Is Life Really a Dream?


By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are times when life goes out of kilter and the world doesn’t seem real and substantial anymore. Such experiences occur regularly, either to us or other people. For example, when there’s a sudden death in the family or a catastrophe like a tornado or the house burning down, a person can go into shock. With a blank stare they reveal how dislocated their existence suddenly feels, saying things like “This can’t be happening. It’s unreal” or “Nothing matters anymore.”

It’s normal for this dissociated state to pass, and in time reality feels real again. But some people never return—after a psychotic break, for example, a percentage of mental patients become chronically schizophrenic and have hallucinations for the rest of their lives. But the feeling of “This can’t be happening, it’s like a dream” doesn’t have to be triggered by shock. When someone is ecstatically happy at their good fortune, everything can seem unreal.

I’m pointing out these experiences because they give a basis for the notion that life actually is a dream, but we don’t notice it unless there is a sudden dislocation, a moment when we glimpse the dream for what it is before lapsing back into it quite unconsciously. A passing glance at the history of philosophy indicates that the Eastern view of Maya and Plato’s image of the cave are declarations that the illusory nature of life has fooled us, with the exception of the few who have wake up and seen the “real” reality.

In Plato’s image, everyday life is like watching shadows at play on the walls of a cave, and only those who turn around and see the sun projecting the shadow play know what is real and where the illusion came from. Philosophy isn’t a potent force in modern life, but there’s literature to consider. The dreamlike nature of life is central to Shakespeare’s last play, The

Tempest, and the 17th-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón titled his most famous play La vida es sueño, literally “Life Is a Dream.”

Thus personal experience, philosophy, and art have endorsed an idea that reality can somehow feel totally wrong under ordinary circumstances. The world feels real and substantial 99% of the time, which is proof enough, one would think. But modern science, despite its reputation for being based on physical reality, cannot prove that “reality as given” is actually valid. Reality as given is a phrase used to describe an acceptance that the physical world “out there” can be trusted. As in everyday life, this trust is workable 99% of the time, but when we are dreaming at night in bed, a dream feels real until we wake up. In addition, it’s well accepted that the five senses cannot be relied upon—if they could, science textbooks would teach that the sun rises in the East as it moves around the Earth, or that solid matter is as solid as it feels when you stub your toe.

The bald fact is that nothing about “reality as given” can be scientifically proven. Matter can be reduced to invisible waves that have no definite location in time and space. The big bang created a universe where time and space exist, but there was a precreated state where no one can verify that time and space existed at all. Because we know body, mind, and brain through experience, they are also part of the dream. At bottom, “reality as given” has no validity except that it matches our experience. All phenomena in the universe come to us as experiences, and even when reduced to the abstract language of mathematics, experience is how math exists, too—there are no numbers in Nature, only our mental model that invented counting and found it useful.

I’ve sketched in a peculiarly intriguing mystery that has captivated the human mind in all its expressions—religion, philosophy, art, and science—and which keeps popping up no matter how much we try to ignore it and pretend that “reality as given” is good enough. It isn’t, because the testimony of people who have transcended everyday reality is just as valid as the testimony that insists on everyday reality. Jesus, Buddha, Plato, Shakespeare, Kant, and a batch of famous quantum physicists cannot simply be dismissed. They could be right when 99% of humanity is wrong, just as a single person, Copernicus, was right when the rest of humanity around him thought that the sun revolved around the Earth.

Most people are pragmatists and would wonder why this arcane notion of “life is a dream” makes any difference. It makes a difference because if some individuals have in fact waked up to expose the illusion for what it is, then what they have to say should interest us. We might want to transcend the dream, too, because the common testimony given by those who have waked up is very significant:

They no longer fear death. They identify with a self that is timeless and unbounded. They stop experiencing extremes of emotion. Their minds aren’t riddled with extraneous thoughts but feel calm, alert, and open. Wounds and traumas in their past no longer return to haunt them. They tend to feel detached, as if witnessing how life unfolds rather than being tossed and tumbled in the chaotic stream of daily events. At the height of the experience of waking up, they feel liberated and blissful.

