Racism Is False Identity

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

America is said to be on the verge of a racial reckoning, a prospect that fills people with either hope or rage, depending on their politics. The far right encourages white supremacy while hotly denying that they are racists. Fully justified protest after police shootings of black men are seen in some quarters as the breakdown of law and order, which gets used as propaganda, again behind the shield of “I’m not a racist.” But the issue runs deeper than politics, and so does the possibility of healing.

The human race seems to move slowly out of the shadow of racism. Racism is entangled with the greatest forces that have shaped the fate of every people: war, empire, colonialism, and nationalism. At various points, all of these have been put in a positive light. Even now, when few would extol the virtues of empire or colonialism, the grip of nationalism remains strong.

Let’s say that we call racism a disease or infection in otherwise sane minds. This seems reasonable since feeling superior or inferior according to the color of your skin exists at an emotional, often subconscious level, not a rational one. How can we remove this infection when it hides so subtly inside us?

Irrational ideas are sticky. They cling even when we don’t want them to. This stickiness is due to various factors, and each can be changed. The primary factor is belief. Children are raised believing that one race is innately superior to another. If they belong to the wrong race, they are raised to feel victimized, angry, and resentful. Another belief is that history dictates destiny. The stagnation of any underclass is perpetuated because “it’s always been this way.” Then there are the endemic beliefs that a certain race is dangerous, criminal, ignorant, stupid, and prone to irrational acts.

Insidiously, these beliefs mask the disease. A racist can afford not to see himself as sick because he seemingly profits by being a racist. He is given a superior identity. In medicine, we call this a secondary gain, like a child getting ice cream and lots of attention when he goes into the hospital to have his tonsils taken out. To cure racism, you must first burst the spell of the false identity that racism confers, both on the racist and his victim.

I feel hopeful here because some powerful forces are at work against the disease. The election of Joe Biden has been widely and correctly seen as a blow against racism. But I also think back to Barack Obama, who rose above racial identity by first facing the broader question, “Who am I?” His struggle and the answers he came to are outlined in his book, Dreams of My Father, with its telling subtitle, “A Story of Race and Inheritance.” No person can be free of racism without examining the burden of a toxic inheritance. All over the world, improvements in living conditions, where they occur, give the population a chance to move away from primitive identities forced upon them by survival. Opportunity is strong medicine against enforced group think; poverty makes the disease worse.

But ultimately it will be the need to survive as a planet that will make racism no longer viable. Survival of the fittest is giving way to survival of the wisest. It may seem overblown to call an economically surging India wise, or America under Trump or oil-rich Russia with its defiance of environmental regulation. Yet anywhere that old, toxic identities are being toppled, wisdom has a chance to prevail over ignorance and prejudice. At its most basic, wisdom sees equality among all people at the level of possibility; once you stop narrowly defining yourself by tags of race, gender, nation, politics, and tribe, the truth dawns that human consciousness is a field of infinite possibilities. Every wisdom tradition has taught this truth for centuries.

Addressing climate change requires global cooperation, which eventually won’t be a choice anymore. When we are all in the same lifeboat, feeling superior to anyone else is folly. Let’s say that the lifeboat gets rescued and climate change is solved. What then? Racism cannot be separated neatly from the holistic issue of identity. “Who am I?” is a question that shifts with history, economics, and crises. If we are lucky, the current global crisis will serve as a cauldron for burning up racism and pushing it closer to eradication.

 

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

Did Life Create the Universe?

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

No matter how life began on Earth—there are still some huge gaps in our knowledge about that—it seems indisputable that the universe set up the conditions for life. But a radical twist has now been offered by the prominent stem-cell biologist Robert Lanza and theoretical physicist Matej Pavšič in their deliberately startling new book, The Grand Biocentric Design. As Lanza bluntly declares in the book’s introduction, “Life is not a product of the universe but the other way around.” Lanza calls this theory “biocentrism,” which he introduced in his 2010 book of the same name.

On the face of it, saying that life created the universe is preposterous as long as the Big Bang and all the accepted steps leading to the creation of Earth are true. Yet what if they are just the assumptions of a current scientific model or paradigm? By definition a paradigm shift calls into question the rock-solid assumptions on which the previous paradigm rests.

