Your Body Wants to Be Your Strongest Ally—Let It

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Modern medicine has triumphed on many fronts in conquering diseases and extending life, but its greatest advance is almost totally unsung. Health and longevity have made it possible to see the body as our greatest ally.

After centuries of inevitable sickness and early death for the vast majority of people, the human body is poised to become our greatest ally on a new front: consciousness.

If you can step outside the accepted image of your body as a machine, you will discover that it is actually not a separate physical object but united with your mind as one consciousness—call it the bodymind. This step alone rids you of many damaging attitudes. As a thing separate from ourselves, the body is an obsessive source of worry over sickness, aging, and death. Equally obsessive is whether someone’s body is beautiful enough, strong enough, appealing enough to the opposite sex.

To escape all of these damaging attitudes, realize a few basic principles about the bodymind:

  • You are already whole, thanks to the union of mind and body.
  • Every mental process has a corresponding bodily process.
  • You are embodying your own state of consciousness.
  • The same traits you attribute to your mind also belong to every cell in your body.

 

The fact that we are embodying our own consciousness is probably the biggest breakthrough of our time, but it is still hard for the average person to grasp.

(For a detailed discussion of this concept, see the eye-opening video by Judith Blackstone, “Can We Embody Nonduality?”)

In religion and spirituality generally there has been strong judgment against the body, with a corresponding celebration of the soul. But in reality this separation was totally artificial. You cannot have any experience, however earthly or divine, without your brain registering it and passing the message to every cell in the body. You cannot hide your thoughts from your body. If you look in the mirror and feel bad about your body, you are simultaneously judging against yourself.

What’s so liberating about the bodymind is both short-term and long-term. In the short term, the elusive goal of living in the present moment is radically turned around, because your body, including your brain, has no choice but to live in the now. In fact, so confident are your cells about living in the present moment that they store only about 3 seconds of oxygen and nutrients. It is completely natural to be in the present for the bodymind.

As to the long term, the bodymind opens a path to become whole. Because you are already whole, as far as your cells are concerned, there is no doubt that the state of separation, which began by separating mind form body, is artificial. Any step you take toward higher consciousness is supported—indeed is made possible—by your body.

Saying these things will disturb someone who feels that the body is not an ally but a fragile container of life that threatens to break down, betray us, grow weaker over time, and eventually condemn us to helpless infirmity. Fortunately, this truism from the past is steadily being invalidated. Futurists, if they are in an optimistic mood, foresee the day when all diseases have been eradicated, genetic anomalies can be rectified, and even physical immortality isn’t preposterous.

But that perspective misses the most important aspect of the bodymind revolution, because such visions remain physical, rooted in the misconception of the body-as-machine. When you absorb the truth of wholeness as your most natural state, then your body contributes to the highest values of being human: intelligence, creativity, love, curiosity, and evolution. Your cells are imprinted at the genetic level by every vivid experience, both positive and negative, that you have had since birth and are still having.

Therefore, you can imprint your genetic activity in such a way that you become, as a bodymind, more conscious and evolved every year. This is a vision worth pursuing, far beyond anything medical technology envisions. That technology will bring more advances, no doubt, but the real challenge in our lives—how to raise the status of human consciousness—is intimate and personal.

It is time to stop judging against the body, demoting it to a machine, and fearing the possibilities of sickness, aging, and death. Everything you cherish about yourself as a person is embodied in you, which means that your body deserves to be equally cherished. Only in that spirit can all our higher aspirations be reached.

 

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 

Three Impossible Things We Can’t Do Without

By Deepak Chopra, MD

If you want to know what human beings really want, consider how Alice reacts to Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll’s inventions are so entertaining, we tend to smile at how upset, vexed, and unsettled Alice actually is. Wonderland overturns our regular, orderly, and predictable life, which is what people actually want.

The inhabitants of Wonderland aren’t just fantastic. They are unhappy. The White Rabbit is anxious enough to be a study in stress over a deadline. The Duchess’s cook throws dishes in a state of rage, and the Duchess herself hands Alice her squalling baby, which turns into a pig. Alice is very glad to get out of there. But Wonderland haunts us, and for good reason.

