• Anoop Kumar is an ER physician who had a spontaneous awakening in medical school — a complete dissolution and reconstruction of reality he describes as sitting in the sun — that permanently changed his perception of the world.
• He developed the Three Minds Framework to bridge his lived experience with Vedantic philosophy, modern science, and medicine in a way that could be communicated consistently across different audiences.
• First mind is the individual, boundaried sense of identity most people operate from; second mind is the field of undifferentiated consciousness from which the first mind’s world is constructed; third mind is beyond even light/dark duality and has no experiential content to describe.
• A central argument of the framework is that what we experience as the world is directly relative to how we experience our own identity — meaning identity work is the foundation of all perception, and therefore all fields of knowledge.
• He applies this to medicine and mental health, arguing that a purely physicalist model in healthcare is structurally incapable of accounting for consciousness, identity, or the full range of healing that is actually happening. Key Takeaways
• There is no hard wall between spiritual awakening and what medicine calls psychosis — both involve a fundamental shift in identity and relationship to reality; the difference lies in context, support, and integration, not the experience itself.
• Belief and experience are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the main reasons spiritual discourse becomes imprecise and ungrounded; the framework asks people to hold consciousness-is-primary as a hypothesis and test it against all of their experience.
• The world you perceive is not independent of how you identify yourself — as identity becomes subtler and its boundaries more transparent, the apparent distinctness of objects and separation between self and world also shifts.
• Practical integration of second-mind awareness runs through four concrete domains: nutrition (especially plant-based), movement (full range of motion including the smallest joints), connection (to self, others, and the planet directly), and rest.
• All fields of knowledge — medicine, physics, philosophy, religion — are built on perception, and perception depends on identity; a society that investigates the sense of identity rigorously would find a unifying foundation under all of them.

Full transcript, edited for readability:

Introduction: Emergency Medicine and a Life Integrating Spirituality

Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. My guest today is Anoop Kumar. Anoop is a board-certified emergency medical doctor working in an ER in the DC area. He also has a master’s degree in management with a focus on health leadership. He has written two books, Michelangelo’s Medicine and Is This a Dream? He has developed something called the three minds framework, and has websites anoopkumar.com and healthrevolution.org. Anoop, you work in the suburbs in Northern Virginia?

Anoop Kumar: In the suburbs in Northern Virginia.

Rick Archer: How long have you been an ER doctor?

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, about 15 years or so.

Rick Archer: Wow, you enjoy it?

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, I find it it’s a great place to integrate everything that’s happened in my life and what I talk about. It’s like, where the pedal meets the metal. If you’re talking about the kinds of stuff I’m talking about, and if you have to integrate that with emergency medicine, I think that’s a pretty good arena to do it.

Rick Archer: Kind of like the battle of Kurukshetra?

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, exactly. In a very condensed, intense form. It can still be intense when you have a seven-day-old in distress and a 97-year-old in distress. You get that whole mix. So it’s its own kind of challenge. No helicopter blades yet.

Rick Archer: So you were born in DC, lived in Kerala for a while. You speak Malayalam?

Anoop Kumar: I do. I wouldn’t say I speak it well. But I can understand it. I can hold a conversation. Yeah.

The Blowout Experience: Sitting in the Sun

Rick Archer: Would it be a good place to start with your blowout experience when you were in medical school and you were just in your room reading?

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, sure. So that was in my late 20s. In medical school, I was at home for a break and was reading in the bedroom. And, yeah, it was kind of like a blowout experience — it was as if an explosion went off. And the world fell away. And it was something like sitting in the sun is the only way I could describe it. And there was a choice. At some point, after some kind of unknown time interval, there was a choice as to whether to keep going or not. And at that point, it was as if there was a reminder, where a thought was instilled in the mind saying, hey, if this happens there’s still work to do. And it wouldn’t be fair, something like that. And that caused a hesitation, and then that caused kind of re-implosion.

Rick Archer: Like those near-death experiences, you were almost given a choice. You were reminded that you have stuff to do here.

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, except I wouldn’t say I would have died. It’s just that I would have moved on to the next phase of the journey — the body would have died. I always think that people would be like, Oh, I could see a headline: medical student commits suicide or medical student overdoses. But I was on South Indian vegetarian food at the time.

Rick Archer: So aside from feeling like you were sitting in the sun — was it warm, bright?

Anoop Kumar: That’s the bizarre thing about it. It was bright. It was like saffron. The color was there. It was warm, but not in a temperature sense, in a feeling sense. But more than anything else, more than the color, I can just say that I knew I was in the sun, for what it’s worth. It’s not because of the color that I’m saying it.

