Racism Is False Identity

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

America is said to be on the verge of a racial reckoning, a prospect that fills people with either hope or rage, depending on their politics. The far right encourages white supremacy while hotly denying that they are racists. Fully justified protest after police shootings of black men are seen in some quarters as the breakdown of law and order, which gets used as propaganda, again behind the shield of “I’m not a racist.” But the issue runs deeper than politics, and so does the possibility of healing.

The human race seems to move slowly out of the shadow of racism. Racism is entangled with the greatest forces that have shaped the fate of every people: war, empire, colonialism, and nationalism. At various points, all of these have been put in a positive light. Even now, when few would extol the virtues of empire or colonialism, the grip of nationalism remains strong.

Let’s say that we call racism a disease or infection in otherwise sane minds. This seems reasonable since feeling superior or inferior according to the color of your skin exists at an emotional, often subconscious level, not a rational one. How can we remove this infection when it hides so subtly inside us?

Irrational ideas are sticky. They cling even when we don’t want them to. This stickiness is due to various factors, and each can be changed. The primary factor is belief. Children are raised believing that one race is innately superior to another. If they belong to the wrong race, they are raised to feel victimized, angry, and resentful. Another belief is that history dictates destiny. The stagnation of any underclass is perpetuated because “it’s always been this way.” Then there are the endemic beliefs that a certain race is dangerous, criminal, ignorant, stupid, and prone to irrational acts.

Insidiously, these beliefs mask the disease. A racist can afford not to see himself as sick because he seemingly profits by being a racist. He is given a superior identity. In medicine, we call this a secondary gain, like a child getting ice cream and lots of attention when he goes into the hospital to have his tonsils taken out. To cure racism, you must first burst the spell of the false identity that racism confers, both on the racist and his victim.

I feel hopeful here because some powerful forces are at work against the disease. The election of Joe Biden has been widely and correctly seen as a blow against racism. But I also think back to Barack Obama, who rose above racial identity by first facing the broader question, “Who am I?” His struggle and the answers he came to are outlined in his book, Dreams of My Father, with its telling subtitle, “A Story of Race and Inheritance.” No person can be free of racism without examining the burden of a toxic inheritance. All over the world, improvements in living conditions, where they occur, give the population a chance to move away from primitive identities forced upon them by survival. Opportunity is strong medicine against enforced group think; poverty makes the disease worse.

But ultimately it will be the need to survive as a planet that will make racism no longer viable. Survival of the fittest is giving way to survival of the wisest. It may seem overblown to call an economically surging India wise, or America under Trump or oil-rich Russia with its defiance of environmental regulation. Yet anywhere that old, toxic identities are being toppled, wisdom has a chance to prevail over ignorance and prejudice. At its most basic, wisdom sees equality among all people at the level of possibility; once you stop narrowly defining yourself by tags of race, gender, nation, politics, and tribe, the truth dawns that human consciousness is a field of infinite possibilities. Every wisdom tradition has taught this truth for centuries.

Addressing climate change requires global cooperation, which eventually won’t be a choice anymore. When we are all in the same lifeboat, feeling superior to anyone else is folly. Let’s say that the lifeboat gets rescued and climate change is solved. What then? Racism cannot be separated neatly from the holistic issue of identity. “Who am I?” is a question that shifts with history, economics, and crises. If we are lucky, the current global crisis will serve as a cauldron for burning up racism and pushing it closer to eradication.

 


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 whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Mystery That Makes Life Possible

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Over the past few decades there’s been a creeping invasion that has tremendous repercussions for all of us. Strangely, it is the invasion of consciousness. I say strangely because for millennia human beings claimed total possession of consciousness. We think, invent, solve problems, show curiosity, and make conscious decisions. Even the cleverest of our near relations among the primates might or might not have minds—expert opinion remains sharply divided on the issue.

A chimpanzee or gorilla displays only a limited range of skills compared with human skills. A chimp might learn to dig grubs out from a hole using a stick, but toolmaking basically stops there, or using a rock to smash hard nuts, which some monkeys can do. A gorilla might learn to understand language and even use hand signs to communicate, but it can’t teach this skill to another gorilla.

You’d never suspect on the evidence that consciousness was creeping in everywhere, but now there are books on the conscious universe, and a band of physicists believes in panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is inherent in creation, permeating even subatomic particles. Almost a hundred years ago the astronomer Sir James Jeans declared that the universe “begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”

The invasion of consciousness has not reached the average person, but it has immense implications for how we view reality. It’s no mere curiosity if the universe is conscious. It means that life on Earth isn’t unique. It borrowed a cosmic trait and ran with it to produce billions of life forms. But the notion of cosmic consciousness only comes home when you look deeper into the mystery.

