The Best Way to Change Your Life: Getting Unstuck

By Deepak Chopra, MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

Giving “Wholeness” a Higher Meaning

By Deepak Chopra, MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Higher Consciousness in Less than a Minute

By Deepak Chopra, MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

Everyday Immortality

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Questions of life and death, including the existence of life after death, seem to resist any firm conclusion. Most people tell pollsters that they believe in God, the soul, and the afterlife, but for all practical purposes we live in a secular society. The reassurances of organized religion no longer persuade millions of modern people, while on the other hand, there is a sharp rise in skepticism, doubt, and atheism.

Living as if we are mortal is the choice most people now make—for practical purposes, they live as if nothing existed before birth and nothing is likely to exist after death. Yet there is another choice rarely discussed, which one might call practical immortality. It rests upon a simple but life-changing decision anyone can make, the decision to identify with consciousness.

Right now everyone’s allegiance is split. We identify with our bodies some of the time and with our minds the rest of the time. If you run a marathon, go to the doctor for a checkup, feel attracted to someone else physically, or drag through the day for lack of sleep, you are identifying with your body. When you feel sad, have a bright idea, or argue about politics, you identify with your mind.

These may seem like obvious things, but it is due to split allegiances that death poses so much fear. If you think that life ends when the physical body ends, the prospect is rarely pleasant, and no matter how much spiritual literature you read, a mental conviction that physical death isn’t the end won’t resolve your fear. Everyone seems to agree that nothing can be known about the existence of the afterlife until we get there—or not.

By the same token, going beyond our divided allegiance offers a solution that dispels all doubt and fear, through the simple step of seeing consciousness as the foundation of life. In such a framework, here are the basic points:

  • We live in a universe where consciousness has always existed. This point is easy to accept because science has never found, and never will find, the process by which atoms and molecules learned to think.
  • The brain allows consciousness to function throughout the bodymind system (including thoughts and feelings along with monitoring and regulating every bodily process), but the brain doesn’t create consciousness. This follows from the fact stated above that atoms and molecules don’t think.
  • Mind is intimately linked to matter, but can neither be created nor destroyed. Since physics already holds that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, there is no reason not to say the same about consciousness.
  • Consciousness is constantly changing according to whether a process if physical or mental. This too is in line with the standard rule in physics that matter and energy are ever-changing.
  • The modes that consciousness takes give color, dimensions, shape, the five senses, and any other way of knowing the world. We experience our lives through the qualities, or qualia, of the five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell deliver the primary qualia, but all mental activity depends on experience, which only occurs in consciousness.
  • In itself, consciousness doesn’t need any specific quality. Water is innately wet, fire is innately hot, but at its source, consciousness is the wellspring of qualia; therefore, there are infinite possibilities for combining and recombining the ingredients of experience.
  • In different states of consciousness, qualia come and go. Smelling a rose when you are awake is different from smelling a rose when you are dreaming. In deep, dreamless sleep qualia subside, and there is only pure undisturbed consciousness.
  • At no point can you show that consciousness ceases to exist. Non-existence is a human concept, not a natural fact. For non-existence to be a fact, consciousness would have to be and not be at the same time. Since we know that consciousness is here with us all the time, the “not be” option makes no sense.
  • If consciousness has no non-existence, neither do we. During sleep all kinds of qualia, including memories, feelings, thoughts, and plans, get rearranged. When you wake up in the morning, this rearrangement allows you to be renewed for the new day. You don’t automatically follow a pre-set program.
  • Likewise, death is a re-arrangement of qualia. The eternal transformation of consciousness, which we live with on a practical basis every day, simply enters a new phase.

It’s not necessary to dwell on the details of every point on the list. The gist of practical immortality is actually quite simple. If consciousness exists—and we know it does—living with it as a permanent feature of life is the most logical way to live. We don’t fear going to sleep at night, because the continuity of consciousness has been part and parcel of every life without exception. It would defy everything we know—and experience—about consciousness for it simply to cease because the physical body comes to an end. Everything about creation and destruction has been regulated by consciousness, and it will never cease doing this in a timeless way.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

Your Body Wants to Be Your Strongest Ally—Let It

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Modern medicine has triumphed on many fronts in conquering diseases and extending life, but its greatest advance is almost totally unsung. Health and longevity have made it possible to see the body as our greatest ally.

After centuries of inevitable sickness and early death for the vast majority of people, the human body is poised to become our greatest ally on a new front: consciousness.

If you can step outside the accepted image of your body as a machine, you will discover that it is actually not a separate physical object but united with your mind as one consciousness—call it the bodymind. This step alone rids you of many damaging attitudes. As a thing separate from ourselves, the body is an obsessive source of worry over sickness, aging, and death. Equally obsessive is whether someone’s body is beautiful enough, strong enough, appealing enough to the opposite sex.

To escape all of these damaging attitudes, realize a few basic principles about the bodymind:

  • You are already whole, thanks to the union of mind and body.
  • Every mental process has a corresponding bodily process.
  • You are embodying your own state of consciousness.
  • The same traits you attribute to your mind also belong to every cell in your body.

 

The fact that we are embodying our own consciousness is probably the biggest breakthrough of our time, but it is still hard for the average person to grasp.

(For a detailed discussion of this concept, see the eye-opening video by Judith Blackstone, “Can We Embody Nonduality?”)

In religion and spirituality generally there has been strong judgment against the body, with a corresponding celebration of the soul. But in reality this separation was totally artificial. You cannot have any experience, however earthly or divine, without your brain registering it and passing the message to every cell in the body. You cannot hide your thoughts from your body. If you look in the mirror and feel bad about your body, you are simultaneously judging against yourself.

What’s so liberating about the bodymind is both short-term and long-term. In the short term, the elusive goal of living in the present moment is radically turned around, because your body, including your brain, has no choice but to live in the now. In fact, so confident are your cells about living in the present moment that they store only about 3 seconds of oxygen and nutrients. It is completely natural to be in the present for the bodymind.

As to the long term, the bodymind opens a path to become whole. Because you are already whole, as far as your cells are concerned, there is no doubt that the state of separation, which began by separating mind form body, is artificial. Any step you take toward higher consciousness is supported—indeed is made possible—by your body.

Saying these things will disturb someone who feels that the body is not an ally but a fragile container of life that threatens to break down, betray us, grow weaker over time, and eventually condemn us to helpless infirmity. Fortunately, this truism from the past is steadily being invalidated. Futurists, if they are in an optimistic mood, foresee the day when all diseases have been eradicated, genetic anomalies can be rectified, and even physical immortality isn’t preposterous.

But that perspective misses the most important aspect of the bodymind revolution, because such visions remain physical, rooted in the misconception of the body-as-machine. When you absorb the truth of wholeness as your most natural state, then your body contributes to the highest values of being human: intelligence, creativity, love, curiosity, and evolution. Your cells are imprinted at the genetic level by every vivid experience, both positive and negative, that you have had since birth and are still having.

Therefore, you can imprint your genetic activity in such a way that you become, as a bodymind, more conscious and evolved every year. This is a vision worth pursuing, far beyond anything medical technology envisions. That technology will bring more advances, no doubt, but the real challenge in our lives—how to raise the status of human consciousness—is intimate and personal.

It is time to stop judging against the body, demoting it to a machine, and fearing the possibilities of sickness, aging, and death. Everything you cherish about yourself as a person is embodied in you, which means that your body deserves to be equally cherished. Only in that spirit can all our higher aspirations be reached.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com