Why Einstein Was Wrong About the Moon

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Reality contains many mysteries, some so impenetrable that even the greatest minds are baffled. Albert Einstein was among them. Even though quantum physics had achieved a huge success, Einstein had doubts about its description of reality. These doubts were crystallized in an anecdote. As related the acclaimed modern physicist Lee Smolin, “He 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?’”

Einstein was defending two of the most basic principles in everyday life, first, that physical objects exist “out there” as real things, second, that they exist independent of an observer. It would seem impossible that these two propositions aren’t true. Of course, we say, the moon exists as a real thing, and it was around for billions of years before the first human gazed at it. But this view, technically known as naive realism, is fatally flawed.

Imagine that you have a red light bulb hanging in a room of your house, and every time you walk into the room, the bulb is on. Does that mean that it is on all the time? The possibility exists that it only turns on when you walk into the room. This sounds far-fetched, but in fact you cannot prove that the red light ever turns off. It would have to turn off when you aren’t looking, and yet the only way to check on it is to walk into the room and look.

Quantum physics has many theoretical arguments that have raged for over a century, but among its greatest pioneers, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg stated that nothing in Nature, not just a red light but all the basic “stuff” in creation, such as electrons and photons, cannot be proven to exist unless someone looks at them. This is only one of the strange behaviors exhibited in the quantum world, but it is probably the most crucial for figuring out the mystery of reality.

Bohr and Heisenberg were pioneering an idea that came to be known as the participatory universe, which holds that human beings, far from being insignificant compared to the vast operation of cosmic laws, are key players. As Heisenberg put it, electrons and other particles are not real but exist only as ideas or concepts. They become real when someone asks questions about Nature, and depending on which question you ask, Nature obligingly supplies an answer.

What exists outside our questions? That is the core mystery. The quantum revolution did away with the common-sense view that physical objects “out there” can be taken for granted. Einstein knew this, of course. Having discovered relativity, he understood that time and space are not actually the time and space of everyday perception. He wanted the moon to be real for a deeper reason: the unity of Nature. He was fairly young when he made headlines around the world with E=mc2, and for the remaining decades of his career he strived to come up with a method, mathematically speaking, that would unify quantum mechanics and relativity.

In that project he failed, and no one has succeeded to this day. Why should this matter to the average person? Because right now quantum reality behaves in its strange way and the everyday world behaves in a mostly common-sense way. The two are in flat contradiction, as evidenced very close to home in the human brain.

The brain, like all physical objects, can be broken down, layer by layer, until you reach the level of the quantum. At that point, it basically vanishes. Seemingly solid matter diffuses into clouds of energy, these clouds spread out as ripples in the quantum field, and the ripples cannot be conceived except as mathematical configurations in hyperspace. It doesn’t matter whether you start at the top or the bottom of the heap. You can’t make mathematical configurations learn to think, and you can’t keep the brain intact as a solid physical object.

To bring the issue even closer to home, your brain is like the red light bulb in the room. You can’t prove that it exists without you to observe it. If Heisenberg was right and electrons are merely ideas that Nature turns into particles when human being dream up questions about electrons, then the brain is also an idea. It happens to be a huge, complex idea. The brain is Natures’ answer when someone asks, “what does the mind look like?”

Once you ask this question, the whole field of neuroscience pops into existence. Nature has tons of tiny answers about neurons, synapses, serotonin, and so on to fill out the one big answer. But the brain doesn’t become real just because it provides lots of facts. These facts are linked to the basic rule that nothing can be real without an observer. To put it simply, every experience needs three things: an observer, the thing observed, and the process of observation. Einstein wanted to reduce the three parts to one: the thing observed (in this case, the moon).

His contention doesn’t hold up, however, because as with the red light bulb, the whole universe can’t be separated from an observer and the act of observation. You have to back up quite a few steps to reach this conclusion, too many steps for the average person, including the vast majority of scientists. But physics is still haunted by Einstein’s question: Is anything “out there” real by itself?

Physics is in a funk today because it can’t make this question go away. Two or three decades ago, physical “stuff” was real, and this whole business about the observer could be ignored, at least for workaday purposes like building high-speed particle accelerators. But the ground has shifted. “Stuff” has become “our current model of matter and energy,” and no one can agree on what this model should be.

