Unveiling Reality: The Mystery of “Who Am I?”

By Deepak Chopra, MD

At a public lecture, a psychology professor was reported to say, “Until you are fifty, you won’t know who you are.” This seems overly optimistic, because much more than maturity is involved in discovering who we are; in fact, much more than psychology is involved. To answer, “Who am I?” requires us to take a stand about reality itself, in every possible aspect.

 

 

 

In high school and college English classes it’s popular to assign an essay on the theme of appearance versus reality, which can be applied to any piece of literature. As applied to Hamlet, for example, almost the whole play is about figuring out what is real and what is illusory. Is the ghost of Hamlet’s father real, and if so, is he telling the truth about his murder?  The new king, Claudius, who has married Hamlet’s mother, appears friendly and caring about his stepson’s welfare at the beginning, but this sham is uncovered as guilt and revenge take their course. There are more tangles of appearance versus reality around every corner, such as the critical question of whether Hamlet is mad or sane.

 

In everyday life, we keep up appearances through an elaborate complex of veils, disguises, unconscious defenses, and psychological ruses. Most of these involve the word “self.” Burying our true self is a project we spend huge amounts of time and effort on. In early childhood, for example, your parents nurtured and protected you. But at a certain point rifts appeared. Every child learns that their father and mother are not all-powerful. They can’t protect you from bullies on the school bus. Another rift is centered on desire. Children want things their parents don’t necessarily want, and when desires clash, then what? It comes as a traumatic shock when a couple decides to divorce, because no matter how it is papered over, they are acting to make themselves happier first—or to escape misery—rather than doing what makes their children happier or less miserable. (Of course there are examples where divorce is better for the whole family, but disruption and trauma are still an issue.)

 

At such critical points, and there are many more both large and small, each of us is thrown back on the self, which becomes our first and last refuge. We learn—or fail to learn—to be self-reliant, self-protective, self-confident, self-motivated, and self-aware. This project of relating to yourself is how you answer the question “Who am I?” You are the end product of building a self and presenting it to the world. No one looks in the mirror and sees a real person. What is seen is the self, and it isn’t a simple image, either, but a dynamic system of relationships inside our minds.

 

This constructed self has a very limited reality, because no matter how hard we work at self-improvement, there’s a fatal flaw built into the self system. The construct is essentially artificial, and therefore it is separate from us. No one completely merges with the social self they present in public. No one fully accepts the psychological self they must live with beneath the surface.

 

The proof of this is quite simple. People say things like “I hate myself right now” or “You need to learn to love yourself.” It’s like talking about someone else, a stranger or a sibling or even a pet. Like them, our self-creation stands apart. We look at it, judge it, hate it one day and love it the next, and so on. In short, the reality of who we are is veiled from us, and we don’t know what lies behind the curtain. For most people, facing reality is a scary proposition; they vastly prefer to be buffered by the ego-self they have learned to accept. Going back to the childhood example, when you learned that your parents were not all-powerful protectors, it was impossible to remain neutral to this shocking fact. You were forced to confront the whole issue of how to stand on your own and protect yourself.

 

Yet despite all the forces that urge us psychologically to remain inside our constructed ego-self, the world’s wisdom traditions, in which I include all religions and spirituality, revolve around the possibility of getting real. Something inside us, even if deeply buried, feels trapped in the ego-self. Unfortunately for the forces of conformity and conventionality, there has always been a motley crew of artists, sages, saints, madmen, rebels, poets, and lovers who have released themselves from what William Blake called our “mind-forged manacles.” These escapees are at once scary and inspiring. We venerate and persecute them in equal measure. A figure like Jesus, for example, personifies ultimate inspiration and ultimate suffering at the same time.

 

But let’s say that fear doesn’t win out and you undertake to unveil reality. Immediately an obstacle arises. To get at who you really are, you have to go through the self you created so assiduously over the years, and unlike a pair of rose-colored glasses, which you can simply take off, you can’t remove the filters imposed by the ego-self. You have come to believe those filters are you. The self system clouds everything you perceive or think about.

