By Deepak Chopra, MD

Everyone is good at avoiding the elephant in the room, which refers to something everyone is aware of but cannot bring themselves to discuss. In some ways the ultimate elephant in the room is human nature. We all exhibit human nature, but we rarely discuss it for a simple reason: no one knows what to do with it.

Lions suffer no inner conflict when they prey upon the weak, but we do, or should. Mating season doesn’t send dolphins into an emotional tailspin, but human sexuality is fraught with psychological implications, and for some people these are unresolved for a lifetime. The essential problem, however, is that human nature is torn between opposites. We see ourselves as good and bad together, rational and irrational, peaceful and violent.

The divided self is a central topic in a new book I’ve written titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. In it I counter the general helplessness that people feel about human nature. It’s a helplessness born of being human, quite literally. Just to exist as a human being involves an inheritance of opposites. As children we learn to curb the dark side of these opposites, but psychology hasn’t gotten much beyond Freud’s sad conclusion that civilization barely keeps a lid on our innate tendency to violence, sexual jealousy, hatred of others, and similar inherited woes.
If human nature has been in conflict since recorded history began, perhaps it should remain the elephant in the room. This seems to be a kind of silent consensus. People feel free to discuss almost anything except the presence of the divided self. Countries pass military budgets, cities support police forces, legislatures pass laws, all of which try to curb the worst in human nature, and yet the people passing the laws and paying for armies and police forces are afflicted with the same impulses they attempt to curb.

Despite the tendency to take these things for granted, human nature is not like the nature of a lion, dolphin, or any other creature—it isn’t really fixed or innate. We go beyond our nature all the time, which is why I chose the Greek word “meta,” which means beyond, in the book’s title. There is a well-known dictum that you cannot fix a problem at the level of the problem. This would seem to stymie any solution to the problem of human nature, because most people assume they are stuck with being human and all the defects this entails.

Rationality, science, art, education, and lawmaking constitute vast areas where we do not simply accept our divided self but build constructs that shape reality in an orderly, predictable, safe, and even beautiful way. The streets of Renaissance Italy were rife with gangs and family feuds (think of Romeo and Juliet) that gave rise to daily violence and danger, and yet Leonardo and Raphael flourished at the same time.

Going beyond has its limits, however. One could say that science and art and laws compensate for our inner conflicts without actually solving them. This seems obvious, in fact. Caravaggio, a great Italian painter, was on the run for murder and eventually died by violence in some obscure way no one has gotten to the bottom of. Corruption in politics, as well as the #MeToo movement, are indicators that the worst in human nature lurks in places of the highest positions and power.

In Metahuman I argue that going beyond hasn’t really been tested to the limit. There is a more powerful form of going beyond than art, science, laws, and even rationality. It involves going beyond human nature itself and undoing all the mental constructs that enfold us. The bald fact is that human nature is a self-created construct. The lower brain remains with us on our evolutionary journey, implanted with basic impulses like fight-or-flight. But Homo sapiens escaped from evolutionary jail thousands of years ago.

A lion is a lion because it’s a lion—there is no choice in the matter. Humans are self-created because we are self-aware. Thus we counter survival of the fittest by taking care of our weak, poor, and disabled. We educate ourselves to transcend instinct in favor of expanded awareness. In fact, expanded awareness is our whole purpose. Science and technology cannot exist unless you are aware that there is a challenge or problem to solve. Then you look inside for ideas that lead to a solution.

What this means is that awareness solves the conflicts inherit in human nature. Nothing can be changed if you aren’t aware of it. I am not addressing how difficult our problems are. My only aim is to point to the only true level of the solution that isn’t mired at the level of the problem. We have constructed imperfect societies, imposed religious beliefs that are shot through with mythology, and funded armies to project our need to be violent when called upon.

Yet the things we most value are not mental constructs. They include love, compassion, creativity, generosity, joy, curiosity, and the potential to grow. Leonardo had the mind and skill to paint the Mona Lisa, but he didn’t invent creativity. Einstein had brilliant scientific ideas, but he didn’t invent curiosity. The foundation for what we most value lies at the source of the mind, which is consciousness itself. Human nature was invented at a distance from the source. We can be sure of this because consciousness per se is not divided; it is whole.

Wholeness is uncreated. We exist and we are conscious. That is a statement of wholeness. Metahuman is based on the claim that existence and consciousness are the same. To be fully conscious, you only need to be here now. Everything else is at the level of the problem.

“Be here now” is a good catchphrase, devised by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who is still alive. Beyond the catchphrase lies the hidden reality that transcends all of our mental constructs. There is no apparent limit to human potential. We have infinite thoughts to think and infinite ways to express those thoughts. Yet the most brilliant thoughts are still secondary to consciousness itself. The fact is that humans live from the level of thought rather than the level of awareness. This is like knowing how to use a computer while suffering from amnesia about where computers come from.

I’ve only given a bare outline of what can be accomplished by going beyond. The essential thing is to go beyond human nature in order to find the source where human nature was invented. Only from there can we change human nature. Our other choice is to keep living with human nature and shrug off its defects as if they are inevitable. Which course seems better to you?

