From world leadership to inner values, non-violence, and mental fitness, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra talked on a whole host of topics at a recent meeting at the Dalai Lama’s residence in Dharamsala, HP, India. Deepak was joined by a number of close friends at the recent audience with the Dalai Lama.
https://www.dalailama.com/news/2019/deepak-chopra-and-friends-meet-his-holiness-the-dalai-lama
Modern machines are assembled from separate moving parts, a fact that seems so obvious that we usually don’t notice its vast influence over us. But the image of a machine extends to the human body, which is an assemblage of trillions of separate cells, and ultimately to the universe, which is considered an assemblage of atoms and molecules beyond numbering.
So ingrained is the machine metaphor that it has taken centuries to realize that it has a fatal flaw. The human body and the universe operate as a single wholeness that cannot be explained mechanically or even logically. The general public has a vague acquaintance that quantum physics changed how science views space, time, matter, and energy. What escapes general notice, however, is the revolution that followed the quantum revolution.
Since roughly World War II, the following activities of the universe have sent science scrambling to find a rational explanation:
One could go on, but the upshot of these discoveries is that mathematically speaking, as well as in real-time experiences, the notion of the universe as a machine with tiny moving parts governed by space, time, and everyday logic is totally false. Noted physicists, including the late Stephen Hawking, declare that there is no longer a guarantee that the advanced theories of modern physics actually match reality. (You can get a sense of the prevailing confusion in a recent New York Times article, “Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?”)
If the universe isn’t a giant machine, there’s every reason to drop the whole analogy of the machine, but what to put in its place? The answer advanced by more and more scientists is “wholeness.” Since space, time, matter, energy, and everyday logic aren’t truly fundamental, it makes sense that whatever controls space, time, matter, and energy must be the universes overriding reality. Wholeness exerts a force, call it “the power of one,” that goes beyond physical forces. Or to put it another way, no combination of physical forces can be sued to explain how the whole maintains and organizes itself.
The power of one can be seen on a small scale as well as a cosmic scale. The fertilized ovum from which the human body develops is a self-organizing system, not a watery bag of chemicals enclosed in a membrane. With infinite precision this first cell begins to send out chemical and electrical signals almost from the instant it divides into two cells, and within weeks stem cells know how to become heart, liver, and brain cells using the same DNA. The concept of the self-organizing system now permeates biology, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, and more.
What science clings to, for complicated reasons that have little to do with the actual evidence, is an insistence that self-organization has to be physical. This insistence runs into glaring contradictions. For instance, if elementary particles can operate three ways—via cause-and-effect, reverse cause-and-effect, and no cause-and-effect—how do they make the choice between them?
Since it has been obvious to a number of cosmologists that the physical universe functions much more like a mind than like a machine, a trend has emerged to include consciousness as fundamental in creation. If consciousness has always been with us, it is the best candidate for explaining where the power of one comes from. The same would then hold true for how atoms, molecules, cells, tissues and organs self-organize into the human body. It has never been shown that the atoms and molecules somehow learned to think through a magical physical transformation. The best explanation is that the brain doesn’t think in the first place. Mind thinks, and on the physical plane it devises a brain to accommodate its thoughts.
Yet in the end a new conception of reality must pass the “So what?” test. Quantum mechanics is considered the most successful scientific theory of all time, but its effect on everyday life—or at least everyday thought—has been marginal. The power of one has a much better chance of passing the “So what?” test, however. By deposing the metaphor of the body as a machine, the power of one allows us to see several vital things.
It is obvious at first glance that human beings are intelligent, creative, and capable of the fastest evolution of any species on earth. This alone testifies to the validity of the power of one. But we can look even deeper. People have reported experiences of meaningful coincidences or synchronicity for a very long time. The key word is “meaningful,” because meaningless coincidences can be explained as random events.
However, a system cannot be meaningless and meaningful at the same time. Synchronicity is a valuable clue. It points toward wholeness as having a meaning to everything it does.
This possibility, that everything truly does happen for a reason, would be a game changer as far as how we live our lives. We’ll explore this possibility and what it would mean for the average person in the next post.
(To be cont.)
More people than ever have undertaken a spiritual path of their own, independently of organized religion. “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual” has become a common expression, and I count myself among those who struck out on their own as a seeker. My search has covered a lot of ground over the years, from mind-body medicine to quantum physics, higher consciousness, the future of God, and personal transformation.
