How to End the Blame Game

By Deepak Chopra™ MD

It’s time to talk seriously about the blame game. In a divided nation everyone finds reasons to blame, and the only choice is who deserves the blame. Targets are easy to find, because they are everywhere. Somebody, somewhere is behaving in ways you disapprove of. When the situation is us-versus-them, has it ever been hard to name “them”?

That, in the simplest outline, is the blame game. Calls for unity have no chance for success as long as the blame game keeps going. It ruins the very basis of negotiation, which rests on mutual respect. The outcome of the blame game is always escalation: you find more reasons to attack “Them.” If you are lucky enough to gain more power than “they” have, you can turn your blame into domination—until the tables turn and your adversary is in power.

Yet the blame game isn’t innate in human nature. We are a species capable of imagination and choice. At any moment we can alter any mental construct, and the first step is to realize that the blame game is in fact just a mental construct. When you recognize this fact, you are beginning to see a way out. You can’t force or cajole someone else to stop playing the blame game, but you certainly can stop playing it yourself.

The most effective way to end your participation lies in the following realizations:

  • There is no “them,” meaning a class of people you can assign wholesale blame. Among “them” are reasonable people like “us.”
  • As long as you keep on blaming, you are stuck in the same behavior as the people you are blaming.
  • Since you are part of the game, it is your responsibility to end your participation. It is pure fantasy to believe that one day “they” will see the light of day and realize how right and virtuous you are and how wrong and bad they are.
  • The first thing to take responsibility for is your anger. Blame is anger directed at someone else. But it is you who are harboring the anger, and therefore you must own it.
  • Owning your anger is harder than attacking someone else, but who says that this means you shouldn’t try?
  • Blame feeds on self-righteousness. You hold yourself above those you choose to blame. But when you sit in judgment, you are blinded to an important truth, which is this: Everyone is doing the best they can at their level of awareness.
  • Blame is never part of the solution. It exists at the level of the problem, mixed in with anger, judgment, self-righteousness, and other psychological issues such as jealousy, resentment, and holding grudges. Stop and ask yourself how much happiness exists at this level.
  • At the level of the solution, answers can be found without blame. The level of the solution is a deeper awareness based on a quiet sense of personal peace, balance, optimism, and the absence of the every-demanding, judgmental ego. Learn to recognize this state of mind and cultivate it.

None of these points are arcane; they are basic psychology in many ways. What is required is something people are reluctant to do, to look in the mirror and honestly assess if they are part of the problem. At the present moment in these stressful times, the blame game seems to be everyone’s favorite. Turn on the cable network that spouts the ideas, beliefs, and opinions that are the opposite of your own. You will notice within a few minutes that instead of “us,” you are “them.”

Your first reaction will be to snort in disgust. How can these commentators be blaming you? You are absolutely in the right, and they are bad people for not recognizing this. Of course there are issues where it is totally justified to choose the side that is moral, just, equal, and solution-minded. People who put up stubborn, irrational, pointless resistance are not making the right choice.

But if you keep watching the cable channel that holds the opposite of your opinion, no matter what the issue is, you might be amazed to discover that your side is being labeled as stubborn, irrational, and the real cause of the problem.

If I’ve described the blame game accurately, there is a lot to think about. You cannot cry out for unity and the end of divisiveness while at the same time playing the blame game. In frustrating times, blame is tempting. It keeps the emotional pot on the simmer, which many people like to experience. Unfortunately, anger begets more anger, and eventually the pot boils over.

You can’t end the blame game all by yourself, but you can end the part you are playing. By backing out of the game, you will improve your own emotional life, and with clear eyes you might even become part of the solution. At the very least you will have discarded a mode of behavior that hasn’t worked up to now and never will.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

Five Fantasies That Keep Us Apart

By Deepak Chopra,™ MD

When a society is deeply divided, a paradox is in force. On the one hand, people cry out for unity, while on the other hand, they keep on doing the very things that incite division. We are seeing this paradox grow stronger year by year in politics, but at the bottom what we’re facing is a broken relationship. Society is a huge bundle of relationships, nothing more.

To stop being trapped in a paradox, you need a little practical psychology. The first step when a relationship falters if you consider the situation psychologically, is to stop doing more of what didn’t work in the first place. The same holds true in a divided society.

As long as both sides engage in futile behavior, ending the divide between them isn’t going to happen. At a certain point, a futile tactic turns into fantasy. Here I’d define fantasy as a belief that runs contrary to reality. If you confront the realities of a situation but continue to ignore them, you are indulging in a fantasy.

