For centuries a quality has existed that is referred to as wisdom. A phrase like “wiser heads prevailed” implies that wisdom can save us from stupid or foolish actions. Elders were once considered wise, and so were philosophers. But once you bring up these references, wisdom feels antiquated and irrelevant. Who are the wiser heads in our day? Aside from a revered figure like the Dalai Lama, it’s hard to name one, and he is really a spiritual figurehead more than the classic wise man.

Whatever wisdom might be, the average person doesn’t think about it very much, if at all, and when you consider the problems that feel the most disturbing—climate change, terrorism, racism, poverty, and international tensions, for example—nobody is clamoring to call on wisdom to solve them.

But maybe only wisdom can. Let me explain what I mean.

Every problem, not just the big global ones but problems in everyday life, get solved by using a mental model. This model explains what has gone wrong, which is the first step in making things right again. Consider a common problem like feeling depressed. In our time we apply a medical model and send the depressed person to get help from a doctor, who will prescribe an antidepressant, or to a psychologist, who will apply some kind of therapy.

In the past, other models would have offered a very different explanation of why someone is depressed. Instead of calling depression a mental disorder or a psychological malady, which leads to trying to understand the person’s brain, depression would have been considered a lack of personal discipline or a moral failing. A depressed person in another model would be considered possessed by evil spirits or punished by God for some hidden sin. It’s strange to think that depression might be treated using everything from bleeding to exorcism, but such is the power of mental models.

Models fool people into believing that they are true. In modern society, the general belief that depression is an illness like catching a cold or contracting cancer feels so certain that few would disagree. But in fact, the disease model is not always workable in depression. The action of popular antidepressants on the brain isn’t certain and may be totally misunderstood. You cannot reliably predict who will get depressed, and quite often depression comes and goes on its own for no reason anyone can explain.

If your model doesn’t predict things correctly, leads to haphazard solutions, and depends on unproven assumptions (in this case, the assumption that depression is a brain problem), it’s not a model that matches reality. In modern life, we rely on a model of reality that has three components or levels.

The first level is data, which we collect and assemble into facts. Facts are supposed to match reality, but thanks to the human gift of rationality we now have so-called “alternative” facts, that are really just stubborn opinions that refuse to be rational.

The second level is information. Information consists of the conclusion that the data reveals. If your blood test comes back with an abnormal blood sugar reading (fact), your doctor might inform you that you are diabetic (conclusion). But in many cases of other disorders doctors and other experts frequently disagree. The same information can often lead to opposite conclusions.

The third level is knowledge, which consists of understanding. You are a knowledgeable doctor if you went to medical school and acquired the knowledge of diseases and how to treat them. Knowledge is the summit of the scientific or rational model. Data gives us the facts; facts assemble into correct information; information, when absorbed as knowledge, allows any problem to be solved, any question to be answered.

And yet knowledge also breaks down; in fact, it breaks down all the time. A good example is diets. There is enough information out there about the failure of diets to show that they don’t work, but the fact that only around 2% of dieters can lose five pounds and keep it off for five years doesn’t inhibit the massive lucrative diet industry. We know all kinds of things where our understanding is futile: carbon emissions warm the planet, women are equal to men, wars have no upside. Gender inequality, global warming, and violent conflicts run amok, not for lack of understanding—after all, the data, facts, information, and knowledge about these problems are irrefutable—but because the current model has failed.

What do people do when their cherished model of reality breaks down? They cling to it even harder and continue to do the same old things that have never worked. Science, the ultimate icon of the rational model, clings to the totally unproven notion that the brain creates the mind, for example, and if you say that this model has lots of problems, a brain scientist will ignore your objections. He clings to his model because it seems good enough, despite its inconsistencies, and his job depends upon it.

Enter wisdom. Wisdom has grown scarce for the simple reason that it follows no model. Socrates made the point, and it got him into a great deal of trouble, that wisdom cannot be taught. You can teach data collection, the amassing of facts, and many branches of knowledge, but wisdom stands apart. True wisdom leads to such things as insight, intuition, depth of experience, self-awareness, and humility before mysteries that will never be fully comprehended.

