Peace Week New York Town Hall Conversation to heal our communities from the disease of violence and the disparities of mass incarceration hosted by Peace is a Lifestyle on January 21, 2019. An interactive conversation amongst influencers, thought leaders, LIFE Changers and community members impacted by violence and incarceration.
There’s an old joke about a man who falls off the Empire State Building. As he passes an office window on the way down, someone shouts, “How are you doing?” and the man answers, “I’m okay so far.” I don’t know anyone who doesn’t laugh at the punchline the first time they hear the joke, but there’s also a wince thinking about the thud that awaits the man at the end.
Science has been okay—so far—in explaining how nature works, riding the crest of success for several centuries now. But the thud is near at hand, as outlined in a very readable, perceptive online article titled “The Blind Spot,” jointly written by two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s well worth your time to read it, because the blind spot referred to in the title has been of tremendous but hidden importance in your life.
The blind spot refers to science’s rejection of consciousness as a key factor in describing reality. Rigidly adhering to a belief that it holds the key for explaining everything, science hasn’t seen its own blind spot—or taken it seriously, with a few exceptions—and therefore the vast majority of working scientists don’t hear the thud that awaits them. The authors of the article do, and they go right to the heart of the problem. As they view it, science has been wrong on two counts. The first is the belief that science can accurately and objectively describe the real world as it exists. The second is the belief that physical reality is all that must be accounted for.
But as the authors cogently argue in plain language, “To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty.” This conclusion can be supported in countless ways, but the most important way, which touches all of us, is that the mind isn’t material, and no attempt to explain thoughts as the byproduct of physical activity in the brain has been remotely successful. The fact that 99% of neuroscientists assume that the brain produces the mind—which is roughly akin to the assumption that a piano composes the music it transmits—testifies to how blind the blind spot actually is.
No matter what branch of science you examine, it works through reductionism, breaking existence down to the smallest unity, the source and cause of whatever is being examined. Like the man who is okay on his way down to the ground, reductionism has proved wildly successful in physic, chemistry, medicine, biology, and so on. We know how atoms, cells, and chemicals work in fine detail. But there’s a fundamental problem, which is that at a certain point—the point where you hear a thud—reductionism fails.
If you reduce the mind to atoms and subatomic particles, none of these can actually think, nor is there a viable argument for showing how they learn to think. If you reduce time to the first instant of the Big Bang, this tells you nothing about how time came into being, only when the cosmic clock started, which isn’t the same thing. If you search for the tiniest bit of matter, it vanishes into invisible waves in the quantum field, totally losing its solid “thingness.” In fact, by reducing the universe to ripples in the quantum field interacting with ripples in the electron field, the quark field, the gravity field, and so on, the entire cosmos becomes a mathematical riddle that is impossible to calculate.
There are many such difficulties with reductionism, presented in detail in You Are the Universe, which I co-wrote with physicist Menas Kafatos. Our arguments are totally in accord with the blind spot article. Yet in either case the average person will say “So what?” The interactions of the quantum field have zero bearing on finding a job, raising a family, and all the other activities of everyday life. Yet each activity begins with our experience of the world and the mental models we carry around in our heads.
If you get in a fender bender, for example, you can explain it by any number of models. The accident could be caused by an act of God, random chance, bad luck, a sleepy brain, distracting thoughts, a malfunction in your car, slippery roads in winter, crowded traffic patterns, or lousy drivers clogging up the road—take your pick. Each explanation leads back to one thing: how you perceive the accident. Every experience involves an interpretation; perceptions are never impersonal.
The fact is that since birth you have undergone the process of living in an interpreted world, which is where the theoretical problems in science bump into “so what?” Science is the chief bulwark of modern life and the models we follow to explain how everything works. If science discounts consciousness and cannot explain the mind, then we as ordinary citizens have inherited this blind spot. As a result, any belief that we know how things “really” work is wobbly. Or to recall the blind spot article, our assumptions are either false or empty.
Examples of our muddled state greet us everywhere. Why are some people geniuses, criminals, hungry for power, cruel, or saintly? No one can explain it. What is talent? Is Schizophrenia a disease? Why do some people get hooked on drugs after trying them one time while others walk away and never become addicted? What is love? Can animals think?
What these questions have in common are two things. First, we’ve all experienced them or know someone who has. In other words, they are inescapable, and it’s natural to want reliable answers. Second, using reductionism to provide the answer doesn’t work. Being human isn’t about physical “stuff” bouncing around, either in the brain or out there in the cosmos. Instead of a first cause, which is what science looks for all the time when exploring space, time, matter, and energy, human experience is embedded in a cloud of causes.
