Why You and the Universe Are One

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By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Menas Kafatos, PhD.

It takes a lot to overturn the accepted view of reality, but it doesn’t take a lot to begin. The accepted view of reality holds that human beings exist in the context of a vast physical universe “out there.” Only an extreme mystic would doubt this description, but all of us should. Sir John Eccles, a famous British neurologist and Nobel laureate, declared, “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.” What Eccles means is that all the qualities of Nature, from the luxurious scent of a rose to the sting of a wasp and the taste of honey, are produced by human beings. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the main founders of quantum mechanics, said essentially the same thing when he declared that photons, quanta of light, have no color, such properties arise in the biology of perception.

 

Those are remarkable statements, all the more because they are all-inclusive. The most distant galaxies billions of light years away, have no reality without you, because everything that makes any galaxy real— with the multitude of stars with their heat, emitted light, and masses, the positions of the distant galaxies in space and the velocity that carries each distant galaxy away at enormous speed—requires a human observer with a human nervous system.  If no one existed to experience heat, light, mass, and so on, nothing could be real as we know it. If the qualities of Nature are a human construct arising from human experiences, the existence of the physical universe “out there” must be seriously questioned–and along with it, our participation in such a universe.

 

When you break experience down into its tiniest ingredients, the physicality of everything begins to vanish. The story we keep telling ourselves depends on reality “out there” having a physical explanation, but it doesn’t. For example, we depend on sight to navigate through the world. No matter what you see “out there”—an apple, cloud, mountain, or tree—light bouncing off the object makes it visible, but how? No one knows. What makes seeing totally mysterious can be summed up in a few undeniable facts:

 

  • Photons, the quanta of light, are invisible. They aren’t bright, even though you see sunlight as bright.
  • The brain has essentially zero light inside it, being a dark mass of oatmeal-textured cells enveloped in a fluid that is not terribly different from sea water. (There are extremely faint traces of photon activity in the brain, but the optic nerve doesn’t transmit photons to the visual cortex.)
  • Because there is no light to speak off in the brain, there are no pictures or images, either. When you imagine the face of a loved one, nowhere in the brain does that face exist like a photograph. How do action potentials in neuron electric firings become conscious awareness, no one knows.

 

At present no one can explain how invisible photons being converted to chemical reactions and faint electrical impulses in the brain creates the three-dimensional reality we all take for granted. Brain scans pick up the electrical activity, which is why an fMRI contains patches of brightness and color. So something is going on in the brain. But the actual nature of sight itself is mysterious. One thing is known, however. The creation of sight is done by you. Without you, the entire world—and the vast universe extending in all directions—can’t exist.

 

Expand this known fact to everything you experience, and every quality of life requires human participation. “Requires” means two things, first, that experience is the ground state of everything, including the activity of doing science, and second, that every quality is a human construct derived from experiences of individuals in human species. Another species with a different nervous system would participate in the universe in a way completely unknown to us with our human nervous system.

 

Physics has had decades to process the insight of John Archibald Wheeler, the eminent American physicist, general relativist and quantum physicist, who originated the notion of a “participatory universe,” a cosmos in which all of us are embedded as co-creators, replacing the accepted universe “out there,” which is separate from us. Wheeler used the image of children with their noses pressed against a bakery window to describe the view that kept the observer separate from the thing being observed. But in a fully participatory universe, the observer and the thing observed are one.

 

You are one with the universe because you experience Nature in your awareness, and there is no other source for reality as we know it. If anything is real that cannot enter human consciousness, we will never know it. How would we even know it? Even if we resort to abstract mathematics which might infer the existence of realities beyond our ability to sense them or measure them, we should realize that mathematics itself, albeit the most refined one, is tied to human observers. It takes a mathematician to understand mathematics. To summarize,

 

  • The universe we live in is a human construct, including everything in it.
  • All activity takes place in consciousness. If you want to point at where the stars are, there is no physical location, because consciousness isn’t a “thing.”
  • The brain isn’t the seat of consciousness but acts more like a radio receiver, and perhaps emitter, translating conscious activity into physical correlates. (The radio receiver metaphor describes the feedback loop between mind and brain, which are actually not separate but part of the same complementary activity in consciousness.)
  • To understand our true participation in the universe, we must learn much more about awareness and how it turns mind into matter and vice versa.

