How to Change Human Nature

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Everyone is good at avoiding the elephant in the room, which refers to something everyone is aware of but cannot bring themselves to discuss. In some ways the ultimate elephant in the room is human nature. We all exhibit human nature, but we rarely discuss it for a simple reason: no one knows what to do with it.

Lions suffer no inner conflict when they prey upon the weak, but we do, or should. Mating season doesn’t send dolphins into an emotional tailspin, but human sexuality is fraught with psychological implications, and for some people these are unresolved for a lifetime. The essential problem, however, is that human nature is torn between opposites. We see ourselves as good and bad together, rational and irrational, peaceful and violent.

The divided self is a central topic in a new book I’ve written titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. In it I counter the general helplessness that people feel about human nature. It’s a helplessness born of being human, quite literally. Just to exist as a human being involves an inheritance of opposites. As children we learn to curb the dark side of these opposites, but psychology hasn’t gotten much beyond Freud’s sad conclusion that civilization barely keeps a lid on our innate tendency to violence, sexual jealousy, hatred of others, and similar inherited woes.
If human nature has been in conflict since recorded history began, perhaps it should remain the elephant in the room. This seems to be a kind of silent consensus. People feel free to discuss almost anything except the presence of the divided self. Countries pass military budgets, cities support police forces, legislatures pass laws, all of which try to curb the worst in human nature, and yet the people passing the laws and paying for armies and police forces are afflicted with the same impulses they attempt to curb.

Despite the tendency to take these things for granted, human nature is not like the nature of a lion, dolphin, or any other creature—it isn’t really fixed or innate. We go beyond our nature all the time, which is why I chose the Greek word “meta,” which means beyond, in the book’s title. There is a well-known dictum that you cannot fix a problem at the level of the problem. This would seem to stymie any solution to the problem of human nature, because most people assume they are stuck with being human and all the defects this entails.

Rationality, science, art, education, and lawmaking constitute vast areas where we do not simply accept our divided self but build constructs that shape reality in an orderly, predictable, safe, and even beautiful way. The streets of Renaissance Italy were rife with gangs and family feuds (think of Romeo and Juliet) that gave rise to daily violence and danger, and yet Leonardo and Raphael flourished at the same time.

Going beyond has its limits, however. One could say that science and art and laws compensate for our inner conflicts without actually solving them. This seems obvious, in fact. Caravaggio, a great Italian painter, was on the run for murder and eventually died by violence in some obscure way no one has gotten to the bottom of. Corruption in politics, as well as the #MeToo movement, are indicators that the worst in human nature lurks in places of the highest positions and power.

In Metahuman I argue that going beyond hasn’t really been tested to the limit. There is a more powerful form of going beyond than art, science, laws, and even rationality. It involves going beyond human nature itself and undoing all the mental constructs that enfold us. The bald fact is that human nature is a self-created construct. The lower brain remains with us on our evolutionary journey, implanted with basic impulses like fight-or-flight. But Homo sapiens escaped from evolutionary jail thousands of years ago.

A lion is a lion because it’s a lion—there is no choice in the matter. Humans are self-created because we are self-aware. Thus we counter survival of the fittest by taking care of our weak, poor, and disabled. We educate ourselves to transcend instinct in favor of expanded awareness. In fact, expanded awareness is our whole purpose. Science and technology cannot exist unless you are aware that there is a challenge or problem to solve. Then you look inside for ideas that lead to a solution.

What this means is that awareness solves the conflicts inherit in human nature. Nothing can be changed if you aren’t aware of it. I am not addressing how difficult our problems are. My only aim is to point to the only true level of the solution that isn’t mired at the level of the problem. We have constructed imperfect societies, imposed religious beliefs that are shot through with mythology, and funded armies to project our need to be violent when called upon.

Yet the things we most value are not mental constructs. They include love, compassion, creativity, generosity, joy, curiosity, and the potential to grow. Leonardo had the mind and skill to paint the Mona Lisa, but he didn’t invent creativity. Einstein had brilliant scientific ideas, but he didn’t invent curiosity. The foundation for what we most value lies at the source of the mind, which is consciousness itself. Human nature was invented at a distance from the source. We can be sure of this because consciousness per se is not divided; it is whole.

