By Deepak Chopra, MD
Lewis Carroll’s inventions are so entertaining, we tend to smile at how upset, vexed, and unsettled Alice actually is. Wonderland overturns our regular, orderly, and predictable life, which is what people actually want.
The inhabitants of Wonderland aren’t just fantastic. They are unhappy. The White Rabbit is anxious enough to be a study in stress over a deadline. The Duchess’s cook throws dishes in a state of rage, and the Duchess herself hands Alice her squalling baby, which turns into a pig. Alice is very glad to get out of there. But Wonderland haunts us, and for good reason.
We are shadowed in everyday life by fear of the unknown and unpredictable, and perpetual chaos would be intolerable. To assuage our fears, we have mentally constructed a picture of life that is reassuring, but wrong. There’s a kind of silent conspiracy to impose logic, reason, order, and predictability which actually isn’t there in Nature.
As an Oxford mathematician, under his real name of Charles Dodgson, Carroll was deeply attached to order, reason, and logic. In the Alice books he was sending two messages that modern people still believe in. The first has already been mentioned: It is better to live an orderly, well-organized life than its opposite, a disorderly and messy life. The second message is that the natural world runs on logical and predictable cause-and-effect. This message is sent by reverse example, since Wonderland is the place where the Red Queen “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Alice laughs at this, but there are at least three impossible things that everyone cannot do without.
Without it, the modern world wouldn’t exist—we might not even have the wheel.
Without synchronicity, diverse areas of the brain could not perform precisely coordinated activities; in fact, no cell could. Hard as it might be to credit, your whole body is held together by synchronicity, because gravity, electromagnetism, and chemical bonding aren’t enough to keep your body from flying apart into a cloud of atoms and molecules. Every force that acts upon you, every chemical reaction, and the hum of electricity in every cell must act in perfect accord to keep you intact. Mechanical cause-and-effect can do no more than make physical objects glom together lifelessly.
Two subatomic particles like an electron or photon can be paired so that no matter how far apart they are, if one undergoes a change, it will be instantaneously mirrored by the other in complementary fashion. Quantum entanglement happens instantaneously even across billions of light years, therefore defying the speed of light.
Einstein’s famous phrase for this, “spooky action at a distance,” reflected his disbelief that the speed of light could be defied. He spent the second half of his life trying to make sense of the phenomenon, and such was Einstein’s prestige that it has taken highly complex, expensive experiments (the latest involved using light from quasars billions of light years away, passing through some of the world’s biggest telescopes) to settle once and for all that he was wrong.
These three impossible things have such vast and unsettling implications that whole books have been written about each, but the upshot is that we are all Alice. We have settled into regular, orderly lives where predictability, logic, cause and effect, and the general theory of relativity operate, while on the fringes our existence is shadowed by impossible things. It is hard to realize that both worlds are equally valid as the framework of existence, and even harder to see that all the order, logic, rationality, and predictability is solely the construct of the human mind.
Standing back without any agenda in mind, you cannot help but observe that human beings are as intensely irrational as they are rational, that the creation of life on Earth has required the destruction of millions of prehistoric species in order to make way for Homo sapiens, and that science’s cherished laws of nature are constantly confronted with chaotic, random activity everywhere in the cosmos (not to mention in our bodies, where cancer is thought to be a runaway genetic mistake).
There’s a lot of skepticism about impossible things—the impossible things always win in the end, however—and a lot of propaganda, about how to make your dreams come true though making money, leading the ideal family life, constantly consuming more and more, etc. The three impossible things we’re discussing here haven’t shattered this illusion, but global climate change has a good chance of doing the job for us. The prosperous lives of consumers carelessly leaving huge carbon footprints has to change to avoid climate catastrophe, and yet the illusion of normality makes people cling to a lifestyle that only brings the peril closer.
One of the impossible things, intuition, might save us, in the form of new bright ideas that can be transformed into technology to end the imbalance of greenhouse gases. But many of these ideas already exist, but are blocked by our stubborn, perhaps fatal, attachment of what we call normal life. Believing in impossible things has a vastly important legacy and no doubt a future just as important. Science and our understanding of reality depends upon abandoning our illusions, no matter how comfortable they are.
OZY Fest is back — and it’s bigger, bolder and weirder than ever. This summer, get ready for the ultimate mashup in New York City’s Central Park.
SATURDAY JULY 20 & SUNDAY JULY 21, 2019
By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, PhD
So far as we know, human beings are unique in pondering our own existence as selves and also our place in the universe. You would think that this trait is enough to solve the mystery. After all, if I am aware of myself, I should be an expert on how the self operates.
But exactly the opposite is true. No one can say, with any hope of reaching a consensus, even the most basic things about the self. For example, “self” is both a word and a concept, yet no one knows how or when human speech came about, and concepts, which imply thinking, confront us with our ignorance about what a thought actually is. Take the simplest statement about the individual self, “I am.” When you say these two words to yourself, is it really possible that your brain cells know English and possess a voice?
The world’s spiritual traditions can be reframed as explorations into “I am.” Jehovah uses the phrase when he speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, as well as in Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” Jesus tells his disciples, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” In the ancient Vedas, supreme knowledge is conveyed, mysteriously enough, in the declaration, “I am That.”
