Renowned surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty asks Sadhguru whether psychic powers and telepathy are real, and if it is possible to learn these abilities. Sadhguru speaks about chitta, the innermost core of the mind, which is your connection with what we call consciousness. He explains that if the chitta comes within our conscious control, life arranges itself around us beautifully.

Devi Shetty: Sadhguru, many years ago, when my son was a little kid, he gave me a book written by Swami Vivekananda. He was describing how ancient gurus could communicate with each other thousands of miles away, just by thought. It’s essentially… it’s like a modern internet how one computer can communicate with another computer in US or Europe, anywhere. Do you believe that human mind can be trained to influence another human mind or people’s mind who are far away, just by tuning our mind to the right frequency? Can it be trained, can we… can we learn that art?

Sadhguru: You are trying to beat the cell phone companies. It’s not just about the mind, see when we say mind, the English word mind, is generally referring to only the thought process. Thought process is the most surface element of your mind. I think because of European thought, we have given too much significance to the thought. In the yogic science, we do not attach any importance to what you are thinking about or feeling right now. Because what can you think? Only the data that you have collected, you’re recycling it. It’s of no great consequence. Whatever is in the surface of your mind keeps rolling. That is not of any consequence. What you are thinking and feeling right now is very surface of mind, there are deeper dimensions of the mind.

In Sanskrit language, there are many many words to describe the different states of mind. But now there is one aspect of the mind, for lack of time and stuff I’ll leave those things. There is one aspect of the mind which we refer to as “chitta”. Chitta is the innermost core of the mind, which is your connection with what we are referring to as consciousness. If your chitta becomes conscious, if your chitta acquires a certain level of conscious control if you acquire - now you have access to your consciousness. What we are referring to as consciousness is that dimension which is neither physical nor is it electrical, nor is it electromagnetic. It is a quantum leap from physical to non-physical dimension. A non-physical dimension being the lap of the existence, it is the non-physical in whose lap the physical is happening. Physical is a small happening. In this cosmos not even two percent, or not even one percent is physical, rest is non-physical.

This non-physical dimension in the yogic terminology, we use a specific sound which is connected with that dimension. Today it’s all very… highly distorted, we call this “Shi-va” that means “that which is not.” When we say Shiva we are not referring to some man sitting up there. We are talking about a dimension which is “not”, but it is in the lap of this dimension everything that is happens. So if your chitta becomes even mildly conscious, your ability to not only communicate an idea, or a thought, even to deliver something is possible, physically deliver something is possible.

So is it a possibility? Definitely it is. Right now can we teach it to all these people? In theory, yes. But are they willing to work towards it, that’s a question mark. One big problem is our education systems are such, we have glorified our thought to such a place, first to bring that down itself will take time. To make them understand the stupidity of their thought, it will take a whole lot of time. Because everybody thinks they are smart. But actually the smartest thing about most people is their phone.

Because your thought process is just an outcome of the limited data that you have gathered. It doesn’t matter if I have read the libraries of the world - still it is too limited, compared to what it is, what the creation is. With all the scientific development, we still do not know how a leaf really works.

Devi Shetty: Yes.

Sadhguru: We do not know how a single atom in its entirety we do not know, with all the scientific exploration. So that should be humbling enough for everybody to know that we hardly know how to use things but we do not know what it is. It will take lifetime of attention to even grasp the fundamentals of what it is. So if people are willing to first of all understand like the whims of their heart - you just dismissed as dumb, okay - if they also understand the so called smartness of their thought process and emotion is quite dumb, now it becomes easy. It becomes easy to train people that communication need… It’s not like now I want to generate this thought and give it you, not like that. Things will happen to you before you think. What… what is best for you will simply happen to you even before you articulate in your mind, you don’t have to ever think what you want to become, how you want to be. Life will just arrange itself. An intelligence beyond what you can contain in this bone box starts working for you and it will work.

You have heard of Ramanujam and others just opened a window with their Devi and he becomes that kind of a mathematician, which is…. you know even today, they’re… after one century they’re still trying to figure out what he said. And the mathematical calculations that he gave is the backbone for describing the black holes in the universe. When he was there, there was no word called black hole, nobody knew there is such a thing. When we say black hole, what we are talking about is the curve of time and gravity, which is something modern science is battling with, he made mathematical background for that. As the curve increases, it… what is in existence, physical existence becomes non-existence.

So this is what it is, when we say yoga, you reduce the curve in such a way, that what is largely physical becomes non-physical. Once it’s non-physical, time and space is not an issue. Once time and space is not an issue, communication is simply there.

Devi Shetty: Yes.