The Microbiome: How to Talk to Your 2 Million Genes

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Naveen Jain

The term “microbiome” has become popular in the last decade, and most people now realize that their bodies are populated by an enormous quantity of microbes. Taking every location from the skin to the mouth to the intestinal tract into consideration, the microbiome weighs around 3 lbs., roughly the same as the human brain.

The radical importance of keeping your microbiome balanced and healthy is just beginning to dawn on medical science and biology. If you took a snapshot of a tiny portion of your digestive tract, it would be teeming with an array of life forms almost beyond comprehension (including bacteria, viruses, bacteriophages, archaea, fungi, yeast, etc. Since it has long been known that we can’t digest food without the aid of the so-called “flora” in our intestines, the microbiome didn’t spring out of nowhere. What wasn’t realized until recently, however, is its staggering extent.

A human being possesses roughly 23,000 to 25,000 genes, and there is enough capacity for juggling DNA into new combination that these genes create 7 billion unique individuals on Earth, with no end in sight for creating billions more unique people. Your trillions of cells, however, are estimated to be outnumbered around 3 to 1 by the collected microbiota (as the collective microbial colonies are called) that co-exist with us. In terms of genes, however, it is estimated that all of these small creatures and plants contribute 2 million genes to our existence.

Now we realize that the human body is an ecosystem, and to be healthy requires “talking” to your microbiome in all kinds of ways—you have a whole planet to manage at the microbial level. The digestive functions they perform is barely the tip of the iceberg. As intestinal microbes feed, they excrete chemicals that are essential to wellness. Besides producing well-known chemicals like vitamin B, the microbiome sends neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine into the bloodstream. Hormonal levels are influenced, and so is your immunity from disease.

What we are realizing is that none of the microbial life inside us is a free rider. Those 2 million genes evolved with us. Some are actually woven into our own DNA. As in the Earth’s ecosystem, survival demands that every microbe performs a useful function. But where there is balance the possibility for imbalance occurs. When this happens, the body and the microbiome are off kilter, with the result that disease processes may start to form, and natural functions like staying at a proper healthy weight are impaired—or even become impossible.

The cutting edge of microbiome research involves mapping out thousands of microbes and identifying their functions—an overwhelming task now made possible by high-speed computers and data analysis. But even at this early stage, we can jump to some practical conclusions.

Companies are beginning to offer a service that analyzes your personal microbiome. With a small stool sample, it is possible to profile your unique digestive process, which foods you metabolize well or not so well, which chemicals (known as metabolites) your microbiome is secreting in terms of harmful and helpful ones—and this is just the beginning.

The most challenging epidemics in modern society are connected to lifestyle, and lifestyle is how we “talk” to our microbiome. The next bite of food you eat sends a message to your microbiome, and in reply it will send a chemical message back. Unhealthy chemical responses that originate in the microbiome are thought to be strongly linked to heart disease and overweight, for example. No two people are chemically alike at any given moment. The body is like an information superhighway, and although traditionally the brain was the hub for all incoming and outgoing information, the true hub is the gene. Therefore, with its huge preponderance of genes, the microbiome is thought now to dominate the information superhighway.

Pursuing gene therapies for the past fifteen years, ever since the Human Genome Project provided a complete map of human DNA, has proved frustrating and enormously expensive. But influencing your ecosystem of genes happens naturally every day. The information superhighway is populated by the messages sent from gene to gene, and these come from thoughts, emotions, stress levels, relationships, and the quality of food, air, and water you ingest.

The future of wellness is at stake here. By attending to the ecosystem that is you, the entire system of mind and body is affected. For the first time, in practical terms relating to eating, being active, sleeping, and managing stress and inflammation, the old model of preventing risks can be replaced by a positive model. The positive model is about optimizing the personal well-being of each person. If we learn from an early age how to “talk” to our microbiome, that conversation turns into feedback loops that maintain balance and wholeness everywhere.

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

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several successful companies including Moon Express, Viome, Bluedot, TalentWise, Intelius and InfoSpace. Moon Express is the only company to have permission from the US government to leave earth orbit and land on the moon. Viome is focused on disrupting healthcare with the goal of “making illness elective” by identifying biomarkers that are predictive of chronic diseases and preventing them through personalized diet & nutrition. Naveen is a director of the board at the X PRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors including “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year”, “Albert Einstein Technology Medal” for pioneers in technology, Recipient of “Ellis Island Medal of Honor”, Most creative person” by Fast Company, “Top 50 philanthropists of 2018” by Town & Country magazine and “Humanitarian Innovation Award” at the United Nations

The Microbiome: How to Talk to Your 2 Million Genes

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Naveen Jain

The term “microbiome” has become popular in the last decade, and most people now realize that their bodies are populated by an enormous quantity of microbes. Taking every location from the skin to the mouth to the intestinal tract into consideration, the microbiome weighs around 3 lbs., roughly the same as the human brain.

