A Surprising Answer to “Who Am I?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Not many people reflect philosophically on the age-old question, “Who am I?” For practical purposes, everyday life depends on accepting the self that gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, and goes off to work. This makes it seem as if “Who am I?” is a given. But in fact, it isn’t. You are shifting unconsciously from one persona to the next all the time. There is tremendous importance in this fact, because the shifting self isn’t the real you.

The shifting self can be divided into three general identities, three versions of “I.”

The outward self: This is the social persona, which you identify with if your focus is on socially-approved things like money, career, the right neighborhood, an impressive house, etc. “I” is attached to labels that relate to those things, so that “WASP surgeon with a Park Avenue practice, a socialite wife, and a major portfolio” defines a very different self than “Latino working-class single mother living on food stamps.”

The private self: This is who you are behind closed doors. The private self identifies with feelings and relationships. The values that matter most include a happy marriage, satisfying sex life, children to love and be proud of, etc. On the downside are the private trials and miseries that come into every life. “I” is attached to the hopes and fears of everyday existence, which for some people means an existence of insecurity, anxiety, depression, and dashed hopes that seem inescapable.

The subconscious self: This is the self that lies beneath the surface, where repressed feelings, old wounds and traumas, and various hidden forces live. This is a shadowy region that many find dangerous to enter. But here there is also creativity and intuition, so the subconscious self isn’t only about lower or darker impulses. Unlike the outward and private self, there is no well-defined “I” in the subconscious. Most people are unaware of their deepest drives, desires, and fears because unless there is a sudden outbreak from here, they’d rather keep the subconscious self hidden, even from themselves.

The “I” you identify with is like a magnifying glass gathering the sun’s rays to a point. Your “I” interprets every experience and makes it personal. “I” is a bundle of hopes, fears, wishes, and reams. “I” harbors memories no one else has, and in the compartments of memory are stored habits, beliefs, old traumas, and past conditioning. This multiplicity is bewildering, which is why the teaching of “Know thyself” is actually the point of being alive—until you know where “I” came from, you cannot discover who you really are.

In the world’s wisdom traditions, the three versions of “I” are called the divided self, and a person can be trapped inside it for a lifetime. But the divided self serves as a disguise from the real self, which is sometimes known as the higher self or simply the Self with a capital S. The secret to the Self is that it is made from the same “stuff” as the divided self, the stuff of consciousness. It only takes awareness for the mind to exist, going about its business of thinking, feeling, and sensing the world. But with the divided self, this “stuff” is constantly taking shape. We mistake our thoughts, feelings, and sensations as the whole story.

Yet if you take away all the shapes that consciousness turns into, the is another kind of experience, of inner silence without any content. This alone deserves to be called the Self. It is the pure experiencer, devoid of mental or physical activity, needing nothing to identify with except its own being. It’s odd that this is who we are, and people need convincing, because the allure of the divided self is powerful; in addition, it’s the only self–or three selves–we’ve been used to all our lives.

Yet if the Self is the correct answer to “Who am I?” it must be present here and now. Which means that the higher states of consciousness that is our birthright, the source of love, compassion, creativity, intelligence, and evolution, can’t simply be faraway ideals. They are attributes of who we really are. This is the main teaching of the worlds wisdom traditions, and the seers, saints, sages, and spiritual guides revered in every culture are no more than people who found the right answer to “Who am I?” In that light, there is only one discovery to make along the spiritual path, the discovery that the Self is intimately present at every moment. Being the source of everything, it cannot change. It cannot come and go.

The only thing that changes is our perception and understanding. The three selves we identify with right this moment are only perceptions, constructs or models we hold in our heads. Abandon the constructs, and what is left is the “real” reality, the field of pure consciousness. In the practice of meditation perception shifts closer to the source of awareness. That is the open door through which the self is glimpsed, and with time and attention, the divided self melts away leaving only the unified Self. In that process lies the whole story of answering “who am I?”

