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 

How to Solve Life’s Problems—A Fresh Idea

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Einstein wasn’t the first person to state one of the basic facts of life when he said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” But most people attempt, time and again, to think at the level of the problem rather than finding the level of the solution. They continue to do what wasn’t working in the first place. They repeat the same actions expecting that this will lead to different results, when it almost never does.

In a new book, Metahuman, I confront this dilemma head on, starting with the notion that repeating the same futile action is endemic to our way of life. The vast majority of people are trapped inside routine, habits, old conditioning, secondhand beliefs, and the like. They repeat the past without being able to free themselves of the most painful memories. They are afraid of new, unknown things even though every creative idea or solution to a problem comes out of the new and unknown.

The whole complex of old thinking and habits burdens each of us in different ways, from stale relationships and boring jobs to ingrained prejudice and xenophobic nationalism. The rhythm of “same old, same old” beats incessantly, and yet somehow solutions are found, creativity flourishes, new ideas emerge, and “Aha!” moments occur unexpectedly.

Big money in Silicon Valley has been spent by corporations like Google, whose life blood is creativity and innovation, to unlock the secret of creative people and how they think. In their 2017 book Stealing Fire authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal describe various attempts to turn creativity into a skill set, all of which essentially failed. It turned out that creativity is a state of consciousness, not a skill.

So the real question is how to arrive at this state of consciousness. It turns out that the level of the solution isn’t different for every problem. Certainly a physicist searching for a new subatomic particle thinks very differently from a mother trying to get her three-year-old to go to bed on time. Problems are specific, and yet oddly enough, solutions spring from the same source in consciousness. If we let this realization sink in, the repetition of “same old, same old” would cease, along with the mystery of how to live in the present moment.

In Metahuman I focus on two breakthrough ideas. The first is that consciousness is the fundamental “stuff” of creation, the second is that existence can take care of itself. These ideas can’t be unpacked here in a short space, but essentially they open the door to finding the level of the solution. If consciousness is the source of everything, it holds all solutions, and if existence can take care of itself, these solutions are always available. All you need to do is get out of the way and allow the natural process of creativity to bubble up from its source.

The restless, active mind is the level of the problem almost all the time—we aren’t speaking of natural disasters or the incursion of other people. The level of the solution lies deeper. “Deeper” implies levels of mind, which isn’t really accurate, but to simplify matters, it is helpful to use a word that implies getting away from superficial mental activity, the busy drone of thinking and reacting. “Closer to the source” makes the point more clearly, perhaps.

We experience new ideas all the time, yet the process is a mystery. We have no idea where we go to get our next thought, and most of the time it comes of its own accord. But when Shakespeare, Newton, or Mozart went inside, they accessed a level of creative thinking that was extraordinary. This level is silent, rich with possibilities, dynamically involved with life’s challenges, intuitive, and insightful. By contrast, most of us go inward and find much less of these qualities—never none, because the mysterious agency that produces thoughts, feelings, and sensations is at work in everyone.

The level of the solution isn’t hard to reach. Everything depends on what you find when you get there. Words meet their match when discussing this issue. Even to say that we go “inward” is a misnomer, because consciousness pervades the bodymind. It isn’t inside your head or inside a cell. Mind has no dimensions the way a dining room or an auditorium does. Because words fall short, only the experience of becoming more creative, insightful, and intuitive really counts.

Can we trigger the experience voluntarily? To some extent yes. Removing stress gives creative thinking a chance to emerge clearly. Being relaxed and open is necessary. Training in a particular field provides a grounding of knowledge and skill. But you can attend to all of these preparations and not make much progress when it comes to problem-solving, because you haven’t changed your state of consciousness. That is accomplished not by thinking about it but by actually going beyond your current state of consciousness.

I took the Greek word “meta,” which means “beyond,” to indicate what is necessary. Metahuman is a state of consciousness that goes beyond what we are normally used to. It doesn’t mean becoming freakish or some other comic-book connotation. The simplest description is waking up—you shift from an unconscious life to a fully conscious, alert, present life. Those are the characteristics of a shift in your state of consciousness. We have glimpses of feeling creative, insightful, intuitive, alert, and open to new experiences. The project of waking up involves taking these glimpses and making them a continuous experience. There is no better way to live. You get real about yourself, other people, and the world at the same time that solutions in all these areas emerge spontaneously, as nature intends them to.

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 

The Mystery of Reality Is the Mystery of You

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Solving the mystery of reality is left to experts, which is nothing new. The explanations of the cosmos is assigned to physicists today as it was assigned to theologians in an age of faith. In some ways modern people are even less interested in the topic. Your soul isn’t likely to be in jeopardy if you don’t accept the Big Bang.

