What It Takes to Live in the Present Moment

By Deepak Chopra,TM MD

The allure of living in the present moment is popular but also endangered. The pandemic lockdown has forced millions of people into cramped living conditions that disrupt normal life, puts strain on relationships, adds stress to families, and introduces depression and anxiety. Escaping the present moment is likely to be everyone’s dream.

But the situation will eventually change, and phrases like “the power of now” are embedded in people’s aspirations. The present moment has wound up being a problem and a solution at the same time. The most basic question needs answering, then. Why live in the present moment and how is it achieved?

Sometimes the present moment brings experiences of love, kindness, creativity, beauty, and insight. In those moments no one needs to ask why it’s good to live in the now. (The body’s trillions of cells, including brain cells, don’t ask the question, because they are designed to only live in the present, occupied with thousands of chemical reactions and electrical signaling every second. Even when you recall a past event, your brain is strictly confined to the now in order to retrieve the memory.)

The first thing to notice when you are overtaken by the now is that you didn’t have to work for it. The present moment is always present. The real question is why we aren’t in the present moment. Countless people ae working hard on themselves to stay in the now. But if it takes no work to get a glimpse of the beauty, love, and fulfillment that dawns in the present moment, can we expect that working to get back there is really necessary, or even effective?

If you break the whole thing down, the difference is between a temporary experience of the present moment and a constant, unbroken experience. The now is either sometimes or all the time. Sometimes is what all of us experience, those passing moments of bliss, love, beauty, etc. I’d argue that these privileged experiences come and go of their own accord. They are as unpredictable as your next thought.

This doesn’t preclude working on yourself to expand your awareness through meditation and yoga, going inside to heal old wounds, rising yourself of self-judgment, and all the other things people do in the human potential movement. If you are stuck in worry, depression, fear of aging and death, and other kinds of stuckness that create pain and suffering, then finding a way out is absolutely necessary.

But no amount of personal work is going to change “sometimes” to “all the time.” The healthiest, happiest, sanest person in the world doesn’t necessarily live in the present moment, because the present moment is timeless. No matter how expensive our Rolex is, it doesn’t tell the timeless. To be in the present moment all the time requires a shift in identity, which can be specified as follows:

  • “I am me, a separate person” changes to “I am,” without reference to a separate person.
  • “I am here in this location” changes to “I am unbounded and have no location.”
  • “I am young (or old or middle-aged)” changes to “I have no sense of time passing.”
  • “I want” changes to “I am without desires, fulfilled in myself.”

If there was a mechanism like a car’s gear shift to handle these changes, we would be machines ourselves. But in reality, the “I” that wants to live in the present is a mysterious creation of the mind, which itself is a mysterious creation of God-knows-what (insert any theory you want here, religious or secular), and the God-knows-what transcends everyday life. The normal approaches we take to explain “I” unfortunately were constructed by “I,” and therefore there’s a true Catch-22. If “I” investigates itself with the intention of going beyond “I,” the result is simply to reinforce “I,” making sure it sticks around. Giving your ego the project of going beyond the ego won’t succeed, because all you’ve done is add another project to a self that undertakes a hundred other projects (work, family, relationships sex, hobbies, vacations, gossip, and keeping up with the news are only the beginning).

In my forthcoming book, Total Meditation, I offer a way to escape this Catch-22. It begins with the idea that the whole bodymind is naturally set up to live in the present. When it is subjected to stress, the body adapts temporarily until the stress subsides, and then it returns to a dynamic state of balance known as homeostasis. The mind does the same thing. Between every thought or feeling, the mind returns to readiness for the next thought or feeling. This state of readiness is just as balanced as homeostasis. But we fail to notice it because we are entirely focused on mental activity rather than mental silence.

Yet silence is only a superficial clue. In a stressful world peace and quiet acquire a special value. But in reality, the state of readiness is the source of everything we value in our lives. Love, bliss, compassion, creativity, and insight all have the same origin in pure, unbounded awareness. The whole bodymind has the same source. Knowing this, you can consciously return to the readiness state the minute you notice that you aren’t in it.

