By Deepak Chopra, MD, William C. Bushell, PhD, Ryan Castle, David Vago, PhD, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D.

Ten years ago researchers began to focus on inflammation as a link to disease. They stood out in that they did not emphasize the acute redness and swelling that accompanies the site of a wound or burn as it heals, which is known as acute inflammation. Rather, they discovered clues were leading to something more subtle – a low-grade, chronic inflammation that has few if any overt symptoms. This kind of everyday inflammation has now been linked to an overwhelming majority of serious lifestyle disorders, including hypertension, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and most cancers. What was an intriguing trend ten years ago is now being recognized as major global epidemic, all the more dangerous because it is invisible.

We encourage you to read the first post we wrote last week in order to gain more basic knowledge about chronic inflammation. Going past lifestyle disorders, chronic inflammation may be the key to aging. In addition, numerous inflammation-related genes have been linked to susceptibility to most age-related diseases, such as those mentioned above. The chemical markers in the bloodstream that serve to indicate inflammation are associated with the aging body and cellular death. Already some gerontologists are floating the idea that inflammation may be the largest contributor to aging. If this turns out to be right it will greatly simplify a complex subject, because two aspects of aging have traditionally made it very hard to grasp medically.

First, the deterioration of the body over time is not a straight line but an unpredictable set of changes that look different in everyone. Second, no single process can be pinned down as “aging” by itself. The common signs of aging, such as losing muscle strength, defects in memory, and moving more slowly – not to mention medical conditions like arthritis and dimmed eyesight – are related to many different processes and don’t appear in every elderly person. In fact, there are at least a few cases where these changes are at least temporarily reversed; there are even people who get stronger and have better memories as the years go by. Chronic inflammation has the possibility to simplify this scenario, in part by exploring the common factor that so many seemingly unrelated aging processes share.

Another connection with aging is centered on the immune system. When you were young, your immune system was very specific, precise, and targeted as it met invading pathogens (i.e., bacteria and viruses). This precision sets human beings apart from lower rungs on the evolutionary ladder where immunity is very general and diffuse. Instead of being precise, a

diffuse immune system sends the same chemicals in various doses to spots of injury and disease. There is no precise targeting. As we age, our immune system loses the precision of youth, and because inflammation is the most general type of response to pathogens, the body begins to indiscriminately secrete inflammatory chemicals that injure its own cells rather than healing them. If this goes on long enough, damaging feedback loops are set up that turn diffuse immunity into a pattern. This exacerbates the damage to cells throughout your body, accelerating cellular death. This complex syndrome has been labeled “InflammAging.” The glia cells in the brain that normally nurture and support nerve cells can instead attack nerve cells in bouts of neurology-inflammation.

Chronic inflammation takes years or even decades before visible damage or disease symptoms appear. This means that to reverse the process individuals must dedicate significant time. No one can do that without turning anti-inflammation into a lifestyle that feels as easy and natural as their present lifestyle. The most basic changes involve going down the list of things that create inflammation and doing the opposite instead. The result looks something like the following:

· A balanced lifestyle without extreme changes.

· Good sleep.

· A natural whole foods diet.

· Paying attention to everyday activity, including walking and standing.

· Reducing stress.

· Absence of emotional upset, anxiety, and depression.

· Solid family and community support.

· Feeling loved and wanted.

· A calm, unconflicted mind.

Nothing here is a surprise, but the distinction lies in understanding these changes are not just positive in some general way, they could literally save your life. It would appear that stress is extremely important because our response to everyday stress directly leads to stress on cells, and stressed cells produce the biochemicals that indicate inflammation. It is now well known that psychosocial stress may also significantly exacerbate many forms of disease pathology, including psychological disorders like anxiety and depression. Stress can actually produce chemicals that are toxic to nerve cells in the brain, such as cortisol. It has been theorized that the most serious form of depression, Major Depressive Disorder, could be considered an inflammatory disease.

This and other clues relate to aging, in that it takes smaller stresses to agitate older people, and they recover from them more slowly. What if this is the result of longstanding inflammatory feedback loops? There are numerous psychosocial causes for increase inflammation in the elderly, and there are age-specific types of depression. Being able to trace these conditions to a single cause would be very beneficial.

