The Levels of the Human Being According to Yoga and Their Dialogue with Artificial Intelligence
Talk by Satchidananda
Hosted by Yoga 104, MACA Museum
February 11, 2026
Note on This Transcript: This document was created through human-AI collaboration using Whisper transcription technology. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, transcription errors may occur. Please refer to the original video recording as the definitive source: [YouTube link TBC]
New to the yoga terms in this talk? See the Glossary of Terms.
Opening Remarks
Namaste and Hari Om to everyone. Thank you for your presence here tonight.
And I want to start by thanking the museum, of course, for having me back here. I was here last year as well. And to Yoga 104, which holds many different types of programs. And to lastly express gratitude to all the traditions, to all the masters, to all the sources of knowledge that have come into my life.
I think this museum is one of the most suitable places to have discussions about consciousness and technology. Because we can see in this amazing space that it's a blend of both.
Art, in particular, seems to have an amazing quality or ability to highlight and reveal layers of our shared reality that we might not otherwise pay attention to. Even just walking through the museum today, I'm coming across exhibits that highlight various parts of myself.
Invitation to Explore the Koshas
The intention for sharing the idea of koshas, or the layers of our body, is to invite you to see the world in a way that you may not already be experiencing it.
Whether you believe we live once or thousands of lives, it would be ideal to live every life to the fullest. Most of us agree with that statement. But what does it actually mean to be full?
We understand that in the context of a bathtub. Because it has boundaries. But what if our boundaries aren't limited to matter or our physical body? Then what does it mean to be full in the next dimension of our being, if there is one?
And so we go into a very short and small journey into these layers that have been searched for for over thousands of years. What I share is the discovery of more than one culture. But it's not the end of discovering. We have not reached the final layer.
And this is where modalities such as yoga come in. And this is why spaces such as Yoga 104 exist. To let us be our own explorers and not just blindly trust what has been told to us.
If any of the ideas tonight are new or resonate with you, I sincerely invite you to explore it to its end and find a way to let me know what your experience was.
Guided Awareness Through the Five Koshas
I'm going to start by asking you to really make yourselves very comfortable in your chair. You might already be walking in here with a certain pattern of holding yourself, conditioned by years or decades of moving in the physical world.
Close your eyes for a moment. Push your backs up against the seat. Allow your arms to relax on your thighs or knees or arm rests. Allow the legs to be symmetrical, the feet to be well supported by the floor. And see if you can arrange the left half of the body so that it mirrors the right half exactly.
If you've taken the invitation to close your eyes, imagine yourself seated as you are. Feel the weight of your body, the different parts of your body, including the inner organs, muscles and bones, skin, hair and nails.
At any point, feel free to open your eyes should you choose to. Otherwise, feel free to keep them closed.
1. Annamaya Kosha - The Physical Body
Your awareness is currently in the Annamaya Kosha, the physical body. Anna means food in Sanskrit. That part of us which is constructed by the food we eat, that is considered the physical body.
It has a very deep intelligence of its own. It's extremely strong and extremely vulnerable at the same time.
2. Pranamaya Kosha - The Energetic Body
Next, I want you to connect with your breathing. The moment that it enters your nasal passages to the point that it actually fills your lungs. And follow that same breath all the way out the body. With each new breath, see if you can make it a little bit longer, a little bit deeper.
The body without this breath is simply a corpse. But as soon as oxygen enters, all of a sudden there is vitality. We call this vitality Prana. It's the life force that has been around far before earth was even here. It's the Shakti or energy that is revealed when matter is exploded.
When we add Prana to a system, all of a sudden it has the ability to move matter. So you can imagine that you are a puppet at this stage.
And so the question arises, well, what is it that is moving the strings of this puppet?
3. Manomaya Kosha - The Mental Body
And for this I want you to place your awareness in your mental faculty, your ability to hear my words, to think about what I'm saying, to be aware of the passing of time, how much of the way that you think and receive my words is conditioned by your culture, how much of it is conditioned by your gender, or by your age, or by your stage in life right now.
At this point we are like robots, very capable, programmed machines, like the best cars in the world able to survive for decades, able to live for decades. Yeah, cars. And able to help navigate us through the world.
4. Vijnanamaya Kosha - The Intuitive/Psychic Body
Go one level deeper still and notice what feelings you're experiencing right now. The actual emotions, boredom, interest, curiosity, confusion, fatigue, calm.
I believe this is the level that actually makes us human, uniquely human. What happens what at the moment seems to differentiate us from the machines that we have created in our own image.