Wholeness is uncreated. We exist and we are conscious. That is a statement of wholeness. Metahuman is based on the claim that existence and consciousness are the same. To be fully conscious, you only need to be here now. Everything else is at the level of the problem.

“Be here now” is a good catchphrase, devised by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who is still alive. Beyond the catchphrase lies the hidden reality that transcends all of our mental constructs. There is no apparent limit to human potential. We have infinite thoughts to think and infinite ways to express those thoughts. Yet the most brilliant thoughts are still secondary to consciousness itself. The fact is that humans live from the level of thought rather than the level of awareness. This is like knowing how to use a computer while suffering from amnesia about where computers come from.

I’ve only given a bare outline of what can be accomplished by going beyond. The essential thing is to go beyond human nature in order to find the source where human nature was invented. Only from there can we change human nature. Our other choice is to keep living with human nature and shrug off its defects as if they are inevitable. Which course seems better to you?

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify www.deepakchopra.com 

Do We Really Have Infinite Potential?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The human potential movement has existed for several decades, and in many ways is an alternative name for self-improvement. The urge to improve oneself exists naturally in everyone, unless outside forces like poverty damp it down. But the human potential movement is far more ambitious. It aims to open up a vast area of unexplored potential.

I argue in a new book titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential that the true foundation of human potential is infinite. At first that seems like a drastic overreach. Everyone experiences personal limitations that stop far, far short of the infinite. But let me make the case by first turning the whole premise of self-improvement on its head.

The typical way that human potential is approached starts with the limited individual and seeks to lessen these limitations. There’s a school of thought that believes in achieving a 10% increase in happiness, which is seen as a major step. The notion is that happiness is so difficult to understand that any improvement would have to be small. In an area like IQ, the goal is even smaller, because intelligence is accepted among experts to be fixed, budging very little from childhood. A third example is creativity, which would seem to allow for enormous improvement, but finding out what makes creative people creative has proved to be a frustrating and baffling business.

The problem in all these areas, I believe, isn’t human limitation but the wrong starting point. You can’t get to infinite potential by starting with finite potential. All of us start from infinity in certain areas, although we might not realize it. Your mind is capable of infinite thoughts, for example. You won’t actually have an infinite number of thoughts in a lifetime—the actual number is unknown but one assumes it is very large –yet the potential for infinite thought is the reservoir you draw on. You are free to think anything you want.

The same holds true for language. A reasonably large vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words is sufficient to create more sentences than the number of atoms in the universe. The infinite capacity of language parallels the capacity of thought, since thoughts are in words. Another kind of infinity exists with creativity. The potential number of paintings, photographs, and pieces of music that can possibly exist is unlimited.

Since we are already comfortable with the infinite in so many areas, why do we adopt a self-image that is severely limited? The two culprits are ego and the stories the ego builds around itself. What people don’t realize is that their egos have agendas. This agenda consists of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, following a constant stream of desires that want fulfillment, finding safety and security, and defending itself from threat.

To turn this agenda into reality is a skill we were all taught as children. A child is full of doubt and curiosity; everything in life demands to be tested. In the process of having desires, feeling insecure, wanting predictability, and pleasing our parents, we wobble towards maturity on a path that is different for everyone and yet the same. The ego accumulates experiences that must further its agenda in order to be acceptable. Too much pain, difficulty, vulnerability, embarrassment, defeat, and rejection by others constitute a major threat to the ego agenda.

Since life is unpredictable, it can bring any of those undesirable experience at any time. To defend against this possibility, the ego builds up a story about what a person’s life is all about, and in this story things are not unpredictable—far from it. Most people think, say, and do what they said, thought, and did yesterday. In this way we feel a measure of security, but it comes at the cost of losing our infinite potential. Nothing limits the unlimited reservoir of thoughts, words, and creativity except our self-imposed boundaries.

If the ego’s agenda actually worked, life might be fulfilling enough. However, there is no escaping the fact that the future is unknown, filled with awful possibilities the ego cannot defend against.

