By Deepak Chopra, MD and Anoop Kumar, MD

We recently participated in a public debate on the proposition “The more we evolve, the less we need God.” The results were clearly in favor of the proposition against the stance we took. This was so amongst both the live audience and the online audience.

 

The cerebral cortex, the most recent part of the human brain to evolve, hasn’t changed for more than ten thousand years. The writers of the world’s ancient spiritual texts used the same brain as modern people, and since the world’s religions revere these ancient texts, we accept that the Ten Commandments and the Four Noble truths of Buddhism came from minds whose processes we’d recognize today, however dissimilar the cultures of ancient Judea and India.

 

It must be cultural evolution that is relevant, and of course our modern secular culture has moved away from the age of faith. Rationalism seems to dominate our lives, and when we read of religious fanaticism, we feel that such issues belong to people living outside the reach of a modern secular society. Few people seeing news on TV of an attack in Paris or London feel an impulse to fight back by re-energizing their own religious beliefs. Being secular can easily feed the belief that one has evolved beyond God, religion, dogma, and the whole rigmarole.

 

But in large part this attitude is founded on an illusion, the illusion that God can be accepted or rejected like an item on a restaurant menu. The whole point of calling God infinite and eternal, along with omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, is to note that the infinite is different from anything we can subject to an either/or, yes/no choice. Even concepts as fundamental as space and time are structured in the infinite. In this sense, God is the very scheme of existence–if God exists.

 

Some atheists, skeptics, and agnostics apply “if God exists” to the same litmus test as “Does oxygen exist?” They make the mistake of shoving God back into the category of accept/reject to which ordinary objects belong. But the God hypothesis is unique and can only be interpreted by standards applicable to monism. Monism refers to wholeness and the qualities of wholeness. Science, for example, is monistic in positing that physical processes are sufficient to explain all phenomena in the universe. This is monism because nothing outside physicality is thought to be real.

 

God is also monistic, as in “God is One.”  Religious monism seems very weak in a secular age that accepts scientific monism. But this is another illusion. Modern people largely reject “God is One” because they see God in the form of a human being, and obviously such an image is as limited as we humans are. Since we are not One, it feels unlikely that God is One. In fact, that’s a false analogy. God is monistic, not as a humanoid figure sitting above the clouds but as the basis of consciousness. Nothing can be conscious without a basis or source in consciousness; therefore, religious monism states that God is the source of all mind, and mind is the source of the universe.

 

In a secular society, this too seems unlikely, but religious monism becomes stronger if you rephrase it. Instead of “God is the source of consciousness,” say “The source of consciousness is God.” In other words, once you locate where consciousness comes from, you will have arrived at God. The letters g, o, and d are not the primary issue. The whole point of religious monism is to assert that consciousness is universal and eternal, without beginning or end, the source of all created things but itself not created. The more popularized notions of god are relativistic aspects of that infinity, just as space and time are relativistic aspects of our universe.

 

If you leave out the loaded term “God,” this definition of religious monism collaborates successfully with scientific monism, because science has reached the point where the entire physical universe originates from a precreated state that gives rise to space, time, matter, and energy. Uncreated states, whether called God, the quantum vacuum, or some other moniker, defy rational thought. We cannot ask when time began, for example, because “when” refers to time, not a state that is timeless.

 

To get past this mental block, there are workarounds in both monistic systems, and they are equally arcane. In physics the workarounds have tags like superstrings, multiverse, Hilbert space, and so on. In Christianity the main workaround is the Holy Trinity, which manages to be here but not here, physical but also spiritual, flesh and not flesh. In both cases, the smell of paradox remains strong. Trying to fuse opposites by using words or even mathematics doesn’t work in the end.

 

The best workaround is the same for both types of monism. Indeed, it must be the same if monism is correct. This is the assertion that God, or the ground state of the physical universe, is pure potential, a domain of infinite possibilities. We are all aware in daily life of a potential or possibility coming true and becoming real. Everyone who buys a lottery ticket has the potential to win, and eventually someone does. Every baby has the potential to be President, and eventually some babies do. So there’s no mystical ring to thinking of creation springing out of pure potential.

