Conscious Living
[Applause]
today i want you to travel 100 years
into the past with me
we are a population of only 2 billion
people
not even a third of what we are today
the world had just suffered a war to
which we lost
40 million lives
and then we had the spanish flu pandemic
to which we lost another 50 million
lives
what did we lose those lives to
power land
money on
average people back then only lived for
about 47 years
less than 10 percent of the population
enrolled into schools
survival was the epitome of human life
but even then we craved for something
more
something that would surpass our human
mind’s imagination
and so we developed technology gadgets
devices airplanes
and since then the population has
quadrupled
life expectancy today sits at 77 years
we enjoy a sense of pride in our
evolution
from chalkboards to smart boards to
whiteboards on zoom
we could have never imagined that
telephones would be wireless pocket
devices
with instant global communication
that we would have electric cars smart
televisions
virtual desktops
now have you ever imagined a world a
hundred years
into the future
we could be living with robots who do
all the work for us earning for us
serving you cookies
while you play golf
or you could be choosing between the
moon and mars as your next holiday
destination
people driving cars in the 22nd century
would be the equivalent to those with an
iphone 5s today
please tell me no one has one
but the only thing that’s remained
constant in
all of those years is that we lived
for happiness we lived to be happy back
then
we live to be happy today and we will
always live
to be happy
but what is happiness
it’s a reaction to various biochemical
substances in the brain
if you like it’s the absence of negative
emotions in your body
but today i want you to focus on how
you’re feeling
are you agitated are you stressed
are you happy are you upset about
something
because even though on your external
front you appear to me as completely
conscious
your eyes are open you’re breathing
you’re alive
i hope
your internal front may not be as
conscious
and with all the limitless change that
has gone on around us in the world
keeping our internal body at peace
has become challenging who we are and
what we look like at face value
has distanced so much from who we are
internally
that living consciously has become
challenging
at the start of 2020 i moved to adelaide
to study health and medical sciences
born into a family of doctors the
preferred career choice for me was to
study medicine
and the common selling points to me were
financial security it’s a familiar
pathway my family knows the profession
inside out you’ll be fine
i wanted to be an actor
study international business
apply for a beauty pageant
anyhow i came to adelaide thinking i’ll
transfer into medicine after a year of
doing health and med
but three weeks in when the lockdown
happened and i got to go home
i had some time to think and reflect
and in those moments i realized that if
i didn’t do what i had set out for
myself
i would be creating regrets for myself
to mull over
for the rest of my life
you know i’ve always been told that i do
the exact
opposite of what i’ve been told to do
but in reality all i did what i believed
i did was take charge of my life
take a step back and take a distant
neutral perspective
on who you are and where you want to go
i followed what i felt in that moment
and not some superficial idea of earning
thousands of dollars
15 years after pursuing medicine
but i had to prove myself
so i came back to adelaide started
volunteering
socializing networking
i applied for that beauty pageant
and all of a sudden i had a job to go to
i had a cause that i support
friends that i call family
they’re sitting in the audience
and i won the pageant
point is that you and i
we have the power to change what the
next
100 years look like we can do so much
more than just survive
it’s because we have the freedom the
luxury and the time to plan
and act consciously
consciousness is our ability
to be in this present moment
giving it our complete 100 attention
it can be defined as a heightened level
of awareness
which is the ability to keep our mind
under control
even in adverse situations
for several years it’s been in the
nature of our human race
to crave for more we’re momentarily
satisfied by materialistic comforts
it’s an external stimulus that fires up
the chemistry in our brains
and makes us happy momentarily but as
soon as that spark disappears
we feel deprived again
and if only we can balance our internal
body chemistry
even in the absence of external stimuli
then that to me is true joy because the
secret of that balance
is conscious living the evolution
of our inner dimension
when times get tough we often choose to
live
in a bubble of mum dad family
friends possibly latch onto alcohol or
partying to escape
for years and years we’ve been
preconditioned to think of life
as a cycle you go to school
university get a job marriage kids
retirement death and the repetition
and reinforcement of this idea on us for
centuries
has curbed consciousness
you tell me if you’ve been deprived of
food for two days
and then been asked to come in here and
listen to me talk about conscious living
would i have your full attention
probably not you’d want food
because hunger overrides your conscious
line of thought
similarly with our human lives when
we’re compulsively chasing
money intelligence power
we forget to stop and realize that
