consciousness - The Chopra Foundation

Can Current Science Give Us Access to Reality?

Can the Scientific Method as now practiced and based on naive realism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism; give us access to the nature of Fundamental Reality – the “stuff” or “essence” of the universe?

Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Neil Theise, MD

Here are some of our thoughts, gleaned from our own contemplative practices, meditation, experiences of transcendence and conversations with other scientists who struggle with cosmic riddles:

We have no access to fundamental reality — only to our perceptions and cognitions.
“Empirical evidence” is a description of a species specific (human) mode of observation in a specific planetary system.
The universe we describe in science is a human universe accessible through the perceptive capacities of the human organism (it’s not a bat or dolphin universe, etc.).
The so called “hard problem” can be summarized as follows: We do not have an explanation for experience–any experience–mental or perceptual–how do photons going to the brain – become the experience of a 3D+1 reality in space and time or our own thoughts?
Human knowledge is limited by the nature of human perceptive capacity and by the structure of language with several levels of abstraction by the time information gets to the brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
The fine-tuning of the universe responsible for the manifestation of every phenomenon including our own brain body complex is unaccounted for.

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Will the “Real” Reality Please Stand Up?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In the pursuit of knowledge about the universe, recent discoveries have pushed earlier than the Big Bang, bringing physics to the point when the early universe was doubling in size every hundredth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Such fine-scale measurement is awe-inspiring. The technicalities of how a Cold Little Swoosh preceded the Hot Big Bang was lucidly presented in a New York Times article by the noted cosmologist Max Tegmark. He explained for us laymen why physicists are so excited about the discovery of gravitational waves that originated so early in cosmological time, another victory for the predictive powers of quantum field theory.

One is left with the impression that science has now delved much deeper into reality, getting closer to the origins of the universe and therefore our own origins. However, there’s an analogy that seems relevant here. If you wanted to know the reality of music, would you study a radio as it broadcasts a Mozart symphony, taking it apart and delving into the atomic and subatomic structure of its transistors, or would you study music as a creation of the human mind?

The answer seems obvious, and yet by dismantling the cosmos down to trillionths of a second, physics is basically dismantling a mechanism, like a radio. This leaves aside the unassailable fact that like music, our entire knowledge of the universe arrives through subjective experience. We are immersed in reality, not detached from it. The exciting discoveries of cosmology keep advancing along an objective track when it’s well known in quantum physics that objectivity has definite limits. Whatever cosmology is discovering, it may very well not be reality itself.

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Is the Universe Evolving?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Behind the mask of matter, something more mysterious is happening in the universe.

To get at the mystery, let’s follow the path a hydrogen atom might take over the thirteen billions years or so following its creation. First it drifts out into space in a completely disorganized, random fashion, bouncing around like an infinitesimal feather on the cosmic wind. Some atoms keep on doing this until they form clouds of interstellar dust. But this atom falls into a stronger gravitational field and becomes a building block for a star, which takes primitive atoms like hydrogen and helium and transforms them into heavier, more complex elements. Through a series of nuclear reactions our particular hydrogen atom becomes part of the element known as iron, the heaviest metal formed inside stars.

The life span of this star comes to an end in the dramatic death throe known as a supernova, an enormous explosion that scatters iron atoms throughout the nearby regions of the cosmos. Our original hydrogen atom no longer exists as such, but its component parts are being drawn toward another star, hundreds of times smaller: the sun.

By this point in the history of the universe, the sun has already thrown off enough matter during its birth pangs that rings of dust have settled into orbit around it. This dust is clumping into planets and our iron atom, pulled in by gravity, joins the planet Earth. At its core, the Earth is thought to be up to 70 percent molten iron, but our atom arrives late enough to settle onto the surface of the planet, which is around 10 percent iron.

Ten billion years have now passed. Many iron atoms have undergone random interactions with various chemicals, but ours is still intact. More time passes. It ﬁnds itself drawn into a spinach leaf, which gets eaten by a human being. Then our iron atom becomes part of a molecule thousands of times more complex than itself, a molecule that has the ability to pick up oxygen and throw it off at will: hemoglobin. Hemoglobin’s ability to perform this trick turns out to be crucial, because another molecule, this one millions of times more complex, has managed to create life. It is known as DNA, and around itself DNA is gathering the building blocks of life, known as organic chemicals, of which hemoglobin is one of the most necessary, since without it, animals cannot convert oxygen into cells.

In our story, one primal hydrogen atom has undergone incredible transformations to get to the point where it can contribute to life on Earth, and every step of the way involves evolution. Since all the iron on Earth was once part of a supernova (plus some iron deposited when meteorites collided with the early planet), the journey from the Big Bang can be observed and measured. Yet our iron atom has still another transformation to undergo. It has entered the bloodstream of a human being—you or me, perhaps—to become part of a sentient, thinking creature, one that is capable of looking back on its own evolution. In fact, this sentient creature created the notion of evolution in order to explain itself to itself. A primal atom has somehow become thoughtful.

Courtesy of War of the Worldviews by Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow.

Deepak Chopra, MD, Founder of The Chopra Foundation, Co-Founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, coauthor of Super Brain with Rudolph Tanzi and for more information visit The Universe Within. Come to the Chopra Foundation Sages and Scientists Symposium 2014.

Five Spiritual Mysteries: #1 Is Karma Fair? (Part 2)

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Even at a time when religion is declining in the West, most people remember the Biblical saying “As you sow, so shall you reap.” they cling to a belief taught in childhood, that good is rewarded and evil punished. In the first post we started to look at the possibility that what was learned in childhood is correct. The universe balances right and wrong, good and evil. In the Indian spiritual tradition this simple notion was developed into the Law of Karma. But common experience offers endless examples of good that isn’t rewarded and evil that is never punished. So is karma really fair or not?

In his famous encounter with Albert Einstein in 1930, the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore argued against the random universe of quantum physics in favor of a “human universe” where harmony prevailed despite the evidence of unruly passions and bad deeds. Tagore meant this quite literally, not metaphorically. The universe was an expression of divine consciousness, and human beings, who express the same cosmic consciousness, belong within the grand scheme. In fact, the universe mirrors human destiny and vice versa.

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Online Consciousness Course, Starting April 27, 2014

The question “Who am I?” and its related search for a firm reality underlying all appearances has been at the core of humanity’s search for self-understanding. In recent years, neuroscience research has developed to the point where it is beginning to converge with the styles of questioning from philosophy and the “wisdom” traditions. This online course is exactly as taught as an advanced seminar at Stanford, and includes philosophical, neuroscientific, and computational content.

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