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

Transformation Is Possible—It Is Already Here

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The one thing in life that never changes is change, or so people say. But in reality we all experience a struggle between accepting change and resisting it, trying to make things different and yet feeling an anxious need to keep things the same. This struggle is what makes personal change so difficult. We can’t make up our minds once and for all how we feel about changing.

If change is so difficult, how can there be personal transformation, upon which the whole movement of human potential is based? It takes vision and commitment to believe that such a thing is even possible. Most people have mixed feelings about how their lives are going. “Taking the bitter with the sweet” is an old saying in English dating back to the 13th century, but it expresses a universal experience in every society.

In the face of life’s mixed blessings there runs a contrary trend, however, based on a deep yearning for transformation. The yearning is expressed through visions of a heaven where eternal bliss is gained, in romantic literature where perfect love is found, and in imaginary utopias of every kind, including a lost Eden or 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, you abandon such fantasies so that you can productively direct your energies to becoming better off by inches and degrees. (There’s at least one bestseller promising how to get ten percent happier, for example, which sounds like opening a passbook savings account—better to get a small safe return than shoot for a higher but much riskier reward.) Even then, modest goals aren’t always achievable. We settle for half a loaf, or less, because common sense tells us to.

But the real issue runs deeper. Transformation exists throughout Nature. Consider the total change of state when two invisible combustible gases, oxygen and hydrogen, combine to form a liquid, water, which is so non-combustible that it puts out fires. Two poisons, sodium and chlorine, combine to make salt, which is necessary for life. The essential nature of the two ingredients 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 achieve personal transformation? Despite the stubborn way that people resist change, clinging to beliefs, fears, biases, and personal habits 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 individually have no motion, but your mind transforms these into the moving world, the same way that a movie is created out of a series of still frames projected in rapid sequence.
  • In the presence of a sudden shock, the balanced state of your body at rest is transformed into the aroused 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 happen through gradual or stepwise change. There is a sudden alteration by which one state turns into another completely different state. And as with water and salt, the first state gives no clue about what the new state will be like. That’s why someone falling in love for the first time often says in amazement, “I never knew such a thing ever existed.”

Obviously, the setup of society is drastically tilted toward conformity, routine, and conventionality. There is pressure not to be different. But none of this alters the fact that we are surrounded by transformation in Nature. Moreover, our brains couldn’t transform the raw signals received by the five senses into the image of a three-dimensional world without transforming them.

The lesson here is to accept that transformation is always within reach and requires no special effort or struggle to achieve. But to access any kind of personal transformation, you cannot rely on either your ego or your brain—both ae designed to keep doing what they are used to doing. Both are conditioned by the past. The source of transformation lies elsewhere, in consciousness.

What triggers transformation happens in consciousness; the intention to change registers in consciousness; and consciousness carries out the desired transformation. This isn’t mysticism. Your intention to lift your arm is a conscious trigger for the bodymind to go into action. Without conscious intention, nothing can happen in the direction you desire. What people find hard to accept is that consciousness is present not just as a trigger; it governs and creates change. Ultimately the entire experience occurs only in consciousness.

That’s why we refer to states of consciousness. Only consciousness can change the state you are in physically, mentally, or emotionally. Like a gas changing state into a liquid, the new state isn’t a matter of a little more or a little less. A change of state is a transformation. In childhood, most fairy tales are about transformation, like Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast. These tales linger our entire lives because deep down we know that transformation is real.

In adulthood, transformation becomes wishful thinking because we turn to the ego-personality to affect change, yet it always fails in the end, because of the inner conflict I began with, in which change is desired and feared at the same time. The key is to journey to the source of transformation, which is achieved through meditation. Only when you learn to identify with the inner level of yourself that creates transformation effortlessly can you master your own transformation. In effect, you stop trying to change and let consciousness do it for you. Discovering that this is possible brings fulfillment to our deep yearning to be transformed.

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 Divine Feminine and the Power to Change the World

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The time has come to think about women’s power and not just women’s rights. When the New York Times editorial board recently split over which Democratic presidential candidate to endorse, the debate was over two women, and eventually both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were selected. This is a sign of our collective exhaustion with a president who expresses the most extreme and worst aspects of masculine behavior. The best hope for turning the tide is said to be the suburban women’s vote, which already showed its power in the 2018 mid-term elections.

