Spirituality Means More Than Ever Now

By Deepak Chopra™ MD

It’s natural in troubled times for people to reflect on God and religion as a source of solace and hop, which matters more in a crisis. But with church services being so limited, not to mention the decline in organized religion that has continued for fifty years, God isn’t the pillar of faith that past generations relied on.

I don’t find myself thinking about spirituality in those terms, however. Like a winter coat that’s put away in spring, for many people religion gets put away once the crisis has passed. Crises by their nature go up and down, but the deeper need for spirituality remains. This need is rooted deeper than solace and hope. It’s the need for wisdom. Wisdom is a word that’s open to skepticism and dismissal. Even people who think of themselves as spiritual are likely to think much more about issues like self-esteem and love.

Wisdom is much less personal but of crucial importance. It gives answers to why we exist and what our purpose is. Wisdom offers a vision of consciousness itself, bridging all ages and circumstances. It gets at the heart of reality. Ultimately the search for reality is what binds people who want to reach beyond organized religion and its perceived drawbacks.

Right now the search for wisdom is more important, I think, than the search for God. Ever since Aldous Huxley coined the phrase “the perennial philosophy,” seekers in the West have come to realize that sectarianism is too narrow and religions too orthodox to contain the great body of wisdom that has accumulated over time. The spiritual scene unfolding around us is today’s Americanized version of the perennial philosophy. In all times and places, the perennial philosophy is about transcendence. It’s the evidence based on direct experience that higher consciousness is real.

For many spiritual people there’s little doubt that organized religion, by turning to fundamentalism, is serving reactionary social forces and a dogmatic version of God. Yet it is far more deplorable to ignore the spiritual yearning that exists in us. The current spiritual scene may not fill the vacuum perfectly, but it has many virtues, which I consider real wisdom because it is dynamic and alive.

  • People feel free to express themselves outside the doctrines of organized faiths.
  • They feel open to experiences that earlier generations denied or condemned, and that arch materialists totally deny.
  • They are aware that spirituality is a broad river running back many centuries.
  • They feel included in a magnificent human quest.
  • They believe that evolution of consciousness is real and worth pursuing.
  • They believe they can find a noble vision and begin to live up to it.

These values represent wisdom as personal experience rather than words in a book, however sacred the text. The current spirituality embraces a huge number of people who have tasted transcendence through meditation and various peak experience, those moments when the veil of the personal self drops away and reality is seen without interference by the ego, memory, and old conditioning.

The seekers that one meets vary enormously: students and practitioners of yoga, meditators of every stripe, Jungians brought up in the Fifties, freethinkers and flower children from the Sixties, and even Theosophists, followers of teachers like J. Krishnamurti and gurus like Paramahansa Yogananda, not to mention readers of Huxley, Gerald Heard, and other expatriates who brought Vedanta to Southern California in the era before World War II. It’s a big tent and hardly a new one.

The net result of this diverse movement is hard to calculate. Certainly, there don’t seem to be many inroads into orthodox political or academic thought, but as a grassroots movement personal spirituality is powerful; it stands for the unquenchable idealism of millions of people who either flirt with the perennial philosophy or dive into it more deeply.

The path of wisdom, being timeless, is always open. I don’t see an alternative, frankly, to our spiritual yearnings unless organized religion finds a new flowering, which seems highly unlikely. So whatever the spiritual scene morphs into thirty years from now, at this moment personal seeking and the inward path are the most viable movement we have, and it deserves to be considered on its own terms, without labels but with a love for wisdom and the untapped resource of human possibilities.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 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. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

Where True Spirituality Begins

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Many people still view difficult times as a spiritual challenge. The numbers are less than in the distant past, when catastrophes, tragedies, setbacks, and failures were seen in religious terms. An Old Testament plague was a sign of God’s wrath, but in modern secular society medical science gives a different explanation, based on research data and the rise of the scientific worldview.

And yet millions of people would find in the COVID-19 pandemic a test of faith and perhaps even a test for whether God is paying attention to human suffering. I’d like to offer a different viewpoint—difficult times can motivate you to place a higher value on your spiritual life. Out of confusion and conflict, there is an inner journey to be made. This has been true for centuries, and modern times don’t erase the possibility.

What modern times do, however, is diminish the solace of traditional religion. The waning of organized faiths has been happening during the entire postwar era, more than two generations. Without the safety net of religion (which often offered no safety at all), the inner journey has become a do-it-yourself project. So where does it begin? How do you know you are actually on the path? What can you expect to happen in your life?

