Ep. 14: Decoding the Vipassana with Harshal Modi

it feels like everyone's searching for the secret to living longer these days better health sharper minds stronger bodies this is the john t and the dog podcast i'm dr marcus rani and i'm joined by someone who understands performance and resilience better than most international cricketer john t rose in this show we explore the science of longevity from how our bodies age to the everyday habits that help us stay strong sharp and resilient as the years go by catch full episodes on the ibm podcast youtube channel and on all audio streaming platforms and welcome back to another episode of simplify another episode somehow and not just have we managed to survive this long and carry out we have recruited another accomplice well only for this episode we are interviewing very old friend he's going to be a guest on our episode and i hope you guys enjoy yeah so introducing groundmaster also known as harshal modhi hello yes that's harshal uh harshal and i go back a long way uh we've shared a lot of stuff on puggal guy uh when i went through some accidents in 2011 uh ferried me off to hospitals and uh things like that so on a very happy note we should so harshal is here for a very specific reason um so one of the things that we've been i've been very keen on is uh this whole idea of mindfulness meditation and i'm as you doubtless know from the uh vigor with which i speak i'm advancing in years i'm pretty old and closer i get to making my maker i find myself wondering about what life is all about what things and all you know everything and one of the things that uh bothers me is how little time i spend with myself knowing myself just so i was just talking about all these things to harshal and at that time i didn't know that he was into meditation and things like that and he gave me a lot of really really good you know inputs and i'm just going to ask him to talk more about just before we get into that uh so harshal has been associated with the global vipassana pagoda for a very long time uh for people who don't know what is the whole moment the whole moment uh for people who don't know what the gbp is uh sometimes when you when the smog clears away from bombay skies you see this beautiful triangular uh almost triangular uh golden structure in the sky is somewhere from the malar east ish region you know near estlworld that is a global vipassana pagoda and harshal has been associated with that for a very very long time so harshal yes so vipassana is actually a meditation technique uh it was rediscovered by the buddha now uh historically speaking if you talk about the buddha then people would say that either he's an incarnation of uh one of his myriads of buds or he started a religion called buddhism but uh to say that is quite wrong and it would almost say that satsundal is known only for hokkan and lands he's actually known for a lot lot more he gave us a technique of living life he gave us ways to lead our life in a much more moral much fruitful manner which would be quite useful to us throughout our lives and in our interactions with people around us and i'm guessing in a slightly more credible manner than deepak sopra in a lot more uh in a lot more exponential manner in the sense that he actually experienced the whole he's and laws himself before he actually taught it to others so uh the buddha he discovered this meditation technique it's called the pashana the pashana is uh like a lot of indian words uh mixture of two words we're called uh pashana pashana is to see and we is uh like it's a prefect special so to see in a special manner to to observe the reality as it is so that's what the pashana is so it teaches you how to observe the reality within you as it is and that's what meditation technique is it is a very helpful technique it helps in a lot of ways i'll just tell you a couple of ways it does so concentration of mind increases uh memory becomes very sharp uh decision making power improves improved efficiency and productivity capacity to work increases so these are all things that typically would be welcome in a standard world yeah and most people take coffee for that you don't need to edit yourself as caffeine for that uh it's just your own observation so that's what the meditation so meditation is the observation of something around you and the pashana is one of those techniques that makes you observe things in you and there is no external input to it so within yeah you're looking within within and not only within but purely so there's a lot of purity to it in terms that you know you are not adding any some extraneous item to it so for example if someone says you know um like you do yoga so yoga is a meditation technique where in you everything it's your own body that you're meditating but the thing is it's controlled okay so you're controlling your breath or you're controlling your body posture and things like that uh pashana is quite different from this it teaches you to observe things as they are so when you're observing your breath uh then you're observing your breath as it is so if it's shallow it's shallow if it's fast it's fast it's deep it's deep you're not controlling it the way you would do a pranayama or any other breath exercises uh this isn't necessarily like that it's a meditation it's an observation technique so meditation by observation purification by observation concentration by observation that's what the meditation technique is pretty cool yeah so one of the things that i want i've been to ask you is i've uh i've actually downloaded this app which talks about mindfulness meditation right so it talks about uh you know you sit in one place you observe how your breath goes and comes out how you know how your body feels on the chair your weight on your feet right your chair against your back and that kind of thing so level exercise one yes and i promptly fell up asleep i haven't gone to exercise two yet but i'm i'm so one of my uh one of my like my brother-in-law he he went through vipassana and he told me a lot of uh about vipassana which sounded the same as i recall so how is it different or is it the same as mindfulness meditation what respects do they are they similar in what respects are they different so a lot of the meditation techniques when you actually uh dissect the message turns out they're talking about the same thing okay okay so well mindfulness