Here are five fantasies that surround us right now. I’ll couch them in terms of a broken relationship.

Fantasy No. 1: “You need to listen to me. Meanwhile, I refuse to listen to you.”

When two opposing sides stop listening to each other, the relationship has reached an impasse. Communication has shut down. In its place, rigid rituals are acted out. These rituals consist of repeating the same argument over and over, shouting to try and be heard, and freezing the other side out with rude contempt or silence.

Fantasy No. 2: “Everything will be okay if you change. I certainly don’t need to change.”

This is the classic disguise for blame. When you demand that the other person change, you are judging against them without really coming out and saying so. What fuels this fantasy is the delusion that others change if you blame them enough. The other part of the fantasy is a self-righteous confidence that you don’t need to change because the other person has no right to blame you.

Fantasy No. 3: “You are here to make me happy. Until you do that, I can’t relate to you.”

This fantasy is a holdover from childhood. Young children pout and cry when they are unhappy, and as long as they are unhappy, they don’t relate. They are too sunk in their own feelings. When carried over into adulthood, however, the same attitude becomes narcissistic. No one outside your marriage or intimate partnership is here to make you happy. To cut off ties because you are waiting to be made happy leads nowhere if your aim is to bring people together.

Fantasy No. 4: “I’m better than you. That’s why I have the right to tell you what to do.”

Much of social discord can be laid down to a mutual superiority complex. Tune in to commentators for the other side, and you will probably be shocked at their sense of superiority, especially if you think that only your side has the right to feel superior. In reality neither side has the right to feel superior. If this fact is ignored, there is no chance for reconciliation.

Fantasy No. 5: “I deserve to win, and once I do, you will be sunk once and for all.”

This is the emotional equivalent of a zero-sum game. The Super Bowl is a zero-sum game because only one side can win. But human affairs are tidal. One day you are down, the next day you are up. The belief that you can be up forever and never down again is pure fantasy.

If two people, two factions, or two nations find themselves stuck at an angry impasse, these five fantasies are almost always in play. Perhaps not all of them at once, and perhaps not everyone is honest about how they feel, yet this makes no difference. Each fantasy is based on two underlying tendencies. The first tendency is holding judgments; the second tendency is us-versus-them thinking. Each fantasy expresses these two tendencies in a slightly different way. But you can be sure that they are present.

Calls for unity, comity, and healing don’t lead to actual healing until both sides stop engaging in more of what never worked in the first place. By looking closely at how we indulge in fantasy, we can get much closer to turning good intentions into reality.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

A Renewed Planet Starts with Food

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD, FACP, Poonacha Machaiah, Rajnish Khanna, PhD

The way we eat has changed the planet. In this simple idea, which few of us consider when we go to the grocery store, lies immense hope for the future—if we pay attention. On the medical front a large number of people accept the notion, once thought of as a fringe belief, that “you are what you eat.” The decisions you make today about what you eat will have a huge impact in your future health. Food plays a decisive factor in modern lifestyle diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and all the damaging side effects related to the epidemic of obesity in this country.

The next step in our growing awareness expands on the same idea. The next bite you take adds to the health of planet Earth or pushes it a tiny step toward deterioration. Unconscious eating is bad for the environment. Conscious eating puts the planet on the road to renewal and wellness.

We can heal the environment by thinking from the ground up, quite literally. The health of soils around the world is essential to keeping the entire planet in balance. This truth has dawned with the rise of the word “microbiome,” which is gaining wide circulation. The microbiome is comprised of the genetic material of all microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, and viruses) in a specific place, such as the human gut, in the soil, in water, or on the skin. Each local microbiome is intricately connected to other microbiomes, thereby linking all living organisms together.

New ideas are a motivation for rethinking old ideas, and this happened with a vengeance when the microbiome idea emerged.

To give a shortlist of mental resets that have occurred:

Old idea: Germs are dangerous and exist to attack human beings to make them sick.
Rethink: The microbiome is hugely beneficial in keeping every living thing in a state of health and balance.

Old idea: Germs invade the body like enemies from without.
Rethink: Thousands of species of micro-organisms inhabit the body and work intimately to keep us healthy, beginning with the digestion of food.

Old idea: Humans are free to dominate and change Nature according to what we want to do.
Rethink: Human survival depends on remaining in balance with Nature, who is the great sustainer and healer.

