Transformation - The Chopra Foundation

The Most Important Choice to Make Today

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In every age there has been a dominant worldview that people tried to conform to. In an age of faith, everyone asked how they could better serve God. This was their daily concern. In the Industrial Age the question shifted to economics and improving one’s lot in life. In an age dominated by science the question shifted again–people asked every day how they could keep up with progress and add to it. As times change, so do people’s vision of what is important, and usually they thought they had a better vision than the one which preceded them.

Yet if you back away to see the bigger picture, each age had one thing in common, and it wasn’t God, economics, or progress. It was the fundamental idea that life is well lived only if you have a vision. Without one, purpose and meaning are limited.

It turns out that the one question you should ask every day is this: How can I fulfill my vision today? Whether they put it exactly in these words, this is the secret behind the greatest success stories. Someone dedicated his or her life to a plan, project, or set of values larger than any individual. A worthy vision, I think, needs to fulfill certain criteria.

Your vision should be suited to who you really are. It can’t be borrowed from someone else, and it can’t be chosen out of obligation. Your parents may desperately have wanted you to follow the family business or go to medical school because they weren’t able to. Those are laudable motives, but it’s risky to adopt a vision that isn’t really your own.
Your vision should be valuable no matter how much money you expect to make. Of course, you can always make it your vision to get rich, but there are two problems with that. First, the day you arrive at a financial goal, it will tend to feel empty. Second, a life totally devoted to money never stops. Making more and more–greed and competition fuel an insatiable desire.
You should compare the visions that seem most appealing, which means doing research and dipping your toe into more than one pool. Philosophy, religion, science, business, and scholarship are rich with potential, and you owe it to yourself at least to sample what they are like.
Your vision should be ambitious. the old saying that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp still holds true (or a woman’s reach). Settling isn’t visionary. Pick something that will feel like a challenge every day for as long as you can see into the future.
Finally, don’t lose sight of two words that often escape notice when someone has burning ambition and drive: happiness and love. The more you can increase these two qualities, in your life and the lives of others, the more worthwhile your life will seem as it unfolds. A hugely successful life devoid of happiness and love is what Scrooges are made of.

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

Transformation Is Possible—It Is Already Here

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The one thing in life that never changes is change, or so people say. But in reality we all experience a struggle between accepting change and resisting it, trying to make things different and yet feeling an anxious need to keep things the same. This struggle is what makes personal change so difficult. We can’t make up our minds once and for all how we feel about changing.

If change is so difficult, how can there be personal transformation, upon which the whole movement of human potential is based? It takes vision and commitment to believe that such a thing is even possible. Most people have mixed feelings about how their lives are going. “Taking the bitter with the sweet” is an old saying in English dating back to the 13th century, but it expresses a universal experience in every society.

In the face of life’s mixed blessings there runs a contrary trend, however, based on a deep yearning for transformation. The yearning is expressed through visions of a heaven where eternal bliss is gained, in romantic literature where perfect love is found, and in imaginary utopias of every kind, including a lost Eden or Golden Age.

Is this yearning for transformation mere wish fulfillment, like dreaming of what you’d do if you won the lottery? If you are totally pragmatic, you abandon such fantasies so that you can productively direct your energies to becoming better off by inches and degrees. (There’s at least one bestseller promising how to get ten percent happier, for example, which sounds like opening a passbook savings account—better to get a small safe return than shoot for a higher but much riskier reward.) Even then, modest goals aren’t always achievable. We settle for half a loaf, or less, because common sense tells us to.

But the real issue runs deeper. Transformation exists throughout Nature. Consider the total change of state when two invisible combustible gases, oxygen and hydrogen, combine to form a liquid, water, which is so non-combustible that it puts out fires. Two poisons, sodium and chlorine, combine to make salt, which is necessary for life. The essential nature of the two ingredients give no hint that they could be transformed so completely. But that is what transformation means, as opposed to gradual stepwise change.

What would it mean to achieve personal transformation? Despite the stubborn way that people resist change, clinging to beliefs, fears, biases, and personal habits for no rational reason, we are transformative beings. This can be evidenced in everyday experience.

When you have a thought, mental silence is transformed into a voice in your head.
When you see an object, invisible electrical signals in your brain transform into color and shape.
The sense of sight works by taking minuscule snapshots that individually have no motion, but your mind transforms these into the moving world, the same way that a movie is created out of a series of still frames projected in rapid sequence.
In the presence of a sudden shock, the balanced state of your body at rest is transformed into the aroused state of fight or flight.
The words “I love you,” if spoken by the right person at the right time, creates a total psychological transformation known as falling in love.

