The Blissful Life and You

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

When the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell first used the phrase, “Follow your bliss,” he inspired many people. He held out a vision that was radically different from the notion that hard work, persistence, and keeping your shoulder to the wheel was the key to success. But actually, achieving this new vision didn’t prove to be easy.

Campbell’s underlying intention had mythical and spiritual roots. This is clear when you read a bit more about his advice. “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you.” This is where people get confused and frustrated, however. They have something they love to do, but the invisible track doesn’t show up. Or what they love to do might have absolutely no financial aspect. What then?

I wanted to clarify what the blissful life actually is, which motivated me to write my latest book, Total Meditation. The key, I believe, to finding your bliss is knowing where to look. There is a source of bliss in everyone that can guide the choices you make. The track to follow isn’t mystical. When the mind settles down in meditation, there is contact with the deeper qualities of consciousness. Bliss is one quality, but simply feeling joyful, carefree, and light, which is the feeling of bliss, carries no greater meaning without other qualities of awareness that are contacted at the same time.

The qualities include creativity, intelligence, intuition, and inner growth. When they become real experiences, the track to a blissful life is open and can be followed. Here arises a second puzzle. How do you know you are on the right track? Do you drop your job as an accountant, office manager, or salesperson and jump immediately into opera singing, painting, or raising roses? That’s not what Campbell is actually saying. “Follow your bliss” points inward, to a pre-existing state of bliss that has the power to bring transformation.

As Campbell defines the goal, “…the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.” Because the goal isn’t very near in most people’s life, there have to be steps along the path. In Total Meditation I outline these steps quite simply. Your mind has creative intelligence and bliss as its source. Therefore, your mind will move closer to its source if you give it a chance. Not much progress can be made if you meditate only occasionally. The path is more like following a trail of breadcrumbs out of the forest; you reconnect with the path by small increments, and there need to be many of them to keep you on course.

This again is simple, because any time you notice that you are distracted, worried, stressed, or starting to feel overwhelmed, you can stop, find a quiet place, and spend a few minutes of quiet meditation until you feel centered again. Do this as often during the day as you need to. You will be allowing your mind to find the settled state it wants to be in naturally.

Will this simple practice, which I call total meditation, instantly give you a blissful life? Very likely it won’t, but you will be on the path that makes a blissful life not just possible but very probable. That’s because what Campbell had in mind goes back thousands of years. He had gleaned from his deep knowledge of world mythology a belief that consciousness creates change in a way inexplicable to reason alone.

He makes this point quite clearly: “Follow your bliss, don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” In other words, step into the unknown and make an ally of uncertainty. Here the inspiration of “follow your bliss” runs into a psychological block. Countless people have had glimpses of what a spiritual life can be. Who hasn’t experienced love, compassion, inspiration, beauty, and joy some time in their life?

But these scattered glimpses are far from organized and integrated into normal life. That’s why we always return to what is familiar, routine, tried and true. We fear uncertainty; we have no desire to step into the unknown. I address this fear in the book not by ramping up a person’s motivation but by making it clear that consciousness moves fear away by itself. You don’t have to commit acts of bravery (of reckless folly). In effect, your vision of a blissful life unfolds on its own, because everything that is organized and integrated in your life already depends upon consciousness.

You can only change what you are aware of. The unseen doors that will open aren’t a figment of Campbell’s imagination, nor is the biblical injunction of “knock and the door will be opened.” In both cases the lesson is that when you become fully aware, the organizing power to bring solutions, answers, and opportunities is actually built into your awareness. Instead of using a mind that works at the level of the problem, your mind works at the level of the solution.

If these things are true, then the spiritual life is also the most productive, successful, and blissful life. That’s a vison worth experimenting with. In the book I detail how this vision applies to each reader and what it takes to produce change in the direction of bliss consciousness. But I wanted to give a nod to Campbell here, because I was one of those who were inspired so many years ago by his famous phrase. Following your bliss is a notion that opened many doors for me, and I believe it remains valid for countless people today.

 

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

How Wholeness Works – The Vanishing “I”

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Holistic health, diet, and medicine have made the term “holistic” more familiar today. The era when anything “holistic” was considered fringe is long past. But the central concept of wholeness remains misunderstood. You cannot aim to be whole, learn to be whole, or make yourself whole. You are already whole as far as your body is concerned. There is constant unified coordination between trillions of cells that organize thousands of organic processes into a working whole.

Understanding organic wholeness in complete detail is beyond anyone’s current intellectual grasp, and is likely to remain that way. The only working model of a neuron, it has been said, would be a neuron. The brain resists any simple reduction, in other words. But the wholeness of mind and spirit is even more baffling, as I address in a new book, Total Meditation. I based the title on practical consideration, to distinguish how meditation can be holistic rather than occasional.

