Where Do You Call Home? A Cosmic Answer

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By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Menas Kafatos, PhD

Home is a charged word for everyone, a source of emotion that’s intimately associated with feeling safe and loved, of belonging. When asked “Where is home?” people reply with a country or city, perhaps a specific street address. Almost no one says “My home is the universe.” But for scientists trying to explain cosmic issues, the fact that the universe is the ultimate home where human life arose poses some huge mysteries. In our book You Are the Universe , we explore these mysteries, but that’s really secondary to something more important. We aim to show that the universe exists to be the home of human beings.

In other words, we take the universe personally. Such a position sounds at first blush like a totally wrong-headed stance. The universe, whether viewed by the naked eye or through the Hubble telescope, presents itself as a vast space where some three trillion galaxies, by the latest estimates, are rushing away from one another at high speed, where spacetime is being stretched out, carrying along every object embedded in it. This picture is so well established that many people, including trained physicists, assume that new discoveries will basically just fill in the blanks. It’s not as if we need a totally new definition of the cosmos.

But in fact we do, and there’s a growing sense among scientists that this is true. Even those who accept the inflationary model of the universe (a model based upon the reality of the big bang 13.7 billion years ago) realize that the fundamental components of reality–space, time, matter, and energy–remain mysterious. In fact, it’s the breakdown at the most fundamental levels that causes the universe to be very different from what the eye or telescope sees.

The word “breakdown” must be taken seriously here. The New York Times ran an article over a year ago on the crisis in physics, and quite publicly Stephen Hawking has been exploring the a cracks in a unified Theory of Everything (the holy grail of physics at least since the lifetime of Einstein).  Hawking is prone to quotes like the following: “I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper.” The fact that the most advanced theories about space, time, matter, and energy don’t necessarily match reality opens the way for looking at reality very differently.

Our different view is that the universe is trapped in a paradox. On the one hand, everyone holds that the universe developed after the big bang in keeping with random events, whether those events are the collision of two helium atoms or two galaxies. There is no plan or design, no predetermined purpose in creation, and ultimately no meaning to why things happen as they do. On the other hand, and this is where paradox reigns, the universe is the perfect home for human life to have evolved on Earth. In fact, the universe is so incredibly precise in allowing life and intelligence that randomness just does not fit the bill.

The evidence for this side of the paradox begins with what is known in cosmology as the fine-tuning problem. After the big bang, there was a precarious balance of natural forces. Given a change one way or another by less than one part in a billion, the infant universe could have collapsed in on itself or, at the opposite extreme, flown apart so fast that atoms and molecules would never had developed. If the laws of nuclear physics were slightly different, a collapsing supernova could not occur and the heavy elements which are essential to our bodies could not have formed in the cauldron of stellar collapse. Other more arcane disasters and distortions were also possible, but the upshot is that the constants that keep the universe intact are meshed together so finely as to defy any random explanation.

Human life needed a home to evolve in, meaning a planet, which in turn needed a solar system, which in turn needed stars, interstellar dust, viable stable atoms, and so forth, all the way down the line to the big bang. It’s very suspicious that there were no hitches along the way. Very small hitches would have made it impossible for the most complex molecule in the known cosmos–human DNA, with its 3 billion base pairs–to evolve.

To compound the paradox, there are other enormous gaps in the models we apply every day to explain reality, among them:

  • No one knows what came before the big bang because “before” implies time, and time didn’t necessarily exist before the moment of creation. In fact, the very question only makes sense when time exists, not “before” time existed.
  • In a similar way, no one knows what lies outside the universe, because “outside” applies to space in the sense of a box that has an inside and outside, whereas such space can’t apply before the big bang occurred. How can there be space outside space?
  • No one knows where cause-and-effect came from. Cause and effect both depend on something happening “before” to cause something else “after.” This ties us to a linear scheme that can’t step outside time, even though we can compute mathematically that the quantum world doesn’t seem to work by linear cause and effect–perhaps not any kind of cause and effect.
  • No one knows where meaning came from. If the universe evolved by random events that are meaningless, how did we humans arrive at meaning, purpose, design, and the concept of evolution? These concepts are fundamental everyday realities. This problem of locating the origin of meaning is tied to an even bigger one:  no one can explain how an unconscious universe came up with consciousness. It’s not as if the ordinary molecules of salt, water, sugar, and other basic components of the brain suddenly learned to think.

Our book delves into the details of these baffling mysteries, but where a physicist might consider them abstract puzzles to which advanced mathematics must be applied, the mismatch between theory and reality concerns everyone. We don’t know why the universe is our home or even what “home” means in the larger sense. No one would put money down on a house built of materials the builder can’t describe or tell where they came from. Yet we have bought into a conception of the cosmos with exactly those flaws. In fact, far from looking out at a physical universe filled with stars the way a box of chocolates is filled with truffles, we are actually looking out at a conception, a human artifact that we alone are responsible for. That’s a mystery worth pondering if we ever hope to find out who we really are.

