What You Don’t Know Can Change Your Life

By Deepak Chopra, MD

We’ve all met people who shrug off their lack of knowledge by saying, “Ignorance is bliss,” but who takes that seriously? The modern world is built upon levels of understanding and knowledge. Our life isn’t blissful, but without a doubt the sciences and technology we base our lives upon represent mountains of knowledge and mountain ranges of data, experimentation, and research studies.

It is baffling, then, to consider a famous remark attributed by Plato to his mentor Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.” Why did the greatest Greek philosopher claim that his teacher said this? It makes Socrates seem to be anti-knowledge. In fact, he was, because the kind of knowledge Socrates opposed was specious knowledge. His philosophical antagonists, the Sophists, taught the better class of young men in Athens, and what they transmitted, if we translate it into modern terms, was the validity of objective facts. What Socrates taught was intuitive inner knowing. That’s why it is possible to say in the same breath, “Know thyself” and “All I know is that I know nothing.”

To unravel his meaning even more deeply, Socrates wasn’t claiming that intuitive inner knowing was superior to objective facts. As we all experience—and as scientists constantly remind us—the subjective world “in here” is capricious, changeable, unpredictable, and filled with imagination and therefore unreal things.

Setting aside subjectivity is the bedrock of science and its pursuit of objective truth—the Sophist position seems to have won out in the end. But unfortunately for that position, all-knowing occurs subjectively. You can know something that originates inside, like feeling sad or having a sore elbow, or you can know something that occurs apparently outside yourself, like the score of the World Series or the atomic weight of potassium. Either way, the knowing takes place subjectively, through the mind.

We can take it for granted that “Know thyself” points in the direction of this process of knowing things. Knowing things and making things go together. What we know—music, art, engineering, chemistry, etc.—turns into all the things humans make or do. What is so peculiar about the link between knowing and making is that no one has the slightest idea where knowing comes from, only that it is entirely necessary. The universe is engaged in a creative process at every level that produces something out of nothing, because at bottom, all physical objects are invisible ripples in the quantum field, which itself springs from a vacuum or void. (You might want to look at the last post “The Magic behind Creation,” where the inexplicable nature of creation was covered.)

Even more peculiar is the fact that our thoughts spring from nothing, in the sense that your next thought, whatever it is, isn’t built from previous ingredients the way a cake is made from basic ingredients combined according to a recipe. However a thought spring to mind, it is simply there, by itself. Humans can think logically, which strings thoughts together. We use language, which requires basic ingredients taught in school. But all the grammar and syntax in the world cannot explain why a thought actually means something.

In some way, the mind knows. It also knows that it knows. A doctor knows what he learned in medical school, for example, and he knows that he knows it. But it is nearly impossible to define what knowing is, pure and simple. This is the mystery Socrates was referring to when he said, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Like him, we are all immersed in knowing all kinds of things both subjective and objective, yet lacking a grasp of what it means to know.

This hole in the middle of human understanding turns out to have great value. If you investigate knowing, you are taken deeper and deeper into how the mind works. This is a unique journey, radically unlike any other. If you are a physicist and delve deep into the physical world, at some point “something” vanishes back into “nothing”—you have reached the void or vacuum state from which the physical universe magically appears. If on the other hand you delve into the subjective world, thoughts also vanish into nothing (i.e., silence), which is a kind of void also, from which the mind mysteriously appears.

But if you delve into knowing, no matter how deeply you explore, it never vanishes. To be conscious, it isn’t necessary to think, but it is necessary to know. Knowing is inseparable from consciousness. You aren’t conscious because you know X, Y, or Z but simply by being here, existing as a conscious being. At every moment in life we exercise our knowingness by applying it to X, Y, and Z. This mental activity is the job of knowing, you might say, but it’s one job you cannot be fired from.

Let’s accept that knowingness exists by itself, prior to any mental activity. The journey doesn’t stop there. Look deeper, and two things emerge: you can’t find out where knowing begins, where it came from, and you can’t locate it in the human brain. The brain knows how to organize itself, each brain cell knows how to organize itself, and the same knowing pertains to molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and the quantum field. Knowing is indissoluble, and irreducible—it is everywhere in Nature.

Moreover, it is the same knowing wherever you look. A quark that knows how to organize itself isn’t inferior to an atom, molecule, cell, or brain. Every link in the chain must know not only how to organize itself, but how to seamlessly produce the next link in the chain. Without the quark, no brain. When “nothing” created “something,” it already knew what it was doing, not just in the visible universe but in the vacuum state before the visible universe was created.