That last rethink is the big one. Greenhouse gases told us that how we live has planetary consequences. The planetary biome tells us the same thing, and for much the same reason. The industrialization of human life gave rise to excess carbon dioxide in the air. The industrialization of food production, which has exponentially increased around the world, has proceeded with reckless disregard for the planetary biome, particularly the health of soils.

Here are the trends that pose the most worry, keeping in mind that we have the power to reverse them:

  • The wide use of antibiotics in farm animals.
  • Reducing a wide variety of plant life to a small handful of food crops, such as wheat, rice, and soybeans.
  • Contaminating the soil with a huge range of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
  • Turning wildlands such as rain forests into cultivated land or stripping them bare for logging.

On the one hand these measures have produced an enormous quantity of food and established a food delivery chain capable of feeding 7 billion people and counting. But as with our carbon footprint, there are immense drawbacks at the same time.

The speed and virulence of the spread of the novel coronavirus represents the kind of drastic disruption that can occur when one microbiome in Wuhan, China goes out of balance. There have been near-misses, too, notably the SARS outbreak in Asia in 2003 and the 2013 Ebola outbreak in Africa. Someone has grimly called COVID-19 a “starter pandemic.”

It is now being dealt with on an industrial level with a global vaccination program, but we can’t afford to slip back into two old outworn ideas, that microbes are our enemy and that we should fight them with all-out war. The planetary biome is what keeps microbial life in balance, and Nature is the only force large enough to do the job. For billions of years a biome consisting of billions of species at the microscopic level has existed in balance.

However long it takes, humans will learn to think about the planetary biome. It’s part of the same planetary thinking that climate change has motived. Awareness is the first step toward change, and here we are concerned with changing your awareness. But action follows. The individual consumer holds the levers of power, and if you eat consciously, you are nudging the food supply system in the right direction.

Conscious eating means whole organic foods, locally sourced and raised with consideration for healthy farming, healthy soils, and healthy livestock raised as close to Nature as possible. We know that this sounds like a dream. Groceries are dominated by processed food, chemical additives, and all manner of produce and meat that uses antibiotics, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides in their production.

One might say, with some justification, that balance is what lies in the balance. There is no reason why Nature should be the source of balance while humans are the cause for imbalance. But that’s the present reality, just as willfully extracting natural resources is the prevailing mindset. Humans are brilliant at solving problems. We are also notorious for waiting until the last minute before facing a big problem.

What makes a planetary issue like the biome different this time around is that it is really an awareness issue. Nothing like the discovery of penicillin is going to work. Only a shift in awareness will work, and such a shift occurs one person at a time until a critical mass is reached and the whole population clamors for change. Consider this moment a tipping point in the making. Changing your eating habits looks like a small step, but the change in your awareness has momentous consequences.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com
Rajnish Khanna, Ph.D., founder and Chief Executive Officer of i-Cultiver, Inc. and Global Food Scholar, Inc. Rajnish has served as a lead scientist in biotechnology industry and has worked at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. Rajnish is a strategic biotechnology consultant, plant and soil health scientist applying multidisciplinary approaches for research and development. Known for empowering the industry through strategic partnerships with academic institutions to leverage advanced technologies, increase technology transfer and product impact. Rajnish is creating the online local food marketing platform, TerreLocal, to digitally map food supply with local demand. Rajnish is a photobiologist, interested in how information, such as light, is perceived and translated by organisms into biological responses. www.rajnishkhanna.com
Poonacha Machaiah is the CEO of The Chopra Foundation, a 501(c) (3) organization and co-founder of the Never Alone Movement for Suicide Prevention and Mental Health along with both world-renowned mind-body medicine pioneer and New York Times best-selling author Deepak Chopra, M.D, actress and humanitarian Gabriella Wright. Poonacha launched the Warrior Monk brand targeted at creating a positive societal shift through the compassionate transformation of humankind (www.thewarriormonk.com). He is the founder of Wellbeing Tech, a leading technology innovation company that has deployed transformative wellbeing solutions such as the hyper-local neighborhood app i.e. GABL (www.gabl.global) and Remote Assistance Management platform for providing assisted reality with Glass Enterprise Edition (www.wellbeingtech.com/ramp). He holds an MBA from the College of William and Mary, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from the B.M.S. College of Engineering.

Take Hope from the Healing Cycle

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Right now the push to control the latest surges in Covid have focused on three things that have gained around-the-clock publicity: masks, distancing, and vaccines. Relying on them has given people hope in the face of the pandemic. But there are sources of hope, including a new one just added to the mix, that everyone should know about.

