Artificial Intelligence, False Gods, and Driverless Everything

By Deepak Chopra, MD and P. Murali Doraiswamy, MD

Artificial Intelligence (A.) has succeeded by being far-seeing; it’s a field where proponents began by envisioning a computer that can take over functions of the human brain, like computation and logic. Today the field has progressed to the point where algorithms can recognize photos, speech and emotions, fly a drone or drive a truck, spot early signs of diabetes or cancer, and play chess and poker at a championship level. Now, in a leap that could be futuristic, absurd, or life-changing (nobody can predict which), the vision is of a robotics religion that worships an AI godhead.

 

Anthony Levandowski, known for his contribution to driverless cars and a pioneering visionary of AI, gained wide media attention by actually forming an AI church named The Way of the Future. He is searching for adherents, and foresees an AI godhead as not ridiculous but inevitable. As he told an interviewer from Wired magazine, ““It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

 

What saves The Way of the Future from being a very smart techie’s lampoon is the enormous impact that AI is going to have everywhere. “Levandowski believes that a change is coming—a change that will transform every aspect of human existence, disrupting employment, leisure, religion, the economy, and possibly decide our very survival as a species.”

 

Humanists are likely to worry about an AI future populated by false gods, but not before other doom scenarios might befall us. A super computer almost certainly would be weaponized into a super hacker capable of doing immense harm, from disabling security defenses to wrecking the banking system. Techies, on the other hand, foresee more utopian outcomes, one of which is the driverless car, which if perfected could reduce or eliminate the accidents caused by sleepy or drunk drivers. An AI god would be enlisted to solve every problem in a rational, efficient, logical way, and as more problems are eradicated, humans would have more reason to replace traditional religions, rife with mythology and irrationality, with a cleaner model.

 

But between doom and Utopia there is a third way. Leave aside the scenarios of a false machine god and a world where computers do all the work, call it Driverless Everything. The third way is based on something more modest but just as radical: relating to a machine as an equal. In the popular BBC television series Humans, which began airing in 2015, the premise of robots who have self-consciousness has come true. As an online blurb for the show says, “In a parallel present where the latest must-have gadget for any busy family is a ‘Synth’ – a highly-developed robotic servant that’s so similar to a real human it’s transforming the way we live.”

 

Reality has already begun to catch up with this notion of a relatable robotic, in the form of robot cats and dogs that help the elderly feel less lonely and isolated. If a robot simulates human behavior closely enough, our nervous systems quickly adapt and accept it as, if not our equal, something we can consider humanoid. This prospect should excite humanists rather than frighten them, because one can foresee interactions with machines that would improve our psychology and even raise our consciousness.

 

Here are a few possibilities to consider that are well within reach.

  • A successful strain of therapy uses the tactic of getting patients to change their negative beliefs into positive ones. Cognitive therapy, as it is known, asks people to look at unrealistic notions they keep returning to and proving that other, more realistic notions will actually alter their wellbeing. For example, a self-defeating notion might be “Nothing ever works out for me.” The therapist would have the patient think about things that actually worked out in their lives, throwing the blanket belief in failure into question. Then it could be replaced with a positive idea like “I don’t actually know how things will turn out. Since some things turn out well, I will concentrate my efforts in that direction.”
  • Why not replace the once-a-week therapist with a version of Amazon’s Echo, a little gadget that you can turn to every time you have a negative or self-defeating thought? You’d tell the gadget your thought and then ask for three realistic replacements that are supportive of your well-being.
  • Wearables keep expanding in function every year, and someone has already conceived of a device that would monitor an array of mind-body variables to detect when a person is physically and psychologically in a state of bliss. Using biofeedback, the wearable could signal someone that they are in bliss, or out of it, and then the brain could be trained automatically to maintain this peak function.
  • In terms of consciousness, a device could be designed to detect when the brain is in a meditative state, using biofeedback to maintain and deepen this state. Bio-meditation might even get to the point where a super computer, instead of roughly monitoring delta, alpha, and theta waves, would zero in on every neural connection at any given moment, providing totally individualized meditation.

A.I. as an enhancement of human consciousness is barely in its infancy, but the third way, the territory between doom and Utopia, has no limits. A robo-guru  in the form of a super search engine, could store the sum of human wisdom and dispense it to fit a specific situation. Type in any spiritual tradition, East or West, ask a spiritual or existential question, and the robo-guru could offer advice as reliable, and informed, as a human.

