By Deepak Chopra, MD

There is no denying that the different versions of God in world religions has led to historical violence and conflict, which humanitarians have tried to end by saying that there is only one God, implying that such conflicts are pointless. But is there only one God? The conflicting versions of God all attempt to grasp God in reality, so every version actually is God for that religion.

 

Atheists claim that all of these versions are fictional to begin with, but this misses the point. Human beings have experienced the spiritual dimension of life for as long as history can tell. The need for God grew out of the same need as modern science: to explain a fundamental aspect of Nature. The problem is that there is a gap between this need for explanations and the answers arrived at.

 

In this gap creativity went to work. The gods and God are human creations, constructs of the mind. Faced with unanswerable dilemmas the human mind went to work to fashion a supernatural dimension presided over by a ruler, or rulers, who stand in for rulers here on Earth, being human, emotional, unpredictable, beautiful, terrible, merciful, vengeful–pick any human trait and you can match it to some version of God worshipped now or in the past. The rational God of Thomas Jefferson’s enlightened God is a projection of his ideal human portrayed on a superhuman scale, just as Jehovah, the complete opposite of Jefferson’s God, was an idealized projection by ancient rabbis.

 

The need to create God in our own image is undeniable, and warring faiths were probably inevitable since antagonistic versions of God represented values worth fighting and dying for. Now the ground has shifted, however. The need to keep on creating God has waned drastically. There are unlikely to be new world religions armed with the power and might of the old ones. About the only God anyone wants in a modern secular society is either harmless, antiquated, and benign–like a fairy-tale grandfather–or else totally abstract, which is why some people defend evolution and science with the fierceness of defending God in the past.

 

Whether you approve of God on the wane or not, the need for God isn’t the same as the need to create God. The latter serves a lower purpose, which is the mind’s need for constructs–stories, explanations, wishful thinking myths, consolations, and so on. The need for mental constructs rules everything we can think about or put into worlds. From this perspective, the creativity put into the God-construct has been enormously impressive. Think of the great cathedrals and religious painters in the Western tradition–they glorify magnificently the God-construct and yet amount to the tiniest fraction of the whole enterprise.

 

If every trace of God was wiped off the face of the earth, the need for God would remain. This attests to a simple fact: being human has an inexpressible dimension to it.  This inexpressible dimension cannot be put into words or concepts, and even when cathedrals are built around it, they are fragile symbols of the reality. There is no place where this dimension can be found, and no time when it will either come or go. To validate it only happens through inner experience, and even then the experience must be transcendent, going beyond words, concepts, symbols, and mental constructs.

 

The transcendent journey leads to the source of consciousness and therefore the source of reality. To say that one arrives at God is true only if you realize that the God in question isn’t anything like the God made out of human creativity. God is the immeasurable potential as consciousness for all forms of knowing and experience in every living organism. Our everyday reality is an experience in that consciousness. The real God is wholeness, which has no qualities we can speak of, including cherished qualities like mercy and compassion, and yet God is the source of all possible qualities. This disparity is one reason for the gap between our need to create God and our need for God as reality. Frustrated by not experiencing the reality, we fall back into the old, familiar game of mental constructs, and thus a new, provisional, incomplete, and dangerously factional version of God gets born.

 

Our greatest hope for the evolution of human consciousness is that we are finally ready to give up on all pseudo-Gods, not only for the incomparable violence and suffering they leave in their wake, but more importantly because God as reality awaits our awakening. What better hope for humanity is there?

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

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

If you think about being yourself, what does that mean? If asked, “Do you like being who you are?” not everyone would say yes–some people dislike themselves. This can be the product of low self-esteem or perhaps a deep sense of guilt. Liking yourself doesn’t have to occur all the time, however. There are times when you behave in ways you aren’t proud of and say things you wish you could take back. Yet being yourself is more mysterious than like or dislike.