These sources of hope are based on an aspect of daily life that is ordinary and at the same time extremely complex and mysterious. Every day your body goes through a healing cycle. This cycle is the product of billions of years of evolution, setting in place many cycles, clocks, feedback loops, and chemical messaging. But the upshot is a total reset of the mind-body system every day. Anything that has gone out of balance is reset, and all the parts of the system once again mesh as they were designed to.

Your lifestyle either supports the healing cycle or hinders it. After decades of progress in the area of wellness, people’s lifestyles have been improving, but for many the onset of the Covid pandemic causes a major disruption, and for some, the roof caved in. Their lifestyles began to hinder the healing cycle in crucial ways.

  • Daily routines were thrown into chaos.
  • Exercise got neglected.
  • Passive distractions like texting and surfing the Internet took up more time.
  • Meaningful work declined.
  • Human contact was severely diminished.
  • Symptoms of anxiety and depression were magnified.
  • Stress took a larger toll than normal.
  • Sleep became erratic.

Some fascinating new research from many sources is pointing to sleep as the key. For a long time our busy modern lifestyles have worked to the detriment of getting a good night’s sleep. At the same time, ironically, the importance of regular sound sleep has grown enormously. The arrival of the Covid pandemic has widened this gap between how we live and how we should live.

Specifically, researchers have spotted that levels of melatonin, the “Sleep Hormone,” seem to be involved in who gets infected and suffers serious illness, followed by potentially long-lasting damage to the nervous system. The conclusion of a long, detailed article at The Atlantic website offers a remarkably hopeful possibility: Melatonin might block the virus.

After reading the article you might be motivated to start taking melatonin, which is readily available over the counter, but one shouldn’t blithely alter the body’s hormone cycles. Covid isn’t going to be prevented with a supplement. The larger picture concerns the healing cycle. Melatonin levels point to a deeper factor, which is sleep itself. Sleep is connected to everything that happens when you undergo the healing cycle every day.

Insomnia and various sleep irregularities throw off biorhythms and hormone cycles—that much has been well established. Sleep deprivation is associated with almost anything that a hormone influences, which makes things so all-embracing that medical research is forced to isolate and study small parts of the entire picture, such as the relationship between bad sleep and type 2 diabetes, obesity, sleep apnea, and depression.

Medicine is concerned with pathologies of every kind, but the healing cycle is about wellness as a whole. To support the healing cycle, you need to address your daily routine and do everything you can to correct the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Passively waiting for the vaccine has no prevention value, and there is some research connected to flu vaccines showing that people who get a good night’s sleep in the days before getting a flu shot receive more effectiveness form the vaccination.

In practical terms, the following steps should be given priority, because they relate directly to improving your sleep and getting the most out of the healing cycle:

  • Go to sleep at the same time every night, including weekends.
  • Spend time out in the sun on a daily walk, since sunlight promotes melatonin levels.
  • Exercise every day, at the least getting up and stretching every hour.
  • Don’t look at bright screens for two hours before bedtime. Their blue light suppresses melatonin levels.
  • Reduce passive distractions and increase creative activities and work that is challenging to your mind. The healing cycle is thrown off by a passive lifestyle.
  • Give sleep a priority rather than doing other things late at night.

The need for these measures has always existed; Covid simply brought them into high relief. Restoring the healing cycle to its natural functioning has benefits extending far beyond the pandemic. But you should consider this a foundation, not the complete answer.

The other disruptions I mentioned above can’t be overlooked. Lockdowns and social distancing automatically reduce human contact. People at younger ages are prone to sudden exposure to what a bad old age feels like: isolated, lonely, depressing, and boring. At a minimum, you need to keep up human contact and become part of an active support system, even if this contact is at a distance and involves phone calls rather than going out to lunch or meeting at work.

From every direction, one hears that the pandemic is leading to a major reset on a global scale. What will actually come about is still speculative. We are living under emergency conditions, which gives priority to emergency measures. But on your own, you can undertake the most important reset that matters personally. Reset the healing cycle, and you will be prepared for emergency conditions and the world that will emerge after the emergency subsides.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

Where True Spirituality Begins

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Many people still view difficult times as a spiritual challenge. The numbers are less than in the distant past, when catastrophes, tragedies, setbacks, and failures were seen in religious terms. An Old Testament plague was a sign of God’s wrath, but in modern secular society medical science gives a different explanation, based on research data and the rise of the scientific worldview.

