We All Need Awareness Skills: No. 1–Centering

By Deepak Chopra, MD

This post begins a series on “skills in awareness.” These are skills that anyone can learn -and benefit form. the more aware you are, the better you will be at making positive lifestyle choices, resisting impulsiveness, being triggered by stress and people around you, and finding out who you really are. These are the goals of conscious living.

 

Most people use the words “consciousness” and “awareness” in a fuzzy way. The average person might think “If I’m awake and not asleep in bed, I’m conscious.” But to be aware is defined more accurately as not being unconscious in your habits, attitudes, and beliefs. Being aware isn’t passive. It influences all of your mental activity.  

 

To illustrate, we can begin with the most basic awareness skill, being centered.  The experience of many actors and singers is that they suffer from terrible stage fright until the moment they walk on stage, when suddenly they fall into a groove – despite their nerves, great performers like Olivier and Pavarotti, two notable sufferers from stage fright, showed total command of their art before the public. What causes such an instantaneous transformation? A combination of things:

 

  • They became self-possessed.
  • Nervousness turned to calmness inside.
  • A practiced skill took over, as if on its own.
  • They found themselves totally focused in the moment.

 

These are the ingredients of being centered. The last one is probably the most important. Before a performer steps on stage, there’s no demand to be present, to live in the moment. This gives wiggle room for nerves, queasiness, pacing back and forth – all signs of distraction.  But to sing or act before an audience demands that you be present; it’s make or break.  If your mind/body knows this, and if you have learned through repetition to meet the demand of the present moment, getting centered comes automatically.

 

Most leaders are performers, too – besides public speaking, they are called upon generally to set their personality aside in order to meet the demands placed by other people. A writer who had long-term access to President Obama remarked on how skillfully the president had learned to adapt his personal manner as he moved from one event to the next. In an hour’s span he might be called upon to meet with grieving families after a catastrophe, discuss policy with his cabinet, welcome a new appointee, and hold a news conference. Obama remarked that this quick-change didn’t come naturally to him.  He wasn’t by nature a performer. But he trained to encompass a job with many facets. He had to be centered no matter how drastically the situation changed.

 

How should you train yourself to be centered? First, take an objective look at the traits you’d see in someone who is very good at being centered. Such a person

– Puts his entire attention on the job at hand

– Makes other people feel as if they have his entire attention while talking to him (a typical remark: “He made me feel for those five minutes that I was the most important thing he had to attend to that day.”)

– Remains calm in the midst of crisis and chaos.

– Rises to her best under pressure.

– Absorbs new information quickly.

– Keeps his self-possession.

– Doesn’t retreat from the moment.

– Isn’t easily distracted.

– Finds it easy to stay in the flow.

 

Assess where you stand on all these points. Once you honestly rate how well you are doing, the question is how to improve. First, stop doing the opposite things, the mental habits that defeat being centered.

– Don’t multi-task. focus on the moment at hand.

– Resist being distracted. Close the door, turn off the phone, and have your computer screen go black if you are talking to someone who needs your attention.

– Don’t use discussions in a one-sided way, as a sounding board for yourself.  Others can tell when you aren’t interested in them, and one of the surest signs is silent impatience while you wait for them to quit talking.

– Avoid obvious signs of a lack of interest, such as tapping your pencil, fidgeting, interrupting others before they finish, glancing out the window, etc.

– Don’t isolate yourself in a private space when talking to others. Instead of sitting back behind your desk with your arms crossed, join the other person and lean toward them as they talk.

– Don’t scatter your attention randomly. Manage your mental time efficiently, so that you can be alone for serious thinking and share your mind at other times without feeling that you are being pulled away from what you’re interested in.

 

Avoiding these missteps and bad habits will go a long way. But you also need the positive experience of being centered. It begins when you are alone. In a quiet place, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and go inward. Place your attention on your heart, in the center of your chest. Sit quietly and easily let your attention remain there. If it is pulled away by random thoughts, recenter as soon as you notice what has happened. After a few minutes open your eyes. for the next half hour or so, observe yourself to see if you remain centered. Don’t instantly throw yourself into external demands.

