who we are. We do have to get down to that fundamental question of who are we and what have we become? What decisions have we made to make us who we are? I think one quality of fear is the anxiety that I'll have my freedom of choice compromised that someone, some government, some my wife, my boss, my coach on the sports team that they're somehow going to steal my ability, my free will, my freedom of choice. And I think that's something we see all over the world with governments and in a lot of different contexts, religiously we see clergy stealing the free will of their flock, we see political leaders compromising people's freedom of choice more than ever maybe possibly right now during this pandemic. So I feel like people have an innate fear of losing their ability to determine the direction of their life. So that may not be the most fundamental thing, but I think it's a pretty fundamental thing. But I guess what I'm driving at is, to what extent is that real? I mean, I am more interested. It's illusory, it's illusory. And it's all illusory. I mean, I get that because we can kind of get that and it becomes the blob of consciousness thing. And it's non-dual and it's ultimate, it's all an illusion. Here's the point I guess I'm trying to make, is that when you start listing real fears that we can have, like you're mentioning the kind of COVID thing that we're in the middle of, there's legitimate reason to be afraid of that. You mentioned about the power of governments or the power of your boss or even your wife. Those things are real. But I think what most of us have a harder time really coming to grips with, but in a lot of ways is a better insight into what's really going on inside of us, is the fear we have about the spider that's crawling on the walls. I'm called into the house, I'm the spider control. And I go to my kids, my girls, I'm like, what are we doing here? Let's kind of break that down a little bit. Why do we have that fear? And of course we have fears of other things that are really debilitating to people as well. So what's at the core of that? And then we kind of create this other level of it that we're going on to talk about when we talk about demons and hell and spirits and to what extent we need to fear them as well. Somewhere in the novel, the guru of the hero, the guru of the protagonist that's teaching his, teaching, he used the analogy of a tiger that moves through the forest. And wherever the tiger goes, fear is present in the monkeys, it's present in the ground animals and everybody feels the fear of it. And they can sense the tiger's presence and the tiger may move on and go a couple to the next mountain over, but the lingering effect of the tiger's presence is still there with the animals even long after the tiger's gone. Now that residual influence, that stress that got put in the monkey from being, you know, nearly attacked or being hunted for a while, or the thought that the monkey thought he was being hunted is creates a sunscar, a stress, a strain and impurity in his consciousness, the consciousness even of an animal and that lack of light or that lack of clarity, that cloud, that shadow that's come in as a result of the tiger creating fear stays with that monkey and it could stay with him for the rest of his life. It could, if it was face to face with the tiger it may be 10 lifetimes before that creature, that soul could resolve that intense fear if it was face to face. So- See, but my problem with that, I mean, I'm okay with that. I think that's true, but I wanna try and understand that for more of a psychological level. And I'm not a psychologist. I wouldn't really be qualified to say what triggers them but the way I understand it from the point of view sunscars that are lying latent, they are triggered by certain experiences in our environment at any point in time and when they're triggered, they can cause irrational fear, they could cause terror, they could cause a heart attack, any kind of thing could resolve. So those fears need to be dealt with. We can't shove them under the carpet, we have to deal with them and that's where a spiritual practice like meditation or counseling, all kinds of things can come into play that help us resolve these knots. These, they call them grantees in this Vedic lore, these knots in the physiology that literally are impeding the flow of consciousness as it could flow if we didn't have them. And in the West, we have Carl Jung and our shadow, which is another aspect of this and the idea that we need to integrate the shadow aspects of ourselves. So it's something that's popped up again and again and I think you're round to something. And I do think it's also super interesting, like what you just proposed there, I think is a borderline to a scientific kind of thesis that is we have this energy that's supposed to be flowing through our body and when we impede the flow of that energy, different things happen that aren't so good. And I would suggest that some people have told me that that kind of opens the door for this evil thing because we wanna get that energy flowing and if we don't know how to do it, we might seek all sorts of ways to do it, either drugs or other behaviors that might not be good in the long term, but in short term. Because they mask the pain, they mask the subconscious unhappiness. That's part of the practice of various powerful pranayams and yogic practices like hatha yoga and meditation. They can address these knots in the physiology and when a person gets to a state where they're a master or a true sage, they've resolved those in one way or another, maybe through the help of their own guru, through their own extended practice, whatever. Yeah, but