The Mystery That Makes Life Possible

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Over the past few decades there’s been a creeping invasion that has tremendous repercussions for all of us. Strangely, it is the invasion of consciousness. I say strangely because for millennia human beings claimed total possession of consciousness. We think, invent, solve problems, show curiosity, and make conscious decisions. Even the cleverest of our near relations among the primates might or might not have minds—expert opinion remains sharply divided on the issue.

A chimpanzee or gorilla displays only a limited range of skills compared with human skills. A chimp might learn to dig grubs out from a hole using a stick, but toolmaking basically stops there, or using a rock to smash hard nuts, which some monkeys can do. A gorilla might learn to understand language and even use hand signs to communicate, but it can’t teach this skill to another gorilla.

You’d never suspect on the evidence that consciousness was creeping in everywhere, but now there are books on the conscious universe, and a band of physicists believes in panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is inherent in creation, permeating even subatomic particles. Almost a hundred years ago the astronomer Sir James Jeans declared that the universe “begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”

The invasion of consciousness has not reached the average person, but it has immense implications for how we view reality. It’s no mere curiosity if the universe is conscious. It means that life on Earth isn’t unique. It borrowed a cosmic trait and ran with it to produce billions of life forms. But the notion of cosmic consciousness only comes home when you look deeper into the mystery.

As consciousness has been ascribed to everything, by implication everything knows as much as we humans do. Mind isn’t just passively present. It is creating the cosmos in its own image. This of course is how God is described in religion. God as a superhuman living somewhere in the sky is graspable. Invisible, all-pervasive consciousness isn’t. Some mysteries are hard to fathom. How time began is one example. How electrical impulses in the brain create sights and sounds is another.

But the mystery of consciousness is different and unique. No other mystery will never be solved, because only this mystery is absolute. Anything else in Nature you can relate to. If it’s an object like a cloud, mountain, limestone cliffs, or a herd of elephants, you can break it down through your five senses to make a mental picture of it. You can take the object in hand and physically take it apart. You can think and argue about thoughts related to any experience.

But there’s no place to stand in order to view, handle, take apart, or manipulate consciousness. All actions go back to some idea in the mind, and the mind is like the eye—it can see everything but itself. Unless the skull is opened, none of us would know we have a brain. Even after ancient civilizations examined the brain, there was general agreement that the heart generated thoughts and feelings, not the gray, mushy, cold oatmeal-textured brain.

I don’t want to get tangled up in the thicket of metaphysics. In practical terms, consciousness, being an absolute mystery, is totally inconceivable. It can’t be defined for the same reason a fish can’t define what “wet” means. When you are completely immersed in water, there is nothing that isn’t wet. At this moment, as consciousness is creeping in everywhere, the same problem is stumping the best thinkers. If we are totally immersed in consciousness, there is no way to define it. You simply wind up talking around it, and the whole time you will be using consciousness, making the project the same as a snake swallowing its tail.

The mystery of consciousness can never be solved, yet in ancient India something extremely important was said about it: Consciousness is the inconceivable source of everything conceivable. The word “source” has enormous power. There used to be an old TV series, “The Millionaire,” where every week an anonymous check for one million dollars was given to someone chosen at the whim of the invisible benefactor. They were given only one restriction, that they could never tell anyone about the gift.
You and I find ourselves in the same position. We cannot tell anyone about the source of everything that makes life rich: love, compassion, charity, empathy, creativity, truth, beauty, insight, intuition, and personal evolution. They flow for the source of our humanity, and it is a creation of consciousness. God functions like the ultimate benefactor if you are religious, and in most faiths God asks for obedience, reverence, and worship. Consciousness ask for nothing. How could it? There is no worshiper separate from the source.

We are cosmic consciousness, working in, around, and through us. A quark, bacteria, and buzzing mosquito are different avenues for consciousness, but they are cosmic consciousness also. When everything has the same source, the playing field is leveled. But the value for the human condition is that we can say with total certainty that our highest values, the ones just named, are innate. Our existence is packaged with them because our consciousness is packaged with them.

Therefore, when we wander into wrongdoing, we’ve made a mistake. Evil and good aren’t equals or the product of genes or archetypes. Nothing conceivable by the mind can explain the source of love, compassion, creativity, and all the rest. But when these values are absent, distorted, or betrayed, it is important to realize that the negative side isn’t innate.

