By Deepak Chopra, MD and Anoop Kumar, MD

One of the main reasons a sane person feels sane is that reality holds together and makes sense. Billiard balls don’t suddenly turn into elephants; gravity doesn’t cause things to fall down one day and up the next. In current neuroscience, creating a sane reality is the job of the brain—and if you look closely, the job isn’t done very well at all. Not only is there mental disease but also everyday anxiety or depression, false impressions, misunderstandings, and even very strange distortions of reality, as with someone deathly afraid of the number thirteen.

In a recent TED talk, the fallibility of the human brain was discussed by Anil Seth, a cognitive neuroscientist who takes the position that our personal reality isn’t just skewed or eccentric—it’s a brain hallucination. According to Seth, we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it “reality.” This is actually a tried-and-true position occupied by people who can’t find consciousness in the brain—an impossible task since the brain is a physical object and the mind isn’t. Assuming that the activity of billions of brain cells is what produces our four-dimensional picture of reality (three dimensions of space plus the dimension of time), basic things like a sense of self aren’t real in themselves. As the byproduct of brain activity, mental perceptions may convince us all the time—after all, we depend on our minds every second we are alive—but they are untrustworthy, unreliable, and ultimately just a hoax, illusion, or hallucination.

Seth, like others in this camp, uses clever examples of how the brain fools us all the time—it can be tricked by optical illusions, for example. Take this far enough, and you wind up

with Seth’s logical conclusion: “Our basic sense of being a unified self is a fragile construction of the brain.” What’s peculiar about this conclusion is that it is exactly what the world’s wisdom traditions have been saying for thousands of years. Yet the two viewpoints totally disagree. Neuroscience says we are all a mass of mixed-up perceptions, memories, expectations, and flawed brain processing (like a computer whose software can’t keep up with a flood of data coming in), and therefore we can’t trust the brain’s hallucinations.

The world’s wisdom traditions might hear such a statement and respond, “Since every object of perception is a hallucination, and the brain itself is such an object, it too must be a hallucination.” In other words, the first and most basic assumption of neuroscience, that the brain projects the mind the way a bonfire projects heat and light, is circular reasoning. One might ask, “If the brain projects the mind, what projects the brain?” You can’t give the brain a privileged position as a kind of physical mastermind when it too is part of the hallucination.

In our first post, we pointed out that the chemicals and electrical charges in the brain are not special; they follow simple laws of chemistry and physics that apply to rocks, trees, and clouds. But Seth, like most neuroscientists, is forced to assume that the brain produces the mind because otherwise two outcomes occur that are unacceptable: Either 1.) The mind produces the brain and not the other way around, or 2.) There is no way to prove that brain causes mind or mind causes brain. Rejecting these two possibilities and accepting Seth’s hypothesis leaves us with a unique case of split personality: We become physical things that somehow experience a non-physical sense of self. (If the mind produces the brain, we don’t have this problem, since the experience of a physical thing can easily be a mental phenomenon—think of all the “physical” objects in your last dream.)

Until this whole dilemma is solved, each of us walks around fragmented in some way. An early brain experiment by the pioneering brain surgeon Wilder Penfield proved the point beyond doubt. He inserted electrical probes (painlessly) into the open brains of patients, and by mildly zapping the motor cortex in a specific place, the patient’s arm flew up. The patient would be surprised and say, “My arm just flew up.” But Penfield could also ask the patient to lift his arm voluntarily. In one case, the brain made the arm fly up; in the other case the mind willed the arm to fly up.

In the same way, we seem to inhabit a split world, where reality is brain-based and mind-based at the same time. This intimate, bidirectional relationship between mind and brain hints at a deeper possibility: The duality of mind and brain may be mere appearance. The brain may well be a robust image of one aspect of the mind, or conversely, the mind may be a subtler and more expansive rendition of what we call a “physical” brain. Either way, these possibilities bridge the apparent split between mind and brain, mental and physical, and subjective and objective. We may all be soon talking about the “brain-mind.”