We are shadowed in everyday life by fear of the unknown and unpredictable, and perpetual chaos would be intolerable. To assuage our fears, we have mentally constructed a picture of life that is reassuring, but wrong. There’s a kind of silent conspiracy to impose logic, reason, order, and predictability which actually isn’t there in Nature.

As an Oxford mathematician, under his real name of Charles Dodgson, Carroll was deeply attached to order, reason, and logic. In the Alice books he was sending two messages that modern people still believe in. The first has already been mentioned: It is better to live an orderly, well-organized life than its opposite, a disorderly and messy life. The second message is that the natural world runs on logical and predictable cause-and-effect. This message is sent by reverse example, since Wonderland is the place where the Red Queen “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice laughs at this, but there are at least three impossible things that everyone cannot do without.

The first, known as intuition, defies logic, because intuition strikes out of the blue, giving rise to sudden insights, breakthroughs, and discoveries.

Without it, the modern world wouldn’t exist—we might not even have the wheel.

The second impossible thing is synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences, which defies cause-and-effect.

Without synchronicity, diverse areas of the brain could not perform precisely coordinated activities; in fact, no cell could. Hard as it might be to credit, your whole body is held together by synchronicity, because gravity, electromagnetism, and chemical bonding aren’t enough to keep your body from flying apart into a cloud of atoms and molecules. Every force that acts upon you, every chemical reaction, and the hum of electricity in every cell must act in perfect accord to keep you intact. Mechanical cause-and-effect can do no more than make physical objects glom together lifelessly.

The third impossible thing is more technical and is known as quantum entanglement.

Two subatomic particles like an electron or photon can be paired so that no matter how far apart they are, if one undergoes a change, it will be instantaneously mirrored by the other in complementary fashion. Quantum entanglement happens instantaneously even across billions of light years, therefore defying the speed of light.

Einstein’s famous phrase for this, “spooky action at a distance,” reflected his disbelief that the speed of light could be defied. He spent the second half of his life trying to make sense of the phenomenon, and such was Einstein’s prestige that it has taken highly complex, expensive experiments (the latest involved using light from quasars billions of light years away, passing through some of the world’s biggest telescopes) to settle once and for all that he was wrong.

These three impossible things have such vast and unsettling implications that whole books have been written about each, but the upshot is that we are all Alice. We have settled into regular, orderly lives where predictability, logic, cause and effect, and the general theory of relativity operate, while on the fringes our existence is shadowed by impossible things. It is hard to realize that both worlds are equally valid as the framework of existence, and even harder to see that all the order, logic, rationality, and predictability is solely the construct of the human mind.

Standing back without any agenda in mind, you cannot help but observe that human beings are as intensely irrational as they are rational, that the creation of life on Earth has required the destruction of millions of prehistoric species in order to make way for Homo sapiens, and that science’s cherished laws of nature are constantly confronted with chaotic, random activity everywhere in the cosmos (not to mention in our bodies, where cancer is thought to be a runaway genetic mistake).

There’s a lot of skepticism about impossible things—the impossible things always win in the end, however—and a lot of propaganda, about how to make your dreams come true though making money, leading the ideal family life, constantly consuming more and more, etc. The three impossible things we’re discussing here haven’t shattered this illusion, but global climate change has a good chance of doing the job for us. The prosperous lives of consumers carelessly leaving huge carbon footprints has to change to avoid climate catastrophe, and yet the illusion of normality makes people cling to a lifestyle that only brings the peril closer.

One of the impossible things, intuition, might save us, in the form of new bright ideas that can be transformed into technology to end the imbalance of greenhouse gases. But many of these ideas already exist, but are blocked by our stubborn, perhaps fatal, attachment of what we call normal life. Believing in impossible things has a vastly important legacy and no doubt a future just as important. Science and our understanding of reality depends upon abandoning our illusions, no matter how comfortable they are.

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 the Greatest Mystery Is You

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, PhD

Even though teams of scientists around the world are working on great mysteries, from the origin of the universe to the origin of life, the greatest mystery remains personal, the mystery of the self.

So far as we know, human beings are unique in pondering our own existence as selves and also our place in the universe. You would think that this trait is enough to solve the mystery. After all, if I am aware of myself, I should be an expert on how the self operates.