I realize that there is much room for heated debate about human nature, pain and suffering, and all manner of violence. Solutions to these things must be found in the outside world, to be sure. But the entire spiritual basis of humankind is the knowledge that each of us can return to our source, no matter how much we’ve strayed from it. Spiritual awakening is called a realization because you realize who you really are and where you came from. You came from the absolute mystery of consciousness, the source that made life possible in the first place.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

Only the Present Mind Is Without Fear

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

In stressful times many more people feel fear than in normal times. What this means is that an ability to be fearless becomes more essential than in normal times. How is that accomplished? Being fearful is a skill you can master. It doesn’t require any of the things society falls back on. You don’t have to be tougher, stronger, more of a man (if you happen to be a male) or call upon a strong man for help (if you happen to be female).

In reality you only have to be present, because in the present there is no fear. At first this sounds wrong, because when you experience worry and anxiety, the most common types of fear, they hit you here and now. But here and now isn’t the same as the Present. Here and now describes clock time. If you are waiting for a bus and it is five minutes late, once it arrives, it is here now. The present moment, however, has nothing to do with clock time. The present is a state of mind, and in fact is the most natural state of mind, the state your mind wants to be in.

One of the key concepts in my new book, Total Meditation, is that the mind will return to the present effortlessly if given a chance. Even though “living in the present” has become a popular phrase, most people still approach it as a kind of spiritual challenge that requires them to intensely focus to make sure they stay mindful and present. This is the mental equivalent of balancing a penny on the end of your finger. The penny naturally wants to topple over unless you exert an effort to keep it balanced.

The active mind can feel like that. When fear and anxiety are roaming the mind. Balance seems difficult. In reality it’s not. Fear, despite its unique power, is just another mental distraction. Distractions can also be pleasant, as we all know watching a movie, and the active mind finds them very useful, because when you are distracted, you get a vacation from the endless stream of thoughts and feelings that the active mind must deal with.

Meditation isn’t the same as a distraction. It too gives the active mind a vacation, but with a difference. When watching a movie, texting, playing a video game, or doing a household chore, your attention goes outward. As soon as the distraction is over, the underlying worry and anxiety you were trying to escape will return. Meditation, on the other hand, goes to a level of awareness that is beyond fear; this is present mind. It is mind meeting itself rather than being filled with thoughts and feelings.

The theme of Total Meditation is about the need to keep meeting yourself throughout the day. Rather than setting aside a fixed time for meditating, you let your awareness return to present mind the moment you notice that you are distracted, stressed, worried, or on any other state of imbalance. The reason that anxiety can dominate even a person who isn’t normally anxious is that the person gets trapped in conflict between warring parts of the mind.

We experience these warring parts as voices in our head or sometimes as inner impulses. Dieters know the experience as the tug-or-war between “I want to eat this” and “I really shouldn’t.” there might be times when the “good’ voice wins, but this only frustrates the “bad” mind even more. So it lies in wait for a weak moment, and then instead of being “good” for not eating a candy bar, you eat a pint of ice cream, which is “bad” for you.

The issue should never be about any kind of inner conflict, because once you get sucked into one, you become a combatant against yourself. Unfortunately, as a legacy of our past, we all have years of inner conflict behind us. All kinds of fragmented memories lie in wait, charged with unresolved feelings of fear, anger, frustration, failure, humiliation, grief, and self-doubt. They form a rich field of material for fighting against yourself. But present mind has nothing to fight against, because the residues of the past are just distractions when you stand back and see them as a whole.

I realize that there is great suffering in people’s lives. Some of it is happening now; some of it is remembered from the past. For countless people the only choices are to put up with suffering or fight against it, and sometimes the struggle is just too much. Then we simply give up. But there is another choice, and the way is opened by letting the mind return to a state of being present, not with the outside world but with itself.

The secret of present mind can be hard to grasp, because we are so used to the fragments of our mind fighting against each other. You need to have an “aha” moment in which you see that the problem is inner conflict that arises form a divided self that has gotten into the habit of fighting itself. You must see, once and for all, that the solution is to go beyond conflict, which can only happen in present mind. You don’t struggle to get there, which would be just another kind of fighting against yourself. You find present mind in meditation, learn to recognize the experience, and then return to that experience any time you want to. Only in present mind is there no fear. With that one lesson you can survive, and even thrive, in the most distressing times.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Most Precious Freedom Is Inner Freedom

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

There’s a spiritual concept that seems to create a good deal of confusion. It goes by the name of freedom or liberation, both terms referring not to political freedom but inner freedom. The reason that “freedom” has a spiritual meaning is that a state of total freedom is possible. The confusion arises because at first glance we already feel free inside, most of the time, at least. Our thoughts and feelings are our own. We can be persuaded or coerced to change our minds, but in the end, we decide for ourselves.