A sizable quotient of very smart physicists believes that consciousness is an innate part of creation. This idea comes from thinkers who were backed into a corner. They couldn’t, no matter how hard they tried, show how mind came about—all physical explanations failed and continue to fail. Secondly, they couldn’t take out the pesky need to include the observer and process of observation—the universe has to be participatory.

Revolutions often occur when old thought and received opinions are backed into a corner. That is happening right now, and in the next post we’ll discuss why Einstein being wrong about the moon actually changes everything.
(to be cont.)

 

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.”

Why Matter Is a (Useful) Fiction

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Given a choice between physics and metaphysics, almost everyone chooses physics. This is a modern habit that is deeply ingrained, and it turns the tables on the religious approach to reality, which put a divine or supernatural entity, first and foremost in creation. But relying on the physical world as the foundation of reality has run into serious problems. Unable or unwilling to return to metaphysics, people are stuck without a viable model of reality.

This becomes apparent if you go to the nub of the physical model, which is matter. For centuries, ever since the ancient Greek concept of the atom, there has been a constant search for the smallest building block in Nature, on the supposition that the world is like a sandcastle on the beach. If you reduce the sandcastle to grains of sand, you know where it comes from. Putting things on a firm foundation is one of humanity’s driving force, and in the physical world, this drive leads to atoms and beyond.

The problem is the “beyond” part, because around a century ago quantum physics discovered that there is nothing like a minuscule grain of sand from which everything is built. Atoms can be envisioned on a chart in physics class as a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. This is a reassuring picture since it makes the atom seem like a miniature solar system. However, this model isn’t the same as reality.

The subatomic particles, also known as fundamental particles or quanta, that make up an atom are not bits of solid matter. They are a mysterious “something else” that quantum physics still ponders. Nothing can be truly settled about quanta because their behavior defies human logic. To begin with, a quantum has a dual personality, sometimes behaving like an invisible wave that extends in all directions, sometimes like a particle with a definite location. Quanta constantly bubble up as “quantum foam” out of a state that has neither matter nor energy in it but is “virtual,” meaning that it has the potential for turning into matter and energy, not to mention time and space.

The best visualization one encounters for how matter exists is a rippling field of activity, with particles being the intersection between two or more waves. This visualization is just a stab at giving substance to a mystery that physics expresses through mathematical formulas. Everything in modern physics occurs in a mathematical space that doesn’t necessarily match the real world.

What this means is that matter, if understood as grains of sand building up bigger and bigger structures, is a useful fiction. The usefulness comes about because each model one can devise leads to a practical technology. The model in physics class of the atom as miniature solar system allows for two powerful technologies, chemistry and atomic energy. Chemistry is entirely built upon the whirling electrons orbiting around the nucleus. Atomic energy is built on splitting the nucleus to release its energy or fusing two nuclei for the same purpose.

In a world based on ever-progressing technology, these outcomes are good enough, and there are new horizons in quantum technology to look forward to. But the building block theory of reality, however useful, leaves out the very thing that builds models and invents technology: the mind. Grains of sand might build a sandcastle, but they don’t spontaneously invent the idea of a sandcastle. The best they can do is to build sand dunes, which are shapeless humps, not complex structures. Without explaining the mind, you cannot explain creativity, curiosity, invention, emotion, aspirations, fears, wishes, dreams, and every other aspect of mind.

The only way forward begins by realizing that matter isn’t what it seems to be. There was always an illusory side to the whole acceptance of the physical world as the foundation of reality. You can take any quality of matter and reproduce it to a subjective experience. Matter is hard, visible, and heavy. Yet if you push the same pole o two poles of a powerful magnet together, they repel each other so forcefully that you can never get them to touch. The space between them is as hard as iron.

A mirage of water in the desert is visible but is made of invisible shimmering air. The pictures you see in your mind’s eye arise in the total blackness of the brain’s interior and from a physical viewpoint are actually invisible. As for heaviness, when you are very tired your body feels heavier, even though the physical model tells you that you didn’t actually gain weight.