A skeptic would shrug these experiences off as subjective and therefore unreliable—we’re all in the habit, in fact, of equating transcendent experiences with abnormality, social dysfunction, even madness. People who are different upset the social norm, which is actually evidence that the social norm is quite insecure at bottom. It holds up only as long as everyone—or nearly everyone—agrees with it. Outsiders are not welcome.

But dismissing the validity of waking up as mere subjectivity and being a social aberration are both red herrings. When people report that they have waked up, they are talking about a shift in consciousness, and such shifts are only validated through experience. A dream researcher can pinpoint through brain activity when a sleeper has gone into REM sleep and begun to experience a dream. But humanity wouldn’t even have a concept of “dream” without the experience of it. The sensations of pain and pleasure are similar. They exist as experiences before neuroscience has any clue what to look for in the brain.

If we stand back and drop all assumptions about “reality as given,” it is entirely possible that consciousness conforms to our mindset that it fits too tightly and too well. We are so convinced that our commonly accepted belief about a material world is the only valid perspective on reality, that we train consciousness to fit our understanding to the only the model we believe in. In other words, there’s a constant confirmation of the biases we want confirmed. Trapped inside a seemingly inescapable mental construct, we passively accept it. This brings up the most important thing to be learned from those who have waked up—the power to create and dismantle mental constructs is always present. As a birthright, human consciousness possesses the ability to create any kind of virtual reality imaginable. “Virtual” is the right word, because any mental construct is artificial and provisional.

There is no doubt that cultures rise and fall, creating systems of belief that grip the imagination for a while, often lasting for centuries, and individuals living inside the collective story create their own separate stories. But just as novels and romances must have an author, someone who is quite conscious of creating a fiction, the stories that grip people in their everyday lives must have a source that isn’t mistaken into believing the story is real. This source stands outside thought, words, images, and the stories they coalesce into. It is consciousness itself.

The argument for “life is a dream” arises not from a kind of stubborn refusal to accept “reality as given,” but from confidence that we are all conscious agents with the capacity to create and then project any version of virtual reality we choose. The trick is to be in touch with your creative source; otherwise, you fall for your own creation, as if Shakespeare believed he was actually Hamlet. “Life is a dream” presents the most liberating insight to enter the human mind, and it will never go away, because no other explanation tells us more about the “real” reality than it.

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 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

If a Machine Could Make You Happy, Would You Do It?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes many claims, some quite futuristic, others just around the corner. Somewhere in the middle lies the prediction of human behavior, with the attendant claim that if people are predictable, this could be the future of well-being.

To predict when someone is going to get angry, sad, afraid, or tense is already well within reach. AI is developing readouts of muscle activity and related bodily responses that indicate what the brain is going to do. Going a step further, at the MIT Media Lab they’ve taken enormous steps into translating thoughts—i.e., words in our heads—into signature brain signals. These signals can be digitized, and suddenly, a thought in your head can be sent to Google’s search engine via Wi-Fi, allowing you to search the Internet simply by thinking.

If you put these breakthroughs together, a new model of human behavior emerges, one based on predictability and reading the signals originating in the brain that attend predictable behaviors. AI experimenters get very excited about the notion that the brain, and the behavior it triggers, can be mathematically reduced to equations that in essence turn people into a complex of algorithms. The excitement is justified, because anything that can be expressed logically is understandable in computer language.

Even though a computer cannot fall in love and arguably could never grasp any emotion, positive or negative, if a certain muscle response triggered by the brain gives a 75% probability that you are about to fall in love, then match.com can be perfected—compatibility will be a numbers game.

Let’s say that AI’s dreams come true in the future. Would it be ethical to plug the brains of criminals into a Wi-Fi network that predicts the likelihood of a crime being committed, so that the police can head it off at the pass? That was the premise of Steven Spielberg’s movie, Minority Report, and in real life we are close enough to science fiction that prisons are working with predictability models to judge which inmates are safer to parole.