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

How Does Something Come Out of Nothing? A Cosmic Tale

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Prof. Pankaj S. Joshi

The question of where the universe came from isn’t solved by pointing to the big bang, because this begs the question of where it came from. In physics creation is often dubbed “something out of nothing,” meaning that the entire observable cosmos emerged from a pre-created state that is devoid of the familiar landmarks of reality: time, space, matter and energy. The boundary between this “something” all around us and that “nothing” that is also present but undetectable has fascinated physics in recent decades. It’s a fascination we should all share if we want to know where creation came from.

The trail leading to a scientific explanation of the universe has run into problems. In ancient Greek thought physis, usually translated as “nature,” meant the fundamental essence or guiding principle of creation. Today the motive to unravel nature’s secrets remains the same, but it’s been frustrating to find a single unifying theory underlying the universe. Modern physics has a formidable reputation for rigor, and its theories are supported by advanced mathematical equations and computations, but the key paradigms within physics have been constantly changing and evolving. The Holy Grail of physics, to unify all the forces of nature into a Theory of Everything (TOE), has remained out of reach because the two most successful areas of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, are incompatible.

The solution is generally accepted to be a theory of quantum gravity, but in the usual regimes of natural phenomena that we observe and experience in daily life, it is impossible to observe quantum phenomena and gravity working together. Interestingly, Nature herself comes to our aid in understanding the gravity and quantum phenomena together or in a combined way. A quantum gravity laboratory is possibly created when a massive star collapses under its own gravity towards the end of its life cycle. The fascinating opportunity thus presents itself for making progress towards understanding of quantum gravity and TOE. At the same time, the collapse of massive stars takes us to the edge of the greatest mystery in creation: how something came out of nothing, and in this case, returns to nothing when its life cycle is over.

Having exhausted the fuel that sustained them for millions of years, massive stars are no longer able to hold themselves up under their own weight; they begin to shrink and collapse catastrophically under their own gravity. Modest stars like the Sun also collapse at the end of their cycle, but they stabilize at a smaller dwarf size. By contrast, when a star is massive enough, orders of magnitude larger than the Sun, its gravity overwhelms all the forces that might possibly halt the collapse. From a diameter millions of kilometers across, the star crumples to an infinitesimal dimension much smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.   Untitled Design(31)

What is the eventual fate of such massive collapsing stars? This is one of the most exciting questions in astrophysics and modern cosmology today. To give some background, the story began some eight decades ago when Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar probed the question of the final fate of stars such as the Sun. He showed that such a star, on exhausting its internal nuclear fuel, would stabilize as a “White Dwarf,” about a thousand kilometers in size. Eminent scientists of the time, in particular Sir Arthur Eddington, refused to accept this, saying that a star could never become that small. Chandrasekhar left Cambridge to settle in the United States, and after many years his prediction was verified. Later it also became known that stars which are three to five

times the Sun’s mass give rise to what are called neutron stars, about ten kilometers in diameter, after a supernova explosion.

But when a star has a mass more than these limits, the force of gravity is supreme and overwhelming. A star as massive as tens of solar masses burns much faster and lives only up to 10 to 20 million years, compared to a lifetime of some ten billion years for a smaller star like the Sun. When gravity is unopposed by countering forces, no stable configuration is possible, and amazingly the star’s catastrophic collapse happens within a matter of seconds. The outcome, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is a space-time singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, not encountered in any of our usual experiences of the physical world.

As one possibility, a so-called event horizon of gravity can develop. This is essentially a one-way membrane that allows entry but no exit. If the star entered the event horizon before it collapsed to a singularity, the result is a black hole that hides the final singularity. Black holes are a permanent graveyard for the collapsing star. According to our current understanding, it was one such singularity, namely the big bang, that created the expanding universe. But the big bang isn’t unique. Such singularities will be produced whenever massive stars die and collapse. And so we arrive at the mysterious boundary of the cosmos, a region of arbitrarily large densities billions of times the sun’s density.

