Why Math Is Leading Us Deeper into Illusion

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It’s hard to imagine a world without numbers. The square footage of your house, the rent or mortgage payment, the weight you see on your bathroom scale are all examples of lower mathematics, while the GPS that guides your travels, your smartphone, and sending a space probe to Saturn are examples of higher mathematics. Yet the Pyramids and the Parthenon needed only lower math, little more than a few basic equations and the ability to count.

It seems absurd to call numbers a problem; they are too useful in every aspect of life. But if you aspire to go beyond your present state of consciousness, if you want to be happier, to find love, or to know yourself, mathematics is not only useless, it blocks the way. It traps you in an illusion and deepens the illusion in radical ways. Believe it or not, anything you can count, weigh, calculate, or measure is part of an all-embracing illusion—to grasp this fact will put you on the threshold to the “real” reality and your place in it.

I mean illusion in the most common sense of the word, the way a dream is an illusion. Imagine that you are dreaming one night, and inside your dream you can use numbers, measure things, and even pursue science. Obviously the ability to do these things would reassure you of the reality of your dream. But once the bubble is burst and you wake up, all the counting, measuring, and doing science would become instantly irrelevant.

Do you think this example doesn’t apply after you wake up? It does. To burst the bubble of numbers and the illusion they create, here are a few facts about the nature of a basic property of Nature, namely, light.

  • Photons, the elementary particles of light, are invisible and have no brightness whatsoever.
  • Light has two incompatible states, as a particle and a wave. Both can be measured, but how one state turns into another is a total mystery. We only can observe that it happens.
  • Color as a perception cannot be explained. Why red is red has nothing to do with its frequency or wavelength, any more than the sweet taste of sugar Is explained by counting the carbon atoms in a sugar molecule.
  • No one has the slightest idea why light exists in the first place.
  • The visual images you see in your mind’s eye cannot be explained by examining the brain.
  • The brain’s visual cortex has no pictures in it; indeed, it is totally dark and devoid of light.

If not shocked, I hope you are at least surprised to read these facts. What ties them together is one thing, a thing that marks the ultimate and total failure of mathematics: consciousness. Your consciousness gives light its brightness and color, creates images in our mind, and experiences the world as a theater of events in time and space.

For sticklers who believe I am exaggerating the failure of numbers on their own, to explain reality, please see a classic paper on the baffling relationship of math and reality, written by the eminent Princeton physicist Eugene Wigner in 1960 and entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner’s argument is dense, but he arrives at the conclusion that without an explanation of consciousness, mathematics has a totally mysterious relationship to reality.

Let’s concede that math can’t explain anything about consciousness. So what? Everyone depends on the world of technology, and the course of civilization has itself depended on mathematics ever since the first architectural measurements were made thousands of years ago using knots evenly spaced on a rope. If all of that is an illusion, welcome to it. That’s how most people would react. As for scientists, who have a deep aversion to “metaphysical” speculations, there’s a famous putdown in science, “Shut up and calculate.”

To get past “So what?” isn’t easy if you refuse to entertain the very notion that the everyday physical world is an illusion. But the existence of solid tangible objects was long ago undermined by quantum physics. If you delve deeply into the fabric of nature, the most basic level, the quantum field, is where “something comes out of nothing.” Mere ripples in the quantum field, arising from the quantum vacuum state, are the basis of the universe. And that’s an enormous clue to escaping the illusion.

There is a convincing argument that these ripples are products of consciousness; in other words, the universe thinks itself into existence. Decades ago the eminent British physicist Sir James Jeans declared that the universe was beginning to look much more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind-like behavior has been spotted in the action of elementary particles. Moreover, if the universe isn’t a product of some sort of cosmic consciousness—indeed, if existence isn’t the same as consciousness—science is totally unable to explain how consciousness came about. There’s no point at which atoms learned to think. Physical explanations for mind are the ultimate apples and oranges mistake.

When Nature created “something out of nothing,” two tracks emerged and separated. One track we call objective—the world “out there” filled with objects and events—and the other track we call subjective—the world “in here” of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. We are extremely good at balancing the two worlds. A physicist can measure Higgs bosons and also fall in love.

