Self - The Chopra Foundation

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

The Microbiome: How to Talk to Your 2 Million Genes

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Naveen Jain

The term “microbiome” has become popular in the last decade, and most people now realize that their bodies are populated by an enormous quantity of microbes. Taking every location from the skin to the mouth to the intestinal tract into consideration, the microbiome weighs around 3 lbs., roughly the same as the human brain.

The radical importance of keeping your microbiome balanced and healthy is just beginning to dawn on medical science and biology. If you took a snapshot of a tiny portion of your digestive tract, it would be teeming with an array of life forms almost beyond comprehension (including bacteria, viruses, bacteriophages, archaea, fungi, yeast, etc. Since it has long been known that we can’t digest food without the aid of the so-called “flora” in our intestines, the microbiome didn’t spring out of nowhere. What wasn’t realized until recently, however, is its staggering extent.

A human being possesses roughly 23,000 to 25,000 genes, and there is enough capacity for juggling DNA into new combination that these genes create 7 billion unique individuals on Earth, with no end in sight for creating billions more unique people. Your trillions of cells, however, are estimated to be outnumbered around 3 to 1 by the collected microbiota (as the collective microbial colonies are called) that co-exist with us. In terms of genes, however, it is estimated that all of these small creatures and plants contribute 2 million genes to our existence.

Now we realize that the human body is an ecosystem, and to be healthy requires “talking” to your microbiome in all kinds of ways—you have a whole planet to manage at the microbial level. The digestive functions they perform is barely the tip of the iceberg. As intestinal microbes feed, they excrete chemicals that are essential to wellness. Besides producing well-known chemicals like vitamin B, the microbiome sends neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine into the bloodstream. Hormonal levels are influenced, and so is your immunity from disease.

What we are realizing is that none of the microbial life inside us is a free rider. Those 2 million genes evolved with us. Some are actually woven into our own DNA. As in the Earth’s ecosystem, survival demands that every microbe performs a useful function. But where there is balance the possibility for imbalance occurs. When this happens, the body and the microbiome are off kilter, with the result that disease processes may start to form, and natural functions like staying at a proper healthy weight are impaired—or even become impossible.

The cutting edge of microbiome research involves mapping out thousands of microbes and identifying their functions—an overwhelming task now made possible by high-speed computers and data analysis. But even at this early stage, we can jump to some practical conclusions.

Companies are beginning to offer a service that analyzes your personal microbiome. With a small stool sample, it is possible to profile your unique digestive process, which foods you metabolize well or not so well, which chemicals (known as metabolites) your microbiome is secreting in terms of harmful and helpful ones—and this is just the beginning.

The most challenging epidemics in modern society are connected to lifestyle, and lifestyle is how we “talk” to our microbiome. The next bite of food you eat sends a message to your microbiome, and in reply it will send a chemical message back. Unhealthy chemical responses that originate in the microbiome are thought to be strongly linked to heart disease and overweight, for example. No two people are chemically alike at any given moment. The body is like an information superhighway, and although traditionally the brain was the hub for all incoming and outgoing information, the true hub is the gene. Therefore, with its huge preponderance of genes, the microbiome is thought now to dominate the information superhighway.

Pursuing gene therapies for the past fifteen years, ever since the Human Genome Project provided a complete map of human DNA, has proved frustrating and enormously expensive. But influencing your ecosystem of genes happens naturally every day. The information superhighway is populated by the messages sent from gene to gene, and these come from thoughts, emotions, stress levels, relationships, and the quality of food, air, and water you ingest.

The future of wellness is at stake here. By attending to the ecosystem that is you, the entire system of mind and body is affected. For the first time, in practical terms relating to eating, being active, sleeping, and managing stress and inflammation, the old model of preventing risks can be replaced by a positive model. The positive model is about optimizing the personal well-being of each person. If we learn from an early age how to “talk” to our microbiome, that conversation turns into feedback loops that maintain balance and wholeness everywhere.