If stress and inflammation are the joint villains in aging and disease, the top priority in making lifestyle changes should be anti-stress. It is ironic that millions of people who willingly undertake improving their diet and exercise put a low priority on everyday stress, enduring routine pressures at home and work. In an exciting development, a growing body of literature has suggested systematic forms of mental training associated with meditation practice, good diet and sleep habits, and daily exercise, may improve clinical outcomes through an anti-inflammatory mechanism. It has been suggested previously that specific forms of meditation practice can indeed engage and modulate vagal tone through what has been coined, the “relaxation response” – a volitional state in which physiological recovery from psychosocial stress is facilitated. Much progress has been made in the last decade to identify potential neuroanatomical and network- based physiological changes due to mindfulness and other styles of meditation training.

We’ve outlined the main points of a new picture of aging and disease. Research is ongoing, and by no means do aging researchers all agree on inflammation as the root cause of aging. For one thing, inflammation, being necessary for the healing response, is a beneficial process as well as a harmful one, and discriminating between the two is complex. Second, the presence of inflammatory markers in the bloodstream, some would argue, is a symptom of stressed, dying cells, not the cause. However these issues resolve themselves in the future, the damaging effects of low-grade chronic stress are indisputable already. More in-depth research into the complex systems of the body and its inflammatory response are needed to determine these surprisingly fundamental questions.

A lifestyle aimed at countering inflammation has been described in detail in the book, Super Genes, and is a central part of the upcoming book by Deepak Chopra and Rudy E. Tanzi, The Healing Self. There you will find an in-depth discussion as well as a lifestyle program that addresses this vital topic.

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 Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

William C Bushell, PhD, Biophysical Anthropology, MIT is the Director of Research at ISHAR and has been researching mind-body phenomena for over three decades, focusing on the field of consciousness studies around the world as a biological, medical, and psychological anthropologist affiliated with Columbia, Harvard, and MIT.

Ryan Castle, Executive Director of ISHAR, specializes in research analysis and whole systems integration. He is an advocate for open-access science and multidisciplinary approaches.

David Vago, PhD, is Research Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Associate professor, department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation; Associate professor, department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; Research associate, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World”.

By Deepak Chopra, MD, William C. Bushell, PhD, Ryan Castle, David Vago, PhD, Mark Lambert
Until very recently, it was fairly unthinkable that our own bodies pose a greater threat to health than any outside disease. Most people have never heard of one of the greatest plagues of the 21st century, because it is caused by one of the most subtle, complex reactions in the body. This plague is inflammation, which in medical terms is the ultimate two-edged sword.

On the positive side, the body’s healing response can’t occur without inflammation, as wounded or diseased areas are flooded with extra blood and immune cells–the familiar signs are redness, puffiness, and at times a warm or burning sensation. The negative side is the harm caused when inflammation tips the balance against healing, as when people die of severe burns or fevers gone out of control. The polar nature of inflammation has been known for a long time, but the focus was overwhelmingly on acute inflammation, the drastic kind triggered by wounds and disease.

The plague referred to by a growing body of researchers is different, it involves the easily overlooked, seemingly innocuous state of low-grade chronic inflamm

ation that can have massive health impacts. What makes chronic inflammation so dangerous, it is now realized, is a matter of time. The lifestyle disorders that cause the most harm in modern society–hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and most probably many cancers–take years or even decades to gestate before the first symptoms appear. The same appears to be true for Alzheimer’s. This discovery pushes back the onset of disease so far that detection is difficult without developing sensitive new tools.

As research in various disorders unfolded, a single factor kept appearing over and over, no matter how differ

ent any two disorders are–markers for inflammation. This was a startling revelation, because hypertension looks nothing like Alzheimer’s or cancer like diabetes. Yet in the incremental breakdown of healthy cell function, chemicals that trigger inflammation are a vital link, and often the only link.

In fact, inflammation is a contributing factor to a majority of all deaths in the United States, likely making it the most deadly condition in the modern world. Literally billions of lives are at risk in both the developed and developing world.

The media have started to bring inflammation to public awareness, and there are now numerous articles on anti-inflammatory diets, for example. But two enormous challenges lie ahead, stemming from the fact that a.) Inflammation is holistic, affecting potentially any system in the body, and b.) Measures to overcome chronic inflammation need to be maintained for a lifetime. The second factor is made harder by the fact that the anti-inflammation program someone undertakes won’t show any marked benefits most of the time. An invisible plague requires a nearly invisible solution.

How do you fight against a threat that potentially targets the brain, cardiovascular system, the immune system, the organs and tissues of the endocrine system, in what has been referred to as ‘smoldering inflammation’? The answer may not lie in drugs but in lifestyle. In fact, the entire wellness movement, in its goal of achieving lifelong good health, must drill into the public mind a new model for health that doesn’t focus of risks and prevention, important as they are. Instead, the new model is all about the entire body-mind and making every day a healing day.