 

These are difficult truths for mainstream scientists to accept, and some would react to them with skepticism, disbelief, or anger. But following the other track of explanation, beginning with physical objects “out there,” fails utterly to explain how we are conscious to begin with. That’s why in scattered pockets, some physicists are beginning to talk about a conscious universe, where consciousness is a given throughout Nature. In fact, the founders of quantum mechanics a century ago agreed more with this view, having understood that quantum mechanics implies observation and agency of mind. In our upcoming book You Are the Universewe call it the human universe, emphasizing where the whole construct comes from. As we will see in future posts, once you realize that you and the universe are one, the whole journey of being human shifts radically.

(To be cont.)

 

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD  and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics, at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, and climate impacts researcher and works extensively on consciousness. He holds seminars and workshops for individuals, health and mental professionals, practitioners of contemplative traditions, and corporations on the natural laws that apply everywhere and are the foundations of the universe, for well-being and success. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 315+ articles, is author or editor of 15 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, You Are the Universe (Harmony). He maintains a Huffington Post blog. You can learn more at http://www.menaskafatos.com 

Everyday Reality is a Human Construct

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It is often overlooked that the role of spirituality was once the same as the role science plays today: to explain how Nature works. As science views reality, objective facts and rational thinking outstrip the traditional spiritual worldview, which explained Nature through higher powers known as the gods or God. But recently the playing field has become much more level than anyone ever anticipated.

Explaining reality through objective means has seriously eroded, chiefly because as science drew closer to the source where space, time, matter, and energy emerge, Nature as we know it vanished. At the level of the quantum vacuum, the zero point of empirical knowledge, something inconceivable is at work. Only advanced mathematics remains as a useful tool when time and space no longer exist, and even then, our mathematical models are suspect, because there is no longer any proof that they actually match reality.

To visualize this situation, imagine that you are a traveler who has followed your tour guide to a borderline. He turns and says, “Up to now we have crossed the land where causes lead to effects, where clocks measure time and space has three dimensions, where physical objects are reliably solid. No doubt you’ve already noticed that your five senses no longer operate, and we had better be careful taking another step, because your mind won’t be capable of reasoning out anything across this borderline. Shall we cross?”

You can imagine that you would hesitate, because across the borderline is simply “beyond,” a realm where reality originates even though nothing we consider real exists. It’s remarkable that thousands of years ago, looking inward through self-awareness, ancient thinkers reached the same borderline, and what they imagined “beyond” wasn’t in fact gods or God, because religion arrived much later to offer a simpler story about “beyond.” The non-simple story was about pure

consciousness. Where science views “beyond” as a dark mystery, the ancient thinkers of India saw the starting-point of reality as a state of awareness that is actually reachable.

In both cases the familiar world of space, time, matter, and energy disappears across the borderline, but for modern science, which takes objective facts as the most reliable guide to reality, there’s a breakdown, because beyond the zero point, the absence of data means there are no more objective facts. In the worldview we dub as spiritual, however, reality doesn’t break down. The “beyond” is continuous with our world as the source of experience.

It turns out, when it comes to explaining reality, that where you start has everything to do with where you end. If you start with conscious experience as your measure of reality, the end is pure consciousness. If you start with physical objects “out there,” you end up with emptiness, a void. A scientific skeptic might protest that the “beyond” can’t be different for two people just because they began with different assumptions. Two travelers visiting the Pyramids are going to see the same thing, no matter what they expect when they set foot on the plane.

But the extraordinary thing is that the “beyond” is an exception. It can be the source of awareness or an empty void, entirely depending on how the human mind constructs it. If the world “out there” is real, once it vanishes into the quantum vacuum, the “beyond” is an empty void or at best a theoretical mathematical space. But if conscious experience is real, then consciousness was constructing reality all along. Having arrived at the borderline, we can look back over our shoulder and say, “Oh, I get it now. Everything I ever thought was real is constructed from consciousness. Consciousness isn’t an add-on. It’s the only thing that was real in the first place.”