Bridging the split is essential because we aren’t happy with our split personalities. All the flaws Seth and others attribute to the brain do in fact exist, and when we suffer on the inside, the brain can be the reason, and so can the mind. There is no dividing line between the two, which is why countless people suffer chronic pain, for example, that has no physical explanation or cure. Luckily, the brain-mind also brings us joy, hope, art, invention, creativity of all kinds, insight, love, and everything else that makes us human. Does anyone seriously believe that Leonardo’s physical brain alone produced the Mona Lisa, or that Einstein’s discovered relativity?

At a subtler level, the indissoluble union of mind and brain has also played a limiting role in human evolution. As Al Gore once commented direly, human nature hasn’t changed, but technologies for destruction and planetary degradation have leapt ahead. The human brain-mind can be trained into fixed patterns and beliefs, and whether the fixed pattern is religious or scientific, a huge swath of reality is sacrificed in the process. Our brain-minds are constantly filtering out, censoring, and editing the “real” reality, and yet this goes largely unnoticed.

To overcome such crippling limitations, a person must become whole by healing the split personality. The world’s wisdom traditions refer to this as waking up, which involves two steps. The first is stirring from the slumber of the objective/subjective divide, which can be approached secularly by reconciling brain and mind. Once this is accomplished, the stage is set for the second step: No longer fooled by the brain-mind, one wakes up to a new identity as awareness itself. “Enlightenment” is a loaded word, but it points in the right direction. Awareness can break out of confinements (beliefs, conditioning, social pressures, and mental suffering) the same way we break out of the terrors of a nightmare—the moment we wake up, our identity shifts and we drop the burdens of a dream.

Dreams are neurological illusions, yet this fact can be proven only on waking up. If you are already awake in the typical sense—walking around, talking to other people, going to work, etc.—it’s easy to believe that this world is independently real and not another kind of neurological illusion. But the proof is in the pudding: you can wake up from your waking dream just as you woke up from your sleeping dream. The instant this happens, the burdens of pain, suffering, fear, anger, etc. fade. Fortunately, such a claim doesn’t have to be anti-science. Because mind and brain are indissolubly wed, when the mind shifts by waking up, the brainmust also change its physical functioning. We’ve known for three decades that this is the case, ever since the first research demonstrated how the brain changes in response to meditation.The benefits of many such introspective practices, including prayer, mindfulness, and yoga, have only deepened. On a practical basis, two of the most damaging disease processes, inflammation and the stress response, are alleviated by these practices. But the real breakthrough will come when the complete process of waking up is acknowledged to be valid, at which point the end of our collective split personality will be in sight.

In wholeness we will reassess what it means to be human and what it takes to heal our wounded planet. As long as human nature remains in its current evolutionary stage, planetary healing will remain a remote possibility. Only wholeness leads to healing, and collective wholeness begins at the individual level. This is the ultimate version of Gandhi’s dictum to become the change you want to see in the world.

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 Super Genes 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 from McGill University. 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 Anoop Kumar, MD

In many fields, such as medicine, psychology, and neuroscience, there’s a serious problem with the difference between subjective and objective reality. Until this problem is solved, the two realities will never really mesh. At first the subject-object split seems easy enough. If you feel a pain in your foot and you find a rock in your shoe, the rock (objective fact) is the cause of the pain (subjective experience). Medicine, psychology, and neuroscience all accept this as the true model for all subjective states (love, happiness, depression, anxiety, etc.)—a physical cause in the objective world creates a subjective feeling.

Such a stance is known as physicalism, and it’s the basis for all science, which means that it is supposed to explain reality itself. But the model is obviously wrong, because it can be reversed. If someone walks up behind you and shouts “Boo!” (objective event), you might be scared for a second (subjective event), but you can also worry about money (subjective event) and create all the signs of the stress response in your body (objective facts). In other words, while objective events can cause subjective experiences, subjective experiences can cause objective events as well–causality may be bidirectional. The fact that schizophrenia has a genetic cause seems well established by now, yet identical twins who are born with the same genes have only a 50% chance of developing the disease. Something else makes the difference in its clinical expression, and it is most likely the difference in their experiences after they were born, which includes how they process and interpret these experiences (subjective).