The questions are many, and the answers are slippery. Religions have the advantage that one size fits all. By contrast, an individual slant on spirituality is as unique as a person’s life story, which is filled with beliefs and expectations shared by no one else. But I think there is a universal experience that unites every genuine act of spiritual exploration. It is the experience of meeting yourself for the first time.

Everyone has more than oneself, and several versions are not what I’m referring to. You have a social self that you show to others. You have a self-image based on your ego-personality. You have a private self that harbors your fears, wishes, doubts, and dreams. For countless people, life consists of juggling the interests of these separate selves. A host of experiences springs from this activity, but this must be set aside. The inner journey doesn’t concern these different selves, which are all constructed by the mind.

The self you must meet on the spiritual journey is a kind of silent companion who has been with you all your life. Sometimes I think of it as the true self; it has also been called the witness. Names are not as useful as recognizing the experience itself, because that experience forms the foundation for all other spiritual experiences. To have the experience, simply be yourself, in a state of simple awareness.

It is easy to show that you have been having this experience all your life. It amounts to your basic sense of self. Something has remained constant despite the ups and downs of your life story, and your sense of self is as good a name as any. The reason that this basic experience hasn’t blossomed into a full-blown, satisfying spirituality is twofold. You haven’t noticed it or given it much value. In other words, it has been an unconscious experience.

If you consider the other versions of the self, the mind-made ones, they promise a reward, and so we chase after the promise. The social self promises acceptance, belonging, bonding with others, being on teams at work and play, and so on. Anything that involves a group, from a family to a corporation, nation, or tribe is the arena of the social self.

The next self, based on your ego-personality, is individualized. It promises all the rewards you can enjoy by getting what you want. Personal desires and ambitions drive everyone from the ego level. Everyone has a self-image they need to protect, so the ego provides a very full agenda between getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want.

The private self is more ambiguous. Here you conduct an internal dialogue with yourself that can be very dark or very bright or everything in between. No one eavesdrops on the private self. You relate to it alone. This can be terrifying if you are prone to anxiety and depression. It can be rewarding if you are a creative artist finding inspiration inside yourself.

By contrast, the true self seems to promise nothing. This is a major reason for overlooking it and giving it very little value. The insight that every wisdom tradition offers serves as a guide here. Your sense of self brings you close to the origin of consciousness. It is the only valid starting point for journeying to the source itself. At the source, you discover something the mind cannot make: a flow of creative intelligence. This is consciousness transforming itself from infinite possibilities into everything most valued in human existence: love, compassion, beauty, truth, empathy, wisdom creativity, devotion, the presence of the divine, and personal evolution.

When the flow of creative intelligence enters your awareness, it enters through these values. They are not mind-made. They are innate in human awareness. No matter how primitive the ancient world might look to us in the modern world, having no electricity, smartphones, satellites, and television, every culture had the same sense of human potential as unlimited—such was the vision of all wisdom traditions. Yet no matter how exalted the achievements of the human mind, a single silent source was present.

All you need for a rewarding spiritual life is to meet yourself inside and allow your awareness to settle into its simplest state. This is true meditation. What happens next is the journey itself, because simple awareness is how everything is created out of nothing. Your sense of self has no content in terms of ideas, sensations, feelings, etc. From the mind’s viewpoint, if you have no thoughts running through your head, there is nothing.

But the mind has made a mistake. This nothing is the basic “stuff” of creation; it is the threshold for everything the mind can conceive or create. When the ancient rishis of India declared, “I am that, thou art That, and all this is That,” they meant “that” to be pure awareness. One modern spiritual teacher put it very simply: “Everything the mind makes is like the products of baking, all the things that can be made flour. I am none of those things. I am the flour.”

Yet however you express it in words, the fundamental experience that ignites the spiritual journey comes down to one thing: meeting yourself. It guarantees that spirituality is open to everyone, at all times, under any circumstance.

 

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

A One-Minute Lesson in Higher Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra,™ MD

Although meditation has become widely popular, higher consciousness baffles and intimidates people. It seems like a faraway exotic attainment, and perhaps more myth than reality. But higher consciousness is just a convenient catch-all for expanded awareness. Reaching any higher state depends on a simple, very basic axiom: You cannot change what you are not aware of. Grasping this statement takes only a minute, but the point is critically important.

To be aware is also called being mindful. It is very desirable to be mindful. It keeps you in the present moment. It involves being alert and open to new experiences. Mindfulness is detached: you are open to the present moment but are not attached to any outcome that you either desire or fear.

Yet mindfulness has a built-in catch. How do you remind yourself to be mindful when you have drifted away from the present moment? Mindfulness is the very state you are not in. Telling someone to be mindful is like saying “Don’t forget to remember.” Fortunately, you can get past the catch. It involves the simple act of noticing. Your mind is designed to notice things all the time and sending the signal to you.

