Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 2)

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas  Kafatos, Ph.D., and Subhash Kak, Ph.D.

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Although everyone as a practical matter accepts “reality as given” – the world presented by the five senses – that common-sense version of the world was radically undermined over a century ago with the advent of relativity and quantum theory.  Equally dramatically, results from neuroscience show that mind creates representations of reality as in the phantom limb phenomenon. The trail from this ongoing revolution leads to current theories about a conscious universe, one that displays all the attributes of mind. In other words, mind precedes matter. The first post in this series introduced this concept, which if true would revolutionize everyday life. Reality itself, as explored by cutting-edge theories in physics, cosmology, and neuroscience, is giving us hints that we should look at the world through fresh eyes.

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Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 1)

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas  Kafatos, Ph.D., and  Subhash Kak, Ph.D.

KoUjNOW4Q3OQZZSjglhf3g-2Despite their many divergences, science and philosophy are both led forward by reality. This is inevitable if facts, concepts, axioms, and other mental models are to be reliable.  There are two ongoing projects, thousands of years old by now, that sprang from a different response to reality and where it leads. Roughly speaking, they are materialism and idealism. Materialism is fact-based, data driven, and wedded to the notion that “reality as given” is essentially trustworthy. Idealism cannot accept “reality as given” but looks to a hidden intelligence or level of Nature (if not God or the gods) that invisibly originates the physical universe.

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Radical Well being: Where We Need to Go (Part 2)

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD 

 

genome_1661901c There are two reasons why radical well being hasn’t captured the imagination of the general public. As we saw in the first part, people all too often let their health go and then depend on the standard medical approach of drugs and surgery. Taking an active role in their own well being doesn’t seem crucial compared to the powerful interventions of modern medicine once symptoms of illness appear. The second reason, however, carries just as much weight. People aren’t aware of the new findings that indicate how central the mind-body connection actually is.

 

We’re all accustomed to seeing our bodies as a set of separate parts (cells, tissues, organs) operating like a machine, and since machines tend to break down one part at a time, medicine has been compartmentalized into specializations for the heart, liver, brain, and so on.  If your car doesn’t start, a mechanic examines the alternator or the battery; if your heart stops ejecting enough blood, a cardiologist checks it out with diagnostic tests.

 

Radical well being jettisons the model of body as machine for something closer to reality: a model that is living, dynamic, fluid, and adaptive.  This new model leads to a state of higher health controlled and monitored by each person.  The reason that directing your own health is so powerful can be summarized in a few insights that have taken decades to develop. As we emphasized in our book “Super Brain”:

 

  • Every thought, feeling, and sensation in the mind sends a message to every cell in the body.
  • Cells operate through feedback loops that mesh with the feedback loops of tissues, organs, and the body itself.
  • Disease begins with subtle imbalances in these feedback loops.
  • The brain’s ability to consciously direct a person’s life depends on intelligence embedded in every cell.
  • Behavior today has consequences for our genes, altering their expression in profound ways.

 

Mainstream medicine finds itself in a paradoxical position at the moment, because these new insights, which came about from cutting-edge research, have had minimal effect on medical school training and the practice of physicians.  The “body as machine” model, complete with outmoded notions of fixed genes, “hard” inheritance, and duty to treat patients only after symptoms appear remains firmly rooted in doctors’ minds.

 

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Photo Credit:University of Waikato

Which leads to the conclusion that each person must decide to take advantage of the new model. The things that health-conscious people already do aren’t negated. It remains of primary importance not to smoke, avoid excess weight, and minimize use alcohol (with perhaps an exemption for drinking a glass of wine a day, at most).  If you already have taken these steps, the new model also supports other familiar advice: exercise moderately, eat a good, balanced diet, and avoid environmental toxins. But these steps bring us only to the very edge of radical well being.

The really fascinating area to explore is known as “self-directed biological transformation,” which has enormous implications for your present health and everyone’s future evolution. Change is inevitable, and transformation is taking place in your body many thousands of times a second. For the most part, each of us has played a passive role in our own transformation, allowing biological processes, governed by our genes, to run automatically. The problem is that, as miraculous as the body’s feedback loops are, they deteriorate over time and are susceptible to imbalances that aren’t self-correcting. The result is unhealthy aging and disease. Short of that, the level of well being you experience is vulnerable to degradation biologically, much of which can be avoided.

