Why Matter Is a (Useful) Fiction

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Given a choice between physics and metaphysics, almost everyone chooses physics. This is a modern habit that is deeply ingrained, and it turns the tables on the religious approach to reality, which put a divine or supernatural entity, first and foremost in creation. But relying on the physical world as the foundation of reality has run into serious problems. Unable or unwilling to return to metaphysics, people are stuck without a viable model of reality.

This becomes apparent if you go to the nub of the physical model, which is matter. For centuries, ever since the ancient Greek concept of the atom, there has been a constant search for the smallest building block in Nature, on the supposition that the world is like a sandcastle on the beach. If you reduce the sandcastle to grains of sand, you know where it comes from. Putting things on a firm foundation is one of humanity’s driving force, and in the physical world, this drive leads to atoms and beyond.

The problem is the “beyond” part, because around a century ago quantum physics discovered that there is nothing like a minuscule grain of sand from which everything is built. Atoms can be envisioned on a chart in physics class as a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. This is a reassuring picture since it makes the atom seem like a miniature solar system. However, this model isn’t the same as reality.

The subatomic particles, also known as fundamental particles or quanta, that make up an atom are not bits of solid matter. They are a mysterious “something else” that quantum physics still ponders. Nothing can be truly settled about quanta because their behavior defies human logic. To begin with, a quantum has a dual personality, sometimes behaving like an invisible wave that extends in all directions, sometimes like a particle with a definite location. Quanta constantly bubble up as “quantum foam” out of a state that has neither matter nor energy in it but is “virtual,” meaning that it has the potential for turning into matter and energy, not to mention time and space.

The best visualization one encounters for how matter exists is a rippling field of activity, with particles being the intersection between two or more waves. This visualization is just a stab at giving substance to a mystery that physics expresses through mathematical formulas. Everything in modern physics occurs in a mathematical space that doesn’t necessarily match the real world.

What this means is that matter, if understood as grains of sand building up bigger and bigger structures, is a useful fiction. The usefulness comes about because each model one can devise leads to a practical technology. The model in physics class of the atom as miniature solar system allows for two powerful technologies, chemistry and atomic energy. Chemistry is entirely built upon the whirling electrons orbiting around the nucleus. Atomic energy is built on splitting the nucleus to release its energy or fusing two nuclei for the same purpose.

In a world based on ever-progressing technology, these outcomes are good enough, and there are new horizons in quantum technology to look forward to. But the building block theory of reality, however useful, leaves out the very thing that builds models and invents technology: the mind. Grains of sand might build a sandcastle, but they don’t spontaneously invent the idea of a sandcastle. The best they can do is to build sand dunes, which are shapeless humps, not complex structures. Without explaining the mind, you cannot explain creativity, curiosity, invention, emotion, aspirations, fears, wishes, dreams, and every other aspect of mind.

The only way forward begins by realizing that matter isn’t what it seems to be. There was always an illusory side to the whole acceptance of the physical world as the foundation of reality. You can take any quality of matter and reproduce it to a subjective experience. Matter is hard, visible, and heavy. Yet if you push the same pole o two poles of a powerful magnet together, they repel each other so forcefully that you can never get them to touch. The space between them is as hard as iron.

A mirage of water in the desert is visible but is made of invisible shimmering air. The pictures you see in your mind’s eye arise in the total blackness of the brain’s interior and from a physical viewpoint are actually invisible. As for heaviness, when you are very tired your body feels heavier, even though the physical model tells you that you didn’t actually gain weight.

What these examples show is that objective and subjective reality don’t form two separate domains but an entangled whole that is very hard to explain. This wholeness is known as reality. What is it made of? Two viable answers are possible. The first says that reality is made from the viewpoint of the observer. One of the greatest quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg, held that atoms and subatomic particles do not exist as material things but as response by Nature to whatever the experimenter is asking. Change your questions, and Nature obliges with an answer that fits your point of view. We can call this answer perspectivism.

The second answer agrees with perspectivism but is bigger. It says that reality is more than the sum of all possible perspectives. Even if you give every living thing from a virus and bacterium to a whale and a human being, their own viewpoint, there can be no perspectives without consciousness. So reality comes down to consciousness, which is the very opposite of a building block. Instead of being tiny and separate like a grain of sand, consciousness is a field extending infinitely everywhere.