When you notice a friend in the crowd or something appetizing on a restaurant menu or an attractive stranger, what actually happens? You flick a switch and start to pay attention. The thing you notice is selected from lots of other things you are not noticing. When you see a friend in the crowd, you ignore the other people all around.

The one-minute lesson, which you can adopt immediately, is

  1. Notice when you feel distracted, stressed, angry, anxious, or otherwise out of tune. Don’t dismiss this perception.
  2. Pause. Whatever you are about to say or do, whatever reaction you are in the middle of, back away from it.
  3. Put your attention in the middle of your chest in the region of the heart, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths until you return to the situation with a clear mind.

These steps are simple, but noticing can be extremely powerful. You have found the key to change, following the axiom that what you are not aware of, you cannot change. By noticing, you give awareness an opening that it doesn’t otherwise have.

Noticing can change the course of history, as in 1928 when the Scottish medical researcher Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find, much to his annoyance, that green mold has spoiled some open dishes of cultured bacteria. Instead of reacting as he and other researchers always had, simply throwing out the tainted specimens, Fleming noticed, paused to think, and realized, in a stroke of awareness, that he was observing a powerful killer of bacteria. Penicillin was born from an observation made hundreds of times before but without truly noticing what was going on.

Noticing doesn’t simply flick a switch; it invites you to rethink, reframe, and go deeper than your normal reaction.  In an instant, you call upon the mind’s natural ability to reflect. We do not notice at random. Instead, we notice:

  • Something we’re looking for
  • Something we judge against
  • Something we fear
  • Something we might be attracted to
  • Something that offers an explanation or solution

These are the ingredients in everyone’s agenda, even though no two agendas match. In my new book, Total Meditation, I outline the best agenda for effortlessly nurturing higher consciousness.

The best agenda is to promote your personal growth by noticing opportunities to be more conscious. Catching yourself doing something unconsciously is an important part of this agenda. But there are also other dimensions of the total meditation agenda:

  • Notice when someone else needs attention and appreciation.
  • Notice an opportunity to give or be of service.
  • Notice an opportunity to be kind.
  • Notice when help is needed.
  • Notice beauty in Nature.

Setting your inner agenda to take advantage of such opportunities helps reset your deeper awareness. Like the internal clock that notices what time it is even when you are asleep, deeper levels of consciousness know much more than your thinking mind does. In particular, your deeper awareness is the source of the most valued things in human existence: love, compassion, creativity, curiosity, discovery, intelligence, and evolution.

Set your agenda to any of these things and it will turn into opportunities that you begin to notice more and more. Alexander Fleming was primed to discover penicillin because he was already a noted researcher with important findings to his credit. A loving mother is already primed to notice if her child feels unwell, something that might escape the attention of a negligent parent.

To notice is to open the door of awareness. What you do after that is up to you. In total meditation you notice much more than you did before, but there is no obligation to act in a certain away. Consciousness can accomplish anything, but consciousness is its own reward.

In daily life, shifting your inner agenda also involves getting past the kind of noticing that doesn’t serve your personal evolution. Noticing other people’s faults, being on the lookout to correct someone else, assigning to ourselves the role of rule enforcer, or judging people as winners or losers are wrong uses of noticing. There’s no getting around the fact that agendas have a dark side. It is hard to notice something without immediately judging it.

In total meditation, it is important to be aware of your judgments but not act on them. We are all too practiced in likes and dislikes, acceptance and rejection, attraction and aversion. These opposites dominate our inner agendas. But simply by favoring a new agenda, you can change, and in time what you notice will more and more be self-enhancing. Freedom from judgment begins by not favoring judgments you know are negative. Noticing isn’t random. You can begin right now to notice opportunities to wake up. This alone is enough to greatly accelerate your personal evolution.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Clash between Truth and Reality

By Deepak Chopra™, MD

Every person wakes up in the morning to join the struggle between truth and reality. Yet almost no one realizes that this is what they are doing. Life contains struggles—no one disagrees with that sad fact—but what are we struggling against? The answers seem obvious. We struggle to stay healthy, make a living, maintain our relationships, and in general to keep our heads above water.

Where does truth enter into this? Imagine someone sitting in a chair wearing state-of-the-art virtual reality gear. In the simulation bombarding his senses, he is racing in the Indy 500, running away from tigers in the jungle, or walking a tightrope. These are perilous adventures that he is immersed in, where survival itself is at stake. His body will exhibit all the signs of a stress response. But his experience is entirely fake, a construct by clever VR engineers. The truth is that he is sitting still in a chair, perfectly safe and sheltered from struggle.