As soon as such a possibility is raised, the specter of Brave New World rises, along with the robotic behavior of North Koreans. Mind control is only a step away from mind reading. None of us wants our free will taken away, even if we would behave like happy people. We assume that

North Koreans aren’t robots when they aren’t under threat of reprisal, and this is true. Apparently, the American sitcom Friends has become a cult in North Korea, and despite the threat if imprisonment, tapes of Friends episodes are hot on the black market and constitute a forbidden pleasure for North Koreans.

But let’s go a step farther. What if a computer could figure out the algorithm of specific behavior that you, an average citizen, follows. Much unhappiness is caused by unconscious behavior that is totally predictable, and self-awareness is a rare commodity. If a computer knew you better than you know yourself, it could detect all the ways you make yourself unhappy, and then set out to improve your well-being.

There are lots of ways this might happen. A drug could change your brain chemistry or make your muscles relax. Biofeedback could train your brain to abandon certain self-defeating pathways and build better pathways in their place. Schools and training labs could teach you to recognize when you are about to feel depressed or anxious and then give you meditations that abort the depression and anxiety at a very early stage. The field of bio-manipulation could conceivably end the worst of human suffering, which is mental.

The bottom line right now is that AI plays both sides of the street. While claiming that body-mind responses can be predicted, digitized, and used for all kinds of healing, from repairing spinal injuries to teaching autistic children how to change their facial expressions (the notion being that if the child adopts normal expressions in place of the typical blank autistic mask, the range of the child’s emotions will become more normal at the level of the brain). Simple but profound behavioral techniques such having doctors smile at their patients and touch them reassuringly on the shoulder seem promising in reducing patient anxiety and complaints.

The other side of the street is the claim that “of course” people aren’t going to be turned into robots by AI. But how is the mind to be neatly divided into the trainable part (deterministic) and the creative, liberated part (free will)? If I can be plugged into a device that predictably improves my mood, transforming me from sad and lonely to a happy camper, should I do it? The argument against bio-manipulation is hard to pin down, but not because a future Big Brother is going to turn us into robots.

The problem is that every aspect of mind and body works in a complex fashion with every other aspect. If you “improve” a person’s mood, for example, you might strip away the benefits of anxiety. One marked benefit is the phase that artists and problem solvers go through known as “anxious searching,” where the mind worries over a painting, poem, or difficult problem until the answer emerges. Then the anxiety has served its purpose, and the mind, having reached a creative solution, is actually happier and more contented.

I’ve only scratched the surface of how AI can affect the mind but knowing what’s at stake is important. In future posts the discussion can go deeper. At the moment, there’s no doubt that AI finds itself at the troubled junction point of neuroscience, big pharma, ethics, philosophy, and social engineering. The most basic questions like “Do we have free will?” lead to harder questions still, like, “Is free will hurting or harming us?” It’s likely that issues once consigned to religion and philosophy will loom as practical choices in everyday life. How things will ultimately turn out isn’t subject to an algorithm, even if human behavior is mostly predictable.

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 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

The True Meaning of Meditation

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The American way of meditation is now firmly a part of our lifestyle, and millions of people who have taken up yoga and learned about mindfulness feel quite comfortable meditating. I’m saying “the American way,” because it took scientific research and the promise of improved health to convince the average person that meditation wasn’t mystical, in a society where mystical implies religion, or in this case Hinduism.

The acceptance of meditation has been a good thing, but I wonder if its true meaning has taken hold. The situation today feels much like it was thirty years ago, when being serious about meditation meant you were a committed Buddhist or otherwise found the time to devote hours a day to sitting in lotus position. Meditation still has a split personality, one side promising nice benefits like relaxation and lower stress levels, the other side requiring you to get serious about renouncing everyday life and its demands.

The noted spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti made a crucial point when he said that to be real, meditation must happen twenty-four hours a day. As startling as that sounds, he wasn’t demanding a specialized lifestyle that even Buddhist monks would find hard to maintain—after all, twenty-four hours a day implies that you’d meditate in your sleep. What, then, did he mean?