Therefore, every level of Nature has in common the trait of knowing, which is applied to the major task shared by all things: self-creation. After all, if knowing is essential at every level of Nature, it is uncreated at any level. Knowing has to know itself before it can create anything. There is no reason to believe that self-knowledge and self-creation will ever stop, which is the same as saying that evolution is something else Nature knows how to organize.

If you look at yourself in this light, a great change occurs in your self-image. You are no longer an isolated speck in the cosmos that won a random lottery by getting a human brain. You stand at the center of the cosmic process of self-knowing, self-organizing, self-creating consciousness, which is constantly evolving. You are the knowingness that permeates everything.

My co-author, physicist Menas Kafatos, and I encapsulated this into a single concept, “You are the universe,” which then became a book with that title. Yet the important thing isn’t a concept at all. “You are the universe” is the dynamic state of knowing that occurs at every second, and this process constitutes who you really are, what you are doing, and why you are here.

 

 

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 

The Magic Behind Creation

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Magic is supposed to be a primitive belief, and in modern society it has largely disappeared. Science and technology are not only triumphs of rationality; they represent victories over magic, which is irrational. It is magical to explain thunder as the anger of the gods. It is magical to believe in the story of Creation taking place in seven days as related in the Book of Genesis.

But magic clings stubbornly to a foothold in our lives. Children are delighted by it, and not just children. Einstein said that he was the most unlikely person to discover relativity, but the theory came to him due to a streak of wonder that he had retained from childhood. Wonder is the wide-eyed reaction a child has on seeing a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, and Einstein claimed that no great discoveries could be made in science without a sense of wonder at Nature’s mysteries.

All of this sounds old-fashioned and quaint now that science has come to dominate our lives much more—inconceivably more—than in Einstein’s lifetime, and if we go back to the life of Newton, we discover that besides being the greatest scientist before Einstein, Newton was a devout Christian with fundamentalist views of creation—he spent years trying to assign specific dates to Genesis and all the events in the Old Testament.

It irritates rationalists to see magic hanging around, just as it irritates atheists to see God hanging around. But there’s a sound reason for magic to persist: without it, creation cannot be explained. Despite our modern devotion to logic and reason, when you look at any level of creation, a powerful magic is at work.

No one knows where a thought comes from, even given the most intensive investigation into the brain. Thoughts are words in our heads, but brain cells don’t speak. No one knows how exceptional gifts come about, such as child prodigies in music like Mozart. No matter how deeply geneticists investigate DNA, a gene can’t play the piano, and the gene that gives a three-year-old the ability to play the piano is beyond explaining.

At every level, creation springs seemingly out of nowhere. This is more than a casual thought. Modern physics deals seriously with the issue known as “something out of nothing.” The something is the universe and everything in it. The nothing is the quantum vacuum state, which is the zero point of creation. In the quantum vacuum state there is no time, space, matter, or energy. There is only the potential for those things.

At some point the vacuum state starts to vibrate, although no one knows why. “Why” is a tricky word in science, and some scientists don’t even consider it valid. Cosmology knows a great deal about what happened during the big bang some 14 billion years ago, but why it happened hardly makes sense. It happened because it happened. This is essentially the whole story of something out of nothing. As ripples spread across the quantum field and other primal fields like the gravity field, the familiar territory of the universe came about.

We have time, space, matter, and energy, the basic setup of creation, because they are there. Without them, existence is inconceivable, quite literally. As the product of time, space, matter, and energy, the human brain is confined within them. The brain radically limits what we can perceive. Dogs and bats hear frequencies of sound that we cannot; eagles see better; foxes hear better, and so on.

Whatever lies beyond your ability to perceive is magic. Until you perceive something, you can’t understand it, and the basic quality of magic is that you cannot see how it is done. You can look upon the magic behind creation with wonder or ignore it altogether. Einstein commented that either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle. You can practice a bit of linguistic cleverness and say that “nothing” (the quantum vacuum) is equally a miracle with “everything” (the universe).

These broad generalizations don’t impact our lives directly, but they should. There is magic behind everything in your everyday life. The brain’s ability to produce the visible world is magic, since the brain is totally dark and has no pictures in it. Your next thought is magic, because it comes spontaneously out of nowhere, and there is no physical explanation for thought to exist in the first place—it is not as though the common atoms and molecules in a brain cell should think why the same molecules in a skin cell don’t.

