Existence and the Virus: A Healing Solution

By Deepak Chopra™, MD

The COVID crisis is being fought on two fronts, medical and economic, but most people are suffering psychologically. The word “existential” rarely comes up in normal everyday life, but the crisis has created all the symptoms of existential dread: a sense of futility, anxiety about the human condition, and a deep fear of death. This comes as a shocking occurrence, and if there is such a thing as existential healing, now is the time for it.

Questions about existence baffle people, and there seems to be no reason to confront them until the last moment. One of the reasons that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 book, On Death and Dying, was seized upon by millions is that she drew a map of grief that showed dying patients that the inevitability of death wasn’t terrifying in the end. The five stages of grief outlined by Kübler-Ross—denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance—coincides with what is seen in hospice care. The prospect of death for most people leads to acceptance.

But there is a sixth stage of grieving that applies right now: meaning. The most fortunate patients go beyond acceptance to see that their lives had purpose, that existence is meaningful, and therefore that death lost its final power, which is fear and dread. This is the healing that I think should be embraced now. The actual deaths caused by COVID-19 are outnumbered by the cases of fear and dread being experienced on a mass scale. One way or another, we have all entered the grieving process.

There are two paths to arrive at the peace that comes when your life is meaningful. The first path is through action and achievement. You set out on a purpose, and you succeed in fulfilling it. Ideally everyone should be able to create meaning through the work they do, the service they offer, the love they share, and the good they achieve. But during lockdown, there is often no outlet for this path. We find ourselves passively victimized by a mindless virus that is achieving far more than its human victims; that is, its purpose in life, which is to find a host and multiply, has been astoundingly successful.

But the second path to a meaningful life hasn’t been touched by the virus, and never can be. This path is one of realization. You go inside and discover that you are sustained by your own being. At your core you find value, no matter what you do in life, and no matter what external threats assail you. This path has been open forever, and its teaching occupies the world’s spiritual traditions both East and West. Nirvana, Moksha, liberation, the Kingdom of Heaven within, the peace that passes understanding: by whatever name, the path is essentially the same.

The problem is that we have erected mental barriers that block this path, which should be the easiest path imaginable. Its message is grasped naturally by children: You are here, and that is enough. There is no need to a pilgrimage to a holy place, years in a spiritual retreat, long immersions in silence, or the proverbial cave in the Himalayas. The only thing to do is to wake up as directly as you can, here and now. So why don’t we? It isn’t as if the teachings from spiritual guides, teachers, seers, sages, avatars, gurus, and saints is lacking. What’s the problem?

Once you ask this question, you are on your way to waking up. Existential dread is actually a mental creation. We listen to the voice of fear in our heads; we let fear become an emotion that we feel powerless to oppose; we are lulled into passivity by the everyday routine of life; we don’t bother to see for ourselves; and we have a lot of desirable goals in mind that make it easy to avoid the inner journey.

If you set all of that baggage aside for one moment of clarity, you will see clearly that existence has never been the problem. In fact, it is the solution. Every moment of epiphany, revelation, divine presence, inner peace, etc. has only one source: existence. You have to be here first before anything, good or bad, can happen. So why not just be here? The thinking mind cannot just be here, because it is filled with a riotous display of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Yet these must have a source, and the source isn’t a thought, feeling, or sensation.

The source is existence. The spiritual promise, the goodie that every religion holds out, is that there is “higher” existence. But this too is a mental construct. Existence isn’t like a luxury high rise that saves the best apartments for the top floors. Existence is the rock solid, indestructible, eternal, immutable zero point at which everything begins. Simply by existing, human beings are given infinite possibilities in life. That alone is the source of life’s vibrancy, as well as our own joy, live, creativity, discovery, and evolution.

The real promise that we should all explore is this: Being is more meaningful than doing. The ultimate healing, the end of all fear, including the fear of death, is contained in that simple axiom. Being is more meaningful than doing. This is why Buddhism engendered the concept of non-doing. Settle down in yourself, meet yourself in silence, appreciate the silence, and accept the peace that is part of existence. You can’t create peace; you can only discover it.

We test out how life works through our experiences. The good experiences encourage us to give a cheer for being alive; the bad experiences raise doubts, fear, uncertainty, and depression. So healing cannot come from amassing more good experiences until your bank account is bursting with them. Goodies don’t make for a good life. Only life makes for a good life. Shed all your experiences temporarily, in other words sit in silence for a few minutes. You won’t know who you really are or what your life means until you meet yourself inside. What awaits is the merging of self, silence, existence, and being. In this merging lies the answer to fear and dread. More importantly, this is where life finally begins to mean everything we want it to mean.

 

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. 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 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, 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.”

Shakespeare, COVID, and the Plague

By Deepak Chopra, MD
Social isolation gives us time to examine our lives in a new light, suddenly faced with economic collapse, empty streets, current panic and future uncertainty, and death appearing out of nowhere—in other words, the conditions that confronted every person on a daily basis during the lifetime of Shakespeare. What feels horribly abnormal to us was routinely normal for him and every member of the human race in the 16th century.