happiness probably lies
in being in this moment that you have
right here
our human minds they have innate powers
of imagination
and memory and that’s why our mind has
the tendency
to wander off more often than not how
you’re feeling
in this waking moment is a
representation of something that
happened in the past
or an imaginative figment of the future
and over time this loss of presence
starts to create a void in our life
we feel stressed anxious
maybe depressed
extreme emotions like hunger anger
jealousy even extreme happiness cloud
our ability to see
life in its purest form
for instance have you ever been
so hungry that you decided to skip your
diet and eat the fattiest foods you
could find
or have you ever been so angry that you
said things that you would never say in
your right mind
and let me ask you in one word how did
you feel
when you ate those fried chicken wings
or yelled at the top of your lungs
regret
we’ve concocted behaviors and patterns
that we can’t even explain but we would
do them anyway
just to get through that one split
second
we underestimate the ability of our
human mind
and body
life was once about survival but it
doesn’t have to be that way anymore
our set ideas of people culture
religions
they constantly influence the way we
talk react and behave on a daily basis
but my question to you is if we’ve
created these boundaries
why can’t we take them away if
only we could open up our mind and our
hearts to the larger impact of life on
this planet
your larger purpose of living
we could together change what the next
50 to 80 years look like for our future
generations
now you might be thinking i feel
conscious
i feel like i’m self-aware am i not
but the question is how do we maximize
this on a daily basis
so now i want you to think about these
questions
if you had only 80 minutes left to live
what would you do 80 minutes
shopping eat the food you really love
meet your family
but now if i gave you 80 years left to
live
what would you do what would you do
differently
is your mind now saying that 80 years
that’s too long
that’s a whole lifetime i would live the
way i’m supposed to live
and all of a sudden 80 years takes away
the urgency to live
now to be better now and to be happier
now it relaxes
all of those emotions
but are 80 years really that long
some of us are 20 30 40.
if life was limitless and if death
didn’t abruptly stop your journey
we would keep living the way we’re
always living
and losing that value of the existence
because the value of our existence lies
in the fact
that you and i we’re mortal
sitting here today how many of you
are aware of what’s around you
the empty chair next to you your feet in
your shoes
your stomach rumbling mind’s rumbling
but how many of you are aware of what’s
inside of you
how many of you aware of how many times
your mind wandered off
i said something that probably triggered
a memory or an emotion
or put you somewhere else i lost you for
a few minutes in the middle
awareness of what’s outside and around
will help you survive but awareness of
what’s inside of you
will help you thrive through life
if you wake up 10 minutes earlier than
you do or sleep 10 minutes later than
you do take 10 minutes in the shower
doesn’t matter where you take 10 minutes
to yourself just to ponder upon how
you’re feeling
what you want to get out of your day
what are you grateful for
it’ll send to you
talk to your loved ones create
conversations
about whether to keep that job or not
what do i do after this degree
am i really enjoying what i’m doing at
this point in time
these conversations are energy that over
time
translate into action that creates so
much space for positivity in our lives
ladies and gentlemen we have lived for a
hundred years
we’re living today we’ve survived a
pandemic we’re still surviving it
and we will live for the next hundred
years
and limitless change that will continue
into the future
so far we occupied our minds with the
worries of survival
how do we survive but now it’s time to
take a leap of faith
and explore the full human potential who
you really are
to be aware of your mind body and soul
and to be the driver
of your life
the speed at which life is changing is
getting faster and faster
each year 2020 looked so different to
2019
and two months into 2021 it already
looks so different to what it was last
year
and that’s why we need some sort of
balance
the power of balance is that it paves
the way for creativity and innovation
beyond our imagination
but the power to be able to do that puts
an enormous responsibility on
us you and i to leave this planet
better than we found it
our education systems they’ve taught us
english
math science economics
but ways of living they’re only
seen repeated and duplicated
conscious living is just as important
as english maths or science
it’s the language of a happy and
balanced mind
change starts with every thought every
action
and every individual
so 100 years later if someone comes here
and talks about conscious living at tedx
let them have a century of joy and
togetherness to reflect back on
a world full of equality and equity
where no
color gender or money can separate two
people
where war and violence is replaced by
conversation
where global warming only becomes a
chapter in our history textbooks
where every woman of any size
color or culture has an equal
representation at the table
and is heard and then
we can truly say that we lived life
and we lived it consciously
thank you
you