The clash between magic and reason lies behind the conflict between science and religion, but this conflict is unnecessary. Magic is essential to creation, no matter what creation story you apply to it, whether the Book of Genesis or the big bang. Something out of nothing has no rational explanation, and yet being rational creatures (some of the time), humans need a way to live with magic that isn’t simply dumbstruck wonder.

This need links so-called primitive creation myths and modern cosmology—once you adopt either of them, you can live comfortably with magic. Your daily life can proceed without being struck dumb—usually with fear—by the next thunderstorm. The ability to be comfortable has its limits, though. Nature lords it over us with power we cannot control. Lightning, tsunamis, and earthquakes must be tolerated, both in prehistoric times and now.

However, destructive magic and the magic behind creation are the same; they both can be traced back to something out of nothing. To come to terms with this magic, creation stories aren’t good enough. When you see a child prodigy, a newborn baby, Hubble telescope photos of supernovae exploding, or proof of black holes, it’s not sufficient to say, “There goes the quantum field again, rippling away.”

The human urge to understand everything won’t be satisfied until we penetrate the veil of magic. Reality is unsatisfactory if we are forced to admit total bafflement in the face of creation, particularly if that bafflement extends to everything, big and small, in the universe. Penetrating the veil of magic leads to understanding how stars, life on Earth, evolution, the human brain, and your next thought are created. The challenge is huge, and we will take it up in our next discussion.

(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 

Ending Our Fear of Death

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Fear is a powerful force, nowhere more so than when it comes to death and dying. By comparison, the solutions for solving other fears seem useless. You cannot test your fear; you cannot feel it and move on anyway. There is little reason to trust other people who seem to have no such fear. They have no more valid experience of dying than any other person who is alive.

It is reported that near-death experiences leave survivors without any fear of death, because they have seen the other side and found it unfearful. But near-death experiences, although highly publicized, are rare, even among patients who have died on the table in the emergency room, generally from a heart attack, and been resuscitated. You can take hope from their anecdotal stories—and millions do—but the information remains second-hand.

Fear of death is unique in the hold it has over us, and we spend our lives hiding or suppressing it. The prospect of not existing seems too overwhelming to face. But in one respect, despite its uniqueness, the fear of death can be faced and dismantled. There is a cure that is available to anyone. It consists of exposing death as an illusion,

This is the last solution people seek, in all probability, because death looks so real, and the sight of a corpse is frightening and disturbing to most of us. Instead of bringing our fear of death to light, we feel too emotional to begin. But overcoming your emotions puts the cart before the horse. Our fear and revulsion didn’t arise by themselves; they are the coating, as it were, that surrounds the core of illusion, an after-effect rather than the cause.

We can trace the cause backwards by dissecting the illusion in stages, beginning with the top layer and working toward the source of the fear that gave rise to everything else, as follows:

  • When my body dies, I die.
  • I am my body.
  • I reside inside my body and need it to survive.
  • Death is the opposite of life.
  • Death is non-existence.
  • Nothing is worse than non-existence.

As you can see, fear of death is a layered belief system; it isn’t a simple belief. To overcome this fear each layer must be dismantled, which means exposing the belief as false and processing the emotions tangled up in the belief. Taken one step at a time, the process of dismantling isn’t difficult. The difficulty arises when we try to attack fear of death all at once. That tactic is doomed, given how many false ideas are woven together inside our fear.

Let me show how the dismantling process works by briefly confronting each layer of fear.