On examination, it turns out that the subject-object split runs much deeper than medicine. Why is an apple red? A physicalist, using the scientific model, will point to a certain band of wavelengths in the spectrum of light. But photons, the particles of light, are invisible. Red, like all colors, and indeed the visibility of light itself, is a mental phenomenon. A neuroscientist can point to the visual cortex as the region of the brain where sight occurs, but the neurons in that region are 99% like any other brain cell in their structure and operation, depending on the same laws of chemistry and physics that govern molecules outside the brain. Nothing objective accounts for how the brain (an object) creates the sensation of red (subjective event).

The existence of two realities that cannot be bridged means that reality as a whole appears incurably split. Physicalism only pretends to heal the split, yet it’s obvious that science cannot explain where thoughts come from, why we are conscious beings, and why the human mind is creative. Fixed laws of chemistry and physics should, in fact, turn the brain into a machine that rigidly repeats the same processes over and over, without a possibility of new thoughts, feelings, creative breakthroughs, etc. So how can the subject-object split be cured?

Here are four possibilities, and they seem to be the only ones with a chance to be successful.

You can dovetail subjectivity into objectivity, and vice versa.

Some key scientific concepts can be dovetailed into first-hand experiences that mesh surprisingly well. A model ranging from the macro to the micro level might look something like the following:

Consciousness = quantum vacuum

Everything that is known and can be known arises in and from consciousness. Similarly, the entire universe arises in and from the quantum vacuum.

Mind = spacetime

Mind begins when consciousness splits into observer and observed, i.e., when the split into two occurs. Similarly, space is defined by the interval between two points. Time also requires two successive points – the first and the second millisecond, or any basic unit of time.

Wave = intuition

In physics a particle has an invisible state (wave) and a visible one (particle) without any cause that turns one into the other. This seems like intuition, which springs of its own accord, not caused by a previous state of thoughts.

Particle = thought

A thought is a concrete mental event the way a particle is. In both cases a “thing” appears in consciousness, even though one is considered mental and the other physical.

One can extend this model with parallels between the atom and concentrated thought, the molecule and a line of thought, etc. The point is not to draw total equivalence between these exact aspects of physical and mental experience, but rather to see that the worlds of matter and mind may not be irreconcilable if we can recognize one in the other.

This approach is best for people who are already reflective. There has to be some familiarity with the terrain of the mind for it to be useful. But a skeptic would argue that drawing parallels is simply drawing an analogy or applying a metaphor. In science, analogies aren’t proof.

Yet, these parallels between subject and object open a window through which some can make connections and develop new hypotheses to explore whether the worlds of physics and mind may converge.

You can subsume objectivity into consciousness.

Here, consciousness comes first, serving as the basis for any perspective the mind takes—imagination, fantasy, science, even hallucination and delusion. In everyday life we do this all the time. A climate change denier (subjective state) can’t be convinced by objective facts. There is no brain-based explanation for this. The mind puts itself first, as the final arbiter of what is real. Objectivity thus has no privileged position. Naturally, scientists howl in outrage at such an assertion, and we all in fact privilege facts as more valid than subjectivity.

Demoting objective facts creates psychological agitation, too, as witness the current flap over fake news. The achievements of science argue heavily in most people’s minds for objective reality being the “real” reality. Still, it is undeniable that consciousness is the basis of all human experience, including our experience of doing science and finding facts. More to the point, this argument retains the subject-object split instead of healing it. You can remove the taint of subjectivity.

If objectivity is the ‘real” reality, the denial of subjectivity amounts to a prejudice that is not based on facts. Art, creativity, depression, pain, love, etc. are not only real but powerful agents in human life and some might say the actual meaning of being human. Physicalists like to point out that facts can be agreed upon in science, while subjectivity varies from one person to another.

But one can point out how an experience like pain, depression, elation, anticipation, and even thinking are just as agreed upon as wave and particle or gravity, with no lesser status as real things. One reason this argument can be effective is that people are already familiar with both aspects of reality even though they cannot give you an explanation for consciousness (the experts can’t either). Now the whole issue of split reality is obvious rather than confusing and exotic. One can see that the superiority of the objective worldview is dubious.

