Should You Plan for Your Next Incarnation?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Do you believe in reincarnation, and if so, does it matter? According to a 2018 Pew Research survey, 33% of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, yet it is beyond the range of ordinary polling to ask why this belief exists. In an age of faith, both East and West, a person’s daily life was deeply influenced by a religion’s teaching about the afterlife.

Questions of sin and redemption, karmic retribution, heavens and hells, and journeys through other bodies such as those of animals—these were pressing concerns for many centuries. Now in modern secular society, the question of surviving the extinction of the physical body has been channeled into belief versus science. We don’t ask if God finds us worthy to go to heaven so much as how credible a near-death experience might be according to the best research.

The scheme of belief versus science is something of a false divide, however. There has been credible research on reincarnation, which would surprise most people, including scientists. Pioneering studies were conducted by Ian Stevenson, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia Medical School, who began investigating the phenomenon of young children who say they recall a past life. Hundreds of such cases were looked into with the aim of validating if the person they remembered being actually existed.

Stevenson traveled the world closely examining children’s memories and matching them to specific individuals, and not only were many validated, but some children even bore physical signs of injuries sustained when their previous incarnation died. After Stevenson’s death in 2010, the research was continued by another U. of V. psychiatrist, Jim Tucker, who presents some fascinating statistics in two books. In an online article that summarizes some of the more startling numbers,

  • Around 20% of young children claim to have memories of the time between death and birth.
  • 60% of children who claim to remember past lives are male.
  • Roughly 70% of such children remember an unnatural or violent death.
  • The average time spent between lifetimes is 16 months.
  • Such reports occur in general in children between the ages of 2 and 6, after which the phenomenon of remembering a past life wanes.

There has been no serious questioning of the validity of this research, and Tucker explains reincarnation in terms of natural phenomena. “Quantum physics indicates that our physical world may grow out of our consciousness. That’s a view held not just by me, but by a number of physicists as well.”

Without a doubt there’s a need in contemporary physics to account for consciousness in the universe. No physical explanation has been satisfactory in the past. People casually assume that as life evolved and became more complex, the primitive brains of lower species evolved into the massive brain of Homo sapiens. The physical evidence for that is unassailable. Yet no one has described why and how any brain is related to the mind. Brain cells do nothing so different from any other cell that their activity should produce a three-dimensional world complete with sights and sounds from an organ the texture of cold oatmeal that is totally dark and silent inside.

To overcome this huge gap in our understanding of reality, two trends have cropped up in physics—one is panpsychism, the notion that the universe contains traits of mind or proto-mind the way it contains matter and energy, the other the notion that information is at the root of mind, again with the assumption that the cosmos had this property from the very outset 13.8 billion years ago. Panpsychism and information theory are fashionable, but no one knows if they are valid explanations of mind or Band-Aids applied to keep physics patched together.

Without settling the unknowable future, one thing is clear. After decades of stubbornly insisting that only physical data are needed to explain everything about creation, some scientists are assigning validity to human perceptions—this is where the trail to reincarnation begins. I’m not referring to a full-blown leap into the arms of life after death. Instead, words like harmony, beauty, balance, and orderliness are acceptable in describing mathematics. Since mathematics is the fundamental language of physics, applying human terms, and subjective terms at that, to numbers is a radical step (despite the fact that mathematicians have spoken personally about the beauty of numbers for centuries).

A similar shift can be observed in evolution, where Darwin’s theory resulted over time in making evolutionary studies a matter of data and statistical distributions. The rigor of modern Darwinism may be a fig leaf to cover the obvious flaw in evolutionary studies—namely that no experiments on evolution can be conducted, since evolution either took place long ago or is proceeding now at a creepingly slow rate. Suddenly in recent decades so-called “soft” inheritance has broken the lockstep of rigid Darwinism. “Soft” inheritance holds that genes do not have to mutate to create evolutionary traits, as “hard” inheritance insists upon—after all, living things are born with a complement of genes that are fixed for life.

