A Meditation to Restore Hope, Faith, and Trust

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Steve Israel

Everyone has been experiencing the ill effects of disruptive politics. Thinking of the present situation in terms of a partisan divide doesn’t go far enough–there has been a wholesale loss of trust. Hope for a better future is defeated on a daily basis. Faith in the democratic system is perhaps at an all-time low. This malaise isn’t about issues and parties. It’s about how we view bad events and react to them. Society presses the argument that problems arise “out there,” usually caused by other people, and getting immersed in private emotion is a suitable response.

The cycle of event-response never ends, and it rarely solves anything. But we are all addicted to it. Not only do outside events capture our attention, but also there is the rush of feeling angry or elated, victorious or defeated. The world’s wisdom traditions say very little about politics, but they have much to say about getting entangled in the drama, beginning with the teaching that matters the most: the drama never ends. Once you get enmeshed in external events that trigger strong emotions, you have joined the drama either as participant or spectator. Therefore, reality “out there” is the level of the unending problems life brings our way. By becoming stuck in it, people sacrifice their only path to finding a solution, which is to base their sense of self “in here.” If you don’t want to be affected with malaise, stop ingesting the next dose of poison.

When you lose hope, trust, and faith, nobody did it to you. However much you are tempted to demonize somebody else, everything “out there” is aimed at one and only one thing: keeping the drama going at full boil. How you respond is your responsibility, and this turns out to be the opening that sets you free of the drama. Dramas are built out of plot lines, and when you start to look inward, it becomes clear that every plot line, down to the smallest detail, is self-created.
Instead of talking about how to change the narrative–a common topic now, after so many old plot lines have been disrupted and destroyed–it’s crucial to know where any story comes from. When you were a baby, there was no story. If a baby starts chewing when it’s teething, there is no concept of “shoe” (or baby). There are only sensations associated with the shoe: color, texture, shape, smell, and in this case, taste. In the process of development, babies move from feelings to organized perceptions, then on to language and thoughts. Each step adds a building block to the story of life, and by the time adulthood is reached, everyone’s story has taken on a life of its own.
Which is the whole problem. The tags in your story may be white, male, professional, Republican, which enables you to ease into someone else’s worldview if they share enough of the same tags.
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These tags are constructs. Nature doesn’t give birth to Democrats or conservatives, Catholics or Protestants, etc. But by identifying with all the labels that attach to us, we gain a sense of identity–and it’s a false identity, in every case. The story you’ve created has taken on a life of its own because you forgot that you are the creator, the author and not a character.
Babies are not blank slates that get imprinted like hammering a dent into a car fender. They are bundles of experience that is being processed in awareness. How the process turns baby A into Mozart and baby B into Kim Jong-Un remains a total mystery. But one thing is certain: the process occurs in awareness. Expose two children to the same upbringing, and each can turn out to be completely unlike the other. Expose any group of people to the same set of facts, and you will get as many interpretations as there are people.

At this stage of the argument, most of us will agree that all kinds of external influences went into our personal story, and that we interpreted these influences in a very personal way. But go back to the baby chewing a shoe. The experience of chewing the shoe is all the shoe is for the baby. Without a concept of “shoe” to organize the experience, it’s just an activity in awareness. This leads to a startling conclusion that takes time to absorb. Your body is experienced the same way a baby experiences a shoe. You take in a bundle of sensations through the five senses. There is no “body,” much less “my body,” until you construct a concept that organizes the actual reality, which is that your body is only an activity in your awareness.
You can prove this to yourself with a simple thought experiment. If you are experiencing your body and take away how it smells, what’s left? The other four senses. Take away how your body sounds, and what’s left? Three senses. Take all of those away and what’s left? In other words, imagine yourself paralyzed in a hospital bed, blind and deaf, receiving no sensations from your body at all. What remains is only a concept, the notion of “I have a body.” That notion is something to hold on to, which is fine. No one is saying you have to return to the state of a baby chewing on a shoe.
The point instead is to realize that your body is a construct in awareness. If you take away every label and tag that defines you, the same thing will always be left behind: the awareness that builds constructs, modifies and destroys them, gets bored with an old story and rearranges it into a new one. the only stable self is the awareness that participates in this creative process. Therefore, the world’s wisdom traditions teach that there is no “I” except awareness, and what it happens to be doing, which is knowing and experiencing.
How does this cure the current state of malaise? Diving into the drama leads eventually to exhaustion and misery. Staying above the drama is impossible–you may have no interest in politics, but the drama has a thousand other hooks. Wisdom consists in knowing that there is a third option. Take control of the constructs you have been immersed in. Realize that you can do and undo these constructs. This realization brings a sense of excitement and independence of real control and creative living. Isn’t that a lot better than suffering from the malaise?