This openness to let your mind regain its balance is the key to total meditation. Unlike occasional meditation, which requires a set time every day that needs to be set aside, total meditation keeps up with our life from moment to moment. You always keep your eye on the prize, which is to live from your source. There’s no struggle or effort involved. You simply allow your mind to obey its own nature.

There’s much to say about this topic, but when it comes to living in the present moment, total meditation changes “sometimes” to “all the time.” The beauty of such an approach is that you experience change with the support of existence itself. To be here now looks like some kind of deep spiritual challenge. In reality it is just the opposite. Living in the present moment involves a state of awareness that the mind gravitates toward if you leave it alone and let the nature of the mind be what it is. In fact, this is the secret behind all spiritual attainments. The less you try, the closer you get. One could hardly wish for a more propitious setup.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

The Spread of “Stranger Than We Can Think”

By Deepak Chopra,TM MD and Menas C. Kafatos, PhD

As we go about everyday life, we are embedded in a mystery no one has ever solved. The mystery was voiced by one of the most brilliant quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg: “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” (There are variants of the quote that use “reality” for “universe,” and the remark has also been attributed to other famous scientists, but the gist is always the same.)

If we take this remark seriously, it turns out to be truer today than it was in 1900 when the quantum revolution began and the revolutionary new theory of quantum mechanics was put together. How can reality be stranger than we could possibly think? Look at the framework of your life. You pick up your morning coffee, and instantly you are acting in space and time. Your perception of the cup in your hand depends upon the five senses as communicated through the brain. You can think about anything you fancy as you sip your coffee.

These might not seem so mysterious, but there is one mystery after another nested inside everyday experience. Science can reach no consensus on the following:

  • Where did time come from?
  • Why do properties of physical objects have their origin in invisible waves of probability of observation?
  • Where does a thought come from?
  • How did matter transform into mind?
  • Is consciousness solely a human trait or is it everywhere in the universe?

The pioneers of quantum physics weren’t the first to ask such questions, but quantum physics got to the nub of how the physical universe is constructed. Everything in existence emerges from ripples in the quantum field, and underlying these ripples is an invisible or virtual domain that goes beyond spacetime, matter, and energy. In the virtual domain, the universe and everything in it is a field of infinite possibilities, and yet the virtual domain cannot be observed directly. As a result, contemporary physics can take us to the horizon of reality, the womb of creation, but it cannot cross the boundary between us and our source of existence.

Almost all the recent models that have gained popularity, including superstrings, the multiverse, and dark matter and energy, exist in so-called mathematical space, or Hilbert space, in recognition that they are not going to yield direct empirical evidence that can be perceived with our senses. Astrophysics had already gotten used to the fact that just 4% of the created universe is accounted for by the matter and energy visible to the eye or to telescopes. With dark matter and energy added in, most of what we see is not really what the universe consists of.

Leaving the technicalities aside, it has become far more difficult to foresee that the human mind can fully comprehend the nature of reality when so many crucial aspects are beyond the setup that our brains can grasp. The thinking mind needs the brain in order to operate, and the brain is a creation in spacetime consisting of matter and energy, that are in spacetime. We wear mind-made manacles. When this fact dawned on the late Stephen Hawking, he ruefully conceded that scientific models might no longer describe reality in any reliable or complete way.

When we discussed these issues in our book, You Are the Universe, the title reflected another approach entirely. Instead of founding the universe on physical things, however small, or even ripples in the quantum field, which are knowable only through advanced mathematics, reality can be grounded in experience. Everything we call real is an experience in consciousness, including the experience of doing science. Mathematics is a very refined, complex language, but there is no language, simple or complex, without consciousness.

