Thousands of years ago, teachers like Vivekananda and Yogananda said that the human mind is not a fixed thing, that consciousness can be expanded, that awareness itself can grow. For most of history, that was considered spiritual teaching. But today there are scientists working in laboratories asking, what if they were right? And more than that, what if we now have the tools to prove it and act on it? This is that conversation listeners. Welcome to Healthy Mind, Healthy Life, part of the Healthy Mind Biowic Network. As you all know, this is the space where we explore everything that helps us think more clearly, live more fully, and feel more whole. I am Sana, Miss Ness, your host, and today I'm joined by someone really, really incredible. John May, he's a futurist, inventor, and also founder of Cognigenics, which is a pioneering biotech company working at the intersection of genetic engineering and mental health. And listeners, let me tell you that John holds multiple patterns pending on genetic methods for enhancing human cognition. And his work bridges one of the most surprising gaps in modern science. The gap between ancient consciousness traditions and cutting-edge neuroscience. So stick with us because this is going to be super, super interesting and yeah, maybe a bit of nerdy conversation. So, John, welcome to the show. And I'm I'm absolutely honored having you here with us.

No, thank you, Avik. It's a pleasure to be here.

Okay, okay. Uh, John, uh, before we get into the science part, I I want to understand the journey that brought you here. Because the path from Swami Vivekananda and Swami Yogananda, then uh to to gene editing. I mean, if it's it's not a conventional one, not a conventional one, but still is a very interesting one. So, what's what's the thread that connects those two worlds for you personally?

Uh well personally, the story really begins with well, maybe baby Kananda 150 years ago coming to America, uh started a movement, uh, an awareness in this country of uh Vedic thinking. Uh, then in the 19 in the 1920s, uh Parmohansi Ugananda, and then in the 60s, uh Maharishi. Um Maharishi, of course, uh had the Beatles at his Rishikesh ashram for four months in 1968, while the rest of the world looked on enthralled. And uh this created a tremendous uh interest on the part of young people in all things uh Indian. And in my case, it uh created an interest in meditation, so that um I was positioned to be able to use meditation to access higher states of consciousness more than 50 years ago. And um, when I was in those states, um I discovered uh the truths of the ancient Vedic texts, which I used as a basis for uh research, contemporary research, and developing uh gene therapies for enhancing cognition. So this all all goes back to um the Vedic lineage.

And and that absolutely makes, I can say not only sense, but uh this curiosity, often because discussions and conversations around consciousness or awakening, more more on the spirituality part, and whenever it kind of connects with ancient wisdom, it's more taken in the light of something which is um it doesn't make any sense in the in the hard reality of today's world, or maybe you know, in in science also. But but I think that kind of curiosity, John, within you uh itself helped you get on to this journey of exploring, especially around human mind and and consciousness. And if if I come to the ancient spiritual teaching, the the Vedantic idea that you just mentioned, and by the way, so you mentioned about Rishikesh. Uh so I was born in that small town, north of India. It's a very small town, but um very kind of it holds a very significant uh place, especially in in the Hindu culture and uh the Ganges, the holy river, which flows through the entire Indian heartland, you know, and on the northern side. Um it's it's a very, very sacred place. Um, but anyway, moving on to the ancient spiritual teachings about the mind zone, the Vedanta idea that consciousness can expand, awareness has no fixed ceiling. They are beautiful, but they are ultimately metaphorical. I mean, they belong to a very different category than and than science. So, from where you stand, John, what do traditions like Vedanta actually understand about the mind that modern science is now now beginning to take seriously?

Well, the the most important point for me is um the fact that uh pure awareness, according to the the Vedic text, uh has no mass, no energy, no location in space and time. Um it's formless. And that's a a core teaching. Um the way that I applied it to genetics is um there's one other aspect of pure consciousness that is not listed uh in the way that we normally think about it. So not only does it have no mass, no energy, no space, and no time, there's one other component that it does not possess um that hasn't been thought of before. And that component is wavelength.

Oh, okay.