Modern physics likes the model of a field, which is why from a physics viewpoint reality consists of ripples in the quantum field, the gravity field, and a few other basic fields. The advantage of a field is that it allows you to conceive of Nature as a whole. But we don’t conceive consciousness. It is too real for that. Consciousness is where conceptions come from. It is the “stuff” of ideas, emotions, invention, curiosity, and all the other things created in the mind. You might struggle with the fact that time, space, matter, and energy are also created in consciousness, but there is actually no other way to explain wholeness.

You can’t have on foundation for the physical world and another foundation for the mental world. Science has long recognized this, which is why so much weight was put on the atom. It was hoped that somehow tiny grains of sand would explain the mind if only they got tiny enough. Many working scientists still assume that this hope will come true one day, but it won’t, for the simple reason that matter is just as conceptual as Alice in Wonderland. Alice knew she was in an imaginary world and devoted herself to getting back to the real world. We are in the real world, being conscious, while applying our efforts to stick inside an imaginary one. This has to change if we want to become totally real again, in other words totally conscious.

 

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 Most Popular Model of Reality Is Wrong

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It would be ideal if reality and our model of reality merged into the same thing. A model of reality explains how the universe was created and how it operates. You might think that this is a definition of reality itself, but it isn’t, which can be illustrated by looking at the most popular model, known as naïve realism.

In a nutshell, naïve realism says that what you see is what you get. In other words, the reality presented by the five senses is reliable. Such a view appeals to common sense. It rests on experiences we take for granted. There is a physical world “out there” separate from our subjective experience “in here.” The physical world predates human beings by 13.8 billion years, going back to the Big Bang. If both of those things are true, then obviously what we think, feel, and desire “in here” has no effect on reality “out there.”

As unimaginably sophisticated as modern science has become, most scientists accept naïve realism, usually without question, even though each of the common-sense facts just mentioned is known to be false.

  • The division of reality into mind and matter has never worked, because it fails to tell us where mind came from or how it relates to the brain.
  • The passage of time, whether in milliseconds or the eons since the Big Bang, has no fixed validity. The quantum field, considered the finest level of Nature by physicists, doesn’t exhibit linear clock time, and the source of the quantum field is timeless.
  • A longstanding problem in physics, known as the measurement problem, indicates that an observer is needed in order to produce the basic outcomes that create particles. In other words, physical reality has a psychological component that is inseparable from it—we live in a participatory universe.

Leave aside the obvious ways we cannot trust our five senses, which tell us mistakenly that the sun rises in the East, that a thunderclap happens after a flash of lightning, and that there could be no such things as small as bacteria and viruses, since they are invisible to our eyesight. Naïve realism is wrong at a much deeper level, which has been grappled with by the most eminent physicists. It is wrong about mind; it cannot connect mind and brain; it has nothing to tell us about the origins of space, time, matter, and energy’ it is contradicted by the strange behavior of the quantum field; and it has no chance of linking the microscopic world with the macroscopic world—in other words, the so-called building blocks of reality live in a separate, totally closed-off domain from everyday reality.

These multiple failures are widely known among physicists but just as widely ignored. A great deal of science and most of technology can advance without a theoretical model of reality. Before he died Stephen Hawking published a book, The Grand Design, in which he conceded the high probability that scientific models will not succeed in matching the reality they are supposed to describe.

If science rolls along without a viable model of reality, that lack isn’t incidental. We celebrate Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein for getting something right, not simply for issuing metaphysical suppositions. So it is important to get things right now. If the present model of reality is, in fact, an abstruse collection of mathematical formulas suspended in a theoretical mathematical space, clearly something is amiss. In medieval times the world had to conform to divine law; now it must conform to mathematical law, yet the fallacy remains the same.

There is a way out. First, we acknowledge a simple truth: Models are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude. Naïve realism is dead wrong about consciousness because it excludes mind in favor of physical explanations. Secondly, we must accept that reality cannot be modeled. The whole enterprise of reducing the physical world into tinier and tinier building blocks has reached its useful limit. Leading theorists suggest that quarks and superstrings might not actually exist. More to the point, we live with space, time, matter, and energy and yet have no origins story for where any of them came from.

Without a model, what’s left? Still standing is the one thing that permeates reality, brings the five senses to life, allows thoughts to arise in our heads, gives the world color and form, and tells us that we are alive: consciousness. The very thing that naïve realism leaves out is the thing that holds all the answers.

There was a lamentable decline after the earliest decades of the quantum revolution, when all the greatest physicists tackled the problem of mind. In place of great thinkers physics turned to number crunching and atom smashing, which remains its chief occupation, now on a billion-dollar scale. There were exceptions like John von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and David Bohm, who continued the search for a link between mind and matter.