The vast majority of scientists will continue to engage in experimentation and theoretical modeling without this venture into “metaphysics,” which is a no-no word in science (a famous put down when things get to speculative is “Shut up and calculate”). But it was quantum physics that brought the mystery of reality into the laboratory in modern terms, even though Plato and Aristotle also wondered about what is real.

A younger generation has proved more open-minded, and a growing cadre of cosmologists now hold to the notion of panpsychism, which holds that mind is built into reality from the start. This is a huge turn-around from the view that mind evolved out of matter here on Earth as a unique creation. The fact is that nobody in the physicalist camp could explain how atoms and molecules learned to think—creating mind out of matter was dead on arrival, even though the vast majority of scientists still hold on to this view as an assumption or superstition.

Ironically, to say that reality is stranger than we can think isn’t confined to the queer behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. You cannot think about consciousness, either, any more than the eye can see itself or the brain know that it exists (without cutting through the skull to see the brain from the outside). A fish cannot know that water is wet unless it jumps out of the sea and splashes back down again. We cannot think about consciousness without a place to stand outside consciousness, and such a place doesn’t exist in the entire cosmos.

The source of space isn’t inside space; the source of time isn’t in time. Likewise, the source of mind isn’t inside the mind. The ceaseless stream of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that run through your mind are the products of consciousness. Consciousness itself has no location. It is infinite, without dimensions in space and time, unborn and undying. Can you really think about such a thing as consciousness? And yet you know without a doubt that you are conscious. This is what allows us to make peace with reality being too strange to think about.

We can simply drop the “strange” part. Reality can be founded on knowing that you exist and that you are aware. Existence is consciousness. If science is dedicated to the simplest, most complete explanation of things, existence = consciousness is the simplest and most complete explanation. There is no need for religious or spiritual beliefs in order to accept this foundation for reality, since it is based on what science has arrived at. By removing our outdated allegiance to “things” existing independently of consciousness, the basis of reality can be seen clearly. In our everyday life we navigate with existence and consciousness at our side, indivisible, secure, inviolate, and unchallengeable. A whole new future may spring from accepting this simple but awe-inspiring fact.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. Author, physicist and philosopher, he works in quantum mechanics, cosmology, the environment and climate change and extensively on philosophical issues of consciousness, connecting science to metaphysical traditions. Member or candidate of foreign national academies, he holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the universal principles for well-being and human potential. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 334 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe, Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence (in Greek and in Korean), Science, Reality and

One Word Is the Answer to Everything

By Deepak Chopra™, MD and Neil D. Theise, MD

The one word that is the answer to everything is “space.” It’s a surprising answer that looks far from obvious, but space joins a long list of candidates as old as the written word. The human mind is fond of putting all its eggs in one basket. If you wanted to answer any question, over the centuries you’d be told to rely on one word. In an age of faith the word was God; today it is science. Other one-word possibilities have had their appeal: reason is big, so is love. “All you need is love” is a Beatles lyric that moves the heart, and at the other end of the spectrum, cosmologists searching for a Theory of Everything to unite the fundamental forces in nature stake their hopes on their favorite word, mathematics.

But in many ways space is the one word that satisfies the clashing claims of love, reason, God, and science. Space allows us to embrace all of them. Here’s how the argument goes. In between every thought, there is a gap, a space that divides mental activity into discrete feelings, sensations, images, and thoughts. Spacing makes separate words intelligible. We inhabit a personal space that we don’t like others to intrude upon. Outer space contains every physical object in creation. Inner space is the domain of the psyche. Between them, the space “out there” and “in here” embraces all of existence.

In this manner, spaces are defined by their boundaries. Our skin is the boundary between “out there” and “in here.” The beginnings and ends of words define the space between them. Indeed, even each letter defines the spaces between it and the letters to either side. Jewish mystics speak of the “other alphabet” of the spaces between the Hebrew letters of the scriptures. The moments of thought, of insight, fills the gaps between them.