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

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several successful companies including Moon Express, Viome, Bluedot, TalentWise, Intelius and InfoSpace. Moon Express is the only company to have permission from the US government to leave earth orbit and land on the moon. Viome is focused on disrupting healthcare with the goal of “making illness elective” by identifying biomarkers that are predictive of chronic diseases and preventing them through personalized diet & nutrition. Naveen is a director of the board at the X PRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors including “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year”, “Albert Einstein Technology Medal” for pioneers in technology, Recipient of “Ellis Island Medal of Honor”, Most creative person” by Fast Company, “Top 50 philanthropists of 2018” by Town & Country magazine and “Humanitarian Innovation Award” at the United Nations.

Is There One Best Path in Life?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Without using the term, everyone has marked out a path in life–a path can be defined as a road map that guides you to a goal. Because every day presents some kind of goal, however small, being on a path is inevitable. It doesn’t have to be a conscious choice. Yet at a certain point it dawns on most people that they have larger goals, even lifetime goals, that require long-term planning. At this point choosing a path does become a conscious decision.

On the surface, it would appear that life presents many paths, because so many goals present themselves: finding the right partner, raising a family, settling on a career, pursuing success, earning more money, saving a nest egg for retirement. These are socially shared goals, to which more can be added, such as finding God or writing a novel. But if you look deeper, everything on this list boils down to one path only.

This is the path of desire, which is the most natural path, since we all have desires. The impetus that keeps people on the path of desire is universal but also logical. If you want to eat breakfast, make friends, do something you enjoy, or have any other everyday desire, it’s logical that expanding your desires and following a bigger dream should serve as a reliable path in life. In fact, because 99% of the human race follows the path of desire, this should prove how defective it is. The problems of poverty, crime, war, hunger, disease, and mental anguish haven’t been solved around the world, and one or more of these problems reaches into everyone’s life.

The irony of turning desire into a path is that no one can validate that desire itself is positive. Shattered dreams are at least as common as dreams fulfilled. Psychological studies show that human beings are very bad predictors of what will make them happy. A young woman who deeply desires to have a child will confront the fact that being a new mother is one of the most stressful times of life for many women. Having more money increases happiness up to a certain threshold when you feel financially secure, after which having more money has diminishing returns. Unchecked impulses are a major aspect of things like the obesity epidemic, huge credit card debt, and criminal behavior–in a word, we desire lots of things that are self-defeating.

If there is a best path in life, the path of desire isn’t it. But how do you get off this path, which is so ingrained and occupies every waking hour from infancy onward? One insight is that desire comes from a shallow source. A restless mind leads to restless desires, which plays a major part in the pattern of endless desires that never seem to reach inner fulfillment even when the outer goal has been attained. If this is true, then going deeper into the mind to find a place of inner fulfillment opens up another path.

For just this reason millions of people have started to meditate and do yoga, and for the most part they discover the satisfaction of stepping out of the demands of desire. But still this doesn’t constitute a new path; it is more like a glimpse of a new path. After meditation and yoga class come to an end, it’s back onto the treadmill of desire. Seeing the downside of the path of desire doesn’t free you from the problems created by desire. Since these problems are mixed in with the pleasure and delight of desire, countless people remain confused, conflicted, and at a loss.

The basis for confusion comes down to either/or thinking. There’s a time-honored belief that the worldly life and the spiritual life exist as opposites, the worldly life being defined by desires and the spiritual life by selfless abstention. Yet even if you could persuade yourself that you are renouncing desire, that itself is a desire–you still want to be happy and fulfilled, even though your attitude is higher and holier than people who pursue happiness by taking a vacation in Las Vegas or Disney World.

The best path in life begins by abolishing the separation between worldly and spiritual aspirations. Such a path allows desire to play out its natural course without running wild, while bringing experiences of love, joy, truth, beauty, divine presence, or whatever else you consider higher and spiritual. In other words, the best path in life should aim for the goal of wholeness. Being human is complete and whole when we are not self-divided by conflict, confusion, frustration, and the constant demands that pull us in opposite directions.