don't heavy down that path because I'm gonna bring up your guy again and it doesn't always work that way. No, of course it doesn't, it doesn't, but it's- And that's what I think, that's the problem in my mind and I'm gonna expand this even more in just a minute, but it's like, don't be so sure because that's what the Western scientists can do is like, I'm not so fast. I have this contradictory explanation of things over here too. If you allow someone else to do the work for you, the work's not gonna get done. We all have another, I'm saying if it's your teacher, your whoever, you've gotta do the work yourself. Maybe there's no work to do. Let me give you an example because I've been holding off on the last quote on that screen that I just shared with you and I think it's, to me, it launches into some of these harder questions and the quote from the book is, demons fear that which is protected by love. They feed fear in the way a villager craves food after a day's work in the field. There's a couple words here that really kind of spark me in a different direction. Who's to say, I mean, to suggest that we understand the mind of God and there's these demons and we understand what they are in this extended realm, but oh no, they're protected by love. What the hell does that mean in terms of a free will kind of cosmology that we have and they feed on fear. We hear that over and over again. What does that really mean? I mean, these are the kind of statements I think that really throw people for a loop. And also, if you look at people that are kind of enmeshed in a cultish kind of thing, these are the kind of things that feed those kind of beliefs that how the heck would I ever figure out what my path is when I have to worry about demons that are feeding off of my fear? I mean, do we really have to go there? We don't know if any of that stuff is real. That, he picked an interesting quote because that quote I lifted directly from a conversation I had with the Yogi and the Himalayas. We were talking about human emotion. And at one point he said, human emotion is the most misunderstood quality of the human being. And our inability to, he didn't use the word control our emotions, but our inability to channel our emotions, utilize our emotions in the most self beneficial way is a huge stumbling block for all of us. And he, so I basically, that was one of the quotes he gave me, I just put it right in there. Well, I'll give you a quote from my buddy I was just talking about Tom Zinzer, right? So Tom Zinzer spent 30 years, hundreds and hundreds of clients he's working with in a clinical setting. He's the first one to acknowledge that as soon as he starts talking to spirits, he's off reservations as far as a psychologist, the clinical psychologist is concerned. But at the same time, he's bringing that rigor and that training to his work. He's transcribing all the sessions. He's trying to work with people. He's putting them into deep trance and then trying to connect with them in all these different ways. And what he says is, I think in some ways fits with what you're saying but also offers a different understanding of it. And this goes back to the beginning where I think we need to go. And I'm not agreeing with Tom, but he says, look, we all have these ego states. When we separate these ego states in our mind, you know, like multiple personality disorder, which is not a popular term. It's now disassociative identity disorder. That's what it is. But it's the same thing. We recognize it. He says, hey, and then it gets into the top of thing. You separate these things out and they can kind of form an energy of their own and they can even attract other spirits. And you talk to Buddhists and Buddhists will tell you exactly that and they've explored it in that way. But then here's what he says further. He says, even if these spirits come and then he breaks down the kind of spirits. He goes, some spirits are just mischievous spirits. They're stuck. They haven't gone to the light and they're just kind of hanging around. Just like a soul or something, yeah. Yeah. And he said, but sometimes it's also even relatives that shouldn't but mom wants us to stick around and she's bugging you. But then there's some spirits that have never incarnated and have just gone to the darkness and the darkness is different from the evil. Darkness is like a gravitational force. Anyways, he has a whole description of how this works and I'm not saying that that is the answer but I'm saying when I see something like what I just put up on the screen, I see differences, irreconcilable differences in my mind between what he's saying and what the yogi's saying. I don't think that the idea then one of the main things that I guess I want to dispel but I don't know if I can I don't know if that's stretching it too far but this idea that we can compel these spirit entities to do anything on our behalf or against us or anything like that seems like such a stretch especially from this non-dual perspective if we get at that at some deeper level we have somehow created all this stuff in the first place then it seems like not such a great idea to think that we can somehow manage and manipulate these demons and make them afraid because we're going this way or worry that if we walk into this situation or that situation we're gonna be accosted by these things. I'd like to, if it's real, come to a different, more mature understanding of it unless that's the reality of it unless we really do have to fear these demons and there's no way we can get around them other than by circling in a circle and drawing this kind of figure with a sharpened knife. Hey, if that's what it