COVID-19 and a New Way to Be Happy

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Diseases point the way to the future if we pay attention. This holds especially true of the global outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19. It is clear that some important lessons have emerged already. Some of these are obvious because they are so visible: Uncertainty is a major cause of panic. No one could miss that lesson. Economies reflect mass psychology. This lesson follows from the first, because the plunge in worldwide markets has been driven by uncertainty.

But if you look a bit deeper, COVID-19 exposes a need to take human well-being more seriously. The great push to create a welfare state is around a century old, and certain countries like Sweden and Denmark went much further than the United States. But even in places where democratic socialism won the day, true human welfare wasn’t addressed. The basic right to have guaranteed housing medicine, and education—the cornerstones of the modern welfare state—treat people as economic units.

Actual well-being looks very different. Its hallmarks are community and mutual support, valuing happiness as essential to human life, affording lifelong good health, living in an environment with pure air and water, a lack of violence with a necessary emphasis on peace, equal acceptance for all, and the abolition of us-versus-them thinking of the kind that builds barriers of every kind.

When you list these ingredients in one place, it becomes painfully clear that a welfare state is far from being a well-being state. COVID-19 exposed how insecure most people actually feel, to the point that the real pandemic is fear, not the virus. It has been largely futile to spread actual facts in the face of the mass fear that social media and 24/7 news incite so easily. The people who are chiefly at risk of dying from the virus as the elderly and disadvantaged, two groups likely to have compromised immune systems or underlying chronic medical conditions.

For everyone else, standard prevention is the best recourse, with the additional advice not to go on extended planes trips or a cruise ship if you are already at risk. But such sensible medical advice is being drowned out. Moreover, the recent tendency toward authoritarian reactionary leadership has exposed that such leaders have a shocking lack of interest in anyone’s welfare but their own and the privileged class they belong to and protect.

COVID-19 has made people aware at some level that that their well-being is of little interest to the leaders they elect. But the underlying issue is that the wellness movement hasn’t caught on even to the extent that the average person knows how to be well, secure, happy, and self-sufficient for life. I mean this in personal terms, not economic ones. The average person is so fixated on holding a job and the price of gas that it seems like fantasy to talk about a fulfilling job and the price of unhappiness.

We need a new way to be happy based on well-being. To instigate such a radical shift has already begun—the wellness movement is here to stay. Global warming, despite reactionary resistance, has already alerted the world that any solution must be global. Nationalism only makes the problem worse. Sectarian violence, terrorism, and civil unrest are pointless (as they always have been) if you and the person you hate are both under the same climate threat.

If the progressive wing in politics really values well-being, it should propose a secretary position in the cabinet to boost everything that well-being stands for. If that proposal sounds too ideal or even foolish, then you might look in the mirror and ask what your own happiness is based on. If it is based on money, status, possessions, and lifelong consumerism, you need to wake up. Those have been the normal standards of happiness for a long time, but they have led to gross income disparity, a huge carbon footprint, a pitiful level of well-being for the world’s under-privileged, an ingrained prejudice against the poor and anyone “not like us,” and a society in which, beyond our immediate family and friends, all of us feel like strangers in a strange land.

COVID-19 has brought the situation under a glaring spotlight. If the past is prologue, the immediate reflex will not be positive—stores will be cleaned out of essential products when the right thing to do is to share these products, not hoard them. Rumor, gossip, and absurd untruths will block sensible advice, correct facts, and a healthy caution toward the outbreak.

But for all that, COVID-19 implies a new future and makes it more urgent. Passivity and inertia are no longer affordable. We’ve all booked passage on cruise ship Earth. There’s nowhere anyone can disembark, and all the passengers, including the ones in first class, are literally in the same boat. Only a new way to find happiness, based on a global self-care movements and personal well-being to replace empty consumerism and mass distractions, has any hope of leading to a better future. Consider this as seriously as you can, and make your own well-being the start of global wellness.

 

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.”

If You Aren’t You, Then Who Are You?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Whether you call it your spiritual life, your inner journey, or a search for a higher power, there is a necessary process, known as waking up. It consists of no longer being unaware. By growing more conscious, you give up many things you once took for granted. You recognize that they were illusions, unproven assumptions, and second-hand opinions.

You can take a major step toward waking up right this minute. All you need to do is answer one question: Who are you? This question is about your identity, which everyone takes for granted –so much so, in fact, that we lose ourselves in an illusion without ever realizing it.

Let’s start without any assumptions. Drop your assumption that you already know who you are, because what people really know is not who they really are but their story. Your story consists of everything you have amassed in the past through experience, belief, successes and failures, likes and dislikes. When you identify with these things, you mistake a dead relic of the past for who you really are. Your story might be good or bad, something to be proud of or not, filled with experiences you want to hold on to and others you would rather forget. None of this really matters when you want to know who you really are. You are more than your story.