In a new book titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, I hope to change this indifferent attitude by showing that the mystery of reality is actually personal. You are the same mystery as the cosmos. My argument isn’t religious or scientific, however. It is based on consciousness, and it begins with a common experience: eating a meal.

See yourself sitting down to breakfast with a plate of eggs and toast in front of you (you can actually do this exercise with your next breakfast). See if you can look at the food simply as shapes and colors; this isn’t hard to do. As you take your first bite, let the taste and smell register without interpreting them as food. This is a bit harder, but imagine that you come from a society that has no eggs or toast, and someone has told you to put these foreign substances in your mouth. At the same time, focus on the sound of chewing and the texture of these substances on your tongue.

The point here is to realize something simple but quite basic. When you were an infant, you had no mental constructs called “food, eggs, toast, sight, taste, texture, and smell.” You experienced eggs and toast directly. The experience preceded the mental constructs. Quickly you learned these concepts, and of course they are very useful. Very young infants in a highchair will splash around their food, throw it on the floor, and treat it generally as a plaything. None of this is acceptable, or even makes sense in the everyday world (except for food fights at school, where food becomes weaponized, itself a mental construct).

Without the mental constructs surrounding breakfast, what is actually present are you and the reality of your experience. There is nothing more fundamental, and the two are inseparable. You cannot have knowledge of breakfast without experiencing it; therefore, breakfast depends on your direct experience.

This simple example has far-reaching consequences. Look out the window as the outside world. If it is daytime imagine seeing the stars at night. Nothing you see has any reality without you being meshed into the experience of it. A skeptic with strong convictions about physical reality will scoff at this claim. “Of course,” he will argue, the food, clouds, stars, and galaxies pre-exist our experience of them. No human was around for the Big Bang.

Strangely enough, some physicists would disagree. Without going into the details offered in my book, I will cut to the chase and say that physics has found it impossible to account for reality, either on the vast scale of outer space or the minuscule scale of atoms and subatomic particles, without an observer. This has given rise, however grudgingly, to the concession that consciousness is probably innate in creation. Without consciousness there can be nothing real. Or if something is real without consciousness, the human mind cannot conceive of it.

Who or what is the cosmic observer needed to make everything real? It doesn’t necessarily have to be a human observer. One possibility is God or the gods, stepping in as the creator and therefore the consciousness that shapes creation. In a secular world the more plausible observer is no one but just consciousness itself. This explanation has a major advantage you might not suspect immediately—it levels the playing field between mind and matter.

Modern science has caught up with centuries of philosophers attempting to solve the mystery of where the mind comes form. Science cannot locate the point in the chain of physical things, starting with subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules, where matter started to think and become conscious. Therefore, it is impossible to say how the ordinary atoms in our brains manage to produce thoughts. It isn’t as if adding more and more oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen suddenly causes them to think. As one wit put it, this would be like adding more cards to the deck and finding that they suddenly know how to play poker.

All mysteries of the most basic kind lead back to consciousness. Where does life come from? How did DNA learn to divide? Is Homo sapiens unique in the cosmos? What lies outside spacetime? Naturally there is concerted resistance to the answer that consciousness is the creator, but more than that, consciousness becomes matter, energy, space, and time. In Metahuman I detail why consciousness is the best answer to every mystery.

As for the mystery of you, all of us identify with mental concepts. We have learned to manipulate them, and in the process we have become the victim of our own labels, beliefs, memories, conditioning, prejudices, and judgments. These are particularly harmful when directed at the question “Who am I?” It is freeing to discover that you are none of these things. You are pure consciousness in action. As you eat your breakfast, no matter what is on your plate, you the experiencer remain as consciousness, while sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells move through you.

This sense of self, sometimes called “I am,” stands at the junction point between you and reality. At this junction point there are infinite possibilities. This should be the starting point of human existence. Instead, we learn something different for early childhood, that possibilities are limited, the universe is random, and humans are mere specks in a black void. Only by reversing this misconception can we resume our role as creators of our own reality. It takes a whole book to unfold how liberating it is to change your worldview this radically, but I hope this taste will motivate you to consider how profound the mystery of you actually is.

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 

It’s Much Better to Be Conscious than Smart

By Deepak Chopra, MD

If you had the choice, would you rather be smarter than you are or more aware? Go a step further. If a wizard came to you and said you could be either the smartest person in the world or the most aware, which would you choose?

It’s a symptom of the times, I think, that most people would choose to be smarter. We live in a world based on technology, wealth, and entrepreneurship. You have to be smart to succeed in those areas, and if you feel you are only average in intelligence, you are not likely to expect enormous success. The argument for being more aware is rarely made, yet by far choosing to be more aware is the better choice—and unlike IQ, you can increase your awareness.