This imaginary setup is actually what occurs to all of us in daily life. We inhabit a virtual reality that is so powerful it blinds us to the truth. What we accept as real is mind-made, but when you are inside this spell/illusion/dream, your struggles totally envelop you. Even the words we speak encase us in limitation: the instant you say the word “tree,” you have shoved into a box an immensely complex living organism with thousands of cellular processes occurring every second. The minute you think of the tags that we apply to ourselves and other people—age, race, gender, religion, political persuasion, nationality, income level, occupation, etc.—you shove that person into a box.

When life is relatively comfortable, we can afford to overlook the false position that mental constructs have placed us in—all the prejudices, painful memories, fixed beliefs, personal disasters, failures, and wishful thinking that the mind is prey to. After thousands of years of philosophy, religion, and science, each field seeking to discover the truth, virtual reality remains in charge. Its shell has barely been cracked, which is why we don’t perceive the struggle between truth and reality. Mind-made reality (the spell/illusion/dream) keeps the world going. Only on a side tangent will someone say something extraordinary like “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” But this can be ignored as a religious thought, and when the Persian mystical poet declares, “God speaks in silence, everything else is a mistranslation,” that can be dismissed as poetry or once again religion.

Yet somehow, on the remote frontier where virtual reality and “real” reality meet, the truth is trying to contact us, and doing so all the time. The human mind has incredibly powerful tools at its disposal to keep virtual reality in place; we call these tools thinking, feeling, remembering, desiring, wishing, fearing, and dreaming. Against this armada, the truth (“real” reality) has only one tool: waking up. Waking up is the process of becoming more conscious. You cannot change what you aren’t aware of. In this case, becoming more aware is the truth.

In every other aspect of life, there is something to discover and learn about; we spend every waking hour since birth using the mind’s tools to learn the skills it takes to survive, be accepted, take care of ourselves and our families, and so on. Desire constantly pushes us forward. But here are some bald facts about “real” reality:

  • Nobody taught you to know.
  • Knowing is built into consciousness.
  • Without this innate knowing, you would be blind, deaf, and deprived of the other three senses, because the raw data that reaches you is meaningless unless you know how to interpret them.
  • The most basic thing knowing tells us is that we exist.
  • If existence and consciousness are tied to one another, then without a doubt, they are the foundation of reality.

Behind the spell/illusion/dream of everyday reality, “real” reality simply exists, making everything else possible. You can’t put awareness in a box (although you can scientifically measure how it operates); you can’t stand outside it; you can’t do without it.Before waking up happens, there is already a ratio between the things we do consciously and the things we do unconsciously. This is the primary evidence telling us that we are conscious beings. Blind prejudice, social conditioning, denial, ignorance, bad faith, habits, and the drama of pleasure and pain occupy the domain of unconscious life. Love, compassion, curiosity, creativity, insight, empathy, and inner growth occupy the domain of conscious life. It’s obvious which domain contains the values we hold most precious.

So we are not that far from waking up. Consciousness prevails in many areas of life, even though war, violence, crime, natural disasters, and other forms of bad news grab the headlines. If you want proof that consciousness is the basis of your own life, sit down and make a list. Write down everything that has been fulfilling in your life, and when you examine the list, you will discover that the values of consciousness lie behind every meaningful, fulfilling experience.

You don’t even have to accept the argument about virtual reality and the spell/illusion/dream. Once you see what you truly value, you will automatically want to be more conscious. The motivation to wake up is built into consciousness itself. Even the concept of truth struggling against reality is just an eye-catching phrase. Truth doesn’t struggle against anything. It exists, and it knows. All we need to do is to realize this truth.

When Plato wrote that we are like creatures living in a cave watching a shadow play on the cave’s walls, he came up with the simplest and most powerful metaphor for waking up. The shadow play is mesmerizing, but then you realize that shadows need light to project them. So you turn around to face the light, and when you do, you say, “”Aha, so that’s how the shadow play works.” From that moment of awakening, the shadows can never again hold you in their grip.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

The Surprising Success of Wholeness

By Deepak Chopra™, MD, Tiffany J Barsotti, MTh, Paul J. Mills, PhD

As the notions of “holistic” and “wholeness” became popular in recent decades, they also turned into a paradox. People who focused on holistic health, diet, and wellness found themselves to be cut off from people who didn’t care about such things (which is the majority). Trying to be holistic wound up making you separate, which is the opposite of being whole. The meditation/wholefoods/yoga people are a splinter group from the McDonald’s/Monday Night Football/TGIF people.