Thanks to a new field called epigenetics, it has become evident that a creature’s life experiences can actually be passed on to future generations via genetic markers that influence how DNA is triggered and regulated. Instead of an on-off switch, DNA operates more on a rheostat. Epigenetics may explain as much or more about the rise of species as the discovery of DNA itself.

I’ve skimmed through radical shifts in scientific thought to arrive at the real significance of reincarnation. What Nature presents, from the level of subatomic particles to the level of DNA, is an endless recycling. Just as physics tells us matter and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, the same is thought to apply to information and, going a step further, to consciousness. Everything in Nature is about endless transformation, and in the cosmic recycling bin, ingredients are not simply jumbled and rejumbled like balls in a Bingo cage.

Instead, as viewed in human perception, Nature exhibits evolution through three linked processes: memory, creativity, and imagination. Memory keeps the past intact, allowing older forms to contribute to new ones. Creativity allows for novelty so that recycling isn’t mere repetition of the same forms over and over. Imagination allows for invisible possibilities to take shape, either in the mind or the physical world.

If everything in Nature is recycling under the influence of memory, creativity, and imagination, it seems very likely that human consciousness participates in the same recycling. Or to put it another way, if human consciousness doesn’t recycle/reincarnate, we’d be outside a process that includes everything else in the universe but us. Is that really probable?

The argument for the probability of reincarnation, added to the research on children’s memories of past lives, is very persuasive, so the future of reincarnation looks bright. No one can credibly call it a mere belief or superstition or a holdover from the age of faith. But a probability is weaker than a certainty, and no one should plan on their next incarnation without a stronger argument, perhaps strong enough to approach certainty. That’s the enticing possibility we’ll discuss in the next post.
(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 

 

Giving “Wholeness” a Higher Meaning

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Thanks to its positive connotations, “wholeness” has become a buzz word in areas of life as
diverse as holistic medicine, whole-foods nutrition, and the human potential movement, which
aims to create a whole person rather than a separate, fragmented one. What these various
applications have in common is that wholeness is a choice—and there the problem lies.

If you are talking about whole foods versus processed foods, wholeness is certainly a choice,
and the same can be said for holistic as opposed to mainstream medicine with its reliance on
drugs and surgery. But speaking about a whole person is somehow different. If you consider the
issue a bit deeper, becoming a whole person is involved in the most fundamental questions
about what it means to be human.

The nature of human consciousness is such that we can take any viewpoint we want towards
our own existence. This goes beyond being an optimist or pessimist, beyond positive thinking.
Or even psychology. At the most basic level, each of us decides how to relate to reality itself. In
the modern era society teaches us to relate to reality through scientific, rational, logical means.
Nature, including human nature, is thus quantified, measured, mined for data, and arranged
through rational explanations.

From such a perspective, the human mind must be the product of the brain, following the basic
logic that brain activity can be measured and quantified. This fact seems so obvious that
neuroscience claims to be the prime, perhaps the only, way to explain the mind. Yet this claim
runs afoul of the entire subjective world, which obviously exists—everyone is aware of
sensations, visual images, sounds, thoughts, flashes of memory, etc., which occur “in here.”
This entire realm of human existence cannot be turned into data or quantified. (For some
background, you might want to consult the most recent post, “Why Math Is Leading Us Deeper
into Illusion.”)

Even though modern society officially relates to reality through scientific, rational means,
people actually keep a foot in two worlds, attending to the worlds “out there” and “in here”
separately. In consciousness studies this is known as the subject-object split, but it is far more
than theoretical. Every experience renews the subject-object split, because in every experience
there is something “out there” that registers as a perception “in here.” Fireworks are shot off
on the Fourth of July, hot dogs are served at the ballpark, the sun sets and the moon rises—in
each case, the objective worlds presents a phenomenon, and the mind perceives it, usually
followed by a personal reaction—oohing and aahing at the fireworks, enjoying the hot dog,
feeling a romantic glow in the moonlight, and so on.

