You and Your Brain: Upgrading the Relationship

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Although the marvels of the brain as an organ have been wondered at for decades,
there’s a risk that science will make us feel like brain puppets. Neuroscience runs this
risk by assuming, without any proof, that our brains think, feel, perceive the world, and
make choices. In reality the brain is an instrument at the service of the mind. We cannot
live without it, just as we cannot live without a heart, but by promoting the brain into a
thinking machine (an M.I.T. professor who championed Artificial Intelligence dubbed the
brain “a computer made of meat”), we demote ourselves.

You are much more in charge of your biology than you think. Your experiences
constantly change your brain. Much of the time we fail to pay attention to how we
relate to the brain, but no relationship is more important. One thing the human brain
does, in fact, share with computers: It is programmable. We primarily use this fact the
wrong way around. Instead of programming our brains to be open, creative, alert, and
quiet, we program it to carry out a hundred short cuts.

For example, when a server asks you how you want your burger done or whether you
want brown, white, or fried rice with your Chinese meal, it typically takes approximately
one-fifth of a second to give your response. In a restaurant this trained reflex is
harmless, but it also takes the same amount of time to shoot back a response if
someone asks, “Do you believe in God?” or “Who are you voting for?”

In place of a dynamic relationship, being driven by habits, reflexes, conditioning, and
thoughtless opinions gives the brain too much power. In sci-fi a standard plot has robots
taking over the world, but right now most people are dominated by a robotic brain. The
old view of the brain as fixed for life, constantly losing neurons and declining in function,
has been abolished. The new brain is a process, not a thing, and the process heads in
the direction you point it in.

A Buddhist monk meditating on compassion develops the brain circuitry that brings
compassion into reality. Depending on the input it receives, you can create a
compassionate brain, an artistic brain, a wise brain, or any other kind. That’s why your
brain is—or should be—your most important relationship.

The agent that makes these possibilities become real is the mind, or consciousness. The
brain doesn’t create its own destiny. Genetics delivers the brain in a functioning state
so that the nervous system can regulate itself and the whole body. It doesn’t take your
personal intervention to balance hormone levels, regulate heartbeat, or do a thousand
other autonomic functions. But you can have a powerful experience, such as falling in
love, going to war, or winning the lottery, and your experience will alter all these
processes.

If you think of everyday experience as input for your relationship with your brain, with
your actions and thoughts as output, a feedback loop is formed. The old adage about
computer software—garbage in, garbage out—applies to these feedback loops. Toxic
experiences shape the brain quite differently from healthy ones. Neuroscience has
joined forces with genetics to reveal that right down to the level of DNA, the feedback
loops that unite mind and body are profoundly changed by the input being fed the
brain.

If input is everything, then happiness and well-being are created by giving the brain
positive input. Without realizing it, you are here to inspire your brain to be the best it
can be. This is much more than positive thinking, which is often too superficial and
masks underlying negativity. The input that inspires the brain includes a wide array of
things. They form a matrix with you at the center. Here’s what you want in your matrix.

Matrix for a Positive Lifestyle

  • Have good friends.
  • Don’t isolate yourself.
  • Sustain a lifelong companionship with a spouse or partner.
  • Engage socially in worthwhile projects.
  • Be close with people who have a good lifestyle – habits are contagious.
  • Follow a purpose in life.
  • Leave time for play and relaxation.
  • Maintain satisfying sexual activity.
  • Address issues around anger.
  • Practice stress management.

 

Your brain will thrive in such a matrix, even as life brings its ups and downs. By the same token, the brain can’t arrive at any of these things on its own. You are the leader of your brain. The whole issue of feedback loops turns out to be vital for all kinds of brain functions, including memory and the prevention of feared disorders like Alzheimer’s. A healthy relationship with your brain leads to a state of peak living over a long, healthy lifetime. Society failed to teach us this invaluable lesson, but it’s never too late to learn. 

 


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 Incredible Vanishing Universe (And How to Bring It Back)

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Menas Kafatos, PhD

Looking up at the night sky reveals an uncountable richness of stars and galaxies, which gets augmented billions of times over through telescope images from deep space. The cosmos looks to be in no danger of disappearing, but this is just a comforting illusion. 

Starting in 1933, with the first intimation that dark matter existed—an idea discarded at the time, waiting another 35 years to resurface—the visible universe has been so undermined by dark matter and energy that it now ranks in size about the same as the cherry atop an ice cream sundae. By current estimates dark matter accounts for 27% of the universe, dark energy for 68%, and everything else in the observable universe a mere 5%.