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify www.deepakchopra.com 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The human potential movement has existed for several decades, and in many ways is an alternative name for self-improvement. The urge to improve oneself exists naturally in everyone, unless outside forces like poverty damp it down. But the human potential movement is far more ambitious. It aims to open up a vast area of unexplored potential.

I argue in a new book titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential that the true foundation of human potential is infinite. At first that seems like a drastic overreach. Everyone experiences personal limitations that stop far, far short of the infinite. But let me make the case by first turning the whole premise of self-improvement on its head.

The typical way that human potential is approached starts with the limited individual and seeks to lessen these limitations. There’s a school of thought that believes in achieving a 10% increase in happiness, which is seen as a major step. The notion is that happiness is so difficult to understand that any improvement would have to be small. In an area like IQ, the goal is even smaller, because intelligence is accepted among experts to be fixed, budging very little from childhood. A third example is creativity, which would seem to allow for enormous improvement, but finding out what makes creative people creative has proved to be a frustrating and baffling business.

The problem in all these areas, I believe, isn’t human limitation but the wrong starting point. You can’t get to infinite potential by starting with finite potential. All of us start from infinity in certain areas, although we might not realize it. Your mind is capable of infinite thoughts, for example. You won’t actually have an infinite number of thoughts in a lifetime—the actual number is unknown but one assumes it is very large –yet the potential for infinite thought is the reservoir you draw on. You are free to think anything you want.

The same holds true for language. A reasonably large vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words is sufficient to create more sentences than the number of atoms in the universe. The infinite capacity of language parallels the capacity of thought, since thoughts are in words. Another kind of infinity exists with creativity. The potential number of paintings, photographs, and pieces of music that can possibly exist is unlimited.

Since we are already comfortable with the infinite in so many areas, why do we adopt a self-image that is severely limited? The two culprits are ego and the stories the ego builds around itself. What people don’t realize is that their egos have agendas. This agenda consists of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, following a constant stream of desires that want fulfillment, finding safety and security, and defending itself from threat.

To turn this agenda into reality is a skill we were all taught as children. A child is full of doubt and curiosity; everything in life demands to be tested. In the process of having desires, feeling insecure, wanting predictability, and pleasing our parents, we wobble towards maturity on a path that is different for everyone and yet the same. The ego accumulates experiences that must further its agenda in order to be acceptable. Too much pain, difficulty, vulnerability, embarrassment, defeat, and rejection by others constitute a major threat to the ego agenda.

Since life is unpredictable, it can bring any of those undesirable experience at any time. To defend against this possibility, the ego builds up a story about what a person’s life is all about, and in this story things are not unpredictable—far from it. Most people think, say, and do what they said, thought, and did yesterday. In this way we feel a measure of security, but it comes at the cost of losing our infinite potential. Nothing limits the unlimited reservoir of thoughts, words, and creativity except our self-imposed boundaries.

If the ego’s agenda actually worked, life might be fulfilling enough. However, there is no escaping the fact that the future is unknown, filled with awful possibilities the ego cannot defend against.

Deep down we all know this, but instead of dropping the ego agenda, we become more insecure and stick to it more rigidly. People cling desperately to money, possessions, status, power, and old habits with a fierceness that is in direct proportion to their deep insecurity. Nothing is ever enough to defend you against whatever life might bring. The human potential movement faces an uphill battle because of the inner struggle few of us ever resolves. We want to expand, improve, and better ourselves while at the same time we want to desperately cling to our story, which is founded on anxiety and insecurity.

In Metahuman I argue that beginning from infinite potential is the only way to escape the grip of one’s ego agenda. This doesn’t entail exceptional courage in the face of the unknown. It only involves going beyond your current level of awareness. Einstein observed, as have many others, that problems are not solved at the level of the problem. The ego and its agenda are a constant problem, so the solution is to go beyond the level of struggle where the ego rules.

“Meta” is the Greek word for beyond, and it points toward metahuman, a state of awareness that is fully conscious. The process of becoming metahuman is like waking up. You begin to investigate your personal story and to free yourself from it. The essential thing is to realize that you have edited, censored, reduced, and distorted reality. What you call real is a mind-made dream, spell, or illusion.

Life cannot be whole unless you are whole, a word most people find more comfortable than infinite. But they amount to the same thing. At the source of human awareness there is pure consciousness, the state of awareness that exists simply because it exists. Pure consciousness isn’t flat or empty, however. It is the source of the things we most value out of life: love, compassion, intelligence, creativity, and personal evolution. The closer you live from the source, the greater your share of these valuable things.

This possibility cannot come true until you test it personally. Instead of following an ego agenda, you must shift into a waking-up agenda. This reversal sounds drastic, but in reality it comes naturally once you start. Anything the mind has made the mind can unmake. The potential for metahuman is embedded in the human. We only have to notice and take advantage of the openings that life brings every day. Infinity has always been the right starting point for being truly human, and it beckons us again, as it has forever.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His anticipated book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, (October 1, 2019) unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities.

Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com