Some aspects of chronic inflammation, such as impaired organ function, cellular death, aging, and recovering from serious injury or illness, involve serious medical issues. But for the most part, a lifestyle that allows the whole body’s system to thrive is the key. A thriving, homeostatic system is supported by the following:

· A balanced lifestyle without extreme changes.

· Good sleep.

· A healthy whole foods diet.

· Paying attention to everyday activity, including walking and standing.

· Reducing stress.

· Absence of emotional upset, anxiety, and depression.

· Solid family and community support.

· Feeling loved and wanted.

· A calm, unconflicted mind.

These aren’t mysterious or novel things; we’ve all absorbed lifestyle information for years. But the revelation that chronic inflammation is a true plague changes the urgency and priority of the choices we all have to make. For example, given that yoga and meditation benefit the body-mind in many ways, should they become high-priority choices for everyone, starting at an early age? Recent revelations that the brain can directly regulate inflammation has opened new, tremendously exciting opportunities. Insights on the detailed physiology of how the mind and the nervous system influences this system may provide new ways to help us alleviate chronic inflammation over long periods of time. The challenge now is to identify how best to regulate inflammation and to map that mind-body connection. Only then can we better understand how to truly support a “thriving body”. In the next post these broad questions will be answered according to the best recent research.

(To be cont.)

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 Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

William C Bushell, PhD, Biophysical Anthropology, MIT is the Director of Research at ISHAR and has been researching mind-body phenomena for over three decades, focusing on the field of consciousness studies around the world as a biological, medical, and psychological anthropologist affiliated with Columbia, Harvard, and MIT.

Ryan Castle, Executive Director of ISHAR, specializing in research analysis and whole systems integration. Advocate for open-access science and multidisciplinary approaches.

David Vago, PhD, is Research Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Associate professor, department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation; Associate professor, department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; Research associate, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Peder S. Olofsson, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Bioelectronic Medicine, Department of Medicine at Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Mark Lambert, Project Manager and Director of Innovation for the Center for Bioelectronic Medicine, Karolinska Institute, and supported Dr. Kevin Tracey as Chief of Staff for the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research.

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Avtar Singh, PhD

Until very recently it was nearly laughable among physicists to speak of a conscious universe, and yet the notion now seems to be not only respectable but necessary. The realization is dawning that a true Theory of Everything must include consciousness. Almost every scientist traces any phenomenon, including the mind, back to physical causes. This way of thinking, when applied to the issue of where consciousness comes from, implies either a very big answer or a very small one.

The small answer looks at the most microscopic level of nature, the quantum field, and tries to define how subatomic particles could possibly contain the potential for consciousness. This seems like a dead end, however, if you consider how unlikely it is that particles (or atoms and molecules) somehow learned to think. The molecules inside the human brain are as ordinary as the water, salt, and minerals in the ocean or the carbon in a lettuce leaf. The big answer gets around this dead end by looking at the whole universe as the source of consciousness. The embarrassing failure of the bottoms-up fragmented approach has left no option but to consider the top-down holistic approach to the fundamental reality of consciousness.

The existence of the cosmos is often described as “something out of nothing,” because the ground state of creation is a kind of zero point, a vacuum state devoid of space, time, matter, and energy. (Technically, “nothing” is a misnomer, because the quantum vacuum contains the potential for every bit of matter and energy in the cosmos, existing in virtual form.) The fact that space, time, matter, and energy sprang from nothing makes it easier to credit that consciousness did the same. The first second of time, after all, is just as inexplicable as the first thought.

The overall problem of consciousness has been historically divided into two parts. The so-called easy problem is to experimentally correlate the measured mental states in terms of electromagnetic signals to various well-defined brain and bodily activities. Thanks to modern brain imaging, this part has been essentially solved. The so-called hard problem concerns how firing patterns of neurons in the brain create subjective experiences such as anger, love, fear,

hate etc. No satisfactory solution has been agreed upon to the hard problem, and some would claim that such a solution is far from being discovered. However, the problem of consciousness is generally considered to be a problem only within the domain of neuroscience. That is because of the materialistic assumption that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, or byproduct, of the brain. The firing of neurons is assumed to create what are called the correlates of consciousness. However, this logic is as erroneous as claiming that a radio creates the music being played through it.