So where can you go to find your real identity?

To find out who you really are, you must look into the human mind, where everything about you begins. Most people leave the human mind to the experts, but this poses a problem. The problem relates to an old joke that goes like this: A policeman walks up to a man who is searching on his hands and knees under a streetlight. “What are you looking for?” the policeman asks. “My keys,” the man replies. “Is this where you lost them?” the policeman says. “No,” the man replies, “but the light is better here.”

You will wind up in the middle of this joke if you try to locate the human mind by the light of physical science, which focuses on the brain. It’s more convenient to look for the mind inside the brain because the brain is a thing, a three-pound object to be dissected and examined; its activity flashes on brain scans, and the existence of perhaps a quadrillion connections inside the brain gives huge scope for neuroscience. To completely map the brain is now within reach and will prove to be the greatest achievement in biology since the mapping of the human genome.

But unfortunately, the brain is the wrong place to look for finding your self. If you leave all assumptions aside, it is undeniable that you go through life by experiencing it. You feel; you perceive; you pay attention; you find meaning and purpose in your experiences. Your brain does none of these things. There is no model of the brain, however sophisticated, that shows that the brain creates any experience.

The fact that your brain is active in every experience does not mean it has experience, any more than a piano, whose keys are constantly moving during a performance, experiences music. Physical objects are not experiencers, but you are. So who are you? An experiencer. This makes a good beginning, but it is only a first step. As soon as you see that you are an experiencer, two other traits instantly emerge. You exist; you are aware.

In these three things—existence, experience, and awareness—you have answered the question, “Who am I?” Waking up has begun in earnest. The path that lies ahead of you is uniquely your own. No one will experience life exactly as you will; no one will be aware of exactly the same things you will be aware of. But there are moments of awakening that have been reported on the path for centuries.

Among the most important are these:

  • Existence cannot be taken away from you. Non-existence is an impossibility.
  • You are not bound within the confines of a body and the span of a lifetime.
  • You are as unbounded as consciousness itself, as limitless as existence, as timeless as eternity. These are basic qualities, not metaphysical conceptions invented in some kind of philosophical hyperspace.
  • The purpose of your life is purely and simply to wake up. This purpose was handed to you the moment you took your first step of waking up. In your first step you discarded the illusion that you are your story. There are more illusions to discard, and until they are completely gone, you will not be completely aware.
  • Existence is always conscious.
  • Everything that exists is part of the play of consciousness as it endlessly transforms itself. When you are awake, you can fully participate in this play, the cosmic dance of creation.

These realizations come naturally and effortlessly. They do not have to be worked for. You don’t need special gifts of any kind. The only requirement is to start disbelieving in your story. By focusing so exclusively on it, you are building up a drawer of dead letters. You don’t have to wait to die; your story consists of dead experiences pretending to be alive through repetition. In reality, you are as alive as the next moment, the next perception, the next experience. Nothing and no one can take away or even touch who you really are. Existence, experience, and awareness are yours forever, transcending past, present, and future. The beauty of waking up is that it is available here and now. Blink your eyes, and you are there.

 

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.”

A Brave New World, and How to Get There

By Deepak Chopra, MD

If you find yourself living in a troubled world, what should you do? The question is as old as recorded history, but over the millennia only three basic answers have emerged. If you find yourself living in a troubled world, you should:

A. Turn to God or the gods,

B. Place your trust in science and rational thought, or

C. Renounce the world and retreat inward.

These answers have practical outcomes, which is why we have cathedrals, space programs, and monasteries. But what if none of the three time-honored answers works anymore? That’s the general situation most modern people find themselves in, and so they retain a diluted loyalty to old answers in the absence of a better one. For example, most Americans do not believe the creation story in the Book of Genesis, but neither do they completely believe Darwinism, telling pollsters that in some undefined way God enters into evolution despite the view among evolutionary scientists that Darwin’s theory is completely valid.

The third option, retreating from the world, is actually the one most of us have chosen more or less automatically. We lament the state of the world but spend every day occupied with our personal affairs. If you do nothing to improve the world, you are for all intents and purposes reliant on your own thoughts and actions. A higher authority or proven worldview is irrelevant.

What we need to realize is that a refusal to have a higher vision of life is self-defeating and will do little but let the troubled world go its own way. Shrugging your shoulders and retreating is an attitude that builds no cathedrals or space programs. It represents stasis instead of evolution. I am a great believer in evolution myself, and here’s why.