This simple realization is what the East calls enlightenment or waking up. One sees that physical reality is a human construct and always has been. When we are in bed dreaming at night, a dreamscape can feel entirely real, but on the moment of waking up, we realize its illusory nature.

To a rationalist who bases his worldview on physical objects “out there,” it sounds bizarre to say that one can also wake up and see the familiar world as a dreamscape. But that’s the great challenge of spirituality, which we should more accurately called consciousness-based reality.

The ancient thinkers explained with detailed specificity how consciousness constructs the entire range of reality from the grossest to the subtlest phenomena. For simplicity’s sake, one can reduce the explanation to twelve salient points, as follows:

1. Everyday reality appears to be a given, but on investigation, it reveals itself as a human construct.

2. The building blocks of reality are not tiny physical objects (atoms, subatomic particles) but exist in our awareness, where everything begins and ends as an excitation (activity) in consciousness.

3. We know reality as the experience of observer and observed occurring in the now. The fundamental experience of both observer and observed is in the form of mental sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts (SIFT).

4. Sensations, images, feelings, thoughts are entangled modifications of awareness, the result of social and cultural conditioning and accepted systems of education. Our awareness gets deeply involved in many systems (education, politics, gender, religion, etc.).

5. Systems are arbitrarily made and changed. Therefore, no construct has a privileged position over another. Truth is always relative inside any system.

6. These constructs, however, are intensely real for the individual awareness embedded in it. We allow ourselves to be programmed by such systems and would feel naked and

vulnerable without them. In the world’s wisdom traditions, this is known as the state of bondage.

7. Excitations of awareness are not as basic as pure, timeless, dimensionless awareness. They modulate pure awareness like a switch that brings the familiar world into existence/experience.

8. Excitations or vibrations take place in the domain of time; in fact, they create the sensation of time itself. Pure awareness is timeless.

9. We are entangled in a vibrational reality that feels real on its own terms but is basically a mental construct, like a dream. To realize this is known as “waking up.” To someone who is awake, everything in the phenomenal world exists on the same playing field. As constructs, the same status is shared by birth, death, body, mind, brain, universe, stars, galaxies, the big bang, and God or the gods.

10. Freedom lies in the experience of knowing yourself beyond all constructs. You are pure awareness before the subject/object split came about.

11. All human suffering is the result of attachment to a construct, including fear of the construct we call death. Death is only real within the limits of the construct we manufactured. It doesn’t occur to the awareness that stands apart and sees all experiences rising and falling in the timeless moment of now.

12. The ultimate goal of all experience is the same: finding the “real” reality in one’s own being.

These points are just as logical and consistent as modern science, and one can argue that they are much more sound as philosophy, given that science hasn’t come close to explaining how bits of matter created conscious awareness while these points assume something everyone knows to be true: we are conscious beings. As unconventional as they may seem, these points offer a better way to find out what’s real. And we don’t have to debate whether ancient thinkers can rival modern advanced science. Consciousness-based reality is just as testable today as it ever way. Each person’s challenge is to accept the invitation to journey inward or not, because ultimately, going beyond depends on individual experience and nothing else.

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. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. 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 Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

How to Be Timeless Right This Moment

By Deepak Chopra, MD

For most people, the two words “timeless” and “eternal” seem roughly the same. They spell the end of clock time, and for many religious believers, Heaven is eternal, a place where time goes on forever. Whatever you think about it, time coming to an end isn’t a pleasant prospect, because the clock stops, so to speak, when we die. But there are problems with all of these concepts, and if we really go deeply into the subject, time is very different from what we casually accept.

Physics has had a lot to say about time thanks to Einstein’s revolutionary concept that time isn’t constant but varies according to the situation at hand. Traveling near the speed of light or drawing near the massive gravitational pull of a black hole will have a drastic impact on how time passes. But untitled-design38let’s set relativity aside for a moment to consider how time works in human terms, here and now. Each of us normally experiences three states of time: time ticking off the clock when we are awake, time as part of the illusion of having a dream, and the absence of time when we’re asleep but not dreaming. This tells us that time is tied to our state of consciousness.

