Ending Our Fear of Death

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Fear is a powerful force, nowhere more so than when it comes to death and dying. By comparison, the solutions for solving other fears seem useless. You cannot test your fear; you cannot feel it and move on anyway. There is little reason to trust other people who seem to have no such fear. They have no more valid experience of dying than any other person who is alive.

It is reported that near-death experiences leave survivors without any fear of death, because they have seen the other side and found it unfearful. But near-death experiences, although highly publicized, are rare, even among patients who have died on the table in the emergency room, generally from a heart attack, and been resuscitated. You can take hope from their anecdotal stories—and millions do—but the information remains second-hand.

Fear of death is unique in the hold it has over us, and we spend our lives hiding or suppressing it. The prospect of not existing seems too overwhelming to face. But in one respect, despite its uniqueness, the fear of death can be faced and dismantled. There is a cure that is available to anyone. It consists of exposing death as an illusion,

This is the last solution people seek, in all probability, because death looks so real, and the sight of a corpse is frightening and disturbing to most of us. Instead of bringing our fear of death to light, we feel too emotional to begin. But overcoming your emotions puts the cart before the horse. Our fear and revulsion didn’t arise by themselves; they are the coating, as it were, that surrounds the core of illusion, an after-effect rather than the cause.

We can trace the cause backwards by dissecting the illusion in stages, beginning with the top layer and working toward the source of the fear that gave rise to everything else, as follows:

  • When my body dies, I die.
  • I am my body.
  • I reside inside my body and need it to survive.
  • Death is the opposite of life.
  • Death is non-existence.
  • Nothing is worse than non-existence.

As you can see, fear of death is a layered belief system; it isn’t a simple belief. To overcome this fear each layer must be dismantled, which means exposing the belief as false and processing the emotions tangled up in the belief. Taken one step at a time, the process of dismantling isn’t difficult. The difficulty arises when we try to attack fear of death all at once. That tactic is doomed, given how many false ideas are woven together inside our fear.

Let me show how the dismantling process works by briefly confronting each layer of fear.

  1. When my body dies, I die. This idea has only an emotional basis, generally rooted in childhood when a pet dies and our parents are at a loss to console us. This lack of consolation goes viral, we might say, as the years bring more experience of death. The rational mind knows that there is no data from the brain of a dead person, no credible witnessing beyond the grave, and so on. So this idea can be put on the shelf as unproven and unprovable.
  2. I am my body. This idea is actually just an assumption. One can just as easily say, “I am my mind.” Since the whole difficulty concerns the question of whether the mind dies with the body, it does no good to claim as a fact that you are your body. The current belief in neuroscience is that the mind arises from the brain, so if the brain dies, the mind is extinguished. But there is no proof that the brain produces the mind, and much evidence that it doesn’t, since no one has been able to show that the quite ordinary atoms and molecules that constitute a brain cell ever learned to think.
  3. I reside inside my body and need it to survive. This idea is somewhat different from the first two ideas, because it isn’t an assumption but a misperception. We learned as children to perceive the world “out there” from a position “in here.” But perception is unreliable until it is examined. When you cut your finger, the pain is perceived in the finger when we know logically that the sensation is actually processed in the brain. You can scan your body up and down quite easily, and you can scan the world around you just as easily. This implies that perception isn’t trapped “in here.” The possibility that perception has no fixed location helps to dismantle the misperception that “in here” and “out there” are opposites.
  4. Death is the opposite of life. It is clear that all created forms come and go. Thoughts arise and fade. The body you have includes trillions of cells that were not present when you were two years old. This all points to a simple reality: creation is in flux. Change is constant, and therefore a continuum. What we term death is a concept by which we attempt to fix arbitrary boundaries in a continuum that has no such boundaries. It is false to say that a heart or brain cell is alive while the atoms inside it are dead. The whole thing is purely a mental construct that we created and therefore can uncreate.
  5. Death is non-existence. Now we are getting close to the seed or source of the whole illusion. To say and feel that someone who has died no longer exists is a frightening prospect. But we don’t actually know what non-existence is. Our only connection to not existing is by thinking about it, and thinking by definition exists. Likewise, if we equate non-existence with the extinguishing of consciousness, our only connection is to think about having no consciousness, which is a conscious thought. It is impossible to frame any acceptable reality to non-existence except within the domain of existence, and for a human being, existence must be conscious.
  6. Nothing is worse than non-existence. Finally we get at the core illusion, the one thing fear depends upon when it comes to death. Being aware that we exist and are conscious, we don’t want those things to vanish. In fact, such a vanishing act seems to occur every night when we go to sleep, but all that really happens is that we lose our personal point of view when we sleep. A personal point of view is the product of a separate “I” that identifies with everyday experience, and everyday experience is filtered through mental activity.