But something much deeper is going on. Masculine behavior has run its course as the model for power. The arms race, world wars, civil conflicts, and an insane buildup of atomic bombs symbolize masculine aggression reaching some kind of apex that is also a dead end. The urge to fight and to turn competitors into enemies, nations into armed fortresses, and everyone into winners and losers won’t save a planet that needs emergency medicine.

We find ourselves in a drastic state of imbalance because one entire half of the human psyche, the feminine, has been suppressed, violated, or ignored. The human mind isn’t a chaotic morass. For at least 30,000 years, dating back to the rapid evolution of the higher brain, Homo sapiens has lived by themes and motifs that guide our actions. The pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung called these concentrated themes archetypes, but there is no need for special jargon—at this moment every person taps into the same themes tht permeate civilization back to its roots.

As modern people we see ourselves as beyond mythology, and in fact superior to myths, which feel superstitious and irrational. But if you look at the Greek goddesses—Aphrodite, Hera, Athena, Demeter, and more—each symbolizes a divine feminine energy that must be included in a complete human being, no matter of what gender, or even without gender if that is a conscious choice.

The most basic listing of the divine feminine indicates instantly what is missing on the world stage right now. The leading qualities of the feminine are:

  • Mothering, the source of tenderness, affection, nonjudgmental acceptance, and nurturing.
  • Abundance, the freely given gifts of food and water supplied by the earth.
  • Beauty in every form.
  • Sexual charm and attraction.
  • Inspiration, in the form of intuition, insight, and the muses that inspire art and music.
  • Peace, the impulse to live as a family in harmony.

If the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese could identify and express all of the qualities, not to mention valuing them as divine attributes, how advanced are we who turn our backs on them? There is a concerted call for more women leaders because the rampant behavior of out-of-control masculine energies cannot be tolerated any longer. But the whole point of calling feminine energies divine is that they apply to everyone.

The most reviled leaders in modern history are Hitler and Stalin, neither of whom had the slightest trace of the feminine and whose pure masculinity doomed tens of millions of people to death and suffering. The most revered leaders were Lincoln and Gandhi, both of them repositories of peace and reconciliation. (They both wore shawls,, a gesture toward women’s dress, and Gandhi sat beside a loom, which became the central symbol of India’s flag.)

The choice to express masculine and feminine energies has been unbalanced for a long time. As one psychologist wryly noted, from kindergarten onward boys are trained to be winners who wield power while girls gain their worth by attracting men who are winners and wield power. Daring to break out of the mold of the “second sex” has carried social disapproval and rejection as a constant threat.

All of this is well known, and the modern women’s movement has strived to redress the imbalances that society has tolerated and encouraged. But even when more women assume leadership roles, as they are doing and will continue to, if men don’t respect the feminine archetype, they will never allow it to be part of themselves. The painful truth is that the same men who were motived to kill 100,000,000 people in the twentieth century are just as wiling to kill the planet.

The so-called goddess movement has been vital for several decades but still exists on the fringes. Its most basic aim is to give a woman a sense of self-esteem and worth in her own right, not as an adjunct to a man. This message has widely taken hold in developed countries and has seeped, with aching slowness, into the less privileged world. The next step should be simultaneously personal, social, and spiritual. It should be a movement toward wholeness for everyone.

You cannot make yourself whole; you can only realize the wholeness that has always been inside you. We all live right now in separation, not primarily because of political divisions but because we are divided in ourselves. The divided self tries to live as if one half of itself, the masculine, stands for the whole. It doesn’t and never will.

Everyone needs to take steps to express the suppressed aspects of wholeness. Right now the suppressed aspects are feminine, which has been true for centuries. But wholeness can’t be destroyed, only hidden. You are the agent of peace, nurturing, abundance, beauty, and inspiration. You either express these values or you don’t. The choice involves a conscious decision, and when enough people make the decision, the world will change. Everyone needs to look to the divine feminine. This is the dominant challenge that faces every society, and the future of humanity depends upon meeting the challenge as consciously and as soon as possible.

 

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.”

10 Ways to Resolve All Conflicts and End War

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The recent reckless skirmish between the U.S. and Iran held a deep irony. Neither side wanted to go to war, and yet neither side could talk to each other except in terms of war. Language and action go together. If you are stuck in the metaphor of war, with its winners and losers, revenge, enmities that last for generations, and the macho image of the warrior, you can never end war even though you want to.