If we switch gears and make the whole universe conscious (or protoconscious as some theorists prefer), then it isn’t necessary for the brain to create the mind or vice versa. Imagine that chemists were baffled over why water is wet. There are no physical properties of oxygen and hydrogen, the two gases that constitute the water molecule, that give rise to wetness. Instead, wetness is a quality that water possesses innately. In physics a quality is referred to in Latin as qualia. The subjective world is all about qualia, since they are the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of reality. If discovering how atoms and molecules learned to think is impossible, equally so is discovering how water became wet, sugar sweet, etc. Even the fact that light is bright and visible makes no sense physically, since photons, the fundamental particles of light, are inherently invisible.

If consciousness is a non-local universal state rather than a local neurobiological phenomenon, qualia come along in the same package as scientific facts, the way wetness comes along with H2O. You need one to have the other. In our last post we introduced Dr. Singh’s hypothesis that relativity should be considered universal, eternal, all-inclusive, and without cause. His Universal Relativity Model (URM) solves all kinds of questions–such as what came before the big bang, the origin of time, and the relationship of mind and matter–by making the questions themselves invalid. The so-called hard problem asks a wrong (upside-down) question as to how consciousness arises from the brain. The right question is how brain functions are governed by the eternal laws that represent the very fundamental awareness of the universe.

In a universe that spontaneously generates self-organizing, self-evolving “slices” of space, time, matter, and energy, there is no need to compartmentalize anything. Instead there is spontaneous eternal flow and transformation. This approach sounds exotic because, for one thing, we assume that there must be a cause for every effect and vice versa. Yet if you stand back, what is the actual cause of a new thought? What causes love to feel different from hatred? Why does pain hurt? We constantly inhabit an everyday world where there is

spontaneous flow and sudden creation, where all kinds of things come seemingly out of nothing, and where cause-and-effect are just partial models for sequences of related events. In a spontaneous, continuous, and flowing universe, a match will still start a fire–local events remain the same–but the hotness of fire and the chemistry of combustion aren’t separate. They are different modes of knowing, and all knowing comes back to consciousness.

Currently some physicists are toying with various models of a conscious universe, but the materialistic bias holds strong, and very few, if any, have concluded that the universe must be conscious to exist in the first place. That’s an important correlate of URM. Einstein definitively proved with E=mc2 that matter and energy are recombinations of each other, states of transformation in one continuum, and once this door was opened, he saw (but could never prove mathematically) that all the inherent ingredients of creation belong on the same continuum. However, Einstein was unwilling to place mind or consciousness in his relativistic scheme. One has to back away from materialism to understand that no valid model of reality “out there” can assign a cause to reality “In here.” Although Einstein wanted to know “the mind of God”, his denial of free will kept him from reaching the “hidden factor” of consciousness now incorporated into URM.

Another implication of URM is that being conscious, the universe must be alive. Life is defined as spontaneous creation without an external cause. A dead universe would have no spontaneous motion or laws of motion. The very fact that the human mind can perceive and experience the reality of universal laws points to the non-locality of the human mind–i.e., we are outcroppings of cosmic mind perceiving itself. The neuro-biological mind has no such inherent connection to the laws of nature and their eternal, non-local existence. This implication is a bit obscure, but it simply states that awareness isn’t an isolated property like wetness. Awareness is aware of itself, and for that reason it can fathom its own operations, including the laws of nature.

What we’ve been saying here builds upon distinguished precedents. The well-known physicist Freeman Dyson pointed to the evidence of three levels of mind in Nature: the human mind, the mind residing at the micro level of subatomic activity, and the mind of the universe. The manifestations of the way the subatomic or quantum world acts lead one to think that mind is a reasonable way to describe what’s going on. As Dyson states, “So the atom seems to have a freedom to choose, that’s something which characterizes quantum processes, that they seem to just occur spontaneously. We call that spontaneous decay. So it is spontaneous; that to my mind implies that the thing makes a choice … this freedom that the individual atom has to have…. seems to be an indication of some rudimentary form of mind.”

Thoughts in a contemplative or meditative human mind can decay or be born through the spontaneous intention or free will of the person. Since seemingly empty space in the universe is shown by quantum mechanics to be filled with particles that are born and decay spontaneously, the argument of similarity between the human mind and the micro-mind can be extended to the macro- or universal mind. Of course finding similarities, even very strong ones, isn’t the same as rigorous scientific proof. URM addresses consciousness-related issues to intractable problems in contemporary physics to show that the neurobiological or brain-mind processes and qualia (emotions, thoughts, intentions etc.) are a subset of the relativistic states of consciousness in the universe.