But as before, the subject-object split hasn’t been healed. The big step here is to put subject and object on a more level playing field. That’s a major achievement if it can occur. The bias in favor of facts and a built-in distrust of subjectivity are hard things to get beyond.

You can drop the dualist model altogether and go straight to one reality.

This is the most radical option, and yet it may prove to be the only viable one. It basically says that there is no actual subject-object split, only a perception of such a split that we have grown to be convinced of. Is that really possible? Yes—in fact, the world’s wisdom traditions, with deep roots in India, take this position. In common language, if someone says of the universe “This is God,” a nondual argument is being made, by tracing everything in existence back to a single source. (Physicalists attempt the same thing by tracing everything back to matter and energy, but this requires leaving out or fudging the entire world of subjective experience, not to mention morality, purpose, meaning, inspiration, etc. It’s impossible to believe that such experiences are merely combinations of subatomic particles.)

There are two big problems with the nondual view of reality that have blocked the way forward. First is the whiff of religion. When most people think of a single unifier of creation, their minds jump to God. Since science long ago deposed religion as the explainer of reality, even the slightest hint of the supernatural is fatal. The second problem is a habit of mind: we are all ingrained to see the world “out there” as separate from the world “in here.” This habit keeps the subject-object split going day after day, generation after generation.

But habits can be broken. What is this particular habit that apparently caused reality to split apart in the first place? Wisdom traditions around the world have posed this question, and they are almost unanimous in their conclusion. They argue that life is much like a dream, and in a dream, it would be silly to argue about what is fact and what is subjective fancy. Everything is part of the dream, and until you find a way to wake up, the dream is all you know. This doesn’t eradicate the problems we face in the course of daily life, but it does present them in a radically new context. Thus the rift between subject and object comes down to settling illusion versus reality. This is such a thorny—and fascinating—challenge that we will devote an entire post to it.

(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 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes 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 from McGill University. 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, William C. Bushell, PhD, Ryan Castle, David Vago, PhD, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D.

Ten years ago researchers began to focus on inflammation as a link to disease. They stood out in that they did not emphasize the acute redness and swelling that accompanies the site of a wound or burn as it heals, which is known as acute inflammation. Rather, they discovered clues were leading to something more subtle – a low-grade, chronic inflammation that has few if any overt symptoms. This kind of everyday inflammation has now been linked to an overwhelming majority of serious lifestyle disorders, including hypertension, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and most cancers. What was an intriguing trend ten years ago is now being recognized as major global epidemic, all the more dangerous because it is invisible.

We encourage you to read the first post we wrote last week in order to gain more basic knowledge about chronic inflammation. Going past lifestyle disorders, chronic inflammation may be the key to aging. In addition, numerous inflammation-related genes have been linked to susceptibility to most age-related diseases, such as those mentioned above. The chemical markers in the bloodstream that serve to indicate inflammation are associated with the aging body and cellular death. Already some gerontologists are floating the idea that inflammation may be the largest contributor to aging. If this turns out to be right it will greatly simplify a complex subject, because two aspects of aging have traditionally made it very hard to grasp medically.

First, the deterioration of the body over time is not a straight line but an unpredictable set of changes that look different in everyone. Second, no single process can be pinned down as “aging” by itself. The common signs of aging, such as losing muscle strength, defects in memory, and moving more slowly – not to mention medical conditions like arthritis and dimmed eyesight – are related to many different processes and don’t appear in every elderly person. In fact, there are at least a few cases where these changes are at least temporarily reversed; there are even people who get stronger and have better memories as the years go by. Chronic inflammation has the possibility to simplify this scenario, in part by exploring the common factor that so many seemingly unrelated aging processes share.

Another connection with aging is centered on the immune system. When you were young, your immune system was very specific, precise, and targeted as it met invading pathogens (i.e., bacteria and viruses). This precision sets human beings apart from lower rungs on the evolutionary ladder where immunity is very general and diffuse. Instead of being precise, a

diffuse immune system sends the same chemicals in various doses to spots of injury and disease. There is no precise targeting. As we age, our immune system loses the precision of youth, and because inflammation is the most general type of response to pathogens, the body begins to indiscriminately secrete inflammatory chemicals that injure its own cells rather than healing them. If this goes on long enough, damaging feedback loops are set up that turn diffuse immunity into a pattern. This exacerbates the damage to cells throughout your body, accelerating cellular death. This complex syndrome has been labeled “InflammAging.” The glia cells in the brain that normally nurture and support nerve cells can instead attack nerve cells in bouts of neurology-inflammation.

