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 Medicinewww.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.

 

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 Medicinewww.deepakchopra.com 

 

An Educated Society Can No Longer Hide from Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Anoop Kumar, MD

Because science is the primary way we view reality, it has shaped the minds of students from grade school through graduate studies and beyond. But behind the scenes, experts are telling a new story–and in fact have been doing so for at least a century. In the July 2005 issue of Nature magazine, Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, wrote:

 

“…The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time, that the Universe is mental.” This startling realization has not yet impacted our education system, and yet decades before Prof. Henry’s comment, the eminent British physicist Sir James Jeans wrote that “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter…”

 

These radical insights ran counter to the default worldview of science, which founds reality on objectivity (facts, data, experiments, mathematical formulations) and holds a deep suspicion of subjectivity. The irony of such a position is that consciousness, the “stuff” of all mental activity, is also the stuff of the mental activity we label as science.

 

The resistance to a mental universe remains strong, and once again dates back decades, as when another eminent physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, noted, “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character…” What scientists cannot accept eventually trickles down into what teachers don’t teach.  Since we were children, our teachers have taught us that the world is made of little things called particles or atoms. They were only partially right. In fact, particles and atoms are mental concepts and images, a way of objectifying experiences of the mind.

 

The vast majority of scientists and other so-called thought leaders have not diligently explored the possibility that “matter” is actually an experience we are having in consciousness, not unlike the objects that populate dreams, which are mind-made. Ignoring the role of consciousness as a shaping force when we are awake and not dreaming isn’t simply incomplete but irresponsible. Leaving aside arguments at the level of quantum physics, students progress through the entire educational system with no instruction about the basics of mind, emotions, everyday psychology, mental disorders, insight, intuition, and the source of creativity. All of this, the whole world “in here” that science has traditionally rejected, is left for us to cobble together without guidance. The result is that millions of people are so alienated from their subjective experiences that conditions like depression, anxiety, insomnia, self-doubt, obsessive compulsions, addictions, and psychological dependency gain enormous power over us as we wander in the dark.

 

The charge of being irresponsible isn’t made lightly. You don’t have to know the science to appreciate the plausibility that consciousness is the basis of reality. Consider the following:

Nobody has ever known anything independent of consciousness. In other words, the entire history of human knowledge occurs in consciousness, without exception. What we categorize separately as religion, history, science, and technology are experienced in consciousness. Quantum theory has long asserted that space and time have no independent existence but occur purely in mathematical space, taking their reality from human mental constructs.

 

Why do these things seem so dubious, impossible, or threatening? Because having created these constructs, we have forgotten our role in creating them and believe that they are real. There are many ways to undercut this default acceptance of the world “out there” as being the source of reality. One important clue is that there is no explanation for how the brain produces the four-dimensional artifact of everyday sights, sounds, tastes, textures, smells, and the passage of time. There isn’t even convincing evidence that the brain is the source of mind. It is just as plausible that mind is the source of the brain, or that both are modifications of consciousness and therefore do not create each other.

 

Yet none of this is revealed to students, or only rarely, as they pass through the educational system. As an educated society, we profess to be interested in what is true. The reason we support science and conduct experiments is to find the truth, and then to live better lives. But if we really want truth, we must go where the evidence leads us. Now that open-minded science is overturning old prejudices, all roads lead to consciousness.

 

If in fact consciousness is primary, then our very nature must be redefined. Consider what it would feel like if your real nature were infinite and eternal, and yet you were forced to believe and live as though you were stuffed into a coffin-like box less than two meters tall that exists for a brief time between birth and death. It would feel like pain, worry, sadness, depression, anger, resentment, and confusion—the very situation that has resulted from defining human beings as confined inside a body and believing that the birth and death of the body creates and annihilates the person.

 

The question is not whether we like what the evidence suggests, or even whether changing course is easy. There is no doubt that a radical re-examination of reality and Nature itself will challenge minds, careers, and institutions. But the alternative is blinkered, ill-informed, and bad science. Our children deserve to be told the whole story, for their wellbeing and ours.

 

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 Medicinewww.deepakchopra.com 

 

Anoop Kumar, MD, MM is board certified in Emergency Medicine and holds a Master’s degree in Management with a focus in Health Leadership from McGill University. He practices in the Washington, DC metro area, where he also leads meditation gatherings for clinicians. He is the author of the book Michelangelo’s Medicine: How redefining the human body will transform health and healthcare. Anoop enjoys exploring and communicating about the intersection of self-awareness, science, and wellbeing. Visit him at anoopkumar.com and follow along @DrAnoopKumar.