It was as if you take the room you’re in, freeze it like frozen light, and then it shatters into innumerable jigsaw pieces — and then you reconstruct the set, and you see that everything was built from something subtler.

Anoop Kumar: After the experience, it was like the room deconstructed and reconstructed. Like frozen water, frozen light — you pause it and it shatters and falls down into innumerable jigsaw pieces. And now somebody takes and picks all these up and reconstructs the set. And now you could see that it was all constructed from something subtler. The things that we see that are independent pieces — like a brick, or wood paneling, or a rug — those themselves are representations of something subtler.

Rick Archer: So your view was now radically fresh and different?

Anoop Kumar: I’d say it was much sharper and clearer. It wasn’t radically disorienting — it was just much more crystal clear as to everything that had been described and the intimations that had happened.

Integration Challenges: Marriage, ER Training, and a Crash Course

Rick Archer: Did that impede your ability to function?

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, it did initially. Initially, there was a period where it was just me in the room. But when the level of responsibility really increased — I got married, and I started my training in emergency medicine, and we moved to Philadelphia — then it became very difficult. It became very apparent just how much things had changed and how much learning there had to be done, how much adjusting and integrating had to happen. And I was on the crash course in the ER to integrate it all as fast as possible.

Rick Archer: I think that people can relate to this. Anybody who’s on a spiritual path will have found that they have to do some integrating to acclimate to changed states of consciousness. It does happen incrementally in most cases because if it happened all at once, we’d just be sitting in a corner drooling.

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, drooling. Or we would be diagnosed with something and put as an inpatient — which is something that we’ve got to touch on at some point.

Rick Archer: Yes, we’re definitely going to get into that. In any case, you were steeped in Indian philosophy since elementary school. So after the experience — no going back?

Anoop Kumar: Things had indeed changed. The way of perceiving the world had changed. I had already been predisposed to the interpretation that consciousness was fundamental, whatever that means. But after that point, it was like no going back. And what that meant was quite apparent.

Why a New Framework? The Origins of the Three Minds Model

Rick Archer: Is the three minds framework a repackaging of some Vedic knowledge like the Pancha Kosha model, or did you feel like none of those old explanations really worked?

Anoop Kumar: It’s closer to the second. I had heard all the stuff from Advaita from very learned people since I was a child. And I’m very grateful for all of that exposure — it’s priceless. But I reached a point where it wasn’t enough. I realized I wanted it all together in one place. This came from essentially my own experience, and struggling to try to explain this, and struggling to try to talk to different kinds of people — spiritual people, scientific people, philosophers, patients, people who have disease, people who are suffering.

How do you talk to all of them without having to change the story every time? How do you use the same framework and just start at a different point for each person? That’s what the three minds framework came from.

Anoop Kumar: It came from a need, because of a frustration within myself of not being able to communicate this consistently. It’s always the three minds framework. And that’s helpful because if you say it 100,000 times, some more of it will sink in. And if you can account for any experience through this — without saying, Oh, that’s just spiritual, or that’s science — it has to be integrating everything.

Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s a good point about hearing things over and over. I never tire of hearing talks on Vedanta and stuff over and over because I feel that I never get it 100%. So what is the three minds framework?

The First Mind: Identity, Boundaries, and the World We Perceive

Anoop Kumar: The three minds framework comes from the premise that consciousness is primary. And it asks the person to consider this as a hypothesis. Furthermore, it says that the way we experience the world is relative to our sense of identity. In today’s society, in almost most cultures, you will be told that you are a body — not explicitly, but subtly. Our parents teach us this is your nose, this is your mouth. And then Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick — you put all these things together, and this is how the identity starts to form.

Anoop Kumar: The extent to which we experience our identity as distinct — as having a distinct boundary around it — will translate to an experience of the world that also shows distinctness. When you look closely at the boundary of any object, you’ll see that nice smooth line is not there. Ultimately it will be molecules. And if you zoom in on the boundary of the molecule, it’s atoms or energy. And if you zoom in beyond that, you’ve lost the boundary entirely. The boundary we see between any one object and any other object is a superimposition and construction of the human mind — it’s relatively true, not fundamentally true.

The boundary that we see between any object and any other object is an interpretation of the human mind — a superimposition. It is useful at the first mind level, but it is not fundamentally true, it is relatively true.

Rick Archer: So, first mind is the concrete perspective most people have — it takes things as being separate, physical, solid. Second mind is more fundamental. It’s that which gives rise to the world the first mind perceives. Am I with you so far?