None of these experiences happen through gradual or stepwise change. There is a sudden alteration by which one state turns into another completely different state. And as with water and salt, the first state gives no clue about what the new state will be like. That’s why someone falling in love for the first time often says in amazement, “I never knew such a thing ever existed.”

Obviously, the setup of society is drastically tilted toward conformity, routine, and conventionality. There is pressure not to be different. But none of this alters the fact that we are surrounded by transformation in Nature. Moreover, our brains couldn’t transform the raw signals received by the five senses into the image of a three-dimensional world without transforming them.

The lesson here is to accept that transformation is always within reach and requires no special effort or struggle to achieve. But to access any kind of personal transformation, you cannot rely on either your ego or your brain—both ae designed to keep doing what they are used to doing. Both are conditioned by the past. The source of transformation lies elsewhere, in consciousness.

What triggers transformation happens in consciousness; the intention to change registers in consciousness; and consciousness carries out the desired transformation. This isn’t mysticism. Your intention to lift your arm is a conscious trigger for the bodymind to go into action. Without conscious intention, nothing can happen in the direction you desire. What people find hard to accept is that consciousness is present not just as a trigger; it governs and creates change. Ultimately the entire experience occurs only in consciousness.

That’s why we refer to states of consciousness. Only consciousness can change the state you are in physically, mentally, or emotionally. Like a gas changing state into a liquid, the new state isn’t a matter of a little more or a little less. A change of state is a transformation. In childhood, most fairy tales are about transformation, like Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast. These tales linger our entire lives because deep down we know that transformation is real.

In adulthood, transformation becomes wishful thinking because we turn to the ego-personality to affect change, yet it always fails in the end, because of the inner conflict I began with, in which change is desired and feared at the same time. The key is to journey to the source of transformation, which is achieved through meditation. Only when you learn to identify with the inner level of yourself that creates transformation effortlessly can you master your own transformation. In effect, you stop trying to change and let consciousness do it for you. Discovering that this is possible brings fulfillment to our deep yearning to be transformed.

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

The Divine Feminine and the Power to Change the World

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The time has come to think about women’s power and not just women’s rights. When the New York Times editorial board recently split over which Democratic presidential candidate to endorse, the debate was over two women, and eventually both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were selected. This is a sign of our collective exhaustion with a president who expresses the most extreme and worst aspects of masculine behavior. The best hope for turning the tide is said to be the suburban women’s vote, which already showed its power in the 2018 mid-term elections.

But something much deeper is going on. Masculine behavior has run its course as the model for power. The arms race, world wars, civil conflicts, and an insane buildup of atomic bombs symbolize masculine aggression reaching some kind of apex that is also a dead end. The urge to fight and to turn competitors into enemies, nations into armed fortresses, and everyone into winners and losers won’t save a planet that needs emergency medicine.

We find ourselves in a drastic state of imbalance because one entire half of the human psyche, the feminine, has been suppressed, violated, or ignored. The human mind isn’t a chaotic morass. For at least 30,000 years, dating back to the rapid evolution of the higher brain, Homo sapiens has lived by themes and motifs that guide our actions. The pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung called these concentrated themes archetypes, but there is no need for special jargon—at this moment every person taps into the same themes tht permeate civilization back to its roots.

As modern people we see ourselves as beyond mythology, and in fact superior to myths, which feel superstitious and irrational. But if you look at the Greek goddesses—Aphrodite, Hera, Athena, Demeter, and more—each symbolizes a divine feminine energy that must be included in a complete human being, no matter of what gender, or even without gender if that is a conscious choice.

The most basic listing of the divine feminine indicates instantly what is missing on the world stage right now. The leading qualities of the feminine are:

Mothering, the source of tenderness, affection, nonjudgmental acceptance, and nurturing.
Abundance, the freely given gifts of food and water supplied by the earth.
Beauty in every form.
Sexual charm and attraction.
Inspiration, in the form of intuition, insight, and the muses that inspire art and music.
Peace, the impulse to live as a family in harmony.

If the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese could identify and express all of the qualities, not to mention valuing them as divine attributes, how advanced are we who turn our backs on them? There is a concerted call for more women leaders because the rampant behavior of out-of-control masculine energies cannot be tolerated any longer. But the whole point of calling feminine energies divine is that they apply to everyone.

The most reviled leaders in modern history are Hitler and Stalin, neither of whom had the slightest trace of the feminine and whose pure masculinity doomed tens of millions of people to death and suffering. The most revered leaders were Lincoln and Gandhi, both of them repositories of peace and reconciliation. (They both wore shawls,, a gesture toward women’s dress, and Gandhi sat beside a loom, which became the central symbol of India’s flag.)