takes, let me know. Well, in the novel I have that antagonist named Critava and we don't need to necessarily talk about him specifically but he had all the training and all the background that the yogic tradition offers but he spun off and this is just his situation and his ego took him off on a trip and he decided to use his skills to practice sorcery, to practice a dark form of tantric. Now, as I lived in India for those years, about every six months I'd see a big article in the Times of India or Hindustan Times about some tantric sorcerer who made a human sacrifice to propitiate their favorite extended dimensional being, a demon, we'll say. And if you look into the Vedic tradition, you will find, whether it's the Puranas, you'll find that Robin is the most famous demon probably to the Western mind. Robin was Ram's nemesis. Robin abducted Lord Ram's wife, Sita. Robin was a powerful being and if you have some confidence in the Vedic tradition, you say, okay, well, these beings do exist on some dimension. They're not necessarily meant to even be in the human realm but they're in another realm which is invisible to us just the way if there's an angel somewhere in the universe that they're also in a non-physical realm that they exist somewhere as a form of energy or light or something. Science is kind of a hard time with that but these beings are written about at length in Vedic scriptures and they are integral. They are the shadow side. I mean, if you look at probably the three most famous personalities that we can associate with spirituality. We've got Jesus, we've got Buddha and we've got Krishna. Well, all three of them faced huge obstacles from shadow figures that tried to kill them as infants.  Buddha's cousin, Devadatta, was his nemesis. They wanted to poison him. Jesus, we know his story. So there is an issue. We know all those stories, what? As historical fact, as allegory as well. Well, I think that's up to each person's truth. You can go there if you want. I was gonna say we can't go there but of course you can go there. But I think this is the intersection that we have. I mean, we accept certain things, certain events in our life as being true in consensus reality. We all saw them, we all experienced them. So if it's the Afghan war or if it's 9-11, the buildings fell. So I think we have to make a distinction between stuff that we say is real historically and stuff we say, well, we don't know if it's real historically. I'd make a similar distinction here. I don't start telling me we know this or that about Jesus. I don't think I use that, I don't think I use that word. I just think I said that these are stories that many people believe. I personally, if you want my personal, I feel like a great sections of the Bible have completely been rewritten. And I think that that's true with a lot of Vedic scriptures as well. I do think there are very fundamental truths that exist there. But that's my opinion, my truth. And I don't expect mine to be the same as any other viewer or listener or you. But I- No, no, I'm not saying that. Look, you're bringing a lot to the table. I have the utmost respect. As I explained earlier in this interview, here folks, we're talking to a guy who's not only an MBA, a professional who's been successful, but he's a great tennis player too. We talked about that in a flash show. I had to throw that in. But here's the thing, let me juxtapose what you're saying with my interview a year ago, so with Claire Broad. So she's a medium in the UK.   And I say, Claire, you've worked with thousands of people. You're on a daily basis, you're connecting with the other side in the spirit realm and deceased people all the time. What do you think about the demonic and what do you think about the evil? And she says what other people have told me too, she goes, I don't go there. She goes a couple of times it's kind of poked in, but for the most part I've found that where I put my energy, I create and that if I don't put my energy there, it just doesn't happen. It dissipates in a way that is in my mind is at odds with this idea that demons fear that which they're protected and there's this whole magical thing which is so popular now about here's how you do it and here's you burn the sage in your thing and all this. It just seems to me, I like where Claire is coming from, which is to me much more of a direct experience of our consciousness with those extended realms and saying we are after all manifesting those. So let's get a little bit closer to that truth. Maybe why I had to do this and why I had to do it at that in fiction, Alex, rather than those quotes, I stand by them as personally as more than fiction, but okay, if your attention is on love and harmony and the things that you feel expand your quality of life, then as the person you just quoted, those negative qualities, whether they're whatever shadowy form they are, they are not going to be a part of your life. They simply aren't. So there's an old Vedic saying what you see you become, what you think you become. And if your attention is riveted on the fact that there are demons and I should be in contact with them and I should do satanic stuff. We know about the satanic rituals that go on in the world. If my attention is there, there's gonna be a response. If my attention- Hold on, let's be clear. It's not just attention there to draw them in to do your bidding, like the tantric thing, which I think we can then also ask, why would anyone do that in the first place if they have some greater spiritual understanding that we are not doers here? We're just experiencers of our soul. What are we trying to get done? Why are we trying to do anything for our