News - The Chopra Foundation

Synchronicity, Evolution, and Your Genes (Part 1)

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Jordan Flesher

Over the past decade, the hunt for genetic connections with behavior as intensified. For any experience, there must be a physical activity in the brain—otherwise, the experience has no basis. Using this irrefutable assumption, researchers have looked for the seat of anger, criminal behavior, gender identification, the sense of self, and many other aspects of human nature. This includes spirituality. Where is God in the brain? To many neuroscientists, that’s not only a valid question but the only one worth asking, insofar as spiritual experiences have any reality.

Now we are hearing about “God in the genes,” as genetics overtakes neuroscience for the top spot in explaining the roots of human experience. Where the brain operates only in the present, genetics peers deep into the past. A geneticist would want to know what evolutionary advantage early humans got from being spiritual—in the broadest sense of the word—that led to a better chance to survive. This whole line of inquiry, whether we’re taking about the brain or our genes, makes sense if you are a materialist. But it runs the danger of saying that spirituality is only about the physical side of the experience, as if music could never be discussed except by looking at pianos and radios, the physical side of delivering the musical experience.

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The Best Way to Get Rid of Evil

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The best way to get rid of evil is to change our ideas about it. The two concepts about evil that do nothing to end it are, first, the concept of cosmic evil embodied by Satan, and second, the concept of human evil as a permanent human inheritance, part of our nature.

If you Google the phrase “Americans believe in heaven,” you find that about 90 percent do, with 75 percent believing in hell and 70 percent in the devil. Those statistics remain fairly uniform from poll to poll; it’s strange that there’s a drop off between heaven and hell since the two go together in the mind. However, it seems possible that believing in the devil is a matter of having nothing better to put in his place. Evil so perplexes people that attributing it to a cosmic Prince of Darkness provides some explanation at least. It saves the trouble of taking responsibility for evil ourselves.
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Protected: Journey Into Higher Consciousness – Meditation

Interview with Kabir Sehgal and Deepak Chopra

Here is a interview with Deepak Chopra and Kabir Sehgal on the deeper understanding of the relationship between money and humanity They discuss Kabir’s book, Coin: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us.

Deepak: Why did you write Coined?

I began working on Wall Street just a few months before the great financial crisis. I was alarmed with the damage that it caused with people losing their jobs and houses. I wanted to know why we act so irrationally when it comes to money. What’s going on in the brain when we think about money? I researched the topic of money over 4 years while traveling to over 25 countries.

Deepak: How does money have a physiological change on us?

Kabir: Just the idea of making money can increase your skin conductancy, meaning there’s a current of excitement. Money also numbs your senses. People who touched paper money and then placed their hands in hot burning water didn’t feel as much pain as those who hadn’t touched money. Researchers have compared brain scans of those people who are making money to those high on cocaine and found that them to be almost identical. Money has a biological and psychological effect on us.

Deepak: What did you learn about money that surprised you?

Kabir: The oldest and most important currency is debt. And different cultures treat debt differently. For example, in Tokyo, I bought some delicious fruit as a gift for my friend. But he didn’t want to accept it because he said he wouldn’t be able to repay me, as I was leaving in a few days. The word for thank you “arigato” loosely translates into “this difficult thing.” When you go to a Japense wedding, make sure that you tie the ribbon on the present tightly because if you don’t, you may imply that you don’t think the marriage will last.

Deepak: What is the future of money?

Kabir: Reputation will become an even more important currency in the future. I went to a restaurant, and they made a mistake with my reservation, so I took out my phone to text my friend that he could take his time. But the maitre d was alarmed, and said “please don’t write a negative review of us on Yelp. We’ll find you a table right away.” For him, a negative review could jeopardize future business. Social standing and reptuation has always mattered, but now it ‘s happening on a global basis. The number of twitter followers and Facebook likes really matter. For example, American Airlines gives VIP lounge perks to those who have higher Klout scores, which is a metric for someone’s social media influence.

Deepak: How can spirituality teach us how to be better with money?

Kabir: I traveled to Kolkatta, India and visited Mother Theresa’s home for the dying and destitute. It’s there that I saw many lepers, and there was a European teenager who was serving as a volunteer. He told me he was there because of what he learned in the scriptures. Jesus speaks about the importance of storing up treasures in heaven but not on earth. In Hinduism, one of the goals of life is artha, the accumulation of wealth. You are supposed to make money and take care of your family, but when you pursue artha you will awaken to moksha, or liberation. There will come a time in your life when you should renounce money and detach from it. Spirtuality teaches not to follow the evolutionary logic of “more is better” but to realize that “less is more.”

Learn more about Kabir Sehgal’s Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us