I made this the theme of a new book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, so let me encapsulate the argument. Being smart, even very, very smart, doesn’t immunize you from living unconsciously. An unconscious life is driven by habits, fixed beliefs, second-hand opinions, social pressure, peer-group values, and old conditioning. To realize this, and then to escape its grip, requires awareness, not IQ.

A high IQ can even lead you deeper into an unconscious life, because very smart people generally believe they are right, so they strongly prefer their version of reality. This reduces the motivation to be open to new and unknown possibilities. It cements fixed habits and beliefs in place.

If you closely examine the lives of eminent scientists from Newton and Einstein to James Watson and Francis Crick, their greatest discoveries made a crucial breakthrough, but then each became trapped inside a cage of beliefs. Newton believed the Bible was literally true; Einstein was unable to accept quantum mechanics; Watson and Crick hold on to the mistaken notion that DNA dictates everything. Even the greatest “Aha!” moment, which defines a great mind, isn’t sufficient to make you more aware.

What awareness brings is freedom from fixed beliefs and habits. You don’t think through what’s wrong with your life as if a formula can be applied from the outside. The core message of Metahuman is that you are consciousness. You don’t have awareness the way you have blue eyes, curly hair, a short temper, or a flair for cooking. You are the awareness from which everything is made.

Once you have this insight, a radical shift occurs inside. You find yourself wanting to intensify the qualities of awareness that are the most valuable. It is undeniable that these qualities are essential to being human, and they include love, compassion, curiosity, creativity, and personal evolution. Everything we value comes from the inside, including science. Everything we do comes from the inside.

So how do we intensify those qualities we value most? We pay attention to them. This is the heart of what Buddhism calls non-doing. Instead of applying an idea, even a brilliant idea, you feel your way along, letting awareness guide you to the goal. Einstein made explicit reference to this when he said that a sense of wonder was essential to any great scientific discovery. Wonder isn’t a thought. Wonder is a quality of awareness, the opposite of taking things for granted.

To be unaware leads to taking far too much for granted, such as who you are, what you are capable of, and what the future holds. It is far too easy to lock things down in mental boxes and throw away the key, and this has happened in everyone’s life to some degree or other. Take any label you apply to yourself, and it is a box. “I am X” should be a mystery. We should all be saying “I am infinite consciousness and all the possibilities it contains.”

Instead, we are locked down in compartments like “I am an Indian male, trained in medicine, owning an apartment in New York, with a loving wife and two wonderful children.” Those are certainly not negatives. They imply a life that is working out well. But they are not me, and if I mistake myself for the labels that apply to me, I have adopted a provisional identity and mistaken it for the real me.

The Greek word “meta” means “beyond.” As used in Metahuman, the process of going beyond leads to an evolutionary leap in what it means to be human. It means no longer living a provisional identity, with limited experiences and confined expectations. Everything provisional is part of the virtual reality we accept in everyday life. The visionary poet William Blake called these our “mind-forg’d manacles.”

The human mind creates wonderful things and dreadful things. We spend our lives racing after the one and avoiding the other. The only thing the mind cannot create is consciousness. To be aware is the same, for a human being, as existing. The secret that modern technological society has lost is that existence takes care of itself. To be aware isn’t like a blank sheet of paper. Awareness brings you close to the source of the most valued things, as mentioned earlier. But more importantly, being aware aligns you with the creative impulse in Nature.

This alignment, known in Sanskrit as Dharma, allows someone to live without struggle. By going beyond everyday reality, you shift your allegiance to metareality. In metareality consciousness is not impeded by ego, memory, beliefs, opinions, and old conditioning. When people aspire to live in the present moment, they may not realize that they are aspiring to metareality. But by remaining inside mental constructs, we cannot live in the present. The past will always weigh us down, and the present will unconsciously repeat the past, no matter how hard we try to make this not happen.

For all these reasons, it is much better to be more aware than smarter. Being more aware will also make you smarter in the bargain, because a conscious person makes better choices than an unconscious person. If people understood this, there would be a rush to live more consciously. I can’t think of a better goal for every person as well as the entire human race.

 

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

The Balanced Mind: A Better Model

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Now that meditation has caught on widely, it’s time to understand why it works. The physical findings measured by neuroscience gives intriguing hints about changes in brain wave activity, but that’s an effect, not a cause. The same holds true for physiological changes outside the brain, such as lowered heart rate and blood pressure. The how and why of meditation must be sought “in here,” in the meditator’s subjective experience.