You might see the situation as a kind of “tip of the iceberg,” with the bulk of the berg hidden underwater, but the reality is more baffling.  No one knows how the hidden bulk of the universe relates to the visible tip. It isn’t even credible yet that “matter” and “energy” are the right words for it. 

This is where a rescue effort was called for, because it is totally unacceptable in science for anything to exist without being physical.  Rather strangely, the hero riding to the rescue is information. In 1989 at a talk given at the Santa Fe Institute, the eminent Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler declared that “every particle in the universe emanates from the information locked inside it.”

The term “bit” had already been coined to describe the most basic unit of information, and Wheeler coined the term “it from bit,” meaning that any physical thing (it) is actually born from information (bit). But because information isn’t physical, the whole rescue effort looked precarious. A cosmos entirely based on information would completely vanish into invisibility, unless…

The “unless” was recently filled in by another physicist, Melvin Vopson at the University of Portsmouth in England, who theorizes that “information has mass.” This proposal is strongly counterintuitive. Information theory reduces to the mathematics of 1s and zeros, but how could a number have weight, which is how we commonly think of mass? The answer isn’t simple, but the decisive link is the notion that when any bit of information is erased, heat is emitted.  Heat is energy, and energy is convertible to matter.

The reason that information must be linked to matter and energy is that current science cannot stand on its feet unless everything has a physical basis.  Similar efforts have been mounted to give a physical basis to the mind. The two rescue efforts are linked, and as far as mainstream science is concerned, the only acceptable outcome is a cosmos based on physicality, despite the common-sense objection that information and thoughts are nonphysical to begin with.

Let’s accept that the cosmos originated either from information or from consciousness. They are the leading contenders in the dispute. It is rare for an argument to be the breakthrough everyone needs instead of the answer to the argument. But in this case the outcome almost doesn’t matter. As long as either information or consciousness is the basis of the visible universe, it allows for configurations of dark matter and energy that do not depend on ordinary matter and energy. Instead of trying to understand “darkness” as if there is something similar in our world, everything can be signified through mathematics, the true language of science

Information derived from computers isn’t hard to explain mathematically, since it is already based on zeroes and ones. Consciousness is much harder to reduce to numbers. In your computer any concept that can be logically written out is computable, but there is no computation for love, compassion, imagination, creativity, curiosity, and self-awareness. Artificial intelligence is trying with might and main to make those aspects of human experience computable, but so far the project seems fanciful. If your computer one day announced that it loved you, would anyone fall for it?

As things stand, if you had to bet on which theory, information or consciousness, will win the most favor, information wins hands down, just because it is reducible to numbers. But winning an argument isn’t the same as finding out the truth. Humans directly experience the world, including mathematics, though our awareness. Awareness came up with information theory, beginning in the 1940s when the term “bit” was coined by the father of the digital age, Dr. Claude E. Shannon at Bell Labs. 

If human beings created the digital revolution, it’s pretty hard to turn the tables and say that ones and zeroes created human beings. We are obviously creatures based entirely in consciousness. The only problem with accepting this fact is that mainstream  science is stuck on physical models. Either it refuses to grapple with consciousness, or physical theories of mind get mired in impossible claims about how atoms and molecules learned to think

We believe this stuckness will pass, as outlined in our book, You Are the Universe, which aligns with a cadre of theorists who have begun to accept a consciousness-based cosmos. One day the mind will truly value the mind. Cosmic consciousness will become fundamental to creation. In the meantime, the universe will continue to vanish and probably laugh at us while it does.

 


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. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), 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 and the Director of the Center of Excellence in Earth Systems Modeling and Observations. 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. As dean and vice provost, he promoted interdisciplinary educational and research projects, leading many grants. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored more than 333 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer, 2000), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House, 1991), Living the Living Presence (in Greek, Melissa, 2017; and in Korean, Miruksa Press, 2016), Science, Reality and Everyday Life (in Greek, Asimakis 2019), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the NY Times Bestseller You are the Universe (Harmony/Random House/Penguin, 2017, translated into many languages and at many countries). You can learn more at menaskafatos.com

Personal Transformation—What It Really Means

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Most people have mixed feelings about how their lives are going, which seems inevitable. Taking the bitter with the sweet is an old saying dating back to the 13th century, but it expresses a universal experience. In the face of life’s mixed blessings, however, there runs a deep yearning for transformation. It is expressed through visons of heaven where eternal bliss is gained, in romantic literature where a perfect life is attained here on earth, and in utopian visions of every kind, including worldwide myths of a lost Eden or a Golden Age.

