Reality Is Structured in Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra, MD

One of the most surprising survivors in our society, long counted out as either moribund or dead, is philosophy. The “love of truth,” as the Greek term describes, was defeated by science and its love of facts. So it was unexpected when the New York Times ran an op-ed piece titled “If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?” (March 6, 2017) by the veteran English philosopher Roger Scruton.

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The piece begins by nodding toward the tradition of endowing human beings with a soul, a supernatural spark that sets us apart from the animals, and quite realistically Scruton notes that “Recent advances in genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology have all but killed off that idea.” Although a popular belief in the soul is very much alive, our official secular culture and its primary source of knowledge, science, totally dismisses it.

What then? Scruton uses a split-the-difference tactic, arguing that although we are undeniably animals who evolved from primitive ancestors, we aren’t just animals. We are special creatures, beginning with our sense of morality. Modern philosophy, therefore, continues to ask the same questions about human specialness as ancient philosophy, searching for the true secret of being human. Scruton looks first to morality as a truth about being human, which most people would sympathize with.
“We believe that people have rights, that they are sovereign over their lives, and that those who live by enslaving or abusing others,” he writes, “are denying their own humanity.” But this appeal seems doomed, I think, because in a secular society truth and facts are the same, and for every nice thing that makes humans special, there are savage behaviors that place us far below the animal kingdom. Genocide, whether we like it or not, is just as human as compassion.

Scruton has more to say, but I think there’s an essential point he misses. Placing science up against philosophy doesn’t hold water, because science is itself a philosophy. The noted senior physicist George Ellis has pointed out quite sharply that when scientists disdain metaphysics, as the vast majority do, they are ignorant of the fact that their view of Nature is also metaphysical. To say that we live in a random universe, for example, is just as metaphysical as saying that the universe was made by God. Arguing than human begins are a mere speck in the cosmos, accidents of evolution that probably got repeated on hundreds or thousands of planets in other galaxies, declares a truth about humanness that is philosophical in its ramifications.

So splitting the difference with science isn’t going to breathe new life into philosophy. Scruton winds up with a fuzzy declaration that is unscientific but also inadequate philosophy: “…as persons we inhabit a life-world that is not reducible to the world of nature.” There’s nothing helpful in this, because things we cherish in our “life-world,” like love and compassion, are still going to be reduced to scientific explanations that for better or worse will rule the argument for a long time, just as they rule the argument now. If science is actually a philosophy, the critical question is this: which philosophy is the best one to live by?

The current crisis in physics doesn’t feature the word philosophy, but the predicaments are absolutely philosophical. Let me sketch in just one critical problem, which might be called the fudge factor. Fudging can imply dishonesty or taking shortcuts, but not in this case. Rather, certain numbers and explanations serve as placeholders while science awaits a new model–or even a new perspective on reality–to fill in the gaps. With the “discovery” of so-called dark matter and dark energy, physics has tried to fill in an enormous gap between theory and reality. Certain phenomena like the speed at which galaxies are rushing away from one another, cannot be explained away with new data. To fill in an enormous discrepancy, particularly in the cosmological constant, one of the most fundamental mathematical calculations in physics, dark matter and energy came along quite conveniently. Neither has ever been observed or directly measured. There is a strong feeling that their structure may be totally alien to the accepted structure of time, space, matter, and energy in the visible (non-dark) universe.

Since fudging the numbers requires such a huge adjustment, it was necessary to re balance creation so that 96% of it is dark, while the visible universe, including all the matter contained in stars, planets, galaxies, and interstellar dust, amount to only 4% of the total. This means that reality is largely unknown, for even though it’s accepted in many circles that a special particle known as a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) may forge a link with the known universe, no one has ever detected such a particle. Like the multiverse and superstring theory, dark matter and energy may be unknowable. All of these structures are totally mathematical, existing as creations of human consciousness. They provide no data or measurements. Therefore, if you are a radical skeptic, the whole superstructure of modern physics may be just a huge fudge factor.

Even if you aren’t willing to take that spectacular leap, even everyday subatomic particles like electrons are not objective, free-standing things like a loaf of bread or a tree. Being dual in nature, electrons exhibit “thingness” when they are observed but exist the rest of the time aswaves of potentiality with no fixed qualities of any kind. This is a bedrock fact of quantum physics going back to its early days over a century ago. To stitch together a marriage of convenience between the everyday world of big objects and the quantum world of very tiny ones (which are dubiously called objects in the first place), it was necessary to erect a wall separating the two domains. This détente isn’t scientifically convincing, but at least it was reassuring. Quantum events could continue to be “spooky action at a distance” while the everyday world chugged along normally.