As consciousness has been ascribed to everything, by implication everything knows as much as we humans do. Mind isn’t just passively present. It is creating the cosmos in its own image. This of course is how God is described in religion. God as a superhuman living somewhere in the sky is graspable. Invisible, all-pervasive consciousness isn’t. Some mysteries are hard to fathom. How time began is one example. How electrical impulses in the brain create sights and sounds is another.

But the mystery of consciousness is different and unique. No other mystery will never be solved, because only this mystery is absolute. Anything else in Nature you can relate to. If it’s an object like a cloud, mountain, limestone cliffs, or a herd of elephants, you can break it down through your five senses to make a mental picture of it. You can take the object in hand and physically take it apart. You can think and argue about thoughts related to any experience.

But there’s no place to stand in order to view, handle, take apart, or manipulate consciousness. All actions go back to some idea in the mind, and the mind is like the eye—it can see everything but itself. Unless the skull is opened, none of us would know we have a brain. Even after ancient civilizations examined the brain, there was general agreement that the heart generated thoughts and feelings, not the gray, mushy, cold oatmeal-textured brain.

I don’t want to get tangled up in the thicket of metaphysics. In practical terms, consciousness, being an absolute mystery, is totally inconceivable. It can’t be defined for the same reason a fish can’t define what “wet” means. When you are completely immersed in water, there is nothing that isn’t wet. At this moment, as consciousness is creeping in everywhere, the same problem is stumping the best thinkers. If we are totally immersed in consciousness, there is no way to define it. You simply wind up talking around it, and the whole time you will be using consciousness, making the project the same as a snake swallowing its tail.

The mystery of consciousness can never be solved, yet in ancient India something extremely important was said about it: Consciousness is the inconceivable source of everything conceivable. The word “source” has enormous power. There used to be an old TV series, “The Millionaire,” where every week an anonymous check for one million dollars was given to someone chosen at the whim of the invisible benefactor. They were given only one restriction, that they could never tell anyone about the gift.
You and I find ourselves in the same position. We cannot tell anyone about the source of everything that makes life rich: love, compassion, charity, empathy, creativity, truth, beauty, insight, intuition, and personal evolution. They flow for the source of our humanity, and it is a creation of consciousness. God functions like the ultimate benefactor if you are religious, and in most faiths God asks for obedience, reverence, and worship. Consciousness ask for nothing. How could it? There is no worshiper separate from the source.

We are cosmic consciousness, working in, around, and through us. A quark, bacteria, and buzzing mosquito are different avenues for consciousness, but they are cosmic consciousness also. When everything has the same source, the playing field is leveled. But the value for the human condition is that we can say with total certainty that our highest values, the ones just named, are innate. Our existence is packaged with them because our consciousness is packaged with them.

Therefore, when we wander into wrongdoing, we’ve made a mistake. Evil and good aren’t equals or the product of genes or archetypes. Nothing conceivable by the mind can explain the source of love, compassion, creativity, and all the rest. But when these values are absent, distorted, or betrayed, it is important to realize that the negative side isn’t innate.

I realize that there is much room for heated debate about human nature, pain and suffering, and all manner of violence. Solutions to these things must be found in the outside world, to be sure. But the entire spiritual basis of humankind is the knowledge that each of us can return to our source, no matter how much we’ve strayed from it. Spiritual awakening is called a realization because you realize who you really are and where you came from. You came from the absolute mystery of consciousness, the source that made life possible in the first place.

 


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 whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

COVID-19 and a New Way to Be Happy

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Diseases point the way to the future if we pay attention. This holds especially true of the global outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19. It is clear that some important lessons have emerged already. Some of these are obvious because they are so visible: Uncertainty is a major cause of panic. No one could miss that lesson. Economies reflect mass psychology. This lesson follows from the first, because the plunge in worldwide markets has been driven by uncertainty.

But if you look a bit deeper, COVID-19 exposes a need to take human well-being more seriously. The great push to create a welfare state is around a century old, and certain countries like Sweden and Denmark went much further than the United States. But even in places where democratic socialism won the day, true human welfare wasn’t addressed. The basic right to have guaranteed housing medicine, and education—the cornerstones of the modern welfare state—treat people as economic units.

Actual well-being looks very different. Its hallmarks are community and mutual support, valuing happiness as essential to human life, affording lifelong good health, living in an environment with pure air and water, a lack of violence with a necessary emphasis on peace, equal acceptance for all, and the abolition of us-versus-them thinking of the kind that builds barriers of every kind.

When you list these ingredients in one place, it becomes painfully clear that a welfare state is far from being a well-being state. COVID-19 exposed how insecure most people actually feel, to the point that the real pandemic is fear, not the virus. It has been largely futile to spread actual facts in the face of the mass fear that social media and 24/7 news incite so easily. The people who are chiefly at risk of dying from the virus as the elderly and disadvantaged, two groups likely to have compromised immune systems or underlying chronic medical conditions.