 

The radical importance of keeping your microbiome balanced and healthy is just beginning to dawn on medical science and biology. If you took a snapshot of a tiny portion of your digestive tract, it would be teeming with an array of life forms almost beyond comprehension (including bacteria, viruses, bacteriophages, archaea, fungi, yeast, etc. Since it has long been known that we can’t digest food without the aid of the so-called “flora” in our intestines, the microbiome didn’t spring out of nowhere. What wasn’t realized until recently, however, is its staggering extent.

 

A human being possesses roughly 23,000 to 25,000 genes, and there is enough capacity for juggling DNA into new combination that these genes create 7 billion unique individuals on Earth, with no end in sight for creating billions more unique people.  Your trillions of cells, however, are estimated to be outnumbered around 3 to 1 by the collected microbiota (as the collective microbial colonies are called) that co-exist with us. In terms of genes, however, it is estimated that all of these small creatures and plants contribute 2 million genes to our existence.

 

Now we realize that the human body is an ecosystem, and to be healthy requires “talking” to your microbiome in all kinds of ways—you have a whole planet to manage at the microbial level. The digestive functions they perform is barely the tip of the iceberg. As intestinal microbes feed, they excrete chemicals that are essential to wellness. Besides producing well-known chemicals like vitamin B, the microbiome sends neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine into the bloodstream. Hormonal levels are influenced, and so is your immunity from disease.

 

What we are realizing is that none of the microbial life inside us is a free rider. Those 2 million genes evolved with us. Some are actually woven into our own DNA. As in the Earth’s ecosystem, survival demands that every microbe performs a useful function. But where there is balance the possibility for imbalance occurs. When this happens, the body and the microbiome are off kilter, with the result that disease processes may start to form, and natural functions like staying at a proper healthy weight are impaired—or even become impossible.

 

The cutting edge of microbiome research involves mapping out thousands of microbes and identifying their functions—an overwhelming task now made possible by high-speed computers and data analysis. But even at this early stage, we can jump to some practical conclusions.

 

Companies are beginning to offer a service that analyzes your personal microbiome. With a small stool sample, it is possible to profile your unique digestive process, which foods you metabolize well or not so well, which chemicals (known as metabolites) your microbiome is secreting in terms of harmful and helpful ones—and this is just the beginning.

 

The most challenging epidemics in modern society are connected to lifestyle, and lifestyle is how we “talk” to our microbiome. The next bite of food you eat sends a message to your microbiome, and in reply it will send a chemical message back.  Unhealthy chemical responses that originate in the microbiome are thought to be strongly linked to heart disease and overweight, for example. No two people are chemically alike at any given moment. The body is like an information superhighway, and although traditionally the brain was the hub for all incoming and outgoing information, the true hub is the gene. Therefore, with its huge preponderance of genes, the microbiome is thought now to dominate the information superhighway.

 

Pursuing gene therapies for the past fifteen years, ever since the Human Genome Project provided a complete map of human DNA, has proved frustrating and enormously expensive. But influencing your ecosystem of genes happens naturally every day. The information superhighway is populated by the messages sent from gene to gene, and these come from thoughts, emotions, stress levels, relationships, and the quality of food, air, and water you ingest.

 

The future of wellness is at stake here. By attending to the ecosystem that is you, the entire system of mind and body is affected.  For the first time, in practical terms relating to eating, being active, sleeping, and managing stress and inflammation, the old model of preventing risks can be replaced by a positive model. The positive model is about optimizing the personal well-being of each person. If we learn from an early age how to “talk” to our microbiome, that conversation turns into feedback loops that maintain balance and wholeness everywhere.

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

 

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several successful companies including Moon Express, Viome, Bluedot, TalentWise, Intelius and InfoSpace. Moon Express is the only company to have permission from the US government to leave earth orbit and land on the moon. Viome is focused on disrupting healthcare with the goal of “making illness elective” by identifying biomarkers that are predictive of chronic diseases and preventing them through personalized diet & nutrition. Naveen is a director of the board at the X PRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors including “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year”, “Albert Einstein Technology Medal” for pioneers in technology, Recipient of “Ellis Island Medal of Honor”, Most creative person” by Fast Company,  “Top 50 philanthropists of 2018” by Town & Country magazine and “Humanitarian Innovation Award” at the United Nations.