However, to define reality on either track is an illusion. On the objective side there is chaotic “quantum soup” constantly boiling away, totally separate from our everyday experience. On the other side is perceptual soup, the chaos of personal experiences that fill the mind (one can also call this “qualia soup,” using the technical term for the qualities of the five senses, in other words, everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell).

Both sides, as long as they are separate, falsify reality, which is why it isn’t absurd to say that numbers draw us deeper into an illusion. We deceive ourselves by assuming that the world “out there” isn’t the same as a dream, while at the same time our inner experiences are solipsistic without an external world. So by simple logic, reality dawns when the subject-object split is healed. Reality is wholeness, and we won’t experience it until we are whole. That will be the topic of the next post. Nothing can replace or substitute for wholeness, and yet this fact has yet to dawn for billions of people.

(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 

Is the Self the Ultimate Healer?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In recent years the self-care movement has been gathering momentum, and in many ways it is a natural extension of what came before, which was prevention. Both put the focus of remaining well on the individual. Instead of running to the doctor’s when symptoms appear, prevention taught people to avoid risks in advance. Giving up smoking to prevent the risk of lung cancer was a milestone in prevention over fifty years ago, and since then a host of preventive measures have been discovered.

But prevention focused on disease rather than wellness, which made room for self-care and its aim to attain lifelong well-being. A positive lifestyle that benefits both mind and body lies at the core of self-care, and important breakthroughs are being made, such as the vital importance of avoiding low-grade chronic inflammation and also chronic stress. Yet few realize how revolutionary self-care can actually be.

What if the self, all alone and unaided, is the ultimate healer? On the one hand modern medicine would hotly and even violently reject such a notion. Mainstream medicine still has objections to self-care insofar as it encroaches on the expertise of doctors and the accepted treatments through drugs and surgery. Let’s set aside the possible objections to the self as healer, because it’s more important to get at what the concept is all about.

An opening is provided by a first-person account on a personal website by Joey Lott, who poses what he calls “A cure for anxiety.” Lott presents himself as a longtime sufferer from anxiety whose affliction was intractable: “I failed so completely to make things better (even after years of therapy, meditation, yoga, affirmations, breathwork, prayer, hundreds of self-help books, countless workshops, and on and on) that eventually I grew hopeless. Nothing could help me, I believed. I thought I was broken.”

The cure he ultimately discovered is a form of “not doing,” to use a Buddhist term, although it was the experience, not the terminology, that was key. Lott realized that his anxiety was rooted in thought itself, in the mind’s constant attempt to attack anxiety in self-defeating ways. The cure, he declares, “is completely counterintuitive, because it is not about getting rid of unwanted symptoms. It is not about getting rid of anxiety. It is not about defeating anxiety or breaking free of anxiety. It is about actually discovering directly what anxiety is and welcoming it home.”

The method he has in mind is to stop resisting anxiety in any way; Lott maintains that resistance—along with every attempt to get rid of anxiety—is the cause of anxiety. Instead of getting entangled in so much mental activity, Lott bypasses all of it. “The essential cure for anxiety is …the direct meeting of the experience. Not trying to get rid of it, calm it, change it, fix it, solve it, or anything else. How does one go about direct meeting? Simple. Do nothing.”

Lott is conscientious about telling his readers that the various methods he tried, such as mindfulness and meditation, can help with anxiety. But with the conviction of someone who has healed himself and many others, he believes he has found the real cure. What he proposes is a form of self-care, and needless to say there is no accepted medical model for it; as a physician I must add that I am not endorsing such a cure. And yet there is a trend moving in the “not doing” direction that has been growing stronger.

The trend is known generally as the “direct method” in consciousness studies. The basic tenet is that with any experience, a person has two choices, either to pay attention to the mental activity in the experience or to pay attention to the constant presence of awareness itself. The aim ultimately is to wake up, to realize that the constant presence of awareness is actually the self.

Some therapists have seen the potential value in getting a patient to experience the constant state of awareness lying behind mental activity. The theory is that awareness by itself has no anxiety, depression or other form of mental suffering. It simply is. Lott found, with himself and other people, that it is possible to “do nothing”—that is, to simply be aware o awareness.

He acknowledges that even a fleeting experience of this kind, lasting a second or two, might require a coach. The mind is habituated to pay attention to its experiences, and when the experience is painful, it is all but impossible to not pay attention. Therefore, one can start by paying less attention. In time, the cure results, according to the direct method, by repetition, until a person’s attention gets attracted to self-awareness instead of the painful symptoms. Eventually, no matter what form of “not doing” being adopted, the affliction is predicted to heal itself. It has been starved of attention, which was what kept it going in the first place.