Biocentrism aims to topple any version of reality based on physicalism, the doctrine in science that roots reality in physical objects from quarks to galaxies and on to multiple universes. Physicalism created the modern world of science and technology. But having reached the horizon where time, space, matter, and energy come into existence, physicalism reached a dead end. This was (and still is) the last thing anyone expected. In place of a crowning, all-embracing Theory of Everything, investigators found themselves faced with logic-defying questions.

What came before time? What lies outside space? How did matter acquire a mind, or is it the other way around?

These questions are self-contradictory. Logically there cannot be anything before time, because “before” is a time-bound concept. There cannot be anything outside space, because “outside” is a space-bound concept. To break out of self-contradiction, you have to abandon spacetime causality which science is extremely loath to do. Asking a scientist to abandon physical causality is like asking the Pope to be an atheist.

Biocentrism challenges the bedrock dogmas of physical science, and it does so by putting mind ahead of matter. The prime mover in creation is consciousness, the invisible creator behind the mask of the physical universe. This notion isn’t novel to Lanza and Pavšič, but their new book details the argument in unsurpassed detail.

The pivotal chapter in The Grand Biocentric Design is “How Consciousness Works,” and the pivotal sentence in the chapter is this: “Consciousness encompasses all of reality—the two are essentially synonyms.” Although the authors make much of the dead-end that physicalism has reached, and about how mainstream science stubbornly resists any challenge to its deepest long-held assumptions, all of us are involved in the declaration that reality is consciousness.

Like the serpent devouring its tail, we are back to a saying from Vedic India that is thousands of years old: “As you are, so is the world.” Lanza and Pavšič go into intricate detail to support this conclusion, which the ancient seers arrived at solely through introspection. But the two paths join on a level playing field, over which flies a banner proclaiming “Only consciousness can explain consciousness.” The irreducible fact of the universe, in other words, isn’t a thing, no matter how small and exotic the thing is (e.g., quarks, Higgs boson, superstrings). The irreducible fact, in human reality at least, is that we exist as conscious beings.

Nothing can get around this fact (which was stated in a 1931 interview by Max Planck, the renowned German physicist who first named the quantum). What biocentrism involves, once the door to the new paradigm is flung open, is process. Physicalism was a whiz at unlocking the processes by which the laws of nature operate. However, when faced with explaining how lumps of matter, namely, the quadrillions of organic molecules in the human brain, manage to think, physical explanations become a mere waving of hands.

The needle of a thermostat on the wall traces the rise and fall of the temperature in a room, but thermostats don’t create temperature. Brain imaging can detect in fine detail how brain activity parallels mental activity. Certain parts of the brain will light up when you get very angry, while other parts will light up when you meditate, have sex, feel depressed, and so on. But brain cells don’t create thought. At bottom a brain cell is activated by the exchange of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane. It isn’t possible to start there and draw a reasonable line of explanation to thoughts, feelings, sensations—indeed the entire world “in here” that is the domain of consciousness.

By turning to the processes by which consciousness operates, The Grand Biocentric Design provides a wealth of evidence in support of the notion that everything in existence is consciousness modifying itself. The book’s two-pronged approach, calling upon both biology and physics, is one of its strengths and also one of its most unique points. If these two branches of science can’t be unified in a single theory, biocentrism won’t satisfy either biologists or physicists.

The book’s lofty aims and deep explorations could have been too daunting for non-scientists, but The Grand Biocentric Design is accessible and engaging, in short, a very good read. Nearly a century ago the eminent English physicist-astronomer Sir James Jeans declared that “the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” To this day it remains a daring venture to follow up the implications of that statement. No one has gone further, or more convincingly than Lanza and Pavšič do here. If it ever becomes accepted wisdom that “the universe as mind” is true, The Grand Biocentric Design will be looked upon as a significant milestone along the way.

When the mathematical philosopher Bertrand Russell declared, probably apocryphally, that only three people in the world (including Russell, naturally) understood Einstein’s mind-bending theory, few doubted it.

Relativity explained how objects larger than atoms and subatomic particles behave, while quantum mechanics explained how the very smallest things behaved, taking the scope of physics from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest, to borrow an ancient Sanskrit phrase. By the 1970s a common assumption arose that physics was on the verge of a Theory of Everything that would reduce the mechanics of space, time, matter, and energy to a unified set of equations.