Is There One Best Path in Life?


By Deepak Chopra, MD

Without using the term, everyone has marked out a path in life–a path can be defined as a road map that guides you to a goal. Because every day presents some kind of goal, however small, being on a path is inevitable. It doesn’t have to be a conscious choice. Yet at a certain point it dawns on most people that they have larger goals, even lifetime goals, that require long-term planning. At this point choosing a path does become a conscious decision.

 

On the surface, it would appear that life presents many paths, because so many goals present themselves: finding the right partner, raising a family, settling on a career, pursuing success, earning more money, saving a nest egg for retirement. These are socially shared goals, to which more can be added, such as finding God or writing a novel. But if you look deeper, everything on this list boils down to one path only.

 

This is the path of desire, which is the most natural path, since we all have desires. The impetus that keeps people on the path of desire is universal but also logical. If you want to eat breakfast, make friends, do something you enjoy, or have any other everyday desire, it’s logical that expanding your desires and following a bigger dream should serve as a reliable path in life. In fact, because 99% of the human race follows the path of desire, this should prove how defective it is. The problems of poverty, crime, war, hunger, disease, and mental anguish haven’t been solved around the world, and one or more of these problems reaches into everyone’s life.

 

The irony of turning desire into a path is that no one can validate that desire itself is positive. Shattered dreams are at least as common as dreams fulfilled. Psychological studies show that human beings are very bad predictors of what will make them happy. A young woman who deeply desires to have a child will confront the fact that being a new mother is one of the most stressful times of life for many women. Having more money increases happiness up to a certain threshold when you feel financially secure, after which having more money has diminishing returns. Unchecked impulses are a major aspect of things like the obesity epidemic, huge credit card debt, and criminal behavior–in a word, we desire lots of things that are self-defeating.

 

If there is a best path in life, the path of desire isn’t it. But how do you get off this path, which is so ingrained and occupies every waking hour from infancy onward? One insight is that desire comes from a shallow source. A restless mind leads to restless desires, which plays a major part in the pattern of endless desires that never seem to reach inner fulfillment even when the outer goal has been attained. If this is true, then going deeper into the mind to find a place of inner fulfillment opens up another path.

 

For just this reason millions of people have started to meditate and do yoga, and for the most part they discover the satisfaction of stepping out of the demands of desire. But still this doesn’t constitute a new path; it is more like a glimpse of a new path.  After meditation and yoga class come to an end, it’s back onto the treadmill of desire. Seeing the downside of the path of desire doesn’t free you from the problems created by desire. Since these problems are mixed in with the pleasure and delight of desire, countless people remain confused, conflicted, and at a loss.

 

The basis for confusion comes down to either/or thinking. There’s a time-honored belief that the worldly life and the spiritual life exist as opposites, the worldly life being defined by desires and the spiritual life by selfless abstention.  Yet even if you could persuade yourself that you are renouncing desire, that itself is a desire–you still want to be happy and fulfilled, even though your attitude is higher and holier than people who pursue happiness by taking a vacation in Las Vegas or Disney World.

 

The best path in life begins by abolishing the separation between worldly and spiritual aspirations. Such a path allows desire to play out its natural course without running wild, while bringing experiences of love, joy, truth, beauty, divine presence, or whatever else you consider higher and spiritual. In other words, the best path in life should aim for the goal of wholeness. Being human is complete and whole when we are not self-divided by conflict, confusion, frustration, and the constant demands that pull us in opposite directions.

 

To be self-divided is the product of blindly accepting that your desires will get you where you want to be. Even when one cherished goal is attained, that still leaves untold potential that lies unfulfilled. The only way to lead a whole and complete life is to be whole and complete yourself. This, finally, is the best path in life, which can be called for the sake of simplicity the path of the self. I’m not endorsing selfishness and egotism. The path of the self is a lifelong quest to discover who you are, knitting together the glimpses of fulfillment that occur in everyone’s life.

 

The great discoveries that dawn on this path are “I am enough. Being here is fulfilling. Existence unfolds inner potential without end.” Being human isn’t complete without these discoveries, and they cannot be found through desire. To know that you are enough, and that existence will unfold your inner potential transforms daily life in profound ways. But transformation cannot be a goal. It is the fruit of being on the path of the self. All such discoveries happen spontaneously, on their own time schedule, under the guidance of an intelligence that transcends the everyday thinking mind.