advantage? But it also ties back to even if you're not in that mode, it comes back to the fear mode, which I think so many people live in and our religions promote. Well, you should be afraid of that and here let me save you from that. And what I hear Claire saying is that really you don't have to engage in that either way. You can acknowledge the reality of it without engaging. Well, the ego protects itself out of its fear. Let me tell you a quick story. I have a friend who's retired, but he was a magician. He did magician magic in New York for years as a professional. So he goes to India and he goes to Bombay to have some health work done in Ayurveda. He goes to a clinic and the Vija, the doctor running the clinics, a prominent guy and very successful guy and big clientele, international clientele. So the guy finds out that my friend is a magician. And he says, would you teach me magic? And my friend says, yeah, I'll teach you magic. Sure, I'll show you some tricks. He says, no, I want to learn a lot of magic. He said, well, before I teach you, why don't you tell me why you're interested in learning magic? And the guy says, because I want to be a guru. And my friend says, well, what is learning magic have to do with being a guru? He says, well, if you want to be a guru in India, you need to know how to do magic so you can basically trick people into coming your way. So there are a lot of reasons why people do anything. And a lot of it has to do with some small shadowy part of a person's nature that is hankering for attention. And it all boils down to egos. Again, if you look at Jungian psychology, I don't know who addresses it the best. But the ego is a prime suspect for most of the issues we have, including fear and jealousy and hatred and he's my enemy. And we've been kind of duped into this world of this illusion we live in, the veil of forgetfulness, the veil of ignorance that we live here. The Maya is the term in India that's common, that everything is outside of ourselves. And it's fight or flight. We have to survive and struggle. We have all these things we have to do. Well, if you go to the true handful of mystics, the true handful of sages that record their experience, they'll say that the shadow, they'll say that that child was there inside me as well. I mean, everything, the Vedic sloka that is shared with the person when they're on the cusp of enlightenment, according to tradition, is aham brahmasmi, that I am the totality. And if that has any shred of truth to it, that totality means totality. It means all the demons, all the genocidal maniacs, all the satanists. They're all part of the great self of the universe. And so how do you reconcile that? That's a whole topic unto itself. I understand that in some ways, that's an inescapable part of our understanding of consciousness, even from a scientific standpoint. It's all one. On the other hand, I think it obscures the greater truth of, first of all, where we live. We live in a culture where we decide there will be things that are acceptable and things that are not acceptable. And the reason, and we also live with certain moral principles of what we say is acceptable and non-acceptable. For me to say, repeat that, what I just said a minute ago, to some parent whose child has been abused, they would reject that immediately, that all that negativity is also inside you. And so it's not. To me, it doesn't really matter if they would reject it or not, because I think my problem with it is that I think it obscures a bigger truth and a truth that a lot of people seem to be kind of missing. And that is that you should do good things and you should try and avoid doing bad things. Absolutely. So it's not like it's all one. There really is no good or bad. Well, I think most of us have an experience that's very different than that. We have an experience of, on a daily minute by minute experience, having to make a choice of saying something that isn't quite as hurtful as you have it. Absolutely. Speak the sweet truth has always been something that my teachers have said is very important in your life.  You're only the things you think and say and feel or just to... I guess the larger point, it's not just speak the truth. The larger point I guess I was making is, it seems to me hard for a lot of folks. And I've spoken to a bunch of really intelligent people on this show who have a problem with the idea that there's a moral imperative, that that little angel on the shoulder, devil on the shoulder thing is kind of more real in a way that we all know it's real, but don't really want to acknowledge that it's real. So that's what comes through from the near-death experience science is they come back and go, oh yeah, it is. You are supposed to do good things. You are not supposed to do bad things. There is a light. There is love. There is a hierarchy of consciousness and there is a moral imperative. And here's my point that I guess I pull you into responding to because I'm not really challenging on any of this. Steve, I think you're down with this. But our culture, we've lost that. I mean, again, when I talk to people in religious studies, they go the exact opposite of that. They say, of course there isn't a moral imperative. Of course there isn't a judgment between right and wrong. There is only relativism. And I want to drive a stake in this game and say, I challenge whether or not that's true. I'm not standing out on a pulpit to argue with that. I'm saying scientifically, you guys are men of logic, men of reason, men of science. I think you're misinterpreting the data in a fundamental way. Yes, there is a moral imperative. Well, I can come back to that comment I made about my