The upshot, if we gather these statements together, is that “I am” is a statement beyond what we ordinarily think ourselves as individuals and holds the key to truth, life, existence, and a higher power known as God. The gist of the Upanishads is that all things are done by, for, and because of the self, the foundation of reality. However you parse our different types of scriptural heritage, as a species, we have been fascinated and baffled by our own self-awareness.
With self-awareness came an almost immediate sense that the self is divided. Again there are many expressions of this inescapable fact, but they generally play on the notion of opposites. Humans are divine and animal in their nature, capable of the highest good and the worst evil, driven by the conscious and the unconscious. So thoroughly is the divided self embedded in the rise of Homo sapiens that we possess a higher and lower brain, feeling torn between reason and irrational drives for sex, survival, and perhaps love and hate.
No one needs to be told that life, as viewed by humans, offers no escape from the divided self except one: discover the undivided self. If the self’s division isn’t innate, if it is a human creation, we should be able to go back and regain the earlier, more primal state of being one and whole.
This quest has held importance for centuries, and at some level, it unites the Christian search for Heaven, the Buddhist vision of Nirvana, and the Vedic teaching of liberation or enlightenment. Things haven’t changed that much in modern times. Eventually, if you take an interest in psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, religion, or the vast amorphous domain we call spirituality, you arrive at the self and its mysterious nature. Science cannot solve this mystery for us, although it can provide many clues through neuroscience, for example. But no brain map, however detailed, will ever put us in direct contact with the self, just as the best topographic maps cannot deliver the feeling of grass beneath your feet—the map isn’t the territory, as the saying goes.
What has baffled many explorers of the self, if we lump all of these fields together, is that the answer to the mystery of the self is right before our eyes. Every experience has one thing in common: the sense of the self. No matter what activity you are engaged in, excluding deep dreamless sleep, you have a sense of yourself. This sense has no voice, words, or thoughts to express itself in. “I am” is all there is. Without ‘I am” nothing else can happen, no thought, word, action, or act of imagination.
The reason that “I am” doesn’t seem to offer any answers isn’t just because it stays silent. The bigger reason is that “I am” is the answer. The sense of self, in other words, is the bottom line of human existence. There is nowhere else to go. The unitary self is inextricably entwined with consciousness and existence and therefore life itself. “I am” as the ultimate answer has little appeal, unfortunately, in the realm of science, which is based on investigating facts, data, and measurements of the physical world. Far from being intrigued by the mystery of the self, science has assiduously avoided the subjective world “in here” and continues to look for self-awareness as a physical function of the brain, or perhaps simply an illusion traceable to the complexity of a hundred billion neurons constantly sending signals in a vast, teeming storm of chemistry and electromagnetism. This is not an absolute statement. Some prominent founders of quantum mechanics, such as Max Planck and Schrödinger, believed in reality beyond what appears to be an external reality.
There’s no use, obviously, in trying to argue with many scientists who still follow a classical physics point of view, which is why the mystery of the self remains, as it has existed for thousands of years, a personal mystery, solved one person at a time. In the historical records we have literally thousands upon thousands of testimonies from explorers of the self, and their declarations about the unitary self—the self that lies beyond the divided self—show many common elements.
In quick summary, here are some of the unitary self’s leading qualities. It is:
Taken altogether, these traits are the enticement for seeking an answer to the ‘myself’ of the self, because at bottom, the self contains all of these traits if we can only get beyond our divided self, with all of its confusion and conflicts. Even in our divided state human beings possess every trait on the list—after all, the unitary self isn’t foreign to us, it is just “I am” when seen directly, without the cloud of beliefs, old conditioning, social training, and ego needs that occupy and dominate everyday life.
Reaching the unitary self—the term “nonduality” has become a popular tag for the same thing—involves an inward journey. Any kind of clarification (e.g., higher education, psychotherapy, philosophy) can serve to penetrate some of the fog that mask the nondual state, but deeper investigations lead to meditation, contemplation, self-reflection, and keeping on the path until enlightenment or awakening is reached. This whole area can be termed personal evolution, and of course it’s not news that our times are rife with interest in this very thing.
We’ve explored the universal extent of self-awareness in our book You Are the Universe, but we’d like to underline one point that will seem exotic. If the unitary self is real and can actually be experienced, deep sleep should form no barrier. Every-present means ever-present. The sense of self should not vanish in sleep just because mental activity and perception of the world “out there” are gone. And so it is fascinating that people who have awakened, in fact continue to experience, quite consciously, a sense of self during deep dreamless sleep. They testify that this is the purest experience of the self, due to the very absence of mental activity.
It’s a fascinating note to end on. “I am” can be secularized, and in our view should be, if it is ever to become the cornerstone of human existence. In terms of higher consciousness, “I am” is the way, the truth, and the life.
Who are you? If you’ve ever stopped to ask yourself this question, a myriad of adjectives have likely swirled around your…brain. But, is that really you? My guest today, psychologist and author Rebecca Gladding, MD, says, not necessarily. In fact, you may be working from a set of deceptive and tenacious, maybe even false, narratives in your brain. So join me to investigate how our identity is shaped and by whom —or what. And most importantly, how to reimagine the very idea of who you think you are.
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