We take it for granted that one species of time–the one measured by clocks–is real time, but that’s not true. All three relationships with time–waking, dreaming, and sleeping–are knowable only as personal experiences. Time in fact doesn’t exist outside human awareness. There is no absolute clock time “out there” in the universe. Many cosmologists would argue that time, as we know it in waking state, entered the universe only at the big bang. What came before the big bang is probably inconceivable, because “before the big bang” has no meaning if time was born at the instant the cosmos was born. If you go to the finest level of Nature, to the vacuum state from which the quantum field emerged, the qualities of everyday existence, such as sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, no longer exist, and there is also a vanishing point where three-dimensionality vanishes, along with time itself.

What lies beyond the quantum horizon is purely a matter of mathematical conjecture, yet one thing is certain. The origin of everything real is beyond the reach of time and space. The realm that is the pre-created state of the universe can be modeled mathematically as being multi-dimensional, infinitely dimensional, or non-dimensional. Once the everyday four dimensions vanish, any kind of mathematical explanation is open. So it must be accepted that time came out of the timeless and not just at the big bang. Everything in the physical universe winks in and out of existence at a rapid rate of excitation here and now. The timeless is with us at every second of our lives.

Yet something looks fishy in that sentence, because the timeless can’t be measured using a clock, so it makes no sense to say that the timeless is with us “at every second.” Instead, the timeless is with us, period. This world is timeless. There is no need to wait for death or Heaven to prove that eternity is real.

Once you grant that the timeless is with us, a question naturally arises: How is the timeless related to clock time? The answer is that the two aren’t related. The timeless is an absolute, and since it can’t be measured by clocks, it has no relative existence. How strange. The timeless is with us, yet we can’t relate to it. Then of what good is the timeless?

To answer this question, we have to back up a bit. Clock time has no privileged position in reality. There is no reason why it should be elevated above dream time or the absence of time in dreamless sleep. Clock time is just a quality of being awake, like other qualities we know as colors, tastes, smells, etc. Without human beings to experience these qualities, they don’t exist. Photons, the particles of light, have no brightness without our perception of brightness; photons are invisible and colorless. Likewise, time is an artifact of human experience. Outside our perception, we cannot know anything about time. This seems to contradict the cornerstone of science, which holds that “of course” there was a physical universe before human life evolved on Earth, which means that “of course” there was time also, billions of years of time.

Here we come to a fork in the road, because either you accept that time, as registered by the human brain, is real on its own or you argue that, being dependent on the human brain, time is created in consciousness. The second position is by far the stronger one, even though fewer people believe it. In our awareness we constantly convert the timeless into the experience of time–there is no getting around this. Since such a transformation cannot happen “in” time, something else must be going on. To get a handle on this “something else,” let’s look at the present moment, the now, the immediate present.

All experience happens in the now. Even to remember the past or anticipate the future is a present-moment event. Brain cells, which physically process the conversion of the timeless into time, only function in the present. They have no other choice, since the electrical signals and chemical reactions that run brain cells only occur here and now. If the present moment is the only real time we can know in waking state, why is it so elusive? You can use a clock as fine-tuned as an atomic clock to predict when the next second, millisecond, or trillionth of a second will arrive, but that’s not the same as predicting the now. The present moment, as an experience, is totally unpredictable. If it could be predicted, you’d know your next thought in advance, which is impossible.

Moreover, the present moment is elusive, because the instant you register it as either a sensation, image, feeling, or thought, it’s gone. So let’s boil these insights down. The now, the place where we all live, can be described as:

  • — the junction point where the timeless is converted into time
  • — the only “real” time we know in waking state
  • — a totally unpredictable phenomenon
  • — a totally elusive phenomenon.

Now, if all these characteristics are being correctly described, it turns out that we have been fooling ourselves to believe that time is a simple matter of tick-tock on the clock. In some mysterious way, each of us occupies a timeless domain, and to produce a four-dimensional world for the purpose of living in it, we dream it forth. That is, we create the world in consciousness first and foremost. There is no given world “out there.”