 

If you repeat this practice several times a day, you will start to learn the difference between being centered and not. With repetition you train your brain, and in turn your involuntary nervous system, to prefer a calm, quiet, centered state. This preference brings along lower blood pressure, decreased stress response, and slower heart rate. You aren’t trying to be inert and unresponsive; nor are you forcing your attention to stay in the middle of your chest. The state you want is restful alertness, where you are more awake, not less, as the result of feeling calm.

 

I’ve begun with the skill of remaining centered because it’s so basic but also as an example of why the word “skill” is appropriate. It takes training to be centered, and only you are in a position to train yourself.  Yoga and meditation teachers can certainly guide you, but in reality, most people have spent a lifetime learning how to manage and organize their outer life, paying scant attention to what goes on inside. Yet what goes on inside precedes everything external, shapes it, and allows you to understand and respond.  Until you develop skills in awareness, you haven’t fully embraced a conscious lifestyle.

 

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

Is Life Really a Dream?


By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are times when life goes out of kilter and the world doesn’t seem real and substantial anymore. Such experiences occur regularly, either to us or other people. For example, when there’s a sudden death in the family or a catastrophe like a tornado or the house burning down, a person can go into shock. With a blank stare they reveal how dislocated their existence suddenly feels, saying things like “This can’t be happening. It’s unreal” or “Nothing matters anymore.”

It’s normal for this dissociated state to pass, and in time reality feels real again. But some people never return—after a psychotic break, for example, a percentage of mental patients become chronically schizophrenic and have hallucinations for the rest of their lives. But the feeling of “This can’t be happening, it’s like a dream” doesn’t have to be triggered by shock. When someone is ecstatically happy at their good fortune, everything can seem unreal.

I’m pointing out these experiences because they give a basis for the notion that life actually is a dream, but we don’t notice it unless there is a sudden dislocation, a moment when we glimpse the dream for what it is before lapsing back into it quite unconsciously. A passing glance at the history of philosophy indicates that the Eastern view of Maya and Plato’s image of the cave are declarations that the illusory nature of life has fooled us, with the exception of the few who have wake up and seen the “real” reality.

In Plato’s image, everyday life is like watching shadows at play on the walls of a cave, and only those who turn around and see the sun projecting the shadow play know what is real and where the illusion came from. Philosophy isn’t a potent force in modern life, but there’s literature to consider. The dreamlike nature of life is central to Shakespeare’s last play, The

Tempest, and the 17th-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón titled his most famous play La vida es sueño, literally “Life Is a Dream.”

Thus personal experience, philosophy, and art have endorsed an idea that reality can somehow feel totally wrong under ordinary circumstances. The world feels real and substantial 99% of the time, which is proof enough, one would think. But modern science, despite its reputation for being based on physical reality, cannot prove that “reality as given” is actually valid. Reality as given is a phrase used to describe an acceptance that the physical world “out there” can be trusted. As in everyday life, this trust is workable 99% of the time, but when we are dreaming at night in bed, a dream feels real until we wake up. In addition, it’s well accepted that the five senses cannot be relied upon—if they could, science textbooks would teach that the sun rises in the East as it moves around the Earth, or that solid matter is as solid as it feels when you stub your toe.

The bald fact is that nothing about “reality as given” can be scientifically proven. Matter can be reduced to invisible waves that have no definite location in time and space. The big bang created a universe where time and space exist, but there was a precreated state where no one can verify that time and space existed at all. Because we know body, mind, and brain through experience, they are also part of the dream. At bottom, “reality as given” has no validity except that it matches our experience. All phenomena in the universe come to us as experiences, and even when reduced to the abstract language of mathematics, experience is how math exists, too—there are no numbers in Nature, only our mental model that invented counting and found it useful.

I’ve sketched in a peculiarly intriguing mystery that has captivated the human mind in all its expressions—religion, philosophy, art, and science—and which keeps popping up no matter how much we try to ignore it and pretend that “reality as given” is good enough. It isn’t, because the testimony of people who have transcended everyday reality is just as valid as the testimony that insists on everyday reality. Jesus, Buddha, Plato, Shakespeare, Kant, and a batch of famous quantum physicists cannot simply be dismissed. They could be right when 99% of humanity is wrong, just as a single person, Copernicus, was right when the rest of humanity around him thought that the sun revolved around the Earth.