Countless people start meditating only to quickly drop it or else to return to it when their day is particularly stressful. I think this high dropout rate can be turned around simply by offering simpler techniques that encourage the mind to do what it naturally wants to do, which is to stay in balance all the time, regardless of daily pressure, stress, worries, and overwhelm. These challenging times make the need even more urgent.

But there’s a deeper message about meditation that has barely been received despite the popularity of Yoga and meditation in general. This deeper message has to do with wholeness and how it works. In the ancient Indian tradition, two diametrically different approaches reached the same aim, which is to exist in wholeness as your normal, constant state. The first technique (known in Sanskrit as Neti, Neti) works by the process of elimination. The word Neti translates as “not this,” referring to the false identity we carry around with us.

The ego, the everyday “I” that we automatically refer to, is built up as an accumulation of experience and memory. “I” can be defined as a collection of tags, such as age, gender, race, religion, income, marital status, etc. The tags are endless, and we unthinkingly collect more of them as life unfolds, so that “I” feels unique, accomplished, complete, and whole. But if looked at closely, you are not these tags. Winnow them down one by one—“I am not this, not that, not this, not that”—and that objectified “I’ begins to shrink.

The ego’s wholeness is a thin disguise for what really exists, a sense of self that has no contents, memories, inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, wishes, and fears. These are add-ons to something much simpler: a sense of self. Without applying any of the elaborate trappings that “I” requires in order to keep the focus on itself, your sense of self has been silently present throughout your life. Eliminate what is illusory, and what you are left with it real. In this case, Neti, Neti has led to wholeness as an all-embracing consciousness that needs no temporary identities of the kind we all accumulate from infancy onward.

The opposite procedure expands your awareness until it is unbounded. The most common Sanskrit formula for this is “Tat Tvam Asi,” which translates as “You are That,” where “that” is the infinite field of awareness. Instead of winnowing out illusions, this is a process of going beyond boundaries. In meditation the mind ceases to be active and finds itself drawing closer to its source, which is the simple state described in the pop phrase “Be here now.” Aside from anything your mind is doing. You exist here and now.

The implications of this apparently empty statement are immense. Being here now sounds passive, even inert (like a Pet Rock) but it is far from that. In reality very few people exist in the present moment. They are preoccupied with the same ego demands that Neti, Neti seeks to discard. The active mind is too absorbed in thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, fears, and habits to really know itself. In a way that most of us don’t recognize, we haven’t really met ourselves, because if we did, the essence of “be here now” would dawn on us.

This essence is the infinite pure consciousness form which reality rises. Compared to infinity, the ego is barely a speck of dust, so Tat Tvam Asi, despite being the complete opposite of Neti, Neti, leads to the same end. The incredible shrinking ‘I” is eclipsed so that wholeness can predominate. The terminology is secondary here. What I argue in Total Meditation is that wholeness should be understood as the true basis of human life. I don’t claim that this is so through any arcane metaphysics.

Instead, there is only a single proposition that needs to be brought to light, experienced, and tested. The proposition is this: Existence is consciousness. The two are the same. The physical world didn’t evolve through some chemical or electromagnetic chicanery to allow consciousness to emerge. Consciousness isn’t an add-on, because nothing is more basic. What is literally true is that reality is consciousness modifying itself into space, time, matter, and energy. This is the setup for the human gift of self-awareness. Every living thing participates in wholeness, because by definition wholeness excludes nothing.

The only other thing that excludes nothing is existence. Exclusion takes place in the human mind, which adopts beliefs, habits, and conditioning on behalf of the ego’s agenda. The ego’s agenda, which we all know quite well, is to get more for “I, me, mine” through the increase of pleasure and the decrease of pain. Most people are so unsuccessful at this that the ego has to keep promising that fulfillment is just around the next corner. In fact, the ego setup is deficient and false to begin with.

The only valid setup is consciousness as the all-pervading source, from which the qualities of life we most value spring, including love, compassion, creativity, intelligence, beauty, truth, and personal growth. As “I” begins to grow less significant, its agenda shrinks, and eventually the provisional identity we call “I,” the separate isolated self, vanishes altogether. When that happens, the worst trappings of “I”—self-doubt, insecurity, dread, fear of death, free-floating anxiety, and depression—no longer exist. They have nothing to hang on to anymore.

Because wholeness is who we are, the twin processes of Neti, Neti and Tat Tvam Asi cannot help but be compatible, and if correctly carried out, they are effortless. The first step is to straighten out what wholeness actually is. Words make a start, but the experience of meditation is just as essential. With knowledge and experience the path to reality is opened, and it becomes possible to live in the light in the fullest, truest sense. Everyone is cordially invited to join an immersive and livestream experience about Total Meditation on September 22nd. totalmeditationlive

 

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

What It Takes to Live in the Present Moment

By Deepak Chopra,TM MD

The allure of living in the present moment is popular but also endangered. The pandemic lockdown has forced millions of people into cramped living conditions that disrupt normal life, puts strain on relationships, adds stress to families, and introduces depression and anxiety. Escaping the present moment is likely to be everyone’s dream.