But exactly the opposite is true. No one can say, with any hope of reaching a consensus, even the most basic things about the self. For example, “self” is both a word and a concept, yet no one knows how or when human speech came about, and concepts, which imply thinking, confront us with our ignorance about what a thought actually is. Take the simplest statement about the individual self, “I am.” When you say these two words to yourself, is it really possible that your brain cells know English and possess a voice?

The world’s spiritual traditions can be reframed as explorations into “I am.” Jehovah uses the phrase when he speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, as well as in Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” Jesus tells his disciples, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” In the ancient Vedas, supreme knowledge is conveyed, mysteriously enough, in the declaration, “I am That.”

The upshot, if we gather these statements together, is that “I am” is a statement beyond what we ordinarily think ourselves as individuals and holds the key to truth, life, existence, and a higher power known as God. The gist of the Upanishads is that all things are done by, for, and because of the self, the foundation of reality. However you parse our different types of scriptural heritage, as a species, we have been fascinated and baffled by our own self-awareness.

With self-awareness came an almost immediate sense that the self is divided. Again there are many expressions of this inescapable fact, but they generally play on the notion of opposites. Humans are divine and animal in their nature, capable of the highest good and the worst evil, driven by the conscious and the unconscious. So thoroughly is the divided self embedded in the rise of Homo sapiens that we possess a higher and lower brain, feeling torn between reason and irrational drives for sex, survival, and perhaps love and hate.

No one needs to be told that life, as viewed by humans, offers no escape from the divided self except one: discover the undivided self. If the self’s division isn’t innate, if it is a human creation, we should be able to go back and regain the earlier, more primal state of being one and whole.

This quest has held importance for centuries, and at some level, it unites the Christian search for Heaven, the Buddhist vision of Nirvana, and the Vedic teaching of liberation or enlightenment. Things haven’t changed that much in modern times. Eventually, if you take an interest in psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, religion, or the vast amorphous domain we call spirituality, you arrive at the self and its mysterious nature. Science cannot solve this mystery for us, although it can provide many clues through neuroscience, for example. But no brain map, however detailed, will ever put us in direct contact with the self, just as the best topographic maps cannot deliver the feeling of grass beneath your feet—the map isn’t the territory, as the saying goes.

What has baffled many explorers of the self, if we lump all of these fields together, is that the answer to the mystery of the self is right before our eyes. Every experience has one thing in common: the sense of the self. No matter what activity you are engaged in, excluding deep dreamless sleep, you have a sense of yourself. This sense has no voice, words, or thoughts to express itself in. “I am” is all there is. Without ‘I am” nothing else can happen, no thought, word, action, or act of imagination.

The reason that “I am” doesn’t seem to offer any answers isn’t just because it stays silent. The bigger reason is that “I am” is the answer. The sense of self, in other words, is the bottom line of human existence. There is nowhere else to go. The unitary self is inextricably entwined with consciousness and existence and therefore life itself. “I am” as the ultimate answer has little appeal, unfortunately, in the realm of science, which is based on investigating facts, data, and measurements of the physical world. Far from being intrigued by the mystery of the self, science has assiduously avoided the subjective world “in here” and continues to look for self-awareness as a physical function of the brain, or perhaps simply an illusion traceable to the complexity of a hundred billion neurons constantly sending signals in a vast, teeming storm of chemistry and electromagnetism. This is not an absolute statement. Some prominent founders of quantum mechanics, such as Max Planck and Schrödinger, believed in reality beyond what appears to be an external reality.

There’s no use, obviously, in trying to argue with many scientists who still follow a classical physics point of view, which is why the mystery of the self remains, as it has existed for thousands of years, a personal mystery, solved one person at a time. In the historical records we have literally thousands upon thousands of testimonies from explorers of the self, and their declarations about the unitary self—the self that lies beyond the divided self—show many common elements.

In quick summary, here are some of the unitary self’s leading qualities. It is:

  • Ever-present as the sense of self
  • Silent
  • Alert
  • Blissful
  • The origin of the mind
  • The source of love, intelligence, creativity, insight, and evolution
  • Self-regulating
  • Unbounded by time and space, therefore eternal
  • Untouched by physical change
  • Inconceivable and yet the origin of all concepts

Taken altogether, these traits are the enticement for seeking an answer to the ‘myself’ of the self, because at bottom, the self contains all of these traits if we can only get beyond our divided self, with all of its confusion and conflicts. Even in our divided state human beings possess every trait on the list—after all, the unitary self isn’t foreign to us, it is just “I am” when seen directly, without the cloud of beliefs, old conditioning, social training, and ego needs that occupy and dominate everyday life.