Because wisdom contradicts the certainty that models try to give us, it has had a hard time in society, as the death of Socrates shows. Society defends its favored and cherished models (which can be mythical, religious, animistic, scientific, and so on) with ferocity; certainty is not to be flouted. Wisdom calls for a totally different way of looking at reality. I will argue in the next post for taking the road back to wisdom. It is the only way to fulfill the infinite potential that human beings possess, and on a global scale, it is the only way we will reach desperately needed solutions.

 

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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.  www.deepakchopra.com

The human potential movement deals in self-improvement, encouraging people to realize that they are not as limited as they think they are. This approach of overcoming limitations has benefitted many, but from a wider perspective, there should be an “infinite potential” movement. Let’s say that the proposition of infinite potential is viable. How would you prove that it exists?

The proof is much simpler—and far more surprising—than you might suppose. Consider yourself going to the supermarket to buy a dozen organic brown eggs. This everyday task is enough to open the door to infinity. “Dozen” is a mathematical concept. Not only are numbers infinite, but so are the equations that grow out of numbers. From equations grow scientific formulas, and science stands for the human capacity to experiment, measure, and rationally understand the world, which may not be infinite but shows no signs of doing anything but grow.

If you decide you want brown eggs instead of white, you are using your capacity for discerning colors, and the human eye can discriminate something like two million different colors. But far more significant is color itself. It is one of the qualities—sometimes called qualia—that we base our experiences on. Having no math or science background, you can still make your way perfectly well through the world by dint of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. The human capacity for experience through qualia is infinite.

But once you see that the world can be understood starting with counting, which leads to all the quantities in existence, from the number of stars in the universe to all the money in the world, you have a choice to use one model of reality (math, science, reason, logic) or the other (qualia, experience, sensation). Now a great secret enters the picture, because choosing between quantity and quality doesn’t happen on the level of either. You switch perspectives by going beyond quality and quantity. If someone asks you how many eggs you want and what color they should be, you automatically know which worldview the question comes form.

But this “going beyond” runs much deeper. If you “want” eggs but you “don’t want” apples, you have entered the world of desire, which has infinite expressions. If you refuse to accept apples when you asked for eggs, you’ve switched to will power. From will power grows work, diligence, endurance, resistance, and so on. So that gives you two more entirely distinct ways of switching from one perspective to the other. And in all cases, you choose to switch automatically, without even noticing that you are shuffling infinite possibilities around.

Let’s go even deeper. If you say of an intellectual that he is an egghead or compare a fat person’s shape to an apple, you have opened up two more infinities: symbol and language. Recognizing that things are egg-shaped uses the egg as a symbol for a lopsided ovoid. When you speak, you use a specialized set of symbols that includes alphabets, grammar, dictionaries, literature, and all the other aspects of language.

Thus, the wonder of human capacity doesn’t lie in a single infinity but as many as you like, for there is no reason for such creative possibilities to stop. In fact, “creativity” is another kind of infinity, leading to others: the infinite number of novels, poems, music and paintings that await to be created. I’m not expanding these categories to make your mind reel or to sound academic. I want instead to propose that there must be a source for these infinite possibilities. We cannot say that math is the source of how chocolate tastes, because counting a person’s taste buds, olfactory nerves, and sense of touch—all of which enter into the taste of chocolate—never crosses the line into the actual experience of how chocolate tastes.

The only thing that can determine whether you will choose at any given moment to refer to quality, quantity, reason, emotion, creativity, desire, or will power—a choice you make hundreds of times a day—is consciousness. Your capacity is infinite because you can play with consciousness without end. In fact, there is no such thing as the unconscious, because when you do something like shut out an annoying person, you make a conscious choice to be unconscious.

There are underlying processes that go on all the time, such as the regulation of breathing, digestion, and the immune system, that were once thought to be mechanical and therefore unconscious. Now we realize two things: first, the body has its own deeply complex intelligence, and with enough training, a person can consciously control a process like breathing or heart rate to an extraordinary degree.