Chronic inflammation takes years or even decades before visible damage or disease symptoms appear. This means that to reverse the process individuals must dedicate significant time. No one can do that without turning anti-inflammation into a lifestyle that feels as easy and natural as their present lifestyle. The most basic changes involve going down the list of things that create inflammation and doing the opposite instead. The result looks something like the following:

· A balanced lifestyle without extreme changes.

· Good sleep.

· A natural whole foods diet.

· Paying attention to everyday activity, including walking and standing.

· Reducing stress.

· Absence of emotional upset, anxiety, and depression.

· Solid family and community support.

· Feeling loved and wanted.

· A calm, unconflicted mind.

Nothing here is a surprise, but the distinction lies in understanding these changes are not just positive in some general way, they could literally save your life. It would appear that stress is extremely important because our response to everyday stress directly leads to stress on cells, and stressed cells produce the biochemicals that indicate inflammation. It is now well known that psychosocial stress may also significantly exacerbate many forms of disease pathology, including psychological disorders like anxiety and depression. Stress can actually produce chemicals that are toxic to nerve cells in the brain, such as cortisol. It has been theorized that the most serious form of depression, Major Depressive Disorder, could be considered an inflammatory disease.

This and other clues relate to aging, in that it takes smaller stresses to agitate older people, and they recover from them more slowly. What if this is the result of longstanding inflammatory feedback loops? There are numerous psychosocial causes for increase inflammation in the elderly, and there are age-specific types of depression. Being able to trace these conditions to a single cause would be very beneficial.

If stress and inflammation are the joint villains in aging and disease, the top priority in making lifestyle changes should be anti-stress. It is ironic that millions of people who willingly undertake improving their diet and exercise put a low priority on everyday stress, enduring routine pressures at home and work. In an exciting development, a growing body of literature has suggested systematic forms of mental training associated with meditation practice, good diet and sleep habits, and daily exercise, may improve clinical outcomes through an anti-inflammatory mechanism. It has been suggested previously that specific forms of meditation practice can indeed engage and modulate vagal tone through what has been coined, the “relaxation response” – a volitional state in which physiological recovery from psychosocial stress is facilitated. Much progress has been made in the last decade to identify potential neuroanatomical and network- based physiological changes due to mindfulness and other styles of meditation training.

We’ve outlined the main points of a new picture of aging and disease. Research is ongoing, and by no means do aging researchers all agree on inflammation as the root cause of aging. For one thing, inflammation, being necessary for the healing response, is a beneficial process as well as a harmful one, and discriminating between the two is complex. Second, the presence of inflammatory markers in the bloodstream, some would argue, is a symptom of stressed, dying cells, not the cause. However these issues resolve themselves in the future, the damaging effects of low-grade chronic stress are indisputable already. More in-depth research into the complex systems of the body and its inflammatory response are needed to determine these surprisingly fundamental questions.

A lifestyle aimed at countering inflammation has been described in detail in the book, Super Genes, and is a central part of the upcoming book by Deepak Chopra and Rudy E. Tanzi, The Healing Self. There you will find an in-depth discussion as well as a lifestyle program that addresses this vital topic.

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 Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

William C Bushell, PhD, Biophysical Anthropology, MIT is the Director of Research at ISHAR and has been researching mind-body phenomena for over three decades, focusing on the field of consciousness studies around the world as a biological, medical, and psychological anthropologist affiliated with Columbia, Harvard, and MIT.

Ryan Castle, Executive Director of ISHAR, specializes in research analysis and whole systems integration. He is an advocate for open-access science and multidisciplinary approaches.

David Vago, PhD, is Research Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Associate professor, department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation; Associate professor, department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; Research associate, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World”.