Waking Up to Reality Directly

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Many, perhaps most, people would like to change their lives. They’d like the good parts to get better and the bad parts to go away. How you define these good and bad parts are entirely individual, reflecting the infinite diversity of human life. But consider yourself and take stock of where you are now. No one can do this realistically without wanting something to change. Yet after a certain point most people realize that change is difficult, and the path to finding a better life is twisted and rocky. A certain percentage will simply decide that “people don’t change” is a fact of life. If you are a hard realist, you give up trying to change yourself, much less anyone else.

 

With this background, it seems strange that so many people hold out the goal of total transformation, and in fact every spiritual tradition supports this, whether through redemption, salvation, the promise of heaven, enlightenment, or Nirvana. Total transformation goes far beyond making some changes in your life. If limited change is difficult, isn’t it folly to hold out for complete change?

 

Yes and no. The way that people struggle to break bad habits, improve their relationships, stop feeling anxious and insecure, and hoping to stay afloat financially is where change often proves futile. The mind struggling with itself can’t help but wind up with more struggle. In the world’s wisdom traditions, there is also a deep analysis of the ego, the isolated individual “I,” which by its nature is constantly presenting demands that never get satisfied, not to mention that the isolated “I” is by its very nature small and insecure. So relying on your ego or the restless mind doesn’t lead to meaningful personal change.

 

Total transformation must be on a different basis, then. It isn’t something that happens to “I, me, or mine.” Instead, the level of change takes place in your experience of simply being here. Nothing is more fundamental, and if you trace your dissatisfaction, insecurity, fear, and lack of fulfillment to its root, you strip away layer after layer of built-up beliefs, memories, and old conditioning. That sounds like heavy work, but in fact everyone experiences moments of simply being here when life is satisfying because the mind is still and the ego isn’t rattling its cage. Babies and small children bring a wistful smile to our lips because they seem to exist in a simple, contented state much of the time.

 

Babies will grow up to face a more complicated life, of course, but even so, there is something about the simplicity of existence that can persist throughout life, except that in adults it must be found once more. Existence has become buried and obscured by all kinds of baggage. Again going back to the world’s wisdom traditions, “baggage” means the constructs of the mind, which navigates the world with mental constructs, ideas, assumptions, beliefs, etc. It’s as if we only feel real when surrounded by a cloud of mental stuff, including the ghosts from our past and the fantasy projections of the future.

 

Taking altogether this burden of mental baggage, life’s accumulated problems, demands, and duties, plus ingrained habits and beliefs, one can see why a small cadre of people throughout history have renounced everything, walked away, and taken up a lifelong project of trying to free themselves—they opt for total transformation like opting for radical surgery. Or to switch images, rather than trying to peel off a clinging octopus one tentacle at a time, which never works, they want a way to throw off the entire creature once and for all.

 

This tradition of renouncing and walking away isn’t practical for the multitude of people, nor is a lifelong pursuit of liberation. But there are guides and teachers who declare that getting free can happen another way, a way that is more direct and even immediate. This “direct path,” as it is sometimes called, is appealing because of its simplicity. The major insight of the direct path is that the condition of liberation is always available here and now; it doesn’t involve struggle but instead a shift of perception.

 

This shift involves existence itself. Each of us is aware that we exist, and this fact is something we know that we know. To use a popular metaphor in the direct path, existence is like a movie screen on which all the inner and outer events of life are projected. The images flicker and change, but the screen remains the same. However, in the case of human awareness, the “screen” and the “images” are made of the same stuff—pure consciousness endlessly modifying and transforming itself. This is a hard point to get across, because we assume several things about ourselves that aren’t true but which stubbornly persist.

 

We assume that the physical world “out there” is separate from the subjective world “in here.” We assume that the three-dimensional picture our brain is giving us is an actual, separately existing reality. We assume that “I” is a speck of awareness isolated and separate from the world and other people. Undoing these assumptions comes naturally once a person experientially steps out of them, not by arguing and persuading someone that they are unreal. So we can set aside for the moment the whole thorny business of the mind’s illusions.

 

Instead, the direct path goes to the things everyone can agree upon, with the proviso that reality is defined by what we experience and what we know, not by our habits of mind and ingrained beliefs. Here are somethings everyone agrees upon when presented with them.

