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.”

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

2020 Wellbeing Predictions with Deepak Chopra

“The future of wellbeing is bioregulation and homeostasis through self-regulation.”‘ – Deepak Chopra

Deepak recently participated in Virgin Pulse’s 2020 Vision: Wellbeing Industry Predictions where leading experts in health and wellbeing, HR and business share insights on emerging trends that will impact your employee experience in 2020 and beyond. You can explore the predictions in detail and get related resources to turn your vision into action, or download a complete eBook of the 2020 predictions at Virgin Pulse Website.

Deepaks predictions along with additional wellness resources for the new year can be found here.

 

There Is No chaos, There Is Only Creativity

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The human mind is addicted to opposites, but it turns out that Nature isn’t. This statement becomes important in a deep way when it comes to chaos. In our minds chaos, or disorder, is the opposite of order. By thinking like this, we oblige the human tendency to prefer order over disorder. Leading an orderly life supports every kind of organized activity from making a meal out of raw ingredients assembled in an orderly way to making an iPhone or any other technological tool in an orderly way.

Chaos is the messiness that disrupts order and can cause it to fall apart. In Victorian times mental illness was often referred to as a disordered mind, and it is the mind that we rely upon to keep life organized and rational. But what if this whole discussion is simply wrong? As long as we believe in chaos, it serves as a potent threat. Cancer causes chaos in the regulation of the body; earthquakes shake up cities; riots in the street threaten civil society.

The threat of chaos changes when we shift our perspective. Expand your viewpoint, and chaos is the mask worn by creativity. To die of cancer returns your orderly body to a disorderly state known as decay, but the material of your body continues to contribute to the life of fungi, bacteria, and other micro-organisms. Good for them, you might grumble, but without them, human DNA could not have evolved. Earthquakes topple buildings, but without seismic shifts, the present-day continents wouldn’t exist, or the life forms that inhabit Asia instead of Africa or North America instead of Europe.

Creation cannot exist without destruction. This much is clear even in our thoughts. Your last thought has to vanish in order for a new thought to arise. The same is true of chemical reactions and electromagnetic charges that makes the brain operate. No process in Nature can exist eternally, and many of the most crucial, from the viewpoint of being on planet Earth as a living creature, last only a few thousandths of a second at the level of the quantum.

Science has favored an imbalance by favoring destruction over creation. For a long time the model of Nature physics operates under gives precedence of randomness, chaos, accident, and entropy, as if we are back in the 18th century when the cosmos was seen as a windup mechanism like a clock perpetually running down. The cosmic mechanism was set up with everything it needed at the Big Bang, and it has been decaying ever since, with exceptions.

The exceptions are big ones—all the orderly forms in Nature from atoms and molecules to stars, galaxies, and planets. It has never been clear why this imbalance favoring destruction looks upon creation as the exception when just as easily we could see creation as the rule and the dominant force in Nature.

It actually makes sense to see Nature as absolutely creative, with destruction simply being a construct of the human mind. It is impossible to think of any destructive process that isn’t actually a step toward a new creative outcome. Since this is undeniable, from the quantum to the cosmic level, it is better to drop the opposition of chaos and order. From a creative standpoint, disorder mixes things up to open the way for something new to happen.

This new perspective isn’t just a mental game. As long as human beings are just physical entities sitting on a speck of a planet lost among trillions of stars, destruction has the upper hand and randomness rules. But if we are part of eternal creation instead, then our participation changes, and the change is radical. If we live in a participatory universe where our thoughts, desires, and intentions matter, human beings turn into powerful creative agents.

That can only happen when we give consciousness priority over the physical. At bottom, science views chaos as a dominant feature because of physicality—tiny bits of matter can be viewed bouncing around mindlessly everywhere. Yet the bouncing around of tiny bits of matter in our brains doesn’t dominate at all. Those tiny bits are serving the mind and its infinite creative potential. Outside the brain, any given cell in the body is a riot of tiny bits bouncing around, yet our bodies operate with exquisite intelligence, precision, and knowledge. The wisdom of the body sounds like a faddish phrase, but that wisdom is real, and without it we wouldn’t exist.
Physics is currently in a funk due to the unraveling of almost every accepted model based on pure physicality. Look at the rash of current articles in any branch of physics, and you find headlines about quarks (the tiniest building blocks in nature) not really existing, causation going backwards in time, photons being teleported from one location to another, dark matter and energy subverting the whole scheme of atoms and molecules, and much, much more in the way of anomalies piling up to disprove previous assumptions that only a few decades ago seemed all but iron-clad.

The reality is that Nature is totally creative. There are no anomalies contradicting set laws of nature. The laws are provisional at best, constantly open to change. Nor is this change destructive. A new process is always bubbling up to create new forms. A higher order of creation is always possible, which is why physics now credits the existence of trillions of universes, each employing its own laws and its own version of space, time, mater, and energy.

We live in a state of fermenting creativity, and nothing else matters. In the flux of creative dynamism, the only force that oversees everything is consciousness. I don’t have the space to detail why this is true (interested readers can consult my book, Metahuman, for the full picture). But at the very least, once you see that you are embedded in infinite creative possibilities, the current gloom about the future of humankind and the planet we inhabit can be dispelled. The way out of every difficulty is always creative, and no one is better placed to put that principle into action than you, me, and everyone.

