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

Most people have heard about the fragile start that the universe had. Although the big bang sounds big, it occurred in a space smaller by millions of times than the period at the end of this sentence. The forces of nature had to be exquisitely balanced for the infant universe to work once it expanded to its present enormous size. This exquisite balance is known to physicists as fine tuning. If any one of about twenty constants responsible for the nature of the cosmos had been off by one part in a billion, the infant universe could have collapsed in on itself or flown apart so fast that atoms would never emerge from the primal quantum soup surrounding the beginning of the universe.

A constant is an unvarying number like C, the speed of light. Constants aren’t allowed to be wobbly. The speed of light can’t be unpredictable, changing in the Andromeda nebula (the next-door galaxy to our own Milky Way), from what it is here on Earth. Nor can it change from Monday to Tuesday. Whether you speak of the universe 13.8 billion years ago or today, C hasn’t changed, nor have the other constants that regulate all the matter and energy in the cosmos.

But then a funny thing was observed. Certain large ratios of numbers coming from widely different fields seem to unexpectedly be the same. An example would be the ratio of the electromagnetic force to gravitational force being very similar to the ratio of the radius of the universe to the size of an elementary particle. For no logical reason, both ratios are about 1 followed by 40 zeroes.

Why would this be the case?

Dubbed the large number hypothesis by the pioneering English physicist Paul Dirac, this similarity, he argued, could be far from a numerical coincidence. Some have argued that such coincidences point to the unique characteristics of the universe we live in, namely the ability to develop life and intelligence. If a Swiss watch is missing even one tiny moving part, it can’t tell time. Apparently the same holds true on a cosmic scale. If one constant is off by even a fraction, time couldn’t exist and the universe as we know it today would not be. Since everything is inter-related, the same breakdown would make space, matter, and energy impossible, or at the very least would alter them in ways we can’t imagine.

Our brains, being the product of the same constants that regulate the atom, are also fine-tuned. We think using a physical organ that operates from quantum to cerebrum in a chain of processes that depend on everything being meshed with everything else. If potassium and sodium ions had a different electric charge, for instance, neurons wouldn’t work because they would lack the proper chemistry.

The fact that there is a fixed ratio between a given constant and the diameter of the universe raises an obvious question. In an expanding universe, do constants remain the same, or do they expand and shrink like a rubber band to fit what the universe is doing? The latter would be a remarkable state of affairs; it could challenge the way we go about doing science and how we gather knowledge about the nature of the universe. For at least six decades it was gospel that “constants” cannot change (hence their name). But recent findings, as outlined in last week’s post, has thrown this certainty into doubt. There is evidence that when light travels to Earth from some 12 billion light years away, nearly at the edge of the cosmos, it changed by a tiny fraction.

This could be the biggest breakthrough in modern science, small as the variation is thought to be. We are talking about a few parts in several million. But fine-tuning is much more precise. If you tote up how perfectly all the constants have to be, they form a tight matrix, so tight in fact that any wiggle is impossible. The whole house of cards might crash down, leaving us with no universe. Most physicists would agree in principle with that statement. The grand prize will go to the physicist who can prove it in reality.

If the matrix of constants equals the structure of the universe as we know it, then the large number hypothesis doesn’t point to a mathematical curiosity–it’s the key to life on Earth and the evolution of human beings. There is already a theory of creation based on the anthropic principle, as it is known. The weak version of this theory holds that the universe is only knowable through the human brain, and therefore we will inevitably see creation as leading with perfect design to us here on Earth. An alien on some distant planet light years away, if it possessed a totally different brain, would see a universe based on its nervous system, with a creation story that leads with perfect inevitability to its emergence. In both cases, we would have perfect design.

The strong version of the anthropic principle goes beyond having a human (anthropic) viewpoint. It holds that the universe must be geared to life on Earth and the evolution of Homo sapiens because otherwise, we wouldn’t exist. Fine-tuning is for our benefit. Are there other universes that followed a different trajectory? This is possible mathematically, but we will never experience them, because our home universe is custom made for us.

Homo sapiens inhabits a human universe, which is what our book, You Are the Universe, contends. But the new findings that suggest a reality where the constants are changeable opens up a wider, stranger possibility. The human universe may be evolving to suit our own fluid situation. Homo sapiens acquired a modern human brain around 30,000 years ago. But life back then bore no resemblance to life today. Stone Age humans had the brains to build a nuclear reactor or the Hubble telescope, but they needed a more evolved technological setting to bring such achievements into reality.