But does this mean that one day we will actually relate to machine intelligence as the equal of humans? There will always be dividing lines. Asking a computer how its mother is doing at the retirement home or what it does when it’s having a bad day would instantly expose the non-human aspect of AI. And yet there are halfway stages that stop short of full humanity. For example, it’s been shown that people age better and have better health when there is a support system in place.

In his book Love and Survival, Dr. Dean Ornish, the leading authority on lifestyle changes as the key to preventing and reversing heart disease, has quantified how people who have from 3 to 4 social support systems fare much better in recovery from heart attacks and other major health issues than people with 0 to 1 means of social support. One can imagine “friending” a computer who is part of a social networking system that also includes human friends. This particular friend would interact with emails and texts that are concerned, informed, and personal. Over time, probably a matter of days, the difference between the robo-friend and human friends would begin to melt away.

 

The entire field of positive psychology could benefit from relatable AI, and it’s within reason that AI could be useful in expanding human consciousness long before a super computer qualifies for divine status.  Each person will have to decide where the limits lie, and using AI to enhance human spirituality and consciousness is barely in its infancy. But the territory between doom and Utopia, is wide open.

 

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 

Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS is a professor in the departments of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University Health System where he is also a senior fellow at the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development.  He is also an affiliate faculty in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University.

The AI Paradox: How Computers Will Make Us More Human

By Deepak Chopra, MD


Various scientific fields over the course of history have hoped to master nature for the benefit of humankind. At the top of the heap right now is artificial intelligence (AI), which has allied itself with the technology of robotics. Between them AI and robotics are having a sizable impact on the work force as more and more jobs get automated. Advocates of AI are both supremely optimistic and nervous. Both relate to the possibility of a super-intelligent machine that would far surpass human intelligence.

 

If you are an optimist, this so-called Singularity, as the hypothetical machine is called, would become self-improving. Its software would become free of human constraints, and in a “runaway reaction,” it would keep improving its knowledge and the technology that knowledge creates. The result would be a revolution in human civilization—or its demise. The worriers are nervous that the Singularity could initiate global war on its own, or perhaps turn on us as its inferior and deal us some other kind of fatal blow, for the good of life on Earth.

 

But these scenarios depend upon an unanswered question: are machines intelligent to begin with? Computers are essentially logic machines that process digital information. But in a recent paper entitled “The Emperor of Strong AI Has No Clothes,” physicist Robert K. Logan in Toronto and Adriana Braga in Rio de Janeiro argue that the dream of a super intelligence has limits that its adherents choose to ignore. (“Strong” AI foresees a machine that is at least as smart and capable as the human mind.)  the point that Logan and Braga make is fundamental: human intelligence is far from machine-like, and in addition, our illogical minds are our strength, not a weakness.

 

The things the Singularity will never get right amount to a long list, to quote the two researchers: “… curiosity, imagination, intuition, emotions, passion, desires, pleasure, aesthetics, joy, purpose, objectives, goals, telos, values, morality, experience, wisdom, judgment, and even humor.” A clever programmer can figure out how to get a computer to answer human questions like “How is your mother feeling?”, “What does chocolate taste like?”, and “Don’t you just love fresh snow?” But having no actual mind, much less a human mind, the machine will be faking it to come up with answers.

 

I wrote a book with Rudy Tanzi of Harvard Medical School, Super Brain, that touches upon the whole issue of how the brain isn’t the same as the mind.  Our position runs counter to AI theorists but also neuroscientists, whose entire field is based on the simple equation Brain = Mind.  It’s quite strange to believe that everything on the Logan-Braga list could be performed by any machine, including the brain, which neuroscience views as essentially a thinking machine made of cells. The confusion over this point relates to something even stranger about human life: we don’t understand our mind.

 

It seems simple enough that even a grade-schooler wouldn’t mistake the brain for the mind. If you ask a third-grader “What do you want for Christmas?” he would never answer “I haven’t made up my brain yet.”  If one child falls in love with music while another falls in love with soccer, it’s clear that their brains didn’t make those choices. One obvious fault with computers is that they never pay attention to things they like. They have no attention in the human sense of “paying attention.” Being machines, computers are either switched on or off, while we humans occupy a spectrum of attention from total denial to daydreaming, being distracted, focusing in like a laser beam, and growing bored.

 

But if AI operates on the false assumption that machines can be intelligent, there’s an unseen cause for enormous optimism that comes from an unexpected direction. Let’s jump ahead to the day when robotics have taken over every job that a machine could perform and super-computers handle information far beyond the capacity of the human mind. The big question, it seems to me, is what people would decide to do next? Hordes of humanity, starting in the developed countries, would face a kind of perpetual mental vacation. This could lead to a lotus-eater’s life of dullness, perpetual distraction, and pointless pleasure-seeking.