An enormous creation and destruction of particles takes place in the vicinity of a singularity. One could imagine this as the cosmic interplay of the basic forces of nature coming together in a unified manner. These energies and all physical quantities in the vicinity of singularity reach their extreme values; quantum gravity effects dominate this region. This is how collapsing massive stars present a laboratory for quantum gravity, holding out the potential for a TOE, if visible naked singularities occur in astrophysical settings in faraway skies. The basic question then arises: Are such super-ultra-dense regions forming in the collapse of massive stars, visible to faraway observers, or would they always be hidden in a black hole?

A visible singularity is sometimes called a naked singularity or quantum star. The visibility or otherwise of such a super-ultra-dense fireball that the star has turned into is one of the most exciting and important questions in astrophysics and cosmology today. This is because the unification of fundamental forces taking place here becomes observable, at least in principle.

A crucial point arises: while gravitation theory implies that singularities must form in collapse, we have no proof that the event horizon must necessarily develop. It was only a working assumption that an event horizon always does form, hiding all singularities without fail. This is referred to as the cosmic censorship conjecture, the foundation of the current theory of black holes and their modern astrophysical applications. But if the event horizon did not form before the singularity, we would then observe the super-dense regions that form in collapsing massive stars, and the quantum gravity effects near the naked singularity would become observable. Thus we could actually see the extreme physics near such ultimate super-dense regions. As a step toward this possibility, in recent years a series of collapse models have been developed in which the event horizon fails to form in the collapse of a massive star.

In short, it turns out that the collapse of a massive star gives rise to either a black hole or naked singularity, depending on the internal conditions within the star, such as its densities and pressure profiles, and the velocities of the collapsing shells. When a naked singularity occurs, small inhomogeneities (i.e., lumpiness) in matter densities close to singularity could spread out and magnify enormously to create high-energy shock waves. These, in turn, have connections to extreme high-energy astrophysical phenomena such as cosmic gamma ray bursts, which we do not yet understand today.

Will we actually be able to see this cosmic dance, the finale of collapsing stars in the theatre of the galaxies? Or will the black hole curtain always hide and close the end game off forever, even before the ferment of creation has begun? Only future observations of massive collapsing stars can possibly tell us. Interestingly, the 2014 sci-fi adventure Interstellar refers to naked singularities in the script, suggesting that without them we’d never understand how interstellar leaps in space travel are possible—but real science isn’t there yet.

As it stands, the closer we get to the boundary between nothing and something, the more urgent the problem of creation becomes. It’s as if “nothing” and “something” are merely symbols for domains of creation and pre-creation that can’t be understood with objective measurement. In the next part of this series we’ll look into the possibility that scientific knowledge is about to converge with the problem of how the human mind is able to know anything at all. In the end, our thoughts and feelings are “something out of nothing” just as much as collapsing massive stars and the big bang.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Cen-ter for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transfor-mation, 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, Neurol-ogy and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American As-sociation of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet sur-vey 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 best-sellers. 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

Professor Pankaj Joshi is a theoretical physicist and Senior Professor at the Tata Institute of Fun-damental Research (TIFR), Mumbai India. Professor Pankaj Joshi has published many (more than 170) research papers, and monographs on cosmology and gravitation. He has made fundamental contributions on gravitational collapse, black holes and naked singularities. The new analysis on collapsing stars from Joshi and his collaborators, as reported and reviewed in his Oxford (1993) and Cambridge (2007) monographs, showed that both black holes and visible naked singularities form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life-cycles. Recent results from Cambridge, Princeton, Perimeter and others, now corroborate these results.

