The Role Of Consciousness In Healing

Introduction and speaker background 0:00

For. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the bioenergetics Summit. I am Doctor Greg Eckel, your host. And I have Doctor Pedram. So drive here, the urban model. We're talking about the role of consciousness in healing a little of his background. He's a New York Times bestselling author of several books and the producer of over a dozen films and series. He's the founder of B possible.com. He hails from the tradition of Daoist chee gong masters, and is an abbot from the Yellow Dragon Monastery. Doctor Pedram, welcome aboard. Great to be here.

Nice to see you. This topic is very compelling. The role of consciousness in healing. And it is an enormous topic and a very important one at best. I wanted to start out with this question of, well, one, why did you pick this one for the bioenergetics summit? I think a lot of times people are, you know, our world and our culture. People are talking about the myriad ways to address certain things, down in the level of the, as that was would say, the 10,000 things, but before the 10,000 things, there's, you know, the five elements, there's the yin and yang, and then there's the great Dao.

And I think understanding that we need to swim upstream to really come to resolution at a level that actually transforms things in life is important. I could try to direct, a topical remedy to say, an eczema issue, but not realize that it came from something upstream in my gut or something, you know, from my anxiety.

Three treasures and the role of Shen 1:35

And so I think there's just precious little conversation around that. And I figure in a summit like this, people are going to be talking about a lot of the other stuff. And so I would like to kind of put a pin in this, this piece of it and say, let's, let's talk about the way this is mapped out and the way the ancients saw it, because I think that, you know, energy healing. Great. Right. But, you know, the chief follows the Shen. So what's the Shen? And so, you know, one, doctor of Oriental medicine to another.

Let's get into kind of the core philosophy and then reconstruct back how this conversation, started in ancient that was circles. I love it. All right, well, let's start then with what are the three treasures? Jingjian Chen Jing being the essence, the DNA you came in with, what your parents gave you the the endowment, if you will. For good or for bad. You know, the genetic tendencies, the anxiety, the the allergies, the immunity issues, the, you know, the in some aspects, you know, the quality of the way your brain processes in a lot of stuff we can't control.

Our parents could have controlled, but if had they known better in some ways and some of it just goes down multiple generations and takes a lot of time to to heal, right on a, on a conscious level. So that's the essence, right? And so the metaphor would be a candle that's the wax, the cheese, the energy and the she would be the flame of the candle. And then the glow around that flame is the Shen or the spirit. And so you have this kind of material substrate that has incarnated in the human body.

But then this process of life is the energy that's flowing all around it. But for what? Right. What is it? What's the vision? What's the mind map around it? Where is the ultimate expression of that? And in this metaphor would be the halo or the glow around the candle. And that's what we're gonna talk about today, because the treasures, the three treasures that we talk about in the Dao system, you know, you always want to, you know, preserve the jing so that, you know, life is long and life is healthy.

And then you want to treat the key or the flow of that energy so that you can have, you know, healing and resolution flow. But the most important part that I think gets sidestepped in a lot of these conversations, not by all, but, you know, it's just it doesn't hit the narrative as much. Is that the the rule being that the chief follows the Shen mind directs the flow of energy. So whether that is an external idea, I want to build a treehouse for my kids. I think about the treehouse, I think about the treehouse, and I put mental energy in a symbol, kind of a mapping of this treehouse.

But then I also, you know, put my feet under me and put some money behind it and go buy some lumber and nails and, you know, do the thing. But then I drive energy into manifesting this vision on planet Earth. And finally my kids get a treehouse, right? Whether that is healing a shoulder, whether that is bringing up a kid, all of these things need your consciousness anchored first, and then the energy follows. And that sounds really cool and abstract. But what I would put to our listeners is that we live in a in an attention economy.

We live in a universe where, you know, we are perpetually being distracted more and more by the myriad things, trying to grab our attention and monetize them, or, you know, get our votes, get our money, get our energy, whatever way that is. And it makes us less capable of being present and anchoring our consciousness on one thing at a time so that we can actually heal that body part. Menifee best that thing. Get the promotion, build the treehouse right. And so the attention is a scarce resource, and it's something that I'd love to kind of spend more time talking about with you today, because there's been a lot of talk, you know, in Dyer's work about the power of intention.

You know, you get you muster up a bunch of willpower and you, you know, you push it into something and you make it happen. But I would say the intention is half the battle, right? The intention sits in the kidneys. It's the germ.