 

To be yourself, you have to know who you are. “I” isn’t simple and in many ways is very elusive. A two-year-old writing on the walls with crayon is being herself, and so is a middle-school bully tormenting a classmate on social media. Running wild, acting on your worst impulses, and flouting all the normal rules are behaviors worth suppressing. But if you are candid about yourself, such impulses exist inside you.

 

If you take a look at how your mind operates, you’ll quickly realize that many agendas compete for your attention. In certain situations you call upon a wide range of emotions that want to be expressed. You act differently at work than at home. Habit, memory, and old conditioning compete over your attention. These agendas have their own claims, and there has to be a decision-maker and overseer who chooses which persona to adopt, which feelings to suppress, which behavior is appropriate at any given moment.

 

Our sense of identity is assigned the task of sorting out and controlling these agendas, which means that being yourself, if we want “I” to be free and easy, could mean almost anything.  The domestic abuser who is a “model citizen,” works hard, and prides himself on being in control has multiple faces, and depending on which one is being allowed to behave freely, a man with these facts can be horrible or honorable at any particular time.

 

“I” is incredibly adroit at figuring out which agendas to hide from public sight, which leads to a wide gap between the social self and the private self. When it comes to primitive drives like sex and aggression, a person may even be afraid of himself, and then “I” becomes a kind of inner jailer who keeps the worst side of human nature from leaping out. With all of this complex business going on, “I” isn’t actually a person but more like a traffic manager, a process more than a self. As the poet Rumi asks, “Who am I in the middle of this thought traffic?”

 

At the very least, being yourself can’t be pinned down. To complicate matters further, “I” accumulates labels and tags to define who it is. If I am a senior citizen, male, a doctor, husband, father, and grandfather, Indian by birth American by nationality, and so on, these labels have a claim on me. I can present them to the world as me, while at another level “I” can’t really be defined by labels and tags. They come on and off like clothing, and if I get weighed down by a label, it becomes very hard to be myself. Instead, I will simply be letting the male or Indian or doctor out, playing the role defined by the label.

 

For all of that, something inside everyone says, “I just want to be myself.” This is the cry of a prisoner who craves freedom, but freedom from what? If I give up my tags and labels, I risk becoming a social outcast or a nobody. If I stop overseeing all those competing agendas inside my head, I might behave like an animal or go crazy. If I sit passively and do nothing, existence loses its meaning and purpose. But at least we can say that being yourself is the impulse to be free.

 

If you attempt to be free by setting “I’m” free, it won’t succeed. “I” or ego doesn’t exist beyond the functions we assign to it. “I” is a concept in the mind that has no real substance or essence. Take away its assigned functions and it doesn’t exist, as one can see in real life with babies, who are without ego at birth and gradually assemble one in their earliest years. Babies experience the world innocently, and they often seem to feel wonder and delight. No one would willingly return to infancy, but we’d like to be innocent again if it brought wonder, love, freshness, and renewal back into our lives.

 

What blocks innocence of experience is the burden of the self, with its lifelong disappointments, worries, frustration, ingrained habits, and pointless attitudes. Shedding the burden of the self isn’t something “I” can do; it’s beyond the ego’s job description. In fact–and here is the big twist in the plot–the self that yearns to be free is part of the burden of the self. Water cannot say “I don’t want to be wet” without self-contradiction. Likewise, the self cannot say “I want to get rid of the burden of the self,” because that burden is the self. Not just ego but anything you identify with, desire, reject, remember, anticipate. and feel is self-made for the purposes of substantiating your personal reality.

 

This is the agenda of agendas, to hold on to the stuff that floats through the mind and make it real. “I” am here to keep “me” real, and as long as that’s the agenda, there can be no freedom. This twist in the plot has been mulled over by the world’s wisdom traditions for many centuries. To be yourself, you need to find an escape route from “I” and the reality it constantly reinforces.  Such is the conclusion arrived at by every strain of spiritual teaching East and West. Dreams of Heaven, a return to Eden, Nirvana, enlightenment, unconditional love, divine grace, and perpetual bliss all express the same urge–to be free once and for all.