What gives space its real potency is something mysterious. The gap between thoughts isn’t empty. It is the womb of the mind? No one knows where a thought comes from, but the place must be empty of thought, at least. An artist’s mind isn’t a collection of paintings but the source of possible paintings. So space is the place where possibilities exist. (Calling the mind a space is very old, going back to the Sanskrit term Chit Akash, where Akash means space and Chit is conscious awareness.)

How can empty space contain the possibility of anything, much less everything? That’s a question the mind cannot answer, because thinking is a process that shoots you out of pure space (pure awareness) into the mind’s bustling activity. This sounds like metaphysics, but there is a tantalizing mystery about the space inside your body, which is much closer to home.

Once microscopes were invented, it could be seen that the body is made up of cells. Looking carefully, one observes that every cell derives from a prior cell. But are our bodies only cells, one vast, solidly packed cluster and nothing else? No. Because while many cells are tightly clustered together, many are not.

There are spaces between some cells (in skin, where they allow your body to absorb moisture), though not between others (the digestive tract lining is tightly bound to keep in-flow and out-flow tightly controlled). There are bigger spaces around capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels, where nutrients are delivered to cells and take away the cells’ waste. These spaces are called interstitial spaces, literally the “in between.”

Holding all this together is fibrous tissue made up of different types of collagens and other large molecules, which are stiff or elastic, allowing things in the body to both stay where they are and move when they need to. New kinds of microscopes now allow us to look into the smallest nooks and crannies of living tissues, not just removed and processed to make slides for examining under a standard microscope. We can now observe that all these spaces are probably interconnected, across tissues, across organs, throughout our bodies.

This continuity might be a newly understood path beyond the blood vessels and lymph system for how cancer spreads from one part of the body to another. It might also be the pathway by which the microbiome, the vast bacterial colony in your digestive tract, communicates with the brain and the liver, or how the lungs and heart communicate with the brain and other organs. There is no other conventional answer that works.

We think of space as the emptiness that separates things, and interstitial spaces look empty on a microscope slide, but they are filled with fluid and molecules. They probably conduct electricity, and some cells live and travel through them. On the cosmic scale, outer space is also typically seen as empty, but it is more alive than anything in the visible universe – the “emptiness” of the vacuum we usually picture is full of energy, the energy out of which physical matter arises.

And our thoughts? The spaces between them are not blank. When one stills the mind and experiences a moment of “samadhi” the absence is rich with pure and fundamental Awareness. If the interstitium of the human body is full and unites all the disparate tissues and organs into a living whole, if it is a vast rich energy field filling the vacuum of the universe that brings material existence into being, it is Pure Awareness, consciousness itself that unites and creates all of it. From the smallest to the most vast, notions of inside and outside disappear. Boundaries disappear. Space is simultaneously both nothing and everything.

When a group of physicists and cosmologists was asked to name the one concept they could all agree upon, the answer they came up with was unboundedness. Nothing in creation is disconnected from everything else. Reality is boundless even though our minds and the five senses create boundaries. The appearance of boundaries underlies our belief in separation. But to a quantum physicist, the physical universe has a deeper level where nothing exists but invisible waves or ripples in the quantum field.

These ripples have no edges or boundaries. They are said to collapse in order to appear in the physical domain as objects we can see, touch, and investigate. But the real womb of the universe is known as a mathematical space (Hilbert space). Mathematics would seem to be the ultimate space, but there’s another step to go. Mathematics is still a construct in the mind, and we can’t claim to find the ultimate space until we go beyond mind-made constructs.

All trails eventually lead to some kind of meta-space. The agreed-upon word for it is consciousness (although many scientists are willing to put their eggs into the basket of materialism, preferring to leave consciousness out of the discussion). Consciousness is so different from outer space that it isn’t obvious why “space” is a useful term for it. In fact, the word “space” is only useful to give a general sense of things, the lay of the land. But no words actually describe consciousness.