5. Anandamaya Kosha - The Causal Body
And finally, the last layer. I want you to go to that moment of waking every morning. Before you have any awareness of where you are, before you even recall your name, it is a fleeting moment that for many of us passes day by day unexperienced. And yet, out of that totally unconscious moment, our life begins again.
Feel free to open your eyes at this point.
The Five Koshas as Human Limits
What we just traveled through are called the five koshas, or the five yogic bodies. They come from trying to find our limits of what we can do as a human.
I think right now the Winter Games are going on, the Winter Olympic Games. So you have a number of humans who have spent pretty much their whole lives trying to find the limits of how well they can perform. And there you are going to find many people who have spent their whole lives trying to find their limits.
What I find amazing and inspiring, and much of the rest of the world does as well, is that we don't seem to have a limit. Every time a world record is broken, every other athlete catches up to that record. And then some years later, another athlete pushes that boundary farther. And what was unachievable for some number of years, all of a sudden, all the new athletes are able to meet that. Because at that time it was not accessible for all athletes, everyone can reach that level.
Technology's Influence on the Five Bodies
As part of this talk about technology and AI, I want to give information about how each of our five bodies have been influenced by modern technology.
The Physical Body and Technology
At the moment, there are monks who are training with robots. Kung Fu masters used to be depicted as wise old men. Now they are machines developed by Boston Robotics.
We also have CRISPR, the very advanced gene editing program, which continues to evolve and will definitely get to the point where you can design your own body. Some people are already designing the qualities of their babies.
What does this say about being human when our looks and feels are totally changeable? How does that make you feel about your own body if you were to live in a time where you could change anything you wanted about yourself? What would you keep the same and what would you be open to modifying? And what would influence that decision?
How many of you change your profile pictures at least once a year? I only saw one hand up, I don't believe it. So how many times a year would you be willing to change your entire appearance if that was possible?
The Energetic Body and Technology
The next layer is this energetic dimension. The Pranamaya Kosha. Similar to feats of athleticism, we continue to break records in the field of energy. Certainly in the external world with energy harnessing. Energy unpacking with fusion. But even in the human realm for things such as how deep can someone dive? How far can someone run without eating or sleeping?
We now have watches that tell us how fast we're breathing. Our heartbeat. Our sleep cycles. And so for the first time I'm aware technology is starting to regulate our own energy systems.
The Mental Body and Technology
And then we get into one of the most interesting dimensions the Manomaya Kosha or that of the mind. Especially those of us in modern countries and developed countries we seem to be almost exclusively here. Far less people are growing their own food or collecting their own water. Many of us seek artificial ways of remaining strong because our lifestyle has shifted to interior environments.
I come from a country where I don't believe the things that I'm seeing. I was in a village where a creek was covered with a large rock as the bridge. And I asked the villagers how many people did it take to lift that single stone? It was a single stone bridge. And they said, oh, just one. And for me it was like hearing something in the matrix like, no way, that's totally impossible. I still don't believe it to this day. But they said the time when that bridge was built not one person was that strong, multiple people in the village.
In the case of the mind, we've definitely come to a time where we've outsourced almost all our mental faculties. The new generation are entering a time where education has many challenging questions or problems for them. Do we teach new people to actually write? Should we? Is personal memory actually important when we have almost infinite memory in most of our pockets?
What is the value in training our eyes or ears or nose or tongue or skin to perceive the world when devices can do it a hundred times better?
We're also in the age of brain computer interfaces. Chips that connect directly to the spinal cord. Right now they're in their infant stage, but one can imagine that in a few years they will be as powerful as our phones or computers.
We have technology that can now read images that are in people's minds and hear the inner speech that they're speaking. Colorado, one of the states in the U.S., has already passed a law saying it's illegal to spy on another person's brain. That's in preparation for technology that already exists in laboratories that allows us to do that.
The purpose of giving these examples isn't to glorify technology or to present it in a frightening manner. It's simply to highlight that what we used to think was uniquely human is proving to not be uniquely human.
So is there anything about us that makes us us, that can't be replicated? And that has been an open question for as long as humans have been able to think.
The Intuitive/Psychic Body and Technology
And that brings us to this fourth dimension. The Vijnanamaya Kosha. It is the psyche including emotions, the space of intuition and what we call wisdom.
And I think it's helpful to think of it as the space of all knowledge, of anything that can be known, of the underlying order of this reality. And the underlying chaos.
Many of the greatest discoveries in the world came not from the mind but from the intuition of very deep souls. These include poets, artists of all types, scientists.
