Science - The Chopra Foundation

A New, Improved Reality Depends on You

How do we know that anything is real?

This isn’t a question that usually bothers most people, because we’ve all been brought up to look upon the physical world “out there” as a given. But let’s say that someone actually asks you the question, “How do you know the physical world is real?” What would you answer?

If you pause for a second, there are only two kinds of answers to this question: Either you tell a story or you refer to your own experience. Stories used to be collective myths, generally based on religion, about how God or the gods created the world. But any story, including the most advanced scientific models, depends on belief. If you believe in the Book of Genesis, you will see reality very differently from someone who believes in the Big Bang. To sort out which story is actually true, the second kind of answer arose, defining reality according to our experience. A rock is hard because two people who kick it agree from their experience that it is, in fact, hard.

A scientist might loudly object that we’ve left out physical data and facts. Surely a rock is hard because geologists have assembled all kinds of facts about all kinds of rocks. But such facts also come down to experience. There are rock-eating bacteria deep in the earth, and to them a rock is food, so hardness doesn’t enter their experience—for all we know, granite is to a bacterium what a lettuce leaf is to us. “Hardness” is not objective. Neutrinos are particles that travel through the Earth by the trillions and more, being impeded no more by a solid planet than if it was a puff of air, or nothing at all.

No matter how insistent you are about scientific fact, all facts enter our minds as either sensations, images, feelings, or thoughts, which UCLA psychiatry professor Daniel J. Siegel has shortened to SIFT. SIFT is necessary in order for anything to be real to a human being. Since the stories we tell and hear are also based on SIFT, especially on thoughts, it turns out that reality gets much messier than it would at first appear. Facts, data, experiences, and stories cannot be disentangled into neat categories that everyone would agree on. Thus a specific perception of the world, such as Newton looking upon gravity as a force, got entangled with Newton’s parallel belief that the Book of Genesis was factual, and when Einstein turned gravity from a force into a matter of curved spacetime geometry, a new entanglement of facts, data, experiences, and stories came about. In Einstein’s case the Book of Genesis didn’t enter the picture, but he certainly had his own religious notions and philosophical ideas that others might or might not agree with.

If you consult our last post, “Changing the World with a Glance,” we covered an accepted fact among most modern physicists, that nothing can be proven to exist, including the entire universe, without an observer. Even though physical things appear to exist independently we cannot rely on appearances. This notion is counterintuitive to anyone who accepts that the physical world “out there” is the basis of reality.

Holding two versions of reality has now become common-place among physicists: in the everyday world they accept how things ordinarily work, which depend on the senses, while in the quantum world, far beyond the senses, they accept such seemingly bizarre notions as reverse causation, creation from nothingness, and 11-dimensional string theory, which reduces all matter and energy to invisible vibrations in a domain that has no time, space, matter, or energy and therefore can be described only through pure mathematics.

These two models of reality certainly don’t fit together. If a new, improved reality is ever to exist, it could include many unusual features, but one aspect is certain: It would be whole, not fragmented. If you concede that it takes an observer to create reality as we know it, then any new and improved reality depends on each of us, acting as an observer. Observation isn’t passive or neutral. It is always creative. Thanks to SIFT, everything you know and accept as real depends on mental activity. At any given second you are either sensing, feeling, imagining, or thinking in order for anything—an atom, coffee cup, cloud, or Marvel comic—to be real.

Our previous post filled in the argument for how each person became a co-creator of the universe (and we co-authored a book on the subject, You Are the Universe), so let’s jump to the bottom line. If you accept that you co-create reality with every other person who possesses a human nervous system, how would this change your life? Here is a list of possibilities:

You would become curious about your creative powers.
You would want to test these powers out.
You would question second-hand stories about creation, preferring to either create your own model or no model at all.
If you get rid of all stories and models, you would find yourself basing reality on your own experience, and then would quickly realize that you have been doing that all your life.

The difference would be that now you can be conscious of how the process works.

Since everyone’s personal reality is based on entangled facts, data, stories, and experiences, you would become very interested in getting untangled.
To become untangled, you would find yourself experiencing reality only in the now, unburdened by the past or by anticipation of the future. Only the present moment is free of entanglement. Only in the present moment is reality fresh and ever renewed—this is why it is sometimes referred to as the eternal now.

