The Reality of Truth

There is a story in the Bible

about God providing Manna from heaven.

Food to sustain the Israelites,

while they're wandering in the wilderness.

But it never said specifically what it was.

What was this Manna from heaven?

When I asked that question

I had no idea how much my life was about to change.

The first miracle that Jesus was reported to have done

was turning water into wine at a wedding.

The story goes that they ran out of wine

and Jesus put a portion of the Manna

into the water that they boiled as tea.

He told the waiters to pass it out as wine.

So I call up Deepak and I said Deepak I gotta talk to you,

I found some stuff in the Bible that is not making any sense.

I think I found some psychedelics in there,

I think there is meditation.. like.. wha ...what do you think.

He's quiet on the phone, and I was like

"Deepak are you there?", and he's like

"Yeah he said uh where'd you

where'd you find this exactly?"

like "send me what you're talking to me about."

What do you want to do Deepak,

what should we do about this?

You want to write something up?

And Deepak was like, "This is too important".

He's like "Why don't we have a conversation about this?"

Could part of the religious experience

have to do with plant sacraments?

In Deepak's tradition the mystery plant,

Soma was used to bring people to communion with God.

Could have been that the hymns of the Rigveda

were actually sung to this plant which had no seeds,

that had no flowers, that was really mushrooms.

There's a scene in the movie Noah,

starring Russell Crowe where he has a dream

that he is underwater with animals floating past,

he wakes up knowing that God wants him to do something,

but he doesn't know what.

He goes and sits with the wise man in the cave

played by Anthony Hopkins who gives him some psychedelic tea.

He drinks it and has a detailed vision of exactly what God wants him to do.

First of all, that's a possibility.

Yup.

Secondly, why does our brain have receptors to these things.

Well because we are part of the same nature.

You know we are not separate from nature.

Science is based on a subject-object split

on the separation that is artificial,

me and the universe when in fact

I am also part of the universe.

So the same electrical storms

that create thunder and lightning in the sky

creates synaptic firings in my brain, which creates thought.

We are part of a wholeness.

And what the religious experience

is to experience that wholeness.

What is enlightenment

of being one with the source.

So whilst they give people what

I wouldn't even call altered state of consciousness,

I wouldn't call then hallucinations.

They help people break out of the everyday hallucination

of separation and to the reality of truth

and whether they did it through wine or manna or soma who cares.

It doesn't make any sense.

How can these ancient plants that connect you to God be somehow taken out.

Could these plants be the ancient wisdom

that we need for our modern problems?

What we call today, everyday reality which we take for normal,

okay, there is war there's terrorism, there's global warming,

there's social injustice.

50% of the world lives on less than $2 a day.

The environment is totally screwed up and we say this is normal.

Its psychotic.

Right? And its psychotic because we have created it.

What do you think it would take to break through that boundary at this point?

- I mean, here we are in this 21st century. - Let's have a party.

Let's have a party.

We'll bring everybody down to Peru and enlighten them.

And put some in the pot and let's drink it.

I'm in

I'm in.

Did Deepak Chopra just tell me to go down to Peru

and drink Ayahuasca tea, one of the most powerful psychedelics known to man?

Still dazed by what Deepak had recommended,

I bumped into our friend Gerry

who had generously loaned us his beach house for the interview.

I was curious what he thought about what Deepak said.

I didn't realize at the time

but Gerry's world was spinning out of control.

Despite having sold his company for almost 100 million dollars,

Gerry was abusing drugs, drinking a lot of alcohol,

his family was in shambles

and he was basically trying to kill himself slowly.

More than I realized Deepak's words were really sinking in.

At this point you're probably wondering who this Zappy guy is.

Lemme tell you a little bit about myself.

I'd done everything society told me to do:

go to school, get a job, make a bunch of money,

fall in love, start a family. I was living the American dream.

Here I am starring in my own super bowl ad. Life was becoming very surreal.