Respected but sidelined in favor of bigger particle accelerators and telescopes, all of these thinkers now enjoy a latter-day revenge, so to speak. Having exhausted the models of reality that discounted and ignored consciousness, forward-looking physicists now realize that mind must be accounted for, which seems like a simple realization except that it was clouded behind a screen, the biggest factor being naïve realism. Satisfied with the common-sense view of reality in their everyday life, physicists were happy to think of mind as “not my job.”

A huge hurdle remains, however, which is the enormous seduction of physical explanations. What is science without them? What is life if we get rid of relying on the five senses? These aren’t rhetorical questions. Life would be transformed if we abandoned the lure of the physical world and the mistaken data of the five senses. The human mind is uniquely able to go beyond appearances, and when we do, the destination is always consciousness. There’s no need to call it “higher” consciousness. A better term is “total” consciousness, the ground state of everything in existence.

Account for consciousness and you explain everything. No models are needed. The everyday mind is the arena of consciousness. Stick with it, experience it deeply, and be self-aware. Only then will reality be fully comprehended, absent any model at all.

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 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 

Personal Transformation—What It Really Means

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Most people have mixed feelings about how their lives are going, which seems inevitable. Taking the bitter with the sweet is an old saying dating back to the 13th century, but it expresses a universal experience. In the face of life’s mixed blessings, however, there runs a deep yearning for transformation. It is expressed through visons of heaven where eternal bliss is gained, in romantic literature where a perfect life is attained here on earth, and in utopian visions of every kind, including worldwide myths of a lost Eden or a 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, the answer is yes, and having abandoned such fantasies you can productively direct your energies to becoming better off by inches and degrees. Even then, modest goals aren’t always achievable. We settle for half a loaf, or less, because common sense tells us to.

But I think the issue runs deeper than pragmatism. In my new book Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, I propose that the desire for transformation is not only realistic but totally necessary. Transformation is like the total change of state when two invisible combustible gases, oxygen and hydrogen, combine to form a liquid, water, that puts out fires. The essential nature of the two gases 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 totally transform a human being? Despite the stubborn way that people resist change, clinging to beliefs, fears, biases, and personal tastes 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 have no motion, but your mind transforms these into the moving world.
  • In the presence of a sudden shock, the balanced state of your body at rest is transformed into the 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 is alien, yet we don’t usually label them transformative. Why not? Because the setup for being human is drastically tilted toward conformity, normality, and conventionality. Every child absorbs, as if by osmosis, that life is a struggle between good and bad, light and dark, desire and frustration, success and failure.

This condition, generally known as duality, is what Metahuman tries to overturn. Duality condemns us to a lifetime of either/or choices. We identify with the choices we make, and then we cling to the identity that results. We shake our heads when we encounter people who have made bad choices, turning for example into racists or xenophobes, but at bottom the problem isn’t bad choices and the solution isn’t good choices. Either side of the coin keeps you trapped in duality.

Transformation provides an escape route from what is otherwise an all-embracing worldview. All visions of transformation have in common a desire to be liberated, set free from some kind of personal limitation. In exceptional cases, such as the life of the Buddha or Jesus, the vision of transformation renounces everything duality holds out as the good life. To be in the world but not of it is as radical as seeking to escape the eternal cycle of pleasure and pain.

In Metahuman I don’t argue for radical transformation in that way. Instead of presenting transformation as a far-away goal, I argue that it should be a starting point. The common experiences cited earlier give a clue to what the transformed life is like. It is open to change because change is always with us. It allows rather than resists, because no one can predict where any situation might go.

But the biggest shift occurs in a person’s identity. Instead of identifying with all the choices you’ve made in your life, you identify with the state of awareness you are in. Consciousness becomes your identity. I can illustrate what that means with a simple example. Imagine that you are on a debating team, and the question is “Does God exist?” In this debate the two teams will draw lots to determine who take which side of the question. As a debater you are prepared to argue for total faith in God or total atheism.

Clearly a good debater can do this, and in our legal system, defense lawyers are often asked to mount an argument for indefensible clients. In everyday life we identify with one viewpoint or the other, faith versus atheism, but in reality we are set up to rise above either position, simply because we can instantly change our perspective. This is more basic than any single perspective, yet we live as if the opposite is true. Every “-ism” is just a perspective somebody wants to defend and cling to. Nazism is dire while pacifism is benign, but each concept limits your unconditioned consciousness, depriving you of the power of transformation.