  1. When my body dies, I die. This idea has only an emotional basis, generally rooted in childhood when a pet dies and our parents are at a loss to console us. This lack of consolation goes viral, we might say, as the years bring more experience of death. The rational mind knows that there is no data from the brain of a dead person, no credible witnessing beyond the grave, and so on. So this idea can be put on the shelf as unproven and unprovable.
  2. I am my body. This idea is actually just an assumption. One can just as easily say, “I am my mind.” Since the whole difficulty concerns the question of whether the mind dies with the body, it does no good to claim as a fact that you are your body. The current belief in neuroscience is that the mind arises from the brain, so if the brain dies, the mind is extinguished. But there is no proof that the brain produces the mind, and much evidence that it doesn’t, since no one has been able to show that the quite ordinary atoms and molecules that constitute a brain cell ever learned to think.
  3. I reside inside my body and need it to survive. This idea is somewhat different from the first two ideas, because it isn’t an assumption but a misperception. We learned as children to perceive the world “out there” from a position “in here.” But perception is unreliable until it is examined. When you cut your finger, the pain is perceived in the finger when we know logically that the sensation is actually processed in the brain. You can scan your body up and down quite easily, and you can scan the world around you just as easily. This implies that perception isn’t trapped “in here.” The possibility that perception has no fixed location helps to dismantle the misperception that “in here” and “out there” are opposites.
  4. Death is the opposite of life. It is clear that all created forms come and go. Thoughts arise and fade. The body you have includes trillions of cells that were not present when you were two years old. This all points to a simple reality: creation is in flux. Change is constant, and therefore a continuum. What we term death is a concept by which we attempt to fix arbitrary boundaries in a continuum that has no such boundaries. It is false to say that a heart or brain cell is alive while the atoms inside it are dead. The whole thing is purely a mental construct that we created and therefore can uncreate.
  5. Death is non-existence. Now we are getting close to the seed or source of the whole illusion. To say and feel that someone who has died no longer exists is a frightening prospect. But we don’t actually know what non-existence is. Our only connection to not existing is by thinking about it, and thinking by definition exists. Likewise, if we equate non-existence with the extinguishing of consciousness, our only connection is to think about having no consciousness, which is a conscious thought. It is impossible to frame any acceptable reality to non-existence except within the domain of existence, and for a human being, existence must be conscious.
  6. Nothing is worse than non-existence. Finally we get at the core illusion, the one thing fear depends upon when it comes to death. Being aware that we exist and are conscious, we don’t want those things to vanish. In fact, such a vanishing act seems to occur every night when we go to sleep, but all that really happens is that we lose our personal point of view when we sleep. A personal point of view is the product of a separate “I” that identifies with everyday experience, and everyday experience is filtered through mental activity.

But clearly mental activity isn’t the mind, just as the miles on a speedometer isn’t a car. The car and the mind both move, but they don’t have to in order to exist. Silent mind can easily be experienced. There is a silent gap between any two thoughts or sensations.

The experience of silent mind, sleep, and simply tuning out for a moment isn’t fearful in the slightest. These experiences are not even close to non-existence. In fact, non-existence cannot be experienced, since by definition you have to exist to have any experience.

Once you realize that non-existence cannot be experienced, with or without a physical body, there is nothing to fear. However vividly you imagine a fire-breathing dragon, it can’t arouse true fear. An elaborate fiction can be built around dragons, but entering their imaginative domain is a choice, and ultimately we know the choice is pure imagination. The same holds true when we choose to enter the domain where death is the ultimate fear. Once you pierce the mask of illusion, you can choose to exit the domain where this fear exists, and then you are free.

 

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 

The Best Way to Change Your Life: Getting Unstuck

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are lots of reasons to consider the human mind is unfathomable, beginning with simple evidence like the thousands of psychology books on the market and the years of training required to become a licensed psychiatrist. But it is possible to create huge changes in how your mind is working, here and now, that do not require in-depth knowledge.

Instead, all that is needed is the habit of watching yourself. Life is about action and reaction. Very complex and tangled influences may be at work—and almost certainly are—but they mostly remain undercover. What we experience is action and reaction, which leads to each person’s unique pattern of behaving.

Looking at your behavior on the scale of months and years, or even days and weeks, is impossible, because everyone has thousands of thoughts that lead to thousands of actions and reactions. But it is very different, and much easier, to simply look at what happens next. If you look at your next reaction to anything—an incident at work, a phone call, your child running in with a scraped knee—the same thing happens next: you do something based on the past.

You possess a backlog, a virtual library, of memories that imprinted how you acted and reacted. Some people are more predictable than others in how they act and react—a frontline soldier confronts very limited options compared with a philosopher. But everyone consults a library of set responses when the next thing happens.

If these set responses work out reasonably well, most people are satisfied. They react and move on. But if you take a moment to observe your next reaction, some disturbing clues emerge about what is actually going on inside you. These observations include the following:

  • Your reactions are knee-jerk and not actually thought through.
  • Being the product of memory, your reaction is repeating the past rather than meeting the present moment.
  • Set responses make you a robot of the past.
  • If you think you are living in the present, you are the victim of an illusion.

These observations describe someone who is stuck. Stuckness doesn’t need a technical definition. Look around, and you will see people repeating themselves all the time, engaging in mindless daily routines, arguing over the same old things in relationship, feeling uncomfortable with change, and suffering pain and frustration because their lives never seem to improve.