Most people are pragmatists and would wonder why this arcane notion of “life is a dream” makes any difference. It makes a difference because if some individuals have in fact waked up to expose the illusion for what it is, then what they have to say should interest us. We might want to transcend the dream, too, because the common testimony given by those who have waked up is very significant:

They no longer fear death. They identify with a self that is timeless and unbounded. They stop experiencing extremes of emotion. Their minds aren’t riddled with extraneous thoughts but feel calm, alert, and open. Wounds and traumas in their past no longer return to haunt them. They tend to feel detached, as if witnessing how life unfolds rather than being tossed and tumbled in the chaotic stream of daily events. At the height of the experience of waking up, they feel liberated and blissful.

A skeptic would shrug these experiences off as subjective and therefore unreliable—we’re all in the habit, in fact, of equating transcendent experiences with abnormality, social dysfunction, even madness. People who are different upset the social norm, which is actually evidence that the social norm is quite insecure at bottom. It holds up only as long as everyone—or nearly everyone—agrees with it. Outsiders are not welcome.

But dismissing the validity of waking up as mere subjectivity and being a social aberration are both red herrings. When people report that they have waked up, they are talking about a shift in consciousness, and such shifts are only validated through experience. A dream researcher can pinpoint through brain activity when a sleeper has gone into REM sleep and begun to experience a dream. But humanity wouldn’t even have a concept of “dream” without the experience of it. The sensations of pain and pleasure are similar. They exist as experiences before neuroscience has any clue what to look for in the brain.

If we stand back and drop all assumptions about “reality as given,” it is entirely possible that consciousness conforms to our mindset that it fits too tightly and too well. We are so convinced that our commonly accepted belief about a material world is the only valid perspective on reality, that we train consciousness to fit our understanding to the only the model we believe in. In other words, there’s a constant confirmation of the biases we want confirmed. Trapped inside a seemingly inescapable mental construct, we passively accept it. This brings up the most important thing to be learned from those who have waked up—the power to create and dismantle mental constructs is always present. As a birthright, human consciousness possesses the ability to create any kind of virtual reality imaginable. “Virtual” is the right word, because any mental construct is artificial and provisional.

There is no doubt that cultures rise and fall, creating systems of belief that grip the imagination for a while, often lasting for centuries, and individuals living inside the collective story create their own separate stories. But just as novels and romances must have an author, someone who is quite conscious of creating a fiction, the stories that grip people in their everyday lives must have a source that isn’t mistaken into believing the story is real. This source stands outside thought, words, images, and the stories they coalesce into. It is consciousness itself.

The argument for “life is a dream” arises not from a kind of stubborn refusal to accept “reality as given,” but from confidence that we are all conscious agents with the capacity to create and then project any version of virtual reality we choose. The trick is to be in touch with your creative source; otherwise, you fall for your own creation, as if Shakespeare believed he was actually Hamlet. “Life is a dream” presents the most liberating insight to enter the human mind, and it will never go away, because no other explanation tells us more about the “real” reality than it.

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 Biggest Step in Human Potential

By Deepak Chopra, MD

By now many people are familiar with the term “positive psychology,” although they might not realize its significance. Medicine proceeds by diagnosing diseases and attempting to cure them, and as a branch of medicine, psychiatry and psychology focused for decades on the pathology of the mind. It took an enormous change in attitude to switch the focus to the positive potential of the mind. Positive psychology therefore addresses issues like how to be happy, to increase self-esteem, to promote well-being and so on.

One can think of this shift toward human potential in much bigger terms. There are so-called paranormal or psi abilities—are they a hidden potential in us? There is the exploration of higher consciousness, investigating the possibility of waking up from the dream of pain and suffering and ultimately taking the mind to a more evolved state. If you collect all the areas of expanded human potential, which includes creativity, insight, the renunciation of violence, Yoga, meditation, and much more—there is enough to revolutionize our conception of mind. Once this happens, then we have a foundation for redefining what it means to be human.

In an open society it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t dabbled in human potential, beginning with the most popular aspect, which is self-improvement. The desire to improve yourself is an expression of the impulse to evolve, which is unstoppable in human beings. But having painted this picture, one needs to ask if the human potential movement is bearing fruit. Is it moving fast enough? Are reactionary forces pulling society in the opposite direction?