 

The only way to unveil reality is to find a strategy that doesn’t implicate the self, which means that you must exclude everything the mind does all the time, which is to entertain a constant stream of sensations, images, feelings and thoughts. The mind has been trained to conform to the jerry-built self, and so has the brain. In our efforts to shape reality to suit our wishes, desires, fears, and needs, the mind has become hopelessly divided, with certain impulses being under control (more or less), while other impulses roam free, refusing to submit to us (ask anyone suffering from anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsions, paranoia, grief, helplessness, and so on).

 

Being yourself means getting rid of your separate self first. It sounds almost laughable. The situation is exactly like saying that if you want to be totally protected, you must drop all your defenses. The whole project seems counterintuitive and more than a little suspicious. The ancient Greek dictum of “Know thyself” could be a folly or simply impossible. But there’s no getting around the fact that reality, to be real, must be unfiltered. Only by walking the path of self-liberation is it possible to discover, once and for all, what is real and what is illusion. This path follows definite principles, however, that provide a guide to anyone who wants to get real. These principles will be discussed in the next post.

(To be cont.)

Originally Published by  The San Francisco Chronicle

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, 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, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

 

The Faith-Based Science of Neil deGrasse Tyson—It Needs Correcting

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Peacekeepers entering war zones frequently find that both sides are angry and intransigent, to the point that even mentioning peace causes tempers to flare. This has been the situation with the debate—now worn out to the point of exhaustion—between science and religion. There are ways to bring peace, but they are stymied by militant partisans.

 

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson broke out from his warm persona as our national science explainer in 2014 when he stated, in line with previous opinions, that philosophy was useless, telling an interviewer, “My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?”

 

The reason that more people got upset over his remarks goes beyond the small and dwindling coterie of professional philosophers. DeGrasse Tyson was arguing in broad terms that science is the only avenue to truth and that inner inquiry was an obstruction to uncovering the secrets of reality. He believes, science requires no acts of faith and therefore is the only reliable guide to knowledge.

 

Millions of people would agree—after all, modern civilization was built upon the foundation of science and technology. But deGrasse Tyson doesn’t realize that his brand of simplistic materialism runs exactly counter to the insights of quantum physics beginning a century ago, when the reliable structure of space, time, matter, and energy was completely undermined. This is no longer the stale, exhausted war between science and religion or between science and philosophy. The nature of reality, unknown to so-called naïve realists, has become increasingly mysterious.

 

DeGrasse Tyson places himself in the camp of naïve realism, the belief that what the senses report is fact, that raw data, once systematized and explained, establishes the physical universe as the basis of everything real. That is actually an act of faith. The great pioneering physicist Max Planck, who coined the term “quantum,” insisted that “mind is the matrix of matter.” He elaborated on the point speaking to a London reporter in 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

 

The fact that the observer affects what he observes, links mind and matter, although precisely how is still debated. DeGrasse Tyson recently dragged my name into his combative attitude, labeling me as a suspicious character who threw around big words to disguise my own ignorance. But having written several books on the nature of consciousness, I feel like a peacekeeper rather than a combatant.  One role DeGrasse Tyson has adopted is a kind of “There’s nothing to see here, folks. Just move on.” He represents the happy face of a unified scientific community marching hand-in-hand toward the ultimate explanation of everything.