 

If the limited self, the ego personality and all its agendas, can’t achieve the goal of lasting freedom, there is only one alternative. Existence must have freedom built into it. Being free simply means Being. If existence is a trap instead, destined to imprison the mind because the mind has no hope of freedom, the whole spiritual rigmarole might as well be tossed away. Fortunately, each person can test the validity of lasting freedom by exploring what it means to be. Existence isn’t a flat, empty void. To be is to be fully conscious, which means that being conscious could be enough in order to attain lasting freedom. 

 

No one can assure you of this possibility from the outside. It must be tested personally, which implies a journey from limited consciousness to full consciousness. Now is always the right time to undertake such a journey. No one is going to deprive you of your share of existence and consciousness. The real question is whether you listen or not to the inner voice that cries, “I want to be myself.” Once you begin to listen, the journey to full consciousness takes care of itself.

 

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

 

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Anoop Kumar, MD

We recently participated in a public debate on the proposition “The more we evolve, the less we need God.” The results were clearly in favor of the proposition against the stance we took. This was so amongst both the live audience and the online audience.

 

The cerebral cortex, the most recent part of the human brain to evolve, hasn’t changed for more than ten thousand years. The writers of the world’s ancient spiritual texts used the same brain as modern people, and since the world’s religions revere these ancient texts, we accept that the Ten Commandments and the Four Noble truths of Buddhism came from minds whose processes we’d recognize today, however dissimilar the cultures of ancient Judea and India.

 

It must be cultural evolution that is relevant, and of course our modern secular culture has moved away from the age of faith. Rationalism seems to dominate our lives, and when we read of religious fanaticism, we feel that such issues belong to people living outside the reach of a modern secular society. Few people seeing news on TV of an attack in Paris or London feel an impulse to fight back by re-energizing their own religious beliefs. Being secular can easily feed the belief that one has evolved beyond God, religion, dogma, and the whole rigmarole.

 

But in large part this attitude is founded on an illusion, the illusion that God can be accepted or rejected like an item on a restaurant menu. The whole point of calling God infinite and eternal, along with omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, is to note that the infinite is different from anything we can subject to an either/or, yes/no choice. Even concepts as fundamental as space and time are structured in the infinite. In this sense, God is the very scheme of existence–if God exists.

 

Some atheists, skeptics, and agnostics apply “if God exists” to the same litmus test as “Does oxygen exist?” They make the mistake of shoving God back into the category of accept/reject to which ordinary objects belong. But the God hypothesis is unique and can only be interpreted by standards applicable to monism. Monism refers to wholeness and the qualities of wholeness. Science, for example, is monistic in positing that physical processes are sufficient to explain all phenomena in the universe. This is monism because nothing outside physicality is thought to be real.

 

God is also monistic, as in “God is One.”  Religious monism seems very weak in a secular age that accepts scientific monism. But this is another illusion. Modern people largely reject “God is One” because they see God in the form of a human being, and obviously such an image is as limited as we humans are. Since we are not One, it feels unlikely that God is One. In fact, that’s a false analogy. God is monistic, not as a humanoid figure sitting above the clouds but as the basis of consciousness. Nothing can be conscious without a basis or source in consciousness; therefore, religious monism states that God is the source of all mind, and mind is the source of the universe.

 

In a secular society, this too seems unlikely, but religious monism becomes stronger if you rephrase it. Instead of “God is the source of consciousness,” say “The source of consciousness is God.” In other words, once you locate where consciousness comes from, you will have arrived at God. The letters g, o, and d are not the primary issue. The whole point of religious monism is to assert that consciousness is universal and eternal, without beginning or end, the source of all created things but itself not created. The more popularized notions of god are relativistic aspects of that infinity, just as space and time are relativistic aspects of our universe.

 

If you leave out the loaded term “God,” this definition of religious monism collaborates successfully with scientific monism, because science has reached the point where the entire physical universe originates from a precreated state that gives rise to space, time, matter, and energy. Uncreated states, whether called God, the quantum vacuum, or some other moniker, defy rational thought. We cannot ask when time began, for example, because “when” refers to time, not a state that is timeless.