definition of evil in the very beginning and that is the act of denying another person their right of freedom, their free will. Let's look at an analogy. Okay, two adults say they just met and a guy and a woman, they're attracted. Let's go to the hotel and have some fun. Okay, is that evil? Maybe to a Christian, I don't know. But no, it's not evil because there was an agreement there. But two people meet again and it's a different context when the man starts to abuse her. Is that evil from my definition? Yes, because he is denying her her right of free will. She's not agreed to this. The first situation, it was consensual. The second situation, he was imposing his will on another person. So it seems like a simplistic definition, but it really works quite well. And a lot of, so far I haven't found a place where it didn't work. And you're a lot smarter guy than me. You can probably tell me where that breaks down. But for me, it's a- Well, it certainly breaks down to business and politics. Well, according to their rules of the game, but still, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not true. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just saying it breaks down. Oh, it breaks down. Yeah, well, okay. And I don't want to toot the horn of Vedic references so often, much, I don't think I have. But according to Vedic history, we're in the throes of Kali Yuga. Kali Yuga is called the age of ignorance, the dark age, the black age of mankind, 432,000 years, if I have it right. And there are other ages that are highly enlightened and less negativity, less stress, less evil. Well, one of the things that are highlighted by Kali Yuga is that governments and religions are run by evil-minded people. Okay, so please tell me in history when they weren't. Please tell me how Genghis Khan was. Well, that's a very short, very short stand of history. Okay, I just, I'm just finishing up a film with a guy I've had on the show. His guy, his name is Bruce Fenton. And what I love about Bruce Fenton is he has some scientific evidence like tech-tites from Australia and stuff like that that match up with a story that says 780,000 years ago on the planet, there were these events and they were very violent kind of a war of the gods thing. So you can believe that or not believe that, but what I particularly like about that is that it kind of suggested bullshit. I mean, I can't but not point to any time in my history of my long, getting to be longer life or anything I read in history where there was this time when it was so dramatically different in terms of that.  Okay, well. I mean, no, when is the time? When is the time when there was this golden age? I'd like to know about it. The term for it is Satyuga. Mr. Prabhupada, I'm sure yoga Nanda talked about it. And if it was real, if it existed, it was a time when human life was 1000, 2000 years span which is actually crucial in some ways because our lives now are so short that a lot of the sun scars, a lot of the events that happen in our life that may be karmically driven, we have no chance to connect the dots. That, okay, I am suffering from this disease based on some action I performed in the past. And if we don't accept that as a viable principle of nature then basically we don't have a fair universe.  What did that child do to deserve to die? If you don't pull back and take a lot larger, broader perspective and include past lives and include the journey of the soul that's basically gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, you can't possibly come to a decision on that death that seems fair. That seems to have an innate goodness behind it. You can't, but if you can understand and physics is telling us that there's an equal reaction for every action in the universe. Jesus said, as you so so show you read. Now, I know you're not high on those kind of quotes it seems like, but they keep coming up. They keep coming up in Buddhist context. They come up and when you see kind of archetypal truths or what might be truths and then you say, well, maybe, maybe let's hope that the universe has some justice in it. Otherwise, I mean, how do you feel about it? No, I think I'm out of my league here. Alex, she can, you can shoot holes in me. Dave, my friend, if anything, I am way out of my league. So don't ever say that. And we're just having fun here at the beginning. It's not like we're really gonna solve those kinds of things. But I do kind of, and I can, I guess, sound argumentative. I don't know why I do, but I guess I, why don't I do? You're pulling out good points and I, you know, I feel good about that. You know, we've got basically the whole, from my experience now, and I'm not saying I had a death experience of that sort of thing, but my understanding is as I've done now 49 years of twice a day meditation without really ever missing one, is that the birth that we go through when we come into this life is more of a forgetting and a falling asleep and death is more awakening and expansion where you're actually far more aware of what you are as a soul and everything is forgotten. When you come in and you have to figure it out. And so that's why we're having these kind of conversations because we're trying to figure the whole game out. We're in a game, we're in a schoolhouse which we're so many fun analogies that people use and they beat them to death maybe, but we're trying to figure out the game, the rules of the game so we can progress on to the next game which might be a little more loving and fun. So I can't really say that this civilization 600,000 years ago where purportedly humans were telepathic and lived 2000 years and kumbaya and they loved each other. I mean, how can I prove that through hard science? I can't, I simply can't. But I don't think that it's all always fairy tales and legends and symbolic stuff. I think that there's archetypal stuff that exists and that exists for a reason because there is something in history that has some valid basis to reason why these myths persist whether it's the great floods, they keep happening and all that sort of thing. I think, by the way, in my personal opinion, we're at one of those archetypal transition points even right now. Yeah, see, dammit, dammit, dammit, Steve, I was just about to agree with you. Then you have to say something. And I said that garbage, okay. Well, I'm not really into the new age kumbaya kind of thing.  