But clearly mental activity isn’t the mind, just as the miles on a speedometer isn’t a car. The car and the mind both move, but they don’t have to in order to exist. Silent mind can easily be experienced. There is a silent gap between any two thoughts or sensations.

The experience of silent mind, sleep, and simply tuning out for a moment isn’t fearful in the slightest. These experiences are not even close to non-existence. In fact, non-existence cannot be experienced, since by definition you have to exist to have any experience.

Once you realize that non-existence cannot be experienced, with or without a physical body, there is nothing to fear. However vividly you imagine a fire-breathing dragon, it can’t arouse true fear. An elaborate fiction can be built around dragons, but entering their imaginative domain is a choice, and ultimately we know the choice is pure imagination. The same holds true when we choose to enter the domain where death is the ultimate fear. Once you pierce the mask of illusion, you can choose to exit the domain where this fear exists, and then you are free.

 

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. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

The Best Way to Change Your Life: Getting Unstuck

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are lots of reasons to consider the human mind is unfathomable, beginning with simple evidence like the thousands of psychology books on the market and the years of training required to become a licensed psychiatrist. But it is possible to create huge changes in how your mind is working, here and now, that do not require in-depth knowledge.

Instead, all that is needed is the habit of watching yourself. Life is about action and reaction. Very complex and tangled influences may be at work—and almost certainly are—but they mostly remain undercover. What we experience is action and reaction, which leads to each person’s unique pattern of behaving.

Looking at your behavior on the scale of months and years, or even days and weeks, is impossible, because everyone has thousands of thoughts that lead to thousands of actions and reactions. But it is very different, and much easier, to simply look at what happens next. If you look at your next reaction to anything—an incident at work, a phone call, your child running in with a scraped knee—the same thing happens next: you do something based on the past.

You possess a backlog, a virtual library, of memories that imprinted how you acted and reacted. Some people are more predictable than others in how they act and react—a frontline soldier confronts very limited options compared with a philosopher. But everyone consults a library of set responses when the next thing happens.

If these set responses work out reasonably well, most people are satisfied. They react and move on. But if you take a moment to observe your next reaction, some disturbing clues emerge about what is actually going on inside you. These observations include the following:

  • Your reactions are knee-jerk and not actually thought through.
  • Being the product of memory, your reaction is repeating the past rather than meeting the present moment.
  • Set responses make you a robot of the past.
  • If you think you are living in the present, you are the victim of an illusion.

These observations describe someone who is stuck. Stuckness doesn’t need a technical definition. Look around, and you will see people repeating themselves all the time, engaging in mindless daily routines, arguing over the same old things in relationship, feeling uncomfortable with change, and suffering pain and frustration because their lives never seem to improve.

None of that sounds desirable, so why do we content ourselves with being stuck? Again observation provides an answer. If you look at your next reaction, there is a push-and-pull between the positive and negative aspects of being stuck.

Positive: Routine makes life predictable and reassuring. Repetition is the path of least resistance. It feels safe to know where you stand. Fixed reactions remove the threat of the unknown.

