Expanded Awareness and Success

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

Only about half of Americans tell pollsters that they still believe the American Dream is attainable. If the dream is the same as achieving success, perhaps there’s a more optimistic way to think about the whole issue.

 

To have worldly success, do you have to be worldly yourself?  Most people assume that the answer is yes.  The poet Wordsworth may complain that “the world is too much with us late and soon,” but modern life seems to demand total immersion in the race to the top.  If you stop looking out for number one, no one else is likely to, and in a highly competitive workplace, there’s only room for winners.

 

In earlier posts I’ve pointed out that the world’s wisdom traditions don’t agree with this viewpoint.  The path to happiness isn’t through obeying the demands of the ego-personality, with its constant focus on “I, me, and mine.” But one must be realistic.

 

The appeal of the conscious lifestyle – one that attends to higher values like love, compassion, selflessness, and inner growth – must be short-term, too, or it won’t stick.  Success has to be compatible with that lifestyle – and I argue that it is.  The essence of spirituality is consciousness. Whether you find God or enlightenment at the end of your journey is secondary. You can’t even proceed on the journey without expanding your awareness.

 

There’s where the secret resides. Expanded awareness brings success. All our customary notions about the spiritual need for renunciation, poverty, and humility are, in my view, too limited and perhaps wrong.  There has been a mix-up between a specific religious view, which abhors worldliness as the root of all evil, and the value of consciousness itself. It doesn’t matter if you choose to be worldly or not. What matters is the following:

 

– Do you enjoy a fresh stream of new solutions and insights?

– Are you in touch with who you really are, which is beyond the roles you play?

– Can you see a situation past your own point of view?

– Can you empathize with others and genuinely feel where they are coming from?

– Do you feel connected to a reality larger than yourself?

– Can you see the underlying purpose and value of your existence?

– Are you following a vision of life that can sustain you for years to come?

 

To answer “yes” to these questions doesn’t make you a saint – it makes you someone who has seriously walked the path of expanded awareness.  Each of these things I’ve listed are of immense value to an innovator, entrepreneur, manager, or CEO.  Awareness isn’t a rubber band, but it needs to be stretched. This can’t be done by force; nor can you rely on life lessons as you struggle to the top.  Success ultimately depends on who you are, not what you do.

 

Which is why the world’s wisdom traditions speak about the need for transformation.  At this moment, what does your life consist of? At bottom, it consists of input and output. You find yourself experiencing a given situation – the input – and you do, think, or say something – the output.  For the vast majority of people, the output is automatic, reflexive, and mostly unconscious. I’m not saying this to demean anyone.  It’s a spiritual axiom that everyone is doing the best they can from their own level of consciousness.

 

If you are asked to cook a souffle, the result will be different depending on your level of culinary skill. The same holds true for thinking, speaking, and doing. They all reflect your level of skill, although “skill” is too limited a term.  Awareness is all-embracing. It includes everything you are and all that you have experienced.  But the beauty of the human mind extends much further, because your awareness also embraces everything you have never thought or said or done, all the hidden possibilities that need to be awakened before you really discover who you are.

 

This domain of hidden potential is the richest reward of expanded awareness. When you consider that a Henry Ford started out as apprentice machinist and went on to run a failed automobile start-up company after his investors lost faith in him, his immense success later running the world’s largest car company depended on a vision that kept expanding, sustaining him despite external twists of fate. Failure turns into opportunity exactly this way, by incorporating the setback into your awareness, processing it unflinchingly, and emerging with a bigger vision.

 

If this all sounds too idealistic, consider the poison dart hidden in worldliness, or attachment to external success and failure as the sole measure of achievement. In that scheme, losing makes your awareness contract. Every loss of money, power, and status is like a loss of self.  Awareness can be expanded in many ways. The most important are these:

  • Meditation
  • Silent reflection and contemplation.
  • Communing with Nature.
  • Seeking higher guidance.
  • Associating with admired people who serve as mentors and models.
  • Studying the great saints, sages, and seers.
  • Identifying with your inner self and not your external achievements.
  • Living by a higher vision of life, and of who you are.
  • Placing importance on our own inner growth and spending time on it.
  • Keeping up with the most far-seeing thinkers in your field.
  • Being open to change, not fearing the unknown.
  • Being comfortable with uncertainty and the rewards it offers.