None of that sounds desirable, so why do we content ourselves with being stuck? Again observation provides an answer. If you look at your next reaction, there is a push-and-pull between the positive and negative aspects of being stuck.

Positive: Routine makes life predictable and reassuring. Repetition is the path of least resistance. It feels safe to know where you stand. Fixed reactions remove the threat of the unknown.

Negatives: Routine is stifling and boring. Repetition is stultifying. It feels empty to think of yourself as a known quantity, with nothing new to offer. By not welcoming the unknown, all avenues of creativity, discovery, and curiosity are cut off.

If you consider the positives and negatives for a moment, there’s no contest. Everyone would want to get unstuck. Tolerating a routine, repetitive existence leads nowhere. We all know this inside, even if we have to dig deep to admit the truth. Money, skill, and status don’t make a difference, which is why doctors have a high burnout rate.

The real problem isn’t stuckness but not knowing how to get unstuck. The simple step already mentioned—observing your own reactions—is the key. Stuckness represents a surrender to unconscious habits, beliefs, and old conditioning. To undo their hold on you, you must first observe how these influences work. You cannot change what you aren’t aware of.

What should you start noticing? Very simple things, really.

  • Notice when you say something you said before.
  • Notice when you react the same way you reacted in the past.
  • Notice when other people tune you out.
  • Notice how you actually feel, here and now.
  • Notice when you resort to anxiety or anger.

Many times, all you have to do is to observe these repeated reactions and they will start to dissolve and dissipate. You are exchanging an unconscious existence for a conscious one, and living consciously is both the remedy and the goal of getting unstuck. But there is also a simple action you can take. When you notice any of the reactions on the list—in other words, any obvious repetition of old conditioning—stop at once.

By stopping you tell your unconscious mind that you don’t want to operate on autopilot. What happens next? Wait and see. Most of the time, especially at first, the old conditioning will force its way back. Autopilot has had years of reinforcement. It thinks it knows what to do in any situation. Only you have the power to wake up from this fixed notion, because only your conscious mind can turn the autopilot off.

Getting unstuck requires nothing more than what I’ve described. Everyone has conscious moments, many of them in fact. No one is ever completely robotic. We sense the upwelling of love, joy, curiosity, altruism, sympathy, insight, and intuition. These are non-reactive responses. Diminish your automatic reactions and expand your responses to life here and now. Again, that is both the remedy and the goal. The fully conscious life is the best life. To discover that this is so, the place to begin is by getting unstuck.

 

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 

Trading In the Afterlife for One Life

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Every doctrine of the afterlife has run into the same problem, which is that of belief. For centuries the existence of life after death has been couched in religious terms, which necessitates believing in religion before the question of the afterlife can be approached. Is it possible to say something more firmly grounded than mere belief, which falls so short of certainty?
With the continuing decline of organized religion in developed countries, a strain of rational atheism has arisen that seems to have the backing of science. In this view, since we lack data from people who have died, there is no reason to abide by age-old myths concerning a promise of life after death. Fundamentally, the death and decay of the physical body points to the death of the mind, because to a physicalist the mind is a product of the brain.

The weakness in this viewpoint is twofold. First, it is founded on unproven assumptions. No one has proved that the brain produces the mind, only that brain activity parallels mental activity. By analogy, the heart beats faster when someone gets excited emotionally, but by no means does this prove that the heart produces emotions. The second flaw is that receiving no data from people who have died begs the question. Entire theories of cosmology delve into string theories and the multiverse with no data and indeed no chance of gathering any data. There are certain boundaries that physical exploration cannot cross, but this obstacle doesn’t invalidate their existence.

Nor is atheism the only rational choice. The 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal devised a famous wager in the face of his own doubt about God. A rational person, Pascal argued, should believe in God, because if God doesn’t exist, only a small loss is incurred by following the strictures of religion, while if God does exist, eternal life would be gained after death. The argument is just as rationally based as modern scientific atheism, and it is pertinent that Pascal was also a mathematician.

But both of these rational tactics do little more than speculate about probabilities. Belief, whatever its flaws, has proved comforting to those who have it. What’s needed is a view of the afterlife that is reassuring in the face of fear and not based on probabilities. For that, I believe the important factor is a credible theory of life, for without this, a theory of death has no basis.
The most credible theory of life that we have isn’t physical, which will surprise most people. (I’ve backed up this contention in a previous blog, “Should You Plan on Your Next Incarnation.”) Except among hardline materialists (which admittedly constitute the majority of scientists) it seems highly plausible that consciousness is woven into the fabric of creation; it is not a property that emerged from a more basic property.