Going back to all the explanations that can be applied to a fender bender, it is obvious that no single one is “the” answer. Not so obvious is the fact that being human is about our infinite capacity to interpret experience any way we choose. Thus we are creative users of consciousness. As the answer to science’s dilemmas and failures, I think we must concede that first and foremost Homo sapiens is a species based on consciousness. There’s no other way to get rid of the blind spot. As long as we consider ourselves a bundle of physical “stuff” operating like a complex machine, the most urgent problems of everyday life will not be solved.
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People have become convinced that there is a spiritual benefit to living in the present. This is a surprising phenomenon, because nothing seems more mundane than the here and now. You wouldn’t expect anything special to emerge from the constant flow of seconds, minutes, and hours that fill everyone’s life from the moment of birth. There must be a deeper reason for giving the present moment a special value. (As an introduction to the significance of now, please see my recent post, “What Does It Mean to Live in the Present?”
“Now” is a concept that runs deeper than you might suppose. First of all, it cannot be measured by the clock. Before the tick of the clock is over, it has vanished into the past. Likewise, the experience of now as a subjective event is ungraspable by the mind. A thought is gone the instant you think it, and there’s an argument from neuroscience that says the words you perceive as a thought are after-effects of the brain activity that created them, since the electrical impulses and chemical reactions inside neurons take fractions of a second, while the words in your head take much longer.
In fact, because the now can’t be measured or seized upon, it doesn’t actually exist in the scheme of time. The present moment is like the mathematical definition of a point, which has no length–it is merely a marker dividing one measurement from another, as in the number 1/3 expressed as .3333 on to infinity.
But the same convention misrepresents time as it really is. Time is relative, as Einstein showed. It can slow down and speed up depending on where you are standing in relation to a moving object. (The fact that time speeds up in the presence of a large gravitational field is used every day to give precise locations on the Earth from GPS satellites–they must compensate for the different rates of time between outer space and within the Earth’s gravitational field.) Time also comes and goes. It has a very different nature in the quantum field than it does in the everyday world, and when you go deeper, into the quantum vacuum, time disappears where it came from, a void without dimension that is the source of space, time, matter, and energy.
You don’t have to delve into these points of science, or the mystery of time as studied by philosophers, to realize something important. Time in the human world is a malleable, elusive experience, which is why we feel that there aren’t enough hours in the day but also that time hangs heavy on our hands. The difference between not enough time and too much time is completely personal.
The timeless is just another word for the now. Being outside clock time, the now is unique. For each of us, if we stop buying into the convention of clock time, the now is the meeting point between the known and the unknown. The known is the past, the unknown is the future. What makes the now so intensely real is that life consists of nothing else but the flow of the known into the unknown. You know your last thought, but your next thought is unknown. So the real issue is how best to live at this ever-flowing, omnipresent reality?
Most people, conditioned to be afraid of the unknown, try to ignore it or at the very least blur its impact. They think, say, and do the same thing today that they thought, said, and did yesterday. No one is immune from this habit. We need a buffer from reality so that it can’t hurt us so much–or so we suppose. In any encounter we bring a set of expectations that buffers direct contact, whether it is contact with another person or a new situation. These expectations tell us where we are in relation to the person or situation.
From one perspective this setup is all well and good. You don’t want to meet your family at the breakfast table and ask them who they are, and you don’t want to go to work and learn your job over every day from scratch. The continuation of memory keeps things moving along. But the thread that memory provides is in time. It has nothing to do with the now, which is timeless. Memory, habit, social conditioning, and everything else that makes life continue day by day has one fatal flaw: nothing new could ever happen. Without the eternal now, which constantly renews our experience, life would be a ceaseless repetition of the old.
This gives us a clue how to live in the now. Be open. Let the new emerge. Be alert to unknown possibilities. Don’t get stuck in your old habits and expectations. This sounds all very well, but what in practical terms do you need to do? In terms of physical and mental activity, there is nothing to do. Doing happens by the clock, as so does thinking. You can only live in the now if you go beyond time. This journey occurs in consciousness. One striking feature of Buddhism is known as the teaching of non-doing. It gives instructions for how to be timeless or to put it another way, how to live in the now.
Non-doing has two parts. The first is to get unstuck from outworn beliefs, memories, and conditioning. The second is to be mindful of the here and now. Again, this sounds all well and good, but there’s seemingly a flaw. to get unstuck and to be mindful are things we’re asked to do. so how can you do and not do at the same time? You can’t. Non-doing isn’t something you can practice. One might go so far as to say that there’s nothing you can actually do that will get you unstuck or make you mindful. They are both the outcome of a shift in consciousness, not a recipe for creating the shift.
The only agent that can create a shift in consciousness is consciousness itself. This isn’t a riddle or a paradox. If you think about it, at every moment when the known flows into the unknown, your awareness shifts. The shift can be tiny, like becoming aware that you are hungry or sleepy, or suddenly realizing that you have a dental appointment. The shift can also be momentous, as in a sudden insight of “aha” experience. Since you never known what the next experience will be, consciousness can’t be managed or controlled. It has been shifting all your life outside your control. So the basic truth is that consciousness has always been the creator of experience and therefore the creator of reality. Your personal reality has been nothing else but the unfolding of experience.