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 You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

Congressman Steve Israel is a Distinguished Writer-In-Residence at Long Island University in New York and was a Member of Congress for sixteen years. He served as House Democrats chief political strategist as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; and President Bill Clinton called him “one of the most thoughtful Members of Congress.” He published a critically acclaimed satire of Washington entitled “The Global War on Morris” in 2015. Israel is a political commentator on CNN. His insights appear regularly in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere.

Reality Is Structured in Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra, MD

One of the most surprising survivors in our society, long counted out as either moribund or dead, is philosophy. The “love of truth,” as the Greek term describes, was defeated by science and its love of facts. So it was unexpected when the New York Times ran an op-ed piece titled “If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?” (March 6, 2017) by the veteran English philosopher Roger Scruton.

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The piece begins by nodding toward the tradition of endowing human beings with a soul, a supernatural spark that sets us apart from the animals, and quite realistically Scruton notes that “Recent advances in genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology have all but killed off that idea.” Although a popular belief in the soul is very much alive, our official secular culture and its primary source of knowledge, science, totally dismisses it.

What then? Scruton uses a split-the-difference tactic, arguing that although we are undeniably animals who evolved from primitive ancestors, we aren’t just animals. We are special creatures, beginning with our sense of morality. Modern philosophy, therefore, continues to ask the same questions about human specialness as ancient philosophy, searching for the true secret of being human. Scruton looks first to morality as a truth about being human, which most people would sympathize with.
“We believe that people have rights, that they are sovereign over their lives, and that those who live by enslaving or abusing others,” he writes, “are denying their own humanity.” But this appeal seems doomed, I think, because in a secular society truth and facts are the same, and for every nice thing that makes humans special, there are savage behaviors that place us far below the animal kingdom. Genocide, whether we like it or not, is just as human as compassion.

Scruton has more to say, but I think there’s an essential point he misses. Placing science up against philosophy doesn’t hold water, because science is itself a philosophy. The noted senior physicist George Ellis has pointed out quite sharply that when scientists disdain metaphysics, as the vast majority do, they are ignorant of the fact that their view of Nature is also metaphysical. To say that we live in a random universe, for example, is just as metaphysical as saying that the universe was made by God. Arguing than human begins are a mere speck in the cosmos, accidents of evolution that probably got repeated on hundreds or thousands of planets in other galaxies, declares a truth about humanness that is philosophical in its ramifications.

So splitting the difference with science isn’t going to breathe new life into philosophy. Scruton winds up with a fuzzy declaration that is unscientific but also inadequate philosophy: “…as persons we inhabit a life-world that is not reducible to the world of nature.” There’s nothing helpful in this, because things we cherish in our “life-world,” like love and compassion, are still going to be reduced to scientific explanations that for better or worse will rule the argument for a long time, just as they rule the argument now. If science is actually a philosophy, the critical question is this: which philosophy is the best one to live by?

The current crisis in physics doesn’t feature the word philosophy, but the predicaments are absolutely philosophical. Let me sketch in just one critical problem, which might be called the fudge factor. Fudging can imply dishonesty or taking shortcuts, but not in this case. Rather, certain numbers and explanations serve as placeholders while science awaits a new model–or even a new perspective on reality–to fill in the gaps. With the “discovery” of so-called dark matter and dark energy, physics has tried to fill in an enormous gap between theory and reality. Certain phenomena like the speed at which galaxies are rushing away from one another, cannot be explained away with new data. To fill in an enormous discrepancy, particularly in the cosmological constant, one of the most fundamental mathematical calculations in physics, dark matter and energy came along quite conveniently. Neither has ever been observed or directly measured. There is a strong feeling that their structure may be totally alien to the accepted structure of time, space, matter, and energy in the visible (non-dark) universe.