 

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.   discoveringyourcosmicself.com

 

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics, at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, and climate impacts researcher and works extensively on consciousness. He holds seminars and workshops for individuals, health and mental professionals, practitioners of contemplative traditions, and corporations on the natural laws that apply everywhere and are the foundations of the universe, for well-being and success. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 315+ articles, is author or editor of 16 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, You Are the Universe (Harmony). He maintains a Huffington Post blog. You can learn more at http://www.menaskafatos.com 

 

Originally Published by The  San Francisco Chronicle

How to Meet Your Cosmic Self

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Science has been falsely portrayed as the enemy of spirituality, largely because of a noisy band of militant atheists who also happen to be scientists. Their outcry that to believe in God is irrational and therefore anti-scientific misses the point. Not all scientists are irreligious, but the whole premise of this militant group is faulty. They don’t just disbelieve in God; they disbelieve in the entire domain of subjectivity. What happens “in here” is unscientific, they say, a preposterous claim given that the works of Shakespeare and Mozart emerged from the inner world, along with all sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
We don’t need to re-litigate the issue, and we don’t need to enter the area of post-truth, to use a favorite term being bandied about. The truth is that the universe, and our participation in it, is a single activity. It takes all the laws of nature to produce a galaxy or to bring the image of a rose to mind. Nature has only one source and origin, whether we are discussing mind or matter.

This point lies at the heart of my new book, You Are the Universe, with co-author and widely published physicist Menas Kafatos. Our title is a free translation of an ancient India aphorism from the Vedic tradition, Aham Brahmasmi. Our intention was to show that the cosmos is intimately tied to human awareness. In fact, human awareness is pivotal and irreplaceable when trying to unwrap every cosmic mystery. That’s because the only reality we know, or can ever know, is based on experience. Even the most abstruse mathematical model of the universe can’t exist outside experience.

But if this sounds abstract or like a foray into metaphysics, far from it. The whole point of Aham Brahmasmi is to reveal the existence of a cosmic self. The world’s wisdom traditions sometimes refer to God, but not always. What they absolutely agree upon, however, is a hidden level of reality accessible only through higher awareness. Since everyday reality is only accessible through awareness, such a claim isn’t a stretch. “Higher awareness” doesn’t even have to be a mystical term–it can apply to the greatest artists, writers, philosophers, and scientists. untitled-design96
Modern science is best seen as a jumping-off point for inner exploration. Already there is turmoil inside cosmology because the accepted methods of doing science–conducting experiments, making measurements, and gathering data—have reached their limits. At the far edge of spacetime, as well as at the source of matter and energy, physical reality disappears into the vacuum state, which is a void. It is settled science that the entire universe emerged from nothingness, and yet we can’t go home again–there’s no way to return to the pre-created state of the cosmos given that it probably contains nothing like what we term space, time, matter, and energy.

But if that’s the end point of physical exploration, it’s the jumping-off point for inner exploration. Awareness looks out and creates a world; it looks inward and knows itself. A bacteriologist can’t do his job without understanding how a microscope works, yet for a long time science has tried to explain the universe without understanding how consciousness works, and consciousness is the primary tool at hand. The investigations we lump together as spiritual, religious, or metaphysical are actually one thing–a journey to meet the cosmic self. Higher consciousness is nothing more than being aware of awareness, consciousness knowing itself.

You Are the Universe argues that scientific knowledge will take a quantum leap once consciousness is no longer ignored, and a growing cadre of far-seeing physicists, joined by biologists, physicians, and neuroscientists, agree. But the real value of meeting the cosmic self is personal and applies to every person, in or out of science. The path to enlightenment is a project that is as old as recorded history. We are incredibly fortunate to live at a time when the most sophisticated theories in cosmology and the deepest scientific understanding of the universe offer proof that meeting the cosmic self is actually possible–indeed, it’s the only way to settle once and for all who we are, why we are here, and what the nature of reality truly is.

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

Hitching a Ride on the Cosmos

By Deepak Chopra MD and Menas Kafatos, PhD

The universe and the human brain have something important in common. The inner workings of both are invisible. At this moment you have no perception of what’s happening in your brain; neural activity is unknown to the mind of the person to whom the neurons belong without the invention of brain scans to reveal that activity, and then only crudely. Imagine, being a master of a house and not knowing or seeing what is inside the house.

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At first blush the universe doesn’t appear to be that way, tens to hundreds of billions of stars in as many as two trillion galaxies, although not directly observable with the naked eye can be studied with big telescopes such as the Hubble space telescope. But no matter how finely you dissect physical objects, whether the object is a drop of water or a massive nebula, in reality the inner workings of objects are totally invisible. The phrase used by physicists is “something out of nothing,” which refers to the fact that ground zero for creation is a void, the quantum vacuum. On that basis, both the brain and a star and an atom are examples of something coming out of nothing.