 

To get past this mental block, there are workarounds in both monistic systems, and they are equally arcane. In physics the workarounds have tags like superstrings, multiverse, Hilbert space, and so on. In Christianity the main workaround is the Holy Trinity, which manages to be here but not here, physical but also spiritual, flesh and not flesh. In both cases, the smell of paradox remains strong. Trying to fuse opposites by using words or even mathematics doesn’t work in the end.

 

The best workaround is the same for both types of monism. Indeed, it must be the same if monism is correct. This is the assertion that God, or the ground state of the physical universe, is pure potential, a domain of infinite possibilities. We are all aware in daily life of a potential or possibility coming true and becoming real. Everyone who buys a lottery ticket has the potential to win, and eventually someone does. Every baby has the potential to be President, and eventually some babies do. So there’s no mystical ring to thinking of creation springing out of pure potential.

 

This, we believe, is where true evolution is possible. Pure potential fuses the two types of monism and levels the playing field. Now it is only necessary to show that the field of pure potential exists. In both types of monism, empirical evidence doesn’t exist. God leaves no distinct footprints in the physical universe, and neither do the multiverse, superstrings, or Hilbert space. Such is the nature of any uncreated domain. Being uncreated, it doesn’t look or behave like anything created. It is unique unto itself.

 

So lacking physical evidence, which type of monism is more likely to be valid? This is the wrong question, because by definition, monism is everything. Excluding nothing, the religious type of monism cannot exclude science, and vice versa. The proper question is whether an uncreated source exists at all, and the answer is yes, because everything must have a source. There is plenty of room for evolution in science and religion once both sides accept that the perceived split between them is merely a debating point, the juggling of words. Having accepted that monism is monism, needing no tag like God or science, we can move on to the great exploration, which is to participate in the universe not simply as self-aware creatures but to participate from our very source.

 

 

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

 

 

Anoop Kumar, MD, MM is board certified in Emergency Medicine and holds a Master’s degree in Management with a focus in Health Leadership. He practices in the Washington, DC metro area, where he also leads meditation gatherings for clinicians. He is the author of the book Michelangelo’s Medicine: How redefining the human body will transform health and healthcare. Anoop enjoys exploring and communicating about the intersection of self-awareness, science, and wellbeing. Visit him at anoopkumar.com.

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Paul J. Mills, PhD

Part of being human is that happiness is difficult. We are too complex for a cut-and-dried answer to work. There have been broad trends, however, over the course of time. Devotion to God, the pursuit of reason, getting rich, going to a therapist—all the possible avenues for achieving happiness have been explored, and in modern society each solution remains open. No one is locked into another person’s way to find happiness.

 

But that’s not the same as claiming that all of these various approaches have worked—there is a good possibility, in fact, that none has. That’s the position taken by a wide swath of teachers and guides, most of them classified as “spiritual,” who declare that living in the state of separation is the root cause of suffering. Separation is also known as duality, and so in recent years a new rubric, nondualism, has been used to embrace philosophers, therapists, spiritual teachers, and general writers who promote wholeness as the secret of true, lasting well-being.

In this post we’ll look at the nondual argument through an overview of how things stand in the wellness movement and particularly the evidence in biomedical literature that might offer scientific evidence for nondual claims.

 

A significant gap exists in the biomedical literature on the subject of consciousness and nondual awareness – or nonduality. The benefits of techniques to foster this awareness, such as meditation, are now widely studied but typically only as a means to overcome stress and promote relaxation, without drawing attention to the transcendent aspects of the individual.

Research into nondual awareness can address a missing component of well-being in the psychologic and psychiatric literature. In the foreword to “Mystery of the Mind” by Swami Muktananda, Swami Durgananda writes “Up until now, the great body of literature documenting this state [of nonduality] isn’t in psychology. But just as with modern psychology, the millennial-old spiritual paths of the East also viewed ‘understanding ourselves and others as largely a matter of understanding our own minds,’ rather than blaming our dissatisfaction on external forces”¹.