On the surface you might suppose that relating to reality through the subject-object split is the
only way to relate. If so, then aiming to be a whole person would be futile. Wholeness by
definition lies beyond any kind of split or fragmentation. In physics, for example, more than a
century has been spent attempting to fuse two irreconcilable domains, the quantum world of
microscopic phenomena and the so-called classical world of macroscopic phenomena. This split
pertains to everyday life because there should be a seamless connection between quanta, the
basic building blocks of nature, and all the things we see around us—rocks, trees, mountains,
and clouds.

So far the split has proved insoluble, however, and physics remains with a rift down the middle
that no one has been able to fuse or bridge. The same is true in the human mind. The world
“out there” operates through things like cause-and-effect that should seamlessly connect to our
subjective responses. Sometimes there is no serious rift. If you poke someone with a pin, they
will go “ouch” almost without exception.

Yet these predictable responses are few compared with the unique ways in which seven billion
people are building a life story based on their own beliefs, memories, desires, fears, and
predilections. You cannot robotize a human being, no matter how hard authoritarian regimes
have tried. There is always the unknown, unpredictable possibility of a new and unexpected

thought. That’s the source of our greatest human gift, creativity. But it is also the source of our
suffering. The unpredictable mind is intimately tied to the uncontrollable mind, which afflicts us
with guilt, shame, doubt, hostility, anxiety, and depression.

For centuries it has been declared, usually in a religious or spiritual context, that the cause of
suffering is the separate self. Isolated and alone, building our individual stories, we have no
connection to wholeness. We are like coral reefs amassed from tiny grains of experience, and
that’s that unless we can exchange the subject-object split—the very thing that placed us in
separation—for a new relationship with reality.

Let’s say that you accept the terms of this argument, or if you don’t, let’s say you have other
reasons for believing that wholeness is worth attaining. How would you get there? What would
it feel like? Might you not be better off with your present life, warts and all, than pursuing some
chimera? The answer to all of these questions is the same: they are the wrong questions. They
presuppose that wholeness is a choice when in reality it isn’t.

Wholeness is everything. It is the One, the All, or Brahman, as it was known in Vedic India.
Being whole, it cannot be accepted or rejected. It cannot be lost, either. To choose wholeness is
like saying “I chose not to exist yesterday, but I have decided to exist today.” Another
implication, which will surprise almost everyone, is that you cannot related to wholeness. There
can only be a relation between two separate things, and wholeness has no separations, no
divisions, no “this and that,” no “yes or no.”

As a result, wholeness offers the possibility for choiceless awareness. In choiceless awareness
you experience yourself as whole, which is to say, as pure existence and pure consciousness.
You still accomplish the things you ordinarily do in the world, but your experience is seamless
and unified. I realize that choiceless awareness sounds arcane if not impossible. We are so used
to relating to reality through the subject-object split that everything is a matter of A or B.
Countless choices fill our lives.

But these choices have not made us happier, wiser, or more certain about who we are and
what our place is in the universe. Indeed, no ultimate questions have been solved, which is the
legacy of separation. We peer into reality like children with their noses pressed to the window
of a candy store. This isn’t the place to detail what the journey to wholeness actually is (for
that, please see my book, The Book of Secrets), but the road to wholeness begins by knowing
what’s at stake: a complete shift in how we relate to reality. From there, the possibility of
higher existence opens up.

 

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 

 

Why Math Is Leading Us Deeper into Illusion

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It’s hard to imagine a world without numbers. The square footage of your house, the rent or mortgage payment, the weight you see on your bathroom scale are all examples of lower mathematics, while the GPS that guides your travels, your smartphone, and sending a space probe to Saturn are examples of higher mathematics. Yet the Pyramids and the Parthenon needed only lower math, little more than a few basic equations and the ability to count.