To be self-divided is the product of blindly accepting that your desires will get you where you want to be. Even when one cherished goal is attained, that still leaves untold potential that lies unfulfilled. The only way to lead a whole and complete life is to be whole and complete yourself. This, finally, is the best path in life, which can be called for the sake of simplicity the path of the self. I’m not endorsing selfishness and egotism. The path of the self is a lifelong quest to discover who you are, knitting together the glimpses of fulfillment that occur in everyone’s life.

The great discoveries that dawn on this path are “I am enough. Being here is fulfilling. Existence unfolds inner potential without end.” Being human isn’t complete without these discoveries, and they cannot be found through desire. To know that you are enough, and that existence will unfold your inner potential transforms daily life in profound ways. But transformation cannot be a goal. It is the fruit of being on the path of the self. All such discoveries happen spontaneously, on their own time schedule, under the guidance of an intelligence that transcends the everyday thinking mind.

The path of the self has always been open to everyone, and meditation takes you through the door. Then it is necessary to have a vision and a long-term intention, in this case, to find your true self. Along the way choices have to be made about your beliefs, guiding principles, personal relationships, and so on–but these are secondary. What is held before you every day is finding the way out of self-doubt, confusion, inner conflict, and divisive desires that keep you entangled in a state of separation. The divided self is easy to spot, and its consequences litter our lives. So there’s real work to be done on the path of the self, only it is the effortless work of going inside, adopting the next step of self-awareness, and identifying with a level of mind deeper than the restless, superficial mind. When you see the value of this project, you have taken the important first step that brings the path of the self into view.

How to Be Your Own Medical Advocate

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

When the average person goes to the doctor, shows up at the ER, or enters the hospital, the possibility of controlling what happens next is minimal. We put ourselves in the hands of the medical machine, which in reality rests upon individual people—doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants, and so on. Human behavior involves lapses and mistakes, and these get magnified in medical care, where misreading a patient’s chart or failing to notice a specific symptom can be a matter of life and death. The riskiness of high-tech medicine like gene therapy and toxic cancer treatments is dramatically increased because there is a wider range of mistakes the more complex any treatment is. To be fair, doctors do their utmost to save patients who would have been left to die a generation ago, but they are successful only a percentage of the time.

Risk and mistakes go together, but the general public has limited knowledge of the disturbing facts:

Medical errors are estimated to cause up to 440,000 deaths per year in U.S. hospitals alone. It is widely believed that this figure could be grossly inaccurate, because countless mistakes go unreported—death reports offer only the immediate cause, and many doctors band together to protect the reputation of their profession.
The total direct expense of “adverse events,” as medical mistakes are known, is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Indirect expenses such as lost economic productivity from premature death and unnecessary illness exceeds $1 trillion per year.

Statistics barely touch upon the fear involved when any patient thinks about being at the wrong end of a medical mistake. What the patient is all too aware of is the doctor visit that goes by in the blink of an eye. A 2007 analysis of optimal primary-care visits found that they last 16 minutes on average. From 1 to 5 minutes is spent discussing each topic that’s raised. This figure is at the high end of estimates, given that according to other studies, the actual face-to-face time spent with a doctor or other health-care provider comes down to 7 minutes on average. Doctors place the primary blame on increasing de

mands for them to fill out medical reports and detailed insurance claims. Patients tend to believe that doctors want to cram in as many paying customers as they can, or simply that the patient as a person doesn’t matter very much.

As a result there’s a new movement afoot to provide a personal advocate who stays in the doctor’s office with the patient. The advocate is basically someone who represents the patient’s best interests in any medical situation. The person might be a well-meaning relative who helps an older patient understand what’s going on, or who steps in to do attendant tasks like picking up prescriptions and organizing medical bills. But more and more one sees the need for an advocate who is professionally trained to buffer the mounting risks in a health-care system in which less and less time is spent between doctor and patient.