We are not saying that creating personal reality makes you isolated or solipsistic. The point is that conscious experiencing is what makes us more complete, freer as human beings. We are, as quantum physicists claim, active participants of our own existence.

As you can see, a lot is at stake in any new, improved reality. Getting untangled is the chief hurdle. The underlying unity of reality opens up huge opportunities. It is also the key to the exotic states described for centuries as enlightenment, waking up, Nirvana, Moksha, and liberation. But by any name, higher consciousness has many enticements, which we will discuss in the next post. All who are curious are cordially invited.

(To be cont.)

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

Menas C. Kafatos, PhD is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University, conducting research in quantum physics, cosmology, climate change and related hazards. He works on issues related to reality and the role of consciousness for natural laws that apply everywhere, the foundations of the universe, for scientific understanding, and spiritual non-dual awareness in everyday life. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison. He is a lecturer and has authored 330 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence, Science, Reality and Everyday Life, and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of You are the Universe. www.menaskafatos.com

Changing the World with a Glance

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, PhD

The power of seeing is well known to everyone, and many examples exist. There is love at first sight and Alexander Fleming noticing that penicillium mold kills bacteria. Galileo as a youth in church was the first to notice that a pendulum swings in a regular rhythm, setting the basis for pendulum clocks. Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity by watching an apple fall, although this tale was told second-hand and is probably a romantic fiction.

But what if a mere glance has untold power, literally the power to create reality? The opening for this idea came from what is known in quantum physics as the measurement problem a hundred years ago. A quantum is a tiny unit of energy, and if a specific quantum like an electron or a photon is considered a thing, it should be measurable. You should be able to know where it is at a given instant in time, for example, or how fast it is moving, how much it weighs, and the other properties that we assign to things in the everyday world.

But measuring the quantum turned out to be very tricky. Early in the era that begat quantum physics, two important closely related discoveries rocked the very notion of what a thing is. The first discovery was that a quantum appears in a double nature, depending on the circumstances of observation; it can behave like a particle but in other circumstances it could also behave like a wave. In many ways a wave is the very opposite of a particle, in that it extends infinitely in all directions, having no localized position. The particle aspect of a quantum became knowable only through an act of observation, converting it from an indefinite possibility to a concrete existence, known technically as the collapse of the wave function.

In fact, this collapse occurs with the active participation of an observer, setting up a quantum experiment, something known as the observer effect. The phenomenon that reality does not exist independently of measurement was so counter-intuitive that it continues to pose riddles a century after it was proposed, for unlike normal objects in everyday life—mountains, trees, rocks, etc.—that stay put no matter whether someone is present to look at them, a quantum apparently has an absolute need for an observer. Without being looked at, for the purposes of measuring it, there is no proof that the quantum, as a particle, even exists or where it might be.

Let’s set aside the technical issues the measurement problem gives rise to. Behind the technicalities, one faces the prospect that creation itself needs an observer in order to exist, including the entire universe. This theoretical hypothesis is taken very seriously in contemporary physics, because when you go as deep as the quantum field and reach the zero point of creation, time and space themselves vanish. Nothing of the known universe has a proven existence without an observer (although in a novel twist, some physicists theorize that the observer doesn’t necessarily have to be human).

Let’s accept the fact, well established in modern physics, that the precreated state exists, and that in some way the physical universe popped into existence from a state that has no ordinary qualities of everyday reality, no time, space, colors, shapes, indeed no materiality or constant energy. If the observer effect gives us any clue about how precreation turned into creation, a glaring fact emerges. Observation is neither passive nor neutral. Creation isn’t a passive act, and no observer is neutral because every living creature sees the world through a specific nervous system, tied to specific sensors. It is inconceivable with the human nervous system, for example, to imagine how a butterfly’s 360-degree field of vision operates.

So far, we’ve taken no unproven leaps; everything up to now is fairly standard physics, although there are all kinds of interpretations about what any of these discoveries actually mean and what kind of world is implied. One sizable portion of physicists, for example, have given up on describing reality in everyday familiar, sensory-based terms, conceding that the quantum world and the precreated state are only describable as abstract mathematical entities existing in a purely mathematical space.