I hope you get a sense of wonder at the power of consciousness, which is the very foundation of experience and existence. To be is to be conscious. Yet there is a final step. Consciousness cannot be counted, nor can it be described with language or symbols. You can be aware of a qualia like how hot the temperature is or how big your living room is, but the content of awareness isn’t the same as awareness itself. For example, there’s a rare medical condition where the person is deprived of all sensory experience. Unable to see, hear, touch, taste, or smell, the person is still aware. Similarly, it is possible to be aware during deep sleep, an attainment associated with enlightenment but which we can label just another example of extended self-awareness.

Since consciousness cannot be defined or described, it has no limits, no beginning or end, no birth or death, no X or Y, no matter what X and Y stand for. Consciousness is simply One and All, for which the ancient Indians coined the Sanskrit word Brahman. Here’s the kicker: Because you are conscious, you too are the One and All. You are not one person among seven billion—that’s just a matter of counting. It doesn’t get at the real you, your essence. The real you is pure, infinite, indescribable, eternal, limitless consciousness.

Putting things this way isn’t an exaggeration; it is the conclusion you must arrive at once you ask for a dozen organic brown eggs and stop a moment to examine what you are actually doing. All roads, so far as being human goes, lead back to our source. Instead of pure consciousness, you could just a rightfully call it the infinity of infinities—and it is you.

 

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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.  www.deepakchopra.com

Modern machines are assembled from separate moving parts, a fact that seems so obvious that we usually don’t notice its vast influence over us. But the image of a machine extends to the human body, which is an assemblage of trillions of separate cells, and ultimately to the universe, which is considered an assemblage of atoms and molecules beyond numbering.

So ingrained is the machine metaphor that it has taken centuries to realize that it has a fatal flaw. The human body and the universe operate as a single wholeness that cannot be explained mechanically or even logically. The general public has a vague acquaintance that quantum physics changed how science views space, time, matter, and energy. What escapes general notice, however, is the revolution that followed the quantum revolution.

Since roughly World War II, the following activities of the universe have sent science scrambling to find a rational explanation:

• Cause and effect breaks down at the quantum level, and along with it so does time. There is a phenomenon known as reverse causation whereby a future event affects a previous one.
• Two elementary particles can be identically matched so that when one changes its properties, its twin responds simultaneously, no matter how far away it might be. Through a principle known as quantum entanglement, two particles separated by billions of light years can act without physical communication, thus defying the speed of light and ultimately demolishing the concept of space.
• The infant universe was so finely calibrated that a change in any one of a dozen constants by as little as one part in a billion would have prevented our universe from emerging as it exists today. The infant universe would either have collapsed upon itself or flown apart so fast that atoms and molecules would never have formed.
• Every solid object in the universe has a separate existence at the quantum level as merely a ripple or wave in the quantum field, thus demolishing the notion that there is a small building block in nature that is the irreducible “thing” from which the cosmos is constructed.

One could go on, but the upshot of these discoveries is that mathematically speaking, as well as in real-time experiences, the notion of the universe as a machine with tiny moving parts governed by space, time, and everyday logic is totally false. Noted physicists, including the late Stephen Hawking, declare that there is no longer a guarantee that the advanced theories of modern physics actually match reality. (You can get a sense of the prevailing confusion in a recent New York Times article, “Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?”)

If the universe isn’t a giant machine, there’s every reason to drop the whole analogy of the machine, but what to put in its place? The answer advanced by more and more scientists is “wholeness.” Since space, time, matter, energy, and everyday logic aren’t truly fundamental, it makes sense that whatever controls space, time, matter, and energy must be the universes overriding reality. Wholeness exerts a force, call it “the power of one,” that goes beyond physical forces. Or to put it another way, no combination of physical forces can be sued to explain how the whole maintains and organizes itself.

The power of one can be seen on a small scale as well as a cosmic scale. The fertilized ovum from which the human body develops is a self-organizing system, not a watery bag of chemicals enclosed in a membrane. With infinite precision this first cell begins to send out chemical and electrical signals almost from the instant it divides into two cells, and within weeks stem cells know how to become heart, liver, and brain cells using the same DNA. The concept of the self-organizing system now permeates biology, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, and more.