It seems absurd to call numbers a problem; they are too useful in every aspect of life. But if you aspire to go beyond your present state of consciousness, if you want to be happier, to find love, or to know yourself, mathematics is not only useless, it blocks the way. It traps you in an illusion and deepens the illusion in radical ways. Believe it or not, anything you can count, weigh, calculate, or measure is part of an all-embracing illusion—to grasp this fact will put you on the threshold to the “real” reality and your place in it.

I mean illusion in the most common sense of the word, the way a dream is an illusion. Imagine that you are dreaming one night, and inside your dream you can use numbers, measure things, and even pursue science. Obviously the ability to do these things would reassure you of the reality of your dream. But once the bubble is burst and you wake up, all the counting, measuring, and doing science would become instantly irrelevant.

Do you think this example doesn’t apply after you wake up? It does. To burst the bubble of numbers and the illusion they create, here are a few facts about the nature of a basic property of Nature, namely, light.

  • Photons, the elementary particles of light, are invisible and have no brightness whatsoever.
  • Light has two incompatible states, as a particle and a wave. Both can be measured, but how one state turns into another is a total mystery. We only can observe that it happens.
  • Color as a perception cannot be explained. Why red is red has nothing to do with its frequency or wavelength, any more than the sweet taste of sugar Is explained by counting the carbon atoms in a sugar molecule.
  • No one has the slightest idea why light exists in the first place.
  • The visual images you see in your mind’s eye cannot be explained by examining the brain.
  • The brain’s visual cortex has no pictures in it; indeed, it is totally dark and devoid of light.

If not shocked, I hope you are at least surprised to read these facts. What ties them together is one thing, a thing that marks the ultimate and total failure of mathematics: consciousness. Your consciousness gives light its brightness and color, creates images in our mind, and experiences the world as a theater of events in time and space.

For sticklers who believe I am exaggerating the failure of numbers on their own, to explain reality, please see a classic paper on the baffling relationship of math and reality, written by the eminent Princeton physicist Eugene Wigner in 1960 and entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner’s argument is dense, but he arrives at the conclusion that without an explanation of consciousness, mathematics has a totally mysterious relationship to reality.

Let’s concede that math can’t explain anything about consciousness. So what? Everyone depends on the world of technology, and the course of civilization has itself depended on mathematics ever since the first architectural measurements were made thousands of years ago using knots evenly spaced on a rope. If all of that is an illusion, welcome to it. That’s how most people would react. As for scientists, who have a deep aversion to “metaphysical” speculations, there’s a famous putdown in science, “Shut up and calculate.”

To get past “So what?” isn’t easy if you refuse to entertain the very notion that the everyday physical world is an illusion. But the existence of solid tangible objects was long ago undermined by quantum physics. If you delve deeply into the fabric of nature, the most basic level, the quantum field, is where “something comes out of nothing.” Mere ripples in the quantum field, arising from the quantum vacuum state, are the basis of the universe. And that’s an enormous clue to escaping the illusion.

There is a convincing argument that these ripples are products of consciousness; in other words, the universe thinks itself into existence. Decades ago the eminent British physicist Sir James Jeans declared that the universe was beginning to look much more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind-like behavior has been spotted in the action of elementary particles. Moreover, if the universe isn’t a product of some sort of cosmic consciousness—indeed, if existence isn’t the same as consciousness—science is totally unable to explain how consciousness came about. There’s no point at which atoms learned to think. Physical explanations for mind are the ultimate apples and oranges mistake.

When Nature created “something out of nothing,” two tracks emerged and separated. One track we call objective—the world “out there” filled with objects and events—and the other track we call subjective—the world “in here” of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. We are extremely good at balancing the two worlds. A physicist can measure Higgs bosons and also fall in love.

However, to define reality on either track is an illusion. On the objective side there is chaotic “quantum soup” constantly boiling away, totally separate from our everyday experience. On the other side is perceptual soup, the chaos of personal experiences that fill the mind (one can also call this “qualia soup,” using the technical term for the qualities of the five senses, in other words, everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell).