It would be startling if our species also needed a different universe for each phase of our evolution. This possibility would make us co-creators of the cosmos. Perhaps we must be co-creators of the cosmos. The existence of fluid constants breaks all the rules, but there has to be a central headquarters that keeps reality intact no matter how different things change. A car remains a car even if you redesign the engine. What makes a car a car? It is a concept that engineers and designers turn into a physical object.

In the same way, our universe may be a concept we maintain in its essential nature, but which can be altered creatively in all kinds of ways, the way a Formula One race car is the creative modification of a Model T Ford. If so, then every model of the universe is altered, not by manipulating the physical parts, but by creating new concepts of what belongs to a universe according to collective humanity. We know that this sounds like a wild surmise, but there are leading physicists, following the lead of most of the founders of quantum mechanics, who already believe that we inhabit a conscious universe. It isn’t much of a step to realize that the evidence of consciousness exists because as conscious beings, we insist that reality reflect our state of mind. The human universe has further horizons than anyone ever expected, beyond perhaps what we used to consider as a purely physical universe.

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

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, and climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness. He holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the natural laws that apply everywhere and are the foundations of the universe, for well-being and success. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 325 articles, is author or editor of 19 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of You are the Universe (Harmony). You can learn more at http://www.menaskafatos.com

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

 

Although advanced instruments like the Very Large Telescope in Chile grab spectacular images and space probes give first-person access to distant bodies like comets, asteroids and planets, the story of the universe is largely told by the numbers. The cosmos holds together, particularly at the farthest horizons, through mathematical calculations. It’s incredibly tricky to calculate what actually occurred during the big bang, for example. At the other extreme, the potential (inevitable?) death of the universe is conjectured, not by envisioning it but by taking the known laws of nature and foreseeing how they play out over time.

 

There are so many variables in this numbers game that huge gaps are possible and possible errors that are more than sizable. Trouble was recently reported in the October 3 issue of New Scientist, a “glitch at the edge of the universe that could remake physics,” as the headline declared. What’s in question–perhaps–is one of the constants upon which most of our theoretical understanding of matter and energy rest. The general public is aware of constants like the speed of light and the force of gravity, but the “fine structure constant,” also known as alpha, has deep implications for the biggest and smallest things in creation.

 

Alpha is known to be approximately 1/137, and it recurs in all kinds of ways arbitrarily, it would seem. One of the most famous American physicists, Richard Feynman called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding.”  But it is accepted that alpha is part of the fine-tuning of the universe, without which creation would be unrecognizable, or even doomed from the start.

 

As the writer of the article, Michael Brooks, summarizes it, alpha lies at the heart of the theory of how electromagnetism works. “Change this number by a smidgen, and you change the universe. Increase it too much, and protons repel each other so strongly that small atomic nuclei can’t hold together. Go a bit further and nuclear fusion factories within stars grind to a halt and can no longer produce carbon, the element on which life is based. Make alpha much smaller, and molecular bonds fall apart at lower temperatures, altering many processes essential to life.”

 

The fact that modern physics requires constants is accepted without question, yet there’s an undercurrent of embarrassment that certain constants, at least 19 in sum for the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, are totally arbitrary numbers that must be injected into equations to make them match reality. In other words, to make the numbers fit what is observed in Nature, physics requires fudge factors. In our book, You Are the Universe, we discuss at length how the discovery of so-called “dark” matter and energy enormously threw the best calculations off balance. Not only was the fudge factor for dark energy enormous, but it seems, mathematically speaking, that the sum total of ordinary matter and energy in the universe is only 4.9% of creation. Dark matter is calculated to be 26.8 % of creation and dark energy 68.3%.

 

It causes consternation to realize that the dark preponderance of creation yields no empirical data; it is speculated that dark matter, for example, may not be atomic, and its interaction with the visible universe is tenuous at best.  But the situation could be untenable if constants are not actually constant. The possibility that constants are fluid or variable, differing over time or from place to place, was intuited decades ago by the imaginative English physicist Paul Dirac. This possibility wouldn’t upset the apple cart on Earth, where alpha varies by only a few parts in 10 billion. This calculation is 100,000 times more precise than computing the constant (nicknamed “big G”) that regulates gravity.