His research was published as an International cover in “Scientific American.” He served as an ad-junct Faculty with the New York University, and was awarded the A C Banerji Gold Medal and Lec-ture Award by the National Academy of Sciences, India, along with many other awards. He holds visiting faculty positions in many reputed universities and has won fellowships in various scientific academies. His research papers and monographs are widely cited internationally. His recent book, The Story of Collapsing Stars (Oxford University Press), explores the death of massive stars and the subsequent formation of black holes or naked singularities through gravitational collapse of stars.

Why You Aren’t Who You Think You Are

By : Deepak Chopra

Each of us perceives reality through the filter of a personal self, an “I” that is unique in the world, thanks to the unique experiences we’ve had since birth. We rely on “I” to be able to navigate through everyday situations, not realizing how limiting “I” actually is. It’s fair to say that few people realize how unstable and distorted their sense of self actually is. To begin with, each of us filters out an enormous portion of the input we receive at a given moment.
Part of the filtering is unavoidable–human eyesight is limited to the visible wavelengths between ultraviolet and infrared, human hearing between the frequencies of 20 and 20,ooo Hz (vibrations per second). In cosmic terms the visible universe, along with the universe detectable with scientific instruments, is a fraction of the total matter and energy in creation–perhaps as little as 1% to 4% depending on how “dark” matter and energy are computed, along with invisible interstellar dust.
On the personal level, the human brain has all kinds of limitations, including its dependence of a macro level of space, time, matter, and energy. At other levels of nature, including the quantum, ordinary clock time, the familiar three dimensions of space, the solidity of physical matter, and so on change entirely and at a certain point disappear. The fact that “something came out of nothing” during the big bang destabilizes common-sense reality in radical ways.
Most of our filtering, however, occurs as a result of the experiences we assimilate all our lives. A collection of past wounds, conditioning, and beliefs forces us to go into denial about ourselves and the world around us. The phobic who is deathly afraid of spiders seems extreme, but every strongly held belief shuts out other viewpoints, and in the process the world we don’t want tot see becomes invisible. The input we receive as raw information might not be entirely suppressed, but it still gets examined in the process of interpreting what’s happening to us. At a crude level we interpret every experience as good or bad, hurtful or pleasurable, something we like or dislike, etc. Depending on how judgmental you are, you fall somewhere between extremely close-minded and extremely open-minded. Depending on how empathetic you are, you fall somewhere between compassionate and cruel.

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One we take into account the ways that “I” gets shaped–through filtering, interpretation, beliefs, memories, and all types of social conditioning–it’s inescapable that “I” is a rickety structure that we ourselves didn’t build of our own free will. With most people, “I” reflects forces outside their control since birth. Still, we all defend “I” and go to great lengths to identify with it. But a closer examination reveals that “I” doesn’t have a secure perch on reality, because instead of a stable structure, the self is constantly bounding around. At a minimum we have three versions of “I”:
The outward self: This is the social persona, which you identify with if your focus is on socially-approved things like money, career, the right neighborhood, an impressive house, etc. “I” is attached to labels that relate to those things, so that “WASP surgeon with a Park Avenue practice, a socialite wife, and a major portfolio” defines a very different self than “Latino working-class single mother living on food stamps.”

 

 

The private self: This is who you are behind closed doors. The private self identifies with feelings and relationships. The values that matter most include a happy marriage, satisfying sex life, children to love and be proud of, etc. On the downside are the private trails and miseries that come into every life. “I” is attached to the hopes and fears of everyday existence, which for some people means an existence of insecurity, anxiety, depression, and dashed hopes that seem inescapable.

 

The unconscious self: This is the self we do not know in waking life. It is governed by instincts and drives that most of us don’t want to bring to light. At its most menacing, the unconscious self has been called “the shadow,” where the worst human traits of anger, violence, envy, revenge, and deep-seated existential fear reside. “I’ can be attached to two different projects: keeping the dark side of the unconscious self hidden or converting it to the light. Artists, musicians, and poets do the latter. They approach the unconscious self not as a fearful domain but as a source of creativity waiting to be born.