Here we’ve avoided the technicalities of a scholarly article, but for the non-scientist what’s important are the big concepts that lead to a major paradigm shift. In that regard URM takes us one step closer, not just to solving the hard problem, but of learning the right way to think about it and to frame the questions that matter most. Just asking the right question often dissolves, if not resolves, the question 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 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Avtar Singh, PhD, is author of the book – “The Hidden Factor: An Approach for Resolving Paradoxes of Science, Cosmology and Universal Reality”. He has Doctor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA. As a member of American Nuclear Society and American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he has been involved in state-of-the-art research and development in science/engineering over the past 30 years. He has published more than fifty papers in professional journals and two monographs. He received the ‘Best Paper Award’ from the American Nuclear Society, MIT Fellowship, national scholarship awards, and several industry technical excellence awards.

By now most people have heard that a Theory of Everything is within reach in the near future, meaning a unified explanation of the physical forces in the universe. Yet “the near future” has stretched out for several decades. This apparent overconfidence and undue optimism points to some serious and as yet unexplained oddities and paradoxes afflicting the flagship theories of science, which are unable, in stark contrast to the prevailing confidence of the past, to explain the vast majority (96%) of the universe. The presence of dark matter and energy, for example, has caused some expected calculations in quantum mechanics to be off by a staggering 120 orders of magnitude.

The average person would see no relationship between an intellectual difficulty facing modern physics and everyday life. We are all used to experiencing the sensual world where a geranium leaf is soft, fuzzy, green, and aromatic. In the scientific world the same leaf is quantified into objective facts like the molecular structure of chlorophyll and the nature of photosynthesis. What almost no one realizes is that these two views of the natural world actually represent two universes. A single geranium leaf is like a fork in the road. One way leads to the richness of the world as we experience it every day. The other road leads to the universe of gravity, relativity, and quantum activity.

To the chagrin of physics, the universe they have so precisely calculated may depend upon the common-or-garden universe of everyday experience to survive. Here’s why. The root cause for the lack of a Theory of Everything is ignorance of the physics of spontaneous mass-energy conversion. Einstein discovered the mathematics that allows matter to convert to energy in his famous equation E=mc2, and the result that most people are aware of is the atom bomb, where tiny amounts of matter (uranium) are converted into enormous amounts of energy.

Yet at the smallest level of nature, mass and energy are spontaneously converting into each other, as when particles decay. The most basic conversion concerns the fact that every elementary particle like an electron or photon has a dual nature, existing either as a wave or a particle. But when a photon in a light bulb is released by an electron, it immediately travels at the speed of light without any real explanation. On a vast scale, the big bang represents a titanic conversion of mass-energy again without a viable explanation. Current theories about the multiverse, in which ours is only one of trillions of possible universes, doesn’t really help, because the alternative universes cannot be reached, observed, or measured.

We seem to have wandered farther from everyday life rather than closer, but if you consider the second universe, the one we all live in matter of factly, it too has a huge unsolved problem. How does the brain produce the sights, sounds, and other properties of the visible world? Neuroscience assumes that the mind is a byproduct of the brain but there is zero explanation of how tiny electrical firings and chemical reactions in a nerve cell suddenly blossom into the whole three-dimensional world. What if there is a common missing link between this problem usually referred to as the “hard problem” of connecting mind and brain and the problem facing physics?

One of the authors of this post, Dr. Singh, proposes that there is in fact an integrated model that provides a direct relationship between the physics concepts of space, time, mass, and energy, and the concepts associated with consciousness, in particular spontaneity and free will. A new thought occurs just as spontaneously as a new particle or wave, and equally mysteriously. The laws of physics and chemistry ruling the brain are fixed but the intentional choice input of the observer determines the outcome. This spontaneity of the observer’s consciousness negates the repetition of fixed, predetermined mental activity, leading to the storm of freely arising feelings, thoughts, images, and sensations that constitute mental life. The universe of everyday experience derives from such spontaneous conscious events, and just as equally, the fixed laws that govern the scientific universe are easily, howsoever not so intuitively, correlatable with the spontaneous conversion of mass into energy.

Dr. Singh’s unique answer to all the paradoxes of physics and consciousness is what he calls the Universal Relativity Model (URM). Deepak became fascinated because his recent book, You Are the Universe, co-authored with physicist Menas Kafatos, posited exactly what URM delivers: a single reality that doesn’t need two universes, one for science and one for everyday life. Singh’s breakthrough was to take Einstein’s E=mc2, which applied relativity to matter, energy, space, and time in a very general way, and go a step further, applying it to everything in the universe, including human consciousness.