 

It’s not important to label any of these things as spiritual.  They are derived from the knowledge of consciousness that wisdom traditions have cultivated for centuries. Even in our own materialistic times, where success and failure have apparently become a matter of life and death, if you actually encounter someone who has risen to notable success, sit down and ask them their secret. One way or another, you will find evidence of expanded awareness, even if that’s not a phrase they use. Even better, consider the things that lead to expanded awareness and test them out for yourself. The potential rewards are limitless.

 

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, 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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

Waking Up Is Impossible, But It Happens Anyway


By Deepak Chopra, MD

The punchline from a joke has gotten embedded in popular language: You can’t get there from here. The original joke has a lost traveler stopping his car to ask a farmer how to get to a certain town. The farmer scratches his head and says, “You can’t get there from here.” the humor, of course, is rooted in the fact that you can get anywhere on the map from anywhere else.

One place where the punchline isn’t funny refers to our minds. Everything the mind does is active. It takes the fluctuations of air molecules to create sound, which travels from the vibrating eardrum until the impulse is converted into electrical and chemical signals in the brain. All other information about the world “out there” depends on variations of the same model. Sight is possible through the interaction of photons with specialized cells in the retina. These in turn send electrical and chemical signals to the visual cortex. Without this activity, nothing in the universe is visible; photons by their nature are invisible.

As for the world “in here,” it takes fluctuations inside brain cells to create thoughts, feelings, and sensation. So far, none of this seems problematic. A world created by fluctuations of physical fields, matched to a mind that can interpret brain fluctuations as meaningful experience, is totally coherent. But there’s a fly in the ointment that we don’t choose to recognize in everyday life.

All activity must have a source, which physics calls a ground state. You can reduce the fluctuations of electrical and chemical signals, for example, to a unified force field that is their source–the field of electromagnetism. This field, however, isn’t defined by the activity it produces. The activity is an effect; the field is the cause or source. Even when it isn’t fluctuating, the field exists, just as a still lake exists without waves. But our experience is totally composed of activity in mind, body, and brain. So how do we know that such a source, entirely invisible and outside our experience, is real?

We know it through mathematics, the unifying language of science. This is somewhat reassuring, although it begs the question of where mathematics came from. Let’s leave that huge mystery aside for the moment. The reason math has to be resorted to is that human experience cannot arrive at the source of any fluctuation, whether it is physical (like gravity or electricity) or mental (in the form of thoughts, perceptions, sensations, etc.). Literally you cannot get there from here.

Science feels good enough about using mathematical models (this confidence may be misplaced, but let it pass). However, mathematics is woefully unable to explain where meaning comes from. Meaning isn’t in the cards when formulas are applied. You cannot compute creativity, intelligence, love, compassion, imagination, fears, hopes, wishes, and dreams using the logic of numbers. Yet just as science is satisfied with its mathematical models to describe the source of the physical universe, there is a satisfying explanation for meaning, too.

This is the experience of waking up or enlightenment, which exposes the mind to its source. In between the fluctuations of the mind, which are responsible for the entire know world in human terms, there is a field of awareness. Like a still lake, it gives rise to waves but in its own nature is still, quiet, and undisturbed. When we identify with the mental activity that fills every waking moment, the source of mind is hidden from view. Yet everyone knows of it, because between every thought and sensation there is a gap, and this gap contains no activity. Here I’m speaking of the conscious mind. Physically the brain is always fluctuating since that is the life of all cells in the body.

Waking up to the source of the mind means that we contact the field of consciousness. This experience, simply labeled waking up, is mysterious. How do you stop identifying with the stream of consciousness that never stops during every waking hour? The traditional answer is meditation, which is the practice of being aware of awareness. As popular as meditation has become, the mystery of being aware of awareness isn’t widely known. We are trapped in the belief that you can’t get there from here, which on the one hand is irrefutable. You cannot use a fluctuation to get to stillness. The two are mutually exclusive.

What makes waking up a genuine experience–indeed, the most profound and meaningful experience anyone can have–is that awareness must be aware of itself. There is no other alternative. How could there be? To say that awareness brings us the whole world, both inner and outer, while it is unaware of itself is self-contradictory. It would be like saying that water makes everything it touches wet but isn’t wet itself. The ability to become aware of awareness enters the human world as what we call self-awareness. There are two types of self-awareness, however, which adds to the confusion. One type of self-awareness is bound by the ego. When someone says, “I know I have a bad temper” or “I tend to be a perfectionist,” a moment of self-awareness has occurred, but it is confined within the behavior of “I,” the self that is built up from memories.