Intervening in the body’s feedback loops comes down to a simple principle: The more positive the input your body receives, the more positive its output. Your body, down to the genetic level, is altered by the events of everyday life. (It’s already known that positive lifestyle changes directed at preventing and healing heart disease alter as many as 500 genes.)  The time is right for proving just how much overall control we have over this enormous potential in the mind-body connection. One can foresee the future as self-directed biological transformation.

The platform for self-directed transformation is available to everyone. It includes yoga and meditation, exercise for strength, agility, endurance and play, a balanced farm-to-table and Mediterranean diet, good sleep, and stress reduction. These are well-established ways to improve bodily function. But there’s more to explore, given another basic principle: Every experience in consciousness has a physical correlate. A mystic experiencing deep inner silence, a Buddhist monk meditating on compassion, or a saint having a vision of angels isn’t exempted from this principle, because the label of “spiritual” doesn’t diminish the mind-body connection – that connection is actually amplified.

Whatever activity you undertake is a step in self-directed biological transformation.  Knowing this, how should you choose to live? Certainly a higher priority should be given to those things that make you more conscious, with the aim of being more centered, free of psychological deficits, capable of experiencing love, bonding with others, and pursuing happiness with the dedication we show in pursuing success.

These intangibles assume central importance in achieving radical well being, for the simple reason that the true controller of well being, which is consciousness, is intangible. By opening up the doorway between consciousness and your gene activity, well being takes a leap forward. For example, recent studies indicate that meditation can have a strong effect on the length of chromosome telomeres, the nucleotide sequences that protect chromosomes from the deterioration linked to aging. That these beneficial effects occur so quickly indicates just how responsive genetic activity is to mind-body interventions – something never previously suspected.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ci59fWmc7g&feature=share&list=PLdrUeeBIMbrIRQZM8yUbWpZfRwP82AKYr&index=12[/youtube]

Courtesy of YouTube/The ChopraWell

To validate the effects of consciousness on biology requires imaginative, forward-looking research. At the Chopra Center alliances have been made with top-level medical-school researchers to delve into exactly how self-directed biological transformation works.  Groups of subjects are being recruited to undergo intensive experiences of enhanced well being, with the aim of using the latest digital monitoring to detect change at heart and brain activity at the cellular and level of gene expression through blood samples.

Studies planned include:

  1. Whole genome sequencing using HiSeq at Illumina
  2. Whole genome gene expression of roughly 40,000 gene transcripts
  3. Alzheimer’s-related amyloid beta protein species in plasma by ELISA and MesoScale
  4. Cytokine levels in plasma by MesoScale
  5. Whole-genome epigenetic changes using Pacific Bio systems
  6. The plasma proteome
  7. Blood based markers of cellular aging including:
  8. Telomerase and telomere length
  9. Oxidative stress
  10. Inflammation, cardiovascular disease and stress biomarkers
  11. Mitochondrial DNA health
  12. Single lead ECG/ heart rate
  13. Heart rate variability
  14. Physical activity
  15. Sleep quality
  16. Respiratory rate and depth
  17. Photoplethysmogram

The current thinking holds that genes are fixed, but new research shows gene activity can be changed by experience. The results have been entirely encouraging so far, and there are other related studies that are exploring consciousness-related changes in such areas as risk for Alzheimer’s disease.  The public has become deeply confused – as have practicing physicians – by recent findings questioning many standbys of mainstream medical interventions, from antidepressants to statins, from mammograms to PSA testing for prostate cancer, up to and including the benefits of cardiac bypass surgery and angioplasty in reducing mortality rates from heart attacks. Sometimes, these interventions are unavoidable. But, the positive thing to do is to embrace a new model of human biology that will keep people in the best possible condition of well being.  A person who is thriving in mind and body holds the key to most medical mysteries before they are solved.

 

 

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 75 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers including Super Brain. Join the weightlessproject.org to eradicate obesity and malnutrition. For more interesting articles visit The Universe Within

Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School Vice-Chair of Neurology and Director of Genetics and Aging Research at Massachusetts General Hospital.

 

Radical Well-Being: Where We Need to Go

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

7Radical-760x428

As far as our health goes, America is about a little of this and a lot of that. The little is self-care, the lot is drugs and surgery. Thirty years after a mind-body revolution took place in medicine and fifty years after the Surgeon General launched a prevention campaign against smoking, the public hasn’t fully embraced the simple, unalterable fact that doctors aren’t responsible for the well-being of their patients. Self-care is the one need no one can afford to ignore.