 

On any given day, that the one thing we cannot live without—a self—is shifting and unreliable. We may not be aware of it, but we are constantly changing our loyalties. The external self claims us at work or enjoying ourselves at a party or buying a new house. The private self claims us in matters of the heart, in moments of depression and anxiety, and in our family life. The unconscious self does whatever it wants to, and hard as we try to keep it at bay, everyone knows the experience of sexual appetite, raging fury, and nightmares—perhaps nightmares are our purest encounters with the dark side of the unconscious.

 

The world’s wisdom traditions have seen through the illusion of a stable, reliable, realistic “I” and unmasked it as a grossly imperfect guide through life. In its place we need to identify with what is often referred to as a higher self, which is independent of the random forces, inner and outer, that distort reality.

 

The higher self is the self that aspires to rise above everyday conflicts and confusion. Experience tells us that the other versions of the self—the outward, private, and unconscious self—are constantly in conflict. This is why civilization is so discontented, to use Freud’s term. Eruptions from the unconscious bring war, crime, and violence. Private misery overshadows public success. The arts point to immense possibilities for creativity, but too few people are able to take advantage of them. In the world’s wisdom traditions, the struggle between so many conflicts can’t be won at the level of struggle. “I” must surrender every claim of the ego, whether public or private, to seek a higher state of consciousness.

 

 

For most people, this analysis leads to an untenable conclusion, because it seems inconceivable to give up the everyday “I” for a higher self that may be simply a fantasy, a product of mysticism, a religious tenet, or simply wishful thinking. Standing against this doubt and skepticism are centuries of descriptions from seekers, safes, saints, and spiritual teachers who validate that the higher self, far from being alien, is the core or true self, the source of consciousness. The choice to encounter your higher self is always open. At the very least, we need to be clear about the present situation. The “I” we take for granted is deeply flawed, and therefore we don’t really know who we are.

 

 

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

Have Human Beings Stopped Evolving?

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By Deepak Chopra, MD

No idea has become baked into the social fabric than Darwinism, and yet Darwin himself never meant this to happen. In his mind, he was scientifically describing “the descent of species,” a specific notion of how life forms changed over time. Evolution was a rebuttal of the prevailing concept that species were fixed–if honeybees, ferns, and pandas exist, they always had. The momentous discovery of fossils, among other things, offered irrefutable evidence that species could vanish, and more importantly, that current species had ancestors.

But the term “evolution” turned into a loose metaphor, quickly escaping the rules of science. And the most dangerous application of the metaphor was to human society, where certain ideas about everyday life became falsely linked with Darwinism. Here are the main distortions that enormous numbers of people believe in without thinking.

1. Nature is all about survival of the fittest; therefore, so is society.

2. Evolution works through bloody competition that weeds out the weak and favors the strong. This applies to human competition and makes violence amoral–Nature is working through us, the ultimate excuse for the powerful dominating the weak.

3. If you are weak, you deserve to fail. Nature demands that survival be ruthless in order to strengthen a species.

4. Poverty is a sign of weakness in the evolutionary scheme.

5. Lower species evolve physically, but once evolution reached the level of early humans, evolution began to apply to psychology, emotions, and social behavior.

There are other offshoots of this main mistakes, but let’s stay with them. The most pernicious application of the evolution metaphor crops up as a justification for inequality. Racism dictates that some races are superior and others inferior. Sexism dictates that men are powerful and women comparatively weak. Free market fanatics push the notion that money shouldn’t be

wasted on the poor, aged, or sick because it is the obligation of such groups to fend for themselves in open competition. Pushed to such limits, the doctrine of social Darwinism, as it came to be called in the nineteenth century, can justify almost any kind of power grab or ruthless competition. As we’ve learned in this country quite recently, the appeal of social Darwinism remains both widespread and powerful. Millions of people feel the attraction of a white male portraying himself as a strong man who is a winner instead of a loser–all are masked Darwinian terms.