The other kind of self-awareness isn’t bound by the limited self. It is the experience of pure awareness knowing itself. What is this like? Those who have waked up report it as blissful, freeing, fearless, and deeply peaceful. The evidence of thousands of people waking up in every

culture, including modern-day America, testifies to a simple truth: Against all odds, you can get there from here.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, 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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

Delivering on JUST Capital

Deepak Chopra and Paul Tudor Jones II

In August 2012, this column featured an article entitled Just Capital: What the 99% Really Need, which said “What the majority of people need in this country is a financial system that incorporates social justice.”

Last week, thanks to the work of JUST Capital, the nonprofit charitable organization we co-founded in 2014, that vision took a giant leap forward toward becoming a reality. On June 13, we rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange for the launch of the JUST ETF, a new exchange-traded fund launched by Goldman Sachs, based on JUST Capital’s research. To our knowledge, it is the first ever financial product in which the underlying companies are included based solely on their alignment with the values and priorities of Main Street America. On the day of its release it became the single most successful sustainability or values-oriented ETF launch in history, and one of the top 10 equity ETF launches of any kind.

JUST Capital was created to breathe life into the vision of a more just marketplace in America. Our hope is that last week’s NYSE bell ringing represents a shift in how capitalism itself can better serve the broader best interests of society, especially for those who need it the most.

The salient point of the original article, and the mission that JUST Capital has taken on, is this: If we are to address the critical social challenges of our time, then the intrinsic enabling power of the $15 trillion private sector, and especially the large corporations that drive it forward, must be harnessed. Business as a force for good – in addition to making a profit – must become the new normal.

Unlike any other financial product we know of, the JUST ETF is built around the priorities and values of the American people. It is Main Street, not Wall Street, that gets to decide the criteria for just business behavior, how important they are, and ultimately how corporate success is defined.

We’ve captured the priorities of the public through three years of exhaustive polling and survey work, during which we engaged a cross-section of 75,000 Americans. We can now state with some confidence that the criteria for just businesses are: paying a fair (and living) wage; investing in workers; making healthier, more beneficial products; treating customers with respect; reducing environmental impacts; creating good jobs; strengthening communities; leading with integrity; and ultimately striking a better balance between the needs of all business stakeholders.

The beauty of this simple framework lies not just in its anchoring in basic, shared human values; it’s that it also makes for more successful company performance over time. In our rankings of the largest publicly-traded corporations in America, the most just corporations not only outperform their peers across all the themes described above, they also do better in the financial markets. Our diversified index of the top 50% of just corporations by industry has outperformed its benchmark in live trading by over 4% over the past 18 months, and the companies featured in the index generated a 7% higher return on equity. When you think about it, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Any company that invests in its workers, makes great products, looks after its customers, treats its community stakeholders well and is run with genuine integrity is bound to outcompete its peers. This is the win-win we believe in, and which many just corporate leaders throughout the country have also committed to.

The conditions that gave rise to the original two-part article about JUST Capital – the need to address income inequality, the erosion of public faith in our country’s institutions – have not changed. Indeed, some might say they have deteriorated. But the tools we are developing to overcome them are becoming at once more powerful and more in

tune with our fundamental values as a free market economy that is of, by, and for the people.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, 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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

Paul Tudor Jones II is founder, Co-Chairman, Chief Investment Officer and the controlling principal of Tudor Investment Corporation, a leading alternative investment firm founded in 1980 with principal operations today in Connecticut, New York and London.

Paul’s philanthropic service includes founding and serving as former Chairman and current board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, and founding and serving as former board member of the Excellence Charter School. He is Chairman of JUST Capital Foundation, Inc., Director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, former Chairman and current board member of The Everglades Foundation Inc., Chairman of Pure Edge, Inc. Foundation, Trustee of NYU Langone Medical Center and serves on the Board of the Apollo Theater Foundation.

Paul holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Virginia.

If a Machine Could Make You Happy, Would You Do It?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes many claims, some quite futuristic, others just around the corner. Somewhere in the middle lies the prediction of human behavior, with the attendant claim that if people are predictable, this could be the future of well-being.

To predict when someone is going to get angry, sad, afraid, or tense is already well within reach. AI is developing readouts of muscle activity and related bodily responses that indicate what the brain is going to do. Going a step further, at the MIT Media Lab they’ve taken enormous steps into translating thoughts—i.e., words in our heads—into signature brain signals. These signals can be digitized, and suddenly, a thought in your head can be sent to Google’s search engine via Wi-Fi, allowing you to search the Internet simply by thinking.