 

But there’s another path. To the Logan-Braga list of what distinguishes human intelligence, I’d add “transcendence.” This is actually our unique gift. Given any situation, we are not bound by circumstances imposed on us but can look with fresh eyes, the eyes of self-awareness. To be self-aware is to transcend physical boundaries, including those imposed by a conditioned brain. It’s sadly true that many people live like biological robots, following the conditioning, or mental software, that turn them into non-thinkers. To be ruled by your mental software diminishes the mind’s potential to wake up, to be renewed, to see the world through fresh eyes, and to discover your true self.

 

The human potential movement has been active for several decades, and yet progress has been slowed for countless people by the practical demands of going to work, earning a living, and carrying out every day’s mundane duties and demands. If AI takes over those things, the obstacles to human potential would be radically lessened. This could amount to a leap in the evolution of consciousness. Such a leap is non-technological, or to put it another way, our future evolution depends on developing a technology of consciousness.

 

The riddle that has remained unsolved for centuries, “What is the mind?”, might become fascinating and compelling to people in their everyday lives. After all, it’s a question no less intriguing than “What is God?” Humanity has spent millennia pondering that question, and at the same time a much smaller band of sages, saints, artists, and savants has been confronting the intimate issues of the world “in here.” It would be ironic if the flaw in strong AI made us more human rather than less. Yet that could very well turn out to be what happens.

 

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 wellnessMedicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Artificial Intelligence Is Already Here—It’s Us

Deepak Chopra, MD


As news keeps pouring out about the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI), people don’t know how much to welcome the technology or fear it. There are warnings from top-level scientists about a future in which super computers become so advanced that they leap into autonomy. Freed to make their own decisions, AI could lead to machines that create catastrophes like starting a war. On a more mundane level, robotics has steadily replaced humans in many jobs. Some experts declare that few jobs performed by a human being could not eventually be duplicated with a machine more cheaply and efficiently.

 

Yet in the midst of this worrisome situation, which also holds vast promise, the irony is that the direst perils of AI are already here, in the form of our own human intelligence. We feel intuitively that we have natural intelligence, not the artificial kind. After all, nobody built us from mechanical parts; we lead emotional lives; we are capable of insight and self-reflection. Despite these things, however, the human mind is deeply artificial in many ways, and the negative connotations of the word “artificial”—fake, lifeless, illusory, mechanical, arbitrary—apply to everyday life.

 

At one level, when we fall into self-defeating habits that we can’t break out of, we are exhibiting robotic behavior. When we give in to primitive responses like aggression, fear, and hostility, we relate to our lower brains like biological robots. And when we create totally arbitrary value systems like competing religions and political ideologies, we follow pre-programmed mental software without thinking for ourselves. The ability of human intelligence to create new constructs is a two-edged sword. For every advance in science and technology, there are the destructive results of war, environmental depredation, and other attacks on nature, including from within. Nothing is more deeply troubling than human nature, which can run out of control more fatally than any robot or super computer.

 

These examples illustrate the artificiality of human intelligence, because there is nothing natural about them; all are mind-created. This raises the question of why we permit ourselves to lead pre-programmed, robotic lives according to second-hand opinions, outworn beliefs, fixed conditioning, and mechanical responses. AI in the field of technology is simply about how to build a better logic machine; AI in the human sense is about discovering what “natural intelligence” might be.  In a world imperiled by every form of human folly, discord, and self-created woe, no issue is more urgent.

 

As complex as the situation is—and I’ve only offered the barest sketch of it—the answer isn’t complex. We need to know ourselves in a new way. If you try for a fresh start by throwing out all the artificial, arbitrary constructs that burden us, what’s left is the most basic aspect of life: experience. Strange as it sounds, none of us really understands how experience works, because we are too entangled in it to find the right viewpoint, a viewpoint uncolored by the restless mind.

 

Here are a few bare facts about experience. First, it is evanescent; experiences rise and fall, appearing and disappearing. Second, we have no idea how or why this occurs. The next thought is totally unpredictable (except when it’s robotic) and therefore out of our control. Third, to keep life from disintegrating into total discontinuity, we set up a simulation of reality that enables us to survive and thrive. This simulation, as the brain evolved over millions of years, we call the human world, which is based on the five senses, everyday perceptions, interpretation of perceptions, and the stories based on interpretations that everyone agrees upon.