In reality, most people experience only a taste of inner freedom. They exist in a state of limitation that is far removed from total freedom. I discuss the desirability of total freedom in my new book, Total Meditation, and I’d like to offer a preview here.

We cannot be free inside if some experiences frighten or distress us. We shut out and deny them, and as a result, many if not most experiences get edited, censored, forgotten, and pushed aside in favor of a narrow band of experience that feels safe. Limited freedom is based on what you can reasonably expect from life. Total freedom begins by looking on life as a field of infinite possibilities. It takes some persuasion to make total freedom seem like more than a pipe dream, however. Is it even desirable to feel totally open, unbounded, and free of boundaries to keep us safe?

A key issue here is spontaneity. Spontaneity is without rules, which seems like a recipe for anarchy. Rule enforcement is the surest way to keep people in line, or so the rule enforcers believe. Consider the extreme example of applying to the bank for a personal loan in China. If you want a loan there, you can use your smartphone, and online lending agencies check you out electronically, using data stored in the cloud. An applicant gets accepted or rejected for a loan in one-tenth of a second, after the lending agency has checked out 5,000 (!) personal factors, including how firmly your hand moved when you filled out your application and how low you let your phone battery get before recharging it.

Each of us is happy to enforce rules upon ourselves—we don’t need an authority figure to do it for us. Self-discipline and impulse control are considered desirable as marks of a mature adult. There’s a famous experiment in child psychology in which a youngster is placed in a chair with a marshmallow on a table in front of them. The child is told they can eat the marshmallow right now, but if they wait five minutes, they will be given two marshmallows. The experimenter then leaves the room and watches what unfolds through a two-way mirror. Some children fidget, fighting the impulse for immediate gratification. Others grab the marshmallow instantly or wait patiently until the five minutes is up. (You can view their behavior on an endearing YouTube video, “The Marshmallow Test.”)

This experiment implies that we already have a predisposition toward impulse control (or not) from a very early age. However, many of life’s greatest gifts involve spontaneity, including falling in love, appreciating beauty, composing music, making art, being surprised with “Aha!” moments, and having so-called peak experiences.

How can we make spontaneity be life-enhancing without the need to suppress it? The solution is to stop imposing limitations in the first place. This is possible only from the level of total consciousness. Everyone is divided inside between what is permitted and what is forbidden. You can’t resolve this conflict at the level of awareness dictated by the divided self.

The war we have with ourselves takes place in the divided self. All manner of judgments, beliefs, fear of bad consequences, memories of past embarrassment, and socially trained inhibitions are entangled together inside us. Trying to resolve each conflict one at a time is pointless and fated to fail. When we try to decide how spontaneous we want to be we confront the fact that the divided self doesn’t really trust itself.

Happily, everyone enjoys enough freedom to enjoy moments of spontaneity, and if we are awake enough, we can experience laughter, joy, and playfulness our entire life (if only this were the norm). The deeper spiritual truth holds that freedom is absolute. When you are settled in yourself and there are no more dark places to fear, nothing hides out of sight. The damaging effect of self-suppression lessens with every step you take to get rid of self-judgment. Bad behavior grows only more enticing when it is forbidden, like leaving the cookie jar out but telling a little child not to grab a cookie. We all know what happens when the mother’s back is turned.

Right now you are both your own rule enforcer and a rebel against the rules. It takes a journey into consciousness to become undivided. You are not designed to prosecute and defend yourself at the same time. You are designed so the next thing you want to do is the best thing for you. That’s a radical rethinking of what society tells us to believe, but when you adopt a lifestyle based on consciousness, reality will dawn. Spontaneity is the essence of life and the soul of creativity.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Matrix Is Real, and It Is Here

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

When the Matrix movies first gained immense popularity in 1999, the notion of an imaginary world in which everyone was enslaved seemed just that, imaginary. Pop culture didn’t look deep enough to reveal that ancient tradition of Maya, the Sanskrit term for an all-enveloping illusion that, for real, envelops all of us. When Maya was discussed, it belonged to an exotic worldview that no modern person in the West gave much credence to.

But that’s how illusion keeps us entranced, by making it seem, as in the brilliant movies, that the matrix constitutes real life. Clearly a better explanation is needed in order to convince the average person, not so much that we all live in a dream/spell/illusion, but that it can be escaped. I discuss what it means to escape the illusion in my new book, Total Meditation. Here I’d like to give a capsule preview of why the real-life matrix matters to everyone.