I guess, and again, framing this up as trying to nudge a little bit closer to the truth. And part of that process is cleaning out the non truths. So I hammer pretty hard on the social science wokeness folks in comparative religion, but it's just funny that that's been our best and brightest approach to this or the religious approach to it. But I do also have to kind of call some of this stuff that falls into the non dual or even the new age community. And one of my triggers for me is whatever when someone suggests that we are in a special time, I think we're pointing towards this transition. And again, I mentioned our mutual friend, Rick, who I do really appreciate so much, Rick from Buddha at the gas pump.  It becomes a religious thing. And I dare say I was a little bit worried that you were going down that same path in the book, the tale of the Himalayan yogis when there is that nature will unleash her fury if man. Also the book is kind of, I don't wanna say it's sexist because I don't like going down that whole path but in a way there's a lot of man this and the woman playing her traditional role but nature will unleash her fury if man does not mend his ways. She appeals to you for help. Man has wrought this evil and man must correct it. If we intervene, then man will not learn his lesson. You are like a seeding to the forest. You might write this wrong, environmental wrong for if it persists, the mountains will bury the men who live on it. Now do you really, so do you think the yogis in the sky are green environmentalists and what would they feel about the latest move towards climate change or any of the rest of this? Do we really wanna go there? Climate change is one of the contentious points in my household because I don't buy, I'm not a buy if my wife is very sensitive to probably in the way Rick's discussing with you. Those quotes, I think some of them came from a character in the book called Yogi Raj. Am I right? Maybe you don't remember. I can't remember. Okay, that's fine, but can you put him back up there? It's like maybe address a little bit something. So as if I think if I'd made those statements in a nonfiction context, I think you could hammer me harder. Fair enough, definitely, definitely fair enough. Yes, yes, fair enough. The sexist side of it. I tried to be true to the time and believe me, this is Muslim dominated Indian culture, which was probably 400 years ago, which is it tried to be, this was not a unequal rights culture. And I had, when I gave a book opening, book promotion, book signing talk, my first one, the lady came in and said, I read it. I threw it in the trash, it was trash. And I said, well, give me a little bit more elaboration. She said, it's trash. You trashed the women. I said, man, I apologize, but please let me give a context here. We're talking about 16th century mogul India. And this is just, this is not the 21st century here, America. And I just, if I were to be thinking along those lines, I mean, the emperors of India at that time adhered to 2,000 women from all over the world. This is a fact. And if I want to make it somewhat historically accurate, I have to be true to, and I chose that time for a reason, for many reasons. I feel like current India is so far, looked so far away from the whole yogic tradition, I wouldn't even bother with trying to present that as a context for a story. But at the time that I chose, it was a time of enormous, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian of Guiding Will Durant wrote that the mogul treatment and the sultanate treatment of native India reproduced the greatest genocide in human history. 80 million people were exterminated in one way or another over the centuries of mogul rule. So I chose a time that had enormous implications conflict within the culture. And I did that for a reason. So a lot of things, it was a militaristic period of time that emperor had an army that included maybe something like 40% of the population. It was a very chauvinistic situation. So I realized as I was writing, well, this isn't really gonna go down if a lot of American people were interested in talking about the equality of the sexes. And I mean, if you could ask Chris my wife about my true position on this, okay, if I'm gonna write a story, I better be true to the story or what business I have trying to pick an era. I understand both sides of that. And I think you're adding a lot to it. I am not a feminist.  