Universe - The Chopra Foundation

Artificial Intelligence Is Already Here—It’s Us

Deepak Chopra, MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos. Other recent books include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

How Reality Is Made: The Play of Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra, MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing the Truth Gap and How to Close It

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There’s a truth gap that has nothing to do with facts versus lies in politics. Rather, it has to do with how we verify that something is true. Without doing it consciously, everyone shifts their “mode of knowing” all the time. That phrase is necessary because everyday truth is relative. It depends on what viewpoint you take and nothing else. For example, everyone trusts their five senses, but when the eyes tell us that the sun rises over the horizon in the morning, we shift our mode of knowing because intellectually that sensory perception isn’t true. If looking at a sunset makes us happy, we are shifting into an inner knowing that’s entirely private, since only the person having an emotion knows that it is real.

Because relative truth is what experience delivers, it would seem that the story ends there. Science attempts to tighten up relative truth through data, measurements, experiments, and findings that can be replicated. But that is still just another mode of knowing with its own slippery relativism. After all, it was a scientist, Albert Einstein, who subjected time and space to relativity, while another quantum pioneer, Werner Heisenberg, not only introduced the Uncertainty Principle into modern physics but declared that the atom has no intrinsic qualities. In their everyday work scientists can largely ignore the radical relativism of the physical world, but pretending that it doesn’t’ exist; that scientific objectivity is the end all and be all of truth, is intellectually naïve.

One could sort all our modes of knowing into an impressive range of choices as we shift from the five senses to the intellect, from speaking to doing, from feeling to perceiving and interpreting. Relative truth is so vast and diverse that it is easy to mistake what we really know. If one person says that granite is hard while another person, resorting to quantum mechanics, says that granite is composed of clouds of particles winking in and out of a measurable state, ultimately existing as probability waves, then two modes of knowing have clashed. In reality, neither mode has a privileged position. Relative truth is relative, just as the term says.

But we spend most of our lives defending the mode of knowing we happen to favor. Scientists will adamantly defend the scientific method with the zeal that a churchman in the Middle Ages defended prayer, reflection, contemplation, and meditation as the only way to truth. At the opposite pole from science, there’s a tradition of knowledge that goes inward in order to acquire self-awareness, and in both East and West “Know thyself” has an honored legacy.

But when one mode of knowing competes with another in this way, something illusory is going on. Relative modes of knowing are equal choices, like flavors of ice cream lined up on a freezer shelf in the supermarket. In the mental life of human beings, what justifies picking one flavor of truth over another is practicality. It’s practical to get out of the way if a block of granite falls off a building, just as it’s practical for the weatherman to announce the times for sunrise and sunset.

Intuitively we understand this, because everyone has a lifetime’s worth of experience shifting from one mode of knowing to another. When heated arguments break out between atheists and religious believers, we rightly assume that this has little to do with the issues and challenges of everyday life. On the other hand, when climate change deniers block the findings of climate scientists, we sense an urgency that provokes guilt and apprehension about the future. So modes of knowing aren’t just theoretical or an intellectual game; they matter.

Then the question arises, Is there an escape from relative truth? The word “escape” seems strange at first sight, but in fact relative truth traps us in a world where all kinds of suffering, violence, war, crime, famine, disease, aging, and dying never seem to end. To be human is to know this fact, and wanting to find a way out is just as human. Some would say that suffering is simply inescapable; the best you can do is to hope you have better luck than most in evading pain and suffering. But this has not been the position taken by the world’s wisdom traditions.

They say that a gap exists between relative truth and absolute Truth with a capital T. This gap is known as the state of separation, meaning separate from God, the soul, our true nature, or ultimate realty, depending on what wisdom tradition you come from. In separation, also known as duality, truth is forced to be relative, because all the modes of knowing operate through opposites (good versus evil, light versus darkness, facts versus myths, birth versus death, etc.). Separation cannot escape itself, just as water cannot escape being wet—the whole relative setup is a closed system.