Negatives: Routine is stifling and boring. Repetition is stultifying. It feels empty to think of yourself as a known quantity, with nothing new to offer. By not welcoming the unknown, all avenues of creativity, discovery, and curiosity are cut off.

If you consider the positives and negatives for a moment, there’s no contest. Everyone would want to get unstuck. Tolerating a routine, repetitive existence leads nowhere. We all know this inside, even if we have to dig deep to admit the truth. Money, skill, and status don’t make a difference, which is why doctors have a high burnout rate.

The real problem isn’t stuckness but not knowing how to get unstuck. The simple step already mentioned—observing your own reactions—is the key. Stuckness represents a surrender to unconscious habits, beliefs, and old conditioning. To undo their hold on you, you must first observe how these influences work. You cannot change what you aren’t aware of.

What should you start noticing? Very simple things, really.

  • Notice when you say something you said before.
  • Notice when you react the same way you reacted in the past.
  • Notice when other people tune you out.
  • Notice how you actually feel, here and now.
  • Notice when you resort to anxiety or anger.

Many times, all you have to do is to observe these repeated reactions and they will start to dissolve and dissipate. You are exchanging an unconscious existence for a conscious one, and living consciously is both the remedy and the goal of getting unstuck. But there is also a simple action you can take. When you notice any of the reactions on the list—in other words, any obvious repetition of old conditioning—stop at once.

By stopping you tell your unconscious mind that you don’t want to operate on autopilot. What happens next? Wait and see. Most of the time, especially at first, the old conditioning will force its way back. Autopilot has had years of reinforcement. It thinks it knows what to do in any situation. Only you have the power to wake up from this fixed notion, because only your conscious mind can turn the autopilot off.

Getting unstuck requires nothing more than what I’ve described. Everyone has conscious moments, many of them in fact. No one is ever completely robotic. We sense the upwelling of love, joy, curiosity, altruism, sympathy, insight, and intuition. These are non-reactive responses. Diminish your automatic reactions and expand your responses to life here and now. Again, that is both the remedy and the goal. The fully conscious life is the best life. To discover that this is so, the place to begin is by getting unstuck.

 

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. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

Trading In the Afterlife for One Life

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Every doctrine of the afterlife has run into the same problem, which is that of belief. For centuries the existence of life after death has been couched in religious terms, which necessitates believing in religion before the question of the afterlife can be approached. Is it possible to say something more firmly grounded than mere belief, which falls so short of certainty?
With the continuing decline of organized religion in developed countries, a strain of rational atheism has arisen that seems to have the backing of science. In this view, since we lack data from people who have died, there is no reason to abide by age-old myths concerning a promise of life after death. Fundamentally, the death and decay of the physical body points to the death of the mind, because to a physicalist the mind is a product of the brain.

The weakness in this viewpoint is twofold. First, it is founded on unproven assumptions. No one has proved that the brain produces the mind, only that brain activity parallels mental activity. By analogy, the heart beats faster when someone gets excited emotionally, but by no means does this prove that the heart produces emotions. The second flaw is that receiving no data from people who have died begs the question. Entire theories of cosmology delve into string theories and the multiverse with no data and indeed no chance of gathering any data. There are certain boundaries that physical exploration cannot cross, but this obstacle doesn’t invalidate their existence.

Nor is atheism the only rational choice. The 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal devised a famous wager in the face of his own doubt about God. A rational person, Pascal argued, should believe in God, because if God doesn’t exist, only a small loss is incurred by following the strictures of religion, while if God does exist, eternal life would be gained after death. The argument is just as rationally based as modern scientific atheism, and it is pertinent that Pascal was also a mathematician.

But both of these rational tactics do little more than speculate about probabilities. Belief, whatever its flaws, has proved comforting to those who have it. What’s needed is a view of the afterlife that is reassuring in the face of fear and not based on probabilities. For that, I believe the important factor is a credible theory of life, for without this, a theory of death has no basis.
The most credible theory of life that we have isn’t physical, which will surprise most people. (I’ve backed up this contention in a previous blog, “Should You Plan on Your Next Incarnation.”) Except among hardline materialists (which admittedly constitute the majority of scientists) it seems highly plausible that consciousness is woven into the fabric of creation; it is not a property that emerged from a more basic property.