That the Theory of Everything never arrived, that the confidence of fifty years ago would unravel into a crisis that has shaken physics to its roots, is the starting point of The Grand Biocentric Design.

 

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

The Mystery That Makes Life Possible

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Over the past few decades there’s been a creeping invasion that has tremendous repercussions for all of us. Strangely, it is the invasion of consciousness. I say strangely because for millennia human beings claimed total possession of consciousness. We think, invent, solve problems, show curiosity, and make conscious decisions. Even the cleverest of our near relations among the primates might or might not have minds—expert opinion remains sharply divided on the issue.

A chimpanzee or gorilla displays only a limited range of skills compared with human skills. A chimp might learn to dig grubs out from a hole using a stick, but toolmaking basically stops there, or using a rock to smash hard nuts, which some monkeys can do. A gorilla might learn to understand language and even use hand signs to communicate, but it can’t teach this skill to another gorilla.

You’d never suspect on the evidence that consciousness was creeping in everywhere, but now there are books on the conscious universe, and a band of physicists believes in panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is inherent in creation, permeating even subatomic particles. Almost a hundred years ago the astronomer Sir James Jeans declared that the universe “begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”

The invasion of consciousness has not reached the average person, but it has immense implications for how we view reality. It’s no mere curiosity if the universe is conscious. It means that life on Earth isn’t unique. It borrowed a cosmic trait and ran with it to produce billions of life forms. But the notion of cosmic consciousness only comes home when you look deeper into the mystery.

As consciousness has been ascribed to everything, by implication everything knows as much as we humans do. Mind isn’t just passively present. It is creating the cosmos in its own image. This of course is how God is described in religion. God as a superhuman living somewhere in the sky is graspable. Invisible, all-pervasive consciousness isn’t. Some mysteries are hard to fathom. How time began is one example. How electrical impulses in the brain create sights and sounds is another.

But the mystery of consciousness is different and unique. No other mystery will never be solved, because only this mystery is absolute. Anything else in Nature you can relate to. If it’s an object like a cloud, mountain, limestone cliffs, or a herd of elephants, you can break it down through your five senses to make a mental picture of it. You can take the object in hand and physically take it apart. You can think and argue about thoughts related to any experience.

But there’s no place to stand in order to view, handle, take apart, or manipulate consciousness. All actions go back to some idea in the mind, and the mind is like the eye—it can see everything but itself. Unless the skull is opened, none of us would know we have a brain. Even after ancient civilizations examined the brain, there was general agreement that the heart generated thoughts and feelings, not the gray, mushy, cold oatmeal-textured brain.

I don’t want to get tangled up in the thicket of metaphysics. In practical terms, consciousness, being an absolute mystery, is totally inconceivable. It can’t be defined for the same reason a fish can’t define what “wet” means. When you are completely immersed in water, there is nothing that isn’t wet. At this moment, as consciousness is creeping in everywhere, the same problem is stumping the best thinkers. If we are totally immersed in consciousness, there is no way to define it. You simply wind up talking around it, and the whole time you will be using consciousness, making the project the same as a snake swallowing its tail.

The mystery of consciousness can never be solved, yet in ancient India something extremely important was said about it: Consciousness is the inconceivable source of everything conceivable. The word “source” has enormous power. There used to be an old TV series, “The Millionaire,” where every week an anonymous check for one million dollars was given to someone chosen at the whim of the invisible benefactor. They were given only one restriction, that they could never tell anyone about the gift.
You and I find ourselves in the same position. We cannot tell anyone about the source of everything that makes life rich: love, compassion, charity, empathy, creativity, truth, beauty, insight, intuition, and personal evolution. They flow for the source of our humanity, and it is a creation of consciousness. God functions like the ultimate benefactor if you are religious, and in most faiths God asks for obedience, reverence, and worship. Consciousness ask for nothing. How could it? There is no worshiper separate from the source.

We are cosmic consciousness, working in, around, and through us. A quark, bacteria, and buzzing mosquito are different avenues for consciousness, but they are cosmic consciousness also. When everything has the same source, the playing field is leveled. But the value for the human condition is that we can say with total certainty that our highest values, the ones just named, are innate. Our existence is packaged with them because our consciousness is packaged with them.

Therefore, when we wander into wrongdoing, we’ve made a mistake. Evil and good aren’t equals or the product of genes or archetypes. Nothing conceivable by the mind can explain the source of love, compassion, creativity, and all the rest. But when these values are absent, distorted, or betrayed, it is important to realize that the negative side isn’t innate.