If you examine the religious worldview, the scientific worldview, and the renunciant worldview, you can say yes or no to any of them. But you cannot say yes or no to the consciousness that originated them. In consciousness we create the story of humankind and always have. When a worldview gets wobbly or collapses, nothing changes consciousness. It is free to invent and reinvent stories endlessly.

This ability is the key to a brave new world. We need to adopt a higher vision that places human consciousness at the core. Recently there was a fascinating article proposing a new theory of time. According to this new theory, every aspect of time—past, present, and future—exists simultaneously. A map of cosmic time would give equal weight to every kind of time, embracing them all without preferring any single one. This seemingly bizarre viewpoint actually builds upon Einstein’s similar view, expressed in one of his more famous quotes: “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Most people would strongly resist that there is no “real” past, present, or future, but Einstein meant his insight to be liberating. If time can exist simultaneously in any form, then pride of place must be given to consciousness, because it is already free from past, present, and future. It’s very easy to prove this idea. Imagine a scene from your childhood, then imagine your next vacation, and finally look at your watch. You have just time-traveled through past, present, and future. In order to do that, you need a place to stand that is outside past, present, and future. The only viable place is consciousness, because every other location in spacetime is either totally fixed or depends upon the human mind to exist.

Every previous worldview has given rise to a story or narrative that people shape their lives around. The religious story in the West was about getting to Heaven and avoiding Hell. The scientific story is about constant material progress. But consciousness has no story. If you are free to time-travel in consciousness, you can pick which direction you want to go in. The same is true in all things. If you are not tied to any story, you can choose your experience, give it meaning, and decide on how to follow your bliss.

A brave new world will not emerge by worrying over the troubled world. Anxiety isn’t creative. Only creative intelligence is creative, and that intelligence is innate in all of us. You do not even need to abide by the story you apply to your body, to aging or death. In the perfect equanimity of consciousness, direct experience is the foundation of a new world because each person will feel new.

This isn’t a dream. If you stand back to see time in its wholeness, according to the new theory, all time is simultaneous. There is only a field of time with free choice about the vectors an event travels along. What saves this notion from total disorder, with time whizzing back and forth like leaves in the wind, is the stability of consciousness. We live in a cosmos that contains form, structure, evolution, organization, and infinite correlation across billions of light years. The tremble of an electron is registered everywhere.

It is no accident that human life is also organized and structured, or that the trillions of cells in our bodies are correlated with one another. Wholeness rules. The parts that seem to move randomly fit into perfectly organized structures. Without physics, there would be no name for atoms, molecules, quarks, quasars, etc. By naming these phenomena, we lasso them into the human world and give them reality. But there is no necessity to name consciousness itself. Consciousness simply is. It defines wholeness in the only valid way wholeness can ever be.

I’ll write more about the brave new world, because people today feel increasingly powerless, desperate, helpless, and hopeless about the troubled world. The message that needs to be sent everywhere is that the world isn’t our boss. We created the human world, and our creative intelligence can never desert us. If truth exists with a capital T, it resides in consciousness and nowhere else.

 

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.”

When the World Stops Working, We Will Know the Truth

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Everyone looks at the world, and their lives, assuming that they know the truth. This isn’t truth with a capital T but simply the truth about everyday things, like how to drive a car, buy groceries, and do one’s job. We know other basic things that are true, such as when we are awake as opposed to being asleep. In other words, the world works, more or less to our satisfaction.

Somewhere beyond everyday affairs there are experts, professionals, and thinkers who deal in deeper truths, still not with a capital T but getting closer. Scientists especially are trusted to give us the truth about Nature from the most microscopic regions of quanta to the most cosmic regions, where quasars and black holes exist. We trust that if the everyday world is working, science must have a handle on why it works, operating from its deeper perspective.

So it comes as something of a shock, even though it doesn’t touch us personally, that the scientific view of the world is so wobbly that it is on the verge of becoming either untrue or obsolete or both. At the farthest edges of exploration, the basic elements of physics—space, time, matter, and energy—vanish, either because they disappear into a black hole or because the scale of measurement reaches the limit, known as the Planck scale, where there is no way to calculate anything. At the same time there is the whole issue of dark matter and energy, which are barely known and may not be knowable by the human mind, since our brains are set up for regular matter and energy.

Because the scientific world stops working so far away from everyday life, including the everyday life of 99.99% of professional scientists, why should anyone but cosmologists, quantum physicists, and abstract theoreticians care? Even they rely upon their cars to get to the places where they do their advanced theoretical thinking.

The reason we should care has to do with that elusive thing, truth with a capital T. When it felt secure about space, time, matter, and energy (i.e., ever since Galileo and Newton), science thought it was getting closer to truth with a capital T, otherwise known as the Theory of Everything. If you know that the world, including the human brain, is totally based on material things, eventually you can compute every natural process, and you could declare that everything has been explained.

