consciousness - The Chopra Foundation

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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Why Spirituality Matters More than Ever

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In troubled times, when the world seems to be on fire, people think about God and the religion they were raised in–a source of solace and hope matters more in a crisis. I don’t find myself thinking about spirituality in those terms, however. Like a winter coat that’s put away in spring, for many people spirituality, in the sense of going to church or praying to God, gets put away when the crisis has passed.

Crises by their nature, come and go, but the deeper need for spirituality remains. This need is rooted deeper than solace and hope. It’s the need for wisdom. Wisdom is a word that’s open to cheap shots and automatic dismissal. It’s even alien to the kind of spirituality that’s about issues like self-esteem and love. Wisdom is much less personal and mysterious. It gets at the heart of why we exist and what our purpose is. Wisdom gives you a vision of possibilities that are found in consciousness, bridging all ages and circumstances. It gets at the heart of reality. Ultimately the search for reality is what binds a loose coalition of people who want to reach beyond organized religion and its perceived drawbacks.

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Do Your Emotions Help You or Hold You Back?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Recently, a close friend of mine made the remark that our emotions for the most part are basic, primal, immature, and unevolved. Ever since then, I have been ruminating on the validity of this statement. If our emotions are basically primitive, then how they be our allies, especially on the path to personal growth? Might emotions be so backward that they are enemies of growth instead? Like most generalities, this one about the primitive nature of emotions seems to be equally true and untrue — and therefore, possibly a half truth. In nature’s scheme, nothing is wasted. The universe is a big jigsaw puzzle where everything seems to fit.

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Powers of Mind: In Praise of Subtle Actions

By Deepak Chopra

At a time when the mass of headlines seem to be about the brain, artificial intelligence, robotics, and smarter computers, not enough is said about the mind. When reduced to a mechanism, the mind somehow is thought to turn into the brain, with no difference between them. It’s true that the brain seems to exhibit physical changes that correlate with every activity of the mind, and one day the word “seems” may no longer be necessary. The brain as mirror of the mind may be completely understood and mapped out.

It should be underlined, however, that neuroscience is far from understanding the mind’s subtlety, and the most sophisticated brain scans take broad swipes at mental processes–there is no fine detail. The same areas of the brain devoted to language will light up on an fMRI whether Shakespeare is writing a sonnet or a very bad poet is writing doggerel. There is no area of the brain that can remotely be detected in such detail that a researcher reading the scan can say, “Oh, that’s Mozart.” In fact, if you present our brain scan to a neuroscientist, he won’t be able to identify who you are, either. The broad strokes of current brain research yield interesting and medically valuable information, but they don’t come close to explaining the activity I’d call “subtle action.”

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Celebrating the message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Drs. Clarence B. Jones and Diane Nash joined our 2013 Sages and Scientists Symposium and share the history of the non violence movement and their continued commitment to social change.