There is an important personal choice, I believe, that turns dabbling into commitment. It’s the choice to envision yourself as an expression of consciousness. For most people this would be a radical step, because they see themselves in other ways. Take a moment and mentally take stock. Do you agree with the statement, “I am my body”? Do you place importance on your income, social status, possessions, and other external validations? Consider the harsh political divisions in this country—which side do you identify with?

A frank self-assessment quickly indicates that each of us identifies with various tags, labels, issues, habits, and a wide range of conditioning. Let’s take a non-judgmental perspective and neutralize words like good and bad, right and wrong, politically correct and incorrect, and so on. From a completely neutral position, anything you identify with is a product of consciousness. We have all spent our lives surrounded by these products. In effect, we are wearing virtual reality goggles through which we view the world, filtering every perception through our habits, beliefs, conditioning, likes and dislikes.

The human potential movement at bottom is about one thing: getting free of virtual reality in order to experience the “real” reality. Keeping our neutral viewpoint for a moment, what is the best way to divest ourselves of the mental constructs—products of consciousness—that create pain, suffering, frustration, victimhood, and self-limitation? The answer is not to winnow out the bad stuff and accentuate the good stuff. Of course everyone wants to be good, but one quickly discovers that there’s no real agreement on what is good, and furthermore, life is inevitably a mixture of good and bad.

There is a different answer for ending pain and suffering, which is to stop identifying with the products of consciousness and to start identifying with consciousness itself. Right now we are like visitors to an art museum wandering around saying “I like this one” and “I don’t like that one,” all the while never realizing that artists painted the pictures. Artists are free to paint anything they want, and questions of taste come second. The same is true of consciousness. We wander through life saying, “I like this about myself” and “I don’t like that about myself,” without seeing that these are secondary reactions. To live creatively is to know that consciousness is the common element of experience, the “stuff” from which human reality is made.

When you see that you are a co-creator with every other consciousness agent in the world, you have truly entered the movement for higher consciousness, personal evolution, overcoming all the imprisoning mental constructs that create hated, prejudice, and other divisive forces, along with all the inner forces that enforce the divided self. Taken altogether, the products of consciousness, whether you look at history or just the contents of a normal person’s mind, are chaotic. They contain huge gaps, contradictions, blind spots, irrational prejudices, and impulses of anger, fear, jealousy, and self-doubt that have enormous power over us.

This chaos represents the misuse of consciousness. What we call human nature isn’t natural at all but a totally artificial, jerry-built Frankenstein’s monster, a creation that has turned upon its creator. Among all the contradictions that exist in human nature, which force us to be loving one moment and hateful the next, rational but deeply irrational, proud but secretly ashamed, the ultimate contradiction is that we create the products of consciousness and then believe in them as if they exist independently of us. No aspect of human nature exists outside consciousness, and when we cannot change the things we fear, we are renouncing consciousness, the very thing that creates those fears. Once we identify with consciousness itself, we will no longer be defined by anything except the infinite possibilities that are the ground state of reality. To say “I am the field of infinite potential” is the proper definition of being human.

 

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

Your Body Is Trapped in Stale Information

By Deepak Chopra, MD

One of the mysteries about our bodies is how they manage to change and yet remain the same.  DNA is routinely called the blueprint of life, yet no other blueprint actually builds the house or skyscraper it models. Once DNA builds a body, the body grows and disintegrates at the same time. This is apparent from the skin and stomach lining, which rapidly form new cells as old ones die. But every cell has a given lifespan and willingly dies, so to speak, when it’s time is up.

 

How did the body develop this ability to be born and die at the same time, to balance creation and destruction? If we dive to the molecular level, the mystery only deepens. Cells need food, air, and water, and the molecules of each are in constant transport, passing through the cell wall and out again. In addition, the messages that the brain sends to every cell in the body course through the bloodstream with precise messaging that doesn’t get confused–in effect, the bloodstream is an information superhighway in which there are no traffic accidents even though the cars have no drivers.

 

To date, the best way to understand what’s going on is through genetics, and now the whole field of genetics has entered the information age. As summarized in a recent TED talk by biologist Dean Gibson provocatively titled “How to Build Synthetic DNA and Send It Across the Internet ” there are now machines that biologically print DNA once they are fed instructions in the form of data easily transmitted on the Web. This conversion of information into actual DNA builds upon previous technology that enables bits of stored genetic material (the basic four-letter alphabet of ACGT) to be combined in any conceivable way.