As the pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck declared in a 1931 interview with the Observer newspaper in London, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Almost ninety years later, physics is gradually but steadily coming around to the same conclusion.

Let’s accept as the basis for a theory of life that life is conscious, even if the consciousness of a virus, an oak tree, a frog, and a chimpanzee is foreign and far removed from the human experience of consciousness. The next step is to humanize a theory of life to make it matter personally. After all, when we can bring ourselves to think about our own death, the issue is very personal.
Fear of death is so powerful that it blocks clear thinking, but here are some premises about consciousness that hold water. The first is that every experience has the same three aspects. There is a knower who knows his experience through the process of knowing. Whether we are referring to a sore tooth, viewing the Mona Lisa, or reading the words on this page, the same three elements—knower, known, and process of knowing—are contained in the experience.

There is every reason to suppose that this is the basic setup for the human mind. We know no other setup, and if another one exists—for example, if galaxies perceive themselves consciously—it will be inaccessible from our own setup. In fact, the consciousness of a pet dog or cat is just as inaccessible, no matter how closely we observe their behavior.

In the setup of knower, known, and process of knowing, all three elements are unified—you cannot have one without the others. Therefore, separating out the physical body and giving it a privileged position is invalid. There is nothing about the dying body that proves the extinction of the mind, any more than the dying away of your next thought proves that your body is dying. Every phenomenon is transient, yet life persists because consciousness persists to sustain it.

The fact that the cells in your body have a limited lifetime dictated by DNA, with stomach cells dying in less than a week, red blood corpuscles in a few months, and bone cells after years, doesn’t threaten the body. The body remains intact through a non-physical trait, memory. The body remembers how to exist as a whole entity, and within this memory, one finds precision, intelligence, detailed technical knowledge about how to build a cell, and an intricate system of cooperation among various organs.
This is like seeing a building stand even though bricks are replaced in and out of it constantly—the blueprint holds it together, we can say, but in the case of the body the blueprint is alive. It responds dynamically to everything happening inside and outside the body. To say that DNA has this capacity is another invalid claim. DNA controls the production of enzymes and proteins inside a cell. This is a critical function for the maintenance of life but has almost no bearing on how the human body as a whole sustains itself as a dynamic living entity.

The body is sustained by a quality observed in every natural system: wholeness. Wholeness keeps every level of life intact: atoms and molecules, DNA, proteins and enzymes, a community of cells in a tissue, then an organ, and finally a body. This can be seen as an extension of the unity between knower, known, and the process of knowing, because in its own way, every atom, molecule, cell, tissue, organ, and body has to know what it is doing. To know what it is doing requires the other two elements of knower and known.

Taking a bird’s eye view, all life forms recycle the same triad of knower, known, and process of knowing in a distinctive way. This is also true of you and me. We know ourselves as individuals, and seven billion individuals on planet Earth construct unique lives out of knower, known, and process of knowing. Our setup is different from other species of consciousness in that we have self-awareness, which (we suppose) is a uniquely human trait.

The flaw in the setup arises when we take self-awareness in the wrong direction. We identify with “I,” a fixed ego-personality inhabiting a fixed physical body. In reality, at any given moment the body is provisional, a snapshot in time capturing the endless, dynamic recycling of its basic materials. Likewise, “I” is also a snapshot capturing a fleeting moment in the endless stream of consciousness that constitutes our inner life.

You are no more the self you were at age two than your body is that of a two-year-old’s. All identity is provisional, liable to the flux of time. What isn’t provisional is the persistence of knower-known-process of knowing. It recycles the flow of physical and mental life without altering in its essential status. Its essential status is as firm and lasting as existence itself. Every lifespan observable in Nature is sustained and kept intact by the invisible meshing of non-change in the midst of change.

I regard this as the most reliable foundation for losing our fear of death. With a clear view of how life actually works, and how absolutely essential it is for wholeness to govern all of life at every level, we can place our trust in eternal life. Wholeness will never let us go. Ultimately, eternal life isn’t a religious or spiritual matter. Eternal life rests upon eternal consciousness. The argument for eternal consciousness is at least as solid as our sense of being human and of accepting the universe around us. In the future, if a more evolved explanation appears, it is highly likely to cement together even more strongly the unity of existence, life, and consciousness.

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