 

Self-care is a better term than prevention.  First of all, it’s positive – you take steps to insure a better lifestyle, not simply to ward off disease. Second, self-care proceeds on every front that creates well-being: physical, emotional, spiritual, and environmental.  If you attend to your own well-being by taking advantage of the latest medical findings, a leap is possible into a higher state of health that can be termed radical well-being.

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Next for the Gay Rights Movement – Filling the Spiritual Dimension

By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP

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It’s taken decades for gay activists to achieve the most basic right that every minority deserves: equality under the law. In principle one might say that the battle has been won, even if some states are dragging their heels and some groups mount fierce resistance. Thirty years ago it took mass protests to push for major funding of AIDS research, and the overturning of antiquated, prejudiced sodomy laws wasn’t a sure thing when the Supreme Court took up the issue in 2003.

The fact that the court did invalidate state laws against homosexuality was the bellwether for a shift in public acceptance that will only accelerate in the future. It’s time, then, to consider another dimension that has been masked by the headlines over legal battles. That’s the dimension of spirituality, where religious intolerance has been the norm and finding the way to self-acceptance has been a poignant personal struggle for every gay man and woman.

 

The issues are framed by questions that millions ask every day without being gay, since they pertain to the loss of faith that society has been wrestling with for decades:

Does God love me?

Does He (or She) know that I exist?

Can God relieve my suffering?

Where was God when I endured my darkest hours?

It would be easy, and probably correct, to say that these questions are more pointed for gay people, because they are burdened by social disapproval, hidden prejudices, and long-held dogmas about God’s condemnation of homosexuality. Spirituality is a larger dimension of life, however, based on real personal needs. For gay people to realize their place in a living kind of spirituality, seven needs must be filled:

outside the circle

1. The need to safety and security.

2. The need to be recognized for achievement and success.

3. The need to belong to a community.

4. The need to be listened to and understood.

5. The need to express oneself through creativity and self-exploration.

6. The need for higher moral worth.

7. The need to feel at one with God or other depiction of highest Being.

 equality

I hate to announce it to accepted prejudice (both inside and outside the gay community), but in my experience, gay people have done more to fulfill these needs than society as a whole.  They may have been forced to face themselves by hostile circumstances; they may be more compassionate and accepting of differences in general; it could be that feeling like outsiders has increased their self-awareness. I can’t point to an exact cause – no doubt there is a mixture of many causes – but the result has been an open kind of seeking that is one of the most valuable aspects of modern gay life.

Which of us has had to pay constant attention to being safe and secure when we walk down the street?  Who feels automatically that their achievements will be undermined or their acceptance put into question simply because of who they are? Gay people confront both obstacles to the first two needs on the list, which are taken for granted by the majority population. The higher needs are just as tinged with self-doubt and negative social attitudes. What this means is that your gay friends and those happy gay couples kissing on their wedding day have gone through personal struggles you probably have only a little awareness of. Seeking for God comes down to seeking oneself in the grand scheme of things, and every gay person knows what that feels like.

Spiritual seeking is a huge topic, naturally. On one front most gay people have to come to terms with the religion they were brought up in. For Christians, a landmark is The Good Book by the late Peter Gomes, who held the position of Preacher to Harvard College. Gomes, who came out fairly late in life, devotes considerable space to the condemnation of homosexuality in the Bible, and his approach in the face of these condemnations is summarized in the book’s subtitle, “Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart.”

In other words, bringing a modern mindset and an open heart unfolds a new path, one that isn’t literally tied to the attitudes of Jewish culture thousands of years ago, or the extension of those attitudes by the early Christian fathers.  For gay people who want to remain among the faithful, there are churches in every large city that will welcome them. Even the Catholic Church shows signs of softening its strictures under a new, more compassionate Pope.

Not having the church door slammed in your face is barely the first step in filling the spiritual dimension in a person’s life.  The seven needs I’ve listed take a lifetime to fulfill, attended by inner work and a desire to keep evolving every day.  At the very least the straight and gay world can agree on that, because seeking is a common human project.  To fill the spiritual dimension requires a shift in attitudes in all of us. Gay people need to realize that they deserve to be fulfilled spiritually. Straight people need to agree.

 

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How many ways can you say “Love You”? | The Chopra Center

 

 

Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, Founder of The Chopra Foundation, Co-Founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, coauthor of Super Brain with Rudolph Tanzi. Join the weightlessproject.org to eradicate obesity and malnutrition. For more interesting articles visit The Universe Within