meditation obviously talks about you know being mindful of what is happening on you on your body right so for example uh if you're sitting down so as you said the weight of your body on the chair so these are very gross these are very heavy things that happen on your body right you are observing your breath uh but what happens is what are you doing next you're observing something so for example if uh you were uh carrying out mindfulness meditation and uh mosquito came in your hand so there's an itch that you're getting so how do you react to that itch so the technique vipassana as a technique primarily concentrates a lot on equanimity so equanimity equanimity is being aware of what is happening but not reacting to it or rather refusing to react to something or rather um uh not exactly refusing to react but saying that you know what i know this is happening i have evaluated that this is good or bad and that's it i'm not going not being judgmental not being judgmental about it i'm not doing anything about it yeah but the point is you've chosen not to react to it so for example if that itch is there now what is your typical reaction you scratch it immediately scratch it immediately and hope that it goes away yeah this reminds me of a organ mash poem i greatly admire barbara fridgy i bet she scratched when she was itchy ouch but yeah so uh what happens is that suddenly what is happening is that you keep scratching so itch has gone away but you still keep scratching it yeah so why has that happened because you are now liking the itch the feel of the scratch yeah yeah okay so this instead of being a one-shot you know uh action and reaction suddenly has grown into something later it has become a sort of an addiction to you so you like you start liking the itch and it's not a natural thing to happen so vipashna actually focuses on the point where you got that itch you observed that itch and you chose not to you chose to be equanimous about itch so equanimity goes beyond objectivity the idea of equanimity goes beyond objectivity beyond non-genitalness it's all of them actually like this technique in office next time my boss gives me something to work i like choose to ignore and say no i'm actually it's not apathy as well so yeah actually i did something very similar when i when i gave up smoking about 10 years ago so i used to smoke not much but maybe 7-8 seconds a day and not much and uh i for the life of me i wasn't able to do it up right so it used to be i tried stopping it i tried everything i tried nicotine chewing gum and i found i was addicted to nicotine chewing gum like mark me one side is very easy to keep smoking i've had thousands of nights yeah and uh then one day i i was sick also we wife and i she would hate the smell of tobacco smoke and i you know i'd get out of the house at 7 in the morning saying that i have a lot of work i wouldn't come back at midnight because you know if i came home i won't be able to smoke because it started taking control of my life so one day uh i i said this is too much so i said hell with it and i i decided i read somewhere on the internet saying that the more you fight it the more it will fight back so the best way is to sort of flow with it i read that somewhere and that's what i did so i i said okay i'll get i know i get all that turkey right and uh i won't do anything about it and it worked man i haven't smoked a cigarette for 10 years now wow congratulations so what would have happened is okay fine originally when you got a feeling of you know let's get a smoker your body started reacting or it had a certain you know on-off switch or an alarm switch in that okay the alarm rings the mind says okay fine we need to smoke so you go out and have a smoke now out here you uh what you do is okay fine i am getting this feeling to smoke fine end of story yeah that's it i have the feeling but i am not reacting but the point is it's not that easy as i'm making it sound it's a lot more difficult it's a lot more it's a lot more nuance so you have to first achieve a sense of concentration and a sense of mastery over your own mind saying that you know what i am going to control what my mind is doing because the moment typically what happens is the moment you start doing these kinds of things your mind starts playing different games and then suddenly what happens is you are distracted by something else in your mind and then this particular kick comes in before you know it you are already smoking a cigarette correct so that is what happens over there so that is what the whole program the actual session where you learn it is 10 days long so what you're uh what you're saying is that uh a technique like vipassana vipassana itself will help you be more in uh you know more in control of yourself like we do what we do yes it doesn't need any religious belief like we have to believe in the buddha and no no so again um as i said the buddha did not start a religion called buddhism the whole thing started actually if you really read whatever the scriptures say or if you read the history of how it happened the word buddhist or the word bodh if you uh if you were talking about himself it doesn't exist in in in the whole history of whatever written word we have till at least about 500 to 600 years after the past yeah this actually reminds me and i'm going as far away from buddha as possible i have a band called black sabbath okay they are often called the fathers of heavy metal okay they never intended to call it heavy metal or anything but maybe all the music journalists called it oh black sabbath is playing heavy metal and then one of the journalists actually came to tony ayumi the famous guitarist of black sabbath and said okay so you're playing the heavy metal music what what's that yeah so that's what uh that's what the technique is so that's how it is actually so so the actual technique it takes 10 days to learn the first three days you are learning how to concentrate your mind by observing your breath or rather gain mastery over the mind and that's a small meditation technique called lanapan and which effectively means breathing and breathing out and the next one after that on the fourth day onwards you learn the actual meditation technique which is uh observing your sensations and what is happening on the body not reacting to it you know observing them and then purifying your own mind so it's it's like