I realize that there is much room for heated debate about human nature, pain and suffering, and all manner of violence. Solutions to these things must be found in the outside world, to be sure. But the entire spiritual basis of humankind is the knowledge that each of us can return to our source, no matter how much we’ve strayed from it. Spiritual awakening is called a realization because you realize who you really are and where you came from. You came from the absolute mystery of consciousness, the source that made life possible in the first place.

 

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

Only the Present Mind Is Without Fear

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

In stressful times many more people feel fear than in normal times. What this means is that an ability to be fearless becomes more essential than in normal times. How is that accomplished? Being fearful is a skill you can master. It doesn’t require any of the things society falls back on. You don’t have to be tougher, stronger, more of a man (if you happen to be a male) or call upon a strong man for help (if you happen to be female).

In reality you only have to be present, because in the present there is no fear. At first this sounds wrong, because when you experience worry and anxiety, the most common types of fear, they hit you here and now. But here and now isn’t the same as the Present. Here and now describes clock time. If you are waiting for a bus and it is five minutes late, once it arrives, it is here now. The present moment, however, has nothing to do with clock time. The present is a state of mind, and in fact is the most natural state of mind, the state your mind wants to be in.

One of the key concepts in my new book, Total Meditation, is that the mind will return to the present effortlessly if given a chance. Even though “living in the present” has become a popular phrase, most people still approach it as a kind of spiritual challenge that requires them to intensely focus to make sure they stay mindful and present. This is the mental equivalent of balancing a penny on the end of your finger. The penny naturally wants to topple over unless you exert an effort to keep it balanced.

The active mind can feel like that. When fear and anxiety are roaming the mind. Balance seems difficult. In reality it’s not. Fear, despite its unique power, is just another mental distraction. Distractions can also be pleasant, as we all know watching a movie, and the active mind finds them very useful, because when you are distracted, you get a vacation from the endless stream of thoughts and feelings that the active mind must deal with.

Meditation isn’t the same as a distraction. It too gives the active mind a vacation, but with a difference. When watching a movie, texting, playing a video game, or doing a household chore, your attention goes outward. As soon as the distraction is over, the underlying worry and anxiety you were trying to escape will return. Meditation, on the other hand, goes to a level of awareness that is beyond fear; this is present mind. It is mind meeting itself rather than being filled with thoughts and feelings.

The theme of Total Meditation is about the need to keep meeting yourself throughout the day. Rather than setting aside a fixed time for meditating, you let your awareness return to present mind the moment you notice that you are distracted, stressed, worried, or on any other state of imbalance. The reason that anxiety can dominate even a person who isn’t normally anxious is that the person gets trapped in conflict between warring parts of the mind.

We experience these warring parts as voices in our head or sometimes as inner impulses. Dieters know the experience as the tug-or-war between “I want to eat this” and “I really shouldn’t.” there might be times when the “good’ voice wins, but this only frustrates the “bad” mind even more. So it lies in wait for a weak moment, and then instead of being “good” for not eating a candy bar, you eat a pint of ice cream, which is “bad” for you.

The issue should never be about any kind of inner conflict, because once you get sucked into one, you become a combatant against yourself. Unfortunately, as a legacy of our past, we all have years of inner conflict behind us. All kinds of fragmented memories lie in wait, charged with unresolved feelings of fear, anger, frustration, failure, humiliation, grief, and self-doubt. They form a rich field of material for fighting against yourself. But present mind has nothing to fight against, because the residues of the past are just distractions when you stand back and see them as a whole.

I realize that there is great suffering in people’s lives. Some of it is happening now; some of it is remembered from the past. For countless people the only choices are to put up with suffering or fight against it, and sometimes the struggle is just too much. Then we simply give up. But there is another choice, and the way is opened by letting the mind return to a state of being present, not with the outside world but with itself.

The secret of present mind can be hard to grasp, because we are so used to the fragments of our mind fighting against each other. You need to have an “aha” moment in which you see that the problem is inner conflict that arises form a divided self that has gotten into the habit of fighting itself. You must see, once and for all, that the solution is to go beyond conflict, which can only happen in present mind. You don’t struggle to get there, which would be just another kind of fighting against yourself. You find present mind in meditation, learn to recognize the experience, and then return to that experience any time you want to. Only in present mind is there no fear. With that one lesson you can survive, and even thrive, in the most distressing times.