Reaching the unitary self—the term “nonduality” has become a popular tag for the same thing—involves an inward journey. Any kind of clarification (e.g., higher education, psychotherapy, philosophy) can serve to penetrate some of the fog that mask the nondual state, but deeper investigations lead to meditation, contemplation, self-reflection, and keeping on the path until enlightenment or awakening is reached. This whole area can be termed personal evolution, and of course it’s not news that our times are rife with interest in this very thing.

We’ve explored the universal extent of self-awareness in our book You Are the Universe, but we’d like to underline one point that will seem exotic. If the unitary self is real and can actually be experienced, deep sleep should form no barrier. Every-present means ever-present. The sense of self should not vanish in sleep just because mental activity and perception of the world “out there” are gone. And so it is fascinating that people who have awakened, in fact continue to experience, quite consciously, a sense of self during deep dreamless sleep. They testify that this is the purest experience of the self, due to the very absence of mental activity.

It’s a fascinating note to end on. “I am” can be secularized, and in our view should be, if it is ever to become the cornerstone of human existence. In terms of higher consciousness, “I am” is the way, the truth, and the life.

 

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 
Menas C. Kafatos, PhD is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University, conducting research in quantum physics, cosmology, climate change and related hazards. He works on issues related to reality and the role of consciousness for natural laws that apply everywhere, the foundations of the universe, for scientific understanding, and spiritual non-dual awareness in everyday life. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison. He is a lecturer and has authored 330 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence, Science, Reality and Everyday Life, and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of You are the Universe. www.menaskafatos.com 

A New, Improved Reality Depends on You

How do we know that anything is real?

This isn’t a question that usually bothers most people, because we’ve all been brought up to look upon the physical world “out there” as a given. But let’s say that someone actually asks you the question, “How do you know the physical world is real?” What would you answer?

If you pause for a second, there are only two kinds of answers to this question: Either you tell a story or you refer to your own experience. Stories used to be collective myths, generally based on religion, about how God or the gods created the world. But any story, including the most advanced scientific models, depends on belief. If you believe in the Book of Genesis, you will see reality very differently from someone who believes in the Big Bang. To sort out which story is actually true, the second kind of answer arose, defining reality according to our experience. A rock is hard because two people who kick it agree from their experience that it is, in fact, hard.

A scientist might loudly object that we’ve left out physical data and facts. Surely a rock is hard because geologists have assembled all kinds of facts about all kinds of rocks. But such facts also come down to experience. There are rock-eating bacteria deep in the earth, and to them a rock is food, so hardness doesn’t enter their experience—for all we know, granite is to a bacterium what a lettuce leaf is to us. “Hardness” is not objective. Neutrinos are particles that travel through the Earth by the trillions and more, being impeded no more by a solid planet than if it was a puff of air, or nothing at all.

No matter how insistent you are about scientific fact, all facts enter our minds as either sensations, images, feelings, or thoughts, which UCLA psychiatry professor Daniel J. Siegel has shortened to SIFT. SIFT is necessary in order for anything to be real to a human being. Since the stories we tell and hear are also based on SIFT, especially on thoughts, it turns out that reality gets much messier than it would at first appear. Facts, data, experiences, and stories cannot be disentangled into neat categories that everyone would agree on. Thus a specific perception of the world, such as Newton looking upon gravity as a force, got entangled with Newton’s parallel belief that the Book of Genesis was factual, and when Einstein turned gravity from a force into a matter of curved spacetime geometry, a new entanglement of facts, data, experiences, and stories came about. In Einstein’s case the Book of Genesis didn’t enter the picture, but he certainly had his own religious notions and philosophical ideas that others might or might not agree with.

If you consult our last post, “Changing the World with a Glance,” we covered an accepted fact among most modern physicists, that nothing can be proven to exist, including the entire universe, without an observer. Even though physical things appear to exist independently we cannot rely on appearances. This notion is counterintuitive to anyone who accepts that the physical world “out there” is the basis of reality.