Anoop Kumar: The second mind, rather than saying it’s ubiquitous, it is ubiquity. It is all-pervading from the first mind perspective. It’s not all-pervading, because it’s not extended in space until it’s interpreted that way by differentiating.

Rick Archer: So you’re saying it’s all there is — not just in a transcendental sense. But if you’re looking at your camera or the potted plant, that’s actually second mind appearing as a camera or a potted plant?

Anoop Kumar: 100%. Exactly. And that is the key. That is the key change that has to happen, where it has to be integrated into the most plain, everyday experience.

The Second and Third Mind: Light, Potential, and What Lies Beyond

Rick Archer: The second mind sounds pretty cool. So what’s the third mind?

Anoop Kumar: So the third mind is — I always get caught here because all the language that we use stops with the second mind. These are not three different things like there are no walls between these three. We’re describing ranges of experience. It’s like if you stood on the beach and looked out at the sea — you see the subtle hues of blue and green that don’t really have names. That’s kind of like the second mind range. There are subtle ranges of experience of polarity, of what I am, that extends from seeing oneself as an individual all the way to simply seeing the world as potential.

Anoop Kumar: What differentiates the second mind from the third mind is that as the second mind, we can still say there is this — whether it refers to light, bliss, potential, something like this — there is still some experience. But as a third mind, that is no longer true. And from the third mind perspective, even light and dark are completely integrated. What we are is neither light nor darkness — it is what it is.

What I’m simply saying is that there is no experience to be described in the third mind. There’s no diversification. No subject-object. It’s not light and not darkness — it is what it is.

Rick Archer: So in Hindu terminology — Brahman, Atman, and Jiva — that sounds like third, second, and first mind.

Anoop Kumar: Yeah, so first mind is something like Jiva. But it’s more than Jiva in the sense that Jiva is just the individual self. The first mind is the condition of the universe expressly related through the individual first mind — the bounded, multiplicitous nature of the universe. The second mind is closer to saguna Brahman. And the third mind would be closest to nirguna Brahman — that integration of even darkness and light and all qualities, that is closest to nirguna Brahman.

Consciousness, Science, and the Unified Field

Rick Archer: My skeptical friend says: okay, I go deep in meditation and I experience vastness. But does that really mean consciousness is unbounded? How can I prove it?

Anoop Kumar: Very, very much true. Just because I am having a vast experience, it does not mean consciousness is fundamental — and one should be skeptical. You shouldn’t just make the jump from, Oh, I feel vast, I feel amazing, consciousness is fundamental. No. If I am feeling vast, then what is the differentiation in quality between the sense of I and the sense of vastness? There is a duality there. How does that get reconciled?

Anoop Kumar: If you are not skeptical, and if you kind of just jump a step or two, there will be a disconnection in experience. It will not be a homogenous and integrated experience. There will still be the spiritual world, and then my life. There will still be the scientific world, and my life. And the way all of these get integrated is by remaining skeptical until experience and rationale and everything kind of integrates.

Rick Archer: I’d say it’s healthy to be scientific about spirituality and to insist upon empirical evidence for the things you think might be true, and to pursue that evidence through your direct experience.

Anoop Kumar: Absolutely. And it has to, today, it has to be that way. What I’m saying is there has to be a place where you say — for me, the buck stops with me. I want to know. I’m not just going to accept something because it feels really good. But I’m going to accept this because it integrates every single experience I have — it integrates my daily life, my sleep, my dream life, scientific inquiry, philosophical inquiry, what all the spiritual people are saying. If you have consistency across all these fields, then the walls of the mind just drop. And then you just see what’s there to see.

Spirituality and Mental Health: The Elephant in the Room

Rick Archer: Let’s talk about mental health, mental illness, and the relationship to spirituality. Spiritual practices can destabilize people, get them into strange mental states, sometimes so strange that they end up committing suicide. So let’s talk about whether spirituality reliably enhances mental health or could actually disrupt it.

Anoop Kumar: Spirituality can either enhance or worsen mental health — no doubt about it. At the heart of what we call spirituality is one experience: the sense of identity and the extent to which it is malleable and changes. Everything that has ever been written about spirituality — the core of that is the sense of identity. What I am, who I am. Guess what? One of the key things that happens in what we call psychosis is also a change in identity, and not knowing what exactly I am and how I fit in with the world. Coincidence? No.

Psychosis is basically a label that talks about not fitting in with reality. Whereas all of spirituality talks exactly about: your reality is not this, reality is something else. Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room — fundamentally, these two are talking about the same thing.