 

This, we believe, is where true evolution is possible. Pure potential fuses the two types of monism and levels the playing field. Now it is only necessary to show that the field of pure potential exists. In both types of monism, empirical evidence doesn’t exist. God leaves no distinct footprints in the physical universe, and neither do the multiverse, superstrings, or Hilbert space. Such is the nature of any uncreated domain. Being uncreated, it doesn’t look or behave like anything created. It is unique unto itself.

 

So lacking physical evidence, which type of monism is more likely to be valid? This is the wrong question, because by definition, monism is everything. Excluding nothing, the religious type of monism cannot exclude science, and vice versa. The proper question is whether an uncreated source exists at all, and the answer is yes, because everything must have a source. There is plenty of room for evolution in science and religion once both sides accept that the perceived split between them is merely a debating point, the juggling of words. Having accepted that monism is monism, needing no tag like God or science, we can move on to the great exploration, which is to participate in the universe not simply as self-aware creatures but to participate from our very source.

 

 

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

 

 

Anoop Kumar, MD, MM is board certified in Emergency Medicine and holds a Master’s degree in Management with a focus in Health Leadership. He practices in the Washington, DC metro area, where he also leads meditation gatherings for clinicians. He is the author of the book Michelangelo’s Medicine: How redefining the human body will transform health and healthcare. Anoop enjoys exploring and communicating about the intersection of self-awareness, science, and wellbeing. Visit him at anoopkumar.com.

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Paul J. Mills, PhD

Part of being human is that happiness is difficult. We are too complex for a cut-and-dried answer to work. There have been broad trends, however, over the course of time. Devotion to God, the pursuit of reason, getting rich, going to a therapist—all the possible avenues for achieving happiness have been explored, and in modern society each solution remains open. No one is locked into another person’s way to find happiness.

 

But that’s not the same as claiming that all of these various approaches have worked—there is a good possibility, in fact, that none has. That’s the position taken by a wide swath of teachers and guides, most of them classified as “spiritual,” who declare that living in the state of separation is the root cause of suffering. Separation is also known as duality, and so in recent years a new rubric, nondualism, has been used to embrace philosophers, therapists, spiritual teachers, and general writers who promote wholeness as the secret of true, lasting well-being.

In this post we’ll look at the nondual argument through an overview of how things stand in the wellness movement and particularly the evidence in biomedical literature that might offer scientific evidence for nondual claims.

 

A significant gap exists in the biomedical literature on the subject of consciousness and nondual awareness – or nonduality. The benefits of techniques to foster this awareness, such as meditation, are now widely studied but typically only as a means to overcome stress and promote relaxation, without drawing attention to the transcendent aspects of the individual.

Research into nondual awareness can address a missing component of well-being in the psychologic and psychiatric literature. In the foreword to “Mystery of the Mind” by Swami Muktananda, Swami Durgananda writes “Up until now, the great body of literature documenting this state [of nonduality] isn’t in psychology. But just as with modern psychology, the millennial-old spiritual paths of the East also viewed ‘understanding ourselves and others as largely a matter of understanding our own minds,’ rather than blaming our dissatisfaction on external forces”¹.

 

Still essential distinctions exist between science’s understanding of well-being and the state of awareness known as nonduality. Nonduality—a term coined to describe what the experience is not—can perhaps be more appropriately described as oneness. It is in essence a state of being, knowing, and perception, that all that exists is one.

 

The ancient Hindu text, Yoga Vasishtha, characterizes nonduality as a “continuous and unbroken awareness of the indwelling presence, inner light or Consciousness.” There is only Consciousness appearing as this or that. In this regard, knowledge of Self is knowledge of one’s “true identity,” as distinct from ordinary self-consciousness, which fosters a sense of feeling different and separate.

 

Neuroscientist Zoran Josipovic describes nondual awareness as “an open, awake cognizance that precedes conceptualization and intention, and contextualizes and unifies both extrinsic task-positive and intrinsic self-referential mental processes, without fragmenting the field of experience into opposing dualities” ^2,3.