 

Gibson’s lab has pioneered sending information and turning it into genetic material, which in 2013 allowed them to take the code for an alarming new strain of bird flu in China and in a matter of hours turn it into a viable vaccine to fight the disease, a process that normally takes up to six months. The promise of similar applications is set to revolutionize how new drugs are made.

 

But none of this would be possible without reducing biology to data, making information the basis of life. If you take this new viewpoint and apply it to your own body, then the mystery of simultaneous creation and destruction, birth and death, change and nonchange is suddenly dematerialized.  It’s no longer the physical “stuff” that holds the body together but the endless processing of information. It is an axiom in information science that information cannot be created or destroyed, because the very nature of information is the rearrangement of zeros and ones, which are indestructible in Nature if we transform them into positive and negative electrical charges. (This is what happens in a computer).

 

If the mystery of creation and destruction is reduced to the shuffling of information, it is entirely possible to have codes that build and codes that destroy. What fascinates me is that all of us are stuck with old, useless, or self-defeating codes. We normally call these codes of information by other names that everyone knows: habits, beliefs, conditioning, mindsets, and so on. We aren’t used to thinking that we are trapped in old information when we find it hard to quit smoking or lose weight, or when someone close to us stubbornly sticks to a mindset that is clearly toxic for their own well-being.

 

Yet a belief or habit shares the same foundation as any other type of information that can be coded. When somebody has a knee-jerk response, the brain must send signals that correspond to that response, and such signals are information. This sounds abstract, but everyone knows what it feels like to do or say something mechanically, sometimes without even seeing what you’re doing. Hence the repetitive action of eating a whole bag of chips without noticing it or entering into the same marital argument without budging for years at a time.

 

How do we break out of old information that has trapped us? The clue is this: information doesn’t create itself. The shuffling of genetic information happens, according to standard genetic theory, by accident as random mutations are passed on from parents to offspring.  And there are automatic centers of information in our cells for manufacturing enzymes and proteins–a great deal of information seems to work automatically. Yet this is not sufficient for explaining the constant creation of new coding, which in common parlance we call thinking, feeling, speaking, and doing. The condition of being a living human being can be reduced to consciously coding the things you do every day, every choice and decision.

 

Whatever you consciously code becomes part of your body and mind, operating as one unified process. Because it is all information, an angry thought exists on the same playing field as the chemical messaging that communicates your anger to every cell. Thus the body’s information superhighway isn’t limited to the bloodstream; it courses through every cell. In and of itself information isn’t alive; it doesn’t think’ it has no mind. Yet nothing exists outside information in one form or another.

 

There has to be an agency that infuses life and mind into information. This is self-evident. I can digitize Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” send it over the internet, and have it received by a computer at the other end. But I didn’t actually send words or a speech, much less a speech that has a history and deep meaning. All of those things require an interpreter, and interpretation is a mental act. What causes so much human suffering is interpretation that is negative, self-defeating, mechanical, hidebound, fearful, hostile, and unconscious.

 

The visionary poet William Blake referred to these as “Mind-forg’d manacles,” the constraints created by the mind to limit the mind. Therefore, the way out of suffering is to break those mind-forg’d manacles, which can only be done by the mind. It’s a self-contradiction to live as both jailer and prisoner, but all of us are caught in that contradiction.  We forged mental restraints and began to live by them as if they were imposed by a higher power.

 

As a species Homo sapiens has arrived at this astonishing moment when we can assemble and disassemble the codes of life, and yet we’ve been doing the same thing in everyday life for eons, at the level of information. It’s time to wake up and realize that this creative power exists to make us free of the stale, outworn, self-defeating, and painful information that we’re stuck with. Consciousness transcends information, and only consciousness can reshape it into higher and better uses.

 

 

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

Expanded Awareness and Success

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

Only about half of Americans tell pollsters that they still believe the American Dream is attainable. If the dream is the same as achieving success, perhaps there’s a more optimistic way to think about the whole issue.

 

To have worldly success, do you have to be worldly yourself?  Most people assume that the answer is yes.  The poet Wordsworth may complain that “the world is too much with us late and soon,” but modern life seems to demand total immersion in the race to the top.  If you stop looking out for number one, no one else is likely to, and in a highly competitive workplace, there’s only room for winners.