If this view doesn’t represent a defeat for an objective reality devoid of the participation of observation, it certainly amounts to a humbling turn of events. The optimism that modern physics would arrive at a Theory of Everything has waned in many circles, and various advanced equations and observations of strange phenomena like dark matter, dark energy, and black holes greatly diminish anyone’s certainty that the physical universe is actually open to human explanation and its inherent limitations. Despite the excitement over observing a black hole for the first time, no one knows where the matter and energy sucked into a black hole goes (perhaps to regions of space-time beyond our accessibility) or whether it comes back again.

But if we stay with the basics, the observer effect and the collapse of the wave function seem to indicate that simply by looking out upon the world, each observer is enmeshed in creation, perhaps forever and everywhere. We are not solid bodies plunked down on the stage of history. We are entangled in the whole process of creating space, time, matter, and energy. For one implication of the precreated state is that the leap from precreation to creation is occurring all the time. Some theorists go so far as to say that we are surrounded by countless big bangs going off every second. What makes them occur? No one knows, but a very good candidate is our own participation in the process.

In other words, simply by looking, you are shaping the universe you perceive, a human universe unique to us as a species of consciousness. Unseen all around us are frameworks of space, time, matter, and energy spinning off on their own course. It is speculated that every thought leads to an “event line” that shoots off into a new reality. This sounds like dizzying stuff, but it gives rise to amazing possibilities in everyday life.

The first possibility, which has already been sketched in, is that each of us co-creates reality. Instead of being something “out there” in the physical world, reality not only includes the subjective mental world “in here,” but reality cannot exist in its present form without human consciousness. “You are the universe” must be taken seriously, along with its converse, “the universe is you.”

In the next post we’ll see that this proposition totally overturns everyday life and how we interact with the world. An expanded state of freedom with far more creative possibilities is dawning.

(To be cont.)

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

Menas C. Kafatos, PhD is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University, conducting research in quantum physics, cosmology, climate change and related hazards. He works on issues related to reality and the role of consciousness for natural laws that apply everywhere, the foundations of the universe, for scientific understanding, and spiritual non-dual awareness in everyday life. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison. He is a lecturer and has authored 330 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence, Science, Reality and Everyday Life, and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of You are the Universe. www.menaskafatos.com

Infinite Potential – Episode 6: AI / Robert LoCascio – Part One

Conscious AI / Robert LoCascio – Part One

Artificial Intelligence, AI, is now a reality. It lives with us in our pockets, in our homes, and in our…minds? We take on this brave new world in two parts, linked by one critical question: will AI ever be truly conscious?

In Part One, we speak to founder & CEO of LivePerson, Robert LoCascio, who has had decades of pioneering experience in creating and using Artificial Intelligence to better our life here on earth. Join me today as we look behind the curtain at how AI is really made and what it can tell us about ourselves.

The Faith-Based Science of Neil deGrasse Tyson—It Needs Correcting

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Peacekeepers entering war zones frequently find that both sides are angry and intransigent, to the point that even mentioning peace causes tempers to flare. This has been the situation with the debate—now worn out to the point of exhaustion—between science and religion. There are ways to bring peace, but they are stymied by militant partisans.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson broke out from his warm persona as our national science explainer in 2014 when he stated, in line with previous opinions, that philosophy was useless, telling an interviewer, “My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?”

The reason that more people got upset over his remarks goes beyond the small and dwindling coterie of professional philosophers. DeGrasse Tyson was arguing in broad terms that science is the only avenue to truth and that inner inquiry was an obstruction to uncovering the secrets of reality. He believes, science requires no acts of faith and therefore is the only reliable guide to knowledge.

Millions of people would agree—after all, modern civilization was built upon the foundation of science and technology. But deGrasse Tyson doesn’t realize that his brand of simplistic materialism runs exactly counter to the insights of quantum physics beginning a century ago, when the reliable structure of space, time, matter, and energy was completely undermined. This is no longer the stale, exhausted war between science and religion or between science and philosophy. The nature of reality, unknown to so-called naïve realists, has become increasingly mysterious.