By Deepak Chopra, MD, William C. Bushell, PhD, Ryan Castle, David Vago, PhD, Mark Lambert
Until very recently, it was fairly unthinkable that our own bodies pose a greater threat to health than any outside disease. Most people have never heard of one of the greatest plagues of the 21st century, because it is caused by one of the most subtle, complex reactions in the body. This plague is inflammation, which in medical terms is the ultimate two-edged sword.

On the positive side, the body’s healing response can’t occur without inflammation, as wounded or diseased areas are flooded with extra blood and immune cells–the familiar signs are redness, puffiness, and at times a warm or burning sensation. The negative side is the harm caused when inflammation tips the balance against healing, as when people die of severe burns or fevers gone out of control. The polar nature of inflammation has been known for a long time, but the focus was overwhelmingly on acute inflammation, the drastic kind triggered by wounds and disease.

The plague referred to by a growing body of researchers is different, it involves the easily overlooked, seemingly innocuous state of low-grade chronic inflamm

ation that can have massive health impacts. What makes chronic inflammation so dangerous, it is now realized, is a matter of time. The lifestyle disorders that cause the most harm in modern society–hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and most probably many cancers–take years or even decades to gestate before the first symptoms appear. The same appears to be true for Alzheimer’s. This discovery pushes back the onset of disease so far that detection is difficult without developing sensitive new tools.

As research in various disorders unfolded, a single factor kept appearing over and over, no matter how differ

ent any two disorders are–markers for inflammation. This was a startling revelation, because hypertension looks nothing like Alzheimer’s or cancer like diabetes. Yet in the incremental breakdown of healthy cell function, chemicals that trigger inflammation are a vital link, and often the only link.

In fact, inflammation is a contributing factor to a majority of all deaths in the United States, likely making it the most deadly condition in the modern world. Literally billions of lives are at risk in both the developed and developing world.

The media have started to bring inflammation to public awareness, and there are now numerous articles on anti-inflammatory diets, for example. But two enormous challenges lie ahead, stemming from the fact that a.) Inflammation is holistic, affecting potentially any system in the body, and b.) Measures to overcome chronic inflammation need to be maintained for a lifetime. The second factor is made harder by the fact that the anti-inflammation program someone undertakes won’t show any marked benefits most of the time. An invisible plague requires a nearly invisible solution.

How do you fight against a threat that potentially targets the brain, cardiovascular system, the immune system, the organs and tissues of the endocrine system, in what has been referred to as ‘smoldering inflammation’? The answer may not lie in drugs but in lifestyle. In fact, the entire wellness movement, in its goal of achieving lifelong good health, must drill into the public mind a new model for health that doesn’t focus of risks and prevention, important as they are. Instead, the new model is all about the entire body-mind and making every day a healing day.

Some aspects of chronic inflammation, such as impaired organ function, cellular death, aging, and recovering from serious injury or illness, involve serious medical issues. But for the most part, a lifestyle that allows the whole body’s system to thrive is the key. A thriving, homeostatic system is supported by the following:

· A balanced lifestyle without extreme changes.

· Good sleep.

· A healthy whole foods diet.

· Paying attention to everyday activity, including walking and standing.

· Reducing stress.

· Absence of emotional upset, anxiety, and depression.

· Solid family and community support.

· Feeling loved and wanted.

· A calm, unconflicted mind.

These aren’t mysterious or novel things; we’ve all absorbed lifestyle information for years. But the revelation that chronic inflammation is a true plague changes the urgency and priority of the choices we all have to make. For example, given that yoga and meditation benefit the body-mind in many ways, should they become high-priority choices for everyone, starting at an early age? Recent revelations that the brain can directly regulate inflammation has opened new, tremendously exciting opportunities. Insights on the detailed physiology of how the mind and the nervous system influences this system may provide new ways to help us alleviate chronic inflammation over long periods of time. The challenge now is to identify how best to regulate inflammation and to map that mind-body connection. Only then can we better understand how to truly support a “thriving body”. In the next post these broad questions will be answered according to the best recent research.