What these examples show is that objective and subjective reality don’t form two separate domains but an entangled whole that is very hard to explain. This wholeness is known as reality. What is it made of? Two viable answers are possible. The first says that reality is made from the viewpoint of the observer. One of the greatest quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg, held that atoms and subatomic particles do not exist as material things but as response by Nature to whatever the experimenter is asking. Change your questions, and Nature obliges with an answer that fits your point of view. We can call this answer perspectivism.

The second answer agrees with perspectivism but is bigger. It says that reality is more than the sum of all possible perspectives. Even if you give every living thing from a virus and bacterium to a whale and a human being, their own viewpoint, there can be no perspectives without consciousness. So reality comes down to consciousness, which is the very opposite of a building block. Instead of being tiny and separate like a grain of sand, consciousness is a field extending infinitely everywhere.

Modern physics likes the model of a field, which is why from a physics viewpoint reality consists of ripples in the quantum field, the gravity field, and a few other basic fields. The advantage of a field is that it allows you to conceive of Nature as a whole. But we don’t conceive consciousness. It is too real for that. Consciousness is where conceptions come from. It is the “stuff” of ideas, emotions, invention, curiosity, and all the other things created in the mind. You might struggle with the fact that time, space, matter, and energy are also created in consciousness, but there is actually no other way to explain wholeness.

You can’t have on foundation for the physical world and another foundation for the mental world. Science has long recognized this, which is why so much weight was put on the atom. It was hoped that somehow tiny grains of sand would explain the mind if only they got tiny enough. Many working scientists still assume that this hope will come true one day, but it won’t, for the simple reason that matter is just as conceptual as Alice in Wonderland. Alice knew she was in an imaginary world and devoted herself to getting back to the real world. We are in the real world, being conscious, while applying our efforts to stick inside an imaginary one. This has to change if we want to become totally real again, in other words totally conscious.

 

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.”

The Most Popular Model of Reality Is Wrong

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It would be ideal if reality and our model of reality merged into the same thing. A model of reality explains how the universe was created and how it operates. You might think that this is a definition of reality itself, but it isn’t, which can be illustrated by looking at the most popular model, known as naïve realism.

In a nutshell, naïve realism says that what you see is what you get. In other words, the reality presented by the five senses is reliable. Such a view appeals to common sense. It rests on experiences we take for granted. There is a physical world “out there” separate from our subjective experience “in here.” The physical world predates human beings by 13.8 billion years, going back to the Big Bang. If both of those things are true, then obviously what we think, feel, and desire “in here” has no effect on reality “out there.”

As unimaginably sophisticated as modern science has become, most scientists accept naïve realism, usually without question, even though each of the common-sense facts just mentioned is known to be false.

  • The division of reality into mind and matter has never worked, because it fails to tell us where mind came from or how it relates to the brain.
  • The passage of time, whether in milliseconds or the eons since the Big Bang, has no fixed validity. The quantum field, considered the finest level of Nature by physicists, doesn’t exhibit linear clock time, and the source of the quantum field is timeless.
  • A longstanding problem in physics, known as the measurement problem, indicates that an observer is needed in order to produce the basic outcomes that create particles. In other words, physical reality has a psychological component that is inseparable from it—we live in a participatory universe.

Leave aside the obvious ways we cannot trust our five senses, which tell us mistakenly that the sun rises in the East, that a thunderclap happens after a flash of lightning, and that there could be no such things as small as bacteria and viruses, since they are invisible to our eyesight. Naïve realism is wrong at a much deeper level, which has been grappled with by the most eminent physicists. It is wrong about mind; it cannot connect mind and brain; it has nothing to tell us about the origins of space, time, matter, and energy’ it is contradicted by the strange behavior of the quantum field; and it has no chance of linking the microscopic world with the macroscopic world—in other words, the so-called building blocks of reality live in a separate, totally closed-off domain from everyday reality.

These multiple failures are widely known among physicists but just as widely ignored. A great deal of science and most of technology can advance without a theoretical model of reality. Before he died Stephen Hawking published a book, The Grand Design, in which he conceded the high probability that scientific models will not succeed in matching the reality they are supposed to describe.