“My way or the highway” has become a noxious trend in today’s divisive world, by which polarization has become the status quo. But at a subtler level we all cling to our point of view, having forgotten that to be human is never a point of view. To be human is to go beyond any fixed belief, conditioning, bias, or fixed assumptions. What would it be like to live as if transformation is your true essence? That’s the real issue we should be discussing, because the future of humanity and of the planet depends on the answer we arrive at.

 

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 

Are Human Beings the Ultimate Creator?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It’s rare to find someone with an optimistic view of humanity’s future. The prevailing mood globally is dark, and yet David Deutsch, a far-seeing British physicist, argues that humans are responsible for everything new—we are the ultimate creators in the cosmos.

I was excited to view his April 2019 TED talk headlined “After billions of years of monotony, the universe is waking up” By monotony Deutsch means the mechanistic processes that have been in place ever since stars and galaxies began to form, and by waking up, he means us. We are a unique source of creative novelty in the universe, so far as we know.

To support this very original idea, Deutsch points out that humans have told themselves a story for centuries that is mistaken. We have seen ourselves caught in the middle of struggle between cosmic good and evil, which was expressed in religious terms for a long time but has been updated by science into the struggle between order (the good side of the war) and chaos (the destructive side of the war, and therefore bad).

What we fail to realize, he says, is that human beings are not subject to the laws of nature; we use them in creative ways and therefore have broken the monotonous chain of pre-determined cosmic forces. This became possible thanks to DNA. When life first appeared, it began to change planet Earth.

In itself this was unparalleled in the universe, where tiny things are as a rule dominated by bigger things. When a comet hits the sun, for example, the comet is destroyed while the sun, being much bigger, is unaffected. Earth has been hugely affected by DNA, however. Photosynthesis from one-celled plants provided the necessary oxygen in the atmosphere to sustain higher life forms. The planet has chalk deposits, oil, gas, and coal thanks to dead life forms.

This amounts to the first time that the monotonous universe found a new direction, hence his use of waking up. The epitome of waking up arrived with Homo sapiens. Since that is the theme of my new book, Metahuman, I was particularly fascinated by this part of the argument. If we stop seeing ourselves as passively trapped between good and evil, evolution and entropy, the light and dark sides of our own nature, we can redefine what it means to be human.

What it means—here I totally agree with Deutsch—is unbounded creative potential. In Deutsch’s view we are the only life form that has the ability to acquire new knowledge that can be communicated in language, and from this unique ability we can turn any knowledge into technology. Our whole reality is already mind-created, and there is no reason to believe that the creative process is about to end.

In my book I also speak of human reality as mind-made, but I see that a choice is involved. Besides creative knowledge, we walk around prey to illusions created by the mind. The war between cosmic good and evil serves as only one example. Everyone is trapped in beliefs, prejudices, second-hand opinions, and unproven assumptions. These, in fact, are the source of war, crime, violence, racism, famine, anxiety, and pessimism. There is nothing in the setup of reality to confirm the necessity of any of these limitations.

Everyone knows before going into a war that the outcome will be pointless destruction and suffering, yet we find ourselves unable to turn this realization into lasting peace. Our self-made constructs push us in directions we know are bad for us. The point of Metahuman is that only by going beyond, arriving at a new level of self-awareness, can human beings evolve. I feel that this adds a new element to Deutsch’s model for the future. Where he places his faith on knowledge as the ultimate creative agency. I think the picture must be widened. Knowledge depends on the ability to know, an ability that is traceable to consciousness.

This doesn’t sound like a big distinction, but it is. Deutsch offers a radical rethinking of what it means to be human, yet his basic worldview is physical. He ascribes novelty and creative force to DNA, not to consciousness. But if he is right that evolution has led to humans as the ultimate knowers, where did this knowing arise? Either it was present in the creation to begin with, or you are forced to find the time and place where atoms and molecules bunching together learned how to think. Such a time and place has never remotely been discovered—and it never will be.

Knowing, as a trait of consciousness, must pre-exist. There is nothing to know without a knower, yet humans cannot be unique knowers. It took knowledge to create us. We didn’t create the trait of knowing; it came with life itself, and indeed with the whole project of the created universe. It takes a whole book to explain how existence and consciousness are one. But in his TED talk Deutsch describes just how far knowledge has gotten us, pointing out that our creative unfoldment is hardly about to end. Accepting that is half the battle.

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