Only now it appears that the everyday world of big objects is probably quantum in nature, too. Big objects move so slowly, however, that we are fooled by their appearance of solidity. In reality, nothing is fixed, solid, firmly in place, or unchanging. Every piece of creation is caught up in the same process of flow, unpredictability, and spookiness. Without going into details, let’s admit that the fudge factor, which attests to a huge mismatch between theory and reality, upends science’s claim to hard-headed facts. Science is a collection of concepts created in the human mind, just like philosophy. Electrons exist because in our species of consciousness, we gave them a name attached to a concept, and one of the concepts was to call electrons objects or things. In another mode of knowing–perhaps possessed by “dark” thinkers in a domain we can’t conceive of-electrons are totally different, if they exist at all. All of these ideas are explored in great detail in a new book , You Are the Universe I co-wrote with physicist Menas Kafatos.

Over the past century philosophy has capitulated to science, and all of us, whether we realize it or not, live according to the philosophy that science espouses. Because of science’s triumphant discovery of new technologies, we assume that its philosophy must be right. This is like a medieval person who happened to see an airplane fly overhead then rushes to tell his priest that God is real. Technology isn’t the doorkeeper of truth. There is really only one viable way forward. A livable philosophy must be based on a foundation in reality, and for that purpose, the only way we know anything is through consciousness. Reality is an activity in consciousness, whether it’s a matter of falling in love or creating the concept of an electron. Until everyone begins to explore a consciousness-based approach to reality, the pursuit of science and philosophy will both be hobbled.

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

The Ultimate Self-Help: Upgrading the Illusion

By Deepak Chopra, MD

YATU 1

The phrase “personal reality” has a range of meanings, and most people would begin with their situation, the place where they find themselves. There’s a natural impulse to improve the situation, whatever it happens to be. If your situation lacks enough money, satisfying work, a loving relationship, and so on, it will improve your personal reality to work on those things. That’s about as far as society tells us we can go. On a larger scale, one person can make a minuscule difference by casting a vote for President or deciding to recycle, but big or small, personal reality has a big outer component, consisting of the external world, other people, natural forces, and so on.

 

It seems so obvious that there is a “big” reality compared to which anyone’s “small” reality is fairly insignificant. But this small reality is personal, so we all spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to upgrade it–all of our life, in fact. So it’s mystifying to run into the world’s wisdom traditions, which perversely turn this whole idea upside down, claiming that the “big” reality is actually a snare, a trap, an illusion. That’s the gist of the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Buddhism, different as they are when taken as religions. In my new book, You Are the Universe , written with physicist Menas Kafatos, we look very closely at how to upgrade personal reality from the ground up, a process that begins with solving the whole mystery of reality.

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How to Stop Being a Biological Robot

Most people are too busy, or otherwise distracted, to think about how the mind works, much less about the vexed problem of connecting mind and brain. This includes neuroscientists. They run their experiments and publish new data without addressing the most fundamental questions. Their field runs nicely by simply assuming that the brain is the mind. After all, without a brain there cannot be any mental activity, QED. Why bother to go any deeper?

One reason is that human beings are clearly not brain-defined. We need the brain the way a musician needs a piano or TV news needs a television set–to carry the mind into the physical world. The belief held by 99% of neuroscientists is that with sophisticated enough brain scans and various other measurements, the mystery of thinking, feeling, sensing, and imagining will one day be solved. It’s a futile dream, however, because even the most basic issues, such as why the color red is red, how we hear sounds in a brain that is totally silent, and where a thought comes from are nowhere near being understood.

Leaving theory aside, there is a huge practical problem involved. What do we do when the brain makes us its victim? If we are brain-driven, this implies that the brain is in charge of daily habits, decisions, reflexes, and responses. In many cases this is clearly true. When you reach for ice cream at midnight telling yourself that it’s the wrong thing to do, who is making you act automatically, against your best interests, and without your ability to break the habit?

The answer is the conditioned brain. Conditioning is synonymous with training, and a conditioned brain is a tricky thing. Some of its training is voluntary and conscious, such as when a pilot is trained to fly a jumbo jet or any skill is learned. Some training is involuntary and unconscious, such as when children learn to be afraid of abusive parents. Some training is purely physical, as when addicts are conditioned to crave a drug because there is distorted functioning of opiate receptors in their neurons. The Mind

All of us walk around behaving as if we are not biological robots, and yet we live on the cusp of free will and determinism. In an era of triumphant neuroscience, determinism is no longer a religious or metaphysical issue. It’s the nitty-gritty of having a conditioned brain and what to do

about it. Can the brain get rid of its negative conditioning? Once a neural pathway is engraved deeply enough, can it be erased? No, the brain cannot uncondition itself any more than a dog can untrain itself to fetch a stick or a computer can write its own new operating system. There must be conscious mental intervention, and the evidence seems to be that new neural pathways can be established through many kinds of lifestyle interventions and new ways of thinking.