Why does this truth matter? It matters in lots of ways. Once you see that consciousness is doing everything, you can stop hindering it. People have devised countless ways to remain unconscious. They go into denial. They go into unrealistic daydreams, rationalizations, and fears. They fixate on the past and anticipate the future. They obsess over obtaining something that will bring lasting happiness, only to discover frustration and disappointment when this cherished thing doesn’t appear, and almost equal frustration and disappointment if it does appear and they wind up no happier than before. Between fantasy and distraction, fixation and habit, denial and repression, our mental life unfolds almost entirely outside the now.
The most important thing you can actually do, therefore, is to want to be here now, because in reality you aren’t. You are somewhere else, and in that somewhere else, the unconscious has stifled the most precious aspect of being human: our infinite potential. Just as the now is timeless, it is also infinite. It has no boundaries except those we impose, which the poet William Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles.” Once you want to live in the here and now, you send this message throughout the field of consciousness. What happens next no one can predict. The only common element is that you start to wake up. The transformation from unconscious to conscious happens by steps of waking up. You can wake up a little, many times a day, simply by pausing, taking a few deep breaths, and reconnecting with your sense of self. In effect you open a line of communication to yourself instead of being distracted from yourself. In this simple act, if repeated often enough, you expand your awareness–or rather, it expands by itself. The process that totally transforms a human being into a conscious creator of reality is the ultimate fruit of non-doing, where being here is enough and you are the essence of the eternal now.
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By Deepak Chopra, MD
In a news-driven society more attention is paid to events that will soon fade away than to ideas that could alter civilization. Modern secular society needs the impetus of great ideas to add meaning and purpose to our lives, as religion once did when it was the dominant force around the world. In turbulent times the prospect of a single idea that can transform humanity seems remote.
But just such an idea has arrived. It travels under various tags, the most common being “the one mind.” It’s the notion that there is only one mind in the universe despite the appearance here on Earth of seven billion minds. On the surface the radical possibilities stemming from “the one mind” aren’t obvious. In fact, the last thing anyone would want to give up is the claim to be a unique individual. That’s not what the one mind is about—it’s about expanding into higher consciousness as a practical reality. If humanity shares one mind, and this mind has a cosmic dimension, the very idea begins to cause one’s consciousness to expand.
Radical ideas are rarely new, and in the history of religion there has always been the concept that everything is happening in God’s mind. Without religious overtones, the one mind brings in attributes once considered divine, such as omniscience. An all-knowing god is remote; an all-knowing consciousness that you are part of is intimate. In place of divine omnipresence, the one mind brings timelessness down to Earth as a human attribute.
Can you in fact feel the effect of being timeless and all-knowing? There’s a wealth of tradition behind the possibility that the human mind can transcend the physical world, reaching a domain of higher reality. Undertaking the journey to reach that reality is at once an ancient challenge and a contemporary one. The one mind isn’t about inflating our sense of self-importance. You can’t experience what it means to be timeless and all-knowing as if those traits belong to the individual ego personality. “I” is a limiting concept. By transcending the everyday mind you get a glimpse of your source, which is where the timeless and all-knowing originate.
The point is to base reality, including your personal reality, on consciousness. That’s a radical departure from the official story that human beings are essentially physical, with the evolutionary add-on of a higher brain. When the one mind becomes the official story, all of life finds the same foundation in cosmic consciousness. There is no longer higher and lower life but one life that must be cherished and seen as a whole. At the very least, adopting this view can make saving the planet more central to everyone’s purpose. Clearly the crisis of climate change only deepens the longer we believe in separation between nations, belief systems, and individuals.
It would sell the one mind short, however, to call it a viewpoint or a story. What’s at stake is the hidden reality that humans have continually glimpsed and yearned to reach. It’s the realm of peace where there is no fear of death because death doesn’t exist. It’s the beginning of creation and the end of suffering, because suffering is caused by creation gone awry.
Ours would seem to be the last era when such a vision can reach fulfillment, but in the long view it was necessary to bring the one mind down from myth and mysticism. Science needs to confront nature head on and affirm that the one mind is real. Huge steps have been taken in this direction. Almost a century ago a quantum pioneer like Erwin Schrödinger affirmed that consciousness was one and indivisible, and another genius in physics, Werner Heisenberg, asserted that physical reality cannot exist without the interaction of an observer.
Despite these radical insights, or perhaps in defiance of them, physics has clung to the idea that nature is what is seems, a given that cannot be challenged. Now the challenge has not only arrived but is making headway. Serious consideration is given to the concept of one observer in the universe, and after decades of failing to show that mind can be created through physical processes, the idea is rising that the cosmos has always been conscious—mind is a feature as innate to creation as gravity or the speed of light.