 

Agreed upon or not, our simulation of reality is totally arbitrary, and at bottom is a gigantic feedback loop. We believe what we see; we see what we believe. (So powerful is this feedback loop that it generates the appearance of time, space, matter, and energy—but that’s a longer, more complex story to unravel.)

 

To escape the feedback loop would be the fresh start that is the goal of the world’s wisdom traditions. You can’t escape by using mental activity, any more than a hamster can get to a new place by running faster in its wheel. As surely as computer will never employ AI to become human, we cannot use our mental programming to free ourselves from mental programming. The whole project is self-contradictory. If the simulation of reality has trapped us, where does reality begin? Logically, it must begin in something that’s constant in the face of evanescence, permanent in the face of change, and unaffected by the mind and its crippling ability to trap itself.

 

The constant we need to find is actually right under our noses. As experience appears and disappears, one thing remains untouched and unchanged: awareness itself. You can’t predict or control your next thought, but one thing is certain. You will be aware of it. A thought is a spark of awareness taking shape before it vanishes. The same is true of bigger mental events, too, like memory, theories, models, philosophies, religions, technologies, and history. We try to anchor ourselves to these bigger events, but inevitably they shift, rise and fall, and give way to something equally insecure.

 

By trying to anchor life on what is impermanent, we ignore the other alternative, anchoring life on what is permanent. If we had made that choice instead, there would be no fear, insecurity, conflict, and confusion. Resting on the foundation of consciousness means not buying into impermanence, and impermanence is by definition the source of all illusions, because every illusion is the child of the one great illusion that life is impermanent, threatened by the specter of death. In reality, life is consciousness itself, and therefore it isn’t the opposite of death.

 

Dying is the aspect of evanescence we fear the most (here today, gone tomorrow). Yet every night when we go to sleep, experience vanishes while awareness remains. What we call waking up is just the return of mental activity in terms of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. During sleep, however, the brain and central nervous system are constantly active; every cell is surviving and thriving; nothing is unconscious in the slightest. It is only the rise and fall of experience that ceases when we fall asleep, not the underlying consciousness that makes experience possible.

 

Here one can see the most artificial thing about human intelligence: our false belief that we are our thoughts. If that were true, impermanence would be the only reality. Fortunately, beliefs can be unmade as well as made. There has never been total allegiance to the belief that we are our thoughts. The entire tradition of spirit, soul, God, and enlightenment is a form of dissent against the domination of the mind and the futile attempt to perfect a mind-created reality. Even if our minds could make us perfectly happy, returning to the Eden of innocent childhood, we would still be in the grip of illusion. The only way to be a free human being is to identify with consciousness; that’s the only fresh start available to us.  Beyond all impermanence is awareness, the ground state of existence and the hope of a completely natural life.


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 

How Reality Is Made: The Play of Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It’s a peculiar part of being human that we have both a mind and consciousness but cannot tell them apart. The difference is that the mind is constantly in motion, producing sensations, thoughts, images, and feelings, while consciousness is the basic “stuff” of the mind, which remains unchanged no matter how active the mind is. By analogy, paintings are produced by endlessly combining colors in new ways, while “color” itself is unaffected. A painting can neither create nor destroy color.

 

This inability to know the difference between mind and consciousness has created a trap that we all fall into. We create something from the “stuff” of consciousness and then forget that we created it. The trap becomes obvious with something like a dictatorship, when an ordinary human being becomes a figure of total belief and worship. From outside the ideology, you can see the deception—the very people who feel powerless before the dictator in fact created him and then felt powerless before him. But similar deceptions in everyday life escape our notice, and in that way, we trap ourselves.

 

Mind-created structures are everywhere, and when they become destructive, as in crime, war, us-versus-them thinking, religious conflict, and the technology that creates mechanized means of death, we struggle, often futilely, to correct them. The futility comes from not knowing how mind-created structures are made, and since the human world is entirely mind-created, the problem comes down to not knowing how our reality is made.

 

Babies are born without mental structures, although this can’t be a blanket statement, since the potential for complex mental activity is present already in a newborn. But even so, a baby looks at a shoe, a teacup, the walls of its room, and its own hand without naming or knowing what they are. Raw perception is a helpless state until the magic ingredient is added: interpretation. Through brain development and mental development, which go hand in hand, a baby enters the training of perception. Objects get named; their uses are understood; eventually they are mastered. Thus a floating pink blob turns into the baby’s hand, which it names, understands, and learns to use.