At first blush this seems all but infeasible, because, as we saw, a green leaf looks, feels, and appears in every way different from the formulas of biology, chemistry, and physics. But the distance between any subjective experiences–the heat of a summer day, the sound of rain on the roof, the scent of a rose–has been impossible to bridge to the world of objective data, measurements, and experiments? How many meters wide is love? What does a laugh weigh? To construct this bridge is actually possible only if we wake up to the fact that Nature is doing it already without playing any dice.

And that’s what is happening. Nature is so precisely organized that it coordinates every dimension and force from zero to infinity as part of the implicate cosmic order. Take a snapshot of a single moment in time, such as the moment the first primitive life form like blue-green algae or a single-celled amoeba appeared. This was more than a moment (the dimension of time). There also had to be the exact portion of space (planet Earth), mass (all the chemicals involved in living forms), and energy (the proper temperature range for living things). The coordination of these factors was in fact unique for this moment. Pick another moment–when the first dinosaur appears, a specific supernova exploded, or your first birthday–and the “recipe” of time, space, matter, and energy was just as unique. The universe entails life and nature as one wholesome continuum of conscious experiences or awareness.

Since all of these factors are flexible and expandable, they are in a relativistic relationship with one another. This is all logical and easy to grasp, although the necessary math is complex. What emerges is universal relativity, an infinite continuum of unique “recipes” for anything you can name in the cosmos. Along this infinite continuum, every option is open to human awareness. There can be time close to zero or expanded to eons, space smaller than the infant universe when it was billions of times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence or expanded to billions of lightyears, and so on.

If everything exists on the same continuum of universal relativity, there are no more paradoxes, contradictions theoretical bumps, and discontinuities. This model does something that even the standard Theory of Everything would not be able to do even if it was finally formulated. It includes the second universe of conscious experience. Two totally opposed conceptions of reality – the objective scientific worldview and the inner world of the mind, are bridged while remaining within the demand for data, measurements, and hard evidence.

In our next post we will cover the immense implications of URM for how reality actually works. As a preview, below is a brief description of how URM resolves the current paradoxes of physics and cosmology (using somewhat more technical language than in the previous paragraphs):

URM eliminates the need for a single creative event like the big bang, because genesis is a constant: there is continuous unlimited mass-to-energy conversion all the way to the most infinitesimal sizes of the universe.

1. What came before the big bang? URM predicts an eternal quasi-static universe without time being a parameter. Hence, nothing came before (or after) since there was NO big bang.
2. Where did time come from? URM predicts the observed universe without time as a parameter. Relativistic time appears as a property of gravity-dominated states of matter. There is no unique universal time as such.
3. What is the universe made of? URM describes the universe as an infinite number of relativistic states of mass-energy-space-time varying with each circumstance. The net mass-energy of the universe is conserved and remains constant in all states.
4. Is there design in the universe? The unchanging relativistic laws of the conservation of mass-energy-space-time and various universal constants govern cosmic behavior. There is no need for either a designer or design.
5. Is the quantum world linked to everyday life? Yes. URM describes the whole universe as a continuum from infinitesimally small to infinitely large scales. There no duality–no split-screen for physics to worry about, once every level of Nature is interwoven seamlessly.

We will skip the other more technical paradoxes that URM addresses in order to jump to its most revolutionary implication. Do we live in a conscious universe? Yes, for the simplest of reasons. In an eternal universe where change is totally relativistic, creation is eternal also; therefore, so is life. The form that life takes–an amoeba, algae, dinosaur, Homo sapiens–is really a snapshot isolated from the reality of eternal life as it spontaneously “bubbles” up with new forms.

Because the prospect of eternal life is so full of meaning, we will discuss this aspect of URM next time. For the moment, the possibility of the two universes having the same fate as aspects of one reality is quite thrilling in its own right.

(To be cont.)

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 Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Avtar Singh, PhD, is author of the book – “The Hidden Factor: An Approach for Resolving Paradoxes of Science, Cosmology and Universal Reality”. He has Doctor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA. As a member of American Nuclear Society and American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he has been involved in state-of-the-art research and development in science/engineering over the past 30 years. He has published more than fifty papers in professional journals and two monographs. He received the ‘Best Paper Award’ from the American Nuclear Society, MIT Fellowship, national scholarship awards, and several industry technical excellence awards.