It would be up to an advocate to find out, and needless to say, this has created hostility from some doctors. Used to ruling their domain with absolute authority, few doctors want an overseer in the room asking questions, inserting their own opinions, and potentially finding fault. At worst, the specter of a malpractice suit looms. The movement for professional advocates, which is quite young, insists that looking out for a patient’s best interests is benign. The medical profession has its doubts.

The upshot, for now at least, is that patients who want an advocate must play the role themselves. At the heart of the problem is passivity. When we surrender to medical care, whether at the doctor’s office, the ER, or the hospital, we shouldn’t surrender everything. Poking and prodding is intrusive. Undergoing various tests can be stressful. The minute we walk in the door, we become largely anonymous—a walking set of symptoms replaces the person. There are doctors and nurses who take these negative effects seriously and who go out of their way to offer a personal touch. They should be saluted for their humane compassion in a system that focuses more on impersonal efficiency.

You may like your doctor and feel that he cares, but this doesn’t rule out being your own advocate. Quite the opposite—the inherent stress in medical treatment is what you want to counter. First comes the stress of worry and anticipation, what is commonly known as white-coat syndrome. We all remember how afraid we became as children thinking about getting a shot from the school nurse or how scary it was sitting in the dentist’s chair even before the drill was turned on. Studies have verified that anticipating a stressful situation can cause as great a stress response as actually undergoing the stress. In one study subjects were divided into two groups, one of which gave a public speech while the other was told that they were going to give a speech but actually didn’t. Both groups became stressed out, but the researchers wanted to measure how well they recovered from the stress

Knowing that you are going to be in a stressful situation, there are a number of ways to feel more in control:

Be informed about your illness. Don’t relinquish your opportunity to find out exactly what is wrong with you. This doesn’t mean you should challenge your doctor. If you feel the need to inform your doctor about something you saw online, you aren’t being confrontational, and most doctors are now used to well-informed patients.
If the illness isn’t temporary and minor, contact someone else who is going through the same diagnosis and treatment as you. This may involve a support group, of which many exist online, or simply talking to another patient in the waiting room or hospital.
If you are facing a protracted illness, become part of a support group, either locally or online.
Keep a journal of your health challenge and the progress you are making toward being healed.
Seek emotional support from a friend or confidant who is empathic and who wants to help (in other words, don’t lean upon someone who is merely putting up with you).
Establish a personal bond with someone who is part of your care—nurses and physician’s assistants are typically more accessible and have more time than doctors. Ideally, this bond should be based on something the two of you share—family children, hobbies, outside interests—not simply your illness.
Resist the temptation to suffer in silence and to go it alone. Isolation brings a false sense of control. What actually works is to maintain a normal life and social contacts as much as possible.

Following these steps will go a long way to achieving the goal of patient advocacy, which is to serve the patient’s best interests at all times. But there remains a difficult unknown, the possibility of a medical error.

Seeing the doctor involves personal interaction, and it’s important to reduce any possible friction. Here are a few pointers:

Be involved in your own care.
Inform the doctor and nurses that you like to be involved.
Ask for extra information when you need it.
Ask for a questionable event, like a pill you aren’t sure is the right one, to be checked with the doctor.
Tell somebody if you have gone out of your comfort zone.
Remain polite in all of the above.
Praise the doctor and nurses when it’s called for. A show of gratitude doesn’t go amiss

Don’t

Don’t act hostile, suspicious, or demanding.
Don’t challenge the competency of doctors and nurses.
Don’t nag or whine, no matter how anxious you are. Reserve these feelings for someone in your family, a friend, or a member of a support group.
Don’t pretend you know as much (or more) than the people who are treating you.
Don’t, when hospitalized, repeatedly press the call button or run to the nurses’ station. Trust their routine. Realize that the main reason patients call a nurse is more out of anxiety than out of real need.
Don’t play the part of a victim. Show your caregivers that you are maintaining a normal sense of security, control, and good cheer even under trying circumstances.

Probably the most important finding about medical mistakes is that they are frequently caused by lack of communication.
In our new book The Healing Self we delve into patient advocacy in more detail as well as covering the expanding role of self-healing, which is going to only become more important in the coming decades.

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

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

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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.