The point, I think, is that a person should live from the deepest level of awareness all the time. Everyday life is preoccupied with the restless surface of the mind, and taking a little time to meditate during a busy day is merely an interlude. The restless mind still has its way the rest of the day. But there are other issues to confront. In the unconscious resides “the shadow,” Carl Jung’s term for the hidden forces of anger, fear, dread, guilt, and shame.

These forces have a power that the rational mind can’t resolve, hoping only to keep them at bay. But repression is a flawed strategy, as the prevalence of war, crime, and domestic violence glaringly attest. Then there is the still mystifying occurrence of depression, obsessive compulsion disorder, free-floating anxiety, and other mental disorders, which seem to be getting more common even in the face of therapeutic drugs.

What these issues tell us is that the mind is divided against itself, fragmented by conflict, confusion, and random events that disrupt everyday life. This isn’t news. The mind, when it reflects on being human, quickly realizes that its great opponent is itself. Mind versus mind has been the major conflict every culture has been engaged in.

The American way of meditation skirts this conflict or lightly brushes it. As impressive as the health benefits of meditation are—I am not remotely discounting them—the real purpose of meditation is to answer, once and for all, the true nature of the mind. The pursuit of higher consciousness, the process of waking up, the journey to enlightenment—whatever term you use, meditation solves the problem of the divided mind by opening the door to whole mind.

The mistake we all make is to identify the mind with the activity going on in our heads, the endless stream of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that comprise consciousness in its active phase. In the gap between thoughts, something else appears—consciousness as the silent, boundless source of mental activity. Real meditation explores pure consciousness, brings it to the fore, and establishes it as the true nature of the mind.

This is like detective work, uncovering and unmasking the culprit, only to find that there is no culprit. The mind warring against itself is nothing but a mask. Behind it there is no one to blame or fear. No inner enemy lurks in hiding to trip us up if we lower our guard. Meditation becomes a twenty-four hour process when you see clearly how you constantly defend and protect yourself without purpose, except to increase the fear and insecurity that keeps those defenses up.

Without being fully conscious of this, the average person distrusts the mind for its ability to create suffering. But to say that meditation ends suffering, however true, isn’t enough.

Meditation puts you back in touch with reality. What we call reality in the accepted sense is a mind-made artifact. Seeing this clearly is another aspect of meditating twenty-four hours a day.

Can this project really extend to sleeping at night? Yes, because pure consciousness is aware of itself, and that doesn’t end when the brain and body need the renewal of sleep. But for now, it’s the waking hours that demand our attention in meditation. Contrary to the image of the cross-legged yogi lost to the world, meditation is a dynamic, wakeful process. The purpose of sitting for a period each day to use a meditation technique is to deepen one’s experience of what pure consciousness feels like. With few distractions. The mind is thus reacquainted with its true nature.

Outside meditation, the rest of the day is about noticing, seeing, and changing. We are our minds. If the mind becomes eager to wake up, to unmask its fears and return to its true nature, the same eagerness will seep into us as we go through the day. We all know what it’s like to spend the day eagerly awaiting something we really cherish, whether it is meeting a loved one, reading a book that can’t be put down, or watching the Super Bowl. The same eagerness applies to meditation. Once the spark is lit, the mind cannot wait to find out what reality is all about, because there is no difference between the true nature of the mind and the true nature of everything in existence.

Meditation is the greatest quest ever conceived, and it is open to everyone. Fear and suffering are very bad motivators; we’d rather turn our backs on them than try to solve them. The only lasting motivator is desire, and meditation brings out the deepest desires, to know who you really are, to achieve fulfillment, to turn chaos into orderliness, to create a life whose satisfactions can never be undermined or taken away from you. None of these desires is foreign to anyone. The secret of meditation is that they can be realized in full.

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 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are  The Healing Self  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

Grounding the Human Body for Health :

By Marty Zucker, Gaetan Chevalier, PhD, Clint Ober, Paul J. Mills, Deepak Chopra, MD
The Earth is like a gigantic battery that contains a natural, subtle electric charge—a special kind of energy present in the ground. For safety and stability, almost everything in the electrical world is connected to the ground, whether it is an electric power plant or your refrigerator. That’s what the term “grounded” means.