But if there are all kinds of things that do not have a material explanation, you are back at square one, because truth with a capital T is actually where our models of the world come from. In an age of faith God was truth with a capital T. Posit the existence of God, totally believe in this model of reality, and you are set until something comes along to disprove your model.

Science felt that it disproved the existence of God, because God isn’t subject to scientific measurement, data collecting, experiments, and the replication of experimental results. But there are other things besides God that are disproving science. Maybe black holes, dark matter and energy, and the origin of the universe will one day be squeezed back into some kind of materialistic model, but it is clear that one thing—the mind—cannot.

In a recent dialogue with the farseeing cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, we started from a premise that will shock most people. The objects we perceive around us only exist because our perception is trained to perceive them. There are no atoms, quarks, quasars, trees, clouds, or even the human brain, without humans constructing them to fit our way of navigating the world. Prof. Hoffman’s view is based on evolution. His basic premise is that creatures survive not by seeing reality but by adapting to survival signals. A cat will ignore everything in a room except a mouse, driven to catch and eat it. If the cat paid attention to reality, i.e., everything in the room, it would have gone extinct long ago.

Humans beings are more complex in our evolution, because so much of it is based on the higher brain, but we still only perceive the tiniest fraction of electromagnetic frequencies, for example, and hear only a middle slice of sound frequencies. Using our higher brains we have constructed a human world, and as long as it works, we feel okay. We are not overly concerned that we cannot see the infrared spectrum or hear the ultrasonic spectrum.

No one would disagree that humans have our own specific models of reality, but the niggling problem of truth with a capital T enters the picture. If you trust your five senses to bring you the “real” world, your notion of truth with a capital T has no basis, because when you trace sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell back to the brain, the trail ends. As Prof. Hoffman puts it, despite decades of effort and the input of brilliant neuroscientists and related cognitive sciences, no one has shown that any brain activity can be measured scientifically to cause a single thing we perceive “out there” in the world.

The brain is certainly active all the time, but it is dark, soundless, and silent. There is no way to get at truth with a capital T when you start with the brain.

So, if God is no longer truth with a capital T, and the material-physical basis of science is quickly losing its grip on truth with a capital T, what does reality actually rest on? This is a fascinating question, because only when the world stops working can you see beyond false assumptions and old conditioning to get a view of the truth. The purpose of this post is simply to get us to that point. In the next post we’ll see how the truth and reality can be reframed in a way that makes our personal lives quite different from what we assume them to be.

(To be cont.)

 

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.”

The Most Important Choice to Make Today

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In every age there has been a dominant worldview that people tried to conform to. In an age of faith, everyone asked how they could better serve God. This was their daily concern. In the Industrial Age the question shifted to economics and improving one’s lot in life. In an age dominated by science the question shifted again–people asked every day how they could keep up with progress and add to it. As times change, so do people’s vision of what is important, and usually they thought they had a better vision than the one which preceded them.

Yet if you back away to see the bigger picture, each age had one thing in common, and it wasn’t God, economics, or progress. It was the fundamental idea that life is well lived only if you have a vision. Without one, purpose and meaning are limited.

It turns out that the one question you should ask every day is this: How can I fulfill my vision today? Whether they put it exactly in these words, this is the secret behind the greatest success stories. Someone dedicated his or her life to a plan, project, or set of values larger than any individual. A worthy vision, I think, needs to fulfill certain criteria.

  1. Your vision should be suited to who you really are. It can’t be borrowed from someone else, and it can’t be chosen out of obligation. Your parents may desperately have wanted you to follow the family business or go to medical school because they weren’t able to. Those are laudable motives, but it’s risky to adopt a vision that isn’t really your own.
  2. Your vision should be valuable no matter how much money you expect to make. Of course, you can always make it your vision to get rich, but there are two problems with that. First, the day you arrive at a financial goal, it will tend to feel empty. Second, a life totally devoted to money never stops. Making more and more–greed and competition fuel an insatiable desire.
  3. You should compare the visions that seem most appealing, which means doing research and dipping your toe into more than one pool. Philosophy, religion, science, business, and scholarship are rich with potential, and you owe it to yourself at least to sample what they are like.
  4. Your vision should be ambitious. the old saying that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp still holds true (or a woman’s reach). Settling isn’t visionary. Pick something that will feel like a challenge every day for as long as you can see into the future.
  5. Finally, don’t lose sight of two words that often escape notice when someone has burning ambition and drive: happiness and love. The more you can increase these two qualities, in your life and the lives of others, the more worthwhile your life will seem as it unfolds. A hugely successful life devoid of happiness and love is what Scrooges are made of.

 

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.”