 

Still essential distinctions exist between science’s understanding of well-being and the state of awareness known as nonduality. Nonduality—a term coined to describe what the experience is not—can perhaps be more appropriately described as oneness. It is in essence a state of being, knowing, and perception, that all that exists is one.

 

The ancient Hindu text, Yoga Vasishtha, characterizes nonduality as a “continuous and unbroken awareness of the indwelling presence, inner light or Consciousness.” There is only Consciousness appearing as this or that. In this regard, knowledge of Self is knowledge of one’s “true identity,” as distinct from ordinary self-consciousness, which fosters a sense of feeling different and separate.

 

Neuroscientist Zoran Josipovic describes nondual awareness as “an open, awake cognizance that precedes conceptualization and intention, and contextualizes and unifies both extrinsic task-positive and intrinsic self-referential mental processes, without fragmenting the field of experience into opposing dualities” ^2,3.

 

Nonduality is also sometimes called non-separation. Most individuals identify with the body as self and experience themselves as residing in the body. They look out at the world as separate from themselves. This is the experience of separation, duality. In nondual awareness, there is no distinction between the perceiver and what is perceived; between the knower and the known. There is no, ‘I’m here in the body and everything else is out there’, but rather everything is known and experienced to be one. There is no separation from Self and what is being experienced. It’s literally all the same. Any prior experience of individual identity is now the experience of the Self in its multitude of expression. The ‘person’ identifies not as an individual but as the Self (or Universal Awareness), and in this sense nondual awareness is a fulfillment of ‘Know Thyself’, an aphorism of many great ancient cultures. Ultimately, terms such as non-separation and unity are less fitting as they implicitly refer to a situation where what was once separate is no longer separate whereas in Consciousness this is not possible as there is nothing that is that is not of that oneness.

 

While psychology and nondual thought share the aim of alleviating human suffering perpetuated by the mind, the focus is limited to the mind itself, without an understanding of Awareness beyond mind. For psychiatry and psychology, this represents a shift in understanding of well-being. The focus is no longer on how to attain well-being through the acquisition of objects or experiences, but rather a focus on who is seeking the well-being.

While over the past decade the biomedical literature has expanded in several domains highly relevant to our understanding of well-being, there remains much work to be done. The psychological and psychiatric literature have, for example, embraced “positive psychology” (sometimes called “positive psychiatry,” although something of an oxymoron) to describe the significant contribution of factors such as gratitude, compassion and empathy to well-being.

 

The Journal of Positive Psychology was launched in 2006 while the Journal of Positive Psychology and Well-being launched in 2017, to specifically address how attributes of positive psychology support well-being. The journal is “devoted to basic research and professional application on states of optimal human functioning and fulfillment and the facilitation and promotion of well-being.” While there are no journals devoted to positive psychiatry, the book Positive Psychiatry: A Clinical Handbook was published in 2015 in order to initiate this dialogue. Even within the field of Behavioral Cardiology, which since its origins over five decades ago focused on the effects of ‘negative’ traits such as stress, depression, and anxiety on cardiac outcomes, has shifted to an appreciation of the value of gratitude and empathy to improve long-term outcomes and well-being in cardiac patients. Such efforts have significantly broadened our understanding of what it takes to cultivate and maintain well-being, which previously was more limited to a focus on domains such as career, social, financial, physical, and community ⁴ The question remains, keeping in mind an understanding of the importance of these factors, to what degree does cultivating nondual awareness provide a further foundation to well-being?

 

Since the early 1970s, the scientific literature on meditation has grown significantly, with today approximately 4,700 citations appearing on the biomedical database PubMed.gov. While a majority of meditation practices share the common ultimate aim of transcending ego self-identification towards establishing a more unified life of nonduality, there is little evidence of this in the biomedical literature. ^{5 2} In addition to meditation, other common approaches to gaining insight into nondual awareness and spiritual awakening include self-inquiry, prayer, and psychedelics.