 

Nonduality is also sometimes called non-separation. Most individuals identify with the body as self and experience themselves as residing in the body. They look out at the world as separate from themselves. This is the experience of separation, duality. In nondual awareness, there is no distinction between the perceiver and what is perceived; between the knower and the known. There is no, ‘I’m here in the body and everything else is out there’, but rather everything is known and experienced to be one. There is no separation from Self and what is being experienced. It’s literally all the same. Any prior experience of individual identity is now the experience of the Self in its multitude of expression. The ‘person’ identifies not as an individual but as the Self (or Universal Awareness), and in this sense nondual awareness is a fulfillment of ‘Know Thyself’, an aphorism of many great ancient cultures. Ultimately, terms such as non-separation and unity are less fitting as they implicitly refer to a situation where what was once separate is no longer separate whereas in Consciousness this is not possible as there is nothing that is that is not of that oneness.

 

While psychology and nondual thought share the aim of alleviating human suffering perpetuated by the mind, the focus is limited to the mind itself, without an understanding of Awareness beyond mind. For psychiatry and psychology, this represents a shift in understanding of well-being. The focus is no longer on how to attain well-being through the acquisition of objects or experiences, but rather a focus on who is seeking the well-being.

While over the past decade the biomedical literature has expanded in several domains highly relevant to our understanding of well-being, there remains much work to be done. The psychological and psychiatric literature have, for example, embraced “positive psychology” (sometimes called “positive psychiatry,” although something of an oxymoron) to describe the significant contribution of factors such as gratitude, compassion and empathy to well-being.

 

The Journal of Positive Psychology was launched in 2006 while the Journal of Positive Psychology and Well-being launched in 2017, to specifically address how attributes of positive psychology support well-being. The journal is “devoted to basic research and professional application on states of optimal human functioning and fulfillment and the facilitation and promotion of well-being.” While there are no journals devoted to positive psychiatry, the book Positive Psychiatry: A Clinical Handbook was published in 2015 in order to initiate this dialogue. Even within the field of Behavioral Cardiology, which since its origins over five decades ago focused on the effects of ‘negative’ traits such as stress, depression, and anxiety on cardiac outcomes, has shifted to an appreciation of the value of gratitude and empathy to improve long-term outcomes and well-being in cardiac patients. Such efforts have significantly broadened our understanding of what it takes to cultivate and maintain well-being, which previously was more limited to a focus on domains such as career, social, financial, physical, and community ⁴ The question remains, keeping in mind an understanding of the importance of these factors, to what degree does cultivating nondual awareness provide a further foundation to well-being?

 

Since the early 1970s, the scientific literature on meditation has grown significantly, with today approximately 4,700 citations appearing on the biomedical database PubMed.gov. While a majority of meditation practices share the common ultimate aim of transcending ego self-identification towards establishing a more unified life of nonduality, there is little evidence of this in the biomedical literature. ^{5 2} In addition to meditation, other common approaches to gaining insight into nondual awareness and spiritual awakening include self-inquiry, prayer, and psychedelics.

 

As the meditation movement picked up steam, the field of Transpersonal Psychology was founded in an attempt to integrate the emerging understanding of the transcendent aspects of the human experience within the framework of modern psychology. Transpersonal refers to any experience where the sense of identity or self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos ⁶. While for any individual’s spiritual journey there are likely many transpersonal experiences, such experiences may or may not include an experience of nondual awareness. ^7,8 That is, while nondual awareness can be considered a transpersonal state, transpersonal states may not necessarily include nondual awareness. Therapists working in Transpersonal Psychology seek to help individuals with spiritual self-development, mystical experiences, altered states of consciousness, understanding self beyond the ego, and how to integrate those experiences into everyday life ⁶. These are significant contributions as there are more often than not challenges for an individual to understand and adjust to changes (and loss) of sense of self and personhood along the spiritual journey.

 

A permanent residing in nondual awareness can be considered a penultimate transpersonal experience because the prerequisite for it is the loss of what had been experienced as an individual identify, which was responsible for the experience of duality in the first place. In the nondual state, the limited self-identity as a personal state has been transcended and recognized to have been merely an impermanent pattern in the space (field) of nondual awareness (fundamental consciousness). The gap of separation from Self no longer exists, breaking prior patterns of dependence on external sources for the experience of wholeness.

For someone in a state of nondual awareness, the knower, the known, and the process of knowing are experienced as one. Well-being then is not based on an object or another person, but truly autonomous in the fullest sense of the word. From a (clinical) psychological point of view, it should be noted that nondual awareness is not a panacea in terms of providing immunity from experiencing day-to-day life’s challenges, nor a guarantee of emotional maturity and development.