Attention, intention, and manifestation 5:23

It's the part of our energetic system that is anchored to our water. But the manifestation platform for Daoism and the way we think about things and kind of my, my temple lineage is it's always fire and water working together as a manifestation platform. And so the fire sits in the heart, the Shen. So how do you take the intention and attention and put them together to actually make things happen in the world around you? And that's what I'd love to spend some time talking about today. I love that you know that this statement is energy or Chee goes where the tension flows, right?

So the energy flows where the attention is. And you know that component of the heart and the kidney and the steaming that the fire steams the the water from the kidneys and then distributes to the body. I think it is so crucial, you know, we can't go through it unconsciously, you know, looking for the purple pill to take, you know, mindlessly and even, you know, what that stirs up for me is that even that thought around consciously creating the world that we want to live in, from our health to our relations to our balance with the planet, and it is what is missing now in Western medicine, in kind of the Western world is this this rootedness in consciousness, the remembrance of almost our future, of where we're going is as a species together.

You brought up this concept of Shen, right? Spirit. And you said that resides in the heart. But will you expand on that a little? Yeah. Lives in the blood, resides in the heart, according to the ancients. And it's also synonymous with mind. So mind and spirit in the Chinese system are very integrated. Now there's a different aspect of mind called the yi or lives in the Earth element. So there's different areas of mind in different ways. The ancient Daoist had kind of mapped out the different parts of how, you know, the intellect versus spirit that's connected with the universe at large.

And so that's the one I'm talking about, the fire element aspect of mind that is the anchor of your consciousness. And to your point, you know, we're all walking around these kind of empty shell meat suits trying to look for external fixes to problems that we're having because we have been distorted in a reality that is looking for answers from without instead of within. And so I come from a Steam school actually, so that on Pi in the lineage I come from is a fire water school. It's the fusion of fire water into steam that that creates that fusion of heaven.

And earth, if you will. And that is the missing ingredient. Everyone is looking for a quaalude, whether it's Advil or tapping or some meditation or some device that zaps my G, I'm looking for something outside of myself to fix this thing. Instead of embodying the temple and bringing the consciousness back in, which is the agent of change in that consciousness will map all change in a way that will then bring balance to your life, right? Not just put a Band-Aid on what you think you need to fix. Or, you know, if all I did was make more money, then my life would work out right?

Like all these kind of like if then clauses that, you know, or if this damn shoulder wasn't bugging me so much, I'd be working out every day. It turns out people, you know, fix their shoulders and they still don't work out every day. What is that? Right? Where's the operating system in that? And so this mapping of the shin to the heart, the heart being the emperor in kind of the the law of Chinese, you know, Chinese cultural influence on their medicine is obviously all over the place. Right? Like they approximated the metaphors to, to reflect their reality.

Right. And still works. Right. The Emperor being in the heart, the general being the liver, you know, and, and the different elements working through the body to kind of help you execute this thing called life. And I think that when you bring the consciousness back into the fold, not only do you then stop. And so what am I doing to contribute to this problem? What am I doing that's not helping this problem? How am I involved in this thing? But I'm asking for help on right? So easy to go help doctor fix me, right?

But you've run your life into this corner. So where's your agency? Where's your relationship with whatever this ailment is? And how do you become a central player in bringing that resolution back? Because again, if I'm looking to Doctor Gregg over here to fix my shoulder, my she is now over here with this, this wonderful doctor, but this guy outside of myself saying, you come in and fix me. Oh external person. Instead of retro affecting my attention and putting my consciousness in my own shoulder and saying, you know, it's funny.

It feels like when I do this, it grabs here. And then working with this agent called Doctor Gregg to help come to a resolution together. Right. And so I push my mind out of my body, looking for someone from outside to help it back in. And that man, that seems like a it's like a syntax error in computer science, right? That that it just doesn't work that way. Yeah. Yes. It's a it's like step one, we're disempowered.

Healing requires inner responsibility 10:12

We become a victim in that scenario of external reality fixing us. I wouldn't be. Yes. Yes. Boom. It's almost like we become a victim with that step one of going outside of our body and looking for that external fix. And, you know, if we we look at this from the ancients and looking at the universal principle of oneness, you know, in the inherent wisdom of the body, presenting us with a symptom to show us, hey, pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. I'm out of balance. If we listen to that and ask the questions of ourself like you brought up of like, we need to bring that in into the discussion and really come at it from this extra internal path rather than immediately stepping outside of the body, becoming a victim.