Since fudging the numbers requires such a huge adjustment, it was necessary to re balance creation so that 96% of it is dark, while the visible universe, including all the matter contained in stars, planets, galaxies, and interstellar dust, amount to only 4% of the total. This means that reality is largely unknown, for even though it’s accepted in many circles that a special particle known as a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) may forge a link with the known universe, no one has ever detected such a particle. Like the multiverse and superstring theory, dark matter and energy may be unknowable. All of these structures are totally mathematical, existing as creations of human consciousness. They provide no data or measurements. Therefore, if you are a radical skeptic, the whole superstructure of modern physics may be just a huge fudge factor.

Even if you aren’t willing to take that spectacular leap, even everyday subatomic particles like electrons are not objective, free-standing things like a loaf of bread or a tree. Being dual in nature, electrons exhibit “thingness” when they are observed but exist the rest of the time aswaves of potentiality with no fixed qualities of any kind. This is a bedrock fact of quantum physics going back to its early days over a century ago. To stitch together a marriage of convenience between the everyday world of big objects and the quantum world of very tiny ones (which are dubiously called objects in the first place), it was necessary to erect a wall separating the two domains. This détente isn’t scientifically convincing, but at least it was reassuring. Quantum events could continue to be “spooky action at a distance” while the everyday world chugged along normally.

Only now it appears that the everyday world of big objects is probably quantum in nature, too. Big objects move so slowly, however, that we are fooled by their appearance of solidity. In reality, nothing is fixed, solid, firmly in place, or unchanging. Every piece of creation is caught up in the same process of flow, unpredictability, and spookiness. Without going into details, let’s admit that the fudge factor, which attests to a huge mismatch between theory and reality, upends science’s claim to hard-headed facts. Science is a collection of concepts created in the human mind, just like philosophy. Electrons exist because in our species of consciousness, we gave them a name attached to a concept, and one of the concepts was to call electrons objects or things. In another mode of knowing–perhaps possessed by “dark” thinkers in a domain we can’t conceive of-electrons are totally different, if they exist at all. All of these ideas are explored in great detail in a new book , You Are the Universe I co-wrote with physicist Menas Kafatos.

Over the past century philosophy has capitulated to science, and all of us, whether we realize it or not, live according to the philosophy that science espouses. Because of science’s triumphant discovery of new technologies, we assume that its philosophy must be right. This is like a medieval person who happened to see an airplane fly overhead then rushes to tell his priest that God is real. Technology isn’t the doorkeeper of truth. There is really only one viable way forward. A livable philosophy must be based on a foundation in reality, and for that purpose, the only way we know anything is through consciousness. Reality is an activity in consciousness, whether it’s a matter of falling in love or creating the concept of an electron. Until everyone begins to explore a consciousness-based approach to reality, the pursuit of science and philosophy will both be hobbled.

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 You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.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

Why Spirituality Matters More than Ever

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In troubled times, when the world seems to be on fire, people think about God and the religion they were raised in–a source of solace and hope matters more in a crisis. I don’t find myself thinking about spirituality in those terms, however. Like a winter coat that’s put away in spring, for many people spirituality, in the sense of going to church or praying to God, gets put away when the crisis has passed.

 

Crises by their nature, come and go, but the deeper need for spirituality remains. This need is rooted deeper than solace and hope. It’s the need for wisdom.  Wisdom is a word that’s open to cheap shots and automatic dismissal. It’s even alien to the kind of spirituality that’s about issues like self-esteem and love. Wisdom is much less personal and mysterious. It gets at the heart of why we exist and what our purpose is. Wisdom gives you a vision of possibilities that are found in consciousness, bridging all ages and circumstances.  It gets at the heart of reality. Ultimately the search for reality is what binds a loose coalition of people who want to reach beyond organized religion and its perceived drawbacks.

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Will God 2.0 Be Indispensable in Ten Years?

by Deepak Chopra, MD

The primary difficult with God isn’t belief–more than 80% of US responders tell pollsters that they believe God exists. The problem is that God is irrelevant, providing few if any practical benefits in daily life. In an age of faith the circumstances were in God’s favor. When people got sick or died, had a run of bad luck, committed immoral acts, received unexpected rewards, or couldn’t have children–the list of situations was endless–God was invoked to explain why. In one way or another, the deity was interwoven into the fabric of daily life. (more…)