 

Despite the central importance of nondual awareness for human well-being, it has been largely overlooked in Western clinical psychology and psychiatry, hence it’s absence in the biomedical literature. For reasons that are understandable, but nonetheless unfortunate, the meditation literature emphasizes the value of meditative techniques for the purpose of promoting relaxation and increasing mindfulness, and not drawing attention to the transcendent aspects of the individual and the practices potential to cultivate a life therein. It’s been pointed out in the literature that “it is not clear whether secular mindfulness-based approaches could enable a progression beyond initial stages of modes of existential awareness” as loss of subject-object duality are rarely emphasized in meditation as taught by clinical psychologists ⁹. Some of the psychotherapeutic meditative techniques do, however, focus on training earlier phases or modes of existential awareness⁹ such as nonattachment ^10,11, decentering ^12,13, and self-awareness and regulation ^9,11.

 

It’s not as if this knowledge is unavailable. Many of the meditative traditions and philosophies, such as Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism and mystical Christianity share the foundational understanding that the Self is absolute and unitary. Fascinating newer developments in neuroscience seek to understand neural mechanisms of nondual awareness as compared to those of focused attention, open monitoring, and mind wandering, as well as seeking to understand the effects of nondual awareness on cognitive and affective processes which are hypothesized to be related to changes in fragmented subject vs. object experience ^{3 2}.

 

A caveat with pursuing nondual awareness as a foundation of well-being is that, while it is attainable, it is less readily cultivated than, say, learning habits of gratitude or practicing breathing techniques or meditation as means to foster relaxation and well-being. While there are many paths to developing nondual awareness, it’s not evident which might be more or less conducive to success.

 

In summary, the journey to nondual awareness is the journey to establishing a true well-being. Bringing greater attention to this in the biomedical literature can help further advance our understanding of the human being and of our potential for developing extraordinary well-being.

 

 

 

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 80 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

 

Paul J. Mills PhD is a Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health at the University of California, San Diego. He is a long-standing National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported clinical investigator with expertise in psychoneuroimmune processes in wellness and in disease, with a current focus on integrative and behavioral medicine. He has been active in the fields of complementary and integrative medicine, conducting some of the earliest studies on the physiology of meditation in the late 1970s.

 

 

REFERENCES

 

1. Venkatesananda S. The Supreme Yoga: Yoga Vasishtha. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. 2010.
2. Josipovic Z. Freedom of the mind. Front Psychol. 2013;4:538.
3. Josipovic Z. Neural correlates of nondual awareness in meditation. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2014;1307:9-18.
4. Diener E, Tay L. Subjective well-being and human welfare around the world as reflected in the Gallup World Poll. Int J Psychol. 2015;50(2):135-149.
5. Baerentsen KB, Stodkilde-Jorgensen H, Sommerlund B, et al. An investigation of brain processes supporting meditation. Cogn Process. 2010;11(1):57-84.
6. Kasprow MC, Scotton BW. A review of transpersonal theory and its application to the practice of psychotherapy. J Psychother Pract Res. 1999;8(1):12-23.
7. Strobbe S, Cranford JA, Wojnar M, Brower KJ. Spiritual awakening predicts improved drinking outcomes in a Polish treatment sample. J Addict Nurs. 2013;24(4):209-216.
8. Miller L. Spiritual awakening and depression in adolescents: a unified pathway or “two sides of the same coin”. Bull Menninger Clin. 2013;77(4):332-348.
9. Dorjee D. Defining Contemplative Science: The Metacognitive Self-Regulatory Capacity of the Mind, Context of Meditation Practice and Modes of Existential Awareness. Front Psychol. 2016;7:1788.
10. Barnes S, Brown KW, Krusemark E, Campbell WK, Rogge RD. The role of mindfulness in romantic relationship satisfaction and responses to relationship stress. J Marital Fam Ther. 2007;33(4):482-500.
11. Holzel BK, Lazar SW, Gard T, Schuman-Olivier Z, Vago DR, Ott U. How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2011;6(6):537-559.
12. Walsh E, Eisenlohr-Moul T, Baer R. Brief mindfulness training reduces salivary IL-6 and TNF-alpha in young women with depressive symptomatology. J Consult Clin Psychol. 2016;84(10):887-897.
13. Shapiro SL, Carlson LE, Astin JA, Freedman B. Mechanisms of mindfulness. J Clin Psychol. 2006;62(3):373-386.