 

The glitch in alpha occurs, if it exists at all, is located in light that has traveled over 12 billion light years from Earth, the furthest that the most powerful telescopes can see.  Since the universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, this is very ancient light. On its journey to Earth, some researchers believe that alpha decreased by a few parts in a million. This might be enough to alter how the cosmos operates at its extreme edges; for example, a new physics might be required that uses new dimensions at a miniature scale compared to the large scale of three-dimensional space.

 

The findings about alpha are speculative, and there is a continual back and forth between what the data seem to say and how this is refuted by other calculations and possible errors. But where Dirac was only intuiting that constants might be inconstant, the door has been opened to this as a reality. If you stand back, the larger picture is quite ambiguous. Science has reached the point, according to no less than the late Stephen Hawking, where there is no assurance that theory matches reality. The accepted set of constants hasn’t changed in over at least fifty years, which would make fluid constants a very big deal. Yet another big deal has already occurred. Instead of being confident that a Theory of Everything would explain how creation works, physics has settled into patchy, at times disconnected theories about small parts of reality.

 

Already the most advanced calculations posit a cosmos that exists in a mathematical hyperspace that isn’t expected to correspond to physical space. Other dimensions and countless other universes in the so-called Multiverse are fitted into the equations, with even less guarantee that they exist. One is reminded of the centuries before Copernicus declared that the Earth moved around the sun. The ancient belief that the Earth was at the center of God’s creation had led into ever more complex circles within circles to explain the movement of the moon and stars. It took a bold, simple insight to overturn the apple cart and bring theory in line with observation.

 

Is physics repeating history, awaiting an insight that will cut through the huge complications of modern cosmology?  We believe so, and the possibility of a new theory, bringing with it a new view of reality, will be the topic of our next post.

(to be cont.)

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, and climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness. He holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the natural laws that apply everywhere and are the foundations of the universe, for well-being and success. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 310 325 articles, is author or editor of 19 15 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of You are the Universe (Harmony). You can learn more at http://www.menaskafatos.com 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

At some point in the history of medicine, a picture coalesced about the role of the brain. From the first basic insight that the brain is the organ of thought, this picture became more and more complex, until neuroscience reached it present state, where the brain is glorified as “the three-pound universe.” Like a magic lantern casting pictures on a blank wall, the brain supposedly projects the three-dimensional world and everything in it.

I ended the last post on the brain by saying that placing the brain on such an exalted plane will lead to a dead end–in fact, it already has. There is no physical evidence that your brain has ever had a single thought, that it projects a realistic picture of the world, or that it creates mind as a byproduct of cellular activity the way a bonfire creates heat. Nothing about the brain suggests anything of the sort. Instead, the brain displays physical activity as thoughts take place, the same as a piano’s keys going up and down as a performer plays the “Maple Leaf Rag” or Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.

Our experience of life lies at the foundation of being human, and we have evolved by being self-aware. This fact cannot be explained by declaring that the brain, with its 100 billion neurons and up to a quadrillion connections between them, somehow became conscious through sheer complexity. A piano needs only 88 keys to produce every piece of music in Western culture, but there was Mozart and Beethoven when pianos had fewer than 80 keys. Another factor, freedom of imagination, was in charge of those keys.

Likewise, freedom of mind is what the brain is here to serve. As I pointed out in the last blog, the brain isn’t a fixed object. It can produce new neurons and new connections according to a person’s experiences in life (contemplative practices appear to do both). We misuse the brain by conditioning it into fixed habits, beliefs, and behavior. This sort of self-limiting conditioning wasn’t caused by the brain. If you meet a stubborn, angry, controlling, or bigoted person, he

became that way by interpreting the world and coming to fixed conclusions about it. No one lives in a neutral world–the human mind interprets every conscious experience.

Therefore, we have a choice. Unlike a piano, which doesn’t change just because someone plays Mozart on it, the human brain is fluid, dynamic, and malleable. This provides a clue for how we should use it as the instrument of thought. We should think and behave in such a way that old conditioning, the kind that keeps us stuck, is challenged and an open, accepting, fresh approach is favored. If we managed to make such a shift, the unlimited capacity of the human mind would break out of prison.

This invisible prison, which the poet William Blake described as “mind-forg’d manacles,” is a paradox. The mind is both prisoner and jailer. As we engage in the mental act of interpreting the world, we decide what is fearful, dangerous, alien, and unknown. On that basis we lay down our core beliefs. Then when a situation comes along that makes us feel afraid, angry, or threatened, we react automatically, as if we have no control over what the conditioned mind and the conditioned brain are doing.