Perhaps a misunderstanding lies at the bottom of this situation. Wholeness people tend to feel that they are waiting for non-wholeness people to catch on, a little like non-smokers and teetotalers waiting for chain-smokers and beer drinkers to catch on. This divide disappears, however, once you realize that you cannot make yourself whole, while on the other side of the coin you cannot make yourself unwhole. Everyone is whole already.

A simple observation is enough to clarify why wholeness is inescapable. Imagine someone sitting at a computer doing a task. You cannot see the monitor, so you don’t know what their task is. The physical body you see is a person; the thinker responding to the computer screen is a person. The two must co-exist, uniting two sides of reality, physical and mental. This union defines everyone’s existence. You were born whole, and the only thing that separates you from a random stranger is what you decide to do with your wholeness.

Here we are looking beyond lifestyle, although that would seem to be the most glaring difference between people. Instead, how you use your wholeness primarily centers on something else: awareness. Someone in the meditation/whole foods/yoga group can be miserable, conflicted, and anxious while someone in the other group is content, loving, and secure. Clearly awareness is involved in this difference, but how?

The problem is that everyone, with the tiniest fraction of exceptions, lives as if they are not whole. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but chief among them is that almost everyone, however competent they are at the business of living, knows next to nothing about how awareness works. We live with mental activity every waking moment, but all our thinking, feeling, and sensing reveals very little about the nature of the mind itself. We are left with a version of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” because the human mind is the source of the best and worst things that life has to offer.

To resolve this state of confusion, there have been quiet steps taken by researchers interested in holistic medicine, the wellness movement, psychotherapy, and spirituality. Different as these fields might be, each researcher has taken heed of what the groundbreaking psychologist Abraham Maslow called self-transcendence. Instead of being satisfied with an everyday life guided by the ego’s demands, duties, and desires, in the process of self-transcending (going beyond the ego) the individual begins to experience more holistic levels of their own consciousness. Maslow’s self-transcendence is akin to the concept of self-realization, often espoused by Eastern traditions.

The general public doesn’t’ yet realize that wholeness has become a surprising success story, which can be scientifically verified. Here are some highlights from a number of fields.

  • Mainstream medicine is being surpassed by a better way to keep people healthy. As the scientific evidence grows, with over 100,0000 studies to date, complementary and alternative medicines have become much more accepted in the West. Something new is evolving called Integrative Health, where being healthy is a state of body, mind, and spirit.
  • Spirituality has been brought into the fold. Supporting someone’s spiritual health is understood to be crucial for establishing wellbeing. A cue is being taken from Eastern medicine, in which meditation and yoga are as beneficial to wellbeing as any medical prescription, and much more useful in preventing future problems.
  • Mediation works, in a very big way, but it opens the door to a wider domain. Beyond inner peace and quiet is wholeness, now generally called nondual awareness. Freed of all the demands of mental activity, a person experiences what it is like to be aware in a simple, present-moment fashion.
  • “Who am I?” is being reframed. Instead of identifying with the “I” that constantly deals with the ups and downs of life, one learns how to remain centered in nondual awareness. An agitated state is exchanged for a steady state. “I am” is the baseline, not “I think, feel, and do.”
  • Existence has become a solid foundation of life. It might seem that “I am” is a poor relation to “I think, feel, and do,” but the actual experience of “I am” brings about a deep realization. Awareness is the source of love, compassion, creativity, personal growth, purpose, and meaning. From this foundation, thinking, feeling, and doing are infused with spiritual value, and well-being is nurtured throughout the whole person.

Integrative Health is not an invention or discovery but a journey back to who we really are. It’s only natural to see that life is better when it is lived with far less attachment to the drama of pain and pleasure, ups and downs, failure and fulfillment. Nondual awareness brings the needed detachment that allows us to respond from a deeper self, one that is always connected to our source in pure awareness. These are profound matters, but the state of wellbeing is natural to the whole person. In that light, the surprising success of wholeness needs to be shouted from the rooftops, especially in the turbulent times we find ourselves in.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
TIFFANY J. BARSOTTI, MTh, is an internationally renowned medical intuitive, clinician and researcher of subtle energy and biofield therapies. With spiritual and intuitive guidance, she serves as an integrative practitioner working alongside physicians and other allied health professionals.
PAUL J MILLS, PhD, is Professor and Chief at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Department of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the UCSD Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health. He is Director of Research for the Deepak Chopra Foundation, with a focus on meditation and yoga within the context of Traditional Medical Systems. In the early 1980s, he published some of the earliest scientific research on meditation. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, US News and World Reports, Consumer Reports, The Huffington Post, Gaia TV, and WebMD, among others.