By Deepak Chopra, MD

A genuine social upheaval has begun, its theme is the empowerment of women. Old attitudes that have resulted in many kinds of unfairness are being challenged. The long-suppressed outrage of sexual harassment has been exposed to the light of day. No one with a heart and a conscience can do anything but respond with encouragement. It’s about time.

 

Rising from a position of weakness to become stronger, turning old wounds into a source of healing—these are important changes in anyone’s life. The eternal feminine has been a running thread in human culture for thousands of years, but each generation has to reinterpret it, and at the moment, embedded in a secular society where daily demands and distractions are the rule, envisioning the eternal feminine requires going deeper into our self-awareness.

 

Everyone’s source is pure awareness, which has no gender. When pure awareness manifests into creation, gender isn’t in evidence, either. When you wake up from deep sleep and become aware of your existence, the experience has no labels. The issues of masculine and feminine enter in a social context, defined by your beliefs, attitudes, and mental conditioning. To be a woman is to be a creation of many factors, going far beyond the physiological.

 

The eternal feminine isn’t found in any kind of belief, attitude, or conditioning, however. It isn’t restricted to women, because in reality the eternal feminine is part of everyone’s wholeness. When we divide women as being from Venus and men from Mars, that wholeness has been lost. In order to truly love women, and for them to love themselves, both sexes must nurture the universal values that belong to the eternal feminine. Every human quality that we cherish has a pure source, and the closer you are to the source, the more intense, personal, and lasting your values will be.

 

What does the eternal feminine add to everyone’s life? In one way or another we express the eternal feminine wherever there is motherliness, inner beauty, devotion, nurturing, loving kindness, inspiration, and creativity. The Goddess has always been about these things. When the feminine is ignored, distorted, or wounded, the same values are undermined. Hardness, cruelty, war, ruthless competitiveness—it’s not that these are bad masculine values. They are exaggerated and divorced from wholeness.

 

On the individual level, the loss of the eternal feminine can be devastating. There is an imbalance toward the masculine, which no one can sustain without damaging their capacity for loving acceptance, beginning with self-acceptance. I doubt there is anyone, man or woman, who can’t benefit from healing their feminine side. We regain wholeness in meditation, yet it is in daily life, where we apply self-awareness, that healing steps can be taken.

 

Take a moment every day and look through the feminine values I’ve listed above. Think of one value you’d like to encourage and enhance, then make a mental note of the action you’ll take that day to implement it. At night before you go to bed, reflect on your day to see if you carried out the action you planed. If so, how did it make you feel?

 

Here are some suggestions about how you might carry out healing the feminine side of wholeness:

Motherliness is warm, caring, accepting, and embracing. You might show someone close to you that you care by listening without judgment. You might include a person who seems like an outsider to your group and make them feel welcome.

Inner beauty is about letting the light of your awareness shine through. The key is to find the courage to show your true self to others, dropping the social mask to reveal sympathy, innocence, openness, and your joy in life.

Devotion is about the heart’s need to surrender to something outside yourself, pouring out love and appreciation. Devotion is private and happens in silent communion. It doesn’t have to be showy or even outwardly expressed. But when you feel the impulse to express loving devotion, act upon it.

Nurturing is about all the things a mother does to raise her child, and we often identify it with helping the young. But adults also need support, encouragement, protection from harm, and wise guidance. These are nurturing values too often neglected in our relationships. We forget that the child within us hasn’t vanished with the passage of time. So acting as a nurturing figure in anyone else’s life is deeply appreciated.

Loving kindness is about compassion, and the values that flow from it, such as empathy, acceptance, and non-judgment. Being easy with yourself and ending your own self-judgment are acts of loving kindness. The same is true when you extend the same attitude to others. As exalted as compassion sounds, it comes down to deciding that you are on the side of acceptance and kindness rather than judgment and harshness.