What I’ve outlined is no substitute for reading Lott’s article and looking into detailed expositions of the direct method and the theory behind it. But we’ve discussed enough here to indicate the revolutionary implications of self-care. Gradually, and mostly at the margins of professional therapy and medicine in general, the possibility of the self as healer is gaining ground. (The reader might want to see The Healing Self, a book I co-write with Harvard geneticist Rudy E. Tanzi. We discuss many modalities of self-care already accepted in both mainstream and integrative medicine.)

Whatever happens in the near future, the direct method is attempting in modern terms to validate the ancient doctrines of mind from Buddhism and even older Vedic sources. The deepest questions about what it means to be human and to lead a conscious life are at stake. In that regard, the healing self is as important today as it was thousands of years ago, and we may discover that the self is as timeless, not to mention healing, as it has always been reputed to be.

 

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 

Taking a Beautiful Line from Rumi: Beyond the Boundaries of the Intellect

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The popularity of the mystic Sufi poet Rumi is based on his love affair with God, expressed in such ecstatic terms that he makes the spiritual journey seem deeply romantic. But Rumi also reported about how his state of consciousness felt, which gives valuable clues about higher consciousness itself.

Here is a beautiful line of his that has profound implications for consciousness as well: “Exchange your cleverness for bewilderment.” What kind of bewilderment does he mean? To most people, bewilderment is the opposite of an appealing state, since it implies indecision, confusion, perhaps loss of control entirely. Rumi was known for applauding such a state, however, if the result was bliss and ecstasy.

To modern ears the message is more pointed. “Cleverness” is Rumi’s synonym for the rational mind, which seeks explanations that are logical and consistent. The aim of the intellect is to bring everything down to earth, so to speak, eliminating the folderol and fantasy associated with spirituality and mysticism in particular. Rumi encountered this not in terms of modern rationality with its basis in science but from clerics who studied and became expert authorities on “correct” Islam.

Another way to put Rumi’s idea comes from the inspired Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who said, “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” This translates into the declaration that making maps, models, brain scans, and anatomical pathways to explain consciousness isn’t the same as experiencing it.

This is an undeniable fact. Take the most basic conduit of experience, the five senses. Remove any one of them, and it is impossible to bring it back by describing it. “Color” is meaningless to someone who is blind, just as “scent” is unfathomable to someone without a sense of smell. But logical models supported by facts, data, and experiments overlook the obvious truth just stated. There is a fallacious claim that the brain, once its operations are fully mapped and analyzed, will disclose the source of the mind.

Instead of criticizing this viewpoint, Rumi offers an alternative, which he calls bewilderment, but which could equally be called wonder. We should all be struck with wonder and thrown into bewilderment by everyday life, as Rumi was. Not just Rumi, though. There’s a famous saying of Einstein’s: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

The advantage of having a great scientist backup a great poet is that we cannot wriggle out of Rumi’s challenge to rationality by saying that he’s only speaking like a poet. He’s speaking like someone who knows full well the limits of reason when it comes to beauty, love, devotion, creativity, and wonder. Being closer to our time, Einstein’s affirmation tells us that reason isn’t abandoned; it is put in its rightful place.

Reason’s rightful place has been exaggerated in modern life, allowing science and technology to usurp essentially everything. In a world where being human is cherished fully, the things just listed—love, creativity wonder, and the rest—would be valued for their own sake, which brings us closer to the infinite potential of consciousness than any mind-made model, past, present, or future.

 

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 

Experiments Suggest Humans Can Directly Observe the Quantum

A recent article by William C. Bushell and Maureen Seaberg on Psychology Today dives into our capabilities as humans for quantum perception, adept potential, and the implications for consciousness theory.

We highly recommend giving the full article a read!

William C. Bushell, PhD, is the Director of Research & Academic Liaison of the Integrative Studies Historical Archive & Repository (ISHAR), an initiative of the Chopra Foundation.

 

 

 

Higher Consciousness in Less than a Minute

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are very old, rich traditions of higher consciousness around the world, and diverse as they are, they seem to have one thing in common: Arriving at higher consciousness takes time, perhaps a lifetime. Along with this idea comes other, closely related ones. Higher consciousness is exceptional. It requires intense inner work. Only a select few ever reach the goal.

