A special thank you from Deepak while on book tour of The 13th Disciple.
Synchronicity, Evolution, and Your Genes (Part 3)
By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Jordan Flesher, MA Psychology
Two views of the universe have been contending with each other to explain why human beings exist. The first view holds that human beings are not special in any way. We evolved through random events that have accumulated over time, taking 13.7 billion years since the big Bang to arrive at the most complex structure in creation, the human brain. This view, long established in physics and biology, constructs evolution in the absence of mind. Matter came first, and mind emerged very late in the game.
The contending view, held by every wisdom tradition, holds that mind came first. The universe is a field of consciousness, which made it inevitable that conscious creatures would evolve over time. Using our self-awareness, humans recognize order, harmony, beauty, truth, love, balance, equanimity, creativity, and the other qualities essential to consciousness. Over the course of our evolution as a species, we have come to embody these qualities. Therefore, the link between humanity and the universe is intimate, to the extent that the only creation we experience is the human cosmos.
Why Does Richard Dawkins Keep Doing Me Favors?
By Deepak Chopra, MD
In a recent article on his website, Richard Dawkins spontaneously erupted, even though he and I haven’t had contact for many months. We debated once in Mexico City, and he erupted there, too. The ideas I put forth, such as the possibility that we live in a conscious universe, bring out the Scrooge in him.
Now he’s posted a real bah humbug: “Why Does Deepak Chopra Hate Me?” written by Steven Newton (Link: https://richarddawkins.net/2015/04/why-does-deepak-chopra-hate-me/) It’s mostly an ad hominem fulmination without basis in fact. Dawkins pastes the tag “anti-evolutionist” on me even though he was part of an e-mail discussion for a while that included top geneticists and other scientists along with me, in which we discussed where evolutionary theory might be heading in the future.
Dawkins bowed out with a surly growl. He doesn’t keep up with the new genetics, and so one can understand why it infuriates him that someone like me, lacking his academic credentials, knows something about the subject–enough to be writing a new book, Super Genes, with Dr. Rudy E. Tanzi, one of the world’s leading researchers on Alzheimer’s. Dawkins, despite his scientific background and air of complete authority, has written zero books with any prominent researcher, geneticist, or anyone else who might bring him up to date on his own field.
I can only shrug at his latest polemic, which is filled with stray arrows shot in the dark. Actually, he’s done me a favor. By airing the ideas he finds preposterous, such as flaws in Darwinian theory, the conscious universe, and the ontological problem of whether the moon exists without an observer (he seems unaware that this “crackpot” idea was discussed between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr on a famous occasion), Dawkins is pointing his readers to some of the most exciting theory that is sure to impact the future of science.
Sadly, mocking these ideas is the closest he will ever come to grasping them.
Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. His latest book is The 13th Disciple: A Spiritual Adventure.
The 13th Disciple & The Future of God
Deepak has generously shared his Prezi presentation on The 13th Disciple & The Future of God. Check it out: Prezi.
Synchronicity, Evolution, and Your Genes (Part 2)
By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Jordan Flesher, BA Psychology
Everyone has had a meaningful coincidence happen to them–the classic example is thinking of someone’s name and the next minute that person telephones, or seeing an unusual word in your mind’s eye and then running across that word the next time you open a book. It’s spooky that the outside world can be synchronized with our inner world, yet the bigger question is about reality itself. Synchronicity, the common term for meaningful coincidences, doesn’t tend to change anyone’s life–but it could.
Instead of passing off such experiences as incidental, what if synchronicity is telling us something crucial about reality, linking the inner and outer worlds because in the long run, they are completely unified? If inner=outer, a tremendous shift in the Western materialistic worldview would follow. Let’s see how far the trail of clues takes us.