 

The path of the self has always been open to everyone, and meditation takes you through the door. Then it is necessary to have a vision and a long-term intention, in this case, to find your true self. Along the way choices have to be made about your beliefs, guiding principles, personal relationships, and so on–but these are secondary. What is held before you every day is finding the way out of self-doubt, confusion, inner conflict, and divisive desires that keep you entangled in a state of separation. The divided self is easy to spot, and its consequences litter our lives. So there’s real work to be done on the path of the self, only it is the effortless work of going inside, adopting the next step of self-awareness, and identifying with a level of mind deeper than the restless, superficial mind.  When you see the value of this project, you have taken the important first step that brings the path of the self into view.

 

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

Looking Deep into the Problem of Fear


By Deepak Chopra, MD

Everyday life proceeds along no matter how terrible circumstances become. But when traumatic events occur, everyday life doesn’t solve them. Time alone cannot heal deep wounds. One after-effect of having something bad happen, whether it is the loss of a loved one, a bitter divorce, the outbreak of war, or being the victim of a crime, is anxiety. Millions of people suffer from anxiety and seek help from the billion-dollar market for tranquilizers or, less legitimately, opioids.

Anxiety often feels mysterious to those who suffer from it. Instead of being linked to a cause, such as being anxious to get to work on time when your car dies in traffic, modern anxiety is often free-floating. It’s like a chronic condition that needs no immediate cause or is triggered by tiny causes that normally don’t justify a feeling of anxiety.

To get at anxiety, there has to be an understanding of fear, because anxiety is residual fear. Despite the seemingly normal, untroubled activities of everyday life, something deeper down is generating the response of fear. So what is the role of fear as a human emotion? There is more than one function that fear plays, as follows:

Physical fear is born of a physical threat. It crosses over into psychological fear when the actual threat is gone but its effects linger. An abusive parent, for example, feels like a physical threat to a child–and sometimes is one. Leaving home at 17 or 18 removes the physical threat, but still the effects will linger psychologically. In this case, that fear of physical threat has become useless, a false protection against an imaginary bogeyman. Psychologists point out that fear isn’t entirely negative. It can be part of the fight-or-flight mechanism embedded in the lower brain, a response inherited from our remote ancestors to defend themselves from danger.

Yet in modern life the actual uses of fear are overwhelmed by useless psychological fear that hampers and often cripples people’s lives. Lingering, useless fear is the result of impressions made in the past that turned into conditioning. Even when you survive a trauma, the impression it leaves creates new, repeated trauma–that’s the whole point of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, which traumatizes soldiers back home because of the impressions left by war.

To get at the cause of anxiety, we can say that PTSD applies in small and large ways to everything we are afraid us. Something had to make us afraid in the first place, and then the fear was kept alive by lingering impressions. The memory of fear is mysterious, because all memory is mysterious. Yet it is enough to say that old traumas affect mind, brain, and body. Fear cannot be undone without reaching the whole bodymind.

There are many therapies and drugs that come into play when dealing with anxiety, but ultimately, we need to know how psychological fear ever got created in the first place. If you were not in the habit of fear, bad things would come and go without leaving a lasting impression. The viewpoint that seems most valid to me is that all fears are generated by a single primal fear. This single fear made an inescapable impression, generating the habit of fear, and afterwards all the other miscellaneous fears latched on to the habit.

What constitutes a primal fear? “Primal” means that it is built into the very state of being human. Does this imply that simply by being human we must be afraid, without remedy or escape? No–our primal fear runs very deep, but not as deep as that. Our primal fear is that we are alone, unsafe, disconnected from Nature, prey to random harm, and fated to suffer traumas. This describes the state of separation, and there is no better or deeper explanation of where fear was born. it was born of separation.

If this is true, then the solution to fear of the lingering, psychological post-traumatic kind is to expose separation as an illusion. Getting out of separation is usually put in spiritual terms, but I feel that any category is too limiting and ultimately artificial. Either we are destined to be in the state of separation or we can wake up and see that separation is an illusion. It’s a matter of consciousness, not spirit. “Spirit” is a convenient tag for higher consciousness or expanded consciousness. The important thing, the real thing, is to wake up.

Only when you wake up, realize that you are not separate, and suddenly know the difference between reality and illusion does fear go away–indeed, all suffering goes away, since suffering was created by the state of separation too. Fear and suffering are lingering psychological reactions to feeling alone and threatened by our existence. If being human was an existential threat, we are doomed. But that’s the illusion. Being human is a state of infinite potential because existence contains infinite possibilities. Waking up to the infinite cures fear and suffering. There’s more to say about how to reach the state of waking up, but the bottom line is that fear is born of separation. Once a person discovers this truth and begins to take it to heart, the end of fear becomes possible.

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 

How Real Is the Soul?