What science clings to, for complicated reasons that have little to do with the actual evidence, is an insistence that self-organization has to be physical. This insistence runs into glaring contradictions. For instance, if elementary particles can operate three ways—via cause-and-effect, reverse cause-and-effect, and no cause-and-effect—how do they make the choice between them?

Since it has been obvious to a number of cosmologists that the physical universe functions much more like a mind than like a machine, a trend has emerged to include consciousness as fundamental in creation. If consciousness has always been with us, it is the best candidate for explaining where the power of one comes from. The same would then hold true for how atoms, molecules, cells, tissues and organs self-organize into the human body. It has never been shown that the atoms and molecules somehow learned to think through a magical physical transformation. The best explanation is that the brain doesn’t think in the first place. Mind thinks, and on the physical plane it devises a brain to accommodate its thoughts.

Yet in the end a new conception of reality must pass the “So what?” test. Quantum mechanics is considered the most successful scientific theory of all time, but its effect on everyday life—or at least everyday thought—has been marginal. The power of one has a much better chance of passing the “So what?” test, however. By deposing the metaphor of the body as a machine, the power of one allows us to see several vital things.

• Since the power of one controls both creation and destruction, it transcends death. There is a good likelihood that death is no longer even a viable concept. Instead, eternal consciousness should be considered our foundation.
• The individual self with its ego-driven demands is supported by the false notion that every person is a separate entity, isolated and alone. In fact, we are all an activity of the universe, requiring the power of one to exist in a physical body.
• We are attached to our individual thoughts, but this too is an illusion. There is every reason to believe that cosmic mind is the only mind. Therefore, what we think is only an outcropping in the activity of this cosmic mind.

It is obvious at first glance that human beings are intelligent, creative, and capable of the fastest evolution of any species on earth. This alone testifies to the validity of the power of one. But we can look even deeper. People have reported experiences of meaningful coincidences or synchronicity for a very long time. The key word is “meaningful,” because meaningless coincidences can be explained as random events.

However, a system cannot be meaningless and meaningful at the same time. Synchronicity is a valuable clue. It points toward wholeness as having a meaning to everything it does.

This possibility, that everything truly does happen for a reason, would be a game changer as far as how we live our lives. We’ll explore this possibility and what it would mean for the average person in the next post.

(To be cont.)

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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.  www.deepakchopra.com

More people than ever have undertaken a spiritual path of their own, independently of organized religion. “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual” has become a common expression, and I count myself among those who struck out on their own as a seeker. My search has covered a lot of ground over the years, from mind-body medicine to quantum physics, higher consciousness, the future of God, and personal transformation.

What all of these disparate topics have in common is reality, in the sense that everyday reality is hiding from view the “real” reality that needs to be unveiled. (Readers might want to look at last week’s post, “Unveiling Reality,” which details what it means to unveil reality.) There’s no question that the five senses detect the world in a very limited way, since they give no clue that molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles exist, not to mention genes and DNA. But unveiling a deeper physical reality is far from the whole story.

The physical sciences are about the external world, while another hidden reality, which is crucial to spiritual seeking, takes place “in here,” where the mind is the explorer and the territory being explored. This sounds like a contradiction, and so does the traditional way of reaching higher consciousness, which is called “the pathless path.” How can you unveil reality “in here” when the explorer—the mind—isn’t separate from the territory it wants to explore. The difficulty emerges clearly if you ask a question like “What do I think about thinking?” or “Am I aware of awareness?”

At best these questions sound circular, like a snake biting its tail. But the contradiction is straightened out, and the pathless path makes sense, when you realize one simple thing: The active mind isn’t the same as the still, quiet mind. Every method of spiritual seeking, if it is successful, goes beyond the active mind and its restless baggage of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts, with the aim of settling down into pure, undisturbed awareness. By analogy, one dives below the churning surface of a raging river, moving through deeper waters where the currents are slower, until one reaches the bottom, where the river is almost motionless.