Is this yearning for transformation mere wish fulfillment, like dreaming of what you’d do if you won the lottery? If you are totally pragmatic, the answer is yes, and having abandoned such fantasies you can productively direct your energies to becoming better off by inches and degrees. Even then, modest goals aren’t always achievable. We settle for half a loaf, or less, because common sense tells us to.

But I think the issue runs deeper than pragmatism. In my new book Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, I propose that the desire for transformation is not only realistic but totally necessary. Transformation is like the total change of state when two invisible combustible gases, oxygen and hydrogen, combine to form a liquid, water, that puts out fires. The essential nature of the two gases give no hint that they could be transformed so completely. But that is what transformation means, as opposed to gradual stepwise change.

What would it mean to totally transform a human being? Despite the stubborn way that people resist change, clinging to beliefs, fears, biases, and personal tastes for no rational reason, we are transformative beings. This can be evidenced in everyday experience.

  • When you have a thought, mental silence is transformed into a voice in your head.
  • When you see an object, invisible electrical signals in your brain transform into color and shape.
  • The sense of sight works by taking minuscule snapshots that have no motion, but your mind transforms these into the moving world.
  • In the presence of a sudden shock, the balanced state of your body at rest is transformed into the state of fight or flight.
  • The words “I love you,” if spoken by the right person at the right time, creates a total psychological transformation known as falling in love.

None of these experiences is alien, yet we don’t usually label them transformative. Why not? Because the setup for being human is drastically tilted toward conformity, normality, and conventionality. Every child absorbs, as if by osmosis, that life is a struggle between good and bad, light and dark, desire and frustration, success and failure.

This condition, generally known as duality, is what Metahuman tries to overturn. Duality condemns us to a lifetime of either/or choices. We identify with the choices we make, and then we cling to the identity that results. We shake our heads when we encounter people who have made bad choices, turning for example into racists or xenophobes, but at bottom the problem isn’t bad choices and the solution isn’t good choices. Either side of the coin keeps you trapped in duality.

Transformation provides an escape route from what is otherwise an all-embracing worldview. All visions of transformation have in common a desire to be liberated, set free from some kind of personal limitation. In exceptional cases, such as the life of the Buddha or Jesus, the vision of transformation renounces everything duality holds out as the good life. To be in the world but not of it is as radical as seeking to escape the eternal cycle of pleasure and pain.

In Metahuman I don’t argue for radical transformation in that way. Instead of presenting transformation as a far-away goal, I argue that it should be a starting point. The common experiences cited earlier give a clue to what the transformed life is like. It is open to change because change is always with us. It allows rather than resists, because no one can predict where any situation might go.

But the biggest shift occurs in a person’s identity. Instead of identifying with all the choices you’ve made in your life, you identify with the state of awareness you are in. Consciousness becomes your identity. I can illustrate what that means with a simple example. Imagine that you are on a debating team, and the question is “Does God exist?” In this debate the two teams will draw lots to determine who take which side of the question. As a debater you are prepared to argue for total faith in God or total atheism.

Clearly a good debater can do this, and in our legal system, defense lawyers are often asked to mount an argument for indefensible clients. In everyday life we identify with one viewpoint or the other, faith versus atheism, but in reality we are set up to rise above either position, simply because we can instantly change our perspective. This is more basic than any single perspective, yet we live as if the opposite is true. Every “-ism” is just a perspective somebody wants to defend and cling to. Nazism is dire while pacifism is benign, but each concept limits your unconditioned consciousness, depriving you of the power of transformation.

“My way or the highway” has become a noxious trend in today’s divisive world, by which polarization has become the status quo. But at a subtler level we all cling to our point of view, having forgotten that to be human is never a point of view. To be human is to go beyond any fixed belief, conditioning, bias, or fixed assumptions. What would it be like to live as if transformation is your true essence? That’s the real issue we should be discussing, because the future of humanity and of the planet depends on the answer we arrive at.

 


Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotifywww.deepakchopra.com 

Getting Serious About Nothing

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Nothing in the creation myths told in ancient cultures match our current model of creation for strangeness and improbability. We tend to smile indulgently at those old myths, although the average person probably hasn’t gone very far past the Book of Genesis, if they are religious, or a vague sense of the big bang as a kind of cosmic dynamite explosion. Like our ancestors, we have wrapped creation in a story. The difference is supposed to be that our story, backed by modern physics, is rational, scientific, and therefore on the money.