The irony is that Homo sapiens long ago left “the state of nature,” the naked arena where physical evolution takes place. In the state of nature, two things determine if a species survives: the ability to compete for food and to mate. Food is the most basic need for survival; mating passes on genes that would otherwise disappear from the gene pool. For thousands of years human beings have consciously departed from these two driving forces.

1. We care for our sick, weak, and old rather than letting nature takes its course.

2. We resort to medicine to wipe out and control fatal diseases that would thin the population if left untreated.

3. We have economies that spread food to every corner of the globe. People can buy the food they otherwise couldn’t raise.

4. Concepts of justice punish those who use violence to harm others or steal what they want.

5. We override who is physically strong or weak with weapons and bullets, allowing us to harm and kill at a distance.

These are only a few of the ways human beings escaped the arena where survival of the fittest rules (not that Darwin ever used that phrase, or espoused it). Some of humanity’s post-evolutionary traits are negative to the point of being horrifying, like the development of weapons of mass destruction, suicide bombers, and even suicide itself. Where evolution promotes physical survival, our ability to willingly end life has been a curse that people volunteer to place on themselves through war, crime, and violence of every stripe. Other post-

evolutionary traits like charities and hospitals exist as symbols of the benefits of escaping the state of nature.

There are evolutionists who continue to maintain that Darwinism applies to human beings, particularly in the two related fields of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, but those applications have their own skeptics. Let’s set them both aside. Because post-evolution has brought good and ill effects to humanity, and because the metaphor of evolution is still powerful, the crucial question is whether we still want to evolve and if so, how? In its crudest form, the evolutionary metaphor is still about survival, so future evolution depends on such survival issues as the ecology, global climate change, and nuclear weapons.

In less crude form, the evolutionary metaphor is synonymous with progress, and almost everyone in modern society wants progress to continue, despite pull-backs by radical jihadists who yearn for a return to the illusion of religious purity, white supremacists who yearn for equally illusory racial purity, and xenophobes who push ultra-nationalism following a third illusion, that a single nation can isolate itself from the tide of globalism.

Yet the most compelling reason to seize the evolutionary metaphor is to promote post-evolution, to win even more freedom from the state of nature. This largely happens individually as the evolution of consciousness, a notion that was ridiculed fifty years ago, but which now drives the aspirations of millions of spiritual seekers. Having abandoned formal religion, these people have turned inward to find their own path to higher consciousness, and if that term is too elevated or alien, there is the search for inner peace, love, creativity, joy, and fulfillment. Long ago, human beings made the most radical evolutionary leap in history, turning away from physical evolution to mental evolution–hence the amazingly rapid development of the higher brain (cerebral cortex) from which all language, morality, and rational thought emerged.

There is no reason to assume that our consciousness can’t keep evolving, but there is no evidence that the brain needs new structures physically. The brain has enough flexibility

already to set us free by our own choice. We choose to evolve or not, to explore new domains of the mind or retreat into old, outmoded ones. In the end, the reason that Darwinism is the best of theories and the worst of theories comes down to how the theory is used. We are no longer Darwinian creatures, but as a metaphor evolution traces a path that applies to the best and worst possibilities in us.

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

How to Be a Know-It-All (For Real)

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Omniscience, the ability to know everything, has a strong spiritual tradition, which places it as a divine quality, not a human one. In secular society, artificial intelligence grabs headlines while omniscience, except for those who believe in an all-knowing God, is an archaic notion. But there’s a reason why omniscience arose in the first place, and its possibility turns out to be very human.
What makes omniscience sound preposterous to a rational skeptic is ingrained in our habits of knowing. We know things one at a time. This holds true for things “out there” like mountains, flowers, and stars, as well as things “in here,” which include thoughts, images, and sensations. One-at-a-time knowledge can’t be omniscient, obviously. But instead of closing the argument, is there a kind of knowing that isn’t one at a time? Clearly there is. Do you know what is meant by “colors”? Of course, and you know colors as a concept that covers individual hues like red, green, blue, etc. There are also intuitive qualities like love, truth, beauty, and creativity that we know without having to tick off one example at a time.