This seemingly bizarre conclusion lies at the heart of all non-dual philosophies like Platonism, Buddhism, and Vedanta. None of them had access to neuroscience, so they didn’t fall into the trap of claiming that the brain is responsible for creating time, space, and the messages received by the five senses. The brain, after all, is just another object inside the dream, like a table and chairs, a rock, or a distant galaxy. Nor did these non-dual philosophies fall into the trap of saying that the mind creates reality. The mind is a vehicle of experience, and like time and space, it had to have a source beyond mental experience. If we trusted our minds, we’d equate going to sleep with death. In sleep the conscious mind gives up the world of solid physical objects and clock time. Yet when we wake up in the morning, there is a return of solid objects and clock time. They were held in waiting, so to speak, by consciousness even during the eight hours a day that the thinking mind is out of commission.

In the end, non-dual philosophies, as the name implies, aim to get us free of the dreamscape we mistake as the real world in order to return us to our source. At our source, in pure awareness, we recognize ourselves not as puppets of time, space, matter, and energy but as creators of reality. The merest second of time originated in us. We fill the now with experience. That’s what it means to take the timeless seriously; it changes our very identity. The categories that we lock into separate compartments are in fact part of one unified phenomenon, the unfoldment of awareness within itself.

I realize what a mouthful those words are, but we must wake up to the fact that reality is simply one thing. Body, mind, and spirit belong to this one thing. The come into being all together, and only our belief system turns them into three different things. There is a huge amount to say once you realize that you exist as the timeless source of creation. But the first step is to know that the timeless is with us, beyond any belief in birth and death, time and decay. Things get born and die in our dreams when we’re sleeping, and yet we don’t mourn them because we know that dreams are an illusion. Discovering that the same is true about our waking dream brings the experience known as enlightenment.

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. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. 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 Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

A Revolution in Reality Is Around the Corner

Whether they think about it or not, people take sides about reality. The dividing line separating science from spirituality was crossed long ago, and it doesn’t take a lesson in philosophy or theology to pick up a smartphone. Therefore, by default reality for everyone is scientific reality. Let’s set the old science versus spirituality divide aside and simply accept that science has taken a journey to the very origin of reality and returned with a story everyone essentially buys into by virtue of how rational and useful it is to live by science.

To get to the origin of reality, science had to scrub away a lot of misinformation and misdirection. The five senses are the source of most misinformation, but so is the brain itself. When scrubbed down to the most basic level, reality as explained in quantum physics has no color, sight, sound, taste, or smell. So much for what the five senses consider real. Scrub even closer to the bone, and time and space vanish, too, even though the human brain depends upon both. When atoms and molecules vanish into probability waves, so does the brain–it has no privileged position in the universe. Surprising as it sounds, this whole apparatus of scientific experiments and useful technology can be scrubbed away until you reach a zero point, a timeless, dimensionless state from which the universe sprang.

Here’s the most fascinating part. The universe didn’t spring into existence with the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. That episode requires the existence of time and space. The big bang is an event constructed in the human mind as if we were there to witness it. “If” you could take the human brain back to the origin of the universe, the big bang is totally real. But that “if” is impossible. A human brain would disintegrate long before you got to the source of the big bang. In fact, the big bang itself had its own origin, which preceded time, space, matter, and energy. Even to visualize the big bang as an explosion is totally incorrect, because explosions only occur in the context of time and space.

So we are left with a startling conclusion. The origin of reality is outside our ability to explain it. Even mathematics, the last stand of the rational mind, can’t be proven to exist outside our mental awareness of numbers. Nothing can be shown to exist outside our awareness. This realization has caused a crisis in theoretical physics, among other areas like philosophy and theology, because on the one hand, the version of reality scrubbed down to zero seems absolutely valid while on the other hand, scrubbed-down reality has nothing we can see, touch, measure, experiment with, gather data about, or even conceive. (Every physicist I’ve debated concedes that all of theoretical physics exists in mathematical imagination, which is itself an activity in awareness.)

Let’s agree that reality is here and that it needs explaining. You can start with a spiritual or religious view of reality and take a parallel journey that scrubs it down to zero, or very close. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” or “The Word was made flesh.” Those phrases speak of a creation that emerges from nothing more than a concept, but since this concept is empty, being merely some kind of “word,” there’s a huge problem. The original word emerged from an inconceivable state. So once again, starting from the very opposite worldview of science, scrubbing reality down to its origin leaves you with something inconceivable.