For everyone else, standard prevention is the best recourse, with the additional advice not to go on extended planes trips or a cruise ship if you are already at risk. But such sensible medical advice is being drowned out. Moreover, the recent tendency toward authoritarian reactionary leadership has exposed that such leaders have a shocking lack of interest in anyone’s welfare but their own and the privileged class they belong to and protect.

COVID-19 has made people aware at some level that that their well-being is of little interest to the leaders they elect. But the underlying issue is that the wellness movement hasn’t caught on even to the extent that the average person knows how to be well, secure, happy, and self-sufficient for life. I mean this in personal terms, not economic ones. The average person is so fixated on holding a job and the price of gas that it seems like fantasy to talk about a fulfilling job and the price of unhappiness.

We need a new way to be happy based on well-being. To instigate such a radical shift has already begun—the wellness movement is here to stay. Global warming, despite reactionary resistance, has already alerted the world that any solution must be global. Nationalism only makes the problem worse. Sectarian violence, terrorism, and civil unrest are pointless (as they always have been) if you and the person you hate are both under the same climate threat.

If the progressive wing in politics really values well-being, it should propose a secretary position in the cabinet to boost everything that well-being stands for. If that proposal sounds too ideal or even foolish, then you might look in the mirror and ask what your own happiness is based on. If it is based on money, status, possessions, and lifelong consumerism, you need to wake up. Those have been the normal standards of happiness for a long time, but they have led to gross income disparity, a huge carbon footprint, a pitiful level of well-being for the world’s under-privileged, an ingrained prejudice against the poor and anyone “not like us,” and a society in which, beyond our immediate family and friends, all of us feel like strangers in a strange land.

COVID-19 has brought the situation under a glaring spotlight. If the past is prologue, the immediate reflex will not be positive—stores will be cleaned out of essential products when the right thing to do is to share these products, not hoard them. Rumor, gossip, and absurd untruths will block sensible advice, correct facts, and a healthy caution toward the outbreak.

But for all that, COVID-19 implies a new future and makes it more urgent. Passivity and inertia are no longer affordable. We’ve all booked passage on cruise ship Earth. There’s nowhere anyone can disembark, and all the passengers, including the ones in first class, are literally in the same boat. Only a new way to find happiness, based on a global self-care movements and personal well-being to replace empty consumerism and mass distractions, has any hope of leading to a better future. Consider this as seriously as you can, and make your own well-being the start of global wellness.

 


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.”

Finding Your Way to Gratitude

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Although Thanksgiving Day has become a time for turkey and football, its true purpose lingers, often as a wistful hope that one could be truly thankful. You cannot conjure up thanks if you are focused on the world’s troubles and a constant stream of bad news. So how is true gratitude found?

As writer and teacher Dana Arcuri has said, “The more you are grateful for what you have, the more you can live fully in the present.”. Psychologically, research has shown that practicing gratitude measurably improves your well-being and on the physical side, your heart health.

Gratitude begins when we change our relationship with life from an attitude of rejecting and defending to one of acceptance and appreciation. We all need reminding about a truth expressed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

When you spontaneously feel grateful for anything, don’t let the moment slip by. Pause, put your attention on the heart region in your chest, and experience the warm emotion suffusing it—this is how gratitude opens up the experience of love and bliss. At the same time you are making a mind-body connection. The sensation of warmth in your heart tells you that the message of gratitude has been sent and received by your cells. You can reinforce this connection by visualizing what you are grateful for; visualization is a powerful way to focus your intention.

Another very good practice is to lie in bed for a few minutes before falling asleep to review your day, bring to mind the things you are grateful for but were too busy to notice. Another quote is relevant, this one from the poet Maya Angelou: “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.” In other words, feeling grateful can be a devotional meditation.

Many people feel grateful in a way that doesn’t go very deep, especially if their motivation is material. Being grateful for a great job, big house, and new car keeps everything on the surface. At a deeper emotional level we are grateful for our families and good health. But at the deepest level, gratitude acknowledges that you have the support of nature. This support underlies your whole existence. It comes to you from pure consciousness, expressing itself through your true self.

Your true self is connected to pure consciousness and everything that flows from it. There is also another self, the ego, that manipulates life for its own purposes. The ego constantly chooses between “I want this” and “I don’t want that.” Life proceeds by getting more of what you want and less of what you don’t want. But this process overlooks the values located in the true self: love, compassion, truth, beauty, discovery, creativity, and evolution.

Some of these values do manage to make it to the surface of life, but our birthright is to have much more of them. Gratitude is a way of opening the channel that will bring more, by contacting the true self and speaking from your heart. Buddha taught a gratitude meditation called “gladdening the heart,” instructing the aspirant to consider the wonderful circumstances that led them to seek spiritual awakening and the ability to achieve it. Thanksgiving Day may never match the wisdom of this kind of meditation, but you can start, beginning her and now to bring the power of gratitude into your life.

 


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.”