Articles - The Chopra Foundation

The President’s Tweets and the Future of Shame

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Last week the new Twitter account @POTUS of President Obama became a lightning rod for the worst in social media behavior. Within minutes of its setup, as reported in the New York Times, the account was flooded with vitriolic racist tweet Photo Mar 06, 1 25 27 AM s, complete with hideous images, including one of Mr. Obama with his neck in a noose. Many troubling issues arise from this shameful behavior, but at the center is shame itself.

Behavior on the Internet, Twitter, and other social media outlets has become shameless, and at the same time, these outlets are being used to publicly shame people, especially innocent high school students being electronically bullied by cruel classmates. Shameless behavior has no consequences, and social media and the Internet afford easy anonymity. Put these two elements together, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for anti-social trends that keep building and building.

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How the Universe Pulled a Vanishing Act

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The issues facing modern physics are so baffling that they’ve crossed a threshold and now fascinate the general public. We laymen have very little at stake, personally speaking, when scientists argue over the Big Bang—without advanced mathematical training, it’s all but impossible to follow the arguments. But we do have a stake when the universe starts to disappear, as it is doing right this minute.

The cosmic vanishing act began, approximately, when dark matter and dark energy showed up on the radar of cosmology. “Dark” is a misleading term, because the space between the stars is pitch black, but it isn’t dark in the way that dark matter and energy are. They are dark as in totally mysterious. No light is given off by them, or any known form of energy we associate with the universe. They cannot be measured, and so far as anyone can guess, dark matter is probably not constituted of anything resembling atoms or subatomic particles.

The reason that dark matter and energy are important is arcane to the layman, having to do with the fact that instead of moving apart at a constant rate or slowing down, the galaxies are accelerating as they move away from each other. This acceleration defies gravity, so at the very least dark energy is some species of antigravity (to put it in very general terms—the actual nature of this unknown force is complex, arcane, and much speculated over).

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How to Be at Peace When the World Isn’t

By Deepak Chopra, MD

We seem to be living out the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” The curse is probably mythical, but our interesting times contain much turbulence. The horrific refugee situation in Syria, the rise of the even more horrific ISIS movement, not to mention Ukraine and news of natural disasters that never ends–from media reports you might think the humanity is unraveling and the planet with it.

But in the face of chaos, some facts remain constant and stable:

To advance the cause of peace, you must be at peace.

The wars around the world reflect a war in human nature.

No dispute is ever settled unless both sides achieve a level of mutual satisfaction.

When politics comes down to rigidly opposing views, such as one side wanting armed intervention in the Middle East while the other side wants to stay out, all of these facts are being ignored. That’s why the Iraq War ended in chaos, because the issues were never resolved so that all sides achieved mutual satisfaction, and why grudges that simmered for centuries suddenly erupt today.

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Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Jordan Flesher, MA Psychology

The human mind can adapt to almost anything, but not chaos. No one can lead a completely random and chaotic life. The messy room of a teenager may look completely chaotic, but even there a decision was made. The choice was to be messy rather than straighten up the room, and as long as choices exist, true randomness isn’t in charge.

Yet clearly there are random events in Nature, and a vast body of science is based on them, from the random collision of atoms to the random mutations that drive Darwinian evolution. It’s hard to square the randomness in Nature with the incredible orderliness of human thought at its best (allowance must be made, unfortunately, for our own random impulses, which can be capricious, self-defeating, and violent.) Science tends to ignore the fact that the researcher who is driving to work in order to study random particles isn’t heading for a random place on the map. He is guided by purpose, meaning, and direction.

In the last few posts we’ve been looking at how to break this deadlock through synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. This is a perfect junction point, since “meaningful” has a purpose and “coincidence” is by definition random. What often accompanies experiences of synchronicity is a feeling of trust. The synchronous event seems to reveal to that there is a meaning, purpose, and direction “out there,” somewhere in a mysterious domain where the event was organized. This is what is meant when people say “Everything happens for a reason” – synchronicity is a reminder that randomness is being countered. But saying that everything happens for a reason isn’t provable. It exists as a shared belief, an article of faith, or wishful thinking, and sometimes all three.

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