Deepak Chopra

President Nikias, Dean Bernsoni, faculty members, religious directors, graduating students, families, friends, and trustees, it's a great honor for me to be speaking to you just now. In the next few minutes, I want to share with you just seven little steps that you could take to embark on the most heroic story that you can imagine for yourself. Step one: become the best listener in the world.

There's a conversation going on right now in the world, and it's a scary conversation: war, terrorism, eco destruction, extinction of species, poison in our food chain, climate change. That's part of the conversation. But there's also another story alongside with that.

Are we going to allow extinction, the sixth extinction to take place? Or can we together create a story for a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful world? Because as Mahatma Gandhi said, "If we can't be the change that we want to see in the world, then we'll end up being angry, active, angry peace, advocates, peace activists who are angry, and that's a contradiction in itself."

So listen. Listen to the zeitgeist of the moment. Create a vision for yourself. Get together with people who want to share your vision.

Bond with them emotionally. Complement their strengths with your strengths. There's nothing that cannot be accomplished when we share vision together, when we bond emotionally, when we complement each other's strengths.

And I know my son is sitting there in the ba in the audience, and he's got a series called Religion of Sport. I'll tell you any sport team that wins has those characteristics: shared vision, emotional bonding, and complementing strengths. We have to do that together.

It is your journey now that is going to help us go in that direction. Even more important, be authentic. Have integrity. Be responsible for your health and the health and joy of others.

Recognize that the most valuable things, even though this is a great university, and you're going to get a great degree, but the most valuable things in life don't come with degrees. They don't come with credentials.

The most valuable things in life come with, your ability to create relationship, your ability to nurture love, your ability to have empathy and compassion and equanimity and joy, your desire to evolve in the direction of truth, goodness, harmony, beauty, peace and joy. Without that, it, is a futile experience, not. Academia is great because it brings us knowledge.

But unless you self-reflect, unless you ask yourself: Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose?

What am I grateful for? What kind of world do I want to live in? What kind of world do I want future generations to live in?

What am I doing to manifest that dream? Does my daily activity in some way reflect the dream that I have? If we don't ask ourselves those questions, then our life will not have been fruitful.

Reflecting back now, you know, fifty years ago or more, I graduated, and it seems to have gone by like a dream. The German philosopher Wittgenstein said, "We are asleep. Our life is a dream.

We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But once in a while, we wake up enough to know that we're dreaming." So what do we wake up to?

We wake up to the awareness in which all experience happens. This is an experience right now. But you know, the first part of this evening is already over.

It's a dream. Five minutes ago is already over. It's a dream. A minute ago is already over. By the time I get to the end of my sentence, the first part is over.

You can't grasp the past. You can't grasp the future, and the present is over as soon as it is born. So we must wake up.

Wake up to the presence in which this is all happening. Experience is in time, but the awareness in which experience happens is not in time. So I'd just like you to try something right now As you're listening to me right now, just turn your attention to that which is having this experience.

Be aware of that in which this experience is happening. That awareness is the only real thing about you. Everything else arises and subsides in every moment of time.

Hold on to that. Hold on to the presence in which experience happens, and recognize that experience is in time, but you that which has the experience, is not in time.

The same awareness when you were a baby, the same awareness when you were a teenager, now, and because it's not in time, we are told by the great luminaries of all time, the sages of the Upanishads, that this awareness that you are is not subject to birth or death. Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita says, "Water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it, weapons cannot shatter it, fire cannot burn it."

You are that. All this is that, and that alone is. So without that self-awareness, life could go by as a dream, but to wake up to it is the goal of our life. Waking up to presence, waking up to spirit, waking up to our soul cannot be done through a system of thought, be it religion or philosophy or theology or science, because reality is not a system of thought.

Reality is that which gives rise to thought, and as we trace thought back to its source, we realize it is also the source of perception. It is also the source of feeling. It is also the source of everything that happens in our life, our personal relationships, our social interactions, that which we call the world, the universe.

It arises and subsides in our own being, and that is the highest intelligence. Being is the highest intelligence. Feeling comes after that, feeling that we call love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and then thinking, but not dogmatic thinking, but living the questions, and if we live the questions, then life moves us into the answers.

And finally, the last is doing. We're living in a society today where everybody is doing, bundles of conditioned reflexes and nerves constantly being triggered by people and circumstance into predictable outcomes. We're algorithms. We are biological robots because we have not woken up to that in which all experience happens.

So I shall close now. Wish you good luck, Godspeed, but don't forget, don't forget that God's language is silence, and everything else is poor translation. Thank you.