DeGrasse Tyson places himself in the camp of naïve realism, the belief that what the senses report is fact, that raw data, once systematized and explained, establishes the physical universe as the basis of everything real. That is actually an act of faith. The great pioneering physicist Max Planck, who coined the term “quantum,” insisted that “mind is the matrix of matter.” He elaborated on the point speaking to a London reporter in 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

The fact that the observer affects what he observes, links mind and matter, although precisely how is still debated. DeGrasse Tyson recently dragged my name into his combative attitude, labeling me as a suspicious character who threw around big words to disguise my own ignorance. But having written several books on the nature of consciousness, I feel like a peacekeeper rather than a combatant. One role DeGrasse Tyson has adopted is a kind of “There’s nothing to see here, folks. Just move on.” He represents the happy face of a unified scientific community marching hand-in-hand toward the ultimate explanation of everything.

The problem with such an attitude is its combination of willful ignorance and outdated science. The salient points are these:

Physicists find themselves more baffled than ever about the nature of the universe, thanks to the discovery of dark matter and energy, which contradicts many previously held assumptions.
The holy grail of science, the sought-after Theory of everything, is farther than ever from being achieved. This has led to a deep rift and much doubt among theorists—see Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow. In explaining their M-Theory, they use the phrase “model-based reality.”
The traditional way for dealing with consciousness has been for science to ignore it, be suspicious of the entire subjective realm, and ridicule anyone who brought up the subject. This attitude, encapsulated in the phrase, “Shut up and calculate,” is a mask for ignorance about the nature of the mind. Like it or not, science is a mode of explanation that rests upon experience, just as other modes of explanation do.
Without understanding consciousness, science as pure physicalism may be reaching a dead end. Once you arrive at the quantum vacuum state, the void from which time, space, matter, and energy emerged, there is no more data to harvest. Across an uncrossable horizon lies the “nothing that gave rise to everything.” A new mode of explanation based on consciousness offers a way past this barrier. But about this deGrasse Tyson knows nothing.
Pride in being a know-nothing is gradually fading among far-seeing scientists. In an influential Scientific American article in 2014, the prominent British physicist George Ellis knocked the scientific attack on philosophy. Ellis’s central point was that the assumptions behind science are metaphysical to begin with, yet practitioners of science remain woefully ignorant of this fact. Both opposing camps, the one that derives creation from material forces and the one that derives creation from an invisible transcendent agent of mind, are making philosophical statements, not proven statements of fact.

Taken altogether, these points, which are well known in and out of science, are not quackery or suspicious anti-science attitudes promulgated by exponents of woo woo. I can shrug off unfair denigration, but deGrasse Tyson needs to get past his faith-based view of science. Instead of disparaging better thinkers than himself, he should join the peacekeeping mission that might, at long last, repair a division that needs healing, not misplaced antagonisms.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, 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, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos. Other recent books include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

The Ultimate Self-Help: Upgrading the Illusion

By Deepak Chopra, MD

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The phrase “personal reality” has a range of meanings, and most people would begin with their situation, the place where they find themselves. There’s a natural impulse to improve the situation, whatever it happens to be. If your situation lacks enough money, satisfying work, a loving relationship, and so on, it will improve your personal reality to work on those things. That’s about as far as society tells us we can go. On a larger scale, one person can make a minuscule difference by casting a vote for President or deciding to recycle, but big or small, personal reality has a big outer component, consisting of the external world, other people, natural forces, and so on.

It seems so obvious that there is a “big” reality compared to which anyone’s “small” reality is fairly insignificant. But this small reality is personal, so we all spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to upgrade it–all of our life, in fact. So it’s mystifying to run into the world’s wisdom traditions, which perversely turn this whole idea upside down, claiming that the “big” reality is actually a snare, a trap, an illusion. That’s the gist of the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Buddhism, different as they are when taken as religions. In my new book, You Are the Universe , written with physicist Menas Kafatos, we look very closely at how to upgrade personal reality from the ground up, a process that begins with solving the whole mystery of reality.

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