It's all that game of, it's all the game of debauchery. Tell me, figure that out. We're stuck in this game. And it's individual, we have to individually here I guess is gonna be my point because at the same time, and I think I know from talking to you before you'd acknowledge this, it goes back to the historical thing. We do have to acknowledge and I have to acknowledge with my two girls, I have two girls and two boys that, hey, there's a reality to that. When, certainly when my mom was coming up, there was not that kind of equality that we kind of take for granted. So hats off to some of that social change that came about from that woman who came up and threw it in the trash. Do you think she would have been a little bit sued or do you think you could have written a page or two at the beginning and just explained what you just explained to me and maybe that would have- I could have, in the preface I definitely could have. I mean, I have some, I thought I had some pretty strong women in the story. Maybe it's not seen that way, but in my family, this is just to decide when I first got married, I very quickly realized that there was a spouse there that was substantially further down the spiritual path than I was. And we were talking about spiritual things one day and my wife's name is Boomi, which was an Indian name. She said, she says, Steve, you really don't know anything, do you? I agree with her. I think you could say that about anybody.  So I suspect she doesn't really know anything either. That seems to be the common thread that we all have going through life. Maybe you met some guys up in the mountains there in the homilay as it did, but... Steve, the one guy that you put the quotes up that was sort of like our Yogi's green, that was Yogi Raj, and actually his prototype or his real person was Keshima. Now, I wrote a book that was not fiction and if you want kind of what I really stand for in principles, that would be I didn't diverge from that at all what I stand for in my memoir. I wrote a seven-year story of my travel law of India called India Mirror of Truth. And in that book, I met some of the yogis we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, but Keshima was far and away someone that I'd never encountered anywhere else. I met him up above Jyotima. And I modeled Yogi Raj, the ageless Yogi, in the novel after him, because he's been written about many, many times, including by Yogananda. And I just feel like that individual, from my limited point of view, was the pinnacle of what I would like to aspire to become. And I know that's not gonna happen, but that's sort of like wow, that's a role model if role models could exist. Keshima is the name I used in the other book. That's really cool, Steve, and that adds, again, this level of realness to this whole account that we're talking about, even super gracious in spending your time with us. I'll tell you what, one last question slash topic area from the book has to do with this idea that really we could have started with this, but I felt like we'd never get past it. And that is the question of what is real. And I have the quote up on the screen and I forget which character it is, I apologize, but it says, Baba, did we visit a dream world or was it real? That was Govinda, Govinda, the protagonist, the apprentice who is studying under Baba Shankar Baba, who is his guru, Himalayan Yogi. And has experienced hell, has experienced some just horrific unimaginable things that we hear about over and over again in different ways. I mean, some people seek this out through different practices, magical practices, other people encounter it spontaneously through near-death experiences, some people encounter it through drug experiences. So it's really interesting and I really wanna understand what you understand about these other realms, but I also wanna understand, again, the deeper part that we asked because the reply to that by Shankar Baba is, did we visit a dream world or a real world? And he says, a little of each, but understand the suffering is real. I think that's such a great point I want you to elaborate on. The seven hells are not God's creation, the evil in men has created these realms. I could pick that apart, but I'm not gonna, men act impulsively due to their accumulated sanskaras. So talk about what's real. Where I came from with this was halfway through my seven years in India when I was teaching meditation to corporate people, I had a health issue and it required some minor surgery, but it required me to be put under 100% sedation. They put me out. And when I came back to consciousness, whatever number of hours after I put under general anesthesia, internally I had an experience of many, many dimensions of the universe. I'll say this is, it was very lucid. Now someone say, oh, you could be experiencing the side effects of the drug, who knows? And I don't, but I experienced progression from a very low, low, what I would say low vibrational thing where I saw and experienced some people I would never really want to interact with. I would just call them demons or dark beings. Okay, for lack of a better word, vakshasas would be a Hindu term. And then progressively my vibration, my consciousness started to lift out of that deep funk. And I went up and up and up and by the time I went through these different dimensional experiences, if you will, I was in a very angelic kind of experience where I was hearing, I'm not saying harps because that was really good to go, but the music was celestial. It was just there throughout the realm I was in. It was like it wasn't coming from a speaker, it was just pervasive. And it was like times 10 better than the best set of acoustic speakers I ever have listened to, it was just spectacular. And from there, then I slowly came back to Steve consciousness. But I went through like all these different levels and I wrote about it in my memoir. And so that kind of got me, that was my first experience that there are multidimensions to our reality and many of them we didn't know even existed or unless we read about them, unless somebody told us about them or something like that. So I kind of took that as a foundation and I did some research again, and valid or