Here, however, the analogy breaks down, because meditation, which is like an inner dive, can reach the zero point of no motion or activity of any kind. At the source of your awareness you can encounter pure awareness. Why is this experience worthwhile? Because the field of pure awareness is the origin of traits that are innate in us: Intelligence, creativity, evolution, love, and self-awareness are chief among these.

The pathless path makes sense for that reason; it leads you, without going anywhere, to a deeper level of awareness. Once you experience the deeper level, you find that there’s a shift. You identify less with your everyday self, which is totally dependent on the active mind (along with the desires, hopes, wishes, and dreams it generates), and you start to identify more with the field of pure awareness.

In this way higher consciousness gets assimilated into who you are and how you live your life. The word “spiritual” isn’t mandatory to describe this shift; I prefer to describe the whole process in terms of awareness, which is a more neutral term. What baffles people is that the whole project of seeking gets tangled up in misguided ideas. Let me list the pitfalls one is most likely to encounter.

1. Mistaking the goal for some kind of self-improvement.
2. Assuming that you already know what the goal is.
3. Hoping that higher consciousness will solve all your problems.
4. Struggling and striving to get somewhere.
5. Following a cut-and-dried method, usually a method backed by some spiritual authority or other.
6. Hoping to be looked upon with respect, reverence, or devotion as a higher being.
7. Being tossed around by the ups and downs of momentary successes and failures.
   I doubt that anyone who has honestly undertaken an inner journey is immune to some or all of these pitfalls. There is an enormous gap between where you find yourself today (totally dependent on the active mind) and the reality yet to be unveiled. Nothing less than an all-encompassing illusion surrounds us, a construct of the human mind that conditions everything we think and feel.

When it is put that way, the pathless path seems impossible or at the very least difficult and probably painful. But what’s difficult and painful are the pitfalls I’ve listed. The illusion creates all the problems. It’s crucial to see this. The actual path is effortless and pain-free. The mind by its own nature can know its source in pure awareness. By analogy, you can go through troubles, worries, everyday crises, and arguments with your children, but without a doubt you know you love them. Love goes beyond the other stuff—that’s how transcendence, or going beyond, works.

The same holds true in the process of unveiling reality, which also goes by the simple name of waking up. The ancient Vedas declare that everyone is defined by their deepest desires. Desire leads to thoughts, thoughts to words and actions, actions to the fulfillment of desire. So in a very basic way, the pathless path is a path of desire. If your deepest desire is to wake up, to escape the illusion, to unveil reality, and in the end to know who you really are, the message gets through. Your deepest desire activates a level of awareness that will lead you to the goal.

As with raising kids, the everyday stuff rises and falls, but love, caring, attention, and devotion steadily work their way. The same is true of you the seeker, even though you are both parent and child to yourself, both teacher and student, healer and healed. Because these dual roles merge into one, the pathless path makes sense, and it works.

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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.  www.deepakchopra.com

The near-death experience (NDE) has entered popular culture, starting in the 1970s, and “going into the light” is considered by the average person to be what happens after you die, assuming that anything happens. But the largest study of NDEs, which examined 2,060 patients who died under emergency or intensive care, arrive at the conclusion that death isn’t a single event–it is a process. During this process, there are ways to reverse death. If you are successful at getting the heart, lungs, and brain to come back to normal functioning, about 40% of those who died and came back remember that “something happened” when they were flat line.

This part of the study, which was titled AWARE and was led by intensive-care doctor Sam Parnia, seems irrefutable. But very quickly the details of “something happened” become controversial. We have to dive into a few details to see what the issues are. Out of the 2,060 patients who died (the study went from 2008 to 2012 and included 33 researchers in 15 hospitals), 104 were resuscitated. The first point to note is that all had actually died. They were not “near death.” Their hearts and lungs had stopped functioning, and within 20-30 seconds their brains showed no activity.  The decomposition of cells throughout the body actually takes several hours to commence afterward. During the interval between dying and being brought back is when 39% reported the memory of being conscious even though their brains had stopped.