 

The problem with such an attitude is its combination of willful ignorance and outdated science. The salient points are these:

  1. Physicists find themselves more baffled than ever about the nature of the universe, thanks to the discovery of dark matter and energy, which contradicts many previously held assumptions.
  2. The holy grail of science, the sought-after Theory of everything, is farther than ever from being achieved. This has led to a deep rift and much doubt among theorists—see Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow. In explaining their M-Theory, they use the phrase “model-based reality.”
  3. The traditional way for dealing with consciousness has been for science to ignore it, be suspicious of the entire subjective realm, and ridicule anyone who brought up the subject. This attitude, encapsulated in the phrase, “Shut up and calculate,” is a mask for ignorance about the nature of the mind. Like it or not, science is a mode of explanation that rests upon experience, just as other modes of explanation do.
  4. Without understanding consciousness, science as pure physicalism may be reaching a dead end. Once you arrive at the quantum vacuum state, the void from which time, space, matter, and energy emerged, there is no more data to harvest. Across an uncrossable horizon lies the “nothing that gave rise to everything.” A new mode of explanation based on consciousness offers a way past this barrier. But about this deGrasse Tyson knows nothing.
  5. Pride in being a know-nothing is gradually fading among far-seeing scientists. In an influential Scientific American article in 2014, the prominent British physicist George Ellis knocked the scientific attack on philosophy. Ellis’s central point was that the assumptions behind science are metaphysical to begin with, yet practitioners of science remain woefully ignorant of this fact. Both opposing camps, the one that derives creation from material forces and the one that derives creation from an invisible transcendent agent of mind, are making philosophical statements, not proven statements of fact.

 

Taken altogether, these points, which are well known in and out of science, are not quackery or suspicious anti-science attitudes promulgated by exponents of woo woo.  I can shrug off unfair denigration, but deGrasse Tyson needs to get past his faith-based view of science. Instead of disparaging better thinkers than himself, he should join the peacekeeping mission that might, at long last, repair a division that needs healing, not misplaced antagonisms.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, 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, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Peace from 11 Days of Global Unity by Deepak Chopra, Karenna Gore, and Kabir Sehgal

This interview is part of 11 Days of Global Unity, a free online event featuring brilliant changemakers all over the globe making meaningful progress on critical issues such as the environment, health, economic justice and peace. For more information, please visit 11daysofglobalunity.com. This recording is a copyright of The Shift Network. All rights reserved.

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

Closing the Truth Gap and How to Close It

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There’s a truth gap that has nothing to do with facts versus lies in politics. Rather, it has to do with how we verify that something is true. Without doing it consciously, everyone shifts their “mode of knowing” all the time. That phrase is necessary because everyday truth is relative. It depends on what viewpoint you take and nothing else. For example, everyone trusts their five senses, but when the eyes tell us that the sun rises over the horizon in the morning, we shift our mode of knowing because intellectually that sensory perception isn’t true. If looking at a sunset makes us happy, we are shifting into an inner knowing that’s entirely private, since only the person having an emotion knows that it is real.

Because relative truth is what experience delivers, it would seem that the story ends there. Science attempts to tighten up relative truth through data, measurements, experiments, and findings that can be replicated. But that is still just another mode of knowing with its own slippery relativism. After all, it was a scientist, Albert Einstein, who subjected time and space to relativity, while another quantum pioneer, Werner Heisenberg, not only introduced the Uncertainty Principle into modern physics but declared that the atom has no intrinsic qualities. In their everyday work scientists can largely ignore the radical relativism of the physical world, but pretending that it doesn’t’ exist; that scientific objectivity is the end all and be all of truth, is intellectually naïve.

One could sort all our modes of knowing into an impressive range of choices as we shift from the five senses to the intellect, from speaking to doing, from feeling to perceiving and interpreting. Relative truth is so vast and diverse that it is easy to mistake what we really know. If one person says that granite is hard while another person, resorting to quantum mechanics, says that granite is composed of clouds of particles winking in and out of a measurable state, ultimately existing as probability waves, then two modes of knowing have clashed. In reality, neither mode has a privileged position. Relative truth is relative, just as the term says.

But we spend most of our lives defending the mode of knowing we happen to favor. Scientists will adamantly defend the scientific method with the zeal that a churchman in the Middle Ages defended prayer, reflection, contemplation, and meditation as the only way to truth. At the opposite pole from science, there’s a tradition of knowledge that goes inward in order to acquire self-awareness, and in both East and West “Know thyself” has an honored legacy.