Even though I had it all, my conversation with Deepak

made it clear that there were other experiences that I needed to have.

The value that I place on the experience is more important to me.

So I always felt like I'd rather have

a passport full of stamps than a house of a certain type.

It occurred to me that like most people

I'd been searching for happiness outside of myself.

And I was having the realization that

I might never be truly happy unless

I went inside my own mind to look for some answers.

Albert Einstein famously said,

"you can't fix a problem with the same consciousness"

or thinking that got you into this situation.

What this meant to me was that if

I wanted to solve a problem in my life,

or if we as a society wanted to solve big problems

we have like violence, eco destruction, addiction, depression.

We needed to change our collective consciousness.

Could society use some of these

ancient techniques for its modern problems?

I was inspired by the people who came before me,

that seemingly had it all,

but chose to take the risk of going inside their own minds.

These people were what I would call psychonauts: sailors of the mind.

And I saw that these people were going

inside their minds and exploring inside their minds

as part of what they wound up doing

and I thought wow I have to do that.

I figured before I got too extreme and sat with a shaman,

I should go out and talk to some of Deepak's friends about our so called reality.

If you only identify with the realm of 3 dimensions...

if you only identify with the realm of the body,

if you only identify with the mortal circumstance

and the mortal experience then to that extent

you are at the effect of those circumstances.

Faith is standing on the conviction,

standing on the knowledge on the conviction.

There is something way bigger going on here.

What we see is only a small portion of the total reality.

See... we have three states making, dreaming and sleeping.

But beyond that there is a state that it's neither

of the three, but there is a restful alertness that dances deep within.

There is nowhere, where we escape from being energy, so we're always energy.

What we see as it looks physical material

is actually the reflection of light photons of light

that hit our energy and bounce back so we're reflecting light but...

We're reflecting it as a force field, a tornado of energy.

If we can stand within the unreal world,

the ultimate unreal that appears real that seems limited

by the laws of time and space and yet have faith

in the realm beyond that literally invokes that realm into being.

It seemed like what everyone was saying is reality is just a concept.

I needed to have the direct experience of going inside.

Could ancient wisdom have included plants and meditation.

I was excited to learn that a lot of celebrities, people like Jerry Seinfeld, Martin Scorsese

were doing this meditation for a long time

and recently people like Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Oz and Katy Perry

had taken up the meditation and it seemed to be making them even more creative.

I wanted to see if some of this ancient wisdom

could help me to tap into my creativity.

In the 1960's a funny little man named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

came out of the Himalayas to the United States

and he wound up teaching his transcendental meditation technique

to the Beatles and the rest is history.

Today there are more than 7 million people worldwide

doing transcendental meditation.

What I like about a T-M technique is that there is no dogma attached to it.

It's really just a simple technique of silently repeating a mantra to yourself

which causes you to transcend into your quieted mind

to subtler and subtler states of consciousness until a point

that you reach a place called universal consciousness.

An endless field of energy that connects all of us where all knowledge

is contained and where everything is manifested from.

When the Maharishi passed away in 2007, he put John Hagelin in charge.

As a quantum physicist and a meditator,

he had successfully used quantum theory to support

Maharishi's model of creative intelligence being at the center of all creation.

Waking conscious is all about being aware of something...

this... that... this concept... that person.

Transcending is leaving all that behind,

to isolate an experience the self, itself.

It's blissful. It's not the end of the story,

10, 20, minutes of that is enough.

The idea is to come back into activity

and increasingly integrate

and stabilize the experience of inner reality,

inner silence along without a reality.

And that's when life really gets to be interesting and fun.

The mind has two aspects to it,

it's the brain, which is very concrete you can measure

it and you can touch it but it's interacting

with this field of consciousness.

And when they come together it's our individual self,

our individual personality.

And that's what most people think they are.

I'm 5'11, I have this education,

I'm this part in society I have this amount of money