The problem is that the current creation story doesn’t match reality, having long ago drifted beyond anything conceivable, provable, or accessible. I talk at length about this in my new book Metahuman, where I propose something quite radical: The cosmos is a construct of the human mind, a backdrop for the virtual reality we have all bought into. The purpose of the book is to get the reader to wake up to the “real” reality, but this cannot happen if you accept without question that the physical universe is the foundation of everything that exists.

Clearly it isn’t. The physical universe rests upon four things, time, space, matter, and energy. The five senses bring us information based upon these four things, so naturally if we believe our senses, there is no mystery. Believing in the five senses is known as naïve realism, which turns out to be totally indefensible. The classic example of how the five senses deceive us is the experience of sunrise and sunset. The sun, to all appearances, moves across the sky, just as to all appearances the sky is blue, the Earth around us flat, the moon changeable in shape, etc.

To replace naïve realism, modern physics delved into the nature of time, space, matter, and energy, only to discover that none has a secure basis. Whether you go backward in time to the big bang or dive vertically, as it were, from gross objects to subtle particles, whether you try to calculate where the edge of the universe is or how invisible energy waves turn into solid “stuff,” there is one fundamental mystery behind everything.

This mystery is generally known as “something from nothing,” which expresses the same thing our ancestors pondered but in sophisticated scientific terms. For its own purposes physics and cosmology have to describe in detail how Nature works, but “something from nothing” hits a dead end. It is simply inconceivable that the quantum vacuum, a void that contains no dimensions, no time, and no “stuff” at all, could somehow create the cosmos. Faced with the inconceivable, science resorts to advanced mathematical theories like superstrings and multiverses, while knowing full well that there is no guarantee that these theories describe anything real. Secondly, mathematics is just numbers, and numbers didn’t create space, time, matter, and energy.

In the midst of the current bafflement over creation, which the public has gotten a whiff of, one good thing has emerged. Having spent centuries examining and explaining “something,” science now has to take “nothing” seriously. Nothing is more accurately described as the precreated state. Creation actually contains two varieties of “something,” namely, the objective physical world and the inner subjective world. Nobody has experienced the first part of precreation, because there is no objective data, indeed no possibility of objective data, from the domain beyond space, time, matter, and energy. That’s the essential reason that “nothing” is inconceivable.

But the second part of the precreated state is experienced all the time. The “stuff” of our subjective existence has been dubbed SIFT, which stands for sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. SIFT is a useful shorthand for mental activity, and it is clear that if you take it all away, the “nothing” you confront isn’t a void. Even without any activity, the mind retains its essential nature, which we call consciousness. When you are conscious, you exist, which seems too obvious to mention.

But existence, as experienced by human beings, cannot be separated from intelligence, perception, creativity, curiosity, known, interpretation, evolution, and self-awareness. These form our precreated state on the subjective side of the ledger.

Unlike the physical side of the ledger, where space, time, matter, and energy must be explained without space, time, matter, and energy—a task no one has come close to fulfilling—we experience our thoughts with all the characteristics of precreation. No one is divorced from knowing, perceiving, being aware, interpreting one’s personal experience, and possessing self-awareness. In terms of creativity, for example, Michelangelo or Picasso created beautiful artworks, but they didn’t invent creativity. No one did—like all the other characteristics of consciousness, creativity is simply part of the setup. If you exist, creativity is on the move through you from the instant a fertilized egg began creating an embryo in the womb.

Metahuman goes into detail about where the physical universe came from, arguing that both aspects of creation, objective and subjective, have the same origin. Consciousness is both creator and creation, the knower and the known, the inside and outside of everything no matter from what angle you observe reality. It takes an entire book to justify such a claim, but the advantage of regarding consciousness as the “real” reality needs no extended argument.

The advantage is that “something from nothing” now has meaning, and it matches reality as lived by the average person. Once you realize that at your source you are connected to intelligence, creativity, knowing, and all the rest, there is the possibility of getting more of those things. They are the most valuable things anyone can hope to find, and one can go further to say that love, compassion, bliss, and all spiritual values are also embedded in the same setup.

It turns out that “nothing” is actually a field of infinite possibilities, and this field is consciousness, which we all participate in. There is no need to get an advanced degree in quantum physics to delve into the precreated state. Nothing turns into something here and now, through every thought, word, and action. To realize this is to wake up to reality. Waking up Is just a starting point, but the whole point is that without the right starting point, you easily get lost. I wrote my book to convince readers that the right starting point is staring us in the face, and always has.

 


Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotifywww.deepakchopra.com