Holding two versions of reality has now become common-place among physicists: in the everyday world they accept how things ordinarily work, which depend on the senses, while in the quantum world, far beyond the senses, they accept such seemingly bizarre notions as reverse causation, creation from nothingness, and 11-dimensional string theory, which reduces all matter and energy to invisible vibrations in a domain that has no time, space, matter, or energy and therefore can be described only through pure mathematics.

These two models of reality certainly don’t fit together. If a new, improved reality is ever to exist, it could include many unusual features, but one aspect is certain: It would be whole, not fragmented. If you concede that it takes an observer to create reality as we know it, then any new and improved reality depends on each of us, acting as an observer. Observation isn’t passive or neutral. It is always creative. Thanks to SIFT, everything you know and accept as real depends on mental activity. At any given second you are either sensing, feeling, imagining, or thinking in order for anything—an atom, coffee cup, cloud, or Marvel comic—to be real.

Our previous post filled in the argument for how each person became a co-creator of the universe (and we co-authored a book on the subject, You Are the Universe), so let’s jump to the bottom line. If you accept that you co-create reality with every other person who possesses a human nervous system, how would this change your life? Here is a list of possibilities:

  • You would become curious about your creative powers.
  • You would want to test these powers out.
  • You would question second-hand stories about creation, preferring to either create your own model or no model at all.
  • If you get rid of all stories and models, you would find yourself basing reality on your own experience, and then would quickly realize that you have been doing that all your life.

The difference would be that now you can be conscious of how the process works.

  • Since everyone’s personal reality is based on entangled facts, data, stories, and experiences, you would become very interested in getting untangled.
  • To become untangled, you would find yourself experiencing reality only in the now, unburdened by the past or by anticipation of the future. Only the present moment is free of entanglement. Only in the present moment is reality fresh and ever renewed—this is why it is sometimes referred to as the eternal now.

We are not saying that creating personal reality makes you isolated or solipsistic. The point is that conscious experiencing is what makes us more complete, freer as human beings. We are, as quantum physicists claim, active participants of our own existence.

As you can see, a lot is at stake in any new, improved reality. Getting untangled is the chief hurdle. The underlying unity of reality opens up huge opportunities. It is also the key to the exotic states described for centuries as enlightenment, waking up, Nirvana, Moksha, and liberation. But by any name, higher consciousness has many enticements, which we will discuss in the next post. All who are curious are cordially invited.

(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 
Menas C. Kafatos, PhD is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University, conducting research in quantum physics, cosmology, climate change and related hazards. He works on issues related to reality and the role of consciousness for natural laws that apply everywhere, the foundations of the universe, for scientific understanding, and spiritual non-dual awareness in everyday life. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison. He is a lecturer and has authored 330 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence, Science, Reality and Everyday Life, and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of You are the Universe. www.menaskafatos.com 

Research Article: Physics Must Evolve Beyond the Physical

View the Paper

This article recognizes Henry Stapp’s contribution to physics. Henry Stapp is a Spirit of Rustom Roy Award Recipient (2012)

Abstract: Contemporary physics finds itself pondering questions about mind and consciousness, an uncomfortable area for theorists. But historically, key figures at the founding of quantum theory assumed that reality was composed of two parts, mind and matter, which interacted with each other according to some new laws that they specified. This departure from the prior (classical-physicalist) assumption that mind was a mere side effect of brain activity was such a startling proposal that it basically split physics in two, with one camp insisting that mind will ultimately be explained via physical processes in the brain and the other camp embracing mind as innate in creation and the key to understanding reality in its completeness. Henry Stapp made important contributions toward a coherent explanation by advocating John von Neumann’s orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics. von Neumann postulated that at its basis, quantum mechanics requires both a psychological and physical component. He was left, however, with a dualist view in which the psychological and physical aspects of QM remained unresolved. In this article, the relevant issues are laid out with the aim of finding a nondual explanation that allows mind and matter to exist as features of the same universal consciousness, in the hope that the critical insights of Planck, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, von Neumann, and Stapp will be recognized and valued, with the aim of an expanded physics that goes beyond physicalist dogma.