I’m barely touching upon the explosive implications of the one mind. (Anyone curious to read a complete in-depth treatment should consult Larry Dossey’s riveting book, The One Mind” How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness.) Science is poised to go in an intriguing direction, but where I feel the most hope, and genuine confidence, is in the future of spirituality and personal evolution. Without transcendence, we are stuck in the domain of separation. Body and mind inhabit separate compartments, and within the mind there is a war of opposing impulses, feelings, and thoughts.
The prevailing attitude is to live with the divided mind, protect yourself form the worst aspects of human nature, and boost the self-interest of “I, me, and mine” as far as you can. At best this strategy has left us feeling insecure and dissatisfied. At worst it has led to the catastrophes of war, xenophobia, and the specter of an environment damaged beyond repair. The primary attraction of the one mind is that it heals everything created by the state of separation. In itself, that is enough to create a new future. Who would settle for the old one that is looming before us when healing and renewal have arrived to save us from ourselves?
Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com
Fad diets come and go, but officially the subject of nutrition is guided by science. The public stubbornly thinks in terms of “good” foods and “bad” foods, so when the government’s nutritional experts issue scientifically based advice, any attempt at a nuanced picture generally gets lost. Recently there were headlines when the highest board for dietary protocols, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Council, reversed a government warning about avoiding foods high in cholesterol, which has been in place nearly 40 years.
The public is likely to shrug off this about-face, or else decide that eggs, the most common food high in cholesterol, is no longer a “bad” food but has moved into the “good” column. This ignores the council’s message, which weighed one thing against another. For people in a normal state of health, saturated fats from animal products pose a higher risk than high cholesterol. This finding is more a shift in focus than an about-face. It’s still unhealthy, the majority of nutritionists agree, to eat too much red meat as opposed to eggs, but eggs are high in saturated fat, too, so you shouldn’t overdo them, either.
The picture of the human body as a machine works only so far, and after that all kinds of confusion sets in. Too many processes are happening on too many levels, each interwoven, for the machine model to be simple in the first place. Imagine a car that ran on gasoline, air, water, and a dose of daily vitamins and minerals. If a car that runs on gasoline alone is complicated, adding these other elements would require an engine beyond our present power of engineering.
Now substitute food for gasoline, and no amount of knowledge can reduce the body-as-machine to a level of useful comprehension. Some vitamins, being soluble in water, leach from the body quickly, the oil-soluble vitamins stick around for a long time. Some minerals like potassium also readily leach out in urine, while iron levels remain steady for years at a time. The processes that affect every nutrient are subject to mental factors that seem far removed from food intake, such as stress and depression. A cascade of hormones influences digestion, assimilation, and weight, so going back to the analog of a car, what would it be like to press on the gas pedal and have the car refuse to accelerate because it feels depressed?
Until the body is redefined as a process rather than a machine, nutrition (not to mention all of medical science) will never be a settled matter. Human beings are omnivores, and our capacity to digest a huge range of food has resulted in diets around the world of amazing diversity. Even the fact that the microbiome–the sum total of bacterial populations in the intestinal tract and elsewhere–is different all around the globe stymies any attempt to standardize the human diet. Not only is the body a process, but through the microbiome we merge into the surrounding ecology.
In fact, the most useful model of the body would approach it as an ecology that reflects the planetary ecology. Just as the separation between mind and body is totally arbitrary, so is the division between what our bodies are doing and what Nature as a whole is doing.
The answer isn’t going to be a shopping list. Almost everyone has gotten the message that a whole foods diet is the best, and in this general category a Mediterranean diet has distinct advantages, largely because its reliance on fish and olive oil is healthier than a reliance on saturated fats and red meat. The high fiber content in any whole foods diet gives the microbiome the nutrition it feeds on. There’s not much more to advise, because almost everything else is mental. Stress is worse for you than a bad diet. Depression, too. Habits are mental, and it is habit that keeps Americans eating processed and junk food, far too much sugar and fat, probably too much salt, and so on. As long as 1 in 10 meals is eaten in McDonald’s, which can stand symbolically for the gamut of fast food, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Council seems a little out of touch.
Because the poor and uneducated have the worst health and consume the worst diet, the ideal of a perfect American diet runs into one more huge snag. But “perfect” has always been the wrong goal. “Balance” is the right word, boring as it sounds, and to really get it right, there must be a holistic mind-body balance. I don’t know when the machine model will ultimately be discarded, but no one has to await the official word. Individuals can take the power for themselves to take wellness seriously, incrementally end bad habits, reduce their stress for real rather than always procrastinating, and stop obsessing over “good” and “bad” foods. When you throw out the wrong model and begin to appreciate the right one, major changes in the right direction are actually achievable.
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