As the pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck declared in a 1931 interview with the Observer newspaper in London, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Almost ninety years later, physics is gradually but steadily coming around to the same conclusion.

Let’s accept as the basis for a theory of life that life is conscious, even if the consciousness of a virus, an oak tree, a frog, and a chimpanzee is foreign and far removed from the human experience of consciousness. The next step is to humanize a theory of life to make it matter personally. After all, when we can bring ourselves to think about our own death, the issue is very personal.
Fear of death is so powerful that it blocks clear thinking, but here are some premises about consciousness that hold water. The first is that every experience has the same three aspects. There is a knower who knows his experience through the process of knowing. Whether we are referring to a sore tooth, viewing the Mona Lisa, or reading the words on this page, the same three elements—knower, known, and process of knowing—are contained in the experience.

There is every reason to suppose that this is the basic setup for the human mind. We know no other setup, and if another one exists—for example, if galaxies perceive themselves consciously—it will be inaccessible from our own setup. In fact, the consciousness of a pet dog or cat is just as inaccessible, no matter how closely we observe their behavior.

In the setup of knower, known, and process of knowing, all three elements are unified—you cannot have one without the others. Therefore, separating out the physical body and giving it a privileged position is invalid. There is nothing about the dying body that proves the extinction of the mind, any more than the dying away of your next thought proves that your body is dying. Every phenomenon is transient, yet life persists because consciousness persists to sustain it.

The fact that the cells in your body have a limited lifetime dictated by DNA, with stomach cells dying in less than a week, red blood corpuscles in a few months, and bone cells after years, doesn’t threaten the body. The body remains intact through a non-physical trait, memory. The body remembers how to exist as a whole entity, and within this memory, one finds precision, intelligence, detailed technical knowledge about how to build a cell, and an intricate system of cooperation among various organs.
This is like seeing a building stand even though bricks are replaced in and out of it constantly—the blueprint holds it together, we can say, but in the case of the body the blueprint is alive. It responds dynamically to everything happening inside and outside the body. To say that DNA has this capacity is another invalid claim. DNA controls the production of enzymes and proteins inside a cell. This is a critical function for the maintenance of life but has almost no bearing on how the human body as a whole sustains itself as a dynamic living entity.

The body is sustained by a quality observed in every natural system: wholeness. Wholeness keeps every level of life intact: atoms and molecules, DNA, proteins and enzymes, a community of cells in a tissue, then an organ, and finally a body. This can be seen as an extension of the unity between knower, known, and the process of knowing, because in its own way, every atom, molecule, cell, tissue, organ, and body has to know what it is doing. To know what it is doing requires the other two elements of knower and known.

Taking a bird’s eye view, all life forms recycle the same triad of knower, known, and process of knowing in a distinctive way. This is also true of you and me. We know ourselves as individuals, and seven billion individuals on planet Earth construct unique lives out of knower, known, and process of knowing. Our setup is different from other species of consciousness in that we have self-awareness, which (we suppose) is a uniquely human trait.

The flaw in the setup arises when we take self-awareness in the wrong direction. We identify with “I,” a fixed ego-personality inhabiting a fixed physical body. In reality, at any given moment the body is provisional, a snapshot in time capturing the endless, dynamic recycling of its basic materials. Likewise, “I” is also a snapshot capturing a fleeting moment in the endless stream of consciousness that constitutes our inner life.

You are no more the self you were at age two than your body is that of a two-year-old’s. All identity is provisional, liable to the flux of time. What isn’t provisional is the persistence of knower-known-process of knowing. It recycles the flow of physical and mental life without altering in its essential status. Its essential status is as firm and lasting as existence itself. Every lifespan observable in Nature is sustained and kept intact by the invisible meshing of non-change in the midst of change.