If if pure awareness has no wavelength, this actually has tremendous implications for um designing systems to enhance human cognition. I'll explain how. So the Vedic um sages could not have known about wavelength or electromagnetism because electromagnetic waves were only discovered in the 1850s by James Clerk Maxwell and uh Michael Faraday. So nobody knew about electromagnetic waves until the 1850s. So if pure conscious awareness has no wavelengths, then it's not associated with electromagnetic waves, which makes sense. So when somebody sits down to meditate, uh they clear their mind and everything is supposed to stop. But if you have them on an EG machine, you see millions and millions and millions of tiny electromagnetic waves in the brain. Yeah. While these waves can't be associated with pure consciousness because it has no wavelength, so they must be associated with unconsciousness. And when you when you there's been 300 experiments done uh in India with putting stages on EED machines and whatnot, and what people discover is uh higher states awareness, uh the the brainwave profiles of these people go down, and sometimes it'll even flatline, so there won't be any. So essentially there's an there's an inverse relationship between brain activity and free conscious awareness. Um, I've assembled about 225 uh experiments in the scientific literature that um support this notion. So this is this is my this is my starting point for design gene therapies, which I can tell you about um in the next next segment.

Absolutely, absolutely. I'm so curious to know about that. And it's kind of interesting, you know, because maybe it's not measurable, or maybe the the scientific behavior or the physical behavior, it doesn't go with you know what we would normally expect. It is actually very surprising. Let's see how it all works out. So yeah, please explain through the lens of genetics.

Well, uh tradit traditional neuroscience thought that more brain activity meant a higher consciousness, but actually the reverse has happened. There are 200 theories of consciousness that have been uh offered by people uh so far uh in a great landscape of different ideas. Most of it's materialistic. Um, and the rest of it that isn't materialistic all treats consciousness as if consciousness is uh um integrally woven in with content. There's only one system that treats consciousness as having the ability to have formless, contentless awareness with no content, and that's Vedanta. So that's that's and that's that is the correct system. So essentially going forward, um, if there's an inverse relationship between brain activity and free conscious awareness, and there's an awful lot of unnecessary unconscious activity going on that is superfluous, then if you if you were able to uh selectively and pr precisely reduce activity in unconscious that was unnecessary, uh then theoretically you would free up uh conscious awareness that was encapsulated in these um situations. Uh and that's essentially what we've been able to do uh at cognogenics, is precisely we found a master control switch for consciousness in the human genome, a way to regulate the switch in order to change the neuron uh the electrical properties of neurons, specifically resistance, uh, by increasing resistance in certain neurons, a small number very precisely, we're able to lower uh the amount of superfluous brain act brain weight brainwave activity. And in mice, we've uh managed to achieve a 94% improvement in memory as a result of doing this. Well, what does that mean? Memory improves to the to the degree that the animal is paying attention. So the more the mice is paying attention to something, the better it remembers. And the the the best part is in neuroscience, attention in mice is is widely considered to be to be a proxy for awareness in humans. So we may be standing at the threshold of being able to design new states of consciousness.

Wow. And and um I think uh what I find striking um is like you know, this uh it kind of removes that I shouldn't say it's misconception, but maybe kind of removes that boundary uh that you know most people assume that, you know, it's it's permanent, like the boundary or the restriction between um who we are right now uh emotionally, or maybe uh you know, it doesn't put a ceiling in there who we are cognitively and emotionally and who we might be capable of becoming. And and I think you know, what Swami Vivekananda or Pamanand uh Maharshi uh they they shared is you know the ancient traditions and maybe your science, it seemed to be saying that the boundary, that restriction, it is not fixed, that it's limitless.

And from the viewpoint of your listeners, people in their 20s or 30s today could wind up spending the majority of the rest of their lives in cognitively enhanced states. Uh, because this this upgrade is relatively easy to do. Um, it'll be years, obviously, before it gets out to the market and it's first going to be introduced to treat mental health conditions. But eventually it will be used, it will be available as cognitive upgrades, and somebody in their 20s or 30s today could spend the rest of their life in a cognitively upgraded state.

Hmm. Okay, okay. And I want to just make it uh much more easier to interpret for our listeners because especially because you mentioned about mental health, and uh most of the conversations uh around mental health is about anxiety or about um uh difficulty in focusing, like feeling stuck, you know, in in um in loops of worry or maybe mood, uh not disorders, but yeah, low mood. How how does the lens that you're describing, John, the neurophysics, the the interface of mind and matter, how uh it is helping us understand that why so many people why so many of us we are struggling mentally right now? And especially, you know, one thing that is once again stuck in my mind is the the result or the observation that um higher brain activity in the EEG results does not mean that you are at a higher state of consciousness. I mean, what are we missing in the current con conversation around mental health?