The choice to express masculine and feminine energies has been unbalanced for a long time. As one psychologist wryly noted, from kindergarten onward boys are trained to be winners who wield power while girls gain their worth by attracting men who are winners and wield power. Daring to break out of the mold of the “second sex” has carried social disapproval and rejection as a constant threat.

All of this is well known, and the modern women’s movement has strived to redress the imbalances that society has tolerated and encouraged. But even when more women assume leadership roles, as they are doing and will continue to, if men don’t respect the feminine archetype, they will never allow it to be part of themselves. The painful truth is that the same men who were motived to kill 100,000,000 people in the twentieth century are just as wiling to kill the planet.

The so-called goddess movement has been vital for several decades but still exists on the fringes. Its most basic aim is to give a woman a sense of self-esteem and worth in her own right, not as an adjunct to a man. This message has widely taken hold in developed countries and has seeped, with aching slowness, into the less privileged world. The next step should be simultaneously personal, social, and spiritual. It should be a movement toward wholeness for everyone.

You cannot make yourself whole; you can only realize the wholeness that has always been inside you. We all live right now in separation, not primarily because of political divisions but because we are divided in ourselves. The divided self tries to live as if one half of itself, the masculine, stands for the whole. It doesn’t and never will.

Everyone needs to take steps to express the suppressed aspects of wholeness. Right now the suppressed aspects are feminine, which has been true for centuries. But wholeness can’t be destroyed, only hidden. You are the agent of peace, nurturing, abundance, beauty, and inspiration. You either express these values or you don’t. The choice involves a conscious decision, and when enough people make the decision, the world will change. Everyone needs to look to the divine feminine. This is the dominant challenge that faces every society, and the future of humanity depends upon meeting the challenge as consciously and as soon as possible.

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

Einstein, the Moon, and You

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Menas Kafatos, PhD

At the present moment a lot of the basic principles of traditional physics are in a confused state of disarray. Occasionally the media carries a story about strange discoveries by modern science on the order of black holes or dark matter and energy, suggesting that such phenomena are as yet unexplained. What isn’t publicized is that many if not most of the most commonly cherished ideas in traditional physics are dead as dodos. They are either wrong, impossible to verify, or contradicted by other more modern ideas without the contradiction being resolved.

Here is a list of the dead dodos, although some might still be clinging to life tenuously.

The physical world perceived by the five senses is reliable. It serves as the basis for everything real, including mind and matter.
The Big Bang occurred once, in a specific time and place, and provided for the emergence of all the energy in the known universe.
Space, time, matter, and energy provide the unshakable framework of reality.
The subjective world “in here” is separate from the objective world “out there.” Science properly deals with the objective world, since it can be fully understood through facts, data, experimentation, and mathematical formulas. The subjective notions and impressions filling our heads have no such reliability.
Having triumphed for centuries and providing us with the modern technological world, science will eventually have a complete theory of everything. This is only a matter of time, needing only the continuation of rational thought to penetrate all of Nature’s secrets.

Without giving it a passing thought, countless people accept these outdated or outright dead ideas as a given, the same way that religious societies accept the idea of an external God as a given. If you accept either the traditional religious or scientific worldview, you are unwittingly living by unexamined ideas that came to you second hand. It would be better to expand human potential by living free of second-hand ideas. But this is a daunting proposition.

As discussed in a previous post, “Why Einstein Was Wrong about the Moon,” even the most brilliant minds can wind up defending flawed ideas as if they were facts. The nub of the matter was Einstein’s stubborn belief in the physical world as something independent and pre-existing, needing no input from human beings. To repeat the incident that began this series of posts, “[Einstein] once walked back from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with the late Abraham Pais. The moon was out and Einstein asked Pais, ‘Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?’”

Why was this even an issue? Surely we can believe in the moon, and all gross physical objects, existing without us. You’d never suspect, cocooned in a worldview you take for granted, that Einstein of all people could be wrong about something so basic and obvious to our senses. But beginning with the quantum revolution over a century ago, as old accepted ideas went the way of the dodo, they were replaced by ideas closer to what is the actual reality. Here is a list of the most crucial ones, which we’ve selected because they apply to you as an individual.

We live in a participatory universe in which human input and the human mind matter.
The universe is either permeated by consciousness or even created and maintained by consciousness.
Matter doesn’t create mind. The two co-arise without one causing the other.
Every version of so-called “external” reality is provisional, incomplete, and flawed.
When stripped of theoretical explanations, time is not universal but is tied to observations. In reality there is only the eternal now.
The laws of nature are not immutable but are subject to change.
There is a psychological component to reality as observed by human beings. Observation isn’t passive; it changes the thing being observed.
With the breakdown of external physical explanations, the only reliable building blocks in Nature are derived from direct experience. We live in a universe constructed from qualia, the sight, sound, taste, texture, and smell of our experiences. Qualia are irrefutable, and if there is a reality beyond them, it cannot be conceived by the human mind.