Being grounded also applies to people. When you are electrically grounded, when you maintain your body at earth’s electric potential, you feel:

· Centered

· Solid

· Strong

· Balanced

· Less tense

· Less stressed

Overall, you feel good. If you have pain, you have less of it, or maybe none at all, when electrically grounded to the earth.

Increase in Illness

Many people live with daily pain and constant stress, anxiety, depression, and fatigue. They feel out-of-sorts, not centered, strong, or solid. Doctors often can’t find the cause and resort to prescribing medications that produce side effects like fatigue, poor mood, and headaches.

There has been an increase in the number of people suffering from autoimmune diseases in the U.S. Fifty million people in the U.S.—75 percent of whom are women—are suffering from:

· Multiple sclerosis

· Lupus

· Inflammatory bowel disorders

· Rheumatoid arthritis

Researchers don’t know the specific causes behind the steep increases in a diversity of illnesses. Some say it is because people are eating more unnatural foods than ever and that the ingredients in these foods could be harmful, others point to increased exposure to environmental pollutants.

While certain lifestyle approaches such as meditation and yoga can help, there are limitations to their effectiveness for many of these illnesses.

The Art of Grounding

We are bioelectrical beings living on an electrical planet. Our bodies operate electrically. All of our cells transmit multiple frequencies that run our heart, immune system, muscles, and nervous system.

With the exception of humans living in industrialized societies, all living things on our planet are connected to the ground’s electrical energy. In industrialized societies, we rarely go barefoot outside or

wear natural leather shoes that allow us to absorb the ground’s energy. For the last 50 years or so, most people have been wearing plastic soled shoes that act as a barrier to the Earth’s energy, insulating them from electrical contact with the Earth. People also generally don’t sleep on the ground anymore. They live and work above the ground, even far above the ground in high-rises.

The truth is, we are disconnected, ungrounded, out of touch with the Earth. Might this disconnection be a factor in the onset of some illnesses?

Healing Benefits of Grounding

Scientific research over the past decade indicates that our bodies can be protected and helped—and that we feel better—when we are electrically connected to the Earth. That is, when we are grounded. Here are three examples of benefits that have been reported in scientific research studies (these studies are listed at the end of this article):

1. Decreased Levels of Inflammation and Pain

Being grounded can help relieve inflammation. In a small pilot study of 12 subjects, results indicated that grounding the human body during sleep reduces night-time levels of cortisol and resynchronizes cortisol hormone secretion more in alignment with the natural 24-hour circadian rhythm profile. In one case, medical thermal imaging was used to image a 44-year-old woman with chronic back pain. Images taken after being grounded while sleeping for four nights, as compared to before grounding, showed a reductions in inflammation, at which time the woman also reported:

· 30 percent reduction in pain

· 70 percent reduction in pain interfering with sleep

· 30 percent reduction in morning stiffness and soreness

After four weeks of continued grounding while sleeping, she reported:

· 80 percent reduction in pain

· No sleep interference

· 70 percent reduction in morning stiffness and soreness

By eight weeks, she reported that her pain was gone.

2. Reduced Stress Levels

When grounded, the diurnal rhythm of the stress hormone, cortisol, begins to normalize. Cortisol is a vital part of our body’s stress response system and helps control blood sugar levels, regulate metabolism and inflammation, and assist with memory formulation. A study that examined the diurnal rhythm of cortisol after sleeping grounded showed a normalization of the rhythm. In addition to a normalization of the rhythm, participants in this study also slept better and woke up feeling more refreshed.

3. Improved Circulation

When we are grounded our circulation improves, aiding in the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the tissues in the body, including better blood flow to the face. These were findings of a study that used a laser speckle contrast camera to quantify facial blood flow in response to one hour of grounding.

How to Reconnect to the Earth

While the research on grounding is relatively new, the practice is timeless. Past societies went barefoot or wore leather footwear made from hides that allowed the energy of the Earth to rise up into their bodies. They were grounded.

In modern society, most of us have lost our electrical roots, so to speak. We are disconnected and this disconnection may be a seriously overlooked cause of human pain and discomfort and the steady rise of chronic illness worldwide.