We have ascribed to the brain far too much independent power when the real power lies in ourselves. The most primal responses that are difficult to reshape, such as sex drive, fight or flight response, and so on, do dictate behavior in a very narrow set of circumstances. these set reactions are an evolutionary inheritance. But the vast majority of fixed responses–our habits, likes and dislikes, loves and hates–were created mentally. One can argue forever about how to reduce violence, crime, war, prejudice, and the bane of us-versus-them thinking, but those matters are secondary.

The primary thing is to reclaim our role as conscious agents who shape human reality. In that role we’ve constructed the human world and all seven billion unique stories that belong to each individual. As a first step to reclaiming the primary role played by consciousness, we need to

stop assigning a leading role to the brain. Its privileged position is a gross exaggeration. The only aspect of life that deserves a privileged position is self-awareness.

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

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

One can often feel powerless when confronting the naked use of power, as in politics or corporate life. Meaningful action can be taken, however, the first step being to overcome one’s personal sense of weakness. There is such a thing as personal power, even though most people haven’t experienced it. That’s because their notion of personal power aims at the wrong goal. They define a powerful person as someone with money and status who can exert his will over others. Such a person is imagined to be strong, smart, lucky, and more than a little ruthless. Examples crop up from Washington to Wall Street, any area of life where competition is fierce and the spoils go to the victors.

 

But the real secret to personal power lies elsewhere. The difference is that one kind of power, the kind I’ve just sketched, comes from what you do while the other comes from who you are.  Before writing this post, I reviewed in my mind the qualities I’ve observed in the most powerful people I’ve met over the past thirty years, and it was astonishing how many qualities come directly from being rather than doing. Here’s my list:

 

• A powerful person has built a life filled with meaning and purpose.
• They are able to realize their intentions.
• They direct their attention with efficiency and focus.
• Their choices benefit themselves and the people around them.
• From inside themselves they tap into creativity, imagination, and insight.
• They can feel out a situation through reliable intuition.
• Their accomplishments haven’t led to self-importance – humility and gratitude are present in their makeup.
• At the end of the day life is a continuous source of joy and equanimity for them, not a battlefield of struggle and frustration.

 

Not every powerful person exhibits these qualities every day; room must be left for personal growth and a host of personal differences. Yet no matter how unique each of us is, we share a common source in the consciousness from which all personal power arises. Once you have made contact with this source, the most valuable things in life – love, compassion, strength, a sense of truth – can be accessed naturally. There is no need to rely on your ego to win them for you (or to do without once your ego fails at the quest).

 

The kind of power I’m describing isn’t the fruit of worldly success – it lies at the source of who you are.  Therefore, success is guaranteed and cannot be taken away. This message has been delivered for centuries by the world’s wisdom traditions, yet it is left to each of us, at any age, to realize the truth by testing it for ourselves. A journey is implied, a lifelong project to know who you really are.

 

It’s a problem that modern society has such conflicted notions about the inner world, where a muddle has been created by the conflicts between science and religion, contending approaches to psychology, the demands of daily life, and the buried aspirations we never achieve because we spend so much time and effort on distractions. Even so, these obstacles exist in the realm of doing. The realm of being isn’t damaged by them; its door is always open.

 

How do you recognize if you are accessing your own being? Personally, when I look at myself, I ask if I’m living up to the following traits:

• Am I immune to criticism but responsive to feedback?
• Do I feel that I’m beneath no one and superior to no one?
• Do I feel fearless?
• Am I standing up for my own truth?
• Do I find myself in the company of those who seek the truth (and act cautious around those who claim to have found it)?
• Do I exist in mutual respect with everyone I encounter?
• Do I feel the kind of courtesy that comes from the heart?
• Do I know when to defer and when to assert myself?

 

These touchstones are the most valuable ones on a day-to-day basis because they tell me that I am connected to who I really am, my true self, as opposed to the image I project and the labels that others attach to me.  It’s not always easy to remain connected to being; you have to leave room for self-forgiveness and a wide tolerance for making mistakes. But the kind of self-power that is rooted in the self and not in ego is unmistakable and deeply satisfying. The fact that it is open to all remains one of the great secrets of human existence.