If science rolls along without a viable model of reality, that lack isn’t incidental. We celebrate Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein for getting something right, not simply for issuing metaphysical suppositions. So it is important to get things right now. If the present model of reality is, in fact, an abstruse collection of mathematical formulas suspended in a theoretical mathematical space, clearly something is amiss. In medieval times the world had to conform to divine law; now it must conform to mathematical law, yet the fallacy remains the same.

There is a way out. First, we acknowledge a simple truth: Models are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude. Naïve realism is dead wrong about consciousness because it excludes mind in favor of physical explanations. Secondly, we must accept that reality cannot be modeled. The whole enterprise of reducing the physical world into tinier and tinier building blocks has reached its useful limit. Leading theorists suggest that quarks and superstrings might not actually exist. More to the point, we live with space, time, matter, and energy and yet have no origins story for where any of them came from.

Without a model, what’s left? Still standing is the one thing that permeates reality, brings the five senses to life, allows thoughts to arise in our heads, gives the world color and form, and tells us that we are alive: consciousness. The very thing that naïve realism leaves out is the thing that holds all the answers.

There was a lamentable decline after the earliest decades of the quantum revolution, when all the greatest physicists tackled the problem of mind. In place of great thinkers physics turned to number crunching and atom smashing, which remains its chief occupation, now on a billion-dollar scale. There were exceptions like John von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and David Bohm, who continued the search for a link between mind and matter.

Respected but sidelined in favor of bigger particle accelerators and telescopes, all of these thinkers now enjoy a latter-day revenge, so to speak. Having exhausted the models of reality that discounted and ignored consciousness, forward-looking physicists now realize that mind must be accounted for, which seems like a simple realization except that it was clouded behind a screen, the biggest factor being naïve realism. Satisfied with the common-sense view of reality in their everyday life, physicists were happy to think of mind as “not my job.”

A huge hurdle remains, however, which is the enormous seduction of physical explanations. What is science without them? What is life if we get rid of relying on the five senses? These aren’t rhetorical questions. Life would be transformed if we abandoned the lure of the physical world and the mistaken data of the five senses. The human mind is uniquely able to go beyond appearances, and when we do, the destination is always consciousness. There’s no need to call it “higher” consciousness. A better term is “total” consciousness, the ground state of everything in existence.

Account for consciousness and you explain everything. No models are needed. The everyday mind is the arena of consciousness. Stick with it, experience it deeply, and be self-aware. Only then will reality be fully comprehended, absent any model at all.

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.”

The Future of Personal and Planetary Well Being : An invitation to Sages and Scientists Symposium, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville Arkansas

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Despite a steady increase in life expectancy, medical science is facing diminishing returns. It has been estimated that every increase in lifespan since 1990 has resulted in only ten months of increased healthy life; the rest is only prolonged suffering and the decline of aging. Globally more people now die of so-called “lifestyle diseases” than from infectious diseases. Doctors cannot make choices about lifestyle; only the patient can. Finally, half of all heart attacks before old age occur in people who live a good lifestyle, managing their weight, eating right, and exercising regularly.

What lies beyond lifestyle? That’s a matter of much speculation. Will human existence be improved in the future through technology, genetic manipulation, nano-robots in the bloodstream serving as cancer hunters? Or will it take a new philosophical conception, one that entices people away from a life of speed, constant activity, and stress?

By all odds it will take both, because innovations in technology can’t succeed if we continue to define well-being in old, outworn ways. Consider the following statements, which almost everyone, including doctors, take as fact:

  • The body is a machine, and like all machines it breaks down.
  • Aging is a pre-determined process, probably controlled by our genes.
  • The body is a mindless lump of matter except for the brain, which has evolved to produce mind or consciousness.]
  • The causes of most diseases are now known. What remains is to find effective drugs to target each malady.
  • You are healthy until something goes wrong, which is signaled by the appearance of symptoms.

In reality none of these statements is correct. The body isn’t a machine; machines cannot heal themselves. The body isn’t mindless; every cell is imbued with vast knowledge that far surpasses anything found in medical textbooks. The brain doesn’t produce the mind; that’s merely an assumption that has never been proved.

The most urgent need facing each of us is how to envision our bodies without the burden of outworn assumptions, which is why, starting in two weeks, an annual symposium known as Sages & Scientists Symposium will bring together the best thinkers with views both humanistic and scientific. This year’s theme is “The Future of Well-Being,” and the public is invited to attend. There is nothing on the planet as open to the free exchange of ideas, from every kind of thinker and researcher, all aiming to find a way forward into a viable future.