Consciousness wouldn’t exist if we weren’t conscious. “I think, therefore I am” doesn’t go far enough. “I am aware, therefore I am” is better. You don’t have to be thinking to be aware. Babies are very aware without any words in their heads. It seems fair to say that consciousness is aware of itself, and nothing else, no complex philosophical explanation or religious doctrine, is needed.

A few other things go along with “I am aware, therefore I am.” You are here in the now. You are alive. With life comes thinking, feeling, and doing. These things are so basic that we rarely talk about them. But the questions we’ve touched on (lumped together in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Life, the Universe, and Everything) occur in the space known as consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t do anything. Invisibly, secretly, it holds possibilities, an infinite number of them, that will manifest as reality.

Thanks to this space known as consciousness, no matter how many ideas, feelings, artworks, dreams, discoveries, and imaginary fancies human beings come up with, an infinite number will remain. Possibilities, like the universe, are unbounded. The whole reason for finding a one-word answer has always been the same: to explain ourselves to ourselves. We, Deepak and Neil, nominate space as the best choice, the one word that holds out infinite promise.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
NEIL THEISE, MD is a physician-scientist and professor of pathology at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. A global thought leader in clinical and scientific aspects of liver diseases, he is also considered a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity. As an anatomist, he is most well-known for the re-definition of the human interstitial spaces that became global news as a “new human organ” in 2017. Delving into complexity theory has led him into consciousness studies with longtime collaborator Menas Kafatos. Together they have written on “fundamental awareness” as the ground of being and implications of idealist views of consciousness for understanding the relationships between contemporary scientific practice and experiential insights from diverse cultures of spirituality. He is a Senior Student of Enkyo O’Hara Roshi of the Village Zendo in NYC, a sometime student of Kabbalah, and has recently been initiated into shamanic practice.

The Clash between Truth and Reality

By Deepak Chopra™, MD

Every person wakes up in the morning to join the struggle between truth and reality. Yet almost no one realizes that this is what they are doing. Life contains struggles—no one disagrees with that sad fact—but what are we struggling against? The answers seem obvious. We struggle to stay healthy, make a living, maintain our relationships, and in general to keep our heads above water.

Where does truth enter into this? Imagine someone sitting in a chair wearing state-of-the-art virtual reality gear. In the simulation bombarding his senses, he is racing in the Indy 500, running away from tigers in the jungle, or walking a tightrope. These are perilous adventures that he is immersed in, where survival itself is at stake. His body will exhibit all the signs of a stress response. But his experience is entirely fake, a construct by clever VR engineers. The truth is that he is sitting still in a chair, perfectly safe and sheltered from struggle.

This imaginary setup is actually what occurs to all of us in daily life. We inhabit a virtual reality that is so powerful it blinds us to the truth. What we accept as real is mind-made, but when you are inside this spell/illusion/dream, your struggles totally envelop you. Even the words we speak encase us in limitation: the instant you say the word “tree,” you have shoved into a box an immensely complex living organism with thousands of cellular processes occurring every second. The minute you think of the tags that we apply to ourselves and other people—age, race, gender, religion, political persuasion, nationality, income level, occupation, etc.—you shove that person into a box.

When life is relatively comfortable, we can afford to overlook the false position that mental constructs have placed us in—all the prejudices, painful memories, fixed beliefs, personal disasters, failures, and wishful thinking that the mind is prey to. After thousands of years of philosophy, religion, and science, each field seeking to discover the truth, virtual reality remains in charge. Its shell has barely been cracked, which is why we don’t perceive the struggle between truth and reality. Mind-made reality (the spell/illusion/dream) keeps the world going. Only on a side tangent will someone say something extraordinary like “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” But this can be ignored as a religious thought, and when the Persian mystical poet declares, “God speaks in silence, everything else is a mistranslation,” that can be dismissed as poetry or once again religion.