The good news is we can easily get grounded. Weather and schedule permitting, go barefoot for a half-hour or more, go outside and see what a difference that makes on your pain or stress level. Sit, stand, or walk on soil, grass, sand, or concrete. These are all conductive surfaces from which your body can draw the Earth’s energy. Wood, asphalt, and vinyl are not conductive.

For many people, however, there isn’t time in their busy days to go out barefoot. There are, fortunately, indoor options. Investing in grounding products, such as grounding mats or chairs, can be used to remain electrically grounded to the earth while sleeping, relaxing, or working.

Ideally, you want to sustain the grounding experience and make it a part of your daily routine.

Further Reading and References to the findings discussed in this article.

1. Grounding after moderate eccentric contractions reduces muscle damage.

Brown R, Chevalier G, Hill M. Open Access J Sports Med. 2015 Sep 21;6:305-17. doi: 10.2147/OAJSM.S87970.

2. The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.

Oschman JL, Chevalier G, Brown R. J Inflamm Res. 2015 Mar 24;8:83-96. doi: 10.2147/JIR.S69656.

3. The effect of grounding the human body on mood.

Chevalier G. Psychol Rep. 2015 Apr;116(2):534-42. doi: 10.2466/06.PR0.116k21w5.

4. Earthing (grounding) the human body reduces blood viscosity-a major factor in cardiovascular disease.

Chevalier G, Sinatra ST, Oschman JL, Delany RM. J Altern Complement Med. 2013 Feb;19(2):102-10. doi: 10.1089/acm.2011.0820.

5. Earthing: health implications of reconnecting the human body to the Earth’s surface electrons.

Chevalier G, Sinatra ST, Oschman JL, Sokal K, Sokal P. J Environ Public Health. 2012;2012:291541. doi: 10.1155/2012/291541. Review.

6. The biologic effects of grounding the human body during sleep as measured by cortisol levels and subjective reporting of sleep, pain, and stress.

Ghaly M, Teplitz D. J Altern Complement Med. 2004 Oct;10(5):767-76.

7. Grounding the human body improves facial blood flow regulation: Results of a randomized, placebo controlled pilot study.

Chevalier G. Journal of Cosmetics, DermatologicalSciencesandApplications. 2012;4:293-308. doi: 10.4236/jcdsa.2014.45039

AUTHORS

Martin Zucker

Marty has written extensively on natural healing, fitness, and alternative medicine for nearly 40 years and has co-authored or ghostwritten more than a dozen books during that time, including Earthing (Basic Health Publications, 2014, second edition), co-authored with Clint Ober and cardiologist Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D. His previous books include Reverse Heart Disease Now (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), Natural Hormone Balance for Women (Pocket Books, 2002), and The Miracle of MSM (Berkley Trade, 1999). He is a former Associated Press foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East.

Gaétan Chevalier, PhD

Gaétan has his PH.D. in engineering physics and specializations in Atomic Physics and Laser Spectroscopy. He spent four years of researching plasma physics and nuclear fusion at UCLA, and then served as a professor at the California Institute for Human Science (CIHS). Dr. Chevalier is currently lead faculty at CIHS, visiting scholar in the Department of Family Medicine & Public Health, School of Medicine, UC San Diego.

Clint Ober

Thirty-year veteran of the cable television industry, Clint pioneered cable modem and satellite distribution of digital services via cable to personal computers. In 1998, he began investigating the effects of electrically grounding the human body to earth. He has promoted and supported 20 research studies that collectively demonstrate how maintaining the body at earth’s electrical potential reduces inflammation and promotes normal functioning of the body’s electrical systems. Clint is currently President of Earth FX Inc. in Thousand Palms, CA.

Paul J. Mills

Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health at the University of California, San Diego. He is Principal Investigator of the Self-Directed Biological Transformation Initiative, a randomized trial that is examining the psychosocial and biological effects of whole-systems medicine approaches to wellbeing.

Deepak Chopra, MD

Founder of The Chopra Foundation and the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, and Co-Founder of JIYO.COM, which sells grounding products. Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego.