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.”

Finding the Universe in a Coffee Cup

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Menas Kafatos, PhD

The universe is hard to explain, because there are so many moving parts and so many levels, probably infinite in both cases. It is a cherished goal in physics to unify these parts, but so far success has eluded even the most brilliant investigators. The average person might take an occasional interest in the latest theories about the cosmos, but we think the mystery of the universe faces everyone on a daily basis, as does the solution to the mystery.

The cosmic riddle is easy to state: Is the universe whole? Do its parts all work together, and if so, how? Clearly the universe isn’t a machine, because machines are assembled from mechanical parts with visible connections like the gears in a car’s transmission. But the universe has a peculiar feature. The moving parts, meaning any physical object, whether as large as a galaxy or as tiny as an atom, depend on probabilities to show us their properties, and these suddenly vanish at the quantum level. Even large, or macroscopic, objects exhibit quantum behavior. To drive the point home, subatomic particles do not have a stable identity. They flicker in and out of one state, following invisible probability waves. The same peculiarity holds true for the other basic ingredients of what we call everyday reality: time, space, and energy. All have an invisible source beyond the physical, even though we experience them in the physical world.

Classical physics, like all of today’s science, depends on reductionism, the method that explains a phenomenon by breaking it down into smaller parts. Reductionism is tied to the fundamental idea that reality is physical and that nothing else is needed beyond the physical. Even though modern physics is hugely complex, the outmoded notion that the universe is a gigantic physical mechanism keeps persisting a century after quantum theory dismantled the very notion that the mystery of the universe lies in its tiniest bits and pieces.

If the mystery of the universe can be solved, the solution doesn’t lie with a purely physical explanation. If we take an ordinary object like a coffee cup, the mystery of everything is contained in it, and in one stroke the mystery can be solved, because in the experience of holding a coffee cup, you can simultaneously throw out a solution that doesn’t work and see that the right solution is dawning. Holding the cup and experiencing it is as important as the cup itself. The two cannot be separated.

Physics can reduce a coffee cup to the smallest scale before everything vanishes in the quantum dimensions known as the Planck scale, named for a seminal quantum physicist, Max Planck, who started the entire quantum revolution in 1903. Measurements of length are extremely tiny, almost infinitesimal at the Planck scale. As a unit of measurement, the Planck length is 100 million trillion times smaller than the proton. Planck theorized that five infinitesimal units that characterize the micro world—length, mass, energy, temperature, and charge—can be reduced to individual quantum scales to the smallest possible values at the scale where the universe, and everything in it, originates. If you try to imagine the womb of creation, the Planck scale is its location.

Planck-scale units tell us the scale at which the universe began during the Big Bang, but they also mark the end of the road. This is where the laws of nature no longer operate, where “smaller” is impossible to measure because length itself, along with the whole setup of three dimensions, time, and every known constant, ceases to have meaning. There is much more to say about the Planck scale, but one thing is clear. Physical explanations stop here, and they haven’t solved the mystery of the origin of the universe. What lies over the Planck scale horizon cannot be known by any kind of physical experiment, data, facts, or any observation.

Where the universe collapses into pure mystery, so does a coffee cup and so do you. You are beyond any facts, which means that physical data concerning you, although interesting and useful, are just provisional, temporary, and relative. In fact, any theory reaches a horizon of understanding about the mysteries that lie beyond. The true, essential you (along with the coffee cup and the entire universe) can only be found following a non-physical path of explanation. This path, which is open to direct experience, is the path of consciousness. We are so conditioned to accept the physical explanation of reality that the path of consciousness seems alien. But consciousness itself already defies the reductionist approach—as another great quantum physicist, Erwin Schrödinger declared, it makes no sense to subdivide the mind. It is far more credible and ultimately self-consistent to explain everything as a creation of consciousness than as a machine-like conglomeration of matter and energy.

The Planck scale cannot be observed, only speculated about. But whatever is happening, you and I are the result, along with everything in existence. Something has to be going on, and if it isn’t material or physical, if it doesn’t take time or occur in space, there is only one thing that the human mind can conceive, which is consciousness. This is a classic example, one might say, of Sherlock Holmes’s dictum that when every other explanation has failed, the one that remains, however improbable, must be true. Consciousness-based reality is ultimately the cleanest, most self-consistent and irreducible view of the wholeness that science and philosophy are trying to reach.

Assigning the leading role to consciousness isn’t improbable. Being conscious is the essence of every experience. Without awareness, there is no known reality. To someone wedded to a purely physical explanation, consciousness is nothing, or at best a lingering mystery that no one can understand, but once you step away from physicalism, consciousness is everything. This choice, between nothing and everything, is crucial; you can’t get around it. Planck himself came to believe that consciousness is fundamental to the universe. In an attempt to salvage physicalism, it is argued that the universe existed for billions of years before human beings appeared on the scene to be aware of it.

Physical explanations miss the point. What does it mean to say you are conscious? It means that you perceive, understand, and know. It means that you can think, observe, speak, and act. It means that you have a sense of self. These features of you cannot be created out of physical stuff. It only makes sense that they have always been around, woven into the fabric of existence itself. Consciousness knows, understands, perceives, observes, etc. These are its basic qualities, just as wetness is a basic quality of water.

So the path of consciousness is built up not from bits and pieces of matter, but the process of consciousness creating anything it wants simply by projecting itself. Its creative ability begins with nothing but itself. It doesn’t need space, time, matter, and energy. They are tools of creation the way a painter uses the tools of color. A painting needs the tools of color to be created, but clearly the painting is much more than those tools. A coffee cup has local qualities and universal qualities at the same time. It is a “thing” and it is the idea of the thing. The local qualities are its color, shape, hardness, lightness, and so on. Its universal qualities are invisible, playing their part behind the scene. These are the qualities of creativity embedded in consciousness.

There is every reason to shift our explanations to be consciousness-based. When you see a painting, its local qualities are in the picture. You can study the Mona Lisa for hours absorbing these qualities. But implicitly you know that it took a conscious mind, belonging to Leonardo da Vinci, to assemble those local qualities. He conceived how to make the model’s smile elusive, her beauty enigmatic, her skin luminous, and the inert paint come alive. Without consciousness, no local qualities can exist. The same is true of the universe, your body, a coffee cup, and anything else. Without consciousness to unify everything, we would be left with the only alternative, which is nothing.

 

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