But the situation will eventually change, and phrases like “the power of now” are embedded in people’s aspirations. The present moment has wound up being a problem and a solution at the same time. The most basic question needs answering, then. Why live in the present moment and how is it achieved?

Sometimes the present moment brings experiences of love, kindness, creativity, beauty, and insight. In those moments no one needs to ask why it’s good to live in the now. (The body’s trillions of cells, including brain cells, don’t ask the question, because they are designed to only live in the present, occupied with thousands of chemical reactions and electrical signaling every second. Even when you recall a past event, your brain is strictly confined to the now in order to retrieve the memory.)

The first thing to notice when you are overtaken by the now is that you didn’t have to work for it. The present moment is always present. The real question is why we aren’t in the present moment. Countless people ae working hard on themselves to stay in the now. But if it takes no work to get a glimpse of the beauty, love, and fulfillment that dawns in the present moment, can we expect that working to get back there is really necessary, or even effective?

If you break the whole thing down, the difference is between a temporary experience of the present moment and a constant, unbroken experience. The now is either sometimes or all the time. Sometimes is what all of us experience, those passing moments of bliss, love, beauty, etc. I’d argue that these privileged experiences come and go of their own accord. They are as unpredictable as your next thought.

This doesn’t preclude working on yourself to expand your awareness through meditation and yoga, going inside to heal old wounds, rising yourself of self-judgment, and all the other things people do in the human potential movement. If you are stuck in worry, depression, fear of aging and death, and other kinds of stuckness that create pain and suffering, then finding a way out is absolutely necessary.

But no amount of personal work is going to change “sometimes” to “all the time.” The healthiest, happiest, sanest person in the world doesn’t necessarily live in the present moment, because the present moment is timeless. No matter how expensive our Rolex is, it doesn’t tell the timeless. To be in the present moment all the time requires a shift in identity, which can be specified as follows:

  • “I am me, a separate person” changes to “I am,” without reference to a separate person.
  • “I am here in this location” changes to “I am unbounded and have no location.”
  • “I am young (or old or middle-aged)” changes to “I have no sense of time passing.”
  • “I want” changes to “I am without desires, fulfilled in myself.”

If there was a mechanism like a car’s gear shift to handle these changes, we would be machines ourselves. But in reality, the “I” that wants to live in the present is a mysterious creation of the mind, which itself is a mysterious creation of God-knows-what (insert any theory you want here, religious or secular), and the God-knows-what transcends everyday life. The normal approaches we take to explain “I” unfortunately were constructed by “I,” and therefore there’s a true Catch-22. If “I” investigates itself with the intention of going beyond “I,” the result is simply to reinforce “I,” making sure it sticks around. Giving your ego the project of going beyond the ego won’t succeed, because all you’ve done is add another project to a self that undertakes a hundred other projects (work, family, relationships sex, hobbies, vacations, gossip, and keeping up with the news are only the beginning).

In my forthcoming book, Total Meditation, I offer a way to escape this Catch-22. It begins with the idea that the whole bodymind is naturally set up to live in the present. When it is subjected to stress, the body adapts temporarily until the stress subsides, and then it returns to a dynamic state of balance known as homeostasis. The mind does the same thing. Between every thought or feeling, the mind returns to readiness for the next thought or feeling. This state of readiness is just as balanced as homeostasis. But we fail to notice it because we are entirely focused on mental activity rather than mental silence.

Yet silence is only a superficial clue. In a stressful world peace and quiet acquire a special value. But in reality, the state of readiness is the source of everything we value in our lives. Love, bliss, compassion, creativity, and insight all have the same origin in pure, unbounded awareness. The whole bodymind has the same source. Knowing this, you can consciously return to the readiness state the minute you notice that you aren’t in it.

This openness to let your mind regain its balance is the key to total meditation. Unlike occasional meditation, which requires a set time every day that needs to be set aside, total meditation keeps up with our life from moment to moment. You always keep your eye on the prize, which is to live from your source. There’s no struggle or effort involved. You simply allow your mind to obey its own nature.

There’s much to say about this topic, but when it comes to living in the present moment, total meditation changes “sometimes” to “all the time.” The beauty of such an approach is that you experience change with the support of existence itself. To be here now looks like some kind of deep spiritual challenge. In reality it is just the opposite. Living in the present moment involves a state of awareness that the mind gravitates toward if you leave it alone and let the nature of the mind be what it is. In fact, this is the secret behind all spiritual attainments. The less you try, the closer you get. One could hardly wish for a more propitious setup.

 

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.”