In the yogic system the capacity of what we can feel starts at the base of the spine and goes to the mid of the brain. It includes everything from fear and security to love and generosity to intuition and just knowing things that defy logic or calculation.
We used to feel very confident that this was a dimension that technology could not really enter because it included things as unique as love. But now people have AI partners that they are truly in love with. We have a growing number of people that use chatbots as effective therapists rather than humans.
And we're certainly at the point where if any of us had a conversation with a personality we could not see we could not say if it was human or not.
So where does that leave us in terms of uniqueness and what it means to still be human now that most of these dimensions are being simulated.
The Causal Body and Consciousness
We have one final one that the yogis have identified. The Anandamaya Kosha. Some say it is pure consciousness. Undifferentiated awareness. And many other abstract ideas that I'm not even trying to really understand because it feels so subtle.
But if you asked me do I have this I would say emphatically I do, I'm conscious. And depending on which AI you ask, some will say I'm not and others will say I am.
To me it's less important whether AI is conscious or not. And more significant if I am a medium of consciousness how do I become the clearest medium possible for it.
The Koshas as Instruments of Consciousness
From that perspective the emotional body or the intuitive body is a container, an instrument. The mind is a conduit, an instrument. The pranic system, the nervous system is a medium, an instrument. And the body is certainly just a way to move around, another instrument.
From this line of thought these cultures where yogis have made a science of consciousness, they ask us for thousands of years, not recently, to not be overly identified with one's own body. It can change, it doesn't have to define who we are. That's very liberating, especially because all of us change from age very young to very old. And in those moments where we overly identify with the body, we tend to experience some unpleasant feelings when it changes in a direction we don't like.
And yet changes in the body don't have to define our sense of vitality, or our mental capacity, or our ability to feel deeply and profoundly. Or to feel that we are part of a greater reality and not an isolated being.
Non-Identification with Energy
But even the energetic body is just another layer. We have people in hospitals right now that are in years long coma. The heart would not pump if it were not for a machine pumping it. The lungs would not breathe if it wasn't for a machine breathing it. All of their prana is externally supplied. And it's all seen externally. And those who come back from a coma can often tell us about their experiences and what they have done proving that they were still there, whatever that they is.
All of us will experience increasingly diminished energy as we approach death. But most of us would vote no to a law that says when someone is below this threshold they are no longer human. Cut them off. But we would never vote for a law in which all those who are below this level of energy are eliminated and taken out.
Non-Identification with Mind
As long as a human can feel, whether they are a slow thinker or a fast thinker, an articulate speaker or an inarticulate speaker, there is tolerance as humans for each other and our mindsets. And so the yogic cultures have said do not over identify with the mind. You are not the mind. It is an instrument for expressing something deeper.
The Psychic Dimension as Conditionable
And then we finally get into this layer of psyche and emotions and knowledge. And we find that even this dimension is changing throughout life. That even this dimension can be heavily conditioned. But it can also be deconditioned.
And this is where a lot of the work of spiritual modality comes in. That as we begin to decondition this layer, how does that change the way we perceive the world? How does it change the quality and the quantity of vitality we have for wanting to live in the world? And how does it change the way that we use our body, possibly not just as our identity but as instruments for service?
Conclusion
And so that in short is the end of our journey. From physical to energetic, mental and intuitive or psychic to the causal dimension.
This is a QR code for the activities that are happening this week just up the road. We've designed it so that each day focuses on one dimension in particular.
And a very special time with Carnival going on right now. We have an event called Shivaratri happening from Saturday night through Sunday night. Where everyone is invited to come sing for up to 24 hours.
If you have never tried to sing for 24 hours it's really challenging. But not for the reasons you might think. For many of us who have done it a certain amount of positivity starts to generate. And it can actually be challenging to feel like you're still in your body. So we'll have other practices throughout the 24 hours to remain grounded. Which include eating and guided resting.
But sincerely if you have the opportunity come by anytime, clap a little bit, dance a little bit. And if you know how to sing, sing a little bit.
And with this museum being close it's an ideal time to have a back and forth experience. Walk through these grounds. Do some practice that changes the internal perception. And then walk through these grounds again and see if you take in the exhibits in a different way. And if you do have that shift in experience, then something has been revealed to you. And it's left to you to figure out what that quality is.
So, Hari Om Tat Sat and thank you for your participation and attention.
We're going to continue outside to the lawn area now. And do a few practices connected to each of these dimensions. If you have the time, come join us for the next 30 to 45 minutes.
Thank you very much.