 

In our book You Are the Universe , we explore what might be emerging besides physical objects and the energy states they occupy. For it’s obvious that the brain doesn’t simply produce electrical and chemical activity at random. It somehow is tied to our inner world of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and images. Using these, we experience a three-dimensional world. So everything in that world is dependent on experience; if there is a reality outside what we can experience (including the extended perception of microscopes, telescopes, particle accelerators, and so on), such a reality will be as inaccessible as a dark hole.

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The Genetics of a Silent Killer and the Quest for a Cure

By Deepak Chopra, MD FACP and Mark L. Zeidel, M.D

Some diseases make headlines, pull at our heart strings, and inspire high-visibility fundraising events. Others, like kidney disease, wreak havoc more quietly. Chronic kidney disease afflicts more than 26 million people in the U.S., putting them at high risk for other serious illnesses, like heart disease. Nearly half a million people suffer from end-stage kidney disease, a devastating condition often requiring dialysis or transplantation. Medicare spends more than 30 billion dollars a year taking care of kidney failure patients—about 6 percent of the Medicare budget.

While kidney disease is widespread, it disproportionately affects certain populations: African Americans and others of recent African ancestry are more than three times as likely to suffer from kidney failure as those of European descent. African Americans constitute 35 percent of all patients receiving dialysis for kidney disease, despite being only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Some of this disparity is attributable to the most common causes of kidney disease: diabetes and high blood pressure, both of which are more prevalent among African Americans. But there’s increasing evidence that genetics may also play a significant role in the disease. Researchers at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and elsewhere have discovered that two common variations in a gene called apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) are responsible for an increased susceptibility to several forms of non-diabetes-related kidney disease among African Americans.

Thirty percent of African Americans carry these particular mutations, and for much of human history this served them well: This genotype is actually protective against a disease called African Sleeping Sickness, caused by certain forms of African trypanosomes. Transmitted by the tsetse fly, African Sleeping Sickness is common in eastern Africa and can cause fever, anemia, and death from neurologic disease. While these variants may still be of some benefit to populations living in Africa and exposed to the tsetse fly, here in the U.S. the genetic variation has little benefit and carries significant risk, particularly since there is no cure for kidney disease. As Martin Pollak, MD, Chief of Nephrology at BIDMC, explains, “We have treatments like dialysis and kidney transplants to keep those who have advanced kidney disease alive longer, but we don’t have any cures.” He adds, “Fewer than 40 percent of patients on dialysis live more than five years.” (And in developing countries, even these treatments are often too expensive to be available.) Pollak’s hope is that the APOL1 discovery—part of a body of research that earned him election into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences—will help pave the way toward prevention and treatment of the disease.untitled-design85

To that end, the BIDMC investigators—among the top researchers on kidney disease in the world—are using every scientific tool at their disposal. They’re developing human, mouse and fish models to better understand the genetics, cell biology and biochemistry of APOL1’s action in the kidney. Pollak and his team are also trying to understand why certain carriers of the APOL1 mutations are more susceptible to kidney disease than others. “That might give us some clues on how to better treat the condition,” he says.

In terms of patient care, their research has begun to inform clinical practice. Increasingly, doctors are debating the merits of genetic screening and counseling for those at highest risk of carrying the APOL1 gene mutation. However, until more is known about how to prevent and treat this form of disease, the benefit of testing is unclear. Based on this work, the hope is that specific methods for preventing and treating APOL1-associated kidney disease will be developed and implemented in the coming years.

“We want to put our own division out of business by preventing this disease to begin with,” Pollak says. “Short of that, we’d like to develop treatments that allow people with kidney disease to live with it as a chronic disease.” Until recently, he explains, kidney disease was much like HIV/AIDS was in the 1980s—a terrible disease that devastated lives and perplexed biomedical researchers. Once the causative organism, the HIV virus, was identified, combinations of drugs were developed, which now suppress the virus effectively. “With the discovery of APOL1, this major form of kidney failure now has a cause, and we can develop treatments directed to fixing the causal problem,” Pollak explains. “With a clearer understanding of the underlying genetics, we’re hopeful that kidney disease will soon be like AIDS—a treatable condition with which people can live long and active lives.”

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.discoveringyourcosmicself.com

Mark Zeidel, M.D., is Herrman L. Blumgart Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Physician and Chief and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has made important contributions to our understanding of how the kidney helps control body chemistry, and has led several successful national initiatives in medical education.A national thought leader in quality improvement, he has pioneered the provision of highly reliable, cost-effective care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), where he helped BIDMC’s achieve of outstanding clinical outcomes, recognized by the American Hospital Association, Society for Critical Care Medicine, the Leapfrog Group, and the Department of Health and Human Services. He has received numerous awards, including election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, the Robert H. Williams Distinguished Chair of Medicine Award from the Association of Professors of Medicine and the Robert Narins Award for Medical Education from the American Society of Nephrology.