Here is where the twist comes in. What does knowledge of everything, whether inner or outer, have in common? The experience of knowing. A rose has no fragrance without the experience of smelling, just as a rose cannot be crimson without the experience of sight and velvety-textured without the experience of touch. This simple fact leads to the possibility that all the contents of libraries, science, and the human mind can be set aside in favor of one common denominator: the experience of knowing.
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This may sound like something too abstract to make a difference in daily life, yet imagine being a child who believes that movies are real. This illusion melts away once he is shown a projector and the light that emanates from it. Once he knows how movies are made, the child doesn’t stop going to them in disgust at being fooled. Instead, a new world—the making of movies—is potentially open to him when he grows up. Likewise, when everything we assume to be real—objects in here and out there—are shown to be real only because we experience them, new creative possibilities open up—that is ultimately why enlightenment is called waking up.
What blocks us from stepping into this awakened (i.e., non-illusory) state is that we give a privileged position to our bodies—no matter how convincing it is to break a rose down into the experience of light, texture, color, scent, etc., all of which are human-centered, breaking your hand down into the same thing feels wrong—but it isn’t. Think of an infant who doesn’t know the concept of “hand.” He experiences a soft, pink, fleshy object floating in his field of vision, and only after gaining control of it and learning that this floaty thing is a “hand” does it become a privileged part of the body.

It’s hard to see that your body is just a mode of knowing like any other, fitting into the big reality, which consists of other modes of knowing. The mode of knowing the body is rich with sensual perception tied to the infinite wealth of mental activity, while a rock falling on your foot is a much cruder, simpler mode of knowing. Mathematics is a very complex mode of knowing that bears little resemblance to how spaghetti tastes or how love feels. But no matter what corner of reality you investigate, as far away as the newly discovered seven planets orbiting a nearby star or a single bacterium settling on your skin, the common denominator of knowing and experience can’t be subtracted.
Now, why does this fact pass the “So what” test? In one way, it puts the creation of personal reality into each person’s hands, which is why the metaphor of waking up is so often used—obviously it’s better to be awake than asleep. One of the reasons creative people love their creativity is that they feel free of old concepts, liberated to move into new territory in their art. The world’s wisdom traditions go a step further. They advise us to be free of concepts altogether—in other words, to live in the moment with total immediacy.
Yet there are two deeper reasons to adopt this notion that reality isn’t the same as the words and concepts we apply to it.

The first reason comes from Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita when he declares, “I am the field and the knower of the field.” In other words, the essence of being conscious is to realize that pure knowing, also called witnessing awareness, is who youare. It’s not a skill, talent, gift, attribute, or add-on. It’s you, the unchanging, unborn, undying witness that exists in every experience. To live as the witness brings an end to illusion, including the illusion of death, fear, and suffering.

The second reason for redefining reality in such a radical way, shifting everything to the knower, is contained in an ancient Indian teaching, “Know that one thing by which all else is known.” This “one thing” can’t really be a thing but instead is the key to omniscience. The “one thing” is awareness itself, and it holds the key because in awareness everything we actually want from life—love, compassion, intelligence, evolution, creativity, and inner peace—begins and ends in consciousness. The reason God is called omniscient is naively believed to be factual knowledge, like a cosmic “Okay, Google.” In fact, God is omniscient because the essence of all known things has its source beyond physicality. There’s no need to use religious language to search for this source since it is within us. This concept is explored in great detail in my new book, You Are the Universe , written with physicist Menas Kafatos.
Clearly this explanation of reality as an activity in consciousness won’t hold water until the individual undergoes a journey to prove if it is valid or not. That journey is invaluable, the great object of human existence, and every step on the way makes life more worth living.

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