The most necessary role of the human brain is to present a picture of reality that fits our needs, or to be more accurate, the needs of our ancestors in the hominid lineage. The primary need was for survival, which Darwinians break down into two elements, food and mating. But clearly there were other needs that separated hominids out from other mammals, including shelter and a peaceful community at the physical level. Far more crucial, however, was the emergence of human needs that are primarily a matter of higher consciousness. These include free will, language, art, writing, love, compassion, altruism, creativity, and above all, self-awareness.

These qualities make us human, and in the process of evolving, they became completely entangled in a unified setup we can call the matrix or Maya—terminology isn’t important here. The important thing, which the movie got right, is that you and I are the matrix. We are not in it, nor is there any separation between the things we perceive “out there”—rocks, trees, buildings, sky, other people—and the things we perceive “in here”—thoughts, sensations, images, and feelings. So seamless is the matrix that countless people go through life accepting it on appearance alone.

This, in fact, is the basis of scientific inquiry, which gives primary importance to physical objects as the basis of reality. With all respect to the incredible advances of science and technology, such a worldview is only a convenient fiction, the very fiction that the dream/spell/illusion has thrown us into all the way back to our survival instincts. What motivation do we have, then, for trying to escape? The answer lies outside the matrix, because once you are the matrix, you can’t escape unless you find a way to escape yourself.

The key word here is “self.” When the doctrine of Maya arose in India’s ancient past, it was unlike any other concept, thought, teaching, or everyday fact. Nor was it a religious notion or someone’s stroke of genius. Instead, there was a natural relationship to Maya that we have lost. It was the relationship of a creator to his/her creation. Realizing that the human mind had constructed the matrix, the ancient rishis kept in mind that being fooled by your own creation isn’t desirable. But everyday life was beset by amnesia. No one looked at himself and said, “this whole world is something my mind created.

Maya had been around as long as anyone could remember, and for evolutionary purposes it worked very well, as witness the immense creations of civilization. But there was a fly in the ointment. The continuity that makes the matrix so convincing had holes in it. I’ll name three:

  • No one could say where the human mind came from. To this day no one can point to how a thought arises, or even, strictly speaking, what a thought is.
  • Pain and suffering seems to be universal, and yet so-called lower animals didn’t exhibit existential pain and suffering. Why do we?
  • Self-awareness kept asking, “Who am I?”

Once you verbalize them, these flaws or holes in the whole setup smack of philosophy. But in reality they did not emerge from abstract thinking. There was just this sense that couldn’t be explained. This sense was common enough that when ordinary people asked—and still ask —“Is this all there is?”, they said no.

Only when you go into the vague sense that there must be something more to life do you arrive at the secret of human existence—hidden evolution. Hidden from the sight of the physical world, the human mind kept evolving thanks to several factors that are easy to recognize once you look at yourself closely. These factors are all part of our consciousness, built into it without anyone creating them. They include

  • Curiosity and a thirst for discovery
  • Creativity
  • Inspiration and insight
  • Attraction towards the source
  • Wholeness of the self

No one would be surprised by the first three things on the list, but the last two require some explanation. All cultures contain myths, religion, and metaphysics. The word “god” needn’t be dragged in, because the common denominator isn’t religion but the source of religion. Built into human awareness is a pull or attraction toward the very source of our own awareness. This isn’t a mystical notion. The universal evidence of seeking a higher reality has existed from the beginning. Some cultures took this impulse and looked outward for gods and goddesses, but India looked inward and explored consciousness itself, using as the only tool simple, everyday self-awareness.

The same opportunity still exists, as I discuss at length in Total Meditation. The other factor, wholeness of the self, needs explanation because as modern people, we are conditioned to occupy a divided and fragmented self. We identify with a reality divided into “in here” and “out there,” which makes sense when you have to hunt to survive—a keen sense of what lies “out there” mustn’t be clouded by inner moods, fears, and distractions. The problem is that once people got deeply immersed in “out there,” the divided self forgot that it was an evolutionary convenience, not the actual nature of the self.

Sit quietly for a moment and sense who you are. Effortlessly and naturally you are simply here, and your sense of self is your knowledge that you exist. To be conscious and to exist go together. They are the creative foundation of the matrix, not the movie’s unholy, malignant machinery that babies get plugged into. The simple sense of self needs nothing to justify its existence. Not even evolution is on the table; there is no agenda beyond to be here now.