In our book, You Are the Universe, we expand upon these ideas in detail. What matters to the individual is whether a better worldview exists than the one propped up by shaky, often dead ideas absorbed second hand.

Such a worldview lies beyond theory and is centered entirely on the creative aspect of consciousness. The replacement ideas just listed are not wishful thinking or anti-scientific. There are leading physicists, other scientists, and philosophers expounding them every day. Let’s imagine that a new and better worldview did arise and got accepted. Some time in a future we cannot predict, a team of advanced alien explorers from a distant star system might send back a report to their home planet about human beings that would read like the following:

“The human species is no longer as lonely, isolated, insecure, and self-doubting as they once were, nor as arrogant. They no longer attack and despoil their planet. Instead, they realize that they are immersed and entangled in the very fabric of Nature. They take responsibility as conscious agents who shape their own personal reality and in turn their environment. They humbly recognize that the universe at every moments springs from an inconceivable source.

“Rather than worshiping this source or ignoring it, humans celebrate the infinite creative potential of consciousness. Now that they understand how consciousness works at the very basis of reality, humans have adopted the role that always belonged to them, as co-creators of everything they know as real. The very universe they participate in is tailored to support human evolution.

“This shift in worldview represents the merger of two realms that humans kept apart, quite arbitrarily, for centuries, the realms of ‘in here’ and ‘out there.’ The two got united as one consciousness creating and governing everything. In fact, humans now see the world as nothing but consciousness modifying and reshaping itself constantly. This shift has had the practical effect of bringing body and mind together as a unity, the bodymind.

“There is enormous optimism on the planet for the first time in memory. No longer tied to conditioning from the past and anxious anticipation about the future, humans have learned to live in the present moment. In the present they have rediscovered the richness of insight, intuition, imagination, curiosity, love, compassion, personal growth, and their common humanity.

“Old rigid barriers of religious dogma, racial divides, and aggressive nationalism have come down thanks to the global effort that saved Earth from ecological disaster, just in the nick of time. Humans see boundless untapped potential within themselves, and this belief is taught to every child growing up. All of these changes are rooted in one tremendous insight, that reality is consciousness-based. No longer insignificant life forms clinging for survival on the speck of a planet floating in the cold void of infinite space, humans have reimagined themselves. In so doing, they realize that they have been imagining themselves all along. It’s lucky they made this insight in time to turn their destiny around.”

No one can read the future, but we can say that everything in the aliens’ report is plausible and has science on its side. Coming to terms with a new and better worldview will spring from science naturally, as the next step of the human project to understand who we are and why we are here.

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

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University and the Director of the Center of Excellence in Earth Systems Modeling and Observations. Author, physicist and philosopher, he works in quantum mechanics, cosmology, the environment and climate change and extensively on philosophical issues of consciousness, connecting science to metaphysical traditions. Member or candidate of foreign national academies, he holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the universal principles for well-being and human potential. As dean and vice provost, he promoted interdisciplinary educational and research projects, leading many grants. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored more than 333 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer, 2000), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House, 1991), Living the Living Presence (in Greek, Melissa, 2017; and in Korean, Miruksa Press, 2016), Science, Reality and Everyday Life (in Greek, Asimakis 2019), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the NY Times Bestseller You are the Universe (Harmony/Random House/Penguin, 2017, translated into many languages and at many countries). You can learn more at menaskafatos.com

The Chopra Foundation supports Project Why’s Adopt a Teacher Program

In addition to our longstanding support of Project Why, The Chopra Foundation is proud to extend that support to Project Why’s new Adopt a Teacher Campaign that is designed to Empower Teachers to Educate future generations and curb dropouts.

Project WHY’s Adopt-a-Teacher Campaign ensures that every child, no matter what their background, gets a good education by having access to a good teacher.

They have 45 teachers across 5 educational centers in Delhi. By adopting a teacher, you enable a good teacher to reach out to 50 underprivileged children who need educational support to complete their schooling years. Without good teachers, this is not possible. You can help support this initiative by adopting one of our teachers for as little as INR 10,000 rupees a month (USD 145 or euros 130).

Please Note: INR 10,000 a month is the average cost of a teacher at Project WHY. If the teacher you choose whose salary is below INR 10,000 a month, the remaining amount will be utilized for purchasing learning aids for their class. If the salary of the teacher is over INR 10,000, the organization will pay for the difference.

More information about the Chopra Foundation’s support of Project Why can be found here.

Please find all the teacher’s stories from Project Why here.