Dr. Parnia believes that this is probably just a fraction of those who had such experiences; the rest had their memories erased either by brain inflammation, which occurs for 72 hours after a person is brought back from death, or because of drugs that are administered as part of resuscitation that also causes memory loss. But of the 101 out of 104 who completed the questionnaire about their experience during death, only 9% had an experience compatible with the typical view of NDEs; the majority of memories were vague and unfocused, sometimes pleasant but sometimes not.

Only 2%, which means two people out of the 104 who completed questionnaires, had the experience of full awareness or out-of-body experiences like looking down from above their bodies watching and listening to the medical team as it was working to revive them. Of these two people, only one could accurately narrate what had been happening in the room in such a way that it corresponded to timed events. So what does this one person tell us about dying?

It depends. Skeptics shrug off all such experiences as purely physical, claiming that if we had finer measurements of brain activity, at a very subtle level we’d discover that the brain hadn’t actually died. Dr. Parnia accepts that this might be true. His main focus is on how to achieve better results at resuscitation that might bring back a normal person with no organ damage, particularly brain damage after clinical death. But Parnia’s personal conclusion is that a person can be fully conscious without brain function, as this one patient was. He points to the basic disagreement, thousands of years ago, between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle contended that consciousness was a physical phenomenon, Plato that it was non-physical, residing in a soul that transcends the body.

The AWARE study didn’t confirm either side. Unsurprisingly, skeptics and believers didn’t change their position, or their prejudices one way or another. One can say that it’s a significant step to turn death into a process that can be reversed. It’s also significant that awareness during death covers a wide range of experiences, not a one-size-fits-all of going into the light. Parnia found that people’s spiritual interpretation of their death experience coincided with their own faith. They interpreted the light as being Christ, if they were Christians, which was different for Hindus and non-spiritual for atheists.  but the consensus was that death is a comfortable process, not to be feared. Having directly experienced that their old fears were groundless, these people who came back had a different perspective on life. Many if not most also concluded that they should lead more selfless lives in service to others.

If we stick with the Aristotle-Plato split, scientists are almost totally committed to the physical explanation for consciousness (i.e., the brain creates consciousness) while a strong majority in the general public tell pollsters they believe in the existence of the soul. I think it is useful that the AWARE study validated that “something happens,” but why are we trying to settle the issue of consciousness at the most extreme moment when life and death are at stake? It’s like trying to validate gravity by asking survivors of a plane crash about their experience of falling from the sky.

It is the normal, everyday experience of consciousness that needs to be explained, not the extreme states. I’ve debated or conversed with many neuroscientists, and all, I concluded, believe that the brain creates the mind. Yet despite being experts on brain activity, none has been able to answer the simplest questions about consciousness. These simple questions include the following:

What is a thought?

How does the electrochemical activity in a neuron turn into words, sights, and sounds in our heads?

Why is a person’s next thought totally unpredictable?

If someone has a vocabulary of 30,000 words, does this mean that a clump of brain cells knows 30,000 words? If so, in what way are the words being stored? For the word “cat,” is there a place inside a brain cell that holds the letters C-A-T? 

All brain activity occurs here and now, in the present, because chemical reactions and electrical impulses are instantaneous events. So how is it that I remember, relive, or revisit the past?

There is such a thing as “sudden genius syndrome,” where a person who has little knowledge of music, mathematics, or art suddenly acquires deep knowledge. How can they suddenly know what their brains never learned?

Genius exists among child prodigies. A musical prodigy can play Mozart before age three on the piano. How is this consistent with the known facts about the development of infant’s brains?

There are lots more of these basic questions, and assuming that they can be answered by measuring brain activity is wobbly, so wobbly that the basic belief about the brain creating the mind should be taken by everyone with a huge grain of salt. Not just Plato but some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century were convinced that consciousness simply is–it pre-existed the evolution of the human brain and indeed is the basic “stuff” of creation. It is only a tiny step for one patient to see and hear what is happening around her when she was clinically dead, but in that one experience could be hidden an important conclusion: consciousness exists outside the brain.

 

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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.  www.deepakchopra.com