 

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.”

Making the Season of Peace Really Matter

By Deepak Chopra, MD

A world ceaselessly in a state of unrest seems to mock this time of year as a season of peace. Most people are simply grateful that unrest hasn’t touched their lives, and hope fades for the victims of war and strife who will probably never enjoy peace except during brief truces. The link between holidays and holy days may be fragile in these times, but you can be a unit of peace consciousness starting now.

This happens at the level of intention and attention.

First, intention. Holidays are about gatherings, first of family but also of events that embrace community and nation. It’s therefore easy to feel, on the negative side, that you have little or no control over what’s happening around you. Swept up in holiday rituals that are simply a given, surrounded by squabbling family members and old tensions, you can easily be overwhelmed.

The way out is by centering yourself and being clear, first on the inside, what you intend your holiday season to be. A helpful exercise is to sit quietly with eyes closed and say to yourself, I want joy. I want peace. I want grace and love. As you say each phrase, pause and feel joy, peace, love, and grace as the silence of your Being. Joy, peace, love and grace are your essential nature. It doesn’t matter how you settle into this feeling/knowing. Putting your attention on your heart is often helpful, or seeing a soft light in that region.

No one can intend these things except you, and when you feel them inside, you don’t depend on others quite as much. Try repeating this exercise every day during the holiday season. You can go a step further, too. Instead of seeing this as a defense against holiday stresses, why not commit yourself to making the holidays a time for your own evolution? In other words, by asking for joy, peace, love, and grace, your intention is to arrive at the new year renewed in spirit.
Secondly, attention. Once you have committed yourself to evolving during the holidays, put your attention on this. What most people do at this time of year is brace themselves for the negative side of the holidays—the family tensions, shopping, scary credit card bills, hectic pace, and for many, a predictable bout of depression. The gap between what people wish for and what actually happens to them is wide. You can put your attention on closing the gap, both for you and for others.

Some suggestions to do this:

  1. Raise your appreciation quotient. When you interact with anyone, don’t automatically mutter “Happy Holidays.” Say of word of appreciation and offer a smile. Make them feel your good will.
  2. Think less about yourself, more about others. Inner growth doesn’t happen at the ego level, and it’s the ego that constantly finds fault, with yourself and others. By turning your attention to others, you can give yourself a vacation from the ego.
  3. Practice empathy. Focus on how others are feeling and extend yourself with sympathy. Empathy establishes an emotional bond and helps counter the isolation and loneliness that people tend to feel during the holidays. But empathy can also extend to noticing how happy someone looks, also. It doesn’t have to be sympathy for negative emotions.
  4. Be easy on yourself. If you aim to make the holidays perfect, failure is around the corner. Most people are weighed down by demands they make on themselves, so consciously look for ways to be easy on yourself. Taking time out every day for a few private moments to relax and meditate is a good practical step.
  5. Keep away from toxicity. When you find yourself in the presence of toxic emotions, tension, stress, and conflict, don’t join in. Do your best to walk away as soon as you can. Toxicity also extends to alcohol. It may be traditional to drink heavily during the holidays, but remain mindful of your consumption. In fact, notice if you aren’t actually more pleasant and friendlier without alcohol.
  6. Set limits, and do it gracefully. When people drink or revive old family issues or find other excuses to drop their inhibitions, things often get said and done that lead to regret. It doesn’t matter if other people stop respecting your boundaries. It is up to you to maintain them, to politely point out when you are uncomfortable. If the other person can’t take a hint, don’t repeat your objection but walk away.
  7. Watch out for reactive responses. A reactive response is a knee-jerk response, and most people indulge in them dozens of times a day. We repeat the same words, feelings, opinions, beliefs, and judgments without pausing to think. If you want to evolve, reactive responses aren’t helpful. They prevent you from living in the now, renewing yourself, being open to new possibilities, seeing something good in other people, and much more. So, if you notice yourself thinking, feeling, or saying something and you know you’re automatically repeating the past, pause, and find a different response.
  8. Look for new responses. Once you stop reacting, a space is open for a new response. Where do you find it? Look around. Open your eyes to something or someone in the room that you haven’t noticed before. Or simply center yourself and be quiet inside for a moment. The point is to step outside constricted awareness. Being “tight” in your awareness supports the reactive mind; being “loose” in your awareness brings openness.
  9. Focus on the spiritual, the uplifting side of things. Even if you find little to inspire you from other people and outside events during the holidays, don’t criticize them, or the world, for that. Inspiration is an inner quality. Turn to the poetry or scriptures that inspire you, and you will find in them something precious: intimate communication from another person’s heart and soul. It doesn’t even matter if you adopt the beliefs or sentiments in the words. The important thing about inspiration is its humanity, the felt presence of someone else’s higher self that sparks and warms your higher self.

 

These nine points give you a personal agenda for the holidays, and with a little creativity, you can personalize them to fit your life. Even though the time may not come soon when holy days take on their true meaning, as times for spiritual communion, but you can still devote yourself to a private spirituality that brings holiness to your inner world.

 

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.”