Both sides, as long as they are separate, falsify reality, which is why it isn’t absurd to say that numbers draw us deeper into an illusion. We deceive ourselves by assuming that the world “out there” isn’t the same as a dream, while at the same time our inner experiences are solipsistic without an external world. So by simple logic, reality dawns when the subject-object split is healed. Reality is wholeness, and we won’t experience it until we are whole. That will be the topic of the next post. Nothing can replace or substitute for wholeness, and yet this fact has yet to dawn for billions of people.

(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 

Is the Self the Ultimate Healer?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In recent years the self-care movement has been gathering momentum, and in many ways it is a natural extension of what came before, which was prevention. Both put the focus of remaining well on the individual. Instead of running to the doctor’s when symptoms appear, prevention taught people to avoid risks in advance. Giving up smoking to prevent the risk of lung cancer was a milestone in prevention over fifty years ago, and since then a host of preventive measures have been discovered.

But prevention focused on disease rather than wellness, which made room for self-care and its aim to attain lifelong well-being. A positive lifestyle that benefits both mind and body lies at the core of self-care, and important breakthroughs are being made, such as the vital importance of avoiding low-grade chronic inflammation and also chronic stress. Yet few realize how revolutionary self-care can actually be.

What if the self, all alone and unaided, is the ultimate healer? On the one hand modern medicine would hotly and even violently reject such a notion. Mainstream medicine still has objections to self-care insofar as it encroaches on the expertise of doctors and the accepted treatments through drugs and surgery. Let’s set aside the possible objections to the self as healer, because it’s more important to get at what the concept is all about.

An opening is provided by a first-person account on a personal website by Joey Lott, who poses what he calls “A cure for anxiety.” Lott presents himself as a longtime sufferer from anxiety whose affliction was intractable: “I failed so completely to make things better (even after years of therapy, meditation, yoga, affirmations, breathwork, prayer, hundreds of self-help books, countless workshops, and on and on) that eventually I grew hopeless. Nothing could help me, I believed. I thought I was broken.”

The cure he ultimately discovered is a form of “not doing,” to use a Buddhist term, although it was the experience, not the terminology, that was key. Lott realized that his anxiety was rooted in thought itself, in the mind’s constant attempt to attack anxiety in self-defeating ways. The cure, he declares, “is completely counterintuitive, because it is not about getting rid of unwanted symptoms. It is not about getting rid of anxiety. It is not about defeating anxiety or breaking free of anxiety. It is about actually discovering directly what anxiety is and welcoming it home.”

The method he has in mind is to stop resisting anxiety in any way; Lott maintains that resistance—along with every attempt to get rid of anxiety—is the cause of anxiety. Instead of getting entangled in so much mental activity, Lott bypasses all of it. “The essential cure for anxiety is …the direct meeting of the experience. Not trying to get rid of it, calm it, change it, fix it, solve it, or anything else. How does one go about direct meeting? Simple. Do nothing.”

Lott is conscientious about telling his readers that the various methods he tried, such as mindfulness and meditation, can help with anxiety. But with the conviction of someone who has healed himself and many others, he believes he has found the real cure. What he proposes is a form of self-care, and needless to say there is no accepted medical model for it; as a physician I must add that I am not endorsing such a cure. And yet there is a trend moving in the “not doing” direction that has been growing stronger.

The trend is known generally as the “direct method” in consciousness studies. The basic tenet is that with any experience, a person has two choices, either to pay attention to the mental activity in the experience or to pay attention to the constant presence of awareness itself. The aim ultimately is to wake up, to realize that the constant presence of awareness is actually the self.

Some therapists have seen the potential value in getting a patient to experience the constant state of awareness lying behind mental activity. The theory is that awareness by itself has no anxiety, depression or other form of mental suffering. It simply is. Lott found, with himself and other people, that it is possible to “do nothing”—that is, to simply be aware o awareness.