this so for example if you have uh if you say you have stuff okay now uh it is and you're putting fuel on it and it's burning okay now before it before all the fuel gets used up and fire is uh is gone you put more fuel on it okay and you put even more fuel on it and you put even more fuel on it so what is going to happen but what you're expecting is the fire to go out yeah and you're doing exactly the opposite yeah so what vipasha does is by being equanimous what you're doing is you're using up the fuel you're depriving it of the fuel you're depriving it of your fuel so you're depriving it of your fuel by not reacting to it so what's happening is the fire is burning the fuel is used up nice lovely and slowly what's going to happen is all the fuel gets used up and the fire is out so this is incredibly interesting i'm sure it's you know a very very practical way it's probably a terrific way of getting rid of all kinds of addictions such as uh not just substance okay such as temper such as uh impatience but then again what you're doing is uh missing the forest for the streets you don't make uh you don't set up a sugar plant to make molasses you make you set up a sugar plant to make sugar and molasses are a bi-product that's going to come but what happens molasses are sweeter so you like molasses more right so the question is like that all these benefits you're talking about are like the molasses they will come okay your main aim is to improve yourself your main aim is to purify yourself so it's like one standard um so it's very short-sighted to getting away so it's the one same thing that everybody goes through and then you choose how to apply that absolutely absolutely so you do it you're purifying yourself you're improving yourself so how the improvement manifests in your life is dependent on you it's dependent on your life it's dependent on your society it's not like you go to the website i'm impatient do you have a solution for that no it's like one yes yes i've been wanting to do this for a really long time i think i'm going to enroll so but yeah it's it's very useful it's i'm told that the course is free the course is free it's run on donations by passwords incredible so all 10 days everything yes you're staying you're eating everything is yes so you arrive on buying the afternoon of what we call day zero you stay there 10 whole days and you are free to leave on the morning of day 11 you're done by over 67 and you are degadgeted completely totally degadgeted so there is no mobiles no smartphones no tablets uh no ipads no ipods nothing iot connected uh no walkman no cd players no mp3 players basemakers so no books no magazines no newspapers uh the idea is to disconnect yourself totally from the outside world so anything that is from the outside is not a lot it's basically like you know it's it's sort of maybe a mental operation so the way an option here that is federalized or where the studio is you know isolated from sound uh you have to isolate yourself from the outside world if you're going to go inside and cleanse yourself and what is amazing is that this oasis of isolation is in bombay that is incredible yeah a little bit about the location we know is it's right next to esilwood it's again i'm also doesn't it's there no noise that comes from esilwood and those freaking kids well we do get a lot of that especially it's a place that has been started with a lot of objectives when did it start so we started construction sometime in 1998 1999 and it was inaugurated by the president of india in 2009 so it is so there are two aspects to it one is the global lupashana pagoda itself and the second is the dhammokattam lupashana center so that's the meditation center it's a small even more isolated spot within the pagoda itself within the pagoda complex rather where meditation courses ahead all right and on that note let's take a little break a meditative break would you say yes let us reflect all right and we'll be back in a very short while and let's pick you know that feeling when you finish a movie and you just need to talk about it that desperate need to discuss why kal hona ho hits different enter ivm's brand new podcast cine5 it's streaming and current just yapping over hindi cinema every friday romcom's directory debuts video defining moments whatever they're vibing with they're breaking it down join the podcast on ivm pops youtube or any audio streaming platforms caution you want to rewatch everything after listening to us come join us on cine5 it feels like everyone's talking about two things right now pickleball and podcast so what happens when someone who's lived her whole life on the court decides to bring those two girls together i'm sanya mirzam and i'm bringing you you a brand new podcast Serving It Up with Sanya I've had some incredible conversations with friends fellow athletes artists and entrepreneurs each episode starts with a game of pickleball and once the rallies are done the real talk begins Serving It Up with Sanya watch and listen on YouTube and wherever you get your favorite podcasts and we are back with Harshal Meditator tell us more Harshal so I'll just speak a couple of words about the global the history behind it is that the same technique as I said was rediscovered by the Buddha the thing is about 500 years after the Buddha passed away the whole technique collapsed so the way you have a classroom wherein you're taught science so you have science you have theory you have practical science has a theory and a practical aspect so you learn something in class and you actually go into a lab and experiment and do it similarly with life you learn something from around people and you put it in practice so the meditation technique like this also was there is some theory to it and there is some practical aspect to it which you actually implement and put it into a user life and improve and benefit from it so the practical aspect of this whole technique was lost 500 years after the Buddha passed away the country of Myanmar Burma kept it in its pristine quality for 2500 years so they learnt it sometime in India to teach it to the people over there all this happened for 2500 years they kept it in pristine quality and they were very grateful to India for giving birth to a person like the Buddha so they showed a lot of gratitude so when the technique came back to India and then spread across the world in the 70s