Yet somehow, on the remote frontier where virtual reality and “real” reality meet, the truth is trying to contact us, and doing so all the time. The human mind has incredibly powerful tools at its disposal to keep virtual reality in place; we call these tools thinking, feeling, remembering, desiring, wishing, fearing, and dreaming. Against this armada, the truth (“real” reality) has only one tool: waking up. Waking up is the process of becoming more conscious. You cannot change what you aren’t aware of. In this case, becoming more aware is the truth.

In every other aspect of life, there is something to discover and learn about; we spend every waking hour since birth using the mind’s tools to learn the skills it takes to survive, be accepted, take care of ourselves and our families, and so on. Desire constantly pushes us forward. But here are some bald facts about “real” reality:

  • Nobody taught you to know.
  • Knowing is built into consciousness.
  • Without this innate knowing, you would be blind, deaf, and deprived of the other three senses, because the raw data that reaches you is meaningless unless you know how to interpret them.
  • The most basic thing knowing tells us is that we exist.
  • If existence and consciousness are tied to one another, then without a doubt, they are the foundation of reality.

Behind the spell/illusion/dream of everyday reality, “real” reality simply exists, making everything else possible. You can’t put awareness in a box (although you can scientifically measure how it operates); you can’t stand outside it; you can’t do without it.Before waking up happens, there is already a ratio between the things we do consciously and the things we do unconsciously. This is the primary evidence telling us that we are conscious beings. Blind prejudice, social conditioning, denial, ignorance, bad faith, habits, and the drama of pleasure and pain occupy the domain of unconscious life. Love, compassion, curiosity, creativity, insight, empathy, and inner growth occupy the domain of conscious life. It’s obvious which domain contains the values we hold most precious.

So we are not that far from waking up. Consciousness prevails in many areas of life, even though war, violence, crime, natural disasters, and other forms of bad news grab the headlines. If you want proof that consciousness is the basis of your own life, sit down and make a list. Write down everything that has been fulfilling in your life, and when you examine the list, you will discover that the values of consciousness lie behind every meaningful, fulfilling experience.

You don’t even have to accept the argument about virtual reality and the spell/illusion/dream. Once you see what you truly value, you will automatically want to be more conscious. The motivation to wake up is built into consciousness itself. Even the concept of truth struggling against reality is just an eye-catching phrase. Truth doesn’t struggle against anything. It exists, and it knows. All we need to do is to realize this truth.

When Plato wrote that we are like creatures living in a cave watching a shadow play on the cave’s walls, he came up with the simplest and most powerful metaphor for waking up. The shadow play is mesmerizing, but then you realize that shadows need light to project them. So you turn around to face the light, and when you do, you say, “”Aha, so that’s how the shadow play works.” From that moment of awakening, the shadows can never again hold you in their grip.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

The Surprising Success of Wholeness

By Deepak Chopra™, MD, Tiffany J Barsotti, MTh, Paul J. Mills, PhD

As the notions of “holistic” and “wholeness” became popular in recent decades, they also turned into a paradox. People who focused on holistic health, diet, and wellness found themselves to be cut off from people who didn’t care about such things (which is the majority). Trying to be holistic wound up making you separate, which is the opposite of being whole. The meditation/wholefoods/yoga people are a splinter group from the McDonald’s/Monday Night Football/TGIF people.

Perhaps a misunderstanding lies at the bottom of this situation. Wholeness people tend to feel that they are waiting for non-wholeness people to catch on, a little like non-smokers and teetotalers waiting for chain-smokers and beer drinkers to catch on. This divide disappears, however, once you realize that you cannot make yourself whole, while on the other side of the coin you cannot make yourself unwhole. Everyone is whole already.

A simple observation is enough to clarify why wholeness is inescapable. Imagine someone sitting at a computer doing a task. You cannot see the monitor, so you don’t know what their task is. The physical body you see is a person; the thinker responding to the computer screen is a person. The two must co-exist, uniting two sides of reality, physical and mental. This union defines everyone’s existence. You were born whole, and the only thing that separates you from a random stranger is what you decide to do with your wholeness.