(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 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

William C Bushell, PhD, Biophysical Anthropology, MIT is the Director of Research at ISHAR and has been researching mind-body phenomena for over three decades, focusing on the field of consciousness studies around the world as a biological, medical, and psychological anthropologist affiliated with Columbia, Harvard, and MIT.

Ryan Castle, Executive Director of ISHAR, specializing in research analysis and whole systems integration. Advocate for open-access science and multidisciplinary approaches.

David Vago, PhD, is Research Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Associate professor, department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation; Associate professor, department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; Research associate, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Peder S. Olofsson, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Bioelectronic Medicine, Department of Medicine at Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Mark Lambert, Project Manager and Director of Innovation for the Center for Bioelectronic Medicine, Karolinska Institute, and supported Dr. Kevin Tracey as Chief of Staff for the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research.

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Avtar Singh, PhD

Until very recently it was nearly laughable among physicists to speak of a conscious universe, and yet the notion now seems to be not only respectable but necessary. The realization is dawning that a true Theory of Everything must include consciousness. Almost every scientist traces any phenomenon, including the mind, back to physical causes. This way of thinking, when applied to the issue of where consciousness comes from, implies either a very big answer or a very small one.

The small answer looks at the most microscopic level of nature, the quantum field, and tries to define how subatomic particles could possibly contain the potential for consciousness. This seems like a dead end, however, if you consider how unlikely it is that particles (or atoms and molecules) somehow learned to think. The molecules inside the human brain are as ordinary as the water, salt, and minerals in the ocean or the carbon in a lettuce leaf. The big answer gets around this dead end by looking at the whole universe as the source of consciousness. The embarrassing failure of the bottoms-up fragmented approach has left no option but to consider the top-down holistic approach to the fundamental reality of consciousness.

The existence of the cosmos is often described as “something out of nothing,” because the ground state of creation is a kind of zero point, a vacuum state devoid of space, time, matter, and energy. (Technically, “nothing” is a misnomer, because the quantum vacuum contains the potential for every bit of matter and energy in the cosmos, existing in virtual form.) The fact that space, time, matter, and energy sprang from nothing makes it easier to credit that consciousness did the same. The first second of time, after all, is just as inexplicable as the first thought.

The overall problem of consciousness has been historically divided into two parts. The so-called easy problem is to experimentally correlate the measured mental states in terms of electromagnetic signals to various well-defined brain and bodily activities. Thanks to modern brain imaging, this part has been essentially solved. The so-called hard problem concerns how firing patterns of neurons in the brain create subjective experiences such as anger, love, fear,

hate etc. No satisfactory solution has been agreed upon to the hard problem, and some would claim that such a solution is far from being discovered. However, the problem of consciousness is generally considered to be a problem only within the domain of neuroscience. That is because of the materialistic assumption that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, or byproduct, of the brain. The firing of neurons is assumed to create what are called the correlates of consciousness. However, this logic is as erroneous as claiming that a radio creates the music being played through it.

If we switch gears and make the whole universe conscious (or protoconscious as some theorists prefer), then it isn’t necessary for the brain to create the mind or vice versa. Imagine that chemists were baffled over why water is wet. There are no physical properties of oxygen and hydrogen, the two gases that constitute the water molecule, that give rise to wetness. Instead, wetness is a quality that water possesses innately. In physics a quality is referred to in Latin as qualia. The subjective world is all about qualia, since they are the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of reality. If discovering how atoms and molecules learned to think is impossible, equally so is discovering how water became wet, sugar sweet, etc. Even the fact that light is bright and visible makes no sense physically, since photons, the fundamental particles of light, are inherently invisible.

If consciousness is a non-local universal state rather than a local neurobiological phenomenon, qualia come along in the same package as scientific facts, the way wetness comes along with H2O. You need one to have the other. In our last post we introduced Dr. Singh’s hypothesis that relativity should be considered universal, eternal, all-inclusive, and without cause. His Universal Relativity Model (URM) solves all kinds of questions–such as what came before the big bang, the origin of time, and the relationship of mind and matter–by making the questions themselves invalid. The so-called hard problem asks a wrong (upside-down) question as to how consciousness arises from the brain. The right question is how brain functions are governed by the eternal laws that represent the very fundamental awareness of the universe.