There is no clean end to war once you are in a war mentality. Winners in one war become losers the next, and combat runs into a quagmire in which it is obvious that neither side will be able to claim victory, war thinking keeps stubbornly drilling home the same metaphor of war. As history teaches us from World War I to Vietnam and now Afghanistan, wars are at once pointless, relentless, and endless. War heroes on one side are war criminals on the other.

There is a way to end war, and one sees signs of the solution appearing wherever people realize that we share the same goal, to achieve a prosperous, healthy, sustainable planet. War doesn’t serve this shared goal, and the question is how long it will take for a positive global purpose to overshadow the metaphor of war that is embedded in nationalism, tribalism, racial and ethnic divides, and the other fellow travelers of war. All of these divisions are mind-made. They exist because we constructed them, and the secret is that whatever you made you can unmake.

In the face of so much blood and death, it seems strange to root war in a misguided concept. What William Blake called our “mind-forg’d manacles” are a form of self-imprisonment. Change your concepts, and only then will the manacles fall off. Here are some of the replacements for the whole concept of war.

  1. De-escalate the concept of enemy. An enemy can be reframed, in progressive order, as an adversary, competitor, partner, teacher, and finally your equal.

  2. Treat the other side with respect. Otherwise you lose them before you start.

  3. Recognize that there is the perception of injustice on both sides. This is a point of agreement adversaries can join in.

  4. Be prepared to forgive and ask for forgiveness. Here forgiveness means letting go of your desire for retribution and revenge. This is an act of true courage. Even if you believe that the other side doesn’t deserve forgiveness, you deserve peace.

  5. Refrain from belligerence. It will be taken as bullying and arouses renewed antagonism.

  6. Use emotional intelligence, which means understanding the other side’s feelings, giving them value, and making them equal to your feelings.

  7. Reach out to understand the other side’s values, both personal and cultural. The fog of war descends when two adversaries know nothing about one another. The result is a war based on projections and prejudice. The goal is mutual acceptance. At the deepest level we all want the same things.

  8. Refrain from ideological rhetoric over politics and religion.

  9. Recognize that there is fear on both sides. Don’t be afraid to express your anxieties and to ask the other side what they are afraid of.

  10. Do not insist on being right and proving the other side wrong. Give up the need to be right allows you to focus on what you actually want.

These ideas work in any negotiation, whether between nations or in a family. When we lack these ideas, we cannot turn them into coping mechanisms. War is the worst of all coping mechanisms, yet in many cases conflict is the first response we make when we feel resistance, obstacles, and pushback.

When people don’t know how to cope, nations don’t either. The basis of peace is peace consciousness in individuals. Even though you and I can’t change how nations interact, we have the choice to be units of peace consciousness and to put the ideas listed above into daily practice. The survival of the planet depends on as many people hearing the call in the shortest possible time.

 

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.”

Einstein, the Moon, and You

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Menas Kafatos, PhD

At the present moment a lot of the basic principles of traditional physics are in a confused state of disarray. Occasionally the media carries a story about strange discoveries by modern science on the order of black holes or dark matter and energy, suggesting that such phenomena are as yet unexplained. What isn’t publicized is that many if not most of the most commonly cherished ideas in traditional physics are dead as dodos. They are either wrong, impossible to verify, or contradicted by other more modern ideas without the contradiction being resolved.

Here is a list of the dead dodos, although some might still be clinging to life tenuously.

  • The physical world perceived by the five senses is reliable. It serves as the basis for everything real, including mind and matter.
  • The Big Bang occurred once, in a specific time and place, and provided for the emergence of all the energy in the known universe.
  • Space, time, matter, and energy provide the unshakable framework of reality.
  • The subjective world “in here” is separate from the objective world “out there.” Science properly deals with the objective world, since it can be fully understood through facts, data, experimentation, and mathematical formulas. The subjective notions and impressions filling our heads have no such reliability.
  • Having triumphed for centuries and providing us with the modern technological world, science will eventually have a complete theory of everything. This is only a matter of time, needing only the continuation of rational thought to penetrate all of Nature’s secrets.

Without giving it a passing thought, countless people accept these outdated or outright dead ideas as a given, the same way that religious societies accept the idea of an external God as a given. If you accept either the traditional religious or scientific worldview, you are unwittingly living by unexamined ideas that came to you second hand. It would be better to expand human potential by living free of second-hand ideas. But this is a daunting proposition.