Deep down we all know this, but instead of dropping the ego agenda, we become more insecure and stick to it more rigidly. People cling desperately to money, possessions, status, power, and old habits with a fierceness that is in direct proportion to their deep insecurity. Nothing is ever enough to defend you against whatever life might bring. The human potential movement faces an uphill battle because of the inner struggle few of us ever resolves. We want to expand, improve, and better ourselves while at the same time we want to desperately cling to our story, which is founded on anxiety and insecurity.

In Metahuman I argue that beginning from infinite potential is the only way to escape the grip of one’s ego agenda. This doesn’t entail exceptional courage in the face of the unknown. It only involves going beyond your current level of awareness. Einstein observed, as have many others, that problems are not solved at the level of the problem. The ego and its agenda are a constant problem, so the solution is to go beyond the level of struggle where the ego rules.

“Meta” is the Greek word for beyond, and it points toward metahuman, a state of awareness that is fully conscious. The process of becoming metahuman is like waking up. You begin to investigate your personal story and to free yourself from it. The essential thing is to realize that you have edited, censored, reduced, and distorted reality. What you call real is a mind-made dream, spell, or illusion.

Life cannot be whole unless you are whole, a word most people find more comfortable than infinite. But they amount to the same thing. At the source of human awareness there is pure consciousness, the state of awareness that exists simply because it exists. Pure consciousness isn’t flat or empty, however. It is the source of the things we most value out of life: love, compassion, intelligence, creativity, and personal evolution. The closer you live from the source, the greater your share of these valuable things.

This possibility cannot come true until you test it personally. Instead of following an ego agenda, you must shift into a waking-up agenda. This reversal sounds drastic, but in reality it comes naturally once you start. Anything the mind has made the mind can unmake. The potential for metahuman is embedded in the human. We only have to notice and take advantage of the openings that life brings every day. Infinity has always been the right starting point for being truly human, and it beckons us again, as it has forever.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His anticipated book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, (October 1, 2019) unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities.
Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com 

It’s Much Better to Be Conscious than Smart

By Deepak Chopra, MD

If you had the choice, would you rather be smarter than you are or more aware? Go a step further. If a wizard came to you and said you could be either the smartest person in the world or the most aware, which would you choose?

It’s a symptom of the times, I think, that most people would choose to be smarter. We live in a world based on technology, wealth, and entrepreneurship. You have to be smart to succeed in those areas, and if you feel you are only average in intelligence, you are not likely to expect enormous success. The argument for being more aware is rarely made, yet by far choosing to be more aware is the better choice—and unlike IQ, you can increase your awareness.

I made this the theme of a new book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, so let me encapsulate the argument. Being smart, even very, very smart, doesn’t immunize you from living unconsciously. An unconscious life is driven by habits, fixed beliefs, second-hand opinions, social pressure, peer-group values, and old conditioning. To realize this, and then to escape its grip, requires awareness, not IQ.

A high IQ can even lead you deeper into an unconscious life, because very smart people generally believe they are right, so they strongly prefer their version of reality. This reduces the motivation to be open to new and unknown possibilities. It cements fixed habits and beliefs in place.

If you closely examine the lives of eminent scientists from Newton and Einstein to James Watson and Francis Crick, their greatest discoveries made a crucial breakthrough, but then each became trapped inside a cage of beliefs. Newton believed the Bible was literally true; Einstein was unable to accept quantum mechanics; Watson and Crick hold on to the mistaken notion that DNA dictates everything. Even the greatest “Aha!” moment, which defines a great mind, isn’t sufficient to make you more aware.

What awareness brings is freedom from fixed beliefs and habits. You don’t think through what’s wrong with your life as if a formula can be applied from the outside. The core message of Metahuman is that you are consciousness. You don’t have awareness the way you have blue eyes, curly hair, a short temper, or a flair for cooking. You are the awareness from which everything is made.

Once you have this insight, a radical shift occurs inside. You find yourself wanting to intensify the qualities of awareness that are the most valuable. It is undeniable that these qualities are essential to being human, and they include love, compassion, curiosity, creativity, and personal evolution. Everything we value comes from the inside, including science. Everything we do comes from the inside.

