Deepak Chopra - The Chopra Foundation

The Health Benefits of Practicing Compassion

The Health Benefits of Practicing Compassion by Deepak Chopra, MD

Compassion is changing before our eyes. A religious concept associated with Jesus and Buddha (known as “the Compassionate One”) is being researched today through brain scans and positive psychology. In positive psychology your aim is to reach a state of well-being. The actions of a compassionate person, being kind and sympathetic, turn out to bring personal benefits as well. This is one way that a spiritual value acquires practical, everyday value. (more…)

The President’s Tweets and the Future of Shame

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Last week the new Twitter account @POTUS of President Obama became a lightning rod for the worst in social media behavior. Within minutes of its setup, as reported in the New York Times, the account was flooded with vitriolic racist tweet Photo Mar 06, 1 25 27 AM s, complete with hideous images, including one of Mr. Obama with his neck in a noose. Many troubling issues arise from this shameful behavior, but at the center is shame itself.

Behavior on the Internet, Twitter, and other social media outlets has become shameless, and at the same time, these outlets are being used to publicly shame people, especially innocent high school students being electronically bullied by cruel classmates. Shameless behavior has no consequences, and social media and the Internet afford easy anonymity. Put these two elements together, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for anti-social trends that keep building and building.

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How the Universe Pulled a Vanishing Act

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The issues facing modern physics are so baffling that they’ve crossed a threshold and now fascinate the general public. We laymen have very little at stake, personally speaking, when scientists argue over the Big Bang—without advanced mathematical training, it’s all but impossible to follow the arguments. But we do have a stake when the universe starts to disappear, as it is doing right this minute.

The cosmic vanishing act began, approximately, when dark matter and dark energy showed up on the radar of cosmology. “Dark” is a misleading term, because the space between the stars is pitch black, but it isn’t dark in the way that dark matter and energy are. They are dark as in totally mysterious. No light is given off by them, or any known form of energy we associate with the universe. They cannot be measured, and so far as anyone can guess, dark matter is probably not constituted of anything resembling atoms or subatomic particles.

The reason that dark matter and energy are important is arcane to the layman, having to do with the fact that instead of moving apart at a constant rate or slowing down, the galaxies are accelerating as they move away from each other. This acceleration defies gravity, so at the very least dark energy is some species of antigravity (to put it in very general terms—the actual nature of this unknown force is complex, arcane, and much speculated over).

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Is Nature About to Abandon Us?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Feeling guilty about climate change hasn’t proved to be a good motivator. The most recent report on greenhouse gas emissions puts March at a record-breaking level of emissions. Presidential urging doesn’t move Congress to take significant steps at solving the issue. The world community passes well-meaning resolutions that don’t lead to major global cooperation.

We are headed on a downward track, and everybody knows it. But we already know that guilt is a poor motivator. Fear is somewhat better, because it implies imminent harm, yet if the Earth is the Titanic and climate change is the iceberg, there’s enough open sea between us and catastrophe to lull the passengers into one more round of champagne and caviar.

I’m convinced that the problem will only be solved through higher awareness, not in a lofty spiritual sense but simply by applying self-awareness in place of guilt and fear. Instead of turning our backs on possibilities we’re afraid to confront, we could embrace a positive emotion that everyone agrees upon, which is the feeling that humanity is bound with Nature. What we’re up against is the equivalent, more than a century ago, of the mass distress over losing faith in God. Only in our time, we are about to lose faith in Nature.

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