I regard this as the most reliable foundation for losing our fear of death. With a clear view of how life actually works, and how absolutely essential it is for wholeness to govern all of life at every level, we can place our trust in eternal life. Wholeness will never let us go. Ultimately, eternal life isn’t a religious or spiritual matter. Eternal life rests upon eternal consciousness. The argument for eternal consciousness is at least as solid as our sense of being human and of accepting the universe around us. In the future, if a more evolved explanation appears, it is highly likely to cement together even more strongly the unity of existence, life, and consciousness.

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. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

Should You Plan for Your Next Incarnation?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Do you believe in reincarnation, and if so, does it matter? According to a 2018 Pew Research survey, 33% of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, yet it is beyond the range of ordinary polling to ask why this belief exists. In an age of faith, both East and West, a person’s daily life was deeply influenced by a religion’s teaching about the afterlife.

Questions of sin and redemption, karmic retribution, heavens and hells, and journeys through other bodies such as those of animals—these were pressing concerns for many centuries. Now in modern secular society, the question of surviving the extinction of the physical body has been channeled into belief versus science. We don’t ask if God finds us worthy to go to heaven so much as how credible a near-death experience might be according to the best research.

The scheme of belief versus science is something of a false divide, however. There has been credible research on reincarnation, which would surprise most people, including scientists. Pioneering studies were conducted by Ian Stevenson, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia Medical School, who began investigating the phenomenon of young children who say they recall a past life. Hundreds of such cases were looked into with the aim of validating if the person they remembered being actually existed.

Stevenson traveled the world closely examining children’s memories and matching them to specific individuals, and not only were many validated, but some children even bore physical signs of injuries sustained when their previous incarnation died. After Stevenson’s death in 2010, the research was continued by another U. of V. psychiatrist, Jim Tucker, who presents some fascinating statistics in two books. In an online article that summarizes some of the more startling numbers,

  • Around 20% of young children claim to have memories of the time between death and birth.
  • 60% of children who claim to remember past lives are male.
  • Roughly 70% of such children remember an unnatural or violent death.
  • The average time spent between lifetimes is 16 months.
  • Such reports occur in general in children between the ages of 2 and 6, after which the phenomenon of remembering a past life wanes.

There has been no serious questioning of the validity of this research, and Tucker explains reincarnation in terms of natural phenomena. “Quantum physics indicates that our physical world may grow out of our consciousness. That’s a view held not just by me, but by a number of physicists as well.”

Without a doubt there’s a need in contemporary physics to account for consciousness in the universe. No physical explanation has been satisfactory in the past. People casually assume that as life evolved and became more complex, the primitive brains of lower species evolved into the massive brain of Homo sapiens. The physical evidence for that is unassailable. Yet no one has described why and how any brain is related to the mind. Brain cells do nothing so different from any other cell that their activity should produce a three-dimensional world complete with sights and sounds from an organ the texture of cold oatmeal that is totally dark and silent inside.

To overcome this huge gap in our understanding of reality, two trends have cropped up in physics—one is panpsychism, the notion that the universe contains traits of mind or proto-mind the way it contains matter and energy, the other the notion that information is at the root of mind, again with the assumption that the cosmos had this property from the very outset 13.8 billion years ago. Panpsychism and information theory are fashionable, but no one knows if they are valid explanations of mind or Band-Aids applied to keep physics patched together.

Without settling the unknowable future, one thing is clear. After decades of stubbornly insisting that only physical data are needed to explain everything about creation, some scientists are assigning validity to human perceptions—this is where the trail to reincarnation begins. I’m not referring to a full-blown leap into the arms of life after death. Instead, words like harmony, beauty, balance, and orderliness are acceptable in describing mathematics. Since mathematics is the fundamental language of physics, applying human terms, and subjective terms at that, to numbers is a radical step (despite the fact that mathematicians have spoken personally about the beauty of numbers for centuries).