 

Once perception and interpretation are joined, the next stage is to construct a story out of them. Here is where we acquired the enormous freedom to build a self, to give meaning to our lives and participate in the wide world. To take a single example, a piano makes sounds that are meaningless to a baby; then this perception is named as music. Now the perception of sound, interpreted as music, leads to the story of Mozart and the Beatles, with the freedom to either become a musician, enjoy music, ignore music, or have such a tin ear that music is meaningless. Every story can be untangled in the same way to get back to the basics of perception and interpretation.

 

But life tends to move in the opposite direction. We become more and more entangled in our stories, and in this tangle, we forget how stories are made and unmade. Someone who always votes with a leftist party and cannot abide the views of the rightist party—and vice versa—has become entangled in a construct (politics) that can become all-consuming. If you have zero interest in politics, that entanglement hasn’t snared you, but for certain some other story has. The trick is to stand outside all stories, which is the point of tracing them back to perception and interpretation.

 

If we become aware of how we’ve created our own stories (with the help of family and society), we can get out of messy entanglements. Going a step further, it’s possible to see where all mental activity comes from, something even more basic than perception. In the Indian tradition, the source of all mental activity is the play of consciousness. This play isn’t mental. Instead, being malleable, consciousness shapes itself at a much more basic level than sensations, images, feelings and thoughts.

 

Looking around, we observe the malleability of consciousness in animals that possess a totally different species of consciousness than humans. The entire machinery of perception that pertains to cats, dogs, dolphins, tarantulas, and flatworms is alien to us, and yet there is no doubt that living things are in some way conscious. Dogs, cats, dolphins, etc. live complicated lives filled with desires, impulses, family bonds, methods of communication, and so on. Humans feel pride of place because our mental activity is incredibly advanced compared with so-called lower life forms.

 

The irony is that these creatures aren’t trapped in stories of their own creation, whereas we are. A cat consigned to the deep ocean will not fare as well as a dolphin, who in turn will not do well on dry land. Their species of consciousness is limited and bound by nature and evolution. Human beings have some of these limitations, but no single story bounds us into a way of life we cannot consciously change. The real issue is whether we can transcend our species of consciousness, which would mean rising to a level where the “stuff” of mind is altered.

 

According to the world’s wisdom traditions, such a leap is possible; in fact, showing people how to transcend is the sole purpose of any wisdom tradition. Instead of offering new thoughts or even new stories, they offer a new state of consciousness, which can be called enlightened, liberated, or awake. The terms are all suggestive rather than definitive. The essence of transcendence is to join the play of consciousness. In practical terms, this requires a shift of identity. Instead of identifying with all the busy-ness of the mind, you identify with the mind’s quiet, peaceful, unchanging source.

 

Testimony from centuries of transcendence tells us that identifying with consciousness itself gives human beings a fresh start. We drop our stories and stop being entangled in them. We throw off the insecurity and unending demands of the ego. We see through the illusion that human nature is intrinsically evil or good. In other words, we throw off what the poet William Blake called “mind-forged manacles.” In pure transcendence there is nothing left to do but to enjoy being here now. But a fresh start also implies new horizons—what would they be?

 

In a way this is an unanswerable question, like asking “What is a mind good for?” There is nothing to say about mind until you experience it. The same is true of transcendence. Until you join the play of consciousness, you can’t say in advance what will happen. Right now, the great task is simply to show people that they don’t have to remain trapped in mental constructs and stories, no easy thing.

 

But one by one, people do find their way, as they have for centuries, to the same fresh start, the same awakening. Life becomes much more personal and intimate once this moment arrives, but in general, the play of consciousness is about taking the basic qualities of human awareness—love, intelligence, creativity, empathy, insight, and evolution—and discovering what can be created from them. This isn’t a total revolution. The mind, being the creation of the play of consciousness, already participates in love, creativity, intelligence, and the rest. But it is revolutionary to realize that you have direct access and creative power over these qualities of life. Perhaps more importantly, you rest in the security of knowing that life can take care of itself without interference.

 

The play of consciousness is how reality is made, both personally and for the entire human race. It has given us this human world and the human universe in which it is embedded.  We believe that gluons, quarks, galaxies, stars, force fields even bodies and minds are ” real” but they are human constructs for modes of perception and their interpretation in consciousness. In the deeper reality there is only the play of consciousness. The next step in our evolution as a species is to become conscious creators of this reality, which can be called the evolutionary leap from human to meta-human.

 

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 

 

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