 

As the meditation movement picked up steam, the field of Transpersonal Psychology was founded in an attempt to integrate the emerging understanding of the transcendent aspects of the human experience within the framework of modern psychology. Transpersonal refers to any experience where the sense of identity or self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos ⁶. While for any individual’s spiritual journey there are likely many transpersonal experiences, such experiences may or may not include an experience of nondual awareness. ^7,8 That is, while nondual awareness can be considered a transpersonal state, transpersonal states may not necessarily include nondual awareness. Therapists working in Transpersonal Psychology seek to help individuals with spiritual self-development, mystical experiences, altered states of consciousness, understanding self beyond the ego, and how to integrate those experiences into everyday life ⁶. These are significant contributions as there are more often than not challenges for an individual to understand and adjust to changes (and loss) of sense of self and personhood along the spiritual journey.

 

A permanent residing in nondual awareness can be considered a penultimate transpersonal experience because the prerequisite for it is the loss of what had been experienced as an individual identify, which was responsible for the experience of duality in the first place. In the nondual state, the limited self-identity as a personal state has been transcended and recognized to have been merely an impermanent pattern in the space (field) of nondual awareness (fundamental consciousness). The gap of separation from Self no longer exists, breaking prior patterns of dependence on external sources for the experience of wholeness.

For someone in a state of nondual awareness, the knower, the known, and the process of knowing are experienced as one. Well-being then is not based on an object or another person, but truly autonomous in the fullest sense of the word. From a (clinical) psychological point of view, it should be noted that nondual awareness is not a panacea in terms of providing immunity from experiencing day-to-day life’s challenges, nor a guarantee of emotional maturity and development.

 

Despite the central importance of nondual awareness for human well-being, it has been largely overlooked in Western clinical psychology and psychiatry, hence it’s absence in the biomedical literature. For reasons that are understandable, but nonetheless unfortunate, the meditation literature emphasizes the value of meditative techniques for the purpose of promoting relaxation and increasing mindfulness, and not drawing attention to the transcendent aspects of the individual and the practices potential to cultivate a life therein. It’s been pointed out in the literature that “it is not clear whether secular mindfulness-based approaches could enable a progression beyond initial stages of modes of existential awareness” as loss of subject-object duality are rarely emphasized in meditation as taught by clinical psychologists ⁹. Some of the psychotherapeutic meditative techniques do, however, focus on training earlier phases or modes of existential awareness⁹ such as nonattachment ^10,11, decentering ^12,13, and self-awareness and regulation ^9,11.

 

It’s not as if this knowledge is unavailable. Many of the meditative traditions and philosophies, such as Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism and mystical Christianity share the foundational understanding that the Self is absolute and unitary. Fascinating newer developments in neuroscience seek to understand neural mechanisms of nondual awareness as compared to those of focused attention, open monitoring, and mind wandering, as well as seeking to understand the effects of nondual awareness on cognitive and affective processes which are hypothesized to be related to changes in fragmented subject vs. object experience ^{3 2}.

 

A caveat with pursuing nondual awareness as a foundation of well-being is that, while it is attainable, it is less readily cultivated than, say, learning habits of gratitude or practicing breathing techniques or meditation as means to foster relaxation and well-being. While there are many paths to developing nondual awareness, it’s not evident which might be more or less conducive to success.

 

In summary, the journey to nondual awareness is the journey to establishing a true well-being. Bringing greater attention to this in the biomedical literature can help further advance our understanding of the human being and of our potential for developing extraordinary well-being.

 

 

 

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 80 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 J. Mills PhD is a Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health at the University of California, San Diego. He is a long-standing National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported clinical investigator with expertise in psychoneuroimmune processes in wellness and in disease, with a current focus on integrative and behavioral medicine. He has been active in the fields of complementary and integrative medicine, conducting some of the earliest studies on the physiology of meditation in the late 1970s.

 

 

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