the movement wanted to show our gratitude to the country of Myanmar for maintaining this particular technique in its pristine quality for 2500 years it's a simple thing so what we decided was that the places that we build the structures that we build will be replicas of structures that are already there in Burma in Myanmar so the Global Pashna Pagoda is actually a smaller replica of the Shwadagwan Pagoda in Myanmar it's in Myanmar so it's that is bigger than the so this one is about 325 feet high Shwadagwan is 325 feet high so almost the same well it's a bit smaller because of the fact that we want to show that we are a bit lower than that so the relics of the Buddha that have been donated by the Mahori Society of India have been instrumented in this and it's India it's the world's largest pillarless stone dome I've been to the Pagoda it's actually fascinating architecture that dome in particular all the bricks are just held in place so you imagine about 65,000 square feet of stone a circle 65,000 square feet in area about 280 feet wide that's 90 feet high that's the dome it's all held together in place by stones that have just been kept next to each other obviously they are designed so that they don't move they're measured into place so if the design is stuck in place then you know the stone is stuck in place it can't go up or down as impervious to weather conditions expanding contracting all those have been taken care of again you're talking about stones that are 300 to 400 kilos each I'm talking about millions of tons of stone I'm not going to how many millions of tons so you said that the technique was rediscovered by the Buddha so who discovered it before that so this mythology is actually a religious version of the Sadi-State theory so as the Sadi-State theory says the universe is in place always and it will be in place always so similarly Buddhist theory states there are cycles of so everything happens in a certain cycle so the Buddha also is not a single human being or a unitary occurrence there are times when a Buddha comes teaches this technique and dies and the teaching spreads across the world for a few millennia then dies out itself and then comes across then there is a cycle of despair of death of hopelessness and then suddenly out of that another lotus rises and another Buddha so this is a cycle so that's why what a bummer it would be to be living in the last weeks just before tomorrow is going to be discussed today but then again this mythology also believes in reincarnation so the idea of the technique the idea on a most loftier scale is to purify your mind to such an extent that there is no impurity left in your mind and you attain nirvana so that is where the word nirvana comes from actually you become so pure so there is no impurity left in you so that's what nirvana means so that's where enlightenment so you will attain enlightenment so from there on ok fine no more cycle for you no more cycle for you so what if for you personally how has it you have been associated with it for more than 10 years now 20 years ok so I was born into it in fact my mother and my grandmother they learnt it before I was born so you have a really long association where did they learn it from I mean the pagoda came up only in 98, 99 ok the pagoda is one of the newer centers actually there are over 150 centers across the world and the oldest center actually is in Nipuri ok so that was set up in the mid 70s ok so it's also the largest center now so so since you have been I was going to ask you how did it transform yourself do we I'll tell you one thing to be honest the first time I did actually the course was when I was 6 the children's camp so when I did that course I was 6 so again I don't have a position of before and after but yes I can say this with absolute confidence that the challenges that one faces as one is growing up or the challenges they face as as one enters adulthood you know they've just completed their education and they're starting work I can say with confidence that the way that I handled those challenges myself gave me better results gave me much more peace gave me much more stability then the way my peers handled those same challenges and maybe some of them were very shaken about it I wasn't really too shaken about it so that's how I mean so I don't have a before and after I can give you examples of before and after also but yeah that's what my case has been ok I'll give you a simple example of a before and after actually a very drastic example if I may this technique is being practiced in a lot of prisons across India oh yeah it's talked to prisoners so there's this example in a Rashford prison so a man is in for murder and he is typical of all you know all prisoners all convicts angry guy you know angry at the world angry at the system angry at the government for putting them in prison and things like that ok he learns this technique and he goes undergoes a sea change in the way he behaves he asks for forgiveness from the widow of his victim ok ok then he takes over using the prison's employment program he takes over the maintenance of his widow's family wow yeah and the widow is so overwhelmed by this transformation that she comes to the prison ties her back on his list ties her back on the wrist of the murderer who murdered her husband because he is under one of the season so this is like a drastic example of people who undergo changes like this people have given up smoking people have given up drinking some people have given up eating meat because one of the core principles of the technique is morality so morality means you are not killing others so one of the tenets of morality is not killing others not taking what is others so being true to yourself being true to others do unto others as other than to you basically speaking so morality also effectively means that you do not kill any human being so people do something like that how does one sign up for this if they decide to well you can just go online on website www.dhamma.org and from there you can sign up across any center across the board so great thanks so much Harshal for taking your time out I know that you are moving to Delhi soon so we will of course be in touch and thanks to all our listeners from all our listeners sharing this wonderful technique of it's more than a technique right so stay tuned guys and see you soon thank you so much bye bye