A similar shift can be observed in evolution, where Darwin’s theory resulted over time in making evolutionary studies a matter of data and statistical distributions. The rigor of modern Darwinism may be a fig leaf to cover the obvious flaw in evolutionary studies—namely that no experiments on evolution can be conducted, since evolution either took place long ago or is proceeding now at a creepingly slow rate. Suddenly in recent decades so-called “soft” inheritance has broken the lockstep of rigid Darwinism. “Soft” inheritance holds that genes do not have to mutate to create evolutionary traits, as “hard” inheritance insists upon—after all, living things are born with a complement of genes that are fixed for life.

Thanks to a new field called epigenetics, it has become evident that a creature’s life experiences can actually be passed on to future generations via genetic markers that influence how DNA is triggered and regulated. Instead of an on-off switch, DNA operates more on a rheostat. Epigenetics may explain as much or more about the rise of species as the discovery of DNA itself.

I’ve skimmed through radical shifts in scientific thought to arrive at the real significance of reincarnation. What Nature presents, from the level of subatomic particles to the level of DNA, is an endless recycling. Just as physics tells us matter and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, the same is thought to apply to information and, going a step further, to consciousness. Everything in Nature is about endless transformation, and in the cosmic recycling bin, ingredients are not simply jumbled and rejumbled like balls in a Bingo cage.

Instead, as viewed in human perception, Nature exhibits evolution through three linked processes: memory, creativity, and imagination. Memory keeps the past intact, allowing older forms to contribute to new ones. Creativity allows for novelty so that recycling isn’t mere repetition of the same forms over and over. Imagination allows for invisible possibilities to take shape, either in the mind or the physical world.

If everything in Nature is recycling under the influence of memory, creativity, and imagination, it seems very likely that human consciousness participates in the same recycling. Or to put it another way, if human consciousness doesn’t recycle/reincarnate, we’d be outside a process that includes everything else in the universe but us. Is that really probable?

The argument for the probability of reincarnation, added to the research on children’s memories of past lives, is very persuasive, so the future of reincarnation looks bright. No one can credibly call it a mere belief or superstition or a holdover from the age of faith. But a probability is weaker than a certainty, and no one should plan on their next incarnation without a stronger argument, perhaps strong enough to approach certainty. That’s the enticing possibility we’ll discuss in the next post.
(to be cont.)

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians 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. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Giving “Wholeness” a Higher Meaning

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Thanks to its positive connotations, “wholeness” has become a buzz word in areas of life as
diverse as holistic medicine, whole-foods nutrition, and the human potential movement, which
aims to create a whole person rather than a separate, fragmented one. What these various
applications have in common is that wholeness is a choice—and there the problem lies.

If you are talking about whole foods versus processed foods, wholeness is certainly a choice,
and the same can be said for holistic as opposed to mainstream medicine with its reliance on
drugs and surgery. But speaking about a whole person is somehow different. If you consider the
issue a bit deeper, becoming a whole person is involved in the most fundamental questions
about what it means to be human.

The nature of human consciousness is such that we can take any viewpoint we want towards
our own existence. This goes beyond being an optimist or pessimist, beyond positive thinking.
Or even psychology. At the most basic level, each of us decides how to relate to reality itself. In
the modern era society teaches us to relate to reality through scientific, rational, logical means.
Nature, including human nature, is thus quantified, measured, mined for data, and arranged
through rational explanations.

From such a perspective, the human mind must be the product of the brain, following the basic
logic that brain activity can be measured and quantified. This fact seems so obvious that
neuroscience claims to be the prime, perhaps the only, way to explain the mind. Yet this claim
runs afoul of the entire subjective world, which obviously exists—everyone is aware of
sensations, visual images, sounds, thoughts, flashes of memory, etc., which occur “in here.”
This entire realm of human existence cannot be turned into data or quantified. (For some
background, you might want to consult the most recent post, “Why Math Is Leading Us Deeper
into Illusion.”)