 

In earlier posts I’ve pointed out that the world’s wisdom traditions don’t agree with this viewpoint.  The path to happiness isn’t through obeying the demands of the ego-personality, with its constant focus on “I, me, and mine.” But one must be realistic.

 

The appeal of the conscious lifestyle – one that attends to higher values like love, compassion, selflessness, and inner growth – must be short-term, too, or it won’t stick.  Success has to be compatible with that lifestyle – and I argue that it is.  The essence of spirituality is consciousness. Whether you find God or enlightenment at the end of your journey is secondary. You can’t even proceed on the journey without expanding your awareness.

 

There’s where the secret resides. Expanded awareness brings success. All our customary notions about the spiritual need for renunciation, poverty, and humility are, in my view, too limited and perhaps wrong.  There has been a mix-up between a specific religious view, which abhors worldliness as the root of all evil, and the value of consciousness itself. It doesn’t matter if you choose to be worldly or not. What matters is the following:

 

– Do you enjoy a fresh stream of new solutions and insights?

– Are you in touch with who you really are, which is beyond the roles you play?

– Can you see a situation past your own point of view?

– Can you empathize with others and genuinely feel where they are coming from?

– Do you feel connected to a reality larger than yourself?

– Can you see the underlying purpose and value of your existence?

– Are you following a vision of life that can sustain you for years to come?

 

To answer “yes” to these questions doesn’t make you a saint – it makes you someone who has seriously walked the path of expanded awareness.  Each of these things I’ve listed are of immense value to an innovator, entrepreneur, manager, or CEO.  Awareness isn’t a rubber band, but it needs to be stretched. This can’t be done by force; nor can you rely on life lessons as you struggle to the top.  Success ultimately depends on who you are, not what you do.

 

Which is why the world’s wisdom traditions speak about the need for transformation.  At this moment, what does your life consist of? At bottom, it consists of input and output. You find yourself experiencing a given situation – the input – and you do, think, or say something – the output.  For the vast majority of people, the output is automatic, reflexive, and mostly unconscious. I’m not saying this to demean anyone.  It’s a spiritual axiom that everyone is doing the best they can from their own level of consciousness.

 

If you are asked to cook a souffle, the result will be different depending on your level of culinary skill. The same holds true for thinking, speaking, and doing. They all reflect your level of skill, although “skill” is too limited a term.  Awareness is all-embracing. It includes everything you are and all that you have experienced.  But the beauty of the human mind extends much further, because your awareness also embraces everything you have never thought or said or done, all the hidden possibilities that need to be awakened before you really discover who you are.

 

This domain of hidden potential is the richest reward of expanded awareness. When you consider that a Henry Ford started out as apprentice machinist and went on to run a failed automobile start-up company after his investors lost faith in him, his immense success later running the world’s largest car company depended on a vision that kept expanding, sustaining him despite external twists of fate. Failure turns into opportunity exactly this way, by incorporating the setback into your awareness, processing it unflinchingly, and emerging with a bigger vision.

 

If this all sounds too idealistic, consider the poison dart hidden in worldliness, or attachment to external success and failure as the sole measure of achievement. In that scheme, losing makes your awareness contract. Every loss of money, power, and status is like a loss of self.  Awareness can be expanded in many ways. The most important are these:

  • Meditation
  • Silent reflection and contemplation.
  • Communing with Nature.
  • Seeking higher guidance.
  • Associating with admired people who serve as mentors and models.
  • Studying the great saints, sages, and seers.
  • Identifying with your inner self and not your external achievements.
  • Living by a higher vision of life, and of who you are.
  • Placing importance on our own inner growth and spending time on it.
  • Keeping up with the most far-seeing thinkers in your field.
  • Being open to change, not fearing the unknown.
  • Being comfortable with uncertainty and the rewards it offers.

 

It’s not important to label any of these things as spiritual.  They are derived from the knowledge of consciousness that wisdom traditions have cultivated for centuries. Even in our own materialistic times, where success and failure have apparently become a matter of life and death, if you actually encounter someone who has risen to notable success, sit down and ask them their secret. One way or another, you will find evidence of expanded awareness, even if that’s not a phrase they use. Even better, consider the things that lead to expanded awareness and test them out for yourself. The potential rewards are limitless.

 

 

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