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my father was. But she had enough ideas in her upbringing to say that the world you
experience as everyday reality is not real. She would say that probably because she had
heard it an amount of times. But when you’re a child, that sticks with you, that the world
you experience is not real. So that’s my childhood background until I went to medical
school. Medical school, I embraced everything that my father had taught about reality being
physical, material. He was actually more than—he was almost like Michael Shermer in the
earlier days when I was growing up.
Matt: How did your parents get along?
Deepak: Oh he was a very loving person.
Matt: Completely different philosophies.
Deepak: Yeah but he was an amazing person in terms of being a physician. I mean this is
long before technology. He could listen to a heart with a stethoscope and tell you, which you
may or may not know, the PR interval, which means the difference in microseconds between
the atrial and the ventricular beat, which you could verify on an electrocardiogram. He was
astonishing as a diagnostician. He trained with Wallace Brigden in England who was one of
the earlier pioneers in electrocardiography. He was a consultant to the royal heart hospital to
the queen at one time before he came back to India, the British army. So, he was an amazing
person but he was also very compassionate. On weekends he would see patients free of
charge, and my mother would cook food for them and make sure they had enough money for
their bus or their train. So there was a very compassionate aspect to him, but he didn’t
believe in religion or anything like that.
So then when I went to medical school I totally embraced my father’s constructs. Except for
one or two experiences during medical school, which was in India by the way. And it was
one of the newer medical schools after British independence, called the Indian Institute of
Medical Sciences, and it was funded by, amongst other people, the Rockefeller Foundation,
and so we had lots of international faculty. So in my fourth year of medical school, when the
Beatles were in India—that’s George Harrison behind you, by the way, in a turban sitting
next to me. So that is a later picture but the Beatles came to India in 1969, when I was
finishing my medical school. I didn’t know these guys at that time. But Sergeant Pepper’s
had come out, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and we had four medical students as visitors
to our classroom for the summer from Harvard. And they had with them a bunch of LSD. So
my first experience was—and I was just near 18, when we had the first LSD experience.
And then another one. Twice. And suddenly what my mother had been saying all these years
about the world being an illusion was in the way an epiphany to me, at the age of 17. I mean
I saw that the construction of—dissolving of boundaries like this, this, this and melting
away. And then just colors and shapes and forms and sounds. And then a vast nothingness
with no boundaries. But I was there. Not as a body, not as a mind, not as anything I could
identify with, but just totally boundless. It was totally life-shifting at the age of 18 years. But

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