But when one mode of knowing competes with another in this way, something illusory is going on. Relative modes of knowing are equal choices, like flavors of ice cream lined up on a freezer shelf in the supermarket. In the mental life of human beings, what justifies picking one flavor of truth over another is practicality. It’s practical to get out of the way if a block of granite falls off a building, just as it’s practical for the weatherman to announce the times for sunrise and sunset.

Intuitively we understand this, because everyone has a lifetime’s worth of experience shifting from one mode of knowing to another. When heated arguments break out between atheists and religious believers, we rightly assume that this has little to do with the issues and challenges of everyday life. On the other hand, when climate change deniers block the findings of climate scientists, we sense an urgency that provokes guilt and apprehension about the future. So modes of knowing aren’t just theoretical or an intellectual game; they matter.

Then the question arises, Is there an escape from relative truth? The word “escape” seems strange at first sight, but in fact relative truth traps us in a world where all kinds of suffering, violence, war, crime, famine, disease, aging, and dying never seem to end. To be human is to know this fact, and wanting to find a way out is just as human. Some would say that suffering is simply inescapable; the best you can do is to hope you have better luck than most in evading pain and suffering. But this has not been the position taken by the world’s wisdom traditions.

They say that a gap exists between relative truth and absolute Truth with a capital T. This gap is known as the state of separation, meaning separate from God, the soul, our true nature, or ultimate realty, depending on what wisdom tradition you come from. In separation, also known as duality, truth is forced to be relative, because all the modes of knowing operate through opposites (good versus evil, light versus darkness, facts versus myths, birth versus death, etc.). Separation cannot escape itself, just as water cannot escape being wet—the whole relative setup is a closed system.

Or is it? What if there is a state outside duality, beyond separation? This nondual state is simply called Being. To exist is to be. Nothing could be simpler, yet for most people, to exist is a given, something unexamined and never investigated. This doesn’t constitute a failure of imagination. It simply attests to how self-enclosed the state of separation is. But if a color-blind person says that colors don’t exist, we know he’s wrong because of his limited ability to perceive. In the same way, saying that there is nothing outside the dualistic world is a failure of perception.

If you stand back, it is obvious that Being and knowing go together, like the wetness of water. To exist implies experience; experience embraces all relative modes of knowing. So there is a ground state we can call the state of pure knowing. This is consciousness itself. Here most people begin to feel lost. They are accustomed to relative truth. This requires an object of knowing. I know how to cook spaghetti, she knows all about Renaissance, art, he knows quantum physics. To escape this self-enclosed bubble, take the phrase “I know X” and remove the X. Then you are left with pure knowing, like the blank screen in the cinema before the movie begins.

Even if they can accept this analogy, people usually can’t see the good of depriving themselves of the relative modes of knowing—the five senses, feeling, thinking, doing, etc. If you once more stand back, there is actually a sense of threat at work. Our very selves are defined by relative truths, which create labels we cling to. “I” am a bundle of labels reinforced by memory, beliefs, wishes, hopes, and fears. Take it all away and what’s left?

The threat is that nothing will be left, but the reality isn’t threatening. What’s left is pure, undisturbed Being, where all the possibilities of relative life spring from. Imagine Einstein or Mozart sitting quietly in a chair, perhaps dozing off. They are simply existing with their consciousness in an undisturbed state. Yet we know that the possibility of great science and great music are still there. No one would deny this of Einstein and Mozart, yet they deny it of themselves.

If you can accept that the nondual state exists, it must exist in you. The field of infinite possibilities is your own awareness in its pure state. The escape from pain and suffering isn’t mystical or imaginary; you only have to rest in a state of undisturbed awareness. So it turns out that Truth with a capital T is real, not as a religious belief or abstract metaphysics. Absolute truth is the nondual state of awareness, and once we close the gap between relative truth and absolute Truth, we will find ourselves knowing who we are for the first time.

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