not, but in the Puranic literature in the Davy Bhagavatam, for example, that body of literature lists the Narakas, N-A-R-A-K-A, the many Narakas where human souls migrate to based upon their actions and behavior. And they don't exist there and reside there for eternity, the way a Christian belief is, it's not such a thing, but while the karma is being dissolved, they are experiencing some rough patch in their souls' progress. So after the very lucid, descriptive chapters in the Srimad Davy Bhagavatam about these Narakas and what sends an individual to this one versus that one, like heinous crimes such as cold-blooded murder versus something else. So whether they're allegories or a symbolic, take it anyway. Again, I kind of feel like, okay, I'm in fiction, I want to explore these things and I chose fiction for this particular book because I wanted to have a palette that gave me freedom. I didn't want to feel like, okay, am I gonna be pinned down to this as Steve's belief? Now, in my memoir, that is nonfiction so that people could really take me to task on my beliefs or my opinions or my convictions in fiction. I'm free. Let's talk about that point because I don't want people to get the wrong impression. This is a book of fiction and as you said, you're allowed to explore ideas differently in a book of fiction, but I think it also has this connection to reality and some really important values that you're talking about. So in the time that we have left recap for people a little bit about this book, where they can find it, The Tale of the Himalayan Yogies and the prior book, which we had you on Skepticova 4 and you talked, you did a great job and people will really, I think, enjoy this second book. With most stuff these days, Amazon and the online sellers, online stores, it's available in both e-book and in paperback. It is the first book of a trilogy and the second book, The Rough Draft, is written. I have 200 pages of The Rough Draft is there in book two and I'm not saying I'm stalled because of my wife but I have, she's my editor and she's my love of my life. I'm just sorting that out. I just want to put a plug for some of the finest characters that I was able to, that I felt that I worked with in the story where people from within the Zenana, which was the harem and how they worked behind the scenes to rectify a lot of the wrongs that were going on in the story. These are not historically accurate people but I did, I read some of the very best historical accounts of Mobile Empire and drew actual characters, brothers of emperors and drew upon those characters to bring into the story so there was as much authenticity as I could. So it was a lot of fun to do that because it was a learning experience but you're right, this idea of privilege, I mean, the emperor was an opium addict. The whole idea of privilege is so counter to the idea of spirituality that it's just offensive to me.   The successor to the organization that I grew up with, the TM movement, he came into the dome where everybody or 2,000 people meditate for the first time I went to hear the guy talk. And he's a good guy, he's got a PhD from Harvard and an MD from MIT or vice versa, smart guy. Very good guys from the Middle East. And he said, we have to adjust the issue of personality disorders. And I've never, ever once heard that in the 50 years I've been in our organization. I thought good for him. Our guest again has been Steve Briggs and the book that you're gonna wanna check out. And I do hope you will if you're at all interested. We've talked about it, The Tale of the Himalayan Yogis and check out his other books. Steve, it's been absolutely terrific. We covered so much ground and you're so open and sincere travel around the path. It's a joy to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you. And when you see Ben, if given my best, he's a good man. I had yet to meet Ben when we talked to the phone four or five times and I got so happy to hear he loved his trip to India and I could have a hand and help people out with that. So hopefully you and I will meet one day but until then we'll just keep talking on the screen. Well, you come back to Del Mar anytime. Well, that's a, you're privileged. I'm privileged, thank you. Thank you. I am privileged. Byness Beach in San Diego County. We just love that place. Good for you. You earned it. Nothing happens by accident, right? Yeah, I know. I think everything happens by accident. Thanks my man. You're awesome. Take care now. Good to talk. Thanks again to Steve Briggs for joining me today on Skeptico. I've realized in editing this that I talked a lot during this interview. People always accuse me of that anyway but especially this one. But I really felt like I needed to push Steve on a couple of things because he is a TM guy but I think that's also kind of a follower kind of thing and I love the Vedic yoga stuff but I think it has the same problems with sage on the stage kind of idolization and unchallenging beliefs just cause people say it. So I wanna try and get to that next level. So I don't know if I dominated the conversation too much or not but I'll just take my chances on that and you can tell me if you think I did and I will take it under consideration. So the one question I tee up from this interview is do you think there is a moral imperative and I guess more importantly do you think it makes sense to try and tackle that from a pre-scientific but logical way? So let me know your thoughts, pop over to the Skeptico forum and tell me or drop me an email. As always, I love hearing and interacting with you all. So I do have some great shows coming up. Stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.