In statistical terms, Shakespeare is just another survivor. Unlike his son, Hamnet, who died at 11, Shakespeare didn’t die as a child, nor did his mother die giving birth to him. He also escaped the plague. Ever since the Black Death swept across the globe in the 14th century, bubonic plague remained a threat, killing on average one to three people in every house where it struck. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, there were four plague years, 1582, 1592, 1603, and 1607, when London, including its theaters, shut down because of the disease.

Syphilis had arrived in Europe from the New World in 1495, first appearing in a French garrison outside Naples, and it quickly infected every level of society. But Shakespeare didn’t die of it, either, or of smallpox. He wasn’t murdered in the street even though there was no London police force. He couldn’t have been executed as a witch, not being a woman, although the practice was not only current but growing. Finally, unlike his father, John Shakespeare, Will’s life and reputation weren’t ruined overnight due to charges brought against him by Queen Elizabeth’s huge network of internal spies.

As a survivor, Shakespeare stands out because of his genius, but the horrible conditions surrounding him persisted more or less unchanged until the middle of the 19th century. The causes of plague syphilis, and deaths in childbirth started to emerge, and more mundane but equally life-saving advances occurred in public health, like the first sewer system in America, which was built in Chicago in the late 1850s.

If humans were simply higher primates with very big brains, survival would be the beginning and end of our story. The Darwinian model for survival requires only getting enough food and finding a willing mate so that you didn’t starve before you were able to pass on your genes to the next generation. Nothing much mattered after that momentous event.

Evolutionists persist in seeing Homo sapiens through the lens of basic survival, but we do all kinds of things to deliberately imperil our survival, from taking care of our weak and sick instead of abandoning them, to stockpiling nuclear warheads, just to make sure that total war can erupt if we feel like it. War, crime, and violence do nothing to improve human genes and in fact work against simple survival.

But if you put Shakespeare and the plague together, something mysterious emerges. Despite every threat of disease and death, crime, poverty, political oppression, and religious fanaticism (the Puritans in Shakespeare’s day railed against the London theaters as ungodly, but luckily they didn’t shut them down until 1642, 26 years after his death), not to mention widespread illiteracy, no public sanitation, and no police force, these horrendous circumstances didn’t wipe out creativity, discovery, love, compassion, and a vision of a higher ideals.

Homo sapiens is the only species that liberated itself from natural evolution, and this unprecedented achievement involved one thing only: going beyond. Not our higher brain but human nature envisioned life independent of physical circumstances. Miraculously, if you peer at the oldest cave paintings in Europe, such as those in Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, France, you don’t see primitive scratching from 30,000 years ago.

You see art. The animals depicted are done with confident, artistic lines that are also scientifically accurate, depicting a wide range of Paleolithic creatures precisely enough that they can be identified by species. No one knows why sophisticated cave paintings suddenly appeared. The Chauvet depictions lie deep in the darkest heart of the caves. No sunlight penetrated, so the painters worked by the quavering light of torches. In addition, since the animals were not right before them, they worked from memory of how each one looked.

This act of going beyond exemplifies a trait that belongs to the human condition, the trait of creativity for its own sake. In fact, even though the modern world owes everything to discoveries that improved life, the rise of technology and all the practical benefits it has brought, going beyond has always happened “in here” before anything could happen “out there.” Before the first primitive flint blades could be hacked out, the concept of “tool” and “weapon” had to come first. And before a concept can be born, there has to be a mind capable of concepts.

My point is that you and I, like our ancestors, are the product not of genetic evolution but the evolution of consciousness. We were liberated from the Darwinian scheme by self-awareness. In other words, we said to ourselves, “I just thought of what I’d like to do,” and with the combination of awareness, vision, and desire, we evolved into the human condition. The Greek word for beyond is meta, and we should apply it to ourselves more often. To be human is an expression of the metahuman. Shakespeare was a meta-genius, but everyday people are just as meta in their own way. Parents sacrifice for their children, even die for them, because they go beyond their own selfish needs. Any creative hobby is meta, because it has nothing to do with surviving.
The higher your vision, the more meta you are. Buddha was extraordinarily meta, but his followers, seeing the worth of his vision, had to be meta or Buddha would have preached in the wilderness. Likewise, without metahumans among Jesus’s disciples, Christianity would have perished on the cross.

The COVID virus has put everyday life in peril for countless people, but it has actually risen the level of self-sacrifice, service, sharing, cooperating for the common good, laying down political antagonisms, seeking a global solution, and reflecting upon what really matters. Those are all meta qualities; they are perfect examples of going beyond. The fact that we can see a future past the devastation of the pandemic is a meta trait of huge importance. We aren’t human without being metahuman. For me, this is the lasting lesson and the deeper meaning to be taken away form a terrible 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. 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 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, 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.”

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.”