He acknowledges that even a fleeting experience of this kind, lasting a second or two, might require a coach. The mind is habituated to pay attention to its experiences, and when the experience is painful, it is all but impossible to not pay attention. Therefore, one can start by paying less attention. In time, the cure results, according to the direct method, by repetition, until a person’s attention gets attracted to self-awareness instead of the painful symptoms. Eventually, no matter what form of “not doing” being adopted, the affliction is predicted to heal itself. It has been starved of attention, which was what kept it going in the first place.

What I’ve outlined is no substitute for reading Lott’s article and looking into detailed expositions of the direct method and the theory behind it. But we’ve discussed enough here to indicate the revolutionary implications of self-care. Gradually, and mostly at the margins of professional therapy and medicine in general, the possibility of the self as healer is gaining ground. (The reader might want to see The Healing Self, a book I co-write with Harvard geneticist Rudy E. Tanzi. We discuss many modalities of self-care already accepted in both mainstream and integrative medicine.)

Whatever happens in the near future, the direct method is attempting in modern terms to validate the ancient doctrines of mind from Buddhism and even older Vedic sources. The deepest questions about what it means to be human and to lead a conscious life are at stake. In that regard, the healing self is as important today as it was thousands of years ago, and we may discover that the self is as timeless, not to mention healing, as it has always been reputed to be.

 

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 

Taking a Beautiful Line from Rumi: Beyond the Boundaries of the Intellect

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The popularity of the mystic Sufi poet Rumi is based on his love affair with God, expressed in such ecstatic terms that he makes the spiritual journey seem deeply romantic. But Rumi also reported about how his state of consciousness felt, which gives valuable clues about higher consciousness itself.

Here is a beautiful line of his that has profound implications for consciousness as well: “Exchange your cleverness for bewilderment.” What kind of bewilderment does he mean? To most people, bewilderment is the opposite of an appealing state, since it implies indecision, confusion, perhaps loss of control entirely. Rumi was known for applauding such a state, however, if the result was bliss and ecstasy.

To modern ears the message is more pointed. “Cleverness” is Rumi’s synonym for the rational mind, which seeks explanations that are logical and consistent. The aim of the intellect is to bring everything down to earth, so to speak, eliminating the folderol and fantasy associated with spirituality and mysticism in particular. Rumi encountered this not in terms of modern rationality with its basis in science but from clerics who studied and became expert authorities on “correct” Islam.

Another way to put Rumi’s idea comes from the inspired Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who said, “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” This translates into the declaration that making maps, models, brain scans, and anatomical pathways to explain consciousness isn’t the same as experiencing it.

This is an undeniable fact. Take the most basic conduit of experience, the five senses. Remove any one of them, and it is impossible to bring it back by describing it. “Color” is meaningless to someone who is blind, just as “scent” is unfathomable to someone without a sense of smell. But logical models supported by facts, data, and experiments overlook the obvious truth just stated. There is a fallacious claim that the brain, once its operations are fully mapped and analyzed, will disclose the source of the mind.

Instead of criticizing this viewpoint, Rumi offers an alternative, which he calls bewilderment, but which could equally be called wonder. We should all be struck with wonder and thrown into bewilderment by everyday life, as Rumi was. Not just Rumi, though. There’s a famous saying of Einstein’s: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

The advantage of having a great scientist backup a great poet is that we cannot wriggle out of Rumi’s challenge to rationality by saying that he’s only speaking like a poet. He’s speaking like someone who knows full well the limits of reason when it comes to beauty, love, devotion, creativity, and wonder. Being closer to our time, Einstein’s affirmation tells us that reason isn’t abandoned; it is put in its rightful place.

Reason’s rightful place has been exaggerated in modern life, allowing science and technology to usurp essentially everything. In a world where being human is cherished fully, the things just listed—love, creativity wonder, and the rest—would be valued for their own sake, which brings us closer to the infinite potential of consciousness than any mind-made model, past, present, or future.

 

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