 

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

The Most Precious Freedom Is Inner Freedom

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

There’s a spiritual concept that seems to create a good deal of confusion. It goes by the name of freedom or liberation, both terms referring not to political freedom but inner freedom. The reason that “freedom” has a spiritual meaning is that a state of total freedom is possible. The confusion arises because at first glance we already feel free inside, most of the time, at least. Our thoughts and feelings are our own. We can be persuaded or coerced to change our minds, but in the end, we decide for ourselves.

In reality, most people experience only a taste of inner freedom. They exist in a state of limitation that is far removed from total freedom. I discuss the desirability of total freedom in my new book, Total Meditation, and I’d like to offer a preview here.

We cannot be free inside if some experiences frighten or distress us. We shut out and deny them, and as a result, many if not most experiences get edited, censored, forgotten, and pushed aside in favor of a narrow band of experience that feels safe. Limited freedom is based on what you can reasonably expect from life. Total freedom begins by looking on life as a field of infinite possibilities. It takes some persuasion to make total freedom seem like more than a pipe dream, however. Is it even desirable to feel totally open, unbounded, and free of boundaries to keep us safe?

A key issue here is spontaneity. Spontaneity is without rules, which seems like a recipe for anarchy. Rule enforcement is the surest way to keep people in line, or so the rule enforcers believe. Consider the extreme example of applying to the bank for a personal loan in China. If you want a loan there, you can use your smartphone, and online lending agencies check you out electronically, using data stored in the cloud. An applicant gets accepted or rejected for a loan in one-tenth of a second, after the lending agency has checked out 5,000 (!) personal factors, including how firmly your hand moved when you filled out your application and how low you let your phone battery get before recharging it.

Each of us is happy to enforce rules upon ourselves—we don’t need an authority figure to do it for us. Self-discipline and impulse control are considered desirable as marks of a mature adult. There’s a famous experiment in child psychology in which a youngster is placed in a chair with a marshmallow on a table in front of them. The child is told they can eat the marshmallow right now, but if they wait five minutes, they will be given two marshmallows. The experimenter then leaves the room and watches what unfolds through a two-way mirror. Some children fidget, fighting the impulse for immediate gratification. Others grab the marshmallow instantly or wait patiently until the five minutes is up. (You can view their behavior on an endearing YouTube video, “The Marshmallow Test.”)

This experiment implies that we already have a predisposition toward impulse control (or not) from a very early age. However, many of life’s greatest gifts involve spontaneity, including falling in love, appreciating beauty, composing music, making art, being surprised with “Aha!” moments, and having so-called peak experiences.

How can we make spontaneity be life-enhancing without the need to suppress it? The solution is to stop imposing limitations in the first place. This is possible only from the level of total consciousness. Everyone is divided inside between what is permitted and what is forbidden. You can’t resolve this conflict at the level of awareness dictated by the divided self.

The war we have with ourselves takes place in the divided self. All manner of judgments, beliefs, fear of bad consequences, memories of past embarrassment, and socially trained inhibitions are entangled together inside us. Trying to resolve each conflict one at a time is pointless and fated to fail. When we try to decide how spontaneous we want to be we confront the fact that the divided self doesn’t really trust itself.

Happily, everyone enjoys enough freedom to enjoy moments of spontaneity, and if we are awake enough, we can experience laughter, joy, and playfulness our entire life (if only this were the norm). The deeper spiritual truth holds that freedom is absolute. When you are settled in yourself and there are no more dark places to fear, nothing hides out of sight. The damaging effect of self-suppression lessens with every step you take to get rid of self-judgment. Bad behavior grows only more enticing when it is forbidden, like leaving the cookie jar out but telling a little child not to grab a cookie. We all know what happens when the mother’s back is turned.

Right now you are both your own rule enforcer and a rebel against the rules. It takes a journey into consciousness to become undivided. You are not designed to prosecute and defend yourself at the same time. You are designed so the next thing you want to do is the best thing for you. That’s a radical rethinking of what society tells us to believe, but when you adopt a lifestyle based on consciousness, reality will dawn. Spontaneity is the essence of life and the soul of creativity.

 

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