 

To stop being a biological robot is possible. The first step is to be aware of your robotic behaviors. The most common of these include:

— Having repetitive or obsessive thoughts.

— Being unable to control your impulses.

— Finding it difficult to impossible to change a bad habit.

— Relating to others with habitual responses; living in a ritualized relationship where the same issues persist year after year.

— Saying or thinking the same things day after day.

— Feeling empty, flat, or unfulfilled.

— Lacking new solutions to your problems.

— Feeling unable to get past ingrained fear and hostility.

— Being trapped in old memories, unable to get past emotional trauma from the past.

— Adopting second-hand opinions, either positive or negative.

— Feeling that you need to be fixed but not finding a way to accomplish this.

 

This is a long and perhaps discouraging list; certainly the items on it can’t be changed all at once. But at bottom there is a common link at work, which is lack of awareness. Freedom of choice comes down to having enough awareness to overcome your old conditioning, whatever form that takes. The mind is meant to tell the brain how to respond, not vice versa. There are gray areas here. The brain exists in layers that range from the lower brain, which controls automatic responses like fight or flight that evolved millions of years ago, to the middle brain, where emotions evolved, to the higher brain, the newest part, responsible for higher reasoning and decision-making.

To stop being a biological robot begins in the higher brain, since it involves conscious choice, but emotions play their part (as when someone with a weight problem “eats their feelings”), and the stubborn responses of the lower brain, such as feeling attacked, often enter the

negotiations. It takes negotiation between mind and brain to accomplish any change. You can get out of your car to change a flat tire. You can’t get out of your brain to change a bad habit.

Having become aware that you are being driven by a conditioned brain, the next step is to alter how your mind relates to your brain. for this step to succeed, you need more than awareness. You must develop self-awareness. Since this is a complicated process that involves mind and body, biology and psychology, positive and negative input–and much more–the whole topic needs a post of its own.

(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 Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

What’s the Point of Being Human? The Best Answer So Far.

BrainBy Deepak Chopra, MD

The point of being human is to push the envelope of being human. This is worth remembering when times are tough and we lose confidence in ourselves. No other creature on earth has the capacity to redefine itself. We do.  How humans gained this ability remains a totally mystery. Looking at physical remains, it’s possible—although controversial—to outline the evolutionary march from ape to hominid, from hominid to Homo, and finally from Homo to our specific species Homo sapiens.

But the physical evidence is blurry at times, and even a simple achievement like the discovery of fire is up in the air; estimates could be off by hundreds of thousands of years. But not a single physical trait explains why we are self-aware. Awareness gave us the ability to push the envelope of being human. Ten thousand years ago the higher brain, the cerebral cortex, was a finished structure, more or less. In other creatures, once their brains are finished, that’s the limit. An elephant’s huge brain allows, we think, for emotional empathy. Elephants grieve over the dead and are emotionally tied to one another.

But an elephant’s brain can’t do math, write poetry, or invent the atom bomb. The human brain is the secret, physically speaking, behind our incredible abilities with language, tool-making, art, and weaponry. But no one knows the secret behind how the mind uses this brain. On the one hand, we remain totally confused about who we really are. We don’t even know if we are basically good or bad. At the moment, opinion has turned us into baddies destroying the environment. But that’s a lopsided view, given the fact that no matter how horrible our behavior, we can look in the mirror and change it.

If this is true—and it seems undeniable—then what’s the next stage in pushing the envelope? No one knows, because the whole point of human evolution is that you can’t predict where it’s going. Indeed, none of us knows what our next thought will be. We plunge into the unknown at every second. But in the face of confusion, uncertainty, and low morale, one possibility remains untarnished. We are likely to become even more self-aware. That’s the pattern that has held good for all of recorded history, and despite every catastrophic setback and horrifying turn of events, the march of awareness continues. (more…)

Faith, Itself, Must Evolve in Our Modern World

Originally published by MariaShriver.com on September 21, 2015

Faith, Itself, Must Evolve in Our Modern World

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Photo Credit: Jacob Sciacchitano, Unsplash

Photo Credit: Jacob Sciacchitano, Unsplash

Like everything in human life, faith evolves—or not. Among the species on the planet in danger of extinction is the creature of simple faith, a person who accepts the supernatural reality upon which Christianity is based. Too many secular forces fight against simple faith; therefore, to counter the possibility of extinction, the faithful must evolve.

But in what direction? First is the movement toward faith based on compassion. Thanks to a Pope who embodies kindness and humility, and who has decided that the Church must speak out about worldly problems, it is foreseen that faith is on the rise. But this bump in popularity doesn’t resolve the central problem of how to hold one’s faith in an impossible world. (more…)