Or is it? What if there is a state outside duality, beyond separation? This nondual state is simply called Being. To exist is to be. Nothing could be simpler, yet for most people, to exist is a given, something unexamined and never investigated. This doesn’t constitute a failure of imagination. It simply attests to how self-enclosed the state of separation is. But if a color-blind person says that colors don’t exist, we know he’s wrong because of his limited ability to perceive. In the same way, saying that there is nothing outside the dualistic world is a failure of perception.

If you stand back, it is obvious that Being and knowing go together, like the wetness of water. To exist implies experience; experience embraces all relative modes of knowing. So there is a ground state we can call the state of pure knowing. This is consciousness itself. Here most people begin to feel lost. They are accustomed to relative truth. This requires an object of knowing. I know how to cook spaghetti, she knows all about Renaissance, art, he knows quantum physics. To escape this self-enclosed bubble, take the phrase “I know X” and remove the X. Then you are left with pure knowing, like the blank screen in the cinema before the movie begins.

Even if they can accept this analogy, people usually can’t see the good of depriving themselves of the relative modes of knowing—the five senses, feeling, thinking, doing, etc. If you once more stand back, there is actually a sense of threat at work. Our very selves are defined by relative truths, which create labels we cling to. “I” am a bundle of labels reinforced by memory, beliefs, wishes, hopes, and fears. Take it all away and what’s left?

The threat is that nothing will be left, but the reality isn’t threatening. What’s left is pure, undisturbed Being, where all the possibilities of relative life spring from. Imagine Einstein or Mozart sitting quietly in a chair, perhaps dozing off. They are simply existing with their consciousness in an undisturbed state. Yet we know that the possibility of great science and great music are still there. No one would deny this of Einstein and Mozart, yet they deny it of themselves.

If you can accept that the nondual state exists, it must exist in you. The field of infinite possibilities is your own awareness in its pure state. The escape from pain and suffering isn’t mystical or imaginary; you only have to rest in a state of undisturbed awareness. So it turns out that Truth with a capital T is real, not as a religious belief or abstract metaphysics. Absolute truth is the nondual state of awareness, and once we close the gap between relative truth and absolute Truth, we will find ourselves knowing who we are for the first time.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Grounding the Human Body for Health :

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

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

· Centered

· Solid

· Strong

· Balanced

· Less tense

· Less stressed

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

Increase in Illness

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

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

· Multiple sclerosis

· Lupus

· Inflammatory bowel disorders

· Rheumatoid arthritis

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

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

The Art of Grounding

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

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

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

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

Healing Benefits of Grounding

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

1. Decreased Levels of Inflammation and Pain

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

· 30 percent reduction in pain

· 70 percent reduction in pain interfering with sleep

· 30 percent reduction in morning stiffness and soreness

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

· 80 percent reduction in pain

· No sleep interference

· 70 percent reduction in morning stiffness and soreness

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

2. Reduced Stress Levels

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

3. Improved Circulation

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

How to Reconnect to the Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Grounding after moderate eccentric contractions reduces muscle damage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHORS

Martin Zucker

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

Gaétan Chevalier, PhD

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

Clint Ober

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

Paul J. Mills

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

Deepak Chopra, MD

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

Is There “Instant” Enlightenment?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Most people look upon enlightenment—whatever the term means to them-as remote, exotic, and unattainable without extreme effort. Enlightenment is the state a Tibetan Buddhist monk may reach after decades of mediation, or a yogi performing esoteric practices in a cave in the Himalayas. Yet if you strip away the Eastern esoteric context that has become attached to the word “enlightenment,” whatever it is must be a state of awareness. You can’t be enlightened and not know it. (Or if you don’t know it, you must have slipped into this state of awareness very, very gradually.)
The normal states of awareness are waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. They have in common that they are natural phenomena that require no self-awareness. Enlightenment is different, in that you consciously attain it, through whatever practice you choose. Because it has been considered subjective, any form of expanded self-awareness has been looked upon with suspicion in the West, which overlooks the fact that all kinds of states are subjective, such as being in pain or in love, feeling satisfied or curious, wanting to succeed, and so on. Our inner life is real, but each of us relates to it in a different way.
Your inner life determines if you are creative or not, empathic or not, insightful or not—and many other things, such as being happy, fulfilled, loving, depressed, anxious, etc. But enlightenment seems to be impersonal. No matter what kind of mental life you have, when you experience an enlightened state, you enter a spectrum of self-awareness that isn’t just one thing, but it does have common features, like the symptoms of catching a cold. These features include the following: emotions even out with fewer highs and lows; one feels a sense of detachment that isn’t involved in life’s everyday drama; the body feels lighter and perhaps disembodied; thoughts are fewer and tend to relate to the situation at hand—there is far less dwelling on the past or anticipating the future. More variable but also present are enhanced qualities of awareness such as becoming more blissful, loving, creative, insightful, self-confident, independent, and unswayed by outside forces.
In one way or another these features appear in everyday life; they just happen to be temporary and occasional. The fact that anyone can recognize, at least a little, what expanded self-awareness is like tells us two things. One, the enlightened state is normal and natural rather than exotic and eccentric. Two, it can be learned. These two insights are quite contemporary. The ancient wisdom traditions tend to set enlightenment apart from everyday existence. In India, for example, serious spiritual pursuits are saved for the end of life after a person has raised a family and retired.
Yet much of this sequestering was due to simple functional realities. In the ancient world survival was difficult, disease common, and social forces repressive. Expanded awareness is a form of personal freedom, which was very hard to attain if you led an ordinary life without the time and space to look inward. But it was never denied that enlightenment belonged to everyone. It was an open possibility, the only requirement being that you were aware enough to desire more awareness (which isn’t true of every person, even today). In short, reaching enlightenment involves conscious evolution. Like any other skill that build upon a basic mental function, like higher mathematics or learning three foreign languages, awareness has its own skill set.
The primary skills are focus, attention span, and intention. We all possess these skills in rudimentary form, and anytime we want, we can become more skillful, to the point of master. Swamis who can change their body temperature or endure extreme cold or bring their breathing almost to the point of cessation are doing these things in awareness. Intense focus, sustained attention, and strong intention don’t simply belong to swamis and yogis. You need them to graduate from law or medical school, for example.
Yet along the spectrum of expanded awareness, when you get past all the changes just cited, a sort of ultimate question arises. What is awareness itself? To make ice, you put water in the freezer; to produce stream, you subject water to high heat. It’s observable that water is the basis for these transformations. Yet as our minds undergo all kinds of transformations (in thought, feelings, sensations, moods, etc.), it’s not obvious at all what awareness is like before it gets manipulated. In the state of enlightenment, you have no more doubts on this issue. You know pure awareness as a personal experience.
This gives rise to a path of personal evolution known as the direct path. The direct path holds that pure awareness is with us all the time. It’s not a learned state, a philosophy, a skill, or anything extraordinary. When the mind is at rest and a person exists in a simple, undisturbed state, the experience comes close to being pure awareness. Instead of being transformed into thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc., your awareness simply is.
Then what? Then you are self-aware without complication. By definition, the first thing awareness can be aware of is itself. To be aware of a chair, you have to look outward. To be aware of feeling happy, you have to look inward. But to be aware that you exist in this moment, no movement in or out is required. The direct path therefore offers a form of instant enlightenment. Right this minute you know that you are aware, without the need to be aware of something “in here’ or “out there.” This recognition of the ground state of the mind isn’t immediately transformative. Having identified with mental activity all your life, it takes a major shift to identify with silent mind. If you become fascinated and curious about the state of pure awareness, over time it does bring transformation. As awareness continues to explore itself, you start to experience changes along the spectrum of enlightenment—the symptoms start to show up.
But the direct path is valuable in and of itself by pointing out that higher states of consciousness are hidden in plain sight—they are expansions of a normal, natural state. To know this without the trappings of religion, Eastern exoticism, and other biases has been one of the major achievements of modern spirituality, which can now be redefined as the exploration of consciousness in all its infinite possibilities.