This isn’t a mysterious route to take. Pain studies are based on how much pain a subject feels; there is no objective way to measure this. In the case of meditation, I believe the correct model is that the mind in meditation is rebalancing itself. Medical studies have known for a long time that the body tends toward a state of dynamic balance known as homeostasis. If you push your body out of balance by shoveling snow off the driveway or running a marathon, as soon as you stop that activity, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen use in the muscles, and even digestion and the immune system return to homeostatic balance.

Something similar is supported by psychological studies into emotion—everyone seems to have a set point for a level of mood to which they return after an emotional event, whether the event is happy or sad. But the notion that the mind rebalances itself is new. We all pay attention chiefly to the activity whirling around in our heads, and this activity takes only brief pauses here and there, awaiting the time when we fall asleep, where conscious activity ceases (except in dreams). So it has never seemed that the mind is rebalancing itself. Indeed, what would that even feel like?

I believe that meditation wouldn’t work unless the mind already had a rebalancing mechanism. It’s not as if meditation is magical. It only deepens what the mind naturally does already, the way that relaxation techniques deepen the relaxed state that the body returns to in homeostasis.

If we look closely into our own experience, it isn’t hard to identify the states of mind that rebalance it. The names we give to different kinds of meditation techniques shows the way.

Mindfulness

Self-Inquiry

Reflection

Contemplation

Concentration

Prayer

Quiet mind

Controlled breathing

Bliss

I believe that these techniques are simply ways of deepening a process that the mind already uses to rebalance itself.

Mindfulness is how your mind rebalances distraction. You are brought back into the present moment. This is naturally where every cell in your body lives. It is also where the mind should live.

Self-Inquiry is how your mind rebalances habits. By asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” you bring conscious choice into a situation where you have been ruled by habits, routines, obsessive behavior, knee-jerk reactions, and outworn beliefs.

Reflection is how your mind rebalances thoughtlessness. You regard your behavior, see what is self-defeating or heedless about it, and realize what is actually going on. The mind is naturally thoughtful when it reflects upon itself.

Contemplation is how your mind rebalances confusion. When faced with multiple choices, each with its points pro and con, you sort everything out by contemplating the situation until you have clarity. The mind naturally prefers clarity over confusion.

Concentration how your mind rebalances pointlessness. It is pointless to do a careless job, having careless opinions, and relate to other people in a lazy, careless way. It creates many kinds of trouble when you feel that life is pointless. By concentrating itself, the mind gets absorbed in something deeply enough that it has a point. This satisfied the mind’s natural urge to find life meaningful.

Prayer how your mind rebalances helplessness. By contacting a higher power, you no longer feel isolated, alone, small, and lost. Those are the qualities of helplessness, and for centuries humans have summoned God or the gods to bring a higher power into their lives. The mind naturally wants to be rid of feeling powerless.

Quiet mind how your mind rebalances restlessness. The mind is constantly processing daily life and its challenges, but when mental activity becomes restless, there is a risk of exhaustion, anxiety, and mental agitation. The mind naturally wants to be quiet when no activity is necessary. In peace and quiet lies the simple contentment of existence, but also the potential for confronting the next situation that demands a response.

Controlled breathing is how your mind rebalances stress. Stress is the term we’ve devised for an imbalanced state of mind and body under pressure. Breathing becomes rapid and irregular. Behind the scenes many other signs of imbalance are occurring, but breathing is connected to the whole issue of responding to pressure. By taking a few deep breaths, sighing deeply, or falling asleep (a natural state of regular, relaxed breathing), a choice has been made to return to balance.

Bliss is how your mind rebalances suffering. The mind naturally prefers well-being to suffering, no matter how much we rationalize that certain forms of suffering are good for us. Bliss, joy, or ecstasy is a state of perfect happiness. It seems to arrive unpredictably, but we all have experienced it, and the mind wants to be there as much as possible. Bliss is a natural state; suffering is an unnatural distortion, a kind of persistent bad vibration that destroys the mind’s good vibrations.

This new model contrasts with age-old viewpoints about the mind being like a monkey, a metaphor often cited from Indian traditions, or like the struggle between virtue and sin or angels and demons, which is more Christian. We need to go beyond metaphors now. Clearly the human mind is the source of our greatest achievements. This alone is enough to support the notion that the mind isn’t a battlefield of happiness versus suffering. The mind is a self-balancing process in constant dynamic motion that is subject to imbalances that create conflict, confusion, and suffering.

The advantage of this model is that it allows meditation to become more central as a healing mode. By accentuating the mind’s rebalancing ability and deepening it, by bringing the mind’s natural tendencies under our conscious control, meditation in all its forms is the most natural way to heal our minds of everyday difficulties, without any side effects. From this modest basis all the promises of higher consciousness can be explored, because they are only a further deepening of the same processes.

 

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