What Came Before the Big Bang? A Surprise Answer

By Deepak Chopra, MD and  Menas Kafatos, PhD

The most widely accepted notions about the universe are central to how we view reality. One striking example links birth and death. In the age of faith, religion existed to reassure believers about a higher plane of reality. On this plane, the everyday experience of birth and death was negated. Souls were immortal aspects of being human. Depending on your particular religion, the soul either went to Heaven, if one were good, after death or existed perpetually in a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.untitled-design67

Ironically, science has stuck to these possible scenarios with the universe, even though what science is supposedly famous for is its defeat of religion, or to be more specific, its defeat of metaphysics and the whole notion of a higher plane. If you look closely, the way the universe was born in the big bang and will one day, presumably die, is pure metaphysics. In fact, the big bang and expansion of the universe was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, who was an astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. In fact, many have pointed out to the agreement of the big bang view with Biblical accounts in the book of Genesis. Unwittingly, the general public that accepts a casual idea about the universe being born and dying is actually adopting a metaphysical position about human birth and death, not simple, unvarnished, provable facts.

 

In our book, You Are the Universe, we cover this topic in great detail, but here’s a thumbnail sketch of our argument. If you ask a simple question like “What came before the big bang?” you are posing a paradox. “Before” and “after” have a meaning only in time, and linear time at that. There is no evidence of any kind that time existed before the big bang. Moreover, what we typically think of as time–the tick tock on a clock face–depends on having a human nervous system. Einstein broke free of this model, where we think we intuitively know what time is, when he introduced the concepts in his theories of relativity. In those theories, the speeding up or slowing down of time depends on the frames of references of observers. Time is not universal. For example, a moving observer’s time slows down as seen by a stationary observer. Slowing down of time also occurs when an observer is falling towards a black hole, as seen by a distant observer. The effect is still there, but tiny, in all gravitational fields, including the Earth’s gravity.

 

The relativity of time depended upon a new theory, and if we stand back, we discover that all views of time are human constructs. If time seems linear, that’s because we humans have modeled it that way in accord with our nervous system. It is just as viable to construct other models of time. For example, your body obeys natural rhythms in accord with the planetary, lunar, and solar cycles. The very notion of “time passing” fits with the firing of neurons in the brain, which have a beginning, middle, and end.

 

If you drop every model, something surprising happens. They are not needed. For example, you can view your daily life as occurring entirely in the present moment. The present moment is not a clock phenomenon. Clocks measure intervals–seconds, minutes, hours–while the present moment has no interval. It’s always here, endlessly renewing itself, unmeasurable, and fleeting. Because the instant you try to capture it, it’s gone. This implies that the “now” is actually outside time. It can be defined either as instantaneous or eternal. Both are valid as verbal descriptions but in the end invalid, since the vocabulary of time doesn’t apply to the timeless.

 

The same is true of the big bang or the potential end of the universe. Time doesn’t begin or end in an absolute way. It is a convenient way of using words. Time is simply a concept that fits various physical models. But its origin is as much in metaphysics as in physics. When someone believes he will die and go to Heaven for eternity, the typical, casual definition of “eternity” is a long, long time. But that’s not true, because whatever is eternal must be outside time. Ultimately, the only participation we can have in time, outside time, or with a dimension of inconceivable time, occurs in our consciousness. Whatever we can experience determines the nature of time. It is just as true to say that the big bang is occurring right now as to date it back to 13.8 billion years, because only when we think about the event do we draw the big bang into the world of human experience, and thinking happens in the now.

 

None of these conclusions are speculative–quantum physics and cosmology deal with them–and cosmologists and quantum physicists argue over them–every day. Without settling the vexing questions of “What came before the big bang?” “Where did time originate?” and “What is the timeless like?” we only want to point out that time has no meaning outside a specific frame of reference. There is no “real” time, only models of time constructed in human awareness. Once we realize this simple fact, the capacity to move beyond all models, to truly lose our fear of death, come alive. The spiritual concept that we were never born and will never die then becomes viable, too.

 

 

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

 

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics, at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, and climate impacts researcher and works extensively on consciousness. He holds seminars and workshops for individuals,health and mental professionals, practitioners of contemplative traditions, and corporations on the natural laws that apply everywhere and are the foundations of the universe, for well-being and success. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 315+ articles, is author or editor of 15 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, You Are the Universe (Harmony). He maintains a Huffington Post blog. You can learn more at http://www.menaskafatos.com