And yet the sense of self, tapping into the source of consciousness, gave us every human value, every civilization, every scrap of art, science, and technology. Crucially, it now offers an escape route from the divided self and all the pain and suffering created by being trapped in the matrix. The message of Total Meditation is simple: you are the source and substance of the matrix, but you don’t have to be identified with it. That in many ways is the ultimate promise, the only one that counts in everybody’s life.

 

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Blissful Life and You

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

When the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell first used the phrase, “Follow your bliss,” he inspired many people. He held out a vision that was radically different from the notion that hard work, persistence, and keeping your shoulder to the wheel was the key to success. But actually, achieving this new vision didn’t prove to be easy.

Campbell’s underlying intention had mythical and spiritual roots. This is clear when you read a bit more about his advice. “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you.” This is where people get confused and frustrated, however. They have something they love to do, but the invisible track doesn’t show up. Or what they love to do might have absolutely no financial aspect. What then?

I wanted to clarify what the blissful life actually is, which motivated me to write my latest book, Total Meditation. The key, I believe, to finding your bliss is knowing where to look. There is a source of bliss in everyone that can guide the choices you make. The track to follow isn’t mystical. When the mind settles down in meditation, there is contact with the deeper qualities of consciousness. Bliss is one quality, but simply feeling joyful, carefree, and light, which is the feeling of bliss, carries no greater meaning without other qualities of awareness that are contacted at the same time.

The qualities include creativity, intelligence, intuition, and inner growth. When they become real experiences, the track to a blissful life is open and can be followed. Here arises a second puzzle. How do you know you are on the right track? Do you drop your job as an accountant, office manager, or salesperson and jump immediately into opera singing, painting, or raising roses? That’s not what Campbell is actually saying. “Follow your bliss” points inward, to a pre-existing state of bliss that has the power to bring transformation.

As Campbell defines the goal, “…the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.” Because the goal isn’t very near in most people’s life, there have to be steps along the path. In Total Meditation I outline these steps quite simply. Your mind has creative intelligence and bliss as its source. Therefore, your mind will move closer to its source if you give it a chance. Not much progress can be made if you meditate only occasionally. The path is more like following a trail of breadcrumbs out of the forest; you reconnect with the path by small increments, and there need to be many of them to keep you on course.

This again is simple, because any time you notice that you are distracted, worried, stressed, or starting to feel overwhelmed, you can stop, find a quiet place, and spend a few minutes of quiet meditation until you feel centered again. Do this as often during the day as you need to. You will be allowing your mind to find the settled state it wants to be in naturally.

Will this simple practice, which I call total meditation, instantly give you a blissful life? Very likely it won’t, but you will be on the path that makes a blissful life not just possible but very probable. That’s because what Campbell had in mind goes back thousands of years. He had gleaned from his deep knowledge of world mythology a belief that consciousness creates change in a way inexplicable to reason alone.

He makes this point quite clearly: “Follow your bliss, don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” In other words, step into the unknown and make an ally of uncertainty. Here the inspiration of “follow your bliss” runs into a psychological block. Countless people have had glimpses of what a spiritual life can be. Who hasn’t experienced love, compassion, inspiration, beauty, and joy some time in their life?

But these scattered glimpses are far from organized and integrated into normal life. That’s why we always return to what is familiar, routine, tried and true. We fear uncertainty; we have no desire to step into the unknown. I address this fear in the book not by ramping up a person’s motivation but by making it clear that consciousness moves fear away by itself. You don’t have to commit acts of bravery (of reckless folly). In effect, your vision of a blissful life unfolds on its own, because everything that is organized and integrated in your life already depends upon consciousness.

You can only change what you are aware of. The unseen doors that will open aren’t a figment of Campbell’s imagination, nor is the biblical injunction of “knock and the door will be opened.” In both cases the lesson is that when you become fully aware, the organizing power to bring solutions, answers, and opportunities is actually built into your awareness. Instead of using a mind that works at the level of the problem, your mind works at the level of the solution.

If these things are true, then the spiritual life is also the most productive, successful, and blissful life. That’s a vison worth experimenting with. In the book I detail how this vision applies to each reader and what it takes to produce change in the direction of bliss consciousness. But I wanted to give a nod to Campbell here, because I was one of those who were inspired so many years ago by his famous phrase. Following your bliss is a notion that opened many doors for me, and I believe it remains valid for countless people today.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com