What all of these disparate topics have in common is reality, in the sense that everyday reality is hiding from view the “real” reality that needs to be unveiled. (Readers might want to look at last week’s post, “Unveiling Reality,” which details what it means to unveil reality.) There’s no question that the five senses detect the world in a very limited way, since they give no clue that molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles exist, not to mention genes and DNA. But unveiling a deeper physical reality is far from the whole story.
The physical sciences are about the external world, while another hidden reality, which is crucial to spiritual seeking, takes place “in here,” where the mind is the explorer and the territory being explored. This sounds like a contradiction, and so does the traditional way of reaching higher consciousness, which is called “the pathless path.” How can you unveil reality “in here” when the explorer—the mind—isn’t separate from the territory it wants to explore. The difficulty emerges clearly if you ask a question like “What do I think about thinking?” or “Am I aware of awareness?”
At best these questions sound circular, like a snake biting its tail. But the contradiction is straightened out, and the pathless path makes sense, when you realize one simple thing: The active mind isn’t the same as the still, quiet mind. Every method of spiritual seeking, if it is successful, goes beyond the active mind and its restless baggage of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts, with the aim of settling down into pure, undisturbed awareness. By analogy, one dives below the churning surface of a raging river, moving through deeper waters where the currents are slower, until one reaches the bottom, where the river is almost motionless.
Here, however, the analogy breaks down, because meditation, which is like an inner dive, can reach the zero point of no motion or activity of any kind. At the source of your awareness you can encounter pure awareness. Why is this experience worthwhile? Because the field of pure awareness is the origin of traits that are innate in us: Intelligence, creativity, evolution, love, and self-awareness are chief among these.
The pathless path makes sense for that reason; it leads you, without going anywhere, to a deeper level of awareness. Once you experience the deeper level, you find that there’s a shift. You identify less with your everyday self, which is totally dependent on the active mind (along with the desires, hopes, wishes, and dreams it generates), and you start to identify more with the field of pure awareness.
In this way higher consciousness gets assimilated into who you are and how you live your life. The word “spiritual” isn’t mandatory to describe this shift; I prefer to describe the whole process in terms of awareness, which is a more neutral term. What baffles people is that the whole project of seeking gets tangled up in misguided ideas. Let me list the pitfalls one is most likely to encounter.
When it is put that way, the pathless path seems impossible or at the very least difficult and probably painful. But what’s difficult and painful are the pitfalls I’ve listed. The illusion creates all the problems. It’s crucial to see this. The actual path is effortless and pain-free. The mind by its own nature can know its source in pure awareness. By analogy, you can go through troubles, worries, everyday crises, and arguments with your children, but without a doubt you know you love them. Love goes beyond the other stuff—that’s how transcendence, or going beyond, works.
The same holds true in the process of unveiling reality, which also goes by the simple name of waking up. The ancient Vedas declare that everyone is defined by their deepest desires. Desire leads to thoughts, thoughts to words and actions, actions to the fulfillment of desire. So in a very basic way, the pathless path is a path of desire. If your deepest desire is to wake up, to escape the illusion, to unveil reality, and in the end to know who you really are, the message gets through. Your deepest desire activates a level of awareness that will lead you to the goal.
As with raising kids, the everyday stuff rises and falls, but love, caring, attention, and devotion steadily work their way. The same is true of you the seeker, even though you are both parent and child to yourself, both teacher and student, healer and healed. Because these dual roles merge into one, the pathless path makes sense, and it works.
The near-death experience (NDE) has entered popular culture, starting in the 1970s, and “going into the light” is considered by the average person to be what happens after you die, assuming that anything happens. But the largest study of NDEs, which examined 2,060 patients who died under emergency or intensive care, arrive at the conclusion that death isn’t a single event–it is a process. During this process, there are ways to reverse death. If you are successful at getting the heart, lungs, and brain to come back to normal functioning, about 40% of those who died and came back remember that “something happened” when they were flat line.
This part of the study, which was titled AWARE and was led by intensive-care doctor Sam Parnia, seems irrefutable. But very quickly the details of “something happened” become controversial. We have to dive into a few details to see what the issues are. Out of the 2,060 patients who died (the study went from 2008 to 2012 and included 33 researchers in 15 hospitals), 104 were resuscitated. The first point to note is that all had actually died. They were not “near death.” Their hearts and lungs had stopped functioning, and within 20-30 seconds their brains showed no activity. The decomposition of cells throughout the body actually takes several hours to commence afterward. During the interval between dying and being brought back is when 39% reported the memory of being conscious even though their brains had stopped.