Even though modern society officially relates to reality through scientific, rational means,
people actually keep a foot in two worlds, attending to the worlds “out there” and “in here”
separately. In consciousness studies this is known as the subject-object split, but it is far more
than theoretical. Every experience renews the subject-object split, because in every experience
there is something “out there” that registers as a perception “in here.” Fireworks are shot off
on the Fourth of July, hot dogs are served at the ballpark, the sun sets and the moon rises—in
each case, the objective worlds presents a phenomenon, and the mind perceives it, usually
followed by a personal reaction—oohing and aahing at the fireworks, enjoying the hot dog,
feeling a romantic glow in the moonlight, and so on.

On the surface you might suppose that relating to reality through the subject-object split is the
only way to relate. If so, then aiming to be a whole person would be futile. Wholeness by
definition lies beyond any kind of split or fragmentation. In physics, for example, more than a
century has been spent attempting to fuse two irreconcilable domains, the quantum world of
microscopic phenomena and the so-called classical world of macroscopic phenomena. This split
pertains to everyday life because there should be a seamless connection between quanta, the
basic building blocks of nature, and all the things we see around us—rocks, trees, mountains,
and clouds.

So far the split has proved insoluble, however, and physics remains with a rift down the middle
that no one has been able to fuse or bridge. The same is true in the human mind. The world
“out there” operates through things like cause-and-effect that should seamlessly connect to our
subjective responses. Sometimes there is no serious rift. If you poke someone with a pin, they
will go “ouch” almost without exception.

Yet these predictable responses are few compared with the unique ways in which seven billion
people are building a life story based on their own beliefs, memories, desires, fears, and
predilections. You cannot robotize a human being, no matter how hard authoritarian regimes
have tried. There is always the unknown, unpredictable possibility of a new and unexpected

thought. That’s the source of our greatest human gift, creativity. But it is also the source of our
suffering. The unpredictable mind is intimately tied to the uncontrollable mind, which afflicts us
with guilt, shame, doubt, hostility, anxiety, and depression.

For centuries it has been declared, usually in a religious or spiritual context, that the cause of
suffering is the separate self. Isolated and alone, building our individual stories, we have no
connection to wholeness. We are like coral reefs amassed from tiny grains of experience, and
that’s that unless we can exchange the subject-object split—the very thing that placed us in
separation—for a new relationship with reality.

Let’s say that you accept the terms of this argument, or if you don’t, let’s say you have other
reasons for believing that wholeness is worth attaining. How would you get there? What would
it feel like? Might you not be better off with your present life, warts and all, than pursuing some
chimera? The answer to all of these questions is the same: they are the wrong questions. They
presuppose that wholeness is a choice when in reality it isn’t.

Wholeness is everything. It is the One, the All, or Brahman, as it was known in Vedic India.
Being whole, it cannot be accepted or rejected. It cannot be lost, either. To choose wholeness is
like saying “I chose not to exist yesterday, but I have decided to exist today.” Another
implication, which will surprise almost everyone, is that you cannot related to wholeness. There
can only be a relation between two separate things, and wholeness has no separations, no
divisions, no “this and that,” no “yes or no.”

As a result, wholeness offers the possibility for choiceless awareness. In choiceless awareness
you experience yourself as whole, which is to say, as pure existence and pure consciousness.
You still accomplish the things you ordinarily do in the world, but your experience is seamless
and unified. I realize that choiceless awareness sounds arcane if not impossible. We are so used
to relating to reality through the subject-object split that everything is a matter of A or B.
Countless choices fill our lives.

But these choices have not made us happier, wiser, or more certain about who we are and
what our place is in the universe. Indeed, no ultimate questions have been solved, which is the
legacy of separation. We peer into reality like children with their noses pressed to the window
of a candy store. This isn’t the place to detail what the journey to wholeness actually is (for
that, please see my book, The Book of Secrets), but the road to wholeness begins by knowing
what’s at stake: a complete shift in how we relate to reality. From there, the possibility of
higher existence opens up.

 

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. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com