 

  1. As already mentioned, we are aware of existing, and we know we exist.
  2. No one knows where thoughts come from, only that they rise and fall in awareness. In addition, no one can predict what their next thought will be.
  3. No one can predict what will happen to them with any certainty. The next moment could bring anything, large or small. Yes, we all live by routines, which give orderliness to or lives, but these routines are manmade. Step out of them and life becomes radically unpredictable.
  4. We cannot tell if the next thought or event will be trivial or momentous, a repetition of old thoughts or something new and insightful.
  5. Therefore, having a fixed viewpoint about how our mind works and how the world works is pointless and illusory. This is why struggling with the mind never works.
  6. If you stop trying to figure out your mind and the world and life itself, what is left is an open field of possibilities. The reason we envy childhood innocence and call it wise is that children naturally exist in this open field of possibilities.
  7. A possibility isn’t a thought, image, feeling, or sensation. It is existence unadorned by mental constructs. In an authentic way, this field is the only real thing.
  8. Because you are conscious, you are participating in the field of consciousness, even while doing nothing. Even in deep sleep your fundamental existence hasn’t gone away or turned to nothing. In fact, deep sleep is so enjoyable because we return to the most real thing in life, being immersed in the field of consciousness.
  9. It isn’t necessary to be aware of anything. The most authentic state is simply awareness, without any content, baggage, or constructs.
  10. To be open, aware, and present is an ordinary experience that everyone has every day, only we don’t give it much value because we identify with the contents of the mind and the baggage of our lives all the time.
  11. By making a shift toward the simple state of being aware, we reach the goal of a life that is fulfilling in and of itself. There is nothing to seek, no improvements to make. Awareness must first be secured, and from this starting point, all change is put into the proper perspective. The play of consciousness is witnessed and accepted as a natural thing. But instead of losing ourselves in change, we stand in a secure state of awareness, from which change is no longer threatening or enticing. Change is consciousness modifying itself in infinite ways; non-change is consciousness before it manifests into something we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, or think about.

 

If you jump to the last point too fast, it seems like philosophy, and few people would agree with it. It is necessary, in the direct path, to go one step at a time, agreeing that the early points are part of your experience and only then moving on. The bigger picture is impossible to accept at first glance, because the bigger picture is that everything in existence consists of consciousness endlessly modifying itself. No one can accept this who stays with the assumption that the physical world “out there” is the basis of reality.

 

The bigger picture also says that you and I are consciousness and nothing else, our physical bodies being no more than generic experiences on the order of experiencing a mountain, tree, or cloud. No one will accept this who believes that the body, and especially the brain, is a special, unique creation existing apart from other objects.

 

Finally, the bigger picture holds that consciousness is inconceivable, even though everything we can think, feel, or know comes from it.  No one will accept this who believes that neuroscience will one day explain how consciousness arose from brain tissue. The reason consciousness is inconceivable is twofold: first, to “conceive” means to create a concept about something, a model or blueprint that shows clear outlines and contents. Consciousness cannot be reduced to a model or blueprint because it is everything, and everything has no limits, borders, or outlines.

 

Second, consciousness is inconceivable because the mind that tries to grasp it is made of nothing but consciousness. The individual mind pretends that it can stand somewhere apart from the infinite field of consciousness, but this is an illusion, like a wave pretending that it is standing apart from the ocean.

 

In the end, the direct path holds out the key to total transformation because there is no struggle to try and change. Instead, there is a shift of identity, away from the ego-personality that exists in the illusion of separation and toward the simplest state of awareness. The one is the end product of centuries of struggle and futility, the other is a return to the basis of reality. In that return lies the end of struggle. What unfolds next is known only to the infinite field of consciousness.

 

 

 

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 Medicinewww.deepakchopra.com 

Creating Your Own Enlightenment

By Deepak Chopra, MD

To be enlightened has many positive connotations and no negative ones. Therefore, you’d think that more people would pursue it—but they don’t. The first obstacle is the lack of a clear definition. What does it actually mean to be enlightened? The simplest definition, which would clear away a lot of confusion is “waking up.” To become enlightened is to move out of a state of confusion and conflict, anxiety and depression, or simply dull routine—whatever you associate with “being asleep.”

Waking up is a metaphor, since most people already consider themselves awake in the ordinary sense of not being asleep in bed. But it’s a powerful metaphor, pointing toward a state of awareness better than what we usually experience. Also, the metaphor is simple. It implies that you don’t have to be a monk sitting in a Himalayan cave practicing intense spiritual practices. Waking up sounds a lot like enlightenment for all. This in fact is true.

Or potentially true. What stands in the way is the second obstacle, which can be called your story. Everyone has their own story, and a huge amount of time, effort, emotion, and commitment is spent defending it. Your story is the foundation of “I,” your identity. Since you were born, “I” has been acquiring all kinds of qualities and characteristics. Call them tags just to keep things simple. In my own case, the tags include the following; Indian, male, husband, father, grandfather, doctor, financially secure, writer, and so on.