Dr. Parnia believes that this is probably just a fraction of those who had such experiences; the rest had their memories erased either by brain inflammation, which occurs for 72 hours after a person is brought back from death, or because of drugs that are administered as part of resuscitation that also causes memory loss. But of the 101 out of 104 who completed the questionnaire about their experience during death, only 9% had an experience compatible with the typical view of NDEs; the majority of memories were vague and unfocused, sometimes pleasant but sometimes not.
Only 2%, which means two people out of the 104 who completed questionnaires, had the experience of full awareness or out-of-body experiences like looking down from above their bodies watching and listening to the medical team as it was working to revive them. Of these two people, only one could accurately narrate what had been happening in the room in such a way that it corresponded to timed events. So what does this one person tell us about dying?
It depends. Skeptics shrug off all such experiences as purely physical, claiming that if we had finer measurements of brain activity, at a very subtle level we’d discover that the brain hadn’t actually died. Dr. Parnia accepts that this might be true. His main focus is on how to achieve better results at resuscitation that might bring back a normal person with no organ damage, particularly brain damage after clinical death. But Parnia’s personal conclusion is that a person can be fully conscious without brain function, as this one patient was. He points to the basic disagreement, thousands of years ago, between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle contended that consciousness was a physical phenomenon, Plato that it was non-physical, residing in a soul that transcends the body.
The AWARE study didn’t confirm either side. Unsurprisingly, skeptics and believers didn’t change their position, or their prejudices one way or another. One can say that it’s a significant step to turn death into a process that can be reversed. It’s also significant that awareness during death covers a wide range of experiences, not a one-size-fits-all of going into the light. Parnia found that people’s spiritual interpretation of their death experience coincided with their own faith. They interpreted the light as being Christ, if they were Christians, which was different for Hindus and non-spiritual for atheists. but the consensus was that death is a comfortable process, not to be feared. Having directly experienced that their old fears were groundless, these people who came back had a different perspective on life. Many if not most also concluded that they should lead more selfless lives in service to others.
If we stick with the Aristotle-Plato split, scientists are almost totally committed to the physical explanation for consciousness (i.e., the brain creates consciousness) while a strong majority in the general public tell pollsters they believe in the existence of the soul. I think it is useful that the AWARE study validated that “something happens,” but why are we trying to settle the issue of consciousness at the most extreme moment when life and death are at stake? It’s like trying to validate gravity by asking survivors of a plane crash about their experience of falling from the sky.
It is the normal, everyday experience of consciousness that needs to be explained, not the extreme states. I’ve debated or conversed with many neuroscientists, and all, I concluded, believe that the brain creates the mind. Yet despite being experts on brain activity, none has been able to answer the simplest questions about consciousness. These simple questions include the following:
What is a thought?
How does the electrochemical activity in a neuron turn into words, sights, and sounds in our heads?
Why is a person’s next thought totally unpredictable?
If someone has a vocabulary of 30,000 words, does this mean that a clump of brain cells knows 30,000 words? If so, in what way are the words being stored? For the word “cat,” is there a place inside a brain cell that holds the letters C-A-T?
All brain activity occurs here and now, in the present, because chemical reactions and electrical impulses are instantaneous events. So how is it that I remember, relive, or revisit the past?
There is such a thing as “sudden genius syndrome,” where a person who has little knowledge of music, mathematics, or art suddenly acquires deep knowledge. How can they suddenly know what their brains never learned?
Genius exists among child prodigies. A musical prodigy can play Mozart before age three on the piano. How is this consistent with the known facts about the development of infant’s brains?
There are lots more of these basic questions, and assuming that they can be answered by measuring brain activity is wobbly, so wobbly that the basic belief about the brain creating the mind should be taken by everyone with a huge grain of salt. Not just Plato but some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century were convinced that consciousness simply is–it pre-existed the evolution of the human brain and indeed is the basic “stuff” of creation. It is only a tiny step for one patient to see and hear what is happening around her when she was clinically dead, but in that one experience could be hidden an important conclusion: consciousness exists outside the brain.