And yet millions of people would find in the COVID-19 pandemic a test of faith and perhaps even a test for whether God is paying attention to human suffering. I’d like to offer a different viewpoint—difficult times can motivate you to place a higher value on your spiritual life. Out of confusion and conflict, there is an inner journey to be made. This has been true for centuries, and modern times don’t erase the possibility.

What modern times do, however, is diminish the solace of traditional religion. The waning of organized faiths has been happening during the entire postwar era, more than two generations. Without the safety net of religion (which often offered no safety at all), the inner journey has become a do-it-yourself project. So where does it begin? How do you know you are actually on the path? What can you expect to happen in your life?

The questions are many, and the answers are slippery. Religions have the advantage that one size fits all. By contrast, an individual slant on spirituality is as unique as a person’s life story, which is filled with beliefs and expectations shared by no one else. But I think there is a universal experience that unites every genuine act of spiritual exploration. It is the experience of meeting yourself for the first time.

Everyone has more than oneself, and several versions are not what I’m referring to. You have a social self that you show to others. You have a self-image based on your ego-personality. You have a private self that harbors your fears, wishes, doubts, and dreams. For countless people, life consists of juggling the interests of these separate selves. A host of experiences springs from this activity, but this must be set aside. The inner journey doesn’t concern these different selves, which are all constructed by the mind.

The self you must meet on the spiritual journey is a kind of silent companion who has been with you all your life. Sometimes I think of it as the true self; it has also been called the witness. Names are not as useful as recognizing the experience itself, because that experience forms the foundation for all other spiritual experiences. To have the experience, simply be yourself, in a state of simple awareness.

It is easy to show that you have been having this experience all your life. It amounts to your basic sense of self. Something has remained constant despite the ups and downs of your life story, and your sense of self is as good a name as any. The reason that this basic experience hasn’t blossomed into a full-blown, satisfying spirituality is twofold. You haven’t noticed it or given it much value. In other words, it has been an unconscious experience.

If you consider the other versions of the self, the mind-made ones, they promise a reward, and so we chase after the promise. The social self promises acceptance, belonging, bonding with others, being on teams at work and play, and so on. Anything that involves a group, from a family to a corporation, nation, or tribe is the arena of the social self.

The next self, based on your ego-personality, is individualized. It promises all the rewards you can enjoy by getting what you want. Personal desires and ambitions drive everyone from the ego level. Everyone has a self-image they need to protect, so the ego provides a very full agenda between getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want.

The private self is more ambiguous. Here you conduct an internal dialogue with yourself that can be very dark or very bright or everything in between. No one eavesdrops on the private self. You relate to it alone. This can be terrifying if you are prone to anxiety and depression. It can be rewarding if you are a creative artist finding inspiration inside yourself.

By contrast, the true self seems to promise nothing. This is a major reason for overlooking it and giving it very little value. The insight that every wisdom tradition offers serves as a guide here. Your sense of self brings you close to the origin of consciousness. It is the only valid starting point for journeying to the source itself. At the source, you discover something the mind cannot make: a flow of creative intelligence. This is consciousness transforming itself from infinite possibilities into everything most valued in human existence: love, compassion, beauty, truth, empathy, wisdom creativity, devotion, the presence of the divine, and personal evolution.

When the flow of creative intelligence enters your awareness, it enters through these values. They are not mind-made. They are innate in human awareness. No matter how primitive the ancient world might look to us in the modern world, having no electricity, smartphones, satellites, and television, every culture had the same sense of human potential as unlimited—such was the vision of all wisdom traditions. Yet no matter how exalted the achievements of the human mind, a single silent source was present.

All you need for a rewarding spiritual life is to meet yourself inside and allow your awareness to settle into its simplest state. This is true meditation. What happens next is the journey itself, because simple awareness is how everything is created out of nothing. Your sense of self has no content in terms of ideas, sensations, feelings, etc. From the mind’s viewpoint, if you have no thoughts running through your head, there is nothing.

But the mind has made a mistake. This nothing is the basic “stuff” of creation; it is the threshold for everything the mind can conceive or create. When the ancient rishis of India declared, “I am that, thou art That, and all this is That,” they meant “that” to be pure awareness. One modern spiritual teacher put it very simply: “Everything the mind makes is like the products of baking, all the things that can be made flour. I am none of those things. I am the flour.”

Yet however you express it in words, the fundamental experience that ignites the spiritual journey comes down to one thing: meeting yourself. It guarantees that spirituality is open to everyone, at all times, under any circumstance.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com