If you put these breakthroughs together, a new model of human behavior emerges, one based on predictability and reading the signals originating in the brain that attend predictable behaviors. AI experimenters get very excited about the notion that the brain, and the behavior it triggers, can be mathematically reduced to equations that in essence turn people into a complex of algorithms. The excitement is justified, because anything that can be expressed logically is understandable in computer language.

Even though a computer cannot fall in love and arguably could never grasp any emotion, positive or negative, if a certain muscle response triggered by the brain gives a 75% probability that you are about to fall in love, then match.com can be perfected—compatibility will be a numbers game.

Let’s say that AI’s dreams come true in the future. Would it be ethical to plug the brains of criminals into a Wi-Fi network that predicts the likelihood of a crime being committed, so that the police can head it off at the pass? That was the premise of Steven Spielberg’s movie, Minority Report, and in real life we are close enough to science fiction that prisons are working with predictability models to judge which inmates are safer to parole.

As soon as such a possibility is raised, the specter of Brave New World rises, along with the robotic behavior of North Koreans. Mind control is only a step away from mind reading. None of us wants our free will taken away, even if we would behave like happy people. We assume that

North Koreans aren’t robots when they aren’t under threat of reprisal, and this is true. Apparently, the American sitcom Friends has become a cult in North Korea, and despite the threat if imprisonment, tapes of Friends episodes are hot on the black market and constitute a forbidden pleasure for North Koreans.

But let’s go a step farther. What if a computer could figure out the algorithm of specific behavior that you, an average citizen, follows. Much unhappiness is caused by unconscious behavior that is totally predictable, and self-awareness is a rare commodity. If a computer knew you better than you know yourself, it could detect all the ways you make yourself unhappy, and then set out to improve your well-being.

There are lots of ways this might happen. A drug could change your brain chemistry or make your muscles relax. Biofeedback could train your brain to abandon certain self-defeating pathways and build better pathways in their place. Schools and training labs could teach you to recognize when you are about to feel depressed or anxious and then give you meditations that abort the depression and anxiety at a very early stage. The field of bio-manipulation could conceivably end the worst of human suffering, which is mental.

The bottom line right now is that AI plays both sides of the street. While claiming that body-mind responses can be predicted, digitized, and used for all kinds of healing, from repairing spinal injuries to teaching autistic children how to change their facial expressions (the notion being that if the child adopts normal expressions in place of the typical blank autistic mask, the range of the child’s emotions will become more normal at the level of the brain). Simple but profound behavioral techniques such having doctors smile at their patients and touch them reassuringly on the shoulder seem promising in reducing patient anxiety and complaints.

The other side of the street is the claim that “of course” people aren’t going to be turned into robots by AI. But how is the mind to be neatly divided into the trainable part (deterministic) and the creative, liberated part (free will)? If I can be plugged into a device that predictably improves my mood, transforming me from sad and lonely to a happy camper, should I do it? The argument against bio-manipulation is hard to pin down, but not because a future Big Brother is going to turn us into robots.

The problem is that every aspect of mind and body works in a complex fashion with every other aspect. If you “improve” a person’s mood, for example, you might strip away the benefits of anxiety. One marked benefit is the phase that artists and problem solvers go through known as “anxious searching,” where the mind worries over a painting, poem, or difficult problem until the answer emerges. Then the anxiety has served its purpose, and the mind, having reached a creative solution, is actually happier and more contented.

I’ve only scratched the surface of how AI can affect the mind but knowing what’s at stake is important. In future posts the discussion can go deeper. At the moment, there’s no doubt that AI finds itself at the troubled junction point of neuroscience, big pharma, ethics, philosophy, and social engineering. The most basic questions like “Do we have free will?” lead to harder questions still, like, “Is free will hurting or harming us?” It’s likely that issues once consigned to religion and philosophy will loom as practical choices in everyday life. How things will ultimately turn out isn’t subject to an algorithm, even if human behavior is mostly predictable.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, 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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

The True Meaning of Meditation

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The American way of meditation is now firmly a part of our lifestyle, and millions of people who have taken up yoga and learned about mindfulness feel quite comfortable meditating. I’m saying “the American way,” because it took scientific research and the promise of improved health to convince the average person that meditation wasn’t mystical, in a society where mystical implies religion, or in this case Hinduism.