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The field of genetics is so complex that the story is simplified for popular consumption. The simplified story is that DNA contains the “code of life,” a master blueprint that jumps into action the instant an egg is fertilized in the mother’s womb. From that point on, a human being develops from a single cell to 37 trillion cells as the blueprint unfolds. The traditional view is that we are then the sole products of our genes. Yet, increasingly, evidence shows that “nurture” plays a much bigger role over “nature” than even professional geneticists have ever envisaged. When it comes to genetics, “nurture” exerts its effects on “nature” via epigenetics, as we laid out in our book Super Genes.
As powerful as the “code of life” story is, behind the scenes a growing number of geneticists don’t buy into it; in fact, they think we’ve gotten a lot about genes, wrong. At the same time, a new, improved picture of human development, based on the interplay of genes and lifestyle, is emerging. This revolution is outlined beautifully in an online article at Nautilus.com titled “It’s the End of Genes as We Know It.” The author, Ken Richardson, is an expert in human development, and he is worried that wildly exaggerated assumptions about the deterministic effects of DNA could lead to social policy that echoes the racism that fueled the eugenic movement decades ago, most notoriously with the Nazi ideology of a master race. As a case in point, Nobel Laureate, James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, was recently stripped of all his honors at Cold Spring Harbor, Laboratories, where he spent much of scientific career, after he continually expressed his bigoted opinion that black people and women are less intelligent than others based on their genetics.
Richardson’s article cuts much deeper, into everyone’s everyday aspirations, in fact. The problem with the traditional “code of life” story is that it has huge holes in it that are growing bigger every day. There’s no substitute for reading Richardson’s argument in detail, but here’s the gist. DNA’s purpose is to produce the proteins that are the basic building blocks of a cell and other products that regulate the genes that produce these proteins. But DNA, alone, does not account for the many ways cells, tissues, and organs use these proteins. Jumping to the conclusion that DNA is the final blueprint for the body, mind, and behavioral traits of a person is dead in the water.
Recent research has shown that cells have their own intelligence. They are dynamic systems that change their makeup “on the hoof,” as Richardson puts it, a process of self-regulation that begins almost the moment a sperm fertilizes an ovum. As soon as that one cell forms into a ball of identical cells, “the cells are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo [i.e., from scratch].” It turns out that totally independent of DNA, a cell is controlling all kinds of information contained in amino acids, fats, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and various kinds of nucleic acids (RNA)—a whole factory of ingredients necessary to keep the cell going are not predetermined by our genes at all.
In the newly emerging view, the cell controls DNA just as much as DNA controls the cell. DNA, it seems, emerged at a later stage of evolution. In their earliest stages, billions of years ago, cells had no DNA but were self-enclosed vats of molecular soup that likely used RNA, the blueprint of proteins. This soup somehow began to regulate itself, giving rise gradually over time to permanent structures that were needed on a regular basis. The information for these structures was then coded as DNA, which serves as a kind of passive database.
A validation of this new understanding is that cells, in fact, can alter their own DNA via epigenetics. This means that the life of a cell is intelligent, dynamic, responsive to changing conditions, and creative. DNA possesses none of these traits; they operate outside the manufacture of proteins. Richardson notes something else that puts DNA in its rightful place as a necessary part of a cell’s existence but not its whole complex life. “More startling has been the realization that less than 5 percent of the genome is used to make proteins at all. Most produce a vast range of different factors (RNAs) regulating, through the network, how the other genes are used.”
If the life of a cell is dynamic, intelligent, self-regulating, and creative, it is no wonder that complex life forms, including Homo sapiens, display the same traits. But where did they come from? At present, the new story is stuck on two factors: information and complexity. The notion is that primal “molecular soup” found ways for atoms and molecules to form complicated structures through information exchange and the statistical possibilities that arise when zillions of molecules start churning around.
But is that feasible? As someone wittily put it, the notion that complexity is enough to explain the behavior of a structure as complex as the human brain is like saying that if you add enough cards to the deck, they start playing poker.
In our book Super Genes we tackle these issues head-on in great detail. Our premise is that a cell, tissue, organ, system, or a complete person are all expressions of an underlying field of consciousness. Only consciousness explains what must be accounted for: intelligence, self-regulation, dynamism, and creativity. It’s good news that these traits have been tracked to the level of the cell. It’s also good news that the notion that we are robots controlled by DNA is being dismantled. But just as important is the next step, to stop defending physical matter as the only basis of life, turning to consciousness, as well. It was the ideology of materialism that got us into trouble in the first place.
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