These tags belong to my story and to my identity. By defending my story, I keep my identity intact. Take away some part of my story, and if it matters enough, my identity will be attacked or undermined. People fear this more than almost anything in their lives. When a story is disrupted by a major event such as divorce, serious illness, or bankruptcy, an inner crisis usually occurs. Because they fear disruption, people don’t look beyond their story, even when they know they should and deeply want to. A wife trapped in domestic violence, a kid being bullied, a worker terminally bored in a bad job. None is happy with how their story is going, but quite often it’s easier to play out a story than to attempt to disrupt and change it.

Enlightenment lies outside your story; it consists of waking up to new possibilities, including the possibility of an “I” that isn’t defined by your story. This sounds at once enticing and fearful. Think of the image of a wandering Buddhist monk begging for food and sleeping at night in a temple. Would you exchange your life for his if you were promised enlightenment? Very few westerners would, even if their personal story made them totally miserable. On the face of it, fearing enlightenment is totally irrational. It’s like being offered freedom and refusing because you are used to being in jail.

Yet in one way or another, almost everyone prefers defending their story in place of seeking a higher state of consciousness. They’d rather be trapped, burdened, unfulfilled, maybe anxious and depressed—all the marks of being asleep. Yet the world’s wisdom traditions teach that waking up is natural and nothing to fear. The process isn’t mystical. To be awake is simply to be real, to look around and accept reality as it is, and to trust that reality is better than illusion. So how does a person trigger the waking up process?

The path to enlightenment is so personal that there’s no fixed template. You can follow a map to Arizona or even a map to getting into college, becoming a success on Wall Street, or learning to win friends and influence people. But every map keeps you inside your story. At best you can upgrade your story, but ironically, the upgrade will only solidify the “I” defined by success on Wall Street or having a lot of friends. This tells us that enlightenment doesn’t’ consist of anything about your present story. Nothing you do to make your story better or worse matters in the end, not as it relates to waking up.

Instead, you shift your identity by aligning with the reality that shows the way to a new inner life, for “I” is being defended on the inside. What does reality say that will alter how you see the world, and yourself, from the inside? Here “reality” means the waking state as described by those who are already awake. For short, we can define “those who are awake” as the tradition of saints, sages, and spiritual guides, including poets and writers of scripture, in every culture. Winnow out the essence of what they say, and here’s how waking up worked for them.

  1. You discover that there is more to life than your limited story.
  2. You realize that stories are simply human constructs. As such, they are arbitrary, flimsy, insecure, and disconnected from reality.
  3. If you examine your story and allow its false constructs to fall away, you automatically become more real. When every manmade illusion is gone, you are completely real.
  4. To dismantle a story is the same as dismantling the “I” who is defending the story with all its might and main. Therefore, the dismantling must be accompanied by something that “I” considers better. Giving up something precious only happens if you are getting something more precious in return.
  5. There is nothing outward in the physical world that is precious enough to replace your story and the “I” that defends it. Only something “in here” could be more precious, not to mention permanent, since external things, people, and events all come and go. They are temporary and transient.
  6. At first glance, the inner world is even more temporary and transient, because the restless mind is continually filled with the rise and fall of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. The mind, in fact, would seem to be a worse place to find security than in externals like money, career, status, a happy family life, etc. This attitude helps to keep people trapped in their stories, hoping all the time that by upgrading the story, security and happiness will be achieved.
  7. Yet waking up doesn’t consist of conquering the restless mind, trying to force it into peace and quiet. Nothing about the restless mind or the movie of your life that emerges from your mental activity, makes a difference in the end. What makes a difference is to find a level of awareness that is already awake.
  8. Having found this level, you only need to identify with it, because you discover  that the “I” of being awake is actually more enjoyable, secure, peaceful, fulfilled, creative, loving, and evolved than the “I” which is struggling to defend its story year after year, a story it knows is jerry-rigged to begin with and not all that great to experience.
  9. To begin to identify with a deeper level of the mind, you must experience it. We all have, but on an irregular basis. Whenever you feel love, fulfillment, contentment, beauty, inspiration, or an expanded sense of self, you have stepped into a new identity by stepping into a new state of awareness. To maintain these moments of being awake isn’t possible—they come and go.
  10. However, it is possible to practice meditation, which takes you to the level of wakefulness without any distractions. In one way or another, the waking state and the meditative state must be the same. This is the only path to being awake all the time, completely free from your story and yet also free from the fearful need that without your story, you will wind up in deep trouble.

These steps indicate how to create your own enlightenment, and if they seem reasonable and clear to you, the last step, being awake and in a meditative state all the time, is possible to achieve. It may come as a shock to realize that you can only meditate by being awake 24 hours a day, but that’s the inevitable conclusion. In the next post we’ll discuss how to get there from here, which is the essence of the spiritual journey.

 

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 Medicinewww.deepakchopra.com