In my view a total rethink of the human body is long past due. To begin with, the division between mind and body is totally arbitrary. The body is a super-highway of information traveling to every cell, and thousands of different molecules inside a cell know exactly what their precise function is. The body’s ability to heal, along with the immune system’s encyclopedic knowledge of all the disease organisms our ancestors encountered (and defeated), far exceeds current medicine.

To get real about your body, you need to see it as a bodymind, a wholeness whose capacity for survival is only exceeded by its capacity to evolve. As the British physicist David Deutsch pointed out in a TED talk this past April, human beings have freed ourselves from the laws of nature that govern the physical universe, and this freedom has allowed us to define entirely how our future will look. That’s a startling reinvention of what it means to be human, because everyone assumes that the laws of nature are vastly more powerful than human beings.

In reality the possibilities created in our consciousness are infinite, but we will remain limited, insecure, and fearful until a new vision tells us who we really are. The body is as conscious as any thought, which is why bodymind is the right conception of our wholeness. Consciousness creates, governs, and organizes every process in the bodymind, and the source of this unlimited knowledge is you. There is no higher power or law of nature dictating your future. The limitations we ascribe to illness, aging, and death are largely mind-made, and the worst of these limitations is our belief that we must be limited.

In reality there is no “must” about it. The reason science talks about biology as destiny and evolutionists talk about humans as higher apes rests upon a deeply rooted mistake, that we are physical creations glommed together from bits and pieces of matter. This is the same as saying that a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso is just daubs of oil paint. The entire point of a great painting is the consciousness that goes into it, fashioning beauty and meaning first and foremost.

Likewise, human beings are conscious agents whose existence, first and foremost, is rooted in beauty and meaning also, to which can be added everything else we most value: love, compassion discovery, curiosity, creativity, and evolution. These are aspects of consciousness, and the bodymind is our vehicle for exploring them. The future will be viable only if we have the confidence to see ourselves as expressions of higher consciousness.

I inaugurated Sages & Scientists Symposium so that the best thinkers would feel comfortable in each other’s company. Instead of compartmentalization, which is the norm in the academic world, there is a free and open field in which anything, from artificial intelligence to Vedanta, from virtual reality to epigenetics, is given time and space to be expressed. The concept has borne fruit beyond anything I originally envisioned. Now it can be truly said that well-being has a future and not simply a repeat of the past. The only way to know if human potential is unlimited is to test it through unlimited imagination, discovery, and deep understanding. The sooner every individual grasps this, the more we can live in hope and optimism.

 

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 

Ending Our Fear of Death

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Fear is a powerful force, nowhere more so than when it comes to death and dying. By comparison, the solutions for solving other fears seem useless. You cannot test your fear; you cannot feel it and move on anyway. There is little reason to trust other people who seem to have no such fear. They have no more valid experience of dying than any other person who is alive.

It is reported that near-death experiences leave survivors without any fear of death, because they have seen the other side and found it unfearful. But near-death experiences, although highly publicized, are rare, even among patients who have died on the table in the emergency room, generally from a heart attack, and been resuscitated. You can take hope from their anecdotal stories—and millions do—but the information remains second-hand.

Fear of death is unique in the hold it has over us, and we spend our lives hiding or suppressing it. The prospect of not existing seems too overwhelming to face. But in one respect, despite its uniqueness, the fear of death can be faced and dismantled. There is a cure that is available to anyone. It consists of exposing death as an illusion,

This is the last solution people seek, in all probability, because death looks so real, and the sight of a corpse is frightening and disturbing to most of us. Instead of bringing our fear of death to light, we feel too emotional to begin. But overcoming your emotions puts the cart before the horse. Our fear and revulsion didn’t arise by themselves; they are the coating, as it were, that surrounds the core of illusion, an after-effect rather than the cause.

We can trace the cause backwards by dissecting the illusion in stages, beginning with the top layer and working toward the source of the fear that gave rise to everything else, as follows:

  • When my body dies, I die.
  • I am my body.
  • I reside inside my body and need it to survive.
  • Death is the opposite of life.
  • Death is non-existence.
  • Nothing is worse than non-existence.