Anoop Kumar: I’m not saying they’re the same thing. But before we make a distinction between the two, let’s talk about what is in common. Because that is everything. For myself, when I went through this period of change, I could have gone through every experience that would be listed as a disorder. Consciousness is everything — that’s a delusion. Seeing other realms or dimensions, or seeing the very thing in front of you in a completely different way — that’s hallucination. Believing in past lives is a delusion, depending on how far you want to take it. Not being able to give attention to what other people want you to attend to, because there’s a deep integrative process happening — that’s attention deficit.

Anoop Kumar: I was incredibly fortunate to have a couple of decades of initiation into what is possible. I was fortunate to have a medical background so I knew exactly how physicians would see it and interpret it. I was incredibly fortunate to have a Swamiji nearby who would make a subtle adjustment when I was going a little bit off course. Because of those three, it was still incredibly difficult — for about the first six months especially. But then, over a 10-year period, it was a tremendous adjustment.

Medicine’s Shallow Map of the Mind

Rick Archer: As I understand it, prescribing drugs is pretty much all that psychiatry does these days?

Anoop Kumar: Prescribing drugs is a big part of it. But for all physicians, including psychiatrists, our model of the human being is physical. Just pause for a second and think about that. The fundamental map of being human in allopathic medicine is that you are made up of protons and neutrons. Where’s the mind in that? Where’s joy in that? The fundamental experience of joy as joy isn’t there — it doesn’t fit in our paradigm. The experience of identity as fundamental — my dreams, my hopes — doesn’t fit in my paradigm. It has to be a consequence of molecules and protons.

We have such a shallow understanding of the mind today in medicine. And once you subscribe to the human being as physical model, you’re forced to physicalize experiences — because that’s where your credibility is. That’s where your salary is.

Anoop Kumar: So what I’m saying is, all the processes that a person can go through during this experience can also be given a diagnosis depending on the knowledge of society, depending on the support around them. When the societal structures are not in place, the societal knowledge is not there to help this person through this transition in their life that’s making them question things. And that can be called mental illness. But in my view, it is suffering, it’s difficulty, and it’s confusion. It’s not a mental illness.

The Four Engines of Healing and Practical Integration

Rick Archer: Your cousin Pawan asks: what practices or exercises can help us to understand our true identity better or broaden our perspective?

Anoop Kumar: So a few ways. One is by inquiring into the sense of identity. When I say I, or me — what is the sense of that? What does that feel like? If I had to draw an arrow from the word me to what that actually is, what would that be pointing to? That will be the boundary of the first mind, the boundary of identity. Spend a lot of time with that. And that sense of boundary will slowly start to change and shift. And your experience of the world will also start to change and shift. Important to know that this isn’t magic. All the beliefs are caked into that boundary, all the traumatic experiences from this lifetime or any lifetime. So when we’re talking about this boundary of identity, it is tremendously significant. It’s not just a metaphysical cool abstract term. It’s incredibly real.

Anoop Kumar: The most concrete way that anybody can jump in is through what I call the four engines of health and healing — nutrition, movement, connection, and rest. Plant-based nutrition will facilitate the integration process. Movement: take your body through your full range of motion, even the tip of this finger, because if the body is the representation of the deep mind, then range of motion of the body is opening something in the mind. Connection: with oneself through meditation, with others by talking about your experiences, and with the planet — feet in the soil, feet in the ocean, the sun on the skin. And rest: not only sleep, but knowing how to just set the mind aside and just be.

What we consider to be a monk — they intuitively knew what these four engines were. Why barefoot? Electron transfer with the ground. Why in a loincloth? Sun on the skin. Why plant-based food? Because food is modified as thought.

Rick Archer: Great. And that’s all on healthrevolution.org. Any concluding thoughts?

Anoop Kumar: I like to associate everything we’re talking about with healing. What we say at Health Revolution is healing is possible. By healing, we mean becoming whole and becoming integrated. That requires a whole human approach — seeing all of what we are, addressing and engaging all of what we are. And in doing that, engaging and addressing all of what the world is. Healing is possible for the mind, for the body, for what we call mental illness, which I think is a misnomer. We should simply call it suffering or experience. And that very same thing externally is what we call war and strife in the world. We can, by seeing more deeply and integrating all of this, we can heal. It requires us doing the work. And I hope you’ll join me in this process.

Rick Archer: Thanks so much, Anoop. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. It’s very enriching for me to have these conversations with people. And you were a good one.

Anoop Kumar: Thank you.