In a universe that spontaneously generates self-organizing, self-evolving “slices” of space, time, matter, and energy, there is no need to compartmentalize anything. Instead there is spontaneous eternal flow and transformation. This approach sounds exotic because, for one thing, we assume that there must be a cause for every effect and vice versa. Yet if you stand back, what is the actual cause of a new thought? What causes love to feel different from hatred? Why does pain hurt? We constantly inhabit an everyday world where there is

spontaneous flow and sudden creation, where all kinds of things come seemingly out of nothing, and where cause-and-effect are just partial models for sequences of related events. In a spontaneous, continuous, and flowing universe, a match will still start a fire–local events remain the same–but the hotness of fire and the chemistry of combustion aren’t separate. They are different modes of knowing, and all knowing comes back to consciousness.

Currently some physicists are toying with various models of a conscious universe, but the materialistic bias holds strong, and very few, if any, have concluded that the universe must be conscious to exist in the first place. That’s an important correlate of URM. Einstein definitively proved with E=mc2 that matter and energy are recombinations of each other, states of transformation in one continuum, and once this door was opened, he saw (but could never prove mathematically) that all the inherent ingredients of creation belong on the same continuum. However, Einstein was unwilling to place mind or consciousness in his relativistic scheme. One has to back away from materialism to understand that no valid model of reality “out there” can assign a cause to reality “In here.” Although Einstein wanted to know “the mind of God”, his denial of free will kept him from reaching the “hidden factor” of consciousness now incorporated into URM.

Another implication of URM is that being conscious, the universe must be alive. Life is defined as spontaneous creation without an external cause. A dead universe would have no spontaneous motion or laws of motion. The very fact that the human mind can perceive and experience the reality of universal laws points to the non-locality of the human mind–i.e., we are outcroppings of cosmic mind perceiving itself. The neuro-biological mind has no such inherent connection to the laws of nature and their eternal, non-local existence. This implication is a bit obscure, but it simply states that awareness isn’t an isolated property like wetness. Awareness is aware of itself, and for that reason it can fathom its own operations, including the laws of nature.

What we’ve been saying here builds upon distinguished precedents. The well-known physicist Freeman Dyson pointed to the evidence of three levels of mind in Nature: the human mind, the mind residing at the micro level of subatomic activity, and the mind of the universe. The manifestations of the way the subatomic or quantum world acts lead one to think that mind is a reasonable way to describe what’s going on. As Dyson states, “So the atom seems to have a freedom to choose, that’s something which characterizes quantum processes, that they seem to just occur spontaneously. We call that spontaneous decay. So it is spontaneous; that to my mind implies that the thing makes a choice … this freedom that the individual atom has to have…. seems to be an indication of some rudimentary form of mind.”

Thoughts in a contemplative or meditative human mind can decay or be born through the spontaneous intention or free will of the person. Since seemingly empty space in the universe is shown by quantum mechanics to be filled with particles that are born and decay spontaneously, the argument of similarity between the human mind and the micro-mind can be extended to the macro- or universal mind. Of course finding similarities, even very strong ones, isn’t the same as rigorous scientific proof. URM addresses consciousness-related issues to intractable problems in contemporary physics to show that the neurobiological or brain-mind processes and qualia (emotions, thoughts, intentions etc.) are a subset of the relativistic states of consciousness in the universe.

Here we’ve avoided the technicalities of a scholarly article, but for the non-scientist what’s important are the big concepts that lead to a major paradigm shift. In that regard URM takes us one step closer, not just to solving the hard problem, but of learning the right way to think about it and to frame the questions that matter most. Just asking the right question often dissolves, if not resolves, the question itself.

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 Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Avtar Singh, PhD, is author of the book – “The Hidden Factor: An Approach for Resolving Paradoxes of Science, Cosmology and Universal Reality”. He has Doctor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA. As a member of American Nuclear Society and American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he has been involved in state-of-the-art research and development in science/engineering over the past 30 years. He has published more than fifty papers in professional journals and two monographs. He received the ‘Best Paper Award’ from the American Nuclear Society, MIT Fellowship, national scholarship awards, and several industry technical excellence awards.