The acceptance of meditation has been a good thing, but I wonder if its true meaning has taken hold. The situation today feels much like it was thirty years ago, when being serious about meditation meant you were a committed Buddhist or otherwise found the time to devote hours a day to sitting in lotus position. Meditation still has a split personality, one side promising nice benefits like relaxation and lower stress levels, the other side requiring you to get serious about renouncing everyday life and its demands.

The noted spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti made a crucial point when he said that to be real, meditation must happen twenty-four hours a day. As startling as that sounds, he wasn’t demanding a specialized lifestyle that even Buddhist monks would find hard to maintain—after all, twenty-four hours a day implies that you’d meditate in your sleep. What, then, did he mean?

The point, I think, is that a person should live from the deepest level of awareness all the time. Everyday life is preoccupied with the restless surface of the mind, and taking a little time to meditate during a busy day is merely an interlude. The restless mind still has its way the rest of the day. But there are other issues to confront. In the unconscious resides “the shadow,” Carl Jung’s term for the hidden forces of anger, fear, dread, guilt, and shame.

These forces have a power that the rational mind can’t resolve, hoping only to keep them at bay. But repression is a flawed strategy, as the prevalence of war, crime, and domestic violence glaringly attest. Then there is the still mystifying occurrence of depression, obsessive compulsion disorder, free-floating anxiety, and other mental disorders, which seem to be getting more common even in the face of therapeutic drugs.

What these issues tell us is that the mind is divided against itself, fragmented by conflict, confusion, and random events that disrupt everyday life. This isn’t news. The mind, when it reflects on being human, quickly realizes that its great opponent is itself. Mind versus mind has been the major conflict every culture has been engaged in.

The American way of meditation skirts this conflict or lightly brushes it. As impressive as the health benefits of meditation are—I am not remotely discounting them—the real purpose of meditation is to answer, once and for all, the true nature of the mind. The pursuit of higher consciousness, the process of waking up, the journey to enlightenment—whatever term you use, meditation solves the problem of the divided mind by opening the door to whole mind.

The mistake we all make is to identify the mind with the activity going on in our heads, the endless stream of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that comprise consciousness in its active phase. In the gap between thoughts, something else appears—consciousness as the silent, boundless source of mental activity. Real meditation explores pure consciousness, brings it to the fore, and establishes it as the true nature of the mind.

This is like detective work, uncovering and unmasking the culprit, only to find that there is no culprit. The mind warring against itself is nothing but a mask. Behind it there is no one to blame or fear. No inner enemy lurks in hiding to trip us up if we lower our guard. Meditation becomes a twenty-four hour process when you see clearly how you constantly defend and protect yourself without purpose, except to increase the fear and insecurity that keeps those defenses up.

Without being fully conscious of this, the average person distrusts the mind for its ability to create suffering. But to say that meditation ends suffering, however true, isn’t enough.

Meditation puts you back in touch with reality. What we call reality in the accepted sense is a mind-made artifact. Seeing this clearly is another aspect of meditating twenty-four hours a day.

Can this project really extend to sleeping at night? Yes, because pure consciousness is aware of itself, and that doesn’t end when the brain and body need the renewal of sleep. But for now, it’s the waking hours that demand our attention in meditation. Contrary to the image of the cross-legged yogi lost to the world, meditation is a dynamic, wakeful process. The purpose of sitting for a period each day to use a meditation technique is to deepen one’s experience of what pure consciousness feels like. With few distractions. The mind is thus reacquainted with its true nature.

Outside meditation, the rest of the day is about noticing, seeing, and changing. We are our minds. If the mind becomes eager to wake up, to unmask its fears and return to its true nature, the same eagerness will seep into us as we go through the day. We all know what it’s like to spend the day eagerly awaiting something we really cherish, whether it is meeting a loved one, reading a book that can’t be put down, or watching the Super Bowl. The same eagerness applies to meditation. Once the spark is lit, the mind cannot wait to find out what reality is all about, because there is no difference between the true nature of the mind and the true nature of everything in existence.

Meditation is the greatest quest ever conceived, and it is open to everyone. Fear and suffering are very bad motivators; we’d rather turn our backs on them than try to solve them. The only lasting motivator is desire, and meditation brings out the deepest desires, to know who you really are, to achieve fulfillment, to turn chaos into orderliness, to create a life whose satisfactions can never be undermined or taken away from you. None of these desires is foreign to anyone. The secret of meditation is that they can be realized in full.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of  The Chopra Foundation  and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, 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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are  The Healing Self  co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com