That's the way that I practice. Pedram. And it's really interesting to hear, you know, it is couched. I mean, I know that, but I want to share this and make a highlight of it for our listeners and viewers in the in the oneness principle of listening to your body, listening to the symptoms, because it's the guide. Like that's all I do all day. I like to say I do a lot of nothing all day. It's the body, it's the medicine, it's the innate intelligence working together. And so having it, you know, clearly, delineated in these ancient texts, in these lineages is so exciting to be able to share this.

So thank you, for bringing it up. And I love that, you know, you started out with the role of consciousness in healing right from the get go to really couch and put us into this vein of discussion. So, you know, the Shen, the spirit, the emperor of the heart, kind of manifested or delineated by the cultural importance in China. It still does play out today. You know, we can we can understand this in the West. It's not our upbringing or our backgrounds, but we get that. I love that Chinese medicine is heart centered.

Any other aspects of Shen that you wanted to bring into this conversation here? So if you look at the trigrams of heaven and earth, you know it's pure three pure yang lines, three pure yin lines. But then when you transpose fire and water, fire will have to yang lines with the yin line in between, and it'll be the opposite. It'll flip for water. And so part of the kind of alchemical process is to take the Shen and the juror. The attention and the intention infuse them in a way so that you come closer to heaven and earth, to your primordial kind of root being.

And the Shen needs the counterpart of the juror, the water. So the intent often needs the attention. The attention needs the intention. Think about it. It's one thing to focus on something, right? Okay, I'm focusing on a seed that I just put in the ground, which is a thought form an idea. But where's the water? Right. And then that's where you bring the water, the flow of your vitality. So now you're taking a thought form and you're bringing energy to it. You're watering this thought form seed until it becomes manifest.

It's like a hologram that that keeps taking energy from your attention and your intention until it waters it into the unfolding in three dimensions. And so you'll see this with like Sai Baba, you'll see this with people that can actually, you know, understand and short circuit this and bring things, and manifest things very quickly. Right. And so when I see somebody who is in a healing crisis and has been in it for a decade, I know that their attention is splintered. I know that they are distracted beyond repair from an outside agent, and they've been doctor shopping for a decade, and everyone's let them down because they are not able to put their attention on something.

Now, there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, you could say, oh, you're terrible meditator, but that's kind of a cop out. There could be a lot of trauma. There could be a lot of gut dysbiosis leading to noise. That's amplifying, you know, all the all the voices in their heads. There are a lot of reasons why someone can't sit still. And as a physician, we we work to help resolve that, move the impedance and kind of help them come to their, their center. But there is one meme that I challenge and this isn't popular, but I don't care to be popular is we've lost our relationship with kung fu, we've lost our relationship with hard work.

And so, you know, oh, I have a device that does meditation for me. I have an app I listen to that puts me into my Zen state. I take, you know, ketamine or Quaaludes or a pill. Again, all these outside things that are shortcuts to this state of being that the ancients found is best accessed through silence and equanimity, and that, unfortunately for our Western listener, means sit on your ass and breathe and observe and meditate. And every single human who's taken that advice after some time, and probably after some initial friction, has gotten to a point where I say, Holy crap, I don't know what's happening, but it's helping.

And that's work, right? Nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to do work. Everyone wants Doctor Gregg to fix them. Everyone wants a device that zaps them back into balance so they can go back to their lives. And that's also a crisis of consciousness where I think we've been usurped and our consciousness is no longer connected with the work that truly needs to be done, which is coming back to life through our alignment of mind, body and spirit. And so if you if you're like, oh, I tried meditating, it didn't work.

Like get back to work. I refuse to sell sugar cereal to children. Right. Like, everyone out there is trying to teach people that it's okay to cop out of that work. And I've never, ever, ever seen a patient who truly healed not take responsibility and step in and wake up, retrofit their attention and wake up that responsibility. That is a lovely word. We put a dash in their response dash ability. We have that ability in the response and it really is. I feel like it is the work of what why we incarnated to this planet, this learning environment.

And it is this remembering of this ancient component of, you know, these are miraculous vessels. When operated properly, they are just meat suits when not. And and it's really putting, putting that the spirit back in the consciousness, aligning with ourselves as the universal one. Because that's where we return. It's where we came from. It's, you know, and then we have this separation and, and remembering. So down you've talked about manifestation. And when people are aligned or like Saibaba or others

Practical guidance and closing reflections 16:48

that have mastered this component of almost magical abilities because they step out of the physical reality and they are they have remembered that they are the one Daoist manifestation and living in a chaotic world like it is. Our attention units are scattered. There's traumas that play, you know, you went through the list. What kind of recommendations or suggestions? I mean, you definitely said, just sit and breathe. Number one, how else do you address this with books? Yeah, it's it's really kind of like a universal judo flip, right?