Here we are looking beyond lifestyle, although that would seem to be the most glaring difference between people. Instead, how you use your wholeness primarily centers on something else: awareness. Someone in the meditation/whole foods/yoga group can be miserable, conflicted, and anxious while someone in the other group is content, loving, and secure. Clearly awareness is involved in this difference, but how?

The problem is that everyone, with the tiniest fraction of exceptions, lives as if they are not whole. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but chief among them is that almost everyone, however competent they are at the business of living, knows next to nothing about how awareness works. We live with mental activity every waking moment, but all our thinking, feeling, and sensing reveals very little about the nature of the mind itself. We are left with a version of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” because the human mind is the source of the best and worst things that life has to offer.

To resolve this state of confusion, there have been quiet steps taken by researchers interested in holistic medicine, the wellness movement, psychotherapy, and spirituality. Different as these fields might be, each researcher has taken heed of what the groundbreaking psychologist Abraham Maslow called self-transcendence. Instead of being satisfied with an everyday life guided by the ego’s demands, duties, and desires, in the process of self-transcending (going beyond the ego) the individual begins to experience more holistic levels of their own consciousness. Maslow’s self-transcendence is akin to the concept of self-realization, often espoused by Eastern traditions.

The general public doesn’t’ yet realize that wholeness has become a surprising success story, which can be scientifically verified. Here are some highlights from a number of fields.

  • Mainstream medicine is being surpassed by a better way to keep people healthy. As the scientific evidence grows, with over 100,0000 studies to date, complementary and alternative medicines have become much more accepted in the West. Something new is evolving called Integrative Health, where being healthy is a state of body, mind, and spirit.
  • Spirituality has been brought into the fold. Supporting someone’s spiritual health is understood to be crucial for establishing wellbeing. A cue is being taken from Eastern medicine, in which meditation and yoga are as beneficial to wellbeing as any medical prescription, and much more useful in preventing future problems.
  • Mediation works, in a very big way, but it opens the door to a wider domain. Beyond inner peace and quiet is wholeness, now generally called nondual awareness. Freed of all the demands of mental activity, a person experiences what it is like to be aware in a simple, present-moment fashion.
  • “Who am I?” is being reframed. Instead of identifying with the “I” that constantly deals with the ups and downs of life, one learns how to remain centered in nondual awareness. An agitated state is exchanged for a steady state. “I am” is the baseline, not “I think, feel, and do.”
  • Existence has become a solid foundation of life. It might seem that “I am” is a poor relation to “I think, feel, and do,” but the actual experience of “I am” brings about a deep realization. Awareness is the source of love, compassion, creativity, personal growth, purpose, and meaning. From this foundation, thinking, feeling, and doing are infused with spiritual value, and well-being is nurtured throughout the whole person.

Integrative Health is not an invention or discovery but a journey back to who we really are. It’s only natural to see that life is better when it is lived with far less attachment to the drama of pain and pleasure, ups and downs, failure and fulfillment. Nondual awareness brings the needed detachment that allows us to respond from a deeper self, one that is always connected to our source in pure awareness. These are profound matters, but the state of wellbeing is natural to the whole person. In that light, the surprising success of wholeness needs to be shouted from the rooftops, especially in the turbulent times we find ourselves in.

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
TIFFANY J. BARSOTTI, MTh, is an internationally renowned medical intuitive, clinician and researcher of subtle energy and biofield therapies. With spiritual and intuitive guidance, she serves as an integrative practitioner working alongside physicians and other allied health professionals.
PAUL J MILLS, PhD, is Professor and Chief at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Department of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the UCSD Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health. He is Director of Research for the Deepak Chopra Foundation, with a focus on meditation and yoga within the context of Traditional Medical Systems. In the early 1980s, he published some of the earliest scientific research on meditation. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, US News and World Reports, Consumer Reports, The Huffington Post, Gaia TV, and WebMD, among others.