Inspiration and creativity are about making life new by living from the source. We make a mistake setting creativity apart as the domain of artists. Pure consciousness endlessly creates, and every day can be based on the flow of renewal. The opposite of renewal is habit, routine, mental conditioning, and fixed beliefs. So rather than struggling to be more creative, use your efforts to remove the obstacles that block inspiration and creativity. Once you stop identifying with habit and routine, life’s freshness returns naturally, like water gushing from a spring.

 

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 80 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

 

A crucial fact about American medicine goes largely ignored, even by doctors. Dollar for dollar, more people will gain years of healthy lifespan from prevention than from drugs or surgery. We don’t tend to think that prevention costs money. Once you learn that cigarettes cause lung cancer, you can decide not to smoke. The choice is free if you were a non-smoker to begin with. If you get up off the couch and start a brisk walking program to help prevent heart disease, that choice also doesn’t cost a penny.

 

What isn’t free, however, is getting information out there. Poor and less educated Americans are known to have a higher prevalence of major lifestyle disorders like heart disease, obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. The reverse is also true: better lifestyle choices are made by the affluent and well educated.

 

You can’t prevent what you don’t know about. That makes it essential that we keep funding the most dollar-wise education for physicians so that young residents can go on to spearhead prevention programs. America cannot continue to rely on a reactionary stance of simply treating health issues.  It must refocus its efforts and investments in prevention.  The surgery to treat a lung cancer patient is highly unlikely to succeed and will be very expensive. Informing a middle-school classroom about the risks of smoking potentially saves lives at a fraction of the cost.

 

It’s alarming, in the face of these facts, that the President’s proposed budget for the fiscal years 2018 and 2019 calls for eliminating funds to Preventive Medicine residencies. Residencies (training programs after medical school) provide the knowledge base, skills, and experience to be experts at preventive medicine and public health. Compared to overall healthcare dollars, these programs cost pennies. It’s unreasonable, inefficient, and against the public interest to cut these residencies.

 

Prevention is neither glamorous nor lucrative, but its importance is greater than ever. While the 20^th century saw the average lifespan increase by 30 years (thanks to vaccinations, controlling infectious diseases, declines in heart disease, motor-vehicle safety, and reductions in smoking), life expectancy has now declined in this country for two consecutive years[1]. Medical costs continue to rise, and serious new threats arise like the opioid epidemic, the Zika virus, and the decreased effectiveness of standard antibiotics.

 

Health care spending is out of control, which worries everyone. There is no medical argument against prevention as the best way to dramatically reduce the nation’s medical bill. Who will avoid the ill effects of obesity? The person who doesn’t gain weight to begin with. How do you increase the number of these people? Good habits go viral in a society, and so do bad habits. Teach the good habit of sensible eating on a wide basis, and you can start a lifestyle movement that will be set for coming generations.

 

America faces a serious problem over income inequality. The richest are getting richer while average income barely increases or stagnates for decades. When a Rolls-Royce passes you on the road, it’s easy to see who’s prosperous. Information inequality, however, is invisible, and far more crucial. The world’s most expensive car won’t add years of healthspan, which is a better measure than simple lifespan. Living longer when you’re sick or disabled is not as valuable as a longer healthy life.

 

The average life expectancy in the U.S. is now 79.3 years, but there is no reliable statistic on how many of those years are healthy. What is known, however, is that the onset of major disorders of old age is either the same as in the recent past or getting worse. As more people live longer, they need to get sick at a later age, and that’s not happening.

Yet the concept of healthspan is just now catching on in the general public, a prime example of why information is critical.

 

The future of preventive medicine in this country will be threatened if lawmakers don’t take action. You must contact your members of Congress today and ask them to join two champions of prevention in Congress, Representative Gene Green and Senator Tom Udall—they are leading the fight for funding residencies in preventive medicine.

 

American healthcare costs are nearly three times developed countries, but our life expectancy is shorter than 30 other nations. We all need to build a future where a culture of prevention becomes a dominant force.  The Center for Disease Control (CDC) acknowledges this; the science is there; the economic benefits are clear. What’s needed now is to get Congress to do the right thing.

 

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 80 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

 

 

 

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fueled-by-drug-crisis-us-life-expectancy-declines-for-a-second-straight-year/2017/12/20/2e3f8dea-e596-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?utm_term=.18737215abd2