Uh so the same uh compound that we use to increase memory by 94% also reduced anxiety by 34% in mice. And anxiety and stress and depression are all correlated with overactive neurons, uh, primarily in the limbic lobe, the hippocampus and amygdala circuit, and the ventral posterior singular cortex. So there's over there's overactive neurons in in these areas uh in cases of uh anxiety disorders and depressive disorders. So uh by um calming down the the neuronal hyperactivity, uh we not only increase attention, but we improve emotional intelligence and reduce uh anxiety. It's all interconnected.

Yeah, it is all it is all interconnected. And uh it's not just I think neurons. I mean, you know, because they are transferring the information in there. And um, let's say we talk about hormones, we talk about uh dopamine head, or we talk about oxytocin and you know the sleep hormones, uh the stress hormones, um, you know, these are triggering uh the responses in there. And you know, the I think uh I mean it's an important point. Maybe, you know, some of what we are calling a mental health crisis might actually be a consciousness crisis, also in some sense, you know, like the disconnection from the deeper layers of the mind. And and I think what also the influence of teachers like Maharishi and the Vedantic tradition, they can fit into this.

Well, that's exactly right, uh, Avik, because the genetic component of this is only half the story. Uh, this technology has to be introduced within a holistic cognitive ecosystem of education, counseling, and support to prepare people for living uh in cognitively enhanced states and to make sure that they are able to translate uh their newfound cognitive gains into uh distraction uh distraction is a key problem uh with devices and mobile phones and whatnot. Um that's often correlated with overactivity in the posterior cingular cortex, uh, which is also a hormone, it's also a hormone, a hallmark of uh ADHD. And so we can we can tune that down. The point is by tuning down this activity, what you're doing is you're you're returning awareness that's encapsulated in these brainwaves out of unconscious functions, and you're returning it back into conscious capital. It's like cognitive capital. It's it's more awareness, more presence available in present time. For the person to occupy their larger identity as a spiritual being and to reclaim their sovereignty. Uh, and it creates a cornucopia of benefits. So it's it's a very exciting uh project. We're having tremendous success in the laboratory. This technology is proceeding towards human clinical trials, and I believe the genie is out of the bottle, and it's unstoppable. Uh, it's all founded in Vedic principles, so it's grounded in truth, and that's going to make it unstoppable. Previously, American neuroscience has been all materialistic grounded, but there's been a tremendous shift in the mentality of a lot of leaderships in the financial community and the investment community and the entrepreneurial community uh over the last 50 years as a result of uh Vivekananda, Yogananda, Maharishi, the Beatles, and the tremendous amount of change that's happened in this country and embracing yoga meditation and these higher principles. So it's it's changing the way the capital is flowing, and it's changed it's changing the way that these ideas are being accepted. Uh, my co my co-partner, Dean Raden, um, is very well known in the Indian community. He has been um given an honorary doctorate by Swami Vivankananda University outside of Bangalore, and he's my co-founder. So this is all grounded uh in truth, and it's it's very exciting.

It is. It is super exciting, super exciting, John. Yes, and and as a normal person, what I can I feel uh really joyous about is that at least you know, because we we look up to science uh for validation, for proving, for for lending that credibility in there, you know, some of the spiritual aspects. Um I mean, now we are talking about energy, frequency, uh, you know, in in the way maybe as a leader we are behaving or communicating uh in relationships and you know, all these very different aspects of our life, not just in the workplaces, but in our in our personal lives also. So it's it's kind of very, it will be very unfortunate to dismiss the importance of of uh these ancient traditions that hold such a significant value, even if they were not at that time proven by science. But I think that's where you know technology and ancient traditions they can complement each other instead of instead of you know proving each other wrong or fighting with each other.

Well, that's certain that's certainly what's happening here. So I'll I'll be delighted to stay in touch with you and keep you uh appraised of our progress. But uh it's uh it's been wonderful to have the opportunity to speak with you. I appreciate the time very much.

John, for for our listeners, uh, if they would like to further explore about the work that you're doing and the research and everything, um how how they can reach out to you.

Uh an easy way to find out about uh the work that we're doing more is to go to cognitivecollege.org. And that's got uh a complete set of information about the work. Um, it's got interactive models, it has uh my manuscript on it, which is uh completely available free in its entirety to everyone, and it's got a way to contact us.

Super. Business, I'll have all the links in the show notes, and thank you to all of you for tuning into this very interesting conversation to Healthy Man Healthy Life. And yes, the idea that your mind has more to give, more layers to access, more capacity than you have been led to believe. That's not a wishful thinking. It might be the most important truth you carry forward from today. So take care of yourselves, stay curious, and I'll catch you in the next episode of Healthy Man Healthy Life. Thank you so much.