The Gnostics talked about this kind of parasitic consciousness called the Archons, which were there to distract us from our gods self. And everything they did created a distraction to have us forget our God selves. Right. And that was kind of the orientation of the entire Gnostic gospel is coming back to your God self, realizing that you know, Gaia or Sophia is Mother Earth, is actually a goddess that gave her body for us. And to incarnate in. The sun is a, you know, God and everything is everything is divine.

And we have fallen into this dreary sleep where we forget that. And so the remembrance of that and, you know, you gotta be careful about this, because once you start talking about the G word, you know, people, you know, start fighting about it. Right? And I think that is also the devil's work is to, you know, intercept the dialog at that level and not let us find our God selves because my God self and I'm Muslim and a Jew and a Buddhist, God self is the same essential God self. And then people start fighting over the words, right?

And it gets very dangerous. But I would say that that the central orientation of waking up to who you truly are and awakening your consciousness to the immortality of its true essence, whether or not that carries through in this body or not, is irrelevant. The immortality of of life in the in the the energy of that spring that kernel of life that's moving through all of us, that has an awareness upon itself and turning our externalized awareness back to that. And becoming cognizant of this thing that that is inside of us.

That is the only game in town. Everything else is Band-Aids, right? Everything else is distractions. And so if you look at all of the kind of ancient traditions coming home to who you truly are, is it? It's the only game in town. Everything else is there to distract you away from your God self. Everything there is, you know, an externalized pull of your consciousness to somewhere where you are less focused on that very thing. And the more you focus on that, the more that light starts to turn on, the more you wake up and the more you realize you can never harm another human.

Because that, as you beautifully said, and I just am going to reiterate that energy flows where attention goes. So it is our responsibility to focus our attention right in, into what we're creating, what we want. So this Daoist manifestation, I mean, it's the ancients had it figured out and it's been transmitted through time. You're this lineage holder of an abbot. I want to put people into action at the end of our interview here. And what what would you recommend? What would be your best next step for somebody watching, viewing, listening?

What do you recommend? Where I would I would say, you know, and one of the things you said is, you know, energy goes where your attention, you know, your energy flows to where your attention goes and then the last part of that statement is and that's what grows. Right. And so you are watering those seeds. And so I would say if you're listening to this right now, and if it's your shoulder, it's your adrenal, it's your Lyme disease, whatever, I would immediately retro reflect my attention back inward to the thing that's bothering me and ask my body, ask the thing.

Ask that joint. What do you want? What is this? What's ailing you? And really kind of get into the subtle messaging and communication system that is constantly been running. Pain is a really blunt instrument, and pain comes much later on the information highway and that usually comes because we're too distracted and distorted to hear the subtle messaging well before it's, you know, a meditator would understand that they're experiencing a minute amount of anxiety probably two years before the panic attack starts.

Right. And so the question is, how do we go back into asking this, this child, if you will, why it's crying inside our body, whatever that ailment is to you. And again, learn to listen and learn to retrofit your attention back to that. So that the meaningful information helps you unravel that now doesn't mean you fire your doctor. Does it mean you don't do other interventions? But it means you're now in the ring and you're an active participant, if not the conductor of this orchestra again. And once that happened, that's, you know, listen, I've seen thousands of patients and been around the block, you know, used to have a lot of hair.

Right. It's the people that take responsibility and bring their consciousness to the campfire who heal. Everyone else is shopping for outside solutions, and they're going to continue to shop. It's exhausting. Love it. I think you you really brought it back. The role of consciousness and healing. Thank you so much. Any last parting words for our listeners and viewers? I yeah, listen, you are more valuable today than you were yesterday to planet Earth. And so the onus is on you not just for the planet and what it needs of us, of your family, of your community to be the best, brightest and most healthy expression of yourself every day going forward.

And so, again, the sooner you wake up the majesty of that, the sooner you start to clean out your systems and heal your body and bring energy through your life to then be a co-creator of a beautiful dream instead of, you know, someone who's a passive participant in what could be construed as a nightmare, right? So the world needs you back. Please come back. Thank you, Doctor Pedram, so much.