The overall effect of these ideas is to discourage the average person from even considering that higher consciousness is within reach. For all practical purposes, society sets those apart who have become enlightened, saintly, or spiritually advanced. In an age of faith such figures were revered; today they are more likely to be viewed as beyond normal life, to be admired, shrugged off, or forgotten.

Much of this is a holdover from the merger of religion, spirituality, and consciousness. For centuries there was no separating the three. Most traditional societies developed a priestly class to guard the sanctity—and privileged status—of reaching near to God. But these trappings are now outdated and even work against the truth, which is that higher consciousness is as natural and effortless as consciousness itself. If you are aware, you can become more aware. There is nothing to higher consciousness than this logical conclusion.

No matter who you are or what level of consciousness you think you are in, two things always apply. The first is that you use your awareness every day in all kinds of ways. You think, feel, wish, perceive, etc. The second thing is that you have constricted your awareness, through a process that the English writer Aldous Huxley called the reducing valve. Instead of finding yourself in a state of expanded awareness, you edit, censor, ignore, and deny many aspects of reality. The reducing valve squeezes “whole mind,” another term favored by Huxley, to a small flow of permissible thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.

The reducing valve takes years to form, and much of what happens consists of social conditioning, which shapes us almost unconsciously. There is the huge influence of negative experiences that give rise to fear, the memory of pain, and the desire to be less open and more closed off for the sake of defending yourself. But positive experiences also can constrict your awareness, because likes and dislikes operate together. “Yes to this” and “No to that” is like a pendulum whose swing we ride for a lifetime. So powerful are our reasons for reducing reality that we grow to fear, dislike, and deny the possibility of whole mind.

Yet by definition whole mind cannot be destroyed, only distorted. A simple example is contained in the word “Hello.” Whenever someone says hello, they open a channel of experience that has little to do with the dictionary definition of the word.

If you aren’t using the reducing valve, this is what “hello” can communicate:

  • Tone of voice
  • Mood
  • State of two people’s relationship
  • Memories of past encounters
  • Foretelling of what might happen next\
  • Signals of acceptance or rejection
  • Alerts to possible threat or, possible welcome.

Can so much be contained in a single word? Absolutely. The study of linguistics packs all these layered experiences inside everyday language. The next time someone says hello, open yourself to the wider experience you are having. Is the other person feeling friendly or indifferent? Are you reminded of old thoughts of this person? Does your mood suddenly change? What’s the vibe being created between you?

If a traffic cop stops you and walks up to your car, his hello and yours in reply have the same dictionary definition as when someone you are deeply infatuated with says hello. But the two encounters carry vastly different meanings, which our antennae always pick up. They pick up everything unless we use the reducing valve. But 99% of the time we do use it. We don’t want the traffic cop to see that we are angry, scared, annoyed, or guilty. Or we don’t want the lover we are infatuated with to see anything but what we think will seem desirable.

In a word, we feel safer and more in control by editing reality, and yet even if such feelings are attained, we pay a high cost. The reducing valve makes every situation a reflection or repetition of an older experience. It enforces routine. It puts other people, and ourselves, into a box. Very little is actually new and fresh, even though as viewed by whole mind, every moment is unique and unpredictable, open to infinite possibilities. Great painters have looked at the same trees, grass, clouds, and flowers that you pass by without notice and turned them into beautiful visions. Nothing is so mundane that is cannot be a source of wonder, creativity, love, and the deep satisfaction of being alive, here and now.

“Nothing is so mundane that is cannot be a source of wonder, creativity, love, and the deep satisfaction of being alive, here and now.”

That last sentence is the key—it opens the door to higher consciousness not just in a minute but instantly. You are naturally nothing less than whole mind; the reducing valve minimizes your potential by an unmeasurable extent. How do you measure the next opportunity to feel wonder after the opportunity has vanished? What value is lost when “hello” is a ritualized word with hardly any meaning once all the possible meanings have been squeezed out of it?

The motivation for expanding your awareness lies in those questions. You can do it here and now, without effort. Just realize clearly that higher consciousness is the most natural, effortless, and fulfilling way to live. From there, infinity follows.

 

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