So how do we intensify those qualities we value most? We pay attention to them. This is the heart of what Buddhism calls non-doing. Instead of applying an idea, even a brilliant idea, you feel your way along, letting awareness guide you to the goal. Einstein made explicit reference to this when he said that a sense of wonder was essential to any great scientific discovery. Wonder isn’t a thought. Wonder is a quality of awareness, the opposite of taking things for granted.

To be unaware leads to taking far too much for granted, such as who you are, what you are capable of, and what the future holds. It is far too easy to lock things down in mental boxes and throw away the key, and this has happened in everyone’s life to some degree or other. Take any label you apply to yourself, and it is a box. “I am X” should be a mystery. We should all be saying “I am infinite consciousness and all the possibilities it contains.”

Instead, we are locked down in compartments like “I am an Indian male, trained in medicine, owning an apartment in New York, with a loving wife and two wonderful children.” Those are certainly not negatives. They imply a life that is working out well. But they are not me, and if I mistake myself for the labels that apply to me, I have adopted a provisional identity and mistaken it for the real me.

The Greek word “meta” means “beyond.” As used in Metahuman, the process of going beyond leads to an evolutionary leap in what it means to be human. It means no longer living a provisional identity, with limited experiences and confined expectations. Everything provisional is part of the virtual reality we accept in everyday life. The visionary poet William Blake called these our “mind-forg’d manacles.”

The human mind creates wonderful things and dreadful things. We spend our lives racing after the one and avoiding the other. The only thing the mind cannot create is consciousness. To be aware is the same, for a human being, as existing. The secret that modern technological society has lost is that existence takes care of itself. To be aware isn’t like a blank sheet of paper. Awareness brings you close to the source of the most valued things, as mentioned earlier. But more importantly, being aware aligns you with the creative impulse in Nature.

This alignment, known in Sanskrit as Dharma, allows someone to live without struggle. By going beyond everyday reality, you shift your allegiance to metareality. In metareality consciousness is not impeded by ego, memory, beliefs, opinions, and old conditioning. When people aspire to live in the present moment, they may not realize that they are aspiring to metareality. But by remaining inside mental constructs, we cannot live in the present. The past will always weigh us down, and the present will unconsciously repeat the past, no matter how hard we try to make this not happen.

For all these reasons, it is much better to be more aware than smarter. Being more aware will also make you smarter in the bargain, because a conscious person makes better choices than an unconscious person. If people understood this, there would be a rush to live more consciously. I can’t think of a better goal for every person as well as the entire human race.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His anticipated book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, (October 1, 2019) unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities.
Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com 

The Balanced Mind: A Better Model

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Now that meditation has caught on widely, it’s time to understand why it works. The physical findings measured by neuroscience gives intriguing hints about changes in brain wave activity, but that’s an effect, not a cause. The same holds true for physiological changes outside the brain, such as lowered heart rate and blood pressure. The how and why of meditation must be sought “in here,” in the meditator’s subjective experience.

This isn’t a mysterious route to take. Pain studies are based on how much pain a subject feels; there is no objective way to measure this. In the case of meditation, I believe the correct model is that the mind in meditation is rebalancing itself. Medical studies have known for a long time that the body tends toward a state of dynamic balance known as homeostasis. If you push your body out of balance by shoveling snow off the driveway or running a marathon, as soon as you stop that activity, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen use in the muscles, and even digestion and the immune system return to homeostatic balance.

Something similar is supported by psychological studies into emotion—everyone seems to have a set point for a level of mood to which they return after an emotional event, whether the event is happy or sad. But the notion that the mind rebalances itself is new. We all pay attention chiefly to the activity whirling around in our heads, and this activity takes only brief pauses here and there, awaiting the time when we fall asleep, where conscious activity ceases (except in dreams). So it has never seemed that the mind is rebalancing itself. Indeed, what would that even feel like?

I believe that meditation wouldn’t work unless the mind already had a rebalancing mechanism. It’s not as if meditation is magical. It only deepens what the mind naturally does already, the way that relaxation techniques deepen the relaxed state that the body returns to in homeostasis.

If we look closely into our own experience, it isn’t hard to identify the states of mind that rebalance it. The names we give to different kinds of meditation techniques shows the way.