How do we get out of this paradoxical trap, where the mind takes us on a journey to find out where we came from, only to arrive at a place that has a sign saying, “Please leave your mind at the door. Only then can you enter”? The way out of this trap is to stop asking the wrong questions and start asking the right ones. Instead of asking how the world “out there” emerged from zero (what some physicists call the emergence of something from nothing), we could start with the only thing we know for sure and go from there.

What we know for sure is that we experience reality, and therefore the starting point is no longer zero. In truth, we live at the starting point of reality every day and every minute. Reality is experience itself. It’s a fluid, ever-renewing process that continually spins out the now. Unlike a telescope floating in deep space sending back data from distant galaxies, our minds are dynamic, active, and creative. Set aside the fruits of this creativity. Every mind travels a different arc of life experience. But this diversity disguises a common thread.

If you look at what your mind is doing right this minute, the following things are always occurring:

  • 1. There is a constant stream of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images.
  • 2. We identify with this mental activity, using it to create our personal reality.
  • 3. Confronting the bewildering phenomena that fills reality and floods the senses, we give words to each process, thus stopping the phenomenon in its tracks. A mystery like time turns into “time,” a term we grasp the way we grasp “rock” or “tree.”
  • 4. In this way, our chief creative act is to manufacture a world of objects that perfectly fits one species of consciousness, our own. Animals exist in this objectified world, but we have no entry into their species of consciousness.
  • 5. Therefore, we feel secure in our self-created reality, as if it existed before human beings appeared. In fact, there is no reality outside the mental activity taking place right this minute in our awareness.img_2001

It can take a bit of time to nail down each of these points, but people will accept them as unarguable given a chance to absorb what is going on. When you begin with “reality is experience in awareness,” there is a totally level playing field. Think about having a dream one night where Einstein, Buddha, Plato, and Mozart came to visit you. They start talking about how reality looks to them, each having a strong separate awareness of what their own reality is like. Yet you have no trouble knowing that Einstein, Buddha, Plato, and Mozart are in the same dream, inhabiting the same dreamscape. The fact that they play different roles in the dreamscape doesn’t change that basic shared fact.

It turns out, therefore, that reality can be explained as a state of awareness, and although there are billions of people playing out their own state of awareness, the big tent is one awareness that we all share. it is the awareness of having an experience and knowing what the experience is. Finding such a unified basis for reality should come as a tremendous relief, and it will, I believe, revolutionize life on Earth. We have all accepted science as the measure of the real world, yet soon the news will spread that science has scrubbed reality down to the zero point. This in essence gives us the freedom to start over again. We each have the opportunity to scrub our personal reality down, to discard what isn’t working and retain only what does work.

Here, I’d like to suggest, is what does work:

  • 1. Creating personal reality as each person’s joyful challenge.
  • 2. Seeing past the mask of materialism in order to elevate the inner world of awareness.
  • 3. Fostering the evolution of consciousness as a self-directed project.
  • 4. Granting equal status to everyone as conscious agents, equipped with the same ability to shape reality.
  • 5. Refusing to buy into the state of separation, replacing it with a state of unity based on pure consciousness.

When we focus on these things, reality will shift dramatically. Once you realize that everything, absolutely everything, is an excitation in consciousness, the everyday world gets reduced to the same status as a dreamscape. Time, space, matter, and energy each tell a different story; each has a different feel. But you exist at the center of the dreamscape, knowing that time, space, matter, and energy are all excitations in consciousness. And then comes the kicker: You are that consciousness. This must be what Buddha experienced in a flash sitting under the Bodhi tree. The phenomenal world dissolved, replaced by one thing, consciousness itself. The same realization has been repeated countless times in other minds; the circumstances will look outwardly different, but the result is always the same. At the source of human awareness is the origin of reality. One history unfolds this truth on a mass scale, nothing will ever be the same again.

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. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. 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 Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

 

Taking Personal Reality Seriously (Including Yours)

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

In college, a time-honored theme for assigning term papers is to discuss appearance versus reality, which can be applied to questions as diverse as “Is the ghost of Hamlet’s father real?” and “What was actually at stake in the Cold War?” But this intriguing topic doesn’t usually stick, and when students graduate into a world of hard realities, they accept appearances without questioning them. In this way the mystery of appearance versus reality doesn’t get past the classroom.

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