As you can see, fear of death is a layered belief system; it isn’t a simple belief. To overcome this fear each layer must be dismantled, which means exposing the belief as false and processing the emotions tangled up in the belief. Taken one step at a time, the process of dismantling isn’t difficult. The difficulty arises when we try to attack fear of death all at once. That tactic is doomed, given how many false ideas are woven together inside our fear.

Let me show how the dismantling process works by briefly confronting each layer of fear.

  1. When my body dies, I die. This idea has only an emotional basis, generally rooted in childhood when a pet dies and our parents are at a loss to console us. This lack of consolation goes viral, we might say, as the years bring more experience of death. The rational mind knows that there is no data from the brain of a dead person, no credible witnessing beyond the grave, and so on. So this idea can be put on the shelf as unproven and unprovable.
  2. I am my body. This idea is actually just an assumption. One can just as easily say, “I am my mind.” Since the whole difficulty concerns the question of whether the mind dies with the body, it does no good to claim as a fact that you are your body. The current belief in neuroscience is that the mind arises from the brain, so if the brain dies, the mind is extinguished. But there is no proof that the brain produces the mind, and much evidence that it doesn’t, since no one has been able to show that the quite ordinary atoms and molecules that constitute a brain cell ever learned to think.
  3. I reside inside my body and need it to survive. This idea is somewhat different from the first two ideas, because it isn’t an assumption but a misperception. We learned as children to perceive the world “out there” from a position “in here.” But perception is unreliable until it is examined. When you cut your finger, the pain is perceived in the finger when we know logically that the sensation is actually processed in the brain. You can scan your body up and down quite easily, and you can scan the world around you just as easily. This implies that perception isn’t trapped “in here.” The possibility that perception has no fixed location helps to dismantle the misperception that “in here” and “out there” are opposites.
  4. Death is the opposite of life. It is clear that all created forms come and go. Thoughts arise and fade. The body you have includes trillions of cells that were not present when you were two years old. This all points to a simple reality: creation is in flux. Change is constant, and therefore a continuum. What we term death is a concept by which we attempt to fix arbitrary boundaries in a continuum that has no such boundaries. It is false to say that a heart or brain cell is alive while the atoms inside it are dead. The whole thing is purely a mental construct that we created and therefore can uncreate.
  5. Death is non-existence. Now we are getting close to the seed or source of the whole illusion. To say and feel that someone who has died no longer exists is a frightening prospect. But we don’t actually know what non-existence is. Our only connection to not existing is by thinking about it, and thinking by definition exists. Likewise, if we equate non-existence with the extinguishing of consciousness, our only connection is to think about having no consciousness, which is a conscious thought. It is impossible to frame any acceptable reality to non-existence except within the domain of existence, and for a human being, existence must be conscious.
  6. Nothing is worse than non-existence. Finally we get at the core illusion, the one thing fear depends upon when it comes to death. Being aware that we exist and are conscious, we don’t want those things to vanish. In fact, such a vanishing act seems to occur every night when we go to sleep, but all that really happens is that we lose our personal point of view when we sleep. A personal point of view is the product of a separate “I” that identifies with everyday experience, and everyday experience is filtered through mental activity.

But clearly mental activity isn’t the mind, just as the miles on a speedometer isn’t a car. The car and the mind both move, but they don’t have to in order to exist. Silent mind can easily be experienced. There is a silent gap between any two thoughts or sensations.

The experience of silent mind, sleep, and simply tuning out for a moment isn’t fearful in the slightest. These experiences are not even close to non-existence. In fact, non-existence cannot be experienced, since by definition you have to exist to have any experience.

Once you realize that non-existence cannot be experienced, with or without a physical body, there is nothing to fear. However vividly you imagine a fire-breathing dragon, it can’t arouse true fear. An elaborate fiction can be built around dragons, but entering their imaginative domain is a choice, and ultimately we know the choice is pure imagination. The same holds true when we choose to enter the domain where death is the ultimate fear. Once you pierce the mask of illusion, you can choose to exit the domain where this fear exists, and then you are free.

 

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 latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com