Mindfulness

Self-Inquiry

Reflection

Contemplation

Concentration

Prayer

Quiet mind

Controlled breathing

Bliss

I believe that these techniques are simply ways of deepening a process that the mind already uses to rebalance itself.

Mindfulness is how your mind rebalances distraction. You are brought back into the present moment. This is naturally where every cell in your body lives. It is also where the mind should live.

Self-Inquiry is how your mind rebalances habits. By asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” you bring conscious choice into a situation where you have been ruled by habits, routines, obsessive behavior, knee-jerk reactions, and outworn beliefs.

Reflection is how your mind rebalances thoughtlessness. You regard your behavior, see what is self-defeating or heedless about it, and realize what is actually going on. The mind is naturally thoughtful when it reflects upon itself.

Contemplation is how your mind rebalances confusion. When faced with multiple choices, each with its points pro and con, you sort everything out by contemplating the situation until you have clarity. The mind naturally prefers clarity over confusion.

Concentration how your mind rebalances pointlessness. It is pointless to do a careless job, having careless opinions, and relate to other people in a lazy, careless way. It creates many kinds of trouble when you feel that life is pointless. By concentrating itself, the mind gets absorbed in something deeply enough that it has a point. This satisfied the mind’s natural urge to find life meaningful.

Prayer how your mind rebalances helplessness. By contacting a higher power, you no longer feel isolated, alone, small, and lost. Those are the qualities of helplessness, and for centuries humans have summoned God or the gods to bring a higher power into their lives. The mind naturally wants to be rid of feeling powerless.

Quiet mind how your mind rebalances restlessness. The mind is constantly processing daily life and its challenges, but when mental activity becomes restless, there is a risk of exhaustion, anxiety, and mental agitation. The mind naturally wants to be quiet when no activity is necessary. In peace and quiet lies the simple contentment of existence, but also the potential for confronting the next situation that demands a response.

Controlled breathing is how your mind rebalances stress. Stress is the term we’ve devised for an imbalanced state of mind and body under pressure. Breathing becomes rapid and irregular. Behind the scenes many other signs of imbalance are occurring, but breathing is connected to the whole issue of responding to pressure. By taking a few deep breaths, sighing deeply, or falling asleep (a natural state of regular, relaxed breathing), a choice has been made to return to balance.

Bliss is how your mind rebalances suffering. The mind naturally prefers well-being to suffering, no matter how much we rationalize that certain forms of suffering are good for us. Bliss, joy, or ecstasy is a state of perfect happiness. It seems to arrive unpredictably, but we all have experienced it, and the mind wants to be there as much as possible. Bliss is a natural state; suffering is an unnatural distortion, a kind of persistent bad vibration that destroys the mind’s good vibrations.

This new model contrasts with age-old viewpoints about the mind being like a monkey, a metaphor often cited from Indian traditions, or like the struggle between virtue and sin or angels and demons, which is more Christian. We need to go beyond metaphors now. Clearly the human mind is the source of our greatest achievements. This alone is enough to support the notion that the mind isn’t a battlefield of happiness versus suffering. The mind is a self-balancing process in constant dynamic motion that is subject to imbalances that create conflict, confusion, and suffering.

The advantage of this model is that it allows meditation to become more central as a healing mode. By accentuating the mind’s rebalancing ability and deepening it, by bringing the mind’s natural tendencies under our conscious control, meditation in all its forms is the most natural way to heal our minds of everyday difficulties, without any side effects. From this modest basis all the promises of higher consciousness can be explored, because they are only a further deepening of the same processes.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His anticipated book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, (October 1, 2019) unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities.
Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com 

accel-kkr.com

By Deepak Chopra, MD
It feels to many people as if we’re living in a Humpty-Dumpty time, when everything has gone smash. A sense of chaos and disorder permeates everything, and as you look around, there’s no longer any consensus about the most basic facts. Reality has become the clash of opposing viewpoints. When the phrase “alternative facts” first hit the media, it was met with jeers. Now it’s the definition of our troubling times.

What’s missing isn’t what people usually point to—order, tradition, solid values, and cooperation. Those things depend entirely on the real missing element, which T.S. Eliot poetically called “the still point of the turning world.” For the fact is that chaos isn’t new; disorder has threatened humanity throughout recorded history. The only way for chaos to be defeated is to have a firm foundation, something so solid, immovable, and permanent that we can build upon it. Otherwise, anything we try to build stands on sand.