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

By Deepak Chopra, MD

We’re living in a golden age for brain research, which aims to revolutionize how we think, feel, and behave.  Thanks to brain scans like the fMRI, brain activity can be localized and even the most precise activity pinpointed. For example, researchers can spot the minuscule area in the visual cortex that, when damaged, prevents a person from recognizing faces, including one’s own.

 

The ultimate challenge in neuroscience is to map the whole brain down to the tiniest detail. This is the brain equivalent of mapping the human genome, and a public-private collaboration began in 2013 called the White House BRAIN Initiative is underway.

 

But what will we use the completed brain map for? One obvious area is medicine. The more we know about what goes wrong in Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, the closer we get to a cure.  Yet one could argue that a higher goal would be to reinvent how we use our brains. “Reinvent” isn’t an exaggeration. Thirty thousand years ago Homo sapiens had evolved the same genetic array that modern people inherit. In those thirty thousand years arose reading, writing, advanced art and music, government, mathematics, and science.  Their foundation was an ever-evolving relationship between mind and body.

 

If genes and a fixed structure of brain cells told the whole story, it would remain a total mystery why a cave dweller after the last Ice Age should have just the right complement of neurons to discover gravity or write a symphony. Now we realize that the human brain is far from fixed. New brain cells are being formed throughout life; trillions of connections between neurons are developed; and the genetic activity inside each neuron is dynamic, responding to every experience and every stimulus from the outside world.

 

Human beings reinvent the brain as we go along, day by day. It’s not a matter of eons. Wherever your mind goes this very minute, your brain goes. In short, the brain is a verb, not a noun. It is reshaped by thoughts, memories, desire, and experience. Once we realize this, the final step in brain evolution can take place—we will fuse brain, body, and mind into a single process, the movement of consciousness.  The groundwork has already been laid.

 

Because it is dynamic, fluid, and ever-renewing, the brain is much more malleable than anyone ever imagined.  Consider a remarkable British medical journal article from 1980 entitled, “Is the brain really necessary?” It was based on the work of British neurologist John Lorber, who had been working with victims of a brain disorder known as hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”), in which excessive fluid builds up inside the skull. The pressure that results squeezes the life out of brain cells. Hydrocephalus can lead to mental impairment as well as other severe damage and even death.

 

Lorber had previously written about two infants born with no cerebral cortex, the thin outer layer of the higher brain (cortex in Latin refers to the bark of a tree). Yet despite this rare defect, the two infants seemed to be developing normally, with no external signs of damage. One child survived for three months, the other for a year.  If this were not remarkable enough, a colleague at Sheffield University sent Lorber a young man who had an enlarged head. He had graduated from college with a first-class honors degree in mathematics and had an I.Q. of 126.  There were no symptoms of hydrocephalus; the young man was leading a normal life. Yet a CAT scan revealed, in Lorber’s words, that he had “virtually no brain.” The skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells about a millimeter thick (less than 1/10 of an inch), while the rest of the space in the skull was filled with cerebral fluid.

This is an appalling disorder to contemplate, but Lorber pushed on, recording over 600 cases. He divided his subjects into four categories depending on how much fluid was in the brain. The most severe category, which accounted for 10% of the sample, consisted of people whose brain cavity was 95% filled with fluid. Of these, half were severely retarded; the other half, however, had I.Q.s over 100.

These findings were not seriously challenged as being false or distorted. However, a controversy arose over how to explain them.  Even now, when the old view of a fixed brain has been replaced, such radical adaptability is mystifying. Researchers witness the brain’s ability to heal in various ways, such as recovering from a stroke, where the dead or damaged areas of the brain no longer function, but other areas take over.

As long as we are stuck with the brain as a physical object that produces the mind, reinventing the brain foresees a dead end. The way forward is to abandon the very assumption that the brain thinks. There has never been the slightest proof that the atoms and molecules inside a brain cell are different from the atoms and molecules outside the brain. There’s little chemical difference between the contents of a brain cell and a drop of ocean water.

We need to realize that brain, body, and mind are on an equal footing. They are all experiences in consciousness. It’s not easy for people to take this step, because we so easily accept that the brain is a privileged object that produces mind the way a bonfire produces heat. First comes the brain, then the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images that fill our heads. But this sequence of cause-and-effect has never been proved, either.

Nothing is more important for the future of human awareness than to stop feeling dependent on the brain as a kind of magical machine. There is no magic and no machine. To prove why this is so will be the topic of the next post.

(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com