As discussed in a previous post, “Why Einstein Was Wrong about the Moon,” even the most brilliant minds can wind up defending flawed ideas as if they were facts. The nub of the matter was Einstein’s stubborn belief in the physical world as something independent and pre-existing, needing no input from human beings. To repeat the incident that began this series of posts, “[Einstein] once walked back from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with the late Abraham Pais. The moon was out and Einstein asked Pais, ‘Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?’”

Why was this even an issue? Surely we can believe in the moon, and all gross physical objects, existing without us. You’d never suspect, cocooned in a worldview you take for granted, that Einstein of all people could be wrong about something so basic and obvious to our senses. But beginning with the quantum revolution over a century ago, as old accepted ideas went the way of the dodo, they were replaced by ideas closer to what is the actual reality. Here is a list of the most crucial ones, which we’ve selected because they apply to you as an individual.

  • We live in a participatory universe in which human input and the human mind matter.
  • The universe is either permeated by consciousness or even created and maintained by consciousness.
  • Matter doesn’t create mind. The two co-arise without one causing the other.
  • Every version of so-called “external” reality is provisional, incomplete, and flawed.
  • When stripped of theoretical explanations, time is not universal but is tied to observations. In reality there is only the eternal now.
  • The laws of nature are not immutable but are subject to change.
  • There is a psychological component to reality as observed by human beings. Observation isn’t passive; it changes the thing being observed.
  • With the breakdown of external physical explanations, the only reliable building blocks in Nature are derived from direct experience. We live in a universe constructed from qualia, the sight, sound, taste, texture, and smell of our experiences. Qualia are irrefutable, and if there is a reality beyond them, it cannot be conceived by the human mind.

In our book, You Are the Universe, we expand upon these ideas in detail. What matters to the individual is whether a better worldview exists than the one propped up by shaky, often dead ideas absorbed second hand.

Such a worldview lies beyond theory and is centered entirely on the creative aspect of consciousness. The replacement ideas just listed are not wishful thinking or anti-scientific. There are leading physicists, other scientists, and philosophers expounding them every day. Let’s imagine that a new and better worldview did arise and got accepted. Some time in a future we cannot predict, a team of advanced alien explorers from a distant star system might send back a report to their home planet about human beings that would read like the following:

“The human species is no longer as lonely, isolated, insecure, and self-doubting as they once were, nor as arrogant. They no longer attack and despoil their planet. Instead, they realize that they are immersed and entangled in the very fabric of Nature. They take responsibility as conscious agents who shape their own personal reality and in turn their environment. They humbly recognize that the universe at every moments springs from an inconceivable source.

“Rather than worshiping this source or ignoring it, humans celebrate the infinite creative potential of consciousness. Now that they understand how consciousness works at the very basis of reality, humans have adopted the role that always belonged to them, as co-creators of everything they know as real. The very universe they participate in is tailored to support human evolution.

“This shift in worldview represents the merger of two realms that humans kept apart, quite arbitrarily, for centuries, the realms of ‘in here’ and ‘out there.’ The two got united as one consciousness creating and governing everything. In fact, humans now see the world as nothing but consciousness modifying and reshaping itself constantly. This shift has had the practical effect of bringing body and mind together as a unity, the bodymind.

“There is enormous optimism on the planet for the first time in memory. No longer tied to conditioning from the past and anxious anticipation about the future, humans have learned to live in the present moment. In the present they have rediscovered the richness of insight, intuition, imagination, curiosity, love, compassion, personal growth, and their common humanity.

“Old rigid barriers of religious dogma, racial divides, and aggressive nationalism have come down thanks to the global effort that saved Earth from ecological disaster, just in the nick of time. Humans see boundless untapped potential within themselves, and this belief is taught to every child growing up. All of these changes are rooted in one tremendous insight, that reality is consciousness-based. No longer insignificant life forms clinging for survival on the speck of a planet floating in the cold void of infinite space, humans have reimagined themselves. In so doing, they realize that they have been imagining themselves all along. It’s lucky they made this insight in time to turn their destiny around.”

No one can read the future, but we can say that everything in the aliens’ report is plausible and has science on its side. Coming to terms with a new and better worldview will spring from science naturally, as the next step of the human project to understand who we are and why we are here.

 

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