A phrase like “solid foundation” sounds physical and rock-like, but Eliot understood that nothing more is needed than a fixed point. In his mind that point was God, and civilization has agreed with him. Organized religion issues articles of faith and dogma, on which an entire culture can rise. All of these proclamations of truth stem from truth with a capital T, the almighty. God is like a point because in an age of faith, God is always at the center of everything, the way a merry-go-round might have, at its very center, an invisible dot that doesn’t turn.

The trend in modern society for two generations at least has been the steady dissolution of faith in organized religion. Its replacement was science, whose foundation isn’t a still point but a methodology: the search for objective facts. Whatever you think about science, its methodology has been supremely successful in discovering the mechanics behind the universe, but it has done nothing to cure our unease over disorder and chaos. Quite the opposite—with every passing year the universe can feel more unstable, unknowable, and mysterious.

This, however, is not the business of the average person going about the routines of daily life. Even if the New York Times announced tomorrow that physics has achieved its holy grail, a Theory of Everything that can predict the movement of every single particle in the universe since the big bang, this epic achievement would do nothing about our unease over climate change, refugees, Putin’s Russia, or anything else in the Humpty-Dumpty world.

If religion has lost its authority and science is occupied with cosmic issues, who or what will heal this chaos?

The answer is at once reassuring and bothersome. The only still point of the turning world is you. Until you discover your own center, a place immune to change, the world will be an out of control merry-go-round. This isn’t a glib metaphor. Imagine a carnival carousel in your mind’s eye. Once you see it, shift your viewpoint to the following different perspectives:

  • See the carousel spinning as you stand outside it on the ground.
  • Take a bird’s eye view and see the carousel rotating from above.
  • Get on a horse and see the world as you go around and around, up and down.
  • Find the center post of the carousel and lean against it, watching the world spin while you appear to be stationary.

What you’ve done is an exercise in non-Einstein relativity. You have shifted viewpoints in any direction you want to—this isn’t limited to the viewpoints listed above. You could if you wanted to view the carousel from the moon, or Alpha Centauri, or any place in the cosmos. The ability of the human mind to change viewpoints makes us unique among living creatures (we assume).

This isn’t just a special talent—it is who we are. Take any situation in world history, and it is open to countless viewpoints. It is mind-blowing enough to realize that reality is different for each person, but inside each person there are as many viewpoints as you happen to want. Think of any historical figure: Buddha, Napoleon, Mozart, Rudolf Valentino, anybody.

With no effort at all, you can imagine this person from the viewpoint of:

  • A historian describing the march of history.
  • The person’s mother or father.
  • A doctor listening to his heart.
  • A tailor measuring him for clothes.
  • A beggar watching him go by on the street.

These are only the tiniest quotient of viewpoints. You could take any figure in history—or in your private life—and have a different reaction to him or her at every moment in your life.

Now we are at the heart of the issue. Chaos and disorder are mental points of view. We construct them out of thoughts, beliefs, opinions, prejudices, expectations, and fears. There is nothing about reality that is not structured “in here” in our own consciousness. The fact that there are infinite viewpoints isn’t the problem. Without shifting viewpoints, we’d never have art, music, literature, science, medicine, and so on.

The problem arises when we forget that these constructs are mind-made and can be unmade. Once you decide that chaos is real, you become the victim of your own forgetfulness. Truth with a capital T isn’t God, not anymore in the modern secular world. Truth with a capital T is the immutable, changeless, eternal, ever-present awareness that is the still point of the restless mind.

Therefore, there is nothing outside us that needs to be discovered in order to turn chaos into orderliness. Chaos and orderliness are like a stream that flows without end that also has standing eddies. The river sends water downstream without apparent design, yet the eddies remain constant even as they are in motion. Which do you prefer to see, the river or the eddies?

The fact that you even have this choice proves that you are beyond order and chaos. I hope that this conclusion surprises or even shocks you. What would it be like to live as the still point of the turning world? We will discuss this unique possibility next.

(To be cont.)

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com