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Depending on which polls you consult, more than half of Americans and up to 67% believe that a person’s soul goes to heaven or hell after death. This belief seems unusually strong considering that more and more Americans no longer identify with a fixed religion. “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual” has become a common sentiment, and yet the idea of the soul continues to hold its place.  One might even say it outstrips God as a matter of belief.

 

Look at how deeply embedded the word “soul” is in our culture, from soul music to soul searching. Once a word takes hold, so does the concept it represents. To a pure rationalist, there’s no reason to say that the gospels sung in African American churches are more soulful than a Beethoven symphony. When someone searches his soul, the psychological reality is that he is usually just consulting his conscience or weighing issues of right and wrong that came from childhood upbringing.

 

There is a good possibility in fact, that the soul is a deeply rooted concept rather than a reality–militant atheists would go even further and describe the soul as pure superstition. At the very least, if you no longer abide by religious doctrine, discovering the reality of the soul means that you must move from belief to experience. The soul, when stripped to its essence, is an experience that transcends everyday life; it goes beyond reason and logic; it is validated not by facts in evidence but by direct contact. Lots of things, starting with our emotions, are validated the same way. If you haven’t experienced anger or love, you know these emotions only abstractly and from the outside.

 

The tricky part, so far as the soul is concerned, is transcendence. Do we actually go beyond daily life and ordinary experience to visit another, higher dimension? Doubts on this score abound, which is why most people try to bring the soul down to earth, beginning with the words “my soul.” To say “I have a soul” brings everything down to a personal level, and yet this is the very thing that deprives the soul of any chance to be real. “I have a bank account” and “I have a job” implies possession, and the soul, not being a thing, cannot be possessed. “I have a family” and “I have a religion” implies identification, helping to strengthen and define who you think you are. Thinking you are your soul can’t work the same way, however, unless you lived at the soul level, if not all the time, at least enough of the time that it feels like you.

 

Making the shift from belief to reality can never happen by accepting second-hand opinions and mental concepts. These are habits that reinforce themselves without actually getting anywhere. Your belief in the soul probably has little or no effect on your daily life, focused as you are on the demands of the modern secular world.  This makes belief in the soul a cheap commodity, something we can casually hold on to without being forced to test it. It’s safe to say that for millions of people, the testing time won’t arrive until they die, when supposedly you will discover if a soul goes to heaven or hell.

 

Far better to make the testing time today, or at least begin the journey that will validate the soul or do something else with it.  by “something else” I mean that on the journey of expanding your own awareness, the soul undergoes a transformation. “My” soul exists only when the concept of I” is limited, confined to a span of time between birth and death and enclosed within a physical body destined to age and perish. It is because we identify with this limited “I” that the dilemma of the soul arises. When you change your identification, the soul shrinks in significance.

 

Rather than standing for the precious divine essence inside you, the soul becomes not much more than a verbal tag. The tag was needed in the mental setup of opposites that runs daily life. Religions codify a special set of opposites: good and evil, God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, etc. All these verbal tags are then set in dramatic motion as a kind of war or spiritual combat for the souls of humans. When someone accepts this special set of religious tags, they stand for something real; by stepping away from them, this reality becomes shaky and eventually dissipates.

 

Yet it seems that one particular opposite lingers everywhere that religion has reached: mortal and immortal. This is the essence of the spiritual mystery, in that this mortal body contrasts with the immortal soul. In the actual experience of expanded consciousness, the duality of mortal and immortal is meaningless. Existence is whole, complete, undivided, having no before or after, no place to arrive at or leave. The experience of existence at its most basic, when a person confronts the state of pure consciousness, is the experience of waking up.

 

Waking up resolves most spiritual questions by revealing that they don’t actually have much, if any, meaning. For example, if existence is one and God is one, the two merge, and there is no reason to create a mysterious category for a supreme divine Creator. In the same way, all the attributes we hope to find in the soul, most especially our hope of being immortal, are embedded in existence itself. Once you consciously awaken to this reality, every dilemma in the state of duality, or opposites, ceases to have any meaning.

 

Belief in the soul, then, is a hopeful state that turns out to be two-edged. Hope keeps a cherished possibility open while at the same time blocking the way forward.  Being stuck in your faith is like being stuck in anything; it’s static. It’s truly said that the spiritual journey consists of eliminating all illusions, because once every illusion is gone, what remains must be real.  In reality consciousness is the source of everything in existence, unfolding in modes of knowing and experience that are modes of consciousness at play. The soul as a human concept is what it is–a tag for experiencing the transcendent. But no tag is as valuable as experiencing the transcendent itself, which is the goal of waking up.

 

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